# Alex Callinicos/SWP vs Laurie Penny/New Statesman Facebook handbags



## Prince Rhyus (Dec 25, 2010)

http://www.facebook.com/alex.callinicos#!/alex.callinicos/posts/179654665387130

Comments on a post-Xmas lunch postcard please.


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## FridgeMagnet (Dec 25, 2010)

Can't even view it without being signed into facebook. The comment is therefore "load of wank".


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## LiamO (Dec 25, 2010)

Can'tread it but if Alex @that is not my role in the Party' Callinicos is on one side, I am probably on the other


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## ViolentPanda (Dec 25, 2010)

LiamO said:


> Can'tread it but if Alex @that is not my role in the Party' Callinicos is on one side, I am probably on the other


 
I thought his name was Alex "I'm of good working-class stock, honest!" Callinicos. Did he change it recently?


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## gawkrodger (Dec 25, 2010)

she said the only thing left after a nuclear holocaust would be cockroaches and SWP paper sellers

Callinicos/other SWPies then had a bit of a strop and was slightly selective with his recollection of recent history.


So no big change there than!


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## ViolentPanda (Dec 25, 2010)

gawkrodger said:


> she said the only thing left after a nuclear holocaust would be cockroaches and SWP paper sellers
> 
> Callinicos/other SWPies then had a bit of a strop and was slightly selective with his recollection of recent history.
> 
> ...



Let's face it. we'd be surprised if he wasn't "slightly selective". It's his "unique selling point".


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## DotCommunist (Dec 25, 2010)

* he agreed to give us two copies to burn if, and only if, we could sing the first two verses of the Internationale. So we did! *


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## ymu (Dec 25, 2010)

gawkrodger said:


> she said the only thing left after a nuclear holocaust would be cockroaches and SWP paper sellers
> 
> Callinicos/other SWPies then had a bit of a strop and was slightly selective with his recollection of recent history.
> 
> ...


 
Ah, starting to make sense. Perhaps we can cobble together a halfway decent OP, seeing as the thread starter couldn't be arsed. 

This is the Laurie Penny article: Out with the old politics. Here's the bit Callinicos probably didn't like very much:



> The unions have begun to realise what the Labour party is still too arrogant to consider – that the nature of the fight against bigotry and greed has evolved beyond the traditional hierarchies of the left.
> 
> It is highly significant that one of the first things this hydra-headed youth movement set out to achieve was the decapitation of its own official leadership. When Aaron Porter of the National Union of Students was seen to be "dithering" over whether or not to support the protests, there were immediate calls for his resignation – and in subsequent weeks the NUS has proved itself worse than irrelevant as an organising force for demonstrations.
> 
> ...


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## imposs1904 (Dec 25, 2010)

ymu said:


> The unions have begun to realise what the Labour party is still too arrogant to consider – that the nature of the fight against bigotry and greed has evolved beyond the traditional hierarchies of the left.
> 
> It is highly significant that one of the first things this hydra-headed youth movement set out to achieve was the decapitation of its own official leadership. When Aaron Porter of the National Union of Students was seen to be "dithering" over whether or not to support the protests, there were immediate calls for his resignation – and in subsequent weeks the NUS has proved itself worse than irrelevant as an organising force for demonstrations.
> 
> ...



Kind of funny that the link leads you to a pic of a sour faced Laurie vending herself as the voice of youth.


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## ymu (Dec 25, 2010)

Please don't quote her words as if they are mine.


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## FridgeMagnet (Dec 25, 2010)

Those kids don't like the old style of sour-faced vendors! They like the new style, as indicated by the Guardian and the New Statesman!


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## ymu (Dec 25, 2010)




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## imposs1904 (Dec 25, 2010)

ymu said:


> Please don't quote her words as if they are mine.



Apologies. My cut and paste wasn't up to scratch.


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## ymu (Dec 25, 2010)

imposs1904 said:


> Apologies. My cut and paste wasn't up to scratch.


 
No problem. It's a vbulletin annoyance. 

If you select the text and hit the speech bubble icon, it will put them in a quote inside the quote.


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## Captain Hurrah (Dec 25, 2010)

DotCommunist said:


> * he agreed to give us two copies to burn if, and only if, we could sing the first two verses of the Internationale. So we did! *



Sounds like one of the crap made-up stories she relates on her blog.


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## butchersapron (Dec 25, 2010)

Busy year for Laurie 'what, you can get the Internet on a phone?' Penny - from working unpaid as a labour party intern, to pimping David Lammy as the voice of the modern radical, then onto Clegg, now herself and her pluralist journo mates, from getting caught out making stuff about her past and having to publicly apologise in the Guardian to making stuff up in the above article. Fascinating too see the amount of privately educated (and healthed in Penny's case) oxbridge graduates fighting each other for the media's official sanctioned voice of youth - very good move career wise. Even Toynbee and Lawson are embarrassing themselves by trying to muscle their way in. Happy Christmas Laurie.


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## Sgt Howie (Dec 25, 2010)

Didn't she work for the Morning Star as well? What a convoluted political background for one so young.


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## butchersapron (Dec 25, 2010)

Lots of desperate editors jumping on her and people like her.


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## killer b (Dec 25, 2010)

Her writing is shocking. She's like a posh lefty glenda slagg.


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## Lo Siento. (Dec 25, 2010)

surprisingly with Callinicos on this one. I dig at a left group in a national newspaper, total waste of time, when there are better targets for anyone well-meaning with a platform. Sick of hearing the old we're crap because the swaps ruin everything shit, and sick of each new wave of protest being claimed as the solution to everything.


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## Prince Rhyus (Dec 25, 2010)

I prefer Mark Thomas's take:

Mark: "I'll join the SWP if you give me a gun"
SWPer: "Sorry, we don't have one of them, bbut you can have a paper instead!"


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## imposs1904 (Dec 25, 2010)

Prince Rhyus said:


> I prefer Mark Thomas's take:
> 
> Mark: "I'll join the SWP if you give me a gun"
> SWPer: "Sorry, we don't have one of them, bbut you can have a paper instead!"



Wasn't Mark Thomas in Socialist Action at one point or was that just a scurrilous rumour?

Does SA issue rifles or handguns?


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## _pH_ (Dec 25, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> getting caught out making stuff about her past and having to publicly apologise in the Guardian to making stuff up in the above article



what did she make up? was it the 'I was a burlesque dancer before it was popular and it was empowering but now it's popular it's just an excuse for blokes to have a wank. yeah and I liked that cool band before anyone else knew about them'?

'An erection is not ironic'. Fucking hell. Can't stand her or her stupid hitler hairdo.


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## Captain Hurrah (Dec 25, 2010)

She's even lived in poverty, apparently.



> "We were living like a scene from Withnail & I, except there was no space to move," she said. "It was very miserable. People get very depressed – that level of poverty has a bad effect on your mental health, it makes people feel that nothing will ever get better. I know that is the situation for a lot of people, but for young graduates, middle-class people, it is a real shock. It is not sufficiently recognised at all – how poor the rates are in the benefit system."



Makes me fucking sick.


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## Kid_Eternity (Dec 25, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Busy year for Laurie 'what, you can get the Internet on a phone?' Penny - from working unpaid as a labour party intern, to pimping David Lammy as the voice of the modern radical, then onto Clegg, now herself and her pluralist journo mates, from getting caught out making stuff about her past and having to publicly apologise in the Guardian to making stuff up in the above article. Fascinating too see the amount of privately educated (and healthed in Penny's case) oxbridge graduates fighting each other for the media's official sanctioned voice of youth - very good move career wise. Even Toynbee and Lawson are embarrassing themselves by trying to muscle their way in. Happy Christmas Laurie.


 
What did she make up about her past?


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## _pH_ (Dec 25, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> She's even lived in poverty, apparently.
> 
> 
> 
> Makes me fucking sick.


 
Fucking hell that's nauseating.


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## Prince Rhyus (Dec 25, 2010)

imposs1904 said:


> Wasn't Mark Thomas in Socialist Action at one point or was that just a scurrilous rumour?
> 
> Does SA issue rifles or handguns?


 
What's Socialist Action? ( Or rather, who are?)


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## imposs1904 (Dec 25, 2010)

Prince Rhyus said:


> What's Socialist Action? ( Or rather, who are?)



One of the groups that came out of the old International Marxist Group. Best known these days because a few of them were advisors to Livingstone when he was Mayor.


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## SaskiaJayne (Dec 25, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> She's even lived in poverty, apparently.
> 
> 
> 
> Makes me fucking sick.


I have no idea what this thread is about but what is wrong with the article in your link?


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## butchersapron (Dec 25, 2010)

Kid_Eternity said:


> What did she make up about her past?


 As mentioned above, she embellished a tale of her 'burlesque' experience, was caught out by other members of the troupe and the article was seriously (and embarrassingly/damaging to credibility IMO) amended a month later and was _still_ being edited a full 5 months later. 

Just noticed that now Labour, then Lammy and then Clegg have all fallen by the wayside it's now counter-fire and their extensive media contacts book that's the future - book with Clare Solomon and Tariq frigging ali (another lib-dem believer) on the way. Lot of people getting a  bit fed up of her self-appointed role as voice of 'the youth'...


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## Captain Hurrah (Dec 25, 2010)

SaskiaJayne said:


> I have no idea what this thread is about but what is wrong with the article in your link?



What's right with it?


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## Lo Siento. (Dec 25, 2010)

SaskiaJayne said:


> I have no idea what this thread is about but what is wrong with the article in your link?


 
i presume they mean the complaints about her temporary poverty. Or indeed the constant reference to how hard unemployed young graduates have it. 

On the other hand, considering the audience, it's a good way of making the point that unemployment benefit is (a) very little money and (b) claimed by people just like them.


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## _pH_ (Dec 25, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> As mentioned above, she embellished a tale of her 'burlesque' experience, was caught out by other members of the troupe and the article was seriously (and embarrassingly/damaging to credibility IMO) amended a month later and was _still_ being edited a full 5 months later.



What article was that then? the one I was thinking of only came out a few weeks back.

This one: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/13/burlesque-sex-empowerment-misogyny


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## butchersapron (Dec 25, 2010)

Here


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## SaskiaJayne (Dec 25, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> What's right with it?


Its just an article about trying to live on JSA. I'm asking you, whats wrong with it?


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## Captain Hurrah (Dec 25, 2010)

I don't need to be told how hard it is for privileged, privately educated middle class graduates.  That she can only make reference to _Withnail and I_ (ffs) says it all.  Dilettantish rubbish.  Where were her parents?  Was it character building?  Mind you, she hasn't done too badly after all.  I smell bullshit.


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## nightbreed (Dec 25, 2010)

"When the Unite leader, Len McLuskey, wrote in these pages this week encouraging union members to lend their support to the "magnificent student movement", he hit precisely the right note – one that respects the energy of these new networks of resistance without seeking to hijack it."

Good point Laurie. Will the left note this or even care?


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## SaskiaJayne (Dec 25, 2010)

Lo Siento. said:


> i presume they mean the complaints about her temporary poverty. Or indeed the constant reference to how hard unemployed young graduates have it.
> 
> On the other hand, considering the audience, it's a good way of making the point that unemployment benefit is (a) very little money and (b) claimed by people just like them.


Oh ok, I'm just looking at it as any newspaper article. Its normal enough for well paid journos to write about the plight of the poverty stricken.


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## audiotech (Dec 25, 2010)

Laurie Penny wrote an article in the Guardian, and contained within was this passage.



> Of course, the old left is not about to disappear completely. It is highly likely that even after a nuclear attack, the only remaining life-forms will be cockroaches and sour-faced vendors of the Socialist Worker. Stunningly, the paper is still being peddled at every demonstration to young cyber-activists for whom the very concept of a newspaper is almost as outdated as the notion of ideological unity as a basis for action.



"Sour-faced Socialist Worker Vendors AKA Revolutionary Smiles" facebook group in response.







http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sour-...A-Revolutionary-Smiles/175541789144500?v=wall


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## killer b (Dec 25, 2010)

Laurie penny must have serious contacts if she's back writing for the guardian again after fucking up so badly so early on. Why would they even consider buying another one of her stories after that? Is her dad best mates with rusbridger?


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## Kid_Eternity (Dec 25, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> As mentioned above, she embellished a tale of her 'burlesque' experience, was caught out by other members of the troupe and the article was seriously (and embarrassingly/damaging to credibility IMO) amended a month later and was _still_ being edited a full 5 months later.
> 
> Just noticed that now Labour, then Lammy and then Clegg have all fallen by the wayside it's now counter-fire and their extensive media contacts book that's the future - book with Clare Solomon and Tariq frigging ali (another lib-dem believer) on the way. Lot of people getting a  bit fed up of her self-appointed role as voice of 'the youth'...


 
Yeah she got some flack on twitter for that last part the last couple days,  she denies it.


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## where to (Dec 25, 2010)

can't believe their writing a book already. ridiculous


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## audiotech (Dec 25, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> As mentioned above, she embellished a tale of her 'burlesque' experience, was caught out by other members of the troupe and the article was seriously (and embarrassingly/damaging to credibility IMO) amended a month later and was _still_ being edited a full 5 months later.
> 
> Just noticed that now Labour, then Lammy and then Clegg have all fallen by the wayside it's now counter-fire and their extensive media contacts book that's the future - book with Clare Solomon and Tariq frigging ali (another lib-dem believer) on the way. Lot of people getting a  bit fed up of her self-appointed role as voice of 'the youth'...



butchersapron, if you can stand this, have a listen to Rees towards the end of this this video. The gall of this man is unfuckingbelievable.


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## Prince Rhyus (Dec 26, 2010)

A few thoughts:

On "middle class living on £50p/w" issue, I think talking about the experience was fine, but the way it came out was all wrong. I think if it was put forward along the lines of "Most middle class people have no idea of what it's like to try and struggle on £50 a week and are thus living in a bubble/completely insulated from the struggles that large numbers of people on such incomes have" would have been a better way to put it rather than "

For me the killer quotation was



> I know that is the situation for a lot of people, but for young graduates, middle-class people, it is a real shock. It is not sufficiently recognised at all – how poor the rates are in the benefit system."



...which made it come across as a "we should be forcing the political classes to do a damn sight more to help those in that situation" rather than "poor us!" message.

In terms of being "self-appointed" - something thrown at Clare Solomon and Laurie Penny, I have a couple of observations to make:

- There will be some (not necessarily many) who will instinctively look towards someone in an elected student post for some sort of direction on what to do next. Because the corporate media gave a lot of airtime to both Clare and Aaron Porter regarding the student protests, and because the statements from the former caught the mood better than those from the latter, the corporate media have helped create the view that Clare is one of the student leaders. Being part of the "Counterfire" outfit has also meant that Rees and German have milked it for all its worth (metaphorically). 

- While organisations such as the Coalition of Resistance, the TUC, the NUS etc will have some influence on the days that given national protests are due to take place on, their ability to influence what happens once people arrive for said demonstrations may well diminish as people go off to do their own thing - whether it was the "cat and mouse" stuff a few weeks ago to Aaron Porter taking a kicking from the corporate media regarding Millbank - i.e. being accused of not being in control of that original demo. Police said at the demos that followed that the "organisers" did not stick to the agreed route, it wasn't so much the organisers not sticking to it, rather it was the demonstrators not wanting to stick to what the organisers may have negotiated with the authorities. Personally I found the UKuncut "crowdsourcing" exercises to be the most enlightening online development I've experienced in recent times. 

- Regarding Rees and Counterfire/Swappyness, one of the things that I love about Twitter is that by it's very nature it prevents "established" figures on the far left from boring people to death with post-markskyite-trotskyismist ramblings. The Counterfire/SWP split (which Solomon blogged at http://solomonsmindfield.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-we-are-resigning-from-swp-open.html ) may have also unintentionally reduced the likelihood of SWP attempts to take over "the movement". 

- Regarding Penny, my take is that she's primarily a blogger, writer and tweeter - and that if people didn't like what she was saying, they'd stop following her. Part of me would like to give her the benefit of the doubt of learning her trade/making mistakes. At least the untruths she wrote were printed in a newspaper - because when it comes to printing untruths our press has got form! I think it also goes to show that people are much more hot on these things and are able to respond to them instantly and publicly - which gives things much more publicity than in the "errors and corrections" column.


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## butchersapron (Dec 26, 2010)

My point about self-appointed was in reference to LP alone.



> Regarding Penny, my take is that she's primarily a blogger, writer and tweeter - and that if people didn't like what she was saying, they'd stop following her. Part of me would like to give her the benefit of the doubt of learning her trade/making mistakes. At least the untruths she wrote were printed in a newspaper - because when it comes to printing untruths our press has got form! I think it also goes to show that people are much more hot on these things and are able to respond to them instantly and publicly - which gives things much more publicity than in the "errors and corrections" column.



This doesn't really say very much though - Jeffrey Archer's work is liked - so what? (And please, let's not reduce important issues of representation , recuperatrion, careerists central roles etc to 'following'). Jeffrey Archer has also made stuff up in print. And he was was also caught out. I can't see what sort of defence of her activity you've mounted there beyond saying she does it.


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## butchersapron (Dec 26, 2010)

audiotech said:


> butchersapron, if you can stand this, have a listen to Rees towards the end of this this video. The gall of this man is unfuckingbelievable.


 
The sound quality is so bad i can barely make out what he's saying - could make out that what he thinks is needed is 'ruthless humility' 

Also, please please check out the ginger kid at 29.45 with his plan for revolution - it's genius absurd. Oddly enough, the local SWP organiser here thinks in the same way, expect he thinks the general strike will come through the TUC.


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## audiotech (Dec 26, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> The sound quality is so bad i can barely make out what he's saying - could make out that what he thinks is needed is 'ruthless humility'
> 
> Also, please please check out the ginger kid at 29.45 with his plan for revolution - it's genius absurd. Oddly enough, the local SWP organiser here thinks in the same way, expect he thinks the general strike will come through the TUC.



'Ruthless humility' is right.

You've misheard the "ginger kid" butchers and btw he doesn't appear a "ginger" to me. Anyway, mentioning hair colour is not relevant here. He's not calling for a general strike, he's criticising some of the left who are getting history wrong. He does say there is the possibilty now for a radical movement of students and workers. On this he's right.


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## butchersapron (Dec 26, 2010)

I didn't mishear - he said this is how a general strike happens. 1) students occupy universities. 2) workers go the factories and are radicalised by the students 3) they go back and occupy factories 4) general strike happens. It's historically wrong, ridiculously formal and based on a mad reading of the production and transmission of 'consciousness'.


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## audiotech (Dec 26, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> I didn't mishear - he said this is how a general strike happens. 1) students occupy universities. 2) workers go the factories and are radicalised by the students 3) they go back and occupy factories 4) general strike happens. It's historically wrong, ridiculously formal and based on a mad reading of the production and transmission of 'consciousness'.



No 2 you've written "factories" when I think you you meant to write 'universities and colleges'?

Anyway, this I picked up from his contribution. Couldn't hear the first bit, however he continues:



> .....then went back to the factories and struck and occupiied..[couldn't make out this bit]   ? schematic and that's basically what happened. Students occupied. Workers go to [students] occupation. The occupation, student movement radicalises a section of workers. This turns into a general strike. It is not the case that students came out of their occupation went to the workers and somehow this turned into a general strike. The mechanism that an awful lot of the left thinks should be in place they've got entirely the wrong way round. Their reading history the wrong way round and that is the problem that we are seeing at the moment. I think it's a challenge for what we are doing.



Goes on a bit more about others getting it wrong and we are the ones who know what needs doing blah, blah, blah - recruitment speech.

You're right, he's arguing primarily that workers be taken to the student movement, become radicalised and then a general strike.

There's nothing wrong in the first bit. Important that unity be built between students and workers. Inviting workers to colleges and universities is nothing new, but and I agree with you here too, he then proceeds in a mechanical, formalistic way.

Maybe if you elaborate what happened in France in '68 to make some comparison?


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## frogwoman (Dec 26, 2010)

im no fan of the swp. but taking swipes at easy targets to further a journalistic career is fucking repellent tbh. no doubt many of the sort of guardian readers who these articles are aimed at will be looking at them and laughing and being like "ho ho, spot on, i used to be all young and idealistic like that once before i "grew up" etc."


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## butchersapron (Dec 26, 2010)

audiotech said:


> No 2 you've written "factories" when I think you you meant to write 'universities and colleges'?
> 
> Anyway, this I picked up from his contribution. Couldn't hear the first bit, however he continues:
> 
> ...


 
Oh god, no.


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## frogwoman (Dec 27, 2010)

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/08/conservative-future-young


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## audiotech (Dec 27, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Oh god, no.


 
Right choice.


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## audiotech (Dec 27, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/08/conservative-future-young


 
They don't wear "Hang Mandela" t-shirts these days and they don't appear that confident, which is good. Let's keep it that way.


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## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

Wow, she's got even worse ( i see she's brushed up on lenin on the paper as an organiser over xmas and got it toally wrong as well). She claims no one has a monopoly then puts her monopoly into action. Where are the kids from the 'London slums' Penny? Hang this Porter #2.


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## DotCommunist (Dec 27, 2010)

repeat of the highly improbable impromptu signing of the internationale claim.


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## Random (Dec 27, 2010)

Jesus christ, I was giving her the benefit of the doubt, or at least failing to want to take sides, until I read this ludicrous, revoltingly made-up paragraph.



> We rounded on him in desperation. None of us had any money, but we were all freezing, and we needed paper - not to read, but to burn. We begged him to give us even one paper, and join us at the fire. A slew of emotions chased across the SWP seller's face as he considered this dilemma. Finally, he agreed to give us two copies, if, and only if, any of us could sing at least two verses of the Internationale. So we did - me, some NEETs and schoolkids from the slums of London - our voices shaking a little from the chill. He handed over the papers with a smile and shuffled into the circle to warm up.



Yet another 'libertarian' privilaged journo who thinks it's their right to write up the world so that it suits them and supports them. Eventually she'll probably write an autobiography describing her early career as a 'gleeful hoax' in the style of DBC Pierre ort something.


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## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

I will never hold hands with book burners :X


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## ymu (Dec 27, 2010)

Lots of we, our and me in there.


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## Random (Dec 27, 2010)

*our voices shaking a little from the chill* The _Dickensian _aspects of protesting


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## DotCommunist (Dec 27, 2010)

I'm tempted to ask if they were forced to do the Billy Bragg version by this swappie tyrant.


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## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

> We rounded on him in desperation. None of us had any money, but we were all freezing, and we needed paper - not to read, but to burn. We begged him to give us even one paper, and join us at the fire. A slew of emotions chased across the SWP seller's face as he considered this dilemma. Finally, he agreed to give us two copies, if, and only if, any of us could sing at least two verses of the Internationale. So we did - me, some NEETs and schoolkids from the slums of London - our voices shaking a little from the chill. He handed over the papers with a smile and shuffled into the circle to warm up.



No singing of the Internationale this time 

Hang this clown.


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## ymu (Dec 27, 2010)

?


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## frogwoman (Dec 27, 2010)

> The fact that there remains, in most communities in Britain, a small but dedicated group of left-wing activists with gloriously unreconstructed socialist sentiments and an inexhaustible energy for leafleting, is just one more thing that makes me proud to live on this bitter little island. Some of their ideas, like the notion that one can truly change the world by standing on the corner of every demonstration selling copies of the party newspaper, are a little antique, but the essential idea of revolution and resistance is never going out of style.



Cunt off you patronising fuck.


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## LLETSA (Dec 27, 2010)

Why do so many people take these shallow self-publicists so seriously?

Is she the new Tamsin Ormond, or whatever she's called?


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## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

ymu said:


> ?


 
Hang Laurie Penny.


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## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

LLETSA said:


> Why do so many people take these shallow self-publicists so seriously?
> 
> Is she the new Tamsin Ormond, or whatever she's called?


 
Because some things annoy people and they like to say how much they annoy them. It's ok.


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## DotCommunist (Dec 27, 2010)

I'm thinking BA lost the will to close read by the time he got to the repetition of that pretty unbelievable anecdote.


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## frogwoman (Dec 27, 2010)

that singing the Internatoinale paragraph is so plainly made up its unreal.


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## frogwoman (Dec 27, 2010)

Sure you dont want to get the perfect christmas gift of six months of the new statesman for £39.99 butchers?


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## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

DotCommunist said:


> I'm thinking BA lost the will to close read by the time he got to the repetition of that pretty unbelievable anecdote.


 
I did, sos, - what totally nutty bulshit she makes up


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## DotCommunist (Dec 27, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> Cunt off you patronising fuck.


 
She's hilarious. Check out the 'I hate football' article- gold.


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## LLETSA (Dec 27, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Because some things annoy people and they like to say how much they annoy them. It's ok.




I know. Nobody's annoying bastards list is as long as mine. But the annoyance is always disproportionate to their influence or importance. Where is little Tamsin now after the 944 page thread on here a while back?


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## frogwoman (Dec 27, 2010)

A searing wound of rage and retribution lol.


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## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> Sure you dont want to get the perfect christmas gift of six months of the new statesman for £39.99 butchers?


  I used to have one when someone called Steve (?) was editing i. It was not very good then, it's desperate editors chasing 'youth' (that oddly enough look exactly like them and their mates) is genius.


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## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

LLETSA said:


> I know. Nobody's annoying bastards list is as long as mine. But the annoyance is always disproportionate to their influence or importance. Where is little Tamsin now after the 944 page thread on here a while back?


 
She gone. She's not barging herself forward as the stamped signed and agreed voice of the anti-cuts movement though. Laurie is.


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## frogwoman (Dec 27, 2010)

God that world cup article is shockingly bad.


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## ymu (Dec 27, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Hang Laurie Penny.


 
Yes, absolutely. 

EDIT: solved by Dotty


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## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

Yes, i missed it. I had sand thrown in my eyes by the mention of NEETS.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 27, 2010)

NEETS who can sing at least two verses of the internationale, or at least mouth the words alongside Penny's lead. Ironic.


----------



## Prince Rhyus (Dec 27, 2010)

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/12/deregulating-resistance - Penny hits back at the Party for Working Socialism


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

Another enemy of the people.


----------



## LLETSA (Dec 27, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> She gone. She's not barging herself forward as the stamped signed and agreed voice of the anti-cuts movement though. Laurie is.





Maybe so-but she won't actually become that will she?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

I don't care. Do you?


----------



## audiotech (Dec 27, 2010)

> I'm interested in whether or not you're going to join me at the fire. I want to know if you're up for a fight.



Answers on a postcard.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

She can fuck off back to the lib-dems and her career. I'll be fighting. She'll be on twitter.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

She was putting Omond on the agenda a few months ago - brilliant 

My generation need to be heroes



> Like many young people, Omond has a deep sense of moral and social justice, but does not trust ancient spiritual and political institutions to deliver the change she wants.



Scum, pure piggy-backing career scum.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Dec 27, 2010)

repetition of the claim that twitter is the key. The vast majority of  people do not spend their lives on social networking sites, ffs.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 27, 2010)

its to make it sound all post-modern and relevant


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

I can get the Internet on my phone and i'm under 30. Is that good enough Guardian/morning star/new statesman/ huffington post/ any old shit/editors


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

> It is for these reason that I am going to be voting, in my constituency of Leyton and Wanstead, for the Liberal Democrat Party. Not because of Nick Clegg's golden tie, and not even because The Guardian says so. Because I want a new, more representative parliamentary system in which citizens can feel like their voices actually matter. I like the Lib Dems; I don't think they were sent to save us. I'd prefer to vote for a third party that had stronger links with workers' organisations. But the Lib Dems represent the best chance this country has for transformation on a structural level. And, of course, I'm sick of the sight of Cameron's soft, evil face.



twat


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 27, 2010)

Soft, evil face.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

Getting your transformation on a structural level now eh Laurie? Enemy of the People.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 27, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Oh god, no.


 
Uncannily like 





> It is only students that have the intellectual power to take on the French Government and it is important that workers leaflet the universities to get their support.



from Solidarity Avec les Frogs


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

A great piece of of writing from the heart that report. Timely _and_ telling.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 27, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> A great piece of of writing from the heart that report. Timely _and_ telling.



probably the first in the post pamplet , pre Twitter period that brought Wilson to the public eye.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 27, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> She can fuck off back to the lib-dems and her career. I'll be fighting. She'll be on twitter.


 
You'll be on here slagging off tweets and blogs. "the cobweb left are irrelevant" yadyadayada - I bet she's getting this stuff off you lot  and selling it to entertain the liberal middle classes


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

And you're the cunt commissioning it. She does write for you does she not?

I wonder why. Actually, no i don't. I know why.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

_I_ sometimes wonder what it's like being the voice of a generation that's all had it exactly the same.


----------



## where to (Dec 27, 2010)

> It is for these reason that I am going to be voting, in my constituency of Leyton and Wanstead, for the Liberal Democrat Party. Not because of Nick Clegg's golden tie, and not even because The Guardian says so.



lol 



Lo Siento. said:


> repetition of the claim that twitter is the key. The vast majority of  people do not spend their lives on social networking sites, ffs.


 
absolutely, but it is a very effective tool and the more folk that use it the better.

and for info, two months ago i never thought i would ever use the thing and was also a sneerer


----------



## articul8 (Dec 27, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> And you're the cunt commissioning it. She does write for you does she not?
> 
> I wonder why. Actually, no i don't. I know why.


 
She has written for the magazine previously - let's just say her involvement has not entirely coincidentally started to diminish in the same period that mine has grown.    So - on this subject as on a few more besdies - you "know" much less than you think


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

articul8 said:


> She has written for the magazine previously - let's just say her involvement has not entirely coincidentally started to diminish in the same period that mine has grown.    So - on this subject as on a few more besdies - you "know" much less than you think


 
Why? because you think she's a liar? A shit writer? An idiot? A useful idiot?


----------



## articul8 (Dec 27, 2010)

Must hurt to hear the liberal commentariat pounce with such gusto on your own cliches.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

You what?

Why did you fire the privately educated oxbridge voice of a generation? You failed to answer.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Dec 27, 2010)

articul8 said:


> She has written for the magazine previously - let's just say her involvement has not entirely coincidentally started to diminish in the same period that mine has grown.    So - on this subject as on a few more besdies - you "know" much less than you think


 
Eh?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

articul8 said:


> Must hurt to hear the liberal commentariat pounce with such gusto on your own cliches.


 
Does your mag have a deal with verso btw?


----------



## articul8 (Dec 27, 2010)

No it doesn't, although it could (and maybe should?).  Why?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

Yeah, maybe it should  

you clueless mug


----------



## articul8 (Dec 27, 2010)

why?  Is Verso part of the evil empire now?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

Yes, yes it is.

You get your books for free and now don't you? I love london.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 27, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Yes, yes it is.
> 
> You get your books for free and now don't you? I love london.


 
Insofar as i do ever get "free" books it is hardly makes up for the amount of totally unpaid voluntary labour that goes into the production of the mag.   If you want to talk about books costing too much it should be Pluto or Pathfinder you have in your sights anyway!!


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

My hearts bleeds for you and all of london. It really really does.


----------



## Kaye (Dec 27, 2010)

After Callinicos' retort in the Guardian, it appears that Penny is going to receive an invite to debate Callinicos at Marxism 2011.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 27, 2010)

i cant wait


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

The voice of a generation versus the voice of the working class!


----------



## imposs1904 (Dec 27, 2010)

Kaye said:


> After Callinicos' retort in the Guardian, it appears that Penny is going to receive an invite to debate Callinicos at Marxism 2011.



Jesus, the SWP must be desperate if that's true.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

Maybe they'll sing the first two _verso_ of the internationale before.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 27, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> The voice of a generation versus the voice of the working class!


 
Will Callinicos speak with his natural accent or his worker's accent, though? That's the important question.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 27, 2010)

imposs1904 said:


> Jesus, the SWP must be desperate if that's true.


 
I've no doubt it'll be a comedy great to listen to, if anyone can be arsed to record it!


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

Red Pepper:



> To mark the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X and the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's death, Verso is publishing an updated edition of Streetfighting Years, Tariq Ali's memoir of the 1960s



Does he do any street-fighting in this new one articul8?


----------



## imposs1904 (Dec 27, 2010)

ViolentPanda said:


> I've no doubt it'll be a comedy great to listen to, if anyone can be arsed to record it!


 
Surely they should be inviting Claire Solomon to speak/debate . . . or is that too close to home?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 27, 2010)

imposs1904 said:


> Surely they should be inviting Claire Solomon to speak/debate . . . or is that too close to home?


 
Definitely a bit too much of a twist of the knife for them to stomach, given Solomon's relative "success" in the protest milieu, compared to the SWP.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 27, 2010)

ViolentPanda said:


> Will Callinicos speak with his natural accent or his worker's accent, though? That's the important question.


 
and be wearing the good fred perry.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 27, 2010)

DotCommunist said:


> and be wearing the good fred perry.


 
That's running boy, Martin Smith.


----------



## Kaye (Dec 28, 2010)

imposs1904 said:


> Jesus, the SWP must be desperate if that's true.


 
From a conversation with Simon Hester, who might not have that much weight in the party any more.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 28, 2010)

Bit of sense.
Beans factories and creeping liberal elitism



> The kids are freezing, but the solidarity is just amazing.
> 
> They could be at home, snug from the sub-zero temperatures, but here they are, stamping their feet for warmth, keeping the fires lit with whatever they can lay their hands on, together against injustice.
> 
> ...


----------



## Kaye (Dec 28, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Bit of sense.
> Beans factories and creeping liberal elitism


 
I really like that article.


----------



## Santino (Dec 28, 2010)

Glad I bought Branston's beans today.


----------



## ernestolynch (Dec 28, 2010)

Beans.
Is this Laura Penny fit?
Any pics?


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 28, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> That's running boy, Martin Smith.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 28, 2010)

lol.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 28, 2010)

I must admit that the first thought that comes to mind when looking at the rift between Penny and the SWP is 'A plague on both their houses.' Being a former member I have no time at all for the SWP leadership, past or present, while Penny strikes me as someone whose primary aim is her own self-promotion and possibly a move from being merely one of the myriad of internet bloggers into becoming a full-time media hack. Her approach does, after all, seem to be the long-established one of wannabe media types of relentlessly attacking the mainstream in the hope that they'll be considered ubiquitous enough and annoying enough to be (willingly) co-opted into the very system that they claim to so heartily despise. Give it another ten or fifteen years of that kind of approach and then they tend to conveniently forget that they were once one the outside of the tent pissing in and often then dismiss their earlier standpoints as being the result of some sense of naive, youthful rebellion or try and hide them away completely.


----------



## Random (Dec 28, 2010)

They're made for each other as 'enemies'. Both make the other look good. Penny acts as a straw-version of anarchism for the SWP to attack and look all pro-working class, while the SWP acts as a straw-version of socialism for Penny to look all futuristic and new wave.


----------



## Red Cat (Dec 28, 2010)

imposs1904 said:


> Jesus, the SWP must be desperate if that's true.



Well, this thread is currently at more than a hundred posts, so clearly there is some interest in this. I've never heard of her and don't give a flying fuck personally but if other people have and would be into a debate, why not? Marxism has always had speakers with a bit of a name, I don't see that inviting her is that different. Maybe it'd be entertaining. Whilst Callinicos is clearly very posh _and_ a member of the SWP, he does have a sense of humour, as do some of the rest of the monolith membership.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 28, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Beans.
> Is this Laura Penny fit?
> Any pics?


 
she has got a hitler haircut, which with your love of totalitarian dictators might stir some life in the nether regions. Can't decide if I would.


----------



## ernestolynch (Dec 28, 2010)

DotCommunist said:


> she has got a hitler haircut, which with your love of totalitarian dictators might stir some life in the nether regions. Can't decide if I would.


 
She's a fucking minger.


----------



## ernestolynch (Dec 28, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> She's a fucking minger.


 
She has i-phone eyes LOL


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 28, 2010)

Can we not have this stuff please? ffs.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 28, 2010)

imposs1904 said:


> Surely they should be inviting Claire Solomon to speak/debate . . . or is that too close to home?


 
another shouty type with too much time on her hands


----------



## ernestolynch (Dec 28, 2010)

She doesn't merit a serious 'discussion'.


----------



## ernestolynch (Dec 28, 2010)

The39thStep said:


> another shouty type with too much time on her hands


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 28, 2010)

Lusty was briefly her 'friend' on facebook, lol.


----------



## ernestolynch (Dec 28, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Lusty was briefly her 'friend' on facebook, lol.


 
And Tasmin's too if I remember right. And Clare Fox. He does like them posh ranters.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 28, 2010)

Don't know why she de-friended him.  Maybe she read the aphorisms wall.


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Dec 28, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Lusty was briefly her 'friend' on facebook, lol.


 
I'm her friend on facebook and she follows me on twitter too, 
she's  O.K with me


----------



## audiotech (Dec 28, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> She's a fucking minger.



cretin


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 28, 2010)

You can't mention how she looks without having her sort of win on the points she raises about patriarchy in politics. She does have a crap haircut though- in mitigation, so do I.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Dec 28, 2010)

Well this thread has taken a nice turn...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 28, 2010)

audiotech said:


> cretin


 
Ern's no oil painting himself, so he should bear in mind the old saw "judge not, lest ye be judged". I'm pretty sure Laurie Penny would take one look at him and say "he looks like a bulldog sucking piss off a thistle".


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 28, 2010)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Well this thread has taken a nice turn...


 

We must be as sour faced as all those SWP paper floggers


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Dec 28, 2010)

Anyhoo...

Sunny Hundal attacks the SWP: http://is.gd/jEBrg


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 28, 2010)

Eh, Laurie Penny's lovely-looking, but that has fuck-all to do with anything. From what I've read she's far more bothered about being someone than anything else. And god forbid she should have to talk to anyone but nice polite students.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 28, 2010)

Yo've not read the thread. She talks to NEETS and goes undercover at Young Tory shindigs.


----------



## Sgt Howie (Dec 28, 2010)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Anyhoo...
> 
> Sunny Hundal attacks the SWP: http://is.gd/jEBrg


 
I'm no fan of the SWP but that's a really, really shallow takedown - even from his soft left social democratic perspective he could have constructed something a lot better than that.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Dec 28, 2010)

Laurie Penny has always been a complete knob. Sunny Hundial is also a cock. Liberal wankers and a burden on working class politics. Fuck them.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 29, 2010)

Sunny Hundial supported the Lib Dems as well didn't he?


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 29, 2010)

ViolentPanda said:


> Ern's no oil painting himself, so he should bear in mind the old saw "judge not, lest ye be judged". I'm pretty sure Laurie Penny would take one look at him and say "he looks like a bulldog sucking piss off a thistle".


 
Are you a good looker Panda?


----------



## ernestolynch (Dec 29, 2010)

I heard he looked like a bald Woody Allen.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 29, 2010)

He said he looked like Shrek.


----------



## where to (Dec 29, 2010)

The39thStep said:


> Sunny Hundial supported the Lib Dems as well didn't he?


 
they all did.

they've got a fucking cheek tbh.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 29, 2010)

The39thStep said:


> Are you a good looker Panda?


 
Nope. "Weathered and homely" is about the best I look.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 29, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> I heard he looked like a bald Woody Allen.


 
Strangely enough, just as not all Welshmen look like Talfryn Thomas, not all Jewish men look like Woody Allen.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 29, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> He said he looked like Shrek.


 
I do, except for the green tinge.


----------



## ernestolynch (Dec 30, 2010)

Like an old Wayne Rooney then?


----------



## TremulousTetra (Dec 30, 2010)

5 pages.


----------



## Random (Dec 30, 2010)

"surely the visteon?"


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Dec 30, 2010)

Seems there's more than a few people not impressed with Penny's positioning on the recent protests:

David Osler


----------



## Proper Tidy (Dec 30, 2010)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Seems there's more than a few people not impressed with Penny's positioning on the recent protests:
> 
> David Osler



Lol



> “It is for these reason that I am going to be voting, in my constituency of Leyton and Wanstead, for the Liberal Democrat Party. Not because of Nick Clegg’s golden tie, and not even because The Guardian says so. Because I want a new, more representative parliamentary system in which citizens can feel like their voices actually matter. I like the Lib Dems; I don’t think they were sent to save us. I’d prefer to vote for a third party that had stronger links with workers’ organisations. But the Lib Dems represent the best chance this country has for transformation on a structural level. And, of course, I’m sick of the sight of Cameron’s soft, evil face
> 
> I’m with the Guardian and with Sunny: if we want anything other than five years of Torygeddon, burning jobcentres and bankers’ red-cheeked sons deciding policy in private lunches with their friends from university and the nice men from Fox, then we have to vote first for the party most likely to beat the Conservatives in our particular areas. After that, or if there’s no clear and present danger of blue peril, grab a shiny off-yellow biro and vote Lib Dem.”


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 31, 2010)

Here's a good one in the election aftermath - note the again:



> I will be joining the Labour Party again in order to vote for Abbott, and I will probably be volunteering for her campaign. You should too. Diane for King.



Lead us Penny, lead us...


----------



## Fruitloop (Dec 31, 2010)

Up to the top of the hill, and then...


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 31, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Here's a good one in the election aftermath - note the again:
> 
> 
> 
> Lead us Penny, lead us...



'FOLLOW THE GOURD!'


----------



## Proper Tidy (Dec 31, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Here's a good one in the election aftermath - note the again:
> 
> 
> 
> Lead us Penny, lead us...


 
Meet the new left, same as the old left


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 31, 2010)

Fruitloop said:


> Up to the top of the hill, and then...


 
Into ed's arms.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 31, 2010)

I don't listen to R4 - was/is this scabbing by Penny?



> An unexpected fruit of the NUJ strike at the BBC came in the form of Laurie Penny on Radio 4 this morning. On Off The Page, which ran instead of the Today programme, Penny described how her blog – a kind of socialist-feminist cultural commentary called Penny Red – led her from *near destitution* to a career in journalism.
> 
> Penny, who publishes her stuff on a Blogger platform under a Creative Commons License, now writes a regular column for the Staggers, *contributing to the usual suspects *such as the Guardian’s Comment is Free. She admits that being a freelance journalist makes her ‘terribly poor’.



The smugness of that second bold tells you all you need to know. Yeah for oxbridge!


----------



## nino_savatte (Dec 31, 2010)

Laurie Penny? More like Bad Penny!  

<gets coat>


----------



## Proper Tidy (Dec 31, 2010)

She fucking scabbed! Oh lordy.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 31, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> She fucking scabbed! Oh lordy.


 
Hang on, it may be a repeat, i don't know R4.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Dec 31, 2010)

I so hope it's true.


----------



## killer b (Dec 31, 2010)

Lolidarity


----------



## BigTom (Dec 31, 2010)

First broadcast Thursday 4th November

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vky79#broadcasts

edit: That means it was a repeat doesn't it? was the strike the friday/saturday or thursday/friday?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 31, 2010)

On priviliege



> Dear whitepeople, straightpeople, cispeople, men: it's not about you. The work that anti-racists, feminists, queer activists and other equality agitators do to combat privilege and prejudice actually has nothing to do with you. No really, listen up.



Class politics has nothing to do with you then right?

(p-lease penny haters, read this one in full - it's truly astonishing)


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 31, 2010)

BigTom said:


> First broadcast Thursday 4th November
> 
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vky79#broadcasts
> 
> edit: That means it was a repeat doesn't it? was the strike the friday/saturday or thursday/friday?



I think so. Maybe we just saw a glimpse of the future.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 31, 2010)

The poor oxbridge prostitutes

No, she means prostitutes

Finger on the mutha-fucking pulse.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 31, 2010)

We are the mods! we are the mods!



> Labour's new cohort knows what it's like to lose. We are, after all, the lost generation. We don't expect our dreams and ideals to be realised without a fight, and we don't expect much help from the grown-ups. There is a profound sense at this party conference that the elder generation of Labour statespeople has failed us, and that the time for deference is finally done. "Young Labour is buzzing with ideas, enthusiasm and anticipation of what can be achieved following this conference," said Tarry. With the politicians who saddled us with debt, tanked the economy and took us into Iraq shuffling off into the twilight, one thing's certain: it's our turn now.


----------



## audiotech (Dec 31, 2010)

> ..the elation of 1997.



Priceless.


----------



## Sgt Howie (Jan 1, 2011)

BigTom said:


> First broadcast Thursday 4th November
> 
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vky79#broadcasts
> 
> edit: That means it was a repeat doesn't it? was the strike the friday/saturday or thursday/friday?


 
It was the Friday/Saturday, although it wouldn't have surprised me if she'd scabbed given her position on unions.

It's always amazed me that people can get paid to basically have opinions, but it stands out even more when those opinions aren't even all that well thought through. Still, she's spotted a niche and none of the people commissioning her care especially whether what she writes makes sense.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 1, 2011)

She's very popular with some of the Libcom lot.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Jan 1, 2011)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> She's very popular with some of the Libcom lot.


 
Why?


----------



## killer b (Jan 1, 2011)

is 'revivify' even a word?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jan 1, 2011)

Proper Tidy said:


> Why?


 
She's very good friends with Sunny Hundal, editor and founder of LibCon.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 1, 2011)

LOL.  Liberal Conspiracy, not students carrying massive photoshopped spanners.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 1, 2011)

what's her position on unions, i must have missed it?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 1, 2011)

They're ok as long as they do what she wants.


----------



## imposs1904 (Jan 1, 2011)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> She's very popular with some of the Libcom lot.



the anarchists?


----------



## Proper Tidy (Jan 1, 2011)

Libcon or Libcom?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 1, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> They're ok as long as they do what she wants.


 
Got a link, this could be good  i find her endlessly hilarious lol


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 1, 2011)

frogwoman said:


> Got a link, this could be good  i find her endlessly hilarious lol


 
I've no idea what her union position is tbh - i was just extending her general view of the oldsters who can't get the internet on their phones to a specific group...


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 1, 2011)

ah ok gotcha


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 1, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> The poor oxbridge prostitutes
> 
> No, she means prostitutes
> 
> Finger on the mutha-fucking pulse.


 
good god


----------



## IC3D (Jan 1, 2011)

imposs1904 said:


> the anarchists?


 
I've got a feeling she was one of the vocal lib/feminists that shouted down the sex workers at the 2009 bookfair, what a cunt.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 1, 2011)

killer b said:


> is 'revivify' even a word?


 
Yes. Poncy, though.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 1, 2011)

Proper Tidy said:


> Libcon or Libcom?


 
Libcom the anarchist website. There's a thread on her in the news forum, even some of the admins seem quite taken with her.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Jan 1, 2011)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Libcom the anarchist website. There's a thread on her in the news forum, even some of the admins seem quite taken with her.


 
How odd


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 1, 2011)

Proper Tidy said:


> How odd


 
Maybe she's wank fodder for some bunch of lifestylers?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jan 1, 2011)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Libcom the anarchist website. There's a thread on her in the news forum, even some of the admins seem quite taken with her.


 
This thread?

http://libcom.org/forums/news/penny-vs-callicinos-27122010


----------



## LLETSA (Jan 1, 2011)

No real people have ever heard of Laurie Penny. Or Jasmin Omond.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 1, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> No real people have ever heard of Laurie Penny. Or Jasmin Omond.


 
They may have had the misfortune to hear of Tamsin Omond, though.


----------



## LLETSA (Jan 1, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> They may have had the misfortune to hear of Tamsin Omond, though.




Tamsin then. Nobody heard of.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Jan 1, 2011)

I always had doubts about you lot being real, and the internet generally. Always suspected I was a brain in a jar.


----------



## LLETSA (Jan 1, 2011)

FridgeMagnet said:


> I always had doubts about you lot being real, and the internet generally. Always suspected I was a brain in a jar.





No matter how bad things get, real people will never allow themselves to be led by somebody called Tamsin.


----------



## ernestolynch (Jan 1, 2011)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Libcom the anarchist website.



(sic)


----------



## audiotech (Jan 2, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> No matter how bad things get, real people will never allow themselves to be led by somebody called Tamsin.



It's what the person is saying and whether it's strikes a chord with real people. Nowt to do with what their name is, as you well know.

Anyway, Tamsin and the meaning of the name:



> [ syll. tam-sin, ta-ms-in ] The girl name Tamsin is pronounced TahMSIHN †. Tamsin has its origins in the Aramaic language and it is used largely in English. Derived from the element teoma which is of the meaning 'twin'. The name developed as a short form of Thomasina, and was common among English speakers in the medieval period. It has in recent times mainly been used as a Cornish name in Cornwall, Britain.



http://www.babynamespedia.com/meaning/Tamsin


----------



## LLETSA (Jan 2, 2011)

audiotech said:


> It's what the person is saying and whether it's strikes a chord with real people. Nowt to do with what their name is, as you well know.
> 
> Anyway, Tamsin and the meaning of the name:
> 
> ...


 
No matter what they say, no self-respecting person could ever throw in their lot with a Tamsin.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Jan 2, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> No matter what they say, no self-respecting person could ever throw in their lot with a Tamsin.


 
It's true.


----------



## audiotech (Jan 2, 2011)

Shortened to Tam? No forget that.


----------



## Riklet (Jan 2, 2011)

Her name and how "omg middle class" it is, is obviously the biggest issue.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 2, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> No matter what they say, no self-respecting person could ever throw in their lot with a Tamsin.



lol.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2011)

I think plenty of blokes would throw their lot in if they could.


----------



## LLETSA (Jan 2, 2011)

Riklet said:


> Her name and how "omg middle class" it is, is obviously the biggest issue.


 
Followed by people who accompany their vacuous posts with  rolleyes crap.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 2, 2011)

Riklet said:


> Her name and how "omg middle class" it is, is obviously the biggest issue.


 
I think you'll find that it's what she *does* that's the biggest issue, and that taking the piss out of her name (and even her class) is secondary.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 2, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> Followed by people who accompany their vacuous posts with  rolleyes crap.


 
That's detective-boy fucked, for sure.


----------



## audiotech (Jan 2, 2011)

Tamsin, a Cambridge graduate, avoided being sent to prison for breaching bail conditions, which forbid the 23-year-old from going anywhere near Parliament.

"Family tradition: Social activism"



> Tamsin Omond is the granddaughter of Sir Thomas Lees, a fourth-generation baronet and owner of the Holton Lee estate at Lytchett Minster in Dorset. Sir Thomas has publicly supported his granddaughters' activism, calling it part of a long family tradition of philanthropy and politics. Her great-great-grandfather Elliot Lees was an MP for Oldham in the late 19th century whilst Sir Thomas himself spends most of his time running a charity for disabled people on 350 acres of woodland in the Purbeck Hills. Omond's mother, Sarah, is Sir Thomas' eldest daughter and her father, John, fled Soviet Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. They live in north London.



http://www.independent.co.uk/enviro...ce-tamsin-omond-faces-her-critics-965457.html


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 2, 2011)

audiotech said:


> Tamsin, a Cambridge graduate, avoided being sent to prison for breaching bail conditions, which forbid the 23-year-old from going anywhere near Parliament.
> 
> "Family tradition: Social activism"
> 
> ...


 
Well meaning middle classes .The world is full of them.


----------



## ernestolynch (Jan 2, 2011)

> her father, John, fled Soviet Czechoslovakia in the 1970s



Counter-revolutionary scum.


----------



## audiotech (Jan 2, 2011)

The39thStep said:


> Well meaning middle classes .The world is full of them.


 
As is this forum.


----------



## killer b (Jan 2, 2011)

it doesn't matter that no 'real people' have heard of penny - hers is still one of the most prominent voices of the anti-cuts movement, and her opinions will be filtered through to the 'real people' as the thoughts of those leading the movement, and not the confused ranting of a privileged teenager.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jan 2, 2011)

Must say she's something of a public relations master, having gone from blogger, to LibDem backer, returned to Labour now courting revolutionary opinion she's got people across the 'left/ liberal' spectrum all talking about her. Love her or hate you lot aint forgetting her in a hurry!


----------



## killer b (Jan 2, 2011)

we'll be remembering her for being shit. what fantastic PR.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 2, 2011)

killer b said:


> it doesn't matter that no 'real people' have heard of penny - hers is still one of the most prominent voices of the anti-cuts movement, and her opinions will be filtered through to the 'real people' as the thoughts of those leading the movement, and not the confused ranting of a privileged teenager.



anti tuition fees perhaps, anti cuts no. The latter won't be as fashionable or as easily impressed.


----------



## LLETSA (Jan 2, 2011)

killer b said:


> it doesn't matter that no 'real people' have heard of penny - hers is still one of the most prominent voices of the anti-cuts movement, and her opinions will be filtered through to the 'real people' as the thoughts of those leading the movement, and not the confused ranting of a privileged teenager.




Real people won't take that much notice of 'those leading the movement' either for that matter.


----------



## LLETSA (Jan 2, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Must say she's something of a public relations master, having gone from blogger, to LibDem backer, returned to Labour now courting revolutionary opinion she's got people across the 'left/ liberal' spectrum all talking about her. Love her or hate you lot aint forgetting her in a hurry!


 
I've never heard anybody talk about her except on here. In fact I'd never heard of her until this thread.


----------



## Fruitloop (Jan 2, 2011)

Guess no-one ever throws old copies of the Guardian down your well


----------



## LLETSA (Jan 2, 2011)

Fruitloop said:


> Guess no-one ever throws old copies of the Guardian down your well


 
I occasionally get to see a Guardian on Saturday and sometimes read it online. But I've still never noticed Laurie Penny.


----------



## Sgt Howie (Jan 2, 2011)

Most "real people" haven't, to their credit, heard of most broadsheet columnists. We all know it's a tiny, self-perpetuating little world. That sort of underpins the entire thread, doesn't it?


----------



## audiotech (Jan 3, 2011)

Cynicism and abuse, from the self appointed representatives of the 'real people'. Just what's needed at this time.


----------



## Riklet (Jan 3, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> I think you'll find that it's what she *does* that's the biggest issue, and that taking the piss out of her name (and even her class) is secondary.


 
Ahhh sigh I wrote a big reply and it just got back-button destroyed, oh noes.

I was reading this pretty late, and I mainly objected to the points in this thread where the (perhaps legitimate) criticism, cynicism and character assassination instead turned into a "look at her pic, what an ugly cunt" or "what a posh clueless cunt, being called Tamsin says it all" blah blah blah.  Pretty nasty kinda undertone imo.  I do think her articles are at times pretty shitty; the lolsome lies about singing the Internationale and harping on about her 'living in poverty' etc, the sense of proportion is really not there, but also is she really claiming to be a 'voice of the yoof'? I guess newspaper editors do genuinely think like that, which is pretty fucking sad really.  

Making a quip about the SWP (and essentially their 'marketing' at protests) isn't exactly the end of the world, personally the whole facebook/CIF handbags-out debate wankery just makes me chuckle (or even eye-roll like the evil green smilie).  She's only 22 or something though isn't she, maybe i'm naive and over-optimistic but writing someone off as a useless liar future lib dem abuser of their class privileges is just as snidey as her SWP comments; compared to Richard Littlejohn or someone her articles are hardly the inadvertent evil some are making them out heh.  

Penny's petty sectarian comments are exactly what some people are replicating (here and elsewhere) on some level, in some ways she's a non issue, a her few CIF pages is not going to either make or destroy how young adults in protest movements are viewed imo, and to say this will buys into a pretty low opinion of people in society as a whole, and their ability to read around, and y'know... think for themselves a bit.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 3, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> I've never heard anybody talk about her except on here. In fact I'd never heard of her until this thread.


 
Me neither to be honest, and I read the Guardian more often than I would like.


----------



## ernestolynch (Jan 3, 2011)

You should see someone about that, it can't be good for you.


----------



## killer b (Jan 3, 2011)

fair points that she won't have a massive impact (what columnist does?), but she's still got a profile which far outweighs her talents. i can't think of another anti-cuts campaigner who's had as many opportunities to mouth off in the mainstream media (guardian / bbc / ns - possibly elsewhere?), so i think it's reasonable to criticise her writing, and to question why it's her who's been 'chosen'.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 3, 2011)

killer b said:


> fair points that she won't have a massive impact (what columnist does?), but she's still got a profile which far outweighs her talents. i can't think of another anti-cuts campaigner who's had as many opportunities to mouth off in the mainstream media (guardian / bbc / ns - possibly elsewhere?), so i think it's reasonable to criticise her writing, and to question why it's her who's been 'chosen'.


 
yep


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2011)

Riklet said:


> Ahhh sigh I wrote a big reply and it just got back-button destroyed, oh noes.
> 
> I was reading this pretty late, and I mainly objected to the points in this thread where the (perhaps legitimate) criticism, cynicism and character assassination instead turned into a "look at her pic, what an ugly cunt" or "what a posh clueless cunt, being called Tamsin says it all" blah blah blah.  Pretty nasty kinda undertone imo.  I do think her articles are at times pretty shitty; the lolsome lies about singing the Internationale and harping on about her 'living in poverty' etc, the sense of proportion is really not there, but also is she really claiming to be a 'voice of the yoof'? I guess newspaper editors do genuinely think like that, which is pretty fucking sad really.
> 
> ...



You've mixed up two different people and have the chronology back to front there. LP has _already_ variously done the Labour party, then the lib-dems, then back to labour now to full fledged revolutionary blah blah. 

The point isn't so much about the content or effects of her writing, but 

a)how you really cannot find a better example of the use of cultural capital based on privilege to extend and transmit that privilege into the future 

b) how certain people attempt to recuperate social movements for their own careerists ends (some journos) and how other groups of people help/make this happen (editors, media bosses) and 

c) how politics is reduced in this game to just another fashion, this years fad. In short how the media and the culture they create and reflect works 

d) personal annoyance at the sort of barely disguised pushy middle class self-obsession that we've all seen in our social or work lives being (self) promoted as the voice of a generation (without even going into the infantile divisions this sort of crap assumes).


----------



## killer b (Jan 3, 2011)

Do we know what her leg up was yet? Strikes me that it must be more than just oxbridge contacts & savage ambition. Is her dad on the board or something?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 3, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> You've mixed up two different people and have the chronology back to front there. LP has _already_ variously done the Labour party, then the lib-dems, then back to labour now to full fledged revolutionary blah blah.
> 
> The point isn't so much about the content or effects of her writing, but
> 
> ...


 
Yeah, all of that really, and I think point c) is one that's very important and sort of been missed ... even on the discussions on here.
also there's no reason why we can't discuss people/phenomenons that annoy us - that's not the be and end all of our political activity, is it?


----------



## LLETSA (Jan 3, 2011)

audiotech said:


> Cynicism and abuse, from the self appointed representatives of the 'real people'. Just what's needed at this time.





If you want cynicism and abuse, I'm your man.

(Not that saying that you've never heard of some kid who writes a blog and a few columns is all that strong. Perhaps you need to get out more.)


----------



## audiotech (Jan 3, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> If you want cynicism and abuse, I'm your man.
> 
> (Not that saying that you've never heard of some kid who writes a blog and a few columns is all that strong. Perhaps you need to get out more.)



What does it matter about some blogger, giving all this attention and wasted energy to? I'd get more out of reading 'Dennis the Menace' and having a larf at 'Lord Snooty'.

Some comment elsewhere I came across, which cuts to the chase about the supposed "new politics".

"....the establishment is quaking in its boots at the threat from activists whose political nous extends to thinking that Topshop "caused the crisis".

I went out last night thanks.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Jan 3, 2011)

So we need to cut across this new politics guff but we shouldn't do that by pointing out the idiocy and hypocrisy of one of it's primary figureheads?


----------



## audiotech (Jan 3, 2011)

Primary figurehead? Not sure about that, but let's accept that premise.

First, there is a need to be clear to Penny and others who believe these developments to be a "new kind of politics" and think there should be a rejection of the "old politics".

What is happening of course is as it always has been, a class war, now open and intensive.

David Harvey, gives a quote from Warren Buffett, industrialist and the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, which makes clear it's the same "old politics" as its always been. This is the quote:

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Here's the original source for that:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html?_r=2

The assessment is that the organised working class is weak and it clearly is. Again, I'll quote Serwotka:



> The union movement today is different to that of the early 1980s – the last time we faced such an attack on the public sector and the welfare state. Membership is barely over half what it was and anti-union laws constrain us.



This is a reality and that needs to be recognised, however, he continues:



> ...[that] does not fatally undermine the potential for resistance.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/30/unions-cuts-protest

Of course the problem here is not only weakness of the organised working class, but also the lack, or little, if any class politics in these apparent "new" types of politics - social networks/ anti-cuts movements emerging and there also lies a weakness. If a movement develops only so far, then no prizes for guessing what comes next? Certainly a reaction of some kind, with workers organisations weakened further and the anti-cuts movement nowhere to be seen. Those left resisting can become especially odious figures during these developments, bearing the brunt of the reaction.

It's a funny old world and a brutal one at that.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 3, 2011)

audiotech said:


> Primary figurehead? Not sure about that, but let's accept that premise.


Okay, but we don't really need to. All we need accept is that Penny is being *represented* as a "primary figurehead" by some elements of the media. All else will tend to lead from how well that representation is taken up by those the media want this representation disseminated to.


> First, there is a need to be clear to Penny and others who believe these developments to be a "new kind of politics" and think there should be a rejection of the "old politics".
> 
> What is happening of course is as it always has been, a class war, now open and intensive.


Unfortunately, the "style" of the "new politics" is what is being most strongly presented in parts of the commercial media, not the *substance* of the ongoing class conflicts.


> David Harvey, gives a quote from Warren Buffett, industrialist and the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, which makes clear it's the same "old politics" as its always been. This is the quote:
> 
> “There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Here's the original source for that:
> 
> ...


Hardly surprising in and of itself, given the finessing of any overt class politics from mainstream political discourse, with what would generally be perceived as class issues re-classified as "social exclusion" and "welfare" issues, for example, and issues about wealth disparity marginalised almost to a binary opposition between being deserving or undeserving.


> social networks/ anti-cuts movements emerging and there also lies a weakness. If a movement develops only so far, then no prizes for guessing what comes next? Certainly a reaction of some kind, with workers organisations weakened further..


How much further can be gone? I noticed the proposals that some on the Tory right are pursuing (lifting the participation and vote-percentage thresholds for a successful strike vote, for example), but how far before the TUC and the individual union boards realise they're being legislated out of existence and actually get off their arses?


> and the anti-cuts movement nowhere to be seen. Those left resisting can become especially odious figures during these developments, bearing the brunt of the reaction.


I suspect that'll depend on how much of a common purpose the disparate elements will have realised that they share by the time something like this happens, and you're partly pre-supposing that the "anti-cuts movement" in general doesn't already intersect and cross-cut "workers organisations" in particular.


> It's a funny old world and a brutal one at that.


Always has been and always will be.


----------



## LLETSA (Jan 3, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> I suspect that'll depend on how much of a common purpose the disparate elements will have realised that they share by the time something like this happens, and you're partly pre-supposing that the "anti-cuts movement" in general doesn't already intersect and cross-cut "workers organisations" in particular.
> 
> Always has been and always will be.




For once Audiotech is correct. No matter how militant the anti-cuts campaigns, without being able to answer the question of political power, the most that can be hoped for (by those who do this kind of thing) is another Labour government. And then the whole thing begins again except with, as he says, a weakened anti-cuts movement and no real reason to think that workers organisations will have been significantly strengthened. 

Sad but true.


----------



## audiotech (Jan 3, 2011)

I dispute the 'for once'.

Anyway, it's not about getting it right, or wrong, but looking reality hard in the face and developing tactics to achieve an overall strategy. These can be either defensive, or offensive positions. 'War of position' (analogous to trench warfare); and the 'war of movement' (or frontal attack).  - Antonio Gramsci.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2011)

Those positions are nothing whatsoever to do with offensive or defensive positions - he was explicitly arguing the second is a worthless approach in countries like the UK. And what's the point in throwing them in this context free form anyway?


----------



## LLETSA (Jan 3, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Those positions are nothing whatsoever to do with offensive or defensive positions - he was explicitly arguing the second is a worthless approach in countries like the UK. And what's the point in throwing them in this context free form anyway?





That's what I was wondering. Not being deliberately antagonistic, but A/tech has always had a penchant for content-free sloganeering. It's as bad as the over-optimism he warns against.


----------



## audiotech (Jan 3, 2011)

To bring the ideas of Gramsci to this thread, for those who may have heard of him, but haven't read that much about him and his ideas? Then perhaps to go away and study further? Perhaps a discussion, clarification and of what position is relevant to the UK? Why do you two in particular come out with negative comments all the time, thinking the worst of posters and in the process demonstrating how really intelligent you both are? It's pathetic.


----------



## audiotech (Jan 3, 2011)

Cat>>>>>>>>>>Pigeons.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 3, 2011)

audiotech said:


> I dispute the 'for once'.
> 
> Anyway, it's not about getting it right, or wrong, but looking reality hard in the face and developing tactics to achieve an overall strategy.


This is something I mention time and again. Unfortunately, too many people don't actually differentiate between tactics and strategy, and even if they do, prefer grand gestures and set pieces in their tactical armoury rather than stuff that enables them to apply pressure through struggle.


> These can be either defensive, or offensive positions. 'War of position' (analogous to trench warfare); and the 'war of movement' (or frontal attack).  - Antonio Gramsci.


Much as I like Signor Gramsci and respect his writing, I prefer Sun Tzu.
It's not about defensive or offensive, it's about realising that both are necessary, and that you fit your tactics to your situation (location, manpower, materiel) and deploy accordingly.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 3, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> For once Audiotech is correct. No matter how militant the anti-cuts campaigns, without being able to answer the question of political power, the most that can be hoped for (by those who do this kind of thing) is another Labour government. And then the whole thing begins again except with, as he says, a weakened anti-cuts movement and no real reason to think that workers organisations will have been significantly strengthened.
> 
> Sad but true.


 
Which is why Penny's much-publicised oscillations between two of the mainstream parties are risible. They offer no alternative, or even the hope of one, especially given the assumption in some sections of the media that any codified anti-cuts movement will eventually be subsumed into Labour.


----------



## LLETSA (Jan 3, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> Which is why Penny's much-publicised oscillations between two of the mainstream parties are risible. They offer no alternative, or even the hope of one, especially given the assumption in some sections of the media that any codified anti-cuts movement will eventually be subsumed into Labour.




When it comes to the lack of a political alternative, Penny's 'oscillations' are the least of the problem, though, aren't they?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 3, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Those positions are nothing whatsoever to do with offensive or defensive positions - he was explicitly arguing the second is a worthless approach in countries like the UK. And what's the point in throwing them in this context free form anyway?


 
There's a point if what you're doing is acknowledging that if you strategise, it needs to be for an offensive against the political elite/the establishment/the ruling classes. 

because otherwise we (the working classes) will be caught between the hammer and the anvil. Again.


----------



## Sue (Jan 3, 2011)

audiotech said:


> To bring the ideas of Gramsci to this thread, for those who may have heard of him, but haven't read that much about him and his ideas? Then perhaps to go away and study further? Perhaps a discussion, clarification and of what position is relevant to the UK?



Or possibly to make yourself look super-smart/exclude those who haven't read Gramsci?  (Perhaps not your intention but that's how it comes across to me anyway.)


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 3, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> When it comes to the lack of a political alternative, Penny's 'oscillations' are the least of the problem, though, aren't they?


 
Maybe so, but they're a visible sample of a phenomenon that I'd expect to be taking place with many people: A search for "truth" that is confined to those two choices because people have been educated away from believing they have the power to organise. The one is possible, and occurs, partly because of the other.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 3, 2011)

audiotech said:


> To bring the ideas of Gramsci to this thread, for those who may have heard of him, but haven't read that much about him and his ideas? Then perhaps to go away and study further? Perhaps a discussion, clarification and of what position is relevant to the UK? Why do you two in particular come out with negative comments all the time, thinking the worst of posters and in the process demonstrating how really intelligent you both are? It's pathetic.



You could be accused of the same attempt at "demonstrating how really intelligent you are" by mentioning him in the first place though, surely?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 3, 2011)

Sue said:


> Or possibly to make yourself look super-smart/exclude those who haven't read Gramsci?  (Perhaps not your intention but that's how it comes across to me anyway.)


 
Probably wasn't intentional on audiotech's part, but could be interpreted like that, and as Butch said, the ref was not really contextually germane anyway.


----------



## Sue (Jan 3, 2011)

Ach, fair enough. Just a pet hate like.


----------



## Riklet (Jan 3, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> You've mixed up two different people



I haven't, both were refered to in this thread, and both in ways that at the time I thought was a bit lame at best, and downright misogynistic unpleasantness at worst, especially with Laurie Penny's pic. 



> ...and have the chronology back to front there. LP has _already_ variously done the Labour party, then the lib-dems, then back to labour now to full fledged revolutionary blah blah.



Fair play that seems clearer to me now.



> The point isn't so much about the content or effects of her writing, but
> 
> a)how you really cannot find a better example of the use of cultural capital based on privilege to extend and transmit that privilege into the future
> 
> ...


 
This is the kind of reply I was hoping for really, some very interesting and enlightening points, ta.  I find it hard to disagree much with any of that when I think about it.  The "leg up" theory/speculation is also interesting and who knows what might come out in that department.

I saw the F.B. bunfight is still going strong with Alex Callinicos' class/wealth being bought into it (not by Laurie Penny though) as well as the rights and wrongs of the soviet oppression of revolution from Kronstadt through to action against the non-communist left in Spain.  Divided left, no it aint... haha.


----------



## audiotech (Jan 3, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> You could be accused of the same attempt at "demonstrating how really intelligent you are" by mentioning him in the first place though, surely?



I've been posting here since since 2003 and I believe that's the first time I've mentioned his name. If someone wanted to demonstrate how really smug and intelligent they are, the name would have been posted long ago. Anyway, I mentioned Dennis the Menace and Lord Snooty a bit earlier, both Beano comic characters, I read as a child and would still do today if I came across a copy.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 3, 2011)

audiotech said:


> I've been posting here since since 2003 and I believe that's the first time I've mentioned his name. If someone wanted to demonstrate how really smug and intelligent they are, the name would have been posted long ago.


Ah, but what other names have you mentioned, the whole Gramsci issue could be a ruse to throw people off the scent of your having previously referred to other historical political theorists and philosophers!   


> Anyway, I mentioned Dennis the Menace and Lord Snooty a bit earlier, both Beano comic characters, I read as a child and would still do today if I came across a copy.


Ah, but Dennis and Gnasher are foot-soldiers in the class war. it's okay to mention them, and Lord Snooty is a useful tool (in both senses of the word) for revealing the inbred foolishness of the ruling classes!


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 4, 2011)

Dennis is a footsoldier in the BUF more like- I simply won't have this appalling revisionist take on the beano.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Jan 4, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> Dennis is a footsoldier in the BUF more like- I simply won't have this appalling revisionist take on the beano.


 
Piss off with your Dennis was a homophobe guff. He was a class warrior.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 4, 2011)

The bash street kids were the real class warriors - Leo Baxendale being an anarchist of course.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 4, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> Dennis is a footsoldier in the BUF more like- I simply won't have this appalling revisionist take on the beano.



Nonsense, Dennis is actually meant to be Jewish thanks to his mother, indeed I remember a story in the eighties where Walter is reciting a letter from Chesterton to Belloc about the Jewish problem in Europe, and the necissity of action, and Dennis soundly landing a large dried pea from his catapault (directly inspired by David's slingshot) on the Softy's rump in response, accompanied by a hearttfelt shout of 'rotter'.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jan 4, 2011)

Dennis wears his politics on his sleeve.

Louis MacNeice


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 4, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> The bash street kids were the real class warriors - Leo Baxendale being an anarchist of course.


 
They acted in unison. Dennis, if we are to take him as a class warrior, was a strangely individualistic lone gunmen- certainly he never built up grass roots support and had no respect for common goals.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Jan 4, 2011)

He had a dog


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 4, 2011)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Dennis wears his politics on his sleeve.
> 
> Louis MacNeice


 
V. Good!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 4, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> They acted in unison. Dennis, if we are to take him as a class warrior, was a strangely individualistic lone gunmen- certainly he never built up grass roots support and had no respect for common goals.



He had his affinity group.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 4, 2011)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Dennis wears his politics on his sleeve.
> 
> Louis MacNeice



In hindsight I should just gone with this.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Jan 4, 2011)

He was no anarkid


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> Dennis is a footsoldier in the BUF more like- I simply won't have this appalling revisionist take on the beano.


 
Dennis and Gnasher put the boot into Walter and Foo-Foo, kicking the ruling classes where it hurt!  Dennis wore the red and the black, obviously an expression of his anarcho-communism!


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 4, 2011)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> He had his affinity group.


 
the glutton pie face and the one that didn't wash? maybe he WAS an anarchist after all.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 4, 2011)

Proper Tidy said:


> He was no anarkid



Red and black - check.
Direct Action against fascism and the forces of the state - check.
Scruffy hair - check.
Affinity group in which he was the informal but accountable leader - check.
Support for animal rights (he had a liberated pig Rasher, and his dog had freedom of  movement) - check.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 4, 2011)

I always suspected that Alf Tupper ( Tough of the track) was secretly a member of the CP


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 4, 2011)




----------



## butchersapron (Jan 4, 2011)

Look at the greedy shopkeeper.


----------



## audiotech (Jan 4, 2011)

Desperate Dan, now there was a comic character in The Dandy. Initially Dan was a desperado on the wrong side of the law. Later on he switched sides and become a friendlier character, helping the underdog. His favourite food being 'cow pie' – an enormous meat pie with the horns sticking out.


----------



## Fedayn (Jan 4, 2011)

Desperate Dan was published by Dundee based DC Thompson a notoriously anti trades union company.


----------



## audiotech (Jan 4, 2011)

Still liked the character.

I've been employed by some anti-trade union companies.


----------



## past caring (Jan 4, 2011)

audiotech said:


> Desperate Dan, now there was a comic character in The Dandy. Initially Dan was a desperado on the wrong side of the law. Later on he switched sides and become a friendlier character, helping the underdog. His favourite food being 'cow pie' – an enormous meat pie with the horns sticking out.


----------



## Streathamite (Jan 4, 2011)

8 pages, and we're at Dennis The Menace and Desperate Dan. quality.


----------



## audiotech (Jan 4, 2011)

"He'll always call a spade a frog."


----------



## where to (Jan 4, 2011)

Fedayn said:


> Desperate Dan was published by Dundee based DC Thompson a notoriously anti trades union company.


 
who also only employed protestants.  this went on into at least the late 60s.  my dad (raised a protestant) was asked at his own Sunday Post (lol) job interview with them "and you are a protestant?".


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 4, 2011)

My favourite was an athlete called Wilson in a comic called The Wizard.  Although born in the late 18th century ( and in Yorkshire)  had been given the secret of eternal life from some old bloke and lived on nuts and berries. Had an incredible record including a three minute mile,first man to really climb Everest, captained the Engalnd cricket team to victory in the Ashes and shot down 20 odd german planes during the war.

Role model- we need more like him .


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 4, 2011)

The39thStep said:


> My favourite was an athlete called Wilson in a comic called The Wizard.  Although born in the late 18th century ( and in Yorkshire)  had been given the secret of eternal life from some old bloke and lived on nuts and berries. Had an incredible record including a three minute mile,first man to really climb Everest, captained the Engalnd cricket team to victory in the Ashes and shot down 20 odd german planes during the war.
> 
> Role model- we need more like him .



Sounds like an obituary from the Telegraph.


----------



## discokermit (Jan 4, 2011)

dennis is middle class. his dad always wore a suit and tie. walter is a swotty cunt what deserved lamping though, so fair play.

'lazy bones' was my hero but that was in 'whizzer and chips' which was probably a bit too hardcore for you cunts.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jan 4, 2011)

Sunny Hundal comments on Laurie Penny's rising 'influence'.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 4, 2011)

All he says is _i am a kingpin_. He doesn't comment on any 'influence'. These people are in for a shock. Not in their intern and think-tank and party workshops though.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jan 4, 2011)

He does comment it's just in a circumspect way, he's basically saying back off from Laurie...


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jan 4, 2011)

I don't think they are in for a shock, this lot look like becoming the new elite.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 4, 2011)

Becoming?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 4, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> He does comment it's just in a circumspect way, he's basically saying back off from Laurie...


 
Or what? He'll black ball us from the shitty lib-dem labour pluralist network meeting he's set up to recuperate the anti-cuts movement?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2011)

now now, why can't you just be media savvy, as one of these types kept going on about the other week


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2011)

oh and don't go on about welfare too much because that means people will associate it with the unions and socialism


----------



## Proper Tidy (Jan 4, 2011)

Nobody mention class. The rich fuckers don't like it.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2011)

if you go on too much about class, people will think you're some kind of marxist or something and this issue doesn't really have anything to do with politics 

let's keep politics out of it


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2011)

Proper Tidy said:


> Nobody mention class. The rich fuckers don't like it.


 
typical trot, trying to control everything as usual, the media aren't gonna like that 

now, can we mention green jobs anywhere on this banner? they have to be green, that's the most important thing , can't have any of those nasty industrial type jobs


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2011)

don't you understand that you are so out of date, unlike the internet


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 4, 2011)

You can get it on your phone now.


----------



## ernestolynch (Jan 4, 2011)

discokermit said:


> dennis is middle class. his dad always wore a suit and tie. walter is a swotty cunt what deserved lamping though, so fair play.
> 
> 'lazy bones' was my hero but that was in 'whizzer and chips' which was probably a bit too hardcore for you cunts.


 
In the 1930s every working man wore a jacket and tie


----------



## ernestolynch (Jan 4, 2011)

The39thStep said:


>


 
Best comic, The Victor


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> You can get it on your phone now.


 
I can, you probably can't though, but then again you're just an old dinosaur from the 70s 

welcome to the new politics


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2011)

hey butchers why don't you spare a thought for the oxbridge prostitutes?


----------



## Proper Tidy (Jan 4, 2011)

frogwoman said:


> now, can we mention green jobs anywhere on this banner? they have to be green, that's the most important thing , can't have any of those nasty industrial type jobs


 
Poor people are bang into the green thing. Fact.


----------



## discokermit (Jan 4, 2011)

ernestolynch said:


> In the 1930s every working man wore a jacket and tie


 
did. they. fuck.


----------



## discokermit (Jan 4, 2011)

ernestolynch said:


> Best comic, The Victor


 
was. it. fuck.


----------



## ernestolynch (Jan 4, 2011)

discokermit said:


> did. they. fuck.


 
Hats too.


----------



## ernestolynch (Jan 4, 2011)

discokermit said:


> was. it. fuck.


 
Yes


----------



## discokermit (Jan 4, 2011)

ernestolynch said:


> Hats too.


 
that's fair comment.


----------



## ernestolynch (Jan 4, 2011)

discokermit said:


> that's fair comment.


 
In the 1950s even young lads wore suits and ties.


----------



## discokermit (Jan 4, 2011)

ernestolynch said:


> Yes


 
victor was shit. for twats who were too scared to read commando.


----------



## Belushi (Jan 4, 2011)

Warlord, Commando, Victor, Battle - I read them all as a bloodthirsty preteen.


----------



## discokermit (Jan 4, 2011)

ernestolynch said:


> In the 1950s even young lads wore suits and ties.


 
it was the fucking thirties a minute ago. you wanna get your story straight.

in the fifties they had their arses hanging out of their trousers and their big brothers had their demob suit and their work clothes.


----------



## ernestolynch (Jan 4, 2011)

discokermit said:


> victor was shit. for twats who were too scared to read commando.


 
They weren't mutually exclusive. Battle, Warlord, Victor, Commando, read them all. Whizzer & Chips, Buster, Cor!, Whoopee!, Beezer, Topper, Dandy, Beano, Nutty, Oink!...all of them.


----------



## ernestolynch (Jan 4, 2011)

discokermit said:


> it was the fucking thirties a minute ago. you wanna get your story straight.
> 
> in the fifties they had their arses hanging out of their trousers and their big brothers had their demob suit and their work clothes.


 
That's right


----------



## discokermit (Jan 4, 2011)

ernestolynch said:


> They weren't mutually exclusive. Battle, Warlord, Victor, Commando, read them all. Whizzer & Chips, Buster, Cor!, Whoopee!, Beezer, Topper, Dandy, Beano, Nutty, Oink!...all of them.


 
did your mom and dad own a fucking papershop? moneybags.


----------



## discokermit (Jan 4, 2011)

ernestolynch said:


> That's right


 
they look working age to me, therefore not kids.


----------



## ernestolynch (Jan 4, 2011)

discokermit said:


> did your mom and dad own a fucking papershop? moneybags.


 
Surname's Menzies.

Lad called Brian in primary school (WBA fan as it happens), his mum worked in WH Smiths and got all last week's comics for free. Brought them in Monday morning and shouted 'scramble'.

Roy of the Rovers was my fave.


----------



## ernestolynch (Jan 4, 2011)

discokermit said:


> they look working age to me, therefore not kids.


 
You lost this one bub.


----------



## discokermit (Jan 4, 2011)

ernestolynch said:


> You lost this one bub.


 
don't think so. late teens in the late fifties is as near as you'll get.


----------



## ernestolynch (Jan 4, 2011)

discokermit said:


> don't think so. late teens in the late fifties is as near as you'll get.


 
I said 'young lads'. I'm middle-aged, like you. Move on. Young lads.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jan 5, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Becoming?


 
They aint there yet, it will take another Labour government for them to become 'critical friends' of.



butchersapron said:


> Or what? He'll black ball us from the shitty lib-dem labour pluralist network meeting he's set up to recuperate the anti-cuts movement?


 
Eh?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 5, 2011)

Did you not get the invite?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jan 5, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Did you not get the invite?



Yeah I got the reference just not seen the word recuperate used like that before couldn't work out how you think he was bringing the anti cuts movement back to health...


----------



## Proper Tidy (Jan 5, 2011)

Looks like an easyjet site.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 5, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Did you not get the invite?


 
Not a single speaker advertised from the unions despite the TUC backing this, I am actually surprised...

ETA: oops of course Brendan Barber is speaking, and some bod from the NUJ, but that's it.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 5, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Did you not get the invite?


 
Interesting that a similar mileu of social networking bods and collectives ( ie same tools but diffrent politics) on this invite are also involved in the Big Society network.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 5, 2011)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Sounds like an obituary from the Telegraph.



Never died .Recorded as missing in action, bit like one of his namesakes. Once those nuts and berries kick in he will be back.


----------



## LLETSA (Jan 5, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> I don't think they are in for a shock, this lot look like becoming the new elite.





Elite of what though?

The thing is that the people who really matter in all this are the overwhelming majority who do not join any campaigns against the cuts (or anything else), and 
don't go on any protests. To them, it doesn't matter on the whole who is seen to be leading this or that campaign (except on relatively rare occasions that the arguments are looked at in detail.) All that matters is the propaganda war, and in the long run this can't be won when the real enemy controls the media. 

Linked to this is the lack of any viable opposition. Most people opposed to the cuts will look to Labour to rescue them-and Labour will, sooner or later, carry out cuts on the same scale-because the corporations who allow them a chance to rule will, of course, demand it. Perhaps by that time young Penny and Sunny et al will be arguing for 'socialist cuts' or some such on their way up the career ladder, but it doesn't matter in the larger scheme of things.


----------



## killer b (Jan 18, 2011)

lol.

http://order-order.com/2011/01/18/sexist-penny-exploits-unemployed-offering-below-minimum-wage/


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 18, 2011)

Fucking hell. She wants someone to write her book for her. I wonder who gets the royalties?  What world does she live in?

_I'm too busy tweeting to write my own book_

edit: there's clearly far more than 80 hours work there as well. A whole lot of unpaid on top. Should i go for this?


----------



## killer b (Jan 18, 2011)

you'll have to convince her to accept a man if you do, butch...


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 18, 2011)

killer b said:


> you'll have to convince her to accept a man if you do, butch...


 
I've convinced other _ladies_ in my time.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 18, 2011)

Hang on it says in the comments she:

"was on Newsnight last night, talking about the Tunisian revolution, why?"

I agree, why?


----------



## past caring (Jan 18, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> I've convinced other _ladies_ in my time.



Of what?


----------



## killer b (Jan 18, 2011)

they were talking about twitter & social media's role in the tunisian revolt. maybe she's the only journalist they know who's under 25, and therefore a premier expert on twitter and the like?

she was shit.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 18, 2011)

past caring said:


> Of what?


 
Of my feminist credentials.

I wonder if the newsnight appearance fee was over £500?


----------



## PlaidDragon (Jan 18, 2011)

Callinicos is a prick, Penny is shockingly naive. We were all young once, I used to support Plaid Cymru ffs, we've all got skeletons. I'm not a huge fan of Penny, but at the same time I don't think she's the antichrist either. There's much more worthy targets for abuse imo.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 18, 2011)

Get cracking then.


----------



## PlaidDragon (Jan 18, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Get cracking then.


 
If I spent any more time slagging off journalists I don't like, I'd be a recluse!


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 21, 2011)

Does this red pepper Student competition  mean that EMA students are excluded? What are higher education institutions? The rules seem to suggest that it means only university students?


----------



## ymu (Jan 21, 2011)

Yes. How crap.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 21, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Does this red pepper Student competition  mean that EMA students are excluded? What are higher education institutions? The rules seem to suggest that it means only university students?





> Competition rules
> 1. You must be enrolled on a course at a higher education institution in the UK for 2010/2011.



Yep, why would they be interested in FE students, RedPepper is a middle class rag for middle class activists on their way to a cushy job for an NGO or charity.


----------



## Random (Jan 21, 2011)

If only there was someone from Red Pepper posting here. Someone, for example, with a seemingly endless appetite for taking abuse and justifying bonkers politics?


----------



## articul8 (Jan 21, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Does this red pepper Student competition  mean that EMA students are excluded? What are higher education institutions? The rules seem to suggest that it means only university students?


 
 Fair point - I will take it up with the publisher (it hasn't been organised by the editors).


----------



## Random (Jan 21, 2011)

See, your voice can make a difference, Butchers. Get in the game.


----------



## JimW (Jan 21, 2011)

Random said:


> See, your voice can make a difference, Butchers. Get in the game.


 
 That strongly-worded petition worked! Put down the rifles.


----------



## audiotech (Jan 22, 2011)

1950's kids. Plastic sandals from woolworths, pumps, baseball boots, snakebelts, boots with studs, raincoats, short trousers and jumpers yer mam knitted. Scruffy urchins most of the year, except for one Sunday, when kids dressed up in new clothes, bought on tick, and went round to the neighbours who gave you a tanner.


----------



## TremulousTetra (Jan 29, 2011)

JimW said:


> That strongly-worded petition worked! Put down the rifles.


 
Certainly offers more potential for DOING something now, than do the 'criticise everything, offer nothing' annakissed.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 29, 2011)

ResistanceMP3 said:


> annakissed.



Cobweb.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 2, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Fucking hell. She wants someone to write her book for her. I wonder who gets the royalties?  What world does she live in?
> 
> _I'm too busy tweeting to write my own book_
> 
> edit: there's clearly far more than 80 hours work there as well. A whole lot of unpaid on top. Should i go for this?


 
go for it butch


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 3, 2011)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Yep, why would they be interested in FE students, RedPepper is a middle class rag for middle class activists on their way to a cushy job for an NGO or charity.


 
Just the place for a devastating critique of 'anti fascism' to be published


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 3, 2011)

The39thStep said:


> Just the place for a devastating critique of 'anti fascism' to be published



Butchers is in the process of setting up an NGO called Workspaces|Livingspaces that can work with the IWCA.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 3, 2011)

The39thStep said:


> Just the place for a devastating critique of 'anti fascism' to be published


 
oops


----------



## articul8 (Feb 3, 2011)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Yep, why would they be interested in FE students, RedPepper is a middle class rag for middle class activists on their way to a cushy job for an NGO or charity.


 
Does anyone actually have a reasoned criticism of the mag's politics, rather than this half-arsed pseduo-sociological shit.  Engels was a factory owner, Marx married into the aristocracy.  SO fucking what?


----------



## jannerboyuk (Feb 3, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Does anyone actually have a reasoned criticism of the mag's politics, rather than this half-arsed pseduo-sociological shit.  Engels was a factory owner, Marx married into the aristocracy.  SO fucking what?


 
I wouldn't say that marx married into the aristocracy more like his wfe married out of it. They hardly lived the life of riley (although an anarchist mate of mine claimed that marx being able to afford pen and paper made him a rich cunt!). Mind you i quite like red pepper.


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 3, 2011)

ResistanceMP3 said:


> Certainly offers more potential for DOING something now, than do the 'criticise everything, offer nothing' annakissed.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 3, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Does anyone actually have a reasoned criticism of the mag's politics, rather than this half-arsed pseduo-sociological shit.  Engels was a factory owner, Marx married into the aristocracy.  SO fucking what?


 
I'm not a marxist to be fair.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Feb 3, 2011)

Bakunin said:


>


----------



## TremulousTetra (Feb 4, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Does anyone actually have a reasoned criticism of the mag's politics, rather than this half-arsed pseduo-sociological shit.  Engels was a factory owner, Marx married into the aristocracy.  SO fucking what?


no chance mate.


----------



## killer b (Mar 20, 2011)

penny's been rumbled lying about porn (again...)

a NS sub ed attempts to take the heat, but with her previous record...

(comments by anna span and then helen L-H on the article - the original text has been changed...)


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 20, 2011)

Hmmm it is very possible this was an editorial fuck up...


----------



## killer b (Mar 20, 2011)

it could - but with her record, who knows? the article is apparently littered with other innacuracies too, but i expect most of them can be blamed on lax googling...


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 20, 2011)

killer b said:


> it could - but with her record, who knows? the article is apparently littered with other innacuracies too, but i expect most of them can be blamed on lax googling...


 
Well that's the thing, those that don't like her will think the worst of her at every turn...


----------



## Bakunin (Mar 20, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Well that's the thing, those that don't like her will think the worst of her at every turn...


 
That's fair comment but, that said, she does seem to have acquired a reputation for gilding the lily with regard to her personal experiences and that won't help her case at all. Neither will the fact that she claims to have met and spoken to Anna Span when Span herself says she didn't even attend this particular event. On the balance of probability (one of them seems to be lying) I'd be inclined to say that Penny, especially with her previous record, has either cooked up another porkie or has been so unprofessional in her conduct as a journalist that she thinks she met someone and didn't even check to make sure precisely who it was.

Personally, I'm not the least bit interested in attacking Penny because she's a woman, or because she's a feminist or any of that. I do, however, have a marked dislike for slack, lazy and (possibly) outright fabricated journalism. If she wants to be taken seriously as a journalist then she's going to have to do better than she has been of late and bouncing from one accusation of outright dishonesty and/or incompetence to another isn't going to do her any favours at all.


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Mar 22, 2011)

Bakunin said:


> Personally, I'm not the least bit interested in attacking Penny because she's a woman, or because she's a feminist or any of that. I do, however, have a marked dislike for slack, lazy and (possibly) outright fabricated journalism. If she wants to be taken seriously as a journalist then she's going to have to do better than she has been of late and bouncing from one accusation of outright dishonesty and/or incompetence to another isn't going to do her any favours at all.



I think the Anna Span thing was probably an honest mistake but the most glaring inaccuracy in her piece  is when she says the SHAFTAs  are the '_the porn industry's annual awards ceremony' _
I dunno if the UK porn industry actually has an annual awards ceremony but the SHAFTA awards are  run by Television X and based  exclusively  on their programmes. -more of a TVX promo party really and the fact she doesn't seem to realise this makes me doubt the credibility of anything else she says in that article


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 22, 2011)

She is right about how joyless a great deal of porn looks though. And I'm not even asking for grand passion, just the sense that the people involved might be enjoying themselves.

She is a crap journalist and one I'd rather outside of the tent pissing rather than inside, but she has a point there.


----------



## discokermit (Mar 22, 2011)

she's in her own tent, pissing on her shoes.


----------



## Bakunin (Mar 22, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> She is right about how joyless a great deal of porn looks though. And I'm not even asking for grand passion, just the sense that the people involved might be enjoying themselves.
> 
> She is a crap journalist and one I'd rather outside of the tent pissing rather than inside, but she has a point there.


 
Fair's fair, I'd agree that most porn looks as though they'd rather be anywhere else but doing what they're doing on film. Can't argue with her about that.


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Mar 22, 2011)

Bakunin said:


> Fair's fair, I'd agree that most porn looks as though they'd rather be anywhere else but doing what they're doing on film. Can't argue with her about that.



depends, I think  most Brit-porn (which is what our Penny would have seen at the SHAFTAs) looks like the performers are having a much better time than us who are watching  What I disliked about LP's article was that  it was so  full of lazy stereotypes and sensationalism - 
_spraytan and crystals
bloodstained tissues strewn around the sinks in the toilets_
 ffs..


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 22, 2011)

dynamicbaddog said:


> I think the Anna Span thing was probably an honest mistake but the most glaring inaccuracy in her piece  is when she says the SHAFTAs  are the '_the porn industry's annual awards ceremony' _
> I dunno if the UK porn industry actually has an annual awards ceremony but the SHAFTA awards are  run by Television X and based  exclusively  on their programmes. -more of a TVX promo party really and the fact she doesn't seem to realise this makes me doubt the credibility of anything else she says in that article


 What makes you think it was an honest mistake?


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Mar 22, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> What makes you think it was an honest mistake?



I believe  it was just a mistake by the  New Statesman sub editor. She can't be that silly as to lie  about meeting Anna  Span at this party, she must have realised  that Anna would eventually get round to reading  it and kick up a fuss (which is what indeed happened) No body could be that clueless surely?


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 22, 2011)

How could the 'mistake' have possibly happened? I can't work out any possible way that a sub just decided to put in that the writer met someone.


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Mar 22, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> How could the 'mistake' have possibly happened? I can't work out any possible way that a sub just decided to put in that the writer met someone.


 
I must admit it is odd. I have'nt seen the orginal piece tho, just the re-edited version.


----------



## flypanam (Mar 22, 2011)

Sounds like in a effort to gain Kudo she's read some David Foster Wallace esp 'Big Red Son' and thought what a great weaze it would be to write her own version.


----------



## redsquirrel (Mar 23, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> How could the 'mistake' have possibly happened? I can't work out any possible way that a sub just decided to put in that the writer met someone.


Agreed it's an obvious lie


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 23, 2011)

An obvious lie proven by what evidence?


----------



## imposs1904 (Mar 23, 2011)

You've had the handbags, now get the T shirt.

Has someone actually bought one of these?


----------



## redsquirrel (Mar 23, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> An obvious lie proven by what evidence?


 Who said anything about proof, I believe it to be a lie for the reason BA outlined above, I don't see what form of words she could have written that could be changed by a  sub get the result that was printed.

Rather than just admit it they played a shitty excuse - "it was some nameless subs fault", that's about as original as the homework being eaten by a dog.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Mar 23, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> An obvious lie proven by what evidence?


 
Do you know her or something KE?


----------



## killer b (Mar 23, 2011)

if so, can you tell us who her dad is?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 23, 2011)

redsquirrel said:


> Who said anything about proof, I believe it to be a lie for the reason BA outlined above, I don't see what form of words she could have written that could be changed by a  sub get the result that was printed.
> 
> Rather than just admit it they played a shitty excuse - "it was some nameless subs fault", that's about as original as the homework being eaten by a dog.



Heh I've seen some strange edits done to people's articles in my time...



Proper Tidy said:


> Do you know her or something KE?


 
Met her once long before she became famous. But that isn't really my point, just like to question assertions and assumptions directed at those that provoke controversy...


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 23, 2011)

killer b said:


> if so, can you tell us who her dad is?


 
Eh?


----------



## killer b (Mar 23, 2011)

i'm curious whether her stratospheric rise through the pages of the liberal press is down to her talent for writing, nose for a story and attention to detail; or because her dad's on the scott trust board or something.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 23, 2011)

killer b said:


> i'm curious whether her stratospheric rise through the pages of the liberal press is down to her talent for writing, nose for a story and attention to detail; or because her dad's on the scott trust board or something.


 
Ahhh...I see. Couldn't say, don't know.


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 25, 2011)

I just had Laurie Penny suggested to me as a friend by facebook


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 25, 2011)

freind her and and c+p quotes from the various threads onto her wall. See how long it takes to get defreinded


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 25, 2011)

killer b said:


> i'm curious whether her stratospheric rise through the pages of the liberal press is down to her talent for writing, nose for a story and attention to detail; or because her dad's on the scott trust board or something.


 
interestingly I read a piece by her the other day talking about how it's been for her trying to make it as a journo, she said her parents aren't in the media etc.


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 25, 2011)

a shame the hardships were not insurmountable eh


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 25, 2011)

They're not exactly labourers.

Do you have a link?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 25, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> They're not exactly labourers.
> 
> Do you have a link?


 
Seems some of the flack she's got recent has hit a nerve, this tweet has the link:



> FYI, anyone calling me a clueless posh bitch on the internet: my stock response is here. http://bit.ly/cnPeUN


----------



## killer b (Mar 25, 2011)

that's quite some whinge.


----------



## nino_savatte (Mar 25, 2011)

frogwoman said:


> I just had Laurie Penny suggested to me as a friend by facebook


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 25, 2011)

All the jobs because of talent. That's how it works.


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 25, 2011)

killer b said:


> that's quite some whinge.


 
I particularly enjoy the call to arms in the last line. That knowing rhetorical flourish-ugh.


In fairness she is not the only person guilty of that.


----------



## killer b (Mar 25, 2011)

i get the impression she's heading towards some sort of breakdown tbh.

can't wait for the column about that...


----------



## Bakunin (Mar 25, 2011)

killer b said:


> that's quite some whinge.


 
It does seem somewhat defensive and self-reverential, not to mention self-justifying. I've known a few journalists in my time and I've never encountered one who felt an urge to complain about how difficult it is to get noticed and get work. They just crack on with the job and don't whimper every time they receive a little (well-founded) criticism. If they were that sensitive then they'd not last long in that line of work.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 25, 2011)

killer b said:


> i get the impression she's heading towards some sort of breakdown tbh.


 
I've thought this too, I think she's mentioned suffering from clinical depression at some point in the past.


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 25, 2011)

More /reality/


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 25, 2011)

Eh?


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 25, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> I've thought this too, I think she's mentioned suffering from clinical depression at some point in the past.


 
What are you basing this on?


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 25, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Eh?


 
Getting caught again.


----------



## killer b (Mar 25, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Getting caught again.


 
she shoots herself in the foot with this shit too - the only reason most people know about it is because of her (transparent) denials via twitter.


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 25, 2011)

its odd- surely a journo would know that to lie properly you lie big and fat. Not about illusory choirs doing the interntationale or whatever. Certainly never respond to people calling you a liar with hissy 'no I aint'.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 25, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> What are you basing this on?


 
Well I'm not 100% hence using the word 'think' as a caveat but I remember reading somewhere on her blog a good while ago or perhaps an article where she mentioned it.


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 25, 2011)

She does -  in a tourist way.  It's bollocks.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 25, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> She does -  in a tourist way.  It's bollocks.


 
How do you know it's bollox (other than the 'evidence' that you don't believe her)?


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Mar 25, 2011)

Awesome  "Yeah I went to a good school and Oxford but I _still_ had to work. So that's all right then."

The easiest way to get people to stop calling you a clueless posh bitch is to stop writing like one, I would have thought.


----------



## sihhi (Mar 25, 2011)

We should play the ball, not the man/woman. I don't know how much her wealth is but it should be redistributed amongst the movement - that's our demand, not that she commit suicide or suffer depression. 

Our other demand is that she sort out her journalism. She has been justifying the aerial assaults over Libya on twitter. FFS as a journalist if you are not sure about something don't bloody spout it all around everywhere.


----------



## killer b (Mar 25, 2011)

it's impossible to play the ball without playing the woman, in this case. the two are indistinguishable.


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 25, 2011)

sihhi said:


> We should play the ball, not the man/woman. I don't know how much her wealth is but it should be redistributed amongst the movement - that's our demand, not that she commit suicide or suffer depression.
> 
> Our other demand is that she sort out her journalism. She has been justifying the aerial assaults over Libya on twitter. FFS as a journalist if you are not sure about something don't bloody spout it all around everywhere.


 

Oh god, end of. 

Get it now people?


----------



## rekil (Mar 25, 2011)

Give her a few years and she'll be churning out guff about how lefties are all useless jealous wankers who hate success and don't understand human nature and the like, because she used to be one until she grew up and so on.


----------



## Sue (Mar 25, 2011)

A new Melanie Philips?


----------



## Bakunin (Mar 25, 2011)

sihhi said:


> Our other demand is that she sort out her journalism.


 
I wouldn't call what she writes journalism, to be honest. I don't think she writes in an especially interesting or exciting way and what she does write does seem pretty dull and uninspired. She's obviously flavour of the month with a few editors and so on and there are folk who like what she writes but I can't say she's what I'd call a really gifted writer or journalist if I'm honest.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 25, 2011)

Sue said:


> A new Melanie Philips?


 
We got Douglas Murray waiting in the wings to fill her shoes.


----------



## rekil (Mar 25, 2011)

Sue said:


> A new Melanie Philips?


I could be wrong but yeah, a bit like that, but even shitter somehow.


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 25, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> We got Douglas Murray waiting in the wings to fill her shoes.


 You drinking from the same pot eh?


----------



## rekil (Mar 25, 2011)

What pot is this.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 25, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> You drinking from the same pot eh?


 
Eh?


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 26, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Oh god, end of.
> 
> Get it now people?


 
Jesus, did she really write that?!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 26, 2011)

Bakunin said:


> It does seem somewhat defensive and self-reverential, not to mention self-justifying. I've known a few journalists in my time and I've never encountered one who felt an urge to complain about how difficult it is to get noticed and get work. They just crack on with the job and don't whimper every time they receive a little (well-founded) criticism. If they were that sensitive then they'd not last long in that line of work.


 
She's a columnist. All columnists are journalists, but not all journalists are columnists. Columnists *do*, however, tend to whinge if they don't get noticed, because getting noticed is what helps boost their stock and up their retainer.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 26, 2011)

Sue said:


> A new Melanie Philips?


 
Although hopefully without the knee-jerk pro-Zionism.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 26, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> We got Douglas Murray waiting in the wings to fill her shoes.


 
I had a feeling that was the way wee Dougie rolled.


----------



## rekil (Mar 26, 2011)

> As a well-spoken, middle-class white girl, I took 22 years to learn to fear the police in the streets. But, in November last year, everything changed. In the Whitehall kettle, as I watched armoured officers brutalise thousands of young protesters, the realisation that the police are there to protect the rich from the rabble hit home like a baton to the back of the neck.


Either she's lying for dramatic effect or she really is even more of an ignorant cosseted twat than previously thought.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 26, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> I had a feeling that was the way wee Dougie rolled.


 
Yep, I think he's more likely to be heir the Mad Mel throne (Doolally Doug?)


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Mar 28, 2011)

she claims to have been  in amongst the thick of it yesterday

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/03/trafalgar-square-police-young

_I find myself in front of the riot line, taking a blow to the head and a kick to the shin; I am dragged to my feet by a girl with blue hair who squeezes my arm and then raises a union flag defiantly at the cops
_


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 28, 2011)

This line:



> under a leaden sky



means she should be shot.


----------



## killer b (Mar 28, 2011)

dynamicbaddog said:


> she claims to have been  in amongst the thick of it yesterday
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/03/trafalgar-square-police-young
> 
> ...


 
i hope she stops to take a breath one of these days.


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 28, 2011)

> raises a union flag defiantly



Argh, have they no subs on this rag?


----------



## stethoscope (Mar 28, 2011)

She predictably popped up on Radio 5 on Sat night on Nolan's show in her usual capacity of 'the voice of the left', carefully treading between "I'm a leftie and I support this" and "I was in the right place at the right time" depending on whether his questioning would incriminate her. Still, that'll be the next few column inches sorted.


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 28, 2011)

Starting to get annoyed now.


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 28, 2011)

This is the key smug arrogant bit in the article though:



> A large number of young people in Britain have become radicalised in a hurry, and _not all of their energies are properly directed_, explaining in part the confusion on the streets yesterday. _Among their numbe_r, however, are many principled, determined and peaceful groups working to affect change and build resistance in any way they can.


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 28, 2011)

How much longer is he being to allowed to get away with this made up tripe?



> The young people being battered in Trafalgar square, however, are neither mindless nor violent. In front of the lines, a teenage girl is crying and shaking after being shoved to the ground. "I'm not moving, I'm not moving," she mutters, her face smeared with tears and makeup. "I've been on every protest, I won't let this government destroy our future without a fight. I won't stand back, I'm not moving." A police officer charges, smacking her with his baton as she flings up her hands.


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 28, 2011)

Her energy is properly directed though.


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 28, 2011)

frogwoman said:


> Her energy is properly directed though.


 
Into her own career?


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 28, 2011)

Yep.


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 28, 2011)

Hopefully nowhere else.


----------



## rekil (Mar 28, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Starting to get annoyed now.


 
See this line from her blog yet? 



> If I tweet momentary disillusion with a protest movement, it might actively dishearten a few hundred people involved, and that matters.


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 28, 2011)

copliker said:


> See this line from her blog yet?


 
Oh that's made my week


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 28, 2011)

NOT saying you're disillusioned could actively dishearten a few hundred people involved. We're not robots. 

Fuck, the other week I was asking myself what the fucking point of it all was. There. Now the world's gonna end.


----------



## stethoscope (Mar 28, 2011)

copliker said:


> See this line from her blog yet?


 
No way


----------



## Dan U (Mar 28, 2011)

Not being funny but traf square looked pretty cleared to me before.midnight. the area around was pretty chaotic, but the bottom of nelson column was very sparse indeed.

I think this lady is chatting breeze and was possibly in her members club well before then


----------



## Proper Tidy (Mar 28, 2011)

Who reads her?


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 28, 2011)

Proper Tidy said:


> Who reads her?


 
The Taafe family. To keep an eye on what the kids are up to.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Mar 28, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> The Taafe family. To keep an eye on what the kids are up to.


 
Lol.

Seriously though, what is the audience? Even the soft-lefts & liberal types I know think she's shite.


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 28, 2011)

People like my mum's mates who want to recapture their younger days out protesting etc? Just a guess, I could be totally wrong, but I can think of one person I know who might read her stuff.


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 28, 2011)

Proper Tidy said:


> Lol.
> 
> Seriously though, what is the audience? Even the soft-lefts & liberal types I know think she's shite.


 
People who read the new statseman and all that london pluralist crap.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Mar 28, 2011)

Mostly people who've not heard of her before, I think. I saw the Trafalgar Square one being linked to by a fair number of people.


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 28, 2011)

Are you thinking of someone on here...?


----------



## rekil (Mar 28, 2011)

stephj said:


> No way


 Yep. She must be fed lists of the day's victories lest the unthinkable happens and she gets bored.


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 28, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> This is the key smug arrogant bit in the article though:


 


> A large number of young people in Britain have become radicalised in a hurry, and not all of their energies are properly directed, explaining in part the confusion on the streets yesterday. Among their number, however, are many principled, determined and peaceful groups working to affect change and build resistance in any way they can.



affect/effect

No sub ed at all by the look of it.


----------



## Sgt Howie (Mar 28, 2011)

Have to say Laurie Penny is a good argument for the old NUJ rule that you had to do three years in the provinces before you were allowed a staff job on a national publication. Her politics will always be shit and muddled (on Twitter the other day she was recounting the vaguely erotic dreams she'd been having about Ed Miliband) to the extent that she makes Dave Spart look like Antonio Negri, but if she took a few more years to learn her craft she wouldn't be making as many unforced errors as she is right now.


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 28, 2011)

worst slashfic ever


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Mar 28, 2011)

copliker said:


> See this line from her blog yet?



Ha Ha.


----------



## articul8 (Mar 28, 2011)

> If I tweet momentary disillusion with a protest movement, it might actively dishearten a few hundred people involved, and that matters.


Jesus wept.


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 28, 2011)

Hang on, you can get the internet on a phone?


----------



## killer b (Mar 28, 2011)

She's on telly tonight if anyone can bear to watch


----------



## Bakunin (Mar 28, 2011)

killer b said:


> She's on telly tonight if anyone can bear to watch


 
I'd rather hear sounds that are somewhat less offensive to my ears and sense of disgust, such as the long and drawn out death throes of a hospital patient suffering from terminal dysentery.


----------



## articul8 (Mar 31, 2011)

@pennyred on 10 O clock live apparently


----------



## killer b (Mar 31, 2011)

sweet jesus.


----------



## The39thStep (Mar 31, 2011)

Sgt Howie said:


> Have to say Laurie Penny is a good argument for the old NUJ rule that you had to do three years in the provinces before you were allowed a staff job on a national publication. Her politics will always be shit and muddled (on Twitter the other day she was recounting the vaguely erotic dreams she'd been having about Ed Miliband) to the extent that she makes Dave Spart look like Antonio Negri, but if she took a few more years to learn her craft she wouldn't be making as many unforced errors as she is right now.


 
Dave Spart now there was a voice of the people .


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Mar 31, 2011)

I remember when he was general secretary of the National Union of Protest Operatives


----------



## The39thStep (Mar 31, 2011)

National Amalgamated Union of Sixth-Form Operatives


----------



## rekil (Apr 1, 2011)

articul8 said:


> @pennyred on 10 O clock live apparently


 She says she didn't have enough time to make points. Her momentary shitness, compounded by being unfairly undermined by an informed and confident Hertz, has disheartened thousands. Never mind, she's on Any Questions later. 'I think I much prefer being on the radio to being on the telly.'


----------



## Sgt Howie (Apr 1, 2011)

The39thStep said:


> Dave Spart now there was a voice of the people .


 
Er...


----------



## LLETSA (Apr 1, 2011)

Proper Tidy said:


> Lol.
> 
> Seriously though, what is the audience? Even the soft-lefts & liberal types I know think she's shite.


 
If people are agreeing that hardly anybody reads her or takes her seriously, why does she deserve a 20 page thread?


----------



## killer b (Apr 1, 2011)

same reason as last time you asked, in january. as far as i'm concerned, anyway.

http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/th...k-handbags?p=11384604&viewfull=1#post11384604


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 1, 2011)

Oh if only there was some mechanism by which the thread could be ignored...


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 1, 2011)

copliker said:


> She says she didn't have enough time to make points. Her momentary shitness, compounded by being unfairly undermined by an informed and confident Hertz, has disheartened thousands. Never mind, she's on Any Questions later. 'I think I much prefer being on the radio to being on the telly.'


 
Hertz has an amazing ability to irritate people too...


----------



## LLETSA (Apr 1, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Oh if only there was some mechanism by which the thread could be ignored...





I'm not in the least bothered by these kind of threads; I just find it interesting that they go on for so long when the subjects are unimportant. This one and the Tasmin Ormond 500 pager would defintely not have run to such lengths had the subjects not been female, for instance...


----------



## LLETSA (Apr 1, 2011)

killer b said:


> same reason as last time you asked, in january. as far as i'm concerned, anyway.
> 
> http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/th...k-handbags?p=11384604&viewfull=1#post11384604





Why not just admit that you're posting with a hard-on?


----------



## killer b (Apr 1, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> I'm not in the least bothered by these kind of threads; I just find it interesting that they go on for so long when the subjects are unimportant. This one and the Tasmin Ormond 500 pager would defintely not have run to such lengths had the subjects not been female, for instance...


 
really?

sure there's plenty more, but that was the first that sprung to mind.

also, go fuck yourself.


----------



## LLETSA (Apr 1, 2011)

killer b said:


> really?
> 
> sure there's plenty more, but that was the first that sprung to mind.
> 
> also, go fuck yourself.





Just admit it-you keep returning to the Tamsin and Penny threads with a big hard-on.


----------



## killer b (Apr 1, 2011)

which tamsin thread? this one, where you posted 8 times, and i posted once, or this one where you posted 76 times and i posted 9?


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 1, 2011)

killer b said:


> really?
> 
> sure there's plenty more, but that was the first that sprung to mind.
> 
> also, go fuck yourself.



are you posting with a hard on?


----------



## killer b (Apr 1, 2011)

(all 9 of which were spent arguing with you btw)


----------



## LLETSA (Apr 1, 2011)

killer b said:


> which tamsin thread? this one, where you posted 8 times, and i posted once, or this one where you posted 76 times and i posted 9?





The difference being that nearly all my posts have been questioning the relevance of these characters, whereas all yours display evidence of posting with a hard-on.

And do you really have all this past thread stuff immediately to hand? You sad bastard.


----------



## killer b (Apr 1, 2011)

you could have checked using the search facility before posting bullshit yourself - why not do it now?


----------



## LLETSA (Apr 1, 2011)

killer b said:


> you could have checked using the search facility before posting bullshit yourself - why not do it now?




The difference being that I'm not bothered who posted what and when; you evidently are.


----------



## killer b (Apr 1, 2011)

sure you are. otherwise you wouldn't be here, whining.


----------



## LLETSA (Apr 1, 2011)

killer b said:


> sure you are. otherwise you wouldn't be here, whining.




I'm just commenting in this thread; you're the one running about looking for what people posted ages ago.


----------



## killer b (Apr 1, 2011)

just checking the accuracy of your insults. turned out you were wrong.


----------



## LLETSA (Apr 1, 2011)

killer b said:


> just checking the accuracy of your insults. turned out you were wrong.




Well done for your dogged commitment to exposing this terrible injustice.


----------



## killer b (Apr 1, 2011)

thanks.


----------



## imposs1904 (Apr 1, 2011)

killer b said:


> which tamsin thread? this one, where you posted 8 times, and i posted once, or this one where you posted 76 times and i posted 9?


 Sorry but that's funny.


----------



## rekil (Apr 1, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Hertz has an amazing ability to irritate people too...


 There is that, but the look on poor laurie's face when Hertz was talking was funny.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 2, 2011)

copliker said:


> There is that, but the look on poor laurie's face when Hertz was talking was funny.


 
Anyone got a link to the show?


----------



## killer b (Apr 2, 2011)

4od should have it. they have a youtube channel too...


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 2, 2011)

Oh yeah, here's the video, she's on from 10 mins in...


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 2, 2011)

What the hell is the deal with the way Hertz is dressed? It's like she's just stepped out of the silver screen age!


----------



## killer b (Apr 2, 2011)

dunno... she laid out that cunt off the times though. 

tbf to laurie, she's improving - last time i saw her on telly she was shocking.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 2, 2011)

I dunno Hertz' seriously patronising tone gets in the way of her message too often, she's far more annoying that Penny could ever be. She seems to think she's some type of celebrity...hasn't changed a bit when she was attending May Day actions ten years ago so she could waffle on tv about what the people involved were trying to achieve.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 2, 2011)

Pennie hasn't at least helped kill thousands of people, unlike NH.


----------



## rekil (Apr 2, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Pennie hasn't at least helped kill thousands of people, unlike NH.


 Helped to wreck Russia? Or something else.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 2, 2011)

That's it, advisor on introducing the most savage form of neo-liberalism leading to massively high death rates and drop in the total population of about 1 million per year for about a decade. Hey, but she's nice now - _one of us._


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 2, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Hey, but she's nice now - _one of us._



Or so she would have us believe, playing Donovan to Naomi Klein's Dylan. Jeffrey Sachs is another one on that 'Most Wanted' List.


----------



## rekil (Apr 2, 2011)

Probably voted Lib Dem. Now she's sorry about that too, hence her Milibandy line on cuts.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 2, 2011)

She did vote lib-dem, was one of their most prominent public backers - here's some more:



> Richard Reeves, John Kampfner, Professor Noreena Hertz, Susie Orbach, Shazia Mirza, Camilla Toulmin, Brian Eno, John le Carré, Henry Porter, Alex Layton, Gordon Roddick, Yasmin Alibhai Brown, Philip Pullman, David Aukin, Nick Harkaway, Lisa Appignanesi, Francis Wheen, Alan Ryan, Raymond Tallis, Julian Baggini, Jeanette Winterson, Rodric Braithwaite, Richard Dawkins, George Monbiot, Ken Macdonald, Philippe Sands, Misha Glenny, Anthony Barnett, Richard Sennett, David Marquand, Colin Firth



The last named being wheeled out as one of the faces of the Yes to AV campaign today.


----------



## rekil (Apr 2, 2011)

Just found that article butchers. You can smell these fuckers. Didn't know she was prominent at all though.


----------



## JHE (Apr 2, 2011)

Have just heard Ms Penny on Any Questions, promoting AV.

She's made a remarkable success of promoting herself.  I hope she has less success promoting AV.

One of the things I find a bit irritating about her is the way she seems to consider herself a spokesperson for the young.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 2, 2011)

A bit?


----------



## LLETSA (Apr 2, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> What the hell is the deal with the way Hertz is dressed? It's like she's just stepped out of the silver screen age!




Who is Hertz? Any connection to the car hire place?


----------



## stethoscope (Apr 2, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> Who is Hertz? Any connection to the car hire place?


 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noreena_Hertz


----------



## LLETSA (Apr 2, 2011)

stephj said:


> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noreena_Hertz




Thanks. Another one I'd never heard of until she cropped up on here.

You learn summat new every day.


----------



## audiotech (Apr 3, 2011)

Don't know if this has been posted?

Lies in London
By Laurie Penny

http://boingboing.net/2011/04/01/lies-in-london.html


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 3, 2011)

She should know


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 3, 2011)

> Those young people came from all over the country. They were students, schoolkids, workers and union members. Nine months ago, many of them were political interns, members of the Labour party or volunteers for the Liberal Democrats.



NO


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 3, 2011)

> Although there were a small number of genuinely violent agitators in attendance on Saturday, most of them middle aged, drunk and uninterested in the main protest, a great many of the young people who chose to mask up and wear black in order to commit acts of civil disobedience had never done anything of the kind before.



Middle aged AND drunk


----------



## killer b (Apr 3, 2011)

wasn't she all three?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 3, 2011)

She's only two years older than me. If I ever get like this please kill me.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 3, 2011)

> In the first instance, there were not a 'few hundred' dedicated 'criminals' on Oxford Street and in Picadilly on Saturday, but thousands and thousands of people, mostly under thirty and unaffiliated, many of whom had come straight from flag-waving and banner-holding on the main march through Whitehall to join in with the peaceful actions planned in central London. These actions had been organised by the campaigning group UKUncut. Some of them, such as the store occupations, were potentially unlawful- but they were peaceful and politically motivated, like all of UKUncut's previous projects.
> 
> Secondly, the 'black bloc' - a phrase that will undoubtedly be used to terrify wavering tabloid readers for years to come - is not an organisation, but a tactic. It is a tactic used, rightly or wrongly, to facilitate the sort of civil disobedience that becomes attractive to the young and the desperate when every polite model of political expression has let them down. *Although there were a small number of genuinely violent agitators in attendance on Saturday, most of them middle aged, drunk and uninterested in the main protest*, a great many of the young people who chose to mask up and wear black in order to commit acts of civil disobedience had never done anything of the kind before.
> 
> Those young people came from all over the country. *They were students, schoolkids, workers and union members. Nine months ago, many of them were political interns, members of the Labour party or volunteers for the Liberal Democrats. Nine months ago, many of them still believed, however naively, that the democratic process might deliver real change. Now a new spirit of youthful unrest has been born into an ugly and uncomprehending political reality.* A generation has been radicalised by the betrayal of their modest request for a fair future, and by repeated experiences of police brutality against those who chose to resist.



Where were these drunk people? On what streets?

Who are these ex-political interns? In the thousands around Picadilly/ Oxford Street?

In all of London in 2010 there were about 3,000 members of Young Labour for 15-27 year olds.
It just sounds circumstancial and iffy from Laurie Penny again.



> British banks and major tax-avoiding companies were attacked because these companies are seen by large swathes of the public as being responsible for the banking crisis and for subsequent ideological decisions on the part of the current government to mortgage healthcare, welfare and education. *In the rush, Spanish banking giant Santander was also vandalised - and we need to be asking ourselves just what has made our nation's children so very upset with world finance that they believe any bank is fair game.*



Spanish multinational banks = Good Banks. ?!?"!"?? ???

British Banks = Bad Banks?? !?"?!?"? ?"



> *They are worried by the prospect of a run on the banks engineered by digital people power, as just occurred in Holland,* and they are worried about the prospect of a general strike. *It's safe to say that the government has a lot less to worry about this week than it did last week*- and activists, anarchists, unions and the Labour movement all need to be asking ourselves why.



They are not worried by a run on the banks being engineered digitally. They are not worried by the internet or by facebook or twitter.

Why does government have less to worry about this week? It makes no sense.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 3, 2011)

Political interns of the world unite.


----------



## ymu (Apr 3, 2011)

She seems to think Santander weren't a legitimate target, on the grounds of being a Spanish bank.


----------



## BigTom (Apr 3, 2011)

I think the point with Santander is that (because of spanish laws) they didn't partake in the whole trading and gambling of debts so were not directly responsible for the bank crisis in the way that lloyds/rbs/hbos/natwest/barclays/hsbc etc.. were.
That's why they were able to buy up abbey national and bradford and bingley.

(I think, anyway)


----------



## sihhi (Apr 3, 2011)

ymu said:


> She seems to think Santander weren't a legitimate target, on the grounds of being a Spanish bank.


 
Yes it's moronic. 

a) It's not really Spanish. b) It has been accumulating infintely more wealth for our overlord class than Fortnum & Mason ever did was (not that Fortnum & Mason isn't a legitimate aim either). Since Darling's bank recovery programme it has consumed sections of banks held up by central government taxation.
http://www.whatinvestment.co.uk/ban...nder-agrees-deal-for-rbs-branch-network.thtml


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 3, 2011)

> Nine months ago, many of them were political interns, members of the Labour party or volunteers for the Liberal Democrats.



Is this her _mea culpa_


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Apr 3, 2011)

> and we need to be asking ourselves just what has made our nation's children so very upset with world finance that they believe any bank is fair game.



She must have popped out of the country for a few years if she doesn't know the answer to that. Also what is it with "our nations children". She is the same age as these "children".


----------



## nino_savatte (Apr 3, 2011)

I think I may rename her Spenda Penny.


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 3, 2011)

frogwoman said:


> Middle aged AND drunk


 
Be rude not to


----------



## emanymton (Apr 3, 2011)

To return to the origins of the thread, apparently she is speaking at Marxism this year. 

As you were


----------



## treelover (Apr 3, 2011)

'That's it, advisor on introducing the most savage form of neo-liberalism leading to massively high death rates and drop in the total population of about 1 million per year for about a decade. Hey, but she's nice now - one of us.'


Its incredible how Noreena Hertz was able to position herself as a spokesperson, nay quuen of the anti-globalisation movement, at least with the media, with her obscene track record in Russia, has she ever aplogised, how old was she when she went to 'advise' them...


----------



## treelover (Apr 3, 2011)

'That's it, advisor on introducing the most savage form of neo-liberalism leading to massively high death rates and drop in the total population of about 1 million per year for about a decade. Hey, but she's nice now - one of us.'


Its incredible how Noreena Hertz was able to position herself as a spokesperson, nay 'Queen' of the anti-globalisation movement, at least with the media, with her obscene track record in Russia, has she ever apologised and how old was she when she went to 'advise' them?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 3, 2011)

treelover said:


> 'That's it, advisor on introducing the most savage form of neo-liberalism leading to massively high death rates and drop in the total population of about 1 million per year for about a decade. Hey, but she's nice now - one of us.'
> 
> 
> Its incredible how Noreena Hertz was able to position herself as a spokesperson, nay 'Queen' of the anti-globalisation movement, at least with the media, with her obscene track record in Russia, has she ever apologised and how old was she when she went to 'advise' them?


 
Her partner is some media bigwig so that probably explains why she got all that press...


----------



## audiotech (Apr 4, 2011)

‎"Long political experience has taught me that whenever a petty- bourgeois professor or journalist begins talking about high moral standards it is necessary to keep a firm hand on one’s pocketbook."--Trotsky


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 4, 2011)

nino_savatte said:


> I think I may rename her Spenda Penny.


 
That would be funny wouldn´t it?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 4, 2011)

treelover NH was 23 when she finished her second degree a masters' degree in business administration from Wharton Pennsylvania and started 'working'/advising abroad.

It's not incredible, it's standard. Her parents were company owners - Crochetta Fashions on the art/media/boho end of fashion. She went to Westminster school, a fairly important site for future media people/contact-making with media people. [Jim Naughtie sent his son there, Peter Stothard editor of the Times and Times Literary Supplement sent his daughter]

At some point in early 2000s she began a relationship with Danny Cohen, a media boss. He was first head of documentaries then head of factual entertainment (Channel 4), then Head of E4, then Head of BBC3 and now Head of BBC1.  (one year= £232,800). Chicken and egg. Relat

When he was head of Ch4 Documentaries, NH did a documentary called The End of Politics on Ch4 in 2001 and was part of other 'anti-globalisation' type documentaries on Channel 4, though none are listed on imdb. 



> Channel 4 jumped at the idea of making a film ... to kickstart their election coverage [2001 GE]. Now, she admits in a low voice as she leads the way up through her tall north London [Primrose Hill] house, they seem to be sufficiently pleased with the results to ask her to do 'a couple more things' for the election.



Most recently in Feb 2011 when DC is Head of BBC1, NH went on Question Time.

Russia and her non-media career it is more complicated.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false 

has info p16 onward

In 1991 she secured a job at William Morris Agency, the entertainment company in Los Angeles but went with Wharton professors to set up St Petersburg stock market. Then taught neoliberalism to Yeltsin's economic team, then started worked for the World Bank in Moscow (and  out to the regions such as the factory with 400,000 workers). She claims she became disillusioned when working for the World Bank in Moscow. 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/talking_point/article486244.ece is:



> "Very quickly I realised that what we were doing was completely misguided and going to impact really negatively on millions of people.* I left the World Bank a few months later * extremely disillusioned." The period became the subject of, and inspiration for, her Cambridge PhD. ... She is grateful for her time on the other side of the debate. "Accepting the party line for even a brief period makes me extra vigilant."



2001 ES interview 
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-933895-the-nigella-lawson-of-economics.do


> She grew quickly mistrustful. Visits to factories on the privatisation hit-list compiled in Washington convinced her that little thought had been given to the fate of about-to-be-scrapped Rus-sian workers. "Early on I raised the issue of social safety nets and was quite shocked to see how clearly my concerns were dismissed." But vindication came as she watched the West's hubristic attempts to create a market economy in Russia crash and fail while "human costs were just ignored".
> 
> She stayed on in Moscow, advising the new Russian government on economic reform



This suggests she had 'doubts' but carried on. Is 'crash' 1992 when  hyperinflation started. Is it 1993 with the street battles in Moscow? Is it 1995/1996 when grain and meat production just sank, hungry people start selling off old magazines, musical instruments, clothes to buy food. 
Each crash is attributable to specific government policies which were in many cases demanded as a condition of new credit massively needed because many workers were being paid 8-12 months late.

So year 199-X she left the World Bank.

Then she started working for Credit Suisse First Boston, the investment bank, 'in and on Russia'.



> Credit Suisse First Boston ... had heavily involved itself in Russia in the postcommunist era, becoming the dominant dealer in Russian government bonds as well as a major lender to Russian companies and municipalities.



Perhaps she worked under Stephen Jennings asset manager/advisor



> Mr. Jennings served as Co-Head of Credit Suisse First Boston (Moscow) from 1992 to 1995. In this role, he was directly responsible for Credit Suisse First Boston's investment banking during a period when CSFB was recognised as the dominant market player in developing and executing pioneering transactions in the Russian marketplace. In 1992, Mr. Jennings led the State Property Committee's pilot voucher auctions, a project that established the foundations for the creation of Russia's capital markets.
> 
> Before coming to Russia in 1992, Mr. Jennings was with Credit Suisse First Boston in London, where he worked on investment banking and privatisation transactions in Central and Eastern Europe. Prior to that, he worked for Credit Suisse First Boston and the Treasury in New Zealand, advising the New Zealand and Australian governments on privatisation and state enterprise restructuring and working on a wide variety of private sector M&A and capital-markets transactions.



For a period for NH Russia was 'fun'


> But it was 1991 and her American professor asked her to go with him to Russia to work on modernising the stock and commodity exchange. When she arrived it only traded cigarettes and funeral urns, and she soon found that jazzing that up was far more fun than sending out scripts.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4722576/Adventures-of-a-high-flier.html

The PhD at Cambridge ""Russian Business Relationships in the Wake of Reform" was awarded in 1996.

1996-1998 she was the head of the team advising Israel, Jordan, Egypt and the 'Palestinian Authority' [under Israeli occupation]. One response in the Third Way interview is, 



> *Do you think that violence is ever justified?*
> I think there's a definite distinction to make between violence to individuals and violence to property- not that I'm condoning smashing up McDonald's. But when violence is used as a strategy, in South Africa or the Middle East or Northern Ireland, used by people when they say that everything else is so hopeless - I don't know. I'm just left thinking about the innocent victims who get caught up in it, and ultimately I can't support that.



The people who hired her for the Middle East has been trying to spearhead global/multinational capitalism in the Middle East for the past 20 years. One example is Yagil Weinberg, Israeli telecom company chief executive.

1998 she returned and became a fellow at Cambridge's Management School teaching business and strategy. Then (maybe 1999/2000 when J18 Seattle is in the news) got the "six-figure advance" to write the 'defending the movement' book Silent Revolution.

It actually attacks the very core of Seattle-type protest, it hates and slanders the movement. In the UK, No Logo by Naomi Klein was snapped by Harper Collins. Arrow part of Random House (Britain's biggest publishing firm) wanted something similar so Silent Takeover was made and distributed well it even reached some supermarkets aswell as libraries and WHSmiths.




			
				NH on populist anti-corporate protest/action in Silent Revolution said:
			
		

> Its limitations mirror those of consumer activism - unsurprisingly so, given their shared genesis in the discontent of the early 1990s, and their similar methods of expressing discontent. The commonality of interests often centres on a shared general disillusionment, rather than specific concerns or proffered solutions. In some cases protesters are motivated by a sense of common good; but in others they are concerned only with safeguarding their own interests, or those of a limited group - the 'raise less corn and more hell' variety of protest, like the British fuel protests of autumn 2000. As we have seen, pressure groups need to play to the media, which encourages polarised posturing, the demonisation of 'enemies', the oversimplification of issues and the choosing of fashionable rather than difficult causes to champion. Issues such as soil erosion, nitrate leaching, and forest biodiversity in Africa, hardly ever get a look in. And the need for media attention can inspire violence. As Brian, the American student I met en route to Genoa, put it, 'There has to be trouble, otherwise the papers won't report it, we won't get our concerns on the front page.' ...
> 
> Various pressure groups ... Because they concentrate on single issues, they may feel no need to concern themselves with the concerns of others, as would occur in a genuine democracy. Sometimes the coalitions of interests are global in their concern, but often they have highly nationalistic undertones. And sometimes the wishes of the demos can be downright nasty, like the British hysteria about paedophiles, largely stirred up by a corporation, News International, through the pages of its News of the World newspaper and resulting in such fiascos as that of the Bristol paediatrician who had to go into hiding because the mob couldn't tell the difference.



In 2001 Jan NH was at protests against the WEF in Switzerland. 

According to this
http://www.mail-archive.com/list@ifwp.org/msg14078.html
she attended the Genoa protests, July 2001 but then in October 2001 she was invited for an EU Summit with Bill Clinton.

In 2002 January she was attended the WEF as a speaker and "she was inside the Waldorf, consorting with foreign ministers and Saudi princes. "I see myself as part of a broad movement," she says".

She constantly defended George Soros, Open Institute and many capitalist firms and capitalist countries in the 2000-2002 era.


----------



## JHE (Apr 4, 2011)

This evening's Dispatches at 9.00 pm on C4: Laurie Penny on universities, salaries and perks etc of top earners in universities and the fees paid by overseas students.


----------



## emanymton (Apr 4, 2011)

sihhi said:


> treelover NH was 23 when she finished her second degree ...



I think we have a stalker in the house


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 4, 2011)

emanymton said:


> I think we have a stalker in the house


 
Fuck her. Why is looking at what people have done and said stalking?

FFS


----------



## emanymton (Apr 4, 2011)

FFS sake it was joke regarding the impressive amount of research performed. hence the


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 4, 2011)

JHE said:


> This evening's Dispatches at 9.00 pm on C4: Laurie Penny on universities, salaries and perks etc of top earners in universities and the fees paid by overseas students.


 
Yeah I'm not sure she's suited for tv work...


----------



## articul8 (Apr 4, 2011)

She's doing ok to be fair - not sure that chalet trip was necessary but...


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 4, 2011)

Who cares how good she is, how did she get the fucking invite. Over to to you  bubble boy.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 4, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Who cares how good she is, how did she get the fucking invite. Over to to you  bubble boy.


 
Your guess is as good as any...


----------



## articul8 (Apr 4, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Who cares how good she is


 
So even if you agreed with her 100% you'd still be after slagging her off for her background?


----------



## treelover (Apr 4, 2011)

I thought it was a very good documentary and she unearthed some very incendiary stuff about how many rich Int Students were basically buying degrees and the neo-liberal nature of todays academy...


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 4, 2011)

I didn't rate it, nothing to do with her just nothing revealed was shocking or new to me...


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 4, 2011)

articul8 said:


> So even if you agreed with her 100% you'd still be after slagging her off for her background?





> how did she get the fucking invite.



How did you?


----------



## articul8 (Apr 5, 2011)

must have missed the TV documentary I presented


----------



## TremulousTetra (Apr 7, 2011)

articul8 said:


> must have missed the TV documentary I presented


----------



## Sue (Apr 9, 2011)

Enjoy..!

'The system is unfair and open to abuse, and gives posh young dogsbodies far too much influence.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/09/power-intern-posh-young-dogsbodies


----------



## love detective (Apr 9, 2011)

the system seems to be shitting out folk like this - has anyone come across Jessica Richer (lol) before?

_Jessica is heavily involved in the student movement and, as Little Miss Wilde, is the ‘Twitter Guru’ of the UCL Occupation. Through this role, she has become an influential source of authority on the use of Twitter and Social Networking in campaigning and is now asked to advise and speak on the subject.

Jessica is available for consulting on and writing and speaking about Twitter and Social Networking and for interviews and comments on the subject_

she also describes herself as a:- 

_politically activistic tweeter _

http://jessicariches.wordpress.com/

Had a handy template letter urging people to nominate her for NUS president


----------



## Sue (Apr 9, 2011)

love detective said:


> the system seems to be shitting out folk like this - has anyone come across Jessica Richer (lol) before?
> 
> _Jessica is heavily involved in the student movement and, as Little Miss Wilde, is the ‘Twitter Guru’ of the UCL Occupation. Through this role, she has become an influential source of authority on the use of Twitter and Social Networking in campaigning and is now asked to advise and speak on the subject.
> 
> ...



'Shitting' being the word.


----------



## love detective (Apr 9, 2011)

just to clarify the (lol) was about her name, not coming across her


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 9, 2011)

Sue said:


> Enjoy..!
> 
> 'The system is unfair and open to abuse, and gives posh young dogsbodies far too much influence.'
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/09/power-intern-posh-young-dogsbodies



She forgets to mention her internship was with a Labour MP


----------



## Sue (Apr 9, 2011)

Just looked at that blog. I really shouldn't have.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 9, 2011)

> I was often asked what young people were thinking on any given issue, as if I, with my Oxford degree and nice rounded vowels, somehow represented everyone under 35.



and why are the Guardian paying you now Laurie


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 10, 2011)

Sue said:


> Enjoy..!
> 
> 'The system is unfair and open to abuse, and gives posh young dogsbodies far too much influence.'
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/09/power-intern-posh-young-dogsbodies


 
I saw that in the Guardian today (it was on a table in a pub). Didnt she have an intern that she wanted to pay below min wage?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 10, 2011)

.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 10, 2011)

frogwoman said:


> I saw that in the Guardian today (it was on a table in a pub). Didnt she have an intern that she wanted to pay below min wage?


 
She hired a research assistant for a lump sum for a amount of hours. I think it worked out just below min wage...


----------



## kavenism (Apr 12, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> She hired a research assistant for a lump sum for a amount of hours. I think it worked out just below min wage...


 
Indeed, apparently to research her newly published pamphlet on Zero books, Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism. I’m only a third of the way through but am having trouble keeping my breakfast down with such gems like: “The ooze and tickle of real-time sex, which can neither be controlled nor mass-produced and sold back to us, threatens both capital and censorship.” And “The eroto-capitalist horror of human flesh, and of female flesh in particular, is a pathology that can and must be resisted” 

I’m probably going to review it, which is unfortunate because right now I think it’s possibly the worst, most nauseating book I have ever read on this subject. The confused dilettantish use of post-modern theory to paraphrase her own twaddle mixed with a style that apes the worst excesses of continental philosopher’s prose combines to make it almost unreadable. I think her researcher’s last gig was writing for Brass Eye given some of this nonsense.


----------



## Sue (Apr 12, 2011)

Maybe the researcher thought they'd get their own back and Ms Penny was too thick to notice.

(I'd like to think so anyway.)


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 12, 2011)

kavenism said:


> I’m probably going to review it, which is unfortunate because right now I think it’s possibly the worst, most nauseating book I have ever read on this subject.


 
Shame if its shit, as Zero have put out some interesting little books recently.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2011)

Rad dude:

A reading list for radical thinkers

She calls The Society of the Spectacle " The situationist bible" - you've either not read it or not understood it Penny.

(I won;t comment on Das Capital/Mein Struggle)


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 15, 2011)

> Thatcherism Goes To College: The Conservative Assault on Higher Education, by Matthew Salusbury - I found this slim volume in a second-hand bookshop in 2009, well before the current attack on the academy in Britain, and it gives vital context to the neoliberal repurposing of education. Hard to get hold of though.



This sounds pretty good, but I think it's revealing that she uses a book that is 'hard to get hold of' in her list of radical must-reads. The goal is to present oneself as an edgy, radical outsider, rather than to provide a reading list that might actually be of some use to people.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2011)

..and what the content of that book - lots of books on university, she left fucking years ago. Incidentally that list this morning was 6 books long (from the top down to the inevitable Adam Curtis)- i reckon insecurity hastily took over a few hours later.


----------



## love detective (Apr 15, 2011)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Shame if its shit, as Zero have put out some interesting little books recently.



When I first read capitalist realism i thought it was fairly so so but it looks like a tour de force in comparison to their latest effort

all those penny reds and other clones seem to start their articles with the same thing these days:-

_Since people have been asking_

who the fuck are these people


----------



## binka (Apr 15, 2011)

does anyone else think laurie penny is a lustbather invention designed to wind butchers up? seems too good to be true and im worried he's being trolled into an early grave


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 15, 2011)

binka said:


> does anyone else think laurie penny is a lustbather invention designed to wind butchers up? seems too good to be true and im worried he's being trolled into an early grave


 
Even lustie wouldn't take trolling as far as publishing a column in the _New Statesman_, surely? 

He has *some* standards, after all!


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 15, 2011)

binka said:


> does anyone else think laurie penny is a* lustbather *invention designed to wind butchers up? seems too good to be true and im worried he's being trolled into an early grave



?????


----------



## binka (Apr 15, 2011)

surely you remember mr lustbather? he of the aphorism


----------



## Belushi (Apr 15, 2011)

Sadly missed


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 15, 2011)




----------



## Captain Hurrah (Apr 16, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> Even lustie wouldn't take trolling as far as publishing a column in the _New Statesman_, surely?
> 
> He has *some* standards, after all!



He litters my Facebook with other people's aphorisms!


----------



## nino_savatte (Apr 16, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Rad dude:
> 
> A reading list for radical thinkers
> 
> ...


 
She said whaaaaaaaaat?  My what a colossal fucking ignoramus she is.


----------



## nino_savatte (Apr 16, 2011)

Where is she from? She sounds sort of Midlands-ish, possibly Leamington Spa.


----------



## Oscar_Lomax (Apr 16, 2011)

Sunny Hundal is worse that L Penny. yes, he is *that* shit.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 16, 2011)

That's one hell of a first post.


----------



## Jeff Robinson (Apr 16, 2011)

Welcome aboard Mr Lomax! I trust you have some mighty fine commodities for us?


----------



## emma goldman (Apr 16, 2011)

more funny laurie penny lefty in-fighting here


----------



## articul8 (Apr 16, 2011)

he does sound like a cunt to be fair


----------



## emma goldman (Apr 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> he does sound like a cunt to be fair


 
i agree


----------



## Oscar_Lomax (Apr 16, 2011)

i posted some shit here but it didn'y get beyong some fuckking cunt 'moderation' cunT. whatever that means


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2011)

Give it a fucking rest you pretend weirdo eh.


----------



## Oscar_Lomax (Apr 16, 2011)

i pretend you are

fuck off tosspot


----------



## editor (Apr 16, 2011)

Oscar_Lomax said:


> i pretend you are
> 
> fuck off tosspot


 It's been great having you, but you've simply got to go.  Bye.


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Apr 18, 2011)

kavenism said:


> Indeed, apparently to research her newly published pamphlet on Zero books, Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism. I’m only a third of the way through but am having trouble keeping my breakfast down with such gems like: “The ooze and tickle of real-time sex, which can neither be controlled nor mass-produced and sold back to us, threatens both capital and censorship.” And “The eroto-capitalist horror of human flesh, and of female flesh in particular, is a pathology that can and must be resisted”
> 
> I’m probably going to review it, which is unfortunate because right now I think it’s possibly the worst, most nauseating book I have ever read on this subject. The confused dilettantish use of post-modern theory to paraphrase her own twaddle mixed with a style that apes the worst excesses of continental philosopher’s prose combines to make it almost unreadable. I think her researcher’s last gig was writing for Brass Eye given some of this nonsense.



ha ha , that sounds horrendous,  good luck trying to review it. 
According to her twitter feed she's churning them out, 2 more books on the way
The other day I was talking  to the person who invited her to that SHAFTA party.  On the night she was introduced to loads of people but was very selective about whom she choose to write about. I doubt she'll be invited back next year


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 22, 2011)

Rather fickle aint she? From supporting the lib-dems to _joining_ labour to now claiming "I am no Labour supporter, btw."


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Apr 22, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Rather fickle aint she? From supporting the lib-dems to _joining_ labour to now claiming "I am no Labour supporter, btw."


 
Ha ha ha - priceless.  What's the Penny one going to be talking about at the Marxism 2011 hoedown?  "Mainstream Party touting for fun and profit"?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 22, 2011)

what is it with the labour party and attracting members who dont support it?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 22, 2011)

every careerist fucker seems to join the labour party just so that they cna slag it off.


----------



## killer b (Apr 22, 2011)

she didn't just support labour - she was a parliamentary researcher - whatever that is - for them.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 22, 2011)

killer b said:


> she didn't just support labour - she was a parliamentary researcher - whatever that is - for them.


 
She did, she wrote about it on LibCon iirc.


----------



## bolshiebhoy (Apr 22, 2011)

frogwoman said:


> every careerist fucker seems to join the labour party just so that they cna slag it off.


Not fair. I never attack my new party, it'd be too easy and miss the point about the Labour Party


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 22, 2011)

i didn't mean you. you're not a careerist fucker. i was referring to people who join the labour "just so they can destroy it" etc


----------



## bolshiebhoy (Apr 23, 2011)

Fair enough, I was being flippant. Actually here in the west country we don't get too many entryist careerists. Just rightwing careerists.


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Apr 23, 2011)

Tho it's true she written nonsense in the past, she does have  moments when she's bang on the money, this recently article about mental health and work for example
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/04/long-mental-work-british-links
_
We are told that no matter how low the pay or long the hours, drudgery will deliver happiness. The dogma driving the current wave of welfare reforms is that out-of-work benefits must be withdrawn on a grand scale, even in a time of mass unemployment - not to cut costs but because work makes people so very happy.

Unemployment can damage well-being but poor mental health has been shown to be just as likely a consequence of what a recent study called "jobs with poor psychosocial attributes". This is academic code for insecure work in awful conditions: corporate serfdom in offices, call centres and canteens._



After I read that I  almost forgave her  for being so rude about Angel Long at the SHAFTAS


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## kavenism (Apr 23, 2011)

The more I re-read Meat Market the more I think she needs to address her own mental health as a first priority.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 24, 2011)

She's hit and miss, more miss than hit though, but do we need to use the tired old 'she must have mental problems' attack? 

That Liz Jones though


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2011)

The first reviews are out.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-e...under-capitalism-by-laurie-penny-2273989.html

This interview makes me feel sorry for her



> "From time to time, I still miss my eating disorder," says Penny. "I miss the sense of control that comes when avoiding food is your highest ambition."





Although this confusion between anorexia and the hunger strike tactic is wrong. 
The hunger strike when part of a wider social movement does not hurt others around you. If that movement's not there - then that's different.

http://globalcomment.com/2011/feminism-socialism-and-the-meat-market-an-interview-with-laurie-penny/



> L.P: It’s a way of evading patriarchal surveillance. It’s also a form of violent submission! Doing exactly what you’re told to an extent that it hurts you and others around you.  It is self-harm, but it is also a lethal form of passive aggression.  Always has been, since the first documented cases in the 1500s. We hunger strike because we haven’t the energy or the ideological framework to offer any other form of resistance, but a hunger strike is also aggressive, we must never forget that.  It’s peaceful, passive aggression. a way of saying to one’s captors: look what you made me do. A way of expressing the inhumanity of the way we are obliged to live, as women, as workers and as consumers.


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## ymu (Apr 24, 2011)

I've been on hunger-strike. It was pure publicity stunt.


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## sihhi (Apr 24, 2011)

ymu said:


> I've been on hunger-strike. It was pure publicity stunt.



What happened? What was it for?


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## kavenism (Apr 25, 2011)

Oddly enough I think she may have something with the whole hunger strike thing, at least in her case. It interests me that she claims she became anorexic just as her parent were splitting up. Not wishing to labour the point but if I were her analyst I'd start there rather than her claims about the "Female flesh hating patriarchal eroto-capitalist hell spiral" and all the rest of it. I've started this review but to be honest it's hard to know which targets to focus on. I'm digging for the politics but I think I'm gonna need to call in the Time Team crew to assist.


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## articul8 (Apr 26, 2011)

frogwoman said:


> every careerist fucker seems to join the labour party just so that they cna slag it off.


 
aimed at me?  You'd rather people just joined Labour and banged on about how wonderful it was?


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## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2011)

Can anyone else spot the flaw in the above?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2011)

articul8 said:


> aimed at me?  You'd rather people just joined Labour and banged on about how wonderful it was?


 
i don't care what you say about it but i find all this "i joined the labour party in order to destroy it BWAHAHAHA" slightly weird. And no it's not just you.


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## ymu (Apr 26, 2011)

sihhi said:


> What happened? What was it for?


 
We were wrongfully imprisoned. 

and wanted the media to report on why whilst we spun it out as long as possible


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## sihhi (Apr 26, 2011)

ymu said:


> We were wrongfully imprisoned.
> 
> and wanted the media to report on why whilst we spun it out as long as possible



It's OK. I've clocked the event now.


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## articul8 (Apr 26, 2011)

frogwoman said:


> i don't care what you say about it but i find all this "i joined the labour party in order to destroy it BWAHAHAHA" slightly weird. And no it's not just you.


 
I don't want to destroy Labour as such (and don't harbour delusions of grandeur) - I just want, in my own miserable little way, to contribute to salvaging something from the party that generations of my family - like so many others - spent in trying to build it on the ground.  I don't think Labour will ever be the sole agent capable of delivering a pro w/c politics, of course I don't.  But no socialist active in the party has ever believed that.  

Labour is going to be the repository of an enormous amount of anti cuts, anti-coalition sentiment.   We know this.  So it's crucial to influence the course it takes, and it isn't allowed to play the shit role it has for most of its existence.  Of course this will be done in part from outside.  But nothing would delight the Labour right more than for the left to shout from the sidelines and isolate themselves from how political debate is framed for most people.


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## nino_savatte (Apr 26, 2011)

Ah but Labour has a habit of betraying those it claims to support. I was listening to an interview that I did with someone from the 60's and he was telling me how Wilson had betrayed voters. I remember the party under Kinnock in the 80's; the tepid, half-hearted support for the miners; the feeble efforts it made to attack the Thatcher government in the Commons. It seems to me, that Labour won't learn from its past mistakes and that we need a party that is going to work for ordinary workers not the fat bastards in the City or their chums in the CBI and IoD.


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## The39thStep (Apr 26, 2011)

Struggled to get through two pages of 'Blue Labour' in Sundays Observer


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## articul8 (Apr 26, 2011)

Blue Labour is a very mixed bag from what I've read so far - it appears to be about developing an alternative which resists the full ideological onslaught of neoliberalism but by appealing to faith, flag, family, etc - and a more solidaristic version of the big society.


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## articul8 (Apr 26, 2011)

nino_savatte said:


> Ah but Labour has a habit of betraying those it claims to support. I was listening to an interview that I did with someone from the 60's and he was telling me how Wilson had betrayed voters. I remember the party under Kinnock in the 80's; the tepid, half-hearted support for the miners; the feeble efforts it made to attack the Thatcher government in the Commons. It seems to me, that Labour won't learn from its past mistakes and that we need a party that is going to work for ordinary workers not the fat bastards in the City or their chums in the CBI and IoD.


 
We need "a party"...

Isn't part of the problem - for Labour too - that the early 20th C model of the mass political party doesn't really work anywhere today?  Re-thinking the relationships between class organisations and social movements - producing new models of community engagement and alliances seem more relevant than insisting that "only by electing a Labour government/council can we.." or "only our by voting for our latest crack at a new workers party in embryo instead can we.."


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## dynamicbaddog (Apr 26, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Blue Labour is a very mixed bag from what I've read so far - it appears to be about developing an alternative which resists the full ideological onslaught of neoliberalism but by appealing to faith, flag, family, etc - and a more solidaristic version of the big society.



  it's a cheap attempt to gain votes  by scrapegoating    the economically  vulnerable , that's what it is.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/25/blue-labour-working-middle-class


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## articul8 (Apr 26, 2011)

That seems to be a (very well deserved) broadside at New Labour's actual record in government - not specifically an engagement with the Blue Labour ideas at all?


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## The39thStep (Apr 26, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Blue Labour is a very mixed bag from what I've read so far - it appears to be about developing an alternative which resists the full ideological onslaught of neoliberalism but by appealing to faith, flag, family, etc - and a more solidaristic version of the big society.



No doubt a 'good' idea but Labour actually undermined  the delivery streams that might have made this idea even vaguely tangible. It was them who said we are all middle class now  and peddled the myth that the working class was a dying breed. ( (a view held by Newbie  as well).

This article makes a reasonable job of summing up labour's dilemna even if I don't agree with its conclusions are :

http://blue-labour.blogspot.com/


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## articul8 (Apr 26, 2011)

The implicit assumption of BL seems to be that class solidarity was one component of a wider small 'c' conservative culture that was also about watching out for each other, bringing up your kids to know right from wrong, grafting hard and wanting the best for them, being proud of your (national?) origins, etc.etc - and once the economic ties of class were disrupted the rest kind of got torn down too.

So the BL project is about the avowedly post-"class" reconstuction in commonly held values and practices.   As though class difference has evaporated altogether and no longer stands for anything.


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## Athos (Apr 26, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Can anyone else spot the flaw in the above?


 
Join Labour and slag it off or join Labour and sing its praises. There simply cannot be any other answer.


----------



## rekil (Apr 26, 2011)

From LP's blog.


> What drags me to the scene of any riot, to any interesting protest currently ongoing, is not just politics, nor thrill-seeking: it's chasing a story that the mainstream press are still not telling properly yet, chasing a an important story, a story to which I currently have unique access as a young person within the movement.


That's how she pitches her articles isn't it. Unique access if you please.


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## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2011)

So why was you 200 miles away from stokes croft and simply collated existing accounts via twitter? A story all over the mainstream press btw penny.


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## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2011)

> don't want to destroy Labour as such (and don't harbour delusions of grandeur) - I just want, in my own miserable little way, to contribute to salvaging something from the party that generations of my family - like so many others - spent in trying to build it on the ground. I don't think Labour will ever be the sole agent capable of delivering a pro w/c politics, of course I don't. But no socialist active in the party has ever believed that.



Fair enough. It's just that some of your posts in the past have given a different impression, but fair enough.


----------



## nino_savatte (Apr 26, 2011)

articul8 said:


> We need "a party"...
> 
> Isn't part of the problem - for Labour too - that the early 20th C model of the mass political party doesn't really work anywhere today?  Re-thinking the relationships between class organisations and social movements - producing new models of community engagement and alliances seem more relevant than insisting that "only by electing a Labour government/council can we.." or "only our by voting for our latest crack at a new workers party in embryo instead can we.."



You can no more change Labour from within than I have a chance of passing for a Tory peer (I have more chance of passing a gall stone). Going back to the past and speaking the language of the enemy is the road to ruin. For a party that tries to portray itself as 'progressive', "blue Labour" is such a backwards step.


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## sihhi (Apr 26, 2011)

nino_savatte said:


> You can no more change Labour from within than I have a chance of passing for a Tory peer (I have more chance of passing a gall stone). Going back to the past and speaking the language of the enemy is the road to ruin. For a party that tries to portray itself as 'progressive', "blue Labour" is such a backwards step.



It's an inevitable step. Labour have nowhere left to run. 

Note that Blue Labour's critique of New Labour is the Labour Party "need to get away from this obsession with absolute fairness, with material equality."
That's what they offer. Anything, anything at all - having more Union flags on public buildings, talking about traditional morality, reducing immigration - to weaken any efforts to strive for equality. A phenomenon, wrapped as populism, that hates the people being equal.




> He has, he believes, ‘no concerns that the future of the country's going to be pluralist' and is himself from a family of immigrants but believes there has also ‘got to simultaneously be solidarity, and there has been an erosion of solidarity'. The party's conception of equality is problematic, he suggests. ‘There have to be ways of honouring the common life of people who come [as immigrants],' he believes, but it also not the case that ‘everyone who comes is equal and has an equal status with people who are here





> ‘I've paid my taxes all these years and yet I get bumped out by people who've just arrived on the basis of need', he argues that the party has ‘got to not view that as reactionary [or] bigoted but as a real violation of what people actually mean by fairness. We've essentially devalued our language by making things the opposite of what they mean, and losing "fairness" - which we did at the last election - was actually a catastrophe for us because when we said "fairness" people thought we meant privilege, privilege for the new, privilege for people who don't work, everything calculated on need and nothing done on desert.



What exactly the proposals are, no one knows. What would a Blue Labour manifesto be? No one knows. That's not BL's point, Blue Labour is there to cement the illusion of Labour as real/red under Red Ed.


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## butchersapron (Jul 14, 2011)




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## treelover (Jul 14, 2011)

'We've essentially devalued our language by making things the opposite of what they mean, and losing "fairness" - which we did at the last election - was actually a catastrophe for us because when we said "fairness" people thought we meant privilege, privilege for the new, privilege for people who don't work, everything calculated on need and nothing done on desert. '



This is exactly what David Milliband is saying, it effectively means more cuts in welfare, more harrasment of claimants, more conditionality, etc...


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## temper_tantrum (Jul 16, 2011)

LP currently getting a kicking on Twitter from Julie Bindel - apparently LP claimed to have interviewed JB for her book, which JB denies.
Edit: Oh and Finn MacKay too apparently.


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## Kid_Eternity (Jul 17, 2011)

That's an odd claim to make if it isn't true and an odd thing to do if it is.


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## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2011)

Jb claims she had a ten minute discussion for a blog article on the phone for years ago, and that lp has now turned that into the claim that she was recently formally interviewed for her book. Argument motivated by gin, jealousy and careerism.


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## Kid_Eternity (Jul 17, 2011)

Laurie wants to be careful with stuff like this given the way the press and media are currently viewed...


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## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2011)

...and given that she already has her own record of making stuff up


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## frogwoman (Jul 17, 2011)

the johann hari school of journalism turns out another graduate i see ...


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## articul8 (Jul 17, 2011)

To be fair if you've spoken to someone with an implicit understanding that it relates to research for a piece you are writing or intend to write - you don't have to announce "this is a formal interview".  Obviously if you've just imported material from somewhere else and passed it off as your own (like Hari) that is different altogether.


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## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2011)

According to bindel there was no interview, there was an out of the blue 10 minute phone call about some blog bollocks years ago that has now evolved into an interview given especially for this book - an interview which JB says she would never have consented to. This - if JB is accurate- is as sort of _reverse Hari _- take things that _were_ said to you elsewhere at another time and in a different context and pretend they took place in a a proper interview - the same as he did with that porn actress a few months back. There appears to be none of this 'implicit understanding' here at all (again, if jb is accurate).


----------



## articul8 (Jul 17, 2011)

Not clear exactly what JB is objecting to - has she changed her views from those given in the phone interview?  Was the phone discussion supposed to be an off the record conversation - and did she make that clear to Laurie?  Books can be researched over a number of years, and research can be cumulative, pieced together from work done for other projects.  Unless LP has made some gratuitously false claim (JB sat down and agreed to be interviewed in person for this book) it seems like a bit pointless strop


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## DaveCinzano (Jul 17, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> the same as he did with that porn actress a few months back.


 
Are you talking about Anna Span and the article about the Shaftas? Anna Span is a director, so do you mean her, or have other 'interviewees' come forward to dispute Penny's version?


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## Kid_Eternity (Jul 17, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> ...and given that she already has her own record of making stuff up


 
Almost doesn't matter how long it may be, one infraction in the current climate is good enough to tarnish a rep and be strung out to dry to deflect from greater scrutiny...


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## Kid_Eternity (Jul 17, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Not clear exactly what JB is objecting to - has she changed her views from those given in the phone interview?  Was the phone discussion supposed to be an off the record conversation - and did she make that clear to Laurie?  Books can be researched over a number of years, and research can be cumulative, pieced together from work done for other projects.  Unless LP has made some gratuitously false claim (JB sat down and agreed to be interviewed in person for this book) it seems like a bit pointless strop



Her agreeing to give an interview lends weight to the book overall.


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## temper_tantrum (Jul 17, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Not clear exactly what JB is objecting to - has she changed her views from those given in the phone interview?  Was the phone discussion supposed to be an off the record conversation - and did she make that clear to Laurie?  Books can be researched over a number of years, and research can be cumulative, pieced together from work done for other projects.  Unless LP has made some gratuitously false claim (JB sat down and agreed to be interviewed in person for this book) it seems like a bit pointless strop



It's generally considered good practice to contact the interviewee if you want to re-use their material in a different format, or if you end up doing a piece of work with a different premise/angle/audience (etc) to the one you originally told them you were putting together.
In this case, JB (and Finn Mackay, I think) objects to her old quotes which she gave for LP's blog being re-used without her permission for a book which has (according to JB) a totally different angle. JB says that she would refuse to contribute to the book because she disagrees with LP's subject matter/perspective on the subject.
I think.


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## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2011)

DaveCinzano said:


> Are you talking about Anna Span and the article about the Shaftas? Anna Span is a director, so do you mean her, or have other 'interviewees' come forward to dispute Penny's version?


 
I meant her.


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## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2011)

Something else she shares with Hari - threats of libel.


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## articul8 (Jul 17, 2011)

temper_tantrum said:


> It's generally considered good practice to contact the interviewee if you want to re-use their material in a different format, or if you end up doing a piece of work with a different premise/angle/audience (etc) to the one you originally told them you were putting together.
> In this case, JB (and Finn Mackay, I think) objects to her old quotes which she gave for LP's blog being re-used without her permission for a book which has (according to JB) a totally different angle. JB says that she would refuse to contribute to the book because she disagrees with LP's subject matter/perspective on the subject.
> I think.



if the book genuinely has a "totally different angle", and hence the original quotes given would be misrepresented by their re-use then yes.  But this is quite a grey area - and consent for the publication of the orginal interview can't just be withdrawn retrospectively on the whim of the interviewee.


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## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2011)

But there was _no original interview published or consent given_! That's the point - it's bindel's point anyway. It was a phone call for background info. See any interview quotes from bindel in the _article_ LP wrote? I don't.


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## articul8 (Jul 17, 2011)

> The radical gender fluidity within the trans movement is exactly what Bindel, when I spoke to her in the process of writing this article, emphasised above everything else: "Normality is horrific. Normality is what I, as a political activist, am trying to turn around. Gender bending, people living outside their prescribed gender roles, is fantastic - and I should know. I've never felt like a woman, or like a man for that matter - I don't know what that's supposed to mean. I live outside of my prescribed gender roles, I'm not skinny and presentable, I don't wear makeup, I'm bolshie, I don't behave like a 'real woman', and like anyone who lives outside their prescribed gender roles, I get stick for it."



Is this not a quote from JB?  LP says she "spoke to her in the course of writing this article" - was that an off-the-record briefing type conversation?  Did JB make this clear at the time (I'm not in a position to tell - but I can see how this is a grey area)


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## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2011)

What i meant was, that you appeared to think that the article _consisted_ of an interview with bindel, one that was by definition consented to for publication - and so the later withdrawal of consent would be dodgy as you suggested. But it's simply not, there's one quote from a phone interview almost in passing, as the body of the article is a response to another one that bindle had written. 

(why the fuck am i writing about this?!!)


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## articul8 (Jul 17, 2011)

LB gave an interview over the phone - ie. not an off-the record conversation (JB isn't complaining about being quoted in the orginal blog).   So why the retroactive withdrawal of consent when said material makes it's way into a book? It's upto JB to demonstrate how the implication that she said these things in an interview for LPs book changes the terms are so dramatic as to change the terms on which the original interview was given.

It's like having consensual sex then later deciding it was actually rape because you were wrong to have consented in the first place.


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## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2011)

One last time - bindel claims that LP says in her book that she was interviewed for the book. The 'interview' wasn't for the book - it couldn't have been, as there was no book. LP using past interviews is fine, to claim that she had been interviewed _for_ the book is not. You're looking at the wrong part of the picture.


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## articul8 (Jul 17, 2011)

OK, if she did that it's stretching the truth of a bit if taken literally - but if LP considers the research for the blog a constituent part of the research for the book then it's a grey area.

No need for JB's histrionics.


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## Kid_Eternity (Jul 17, 2011)

articul8 said:


> OK, if she did that it's stretching the truth of a bit if taken literally - but if LP considers the research for the blog a constituent part of the research for the book then it's a grey area.
> 
> No need for JB's histrionics.


 
How could she consider it research for a book when it's meant to have happened a few years ago?


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## articul8 (Jul 17, 2011)

Books can be years - decades even - in gestation.  I'm not saying this was automatically the case with Laurie, but it's not unusual for writers to synthesise and build on previous essays/articles into longer projects.


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## Kid_Eternity (Jul 17, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Books can be years - decades even - in gestation.  I'm not saying this was automatically the case with Laurie, but it's not unusual for writers to synthesise and build on previous essays/articles into longer projects.


 
Very true but she hasn't said that this was the case from what I can tell. Either way she should be careful with what she thinks the relationship is with people she's talking to that she uses later in published material and what the person involved thinks the relationship is. She's made errors before which are either just sloppy journalism or (if you're a detractor) cynical opportunism so needs to be a bit more careful now with everything else going on than ever before.


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## temper_tantrum (Jul 17, 2011)

articul8 said:


> if the book genuinely has a "totally different angle", and hence the original quotes given would be misrepresented by their re-use then yes.  But this is quite a grey area - and consent for the publication of the orginal interview can't just be withdrawn retrospectively on the whim of the interviewee.


 
If someone interviews me for an article in Newspaper XYZ in 2006 on the subject of ABC, then I would be rather concerned if they took the quotes and re-worked them for a book on DEFG in 2009. Firstly, you're taking the quotes out of context. Secondly, my views might have changed in the meantime. Thirdly, yes, radical thought but interviewees do have a certain amount of rights over their public representation. If they say you are misrepresenting them, then that deserves consideration.

Edit: From my perspective, if I was LP (  ) and I wanted to use _the material _for my new book project, here's what I would do. I would contact JB. I'd say that I'm writing a book on blah-blah, and I'd like to use material from the interview we did in the past. But I appreciate that she might not hold the same views anymore, so therefore does she have any updated opinion on it, and would she like to elaborate on the earlier material? 
Then, if I used the original material again, I would simply cite it clearly. Eg. 'In 2006 Julie Bindel argued ... XYZ (reference to original article)'. If she gave me new or more detailed views for the book, I could then add: 'More recently, she has said ... ABC'. 
That's the way you handle prior material, imo.


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## articul8 (Jul 17, 2011)

As a say there's a certain grey area here.  Obviously it's wrong if quotes are totally ripped out of context and an interviewee wholly misrepresented.  But at the same time no interviewee has the right to retrospectively withdraw consent to publish the results of an interview they freely entered into.  Any more than consent to sex can be withdrawn after the event.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 17, 2011)

articul8 said:


> As a say there's a certain grey area here.  Obviously it's wrong if quotes are totally ripped out of context and an interviewee wholly misrepresented.  But at the same time no interviewee has the right to retrospectively withdraw consent to publish the results of an interview they freely entered into.  Any more than consent to sex can be withdrawn after the event.


 
I dunno about journalism, but that's not the way it works in academia. When I do interviews I must get people to sign an informed consent form that clearly states that consent can be withdrawn at any time during or after the interview. Fail to include that clause and you fail to get clearance from the Research Ethics Committee. And rightly so.

That said, the situation is obviously different if an interview has already entered the public domain via airing or other publication. But even then I think the interviewee should have the right to refuse publication of material that hasn't been made public.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 17, 2011)

articul8 said:


> at the same time no interviewee has the right to retrospectively withdraw consent to publish the results of an interview they freely entered into.  Any more than consent to sex can be withdrawn after the event.


 
If I agree to fuck a guy in his room one night in 2006 on our own, does that mean he has the right to fuck me in public in 2009?
You give an interview in a context, for a particular publication, at a particular time. Re-using that material long after the event in different circumstances, in a different context,without your interviewee's consent is, I'm afraid, unethical.
As I said above, if the quotes were on the record at the time, you can use the old material IF YOU REFERENCE IT PROPERLY. 
In the terms of your metaphor, that means I can't stop you from thinking about the past sex having occurred, for wank bank material.


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## frogwoman (Jul 17, 2011)

Unless the interviewee consented tho obv


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## lazyhack (Jul 18, 2011)

LP isn't a journalist, she has a lot in common with Hari, but has a bit more radical cover. Well positioned people with cultural capital who write themselves into everything they produce, its a good recipe for coming undone in the end.

I heard she got shouted out of the free school squat by a particularly over eager anarchist kid, but the door wouldn't work so she was left trapped there with him shouting in her face about being 'journalist scum'.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 18, 2011)

Penny's 'book' is not well-received, it appears:
http://madamjmo.blogspot.com/2011/07/laurie-penny-looking-familiar.html


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 18, 2011)

Wot happened to the book she was writing with clare solomon?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 18, 2011)

temper_tantrum said:


> Penny's 'book' is not well-received, it appears:
> http://madamjmo.blogspot.com/2011/07/laurie-penny-looking-familiar.html


 
£9.99 for 68 pages!!!! And it appears much of it is recycled anyway. Fuck me she's desperate, I've written longer fucking pamphlets than that.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 18, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> £9.99 for 68 pages!!!! And it appears much of it is recycled anyway. Fuck me she's desperate, I've written longer fucking pamphlets than that.


 
Links?


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## butchersapron (Jul 18, 2011)

frogwoman said:


> Wot happened to the book she was writing with clare solomon?


 
They weren't writing it, they were collecting others writings and plastering their own names on the book cover. It appears Penny was given the boot from this project.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 18, 2011)

She's got another 2 books due out in the next year, according to the latest piece on her blog.
Edit: 'Collected columns' 2007-11, this autumn, and a 'proper' book next spring ('a big book of feminist essays and insurrectionary tactics').
Edit again: Is this the Solomon book?: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Springtime-Student-Rebellions-Clare-Solomon/dp/1844677400


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## butchersapron (Jul 18, 2011)

TruXta said:


> Links?


 
Nah, not yet anyway.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 18, 2011)

> "Cuts, sexism and riots, Laurie Penny's fresh and angry voice captures the moment and the important issues – highly recommended." -- Polly Toynbee ** "Penny is re-inventing the language of dissent, delivering verbal taser-barbs to the left and right, and causing apoplexy among the old men in cardigans who run the British blogosphere." -- Paul Mason, economics editor of BBC's Newsnight In the space of a year, Laurie Penny has become one of the most prominent voices of the new left. This book brings together her diverse writings, showing what it is to be young, angry and progressive in the face of an increasingly violent and oppressive UK government. Penny Red: Notes from the New Age of Dissent collects Penny's writings on youth politics, resistance, feminism and culture. Her journalism is a unique blend of persuasive analysis, captivating interviews and first-hand accounts of political direct action. She was involved in all the key protests of 2010/2011, including the anti-fees demos in 2010 and the anti-cuts protests of spring 2011, often tweeting live from the scene of kettles and baton charges. An introduction, conclusion and extensive footnotes allow Penny to connect all the strands of her work, showing the links between political activism and wider social and cultural issues. This book is essential for understanding what motivates the new generation of activists, writers and thinkers that bring creativity, energy and urgency to the fight against capitalism and exploitation.



This is her columns book it seems - complete with endorsement from Polly Toynbee (!) and Paul Mason


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 18, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> They weren't writing it, they were collecting others writings and plastering their own names on the book cover. It appears Penny was given the boot from this project.


 
how come?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 18, 2011)

Actually, if that review above is correct she has done a Hari, no two ways about it:



> I was very surprised to see that quotes on page 62 from Judith Ramirez are identical to those printed in a March 1988 New Internationalist article by Jane Story.
> 
> - Is Laurie re-using quotes? If so, I wonder what people think about this?
> 
> ...


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 18, 2011)

frogwoman said:


> how come?


 
No idea. But the book was published with her being replaced. by Tania Palmieri


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 18, 2011)

oh ok, no idea who that is ...


----------



## MadamJMo (Jul 18, 2011)

Hi TruXta - links to where Laurie has seemingly recycled copy from are given in my blog posthttp://madamjmo.blogspot.com/2011/07/laurie-penny-looking-familiar.html (if that is what you meant by links). Cheers, MJM.


----------



## MadamJMo (Jul 18, 2011)

I think what Laurie has done is different to Hari, as she is reusing quotes she gathered herself - but she has not been honest that Meat Market is a re-using of her pieces of the past two or three years, nor has she asked at least two of her previous interviewees for their permission to be in Meat Market.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 18, 2011)

Not the Ramirez one you found though.

Welcome to the boards btw.


----------



## MadamJMo (Jul 18, 2011)

Well, true - re Ramirez. Am waiting to see if there is any response from Laurie on this, as the blog post has gone crazy over Twitter etc, and she has been posting on Twitter this morning. She also seems to search for her name on Twitter and respond quickly to those who post bile about her, so am sure she must have seen it. Since I posted this at about 10pm last night, can't believe that nearly 300 people have read it already!! (My blog is only a few weeks old, so this is very out of character for it.)


----------



## articul8 (Jul 18, 2011)

How did you find your way on here to discuss it?


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 18, 2011)

Prolly cos I linked to it, Articul8 

Edit: Welcome, MadamJMo, btw


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 18, 2011)

Welcome to the boards


----------



## MadamJMo (Jul 18, 2011)

Thanks for the welcomes - nice to meet you all - hello! I found the board by looking at where people had found my blog from, and there was a link to this thread. 

If you're interested, Laurie has now joined the comments section on the blog: http://madamjmo.blogspot.com/2011/07/laurie-penny-looking-familiar.html#comments


----------



## lazyhack (Jul 18, 2011)

Quite interested in the Judith Ramirez angle, can someone post the two texts side by side?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 18, 2011)

LP blames the subs - again.


----------



## lazyhack (Jul 18, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> LP blames the subs - again.



Second time in as many days.


----------



## MadamJMo (Jul 18, 2011)

She has sent me 14 DMs on Twitter in the past hour, blaming me for potentially ruining her career... Apparently, it is my fault (as someone who bought her book, read her book, and wrote about it factually and truthfully), that she did not ensure all references were printed in the book, or sources given etc. I pointed out that it is standard practice for publishers to send authors proofs of their books to read and check before it is printed. It is the author and publisher's responsibility to check all sources are included and correct - not the reader's responsibility!!! 

She also says the publisher (Zer0) always prints "collections of posts". I looked on their website and could see no reference to this, and asked her for the link. She said "They don't say so - but that's what most of them are." Well, silly me, for not assuming (!).

Apparently, I'm picking on Laurie. I don't see why. She complains I tweeted the link to my blog post several times (just as I would for any blog post - whether a film review, or a drawing or anything), and that I'm attacking a fellow feminist - I pointed out my argument has nothing to do with her feminist views and is entirely related to her unclear referencing, and reusing of old content. She says she made it clear from the start that it was recycled material - but I cannot find any reference to this in the intro to the book, which I just re-read. 

And she is attempting to make me feel guilty for potentially "ending her career" - as if to 'threaten' anyone for having a negative response to someone's work. 

Extraordinary.


----------



## MadamJMo (Jul 18, 2011)

When else has she done this? Can you post a link please?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 18, 2011)

frogwoman said:


> Welcome to the boards


 
Don't lend Butchersapron your copy of Arshinov.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 18, 2011)

MadamJMo said:


> When else has she done this? Can you post a link please?


 
The whole of this thread is about this, basically!


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 18, 2011)

MadamJMo said:


> She has sent me 14 DMs on Twitter in the past hour, blaming me for potentially ruining her career... Apparently, it is my fault (as someone who bought her book, read her book, and wrote about it factually and truthfully), that she did not ensure all references were printed in the book, or sources given etc. I pointed out that it is standard practice for publishers to send authors proofs of their books to read and check before it is printed. It is the author and publisher's responsibility to check all sources are included and correct - not the reader's responsibility!!!
> 
> She also says the publisher (Zer0) always prints "collections of posts". I looked on their website and could see no reference to this, and asked her for the link. She said "They don't say so - but that's what most of them are." Well, silly me, for not assuming (!).
> 
> ...


 
Yep, extraordinary. Surely her claim that she interviewed bindel  - "Bindel, _when_ I spoke to her _in the process of writing this book_" destroys her own claim that she's open about it being recycled material. It demonstrates the exact opposite. That it's being presented as fresh material. Keep digging Penny. You won't win.


----------



## lazyhack (Jul 18, 2011)

MadamJMo said:


> She has sent me 14 DMs on Twitter in the past hour, blaming me for potentially ruining her career... Apparently, it is my fault (as someone who bought her book, read her book, and wrote about it factually and truthfully), that she did not ensure all references were printed in the book, or sources given etc. I pointed out that it is standard practice for publishers to send authors proofs of their books to read and check before it is printed. It is the author and publisher's responsibility to check all sources are included and correct - not the reader's responsibility!!!
> 
> She also says the publisher (Zer0) always prints "collections of posts". I looked on their website and could see no reference to this, and asked her for the link. She said "They don't say so - but that's what most of them are." Well, silly me, for not assuming (!).
> 
> ...



Just keep it clear that your criticism is purely on the merits of her work, ignore her emotional response. If you're right you'll be vindicated. If you feel like leaking her correspondence however...


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 18, 2011)

http://thethirdestate.net/2011/01/on-being-called-a-cunt-by-laurie-penny/


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 18, 2011)

Any _other_ footnotes left off in subbing i wonder?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 18, 2011)

This generations very own giles cohen


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 18, 2011)

Hang on, is there a number by the Ramirez quote?


----------



## MadamJMo (Jul 18, 2011)

Thanks for the replies, guys (and thanks for the welcomes - I did post an earlier reply saying 'hello' back, but don't think it made it on the board). I'll read the whole thread thoroughly and get up to speed ;-)


----------



## TruXta (Jul 18, 2011)

MadamJMo said:


> Thanks for the replies, guys (and thanks for the welcomes - I did post an earlier reply saying 'hello' back, but don't think it made it on the board). I'll read the whole thread thoroughly and get up to speed ;-)


 
You might like the thread on Johann Hari as well. http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/th...i-admits-copying-and-pasting-interview-quotes


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 18, 2011)

MadamJMo said:


> Thanks for the replies, guys (and thanks for the welcomes - I did post an earlier reply saying 'hello' back, but don't think it made it on the board). I'll read the whole thread thoroughly and get up to speed ;-)


 
If it had a link in it takes a certain min number of posts before they're accepted.


----------



## stethoscope (Jul 18, 2011)

Welcome MadamJMO


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Jul 18, 2011)

Yeah, hello MadamJMo.  Don't let Laurie Penny's pathetic whingeing/borderline bullying behaviour get to ya


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 18, 2011)

Funny how authors always blame the subs for omissions, but never credit them for turning unreadable stream-of-consciousness bollocks into polished articles.


----------



## revol68 (Jul 18, 2011)

Her politics come across as little more than a really annoying dickhead at a dinner party who imagines themselves a radical intellectual cos they've read No Logo and some quotes from Emma Goldman in their American Literature class. 

Well saying she's middle class as fuck, the cretin.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 18, 2011)

see tagline for something else that a sub ed was not to blame for.

I must have laughed for at least a week


----------



## revol68 (Jul 18, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> see tagline for something else that a sub ed was not to blame for.
> 
> I must have laughed for at least a week


 
???


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jul 18, 2011)

revol68 said:


> Her politics come across as little more than a really annoying dickhead at a dinner party who imagines themselves a radical intellectual cos they've read No Logo and some quotes from Emma Goldman in their American Literature class.
> 
> Well saying she's middle class as fuck, the cretin.


 
it was inevitable really wasn't it? After the student protests they were always going to pick a token angry yoof. More hysterical the better. Can't have someone well-thought-out, considered and credible, obviously


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 18, 2011)

revol68 said:


> ???


 
during the student protests while she was frantically tweeting about being THERE MAN she compared herself to 'a tiny protesting icicle, a protesticle' (it were cold you see).


----------



## revol68 (Jul 18, 2011)

Lo Siento. said:


> it was inevitable really wasn't it? After the student protests they were always going to pick a token angry yoof. More hysterical the better. Can't have someone well-thought-out, considered and credible, obviously


 
I don't mind angry or ranty, but does it always have to be some little rich careerist fuckwit....


silly question, of course it does.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jul 18, 2011)

revol68 said:


> I don't mind angry or ranty, but does it always have to be some little rich careerist fuckwit....
> 
> 
> silly question, of course it does.


 
if you were editor on the guardian or the new statesman, what kind of people do you (a) know, (b) relate to and (c) talk to and trust. 
Answer to all three is people who are like you in every way.


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Jul 24, 2011)

Laurie Penny on Twitter today: "Had a lovely weekend spitting on posh people".  Re-tweeted by Johnnie Marbles saying "Go you!".  Have just responded to both with my own cheery comment on the pair....


----------



## stethoscope (Jul 24, 2011)

MellySingsDoom said:


> Laurie Penny on Twitter today: "Had a lovely weekend spitting on posh people".


 
"It's so difficult in life when you've come from Oxford".

Oh wait...



> I'm sorry some people found that tweet offensive - I've deleted it. I don't think spitting is a 'cool thing' to do!


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Jul 24, 2011)

^^^Yeah, so uncool to do she decided to do it anyway.  Fucking moron.

(Not having a go at you by the way, stephj).


----------



## stethoscope (Jul 24, 2011)

Ah no, whatever Laurie does/says I find funny (sometimes maddening but mostly funny).


----------



## stethoscope (Jul 24, 2011)

And that's not funny in a good way.


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Jul 24, 2011)

stephj said:


> And that's not funny in a good way.


 
Indeed!


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 24, 2011)

Weekend at the parents was it laurie?

Really, where was she gobbing on posh people?


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Jul 24, 2011)

In Brighton, I believe, butchersapron (she's deleted the tweets on that front, so can't link to them, I'm afraid)


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 24, 2011)

I suspect her actions verged on hompohobia. 

(Her posh parents are from there as well. )


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Jul 24, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> I suspect her actions verged on hompohobia.
> 
> (Her posh parents are from there as well. )


 
Really?  It just gets better (i.e. worse), doesn't it?


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Jul 24, 2011)

Derail - Johnnie Pieman has decided to get into it w/me on Twitter about this -wll let you know if he comes up with any gems....


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Jul 24, 2011)

Laurie Penny's getting the onion out on Twitter just now:



> Lately I've been really spiteful and bitchy where it's not needed. It's not like me, it's not good enough and I feel really awful about it.



followed by:



> In general, I've been stressed and burned out and letting stuff get to me too much. I'm writing about why. Not sure if I'll publish yet.



Yeah, cos we all know Alice Walker went round spitting on people when she was struggling with "The Color Purple", right?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 24, 2011)

> I'm writing about why.



I'm great even when gobbing on my mum.


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Jul 24, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> I'm great even when gobbing on my mum.


 
Yes, quite.  <shakes head etc> (Just sent her back a reply on her "reasons")

As for Johnnie Pieman, looks like his Twitter account has been hacked.


----------



## belboid (Jul 24, 2011)

spoof account apparently, your on johnnymarb*I*es' account - not marb*L*es


----------



## Belushi (Jul 24, 2011)

Is she suicidal yet?


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Jul 24, 2011)

belboid said:


> spoof account apparently, your on johnnymarb*I*es' account - not marb*L*es


 
You're right there.  Just tried to find his "proper" account (where the Melly/Pieman bunfight was taking place), and it seems to have gone...


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Jul 24, 2011)

The onion's doing sterling work at the moment:



> In brief, I've been depressed by politics, and letting the pressure and all the attacks get to me too much. It's been pretty scary at times.


----------



## stethoscope (Jul 24, 2011)

Oh my fucking good grief.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 25, 2011)

Belushi said:


> Is she suicidal yet?


 
I've been critical of her - but this shit is just sick.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 25, 2011)

Think you've totally missed the allusion there.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 25, 2011)

i must have


----------



## love detective (Jul 25, 2011)

vote labour with no allusions


----------



## treelover (Jul 25, 2011)

'it was inevitable really wasn't it? After the student protests they were always going to pick a token angry yoof. More hysterical the better. Can't have someone well-thought-out, considered and credible, obviously'


Michael Chessum, only 21, is definitely someone of that calibre, (NCAFC) he gets articles in the Guardian but little broadcast time


----------



## Random (Jul 25, 2011)

Has anyone called her Penny Dreadful yet, or have I just made it up?


----------



## treelover (Jul 25, 2011)

Chessums last article

http://anticuts.com/2011/07/13/guardian-tuition-fees-go-ahead-marks-the-betrayal-of-a-generation/


----------



## articul8 (Jul 25, 2011)

love detective said:


> vote labour with no allusions


 
tha's quite witty for you


----------



## articul8 (Jul 26, 2011)

She's just tweeted
"During the pogroms, my great-grandfather was sold a ticket ' to New York' that actually took him to Newcastle. And that's why I'm British!"

Maybe I'm being over-suspicious but something about this story makes me doubt its veracity


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 26, 2011)

articul8 said:


> She's just tweeted
> "During the pogroms, my great-grandfather was sold a ticket ' to New York' that actually took him to Newcastle. And that's why I'm British!"
> 
> Maybe I'm being over-suspicious but something about this story makes me doubt its veracity


 
Her parent(s) and grandparent(s) would have to have had children in their 40s for her great-grandfather to have been old enough to buy a ticket, and for Ms. Penny to only be in her late 20s-early 30s. I'm nearly 50, and my great-grandmother was only 9 when she came over here (with an aunt and uncle) in the early 1900s. She had my nan in 1914, who had my mum in 1940, who had me in '62. Penny's maths don't quite work out.


----------



## killer b (Jul 26, 2011)

Does it matter? It's an off the cuff family tale... I don't particularly want to defend her, but such stories often have a flavour of the apocryphal. I've a few myself that I haven't bothered fact checking...


----------



## articul8 (Jul 26, 2011)

Just if you've been on the wrong end of criticism for making stuff up, then adding more fuel to the fire doesn't seem very clever.


----------



## killer b (Jul 26, 2011)

she said her dad told her something about their family history. i think she's in the clear there tbh, even if it isn't totally accurate.


----------



## flypanam (Jul 26, 2011)

killer b said:


> she said her dad told her something about their family history. i think she's in the clear there tbh, even if it isn't totally accurate.



Your probably right. 

However she has deemed it necessary to make it public on twitter. Maybe in the hope of giving her view of herself as a 'Tribune of the oppressed' some credence.


----------



## belboid (Jul 26, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> Her parent(s) and grandparent(s) would have to have had children in their 40s for her great-grandfather to have been old enough to buy a ticket, and for Ms. Penny to only be in her late 20s-early 30s. I'm nearly 50, and my great-grandmother was only 9 when she came over here (with an aunt and uncle) in the early 1900s. She had my nan in 1914, who had my mum in 1940, who had me in '62. Penny's maths don't quite work out.


 
mm, yes it does.

Penny born 1990

Parent Born 1965

Grandaparent born 1940

Great grandfather got the fuck out shortly before that.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jul 26, 2011)

There's enough genuine stuff out there to get her without picking on her over a half remembered family memory, my family comes out with this shit all the time, and I reuse it if it's interesting without fact checking it, so do loads of others.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 26, 2011)

belboid said:


> mm, yes it does.
> 
> Penny born 1990
> 
> ...



Not really bothered, but she she could have meant the pogroms at the and of the 19th/start of the 20th century. That was my first thought as Germany in the 1930s is not usually referred to in that way. Either way, not really interested in this one.


----------



## Belushi (Jul 26, 2011)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> There's enough genuine stuff out there to get her without picking on her over a half remembered family memory, my family comes out with this shit all the time, and I reuse it if it's interesting without fact checking it, so do loads of others.


 
This.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 26, 2011)

No, because you want to use LP to make a pre-conceived point about class not about integrity of claims per se.  Not claiming that it's scandal of the century.  But as flypanam says it's more about creative self-mythologising.  edit - maybe we all do this to some extent.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 26, 2011)

belboid said:


> mm, yes it does.
> 
> Penny born 1990
> 
> ...


 
Mate, if you're descended from east Europeans Jews, "the pogroms" mean only one thing - Tsarist-era licenced murder and theft. If what she meant was "during Nazism" she should say that.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 26, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Not really bothered, but she she could have meant the pogroms at the and of the 19th/start of the 20th century. That was my first thought as Germany in the 1930s is not usually referred to in that way.



Quite. 



> Either way, not really interested in this one.


 
Neither am I, particularly, but if you put private history into the public sphere you could at least attempt accuracy, so that spods like me don't think "oooh, pogroms. She *obviously* means the late-Victorian period" (which is the era where the apocryphal tales of tickets to the USA that only took you as far as Tilbury/Liverpool/Newcastle etc also came from).


----------



## Sue (Jul 26, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> Quite.
> 
> 
> 
> Neither am I, particularly, but if you put private history into the public sphere you could at least attempt accuracy, so that spods like me don't think "oooh, pogroms. She *obviously* means the late-Victorian period" (which is the era where the apocryphal tales of tickets to the USA that only took you as far as Tilbury/Liverpool/Newcastle etc also came from).


 
We've one of these apocryphal tales in my family, though in that instance was Edinburgh rather than America. Still, at least the dates work out...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 26, 2011)

Sue said:


> We've one of these apocryphal tales in my family, though in that instance was Edinburgh rather than America. Still, at least the dates work out...


 
Whenever I hear about Jews settling in Edinburgh and Glasgow, it's invariably accompanied by a story of how they were asked by the locals "But are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?".


----------



## kavenism (Jul 26, 2011)

Perhaps she’s bigging up her Jewish heritage in order to pave the way to claim that any criticism of her is just thinly veiled anti-Semitism. Wouldn't put it past her.


----------



## killer b (Jul 26, 2011)

she's just retelling an entertaining story her dad told her over dinner ffs.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 26, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> Whenever I hear about Jews settling in Edinburgh and Glasgow, it's invariably accompanied by a story of how they were asked by the locals "But are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?".


 
TF?


----------



## lazyhack (Jul 26, 2011)

kavenism said:


> Perhaps she’s bigging up her Jewish heritage in order to pave the way to claim that any criticism of her is just thinly veiled anti-Semitism. Wouldn't put it past her.


 
Most likely. 

Protestant/Catholic jews thing is an old joke - http://www.bethjacobnorwich.org/yksermon25770.htm


----------



## Sue (Jul 27, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> Whenever I hear about Jews settling in Edinburgh and Glasgow, it's invariably accompanied by a story of how they were asked by the locals "But are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?".



Heh, they were from the South of Italy so Catholic Catholic... (Was more the emigration thing than the Jewish thing I was meaning in terms of aprocryphal tales...)


----------



## Tokyo (Jul 28, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> Her parent(s) and grandparent(s) would have to have had children in their 40s for her great-grandfather to have been old enough to buy a ticket, and for Ms. Penny to only be in her late 20s-early 30s. I'm nearly 50, and my great-grandmother was only 9 when she came over here (with an aunt and uncle) in the early 1900s. She had my nan in 1914, who had my mum in 1940, who had me in '62. Penny's maths don't quite work out.


 
It's not impossible.  I was born in the late 1970s, my father in the early 1950s, his father in the early 1890s (yes, he was 60 when my father was born), and his father in the early 1850s.  So I'm only ten years or so older than her, and my great-grandfather really did come over here during the pogroms.  Pretty sure he knew he was heading for London, though.


----------



## TremulousTetra (Jul 30, 2011)

Sue said:


> We've one of these apocryphal tales in my family, though in that instance was Edinburgh rather than America. Still, at least the dates work out...


 
"spods " what are spods?


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Jul 30, 2011)

ResistanceMP3 said:


> what are spods?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 30, 2011)

ResistanceMP3 said:


> "spods " what are spods?


 
People with a keen interest in a subject. You could be said to be a spod about the SWP (except spods tend to be neutral about their chosen subject).


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 30, 2011)

Has she said anything about Johann Hari yet? Sniping from various directions about 'young and recently-high-profile journalists' who were given a leg-up by Hari suddenly being silent - sounds rather as though they mean LP, perhaps?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 30, 2011)

Very little beyond that the original expose was verging on homophobia. Really.


----------



## nino_savatte (Sep 12, 2011)

I see the Young Britons' Foundation website is listing Laurie Penny on its homepage for some reason. Maybe there's something she's not telling us?



> Are you looking for a daily dose of conservative inspiration but don’t know where to look? Check out YBF’s suggested Sound Bites on Twitter:
> 
> *Member of Parliament:  @timloughton*
> 
> ...


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Sep 12, 2011)

That is er odd to say the least...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Sep 12, 2011)

For trolling. I'm sure George Monbiot used to be linked from that.


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 13, 2011)

Or one of these 'Young Britons' has a crush on Ms. Penny, for which he is 'ragged' mercilessly by the other 'chaps'.


----------



## sihhi (Sep 15, 2011)

> I don't mean to advocate casual sex, polyamory, housing collectives and late nights drinking bad vodka with bisexual activists as alternatives that necessarily work for everyone, though they've always done so for me.



http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/09/true-love-idea-cruel-life

Is a housing collective a housing co-op or a flatshare?


----------



## belboid (Sep 15, 2011)

shit rip off of a hunter s thompson quote either way


----------



## nino_savatte (Sep 16, 2011)

Idris2002 said:


> Or one of these 'Young Britons' has a crush on Ms. Penny, for which he is 'ragged' mercilessly by the other 'chaps'.


Yah. Fancy a Pimms?


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 16, 2011)

SpineyNorman said:


> For trolling. I'm sure George Monbiot used to be linked from that.


16 months in prison for you


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Sep 16, 2011)

sihhi said:


> http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/09/true-love-idea-cruel-life
> 
> Is a housing collective a housing co-op or a flatshare?



Isn't it a euphemism for group sex?


----------



## Nigel (Sep 17, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> Mate, if you're descended from east Europeans Jews, "the pogroms" mean only one thing - Tsarist-era licenced murder and theft. If what she meant was "during Nazism" she should say that.



Wasn't there rumours of "pogroms" in Stalinist Russia?
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stalins-Secret-Pogrom-Inquisition-Anti-fascist/dp/0300084862#_


----------



## rekil (Sep 19, 2011)

Hey normals, check this out. Laurie's flatmate is a 48 year old guardian journo. Crazy.

Bollocks.









> Nick refers to this place as "the Hovel", but it's a palace compared with some of the places I've lived, by virtue of having an intact ceiling and no one's drug-dealer boyfriend sleeping on the sofa.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Sep 19, 2011)

'Normal people' - utter scorn.   Oh dear, I'm getting a bit butchersapron about it all ...


----------



## stethoscope (Sep 19, 2011)

I've just seen this drivel in a colleagues paper.

I can't even get beyond the first sentence of Penny's without it winding me up...


> When I told my friends I was leaving inner-city proto-bohemia and moving in
> ...


----------



## Orang Utan (Sep 19, 2011)

i like what she's done with her hair


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 19, 2011)

Such desperation. Such harin-ness


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 19, 2011)

How long till polly gets a squatter?


----------



## temper_tantrum (Sep 19, 2011)

I've resisted knowing too much about this one so far, but I couldn't help checking her background this time.
According to Wikipedia, 'She then completed her NCTJ journalism training certificate in London.[_citation needed_] 
Anyone got any idea if and where she did her NCTJ then?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 19, 2011)

"this one"? When did you get yours?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Sep 19, 2011)

I don't get that piece, why was it considered worthwhile publishing in a paper?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 19, 2011)

Which one K_e?


----------



## killer b (Sep 19, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> I don't get that piece, why was it considered worthwhile publishing in a paper?


you noticed which paper published it, no?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 19, 2011)

copliker said:


> Hey normals, check this out. Laurie's flatmate is a 48 year old guardian journo. Crazy.
> 
> Bollocks.



Jesus she actually looks really cute there


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 19, 2011)

She looks like a thin you.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Sep 19, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Which one K_e?



Her and the flatmate one...to be clear, I get how lifestyle pieces generally are but this is thin for even that to say the least...puzzling stuff...almost as if someone is doing her a favour by giving some favourable coverage than anything...


----------



## Orang Utan (Sep 19, 2011)

i doubt that piece will do her any favours


----------



## killer b (Sep 19, 2011)

journalists love writing about themselves, and the guardian loves printing it. what's to puzzle over?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Sep 19, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> i doubt that piece will do her any favours



Really? Seems fairly harmless really for your theatre loving hampstead luvvie...


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Sep 19, 2011)

killer b said:


> journalists love writing about themselves, and the guardian loves printing it. what's to puzzle over?



Yeah you're probably right...just doesn't seem quite right. My experience of the media, and guardian journos etc tells me there's a bit more to this...


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 19, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Really? Seems fairly harmless really for your theatre loving hampstead luvvie...


Bitchy


----------



## killer b (Sep 19, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Yeah you're probably right...just doesn't seem quite right. My experience of the media, and guardian journos etc tells me there's a bit more to this...


yeah, they had a 1200 word gap in the colour supplement and three hours to deadline.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Sep 19, 2011)

killer b said:


> yeah, they had a 1200 word gap in the colour supplement and three hours to deadline.



Yeah...as I said you're probably right.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 19, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> She looks like a thin you.



narcissm


----------



## kavenism (Sep 19, 2011)

copliker said:


>


 
That man has a startlingly slappable face. And Penny is quite cute; but then so is Pixie Lott, I wouldn’t recommend reading a feminist tract by either.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Sep 19, 2011)

He looks quite fuckable actually.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 19, 2011)

kavenism said:


> I wouldn’t recommend reading a feminist tract by either.


----------



## rekil (Sep 19, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> i doubt that piece will do her any favours


Vodka guzzler in the newstatesman piece and teetotaller in this. Brand LP in need of a reboot.


----------



## killer b (Sep 19, 2011)

i was thinking the 'virtual teetotaller' bit didn't gel with the many exciting pissed up tweets i've seen from her over the past year. must've taken the pledge fairly recently (mind you, she seems to have given up twitter recently. or i've unfollowed her, dunno which).


----------



## rekil (Sep 19, 2011)

killer b said:


> i was thinking the 'virtual teetotaller' bit didn't gel with the many exciting pissed up tweets i've seen from her over the past year. must've taken the pledge fairly recently (mind you, she seems to have given up twitter recently. or i've unfollowed her, dunno which).


I got the impression she lived in a big nutty house, like the Monkees, except with loadsa booze, scrapes with the man, and the internationale at the end of every evening.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 19, 2011)

if i sang the internationale at the end of every evening i'd get sick of it very quickly.


----------



## imposs1904 (Sep 20, 2011)

copliker said:


> Hey normals, check this out. Laurie's flatmate is a 48 year old guardian journo. Crazy.
> 
> Bollocks.



I can't help feeling that the picture editor of The Guardian dislikes one or both of them. The picture screams 'smug wankers'.


----------



## redsquirrel (Sep 20, 2011)

copliker said:


> I got the impression she lived in a big nutty house, like the Monkees, except with loadsa booze, scrapes with the man, and the internationale at the end of every evening.


Sounds like some weird liberal journo version of big brother.

You could have LP, Hari, that Kitten(?) off Big Brother


----------



## Random (Sep 20, 2011)

kavenism said:


> That man has a startlingly slappable face.


 I have to say I still feel like I owe Lezard a debt of gratitude for writing a glowing review of Greil Marcus' _Lipstick Traces_, about 17 years ago, which connected me to _Society of the Spectacle_, which weaned me off Social Democracy (via various pamphlets from AK Press).


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2011)

redsquirrel said:


> Sounds like some weird liberal journo version of big brother.
> 
> You could have LP, Hari, that Kitten(?) off Big Brother



Solomon, rebel warrior


----------



## rekil (Sep 20, 2011)

imposs1904 said:


> I can't help feeling that the picture editor of The Guardian dislikes one or both of them. The picture screams 'smug wankers'.


I suspect that some photographers imagine that the fag aloft pose evokes an appropriate sense of bookish boho sophistication. I remember a Mark E.Smith interview where he refused to do it. And also one where Guy Chadwick happily obliged.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2011)

Says it all. Arthur Miller/Nin cunt.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Sep 20, 2011)

? *Henry* Miller ?


----------



## Athos (Sep 20, 2011)

copliker said:


> I suspect that some photographers imagine that the fag aloft pose evokes an appropriate sense of bookish boho sophistication. I remember a Mark E.Smith interview where he refused to do it. And also one where Guy Chadwick happily obliged.


It's just so louche, darling.


----------



## Athos (Sep 20, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Says it all. Arthur Miller/Nin cunt.


Didn't Arthur Miller smoke a pipe?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2011)

Sorry, meant arthur mullard


----------



## Athos (Sep 20, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Sorry, meant arthur mullard


----------



## rekil (Sep 20, 2011)

Exhibit b.


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 20, 2011)

copliker said:


> Hey normals, check this out. Laurie's flatmate is a 48 year old guardian journo. Crazy.
> 
> Bollocks.


 
he has no right to smoke amber leaf. He is smoking amber leaf as an affectation.


----------



## Random (Sep 20, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> he has no right to smoke amber leaf. He is smoking amber leaf as an affectation.


Who gets to smoke amber leaf?


----------



## Orang Utan (Sep 20, 2011)

their house must stink


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 20, 2011)

People who buy it for the free rizla. He can afford normal fags.


----------



## rekil (Sep 20, 2011)

Nah, I bet they have a cleaner.


----------



## Orang Utan (Sep 20, 2011)

copliker said:


> Nah, I bet they have a cleaner.


rollie smokers houses always stink.


----------



## Random (Sep 20, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> People who buy it for the free rizla. He can afford normal fags.


We all do odd things to keep in touch with our youth


----------



## LLETSA (Sep 20, 2011)

killer b said:


> i was thinking the 'virtual teetotaller' bit didn't gel with the many exciting pissed up tweets i've seen from her over the past year. must've taken the pledge fairly recently (mind you, she seems to have given up twitter recently. or i've unfollowed her, dunno which).


 
You mean you actually 'follow' people on Twitter?


----------



## Orang Utan (Sep 20, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> You mean you actually 'follow' people on Twitter?


that's how it works


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 20, 2011)

thats how twitter works.


----------



## LLETSA (Sep 20, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> that's how it works



I know, but people actually do this? I just couldn't imagine waking up and thinking, 'Right, shower first or see what Penny Laurie's been saying on twitter?'

What a fucking society we've got now.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2011)

You follow people LLETSA, just slowly and you say the same thing over and over. How about fucking off eh?


----------



## Orang Utan (Sep 20, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> I know, but people actually do this?
> 
> What a fucking society we've got now.


if you don't follow people, your timeline is empty and there's no point using it.


----------



## LLETSA (Sep 20, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> You follow people LLETSA, just slowly and you say the same thing over and over. How about fucking off eh?


 
Touched a nerve?

'Luscious' Tasmin one day, the delightful Penny the next. Ooh, those dirty middle class girls.


----------



## LLETSA (Sep 20, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> if you don't follow people, your timeline is empty and there's no point using it.


 
There's nothing worse than being afflicted with an empty timeline.


----------



## Orang Utan (Sep 20, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> There's nothing worse than being afflicted with an empty timeline.


well it would make using the site pointless.
it's a very useful resource.
from what you have posted so far on it, it's clear you have no idea what you are talking about.


----------



## LLETSA (Sep 20, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> well it would make using the site pointless.
> it's a very useful resource.
> from what you have posted so far on it, it's clear you have no idea what you are talking about.


 
Useful for what exactly?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> Touched a nerve?
> 
> 'Luscious' Tasmin one day, the delightful Penny the next. Ooh, those dirty middle class girls.


As i said, slowly. With some mental old man stuff as well.


----------



## Orang Utan (Sep 20, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> Useful for what exactly?


news and blogs.
chat and gossip too of course.


----------



## LLETSA (Sep 20, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> As i said, slowly. With some mental old man stuff as well.


 
Doesn't matter. Keep calm and carry on.


----------



## LLETSA (Sep 20, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> news and blogs.
> chat and gossip too of course.



What did we ever do without news, chat and gossip? And blogs?


----------



## Orang Utan (Sep 20, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> What did we ever do without news, chat and gossip? And blogs?


what did we ever do without newspapers, books and television? are you about 80?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2011)

Yet another thread springs back to life as LLETSA says the same thing again, and again, again, sprinkle that fairy dust lad


----------



## LLETSA (Sep 20, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Yet another thread springs back to life as LLETSA says the same thing again, and again, again, sprinkle that fairy dust lad



On the other hand, everything in your four million posts from your full-time role as boss of the internet during the last ten years or so has been totally original.

Don't even see that I should appear on your 'radar', to be honest.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2011)

Again, again, again, again. I'm so weary. Oil, end times, small placard, private fraser, bit of a joke at the end of it


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2011)

Nice one for having a go at people for being on the internet. That's at least 4 forums we've both been on over 10+ years, forums you kept posting on no matter what. I hate dem people.


----------



## LLETSA (Sep 20, 2011)

I know what you're saying. Ever thought about making a total change of direction before it's too late?


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 20, 2011)

I love you guys.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> I know what you're saying. Ever thought about making a total change of direction before it's too late?


 What would be the point?


----------



## LLETSA (Sep 20, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Again, again, again, again. I'm so weary. Oil, end times, small placard, private fraser, bit of a joke at the end of it



I've never talked about end times. They're imaginary.

That oil thing's clearly a plot though. Thank God the public sees through it.


----------



## LLETSA (Sep 20, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> What would be the point?


 
There wouldn't really be one. But we could pretend there would, that's the thing.


----------



## LLETSA (Sep 20, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> what did we ever do without newspapers, books and television? are you about 80?


 
Let's be thankful that young people are demanding more and better information.


----------



## killer b (Sep 20, 2011)

_and what exactly is a 'spice girl'?_


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 20, 2011)

Where's Lazy Riser


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 20, 2011)

Random said:


> We all do odd things to keep in touch with our youth



He is probably poncing out of her pack so he can later style it with his journo mates 'oh yah, she's rekindled my love of roll ups, might be drinking strongbow and black next ha ha'

I also mislike his glass of wine. It's filled to that level, the craphat one where you have a small measure in it so that the wine can breath in the balloon. He just looks pure smug as well.

Penny has ditched the hitler hair do which is nice.


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 20, 2011)

Also the transparent attempt to set up a lolsome 'odd couple' hilarity ensues set up is stupid. They are both liberal m/c journalists. Nothing to see here.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Sep 20, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> Also the transparent attempt to set up a lolsome 'odd couple' hilarity ensues set up is stupid. They are both liberal m/c journalists. Nothing to see here.



And the typical gender divide too - naive and energetic young woman, jaded and experienced older man. When are they going to do a feature on Johann Hari moving in with Polly Toynbee instead, ffs?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Sep 20, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> he has no right to smoke amber leaf. He is smoking amber leaf as an affectation.



Cutters Choice.


----------



## Orang Utan (Sep 20, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> I also mislike his glass of wine.


who do you think you are, george rr martin?
i wish he wouldn't use that word.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Sep 21, 2011)

Did one of you lot write this?

http://www.shoutingatco.ws/2011/09/21/the-guardian-finally-disappears-up-its-own-arsehole/


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 21, 2011)

that's a brilliant article.


----------



## rekil (Sep 21, 2011)

> I love it that she's a first-rate writer and thinker. We are on the same side politically,...


He voted Libdem as well then. That's the best bit surely, until someone explains what 'proto-bohemia' is.


----------



## smokedout (Sep 21, 2011)

temper_tantrum said:


> Did one of you lot write this?
> 
> http://www.shoutingatco.ws/2011/09/21/the-guardian-finally-disappears-up-its-own-arsehole/



failed middle class media twats launch attack on successful middle class media twats


----------



## TremulousTetra (Sep 22, 2011)

Honestly, I'm  really shocked that "there is any such things breathing"? {Sin ed O'connor}


----------



## Bakunin (Sep 28, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> People with a keen interest in a subject. You could be said to be a spod about the SWP (except spods tend to be neutral about their chosen subject).



The term 'spod' has been around for quite a while. IIRC, I first heard it in London during my Uni days (the missus was from Staines but always preferred to say she was from Egham because she thought it sounded better, apparently) and that was back in the mid-1990's.

I used to think I was a pure-bred spod about some things (Led Zeppelin, military stuff, good whiskey, old school motor racing, crime and criminals and so on), but now I have the proper diagnosis I realise that my pre-existing spoddish tendencies have merely been exacerbated by Aspergers and thus I'm either an Aspod or Spoderger depending on whichever word people might prefer.


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Sep 29, 2011)

Laurie Penny on Twitter just now:



> Live in NYC? Always wanted to buy a tiny British radical journalist lots of coffee and laugh at a proto-Bristolian accent? NOW YOU CAN!



I always thought Ms Penny hailed from Brighton, not Bristol???


----------



## Bakunin (Sep 29, 2011)

MellySingsDoom said:


> Laurie Penny on Twitter just now:
> 
> I always thought Ms Penny hailed from Brighton, not Bristol???



Ah, but in her world it isn't about where you come from, it's where you want to get that matters. In her case to being the ubiquitous 'voice of the radical left' and the general 'talking head about anything and everything' job is also, I suspect, firmly in her sights as well.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 29, 2011)

Oh please move to bristol laurie​


----------



## Bakunin (Sep 29, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Oh please move to bristol laurie​



But then she might actually have to meet some genuine radicals. Couldn't have that, now could she? Imagine what would happen if she were to suffer the company of genuine activists who genuinely care about what they do, she'd probably have a sincerity overload and explode in a cloud of her own falsity.


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Sep 29, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Oh please move to bristol laurie​



Can you imagine, her moving to Bristol, and in an attempt to fit in with the "radical youth", goes around spitting on people she deems to be "posh".


----------



## rekil (Sep 29, 2011)

MellySingsDoom said:


> I always thought Ms Penny hailed from Brighton, not Bristol???


Dunno. But..."So anyway, NYC: I'm gonna be in town for a few days making trouble. Who wants to drink tea with me? I'm from London and I'm HERE TO HELP."

I'm just relieved that she hasn't gone to Chile.

"The plane touched down in Santiago a bit ahead of schedule and I clapped the pilot. As I made my way down the aisle to the exit clutching 200 duty free fags and a bagful of World Of Whiskies goodies, a doe-eyed air hostess touched me lightly on the arm and said 'Please. Tell the world what's going on here.' Slightly embarrassed that she somehow knew that I'm a radical left wing journalist, I consulted the Spanish phrase book left in my dingy flat by a visiting Barcelona anarchist and muttered 'I'll try' in the least Manuelish accent I could muster. Instinctively, we raised our fists in mutual revolutionary salutation, then I descended to the tarmac, the acrid odour of last night's tear gas and burning barricades still hanging in the air..."


----------



## Bakunin (Sep 30, 2011)

copliker said:


> Dunno. But..."So anyway, NYC: I'm gonna be in town for a few days making trouble. Who wants to drink tea with me? I'm from London and I'm HERE TO HELP."
> 
> I'm just relieved that she hasn't gone to Chile.
> 
> "The plane touched down in Santiago a bit ahead of schedule and I clapped the pilot. As I made my way down the aisle to the exit clutching 200 duty free fags and a bagful of World Of Whiskies goodies, a doe-eyed air hostess touched me lightly on the arm and said 'Please. Tell the world what's going on here.' Slightly embarrassed that she somehow knew that I'm a radical left wing journalist, I consulted the Spanish phrase book left in my dingy flat by a visiting Barcelona anarchist and muttered 'I'll try' in the least Manuelish accent I could muster. Instinctively, we raised our fists in mutual revolutionary salutation, then I descended to the tarmac, the acrid odour of last night's tear gas and burning barricades still hanging in the air..."



So she's from Brighton, London AND Bristol now, is she?

And more of her chunder-inducing, wince-makingly efforts to make Private Eye's 'Pseuds Corner' can be found here:

http://pennyred.blogspot.com/


----------



## rekil (Sep 30, 2011)

Bakunin said:


> And more of her chunder-inducing, wince-makingly efforts to make Private Eye's 'Pseuds Corner' can be found here:
> 
> http://pennyred.blogspot.com/





> Of all the myriad problems with the Nowhere Island project, the press have inevitably focused on the most anodine and inconsequential: the money.


I ain't had no fancypants schoolin' so what does 'anodine' mean? 'Anodyne' maybe? Even then it makes no sense. Perhaps she meant 'asinine', who knows.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Sep 30, 2011)

With all the hate she attracts I'm surprised there's not more people coming out of the woodwork from her past revealing embarrassing or contradictory stuff about her tbh...


----------



## Bakunin (Sep 30, 2011)

copliker said:


> I ain't had no fancypants schoolin' so what does 'anodine' mean?



It's a popular painkiller isn't it?


----------



## rekil (Oct 2, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> twat


Now Laurie says she voted Labour.


----------



## skitr (Oct 3, 2011)

redsquirrel said:


> Sounds like some weird liberal journo version of big brother.
> 
> You could have LP, Hari, that Kitten(?) off Big Brother


Didn't she say she was shortlisted for Celebrity Big Brother this year?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 3, 2011)

copliker said:


> Now Laurie says she voted Labour.


Denying the labour membership stuff as well. What a miserable twister. She'll deny being up Lammy's arsehole next. Pity the voice of youth hasn't sussed out how the internet works yet.


----------



## rekil (Oct 3, 2011)

skitr said:


> Didn't she say she was shortlisted for Celebrity Big Brother this year?


She says as much on her blog entry here. But maybe she'll deny this as well in a few months. Some more corkers and made up stuff there.


----------



## Bakunin (Oct 3, 2011)

She seems to have no idea at all that, once something is out on the web then it's there to stay. She also seems to have trouble with a couple of basic things (like not making things up and/or giving false impressions to people rather than outright dishonesty) and doesn't seem to realise that criticism isn't automatically inflicted by jealous and hateful misogynists, when constructive criticism is exactly that and only to be expected for someone in her line of work. That's not to say that some of the ad hominem personal stuff thrown at her isn't highly objectionable, because it clearly is, just that she seems to take against anybody who criticises her for any reason and is far too free with accusations of bigotry/misogyny/insert bad ideas here rather than simply accepting that, shock horror, she might get things wrong occasionally.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 3, 2011)

Or that she's shit


----------



## Bakunin (Oct 3, 2011)

Or indeed that she's crap, yes.


----------



## andy2002 (Oct 3, 2011)

I don't know what's most depressing about that blog entry - the disingenuous load of cobblers she comes out with, the grovelling comments underneath ("Laurie, you're a legend") or the fact the once rather marvellous Warren Ellis is writing a forward for her dreary book. Spider Jerusalem would be spinning in his grave (if he were real).


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Oct 3, 2011)

andy2002 said:


> I don't know what's most depressing about that blog entry - the disingenuous load of cobblers she comes out with, the grovelling comments underneath ("Laurie, you're a legend") or the fact the once rather marvellous Warren Ellis is writing a forward for her dreary book. Spider Jerusalem would be spinning in his grave (if he were real).



Not so sure, I've never really rated Warren Ellis...


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 4, 2011)

Who is he?


----------



## TruXta (Oct 4, 2011)

Comics writer.


----------



## Random (Oct 4, 2011)

andy2002 said:


> I don't know what's most depressing about that blog entry - the disingenuous load of cobblers she comes out with, the grovelling comments underneath ("Laurie, you're a legend") or the fact the once rather marvellous Warren Ellis is writing a forward for her dreary book. Spider Jerusalem would be spinning in his grave (if he were real).


Spider Jerusalem is just a liberal with guns and drugs. Remember that in the election he advocated voting for "the beast" as the (slightly) lesser of two evils and in his final battle with the Smiler he survives due to being supported by a millionaire political donor who's spoilt daughter fancies Spider.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 4, 2011)

TruXta said:


> Comics writer.


thought for a sec it was the violinist and chum of Nick Cave


----------



## rekil (Oct 4, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Who is he?


If his wiki is correct, he's a bit of twat as well.


> Before starting his career as a writer, Ellis did "most of the shitty jobs you can imagine; ran a bookstore, ran a pub, worked in bankruptcy, worked in a record shop, lifted compost bags for a living"


How is running a bookshop shitty? What's the worst thing that can happen?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 4, 2011)

Ditto a pub


----------



## rekil (Oct 4, 2011)

Any of them.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 4, 2011)

I've had beef with warren ellis for riffing on Midwich Cuckoos in his Freak Angels comic then claiming not to TO MY INTERNET FACE on his mssg board thing. Freak Angels is still a good comic though.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 4, 2011)

copliker said:


> If his wiki is correct, he's a bit of twat as well.
> 
> How is running a bookshop shitty? What's the worst thing that can happen?



Customers, mate. Customers.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 4, 2011)

Running a bookshop's not a shitty job - I'd love to have any job, never mind be a reasonaly well paid manager of a shop


----------



## articul8 (Oct 4, 2011)

Running a bookshop sounds like a dream job - not a chain but a little indie one...


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 4, 2011)

Even with a chain you get all the review copies you can lust for. Much like Penny's oyster gobbling y-front clad housemate does, the cutters choice swine.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 4, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Running a bookshop sounds like a dream job - not a chain but a little indie one...


That's a bit like saying _being a pop star would be great, but not a good one, a really shit unknown o_ne.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 4, 2011)

keep the aspidistras flying


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Oct 4, 2011)

He could have worked in Tesco; how demeaning would that be?

Louis MacNeice


----------



## 5t3IIa (Oct 4, 2011)

Kid_Eternity said:


> With all the hate she attracts I'm surprised there's not more people coming out of the woodwork from her past revealing embarrassing or contradictory stuff about her tbh...



 I sense that you might be just the person who is holding this alleged dirt..............?

I can tell by your elipses.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 4, 2011)

Anyway, it's nice to see one fiction writer being appreciative of another.


----------



## rekil (Oct 4, 2011)

Her indy piece is chockers with made up stuff. Has to be.


> In a pile of cast-off jumpers, donated by supporters to keep the protesters warm in the chill October nights – no tents are allowed – I find a faded sweater reading "Obama '08". Now the Obama generation is beginning to understand that substantive change does not tend to happen if you ask nicely and play by the rules.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 4, 2011)

> The temporary society that has been built here is a mini-utopia of inclusivity and delicious vegan snacks,



oh just fuck off.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Oct 4, 2011)

copliker said:


> Her indy piece is chockers with made up stuff. Has to be.



The Obama sweater was next to this







Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## killer b (Oct 4, 2011)

laurie leads a truly serendipitous life.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 4, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> That's a bit like saying _being a pop star would be great, but not a good one, a really shit unknown o_ne.


how is it?  The measure of a bookshop being any good is - like music - best judged not in purely commercial terms?


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 4, 2011)

If the revolution is 'delicious' vegan snacks and laurie penny stamping on my balls forever then count me out.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 4, 2011)

articul8 said:


> how is it? The measure of a bookshop being any good is - like music - best judged not in purely commercial terms?


You're not william blake you know.


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Oct 4, 2011)

Just been sent this link to an article by LP in the New Statesman: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/10/wall-street-york-police-bridge  I can't check Twitter at the moment (due to it not working at this end, for some reason), but I was under the impression that she'd just returned to the UK from being on some ship/island commune thing for a couple of weeks.  How could she post an article to do with the Wall Street protests, then, if that is the case???


----------



## rekil (Oct 4, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> Customers, mate. Customers.


Garf coming in every day demanding to know why the neds atomic dustbin biography isn't stocked.


----------



## killer b (Oct 4, 2011)

she flew straight out to NY, i think. certainly within a week anyway.

i'm horrified i know this, btw.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 4, 2011)

The voice of the young bourgeois left will lift spirit no end. Soon they will be roasting bankers on fires made from old copies of the Socialist Worker and singing the internationale in mexican spanish. Nopaper round!

etc


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Oct 4, 2011)

I've just been looking through that article, and came across this:



> They mean that the police, like the protesters, are part of the "99 per cent' of the population whose livelihoods are threatened by the financial crisis, as opposed to the 1% of wealthy Americans still raking in profit. "We are the 99 percent," says the group on its Tumblr site. "We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we are working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent." *It's a very polite way of saying 'class war.'*



Can we expect Ms Penny to start "manning the barricades" from the comfort of her laptop, exhorting her comrades to fight the pigs, man, whilst she smokes another carefully-rolled cigarette?


----------



## andy2002 (Oct 4, 2011)

TruXta said:


> Comics writer.



To be fair to Warren, he's a journalist and novelist, too.


----------



## andy2002 (Oct 4, 2011)

Random said:


> Spider Jerusalem is just a liberal with guns and drugs. Remember that in the election he advocated voting for "the beast" as the (slightly) lesser of two evils and in his final battle with the Smiler he survives due to being supported by a millionaire political donor who's spoilt daughter fancies Spider.



Ellis is an Old Labour man at heart. I'm just surprised he's fallen so easily for Penny whatsherface's "Me! Me! Me!" nonsense. I thought he was a lot cleverer than that.


----------



## Random (Oct 4, 2011)

andy2002 said:


> Ellis is an Old Labour man at heart. I'm just surprised he's fallen so easily for Penny whatsherface's "Me! Me! Me!" nonsense. I thought he was a lot cleverer than that.


A bit odd that his standards for Outlaw Journalism are, in actual fact, rather low. I suppose he's just anorther liberal-left media professional when you come down to it.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 4, 2011)

He's alright, though he doesn't like my views on individual comicbooks Vs graphic novels and epublishing.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 4, 2011)

frogwoman said:


> Running a bookshop's not a shitty job - I'd love to have any job, never mind be a reasonaly well paid manager of a shop



The running is fine, it's (a minority of) the customers that make it miserable.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 4, 2011)

copliker said:


> Garf coming in every day demanding to know why the neds atomic dustbin biography isn't stocked.



When I did a few years in a bookshop, it wasn't the customers who knew exactly what they wanted that bugged me, or the browsers (because people who wandered in and appeared to browse aimlessly often bought a handful of books), it was the ones who *sort of* knew what they wanted, but didn't have any actual information that told me what the author or title was, just "it was that one reviewed in the TLS a couple of months ago, it's a biography of a 19th century notable" or similar vague tosh. You'd spend half an hour wrking out what the fuck they were talking about, and then 9 times out of 10 you'd say "it's £19.95" and they'd say "ooh, that's too expensive", like the price isn't usually given in the TLS (or any other) review! That used to have me reaching for my hip flask, I can tell you!


----------



## Orang Utan (Oct 4, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> When I did a few years in a bookshop, it wasn't the customers who knew exactly what they wanted that bugged me, or the browsers (because people who wandered in and appeared to browse aimlessly often bought a handful of books), it was the ones who *sort of* knew what they wanted, but didn't have any actual information that told me what the author or title was, just "it was that one reviewed in the TLS a couple of months ago, it's a biography of a 19th century notable" or similar vague tosh. You'd spend half an hour wrking out what the fuck they were talking about, and then 9 times out of 10 you'd say "it's £19.95" and they'd say "ooh, that's too expensive", like the price isn't usually given in the TLS (or any other) review! That used to have me reaching for my hip flask, I can tell you!



i used to work in one too and i know exactly what you mean. have you seen this blog:
http://jen-campbell.blogspot.com/2011/05/weird-things-customers-say-in-bookshops.html*Customer*: There was a book in the 80s that I loved... but I can't remember the title.
*Me*: Can you remember anything about it?
*Customer*: I think it was called 365 fairy tales.
*Me*: *searches on wholesaler website* Nothing under that name, sorry.
*Customer*: I might have got the number wrong. Could you just type in 'fairy tales' and see what comes up?
*Customer*: Do you have this book *holds up a biography* but without the photographs?
*Me*: I think the photographs are published alongside the text in every edition. 
*Customer*: Why?
*Me*: I suppose so you can see what everyone looked like. 
*Customer*: I don't like photographs. 
*Me*: Ok. 
*Customer*: Could you cut them out for me?
*Me*: .......


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## articul8 (Oct 4, 2011)

I have too - I remember some guy coming in and asking for (or rather demanding) the biog of Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair (sp?) I pointed him to crime section


----------



## JimW (Oct 5, 2011)

Read a book shop worker complaining elsewhere that you now get to spend ages helping someone work out what their dimly-recalled title is, only to have them say they can get it cheaper on Amazon and fuck off


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## marty21 (Oct 5, 2011)

when I worked for a major book chain, it was the staff who nicked most of the books


----------



## andy2002 (Oct 5, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> I've had beef with warren ellis for riffing on Midwich Cuckoos in his Freak Angels comic then claiming not to TO MY INTERNET FACE on his mssg board thing. Freak Angels is still a good comic though.



Ellis denying that is hilarious - it even acknowledges the influence on the Freak Angels Facebook page!


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 5, 2011)

-----

*Me:* Ok, so with postage that brings your total to £13.05. One second and I'll get the card machine."
*Customer:* No. No, absolutely not. I demand that you charge me £12.99. I will not pay for anything that starts with thirteen. You're trying to give me bad luck. Now, change it or I will go to a bookshop who doesn't want me to fall down a hole and die. Ok?

 ------


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 5, 2011)

----

*Man:* Do you have black and white film posters?
*Me*: Yes, we do, over here.
*Man*: Do you have any posters of Adolf Hitler?
*Me*: Pardon?
*Man*: Adolf Hitler.
*Me*: Well, he wasn't a film star, was he.
*Man*: Yes, he was. He was American. Jewish, I think.
*Me*: ...........

 ---

oh god


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 5, 2011)

*Customer:* Do you have any Robin Hood books where he doesn't steal from the rich? My husband's called Robin and I'd like to buy him a book, but he's a banker, so...

Haha


----------



## rekil (Oct 5, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> If the revolution is 'delicious' vegan snacks and laurie penny stamping on my balls forever then count me out.


It involves a smattering of her self orbiting hipster mates as well.






			
				ahipstermate said:
			
		

> Need photographer to shoot me doing free sketches at occupy wall street, 5-7 today.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Oct 5, 2011)

copliker said:


> ahipstermate said:
> 
> 
> 
> > Need photographer to shoot me doing free sketches at occupy wall street, 5-7 today.



Does it have to be a photographer that shoots him/her? I'm free this afternoon!


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 5, 2011)

How quick can you and your rifle get to new york?


----------



## rekil (Oct 5, 2011)

Take out that stoner in the pic on the other thread while you're at it.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Oct 5, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> How quick can you and your rifle get to new york?



Bugger, I'm starting to see the obvious flaw in my plan now - why is it that you only ever see them when you've not got your gun/aren't close enough to fire?


----------



## rekil (Oct 8, 2011)

With all the spanish civil war 75th anniversary stuff happening I had a peculiar feeling today that Laurie might see fit to cast herself and her mates (real, imaginary, whatever) as being the "new international brigades". I might even do it for her.


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## Bakunin (Oct 8, 2011)

copliker said:


> With all the spanish civil war 75th anniversary stuff happening I had a peculiar feeling today that Laurie might see fit to cast herself and her mates (real, imaginary, whatever) as being the "new international brigades". I might even do it for her.



Don't encourage her, please. The thought of her casting herself as some latter-day La Passionara would be quite enough to make me boke up.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 8, 2011)

Too late. Like Passionara she'd see no fighting, she'd just wave people off then decide which of them get in the same journo plane out with her when it all falls down. It's quite a good comparison actually.


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## Bakunin (Oct 8, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Too late. Like Passionara she'd see no fighting, she'd just wave people off then decide which of them get in the same journo plane out with her when it all falls down. It's quite a good comparison actually.



Come to think of it, you're not wrong. She reminds me of a certain type of hack who claims to be a 'war correspondent' while filing their copy from a hotel bar in the capital of whichever country is doing the fighting.

If she'd been around for the Russian Revolution she'd probably claim to have been storming the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg while she was in fact still in Moscow, sipping vodka and patching together other people's copy before filing it as her own like her mate Hari.


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 8, 2011)

Events were bloody in Moscow, so she probably would've been hiding there. 

There was quite heavy street fighting in the city a few days after Piter was taken, when Provisional Government loyalists seized the centre and briefly shut down the Moscow Soviet.


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## MellySingsDoom (Oct 8, 2011)

Laurie Penny's back in the UK now, but her Twitter feed shows she was right in the heart of the action in NYC:



> During my trip I was also privileged to hear two Williamsburg hipsters perform the Steve Jobs Rap on their Iphones. #*newyork*
> 13 minutes ago


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## Bakunin (Oct 8, 2011)

MellySingsDoom said:


> Laurie Penny's back in the UK now, but her Twitter feed shows she was right in the heart of the action in NYC:



I think I'm going to vomit.


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## rekil (Oct 8, 2011)

She's clearly being ironic.


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## rekil (Oct 9, 2011)

Those hipsters didn't exist anyway.

Official voice of youth's tentacles reach New Zealand.. One step closer to the syndication jackpot.


> They said it could never happen in America.


Dunno who 'they' are but I bet they said no such thing. Unless she's referring to ignorant wanker mates of hers.


> The air tastes of pepper spray


I saw that one coming.


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Oct 13, 2011)

Hold tight, Spain - the Penny one is on the way:



> Dear Spanish activists: help! I'm coming to meet you tomorrow for an assignment and I need contacts and a place to stay in Madrid! #*15o* #*15m*


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## DotCommunist (Oct 13, 2011)

staley edwards, your time has come


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## Bakunin (Oct 13, 2011)

MellySingsDoom said:


> Hold tight, Spain - the Penny one is on the way:



I don't suppose its occurred to her to actually use a hotel like any non-poncing individual.


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## MellySingsDoom (Oct 13, 2011)

Bakunin said:


> I don't suppose its occurred to her to actually use a hotel like any non-poncing individual.



Perish the thought!  No doubt she'll blag her way into some poor sod's place, then feel free to pass comment on their living arrangements ("near the sexy danger of the Ramblas, er, no, where I am again?"), and tell us, the dear reader, what a hard life she lives in having to be forced to share living space with hardline activists (as "no hotel would take her, the hardline journalist"), and then ripping off their stories for easy copy telling us how it is on the mean streets of Madrid...


----------



## rekil (Oct 14, 2011)

Loada shit about the SCW coming up. The IBs were formed 75 years ago today.


----------



## Bakunin (Oct 14, 2011)

MellySingsDoom said:


> Perish the thought!



Seeing as Penny seems to think it's OK to sponge off actual activists, does that mean that when I go to Le Mans next year I can scab a few nights on the sofa of some French Green campaigners while telling them I'm doing an expose of the dreadful environmental consequences of motorsport?

Because that would make things a lot cheaper.


----------



## Fruitloop (Oct 14, 2011)

NZ seems to be where people go when they've totally f-ed it up here, a la Barrymore. Expect Hari to pop up writing for the Herald any day now.


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## sihhi (Oct 16, 2011)

Bakunin said:


> Seeing as Penny seems to think it's OK to sponge off actual activists, does that mean that when I go to Le Mans next year I can scab a few nights on the sofa of some French Green campaigners while telling them I'm doing an expose of the dreadful environmental consequences of motorsport?
> 
> Because that would make things a lot cheaper.



I agree she should share her journalism or family wealth with the movement- but we have no evidence that she is poncing - she may have given something in exchange for her stay. Staying with other activists' places/rooms/floors has always been there, avoiding hotels is no crime.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 16, 2011)

sihhi said:


> I agree she should share her journalism or family wealth with the movement- but we have no evidence that she is poncing - she may have given something in exchange for her stay. Staying with other activists' places/rooms/floors has always been there, avoiding hotels is no crime.



Yep, we really need to focus here people, what has she actually done wrong? There's plenty of examples!


----------



## temper_tantrum (Oct 19, 2011)

Laurie's flatmate is a bit upset about Tintin:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/oct/18/how-could-do-this-tintin


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Oct 19, 2011)

temper_tantrum said:


> Laurie's flatmate is a bit upset about Tintin:
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/oct/18/how-could-do-this-tintin



"Spielberg makes film that is not very good" shocker.  What's he doing reviewing films anyway?  Isn't he meant to be reviewing books in his "edgy" abode and drinking wine at 4am whilst not wearing trousers?


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 19, 2011)

and guzzling oysters. Lets not forget his oyster habit, the boho borgois twat.


----------



## kavenism (Oct 19, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> and guzzling oysters. Lets not forget his oyster habit, the boho borgois twat.


 
Oh no no! it is said oyster's conjunction with a radish that is the real story there.

In other Penny related news this is how she starts her latest New Statesman bilge on sex education:

“When I was in Year 8, if you went to a certain field behind the school and shouted a certain code-word halfway up a certain tree, a pulley would be lowered, at the end of which you would be allowed to glimpse, for a few wicked seconds, a picture of Anna Kournikova's bottom.I know this because my superior spatial reasoning skills were enlisted in the design of the pulley system, in return for which I didn't get orange juice poured into my rucksack for a whole month.”

Sadly her superior spatial reasoning skills have as yet failed to allow Laurie to return to whatever planet she went to school on.


----------



## killer b (Oct 19, 2011)

jesus christ.


----------



## binka (Oct 19, 2011)

kavenism said:


> “When I was in Year 8, if you went to a certain field behind the school and shouted a certain code-word halfway up a certain tree, a pulley would be lowered, at the end of which you would be allowed to glimpse, for a few wicked seconds, a picture of Anna Kournikova's bottom.I know this because my superior spatial reasoning skills were enlisted in the design of the pulley system, in return for which I didn't get orange juice poured into my rucksack for a whole month.”
> 
> Sadly her superior spatial reasoning skills have as yet failed to allow Laurie to return to whatever planet she went to school on.


i know writers like to invent things to make their work sound better but that's properly mental. id love it if someone who was lucky enough to go to the same school as her called her out on it. its a completely pointless lie


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 19, 2011)

In this case I think she was genuinely being humorous. The rest of the article is littered with tongue in cheek asides.


----------



## binka (Oct 19, 2011)

you may be right


----------



## JimW (Oct 19, 2011)

Sad state for a 'writer' when we can't tell difference any more.


----------



## kavenism (Oct 19, 2011)

Reading the article though I do agree (mostly) with what she says about the problem of pornography being inherent in its "industry" rather than the products themselves. Shame she didn't develop this line of thought in her awful Meat Market book.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 19, 2011)

kavenism said:


> Reading the article though I do agree (mostly) with what she says about the problem of pornography being inherent in its "industry" rather than the products themselves. Shame she didn't develop this line of thought in her awful Meat Market book.



for once I think she found her stride and wrote a mildly amusing  (if preaching to the choir) piece without recourse to outright made up bollocks like internationale sing-songs around burning copies of the socialist worker.

Ther might even be a half decent writer somewhere in there struggling to get out from behind the reams of crap she comes out with.

and no I don't just fancy her now she's done her hair pink you massive assumers


----------



## TruXta (Oct 19, 2011)

JimW said:


> Sad state for a 'writer' when we can't tell difference any more.



It is? I don't mind a bit of ambiguity myself.


----------



## redsquirrel (Oct 20, 2011)

kavenism said:


> Oh no no! it is said oyster's conjunction with a radish that is the real story there.
> 
> In other Penny related news this is how she starts her latest New Statesman bilge on sex education:
> 
> ...


Does anyone actually believe this story?


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Oct 20, 2011)

When I was at school, I built a lever/ratchet system that would take somebody _all the way to the top of the Faraway Tree_. Where there was a Polaroid of Marcus Brigstocke's nutsack.

So, yes.


----------



## eoin_k (Oct 21, 2011)

From metaphorical handbags to literal ones for Laurie:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/21/designer-handbags-it-bag


----------



## Bakunin (Oct 21, 2011)

And the descent into unaware self parody continues unabated:

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/10/movements-protest-conventional

I don't know where to start with this. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear...


----------



## rekil (Oct 21, 2011)

A piece about the music of 'the movement' that mysteriously fails to identify a single tune. Apart from one by up and coming indie popper Willy Guthrie. Top research.


----------



## kavenism (Oct 22, 2011)

"That regular gig at the Guardian is further away than ever. What has got into this woman lately? If Mills and Boon did 'radical' social commentary it would look like this."

From the comments attached to that music of the movement piece. Spot on I think. I was down at St Paul's on Thursday and all I could hear was the standard fare of drumming and horns that you find at any protest. Some of the banners were well pants too. And someone had a gazebo.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 23, 2011)

on a porn-related note I see harriet harbls of anti-page three and husbands taxpayer funded dirty films fame has been appointed shadow culture sec.

Didn't seem worthy of its own thread but LOL


----------



## rekil (Oct 23, 2011)

eoin_k said:


> From metaphorical handbags to literal ones for Laurie:
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/21/designer-handbags-it-bag





> You're not able to run with a handbag in the same way as you are with a rucksack, which is what I normally have.





> You're not able to run around RIOTIN' an' dodgin' the PIGS with a handbag in the same way as you are with a rucksack, which is what I normally have (in a RIOT)



Fixed that for la pennyionara.


----------



## manny-p (Oct 23, 2011)

> Laurie Penny


She was at the anarchist bookfair, seen her talking to Heather Brooke outside.


----------



## LLETSA (Oct 23, 2011)

allybaba said:


> She was at the anarchist bookfair, seen her talking to Heather Brooke outside.


 
You should have got her to autograph a selection of photos of herself-you could have sold loads on here.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 23, 2011)

laminated


----------



## manny-p (Oct 24, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> You should have got her to autograph a selection of photos of herself-you could have sold loads on here.


Was more thinking along the lines of punching her face in


----------



## LLETSA (Oct 24, 2011)

allybaba said:


> Was more thinking along the lines of punching her face in


 
What, some minor journalist who's little more than a schoolgirl? Get a grip.


----------



## manny-p (Oct 24, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> What, some minor journalist who's little more than a schoolgirl? Get a grip.


It was a joke you dafty


----------



## LLETSA (Oct 24, 2011)

allybaba said:


> It was a joke you dafty


 
I know-people are always talking about punching somebody or killing somebody on here. It seems to fulfil a need.


----------



## manny-p (Oct 24, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> I know-people are always talking about punching somebody or killing somebody on here. It seems to fulfil a need.


Yep.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 24, 2011)

allybaba said:


> Was more thinking along the lines of punching her face in


 


LLETSA said:


> I know-people are always talking about punching somebody or killing somebody on here. It seems to fulfil a need.



laminated


----------



## kavenism (Nov 17, 2011)

From a particularly verbose piece. She's done well here, this below made me laugh at an event that actually makes me feel quite sad.
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/11/occupy-wall-books-library

"There is something in the lizard-brain of human civilisation, something in the superego of the species that drove us down from the trees and into the agora that abhors the destruction of books. The gorge rises. You know it's deeply, horribly wrong ten seconds before you remember why."

WUNDERBAR!


----------



## Belushi (Nov 17, 2011)

She's on Newsnight at the moment, dressed like a minor early-Eighties popstar.


----------



## killer b (Nov 17, 2011)

there's a load of trot books by callinicos and his ilk in the charity shop near me. am i correct to assume they won't be much cop?


----------



## kavenism (Nov 17, 2011)

killer b said:


> there's a load of trot books by callinicos and his ilk in the charity shop near me. am i correct to assume they won't be much cop?


Resources of Critique aint bad and neither is Against Post Modernism . Not sure about the rest of Callinicos's stuff. Avoid pamphlets!!


----------



## killer b (Nov 17, 2011)

i had already discounted lyndsey german's 'can there be a revolution in the UK?', tbf.


----------



## Riklet (Nov 17, 2011)

killer b said:


> there's a load of trot books by callinicos and his ilk in the charity shop near me. am i correct to assume they won't be much cop?



He's meant to be a fairly good writer actually, might be worth grabbing them if they're pretty cheap? If they're that bad you can always donate them back again, or to some barry Trotter that comes your way...


----------



## killer b (Nov 17, 2011)

i think they're a quid a piece. there's fucking loads of them - some ex-swappie lost his faith by the looks of it...

might have another look through. there's some titles that looked like they might have been interesting, but i was suspicious of the company they kept...


----------



## belboid (Nov 17, 2011)

all of the non-party books up till about Against Postmodernism were worth a read (only read Against the Third Way since then). His two party South Africa books are interesting, if very dated, obviously.  Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx is as good an inttro to Marx as an official SWP publication could be


----------



## mk12 (Nov 18, 2011)

I'd rather read his work than have to listen to him. He used to bore me to tears.


----------



## Random (Nov 18, 2011)

Matt!!!!!!!!


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 18, 2011)

I think  a fair number of his books are petty good. Short guide is if they're published by bookmarks they're shit - if published by an academic press they're worth a read.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 18, 2011)

mk12 said:


> I'd rather read his work than have to listen to him. He used to bore me to tears.



A ghost from the past!


----------



## killer b (Nov 18, 2011)

is bookmarks the SWP press?


----------



## Random (Nov 18, 2011)




----------



## Random (Nov 18, 2011)

killer b said:


> is bookmarks the SWP press?


Yes


----------



## mk12 (Nov 18, 2011)

*Keep calm Matt, keep calm. It's just a picture*


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 18, 2011)

Still not eating vegatables while watching rom coms?


----------



## mk12 (Nov 18, 2011)

Indeed. Although I grew a beard.


----------



## TopCat (Nov 18, 2011)

Captain Hurrah said:


> She's even lived in poverty, apparently.
> 
> Makes me fucking sick.



This bit is brilliant. 
""We were living like a scene from Withnail & I, except there was no space to move," she said. "It was very miserable. People get very depressed – that level of poverty has a bad effect on your mental health, it makes people feel that nothing will ever get better. I know that is the situation for a lot of people, but for young graduates, middle-class people, it is a real shock. It is not sufficiently recognised at all – how poor the rates are in the benefit system."


----------



## mk12 (Nov 18, 2011)

Didn't she got to private school, then Oxford?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 18, 2011)

TopCat said:


> This bit is brilliant.
> ""We were living like a scene from Withnail & I, except there was no space to move," she said. "It was very miserable. People get very depressed – that level of poverty has a bad effect on your mental health, it makes people feel that nothing will ever get better. I know that is the situation for a lot of people, but for young graduates, middle-class people, it is a real shock. It is not sufficiently recognised at all – how poor the rates are in the benefit system."



Posho realises in a limited shitty safe way that many working class youth have it harder than her and her mates.  I must say that I'm shocked this self-appointed voice of the people didn't know this until she farted about like a dilettante.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 18, 2011)

killer b said:


> i think they're a quid a piece. there's fucking loads of them - some ex-swappie lost his faith by the looks of it...
> 
> might have another look through. there's some titles that looked like they might have been interesting, but i was suspicious of the company they kept...


which one?  Oxfam?  I might have a trawl through when I'm up here


----------



## killer b (Nov 18, 2011)

one of the new shabby ones in the guildhall arcade. i'm not even sure what the charity is it's raising funds for (it's called the rainbow charity shop, so probably either gay rights or a cancer ridden child).


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 18, 2011)

articul8 said:


> which one? Oxfam? I might have a trawl through when I'm up here


Don't you get them for free?


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Nov 18, 2011)

TopCat said:


> This bit is brilliant.
> ""We were living like a scene from Withnail & I, except there was no space to move," she said. "It was very miserable. People get very depressed – that level of poverty has a bad effect on your mental health, it makes people feel that nothing will ever get better. I know that is the situation for a lot of people, but for young graduates, middle-class people, it is a real shock. It is not sufficiently recognised at all – how poor the rates are in the benefit system."



Ye gods!  I hate to invoke the Littlejohn, but really, "you couldn't make it up".

Her song for today, then:


----------



## barney_pig (Nov 19, 2011)

killer b said:


> there's a load of trot books by callinicos and his ilk in the charity shop near me. am i correct to assume they won't be much cop?


I have donated nearly all my swappie books to charity, but I kept my copies of Callitoff's series of books on south africa, for sheer chortle quality as they continue to insist that 'aparthied cannot be reformed away, only workers wevolution will sweep it away' right up to after mandela is elected president.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Nov 19, 2011)

Random said:


>


Why have you posted a picture of Rees in a thread about Callinicos and Penny?


----------



## rekil (Nov 19, 2011)

Marxism Festival 2011 Dublin Nov 18th to 20th.  Laurie was due to flog her buke at this but it appears she's in the america. Why would they invite a Lib Dem to this sort of do? Tickets are 30 quid.


----------



## discokermit (Nov 19, 2011)

Hocus Eye. said:


> Why have you posted a picture of Rees in a thread about Callinicos and Penny?


to remind people who the real enemy is?


----------



## killer b (Nov 19, 2011)

most of the trot books had gone today, but i took a punt on a few of what was left:

callinicos - southern africa after zimbabwe
tony cliff - the crisis, social contract or socialism
two volumes of a biography of trotsky by tony cliff
ian h. birchall - workers against the monolith, the communist parties since 1943
martin walker - the national front

all of them seem to be of an age...


----------



## articul8 (Nov 20, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Don't you get them for free?


 I get some (not all, not by any stretch) new ones for free but not random old stuff.  eg I'm just re-reading the Bornstein/Richardson 2 vol history of Trotskyism in Britain.

Still a sucker for the charity shop bookshelves


----------



## belboid (Nov 20, 2011)

killer b said:


> tony cliff - the crisis, social contract or socialism
> 
> ian h. birchall - workers against the monolith, the communist parties since 1943


those two are well worth a read, of their time but interesting commentaries


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Nov 22, 2011)

killer b said:


> martin walker - the national front



that one is quite good, and by a Guardian journo rather than a trot if I remember rightly.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 22, 2011)

He's quite the bigshot in international stuff now.


----------



## imposs1904 (Nov 22, 2011)

copliker said:


> Marxism Festival 2011 Dublin Nov 18th to 20th. Laurie was due to flog her buke at this but it appears she's in the america. Why would they invite a Lib Dem to this sort of do? Tickets are 30 quid.


 
She's in New York on the 23rd, plugging her new book at Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 22, 2011)

why are people so obsessed with her? her heart's in the right place, surely?
seems to be a veneer of reverse snobbery/misogyny running through parts of this thread.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 22, 2011)

I hate woman and posh people.

Is that why you think people have criticised her?


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 22, 2011)

not everyone, but there seems to be an element of it in some posts.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 22, 2011)

Which ones?


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 22, 2011)

allybaba said:


> Was more thinking along the lines of punching her face in





LLETSA said:


> What, some minor journalist who's little more than a schoolgirl? Get a grip.


there's two for a start, but a couple of more serious posts made me think, 'so what? why criticise her for that?' gimme a minute.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 22, 2011)

TopCat said:


> This bit is brilliant.
> ""We were living like a scene from Withnail & I, except there was no space to move," she said. "It was very miserable. People get very depressed – that level of poverty has a bad effect on your mental health, it makes people feel that nothing will ever get better. I know that is the situation for a lot of people, but for young graduates, middle-class people, it is a real shock. It is not sufficiently recognised at all – how poor the rates are in the benefit system."


here,  i don't see why people are so incredulous at this. she's middle class. poverty was a novelty to her. so what?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 22, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> there's two for a start, but a couple of more serious posts made me think, 'so what? why criticise her for that?' gimme a minute.


First one polemically expressing extreme dislike not based on her gender
Second one on her social impact.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 22, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> here, i don't see why people are so incredulous at this. she's middle class. poverty was a novelty to her. so what?


Now you've moved to something else and reveal that you're reading the thread backwards into the bargain.That generally works really well on the internet doesn't it? That really lends itslef to  informed debate.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 22, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> First one polemically expressing extreme dislike not based on her gender
> Second one on her social impact.


i read differently


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 22, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> i read differently


You certainly do. Excavate the hidden meanings for us OU.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 22, 2011)

as i said a whiff of irrational hatred behind those posts IMO


----------



## Random (Nov 22, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> as i said a whiff of irrational hatred behind those posts IMO


Behind a post by LLETSA telling someone to calm down?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 22, 2011)

What do you mean by "a veneer of reverse snobbery"? I see her being criticised as an example of how class privilege works. Is that " reverse snobbery"?


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 22, 2011)

see post 1003


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 22, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> as i said a whiff of irrational hatred behind those posts IMO


You said a bit more than that OU. They were used as examples of  reverse snobbery and misogyny.You've now got the responsibility to back them claims up.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 22, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> see post 1003


I have - it explains nothing. I ask again, is pointing out how privilege works  "reverse snobbery"?


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 22, 2011)

forget about it, can't be arsed. was just expressing a suspicion of that clubbishness that's typical amongst many political types. it smells of prejudice to me.
i see a young writer whose heart is in the right place getting a kicking for the odd bit of naivety and gaucheness. i think she deserves a break. her and owen jones seem to be the only leftwing commentators the mainstream press want to speak to at the mo, so i think a bit of solidarity wouldn't go amiss.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 22, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> I have - it explains nothing. I ask again, is pointing out how privilege works "reverse snobbery"?



Learn to read differently.


----------



## discokermit (Nov 22, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> reverse snobbery


no such thing. unless you call disliking someone for being privileged at your expense 'reverse snobbery'.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 22, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> forget about it, can't be arsed. was just expressing a suspicion of that clubbishness that's typical amongst many political types. it smells of prejudice to me.
> i see a young writer whose heart is in the right place getting a kicking for the odd bit of naivety and gaucheness. i think she deserves a break. her and owen jones seem to be the only leftwing commentators the mainstream press want to speak to at the mo, so i think a bit of solidarity wouldn't go amiss.


Then you, OU you lazy lazy cunt have not read the thread,don't know what people are talking about and the many irrelevant crimes is guilty of but though you'd get on your white steed anyway. You didn't express a suspicion did you? You did a bit more than that.You identified two posts as misogynistic as examples of the tone of the thread - now you 'can't be arsed'. Poor show.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 22, 2011)

I'm well interested in this    "reverse snobbery" - what is it?


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 22, 2011)

i don't have the stones for sophisticated political debate and i am a lazy sod. i admit it.


----------



## Random (Nov 22, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> here, i don't see why people are so incredulous at this. she's middle class. poverty was a novelty to her. so what?


Middle class people from sheltered lives get broadsheet columns to reveal that they're sheltered, in order to be read by people from similarly comfortable backgrounds. Hardly surprising, but still shit; still a sign that this paper is all about middle class titillation. And this from the supposedly leftie Guardian and supposedly leftie Penny Red. If the alternative radical journalists are so proud of being sheltered and out of touch, what does that say about media radicalism in the UK today, and its chances of being at all in touch with the needs of those really suffering from the current government's policies?


----------



## chilango (Nov 22, 2011)

Does anyone read *this stuff anyway?

I don't and I don't know anyone who does.

*Laurie Penny et al. Not this thread.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 22, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> forget about it, can't be arsed. was just expressing a suspicion of that clubbishness that's typical amongst many political types. it smells of prejudice to me.
> *i see a young writer whose heart is in the right place getting a kicking for the odd bit of naivety and gaucheness. i think she deserves a break*. her and owen jones seem to be the only leftwing commentators the mainstream press want to speak to at the mo, so i think a bit of solidarity wouldn't go amiss.



another victim of the pink hairdo


----------



## TruXta (Nov 22, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> another victim of the pink hairdo



That's racist.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 22, 2011)

chilango said:


> Does anyone read *this stuff anyway?
> 
> I don't and I don't know anyone who does.
> 
> *Laurie Penny et al. Not this thread.


 
warren ellis


----------



## manny-p (Nov 22, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> there's two for a start, but a couple of more serious posts made me think, 'so what? why criticise her for that?' gimme a minute.


The punching in the face comment was a joke. Fuck sake.


----------



## JimW (Nov 22, 2011)

It's a testament to Laurie's resilience that against the background of Britain's prevailing suppression of the middle classes, she's overcome her Oxbridge education to land a plum job jetting around the world to rehash her schtick from a variety of locations. You chippy proles just can't understand.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 22, 2011)

allybaba said:


> The punching in the face comment was a joke. Fuck sake.


does it matter that it was a joke? the sentiment was expressed.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Nov 22, 2011)

Yes you critics of Laurie Penny just don't understand that she is the Rosa Luxembourg of our age.

probably


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 22, 2011)

edit, allow that


----------



## past caring (Nov 22, 2011)

DotCommunist said:


> warren ellis


----------



## love detective (Nov 22, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> does it matter that it was a joke? the sentiment was expressed.



stop being such a drippy little wet prick


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 22, 2011)

love detective said:


> stop being such a drippy little wet prick


no need for that!


----------



## andy2002 (Nov 22, 2011)

past caring said:


>




Not _that_ Warren Ellis, the one that writes comics, video games, novels etc.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Nov 22, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> i read differently



Seeing what isn't there isn't reading differently. That's called making shit up.


----------



## LLETSA (Nov 23, 2011)

chilango said:


> Does anyone read *this stuff anyway?
> 
> I don't and I don't know anyone who does.
> 
> *Laurie Penny et al. Not this thread.


 
Me neither. In fact, out of the hundreds of people with whom I'm acquainted, I can't think of a single one who I could guarantee would have even heard of her.

You're always going to get people like LP. I don't see what the fuss is really. Easily ignored.  Like most things actually if that's what you want.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 23, 2011)

LLETSA said:


> I don't see what the fuss is really. Easily ignored. Like most things actually if that's what you want.



Disgust and outrage at ephemeral things are satisfying and enjoyable.


----------



## LLETSA (Nov 23, 2011)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Disgust and outrage at ephemeral things are satisfying and enjoyable.


 
True. Despite what I say above, I pay a lot of attention to the things that annoy me just for the sheer pleasure of being annoyed.


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Dec 6, 2011)

Thread bump (sorry) - just encountered this latest transmission from Laurie P: http://politicalscrapbook.net/2011/12/laurie-penny-vs-vodafone/

Perhaps the best solution for her is to, well, avoid using mobile phones altogether?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 6, 2011)

OOh can you get the INTERNET on a phone?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 6, 2011)

MellySingsDoom said:


> Thread bump (sorry) - just encountered this latest transmission from Laurie P: http://politicalscrapbook.net/2011/12/laurie-penny-vs-vodafone/
> 
> Perhaps the best solution for her is to, well, avoid using mobile phones altogether?



That's such a fucking cheapshot! What's that all about? God, she's just having a bit of a moan about her phone being cut off, I've said much worse than that when I've been cut off before. It's not a news story!


----------



## audiotech (Dec 6, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> OOh can you get the INTERNET on a phone?



You can get a 'webpack'. Vodafone charge £5 for a months access. You can stream Aljazeera from the comfort of your own bed, beats porn.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 7, 2011)

audiotech said:


> You can get a 'webpack'. Vodafone charge £5 for a months access. You can stream Aljazeera from the comfort of your own bed, beats porn.



A stream of what from your own bed?


----------



## audiotech (Dec 7, 2011)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> A stream of what from your own bed?



Sub-consciousness and REM whilst asleep.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 7, 2011)

audiotech said:


> Sub-consciousness and REM whilst asleep.


I contest the last part


----------



## Balbi (Dec 7, 2011)

Everytime anyone mentions REM to me I end up asleep, in my soul.


----------



## Sue (Dec 22, 2011)

Dear Lord...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/22/french-exploding-breast-implants-hilarious-wrong


----------



## poului (Dec 24, 2011)

Sue said:


> Dear Lord...
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/22/french-exploding-breast-implants-hilarious-wrong


 
the comments below neuter it very well. she really is fucking rubbish.


----------



## Belushi (Dec 24, 2011)

Callinicos keeps popping up as a talking head on Russia Today.


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Dec 24, 2011)

Jesus fecking Christ.  Is she trying to channel Andrea Dworkin there?  If so, she should stop right now - Dworkin, for all of her fundamentalist hardline stances, wrote with considerable thought and intelligence.  This is more like a pointless Valerie Solanas "tribute" act.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 24, 2011)

I'm glad I was given permission to lol though, else I'd have done myself an injury holding in all thos guffaws about exploding tits


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Dec 24, 2011)

As an aside - when I was at the Bookfair this year, and froggy and steph were buying some whatsits from the Freedom Books stand, I made an amused, piss-taking comment about Solanas' "Scum Manifesto" (Freedom were selling it), and you should've seen the look I got from one of the people there - ha ha ha!


----------



## rekil (Dec 24, 2011)

She's been trying to crack the US market, trying to tap into america so to speak. Not a whole lot of self awareness on display in her shit salon.com piece.


> The room is full of people who won’t speak to you until their handlers approve, all of them trying earnestly to understand the profound change that has taken place in the zeitgeist that provides their income.
> 
> “The ability to influence media for a person in my position is much greater,” Badgley tells me. “Although arguably I work very closely to the 1 percent.” The Occupy movement seemed like it was doing just fine before the celebrity bandwagon showed up. So what do these people have to gain from association with the first genuine counter-culture to show up in a generation?


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 27, 2011)

MellySingsDoom said:


> As an aside - when I was at the Bookfair this year, and froggy and steph were buying some whatsits from the Freedom Books stand, I made an amused, piss-taking comment about Solanas' "Scum Manifesto" (Freedom were selling it), and you should've seen the look I got from one of the people there - ha ha ha!



I read the scum manifesto going home on the train


----------



## revol68 (Dec 27, 2011)

The SCUM manifesto is quite a good tribute to the Poverty of Student Life, batshit like but enjoyable none the less.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 27, 2011)

i dont think it's a text that lends itself to complex contextual analysis.


----------



## revol68 (Dec 27, 2011)

I think the context to remember is that for all it's craziness, she did shoot Andy Warhol and that can never be a bad thing.


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Dec 27, 2011)

frogwoman said:


> I read the scum manifesto going home on the train



That and Kronenbourgstadt in the same evening? Truly, you are made of solid stuff


----------



## MellySingsDoom (Dec 27, 2011)

revol68 said:


> I think the context to remember is that for all it's craziness, she did shoot Andy Warhol and that can never be a bad thing.



...which led to him handing his film stuff over to the bellicose Paul Morrissey! 

(Whose films are great, as it happens).


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2012)

Sexism is the stock in trade of the tabloid press



> • This article was amended on January 1 2011 to remove reference to News International publishing a 'countdown clock' to Charlotte Church's age of consent, an allegation that NI denies



This claim has been a constant for years now - seen it on here loads of times as well.


----------



## kavenism (Jan 2, 2012)

More importantly Laurie's now rocking the sexy Vulcan look! If this can result in some more logic coming into her writing then it's a win win as far as I can see.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Sexism is the stock in trade of the tabloid press
> 
> This claim has been a constant for years now - seen it on here loads of times as well.



Didn't Church herself mention it in her submission to the enquiry?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2012)

Yep


----------



## rekil (Jan 2, 2012)

> This article was amended on January 1 *2011*


.

Laurie in pandahate shocker.


----------



## october_lost (Jan 19, 2012)

Facebook event thingy




			
				Housmanns said:
			
		

> Wednesday, February 8, 2012
> 7:00pm until 8:30pm
> 
> In the space of a year, Laurie Penny has become one of the most prominent voices of the new left. In 2011 she published two books, ‘Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism’ (Zero Books) and ‘Penny Red: Notes from the New Age of Dissent’ (Pluto Press), which collects Penny's writings on youth politics, resistance, feminism and culture.
> ...


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 19, 2012)

unfortunately Omega cider is currently going for 3 quid per three litres at the local shop so I will have to decline that amazing price and choose to drink myself to death rather than have money reedemable at housemans.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 19, 2012)

And there is no redemption for those who tolerate this, not really.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 19, 2012)

Kiss of death from Mason as well. Fucking A.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 19, 2012)




----------



## rekil (Jan 26, 2012)

Why British journalists are taught to be dishonest.



> The first thing I learned in journalism school was not to say anything bad about the police. If I did, even if I'd seen abuses of power with my own eyes, I could face a suit for damages that would ruin me, my editors and whatever paper had been unfortunate enough to publish my work.



That's bollocks isn't it. No mention of Hari btw.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 26, 2012)

> The real problem here is not just censorship, but self-censorship. Cohen points out that British journalists, campaigners and others learn to modify our speech before it ever reaches the point of contention. I will never forget being quietly reminded by other activists, on a demonstration against corporate tax avoidance last year, to chant "tax avoider!" not "tax dodger!". The imprecision of "dodger" might have given grounds for a suit, and we'd already spent all our money on the placards.



given some of the fluffy types active in the anti-cuts movement i can sort of believe this but i doubt it's an everyday occurence?


----------



## rekil (Jan 26, 2012)

Did it even happen to begin with?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2012)

copliker said:


> Why British journalists are taught to be dishonest.
> 
> That's bollocks isn't it. No mention of Hari btw.


Opening with a lie - where did they teach her that?



> The first thing I learned in journalism school was not to say anything bad about the police.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2012)

copliker said:


> Did it even happen to begin with?


Did it fuck.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 26, 2012)

the comments are interesting.


----------



## rekil (Jan 26, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> the comments are interesting.





> Bought a ticket to see her talk about Karl Marx at the ICA. Not sure what to expect now.


/steps back in amazement


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 26, 2012)

Did you see this Butchers? http://zetkin.net/journalism-subjectivity-movement/


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2012)

You fucking what!!!

(Sting singing on the roof of the barbican)


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Did you see this Butchers? http://zetkin.net/journalism-subjectivity-movement/


Good spot.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 26, 2012)

there are two more parts to it as well - well worth a read


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2012)

Worth bearing in mind she's AWL as well...


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 26, 2012)

i take it you mean the blogger rather than penny? Haven't read the rest of the blog btw so might be shit for all i know ..


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2012)

Yeah the other writer - though penny would fit in very well with their smug idiocy as well.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 26, 2012)

bombing for socialism


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2012)

Good example, remember pennies delighted twitter cheers over the bombing of libya...


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 26, 2012)

did she really?! i don't remember that.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2012)

Oh yeah, she was mad for it - sihhi posted about it at the time, see if i can find the exact quotes.

Just looking at the other writer, a lot of these lefty-students stay students for an awful long time don't they?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 26, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Oh yeah, she was mad for it - sihhi posted about it at the time, see if i can find the exact quotes.
> 
> Just looking at the other writer, a lot of these lefty-students stay students for an awful long time don't they?



Lol yes. I haven't looked at her blog in detail but i know what you mean. Where does she say she's awl?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2012)

Loads of student elections reports and write ups of student conferences and debates have her down as one of them,


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 26, 2012)

oh gawd ...


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 26, 2012)

just looked on google, you're right. wtf is deal with them all writing stuff in the new statesman etc too?


----------



## rekil (Jan 26, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Oh yeah, she was mad for it - sihhi posted about it at the time, see if i can find the exact quotes.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 26, 2012)

ugh.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> just looked on google, you're right. wtf is deal with them all writing stuff in the new statesman etc too?


 The power of networking and social capital! (Plus daft editors desperately trying to find young writers)


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2012)

copliker said:


>


Cheers. That's rancid.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 26, 2012)

of the people i know personally who thought the war was necessary i can't think of anyone who was happy over it.


----------



## articul8 (Jan 26, 2012)

To be fair it is easy to take one tweet out of context and make it into something else altogether.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2012)

articul8 said:


> To be fair it is easy to take one tweet out of context and make it into something else altogether.


Yeah, it's pretty ambiguous isn't it?


----------



## articul8 (Jan 26, 2012)

I don't know what she was responding to from this one tweet - it doesn't look good out of any context that's true (whether it would look any better in context is an open question)


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2012)

No it's no not if you were following her posts/arguments at the time. Which is why people know exactly what she meant.


----------



## rekil (Jan 26, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Cheers. That's rancid.


Sihhi in post #416 on march 25th.




			
				sihhi said:
			
		

> She has been justifying the aerial assaults over Libya on twitter. FFS as a journalist if you are not sure about something don't bloody spout it all around everywhere.


So there's more once the bombing and that got underway, I remember it but I'm fucked if I can find the posts.

But anyway...

Marx Reloaded – Laurie Penny and others at the ICA



> To mark the release of the film Marx Reloaded, Laurie Penny, author of Penny Red: Notes from the New Age of Dissent, will be joining Paul Mason, Robin Blackburn and Jason Barker at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the 15th February to discuss the issues raised in the film.
> 
> Marx Reloaded features “a stellar array of philosophers” and promises “an electrifying examination of the contemporary relevance of Karl Marx’s ideas for understanding the current global social and economic crisis.”


----------



## treelover (Jan 26, 2012)

God help us, the Marxist revival, the old man really wouldn't like it...

btw, isn't Blackburn one of the original New Left who in the 00's supported the iraq war, etc, like Fred Halliday


----------



## Idris2002 (Jan 26, 2012)

I don't remember that treelover. Remember, Halliday supported the 1991 Gulf War. I think that may have been the result of a need to find a new idol to worship after the Wall fell. Blackburn was never a full-on Moscow fan, more of a Third Worldist, so I'd be slightly more surprised if he blotted his copybook that way.  Or else Halliday was MI6 all along. Like Hitchens.


----------



## killer b (Jan 26, 2012)

i know it's been mentioned before upthread, but i just saw this:




			
				paul mason said:
			
		

> verbal taser-barbs



and wished a slow & agonising death on it's author.


----------



## Riklet (Jan 27, 2012)

He's either taking the piss, or has fallen under the spell of the Pink Hair...

A friend of mine is friends with L.P. on facebook.  Almost tempted to send her a message asking about the singing of the internationale and learning at journalism school not to talk about the o.b. on the first day....

"poetic license" eh.


----------



## killer b (Jan 27, 2012)

i was at journalism school for three years and they never mentioned it even once.

must've been a substandard course.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 27, 2012)

standards are obviously slipping


----------



## flypanam (Jan 27, 2012)

Shes on BBC 2 now


----------



## rekil (Jan 27, 2012)

Some arrant bullshitting about the poll tax riots.


----------



## articul8 (Jan 27, 2012)

treelover said:


> btw, isn't Blackburn one of the original New Left who in the 00's supported the iraq war, etc, like Fred Halliday



No.  You might be thinking of Norman Geras?


----------



## treelover (Jan 27, 2012)

37 pages on LP, she will be flattered


----------



## Fruitloop (Jan 27, 2012)

copliker said:


> Sihhi in post #416 on march 25th.
> 
> So there's more once the bombing and that got underway, I remember it but I'm fucked if I can find the posts.
> 
> ...


God that looks shit


----------



## rekil (Jan 27, 2012)

Fruitloop said:


> God that looks shit


Cartoon Trotsky giving it large. You'd think it couldn't get shitter than that.


----------



## Fruitloop (Jan 27, 2012)

The only thing worse would be if they could get Laurie Penny and a load of other Guardian faces together to talk about it. At length.


----------



## rekil (Jan 29, 2012)

She'll be on C4 news, something to do with Lammy. All this gushing nonsense forgotten probably.



> I hate him, I hate his terrible smug face, I hated him from the moment he opened his mouth, and I would vote for him in any election you care to mention, because he’s an uniquely talented politican who cares about the poor and the disenfranchised and the young and the desperate almost as much as he cares about stroking his own ego, and that’s a hell of a lot.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 6, 2012)

seen on twitter;




> @Nicklezard I bet you rummage through penny reds laundry basket for her dirty knickers when she's out.
> Nicklezard Nicholas Lezard
> @lustbather You're a disgusting creep, and a coward who hides behind a pseudonym. You can think what you like, jerk-off.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 6, 2012)

Oh, that's fab. Well done Mr. L.

E2A: I mean I take it that is our lustbather. . . there couldn't be two of them, could there?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 6, 2012)

THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 6, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Oh, that's fab. Well done Mr. L.
> 
> E2A: I mean I take it that is our lustbather. . . there couldn't be two of them, could there?


 
it's been confirmed


----------



## _angel_ (Feb 6, 2012)

He uses real name, so dont get that comment.


----------



## articul8 (Feb 6, 2012)

he said "knickers" - te he


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Feb 6, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> seen on twitter;
> 
> 
> 
> ...


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 6, 2012)

"jerk-off?" Does the lez think he's in porkies or something?


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> "jerk-off?" Does the lez think he's in porkies or something?


 
what do you mean?


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 6, 2012)

No one in this country, let alone public schoolboys like him, organically uses the phrase 'jerk off"...


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 6, 2012)

ahhh ok it's hundal you're on about? i was bit wtf at you saying "the lez" lol ...


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 6, 2012)

Hundal? I meant nick lezard...was that hundal? Even worser then!

(See what you mean about how i wrote that )


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 6, 2012)

lol i'm confused  no idea mate ...

if you've seen one liberal twitter commentator ...


----------



## killer b (Feb 6, 2012)

Eminently misunderstandable abreviation there
 good work.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 6, 2012)

Lezard probably wishes he had a cool nickname like "the Lez".


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Feb 6, 2012)

ernestolynch's (I think) NeoStalinism account looks like tired old shit.

I see Lusty has been harassing Owen Jones.


----------



## rekil (Feb 6, 2012)

the lez said:
			
		

> I like the idea of the old Saturnalia [an Ancient Roman festival held in December], where, for a 12-day period, you'd have the roles of masters and servants reversed. I think we could do with a little bit of that.


I wonder which side he imagines he's currently on. I see that he and Laurie are both on the books of AP Watt, the heavyhitter literary agents.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 7, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Hundal? I meant nick lezard...was that hundal? Even worser then!
> 
> (See what you mean about how i wrote that )


 
It was Lezard not Hundal. His mates do call him "the Lez" mind.


----------



## imposs1904 (Feb 16, 2012)

Hilarious.


----------



## barney_pig (Feb 16, 2012)

A classic from bone. Trotsky toffs


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 16, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> Hilarious.


 
as was Bones march on Eton public school last year.


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 16, 2012)

Lustbather now accusing Jones of becoming a mid 80s Carol Vorderman


----------



## revol68 (Feb 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> Cartoon Trotsky giving it large. You'd think it couldn't get shitter than that.


 
You got to love the fact you have the clowns have Trotsky give out lessons to Old Karl, sums up the British trot left's relationship to Marx, always filtered through shitty 2nd and 3rd international pish.


----------



## revol68 (Feb 16, 2012)

And Laurie Penny still needs shooting!


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 16, 2012)

And here's quite the finest example of pretentious and almost unreadable bilge I've seen in quite a while:

http://pennyred.blogspot.com/2012/02/love-letter-for-london.html

If she disappeared any further up her own arse she could clean her teeth from the inside.


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 16, 2012)

Oops, double post.


----------



## Belushi (Feb 16, 2012)

"London is a place of contradictions" 

"Laurie is a writer of banalities"


----------



## Belushi (Feb 16, 2012)

> Late at night, the platforms echo with the memory of thousands of city dwellers huddled together for shelter with the bombs of the Blitz overhead. Catching the last Bakerloo line home, you can almost see them, out of the corner of your eye, through the cracks in history: propped against one another, mindlessly tired.


 
No you can't.


----------



## articul8 (Feb 16, 2012)

I went to that ICA thing last night - pretty banal all round.  Mason was quite interesting - serious fella if prone to techno-futurist pant wetting.  Laurie was doing her usual "voice of a generation" schtick - she admitted to being no kind of theorist ("just writing what I see around me") but babbled on at great length without saying much more than "students are now in lots of debt", people are angry, blah blah.  Nothing much to say on how that relates to Marx - which was the topic of the event.  Robin Blackburn was a bit dull.  The chair was awful - lacing trite observations with "as Hardt and Negri argued", or "as Alain Badiou has said recently" for no purpose. 

What did I expect?


----------



## articul8 (Feb 16, 2012)

double post


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 16, 2012)

Belushi said:


> "Laurie is a writer of banalities"


 
Ahem, as a scribbler myself I'd firmly dispute your useage of the term 'writer' to describe exactly whay it is that she produces. 

'Self-publicising, self-aggrandising, self-pitying jobbing hack, whose current public profile is infinitely more due to relentless self-promotion than actual writing ability, and who uses protest and activism as a means to further her climb up the greasy pole of corporate media' would be far more appropriate, albeit not quite so snappy.


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 16, 2012)

Oops, another double post. Sorry.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 16, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I went to that ICA thing last night - pretty banal all round. Mason was quite interesting - serious fella if prone to techno-futurist pant wetting. Laurie was doing her usual "voice of a generation" schtick - she admitted to being no kind of theorist ("just writing what I see around me") but babbled on at great length without saying much more than "students are now in lots of debt", people are angry, blah blah. Nothing much to say on how that relates to Marx - which was the topic of the event. Robin Blackburn was a bit dull. The chair was awful - lacing trite observations with "as Hardt and Negri argued", or "as Alain Badiou has said recently" for no purpose.
> 
> What did I expect?


I take it that was Jason Barker who made the film and has done an English language intro to Badiou as he can't go 2 minutes without mentioning him. He's doing a follow up to Marx Reloaded called Marx Returns. Let's see if he can manage more than 50 minutes this time.​


----------



## articul8 (Feb 16, 2012)

maybe - wasn't sure except he was both a shit chair and pretentious with it.  Haven't seen the Marx Reloaded film itself yet - was told it was "disappointing, awful in places".  So in no great rush.


----------



## articul8 (Feb 16, 2012)

I'm not anti-theory by any means - but it does make me chuckle when people take every utterance of some continential megastar to be loaded with genius. Badiou could fart and Barker et al would be saying how it illustrated the interruption of the event into the fabric of being whilst also stressing the radical singularity of affective resistance to the plurality and multiplicity of signfication etc.e tc.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 16, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> Hilarious.


 
has this actually be confirmed? saw it last night


----------



## articul8 (Feb 16, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> has this actually be confirmed? saw it last night


 
Wow -   all at the same time [think that's my record smilies per post - but they all apply]


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 16, 2012)

I think it needs establishing that this Max Seddon is his kid - though everything points to it. Here he is arguing with Callinicos/dad over the riots. Odd for them just to happen to know each other...Also need to know if the Eton choice was when the prof was still 'with' the CEO.


----------



## JHE (Feb 16, 2012)

If it is Prof C's son, it'll be fun to watch any ructions. I think Social Worker and Michael Rosen gave Diane Abbott a hard time over her son's private schooling. It might be a little different this time.

Perhaps he'll say he had no say in the lad's schooling, which is possible I suppose.

As in the Abbott case, though, I don't think the problem is that some parents want to buy a privileged education for their progeny. The problem is that they are in a position to do so.


----------



## Random (Feb 16, 2012)

JHE said:


> As in the Abbott case, though, I don't think the problem is that some parents want to buy a privileged education for their progeny. The problem is that they are in a position to do so.


 Bar all rich people from the SWP and the Labour Party?


----------



## imposs1904 (Feb 16, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I think it needs establishing that this Max Seddon is his kid - though everything points to it. Here he is arguing with Callinicos/dad over the riots. Odd for them just to happen to know each other...Also need to know if the Eton choice was when the prof was still 'with' the CEO.


 
Need a pic of him. If he's got ears like the handles of the FA Cup, we'll know.


----------



## JHE (Feb 16, 2012)

Random said:


> Bar all rich people from the SWP and the Labour Party?


 
The Labour Party members who were upset by their MP's decision should take a leaf out of the Millies book and select a candidate who if elected to Parliament will take an ordinary wage.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 16, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> Need a pic of him. If he's got ears like the handles of the FA Cup, we'll know.


Hmmm


----------



## articul8 (Feb 16, 2012)

who's the mother?


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 16, 2012)

Are we 100% sure that it's his kid?


----------



## imposs1904 (Feb 16, 2012)

Double post


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 16, 2012)

On twitter alex callinicos is saying he's got no children.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 16, 2012)

I can see Lusty's getting stuck in


----------



## binka (Feb 16, 2012)

FATHER AND SON HAVING A NICE CHAT ON FACEBOOK

what kind of father denies his own children? disgusting behaviour


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 16, 2012)

Has it def been established it's his kid though? i think it does need establishing


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Feb 16, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I can see Lusty's getting stuck in


 
Anarcho Stalinist? That's ern, I think.


----------



## binka (Feb 16, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Has it def been established it's his kid though? i think it does need establishing


proper aristocrats dont let the bloodline die out do they? 

tbh if he has denied having kids i'd probably believe him because if it turns out he is lying then he's going to look like such an arsehole


----------



## articul8 (Feb 16, 2012)

binka said:


> if it turns out he is lying then he's going to look like such an arsehole


 
that never stopped him in the past


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 16, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Anarcho Stalinist? That's ern, I think.


 
oh ok, someone said @Lustbather tho on there!


----------



## imposs1904 (Feb 16, 2012)

articul8 said:


> who's the mother?


 
I think Stephen Fry may be the father.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 16, 2012)

god, imagine saying you don't have kids when you do! poor kid


----------



## belboid (Feb 16, 2012)

Callinicos's wife is Joanna Seddon (or was anyway).  Max is a little bit of a leftie (he'd like to think).  Boney put two and two together, but seems to have made five.


----------



## binka (Feb 16, 2012)

my opinion of twitter has changed slightly now i know that lusty and ern are on there giving relentless grief to some thoroughly deserving targets


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 16, 2012)

So is the Joanna Seddon Callinicos married the same person as the CEO? And how did max seddon get to be on callinicos's facebook?


----------



## killer b (Feb 16, 2012)

stepson perhaps?


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 16, 2012)

yeah - could be


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 16, 2012)

http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/alex-callinicos-and-max-seddon-an-apology/


----------



## belboid (Feb 16, 2012)

oops.  Good last line tho


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Feb 16, 2012)

Will ern and Lusty apologise?


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Feb 16, 2012)

Why doesn't somebody create two new threads, one for Callinicos and the other for Penny Red? Their original spat is now lost in the mists of time but people keep adding to this lumbering thread. No it won't be me; my interest is only incidental - mild curiosity.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 16, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Will ern and Lusty apologise?


 
Will the pope admit that some of his priests fuck children?


----------



## articul8 (Feb 16, 2012)

superb 'apology'


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Feb 16, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Will the pope admit that some of his priests fuck children?


 
'Some mistakes were made.'


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Feb 16, 2012)

This is the first time that I have seen ern compared with the Pope. He will be pleased. The Pope that is, not ern.


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 18, 2012)

More fact-free hyperbole, as usual untroubled by objective reality, for folk to take the piss out of here:

http://thenewinquiry.com/features/rootless-ruthless/


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 18, 2012)

> Doomed youth isn’t so sympathetic when it’s screaming defiance in your face.


 
lol


----------



## Belushi (Feb 18, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> More fact-free hyperbole, as usual untroubled by objective reality, for folk to take the piss out of here:
> 
> http://thenewinquiry.com/features/rootless-ruthless/


 
That's a particularly wanky article even by her standards.


----------



## dennisr (Feb 18, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/alex-callinicos-and-max-seddon-an-apology/


 
now this made me giggle:

The noble patrician Callinicos
Would sternly lecture the populous
On morals and manners, and socialist banners
In detail both dull and meticulous
But he never mentioned his history
And decided to keep it a mystery
But Fate’s had her day
And the crown’s slipped away
And the cunt looks completely ridiculous


----------



## discokermit (Feb 18, 2012)

i saw alex callinicos in the middle of the poll tax riots. didn't see ian bone. didn't see any o you cunts.


might have seen some millies though den. givin it all that about how we were spoiling the demo for everyone.


----------



## dennisr (Feb 18, 2012)

Belushi said:


> That's a particularly wanky article even by her standards.


 
"We are the new young left: precarious, rootless, ruthless, entitled, digitally enabled, and we are beginning to set the agenda."
arf


----------



## Belushi (Feb 18, 2012)

It's such a relief that finally we've got disgruntled Oxbridge graduates to lead the revolution.


----------



## JHE (Feb 18, 2012)

dennisr said:


> "We are the new young left: precarious, rootless, ruthless, entitled, digitally enabled, and we are beginning to set the agenda."
> arf


 
...shaking the system to its foundations, I expect
arf



discokermit said:


> i saw alex callinicos in the middle of the poll tax riots.


 
Really?  What was he doing?


----------



## discokermit (Feb 18, 2012)

Belushi said:


> It's such a relief that finally we've got disgruntled Oxbridge graduates to lead the revolution.


hasn't it always been?


----------



## articul8 (Feb 18, 2012)

JHE said:


> Really? What was he doing?


 
Got lost on his way from Malet St to LSE


----------



## discokermit (Feb 18, 2012)

JHE said:


> Really? What was he doing?


sellin papers!


----------



## andy2002 (Feb 18, 2012)

dennisr said:


> "We are the new young left: precarious, rootless, ruthless, entitled, digitally enabled, and we are beginning to set the agenda."
> arf


 
Christ, she sounds like Rick in the Young Ones: "We're Young Ones. Bachelor boys. Crazy, mad, wild-eyed, big-bottomed anarchists."


----------



## discokermit (Feb 18, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Got lost on his way from Malet St to LSE


c'mon, whatever the background, his politics are better than yours you labour cunt.


----------



## articul8 (Feb 18, 2012)

get to fuck


----------



## discokermit (Feb 18, 2012)

articul8 said:


> get to fuck


most politically coherent post you've ever made.


----------



## Belushi (Feb 18, 2012)

discokermit said:


> hasn't it always been?


 
No, Laurie and her friends have just discovered that capitalism isn't very nice, even if you've got a degree from Oxford, and you need to listen!


----------



## discokermit (Feb 18, 2012)

Belushi said:


> No, Laurie and her friends have just discovered that capitalism isn't very nice, even if you've got a degree from Oxford, and you need to listen!


no, i mean haven't the oxbridge cunts, sons of the german bourgeoise, russian princes etc. always been in the leadership of the movement? laurie penny should be knocked for the shiteness of her politics and the awful standard of her writing. if she was good, it wouldn't really matter a fuck where she went to school.


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 18, 2012)

I hear she's also got a line of T shirts coming out:


----------



## Belushi (Feb 18, 2012)

discokermit said:


> no, i mean haven't the oxbridge cunts, sons of the german bourgeoise, russian princes etc. always been in the leadership of the movement? laurie penny should be knocked for the shiteness of her politics and the awful standard of her writing. if she was good, it wouldn't really matter a fuck where she went to school.


 
I don't think you can separate the two, she certainly doesn't.


----------



## discokermit (Feb 18, 2012)

Belushi said:


> I don't think you can separate the two, she certainly doesn't.


it's no surprise to see the people trained to lead end up leading. the labour movement is a product of capitalism. tainted by it to the very core. we'll only get rid of the oxbridge cunts after we get rid of oxbridge and the economic system that supports it.


----------



## revol68 (Feb 18, 2012)

I wouldn't give a fuck about Laurie's background if she wasn't such a superficial prick of little writing ability, desperately trying to climb the social ladder on the back of working class struggle.

As it is I've more respect for Callinicos, he might be a posh old trot twat but I think it's obvious he's sincere and certainly less superficial than Laurie Penny.


----------



## revol68 (Feb 18, 2012)

also Laurie Penny is the kind of twat middle class, middle brow pseuds love (being one herself), a quick read of her, coupled with their deluded sense of intellectual superiority and that's them equipped to talk shit for the next year.

I don't think the same can be said for old Alex's books.


----------



## newbie (Feb 18, 2012)

revol68 said:


> I wouldn't give a fuck about Laurie's background if she wasn't such a superficial prick of little writing ability, desperately trying to climb the social ladder on the back of working class struggle.
> 
> As it is I've more respect for Callinicos, he might be a posh old trot twat but I think it's obvious he's sincere and certainly less superficial than Laurie Penny.


that does sound a bit as though you're attacking her simply for the crime of being young and applauding him because he's spent longer at it.

Youth is an excuse, at least in my mind, for pontificating without substance, for exploring ability, for being superficial. How would a vast chunk of the posts on urban be read without that excuse- especially those hectoring us about 'working class struggle' without a trace of depth or humility?

Face it, all she's doing is being a twenty-something who's caught the public eye. Would you deny a public voice to the twenty-somethings? Of course not, yet when one achieves prominence she makes for a very easy target.

fwiw, personally I've never read anything of hers except to skim a few of the links from this thread, a discussion which gives her a prominence she personally clearly doesn't deserve- except as a cipher for a wider malaise. But then I don't read posh old trots either and I think a lot of urban is very funny indeed


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 18, 2012)

Newbie- she can write. Occasionally. But the reams of made up bullshit and pose-striking bourgeois lib left cliches and banalities. They ache upon my eye


----------



## JHE (Feb 18, 2012)

newbie said:


> Face it, all she's doing is being a twenty-something who's caught the public eye. Would you deny a public voice to the twenty-somethings? Of course not, yet when one achieves prominence she makes for a very easy target.


 
She doesn't speak for 20-somethings, does she?  

The one thing I have against her is her extraordinary success at presenting herself as some sort of spokesperson for youth/protest/radicalism.  (I really don't understand how she achieved it.)


----------



## revol68 (Feb 18, 2012)

newbie said:


> that does sound a bit as though you're attacking her simply for the crime of being young and applauding him because he's spent longer at it.
> 
> Youth is an excuse, at least in my mind, for pontificating without substance, for exploring ability, for being superficial. How would a vast chunk of the posts on urban be read without that excuse- especially those hectoring us about 'the working class' without a trace of depth or humility?
> 
> ...


 
Yes but why is it her banal superficial voice that get's chosen to speak for twenty somethings? You don't think it's got to do with an oxbridge education and the social capital that goes with it?

There are thousands of more articulate and intelligent young people out there involved in and around anti cuts stuff and they don't get the mainstream media fan fare Laurie does.

How anyone can fail to see the shallow, grasping nature of Penny is beyond me, it drips from her every utterance, she's a charlatan and social climber, which itself could be a bit more forgivable if she had one iota of self awareness. It's the potent mixture of affected earnest, pen of the people posturing, intellectual inanity  and oxbridge privilege that makes her a particularly contemptible cunt.


----------



## revol68 (Feb 18, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> Newbie- she can write. Occasionally. But the reams of made up bullshit and pose-striking bourgeois lib left cliches and banalities. They ache upon my eye


 
Her writing is cliched, affected piss.



> I was born in London, and though my family moved away when I was small, I grew up longing for the city. Some of us do. The rabbit-bitten fields and sun-kissed cycle paths that my parents were so thrilled for their daughters to grow up with held no interest for me. I wanted the smell of diesel and the rain throwing up soot on the pavements. I wanted lights that never went out and streets to swagger down. I went to sleep in the owl-hooting dark, dreaming of the syphilitic rattle of urban pigeons.


 
Good for A Level English Lit but fuck all else, and especially jarring when it's as the voice of the young precarious working class.

It really does carry the rugged birthmarks of it's formation in the raging proletarian furnaces of a home counties private school...


----------



## newbie (Feb 18, 2012)

dc, don't read her, it really is that simple.


JHE said:


> She doesn't speak for 20-somethings, does she?
> 
> The one thing I have against her is her extraordinary success at presenting herself as some sort of spokesperson for youth/protest/radicalism. (I really don't understand how she achieved it.)


 
does she paint herself, or do threads like this paint her?  I really don't know.  But someone was bound to be in the right place at the right time to write insider articles about the student protests, about the sit-ins and the occupations and so on.  The newspapers needed a columnist to explain it to those of us who weren't part of it.  How that came to be her is faintly interesting, but also mundane.  It was always going to be someone pushy, someone with confidence and contacts, someone personable and presentable, someone who went to oxbridge.

Revol, of course it's to do with oxbridge and social capital, but that wasn't the point I was after.  There may be a lot (thousands?) of her contemporaries who write blogs and aspire to journalism  covering the protests with a better eye, a better style, more articulacy etc.  Those people haven't pushed themselves to such prominence (that may well be because they lack the social capital, I don't know, I don't read their writings) but if they had, they'd be torn to pieces in exactly the same way.  Whatever their background. Because they somehow seek, or are seen, to speak for a generation, a movement, a cohort.


----------



## articul8 (Feb 18, 2012)

Taaffe speaks at Oxford Union (did he wear black tie?  Does footage exist?):
http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/ar...ls-the-poor-accept-oxford-university-students

Madsen Pirie - the cunt's cunt.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Feb 18, 2012)

She's used the term 'my generation' on more than one occasion which can be interpreted as positioning to be the spokesperson or at least the go to person for young people etc.


----------



## newbie (Feb 19, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> She's used the term 'my generation' on more than one occasion which can be interpreted as positioning to be the spokesperson or at least the go to person for young people etc.


that makes an assumption that she's not simply naive- that she knows and understands how her words will be interpreted.  She young enough to have not really been able to observe the lifecycle of a youth culture, and certainly young enough to not really appreciate how she'll be seen by people older than her. 

That's an argument as to why her views are not worth too much consideration, she's too young to have anything rounded to say.  The absurdity of that is blatantly obvious.

Somebody has to write from her generation, or at least from the cohort involved in the protests where they've been so prominent. Just as someone had to write from the generations that produced hippies, punk or raves.  A misplaced word here or there blurs the line between writing from and writing for. 

I'm sure others also write from her cohort- revol claims thousands- yet they are not given the attention of a thread on urban.  That's partially because they're not columnists in mainstream publications- but how many here actually read her in the print version?  Mostly, surely, she's read on the screen where she's competing for eyeball time with her contemporaries.  As I said the dc, if you don't like what she writes don't read her, and more to the point, if there really is someone with a better view, though less social capital, then read them and publicise them.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 19, 2012)

Wtf point are you actually trying to make? Because the above doesn't actually seem to say anything at all - unless that last sentence banality is it? That you don't have to read her. Cheers for that if so.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Wtf point are you actually trying to make? Because the above doesn't actually seem to say anything at all - unless that last sentence banality is it? That you don't have to read her. Cheers for that if so.


 
He goes through her used knickers.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 26, 2012)

She's just left the New Statesman and got a full-time job with the Independent. That's all these people really want, isn't it?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 26, 2012)

S☼I said:


> She's just left the New Statesman and got a full-time job with the Independent. That's all these people really want, isn't it?


 
Link?


----------



## killer b (Mar 26, 2012)

sounds like her perfect home to me. it seems to be entirely composed of the opinion peices of fantasists & drunks the last few times i've picked it up.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 26, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Link?


 
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/gl5s5r

Can you see that?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 26, 2012)

Yep, cheers.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Mar 26, 2012)

The perfect replacement for Hari


----------



## articul8 (Mar 26, 2012)

and so the circle of life continues...


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 26, 2012)

The Independent is an interesting choice, I'd thought the Guardian would've snapped her up by now?


----------



## killer b (Mar 26, 2012)

the guardian got their fingers burned with that erotic dancing article she wrote/made up for them didn't they?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 26, 2012)

killer b said:


> the guardian got their fingers burned with that erotic dancing article she wrote/made up for them didn't they?


 
Yeah but that's a blip aint it? I mean it's not like she has a long history of provable fabrication when it comes to her articles is it.


----------



## killer b (Mar 26, 2012)

maybe not, but you can be sure it's not just us who've been reading her articles since with a raised eyebrow.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 26, 2012)

"Seriously though, thank you everyone for the congratulations. Onwards and upwards!"

That's it, in a nutshell.


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 26, 2012)

perfect home really, liberal hector goes to liberal, hectoring rag.


----------



## kavenism (Mar 26, 2012)

What with Julie Burchill leaving the paper last October they did have an opening. She's surpassed my expectations, I thought she would at least have to go through the ‘write for Guardian – find god – accuse Guardian of anti-Semitism – write for Murdoch press’ sequence before she reached the Inde.


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 26, 2012)

Little matchstick Owen has also just got a job as a columnist on the Independent.  2 Oxbridge voices speaking up for us.


----------



## love detective (Mar 26, 2012)

the commodificazion of the working class continues


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 26, 2012)

love detective said:


> the commodificazion of the working class continues


 
How? Penny's not WC.


----------



## barney_pig (Mar 26, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Yeah but that's a blip aint it? I mean it's not like she has a long history of provable fabrication when it comes to her articles is it.


Fit in well with fisk then.


----------



## killer b (Mar 26, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> How? Penny's not WC.


the stuff she and jones write about is though. riots & chavs, the voices of our generation.


----------



## love detective (Mar 26, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> How? Penny's not WC.


 
not of 'them', by 'them'

they are the ones commodifiying it


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Mar 26, 2012)

killer b said:


> the stuff she and jones write about is though. riots & chavs, the voices of our generation.


 
But if the WC aint buying it why does it matter?


----------



## killer b (Mar 26, 2012)

do you actually need it explaining?


----------



## rekil (Mar 26, 2012)

Laurie last week, tweeting bravely from New York, the frontline in the assault on the NHS.    


> We need a battle for the NHS, not a vigil. This is utter belly-showing cowardice. #nhsvigil
> 
> Don't light a candle, build a bonfire #NHSVigil #NHSdemo






			
				Jones said:
			
		

> Chuffed to be starting a weekly column and other stuff at the Independent. Will use it as a platform for the causes and people I believe in


His career and himself.


----------



## love detective (Mar 27, 2012)

lol

he's always chuffed about something

he was embarrassingly bad on the andrew neil show the other day - basic sloppiness in his facts/assertions left him wide open to be ridiculed by the smug neil and portillio


----------



## articul8 (Mar 27, 2012)

As Eagleton once wrote of David Beckham, "he runs the full gamut of emotions from chuffed to gutted"


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 27, 2012)

love detective said:


> lol
> 
> he's always chuffed about something
> 
> he was embarrassingly bad on the andrew neil show the other day - basic sloppiness in his facts/assertions left him wide open to be ridiculed by the smug neil and portillio


 
what was he saying?


----------



## love detective (Mar 27, 2012)

just in general getting his facts completely wrong and not understanding the things that he talks about, leaving himself open (and by extension the wider left since he's taken on the role of vanguard) to be ridculed by posh smug twats like portillio & neil


----------



## cantsin (Mar 27, 2012)

love detective said:


> just in general getting his facts completely wrong and not understanding the things that he talks about, leaving himself open (and by extension the wider left since he's taken on the role of vanguard) to be ridculed by posh smug twats like portillio & neil




that's painful to watch


----------



## Zabo (Mar 27, 2012)

What a bunch of losers! Campbell, Neill and Portillo.

Owen seems like a left over from the 1960's politburo. He parrots bits from whatever labour says in the House Of Fools.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the little shit should go and get a real job for ten years and then come back with some new ideas.

It's a pity he can't team up with Penny because they could fuck each other senseless. Alas it would be a very short session.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Mar 27, 2012)

love detective said:


> just in general getting his facts completely wrong and not understanding the things that he talks about, leaving himself open (and by extension the wider left since he's taken on the role of vanguard) to be ridculed by posh smug twats like portillio & neil




He needs to stop buying his shirts from Sainsbury's as well


----------



## DaveCinzano (Mar 27, 2012)

He should try something new today.


----------



## articul8 (Mar 27, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> He needs to stop buying his shirts from Sainsbury's as well


you seem to be an expert in these matters


----------



## killer b (Mar 27, 2012)

that owen jones clip is totally humiliating. jesus.


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 27, 2012)

To be fair I'd probably come across similarly if I was on newsnight or something.


----------



## killer b (Mar 27, 2012)

me too. hence i don't put myself forward for it (not that they'd have me).


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 27, 2012)

That reminds me that the "Chavs" book and the Beating the Fash book are on my "to read" pile ...


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Mar 27, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> To be fair I'd probably come across similarly if I was on newsnight or something.


 
And when you try and market yourself as the go to person for leftwing comment we'll take the piss out of you and your clothes as well.


----------



## killer b (Apr 4, 2012)

she claims to have been rescued from being run over by a taxi, by ryan gosling. after which he joined her in a rousing chorus of the internationalle, no doubt.

http://jezebel.com/5898902/your-eve...aves-a-womans-life-we-all-die-a-little-inside


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 4, 2012)

killer b said:


> she claims to have been rescued from being run over by a taxi, by ryan gosling. after which he joined her in a rousing chorus of the internationalle, no doubt.
> 
> http://jezebel.com/5898902/your-eve...aves-a-womans-life-we-all-die-a-little-inside


 
It's embarrassing, that. I mean Penny's "me me me meeee" nonsense. Followed by a tweet about "TIME FOR EVERYONE TO SHUT UP ABOUT RYAN GOSLING" (capitals hers). 

She gets picked on and defended by idiots on all sides, standing in the middle of it all, one eye weeping, the other glinting, one hand with middle finger raised and an establishment quill clutched in the other. I'm getting a bit fucking irritated with these fuckers.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 4, 2012)

What the fuck is wrong with this gosling bloke?


----------



## imposs1904 (Apr 4, 2012)

killer b said:


> she claims to have been rescued from being run over by a taxi, by ryan gosling. after which he joined her in a rousing chorus of the internationalle, no doubt.
> 
> http://jezebel.com/5898902/your-eve...aves-a-womans-life-we-all-die-a-little-inside


 
Ryan earlier today:


----------



## Jeff Robinson (Apr 4, 2012)

killer b said:


> me too. hence i don't put myself forward for it (not that they'd have me).


 
I turn them down all the time. Beneath me.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 4, 2012)

http://gawker.com/5899046/ryan-gosl...-war-in-the-middle-east-so-everyone-calm-down




			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> Look, I am kind of an idiot. I am constantly walking into things, losing my phone and keys, and wandering into traffic because I'm thinking about something else or have spotted something interesting in the sky, and that's when I'm not in a country where all the cars come in the wrong direction.






			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> I really do object to being framed as the ditzy damsel in distress in this story.


----------



## stereotypical (Apr 4, 2012)

S☼I said:


> It's embarrassing, that. I mean Penny's "me me me meeee" nonsense. Followed by a tweet about "TIME FOR EVERYONE TO SHUT UP ABOUT RYAN GOSLING" (capitals hers).
> 
> She gets picked on and defended by idiots on all sides, standing in the middle of it all, one eye weeping, the other glinting, one hand with middle finger raised and an establishment quill clutched in the other. I'm getting a bit fucking irritated with these fuckers.



This is quickly starting to become my opinion aswell.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 4, 2012)

S☼I said:


> It's embarrassing, that. I mean Penny's "me me me meeee" nonsense. Followed by a tweet about "TIME FOR EVERYONE TO SHUT UP ABOUT RYAN GOSLING" (capitals hers).
> 
> She gets picked on and defended by idiots on all sides, standing in the middle of it all, one eye weeping, the other glinting, one hand with middle finger raised and an establishment quill clutched in the other. I'm getting a bit fucking irritated with these fuckers.


Which fuckers?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 4, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Which fuckers?


 
The Voice of a Generation fuckers. Oxbridge journalists pushing themselves onto whichever media will have them to speak for the voiceless poor.


----------



## Jeff Robinson (Apr 4, 2012)

S☼I said:


> It's embarrassing, that. I mean Penny's "me me me meeee" nonsense. Followed by a tweet about "TIME FOR EVERYONE TO SHUT UP ABOUT RYAN GOSLING" (capitals hers).
> 
> She gets picked on and defended by idiots on all sides, standing in the middle of it all, one eye weeping, the other glinting, one hand with middle finger raised and an establishment quill clutched in the other. I'm getting a bit fucking irritated with these fuckers.


 
Nice rant, but complaining about reading self-centredness on twitter is kinda like moaning about being exposed to unpleasant smells upon entering a sewer.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 4, 2012)

Jeff Robinson said:


> Nice rant, but complaining about reading self-centredness on twitter is kinda like moaning about being exposed to unpleasant smells upon entering a sewer.


 
Aye, I know that. It's just that Penny and to a lesser extent Jones, although I agree with a fair bit of what they say, tend to exhibit the kind of traits those critical of "the left" make broad generalizations about. Especially Penny, screeching from one cause to another and having the depth of a July puddle.


----------



## flypanam (Apr 4, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> What the fuck is wrong with this gosling bloke?


 
Probably didn't recognise her. If he had, he'd probably left well alone. Just once I'd wish an actor would stay in character.


----------



## imposs1904 (Apr 4, 2012)

Ryan Gosling is currently trending a Number 1 on yahoo because 'he saved a journalist.'


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 4, 2012)

I think Owen Jones is sincere in his daft and naive beliefs, however Laurie Penny is a howling vacuum of compasion, politics, or sincerity imo.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 4, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I think Owen Jones is sincere in his daft and naive beliefs, however Laurie Penny is a howling vacuum of compasion, politics, or sincerity imo.


Damn right - Jones is a misguided one of us (for now). She ain't.


----------



## rekil (Apr 5, 2012)

> Americans are very strange. They can and do hyperventilate about the most everyday happenings as if they are the most important thing in the world, and then they act completely normal when public conversations are had about war on Iran and war on women's bodies and when Rick Santorum is considered a serious presidential candidate. The real heroes I've met in America are risking everything to make sure that the United States doesn't slide further into bigotry, inequality and violence whilst everyone is distracted by the everyday doings of celebrities.


Stupid normals.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 5, 2012)

_shopping and eating their tea_.Why can't they all just be jet-setting radical-chic superstars like me?


----------



## articul8 (Apr 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Damn right - Jones is a misguided one of us (for now).


Pleased to see his Labour membership card doesn't make him a class enemy to be liquidated (just yet).


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Pleased to see his Labour membership card doesn't make him a class enemy to be liquidated (just yet).


Well he doesn't bother pretending to be some hard-core revolutionary,the most radical of the radical, the blackest of the black...


----------



## rekil (Apr 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> _shopping and eating their tea_.Why can't they all just be jet-setting radical-chic superstars like me?


Wake up sheeple! (And read my indy piece about waiting for some imaginary bloke to eat a sandwich)


----------



## JimW (Apr 5, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> Ryan Gosling is currently trending a Number 1 on yahoo because 'he saved a journalist.'


He's done it again, this time with a journalist?


----------



## treelover (Apr 5, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> She's used the term 'my generation' on more than one occasion which can be interpreted as positioning to be the spokesperson or at least the go to person for young people etc.


 
In the mid 80's Pete Hooton was considered the 'person to go to' on youth issues, partly because of the seminal fanzine, The End, but 'Hooto' was actually from Melling, a posh part of Merseyside, plus la change...


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 5, 2012)

who is he? i've never heard of him.


----------



## treelover (Apr 5, 2012)

love detective said:


> lol
> 
> he's always chuffed about something
> 
> he was embarrassingly bad on the andrew neil show the other day - basic sloppiness in his facts/assertions left him wide open to be ridiculed by the smug neil and portillio


 
Yes, i quite like OJ's, my very shrewd friend who takes no political prisoners is raving about his book, but he was out of his depth on there, against Brillopad he really should have been more briefed, etc, or simply should know his stuff..


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 5, 2012)

treelover said:


> In the mid 80's Pete Hooton was considered the 'person to go to' on youth issues, partly because of the seminal fanzine, The End, but 'Hooto' was actually from Melling, a posh part of Merseyside, plus la change...


Sorry mate, that's an absolutely mental comparison


----------



## treelover (Apr 5, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> who is he? i've never heard of him.


 

sorry, forgot, lead 'singer' in The Farm..


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 5, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> who is he? i've never heard of him.


Lead singer from the Farm who were around for donkeys years then got famous for a few seconds in the early 90s.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Lead singer from the Farm who were around for donkeys years then got famous for a few seconds in the early 90s.


 
Oh, OK


----------



## treelover (Apr 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Sorry mate, that's an absolutely mental comparison


 
to a degree, but this was a direct quote from director of youth programming at Ch4...


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 5, 2012)

Brilliant band

"altogether now..."


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Apr 5, 2012)

Our Penny has now stated she is "leaving Twitter until all this bloody fuss dies down."

Hurrah!

BUt then she tweets again 30 mins later


----------



## rekil (Apr 5, 2012)

Suggestions here that La Pennionara is (prepare to be shocked comrades) making shit up.

Did Ryan Gosling really save Laurie Penny’s life? We’re not so sure.



> Given that Ryan Gosling has not actually come out to confirm your life-changing event (he has merely confirmed that he’s in New York), we’re about ready to call this a hoax.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 5, 2012)

I can see a reverse solanis on the horizon.


----------



## kavenism (Apr 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> Suggestions here that La Pennionara is (prepare to be shocked comrades) making shit up.
> 
> Did Ryan Gosling really save Laurie Penny’s life? We’re not so sure.


 
Do you think there could be a LP sex tape about to break the water?


----------



## treelover (Apr 5, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Brilliant band
> 
> "altogether now..."




'They became The Farm after Martin Dunbar (vocals) left and Peter Hooton joined. '

notice they don't mention Hooto was the lead vocalist, right cos he couldn't sing!


----------



## JimW (Apr 5, 2012)

She's got so used to faking speaking for the young and the oppressed she reckons she can get away with it for A-list celebs. Is that a petard being loaded I hear?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 5, 2012)

treelover said:


> 'They became The Farm after Martin Dunbar (vocals) left and Peter Hooton joined. '
> 
> notice they don't mention Hooto was the lead vocalist, right cos he couldn't sing!


 
Did he take a shit in your cornflakes or something? He seems to rather vex you.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 5, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Did he take a shit in your cornflakes or something? He seems to rather vex you.


 
Presumably wouldn't let her on his groovy train.


----------



## killer b (Apr 5, 2012)

i doubt gosling will deny it if it didn't happen. it would gain him nothing, and it's hardly the kind of allegation you'd ask your lawyers to send a strongly worded letter about.


----------



## lazyhack (Apr 6, 2012)

Footage has emerged of the incident, to stop all you doubters


----------



## rekil (Apr 6, 2012)

I think I might tart up and pad out post #854 then send it into them places what print that sort of thing. 1p per word more than whatever Laurie's on please.


----------



## treelover (Apr 6, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Did he take a shit in your cornflakes or something? He seems to rather vex you.


 
Bizarro, the amount of insults, personal feuds, viscious smears on here, i make a light hearted barb about Pete's singing ability, thats all, he and the Farm have done some great things for good causes, and I get the above...


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 6, 2012)

treelover said:


> Bizarro, the amount of insults, personal feuds, viscious smears on here, i make a light hearted barb about Pete's singing ability, thats all, he and the Farm have done some great things for good causes, and I get the above...


 
You slag of Hooto you get the booto you get me blud?


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 6, 2012)

JimW said:


> She's got so used to faking speaking for the young and the oppressed she reckons she can get away with it for A-list celebs. Is that a petard being loaded I hear?


 
Chances are she was looking to bump up her internet exposure, saw that Ryan Gosling is a very popular name on search engines at the moment and opted to take him saying 'Oh, there's a car coming towards you' and blow it up from something totally insignificant into something much bigger than it actually was. Standard practice from self-promoting hacks who need to up their exposure when they're living somewhere in which barely anybody knows who they are.

Of course, she could just be mistaken as to who the chap was, or maybe she's simply making the whole thing up for some extra publicity and column inches. If she has some tat to sell, like a book or some unsold articles or something like that then I wouldn't be surprised. That said, if she is bullshitting then it won't be long before she gets more exposure than she would have either expected or wanted, and none of it is likely to be doing her nascent attempts to crack the American market any favours.

Give it a few days and either the whole affair is likely to be forgotten or it'll have evolved into a shitstorm that will prove particularly damaging to her career and entirely ruinous to what little credibility she's ever had.


----------



## MAD-T-REX (Apr 8, 2012)

Penny's Gawker article is a great example of the problem with social media: it encourages people to think that every thought that enters their head is not only worth sharing with the world but that people actually want to hear it.

'As I was crossing the street, while I was thinking about a pressing social issue...' If someone dropped that into a face-to-face conversation, you'd think they were a pillock. Penny actually wrote it, read it over and published it.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 8, 2012)

That's not "the problem with social media". That's _one_ of the problems with Penny Dreadful.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 8, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> That's not "the problem with social media". That's _one_ of the problems with Penny Dreadful.


 
One of her many problems, IMHO.

1. She doesn't seem to possess much in the way of self-awareness. As noted above, she has a remarkable tendency to think that the entire world is hanging on her every thought, word and deed and endlessly Twitters away and writes tiresome, pretentious, tedious hackwork. Not only does she think everybody hangs on her every thought, word and deed, though, as she comes across with an air of 'If you aren't doing that then frankly you should be.'

2. 'Me, me, me, me, me. Everything I look at, think about or write about is ALWAYS somehow about me.' Even for a wannabe celeb/columnist/writer/hack/insert nakedly ambitious job title here type like Penny Dreadful, her attitude that EVERYTHING that she writes or tweets about invariably involves her, what she thinks, what she wants and so on is, to put it mildly, grating in the extreme.

3. She's not much of a writer even on her better days, which seem few and far between if I'm entirely honest. I've read work on a variety of subjects that didn't get even a minute fraction of the exposure that hers does, and it's work that has been better-written, not self-promoting or self-aggrandising, contains a minimum of hyperbole, rabble-rousing and deliberately contentious remarks purposely included to create false controversy and get her a little more exposure. 

4. She's a hypocrite in that she'll happily write in a deliberately contrary, provocative manner to gain attention and then complain endlessly that people react strongly and in ways she doesn't like. Well, if you pick a fight then don't whine when you get one. If she doesn't want to get shot at then why does she insist on sticking her head out of the trench as though she's engaging in some game of journalistic Whack-A-Mole, and then whimper because she's provoked the very attention she's so obviously looking for. 

5. She does have a tendency to instantly write off criticism of her or her writing as almost invariably being motivated by sexism/mysogyny/jealousy/insert random accusation of bigotry and intolerance here. I'm as happy as anybody to condemn the naked abuse that she gets (vile and offensive that it undoubtedly is), but it seems as though any sort of criticism is unwelcome enough that she'll instantly start making accusations when she deigns to answer her critics at all.

6. Dishonesty. I wouldn't put her in the same league as Johann Hari for outright bullshit (I hear his next full-time job is as supervisor at the Ministry of Truth, after all), but she's certainly not averse to gilding the lily a fair bit when it suits her and she has been caught out from time to time indulging in the odd flight of fancy passed off as journalistic reportage (the burlesque business and the porn awards fiasco spring to mind). I don't like habitual liars at the best of times, and I have no tolerance at all for habitual liars who try and pass themselves off as actual journalists.

Basically, I don't regard her with any favour at all and the more I've seen of her and her work the less favour I have.


----------



## rekil (Apr 9, 2012)

@mollycrabapple said:
			
		

> Smoking hookah, drinking Fortnam and Mason tea, and @PennyRed is playing me something gorgeous from @gracepetrie


Attention normals, that's how anarchists (nulab/libdem/nulabagain tendency) roll.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 9, 2012)

at least spell it right


----------



## rekil (Apr 9, 2012)

Crap article in the indy on the unaswimmer. Fuckinglol at this bit.


> Pointing and laughing at power has traditionally been one of the few sports at which Britain excels, but lately the practice has become less acceptable. [...] In 1977, the Sex Pistols played from a riverboat to poke fun at the Queen's Silver Jubilee, but if anyone attempts anything similar this year, they can expect deference to be enforced by large men with sticks.


Best comment.


> so a public school oxbridge columnist writes about a public school LSE educated "protestor" disrupting a public school oxbridge event. When do the rest of us get a say?


----------



## JimW (Apr 9, 2012)

copliker said:


> unaswimmer


----------



## imposs1904 (Apr 9, 2012)

copliker said:


> Crap article in the indy on the unaswimmer. Fuckinglol at this bit.





> Pointing and laughing at power has traditionally been one of the few sports at which Britain excels, but lately the practice has become less acceptable. [...] *In 1977, the Sex Pistols played from a riverboat to poke fun at the Queen's Silver Jubilee, but if anyone attempts anything similar this year, they can expect deference to be enforced by large men with sticks.*




Wasn't the police heavy handed back in '77, arresting McLaren and others? I think the author of the piece in the Indy is donning their rose tinted spectacles about past 'protests'.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 9, 2012)

Is it me, or is she increasingly becoming a parody of herself? I can't help thinking her career trajectory is almost like the journalistic equivalent of Spinal Tap (without anything resembling a sense of humour, obviously, she's far too 'right on' for that). She's fast becoming the sort of media type that the good folk at Viz would have made up.

She seems to be evolving into a thoroughly ghastly character, a supposedly permanently 'right on' and impassioned 'voice of the young and dispossessed' type while also possessing the steely will to conquer of your typical narcissist. sort of a genetic mutation combining the worst elements of Roger Mellie and Millie Tant.

Only not anywhere near as funny as either of them.


----------



## rekil (Apr 9, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> Wasn't the police heavy handed back in '77, arresting McLaren and others? I think the author of the piece in the Indy is donning their rose tinted spectacles about past 'protests'.


More a case of Laurie knowing nothing about the period and being too unarsed to do any research. 


JimW said:


>


Nicked it off brian whelan.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 9, 2012)

copliker said:


> More a case of Laurie knowing nothing about the period and being too unarsed to do any research.


 
Fair's fair, my esteemed fellow poster. If she did any actual, proper research then she might actually be confronted with objective facts, possibly even real ones that don't suit her 'arguments' about any issue under the sun as long as she gets a bit more exposure out of it.

Besides, remember that she's the sole and only 'voice of the movement' and, being such a leading light in 'the movement' she's certainly aware that objective facts are bourgeois and merely serve to stand in the way of The Resistible Rise Of Penny Dreadful.

That and she'd suddenly have to morph into a half-decent writer (becoming a decent one is, for her, impossible judging by her apparent writing ability, IMHO) and that's not much more realistic than some of absolutely real stuff that happens to her as she goes about her daily life and then feels perpetually obliged to inflict, sorry I'll read that again, share with the rest of the planet on a tiresomely regular basis.


----------



## poului (Apr 10, 2012)

I really, _really_ hope she's somehow seen this thread.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 10, 2012)

poului said:


> I really, _really_ hope she's somehow seen this thread.


 
Well, I wouldn't even begin to think about speculating on her likely reaction if anyone were to stick a link on her Twitter page.

That would be most improper.


----------



## poului (Apr 10, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Well, I wouldn't even begin to think about speculating on her likely reaction if anyone were to stick a link on her Twitter page.
> 
> That would be most improper.


 
No, she has to chance upon it. Then it seems far less like any sort of personal vendetta she could spin in her head.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 10, 2012)

poului said:


> No, she has to chance upon it. Then it seems far less like any sort of personal vendetta she could spin in her head.


 






'INFAMY! INFAMY! They've all got it in for me!'


----------



## rekil (Apr 10, 2012)

Someone should release some starving badgers into the crowd at her next book launch.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 10, 2012)

poului said:


> No, she has to chance upon it. Then it seems far less like any sort of personal vendetta she could spin in her head.


 
The Passion Of Penny Dreadful:


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Apr 10, 2012)

Who?


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Apr 10, 2012)

Or is 44 pages into the thread too late to ask that?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 10, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> That and she'd suddenly have to morph into a half-decent writer (becoming a decent one is, for her, impossible judging by her apparent writing ability, IMHO) .


 
Dunno with a bit of practice and a good editor I think she could be a decent fiction writer.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Apr 10, 2012)

copliker said:


> Best comment.
> 
> 
> 
> > so a public school oxbridge columnist writes about a public school LSE educated "protestor" disrupting a public school oxbridge event. When do the rest of us get a say?


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 10, 2012)

copliker said:


> Attention normals, that's how anarchists (nulab/libdem/nulabagain tendency) roll.


 
A normal, yesterday:


----------



## rekil (Apr 10, 2012)

LP said:
			
		

> {ETA January 2011: I didn't join the Labour Party. I couldn't bring myself to. I'll never be a member, not till they change their welfare policy.}


It's 'old' but still funny.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 10, 2012)

I wonder was she a member when she was an unpaid labour party intern?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 10, 2012)

Is she a LP member now? Is it really true that to "get on" in that world you basically have to be a member of Labour? wtf


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 10, 2012)

copliker said:


> It's 'old' but still funny.


And from a year before - note the repeated 'we' and our:



> Labour's new cohort knows what it's like to lose. We are, after all, the lost generation. We don't expect our dreams and ideals to be realised without a fight, and we don't expect much help from the grown-ups. There is a profound sense at this party conference that the elder generation of Labour statespeople has failed us, and that the time for deference is finally done. "Young Labour is buzzing with ideas, enthusiasm and anticipation of what can be achieved following this conference," said Tarry. With the politicians who saddled us with debt, tanked the economy and took us into Iraq shuffling off into the twilight, one thing's certain: it's our turn now.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 10, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Is she a LP member now? Is it really true that to "get on" in that world you basically have to be a member of Labour? wtf


After saying she was joining to work for Diane Abbot's Leadership campaign and urging 'the youth' to so the same, she then said she hadn't, despite saying a few months later that she 'no longer' was in labour. Lie after lie.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 10, 2012)

what?? why can't people just be honest 

she's only a year or two older than me!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 10, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Is she a LP member now? Is it really true that to "get on" in that world you basically have to be a member of Labour? wtf


 
You don't have to be but it helps ask articul8


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 10, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> what?? why can't people just be honest
> 
> she's only a year or two older than me!


 
Being a Labour party member is a bit like looking at Japanese schoolgirl porn, it's a dirty little sectret you don't admit in polite company.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 10, 2012)

no i mean saying you're in labour but actually not being. One of my best mates is Labour party member but she doesn't go around saying she isn't


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 10, 2012)

I'm reading Philip Roth's "American Pastoral" at the moment. Last night came across a character that for some reason seemed awfully familiar:




			
				Philip Roth said:
			
		

> This loathsome kid with a head full of fantasies about the "working class"!
> ...
> What was the whole sick enterprise other than angry, infantile egoism thinly disguised as identification with the oppressed? Her weighty responsibility to the workers of the world! Egoistic pathology bristled out of her like the hair that nuttily proclaimed, "I go wherever I want, as far as I want - all that matters is what I want!"
> ...
> ...


----------



## rekil (Apr 10, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I wonder was she a member when she was an unpaid labour party intern?





> I will be joining the Labour Party again in order to vote for Abbott, and I will probably be volunteering for her campaign. You should too. Diane for King.


You posted this blog quote earlier and it was also quoted by the socialist unity site in may 2010. The 'again' now appears to have gone awol and she stuck in the never joining labour (until) nonsense. What will her anarchist mates say if they find out.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 10, 2012)

Shameless, absolutely shameless.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 10, 2012)

She's 24 or something now isn't she? In 2009 she would have been 21, wtf.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 10, 2012)

"Young ambitious person makes decision they will later come to regret shocker"


----------



## JimW (Apr 10, 2012)

I avoided that shame by having no ambition. She should try it!


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 10, 2012)

...and by not being a lying bastard. She should try that too.


----------



## JimW (Apr 10, 2012)

You're asking a bit much now. Leopard, spots etc.


----------



## rekil (Apr 10, 2012)

Rowers take note, Laurie's hipster mate is having a do at Groucho's on April 26th. If you fancy getting back at the 'anarchists', why not get down there and fucking wreck it. Release a badger for me. As Laurie herself said.


> Deeds, not words. Fewer business lunches, more throwing punches.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 10, 2012)

Does she think my mum has ever been to a business lunch in her life? Is that what she really thinks women who aren't her are doing? Getting on with high-flying careers that involve business lunches and blackberry's?


----------



## rekil (Apr 10, 2012)

Maybe she has the worst rhyming dictionary in the world.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Apr 10, 2012)

copliker said:


> why not get down there and fucking wreck it.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 10, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Does she think my mum has ever been to a business lunch in her life? Is that she really thinks women who aren't her are doing? Getting on with high-flying careers that involve business lunches and blackberry's?


 
yes. what, you mean they're not?


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 10, 2012)

It was noted on the thread about A4E and Emma Harrison's imbecilic threats to sue everyone that cat and bag have already long since parted company.

For Penny Dreadful it appears that arse and elbow enjoy a similar lack of rapport...


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 10, 2012)

copliker said:


> Rowers take note, Laurie's hipster mate is having a do at Groucho's on April 26th. If you fancy getting back at the 'anarchists', why not get down there and fucking wreck it. Release a badger for me. As Laurie herself said.


 

propaganda of the deed


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 10, 2012)

P





copliker said:


> Release a badger for me.


 
Please can it be a honey badger? After all, for sheer badness, look what this one's doing to a fucking cobra, of all creatures:


----------



## gawkrodger (Apr 10, 2012)

completely off topic but my mate has a fight company called honey-badger. All the iconography has, well honeybadgers


----------



## MAD-T-REX (Apr 11, 2012)

copliker said:


> As Laurie herself said.


I can imagine her punching that out on the keyboard and then swanning off to have a latte with some arsehole in a hip cafe (maybe in Brixton Village; I hear it's the place to be!). Ugggghhhhh.


----------



## rekil (Apr 11, 2012)

Damarr said:


> I can imagine her punching that out on the keyboard and then swanning off to have a latte with some arsehole in a hip cafe (maybe in Brixton Village; I hear it's the place to be!). Ugggghhhhh.


Nearly right. Except it's macchiatos with some arsehole in New York darling. Most likely imaginary ones with imaginary arsehole in imaginary cafe, but still.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 11, 2012)

> I, too, have heard Metropolitan Police officers complain about overtime while they cuffed protesters for the crime of taking a stand against enforced austerity​​


No you haven't.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 11, 2012)

> Not all cuts are equal. I, for example, have no desire to expend substantial effort fighting cuts to Britain's nuclear defence budgets, despite the fact that it is a major employer. Of course, police cuts are making room for the booming private security industry. Given the choice, I would rather be beaten in the street by a publicly owned police force than by members of the mercenary firms drafted in to take over Lincolnshire police and the Olympic security detail – but has it really come to that?


​ 
Wait ... what?


----------



## revol68 (Apr 11, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No you haven't.


 
First I've heard of cops complaining about overtime, on the contrary many used to joke that Drumcree and the kick off around the twelfth paid for their summer holidays.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 11, 2012)

copliker said:


> Nearly right. Except it's macchiatos with some arsehole in New York darling. Most likely imaginary ones with imaginary arsehole in imaginary cafe, but still.


 
Ahem, I somehow find it highly dubious to assume that Penny Dreadful doesn't spend much time hanging out with arseholes.

Like does tend to attract like, after all.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 11, 2012)

let's scam her


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 11, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> let's scam her


 


Paging Mr Topcat!


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 11, 2012)

Damarr said:


> I can imagine her punching that out on the keyboard and then swanning off to have a latte with some arsehole in a hip cafe (maybe in Brixton Village; I hear it's the place to be!). Ugggghhhhh.


 
Well, if Penny Dreadful really, truly is the 'voice of the movement then it's only appropriate that a movement composed of her and her fellow hipsters should have its own anthem:


----------



## gawkrodger (Apr 11, 2012)

off topic again - what's happened to Topcat?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 11, 2012)

i saw him post a few days ago ..


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 12, 2012)

And, for those who may need a refresher course in exactly why Penny Dreadful is exactly that, here's this little gem from last year:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/laurie-pennys-diary-6390227.html


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 12, 2012)

*These days, I live in two cities*. In one of them, I'm a precariously employed young person. I associate with activists and jobless workers in squats and cramped, overpriced flats rammed with empty cereal packets and internet cables. People eat food out of skips and wear out their trainers running away from the police. In the other, I'm a media luvvie and mingle with people who take taxis to events that have name tags to make it clear something important is under way. TV and radio programmes are made, editorial meetings are held, and networking takes place in large glass buildings. More than any other city, London is a chimera, a human monster stitched together from overlapping lives. Sometimes there is irritation at the seams.​


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 12, 2012)

precariously employed as a fucking new statesman columnist?

truly, laurie is one of the precariat


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Apr 12, 2012)

lol.  

She should meet some of my friends who have never been to an ex-poly let alone Oxbridge.  Precarious my fundament.

Middle class faker trying to have it 'both' ways.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 12, 2012)

Fear not, my fellow posters. Help is at hand...







*Pops down to the local market, sets up stool and puts an open suitcase on top of it*

'Roll up, roll up, get 'em while I've still got any left! There's a run on these things every time Penny Dreadful publishes anything whatsoever, so grab 'em while you can! Sick bags! Get your sick bags here! If she punts out another book of her work and starts a full-on tour of personal appearances there'll be a global shortage, so don't say I didn't warn you! Sick bags! Get your sick bags here!'

'They're a fiver a bag and if you have to read anything she writes then ordering a gross would still be a bargain!'

'Sick bags! Get your sick bags here!'


----------



## rekil (Apr 12, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Well, if Penny Dreadful really, truly is the 'voice of the movement then it's only appropriate that a movement composed of her and her fellow hipsters should have its own anthem:




I'm for communism
I'm for socialism
And for capitalism
Because I'm an opportunist

(chorus)
There are some who object
Who revendicate and who protest
As for me, I do but one gesture
I turn coat
I turn coat
Always to the right side

I'm not afraid of vultures
Or agitators even
I trust voters
And I take the opportunity to make some dough

(chorus)

I'm with all the parties
I'm with all the homelands
I'm with all the cliques
I'm the king of the converts

(chorus)

I shout, "long live the revolution"
I shout, "long live the institutions"
I shout, "long live the demonstrations"
I shout, "long live the Collaboration"

No, never do I object
Nor revendicate or protest
I can do but one gesture
That is, turn coat
Turning coat
Always to the right side

I turned coat so often
That the coat's splitting on all sides
At the next revolution
I'm turning my trousers



frogwoman said:


> People eat food out of skips *and wear out their trainers running away from the police.*


Just like in the cartoons.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Apr 12, 2012)




----------



## rekil (Apr 13, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> And, for those who may need a refresher course in exactly why Penny Dreadful is exactly that, here's this little gem from last year:
> 
> http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/laurie-pennys-diary-6390227.html





> We listen to a genteel debate, sitting down a little stiffly because our legs are covered in baton bruises from the scuffles in Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly.


Lies.

http://bitchmagazine.org/article/protest-desire-and-cheap-dildos


> When I was in New York recently, reporting on Occupy Wall Street, I found it very interesting to watch the protesters begin to realize that perhaps, just perhaps, the police are not there to protect them, but to protect the elite and their assets from anyone who threatens them. That was always was [what] police forces were for, right from the start, when Robert Peel set up the Metropolitan police. *Of course, it doesn't come as such a shock to protesters who aren't white and middle class.*


'Babylon dem mash up me plan.' 


> On the 9th of December 2010, in the huge police kettle in Parliament Square, I was in the front of the protest when the horse charge came through. It was unbelievably dangerous: The police were driving the horses through a crush of unarmed kids who had absolutely nowhere to go. Everyone at the front fell down on top of each other, underneath a toppling metal barrier, and I really did think for a few minutes that I might die, or be seriously injured. That was scary.


If only some boffin would invent a device for capturing images which bleeding edge riot correspondents could use to prove they're not retroactively inserting themselves into dramatic events.


----------



## MAD-T-REX (Apr 13, 2012)

I'm pretty sure you can't drive a horse unless you're on a carriage or herding riderless horses. Fun mental image either way.


----------



## treelover (Apr 13, 2012)

i think the guy on the right in the first few seconds with the tash is a local face here...


----------



## treelover (Apr 13, 2012)

Did anyone go?

btw, be interested in knowing the background of these 'hipsters' those clothes(most of them) don't come cheap, not the leggings, etc, earlier youth cults were more diverse, mods, punks, even new romantics were largely surburban middle class


----------



## treelover (Apr 13, 2012)

poului said:


> I really, _really_ hope she's somehow seen this thread.


 

Apparently she is very aware of these boards...


----------



## Threshers_Flail (Apr 13, 2012)

treelover said:


> Apparently she is very aware of these boards...


 
Who says?


----------



## treelover (Apr 13, 2012)

copliker said:


> I'm for communism
> I'm for socialism
> And for capitalism
> Because I'm an opportunist
> ...




Thats great, reminds me of Phil Ochs 'love me I'm a liberal'

could have been written for someone like Joscha Fischer


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 13, 2012)

Threshers_Flail said:


> Who says?



The enigmatic ellipsis - it's the international symbol for "I have been blessed with inside knowledge of a non-specific variety, details of which I should dearly love to share with you save for the confidential circumstances under which I was made aware of this gnostic bounty".


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 13, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> The enigmatic ellipsis - it's the international symbol for "I have been blessed with inside knowledge of a non-specific variety, details of which I should dearly love to share with you save for the confidential circumstances under which I was made aware of this gnostic bounty".


 
according to a close friend of the writer


----------



## JimW (Apr 13, 2012)

Sign up and join in Laurie. Only through criticism and self-criticism are the true warriors of the class tempered!


----------



## killer b (Apr 13, 2012)

it's very unlikely that she hasn't come across this thread at some point. she'll likely see it as some kind of validation though...


----------



## rekil (Apr 13, 2012)

June 2010.


> Now more than ever, the young people of Britain need to believe ourselves more than acolytes to the staid, boring liberalism of previous generations. We need to begin to formulate an agenda of our own.
> 
> [...]
> 
> ...


Now. Surely liberalism doesn't get more boring than this. 


> Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit public discussion
> 
> Date: Wednesday 2 May 2012
> Time: 6.30-8pm
> ...


----------



## JimW (Apr 13, 2012)

"has tweeted regularly"
Remember standing in solemn tribute at the Memorial to the Tweeters of Belchite.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 13, 2012)

killer b said:


> it's very unlikely that she hasn't come across this thread at some point. she'll likely see it as some kind of validation though...


 
Urbanites' General Consensus:

'We think you're generally lacking in talent, honesty or integrity and are more than willing to point out the fact. We're also thoroughly pissed off with your self-appointed 'voice of the movement' bullshit, your outright lies, your inability to check facts properly, your ability to ignore solid facts unless they suit your agenda, your tireless (and tiresome) self-promoting and self-aggrandising attitude, your hypocrisy in being deliberately confrontational and then complaining because people confront you and your ever-increasing tendency to take even the most valid and constructive critics and instantly accuse them of miscogyny/sexism/bigotry/insert baseless insult here.'

Penny Dreadful's Interpretation Thereof:

'46 whole pages and they're all about me, me, me, me, meeeeeeeeee! It simply must be because I'm obviously the One True Voice Of The Movement and, obviously, speaking for a whole generation as well. Remind me to make a list of anyone voicing even the most reasonable criticism so that they can be subject to baseless accusations of nastiness and posssibly for a full-on hatchet job in whichever paper is daft enough to employ me (especially next time I'm caught either not having checked my facts or am outed for blatantly lying again).'


----------



## poului (Apr 13, 2012)

thread's on page 8 if you simply google her name...

'sup, Penny!


----------



## MAD-T-REX (Apr 13, 2012)

Page 1 if you search 'laurie penny is an idiot'


----------



## killer b (Apr 13, 2012)

i don't think that's a search term laurie could ever bring herself to type.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 13, 2012)

killer b said:


> i don't think that's a search term laurie could ever bring herself to type.


 
Fair's fair, you're expecting our fearless heroine, latter-day La Passionara that she undoubtedly is, not only to actually experience self-awareness and humility, but also to have the courage of those convictions. For example:

Un-named working class revolutionary: 'The revolution has started! All into action to defend our hopes and dreams of a new society! We need every able-bodied fighter to protect the Revolution!'

Penny Dreadful: Yes! Everybody (else) to the barricades for, as your self-appointed spokesperson and the One True Voice Of A Generation, I am determined to continue my inexorable rise to global stardom by fighting to the last fighter, last bullet and the last drop of (everyone else's) blood!

'Onward, To Glory!'


----------



## killer b (Apr 13, 2012)

ok, i think we've got it now.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 14, 2012)

I quite like her and her stunned calf style.


----------



## barney_pig (Apr 15, 2012)

Is the esteemed right honorable professor still alive? And has any actually pinned down his exact relationship with his non son and his education?


----------



## Pickman's model (Apr 15, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> Is the esteemed right honorable professor still alive? And has any actually pinned down his exact relationship with his non son and his education?


you're a man 'of a certain age' so you might appreciate this


----------



## barney_pig (Apr 15, 2012)

Pickman's model said:


> you're a man 'of a certain age' so you might appreciate this



That reminds me of a teenage crush.


----------



## rekil (Apr 15, 2012)

Twitter knows.


----------



## MAD-T-REX (Apr 15, 2012)

That list is incomplete without Sunny Hundal.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Apr 16, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> *These days, I live in two cities*. In one of them, I'm a precariously employed young person. I associate with activists and jobless workers in squats and cramped, overpriced flats rammed with empty cereal packets and internet cables. People eat food out of skips and wear out their trainers running away from the police. In the other, I'm a media luvvie and mingle with people who take taxis to events that have name tags to make it clear something important is under way. TV and radio programmes are made, editorial meetings are held, and networking takes place in large glass buildings. More than any other city, London is a chimera, a human monster stitched together from overlapping lives. Sometimes there is irritation at the seams.​


 

I didn't know who Laurie Penny was & I wondered why posters on here were being so mean to her but that is an absolutely awful piece of writing _ I'm cringing on her behalf. And why are their flats rammed with empty cereal boxes? Don't they take the rubbish out? - If you can't find owt else to do, you can always clean up.


----------



## Belushi (Apr 16, 2012)

I like the way she distinguishes between activists and workers.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 16, 2012)

Damarr said:


> That list is incomplete without Sunny Hundal.


 
When I first encountered Ms Penny it was in the company of Mr Hundal.  I associate them as part of the same crowd.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2012)

They are( and so are you) - he took her on his shit lib-dem-in-disguise blog, this was after her two unpaid labour party internships of course. He wrote a hilarious whiny defence of her around the time this thread started, it was pretty clear that he was simply 'doing business' rather than agreeing with her political tripe.


----------



## andy2002 (Apr 16, 2012)

If anyone's interested, Penny has written a guest blog over at Warren Ellis's site...

*A little over a year ago, before Occupy Wall Street began but well after the first wave of student riots had made political resistance more than a storybook fantasy in Britain, I found myself at a gathering of activists and anarchists. The occasion was the opening of a free university in an empty pub in central London, and journalists were strictly forbidden in the space. I had been let in on the condition that I hand in all my recording equipment before I was allowed to drink, which is a cruel thing to do to anyone who writes for a living.*

*Nonetheless, just after midnight, a man with dreadlocks who I had never met before in my life started jabbing a less than entirely sober finger in my face, calling me scum, asking how I dared to speak on behalf of others, and attempting to assault me gently with a rusty bicycle. I was moved by the idiosyncracy of this attack, but far more perturbed by the fact that five or six comrades, people I had stood beside as police horses charged into lines of protesters in Parliament square, people I would have trusted if not with my life, then at least with my dignity – they turned away, and they pretended not to see.*

*I was bewildered, and heartbroken. More than any other print journalist working in the mainstream media in Britain at that point, I understood what these people were trying to do. I was the same age, I had read the same books, I went to the same meetings, I declined to name names when to do so might have endangered activists, I stepped outside my job description to report faithfully on protests and incidents of police violence that the rest of the press ignored. None of this, by the way required any special cookies for effort - but I thought it might at least be enough to prevent me getting thrown out of a party by drunk hippies.*

It goes on (and on and on) here: www.warrenellis.com/?p=13926


----------



## belboid (Apr 16, 2012)

andy2002 said:


> I stepped outside my job description to report faithfully on protests and incidents of police violence that the rest of the press ignored.


This makes me intrigued to see her job description.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 16, 2012)

andy2002 said:


> * assault me gently with a rusty bicycle.*


----------



## killer b (Apr 16, 2012)

articul8 said:


>


Whack my bonobo.


----------



## rekil (Apr 16, 2012)

> Why is it that in London, in New York, in California, in Egypt and across the world, it is young journalists who have come to be identified, in the absence of named leaders, as figureheads in these new movements? Why not orators, organisers, artists, musicians, singer-songwriters? Why journalists?
> 
> Because people are sick of being lied to.


Identified by whom?


----------



## imposs1904 (Apr 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> Identified by whom?


 
she really is boosting herself, isn't she? I usually admire chutzpah but this is a bit too much for my taste.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 16, 2012)

articul8 said:


> When I first encountered Ms Penny it was in the company of Mr Hundal.  I associate them as part of the same crowd.



Really?


----------



## articul8 (Apr 16, 2012)

is this sarcasm?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 16, 2012)

articul8 said:


> is this sarcasm?


 
Nope. How do you know them both?


----------



## articul8 (Apr 16, 2012)

I don't really know Laurie at all - I know Sunny a little from the odd event


----------



## killer b (Apr 16, 2012)

did they serve canapes?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 16, 2012)

andy2002 said:


> If anyone's interested, Penny has written a guest blog over at Warren Ellis's site...


 
That article really is the most projectile-puke-inducingly-self-aggrandizing doggerel. "I will continue like I've always done....fearlessly telling the truth". Except for, as this thread shows, all those times she's fearlessly lied.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 16, 2012)

andy2002 said:


> If anyone's interested, Penny has written a guest blog over at Warren Ellis's site...
> 
> It goes on (and on and on) here: www.warrenellis.com/?p=13926


 
Cheers. I was actually eating my evening meal when I had the stupidity to click on that.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 16, 2012)

killer b said:


> did they serve canapes?


 
he's the kind of character who "works the room" and is always on the look out for someone really important to schmooze


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 16, 2012)

killer b said:


> did they serve canapes?


Fuck the canapes, was there free wine?


----------



## killer b (Apr 16, 2012)

you think anyone would go if there wasn't?


----------



## belboid (Apr 16, 2012)

the sad thing is, yes they would


----------



## rekil (Apr 16, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> And why are their flats rammed with empty cereal boxes? Don't they take the rubbish out? - If you can't find owt else to do, you can always clean up.


Like she says, they've worn out their trainers from running away from the police. _They can't get out._ So they live off a handful of rice krispies a day and the rubbish piles up and up. I believe the VC had much the same problem in the cu chi tunnels in 'Nam.


----------



## MAD-T-REX (Apr 16, 2012)

> Human beings have a refreshing tendency to pursue truth and excellence in the face of staggering hurdles – and for every professional hack who resigns him or herself to a living as a greased gear in the corporate press factory, there is another for whom the challenge of carving out a space for honest, rigorous reportage and inspiring, imaginative wordcraft is a reason to get up and put the coffee on of a morning.​​​​​​Not that it isn’t a bloody pain sometimes. Anyone can write, but to write well and often and for pay can be a hard and lonely job, because to do it honestly requires, at least at the beginning, a certain amount of boring self-analysis whereby professional and existential crisis feed exhaustingly off one another. To be an honest political writer or journalist today is constantly to negotiate and re-negotiate the complicated relationship between conviction and orthodoxy, between critical reportage and activism-as-journalism.​


​This might be less nauseating if it wasn't obvious that she considers herself to be the embodiment of honest journalism.​


----------



## imposs1904 (Apr 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> Like she says, they've worn out their trainers from running away from the police. _They can't get out._ So they live off a handful of rice krispies a day and the rubbish piles up and up. I believe the VC had much the same problem in the cu chi tunnels in 'Nam.


 

I think she thinks she's a character from a Martin Millar novel from twenty years ago.


----------



## kavenism (Apr 16, 2012)

> I was bewildered, and heartbroken. More than any other print journalist working in the mainstream media in Britain at that point, I understood what these people were trying to do. I was the same age, I had read the same books, I went to the same meetings, I declined to name names when to do so might have endangered activists, I stepped outside my job description to report faithfully on protests and incidents of police violence that the rest of the press ignored. None of this, by the way required any special cookies for effort -  but I thought it might at least be enough to prevent me getting thrown out of a party by drunk hippies.


 
'I' appears no less than eight times in this paragraph! What sort of World Historical Narcissist do you have to be to produce this pile of bobbins? Laurie looks into the fathomless depths of world history and all she sees is me! me! me! me! me! For a women concerned with the issues of eating disorders it's a curious facts that her prose is such a surefire way to expel your last meal.


----------



## rekil (Apr 17, 2012)

I'll just leave this here shall I.


----------



## barney_pig (Apr 17, 2012)

Damarr said:


> ​This might be less nauseating if it wasn't obvious that she considers herself to be the embodiment of honest journalism.​


Given the record of 'honest' journalism in the UK over the past 30 years or so, I think she could be right.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 17, 2012)

andy2002 said:


> If anyone's interested, Penny has written a guest blog over at Warren Ellis's site...
> 
> 
> *Nonetheless, just after midnight, a man with dreadlocks who I had never met before in my life started jabbing a less than entirely sober finger in my face, calling me scum, asking how I dared to speak on behalf of others, and attempting to assault me gently with a rusty bicycle. I was moved by the idiosyncracy of this attack, but far more perturbed by the fact that five or six comrades, people I had stood beside as police horses charged into lines of protesters in Parliament square, people I would have trusted if not with my life, then at least with my dignity – they turned away, and they pretended not to see.*
> ...


 
So i rolled away the stone....


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 17, 2012)

copliker said:


> View attachment 18244
> 
> I'll just leave this here shall I.


And guess what, it was the subs fault...again. Only problem is that her defence leaves her open to the exact same charge. Her defence is that the subs changed her inaccurate quote to another inaccurate quote. This is verging on homophobia.

edit:and even better she then goes on to undermine her original defence by claiming the inaccurate quote was a result of 'cutting' - odd sort of cutting that adds something to an article.


----------



## rekil (Apr 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> And guess what, it was the subs fault...again. Only problem is that her defence leaves her open to the exact same charge. Her defence is that the subs changed her inaccurate quote to another inaccurate quote. This is verging on homophobia.
> 
> edit:and even better she then goes on to undermine her original defence by claiming the inaccurate quote was a result of 'cutting' - odd sort of cutting that adds something to an article.


And it don't stop there!


> The new statesman do not fabricate quotes and neither do I; if you choose to recall it differently, or feel that you have been misrepresented, that’s your prerogative, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t waste energy trying to imply that I’m somehow not behaving professionally.



Dear Laurie, if you like Orwell so much why don't you go live there.



			
				notes on nationalism said:
			
		

> Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which it is felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 17, 2012)

This looks like it might get interesting - let's see if the new statesmen bottle it like they did with hari. Hope they do.


----------



## rekil (Apr 17, 2012)

The Lez wades in. Proclaims that lost generation figurehead is "incapable of deceit."


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 17, 2012)

ooh lovely, i'm starting to smell blood here. Real blood.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 17, 2012)

I see that LibDemmy lawyer, _Staggers_ columnist & member of the twitterati David Allen Green has retreated a little from his earlier, somewhat intemperate, defence of LP in the comments section following the second part of that blog.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 17, 2012)

Yes, he did exactly what he accused hari defenders of doing last year.  Fucking lib-dems.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 17, 2012)

I've got plenty of criticisms of Laurie, but this Sophie doesn't half make a mountain out of a molehill, particularly as the quote wasn't attributed to her by name anyway.  Anyone can make an honest mistake


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 17, 2012)

Yes. Many many times.

What are your criticisms of red?


----------



## ymu (Apr 17, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I've got plenty of criticisms of Laurie, but this Sophie doesn't half make a mountain out of a molehill, particularly as the quote wasn't attributed to her by name anyway. Anyone can make an honest mistake


Most of the substance had nothing to do with being misquoted.

And there's a fuck of a lot of history there. Largely based on similar shitness from la Penny. The fucking conversation she misquoted/misreported/just plain didn't understand, was based on similar shitness from her, ffs.

I have had some sympathy for her, being a similarly clueless middle-class twat myself. But this is a lot more Hari than Jones now.


----------



## MAD-T-REX (Apr 17, 2012)

Blog arguing that Penny isn't as bad as Hari, so if she comes clean now then the matter should be dropped: http://www.kernelmag.com/editors-blog/1868/laurie-penny-johann-haris-final-victim/ Needless to say, DAG has endorsed it.

The author touches on Penny's background but swiftly moves on. He doesn't seem to realise that people dislike her because her public persona is completely contrived and she would never act on her own rhetoric, not because she mangles the odd quote (although that doesn't help).

There are some funny comments. Nic Lezard says "Anyone insulting her will have to get past me first." Didn't Penny say a few weeks ago she wasn't a damsel in distress?

Edit: And Penny has tweeted this out of the blue:

Someday, maybe when I'm less under attack, I'll write about being queer and polyamorous, and what that means for me politically. But not now

Poor Penny!


----------



## articul8 (Apr 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> What are your criticisms of red?


 
Similar to those already recounted (at length) on this thread.  Including making shit up (the youth spontaneously breaking into the internationale was a cracker).  But also in her claims to speak for a generation, her failure to recognise or be open about her own privilege, her egotism, etc.


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2012)

kernelmag said:
			
		

> what were previously whispered accusations are now being made in public


 
not seen that much whispering tbh. mebe some people just haven't been listening?


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2012)

christ that article's shit._ the left refused to acknowledge the extent of hari's wrongdoing?_ do they know any of 'the left'?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 17, 2012)

That's a fairly reasoned post....hmmm...I think butchers is right above, I smell blood...she's in real trouble this time.


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2012)

anyone know what the robert fisk article in private eye that jeremy dunns mentions in the comments on the article above was about?


----------



## articul8 (Apr 17, 2012)

think it was referred to further up this thread


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 17, 2012)

This what you mean?

http://www.urban75.net/forums/posts/11023870/


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2012)

think i read it at the time, come to think of it.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 17, 2012)

copliker said:


> The Lez wades in. Proclaims that lost generation figurehead is "incapable of deceit."


 
That man is *SO* punting for a legover off her.


----------



## ymu (Apr 17, 2012)

He claims to have been living with her for a year. Is he not already getting some?


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> And guess what, it was the subs fault...again. Only problem is that her defence leaves her open to the exact same charge. Her defence is that the subs changed her inaccurate quote to another inaccurate quote. This is verging on homophobia.
> 
> edit:and even better she then goes on to undermine her original defence by claiming the inaccurate quote was a result of 'cutting' - odd sort of cutting that adds something to an article.


 
Funny thing is (seeing as I happen to be a paid scribbler as well), is that it definitely ISN'T a sub-editor's job to to change quotes or add portions of text that aren't there. It simply isn't their job to do that. At all.

If the editor or sub-editor of a big name publication wants something in a piece altered or replaced then they'll punt it back to the original writer (as a rule), having pointed out what they want changed or added, where they want it put and so on. If they want a piece completely rewritten then they'll usually summon a rewrite bod and get it done that way.

As a rule, mere sub-editors DON'T replace quotes with other quotes, they DON'T add bits that weren't previously there, they DON'T do full rewrites and 'cutting' is exactly that as they selectively prune a piece by removing small parts (and only where it enhances the general quality of the piece and/or to fit the space allocated on the page/pages where it's to be printed). 'Cutting' DOES NOT mean doing what Penny Dreadful uses as her prime defence of 'If in doubt, somebody else screwed up my piece.'

So, having seemingly made it a regular practice to not check her facts, ignore the ones that don't suit a previously-held position and her outright falsification of sections of copy (for example, at the porn awards she attended she claimed in her piece to have struck up a conversation with Anna Span, only for Ms Span to raise on her Twitter page the small fact of not having actually attended the event at which Penny Dreadful claimed to have talked with her) she also makes it a regular feature to lie about doing all of the above when she gets caught out and foists the blame on the non-existent professional incompetence of a (possibly also equally non-existent) sub-editor who, despite their clearly being unfit to hold their post, still miraculously remains in the job in spite of their alleged serial uselessness.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2012)

ymu said:


> He claims to have been living with her for a year. Is he not already getting some?


 
Nah, she's just one of a long chain of lodgers he's had over the years to subsidise his drinking habits (he likes to think he's a genteel alkie living in genteel squalor). If he can get it up, he probably bangs his hand.


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2012)

I see.


----------



## belboid (Apr 18, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Funny thing is (seeing as I happen to be a paid scribbler as well), is that it definitely ISN'T a sub-editor's job to to change quotes or add portions of text that aren't there. It simply isn't their job to do that. At all.


 
It can actually be, sometimes.  Notably when 'sub-editing' is a shorthand for 'turning your fucking gibberish into something resembling English.'  There've been a few columnists who have required similar 'subbing'


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2012)

Not altering direct quotes though. I know journos do it to make dodgy spoken prose sound better (and they should have the skill and integrity to retain the original meaning, which is how come so many of Hari's subjects never complained), but sub-editors should never do it, surely?


----------



## articul8 (Apr 18, 2012)

I've seen sub-editors unknowingly change the meaning of a paragraph through cuts, but it's not a subs role to introduce new elements into copy.


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2012)

I've had shedloads of editors completely change the meaning of my text because they do not understand it properly.

I have never had one change a direct quote from a source.

These are completely different things.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 18, 2012)

Blaming it all on the subs, eh? Well, this should win her new friends among the media landscape.


----------



## rekil (Apr 18, 2012)

‏@AmandaMarcotte said:
			
		

> Men's stories can be accepted as fictions. It's assumed female creators are all memoirists, and female audiences have to relate directly.
> 
> Retweeted by Laurie Penny


That's a peculiar sort of sentiment to choose to RT given the scrutiny she's been subjected to isn't it? If I didn't know any better I'd say it looks a bit like a tacit admission of guilt.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> That's a peculiar sort of sentiment to choose to RT given the scrutiny she's been subjected to isn't it? If I didn't know any better I'd say it looks a bit like a tacit admission of guilt.


 
Possibly, either that or she's trying yet another oblique reference to her critics all being miscogynists. 

And I don't recall the falsified reportage of her mate Johann Hari being terribly well accepted as fiction, come to think of it.


----------



## rekil (Apr 19, 2012)

From March 2010 blog post about ludicrous scheme to vote on behalf of people from ghana or something. Just for the record like.



> I will not be taking part directly, because I'm already planning to use my own vote to assist one of the liberal PPCs in Leyton and Wanstead.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 19, 2012)

If I find her saying she's voted Tory, do I shout bingo?


----------



## flypanam (Apr 19, 2012)

http://pennyred.blogspot.co.uk/sear...pdated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00Z&max-results=4

She's doing a questionaire about growing up male. I guess Me has a story to write...


----------



## belboid (Apr 19, 2012)

That is one abysmally written survey - even before we get to what miniscule cross-section of men she'll get a response from if it's only posted on her blog.  The phrase 'utterly worthless' springs to mind


----------



## rekil (Apr 19, 2012)

Damarr said:


> Blog arguing that Penny isn't as bad as Hari, so if she comes clean now then the matter should be dropped: http://www.kernelmag.com/editors-blog/1868/laurie-penny-johann-haris-final-victim/ Needless to say, DAG has endorsed it.


Some tufftalk from Nick Cohen in the comments there.


> Laurie Penny is in an entirely different league. Unlike Hari, she is a proper writer with something to say, and she says it with wit and without malice. You may not like what she has to say, but that is because you disagree with her politics, not because she is some kind of fraud.
> 
> The curse of the Net is that once an article has been posted it can never be expunged. You cannot obliterate all copies of this sorry piece of work, but you ought to regret writing it, offer Ms Penny an apology and resolve to set yourself higher standards. For, from the evidence on this page, it is not Laurie Penny who has the touch of Haris about her. His heirs and successors are a little closer to home.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 19, 2012)

You can expunge it if you're penny - as we've seen.

Oh Nick, i don't like what she has to say because of her politics - _you_ like her _because_ of her politics. The same hole you lot fell in over Hari.

There's a timeline, a methodology and a repeated behaviour and a repeated get out here cohen. Be a journo,


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 20, 2012)

I like the way the blogger says



> But, unlike Hari, Penny does not appear to deserve such treatment. Obviously, I loathe everything the woman writes, *but she’s a nice, middle-class girl* whose schtick happens to be Left, where mine is Right. She’s entirely unlike nasty pieces of work such as Johann Hari or the _New Statesman_’s Mehdi Hasan, who likes to say to Islamist audiences that non-Muslims “live like animals” when he thinks no-one is looking.


----------



## Riklet (Apr 20, 2012)

This has already been posted on the previous page, but i'm loving her new-found humility, she's all grown up:



> I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know whether what I’m trying to do, and what some of the most audacious, inspiring young people I’ve had the privilege to meet over the past two years are trying to do is worth all that much in the long run.


 
Any urbs willing to admit they were the dreadlocked drunken finger-wagger menacing her with their rusty bicycle?  An alternative version of events was probably said person shot her a brief dirty look as she hammered away on her blackberry.  Ah a wonderful thing, the power of imagination...


----------



## Lo Siento. (Apr 20, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I like the way the blogger says


I thought it summed both of them up rather well actually. It's no big deal to this journos if someone they quote feels like they were speaking off-the-record and that the quote misrepresents what they were saying, because it's all just schtick, hers is left, his is right, no big deal, nobody gets hurt etc. etc.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 21, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I like the way the blogger says


 Did Hasan say that btw?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 21, 2012)

That or something very similar, was on youtube.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 21, 2012)

What is completely mad is that the Independent hired her to replace Hari...

I mean is it just lazyness or arrogance?


----------



## articul8 (Apr 21, 2012)

Oh yes :


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 21, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Oh yes :




A different face for a different audience


----------



## imposs1904 (Apr 21, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> A different face for a different audience


 
Another PPE graduate from Oxbridge.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 21, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> A different face for a different audience


I'm sure articul8 condemns such dishonesty, don'tworry.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I'm sure articul8 condemns such dishonesty, don'tworry.


I knew something like that was coming.  I do as it goes.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 21, 2012)

Has Hassan ever apologised for or attempted to worm his way out of the above?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 21, 2012)

Never seen that before...interesting to see him use language like 'no better than the rest' etc...


----------



## rekil (Apr 27, 2012)

Some solipsistic cobblers about mayday in the indy.


> Whatever happens on 1 May, it is doubtful that capitalism will fall.
> 
> That's what we do, though, isn't it, on the left? We set ourselves up to fail. We allow ourselves to fantasise about a world richer and freer and fairer than the one we live in, and we try to make it together out of what we have – which may not be more than a mobile library, a lot of papier mâché and the internet, but sometimes that's just enough to change the mood of a nation. And even when we are disappointed over and over again, and we end up standing in the cold looking ridiculous, or see our friends arrested and our ideas ridiculed in public – even then we keep trying until we can't bear to try any more, at which point we have a strong cup of tea and continue.
> 
> Or we join hedge funds and cover the mirrors in our houses. For those who continue to envisage a future where human beings can live with dignity whatever their race, gender and social status, being set up to fail hasn't stopped us yet.


We join hedge funds do we? Do we bollocks.


----------



## Random (Apr 27, 2012)

Just finished reading the very good series by Warren Ellis, Planetary. Wish he'd stick to the sci fi about holographic universes, rather than trying to foster trufax outlaw journalism. Spider Jerusalem would shit his pants with rage.


----------



## Random (Apr 27, 2012)

"Anyone can write, but to write well and often and for pay can be a hard and lonely job, because to do it honestly requires, at least at the beginning, a certain amount of boring self-analysis whereby professional and existential crisis feed exhaustingly off one another. To be an honest political writer or journalist today is constantly to negotiate and re-negotiate the complicated relationship between conviction and orthodoxy, between critical reportage and activism-as-journalism."

Here in Sweden senior nurses are struggling to get similar starting pay to junior journalists. Stop whining ffs


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

...and die


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

I lay awake last night trying to think of a profession that'd be less missed if they disappeared tomorrow. 

First the bosses, then the cops, then the journos, then the trots.

I'm currently working as a mainstream journalist myself, btw, and I'm under no illusion that a journalist's job is anyhting other than to produce material, on a regular basis, that will sell advertising, or fit a public service broadcaster's political role. In Penny's case, her employer is a paper owned by a Russian oligarch and Putin ally. Any activism that professional jounalism involves is secondary to this.


----------



## emanymton (Apr 28, 2012)

Being a trots a profession, damn it I never got paid.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> I lay awake last night trying to think of a profession that'd be less missed if they disappeared tomorrow.
> 
> First the bosses, then the cops, then the journos, then the trots.
> 
> I'm currently working as a mainstream journalist myself, btw, and I'm under no illusion that a journalist's job is anyhting other than to produce material, on a regular basis, that will sell advertising, or fit a public service broadcaster's political role. In Penny's case, her employer is a paper owned by a Russian oligarch and Putin ally. Any activism that professional jounalism involves is secondary to this.


 
I do it for money as well, although it is a job that I also enjoy a great deal. To me, a journalist's job is to be accurate with facts, honest, fair, diligent when it comes to fact-checking and to write to a reasonably decent standard. It should also be far more about the story being covered than about the person writing it. What I think it shouldn't be about is shameless self-promotion, sloppiness with facts, outright dishonesty, sweeping generalisations, refusing to even acknowledge criticism (however constructive) and the ridiculous notion that any hack is bigger and more important than whatever story they're covering. And I don't like the idea of mixing political beliefs in with journalism either, as far as I'm concerned that simply muddies the waters leaves people wide open to instant accusations of being a propagandist and not being an objective observer reporting the actual facts rather than spinning them to suit a particular pre-conceived agenda.


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

emanymton said:


> Being a trots a profession, damn it I never got paid.


That wasn't a list of professions, it should have been in quotes. Just a list of class enemies.


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Ihat simply muddies the waters leaves people wide open to instant accusations of being a propagandist and not being an objective observer reporting the actual facts rather than spinning them to suit a particular pre-conceived agenda.


The journo ideal of being an objective observer is just a liberal fig leaf, though. Journalists are not objective; they are driven to produce profitable copy for their employers, who are usually capitalist businesses.

The media in general has little chance to carry out radical activism. Reporting can be of some use, or entertainment, and so journalists should try to do a good job, so that the amount of actually poisonous product is as little as possible. But doing an ok job, and doing little harm, is not the same as being a mighty warrior of social change, like certain star columnists think they are.


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

Real social change comes through people organising around shared interests and winning battles against politicians, corporations, etc. It doesn't come through certain skilled people getting well paid for writing lefty articles. Or through NGO professionals, or through full time politicians or trade union officials, for that matter.

Journalists can sometimes help social change, through defending people taking part - like investigations of police activity during a strike. But so can lawyers help to defend people against oppression, and I'd also laugh at someone whinging about how being a barrister is bloody hard work/activism.


----------



## andy2002 (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> Just finished reading the very good series by Warren Ellis, Planetary. Wish he'd stick to the sci fi about holographic universes, rather than trying to foster trufax outlaw journalism. Spider Jerusalem would shit his pants with rage.


 
Laurie Penny is the typical kind of person Ellis attaches himself to. Young, outsider(ish), seemingly cool and radical but not enough to frighten the horses. When they are eventually subsumed into the mainstream he then reminds everyone that he was a supporter/pal of theirs early on and basks in the reflected glory. Some of his comics are great (Planetary being one of them) but he's a precious, pretentious old twat really.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 28, 2012)

emanymton said:


> Being a trots a profession, damn it I never got paid.


 
It's funny how the careers adviser at school never mentioned "full time Trot apparatchik" as an option


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

andy2002 said:


> Laurie Penny is the typical kind of person Ellis attaches himself to. Young, outsider(ish), seemingly cool and radical but not enough to frighten the horses. When they are eventually subsumed into the mainstream he then reminds everyone that he was a supporter/pal of theirs early on and basks in the reflected glory.


 Who else has he done it with?



andy2002 said:


> Some of his comics are great (Planetary being one of them) but he's a precious, pretentious old twat really.


 Am not really expecting much from him; sci fi writers aren't neccessarily activists either . Possibly for a separate thread, but was really shocked after reading Warren Ellis' Seven Soldiers, to realise he's just a hack for the big publishers these days, after seeming to want to use comics for something rather more ambitious and self-destructive, in Animal Man and Invisibles.


----------



## andy2002 (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> Who else has he done it with?


 
Comic writers, artists and photographers mostly, don't think he's done it with a 'radical journo' before though.



Random said:


> Am not really expecting much from him; sci fi writers aren't neccessarily activists either . Possibly for a separate thread, but was really shocked after reading Warren Ellis' Seven Soldiers, to realise he's just a hack for the big publishers these days, after seeming to want to use comics for something rather more ambitious and self-destructive, in Animal Man and Invisibles.


 
I think you're mixing Ellis up with Grant Morrison (writer of Seven Soldiers, Animal Man and The Invisibles), although he too has become a bit of a big publisher man. Ellis has virtually left comics these days to concentrate on writing novels.


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

Yes, was a complete brainfart to keep writing WE, when I knew I mean Morrisson


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

For me, Morrisson's worse hackery lies in the way he self-consciously with 7 soliders seems to have the aim of putting new life into bad old genre hulks owned by his publisher masters, and with a view to making them into a viable franchise (his words). Whereas Ellis, in Planetary, puts together fairly original skilled sci fi with a decent modern view of his women characters, as opposed to the unreconstructured fish net tights heroine fanboy-pleasing females in 7 soldiers.

Derail!


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 28, 2012)

Hasn't Morrison gone utterly anti Islam bonkers in recent years?


----------



## killer b (Apr 28, 2012)

That's frank miller I think. Maybe both of them.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2012)

Miller has always been suss.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 28, 2012)

killer b said:


> That's frank miller I think. Maybe both of them.



Oh balls sorry yep you're right!


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Hasn't Morrison gone utterly anti Islam bonkers in recent years?


A quick google shows that a recent Morisson X Men character is a muslim Afghan woman. Frank Miller's gone really nasty, and Alan Moore turned and bit a chunk out of him recently when Miller slagged off Occupy. IIrc Moore said that 300 was a-historical garbage, and Sin City was pure misogyny.

Back to Morisson - it depresses me that someone who can clearly go beyond the hackneyed genre stereotypes is now one of those centrally involved in reproducing them. Superheroes are one of the worst things in comics, and they're holding back the whole genre. Seems to me, though, that someone like Morisson has recently become supremely bankable for Marvel, since a sucessfully comicbook character can now mean a big budget film.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> That wasn't a list of professions, it should have been in quotes. Just a list of class enemies.


 
lol so "trots" are class enemies now then yeah?

Is the definition of "trot" anyone who's not in your particular sub-category of anarchist by any chance?


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> lol so "trots" are class enemies now then yeah?


Yes, of course they are. Anyone who wants to create a capitalist society is, by definition, a class enemy.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

Whoa hold your horses there a moment, trots are in favour of a capitalist society? Really? Are they? Coz I've been rubbing shoulders with trots of various types for years now and that's not something i've ever encoutered before.

As a class enemy, how do you propose to counter these evil right-wing trots? Perhaps by teaming up with the Daily Mail in a trot-bashing PR campaign perhaps?

Any other class enemies? What about democratic socialists? Is there any kind of left winger that _isn't_ a class enemy whilst were here?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> lol so "trots" are class enemies now then yeah?
> 
> Is the definition of "trot" anyone who's not in your particular sub-category of anarchist by any chance?


Are you a trot delroy?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 28, 2012)

Morrison knows exactly what he is doing and the so-called hackwork has been part of his plan from the begining, it in no way a deviation or a "selling out" or surrendering of his former work.

All his work forms part of a rich tapestrey of 'things Grant Morrison is interested in'. You just don't like some of it.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

^ This is Anarchism in practice


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Whoa hold your horses there a moment, trots are in favour of a capitalist society? Really? Are they? Coz I've been rubbing shoulders with trots of various types for years now and that's not something i've ever encoutered before.
> 
> As a class enemy, how do you propose to counter these evil right-wing trots? Perhaps by teaming up with the Daily Mail in a trot-bashing PR campaign perhaps?
> 
> Any other class enemies? What about democratic socialists? Is there any kind of left winger that _isn't_ a class enemy whilst were here?


What's a democratic socialist?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> ^ This is Anarchism in practice



delroy on THE RAMPAGE. Making anarchists very angrrRRy.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Are you a trot delroy?


 
No I wouldn't say so, I don't like defining myself by the outdated standards of the early 20th century.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> No I wouldn't say so, I don't like defining myself by the outdated standards of the early 20th century.


Ah, a liberal _scared_ trot.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> What's a democratic socialist?


 
A pretty vague catch-all term origninally used to describe the politics of the Labour Party and fellow travellers, although it's worth pointing out that Labour ceased to be a democratic socialist party in any meaningful sense a long time ago.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

So who are you on about in your witch hunt?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Ah, a liberal _scared_ trot.


 
LOL no I just don't see the point in having to constantly refer back to the events of the early 20th century to define myself ideologically, and I think that constantly invoking Lenin and/or Trotsky all the time is fucking stupid in the year 2012. I'm just a socialist.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> LOL no I just don't see the point in having to constantly refer back to the events of the early 20th century to define myself ideologically, and I think that constantly invoking Lenin and/or Trotsky all the time is fucking stupid in the year 2012. I'm just a socialist.


No one said that you have to in order be a trot, esp not a _secret trot._


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Whoa hold your horses there a moment, trots are in favour of a capitalist society? Really? Are they? Coz I've been rubbing shoulders with trots of various types for years now and that's not something i've ever encoutered before.


All the transitional demands that trots put forwards, plus the way they see a post-revolution society working, amount to a capitalist society, with labour being exploited and power exercised by an elite. Haven't you read any Trotsky, or trotskyist literature?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> All the transitional demands that trots put forwards, plus the way they see a post-revolution society working, amount to a capitalist society, with labour being exploited and power exercised by an elite. Haven't you read any Trotsky, or trotskyist literature?


That's the past man, who cares about the past?


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Morrison knows exactly what he is doing and the so-called hackwork has been part of his plan from the begining, it in no way a deviation or a "selling out" or surrendering of his former work.
> 
> All his work forms part of a rich tapestrey of 'things Grant Morrison is interested in'. You just don't like some of it.


 How do you know this? I assumed that he'd followed a simple progression, from animal rights, on to situ and anarchism, pushing his genre to its limit, and then oddly turned back into classical superheroes. 

I still really enjoyed 7 soliders. It was just bizarre to see all this technical brilliance, and original thinking, presented within the narrow genre of unreconstructed big business superheroes. Almost like he's doing it as a technical exercise. When's the next foray into biting the hand that feeds him?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> All the transitional demands that trots put forwards, plus the way they see a post-revolution society working, amount to a capitalist society, with labour being exploited and power exercised by an elite. Haven't you read any Trotsky, or trotskyist literature?


 
Yeah I've read the transitional program if that's what you're asking. And I'm pretty sure that they'd see it in a different way, but I'd rather let a card-carrying trotskyite and advocate of that take up that argument with you tbh.

I love the way anarchists have this belligerently naive faith that all you need for Full Communism is to smash the state and declare private property over and society will instantaneously become communist, as if libertarian communism were some sort of default that all human societies would revert to if only we did away with those pesky trots/fash/all the same.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

You need to slowly smash it via transitional demands that teach the w/c how to cook and govern and all looked over by a benevolent socialist beforehand. Clearly.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

Not much of a reader then delroy?


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> libertarian communism were some sort of default that all human societies would revert to if only we did away with those pesky trots/fash/all the same.



In many ways the struggle against Fascism begins with the striggle against Bolshevism.


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Yeah I've read the transitional program if that's what you're asking. And I'm pretty sure that they'd see it in a different way, but I'd rather let a card-carrying trotskyite and advocate of that take up that argument with you tbh.


Then why did you take up the argument about trotskyism and capitalism in the first place? Over-confidence?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Morrison knows exactly what he is doing and the so-called hackwork has been part of his plan from the begining, it in no way a deviation or a "selling out" or surrendering of his former work.
> 
> All his work forms part of a rich tapestrey of 'things Grant Morrison is interested in'. You just don't like some of it.


 

It was wank when he wrote himself into one of his comics. Animal Man I think. I remember reading it in the library and thinking 'this is him having an absolute bash'


----------



## emanymton (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> In many ways the struggle against Fascism begins with the striggle against Bolshevism.


Do you really believe this?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> How do you know this? I assumed that he'd followed a simple progression, from animal rights, on to situ and anarchism, pushing his genre to its limit, and then oddly turned back into classical superheroes.
> 
> I still really enjoyed 7 soliders. It was just bizarre to see all this technical brilliance, and original thinking, presented within the narrow genre of unreconstructed big business superheroes. Almost like he's doing it as a technical exercise. When's the next foray into biting the hand that feeds him?


 
I think it's clear if you go back and read his columns/letter pages in Invisibles, and old interviews with him, all the way through to his 'Supergods' book. He has always loved the mainstream superheroes and wanted to tell stories with them in, in as many different ways as possible, including the big trad blockbuster styles, while also being free to go off the beaten track and explore his other interests either within the mainstream or seperate to it. 

As for biting the hand that feeds him - he has never ever done that in my knowledge; he has always played by the rules even as far as making new rules that others now have to follow.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> Then why did you take up the argument about trotskyism and capitalism in the first place? Over-confidence?


 
I just spotted some outrageously sectarian anarchism popping up in the thread and felt like shooting it down. By all means criticize the transitional program, it's not something I'd feel inclined to tribally defend, but I wouldn't call it capitalism.

Also, in the "struggle against bolshevism" what sort of measures would you like to take against non-anarchists? Does this include all "trots" or just any socialist you don't like particularly? I'd love to know more.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

_secret bolshevik_


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> _secret bolshevik_


 
C'mon you know the protocol it's _crytpo-bolshevik_ why let a good opportunity to use the word crypto slip away from you like that? Very poor butchers, must do better.


----------



## discokermit (Apr 28, 2012)

transitional demands are fibbing to the class.


----------



## discokermit (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> In many ways the struggle against Fascism begins with the striggle against Bolshevism.


so what's your plan?

here's one, join the edl to get rid of the trots! go on, i dare ya.

then you can turn your guns on the edl!


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2012)

but surely the trots are the memory and spirit of the class so they simply articulate what is needed on behalf of those too busy at toil to imagine or work towards


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I think it's clear if you go back and read his columns/letter pages in Invisibles, and old interviews with him, all the way through to his 'Supergods' book. He has always loved the mainstream superheroes and wanted to tell stories with them in, in as many different ways as possible, including the big trad blockbuster styles, while also being free to go off the beaten track and explore his other interests either within the mainstream or seperate to it.
> 
> As for biting the hand that feeds him - he has never ever done that in my knowledge; he has always played by the rules even as far as making new rules that others now have to follow.


The end of Animal Man, which DC didn't like, I thought was a fine piece of anti-comicbook writing. Ripping apart the cliches that this sub-genre depends on. Plus advocating hunt sabbing, mentioning the ALF, etc. And the Invisibles was so densly anarcho-situ-occult as to be barely readable for an anarcho-situ like me. Hardly commercial.

So what stuff off the beaten track is he doing now?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2012)

Smash the state one TU victory at a time.



*guns, guns, guns, get you guns put the pigs on the run* etc etc


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> The journo ideal of being an objective observer is just a liberal fig leaf, though. Journalists are not objective; they are driven to produce profitable copy for their employers, who are usually capitalist businesses.


 
Yup.


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

emanymton said:


> Do you really believe this?


How long have you been posting on u75?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

discokermit said:


> so what's your plan?
> 
> here's one, join the edl to get rid of the trots! go on, i dare ya.
> 
> then you can turn your guns on the edl!


 
Surely the only logical conclusion to that is for militant anti-fascists to physically attack trots/stalinists/democratic socialists/wrong type of anarchists/TU bureacrats/marxists/etc

No doubt the poor bastard on the SWP stall in lewisham today who got hospitalised was a minor victory in the anarchists war on fascism.


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Also, in the "struggle against bolshevism" what sort of measures would you like to take against non-anarchists? Does this include all "trots" or just any socialist you don't like particularly? I'd love to know more.


Don't worry - only proportionate measures.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> The end of Animal Man, which DC didn't like, I thought was a fine piece of anti-comicbook writing. Ripping apart the cliches that this sub-genre depends on. Plus advocating hunt sabbing, mentioning the ALF, etc. And the Invisibles was so densly anarcho-situ-occult as to be barely readable for an anarcho-situ like me. Hardly commercial.
> 
> So what stuff off the beaten track is he doing now?


 

I managed to negotiate Invisibles based on R A Shea, illuminatus etc. It's esoteric in themes but not impenetrable.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> Don't worry - only proportionate measures.


 
Ooh this sounds interesting? Do tell me more.


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Surely the only logical conclusion to that is for militant anti-fascists to physically attack trots/stalinists/democratic socialists/wrong type of anarchists/TU bureacrats/marxists/etc


This kind of approach just betrays a lack of historical understanding. In the past 100 years it's mostly been anarchists getting massacred by state socialists. Is it odd thatr some anarchists should get fed up at this, and try to stop this happening?


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> I managed to negotiate Invisibles based on R A Shea, illuminatus etc. It's esoteric in themes but not impenetrable.


Bully for you, but the massed ranks of RA Shea readers hardly constitute a commercial demographic.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

Can you tell us how to aid your struggle for Bolshevism please? 





Delroy Booth said:


> C'mon you know the protocol it's _crytpo-bolshevik_ why let a good opportunity to use the word crypto slip away from you like that? Very poor butchers, must do better.


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Ooh this sounds interesting? Do tell me more.


Meet words with words, fists with fists, bullets with more bullets...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> This kind of approach just betrays a lack of historical understanding. In the past 100 years it's mostly been anarchists getting massacred by state socialists. Is it odd thatr some anarchists should get fed up at this, and try to stop this happening?


 
Absolutely, however I'm having a hard time recalling the last time I saw any trots advocating murdering anarchists on my local stall in town. I must've missed that meeting.

Y'see if I thought that fighting anarchists was the first task in fighting fascism i'd be out day and night scalping 'em, how come you're not advocating militant anti-fascist tactics against the trots if you're so certain in your beliefs?


----------



## emanymton (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> How long have you been posting on u75?


What's that got to do with anything. I asked you a simple question, which I notice you haven't answered, so is it 'yes' or 'no'?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> Meet words with words, fists with fists, bullets with more bullets...


 
Sounds like you're selling out to reformism to me.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

Maybe he was trying to point you to some context? 

Two mugs for the price of one.





emanymton said:


> What's that got to do with anything. I asked you a simple question, which I notice you haven't answered, so is it 'yes' or 'no'?


----------



## emanymton (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Absolutely, however I'm having a hard time recalling the last time I saw any trots advocating murdering anarchists on my local stall in town. I must've missed that meeting.
> 
> Y'see if I thought that fighting anarchists was the first task in fighting fascism i'd be out day and night scalping 'em, how come you're not advocating militant anti-fascist tactics against the trots if you're so certain in your beliefs?


This is what I don't get, Random will happily engage in discussion with 'trots' on here, while he (I think Randoms a he?) certainly wouldn't 'hang out' on a discussion board which gave free reign to the EDL or BNP so he can't really believe it.


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Maybe he was trying to point you to some context?


----------



## andy2002 (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> So what stuff off the beaten track is he doing now?


 
He's mostly been concerned with writing various iterations of Batman for the past few years but he does pop up with something a bit more 'out there' every so often. Stuff like Joe the Barbarian and Seaguy spring to mind, although both of these were released through DC. He does love superheroes but I think he's too good a writer to spend any more time in that particular cul de sac. His ongoing feud with Alan Moore is amusing too...


----------



## emanymton (Apr 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Maybe he was trying to point you to some context?
> 
> Two mugs for the price.


Or I see you saying he meant I post on here with trots don't i therefore I don't really believe it, as per my previous post or not. Are all anarchists so fucking cryptic?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:
			
		

> Absolutely, however I'm having a hard time recalling the last time I saw any trots advocating murdering anarchists on my local stall in town. I must've missed that meeting.
> 
> Y'see if I thought that fighting anarchists was the first task in fighting fascism i'd be out day and night scalping 'em, how come you're not advocating militant anti-fascist tactics against the trots if you're so certain in your beliefs?



'My' stall?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

emanymton said:
			
		

> Or I see you saying he meant I post on here with trots don't i therefore I don't really believe it, as per my previous post or not. Are all anarchists so fucking cryptic?



Er... What?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

emanymton said:


> This is what I don't get, Random will happily engage in discussion with 'trots' on here, while he (I think Randoms a he?) certainly wouldn't 'hang out' on a discussion board which gave free reign to the EDL or BNP so he can't really believe it.


 
I wouldn't mind so much but I'm not a trot! Although I get the feeling that my politics would be equally worthless to him whatever label I attempted to attach to it.

It boils down to "If you're not an anarchist, of my type, then you're a fascist." which seems to be the worst type of cult-like tribalism and dogmatic group-think, the sort of thing that trots (deservedly imo) get a lot of stick for, but which in reality is just as commonplace amongst anarchist groups as it is on the trot left.


----------



## emanymton (Apr 28, 2012)

For the record I have seen 'anarchists' at the end of an ant-war demo threatening people on an SWP still with bottles and that pisses me of.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> 'My' stall?


 
Yeah it's mine, all mine, comrade. Just as I own the rights to exclusively represent and speak on behalf of the working class, I own the stall.


----------



## emanymton (Apr 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Er... What?


You fucking tell me. But then again as I'm a fascist maybe not.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

emanymton said:


> You fucking tell me. But then again as I'm a fascist maybe not.


I have no idea what you're attempting to say. I can hear the spittle from here though.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

emanymton said:


> You fucking tell me. But then again as I'm a fascist maybe not.


 
I hope you've got the plans for the Anarchist gulag kept hidden safe comrade, anarchists being made into fertilizer is one of our many transitional demands that we use to deliberately lie to the working class in order to seize the revolution for ourselves and safeguard capitalism

_and we would've got away with it too if it wasn't for those pesky anarchists...._


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

lol, Well and truly mugged, the pair of you. And it only took 5 little letters. _This is the way to keep your heads at a time of crisis comrades, follow our lead._


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

Anyway ironically enough I'm off for a drink with some Anarchists now I'll have a chat with them see if this view of "all trotskyite's are capitalist fascists" is shared throughout the movement.


----------



## emanymton (Apr 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I have no idea what you're attempting to say. I can hear the spittle from here though.


I'm not really attempting to say anything. I asked a very simple question which has not been answered. I don't believe either you or Random believe trots are as bad as fascists what I don't get is why you can't just say that.


----------



## emanymton (Apr 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> lol, Well and truly mugged, the pair of you. And it only took 5 little letters. _This is the way to keep your heads at a time of crisis comrades, follow our lead._


I really have no idea what your on about, are you saying it's a wind up? Fine Ha Ha you got me


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)




----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

emanymton said:


> I'm not really attempting to say anything. I asked a very simple question which has not been answered. I don't believe either you or Random believe trots are as bad as fascists what I don't get is why you can't just say that.


No one said that they were you ranty goon. You've been pointed towards a number of things in this exchange - a long running thread on here and a criticism of the USSR from a pro-socialist pro-w/c perspective and you've responded with this head losing spittle-rant. All because someone made a very obvious trap/joke for ranty spitters to jump into. Go _scalping_ with delboy or something.


----------



## eoin_k (Apr 28, 2012)

emanymton said:


> For the record I have seen 'anarchists' at the end of an ant-war demo threatening people on an SWP still with bottles and that pisses me of.


 
Trotsky wouldn't have taken that sort of shit.


----------



## emanymton (Apr 28, 2012)

emanymton said:


> Do you really believe this?


Yep, ranty and spitty.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

((((You fucking tell me. But then again as I'm a fascist maybe not.))))


----------



## emanymton (Apr 28, 2012)

OK so I got a bit pissed of with people being about as communicative as a brick wall, and this being the internet and all it's easer to be nasty and abusive than in real life. So I apologies for that post. Now since almost every other post I made was essentially saying do you really believe this or are you just taking the piss (Why I didn't just say that I don't know) then I don't get you point. But if t makes you happy believe what you want.


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> It boils down to "If you're not an anarchist, of my type, then you're a fascist." which seems to be the worst type of cult-like tribalism and dogmatic group-think, the sort of thing that trots (deservedly imo) get a lot of stick for, but which in reality is just as commonplace amongst anarchist groups as it is on the trot left.


Why do state-socialists get all prima donna and defensive when people point out some flaws in their politics? Hardly a rational response. Maybe there's some guilt buried there?


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

andy2002 said:


> His ongoing feud with Alan Moore is amusing too...


A quick read of that makes it seem as sad as RMP3 or TBH's 'feud' with a certain anarchist poster on here. Has Moore even responded to this psychic warfare?


----------



## mutley (Apr 28, 2012)

Sorry to interrupt this little domestic but apparently an SWP stall actually has been attackled by the EDL in South London and one person has been hospitalised. It's on twitter and facebook, don't know anything else.

If EDL attached an anarchist stall I'd be absolutley up for having a presence alongside the anarchists to defend their right to put out their ideas without fash interference.


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

Mutley, are you using this attack as throwaway ammunition in a comedy fight with anarchists?

Edit, in any case, it needs a thread of its own, instead of being buried here.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> Why do state-socialists get all prima donna and defensive when people point out some flaws in their politics? Hardly a rational response. Maybe there's some guilt buried there?


 

What does history tell us about anarchism?


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> What does history tell us about anarchism?


Can you give us a clue?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2012)

Starter for points, Begins on the theme of F.

(in my case it is 'f' for 'fucking off to deal with a drama llama and coming back to this massively scintillating debate later ) adieu!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 28, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> Starter for points, Begins on the theme of F.
> 
> (in my case it is 'f' for 'fucking off to deal with a drama llama and coming back to this massively scintillating debate later ) adieu!


 
Coward


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2012)

lickspittle


----------



## rekil (Apr 28, 2012)

So I was browsing for hedge funds and diamonds and came across this.


----------



## Random (Apr 28, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> lickspittle


Paper tiger


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2012)

copliker said:


> That's a peculiar sort of sentiment to choose to RT given the scrutiny she's been subjected to isn't it? If I didn't know any better I'd say it looks a bit like a tacit admission of guilt.


 
Not really. Penny thinks she's being awfully clever and getting a poke in at patriarchy at the same time. That the line she re-tweeted can be read as you state is an unfortunate product of her skill in not actually thinking about what she writes.


----------



## andy2002 (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> A quick read of that makes it seem as sad as RMP3 or TBH's 'feud' with a certain anarchist poster on here. Has Moore even responded to this psychic warfare?


 
Moore started it according to Morrison. Years ago when he was just starting out, Morrison had a Marvelman story accepted by Warrior and wrote to Moore to ask for his 'blessing'. Apparently Moore sent back this really weird and mildly threatening letter warning him off and Morrison was none too impressed.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> ^ This is Anarchism in practice




Don't be foolish, boy. Go and stand in the corner if you've nothing sensible to say.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No one said that you have to in order be a trot, esp not a _secret trot._


 
TBF, I don't reckon there's many "secret Trots". Most of 'em would "out" themselves in short order, just as soon as you said anything that Lev might have disagreed with.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> All the transitional demands that trots put forwards, plus the way they see a post-revolution society working, amount to a capitalist society, with labour being exploited and power exercised by an elite. Haven't you read any Trotsky, or trotskyist literature?


 
But...but...they *promise* that the transitional state will be transistional, and that they won't grab power and then cling onto it like a monkey to a branch! They promise!!!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2012)

emanymton said:


> Or I see you saying he meant I post on here with trots don't i therefore I don't really believe it, as per my previous post or not. Are all anarchists so fucking cryptic?


 
Are you sure it's anarchists being cryptic, rather than you being obtuse?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2012)

emanymton said:


> For the record I have seen 'anarchists' at the end of an ant-war demo threatening people on an SWP still with bottles and that pisses me of.


 
I'd threaten swappies on a still, selling their lethal Trot cabbage vodka alongside the papers, the cunts!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> What does history tell us about anarchism?


 
That we always get stabbed in the back by the sell-out statists.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2012)

This should tell you to function as the conscience/counterbalance to a socialist regime actually capable of being more than state capitalism or soc/dec.shit you can even have little badges.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2012)

Random said:


> Why do state-socialists get all prima donna and defensive when people point out some flaws in their politics? Hardly a rational response. Maybe there's some guilt buried there?


 
Because the term "state-socialist" has absolutely no nuance, and lumps together _literally everyone who's not an anarchist_ into one category as if it were one whole thing, when it blatantly isn't. It implies that _literally everyone who's not an anarchist_ is a proponent of mass murder and tyrannical dictatorship. And that they're also captialists. And fascists. And then, to top it off, they're too dogmatic and sectarian, which is perfectly true, but just a little bit lacking in self-awareness.

And I'd love for you to try pointing out some flaws in my politics but you've clearly got it into your head that I'm a crude stereoype of a trot from the 1970's.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> ^ This is Anarchism in practice



Cor, look at the _nuance_ on that.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 29, 2012)

well i was not going to reply to this, but i have just been reading "anarchist faq" and found something interesting to say the least.

*



			I.5.12 Would an anarchist society provide health care and other public services?
		
Click to expand...

*


> It depends on the type of anarchist society you are talking about. Different anarchists propose different solutions.
> *In an individualist-mutualist society, for example, health care and other public services would be provided by individuals or co-operatives on a pay-for-use basis. It would be likely that individuals or co-operatives/associations would subscribe to various insurance providers or enter into direct contracts with health care providers. Thus the system would be similar to privatised health care but without the profit margins as competition, it is hoped, would drive prices down to cost.*
> Other anarchists reject such a system. They are in favour of socialising health care and other public services. They argue that a privatised system would only be able to meet the requirements of those who can afford to pay for it and so would be unjust and unfair. In addition, such systems would have higher overheads (the need to pay share-holders and the wages of management, most obviously) as well as charge more (privatised public utilities under capitalism have tended to charge consumers more, unsurprisingly as by their very nature they are natural monopolies).


 
...



> Thus, as would be expected, public services would be organised by the public, organised in their syndicates and communes. They would be based on workers' self-management of their daily work and of the system as a whole. Non-workers who took part in the system (patients, students) would not be ignored and would also play a role in providing essential feedback to assure quality control of services and to ensure that the service is responsive to users needs. The resources required to maintain and expand the system would be provided by the communes, syndicates and their federations. For the first time, public services would truly be public and not a statist system imposed upon the public from above nor a system by which the few fleece the many by exploiting natural monopolies for their own interests. Public Services in a free society will be organised by those who do the work and under the effective control of those who use them.
> *Finally, this vision of public services being run by workers' associations could be raised as a valid libertarian reform under capitalism** (not to mention raising the demand to turn firms into co-operatives when they are bailed out during economic crisis).* Equally, rather than nationalisation or privatisation, public utilities could be organised as a consumer co-operative (i.e., owned by those who use it) while the day-to-day running could be in the hands of a producer co-operative.


transitional demands and privatisation. Lol.
i'm not saying the anarcho faq represents all anarchists, obviously, i just thought it was funny

talk about a john lewis economy, jesus


----------



## redsquirrel (Apr 29, 2012)

This is very poor.

If people want to have this debate they need to start a new thread in theory - "Is Bolshevism as bad as Fascism round 2".


----------



## co-op (Apr 29, 2012)

Bolshevism is WORSE than fascism!! A thousand times!!






Anarchists LOL.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 29, 2012)

im just lolling at the anarchist transitional demands

"turn the bailed out banks into cooperatives as a transitional step towards the abolition of the state!" i know not every anarchist, especially on here, takes that faq as gospel but even so


----------



## Random (Apr 30, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> im just lolling at the anarchist transitional demands


You're not actually using that term correctly - it's not actually what Trotsky and his followers meant by transitional demands. Probably because you're not really a trotskyist, just a socialist who happens to be in a trot organisation.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 30, 2012)

what are they then? the idea of demanding that public services be turned into cooperatives rather than "state-based nationalisation", presumably as a step on the road to anarchism? The anarchist faq is basically advocating demanding that the state turn these services into cooperatives rather than privatise or nationalise them


----------



## Random (Apr 30, 2012)

ANYWAY

Just for the record, my original line quoting the old demo chant of "first the bosses...then the trots" was clearly a joke,seeing as it also included journalists on the list of enemies, and I've just admitted to being one myself. And, as about three old-timers on this thread have noticed, my quote about "the fight against fascism begins with the fight against bolshevism" refers to an old thread on U75, a 140-page monstrosity, iirc, of leninists versus anarchists, about ten years ago. Here's the council-communist pamphlet that was the inspiration http://libcom.org/library/fight-against-fascism-begins-with-fight-against-bolshevism-ruhle.

I don't think that trots are class enemies, I don't think that most 'trots' are even trotskyists or leninists. And I certainly don't see the SWP as worse than the EDL, or anything llike that. Of course.

And I'd like to dedicate this troll to ernestolynch and jimmer, wherever they are now.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 30, 2012)

And even if you're right about the transitional demands thing what is this?




> In an individualist-mutualist society, for example, health care and other public services would be provided by individuals or co-operatives on a pay-for-use basis. It would be likely that individuals or co-operatives/associations would subscribe to various insurance providers or enter into direct contracts with health care providers. Thus the system would be similar to privatised health care but without the profit margins as competition, *it is hoped,* would drive prices down to cost.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 30, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> what are they then? the idea of demanding that public services be turned into cooperatives rather than "state-based nationalisation", presumably as a step on the road to anarchism? The anarchist faq is basically advocating demanding that the state turn these services into cooperatives rather than privatise or nationalise them


No it doesn't. You can do better than this.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 30, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> And even if you're right about the transitional demands thing what is this?


 
That's an accurate description of pro-market individualist anarchism.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 30, 2012)

(note, i'm not saying you subscribe to everything in that FAQ, as I don't think you do)


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 30, 2012)

Random said:


> ANYWAY
> 
> Just for the record, my original line quoting the old demo chant of "first the bosses...then the trots" was clearly a joke,seeing as it also included journalists on the list of enemies, and I've just admitted to being one myself. And, as about three old-timers on this thread have noticed, my quote about "the fight against fascism begins with the fight against bolshevism" refers to an old thread on U75, a 140-page monstrosity, iirc, of leninists versus anarchists, about ten years ago. Here's the council-communist pamphlet that was the inspiration http://libcom.org/library/fight-against-fascism-begins-with-fight-against-bolshevism-ruhle.
> 
> ...


That's Ruhle whose pamphlet was a defence of socialism as against the USSR, Ruhle who was on the dewey commission that cleared trotsky and ruhle who trotsky described (wrongly) as the greatest living marxist scholar after ryanazov. 

OMG they're calling us fascists!!!!!!!


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 30, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No it doesn't. You can do better than this.


 
Sorry yeah, just read it again and it doesn't have to be the state doing it - people working in the industry could do this by themselves, if i'm understanding this correctly? In which case fair enough, but it was quite ambiguously phrased - i think the "libertarian reform under capitalism" part confused me!


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## Random (Apr 30, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> what are they then? the idea of demanding that public services be turned into cooperatives rather than "state-based nationalisation", presumably as a step on the road to anarchism? The anarchist faq is basically advocating demanding that the state turn these services into cooperatives rather than privatise or nationalise them


I've not read the anarchist FAQ myself, but isn't it basically a smörgasbord of anarchist ideas, rather than a position paper? Some anarchists surely do believe in going for libertarian reforms under capitalism. But that's not what trotskyist transitional demands are. These are reforms that are called for, in the knowledge that they cannot be met. A quick google finds this trotsky quote.

"By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery."


----------



## Random (Apr 30, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> And even if you're right about the transitional demands thing what is this?


Did you miss the bit where this position was attributed to individualist-mutualist anarchists. Those would be proudhonists, iirc. Never met one myself.,


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## frogwoman (Apr 30, 2012)

Random said:


> I've not read the anarchist FAQ myself, but isn't it basically a smörgasbord of anarchist ideas, rather than a position paper? Some anarchists surely do believe in going for libertarian reforms under capitalism. But that's not what trotskyist transitional demands are. These are reforms that are called for, in the knowledge that they cannot be met. A quick google finds this trotsky quote.
> 
> "By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery."


 
I know what transitional demands are, but some of the stuff advocated on there would also be pretty unlikely if not impossible to achieve under capitalism (unless i suppose the workers bought the service that was being privatised out and ran it themselves, or were able to keep out whoever did get the contract for it successfully). 

And fair enough - it does seem to be more of a description rather than a position paper.


----------



## Random (Apr 30, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I know what transitional demands are, but some of the stuff advocated on there would also be pretty unlikely if not impossible to achieve under capitalism (unless i suppose the workers bought the service that was being privatised out and ran it themselves, or were able to keep out whoever did get the contract for it successfully).


I think failed businesses becoming coops has happened in some times of economic crisis, like in Argentina. I agree as a general demand it does sound very unlikely. Never heard of any anarcho goup making this call, though, whereas in trotskyism organising around unrealisable demands are one of the key ideas.


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## rekil (May 12, 2012)

Bizarre misreading of and shit response to Gove's wet nonsense from the other day.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...on-but-im-still-not-on-your-team-7737823.html


> In 2003, I was informed by a teacher that I would be applying to Oxford. I was the smartest kid in a smart school which needed to boost its Oxbridge figures: there was no question. The only trouble is, I was shy, had a stutter and a tendency to twitch. So a teacher was roped in to practice the interviews with me, to teach me to speak more clearly and be confident in my ideas, to act– I'll never forget this – as if I had a right to be there.


I'm surprised she didn't list her exam grades. And I bet that teacher took the form of a burning shrubbery.


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## frogwoman (May 13, 2012)

.


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## frogwoman (May 13, 2012)

i've never walked into a job or anything else for that matter thinking i had a right to be there. i never had interviews for any unis i applied to and would have almost certainly failed if i had.


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## Ade-oh (May 13, 2012)

copliker said:


> Bizarre misreading of and shit response to Gove's wet nonsense from the other day.
> 
> http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...on-but-im-still-not-on-your-team-7737823.html
> 
> I'm surprised she didn't list her exam grades. And I bet that teacher took the form of a burning shrubbery.


 
She's weirdly desperate to hide her obvious ambition - and success - behind her facade as a constant victim of 'the man' bravely rallying the resistance... most amusing!


----------



## Bakunin (May 13, 2012)

Ade-oh said:


> She's weirdly desperate to hide her obvious ambition - and success - behind her facade as a constant victim of 'the man' bravely rallying the resistance... most amusing!


 
'Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!'


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## _angel_ (May 15, 2012)

tiny man's suit


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## love detective (May 15, 2012)

bring me a tiny man's suit and some pak choi - NOW!


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## frogwoman (May 15, 2012)

> He made a particular point of naming and shaming left-wing journalists – including myself. In the eight years since I left Brighton College, hundreds of people, most of them right-wingers, have suggested that the fact that I went to a private school and then to Oxford places indelible inverted commas around any radical sentiments I may espouse. That notion – that there is some element of hypocrisy at play if "radical" journalists have been to private schools – betrays an important prejudice.


 
no laurie, it's the fact you post dishonest self aggrandising bollocks


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## Spanky Longhorn (May 15, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> tiny man's suit


 
With a tiny man inside


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## love detective (May 15, 2012)

any tiny men?


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## Spanky Longhorn (May 15, 2012)

love detective said:


> any tiny men?


 
how tall are you love detective can I call you love detective?


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## love detective (May 15, 2012)

yes you can call me that

i'm 5'7" (and a half) - not a tiny man but not a huge man either

how tall are you spanky longhorn can i call you spanky longhorn


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## Spanky Longhorn (May 15, 2012)

love detective said:


> yes you can call me that
> 
> i'm 5'7" (and a half) - not a tiny man but not a huge man either
> 
> how tall are you spanky longhorn can i call you spanky longhorn


 
yes you can call me that.

I'm 6'4" (and a quarter) - not a huge man, but a tall man


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## love detective (May 15, 2012)

i thought i was taller than you - i'm not saying you're a tiny man but if I was then I would be


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## rekil (May 15, 2012)

> USA was built on racism and genocide at home. UK built on same but abroad, out of sight till recently.


Smartest kid in a smart school you say.


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## Spanky Longhorn (May 15, 2012)

love detective said:


> i thought i was taller than you - i'm not saying you're a tiny man but if I was then I would be


 
No I'm a little taller than you, not saying your saying that but if you were you would be


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## love detective (May 15, 2012)

i see what you're saying

(not saying that's what you're saying mind, just that I can see what you would be saying if you were saying it, which your not)


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## _angel_ (May 15, 2012)

love detective said:


> yes you can call me that
> 
> i'm 5'7" (and a half) - not a tiny man but not a huge man either
> 
> how tall are you spanky longhorn can i call you spanky longhorn


You're still tall from where I'm standing.


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## love detective (May 15, 2012)

i see what you're saying angel can i call you maddy?


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## killer b (May 15, 2012)

the fuck are you dicks on about?


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## love detective (May 15, 2012)

any tiny men?


----------



## love detective (May 15, 2012)

please send a tiny man's suit, even if you don't have a tiny mans suit, please send a tiny mans suit


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 15, 2012)

killer b said:


> the fuck are you dicks on about?


----------



## love detective (May 15, 2012)

if there had have been something there he wouldn't have fallen but there wasn't so he went to lean on something that wasn't there and he fell through the bit where there should have been something there but wasn't - iyswim


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 15, 2012)

yep


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## love detective (May 15, 2012)

i know!

you see what he's gone and done don't you


----------



## Random (May 16, 2012)

^^ This


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 16, 2012)

Signed.


----------



## Random (May 16, 2012)

suit labour to beat the tiny men in ill fitting suits


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## love detective (May 16, 2012)

any tiny men to fall through a bit that's not there?

please send tiny men to fall through a bit that's not there

(even if you don't have any tiny men to fall through a bit that's not there, please send tiny men to fall through a bit that's not there)


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 16, 2012)

Only 24 hours left to save the tiny men in suits EMAIL NOW!


----------



## love detective (May 16, 2012)

even if you don't have email, please email now


----------



## _angel_ (May 16, 2012)

Random said:


> suit labour to beat the tiny men in ill fitting suits


James came home with a tiny tiny dolly sized pair of trousers in his school bag yesterday. Shall I send them to her???


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 16, 2012)

love detective said:


> even if you don't have email, please email now


 
Not saying you don't have email just that if you didn't you wouldn't of course.


----------



## Random (May 16, 2012)

Great stuff guys


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 16, 2012)

yep


----------



## love detective (May 16, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Not saying you don't have email just that if you didn't you wouldn't of course.


 
look, i agree with everything you've said, I just don't agree with you

not saying that this means that i don't agree with what you've said, it's just that i went to lean on something that wasn't there and i've gone and fallen through the bit where it should have been


----------



## love detective (May 16, 2012)

any tiny men?


----------



## Random (May 16, 2012)

love detective said:


> look, i agree with everything you've said, I just don't agree with you
> 
> not saying that this means that i don't agree with what you've said, it's just that i went to lean on something that wasn't there and i've gone and fallen through the bit where it should have been


I hear you bruv


----------



## love detective (May 16, 2012)

you couldn't make it up


----------



## rekil (May 17, 2012)

Laurie in Chile reporting on yesterday's demos.


> While today we young people may be blown like zephyrs on the howling winter winds of impenitent patriarchy, our anvil eyed gaze is fixed e’er forward, when we shall ride the shimmering breezes of spring’s dancing tomorrows.


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 17, 2012)

Paid by the word.


----------



## JimW (May 17, 2012)

copliker said:


> Laurie in Chile reporting on yesterday's demos.


It's like she's auditioning to be quoted in a new version of 'Politics and the English Language'. Leave no metaphor unmixed!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 17, 2012)

shut up! even she couldn't write that with a straight face


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 17, 2012)

It's like a 1960's Thor comic


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 17, 2012)

It'th a thor thubject with Penny.


----------



## rekil (May 17, 2012)

Full article later. It's a Workers Girder exclusive.


----------



## Nylock (May 17, 2012)

Bad Penny said:
			
		

> While today we young people may be blown like zephyrs on the howling winter winds of impenitent patriarchy, our anvil eyed gaze is fixed e’er forward, when we shall ride the shimmering breezes of spring’s dancing tomorrows.


Oh dear.... Purple prose much?
</boke>


----------



## Captain Hurrah (May 17, 2012)

lol.


----------



## treelover (May 17, 2012)

copliker said:


> Laurie in Chile reporting on yesterday's demos.
> 
> While today we young people may be blown like zephyrs on the howling winter winds of impenitent patriarchy, our anvil eyed gaze is fixed e’er forward, when we shall ride the shimmering breezes of spring’s dancing tomorrows.
> 
> ...


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (May 18, 2012)

> *In the investigative spirit*, I decided to reply to some of these “sugar daddies.” Using a dummy email address and the handle gigglesandsparkles86, I pretended to be a hard-up student, and painted a broad-brushstroke picture of a naive, bookish, ingenue, the sort of girl who likes kittens and bubbles and walks in the rain — and exists mostly in the imaginations of lonely men on the Internet or Zooey Deschanel sitcoms. I kept the details brief — “Amy” was 25, like me, a literature student finding it hard to make ends meet, and interested in more details about the arrangement. I had her respond to every ‘”sugar daddy” ad on Craigslist New York and Craigslist London on three separate days. When necessary, I sent a picture loaned by one of my prettiest and furthest-away friends, explicitly asking her for a shot in which all trace of human complexity would be hidden behind hair and sunglasses. It took approximately three minutes for the emails to start flooding in.


 
_Sure_ it was. Less than investigative IMO . . . Anyway, bit odd.


----------



## rekil (May 18, 2012)

Laurie finally filed her sensational Workers' Girder exclusive "Chile? You've probably never heard of it."


Inch deep analysis
Fuck awful mixed metaphors
Imaginary characters
Lies
Blatant product placement to help pay the bills
And more!


----------



## love detective (May 18, 2012)

> I pretended to be a hard-up student


 
Isn't this what she does all the time anyway?

So while pretending to be a hard up student she went undercover and pretended to be a hard up student

that nearly made my brain implode


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 18, 2012)

love detective said:


> Isn't this what she does all the time anyway?
> 
> So while pretending to be a hard up student she went undercover and pretended to be a hard up student
> 
> that nearly made my brain implode


 
It's like a Paul Auster novel, I bet later on in her investigations she met a young woman called Laurie who was imprisioned in a room by a sugar daddy publisher who forced her to write reams of appalling self interested crap journalism as she slowly wasted away into a pillar of silver.

Or something.


----------



## articul8 (May 18, 2012)

> While today we young people may be blown like zephyrs on the howling winter winds of impenitent patriarchy, our anvil eyed gaze is fixed e’er forward, when we shall ride the shimmering breezes of spring’s dancing tomorrows.


That must be the worst sentence ever written by anyone, ever.  There should be a criminal offence for this.


----------



## Nylock (May 18, 2012)

It's like the stuff Michael Moorcock might have left out of 'The Dancers at the end of Time' for being too 'over the top'...


----------



## Bakunin (May 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> Inch deep analysis
> Fuck awful mixed metaphors
> Imaginary characters
> Lies
> ...


 
This is an entirely inaccurate and blatantly wrong summing up of Penny Dreadful's writing. She can only aspire to be merely that woeful, after all.


----------



## rekil (May 18, 2012)

Laurie doesn't like NATO anymore.


----------



## butchersapron (May 18, 2012)

No more nice bombs


----------



## rekil (May 18, 2012)

Now she's having 'a go' at Tom Morello who "appears to be here to save liberalism".

fffffffuckoffffff


----------



## butchersapron (May 18, 2012)

How come none the groups round the country have had a single penny off her since her -  what_ 150 grand a year_  - new job?


----------



## frogwoman (May 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> How come none the groups round the country have had a single penny off her since her - what_ 150 grand a year_ - new job?


 
150 grand a year?! are you serious? She is my age.


----------



## binka (May 18, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> 150 grand a year?! are you serious? She is my age.


yes but how many generations are you the voice of?


----------



## frogwoman (May 18, 2012)

good point. I'm also not the smartest kid in the smartest school either.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (May 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> How come none the groups round the country have had a single penny off her since her -  what_ 150 grand a year_  - new job?



Lol!! There ain't no way she's on that! The Indy doesn't have that kind of money, reckon she'd be lucky if she's on more than 25k...


----------



## butchersapron (May 18, 2012)

The independent - a paper ran by a billionaire businessman - can't afford that? You think Torres is on min wage as well?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (May 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> The independent - a paper ran by a billionaire businessman - can't afford that? You think Torres is on min wage as well?



You're off in cloud cookoo land!


----------



## frogwoman (May 18, 2012)

She is my age, cant get over that, how the hell is that possible. How is she the voice of a generation or for that matter anyone else apart from herself  how can she possibly think that her experiences represent even the middle class let alone the working class. I am speechless. i don't know many 24 year olds that are earning the average wage of the country let alone 150k.


----------



## butchersapron (May 18, 2012)

I bet you she's on the independent paper as self-employed as well - _which makes her a tax evader._


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 18, 2012)

You're both (butchers and KE) wrong but KE is more wrong (by miles)


----------



## Nylock (May 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> Now she's having 'a go' at Tom Morello who "appears to be here to save liberalism".
> 
> fffffffuckoffffff


WTF?

What has the RATM guitarist done to rouse the ire of bad penny? Surely it's not being a member of a band whose debut album still resonates with people 20 years after it's initial release, and in which its lyrical content pretty much pisses all over her entire literary _oeuvre_ to date?

Surely not....


----------



## rekil (May 18, 2012)

Nylock said:


> WTF?
> 
> What has the RATM guitarist done to rouse the ire of bad penny? Surely it's not being a member of a band whose debut album still resonates with people 20 years after it's initial release, and in which its lyrical content pretty much pisses all over her entire literary _oeuvre_ to date?
> 
> Surely not....


More to the point. Time for twattery reloaded. 



> It is for these reason that I am going to be voting, in my constituency of Leyton and Wanstead, for the Liberal Democrat Party. Not because of Nick Clegg's golden tie, and not even because The Guardian says so. Because I want a new, more representative parliamentary system in which citizens can feel like their voices actually matter. I like the Lib Dems; I don't think they were sent to save us. I'd prefer to vote for a third party that had stronger links with workers' organisations. But the Lib Dems represent the best chance this country has for transformation on a structural level. And, of course, I'm sick of the sight of Cameron's soft, evil face.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (May 18, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> You're both (butchers and KE) wrong but KE is more wrong (by miles)



Lol ok.


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 18, 2012)

I think I read £22k p.a. somewhere. Not that it makes any difference to her vapidity.


----------



## Bakunin (May 18, 2012)

Nylock said:


> WTF?
> 
> What has the RATM guitarist done to rouse the ire of bad penny? Surely it's not being a member of a band whose debut album still resonates with people 20 years after it's initial release, and in which its lyrical content pretty much pisses all over her entire literary _oeuvre_ to date?
> 
> Surely not....


 
Somebody should have her listen to the Led Zeppelin back catalogue, then. I'm sure she'd find much more to complain about.

After all, what could a radical feminist possibly find sexist, sleazy, unapologetically macho, crude or even slightly offensive about this modern classic?:


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 18, 2012)

S☼I said:


> I think I read £22k p.a. somewhere. Not that it makes any difference to her vapidity.


 
I heard 70k from a very reliable source


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 18, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I heard 70k from a very reliable source


 
Which, if accurate, would make KE's guess closer than BA's (by miles).


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 18, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Which, if accurate, would make KE's guess closer than BA's (by miles).




So it would, never been too hot at maths


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 18, 2012)

You'll have to up your arithmetic game if you want to outsmart the smartest kid from a smart school.


----------



## barney_pig (May 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No more nice bombs


((((workers Bomb))))


----------



## Kid_Eternity (May 18, 2012)

S☼I said:


> I think I read £22k p.a. somewhere. Not that it makes any difference to her vapidity.


 
It'll be around 20-25k. The Indy doesn't have the kind of money the Telegraph or Guardian have.


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 19, 2012)

Content however worth about ten bob.


----------



## Das Uberdog (May 19, 2012)

i wouldn't even guess much over 80K for Graun journos either tbh...


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 19, 2012)

Even shills have to share the pain


----------



## Das Uberdog (May 19, 2012)

though i think definitely more than 25K. one of my childhood friends is a model in London and has ended up getting kept by a food critic from the Indy (generalisation but more or less!) who's only in his 20s and on over 30K... so far as i can tell by their dwelling


----------



## Bakunin (May 19, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Content however worth about ten bob.


 
You must be feeling charitable.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (May 19, 2012)

Das Uberdog said:


> i wouldn't even guess much over 80K for Graun journos either tbh...


 
You have to realise that their senior, long established people will be the 150k types. The idea that Polly Toynbee is earning 150k plus for a career spanning decades and Penny is earning that on a paper with far lower circulation and online traffic and a career of barely 3 years is proper funny!


----------



## The39thStep (May 19, 2012)

Bloody hell ..............http://dangerousideas.org.uk/

This is the sort of event that Laura Penny would die to go to  its a blend of  street , global and smart . She could turn up pissed on vodka, get into an argument, fall over and stomp outside to roll a fag and look young and haunted.


----------



## barney_pig (May 19, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Bloody hell ..............http://dangerousideas.org.uk/
> 
> This is the sort of event that Laura Penny would die to go to its a blend of street , global and smart . She could turn up pissed on vodka, get into an argument, fall over and stomp outside to roll a fag and look young and haunted.


same old crap from the former food critic of Respect, the most dangerous idea would be Claire Solomon explaining to the Islamist brethren why she reverted


----------



## killer b (May 19, 2012)

christ, that's horrifying.


----------



## barney_pig (May 19, 2012)

Tansy Hoskins


----------



## killer b (May 19, 2012)

the list of speakers does seem to be heavy on middle class academics.


----------



## barney_pig (May 19, 2012)

http://dangerousideas.org.uk/index.php/video/143-video-wall-why-we-came-to-dangerous-ideas

edit: didn't want prejudged, but i have now watched all of these


----------



## The39thStep (May 19, 2012)

> She writes on the intersection of gender, race, class and sexuality.


----------



## barney_pig (May 19, 2012)

I popped in at the cunterfire website and discovered that there is a national stop the war demo today.
Biggest ever?


----------



## chilango (May 19, 2012)

I trust you'll be there with a pile "why we need the workers bomb" leaflets then?


----------



## The39thStep (May 19, 2012)

killer b said:


> the list of speakers does seem to be heavy on middle class academics.


 
Innit




> *Kate Tempest* is a world famous wordsmith hailing from the housing estates of South London.
> 
> *Robert Montgomery* is a situationist street artist. Defacing public billboards with commentary on the nature of existence under modern capitalism
> 
> ...


----------



## barney_pig (May 19, 2012)

when is the Proletarian democracy summer school festival of resistance? the line up so far looks enticing


----------



## barney_pig (May 19, 2012)

chilango said:


> I trust you'll be there with a pile "why we need the workers bomb" leaflets then?


the "why Proletarian Democracy isn't marching" leaflets aren't back from the printers


----------



## The39thStep (May 19, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> when is the Proletarian democracy summer school festival of resistance? the line up so far looks enticing


 
should be the next project. We need to strike out new ground ;book fares of resistance clearly aren't sufficient, festival/carnival is a bit hackneyed imo, bring and buy sale of resistance doesn't do us justice either.

We need a think tank and someone with a felt tip pen and a white board, in the meantime I will starts a new thread


----------



## barney_pig (May 19, 2012)

a possible opportunity for praxis?


> Newcastle Counterfire Event
> Defeating the 1% - a short course in rebellion
> Saturday 16 June, 12-5pm
> Bar Loco, 22 Leazes Park Road, Newcastle
> ...


----------



## articul8 (May 19, 2012)

The event will be covered by Hoxton FM.  Of course it will!


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> The event will be covered by Hoxton FM. Of course it will!


 
I thought your comment was just a lazy rehashing of obvious clichés.

Then I scrolled down the page


----------



## The39thStep (May 19, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> a possible opportunity for praxis?


 
Reminds me of when Love Detective and Spanky(?) hacked the Milton Keynes RESPECT board


----------



## rekil (May 21, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Bloody hell ..............http://dangerousideas.org.uk/
> 
> This is the sort of event that Laura Penny would die to go to its a blend of street , global and smart . She could turn up pissed on vodka, get into an argument, fall over and stomp outside to roll a fag and look young and haunted.


She's down as a speaker at Marxism. Into the cockroach nest.


----------



## frogwoman (May 21, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> the "why Proletarian Democracy isn't marching" leaflets aren't back from the printers


 
Hahaha I will so do this.


----------



## rekil (May 21, 2012)

Slightly amusing twitterings from Chicago. 



> Prediction: 'anarchist terrorists' will soon become the new folk-horror used to demonise protest, frighten rest of us into behaving





> Caught up w protest at Jackson and La Salle. Seems to be no plan. Seattle 1999, there was a plan. Just saying, like.



Next day. 


> Where are protesters right now? help?





> Hey NATO! Whaddya say? How many kids did you kill today?





> Storm clouds are gathering and Mordor is on the move #nonato #riotcops


Lotr wank cannibalised from her own Workers' Girder piece.



> Solidarity all round. #noNATO


4 hours later.


> Held up my press pass and got shoved with sticks a second time


All that 'solidarity' melts into air. Don't hit me, hit _them._ 



> combabe


----------



## butchersapron (May 21, 2012)

Did/does she later answer this question and why it was ok  - even imperative - for them to do so?


> Hey NATO! Whaddya say? How many kids did you kill today?


----------



## frogwoman (May 21, 2012)

She's probably going to claim that workers' girder piece as hers


----------



## rekil (May 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Did/does she later answer this question and why is was ok even imperative for them to do so?


Apols combabe, still awaiting clarification I'm afraid. I have detected a certain 'fuzziness' in her attitude. I fancy a repeat performance of the Libdem support denials.

It won't be long before someone does a proper 'Why LP is shit' piece surely.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (May 21, 2012)

Probably won't be long before she holds up her press card for a third time, & gets battered. If she hasn't legged it by then. 

Ta for posting those tweets copliker, fuckin' classics.


----------



## love detective (May 22, 2012)

christ i wish i'd never went near her twitter feed



> Photo of me getting shoved by a cop at yesterday's march. You can clearly see my press pass in my hand. By @*kateharnedy*http://katehphoto.photoshelter.com/image/I0000JCeA4gk.YeM


 
Same theme continues, they've a right to hit _them_ but not me


----------



## love detective (May 22, 2012)

although every cloud as they say

http://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/204396850588033024/photo/1


----------



## love detective (May 22, 2012)

party at mollycrabapple's (vomit)

http://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/202400773747916801/photo/1/large

does the bottles of moet champagne indicate she's now a hard up student pretending to be a hard up student pretending to be a champagne socialist, or something a bit more straightforward


----------



## danny la rouge (May 22, 2012)

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...otesters-are-watching-police-too-7769674.html



> It's hard to tell those taking pictures for the press from those who are simply holding up their cameras because it makes them feel powerful.


 
Hold up your cameras and feel powerful, brothers and sisters.


----------



## love detective (May 22, 2012)

for all her usage of protest to boost her career as a hack she's got a huge them & us thing going on there - barely concealed disdain for those she parasitical to and gives her her life blood


----------



## DotCommunist (May 22, 2012)

danny la rouge said:


> http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...otesters-are-watching-police-too-7769674.html
> 
> 
> 
> Hold up your cameras and feel powerful, brothers and sisters.


 

the lens is mightier than the sword


----------



## danny la rouge (May 22, 2012)

Indeed.


----------



## rekil (May 22, 2012)

Buy that sub a pint.


----------



## Bakunin (May 22, 2012)

From LP's Twitter feed:



> Like she says, art/drawing as reportage by its nature cannot be fully objective. And really nor can writing. But that doesn't inhibit truth.


 
At least until truth gets in the way of your grabbing another byline, some more exposure and a bit more cash, eh Laurie?


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 22, 2012)

Quite a large row going on at the moment between some bloke who was arrested for shouting at John Prescott and Penny and a load of her followers. It's all rather ugly. Funny, though, obv.


----------



## rekil (May 22, 2012)

She does get loads of genuinely creepy shit from right wing filth tbf.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 22, 2012)

copliker said:


> She does get loads of genuinely creepy shit from right wing filth tbf.


 
Yeah I can't actually bring myself to take the piss on twitter for fear of being lumped in with the scum.


----------



## chilango (May 22, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Yeah I can't actually bring myself to take the piss on twitter for fear of being lumped in with the scum.


 
Maybe PD should leap to her defence against the common enemy?


----------



## chilango (May 22, 2012)

You know like the Red Army did for us during the war....


----------



## rekil (May 22, 2012)

chilango said:


> Maybe PD should leap to her defence against the common enemy?


I posted the workers defence squad pic, but not with any real enthusiasm.


----------



## chilango (May 22, 2012)

What was said to her?


----------



## rekil (May 22, 2012)

chilango said:


> What was said to her?


Can't remember. He deleted it whatever it was.


----------



## love detective (May 22, 2012)

penny red said:
			
		

> no, YOU want this to stop. I want ppl to understand that violent harrassment of women writers is unacceptable +has consequences


 
violent harrassment of women who are not writers and violent harrassment of men of all stripes are presumably acceptable


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 22, 2012)

chilango said:


> What was said to her?


 
Something about being amused by a mental image of Penny and her idiot followers burning to death in a barn.


----------



## rekil (May 22, 2012)

What happened to "fewer business lunches and more throwing punches" then eh?


----------



## chilango (May 22, 2012)




----------



## Steel Icarus (May 22, 2012)

Oh that's _special_.


----------



## chilango (May 22, 2012)

I want some of Penny's right-wing trolls for ourselves.

See where they can unintentionally spread the word of PD. Those dicks might be dumb enough to take us seriously...


----------



## BigTom (May 22, 2012)

chilango said:


> View attachment 19485


 
 Amazing.


----------



## co-op (May 22, 2012)

chilango said:


> View attachment 19485


Fucking best yet!


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 22, 2012)

love detective said:


> violent harrassment of women who are not writers and violent harrassment of men of all stripes are presumably acceptable


 
and maybe even desirable?


----------



## articul8 (May 22, 2012)

You do realise loves the attention, whether hostile or otherwise?   Just as long as she's not ignored


----------



## butchersapron (May 22, 2012)

articul8 said:


> You do realise loves the attention, whether hostile or otherwise? Just as long as she's not ignored


No, no one realises that. It comes like a blinding revalation.


----------



## articul8 (May 22, 2012)

58 pages says otherwise


----------



## chilango (May 22, 2012)

No it doesn't


----------



## butchersapron (May 22, 2012)

articul8 said:


> 58 pages says otherwise


How do it?


----------



## Mr.Bishie (May 22, 2012)




----------



## articul8 (May 22, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> How do it?


OK, let me rephrase - 58 pages suggests some posters here are giving her the kind of attention she craves


----------



## Mr.Bishie (May 22, 2012)

articul8 said:


> OK, let me rephrase - 58 pages suggests some posters here are giving her the kind of attention she craves


 
58 pages of taking the piss. If she craves that, then she's more of a head banger than I first thought.


----------



## chilango (May 22, 2012)

articul8 said:


> OK, let me rephrase - 58 pages suggests some posters here are giving her the kind of attention she craves



Who's benefitting most from this exchange?


----------



## butchersapron (May 22, 2012)

articul8 said:


> OK, let me rephrase - 58 pages suggests some posters here are giving her the kind of attention she craves


She don't crave this.


----------



## smokedout (May 22, 2012)

chilango said:


> Who's benefitting most from this exchange?


 
The Indy?


----------



## chilango (May 22, 2012)

You reckon?


----------



## smokedout (May 22, 2012)

well its not likely to the doing their cpm revenue any harm

no reason to stop though


----------



## butchersapron (May 22, 2012)

smokedout said:


> well its not likely to the doing their cpm revenue any harm
> 
> no reason to stop though


The one going down month on month?


----------



## chilango (May 22, 2012)

smokedout said:


> well its not likely to the doing their cpm revenue any harm
> 
> no reason to stop though




Dunno about anyone else, but I've not been visiting their site.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (May 22, 2012)

smokedout said:


> The Indy?



Nah they have a billionaire owner who clearly pays any old writer 100k or more a year, they're rolling in it!


----------



## butchersapron (May 22, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Nah they have a billionaire owner who clearly pays any old writer 100k or more a year, they're rolling in it!


As ever, wait. I'm right.


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 22, 2012)

A shame they can't spend some of that Moscow Gold to fix their bloody website so it displays properly


----------



## smokedout (May 22, 2012)

chilango said:


> Dunno about anyone else, but I've not been visiting their site.


 
I have, because of this thread.  It's shit though, hasn't made me want to go back.


----------



## articul8 (May 22, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> 58 pages of taking the piss. If she craves that, then she's more of a head banger than I first thought.


It's attention - all publicity is good publicity.


----------



## smokedout (May 22, 2012)

nah I don't agree with that, it's not doing her any good at all - she wants to be a 'serious' journalist and she's a laughing stock


----------



## chilango (May 22, 2012)

articul8 said:


> It's attention - all publicity is good publicity.



No it's not.


----------



## articul8 (May 22, 2012)

she's a name.  Hostility, piss-takes, derision, whatever - it all fuels that.  She's grateful....


----------



## butchersapron (May 22, 2012)

articul8 said:


> she's a name. Hostility, piss-takes, derision, whatever - it all fuels that. She's grateful....


Everything is everything. There's no way out of you being right is there.


----------



## articul8 (May 22, 2012)

I didn't predict Chelsea would win the champions league


----------



## smokedout (May 22, 2012)

articul8 said:


> she's a name. Hostility, piss-takes, derision, whatever - it all fuels that. She's grateful....


 
tell that to gary glitter


----------



## articul8 (May 22, 2012)

would you be talking about Paul Gadd otherwise?


----------



## butchersapron (May 22, 2012)

articul8 said:


> would you be talking about Paul Gadd otherwise?


Wow


----------



## smokedout (May 22, 2012)

not much else to be said


----------



## smokedout (May 22, 2012)

so when you said 'all publicity is good publicity.' you actually meant 'all publicity is publicity'

dont think anyone would argue with that


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 22, 2012)

articul8 said:


> would you be talking about Paul Gadd otherwise?


 
bonkers bruno


----------



## chilango (May 22, 2012)

articul8 said:


> would you be talking about Paul Gadd otherwise?



Er.....


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 22, 2012)

In the words of Dick Dietrick, people, people, come on.


----------



## bluestreak (May 22, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> She don't crave this.


 
She don't even know we exist, let alone give a monkeys about what we say about her.  I'd like t use this as an example of her critical analysis failure, but...


----------



## Nylock (May 23, 2012)

chilango said:


> View attachment 19485


That is brilliant!


----------



## Riklet (May 23, 2012)

Laurie follows Proletarian Democracy on twitter


----------



## phildwyer (May 23, 2012)

copliker said:


> Bizarre misreading of and shit response to Gove's wet nonsense from the other day.
> 
> http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...on-but-im-still-not-on-your-team-7737823.html
> 
> I'm surprised she didn't list her exam grades. And I bet that teacher took the form of a burning shrubbery.


 
"The idea that nobody can really be a socialist if they were lucky enough to go to a private school is wilful stupidity."

It's the unthinking assumption that going to a private school is "lucky" that gets me. The automatic presupposition that it's "lucky" to grow up surrounded exclusively by rich people. _That's_ what prevents her from being a socialist.


----------



## articul8 (May 23, 2012)

articul8 said:


> would you be talking about Paul Gadd otherwise?


After due reflection and cogitation...I was talking total bollocks here  Point about Laurie still stands..


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 23, 2012)

articul8 said:


> After due reflection and cogitation...I was talking total bollocks here  Point about Laurie still stands..


 
It doesn't still stand at all - 20 oddballs taking the piss on an obscure message board is probably neither here nor there - however if it was to mean owt, it would probably at the very least irritate her not to be taken seriously, and especially to have her bullshit pointed out by people who often claim somesort of radical politics.


----------



## articul8 (May 23, 2012)

it's still attention though - it might irritate her a bit but not to be the object of attention would be worst still


----------



## chilango (May 23, 2012)

If you were playing footy in the park and Sir Alex walked past would you rather he just kept walking or stopped, pointed and laughed whilst shouting "you're shit" in front of all your mates ?


----------



## killer b (May 23, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> It doesn't still stand at all - 20 oddballs taking the piss on an obscure message board is probably neither here nor there - however if it was to mean owt, it would probably at the very least irritate her not to be taken seriously, and especially to have her bullshit pointed out by people who often claim somesort of radical politics.


or 'soi-disant radical trolls', as we're sometimes known.


----------



## love detective (May 23, 2012)

she is a total dick regardless though


----------



## killer b (May 23, 2012)

she's probably seen this thread by now anyway, especially since our more excitable PD comrades started courting her so assiduously. can't imagine it'll have given her much cause for celebration mind.


----------



## chilango (May 23, 2012)

Maybe she'll join Urban...

...any new posters recently spouting shite?


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 23, 2012)

she'll fit in quite well around here.


----------



## chilango (May 23, 2012)

What are you saying?


----------



## butchersapron (May 23, 2012)

articul8 said:
			
		

> After due reflection and cogitation...I was talking total bollocks here  Point about Laurie still stands..



Sorry, I was wrong. (But I was also right to be wrong. And I was right really).


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 23, 2012)

chilango said:


> What are you saying?


 
broken britain


----------



## articul8 (May 23, 2012)

chilango said:


> If you were playing footy in the park and Sir Alex walked past would you rather he just kept walking or stopped, pointed and laughed whilst shouting "you're shit" in front of all your mates ?


 
I can't get my head around this analogy - you are the Sir Alex of radical left web commentary?  And I still flatter myself that my skills as a ball-playing midfielder would impress a top premiership club


----------



## chilango (May 23, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I can't get my head around this analogy - you are the Sir Alex of radical left web commentary? And I still flatter myself that my skills as a ball-playing midfielder would impress a top premiership club


 
i'm more the Carlos Quieros figure really...


----------



## articul8 (May 23, 2012)

who is Sir Alex then


----------



## butchersapron (May 23, 2012)

Penny ffs.


----------



## articul8 (May 23, 2012)

Not in the original analogy - she was the one being judged


----------



## chilango (May 23, 2012)

articul8 said:


> who is Sir Alex then


 
Barry Mainwaring of course.


----------



## rekil (May 23, 2012)

killer b said:


> she's probably seen this thread by now anyway, especially since our more excitable PD comrades started courting her so assiduously. can't imagine it'll have given her much cause for celebration mind.


I was under the impression PD were following Chuikov's 'hug the enemy' principle, but I haven't worked out what the equivalent of a 'retweet' at Stalingrad might have been.


----------



## smokedout (May 23, 2012)

neckshot


----------



## smokedout (May 23, 2012)

as in that cunt deserves a stalingrad retweet


----------



## phildwyer (May 23, 2012)

Retweet from Moscow.


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 24, 2012)

http://www.penny-red.com/

Another rung


----------



## love detective (May 24, 2012)

> Incidentally, this month, which has involved me starting an exciting new job at The Independent, has also been full of more than the usual catalogue of attacks, rapebombing, slut-shaming, death threats, professional slanders, right-wing trolls, libertarian trolls, soi-disant radical trolls and mad people with vendettas, including former comrades, trying to push false stories about me into the gossip press. I try not to let it get to me, but sometimes it does get difficult. Despite all this I’ve managed to keep producing, but that might not have been the case without the support of a lot of wonderful people, friends and colleagues and near-strangers. I am massively grateful to everyone who has offered me their solidarity over the past few weeks - you know who you are, and I hope you know that your efforts are more than appreciated. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love you.


 





​


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 24, 2012)

'PMs of support'


----------



## DotCommunist (May 24, 2012)

soi distant radical trolls


----------



## love detective (May 24, 2012)

at least she's managed to 'keep producing'


----------



## Bakunin (May 24, 2012)

love detective said:


> at least she's managed to 'keep producing'


 
So does a bowel infection. It doesn't mean I like experiencing one on a daily basis.


----------



## past caring (May 24, 2012)

love detective said:


> at least she's managed to 'keep producing'


 
The factory of ideas.


----------



## flypanam (May 24, 2012)

No mention of New York taxi drivers having her in their sights and stepping on the gas? I thought that would warrent a mention seeing as she was saved by a movie star.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 24, 2012)

no mention of th time she and ed milliband re-enacted the iconic vancouver riot kiss to a background bonfire lit by vanities and copies of the Socialist Worker, but we can't have everything eh


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 24, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> So does a bowel infection. It doesn't mean I like experiencing one on a daily basis.


 
Am I imagining things, or has your itchy arsehole magically developed out of a chesty cough?


----------



## Bakunin (May 24, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Am I imagining things, or has your itchy arsehole magically developed out of a chesty cough?


 
A bowel infection is more vile than a chest infection, thus it's a more appropriate metaphor for the subject at hand.


----------



## barney_pig (May 24, 2012)

S☼I said:


> http://www.penny-red.com/
> 
> Another rung


I spent a good time reading and re reading this blog and still am unsure whether its real or one of ours.
 I this what the post modernists were talking about?


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 29, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> I swear, if I could get a camera into my head to record some of my insane cyberpunk dreams I could really freak out some art kids


 
I just saw this and thought it belonged here.


----------



## Random (May 29, 2012)

There's nothing more boring than someone telling you their disjointed "weird" dream. Lacking in all the significance in which it appeared to them that night.


----------



## rekil (Jun 1, 2012)

Retweeting conspiraloons fuck yeah.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jun 14, 2012)

Just happened to notice last night that as twitter etc was going into meltdown about the eviction of Occupy London from Finsbury Square, Penny was tweeting about laundromats in New York.

(I really should stop posting on this thread. Bad BH. But it's just so easy and enjoyable to take the piss...)


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 14, 2012)

I will be honest, I didn't know Occupy London was still happening?? I thought they got evicted months ago...


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 14, 2012)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-18437009


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 14, 2012)

Am I right in assuming it was just the loons and vulnerable people left?


----------



## articul8 (Jun 14, 2012)

Random said:


> There's nothing more boring than someone telling you their disjointed "weird" dream. Lacking in all the significance in which it appeared to them that night.


You won't want to hear about me nicking Glen Hoddle's credit card details then?


----------



## flypanam (Jun 14, 2012)

Seems like Pens is taking the sword of truth to Game of Thrones now, how she sleeps at night when all there is tyranny...

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2012/06/game-thrones-and-good-ruler-complex


----------



## Ade-oh (Jun 14, 2012)

flypanam said:


> Seems like Pens is taking the sword of truth to Game of Thrones now, how she sleeps at night when all there is tyranny...
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2012/06/game-thrones-and-good-ruler-complex


 
Thank goodness she's around to explain it all to us:  I'd nearly fooled myself into thinking that it was just some escapist fantasy entertainment.  I'm off to see 'Prometheus' this evening:  what's the key message from 'the man' there?  I hope Laurie will take some time out to tell me...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 14, 2012)

flypanam said:


> Seems like Pens is taking the sword of truth to Game of Thrones now, how she sleeps at night when all there is tyranny...
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2012/06/game-thrones-and-good-ruler-complex


 
I was going to post about this when I read it last friday, but I thought "why bother? Her grasp of the context is minimal. Anyone who's read the books or seen the series will know she's cocked it and will blame the subs again".


----------



## kavenism (Jun 14, 2012)

flypanam said:


> Seems like Pens is taking the sword of truth to Game of Thrones now, how she sleeps at night when all there is tyranny...
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2012/06/game-thrones-and-good-ruler-complex


 

Is she back writing for them then? Have the Independent giver her ze boot?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 16, 2012)

> As well as being mightily entertaining, ​_Game of Thrones​_ is racist rape-culture Disneyland with Dragons.​


I just watch it for the swordfights


----------



## revol68 (Jun 16, 2012)

Laurie Penny slating Game of Thrones for being unsubtle, lords fucking save us.

She seems to miss the fact that it has some of the best female roles in any tv or film, maybe she is soo stupid that she thinks showing sexism and general cruelty is to approve of it, when anyone with wit would see that the treatment of women and the general cruelty of the world is more mourned and meant to drive home the point that the Game of Thrones is an amoral game.

Nor does she seem to pick up on the fact it's the outcasts and the marginalised amongst the cast who provide what little moral compass there is.

I suppose what you can take from a text is largely dependent on what you can bring to it and in her case it's the usual black and white hysterical pseudo moralistic shite.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jun 16, 2012)

revol68 said:


> Laurie Penny slating Game of Thrones for being unsubtle, lords fucking save us.
> 
> She seems to miss the fact that it has some of the best female roles in any tv or film, maybe she is soo stupid that she thinks showing sexism and general cruelty is to approve of it, when anyone with wit would see that the treatment of women and the general cruelty of the world is more mourned and meant to drive home the point that the Game of Thrones is an amoral game.
> 
> ...


I think Penny Red should have her rate of pay per word tripled. That way she could reach her income target with more economical use of verbiage. Don't they teach them to précis at Oxbridge?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 16, 2012)

revol68 said:


> Laurie Penny slating Game of Thrones for being unsubtle, lords fucking save us.
> 
> She seems to miss the fact that it has some of the best female roles in any tv or film, maybe she is soo stupid that she thinks showing sexism and general cruelty is to approve of it, when anyone with wit would see that the treatment of women and the general cruelty of the world is more mourned and meant to drive home the point that the Game of Thrones is an amoral game.
> 
> ...


 
Indeed the irony here is that GoT is a liberal left critique of fuedal barbarism.


----------



## revol68 (Jun 16, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Indeed the irony here is that GoT is a liberal left critique of fuedal barbarism.


 
I don't know about that, I'd imagine it's not meant to simply be a critique of feudal barbarism, I think it's got more to say about contemporary society too.


----------



## Ole (Jun 17, 2012)

I didn't know what else to do with this other than post it here.



> _*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* _
> In a loft. Listening to some music. Nights after the revolution will be a bit like this, I hope. http://pic.twitter.com/EVNnXt8w


----------



## Ade-oh (Jun 17, 2012)

Ole said:


> I didn't know what else to do with this other than post it here.


 
This'll be the inevitable Lib Dem revolution will it - when the concerned middle-class masses rise up to ensure that Tarquin doesn't have to pay too much for a university education and isn't saddled with a lot of student debt, and that Nescafe only get their raw materials from Fairtrade sources?  When Penny 'La Passionata' Red stands on the barricades, and the oppressors of the huddled not-as-well-off-as-they-used-to-be are put up against the wall for a stiff talking-to?


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 17, 2012)

Ole said:


> I didn't know what else to do with this other than post it here.


 
saw this and thought hang on wouldn't nights after the revolution be full of endless meetings badly chaired by some junior Trot with a permanent section of ism types  making constitutional points about standing orders or suggesting that we all sit in a circle?

Mind you I suppose these are what night after the revolution would be if there were trendy loft spaces and cheap cocktails ,the heady smell of Pink Pepper * and a cab home.

*


> "Pink Pepper is appropriate for these challenging times because it's uplifting and has a certain optimism to it,


----------



## articul8 (Jun 17, 2012)

What is "Pink Pepper"?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 17, 2012)

Don't you follow the scent trade?


----------



## articul8 (Jun 17, 2012)

err, no.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 21, 2012)

Her friend done a picture of her as Leviathan


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 21, 2012)

Yeah, I know.


----------



## chilango (Jun 21, 2012)

If she's a "writer" why's she holding a big stubby marker pen?


----------



## love detective (Jun 21, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Her friend done a picture of her as Leviathan


 
fucking hell


----------



## imposs1904 (Jun 21, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Her friend done a picture of her as Leviathan


 

If Michael Jackson had lived another five years I think he might have ended up looking a lot like this portrait.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 21, 2012)

A credit to scholarship girls everywhere!


----------



## love detective (Jun 21, 2012)

> delaying production schedule so you can refilm a first episode that isn't almost all white ppl


 
any tiny black men in suits? even if you don't have any tiny black men in suits please send tiny black men in suits


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 21, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Her friend done a picture of her as Leviathan


 
Fuckin' lol.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jun 21, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Fuckin' lol.


 Fucking hell. If your friend did that, you'd have a word, wouldn't you?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 21, 2012)




----------



## Lo Siento. (Jun 21, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


>


 It's fucking creepy. Made me feel a bit ill.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 21, 2012)




----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 21, 2012)

She looks like one of the secondary characters from the "Girl Genius" comic. How ironic.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 21, 2012)

What's the fanfic status of Penny? Dare I look?


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jun 21, 2012)

You wonder what she's been telling these poor creatures about her life in England. Something along the lines of "I'm basically Lenin back home", you would imagine.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 21, 2012)

It's her hipster friend Molly Crabapple innit? A Penny Lib Dem version of the bubble machine thing she did.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 21, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Her friend done a picture of her as Leviathan


 
that is fucking creepy


----------



## JimW (Jun 21, 2012)

You'd be backing slowly out the room after they unveiled that masterpiece to you.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jun 21, 2012)

fucking laughable - an insult to proper artists and activists everywhere


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 21, 2012)

that is amazing!


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 21, 2012)

JimW said:


> You'd be backing slowly out the room after they unveiled that masterpiece to you.


----------



## barney_pig (Jun 21, 2012)

as my wife might say, ""why aren't there any normal people anymore?"


----------



## smokedout (Jun 21, 2012)

Ole said:


> I didn't know what else to do with this other than post it here.
> 
> _*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* _
> In a loft. Listening to some music. Nights after the revolution will be a bit like this, I hope. http://pic.twitter.com/EVNnXt8w​


 
I'm not opposed to locking penny red in a loft after and even during the revolution as it goes


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)

Not sure she have the privilege of music though - that has to be earnt. And you can just guess what sort of wank she listens to can't you?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)

Isn't that Jimmy Car anyway?


----------



## killer b (Jun 21, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> that is amazing!


i agree. it looks like a pullout poster from workers girder.


----------



## killer b (Jun 21, 2012)

it doesn't look much like penny though. that crabapple lady needs to practice a bit harder if she wants to get any kind of rep as a socialist painter. stalin would have sent her to the gulag for such a poor reproduction.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)

Why is there a fox in a teapot?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 21, 2012)

It's not a teapot, it's a kettle.

A KETTLE.

THE _*FOX*_ HAS BEEN _*KETTLED*_


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)

It's got a proper spout! Yanks. Fucks sake.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 21, 2012)

killer b said:


> it doesn't look much like penny though. that crabapple lady needs to practice a bit harder if she wants to get any kind of rep as a socialist painter. stalin would have sent her to the gulag for such a poor reproduction.


 
D'you reckon?







butchersapron said:


> And you can just guess what sort of wank she listens to can't you?


 
Some new Indie groups, no doubt. We probably haven't heard of them.


----------



## discokermit (Jun 21, 2012)

what the fuck is the cat with the gold scissors doing?


----------



## JimW (Jun 21, 2012)

discokermit said:


> what the fuck is the cat with the gold scissors doing?


Fat cats making cuts?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 21, 2012)

FATCATS

GOLD SCISSORS REPRESENT WEALTH / CUTS SYMBOLISM OF 'UK UNCUT'


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 21, 2012)

I'm mildly perturbed there isn't a gurt big heffalump frolicking with a donkey in the background.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)

Just needs bob marley in the background.


----------



## JimW (Jun 21, 2012)

It's the Austin Allegro of allegory.


----------



## discokermit (Jun 21, 2012)

the cat is snipping at the flames though?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)

She could have done a saint-sebastian and had penny with all these golden scissors in her body.


----------



## Random (Jun 21, 2012)

discokermit said:


> the cat is snipping at the flames though?


No, the flames are melting the scissors


----------



## discokermit (Jun 21, 2012)

Random said:


> No, the flames are melting the scissors


why is the cat holding them in the flames then?

also, gold is a very good conductor of heat. why is the cat not getting its paws burnt?

i hate to say it, but this picture makes no sense.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 21, 2012)

discokermit said:


> i hate to say it, but this picture makes no sense.


 
Sometimes being a one-woman whirlwind of made-up first-person purple prose won't make any sense. Them's the apples.


----------



## discokermit (Jun 21, 2012)

crabapples?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)

shit apples.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 21, 2012)

That painting is almost as good as that one of the hippy cutting the rope bridge in the gatefold sleeve of the prodigy's music for the jilted generation


----------



## belboid (Jun 21, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> That painting is almost as good as that one of the hippy cutting the rope bridge in the gatefold sleeve of the prodigy's music for the jilted generation


probably the only record sleeve that made Yes's look good


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> That painting is almost as good as that one of the hippy cutting the rope bridge in the gatefold sleeve of the prodigy's music for the jilted generation


Put it up then!


----------



## Blagsta (Jun 21, 2012)

I thought that was ace at the time 

I was taking lots of E.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 21, 2012)

Not as good as this, though:






_THE JAILBREAK The Warrior locked himself into his video scanner and gazed throughout the Universe... until he came upon Dimension 5,_
_DIMENSION 5 was now in the hands of the Overmaster, whose lust for ultimate power had become an obsession. Religion and the media were all under his control and computer files were kept on all known living persons within the city zones._
_Many were arrested and jailed._
_It was therefore significant that The Jailbreak represented a freedom for so many yet to those involved at the time it was a series of events, the outcome of which no-one could have foreseen. The plan was simple. By knocking out the alarm systems in a riot, they then would cause an explosion which would blow half the cell blocks away. Outside help came from an organization known as Phono-Graphics, who if the plan was successful would eventually capitalize on the whole project._
_The night of The Jailbreak all hell broke loose. A Red Alert was issued by the Overmaster himself. Robot trackers, military police. dogs and all available vehicles were on the hunt. All were caught, except four. who made it to the Rampic Buildings on the south side of the city. It was in these buildings that they broadcast and recorded selected material, some of which still survives today. Through these recordings they built up a follow ing who eventually took to the streets in what was to become the Final War._
_The Warrior had become weary and disillusioned with war, but seeing how the people struggled to be free he knew once again he must raise up his sword..._
_The music sailed out into the night then upward towards the skies. travel ling on that thin border between reality and imagination_


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 21, 2012)

I still think it's a great statement even though it makes Banksy look deep
ETA: the Prodigy pic


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 21, 2012)

discokermit said:


> why is the cat holding them in the flames then?
> 
> also, gold is a very good conductor of heat. why is the cat not getting its paws burnt?
> 
> i hate to say it, but this picture makes no sense.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> I still think it's a great statement even though it makes Banksy look deep
> ETA: the Prodigy pic


Should've had the coppers cutting the bridge.


----------



## killer b (Jun 21, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> D'you reckon?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


that looks nothing like penny either.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 21, 2012)




----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)

killer b said:


> that looks nothing like penny either.


Looks like lyndsey and her no shibboleths shibboleth.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 21, 2012)

that bloke siphoning power from gaia looks like captain planets feckless edgy brother


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 21, 2012)

That's Lord V!


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> View attachment 20398


Look like the old ones down the farm sunday mornings.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 21, 2012)

Poor Greece, as if things couldn't get any worse. 



> We’ve been waiting to announce this for a while. On the 4th of July, the splendid Ms Molly Crabapple and I are going to Greece to do some reporting, meeting up with activists and community organisers on the ground in Athens and elsewhere. Molly is an artist who lives in a loft full of birdcages opposite Zucotti Park; I’m a journalist who lives out of a large red backpack on Molly’s floor. We met during Occupy Wall Street and have spent the past several months experimenting with making things happen together - when I went to cover the protests in Chicago and Montreal this summer, I took pictures on my phone and sent them to Molly, who created art from them. Discordia, however, is the first trip where both of us will be there on the ground. She will make pictures, I will make words, we will try very hard not to get arrested or deported, and all shall be marvellous. Discordia is an experimental art-and-journalism project, taking the Hunter Thompson-Ralph Steadman macho model and twisting it to our own ends, and it’ll be published as an ebook in the Autumn.


----------



## killer b (Jun 21, 2012)

'macho'?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)

It never ends. This self-love. I think it's not the macho bit that needs questioning there in the Hunter Thompson-Ralph Steadman comparison. Oddly though dear old ralphy was a very privved person like penny.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 21, 2012)

Some sage advice for her, from someone on twatter:



> If you become too diverse then your content could become shallow and facile.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 21, 2012)

As your diversity trainer, I advise against this.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 21, 2012)

_Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 2: Electric Boogaloo_


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)

The comrades have been informed btw.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 21, 2012)

crabapple has to be an assumed name. I'll check. Yes it is. Crabapple


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)

The shit winds are a blowing. Them shit apples are going to fall.​


----------



## articul8 (Jun 21, 2012)

> On the 4th of July, the splendid Ms Molly Crabapple and I are going to Greece to do some reporting, meeting up with activists and community organisers on the ground in Athens and elsewhere. Molly is an artist who lives in a loft full of birdcages


 
I'm sure the Greeks will be dancing in the fucking streets about this


----------



## kavenism (Jun 21, 2012)

This thread really is the gift that keeps on giving.

It’s odd she thinks of herself as a fox. To me she’s always been more of a stoat.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)




----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 21, 2012)

Destination Athens


----------



## kavenism (Jun 21, 2012)

These last two posts are basically exactly what Penny and Crabapple will be up to, plus a few scatter cushions, scented candles and cheap Ouzo.


----------



## JimW (Jun 21, 2012)

Well then.
Erk, wrong thread.


----------



## love detective (Jun 21, 2012)

kavenism said:


> These last two posts are basically exactly what Penny and Crabapple will be up to, plus a few scatter cushions, scented candles and cheap Ouzo.


 
just making things happen and shit


----------



## rekil (Jun 21, 2012)

chilango said:


> If she's a "writer" why's she holding a big stubby marker pen?


Maybe it has magic properties. That pic looks like an inadvertently appropriate pre-teen comic fantasy book cover. Laurie And The Magic Marker.


I'm probably doing the pre-teen comic fantasy book cover illustrator community something of a disservice there actually.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2012)




----------



## rekil (Jun 21, 2012)




----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 21, 2012)

the red pen is allusion to her 'penny red' name, her gr8 m8 warren ellis (comic book artist) has made reference to it, calls it her pen of justice or something. Goes back to the days when our penny was a humble blogger.

why the fuck do I bother keeping such irrelevant trivia in my head


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 21, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> warren ellis (comic book artist)


 
He's a Penny not a Crabapple.


----------



## Blagsta (Jun 21, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> the red pen is allusion to her 'penny red' name, her gr8 m8 warren ellis (comic book artist) has made reference to it, calls it her pen of justice or something. Goes back to the days when our penny was a humble blogger.
> 
> why the fuck do I bother keeping such irrelevant trivia in my head


 
*throws Badseeds and Grinderman CDs away*


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 21, 2012)

different Warren Ellis though they both look similar as well as sharing a name


----------



## Blagsta (Jun 21, 2012)

I know.  I was making a joke.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 21, 2012)

indeed he is, my mistake. Loved his work on Freak Angels, and the artist also derves props, post-apocalypse whitechapel was so very well drawn


----------



## Bakunin (Jun 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


>




Foxy stoat seeks...


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 22, 2012)

I got this via a tweet by a Mother Jones staff writer:






http://mollycrabapple.tumblr.com/post/24985978345

"What is it with bohemian English women and nicknames?"


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 22, 2012)

I can't stop looking at it.It's so ...shit.


----------



## Riklet (Jun 22, 2012)

All that is needed is a good old feminised and Pennified version of this fabulous piece of Albanian soviet realism, and then we'll be good to go with the heroic statue building (volunteers wanted now - see latest Workers' Girder)


----------



## revol68 (Jun 22, 2012)

To think I used to laugh at the lack of selfawareness in loyalist murals.


----------



## rekil (Jun 22, 2012)

Let's look at the facts.

We have:-


A narcissistic self-styled libertine that espouses a sort of toytown decadence.
A successful career in spite of possessing no discernible talent.
And a picture in an attic that gets shitter every time you look at it.
_What diabolical hand is at play here?_


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 22, 2012)

Don't go all literary mate.

That reminds me, Penny's book list. Contained Debord. Really.


----------



## rekil (Jun 22, 2012)

I know I know.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 22, 2012)

copliker said:


> Let's look at the facts.
> 
> We have:-
> 
> ...


 
Took me some time to get this one.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 22, 2012)

copliker said:


> _What diabolical hand is at play here?_


 
The ghost of Max Gogarty?


----------



## love detective (Jun 22, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Took me some time to get this one.


 
Penny Gray


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 22, 2012)

his old man used to charge some impovrished patients merely the price of a folk tale. So I read. Massive heart


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 22, 2012)

We don't choose the lifestyle, it's thrust upon our young, hip shoulders!


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 22, 2012)

Faces of NATO? Come lovely bombs on them others.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 22, 2012)

WOW

dissent as lifestyle 
not a choice


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 22, 2012)

She has a dream


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 22, 2012)

do we need those flourished g's? I know its a minor point to pick up on but its a slippery slope from curlicued g's to using smiley faces to dot your I's


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 22, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> She has a dream


I have a dream


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 22, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> WOW
> 
> dissent as lifestyle
> not a choice


 
I'm sure that both the irony and the contradictions have entirely passed her by.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 22, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I have a dream


 
then build it ffs


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 22, 2012)

It's non communicable.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 22, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> We don't choose the lifestyle, it's thrust upon our young, hip shoulders!



I've been trying to avoid this thread but this ^^^^ is the last straw. I used to be pretty bad, but I was never THIS bad. Jesus, how is this not a parody or intentional self-mockery? It's unbelievable. It looks like something a pair of 14-yr-olds would do for the school newspaper ...


----------



## articul8 (Jun 22, 2012)

Has it really come to this? The first amoeba out of the ocean and millions of years later...


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 22, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Has it really come to this? The first amoeba out of the ocean and millions of years later...


Fuck off twat.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 22, 2012)

#i #hate #twitter


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 22, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> #i #hate #twitter



In a minute someone will say something mentioning twitter and then you will decide you like it.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 22, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> In a minute someone will say something mentioning twitter and then you will decide you like it.


 
no. i hate twitter. i am only on it to speak to my best mate but she usually speaks to me via skype or on here.


----------



## JimW (Jun 22, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> I've been trying to avoid this thread but this ^^^^ is the last straw. I used to be pretty bad, but I was never THIS bad. Jesus, how is this not a parody or intentional self-mockery? It's unbelievable. It looks like something a pair of 14-yr-olds would do for the school newspaper ...


Blog title, when I followed link to look at pic, was 'demographic of one' which is a pretty sad way of thinking too - me, me, unique and special me.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 22, 2012)

She is the lovechild of Pandora and Adrian Mole


----------



## killer b (Jun 22, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> She is the lovechild of Pandora and Adrian Mole


perfect. All yours?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 22, 2012)

Yes, that last pic made me think of Adrian. Did they end up having kids? Only read the first couple of books


----------



## killer b (Jun 22, 2012)

Dunno. I only read the first one after growing pains, and it was shit. Pandora became a labour party policy wonk though, fittingly enough. 

I imagine the first two are probably shit too,  but they were amazing when I was 13.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 22, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> no. i hate twitter. i am only on it to speak to my best mate but she usually speaks to me via skype or on here.


 
Now is that your final opinion on the matter?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 22, 2012)

I quite like the artwork, but I think Isy Morgenmuffel's and Kate Evans' stuff speaks to me more.

ETA:

So I guess that means that Molly Crabapple's is blanking me


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 22, 2012)




----------



## rekil (Jun 22, 2012)

Smartest kid in a smart school.


----------



## rekil (Jun 22, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> She is the lovechild of Pandora and Adrian Mole


Yep, see Adrian's novel attempt, Longing For Wolverhampton.


----------



## chilango (Jun 22, 2012)

Shit art.

Shit words.

Fucking  shit.

Embarrassing stuff all round.


----------



## rekil (Jun 22, 2012)

chilango said:


> Shit art.
> 
> Shit words.
> 
> ...


Comedy is all about doing things badly. This Greece book will be amazing.


----------



## articul8 (Jun 22, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Fuck off twat.


speaks neanderthal man...


----------



## Garek (Jun 22, 2012)

copliker said:


> This Greece book will be amazing.


 
She can be the George Orwell for the 21st century; "Homage to Ellada".


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 22, 2012)

Garek said:


> She can be the George Orwell for the 21st century; "Homage to Ellada".


 
More like "Homage to a lump of green putty I found in my armpit one midsummer's morning."


----------



## binka (Jun 22, 2012)

has she ever explained why she cheered on nato last year?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 22, 2012)

Garek said:


> She can be the George Orwell for the 21st century; "Homage to Ellada".


 
oddly enough eric was despised by salinists and others alike for being a massive poverty tourist. and a shit.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 22, 2012)

I think that is Garek's point - ??


----------



## rekil (Jun 22, 2012)

What's the name of that massive liar journo who was I think best mates with a soviet bigwig in the scw, mentioned here previously & gets about 2 lines in Preston's We Saw Spain Die book. Claud Cockburn?


----------



## Garek (Jun 22, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> oddly enough eric was despised by salinists and others alike for being a massive poverty tourist. and a shit.


 
Kinda my point


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 22, 2012)

ah excuse me, have my shit glasses on*

*drunk


----------



## articul8 (Jun 23, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> oddly enough eric was despised by salinists and others alike for being a massive poverty tourist. and a shit.


 
How was he "a shit"?  (oh yes, remembered the Encounter/list of reds stuff)


----------



## imposs1904 (Jun 23, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Yes, that last pic made me think of Adrian. Did they end up having kids? Only read the first couple of books


 
they never ever consummated their relationship


----------



## imposs1904 (Jun 23, 2012)

killer b said:


> Dunno. I only read the first one after growing pains, and it was shit. Pandora became a labour party policy wonk though, fittingly enough.
> 
> I imagine the first two are probably shit too, but they were amazing when I was 13.


 

bollocks  don't diss the wonderful sue townsend


----------



## killer b (Jun 23, 2012)

Why not? I've tried a few since I've been an adult purely out of loyalty to the memory of mole. They've all been embarrassingly bad.

Did you read 'the queen and i'? Jaw droppingly shit.


----------



## imposs1904 (Jun 23, 2012)

killer b said:


> Why not? I've tried a few since I've been an adult purely out of loyalty to the memory of mole. They've all been embarrassingly bad.
> 
> Did you read 'the queen and i'? Jaw droppingly shit.


 
No, I haven't read the Queen and I. I still think the first two Mole books are wonderful, and I guess I love the fact that the best selling British author in Thatcher's 80s was an old lefty.

I don't usually go in for 'national treasures' type guff but I think Townsend (and Kathy Burke) qualify.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 23, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> No, I haven't read the Queen and I. I still think the first two Mole books are wonderful, and I guess I love the fact that the best selling British author in Thatcher's 80s was an old lefty.
> 
> I don't usually go in for 'national treasures' type guff but I think Townsend (and Kathy Burke) qualify.


Get back to radio 4.


----------



## imposs1904 (Jun 23, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Get back to radio 4.


 
is she on?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 23, 2012)

They're always on.




_Slice of real life?_ Asks _Brenda_ or _Alison_, _tell me all about it._


----------



## imposs1904 (Jun 23, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> They're always on. _Slice of real life._


 
you're fibbing. my google alert tells me otherwise.

Anyway, please don't let me derail this thread. Penny needs the publicity.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 23, 2012)

copliker said:


> What's the name of that massive liar journo who was I think best mates with a soviet bigwig in the scw, mentioned here previously & gets about 2 lines in Preston's We Saw Spain Die book. Claud Cockburn?



Certainly sounds like Claud


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 23, 2012)

There's a collection of his Daily Worker pieces on Span called Cockburn in Spain that is absolutely hilariously tragic. The most feted pack of lies i've ever read.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 23, 2012)

I'll have to dig out his memoir and finish it now. From memory it starts out with him acting like a freelance secret agent vs Nazism, terribly Hitchcock-meets-Herge.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 23, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> I'll have to dig out his memoir and finish it now. From memory it starts out with him acting like a freelance secret agent vs Nazism, terribly Hitchcock-meets-Herge.


 
The full three volumes or the edited highlights penguin paperback? Its a good read, but as you say the man was a shit. Have his sons ever tried to defend his "legacy"?


----------



## JimW (Jun 23, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> There's a collection of his Daily Worker pieces on Span called Cockburn in Spain that is absolutely hilariously tragic. The most feted pack of lies i've ever read.


Happened to be reading up on a bloke who's known as a scholar and translator of Buddhism called Edward Conze (edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Conze), and turns out he was in the Communist Party in Germany in his youth, organising workers' defence squads etc., then ended up in Spain and wrote a book called_ Spain To-Day Revolution and Counter-Revolution,_ talking about POUM in English before even Orwell (it says here). Fuck all to do with Penny I know but since Spain came up, thought it was interesting and wondered if you/anyone has read it. Him being a Marxist in his youth throws a bit of light on why his histories/descriptions of Buddhist thought are less woo than anyone else's, despite him being into it in his later years.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 23, 2012)

Can't say i've heard him  - his book doesn't appear in the index or bibliographies of  Beating the Fascists: The German Communists and Political Violence, Communist Resistance in Nazi Germany or Communism in Germany under the Weimar Republic. Never trust anyone who was ever attracted - even momentarily - by Theosophy.


----------



## JimW (Jun 23, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Can't say i've heard him - his book doesn't appear in the index or bibliographies of Beating the Fascists: The German Communists and Political Violence, Communist Resistance in Nazi Germany or Communism in Germany under the Weimar Republic. Never trust anyone who was ever attracted - even momentarily - by Theosophy.


Might be worth a look as he wrote it at the time (37 I think), well before his Buddhist phase.
ETA: Tho looking at that Wiki link, he was into Theosophy and astrology back then too, so maybe not much cop!
ETA: Here's the book: http://archive.org/details/spaintodayrevolu009757mbp


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 23, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> The full three volumes or the edited highlights penguin paperback? Its a good read, but as you say the man was a shit.


 


Just the first volume from 1956. Oh the contortions!



Idris2002 said:


> Have his sons ever tried to defend his "legacy"?


 
Yes, it would seem.


----------



## belboid (Jun 23, 2012)

never realised he'd written _Beat the Devil_, great story - at least it is in the film version


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 23, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Now is that your final opinion on the matter?




yeah. i cant stand it, cant stand most of the people who use it either.


----------



## articul8 (Jun 23, 2012)

Has she had some spat with David Starkey?


----------



## weepiper (Jun 23, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Has she had some spat with David Starkey?


 
Apparently she called him for saying something racist about muslim rape gangs on stage at some educational festival, and he got up and jabbed his finger in her face and called her 'a little shit' and 'despicable'


----------



## articul8 (Jun 23, 2012)

battle of the pygmies - who was the tallest dwarf?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 23, 2012)

articul8 said:


> battle of the pygmies - who was the tallest dwarf?


 
If memory serves it was either Doc or Bashful.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 23, 2012)

I'm willing to give "critical support" when it comes to Starkey-baiting.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 23, 2012)

In a voltairish fit of rage I shall declare that I will defend anybodies right to call out /david 'the white have become black' Starkey. honestly how has the universe not erased this individual yet.


----------



## kavenism (Jun 24, 2012)

Well, Molly Crabapple's oil painting may not be much of an oil painting, she on the other hand....






I take it all back. I'm just jealous Penny is sleeping on her floor.


----------



## andy2002 (Jun 24, 2012)

I wondered how long it would be before someone posted a pic of Molly - I'm only surprised it isn't the one of her in skimpy knickers.


----------



## articul8 (Jun 24, 2012)

Link


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 24, 2012)

once again the disgusting chauvinism of the be-webbed soi-distant left rears its ugl..hang on, theres a knickers shot?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 24, 2012)

Oooh. She has tattoos. How _edgy_.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 24, 2012)

Wow.  An annoying middle class brat.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 24, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Wow. An annoying middle class brat.


 
...paints same


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 24, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Wow. An annoying middle class brat.


 
You would though.

And so would I.


----------



## love detective (Jun 24, 2012)

does nothing for me (except annoy)


----------



## Random (Jun 24, 2012)

kavenism said:


> Well, Molly Crabapple's oil painting may not be much of an oil painting, she on the other hand....
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 Oh ffs. Can't we discuss female crap political activists without mentioning how they look?


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 24, 2012)

Random said:


> Oh ffs. Can't we discuss female crap political activists without mentioning how they look?


 
This is the main reason I've been avoiding this thread. It smells a bit.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 24, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> You would though.
> 
> And so would I.


 
And this shit ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 24, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> once again the disgusting chauvinism of the be-webbed soi-distant left rears its ugl..hang on, theres a knickers shot?


 
And this ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 24, 2012)

love detective said:


> does nothing for me (except annoy)


 
And actually also this ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ in an inverse sense.


----------



## Belushi (Jun 24, 2012)

I think you're all being incredibly mean to Molly.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 24, 2012)

oh consider me ticked off. Only got eyes for one, doesn't mean I can't make a fucking joke about left wing chauvinism ffs


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 24, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> And actually also this ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ in an inverse sense.


 

Male Gaze


----------



## love detective (Jun 24, 2012)

Random said:


> Oh ffs. Can't we discuss female crap political activists without mentioning how they look?


 
can we still talk about how owen jones looks?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 24, 2012)

random mention for the creepy bald economist who plays host to Dragons Den. My misandry is confirmed by my thinking that he is sleeping with Meaden on the sly.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 24, 2012)

Feminazis etc.
This reaction is unworthy of you.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 24, 2012)

although the bags under Peter Joneses eyes give mute testimony to an ageing lotharios misdeeds. Its got to be coke or other peoples women, you just don't get that youthful yet haggard visage from honest pursuits like reading in a dark room alone, or watching the snooker or y'know, honest pursuits


----------



## kavenism (Jun 24, 2012)

Random said:


> Oh ffs. Can't we discuss female crap political activists without mentioning how they look?


 

Focusing on her being a good looking woman is probably for the best, not least as I have a sneaky suspicion that if I got to know her all the attraction would shrivel away like a rotting peach.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jun 24, 2012)

Front page news: http://p.twimg.com/AwMBr8RCQAA5Q53.png:large


----------



## kavenism (Jun 25, 2012)

The Bigotaurus Ridiculus? Hmmm if we're in that mode then might I suggest Penny to be a member of the hopefully soon to be extinct Pseudoradicalhipsteramous Rex?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 25, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Feminazis etc.
> This reaction is unworthy of you.


 
is it? you are trying to bollock me for something I have not done.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 25, 2012)

kavenism said:


> The Bigotaurus Ridiculus? Hmmm if we're in that mode then might I suggest Penny to be a member of the hopefully soon to be extinct Pseudoradicalhipsteramous Rex?


 
Nah, just a 'jumped up public school girl.'


----------



## andy2002 (Jun 25, 2012)

Laurie Penny, Warren Ellis and Greg Palast at ULU tomorrow...

http://www.gregpalast.com/store/?vptickets


----------



## Random (Jun 25, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Nah, just a 'jumped up public school girl.'


Hardly jumped up, rather in her natural station. Private school oxbridge graduates have been dominating the media since ehte beginning of time.


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

at least in the past though they didn't try to pretend they were a voice for or representation of something else, it was a lot more honest back then

the likes of penny & jones just perpetuate & compound the type of thing they are nominally/superficially against


----------



## Random (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> at least in the past though they didn't try to pretend they were a voice for or representation of something else, it was a lot more honest back then


Oxbridge types have also been very prominent in the left, radical journalism, etc. Seems to me that the main difference is that a generation or two ago there were also some genuine working class writers and journalists.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 25, 2012)

Surely there's always been a bit of that going on, though? Do-gooding middle-class radical types are not a new thing, though each generation creates its own variation on the theme.

Edit: that was @ LD ...


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Random said:


> Oxbridge types have also been very prominent in the left, radical journalism, etc. Seems to me that the main difference is that a generation or two ago there were also some genuine working class writers and journalists.


Well, we had our own papers to train on an work our way up on - even then you should see the number of private school/oxbridge types working for the daily worker.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 25, 2012)

Random said:


> Hardly jumped up, rather in her natural station. Private school oxbridge graduates have been dominating the media since ehte beginning of time.


 
I was quoting David Starkey for my own ends.  That's what her Bigotaurus Ridiculus thing is about.  I don't agree with Starkey re Rochdale, before someone barges in.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Starkey accused her of wanting such a huge fee for a little talk that their joint Thomas Paine Society lecture was called off - is that right?


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 25, 2012)

i don't think sexism on the left is exactly a new or controversial thing. on a demo i was on some years ago i was told "you're very knowledgeable for a woman" and of course left wing politics has its fair share of predatory men in it from gerry healy to that other guy.

don't doubt there's an element of that with the penny thing.

however, i've got a massive problem with her as well. she's an embarrassment and she'll be writing the same type of purple prose in favour of right-wing ideologies in 30 years. i also find it fairly nauseating the way that she claims to speak for an entire generation as well


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Starkey accused her of wanting such a huge fee for a little talk that their joint Thomas Paine Society lecture was called off - is that right?


 
Could be wrong, but I thought the exchange was initially about his comments over the Rochdale scum, but then later escalated into other things.


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

Random said:


> Oxbridge types have also been very prominent in the left, radical journalism, etc. Seems to me that the main difference is that a generation or two ago there were also some genuine working class writers and journalists.


 
yeah fair enough - I was kind of conflating then & now with oxbridge types who are more honest about what they are & represent and those are not


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 25, 2012)

Sorry for the Daily Fail link, but this appears to give a fairly detailed narrative of what happened:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-gang-values-entrenched-foothills-Punjab.html

Edit:
"Miss Penny made headlines two months ago when she was saved from oncoming traffic by Hollywood heartthrob Ryan Gosling and tweeted about it on her Twitter page"
​ 
​


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 25, 2012)

i wouldn't have a problem with her being middle class, i'm middle class ffs. it's the fact that she's basically a shit version of hari and the stuff she says is so fucking laughable, that and she assumes that her experiences are typical of everyone. people like her actually do damage to the left because they make politics look like a children's game. she doesn't appear to take it seriously.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Could be wrong, but I thought the exchange was initially about his comments over the Rochdale scum, but then later escalated into other things.


Not followed any of it, but did hear that over the weekend. Just wondering if anyone knew if there was any truth in that specific claim (not really interested in two panto dames going at each other, and i'm not going to back penny on some spurious outdated anti-imperialist grounds either!).


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 25, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Sorry for the Daily Fail link, but this appears to give a fairly detailed narrative of what happened:
> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-gang-values-entrenched-foothills-Punjab.html


 
Come on, let's not miss out on this three-for-three:



> As Miss Penny continued speaking, Claire Fox, director of the Insittue of Idea think tank stood up and told the journalist who has written for The Independent and the Guardian, that she was a disgrace to both women and the left.


----------



## Ade-oh (Jun 25, 2012)

Here's a version of what happened:  http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeeho...012/june/pennys-nonviolent-clash-with-starkey


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 25, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Come on, let's not miss out on this three-for-three:


 
Claire Fox said that? That's rich coming from her.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 25, 2012)

new radical left.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 25, 2012)

I just find it a bit baffling that one not-very-famous person is sufficiently interesting/indignation-worthy to generate a 68-page (and counting) thread.
Yes, she's a massive self-promoter and a bit second-rate (and utterly lacking in self-awareness). So are lots of young journalists out there. The Guardian for example is positively swarming with them, as is the New Statesman, and the Indy. I suppose that the ground which LP has occupied - youth protest and radical politics - is a particular irritant for the kind of people who frequent u75, but I still think it's a bit sad and obsessive and weird to be so fixated on her.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

A scorching hot 4 posts a day for someone who writes a shit piece every week that's always worthy of being laughed at.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 25, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> I just find it a bit baffling that one not-very-famous person is sufficiently interesting/indignation-worthy to generate a 68-page (and counting) thread.
> Yes, she's a massive self-promoter and a bit second-rate (and utterly lacking in self-awareness). So are lots of young journalists out there. The Guardian for example is positively swarming with them, as is the New Statesman, and the Indy. I suppose that the ground which LP has occupied - youth protest and radical politics - is a particular irritant for the kind of people who frequent u75, but I still think it's a bit sad and obsessive and weird to be so fixated on her.


Don't forget the Torygraph! Donata Huggins?


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> A scorching hot 4 posts a day for someone who writes a shit piece every week that's always worthy of being laughed at.


 
True. I suppose that laughing at LP is light entertainment of a kind.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 25, 2012)

nino_savatte said:


> Don't forget the Torygraph! Donata Huggins?


 
All over the place really. (Not at the FT though.)


----------



## Ade-oh (Jun 25, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> I just find it a bit baffling that one not-very-famous person is sufficiently interesting/indignation-worthy to generate a 68-page (and counting) thread.
> Yes, she's a massive self-promoter and a bit second-rate (and utterly lacking in self-awareness). So are lots of young journalists out there. The Guardian for example is positively swarming with them, as is the New Statesman, and the Indy. I suppose that the ground which LP has occupied - youth protest and radical politics - is a particular irritant for the kind of people who frequent u75, but I still think it's a bit sad and obsessive and weird to be so fixated on her.


 
It would be a bit sad if the whole thread was devoted to rigorous, tight-lipped doctrinal disapproval of Ms Penny's antics but actually, what's great about it is that she's a classic, middle-class, attention-seeking 'rebel' - a sort of female version of Rick off 'the Young Ones' - and that makes her a genuine comedy goldmine.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 25, 2012)

Ade-oh said:


> It would be a bit sad if the whole thread was devoted to rigorous, tight-lipped doctrinal disapproval of Ms Penny's antics


 
The thread began in recognition not of 'disapproved of doctrine' but of her out-and-out fabrications, made-up quotes, misrepresentations, recuperative narratives and lucrative saddling up upon youthful social movements.

It's less that she's a self-deluding child of privilege in denial; more that she's a thief, a liar and a charlatan.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Hang on, she was taking money to talk at a private school during this brutal violent exchange? (and one of the very top ones at that).


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 25, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> The thread began in recognition not of 'disapproved of doctrine' but of her out-and-out fabrications, made-up quotes, misrepresentations, recuperative narratives and lucrative saddling up upon youthful social movements.
> 
> It's less that she's a self-deluding child of privilege in denial; more that she's a thief, a liar and a charlatan.


 
Yeah fair enough I suppose.
Out of interest, is she the *worst*, do you think? Or are there other journalists out there whose work needs keeping an eye on in the same way?


----------



## Random (Jun 25, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Yeah fair enough I suppose.
> Out of interest, is she the *worst*, do you think? Or are there other journalists out there whose work needs keeping an eye on in the same way?


She's a tragi-comedy recuperator. Someone like G Monbiot or Naomi Klein has far more clout, and is far more reponsible for pushing eco/"anti capitalism" protests towards liberalism. It's a general phenomenon, and we gossip about them because they're supposedly on our side.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 25, 2012)

I doubt she's the worst, but she is a particularly noteworthy one given her willingness to be feted as a spokeswoman for a generation/movement/etc whilst simultaneously smothering the actual voices that provide her with her well-remunerated copy.

Even the journalists pushing forward important stories can have big fat question marks hanging over them for the way they handles sources, information and relationships (Paul Lewis, Shiv Malik etc).


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 25, 2012)

Random said:


> She's a tragi-comedy recuperator. Someone like G Monbiot or Naomi Klein has far more clout...


 
In such company one could also throw in the likes of Noreena Hertz (academic, though media-friendly and conveniently spoused to a Beeb bigwig) and John Vidal. Neither seem as omnipresent as once they were though. O the fickle winds of fate!

Anecdote corner: Vidal looked very uncomfortable when his presence (whilst trawling for colour at a large summit-hop event) was loudly noted to the assembled Euro-insurrectionists by a UK hand  A touch of the "it's my valet's day off" about him.


----------



## Random (Jun 25, 2012)

Good riddance to Noreena Hertz. Demonstrated the extreme poverty of those "anti globalist" days when she could be used as a voice of the movement, appear at protest events, etc. seeing as how she was involved in administering shock therapy to the former USSR


----------



## Random (Jun 25, 2012)

Vidal is just a journalist reporting on his beat for liberals. Never saw him as an organic part of any movement at all


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Notable, every journo mentioned in these last few posts - every single one - went to private school.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 25, 2012)

Random said:


> Vidal is just a journalist reporting on his beat for liberals. Never saw him as an organic part of any movement at all


 
He tried his best! Always looking for an 'in'.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 25, 2012)

Can we have a 'good journalists' thread, to identify people who are acceptable?


----------



## rekil (Jun 25, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Can we have a 'good journalists' thread, to identify people who are acceptable?


Everyone at Workers' Girder.


----------



## Random (Jun 25, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Can we have a 'good journalists' thread, to identify people who are acceptable?


The most important thing is to give up the idea that you need to find the right journalists, and then you can believe what they say. 

But some journalists who're doing something important are exiledonline writers, who're publishing profiles of known media figures and exposing their corporate links http://shameproject.com/ Since journalists are often insiders in the world of PR, lobbying and the rest of these elite networks, it's good to see them working on exposing bought journalists, although I don't share their illusions that it's possible to simply clean up journalism.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 25, 2012)

copliker said:


> Everyone at Workers' Girder.


 
They're not journalists, they're worker-delegates.


----------



## Random (Jun 25, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> They're not journalists, they're worker-delegates.


Consciousness-raiser Commisars


----------



## rekil (Jun 25, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> They're not journalists, they're worker-delegates.


Just testing. Stay on your toes comrades.


----------



## Random (Jun 25, 2012)

She's now arguing with Guido Fawkes, saying that he made threats against her little sister, and that she's too scared to say what the threats are, in case he carries them out. Guido's just said she's a trustafarian, btw, and she's not denied living off an inheritance


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 25, 2012)

Random said:


> She's now arguing with Guido Fawkes, saying that he made threats against her little sister, and that she's too scared to say what the threats are, in case he carries them out. Guido's just said she's a trustafarian, btw, and she's not denied living off an inheritance


 
Well that saves me the hassle of finding out what the second hand farts on my tweetline were about.


----------



## mk12 (Jun 25, 2012)

When do we think she'll give up her lefty credentials and embrace all that she currently despises? 2020?


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 25, 2012)

Random said:


> She's now arguing with Guido Fawkes, saying that he made threats against her little sister, and that she's too scared to say what the threats are, in case he carries them out. Guido's just said she's a trustafarian, btw, and she's not denied living off an inheritance


 
to be fair, guido fawkes is a cock.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 25, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> to be fair, guido fawkes is a cock.


 
Absolutely, and if he has made threats against her or her sister I hope he carries them out gets done.

However going on her past form I find it hard to believe that he has.


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

and so is she (a cock that is)

she's bleating on now about how some people can't comprehend that her privilege actually helps make her a 'more committed leftist' (the implication of this being that those without her privilege don't have the potential to be as committed as her?)

so there it is, leftyism for her is grounded completely in detached morality plays, benevolence and charity work, not class struggle out of collective/individual self interest


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Given that she just had to back down from suggesting that the man-beast starkey attacked her on stage just how vile do you imagine these threats are?


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

did she back down before or after the news that the video is due to be published shortly?


----------



## Random (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> did she back down before or after the news that the video is due to be published shortly?


Just after ppl who were also there started tweeting


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> did she back down before or after the news that the video is due to be published shortly?


After


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

I'm glad Marx never had access to twitter


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> she's bleating on now about how some people can't comprehend that her privilege actually helps make her a 'more committed leftist' (the implication of this being that those without her privilege don't have the potential to be as committed as her?)


 
no way!! did she actually say this?


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

In as many words, yes




			
				Penny Red said:
			
		

> Also seems to be beyond comprehension that understanding the unfairness of your relative privilege might make you a more committed leftist.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 25, 2012)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@PennyRed
@MrHarryCole oh, you mean the naked underage pictures you had of me from university? stay classy.

such a fibber


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> In as many words, yes


 
 Bloody hell.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@PennyRed
> @MrHarryCole oh, you mean the naked underage pictures you had of me from university? stay classy.
> 
> such a fibber


At what age did she _start_ university then? (Just concentrating on that aspect for now   got my suspicions about the other).


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> I'm glad Marx never had access to twitter


 
Imagine what he would have posted while drunk.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> In as many words, yes


 
I don't even know where to start with this one, for christ's sake.


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Imagine what he would have posted while drunk.


 
i was thinking more about the impact on his output - but yes it would be all 'the jewish nigger said this' and 'the jewish nigger said that'


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> At what age did she _start_ university then? (Just concentrating on that aspect for now got my suspicions about the other).


 
exactly!


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Given he spent a whole year on exposing just one person (and i think it was worthwhile despite what the bores say)...


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Given he spent a whole year on exposing just one person (and i think it was worthwhile despite what the bores say)...


 
Are you talking about Marx or Staines now?


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

Yeah Herr Vogt had to be dealt with!


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Marx, Staines has more irons in the fire than that - the old going to jail soon fraud. 





Spanky Longhorn said:


> Are you talking about Marx or Staines now?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> At what age did she _start_ university then? (Just concentrating on that aspect for now got my suspicions about the other).


 
She started in 2004 not sure how old she is...


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 25, 2012)

she was born in 1986 iirc


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> did she back down before or after the news that the video is due to be published shortly?


she said "violent thug starkey" had "attacked" her - and while she didn't actually allege physical violence, she seemed quite happy for that impression to develop. Starkey is a cunt though. (And so is Guido Fawkes.)


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

to be fair those who have seen the video are saying that there was a very aggressive manner in which she was confronted


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Why say violent? Why not aggressive.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@PennyRed
> @MrHarryCole oh, you mean the naked underage pictures you had of me from university? stay classy.
> 
> such a fibber


On this, he claims she posted them on facebook. That they didn't publish them at all and she threatened to sue them. That should be provable one way or the other surely?


----------



## rekil (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> There's a collection of his Daily Worker pieces on Span called Cockburn in Spain that is absolutely hilariously tragic. The most feted pack of lies i've ever read.


Ah yeah, I checked Preston's buke last night and it has a fair bit more than two lines on Cockburn. He made up a story about Koltsov having a direct phone line to Stalin, and fabricated a revolt at Tetuoan.


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> she was born in 1986 iirc


 
quite a big gap in age terms then between her and these 'school age sisters' of her - if she's around 26 then that makes it close to a ten year difference between her and her sister(s)


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 25, 2012)

copliker said:


> Ah yeah, I checked Preston's buke last night and it has a fair bit more than two lines on Cockburn. He made up a story about Koltsov having a direct phone line to Stalin, and fabricated a revolt at Tetuoan.


 
Cut the guy a break, his relative privilege made him a more committed leftist.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Here's penny in 2002.



> She was the top candidate among nearly 925,000 entries in the AQA Examination Board English group of GCSE subjects, and the Brighton College student has now been invited to a special ceremony in London in November.
> 
> 
> Laura, 15, is thrilled at the results. 'It's just unbelievable. I didn't realise I was going to do that well. I was so nervous the night before.'
> ...


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

_Smartest kid in a smart school._


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Here's penny in 2002.


 
August 2002:_ "Laura hopes to go to Oxford and is interested in the possibility of a career as a writer."_

May 2012: _"For instance, in 2003, I was informed by a teacher that I would be applying to Oxford. I was the smartest kid in a smart school which needed to boost its Oxbridge figures: there was no question."​_


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

good spot - never knew she had a made up second name


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 25, 2012)

Politics reduced to showbiz in the media-directed age.

Politics as Strictly Come Dancing without Bruce Forsyth. And the dancing.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Here's penny in 2002.


 
is that actually her?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Course it is.


----------



## agricola (Jun 25, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> is that actually her?


 
I think it has to be, otherwise there would have been a smarter girl in her year - the consequences of which would of course be earth-shattering.


----------



## rekil (Jun 25, 2012)

Burtsevapron.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

copliker said:


> Burtsevapron.


_None shall escape._


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 25, 2012)

copliker said:


> Burtsevapron.





butchersapron said:


> _None shall escape._


 
Sorry?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Deeper - the Headmaster of Brighton College in that article bigging up Laura is Anthony Seldon. Now headmaster of Wellington College where Penny did her paid talk with Starkey over the weekend. Keep it in the family don't they? (hat tip to frogwoman here)


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Sorry?


Vladimir Burtsev


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

seems like it's true about her demanding a fee for the fund raising event



> As the dust settles after Saturday's fracas between David Starkey and Laurie Penny, a source familiar with the situation explains to Mr Steerpike the history between these two scribes:
> 
> _'David and Ms Penny were supposed to be debating at a fundraising event for the Thomas Paine Society about a week ago. Penny was in the US and had demanded a fee (which David did not: he only charges corporate engagements fees and does a huge amount pro bono). Such was her request that the event was cancelled — they couldn't afford her. So David mentioned this in response to the tax avoidance jibe and ended up saying, "I came up from the bottom and won't be lectured at by a jumped up public school girl like you, I will not have it."'_​
> Coincidently Laurie attended Brighton College, home of master tutor Antony Seldon before he moved to Wellington, where Saturday's event was being hosted… That did not stop her attacking the school. Penny did not deny she had asked for a fee.




http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/blogs/steerpike/2012/june/ms-pennys-fees


----------



## rekil (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Deeper - the Headmaster of Brighton College in that article in Anthony Seldon. Now headmaster of Wellington College where Penny did her paid talk with Starkey over the weekend. Keep it on the family don't they? (hat tip to frogwoman here)


And another. 


> Just met a brilliant former English teacher of mine who now works at Wellington, haven't seen him in ten years. Morning instantly memorable.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Jaws snapped shut.


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

And



> Tired of all this. It's an exhausting way to live and not conducive to writing. Not going to jump to decisions, but something has to change


 
What happened to all that additional commitment to leftyism that flows from ones privileged upbringing - only lasted about an hour


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Vladimir Burtsev


 
Ah, I see the connection now (via wiki). Sorry for not being as cool as everyone else round here.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Ah, I see the connection now (via wiki). Sorry for not being as cool as everyone else round here.


_The blue suede shoes of the revolution._


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 25, 2012)

copliker said:


> And another.
> 
> 
> 
> > Just met a brilliant former English teacher of mine who now works at Wellington, haven't seen him in ten years. Morning instantly memorable.


 
Would that be Marnie Yates? She's a he?!

Seeing as she was so oppressed into being an overachieving Oxbridge highflier whilst at Brighton, she didn't half pick up a lot of friends amongst faculty.


----------



## rekil (Jun 25, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Would that be Marnie Yates?


!


> Kids or no kids, my life will have been wasted if I'm not someone's inspiring English teacher one day. Thanks, Mr Clarke and Ms Yates


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> _The blue suede shoes of the revolution._


 
The socks with sandals of reaction.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

> Oh, and anyone taking Starkey's claim involving my charging for a speaking engagement at face-value should speak to the society involved.


 
Doesn't look or sound like a denial of charging.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> The socks with sandals of reaction.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 25, 2012)

You win this round, Senor Apron - but we shall meet again.


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Doesn't look or sound like a denial of charging.


 
she seems to deny it here


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Doesn't sound very confident in her denial!


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> she seems to deny it here




Didn't realise he was a Bangles fan. "Walk like an Egyptian".


----------



## rekil (Jun 25, 2012)

Where's the violence? He sounds like a miffed flump.


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

apparently he gets her in a boston crab off camera


----------



## rekil (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> apparently he gets her in a boston crab off camera


 


(Any excuse)


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 25, 2012)




----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Whose the tall crag-face behind, forgot his name.


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

It's that editor of Prospect, Roy Cropper is it not


----------



## rekil (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Whose the tall crag-face behind, forgot his name.


David Goodhart?

http://www.festivalofeducation.org.uk/speakers-and-topics


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> she seems to deny it here






Screenplay by Andrew Davies.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

That's him - ta both. Cropper has a more weedy meek thing going on. He was loving it.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

I see a fake event to see how much starkey/penny actually charges coming on.


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

lookey likeyes

David Goodhart





Roy Cropper


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Roy's got nice beckoning eyes (and a charming smile), his look like he's prised them out of simon cowell's head/wallet.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 25, 2012)

roy croppers photo there does not do justice to the true size of his jaw. I call 'shop


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> lookey likeyes
> 
> David Goodhart
> 
> ...



Look like pin-ups from the iris scanner kiosk of a Rule 45 wing.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

> Tired of all this. It's an exhausting way to live and not conducive to writing. Not going to jump to decisions, but something has to change.


Stop writing.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

> ​Leaping to his feet, Starkey began with a furious ad hominem attack before marching up to me, wagging his finger in my face, shouting abuse, swearing and showering me with flecks of spittle​


No he didn't. He didn't swear for starters.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Oh wow, she got money for this line, cold hard money:



> Like the ancient lizards, Starkey and his kind are perilously ill-adapted to the modern world – but they have yet to be consigned to history where they belong.


 
Does no one read this stuff before publishing it?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No he didn't. He didn't swear for starters.



Hey, to an Old Brightonian, this counts as brass knuckles and baseball bats. That grammar school guttersnipe fights dirty with his aspirationally over-enunciated vowels. Brap!


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No he didn't. He didn't swear for starters.





DaveCinzano said:


> Hey, to an Old Brightonian, this counts as brass knuckles and baseball bats. That grammar school guttersnipe fights dirty with his aspirationally over-enunciated vowels. Brap!


I note he 'leapt to his feet' from a position of _standing at the podium_ as well. This was only a few days ago - if her memory if so bad no wonder she is forced to hari things all the time.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 25, 2012)

But she's (supposedly) got an NCTJ! It's probably just temporary forgetfulness brought on by The Man's billy-club whilst reporting from The Trenches. or PTSD.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 25, 2012)

quite fancy seeing Starkey and Plan B have a fistfight now. I'd pay to watch that


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Starkey said:

"I will not be lectured to by a jumped-up public school girl like you"

That's the point of this whole thread. He needs support.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 25, 2012)

Neither Starkey nor Penny but International Socialism.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Or. Starkey.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 25, 2012)

its hard to back a horse in this one. in the one corner we have starkey, whose 'self made' nature means his abhorrent right wing views are treatchery to his roots and to his own. In the other, a lolsome narcissist with almost no self awareness at all.


----------



## weepiper (Jun 25, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> its hard to back a horse in this one. in the one corner we have starkey, whose 'self made' nature means his abhorrent right wing views are treatchery to his roots and to his own. In the other, a lolsome narcissist with almost know self awareness at all.


 
I can't stand Laurie Penny but Starkey was being a bully in that clip. Kept _standing over_ her (he's not exactly tall but ykwim), the 'public _schoolgirl_' comment, it was a proper 'older man putting young woman in her place' moment. Fuck 'em both.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 25, 2012)

weepiper said:


> I can't stand Laurie Penny but Starkey was being a bully in that clip. Kept _standing over_ her (he's not exactly tall but ykwim), the 'public _schoolgirl_' comment, it was a proper 'older man putting young woman in her place' moment. Fuck 'em both.


 
Don't make me defend Starkers because I won't but was the public schoolgirl comment not simply a reference to her background compared with his?


----------



## weepiper (Jun 25, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Don't make me defend Starkers because I won't but was the public schoolgirl comment not simply a reference to her background compared with his?


 
I'd believe that if he hadn't got up, stood over her and wagged his finger. It's the combination with the body language, not the phrase by itself


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 25, 2012)

the thing that gets me about penny, is the whole claiming to be a voice of a generation thing - like how the fuck can she know what everyone's lives are like? i mean fuck me im not the most proletarian person in the world but i could bet that my social circle is wider than hers. how can you know what everyone's lives are like if you've gone straight from brighton college into a meejah job paying more than what the majority of the country earn?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> the thing that gets me about penny, is the whole claiming to be a voice of a generation thing - like how the fuck can she know what everyone's lives are like? i mean fuck me im not the most proletarian person in the world but i could bet that my social circle is wider than hers. how can you know what everyone's lives are like if you've gone straight from brighton college into a meejah job paying more than what the majority of the country earn?


Oxford inbetween. She imagines it's this or starving. That's how she talks about it. _I wasn't exactly starving._


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 25, 2012)

How patronising is that? nobody i know is actually physically starving, that doesn't mean that their lives are easy or anything (or even that they don't sometimes go hungry). Nobody I met in Moldova was starving either.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

The idea though, the real damaging thing is not about _her_ conditions, but the mental landscape she has of _other people_ and their choices and options. _They are starving. They need someone to talk for them._


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 25, 2012)

They need somebody to make decisions for them and be told what to do in other words.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 25, 2012)

fabian, kept warm at night by the embers of SW papers she had to sing for


----------



## killer b (Jun 25, 2012)

Bet it was that hideous Billy Bragg version she sang too. Or didn't sing. That she pretended to sing.


----------



## articul8 (Jun 25, 2012)

He reminded me of an aggressive Goose   What had she said?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 25, 2012)

bestiality, your laws do not apply to me


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 25, 2012)




----------



## weepiper (Jun 25, 2012)

oh dear



> ​I was in a rent crisis at the time, and thought it might be worth the stress, preparation and risk if I could earn enough from it to cover the money I was missing, which was several hundred pounds. I asked the Thomas Paine society if they could afford that, and as I expected, they said no - which I was glad about, and I made up the rent money elsewhere. Being a multi-millionaire who loves publicity, Professor Starkey may not understand what it's like to be a low-earning journalist in your early twenties, but I feel I did nothing wrong.​


 
 she's _just like us_, you know.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

What money would she be 'missing' by doing this? She would get expenses and travel. Did she have some other high paid job to go to? Dig that hole deeper and deeper.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

I bet twitter could establish where she was when this event was on and she could be earning a few hundred elsewhere...


----------



## chilango (Jun 25, 2012)

The more she says, the more I sympathise with Starkey.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 25, 2012)

what has she been spending all the money from ns and other writing gigs on the, that she cannot afford the rent. She hasn't the haggadry of a coke fiend so come on- where has it gone, more radishes, oysters and packs of cutters choice for that ageing liberal she lives with.

open the books


----------



## chilango (Jun 25, 2012)

Thing is, her reaction in that video speaks volumes. Her instinctive response is to demand the right of reply. 

Try that in Greece Laura.


----------



## weepiper (Jun 25, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> what has she been spending all the money from ns and other writing gigs on the, that she cannot afford the rent. She hasn't the haggadry of a coke fiend so come on- where has it gone, more radishes, oysters and packs of cutters choice for that ageing liberal she lives with.
> 
> open the books


 
More the implication that someone from her background could _ever_ be in a position of having to make a 'hard choice' in order to pay the rent. Fuck off, Laurie.


----------



## chilango (Jun 25, 2012)

weepiper said:


> I'd believe that if he hadn't got up, stood over her and wagged his finger. It's the combination with the body language, not the phrase by itself



Then, like a true revolutionary, she shoulda decked him.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Thus cutting off a very valuable revenue stream for a young revolutionary. 





chilango said:


> Then, like a true revolutionary, she shoulda decked him.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Has anyone asked her what she got paid for talking at that top private school - and why she participated in an event for future opinion formers from private school? For free = fucked. For money = fucked.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 25, 2012)

> I had a revelation a moment ago. It was that Laurie Penny, David Starkey, Samantha Brick and Paul Staines were all made-up characters.


 
O the chutzpah of _David fucking Aaronovitch_!


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

> I was asked to debate Starkey at the beginning of June and really didn't want to, partly to avoid just this sort of ugly circus


 
So i agreed to do it not once but twice.



> By the way, I'm still not on Twitter today, this has been posted via a trusted comrade to whom I've given my passwords. If any arse-photos appear in my timeline, rest assured it's not my arse.


 
No, it's your elbow.


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> What money would she be 'missing' by doing this? She would get expenses and travel. Did she have some other high paid job to go to? Dig that hole deeper and deeper.


 
Presume she means the money she didn't have to cover her 'rent crisis' - it was fine though as she just got that money from elswhere instead

some crisis!


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> Presume she means the money she didn't have to cover her 'rent crisis' - it was fine though as she just got that money from elswhere instead
> 
> some crisis!


Exactly, the claim was by attending this she would be directly missing out on money - i.e something else_ at that time._ I wonder what it would be that can allow her pull out at least 300 quid for a few hours fuck all?


----------



## agricola (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Has anyone asked her what she got paid for talking at that top private school - and why she participated in an event for future opinion formers from private school? For free = fucked. For money = fucked.


 
On twitter she says it was a favour for a former teacher.. presumably not the one who had her sent as an indentured servant to Wadham College.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jun 25, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> the thing that gets me about penny, is the whole claiming to be a voice of a generation thing - like how the fuck can she know what everyone's lives are like? i mean fuck me im not the most proletarian person in the world but i could bet that my social circle is wider than hers. how can you know what everyone's lives are like if you've gone straight from brighton college into a meejah job paying more than what the majority of the country earn?


But some of her mates live in _squats._ And occasionally she has to _sleep on the floor _of a friend's house. It's really tough when you're struggling to find the pennies to _buy your next coffee in New York_.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Denies central importance of class whilst saying that thinking in terms of class is a pro-rich position:



> In the world of inherited wealth and privilege which people like Michael Gove exist to defend, money and class are more important than ideology


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

agricola said:


> On twitter she says it was a favour for a former teacher.. presumably not the one who had her sent as an indentured servant to Wadham College.


We have found out it's two teachers and a headmaster today. No reason why such a well heeled college wouldn't pay well though.


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Exactly, the claim was by attending this she would be directly missing out on money - i.e something else_at that time._ I wonder what it would be that can allow her pull out at least 300 quid for a few hours fuck all?


nah, i read it as she was missing some money for her rent and by doing that gig she might earn the money that was missing so she could pay her rent

but either way, she just got it from somewhere else anyway so hardly a crisis


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> nah, i read it as she was missing some money for her rent and by doing that gig she might earn the money that was missing so she could pay her rent
> 
> but either way, she just got it from somewhere else anyway so hardly a crisis


 
Her parents are are still solicitors and on some decent money.

Note the vague 'that'



> I asked the Thomas Paine society if they could afford that,


----------



## rekil (Jun 25, 2012)

There was no rent crisis. Who is the evil landord? The Lez? Crabapple? Come off it.


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

doesn't stack up at all does it - if someone was genuinely in a rent crisis and they had an idea as to how to get the money to solve it they wouldn't be 'glad' if they didn't get the money from it

really awfuly flakey excuse for her asking for the money in the first place - she should have just been honest from the start that she wanted paid for it


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Just noticed that Starkey was the only person up there with a sherry/port/red wine in his hand.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 25, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> But some of her mates live in _squats._ And occasionally she has to _sleep on the floor _of a friend's house. It's really tough when you're struggling to find the pennies to _buy your next coffee in New York_.


 
has she been fucked over by capitalism? I mean _properly_ fucked over. i'm really not sure that she has.


----------



## Random (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> nah, i read it as she was missing some money for her rent and by doing that gig she might earn the money that was missing so she could pay her rent
> 
> but either way, she just got it from somewhere else anyway so hardly a crisis


 yes, my interpretation was: the money she was missing, as in, the amount she was short by. So she decided to try to soak the TP society for it, since it was a crisis, despite stress and risk. What stress? What risk?


----------



## articul8 (Jun 25, 2012)

How is it a crisis when you can just get it from somewhere else - I doubt it was wonga.com

(Risk - speaking in public without being lynched)


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Paine would spit in her well-fed face btw.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

articul8 said:


> How is it a crisis when you can just get it from somewhere else - I doubt it was wonga.com
> 
> (Risk - speaking in public without being lynched)


At the fucking Senate House?


----------



## articul8 (Jun 25, 2012)

really?  travel to Senate House from anywhere in London is going to be fairly low.  Or was she going to claim travel from NYC?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

What?

Hands up if you ever paid this person money.


----------



## articul8 (Jun 25, 2012)

<hands kept down>


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 25, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> But some of her mates live in _squats._ And occasionally she has to _sleep on the floor _of a friend's house. It's really tough when you're struggling to find the pennies to _buy your next coffee in New York_.


She's a gonzo journalist, don't you know. It has to be _real_.


----------



## Random (Jun 25, 2012)

'Hunter S Thompson would spit in her face'


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 25, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> its hard to back a horse in this one. in the one corner we have starkey, whose 'self made' nature means his abhorrent right wing views are treatchery to his roots and to his own. In the other, a lolsome narcissist with almost no self awareness at all.


 
Used to live with a bloke who went to school with him (both got into the local grammar).  He was dragged up in poverty on a council estate (I think the same estate as an anarchist who has posted on here), but from anecdotes he was apparently a little shit, and treated his mother dreadfully.  Probably a shame of background/aspirational thing.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Random said:


> 'Hunter S Thompson would spit in her face'


Giles Coren would spit in her face.


----------



## Random (Jun 25, 2012)

And lustbather would lick hunter and giles's spit off her face


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 25, 2012)

lovely fella


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 25, 2012)

articul8 said:


> really? travel to Senate House from anywhere in London is going to be fairly low. Or was she going to claim travel from NYC?


you don't use london transport, do you? it is famously expensive.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Who here has asked for a penny for their writing, for talking, for helping out?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jun 25, 2012)

I never have. Never made a penny on any speaking engagement, workshop or any of the countless advisory groups and boards I've sat on. Nor from the hours and hours of campaign advice and strategy consultation I've given to various activists and community groups and organizations over the years...


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Just in: Murdoch's Sunday Times lot never pay for anything. I wonder what Penny has to say about Murdoch and his papers? A brutal mercenary machine. So this talk at this top private school set up by Murdoch that was doing a favour involved nothing so mercenary as money right? Let's get this clear.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 25, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Look like pin-ups from the iris scanner kiosk of a Rule 45 wing.


 
Rule 45,  two worse than being on Rule 43.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 25, 2012)

and 11 worse than rule 34


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No he didn't. He didn't swear for starters.


 
For ickle Laura, abuse means "any words that are not spoken in slavish worship of me".


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

But three up from -15.5x15.5

(got there!)


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 25, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> and 11 worse than rule 34


 
Ah, do you know what Rule 34 is, though?


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Or. Starkey.


 
Ah now, I don't care if he had to survive by boiling and eating his shoes as a kid, he's a Tory prick now and that's more important.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Up up the saddam!!

As the chant went.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 25, 2012)

articul8 said:


> He reminded me of an aggressive Goose  What had she said?


 
She said that you were a Fabian.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> Presume she means the money she didn't have to cover her 'rent crisis' - it was fine though as she just got that money from elswhere instead
> 
> some crisis!


 
Isn't her British _pied a terre_ a room in Nicholas Lezard's hovel? I can't imagine he charges her that much or, given his infatuation with her, that he'd kick her out for being late with the rent.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Paine would spit in her well-fed face btw.


 
Before or after laughing at her emo hair?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 25, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Ah, do you know what Rule 34 is, though?


 
Ask Shippou


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 25, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Ask Shippou


 
You misunderstand. I know what Rule 34 is, I was asking if you do (it's one of my favourites)?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 25, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Rule 45,  two worse than being on Rule 43.



r43 is now about prisoners' property:

http://www.insidetime.org/resources/Rules/English-Prison-Rules-2010.pdf


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 25, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> You misunderstand. I know what Rule 34 is, I was asking if you do (it's one of my favourites)?


 
You misunderstand, I know what it is and I was demonstrating that by instructing you to look in the direction of someone who is almost certainly monitored by the relevant law enforcement agencies.

It was a rhetorical flourish rather than an instruction.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 25, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> You misunderstand, I know what it is and I was demonstrating that by instructing you to look in the direction of someone who is almost certainly monitored by the relevant law enforcement agencies.
> 
> It was a rhetorical flourish rather than an instruction.


 
I see.
You were attempting to feed me to your MI5 handlers!


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

There are *no rules* in prison ffs. _smash it up like a stokes croft rebellion_ (nb: not there, sold it outside UK as if i was)


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 25, 2012)

hmm fair point, I apologise I should have PMed you a warning.

ETA: @vp


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 25, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> There are no rules in prison ffs. _smash it up like a stokes croft rebellion_ (nb: not there, sold it outside UK as if i was)


 
I've just remembered 'Bad' by James "Jimmy" Carr


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I've just remembered 'Bad' by James "Jimmy" Carr


Bro knew sorrow and could bench press about 1915 kilos at the end


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 25, 2012)

Honory ASLEF member


----------



## Balbi (Jun 25, 2012)

L'uber Mensch defending LP on twitter now.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 25, 2012)

oh god, out of female solidarity? like the tory prty ever wanted feminism to be ought but 'make the female proles do a days graft as well, more money for us that way'


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

Balbi said:


> L'uber Mensch defending LP on twitter now.


Come on this is deep enough.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 25, 2012)

Public school network defends it's own.


----------



## imposs1904 (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> apparently he gets her in a boston crab off camera


 
my favourite seafood chain restaurant here in the states. Do a very nice calamari.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 25, 2012)

oh dear the Starkey Penny incident has already been rule 34'd.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 25, 2012)

cheers for making me imagine starkey and penny BDSM fan fiction


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 25, 2012)

cheers for making me imagine starkey and penny BDSM fan fiction


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 25, 2012)

no one _made_ you

it was already there


----------



## love detective (Jun 25, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> oh dear the Starkey Penny incident has already been rule 34'd.


 
any update on molly crabapple?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 25, 2012)

In my fanfiction penny is the dom and starkey begs for mercy


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> any update on molly crabapple?


The shit-wheels are a-rolling.


----------



## Das Uberdog (Jun 26, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> In my fanfiction penny is the dom and starkey begs for mercy


 
but, ultimately, neither are able to forge a truly meaningful relationship with any other human being...


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jun 26, 2012)

I had never heard of Laurie Penny until this thread. Since then having followed a few of the links, I am familiar with her journalism. To be fair I don't think she is important enough to justify a long slagging-off on here. She is young and not politically experienced, and yes she has found an income source from writing about the protests, but is that a real problem? In a popularity contest between David Starkey and Penny Red, I come down on her side. The thread opposed her to Alex Callinicos but there has been not much mention of this contest since. If people want to start a thread about Penny Red on her own, they should do so. If not then this thread is redundant.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

Shut that foot


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 26, 2012)

Rule 34 has been obeyed. God help us all.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 26, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> I had never heard of Laurie Penny until this thread. Since then having followed a few of the links, I am familiar with her journalism. To be fair I don't think she is important enough to justify a long slagging-off on here. She is young and not politically experienced, and yes she has found an income source from writing about the protests, but is that a real problem? In a popularity contest between David Starkey and Penny Red, I come down on her side. The thread opposed her to Alex Callinicos but there has been not much mention of this contest since. If people want to start a thread about Penny Red on her own, they should do so. If not then this thread is redundant.


Bit late for that. Might be a good idea to change the title mind


----------



## Random (Jun 26, 2012)

Hocus, you don't  agree that a radical journalist being a lying poverty tourist is worth having a thread about?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 26, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> But some of her mates live in _squats._ And occasionally she has to _sleep on the floor _of a friend's house. It's really tough when you're struggling to find the pennies to _buy your next coffee in New York_.


 
Attending a birthday bash with her poor, precariously living mates.


----------



## JimW (Jun 26, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Attending a birthday bash with her poor, precariously living mates.


The blogger seems to be trying to wrestle her own head off in that profile pic. Perhaps she's just read something written by our Laurie?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Attending a birthday bash with her poor, precariously living mates.



Have we just stepped through the looking-glass into the next Bret Easton Ellis novel?


----------



## rekil (Jun 26, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Attending a birthday bash with her poor, precariously living mates.





> She is the co-founder of Beneath the Half Moon with Sherene Schostak, held new and full moon circles at the Edgar Cayce Center, and travelled extensively with tarot in hand.
> 
> Katelan is a Taurus, with Leo rising and a Moon in Capricorn
> 
> ...


Any group rates I wonder? Proletarian Democracy could do with a good reiki cleansing.




> As a standup comic, Jennifer has performed at clubs and colleges nationwide and for the troops in the Middle East, Persian Gulf, and Africa.


Somebody called Jen Dziura there. That's not very right on is it?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 26, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Have we just stepped through the looking-glass into the next Bret Easton Ellis novel?


 
If they all get brutally murdered in amusing ways it could be interesting.

"Larissa Fuchs" is she a pornstar?


----------



## barney_pig (Jun 26, 2012)

More Reichian than reiki, proldem is strictly "hands on"


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 26, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Attending a birthday bash with her poor, precariously living mates.


And an 'alt porn' star


----------



## belboid (Jun 26, 2012)

Random said:


> Hocus, you don't agree that a radical journalist being a lying poverty tourist is worth having a thread about?


for a year and a half?  full of the utter shith this thread is (even before the wank pics were posted).

Penny Dreadful is a talentless egotist who will be gone and forgotten in another year and a half, this is all rather OTT for such low-hanging fruit


----------



## Random (Jun 26, 2012)

It's not jus full of shit, or all ott. It's a political gossip thread, touching on some important issues


----------



## articul8 (Jun 26, 2012)

It's sociologically interesting - these beautiful Ivy Leaguer bobo's she's fallen in with and stuff...


----------



## Dan U (Jun 26, 2012)

maybe a repost but who the fuck are these people

what jolly japes the Greek economy tanking is for those poor Greek types.




> we’ve been waiting to announce this for a while. On the 4th of July, the splendid Ms Molly Crabapple and I are going to Greece to do some reporting, meeting up with activists and community organisers on the ground in Athens and elsewhere. Molly is an artist who lives in a loft full of birdcages opposite Zucotti Park; I’m a journalist who lives out of a large red backpack on Molly’s floor. We met during Occupy Wall Street and have spent the past several months experimenting with making things happen together – when I went to cover the protests in Chicago and Montreal this summer, I took pictures on my phone and sent them to Molly, who created art from them. Discordia, however, is the first trip where both of us will be there on the ground. She will make pictures, I will make words, we will try very hard not to get arrested or deported, and all shall be marvellous. Discordia is an experimental art-and-journalism project, taking the Hunter Thompson-Ralph Steadman macho model and twisting it to our own ends, and it’ll be published as an ebook in the Autumn.
> Putting this project together has been interesting from the start, as I assumed we’d be staying on the floor of a squat and Molly assumed we’d be in some sort of bougie hotel with taps that actually work, and the process of gradual compromise began there, as did my exhortations that Ms Crabapple wear shoes that are at least vaguely sensible. Right now we’re learning rudimentary Greek, pestering contacts and reading a great deal, and whatever happens while we’re there, we hope to produce something really innovative and worthwhile. Stay tuned!


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 26, 2012)

Already posted it a few days ago.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 26, 2012)

but glad it has been reposted so i can get my morning seethe out of the way.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

If that's getting a repost, then so's this.


----------



## Dan U (Jun 26, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Already posted it a few days ago.


 
ah apols. i've only been dipping in and out of this thread.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

Dan U said:


> ah apols. i've only been dipping in and out of this thread.


 
In between detoxifying dips in the bleach baths I hope.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Attending a birthday bash with her poor, precariously living mates.


Entrepreneurs all.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Attending a birthday bash with her poor, precariously living mates.


 
_Radical Chic: That Party at Penny's._

And here we have from the girl herself The return of the Radical Chic evening



> A sea-change is taking place in youth culture across the world, a change that largely refuses to be co-opted, monetized or impressed by fame. Many of the people in the Bowery Hotel risk being swept away by the tide of history, and one or two of them almost know it. In a world where the society of the swarm is beginning to devour the society of the spectacle, celebrities have nothing to offer a people’s movement that does not begin with the abnegation of their celebrity.


 
This really is getting far too easy.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 26, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> _Radical Chic: That Party at Penny's._
> 
> And here have from the girl herself The return of the Radical Chic evening
> 
> ...


 
That reminds me of those "communiques" from the insurrectional anarchists.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 26, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> Rule 34 has been obeyed. God help us all.


----------



## weepiper (Jun 26, 2012)

'the society of the spectacle'. O RLY. That's a bit fucking Marie Antoinette.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 26, 2012)

She knows fuck all about _The Society of the Spectacle_, which she once described as "the bible of protest" or some such bullshit.


----------



## articul8 (Jun 26, 2012)

Self-satirising. She probably thinks she's offering some postmodern deconstruction of celebtrity culture in the activist milieu. Or some bullshit.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 26, 2012)

*



			Penn Badgley, Zoe Kravitz and other young NY celebs throw a sparkly party for Occupiers. Confusion rules
		
Click to expand...

*
For fuck's sake. A sparkly party that most of the people she claims to speak for would never be able to get to, full of twats and media luvvies. A sparkly party for occupiers jesus fucking fucking christ. A party by the bourgeoisie thrown "for" us. For us! Would my mate carly be able to go to that eh penny or would they throw her out for looking like a chav and not knowing about all that radical bullshit you're talking about? Would my mates be able to afford the price of the drinks? Is it any wonder people don't give a fuck about the left and don't give a fuck about you?



> These actors, models, artists, publicity flunkies and those young and well-dressed enough to make their way past the bouncers have spent most of their professional lives learning how to half-listen until it’s their turn to half-speak. “My boss just told me to show up,” says one of the P.R. girls. It’s as good a reason as any to learn about a new people’s movement.


 


> Badgley, Daniel Pinchbeck, Zoe Kravitz and others organized this event in order to raise awareness about the Occupy movement among those in New York society who spend their trust funds in private clubs. A self-consciously scratchy recording of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” plays over an exquisite invisible sound system as you walk in, through a forest of helium balloons, to a low-lit hall where people like Alexa Chung and Olivia Wilde make the scene. The room is full of people who won’t speak to you until their handlers approve, all of them trying earnestly to understand the profound change that has taken place in the zeitgeist that provides their income.


 
The zeitgeist that provids their income. What a load of fucking shit! Raise awareness about the occupy movement among those in New York society who spend their trust funds in private clubs. Do you know something? FUCK those people! I don't want them near ANY movement im part of especially if they're going to be making money out of it and turning it into some sort of che t-shirt merchandise bollocks.



> In fact, we do, but very few of them get invited to parties at the Bowery Hotel. Around the edges of the Occupy movement, a new generation of creatives is beginning to make art that actually matters. Some of that art can be found daubed on pieces of cardboard and held aloft at marches, some of it is tacked on the walls at radical bookshops or illegally wheat-pasted around major world financial districts. Much of it happens on the Internet, and all of it has a sincere quality that utterly confuses those who, ever since the days of Nirvana, have worked to make abject conformity seem like radical individualism, to prostitute the energy of youth to the wealth of age, and to dress apathy in the drag of iconoclasm. It is because of people like this that the Strokes ever sold a record.


 
And what if they don't get invited to the bowery hotel because they've got no money or because they're union reps who are working hard with problems AT WORK eh penny? problems that you almost certainly know absolutely nothing about but your parents' generation probably will? Sorry for the epic rant it just makes me sick !!


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> _Radical Chic: That Party at Penny's._
> 
> And here we have from the girl herself The return of the Radical Chic evening


 
Peculiarly enough, whilst having my breakfast dump this morning I reached the RC part of my current toilet book, David Caute's _Sixty-Eight_*:




> [Ben Whitaker MP] visited a popular off-Broadway play, Christmas Turkey, during which a white girl lay naked on a table through most of the action, asking the black nats to eat her and so end race hatred. This, of course, was youthful idealism and sentimentality engaging in the politics of gesture which, when the the appurtenances of wealth are added, becomes radical chic.
> 
> ...Of the year 1968 [Joan] Didion remarked: I did no good works but I tried to keep in touch. I was responsible. I recognized my name when I saw it.'


 
* No, not a great work, and not a great writer, but handy for snippets of narrative history and pointers to better books. And Wolfe.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 26, 2012)

> “There was a lot of eye-rolling when we started talking about this event,” Zoe Kravitz tells me in the smoking area. “There were a lot of people saying – ‘Who wants to listen to a bunch of rich hipsters talk about Occupy Wall Street?’ And that isn’t the answer. Maybe we don’t have an answer, but that isn’t it. So this is a place to check your eye-rolling at the door.” I ask Kravitz what she thinks will bring the real change. She is unequivocal. “Have events like this! Maybe people will show up, maybe people won’t show up, but I think watching people connect on a very human level is the important thing.”


 
This piece sickens me. It actually SICKENS me.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 26, 2012)

weepiper said:


> 'the society of the spectacle'. O RLY. That's a bit fucking Marie Antoinette.


 
Our lives are a spectacle now Weeps.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

Should've gone to SocietyOfTheSpecSavers.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

I ask Kravitz what she thinks will bring the real change...at a party
 I ask Rachael Johnson what she thinks will bring the real change...at a party


----------



## Ade-oh (Jun 26, 2012)

It's all a misunderstanding, didn't someone say that 'the party will be the vanguard of the proletariat'?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 26, 2012)

Fucking hell. Making shit art with trust fund socialites by jetting in and out of people's struggles and drawing them (looking injured but oddly delighted to be involved in THIS PROJECT) and then going to a party. It wouldn't matter but she's making a good living off this shit and lying her way through. Where did Starkey call her "a little shit"? He didn't. Why say it? What he did was surely bad enough to report exactly. "We smoke roll-up cigarettes. We dream. We party because that's all we can do".

FUCK OFF.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

Can't wait for the CHAV PARTY!!!


----------



## articul8 (Jun 26, 2012)

Do the Americans have CHAVS? - _you're just like soooo parochial_


----------



## rekil (Jun 26, 2012)

Birthday tarot lady "is currently studying Afro-Cuban traditions under her Godfather Ochani Lele and is a confirmed child of Eleggua."


----------



## chilango (Jun 26, 2012)

It's time to get Laura and her mates into some real hardcore vicariousness, huh?

I think the Informal Anarchists need to get in touch with her...



> The Schili were the affluent German leftists who often supported the Baader-Meinhof Gang during their time on the run (they were also called “the Raspberry Reich” or the “Schickeria”). “Schili” was a cross between “chic” (schick), and “left” (linke) and was a somewhat derogatory term. Many of the Schili who supported the outlaw gang members by providing shelter and money, later regretted it when the gang’s activities turned deadly. At the time, however, supporting the Baader-Meinhof Gang was a simple way to live vicariously through their activities.


----------



## articul8 (Jun 26, 2012)

copliker said:


> Birthday tarot lady "is currently studying Afro-Cuban traditions under her Godfather Ochani Lele and is a confirmed child of Eleggua."


that's the spirit - _open the horizons of your mind_ _man_


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

copliker said:


> Birthday tarot lady "is currently studying Afro-Cuban traditions under her Godfather Ochani Lele and is a confirmed child of Eleggua."


Oh brilliant, they are into animal cruelty and torture. Come back Manson family, Dohrn was right.


----------



## belboid (Jun 26, 2012)

Random said:


> It's not jus full of shit, or all ott. It's a political gossip thread, touching on some important issues


mebbe.  Deeply repetitious now.  We all know she's a shit writer and a parasite.  There's nothing left that is worth saying, is there?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 26, 2012)

If you find it boring can't you just not read or post on the thread? I mean, it's not particularly productive I admit but I at least find it quite amusing to laugh at her hypocrisy - she embodies all that I hate about the liberal left, it's like someone has taken all the most irritating traits of student wadicals and distilled them into one person. This isn't just a thread about Laurie Penny - it's a thread about all that's wrong with the middle class left.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 26, 2012)

belboid said:


> mebbe. Deeply repetitious now. We all know she's a shit writer and a parasite. There's nothing left that is worth saying, is there?


 
Posters are commenting on individual articles. So, er, yes there is. You might as well level the same thing at Cameron or David Laws or Stephen Twigg. "Oh, we've got them pegged - best forget about them."


----------



## Random (Jun 26, 2012)

Agree. That last article about a party was shocking, and shed light on the elite Occupy types


----------



## belboid (Jun 26, 2012)

Penny fucking Laurie is hardly in the same league as Cameron n Clegg et al tho, is she?


----------



## Random (Jun 26, 2012)

Belboid you're deeply repetative on this topic and you've nothing worth saying that we've not already heard


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 26, 2012)

if you've got other articles by other annoying bourgeois twats, then post them up. half of this thread isn't just about laurie penny anyway, it's about molly crabapple and all that shit


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 26, 2012)




----------



## belboid (Jun 26, 2012)

Random said:


> Belboid you're deeply repetative on this topic and you've nothing worth saying that we've not already heard


better post a pic of me looking sexy up then, see how that improves the thread


----------



## Random (Jun 26, 2012)

Joking aside, belboid, I dont think you understand how strongly I feel about this. Ten years or so ago I was involved in an anarchoid event in manchester where I discovered that one of the organisers had invited two of his uni friends, now editor of Dazed and Confused, to cover the (illegal) action from the inside. I and others were called wreckers for objecting to this. The event failed for other reasons, but I have a long term interest in opposing this kind of media corruption of radical protests.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 26, 2012)




----------



## rekil (Jun 26, 2012)

The Hari thread wasn't OTT and neither is this. Not as OTT as the Workers Power one anyway.


----------



## belboid (Jun 26, 2012)

Random said:


> Joking aside, belboid, I dont think you understand how strongly I feel about this. Ten years or so ago I was involved in an anarchoid event in manchester where I discovered that one of the organisers had invited two of his uni friends, now editor of Dazed and Confused, to cover the (illegal) action from the inside. I and others were called wreckers for objecting to this. The event failed for other reasons, but I have a long term interest in opposing this kind of media corruption of radical protests.


Fair do's - it is an important point.  But, I think, that kind of point is rather lost amidst all the shite.  When a 'phwoar' pic goes up, sorry, but any political point to a thread is lost.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

belboid said:


> Fair do's - it is an important point. But, I think, that kind of point is rather lost amidst all the shite. When a 'phwoar' pic goes up, sorry, but any political point to a thread is lost.


Oh leave off, one pic was put up and the crap that followed it was dealt with pretty swiftly. Since then we've actually posted about a whole range of things, uncovered a lot of info and discussed demonstrated the context in which this sort of radical-parasitism exists both in terms of educational privilege and cultural capital in the UK and financial privilege in the US.


----------



## rekil (Jun 26, 2012)

A thread with 2275 posts and only 1 phwoar pic has to be some kind of record tbh.


----------



## Random (Jun 26, 2012)

No need to over-dramatise, belboid. A pic like that is also an opportunity to push back agains sexism, it's not to be run from in horror or boredom, not if the topic is important.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

It's a 76 page thread with 2,279 posts. There is no single 'political point'. What is relevant or useful or thought-provoking will not be any less so because of some posts betraying ill-considered misogyny (which has been challenged).


----------



## love detective (Jun 26, 2012)

copliker said:


> A thread with 2275 posts and only 1 phwoar pic has to be some kind of record tbh.


 
belboid in his undercrackers up soon to boost the phwoar count


----------



## belboid (Jun 26, 2012)

Random said:


> No need to over-dramatise, belboid. A pic like that is also an opportunity to push back agains sexism, it's not to be run from in horror or boredom, not if the topic is important.


but the topic is one minor journo. As I said, low-hanging fruit.

Still, whatever. Enjoy yourselves


----------



## belboid (Jun 26, 2012)

love detective said:


> belboid in his undercrackers up soon to boost the phwoar count


done already


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

belboid said:


> but the topic is one minor journo. As I said, low-hanging fruit.
> 
> Still, whatever. Enjoy yourselves


Have you moved into LLETSA'S?


----------



## rekil (Jun 26, 2012)

Leave Hari alone as well. Oh, too late.


----------



## Random (Jun 26, 2012)

belboid said:


> but the topic is one minor journo. As I said, low-hanging fruit.
> 
> Still, whatever. Enjoy yourselves


Thought you said just now you took my point about this being a wider issue. This thread is also a What not to do lesson for all anarcholeftie journalists.


----------



## belboid (Jun 26, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Have you moved into LLETSA'S?


 
ooh, you cad!


----------



## belboid (Jun 26, 2012)

Random said:


> Thought you said just now you took my point about this being a wider issue. This thread is also a What not to do lesson for all anarcholeftie journalists.


Bollocks.  It's a 'penny is shit thread.'  Any lessons are hidden amongst the drivel


----------



## Random (Jun 26, 2012)

belboid said:


> Bollocks.  It's a 'penny is shit thread.'  Any lessons are hidden amongst the drivel


 there are plenty of wider lessons to be learnt. And what's all this superior stuff about 'drivel'? You sometimes spend whole threads swearing at someone you don't like, Mr Content.


----------



## love detective (Jun 26, 2012)

belboid said:


> done already


 
lost a bit of weight there i see!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 26, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Attending a birthday bash with her poor, precariously living mates.


 
Those pictures made me want to start sharpening my hatchet!   Even the names of the attendees to the party roused my (admittedly easily-roused) ire. Burke Heffner, ffs!!!


----------



## articul8 (Jun 26, 2012)

That's yanks in general though - they're all called Brad Nugent or something


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 26, 2012)

Any relation to Hugh, he has the same jawline?


----------



## treelover (Jun 26, 2012)

love detective said:


> yeah fair enough - I was kind of conflating then & now with oxbridge types who are more honest about what they are & represent and those are not


 
Jack Common was one of the working class ones...


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 26, 2012)

Random said:


> one of the organisers had invited two of his uni friends, now editor of Dazed and Confused, to cover the (illegal) action from the inside. I and others were called wreckers for objecting to this.


really? He's a friend of mine. I wouldn't characterise him as a flag-waving radical


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 26, 2012)

articul8 said:


> That's yanks in general though - they're all called Brad Nugent or something


 
And that's just the women.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 26, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Any relation to Hugh, he has the same jawline?


 
Possible, I suppose. Hef did/does put it around a bit.


----------



## belboid (Jun 26, 2012)

Random said:


> You sometimes spend whole threads swearing at someone you don't like, Mr Content.


yeah, but at least those people are actually on the thread.


----------



## rekil (Jun 26, 2012)

> *Dan Franklin ‏@DigitalDanHouse*
> I'm v pleased that we're going to be publishing DISCORDIA by @PennyRed and @mollycrabapple in late summer (ish)


Mr.Digital Publisher at the Random House Group UK, you are mental.


----------



## andy2002 (Jun 26, 2012)

copliker said:


> Mr.Digital Publisher at the Random House Group UK, you are mental.


 
Unfortunately, there's an audience for this kind of bollocks. I can hear Warren Ellis and his ilk wanking themselves stupid over it already. It'll also get loads of publicity through the likes of the Guardian, Indie, NS etc.


----------



## rekil (Jun 26, 2012)

andy2002 said:


> Unfortunately, there's an audience for this kind of bollocks. I can hear Warren Ellis and his ilk wanking themselves stupid over it already. It'll also get loads of publicity through the likes of the Guardian, Indie, NS etc.


Proletarian Democracy issued this demand in response.

'Publish our stuff you bastards.'


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

copliker said:


> Mr.Digital Publisher at the Random House Group UK, you are mental.



I saw it more as a project that would be crowdsourced through Kickstarter, with a launch party hosted by Amanda Palmer and liveblogged via Tumblr.


----------



## Random (Jun 26, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> really? He's a friend of mine. I wouldn't characterise him as a flag-waving radical


 I meant the then-editor, or asst editor. A woman.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 26, 2012)

andy2002 said:


> Unfortunately, there's an audience for this kind of bollocks. I can hear Warren Ellis and his ilk wanking themselves stupid over it already. It'll also get loads of publicity through the likes of the Guardian, Indie, NS etc.


 
I asked A Senior Person at Verso about this, a while back (they published LP's collection of blog posts). They very overtly look for writers with an existing audience, and you have to be able to demonstrate that people would buy your book if they published it. So their first advice to anyone wanting to get a (non-fic) book deal these days is, 'get a blog, and a Twitter account, build an audience and then talk to us'.
That's how it works apparently.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 26, 2012)

Random said:


> I meant the then-editor, or asst editor. A woman.


Right you are


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 26, 2012)

Of course, if you already had a blog and a Twitter account and an audience then you might decide that it would be easier, less irritating and more true to your original vision to self-publish the damn thing, and bypass mainstream publishers entirely.
That would involve far less compromising on the content at the instructions of some marketing random in order to make it 'saleable'. But then you wouldn't get to hobnob with Owen Jones at the Verso Christmas party.
Swings & roundabouts.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

I hear those Verso Christmas Parties are DA BOMB.


----------



## treelover (Jun 26, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> the thing that gets me about penny, is the whole claiming to be a voice of a generation thing - like how the fuck can she know what everyone's lives are like? i mean fuck me im not the most proletarian person in the world but i could bet that my social circle is wider than hers. how can you know what everyone's lives are like if you've gone straight from brighton college into a meejah job paying more than what the majority of the country earn?


 
Her boyfriend, maybe, ex, boyfriend was on disability benefits, her ire towards that part of the system seems genuine..


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 26, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Of course, if you already had a blog and a Twitter account and an audience *then you might decide that it would be easier, less irritating and more true to your original vision to self-publish the damn thing, and bypass mainstream publishers entirely.*
> That would involve far less compromising on the content at the instructions of some marketing random in order to make it 'saleable'. But then you wouldn't get to hobnob with Owen Jones at the Verso Christmas party.
> Swings & roundabouts.


 
You might, but then you would have to buy in professional support for editing, proofing, marketing etc...

Swings and roundabouts.


----------



## belboid (Jun 26, 2012)

are there any proofers who'd work with the Penster, considering how she blames them for all her fuck ups?



(shit!  I'm doing it myself now.  Pass the birch....)


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> You might, but then you would have to buy in professional support for editing, proofing, marketing etc...


 
[Re marketing in particular]

Not necessarily, certainly not at the costs involved in production for a physical print run, and definitely not if it's not aimed at a mass market audience where there would have to be immense breadth in penetration.

[Edited to specify marketing]


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

belboid said:


> are there any proofers who'd work with the Penster, considering how she blames them for all her fuck ups?
> 
> 
> 
> (shit! I'm doing it myself now. Pass the birch....)


I'm sure she could find an eager intern to pay under the legal minimum wage.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

Book? This is 2012 - bung your crap writing on the internet - show you _believe_ all that guff that you wrote about it.


----------



## killer b (Jun 26, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> immense breadth in penetration.


fnar.


----------



## treelover (Jun 26, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> For fuck's sake. A sparkly party that most of the people she claims to speak for would never be able to get to, full of twats and media luvvies. A sparkly party for occupiers jesus fucking fucking christ. A party by the bourgeoisie thrown "for" us. For us! Would my mate carly be able to go to that eh penny or would they throw her out for looking like a chav and not knowing about all that radical bullshit you're talking about? Would my mates be able to afford the price of the drinks? Is it any wonder people don't give a fuck about the left and don't give a fuck about you?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

Wasn't it the case that there was a massive chasm in ONY between the poor, homeless, wc, occupiers and the more affluent and 'geeky' Uptown occupiers: not having a welfare state, the division between young people from poorer backgrounds and the trustarians, sons and daughters of elites, etc must be much wider than here, at least uptil now, after the welfare cuts, tuition fees rises, well..

btw, why some of this is revealing,. like some others I find it a bit disturbing to have thread of so many pages focussing on one person, i don't think it it has happened before, not even with Gogarty...


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

treelover said:


> Wasn't it the case that there was a massive chasm in ONY between the poor, homeless, wc, occupiers and the more affluent and 'geeky' occupiers: not having a welfare state, the division between young people from poorer backgrounds and the trustarians, sons and daughters of elites, etc must be much wider than here, at least uptil now, after the welfare cuts, tuition fees rises, well..
> 
> btw, why some of this is revealing,. like some others I find it a bit disturbing to have thread of so many pages focussing on one person, i don't think it it has happened before, not even with Gogarty...


That's because he was a one week thing - this shit is still going on, week after week after week. If you can't see the issues that are driving this then you're not reading it right.


----------



## Fruitloop (Jun 26, 2012)

The Gogarty thing ran and ran.

The are kind of separated at birth though


----------



## chilango (Jun 26, 2012)

It's not about Laura as an _individual_. It's about Laura as a manifestation of a certain power relationship and the effect that this has on the rest of us. 

"Laurie Penny" is a fictional character anyway...a role eagerly assumed.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 26, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> You might, but then you would have to buy in professional support for editing, proofing, marketing etc...
> 
> Swings and roundabouts.


 
I think it depends on whether you're in it for the intellectual satisfaction, or the fame.
Swings and roundabouts.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 26, 2012)

Back in the old days there must have been loads of Pennys walking around. . . but there were also people like this:


----------



## love detective (Jun 26, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> You might, but then you would have to buy in professional support for editing, proofing, marketing etc...
> 
> Swings and roundabouts.


 
Or in the case of BTF, you go with a publisher and end up doing all that stuff yourselves anyway....


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

chilango said:


> It's not about Laura as an _individual_. It's about Laura as a manifestation of a certain power relationship and the effect that this has on the rest of us.
> 
> "Laurie Penny" is a fictional character anyway...a role eagerly assumed.


That's it exactly. I lost the argument to shelf her book in the fiction section of the Hyrda bookshop.

(hers and chavs absolutely flew out as well - fucking plebs in this town)


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 26, 2012)

Johann Hari is still alive and kicking, btw.

http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/commen...nn-hari-twitter-and-the-importance-of-critics


----------



## Balbi (Jun 26, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Johann Hari is still alive and kicking, btw.
> 
> http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/commen...nn-hari-twitter-and-the-importance-of-critics


 
'journalist'


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Johann Hari is still alive and kicking, btw.
> 
> http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/commen...nn-hari-twitter-and-the-importance-of-critics


Oh wow, please let him be saying what i think he' saying - that his wiki-vandalism was _critique_.


----------



## chilango (Jun 26, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> That's it exactly. I lost the argument to shelf her book in the fiction section of the Hyrda bookshop.
> 
> (hers and chavs absolutely flew out as well - fucking plebs in this town)


 
You stock her book?!?!

Not cool.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

chilango said:


> You stock her book?!?!
> 
> Not cool.


To be fair, we didn't _order_ it - we were a bit desperate for stock due to opening a month earlier than planned so i rang up pluto and asked what they could do to help asap and they said they had boxes of their top 25 sellers sitting there just waiting to go, so i said we'll have that - little did i suspect...


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 26, 2012)

Maybe it's time to revive the Hari thread ...
He's back on Twitter as well btw, if anyone wants to joust with him.
Edit: And lo, it came to pass, that what I predicteth came true. He is now working on a book, according to his Twitter biog. I knew it.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 26, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Oh wow, please let him be saying what i think he' saying - that his wiki-vandalism was _critique_.


 
"They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing".


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 26, 2012)

the extended hari-kiri continues- when will the punctured ego finally bleed out?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Maybe it's time to revive the Hari thread ...
> He's back on Twitter as well btw, if anyone wants to joust with him.
> Edit: And lo, it came to pass, that what I predicteth came true. He is now working on a book, according to his Twitter biog. I knew it.


You said he'd head up a think tank!


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jun 26, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> You said he'd head up a think tank!


 
Not 'head up'. Write for. And/or do a book. Or do something which contained elements of both (non-fic think-tanky policy book effort).
I wonder who his publisher is ...


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Not 'head up'. Write for. And/or do a book. Or do something which contained elements of both (non-fic think-tanky policy book effort).


Everyone said he'd be forced to do a book!


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 26, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> the extended hari-kiri continues- when will the punctured ego finally bleed out?


 
Evil cannot die.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Evil cannot die.


Not if we keep it in our hearts.


----------



## Random (Jun 26, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Oh wow, please let him be saying what i think he' saying - that his wiki-vandalism was _critique_.


 his article seems to be cultural journalism by numbers. The sub ed must have added the bit at the start


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

Random said:


> his article seems to be cultural journalism by numbers. The sub ed must have added the bit at the start


GQ - lol  I heard loaded offered him a spot.

What a heavyweight.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 26, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> GQ - lol  I heard loaded offered him a spot.
> 
> What a heavyweight.


 
He's not exactly the Loaded demographic, though?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

Random said:


> his article seems to be cultural journalism by numbers. The sub ed must have added the bit at the start


 
You mean this?



> *now with footnotes


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 26, 2012)

who is these days, i can't believe they are still alive while my precious interzone continues to to fail.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> He's not exactly the Loaded demographic, though?


 
Originally _Loaded_ wanted Laurie, but what with Johann's 'troubles', the Russian offered a straight swap.


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 26, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I ask Kravitz what she thinks will bring the real change...at a party
> I ask Rachael Johnson what she thinks will bring the real change...at a party


 
by that time of night I am normally accosted by people asking for loose change


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 26, 2012)

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...udices-of-dinosaur-david-starkey-7879710.html


----------



## JimW (Jun 26, 2012)

belboid said:


> are there any proofers who'd work with the Penster, considering how she blames them for all her fuck ups?
> 
> 
> 
> (shit! I'm doing it myself now. Pass the birch....)


It's lovely once you're in! (Works for Laurie too, come to think of it)


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 26, 2012)

I wouldn't give a flying fuck so long as I got my wages. Proofing isn't about preserving someones journalistic integrity- thats their own problem. And anyone who has a clue what proofers do will know that. It's donkey work, on the behalf of people who shouldn't need your eyes. Not nice to be shat on to cover up her indiscretions of writing though, I imagine, if you've pride and aren't at fault. Would be wounding if you consider your work to be anything other than tidying up the ill-thought rantings of some egotist....


----------



## fractionMan (Jun 26, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...udices-of-dinosaur-david-starkey-7879710.html


 
I'm not going to read that because it'll make me feel ill.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jun 26, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Attending a birthday bash with her poor, precariously living mates.


Funnily enough, her mates look just like the hipster crew who have taken over the Angel pub in Brixton under the guise of a "community arts project", where £40 buys you the chance to hang with people inspired by "where the street drinkers hang out; where the bins are kept" : https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.296080590483894.68594.102357773189511&type=1


----------



## kavenism (Jun 26, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> That's it exactly. I lost the argument to shelf her book in the fiction section of the Hyrda bookshop.
> 
> (hers and chavs absolutely flew out as well - fucking plebs in this town)


 
I did enjoy reviewing her book last year. 76% approval rating too.
Proudhon comment a bit harsh in retrospect.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-rev...p_text?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0#RMBPVDBOE8N11


----------



## articul8 (Jun 26, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> fucking plebs


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

kavenism said:


> I did enjoy reviewing her book last year. 76% approval rating too.
> Proudhon comment a bit harsh in retrospect.
> http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-rev...p_text?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0#RMBPVDBOE8N11


Good review! Wasn't that book i was on about mind, was yet another one that collected shit off the internet


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 26, 2012)

articul8 said:


>


I used it strictly accurately here, i assure you.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

> I am extremely satisfied with this product. Arrived very quickly, perfect condition and a great read, definately worth the money. This is an inspiring read!


Mmmm, lovely, juicy, Meaty product!


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

kavenism said:


> I did enjoy reviewing her book last year. 76% approval rating too.
> Proudhon comment a bit harsh in retrospect.
> http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-rev...p_text?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0#RMBPVDBOE8N11


 
I see you have your own fan:



> Coming from the person who gave Independence Day with Will Smith a 4 out of 5 star rating! Haha ; )


----------



## killer b (Jun 26, 2012)

Laurie penny: 3 stars worse than independence day with will smith


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I used it strictly accurately here, i assure you.


 
That's not really in the spirit of a Laurie Penny thread (or indeed column).


----------



## discokermit (Jun 26, 2012)

cracking review.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

Quick - Amazon only has THREE LEFT IN STOCK on her other tome (the one endorsed by butchersapron & Hydra Books):


----------



## Random (Jun 26, 2012)

'autonomous' used as a swear word throughout that review. I smell trot! Great sweaty metaphors btw


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 26, 2012)

The single reviewer of _Notes_ has also given ***** to a volume on Staffordshire oatcakes


----------



## discokermit (Jun 26, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> The single reviewer of _Notes_ has also given ***** to a volume on Staffordshire oatcakes


they are nice though.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 26, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> If you find it boring can't you just not read or post on the thread? I mean, it's not particularly productive I admit but I at least find it quite amusing to laugh at her hypocrisy - she embodies all that I hate about the liberal left, it's like someone has taken all the most irritating traits of student wadicals and distilled them into one person. This isn't just a thread about Laurie Penny - it's a thread about all that's wrong with the middle class left.


 
Exactly.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 26, 2012)

treelover said:


> Jack Common was one of the working class ones...


 
Indeed.  A talented writer.  Great for a working class perspective in the 1930s etc.


----------



## binka (Jun 26, 2012)

i wish i got invited to parties like that


----------



## discokermit (Jun 26, 2012)

binka said:


> i wish i got invited to parties like that


shit party. no one was dancing.


----------



## revol68 (Jun 26, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Funnily enough, her mates look just like the hipster crew who have taken over the Angel pub in Brixton under the guise of a "community arts project", where £40 buys you the chance to hang with people inspired by "where the street drinkers hang out; where the bins are kept" : https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.296080590483894.68594.102357773189511&type=1


 
they look more like wacky wankers than hipsters to me.


----------



## kavenism (Jun 26, 2012)

Random said:


> 'autonomous' used as a swear word throughout that review. I smell trot! Great sweaty metaphors btw


 

Good spot. It was originally written to be published on Counterfire’s site but to be honest they were still rather ‘involved’ with her and so I decided against submitting it to them. Got the chance to add more invective for the Amazon audience though! In hindsight ‘autonomous’ is used in a rather glib and unnecessary way. A bad habit I’ve hopefully rid myself of.


----------



## kavenism (Jun 26, 2012)

killer b said:


> Laurie penny: 3 stars worse than independence day with will smith


 

Independence Day has self-awareness of near monolithic proportions compared to Penny.
And that review was a bit tongue in cheek.


----------



## newbie (Jun 26, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...udices-of-dinosaur-david-starkey-7879710.html


I quite like that tbh.  Starkey deserves all he gets and he's quite capable of dishing it out.  I'll look forward to his reply, this little spat could be fun.


----------



## andy2002 (Jun 27, 2012)

kavenism said:


> Independence Day has self-awareness of near monolithic proportions compared to Penny.
> And that review was a bit tongue in cheek.


 
Will Smith popping onto an alien mothership, uploading a killer computer virus and getting out in one piece is, frankly, a lot more believable than most of the rubbish Penny Dreadful comes out with.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 27, 2012)

Put these two powerhouses together and you get... A GIANT MECHANICAL SPIDER WITH A BIG RED PEN.

Box office gold.


----------



## chilango (Jun 27, 2012)

Captain Steven Hiller wouldn't have felt threatened by David Starkey. Take notes Laura.



> Who's the man? Huh? Who's the man? Wait till I get another plane! I'm a line ya friends up right beside you! Where ya at, huh? Where ya at?
> [_Hiller opens the spaceship, the alien screams, Hiller smacks him in the head_]


----------



## Balbi (Jun 27, 2012)

chilango said:


> Captain Steven Hiller wouldn't have felt threatened by David Starkey. Take notes Laura.


 
*"Welcome to earth"*

Independence Day, beloved of the American right - where a black guy and a jew save the world


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 27, 2012)

and an alien civilisation with the technological awesomeness and biological knowledge to travel across the stars and then engage a biosphere with hostile intent can be brought low with just a laptop and jeff goldblum. Amazing.


----------



## chilango (Jun 27, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> and an alien civilisation with the technological awesomeness and biological knowledge to travel across the stars and then engage a biosphere with hostile intent can be brought low with just a laptop and jeff goldblum. Amazing.


 
No mention in the film about the alien civilisation being a socialist one. Odd, as only a socialist society can be capable of the development needed for interstellar travel...as of course we all should know.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 27, 2012)

I also like how the brits in that film are reduced to standing around waiting for uncle sam to save them.

honestly though, the sight of the whithouse being rendered to ashes by aliens is worth the ticket price


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 27, 2012)

chilango said:


> No mention in the film about the alien civilisation being a socialist one. Odd, as only a socialist society can be capable of the development needed for interstellar travel...as of course we all should know.


----------



## chilango (Jun 27, 2012)

chilango said:


> Captain Steven Hiller wouldn't have felt threatened by David Starkey. Take notes Laura.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 27, 2012)

after a conversation i had recently, i can never view david starkey in the same light again


----------



## chilango (Jun 27, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> after a conversation i had recently, i can never view david starkey in the same light again


 
Do tell?


----------



## chilango (Jun 27, 2012)




----------



## Balbi (Jun 27, 2012)

At least two levels there


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 27, 2012)

chilango said:


> Do tell?


Please don't, I've a dicky stomach and don't need to be hearing about the libertine exploits of a whiney pop academic when I've got a grumbler brewing.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 27, 2012)

chilango said:


> Do tell?


 
we wrote a story about him


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 27, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> we wrote a story about him


Oh? You've got me all intrigued now.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 27, 2012)

Balbi said:


> *"Welcome to earth"*
> 
> Independence Day, beloved of the American right - where a black guy and a jew save the world


Oddly enough, the same two groups that were routinely attacked by the American right up till the 1980s... well, blacks still got attacked (George Bush snr's campaign team deliberately used race as an issue).


----------



## Balbi (Jun 27, 2012)

nino_savatte said:


> Oddly enough, the same two groups that were routinely attacked by the American right up till the 1980s... well, blacks still got attacked (George Bush snr's campaign team deliberately used race as an issue).


 
It's not really funny if you have to explain it though.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 27, 2012)

nino_savatte said:


> Oh? You've got me all intrigued now.


 
i'm not sure you really want to know tbf


----------



## rekil (Jun 27, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> To be fair, we didn't _order_ it - we were a bit desperate for stock due to opening a month earlier than planned so i rang up pluto and asked what they could do to help asap and they said they had boxes of their top 25 sellers sitting there just waiting to go, so i said we'll have that - little did i suspect...


Why not ask her to come in to give a reading.


----------



## Balbi (Jun 27, 2012)

copliker said:


> Why not ask her to come in to give a reading.


 
What did butchers ever do to you, that you would try and hurt him in this way?


----------



## love detective (Jun 27, 2012)

Has this been posted yet about Molly Crabapple?

She raised $65,000 from devotees on the internet so she could paint 9 pictures

edit: and the money was raised in just three days from initial appeal


----------



## chilango (Jun 27, 2012)

love detective said:


> Has this been posted yet about Molly Crabapple?
> 
> She raised $65,000 from devotees on the internet so she could paint 9 pictures
> 
> edit: and the money was raised in just three days from initial appeal


 
'ckin hell.

...and to think I do my "anti-capitalist paintings" for free and then  give them away. I'm missing a trick here!


----------



## rekil (Jun 27, 2012)

love detective said:


> Has this been posted yet about Molly Crabapple?
> 
> She raised $65,000 from devotees on the internet so she could paint 9 pictures
> 
> edit: and the money was raised in just three days from initial appeal


And there she was, hounding Laura over a piddling few hundred for the privilege of sleeping on her floor? What a monster. Laura lied about that too btw, she posts pics of her bed and room on the twitter.

This nonsense reminds me of Plunkitt of Tammany Hall.


> There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”


 
There's a whiff of conspiraloon off her as well.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 27, 2012)

copliker said:


> Why not ask her to come in to give a reading.


 
14 July looks like a suitable day.


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 27, 2012)

love detective said:


> Has this been posted yet about Molly Crabapple?
> 
> She raised $65,000 from devotees on the internet so she could paint 9 pictures
> 
> edit: and the money was raised in just three days from initial appeal


Modern day Stanley edwards


----------



## co-op (Jun 27, 2012)

love detective said:


> Has this been posted yet about Molly Crabapple?
> 
> She raised $65,000 from devotees on the internet so she could paint 9 pictures
> 
> edit: and the money was raised in just three days from initial appeal


 

Are you maybe a super-rich fan of Molly's work and also like to get involved in really trendy stuff like crowd-sourced funding for art and all that, but may be turned off a bit by the whole left-wing thing? Don't worry, Molly's thought about that, it might look political but relax, it's just Art;

_*"Is Shell Game dirty commie pinko propaganda?*_
_Maybe a little. But you'll find the same scampering fat cats, tentacles, and surreal details that are always in my work. So my fans who could care less about world affairs should still like it."_

It's really important not to alienate that whole right-wing demographic, right?


----------



## Balbi (Jun 27, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Modern day Stanley edwards


 
The word you're looking for isn't modern day, it's 'successful'


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 27, 2012)

Balbi said:


> The word you're looking for isn't modern day, it's 'successful'


I met him in Granada !


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 27, 2012)

> Just finished _A New England_ tonight in a mad binge (well this whole month has been a mad binge), right before I take off for three weeks to Paris-Amsterdam-London-Athens.  It was really watching the UK student occupations unfold that got me thinking in the vein of political art, so this was an honor and joy for me to do
> 
> This is the first painting I've done that hasn't been scooped up by collectors yet, so if you're interested, get in touch.


 
For just eight yankee grands you can have Laura by Molly on your wall, forever.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 27, 2012)

copliker said:


> Why not ask her to come in to give a reading.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 27, 2012)

Balbi said:


> The word you're looking for isn't modern day, it's 'successful'


 
Ooh, you bitch!!!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 27, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> I met him in Granada !


 
Does he like bingo, then?


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 27, 2012)

Random said:


> Belboid you're deeply repetative on this topic and you've nothing worth saying that we've not already heard


 


Said with more flair and originality by me.

Relax folks-it isn't going to get any better.


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 27, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Have you moved into LLETSA'S?


 


Shit, beaten to it.

Belboid wouldn't like it at ours.


----------



## belboid (Jun 27, 2012)

true.  I get enough depressed miserabilist cunts at work


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 27, 2012)

belboid said:


> true. I get enough depressed miserabilist cunts at work


 
Paradoxically, pessimists are usually happier than optimists. At least pessimists know in advance it's all going to turn to shit. Optimism is a recipe for eternal disappointment.


----------



## belboid (Jun 27, 2012)

I'd rather be disappointed whilst trying to change the world than be happy about it being shit.


----------



## killer b (Jun 27, 2012)

all the pessimists I know are bitter miserable fucks tbh. optimists tend to be much more cheery.


----------



## belboid (Jun 27, 2012)

killer b said:


> all the pessimists I know are bitter miserable fucks tbh. optimists tend to be much more cheery.


but they always use LLETSA's line, showing all the self-awareness of a shoe


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 27, 2012)

belboid said:


> I'd rather be disappointed whilst trying to change the world than be happy about it being shit.


 

I'd rather be happily disappointed with the knowledge that the world is totally indifferent to everything I could possibly think, say or do.


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 27, 2012)

killer b said:


> all the pessimists I know are bitter miserable fucks tbh. optimists tend to be much more cheery.


 


The world is full of smiling dolts.


----------



## killer b (Jun 27, 2012)

make your mind up.


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 27, 2012)

killer b said:


> make your mind up.


 

What about?


----------



## killer b (Jun 27, 2012)

actually, forget it.


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 27, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Does he like bingo, then?



Smoking ban ruined that industry


----------



## Old Gergl (Jun 27, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> we wrote a story about him


35?


----------



## kavenism (Jun 27, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> For just eight yankee grands you can have Laura by Molly on your wall, forever.


 

That's one expensive dart board.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 27, 2012)




----------



## love detective (Jun 28, 2012)

jesus this is difficult to watch, gets steadily worse and worse - she's a complete wreck, she shouldn't be allowed anywhere near these kind of things, for her own benefit as much as anyone else


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 28, 2012)

_Grime and dubstep_


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 28, 2012)

I couldn't watch it all the way through, that was cringy.

On the brightside if Laurie ever needed to borrow a tiny man's suit the professor might be able to help...


----------



## Joe Reilly (Jun 28, 2012)

love detective said:


> jesus this is difficult to watch, gets steadily worse and worse - she's a complete wreck, she shouldn't be allowed anywhere near these kind of things, for her own benefit as much as anyone else




What a little weasel. As for Starkey...


----------



## SLK (Jun 28, 2012)

love detective said:


> jesus this is difficult to watch, gets steadily worse and worse - she's a complete wreck, she shouldn't be allowed anywhere near these kind of things, for her own benefit as much as anyone else




Unbelievably, as I hate him, I think I'm on Starkey's side if any.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 28, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I couldn't watch it all the way through, that was cringy.
> 
> On the brightside if Laurie ever needed to borrow a tiny man's suit the professor might be able to help...


 
No, you really do have to watch the last few minutes when it really falls apart and she starts lying about asking for a fee for the Thomas Paine debate. After the Starkey debate she claimed she asked for a tiny amount and then when it wasn't forthcoming she pulled out due to the desperate need for that tiny amount to cover her rent. Here she claims that she didn't want to debate with Starkey as she feared a set up and _so deliberately asked for a ridiculous fee_ in order that the organisers would cancel the event. Absolute blatant making up lies on the spot. And she even undermined this idiocy a few minutes before by talking crap about plane fares.



_Clean bowled - _no two ways about it.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 28, 2012)

Fucking hell ok watched it all now. 

Oh dear Penny, don't think you're going to get away with it for as long as Hari did.


----------



## articul8 (Jun 28, 2012)

Seriously painful


I can't believe she actually said:


> now we see the violence inherent in the discussion




If you going to call out Starkey on his personal finances then be prepared to defend your own wicket. She was a gibbering mess. Still no time for Starkey - doing his Rod Hull minus Emu.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 28, 2012)

Pwned and self-pwned.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 28, 2012)

wow


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 28, 2012)

I apologise for the half-hearted defence of her earlier in the thread. I've been following her on twitter and she is a clown.


----------



## co-op (Jun 28, 2012)

That is worse than watching Sarah Teather doing stand up. It's pretty amazing to make David Starkey look good.

Did anyone else catch Laurie's "I'm not privileged" glottal stop creep in to play as she floundered?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 28, 2012)




----------



## butchersapron (Jun 28, 2012)

On review i now give her out for having hit the ball twice whilst still in play before being bowled.


----------



## Balbi (Jun 28, 2012)

She should get a decent comms job, working for someone with an actual coherent message - then develop her own ideas as a part of that, using their statements as some writing practice. Then she would be ready to actually get out on a platform and speak. Otherwise essentially, we're criticising a six year old for spelling, grammar and sentence structure.

"WHAT I DID ON MY HOLLYDAYS, I DISTROYED TH SYTEM"


----------



## gosub (Jun 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> On review i now give her out for having hit the ball twice whilst still in play before being bowled.


Only twice? 

She makes David Starkey look good. Quite a feat.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 28, 2012)

Balbi said:


> She should get a decent comms job, working for someone with an actual coherent message - then develop her own ideas as a part of that, using their statements as some writing practice. Then she would be ready to actually get out on a platform and speak. Otherwise essentially, we're criticising a six year old for spelling, grammar and sentence structure.
> 
> "WHAT I DID ON MY HOLLYDAYS, I DISTROYED TH SYTEM"


I've seen and heard plenty of shit flakey speakers put across really important or informative stuff - what was wrong here (well the kick off for a whole series of wrongs) was the naivety of the tactics. Don't introduce something like Starkey's tax affairs unless you know damn well what they are or you open yourself up to the same sort of attack, and if the other person a) has something b) is cleverer than you then you're likely to end up in a confused lying babbling mess.

Sun-tzu - don't attack unless you can't be beaten.


----------



## articul8 (Jun 28, 2012)

She was clearly out to make a name for herself by calling him out on his tax and calling him a racist to his face.  But just embarrassed herself in public. 

What gets me is the despite this public humiliation, she tried to spin herself as victim of a vile reactionary, aggressive attack which she heroically fended off to the approval of a demonstrably shocked crowd.   Thankyou You Tube!


----------



## Random (Jun 28, 2012)

Unbelievable. How long before the event did she have to make enquiries about where Starkey is domiciled for tax reasons? Why didn't she bother? There's a perfectly good point to make about Starkey's racism, which she totally fluffed by lurching into guesswork.

After seeing that video I can see why she's been feeling the need to step back a bit. Must be terrible to be shown up like that and realise you can't just spin the world the way you want.


----------



## love detective (Jun 28, 2012)

Random said:


> Unbelievable. How long before the event did she have to make enquiries about where Starkey is domiciled for tax reasons? Why didn't she bother? There's a perfectly good point to make about Starkey's racism, which she totally fluffed by lurching into guesswork.


 
it's the sheer level of arrogance and mistaken belief in herself and her ability that gets her into these situations - she's above tactics, preparation and careful consideration and selection of the right battles, she's the cobweb left in fancy new clothes


----------



## Random (Jun 28, 2012)

Not nice to jab a finger at someone, of course, but he barely raised his voice, and she got time to respond. Hardly adds up to the violence and thuggery that she was talking about after the event.


----------



## rekil (Jun 28, 2012)

> Really disappointed that the Times seem not to have put my whole speech up. How's that for sensationalism obscuring actual debate. Never mind. My mistake for assuming an outlet like that might be actually interested in the issues rather than z-list celebrity bunfights. So...all of this fuss...is about a debate....that very few people involved have actually even seen. Oh god, British Press, really I despair.


Poor press standards to blame shocker. It hardly needs reiterating that this is the same british press that provides incompetents like this with careers.


----------



## Balbi (Jun 28, 2012)

Admitting she's Z list though


----------



## gosub (Jun 28, 2012)

So having published ahead of any other coverage that Starkey is a violent racist who attacked her on stage, she thinks the Times is sensationalist


----------



## Balbi (Jun 28, 2012)

Someone get her a press person - someone with an ounce of common sense would do.


----------



## Random (Jun 28, 2012)

After watching that video i can't help thinking that in many ways I've got more in common with some tories than I do with some anarcholefties. Or does Penny now say that the video was edited to make her look bad?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 28, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Someone get her a press person - someone with an ounce of common sense would do.


You apoplectic old man in a cardigan


----------



## gosub (Jun 28, 2012)

Random said:


> After watching that video i can't help thinking that in many ways I've got more in common with some tories than I do with some anarcholefties. Or does Penny now say that the video was edited to make her look bad?


yep, only has the bit she earlier tweeted needed to be included


----------



## Balbi (Jun 28, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> You apoplectic old man in a cardigan


 
More like a hideously dismayed person near her age watching her have an effect on a generation of young bloggers and writers equivalent to a bucket of slurry in a ceiling fan.


----------



## articul8 (Jun 28, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Someone get her a press person - someone with an ounce of common sense would do.


She can't afford my exorbitant fees - not when you count the flights...


----------



## chilango (Jun 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> _Grime and dubstep_



Ha ha.

Class.


----------



## love detective (Jun 28, 2012)

She didn't even have the self awareness and nous to realise that she'd made a huge screw up and just keep quiet about the whole thing after it had happened

If she'd done that instead of exaggerating her 'look at me' victim status, the video would have never been made public and her embarrassing  performance would have been confined to the audience of the debate and at the worst some low level word of mouth stuff


----------



## love detective (Jun 28, 2012)

Random said:


> and she got time to respond


 
2:57 Penny: "May I....may i respond to that, I think i have a right of reply to that, erm I personally feel erm...."

3:06 Starkey: "Did you or did you not do what I just said"

3:08 Penny: "I was going to respond to that, but.....

3:27 Starkey: " I have emails"

3:29 Roy Cropper: "Respond to it Laurie"

3:31 Penny: "Actually, no i don't think i'm going to respond to it"


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 28, 2012)

The thing is, it was Starkey who was actually responding...


----------



## Joe Reilly (Jun 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> On review i now give her out for having hit the ball twice whilst still in play before being bowled.


 'There is a violence inherent in this kind of debate' according to her, but as we all know there is a mendacity involved in this kind of debate as well as she so ably demonstrates. I stopped counting the lies at no 6...not someone you'd want providing a character witness, that's for sure.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 28, 2012)

Roy Cropper.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 28, 2012)

What this latest nonsense has underlined for me is how immune from criticism her fan club wish her to be. Why can't they understand that you can loathe Starkey (leaving his racism aside, his behaviour after being goaded - apropos of nothing about his tax affairs - was unacceptable, seeking as it did to belittle & intimidate her) AND question her reporting - on Twitter, natch - of the incident with her usual lack of concern for facts. He didn't call her "a little shit" or "despicable". I can accept that she was probably shaken by the incident, although she looks quite amused more than anything. But it's a cracking example of her looking at an event, as she tends to do, and seeing only the dramatised version of things, how it would (and no doubt will) appear in the story of her life once she writes it aged 35 or whatever.

As for that party and those boho entrepreneurs she struggled through New York life with - puke puke. The reason she can blend in so well with those and yet has no w/c ties is the same as Owen Jones. They just don't know any w/c people and wouldn't feel comfortable around them. Yet you can imagine it round Crabapple's gaffe. 

"What do you do, Laurie?"
"Erm...I'm a well-known political writer. I went to Oxford University and I'm part of the Occupy Movement"*

*"Help! Where's the protest?"


----------



## rekil (Jun 29, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> I saw it more as a project that would be crowdsourced through Kickstarter, with a launch party hosted by Amanda Palmer and liveblogged via Tumblr.


This is how I imagine proletarian democracy will pitch its buke at that random house westminster school wanker.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 29, 2012)

S☼I said:


> What this latest nonsense has underlined for me is how immune from criticism her fan club wish her to be. Why can't they understand that you can loathe Starkey (leaving his racism aside, his behaviour after being goaded - apropos of nothing about his tax affairs - was unacceptable, seeking as it did to belittle & intimidate her)"


 
I think his behaviour was understandable really, as he says to be fair to him he did work his way up from nowt, and still pays his full taxes, while she came from privilge and was smugly throwing out wild accusations of him not paying his way - without defending him as a person, I think his response was legitimate.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 29, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I think his behaviour was understandable really, as he says to be fair to him he did work his way up from nowt, and still pays his full taxes, while she came from privilge and was smugly throwing out wild accusations of him not paying his way - without defending him as a person, I think his response was legitimate.


 
Oh, I understand it. But I can see how how he behaved could be perceived as bullying. But again, she should have not commented & just left others to decide rather than steaming onto Twitter & saying "I've been attacked. Bit shaken but I'll be okay" and inventing what he said.


----------



## love detective (Jun 29, 2012)

she's in luck, she's got a bit of cover now from weirdos who want to murder her after kicking her in the cunt for a couple of hours

that will be getting pumped out to deflect attention away from recent events


----------



## Ade-oh (Jun 29, 2012)

S☼I said:


> But it's a cracking example of her looking at an event, as she tends to do, and seeing only the dramatised version of things, how it would (and no doubt will) appear in the story of her life once she writes it aged 35 or whatever.


 
That's a good point.  It seems to me that she's trying to live out her fantasy life in front of the rest of us but for her own benefit.  I know it shouldn't annoy me, because I'm a grown up now, but it does because the whole 'me, me, me' business trivialises everything she's involved with and marginalises the actual issues.  I have the same problem with Owen Jones and Johann Hari:  it's all about them, and about being seen to be right on.  Yuck.


----------



## love detective (Jun 29, 2012)

Yeah, there seems to be a huge internalising of neo-liberal/individualist values under the nominal cover of progressive/collective politics these days - although i wouldn't lump Owen Jones in with Hari & Penny in that criticism

Despite other criticisms I think Jones genuinely deep down has the right politics and is deeply passionate about them whereas for the likes of Penny and co it's just superficial & convenient cover for their own ego & self aggrandisement


----------



## Ade-oh (Jun 29, 2012)

love detective said:


> Yeah, there seems to be a huge internalising of neo-liberal/individualist values under the nominal cover of progressive/collective politics these days -


 
It's a simple schtick:  adopt the right set of values, spit out the right buzzwords and you will have a community of fans who genuinely think that you're 'one of them' and for whom you won't be able to do much wrong - at least until it's rammed down their throats that you're an utter arsewipe.  The weird thing is that Hari, for example, still has a lot of fans even though he's been shown to be a plagiarist and fabricator, and that has to be because he cloaked himself with progressive values:  it certainly doesn't reflect the quality of his writing which has always been stodgy and lame.


----------



## gosub (Jun 29, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Oh, I understand it. But I can see how how he behaved could be perceived as bullying. But again, she should have not commented & just left others to decide rather than steaming onto Twitter & saying "I've been attacked. Bit shaken but I'll be okay" and inventing what he said.


Wasn't just twitter, was the basis of her indy column this week as well


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

Yo Dawg I herd you like makin bills 4 speechifyin so we billed for a speech that u never speeched whilst u was speechifyin and made the speech into narticle so you can get paid for speechifyin while you aint speechifyin.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 29, 2012)

Thomas Paine calls Penny a half-liar leaves open the Starkey issue which suggests someone there thinks he does have emails backing up his version.

(Then buggers off to the US after being warned by William Blake)


----------



## SLK (Jun 29, 2012)

Blocked at work. Can someone paste?


----------



## BigTom (Jun 29, 2012)

SLK said:


> Blocked at work. Can someone paste?


 


> Statement regarding the incident between David Starkey and Laurie Penny, 23 June 2012
> 
> The Thomas Paine Society Committee was distressed to hear of last weekends’ altercation between David Starkey and Laurie Penny at the Education Festival. Ad hominem attacks do not move a debate forward about any subject, and we’re sorry to see that it appears both speakers made these.
> 
> ...


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

> From: Thomas Paine Society
> 
> Statement regarding the incident between David Starkey and Laurie Penny, 23 June 2012
> 
> ...


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

Damn you BigTom


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

And in my apoplexy I spilt pickle on my cardigan


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 29, 2012)

angry man in a cardie


----------



## SLK (Jun 29, 2012)

Thanks. Dave I read yours anyway!


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

APOPLECTIC


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

SLK said:


> Thanks. Dave I read yours anyway!



BUT NOW CALM


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 29, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:
			
		

> BUT NOW CALM


That's your side of the story, what about the bits you've conveniently cut out?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

I wiped the pickle away with a tissue?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 29, 2012)

now we see the violence inherent in the sandwich


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

Typical Pennyesque assumption there - it was a bread roll.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jun 29, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> now we see the violence inherent in the sandwich


 
The violence inherent in the cistern.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)




----------



## JimW (Jun 29, 2012)

What sort of Thomas Paine society is distressed to hear about a a piece of mind being given? Yer man was not averse, as I recall.


----------



## Balbi (Jun 29, 2012)

JimW said:


> What sort of Thomas Paine society is distressed to hear about a a piece of mind being given? Yer man was not averse, as I recall.


 
Paine didn't have to deal with twitterrage and blogging


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 29, 2012)

_Ooh can you get words on paper?_


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Paine didn't have to deal with twitterrage and blogging



I suspect that the coffee houses and salons were full of the twitterings of radical posturers.


----------



## JimW (Jun 29, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Paine didn't have to deal with twitterrage and blogging


#commonsense


----------



## Balbi (Jun 29, 2012)

The Age of Reason wouldn't have happened if tl;dr was around.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

Angry mobs not flashmobs.


----------



## Balbi (Jun 29, 2012)

Instant justic_e_, not instagram.


----------



## Balbi (Jun 29, 2012)

Check and Balance not spellcheck!


----------



## love detective (Jun 29, 2012)

JimW said:


> #commonsense


 
very good!


----------



## Balbi (Jun 29, 2012)

140 martyrs, not characters


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 29, 2012)

_fewer constitutions and more executions_


----------



## Balbi (Jun 29, 2012)

Less self-shots, more neck-shots.


----------



## rekil (Jun 29, 2012)

Hébertist Columns Not Herbal Tea Sipping Columnists


----------



## Balbi (Jun 29, 2012)

The people's press not wordpress


----------



## rekil (Jun 29, 2012)

Pikes Not Likes


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

Taking heads with iron not giving head ironically


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

No-nonsense Encyclopédistes not Wikipedia nonces.


----------



## Balbi (Jun 29, 2012)

Red tide not red hair dye.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

Physiocrats not commentariats!


----------



## Balbi (Jun 29, 2012)

Tumbrils not tumblr


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 29, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Tumbrils not tumblr


Can't laugh at your own one!

Prison massacres not Penny's mascara


----------



## Balbi (Jun 29, 2012)

We now return you to the continuing saga of Laurie Penny vs Reality/Capitalism/Quality Journalism.


----------



## Balbi (Jun 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Can't laugh at your own one!
> 
> Prison massacres not Penny's mascara


 
Oh, well played sir.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jun 29, 2012)

Eviscerating not envisioning.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## Balbi (Jun 29, 2012)

Arbeit Macht Frei not Commentisfree


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 29, 2012)

oh god  

You are surely going to hell.


----------



## Balbi (Jun 29, 2012)

I've got dog biscuits ready for Cerberus


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

Women: demand le droit de cité not e-ciggies!


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 29, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Women: demand le droit de cité not e-ciggies!


Those things are real! I thought it was a joke! Note the laugh when Neil picks it up -_ i'm one of you Andrew._


----------



## rekil (Jun 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Penny's mascara





> Don’t wear your granddad’s antique topper, not even ironically – it’ll get nicked, and before it gets nicked you’ll look like a wanker.


----------



## Balbi (Jun 29, 2012)

Proletarian Democracy not Internet Aristocracy


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 29, 2012)

copliker said:


> View attachment 20642


My god she even lies to herself in a two faced way.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Can't laugh at your own one!
> 
> Prison massacres not Penny's mascara


 
Dear God. You can't satirise this, can you? It's absolute zero.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Those things are real! I thought it was a joke! Note the laugh when Neil picks it up -_ i'm one of you Andrew._





> Dear anarchohipsters who scoff at my e-cig: you know what's cooler than cancer? A ROBOT CIGARETTE



https://mobile.twitter.com/#!/PennyRed/status/154676808741175297


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 29, 2012)

You're a sociopath if you try and kick a copper in the head.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

S☼I said:


> You're a sociopath if you try and kick a copper in the head.



Unless they're already on the ground, obviously.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 29, 2012)

_Cooler than cancer._

What a fucking abomination.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 29, 2012)

S☼I said:


> You're a sociopath if you try and kick a copper in the head.


 My ex boss said the biggest buzz he ever had was kicking a copper in the head.


----------



## rekil (Jun 29, 2012)

S☼I said:


> You're a sociopath if you try and kick a copper in the head.


Like these rascals?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 29, 2012)

copliker said:


> Like these rascals?


 
Yeah. They should have protested properly, according to the rules imposed by the ruling forces. Dressed in DMs and fucking top hats and being painted as they march and sang Kumbaya.


----------



## rekil (Jun 29, 2012)

S☼I said:


> You're a sociopath if you try and kick a copper in the head.


 
Did she say that?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 29, 2012)

copliker said:


> Did she say that?


 
She did. It's in Tip #7 in "How to look good at a protest" that butchers posted.


----------



## rekil (Jun 29, 2012)

S☼I said:


> She did. It's in Tip #7 in "How to look good at a protest" that butchers posted.


Crikey. I didn't get that far. My eyes had glazed over by number 4.



> Nobody’s going to be looking at your fucking feet, unless you’re stupid enough to try and kick a copper in the head, in which case you’re drunk or you’re a sociopath, and either way you shouldn’t be on the march.


Oooooh. I hope she tells the Greeks.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 29, 2012)

To touch on a point a couple of people raised a bit back in the thread, of course there's a risk the thread could be accused of taking everything that comes rushing from her Thoughtless Red Marker Pen of Justice and taking it apart, but what she's putting out into the world as an overall "body of work" is that she can neither escape nor even _wants_ to escape what she _is._


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 29, 2012)




----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jun 29, 2012)

The more I find out about Penny Red the more I think she is not half as interesting as the fictional character with her name that has been created on this thread. The article about 'how to look good on a protest' is just a piece of light-hearted hack writing and I don't think she is being serious. It is also a few years old. I have found some YouTube extracts of her speaking and she says nothing enlightening or even mildly interesting. If she can get newspapers to pay for her writing currently while she has a minor fame, then good luck to her. It won't last long because there is no substance to her commentary.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 29, 2012)

*bangs head on screen*


----------



## imposs1904 (Jun 29, 2012)

The39thStep said:


>




wonderful band . . .


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 30, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> *bangs head on screen*


 
*bangs Hocus Eye's head on screen*


----------



## co-op (Jun 30, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> The more I find out about Penny Red the more I think she is not half as interesting as the fictional character with her name that has been created on this thread. The article about 'how to look good on a protest' is just a piece of light-hearted hack writing and I don't think she is being serious. It is also a few years old. I have found some YouTube extracts of her speaking and she says nothing enlightening or even mildly interesting. If she can get newspapers to pay for her writing currently while she has a minor fame, then good luck to her. It won't last long because there is no substance to her commentary.


 
Hmm. I must admit I was inclined to go easy on her too - now that I'm middle-aged I've got a bit indulgent about young people striking poses and I agree things like the 'looking good on a protest' piece are obviously meant to be a joke so getting aerated about them is daft.

But I'm glad this thread exists, because the 'fictional character with her name' is the one that I bought into when I read maybe 2 of her pieces in the New Statesman and thought, she's ok, she's sound, she's a lefty and I try not to get into slagging off people on the left, even if I don't agree with everything they are saying. The reality is that she isn't a lefty, she's a desperate narcissistic poseur and liar whose primary goal is her own personal and professional advancement. "Radical" politics is just another means of furthering her career. And even for an old cynic like myself it is gobsmacking how serious journalistic entities like the Independent and the NS have bought into her fantasy self and made her a figurehead for a movement and so on.It is shockingly bad judgement and not good for her ego problem either.

She needs to go and get a proper job for 5 years somewhere, live out of the limelight and do some growing up. But she obviously won't, she'll just be a shouty professional controverseur and we'll all have to listen to her opinions for decades and be told she's speaking for us*. Christ what a country.




*until she switches horses of course


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 30, 2012)

'switches horses.'

That'll happen eventually.  And I'm a young cynic.


----------



## love detective (Jun 30, 2012)

will be even more excruciating when she goes through the period of trying to ride two horses at once


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 30, 2012)




----------



## love detective (Jun 30, 2012)

although i guess she's already trying to ride two different horses, imagine the introduction of a third horse - that would be two horses going in different directions and then another horse that she's been on since the start just galloping around aimlessly trying to get noticed and avoiding being made into dog food


----------



## JimW (Jun 30, 2012)

We can but hope.


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 30, 2012)

love detective said:


> although i guess she's already trying to ride two different horses, imagine the introduction of a third horse - that would be two horses going in different directions and then another horse that she's been on since the start just galloping around aimlessly trying to get noticed and avoiding being made into dog food


 
I can see where you are coming from


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 30, 2012)

All this stuff about horse riding is clearly thinly veiled misogyny, trying to imply she's a prostitute or something. And anyway, neither St. Laurie nor her savage red crayon of justice would even consider horse riding - it's cruel to animals and clearly symbolic of patriarchy.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 30, 2012)

brown felt-tip pen of bullshit.


----------



## Nice one (Jun 30, 2012)

love detective said:


> although i guess she's already trying to ride two different horses, imagine the introduction of a third horse - that would be two horses going in different directions and then another horse that she's been on since the start just galloping around aimlessly trying to get noticed and avoiding being made into dog food


 
or she could become the new patti smith


----------



## co-op (Jun 30, 2012)

love detective said:


> another horse that she's been on since the start just galloping around aimlessly trying to get noticed and avoiding being made into dog food


 
This is it - she's got more in common with some semi-intellectual X Factor contestant than anything else, the desperation to be in the limelight. And her blustering bullshit when she was pwned by Starkey was more reminiscent of the Bob Diamond/Rupert Murdoch School of Modern British Public Life ; just deny deny deny, doesn't matter what crap you come out with, just stay on the front foot, throw counter-accusations, never admit a thing. Primary school playground.

The absence of any moral skeleton or moral compass or _any inner life at all_ is stunning. As a human being, she is damaged goods.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 30, 2012)

In a few years she'll still be writing a column or two, and now and again saying how embarrassed she is when looking back at her 'radical' phase.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jun 30, 2012)

Think it's interesting how obsessed some people are with her on here. Does it really matter whether she changes her political outlet in ten years...who doesn't evolve their thinking over time??


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 30, 2012)

I generally treat Penny the same as I do Delingpole: I ignore her. That's the best policy.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 30, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Think it's interesting how obsessed some people are with her on here. Does it really matter whether she changes her political outlet in ten years...who doesn't evolve their thinking over time??


Some people? Like people with 80 posts on the thread?


----------



## JHE (Jun 30, 2012)

nino_savatte said:


> I generally treat Penny the same as I do Delingpole: I ignore her. That's the best policy.


 
They're both gutted.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 30, 2012)

Which is probably what I should do with you.


----------



## love detective (Jun 30, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Think it's interesting how obsessed some people are with her on here. Does it really matter whether she changes her political outlet in ten years...who doesn't evolve their thinking over time??


 
she's already told us how her privileged position in life makes her a more committed leftist than the rest of us - so surely we'd expect a bit more consistency, and erm..commitment from one so unfeasibly committed


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 30, 2012)

love detective said:


> will be even more excruciating when she goes through the period of trying to ride two horses at once


 
So, ppc for a safe Labour seat in, say, 10 years?


----------



## JHE (Jun 30, 2012)

nino_savatte said:


> Which is probably what I should do with you.


 
Do you mean ignore me or gut me?


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 30, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I couldn't watch it all the way through, that was cringy...


 
It's alright, the referee stops it before the KO.

What I want to know is how Starkey and Penny managed to get each other's accents.


----------



## Greebo (Jun 30, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> It's alright, the referee stops it before the KO.
> 
> What I want to know is how Starkey and Penny managed to get each other's accents.


You get an ear for it, but lipreading helps as the consonants don't change.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jun 30, 2012)

love detective said:


> she's already told us how her privileged position in life makes her a more committed leftist than the rest of us - so surely we'd expect a bit more consistency, and erm..commitment from one so unfeasibly committed



Well then if you've already decided you can't trust her word why both analyzing every single one she utters? Once you got someone sussed does anyone really need to continue document every single action? 

It's not like LP is actually influential in any real shape or form...


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 30, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> In a few years she'll still be writing a column or two, and now and again saying how embarrassed she is when looking back at her 'radical' phase.


 
Dunno about that Julie Birchall still manages to sound 'radical' despite her apoliticalness  without denouncing herself.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 30, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> So, ppc for a safe Labour seat in, say, 10 years?


 
No she will probably try and stay in letters/the media probably adapting to more mainstream views but ones that can be presented as radical in some way


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 30, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Dunno about that Julie Birchall still manages to sound 'radical' despite her apoliticalness without denouncing herself.


 
like this


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 30, 2012)

co-op said:


> And even for an old cynic like myself it is gobsmacking how serious journalistic entities like the Independent and the NS have bought into her fantasy self and made her a figurehead for a movement and so on.It is shockingly bad judgement


 
No it ain't.  It's very good judgment indeed.


----------



## rekil (Jun 30, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> In a few years she'll still be writing a column or two, and now and again saying how embarrassed she is when looking back at her 'radical' phase.


No she'll blame the normals for being too thick and cowardly to orbit her star properly.

Look at the painting.



Look at it.

(no doubt soon to be seen as a supersized cardboard promo cut-out in a bristol bookshop near you)


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 30, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Well then if you've already decided you can't trust her word why both analyzing every single one she utters? Once you got someone sussed does anyone really need to continue document every single action?
> 
> It's not like LP is actually influential in any real shape or form...


Well stop whinging about her then.


----------



## love detective (Jun 30, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Well then if you've already decided you can't trust her word why both analyzing every single one she utters? Once you got someone sussed does anyone really need to continue document every single action?
> 
> It's not like LP is actually influential in any real shape or form...


 
because as has been pointed out previously, while this thread is nominally about her, it's more about what she represents, the increasingly emerging phenomena of people like her

as to not being influential, i would dispute that, she's corrosively influential in a number of ways and as such threads like this are fair game in my opinion

she puts herself into play through her own ego & desire for self publicity, using collective/progressive politics as cover for her own valorisation

and more generally, none of us here trust capitalism's 'word' and generally have it 'sussed' - does that mean that we shouldn't continue to analyse & understand it, in order to be in a better position to fight it?


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 30, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Dunno about that Julie Birchall still manages to sound 'radical' despite her apoliticalness without denouncing herself.


 
Julie Burchill is a genuine radical.


----------



## Greebo (Jun 30, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Julie Burchill is a genuine radical.


Maybe in her head.  Otherwise, new jokes thread ------------------------------------------>


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 30, 2012)

S☼I said:


> As for that party and those boho entrepreneurs she struggled through New York life with - puke puke. The reason she can blend in so well with those and yet has no w/c ties is the same as Owen Jones. They just don't know any w/c people and wouldn't feel comfortable around them.


 
Precisely.  More to the point, the editors who hire her are all from the same background, so they don't really know any better.  The people who hire _them _are the ones who know better.


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 30, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Maybe in her head. Otherwise, new jokes thread ------------------------------------------>


 
No, you're wrong about this.  Burchill's one of the top ten journos of the C20th.  She really is what Laurie Penny used to think she might be one day.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jun 30, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> No, you're wrong about this. Burchill's one of the top ten journos of the C20th. She really is what Laurie Penny used to think she might be one day.


I can tell you are holding a newspaper in front of your face to hide the grin.


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 30, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Julie Burchill is a genuine radical.


 
don't confuse angry/ irritating/mildly amusing  with being radical like I have done


----------



## Greebo (Jun 30, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> No, you're wrong about this. Burchill's one of the top ten journos of the C20th. She really is what Laurie Penny used to think she might be one day.


One of the top ten journos, maybe.  Radical now?  Not convinced.  She wrote as if she was when that was fashionable.  Tbf I haven't seen any if her more recent material.  *goes off and googles*


----------



## Greebo (Jun 30, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> don't confuse angry/ irritating/mildly amusing with being radical like I have done


He isn't, he's playing devil's advocate.


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 30, 2012)

kavenism said:


> I did enjoy reviewing her book last year.


 
Please tell me you made this bit up:  "of the women I spoke to who had found a workable solution to the sharing of domestic work in their household, 90% employed some sort of home help, from a weekly cleaner to a live in au-pair..."


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 30, 2012)

Greebo said:


> One of the top ten journos, maybe. Radical now? Not convinced. She wrote as if she was when that was fashionable. Tbf I haven't seen any if her more recent material. *goes off and googles*


 
Don't bother, the recent stuff is crap.  I'm talking about when she was 17-18 years old, slagging off the likes of Dylan and the Stones in the _NME _and always hitting the nail exactly on the head.   That took serious courage (and/or an awful lot of amphetamine sulphate) and remains some of the best writing I've read by anyone ever.


----------



## rekil (Jun 30, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Please tell me you made this bit up: "of the women I spoke to who had found a workable solution to the sharing of domestic work in their household, 90% employed some sort of home help, from a weekly cleaner to a live in au-pair..."


I didn't believe it either. But look...googlebooks.


----------



## Greebo (Jun 30, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Don't bother, the recent stuff is crap.


Too late, I've just found her recent bits (readable yes, radical no) on the DM site - where's the decontamination shower?


phildwyer said:


> I'm talking about when she was 17-18 years old, slagging off the likes of Dylan and the Stones in the _NME _and always hitting the nail exactly on the head. That took serious courage (and/or an awful lot of amphetamine sulphate) and remains some of the best writing I've read by anyone ever.


A has been in other words, she's 52 now.  Although better than being a never was.  FWIW I didn't get my hands on the NME at that time.  It's not exactly the sort of thing an 11 year old would read, even if they could afford it.


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 30, 2012)

Greebo said:


> FWIW I didn't get my hands on the NME at that time. It's not exactly the sort of thing an 11 year old would read, even if they could afford it.


 
I was reading it at 11.


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 30, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Too late, I've just found her recent bits (readable yes, radical no) on the DM site - where's the decontamination shower?


 
Try _The Boy Looked at Johnny.  _Completely mad, which is presumably why it's out of print, but stirring stuff.  At least when you're 11.


----------



## Nice one (Jun 30, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> No, you're wrong about this. Burchill's one of the top ten journos of the C20th. She really is what Laurie Penny used to think she might be one day.


 
pretty on the inside?


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 30, 2012)

copliker said:


> I didn't believe it either. But look...googlebooks.


 
Jesus.  Just skimmed through it.  Horrid stuff.  The ending: 'Most of all, we refuse to be beautiful and good."  Basically everything that's wrong with her type of thinking encapsulated.  Notices that what is called beautiful and good is not so.  But response is not to seek out what is truly beautiful and good, but rather to attack the very concepts of beauty and goodness.  Makes me sick.


----------



## Bakunin (Jun 30, 2012)

I've never rated Burchill either, if I'm honest. If she ever had any particular talent then she lost it long ago and has to resort to that 'I'm a professional contrarian, I try to provoke aggro for the sake of it, I'm still here, look at me, look at me, please validate my existence and make me feel I still matter in some way to anybody' approach that most readers nowadays tend to spot pretty quickly and treat for what it is.


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

love detective said:


> Yeah, there seems to be a huge internalising of neo-liberal/individualist values under the nominal cover of progressive/collective politics these days - although i wouldn't lump Owen Jones in with Hari & Penny in that criticism
> 
> Despite other criticisms I think Jones genuinely deep down has the right politics and is deeply passionate about them whereas for the likes of Penny and co it's just superficial & convenient cover for their own ego & self aggrandisement


 

The Culture of Narcissism-Christopher Lasch.


----------



## Greebo (Jun 30, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Try _The Boy Looked at Johnny. _Completely mad, which is presumably why it's out of print, but stirring stuff. At least when you're 11.


Thanks for the tip.  Still available on Abe.  It'll have to wait though.  The library's shut until Monday and my payment card's more or less maxed out until Tuesday.


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 30, 2012)

Oh man, been reading her stuff on Amazon now. I once thought a whole thread about her was a bit much, but I can see why you lot are so obsessed.

"How many times have you heard a man refer to taking care of his own children as "babysitting?"'

Huh? What else is it then? I call it "babysitting" all the time, in fact I'm babysitting at this very moment (it's nap-time). What's wrong with calling it "babysitting?" Just what is wrong with it? What are we supposed to call it then?

And then this: 'the most brain-bleedingly pointless domestic tasks have, for some young women today, become so alien and fantastic that they are now a lifestyle option."

Bloody hell.


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

co-op said:


> She needs to go and get a proper job for 5 years somewhere, live out of the limelight and do some growing up. But she obviously won't, she'll just be a shouty professional controverseur and we'll all have to listen to her opinions for decades and be told she's speaking for us*. Christ what a country.


 

She should also get herself a better hairstyle with a natural looking colour. Make the most of herself while she's still young.

And start calling herself Laura again-it's nicer. Who the fuck's called Laurie anyway? Has anybody ever met a Laurie?


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jun 30, 2012)

I have just looked up Julie Burchill on Wikipedia. I don't think I will be adding her to my Christmas Card list.

PS. Having noticed the red squiggly line under 'Wikipedia' I checked the spelling. It gave me 'windpipe'.


----------



## Greebo (Jun 30, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> <snip>PS. Having noticed the red squiggly line under 'Wikipedia' I checked the spelling. It gave me 'windpipe'.


 Sorry, sometimes you have to take your amusement wherever you can find it.


----------



## Bakunin (Jun 30, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> She should also get herself a better hairstyle with a natural looking colour. Make the most of herself while she's still young.
> 
> And start calling herself Laura again-it's nicer. Who the fuck's called Laurie anyway? Has anybody ever met a Laurie?


 
Well, there was Laurie Lee. But Laurie Lee is somewhat different from LP in that he actually went to Spain and fought, whereas she would have encouraged others to do the actual fighting and would have filed 'frontline' reports from some swish hotel in a safe area while bemoaning the lack of her favourite lattes, the shortage of arty types ('Well, if they will insist on all that tiresome warfare') and the lack of a Blackberry signal if she should accidentally happen to end up near some actual fighting.

Laurie Lee could also string a decent sentence together.


----------



## Nice one (Jun 30, 2012)

and this fella


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 30, 2012)




----------



## rekil (Jun 30, 2012)




----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

I meant in real life.


----------



## rekil (Jun 30, 2012)

I know a Laurie. She's from New Zealand and works as a mental health nurse. There.


----------



## Bakunin (Jun 30, 2012)

Great political debates that never happened:






VS






Entertaining? Probably.

Foregone conclusion? Definitely.

Watching him eat her for breakfast? Priceless.


----------



## rekil (Jun 30, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Tumbrils not tumblr


This would've been a contender if you'd left it smiley free.


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Great political debates that never happened:


 
It isn't possible to take seriously somebody with maroon hair. I don't care what anybody says.


----------



## rekil (Jun 30, 2012)

More posho purée, fewer tarot reading reiki cleansing party girl chorizo choux puff canapés.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)




----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It isn't possible to take seriously somebody with maroon hair. I don't care what anybody says.


I think she's got great hair. I'll give her that .


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> I think she's got great hair. I'll give her that .


 

Why am I not surprised?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

It's a great colour. Attack her for her writing, but she has a nice barnet


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 30, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> She should also get herself a better hairstyle with a natural looking colour. Make the most of herself while she's still young.
> 
> And start calling herself Laura again-it's nicer. Who the fuck's called Laurie anyway? Has anybody ever met a Laurie?


 
Yes, a bloke, and it was his given name, rather than a shortening of "Lawrence". Never met a woman with the name, though.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> It's a great colour. Attack her for her writing, but she has a nice barnet


 
She's got emo-hair. For that alone she should be burned at the stake (along with one of my nephews)!!!


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> It's a great colour. Attack her for her writing, but she has a nice barnet


 


It depends on whether you and her want to join the grown-ups.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 30, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Well, there was Laurie Lee. But Laurie Lee is somewhat different from LP in that he actually went to Spain and fought, whereas she would have encouraged others to do the actual fighting and would have filed 'frontline' reports from some swish hotel in a safe area while bemoaning the lack of her favourite lattes, the shortage of arty types ('Well, if they will insist on all that tiresome warfare') and the lack of a Blackberry signal if she should accidentally happen to end up near some actual fighting.
> 
> Laurie Lee could also string a decent sentence together.


 
And he didn't need a private education to be able to, either.


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

After 13 years I'm just getting used to living next to a student ghetto. Yet still, when one of them walks into the pub with a silly hairstyle or inappropriate piercings I feel a little stab of hatred.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 30, 2012)




----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It depends on whether you and her want to join the grown-ups.





ViolentPanda said:


> She's got emo-hair. For that alone she should be burned at the stake (along with one of my nephews)!!!


You're a right pair of grandads.
Adults dye their hair too anyway.


----------



## rekil (Jun 30, 2012)

I met him once. A true gent.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> After 13 years I'm just getting used to living next to a student ghetto. Yet still, when one of them walks into the pub with a silly hairstyle or inappropriate piercings I feel a little stab of hatred.


That's cos you're a hateful prick


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 30, 2012)

Also Roseanne's sister's real name.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> That's cos you're a hateful prick


 
No it's because students are the worst neighbours you can have, selfish, ignorant, noisy, dirty little scrotes every man jack and woman jill of them.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 30, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> After 13 years I'm just getting used to living next to a student ghetto. Yet still, when one of them walks into the pub with a silly hairstyle or inappropriate piercings I feel a little stab of hatred.


 
They're students. It's to be expected. It's like state-sanctioned rebellion time for most of 'em.
It's when they've left that behind and are still doing it while working for "the man" that they provoke my ire.


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Adults dye their hair too anyway.


 


It's okay if it's a natural colour. If it's something dayglo or lurid it's usually in lieu of personality.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> You're a right pair of grandads.
> Adults dye their hair too anyway.


 
I just hate emo-hair. Those floppy emo-fringes just activate some primal hatred in my psyche. I loved The Human League when I was young, but Oakey's hair always annoyed the fuck out of me. I was well-pleased when he chopped it off.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> No it's because students are the worst neighbours you can have, selfish, ignorant, noisy, dirty little scrotes every man jack and woman jill of them.


Fair enough, though i doubt they all are and I don't know how you can ID a student just by their hairdos or clothes. Judging people on their clothes choices is unwise.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It's okay if it's a natural colour. If it's something dayglo or lurid it's usually in lieu of personality.


No it isn't, you twat


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> I just hate emo-hair. Those floppy emo-fringes just activate some primal hatred in my psyche. I loved The Human League when I was young, but Oakey's hair always annoyed the fuck out of me. I was well-pleased when he chopped it off.


It's not really emo hair. All sorts of people due their hair these days. They don't belong to a particular subculture of the 00s that's moved on somewhat. You and LLETSA are badly out of touch.
Anyway, the brainfarts that are Penny's columns are enough to criticise her for. There's no need for shallowly criticising her appearance. You can't judge someone's character from their hairdo.


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> No it isn't, you twat


 

It is. The same goes for those who cover more or less their entire bodies with tattoos and/or piercings.

When people deliberately disfigure themselves in a fashion they'd pay to have plastic surgery to rectify if the result of, say, an accident, it's a sure sign of a society slowly going insane. Infantilism seems to have taken the fortress.


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> You and LLETSA are badly out of touch.


 

Believe me, I fucking well try to be. When I seem to have fallen in step, please shoot me.


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> You can't judge someone's character from their hairdo.


 

You really, really can.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

Just as I can tell from your posts that you are a bitter old man who hates young people for having the temerity to dye their hair.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It is. The same goes for those who cover more or less their entire bodies with tattoos and/or piercings.
> 
> When people deliberately disfigure themselves in a fashion they'd pay to have plastic surgery to rectify if the result of, say, an accident, it's a sure sign of a society slowly going insane. Infantilism seems to have taken the fortress.


To me this reads: Sppppklllllxxxxxzzzzfffhhhhhh
Are you having a stroke?


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Just as I can tell from your posts that you are a bitter old man who hates young people for having the temerity to dredge their hair.


 
Better that than a bitter old man who tries to be one of them.


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> To me this reads: Sppppklllllxxxxxzzzzfffhhhhhh
> Are you having a stroke?


 


Yes, but you're a robot.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Better that than a bitter old man who tries to be one of them.


Who's that then?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Yes, but you're a robot.


Fuck me, you're almost as bad as Cock & Shite


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> It's not really emo hair. All sorts of people due their hair these days.


 
Mmm, you realise I haven't mentioned the colour of her hair, right? And guess what? Loads of people have dyed their hair for the last several decades, let alone "these days", so why you're making a big deal about it eludes me.



> They don't belong to a particular subculture of the 00s that's moved on somewhat.


 
I didn't say that "they" did. I used a label for Penny's hairstyle.



> You and LLETSA are badly out of touch.


 
Thanks for that, king of cool 2000-and-never-going-to-happen. 



> Anyway, the brainfarts that are Penny's columns are enough to criticise her for. There's no need for shallowly criticising her appearance. You can't judge someone's character from their hairdo.


 
I haven't done so.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Fuck me, you're almost as bad as Cock & Shite


 
Careful, or ickle Locky will be reporting you for misusing his username.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Mmm, you realise I haven't mentioned the colour of her hair, right? And guess what? Loads of people have dyed their hair for the last several decades, let alone "these days", so why you're making a big deal eludes me.


 I thought that was my point.


----------



## JHE (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> You can't judge someone's character from their hairdo.


 
I'm middle-aged and find it difficult to interpret or understand the appeal of (quite a lot of) fashions, but if strange hairstyles don't say anything at all about the person concerned, why are they adopted?  Surely, having strangely-cut lurid green hair, say, is some sort of exercise in self-expression.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

Certainly, but having brightly coloured dyed hair doesn't mean you're a twat or devoid of personality. It doesn't necessarily reflect negatively on someone's personality.


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Certainly, but having brightly coloured dyed hair doesn't mean you're a twat or devoid of personality. It doesn't necessarily reflect negatively on someone's personality.


 


It does.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It does.


Oh dear. You're an awful person. You really are.


----------



## _angel_ (Jun 30, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> You really, really can.


(((Gingers)))


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 30, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It isn't possible to take seriously somebody with maroon hair. I don't care what anybody says.


 
Mrs. Idris informs me that that type of shade is known as "French prostitute red", to those in the know.


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Fair enough, though i doubt they all are and I don't know how you can ID a student just by their hairdos or clothes. Judging people on their clothes choices is unwise.


 
As Urban's very own once put it...


----------



## co-op (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Certainly, but having brightly coloured dyed hair doesn't mean you're a twat or devoid of personality. It doesn't necessarily reflect negatively on someone's personality.


 
In my dull old middle age I have decided that look-at-me-look-at-me haircuts are a pretty sure sign of an ego problem.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

Brightly coloured hair can look awesome. What's wrong with looking awesome?


----------



## JHE (Jun 30, 2012)

Perhaps you are easily awed. These pics don't inspire any awe in me.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

They're great, mostly!


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Just as I can tell from your posts that you are a bitter old man who hates young people for having the temerity to dye their hair.


 
Mr Perception


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Brightly coloured hair can look awesome. What's wrong with looking awesome?


 
Americanism


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Americanism


So what?


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Americanism


 


An Americanism usually used inappropriately, as in this case.

Another sign of a society losing its marbles.


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

co-op said:


> In my dull old middle age I have decided that look-at-me-look-at-me haircuts are a pretty sure sign of an ego problem.


 

Not to mention the hideous disfigurements caused by body/facial piercings and over-tattooing. In the pub last night there were two pretty young girls who had paid money to have unsightly facial blemishes installed.

And all the while society actually becomes blander and more malleable. Style has triumphed over substance. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> So what?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

Crusty old bigots!


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Crusty old bigots!


 


Nowt 'crusty'about being able to see through today's fake individualism.

A tattoo used to be a sign of having served at sea or been inside. Now they're badges of conformism.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

Tattoos can look great too. Get the fuck over it and start judging people by their words and their deeds, not how whether they decorate themselves with tattoos or not.


----------



## LLETSA (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Tattoos can look great too. Get the fuck over it and start judging people by their words and their deeds, not how whether they decorate themselves with tattoos or not.


 


It's easy. Nowadays each tattoo ought to be called an idiot stamp.

Anyway, I'm off out for a gargle. How many people will annoy me on my way into town just by being there? It hardly bears thinking about.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jun 30, 2012)

'nowadays'

You reactionary twerp


----------



## _angel_ (Jun 30, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It's easy. Nowadays each tattoo ought to be called an idiot stamp.
> 
> Anyway, I'm off out for a gargle. How many people will annoy me on my way into town just by being there? It hardly bears thinking about.


Well if you will live in the grim northwest....


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 30, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Notable, every journo mentioned in these last few posts - every single one - went to private school.


 
My guess would be that this is true of literally 95% of journos writing for the British dailies, the BBC, not to mention Parliament.  And we all know what that means--I've never met a product of a private school who was anything other than a wanker.  Do I mean literally _never_?  Yes, thinking about it, I really think I do. 

I suppose it's not fair to blame people for something over which they had no control.  That's what I was told on here, last time I called out one of our resident anarchists for his public school background.  But I'm not _blaming _them, I'm just noting the fact that they are all wankers.  Why wouldn't they be?  I can't imagine a better way of turning someone into a wanker anyway.

So I'm sorry and all that, but I do hold Penny's educational background against her, and I do think it disqualifies her from speaking for the Left.  Not just her, obviously.


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 30, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Given he spent a whole year on exposing just one person (and i think it was worthwhile despite what the bores say)...


 
Two years.  For which he interrupted work on _Capital, _which was never completed as a result, leading to two centuries of internecine warfare among the Left and in all probability to literally millions of deaths.  There but for the grace of God....


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 30, 2012)

Random said:


> Oxbridge types have also been very prominent in the left, radical journalism, etc.


 
Oxbridge is different from public school though.  Normal people do go to Oxbridge on occasion.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jun 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Tattoos can look great too.


 
And pedestrian.


----------



## philx (Jun 30, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


>


Its Lawrie FFS......


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 30, 2012)

.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jun 30, 2012)

Nice one said:


> and this fella



This fella is a she. I haven't heard that track for years. It is quite brilliant.


----------



## Greebo (Jun 30, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> This fella is a she. I haven't heard that track for years. It is quite brilliant.


Well, somebody had to like it.  That track had a load of my relatives completely helpless with laughter (it was Boxing Day and we happened to be in the same room, with local radio on in the background) as they waited for something to happen after each "oh superma-an.............."


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Jun 30, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Oxbridge is different from public school though.  Normal people do go to Oxbridge on occasion.


Do they leave it?


----------



## love detective (Jun 30, 2012)

molly crabapple interlude:-



> Greek followers, if I was drawing people, for free, in Athens, on the evening of the 7th, would you come. Not sure if I have the fanbase


 
'fanbase'


----------



## rekil (Jun 30, 2012)

PD intimated that if they want models, they should pay them. I take it they're getting some sort of advance for their shitty buke.


----------



## love detective (Jun 30, 2012)

it's more the fact that they openly talk in terms of 'fanbase' that stunned me


----------



## rekil (Jun 30, 2012)

They are away with the fairies.

ETA: PD blocked by crabapple.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

When do we get to discuss Owen Jones' hairdo?


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> My guess would be that this is true of literally 95% of journos writing for the British dailies, the BBC, not to mention Parliament. And we all know what that means--I've never met a product of a private school who was anything other than a wanker. Do I mean literally _never_? Yes, thinking about it, I really think I do.
> 
> I suppose it's not fair to blame people for something over which they had no control. That's what I was told on here, last time I called out one of our resident anarchists for his public school background. But I'm not _blaming _them, I'm just noting the fact that they are all wankers. Why wouldn't they be? I can't imagine a better way of turning someone into a wanker anyway.
> 
> So I'm sorry and all that, but I do hold Penny's educational background against her, and I do think it disqualifies her from speaking for the Left. Not just her, obviously.


 
What happens when the product of a British public school thinks that you are a wanker? Does the world implode through the circularity of it all?


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

Oh yeah and also, for good measure ...



LLETSA said:


> It depends on whether you and her want to join the grown-ups.


 
Fuck off. Arsehole. OOH HOW JUVENILE!

Edit: Pre-empting Butchers' inevitable demand for a serious political commentary:
a) this thread doesn't deserve serious comment;
b) sad stalkery weirdos;
c) haven't you all got something better to do?

Just a bit pathetic really. Yeah, LP is spiralling inevitably into irrelevant twattishness, as so many people before her have. Still, carry on fighting the class war by obsessively attacking Laurie Penny. I've no doubt that you're really achieving something here. Keep it up, etc.

edit: same goes for the 'hilarious' PD in-joke sadfest.


----------



## gosub (Jul 1, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> My guess would be that this is true of literally 95% of journos writing for the British dailies, the BBC, not to mention Parliament.  And we all know what that means--I've never met a product of a private school who was anything other than a wanker.  Do I mean literally _never_?  Yes, thinking about it, I really think I do.
> 
> I suppose it's not fair to blame people for something over which they had no control.  That's what I was told on here, last time I called out one of our resident anarchists for his public school background.  But I'm not _blaming _them, I'm just noting the fact that they are all wankers.  Why wouldn't they be?  I can't imagine a better way of turning someone into a wanker anyway.
> 
> So I'm sorry and all that, but I do hold Penny's educational background against her, and I do think it disqualifies her from speaking for the Left.  Not just her, obviously.


I'll take a decent education over phildwyer kudos.


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 1, 2012)

gosub said:


> I'll take a decent education over phildwyer kudos.


 
How are you going to get "a decent education" at a private school? These institutions exist for the specific purpose of keeping the real world out. It is entirely impossible to learn or even to know about the real world when one is educated in its deliberately induced absence.

Your attitude is exactly what annoys people about Penny. She goes on about how "lucky" she was to go to private school. She doesn't know that she is paying a heavy price for such education in ignorance and consequent scorn.

And I am willing to bet any amount of money that, should she have kids herself, she will also send them to private school. Her type always do, because like yourself they think such places provide a good education.

By that very opinion they reveal their completely stupid and pathetic attitude to everything.


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 1, 2012)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Do they leave it?


 
They have to.


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 1, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> What happens when the product of a British public school thinks that you are a wanker? Does the world implode through the circularity of it all?


 
It isn't just my opinion that privately educated people are wankers though, is it?

In fact it is the opinion of _everyone, _except those who went to private school themselves.  Such universally held opinions are generally accorded the status of objective truth.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> same goes for the 'hilarious' PD in-joke sadfest.


 
Bomb Laurie Penny.


----------



## audiotech (Jul 1, 2012)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Do they leave it?


 
Some think ahh, but there's Ruskin College, Oxford, who provide places for the disadvantaged, with few, or no qualifications. One problem with this thinking, Ruskin College is not in fact part of Oxford University.

In 1908 the 'Plebs League' was established at the college by students who viewed its education policy as "too pro-establishment".


----------



## Nice one (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> A tattoo used to be a sign of having served at sea or been inside. Now they're badges of conformism.


 
true but also the crown heads of europe took to it with a passion - by the end of the 19th century at least one in 5 members of the british aristocracy had a tattoo (Churchill's mum anyone).

It was a badge of conformism way before students came along.


----------



## audiotech (Jul 1, 2012)

Prison tattoos are very distinguishable from the run of the mill fashion variety.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> Well if you will live in the grim northwest....


 
Nowt wrong with Manchester, apart from the students.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jul 1, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> It isn't just my opinion that privately educated people are wankers though, is it?
> 
> In fact it is the opinion of _everyone, _except those who went to private school themselves.  Such universally held opinions are generally accorded the status of objective truth.


IME it's a pretty widespread opinion among a substantial minority of people who attended private schools...


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)




----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Nowt wrong with Manchester, apart from the students.


Were you a student once? Slagging off students en masse is the same as slagging off young people en masse. It's a bit sad that normally intelligent and progressive posters are practicing such bigotry.


----------



## _angel_ (Jul 1, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Nowt wrong with Manchester, apart from the students.


It's _Manchester_. Where do you start with the wrongness?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

Bigotry?  You soft get. 

I can't afford to go to university right now.  I don't slag all students off (an ex was one when we met, I have friends, co-workers etc who are currently studying), but come on ...


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Were you a student once? *Slagging off students en masse is the same as slagging off young people en masse*. It's a bit sad that normally intelligent and progressive posters are practicing such bigotry.


 
is it really?


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jul 1, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> It's _Manchester_. Where do you start with the wrongness?


 
The Mancunians. A right bunch of tossers.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> It's _Manchester_. Where do you start with the wrongness?


 
Well, when it comes to Yorkshire Puds I quite like Sheffield.  Leeds was a bit shite when I was last there.  Actually, come to think of it the last time I was there, I was with the nihilist Herbert Read and your hubby, sitting in a Cuba-themed pub.


----------



## _angel_ (Jul 1, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Well, when it comes to Yorkshire Puds I quite like Sheffield. Leeds was a bit shite when I was last there. Actually, come to think of it the last time I was there, I was with the nihilist Herbert Read and your hubby, sitting in a Cuba-themed pub.


That's closed now


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

Good.  It was fucking shit.


----------



## _angel_ (Jul 1, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Good. It was fucking shit.


Cheaper than the alternative for spanishy/cuban food. I reckon him stopping going to Leeds Met made it close down.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

Has that try-hard Sushi bar closed down?


----------



## _angel_ (Jul 1, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Has that try-hard Sushi bar closed down?


It isn't there anymore and hasn't been for ages. The Indian place that followed it died also.
There was not one fucking thing I could order in that place except banana split... even most of the ice cream was made out of sushi!


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

Anyway:  (((students)))


----------



## love detective (Jul 1, 2012)

yeah, enough discussing the merits of various northern eateries, this class war isn't going to fight itself you know

it's taking a big enough hit as it is what with all this stalking of that very private individual laurie penny, can't afford any more distractions

focus


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

on the fanbase.


----------



## _angel_ (Jul 1, 2012)

love detective said:


> yeah, enough discussing the merits of various northern eateries, this class war isn't going to fight itself you know
> 
> it's taking a big enough hit as it is what with all this stalking of that very private individual laurie penny, can't afford any more distractions
> 
> focus


failed leeds eateries need a thread of their own!


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> is it really?


Yes, age resenting youth.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

I'm not that old.


----------



## Nice one (Jul 1, 2012)




----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Nice one said:


> true but also the crown heads of europe took to it with a passion - by the end of the 19th century at least one in 5 members of the british aristocracy had a tattoo (Churchill's mum anyone).
> 
> It was a badge of conformism way before students came along.


 

It's far from being just students now though, or even mainly students. Since the advent of the 'body art' business scam, tattoos have become so widespread and over the top that whatever impact they once had has been totally wiped out. You see people with entire limbs totally covered with some huge infantile picture. Deep orange and vivid red inks on already orangey skin. Female bank clerks, dressed in formal attire, ridiculously have tattoos peeping out from the waist bands of their trousers or skirts, or above their collars. Somebody's old granny on the tills in Asda has a neck tattoo for fuck's sake.

Like I said, something has clearly gone awry.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Nowt wrong with Manchester, apart from the students.


 


I haven't lived in Manchester, or anywhere in the north-west, since 1998.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Somebody's old granny on the tills in Asda has a neck tattoo for fuck's sake.


 
This.


----------



## _angel_ (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I haven't lived in Manchester, or anywhere in the north-west, since 1998.


Where the fuck are you then?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It's far from being just students now though, or even mainly students. It's so widespread and over the top that whatever impact a tattoo once had has been totally wiped out. You see people with entire limbs totally covered with some huge infantile picture. Deep orange and vivid red inks on already orangey skin. Female bank clerks, dressed in formal attire ridiculously have tattoos peeping out from the waist bands of their trousers or skirts, or above their collars. Somebody's old granny on the tills in Asda has a neck tattoo for fuck's sake.
> 
> Like I said, something has clearly gone awry.


Get over it grandad. It's no skin off your nose.


----------



## _angel_ (Jul 1, 2012)

sexists


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

Ageist.


----------



## Nice one (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It's far from being just students now though, or even mainly students. tattoos are so widespread and over the top that whatever impact they once had has been totally wiped out. You see people with entire limbs totally covered with some huge infantile picture. Deep orange and vivid red inks on already orangey skin. Female bank clerks, dressed in formal attire ridiculously have tattoos peeping out from the waist bands of their trousers or skirts, or above their collars. Somebody's old granny on the tills in Asda has a neck tattoo for fuck's sake.
> 
> Like I said, something has clearly gone awry.


 
and premiership footballers. Euro 2012 was definitely the tournament of the tattoo.


----------



## _angel_ (Jul 1, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Ageist.


sexist and ageist!
Alright for grandads to have tattoos but not grandmas!

I don't like em anyway, but that's beside the point. Anything that Sam Cameron has got cannot be considered anything other than fashion I guess!


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> Where the fuck are you then?


 


Your side of the hills. But nowhere near you.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Get over it grandad. It's no skin off your nose.


 

I'm neither under it nor over it. But I'm allowed an opinion, and my opinion is that infantilsim has triumphed, and that tattoos and piercings are a major indicator.


----------



## love detective (Jul 1, 2012)

Iniesta is about the only player who doesn't have a forearm tattoo


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

You're full of shit, LLETSA.
I may have to get a tattoo now.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> You're full of shit, LLETSA.


 

Such devastating ripostes are why I've lately ventured onto to here only rarely.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

love detective said:


> Iniesta is about the only player who doesn't have a forearm tattoo


 


Look at Aguero. I love the player but does he have to have a joke arm?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Such devastating ripostes are why I've lately ventured onto to here only rarely.


Why do you have such a problem with people having tattoos and piercings? It doesn't make any difference to you. It's merely fashion and getting cross about fashion is fruitless and a sure sign of fossilization.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

> edit: same goes for the 'hilarious' PD in-joke sadfest.


 
what's wrong with pd? it's just a joke, it's not about laurie penny and it's hilarious


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Why do you have such a problem with people having tattoos and piercings? It doesn't make any difference to you. It's merely fashion and getting cross about fashion is fruitless and a sure sign of fossilization.


 


This shows just how shallow you are.

Rebels my arse.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

It's shitty safe these days.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Yes, age resenting youth.


 
They may be conveniently invisible to you but can't go along with your quite insulting attempt to  airbrush mature students out of the picture.


----------



## Joe Reilly (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> I may have to get a tattoo now.


 
Get CUNT tattoed on your forehead, that should do nicely.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> This shows just how shallow you are.
> 
> Rebels my arse.


 
Chorlton is full of them , mainly speaking americanisms , how much there houses are worth and who they would shag if they left their partners


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 1, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> what's wrong with pd? it's just a joke, it's not about laurie penny and it's hilarious


 
Its the fact that Barry Mainwairing doesn't dye his hair crimson or sport a tatoo


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Its the fact that Barry Mainwairing doesn't dye his hair crimson or sport a tatoo


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> what's wrong with pd? it's just a joke, it's not about laurie penny and it's hilarious


 
PD branch possibly opening up in Moscow or Bishkek soon. Watch this space. Or rather, look upwards into space and beyond the stars.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> This shows just how shallow you are.
> 
> Rebels my arse.


You're the shallow one, judging people for their appearances


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

Joe Reilly said:


> Get CUNT tattoed on your forehead, that should do nicely.


How rude


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> You're the shallow one, judging people for their appearances


 


You can't even seem to see your own triteness.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Its the fact that Barry Mainwairing doesn't dye his hair crimson or sport a tatoo


 

 Edit: replied to wrong post.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Chorlton is full of them , mainly speaking americanisms , how much there houses are worth and who they would shag if they left their partners


 

Is the Horse and Jockey still there? And that big Holts's pub on the main road?


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

love detective said:


> Iniesta is about the only player who doesn't have a forearm tattoo


 
Which means what?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> You can't even seem to see your own triteness.


I don't think it's trite to defend people expressing themselves. They may look daft, stupid, etc, but fair play if they want to look like that.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> I don't think it's trite to defend people expressing themselves. They may look daft, stupid, etc, but fair play if they want to look like that.


 


Expressing themselves? Jesus.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

youth of today etc


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Expressing themselves? Jesus.


Yes. It's not a difficult concept to grasp.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> youth of today etc


 


It's got little or nothing to do with youth. It's just business, and mug punters of any age are welcome.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Yes. It's not a difficult concept to grasp.


 


So paying through the nose for somebody to pain a daft picture on a limb, which looks from a distance like a nasty burn or something else you'd pay even more for to have removed if acquired by accident, is self-expression?

Are we really that culturally impoverished?


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

if somebody wants to get a tattoo then i personally couldn't give a fuck  at best it can look really nice, at worst it can provide a source of amusement for people on the internet


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

the downfall of rome etc


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> the downfall of rome etc


 


There may be parallels. After all, this socio-economic system will come crashing down at some point, probably when we're not looking.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> So paying through the nose for somebody to pain a daft picture on a limb, which looks from a distance like a nasty burn of something else you'd pay even more for to have removed if acquired by accident, is self-expression?
> 
> Are we really that culturally impoverished?


No, you are just prejudiced and ignorant of any culture beyond your tiny little world


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> at worst it can provide a source of amusement for people on the internet


 

Isn't this part of the problem? The world economy is on life support and we're all looking at each others' tattoos on the internet.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> There may be parallels. After all, tise socio-economic system will come crashing down at some point, probably when we're not looking.


Yeah, and it's people with tattoos who are responsible for the mess we're in


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Isn't this part of the problem. The world economy is on life support and we're all looking at each others' tattoos on the internet.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> No, you are just prejudiced and ignorant of any culture beyond your tiny little world


 


Definitely prejudiced but I'd dispute ignorant. Been to places you'll never go, sunshine.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Yeah, and it's people with tattoos who are responsible for the mess we're in


 


They're a product of it. Children are easy to manipulate.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> There may be parallels. After all, this socio-economic system will come crashing down at some point, probably when we're not looking.


 
dotty posting: 

Were the thousands of ancient cultures which were covered in tattoos as culturally bereft as us or is there something special about our tattoos that makes them less valid in your eyes?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Definitely prejudiced but I'd dispute ignorant. Been to places you'll never go, sunshine.


And obviously have not learnt a thing


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> And obviously have not learnt a thing


 
I've totally failed to absorb sham tolerance and the cult of permanent teenagerdom.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

You don't half talk some rot. Sham tolerance? Permanent teenagerdom? Are you Tony Parsons?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> dotty posting:
> 
> Were the thousands of ancient cultures which were covered in tattoos as culturally bereft as us or is there something special about our tattoos that makes them less valid in your eyes?


 

I don't know. But the current fashion for tattoos is just that: mere fashion, driven by an all-pervasive media and commerce. Bored and frustrated by any chance? Have another big fuck off tattoo to show your dickhead mates. They probably won't be able to tell what it actually is, but having to repeatedly explain it will kill another few hours, especially as they won't actually listen, necessitating your having to keep repeating yourself. Whole evenings can pass like this.

On the whole, speaking of today's society, tattoos=empty head.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I don't know. But the current fashion for tattoos ia mere fashion, driven by an all-pervasive media and commerce. Bored and frustrated by any chance? Have another big fuck off tattoo to show your dickhead mates. They probably won't be able to tell what it actually is, but having to repeatedly explain it will kill another few hours, especially as they won't actually listen, necessitaing your having to keep repeating yourself. Whole evenings can pass like this.
> 
> On the whole, speaking of today's society, tattoos=empty head.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> You don't half talk some rot. Sham tolerance? Permanent teenagerdom? Are you Tony Parsons?


 


No, although I wouldn't mind his bank account.

What you can say about Parsons is that he became wise enough to grow up and realise he spent much of his younger years talking a load of old shit.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

What a huge hornet you have in your helmet. 
One spawned from ignorance and bitterness.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> What a huge hornet you have in your helmet.
> One spawned from ignorance and bitterness.


 

A life without cynicism is a life only half lived.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> *I don't know*. But the current fashion for tattoos is mere fashion, driven by an all-pervasive media and commerce. Bored and frustrated by any chance? Have another big fuck off tattoo to show your dickhead mates. They probably won't be able to tell what it actually is, but having to repeatedly explain it will kill another few hours, especially as they won't actually listen, necessitaing your having to keep repeating yourself. Whole evenings can pass like this.
> 
> On the whole, speaking of today's society, tattoos=empty head.


 

dotty:

so the aztecs, the polynesians, the p-celts presumably had a village elder/eeyore who would look scornfully upon designs worked in woad and scoff that it is all distraction and vapidity for a generation of empty-headed fools.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> dotty:
> 
> so the aztecs, the polynesians, the p-celts presumably had a village elder/eeyore who would look scornfully upon designs worked in woad and scoff that it is all distraction and vapidity for a generation of empty-headed fools.


 


I have no idea. But they didn't have Posh Spice or Jedward as 'positive role models' (itself a concept arising from a thoroughly infantilised society.)


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

There's enough material here for a sitcom.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I have no idea. But they didn't have Posh Spice or Jedward as 'positive role models' (itself a concept arising from a thoroughly infantilised society.)


 
anyone who thinks that jedward and posh spice are positive role models is a fucking idiot tbf.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> There's enough material here for a sitcom.


 

Hancock's Half Hour.


----------



## love detective (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> Which means what?


 
which means he doesn't seem to have been caught up in the fad of getting forearm tattoos like a whole load of others have


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

At the very moment that, to use Hobsbawm's words, the individual triumphed over society, individualism disappeared. Its rotting corpse is a hideous spectacle to behold.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

froggy posting

i bet if you actually meet lletsa in real life he's covered in tattoos


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> froggy posting
> 
> i bet if you actually meet lletsa in real life he's covered in tattoos


 


I'm full of self-hatred but not that full.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

Oh so now tattooees hate themselves


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Sham tolerance? Permanent teenagerdom?


 

Tolerance these days usually means imposing the absurd, commercially driven cult of eternal youth and phoney individualism on the rest of society.

It's why political protest*, for instance, now so often resembles a teenage temper tantrum writ large. Last summer's riots were one big trashing of your own bedroom and a refusal to clean the away the pubes after a bath.


*And impotent protest is, politically, all there is left-in itself a result of today's sham tolerance.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

dotty:

I dread to think what lletsa would have to say on the matter of henna tatooes. By their transient nature and hennas association with that cult of individualism 'hippydom' henna tatts would surely rank as even more annoying to the man.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Oh so now tattooees hate themselves


 


Not as much as I hate most of them.

But yes-voluntary violence against your own body is clearly a form of self-hatred. It's a thin line between self-harm and so-called body art. And at least with self-harm you don't have to pay a charlatan white-man-with-dreads to do it for you.

Society has shed its sense of self-respect.


----------



## _angel_ (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Not as much as I hate most of them.
> 
> But yes-voluntary violence against your own body is clearly a form of self-hatred. It's a thin line between self-harm and so-called body art. And at least with self-harm you don't have to pay a charlatan white-man-with-dreads to do it for you.
> 
> Society has shed its sense of self-respect.


I didn't know editor did tattoos?


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jul 1, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> It isn't just my opinion that privately educated people are wankers though, is it?
> 
> In fact it is the opinion of _everyone, _except those who went to private school themselves. _* Such universally held opinions are generally accorded the status of objective truth*_.


_(my emphasis_)

Here we have another collectable and hilarious dwyerism. This man is to philosophy what William McGonagall is to poetry.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Hancock's Half Hour.


Half cocked half hour, more like.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> dotty:
> 
> I dread to think what lletsa would have to say on the matter of henna tatooes. By their transient nature and hennas association with that cult of individualism 'hippydom' henna tatts would surely rank as even more annoying to the man.


 

I didn't used to mind tattoos when they gave you a bit of a clue as to who you were dealing with, but today's fashion for over-the-top tattooing has nothing whatsoever to do with individualism or 'self-expression.'

By pushing selfishness and narcissism to the centre-stage, ripe for exploitation by capital, the hippies actually won. No movement ever turns out the way you thought it would, but what we see around us today is largely the result of their pioneering work.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Half cocked half hour, more like.


 


The mockery of some people on here only reinforces my conviction that irony is now lost on society.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> _(my emphasis_)
> 
> Here we have another collectable and hilarious dwyerism. This man is to philosophy what William McGonagall is to poetry.


I'm not saying his posts are short and snappy, but at least he gives other posters a warm glow of (undeserved?) superiority about their own.  If we all wrote in the same way, you'd never spot the sock puppets.


----------



## audiotech (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> You don't half talk some rot. Sham tolerance? Permanent teenagerdom? Are you Tony Parsons?



To be frank, I'm intolerant of tolerance, which is indeed a sham.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

You HATE them? Seriously?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 1, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> Where the fuck are you then?


 
They seek him here,
they seek him there.
Those posters seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven,
or is he in hell?
That damned elusive
L-L-ET-SA.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> dotty:
> 
> I dread to think what lletsa would have to say on the matter of henna tatooes. By their transient nature and hennas association with that cult of individualism 'hippydom' henna tatts would surely rank as even more annoying to the man.


Oh, I don't know.  They're less commercialised than inked tattoos, as they're easier to do on yourself.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 1, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> dotty:
> 
> so the aztecs, the polynesians, the p-celts presumably had a village elder/eeyore who would look scornfully upon designs worked in woad and scoff that it is all distraction and vapidity for a generation of empty-headed fools.


 
There is always a temptation to say if something or ever went on in some early civ then  it must have value and relevance. I went to a conference once which banged on about how natives in the  America continents in holding discussions  would  allow individuals to make a pitch to discuss a subject, those interested could then go to the discussion they wished but could move to any other group at any time. Hence a number of simultaneous disillusion could take place  without totally excluding anyone.

Marvellous the audience thought how inclusive and sensitive to others  can you get  but when you thought about it the natives also spent a lot of time chopping peoples heads off to  play an early version of basketball.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Not as much as I hate most of them.
> 
> But yes-voluntary violence against your own body is clearly a form of self-hatred. *It's a thin line between self-harm and so-called body art.* And at least with self-harm you don't have to pay a charlatan white-man-with-dreads to do it for you.
> 
> Society has shed its sense of self-respect.


 
dotty:

this stunning insight was brought to you in association with lletsa


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> They seek him here,
> they seek him there.
> Those posters seek him everywhere.
> <snip>


Do we even really care,
As long as he stays out
Of my hair.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> You HATE them? Seriously?


 

I even hate me.


----------



## Balbi (Jul 1, 2012)

Is LLETSA writing for the political opposite equivalent to PD? As hysterical and overdramatic as the Penny herself.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> They seek him here,
> they seek him there.
> Those posters seek him everywhere.
> Is he in heaven,
> ...


 


I'm not particualrly elusive-I'm where I am most of the time.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

What's PD? 
<LLETSA> people are so lazy these days. It's acronym this, acronym that. They obviously have no self-respect</LLETSA>


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> There is always a temptation to say if something or ever went on in some early civ then it must have value and relevance. I went to a conference once which banged on about how natives in the America continents in holding discussions would allow individuals to make a pitch to discuss a subject, those interested could then go to the discussion they wished but could move to any other group at any time. Hence a number of simultaneous disillusion could take place without totally excluding anyone.
> 
> Marvellous the audience thought how inclusive and sensitive to others can you get but when you thought about it the natives also spent a lot of time chopping peoples heads off to play an early version of basketball.


 
dotty:

yer, theres also some question as to what we know about the function of tatooes in ancient cultures- body art or 'rictual' or social standing signifiers? I recon art, based on absolutely nothing ...

also, for lletsa

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0288114/

'Mark of Cain' a fascinating docu about russian prison tatts from the old school to now. Is as much about russian jails as it is tatts.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Is LLETSA writing for the political opposite equivalent to PD? As hysterical and overdramatic as the Penny herself.


 


That plain common sense and articulating the obvious are now defined as hysterical again only reinforces what I've been saying.

In failing to notice that their radical liberalism was long ago stolen from them, hollowed out, packaged up and sold back to them at an inflated price, the Urban75 rebels are, like most of today's radicals, blind to their own smug impotence. The revolution sponsored by Benetton.

Enjoy it while it lasts. The age of infantilism is your heyday.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

You're no Orwell LLETSA


----------



## Joe Reilly (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> How rude


 
In latin obviously, that would be real classy.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> What's PD?
> <LLETSA> people are so lazy these days. It's acronym this, acronym that. They obviously have no self-respect</LLETSA>


It could be the acronym for a high circulation periodical within one increasingly fashionable subculture, but somehow I doubt it.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

dotty:

The revolution will not be sponsored by benneton. possibly not televised either but tweeted and Grace Petrie will provide the soundtrack lol


----------



## rekil (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> You're no Orwell LLETSA


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I didn't used to mind tattoos when they gave you a bit of a clue as to who you were dealing with, but today's fashion for over-the-top tattooing has nothing whatsoever to do with individualism or 'self-expression.'<snip>


What's your opinion of tattoos (be they ink or henna) done for ritual purposes, if they're not displayed in public?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> You're no Orwell LLETSA


 


True. Who could possibly match Orwell's seminal essay on 'Body Art'?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Actually, thinking about it, if Orwell were alive today he'd probably never have anything published as he'd be spending most of his time arseing around on the internet talking to some gobshites.

But if he did, he'd fit right in as most of what he had to say wasn't particularly insightful.


----------



## audiotech (Jul 1, 2012)

The road to Wigan tattoo parlour.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Greebo said:


> What's your opinion of tattoos (be they ink or henna) done for ritual purposes, if they're not displayed in public?


 
I have no opinion on, or knowledge of, tattoos done for ritual purposes.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I have no opinion on, or knowledge of, tattoos done for ritual purposes.


Perhaps you should get some, then. Knowledge I mean, not tattoos.  Can't abide people railing against something they don't know about.


----------



## Balbi (Jul 1, 2012)

Puff on you pompous blowhard.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

audiotech said:


> The road to Wigan tattoo parlour.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Puff on you pompous blowhard.


 


Again, in today's stifling atmosphere of populist pseudo-individualist soundbites, being accused of pomposity should be a badge of honour.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 1, 2012)

audiotech said:


> Prison tattoos are very distinguishable from the run of the mill fashion variety.


 
In the US prison system tattoos can also often have particular meanings and/or denote an inmate's particular status or offence. For instance, many gang members will have tattoos displaying their particular gang's emblem, a set of teardrops is used to denote a killer and the amount of tattoos an inmate has often shows the extent of their criminal history. For example, a first offender (known in US prisons as a 'fish' or 'new meat') might have no tattoos at all, while a long-term inmate or repeat offender may well have what are called 'full sleeves', arms tattooed from shoulder to wrist and possibly fingers as well. They may well have tattoos displaying gang affiliation (Aryan Brotherhood/Texas Syndicate/Bloods/Crips/MS13 and so on), political affiliations (usually of the Nazi or Fascist variety), the names of previous prisons where they served some time and the obligatory macho bullshit like 'Live Fast, Die Young' or something else gang-related (the Outlaw biker gang members usually have at least one tattoo bearing the words 'God forgives, Outlaws don't'). Of course, the Japanese Yakuza and Russian 'Mafiya' members will display their experience, seniority and offences by the type and amount of tattoos they have as well.

An unusual exception to the convict tattoo trend is that of Mafiosi (Sicilian or American) who usually don't have tattoos at all as they're forbidden under Mob rules and tradition. Some of the younger Mafiosi might opt for it and get away with having some small tattoo or other, but you won't find what remains of the Mob's old-timers having any at all.


----------



## Balbi (Jul 1, 2012)

Ill blu tack it onto you, wouldn't want to burst you. Imagine all that knowledge, certainty, disdain, hate and clarity of thout going to waste.


----------



## audiotech (Jul 1, 2012)

_The illustrated Man _is worth bringing in at this point, with its theme of the conflict of the cold mechanics of technology and human psychology.

Rod Steiger:


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

I'm a fan of literary tattoos. I might get an Orwell one to piss LLETSA off


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Ill blu tack it onto you, wouldn't want to burst you. Imagine all that knowledge, certainty, disdain, hate and clarity of thout going to waste.


 


I was bursted long ago, I'm afraid.


----------



## audiotech (Jul 1, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> In the US prison system tattoos can also often have particular meanings and/or denote an inmate's particular status or offence.


 
The Russian penal system also has an interesting history, with regards to tattoos and status, but that too is dying out.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> I'm a fan of literary tattoos. I might get an Orwell one to piss LLETSA off


 


It wouldn't piss me off as I'm unlikely to see you. None of the many ridiculous tattoos I see on people who have paid hard cash to make themselves ridiculous particularly piss me off either. They just make me despair for our collective sanity.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

dotty:

am I talking to myself here?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0288114/

Mark of Cain- russian jail tatts. very good docu. Fuck me.


----------



## Balbi (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I was bursted long ago, I'm afraid.



You do appear to be acting like a complete bursted. Or maybe im pronouncing that wrong.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Balbi said:


> You do appear to be acting like a complete bursted. Or maybe im pronouncing that wrong.


 

That the mild stuff I'm coming out with should lead to such an accusation also says a lot.

As society becomes more crass under the impact of a culture driven by a capitalism that's eating itself, all sense of proportion is lost.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

Balbi said:


> You do appear to be acting like a complete bursted. Or maybe im pronouncing that wrong.


bar steward?


----------



## Balbi (Jul 1, 2012)

Speaking of eating, my pizza's just arrived. Cheerio.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jul 1, 2012)

Can we get back to the Laura baiting pls?

http://coilhouse.net/2012/07/a-radical-gabfest-with-authoractivist-laurie-penny/


----------



## _angel_ (Jul 1, 2012)

I  Know someone who had relentless the energy drink tattood on him. Now that is ridiculous!


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

dotty posting: 

to be fair i admire the design of relentless, the screaming skull, the backbone design, etc.

i wouldn't have it tatooed tho, that's just mental


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Can we get back to the Laura baiting pls?
> 
> http://coilhouse.net/2012/07/a-radical-gabfest-with-authoractivist-laurie-penny/


I read halfway down that, bored now.  It's well done though.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 1, 2012)

Greebo said:


> It could be the acronym for a high circulation periodical within one increasingly fashionable subculture, but somehow I doubt it.


 
Nah, that's _WG_.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Nah, that's _WG_.


A bit slow of thinking after a few broken nights, but you've lost me there - explain please?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 1, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Can we get back to the Laura baiting pls?
> 
> http://coilhouse.net/2012/07/a-radical-gabfest-with-authoractivist-laurie-penny/


 
Interesting, insofar as she's adapt at playing to her audience.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 1, 2012)

Greebo said:


> A bit slow of thinking after a few broken nights, but you've lost me there - explain please?


 
Proletarian Democracy is an increasingly fashionable subculture.
WG is the acronym for Workers' Girder, the high circulation periodical of that increasingly fashionable subculture.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Proletarian Democracy is an increasingly fashionable subculture.
> WG is the acronym for Workers' Girder, the high circulation periodical of that increasingly fashionable subculture.


There was I thinking PD was the excessively illustrated mag put out by the PF (as a first guess, that is)


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 1, 2012)

Greebo said:


> There was I thinking PD was the excessively illustrated mag put out by the PF (as a first guess, that is)


 
Excessively illustrated with busty faeries and succubi, too.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Excessively illustrated with busty faeries and succubi, too.


Can we get back to shredding what'shername now?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 1, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Can we get back to shredding what'shername now?


 
Laura Lookatme? Great example of social capital coming home to roost, that one. Knew the right people at the right time, and pretty much has jumped every protest bandwagon she can, despite the occasional contradiction. I'm not saying that she isn't sincere, and that her adoring fans aren't sincere, I just happen to believe that her sincerity is a phase, and that she'll become the Tony Parsons (not even the Julie Burchill) of the 2020s: writing a column for one of the dailies that's pretty much a reactionary rant.


----------



## _angel_ (Jul 1, 2012)

I just don't get the obsession with this girl tbf.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Isn't this part of the problem? The world economy is on life support and we're all looking at each others' tattoos on the internet.


 
And your continuing it by making silly remarks about tattoos.... Sense of perspective at all?


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> On the whole, speaking of today's society, tattoos=empty head.


 
How you're managing to intellectualise your comments is indeed a talent you excel at. Some people like tattoos some don't, it's no more than that. That you need to tell others about your own personal antipathy towards tattoos says more about your own cupboard hole impotence than it does anything else...


----------



## andy2002 (Jul 1, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Can we get back to the Laura baiting pls?
> 
> http://coilhouse.net/2012/07/a-radical-gabfest-with-authoractivist-laurie-penny/


 
Disappointed to read that China Mieville has bought into her bullshit, too.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> How you're managing to intellectualise your comments is indeed a talent you excel at. Some people like tattoos some don't, it's no more than that. That you need to tell others about your own personal antipathy towards tattoos says more about your own cupboard hole impotence than it does anything else...


 

Yes, but there is no doubt that it's grown as a phenomenon over the past few years to the extent that whatever it was supposed to signify has now been totally lost, just like everything 'edgy' or 'alternative' gets lost when it becomes big business. Like I say, now that the middle-aged assistant bank manager has a tattoo peeping over her waistband it's a badge of conformism. And the wrinkly sixty year-old in Asda has a tattoo on her neck. Ten years ago she'd have been wearing pearl earrings instead, and rightly so-she's someone's granny. You don't want your granny with a neck tattoo.

I didn't used to mind tattoos when they were fairly discreet, but it's really come to something when you can walk down the street behind some bald, pot-bellied bloke in shorts who has one arm and both legs entirely covered by pictures you couldn't make out even if you studied him all afternoon. Not that you'd want to-he's hideous.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

andy2002 said:


> Disappointed to read that China Mieville has bought into her bullshit, too.


 

Well he does call himself China.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Yes, but there is no doubt that it's grown as a phenomenon over the past few years to the extent that whatever it was supposed to signify has now been totally lost, just like everything 'edgy' or 'alternative' gets lost when it becomes big business. Like I say, now that the middle-aged assistant bank manager has a tattoo peeping over her waistband it's a badge of conformism. And the wrinkly sixty year-old in Asda has a tattoo on her neck. Ten years ago she'd have been wearing pearl earrings instead, and rightly so-she's someone's granny. You don't want your granny with a neck tattoo.
> 
> I didn't used to mind tattoos when they were fairly discreet, but it's really come to something when you can walk down the street behind some bald, pot-bellied bloke in shorts who has one arm and both legs entirely covered by pictures you couldn't make out even if you studied him all afternoon. Not that you'd want to-he's hideous.


 
In the UK historically those with tattoos have overwhelmingly been working-class. That people with tattoos were looked at in the same way the ruling-class eugenicists used to look at skull shape, criminality and class says plenty.

But it doesn't matter frankly. So what if people like tattoos, you don't like them, grand, don't get one done. There's no need to vent about it, it's not exactly up there with anything important is it?

Both my grannies are dead, that said i'd rather have a granny with a tattoo who was a decent person than one without who was a twat.


----------



## rekil (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> I'm a fan of literary tattoos. I might get an Orwell one to piss LLETSA off


How about this one from Victor Pelevin's The Life Of Insects.


> "What's that tattoo he has?" Sam asked softly, when his eyes had adjusted to the semidarkness. "I get the point of Lenin and Stalin, but whys he got OKWIFIP written underneath? Is it a name?"
> 
> "No," said Arthur, "it's an abbreviation. Our Kids Will Fix the Pigs."


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Ten years ago she'd have been wearing pearl earrings instead, and rightly so-she's someone's granny. You don't want your granny with a neck tattoo.


 

Telling women how they should present themselves and how to look appropriate

Can you not see what's wrong with this?!


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Well he does call himself China.


 
No, thats what his parents inflicted him with and he remembers the day the other children at school realised 'china' ryhmes with 'vagina'

still, don't let that stop you


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> In the UK historically those with tattoos have overwhelmingly been working-class. That people with tattoos were looked at in the same way the ruling-class eugenicists used to look at skull shape, criminality and class says plenty.
> 
> But it doesn't matter frankly. So what if people like tattoos, you don't like them, grand, don't get one done. There's no need to vent about it, it's not exactly up there with anything important is it?
> 
> Both my grannies are dead, that said i'd rather have a granny with a tattoo who was a decent person than one without who was a twat.


 

That people with tattoos have been historically working class is neither here nor there in terms of what we're talking about. Now it's a fashion-driven thing, common to working class and middle class alike. And, for all I know, members of the upper class as well. And it is important-like I said, it's a sign of something going on in society: a high number of people have suddenly decided to start hideously disfiguring themselves. Why? What goes on in the mind of grown adults, never previously members of any kind of sub-culture, who decide, out of the blue, to have a stupid indelible picture painted on a limb (or several), or on parts of their torsos?

And what happened to the days when grannies could be grannies?

All of this is linked to the widespread terror of growing old.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Telling women how they should present themselves and how to look appropriate
> 
> Can you not see what's wrong with this?!


 


I am not telling anybody anything.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> No, thats what his parents inflicted him with and he remembers the day the other children at school realised 'china' ryhmes with 'vagina'
> 
> still, don't let that stop you


 


His parents were as daft as you then.


----------



## imposs1904 (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Well he does call himself China.


 
Isn't he another posho? How come he doesn't get a shoeing on the boards?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> Isn't he another posho? How come he doesn't get a shoeing on the boards?


 

Who is he anyway? Another journalist?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 1, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> I just don't get the obsession with this girl tbf.


 
She's kind of an exemplar for a lot of things that are wrong with the mainstream media, as was/is Johann Hari - she's part of a relative elite prescribing solutions for the masses, and using her "activist" credentials (as Hari occasionally used his sexuality) as some kind of badge that innoculates her against any form of criticism. She also doesn't manifest any self-awareness with reference to her being part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Who is he anyway? Another journalist?


 
Author of decent sci-fi, as well as a reasonable political journalist.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Author of decent sci-fi, as well as a reasonable political journalist.


 


That explains why I don't know him then-I hate sci-fi except fot that kind of sci-fi that doesn't really seem like sci-fi.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> How you're managing to intellectualise your comments is indeed a talent you excel at. Some people like tattoos some don't, it's no more than that. That you need to tell others about your own personal antipathy towards tattoos says more about your own cupboard hole impotence than it does anything else...


 
That's harsh. We don't know that LLETSA wasn't maliciously tattooed at some time in the past.

Actually, that's making me smile. Bad panda!


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> That people with tattoos have been historically working class is neither here nor there in terms of what we're talking about. Now it's a fashion-driven thing, common to working class and middle class alike. And, for all I know, members of the upper class as well. And it is important-like I said, it's a sign of something going on in society: a high number of people have suddenly decided to start hideously disfiguring themselves. Why? What goes on in the mind of grown adults, never previously members of any kind of sub-culture, who decide, out of the blue, to have a stupid indelible picture painted on a limb (or several), or on parts of their torsos?
> 
> And what happened to the days when grannies could be grannies?
> 
> All of this is linked to the widespread terror of growing old.


 
It is entirely pertinent, because you're own personal prejudice is directed at ordinary people who have done nothing more than have a tattoo. it's not an issue of any more importance than your preferred jam on your breakfast toast.Stop worrying about silly little things. When you see a tattoo do you mutter to yourself with that knowing grin of how they have transgressed so terribly, confident in your own victory in your own internal monologue?

So middle-class people want to appear 'rough' who cares? That's their problem, why you give a fuck is beyond me.

So, a granny with a tattoo can't be just a granny? What gibberish.

People get tattoos, they grow old, so what?! It sounds very much to me of yet another sign of your own impotent rage against anything that doesn't conform with your own narrow view of 'right' and proper. Calm down, you'll have a heart attack if you're not careful.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> That explains why I don't know him then-I hate sci-fi except fot that kind of sci-fi that doesn't really seem like sci-fi.


 
So much hate, so little focus!


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2012)

'Between Equal Rights' is worth your time, butchers once told me who he draws on for this piece but it's a pretty solid description of the nature of international 'law'


and VP, wash your mouth out- he write non feudalist-lite fantasy oft lumped in with 'steampunk' and 'the new weird'

those genre labels should be wanky enough to make lletsa shit a brick


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I am not telling anybody anything.


 
You're telling women that it's inappropriate to be a granny with a neck tattoo. And that when they get old they should wear pearl earrings.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> Isn't he another posho? How come he doesn't get a shoeing on the boards?


 

he stood for the swappies somewhere once. He's thrown himself under the bus for his principles there- who has penny ever stood for except her own bank balance and media adoration?


----------



## rekil (Jul 1, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> he stood for the swappies somewhere once. He's thrown himself under the bus for his principles there- who has penny ever stood for except her own bank balance and media adoration?


The Lib Dems.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

If Laurie Penny stood for election, it'd be written off as further evidence of her attention-seeking.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

Those poor tattooed grannies


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> it is entirely pertinent, because you're own personal prejudice is dircted at ordinary people who have done nothing more than have a tattoo. it's not an issue of any more importance than your preferred jam on your breakfast toast.Stop worrying about silly little things.
> 
> So middle-class people want to appear 'rough' who cares? That's their problem, why you give a fuck is beyond me.
> 
> ...


 


I'm not actually angry about any of this.  You seem to be the one getting aeriated.

It is an issue of wider significance. What does it say about a society where even those old enough to know better get themselves tattooed just because some vacuous celebrity gets tattooed? More interesting, what makes them think that the kind of heavy tattooing common today looks good? Like I said, from a distance it looks as if they've been badly scarred in some kind of unfortunate accident. And the related issue of piercings: why do young girls so pretty that they've already won in the fucking lottery of life voluntarily pay for somebody to add horrible blemishes to their near-perfect facial features?

No, a granny with a neck tattoo is not merely a granny-she's a granny with a neck tattoo and thus symptomatic of a society losing its grip.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2012)

everybody who stands for election is attention seeking no matter how principled they are. You don't get chivvied into these roles with a sigh of exasperation on your face- and yes you may believe everything you say and want the office to pursue honest aims- but name me 6 introvert shy retiring types who suddenly found themselves elected after someone badgered them into standing?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> So much hate, so little focus!


 

Hate? Just because I don't like science fiction?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> That people with tattoos have been historically working class is neither here nor there in terms of what we're talking about. Now it's a fashion-driven thing, common to working class and middle class alike. And, for all I know, members of the upper class as well. And it is important-like I said, it's a sign of something going on in society: a high number of people have suddenly decided to start hideously disfiguring themselves. Why? What goes on in the mind of grown adults, never previously members of any kind of sub-culture, who decide, out of the blue, to have a stupid indelible picture painted on a limb (or several), or on parts of their torsos?


 
You're conflating the transient phenomenon of fashionability with the rather more permanent phenomenon of subcultural identification, so yes, you have some people being tattooed (and often having the tattoo removed a few years later. It's an ever-expanding business) for reasons of fashion, but you also have some people being tattooed for the same reason their forebears might have - to mark membership of a group, to illustrate places you've been or things you've seen.



> And what happened to the days when grannies could be grannies?


 
They still can and still are. Participating in fashion doesn't change that.



> All of this is linked to the widespread terror of growing old.


 
Really? Anything to substantiate this claim, or is this another of your "I know what I know" statements?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Hate? Just because I don't like science fiction?


 
Yes, hate.
You hate most sci-fi (your words), you hate tattoos, you hate dyed hair and students.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> You're telling women that it's inappropriate to be a granny with a neck tattoo. And that when they get old they should wear pearl earrings.


 


No I'm not. I doubt if I've addressed a single granny while I've been on here.

And even if I had, so what? Grannies need to have a bit of dignity.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Yes, hate.
> You hate most sci-fi (your words), you hate tattoos, you hate dyed hair and students.


 

Like I said, I even hate me.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Really? Anything to substantiate this claim, or is this another of your "I know what I know" statements?


 


It's another one of those 'I know what I know' statements. Trust me-I have an instinct for this kind of thing.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I'm not actually angry about any of this.  You seem to be the one getting aeriated.
> 
> It is an issue of wider significance. What does it say about a society where even those old enough to know better get themselves tattooed just because some vacuous celebrity gets tattooed? More interesting, what makes them think that the kind of heavy tattooing common today looks good? Like I said, from a distance it looks as if they've been badly scarred in some kind of unfortunate accident. And the related issue of piercings: why do young girls so pretty that they've already won in the fucking lottery of life voluntarily pay for somebody to add horrible blemishes to their near-perfect facial features?
> 
> No, a granny with a neck tattoo is not merely a granny-she's a granny with a neck tattoo and thus symptomatic of a society losing its grip.


 
The only person raging is you, i'm just wondering why it makes you so effusive. It's not important.

It says some people think it's trendy, some people want to do something their mates have done or they have seen in a magazine. It's not new it's the same old same old with capitalism expropriating a rebellious trend and selling it to people to give them some kind of edge. Working class people have long had tattoos, it's about as new and exclusive as football. By the way, given the horrible middle-class types who now infest football I take it we can mumble about ordinary football fans now.... They're just the same aren't they?!
People get pierced and tattooed for a whole variety of reasons, that you seem to put them all in one box and point a mocking finger at them again says more about your own inability to realise that people have different tastes and opinions than it does anything else.

In the same way a granny with a pink rinse is just that. It's not really important so stop raging about it. Calm down have a cup of tea.....


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

This is hilarious.  ((((((((((((((((((((tattooed grannies)))))))))))))))))))))))


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> You're conflating the transient phenomenon of fashionability with the rather more permanent phenomenon of subcultural identification, so yes, you have some people being tattooed (and often having the tattoo removed a few years later. It's an ever-expanding business) for reasons of fashion, but you also have some people being tattooed for the same reason their forebears might have - to mark membership of a group, to illustrate places you've been or things you've seen.


 

You don't say.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> everybody who stands for election is attention seeking no matter how principled they are. You don't get chivvied into these roles with a sigh of exasperation on your face- and yes you may believe everything you say and want the office to pursue honest aims- but name me 6 introvert shy retiring types who suddenly found themselves elected after someone badgered them into standing?


 
Yeah - I'm just not sure I'm convinced that the difference between China Mieville and Laurie Penny is that CM has stood for election and thus is more politically 'committed' than LP.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> The only person raging is you, i'm just wondering why it makes you so effusive. It's not important.
> 
> It says some people think it's trendy, some people want to do something their mates have done or they have seen in a magazine. It's not new it's the same old same old with capitalism expropriating a rebellious trend and selling it to people to give them some kind of edge. Working class people have long had tattoos, it's about as new and exclusive as football. By the way, given the horrible middle-class types who now infest football I take it we can mumble about ordinary football fans now.... They're just the same aren';t they?!
> 
> In the same way a granny with a pink rinse is just that. It's not really important so stop raging about it. Calm down have a cup of tea.....


 


I'm not raging; I'm just arguing something you may disagree with in a perfectly reasonable manner. But as I said, it is important: what we're talking about is the triumph of infantilism and the way that at the very moment that the individual triumphed over society, genuine individualism died a squalid, pathetic death.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2012)

copliker said:


> The Lib Dems.


 
heh, i recall the endorsement. The prosecution rests.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I'm not raging; I'm just arguing something you may disagree with in a perfectly reasonable manner. But as I said, it is important: what we're talking about is the triumph of infantilism and the way that at the very moment that the individual triumphed over society, genuine individualism died a squalid, pathetic death.


 
You seem unable to realise the plain fact that tattoos are't 20 years old. They've been here tens of thousands of years. Working class communities have long been home to people who are tattooed it's not new.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> You don't get chivvied into these roles with a sigh of exasperation on your face


it does happen. i expect it happened to china. that or he's an enormous masochist.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Yeah - I'm just not sure I'm convinced that the difference between China Mieville and Laurie Penny is that CM has stood for election and thus is more politically 'committed' than LP.


 

no, you think she is a target of ire for being a woman and being m/c. I disagree but I don't want to fall out with you about it so agree to differ? unless I'm reading you wrong about why you think she gets stick on here and the wider webz?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> You seem unable to realise the plain fact that tattoos are't 20 years old. They've been here tens of thousands of years. Working class communities have long been home to people who are tattooed it's not new.


 

You really don't need to keep telling me how some working class people had tattoos long ago. My dad had a tattoo from his national service days in Hong Kong. I have acknowledged that. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> You really don't need to keep telling me how some working class people had tattoos long ago. My dad had a tattoo from his national service days in Hong Kong. I have acknowledged that. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about.


 
It has alot to do with it, it's nothing new, it's not some great revelatory thing we're seeing. Tastes, likes, fashioons etc change and grow, they're not static. How they change and grow is also not new. It's just being re-packaged as 'trendy' that's all. Hardly something new or even worth giving more than a nod to.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> no, you think she is a target of ire for being a woman and being m/c. I disagree but I don't want to fall out with you about it so agree to differ? unless I'm reading you wrong about why you think she gets stick on here and the wider webz?


 
That's not the entirity (sp?) of my position, no. I can appreciate some of the criticisms of her are perfectly valid. I'm not an LP fangirl - I don't like her work and find her personally quite irritating. I just agree with people like Belboid who have said that this thread is a bit excessive. There are other people out there who make a career off the back of the protest movement, but they don't seem to attract nearly as much ire.
I acknowledge that, when presented with this view, other people on this thread have argued that Penny has parallels with Johann Hari (for whom, I think, the thread on here was valid and proportionate), but I haven't seen enough evidence to convince me of that. What he did is in a different league to LP's scribblings.

Edit: Having said that, some of the diversions on this thread, such as the current one about tattoos, have been pretty entertaining.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jul 1, 2012)

[Aladin mode]"New threads for old new threads for old. Let me take your old tarnished thread and give you a shiny new one in its place. New threads for old."[/Aladin mode]


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> It has alot to do with it, it's nothing new, it's not some great revelatory thing we're seeing. Tastes, likes, fashioons etc change and grow, they're not static. How they change and grow is also not new. It's just being re-packaged as 'trendy' that's all. Hardly something new or even worth giving more than a nod to.


 


What's new is the way that people are starting to cover their entire bodies with pictures so detailed that they can't even be properly seen anyway. This isn't any kind of taste-it's self-inflicted violence and hideous disfigurement.


----------



## rekil (Jul 1, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> heh, i recall the endorsement. The prosecution rests.


Posh Professional Liar Lefty Sect Stalking Protest Groupie Liberals - A Warning From History.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> triumph of infantilism


what is infantile about tattoos?

my great granddad had tattoos. it says so on his papers when he signed up to the army in 1914. it also says he was a navvy, married and had kids. i doubt there was much infantile about him. i also doubt he was trying to be a rebel. i expect he just saw blokes at work with tattoos, liked them and had some done himself.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> what is infantile about tattoos?
> 
> my great granddad had tattoos. it says so on his papers when he signed up to the army in 1914. it also says he was a navvy, married and had kids. i doubt there was much infantile about him. i also doubt he was trying to be a rebel. i expect he just saw blokes at work with tattoos, liked them and had some done himself.


 


Yes, yes-we've done this.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Jul 1, 2012)

Tbh, while I'm not really particularly bothered by LP either, and there is the odd comment here which is a bit  , this thread is always quite refreshing after the relentless pennyfawning that I see on e.g. Twitter, and it's also a constant reminder of how this shit works wrt who becomes representatives of dissent and for whom.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> [Aladin mode]"New threads for old new threads for old. Let me take your old tarnished thread and give you a shiny new one in its place. New threads for old."[/Aladin mode]


 
'what film shall we watch tonight Michael J?'

'Lets get Alladin'

'now now (then) you know how that went last time.....'

/out-of-date-jokes


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> What's new is the way that people are starting to cover their entire bodies with pictures so detailed that can't even be properly seen anyway. This isn't any kind of taste-it's self-inflicted violence and hideous disfigurement.


 
No, it's a taste, no more no less, clearly one that's not your own personal taste. Your opinion is that it's disfigurement, that's a perjorative and judgemental opinion and one that not everyone shares. And might I ask where the line is drawn? Where does it become infantile and disfiguring? What part of being tattooed is 'infantile'? I presume your own dads tattoo wasn't infantile and disgfiguring?
Fuck sake, and again it's not new at all, it's been on earth for tens of thousands of years. You're just seeing people over here with it.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Tbh, while I'm not really particularly bothered by LP either, and there is the odd comment here which is a bit  , this thread is always quite refreshing after the relentless pennyfawning that I see on e.g. Twitter, and it's also a constant reminder of how this shit works wrt who becomes representatives of dissent and for whom.


 
You're clearly following the wrong people ...


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Yes, yes-we've done this.


no we haven't. you haven't explained why it's infantile.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> No, it's a taste, no more no less, clearly one that's not your own personal taste. Your opinion is that it's disfigurement, that's a perjorative and judgemental opinio and one that not everyone shares.
> Fuck sake, and again it's not new at all, it's been on earth for tens of thousands of years. You're just seeing people over here with it.


 


The current phenomenon, with all its excesses and implications, is, as I said, very much a new one.

If an opinion isn't judgemental, it isn't worth holding.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2012)

ennit, body modding for aesthetic reasons is fucking oler than lletsas grudge with the entirety of existence. Which of them could be correct, lletsa or most of human cultures post-fire discovery. It's a tricky question


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> no we haven't. you haven't explained why it's infantile.


 

Don't be lazy-read the thread.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> ennit, body modding for aesthetic reasons is fucking oler than lletsas grudge with the entirety of existence. Which of them could be correct, lletsa or most of human cultures post-fire discovery. It's a tricky question


 


I haven't said it isn't old.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

Just because your own tattoo was a mistake it doesn't mean they all are you know Lletsa....


----------



## imposs1904 (Jul 1, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> *he stood for the swappies somewhere once.* He's thrown himself under the bus for his principles there- who has penny ever stood for except her own bank balance and media adoration?


 
whatever  I get it. You like his novels.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> The current phenomenon, with all its excesses and implications, is, as I said, very much a new one.
> 
> If an opinion isn't judgemental, it isn't worth holding.


 

hmm, I recall reading somewhere of polynesian folks who had their legs heavily tatooed. I'd look it up if I could be arsed- but the idea was full sleeve job done on one leg. Full of meaning about their route to becoming a drummer...what frauds they must have been.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> The current phenomenon, with all its excesses and implications, is, as I said, very much a new one.


 
No, it's not new, it has just moved that's all. What are these implications you are so concerned with?



> If an opinion isn't judgemental, it isn't worth holding.


 
Opinions can also be shite and factually ignorant. They too aren't worth holding.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> no, you think she is a target of ire for being a woman and being m/c. I disagree but I don't want to fall out with you about it so agree to differ? unless I'm reading you wrong about why you think she gets stick on here and the wider webz?


 
Oh and also - every time I read this thread I'm bloody glad that Twitter wasn't around when I was LP's age.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> whatever  I get it. You like his novels.


 

a facepalm. Brilliant. Thats your point made, in ways you probably don't even realise


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Don't be lazy-read the thread.


i have, you haven't.

i think you're just talking bollocks. the idea that previously only convicts and ex services had tattoos is complete bollocks for a start.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Oh and also - every time I read this thread I'm bloody glad that Twitter wasn't around when I was LP's age.


 

I'll give you that one- my brainfarts and the 'rumour mill'  were a lot less grevious when there was not instantaneous, unremovable evidence of that time you made a cunt of yourself by saying something ffs- fucking facebook an twiter


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> What are these implications you are so concerned with?


middle class people are having tattoos just like the oiks. it's an outrage! nice ladies who should be wearing pearls!


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> No, it's not new, it has just moved that's all. What are these implications you are so concerned with?


 





The implication of paying for what amounts to self-harm and voluntary disfigurement is that something has gone badly wrong with the collective psyche.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> The implication of paying for what amounts to self-harm and voluntary disfigurement is that something has gone badly wrong with the collective psyche.


 
That includes your dad I presume?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> i have, you haven't.
> 
> i think you're just talking bollocks. the idea that previously only convicts and ex services had tattoos is complete bollocks for a start.


 


I never said only convicts and ex-services had tattoos, and I'm not interested in being followed round and shouted at by a theme ranty oddball.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> I'll give you that one- my brainfarts and the 'rumour mill' were a lot less grevious when there was not instantaneous, unremovable evidence of that time you made a cunt of yourself by saying something ffs- fucking facebook an twiter


 
Also - I don't want to argue either - but I don't see your argument on this one. China Mieville stood for election, which we agree is attention-seeking, and yet that is somehow evidence that he isn't as bad as LP?


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> The implication of paying for what amounts to self-harm and voluntary disfigurement is that something has gone badly wrong with the collective psyche.


 
Has paying for a tattoo always been an indication of something wrong with the 'collective psyche'?


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I never said only convicts and ex-services had tattoos, and I'm not interested in being followed round and shouted at by a theme ranty oddball.


followed round? you're fucking mental.


----------



## imposs1904 (Jul 1, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> a facepalm. Brilliant. Thats your point made, in ways you probably don't even realise


 
it was all your daft fanboy response merited. have another


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> middle class people are having tattoos just like the oiks. it's an outrage! nice ladies who should be wearing pearls!


 
How can we even TELL who the working class are anymore?! Oh the humanity.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> Has paying for a tattoo always been an indication of something wrong with the 'collective psyche'?


something must have been collectively wrong with the black country before the great war then. a time of the prarie fire chainmakers strikes and the new unionisation.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> That includes your dad I presume?


 

I wish people would follow the argument. It's quite clear, after all, that I've been saying that the old, more discreet ways of getting tattooed were different to today's disfiguring of entire limbs in a quest to hide the lack of any discernible individuality.

As for my dad, it was a relatively small forearm thing. I think he regarded it as a youthful folly.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I wish people would follow the argument. It's quite clear, after all, that I've been saying that the old, more discreet ways of getting tattooed was diffrent to today's disfiguring of entire limbs in a quest to hide the lack of any discernible individuality.
> 
> As for my dad, it was a relatively small forearm thing. I think he regarded it as a youthful folly.


 
So individual tatts are ok, but full sleeves are not. Neither are visible tattoos on older women. 
How about half-sleeves, then? Where do you draw the line.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I wish people would follow the argument. It's quite clear, after all, that I've been saying that the old, more discreet ways of getting tattooed was diffrent to today's disfiguring of entire limbs in a quest to hide the lack of any discernible individuality.
> 
> As for my dad, it was a relatively small forearm thing. I think he regarded it as a youthful folly.


 
But again that's not new neither, it's just moved here. Whole body tattoos are ancient aswell.

Aaaahh, getting a big tattoo de facto = lack of individuality. Really? Care to explain this burp?


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> How can we even TELL who the working class are anymore?! Oh the humanity.


i saw two lovely girls, with lovely bottoms. they would have looked a treat in pearls. but they had wilfully disfigured themselves. like a sailor!


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

my auntie dot has got tattoos on her forearms. she's in her mid sixties.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> i saw two lovely girls, with lovely bottoms. they would have looked a treat in pearls. but they had wilfully disfigured themselves. like a sailor!


 
It's so sad to see such pretty young things exhibiting such self-hatred


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> It's so sad to see such pretty young things exhibiting such self-hatred


surely a sign we are all doomed.

like when crazy frog got to number one.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> middle class people are having tattoos just like the oiks. it's an outrage! nice ladies who should be wearing pearls!


 

Amazing how self-styled revolutionaries can delude themselves into claiming a totally commercially driven bit of celebrity trash culture is some kind of sign of working class vibrancy.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Amazing how self-styled revolutionaries can delude thyemselves into claiming a totally commercially drive bit of celebrity trash culture is some kind of sign of working class vibrancy.


who claimed that then?


----------



## killer b (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> self-styled revolutionaries.


 
soi disant radicals eh? 

hi laurie.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

[





Fedayn said:


> Has paying for a tattoo always been an indication of something wrong with the 'collective psyche'?


 

No, because, as it seems like I keep having to repeat, it wasn't anywhere near as widespread and hence not so lucrative a business, and people didn't usually cover entire limbs with garish colours that look from a short distance like awful burns or scars.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Amazing how self-styled revolutionaries can delude thyemselves into claiming a totally commercially drive bit of celebrity trash culture is some kind of sign of working class vibrancy.


 
Where did anyon do/say anything of the kind?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> So individual tatts are ok, but full sleeves are not. Neither are visible tattoos on older women.
> How about half-sleeves, then? Where do you draw the line.


 

Where did this idiot come from?


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> [
> 
> 
> No, because, as it seems like I keep having to repeat, it wasn't anywhere near as widespread and hence not so lucrative a business, and people didn't usually cover entire limbs with garish colours that look from a short distance like awful burns or scars.


 
I know, cover your eyes, avert your gaze, make them hide in their houses..... Aaaaahh the horror. Do you close your eyes and shake your head when you see such sights?


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Amazing how self-styled revolutionaries can delude thyemselves into claiming a totally commercially drive bit of celebrity trash culture is some kind of sign of working class vibrancy.


 
The only person to make claims about the social significance of tattooing is, erm, you.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> But again that's not new neither, it's just moved here. Whole body tattoos are ancient aswell.
> 
> Aaaahh, getting a big tattoo de facto = lack of individuality. Really? Care to explain this burp?


 


However you want to paint it, it's only relatively recently that you began to see giant tattoos on such a wide numbe and variety of people.

And when you join in a trend, of course you're displaying a lack of individuality.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> i saw two lovely girls, with lovely bottoms. they would have looked a treat in pearls. but they had wilfully disfigured themselves. like a sailor!


 


Middle-aged men with the mentality of schoolkids. This is what I meant by the new infantilism.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> However you want to paint it, it's only relatively recently that you began to see giant tattoos on such a wide numbe and variety of people.


 
In this country perhaps, wordlwide and historically no. But again so what?



> And when you join in a trend, of course you're displaying a lack of individuality.


 
This 'trend' you refer to, when did it start? Where did it come from?


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> [
> 
> and people didn't usually cover entire limbs with garish colours that look from a short distance like awful burns or scars.


they were quite popular twenty odd years ago when i got my half sleeve done and my brother one upped me by getting two full ones. a few of the apprentices i went to tech college with had them as well.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> I know, cover your eyes, avert your gaze, make them hide in their houses..... Aaaaahh the horror. Do you close your eyes and shake your head when you see such sights?


 

I don't do anything other than silently abandon all hope.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Jul 1, 2012)

The most extensive tattoos I see are on blokes in their 60s in pubs IME. Puts the hipsters to shame.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> they were quite popular twenty odd years ago when i got my half sleeve done and my brother one upped me by getting two full ones. a few of the apprentices i went to tech college with had them as well.


 
As I keep having to say (sigh), some people had them, yes. But nowhere near as many.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

FridgeMagnet said:


> The most extensive tattoos I see are on blokes in their 60s in pubs IME. Puts the hipsters to shame.


 

Yes, but they tend to keep them covered up.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Middle-aged men with the mentality of schoolkids. This is what I meant by the new infantilism.


middle aged man with the mentality of private frazer. the old fogeyism.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Yes, but they tend to keep them covered up.


If they did I wouldn't have seen them.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> This 'trend' you refer to, when did it start? Where did it come from?


 


I know your aerieted because you've belonged to a sub-culture where this kind of stuff is the done thing. But it isn't possible to deny that it's now all-too mainstream. It's one thing when you're a hairy-arsed skinhead with a big tattoo and another when you're a female account manager with three kids and the school run to think about. And zumba on Thursday evenings.


When did it start? Relatively recently as a widespread phenomenon. Where did it come from? I don't know. Did some airheaded celebrity kick it off?


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

Just to be clear, the point of this diverting derail is to justify your dislike of Laurie Penny's hair - ?


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I know your aerieted because you've belonged to a sub-culture where this kind of stuff is the done thing. But it isn't possible to deny that it's now all-too mainstream. It's one thing when you're a hairy-arsed skinhead with a big tattoo *and another when you're a female account manager with three kids and the school run to think about. And zumba on Thursday evenings*.
> 
> 
> When did it start? Relatively recently as a widespread phenomenon. Where did it come from? I don't know. Did some airheaded celebrity kick it off?


 
More sexist nonsense.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

FridgeMagnet said:


> If they did I wouldn't have seen them.


 

Well I worked with older men with tattoos across their backs and chests but you only saw them if they were changing their shirts or jumpers before going home or whatever.  Like my dad, some of them seemed to regard them only as youthful follies.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> As I keep having to say (sigh), some people had them, yes. But nowhere near as many.


footballers with their tops off on the telly. people see it, like it and copy it. nothing new and nothing significant. just fashion.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> middle aged man with the mentality of private frazer. the old fogeyism.


 
Ah yes, the dreaded old-fogeyism-one of the biggest possible sins of the times, and another sign of the triumph of infantilism.

Anyway, I'm having a break to watch a film. I might see some of you dickheads later.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> More sexist nonsense.


 


Luckily, you are here to highlight it and prevent it getting out of hand.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Luckily, you are here to highlight it and prevent it getting out of hand.


 
Too late for that, sadly. I fear you're beyond help, judging by your current state of utter confusion.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Ah yes, the dreaded old-fogeyism-one of the biggest possible sins of the times, and another sign of the triumph of infantilism.
> 
> Anyway, I'm having a break to watch a film. I might see some of you dickheads later.


you fear youth and you fear women.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> it was all your daft fanboy response merited. have another


 

simple clarification counts as fanboyism. drip-drip-drip.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Also - I don't want to argue either - but I don't see your argument on this one. China Mieville stood for election, which we agree is attention-seeking, and yet that is somehow evidence that he isn't as bad as LP?


 

for an org that gets a lot of oft valid and sometimes not stick- not the main point however. He was putting himself in the position where he would be endorsed or not by the people he claimed to speak for. Democractic, right? not media driven voice. I believe he lost as well, so there you have it. But I hope you see what I mean here


----------



## Balbi (Jul 1, 2012)

Is someone going to feed that high horse, it must be knackered carrying round LLETSA and his devils advocate winston smith intellectual pomp.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> for an org that gets a lot of oft valid and sometimes not stick- not the main point however. He was putting himself in the position where he would be endorsed or not by the people he claimed to speak for. Democractic, right? not media driven voice. I believe he lost as well, so there you have it. But I hope you see what I mean here



I kinda do - he put his balls on the line by acting on his beliefs in a way LP hasn't. But I reckon that if LP got actively involved in politics, acting on her beliefs, she'd get accused of attention-seeking. It wouldn't make a difference.
I get the impression that there's nothing she can do now that would satisfy her detractors, other than shut up and go away.
Like I said, I'm glad that Twitter etc wan't around when I was her age. It would be really shit to be judged for the rest of your life on silly things you said/did/thought in your early 20s. Which is what is going to happen to her.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Great political debates that never happened:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


i dunno. at least she's never been a copper or a tout (to my knowledge). at least not yet. she could fling that in his posh face and he wouldn't have much of a comeback.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA knows his shit - Infantilisation of the working classes - It's definitely what's happening. And tattoos are corny, even though I've got a couple I reckon they look nobby. Let's let someone draw on our skin in order that we might look cool, I mean _come on._


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> LLETSA knows his shit


no he doesn't.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> no he doesn't.


 
I think he does, that Bukowski poem "Dinosauria, we", that's what he reminds me of.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

poetry? ponce.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I don't know. But the current fashion for tattoos is just that: mere fashion, driven by an all-pervasive media and commerce. Bored and frustrated by any chance? Have another big fuck off tattoo to show your dickhead mates. They probably won't be able to tell what it actually is, but having to repeatedly explain it will kill another few hours, especially as they won't actually listen, necessitating your having to keep repeating yourself. Whole evenings can pass like this.
> 
> On the whole, speaking of today's society, tattoos=empty head.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> dotty:
> 
> am I talking to myself here?
> 
> ...


 
Very much part of a working class prison/convict culture that pretentious middle class twats in other countries wouldn't really know or understand, or ever will, when copying designs for 'aesthetic' reasons.  

Oh, how _edgy_.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> poetry? ponce.


 
Callin me fruity? Arm wrestle NOW.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Callin me fruity? Arm wrestle NOW.


nekkid or gtf.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> nekkid or gtf.


 

Naked apart from our seatless ledehosen. And covered in crisco. Ya know it makes sense.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Very much part of a working class prison/convict culture that pretentious middle class twats in other countries wouldn't really know or understand, or ever will, when copying designs for 'aesthetic' reasons.
> 
> Oh, how _edgy_.


 

it is taken and sold back, thats it now and forever until we eat our own babies /lletsa


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

He has a point.  You don't agree, re Russian prison tattoos?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2012)

to imitate one would be fucking vulgar.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

i imitated the japanese. i don't giva a fuck, it looks cool.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 1, 2012)

Don't worry, most people don't give a fuck.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

no they don't. they all think it looks cool. my girlfriend thinks it looks sexy. if i ever meet a member of the yakuza it might mark me out as a paedo or summat but i'm unlikely to ever meet one so who cares?

i also wear the sunglasses of a 1950's turin tram driver. they are also cool as fuck.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> it is taken and sold back, thats it now and forever until we eat our own babies /lletsa


 
That's it though, the man's right - The truth might be unpalatable but that doesn't make it any less true.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> no they don't. they all think it looks cool. my girlfriend thinks it looks sexy. if i ever meet a member of the yakuza it might mark me out as a paedo or summat but i'm unlikely to ever meet one so who cares?
> 
> i also wear the sunglasses of a 1950's turin tram driver. they are also cool as fuck.


 
Why can't you just wear some nice pearls?


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> That's it though, the man's right - The truth might be unpalatable but that doesn't make it any less true.


it's nothing new. it's not the end of civilization.


----------



## Blagsta (Jul 1, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Why can't you just wear some nice pearls?


 
pervert


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> pervert


 
But it's _authentic_.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> it's nothing new. it's not the end of civilization.


 

No, mibbe we're talkin at cross purposes here - Tats aren't the end of civilisation, me, I think they look a bit corny, but that's just my taste - Am sure you look like a dripping slice of raw sex with your yakuza effort, that's not the issue for me, what I'm on about is lletsa said ages ago that when capitalism fails (which it will), most of us will die - And he's right, essentially, we're all sunk, this shit can't go on, but it will - til it's too late. We're all _doomed_, tellin you, I don't like bearing bad news, but it's a burden whether I like it or not.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Why can't you just wear some nice pearls?


Beacause the last time I asked for a pearl necklace I wasn't given jewellery.


----------



## chilango (Jul 1, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> No, mibbe we're talkin at cross purposes here - Tats aren't the end of civilisation, me, I think they look a bit corny, but that's just my taste - Am sure you look like a dripping slice of raw sex with your yakuza effort, that's not the issue for me, what I'm on about is lletsa said ages ago that when capitalism fails (which it will), most of us will die - And he's right, essentially, we're all sunk, this shit can't go on, but it will - til it's too late. We're all _doomed_, tellin you, I don't like bearing bad news, but it's a burden whether I like it or not.



It's okay. I watch Ray Mears on TV.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> you fear youth and you fear women.


 


Yes, because I've written something you don't like on a messageboard, it means I fear youth and women.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> LLETSA knows his shit - Infantilisation of the working classes - It's definitely what's happening. And tattoos are corny, even though I've got a couple I reckon they look nobby. Let's let someone draw on our skin in order that we might look cool, I mean _come on._


 


Not just the working class-everybody is infantilised to one extent or another now. Except me.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

chilango said:


> It's okay. I watch Ray Mears on TV.


 
Yeah but, you think you'll be alright coz you can trap rabbits or somesuch, they'll be cannibalistic irradiated men who'll just take your rabbits off you.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Not just the working class-everybody is infantilised to one extent or another now. Except me.


 
What makes you not infantalised? Is that why you grew that moustache?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> no they don't. they all think it looks cool. my girlfriend thinks it looks sexy. if i ever meet a member of the yakuza it might mark me out as a paedo or summat but i'm unlikely to ever meet one so who cares?
> 
> i also wear the sunglasses of a 1950's turin tram driver. they are also cool as fuck.


 

Grown men trying to be 'cool' (actually a completely meaningless term.) Only in this day and age.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> What makes you not infantalised? Is that why you grew that moustache?


 


I've never had a moustache. I always think it would make me seem like a character in Patrick Hamilton.


----------



## chilango (Jul 1, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Yeah but, you think you'll be alright coz you can trap rabbits or somesuch, they'll be cannibalistic irradiated men who'll just take your rabbits off you.



They won't be able to make fire without matches, I'll be like a sorcerer.


----------



## rekil (Jul 1, 2012)

chilango said:


> They won't won't be able to make fire without matches, I'll be like a sorcerer.


The emasculation of the working class started with the invention of matches. Fire is bit "ghey" as well come to think of it.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I've never had a moustache. I always think it would make me seem like a character in Patrick Hamilton.


 
Grow one - I'd never heard of Patrick Hamilton til now, I'll check him out. A muzzie and a side parting with gold streaks - Oldskools the only school.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Grown men trying to be 'cool' (actually a completely meaningless term.) Only in this day and age.


What utter nonsense - there have always been dandies


----------



## chilango (Jul 1, 2012)

copliker said:


> The emasculation of the working class started with the invention of matches. Fire is bit "ghey" as well come to think of it.



Been reading Zerzan again have we?


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

chilango said:


> They won't won't be able to make fire without matches, I'll be like a sorcerer.


 
I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation, they'll just eat your rabbits raw. Then eat you. Probably.


----------



## chilango (Jul 1, 2012)

Not after they've got hypothermia and eaten poisonous berries they won't.


----------



## rekil (Jul 1, 2012)

chilango said:


> Been reading Zerzan again have we?


I may have dipped my toes in the swamp.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Grown men trying to be 'cool' (actually a completely meaningless term.) Only in this day and age.


i don't try. i just am. i can't even help it.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> What utter nonsense - there have always been dandies


 
Trocchi had it right with the term "cool", in Cains Book, the sense of invoilability that comes with digging heroin is what the americans have chosen to call "cool" - And that is what it is.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> What utter nonsense - there have always been dandies


 

So? We're not just talking about dandies anymore. It used to be just lazy twats with private incomes, but now everybody has to be cool


----------



## rekil (Jul 1, 2012)

100 pages of Real Urbansness.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> i don't try. i just am. i can't even help it.


 

You don't seem to realise that you are not even you.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> You don't seem to realise that you are not even you.


i'm everything. and nothing.

i'm everywoman, it's all in me.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Trocchi had it right with the term "cool", in Cains Book, the sense of invoilability that comes with digging heroin is what the americans have chosen to call "cool" - And that is what it is.


goes back way further than america. america got it from africa. and it's political.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itutu


----------



## love detective (Jul 1, 2012)

well the good news is that molly crabapple is now in london


----------



## temper_tantrum (Jul 1, 2012)

Is she wearing pearls?


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I know your aerieted because you've belonged to a sub-culture where this kind of stuff is the done thing. But it isn't possible to deny that it's now all-too mainstream. It's one thing when you're a hairy-arsed skinhead with a big tattoo and another when you're a female account manager with three kids and the school run to think about. And zumba on Thursday evenings.


 
Those terrible women with tattoos, who let them out of the house eh?! You're becoming pathetic, I rather expected more form someone who is clearly a smart intelligent individual. Are you really that sad that you think it's somethow worse/unacceptable for a women, with kids-oh the horror-tyo get tattooed. Does it mkake her any less a responsible decent person?
So what if it is all too mainstream, what does it actually matter? Does it make anyone a worse human being?
You belong to a sub-culture too, that of football. You're just a trend follower aswell...
By the way, on here you've mocked people who stay stuck in the past, now you moan about people who keep up with 'trends', make your mind up ffs.

Siple question, why is it ok for me to be tattooed but not for a female who might work in accounts?



> When did it start? Relatively recently as a widespread phenomenon. Where did it come from? I don't know. Did some airheaded celebrity kick it off?


 
I don't know or care, you're the one telling me it's such an overwhelming trend....


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> goes back way further than america. america got it from africa. and it's political.
> 
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itutu


 
Well, I dint know that - You aint cool though, a ginger skinhead, come on.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> So? We're not just talking about dandies anymore. It used to be just lazy twats with private incomes, but now everybody has to be cool


They do?  First I've heard of it.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> Those terrible women with tattoos, who let them out of the house eh?! You're becoming pathetic, I rather expected more form someone who is clearly a smart intelligent individual. Are you really that sad that you think it's somethow worse/unacceptable for a women, with kids-oh the horror-tyo get tattooed. Does it mkake her any less a responsible decent person?
> So what if it is all too mainstream, what does it actually matter? Does it make anyone a worse human being?
> You belong to a sub-culture too, that of football. You're just a trend follower aswell...
> By the way, on here you've mocked people who stay stuck in the past, now you moan about people who keep up with 'trends', make your mind up ffs.
> ...


 

That int what he's saying, though.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Well, I dint know that - You aint cool though, a ginger skinhead, come on.


Only square people think it's cool to be cool


----------



## weepiper (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I know your aerieted because you've belonged to a sub-culture where this kind of stuff is the done thing. But it isn't possible to deny that it's now all-too mainstream. It's one thing when you're a hairy-arsed skinhead with a big tattoo and another when you're a female account manager with three kids and the school run to think about. And zumba on Thursday evenings.
> 
> 
> When did it start? Relatively recently as a widespread phenomenon. Where did it come from? I don't know. Did some airheaded celebrity kick it off?


 
I'm a female bike mechanic with three kids and the school run to think about. Stuff zumba though. I'm tattooed from hip to elbow on one side and if it makes old farts click their tongues at me when I'm in the swimming pool aged 70 then so much the better *shrug*


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Well, I dint know that - You aint cool though, a ginger skinhead, come on.


i haven't been a skinhead for over twenty years. and i'm blond, you cunt.

my beard is ginger though.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> Siple quest
> 
> 
> Fedayn said:
> ...


 

Amazing how you keep missing the point. Just like the arseholes you'd expect it from, you are arguing against something you want me to have said rather than what I have said.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> That int what he's saying, though.


 
It's exactly what he's saying and it's exactly what hll be saying in 40 years time when he's crying for the nurse because he can't piss because of his fucked prostate.... And then the appallingly tattooed nurse will cause him more convulsions of rage.

Some people like tattoos, some people don't. Lletsa is contemplating the end of civilization because a few trendy wankers have tattoos and it's a cause of grave concern for our seer.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

weepiper said:


> I'm a female bike mechanic with three kids and the school run to think about. Stuff zumba though. I'm tattooed from hip to elbow on one side and if it makes old farts click their tongues at me when I'm in the swimming pool aged 70 then so much the better *shrug*


that is fucking cool.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

weepiper said:


> I'm a female bike mechanic with three kids and the school run to think about. Stuff zumba though. I'm tattooed from hip to elbow on one side and if it makes old farts click their tongues at me when I'm in the swimming pool aged 70 then so much the better *shrug*


 


If you're lucky, they might even think you thought of it all yourself.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Amazing how you keep missing the point. Just like the arseholes you'd expect it from, you are arguing against something you want me to have said rather than what I have said.


 
Stop whining, you don't like tattoos, we get it. it's not really that important in the big scheme of things is it?


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> It's exactly what he's saying and it's exactly what hll be saying in 40 years time when he's crying for the nurse because he can't piss because of his fucked prostate.... And then the appallingly tattooed nurse will cause him more convulsions of rage.
> 
> Some people like tattoos, some people don't. Lletsa is contemplating the end of civilization because a few trendy wankers have tattoos and it's a cause of grave concern for our seer.


my dad thinks that football players spitting and diving is an omen of the apocalypse.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> If you're lucky, they might even think you thought of it all yourself.


 
They might think you like man City all by yourself, that your musical taste is purely as a result of your own intelligence.... This is bizarre stuff.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> It's exactly what he's saying and it's exactly what hll be saying in 40 years time when he's crying for the nurse because he can't piss because of his fucked prostate.... And then the appallingly tattooed nurse will cause him more convulsions of rage.
> 
> Some people like tattoos, some people don't. Lletsa is contemplating the end of civilization because a few trendy wankers have tattoos and it's a cause of grave concern for our seer.


 

Also amazing that you think I'm angry about all this.

Nor have I said a single word about the end of civilization. What does the end of civilization mean anyway?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> They might think you like man City all by yourself, that your musical taste is purely as a result of your own intelligence....


 

Even I don't think that. I think the difference is that some people go through life believing that they're exactly what they think they are whereas others have at least an inkling that the truth is more complicated.


----------



## weepiper (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> If you're lucky, they might even think you thought of it all yourself.


 
why would I care? I didn't do it for their approval or otherwise.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Nor have I said a single word about the end of civilization. What does the end of civilization mean anyway?


 
nobody knows any more, because it's the end.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Also amazing that you think I'm angry about all this.
> 
> Nor have I said a single word about the end of civilization. What does the end of civilization mean anyway?


 
So why do you worry so much about it? Why does it irk you?

Man City winning the league, civilization will crunble, especially as some of them are tattooed.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> It's exactly what he's saying and it's exactly what hll be saying in 40 years time when he's crying for the nurse because he can't piss because of his fucked prostate.... And then the appallingly tattooed nurse will cause him more convulsions of rage.
> 
> Some people like tattoos, some people don't. Lletsa is contemplating the end of civilization because a few trendy wankers have tattoos and it's a cause of grave concern for our seer.


 
Nah, lletsa's from M/P, his nurse won't have tats, she'll have big ear rings, jet black hair and that hardfaced as fuck "north manchester face".


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Nah, lletsa's from M/P, his nurse won't have tats, she'll have big ear rings, jet black hair and that hardfaced as fuck "north manchester face".


 
I thought he was from Ardwick.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Even I don't think that. I think the difference is that some people go through life believing that they're exactly what they think they are whereas others have at least an inkling that the truth is more complicated.


 
Some people go through their life moaning about others not doing what they think they should.... There's better/bigger things to worry about than whether some woman from accounts has a tattoo that her kids might see.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

the self mutilation of getting a tattoo is just a reflection of the self mutilation of consumerism upon society

or something


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

I might be wrong, I thought he's from m/p -if am wrong all bets are off.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

the discoloration of the skin is like the discoloration of the workers' consciousness under capitalism


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> I might be wrong, I thought he's from m/p -if am wrong all bets are off.


 


I am but don't live there now. Or even in M/C.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> I thought he was from Ardwick.


 
 Lived there for a bit once.


----------



## weepiper (Jul 1, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> the discoloration of the skin is like the discoloration of the workers' consciousness under capitalism


 
the lack of respect for their bodies reflects their status in society


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> Some people go through their life moaning about others not doing what they think they should.... There's better/bigger things to worry about than whether some woman from accounts has a tattoo that her kids might see.


 


I never said it was the biggest issue; I said it was a symptom of a wider malaise.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

weepiper said:


> the lack of respect for their bodies reflects their status in society


 
Comrades! We must denounce this commodity fetish which reflects the barbarousness of capitalism in its purest form etc


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Lived there for a bit once.


 
Just south of MP isn't it?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> Just south of MP isn't it?


 

I think of it as further east.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I am but don't live there now. Or even in M/C.


not yorkshire?

i thought this was you,


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I think of it as further east.


 
ish


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> not yorkshire?
> 
> i thought this was you,






I'm not taking insults from a woollyback like you.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I never said it was the biggest issue; I said it was a symptom of a wider malaise.


 
It's not a symptom of anything other than people seeing people getting them and because they 'like' those celebs they think they'd like to get one. Not as if this has never happened before, it's nothing new or even worth moaning about. Turning rebellion into money as The Clash once said....


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I am but don't live there now. Or even in M/C.


 
If you're a platting lad, then you'll do for me I think you're safe, you know how it's going. TBF you have professed the end of civilisation - when capitalism fails an such, most of us will die, you have said that, an I don't think you're wrong. Whereabouts in m/p? anywhere near bradfford square in the maisonettes?


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I'm not taking insults from a woollyback like you.


woollyback? we invented industrial capitalism. second biggest urban conurbation in the country, you cottonspinning bumpkin cunt.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2012)

when i get my tattoos i will be sure to show lletsa immediately


----------



## weepiper (Jul 1, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Comrades! We must denounce this commodity fetish which reflects the barbarousness of capitalism in its purest form etc


 
Skin must be pure and unsullied as the skin of Our Great Leader's brow as it stands against the red glow of the new dawn.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> woollyback? we invented industrial capitalism. second biggest urban conurbation in the country, you bumpkin.


 


Still fucking woollybacks. And I think you'll find that we invented industrial capitalism. And most other things.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> If you're a platting lad, then you'll do for me I think you're safe, you know how it's going. TBF you have professed the end of civilisation - when capitalism fails an such, most of us will die, you have said that, an I don't think you're wrong. Whereabouts in m/p? anywhere near bradfford square in the maisonettes?


 


Just off Hulme Hall Lane. Nearly opposite the Red Rec. In fact our house virtually backed onto the evil Edwards's meat empire.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Still fucking woollybacks. And I think you'll find that we invented industrial capitalism. And most other things.


get to fuck. knitting cotton underpants while we mined and made the iron that made the guns that built the empire? fuck off.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

discokermit said:


> get to fuck. knitting cotton underpants while we mined and made the iron that made the guns that built the empire? fuck off.


 


I'd love to hear your comic yokel accent, Noddy.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> <snip>we invented industrial capitalism.<snip>


You say that as if it's a good thing.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I'd love to hear your comic yokel accent, Noddy.


it's like music.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Greebo said:


> You say that as if it's a good thing.


 


It was and it wasn't.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It was and it wasn't.


Expand on that?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> It's not a symptom of anything other than people seeing people getting them and because they 'like' those celebs they think they'd like to get one. Not as if this has never happened before, it's nothing new or even worth moaning about. Turning rebellion into money as The Clash once said....


 

Trouble is, it was never rebellion in the first place.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I think of it as further east.


 
No, it's South, more 'east' would be Beswick.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Trouble is, it was never rebellion in the first place.


 
Yes and no.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Just off Hulme Hall Lane. Nearly opposite the Red Rec. In fact our house virtually backed onto the evil Edwards's meat empire.


 
I know it, that meat factory, was that the one on the 77 route that had meat is murder in massive paint on it? My dad grew up in the tripe colony, I had my first ever flat in gunson street flats, landos court.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Expand on that?


 


It gave birth to the working class movement, which was eventually able to command for the wider class a life where you no longer had to die in your own piss at 37.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 1, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It gave birth to the working class movement, which was eventually able to command for the wider class a life where you no longer had to die in your own piss at 37.


and you could get a tatto if you fancied it. or dye your hair.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 1, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> I know it, that meat factory, was that the one on the 77 route that had meat is murder in massive paint on it? My dad grew up in the tripe colony, I had my first ever flat in gunson street flats, landos court.


 

No, that was on Bradford Road. Edwards's was the big place off Oldham Road near the arches (where MP becomes Newton Heath.) The former owners of the great Manyoo.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Still fucking woollybacks. And I think you'll find that we invented industrial capitalism. And most other things.


 

Mancunians invented everything, for better or worse, but we did.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

discokermit said:


> and you could get a tatto if you fancied it. or dye your hair.


 
Actually tattoos go back thousands of years blah blah...


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 2, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> I had my first ever flat in gunson street flats, landos court.


 
Just off Oldham Road?


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> No, that was on Bradford Road. Edwards's was the big place off Oldham Road near the arches (where MP becomes Newton Heath.) The former owners of the great Manyoo.


 
Edwards was the big abbotoir ,then, yeah youre right, the one am thinkin of was on bradford road.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It gave birth to the working class movement, which was eventually able to command for the wider class a life where you no longer had to die in your own piss at 37.


OTOH it also gave rise to more people becoming slaves to the hours set by their employer, instead of having a bit of freedom to set their own working hours as long as all the work got done by the required time.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> No, it's South, more 'east' would be Beswick.


 

I know. South-east then.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 2, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> Just off Oldham Road?


 
that's the one my mate, just past wing yip on the other side.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Edwards was the big abbotoir ,then, yeah youre right, the one am thinkin of was on bradford road.


 


It was a processing plant. The abbatoir was off Briscoe Lane.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 2, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> that's the one my mate, just past wing yip on the other side.


 
Don't know that part of the ciy as well as you two but for some reason I know those flats....


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> Don't know that part of the ciy as well as you two but for some reason I know those flats....


 
It wasn't you who used to nick the bog roll from the toilets in the Old Pack Horse across the road, was it?


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It wasn't you who used to nick the bog roll from the toilets in the Old Pack Horse across the road, was it?


 
Shhhhh.... Nah, the only pub i've ever drunk in on Oldham Road/Street is The Castle.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It wasn't you who used to nick the bog roll from the toilets in the Old Pack Horse across the road, was it?


Is it his fault that you didn't get there first?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Is it his fault that you didn't get there first?


 


it was apparently the oldest licensed premises within the city boundaries. But never any bog roll.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It was a processing plant. The abbatoir was off Briscoe Lane.


 
Right, I only know the abbotoir and that gaffe on bradford road, my dad used to always talk about mather an platts, I only remember it as a ruin - You got a few years on me, then?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Right, I only know the abbotoir and that gaffe on bradford road, my dad used to always talk about mather an platts, I only remember it as a ruin - You got a few years on me, then?


 

Born in '63.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 2, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> Don't know that part of the ciy as well as you two but for some reason I know those flats....


 
You will know those flats - A lot of history went down in those babies.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 2, 2012)

fuck off you boring manc cunts.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Born in '63.


 

ten years on me then - can you remember m/p before it all got knocked down an rebuilt then?


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 2, 2012)

discokermit said:


> fuck off you boring manc cunts.


 

up yer mam


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> it was apparently the oldest licensed premises within the city boundaries. But never any bog roll.


 
Is that the pub the BNPer ran and was closed down?


----------



## discokermit (Jul 2, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> up yer mam


mom.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> it was apparently the oldest licensed premises within the city boundaries. But never any bog roll.


But if there was never any there, there was never any bog roll to steal in the first place.  Unless you mean that you didn't ever know (or hear of) anyone who used the loos there before it had been nicked.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> ten years on me then - can you remember m/p before it all got knocked down an rebuilt then?


 

I can remember all my relatives getting rehoused when 'the new estate' as everybody called it then, went up. Around 1970, I think. Before that my grandparents' house in the Butler Street area was pulled down in the slum clearances and they were rehoused in the maisonnettes just down from the tower blocks where you lived. I remember those tower blocks going up and the building of the Notts Castle pub. And the Spanking Roger. Long family connection with Corpus Christi school and church.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Greebo said:


> But if there was never any there, there was never any bog roll to steal in the first place. Unless you mean that you didn't ever know (or hear of) anyone who used the loos there before it had been nicked.


 

Landlord was always moaning about people from the flats nicking it as soon as he put it in there.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I can remember all my relatives getting rehoused when 'the new estate' as everybody called it then, went up. Around 1970, I think. Before that my grandparents' house in the Butler Street area was pulled down in the slum clearances and they were rehoused in the maisonnettes just down from the tower blocks where you lived. I remember those tower blocks going up and the building of the Notts Castle pub. And the Spanking Roger. Long family connection with Corpus Christi school and church.


 
For some reason MP was a 'big' Irish and Italian area, never knew/worked out why?


----------



## Greebo (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Landlord was always moaning about people from the flats nicking it as soon as he put it in there.


While I don't think you'd bother to lie about something like that, what makes you think the landlord wasn't lying?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> For some reason MP was a 'big' Irish and Italian area, never knew/worked out why?


 


Ancoats was the main area for Italians. Little Italy, we used to call the part of it around Every Street. I remember being taken to see the Italians marching at Whitsun, it was always regarded as a bit of a spectacle. The poorer immigrants, both Irish and otherwise, always veered towards the cheaper parts of the city, I guess.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Greebo said:


> While I don't think you'd bother to lie about something like that, what makes you think the landlord wasn't lying?


 


I don't really know. It was a bog roll thirty years ago.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I don't really know. It was a bog roll thirty years ago.


Which obviously bothered you or you wouldn't still be mentioning it.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I can remember all my relatives getting rehoused when 'the new estate' as everybody called it then, went up. Around 1970, I think. Before that my grandparents' house in the Butler Street area was pulled down in the slum clearances and they were rehoused in the maisonnettes just down from the tower blocks where you lived. I remember those tower blocks going up and the building of the Notts Castle pub. And the Spanking Roger. Long family connection with Corpus Christi school and church.


 
Did you know a family called the osticks then? I know they had the wankin lodger in the 80's , an I was in Bede's in the same year as Chris Ostick. Stupid thing about bede's was the teachers used to call you by your second name and they used to call Chris Ostick Chris O'StIck.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Did you know a family called the osticks then? I know they had the wankin lodger in the 80's , an I was in Bede's in the same year as Chris Ostick. Stupid thing about bede's was the teachers used to call you by your second name and they used to call Chris Ostick Chris O'StIck.


 


I don't recall them but I'd moved out by the early '80s and rarely drank down there.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Which obviously bothered you or you wouldn't still be mentioning it.


 


It was just a joke with Fedayn.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It was just a joke with Fedayn.


Sweetie, I had worked that out.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Ancoats was the main area for Italians. Little Italy, we used to call the part of it around Every Street. I remember being taken to see the Italians marching at Whitsun, it was always regarded as a bit of a spectacle. The poorer immigrants, both Irish and otherwise, always veered towards the cheaper parts of the city, I guess.


 
Aye I get the last bit, but as you'll know the Irish were mainly concentrated in the South ie Rusholme, fallowfields, levenshulme etc. Struck me as strange that there was this wee area of Irish further up towards the east of the city centre.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> Aye I get the last bit, but as you'll know the Irish were mainly concentrated in the South ie Rusholme, fallowfields, levenshulme etc. Struck me as strange that there was this wee area of Irish further up towards the east of the city centre.


 

I'm not sure of the reason.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 2, 2012)

Well, to me there's loads of irish in north manchester, ancoats, collyhurst, m/p, all those places - in fact, that's what I reckon the north manchester look comes from, that proper harsh faced, dark haired beauty.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I'm not sure of the reason.


 
me neither....


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 2, 2012)

discokermit said:


> poetry? ponce.


 






'I called him a ponce. And now I'm calling you one... PONCE!'


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 2, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> _(my emphasis_)
> 
> Here we have another collectable and hilarious dwyerism. This man is to philosophy what William McGonagall is to poetry.


 
You're an ex-public school boy aren't you?

As such you might want to ask yourself whether this is really the thread for you. On this thread we mock and deride people such as yourself, on the grounds that their education has rendered them annoying twerps, incapable even of grasping the fact of their own ignorance.

Don't you think you might be happier on a thread not devoted to your own denigration?  I certainly do.  It is therefore in your own interests that I must recommend you be permanently banned from this or similar threads.  Goodbye.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 2, 2012)

Dwyer, Dwyer, Dwyer, do you really still believe that you have any say over who posts or doesn't in any given thread?  There was I thinking, nay, hoping that you'd grow out of it.  So much for wisdom being attained with age (or at least, with experience).


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 2, 2012)

Greebo said:


> OTOH it also gave rise to more people becoming slaves to the hours set by their employer, instead of having a bit of freedom to set their own working hours as long as all the work got done by the required time.


 
Somewhat romanticised view of pre capitalist society- feudalism  wasn't full of self employed mobile working


----------



## Greebo (Jul 2, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> <snip>feudalism wasn't full of self employed mobile working


Where have I claimed that it was?

But at least if your were a spinner or weaver paid a  piece rate and working at home, you had the choice of whether to work absolutely flat out for part of the week (and have a bit of free time), or whether to work at a slightly more leisurely pace and forgo a free half day or more.


----------



## Balbi (Jul 2, 2012)

Excellent bit of derailing through sheer force of pub bore holding court from LLETSA.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 2, 2012)

he has had his moment in the dubious sun that is the light of U75 attention. Let us now move on


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jul 2, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Excellent bit of derailing through sheer force of pub bore holding court from LLETSA.


 I'm sure she'll write something atrocious to bring it right back on track soon enough


----------



## Balbi (Jul 2, 2012)

I'm thinking a debate between the two. Unstoppable force vs insufferable object


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 2, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Dwyer, Dwyer, Dwyer, do you really still believe that you have any say over who posts or doesn't in any given thread?


 
Yes I do.  It really works.  Just watch--Hocus Eye won't be back to bother us in a hurry.


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 2, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Somewhat romanticised view of pre capitalist society- feudalism wasn't full of self employed mobile working


 
I'd rather be a C14th peasant than an C18th coal miner or factory hand.  The universalization of wage labor was nothing more than the re-introduction of slavery.


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 2, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Where have I claimed that it was?
> 
> But at least if your were a spinner or weaver paid a piece rate and working at home, you had the choice of whether to work absolutely flat out for part of the week (and have a bit of free time), or whether to work at a slightly more leisurely pace and forgo a free half day or more.


 
Exactly.  Not to mention the most important freedom of all, which is freedom from supervision in the workplace.


----------



## gosub (Jul 2, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Somewhat romanticised view of pre capitalist society- feudalism  wasn't full of self employed mobile working


Was a bit after the black death. Not enough labour to go round so were in better position to make demands


----------



## gosub (Jul 2, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Exactly.  Not to mention the most important freedom of all, which is freedom from supervision in the workplace.


You not seen the watchtower type construction on some big old country houses then?


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 2, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> I'd rather be a C14th peasant than an C18th coal miner or factory hand. The universalization of wage labor was nothing more than the re-introduction of slavery.


 
So really we should demanding the return of feudalism?


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 2, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> So really we should demanding the return of feudalism?


 
after the workers' bomb is dropped, that's what we'll have, so yes


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 2, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> So really we should demanding the return of feudalism?


 
Not necessarily. 

But we should abandon the ancient Socialist myth that the rise of capitalism was in any sense a progressive development or an advance on what had been before.  It was an unmitigated disaster.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Excellent bit of derailing through sheer force of pub bore holding court from LLETSA.


 

You've all been entirely free to resume wanking over little Laura at any point.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

I do look forwards to LLETSA's holidays. Got a week of this to look forward to.


----------



## rekil (Jul 2, 2012)

Lo Siento. said:


> I'm sure she'll write something atrocious to bring it right back on track soon enough


Like this. 


> In a capitalist world, smoking is a little sub-economy of communism. You share cigarettes, matches, lighters, papers. When strangers come up to you in the street and ask you for a cigarette, you give them one, because you understand. I once gave a homeless man half a Lucky Strike out of my own mouth, even though he was wearing a Libertarian T-shirt.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 2, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Yes I do. It really works. Just watch--Hocus Eye won't be back to bother us in a hurry.


"Us"?  Sweetie, have you lapsed into using the royal "We"?


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

What often surprises me about reading what people say on here is the widespread assumption among 'radicals' that this society and its culture (for want of a better word) is basically sound, and that the only real problem is that the wrong people are in power with the wrong set of priorities. Surely it goes without saying that one reinforces the other and that to radically change the power stuctures in society would (or ought to) result in a radically different type of society?

So we have the situation where there is a failure to distinguish between real working class culture (difficult to define nowadays admittedly and different than, say, my own experience in the kind of working class communities referred to above), and a commercially-driven, exploitative kind of plebianism (sp?) designed to keep the working class atomised, tame and cowed and drag everybody down to the same level-and all this while creating a phoney aspirational culture (the desire for fame and wealth gained by it doesn't matter what method; the expansion of higher education by creating more and more pointless areas of study, loading everybody down with debt in the process, which will ensure that people are tame and cowed as soon as they enter working life) and fake social solidarity (football patriotism etc). Much of this is reflected in the utter pointlessness and downright stupidity of much of what preoccupies society (tattoos and piercings, chasing after the latest model of this or that consumer product whether you need it or not or just because your mates are doing it etc etc.)


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I do look forwards to LLETSA's holidays. Got a week of this to look forward to.


 

Two weeks, Butchers. Two. But don't worry, I'm looking at flight options even as we speak.


----------



## gosub (Jul 2, 2012)

copliker said:


> Like this.


Do that in Cuba and they nick your lighter


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

copliker said:


> Like this.


 


> In a capitalist world, smoking is a little sub-economy of communism.


 You can't have communism in capitalist society. You can't have an economy in communism. And these fags produce themselves don't they. That's how it works for Laurie and her like - others produce things for us (.i,e her and hers) to share out. It's Beatrice Webb.

Going back to before all this bullshit yesterday, some people were suggesting that in 10 years she's have dropped her current views and be writing more openly right wing stuff. I don't think she will for a number of reasons: firstly, all good careerists and parasites know that what they're selling is their ability to play a role, and you'd have to be pretty inept not to know that you've sold yourself as the voice of a new left - ditching that = out of a job. Secondly, she does genuinely believe all this warmed up fabian crap, all this confused shit she spouts and so do a whole lot of other bacially decent people. Thirdly the papers need this sort of voice to demonstrate their openness to to what they believe people believe are dissenting non-mainstream views (leaving aside that we know this is bullshit both in terms of who they recruits and the content of what they say).

Now, i wonder if anyone could ever possibly connect that up with the production of _voices_, of the projection of _images_, the construction of_ common sense_, and the defence and extension of _privilege_ that this is based on?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Two weeks, Butchers. Two. But don't worry, I'm looking at flight options even as we speak.


I fucking knew it!


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

copliker said:


> Like this.


 


All the homeless round here seem to be wearing Libertarian t-shirts lately.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 2, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Not necessarily.
> 
> But we should abandon the ancient Socialist myth that the rise of capitalism was in any sense a progressive development or an advance on what had been before. It was an unmitigated disaster.


 
He says writing on his computer.

Lletsa is bang on re this, capitalism has been both good and bad. It developed the productiove forces to the extwent thast it allowed, it was an advance on previous systems as it provided-upto a limit-real, genuione material advances by and for the working-class. That it cannot doasnything otehr than take us on a downward spiral now-as Lletsa says in his doom laden way-does not invalidate the real advances it made previously.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 2, 2012)

for one thing, it created the solicitor class.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> What often surprises me about reading what people say on here is the widespread assumption among 'radicals' that this society and its culture (for want of a better word) is basically sound, and that the only real problem is that the wrong people are in power with the wrong set of priorities. Surely it goes without saying that one reinforces the other and that to radically change the power stuctures in society would (or ought to) result in a radically different type of society?


 
Wo says it's just a case of change who's in charge? Just like a nationalised industry with a Michael Edwardes in charge didn't change that industry in any real sens, the samwe with a socialist society. A different society would of course alter the way that society sees things and the culutres it develops and creates. It would be a fundamental re-structuring of that society and what flows out of it socially and culturally.



> So we have the situation where there is a failure to distinguish between real working class culture (difficult to define nowadays admittedly and different than, say, my own experience in the kind of working class communities referred to above), and a


 
But were all those things that happened in your working-class community acceptable or worth defending? Casual sexism and racism? The idea that women have a defined and gender assigned role? Whilst I will regret saying it tattoos were also part opf that culture, smaller and less obvious but there nonetheless. Your idea of what a working-class community would also be radically changed if we lived in a society where the working-class controlled the means of production.



> commercially-driven, exploitative kind of plebianism (sp?) designed to keep the working class atomised, tame and cowed and drag everybody down to the same level-and all this while creating a phoney aspirational culture (the desire for fame and wealth gained by it doesn't matter what method; the expansion of higher education by creating more and more pointless areas of study, loading everybody down with debt in the process, which will ensure that people are tame and cowed as soon as they enter working life) and fake social solidarity (football patriotism etc). Much of this is reflected in the utter pointlessness and downright stupidity of much of what preoccupies society (tattoos and piercings, chasing after the latest model of this or that consumer product whether you need it or not or just because your mates are doing it etc etc.)


 
Supporting a team just because your mates do it etc etc. liking music just because your ma5tes are doing it etc etc.... It's nothing new at all.

I agree with the points re HE and the drive to almost 'educate' out' working class jobs. Jobs that had a sense of pride and respect now deemed not good enough.
I don't think society is pre-occupied with tattoos, it's still a minority, not one to worry about.


----------



## love detective (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Going back to before all this bullshit yesterday, some people were suggesting that in 10 years she's have dropped her current views and be writing more openly right wing stuff. I don't think she will for a number of reasons: firstly, all good careerists and parasites know that what they're selling is their ability to play a role, and you'd have to be pretty inept not to know that you've sold yourself as the voice of a new left - ditching that = out of a job. Secondly, she does genuinely believe all this warmed up fabian crap, all this confused shit she spouts and so do a whole lot of other bacially decent people. Thirdly the papers need this sort of voice to demonstrate their openness to to what they believe people believe are dissenting non-mainstream views (leaving aside that we know this is bullshit both in terms of who they recruits and the content of what they say).


 
Thing is in ten years time she won't be able to sell herself as the voice of the new left in the way she is able to at the moment - she'll be the cobwebed dinosaur by then. And if she is a good careerist and not inept she'll know that to keep some kind of role in the limelight she'll need to reposition herself.

In ten years time she'll be nowhere near squats and living a very comfortable life embedded in the established media , hosting newsnight review and the like and increasingly out of touch with what she thinks she represents now. Whether she genuinely believe all the crap she spouts now or not, in ten years time I can't see it figuring as prominently as it does now, either because she was never as committed as she makes out to be or because her established/entrenched position forces it to be played down.

One thing's for sure though, you can't make a career out of progressive politics and at some point she will have to make the choice between career and progressive politics, and I think we all know which one it will be


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

She'll be Jon snow, Toynbee (maybe not with the two kids at Westminster for28 grand plus year though) etc as she hasn't got the brains to be an Ali or one of those types, but there'll be another penny behind her.

edit: or you could always go the US and write progressive pap in the nation or mother jones or one of the other mags like that they have over there.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> Wo says it's just a case of change who's in charge? Just like a nationalised industry with a Michael Edwardes in charge didn't change that industry in any real sens, the samwe with a socialist society. A different society would of course alter the way that society sees things and the culutres it develops and creates. It would be a fundamental re-structuring of that society and what flows out of it socially and culturally.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 


I'm not saying that people openly say this but that it's implied in everybody's readiness to leap in to indignantly defend even the slightest criticism of the commercially-driven pleb culture that's been imposed on us.

And I'm not saying that everything in the old working class culture was positive, just that its pretty much disappeared leaving atomisation and disorientation in its wake (which makes the idea of 'the working class owning the means of production' all but redundant.)

And again-the hideous, over-the-top tattooing craze of today is not a major issue but, as I said, a symptom of a wider malaise.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I'm not saying that people openly say this but that it's implied in everybody's readiness to leap in to indignantly defend even the slightest criticism of the commercially-driven pleb culture that's been imposed on us.
> 
> And I'm not saying that everything in the old working class culture was positive, just that its pretty much disappeared leaving atomisation and disorientation in its wake (which makes the idea of 'the working class owning the means of production' all but redundant.)
> 
> And again-the hideous, over-the-top tattooing craze of today is not a major issue but, as I said, a symptom of a wider malaise.


 
I'm not sure they do, they are just able to seperate the perfectly unusual fact that some people like tattoos and those people get tattoos for a whole variety of reasons. It's perhaps also because of your eagerness to refer to people as disfigured and brainless not out of any reasoned thinking but out of your own personal antipathy towards the size of their tattoo. It's the skull readers all over again. Tattooed = stupid.... It's ridiculous and you know it.

I'd agree with much of that yes. The destruction of the traditional indurtries has clearly had a wider social, effect and that includes on the notions of w/c solidarity.

Again, that's your opinion.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> I'm not sure they do, they are just able to seperate the perfectly unusual fact that some people like tattoos and those people get tattoos for a whole variety of reasons. It's perhaps also because of your eagerness to refer to people as disfigured and brainless not out of any reasoned thinking but out of your own personal antipathy towards the size of their tattoo. It's the skull readers all over again. Tattooed = stupid.... It's ridiculous and you know it.
> 
> I'd agree with much of that yes. The destruction of the traditional indurtries has clearly had a wider social, effect and that includes on the notions of w/c solidarity.
> 
> Again, that's your opinion.


 


It happens on here time and time again, not just on the issue of tattooing/piercing. As I said, I find it quite strange that people seem to see no wider significance in the fact that whereas a small minority of people might once have had large, garish tattoos, they have now moved into the mainstream and in a grotesque and overblown fashion. What goes through the mind of an individual who has no long association with a subculture like yours but who thinks that repeatedly having pictures painted on him/herself, covering ever wider areas of the body, is some kind of answer to something? A growing purposelessness and sheeplike stupidity seems to have seized the stage at the moment when technology has transformed our world but the socio-economic system on which it rests has begun to eat itself.

Maybe it's just what happens when, physically, life has never been softer but all sense of direction and purpose has been lost and a converging glut of insoluble crises moves into view. A widespread, unacknowledged sense of unease prevails, and pure irrationality seizes the reins.


----------



## Fruitloop (Jul 2, 2012)

I'm quite liking the new Robert Bly theme to these rants


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Who's ranting? And who is Robert Bly?


----------



## articul8 (Jul 2, 2012)

love detective said:


> Thing is in ten years time she won't be able to sell herself as the voice of the new left in the way she is able to at the moment - she'll be the cobwebed dinosaur by then. And if she is a good careerist and not inept she'll know that to keep some kind of role in the limelight she'll need to reposition herself.


 
She'll be all "my generation were furious idealists, but now we're thirty/fortysomethings we haven't lost this but we know how you need to be pragmatic to make change happen"


----------



## Fruitloop (Jul 2, 2012)

1) You, but in a good way.

2) American poet and author of _The Sibling Society. _Not the _Mutiny on the Bounty_ one.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

articul8 said:


> She'll be all "my generation were furious idealists, but now we're thirty/fortysomethings we haven't lost this but we know how you need to be pragmatic to make change happen"


So she'll be you? No wonder they say there's no future for this generation.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 2, 2012)




----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Fruitloop said:


> 1) You, but in a good way.
> 
> 2) American poet and author of _The Sibling Society. _Not the _Mutiny on the Bounty_ one.


 

I don't want to be Robert Bly; I want to be Michel Houellebecq.


----------



## JimW (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I don't want to be Robert Bly; I want to be Michel Houellebecq.


Or one of his Houellebecq girls.


----------



## Fruitloop (Jul 2, 2012)

Frotty French Trans-Humanism? Doesn't really seem your style.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 2, 2012)

FWIW, most of the people with visible tattooes I see around here are mid-30s to early 40s, meaning they grew up under the GDR. Their tats would be a bit of post-1989 euphoria.

Seeing the wee girl in my building with her septum pierced did bring out my inner LLETSA, though.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> So she'll be you? No wonder they say there's no future for this generation.


She doesn't have the talent, brains, or fantastic good looks to be me


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Fruitloop said:


> Frotty French Trans-Humanism? Doesn't really seem your style.


 

He's spot on about the stupidity and pointlessness of contemporary society and its roots in the convergence of hippydom and liberal capitalism.


----------



## love detective (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> So she'll be you? No wonder they say there's no future for this generation.


 
bastard beat me to it!


----------



## articul8 (Jul 2, 2012)

love detective said:


> bastard beat me to it!


what is it they say...fools seldom differ?


----------



## love detective (Jul 2, 2012)

angels rarely bleed


----------



## love detective (Jul 2, 2012)

thing is, you did accurately describe yourself there, so that makes three of us


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

articul8 said:


> what is it they say...fools seldom differ?


I quite agree.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 2, 2012)

There's a difference between straight down the line reformist pragmatism and a socialist politics which engages tactically with reformist pragmatism to move beyond it.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

articul8 said:


> There's a difference between straight down the line reformist pragmatism and a socialist politics which engages tactically with reformist pragmatism to move beyond it.


Exactly what Penny will say.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 2, 2012)

She's moving right and making lots of money, I'm moving leftwards and losing it


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

You're moving left from the socialist party to labour. Yes, that's correct.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It happens on here time and time again, not just on the issue of tattooing/piercing. As I said, I find it quite strange that people seem to see no wider significance in the fact that whereas a small minority of people might once have had large, garish tattoos, they have now moved into the mainstream and in a grotesque and overblown fashion. What goes through the mind of an individual who has no long association with a subculture like yours but who thinks that repeatedly having pictures painted on him/herself, covering ever wider areas of the body, is some kind of answer to something? A growing purposelessness and sheeplike stupidity seems to have seized the stage at the moment when technology has transformed our world but the socio-economic system on which it rests has begun to eat itself.


 
But who says it's the answerr? Some might, some might simply like the tattoo, the getting it done, the whole aesthetic. Some might I agree, watch London/LA/Miami Ink and see that some twat has a tattoo and gets one done. It's a mixture of things....
Who says their life is purposeless without the tattoos?
It has no new significance though in reality. It's the same old same old, the old being treated as new and re-sold to us. That some people think it gives them an 'edge' or an answer is not my, or your worry really.



> Maybe it's just what happens when, physically, life has never been softer but all sense of direction and purpose has been lost and a converging glut of insoluble crises moves into view. A widespread, unacknowledged sense of unease prevails, and pure irrationality seizes the reins.


 
Who says those people you refer to so glibly have no sense of purpose or direction? How can you possibly know this?


----------



## articul8 (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> You're moving left from the socialist party to labour. Yes, that's correct.


from left of Compass type Labour to LRC. (differences with the SP are mostly on whether it's possible to build a significant electoral force to the left of Labour in the present period.  I don't think that Labour work is the most important sphere in terms of building and mobilising an alternative though, far from it).


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

So from pathetic labour-left to pathetic labour left. You might join the fabians by next week at this rate. Never have i seen such a whirlwind radicalisation.


----------



## love detective (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Exactly what Penny will say.


 
and again


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> But who says it's the answerr? Some might, some might simply like the tattoo, the getting it done, the whole aesthetic. Some might I agree, watch London/LA/Miami Ink and see that some twat has a tattoo and gets one done. It's a mixture of things....
> Who says their life is purposeless without the tattoos?
> It has no new significance though in reality. It's the same old same old, the old being treated as new and re-sold to us. That some people think it gives them an 'edge' or an answer is not my, or your worry really.
> 
> ...


 


Once again: all I am saying is that the fashion for tattoos has moved into the mainstream for a reason-and tried to offer some possible reasons.

I'm not saying anybody's life is purposeless; I just get the feeling that there is a widespread sense of purposelessness and directionlessness at large, arising out of the nature of the times we're living through (I tried to touch on this above.) I feel it myself.


----------



## Fruitloop (Jul 2, 2012)

Have you read any Theodore Dalrymple?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

Fruitloop said:


> Have you read any Theodore Dalrymple?


The prison doctor who signed off on my mate who the screws had beaten black and blue for a few hours as being perfectly fine.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Once again: all I am saying is that the fashion for tattoos has moved into the mainstream for a reason-and tried to offer some possible reasons.


 
I certainly think that with the advent of satellite tv/www/new media the ability to see more and watch more aspects of a culture previously seen as 'underground' and 'rough' has certainly helped move it towards the mainstream. I don't think it is as yet totally mainstream. Especially as there's often still an almost audible exclamation mark after news of someone getting a tattoo. I agree it's boring and utterly un-newsworthy aswell.



> I'm not saying anybody's life is purposeless; I just get the feeling that there is a widespread sense of purposelessness and directionlessness at large, arising out of the nature of the times we're living through (I tried to touch on this above.) I feel it myself.


 
I think that's related more to the changing nature of work and the shifting of 'roles'. Especially with regards to working-class me who traditionally had a very siolidly outlined and 'm,apped' role ie as the worker who 'provided'. The recent economic changes, ie attacks, have certainly played into this.


----------



## Fruitloop (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> The prison doctor who signed off on my mate who the screws had beaten black and blue for a few hours as being perfectly fine.


Nice. Figures.

ETA: The literary pseudonym paints a picture of an amiable curmudgeon, not entirely suprising to find something altogether less pleasant lurking behind it though.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Fruitloop said:


> Have you read any Theodore Dalrymple?


 



No. It's typical of what I've been saying about U75, though, for you to try and paint every criticism of contemporary culture that doesn't come from a hackneyed, juvenile liberalism-disguised-as-leftism direction as right wing.


----------



## Fruitloop (Jul 2, 2012)

This was what I was thinking of:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_4_oh_to_be.html


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 2, 2012)

#mollywatch

Spotted following an innocent tweet by an unwitting bystander...



> Molly Crabapple is...the founder of Dr Sketchy's Anti-Art School, a cabaret life-drawing class with nearly fifty branches around the world...Crabapple learned to draw in a Parisian bookstore...She now wields her pen for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Playgirl and Marvel Comics...


 


http://mollycrabappleart.com/?p=820


----------



## Fruitloop (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> No. It's typical of what I've been saying about U75, though, for you to try and paint every criticism of contemporary culture that doesn't come from a hackneyed, juvenile liberalism-disguised-as-leftism direction as right wing.


It really wasn't intended as some kind of slight. He's occasionally quite good at the symptomology of late capitalist society. Obviously he has this massive Oedipal issue with left thinking in general and communism in particular (about both which he has anyway only the most rudimentary idea), but he's not uninteresting for all that.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> I certainly think that with the advent of satellite tv/www/new media the ability to see more and watch more aspects of a culture previously seen as 'underground' and 'rough' has certainly helped move it towards the mainstream. I don't think it is as yet totally mainstream. Especially as there's often still an almost audible exclamation mark after news of someone getting a tattoo. I agree it's boring and utterly un-newsworthy aswell.
> 
> 
> 
> I think that's related more to the changing nature of work and the shifting of 'roles'. Especially with regards to working-class me who traditionally had a very siolidly outlined and 'm,apped' role ie as the worker who 'provided'. The recent economic changes, ie attacks, have certainly played into this.


 

I don't think most people with tattoos-people of the kind who wouldn't have had them in the past-get them because they want to think it's 'underground' or 'rough'; I think they genuinely believe they're stylish and chic. It's the degradation of taste under the imposed pleb culture that contemorary capitalism thrives on. Talking about inner-city M/C above reminded me how working class women of my mother's generation wouldn't have been seen dead with a tattoo, or a nose piercing.

I agree that your second point make be a major factor in this sense of purposelessness, but I think there are also a lot of relatively intangible factors as well. After all, present society, with its all pervasive media and information overload, is unlike any other that's ever existed.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Fruitloop said:


> It really wasn't intended as some kind of slight. He's occasionally quite good at the symptomology of late capitalist society. Obviously he has this massive Oedipal issue with left thinking in general and communism in particular (about both which he has anyway only the most rudimentary idea), but he's not uninteresting for all that.


 

Fair enough then. Certain right wingers (ie those who have managed to grasp the fact that capitalism undermines social conservatism*) sometimes can see things that the left are deliberately blind to.


*As well as undermining the social solidarity that the working class movement relied on and thus making it impotent, as we see today.


----------



## Fruitloop (Jul 2, 2012)

Indeed. John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education is an excellent survey of the ongoing project for the stupidification of society.

I'll stop derailing now.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Fruitloop said:


> Indeed. John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education is an excellent survey of the ongoing project for the stupidification of society.
> 
> I'll stop derailing now.


 


It isn't a derail-if you trace it all back we're still talking about the crisis of Laura's haircut.


----------



## Blagsta (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> The prison doctor who signed off on my mate who the screws had beaten black and blue for a few hours as being perfectly fine.


The man is a scumbag.


----------



## Blagsta (Jul 2, 2012)

Fruitloop said:


> Nice. Figures.
> 
> ETA: The literary pseudonym paints a picture of an amiable curmudgeon, not entirely suprising to find something altogether less pleasant lurking behind it though.


He describes heroin withdrawal as "trivial" and has advocated against methadone px in prison.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I don't think most people with tattoos-people of the kind who wouldn't have had them in the past-get them because they want to think it's 'underground' or 'rough'; I think they genuinely believe they're stylis and chic. It's the degradation of taste under the imposed pleb culture that contemorary capitalism thrives on.


 
Some do some don't i'd think. A mate at work is training to be a tattooist and he gets 'both', ie the 'posher' types who've seen a celeb with some new tattoo and think they're cool and those who think it's a wee nod at 'rough trade culture'. There's certainly sill an element of 'hard' associated with it and the repeated 'doesn't hurt' it's easy, etc etc. In my own humble experience it hurts at times alright alright, uncomfy at others, easy at others. That 'rough/edgy' thing is still there for some..... Daft sods.



> Talking about inner-city M/C above reminded me how working class women of my mother's generation wouldn't have been seen dead with a tattoo, or a nose piercing.


 
But that's not necessarily a good thing they felt that way to be fair. Just the 'limits' of the time and world they lived in. As you know many things have changed as regards what w/c women feel able to do. Most for the good i'd argue. Some for the bad a la Laurie Penny.



> I agree that your second point make be a major factor in this sense of purposelessness, but I think there are also a lot of relatively intangible factors as well. After all, present society, with its all pervasive media and information overload, is unlike any other that's ever existed.


 
I'd agree with that


----------



## Fruitloop (Jul 2, 2012)

> The sign is a position of desire; but the first signs are the
> territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies. And if one wants to call
> this inscription in naked flesh "writing," then it must be said that speech
> in fact presupposes writing, and that it is this cruel system of inscribed
> ...


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> But that's not necessarily a good thing they felt that way to be fair. Just the 'limits' of the time and world they lived in. As you know many things have changed as regards what w/c women feel able to do. Most for the good id' argue. Some for the bad a la Laurie Penny.


 

It could be-or it could be said that a dumbing down or degradation of taste has taken place. I mean, let's face it, of all the freedoms that my mother's generation didn't have that are available to women today, choosing to have a couple of massive, unsightly tattoos is a pretty impoverished way of indulging yourself, especially if you're merely following the dictates of fashion.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jul 2, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> You're an ex-public school boy aren't you?
> 
> As such you might want to ask yourself whether this is really the thread for you. On this thread we mock and deride people such as yourself, on the grounds that their education has rendered them annoying twerps, incapable even of grasping the fact of their own ignorance.
> 
> Don't you think you might be happier on a thread not devoted to your own denigration? I certainly do. It is therefore in your own interests that I must recommend you be permanently banned from this or similar threads. Goodbye.


Dwyer, why do you think you can decide who is to be banned from threads or the boards? Perhaps you have that arrogance because of your own public school background. You seem to feel threatened by minor challenges. Incidentally you are also wrong about my educational background; I was a state grammar school boy.

Sorry about the time it has taken to get back to you. In contradiction to your post to Greebo, I have not run away. I have only been on the boards today for a few minutes and saw the alert.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 2, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> after the workers' bomb is dropped, that's what we'll have, so yes


 

After the bomb it should be the working classes in power not a mixture of Farmers markets /Camden lock and  stateless small shopkeepers with free wi-fi


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 2, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> After the bomb it should be the working classes in power not a mixture of Farmers markets /Camden lock and stateless small shopkeepers with free wi-fi


 
Drop the bomb = the cockroaches to power.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 2, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> FWIW, most of the people with visible tattooes I see around here are mid-30s to early 40s, meaning they grew up under the GDR. Their tats would be a bit of post-1989 euphoria.
> 
> Seeing the wee girl in my building with her septum pierced did bring out my inner LLETSA, though.


 
 I was trying to hold two conversations at once whilst slightly half cut at a local festival yesterday . One with my mate who used to drive trains but now works at the Job Centre about  East Germany and films we had seen and a parallel one with a quite attractive single mum form Woodhouse Park about her coming botox ,tummy tuck treatment and the fact that her former partner had been murdered over what she thought may have been mistaken identity ( she had finished with him long befire that). Imaging myself as Laurie Penny and over some Strongbow whilst the jukebox was playing Aztec Camera  I took the opportunity to ask her what would bring about radical change, funnily enough it was botox, tummy tuck and doing a bit more for charities. Still toying with the idea of asking if she wants to go to the flicks, but it might be my hangover and craving for a pint later.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 2, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> #mollywatch
> 
> Spotted following an innocent tweet by an unwitting bystander...
> 
> ...


 

I'm calling rip off from an iconic 'Invisibles' cover there


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 2, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Drop the bomb = the cockroaches to power.


 
Never could quite understand why rather than justify a lifestyle of drug , astrology and tatoos on the basis of some ancient hunter gatherer tribes that we don't use the cockroach as a bit of life coaching


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jul 2, 2012)

All this talk about dropping the Workers Bomb has probably brought these boards up higher on the MI5 list of suspect websites. Don't forget that security people are literal-minded people with no sense of humour. They probably think that 'the cockroaches' are some sort of militia group. [listens for boots on the stairs]


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 2, 2012)

OK not rip off, but similar. maybe theres an intentional allusion I am missing


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It could be-or it could be said that a dumbing down or degradation of taste has taken place. I mean, let's face it, of all the freedoms that my mother's generation didn't have that are available to women today, choosing to have a couple of massive, unsightly tattoos is a pretty impoverished way of indulging yourself, especially if you're merely following the dictates of fashion.


 
I doubt it's the first thing they went for in fairness.


----------



## weepiper (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> It could be-or it could be said that a dumbing down or degradation of taste has taken place. I mean, let's face it, of all the freedoms that my mother's generation didn't have that are available to women today, choosing to have a couple of massive, unsightly tattoos is a pretty impoverished way of indulging yourself, especially if you're merely following the dictates of fashion.


 
It's not for you to dictate how we indulge ourselves. That's rather the point.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 2, 2012)

And we're deleting this post.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 2, 2012)

.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

Can i ask you two not to go down this road please.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Can i ask you two not to go down this road please.


 
 Pm'd them both. They weren't to know and no harm done.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Pm'd them both. They weren't to know and no harm done.


I did too, said exact same - almost word for word!. No blame.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 2, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> <snip>I have not run away. I have only been on the boards today for a few minutes and saw the alert.


You might not have noticed, Hocus Eye, but there's a pattern. A lot of the time, soon after Dwyer says he doesn't want this poster or that one on *his* thread, he buggers off for a couple of weeks. It's happened a few times before, the last time was a couple of months ago.

I realise that it's pretty insulting to be on the receiving end of, but it's almost a running gag, albeit a weak one.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 2, 2012)

copliker said:


> I may have dipped my toes in the swamp.


 
Can't have been too much of a dip, you obviously haven't taken an axe to your computer.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

weepiper said:


> It's not for you to dictate how we indulge ourselves. That's rather the point.


 


I'm not dictating anything. Who do you think I am? Idi Amin?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 2, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Mancunians invented everything, for better or worse, but we did.


 
Including syphilis and, even more revoltingly, vegetarian sausages.

You absolute cunts!


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 2, 2012)

now there was a man who knew style.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 2, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> I'm not dictating anything. Who do you think I am? Idi Amin?


 
I see you more as Milton Obote.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 2, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> I see you more as Milton Obote.


 

Just looked him up. He was quite dapper compared to Idi.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> So she'll be you? No wonder they say there's no future for this generation.


 
Harsh but fair.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> So from pathetic labour-left to pathetic labour left. You might join the fabians by next week at this rate. Never have i seen such a whirlwind radicalisation.


 
He's already a Fabian at heart. He'll be kissing ikons of Sid and Beattie before we know it.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 2, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> Dwyer, why do you think you can decide who is to be banned from threads or the boards? Perhaps you have that arrogance because of your own public school background. You seem to feel threatened by minor challenges. Incidentally you are also wrong about my educational background; I was a state grammar school boy.
> 
> Sorry about the time it has taken to get back to you. In contradiction to your post to Greebo, I have not run away. I have only been on the boards today for a few minutes and saw the alert.


 
The correct response is "fuck off, dwyer".


----------



## discokermit (Jul 2, 2012)

anyway, laurie has gone from a tiny little column to a full page in the independent.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

24 grand a year - £500 a week for 500 or so shit words.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> 24 grand a year - £500 a week for 500 or so shit words.


and it doesn't even have to be about politics - just write some guff about the smoking ban or similar.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 2, 2012)

discokermit said:


> anyway, laurie has gone from a tiny little column to a full page in the independent.


 

a full page in the indy, well it may be an earner but leave your principles at the door before you check in. The fucking indy- I was young and foolish enough to cheer their 'legalize cannabis' stuff then genuinley gutted when they u-turned into 'oh no, this isn't the bits we smoked at uni folks, this is schizo-inducing SUPERSKUNK' 
wankers

all the more because I know older smokers of herb and they all told me 'utter bollocks, you just had better hash back then, leb and squidge' and 'the only good green was thai, there were none of these homegrown femminized from seed jobbies- we knew bushweed when we saw it' 

and while there may be an element of 'we walked over broken glass to school in barefoot and when we got there sir beat us fo it and we were grateful, kids thse days'

it does not make the shite peddled by the indy any less amazingly fucking false.


----------



## imposs1904 (Jul 2, 2012)

copliker said:


> Like this.


 


> In a capitalist world, smoking is a little sub-economy of communism. You share cigarettes, matches, lighters, papers. When strangers come up to you in the street and ask you for a cigarette, you give them one, because you understand. I once gave a homeless man half a Lucky Strike out of my own mouth, even though he was wearing a Libertarian T-shirt.


 
I think that's my quote of the year.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

Note the choice/placement/advert of 'lucky strike'. Barthes would have a field day.


----------



## killer b (Jul 2, 2012)

is it 25 grand then? doesn't sound that much for a full page in a national newspaper, even if it is the indie.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

killer b said:


> is it 25 grand then? doesn't sound that much for a full page in a national newspaper, even if it is the indie.


Jones is on that - both signed same week...


----------



## killer b (Jul 2, 2012)

crikey. guess at least it's a leg up to get on the moral maze and the like if nothing else...


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 2, 2012)

killer b said:


> is it 25 grand then? doesn't sound that much for a full page in a national newspaper, even if it is the indie.


 
Laptop's thing on freelance rates - per 1,000 words (the more Xes, the more underpaid):



> *Independent* travel piece _INM 2012
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
http://www.londonfreelance.org/rates/w1000new.html


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 2, 2012)

killer b said:


> crikey. guess at least it's a leg up to get on the moral maze and the like if nothing else...


 
Good grief, could you imagine Laura, David & Claire on together, EVERY FUCKING WEEK?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 2, 2012)

you can't buy luckies in normal people shops. Not round here. You have to go to specialist tobacconist shops to get them imported smokes. And they taste fucking average. Mind you, there are these new lambert and butlers that have a menthol tab in the but, you just squeeze it and lo! menthol

can't report on how they taste firsthand cos I just smoked it. I'm told its like bubblegum. Stop smoking if you don't like the flavour


----------



## rekil (Jul 2, 2012)

She'll be looking to syndicate this crap, that's where the money is, also I suspect it's more about building connections at this stage anyway. Lots of opportunities once labour get back in probably.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 2, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> you can't buy luckies in normal people shops. Not round here.


 
No Tescos in the Midlands then?


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 2, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> and it doesn't even have to be about politics - just write some guff about the smoking ban or similar.


 
If I may deliver to LP the following message on behalf of those of us everywhere who still actively enjoy a smoke or two during the average day:


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 2, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> No Tescos in the Midlands then?


 

I live 2 minutes walk from the local tescos, theres no Lucky Strikes stocke there. I'm sure they'd get them in if I was hungry for them and asked. Also- deckard smoked luckies. The bladerunner pc game said so


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> No Tescos in the Midlands then?


It's the _choice_ not the availability that says it all.


----------



## killer b (Jul 2, 2012)

actually thinking about it 25 grand isn't so bad. it's not as if she'll be working a 37.5 hour week to turn out those 500 words is it? she'll knock 'em out overnight the night before deadline. certainly reads like she does anyway.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

I do more than that first thing in the morning on here and it's a) read by more b) better


----------



## andy2002 (Jul 2, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> you can't buy luckies in normal people shops. Not round here. You have to go to specialist tobacconist shops to get them imported smokes.


 
I assumed the Lucky Strikes reference was just a clever and/or pretentious way of dropping the fact she's been spending time in America into the article.


----------



## killer b (Jul 2, 2012)

luckies are my choice smoke. the shame.


----------



## rekil (Jul 2, 2012)

I once did 1200 words on the opening of a sewage treatment plant for a shit mag. Where's my random house e-book deal?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 2, 2012)

killer b said:


> actually thinking about it 25 grand isn't so bad.


 
It's 5x better than freelances at the same paper!


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 2, 2012)

andy2002 said:


> I assumed the Lucky Strikes reference was just a clever and/or pretentious way of dropping the fact she's been spending time in America into the article.


 
For anyone who never heard the Ryan Gosling lie story.


----------



## killer b (Jul 2, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> It's 5x better than freelances at the same paper!


i worked that out now. i was thinking about it in terms of a f/t job rather than a couple of hours a week...


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

I like the obit rates - i can do that.


----------



## rekil (Jul 2, 2012)

When you offer to make your cleaner a cup of darjeeling, that's a bit communism as well.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

copliker said:


> When you offer to make your cleaner a cup of darjeeling, that's a bit communism as well.


When you let the au-pair eat in the same room as you - that's a little bit communism too.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I like the obit rates - i can do that.



And if work dries up, I'm sure we can collectively agree on who to pump-prime...


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> And if work dries up, I'm sure we can collectively agree on who to pump-prime...


Job-for-life.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

When you don't know anyone working class - that's a little bit communism. Beyond the barriers that separate us.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Job-for-life.



Basically, everyone is a winner.

COMMUNISM IN ACTION!


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

When Kate Winslet wins an oscar and thanks other people - that's a little bit communism.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> When Kate Winslet wins an oscar and thanks other people - that's a little bit communism.



She married a cameraman - COMMUNISM!

She divorced a cameraman - REVANCHISM!


----------



## Greebo (Jul 2, 2012)

discokermit said:


> anyway, laurie has gone from a tiny little column to a full page in the independent.


Bless


----------



## rekil (Jul 2, 2012)

When I was in Chicago, I let some strangers share my taxi - I had communism coming out my ears.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

Letting someone shine your shoes in the street _as a sign of respect_ - little bit communism.


----------



## chilango (Jul 2, 2012)

This thread just keeps on giving. Laura is well worth 25k on this basis alone. I can't think of any other journo that has given me as much entertainment.


----------



## rekil (Jul 2, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> All this talk about dropping the Workers Bomb has probably brought these boards up higher on the MI5 list of suspect websites.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Letting someone shine your shoes in the street _as a sign of respect_ - little bit communism.


 
bringing shoeshiners back should be part of the PD manifesto.They are good for the word on the street.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

pro-po-leace policy surely?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 2, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> bringing shoeshiners back should be part of the PD manifesto.They are good for the word on the street.



GO HOME, GET YOUR FUCKIN SHINEBOX, AND PREPARE FOR VICTORY


----------



## rekil (Jul 2, 2012)

"Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; *even the bootblacks had been collectivized* and their boxes painted red and black."

Orwell sez Shoeshiners is communism. Fact.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 2, 2012)

Bootblacknreds, Eric, bootblacknreds.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 2, 2012)

When you tip a waiter (doesn't matter where) - that's a bit communism.


----------



## rekil (Jul 2, 2012)

But if it's in Kenya, or someplace that might as well be the moon, it's _one_ bit more communism.


----------



## gosub (Jul 3, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> When you tip a waiter (doesn't matter where) - that's a bit communism.


What's McDonalds policy on sharing out tips?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 3, 2012)

gosub said:


> What's McDonalds policy on sharing out tips?


Don't have waiters. As you'd know if you weren't who you are.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 3, 2012)

copliker said:


> But if it's in Kenya, or someplace that might as well be the moon, it's _one_ bit more communism.


That's not only a bit communism, that's a bit colonial-communism.


----------



## gosub (Jul 3, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Don't have waiters. As you'd know if you weren't who you are.


Wimpy ftw then


----------



## gosub (Jul 3, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Don't have waiters. As you'd know if you weren't who you are.


So what do you do if you thought your meal was really flavoursome?


----------



## rekil (Jul 3, 2012)

Empty your tray into the bin and slot it into the little rack thing. McD's is a bit communism.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 3, 2012)

gosub said:


> Wimpy ftw then


It's not the 70s either. You went to some ghastly diplomats school didn't you?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 3, 2012)

copliker said:


> But if it's in Kenya, or someplace that might as well be the moon, it's _one_ bit more communism.


Laura would deffo out-me-me-me the Mau Mau.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 3, 2012)

copliker said:


> Empty your tray into the bin and slot it into the little rack thing. McD's is a bit communism.


Ronald McDonald = SuperSize-Inquart


----------



## gosub (Jul 3, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> It's not the 70s either. You went to some ghastly diplomats school didn't you?


No, used to play one at rugby though. Farnborough where I used to have an office has a wimpy, ate there twice a week when I was renovating the building from derelict. Tipping did seem to improve service. 

Was dragged into a mcd drive through two weeks ago. Had a gloupy sort of cheese in it. Revolting


----------



## JimW (Jul 3, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> bringing shoeshiners back should be part of the PD manifesto.They are good for the word on the street.


Shoes in general are progressive. If I recall my Making of the English Working Classes, itinerant shoe-menders travelled from town to town spreading the good old cause, so of course the PD slogan has to be 'radical cobblers'.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 3, 2012)

See the radical cobblers.


----------



## JimW (Jul 3, 2012)

Our Laurie's produced more than a Clark's factory occupation.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 3, 2012)

I set 'em up...


----------



## JimW (Jul 3, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I set 'em up...


Oi! I set it up!


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 3, 2012)

JimW said:


> Shoes in general are progressive. If I recall my Making of the English Working Classes, itinerant shoe-menders travelled from town to town spreading the good old cause, so of course the PD slogan has to be 'radical cobblers'.


 

If you seek radical cobblers then look no further than the town that sheltered thomas and provided boots for cromwell. Gechya ass to northampton. Our tradition of leatherworked dissidence is aged


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 3, 2012)

JimW said:


> Oi! I set it up!


 
Opps, you actually said radical cobblers


----------



## JimW (Jul 3, 2012)

I've been there for the football. Can't recall much though, that was years ago.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 3, 2012)

JimW said:


> I've been there for the football. Can't recall much though, that was years ago.


Some 6-spoon eye man with a beard meets you. I'm a warlock he says.


----------



## JimW (Jul 3, 2012)

Are we talking Alan Moore? he's about the only other thing I know about the town.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 3, 2012)

JimW said:


> Are we talking Alan Moore? he's about the only other thing I know about the town.


You know the civil war stuff?


----------



## rekil (Jul 3, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Ronald McDonald = SuperSize-Inquart






			
				Chris Bradnam said:
			
		

> Too good.


----------



## JimW (Jul 3, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> You know the civil war stuff?


Nope, is it some mystic Fifth Monarchy types prophesying in the streets?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 3, 2012)

JimW said:


> Are we talking Alan Moore? he's about the only other thing I know about the town.


 

He lives two doors down from my brother. Saw him in  blue wifebeater with his hair tied back an beard trimmed while sticking some shit into a boot. I immediately leapt up and forced a copy of Workers Girder on him....wait no I didn't, I just sat and rolled another spliff while watching 'flog it'

as misleading titles go that one is on par with 'loose women'


----------



## imposs1904 (Jul 3, 2012)

copliker said:


> "Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; *even the bootblacks had been collectivized* and their boxes painted red and black."
> 
> Orwell sez Shoeshiners is communism. Fact.


 
For some daft reason this recent thread derail into the matter of shoeshines made me think of the passage below that I recently read in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's 1989 novel, 'Off Side':




> _'People are beginning to want their shoes polished again, Pepe. Shoeshines are doing good business. The young ones, mainly, because I just do my usual customers, and three or four others a day. Why are people wanting their shoes shined, again, Pepino? Have you asked yourself that? You should think about it, because you've got a good brain, and it's worth some thought. If you ask me, things are changing. Everything. And I'm not talking about a change like in the 1940s or the 1950s, or the years when everyone was flush, the sixties and the seventies, up until Franco died. It's another sort of change. I see it from people's attitude to their shoes. For ten years people have been too ashamed to stick their feet under the nose of a shoeshine and say, "There you go, clean them." They didn't mind going to the dentist to get their teeth cleaned. But when it came to cleaning their shoes, they preferred to do it in the privacy of their own homes, with those shoeshine machines that put the likes of me out of a job. For years they all wanted to be so egalitarian, and it wasn't the done thing to have someone else shine your shoes for you. So what's it all about? What's happened is they they're not embarrassed any more, Pepe. So shoeshines are making money again . . . '_


 
Apologies for derailing the derail.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 3, 2012)




----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 3, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> Apologies for derailing the derail.



The Proletarian Justice is swift and uncompromising when it comes to dealing with saboteurs of the People's Transport Network.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 3, 2012)

It seems we're not the only ones who aren't overly keen on LP, as her current Wikipedia entry indicates:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Penny


----------



## Balbi (Jul 3, 2012)

Ok, who did that


----------



## rekil (Jul 3, 2012)

Dunno, but they did it wrong.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jul 3, 2012)

Can't see owt?!?


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 3, 2012)

Must have been deleted.


----------



## rekil (Jul 3, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Can't see owt?!?


The page history says someone put in a bit (at 07:44, 3 July 2012) linking to this thread, then an editor or someone undid it 15 mins later. I assume the wiki time is one hour behind so...


----------



## Balbi (Jul 3, 2012)

Direct ref. to criticism of her style from not just the right, and not just personal abuse with a link to this here thread.


----------



## JimW (Jul 3, 2012)

copliker said:


> The page history says someone put in a bit (at 07:44, 3 July 2012) linking to this thread, then an editor or someone undid it 15 mins later. I assume the wiki time is one hour behind so...


You can see the bit deleted in the compare versions view: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Laurie_Penny&diff=500453420&oldid=500452198
Refers to this thread, basically
ETA Or, what Balbi just said and I missed completely.


----------



## Balbi (Jul 3, 2012)

LOL @ 'activist underground'  Makes us sound like Trot moles.


----------



## rekil (Jul 3, 2012)

Crabapple's wiki appears to be her own press releases stitched together willy nilly. Are there no rules against this sort of wank?

"Spurred by a desire to de-sterilize the buttoned-up art school scene"
"Molly’s brand of off-grid entrepreneurship"
"it comes as no surprise that Crabapple’s celebrity fans include..."


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 3, 2012)

It's the DIY ethos, man!


----------



## smokedout (Jul 3, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Ok, who did that


 
johann wants his job back.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 3, 2012)

The edit is back up now.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 3, 2012)

copliker said:


> Crabapple's wiki appears to be her own press releases stitched together willy nilly. Are there no rules against this sort of wank?
> 
> "Spurred by a desire to de-sterilize the buttoned-up art school scene"
> "Molly’s brand of off-grid entrepreneurship"
> "it comes as no surprise that Crabapple’s celebrity fans include..."


Wow, every single cliche from the the beatniks to bill gates regurgitated as personality. the spectacle has entered these peoples souls.


----------



## belboid (Jul 3, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> The edit is back up now.


It wont be for long. Whoever reposted it could at least have paid attention to the reason it was taken down ('Forums are not a reliable source') and found a relevant source to use instead.


----------



## love detective (Jul 3, 2012)

She's got a touch of the Hari about her according to this

(sorry if this has already been posted way back)


----------



## Balbi (Jul 3, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Wow, every single cliche from the the beatniks to bill gates regurgitated as personality. the spectacle has entered these peoples souls.


 
Should have gone to specsavers


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 3, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Should have gone to specsavers


 
This is doing my head in - I know I posted that self-same quip a while back, but I can't find it.

Have you brain-drained me, Balbi? Have you? HAVE YOU?!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 3, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> when i get my tattoos i will be sure to show lletsa immediately


 
I'm going to get a tattoo of LLETSA'a face. On my face.


----------



## rekil (Jul 3, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'm going to get a tattoo of LLETSA'a face. On my face.


Tattoo this whole thread on your face. Then get Lletsa's face on the back of your head.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 3, 2012)

copliker said:


> Tattoo this whole thread on your face.


I was considering the possibility of tattooing that on my cock. But then I remebered nobody would see it so nobody would think I was cool


----------



## rekil (Jul 3, 2012)

love detective said:


> She's got a touch of the Hari about her according to this
> 
> (sorry if this has already been posted way back)


Yep, that's back there somewhere, before the 20 page granny tattoo insanity. If anyone was arsed enough, it'd be a piece of piss to go through the thread and stick properly referenced stuff in the wiki. It would get deleted though.


SpineyNorman said:


> I was considering the possibility of tattooing that on my cock. But then I remebered nobody would see it so nobody would think I was cool


(((Spiney's cock)))


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 3, 2012)

Yes, from here on.​


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 3, 2012)

copliker said:


> Tattoo this whole thread on your face. Then get Lletsa's face on the back of your head.


 
I did, and now I no longer have a job and live in the street and am forced to bum cigarettes off of psuedo-commie journalists.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 3, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Should have gone to specsavers


 
I fucking knew it!

Sanity is restored.


----------



## Balbi (Jul 3, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> I fucking knew it!
> 
> Sanity is restored.


 
Yeah, well what I was doing was ironising your original comment and pointing out the crass commnercialism that's seeped into our lives. I've actually had your post, and mine, tattooed on either forearm surrounded by a melange of Communist Premiers and Backstreet Boys members.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 3, 2012)

You _detourned_ him.


----------



## Balbi (Jul 3, 2012)

It's the only way to avoid that nasty ideological smashup in between the next two junctions of discourse


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 3, 2012)




----------



## imposs1904 (Jul 3, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


>


 

What episode of Sherlock Holmes is that scene from?


----------



## rekil (Jul 3, 2012)

Sherlock Holmes And The Post-Wowfactorism Cave-In


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 3, 2012)

You détourn if you want to; the lad's not for détourning


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 3, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> He describes heroin withdrawal as "trivial" and has advocated against methadone px in prison.


 
I heard hım on the radıo ın the USA, goıng on about thıs. Hıs maın evıdence seemed to be havıng spıed on a few wıthdrawıng junkıes ın hıs waıtıng room and seeıng them laughıng among themselves.

It was a phone-ın show, so of course he was deluged wıth calls from people wıth personal experıence, ınformıng hım that he was talkıng crap. He basıcally caled them all malıngerers.


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 3, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> He says writing on his computer.
> 
> Lletsa is bang on re this, capitalism has been both good and bad. It developed the productiove forces to the extwent thast it allowed, it was an advance on previous systems as it provided-upto a limit-real, genuione material advances by and for the working-class. That it cannot doasnything otehr than take us on a downward spiral now-as Lletsa says in his doom laden way-does not invalidate the real advances it made previously.


 
Capıtalısm has been of materıal benefıt to the last 3 generatıons of Westerners.  No-one else.  In fact ıt has destroyed most other cıvılızatıons completely.  And even that lımıted materıal benefıt has to be set agaınst theır spırıtual ımpoverıshment and resultıng mısery.


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 3, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Going back to before all this bullshit yesterday, some people were suggesting that in 10 years she's have dropped her current views and be writing more openly right wing stuff. I don't think she will for a number of reasons: firstly, all good careerists and parasites know that what they're selling is their ability to play a role, and you'd have to be pretty inept not to know that you've sold yourself as the voice of a new left - ditching that = out of a job.


 
Don't be sılly. Nothıng sells better than a recantıng Leftıst.

These people are utterly brazen ın theır weathercockıng. I recently went back and read Johan Harı's essays from 2002-03. He was boostıng the Iraq war shamelessly--obvıously because hıs boss told hım he had to. As soon as ıt was safe to do so he changed tack.

I'm makıng ıt a personal project to remember all the commentators who advocated ınvadıng Iraq, and should I ever get the chance I'll remınd them about ıt. Salman Rushdıe was one of the worst.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 3, 2012)

Rushdie? say it aint so


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 3, 2012)

Greebo said:


> You might not have noticed, Hocus Eye, but there's a pattern. A lot of the time, soon after Dwyer says he doesn't want this poster or that one on *his* thread, he buggers off for a couple of weeks. It's happened a few times before, the last time was a couple of months ago.


 
Thıs ısn't 'my' thread. I banned Hocus Eye because he was dısruptıng an ınterestıng dıscussıon, that's all. And to judge from the PMs of support I've receıved, my decısıon has proved extremely popular.

He's free to post on any other thread he lıkes.


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 3, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> Rushdie? say it aint so


 
Rushdıe's one of the most weaselıest of them all. He publıshed an artıcle just before the ınvasıon, goıng on about how ıt would make the world a 'more modern' place. Then he freaked out when Terry Eagleton called hım on ıt a few years later. Eagleton evıdently was speakıng from memory, because he apologızed--but he was absolutely rıght ın what he'd saıd.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 3, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> <snip>I banned Hocus Eye because he was dısruptıng an ınterestıng dıscussıon, that's all. And to judge from the PMs of support I've receıved, my decısıon has proved extremely popular.<snip>


PMs of support? You're so preXenforo.



phildwyer said:


> <snip>These people are utterly brazen ın theır weathercockıng. I recently went back and read Johan Harı's essays from 2002-03. He was boostıng the Iraq war shamelessly--obvıously because hıs boss told hım he had to. As soon as ıt was safe to do so he changed tack.
> 
> I'm makıng ıt a personal project to remember all the commentators who advocated ınvadıng Iraq, and should I ever get the chance I'll remınd them about ıt. Salman Rushdıe was one of the worst.


You do that. Every year after the anniversary of going into Afghanistan in 20after 9/11*, I reminded the more gung ho people on a mailing list that they'd said the USA just wanted to go in there to "flick out a maggot " (ie Osama bin Laden) but he'd still not been found and civilians were being injured or killed every day. Making them wriggle and try to justify the inexcusable was a delight.

*FFS seriously knackered


----------



## Greebo (Jul 3, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> I heard hım on the radıo ın the USA, goıng on about thıs. Hıs maın evıdence seemed to be havıng spıed on a few wıthdrawıng junkıes ın hıs waıtıng room and seeıng them laughıng among themselves.
> 
> It was a phone-ın show, so of course he was deluged wıth calls from people wıth personal experıence, ınformıng hım that he was talkıng crap. He basıcally caled them all malıngerers.


I know it's common for some GPs to become extremely cynical about their patients, but that's beyond the pale.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jul 3, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Thıs ısn't 'my' thread. I banned Hocus Eye because he was dısruptıng an ınterestıng dıscussıon, that's all. And to judge from the PMs of support I've receıved, my decısıon has proved extremely popular.
> 
> He's free to post on any other thread he lıkes.


Very kind of you phil. You really are living in a fantasy world. You have used the 'PMs of support' line before. Come to think of it you have used most of your lines before. Nobody is fooled by your bluster.

However, has anybody read Laurie's article today in the New Statesman. It is a response to Cameron's talk about an 'entitlement culture'.


----------



## love detective (Jul 3, 2012)

i saw it, and prepared myself to be enraged prior to reading it

but disappointingly I wasn't, it wasn't actually that bad

doesn't feel right

must have missed something, will read it again in a bit


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 3, 2012)

Piece of piss though, standard turn the terms around thing that most people would be able to turnout in half hour.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 3, 2012)

sometimes, when the bullshit and self love isn't clouding her eyes, ms barnetsworth can write a nice piece, often just preaching to the choir but still not bad. It is the needle in the haystack mind- but it is there.


----------



## co-op (Jul 3, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> sometimes, when the bullshit and self love isn't clouding her eyes, ms barnetsworth can write a nice piece, often just preaching to the choir but still not bad. It is the needle in the haystack mind- but it is there.


 
This.

I read a piece by her in the NS ages ago and thought, she's ok. Mind you I've obviously got shit judgement, I thought the same of Hari. What I now wonder is if someone like LP is doomed to the ego-vortex of the media for the rest of her life or can she escape into reality?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 3, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> This is doing my head in - I know I posted that self-same quip a while back, but I can't find it.
> 
> Have you brain-drained me, Balbi? Have you? HAVE YOU?!


 
You've been mind-reamed by Ballbag!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 3, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Thıs ısn't 'my' thread. I banned Hocus Eye because he was dısruptıng an ınterestıng dıscussıon, that's all. And to judge from the PMs of support I've receıved, my decısıon has proved extremely popular.
> 
> He's free to post on any other thread he lıkes.


 
PMs of support = offers from posters to sub phil some heavy tranquilisers until the latest "episode" is over.


----------



## rekil (Jul 4, 2012)

Crabapple flogging mayday posters. Only $100. 

!!!


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 4, 2012)

To further fuel Dotty's Ragged Robin plagiarism paranoia:






http://www.etsy.com/listing/91577870/scarlett-takes-manhattan?ref=v1_other_2


----------



## articul8 (Jul 4, 2012)

Donald McGill meets Gustav Klimt?


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 4, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> Rushdie? say it aint so


 
Thıs ıs what Sır Salman wrote on the eve of the ınvasıon:

''it is possible that this flawed war may end up creating a better Iraq for most Iraqis than could be achieved by any other means. In short, we may be in for a gang war on a gigantic scale, and yet, as in Scorsese's movie, that gang war, brutal, cynical, atavistic - a war in which one man's hero is another's villain -may paradoxically succeed in bringing a more modern world into being.''

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/jan/04/film.salmanrushdie

Cowardly hypocrıtıcal scumbag that he ıs.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jul 4, 2012)

I never liked him or his overblown prose an example of which burst forth onto the thread in the post by phildwyer that is above this one; but that is a flawed, illogical, tortuous, and tautalogus dare I say argument; worthy of a weasal with a dictionary.


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 4, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I never liked him or his overblown prose an example of which burst forth onto the thread in the post by phildwyer that is above this one; but that is a flawed, illogical, tortuous, and tautalogus dare I say argument; worthy of a weasal with a dictionary.


 
Its the sheer stupıdıty that gets me. A ''more modern world'' ındeed. How easıly he adopts the narratıve of progress, wıth Western lıberal democracy the most ''advanced'' form of socıety, so that ıt ıs our duty to drag the ''backward'' heathen ınto modernıty, by force ıf necessary.

Lord Palmerstone couldn't have put ıt better. And thıs from the man held up to us as the spokesman for the postcolonıal world. ''Sır Salman'' ındeed.


----------



## rekil (Jul 4, 2012)

Laura must've joined Labour around the start of the invasion, or at the height of the war. Smartest kid in a smart school.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 4, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Its the sheer stupıdıty that gets me. A ''more modern world'' ındeed. How easıly he adopts the narratıve of progress, wıth Western lıberal democracy the most ''advanced'' form of socıety, so that ıt ıs our duty to drag the ''backward'' heathen ınto modernıty, by force ıf necessary.
> 
> Lord Palmerstone couldn't have put ıt better. And thıs from the man held up to us as the spokesman for the postcolonıal world. ''Sır Salman'' ındeed.


 


And 'a flawed war'. Does he have any examples of not-flawed wars?

I fucking hate armchair generals.


----------



## Fedayn (Jul 4, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> And 'a flawed war'. Does he have any examples of not-flawed wars?
> 
> I fucking hate armchair generals.


 
Especially arm-chair generals who are better hidden than Bin Laden....


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 4, 2012)

bah, and I really enjoyed 'Moors Last Sigh'. no more heros etc


----------



## belboid (Jul 4, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> bah, and I really enjoyed 'Moors Last Sigh'. no more heros etc


possibly the finest writer in the english language.  But what the hell, the King James bible is beautifully written, doesnt stop it being full of shit.  And Lenin was a dreadful writer, but said the odd decent thing.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 4, 2012)

Novelists are (sometimes) okay when they try to incorporate politics into the chaotic world of their novels but usually come unstuck when they make pronouncements in the real world. Celine* was one of the best novelists that ever lived and look where he ended up. And Wyndham Lewis.

* A prize for the first one to post up a picture of Celine Dion.


----------



## rekil (Jul 4, 2012)

PD blogpost 'cobbled' together from the little bit communism gags. Radical Cobblers. Any objections, suggestions etc.


----------



## chilango (Jul 4, 2012)

copliker said:


> PD blogpost 'cobbled' together from the little bit communism gags. Radical Cobblers. Any objections, suggestions etc.



That's very good. But, a bit too much common sense for PD.


----------



## rekil (Jul 4, 2012)

chilango said:


> That's very good. But, a bit too much common sense for PD.


Stuck for ideas see. The next one can have much less common sense then. No harm in mixing it up a little. Stealing other people's words off forums and sticking them up on your crap joke blog - that's a bit communism.


----------



## Nylock (Jul 5, 2012)

...Maybe you should do a two-column thing next with 'Very Communism' down the left side (natch  ) and 'Not so Communism' down the right side.... Maybe....


----------



## Nylock (Jul 5, 2012)

Very Communism: Tank Rush through the Fulda Gap / Not so Communism: Flogging off the state tank works to private arms companies...


----------



## JimW (Jul 5, 2012)

Very Communism: Building the Miyun Reservoir in high revolutionary dudgeon; Not So Communism: Letting the newly privatised chemical enterprises pollute every single river in the country.


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 5, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Novelists are (sometimes) okay when they try to incorporate politics into the chaotic world of their novels but usually come unstuck when they make pronouncements in the real world. Celine* was one of the best novelists that ever lived and look where he ended up. And Wyndham Lewis.


 
Dostoevsky.  Best wrıter ın the unıverse evah, but an arch-reactıonary and Great Russıan ımperıalıst.  He's the only one who made me thınk there must be somethıng ın such ıdeas ıf he held them, but then I realızed ıt was all a psychotıc reactıon to beıng put up ın front of the fırıng squad.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 5, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Dostoevsky. Best wrıter ın the unıverse evah, but an arch-reactıonary and Great Russıan ımperıalıst. He's the only one who made me thınk there must be somethıng ın such ıdeas ıf he held them, but then I realızed ıt was all a psychotıc reactıon to beıng put up ın front of the fırıng squad.


 


Yes. The opening section of Notes From Underground is pretty much the final word on political idealism, whatever direction it may come from, but seems to have affected his political interventions in the real world hardly at all.

(And yes, I do understand the difference between characters in novels and the authors who invent them.)


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 5, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> Yes. The opening section of Notes From Underground is pretty much the final word on political idealism, whatever direction it may come from, but seems to have affected his political interventions in the real world hardly at all.
> 
> (And yes, I do understand the difference between characters in novels and the authors who invent them.)


 
And _Devıls _ıs the most accurate satıre of polıtıcal radıcals I've ever read. He was obvıously drawıng on hıs long and bıtter personal experıence of such revolutıonary groupuscles. I've often thought there are several posters on here who seem to have stepped straıght out of ıts pages.

No prızes for ıdentıfyıng Peter Verkhovensky.  But who ıs Stavrogın?


----------



## dennisr (Jul 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> PD blogpost 'cobbled' together from the little bit communism gags. Radical Cobblers. Any objections, suggestions etc.


 
genius


----------



## Dan U (Jul 5, 2012)

its ok, she is en route to Greece reading Fifty Shades of Grey, we can all stop panicking


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 5, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> And _Devıls _ıs the most accurate satıre of polıtıcal radıcals I've ever read. He was obvıously drawıng on hıs long and bıtter personal experıence of such revolutıonary groupuscles. I've often thought there are several posters on here who seem to have stepped straıght out of ıts pages.
> 
> No prızes for ıdentıfyıng Peter Verkhovensky. But who ıs Stavrogın?


 
Verkhovensky is based on a third, nay, fourth-rate ideologue and bullshitter with a pathetic need to impress, and who in reality wasn't taken _that_ seriously by the radical intelligentsia.  But was Dostoevsky really aware of the facts pertaining Nechaev's reputation?


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 5, 2012)

LLETSA said:


> And 'a flawed war'. Does he have any examples of not-flawed wars?
> 
> I fucking hate armchair generals.


 
Speakıng of whıch, can anyone guess the tosspot who authored thıs lıttle gem back ın '99 (wıthough Googlıng obv)...:

''The Kosovo war, despite its many flaws, established the notion that all the countries of the democratic world have a vital interest and an obligation to act where human rights are being violated. Whether it was effective in preventing those violations (a topic which remains a moot point), another vital precedent was set that creates its own dynamic. Once the global justice argument has been let out of the bag, no rhetorical manoeuvring can put it back...''

Gotta love that ''despıte ıts many flaws.'' ''Flaws'' lıke people beıng kılled and that, presumably.


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 5, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Verkhovensky is based on a third, nay, fourth-rate ideologue and bullshitter with a pathetic need to impress, and who in reality wasn't taken _that_ seriously by the radical intelligentsia. But was Dostoevsky really aware of the facts pertaining Nechaev's reputation?


 
Yes he was. He followed the case very closely as ıt was happenıng.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 5, 2012)

I meant his actual stature, rather than puffed up notoriety (some of it deserved of course), among the ranks of the radical intelligentsia, and not just the above.

For example, while on the run in Russia he sometimes used to dress in the overalls of a locomotive engineer, this masquerading deliberately calculated to impress people, particularly those of a higher class. Such workers in the nineteenth century could be held in a kind of awe at their involvement in cutting edge technology, like pilots or astronauts in the twentieth. A sad little man, really.

I'm sure the revolutionaries of Dvorianstvo origin had a good sneer, in between sips of tea.


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 5, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> A sad little man, really.


 
Well I wouldn't go that far.  He lıved a pretty extraordınary lıfe by anyone's standards, and he certaınly had Bakunın fooled.  Maybe not quıte the evıl genıus of Dostoevsky's ımagınatıon, but certaınly a shrewd, hard, psychopath who mıght easıly have got hıs mıtts on power ıf thıngs had gone just a lıttle bıt dıfferently.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jul 5, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> And _Devıls _ıs the most accurate satıre of polıtıcal radıcals I've ever read. He was obvıously drawıng on hıs long and bıtter personal experıence of such revolutıonary groupuscles. I've often thought there are several posters on here who seem to have stepped straıght out of ıts pages.
> 
> No prızes for ıdentıfyıng Peter Verkhovensky. But who ıs Stavrogın?


 
Went to see a stage adaptation of this down in Wimbledon a few months back. We had never been to the theatre there before, but arrived early and bought some drinks at the bar. There was a group of women dressed up in silver capes with sparkly make-up on gathered around. I remember thinking, quite a lively, party atmosphere for a work by Dostoevsky. Anyway, turns out we were in the wrong theatre and were in fact about to witness the opening act of Dancing Queen.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 5, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Well I wouldn't go that far. He lıved a pretty extraordınary lıfe by anyone's standards, and he certaınly had Bakunın fooled. Maybe not quıte the evıl genıus of Dostoevsky's ımagınatıon, but certaınly a shrewd, hard, psychopath who mıght easıly have got hıs mıtts on power ıf thıngs had gone just a lıttle bıt dıfferently.


 
Bakunin, lol. Plenty of facepalm moments. By using the pissed up fool to gain access, Nechaev tried to play on his reputation and get inside the knickers of a snooty Natalie Herzen, but failed.

I think you're wrong about Nechaev with regard to power largely because his conspiratorial brand of revolutionary methods was for a time out of fashion, in Russia at least, when he was active. It was the turn of the Lavrovists and the like, and the eventual, awfully naive 'going to the people.' There was a Bakuninist, insurrectionary wing of the wider movement, but the Russian Jacobin tradition, of which Nechaev was a part, wouldn't make a comeback until a few years later, when he was languishing in the Fortress. And those that took up such struggle in the People's Will refused to help break him out.


----------



## Joe Reilly (Jul 5, 2012)

[quote="Captain Hurrah, post: 11318520, member: 47466]... Nechaev tried to play on his reputation and get inside the kickers of a snooty Natalie Herzen, but failed.
 [/quote]
On top of everything a foot fethishist?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

_I was bullied into it._



> Precarity is opportunity. Fuck social mobility. Fuck security. Fuck money. Fuck rising above your class rather than with it. Fuck marriage, mortgage, monogamy, *and every other small, ugly ambition we were bullied into pursuing*. We should have abandoned them long before we were obliged to do so, and now we have no choice.


----------



## JimW (Jul 5, 2012)

She'd need a peerage if she wants to rise above her class.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 5, 2012)

(((Laurie's self-awareness)))


----------



## rekil (Jul 5, 2012)

Laura stopped following PD on the twitter for some reason.  It's like jumping over the side of the Granma.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 5, 2012)

"Precarity is opportunity. Fuck social mobility. Fuck security. Fuck money. Fuck rising above your class rather than with it. Fuck marriage, mortgage, monogamy, *and every other small, ugly ambition we were bullied into pursuing*. We should have abandoned them long before we were obliged to do so, and now we have no choice."​ 

She surely found that in an old fifth-form 'punk' fanzine circa 1979.


----------



## rekil (Jul 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> _I was bullied into it._


Yeah, fuck money.


> Two weeks ago, I stayed with an impossibly glamorous friend who insisted upon dressing me up in her latest acquisition, an Alexander McQueen gown.


Bullied into it.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> Yeah, fuck money.
> 
> Bullied into it.


 
I need to hang around a bit more with people like these


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> _I was bullied into it._


 
"The Occupy movement is throwing cold water on the 30-year mass hallucination of the neoliberal consensus."


It's throwing a thimble of piss on it, Laurie.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 5, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> I need to hang around a bit more with people like these


 
You want to wear an Alexander McQueen gown?


----------



## rekil (Jul 5, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> I need to hang around a bit more with people like these


More of a Givenchy kind of guy meself.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 5, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> You want to wear an Alexander McQueen gown?


 
at my age one loses many inhibitions


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 5, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> "The Occupy movement is throwing cold water on the 30-year mass hallucination of the neoliberal consensus."
> 
> 
> It's throwing a thimble of piss on it, Laurie.


 

How dare you, those contemporary ritual clowning lessons are destroying capitalism as we speak


----------



## rekil (Jul 5, 2012)

Tibetan singing bowls.

If half the shite we've quoted was put up on her wiki, it'd get deleted, because the eds would assume it was some loon taking the piss.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 5, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> at my age one loses many inhibitions


I bet they all say that down the nick!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> PD blogpost 'cobbled' together from the little bit communism gags. Radical Cobblers. Any objections, suggestions etc.


 
A fart in a crowded lift is a little bit of communism.


----------



## rekil (Jul 5, 2012)

Fart advantage aside, are lifts more communism than escalators?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 5, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> "The Occupy movement is throwing cold water on the 30-year mass hallucination of the neoliberal consensus."
> 
> 
> It's throwing a thimble of piss on it, Laurie.


 
That's what you have to do with mass hallucinations: throw cold water on them.

Just like you have to shoot people who are "boat happy".


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

"30-year mass hallucination of the neoliberal consensus." - who was hallucinating here? Serious point - us or them? We weren't and neither were they.


----------



## love detective (Jul 5, 2012)

> In so many ways, Athens reminds me of a sun soaked Weimar Berlin


 
this is getting such a hackneyed/cliched thing to say


----------



## love detective (Jul 5, 2012)

> "Precarity is opportunity. Fuck social mobility. Fuck security. Fuck money. Fuck rising above your class rather than with it. Fuck marriage, mortgage, monogamy, and every other small, ugly ambition we were bullied into pursuing. We should have abandoned them long before we were obliged to do so, and now we have no choice."


 
Although still get a taxi to Heathrow from central london when you're going on your poverty tourism hollies


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 5, 2012)

she was in Weimar?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

> Fuck rising above your class rather than with it.


 
This means _staying_ in your class right? Or that the top-end middle class are on the rise together?


----------



## love detective (Jul 5, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> she was in Weimar?


 
In so many ways


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 5, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> she was in Weimar?


Is she Zelig or Gump?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> she was in Weimar?


Yeah, doing burlesque and cabaret - they made a film and opera and all that about her.


----------



## co-op (Jul 5, 2012)

Nylock said:


> ...Maybe you should do a two-column thing next with 'Very Communism' down the left side (natch  ) and 'Not so Communism' down the right side.... Maybe....


 

This used to be a staple of the women's mags - "Hot & _Not_", "Blinging & Minging" etc.

I'm thinking for Workers Girder it's got to be "Communist" & "Communisn't".


----------



## rekil (Jul 5, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> she was in Weimar?


I posted the evidence earlier.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

co-op said:


> This used to be a staple of the women's mags - "Hot & _Not_", "Blinging & Minging" etc.
> 
> I'm thinking for Workers Girder it's got to be "Communist" & "Communisn't".


 
Oh yes.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> I posted the evidence earlier.
> 
> View attachment 20843


Anti-fasction action against war laurie p and fascism. Sweet.


----------



## rekil (Jul 5, 2012)

PD unfollowed AND blocked. 

Radical Cobblers blogpost seems quite popular. Nearly 300 views today, including one in Greece, heh.


----------



## co-op (Jul 5, 2012)

Communist; giving your fag end to a homeless beggar
Communisn't; getting your fag to run down the shops and buy some more.


----------



## co-op (Jul 5, 2012)

Communist; being a columnist in the Indy
Communisn't; being a fifth columnist


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> PD unfollowed AND blocked.



I've been blocked by Dawn Purvis (former PUP leader) and Mark Bradshaw (Bristol Labour Party muppet), but no one in Laura's league


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

Oh wow, the t-shirt thing is going to run now - i see hordes of DG in their spear of destiny t-shirts..

I understand John Lydon is on#*bbcqt* tonight. He might be interested in the number of Sex Pistols tshirts on Greek immigrants at this rally. 

A scary fascist encounter is already written up, before even leaving home i bet you. One of communal work in some old shop. One of no-future graduates. All done by t-shirt.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 5, 2012)

There ain't no future in Penny's dreaming


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

Join labour for the real face of your future.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 5, 2012)

...or sit on your arse with a bit of u75 meta-commentary. The truly radical position


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> ...or sit on your arse with a bit of u75 meta-commentary. The truly radical position


 
Fantastic false opposition Paul. Be a labour stooge or do nothing. There are simply no other options.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> ...or sit on your arse with a bit of u75 meta-commentary. The truly radical position


You've spent two days talking non-stop about fuck all btw. As ever, you want it both ways.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 5, 2012)

Paul?    You can be in Labour without being a Labour stooge.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Paul?  You can be in Labour without being a Labour stooge.


No _you_ can't.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 5, 2012)

that's a clincher


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

You're a labour activist. How is this hard to get your head around?


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

I've just read about this laurie penny for the first time, seems fucking bizarre her position considering her background. Can anyone explain the events/environment in the UK that has made her a "face of the new left"??


----------



## articul8 (Jul 5, 2012)

Activists are active in the party.  My activism is outside


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Activists are active in the party. My activism is outside


 
Even better. The logic of your external activism - join and vote labour. (your claim isn't true btw is it?)


----------



## bluestreak (Jul 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Paul?  You can be in Labour without being a Labour stooge.


 
no you can't.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> I've just read about this laurie penny for the first time, seems fucking bizarre her position considering her background. Can anyone explain the events/environment in the UK that has made her a "face of the new left"??


Or, you can fuck off the thread with your assumptions of having anything in common with any person on here.


----------



## bluestreak (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> I've just read about this laurie penny for the first time, seems fucking bizarre her position considering her background. Can anyone explain the events/environment in the UK that has made her a "face of the new left"??


 
upper middle class networking.  cool points.  the independent ffs.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Even better. The logic of your external activism - join and vote labour. (your claim isn't true btw is it?)


Almost entirely true


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Almost entirely true


There we go.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jul 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Activists are active in the party. My activism is outside


doing what?


----------



## articul8 (Jul 5, 2012)

Like local anticuts stuff, attacking labour group on council


----------



## Pickman's model (Jul 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Like local anticuts stuff, attacking labour group on council


strange that you do that and then tell people to vote labour


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Like local anticuts stuff, attacking labour group on council


Arguing people should join and vote labour.


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:
			
		

> Or, you can fuck off the thread with your assumptions of having anything in common with any person on here.



When did I ever claim to have anything in common with cunts like you?

Fucking proud I don't tbh.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> When did I ever claim to have anything in common with cunts like you?
> 
> Fucking proud I don't tbh.


Not the thread for you then my little tory.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> When did I ever claim to have anything in common with cunts like you?
> 
> Fucking proud I don't tbh.


so you think everyone here's a cunt? top job, grit


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

Pickman's model said:
			
		

> so you think everyone here's a cunt? top job, grit



Just people like you and butchers.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Like local anticuts stuff, attacking labour group on council





Pickman's model said:


> strange that you do that and then tell people to vote labour


 I don't, at local elections.  I didn't myself.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> Just people like you and butchers.


you're a curious one. you've said things about yourself, which you contradict through other things you post. there's more to you than you'd like to let on. and none of it in a good way.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I don't, at local elections. I didn't myself.


Just at the national ones then.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jul 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I don't, at local elections. I didn't myself.


so why are you in the labour party when you don't give a stuff for it where you live?


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

Pickman's model said:
			
		

> there's more to you than you'd like to let on. and none of it in a good way.



I'm Batman.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> I'm Batman.


more like eric pickles, i'm thinking. but without his charm, wit and good humour.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 5, 2012)

not the new left. that was ages ago. perhaps the new,new left. Or not.


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

Pickman's model said:
			
		

> more like eric pickles, i'm thinking. but without his charm, wit and good humour.


 
Hehe, had to google him! Great name.

I thought you lot would have had figured out that I'm an MI5 agent by now


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Fantastic false opposition Paul. Be a labour stooge or do nothing. There are simply no other options.


 
Which one is Labour, Moe, Larry or Curly?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> Hehe, had to google him! Great name.
> 
> I thought you lot would have had figured out that I'm an MI5 agent by now


 
Mmmm, the only Irish-born folk that they ever knowingly hired were touts.


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Mmmm, the only Irish-born folk that they ever knowingly hired were touts.


 
LOL


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 5, 2012)

Did Laura & Molly send out a press release before they left or something?

http://www.athinapoli.gr/2012/07/h-molly-crabapple-laurie-penny.html


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Like local anticuts stuff, attacking labour group on council


 
Thing is, that's what used to happen in the good old days of LP membership (pre-new Labour) anyway. You weren't under any stricture(s) that prevented external activism *or* having a go at your local concillors (even if they were in the same CLP as you) if they were pulling cunt's tricks.
Now, though? Your activism *has* to be outside the party, unless it's sanctioned activism. A decent Labour Party that had any intention at all of even giving lip service to socialism, would mean that you didn't need to go outside the party to participate in that sort of activism unless you wanted to.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> Hehe, had to google him! Great name.
> 
> I thought you lot would have had figured out that I'm an MI5 agent by now


i didn't think they'd be as daft as to hire YOU


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

Pickman's model said:


> i didn't think they'd be as daft as to hire YOU


 
Maybe thats their cunning plan? Or maybe all you cunts are so boring and ineffective, no one gives a shit.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> I'm Batman.


 
Has your officer tried to bugger you yet?


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Has your officer tried to bugger you yet?


 
Batman, not *a* batman. For a country that invented the language you lot seem to fuck it up all the time.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> Maybe thats their cunning plan? Or maybe all you cunts are so boring and ineffective, no one gives a shit.


You spin a good load of bollocks and fantasy as fact don't you. Maybe this is the thread for you after all.


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> You spin a good load of bollocks and fantasy as fact don't you. Maybe this is the thread for you after all.


 
What fantasy is that?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> What fantasy is that?


Sorry, lost patience.


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Sorry, lost patience.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

Are you all coked up right now grit?


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Are you all coked up right now grit?


 
Not tonight my good man, taking a bit of a break for a bit, well at least trying to 

Who would have thought it was addictive? I thought I had a habit smoking spliffs everyday, fucking hell I didnt know how good I had it.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

Well what excuse have you got then for posting this boring shit on this thread?


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Well what excuse have you got then for posting this boring shit on this thread?


 
Intellectual masturbation, same as you.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

What on earth do you even think that means?


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> What on earth do you even think that means?


 
BUTCHERS BINGO!!! 

I win I win! Where do I collect the prize?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

This is even worse than_ offenderati. The game for one cunt to play on his own._


----------



## Pickman's model (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> BUTCHERS BINGO!!!
> 
> I win I win! Where do I collect the prize?


there's a ditch in co. donegal waiting for you.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> Batman, not *a* batman. For a country that invented the language you lot seem to fuck it up all the time.


 
You're no Bruce Wayne, so the only sort of batman you could be is a manservant.

And we all know what "manservant" is slang for.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Are you all coked up right now grit?


 
Coke-user?
Kind of figures, I suppose.


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

Pickman's model said:


> there's a ditch in co. donegal waiting for you.


 
Always wanted to be a land owner.


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Coke-user?
> Kind of figures, I suppose.


 
Its only recent really, all that money was making the mattress lumpy.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> Its only recent really, all that money was making the mattress lumpy.


That wasn't money.


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> That wasn't money.


 
Russians seemed to accept it gladly, god bless them and their smuggling ways.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> Russians seemed to accept it gladly, god bless them and their smuggling ways.


Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.


----------



## weepiper (Jul 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> _I was bullied into it._


 
'we'?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

weepiper said:


> 'we'?


Exactly. 'we' never got the chance to be bullied into it my house. 'we' never had blah blah blah


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jul 5, 2012)

> Now that narrative is collapsing, threatening to bring the whole thing crashing down. So let it come down. There is more than enough room for us to build new lives in the rubble.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2012)

Yeah, but not with the muslims.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> Russians seemed to accept it gladly, god bless them and their smuggling ways.


you're a bigger tit than laurie penny.


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

discokermit said:


> you're a bigger tit than laurie penny.


 
Yeah I do it for free though, its for the love of the art.


----------



## discokermit (Jul 5, 2012)

grit said:


> Yeah I do it for free though, its for the love of the art.


fuck off.


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

discokermit said:


> fuck off.


----------



## rekil (Jul 5, 2012)

Mr. Grit, sir, be quiet now will you; there's a good gentleman. You'll upset the lads.


----------



## grit (Jul 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> You'll upset the lads.


 
They are capable of doing that all on their own, bunch of miserable cunts.


----------



## rekil (Jul 6, 2012)

It goes without saying that there have been numerous PMs of support but then there's this sort thing as well, gratuitous Vaneigemism and all. 


> nothingiseverlost says:
> July 5, 2012 at 8:29 pm (Edit)
> 
> Next time you want to hang an entire article off a throwaway paragraph, you might want to make sure the point you’re making is a bit better. Once you strip away the oh-so-interesting-and-original point that Penny’s a bit posh, which is definitely a fascinating insight that no-one has ever come up with before, all you’re left with is the observation that you can’t have communism in capitalist society. That’s true, of course, but it’s also the case that you can’t have communism at all unless it’s to emerge out of existing society, so I think it’s legitimate enough to look for tendencies within this world that point towards a rupture with it.
> ...


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 6, 2012)

Mein gott! Trapped in the programitism of the social-democratic compromise or what!


----------



## Balbi (Jul 6, 2012)

I didn't realise you were taking submissions


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 6, 2012)

Hang on, m. is that you posting as nothingiseverlost?


----------



## barney_pig (Jul 6, 2012)

Looks like a denouncement on libcom is imminent


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 6, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> Looks like a denouncement on libcom is imminent


 
Does nobody say "denunciation" anymore?


----------



## Fruitloop (Jul 6, 2012)

they seemed to be all the rage at one point


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 6, 2012)

One does not do communisation with an e-fag. One uses a hammer.


----------



## JimW (Jul 6, 2012)

Well, that's us told. Cadge a fag?


----------



## barney_pig (Jul 6, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Does nobody say "denunciation" anymore?


thats the one!


----------



## rekil (Jul 6, 2012)

Balbi said:


> I didn't realise you were taking submissions


Yep, it's just a total free for all atm. Forbidden to forbid!

Blocking party combabes that are mildly critical of you - Communist
Bloc Party - Communisn't


----------



## articul8 (Jul 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Hang on, m. is that you posting as nothingiseverlost?


who is m.?  Molly?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 6, 2012)

articul8 said:


> who is m.? Molly?


None of your business. But not anyone like that no.


----------



## rekil (Jul 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Oh wow, the t-shirt thing is going to run now - i see hordes of DG in their spear of destiny t-shirts..
> 
> I understand John Lydon is on#*bbcqt* tonight. He might be interested in the number of Sex Pistols tshirts on Greek immigrants at this rally.
> 
> A scary fascist encounter is already written up, before even leaving home i bet you. One of communal work in some old shop. One of no-future graduates. All done by t-shirt.


They're going on about the graffiti. They're _that_ stuck.


----------



## belboid (Jul 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Hang on, m. is that you posting as nothingiseverlost?


sounds a bit too northern to me


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 6, 2012)

Not sure we're on about the same bloke here tbh. That said, north of Gloucester is too northern for me.


----------



## rekil (Jul 6, 2012)

http://nothingiseverlost.wordpress.com/

Unreadable. What's wrong with paragraphs?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 6, 2012)

copliker said:


> http://nothingiseverlost.wordpress.com/
> 
> Unreadable. What's wrong with paragraphs?


Communisn't.

I saw a communess out and about this morning.


----------



## rekil (Jul 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I saw a communess out and about this morning.


The Barefoot Communessa.


----------



## Balbi (Jul 6, 2012)

Twitter informs me that The Unsinkable Molly Crabapple and LP are currently doing cigarettes in a cafe, it's LP's first time for that and therefore she must be in Europe.

Thanks twitter.


----------



## rekil (Jul 6, 2012)

So shit.

Help, where is the austerity? Are you a golden dawn?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 6, 2012)

Wow, i was pretty close with my list. Note the absence of terms to allow these clowns to talk to normal people about how austerity is effecting them, what community/work based resistances have developed - what they're based on etc. But just ANARCHISTS.


----------



## JimW (Jul 6, 2012)

Pictured cropped oddly - that full question reads "May I draw you... ...into the blackhole-like vortex of my transnational egotism?"


----------



## rekil (Jul 6, 2012)

Come and sup the piss of off-grid go-getters filtered through the daft sock of conceited liberalism.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 6, 2012)

it won't be france, those bastards went with the smoking ban some years ago. No gaulloisse with your crepe these days


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jul 6, 2012)

germany


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 6, 2012)

A bitte irony


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jul 6, 2012)

I've only just got round to reading the 'Laurie Penny' article in the Workers' Girder - great stuff! Congratulations. 

http://proletariandemocracy.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/workers-girder-issue-11.pdf


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 6, 2012)

copliker said:


> Help, where is the austerity?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 6, 2012)

articul8 said:


> who is m.? Molly?


 
Are you calling butch a Molly?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Wow, i was pretty close with my list. Note the absence of terms to allow these clowns to talk to normal people about how austerity is effecting them, what community/work based resistances have developed - what they're based on etc. But just ANARCHISTS.


 
TBF, it's of a piece with her non-nuanced perspective on politics in general.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 6, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Are you calling butch a Molly?


Molly Maguire


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 6, 2012)

Should've joined the labour party.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Should've joined the labour party.


Didn't Blair n Brown put a fair bit of money Pinkertons' way?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 6, 2012)

WHO ARE THOSE GUYS?!


----------



## rekil (Jul 7, 2012)

They roped some poor mug into doing a load of work for them, for nothing one assumes, for the sheer glory of it all, and now he's gone and lost his iphone. 


> We would really like to fundraise to get Yiannis a new IPhone - he’s as financially precarious as any young person in Greece and as a journalist he can’t really function without one. We can’t afford to buy him one outright, but we will both be contributing. Anything you can donate, however big or small, won’t solve the Eurozone crisis, but it will go a small way towards financing independent journalism in Greece. Anything extra that we raise over the cost of a phone will go towards a plane ticket so that Yiannis can come to the book launch in London in September.


Stinks.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 7, 2012)

copliker said:


> They roped some poor mug into doing a load of work for them, for nothing one assumes, for the sheer glory of it all, and now he's gone and lost his iphone.
> 
> Stinks.


 
Hang on, an iPhone shouldn't be that expensive for someone on Penny's salary, surely?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 7, 2012)

get crabby to flog a sketch maybe?


----------



## rekil (Jul 7, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> get crabby to flog a sketch maybe?


Or dip into that 65k she made on kickstarter? Or ask the random house publisher wanker or even 'the rents' to sort it? If it actually happened at all.


----------



## fractionMan (Jul 7, 2012)

copliker said:


> They roped some poor mug into doing a load of work for them, for nothing one assumes, for the sheer glory of it all, and now he's gone and lost his iphone.


 
Is that quote for real?


----------



## rekil (Jul 7, 2012)

fractionMan said:


> Is that quote for real?


Believe.

http://www.penny-red.com/post/26693844345/emergency-fundraising-help-a-greek-journalist


----------



## grit (Jul 7, 2012)

copliker said:


> Believe.
> 
> http://www.penny-red.com/post/26693844345/emergency-fundraising-help-a-greek-journalist


 
Thats fucking horrific.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 7, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> That's it exactly. I lost the argument to shelf her book in the fiction section of the Hyrda bookshop.


 
I asked in there today about the Laurie Penny book. Much hilarity ensued 

The counter-chap did mention he had unilaterally put Bone's biography in the fiction section, and seemed miffed that apparently no one had noticed this small act of autonomous defiance


----------



## fractionMan (Jul 7, 2012)

copliker said:


> Believe.
> 
> http://www.penny-red.com/post/26693844345/emergency-fundraising-help-a-greek-journalist


 
*barf*


----------



## audiotech (Jul 7, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Molly Maguire


 
_Molly Maguires_ please.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 7, 2012)

But a singular one would be a...?


----------



## audiotech (Jul 7, 2012)

....secret member of the _Molly Maguires_. Name unknown.


----------



## redsquirrel (Jul 8, 2012)

copliker said:


> They roped some poor mug into doing a load of work for them, for nothing one assumes, for the sheer glory of it all, and now he's gone and lost his iphone.
> 
> Stinks.


Some Greeks are struggling to afford food, rent or electricity and they want people to chip in and buy this bloke an iPhone, when they're both earning very good money.
Fucking wankers.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 8, 2012)

What are you on about,  the money raised will also get the bloke a ticket to the book launch. Your attitude is communisn't


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 8, 2012)

I am waiting for a head to head over too many  tequila cocktails at a loft party for destitute artists  between Laurie and this one: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/cel...ect-weekend-Tali-Lennox-model-and-artist.html


----------



## barney_pig (Jul 8, 2012)

Ffs! Every time I start thinking we are getting a bit OTT on ms. Penny, she goes and proves that nothing we can come up with can compare with her own fuck(t)wittery.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jul 8, 2012)

Unbelievable about the iphone stuff. Molly is selling paintings and prints for £250 each, Laura gets £500 for each of her Indie columns, both can afford regular foreign travel and airfares, and they ask for donations for a phone which costs about £200?!

Laura even had to resort to Twitter to ask people to STOP sending money in (MUGS!) because they had got too much. I'm sure all accounts will be published in full in due course and all money donated will be fully accounted for...


----------



## Balbi (Jul 8, 2012)

The money was just resting in my account...


----------



## articul8 (Jul 8, 2012)

grime/dubstep event in solidarity with the Greeks


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 8, 2012)

Balbi said:


> The money was just resting in my account...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 8, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> I am waiting for a head to head over too many tequila cocktails at a loft party for destitute artists between Laurie and this one: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/cel...ect-weekend-Tali-Lennox-model-and-artist.html


 
Fucking hell, what an utter waste of words that "article" is"


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jul 8, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Fucking hell, what an utter waste of words that "article" is"


fucking hell! Just read that. I thought the Telegraph had started up a spoof website or something!

She and Laura would probably get on well....if they could avoid talking about themselves for more than a few seconds.




> I don't really go out clubbing these days.


 - yeah, this 19 year old obviously banged it far too hard for 20 years during the rave scene




> [getting my job]...was all down to luck.


 



> It hasn't been easy though, getting used to living without the routine of lessons. I've had to make my own schedule and that was tough at first.


 




> I love quietly flicking through some of the many books we have in our house, *looking at all the pictures*.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 8, 2012)

> [getting my job]...was all down to luck.


 
Yes, i'm sure your world famous mum had no useful contacts at all.


----------



## Jon-of-arc (Jul 8, 2012)

so why is grit a tory?


----------



## imposs1904 (Jul 9, 2012)

Annie must be so proud.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 9, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> Annie must be so proud.


Doubleplusgood.


----------



## rekil (Jul 9, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> I am waiting for a head to head over too many tequila cocktails at a loft party for destitute artists between Laurie and this one: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/cel...ect-weekend-Tali-Lennox-model-and-artist.html


This one is just plain creepy. My perfect weekend: Lisa Watson, editor of Penguin News, Falkland Islands


> If I'm feeling adventurous, I'll end up at a house party, where I'll invariably bump in to my 18-year-old son, Jacob. That's the nice thing about the Falkland Islands, it's the same size as Wales but everyone knows everyone and all ages mix together.


----------



## barney_pig (Jul 9, 2012)

not to forget the other subject of this thread; the good doctor has opined on the matters of import in the new International socialism journal http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=819&issue=135 among other gems he explains why the SWP supported the clerical fascism of Muslim brotherhood in Egypt:




> _"The second round of the presidential elections saw yet another boycott, this time led by Sabbahi. But the implied logic, that there is no difference between Shafiq and Morsi, is badly flawed. Shafiq is the open candidate of counter-revolution. The Brotherhood, by contrast, is a bourgeois party with deep social roots built up in opposition to Mubarak, which hoped the revolution would lift it into the role of manager of Egyptian capitalism. But it is now in SCAF’s firing line: the dissolution of parliament directly targets the Brotherhood, which ineffectually dominated the People’s Assembly. If Morsi does indeed become president, hedged in by a military reasserting its dominance, and with the pressures for austerity measures becoming stronger, these contradictions will probably become severe._
> _Putting the “revolutionary house in order” therefore requires a revolutionary left that combines a principled opposition to SCAF with the understanding that building a road to the majority of the working class means working with everyone threatened by the counter-revolution."_


 
whilst it voted against Syriza in greece because Syriza is apparently a radical left of reformist origins which needs to be opposed; the delusional self aggrandisement of this his beyond parody:


> _This situation naturally poses the question of how the revolutionary left relates to the radical left parties. This has provoked the most debate in the case of Greece. Syriza is simply one strand in what is, in relative terms, the largest radical left in Europe. The other two main strands are represented by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), historically the most powerful organised force in the workers’ movement, and Antarsya (the Front of the Anti-Capitalist Left), a coalition of far-left groups of which the most significant are the New Left Current (NAR) and the Socialist Workers Party (SEK), the Greek sister organisation of the British SWP. Antarsya’s decision to stand in the 17 June elections, after a low score of 1.2 percent on 6 May, which was predictably squeezed down to 0.33 percent five weeks later, provoked a hubbub of condemnation, This has been particularly intense in those parts of the blogosphere inhabited by armchair strategists whose confidence in pronouncing about Greece seems in inverse relation to their proximity to the country._


no worries, the CC is never wrong, its reality that's at fault, and if it wasn't for those moaning minnies on the internet then everything would be fine.


----------



## grit (Jul 9, 2012)

Jon-of-arc said:


> so why is grit a tory?


 
eh?


----------



## nino_savatte (Jul 9, 2012)

copliker said:


> This one is just plain creepy. My perfect weekend: Lisa Watson, editor of Penguin News, Falkland Islands


That really makes me want to move there. Like fuck does it.


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 9, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> the clerical fascism of Muslim brotherhood in Egypt


 
You wot?

I don't suppose you'd care to back up that description of the MB with a teeny bit of evidence or argument would you?


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jul 9, 2012)

Callinicos said:
			
		

> _"This has been particularly intense in those parts of the blogosphere inhabited by armchair strategists whose confidence in pronouncing about Greece seems in inverse relation to their proximity to the country."_




Looks like a direct slap at Richard Seymour.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 9, 2012)

she went to Greece, she had a thirst for "knowledge"....


----------



## Jon-of-arc (Jul 9, 2012)

grit said:


> eh?



A couple of pages back. Big slahging sesh and butchers or someone called you a tory.

Just wondered what that was all about. It could be true, or it could be one of the massive leeaps of logic that occur in p&p because a poster says something off-message. But id like to know why it was said.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 9, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Looks like a direct slap at Richard Seymour.


Certainly does.


----------



## Jon-of-arc (Jul 9, 2012)

Jon-of-arc said:


> or it could be one of the massive leeaps of logic that occur in p&p because a poster says something off-message. .



See meth lab being denounced as a tory on the jimmy carr thread for a particularly fuck witted example of the above. Funny, but fuck witted.


----------



## grit (Jul 9, 2012)

Jon-of-arc said:


> A couple of pages back. Big slahging sesh and butchers or someone called you a tory.
> 
> Just wondered what that was all about. It could be true, or it could be one of the massive leeaps of logic that occur in p&p because a poster says something off-message. But id like to know why it was said.


 
I'm not tory or labour, I think they are all cunts, I dont even vote.


----------



## Jon-of-arc (Jul 9, 2012)

grit said:


> I think they are all cunts, I dont even vote.



The true mark of a tory


----------



## grit (Jul 9, 2012)

Jon-of-arc said:


> The true mark of a tory


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 9, 2012)

Jon-of-arc said:


> See meth lab being denounced as a tory


 
Now _there's _a man I'd lıke to see ın the cabınet.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jul 9, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Now _there's _a man I'd lıke to see ın the cabınet.


 
The medicine cabinet.


----------



## Jon-of-arc (Jul 9, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Now _there's _a man I'd lıke to see ın the cabınet.



You say that, but if the day ever came, his neo-liberal views and self serving nature would swiftly bring IDSs tenure as top cameronite lick spittle and toriest tory in a cabinet full of torys to a spectacular end.

I mean, have you heard methlabs views on the deregulation of the financial sector? His stance on the eu? Scary stuff...


----------



## barney_pig (Jul 9, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> You wot?
> 
> I don't suppose you'd care to back up that description of the MB with a teeny bit of evidence or argument would you?


not my words; comrade Cliff's:_ "The British are at the same time doing all in their power to foster the Moslem Brotherhood, a clerical-fascist organization in Egypt, which is at present organizing branches in Palestine." _http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1946/07/provocation.htm


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 10, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> The medicine cabinet.


 
it's keeping him out of the medicine cabinet that's the problem...


----------



## Balbi (Jul 10, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> it's keeping him out of the medicine cabinet that's the problem...


 
It's not a problem, it's a hobby.


----------



## andy2002 (Jul 12, 2012)

Anyone heard anything about the Penny Dreadful v Richard Herring Twitter row that's been 'raging' for the last day or two? Something to do with him making a joke about rohypnol to a female heckler at a show...


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 12, 2012)

andy2002 said:


> Anyone heard anything about the Penny Dreadful v Richard Herring Twitter row that's been 'raging' for the last day or two? Something to do with him making a joke about rohypnol to a female heckler at a show...


Richard Herring fails to dig his way out of a rape-joke shaped hole


----------



## andy2002 (Jul 12, 2012)

Ah, that explains it. Herring should know better – a silly, unpleasant 'joke'.


----------



## rekil (Jul 12, 2012)

ooh, wrong thread,

But anyway, I see Laura found the "full communism" joke. She is for full communism now yes.


----------



## love detective (Jul 12, 2012)

only about 2-3 years late


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Jul 12, 2012)

Twitter. Will people never learn?


----------



## revol68 (Jul 12, 2012)

oh fuck has she really taken up the FULL COMMUNISM thing.


----------



## love detective (Jul 14, 2012)

> I sort of love seeing girls in Hijab over skin-tight designer jeans with major camel toe. London: never change


 
she writing for unilad now


----------



## weepiper (Jul 14, 2012)

She put up some 'but wait! Why are there anarchists outside John Lewis?' tweet today. Fuck's sake I know that and I'm not paid lots to be the voice of the radical working class youth (lol)


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 15, 2012)

i bet she'll got to spain in the near future


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 15, 2012)

weepiper said:


> She put up some 'but wait! Why are there anarchists outside John Lewis?' tweet today. Fuck's sake I know that and I'm not paid lots to be the voice of the radical working class youth (lol)


 
Ha ha.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jul 15, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> i bet she'll got to spain in the near future


Where she will meet someone called Pedro and sleep on Juanita's (an artist) floor.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 15, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> i bet she'll got to spain in the near future


 
EXCLUSIVE! OUR INTREPID REPORTER FILES AN EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF THE BATTLE OF THE EBRO!

(Alternatively: 'The Ghost Of Claud Cockburn is back. And this time it's personal...')


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 15, 2012)

"As told to Compañero Johann"


----------



## rekil (Jul 15, 2012)

revol68 said:


> oh fuck has she really taken up the FULL COMMUNISM thing.




Fullcommunisn't. RT'd by libcom as well.


So all that 'rent crisis' nonsense was definitely lies then?


----------



## revol68 (Jul 15, 2012)

copliker said:


> View attachment 21162
> 
> Fullcommunisn't. RT'd by libcom as well.
> 
> ...


 
idiot didn't even do it properly, it's FULL COMMUNISM not Full Communism, prick.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 15, 2012)

Fairweather anti-caps.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jul 15, 2012)

fairweather caps lock


----------



## Balbi (Jul 16, 2012)

No lock but the CAPS LOCK?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jul 16, 2012)

whose lock? OUR LOCK!


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jul 17, 2012)

A CAPS LOCK! REPEATED! WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED!


----------



## love detective (Jul 17, 2012)

i wish i had one of those caps lock comments, they have all been pretty good


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> i wish i had one of those caps lock comments


 
You will.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jul 17, 2012)

CAPS LOCK SCUM! OFF OUR KEYBOARDS!


----------



## love detective (Jul 17, 2012)

yeah, quality slipping a bit now though


----------



## andy2002 (Jul 17, 2012)

THEY SAY CUT BACK!
WE SAY CAPS LOCK!
CUT BACK!
CAPS LOCK!
CUT BACK!
CAPS LOCK!


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 17, 2012)




----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 17, 2012)

Any minute now an affinity group of dreadlocked laptoperati will rush in and CAPSLOCK-ON to the server.


----------



## rekil (Jul 17, 2012)

Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer
We'll keep the shift key pressed down here


----------



## JimW (Jul 17, 2012)

Then comrades, come rally

Embiggen our type face

The Internationale

Is writ in upper case.


----------



## weepiper (Jul 17, 2012)

Blocco maiuscole a trionferà,
Blocco maiuscole a trionferà,
Blocco maiuscole a trionferà,
Evviva il comunismo e la libertà!


----------



## newbie (Jul 18, 2012)

JimW said:


> Then comrades, come rally
> 
> Embiggen our type face
> 
> ...


 
no it's not, you've been suckered into elitism by those with a vested interest in preserving the aristocratic power of the upper case

the caps
the caps
we've got to get rid of the caps


----------



## magneze (Jul 18, 2012)

newbie said:


> no it's not, you've been suckered into elitism by those with a vested interest in preserving the aristocratic power of the upper case


too right but you my friend have fallen into the trap of using punctuation division is exactly what they want dont fall for it


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 18, 2012)

magneze said:


> punctuation division



Is that the EDL elite?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 18, 2012)

trying to think of a joe hill one...the capslock bosses killed you joe....


----------



## newbie (Jul 18, 2012)

magneze said:


> too right but you my friend have fallen into the trap of using punctuation division is exactly what they want dont fall for it


only primitivists and lifestylers believe it's possible to live under capsitalism without compromises, and that includes use of the comma.


----------



## magneze (Jul 18, 2012)

newbie said:


> capsitalism


----------



## rekil (Jul 18, 2012)




----------



## love detective (Jul 18, 2012)

sorry to but in on the excellent caps lock work, but Penny fans can catch her speaking at the Big Tent festival this weekend in Falkland

Along with Adam Ramsay who bills himself as a 'direct action specialist', she will be a panel member on a session entitled 'Dissent Entrepreneurs'


----------



## TruXta (Jul 18, 2012)

love detective said:


> 'Dissent Entrepreneurs'


 
At least they're not shy about it.


----------



## Riklet (Jul 18, 2012)

I keep reading that as dissident for some reason?

They wont play by the man's shift key rules.


----------



## Smokeandsteam (Jul 18, 2012)

love detective said:


> Along with Adam Ramsay who bills himself as a 'direct action specialist',


----------



## Riklet (Jul 18, 2012)

he's occupying the co-op sponsored big tent as we type.

survival rations of organic falafel & mineral water.


----------



## rekil (Jul 18, 2012)

love detective said:


> sorry to but in on the excellent caps lock work, but Penny fans can catch her speaking at the Big Tent festival this weekend in Falkland
> 
> Along with Adam Ramsay who bills himself as a 'direct action specialist', she will be a panel member on a session entitled 'Dissent Entrepreneurs'


Adam Ramsay is an aristocrat isn't he? With a gigantic family castle house thing and all that.


----------



## BigTom (Jul 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> Adam Ramsay is an aristocrat isn't he? With a gigantic family castle house thing and all that.


 
Yeah, daily mail did a proper hatchet job on him after the fortnum and mason arrests:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...rew-castle-arrested-alongside-protesters.html

He's a sound & nice lad though, not to be considered in the same bracket as LP by any means imo.  Direct action specialist lol. I wonder if he actually said that or if the organisers did.


----------



## rekil (Jul 18, 2012)

That reminds me of this shithead the other day.



			
				crabapple said:
			
		

> Happy Bastille Day. May you tear down the massive prisons in your own life, as a lead up for dragging your aristocrats through the streets


After you. Start with Ramsay pls?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 18, 2012)

"dissent entrepeneur"


----------



## cesare (Jul 18, 2012)

"With the advent of this embryonic student movement, however, we are arguably seeing the rise of a form of contention predicated upon values of disintermediation and decentralised, entrepreneurial action undertaken by participants as ‘co-creators’ of the movement as opposed to members-as-consumers who are directed to act by an organisational oligarchy"

Blimey.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> "dissent entrepeneur"


 
make money flogging a che guevara t-shirt


----------



## love detective (Jul 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> "we are arguably seeing the rise of a form of contention predicated upon values of disintermediation and decentralised, entrepreneurial action undertaken by participants as ‘co-creators’"


 
the neo-liberalising of dissent continues apace, for some time now it had seemed to me to have adopted the practices of neo-liberalism, and now with that process so far gone it's also adopting its rhetoric - Penny is recuperating neoliberalism!


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 18, 2012)

i witnessed an excruciating exchange in our house the other day.

someone was wearing this t-shirt*:






and as a result of a slightly garbled conversation, 'random visitor x' is going back to russia under the impression that our laura's the saviour/future of journalism and the left 

*as an endorsement of LP.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 18, 2012)

Speaking of neo-liberalism eating radical politics and shitting it out, there's also this http://farleftfashion.tumblr.com/ which I keep hoping is ironic but it's blatantly not.


----------



## love detective (Jul 18, 2012)




----------



## rekil (Jul 18, 2012)

_'Clare Solomon - radical former ULU President who put looking fabulous at the heart of dissent.'_

.

...


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 18, 2012)

love detective said:


>


 
wtf.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 18, 2012)

what is Ken doing on a tumblr page about fashion ?


----------



## Blagsta (Jul 18, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> what is Ken doing on a tumblr page about fashion ?


What's he doing on a page about the far left?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 18, 2012)

What is Laurie Penny doing on a page about the far left?


----------



## Blagsta (Jul 18, 2012)

What's she doing on a fucking sabcat t-shirt?!?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 18, 2012)

Bankrolling the rest of their operation I would imagine


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jul 18, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> what is Ken doing on a tumblr page about fashion ?


He needs a "knew suit" apparently


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jul 18, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> What's she doing on a fucking sabcat t-shirt?!?


I'm afraid Sabcat have been doing that t-shirt for nearly two years. I think they brought it out when she just started getting known around the time of the Nov 2010 student riots...and probably before people had twigged about her.

I've never seen anyone wearing one...


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 18, 2012)

Chavez could do with a better tailor as well, he looks like 20 pounds of shit in a 15 pound bag there


----------



## love detective (Jul 18, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> wtf.


 
_'Thanks to @katelizharris for sending us this photo of her lefty friends Claire McIntyre and Jacob Bloomfield'_

The NatBol girls could show them a thing or two about fashion/anti-faschion


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 18, 2012)

Our Combat Girlfriends.

With having a mild interest in the fringe of Russian, right-wing nationalist politics, there's also the Eurasian Youth Union.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 18, 2012)

That site is unfindable now but you used to be able to google your way their with the search term 'bolshevik porn'

It was hot and wrong.


----------



## love detective (Jul 18, 2012)

They Have Left Us Alone but Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of Our Rooms


----------



## revol68 (Jul 19, 2012)

I'm very ashamed of myself, though in my defence if their is one thing to be said for Bolshevism and Nazism, they both had a good sense of aesthetic.


----------



## Fruitloop (Jul 19, 2012)

love detective said:


>


 
I am so confused by all this. Who is the dead girl? Why has that man got two nipples?

Remind me not to read this thread when I'm at work.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 19, 2012)

scarumunga and his superflous third nipple


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 19, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> That site is unfindable now but you used to be able to google your way their with the search term 'bolshevik porn'
> 
> It was hot and wrong.


 
Neo-Eurasianists.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 19, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> I've been told that there's a demonstration at 6pm at Scotland Yard. I'll be there, reporting. ‪#*Tomlinson*‬ ‪#*Metpolice*‬


 
https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/225962043235258368


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> "dissent entrepeneur"


 
Turning rebellion into money, as Jones and Strummer had it.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jul 20, 2012)

I saw our Penny at the Ian Tomlinson demo outside Scotland Yard yesterday. I was a bit disappointed she didn't get involved in any of the noise and chanting. She must have had a sore throat from Greece.

Expect 500 angry words on this in the Indy next week.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 20, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/225962043235258368


 
If I was still actively doing press for local groups then I wouldn't let her near anything involving groups I was working with. I don't take her seriously as a journalist and I don't believe for a second that she genuinely shares the convictions and ideas of the groups she writes about. Not only is she useless at her job, she's definitely untrustworthy IMHO.


----------



## barney_pig (Jul 20, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> I saw our Penny at the Ian Tomlinson demo outside Scotland Yard yesterday. I was a bit disappointed she didn't get involved in any of the noise and chanting. She must have had a sore throat from Greece.
> 
> Expect 500 angry words on this in the Indy next week.


"If you haven't got a spare Strepsil, then you are a part of the problem!"


----------



## love detective (Jul 20, 2012)

dunno if it's just me, but her Indy piece here seems to be terribly & awkwardly written - have all her sub editors fucked off and left her to her own shite?


----------



## _angel_ (Jul 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> dunno if it's just me, but her Indy piece here seems to be terribly & awkwardly written - have all her sub editors fucked off and left her to her own shite?


Blimey that's a terribly written article (and I know the Independent aren't well known for hiring people who can actually write).


----------



## Fruitloop (Jul 20, 2012)

Other stuff is better?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> dunno if it's just me, but her Indy piece here seems to be terribly & awkwardly written - have all her sub editors fucked off and left her to her own shite?


given how she's mugged them off in the past....


----------



## rekil (Jul 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> dunno if it's just me, but her Indy piece here seems to be terribly & awkwardly written - have all her sub editors fucked off and left her to her own shite?


First line is a lie isn't it?

Quality research here.


> Lots of ordinary working people have seen their homes cleared and levelled <etc etc>


"How many homes?" 
"Lots."


----------



## love detective (Jul 20, 2012)

great sensitivity shown with this



> Since it's Batman Day, everyone read this essay on @newinquiry that I helped edit.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 21, 2012)

Alexander Cockburn died.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 21, 2012)

but the flame of journalistic integrity lives on


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Alexander Cockburn died.


 
Does that mean we'll be spared his constant stream of bile about Orwell, then? I always thought it was somewhat sad that he chose to pursue his father's vendetta, even after Claud Cockburn was exposed by Orwell as being, at best, an entirely credulous purveyor of Moscow's line or, at worst, a knowingly mendacious mouthpiece masquerading as a journalist of any real substance.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 21, 2012)

Not that Blair would ever knowingly lie, obviously


----------



## phildwyer (Jul 21, 2012)

" The Greek Golden Dawn Party has its equivalents across the Continent, including in Britain, and it is into this climate of violent hostility towards migrants and foreigners that the Olympic Games, a notional celebration of team spirit across borders, is arriving."

Blimey.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 21, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Not that Blair would ever knowingly lie, obviously


 
Seeing as Blair's a pathological narcissist with the self awareness of a boiled potato, he probably eats up his own bullshit with a spoon and asks for seconds.


----------



## yield (Jul 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Alexander Cockburn died.


Another Oxford graduate.

Biggest Financial Scandal in Britain’s History, Yet Not a Single Occupy Sign; What Happened?


----------



## barney_pig (Jul 21, 2012)

> This month, while reporting in Athens, I saw a young Pakistani man get his head split open by the sort of street fascists


did she just watch? or did she do anything about it? or did she just make it up?


----------



## love detective (Jul 21, 2012)

i'd imagine she did what most people seem to do these days, and get their mobile phone out and stand around filming and gawping at said person while furiously trying to upload to facebook/twitter


----------



## rekil (Jul 21, 2012)

Now she saw it, then she didn't.


----------



## love detective (Jul 21, 2012)

interview not intervene


----------



## love detective (Jul 21, 2012)

on her twitter feed she makes it sound like she arrived at the scene after the attack (i.e. 'didn't see by whom' and makes no mention of actually seing it), but by the time the indy piece gets written she has now placed herself directly at the time & place of the attack and claims she witnessed 'street fascists' do it

bit of a developing harri there


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 21, 2012)

What's Molly up to?


----------



## love detective (Jul 21, 2012)

promising to draw a new tentacle thing for every 50 new followers she gets on twitter


----------



## rekil (Jul 21, 2012)

And saying 'comrades' a lot.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 21, 2012)

Making inane lists.


----------



## LLETSA (Jul 21, 2012)

love detective said:


> i'd imagine she did what most people seem to do these days, and get their mobile phone out and stand around filming and gawping at said person while furiously trying to upload to facebook/twitter


 

What do you expect in the age of mass imbecility?

Just look at the sheer number of funny trousers and tattooed calves. Cretinism triumphed some time ago.


----------



## kavenism (Jul 21, 2012)

> Those terrifying mascots dressed as palace guards and police officers, watching the regimented fun with their unblinking panopticon eyes, couldn't be more perfectly pitched: this is shaping up to be an international pageant of paranoia.


 
I'm having panopticon eyes for a song title.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2012)

love detective said:


> on her twitter feed she makes it sound like she arrived at the scene after the attack (i.e. 'didn't see by whom' and makes no mention of actually seing it), but by the time the indy piece gets written she has now placed herself directly at the time & place of the attack and claims she witnessed 'street fascists' do it
> 
> bit of a developing harri there


 
Might have to start referring to her as Johann-ah.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2012)

love detective said:


> promising to draw a new tentacle thing for every 50 new followers she gets on twitter


 
Is she Cthulhu?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2012)

kavenism said:


> I'm having panopticon eyes for a song title.


 It's a good'un isn't it? Make sure it's not copyrighted, though!


----------



## rekil (Jul 21, 2012)

> Those terrifying mascots dressed as palace guards and police officers, watching the regimented fun with their unblinking panopticon eyes, couldn't be more perfectly pitched: this is shaping up to be an international pageant of paranoia.


Oooh look at all them p words. Using alliteration to convey how cross she is.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 21, 2012)

copliker said:


> Oooh look at all them p words. Using alliteration to convey how cross she is.


Practically pissed off, even.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 21, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Might have to start referring to her as Johann-ah.


 
More like Pennochio:


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2012)

copliker said:


> Oooh look at all them p words. Using alliteration to convey how cross she is.


 
Thompsonesque, but without the master's style and panache.


----------



## mlyp (Jul 22, 2012)

love detective said:


> i'd imagine she did what most people seem to do these days, and get their mobile phone out and stand around filming and gawping at said person while furiously trying to upload to facebook/twitter


um, well,


'Video by Laurie Penny'


----------



## rekil (Jul 28, 2012)

London Underground


> They tell a lot of lies about London. Here’s one of them: during the Battle of Britain, with Messerschmitts flattening the capital, those Londoners who were too poor to afford their own shelters were encouraged to take refuge on the platforms of the underground.


'They' do, don't they. And some of 'them' are just pigshit thick. Dorniers, heinkels and ju-88s did the flattening btw Laura. The messerschmitts were fighter escorts.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 28, 2012)

I like the way that in the middle of this laughable shallow error she throws in the fact about working class londoners _taking_ the undergound (with help from the left) as if it's something she always knew, part of her history, rather than just having read it in Angus Calder's book.


----------



## rekil (Jul 28, 2012)

> I often ride the Tube just for fun


They tell a lot of lies about London.

The bit about the "practiced public-school plumminess" of Bojo's voice is good as well, she being something of a plummy voiced public-schoolgel and that.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 28, 2012)

copliker said:


> London Underground
> 
> 'They' do, don't they. And some of 'them' are just pigshit thick. Dorniers, heinkels and ju-88s did the flattening btw Laura. The messerschmitts were fighter escorts.


 
Which she could have noticed by even the most basic effort to check facts. The Messerschmidt 109 and 110 were both fighters, yes. It's not a question of figuring out whether she's incompetent and dishonest (that ought to be increasingly obvious by now), just of working out which she's being within a particular piece.


----------



## love detective (Jul 29, 2012)

she's doing some dreadfully naive stuff about multiculturalism at the moment on twitter - real cringe inducing stuff


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 29, 2012)

I can't see her tweets cos the only twitter I've got access to is the PD one and she blocked us after the Radical Cobblers piece lol.


----------



## love detective (Jul 29, 2012)

she was wanking on in the usual authoritative way about how anyone criticising multiculturalism was racist - and then kenan malik politely put her in her place


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 29, 2012)

Had a quick look - usual spiel, i.e i find you are a racist cunt if you question the capitalist use of diversity through multi-culturalism etc. And brilliantly, she's begging Kenan Malik, probably the most aggressive and articulate critic of multi-culturalism for links so she can understand better - guess when the reading and research is supposed to come Laura? Is it before or after the conclusion? No accusing him of wanting a 'well-behaved white monoculture' is there? Shallow, shallow shallow. Ayatollah would love it.


----------



## rekil (Jul 29, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I can't see her tweets cos the only twitter I've got access to is the PD one and she blocked us after the Radical Cobblers piece lol.


You can 'hax0r' the twitter machine block by not logging in.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 29, 2012)

Fascist now. Is the opposition.


----------



## weepiper (Jul 30, 2012)

Owen Jones has been asking people to tweet their 'lefty ancestors' today and retweeting things like 'my great-granny chained herself to the railings as a suffragette' and 'my great grandad was a conscientious objector in WW1' etc. This is Laurie Penny's response 

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/229923967266349056


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 30, 2012)

Good lord.


----------



## weepiper (Jul 30, 2012)

But I can't jooiiin iiinnnnn! You're all oppressing me with your pride in your family!


----------



## imposs1904 (Jul 30, 2012)

weepiper said:


> Owen Jones has been asking people to tweet their 'lefty ancestors' today and retweeting things like 'my great-granny chained herself to the railings as a suffragette' and 'my great grandad was a conscientious objector in WW1' etc. This is Laurie Penny's response
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/229923967266349056


 
Billy Bragg's po faced response.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 30, 2012)

weepiper said:


> But I can't jooiiin iiinnnnn! You're all oppressing me with your pride in your family!


Now she's saying this sort of things marginalises queers. Yes, having people in your family who lived before you (a prerequisite for most sort of human life) is an act of oppression.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 30, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> Billy Bragg's po faced response.






			
				lib-dem activist and voter billy bragg said:
			
		

> Its more about knowing your history than bloodlines


The anti-icke.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 30, 2012)

bragg lol 'left wing ancesrty! so wet and warm and wild and free, your alienation does not apply to me'


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 30, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Now she's saying this sort of things marginalises queers. Yes, having people in your family who lived before you (a prerequisite for most sort of human life) is an act of oppression.


----------



## krink (Jul 30, 2012)

this thread has intrigued me enough to set up a twitter account, who else apart from @pennyred should I follow (I think that's the correct term)?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 30, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> bragg lol 'left wing ancesrty! so wet and warm and wild and free, your alienation does not apply to me'


 
Dry chuckle


----------



## rekil (Jul 30, 2012)

weepiper said:


> Owen Jones has been asking people to tweet their 'lefty ancestors' today and retweeting things like 'my great-granny chained herself to the railings as a suffragette' and 'my great grandad was a conscientious objector in WW1' etc. This is Laurie Penny's response
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/229923967266349056


What a brat. Just shows why she's so bad at whatever it is she thinks she's trying to do though, she's not interested in people, not interested in listening. 

I think Proletarian Democracy might come up with a few lefty ancestors later.


----------



## JimW (Jul 30, 2012)

I can empathise with LP here - I feel left out of her world of going to the right school and university and getting a free-leg up into the magic circle of paid "opinion-formers" as a result. Very much the same thing.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 30, 2012)

Penny and Big Conk. lol.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 30, 2012)

creative freedom


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 30, 2012)

copliker said:


> What a brat. Just shows why she's so bad at whatever it is she thinks she's trying to do though, she's not interested in people, not interested in listening.
> 
> I think Proletarian Democracy might come up with a few lefty ancestors later.


 
My grandfather had six pence on the horse that won the Derby when that suffragette took out the Kings horse


----------



## rekil (Jul 30, 2012)

JimW said:


> I can empathise with LP here - I feel left out of her world of going to the right school and university and getting a free-leg up into the magic circle of paid "opinion-formers" as a result. Very much the same thing.


Can I put this on the PD twitter machine please?


----------



## JimW (Jul 30, 2012)

copliker said:


> Can I put this on the PD twitter machine please?


Of course!


----------



## love detective (Jul 30, 2012)

jesus fuck




			
				penny red said:
			
		

> but what about those with no #leftyancestors? Where are we in this story?


----------



## revol68 (Jul 30, 2012)

love detective said:


> jesus fuck


 
what a fucking idiot.

everything is a competition for her, the smartest girl from a very smart school.

Not everyone has their life saved by Ryan Gosling, where are we in that story?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 30, 2012)

> don't have any #leftyancestors that I know about, but trying to change the world anyway, because someday I want to be one.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jul 30, 2012)

fucking lol.


----------



## revol68 (Jul 30, 2012)

I think I might have went from hating her to feeling slight pangs of pity, it must be tough to be that desperate for validation.


----------



## JimW (Jul 30, 2012)

revol68 said:


> Not everyone has their life saved by Ryan Gosling, where are we in that story?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 30, 2012)

Perhaps we need to initiate a _Blue Peter_-style appeal, whereby people can donate bits of their superior leftwing ancestry to Pale Pink Penny?


----------



## JHE (Jul 30, 2012)

I think Penny sees the lefty ancestors thing as people boasting about their families.

I'm not aware of having any left-wing ancestors either (but then I have never developed an interest in genealogy).

A few snippets of Esquivo family history:

In 1956, my habitually drunken father, who was not left-wing, but was a Liberal, was (rightly) extremely outspoken against the folly and arrogance of the invasion of Suez.

In 1926, my great-uncle, my father's uncle on his mum's side, was one of those clerks-turned-scabs who drove buses in London during the general strike.

In the First World War, my maternal grandfather, who was Maltese and, like many of his compatriots, trilingual, worked for the British Army, as a civilian interpreter between his employers and the Italians. He had an extremely low opinion of the Italian skills of the British army officer who assessed his (my grandfather's) command of Italian at interview.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 31, 2012)

revol68 said:


> I think I might have went from hating her to feeling slight pangs of pity, it must be tough to be that desperate for validation.


 
That desperation might be the root of her perpetually insatiable ambition, perhaps.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 31, 2012)

JHE said:


> I think Penny sees the lefty ancestors thing as people boasting about their families.
> 
> I'm not aware of having any left-wing ancestors either (but then I have never developed an interest in genealogy).
> 
> ...


 

my old man was in the british army doing that staring match in pre unif berlin- imagine my pride! I think it was his steely glare that caused the berlin wall to crumble.


----------



## _angel_ (Jul 31, 2012)

Oh dear I have a distant great great great uncle (??) who was liberal lord mayor of leeds butchers will hunt me down and kill me now!
We're the poor relations tho.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 31, 2012)

oh fuck and in living memory my uncle stood as tory councilor  take heart penny


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jul 31, 2012)

copliker said:


> What a brat. Just shows why she's so bad at whatever it is she thinks she's trying to do though, she's not interested in people, not interested in listening.
> 
> I think Proletarian Democracy might come up with a few lefty ancestors later.


What is it the wishy-washy radical liberals are always saying? "check your privilege"


----------



## rekil (Jul 31, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I like the way that in the middle of this laughable shallow error she throws in the fact about working class londoners _taking_ the undergound (with help from the left) as if it's something she always knew, part of her history, rather than just having read it in Angus Calder's book.


She has said that her favourite writer is Pratchett and claims that she's re-reading The Dispossessed atm. I'd bet that she hasn't read Calder's book, but I bet the Lez has, and it was just something that he might have told her while deep in his cups.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2012)

Fantasy - that fits. Remember her list if must read anti-capitalist books, sure she's never read a damn one of them.


----------



## love detective (Jul 31, 2012)

what were they?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2012)

A reading list for radical thinkers. Even the title of the piece make me cringe. Each blurb gives away that she's not read even this collection of mostly middlebrow stuff.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2012)

This is hilarious, didn't notice it first time round - she calls Proudhon's What is Property a 'punchy little tract' - it's 300-400+ pages long (depending on the edition). She must think the extract that contains the bit _What is property. Property is theft_ is the book entire.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2012)

Oh man, this rubbish (my bold):



> _The Wretched of the Earth_, by Frantz Fanon - A powerful explanation of the nature of violent uprising and the psychology of oppression. *Almost every page contains quotes that one wants on a poster.*


 
On the same page as she bigs up the society of the spectacle. Amazing.

(And i have to again point out the  Das Capital/Mein Struggle bit in the intro)


----------



## articul8 (Jul 31, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> (And i have to again point out theDas Capital/Mein Struggle bit in the intro)


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 31, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> This is hilarious, didn't notice it first time round - she calls Proudhon's What is Property a 'punchy little tract' - it's 300-400+ pages long (depending on the edition). She must think the extract that contains the bit _What is property. Property is theft_ is the book entire.


 
That and the author of said 'punchy little tract' has such a tedious, turgid, downright dull writing style that he almost manages to make Alex Callinicos seem like Tom Clancy by comparison.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2012)

articul8 said:


>


 
Das Kapital
Mein Kampf (full title is miles better).

Not Das Capital
Mein Struggle.

Come on.

(although _Das Kapital Mein Kampf_ does give a good idea for a film)


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> That and the author of said 'punchy little tract' has such a tedious, turgid, downright dull writing style that he almost manages to make Alex Callinicos seem like Tom Clancy by comparison.


I think Callinicos is a pretty clear writer myself. It tends to be _what_ he says that is the problem.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 31, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I think Callinicos is a pretty clear writer myself. It tends to be _what_ he says that is the problem.


 
It's a question of taste, granted, but I found trying to get through 'The Revolutionary Ideas Of Karl Marx' an experience where I could almost feel my will to live ebbing away, one page at a time.


----------



## belboid (Jul 31, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> It's a question of taste, granted, but I found trying to get through 'The Revolutionary Ideas Of Karl Marx' an experience where I could almost feel my will to live ebbing away, one page at a time.


it's astoundingly straighforward and easy to read, very clear description of marx's economics.  You might disagree with it, but it's clear and straightforward


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 31, 2012)

belboid said:


> it's astoundingly straighforward and easy to read, very clear description of marx's economics. You might disagree with it, but it's clear and straightforward


 
Different tastes make for different opinions, I suppose. One thing we can all agree on is that 'Mein Kampf' is, without a doubt, one of the most appallingly written screeds ever to darken the literary world.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2012)

belboid said:


> it's astoundingly straighforward and easy to read, very clear description of marx's economics. You might disagree with it, but it's clear and straightforward


**Wanker alert** A few years back i was reading a Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism - chapter after chapter of jargon filled rubbish, then i saw Callinicos approach with his chapter on Bhaskar - Ice cold in Alex scenario. I'll always thank him for that.


----------



## barney_pig (Jul 31, 2012)

my granddads fought fascism


----------



## revol68 (Jul 31, 2012)

My ancestors on my da's side were fucked out of scotland for resistance to the nascent commodity form (sheep stealing).


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2012)

_stealing_ - wonderful how language/history evolves.


----------



## revol68 (Jul 31, 2012)

I was waiting for that, and it didn't take very long at all.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2012)

revol68 said:


> I was waiting for that, and it didn't take very long at all.


 
Sorry, quiet afternoon here.


----------



## revol68 (Jul 31, 2012)

No need for apologies, I for one am proud of my sexual pioneering ancestors! I only hope those whose ancestors were still stuck in the rut of anthrocentric sexual relations don't feel left out.


----------



## Voley (Jul 31, 2012)

You can rustle sheep, can't you? I always thought that sounded a bit euphemistic.


----------



## Riklet (Jul 31, 2012)

might as well steal up a nice sandwich for myself n sit back to a good bit of oh my & laurie.


----------



## eoin_k (Jul 31, 2012)

revol68 said:


> No need for apologies, I for one am proud of my sexual pioneering ancestors! I only hope those whose ancestors were still stuck in the rut of anthrocentric sexual relations don't feel left out.


 
Are you trying to tell us that you are the product of a coupling that transcended the species barrier?


----------



## love detective (Jul 31, 2012)

it all happened in a beautiful pea green boat


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 31, 2012)

love detective said:


> it all happened in a beautiful pea green boat


 
Seadogging?


----------



## revol68 (Jul 31, 2012)

love detective said:


> it all happened in a beautiful pea green boat


 
I see what you did there...


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 31, 2012)

revol68 said:


> My ancestors on my da's side were fucked out of scotland for resistance to the nascent commodity form (sheep stealing).


 
I, on the other hand, have petit bourgeois statism in the blood - my Derry great-grandfather was a customs officer (he got posted to Liverpool later on, the poor bugger).

As for _Das Kapital Mein Kampf, _I assume this would be directed by Fassbinder or (seeing as he's dead) Verhoeven?


----------



## rekil (Jul 31, 2012)

I knew my greatgrandad was a blacksmith, my mam told me about how she'd hang about at the forge and he'd let her do the bellows thing and that, but I checked the 1911 census and he's down as a farmer as well. So he had a hammer in one hand and a sickle (or possibly a potato) in the other. That's a little bit communism.



> don't have any #leftyancestors that I know about, but trying to change the world anyway, because someday I want to be one.


This is so communisn't I've got tears of sick in my eyes.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 31, 2012)

is there any knowledge viz a viz Lez's left wing forbears? perhaps one of the people that spawned him used to grow radishes rather than eat them.


----------



## JHE (Jul 31, 2012)

NVP said:


> You can rustle sheep, can't you?


 
You can poach them.  They take longer than eggs, though.


----------



## JimW (Jul 31, 2012)

My grandad was such a left-wing firebrand of a shop steward he got the British Empire Medal for "services to labour". Ahem. Was a lovely bloke by all accounts and half the town came out for his funeral, but that came a bit before I really got to know him.


----------



## miktheword (Jul 31, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I think Callinicos is a pretty clear writer myself. It tends to be _what_ he says that is the problem.


 


I found *'The Revolutionary Ideas'* an easy read - almost too easy /straightforward that I wondered if something was being hidden from me...
A year before,I was only 18 at the time, and didn't know 'who was who' in the 'Left' in Britain; just about to enjoy my one tempestuous year with the SWP, when I bought ' *Is There a Future for Marxism?' by Callinicos.*
 With my lack of years, I can be forgiven for being turned off by the first couple of chapters focusing purely on linguistics, PM, Sassure. 

 But, what stuck with me was reading a review of it in an IS Journal (I think) which said...

_'a number of leading intellectuals in the SWP can make neither head nor tail of it...'  _

 That comment told me more about the SWP than any book I read by any of them_._

Strange how some quotes from the SWP stay with you for ever...(as does the authors _'that is not my role in the party'_ reply to request for assistance with fascist physical threat to a paper sale)


----------



## Random (Aug 3, 2012)

I can see why some people might feel excluded by the topic lefty ancestors. Should be renamed working class/peasant ancestors to include everyone. While on holiday in the north of Sweden I spoke to an elderly relative and found out that one of my wife's family was the only person to be killed in the great fire of 1888 in Hornslandet. Had just read about it in a history book, the dead woman described as "a poor woman who'd gone back in her house to rescue her few possessions." (freely translated from the Swedish) The fire destroyed the forest there and caused the logging company to sell the land to the Crown, and it's now a national park.


----------



## rekil (Aug 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> The anti-icke.





DotCommunist said:


> bragg lol 'left wing ancesrty! so wet and warm and wild and free, your alienation does not apply to me'


Mr.Bragg was very amusing on twitter last night.



Lots more in that vein.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 5, 2012)

Refused isn't as funny as Lusty can be.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 5, 2012)

NVP said:


> You can rustle sheep, can't you?


it's not advisable due to the build up of static electricity.


----------



## Bakunin (Aug 5, 2012)

discokermit said:


> it's not advisable due to the build up of static electricity.


 
True.

Accidentally using my dick as a lightning conductor is slightly more of a thrill than I'm into, personally.


----------



## rekil (Aug 6, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Refused isn't as funny as Lusty can be.


Didn't realise that was refused, I just picked one of the responses at random. Anyway according to Bragg, we, or rather the British, live in a post-ideological society. Yes.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 6, 2012)

I remember young Conservative Einy Shah telling him to 'shut the fuck up bastard prole' on Twatter.


----------



## rekil (Aug 6, 2012)

Prole? His house is bigger than my local school.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 6, 2012)




----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 6, 2012)

Its always a shockto see houses with toilet washing bowls larger than yer one in the kitchen


----------



## rekil (Aug 8, 2012)

Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed said:
			
		

> This is the Anarchist Lesbian Mod look. Jacket by Charity Shop. Badge by Solfed. Thousand-yard-stare by Writing.


Laura likes solfed things now.


----------



## The39thStep (Aug 8, 2012)

copliker said:


> Laura likes solfed things now.


 
There's a lot of retro fashion about now, look at Bradley Wiggins.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 9, 2012)

copliker said:


> Laura likes solfed things now.


 
WTF has Laura experienced that'd give her a thousand-yard stare?
Not being able pay the rent on time?
Being mildly harrassed by the OB?
Having been Nick Lezard's lodger?

TBF, the latter one might have caused it...


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 9, 2012)

the radishes..the radishes...


----------



## rekil (Aug 11, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> There's a lot of retro fashion about now, look at Bradley Wiggins.


I'm sure she did, him and The James at the opening ceremony as well. Marvelous.

She's going on about "fascist PE teachers" at school now. Brighton College. Where the teacher pupil ratio is 1:13 and sports include 'Athletics, Beach Volleyball, Climbing, Cricket (male and female), Croquet, Fencing, Football, Golf, Hockey, Judo, Netball, Tennis, Riding, Rugby, Squash, Rounders, Sailing, Swimming, & Water Polo', ie lots of fun stuff that most normals will never get the opportunity to have a go at.

And these are the fees per term.


----------



## butchersapron (Aug 11, 2012)

And whose teachers she thanked for getting her to oxbridge and making her life absolutely lovely and who she does favours for by talking at other private schools (where David Starkey makes her look like a grasping duplicitous clown).


----------



## rekil (Aug 12, 2012)

Oooh, and look at all the fascist clubs and activities they're bullied into. Too many to bother c&ping but these are my faves.



> Creative Writing for the 6th form - This course will teach writing techniques, give you an insight into your creative process, and encourage novel ways to express yourself. An informal environment in which you can let your imagination run wild!
> 
> Shares For Schools club - Despite the hit taken by "The City" in recent years, there is still something alluring about the institution and the ability to make money by simply buying and selling shares. in this activity, lower sixth formers get the chance to use real money to buy real shares. "The Share Centre" sponsors the school £750 and the pupils raise the rest.The decision-making sessions on Mondays at 1.55pm are tense affairs because it is THEiR money that is on the line if things go wrong! They can't be too active in the market either because they pay real stamp duty (tax on share purchases) and real commission. Not for the feint-hearted! - _For the prick-hearted._
> 
> The shooting Club - The College has a 20m shooting range within the armoury and this is an opportunity to learn how to fire a .22 calibre weapon. The club will run for 6 weeks at a time, with an emphasis on Health and Safety.


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 12, 2012)

less emphasis on health and safety please, thin the numbers


----------



## rekil (Aug 12, 2012)

20m shooting ranges for _all_.


----------



## _angel_ (Aug 12, 2012)

copliker said:


> I'm sure she did, him and The James at the opening ceremony as well. Marvelous.
> 
> She's going on about "fascist PE teachers" at school now. Brighton College. Where the teacher pupil ratio is 1:13 and sports include 'Athletics, Beach Volleyball, Climbing, Cricket (male and female), Croquet, Fencing, Football, Golf, Hockey, Judo, Netball, Tennis, Riding, Rugby, Squash, Rounders, Sailing, Swimming, & Water Polo', ie lots of fun stuff that most normals will never get the opportunity to have a go at.
> 
> And these are the fees per term.


 
Fun? Sounds like total hell!


----------



## rekil (Aug 12, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> Fun? Sounds like total hell!


Look at the clubs and activities for alternatives then. They have cake decorating. And juggling.  Laura says she 'bunked off' to muck about in the fascist 1.3 million visual arts centre instead.


----------



## butchersapron (Aug 12, 2012)

'Bunked off'  - she's never bunked off anything in her life. And on top of that, bunking off tends to mean _not going_ to school, not _going_ to school.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Aug 12, 2012)

'Intrabunking'


----------



## rekil (Aug 12, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> 'Bunked off' - she's never bunked off anything in her life. And on top of that, bunking off tends to mean _not going_ to school, not _going_ to school.





> Loved exercise at school, disliked being screamed at by fascists in tracksuits. In the end I just bunked off and spent detentions doing art.


Her word against yours.


----------



## butchersapron (Aug 12, 2012)

Detention? The smartest kid in a smart school?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Aug 12, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> 'Intrabunking'


 
infrabunking


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 12, 2012)

I think we can file this one with the magical wank tree where there was a dirty picture


----------



## rekil (Aug 12, 2012)

Detention in 1.3 million visual arts centre?

For some reason, she's decided to repost an indy article from last year about 'art and the commodification of dissent.'



> What is required is resistance, and real resistance cannot be rehabilitated. The slogan of the modern resistance movement is a clarion cry against irony and apathy, scrawled over occupied classrooms and the wall of the Treasury: "This is actually happening."
> 
> Drawing "edgy" art and ironic fashion out of a serious ongoing social movement is grisly social taxidermy, an attempt to turn the awakened beast of public defiance into – in effect – a pickled shark in a tank. A pickled shark in a tank is shocking, but it is safe. The real, open-eyed rage of ordinary people is never safe. It is, however, actually happening.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Aug 12, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> infrabunking


Metatruancy


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 12, 2012)

It's called wagging anyway. And going to your detention is not that.


----------



## _angel_ (Aug 12, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> It's called wagging anyway. And going to your detention is not that.


Wagging? Is that straight out of Tom Brown's schooldays or something???
we called it bunking off, Leeds. Swarthy miles and miles away in Bradford said he'd been expelled for 'slamming off in the woods' which made me think he'd done something rather worse.


----------



## weepiper (Aug 12, 2012)

Skiving. What she's spent her entire life doing yet mysteriously has ended up getting paid for.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Aug 12, 2012)

Wagging in in Mcr, though ten miles up the road in Rochdale it was whacking it which, like slamming off, could also sound like a masturbatory euphemism.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Aug 12, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Metatruancy


 
quantumn twagging


----------



## Delroy Booth (Aug 12, 2012)

I want to vent a bit about "fascist PE teachers in tracksuits" comment that fucking Laurie Penny made. It's pissed me off on a load of different levels.

Firstly, coz I'm a socialist, and I really enjoyed PE. My teachers were supportive and decent, there was no bullying or fascist tendencies from them, and even the kids who weren't sporty got a lot out of it. So maybe Penny's school had crap PE teachers who were bullies, fair enough, but that's not a basis to attack the principle of teaching PE. I had an History teacher who was a psycho and borderline nazi, I wouldn't make any conclusions about teaching History based on my own experiences in that one school.

Why would you skive PE? It's like the easiest thing in school. I used to skive maths. That was something worth skiving. Maths is hard. It's basically broadcasting to the world "I'm too clever and arty to be drawn into your lumpen sports, I'm the cleverest girl in school dontcha know, I'm too good for this running and jumping shit, I'd rather have a _detention_ than demean myself by doing sports." That's how it comes accross to me at least, but I'm probably ridiculously over-sensitive to it.

Why mention the tracksuits? They're fucking PE teachers, of course they're wearing tracksuits. Is there a hint of middle-class snobbery in there? Or am I just being over-sensitive? This tracksuit-phobia of the left does my nut in. I remember at the founding conference of Right to Work in manchester the SWP wouldn't let me and a few of my mates in because a few in our party were wearing tracksuits, despite the fact I was nominally on the fucking steering committee and another one of my friends had been invited to lead a workship on organising the unemployed. They thought we might be EDL trying to infiltrate the event. Bless.

I also hate this argument that people on the left often make, that all organised and competitive sport is a type of conditioning for imperialism and war, I think it's incredibly reductionist and stuipd. Yeah no doubt organised sport does play that role, playing fields of eton and all that, but are people so fucking detached from working-class experience and so ignorant of working-class history not to understand that sport can also be the basis for a grand solidarity between working class people? Like, just picking a random example, the Workers Sport Federation were the ones in the 1930's who committed the mass trespass of Kinder Scout, deliberately trespassing on private land used for grouse-shootng, so that working class people could have the right to walk to moors and hills freely. That single act was a million-times more productive than anything Occupy in this country has managed to accomplish. Or you could look at the Clarion Clubs, or look at the history of Rugby League, these things mobilised and unified working class people in a way that Occupy could only dream of.

/rant over


----------



## DaveCinzano (Aug 12, 2012)

I think you're overthinking this, Delroy.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Aug 12, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> I think you're overthinking this, Delroy.


 
Yeah I know, it's just the whole thing winds me up and here's as good a place as any to have a whinge about it.


----------



## Bakunin (Aug 12, 2012)

copliker said:


> Her word against yours.


 
Fair's fair, given that her professed worldview is about as genuine as a Rolex bought from some bloke in a pub lock-in, I'd have to side with Butchers on this one. If she said the sky was blue and grass was green I'd look up and down before taking it as gospel.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 12, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> less emphasis on health and safety please, thin the numbers


 
Hard to kill with a .22 unless you shoot someone through the eye socket or manage to hit an artery.


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 12, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Hard to kill with a .22 unless you shoot someone through the eye socket or manage to hit an artery.


 

the temple. and it'll richochet around inside the skull rather than leaving cleanly iirc. There was some mafia hitman who used a .22 but googling is not helping me find his name


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 12, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> the temple. and it'll richochet around inside the skull rather than leaving cleanly iirc. There was some mafia hitman who used a .22 but googling is not helping me find his name


 
I'd prefer not to burden our NHS with persistently-vegetative posho bed-foulers, though.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Aug 12, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> I'd prefer not to burden our NHS with persistently-vegetative posho bed-foulers, though.


For this we have BUPA.


----------



## Bakunin (Aug 12, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> the temple. and it'll richochet around inside the skull rather than leaving cleanly iirc. There was some mafia hitman who used a .22 but googling is not helping me find his name


 
The .22 automatic with silencer is the most popular handgun amongst hitmen (gang-affiliated and freelance), the Hi Standard being an especially popular make as it does indeed come with its own silencer. It's quiet enough that if you were sitting in a car with tinted windows on a New York street you could shoot someone through the back of the head and nobody would see you do it or hear the shot. Using a heavy calibre weapon like a 9mm or.45 would make that impossible and I certainly wouldn't use a sawn-off and then attempt to use valet parking.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Aug 12, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> The .22 automatic with silencer is the most popular handgun amongst hitmen (gang-affiliated and freelance), the Hi Standard being an especially popular make as it does indeed come with its own silencer. It's quiet enough that if you were sitting in a car with tinted windows on a New York street you could shoot someone through the back of the head and nobody would see you do it or hear the shot. Using a heavy calibre weapon like a 9mm or.45 would make that impossible and I certainly wouldn't use a sawn-off and then attempt to use valet parking.


----------



## treelover (Aug 12, 2012)

'Why mention the tracksuits? They're fucking PE teachers, of course they're wearing tracksuits. Is there a hint of middle-class snobbery in there? Or am I just being over-sensitive? This tracksuit-phobia of the left does my nut in. I remember at the founding conference of Right to Work in manchester the SWP wouldn't let me and a few of my mates in because a few in our party were wearing tracksuits, despite the fact I was nominally on the fucking steering committee and another one of my friends had been invited to lead a workship on organising the unemployed. They thought we might be EDL trying to infiltrate the event. Bless.'

That says so much about the far left, well specifically the SWP, how on earth can they ban people for not wearing the right clothes?


----------



## treelover (Aug 12, 2012)

in fact, how does he get in to these events?

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ma...nH0QW8vIGwCg&ved=0CDoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1666&bih=922

more here....


----------



## rekil (Aug 12, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I also hate this argument that people on the left often make, that all organised and competitive sport is a type of conditioning for imperialism and war, I think it's incredibly reductionist and stuipd.


If this blistering letter from comrade Kev Waddington to the morning star doesn't jerk you out of the fog of such fanciful conceits I dunno what will.



> Sport as we know it as a competitive enterprise is not "natural" but started with the development of capitalism.
> 
> The ideology of sport reflects capitalist ideology and the capitalist organisation of factory production: division of labour, specialisation, maximum output, hierarchical and bureaucratic organisation.
> 
> When sport is taught to children, the child increasingly has to abandon all spontaneity, inventiveness and playfulness, as rigid rules, discipline, authority and a sadomasochistic outlook take over.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Aug 12, 2012)

I mean that's such simple minded bollocks I don't even know where to start. Perhaps sport "as we know it" now reflects capitalism, or in most cases has been bought up wholesale and turned into an industry in itself, but you can find evidence of competetive and organised sport in societies long before the development of capitalism. And yes, in those ancient societies, sport was used as training for war too.

This sentence is clearly written by someone who's not very good at sport "When sport is taught to children, the child increasingly has to abandon all spontaneity, inventiveness and playfulness" Really? Because you won't very far in a lot of sports without those things in abundance.

I also think that people have probably been competing with each other to see who could run the fastest since time immemorial, it way well have been appropriated to fulfill these roles later on, but it doesn't really explain where it comes in the first place.


----------



## agricola (Aug 12, 2012)

copliker said:


> If this blistering letter from comrade Kev Waddington to the morning star doesn't jerk you out of the fog of such fanciful conceits I dunno what will.


 
I cant believe you left out the call demand for more yoga, group dancing and nature walking.


----------



## Bakunin (Aug 12, 2012)

weepiper said:


> Skiving. What she's spent her entire life doing yet mysteriously has ended up getting paid for.


 
In fairness, this isn't dissimilar to many media types. It's just that many of them have either the guile or the grace to recognise that it's money for old rope compared to many jobs and don't feel a compulsive urge to bullshit their way up the greasy pole to a nicely lucrative level before perpetually whimpering about how hard and challenging it supposedly is in the style of Kevin the Teenager (it isn't, by the way, unless you also have a compulsive desire to inflict yourself on others in an entirely tiresome fashion, to an equally tiresome degree, by desperately using any old PR trick that you think will get an extra iota of attention).

They've also got more intelligence, as a rule, than to publicly adopt an attitude that suggests that they themselves are infinitely more important than whatever story they trying to cover.


----------



## JimW (Aug 12, 2012)

agricola said:


> I cant believe you left out the call demand for more yoga, group dancing and nature walking.


That does tip it over into likely clever piss-take territory, I reckon. He can't be serious. Please


----------



## The39thStep (Aug 14, 2012)

More news from class war torn London ( via visiting some London underground stations) under the Olympic occupation of multi international corporations



> At half past 10, Stockwell station, where a Brazilian electrician was gunned down in 2005 by anti-terrorist police who’d followed the wrong brown man off the bus, is doing its best to be clean and uncontroversia


 


> Rolling her machine with practiced effort onto the Hammersmith train, Lisa and I talk about the fight to stop the right-wing Coalition government currently squatting in Westminster – the very shiniest stop on the Jubilee line – from slashing welfare benefits and driving the poor and sick out of the city.


 


> St James’ Park Station, 6 p.m. Three years ago a man was killed in London. This in itself is not news; people die here every day, and in the past two decades 1443 people have done so following contact with the police, although not a single Metropo


 


> Faith in the legal system is fading here, especially in the run-up to the games, which have allowed the Met to deliver short-order sentencing to any young people suspected of loitering whilst unemployed.


 


> One of them explains to an eager news reporter that if this was France, the station would be on fire by now. But this is London, and right now, London feels beaten.


 


> mention this because London is hosting the Olympic Games in much the same way that Maria Callas hosted that tapeworm. It seemed like a great idea at the time. It seemed like it’d keep us modern and relevant and beautiful. But now it’s eating us from the inside, squatting in the East End draining away billions from an economy already in a double-dip recession, and doing terrifying things to the body politic.]


----------



## rekil (Aug 14, 2012)

agricola said:


> I cant believe you left out the call demand for more yoga, group dancing and nature walking.


I agree with that bit.


----------



## cesare (Aug 14, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> More news from class war torn London ( via visiting some London underground stations) under the Olympic occupation of multi international corporations



You're in London today?


----------



## butchersapron (Aug 14, 2012)

> One of them explains to an eager news reporter that if this was France, the station would be on fire by now. But this is London, and right now, London feels beaten.


 
Yeah?

Oddly enough, this is the same city you sell other papers as 'fighting back' and you as it's chief correspondent


----------



## JHE (Aug 14, 2012)

LP said:
			
		

> _At half past 10, Stockwell station, where a Brazilian electrician was gunned down in 2005 by anti-terrorist police who’d followed the wrong brown man off the bus..._


 
Perhaps Ms Penny and the Social Workers should kiss and make up.  They (and assorted posters on U75) also liked to claim that the killing was racist.

Jean Charles de Menezes was white, but they won't let that stand in the way of the story of racist white plod killing a "brown man".


----------



## butchersapron (Aug 14, 2012)

Also, they didn't follow the wrong man off a bus. They followed a single man from his exit from his block.

And, of course racism did play a part in identifying him - then in how he was dealt with.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Aug 14, 2012)

The coalition "squatting" in Westminster. The Olympics "squatting" in the East End.

Clever.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 14, 2012)

Fozzie Bear said:


> The coalition "squatting" in Westminster. The Olympics "squatting" in the East End.
> 
> Clever.


 
I'd suspect that she was ironically aping the Dave Spart school of journalism, except that she hasn't demonstrated having enough of a sense of humour to do so, so the studentish rhetoric is probably in earnest.


----------



## Orang Utan (Aug 14, 2012)

Okay, which one of you nicked her bag from the Bree Louise? It had all her notes and laptop in. She might not be able to write next column!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Aug 14, 2012)

if only!

However I suspect it was Ryan Gosling


----------



## rekil (Aug 14, 2012)

Another reason no person or org should let her come anywhere near them. Security nightmare.


----------



## JimW (Aug 14, 2012)

She might have to just make something up; how unlike all her other columns. Oh yes.


----------



## barney_pig (Aug 15, 2012)

Big kids stole her homework! Makes a change from the dog ate it I suppose.


----------



## kavenism (Aug 15, 2012)

And she lost "meaningful" (apparently this means naked!) pictures. She carries naked pictures of herself around? This wouldn't surprise me.


----------



## rekil (Aug 15, 2012)

David Graeber ‏@davidgraeber said:
			
		

> just finished Batman piece, sent it to editor only to discover her phone, computer, etc have all been stolen so she's offline



!


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 15, 2012)

kavenism said:


> And she lost "meaningful" (apparently this means naked!) pictures. She carries naked pictures of herself around? This wouldn't surprise me.


don't we all?


----------



## killer b (Aug 15, 2012)

tbf, where else would you keep naked shots of yourself?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Aug 15, 2012)

I thought she was all for edgy proletarian expropriation?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Aug 15, 2012)

killer b said:


> tbf, where else would you keep naked shots of yourself?


Posted on the internet


----------



## love detective (Aug 15, 2012)

another blue peter appeal on the way


----------



## articul8 (Aug 15, 2012)

Last seen complaining about ants in her honey pot.  Not clear whether she is speaking figuratively


----------



## DaveCinzano (Aug 15, 2012)

There's something about Penny Red that minds me of Lionel Blue, only less likeable.


----------



## audiotech (Aug 21, 2012)

Came across this gem.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Aug 21, 2012)

audiotech said:


> Came across this gem.




oi last month want's it's lols back!


----------



## audiotech (Aug 21, 2012)

I did a quick glance back honest.


----------



## Bakunin (Aug 21, 2012)

JimW said:


> She might have to just make something up; how unlike all her other columns. Oh yes.


 
What, you mean she might have to desperately cobble together some piece of 'teenage diary'-style crap involving excessive hyperbole, desperate attempts to sound like a committed 'activist', a few buzzwords and bits of political jargon that sound great in her head but she doesn't really understand, throw in a couple of suitably-bowdlerised quotes ripped off from interviews done by other hacks and then successfully string all this garbage round some entirely fictional event that happened to her at exactly the right moment, leaving exactly enough time to make another pisspoor effort at stringing 1500 words together..?

Well, I hope she can adjust to this entirely new experience.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Aug 21, 2012)

audiotech said:


> I did a quick glance back honest.


 
There's only 126 pages to review


----------



## JimW (Aug 21, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> What, you mean she might have to desperately cobble together some piece of 'teenage diary'-style crap involving excessive hyperbole, desperate attempts to sound like a committed 'activist', a few buzzwords and bits of political jargon that sound great in her head but she doesn't really understand, throw in a couple of suitably-bowdlerised quotes ripped off from interviews done by other hacks and then successfully string all this garbage round some entirely fictional event that happened to her at exactly the right moment, leaving exactly enough time to make another pisspoor effort at stringing 1500 words together..?
> 
> Well, I hope she can adjust to this entirely new experience.


It'll be tough but she's nothing if not a soldier is our Laur.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 21, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Okay, which one of you nicked her bag from the Bree Louise? It had all her notes and laptop in. She might not be able to write next column!


and her make up! how on earth is she supposed to be able to write without it? 

but wait! the bag came back!
https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/236126968632983552


> Spent all afternoon in Islington police station waiting to recover my rucksack. Laptop and phone gone, precious jewelry and for some reason


 



> ...the thieves also took a rather nice lipgloss and my favourite purple-brown eyeliner. But they left the rest of my makeup.


https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/236127167497527296
i love* that somebody chose the second status, rather one about the missing phone/laptop, to suggest setting up a donation page for replacements.


*even though i probably shouldn't and will go to hell for it.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Aug 21, 2012)

> Spent all afternoon in Islington police station waiting to recover my rucksack


 
"...And definitely not to to sign my latest CI reports..."

/cynical


----------



## rekil (Aug 21, 2012)

Billy Bragg ‏@billybragg said:
			
		

> @PennyRed still there? I'm about to sound check at the Roundhouse. Fancy a coffee?






			
				Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed said:
			
		

> @billybragg yes!


_Over at the processing station, sub-level three, under the main cooling towers. Looks like a god damn Libdem branch meeting._


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## ViolentPanda (Aug 21, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> What, you mean she might have to desperately cobble together some piece of 'teenage diary'-style crap involving excessive hyperbole, desperate attempts to sound like a committed 'activist', a few buzzwords and bits of political jargon that sound great in her head but she doesn't really understand, throw in a couple of suitably-bowdlerised quotes ripped off from interviews done by other hacks and then successfully string all this garbage round some entirely fictional event that happened to her at exactly the right moment, leaving exactly enough time to make another pisspoor effort at stringing 1500 words together..?
> 
> Well, I hope she can adjust to this entirely new experience.


 
An experience known to its afficionados as "doing a Hari".


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## DaveCinzano (Aug 21, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> An experience known to its afficionados as "doing a Hari".


And when it's all thrown together at the last minute to meet a deadline, it's a 'Hurry Up, Hari' (AKA a 'Sham 69k').


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## ViolentPanda (Aug 21, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> And when it's all thrown together at the last minute to meet a deadline, it's a 'Hurry Up, Hari' (AKA a 'Sham 69k').


 
That's more like the Fleet Street I worked in.

"we're goin' dahn the pub!!"


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## revol68 (Aug 21, 2012)

audiotech said:


> Came across this gem.




I still think I fancy her a wee bit, I know it's wrong, I'm like one of those desperately lonely middle age women who write to convicted murderers and rapists, it's like I lack all self esteem and need validation from the smartest girl at a very smart school.

oh the shame...


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## Riklet (Aug 21, 2012)

she could've made more of his "i came from the bottom" line.  ...no, not like that!

starkey might be an odious ratbag in various ways but he's quite succinct there..


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## SLK (Aug 23, 2012)

Her story about being raped is incredible, despite it being by her.


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## Balbi (Aug 23, 2012)

Agreed, that's a bloody good piece of work. 

http://www.penny-red.com/post/29989130545/its-trigger-warning-week

And im not a usual Penny fan. She usually lacks the incisiveness and direction that this piece has.


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## love detective (Aug 23, 2012)

probably best not to comment on this at all, but can't help thinking given her position of 'influence' in the left liberal media combined with the fact that she knows this person has done the same thing again to other women since it happened, her decision not to out this person is somewhat irresponsible

sure it's up to her what she does about it and she shouldn't be pressurrised into doing something she doesn't want to do - but it kind of pulls the rug away from all her 'sisterhood' type solidarity stuff when she has the power to stop this guy doing this to other women, but refuses to do so (yet still can talk about it enough to include it in a story and makes public tweets about it)


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## Balbi (Aug 23, 2012)

We'll see how it turns out. Personal decision, yes - right one, maybe not. But her choice. I suspect some will be more direct in addrssing this issue to her today love detective, once her article gets a wider readership.


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## Captain Hurrah (Aug 23, 2012)

As someone who has been raped myself, that's a very brave piece.


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## Random (Aug 23, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> As someone who has been raped myself, that's a very brave piece.


Sorry to hear it.


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## Captain Hurrah (Aug 23, 2012)

Shit happens.


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## JimW (Aug 23, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> As someone who has been raped myself, that's a very brave piece.


Me too, that's grim mate.


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## frogwoman (Aug 23, 2012)

Sorry to hear that. I've been raped as well. I can relate to what she's saying in the article - it took me a very long time to realise the fact that it was rape and that the person responsible was "a rapist" because they didn't behave like how "a rapist" behaves and I still have trouble thinking of them like that. It was a long time ago and I'm not traumatised or anything and am now in a relationship with somebody I love, but I can relate to all the emotions that she talks about.


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## Libertad (Aug 23, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> As someone who has been raped myself, that's a very brave piece.


 
And that's a very brave post. Respek in your general direction.


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## Libertad (Aug 23, 2012)

Respek to you also froggie.


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## articul8 (Aug 23, 2012)

Clearly she's struck a chord with peoples' experience, but Laurie's own track record for making shit up does her no favours at all when it comes to a piece like this


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## Belushi (Aug 23, 2012)

Respect to everyone brave enough to talk about their own experiences; and much as I dislike Penny I find it hard to believe she'd fabricate something like this.


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## Random (Aug 23, 2012)

Belushi said:


> Respect to everyone brave enough to talk about their own experiences; and much as I dislike Penny I find it hard to believe she'd fabricate a something like this.


She's gone up a lot in my estimation after writing that. If it turns out she's made it up she'll sink to depths below even J hari. And probably lose all hope for a job in journalism tbh.


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## love detective (Aug 23, 2012)

i don't think there is any reason to even think that she has made any of that up - it just seemed odd to me how she was prepared to speak publicly about it and use it for one thing (writing about it) but not willing to out the person who she knows has done the same thing to other women since, and potentially will do it to others in the future (plus that person is apparently some kind of lefty)

i've never been in that position so don't know what doing such a thing would do to you personally/emotionally/psychologically so i shouldn't really be saying that i think she should do this or that - especially if it's something you've decided you just wanted to move on from and not talk about it - but she is talking about it, to 50,000 people on twitter


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## tufty79 (Aug 23, 2012)

love detective said:


> i don't think there is any reason to even think that she has made any of that up - it just seemed odd to me how she was prepared to speak publicly about it and use it for one thing (writing about it) but not willing to out the person who she knows has done the same thing to other women since, and potentially will do it to others in the future (plus that person is apparently some kind of lefty)


i might be being extremely dense here, but wouldn't it be legally dodgy, to say the least? i suppose it depends on what you mean by 'outing' - naming them in the press? reporting them to the police?


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## Idris2002 (Aug 23, 2012)

Random said:


> She's gone up a lot in my estimation after writing that. If it turns out she's made it up she'll sink to depths below even J hari. And probably lose all hope for a job in journalism tbh.


 
It reads very, very differently from her "probably made up" stuff.


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## Riklet (Aug 23, 2012)

there are plenty of things to criticise laurie penny for, but that article and how she has responded to being raped are not on that list, IMO.

_her _fault if that bloke goes off and rapes other women? isn't this the line of thinking we are struggling against?


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## Random (Aug 23, 2012)

love detective said:


> i've never been in that position so don't know what doing such a thing would do to you personally/emotionally/psychologically so i shouldn't really be saying that i think she should do this or that


 Yes


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## el-ahrairah (Aug 23, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> It reads very, very differently from her "probably made up" stuff.


 
that was my thought exactly.  the tone is very different.


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## Captain Hurrah (Aug 23, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Sorry to hear that. I've been raped as well. I can relate to what she's saying in the article - it took me a very long time to realise the fact that it was rape and that the person responsible was "a rapist" because they didn't behave like how "a rapist" behaves and I still have trouble thinking of them like that. It was a long time ago and I'm not traumatised or anything and am now in a relationship with somebody I love, but I can relate to all the emotions that she talks about.


 
For me it was part of abuse over a long time as a kid. I definitely knew him, not only as _that_, but as someone I liked, loved and trusted, and didn't think at the time that what he was doing was wrong, nor really understand it all. Not until much later, when after the denial began to untangle itself a mental breakdown resulted in an attempted suicide, and while recovering, a few relationships with women ruined by my unpredictable and at times aggressive behaviour. But I now have something really _good_ and a healthy sexual relationship with the person I love.

Rapists or sexual predators aren't necessarily 'monsters' hiding in bushes or in dark alleys, waiting to pounce. Such opportunists do exist, but they're often 'normal,' everyday people. The people close to you in some way. As individuals, they have their own rationalisations for why they do it, and sadly it differs as to whether they even know or care about the damage they cause.


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## love detective (Aug 23, 2012)

Riklet said:


> there are plenty of things to criticise laurie penny for, but that article and how she has responded to being raped are not on that list, IMO.
> 
> _her _fault if that bloke goes off and rapes other women? isn't this the line of thinking we are struggling against?


 
did I say or imply it would be _her_ fault if _he_ raped someone else? He has raped someone else since then, have I implied anywhere that this was Laura's fault?

from my (admittedly small) experience of people who have been sexually assaulted, they don't want to report it to the police because they don't want to have to relive what happened to them and have what happened to them opened up to all kinds of prying eyes and impersonal systemic prodding. That is perfectly understandable that you would just want to blank it out/not let it get back in your head etc..

But if you are happy to give a detailed account of what happened to 50,000 people on twitter and and your blog, then it just seemed odd why she was adamant that she will not out this guy, both so that he is held to account for what he did to her and yes, to help make sure he doesn't do it to anyone else again.


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## Random (Aug 23, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Rapists or sexual predators aren't necessarily 'monsters' hiding in bushes or in dark alleys, waiting to pounce. Such opportunists do exist, but they're often 'normal,' everyday people. The people close to you in some way. As individuals, they have their own rationalisations for why they do it, and sadly it differs as to whether they even know or care about the damage they cause.



Sorry to hear about your experiences. I find it stomach-churning to read about this, but I think it's important that we normalise talking about this and also realise that this kind of rape is also pretty "normal" and done by normal people. But also unacceptable.

In Sweden, in response to the Assange debate, a writer started the "Talk about it" discussion on the internet, to explore the gray zone in sexual experiences. it's worth taking a look: http://prataomdet.se/

--
Ibland känns det svårt, ja nästan omöjligt, att prata om negativa sexuella upplevelser. Bemötandet kan vara kyligt eller rentav fientligt mot dem som vill prata om det. Därför har många bitit sig i tungan och tvingats lägga locket på även om funderingarna fortsatt i det tysta.

Vi behöver ett språk för sex utan skam, vi behöver fundera kring våra egna och andras gränser. Vi behöver prata om de gränsdragningar, gråzoner och övertramp som förekommer i sexuella situationer. Något ska förändras. Vi ska våga


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## TruXta (Aug 23, 2012)

Random said:


> Sorry to hear about your experiences. I find it stomach-churning to read about this, but I think it's important that we normalise talking about this and also realise that this kind of rape is also pretty "normal" and done by normal people. But also unacceptable.
> 
> In Sweden, in response to the Assange debate, a writer started the "Talk about it" discussion on the internet, to explore the gray zone in sexual experiences. it's worth taking a look: http://prataomdet.se/
> 
> ...


 
A worthy sentiment, but I can't see it going anywhere really, at least not for a long god-damned time.


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## Random (Aug 23, 2012)

TruXta said:


> A worthy sentiment, but I can't see it going anywhere really, at least not for a long god-damned time.


Well it seemed to have gone somewhere for some people in Sweden, at least for a while.


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## TruXta (Aug 23, 2012)

Random said:


> Well it seemed to have gone somewhere for some people in Sweden, at least for a while.


 
On that site you mean? I didn't look so that could well be true. The true measure of success lies in taking it from the relative safety of the internet to flesh and blood interaction.


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## Random (Aug 23, 2012)

TruXta said:


> On that site you mean? I didn't look so that could well be true. The true measure of success lies in taking it from the relative safety of the internet to flesh and blood interaction.


it wasn't just a website. It started out as a hashtag on twitter, then a few articles in newspapers, and now a book. Hopefully it's helped at least some people speak out. The internet can be very good for telling stories in a safe space. Meatspace is overrated.


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## TruXta (Aug 23, 2012)

Random said:


> it wasn't just a website. It started out as a hashtag on twitter, then a few articles in newspapers, and now a book. Hopefully it's helped at least some people speak out. The internet can be very good for telling stories in a safe space. Meatspace is overrated.


 
Yeah, had a look and saw that it was a bit more involved than that. I stand by my point about the importance of translating it into meatspace, but we're already well OT, and this is not the place for it.


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## agricola (Aug 23, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Agreed, that's a bloody good piece of work.
> 
> http://www.penny-red.com/post/29989130545/its-trigger-warning-week
> 
> And im not a usual Penny fan. She usually lacks the incisiveness and direction that this piece has.


 
It is really well written, but it is profoundly depressing in much the same way that hearing someone talk about how they lived through years of unreported domestic violence against them is. 

I know she has made her feelings on reporting it known, but I really hope she changes her mind.


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## kavenism (Aug 23, 2012)

I am again drawn back to the fact that the worst treatment of women that I have ever encountered has been by men supposedly on the left, particularly the far left. The reasons are probably variable but I can’t help but think that the common belief that all forms of ethics are just so much dust thrown in the eyes of the workers has got something to do with it.

The worst was without doubt senior members of a certain Trot group striking a deal with a member who had been raped to expel her attacker for 2 years in return for her not going to the police. The girl who was attacked vanished about a year ago, no-one has heard anything since. I remember her saying that she knew he’d done it before and would do it again.

I swear there are people who believe being part of some pitiful left sect is enough to excuse all crimes in this world and guarantee their place the Kingdom of Heaven. Is all of this really that far from Pope Urban and the admonishment of sins?


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## discokermit (Aug 23, 2012)

love detective said:


> it just seemed odd why she was adamant that she will not out this guy,


without him being convicted of it it would probably be libel.


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## Hocus Eye. (Aug 23, 2012)

This particular topic would be best as a thread of its own rather than just a continuation of the Calinicos/Penny Red debate. The topic is current and relates to the Assange case and the other news items around rape connected to the American Election.

Can't the mods replicate the new topic as a new thread?


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## The39thStep (Aug 23, 2012)

kavenism said:


> I am again drawn back to the fact that the worst treatment of women that I have ever encountered has been by men supposedly on the left, particularly the far left. The reasons are probably variable but I can’t help but think that the common belief that all forms of ethics are just so much dust thrown in the eyes of the workers has got something to do with it.
> 
> The worst was without doubt senior members of a certain Trot group striking a deal with a member who had been raped to expel her attacker for 2 years in return for her not going to the police. The girl who was attacked vanished about a year ago, no-one has heard anything since. I remember her saying that she knew he’d done it before and would do it again.
> 
> I swear there are people who believe being part of some pitiful left sect is enough to excuse all crimes in this world and guarantee their place the Kingdom of Heaven. Is all of this really that far from Pope Urban and the admonishment of sins?


 
So what is it in the left, particularly the far left, that causes this phenonema ? is it just confined to the left or does it include anarchists?


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## Hocus Eye. (Aug 23, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> So what is it in the left, particularly the far left, that causes this phenonema ? is it just confined to the left or does it include anarchists?


I haven't seen any evidence of this phenomenon outside of the apocryphal tale related by kavenism with his home-spun explanation.


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## kavenism (Aug 23, 2012)

It may be home-spun but it makes sense.
Beware of men who need only one book and no ethics.


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## butchersapron (Aug 23, 2012)

kavenism said:


> I am again drawn back to the fact that the worst treatment of women that I have ever encountered has been by men supposedly on the left, particularly the far left. The reasons are probably variable but I can’t help but think that the common belief that all forms of ethics are just so much dust thrown in the eyes of the workers has got something to do with it.
> 
> The worst was without doubt senior members of a certain Trot group striking a deal with a member who had been raped to expel her attacker for 2 years in return for her not going to the police. The girl who was attacked vanished about a year ago, no-one has heard anything since. I remember her saying that she knew he’d done it before and would do it again.
> 
> I swear there are people who believe being part of some pitiful left sect is enough to excuse all crimes in this world and guarantee their place the Kingdom of Heaven. Is all of this really that far from Pope Urban and the admonishment of sins?


You _*know*_ this happened?


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## kavenism (Aug 23, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> You _*know*_ this happened?


 
I know this happened. It's not second or third hand, it's from the horses mouth. The girl in question is an ex-partner of mine.


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## butchersapron (Aug 23, 2012)

kavenism said:


> I know this happened. It's not second or third hand, it's from the horses mouth. The girl in question is an ex-partner of mine.


Do you know the trots doing the convincing?


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## kavenism (Aug 23, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Do you know the trots doing the convincing?


 
Yup. They had already supported him through a protest related court case. It doesn't surprise me that given that fact they weren’t prepared to let him disgrace the lot of them with this, even though he was a known violent shit.


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## butchersapron (Aug 23, 2012)

kavenism said:


> Yup. They had already supported him through a protest related court case. It doesn't surprise me that given that fact they weren’t prepared to let him disgrace the lot of them with this, even though he was a known violent shit.


Ta.Won't push on that any further. You know the rest.


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## TruXta (Aug 23, 2012)

I don't think it's particular to Trots or anarchists, it's particular to sects and cults.


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## butchersapron (Aug 23, 2012)

TruXta said:


> I don't think it's particular to Trots or anarchists, it's particular to sects and cults.


It's not.


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## TruXta (Aug 23, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> It's not.


 
Not rape per se, but the form of sexual predation that kavenism describes is more easily sustainable in sects and cults. I'll try and dig up some refs.


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## butchersapron (Aug 23, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Not rape per se, but the form of sexual predation that kavenism describes is more easily sustainable in sects and cults. I'll try and dig up some refs.


Don't worry, you're right.  Diff claim that i was responding to, (congrats btw)


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## cesare (Aug 23, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Not rape per se, but the form of sexual predation that kavenism describes is more easily sustainable in sects and cults. I'll try and dig up some refs.


I thought you meant small left groups for a second there


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## JHE (Aug 23, 2012)

kavenism said:


> I can’t help but think that the common belief that all forms of ethics are just so much dust thrown in the eyes of the workers has got something to do with it.






			
				Dr Marx and Mr Engels said:
			
		

> Law, morality, religion, are to him [the proletarian] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.






			
				kavenism said:
			
		

> The worst was without doubt senior members of a certain Trot group striking a deal with a member who had been raped to expel her attacker for 2 years in return for her not going to the police. The girl who was attacked vanished about a year ago, no-one has heard anything since. I remember her saying that she knew he’d done it before and would do it again.


Even if you choose not to name the individuals, you might at least name the sect. Was it the WRP in the days of Gerry Healy?

ETA:  Sorry, if her disappearance was so recent, it obviously had nothing to do with Healy's sect.  He's long gone.  So, who?


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## TruXta (Aug 23, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Don't worry, you're right. Diff claim that i was responding to, (congrats btw)


 
 Thanks guv.


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## barney_pig (Aug 23, 2012)

I think I know the incident which is being talked about by Kavenism. I know of another case as well in the same organisation- where the victim was eventually hounded out of the group.


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## frogwoman (Aug 23, 2012)

Sorry to hear that CH. What happened to me was a bit different but like you having a healthy sexual relationship with somebody who loves me as much as I love him has helped me to realise just _how_ out of order it was. I don't want to post about it much more, but hopefully if the assange case does any good it will mean that people can talk about this type of stuff more, because at the moment nobody likes to talk about it and it is all a big secret.


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## love detective (Aug 28, 2012)

Re the Rape piece - the good news is that Laura has finally decided to report a name to the police

The bad news is that it's not the person who raped her, but someone of twitter who claimed that she was making the whole thing up

Then she's off to interview Tommy Robinson claiming


> I just don't think 'an interview' is the same thing as 'giving a platform'


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## DotCommunist (Aug 28, 2012)

love detective said:


> Re the Rape piece - the good news is that Laura has finally decided to report a name to the police
> 
> The bad news is that it's not the person who raped her, but someone of twitter who claimed that she was making the whole thing up
> 
> Then *she's off to interview Tommy Robinson* claiming


 

I'm absolutely certain that an upper middle class girl interviewing a rabble rousing 'church and king' incoherent fash hoolie will only throw up epic nuggets of wisdom and show us all just how the roots of w/c fash emerge. I can't fucking wait.

Maybe they could invite Starkey and Bragg to the scintillating debate and really make it of relevance. Fuck me sideways, this is going to be bad.


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## The39thStep (Aug 28, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> I'm absolutely certain that an upper middle class girl interviewing a rabble rousing 'church and king' incoherent fash hoolie will only throw up epic nuggets of wisdom and show us all just how the roots of w/c fash emerge. I can't fucking wait.
> 
> Maybe they could invite Starkey and Bragg to the scintillating debate and really make it of relevance. Fuck me sideways, this is going to be bad.


 
reminds me of that horrendous Russell Brand sorts out the BNP incident


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## audiotech (Aug 28, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> reminds me of that horrendous Russell Brand sorts out the BNP incident


 
That wasn't all bad. I'm thinking of the random moment when some local Leeds lads in a pub garden spotted Brand with Collett and did a good job calling the BNP racist shit-stirrers, not wanted in the city. Even, Chris Beverley, then Leeds BNP super-cadre, probably there as a minder was lost for words flat footed.


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## Delroy Booth (Aug 28, 2012)

What possible justification could there be for giving Tommy Robinson a platform in the New Statesman at this point in time?

2 years ago, when the EDL was new, I could just about understand it, but now? They're clearly a force on the wane, what's the point?


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## tbtommyb (Aug 28, 2012)

Is there really anyone who doesn't consider what happened to Penny to be rape? the whole key element of the massive rape discussion over the last week was how doing x or y meant that it wasn't rape, 'bad manners' à la Galloway. But I read nothing that would ever have justified what happened to her.


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## The39thStep (Aug 28, 2012)

audiotech said:


> That wasn't all bad. I'm thinking of the random moment when some local Leeds lads in a pub garden spotted Brand with Collett and did a good job calling the BNP racist shit-stirrers, not wanted in the city. Even, Chris Beverley, then Leeds BNP super-cadre, probably there as a minder was lost for words flat footed.


 
That would have happened without Brands embarrassing intervention and probably a lot earlier


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## rekil (Aug 29, 2012)

love detective said:


> Re the Rape piece - the good news is that Laura has finally decided to report a name to the police
> 
> The bad news is that it's not the person who raped her, but someone of twitter who claimed that she was making the whole thing up


This guy?



He didn't say she made it up. He said his 'issue was with Laurie using such a sensitive issue to further her media career'. I don't doubt she got genuinely awful shit via email and so on, but reporting this guy to the police would seem a tad unwise.

Elsewhere, Crabapple was featured in a CNN gallery about power or something. She said she was 'inspired by some graffiti from ages ago.' It's plagiarism dear.




> 2011 was a year of ecstatic rebellion. From Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, people were shaking the foundations of power. But in 2012, we get to see what happens after that. In my "Big Fish Eat Little Fish Eat Big Fish" piece, I drew a metaphor for revolution and counter-revolution.


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## tbtommyb (Aug 29, 2012)

What would she report him for?


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## articul8 (Aug 29, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> What possible justification could there be for giving Tommy Robinson a platform in the New Statesman at this point in time?
> 
> 2 years ago, when the EDL was new, I could just about understand it, but now? They're clearly a force on the wane, what's the point?


 
Judging by the Staggers' newstand sales it's not all that much of a platform.


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## Orang Utan (Aug 29, 2012)

On a semi-related note, who is @blacbloc on twitter and what's going on? He seems to be having a meltdown after being accused of domestic violence and grassing activists to newspapers


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## BigTom (Aug 29, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> On a semi-related note, who is @blacbloc on twitter and what's going on? He seems to be having a meltdown after being accused of domestic violence and grassing activists to newspapers


 
He's an activist from London iirc.
Some of what has gone on is this:

There was an activist in Liverpool called Paul Cunliffe (who was @xv_brigada) who has sexually harrased some women activists:
http://angrywomen.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/awol-statement-on-sexual-harassment-in-activist-spaces/

blacbloc took issue with the above, defending paul cunliffe, seeing it as a kangaroo court (although the liverpool people say that they had private conversations with paul before outing him like this [and I believe them], and has accused @smashkyriarchy (Romana) who is one of the people cunliffe harrased of being a honeypot / lieing. He's also said he was falsely accused of rape by an activist that he says was an undercover police officer, and has also accused various other activists who have said stuff against him of being undercover police / police informants. There have been some accusations that @blacbloc beat one of his ex-partners but I can't remember where I saw the emails about that.

so blacbloc gets accused of misogyny / rape apologism by various activists (mostly the liverpool group) due to his defence of paul cunliffe and the other things that have apparently happened, there's a certain amount of harrasment of blacbloc going on, in that they won't leave it, but how blacbloc was talking around the time that paul cunliffe's thing happened and what he's been saying recently were out of order imo.

I'm not sure what the thing about arrests is - some of the liverpool activists got nicked over the weekend or early this week but @leila_shark says that was because she swore at police and called them murderers and others got nicked trying to dearrest her.


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## Orang Utan (Aug 29, 2012)

Thanks Tom, what an ugly mess


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## the button (Aug 29, 2012)

Meanwhile, he (blacbloc -- whose real name I know, but won't descend to his level) has been d0xing people to their employers & the Old Bill left, right & centre. As Big Tom says, the arrests in Liverpool over the weekend are unrelated, but he's been grassing away since.


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## the button (Aug 29, 2012)

And meanwhile again, he's set up another Twitter account (which I'm not going to post on here), giving the home addresses & photos of the houses of folks in Liverpool, giving them the hashtag #EDL. Which is basically giving their details to the far right. Lovely.


----------



## cesare (Aug 29, 2012)

Good grief


----------



## TruXta (Aug 29, 2012)

Fucking hell. Someone deserves whatever bad is coming their way.


----------



## BigTom (Aug 29, 2012)

grassing to police and right wing (esp. in liverpool where the NWI are nasty fucks) is totally out of order. I think it was fair enough to question the way the liverpool people went about outing paul cunliffe, and to ask what kind of process there was and what right to defence paul had but blacbloc went further than that and was just flat out saying his accusers were lying and didn't like paul so made up this stuff / honeypot trapped him in order to disgrace him.
as OU said, a fucked up situation, blacbloc seemed decent before all this, but he's gone a bit warped in the past 6 months or however long it's been.


----------



## Orang Utan (Aug 29, 2012)

Yeah, he seems to be a bit mental about the whole Assnage thing and also about Syria.
He seems to suspect all reporters with a different view to his as agents/tools of the state


----------



## andy2002 (Aug 30, 2012)

copliker said:


> Elsewhere, Crabapple was featured in a CNN gallery about power or something. She said she was 'inspired by some graffiti from ages ago.' It's plagiarism dear.
> 
> View attachment 22520


----------



## cesare (Aug 30, 2012)

BigTom said:


> grassing to police and right wing (esp. in liverpool where the NWI are nasty fucks) is totally out of order. I think it was fair enough to question the way the liverpool people went about outing paul cunliffe, and to ask what kind of process there was and what right to defence paul had but blacbloc went further than that and was just flat out saying his accusers were lying and didn't like paul so made up this stuff / honeypot trapped him in order to disgrace him.
> as OU said, a fucked up situation, blacbloc seemed decent before all this, but he's gone a bit warped in the past 6 months or however long it's been.


I had a wee look at this yesterday (not hard, there's a lot online), and it really is fucked up. I wonder how these kids are coping with it, tbh.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Aug 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Yeah, he seems to be a bit mental about the whole Assnage thing and also about Syria.
> He seems to suspect all reporters with a different view to his as agents/tools of the state


 


the button said:


> And meanwhile again, he's set up another Twitter account (which I'm not going to post on here), giving the home addresses & photos of the houses of folks in Liverpool, giving them the hashtag #EDL. Which is basically giving their details to the far right. Lovely.


 
I reckon he might be state. Just coz people who go out of their way to cause this much trouble, if they're not being employed by the state, they're doing the job for free.


----------



## JHE (Aug 30, 2012)

copliker said:


> ...reporting this guy to the police would seem a tad unwise.


 
It strikes me as plain stupid - and a little surprising.



tbtommyb said:


> What would she report him for?


 
Upsetting Laurie.  That's bound to be a criminal offence.

Will her scurrying off to Mr Plod, now she's been offended, inhibit her from publishing all sorts of juvenile anti-Plod slogans?  Nah, I shouldn't think so.

She isn't the first to have a weird combo of attitudes towards Plod.  She won't be the last.

ACAB!  ACAB!  Smash the Fascist Pigs!  Um.  Officer, officer, help, help!  That nasty man called me names.  He has no right to do that!  It must be a crime!  Arrest him!  Lock him up!  Um.  Smash the Fascist Pigs! ACAB! ACAB!


----------



## rekil (Aug 31, 2012)

andy2002 said:


> crabapple


Not like. Not like at all. Charging idiots $5 for photos? She blocked the PD account after it was suggested that people in Greece should not be expected to model for their shit book for free.  

Laura's piece on the gold dawns isn't very good combabes.


----------



## audiotech (Aug 31, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> That would have happened without Brands embarrassing intervention and probably a lot earlier


 
I doubt that. Brand, with cameras and crew in tow drew passing interest, then the scene which unfolded was recorded and broadcast to a wider audience. No Brand and no cameras, then what? More than likely the usual BNP response would have been banal uttering's about "race traitors", with probably other abuse thrown in for good measure and they would have been off. Instead, the BNP contingent were unable to withdraw from the situation, otherwise they would have looked inept. Instead they were seen struck dumb, unable to string a coherent sentence together and still looked inept in the process. Again, this was then seen by a wider audience and, this small BNP coterie at least, were exposed as the charlatans they really are. They then went off with a flea in their ear, no doubt wishing they'd not taken Brand along, with TV crew and avoided the pub garden altogether. They got carried away with their own ego's and the sense they were marching to some great victory, with the British public on their side. Didn't turn out like that.


----------



## love detective (Aug 31, 2012)

copliker said:


> Not like. Not like at all. Charging idiots $5 for photos? She blocked the PD account after it was suggested that people in Greece should not be expected to model for their shit book for free.


 
she doesn't sound half as annoying as i'd thought she would be


----------



## revol68 (Aug 31, 2012)

love detective said:


> she doesn't sound half as annoying as i'd thought she would be


 
you mean you fancy her.


----------



## articul8 (Sep 1, 2012)

> shoulder rape


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 1, 2012)

where's that from?


----------



## articul8 (Sep 1, 2012)

the Molly Crabapple video up the thread #3848


----------



## co-op (Sep 1, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I reckon he might be state. Just coz people who go out of their way to cause this much trouble, if they're not being employed by the state, they're doing the job for free.


 

Aye. But he may not know it. If I was trying to fuck up activist communities I'd cultivate a few loose canons then set them off randomly. There is something about activism that inevitably attracts a few unstable souls but there are others that just seem a bit too destructive to be real.


----------



## co-op (Sep 1, 2012)

Maybe check out who sponsored him into things?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Sep 1, 2012)

co-op said:


> Aye. But he may not know it. If I was trying to fuck up activist communities I'd cultivate a few loose canons then set them off randomly. There is something about activism that inevitably attracts a few unstable souls but there are others that just seem a bit too destructive to be real.


 
Tbh I don't think he's state at all, there's no way the police would let someone that clearly deranged do a job like that. They have like psycometric tests and profiling and stuff to stop headcases like that. He's probably not involved in anything at all, just sitting on his PC being a weirdo.

I'd keep well the fuck away whatever's behind it, he's clearly trying to incite a reaction.


----------



## co-op (Sep 1, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Tbh I don't think he's state at all, there's no way the police would let someone that clearly deranged do a job like that. They have like psycometric tests and profiling and stuff to stop headcases like that. He's probably not involved in anything at all, just sitting on his PC being a weirdo.
> 
> I'd keep well the fuck away whatever's behind it, he's clearly trying to incite a reaction.


 
That was what I was driving at really. But it doesn't mean that he hasn't been deliberately put in a position to do the damage, some of the most effective damagers are those who don't really know what they're doing or why. Anyway, no point getting too paranoid about it, it's perfectly possible he's just gone off on one, it happens. Just something to think about I reckon.


----------



## cesare (Sep 1, 2012)

co-op said:


> That was what I was driving at really. But it doesn't mean that he hasn't been deliberately put in a position to do the damage, some of the most effective damagers are those who don't really know what they're doing or why. Anyway, no point getting too paranoid about it, it's perfectly possible he's just gone off on one, it happens. Just something to think about I reckon.




He has AVOID writ large, no matter his provenance.


----------



## rekil (Sep 2, 2012)

Did Laura get the interview she was begging Stephen for?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 2, 2012)

Looks like Billy's Royal-air-Force-patriotism has rubbed off on her. At least it will sit easy next to her NATO-patriotism.


----------



## cesare (Sep 4, 2012)

I see Albionism has just posted this in the demo forum "tout warning"
http://libcom.org/blog/warning-tout-03092012


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 4, 2012)

cesare said:


> I see Albionism has just posted this in the demo forum "tout warning"
> http://libcom.org/blog/warning-tout-03092012


 
Its about time sexism was outed in the anarchists scene.Its been the last bastion for too long imo.


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 4, 2012)

audiotech said:


> I doubt that. Brand, with cameras and crew in tow drew passing interest, then the scene which unfolded was recorded and broadcast to a wider audience. No Brand and no cameras, then what? More than likely the usual BNP response would have been banal uttering's about "race traitors", with probably other abuse thrown in for good measure and they would have been off. Instead, the BNP contingent were unable to withdraw from the situation, otherwise they would have looked inept. Instead they were seen struck dumb, unable to string a coherent sentence together and still looked inept in the process. Again, this was then seen by a wider audience and, this small BNP coterie at least, were exposed as the charlatans they really are. They then went off with a flea in their ear, no doubt wishing they'd not taken Brand along, with TV crew and avoided the pub garden altogether. They got carried away with their own ego's and the sense they were marching to some great victory, with the British public on their side. Didn't turn out like that.


 
That sure is one lot of supposition there. Do you honestly think that a TV crew has to be present to regulate a BNP non BNP interaction?  As for this exposing the BNP at the time it was made they were sailing high and it didn't for one moment affect their trajectory one jot. The BNP and Brand have very different audiences.


----------



## cesare (Sep 4, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Its about time sexism was outed in the anarchists scene.Its been the last bastion for too long imo.



I don't really keep track of what's going on in the anarchist scene apart from asking a few questions here and there. It wouldn't surprise me if sexism was the last bastion, but equally I don't think the anarchists particularly stand out in that regard. I think it's encouraging that, for example, south London Solfed comprises a third female nowadays so in terms of membership at least it doesn't seem exclusively male anymore.

I think it's a good thing that they're now taking a more active stance on this particular situation, but I still think issues relating to in loco parentis for these 16/17 year old members is worth discussion.


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 4, 2012)

cesare said:


> I don't really keep track of what's going on in the anarchist scene apart from asking a few questions here and there. It wouldn't surprise me if sexism was the last bastion, but equally I don't think the anarchists particularly stand out in that regard. I think it's encouraging that, for example, south London Solfed comprises a third female nowadays so in terms of membership at least it doesn't seem exclusively male anymore.
> 
> I think it's a good thing that they're now taking a more active stance on this particular situation, but I still think issues relating to in loco parentis for these 16/17 year old members is worth discussion.


 
Explain a bit more about this loco parentis issue. Is there a way to have some form of an alternative to CRB checks?


----------



## cesare (Sep 4, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Explain a bit more about this loco parentis issue. Is there a way to have some form of an alternative to CRB checks?



I don't know about alternatives to CRB checks, whether they'd have a need or want for anything like that - how do you imagine that might work? 

 I was thinking more along the lines of making the very young members more aware of the potential for abuse, and what they can do to stop it/report it at an early stage.


----------



## cesare (Sep 4, 2012)

Actually, I've just found this on libcom: http://libcom.org/library/statement-about-sexual-assault-within-anarchistactivist-community


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 4, 2012)

cesare said:


> I don't know about alternatives to CRB checks, whether they'd have a need or want for anything like that - how do you imagine that might work?
> 
> I was thinking more along the lines of making the very young members more aware of the potential for abuse, and what they can do to stop it/report it at an early stage.


 
I think that's a starting point but we need to think about reporting to whom?

The non state CRB check idea , it might not have wings but given the fact hat those outed so far have previous how can we prevent this area from further becoming a magnet for those who are taking advantage of vulnerable young women?


----------



## cesare (Sep 4, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> I think that's a starting point but we need to think about reporting to whom?
> 
> The non state CRB check idea , it might not have wings but given the fact hat those outed so far have previous how can we prevent this area from further becoming a magnet for those who are taking advantage of vulnerable young women?



In terms of reporting,  my thoughts are that they need to set up some kind of accountability process. Identify (at least) one person per group that has responsibility for investigating complaints (and that complaints should be made to them) and that they are properly trained in how to do so. Then the results of the investigation given to (and this is where it gets trickier) an elected person/s who would make a decision about what course of action to take. Possible courses of action could include (but not limited to) expulsion from the group, details of the decision being circulated amongst the wider activist community, encouraging the target to report to the police with active support, etc.

I suppose that details of any such decisions if circulated, could form the basis for pre-acceptance checks on joining which kind of takes up your non-state CRB check idea but that would need developing.


----------



## audiotech (Sep 4, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> That sure is one lot of supposition there. Do you honestly think that a TV crew has to be present to regulate a BNP non BNP interaction? As for this exposing the BNP at the time it was made they were sailing high and it didn't for one moment affect their trajectory one jot. The BNP and Brand have very different audiences.


 
I don't wish to derail this thread anymore. I've given my thoughts to your comment in reply to my post, but just to reiterate the point that I made, that Brand and a TV crew there, in that particular moment in time, won't have helped them any. It's no more than that.


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 4, 2012)

cesare said:


> In terms of reporting, my thoughts are that they need to set up some kind of accountability process. Identify (at least) one person per group that has responsibility for investigating complaints (and that complaints should be made to them) and that they are properly trained in how to do so. Then the results of the investigation given to (and this is where it gets trickier) an elected person/s who would make a decision about what course of action to take. Possible courses of action could include (but not limited to) expulsion from the group, details of the decision being circulated amongst the wider activist community, encouraging the target to report to the police with active support, etc.
> 
> I suppose that details of any such decisions if circulated, could form the basis for pre-acceptance checks on joining which kind of takes up your non-state CRB check idea but that would need developing.


 
There was a poster on here , Herbert Read an anarchist, who developed some form of anarchist social work around safeguarding. Think he is a lecturer now. he is your man. Soeone might be able to pm you his details.


----------



## cesare (Sep 4, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> There was a poster on here , Herbert Read an anarchist, who developed some form of anarchist social work around safeguarding. Think he is a lecturer now. he is your man. Soeone might be able to pm you his details.



Same as Herbert Read on MATB?

Thanks for the suggestion. 

It would be interesting to know what other Left wing groups have done, too.


----------



## Orang Utan (Sep 4, 2012)

I thought Firky was Herbert Read


----------



## cesare (Sep 4, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> I thought Firky was Herbert Read



Before all that


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 4, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> I thought Firky was Herbert Read


'Herbert read' (a knighted anarchist) gave firky his log-in when he decided to leave.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Sep 6, 2012)

This is priceless - one of the best: Penny and her mates will Save The World, if only a rich lefty philanthropist will pay them to do it.




> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Right there must be some rich leftists out there. Who wants to help finance and support a cabal of brilliant young journos to Fix The Media?
> 
> *Chaminda Jayanetti* ‏@*1000cuts*
> ...


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 6, 2012)

that is fantastic!

If I didn't know better I would assume she was trolling us.


----------



## rekil (Sep 6, 2012)

That bit of lunacy isn't complete without mentioning her first world trauma from the previous day.


> Left a Terry Pratchett book on the train. Had to buy it again as couldn't let the story go, forgoing planned dinner. Always the right choice


----------



## nino_savatte (Sep 6, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> This is priceless - one of the best: Penny and her mates will Save The World, if only a rich lefty philanthropist will pay them to do it.
> 
> _*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* _
> _Right there must be some rich leftists out there. Who wants to help finance and support a cabal of brilliant young journos to Fix The Media?_
> ...


Fizzy pop, pin wheels and fluffy bunnies!


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 6, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> that is fantastic!
> 
> If I didn't know better I would assume she was trolling us.


Isn't she/they trolling the hari-whitewasher Whittam-Smith and his laughable democracy20125 (even though that monstrous initiative is pretty much her and her politics all over - she's proud to be british and proud of our democratic traditions, they're proud of britain and its democratic traditions etc)


----------



## rekil (Sep 6, 2012)

Not trolling, it's something to do with her getting dizzy about compiling a shortlist for some awards.


> I was blown away by some of the Guardian Student Media Awards entries, and want to make a digital magazine so I can hire them all.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 6, 2012)

copliker said:


> Not trolling, it's something to do with her getting dizzy about compiling a shortlist for some awards.


Oh god, she wats to be the next suny hundal and nuture a generation of shit posh writers. Just like he did with her.


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 6, 2012)

'i want to hire them all'

as unpaid interns no doubt


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 7, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> This is priceless - one of the best: Penny and her mates will Save The World, if only a rich lefty philanthropist will pay them to do it.


----------



## cesare (Sep 7, 2012)

Uncle Tom thread's interesting, new poster writing swathes about misunderstood far righters.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 7, 2012)

cesare said:


> Uncle Tom thread's interesting, new poster writing swathes about misunderstood far righters.


 
I reckon it's firky


----------



## cesare (Sep 7, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I reckon it's firky


Heh.  Couldn't have been firky with the earlier tussle with Violent Panda on one of the benefits threads.


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 7, 2012)

cesare said:


> Uncle Tom thread's interesting, new poster writing swathes about misunderstood far righters.


 
Could be a Spastic John reincarnation


----------



## cesare (Sep 7, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Could be a Spastic John reincarnation


Who's that?


----------



## treelover (Sep 7, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> There was a poster on here , Herbert Read an anarchist, who developed some form of anarchist social work around safeguarding. Think he is a lecturer now. he is your man. Soeone might be able to pm you his details.


 

he is probably a senior lecturer now on on the board of the 'adaptive personnel reconfiguration panel', eg, sacking people...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Sep 7, 2012)

cesare said:


> Uncle Tom thread's interesting, new poster writing swathes about misunderstood far righters.


 
Ethnic minority new poster with two Phds who posts under his real name, too.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 7, 2012)

treelover said:


> he is probably a senior lecturer now on on the board of the 'adaptive personnel reconfiguration panel', eg, sacking people...


 
I think he is a shop steward in his union now.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 7, 2012)

treelover said:


> he is probably a senior lecturer now on on the board of the 'adaptive personnel reconfiguration panel', eg, sacking people...


I doubt it. He was/is sound.


----------



## treelover (Sep 7, 2012)

its a joke...

but indicative of the trajectory of many former leftists especially in the long gone past..


----------



## Riklet (Sep 7, 2012)

penny red: vanguard of the radical broadgeoisie, sheeting against the oppression of influential young journalist on a global level.

broadshitters of the world, unite!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 7, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I doubt it. He was/is sound.


 
He really is a fairly militant steward.


----------



## cesare (Sep 7, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> He really is a fairly militant steward.



Give us yr safeguarding tips,daz!


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 7, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I doubt it. He was/is sound.


concerned


----------



## love detective (Sep 7, 2012)

daz power concerns


----------



## the button (Sep 7, 2012)

Talking to crack addicts on a bean bag.


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 7, 2012)

Remember that time we all pretended to be health inspectors, so we could scam free meals from restaurants?


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 7, 2012)

ponds for frogs on allotments
No Gods No Masters
strutting nazi


----------



## love detective (Sep 7, 2012)

Daz spittle was pissed spittle mixed with garlic breath


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 7, 2012)

A group of young lads, all lads.


----------



## the button (Sep 7, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Remember that time we all pretended to be health inspectors, so we could scam free meals from restaurants?


Or that time we spent all day trying not to find out the result of that football match, but then Thelma ruined it?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 7, 2012)

Remeber that time we thought a ghost was terrorising Morcambe but it turned out to be a pale ginger lad cycling home after a night shift at Morrisons?


----------



## the button (Sep 7, 2012)

Kids today with their Twitter & their Facebook. We had to make our *own* entertainment.


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 7, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Remeber that time we thought a ghost was terrorising Morcambe but it turned out to be a pale ginger lad cycling home after a night shift at Morrisons?


 
And then we ripped off his rubber mask, only to be confronted with the gurning vizzog of Joseph Stalin, saying "I'd have got away with it too if it hadn't been for you interfering kids".


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 7, 2012)

treelover said:


> he is probably a senior lecturer now on on the board of the 'adaptive personnel reconfiguration panel', eg, sacking people...


 
He's an unpretentious and bright working class bloke who managed to get into academia.   The few times I've met him he's been very self-deprecating (blagged his way in, lecturing at the ex-poly instead of the red brick etc).  I know you're taking the piss, but from what I gather he's been fairly active against public sector job cuts, and outside of the crap and irrelevant anarchist scene, which he takes the piss out of, or did do when I met him and unfortunately some of his former comrades, one of whom turned up to a student pub on his BMX.


----------



## the button (Sep 7, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> interfering kids".


Whatever happened to chegs, btw?


----------



## love detective (Sep 7, 2012)

the button said:


> Whatever happened to chegs, btw?


 
swept up by Malcolm Stonhehouse and his entourage


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 7, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Remeber that time we thought a ghost was terrorising Morcambe but it turned out to be a pale ginger lad cycling home after a night shift at Morrisons?


 
Those were the days.  Morecambe 2002.  After college we used to get pissed on crap lager sold at the Black Bull pub across from Poulton Road .  Once there was one of those toy parrots on a perch with a motion sensor at the bar, the ones you can speak into and it will repeat whatever you say.  Kids were getting it to say swear words.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 7, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> And then we ripped off his rubber mask, only to be confronted with the gurning vizzog of Joseph Stalin, saying "I'd have got away with it too if it hadn't been for you interfering kids".


 
I was gurning last Friday.  Looked shit on the otuside but felt good on the inside.

Bad comedown though.


----------



## love detective (Sep 7, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Those were the days. Morecambe 2002. After college we used to get pissed on crap lager sold at the Black Bull pub across from Poulton Road . Once there was one of those toy parrots on a perch with a motion sensor at the bar, the ones you can speak into and it will repeat whatever you say. Kids were getting it to say swear words.


we all died a little in that goddamn war


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 7, 2012)

love detective said:


> we all died a little in that goddamn war








Lest we forget.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 7, 2012)

Haven't seen that film in ages.


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 7, 2012)

Unpretentious?


----------



## cesare (Sep 7, 2012)

Kes directed by ken loach


----------



## love detective (Sep 7, 2012)

that was the one i was trying to remember earlier!


----------



## TruXta (Sep 7, 2012)

Too many injokes in this thread now


----------



## cesare (Sep 7, 2012)

love detective said:


> that was the one i was trying to remember earlier!



Look at them all!


----------



## cesare (Sep 7, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Too many injokes in this thread now





Oaten pic


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 7, 2012)

Herbert Read was a teenage Nihilist. I was a teenage Stalinist.  DotCommunist still is (a teenager).


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 7, 2012)

'Davey.'


----------



## TruXta (Sep 7, 2012)

cesare said:


> Oaten pic


----------



## love detective (Sep 7, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> 'Davey.'


 
just a quick panegyric for dave, davey, dav, david, davey, david and davey (DDDDDD)


----------



## love detective (Sep 7, 2012)

tumour on the body politic


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 7, 2012)

cesare said:


> Oaten pic


 
Next best ...


----------



## cesare (Sep 7, 2012)

TruXta said:


>



If something's turning a bit shit, or a reference to shit, etc. Mark Oaten, that well known connoisseur of shit. There's a photo of Oaten for shorthand.


----------



## love detective (Sep 7, 2012)




----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 7, 2012)

Marx, Lenin, Davey.


----------



## TruXta (Sep 7, 2012)

cesare said:


> If something's turning a bit shit, or a reference to shit, etc. Mark Oaten, that well known connoisseur of shit. There's a photo of Oaten for shorthand.


 
Ah. Ha.


----------



## cesare (Sep 7, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Ah. Ha.



Pandas instead of kittens.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 7, 2012)

Clothes for cunts.


----------



## love detective (Sep 7, 2012)

look at all of them


----------



## cesare (Sep 7, 2012)

Never met a Jew


----------



## the button (Sep 7, 2012)

Where do you get your pills and coke from ,then torso??/


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 7, 2012)

Lusty will be watching this.

A retrospective.


----------



## love detective (Sep 7, 2012)

turned out it was Malcolm Stonehouse and his entourage


----------



## love detective (Sep 7, 2012)

remember that time torso crossed a picket line, and tried to cover it up by turning into a paedophile


----------



## the button (Sep 7, 2012)

love detective said:


> remember that time torso crossed a picket line, and tried to cover it up by turning into a paedophile


Driving through a picket line at high speed in an ice-cream van, IIRC.


----------



## love detective (Sep 7, 2012)

remember we nearly made a whole human out of neck, eyebrow, torso, nees (that's a new one)


----------



## cesare (Sep 7, 2012)

nees


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 7, 2012)

love detective said:


> remember we nearly made a whole human out of neck, eyebrow, torso, nees (that's a new one)


 
That was nearly as good as the time we joined hands in a darkened room and tried to contact the living.


----------



## love detective (Sep 7, 2012)

not forgetting


----------



## cesare (Sep 7, 2012)

and making him into a Christmas elf


----------



## Random (Sep 8, 2012)

Using his turntables as an instrument


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 8, 2012)

childish things


----------



## love detective (Sep 8, 2012)

he really does play them as musical instruments


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 8, 2012)

drugfucked annakissed tebbitman.


----------



## love detective (Sep 8, 2012)

i should have added stretched to the list of human body parts earlier, knew i'd forgot one


----------



## cesare (Sep 8, 2012)

love detective said:


> i should have added stretched to the list of human body parts earlier, knew i'd forgot one


and odd pants.


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 8, 2012)

Cockers


----------



## love detective (Sep 8, 2012)

cesare said:


> and odd pants.


 
true, although strictly speaking, pants are not a body part


----------



## cesare (Sep 8, 2012)

love detective said:


> true, although strictly speaking, pants are not a body part



True, barely covering body parts. Wasn't there one about the black and white palestinian scarfs?


----------



## cesare (Sep 8, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Cockers



u r dmped lol


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 8, 2012)

Rice pudding man


----------



## barney_pig (Sep 8, 2012)




----------



## treelover (Sep 8, 2012)

bleeding in jokes, who is the DJ messiah?


----------



## cesare (Sep 8, 2012)

treelover said:


> bleeding in jokes, who is the DJ messiah?



It's more of a cheerful retrospective


----------



## treelover (Sep 8, 2012)

who is it then?


----------



## cesare (Sep 8, 2012)

treelover said:


> who is it then?



The one coining most of the joke descriptions/pisstakes.


----------



## Bakunin (Sep 8, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> This is priceless - one of the best: Penny and her mates will Save The World, if only a rich lefty philanthropist will pay them to do it.


 
Reminds me of a quote from an anonymous mercenary soldier:

'Some of us really care, especially when the money's right.'


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 8, 2012)

blob of spunk doing a black power salute.


----------



## love detective (Sep 8, 2012)

*MATB reply to the black hand*



> *Forgetting Bataille: Postsemantic Rationalism and The Black Hand*
> 
> *1. Expressions of defining characteristic*
> 
> ...


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 8, 2012)

Great stuff guys.


----------



## love detective (Sep 8, 2012)

we certainly responded to the major issues of the day


----------



## cesare (Sep 8, 2012)

love detective said:


> we certainly responded to the major issues of the day


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 13, 2012)

Laurie Penny latest:



> Crikey - this is terrifying !!
> How on earth can I continue in my safe prejudice that she is a loony-lefty champagne socialist trustafarian hanging with the Occupy crowd as a trendy fashion when she writes THIS WELL and, even worse, actually seems to KNOW WHAT SHE IS TALKING ABOUT !!
> Eekk... Never mind, normal service will soon be resumed if we just hurl some vapid insults about her dress sense and laugh at her dyed red hair... won't it ?!


 
From the comments here, on her surprisingly good review of Naomi Wolf's magic vagina book:

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2012/09/problem-naomi-wolfs-vagina

OK, own up now, which of you was it?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Sep 13, 2012)

Laurie Penny's articles on gender and sexual politics seem to be pretty good for the most part. It's when she steps outside of that realm into other political issues where she lets herself down imo.


----------



## kavenism (Sep 13, 2012)

> I have spent a disturbing few days with my nose buried in Naomi Wolf's _Vagina_. Naomi Wolf's _Vagina_ is warm and inviting, but seems to lack depth. Naomi Wolf's _Vagina_ is over-exposed. Naomi Wolf's _Vagina_ is crassly attention-seeking. Naomi Wolf's _Vagina_ is available in all good bookshops. There is something fishy about . . . no, actually, can I stop now? Are we done? Good


 
Swiftian init


----------



## weepiper (Sep 14, 2012)

*Laurie Penny*‏@*PennyRed*​
Essential skills for cash-strapped nomad lady journalists of fortune #97: find an outfit for under £20 when you can't get home#*winning*


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 15, 2012)

brilliant.


----------



## Balbi (Sep 17, 2012)

Molly Crabapple got nicked at the Occupy 1 year anniversary


----------



## love detective (Sep 17, 2012)

publicity stunt to help flog her new book no doubt


----------



## love detective (Sep 17, 2012)

typically, laurie penny is 'unspeakably angry' that molly got lifted, but hasn't said a thing about all the others

no hashtag campaigns to free anyone else - only the celebs


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> publicity stunt to help flog her new book no doubt


 
Yep.


----------



## Orang Utan (Sep 17, 2012)

Spot the champagne case


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> publicity stunt to help flog her new book no doubt





Captain Hurrah said:


> Yep.


 
It must be terrible to be such a cynical person.


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 17, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Spot the champagne case


 

25 quid a bottle. the statesmen gig must pay well


----------



## gosub (Sep 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> typically, laurie penny is 'unspeakably angry' that molly got lifted, but hasn't said a thing about all the others
> 
> no hashtag campaigns to free anyone else - only the celebs


 


 How are you defining celebs?


----------



## love detective (Sep 17, 2012)

look at me, buy my shit


----------



## andy2002 (Sep 17, 2012)

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14330 (complete with tweets etc)


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Sep 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> look at me, buy my shit


very astute of Molly to stop and have a chat with photographers, so they could get a really good shot of her.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 17, 2012)

'look at me, buy my shit.'


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 17, 2012)

_Yes, i've done it!_


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 17, 2012)

_Next, the dreaded kettle..._


----------



## cesare (Sep 17, 2012)

That miniskirt's a bit impractical for this kind of caper, imo.


----------



## revol68 (Sep 17, 2012)

Well since a major catalyst for the Occupy movement was graduates without a future, it's heartwarming to see some clever folk using it to launch their careers.


----------



## andy2002 (Sep 17, 2012)

www.bleedingcool.com/2012/09/17/molly-crabapple-arrested-during-occupy-wall-street-anniversary-protest/


----------



## love detective (Sep 17, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> 'look at me, buy my shit.'


 
technically those 4 likes that you got for that belong to me


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 17, 2012)

You can have one.


----------



## JimW (Sep 17, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> You can have one.


Appropriating a man's mental labour then paying him back a quarter of the value.   You'll go far.


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 17, 2012)

the like theory of value


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 17, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> the like theory of value


There are many theories of value. Which one are you referring to?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 17, 2012)

JimW said:


> Appropriating a man's mental labour then paying him back a quarter of the value.  You'll go far.


 
Expropriation, as the Bolshevik 'battle squads' used to say.


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> There are many theories of value. Which one are you referring to?


 

the like one


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 17, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Expropriation, as the Bolshevik 'battle squads' used to say.


They understood the difference. And there is one.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 17, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> the like one


Then you're fucked lad.


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 17, 2012)

what, again?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> They understood the difference. And there is one.


 
I know.  Just making a bad joke.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 17, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> I know. Just making a bad joke.


I know you did, i was impressing upon the comedy stalinist that these terms mean something. Good night sir!


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 17, 2012)

if you've finished spitroasting me I'm going to walk my 'chavvy' terrier before you decide to change ends and i have to taste the ginger. Ladies of Grace, adieu


----------



## Random (Sep 18, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Molly Crabapple got nicked at the Occupy 1 year anniversary


Getting arrested is no fun. Grinning at someone getting arrested should be reserved for fascists and antisocial thugs.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2012)




----------



## cesare (Sep 18, 2012)

I'm going straight to hell now, aren't I


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 18, 2012)




----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 18, 2012)

Random said:


> Getting arrested is no fun. Grinning at someone getting arrested should be reserved for fascists and antisocial thugs.


 
she falls under the second description


----------



## Random (Sep 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


>


 Counts as a fascist


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


>


 
"UK Police unleash new hell weapon".


----------



## cesare (Sep 18, 2012)

"Poor arrest etiquette"


----------



## Balbi (Sep 18, 2012)

Random said:


> Getting arrested is no fun. Grinning at someone getting arrested should be reserved for fascists and antisocial thugs.



More a  at the #freemollycrabapple stuff. Self-elevating weirdness.


----------



## love detective (Sep 18, 2012)

Brave Penny and her fearless red pen of justice



> That's it. Sorry, guys, but I'm not going back out there today. Really don't want to be arrested and deported just for journalism #s17


 
One minute she's claiming journalism can be more than 'just journalism', that it can be activism as well, next minute after the police rip her mates cardigan, she's like fuck that shit, i'm not risking getting lifted just for 'journalism'


----------



## love detective (Sep 18, 2012)

and 



> Molly is out! #freemollycrabapple #s17 now to wait for all the other troublesome artists and journalists arrested today


 
fuck normals


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2012)

> _That's it. Sorry, guys, but I'm not going back out there today. Really don't want to be arrested and deported just for journalism _


That's the spirit!


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 18, 2012)

well an arrest would scotch future visa applications, forcing her to cover more intense things like chile or the african situation.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> well an arrest would scotch future visa applications, forcing her to cover more intense things like chile or the african situation.


You can be arrested all you like.


----------



## weepiper (Sep 18, 2012)

She is _much too important_ to get arrested.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2012)

The face of youth revolt. _Fuck that, staying in. _She may have inadvertently made a good point by her appalling cowardly uncomradely behaviour.


----------



## treelover (Sep 18, 2012)

Wasn't John Reed a bit of a champagne socialist, self- publicist, boho, etc?

getting arrested by NY cops is not nice no matter who you are...

is P/P turning into MATB?

and no, I'm not comparing MC with J/Reed, but i wonder what the reaction to him would have been if Urban existed then..


----------



## ViolentPanda (Sep 18, 2012)

andy2002 said:


> http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14330 (complete with tweets etc)


 
Why is Sarah Teather wearing an NYPD uniform?


----------



## treelover (Sep 18, 2012)

btw, RTS was full of people like M/C and Laura...


----------



## Random (Sep 18, 2012)

treelover said:


> Wasn't John Reed a bit of a champagne socialist, self- publicist, boho, etc? [...] i wonder what the reaction to him would have been if Urban existed then..


 John Reed rode with Zapata's men, and then lived in Petrograd during the revolution. I think that's hardly living the easy life.

Regarding getting arrested just for journalism - this is what it looks like http://www.panorama.am/en/society/2012/09/18/colombia-farc/


----------



## love detective (Sep 18, 2012)

treelover said:


> getting arrested by NY cops is not nice no matter who you are...


 
Absolutely - and the main point being made here is that all the others who got lifted do not get anything like the concern that the self styled celebrity activists give themselves

From the minute molly got lifted, the only thing penny was concerned about was pushing an online campaign to 'free molly crabapple' - not once did she refer to anyone else who got arrested, let alone show them any concern, or mount any campaigns to ensure their release. The only time she referred to anyone other than molly crabapple was this morning when she showed some concern for the 'troublesome artists and journalists' who had still not been released

And she's also once again done her 'i'm just a journalist, journalist shouldn't be lifted' - with the very strong implication that it's ok for normals to get lifted, just not activist celebs and journalists 'like her'. One minute she's saying journalists can be the best activists, then the next when there's a whiff of trouble, she draws a thick as fuck dividing line between journalists and activists. Both of these things she does for her own benefit depending on the situation

Coming from a privileged background can make her a more committed activist she says


----------



## Random (Sep 18, 2012)

treelover said:


> btw, RTS was full of people like M/C and Laura...


 Are you sure you remember right? I think others will back me up when i say there was fairly deep-seated distrust of mainstream journalists in RTS; people were very careful not to become fodder for someone's writing career.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2012)

treelover said:


> Wasn't John Reed a bit of a champagne socialist, self- publicist, boho, etc?
> 
> getting arrested by NY cops is not nice no matter who you are...
> 
> ...


Yes you are, that's exactly what you're doing. That's the entire point of the post.

Shall everyone who posted on matb stop posting? When we weren't here you moaned that we weren't here.


----------



## revol68 (Sep 18, 2012)

Random said:


> Getting arrested is no fun. Grinning at someone getting arrested should be reserved for fascists and antisocial thugs.



Or assholes doing it for self promotion.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2012)

treelover said:


> getting arrested by NY cops is not nice no matter who you are...


 
And? are we not allowed them comment on the way that the subject of this thread deals with arrests around here? What her actions say about her? What they say about her relation to other people she's supposed to be a comrade of? That's exactly what you're doing here, so why can't anyone else?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2012)

revol68 said:


> Or assholes doing it for self promotion.


_assholes_? Sort it out lad.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2012)

Random said:


> Are you sure you remember right? I think others will back me up when i say there was fairly deep-seated distrust of mainstream journalists in RTS; people were very careful not to become fodder for someone's writing career.


It was the academic careerists that manged to wriggle themselves under the radar.


----------



## Random (Sep 18, 2012)

revol68 said:


> Or assholes doing it for self promotion.


Your doity rat


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2012)

Anyway, it's a great laugh, haven't you all seen  the documentary a fairytale of new york?


----------



## revol68 (Sep 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> _assholes_? Sort it out lad.



Sorry, i meant douchebags!


----------



## Random (Sep 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> It was the academic careerists that manged to wriggle themselves under the radar.


 Very true. I've tried to tell some of them this, but some think they are "blagging the system" by working as social movement theorists.


----------



## treelover (Sep 18, 2012)

Random said:


> Are you sure you remember right? I think others will back me up when i say there was fairly deep-seated distrust of mainstream journalists in RTS; people were very careful not to become fodder for someone's writing career.


 
I mean in terms of background...


----------



## articul8 (Sep 18, 2012)

treelover said:


> btw, RTS was full of people like M/C and Laura...


 what's RTS


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2012)

Reclaim the socialist movement.


----------



## articul8 (Sep 18, 2012)

oh, Reclaim the Streets ?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2012)

Yes. You were doing your fist stint _in the party_ at the time.


----------



## Balbi (Sep 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Yes. You were doing your fist stint _in the party_ at the time.



With lube, one would hope.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2012)

FFs, one day i am going to type that frigging word correctly.


----------



## treelover (Sep 18, 2012)

For all her faults, Laura has wrote passionately about basic issues like welfare(though increasingly less) why not target other dubious individuals like Andy (Cardinal ) Newman, of Socialist Unity grouping, this week the Tories are talking about freezing benefits and uprating them with average wages not inflation, yet what is on their 'very popular' site?, Israel, Palestine, Galloway, Yaqoob, BNP, Assange, etc talk about priorities!


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2012)

Because no one knows or care who Andy newman is. Why not start a thread on him?


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 18, 2012)

treelover said:


> For all her faults, Laura has wrote passionately about basic issues like welfare(though increasingly less) why not target other dubious individuals like Andy (Cardinal ) Newman, of Socialist Unity grouping, *this week the Tories are talking about freezing benefits and uprating them with average wages not inflation*, yet what is on their 'very popular' site?, Israel, Palestine, Galloway, Yaqoob, BNP, Assange, etc talk about priorities!


 

beeb news referred to them as handouts.  again.


----------



## chilango (Sep 18, 2012)

treelover said:


> btw, RTS was full of people like M/C and Laura...



Do expand...


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2012)

treelover said:


> btw, RTS was full of people like M/C and Laura...


Why are you talking about them? Haven't you heard what andy newman said on the socialist unity site the other day?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Sep 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Because no one knows or care who Andy newman is. Why not start a thread on him?


Because treelover doesn't _do_ stuff, treelover _asks why others don't do what treelover thinks is a great idea_.

And when in doubt, treelover leaves an ellipsis hanging in the air to denote something of great gnostic significance...


----------



## chilango (Sep 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> It was the academic careerists that manged to wriggle themselves under the radar.



Not under everyone's radar.

Some of us were always onto them...


----------



## chilango (Sep 18, 2012)

treelover said:


> For all her faults, Laura has wrote passionately about basic issues like welfare(though increasingly less) why not target other dubious individuals like Andy (Cardinal ) Newman, of Socialist Unity grouping, this week the Tories are talking about freezing benefits and uprating them with average wages not inflation, yet what is on their 'very popular' site?, Israel, Palestine, Galloway, Yaqoob, BNP, Assange, etc talk about priorities!



Cos no one gives afuck about Andy Newman.


----------



## andy2002 (Sep 18, 2012)

Molly's arrest made it onto Al Jazeera so mission accomplished!

www.bleedingcool.com/2012/09/18/molly-crabapple-gets-out-of-jail-gets-on-al-jazeera/


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Sep 18, 2012)

andy2002 said:


> Molly's arrest made it onto Al Jazeera so mission accomplished!
> 
> www.bleedingcool.com/2012/09/18/molly-crabapple-gets-out-of-jail-gets-on-al-jazeera/


And the whole affair was covered by Bleeding Cool (that well known cutting edge political news machine comic website) run by her mate from a 3/4 £million house in Kingston.


----------



## rekil (Sep 18, 2012)

A drawing of a pig-faced octopus in a police hat dropping ripped cardigan clad foxes in a cage or something.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Sep 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> A drawing of a pig-faced octopus in a police hat dropping ripped cardigan clad foxes in a cage or something.




With Laura looking down on the scene from a fluffy cloud wielding The Great Red Pen Of Justice


----------



## rekil (Sep 18, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> With Laura looking down from a fluffy cloud wielding The Great Red Pen Of Justice


Running away with wee whirring roadrunner feet more like.


----------



## redsquirrel (Sep 19, 2012)

Not Laurie related (though I'd lay good money on her being a major fan) but Amanda Palmer is another rich "creative" who doesn't believe in paying the people working with/for her either.

Response from Albini here.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 19, 2012)

> In an excellent earlier blog post on the New York Times, Daniel J. Wakin talked to Palmer, who said:
> 
> 
> 
> > “If you could see the enthusiasm of these people, the argument would become invalid. They’re all incredibly happy to be here.”


 
That plonker grit on the suicides at Foxconn in China:


> Not to mention the fact that Chinese workers are lining up down the street to work there.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Sep 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> That plonker grit on the suicides at Foxconn in China:


 People lined up for Ford's 5-dollar day too...


----------



## articul8 (Sep 19, 2012)

Only vaguely related to this thread, but I'm enjoying the Facebook spat between Gopal "pompous windbag" Balakrishnan and Richard "truly hopeless" Seymour


----------



## redsquirrel (Sep 19, 2012)

Lo Siento. said:


> People lined up for Ford's 5-dollar day too...


But that's their choice Lo Siento, who are we to stand in their way if that's what they chose to do.



			
				Amanda 'fucking moron' Palmer said:
			
		

> _YOU HAVE TO LET ARTISTS MAKE THEIR OWN DECISIONS ABOUT HOW THEY SHARE THEIR TALENT AND TIME._
> _especially in this day and age, it’s becoming more and more essential that artists allow each other space to figure out their own systems._
> _the minute YOU make black and white rules about how other artists should value their own art and time, you disempower them._
> _anyone is allowed to crowdfund a record. and anyone is allowed to crowdsource a musician. or a pair of socks. or a place to crash. or a meal. anyone. the band at the local pub can do it, i can do it, tom waits can do it, and justin bieber can do it (his fans would FLIP to be up on that stage making music with him. i’m imagining a crowdsourced belieber playing violin on “boyfriend” right now and loving the image, truly. it’s also fun to think of tom waits wearing fan-knit-socks.)_
> ...


----------



## love detective (Sep 19, 2012)

> this isn’t about money. for me, this is about freedom. and about choices.


 
no doubt you have a fair old amount of freedom & choice when you've got a million dollars to spunk


----------



## redsquirrel (Sep 19, 2012)

I think we should have a thread naming and shaming all these pricks who want people to work for them simply for the chance to be in their presence. Kind of like the celebrity scabwatch thread (also surely that could do with a bit of updating, there must be twats in South Africa and Chicago that we can add to it).


----------



## belboid (Sep 19, 2012)

redsquirrel said:


> Not Laurie related (though I'd lay good money on her being a major fan) but Amanda Palmer is another rich "creative" who doesn't believe in paying the people working with/for her either.
> 
> Response from Albini here.


Albini was wrong.  She's not an idiot, she's a thief.


----------



## articul8 (Sep 19, 2012)

a thieving idiot?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 19, 2012)

Taking money off others and spending it on the better off to get them to give you more money - how fitting for the times:



> Supporters stood to gain much more than just a CD – the more they pledged, the closer they got to Palmer, the biggest spenders being personally rewarded with house parties, makeovers and portraiture.


 
And put some fucking clothes on.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 19, 2012)

Amanda is married to Warren Ellis's mate Neil Gaiman who is also a millionaire and of course Ellis is one of Laurie's biggest cheer leaders.


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 19, 2012)

so thats why all gaimans lead males end up with kooky women


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Sep 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Taking money off others and spending it on the better off to get them to give you more money - how fitting for the times:
> 
> 
> 
> And put some fucking clothes on.


 
I made the mistake of looking at her chosen 13 albums; the prose that went with them made even the ok choices seem wretched.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 19, 2012)

Louis MacNeice said:


> I made the mistake of looking at her chosen 13 albums; the prose that went with them made even the ok choices seem wretched.
> 
> Cheers - Louis MacNeice


Yes, some bland choices and no insight into why she likes them, what they mean and so on. I read that a few weeks ago and gave her the benefit of the doubt on the basis that her old band were named after a fall song - turns out they weren't and dresden dolls are a real thing.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 19, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> so thats why all gaimans lead males end up with kooky women


 
They are all Mary Sues or whatever the male equivelant is - he is one of the worst offenders for that.


----------



## treelover (Sep 19, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Because treelover doesn't _do_ stuff, treelover _asks why others don't do what treelover thinks is a great idea_.
> 
> And when in doubt, treelover leaves an ellipsis hanging in the air to denote something of great gnostic significance...


 

There are very good reasons why 'treelover' doesn't do the things he asks of others...


----------



## treelover (Sep 19, 2012)

chilango said:


> Cos no one gives afuck about Andy Newman.


 
Good, so why give a fuck about Laura?


----------



## Random (Sep 19, 2012)

treelover said:


> There are very good reasons why 'treelover' doesn't do the things he asks of others...


he's talking about your choice of threads to start and to post in...


----------



## Random (Sep 19, 2012)

treelover said:


> Good, so why give a fuck about Laura?


She's in mainstream newspapers, she is amusing, she's had a fight with David Starkey.


----------



## chilango (Sep 19, 2012)

treelover said:


> Good, so why give a fuck about Laura?


 
'Cos she's a bit harder to avoid when she is claiming to be "my voice".


----------



## chilango (Sep 19, 2012)

chilango said:


> 'Cos she's a bit harder to avoid when she is claiming to be "my voice".


 
Newman and SU on t'other hand are almost invisible and claim to speak for, and to, a tiny and increasingly irrelevent audience.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Sep 19, 2012)

treelover said:


> Good, so why give a fuck about Laura?


Is this person the one we know as Laurie?


----------



## Random (Sep 19, 2012)

talking about LP is a fun way to waste time at work. The socialist beardies are less fun.


----------



## JimW (Sep 19, 2012)

Random said:


> talking about LP is a fun way to waste time at work. The socialist beardies are less fun.


It's your thinly-veiled misogyny and you know it


----------



## Random (Sep 19, 2012)

JimW said:


> It's your thinly-veiled misogyny and you know it


Folicophobic misandry, you mean


----------



## JimW (Sep 19, 2012)

Random said:


> Folicophobic misandry, you mean


I might do if I understood it.


----------



## treelover (Sep 19, 2012)

Newman is a senior union rep,his blog is very well read, many of his contributors are very active on the left such asi ti is...

what you are talking about is radical youth politics, which is a temporary activity, increasingly marginal to the issues of the day, poverty, benefit cuts, etc,  and which really shouldn't be a main topic for middle aged posters(not sure if you are)


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## Brixton Hatter (Sep 19, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> Is this person the one we know as Laurie?


yes.


----------



## chilango (Sep 19, 2012)

treelover said:


> what you are talking about is radical youth politics, which is a temporary activity, increasingly marginal to the issues of the day, poverty, benefit cuts, etc, and which really shouldn't be a main topic for middle aged posters(not sure if you are)


 
Except that it's not.

The issues of "precarity" that are key to much of the global resurgence in "youth protests" are just as relevent for many of us are a little older (and , no, I'm not middle-aged...).


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## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 19, 2012)

treelover said:


> Newman is a senior union rep,his blog is very well read, many of his contributors are very active on the left such asi ti is...
> 
> what you are talking about is radical youth politics, which is a temporary activity, increasingly marginal to the issues of the day, poverty, benefit cuts, etc, and which really shouldn't be a main topic for middle aged posters(not sure if you are)


 
surely the Visteon


----------



## ViolentPanda (Sep 19, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> And the whole affair was covered by Bleeding Cool (that well known cutting edge political news machine comic website) run by her mate from a 3/4 £million house in Kingston.


 
£750,000 house in Kingston = 3 bed semi, to be fair.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> surely the Visteon


 
Yes, surely.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Sep 19, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> £750,000 house in Kingston = 3 bed semi, to be fair.


Just your average normal working person then?


----------



## chilango (Sep 19, 2012)

treelover said:


> Newman is a senior union rep,his blog is very well read, many of his contributors are very active on the left such as it is...


 
Well read? Really? in comparison to Laura's outlets?

...very active on the left? the left that is, as you surely must acknowledge, is almost entirely absent from almost everyone's everyday life?

The rare occasions when we do encounter the left, we certainly wouldn't want it to be the left as represented on the SU site. Fortunately that's highly unlikley to happen.


----------



## redsquirrel (Sep 19, 2012)

Louis MacNeice said:


> I made the mistake of looking at her chosen 13 albums; the prose that went with them made even the ok choices seem wretched.
> 
> Cheers - Louis MacNeice


Look at Stuart Braithwaites, good list and much more interesting reading.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Sep 19, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Just your average normal working person then?


 
Not necessarily, just that at current prices, that money doesn't buy much in Kingston. For all I know, £750,000 might have been what he paid 10 years ago, in which case his money would have gone further.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Sep 19, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Not necessarily, just that at current prices, that money doesn't buy much in Kingston. For all I know, £750,000 might have been what he paid 10 years ago, in which case his money would have gone further.


Yeah fair enough I know what you're saying.....the point i was trying to make was more about Laura & Molly's mates and supporters appearing to come exclusively from the moneyed (monied?) classes, which in part explains some of the naive journalism.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Sep 19, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Yeah fair enough I know what you're saying.....the point i was trying to make was more about Laura & Molly's mates and supporters appearing to come exclusively from the moneyed (monied?) classes, which in part explains some of the naive journalism.


 
Insulation from reality, you mean? Yup, does seem that way, and what's been unearthed about Laura's own upbringing seems to support that too.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Sep 19, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Not necessarily, just that at current prices, that money doesn't buy much in Kingston. For all I know, £750,000 might have been what he paid 10 years ago, in which case his money would have gone further.


 
Use the Zoopla search. It will, for example, tell you that (ex) PC Simon Harwood's house is currently worth around £560,000.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Sep 19, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Use the Zoopla search. It will, for example, tell you that (ex) PC Simon Harwood's house is currently worth around £560,000.


 
Lets hope the civil actions that Tomlinson's family launch against him will force him to cash in his assets to compensate them.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Sep 19, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Lets hope the civil actions that Tomlinson's family launch against him will force him to cash in his assets to compensate them.


Well, if he is concerned about losing the shirt off his back perhaps Simon could pop round to see his neighbour Keith and ask if he has any cash-in-hand work available commensurate to his skillsets and abilities.

http://goo.gl/maps/FBqmK


----------



## Orang Utan (Sep 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Taking money off others and spending it on the better off to get them to give you more money - how fitting for the times:
> 
> 
> 
> And put some fucking clothes on.


She's kindly paying them now: 
http://mobile.avclub.com/articles/a...o-pay-her-crowdsourced-mus,85194/?mobile=true


----------



## treelover (Sep 20, 2012)

who is she, weird thread this...


----------



## temper_tantrum (Sep 20, 2012)

In possibly-related news, some guy called Malcolm Harris seems to be busy making a tit of himself:
http://nsfwcorp.co/9cgo2l


----------



## Random (Sep 20, 2012)

treelover said:


> who is she, weird thread this...


Have you heard of a man called Neil Gaiman?


----------



## Random (Sep 20, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> In possibly-related news, some guy called Malcolm Harris seems to be busy making a tit of himself:
> http://nsfwcorp.co/9cgo2l


I like Ames and the exiled crew a lot. Thinking of subscribing to NSFWCORP for the War Nerd's latest article


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

Random said:


> I like Ames and the exiled crew a lot. Thinking of subscribing to NSFWCORP for the War Nerd's latest article


I bet lib-com are well happy to have stuff by this parasite in their library.


----------



## Random (Sep 20, 2012)

It's not libcom's job to decide who's a fully worthy anarchoid or not; I'd rather they uploaded too much to their servers than too litte. the example of a infos is a warning from history! That open letter from Harris seems to be an interesting insight into occupy, at least. No surprise that stuff involving by the crimethinc posers turns out to be parasitic, though.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

They wouldn't be deciding that by not putting that up. They'd be deciding what they want to have in their library. All this stuff is on-line elsewhere - in fact you can barely avoid the little ivy-league Jacobins if you read any political analysis. It doesn't need to be in the lib-com library (this,cof course, is their decision).


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

How far would you extend this prohibition on judgement btw - all the way to Hakim Bey/Lamborn Wilson's pleasure palace?


----------



## Random (Sep 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> in fact you can barely avoid the little ivy-league Jacobins if you read any political analysis.


 Isn't there literally a US webzine called the Jacobin? Not hard to see why the US leftists tend to think that socialism is the left wing of liberalism.


----------



## Random (Sep 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> How far would you extend this prohibition on judgement btw - all the way to Hakim Bey/Lamborn Wilson's pleasure palace?


Like I said, I'd rather see them err on the side of too much rather than too little. But when it comes to pro-kiddy fiddling propaganda there's a fairly easy decision to take. Although I think that Bey's TAZ is worth having available.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

Random said:


> Isn't there literally a US webzine called the Jacobin? Not hard to see why the US leftists tend to think that socialism is the left wing of liberalism.


Yes, it's not just a webzine anymore it's a rather influential hard copy mag/journal - and guess who writes for them?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Sep 20, 2012)

Random said:


> Isn't there literally a US webzine called the Jacobin?


 
The Harris article on Enrager was originally posted to it.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

Random said:


> Like I said, I'd rather see them err on the side of too much rather than too little. But when it comes to pro-kiddy fiddling propaganda there's a fairly easy decision to take. Although I think that Bey's TAZ is worth having available.


Let's lobby them to get a Laura archive up and running then.


----------



## Random (Sep 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Let's lobby them to get a Laura archive up and running then.


Yes let's


----------



## love detective (Sep 20, 2012)

Random said:


> Like I said, I'd rather see them err on the side of too much rather than too little. But when it comes to pro-kiddy fiddling propaganda there's a fairly easy decision to take. Although I think that Bey's TAZ is worth having available.


 
How about all the Giles Dauve stuff that libcom admins were indulging in huge amounts of verbal, political and moral gymnastics to defend?



> "For a World Without Moral Order" was written in 1983, during the backwash of the subversive wave of the sixties and seventies. Since then, things have only gotten worse. "Just try being openly pedophile," we wrote. Sadly prophetic. Any form of child-adult love is instantaneously identified as child abuse, whether in its least "offensive" forms or its most atrocious - rape and murder. Parental love would be the only exception to this rule


 


> A man like Dutroux inBelgium was raping and killing teenage girls and women. A man like Andre Gide would make love to young boys. Why amalgamate two utterly different types of behaviour in the same notion of "paedophilia" ?


 


> Nobody denies the existence of child sexuality any more: Freud can't be as easily suppressed as Reich. But this sexuality is turned into a fortress noone has access to


 


> Let's see for a moment adult sex as child-adult sex is usually perceived, i.e. only in its villainous and bloody aspects. Then any male should regard himself as a potential Jack The Ripper, and any wife should fear to be penetrated against her will by her husband every night.


 
There was also another quote I remember from the time but can't find now which went something along the lines of '_the misery of pedophilia arises from the result of its repression' _

As oddpant once commented 'Dauve is a paedo apologist, Hakim Bey without the pervy poems or shit politics' - so Hakim goes and Dauve stays because he's trendy


----------



## Random (Sep 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> How about all the Giles Dauve stuff that libcom admins were indulging in huge amounts of verbal, political and moral gymnastics to defend?


 Like I said before, i think that opposing kiddy fiddlers is a fairly easy judgment call. Anyone who has sex with children is committing rape, since they cannot really give consent. Whether it's Andre Gide or not makes no difference.

Just leave the fecking greeks out of it.


----------



## love detective (Sep 20, 2012)

Indeed, it's just a pity that the libcom admins couldn't make the same easy judgement call when it came to one of their heroes coming out with a dose of the hakims


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> How about all the Giles Dauve stuff that libcom admins were indulging in huge amounts of verbal, political and moral gymnastics to defend?
> 
> 
> There was also another quote I remember from the time but can't find now which went something along the lines of '_the misery of pedophilia arises from the result of its repression'_
> ...


 
I missed all that. I think there's a fascination/addiction with these sort of communists for this sort of thing that comes from the insight that all things are historical - without having the real-life social grounding to see that this doesn't mean therefore that all things that have developed historically must be overcome. And without any sort of social-grounding they fly off into this _world without moral order_ crap.


----------



## love detective (Sep 20, 2012)

all of the threads with the discussion about it have been airbrushed out of history - all the squirming & gymnastics that went on to draw a clear distinction between Hakim's stuff (unacceptable) and Dauve's/Barrots' (acceptable, or just 'misunderstood' or 'poorly translated' ) stuff have all been purged


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

Pretty shoddy that then. This has long been a theme in a lot of this communist writing since the late 60s.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Sep 20, 2012)

I didn't know that about Dauve, nor about the libcom lots attitude. In the words of Summer Roberts, eeeww.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Pretty shoddy that then. This has long been a theme in a lot of this communist writing since the late 60s.


Bad form to reply to myself i know, but at the same time as this sort of world without moral order stuff appeared so negationism also appeared amongst the same milieu.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2012)

Really? 

Can you recommend any books/articles critiquing this?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Really?
> 
> Can you recommend any books/articles critiquing this?


Well, the whole negationsim thing was mostlt carried out in french )one of the leading negationists was gabriel Cohn-bendit, brother of danny the red and the real author of the book Obsolete Communism). Best you'll find now is probably stuff like Assassins of Memory (chapter on The Sect) and follow the stuff through here.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2012)

left wing holocaust deniers.  Was this part of some "anti-zionist"/anti-imperialism bullshit or part of the whole idea that morality etc is a bourgeois concept?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> left wing holocaust deniers.  Was this part of some "anti-zionist"/anti-imperialism bullshit or part of the whole idea that morality etc is a bourgeois concept?


God no, they totally rejected bullshit like anti-imperialism, in fact this stuff grew partially out of that rejection - everything is just the working of capital. It largely came from a non-negationist text by Bordiga from the late 50s/early 60s called Auschwitz -  the great alibi that they took and ran with developed it further and came up with this madness.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2012)

ah yeah, i've read some stuff by bordiga before on the pointlessness of anti-fascism etc but i didn't know he went as far as this.

for fuck's sake.



butchersapron said:


> God no, they totally rejected bullshit like anti-imperialism, in fact this stuff grew partially out of that rejection - everything is just the working of capital. It largely came from a non-negationist text by Bordiga from the late 50s/early 60s called Auschwitz - the great alibi that they took and ran with developed it further and came up with this madness.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

Bordiga wasn't a negationist though, what he wrote doesn't even come close. He was simply outlining anti-anti-fascist case as it applied to something it cannot go around, and he tried to do it on strict marxist grounds. I can't see any blame should attach itself to him The translators note on that article is more of a disgrace than the article itself.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Bordiga wasn't a negationist though, what he wrote doesn't even come close. He was simply outlining anti-anti-fascist case as it applied to something it cannot go around, and he tried to do it on strict marxist grounds. I can't see any blame should attach itself to him The translators note on that article i more of a disgrace then the article itself.


 
yes, I'm reading it now. I agree with a lot of it but not all (I think that the whole idea that the jews were largely m/c, while true in germany, wasn't true in the vast majority of the countries where the killing was carried out and the victims of the holocaust were overwhelmingly poor and largely unable to leave) but he makes a lot of good points tbh.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2012)

I quite like some of what Bordiga said (from my limited reading) although the ICC etc are raving mentalists


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

I linked to the wrong Pierre Vidal-Naquet thing above btw - i meant this one.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I quite like some of what Bordiga said (from my limited reading) although the ICC etc are raving mentalists


They not bordiguists though.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> They not bordiguists though.


 
Oh OK - I thought they claimed to be?

Apart from the thing about the jews mostly being p/b (which was probably true in germany) that's quite a good article.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Oh OK - I thought they claimed to be?
> 
> Apart from the thing about the jews mostly being p/b (which was probably true in germany) that's quite a good article.


Nah, they obv are influenced by Bordiga but aren't Bordiguists, which means something specific that they're not which it's a waste of time talking about


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2012)

That


butchersapron said:


> I linked to the wrong Pierre Vidal-Naquet thing above btw - i meant this one.


 
That article is really interesting. So did holocaust denial as a large scale thing originate in France then?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> That
> 
> 
> That article is really interesting. So did holocaust denial as a large scale thing originate in France then?


Yes, Paul Rassinier, ex Communist and camp inmate basically got the ball rolling i think.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Yes, Paul Rassinier, ex Communist and camp inmate basically got the ball rolling i think.


 
Bloody hell!


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

Yep, a Commie who was _actually in Buchenwald_...


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2012)

I'm reading about it now. That's utterly mental. Did he deny the holocaust because he thought he was countering propaganda against all germans etc then?

seriously, wtf???



butchersapron said:


> Yep, a Commie who was _actually in Buchenwald_...


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I'm reading about it now. That's utterly mental. Did he deny the holocaust because he thought he was countering propaganda against all germans etc then?
> 
> seriously, wtf???


He was just a broken loon basically from what i could tell. And just to fill out the bio - he was in Buchenwald for resistance activity against the nazis. But here's the thing, he was accepted pretty much across the left-spectrum in the post-war years.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> He was just a broken loon basically from what i could tell. And just to fill out the bio - he was in Buchenwald for resistance activity against the nazis. But here's the thing, he was accepted pretty much across the left-spectrum in the post-war years.


 
Bloody hell. Holocaust denial was never widespread on the left though following the war was it? Or was it?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

No, never. Such a thing didn't really exist then to be honest. Which might go some way to explaining why rassinier was tolerated - that and his being involved in pacifist groups who are largely freaks themselves.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No, never. Such a thing didn't really exist then to be honest. Which might go some way to explaining why rassinier was tolerated - that and his being involved in pacifist groups who are largely freaks themselves.


 
Fair enough. 

that faurisson looks like a cunt.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2012)

New statesman - got an analysis here of what seats which party will be targeting next election here.  Only problem is that it uses the target seats for 2010 as taken from the uk polling report overview and thinks they're the 2015 target list. Not something that i would be caught out spending ages doing at some point last year. No sir.


----------



## rekil (Sep 21, 2012)

Camila Vallejo is at the NUS do in the University of East London. How unfortunate that the voice of global youth rebellion is swanning about new york for no apparent reason and whining about being broke. We could've had a proper new left vs old left smackdown.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Sep 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> New statesman - got an analysis here of what seats which party will be targeting next election here. Only problem is that it uses the target seats for 2010 as taken from the uk polling report overview and thinks they're the 2015 target list. Not something that i would be caught out spending ages doing at some point last year. No sir.


And there are plans to gerrymander 'redraw and simplify' the constituency boundaries anyway.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 21, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> And there are plans to gerrymander 'redraw and simplify' the constituency boundaries anyway.


 
On hold following the botched Lords reform.

Keep up!


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Sep 21, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> On hold following the botched Lords reform.
> 
> Keep up!


Yeah I know...you don't think it's gonna disappear though do you? The Tories need it to stand any chance in the next election...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Sep 21, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Fair enough.
> 
> that faurisson looks like a cunt.


 
He doesn't just look like one.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 21, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Yeah I know...you don't think it's gonna disappear though do you? The Tories need it to stand any chance in the next election...


They're going to be out of time on this pretty soon i *think*.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Sep 21, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Yeah I know...you don't think it's gonna disappear though do you? The Tories need it to stand any chance in the next election...


The Tories are not finished yet - sadly. It is not just about how people vote but how little choice they have. Given a meltdown of the LibDems, and that seems inevitable, the Tories are likely to pick up a lot of current LibDem seats where they are a close second in areas where there is little Labour presence. That is the West Country and Devon and Cornwall in particular.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Sep 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> They're going to be out of time on this pretty soon i *think*.


Good!


----------



## treelover (Sep 21, 2012)

copliker said:


> Camila Vallejo is at the NUS do in the University of East London. How unfortunate that the voice of global youth rebellion is swanning about new york for no apparent reason and whining about being broke. We could've had a proper new left vs old left smackdown.


 
It's called the 'Global Student Leadership Summit'

what a strange title, its as if the NUS head honcho's have chosen such a corporate name so they can put it on their CV's,


----------



## Fruitloop (Sep 21, 2012)

She piques my interest in student politics.


----------



## rekil (Sep 21, 2012)

treelover said:


> It's called the 'Global Student Leadership Summit'
> 
> what a strange title, its as if the NUS head honcho's have chosen such a corporate name so they can put it on their CV's,


Interestingly, she was followed by "Luis Juste, Director, Santander Universities UK". 


> His career at Santander began in 1989 and, since then, he has held various managerial positions within the banking group in areas such as trade finance, corporate banking and SME, working in UK, Spain, Portugal and Latin-America.
> 
> In the year 2000 he joined the Santander Universities Global Division and was initially responsible for the development of the activity in Latin America. In July 2007, he moved to the UK following his appointment as the Director, Santander Universities UK, the position which he has held ever since.


----------



## treelover (Sep 21, 2012)

is Ch4 News covering it?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 21, 2012)

Why did her Communist parents send her to an elite private school?


----------



## rekil (Sep 21, 2012)

treelover said:


> is Ch4 News covering it?


Don't think so, unless a hostage situation or something develops.


----------



## treelover (Sep 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Why did her Communist parents send her to an elite private school?


 
I think she has more than made up for it, at some personal cost, threats, etc..


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 21, 2012)

treelover said:


> I think she has more than made up for it, at some personal cost, threats, etc..


I wasn't talking about her - i was talking about them.


----------



## rekil (Sep 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Why did her Communist parents send her to an elite private school?


It was a subsidised one I think, vouchers and that. The secondary school system is something like 40% public, 50% subsidised and 10% elite private. 

I read somewhere it's a school where anti-Pinochet parents tend to send their kids. I can check at some point.


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Why did her Communist parents send her to an elite private school?


 






Does the church have much influence in Chilean schools, does anyone know? Maybe that was a factor.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 21, 2012)

copliker said:


> It was a subsidised one I think, vouchers and that. The secondary school system is something like 40% public, 50% subsidised and 10% elite private.
> 
> I read somewhere it's a school where anti-Pinochet parents tend to send their kids. I can check at some point.





Idris2002 said:


> Does the church have much influence in Chilean schools, does anyone know? Maybe that was a factor.


 
Don't know. Just struck me as but like the PLO leaderships  kids all going to private euro schools.


----------



## Random (Sep 21, 2012)

Looks like the school is more like a hippy alternative co-op sort of thing, rather than a traditional elite private school. For the alternative elite.


----------



## Fruitloop (Sep 21, 2012)

good slogan


----------



## rekil (Sep 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Don't know. Just struck me as but like the PLO leaderships kids all going to private euro schools.


It's just a consequence of the policies enacted during the dictatorship. What exists of the public education system is deliberately run down and starved of funds in order to force people to send their kids to fee paying schools.


----------



## rekil (Sep 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Don't know. Just struck me as but like the PLO leaderships kids all going to private euro schools.


You may file this away. 


> I caught up with her father, Reinaldo, on a street lined with auto-mechanic shops and hardware stores — he owns a small air-conditioning and heating business with his wife — and we stopped in a cafe to talk. Reinaldo, a lumbering man with fair hair and melancholy blue eyes, once starred, around 1982, in a popular Chilean soap opera. He is also a veteran Communist Party member and belonged to a political theater group that traveled the country, putting on shows for copper-mine workers. Camila, as a little girl, accompanied him.
> 
> For most of Camila’s childhood, the family lived in La Florida, a working- and middle-class neighborhood, where she attended an alternative school called Colegio Raimapu, which educated the children of anti-Pinochet parents (neither Reinaldo nor his wife was ever imprisoned). He told me that she liked art and drawing and was originally going to apply to the University of Chile to study theater design. As a teenager, she joined the Communist Youth. He said he missed having her at home.


This bit is very Barry Mainwaring.


> Then the conversation turned to the elections, and he said: “We Communists are used to losing. I tell Camila that she won’t really become a leader until she learns what it is to lose.”


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 21, 2012)

I reckon a course on the  Mainwaring dialectical model is well overdue. Main-lectics.


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 21, 2012)

copliker said:


> Camila Vallejo is at the NUS do in the University of East London. How unfortunate that the voice of global youth rebellion is swanning about new york for no apparent reason and whining about being broke. We could've had a proper new left vs old left smackdown.


 
Isn't she the Chilean Claire Solomon?


----------



## rekil (Sep 21, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Isn't she the Chilean Claire Solomon?





> “We Communists are used to losing. Like Clare Solomon. I tell Camila that she won’t really become a leader until she learns what it is to lose. Like Clare Solomon.”


----------



## revol68 (Sep 21, 2012)

Just to say I think there is a huge difference between Dauve's arguments around paedophilia and Hakim Bey's, one is really just a kind of abstract historicism and the other is just an outright justification from an actual nonce. Like Butcher's said one is incidental (a kind of solophism), the other is pretty central. 

Also Dauve has some worthwhile ideas, Bey is completely worthless, and I detested his TAZ shite before it became clear he was a paedo.


----------



## Pickman's model (Sep 21, 2012)

revol68 said:


> Just to say I think there is a huge difference between Dauve's arguments around paedophilia and Hakim Bey's, one is really just a kind of abstract historicism and the other is just an outright justification from an actual nonce. Like Butcher's said one is incidental (a kind of solophism), the other is pretty central.
> 
> Also Dauve has some worthwhile ideas, Bey is completely worthless, and I detested his TAZ shite before it became clear he was a paedo.


why did you destest bey's stuff before it became clear he was a nonce?


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 21, 2012)

Pickman's model said:


> why did you destest bey's stuff before it became clear he was a nonce?


 
I've read Pickman's question here in the voice of a Victorian maiden aunt. It's great fun - try it for yourself.


----------



## revol68 (Sep 21, 2012)

Pickman's model said:


> why did you destest bey's stuff before it became clear he was a nonce?


 
cos it's utter incoherent drivel far more fitted to bourgeois individualism and middle class lifestylism than class struggle anarchism.


----------



## love detective (Sep 21, 2012)

just try being openly pedophile these days


----------



## el-ahrairah (Sep 21, 2012)

Pickman's model said:


> why did you destest bey's stuff before it became clear he was a nonce?


 
a TAZ is basically a teenage party in those heady times when it's hours before mum and dad get home and nothing needs to be worried about. surely most people would prefer a Permanent Autonomous Zone.


----------



## revol68 (Sep 21, 2012)

His side comments on sexual violence also display this kind of abstract historicism, and of course the approach that flattens out the singularity of the holocaust. oh im talking about Dauve here, Bey isnt worth discussing.


----------



## Pickman's model (Sep 21, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> I've read Pickman's question here in the voice of a Victorian maiden aunt. It's great fun - try it for yourself.


a handbag?


----------



## Pickman's model (Sep 21, 2012)

revol68 said:


> cos it's utter incoherent drivel far more fitted to bourgeois individualism and middle class lifestylism than class struggle anarchism.


as both of which are, i submit, incoherent shite.


----------



## Random (Sep 21, 2012)

revol68 said:


> cos it's utter incoherent drivel far more fitted to bourgeois individualism and middle class lifestylism than class struggle anarchism.


That's probably why I liked it when I read it in 1998 or so.


----------



## revol68 (Sep 21, 2012)

Random said:


> That's probably why I liked it when I read it in 1998 or so.



I read parts of it around then, immediately followed by Bookchins unbridgeable chasm, a fine palate cleanser.


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 21, 2012)

Pickman's model said:


> a handbag?


 
A _handbag_?


----------



## Pickman's model (Sep 21, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> A _handbag_?


----------



## rekil (Sep 21, 2012)

Anybody got that clip of Solomon shouting 'I'm in charge!' at someone who was doing protest wrong?


----------



## Random (Sep 21, 2012)

revol68 said:


> I read parts of it around then, immediately followed by Bookchins unbridgeable chasm, a fine palate cleanser.


Me too, but I'd already read some of his writings from the 1960s, where he'd talked about rebellious students and so on forming a "new class" that was the new revolutionary agent (iirc 15 years on). So I couldn't take his condemnation of the new anarkids too seriously.


----------



## ska invita (Sep 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Yep, a Commie who was _actually in Buchenwald_...


I forget the correct psychoanalytic term for it - transference maybe? -where victims of trauma/violence, carry out similar acts as a coping mechanism (have a book at thome I could check if i remember)...certainly well documented with holocaust survivors...i doubt anyone who experienced the camps would've left without permanent psychological damage.


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 21, 2012)

copliker said:


> Anybody got that clip of Solomon shouting 'I'm in charge!' at someone who was doing protest wrong?


 
No but I think the world is ready for a Brit version of this as a Xmas special


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 21, 2012)

polly tonybee in a leather onsie. fuck me.


----------



## love detective (Sep 21, 2012)

copliker said:


> Anybody got that clip of Solomon shouting 'I'm in charge!' at someone who was doing protest wrong?


 
this one was also a favorite


----------



## DaveCinzano (Sep 21, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> a TAZ is basically a teenage party in those heady times when it's hours before mum and dad get home and nothing needs to be worried about.


 
Beware - inside all our heads lurks our own Guido the Killer Pimp


----------



## bluestreak (Sep 21, 2012)

mine doesn't lurk in my head, he hangs around in the landing commenting on my dress sense


----------



## barney_pig (Sep 21, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> No but I think the world is ready for a Brit version of this as a Xmas special



what is the point of giving supermarket security guards guns if they won't use them?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 21, 2012)

Random said:


> That's probably why I liked it when I read it in 1998 or so.


 
Cheg liked it because?


----------



## weepiper (Sep 22, 2012)

*Laurie Penny*‏@*PennyRed*​
Reading Gala Darling and Cat Marnell, sort of want to write a beauty-lifestyle column for scruffy nomadic queer anarchist punks. BUT WHERE?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 22, 2012)

It's like she has NO VOICE.


----------



## weepiper (Sep 22, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> It's like she has NO VOICE.


 
SO oppressed


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 22, 2012)

far away from here. Mogadishu. the Congo.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 22, 2012)

weepiper said:


> SO oppressed


If she and her mates think i wouldn't first lock them up for a year then starve then massacre them, then they're wrong.


----------



## stethoscope (Sep 22, 2012)

weepiper said:


> Reading Gala Darling and Cat Marnell, sort of want to write a beauty-lifestyle column for scruffy nomadic queer anarchist punks. BUT WHERE?


 
Oh my...


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 22, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> a TAZ is basically a teenage party in those heady times when it's hours before mum and dad get home and nothing needs to be worried about. surely most people would prefer a Permanent Autonomous Zone.


 
We stayed up until one o'clock - in the morning.


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 22, 2012)

copliker said:


> “We Communists are used to losing. Like Clare Solomon. I tell Camila that she won’t really become a leader until she learns what it is to lose. Like Clare Solomon.”


 
Beaten by a bloke whose main manifesto was opening up student union funding to lesser known sports and didn't even turn up to the hustings.


I just luurve the way she moves the chairs drinks aside as she approaches her 'natural' place at  the table


----------



## ViolentPanda (Sep 22, 2012)

weepiper said:


> *Laurie Penny*‏@*PennyRed*​
> Reading Gala Darling and Cat Marnell, sort of want to write a beauty-lifestyle column for scruffy nomadic queer anarchist punks. BUT WHERE?


 
Moscow. They have a special love for queer anarchist punks in Moscow.


----------



## TruXta (Sep 22, 2012)

Is she anarchist now?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 22, 2012)

she anarchist allways


----------



## Nylock (Sep 22, 2012)

All anarchist, All the time!


----------



## love detective (Sep 22, 2012)

My arrest at Occupy Wall Street by Molly Crabapple exclusive to CNN


----------



## JimW (Sep 22, 2012)

> At 1 Police Plaza in New York City, our cell was 5-by-7, freezing cold, with a padded bench just long enough for three of us to sit on. A fourth woman was curled on the floor. In the corner, there was a non-functioning sink and a toilet. When one woman needed to use it, we formed a line to block her from the male officers. In the 10 hours I was held, there was one meal: Four slices of bread in soggy Saran wrap, a packet of mayo and a mini carton of milk.


It's the Day in a Life of Ivan Denisovich for our times.


----------



## rekil (Sep 23, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Beaten by a bloke whose main manifesto was opening up student union funding to lesser known sports and didn't even turn up to the hustings.
> 
> I just luurve the way she moves the chairs drinks aside as she approaches her 'natural' place at the table


She's an appallingly shit speaker. Stumbling over 6 lines of cobblers? And did someone hide her chair? What's. Going. On.

Oh right, I watched a bit more. They all had to stand? I see.


----------



## treelover (Sep 23, 2012)

Ellie Mae 0' Hagen is doing the Sky Paper review at 10.30..


----------



## love detective (Sep 23, 2012)

i noticed she's changed her 'about me' statement which previously used to say



> Ellie can occasionally be heard debating with fellow political types. She has appeared on Newsnight, BBC Radio 5, Sky News, ITV News, and in the London Evening Standard. She has also given talks at several conferences, including People Power and 6 Billion Ways.


 
her reference to 'fellow political types' speaks volumes


----------



## smokedout (Sep 23, 2012)

she just told me on twitter she speaks differently to a-political people

(after her and owen ganged up on a gay blogger for calling david laws bit on the side his fuck buddy)


----------



## bluestreak (Sep 23, 2012)

weepiper said:


> *Laurie Penny*‏@*PennyRed*​Reading Gala Darling and Cat Marnell, sort of want to write a beauty-lifestyle column for scruffy nomadic queer anarchist punks. BUT WHERE?


 
the threads and dreads forum, circa 2006?


----------



## love detective (Sep 23, 2012)

smokedout said:


> she just told me on twitter she speaks differently to a-political people


 
these folk, despite all their surface rhetoric to the contrary, definitely seem to believe in the existence of a political class where even if you are on the 'other side' you still have more in common with them than those whose side you're nominally on


----------



## bluestreak (Sep 23, 2012)

JimW said:


> It's the Day in a Life of Ivan Denisovich for our times.


 
not enough like buttons


----------



## smokedout (Sep 23, 2012)

love detective said:


> these folk, despite all their surface rhetoric to the contrary, definitely seem to believe in the existence of a political class where even if you are on the 'other side' you still have more in common with them than those whose side you're nominally on


 
better to change sides than be a normal


----------



## Riklet (Sep 24, 2012)

Ironically enough O'Hagen's latest article is called "Class Based Bigotry Is Not OK"

better dead than... norm. lols.

the whole omg outrage at the term "fuckbuddy" is truly ridiculous too.  how do they have any energy left?


----------



## love detective (Sep 24, 2012)

> leftwingers such as myself.


 
did a little bit of sick in my mouth there


----------



## love detective (Sep 24, 2012)

and again



> the leftwing Twitterati


----------



## DaveCinzano (Sep 24, 2012)

Related news:

Current liberal commentator du jour Owen Jones joins yesteryear's anti-apartheid movement brahmin Gillian Slovo, ACPO's quisling academic of choice Clifford Stott
and others at 'Collisions, Coalitions and Riotous Subjects', which takes place at London South Bank University on Friday.



> ...a one-day conference designed to interrogate the relationship between the Riots and re-shaped inequalities of race, class, place, gender, sexuality in a post-crash, austerity era...


http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/ahs/news/010612.shtml


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## love detective (Sep 24, 2012)

From a recent report from the Greater Manchester Police Authority on the policing of major events



> The force should continue to work closely with Dr Cliff Stott (University of Liverpool) re tactics to successfully target trouble-makers within a crowd whilst leaving the peaceful majority to go about their business.


 
A key member of Aufehben has also been involved in some dubious work around public order policing and training cops to be more effective in dealing with crowds etc..(which coincidently following on from the Daueve pedo stuff above, also had libcom admins engaging in all kinds of gymnastics to defend 'their guy' rather than just admit it all looks somewhat dodgy)


----------



## DaveCinzano (Sep 24, 2012)

love detective said:


> From a recent report from the Greater Manchester Police Authority on the policing of major events
> 
> 
> 
> A key member of Aufehben has also been involved in some dubious work around public order policing and training cops to be more effective in dealing with crowds etc..(which coincidently following on from the Daueve pedo stuff above, also had libcom admins engaging in all kinds of gymnastics to defend 'their guy' rather than just admit it all looks somewhat dodgy)


Repost:

http://libcom.org/forums/general/cop-consultant-reading-list-17102011


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## butchersapron (Sep 24, 2012)

Pity its all a load of bollocks.


----------



## Fruitloop (Sep 24, 2012)

How so? (Genuine question, the whole thing was a bit tl;dr for me at the time)


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 24, 2012)

Unless you know the ins and outs (personal and political) of a tiny set of people spread across Europe, the history of their interactions and so on, then you are just not going to get what is going on and what actually happened. And frankly, I spent too long on this this time last year, today I'm on a train off on my hols and really reluctant to get back into it all, esp typing on a phone. Maybe wheni get back.


----------



## Fruitloop (Sep 24, 2012)

Okay, cool, np. The issue is interesting to me in the abstract as discussed here:

http://libcom.org/forums/feedback-c...s-been-removed-07102011?page=9#comment-449687

but I neither know nor especially care about the specific individuals and don't want to dig it up if it's been done to death already, as seems to be the case.

Have a nice holiday!


----------



## articul8 (Sep 24, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Unless you know the ins and outs (personal and political) of a tiny set of people spread across Europe, the history of their interactions and so on, then you are just not going to get what is going on and what actually happened. And frankly, I spent too long on this this time last year, today I'm on a train off on my hols and really reluctant to get back into it all, esp typing on a phone. Maybe wheni get back.


 
Brighton is it?


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 24, 2012)




----------



## DaveCinzano (Sep 24, 2012)




----------



## articul8 (Sep 24, 2012)

so many happy memories...


----------



## sunnysidedown (Sep 24, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Unless you know the ins and outs (personal and political) of a tiny set of people spread across Europe, the history of their interactions and so on, then you are just not going to get what is going on and what actually happened. And frankly, I spent too long on this this time last year, today I'm on a train off on my hols and really reluctant to get back into it all, esp typing on a phone. Maybe wheni get back.



Leninism by the sea.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Sep 24, 2012)

sunnysidedown said:


> Leninism by the sea.


I hear it's nice there in October.


----------



## love detective (Sep 24, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Unless you know the ins and outs (personal and political) of a tiny set of people spread across Europe, the history of their interactions and so on, then you are just not going to get what is going on and what actually happened.


 
This is the thing though, anyone who doesn't know the ints & outs of a tiny set of people across europe and the history of their interactions, would be entitled to raise a few eyebrows (at the minimum) when given the surface level facts of the involvement that J has had in relation to all this

At the very least it shows the contradictions inherent in being a 'radical academic'

My opinion is that his academic work brought him far too close to things that contradicted his politics - now this is not something that is specific to academics, we all have contradictions between what we have to do at work and what our 'pure' politics would be. But this case just seemed to stink to someone looking at it from a neutral/non biased viewpoint. Particularly compounded by the rearguard action that was fought on his behalf by various libcom admins (in a manner which reminded me of the way they defended Duave on his pedophilia type outpourings). To be honest i've forgot a lot of the stuff that made me think it was dodgy at the time, and I suspect a lot of the stuff has, like the Duave stuff, been airbrushed out of history. My memory of it though was that the 'prosecution' went far too over the top on their side, almost to the extent of making themselves look like idiots, but the 'defence' wasn't particularly convincing either.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Sep 24, 2012)

weepiper said:


> *Laurie Penny*‏@*PennyRed*​
> Reading Gala Darling and Cat Marnell, sort of want to write a beauty-lifestyle column for scruffy nomadic queer anarchist punks. BUT WHERE?


Where? Wherever will pay her to write it....which is not many places, which is why she only 'sort of' wants to write it.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Sep 24, 2012)

Also noticed she had her Kindle nicked by a 'hipster boy'. That's her phone, her laptop and her Kindle all gone in a few months. Careless.


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 24, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Also noticed she had her Kindle nicked by a 'hipster boy'. That's her phone, her laptop and her Kindle all gone in a few months. Careless.


 
Easy come, easy go.


----------



## cesare (Sep 24, 2012)

What's a "hipster" boy?


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Sep 24, 2012)

cesare said:


> What's a "hipster" boy?


This, I guess...


----------



## cesare (Sep 24, 2012)

Oh god


----------



## weepiper (Sep 24, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Also noticed she had her Kindle nicked by a 'hipster boy'. That's her phone, her laptop and her Kindle all gone in a few months. Careless.


 
Yeah... because someone 'offered to watch her bag' while she went to the toilet in a coffee shop in a strange city. How stupid can you get? The kind of stupidity that only comes from having grown up in a house where expensive things are easily replaced


----------



## rekil (Sep 24, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Where? Wherever will pay her to write it....which is not many places, which is why she only 'sort of' wants to write it.


Vice? She reads it, Warren Ellis has a column, why can't she? 

This is why the lipstick bit got into the Girder piece.


----------



## co-op (Sep 24, 2012)

"the Girder"


----------



## bluestreak (Sep 24, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Also noticed she had her Kindle nicked by a 'hipster boy'. That's her phone, her laptop and her Kindle all gone in a few months. Careless.


 
cocaine makes you careless with your shit.


----------



## bluestreak (Sep 24, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I'm on a train off on my hols


----------



## Balbi (Sep 24, 2012)

bluestreak said:


>



Thomas the tanky?


----------



## rekil (Sep 24, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I'm on a train off on my hols


 


bluestreak said:


>


----------



## articul8 (Sep 25, 2012)

See Owen's off on a junket to Venezuela.


----------



## Balbi (Sep 25, 2012)

articul8 said:


> See Owen's off on a junket to Venezuela.



Election observing innit? My local Tory went for the Russian ones last year. Sadly came back.


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 25, 2012)

was reading his book and in it he claimes Hope not Hate as being solely behind the collapse of the Dagenham and Barking BNP vote.

sounds like a big hairy bollock to me, but then what do I know....


----------



## love detective (Sep 25, 2012)

this would be the same collapse in the Dagenham & Barking BNP vote which involved the BNP vote doubling


----------



## articul8 (Sep 27, 2012)

they're all leaving  Hundal is off to "work on the Obama campaign"

Perhaps that's where Butchers has gone?


----------



## Balbi (Sep 27, 2012)

Conference season, or the govt wont dare announce anything in the flurry of media so we can all sod off for a bit.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Sep 27, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> was reading his book and in it he claimes Hope not Hate as being solely behind the collapse of the Dagenham and Barking BNP vote.
> 
> sounds like a big hairy bollock to me, but then what do I know....


 
B & D was about just about every leftist who could manage to, mobilising to canvass for Labour in a sustained manner in the run-up to the election, and even then the BNP gained on previous results.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 27, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> was reading his book and in it he claimes Hope not Hate as being solely behind the collapse of the Dagenham and Barking BNP vote.
> 
> sounds like a big hairy bollock to me, but then what do I know....


Which book are we on about now?


----------



## Balbi (Sep 27, 2012)

Good holiday butch?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 27, 2012)

Not home yet, just listening to the england t20 game before heading back off out - home tmw


----------



## Cornetto (Sep 28, 2012)

treelover said:


> he is probably a senior lecturer now on on the board of the 'adaptive personnel reconfiguration panel', eg, sacking people...


 
Herbert Read is back as Cornetto; i am not sacking people on any management panel. In fact i am a UCU organiser and usually on the other end defending members at panels. Still fighting the strutting nazis and dabbling in nihilism when appropriate.


----------



## imposs1904 (Sep 28, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> *Herbert Read is back as Cornetto*; i am not sacking people on any management panel. In fact i am a UCU organiser and usually on the other end defending members at panels. Still fighting the strutting nazis and dabbling in nihilism when appropriate.


 
I think I've read that steampunk novel.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 28, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> Herbert Read is back as Cornetto; i am not sacking people on any management panel. In fact i am a UCU organiser and usually on the other end defending members at panels. Still fighting the strutting nazis and dabbling in nihilism when appropriate.


| bureaucrat on a bean bag. 

All that stuff and you're just a union full-timer?


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 28, 2012)

I always thought herbert read was firky.


----------



## Cornetto (Sep 28, 2012)

The bean bag rides again.


----------



## Cornetto (Sep 28, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I always thought herbert read was firky.


 
i lent him my log in, he became me and got perma banned, crazy times. A wet fart of internet history.


----------



## love detective (Sep 28, 2012)

Daz spittle was pissed spittle mixed with garlic breath


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 28, 2012)

Where do all the union full timers/comrades/paid by  get their jobs?


----------



## Cornetto (Sep 28, 2012)

I have no idea i get 8 hours facility time a week for UCU activity


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 28, 2012)

Up the students and their lecturers facility time


----------



## Cornetto (Sep 28, 2012)

up the mediocrity


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 28, 2012)

yet you do it.


----------



## Cornetto (Sep 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> yet you do it.


 

I kept my head down for a year, then the branch secretary approached me as he was aware I had been a secretary in the GMB, he asked me to act as convenor for the city site and organise case work. A mixture of guilt and duty got me, I have always supported others at work; It is dull repetitive work, but without local lay officials unions like UCU don’t run, we are small have limited full timers and rely on branch level organisation, one member supporting another. I would like to give it up, however we have had a lot of experienced case workers retire or take voluntary severance. I don’t think the work place is a place for radical action, in fact over the years I have come round to the thinking that work actually manufactures consent for capitalism and the dominant business culture we operate in ; people are constantly trying to rationalise the utter idiocy imposed on them from above, we are always on the run and never chasing. We have had a few local dispute victories over imposed change and national strike turn out has been solid, it is the little victories that keep me going, getting a fair deal for a colleague or stopping some shit human from exercising nasty unnecessary disciplinary measures.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 28, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> I kept my head down for a year, then the branch secretary approached me as he was aware I had been a secretary in the GMB, he asked me to act as convenor for the city site and organise case work. A mixture of guilt and duty got me, I have always supported others at work; It is dull repetitive work, but without local lay officials unions like UCU don’t run, we are small have limited full timers and rely on branch level organisation, one member supporting another. I would like to give it up, however we have had a lot of experienced case workers retire or take voluntary severance. I don’t think the work place is a place for radical action, in fact over the years I have come round to the thinking that work actually manufactures consent for capitalism and the dominant business culture we operate in ; people are constantly trying to rationalise the utter idiocy imposed on them from above, we are always on the run and never chasing. We have had a few local dispute victories over imposed change and national strike turn out has been solid, it is the little victories that keep me going, getting a fair deal for a colleague or stopping some shit human from exercising nasty unnecessary disciplinary measures.


Yet you do it.


----------



## Cornetto (Sep 28, 2012)

I would not achieve any thing better if i did not do it.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 28, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> I would not achieve any thing better if i did not do it.


So what?


----------



## Cornetto (Sep 28, 2012)

Fair point, who cares, does it really matter?


----------



## co-op (Sep 28, 2012)

Friday night nihilism ftw.


----------



## redsquirrel (Sep 28, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> I kept my head down for a year, then the branch secretary approached me as he was aware I had been a secretary in the GMB, he asked me to act as convenor for the city site and organise case work. A mixture of guilt and duty got me, I have always supported others at work; It is dull repetitive work, but without local lay officials unions like UCU don’t run, we are small have limited full timers and rely on branch level organisation, one member supporting another. I would like to give it up, however we have had a lot of experienced case workers retire or take voluntary severance. I don’t think the work place is a place for radical action, in fact over the years I have come round to the thinking that work actually manufactures consent for capitalism and the dominant business culture we operate in ; people are constantly trying to rationalise the utter idiocy imposed on them from above, we are always on the run and never chasing. We have had a few local dispute victories over imposed change and national strike turn out has been solid, it is the little victories that keep me going, getting a fair deal for a colleague or stopping some shit human from exercising nasty unnecessary disciplinary measures.


I've come round to a very similar position.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Where do all the union full timers/comrades/paid by get their jobs?


http://www.tuc.org.uk/the_tuc/index.cfm?mins=48&minors=2&majorsubjectID=19


----------



## cesare (Sep 29, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> I kept my head down for a year, then the branch secretary approached me as he was aware I had been a secretary in the GMB, he asked me to act as convenor for the city site and organise case work. A mixture of guilt and duty got me, I have always supported others at work; It is dull repetitive work, but without local lay officials unions like UCU don’t run, we are small have limited full timers and rely on branch level organisation, one member supporting another. I would like to give it up, however we have had a lot of experienced case workers retire or take voluntary severance. I don’t think the work place is a place for radical action, in fact over the years I have come round to the thinking that work actually manufactures consent for capitalism and the dominant business culture we operate in ; people are constantly trying to rationalise the utter idiocy imposed on them from above, we are always on the run and never chasing. We have had a few local dispute victories over imposed change and national strike turn out has been solid, it is the little victories that keep me going, getting a fair deal for a colleague or stopping some shit human from exercising nasty unnecessary disciplinary measures.


Does this mean that you're a full timer?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 29, 2012)

cesare said:


> Does this mean that you're a full timer?


 
8 hours a week would only be fulltime work in a socialist paradise?


----------



## cesare (Sep 29, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> 8 hours a week would only be fulltime work in a socialist paradise?




Daz said 8 hours a week *facility* time, though? I'm confused.


----------



## DotCommunist (Sep 29, 2012)

we pretend to work they pretend to pay us


----------



## The39thStep (Sep 29, 2012)

Build the rank and file


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 29, 2012)

cesare said:


> Daz said 8 hours a week *facility* time, though? I'm confused.


 
yes he does his job for x number of hours but is paid by the employer to spend n (of his total of y hours) hours on his trade union duties as a rep - surely you know about facility time?


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## cesare (Sep 29, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> yes he does his job for x number of hours but is paid by the employer to spend n (of his total of y hours) hours on his trade union duties as a rep - surely you know about facility time?


Yes I do! But he could be a full timer with a number of hours facility time with lots of different employers! Depends how they're organised!


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## cesare (Sep 29, 2012)

I.e. the employer grants the facility time to the union.


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## The39thStep (Sep 29, 2012)

cesare said:


> Yes I do! But he could be a full timer with a number of hours facility time with lots of different employers! Depends how they're organised!


 
They are not organised thats why they sent for the Beanbag


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## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 29, 2012)

cesare said:


> Yes I do! But he could be a full timer with a number of hours facility time with lots of different employers! Depends how they're organised!


 
That would be very unusual can't say I've come across that set up.

Anyway in this case he is a rep who does his substantive post for all but 8 hours which he gets to fulfill his duties as a TU official - the confusion I think is his use of the term organiser which is often a title given to full-timers paid by the union.


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## The39thStep (Sep 29, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> That would be very unusual can't say I've come across that set up.
> 
> Anyway in this case he is a rep who does his substantive post for all but 8 hours which he gets to fulfill his duties as a TU official - the confusion I think is his use of the term organiser which is often a title given to full-timers paid by the union.


 
what about the time he spends looking out the window?


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## Hocus Eye. (Sep 29, 2012)

cesare said:


> Daz said 8 hours a week *facility* time, though? I'm confused.


Facility time is the time off work but still paid by the employer, so that a union representative can do their union work. It is something that will have been agreed between the union and the employer at national level.

edit: Spanky got there first.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 29, 2012)

cesare said:


> I.e. the employer grants the facility time to the union.


 
facility time is generally allocated to paid employees who are apointed by their union to fulfill certain duties in their own employer - not to employees of other companies (though in very rare circumstances a peripheral (outsourced?) employer may make a financial contribution to the core employer to cover facility time for reps employed by the core employer to carry out duties on behalf of members in the peripheral employer).


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## cesare (Sep 29, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> That would be very unusual can't say I've come across that set up.
> 
> Anyway in this case he is a rep who does his substantive post for all but 8 hours which he gets to fulfill his duties as a TU official - the confusion I think is his use of the term organiser which is often a title given to full-timers paid by the union.


You're probably right re the cause of confusion. But I've organised it myself like that previously from the employer viewpoint cos it makes sense I.e. you (the union/s) get X number of hours facility to divide up how you like and then X amount more if there's anything extra going on e.g. Redundancies or whatever.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 29, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> Facility time is the time off work but still paid by the employer, so that a union representative can do their union work. It is something that will have been agreed between the union and the employer at national level.


 
Or at local level it depends on the scope of the agreement/size of the bargaining unit etc


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## cesare (Sep 29, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> Facility time is the time off work but still paid by the employer, so that a union representative can do their union work. It is something that will have been agreed between the union and the employer at national level.


It's not always decided at national level, you know.


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## Hocus Eye. (Sep 29, 2012)

I guess it will have been in the case of the UCU, but you are right.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 29, 2012)

cesare said:


> You're probably right re the cause of confusion. But I've organised it myself like that previously from the employer viewpoint cos it makes sense I.e. you (the union/s) get X number of hours facility to divide up how you like and then X amount more if there's anything extra going on e.g. Redundancies or whatever.


 
Yes me too from the other side - but those hours will be allocated to paid staff of the employer, appointed by the union to fulfil certain roles - if the union has paid officials to deploy fair enough but the employer does not contribute to them and nor should it.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 29, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> I guess it will have been in the case of the UCU, but you are right.


 
No there is a national negotiating body for HE but there are also local 'facilities agreements' and local consultation frameworks something like this would be decided and agreed at local level, though there are national guidelines as well.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 29, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> what about the time he spends looking out the window?


 
That is the time he is stealing from the hard pressed taxpayer


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## cesare (Sep 29, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Yes me too from the other side - but those hours will be allocated to paid staff of the employer, appointed by the union to fulfil certain roles - if the union has paid officials to deploy fair enough but the employer does not contribute to them and nor should it.


Aye, but facility time from an employers' point of view is time off for union activities which can range from allowing stewards time to hold meetings, to consultation, to representation, to recruitment to etc etc etc (as you know) and can also include time for full timers to come in and assist local reps. As I said, depends on how it's organised. But yeah, looks like Daz is still employed by the uni but I just thought I'd ask.

Edited to correct UCU to uni


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## cesare (Sep 29, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Yes me too from the other side - but those hours will be allocated to paid staff of the employer, appointed by the union to fulfil certain roles - if the union has paid officials to deploy fair enough but the employer does not contribute to them and nor should it.


I used to allow pretty much as much time as the union/s wanted and didn't allocate it to paid employees as such. Which if you think about it the union/s should have resisted but they loved it.


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## Cornetto (Sep 29, 2012)

cesare said:


> Does this mean that you're a full timer?


 
No i am a full time lecturer, the UCU negotiating agreement and union recognition gives us a full time academic appointment to divide up between the branch ornganising committee. We share our hours with no more than one full day as union activity as an officer. UCU is one of the faw unions i have been in that does not have a massive amount of full time officials, it runs on local lay elected officials with facility time essentially. I prefer it to Unison and the GMB.


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## Cornetto (Sep 29, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> what about the time he spends looking out the window?


 

From a Hollowayian critique of the cracks and fissures in capitalism, my staring out on to the Leeds Inner ring road from my polytechnic sanctum is probably as effective as my union activity. ‘cracks in capatalism’.

Why is everyone so interested in working time deployment as a lecturer/elected official it is about as exciting as watching grey paint dry?


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## The39thStep (Sep 29, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> From a Hollowayian critique of the cracks and fissures in capitalism, my staring out on to the Leeds Inner ring road from my polytechnic sanctum is probably as effective as my union activity. ‘cracks in capatalism’.
> 
> Why is everyone so interested in working time deployment as a lecturer/elected official it is about as exciting as watching grey paint dry?


 
we found watching grey paint drying too exciting


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## cesare (Sep 29, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> No i am a full time lecturer, the UCU negotiating agreement and union recognition gives us a full time academic appointment to divide up between the branch ornganising committee. We share our hours with no more than one full day as union activity as an officer. UCU is one of the faw unions i have been in that does not have a massive amount of full time officials, it runs on local lay elected officials with facility time essentially. I prefer it to Unison and the GMB.


I much much prefer that type of set up, I can 't stand what happens when unions build in a management hierarchy of their own. You might well find that locally they allow you more time than the allocated amount if you need it, too. Don't think of it as cosying up to management to get it though (although of course it is) you have to be Machiavellian about these things. Sorry for the personal questions, I'm just curious and I like it when union reps are very effective in what they do and not bogged down by bureaucracy. Good to see you back


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## cesare (Sep 29, 2012)

Spanky, have you seen what's happened with the cleaners and the CF/AD fiasco? I was wondering whether to update the IWW thread but thinking it might be offputting for potential members.


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## The39thStep (Sep 29, 2012)

I was a bit miffed that I wasn't invited to Laurie's birthday party in Bushwick 'probably the coolest place on the planet'


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## butchersapron (Sep 29, 2012)

Random said:


> Like I said, I'd rather see them err on the side of too much rather than too little. But when it comes to pro-kiddy fiddling propaganda there's a fairly easy decision to take. Although I think that Bey's TAZ is worth having available.


What about pieces by phil dywer?


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## newbie (Sep 29, 2012)

cesare said:


> Spanky, have you seen what's happened with the cleaners and the CF/AD fiasco? I was wondering whether to update the IWW thread but thinking it might be offputting for potential members.


 
is it a particularly good day for suppressing bad news?


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## cesare (Sep 29, 2012)

newbie said:


> is it a particularly good day for suppressing bad news?


I'm not particularly attached to suppressing it, quite the reverse because it's a case of "I fucking predicted this, as did many others" but wondering whether the IWW thread is the best place for it. I don't think it's sufficiently major for a thread on its own, but it may contribute to derailing the IWW thread further plus possibly being offputting at a time when I think it's a good idea for people to join unions if they don't feel able or inclined to self organise.


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## love detective (Sep 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> What about pieces by phil dywer?


 
well received so far!

and i presume the person who put it up is him writing about himself in the third person

edit: actually probably not, just sounds like how it would be if it was


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## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 29, 2012)

cesare said:


> Spanky, have you seen what's happened with the cleaners and the CF/AD fiasco? I was wondering whether to update the IWW thread but thinking it might be offputting for potential members.


 
nope I've not seen it


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## newbie (Sep 29, 2012)

cesare said:


> I'm not particularly attached to suppressing it, quite the reverse because it's a case of "I fucking predicted this, as did many others" but wondering whether the IWW thread is the best place for it. I don't think it's sufficiently major for a thread on its own, but it may contribute to derailing the IWW thread further plus possibly being offputting at a time when I think it's a good idea for people to join unions if they don't feel able or inclined to self organise.


I think it's a good idea for people to join unions too, but I also think it's a good idea that they do so with some sort of understanding of what's going on. 

I would personally be a bit miffed if I got inspired by a thread on urban, joined and then discovered that the thread had been sanitised specifically so that my enthusiasm wouldn't dampened. iyswim.


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## cesare (Sep 29, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> nope I've not seen it


Here: http://www.change.org/petitions/justice-for-the-cleaners-at-societe-generale

The key bit of info is hidden towards the end i.e. that it's only the IWGB workers that have been suspended, so it looks as though the employer has got wind of the fact that they're not certified yet so employer can do it with impunity. Word is that the IWW have offered to help but CF and AD too stubborn to accept. Just what I've heard though, unverified.


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## cesare (Sep 29, 2012)

newbie said:


> I think it's a good idea for people to join unions too, but I also think it's a good idea that they do so with some sort of understanding of what's going on.
> 
> I would personally be a bit miffed if I got inspired by a thread on urban, joined and then discovered that the thread had been sanitised specifically so that my enthusiasm wouldn't dampened. iyswim.


If you look carefully I was asking Spanky for his opinion and voicing my should I/shouldn't I/where. But yes, I get your point, thanks.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 29, 2012)

it's what we predicted then... what a mess.


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## cesare (Sep 29, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> it's what we predicted then... what a mess.


Aye, exactly


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## _angel_ (Sep 29, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> From a Hollowayian critique of the cracks and fissures in capitalism, my staring out on to the Leeds Inner ring road from my polytechnic sanctum is probably as effective as my union activity. ‘cracks in capatalism’.
> 
> Why is everyone so interested in working time deployment as a lecturer/elected official it is about as exciting as watching grey paint dry?


Hiya.


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## BigTom (Sep 29, 2012)

cesare said:


> Here: http://www.change.org/petitions/justice-for-the-cleaners-at-societe-generale
> 
> The key bit of info is hidden towards the end i.e. that it's only the IWGB workers that have been suspended, so it looks as though the employer has got wind of the fact that they're not certified yet so employer can do it with impunity. Word is that the IWW have offered to help but CF and AD too stubborn to accept. Just what I've heard though, unverified.


 
fucks sake.


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## cesare (Sep 29, 2012)

BigTom said:


> fucks sake.


It's not clear what they have been suspended for, exactly. Therein might lie effective grounds for appeal rather than ( or in addition to)  this petition malarkey.


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## sihhi (Oct 2, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> From a Hollowayian critique of the cracks and fissures in capitalism, my staring out on to the Leeds Inner ring road from my polytechnic sanctum is probably as effective as my union activity. ‘cracks in capatalism’.
> 
> Why is everyone so interested in working time deployment as a lecturer/elected official it is about as exciting as watching grey paint dry?


 
If I had the stamina, I would do a whole post about experiences of UCU in further education how they even managed to fuck up strike leaflets by sending them to the wrong college site. Then union-internally disciplining me for arguing with a heap of security guards who are being bullying idiots and infringing a strikebreaker UCU member with a leaflet tossed on his pocketed arms.
UCU is an elaborate joke in FE (and I've been told in prison education too) - it can't expel its strikebreakers and still has to have them as members. It has zero interest or support in accepting agency workers on the same building as college branch members. Theoretically they have to set up their own branch and join that branch because they've got a different employer and unit. 
It functions using a quasi-full timer model - convenors with extensive facility time - to do acres and acres of casework or listening to management meetings, but because they see themselves as teaching for X hours (subtracting the facility time), they pretend like they are agency hours, who also work X hours (on no holiday pay, no benefits, no Teachers Pension Scheme etc etc) and talk about how terrible cuts are. They try to dampen action against teachers being suspended or investigated for bullshit. They always oppose strike action during 'critical' exams time - the only time that matters - etc. I don't know too much about the behind the scenes university world.


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## sihhi (Oct 2, 2012)

Oh yeah I was gonna post more but I am disheartened to.

Laurie



Lame... but I like the milk touch.

Alex... why admit to do this after England-Sweden game?


And I don't want to go all Monty Python... but there I go again... you kids don't know what real hard monarchist-nationalism is. Tell us more Uncle Alex.



As for Molly Crabbapple, Summer Roberts (who is she?) and Cat Marnell. It all looks really bad from the outside.


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## Cornetto (Oct 2, 2012)

sihhi said:


> If I had the stamina, I would do a whole post about experiences of UCU in further education how they even managed to fuck up strike leaflets by sending them to the wrong college site. Then union-internally disciplining me for arguing with a heap of security guards who are being bullying idiots and infringing a strikebreaker UCU member with a leaflet tossed on his pocketed arms.
> UCU is an elaborate joke in FE (and I've been told in prison education too) - it can't expel its strikebreakers and still has to have them as members. It has zero interest or support in accepting agency workers on the same building as college branch members. Theoretically they have to set up their own branch and join that branch because they've got a different employer and unit.
> It functions using a quasi-full timer model - convenors with extensive facility time - to do acres and acres of casework or listening to management meetings, but because they see themselves as teaching for X hours (subtracting the facility time), they pretend like they are agency hours, who also work X hours (on no holiday pay, no benefits, no Teachers Pension Scheme etc etc) and talk about how terrible cuts are. They try to dampen action against teachers being suspended or investigated for bullshit. They always oppose strike action during 'critical' exams time - the only time that matters - etc. I don't know too much about the behind the scenes university world.


 

UCU that I am discussing is the local organisation, not the centralized turds we pay to beat us.FE is different to my experience; some good local FE examples include Barnsley college going out to get a union sec reinstated and winning some concessions in the redundancy period, Leeds College Of Art is rebuilding from nothing and close to getting recognition. All the good stuff comes from local activity and patient hard work over time. In the HE world the pre 1992 universities are more conservative and the Post 1992 more militant in organising, we come together through UCU left and have had some significant national and local victories, my favourite this year was taking the scalp of the Blairite national chair at congress, calling for a no confidence vote on his partisan behaviour, they ignored a floor vote, lied, we demanded a recount they lost, all before a strike vote – which we subsequently won across pre and post 1992 uni’s. The larger group of delegates were exposed to the lies and bad behaviour of Labour party ghouls. Regarding strike action over exam times, most of my colleagues are against this, so I do not think full timers are out of sync with HE academics. We are building a trade union culture from the ashes of white collar professional associations. The post 1992 are better  IME as lots of the staff come from industry and have experience of unionism outside the academic bubble. I don’t think I would ever recommend on counting on the central org to support militant action they have to punished and forced into a corner. Timid creatures one and all.


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## sihhi (Oct 2, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> UCU that I am discussing is the local organisation, not the centralized turds we pay to beat us.FE is different to my experience; some good local FE examples include Barnsley college going out to get a union sec reinstated and winning some concessions in the redundancy period, Leeds College Of Art is rebuilding from nothing and close to getting recognition. All the good stuff comes from* local activity and patient hard work over time.* In the HE world the pre 1992 universities are more conservative and the Post 1992 more militant in organising, we come together through UCU left and have had some significant national and local victories, my favourite this year was taking the scalp of the Blairite national chair at congress, calling for a no confidence vote on his partisan behaviour, they ignored a floor vote, lied, we demanded a recount they lost, all before a strike vote – which we subsequently won across pre and post 1992 uni’s. The larger group of delegates were exposed to the lies and bad behaviour of Labour party ghouls. Regarding strike action over exam times, most of my colleagues are against this, so I do not think full timers are out of sync with HE academics. We are building a trade union culture from the ashes of white collar professional associations. The post 1992 are better IME as lots of the staff come from industry and have experience of unionism outside the academic bubble. I don’t think I would ever recommend on counting on the central org to support militant action they have to punished and forced into a corner. Timid creatures one and all.


 
I agree with the local activity and patient work. No one new in FE in most subjects unionises as a matter of course. 
It takes time to unionise even one member - about 4-6 proper conversations on average, but then pop older members saying stuff like 'you work so few hours anyway, it's up to you whether you bother, no one will hold it against you of you don't' 

Do you actually respect UCU Left? I was a silent UCU Left member - it seemed entirely fixated upon capturing UCU leadership positions rather than creating an alert and active base to impose a no pay cuts, no job cuts philosophy onto whoever is on the union executive. It's all too easy for people to get gobbled up. Now I've seen it happen, it's like I have grudging respect to the cult-like ICC for being right.   
2 convenor and chairs from UCU Left have supported the taking of voluntary redundancies. 'It's their choice, they can if they want to, we shouldn't tell people not to'.


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## Cornetto (Oct 2, 2012)

I think they have done both in my experience, UCU left have got people on NEC and built as much rank n file support as possible this was seen in the HE congress in Manchester in 2012. I don't think it's either or in my experience. We are a majority UCU left Branch committee at my work, we have a union density of 600+ out of 750-800 FTE (give or take severance etc.), with a good density we are building rank n file we have reps in each academic area and have got all local faculty consultative committees covered; we also have senior reps at the joint consultative committee with the corporate management team. We have 10 active case workers that make up the central organising body, we have won a few local disputes; One key local dispute was defence of precarious staff members, we managed to recruit disability support worker as academic related staff and had a key UCU left comrade working as one, over two years he unionised part time low paid staff, defended conditions and successfully stopped with his members the outsourcing of the disability support service to the private sector, this was done constructively by responding to management concerns with the expert knowledge of rank n file staff. Without UCU left this would not have happened as Unison who has the collective agreement for support staff would have rolled over IMO. the next stage is rolling out union advice drop ins and having weekly visible campaign stall on both sites, which we are doing this week, all of this is been driven by UCU left members. I like UCU Left and will continue to work with them in the future. The UCU Left support network across my city is good within HE and limited in FE. Regarding voluntary severance we had a round with the average lecturer with 10 years in leaving with 30k and a lot of that been tax free, a lot of people took it, they had other jobs or went back into practice. I publicly did not offer any support for it or offer advice on the process to members, personally I could see why they took it and why it was right for them. Politically I am in the role of defending jobs not losing them, as is UCU Left.


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## Random (Oct 2, 2012)

Use paragraphs when you switch from snappy one liners to fullspeeddazpower


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## sihhi (Oct 2, 2012)

> Regarding voluntary severance we had a round with the average lecturer with 10 years in leaving with 30k and a lot of that been tax free, a lot of people took it, they had other jobs or went back into practice. I publicly did not offer any support for it or offer advice on the process to members, personally I could see why they took it and why it was right for them. Politically I am in the role of defending jobs not losing them, as is UCU Left.


 
I guess we disagree then. I argued along with about 4 other lay members that the Branch Cttee - all UCU Left or UCU Left supportive (I think most colleges in London are) should oppose voluntary redundancies, publicly call on all members to reject voluntary redunancies and force them to push out non-union kept staff or engage a larger battle ... 'defending 80 jobs' motivates beyond 'defending 12 jobs (68 have taken voluntary redundancy)'.​


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## Cornetto (Oct 2, 2012)

sihhi said:


> ​​I guess we disagree then. I argued along with about 4 other lay members that the Branch Cttee - all UCU Left or UCU Left supportive (I think most colleges in London are) should oppose voluntary redundancies, publicly call on all members to reject voluntary redunancies and force them to push out non-union kept staff or engage a larger battle ... 'defending 80 jobs' motivates beyond 'defending 12 jobs (68 have taken voluntary redundancy)'. ​


 
I don't think we disagree entirely, the political message was that 'we oppose voluntary severance at work and as a local UCU branch we do not recommend that members take it'. Would i want to run a campaign that would see members not get between 10-30k and an exit if they want it, you have to be pragmatic; would a local dispute on this win, i don't think so, and you would lose credibility by making 'custeristic' demands that lead members into a blatant defeat with HR. The voluntaries were the tip of the iceberg and i am expecting a big cull in the next 18 months, this is where the line in the sand will be drawn. This is when people will have to stick together when the forced HR axe man swings.

edit - we won a local forced redundancy challenge around 2008-09 at our sister pre 1992 university.


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## sihhi (Oct 2, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> I don't think we disagree entirely, the political message was that 'we oppose voluntary severance at work and as a local UCU branch we do not recommend that members take it'. Would i want to run a campaign that would see members not get between 10-30k and an exit if they want it, you have to be pragmatic; would a local dispute on this win, i don't think so, and you would lose _*credibility*_ by making 'custeristic' demands that lead members into a blatant defeat with HR. The voluntaries were the tip of the iceberg and i am expecting a big cull in the next 18 months, this is here the line in the sand will be drawn. This is when people will have to stick together when the forced HR axe man swings.


 
We do disagree a bit though. I would oppose any voluntary redundancy package. I wouldn't argue for more redundancy pay, and I wouldn't present higher voluntary redundancy as a good thing, they're a dangerous and divisive thing.  

No offence to you, but to those locked out of paid employment in the FE sector, 'the future battles are coming' makes the union as a whole out of touch with those pushed into doing voluntary teaching... qualified volunteer ESOL, qualified volunteer IT teachers at charities at semi-funded projects, qualified volunteer-taught courses in childminding. How come people like us cannot find paid work it's in part because the union has colluded in accepting the closure of posts. The whole thing is a precarious sector - it's unnecessary and unneeded. Supported learning (education for the severely disabled, non-mobile severe epileptics...) cut hard due to voluntary redundancies because it's not a funding-productive sector.
Plus the UCU just supports the government increasing the measures and goalposts for imposing more necessary bull qualifications. It is skewed towards the middle-aged, made-it and likely to make it teacher that professional ethos thing you mentioned. I think professionalism as an idea is a weakness - you're brain worker that's it - perhaps it's an advantage in HE.

UCU, like lots of unions, is fixated on credibility, but credibility diminishes as the rapid U-turns increase (deal 1 is terrible, deal 2 three months later hardly any different is excellent). I'm crap at lying to managers I just try to avoid them as much as possible, hence I was no good for a Committee post, because Committee is expected to meet with managers - and it's give and take over productivity if you can ensure grade 1s on the next ofsted inspection trial run, then the dept will be in better shape. At least you are more upfront in general, admiting 'the workplace is no place for radical action' so I respect you for that. Were you from Dewsbury/Batley? I can't remember.


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## Cornetto (Oct 2, 2012)

No union officer in my area argued for more redundancy pay or voluntary redundancy, Your argument with voluntary redundancy is pissing in the wind, no one would go out on strike to defend people who want to leave with a package.

I do not work in FE so do not understand your issues in their entirity, I am talking from a post 1992 HE perspective. You are either creating a 'straw man' argument with me at worst or are tring to confuse my role as a lay elected official with the beareaucratic decisions made by full time officers/union organisers.. I dont know where you got professionalism argument from? i was referring to post 1992 lecturers having a vocational background and union experience outside HE, nothing to do with professionalisation, most of my colleagues are well aware of the prole status as all responsibilty has been centralised and lot of work deskilled.

My future battles (this is my perspective not a UCU one) at work in my sector are not yours, unions are built in sections, while we work in the same sector Education we are at different points. I predict the end game will be the same casualisation of HE as happened in FE but on a more US model (tenure track).

It seems you want a level of pure revoloutionary unionism that is quite simply not happening at the moment, i will take what i can get and deliver what members are prepared to do and live in hope we will collectively grow a spine and start kicking back.

edit.I'm from Batley, I live in Bradford. I think we are arguing over and around each other, classic internet monologues/near misses, lol.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 2, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> It seems you want a level of pure revoloutionary unionism that is quite simply not happening at the moment, i will take what i can get and deliver what members are prepared to do and live in hope we will collectively grow a spine and start kicking back.


 
The nub of it, when we don't live in revolutionary times what do we do?

We do what we can to

get the best deals possible for workers where we can

do the best to build self confidence where we can - through patient work and the odd small victory


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## Cornetto (Oct 2, 2012)

as the great LLETSA sighed 'that's the way it is suckers'.


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## smokedout (Oct 2, 2012)

I don't click on this thread to read a load of boring union internal politics


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## Cornetto (Oct 2, 2012)

avert your eyes


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## cesare (Oct 2, 2012)

smokedout said:


> I don't click on this thread to read a load of boring union internal politics


I do  How else would I get to hear of them apart from examples of how members feel about their unions?


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## cesare (Oct 2, 2012)

Especially since we* allowed the TUC thread to get halted because a full timer threw a hissy fit. 





* yes, me too.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 2, 2012)

cesare said:


> Especially since we* allowed the TUC thread to get halted because a full timer threw a hissy fit.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
smokedout isn't interested in working class organisation though


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## cesare (Oct 2, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> smokedout isn't interested in woring class organisation though


Isn't he? He turns up for Workfare protests etc. or have I missed summat?


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## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 3, 2012)

cesare said:


> Isn't he? He turns up for Workfare protests etc. or have I missed summat?


fair enough I've just always assumed he is some anti organisation liberal type from his posts and shitty blog


----------



## cesare (Oct 3, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> fair enough I've just always assumed he is some anti organisation liberal type from his posts and shitty blog


I haven't met him personally. His posts have changed quite a bit over the past couple of years, def different from before I took a break for a while and now. Maybe that says more about me


----------



## smokedout (Oct 3, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> smokedout isn't interested in working class organisation though


 
oh really


----------



## smokedout (Oct 3, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> smokedout isn't interested in working class organisation though


 
if you think bludgeoning internal political discussions about an academic union into the light relief thread has anything to do with forwarding working class organisation than no wonder we're so fucked


----------



## cesare (Oct 3, 2012)

It wasn't deliberate though, smoked out. Daz got asked some questions on his return, which set the scene for a while. Not bludgeoning


----------



## smokedout (Oct 3, 2012)

give the fuckers an inch and it'll be lectures at half-time and alfie moon ranting on about post structural marxism from the bar of the queen vic


----------



## cesare (Oct 3, 2012)

smokedout said:


> give the fuckers an inch and it'll be lectures at half-time and alfie moon ranting on about post structural marxism from the bar of the queen vic


Heheheh


----------



## Random (Oct 3, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> The nub of it, when we don't live in revolutionary times what do we do?
> 
> We do what we can to
> 
> ...


Also worth remembering that there's no clear-cut divide between "revolutionary times" and "times of social peace". There's a constant conflict that often breaks beyond the control of current institutions. So union reps who believe in radical change have to be ready to tear up the rule book and support action that goes beyond standard practice and even breaks the law. Even if that means sacrificng a chance to do more "patient work".


----------



## Cornetto (Oct 3, 2012)

I'm would throw a wildcat at any opportunity, however me sitting outside like Brian Haw would just be entertainment 'Broomsticks, arses and higher education'.


----------



## cesare (Oct 3, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> I'm would throw a wildcat at any opportunity, however me sitting outside like Brian Haw would just be entertainment 'Broomsticks, arses and higher education'.


I love your interpretation of breaking the law 

Sitting outside.


----------



## Cornetto (Oct 3, 2012)

on the utter edge of mediocrity


----------



## Random (Oct 3, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> on the utter edge of mediocrity


It's called approaching middle age. It doesn't mean the historical chances of major social change have altered.


----------



## cesare (Oct 3, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> on the utter edge of mediocrity



Utterly, utterly rad.


----------



## cesare (Oct 3, 2012)

Mind you, I wonder how long Ms Penny could hack sitting outside.


----------



## love detective (Oct 3, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> smokedout isn't interested in working class organisation though


 


Spanky Longhorn said:


> fair enough I've just always assumed he is some anti organisation liberal type from his posts and shitty blog


 
I think this is unfair, both on his politics and blog - you've got this way wrong in my opinion mate


----------



## cesare (Oct 3, 2012)

love detective said:


> I think this is unfair, both on this politics and blog - you've got this way wrong in my opinion mate


Some good coverage on the blog, and great pics.


----------



## smokedout (Oct 3, 2012)

thanks ld, still at least my blog got mentioned on the penny red thread, does that mean i get some money now and to hang out with molly?


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 3, 2012)

smokedout said:


> thanks ld, still at least my blog got mentioned on the penny red thread, does that mean i get some money now and to hang out with molly?


 

you get to be at the next book launch


----------



## smokedout (Oct 3, 2012)

will there be free booze?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 3, 2012)

love detective said:


> I think this is unfair, both on this politics and blog - you've got this way wrong in my opinion mate


 
fair enough must have changed in the last few years since I last looked


----------



## andy2002 (Oct 3, 2012)

That book about Greece Penny Dreadful and Molly Shoulder Rape worked on is available now apparently...

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14375


----------



## Sue (Oct 3, 2012)

Sounds like the new, privatised name for something along the lines of Consignia.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 3, 2012)

discordia-eris-kallisti-crabapple. it all makes sense


----------



## Fruitloop (Oct 3, 2012)

Is it supposed to look like a vagina?


----------



## sihhi (Oct 4, 2012)

Sorry to smokedout for the derail, but UCU's further education section isn't academics. 
Some of them are even JobCentrePlus teachers, which involve having to penalise claimants for non-attendance on lessons or lose the next blocks of teaching. It's all short-term contracts (the longest block is 10 weeks- what can anyone wholly learn in 10 weeks anyway).

Back to Laurie Penny, she is up for an award sponsored by EVRYTHNG,  

http://www.commentawards.com/category-shortlists.htm





> Commentariat of the Year Sponsored by Jaguar Land Rover
> Shortlist: David Aaronovitch, The Times
> Jonathan Freedland,  The Guardian
> Suzanne Moore, Mail on Sunday & The Guardian
> ...


----------



## rekil (Oct 4, 2012)

Lord Obama is a little bit communism.


----------



## weepiper (Oct 4, 2012)

copliker said:


> View attachment 23699
> 
> Lord Obama is a little bit communism.


 
OH GOD


----------



## kavenism (Oct 4, 2012)

copliker said:


> View attachment 23699
> 
> Lord Obama is a little bit communism.


 
The stuff Twitter Public Personality awards are made of.


----------



## Riklet (Oct 4, 2012)

/chundered everywhere.

communist unmanned drones launching the workers' missile.


----------



## revol68 (Oct 4, 2012)

expect a tweet next week about how Obama's predator drone blew up her would be mugger.


----------



## Cornetto (Oct 5, 2012)

I prefer the brown leather smugness of the Prof to the Laurie Penny hipster awfulness.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> View attachment 23699
> 
> Lord Obama is a little bit communism.


 
Obama picked that look up from me when he popped into The Headless Chicken to watch the 3.30 from Kempton


----------



## love detective (Oct 5, 2012)

Penny Red said:
			
		

> Leg 2 of the Grand Free European Tour begins. Goodbye London, hello Bologna, then Paris, then Athens, Piraeus, Berlin, Leipzig, Koln.


 
voice of the oppressed




			
				Penny Red said:
			
		

> Really really frustrated that I've had so many meetings and so much travel the past 4 days that I haven't been able to write anything. Ugh


 
has it's plus sides though


----------



## rekil (Oct 6, 2012)

Amazon book blurb.


> In July 2012, artist Molly Crabapple and journalist Laurie Penny travelled to Greece. There, they drew and interviewed anarchists, autonomists, striking workers and ordinary people caught up in the Euro crisis. DISCORDIA is the result. In an impassioned climate where ‘objective’ journalism is impossible, Penny and Crabapple offer a snapshot of a nation in the grip of a very modern crisis where young and old see little reason to go on, the left is scattered and the far right is assuming greater power and influence. Along the way they drink far too much coffee, become hypnotised by street art, and somehow manage not to get arrested or mugged.
> 
> DISCORDIA weaves together the personal and political, picking out those elements of the Greek crisis that are recognisable across the West to a generation struggling to articulate its purpose in a world of spiralling unemployment, democratic collapse and civil unrest. The solutions to the failure of modern neoliberal statecraft are very different to the 'tune in, turn on, drop out' ethos of the sixties: these days the drugs are worse and rock 'n' roll can't save us. The future is a question in search of an answer.
> 
> 'This is the Next Big Thing in journalism: digital, visual, intelligent, heartfelt, post-political, female, alarming, and engaging. It's both an honest chronicle of one corner of the collapse of a civilization, and an inspiring demonstration of the kinds of thinking, craft, and collaboration that might yet get us through.' Douglas Rushkoff, author of LIFE INC.


It's crying out for some of those comedy reviews.

They were in Greece for what, 3 or 4 days? That "somehow manage not to get arrested or mugged" bit, a direct quote from Laura rather than de rigueur publisher bullshit, is particularly telling. We are danger, but afraid of dirty forrin thieving poors.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 6, 2012)

copliker said:


> They were in Greece for what, 3 or 4 days?


 
Certainly under a week:



> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> En route to Athens. I have bought Fifty Shades of Grey for the plane. If I write about it that means it's For Work and noone can mock me.
> 4:02 PM - 4 Jul 12 ·


 

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/220533043948036096



> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Have done 25 interviews in 3 days. Good practice. Leaving Athens tomorrow for Munich. Exhausted and dicking around in the hotel.
> 7:13 PM - 9 Jul 12 ·


 
https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/222393166148534273


----------



## where to (Oct 7, 2012)

copliker said:
			
		

> Amazon book blurb.



Is that for real?

Isn't poverty exciting. The next big thing.


----------



## rekil (Oct 7, 2012)

where to said:


> Is that for real?
> 
> Isn't poverty exciting. The next big thing.


Here it is. None more post-political.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 7, 2012)

> Her style is casual yet articulate


 
Hey, that's my style
#


----------



## weepiper (Oct 7, 2012)

> an inspiring demonstration of the kinds of thinking, craft, and collaboration that might yet get us through.


 
I see the rich privately educated people are going to save us all from ourselves again.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 7, 2012)

weepiper said:


> I see the rich privately educated people are going to save us all from ourselves again.


through the medium of words. Her words.


----------



## weepiper (Oct 7, 2012)

> Laurie Penny's prose and Molly Crabapple's illustrations make me imagine a sort of contemporary Alice in Wonderland, told in a voice not unlike William Gibson, and drawn with an observational wit in the spirit of Tenniel.


 
If that doesn't make your trigger finger itchy there's something wrong with you.


----------



## Riklet (Oct 8, 2012)

i properly cringed reading the blurb.

note how she's got her US mates reviewing it glowingly on amazon already.  like fuck she's well known enough for people to be snapping it up/reviewing it yet, couple of shmoozing emails definitely sent...


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 8, 2012)

Let's take all the decent posts off this thread and e-book it, and make it free.


----------



## weepiper (Oct 8, 2012)

this could equally go on the 'guardian going down the pan' thread

http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/...cordia-molly-crabapple?cat=books&type=article


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 8, 2012)

weepiper said:


> this could equally go on the 'guardian going down the pan' thread
> 
> http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/...cordia-molly-crabapple?cat=books&type=article


 


> The final chapter describes events at the 17 September Occupy Wall Street anniversary protest in New York, where Crabapple was arrested. On 26 September Athens erupted with protest


 
Yes, they were not having that arrest


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 8, 2012)

It's amazing isn't it, almost like multiple saved documents can be quickly edited together into a single document.


----------



## love detective (Oct 8, 2012)

wasn't her two previous 'books' pretty much just a collection of auld shite thrown together in fancy packaging?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 8, 2012)

That's exactly what they were - interspersed with interviews that the interviewees said she had bullshitted about.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 8, 2012)

weepiper said:


> this could equally go on the 'guardian going down the pan' thread
> 
> http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/...cordia-molly-crabapple?cat=books&type=article


 
That's written by James Bridle, who also wrote this in _The Observer_:



> There's another term for what Authonomy and Book Country do: "monetising the slush pile".


 
Which leads us to...



love detective said:


> wasn't her two previous 'books' pretty much just a collection of auld shite thrown together in fancy packaging?


 
One of which was _Meat Market_, which did not inspire unanimous praise from feminists.

That tome was published by Zero Books - sorry, Zer0 Books. Zer0 boasts that "we take a democratic view of the author/publisher relationship rather than the traditional feudal one, or the current adversarial model of authors/agents competing amongst themselves for the biggest slice of the publishers’ advance and marketing budget."

What that means in practice is that:




> All authors can see as much as anyone else can see within our internal website systems, subject to some privacy limitations, like the sales figures of other authors, and contact details of people who do not want them public. Authors have a greater degree of control over their book than is the norm, are all on the same royalty rate, and tend to help each other by contributing to the website, particularly in the marketing contacts area. The more authors we have contributing to the contacts database the more comprehensive, detailed and effective it becomes for everyone. It’s a virtuous circle.


 
Oh, and...



> The royalties are basically the same, but we can do less in terms of marketing investment for level 2 than level 1, for level 3 there's a small cost contribution, and a higher one for level 4.


 
Hey, slush pile monetisation, meet vanity publishing and pyramid selling!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 8, 2012)

If Laurie = Laura, does Molly = Maureen?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 8, 2012)

It's all back to the loft for book launch Molly toff cocktails


----------



## weepiper (Oct 8, 2012)

*Following*​

*Laurie Penny*‏@*PennyRed*​
Right, France I am in you, and it's nice to be somewhere where I can speak at least a bit of the langue. Going to miss Italy though.

It's a terribly hard life, this impoverished lefty journo business.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Oct 8, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Hey, slush pile monetisation, meet vanity publishing and pyramid selling!


 
I hadn't realised that there was a pay-to-be-published aspect to Zero's publishing model. That's interesting. It might also explain why they seem to have no quality control in terms of what they put out.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 8, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I hadn't realised that there was a pay-to-be-published aspect to Zero's publishing model. That's interesting. It might also explain why they seem to have no quality control in terms of what they put out.


I think it's only pay to be _marketed_!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 8, 2012)

I got the Mark Fisher book which is OK, but yeah the rest look shite on the whole.

The thing is I don't like slating self publishing or pod per se as there is a long and respectable history of self published comics, indy films, and self produced and released music and I think it's briliant books are now breaking free of the snobbery caused by vanity publishing and self publishing being conflated - but once you start paying the publisher to "market" your book it reverts to vanity publishing in my view


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 8, 2012)

weepiper said:


> *Following*​
> 
> *Laurie Penny*‏@*PennyRed*​
> Right, France I am in you, and it's nice to be somewhere where I can speak at least a bit of the langue. Going to miss Italy though.
> ...


 
rock'n roll.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 8, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I got the Mark Fisher book which is OK, but yeah the rest look shite on the whole.
> 
> The thing is I don't like slating self publishing or pod per se as there is a long and respectable history of self published comics, indy films, and self produced and released music and I think it's briliant books are now breaking free of the snobbery caused by vanity publishing and self publishing being conflated - but once you start paying the publisher to "market" your book it reverts to vanity publishing in my view


 

publishing these days seems to consist of punting whatever an agent flags as a possible winner and covering costs with sure fire cookbooks, celeb bios and Name authors latest offerings. In the hope of scorring a potter or a da vinci code and retiring to a yacht.

Paying to have your work pimped is worse than vanity publishing. At least with vanity publishing you just do a run and beg yourmates to buy it.Paying for associated but undeserved promotion is next level vanity.


----------



## cesare (Oct 9, 2012)

@PennyRed: In the airport I was made aware of What George and Ian Did to the Welfare State. Disgusted, upset, angry.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 9, 2012)

surely she is reading this thread and baiting the hook!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 9, 2012)

weepiper said:


> *Following*​
> 
> *Laurie Penny*‏@*PennyRed*​
> Right, France I am in you, and it's nice to be somewhere where I can speak at least a bit of the langue. Going to miss Italy though.
> ...


 
Is it a sign of my inner patriarchal oppressor tendencies that every time I see a picture of her, I marvel at what a smug, punchable face she has?


----------



## cesare (Oct 9, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> surely she is reading this thread and baiting the hook!


It must be a piss-take, surely?


----------



## revol68 (Oct 9, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I got the Mark Fisher book which is OK, but yeah the rest look shite on the whole.
> 
> The thing is I don't like slating self publishing or pod per se as there is a long and respectable history of self published comics, indy films, and self produced and released music and I think it's briliant books are now breaking free of the snobbery caused by vanity publishing and self publishing being conflated - but once you start paying the publisher to "market" your book it reverts to vanity publishing in my view


 
Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman is pretty good too.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 9, 2012)

Nina is in a different category than people like Laurie - she actually makes the effort to understand what she's writing about


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Oct 9, 2012)

revol68 said:


> Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman is pretty good too.


 
Both of these were from very early in the line though, as was Owen Hatherley's "Militant Modernism".


----------



## love detective (Oct 9, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> surely she is reading this thread and baiting the hook!


 
She's definitely trolling us - she's just done an article for the new statesmen complaining about privileged white middle class women and unexamined privilege


----------



## love detective (Oct 10, 2012)

Big news coming today apparently



> Anyway. On a personal and professional note, I have some important news to announce tomorrow. Watch this space. (No, I'm not pregnant.)


 
Bet it's something to do with something else landed on her lap jobwise


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 10, 2012)

She's got a job doing the fritters at firebox?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Oct 10, 2012)

She and Molly are setting up an activist work space to teach the proles how to emancipate themselves via the medium of drawings of skinny white girls with fairy wings?


----------



## articul8 (Oct 10, 2012)

Good guess but the amazing news is that she's leaving the Indie for a new job (and pay rise?) back at the Staggers:
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/staggers/2012/10/laurie-penny-rejoins-new-statesman


----------



## cesare (Oct 10, 2012)

> She is one of the outstanding talents of her generation


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 10, 2012)

cesare said:


>


Come on, we've all had a boss who's told us to write our own reference.


----------



## cesare (Oct 10, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Come on, we've all had a boss who's told us to write our own reference.


Yebbut, they usually say "don't forget it's got to be factual, and non misrepresentational" at the same time.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 10, 2012)

and the cleverest girl at school


----------



## love detective (Oct 10, 2012)

so her job consists of writing one article a month and one blog post a week


----------



## Balbi (Oct 10, 2012)

love detective said:


> so her job consists of writing one article a month and one blog post a week



I do that. And it's about what's happening in my area, and my country. No international jet-protesting for me


----------



## articul8 (Oct 10, 2012)

Rumours that Butchers is taking over at the Indie


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 10, 2012)

New statesman circulation - 4000
Independent - 100 000

I wonder if a lot of the missing zeros came with the 'editor' name?


----------



## love detective (Oct 10, 2012)

Balbi said:


> I do that. And it's about what's happening in my area, and my country. No international jet-protesting for me


 
Most of us do that in a single day on here, selflessly


----------



## cesare (Oct 10, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> New statesman circulation - 4000
> Independent - 100 000
> 
> I wonder if a lot of the missing zeros came with the 'editor' name?


Probably.

Contributing* Editor









* a little bit


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 10, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> New statesman circulation - 4000
> Independent - 100 000
> 
> I wonder if a lot of the missing zeros came with the 'editor' name?


Yes, but the _Indy_ is read by civilians and other mug punters. _Der Staat_'s readership boasts a greater concentration of opinion shapers, glitzy laptoperati and people who will inevitably give Laura a job in the near future key policy wonks at think tanks.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 10, 2012)

Balbi said:


> I do that. And it's about what's happening in my area, and my country. No international jet-protesting for me


 

not even a 10% off at Aroma


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 10, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> not even a 10% off at Aroma


I bet her package includes a Platinum BiTE Card


----------



## articul8 (Oct 10, 2012)

Has Mehdi left the staggers now?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 10, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Has Mehdi left the staggers now?


He left his political editor role months ago but still writes for them.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 10, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> and the cleverest girl at school


 
No no no, the cleverest girl at a school of clever girls!


----------



## articul8 (Oct 10, 2012)

I rarely if ever read it to be honest.  Must be run at a big loss if it's circulation is only 4000


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 10, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I rarely if ever read it to be honest. Must be run at a big loss if it's circulation is only 4000


Rumours were that Lord Ashcroft was looking into buying it a few weeks back, the Russian gangster who owns the Independent has also been in the frame (and i expect some people will use this non-news to push that line again this week).


----------



## articul8 (Oct 10, 2012)

Who owns it now - still Geoffrey Robinson?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 10, 2012)

I got the 4000 figure from here - but that doesn't include subscribers i.e it's just newstand sales. The wiki article has 20 000 sold (with 17 000 paid - what were the rest then?).


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 10, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I got the 4000 figure from here - but that doesn't include subscribers i.e it's just newstand sales. The wiki article has 20 000 sold (with 17 000 paid - what were the rest then?).


Freebies for hotels, airport lounges, conferences, that sort of thing I would imagine?


----------



## articul8 (Oct 10, 2012)

They give them out free at Labour conference and Guardian type stuff.  4000 news-stand sounds about right for them.  But 16k subs sounds high - I know they'll have institutional ones (libraries etc.) but still...


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 10, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Who owns it now - still Geoffrey Robinson?


Progressive Media - or have they sold it on? Doesn't appear in their own list of publications - assuming i have the right one given the proliferation of firms with this crap name.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 10, 2012)

not sure who they are


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 10, 2012)

This is the lead story on the _Press Gazette_ tickertape


----------



## love detective (Oct 10, 2012)

any chance the Indy have kicked her out because she's unbelievably shite?

it's not as if her workload at the NS would prevent her doing a few shit opinion pieces for the Independent as well as the NS


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 10, 2012)

Yes, does appear to still be owned by the union busting Progressive Media Group.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 10, 2012)

love detective said:


> any chance the Indy have kicked her out because she's unbelievably shite?


Maybe they're clearing the decks so that Johann can make his triumphant return.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 10, 2012)

Here's their unpaid intern pages.  Nice of these unpaid interns to susidise the star names and help out with their rent.


----------



## love detective (Oct 10, 2012)

> In line with DWP guidance, you won't be expected to do any work which replaces that of full-time employees;


 


> You may be asked to help out with tasks such as transcribing or other admin


----------



## articul8 (Oct 10, 2012)

Know it's a big concern for the NUJ - interns replacing paid staff


----------



## cesare (Oct 10, 2012)

The trouble is, that most of these interns are so desperate for a foot in the door that they'll do it for nothing. It drives wages down, it's unpaid labour, these are "real" jobs that should be waged, and the people that can do it for nothing usually have parental subsidy so ensuring a continual recruitment way in for middle class journalism. Most of media's pretty bad for it and there are hardly any complaints (relatively) so it's unchecked.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 10, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Know it's a big concern for the NUJ - interns replacing paid staff


Luckily the NUJ are not recognised at the new statesman.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 10, 2012)

Don't suppose there will be many workfare gigs at the groan or others anytime soon


----------



## inva (Oct 10, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Luckily the NUJ are not recognised at the new statesman.


Was just about to ask about that. So is it still unrecognised there? I remember reading about it a few years back.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 10, 2012)

inva said:


> Was just about to post the same. So is it still unrecognised there? I remember reading about it a few years back.


Yep, does appear to still be the case. Or at least i can't find anything saying the situation has now changed.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 10, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Yep, does appear to still be the case. Or at least i can't find anything saying the situation has now changed.


 
As recently as last week _Private Eye_ mentioned that Cowley was being two-faced, giving it the biggun about the TUs at Conference, when he refuses to recognise the NUJ at the _Statesman_


----------



## rekil (Oct 10, 2012)

Discordia’s Gonzo Journos Analyze, Illustrate Greece’s Deep Debt Crisis





> The illustrated e-book format is an experiment in form for both of us," said Penny. "We're both pushing our boundaries and trying to do something unexpected and original with a medium that is still relatively untested. Why not? Why shouldn't young women be ambitious, and serious, and try to work on a large canvas, or reshape the canvas to suit ourselves?


If they were any more self-absorbed they'd implode.


----------



## Bakunin (Oct 10, 2012)

copliker said:


> If they were any more self-absorbed they'd implode.


 
We can but hope...


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 10, 2012)

> The illustrated e-book format is an experiment in form for both of us," said Penny. "We're both pushing our boundaries and trying to do something unexpected and original with a medium that is still relatively untested. Why not? Why shouldn't young women be ambitious, and serious, and try to work on a large canvas, or reshape the canvas to suit ourselves?


It's pictures and texts in digital format, it's not the unveiling of bloody Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Oct 10, 2012)

copliker said:


> Discordia’s Gonzo Journos Analyze, Illustrate Greece’s Deep Debt Crisis
> 
> View attachment 23883
> 
> ...


 
what does that picture actually mean?  i can understand the other ones on that link, but this one?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 10, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> what does that picture actually mean? i can understand the other ones on that link, but this one?


They got pissed up in greece.


----------



## Bakunin (Oct 10, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> It's pictures and texts in digital format, it's not the unveiling of bloody Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.


 
The quote is a perfect candidate for Private Eye's 'Pseud's Corner' though, so at least they've achieved something.


----------



## revol68 (Oct 10, 2012)

Who buys her shite? Its surely not exotic enough for student lefties, it's hardly Negri, Zizek or communisation level hip, is it? I mean if you are going to be a pretentious student radical atleast do it proper rather than going for new look highstreet knock offs!


----------



## el-ahrairah (Oct 10, 2012)

i got that, but what does the caption mean in relation to the story that they're trying to tell about greece?  why are there glasses on the floor?  i mean, i get that my political analysis is a bit short on the really heavy theory shit but am i being sold a "What I did On My Holidays" picture book as some sort of _text_.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 10, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> i got that, but what does the caption mean in relation to the story that they're trying to tell about greece? why are there glasses on the floor? i mean, i get that my political analysis is a bit short on the really heavy theory shit but am i being sold a "What I did On My Holidays" picture book as some sort of _text_.


They saw it written somewhere and thought it was great so went and got pissed in a social centre? Note the cool barman - little bit racism that one. I don't think there's anything hidden in this one.


----------



## rekil (Oct 10, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> They saw it written somewhere and thought it was great so went and got pissed in a social centre? Note the cool barman - little bit racism that one. I don't think there's anything hidden in this one.


I think the barman is their mate, the iphone blue peter appeal star guy.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 10, 2012)

copliker said:


> Discordia’s Gonzo Journos Analyze, Illustrate Greece’s Deep Debt Crisis
> 
> View attachment 23883
> 
> ...


 

Looks more like Laura is *ex*ploding, out of her own arse. That or Maureen Crabapple has drawn Laura following through with a pebble-dasher after a curry.


----------



## rekil (Oct 10, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Looks more like Laura is *ex*ploding, out of her own arse. That or Maureen Crabapple has drawn Laura following through with a pebble-dasher after a curry.


The shit seems to follow you round the room.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 10, 2012)

copliker said:


> The shit seems to follow you round the room.


 
Fuck, it does, doesn't it?


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Oct 10, 2012)

Where are their shoes? 

So many questions...


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 10, 2012)

Fozzie Bear said:


> Where are their shoes?
> 
> So many questions...


 

they have thrown them at Golden Dawn in a gesture of arabic contempt


----------



## JimW (Oct 10, 2012)

Your social collapse, our social event, and we get a parasitic payday for our "what we did on our holiday in someone else's misery" jottings. Christ.


----------



## JimW (Oct 10, 2012)

DP. blergh.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 10, 2012)

_Your social collapse, our opportunity._


----------



## sihhi (Oct 10, 2012)

Wowsers. Why does the solo man with darkened glasses looking at an angle that meets Molly's neck and below... look so dodgy?

Plus that graffiti line is one which many Greeks in the movement now apparently find annoying. It gets everywhere usually after some more standard graffiti like Fotia stis trapezes! (Fire to the banks) has already appeared.







It started off as a piss-take of the Greek Tourism board's adverts:






There's lots of graffiti in lots of places - it's almost as if they chose the one in English because they could understand it:


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 10, 2012)

Sorry if I am a bit slow on this but are Pennie and Molly an item?


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 10, 2012)

nah, penny has eyes only for milliband, obama and ryan gosling


----------



## sihhi (Oct 10, 2012)

smokedout said:


> she just told me on twitter she speaks differently to a-political people
> 
> (after her and owen ganged up on a gay blogger for calling david laws bit on the side his fuck buddy)


 
Can you explain this? Who called who a what, and why were they annoyed?


----------



## sihhi (Oct 10, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Taking money off others and spending it on the better off to get them to give you more money - how fitting for the times:
> 
> 
> 
> And put some fucking clothes on.


 
The exploitation is beyond vile - the behaviour of frauds, also some of the images of her art/photoshoots look really degrading linking domestic violence and sexuality: 

Warning on this one example: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4065/4636187295_ab05a44c41.jpg


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 10, 2012)

sihhi said:


> The exploitation is beyond vile - the behaviour of frauds, also some of the images of her art/photoshoots look really degrading linking domestic violence and sexuality:
> 
> Warning on this one example: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4065/4636187295_ab05a44c41.jpg


 
Oh, fuck off (not you sihhi, the perpetrator of that fucking rubbish).


----------



## sihhi (Oct 10, 2012)

Also_* if you look at where LP went in Italy it was a fancy literary festival organised by what looks like the equivalent of the New Statesman/New Internationalist/TLS/Mother Jones - Internazionale. *_





(That's Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guradian)

_*She is introduced as "Laurie Penny*_, giovane columnist di. Indipendent e attivista di Occupy Wall Street;"
Young columnist and activist from Occupy Wall Street 







There she's debating stereotypes of masculinity.

This Amanda Palmer figure is fascinating.



> *Everybody is too wrapped up in their own insecurities to worry about your dress being drenched in period blood?*
> Exactly, right. The only thing to ever be embarrassed about is the level and the height of anxious insecurity in your own head.



http://www.mtvhive.com/2012/09/10/amanda-palmer-interview-theatre-is-evil/


> *Let’s talk about Kickstarter. How much did you raise again? A million something?*
> It closed at 1.2 million.
> *That’s insane! You’re like a Jerry Lewis telethon.*
> [_Laughs_.] I guess so.
> ...


----------



## smokedout (Oct 10, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Can you explain this? Who called who a what, and why were they annoyed?


 
owen and ellie were accusing some blogger of being homophobic for referring to laws fuckbuddy as his fuckbuddy.  i took the piss out of them a bit and ellie said she wouldnt speak in the same way to an a-political person (or something like that)


----------



## sihhi (Oct 10, 2012)

smokedout said:


> owen and ellie were accusing some blogger of being homophobic for referring to laws fuckbuddy as his fuckbuddy. i took the piss out of them a bit and ellie said she wouldnt speak in the same way to an a-political person (or something like that)


 
So was that blogger being homophobic or not? 
I don't rate Ellie very high after her enthusiasm for Hollande in the French elections, just want to know I'm not overdoing it.


----------



## smokedout (Oct 10, 2012)

no not at all, apparently fuckbuddy is a homophobic term (according to ellie it would have been misogynist if Laws was straight as i recall)


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 10, 2012)

Balbi said:


> I do that. And it's about what's happening in my area, and my country. No international jet-protesting for me


 
how's that for self sacrifice? Any fashion tips for the precariously dispossessed voyeur for their next gig on poverty and activism?


----------



## Balbi (Oct 10, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> how's that for self sacrifice? Any fashion tips for the precariously dispossessed voyeur for their next gig on poverty and activism?



Buy Kestrel.


----------



## revol68 (Oct 10, 2012)

sihhi said:


> The exploitation is beyond vile - the behaviour of frauds, also some of the images of her art/photoshoots look really degrading linking domestic violence and sexuality:
> 
> Warning on this one example: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4065/4636187295_ab05a44c41.jpg



Isn't that meant to be degrading, Im assuming its a rather unsubtle comment on the violence of the commodification of women.

No fan of the twats but lets not deliberately misread rather obvious things in irder to feed our otherwise righteous indignance.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 10, 2012)

yes I thought that too tbf


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 10, 2012)

smokedout said:


> no not at all, apparently fuckbuddy is a homophobic term (according to ellie it would have been misogynist if Laws was straight as i recall)


 
it's definately not a homophobic term that is bonkers - was that the Ellie Mae O'Hagen scum?


----------



## smokedout (Oct 11, 2012)

yep, Ellie Mae O'Hagen, UNITE Community Union organiser


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 11, 2012)

sihhi said:


> This Amanda Palmer figure is fascinating.


 

Actually, I quite like her music: saw her in Dublin a couple of years ago and she put on a pretty good show. Her basic _shtick _is adolescent romantic individualism, though, something I suspect she has in common with Penny and Crabapple. Unlike those two, she actually has some talent.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Oct 11, 2012)

Dull, contrived quirkiness of the middle class female.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 11, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Actually, I quite like her music: saw her in Dublin a couple of years ago and she put on a pretty good show. Her basic _shtick _is adolescent romantic individualism, though, something I suspect she has in common with Penny and Crabapple. Unlike those two, she actually has some talent.


 
A friend of mine toured with her as a supporting act a few years ago - if you saw a naked lass being painted that was my mate.


----------



## cesare (Oct 11, 2012)

I never get to see any of these wonders


----------



## Orang Utan (Oct 11, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> A friend of mine toured with her as a supporting act a few years ago - if you saw a naked lass being painted that was my mate.


 did she get paid?


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 11, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Dull, contrived quirkiness of the middle class female.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 11, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Actually, I quite like her music: saw her in Dublin a couple of years ago and she put on a pretty good show. Her basic _shtick _is adolescent romantic individualism, though, something I suspect she has in common with Penny and Crabapple. Unlike those two, she actually has some talent.


 
It's not my type of music so I wouldn't know, but the cheek of her is far more galling. A $1million target from your 'fans', screening the best fans to perform - Laurie Penny is a honey-pot for smooth fluffy journalism and she sometimes misleads the reader, but that's far worse.

What's the feeling on this sketch it's much better than the main title one




This one seems dumb, like a pen-and-ink version of what if a Banksy graffiti came to life.





ETA:

The saving grace of these is that they don't have the whispy wool strings/smoke billowing effect all her stuff is based on.


----------



## weepiper (Oct 11, 2012)

Her drawings remind me horribly of the style of whoever drew Modern Parents for Viz. Which is quite apt really.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 11, 2012)

sihhi said:


> It's not my type of music so I wouldn't know, but the cheek of her is far more galling. A $1million target from your 'fans', screening the best fans to perform - Laurie Penny is a honey-pot for smooth fluffy journalism and she sometimes misleads the reader, but that's far worse.
> 
> What's the feeling on this sketch it's much better than the main title one
> 
> ...


Well, I doubt if there are any of Palmer's volunteer force who aren't dilletantes anyway, so is it really so bad? Or at least, is it as bad as Led Zeppelin ripping off geriatric bluesmen?

As for the sketches you've posted, they have curiously preliminary feel to them, like they still need work.


----------



## cesare (Oct 11, 2012)

They remind me of Ronald Searle's illustrations


----------



## the button (Oct 11, 2012)

So Laurie Penny is basically Mavis....


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 11, 2012)

Hmmm. Searle's St. Trinians cartoons were actually based on his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese. Something that would have cured him of the sort of _dilletantisme _we observe in the work of Ms. Penny and Ms. Crabapple.


----------



## cesare (Oct 11, 2012)

the button said:


> So Laurie Penny is basically Mavis....


Hermione is a swot and a sneke!


----------



## the button (Oct 11, 2012)

Chiz.


----------



## chilango (Oct 11, 2012)

Reminiscent of "cartoon Kate".

Only without actually being involved.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 11, 2012)

chilango said:


> Reminiscent of "cartoon Kate".


Noted 2,548 posts before yours 

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...acebook-handbags.266196/page-65#post-11282440


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 11, 2012)

chilango said:


> Only without actually being involved.


 
Hey, Molly died on the cross for your sins!

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/22/opinion/crabapple-occupy-wall-street/index.html


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 11, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> did she get paid?


 
I don't recall, when she told me I was too busy imagining her naked to take any more info in.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 11, 2012)

cesare said:


> They remind me of Ronald Searle's illustrations


 
Searle reminds me more of Rowel Friers:


----------



## weepiper (Oct 11, 2012)

Cutesy-wutesy little anarchodogs. With Anonymous masks on. FFS.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 11, 2012)

A vile article, playing on stereotypes and accusing others in the movement of lying (but excusing, by omission, herself). 

"The young people currently negotiating direct action in the face of a future mortgaged to finance the gambling of the super-rich have no time to wait for their hair to grow. The drugs are worse these days, anyway, and the police more efficient"

"Young people today don’t get to sell out. We don’t get to slink away into *comfortable jobs"*

"We don’t get to retreat into the country and live off the land, because the land is being torn apart for the last dregs of dirty oil."

"There is nothing the least bit Oedipal about the uprisings swelling and fading and swelling again in waves across the world right now. Oedipus, in the old myth, killed the king his father, on the road to Thebes and went on to take over the kingdom. In our story, if young people don’t stand and defend it, there’s not going to be a kingdom left to inherit. Aspects of this conflict are inevitably generational for one reason and one reason only. The people currently in charge of the money, resources and the political capital – call them the ‘one per cent’, call them oligarchs or call them, if you’ve *a certain sort of surname, mum and dad* – aren’t going to be around by the time the real shit hits the fan."

"A lot of lies and half-truths have been told about the Occupy generation and its equivalents. Some of them have been fostered by movement members themselves. When I visited Occupy London in January, some of its spokespeople were keen for me not to write a story giving away the fact that so many long-term residents of the protest camp on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral were homeless people with multiple mental health and substance abuse problems. In fact, it’s been the young, the lost and the homeless who have driven these movements from the start – and to say otherwise would be doing a great disservice to everyone involved."

"Everywhere the so-called futureless generation is discovering that it has to invent the future for itself, with whatever tools it has to hand, even if it’s just a row of bashed-up tents and a way with anti-surveillance software. The greatest weakness and most-mocked feature of the new protest movements – that they’re peopled by youngsters grown old before their time, by lost kids and self-destructive vagrants, by *nervous proto-revolutionaries hiding their cynicism behind straggly protest beards and unwashed hippies in V for Vendetta masks* – is also their greatest strength."


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 11, 2012)

weepiper said:


> Cutesy-wutesy little anarchodogs. With Anonymous masks on. FFS.


 



looks like dantes fifth circle of liberal hell


----------



## phildwyer (Oct 12, 2012)

Diego Rivera.


----------



## Orang Utan (Oct 12, 2012)

i quite like that


----------



## rekil (Oct 12, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> i quite like that


That's the 6th or 7th version of the same thing now. She's a bit young to be repeating herself already.

This is funny.

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
Has anybody done a proper investigation on *global* efficacy of black bloc? With interviews frm London, NYC, Oakland, Athens, Madrid, Cairo?

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
Because I would write the hell out of that if I could get anyone to talk to me.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 12, 2012)

And now for something completely different:


----------



## cesare (Oct 12, 2012)

Is that your work, Idris?


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 12, 2012)

cesare said:


> Is that your work, Idris?


 
Alas no. Those who can do, those who can't teach.

The jolly jape produced above is the work one Boulet, a French creator of _bande dessinees._

You can find his English language site here:

http://english.bouletcorp.com/


----------



## redsquirrel (Oct 13, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Actually, I quite like her music: saw her in Dublin a couple of years ago and she put on a pretty good show. Her basic _shtick _is adolescent romantic individualism, though, something I suspect she has in common with Penny and Crabapple. Unlike those two, she actually has some talent.


New album is miles too long, but the Australian themed one she released last year had some good moments.


----------



## rekil (Oct 13, 2012)

This again. May 2010.



> I'm not interested in change. I'm interested in specific transformation: transformation of the parliamentary system through direct challenge to the two-party orthodoxy in this election, transformation of our creaking, illiberal democracy; transformation of the state's attitude to women's issues; nuclear disarmament.
> 
> It is for these reason that I am going to be voting, in my constituency of Leyton and Wanstead, for the Liberal Democrat Party.


 
Now.

*David Osler* ‏@*davidosler*
@*PennyRed* @*PollyB1967* @*SteveAkehurst* @*owenjones* Tell me again ... how did you vote in 2010. Lib fucking Dem, that's how!
*Expand* 

31m​

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
@*davidosler* @*PollyB1967* @*SteveAkehurst* @*owenjones* nope, I voted for John Cryer, Labour Left, in Leytonstone.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 13, 2012)

Labour left? She means labour.  Not that i believe that she did.


----------



## rekil (Oct 13, 2012)

John Cryer according to wiki.


> He is the son of Ann Cryer and the late Bob Cryer, both Labour MPs.[3] His partner is Ellie Reeves, a Labour NEC member and a trade union lawyer, who is the sister of Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury.


In with Reeves, good move.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 13, 2012)

Just like ultra-intelligent articul8.


----------



## cesare (Oct 13, 2012)

She's spent this afternoon starting a new # campaign about challenging sexism in media, cos that's all she knows lol


----------



## sihhi (Oct 13, 2012)

'Privilege' speak is back.
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




What do people make of this?

Liberals not anarchists are trying to import this from the USA. WWD means women with disabilities by the way.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 13, 2012)

sihhi said:


> 'Privilege' speak is back.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


This is following on from the Moran shitstorm (or rather, not-give-a-shitstorm) isn't it?


----------



## articul8 (Oct 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Just like ultra-intelligent articul8.


 
what is "just like" me?  I never said I'd vote Lib Dem.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 14, 2012)

sihhi said:


> 'Privilege' speak is back.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
women of colour lol. Won't take long though for the anarchists to starts using this language.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 14, 2012)

womyn


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 14, 2012)

posters of colour


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 14, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> posters of colour


 
Benetton-loving ponce!!!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Oct 14, 2012)

sihhi said:


> 'Privilege' speak is back.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Not working class women though - figures.


----------



## rekil (Oct 14, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Where? Wherever will pay her to write it....which is not many places, which is why she only 'sort of' wants to write it.





copliker said:


> Vice? She reads it, Warren Ellis has a column, why can't she?


It was coming wasn't it.

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/greeks-fascist-homophobes-have-gay-jesus-on-their-side

Also this. Forrins trying to do music lol.

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
Hilarious folksy Greek cover of 'The Guns of Brixton' playing in this cafe.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Oct 14, 2012)

copliker said:


> It was coming wasn't it.
> 
> http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/greeks-fascist-homophobes-have-gay-jesus-on-their-side
> 
> ...


 
Telling - from that article:



> The Golden Dawn created a YouTube sensation earlier this year when MP Ilias Kasidiaris assaulted a left-wing politician on live TV, and they still appear to see no reason why elected parliamentary representatives should not punch the shit out of *known journalists* in the street.


 
(my emphasis) - clearly it wouldn't be a problem if it were merely proles and normals but known journalists? How dare they


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 14, 2012)

Faintly Bored said:


> Who is this Ms Penny? Is she some kind of TV personality?


 
Well, she's a personality of some sort, certainly.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Oct 14, 2012)

Also from the link copliker posted:



> We’re having this phone conversation in front of a row of riot cops, who start to give us some extremely dodgy looks.


 
Is it just me who thinks that doesn't make any sense at all? Surely the person she's having the conversation with isn't there so how do the row of riot cops "start to give us some extremely dodgy looks" and how are "we" are having the conversation in front of them? Has she just accidentally admitted to doing a Hari or am I missing something?


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Also from the link copliker posted:
> 
> 
> 
> Is it just me who thinks that doesn't make any sense at all? Surely the person she's having the conversation with isn't there so how do the row of riot cops "start to give us some extremely dodgy looks" and how are "we" are having the conversation in front of them? Has she just accidentally admitted to doing a Hari or am I missing something?


 
She's using the royal "We".


----------



## barney_pig (Oct 14, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> She's using the royal "We".


certainly taking the piss in some way


----------



## Lo Siento. (Oct 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Not working class women though - figures.


Obviously not. As that would rather expose the fact that her and her mates all carry the privilege that trumps all others.


----------



## rekil (Oct 14, 2012)

> Last night I couldn’t get my translator to come with me to watch a burning bank in the north of the city because it was late and there would probably be another bank on fire tomorrow.


How communisn't of the lazy forrin. Probably wants to be paid as well.


----------



## love detective (Oct 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Telling - from that article:
> 
> 
> 
> (my emphasis) - clearly it wouldn't be a problem if it were merely proles and normals but known journalists? How dare they


 
even unknown journalists are implicitly lumped in with the normals - it's only _known_ journalists like her who are different/special

she seems to come out with this thing quite a bit - how dare the police occasionally hit journalists at demos (while their hitting normals which is ok), how dare the cops lift artists like molly at occupy events etc..


----------



## Bakunin (Oct 15, 2012)

copliker said:


> http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/greeks-fascist-homophobes-have-gay-jesus-on-their-side


 
Her justification for writing for Vice is that it's (in her opinion) one of the few places that pays for decent young journalists.

If they're paying 'decent young journalists' then that rather begs the question of why they'd be hiring Penny Dreadful, IMHO.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Oct 15, 2012)

did anyone call her on the lying about voting labour thing?


----------



## emanymton (Oct 15, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> did anyone call her on the lying about voting labour thing?


Technically what was posted up does not prove she was lying, she may have changed her mind between saying she was going to vote lib dem and the time she voted. Is there anything more conclusive out there?


----------



## barney_pig (Oct 15, 2012)

emanymton said:


> Technically what was posted up does not prove she was lying, she may have changed her mind between saying she was going to vote lib dem and the time she voted. Is there anything more conclusive out there?


 

*there is her triumphalist cheer at the result *

http://pennyred.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/people-have-mumbled.html



> *The people have mumbled!*
> 
> 
> Nothing can take the shiteating grin off my face today.
> ...


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 15, 2012)

emanymton said:


> Technically what was posted up does not prove she was lying, she may have changed her mind between saying she was going to vote lib dem and the time she voted. Is there anything more conclusive out there?


She claimed to have changed her mind just as she was marking the ballot. Handy that.


----------



## rekil (Oct 15, 2012)

As mentioned previously, this is from march 2010.


> I'm already planning to use my own vote to assist one of the liberal PPCs in Leyton and Wanstead.


----------



## emanymton (Oct 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> She claimed to have changed her mind just as she was marking the ballot. Handy that.


Thank you, but just the fact she even considered voting lib dem is enough to condemn her anyway.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 15, 2012)

She was still urging it on mayday of all days, 5 days before the election.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 15, 2012)

I wonder what she was claiming on May 6th... I bet there's a stray tweet somewhere...


----------



## bluestreak (Oct 15, 2012)

sihhi said:


> 'Privilege' speak is back.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
tbh she has a point, although its completely lost in her own bullshit.  we need a certain amount of identity empathy to move on - but not full on identity politics, iyswim.


----------



## bluestreak (Oct 15, 2012)

everything she does is promoting already-privileged women.  but you know, they spent four days in greece without being mugged.


----------



## love detective (Oct 15, 2012)

she's on radio bubble today, not even close to seeing the irony in that one!


----------



## articul8 (Oct 16, 2012)

Paul Mason's tips for Journo's


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 16, 2012)

Laura isn't up _against_ "the tranquil consciousness of an effortless superiority." of oxbridge (for that is what it refers to) - she's an _expression_ of it.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 16, 2012)

11. Join Workers Power.
12. Leave Workers Power.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> 11. Join Workers Power.
> 12. Leave Workers Power.


 
13. Use a typewriter while all around you process words.


----------



## love detective (Oct 16, 2012)

14. A League of Nations should be set up to guarantee the political and territorial independence of all states.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

15. The land of Mexico should be equally divided among its people.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 16, 2012)

16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class, the immediate communalization of large stores which will be rented cheaply to small tradespeople, and the strongest consideration must be given to ensure that small traders shall deliver the supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

17. The Milky bars are on me.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 16, 2012)

18. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 16, 2012)

19. We offer peace and unity to all the neighboring states and their peoples, and invite them to
cooperate with the independent Jewish state for the common good of all.


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)

20. The Leader of the plant makes the decisions for the employees and labourers in all matters concerning the enterprise, as far as they are regulated by this law. He is responsible for the well-being of the employees and labourers. The employees and labourers owe him faithfulness according to the principles of the factory community.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

21.We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity, or rapine.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 16, 2012)

22. When you return from a scout, and come near our forts, avoid the usual roads, and avenues thereto, lest the enemy should have headed you, and lay in ambush to receive you, when almost exhausted with fatigues.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 16, 2012)

23. And thou shalt eat before the LORD thy God, in the place which he shall choose to place his name there, the tithe of thy corn, of thy wine, and of thine oil, and the firstlings of thy herds and of thy flocks; that thou mayest learn to fear the LORD thy God always.


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)

24. It is only natural that when the capable intelligences of a nation, which are always in a minority, are regarded only as of the same value as all the rest, then genius, capacity, the value of personality are slowly subjected to the majority and this process is then falsely named the rule of the people. For this is not rule of the people, but in reality the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 16, 2012)

25. Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The institutionalization of the social division of labor in the form of class divisions had given rise to an earlier, religious form of contemplation: the mythical order with which every power has always camouflaged itself. Religion justified the cosmic and ontological order that corresponded to the interests of the masters, expounding and embellishing everything their societies could not deliver. In this sense, all separate power has been spectacular. But this earlier universal devotion to a fixed religious imagery was only a shared acknowledgment of loss, an imaginary compensation for the poverty of a concrete social activity that was still generally experienced as a unitary condition. In contrast, the modern spectacle depicts what society could deliver, but in so doing it rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted. The spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness as they pass through practical changes in their conditions of existence. Like a factitious god, it engenders itself and makes its own rules. It reveals itself for what it is: an autonomously developing separate power, based on the increasing productivity resulting from an increasingly refined division of labor into parcelized gestures dictated by the independent movement of machines, and working for an ever-expanding market. In the course of this development, all community and all critical awareness have disintegrated; and the forces that were able to grow by separating from each other have not yet been reunited.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 16, 2012)

26a. In the midst of wanton aggression, we yet call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to
return to the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, with full and equal
citizenship and due representation in its bodies and institutions - provisional or permanent.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

26b. Under which king, Besonian? Speak, or die.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 16, 2012)

27. Don't leave you valuables in a bag in the care of a random stranger.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 16, 2012)

*28.* The USSR steadfastly pursues a Leninist policy of peace and stands for strengthening of the security of nations and broad international co-operation.

The foreign policy of the USSR is aimed at ensuring international conditions favourable for building communism in the USSR, safeguarding the state interests of the Soviet Union, consolidating the positions of world socialism, supporting the struggle of peoples for national liberation and social progress, preventing wars of aggression, achieving universal and complete disarmament, and consistently implementing the principle of the peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems.In the USSR war propaganda is banned.​


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

29. Unexpected item in the bagging area.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 16, 2012)

30. We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right... And if the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the end.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 16, 2012)

31. Mornington Crescent


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

32. In the four corners of Quebec, may those who have been disdainfully called lousy Frenchmen and alcoholics begin a vigorous battle against those who have muzzled liberty and justice; may they put out of commission all the professional holdup artists and swindlers: bankers, businessmen, judges and corrupt political wheeler-dealers....


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 16, 2012)

34. When you're f****** with me you look at the f****** ground, you look at a tree, you look at a bench, you look at any f***** inanimate object, you do not look at any other human being, you slag, do you understand?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Oct 16, 2012)

1.  No poofters.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 16, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> 34. When you're f****** with me you look at the f****** ground, you look at a tree, you look at a bench, you look at any f***** inanimate object, you do not look at any other human being, you slag, do you understand?


Justin Lee Collins?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Oct 16, 2012)

35. Heat not a furnace for your own foe so hot That it do singe yourself.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

36. You heard me - FLY THIS PLANE TO CUBA.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 16, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Justin Lee Collins?


E.P Thompson.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 16, 2012)

37. A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all.


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)

38. There is rebellion in the wind...It will be crushed.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

39. When insurgency threatens, let power prevail.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 16, 2012)

40. Red Leader standing by


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 16, 2012)

41. Passionate, organized hatred is the element missing in all that we do to try to change the world. Now is the time to spread hate, hatred for the rich.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 16, 2012)

43. The Company can not accept responsibility for loss or damage to persons or property while on the Companies buses. Driver below do not stamp feet.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 16, 2012)

42. Only she can be strong who knows sorrow and deprivation. Overcoming oneself, and life, leads to strength. And that also leads to clarity.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 16, 2012)

43. Do not eat silicia gel.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 16, 2012)

44. We will not be obliged to carry any child under 14 years of age unless that child is accompanied by a responsible person aged 16
or over. One child under 3 years of age may travel free if accompanied by a full fare paying passenger over the age of 16.


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)

45. I will try again in Belgium.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 16, 2012)

46. See overleaf.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 16, 2012)

47. As Jews, we are very fortunate. The holiest day on our calendar comes every week: Shabbat. It is the time when we Reform Jews most often hear the Torah read, making it extra special. And being called to the _bimah_ to chant the Torah blessings is perhaps the highest honor any of us will ever receive in our congregations.


And yet, sometimes individuals who receive this honor are dressed in a disrespectful manner.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 16, 2012)

48. dn ʎɐʍ sıɥʇ


----------



## Balbi (Oct 16, 2012)

50. Ways to leave your lover.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Oct 16, 2012)

51. this is the greatest manifesto ever written.  all you other manifestos better recognise.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 16, 2012)

Balbi said:


> 50. Ways to leave your lover.


Ha, you were so keen to post that, probably so keen that you didn't notice there is no 49.

49. The missing link.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

52.


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)

53. Ambitious careerists may now be disguised as progressives.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

54. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 16, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> 52.


This Vernon Yanner chap sounds like a corker:

http://www.crikey.com.au/2008/06/30/chloe-hooper-tracking-chris-hurley/


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> This Vernon Yanner chap sounds like a corker:
> 
> http://www.crikey.com.au/2008/06/30/chloe-hooper-tracking-chris-hurley/


 
Wow. Just. . . wow.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

55. This here is the wattle, emblem of our land. You can stick in a bottle, or you can hold it in yer hand.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Oct 16, 2012)

56.  love me, i'm a liberal


----------



## sihhi (Oct 16, 2012)

love detective said:


> 14. A League of Nations should be set up to guarantee the political and territorial independence of all states.


 
Sorry LD, the revolutionary youth moment is what matters:



> For us, revolution is a retro concept whose proper use is to sell albums, t-shirts and tickets to hipster discos, rather than a serious political argument.
> Many of us openly or privately believe that change can only happen gradually, incrementally, that we can only respond to neoliberal reforms as and when they occur. Youth politics in Britain today is tragically atomised and lacks ideological direction. We urgently need to entertain the notion that another politics is possible, a type of politics that organises collectively to demand the systemic change we crave.
> Revolutionary politics involve risk. Revolutionary politics do not involve waiting patiently for adults to make the changes. They do not come from interning at a think tank or opening letters for an MP, and I say this as someone who has done both. Revolutionary politics are different from work experience, and they are unlikely to look good on our CVs.
> The young British left has already waited too long and too politely for politicians, political parties and business owners from previous generations to give space to our agenda. We have canvassed for them, distributed their leaflets, worked on their websites, updated their twitter feeds, hashtagged their leadership campaigns, done their photocopying and made their tea, pining all the while for political transcendence. No more; I say no more.
> A radical youth movement requires direct action, it will require risk taking, and it will require central, independent organisation. It will not require us to join the communist party or wear a silly hat, but it will require us to risk upsetting, in no particular order, our parents, our future employers, the party machine, and quite possibly the police.


 
That was her speech at the Compass Conference 2010: "I gave this speech yesterday at the youth panel at the Compass conference, 'A New Hope'. After writing this in a fit of pique at the notion of youth politics being co-opted into the conference-going, *sandwich-eating mode* of adult politics, I got very nervous about actually saying the words out loud, and was sitting next to John Harris of the Guardian as chair, whose columns I adore, which didn't help. Thank you to those who attended and tweeted nice things whilst the event was going on!"

Down with sandwiches! Up with Bengal chai?









Laurie Penny in 2010. Which MP, which Think Tank? Questions must be asked.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Laurie Penny in 2010. Which MP, which Think Tank? Questions must be asked.


 
Bloody hell, that radical journalist lifestyle must have aged her pretty badly, if she ended up looking the bould Tariq. I assume that's an old pic of her with the red dye-job?


----------



## love detective (Oct 16, 2012)

_'skinny men with suspicious moustaches'_


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 16, 2012)

The smartest PPE in a very smart college.


----------



## Bakunin (Oct 16, 2012)

72. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am THE LORD(!), when I lay my vengeance upon you!"


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

23. Fnord


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)

Owen Jones losin' it on the twitter.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 16, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> 23. Fnord


I believe you meant to say:

23. Fnord


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> Owen Jones losin' it on the twitter.


 


post tweets


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> Owen Jones losin' it on the twitter.


 
I think this sums up his cultural reference points for me:



> What is your political activity? Some of this reminds me of 15 year old nu-metal kids who hated the "trendies" and "mainstream"


Makes me feel old. Very old.


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)

It gets better. Stand by.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> Stand by.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 16, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> post tweets


The main conversation:

*dominic* ‏@*casiotone* 
helen lewis if you shut down the new statesman i will apologise for hurting your feelings

*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84* 
@*casiotone* It's not really politics in the case of many of you, is it? Just nihilism and hatred for "the mainstream"

*dominic* ‏@*casiotone* 
@*OwenJones84* more that I don't think what happens in journalism is "politics" or anything like it

*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84* 
@*casiotone* What is your political activity? Some of this reminds me of 15 year old nu-metal kids who hated the "trendies" and "mainstream"

*W* ‏@*wgllm*
@*OwenJones84* way to belittle peoples' criticisms

*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84* 
@*wgllm* Joking about killing people and dismembering them counts as "criticisms", does it?

*Spitzenprodukte* ‏@*spitzenprodukte* 
@*OwenJones84* @*wgllm* although it was pretty distasteful, it's pretty obvious in context it was a crude rhetorical device, no?

*Spitzenprodukte* ‏@*spitzenprodukte* 
@*OwenJones84* @*wgllm* It's not a level of discourse I'd like to engage with but wasn't a joke about killing, it was taking logic to extreme

*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84* 
@*spitzenprodukte* @*wgllm* I had a UKIPer calling for my assassination on Jubilee Day. Maybe it was just a rhetorical device

*Murray Robertson* ‏@*muzrobertson*
@*spitzenprodukte* @*OwenJones84* @*wgllm* Shades of var?

*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84* 
@*spitzenprodukte* @*wgllm* But when people are under sustained attack, that sort of violent imagery can be genuinely intimidating

*W* ‏@*wgllm* 
@*OwenJones84* who's the 'many of you' you're talking about, anyway? who is it you think are nihilistic and hate the mainstream?

*Daniel Trilling* ‏@*trillingual* 
@*spitzenprodukte* @*OwenJones84* @*wgllm* Yeah but weak use of rhetoric quite often ends up being offensive.

*Spitzenprodukte* ‏@*spitzenprodukte* 
@*OwenJones84* @*wgllm* Yeah, I think that's true, and thing everyone should just simmer down, but seemed equivalent to Godwin or something

*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84* 
@*muzrobertson* @*spitzenprodukte* @*wgllm* I wonder how you people would deal with the sustained venom and threats some face on Twitter

*Murray Robertson* ‏@*muzrobertson* 
@*OwenJones84* @*spitzenprodukte* @*wgllm* We wouldn't get compensated by writing about it in a broadsheet, that's for sure.

*Spitzenprodukte* ‏@*spitzenprodukte* 
@*trillingual* @*owenjones84* @*wgllm* yeah that's true. I wouldn't support it at all btw and wouldn't like to be grouped with it.

*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84* 
@*muzrobertson* @*spitzenprodukte* @*wgllm* If you think writing left-wing arguments in the mainstream means you deserve what you get, fine

*Jonnie Marbles* ‏@*JonnieMarbLes* 
@*OwenJones84* @*muzrobertson* @*spitzenprodukte* @*wgllm* I dealt with them pretty well, I think

*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84* 
@*wgllm* A certain type of 'anarchist' who regards a supposedly impure left as the biggest enemy of all


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)

pointless duplicate post erased in massive huff


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)




----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 16, 2012)

Your fancy formatting cost you, kamerad.


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Your fancy formatting cost you, kamerad.


And dinner.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> And dinner.


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)

That's what it was supposed to look like.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 16, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


>


5 sorts of bean in there.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 16, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> 5 sorts of bean in there.


Only £5.99 at *FireBox*


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 16, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Only £5.99 at *FireBox*


5 sorts of bean in there.

(you boil 'em up..)


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)

*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*
@*oscarpower* @*JonnieMarbLes* @*DelroyBooth* @*muzrobertson*@*wgllm* I do. I deal with reams of right-wing abuse constantly. You don't.


*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*
@*oscarpower* @*JonnieMarbLes* @*DelroyBooth* @*muzrobertson*@*wgllm* I'd wager I get more right-wing abuse in a week than you will ever get


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 16, 2012)

Delroy Booth lol


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 16, 2012)

> I'd wager I get more right-wing abuse in a week than you will ever get


 
wtf


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> *Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*
> @*oscarpower* @*JonnieMarbLes* @*DelroyBooth* @*muzrobertson*@*wgllm* I do. I deal with reams of right-wing abuse constantly. You don't.
> 
> 
> ...


On twitter.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 16, 2012)

Its totally a competition


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)

It would never occur to him that normals deal with abuse, threats, violence, thieving bullying cunt bosses etc as a matter of routine.


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)

Reading the papers on skynews. Hardcore.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 16, 2012)

More fun with BOULET:


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Your fancy formatting cost you, kamerad.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> It would never occur to him that normals deal with abuse, threats, violence, thieving bullying cunt bosses etc as a matter of routine.


 
 How dare you *insult*/*threaten* him like that what you just did. He was a researcher for a Labour MP AND had lecturer parents, he faced mountains of violence. He has so many threats brandished to him via his phone screen, for half an hour he once thought about cutting down his twitter usage.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> Reading the papers on skynews. Hardcore.


For £850


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 16, 2012)

copliker said:


>


----------



## sihhi (Oct 16, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> For £850


That's pish. You actually have to use your brain for a while.

£1500 for an hour of filming for Have I Got News For You. No thinking just puns and 'he looks like a...' jokes. That's where the real money is.


----------



## rekil (Oct 16, 2012)

This is a cracker. 

*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*
@*muzrobertson* @*spitzenprodukte* @*wgllm* I spend my life going to union branches, schools, unis, rallies etc to listen to people. Do you?


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> This is a cracker.
> 
> *Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*
> @*muzrobertson* @*spitzenprodukte* @*wgllm* I spend my life going to union branches, schools, unis, rallies etc to listen to people. Do you?


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*
I'm on @*SkyNews* at 1pm talking about the #*PMQs* bumfest and whether Andrew "knowing your f***ing place" Mitchell will survive

He somehow left this off the how-I-spend-my-life list.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

I spend my life shopping and having my tea.


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

*ProletarianDemocracy* ‏@*ProletarianDem*
@*OwenJones84* left this off the how-I-spend-my-life list yesterday. Skynewsless normals will be either working or queueing in a spar at 1pm


*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*
@*ProletarianDem* Over 6 million people who are looking for full-time work, as well as students, pensioners etc are queuing in Spar?


This is just absurd.


----------



## fractionMan (Oct 17, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


>


 
I eat those


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 17, 2012)

fractionMan said:


> I eat those


There's a reason that picture came from a site called Barely Edible


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

copliker said:


> *ProletarianDemocracy* ‏@*ProletarianDem*
> @*OwenJones84* left this off the how-I-spend-my-life list yesterday. Skynewsless normals will be either working or queueing in a spar at 1pm
> 
> 
> ...


Note that norms shop in spar or happy shopper or some other equally proletarian multi-million pound business.


----------



## fractionMan (Oct 17, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> There's a reason that picture came from a site called Barely Edible


 

I have a feeling I inspired that site


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

copliker said:


> This is a cracker.
> 
> *Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*
> @*muzrobertson* @*spitzenprodukte* @*wgllm* I spend my life going to union branches, schools, unis, rallies etc to listen to people. Do you?


 
he could combine this with a quick tour of top European cities  being entertained by artists and writers in the evening if he had any real ambition

There is a potential business case  here for some form of deluxe assisted travel package for  this sort of thing that we could put in Workers Girder


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> How dare you *insult*/*threaten* him like that what you just did. He was a researcher for a Labour MP AND had lecturer parents, he faced mountains of violence. He has so many threats brandished to him via his phone screen, for half an hour he once thought about cutting down his twitter usage.


 
It that sort of unreported cyber bullying that makes cops hitting artists pretty trivial for those affected


----------



## articul8 (Oct 17, 2012)

He didn't say the above were union branches, schools, unis etc in Venezuela


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> There is a potential business case here for some form of deluxe assisted travel package for this sort of thing that we could put in Workers Girder


"deluxxxe" as amanda would say.


----------



## the button (Oct 17, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> he could combine this with a quick tour of top European cities being entertained by artists and writers in the evening if he had any real ambition
> 
> There is a potential business case here for some form of deluxe assisted travel package for this sort of thing that we could put in Workers Girder


Just £3 a month will buy Owen the media adulation he so desparately needs. Call now. Please. Just call now.


----------



## barney_pig (Oct 17, 2012)

does anyone fancy a frappe?


----------



## cesare (Oct 17, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> does anyone fancy a frappe?



I just misread that


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

What happened to the appeal to buy the prof a new coat?


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> What happened to the appeal to buy the prof a new coat?


 
The brown leather bomber is iconic , pretty much the same as Steve McQueens  T shirt in the Great Escape


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

Wonder what it stinks like now.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> What happened to the appeal to buy the prof a new coat?


he might get a new, fashionably distressed one every week


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> The brown leather bomber is iconic , pretty much the same as Steve McQueens T shirt in the Great Escape


*FireBox* should have memorabilia like this up on the walls. Like planet hollywood.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

copliker said:


> Firebox should have memorabilia like this up on the walls. Like planet hollywood.


Fantastic idea - in the spirit of non-sectarianism they should also have stuff from other groups - a donkey jacket worn by Peter Taffe in the 80s for example.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

copliker said:


> Firebox should have memorabilia like this up on the walls. Like planet hollywood.


 
I like the cut of that jib.

What other articles could they have?


----------



## the button (Oct 17, 2012)

A selection of Martin Smith's Fred Perry shirts.


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

Some of clare solomon's loudhailers.


----------



## the button (Oct 17, 2012)

A framed copy of the "troops in" front cover from Socialist Worker from c.1969.


----------



## cesare (Oct 17, 2012)

FT TU white shirt and black trousers, and blazer.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

Centrepiece has to the WRP's Trotsky's death mask


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

Any lefties known to wear a wig?


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 17, 2012)

This is the first time in many many pages that this thread gave a mention to Callinicos who after all is in the title. Penny Farthing or whatever her name is, has had many more mentions. Leather jacket apart, has anyone ever seen the professor wearing anything other than a black shirt and khaki trousers?


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

Tony Cliff wig
Tariq Ali's dufflecoat
Tony Benns tea mug


----------



## the button (Oct 17, 2012)

Dennis Nilsen's wardrobe.


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

Galloway cigar cutter, designed like a guillotine, with little steps and a basket and everything.


----------



## cesare (Oct 17, 2012)

Ian Bone's white linen suit.


----------



## the button (Oct 17, 2012)

Ted Grant's Stan Ogden glasses.


----------



## barney_pig (Oct 17, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> This is the first time in many many pages that this thread gave a mention to Callinicos who after all is in the title. Penny Farthing or whatever her name is, has had many more mentions. Leather jacket apart, has anyone ever seen the professor wearing anything other than a black shirt and khaki trousers?


----------



## the button (Oct 17, 2012)

A collection of Charlie Mowbray's hats.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

Cockers pirate outfit


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Cockers pirate outfit


Was just about to post that


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 17, 2012)

A facsimile Julie Waterson Moleskine address book


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Any lefties known to wear a wig?


*Bristle KRS* ‏@*BristleKRS*
@*ProletarianDem* Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

Laura's big red pen.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 17, 2012)

barney_pig said:


>


 
wtf??


----------



## cesare (Oct 17, 2012)

Solfed's black fleece bike face windshield


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

A MontyVideo's cheap cider bottle


----------



## cesare (Oct 17, 2012)

Black sabcat tattoo transfer


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

belboid's leather trews.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

belboids hair


----------



## the button (Oct 17, 2012)

The bucket from the piss room from the Anarchist Youth Network Marble Arch squat.


----------



## cesare (Oct 17, 2012)

Megaphone with button for police siren


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

> Lindsey,
> 
> I acknowledge receipt of your resignation and have amended our records accordingly.
> 
> ...


----------



## love detective (Oct 17, 2012)

revol68


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

revol68s black eye


----------



## cesare (Oct 17, 2012)

Framed photo of dog on string.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

Tariq Ali's hard-hat as in this picture from 1968.






Actually if you did have that hat, Counterfire would probably auction it and someone would probably buy it. Is that harsh?


----------



## cesare (Oct 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> revol68


With keffiyeh and raccoon tail.


----------



## audiotech (Oct 17, 2012)

Reading this thread and I yearn for the halcyon days of the likes of Julie Burchill, Germaine Greer, Sheila Rowbotham, Shere Hite and even Bea Campbell. You might not agree with what they had to say and write about, but at least there was some substantive, provocative thought behind it.


----------



## cesare (Oct 17, 2012)

Audiotech on a large cross with stigmata


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

audiotech said:


> Reading this thread and I yearn for the halcyon days of the likes of Julie Burchill, Germaine Greer, Sheila Rowbotham, Shere Hite and even Bea Campbell. You might not agree with what they had to say and write about, but at least there was some substantive, provocative thought behind it.


 
Towering intellect.

Redgrave's OBE or whatever it was.


----------



## audiotech (Oct 17, 2012)

Provocative not towering.


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

Assange mask.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

audiotech said:


> Provocative not towering.


You're neither you daft man.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

copliker said:


> Assange mask.


Assange rape mask?


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

Assange poor sexual etiquette mask.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

Which brings us to GG's catsuit.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

Laurie Penny's hardback Clockwork Orange special edition book


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 17, 2012)

the catsuit of third world reformism.


----------



## love detective (Oct 17, 2012)

will there be any room for a couple of shibboleths amongst all that lot?


----------



## audiotech (Oct 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> You're neither you daft man.


 
Too many bloody searing headaches to focus on anything and a shite education has its effect on the old bonce, but I do try my best. I did write a dissertation once.


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

Nailed to the ceiling.


----------



## love detective (Oct 17, 2012)

she died for our sins


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

copliker said:


> View attachment 24100
> 
> Nailed to the ceiling.


How will you keep the nails in?

edit: too late, ld got there first


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

The Billy Bragg Mug.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Any lefties known to wear a wig?


Is Hulk Hogan's lawyer a lefty?

http://twitpic.com/b4ya6t


----------



## cesare (Oct 17, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Is Hulk Hogan's lawyer a lefty?
> 
> http://twitpic.com/b4ya6t


Fabricant lookalike!


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

Starhawk's "sacred stick"


----------



## chilango (Oct 17, 2012)

Julie Waterson's bandage from Welling.


----------



## chilango (Oct 17, 2012)

Articul8's party card.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

chilango said:


> Articul8's party card.


Which one?


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

Chumbawamba's Bucket.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 17, 2012)

chilango said:


> Julie Waterson's bandage from Welling.


A well-travelled dressing - waving it around seven years later in Prague.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

The shells of SWP Martin Smith's eggs.


----------



## chilango (Oct 17, 2012)

Scargill's baseball cap


----------



## chilango (Oct 17, 2012)

Hatton's suits.


----------



## chilango (Oct 17, 2012)

Laura's school reports.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

The ICC typewriter.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

chilango said:


> Hatton's suits.


 
Hatton's number plate


----------



## the button (Oct 17, 2012)

The DAM typewriter.


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

A shoe worn by Saffron Burrows on the set of Frida.


----------



## cesare (Oct 17, 2012)

Some "radical" photography stamped PAID


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

Michael Meacher's swimming trunks.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

Monbiot's eco-cagoule.


----------



## chilango (Oct 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Monbiot's eco-cagoule.


That's a shit jacket.


----------



## cesare (Oct 17, 2012)

A reference to Random


----------



## audiotech (Oct 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Any lefties known to wear a wig?


 
Marjorie "Mo" Mowlam.


----------



## the button (Oct 17, 2012)

Monbiot on the mike. Toynbee waits her turn. It's smug cunt smackdown.


----------



## Random (Oct 17, 2012)

cesare said:


> A reference to Random


What?


----------



## chilango (Oct 17, 2012)

the button said:


> Monbiot on the mike. Toynbee waits her turn. It's smug cunt smackdown.



Why's he standing on a bench? I hope the selfish cock cleaned his muddy footprints off.


----------



## cesare (Oct 17, 2012)

Random said:


> What?


Monbiot pic


----------



## chilango (Oct 17, 2012)

the button said:


> Monbiot on the mike. Toynbee waits her turn. It's smug cunt smackdown.



I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but one of my proudest moments of direct action was completely trashing Monbiot's attempted C4 news interview at EF!s big Whatley Quarry action. He just couldn't get why we didn't want him to speak for us.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Oct 17, 2012)

The ILWP's Letraset


----------



## chilango (Oct 17, 2012)

One of the Spart's red armbands.


----------



## chilango (Oct 17, 2012)

A "revo" flag.


----------



## cesare (Oct 17, 2012)

Perhaps a stuffed raven somewhere


----------



## audiotech (Oct 17, 2012)

chilango said:


> I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but one of my proudest moments of direct action was completely trashing Monbiot's attempted C4 news interview at EF!s big Whatley Quarry action. He just couldn't get why we didn't want him to speak for us.


----------



## imposs1904 (Oct 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> The ICC typewriter.


 
the one that was relating to a burglary back in the day? less watergate, and more swampgate.


----------



## chilango (Oct 17, 2012)

audiotech said:


>



That is Ian Bone on the medal, right?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> the one that was relating to a burglary back in the day? less watergate, and more swampgate.


That was the typewriter that Bordiga and Damen had both looked at. The red thread of proletarian internationalism was made flesh in that typewriter.


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

the button said:


> Monbiot on the mike. Toynbee waits her turn. It's smug cunt smackdown.


The mucky shoes of deranged eco-liberalism lounging raffishly upon the sturdy bench of proletarianism.


----------



## audiotech (Oct 17, 2012)

chilango said:


> That is Ian Bone on the medal, right?


 
A doppelganger.


----------



## the button (Oct 17, 2012)

Toynbee even *listens* in a smug way. A rare gift.


----------



## imposs1904 (Oct 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> That was the typewriter that Bordiga and Damen had both looked at. The red thread of proletarian internationalism was made flesh in that typewriter.


 
damen? bit of a blur that one.


----------



## chilango (Oct 17, 2012)

That bust of Tony Cliff that he had for his house.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> damen? bit of a blur that one.


Oooh - blur drummers head or something. Was it the drummer?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Oct 17, 2012)

an invitation-to-speak letter, addressed to the undercover city boy who used to write in the Metro.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

copliker said:


> The mucky shoes of deranged eco-liberalism lounging raffishly upon the sturdy bench of proletarianism.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

Tony Parson's Hat.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

Yvonne Ridleys hijab


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Tony Parson's Hat.


.
eurgh, what horrible cocaine bodies


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

What about one of  Russian sailor tops that one of our posters wears ?


----------



## audiotech (Oct 17, 2012)

In their book: _The Boy Looked at Johnny_ Burchill and Parsons praise speed as a drug of choice. Burchill in particular looks on the verge of a psychosis in that image.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 17, 2012)

chilango said:


> That bust of Tony Cliff that he had for his house.


That would have been made by Chanie Rosenberg I guess. She won't let you have that while she is still alive.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

audiotech said:


> In their book _The Boy Looked Down at Johnny_ they praise speed as a drug of choice.


Brightest minds of their generation right? Along with, for some odd reason on a parallel with AYATOLLAH'S excoriation of the singer from def leppard, shere hite.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> That would have been made by Chanie Rosenberg I guess. She won't let you have that while she is still alive.


Like to see her try and stop us.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> .
> eurgh, what horrible cocaine bodies


 
Manarchism and/or body fascism.


----------



## audiotech (Oct 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Brightest minds of their generation right? Along with, for some odd reason on a parallel with AYATOLLAH'S excoriation of the singer from def leppard, shere hite.


 
Burchill and Parsons book is pretty dull. Shere Hite's research into clitoral stimulation and orgasm on the other hand.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

audiotech said:


> Burchill and Parsons book is pretty dull. Shere Hite's research into clitoral stimulation and orgasm on the other hand.


I thought you had a headache?


----------



## audiotech (Oct 17, 2012)

I've just taken 5mg of zolmitriptan and sniffed some peppermint oil and its eased.

Edit:


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 17, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> does anyone fancy a frappe?


 
Left wing academics in their heads:






Left wing academics in real life:


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

audiotech said:


> I've just taken 5mg of zolmitriptan and sniffed some peppermint oil and its eased.


Oh god, let's get it over with then.


----------



## audiotech (Oct 17, 2012)

Not yet.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

Back ontopic LP is doing a large speaking tour in Germany over the date of the big march. 

http://www.edition-nautilus.de/programm/politik/buch-978-3-89401-755-2.html

In German, it all sounds much tougher:

Laurie Penny, 25, gemäß Selbstauskunft Journalistin, Autorin, Bloggerin, Feministin, Sozialistin, Utopistin, Querulantin und Unruhestifterin. Lebt in London und versucht, die Welt in Ordnung zu bringen. Sie trinkt zu viel Tee und hat noch immer nicht das Rauchen aufgegeben.

Laurie Penny, 25, self-described journalist, author, blogger, feminist, utopian, querulant and trouble-maker. Lives in London and tries to bring the world to right. She drinks too much tea and has not yet abandoned smoking.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Back ontopic LP is doing a large speaking tour in Germany over the date of the big march.
> 
> http://www.edition-nautilus.de/programm/politik/buch-978-3-89401-755-2.html
> 
> ...


 
 the last bit sounds like that twee cringe making self depreciation in Bridget Jones diary


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

"not yet married a doctor"


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> the last bit sounds like that twee cringe making self depreciation in Bridget Jones diary


 
As it happens 39S there's a lot of that stuff on her twitter.

"Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
The past three weeks have been all about sleeping on sofas, doing endless interviews and writing late into the night. Flagging a little!"

plus her opening up about 'cute' males, also has elements of that style.

"Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
I am still sick and my sister sent me a cute picture of Seth Green in his Oz From Buffy days to cheer me up. She knows me far too well. "


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

See new inquiry bio.



> Laurie Penny was born in a skip in Islington in 1986 and grew up wild in the back-alleys of London’s bourgeois ghetto, surviving only on mouldy paninis and half-eaten pots of hummous fished out of bins and sleeping in rolled-up copies of The Observer Review. After a dispute with a notorious urban fox gang, she fled to Brighton Beach, and was taken in by a radical seagull collective and weaned on mulched-up, regurgitated back-issues of Spare Rib and Red Rag. Eventually she was offered a scholarship to Brighton College Sixth Form, where she edited a student newspaper and never learned to wear a tie. She went to Wadham College, Oxford, and later moved back to London to work in a shop in Camden Market, where being a scuzzy, mohawked Brighton feminist was part of the job description. It didn’t stick, and she rapidly turned to a life of journalism, having discovered that she was unsuited to any other employment by virtue of being weird and difficult. Now she has long hair, a semi-regular income, and zooms around trying to put the world to rights. She can still talk to seagulls.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 17, 2012)

Laura's e-cig, "As Seen On TV" and signed by Brillo.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

Callinicos twitter is workman-like - apart from the odd occasional slip-up - just a list of what articles I have read:


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

copliker said:


> See new inquiry bio.


Odd then that her parents are Brighton solicitors. Not london solicitors.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Laurie Penny, 25, self-described journalist


 
'Soi-disant' has a better ring to it.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

tables outside, in the sun - not like those proles sitting out the front because they haven't got a garden, cluttering up the street with their lifes.


----------



## chilango (Oct 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Callinicos twitter is workman-like - apart from the odd occasional slip-up - just a list of what articles I have read:



Does he just tweet links to the FT all  the time?


----------



## barney_pig (Oct 17, 2012)




----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 17, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> 'Soi-disant' has a better ring to it.


To an English ear perhaps, but a German writer would never use French surely.


----------



## barney_pig (Oct 17, 2012)




----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

A request for you folks does anyone have a bigger version of this picture






Clifford Singer False Economy , Sunny Hundal Liberal Conspiracy, Milena Popova Yes to Fairer Votes, Ellie Mae O’Hagan Labour UK Uncut, Laurie Penny, Sean O’Halloran and Jessica Riches of National Coalition Against Fees and Cuts NUS Broad Left, David Babbs Avaaz/38 Degrees

It featured as part of the London Evening Standard's 2011 article 
http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/the-clicktivists--a-new-breed-of-protesters-6556435.html

but is not on their website anymore.


----------



## rekil (Oct 17, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Laura's e-cig, "As Seen On TV" and signed by Brillo.


Part of a set which also features the red and black 'anarchy' badge as worn on channel 4 news when she was 'having a go' at discarded hero David Lammy.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 17, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> To an English ear perhaps, but a German writer would never use French surely.


The bearded German was fond of 'petit bourgeois' as a turn of phrase.


----------



## barney_pig (Oct 17, 2012)

this has no place here but must be a new initiative from the spartacist league


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> A request for you folks does anyone have a bigger version of this picture
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Tineye shows only three copies of the image, the other two are the same size.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 17, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> The bearded German was fond of 'petit bourgeois' as a turn of phrase.


 
Ils sont fou, ces Allemanois.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 17, 2012)

one of zizeks crap t shirts with the pit stains


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 17, 2012)

One of Hakim Bey's well-worn teddy bears


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

dripping


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

hang on wrong thread


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> hang on wrong thread


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

chilango said:


> Does he just tweet links to the FT all the time?


 
Basically Yes, although Guardian comes in second,
So today is



> Alex Callinicos ‏@alex_callinicos
> Gary Younge, Self-assured Obama recovers with better balance of style and substance http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/17/obama-debate-better-style-substance …


 
Socialist Worker/ISJ third.

but it has to be said his self-promotion is well feeble compared to Laurie Penny:

"Alex Callinicos 
August 17
Still at Nordic Sociological Association conference in Reykjavik. A bit shocked to see that this morning's keynote on social movements is being chaired by someone from the local police."


His whimsy tweets are just genius though, because they're wedged in reams on the collapse of the bond markets and Syria:

"Alex Callinicos ‏@alex_callinicos
I'm in a restaurant in Manchester that seems to be having an Andy Williams tribute night."

"Alex Callinicos ‏@alex_callinicos
For wont of a general strike, I'm watching the original Total Recall - a great film. Did anyone bother to see the remake?"

"Alex Callinicos ‏@alex_callinicos
For the 2nd day running I've had to get a cab into work because the Metropolitan Police is too incompetent to manage traffic in London."

His humour appears more genuine too.

"Alex Callinicos · 
October 10 at 3:45pm via BlackBerry · 
At Sainsbury's the checkout guy offered to help me pack my shopping + I was also offered a free health check: are people trying to tell me something?"

Very rarely does he respond to non-academics, I suppose that saves him from losing his rag like Owen Jones. He also refuses to tweet current artists like Crabapple, sticking to Edward Hopper.

A compilation of Lefty observations about their day-to-day lives would be a stocking-filler for Counterfire.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Oct 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> A request for you folks does anyone have a bigger version of this picture
> 
> 
> 
> ...


"Faces fit for a pre-existing narrative"


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

Lo Siento. said:


> "Faces fit for a pre-existing narrative"


 
I really dislike the director of 38 Degrees David Babbs on the right here handing over a petition to Ofcom.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Oct 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I really dislike the director of 38 Degrees David Babbs on the right here handing over a petition to Ofcom.


 
Am I right in thinking that the 38 degrees money goes back to Moscow gold?


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Oct 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> A request for you folks does anyone have a bigger version of this picture
> 
> 
> 
> ...


ha! Never seen that photo before. Don't know whether to laugh or cry!

The Proleinngdon Club?


----------



## articul8 (Oct 17, 2012)

Lo Siento. said:


> Am I right in thinking that the 38 degrees money goes back to Moscow gold?


 
I doubt it - that's Unlock Democracy.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Oct 17, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I doubt it - that's Unlock Democracy.


ah yes, that's right.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> ha! Never seen that photo before. Don't know whether to laugh or cry!
> 
> The Proleinngdon Club?


 
LOL 

Singer believes the ruling-class are being short-sighted and cuts are a false economy for them.
O'Hagan believes she has a path to the proletarian mind, because she's Labour and so are her parents, and proletarians ARE Labour even though Labour are not necessarily proletarian.
Babbs probably 'eschews' such notions 'altogether'.
Popova believes in pluralism and electoral reform.
Riches believes 'if people knew about twitter there'd be no need for newspapers' http://yougeneration.wordpress.com/...wspapers-ucl-protest-online-guru-jess-riches/
Sean O'Halloran is chair of a charity and gets to speak with government ministers.  http://trusteesweek.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/sean-ohallorans-story.html
Hundal is frankly a mess.

They do consider themselves on opposite sides so couldn't be a club.


L-R it's Singer, Babbs, Hundal, Riches, Popova, O'Hagan, Penny and O'Halloran.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 17, 2012)

I've not met Popova, and have no idea who she is.


----------



## chilango (Oct 17, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I've not met Popova, and have no idea who she is.



Does that mean you've met all the others?


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

Here are anarchists being _____________* at the Cuts Cafe



No I wasn't there and no I won't be going.

*Best inserted word wins a paper graffiti stencil courtesy of ALARM*.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 17, 2012)

ermegherd


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

feral chaos

He's a good performer.


----------



## Fruitloop (Oct 17, 2012)

I can't bring myself to watch it. What's she on about?


----------



## sihhi (Oct 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> feral chaos
> 
> He's a good performer.


 
You know him - the guy at the start?!?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> You know him - the guy at the start?!?


No, he used the term

(reply to pm later btw - have to get home first)


----------



## love detective (Oct 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> A request for you folks does anyone have a bigger version of this picture


 
See that gap on the front row in front of penny, LLETSA was in there originally but they've airbrushed him out of history


----------



## articul8 (Oct 17, 2012)

chilango said:


> Does that mean you've met all the others?


Not all of them - some of them.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Callinicos twitter is workman-like - apart from the odd occasional slip-up - just a list of what articles I have read:


 
Reads like a set of footnotes or breaking news in a slow news week


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> See that gap on the front row in front of penny, LLETSA was in there originally but they've airbrushed him out of history


 

First they came for Llettsa..........


----------



## Sue (Oct 17, 2012)

copliker said:


> See new inquiry bio.


 
'Laurie Penny was born in a skip in Islington in 1986 and grew up wild in the back-alleys of London’s bourgeois ghetto, surviving only on mouldy paninis and half-eaten pots of hummous fished out of bins and sleeping in rolled-up copies of The Observer Review. After a dispute with a notorious urban fox gang, she fled to Brighton Beach, and was taken in by a radical seagull collective and weaned on mulched-up, regurgitated back-issues of Spare Rib and Red Rag. Eventually she was offered a scholarship to Brighton College Sixth Form, where she edited a student newspaper and never learned to wear a tie. She went to Wadham College, Oxford, and later moved back to London to work in a shop in Camden Market, where being a scuzzy, mohawked Brighton feminist was part of the job description. It didn’t stick, and she rapidly turned to a life of journalism, having discovered that she was unsuited to any other employment by virtue of being weird and difficult. Now she has long hair, a semi-regular income, and zooms around trying to put the world to rights. She can still talk to seagulls.'

Oh God, assuming this isn't a pisstake given the rest of the stuff on the thread. Makes me want to vomit.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 17, 2012)

Sue said:


> 'Laurie Penny was born in a skip in Islington in 1986 and grew up wild in the back-alleys of London’s bourgeois ghetto, surviving only on mouldy paninis and half-eaten pots of hummous fished out of bins and sleeping in rolled-up copies of The Observer Review. After a dispute with a notorious urban fox gang, she fled to Brighton Beach, and was taken in by a radical seagull collective and weaned on mulched-up, regurgitated back-issues of Spare Rib and Red Rag. Eventually she was offered a scholarship to Brighton College Sixth Form, where she edited a student newspaper and never learned to wear a tie. She went to Wadham College, Oxford, and later moved back to London to work in a shop in Camden Market, where being a scuzzy, mohawked Brighton feminist was part of the job description. It didn’t stick, and she rapidly turned to a life of journalism, having discovered that she was unsuited to any other employment by virtue of being weird and difficult. Now she has long hair, a semi-regular income, and zooms around trying to put the world to rights. She can still talk to seagulls.'
> 
> Oh God, assuming this isn't a pisstake given the rest of the stuff on the thread. Makes me want to vomit.


No every word is true. It must be because it's on the internet.

The original source for that _The New Inquiry_ is interesting. I liked their Dada influenced pictures on the page about their editorial board.

http://thenewinquiry.com/about/

Here is a picture labelled 'Laurie Penny' from that page; she is a contributing editor:


----------



## Nylock (Oct 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> You know him - the guy at the start?!?


The guy at the start is called 'Pete the Temp'. (Have done sound at a couple of events where a 'poetry slam' invaded the stage for a couple of hours this summer of which he was part of both lineups....)


----------



## smokedout (Oct 18, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> First they came for Llettsa..........


 
who's Lletsa?


----------



## love detective (Oct 18, 2012)

a mate of wriggly pat


----------



## el-ahrairah (Oct 18, 2012)

who's wriggly pat?


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 18, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> who's wriggly pat?


A mate of Lletsa.


----------



## Random (Oct 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Here are anarchists being * at the Cuts Cafe.


 *embarassing x over 9,000


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Here are anarchists being _____________* at the Cuts Cafe
> 
> 
> 
> ...




There is another ( nearly hour long video ) which gives us an insight into the totally intolerable future that would be inflicted on us under these sort of people if the world became one big  workshop and they were asked to facilitate it



> Today, we’ve got an eight hour session on capitalist economics which people have still turned up to, an eight hour session, on a Saturday on some really dense economic theory and that still brought ten people. So, I think it’s going pretty well.


 


> the Palestinians for decades now, using them as human shields, so you can see a lot of this transfer, the fight back gets harder and I think we need to start studying it a bit more…


 


> [cut to question from audience] What sort of system for investigating the police do you personally think would work?
> [speaker and man next to him (Ken?) are now seated] What we want is what you would expect in any, er, criminal investigation, murder investigation or someone dying in suspicious circumstances which is, er, good quality, robust investigators, y’know, that that basically will leave, leave no stone unturned, will follow the leads until the end. [cut] The stuff that was in there that, omitted is the crucial stuff, is the evidence on them and the IPCC listened to the tapes, they, they heard them themselves and if I’m able to pick it out, how come they can’t pick it out? [cuts to Ken?] …coming and talking and sharing, I think that’s the main thing for us to get together and organise, that’s how we change. So thank you, all of you. [New voice, off screen] And I think some dinner’s being cooked downstairs so…


 


> So it’s trying to get people that basically- people that hate the cuts, they know they hate the cuts and the sort of know why they hate the cuts, to come in and give them a space where outside of the daily work and looking after kids and all that sort of stuff, giving them a space where they can actually think about it. So, I think, the energy of the space has been really good so far. It was, there was a problem initially in the first few days because, obviously, we had a space where we had events scheduled and we weren’t- we decided, we actively decided to not put them on because the space wasn’t accessible and we didn’t want events that not everybody could get to  because that’s not really what we’re about.





> You should come down, you should check us out, you should read stuff on our blog, you should follow us on facebook, you can sign up to our email list but, if you can get down to some of our events, the ones that we’ve done so far have been really good and we’ve still got another week of events which are all going to be amazing – we’ve got Ken Loach coming


----------



## rekil (Oct 18, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> No every word is true. It must be because it's on the internet.
> 
> The original source for that _The New Inquiry_ is interesting. I liked their Dada influenced pictures on the page about their editorial board.
> 
> http://thenewinquiry.com/about/


 Sue means the bio is so toecurlingly twee, there's a chance it could have been written by someone to make her look shit and annoying. That Malcolm Harris character got caught trying to charge $5k to talk occupy wank. , Fantastically posh background natch.


sihhi said:


> Back to Laurie Penny, she is up for an award sponsored by EVRYTHNG,
> 
> http://www.commentawards.com/category-shortlists.htm


She won. Whiny victory speech about 'trolls' and this outright lie.



> Social media has been an energising and empowering force for the British commentariat, rearranging some of the old hierarchies and allowing young people and those outside the mainstream press to amplify voices that would otherwise go unheard.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 18, 2012)

I HAVE NO VOICE.

(Apart from the morning star, the new statesman, the guardian, the independent, red pepper, the bbc and loads of others)


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 18, 2012)

'young people' writing for older people to read about yoof


----------



## rekil (Oct 18, 2012)

NO WAY IN TO CASTLE COMMENTARIAT FOR PRIVATE SCHOOLED OXBRIDGERS


----------



## Random (Oct 18, 2012)

David Ostler fell for her schtick recently and "attacked" her while also taking her at face value as a voice of the anarcho-youth


----------



## Belushi (Oct 18, 2012)

Anyone using the term commentariat automatically qualifies for a neckshot


----------



## Delroy Booth (Oct 18, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> There is another ( nearly hour long video ) which gives us an insight into the totally intolerable future that would be inflicted on us under these sort of people if the world became one big workshop and they were asked to facilitate it


 
Christ.... I mean that Firebox place's opening ceremony seemed pretty cringeworthy but this is something else. That video. It's worthy of a Chris Morris parody of student lefties. I know it's only an open mic night, I've emabarassed myself a few times doing similar things, but the standard of crank is clearly very high.

Although they did have a workshop on Luddites which is great, infact it makes me much more inclined to like them and I would've liked to have gone, but to be honest Luddites and a few of these workshops aside, I think my personal hell would to be trapped in a room with all those people indefinitely. Y'know how they say Limbo is like being in a bar and never getting served? Or being stuck in an infinitely large crowd watching Guns and Roses play an infinitely long version of Paradise City, knowing that no matter how hard you try you'll never get out of the crowd? Yeah I bet it's like that.

I don't want to be cynical, coz I'm not a cynical person and I'm grateful that this sort of thing is going on, just all I can think when I see this scene of people is "This isn't for the likes of me" which is a feeling I've had at a few squats and workshop type things in the past.

Also, the politics of Ken Loach being invited down, has no-one mentioned his strident support for Julian Assange yet? I mean is that not a problem for anyone? Or has Ken disowned Assange in the last few weeks or something and I've missed out on it?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 18, 2012)

Belushi said:


> Anyone using the term commentariat automatically qualifies for a neckshot


Laptoperati?


----------



## barney_pig (Oct 18, 2012)

The older I get, the more I feel that the only possible solution is to flood the Thames valley,and begin the task of driving the intelligentsia out of the cities and into the paddy fields. 
   "You'll blog hard with a gun in your back and a bowl of rice a day."


----------



## Sue (Oct 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> Sue means the bio is so toecurlingly twee, there's a chance it could have been written by someone to make her look shit and annoying.


 
Yep, exactly what I meant. Can't believe anyone thought I might've meant anything else...


----------



## ska invita (Oct 18, 2012)

Belushi said:


> Anyone using the term commentariat automatically qualifies for a neckshot


and in so doing shes using it to refer to herself in the 3rd person


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 19, 2012)

Random said:


> David Ostler fell for her schtick recently and "attacked" her while also taking her at face value as a voice of the anarcho-youth


 
The blokes a fucking idiot though.


----------



## rekil (Oct 19, 2012)

the button said:


> A framed copy of the "troops in" front cover from Socialist Worker from c.1969.


Covers of particular interest would go on this wall (which would be transported brick by brick up to the London on the train, much to the annoyance of passengers)


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 19, 2012)

the button said:


> Dennis Nilsen's wardrobe.


 
...and stockpot.


----------



## flypanam (Oct 19, 2012)

copliker said:


> View attachment 24137


 
Would do well to spell 'Socialist'

otherwise its not too offensive. Better than Tox09/10/11/12 on the Jubilee line, which from this thread, i summise was laurie in her graff days.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

I thought that at first but it's c done as < just not straight.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 19, 2012)

Gerry Healy's cock, pickled in brine and kept in a jar _a la_ Rasputin's member.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 19, 2012)

chilango said:


> Hatton's suits.


 
...and his Mr. Byrite loyalty card.


----------



## flypanam (Oct 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I thought that at first but it's c done as < just not straight.


 
Your right. Fuckin yoofs.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 19, 2012)

flypanam said:


> Your right.


 *coff*


----------



## cesare (Oct 19, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> *coff*


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 19, 2012)

flypanam said:


> Your right. Fuckin yoofs.


 
_Get off my lawn._


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 19, 2012)

Is flypanam ginger, and has he ever been knocked down?


----------



## flypanam (Oct 19, 2012)

You've met me, you know I am  and I have.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 19, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> _Get off my lawn._


 
your cruiskeen one?


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> your cruiskeen one?


Chapman once became immersed in the study of dialectical materialism, particularly insofar as economic and social planning could be demonstrated to condition eugenics, birth-rates and anthropology. His wrangles with Keats lasted far into the night. He was particularly obsessed by the fact that in the animal kingdom, where there was no self-evident plan of ordered Society and where connubial relations were casual and polygamous, the breed prospered and disease remained of modest dimensions. Where there was any attempt at the imposition from without - and he instanced the scientific breeeding of race-horses by humans - the breed prospered even more remarkably. He was not slow to point out that philosophers of the school of Marx and Engels had ignored the apparent necessity for ordered breeding on the part of humans as a concomitant to planning in the social and economic spheres. Was this, he once asked Keats, to be taken as evidence of superior reproductive selection on the part of, say, horses - or was it to be taken that a man of the stamp of Engels deliberately shirked an issue too imponderable for rationative evaluation?
The poet found this sort of thing boring, and frowned.
'Foals rush in where Engels feared to tread,' he said morosely.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 19, 2012)

don't get me started on the brother


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> don't get me started on the brother


 
The brother can't stand an egg.

An egg never dies, you see.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Oct 19, 2012)

She won an EI punditry award yesterday. Check out her acceptance speech.

Edit:
http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-...intelligence-twitter-public-personality-award


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> She won an EI punditry award yesterday. Check out her acceptance speech.
> 
> Edit:
> http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-...intelligence-twitter-public-personality-award


Bit sad and obsessive and weird to be so fixated on her.


----------



## rekil (Oct 19, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> She won an EI punditry award yesterday. Check out her acceptance speech.
> 
> Edit:
> http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-...intelligence-twitter-public-personality-award


The speech handily reinforces what this thread is mostly about, that Laura is a case study in class privilege, opportunism, dishonesty and pathological self-absorption. 

List of judges

http://www.commentawards.com/category-judges.htm

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there's a fair chance that all of these people are fucking fuckers.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

What exactly were these _problems_ judging? I still don't get it.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

Sorry, i have to post them names:

HARVEY GOLDSMITH CBE Chair of the Judges
Louise Allen-Jones Literary Scout, Louise Allen-Jones Associates
Mohit Bakaya Commissioning Editor, Specialist Factual, BBC Radio 4
Sam Baker Editor-In-Chief, Red
Bidisha Critic, broadcaster and international human rights reporter
Polly Billington Head of Internal Communications, Labour Party
Giselle Bodie Global CEO, Salience Research
Jane Bruton Editor, Grazia Magazine
Paul Bryden Communications Consultant
Belinda Budge Publisher, HarperCollins
Leo von Bülow-Quirk Partner & Global Head of Research, Chartwell Partners
Charlie Burgess Editorial Director, Editorial Intelligence
Simon Burton Acting Head of Corporate Affairs, Camelot Group
Carla Buzasi Editor-in-Chief, The Huffington Post UK
René Carayol Chairman, Inspired Leaders Network
Henry Chevallier Guild Director of Global Strategy, Aspall
Harry Cole Contributing Editor, Spectator
Rev Richard Coles
Stella Creasy MP Shadow Minister for Crime Prevention
Giles Croot Director, Media Relations, Barclays Group Corporate Affairs
Rt Hon. David Davis MP
Karen Dillon Contributing Editor, Harvard Business Review
Sarah Ducker Managing Director, SJD Events
Huw Edwards Presenter, BBC News at Ten
Amber Elliot Politics Producer, Sky News
Angela Ferreira Television Producer
Dermot Finch Head of Public Affairs, Fishburn Hedges
Jeffrey Gedmin President and CEO, Legatum Institute
Patricia Hamzahee Partner, Kreab & Gavin Anderson Worldwide
Stuart Handley Director, Purple Rabbit
Stephen Hargrave Chairman of Trustees, Reform
Anoushka Healy Group Managing Editor, The Times and Sunday Times
Maurice Helfgott Founder Director of Amery Capital Limited
Steve Hewlett Writer & Broadcaster, BBC Radio 4
Julia Hobsbawm Chair & CEO, Editorial Intelligence
Emma Jacobs Global Communications Director, Financial Times
Paul Kafka Global Head of CEO Communications and Global Head of Marketing, UBS Investment Bank
Jessica Lambert Editor, The Harker
Tashi Lassalle Director & Head of Communications, Actis
Alison Lucas Director, London, Fenton Communications
Jane Martinson Women’s Editor, The Guardian
Rosie Millard Journalist & Broadcaster
Rebecca Miller Senior Media Relations Executive, Office of the Mayor of London
John Mitchinson Co-founder & Publisher, Unbound
Steve Moore Chief Executive, Big Society Network
Mwila Mulenshi Programme Assistant, New Deal of the Mind
Dianne Nelmes Managing Director, Liberty Bell Productions
Claire Oldfield Managing Director, Wardour Publishing
Cliff Oswick Head, Faculty of Management, Deputy Dean Under Graduate Programmes, Cass Business School
Julia Peyton-Jones Director, Serpentine Gallery
Judy Piatkus Owner, Judy Piatkus Enterprises Ltd
Aaron Porter Freelance Journalist & Higher Education Consultant, Aaron Porter Consultancy
Michael Prescott Group Director of Corporate Affairs, BT Group
Hamish Pringle Strategic Advisor, 23red
Peter Riddell Director, Institute for Government
Kerstin Rodgers Chef & Writer, Ms. Marmite Lover Blog
Graham Rumney CEO, R3
Richard Sambrook Professor of Journalism, Cardiff University
Brigitte Trafford Director of Corporate Affairs, ICAP
Chantal Tregear Director, Taylor Bennett
Kitty Ussher Research Fellow, The Smith Institute
Marc Vlessing Co-founder, Pocket
Benjamin Webb Managing Director, Deliberate PR


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Oct 19, 2012)

copliker said:


> The speech handily reinforces what this thread is mostly about, that Laura is a case study in class privilege, opportunism, dishonesty and pathological self-absorption.
> 
> List of judges
> 
> ...


Over 70 "judges"!!


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

These are def the people i want endorsing me and thinking that i'm great.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

Organised by Eric Hobsbawm's daughter, the "networking queen":
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/29/julia-hobsbawm-professor-networking-elitism


----------



## rekil (Oct 19, 2012)

It's a great big fuck off networking do. All award ceremonies are but it's a religion for these people.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Organised by Eric Hobsbawm's daughter, the "networking queen":
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/29/julia-hobsbawm-professor-networking-elitism


Don't pretend this isn't your world.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

Visiting Professor of Networking - for real.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

Lot to be said for filicide. Little bit communism.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Don't pretend this isn't your world.


is it fuck - you really have no idea if that's what you think


----------



## rekil (Oct 19, 2012)

Networking is a little bit communism. Permanent Networktion.

PD to call for a communism award ceremony?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> is it fuck - you really have no idea if that's what you think


It is what i think, you're the left version of this shit.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 19, 2012)

copliker said:


> PD to call for a communism award ceremony?


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> It is what i think, you're the left version of this shit.


never even been to Firebox


----------



## el-ahrairah (Oct 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> These are def the people i want endorsing me and thinking that i'm great.


 
yes, i'd say when a list of names like that is giving you an award you're probably about as radical as a plum pudding.  establishment approved.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Aaron Porter Freelance Journalist & Higher Education Consultant, Aaron Porter Consultancy


----------



## nino_savatte (Oct 19, 2012)

Porter's site is fucking shite. It consists of a pdf.
http://www.arpconsultancy.co.uk/brochure2011.pdf

Here's his blog
http://aaronporter.wordpress.com/

There's been no activity since April.


----------



## Random (Oct 19, 2012)

Judge Harry Cole is one of Guido Fawkes' team. He usually take the piss out of Penny on Twitter, and here he is handing her an award. Goes to show.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

She has previously accused him of threatening her sister and posting stalking naked pics of her. _Principles_.


----------



## rekil (Oct 19, 2012)

Deborah Orr is A LOT communism apparently.

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
Honoured to have been shortlisted alongside the marvellous and inspiring @*deborahjaneorr* for this. #*eicommentawards*


----------



## Random (Oct 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> She has previously accused him of threatening her sister and posting stalking naked pics of her. _Principles_.


Well remembered. She was "in fear" of him iirc.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 19, 2012)

> *Aaron Porter*
> 
> GET UPDATES FROM Aaron Porter
> 
> Aaron Porter is Director of the Talent 2030 campaign. He served as President of the National Union of Students 2010-11, and has served as a non-executive board member for UCAS, the Higher Education Academy and the Office of the Independent Adjudicator. He was also the first NUS President as an observer to the HEFCE Board. Aaron graduated with a BA English from the University of Leicester, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.


 
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/aaron-porter/


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

copliker said:


> Deborah Orr is A LOT communism apparently.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Honoured to have been shortlisted alongside the marvellous and inspiring @*deborahjaneorr* for this. #*eicommentawards*


that's the Lib Dem Deborah Orr then is it?


----------



## rekil (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> that's the Lib Dem Deborah Orr then is it?


Election 2010: The Lib Dems can balance parliament


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 19, 2012)

nino_savatte said:


> Here's his blog
> http://aaronporter.wordpress.com/


 
He should probably not use all those rights reserved pictures teefed directly from the _Grauniad_, _Times HE_ and Opinion Panel websites.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 19, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> He should probably not use all those rights reserved pictures teefed directly from the _Grauniad_, _Times HE_ and Opinion Panel websites.


 
Oh, it's all right, he's networked.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 19, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Oh, it's all right, he's networked.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

copliker said:


> Election 2010: The Lib Dems can balance parliament


People, _do_ read that.


----------



## rekil (Oct 19, 2012)

This one as well.

The Lib Dems won't compromise for power

It's marvellous and inspiring.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

And the astonishing thing is that the author of those articles is still employed to offer analysis. And this is what she offers today:



> Nick Clegg is surely one of the least successful politicians ever to have held a cabinet position. The deputy prime minister is always a bit of a party mascot, having no department to run. But Clegg is the coalition's mascot, and there are few people, even among Liberal Democrats, who don't hold him in contempt.
> 
> He went into coalition with the Conservatives with the aim of persuading the nation that the two parties could work together. He has persuaded the electorate instead that coalitions are largely just a way of legitimising policies that don't have a democratic mandate.
> 
> ...


 
from



> Why didn't Nick Clegg join the Conservative party, even though he was pressed to? Why did Vince Cable start his political career with Labour, but move to the Liberal Democrats? It was because neither of them agreed with "the old parties". They wanted to be in a party that chimed with their beliefs more than they wanted careers in a "strong government". Their beliefs, by the way, include the idea that money follows power, and that if you want to redistribute – and make a society more equal – you make devolving power your first priority.


 
but with no apologies, no look at the sort of ill-informed arrogance or any lazy superiority that led to the original views. Just,_ oh look, i'm right again._


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

In fact, there are other ways in which she sounds like certain posters here:



> We did socialism. We did capitalism. Now, as social democracy's moment has arrived, the political party that's supposed to champion it, the Lib Dems, is in power with the Conservatives. Nick Clegg's Lib Dems are exhausted, confused, poorly led and on the ropes. But Jon Cruddas, recently appointed to lead Labour's policy review, at least has the advantage of knowing very, very well, what doesn't work. There is hope.


----------



## Random (Oct 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> but with no apologies, no look at the sort of ill-informed arrogance or any lazy superiority that led to the original views. Just,_ oh look, i'm right again._


 The Rule of the Commentariat will never cease!


----------



## love detective (Oct 19, 2012)

total face


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Oct 19, 2012)

Face should be brought back into more use, I think.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> that's the Lib Dem Deborah Orr then is it?


 
I'm sure at one stage she wrote that she was joining the Lib Dems...


----------



## sihhi (Oct 19, 2012)

Should really be disgraced home-flipping £20,000 benefit  expenses cheat, forced-to-resign Labour MP Kitty Ussher. Think tanks don't care.



butchersapron said:


> Kitty Ussher Research Fellow, The Smith Institute


----------



## Random (Oct 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Should really be disgraced home-flipping £20,000 benefit  expenses cheat, forced-to-resign Labour MP Kitty Ussher. Think tanks don't care.


Amazing all those people who were disgraced or hated, still able to sell their competence as "consultants" and experts on things.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Stephen Hargrave Chairman of Trustees, Reform


 
His main role is as the Director of a investment firm, Walstead Investments.

http://www.printweek.com/Business/article/1059699/walstead-buys-st-ives-web-operations-20m-deal/

Reform is leading the charge to destroy comprehensive education, and make every school in the country a non-unionised mini-public school with vouchers for parents.

"Value for money cannot be achieved whilst the workforce continues to grow at this rate and schools are restricted by national pay agreements. Even where there is the flexibility to pay good teachers more, schools have been reluctant about deviating from national pay policies. As Reform’s recent survey of academies demonstrated, 60 per cent of schools said the existence of national pay and conditions made it culturally difficult for them to vary pay and conditions in their schools. The key to achieving better value is maximising the quality and capability of teachers rather than increasing the size of the workforce"

http://www.reform.co.uk/content/147...ucing_costs_and_improving_outcomes_in_schools


----------



## chilango (Oct 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> His main role is as the Director of a investment firm, Walstead Investments.
> 
> http://www.printweek.com/Business/article/1059699/walstead-buys-st-ives-web-operations-20m-deal/
> 
> ...



Yeah, but that's irrelevant to the smartest girl at the smartest school, no?


----------



## sihhi (Oct 19, 2012)

chilango said:


> Yeah, but that's irrelevant to the smartest girl at the smartest school, no?


 
Its health wing is equally bad tbh.

Keep Our NHS Public notes: "Originally set up by a Conservative MP and a Tory strategist, the membership of Reform's Advisory Board points to its funding: chief executives, chairmen and directors of major pharmaceutical companies, global investment banks, and accountancy firms. These include Sir Christopher Ghent, chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline pic and non-executive director of Lehman Brothers Bank: Oliver Pawle, vice-chairman of UBS Investment Bank: Derek Scott, a consultant to KPMG and former adviser to Tony Blair: and Jeremy Sillem, former Chairman of Bear Sterns International (the European arm of a US investment bank). The Board also contains Frank Field, former minister for welfare reform, and, more importantly, Sir Steve Robson, ex-arch-privateer from HM Treasury - extremely influential in pushing the PFI programme. The Advisory Council, meanwhile, includes the CBI's Dr Adrian Bull, MD of Carillion Health, a major player in the PFI hospitals market and in the independent sector treatment centre program."


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> total face


 

she did a sex column in the indy once upon a time.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Its health wing is equally bad tbh.
> 
> Keep Our NHS Public notes: "Originally set up by a Conservative MP and a Tory strategist, the membership of Reform's Advisory Board points to its funding: chief executives, chairmen and directors of major pharmaceutical companies, global investment banks, and accountancy firms. These include Sir Christopher Ghent, chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline pic and non-executive director of Lehman Brothers Bank: Oliver Pawle, vice-chairman of UBS Investment Bank: Derek Scott, a consultant to KPMG and former adviser to Tony Blair: and Jeremy Sillem, former Chairman of Bear Sterns International (the European arm of a US investment bank). The Board also contains Frank Field, former minister for welfare reform, and, more importantly, Sir Steve Robson, ex-arch-privateer from HM Treasury - extremely influential in pushing the PFI programme. The Advisory Council, meanwhile, includes the CBI's Dr Adrian Bull, MD of Carillion Health, a major player in the PFI hospitals market and in the independent sector treatment centre program."


That could be a very useful list of potential clients for special treatment come the Revolution.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Rebecca Miller Senior Media Relations Executive, Office of the Mayor of London


 
She is the chief PR appendage to Boris Johnson.

"Rebecca Miller ‏@pr_bex
@WeAreZizzi Just experienced some SHOCKING service at Shad Thames. After 85 mins, still no main course & the staff couldn't care less #fail

Rebecca Miller ‏@pr_bex
Bikram almost kicked my ass tonight. Almost. But I managed rally and dig in #lovetosweat

Rebecca Miller ‏@pr_bex
Last fortnight hamstring, knee and hand injuries and virus. Check. Now to get off the mat and get my groove back #beeninthewars

Rebecca Miller ‏@pr_bex
Nice to have added some diversity to the Regents Park road cycling massive. I didn't see any other female cyclists amongst them.

Rebecca Miller ‏@pr_bex
which made it even sweeter when i overtook the lanky lycra-clad lads on my hybrid wearing diamante trainers! #doingitforthegirls"

The right-wing version of Laurie Penny. Going to Bikram (yoga) is like a war-zone.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> she did a sex column in the indy once upon a time.


 
a one woman effort to prevent premature ejaculation - her face = anti-aphrodisciac


----------



## sihhi (Oct 19, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> she did a sex column in the indy once upon a time.


 
I read a Guardian Saturday supplement when she mentioned doing up her (and Will Self's) house in Islington. Then read somewhere else that their house was on the same street as a government minister's.
I can't remember where though.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> a one woman effort to prevent premature ejaculation - her face = anti-aphrodisciac


 
That really is a sexist comment. DO's problem is that she is a rich Lib Dem supporter, not that she's a woman. Is that hard to understand?


----------



## temper_tantrum (Oct 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Bit sad and obsessive and weird to be so fixated on her.



Yeah, it is, innit. Glad we agree on that


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> a one woman effort to prevent premature ejaculation - her face = anti-aphrodisciac


Did you really just post that? Get on that AA sharpish.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Oct 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I read a Guardian Saturday supplement when she mentioned doing up her (and Will Self's) house in Islington. Then read somewhere else that their house was on the same street as a government minister's.
> I can't remember where though.



They live in Stockwell. Next door or nearly to the attorney-general.


----------



## Plumdaff (Oct 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I read a Guardian Saturday supplement when she mentioned doing up her (and Will Self's) house in Islington. Then read somewhere else that their house was on the same street as a government minister's.
> I can't remember where though.



They live round the corner from me in Stockwell in a Georgian townhouse. See him around, don't see her. There is a Tory MP and a high court judge on that road too, but I forget their names.


----------



## rekil (Oct 19, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> she did a sex column in the indy once upon a time.


You have to type SEX in big letters. It's the rule.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 19, 2012)

lagtbd said:


> They live round the corner from me in Stockwell in a *Georgian townhouse.* See him around, don't see her. There is a Tory MP and a high court judge on that road too, but I forget their names.




Edit my bad apparently they do have kids but she is anti-people having kids:

"The politician who talks the most sense about social deprivation is Iain Duncan Smith. It is worth noting that he dates the development of the present welfare-dependent underclass from the 1970s. The leadership of his party may still be loath to put its hand up and admit that it enthusiastically fostered welfare dependency, in the 1980s, but it is worth bearing in mind that the last Conservative government did not cut public spending at all during its tenure, even though it has retained its image as the party that rolls back the state. It simply moved cash away from health, education and housing, and spent it on its new benefits instead. The real value of those benefits has barely risen since those days – unless you have children. Labour, in placing its emphasis on alleviating child poverty, has inadvertently made it pay – in cash, aspiration, intelligence and self-respect – to have children if you are poor. Well-meaning policies have encouraged those least equipped to have children to do so." (10 December 2008, Independent, The truth is only money can alleviate poverty, but it should not go to neglectful parents)


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> That really is a sexist comment. DO's problem is that she is a rich Lib Dem supporter, not that she's a woman. Is that hard to understand?


FFS its not that she is a woman...its that she is an arrogant m/c woman with a smug attitude.  That look of disdain is a turn off


----------



## sihhi (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> FFS its not that she is a woman...its that she is an arrogant m/c woman with a smug attitude. That look of disdain is a turn off


Hmm.
Discussing sexual preferences is for here, although even there I doubt whether that comment would fly.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> FFS its not that she is a woman...its that she is an arrogant m/c woman with a smug attitude. That look of disdain is a turn off


How dare she.


----------



## Random (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> FFS its not that she is a woman...its that she is an arrogant m/c woman with a smug attitude.  That look of disdain is a turn off


I'm sure Terry Eagleton backs you up on this one, and there's sound materialistic Marxist reasons for slagging off a woman by calling her unattractive.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

Her sex column was cited on this thread... I just don't think of her in that or any favorable context


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:
			
		

> Her sex column was cited on this thread... I just don't think of her in that or any favorable context



She didn't ask you to. Yet you think this is something you need to post about. Jesus. Really.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

Random said:


> I'm sure Terry Eagleton backs you up on this one, and there's sound materialistic Marxist reasons for slagging off a woman by calling her unattractive.


You find her attractive? Whatever floats your boat I guess


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

Note, a sex column is an invitation for everyone to say this sort of thing.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> You find her attractive? Whatever floats your boat I guess


Damn, I liked your post by accident, trying to reply as quickly as I could to it. But I'm off. But you have to stop digging and apologise.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

I will never think of her and sex in the same context ever again.  No probs there


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:
			
		

> I will never think of her and sex in the same context ever again.  No probs there



Star of the left.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

Christ almighty...the hypocrisy here suggests Mp's in the making


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 19, 2012)

Think it was around the time of the indies 'legalise it' campaign which was when I thought it was the best paper eva. And then came the u-turn of 'oh noes this super-skunk wasn't what we smoked at university'.

fuck it


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:
			
		

> Christ almighty...the hypocrisy here suggests Mp's in the making


I think you're secretly something else now. Nasty stuff.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

Right...I am jimmy saville now..?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

No, not every sexist prick is savile. They don't have to be to post such lazy nasty stuff.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

Sexist prick? For finding someone unattractive in both political and every other senses?  Whatever... Not like people have made un pc comments about Maggie or owt


----------



## tufty79 (Oct 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Here are anarchists being _____________* at the Cuts Cafe
> 
> 
> 
> ...





Fruitloop said:


> I can't bring myself to watch it. What's she on about?


oh my. i daren't watch it.
that's my old housemate.


----------



## weepiper (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Sexist prick? For finding someone unattractive in both political and every other senses? Whatever... Not like people have made un pc comments about Maggie or owt


 
You wouldn't have made that comment if she had been a man. And it's nothing to do with being heterosexual.


----------



## killer b (Oct 19, 2012)

it's ok to back down y'know. we all make mistakes sometimes.


----------



## Riklet (Oct 19, 2012)

you're such a fucking pratt articul8


----------



## rekil (Oct 19, 2012)

Perhaps by some weird process of osmosis, a bit of Galloway rubbed off on articul8 that time they swept passed each other in parliament.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Sexist prick? For finding someone unattractive in both political and every other senses? Whatever... Not like people have made un pc comments about Maggie or owt


 
Look chief I take every other criticism flung at you with a pinch of salt but you're beyond the pale now...

This is disturbing


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

weepiper said:


> You wouldn't have made that comment if she had been a man. And it's nothing to do with being heterosexual.


 I find her attitude deeply unattractive...is the basis of my point.  Lack of sexual attraction is not essential to it.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I find her attitude deeply unattractive...is the basis of my point. Lack of sexual attraction is not essential to it.


 
furious backpeddling


----------



## revol68 (Oct 19, 2012)

Tbf I don't think articul8's comment is necessarily sexist, I mean yes women are more likely to have their looks commented on in general due to sexist assumptions but one individual making such a comment does not sexism make. I mean there are plenty of comments about various ugly smug male tories made on these. Also it's not so much her face in the sense of bone structure or whatever but that awful smug face she is making that.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

Haters night is it? Fine... Mea culpa


----------



## weepiper (Oct 19, 2012)

Attack her fucking politics, not whether you want to fuck her.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:
			
		

> I find her attitude deeply unattractive...is the basis of my point. Lack of sexual attraction is not essential to it.


 
So you just cum when reading cruddas and then comment on it.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:
			
		

> Haters night is it? Fine... Mea culpa



Haters? What kind of self image have you built to protect yourself?


----------



## love detective (Oct 19, 2012)

revol68 said:


> Also it's not so much her face in the sense of bone structure or whatever but that awful smug face she is making that.


total face


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 19, 2012)

revol68 said:


> Tbf I don't think articul8's comment is necessarily sexist, I mean yes women are more likely to have their looks commented on in general due to sexist assumptions but one individual making such a comment does not sexism make. I mean there are plenty of comments about various ugly smug male tories made on these. Also it's not so much her face in the sense of bone structure or whatever but that awful smug face she is making that.


 
A ranting fool at the right time most of the time and the wrong time right now.


----------



## revol68 (Oct 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> A ranting fool at the right time most of the time and the wrong time right now.


 
I'm not following?


----------



## cesare (Oct 19, 2012)

revol68 said:


> Tbf I don't think articul8's comment is necessarily sexist, I mean yes women are more likely to have their looks commented on in general due to sexist assumptions but one individual making such a comment does not sexism make. I mean there are plenty of comments about various ugly smug male tories made on these. Also it's not so much her face in the sense of bone structure or whatever but that awful smug face she is making that.


Oh, come off it. Not necessarily sexist lol.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> So you just cum when reading cruddas and then comment on it.


What? What on earth makes u think I'm at all pro Cruddas? Nor have I got close to defending a rapist.  I said I found someone politically and sexually unattractive.  Maybe u all want to fuck Eric pickles?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> What? What on earth makes u think I'm at all pro Cruddas? Nor have I got close to defending a rapist. I said I found someone politically and sexually unattractive. Maybe u all want to fuck Eric pickles?


Moar! As they used to say.


----------



## revol68 (Oct 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> Oh, come off it. Not necessarily sexist lol.


 
No it's not, it's quite possible for someone to hold men and women's views equal whilst also happening to pass comment on one particular women having a smug face that could turn milk, just as passing comment on Gideon Osbournes smug face or various other male politicians appearance doesn't mean you think they should be judged on their appearance above their politics.

I genuinely don't think articul8 is sexist, I think he's a political clown but I really don't think he can be said to be sexist and trying to nail him on this is just people looking an excuse to kick our favourite labourite cat.


----------



## revol68 (Oct 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> total face


 
I don't really know what this means but I still somehow understand.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

True, apart from the clown bit


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

It might  - at best, at best - be alan partridge trying to be 'in with the lads' but given his past form does he get a pass because he pretends to have read pannekoek? Not by me.


----------



## weepiper (Oct 19, 2012)

It was sexist. 'The _temerity_ of the woman, writing a sex advice column. What could she possibly know about sex? _I_ don't fancy her'.


----------



## revol68 (Oct 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> It might - at best, at best - be alan partridge trying to be 'in with the lads' but given his past form does he get a pass because he pretends to have read pannekoek? Not by me.


 
Do you think passing comment on a female politicians face constitutes sexism in itself? I don't, not anymore than commenting on how Gideon's face would put you off your cornflakes means someone judges him on his looks more than his politics.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

revol68 said:
			
		

> Do you think passing comment on a female politicians face constitutes sexism in itself? I don't, not anymore than commenting on how Gideon's face would put you off your cornflakes means someone judges him on his looks more than his politics.



I think this case its nailed on.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

weepiper said:


> It was sexist. 'The _temerity_ of the woman, writing a sex advice column. What could she possibly know about sex? _I_ don't fancy her'.


Rubbish...it was clearly in the context of her politics and smug attitude...not her physiognomy


----------



## revol68 (Oct 19, 2012)

weepiper said:


> It was sexist. 'The _temerity_ of the woman, writing a sex advice column. What could she possibly know about sex? _I_ don't fancy her'.


 
I think it was the face she was making more than her face per se.

And no I don't think it's necessarily sexist to comment on her face, you would have to show a pattern of consistently judging women on their looks over their politics/actions etc


----------



## weepiper (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Rubbish...it was clearly in the context of her politics and smug attitude...not her physiognomy


 


articul8 said:


> a one woman effort to prevent premature ejaculation - her face = anti-aphrodisciac


uh huh.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

weepiper said:
			
		

> It was sexist. 'The temerity of the woman, writing a sex advice column. What could she possibly know about sex? I don't fancy her'.



Exactly. A woman who wrote about sex, I better call her an ugly cow who couldn't make me cum.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I think this case its nailed on.


He means I am a class traitor and so don't need to be judged fairly


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:
			
		

> He means I am a class traitor and so don't need to be judged fairly



I mean your own words damn you.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

R





butchersapron said:


> Exactly. A woman who wrote about sex, I better call her an ugly cow who couldn't make me cum.



Oh ffs where have I suggested women shouldn't write about sex?


----------



## revol68 (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> He means I am a class traitor and so don't need to be judged fairly


 
well if he'd had said that was the case I'd never have raised any objection, I'd happily see you quartered.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 19, 2012)

Panic ye not, help is on the way


----------



## cesare (Oct 19, 2012)

revol68 said:


> No it's not, it's quite possible for someone to hold men and women's views equal whilst also happening to pass comment on one particular women having a smug face that could turn milk, just as passing comment on Gideon Osbournes smug face or various other male politicians appearance doesn't mean you think they should be judged on their appearance above their politics.
> 
> I genuinely don't think articul8 is sexist, I think he's a political clown but I really don't think he can be said to be sexist and trying to nail him on this is just people looking an excuse to kick our favourite labourite cat.


I don't necessarily think he's sexist as a label, like he is a SEXIST. But that was a fucking sexist comment to make, so he should be pulled up on it not find excuses for it. People do sexist, racist, whateverist shit sometimes - doesn't make them a WHATEVER in total. But you should fucking pull them up on it (the comment/thinking) then move on.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

Don't mind being flayed for what I believe in, but being misrepresented is something else


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:
			
		

> R
> 
> Oh ffs where have I suggested women shouldn't write about sex?



No one said that you did. They suggested that you offered her writing asex column as a justification for why she couldn't make you cum and why you felt this is important.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 19, 2012)

...Actually you might need more assistance than that


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

If all the comments about Maggie were taken ad comments on women or the elderly in general you'd all be in the dock.


----------



## revol68 (Oct 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> I don't necessarily think he's sexist as a label, like he is a SEXIST. But that was a fucking sexist comment to make, so he should be pulled up on it not find excuses for it. People do sexist, racist, whateverist shit sometimes - doesn't make them a WHATEVER? But you should fucking pull them up on it then move on.


 
Yeah but I don't think that comment in isolation is sexist, anymore than a comment on Gideon's looks would mean someone judged him as a man by his looks rather than his politics.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 19, 2012)

Did someone order a taxi in the name of Dogger Bank? There's a pissed off cabbie in reception who's half-convinced someone's taking the piss."Fucking shipping forecast" this, "piss-taking wankers" that. Not a happy chappy.


----------



## weepiper (Oct 19, 2012)

revol68 said:


> Yeah but I don't think that comment in isolation is sexist, anymore than a comment on Gideon's looks would mean someone judged him as a man by his looks rather than his politics.


 
When Gideon has written a sex advice column and someone then comes along and says 'him? Fuck's sake what a turn-off' then you might have the beginnings of an argument. But only after men have been belittled into sex objects and whether they are 'acceptable' as the final argument-closer for hundreds of years


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No one said that you did. They suggested that you offered her writing asex column as a justification for why she couldn't make you cum and why you felt this is important.


I was suggesting that someone whose smug attitude and shit politics were deeply unattractive to me was not best placed to write seductively about sex.  Is this so wrong? Really?


----------



## weepiper (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I was suggesting that someone whose smug attitude and shit politics were deeply unattractive to me was not best placed to write seductively about sex. Is this so wrong? Really?


 
Yes, yes it is. Glad we've cleared that up for you.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:
			
		

> If all the comments about Maggie were taken ad comments on women or the elderly in general you'd all be in the dock.



Have you seen many comments suggesting that she couldn't make you cum due to her face and that saying shit like that is OK as she did some sex shit?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:
			
		

> I was suggesting that someone whose smug attitude and shit politics were deeply unattractive to me was not best placed to write seductively about sex.  Is this so wrong? Really?



Seductively. Partridge.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

What do you even thinkan sex column is? Seductively? Fucking hell.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Oct 19, 2012)

Plane takes off.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> If all the comments about Maggie were taken ad comments on women or the elderly in general you'd all be in the dock.


 

I'm checking my privilege right now.


on a side note, I was saying to frogz that this  privilege rhetoric wasn't unfamiliar for some reason.Onna bit of thinking the weather underground and others on the american new left came to mind, and they used to bang on about 'white skin privilege'.

which is a different thing. Or maybe related.

anyway.


----------



## weepiper (Oct 19, 2012)

we're going to need a bigger shovel


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

weepiper said:


> Yes, yes it is. Glad we've cleared that up for you.


Oh? Ok...so it'd be fine to shag a known neo-nazi then? Think I need a lesson in urbanite sexual ethics


----------



## weepiper (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Oh? Ok...so it'd be fine to shag a known neo-nazi then? Think I need a lesson in urbanite sexual ethics


 
I refer the hon. gentleman to my previous post. You should probably just leave it now


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:
			
		

> Oh? Ok...so it'd be fine to shag a known neo-nazi then? Think I need a lesson in urbanite sexual ethics



Or maybe just...


----------



## emanymton (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> If all the comments about Maggie were taken ad comments on women or the elderly in general you'd all be in the dock.


This is an interesting defense in that it is no defense at all. Just because other people may behave like nasty pieces of shit (and I am not saying that I agree with you about the other posters on this thread) does not mean it is Ok for you to be a nasty piece of shit. What it does suggested is that you may now accept your comment was wrong but haven't got enough spine to say so. Or maybe I am giving you too much credit and you are just trying to weasel your way out with any excuse you can come up with


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

Ah that's wrong too.  All thought about sex is wrong and sexist.  Clears that up


----------



## revol68 (Oct 19, 2012)

weepiper said:


> When Gideon has written a sex advice column and someone then comes along and says 'him? Fuck's sake what a turn-off' then you might have the beginnings of an argument. But only after men have been belittled into sex objects and whether they are 'acceptable' as the final argument-closer for hundreds of years


 
I have acknowledged that in my first response. It still doesn't make articul8's comment evidence of sexism in itself.
Anyway the face she made rather than the face she has is disgustingly smug.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Oh? Ok...so it'd be fine to shag a known neo-nazi then? Think I need a lesson in urbanite sexual ethics


 

dude really?


----------



## weepiper (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Oh? Ok...so it'd be fine to shag a known neo-nazi then? Think I need a lesson in urbanite sexual ethics


 
You're the only one bothered about whether it's 'fine to shag' any particular woman here.


----------



## Nice one (Oct 19, 2012)

revol68 said:


> I think it was the face she was making more than her face per se.
> 
> And no I don't think it's necessarily sexist to comment on her face, you would have to show a pattern of consistently judging women on their looks over their politics/actions etc


 
Is it a sign of my inner patriarchal oppressor tendencies that every time I see a picture of her, I marvel at what a smug, punchable face she has?


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

People's attitude, demeanour and politics cuts across any sexual attractiveness.  Is that sexist?


----------



## weepiper (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> People's attitude, demeanour and politics cuts across any sexual attractiveness. Is that sexist?


 
Reducing her to the possibility of sexual attractiveness or otherwise is sexist. You're really not getting this are you?


----------



## emanymton (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Oh? Ok...so it'd be fine to shag a known neo-nazi then? Think I need a lesson in urbanite sexual ethics


Ok your trolling yeah? No one could actually have the thought process that result in writing these words and meaning them.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 19, 2012)

I'm not planning to if that's what u mean


----------



## sihhi (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I was suggesting that someone whose smug attitude and shit politics were deeply unattractive to me was not best placed to write seductively about sex. Is this so wrong? Really?


 
You've made several outright unacceptable remarks all over this thread, and haven't apologised for a single one. I thought you would have apologised over an hour later. This above you've written is (again) sexist nonsense. Just so it's crystal-clear to you. No woman writing a sex column is under any obligation to be sexy to anyone at all, neither her editor nor including her readers. Sex columns do not have to be written seductively or by sexist-ly characterised 'sexy' female journalists. Only sex columns in outright sexist publications like GQ or FHM endorse that demeaning idea.
You are condemning the editor at the time (Simon Kellner or Andrew Marr maybe) for giving the job to a woman whose appearance does not match your desire-to-intercourse.
Your vile attitudes suggest that editors (male ones, in all current broadsheets, as it happens, I wonder why that is with attitudes like yours in the Red Pepper newsroom?) should judge the worthiness of a columnist or sexual affairs on the basis of what the columnist looks like if they are women. You are driving wedges between us.


----------



## emanymton (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> People's attitude, demeanour and politics cuts across any sexual attractiveness. Is that sexist?


But this is not what you said, your orginal post was




			
				articul8 said:
			
		

> a one woman effort to prevent premature ejaculation - her face = anti-aphrodisciac


Not her opinions or her politics, but her face.


----------



## Jenerys (Oct 19, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Did someone order a taxi in the name of Dogger Bank? There's a pissed off cabbie in reception who's half-convinced someone's taking the piss."Fucking shipping forecast" this, "piss-taking wankers" that. Not a happy chappy.


Did you hear the "chicken forecast" earlier on radio 4? Frickin ace


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 19, 2012)

LilJen said:


> Did you hear the "chicken forecast" earlier on radio 4? Frickin ace


No, but I will now


----------



## cesare (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> People's attitude, demeanour and politics cuts across any sexual attractiveness.  Is that sexist?


Your reaction to her face was about the sex-based imagery it aroused in you and that you shared with us expecting similar reaction.  You were mistaken - get over it.


----------



## Riklet (Oct 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> If all the comments about Maggie were taken ad comments on women or the elderly in general you'd all be in the dock.


 
she was well unfit lol i so wouldn't subscribe to her politics, i mean my god,  YOU SEEN HER FACE???

you commented on thingybob's looks in a shit, sexist way and got called out for it.  just admit it and try n get over your cock up if you have any integrity in you..


----------



## revol68 (Oct 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> Your reaction to her face was about the sex-based imagery it aroused in you and that you shared with us expecting similar reaction. You were mistaken - get over it.


 
I reckon he actually wants to bang her though, I can't say I thought about whether or not I thought she was sexually attractive when I saw her pic, I did think she looked like a smug twat, something quite stereotypical about people who are "sex experts".


----------



## cesare (Oct 19, 2012)

revol68 said:


> I reckon he actually wants to bang her though, I can't say I thought about whether or not I thought she was sexually attractive when I saw her pic, I did think she looked like a smug twat, something quite stereotypical about people who are "sex experts".


Totally smug face which was ld's point of posting it, yep. There was something about that smugness that provoked sexytime in arty though, otherwise he wouldn't have graced us with the cum imagery. Unless he was using sexy time to demean her, like. 

Sadly I'm now imagining arty either with a semi over that face expression or a deliberate use of sexy to insult her. Not sure what's worse.


----------



## Balbi (Oct 19, 2012)

_What I meant to say was this, even though my actual words did not resemble that in any way_

Where the fuck did Leon go?


----------



## temper_tantrum (Oct 19, 2012)

weepiper said:


> we're going to need a bigger shovel



That is a fucking awesome pic.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> Totally smug face which was ld's point of posting it, yep. There was something about that smugness that provoked sexytime in arty though, otherwise he wouldn't have graced us with the cum imagery. Unless he was using sexy time to demean her, like.
> 
> Sadly I'm now imagining arty either with a semi over that face expression or a deliberate use of sexy to insult her. Not sure what's worse.


Both


----------



## love detective (Oct 19, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Face should be brought back into more use, I think.


 
It seems to be more relevant now than ever when we look around us - and it was always unrepentantly non-sexist as well


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 20, 2012)

weepiper said:


> we're going to need a bigger shovel


 
I want one of those!


----------



## weepiper (Oct 20, 2012)

I can't believe anyone on the internet doesn't know about Bagger 288.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 20, 2012)

Tangentially related to this thread:



> "Well, my feeling is you have to draw a distinction between people who are successful coming from Oxford and Cambridge and people who are successful coming from Eton and Harrow. Because with Oxford and Cambridge, certainly in the era I was there, no one was paying any fees, so it was about the academic grades," he says. "I'm not saying that privilege doesn't come into it in the Oxbridge-success link, but it's much less of a factor than it is in the Eton-Harrow-Westminster-success link. Eton and Cambridge are often lazily lumped together in a way that harms our whole civilisation."


 
Cheers, David. He's quick to note that whilst he did go to "a minor independent school", his parents were polytechnic lecturers. What, no "and of course, I was on a scholarship"? Must have fallen off the page.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 20, 2012)

Do you think those people on full grants and who couldn't afford to do all them things that you did just chose not to David? Private school and oxbridge - the poor poor man.


----------



## weepiper (Oct 20, 2012)

> Eton and Cambridge are often lazily lumped together in a way that harms our whole civilisation.


 
Like the Black Death or racism.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 20, 2012)

> Because with Oxford and Cambridge, certainly in the era I was there, no one was paying any fees, so it was about the academic grades,


 
Yes and the 70%+ private school figures merely reflected this academic superiority. The 2% qualified for free school meals are totally equal in their opps.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 20, 2012)

sihhi said:


> You've made several outright unacceptable remarks all over this thread, and haven't apologised for a single one. I thought you would have apologised over an hour later. This above you've written is (again) sexist nonsense. Just so it's crystal-clear to you. No woman writing a sex column is under any obligation to be sexy to anyone at all, neither her editor nor including her readers. Sex columns do not have to be written seductively or by sexist-ly characterised 'sexy' female journalists. Only sex columns in outright sexist publications like GQ or FHM endorse that demeaning idea.
> You are condemning the editor at the time (Simon Kellner or Andrew Marr maybe) for giving the job to a woman whose appearance does not match your desire-to-intercourse.
> Your vile attitudes suggest that editors (male ones, in all current broadsheets, as it happens, I wonder why that is with attitudes like yours in the Red Pepper newsroom?) should judge the worthiness of a columnist or sexual affairs on the basis of what the columnist looks like if they are women. You are driving wedges between us.


 
Oh FFS - I was going to drop it and let the lynch mob drift away but this is more serious and totally unwarranted from anything i've said. All I meant was that there are certain people who I'd rather not think of in a sexual context - I wouldn't relish reading a column on sex by Edwina Currie, Eric Pickles or my Dad. Deborah Orr would fall into that category for me.

Nowhere have I suggested that in order to write about sex you have to fit the image of an ideally desirable sexual partner. Nor was I basing my comments on DO's looks primarily - I just happen to find her personality (as it comes across in her columns), her demeanor and attitudes - as typified by the smugness of the expression on her face - about as antithetical to erotic interest as it's possible to get. Sexism doesn't come into it.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 20, 2012)

No, that's not what you actually said at all though is it? And your characterisation of people angry at you for your crass drunken sexism as a lynch mob tells us all we need to know about how seriously you take this. In this very thread you argue that it's ok to say that you dismiss a woman because she doesn't make you cum because she did a sex column and failed to do this 'seductively'. You are a fucking clown. Seriously, you write:



> Nor was a basing my comments on DO's looks primarily


 
when you actually wrote:



> a one woman effort to prevent premature ejaculation - her face = anti-aphrodisciac


 
Fucking clown.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 20, 2012)

by which I meant


> I just happen to find her personality (as it comes across in her columns), her demeanor and attitudes - as typified by the smugness of the expression on her face - about as antithetical to erotic interest as it's possible to get


This is what I meant in the original post, but clearly there was enough room for malicious interpretation.  Given my view above - she doesn't strike me as in the best place to be writing about sex in any way that would induce me to want to read it (this is what I meant by "seductively" incidentally).


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 20, 2012)

I thought this sort of sexism was only confined to the anarchist scene


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 20, 2012)

_a one woman effort to prevent premature ejaculation - her face = anti-aphrodisciac_

This is what you meant by write seductively. You're a fucking disgrace.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 20, 2012)

articul8 said:


> by which I meant
> 
> This is what I meant in the original post, but clearly there was enough room for malicious interpretation. Given my view above - she doesn't strike me as in the best place to be writing about sex in any way that would induce me to want to read it (this is what I meant by "seductively" incidentally).


I take it Hilary endorses this Mcfarlance approach to the issue?


----------



## weepiper (Oct 20, 2012)

Christ you're still fucking doing it, just shut up now


----------



## rekil (Oct 20, 2012)

Sue said:


> Yep, exactly what I meant. Can't believe anyone thought I might've meant anything else...


Well the thread has taken a few odd turns so anything is possible. Look at where we are now!


----------



## articul8 (Oct 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I take it Hilary endorses this Mcfarlance approach to the issue?


Don't know what you mean by "Mcfarlance" but some of my closest political comrades are women, and feminists - which you know damn well.  But well done on your opportunist intervention here - you'd make an excellent leader of a lynch mob.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 20, 2012)

The bulletin board version of Shutter Island


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 20, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Don't know what you mean by "Mcfarlance" but some of my closest political comrades are women, and feminists - which you know damn well. But well done on your opportunist intervention here - you'd make an excellent leader of a lynch mob.


I mean the copper who told the young lad that his problem was that he _would always be a nigger _but only in order to get him on the right track. I feel your drunken intervention was motivated by the same desire to put this poor woman back on her feet. I wonder if these close comrades would support this interesting approach of yours? Or do you think they'd think that you acted like a prick?

There's only one real victim here.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 20, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Don't know what you mean by "Mcfarlance" but some of my closest political comrades are women, and feminists - which you know damn well. But well done on your opportunist intervention here - you'd make an excellent leader of a lynch mob.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 20, 2012)




----------



## articul8 (Oct 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I mean the copper who told the young lad that his problem was that he _would always be a nigger _but only in order to get him on the right track. I feel your drunken intervention was motivated by the same desire to put this poor woman back on her feet. I wonder if these close comrades would support this interesting approach of yours? Or do you think they'd think that you acted like a prick?
> 
> There's only one real victim here.



The comparison beggars belief...


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 20, 2012)

_Can't even call someone a one woman effort to prevent premature ejaculation - her face = anti-aphrodisciac blah blah eu blah blah heffer political correctness gone mad blah blah representation blah blah say what you like about Kinnock but blah blah Badiou blah blah but miliband said blah blah_


----------



## articul8 (Oct 20, 2012)

Funny that when posters up thread said Laurie had the kind of face you'd never tire of punching that didn't raise a flicker...but then it wasn't me saying it.  Different standards apply to media ppl apparently


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 20, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Funny that when posters up thread said Laurie had the kind of face you'd never tire of punching that didn't raise a flicker...but then it wasn't me saying it. Different standards apply to media ppl apparently


Tell us that full quote and pull the rug out from under your own point please.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 20, 2012)

On my phone on way to demo so later maybe


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 20, 2012)

Yeah.


----------



## weepiper (Oct 20, 2012)

echoes of Owen Jones's 'what do _you_ do' there


----------



## killer b (Oct 20, 2012)

articul8 said:


> some of my closest political comrades are women, and feminists.


no doubt some of your closest friends are also black?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 20, 2012)

weepiper said:


> echoes of Owen Jones's 'what do _you_ do' there


I surprised he even lowers himself to post stuff like "a one woman effort to prevent premature ejaculation - her face = anti-aphrodisciac" for us mere mortals to read.


----------



## rekil (Oct 20, 2012)

Had a bit of PD banter there with D.Orr on the twitter over her LibDemidiocy. She took it quite well to be fair and kept going even after being told that PD strategy hinged on securing trident and using it as a defence against counter revolution. I don't know why these people don't just do a Laura and block immediately for wasting their time.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 20, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Don't know what you mean by "Mcfarlance" but some of my closest political comrades are women, and feminists - which you know damn well. But well done on your opportunist intervention here - you'd make an excellent leader of a lynch mob.


_Bitches better have my money._


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 20, 2012)

articul8 said:


> FFS its not that she is a woman...its that she is an arrogant m/c woman with a smug attitude. That look of disdain is a turn off


 
That's not a look of disdain, that's her cumface, possibly as a result of Will Self's tantric explorations.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 20, 2012)

copliker said:


> Perhaps by some weird process of osmosis, a bit of Galloway rubbed off on articul8 that time they swept passed each other in parliament.


 
Do you think that articul8 will try giving us a 'my comment was merely "poor sexual etiquette" ' _schtick_?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 20, 2012)

revol68 said:


> Tbf I don't think articul8's comment is necessarily sexist, I mean yes women are more likely to have their looks commented on in general due to sexist assumptions but one individual making such a comment does not sexism make. I mean there are plenty of comments about various ugly smug male tories made on these. Also it's not so much her face in the sense of bone structure or whatever but *that awful smug face* she is making that.


 
I think she may have noticed that her colostomy bag is leaking, or that the photographer is a member of the lower orders.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> _Bitches better have my money._


 
The love of a pimp is not like that of an ordinary man.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 20, 2012)

weepiper said:


> It was sexist. 'The _temerity_ of the woman, writing a sex advice column. What could she possibly know about sex? _I_ don't fancy her'.


 
If only Deborah Orr had been Mariella Frostrup, I'm sure articul8's comment would have been along the lines of "phwoar", but in a healthy non-sexist, non-denigratory way, of course.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Exactly. A woman who wrote about sex, I better call her an ugly cow who couldn't make me cum.


 
Not even if she whispered sweet nothings about how she was slowly poisoning Will Self to death as you neared the vinegars?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 20, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Don't mind being flayed for what I believe in, but being misrepresented is something else


 
You *believe* in stuff?

Wow. Novel!!!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 20, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I was suggesting that someone whose smug attitude and shit politics were deeply unattractive to me was not best placed to write seductively about sex. Is this so wrong? Really?


 
You're essentialising. That's always a futile and unworthy thing to do.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 20, 2012)

revol68 said:


> I reckon he actually wants to bang her though...


 
Although he'd sell it as a vengeance fuck, done so that the working class could feel that it had had its revenge on someone smug and middle-class who'd written about sex. He might even try to sell it as an act (titter) of hegemonisation.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 20, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Don't know what you mean by "Mcfarlance" but some of my closest political comrades are women, and feminists - which you know damn well. But well done on your opportunist intervention here - you'd make an excellent leader of a lynch mob.


 
Are some of your best friends black/female/one-legged Bolivian intersexed feminists?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 20, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Tangentially related to this thread:
> 
> 
> 
> Cheers, David. He's quick to note that whilst he did go to "a minor independent school", his parents were polytechnic lecturers. What, no "and of course, I was on a scholarship"? Must have fallen off the page.


I wonder he describes his 800 year old 30+ grand a year private school as  "a minor independent school"?


----------



## chilango (Oct 20, 2012)

What school was it? (I know, I could look it up..but I'll forget/get distracted...)

...s'alright, I looked it up.


----------



## chilango (Oct 20, 2012)

articul8 said:


> a one woman effort to prevent premature ejaculation - her face = anti-aphrodisciac


----------



## Bakunin (Oct 20, 2012)

chilango said:


>




Excellent. I now have my new tagline.


----------



## Nice one (Oct 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Tell us that full quote and pull the rug out from under your own point please.


 


> Is it a sign of my inner patriarchal oppressor tendencies that every time I see a picture of her, I marvel at what a smug, punchable face she has?


 
no, still an ugly fucked fantasy about violence against women. _Her face_.


----------



## revol68 (Oct 20, 2012)

Nice one said:


> no, still an ugly fucked fantasy about violence against women. _Her face_.



Not violence against "women" its a fantasy about violence against someone who happens to be a woman.

If i say i would love to punch woody allen it isnt a violent anti semitic fantasy.


----------



## Nice one (Oct 20, 2012)

revol68 said:


> Not violence against "women" its a fantasy about violence against someone who happens to be a women.
> 
> If i say i would love to punch woody allen it isnt a violent anti semitic fantasy.


 
aye and woody allen's face is definitely an anti-aphrodisciac


----------



## smokedout (Oct 20, 2012)

articul8 said:


> by which I meant
> 
> This is what I meant in the original post, but clearly there was enough room for malicious interpretation. Given my view above - she doesn't strike me as in the best place to be writing about sex in any way that would induce me to want to read it (this is what I meant by "seductively" incidentally).


 
you said it, and you defended it



> _a one woman effort to prevent premature ejaculation - her face = anti-aphrodisciac_


 
own it, it's yours for a long long time, the best you can hope for is that people forget the spelling mistake when they quote you


----------



## revol68 (Oct 20, 2012)

Articul8 should have played it out cooler than he did, he got too defensive too quick, a toss away "suck my balls" would have sufficed.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Oct 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Tell us that full quote and pull the rug out from under your own point please.


 
Personally I find that quote you said about "Laurie Penny's Punchable Face" more distasteful than what Articul8 said. Which isn't to say that what Articul8 said was ok or anything.

Out of sheer curiosity, what is it about Laurie Penny's face that makes it so punchable to you? There's nothing wrong with Laurie's face as far as I can tell. It's a really weird comment that even for you Butchers.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 21, 2012)

Fuck me, close reader aren't you delroy?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Oct 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Fuck me, close reader aren't you delroy?


 
This is the quote right?

_Is it a sign of my inner patriarchal oppressor tendencies that every time I see a picture of her, I marvel at what a smug, punchable face she has?_

There's not some other bit I'm missing? Coz if there is I apologize and take it back.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 21, 2012)

I'll do you a favour and strongly suggest that you search the thread for the quote before you make your next post.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Oct 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I'll do you a favour and strongly suggest that you search the thread for the quote before you make your next post.


 
Nah I'm really tired, I've been to a funeral today, I can't be arsed I'm going to bed in a bit, if there's some other chunk of text that puts it into a different context then fair enough, I'm not searching through a million pages of thread for it though. I'll do it tomorrow. That's kinda why I asked you butchers, it's only fair I asked before jumping to conclusions.

Coz in isolation it's a pretty nasty quote. I've never onced looked at Laurie Penny's face and thought to myself "Wow I'd love to punch her in the face" not once.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 21, 2012)

Don't say I didn't try to warn you then.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Oct 21, 2012)

lol listen I'm not searching for it now coz it's past midnight, you gonna put me out my misery or what? EDIT: Was it even you that said it? Or some other numpty?


----------



## free spirit (Oct 21, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> lol listen I'm not searching for it now coz it's past midnight, you gonna put me out my misery or what? EDIT: Was it even you that said it? Or some other numpty?


 


ViolentPanda said:


> Is it a sign of my inner patriarchal oppressor tendencies that every time I see a picture of her, I marvel at what a smug, punchable face she has?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Oct 21, 2012)

ViolentPanda! No way!

Poor form.

Butchers, please accept my most sincere and grovelling apologies.

EDIT: How the fuck did ViolentPanda get away with saying that yet Articul8's getting dragged over the coals for a lesser, yet still distasteful, comment?

EDIT 2: Here's another quick tip for Articul8, based on bitter personal experience. When you're wrong, or you say something stupid you end up regretting, the best thing to do is to admit it, say sorry, with grace and good humour, and then get on with your life. I'm not sure if that sort of stuff gets you very far within the Trade Union movement but in real life it'll do you no harm at all.


----------



## cesare (Oct 21, 2012)

1. Observing that someone (of whatever gender) has a smug punchable face isn't sexist. 

2. Observing that a woman who wrote a sex column at some point, isn't able to make you cum - is sexist. This comment is not "lesser".

Neither of the comments are "nice" and they're not meant to be. But one (1) isn't sexist and the other (2) is.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 21, 2012)

But the person in question re VPs comments was a woman - which entails the basic scenario of repeatedly punching a young woman in the face.    All I said was that for blokes trying not to cum thinking of Deborah Orr's smug face would be a good idea (there are lots of people/things this could apply to - how is it specifically sexist)?


----------



## cesare (Oct 21, 2012)

articul8 said:


> But the person in question re VPs comments was a woman - which entails the basic scenario of repeatedly punching a young woman in the face.    All I said was that for blokes trying not to cum thinking of Deborah Orr's smug face would be a good idea (there are lots of people/things this could apply to - how is it specifically sexist)?


"All I said". 

People haven't just been having a go at you for that comment, we've explained properly. If you choose not to read those explanations, or still persist despite those explanations; then repeating those explanations is clearly a waste of effort.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 21, 2012)

Your "explanations" are inadequate - what I said wasn't specifically sexist.


----------



## cesare (Oct 21, 2012)

articul8 said:


> a one woman effort to prevent premature ejaculation - her face = anti-aphrodisciac


This is sexist, and the explanations why are more than adequate.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 21, 2012)

but violently punching her in the face wouldn't be - ok, sounds eminently reasonable


----------



## cesare (Oct 21, 2012)

articul8 said:


> but violently punching her in the face wouldn't be - ok, sounds eminently reasonable


Violently punching *anyone* isn't sexist in itself. For example, I might want to violently punch you, but it wouldn't be because you are male.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 21, 2012)

where did I say DOs face was a turn-off because she was female?!


----------



## cesare (Oct 21, 2012)

weepiper said:


> You wouldn't have made that comment if she had been a man. And it's nothing to do with being heterosexual.


Exactly.


----------



## cesare (Oct 21, 2012)

sihhi said:


> That really is a sexist comment. DO's problem is that she is a rich Lib Dem supporter, not that she's a woman. Is that hard to understand?


Got it in one, IMO.


----------



## cesare (Oct 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Note, a sex column is an invitation for everyone to say this sort of thing.


It's clearly not, but that didn't stop articul8 who clearly thinks it is.


----------



## cesare (Oct 21, 2012)

weepiper said:


> Attack her fucking politics, not whether you want to fuck her.


Absolutely.


----------



## cesare (Oct 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No one said that you did. They suggested that you offered her writing asex column as a justification for why she couldn't make you cum and why you felt this is important.


He may have missed this comment.


----------



## articul8 (Oct 21, 2012)

All kinds of things are sexual turn offs - Cyril Smith, the Swiss constitution, the workings of the internal combustion engine....  I just happen to include the smug arrogant expression of Deborah Orr amongst them.  This is all.


----------



## cesare (Oct 21, 2012)

articul8 said:


> All kinds of things are sexual turn offs - Cyril Smith, the Swiss constitution, the workings of the internal combustion engine....  I just happen to include the smug arrogant expression of Deborah Orr amongst them.  This is all.


It's frankly creepy that you think about sex in these contexts at all. I now imagine you having a wank whilst posting in P&P.


----------



## cesare (Oct 21, 2012)

"Can't get to the vinegars with Cyril Smith, but Milliband totally helps me shoot my load. Ooer, Red Ken and the GLC tug tug tug"


----------



## articul8 (Oct 21, 2012)

Hmm...yes whatever.  I was talking about avoiding erotic thoughts not having them!


----------



## cesare (Oct 21, 2012)

articul8 said:


> a one woman effort to prevent premature ejaculation - her face = anti-aphrodisciac


Well, you wouldn't know unless you'd tried, would you?


----------



## sihhi (Oct 21, 2012)

Revol's comment is probably meant to be funny, but seeing it from here sounds like a how to guide to not apologise for sexist comments. "Articul8 should have played it out cooler than he did, he got too defensive too quick, a toss away "suck my balls" would have sufficed."

'Suck my balls' - the next move  from 'one woman effort to prevent premature ejaculation - her face = anti-aphrodisciac'. ...



More generally, none of this offers much room for women (LP, DO or any woman) being able to be photographed, without it being degraded or commented either for sexual measured or as a punch-bag.
I think it's out of line. Where any of my posts have given the impression to be goading or encouraging this type of thought or comments, I apologise. I am also sorry for being part of the "lynch mob" A8 refers to. A8 - I think - is suggesting we are all guilty of crimes but choosing to scapegoat/dump on him to cover our own arses. I feel  and sordid for being part of this. 

This should be about tracking the carefully crafted hype (and how media and Oxbridge are part of it) behind Laurie Penny, and how her own classism and hypocrisy ruins her voice-of-youth-protest that monopolises and blocks others. Latest example: "Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed Still in my German publisher's house. No clean socks left. Trying to muster the courage to ask if I can borrow some socks. #trampstyle"


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 21, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> This is the quote right?
> 
> _Is it a sign of my inner patriarchal oppressor tendencies that every time I see a picture of her, I marvel at what a smug, punchable face she has?_
> 
> There's not some other bit I'm missing? Coz if there is I apologize and take it back.


 
You're missing who actually posted that comment.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 21, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Nah I'm really tired, I've been to a funeral today, I can't be arsed I'm going to bed in a bit, if there's some other chunk of text that puts it into a different context then fair enough, I'm not searching through a million pages of thread for it though. I'll do it tomorrow. That's kinda why I asked you butchers, it's only fair I asked before jumping to conclusions.
> 
> Coz in isolation it's a pretty nasty quote. I've never onced looked at Laurie Penny's face and thought to myself "Wow I'd love to punch her in the face" not once.


 
You have a bachelor's degree, so lets assume the ability to read critically.

Care to explain what "_Is it a sign of my inner patriarchal oppressor tendencies that every time I see a picture of her, I marvel at what a smug, punchable face she has?"_
_and_
"_Wow I'd love to punch her in the face"_
have to do with each other besides including the word "face"?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 21, 2012)

articul8 said:


> But the person in question re VPs comments was a woman - which entails the basic scenario of repeatedly punching a young woman in the face. All I said was that for blokes trying not to cum thinking of Deborah Orr's smug face would be a good idea (there are lots of people/things this could apply to - how is it specifically sexist)?


 
Stop digging.
My comment entails *nothing* related to "...repeatedly punching a young woman in the face", and the fact that you misrepresent me as saying that is yet another sign of your dishonesty, your flexible depth of engagement with reality, and your willingness to lie.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 21, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Your "explanations" are inadequate - what I said wasn't specifically sexist.


 
I think that the mention of "one woman" and "anti-aphrodisiac" are specific enough, don't you?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 21, 2012)

articul8 said:


> All kinds of things are sexual turn offs - Cyril Smith, the Swiss constitution, the workings of the internal combustion engine.... I just happen to include the smug arrogant expression of Deborah Orr amongst them. This is all.


 
Of the ones you mention, only Deborah Orr is a *female* sexual turn-off. 
And I suspect that in terms of arousal-preventers, more people (male or female) would focus on Anne Widdecombe than on Deborah Orr if they had to choose a specific public gobshite.


----------



## revol68 (Oct 21, 2012)

If john prescott or gideon had a sex column i think we could expect plenty of comments about them on a similar level.
Sure look at the posts that followed the picture of thise young tory nerds with their copy Hayek.


----------



## Balbi (Oct 21, 2012)

Jesus, this is seriously bad textual etiquette from the lot of you


----------



## revol68 (Oct 21, 2012)

Hey, when you're in the game...


----------



## Balbi (Oct 21, 2012)

Definite lack of RESPECT in this thread, yeah?


----------



## _angel_ (Oct 21, 2012)

cesare said:


> 1. Observing that someone (of whatever gender) has a smug punchable face isn't sexist.
> 
> 2. Observing that a woman who wrote a sex column at some point, isn't able to make you cum - is sexist. This comment is not "lesser".
> 
> Neither of the comments are "nice" and they're not meant to be. But one (1) isn't sexist and the other (2) is.


Whether it's sexist or not, a bloke fantasizing about violence to a woman is always going to look dodgy.


----------



## cesare (Oct 21, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> Whether it's sexist or not, a bloke fantasizing about violence to a woman is always going to look dodgy.


http://www.urban75.com/Punch/


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 21, 2012)

revol68 said:


> If john prescott or gideon had a sex column i think we could expect plenty of comments about them on a similar level.
> Sure look at the posts that followed the picture of thise young tory nerds with their copy Hayek.


I could see a sex column by Prescott being at least amusing, full of shaggy dog stories about what he did with his "girl in every port" back when he was a ship's steward.
Gideon would only be able to give advice such as "rub coke on your helmet to stop yourself cumming too quick", though.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 21, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Definite lack of RESPECT in this thread, yeah?


 
Phwoar, that George Galloway, eh?


----------



## _angel_ (Oct 21, 2012)

DON'T MAKE ME THINK ABOUT GEORGE OSBORNE'S KNOB!
Seriously that is not a place I want to be.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 21, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> Whether it's sexist or not, a bloke fantasizing about violence to a woman is always going to look dodgy.


 
Except there's no "bloke fantasizing about violence to a woman".
Below your usual par.


----------



## _angel_ (Oct 21, 2012)

Seriously nit picking.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 21, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> DON'T MAKE ME THINK ABOUT GEORGE OSBORNE'S KNOB!
> Seriously that is not a place I want to be.


 
What about if you're only thinking about it with regard to...I don't know...smashing it between two bricks, or chopping it off to feed to a chihuahua?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Oct 21, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> DON'T MAKE ME THINK ABOUT GEORGE OSBORNE'S KNOB!
> Seriously that is not a place I want to be.


 
Think of the escorts who used to spank his bottom!


----------



## _angel_ (Oct 21, 2012)

I'm not Jeff Robinson!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 21, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> Seriously nit picking.


 
No. "Marveling at a smug punchable face" isn't "fantasizing about violence to a woman".

Like I said, below par.


----------



## _angel_ (Oct 21, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Think of the escorts who used to spank his bottom!


Don't make me think about it.
They should receive a payout to compensate for the trauma.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 21, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Think of the escorts who used to spank his bottom!


 
Was this before or after they'd taken his adult nappy off?


----------



## _angel_ (Oct 21, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> No. "Marveling at a smug punchable face" isn't "fantasizing about violence to a woman".
> 
> Like I said, below par.


Yeah it is. It's just not very honest.


----------



## cesare (Oct 21, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> Yeah it is. It's just not very honest.


http://www.urban75.com/Punch/


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 21, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> Yeah it is. It's just not very honest.


 
Maybe your mind goes that way, mine doesn't. 
I recall you've attempted to make out you know my thoughts better than I do before, and looked equally daft.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Oct 21, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> You have a bachelor's degree, so lets assume the ability to read critically.


 
You're assuming a lot there. I went to Salford. I got my degree out of pity.



ViolentPanda said:


> Care to explain what "_Is it a sign of my inner patriarchal oppressor tendencies that every time I see a picture of her, I marvel at what a smug, punchable face she has?"_
> _and_
> "_Wow I'd love to punch her in the face"_
> have to do with each other besides including the word "face"?


 
Not really, no. I just can't remember looking at Laurie Penny's face ever in my life and thinking how punchable it is, smug or not. I'm not going to try intellectualising it, my gut feeling was "wow that's a bit nasty" but I'm a massive pussy when it comes towarsd jokes and stuff that have violence directed against women/a woman as the punchline.

It's a weird thing to say tbh, and if I were you I wouldn't dig my heels in trying to defend it. I'm assuming it's an off the cuff sort of remark not some deeply held conviction or owt, bad taste but not exactly proof of how evil you are or anything.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Oct 21, 2012)

Salford.  Manchester's Greater University.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 21, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> You're assuming a lot there. I went to Salford. I got my degree out of pity.


 
They should have given you a masters then. 




> Not really, no. I just can't remember looking at Laurie Penny's face ever in my life and thinking how punchable it is, smug or not. I'm not going to try intellectualising it, my gut feeling was "wow that's a bit nasty" but I'm a massive pussy when it comes towarsd jokes and stuff that have violence directed against women/a woman as the punchline.


 
Which kind of misses the context of what I posted, but hey ho.



> It's a weird thing to say tbh, and if I were you I wouldn't dig my heels in trying to defend it.


 
You're not me. You're better-looking, for a start. 



> I'm assuming it's an off the cuff sort of remark not some deeply held conviction or owt, bad taste but not exactly proof of how evil you are or anything.


 
It's not an "off the cuff" remark, it's an ironic comment. The clue is in the first ten words, and the irony is in Laura's willingness to deploy claims about patriarchy and male dominance and violence without any apparent reflexivity about her own privilege. Admittedly, calling her face "smug" and "punchable" might appear to the likes of _angel_ as fantasising about violence against women, but it's not *about* violence directed at women/a woman.
Context is everything, Del-boy.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 21, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Salford. Manchester's Greater University.


 
Which is/are the lesser, then?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Oct 21, 2012)

SU used it when advertising itself years ago. Did you see what I/they did there?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Oct 21, 2012)

Nah I get the context, just because I don't agree with you doesn't mean I don't get it. You can't make me agree with you, or stop me from thinking what you posted was a offensive load of shit, and this wriggling around the semantics of it isn't getting you off the hook either. Learn from Articul8 and quit while you're ahead.

Anyway I'm gonna leave it there, my postings in this thread are already a cautionary tale about not posting when you're "tired and emotional" and I've said everything I wanted to say.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Oct 21, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> SU used it when advertising itself years ago. Did you see what I/they did there?


 
It's now just "Salford: Manchester" which has pissed off the locals hugely.

The people who run Salford University are scum.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 21, 2012)

cesare said:


> http://www.urban75.com/Punch/


 
There's a fair amount of sexism there:

"Tamara Beckwith! 
Aaaargh! Look at the state of that!. 
Say hello to the most awesomely untalented social parasite you'll ever meet.
Gaze upon the spoil-brat face of this vacuous, non-achieving, selfish, smug non-entity and then ponder awhile about the inequalities of life that gives useless sponging slappers like her more money than most of us will ever see in a lifetime. And then give this hideous, self-centered slapper the slap" 

"Ann Widdecombe 
Here's the mad witch who declared a 'zero tolerance' policy on drugs
We reckon a firm slap can surely only help matters for the still-unflowered Widders, but be careful...there's something very spooky about this lady..."

"Ann Robinson 
We don't care if she tries to act all tough on her shite 'Weakest Link' TV show, but when this wrinkled old hag starts slagging off the Welsh"

Hadn't ever looked at that properly before.


----------



## Balbi (Oct 21, 2012)

And cue editor getting very cross.


----------



## revol68 (Oct 21, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Nah I get the context, just because I don't agree with you doesn't mean I don't get it. You can't make me agree with you, or stop me from thinking what you posted was a offensive load of shit, and this wriggling around the semantics of it isn't getting you off the hook either. Learn from Articul8 and quit while you're ahead.
> 
> Anyway I'm gonna leave it there, my postings in this thread are already a cautionary tale about not posting when you're "tired and emotional" and I've said everything I wanted to say.


Well have a gold star for being such a sensitive soul.


----------



## rekil (Oct 21, 2012)

Die Welt article.


> The slim volume, published as a "pamphlet" by Hamburg's Nautilus Publishing, comes not from an over 60 frustrated feminist, but from the attractive 26-year-old British journalist, activist and blogger Laurie Penny.


Bit sexist. But it's an otherwise totally positive piece so Laura approves.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 21, 2012)

copliker said:


> Die Welt article.
> 
> Bit sexist. But it's an otherwise totally positive piece so Laura approves.


 
Die Welt has always been the highbrow sexism version of Das Bild's lowbrow sexism.







Copies of Die Welt being destroyed, 1969, FDR.


----------



## rekil (Oct 21, 2012)

Yep, but they're a little bit communism now.

Does it make up for the Axel Springer group boycotting Die Linke? Or does it make Laura an anti-communist scab.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 21, 2012)

Balbi said:


> And cue editor getting very cross.


I am certain that nobody would ever even hint at the suggestion that that particular person's behaviour or attitudes towards those of the feminine persuasion is or ever has been anything other than entirely unimpeachable.

Agreed?


----------



## sihhi (Oct 21, 2012)

copliker said:


> Yep, but they're a little bit communism now.
> 
> Does it make up for the Axel Springer group boycotting Die Linke? Or does it make Laura an anti-communist scab.


 
The Springer press do more than 'boycott' they regularly accuse members of Die Linke of being Stasi spies, informers and agents, with zero evidence.


----------



## rekil (Oct 21, 2012)

sihhi said:


> The Springer press do more than 'boycott' they regularly accuse members of Die Linke of being Stasi spies, informers and agents, with zero evidence.


Funny enough, a few days ago I asked people I know in Die Linke to pass the word and steer clear of Laura if she came near them or anyone else.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 21, 2012)

copliker said:


> Funny enough, a few days ago I asked people I know in Die Linke to pass the word and steer clear of Laura if she came near them or anyone else.


 
That's probably the wisest thing for everyone, although the Germans look like they are better at it than we are. She made up quotes about the burlesque people so doing it to others is likely.

"Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed 20 Oct
Dear journalists who have, by duplicity and cheating, made it harder for others to access and write about queer and radical spaces: SNARL."


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 21, 2012)

sihhi said:


> The Springer press do more than 'boycott' they regularly accuse members of Die Linke of being Stasi spies, informers and agents, with zero evidence.


 
Ironic considering the continuing saga of "outing" in the German media on that very subject.


----------



## rekil (Oct 21, 2012)

sihhi said:


> That's probably the wisest thing for everyone, although the Germans look like they are better at it than we are. She made up quotes about the burlesque people so doing it to others is likely.
> 
> "Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed 20 Oct
> Dear journalists who have, by duplicity and cheating, made it harder for others to access and write about queer and radical spaces: SNARL."


Didn't see that. Very interesting. Sounds like they did their homework.


----------



## binka (Oct 21, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Salford. Manchester's Greater University.


"salford - a greater manchester university" surely?


----------



## revol68 (Oct 21, 2012)

It is actually sexist not to punch women in the face.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 21, 2012)

revol68 said:


> It is actually sexist not to punch women in the face.


 
Can you rephrase that? What are you saying?


----------



## revol68 (Oct 21, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Can you rephrase that? What are you saying?


 
It's pretty obvious, I'm saying not punching women in the face on account of them being women is sexist. It's also why I slam doors in their faces.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 21, 2012)

revol68 said:


> It's pretty obvious, I'm saying not punching women in the face on account of them being women is sexist. It's also why I slam doors in their faces.


 
? I still don't understand. Is it a joke?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Oct 21, 2012)

binka said:


> "salford - a greater manchester university" surely?


 
Yes, you're right.


----------



## Bakunin (Oct 22, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> What about if you're only thinking about it with regard to...I don't know...smashing it between two bricks, or chopping it off to feed to a chihuahua?


 





Bakunin: Purveyor of Horrific mental images since 1975.


----------



## rekil (Oct 24, 2012)

sihhi said:


> "Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed 20 Oct
> Dear journalists who have, by duplicity and cheating, made it harder for others to access and write about queer and radical spaces: SNARL."


This is intriguing. It'd be nice if she expanded but she's daft to mention it in the first place.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 24, 2012)

Yes, it is very hard for Laura to write about "write about queer and radical spaces". Very hard indeed.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 24, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Yes, it is very hard for Laura to write about "write about queer and radical spaces". Very hard indeed.


 
 I think a lot of people have sussed she makes up quotes and it wasn't the sub-editor's fault, so even people from that scene don't want her.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 24, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I think a lot of people have sussed she makes up quotes and it wasn't the sub-editor's fault, so even people from that scene don't want her.


I meant more that even without that access she can still write about them and get it published - would love to hear who told her to get lost.

(Will reply to PMs when i get home later today, phone doesn't really show me them properly).


----------



## smokedout (Oct 24, 2012)

i heard a rumour she was made less than welcome at the really free school student squat, largely because of her duplicity and cheating


----------



## sihhi (Oct 24, 2012)

smokedout said:


> i heard a rumour she was made less than welcome at the really free school student squat, largely because of her duplicity and cheating


 
I heard someone telling me she was at the Anarchist Bookfair last year, but if they saw her this year they ask her some questions.


----------



## rekil (Oct 24, 2012)

She's in Hamburg today. I predict it'll be the new bestest city in the world. Mwah.


----------



## Belushi (Oct 24, 2012)

jeez does this mean we can expect a breathless piece about a football team called St Pauli...


----------



## sihhi (Oct 24, 2012)

“Anyone can write, but to write well and often and for pay can be a hard and lonely job, because to do it honestly requires, at least at the beginning, a certain amount of boring self-analysis whereby professional and existential crisis feed exhaustingly off one another. To be an honest political writer or journalist today is constantly to negotiate and re-negotiate the complicated relationship between conviction and orthodoxy, between critical reportage and activism-as-journalism. That relationship never been more fraught than it is now, because the line between activism and media production has become smudged to the point of irrelevance. Anyone with a camera-phone that does the internet can report from a protest; anyone with a blog can write commentary about mortgage foreclosure and financial feudalism. But there’s a line in the sand, and you cross it when you start making most of your living writing about politics. Because once you  have decided that you will always tell the truth you see in front of you, no matter what your bosses say, you have to decide what’s more important: your career or your conscience.” (Laurie Penny, essay on journalism in April 2012)

Now that she is back at the New Statesman, can we expect an expose of its anti-NUJ activities?

Also does she identify as an anarchist still? This picture from 2011 shows her with a red and black bade on her hat:







Some excerpts from the new book of journalism on Greece, Discordia.

“We are the media: put that on your slogan t-shirt and sweat into it. The disintegration of neoliberal capitalism as a workable model for democratic statecraft is coinciding with the collapse of print-and-television-model corporate media like two drunks falling down together in the street, giggling and swearing and blaming one another for the inevitable bloody pavement-dive. As the Arab Spring uprisings and the European riots and city occupations swept the Northern Hemisphere in 2011, commentators scrambled to blame Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry Messenger for the chaos, forgetting that civil unrest tends to owe more to social breakdown than social media.”

“In Athens, there are tourist bars, and there are bars where local people actually drink. Cantina Social is the latter, set back from the street down a narrow alley guarded by two sozzled old men in vests and a beast that can only be described as a dog because it is too big to be a wolf and too obviously carnivorous to be a horse.”

Molly Crabapple is fairly absurd: “Never have I seen a stripper without thinking she was a philosopher queen.” (Molly Crabapple)
With a very sinister take on sex work: “A woman’s beauty is supposed to be her grand project and constant insecurity. We’re meant to shellac our lips with five different glosses, but always think we’re fat. Beauty is Zeno’s paradox. We should endlessly strive for it, but it’s not socially acceptable to admit we’re there. We can’t perceive it in ourselves. It belongs to the guy screaming “nice tits.” Saying “I’m beautiful,” let alone charging for it, breaks the rules.”


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 24, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Molly Crabapple is fairly absurd: “Never have I seen a stripper without thinking she was a philosopher queen.” (Molly Crabapple)
> With a very sinister take on sex work: “A woman’s beauty is supposed to be her grand project and constant insecurity. We’re meant to shellac our lips with five different glosses, but always think we’re fat. Beauty is Zeno’s paradox. We should endlessly strive for it, but it’s not socially acceptable to admit we’re there. We can’t perceive it in ourselves. It belongs to the guy screaming “nice tits.” Saying “I’m beautiful,” let alone charging for it, breaks the rules.”


 
Did she script the Brad Pitt advert?


----------



## cesare (Oct 24, 2012)

Pseud's Corner candidate.


----------



## love detective (Oct 24, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Laurie Penny April 2012 said:
> 
> 
> 
> > “To be an honest political writer or journalist today is constantly to negotiate and re-negotiate the complicated relationship between conviction and orthodoxy, between critical reportage and activism-as-journalism. That relationship never been more fraught than it is now, because the line between activism and media production has become smudged to the point of irrelevance.But there’s a line in the sand, and you cross it when you start making most of your living writing about politics. Because once you have decided that you will always tell the truth you see in front of you, no matter what your bosses say, you have to decide what’s more important: your career or your conscience.” (Laurie Penny, essay on journalism in April 2012)


 



			
				Laurie Penny on 18th Sept 2012 at Occupy demo said:
			
		

> That's it. Sorry, guys, but I'm not going back out there today. Really don't want to be arrested and deported just for journalism


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 24, 2012)

_



			That's it. Sorry, guys, but I'm not going back out there today. Really don't want to be arrested and deported just for journalism
		
Click to expand...

_


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Oct 24, 2012)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
Dear Twitter, I've been on the road for a month and am sickly and pasty and drained of inspiration. What should I write? What should I read?

*Expand* 

 *Reply* 
 *Retweet* 
*Favorite*
 

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
I don't know if anyone would be interested in me writing about actually being on the road and what it's like, seems a little extraneous mayb

*Expand* 

 *Reply* 
 *Retweet* 
*Favorite*


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 24, 2012)




----------



## sihhi (Oct 24, 2012)

Beware of fibbing or exaggeration for effect:



> “In Athens, there are tourist bars, and there are bars where local people actually drink. Cantina Social is the latter, set back from the street down a narrow alley guarded by two sozzled old men in vests and a beast that can only be described as a dog because it is too big to be a wolf and too obviously carnivorous to be a horse.”


 
Cantina Social so un-tourist it's part of Lonely Planet's guide to Athens nightlife

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/greece/athens/entertainment-nightlife/cafe-bar/cantina-social

http://www.athinorama.gr/clubbing/articles/?id=7360


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 24, 2012)

sihhi said:


> “In Athens, there are tourist bars, and there are bars where local people actually drink. Cantina Social is the latter, set back from the street down a narrow alley guarded by two sozzled old men in vests and a beast that can only be described as a dog because it is too big to be a wolf and too obviously carnivorous to be a horse.”


 
Yeah?


----------



## sihhi (Oct 24, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Yeah?


 
Yes.






"Ένα καφενείο από τη δεκαετία του ’70 μετατράπηκε το 2006 σε μία πολυσύχναστη, καλλιτεχνική αστική στέγη."

A coffee-house from the 1970s turned itself in 2006 into a crowded, artistic urban site(?).
'η στέγη' means 'roof' ? ?.

From Half way down this list 

http://www.atticapress.gr/attica/in...92:2011-05-25-13-59-38&catid=41:top-headlines

Turns out there are cafes in Athens called 'Booze Cooperativa' and 'Hoxton'  

The 'bohemia' of Athens is very 'yuppified', my guess is this is a place that has been gentrified to bring in a more lucrative crowd. If anyone does know that would be interesting.

Similar forces want to do the same thing in Istanbul. Ironically, David Harvey gave a lecture at the posh private university in that area.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 24, 2012)

copliker said:


> She's in Hamburg today. I predict it'll be the new bestest city in the world. Mwah.


 
A trip to Leipzig is now sadly inevitable given that _Der Spiegel_ has called it "the new Berlin".


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 24, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> A trip to Leipzig is now sadly inevitable given that _Der Spiegel_ has called it "the new Berlin".


 
Let me know when you're in town, and I'll show you the sights.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 24, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I heard someone telling me she was at the Anarchist Bookfair last year, but if they saw her this year they ask her some questions.


She was - i saw her make a determined beeline for heather brooke and they had a long convo outside the main doors tried to earwig what they were talking about, didn't manage to hear anything though. We were talking to Bone right by them at the time and trying to force a meeting of the great minds


----------



## sihhi (Oct 24, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> She was - i saw her make a determined beeline for heather brooke and they had a long convo outside the main doors tried to earwig what they were talking about, didn't manage to hear anything though. We were talking to Bone right by them at the time and trying to force a meeting of the great minds


 
That was a year ago but this really stuck in people's throats from the April 2012 essay:




> Nonetheless, just after midnight, a man with dreadlocks who I had never met before in my life started jabbing a less than entirely sober finger in my face, calling me scum, asking how I dared to speak on behalf of others, and attempting to assault me gently with a rusty bicycle. I was moved by the idiosyncracy of this attack, but far more perturbed by the fact that five or six comrades, people I had stood beside as police horses charged into lines of protesters in Parliament square, people I would have trusted if not with my life, then at least with my dignity – they turned away, and they pretended not to see. I was bewildered, and heartbroken. *More than any other print journalist working in the mainstream media in Britain at that point, I understood what these people were trying to do.* I was the same age, I had read the same books, I went to the same meetings, I declined to name names when to do so might have endangered activists, I stepped outside my job description to report faithfully on protests and incidents of police violence that the rest of the press ignored. None of this, by the way required any special cookies for effort -  but I thought it might at least be enough to prevent me getting thrown out of a party by drunk hippies. I thought wrong. The abrupt realisation that *solidarity is not extended to members of the mainstream press* was less upsetting than the realisation there are entirely good reasons for this.


 



> On the streets of Athens and Madrid as well as during the London riots of August 2011, journalists have been threatened and attacked by desperate young people making havoc in the streets. Why? Not because these young people don’t want to be seen, but because they don’t want to be seen through the half-closed eyes of privilege.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 24, 2012)

Laurie Penny on 18th Sept 2012 at Occupy demo said:
_That's it. Sorry, guys, but I'm not going back out there today. Really don't want to be arrested and deported just for journalism_​ 


> I believe in fearless journalism, and I believe that it will continue, and I have seen it change the world in the most daring and intimate ways.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 24, 2012)

I wonder in what ways she has seen it change the world in the most daring and intimate ways in her long life.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 24, 2012)

when the sun got major in


----------



## sihhi (Oct 26, 2012)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-20105881

Paul Mason is using Discordia as an important source on Greece.




> The British author Laurie Penny has captured the situation in a recent memoir of a trip to Athens: "We came here expecting riots. Instead we found ourselves looking at what happens when riots die away and horrified inertia sets in." (Penny L and Crabapple M, Discordia, Random House 2012)


What's the feeling on this statement...



> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> My nanna was a low-waged immigrant with six kids. Today, because of wage repression, she would be reliant on welfare


 
is 'Dead Grandparent= Pension Credit' (if they were born 30 years later) sounding odd because it's her or is it just odd?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 27, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> She has previously accused him of threatening her sister and posting stalking naked pics of her. _Principles_.


Today:


> please, save it for someone who gives a damn. You host rape threats and graphic misogyny on your site


 
_I'll have that award though._


----------



## barney_pig (Oct 27, 2012)

Just skimming through the channels before bed and there was a documentary on sky arts 'sex in the comix' voiced over by none other than Molly crabapple, who for no good reason spent a great deal of time being filmed from different angles doing a sketch.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Oct 28, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> Just skimming through the channels before bed and there was a documentary on sky arts 'sex in the comix' voiced over by none other than Molly crabapple, who for no good reason spent a great deal of time being filmed from different angles doing a sketch.


 
did it help you have a good night wank?


----------



## barney_pig (Oct 28, 2012)

Put me right off my stroke


----------



## sihhi (Oct 28, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Nothing to do tonight...oh hey, @*amandapalmer*'s playing a show up the road from me. #*Berlin* loves me and wants me to be happy.
> 
> 39 dk​
> ...


 
Beautiful. A group of Iranian and Afghan refugees begin a hunger strike in central Berlin, then have the police raid them looking for identity. But 'nobody seemed very receptive to press'.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 28, 2012)

Wow. Any defenders left after that?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 28, 2012)

Note: Not


> I went last week - nobody seemed very receptive to press but i offered what practical help i could and tried to establish how i could i use my job to help in the coming period then I went away again


but



> I went last week - nobody seemed very receptive to press _*so*_ I went away again.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 28, 2012)

I shudder to think what she would write about the Kurdish hunger strikers -_ couldn't offer me anything so i didn't bother._


----------



## rekil (Oct 28, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Beautiful. A group of Iranian and Afghan refugees begin a hunger strike in central Berlin, then have the police raid them looking for identity. But 'nobody seemed very receptive to press'.


Why can't they be as fabulous as the sex people.


*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
Lovely interview with @ericalust just now in which we talked about#*feminism*, wanking and the anti-erotics of mainstream porn.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 28, 2012)

> nobody seemed very receptive to press


 
I wonder why.


----------



## rekil (Oct 28, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I wonder why.


I wonder why there's a massive list of press articles about it on this site.

Flüchtlinge harren bei eisigen Temperaturen vor Brandenburger Tor aus (Berliner Zeitung, 28.10.2012)
Polizei nimmt Demonstranten Decken und Iso-Matten weg (spiegel online, 28.10.2012)
Flüchtlinge zeigen Polizisten an (Neues Deutschland, 27.10.2012)
Hungerstreik und Festnahmen am Pariser Platz (Tagesspiegel, 27.10.2012)
Anzeige gegen Polizisten nach Einsatz in nigerianischer Botschaft (rbb, 26.10.2012)
Polizisten wegen Körperverletzung angezeigt (tagesspiegel, 26.10.2012)
Mehrere Flüchtlinge festgenommen (taz, 26.10.2012)
Festnahmen auf dem Pariser Platz (BerlinerZeitung, 26.20.2012)
«Menschenfeindliche» Asylgesetze - Flüchtlinge im Hungerstreik (greenpeace magazine, 25.10.2012)
Polizei räumt Protest-Camp am Brandenburger Tor (spiegel online, 24.10.2102)
Sie beißen die Zähne zusammen (taz, 24.10.2012)
Brandenburger Tor - Flüchtlinge in Hungerstreik getreten (Berliner Morgenpost, 24.10.2012)
1000 Berliner solidarisierten sich spontan mit Flüchtlingen (junge Welt, 17.10.2012)
Flüchtlinge beklagen Aggression (taz,16.10.2012)

etc

Well not exactly massive really, but that's not because they're batting journos away.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 29, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> I've been travelling too much. Arranged to spend some proper time back in London from Christmas onwards. Reconnect w/ people and politics.
> *Aç*
> 
> ...


Laurie Penny - avoiding the hunger strikers seeking the nice coffee shops.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 29, 2012)

Just because I don't want to clog up the board with a new thread.
Is "Mr Lustbather" "Peter Murphy"? Does he have some master strategy as to who he targets?
He's managed to provoke ice between Owen Jones and Ava Vidal.




> *AvaVidal* ‏@*AvaVidal*
> @*lustbather* @*Mairtin1927* Did I ever call anyone inbreds?! Just go back and play with your stupid friends. Twat.
> *Aç*
> 18 sa​
> ...


----------



## sihhi (Oct 29, 2012)

Molly Crabapple is illustrating the 'importance of introversion' for the Royal Society of Arts. I like how they've found a fame-seeking, burlesque dancing, charge $5 for a photo illustrator to highlight how dangerous extroversion.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 29, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Just because I don't want to clog up the board with a new thread.
> Is "Mr Lustbather" "Peter Murphy"? Does he have some master strategy as to who he targets?
> He's managed to provoke ice between Owen Jones and Ava Vidal.


 
Peter 'Master Strategy' Murphy as we like to call him.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 29, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Peter 'Master Strategy' Murphy as we like to call him.


 
Well, he's a master at baiting, anyway.


----------



## the button (Oct 29, 2012)

A masterpiece. Owen Jones doesn't like having his immaculate lefty anti-racist credentials attacked, does he? The touchy prick.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 29, 2012)

He is forever in my head Captain Obvious


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Oct 29, 2012)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
This tour has been a feminist boot camp - every day interviews and writing, every night speaking, defending my arguments. I need a montage!


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Oct 29, 2012)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
I've been travelling too much. Arranged to spend some proper time back in London from Christmas onwards. Reconnect w/ people and politics.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Oct 29, 2012)

Unfortunately she is stuck in Koln and cant get to New York cos of the hurricane


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 29, 2012)

She's not in kansas anymore


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 29, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Unfortunately she is stuck in Koln and cant get to New York cos of the hurricane


 
She'll find the _Kölnische_ as narking to her journo sensibilities as she found Berliners. They're pretty forthright about not suffering fools gladly.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 29, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> This tour has been a feminist boot camp - every day interviews and writing, every night speaking, defending my arguments. I need a montage!


 
Its hell out there


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Oct 29, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Its hell out there


Yes. The hell called WORK.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 29, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Yes. The hell called WORK.


 
Nice work if you can get it.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 29, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Nice work if you can get it.


 
It's not work. It's the struggle of mankind against power.




> *Laurie Penny*
> ‏@*PennyRed*​
> "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting"- Milan Kundera ​#*Thatcher*​#*Murdoch*​


​


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 29, 2012)

The Kundera quote is actually "the struggle of _people _against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting".


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 29, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Yes. The hell called WORK.


 

'oh you hate your job? there's a support group, its called the bar and is attended by everyone'

-_someone wittier than me_


----------



## Bakunin (Oct 29, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> This tour has been a feminist boot camp - every day interviews and writing, every night speaking, defending my arguments. I need a montage!


 






Penny Dreadful answering her critics, yesterday.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Oct 29, 2012)

I'd pay money to see a TV series of Laurie Penny's Feminist Boot Camp. It'd be ace.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 29, 2012)

'your days of pretending to check your privilege are OVER. You will give your privilege a name! You will give your privilege a twitter account. Because that is the only privilege you maggots will see untill you leave this autonomous convergence queer space!'


----------



## sihhi (Oct 29, 2012)

She is back in New York by the end of the week hosting a Q and A session with ("post-modernist") academic and author Kate Zambreno.

Here is Zambreno describing her major novel _Green Girl_: "A work that Green Girl is in dialog with is the Portuguese writer Clarice Lispector’s slim, devastating The Hour of the Star — about a girl living in the slums of Rio and working this blank yet somehow mystic experience as an unloved, orphaned typist enthralled to Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe — although the god-narrator in that book is male, and I had always wondered why. I think of Green Girl as a meditation on youth and beauty, but also an interrogation into the creative process, into writing, into being a woman writer, into the girl who lives her life as an object, a character, into the blank yet mysterious girl in literature and film by male auteurs. The Hour of the Star is about class, rigorously, as well as gender — about the invisibles of society — but in some way I feel Green Girl is too, Ruth is a nameless foreigner, a shopgirl. I think I used the narrator oftentimes to indicate my ambivalence towards Ruth, my cruelty towards this girl, who is in many ways self-consciously a character, a cipher, a grotesque. I often experienced horror at Ruth. I didn’t always like her. I wanted her and Agnes to be banal and boring sometimes. I love Ruth though. I love her, I loathe her. I think I am asking whether this loathing comes somewhat out of our culture. I was interested in the role of the blonde ingénue as a Hollywood construct (when writing the book I was really aware of all these Saw-like horror films, or like Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion), the blonde as this victim character. I was also kind of obsessed with celebutantes like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, and their quite public unraveling and the way the media functioned as a cruel coliseum. So for me there was a whole other fascinating layer to the Tournament of Books spectacle — the passionate vitriol directed at Ruth — that is basically doubling what I was investigating and even echoing the book’s own narrator. Yet, I don’t think Ruth is entirely a wet-blanket — I see glimmers of possibility in Ruth, the sort of coming to consciousness. A watchfulness, an intensity."

The book Laurie will be discussing is a work of literary criticism
https://www.facebook.com/events/293809834065972/



> "In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it—from T. S. Eliot's New Criticism to the writings of such mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional "girl-on-girl crime" of the Second Wave of feminism—she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the"minor," and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. "ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological," writes Zambreno. "When he does, it's existential." By advancing the Girl-As-Philosopher, Zambreno reinvents feminism for her generation while providing a model for a newly subjectivized criticism."


 
Her blog is here http://francesfarmerismysister.blogspot.co.uk/ :



> I'm considering my mad streak of writing a blog entry 6 minutes before I have to jump in the shower and motor to class. I need to figure out my unwillingness to get anywhere on time. This morning I have prepared a Powerpoint re: rape culture where I show pictures of Edward Cullen and Chuck Bass. I chose the sexiest pictures because I'm an old maid. Really, I feel like such an old person, finally figuring out Powerpoint. What a rickety form. What a form! To teach in Powerpoint. This is what we're expected to do. Show some images & links. Someone, maybe, who has a finger on the pulse of the novel today, should write a novel or at least a chapter dealing all with Powerpoint. Wouldn't that be something?
> 
> I have been in a very positive contemplative space lately. It has been quiet and watchful. I feel poised, like on some precipice. I don't know where the future leads, but I do feel that I am ready for a metamorphosis. Oh, god, I have been in therapy. But, really, though - this is what I think - at this moment, I will decide to take writing seriously, go back in the cave and scrawl on the walls and attempt to really fucking do something - or I should go to graduate school. That's what I've decided. I'm in love today, with the possibility of the novel. Of what a novel can hold and breathe and incubate. I want to fail and learn. I need time and space. I feel open to all of this. I also feel, perhaps, finally, after the tour is over, I might try to write a play. To write plays! Something about writing something that can be viewed and communicating in a public space sounds wonderful to me today. Scary + wonderful.


Is it me or does it sound pretentious?
If I do say it's pretentious, is that 'diagnosing women for transgressing social bounds'?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Oct 29, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> The Kundera quote is actually "the struggle of _people _against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting".


 
You're not suggesting that Laura is "doing a Hari", are you?
I hope not, because it's not her fault, it's the fault of her twitter sub-editor!


----------



## rekil (Oct 30, 2012)

sihhi said:


> He's managed to provoke ice between Owen Jones and Ava Vidal.





> *Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*
> @*AvaVidal* This is mad. I gave you a genuine compliment about your speech. It wasn't a pisstake. And since when do I want a political career?


 
What sort of career path does he think he's on?


----------



## Bakunin (Oct 30, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> 'your days of pretending to check your privilege are OVER. You will give your privilege a name! You will give your privilege a twitter account. Because that is the only privilege you maggots will see untill you leave this autonomous convergence queer space!'


 
*



*



*'This is my ego. There are many others like it, but rarely this inflated. My narcissism is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my ego is useless. Without my relentless self-promotion, I am useless. I must ignore my critics, who are trying to criticise me. I must smear them before they make solid points against me. I will. Before God I swear this creed: my career and myself are defenders of my ego, we are the masters of our enemy, we are the saviors of my life. So be it, until there is no enemy, but peace. Amen.'*


----------



## Balbi (Oct 30, 2012)

copliker said:


> What sort of career path does he think he's on?



Eyes on the Marr Show, old big ears isn't immortal!


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 30, 2012)

on a scale of 'fuck me' wrt depictions of casual racism Full Metal Jacket is only about a 5.

Scum is far worse. Bonus points for when there is a basketball match and it turns into a total race brawl. I didn't even have to live in the 70s but thankfully people did films that illustrate how shit it was. Although if you were a cheeky yet charming window cleaner you were balls deep.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 30, 2012)

> People have started asking me and my friends when we’re going to sell out, move on and get real jobs, like they did after the Sixties. We are told that pretty soon, we’ll need to face reality.


 


> The young people currently negotiating direct action in the face of a future mortgaged to finance the gambling of the super-rich have no time to wait for their hair to grow. The drugs are worse these days, anyway, and the police more efficient. This is not a generation war, but a new class war expressing itself along generational lines.


 


> When I visited Occupy London in January, some of its spokespeople were keen for me not to write a story giving away the fact that so many long-term residents of the protest camp on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral were homeless people with multiple mental health and substance abuse problems.


 


> The greatest weakness and most-mocked feature of the new protest movements – that they’re peopled by youngsters grown old before their time, by lost kids and self-destructive vagrants, by nervous proto-revolutionaries hiding their cynicism behind straggly protest beards and unwashed hippies in _V for Vendetta_ masks – is also their greatest strength.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 30, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Most important feminist moment of tour: tonight a girl in audience asked me 'I just don't know what I'm supposed to want anymore. Do you?'


 



> “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
> Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
> What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
> I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
> ...


----------



## articul8 (Oct 30, 2012)

ah the great imponderable: "was will eine Frau eigentlich?"


----------



## Ole (Oct 30, 2012)

Slightly disappointed to learn that Laurie Penny's penned in to speak at the LSE in the Ralph Miliband programme next year on 'Women and Protest', considering that every other speaker is at least double her age, with surely at least 10 times more experience and substance to speak of on their chosen topics.

/age privilege /experience privilege


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 30, 2012)

Has she - a 26 year old private school educated, oxbridge graduate with the best of contacts, the easiest job available and so on - ever explained in any detail why:




			
				penny said:
			
		

> This is not a generation war, but a new class war expressing itself along generational lines.


 
I, for one, as a 40 year old unskilled manual worker of no fixed abode, no pension, no savings etc would be very interested to hear it.


----------



## sihhi (Oct 30, 2012)

More text and words from Discordia.






Is there is a female couple kissing, with one of the women with her arm around a man (facial expression obscured by ink) who is holding her back-side.







The riot police have immense upper body muslce but are walking on a puny artificial limb system - suggesting they are general paper tigers or that people should strike at their legs or that they can't run as fast as protestors. 


Anyway, here they are with the finished version on a portable device.


----------



## nino_savatte (Oct 30, 2012)

sihhi said:


> More text and words from Discordia.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


So are they an item?


----------



## Balbi (Oct 30, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Anyway, here they are with the finished version on a portable device.
> 
> View attachment 24498



Laurie looks disgruntled there, rather than rebel cool.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Oct 30, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Laurie looks disgruntled there, rather than rebel cool.


Maybe she's a bit embarrassed about Molly doing her bit for feminism by sticking her tits out above the book?


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 30, 2012)




----------



## weepiper (Oct 30, 2012)

I wouldn't tolerate that fucking fey curly-wurly 'wistful' writing from my 9-year-old.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 30, 2012)




----------



## rekil (Oct 30, 2012)

I didn't see this before, from last year, linked from this interview. 

A report on Occupy London Stock Exchange by, um, Gilly Pound.



> The prolific young protest journalist, Gilly Pound has sent us this report of yesterday’s protests. It will shortly appear in the blog section of the New Statesman’s website.
> 
> I must admit that yesterday a part of me did not want to go and protest. I was worn out and hungover after spending last night being extremely young and liberated (I had *sex*). Nothing, however, that couldn’t be cured by a rolled up cigarette. I lit it up, and wandered off to join the protest.
> 
> ...


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 30, 2012)

*Apparently, Feminism is dead!!*


----------



## articul8 (Oct 31, 2012)

Guido Fawkes (right wing nob but leading political/media blogger) on Twitter is saying it's rumoured Indy fired Laura.  She's denying it.


----------



## The39thStep (Oct 31, 2012)

> I’m especially worried by the tendency I see amongst some of my peers to play with a sort of cutesy opt-in faux-fifties retro-domesticity, when the battles of Friedanite feminism are far from won”


----------



## rekil (Oct 31, 2012)

dan hancox said:
			
		

> The smashing of glass in Millbank Tower marked the first shattering of capitalist realism and the forging of a new mind-phase...


Did he really say that? I saw it in a review and assumed someone was taking the piss.


----------



## love detective (Oct 31, 2012)

few choice quotes from Penny about (among other things) being on 'tour'



> it’s just me, on my own, traveling in second-class


 


> I could have gone and worked in PR


 


> I do this because I can


 


> I feel I have a duty to live as freely as I possibly can


 
maybe being a bit unfair as they are taken out of context, but even still, jesus


----------



## imposs1904 (Oct 31, 2012)

love detective said:


> few choice quotes from Penny about (among other things) being on 'tour'
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
I think these are what Bill Maher describes as 'brain farts'.


----------



## weepiper (Oct 31, 2012)

'I do this because I can' shows a remarkable amount of honesty. Probably accidental though. Meanwhile the rest of us carry on in our shitty part-time shop jobs and temporary contracts, if we're lucky. Isn't it great we've got her to speak for us?


----------



## articul8 (Oct 31, 2012)

> I feel I have a duty to live as freely as I possibly can


what a load of hippy shite - if everyone thought this is it would be open season for every paedo, rapist, soap-dodging weird anarchist (sorry, couldn't resist ) going


----------



## love detective (Oct 31, 2012)

weepiper said:


> 'I do this because I can' shows a remarkable amount of honesty. Probably accidental though. Meanwhile the rest of us carry on in our shitty part-time shop jobs and temporary contracts, if we're lucky. Isn't it great we've got her to speak for us?


 
she'll even travel in second class whilst doing so

that to me seemed like another accidental bout of revealingness, I mean what normal person refers to themselves as 'travelling in second class', it's a superflous statement unless you are used to, or think you are entitled to, travel in first class everywhere


----------



## rekil (Oct 31, 2012)

> Until then, I’ll keep on writing and talking and watching the star battles on television, because it’s longing like that that sets us free.


.



> If this particular talk were happening in Italy, someone would have turned around and laughed in this guy’s face. In Britain you'd have had a bit of cross muttering followed by quietly furious people coming up to me after the event to ask if I'm sure I'm okay and isn’t it shocking, which is British for "this is fucked beyond belief". But this is Germany, and the room is an orgy of polite silence.


That's a bit racism.


----------



## Fruitloop (Oct 31, 2012)

Is it not 'standard class'? I guess it depends what your standard class is.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Oct 31, 2012)

weepiper said:


> 'I do this because I can' shows a remarkable amount of honesty. Probably accidental though. Meanwhile the rest of us carry on in our shitty part-time shop jobs and temporary contracts, if we're lucky. Isn't it great we've got her to speak for us?


 
Yep.  And people of her 'generation' but not her class.


----------



## weepiper (Oct 31, 2012)

I'd also like to see what her idea of 'next to no money' really means.


----------



## DotCommunist (Oct 31, 2012)

what these people always mean, less than 500 quid in the bank. Thats mother hubbard to them.


----------



## emanymton (Oct 31, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> I think these are what Bill Maher describes as 'brain farts'.


I have lots of these, in fact my brain seems to have a bit of a flatulence problem.


----------



## emanymton (Oct 31, 2012)

love detective said:


> she'll even travel in second class whilst doing so
> 
> that to me seemed like another accidental bout of revealingness, I mean what normal person refers to themselves as 'travelling in second class', it's a superflous statement unless you are used to, or think you are entitled to, travel in first class everywhere


Indeed the only times I have ever felt the need to comment on what class I travel has been the few occasions I went first class. Normally because it worked out cheaper.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 31, 2012)

Here's the argument put forward by the (union busting) mag she now helps edit:

Fifty grades of pay: why you should disclose your wage



> “One can’t help wondering whether, if you’re scared that people will find out how much you earn, you may be earning too much.”


 
So let's hear it Laura.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Oct 31, 2012)

weepiper said:


> 'I do this because I can' shows a remarkable amount of honesty. Probably accidental though. Meanwhile the rest of us carry on in our shitty part-time shop jobs and temporary contracts, if we're lucky. Isn't it great we've got her to speak for us?


Hey, Laura understands precarity, as she juggles her twenty-two grand-a-year weekly columns and her Vintage book contracts, forced to flit between her "little hovel room" in The Lez's poky little £400k Shepherd's Bush pad and Molly's boho apartment just off Wall Street, churning out breathlessly fabricated reimagined reportage like some latterday matchgirl simply to put vegan foie gras on the vintage distressed rustic country cottage kitchen table.


----------



## love detective (Nov 1, 2012)

Penny said:
			
		

> Right, I'll be in New York and functional in about 30 hours. Where are the relief efforts happening and how can I help?


 
Funnily enough, she's (publicly) keen as mustard to get her sleeves rolled up for something that's all over the media


----------



## rekil (Nov 1, 2012)

At number 100 in the Tatler list, whatever that is. Ahead of Blair and Kate Middleton's dog.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 1, 2012)

Ole said:


> Slightly disappointed to learn that Laurie Penny's penned in to speak at the LSE in the Ralph Miliband programme


Saif Gaddafi has spoken on that programme before so they aren't too choosy


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 1, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Hey, Laura understands precarity, as she juggles her twenty-two grand-a-year weekly columns and her Vintage book contracts, forced to flit between her "little hovel room" in The Lez's poky little £400k Shepherd's Bush pad and Molly's boho apartment just off Wall Street, churning out breathlessly fabricated reimagined reportage like some latterday matchgirl simply to put vegan foie gras on the vintage distressed rustic country cottage kitchen table.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 1, 2012)

> how can I help?


 
probably by finding a local queer/trans/autonomous free space and staying the fuck out of the way of the emergency services?


----------



## Bakunin (Nov 1, 2012)

love detective said:


> Funnily enough, she's (publicly) keen as mustard to get her sleeves rolled up for something that's all over the media


 
Is that keen as mustard for personal publicity, keen as mustard for another story she can breathlessly bullshit about (and, in some bizarre way, to let people know that it's really all about her), or keen as mustard to conspicuously look like she's actually doing something useful while quietly doing as little as is necessary to try and justify her presence?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 1, 2012)

weepiper said:


> I'd also like to see what her idea of 'next to no money' really means.


 
One of my uncles, a  builder, is always going on about being skint. By his measure, "being skint" seems to mean having less than 4 figures in the bank at any given time.


----------



## love detective (Nov 2, 2012)

Penny 1st November said:
			
		

> Right, I'll be in New York and functional in about 30 hours. Where are the relief efforts happening and how can I help?


 



			
				Penny 2nd November said:
			
		

> Brooklyn I am in you. One more day then suitcases unpacked and book writing begins in earnest


 
sleeves: rolled up


----------



## rekil (Nov 2, 2012)

That "I am in you" thing has to stop.


----------



## love detective (Nov 2, 2012)

they all say it, all those cunts

that and 'stay classy'


----------



## temper_tantrum (Nov 2, 2012)

Stay classy, LD.


----------



## barney_pig (Nov 2, 2012)

temper_tantrum said:


> Stay classy, LD.


stay first classy


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 2, 2012)

Little matchstick Owen won the Stonewall (the charity of choice for socially liberal extremists) journo of the year award.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 2, 2012)

Is this now the generic thread for ripping into any prominent left-wingers who win awards? Or who don't win awards? The odd sock drawer for sticking the boot into random lefties.

This thread is funnier when it's just laughing at Laurie Penny's tweets. Definitely funnier than Nathan Barley was anyway.

btw butchers what's "little matchstick" a reference too? Sincere question.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 2, 2012)




----------



## nino_savatte (Nov 2, 2012)

copliker said:


> That "I am in you" thing has to stop.


Could this be her song as she waves goodbye to wherever she's been?


----------



## rekil (Nov 2, 2012)

nino_savatte said:


> Could this be her song as she waves goodbye to wherever she's been?


Epic squee!


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 2, 2012)

smokedout said:


> yep, Ellie Mae O'Hagen, UNITE Community Union organiser


And now CLASS national advisory panel member.


----------



## cesare (Nov 2, 2012)

Is that the same Ellie Mae O'Hagen that wrote that dreadful self pitying piece in the Guardian today?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 2, 2012)

Quite probably! Not seen that piece though. Will have a look now.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 2, 2012)

Yep, same one: "peaceful activists like me" now i know what everyone was on about earlier.


----------



## cesare (Nov 2, 2012)

Peaceful activists being psychologically oppressed etc.

Edit: yes, that's it


----------



## love detective (Nov 2, 2012)




----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 2, 2012)

activist.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 2, 2012)

Yet...they rise.


----------



## love detective (Nov 3, 2012)

she's really throwing herself into the relief efforts since arriving in New York



> Excited to be doing the introduction to the German edition of the Pussy Riot book. Will try to find somewhere to put eng. version online.


 


> In NYC? Come and see me and @daughteroffury talk about women, writing and her excellent new book next Friday


 


> Walking through Wburg in the cold. Today is Finish Chapter Plan day. Steeling myself up like a ninja to start this book for real


 


> I just backed The Sky is Calling: Kim Boekbinder's @Kickstarterhttp://kck.st/O5D9PK  you should, too - she's at 98% with 1 day to go!


 
Apparently this is because:-



> No earthly way to get down to volunteering sites so heading out to give blood for the #sandy relief efforts


 
So, I won't be able to come and help out personally but everyone can have a little bit of my blood instead

In a previous tweet she said she would only go to a volunteer site if it was within walking distance of where she was


----------



## love detective (Nov 3, 2012)

she might not be able to give blood as authorities are concerned she may have mad cow disease

(not a sexist comment btw, apparently it's a genuine reason as to why americans won't accept british blood)


----------



## Bakunin (Nov 3, 2012)

love detective said:


> In a previous tweet she said she would only go to a volunteer site if it was within walking distance of where she was


 
How incredibly enthusiastic and truly committed of her. Does her idea of the 'disaster area du jour' also include being within walking distance of a Starbucks and Pizza Hut (both of which will no doubt be expected to deliver) as well? Still, I don't suppose her not being physically there or genuinely willing/possessing the kills to actually be able to do something useful will spare us a series of breathless 'first hand' accounts (for a fiver a paragraph, naturally).


----------



## Random (Nov 3, 2012)

love detective said:


> she might not be able to give blood as authorities are concerned she may have mad cow disease
> 
> (not a sexist comment btw, apparently it's a genuine reason as to why americans won't accept british blood)


They also ask this in Sweden


----------



## love detective (Nov 3, 2012)

she's now saying that she'll go to a volunteering site, but only if somebody drives her there


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 3, 2012)

Random said:


> They also ask this in Sweden


 
Loads of countries don't except our blood for this reason.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 3, 2012)

Meanwhile in red hook, brooklyn:



> The comparisons to Katrina have been everywhere, of course, but for me they hit home when, safe in my Crown Heights apartment that never even lost power, I saw friends and acquaintances who’d been involved with Occupy Wall Street tweeting their relief activities under the hashtag #OccupySandy. I couldn’t help but think, as I watched them tweet their setup of a hub in Red Hook, of Common Ground, of Malik Rahim, of New Orleans’ mutual aid after the storm, and how leftists and radicals (Rahim, a former Black Panther, learned about community care from the Panthers’ free food and tutoring programs) step quietly into the spaces that are left vacant by the wrecking crew that’s laid waste to social welfare programs and the churches and charities that Republicans keep telling us will step up to provide care.


----------



## love detective (Nov 3, 2012)

funny how all that's going in in Brooklyn, meanwhile




			
				Penny 2nd Nov said:
			
		

> Brooklyn I am in you


 



			
				Penny 3rd Nov said:
			
		

> No earthly way to get down to volunteering sites


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 4, 2012)

love detective said:


> funny how all that's going in in Brooklyn, meanwhile


 
Brooklyn is rather bigger than you seem to imagine.


----------



## rekil (Nov 4, 2012)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
@*anamariecox* hey I'm organising volunteering stuff tomorrow, also a journolady. Want to co-ordinate? L xx

Out of all the people in the city she could roll up her sleeves with, she managed to home in on somebody from GQ with over a million twitter followers. Looks like a bit of a fib to make herself sound important as well.


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 4, 2012)

love detective said:


> she's now saying that she'll go to a volunteering site, but only if somebody drives her there


 
Ryan Gosling?


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 4, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Loads of countries don't except our blood for this reason.


 

anyone would think we were fucking riddled


----------



## gosub (Nov 4, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> anyone would think we were fucking riddled


I'd be more worried about Hep E that nobody is screening for


----------



## love detective (Nov 4, 2012)

copliker said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> @*anamariecox* hey I'm organising volunteering stuff tomorrow, also a journolady. Want to co-ordinate? L xx
> 
> Out of all the people in the city she could roll up her sleeves with, she managed to home in on somebody from GQ with over a million twitter followers. Looks like a bit of a fib to make herself sound important as well.


 
yeah, the extent of her 'organising volunteering stuff' seems to be demanding people come and pick her up from midtown manhattan (where she attended a society party last night with someone who had just raised 30 grand of idiots to write a few tunes) and take her to staten island. Despite many people telling her she can get there by ferry and bus/tube no problem, she still continued to ask people to drive her there


----------



## Treacle Toes (Nov 4, 2012)

copliker said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> @*anamariecox* hey I'm organising volunteering stuff tomorrow, also a journolady. Want to co-ordinate? L xx
> 
> Out of all the people in the city she could roll up her sleeves with, she managed to home in on somebody from GQ with over a million twitter followers. Looks like a bit of a fib to make herself sound important as well.


 



> *Ana Marie Cox* ‏@*anamariecox*
> I'll be midtown/Rock Center--looking for a ride for @*PennyRed* and me to volunteer center in #*statenisland* #*sandy*
> Retweeted by *Laurie Penny*
> 
> ...


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 4, 2012)

She's quite simply not 'organising' stuff in the sense of her being involved in organising a volunteer operation - 'organising' in her post actually means getting someone to drive her somewhere that they talked about at their posho party the night before. The fib comes in attempting to suggest by the ambiguous use of 'organise' that she is is actually using it in the first sense above.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Nov 4, 2012)

I _might_ have sent her a list of volunteering opportunities.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 4, 2012)

love detective said:


> yeah, the extent of her 'organising volunteering stuff' seems to be demanding people come and pick her up from midtown manhattan (where she attended a society party last night with someone who had just raised 30 grand of idiots to write a few tunes) and take her to staten island. Despite many people telling her she can get there by ferry and bus/tube no problem, she still continued to ask people to drive her there


 
How would they do a tickertape parade for her if she came on the bus


----------



## Treacle Toes (Nov 4, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Was meant to volunteer at Coney Island today, but my brain and body have been flashing burnout klaxons for some time. So, not a good idea.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> ...


 
IMO LP is falling foul of tweeting her every thought and move. She will be roasted as a result. I personally think she should respect her own privacy more.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 4, 2012)

now that's exhaustion - when you're so tired you can't even be chauffered somewhere


----------



## love detective (Nov 4, 2012)

burnt out, so can't go and help out with the relief efforts despite doing nothing but talking about it for the last few days but still managed to travel to and attend a society party in central manhattan last night

to be fair to molly, she's been putting in some decent shifts the last few days with none of the fuss & pomp of penny


----------



## imposs1904 (Nov 4, 2012)

love detective said:


> funny how all that's going in in Brooklyn, meanwhile


 
eta: it's too early.


----------



## love detective (Nov 4, 2012)

> We will be transporting volunteers and supplies from St Jacobi Church in Sunset Park to impacted areas throughout the day. We prefer that new volunteers come to Sunset Park if possible so that we can route you to the locations with the greatest need, rather than going directly to one of the volunteer sites.
> 
> To catch a ride to Sunset Park, vehicles will be leaving from the following Brooklyn locations at *10am and 1pm*. Please arrive a little before the hour as cars will be leaving on time!
> 
> ...




it's just impossible to get there


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 4, 2012)

Rutita1 said:


> IMO LP is falling foul of tweeting her every thought and move. She will be roasted as a result. I personally think she should respect her own privacy more.


 
Its funnier if she carries on tbf


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Nov 4, 2012)

Unlike the purely voluntary system in the UK, don't they pay you $20 for donating blood in the US?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 4, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> Its funnier if she carries on tbf


 
I feel really cruel for laughing at all the shit that comes out on this thread. It's just it keeps on coming. I'm not sure if obsessing over every little thing Laurie Penny ever tweets is a healthy way to spend your time. And I think one or two people on here seem quite vindictive with it.

If I were Laurie Penny (and there's no definitive proof that I'm not...) I'd consider leaving twitter and just concentrating on actually doing my job. Y'know like maybe reporting honestly and faithfully on what's going on in New York with the cleanup effort for instance. Never mind "I cant' get a lift omg I'm gonna burn out" find a way! That's what journo's are supposed to do isn't it? It's like actually reporting on stuff is beneath her, and unless there's some factually dubious grandiose meta-story, or some Discordia arty book deal to be got out of it, she's just not bothered.

When I was younger i'd have loved to have a career as a journalist like what Laurie's doing.  She's a bit older than me but not by much, but this idea that actual journalism is a chore and instead being an Activist (with a capital A) and iconoclast and celebritry tweeter and achingly bohemian dilettante really pisses me off coz at one point, before the weight of the world crushed all my hopes and aspirations, I'd have loved to do all that shit that's seemingly beneath her. Y'know, writing down facts to a deadline, getting paid ABOVE minimum wage, working with people who can converse intelligently (My last job I was on a 12 hour shift for months with a Hungarian who told me back home his friday night entertainment was shooting Roma with his .22 rifle....) all that stuff. I know it's laughable and pathetic today, but when I was 16 that just about as high as my hopes ever got. I don't think I'd do it now. Having a 176 page thread on a message board dedicated to slating me would crush my fragile ego for starters. But still, there must be loads of people who'd kill for the opportunity to do what she does, but sincerely.

I don't think she realises just how lucky she is to be honest.

/rant over


----------



## nino_savatte (Nov 4, 2012)

Rutita1 said:


> IMO LP is falling foul of tweeting her every thought and move. She will be roasted as a result. I personally think she should respect her own privacy more.


Like a lot of people, she's horribly naive when it comes to the Internet. Once your innermost thoughts are online, it's too late to reel them back in.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 4, 2012)

I take it all back

http://www.penny-red.com/post/34978235379/blood-and-thunder-new-york-after-hurricane-sandy


----------



## cesare (Nov 4, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I take it all back
> 
> http://www.penny-red.com/post/34978235379/blood-and-thunder-new-york-after-hurricane-sandy





> When me and my friend Veronica went down to the Church to open our veins for the cause, I was told that my tangy British blood was not acceptable because I might be riddled with mad cow disease ( this from people who haven’t even read my Twitter feed).


Not even read her twitter feed


----------



## rekil (Nov 4, 2012)

Since she's a communist, she should be in Cuba. Or at least give it the mention.

Y U No Give Cuba The Mention.


----------



## rekil (Nov 4, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I take it all back
> 
> http://www.penny-red.com/post/34978235379/blood-and-thunder-new-york-after-hurricane-sandy





> In every case, though, the most dangerous thing you can do in any crisis  - the absolute worst thing you can possibly do - is sit at home and accept it.





> That's it. Sorry, guys, but I'm not going back out there today. Really don't want to be arrested and deported just for journalism


----------



## emanymton (Nov 4, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I take it all back
> 
> http://www.penny-red.com/post/34978235379/blood-and-thunder-new-york-after-hurricane-sandy


Is it just me that thinks her prose is terrible and barely readable?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 4, 2012)

emanymton said:


> Is it just me that thinks her prose is terrible and barely readable?


 
That article's not very good, but she's written stuff in the past that's better. She was the smartest girl at a school full of smart girls, she's probably got some residual amount of talent.

15 years working at a local newspaper in some deeply unfashionable province before becoming famous would've done her the world of good imo.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 4, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I take it all back
> 
> http://www.penny-red.com/post/34978235379/blood-and-thunder-new-york-after-hurricane-sandy


 

LOL


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 4, 2012)

Indeed.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 4, 2012)

copliker said:


> Since she's a communist, she should be in Cuba. Or at least give it the mention.
> 
> Y U No Give Cuba The Mention.



She's only a little bit communist.


----------



## love detective (Nov 4, 2012)

copliker said:


> ...


 


> In every case, though, the most dangerous thing you can do in any crisis - the absolute worst thing you can possibly do - is sit at home and accept it.


 


> Anyway, I'm not volunteering today.....Am flatsitting for @davidgraeber for a few weeks while he's in Ldn. Just arrived


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 4, 2012)

The normals.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 4, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> (My last job I was on a 12 hour shift for months with a Hungarian who told me back home his friday night entertainment was shooting Roma with his .22 rifle....)


 

He was lying.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 4, 2012)

Aye.


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 5, 2012)

He certainly sounds more interesting than LP's colleagues.


----------



## rekil (Nov 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> Anybody got that clip of Solomon shouting 'I'm in charge!' at someone who was doing protest wrong?


"I'm in control!" at 2:33 on this video. I'm sure there's another one but this is good.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2012)

In her little lenin cap. God i despise these people.

I used to find this Penny stuff amusing but it's making me genuinely angry each time i click on this thread now. How the other half lives eh?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> a one woman effort to prevent premature ejaculation - her face = anti-aphrodisciac


 
classy.  your name goes in the book, mate.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> "I'm in control!" at 2:33 on this video. I'm sure there's another one but this is good.


 
Fucking Hell.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Funny that when posters up thread said Laurie had the kind of face you'd never tire of punching that didn't raise a flicker...but then it wasn't me saying it. Different standards apply to media ppl apparently


 
i know i'm weeks late on this, but are you really something important at Red Pepper? 

Also, did Red Pepper ever used to be good, or was it just because i was a teenager.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 5, 2012)

It is well worth looking out for, if you haven't seen it lately.


----------



## rekil (Nov 5, 2012)

Where does one laugh at Alan Moore's rubbish occupy song. Will here do?


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> Where does one laugh at Alan Moore's rubbish occupy song. Will here do?


 
What's he going on about--"great English murder" did he nick it from Orwell or what?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 5, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> He was lying.


 
This is true.

Far more likely to have been using a .280 or .308.


----------



## rekil (Nov 5, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> What's he going on about--"great English murder" did he nick it from Orwell or what?


Looks like it yes, austerity is murder you see. At least he didn't have a go at hip hop.



> And the scabby grey anti-climb paint and withdrawn amenities
> In case socialising promotes anti-social behaviour
> 
> And English murder. Its all over the place.
> ...


A decent tune could have helped but it just comes across as a bit Adrian Mole.


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 5, 2012)

Don't give up the day job Alan.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> Where does one laugh at Alan Moore's rubbish occupy song. Will here do?


 

I could do it on his doorstep if I so wished.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 5, 2012)

Alan Moore has written some great comics over the years but what a sad old fucker he has become, poor bloke.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2012)

His northampton novel is fantastic - best non-wanky attempt at psychogeogrpahy i've read.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 5, 2012)

good interview with him for Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: anarchist writers on fiction, if anyone was interested in his opinions on the V film of his comic.

I think it'll take more than one crap tune for me to write him off as a sad old fucker. Bragg has done worse


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 5, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> good interview with him for Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: anarchist writers on fiction, if anyone was interested in his opinions on the V film of his comic.
> 
> I think it'll take more than one crap tune for me to write him off as a sad old fucker. Bragg has done worse


 
Fair enough I always forgave RAW and he was no where near as good a writer as Moore.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 5, 2012)

*Definition of BURNOUT*

1
*:* the cessation of operation usually of a jet or rocket engine; _also_ *:* the point at which burnout occurs
2
_a_ *:* exhaustion of physical or emotional strength or motivation usually as a result of prolonged stress or frustration

_b_ *:* a person suffering from burnout
3
*:* a person showing the effects of drug abuse




we all know about your burnout Laura.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> His northampton novel is fantastic - best non-wanky attempt at psychogeogrpahy i've read.


is that voice of the fire?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> is that voice of the fire?


yep


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> *Definition of BURNOUT*
> 
> 1
> *:* the cessation of operation usually of a jet or rocket engine; _also_ *:* the point at which burnout occurs
> ...


Indeed, she is the Lucy Spraggan of radical anarchism.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 5, 2012)

i had to look that up.  i wasn't expecting what i found


----------



## chilango (Nov 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> In her little lenin cap. God i despise these people.
> 
> I used to find this Penny stuff amusing but it's making me genuinely angry each time i click on this thread now. How the other half lives eh?


 
I was just thinking something similar the other day. It's beyond piss taking now. I don't see her "radical pose" lasting much longer, it seems to have run its course.


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 5, 2012)

a similar trajectory to mad mel beckoning there ya think?


----------



## cesare (Nov 5, 2012)

Is it only me that thinks she looks a bit like tax in her photos?


----------



## chilango (Nov 5, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> a similar trajectory to mad mel beckoning there ya think?


 
why? did she pretend to be a lefty in her rebellious youth or something? Can;t say I know anything thing about her...


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 5, 2012)

chilango said:


> why? did she pretend to be a lefty in her rebellious youth or something? Can;t say I know anything thing about her...


 
yes she did, even wrote a vaguely lefty book iirc


----------



## chilango (Nov 5, 2012)

Ah. Ok.

I reckon Laura is already getting bored, and not a little fed up of "the sacrifices she is making".


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 5, 2012)

probably getting pissed off with people taking the piss all the time as well


----------



## Fruitloop (Nov 5, 2012)

Hopefully.


----------



## weepiper (Nov 5, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> probably getting pissed off with people taking the piss all the time as well


 
the poor poppet


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 5, 2012)

Who was the LP of previous generations? Of the 60s? Of the 30s? Of the C19th....

Did they even exist in the past?


----------



## articul8 (Nov 5, 2012)

Tariq Ali, Danny Cohn-Bendit?


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Tariq Ali, Danny Cohn-Bendit?


 
I'll give you DCB, but Tariq Ali's still doing good work... I just read his latest book on Pakistan, very interesting.... certainly a different league from LP....


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 5, 2012)

Jane Fonda?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Tariq Ali, Danny Cohn-Bendit?


Why?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 5, 2012)

Byron.


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 5, 2012)

Jerry Rubin.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Why?


They were a bit more involved in actual movements, I'll grant you.  But they have a tendency to see political events through the lens of their own self-importance - Ali's "Street Fighting Years" is cringeworthy


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 5, 2012)

although, to be fair, his trip to greece went dowbn much better.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 5, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> Byron.


he got himself killed.  He didn't stay in his hotel complaining about burnout


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 5, 2012)

Or Leonard Bernstein as described by Tom Wolfe:

http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 5, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Jerry Rubin.


 
that was going to be my next target...


----------



## Random (Nov 5, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Who was the LP of previous generations? Of the 60s? Of the 30s? Of the C19th....
> 
> Did they even exist in the past?


If they existed they will not be remembered, apart by people with an obsessive study of the past.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> They were a bit more involved in actual movements, I'll grant you. But they have a tendency to see political events through the lens of their own self-importance - Ali's "Street Fighting Years" is cringeworthy


There's a whole network of things that needs to be in place here though - the privilege (check for tariq), the media they used and how they got there, the stuff they actually did and so on - not just how pompous and self-important they were. I can't see why you would compare DCB with a light-weight journo who has never done anything.


----------



## imposs1904 (Nov 5, 2012)

Gary Bushell


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> he got himself killed. He didn't stay in his hotel complaining about burnout


 
no he didn't.  he died of a fever.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 5, 2012)

177 pages in and I'm still not sure why she matters. Is anybody aware of her outside Britain's perpetually shrinking radical left milieu? And even if they were to somehow come across her, wouldn't they have forgotten her and her incoherent, juvenile politicking within minutes, if not seconds?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 5, 2012)

PJ O'Rourke.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 5, 2012)

Julie Burchill


----------



## Random (Nov 5, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> 177 pages in and I'm still not sure why she matters. Is anybody aware of her outside Britain's perpetually shrinking radical left milieu? And even if they were to somehow come across her, wouldn't they have forgotten her and her incoherent, juvenile politicking within minutes, if not seconds?


She's the most visible media effect of the "Occupy" wave of protests. Few have heard of her, but she's about as high-profile as the libertarian left gets these days. Plus she's interesting as she sums up a lot of things that are toxic about journalism, about self-appointed radical leaders, about the way private schooled protesters generally elbow their ways to the front.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 5, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> 177 pages in and I'm still not sure why she matters. Is anybody aware of her outside Britain's perpetually shrinking radical left milieu? And even if they were to somehow come across her, wouldn't they have forgotten her and her incoherent, juvenile politicking within minutes, if not seconds?


 
if you don';t know why it matters, you're clearly not going to understand why it does.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2012)

Don't reply to him ffs or we'll have pages and pages of this stuff.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 5, 2012)

Mikhail Gorbachev


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 5, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Julie Burchill


 
I honestly can't think of anyone more different from LP.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2012)

Joe Pearce


----------



## discokermit (Nov 5, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I'd have loved to do all that shit... working with people who can converse intelligently (My last job I was on a 12 hour shift for months with a Hungarian who told me back home his friday night entertainment was shooting Roma with his .22 rifle....)


this is a weird attitude. do you think only the middle class can converse intelligently?


----------



## Random (Nov 5, 2012)

discokermit said:


> this is a weird attitude. do you think only the middle class can converse intelligently?


Hanging out with the journos at the Independent would probably make you want to go in the rampage with a rifle eventually.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 5, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> if you don';t know why it matters, you're clearly not going to understand why it does.


 


As far as I can see, it only matters to a tiny minority of the tiny minority who are actually aware of her existence, most of whom post on here.

A serious point: is it really conceivable, in the kind of society we are stuck with, that some bright(ish) private school/graduate types won't occasionally try to carve out themselves nice careers in pseudo-radical journalism and the like?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 5, 2012)

Jimmy Savile


----------



## weepiper (Nov 5, 2012)

discokermit said:


> this is a weird attitude. do you think only the middle class can converse intelligently?


 
The dullest conversationalist I know is an uncle of mine who's a Rotarian Tory-voting house-owning retired businessman kirk elder.


----------



## rekil (Nov 5, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Who was the LP of previous generations? Of the 60s? Of the 30s? Of the C19th....
> 
> Did they even exist in the past?


Kevin Myers. 

There must have been swarms of the fuckers in 1968. _Warning: ambitious careerists may now be disguised as “progressives”_ and that.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 5, 2012)

discokermit said:


> this is a weird attitude. do you think only the middle class can converse intelligently?


 
It's revealing.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 5, 2012)

Recently graduated, but having to work with _those people_.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 5, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> no he didn't. he died of a fever.


oh yes - but he fought first. He was my age


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 5, 2012)

Random said:


> She's the most visible media effect of the "Occupy" wave of protests. Few have heard of her, but she's about as high-profile as the libertarian left gets these days. Plus she's interesting as she sums up a lot of things that are toxic about journalism, about self-appointed radical leaders, about the way private schooled protesters generally elbow their ways to the front.


 

And so? Most people, least of all the working class, are not the slightest bit interested in 'the libertarian left', or even aware of it.

All she's done is try to push her way to the front of a passing fad within a political ghetto that seems likely to more or less disappear at some point probably not that far away.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 5, 2012)

Didn't byron nob his sister?


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> oh yes - but he fought first. He was my age


 


It all started going downhill for him when he started hanging out with a bear.


----------



## discokermit (Nov 5, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Recently graduated, but having to work with _those people_.


exactly.

although it has reminded me of a hungarian i worked with. i asked him what his grandparents did in '56, "they ran away and hid".


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> oh yes - but he fought first. He was my age


He didn't actually do any fighting did he? He just employed proto-fascists on  his monarchist quest.


----------



## discokermit (Nov 5, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> Didn't byron nob his sister?


up the bum.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 5, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> Didn't byron nob his sister?


 


Didn't know he was on crack as well.

Edit: thought it said rob his sister.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 5, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> Didn't byron nob his sister?


he was an aristo - that goes with saying


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> There must have been swarms of the fuckers in 1968. _Warning: ambitious careerists may now be disguised as “progressives”_ and that.


 

It's perfectly possible to be both.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 5, 2012)

Misunderstood recluse hounded by gang of bourgeois vigilantes following conveyancing dispute.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Misunderstood recluse hounded by gang of bourgeois vigilantes following conveyancing dispute.


To kill a mocking bird


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 5, 2012)

Bugger. And nope.


----------



## rekil (Nov 5, 2012)

Dracula.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> Dracula.


Correct


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 5, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> As far as I can see, it only matters to a tiny minority of the tiny minority who are actually aware of her existence, most of whom post on here.


 
you think we're a tiny minority of a tiny minority of the left?  fucking hell lad, there's loads of tinier minorities who regard us as some sort of liberal elite


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 5, 2012)

" The other day, an old friend of mine, a black man who has spent his life trying to work things out for his people within the system, said to me’”—Felicia looks at the audience and sets up the clincher—_“‘“Roger, I’m going to get a gun. I can’t help it”’.”_

“That’s marrrrrrr-velous!” says Lenny. He says it with profound emotion . . . He sighs . . . He sinks back into the easy chair . . . Richard Harris . . . Ahura Mazda with the original flaming revelation . . .
Cox seizes the moment: “Our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton, has said if we can’t find a meaningful life . . . you know . . . maybe we can have a meaningful death . . . and one reason the power structure fears the Black Panthers is that they know the Black Panthers are ready to die for what they believe in, and a lot of us have already died.”
“. . .‘When you walk into this house, into this building’—Lenny gestures as if to take it all in—‘you must feel infuriated.’. . .”​Lenny seems like a changed man. He looks up at Cox and says, “When you walk into this house, into this building”—and he gestures vaguely as if to take it all in, the moldings, the sconces, the Roquefort morsels rolled in crushed nuts, the servants, the elevator attendant and the doorman downstairs in their white dickeys, the marble lobby, the brass struts on the marquee out front —“when you walk into this house, you must feel infuriated!”

Cox looks embarrassed. “No, man . . . I manage to overcome that . . . That’s a personal thing . . . I used to get very uptight about things like that, but—”
“Don’t you get bitter? Doesn’t that make you mad?”
“Noooo, man . . . That’s a personal thing . . . see . . . and I don’t get mad about that personally. I’m over that.”
“Well,” says Lenny,” it makes _me_ mad!”
And Cox stares at him, and the Plexiglas lowers over his eyes once more . . . These cats—if I wasn’t here to see it—
“This is a very paradoxical situation,” says Lenny. “Having this apartment makes this meeting possible, and if this apartment didn’t exist, you wouldn’t have it. And yet—well, it’s a very paradoxical situation.”

http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/index13.html


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 5, 2012)

weepiper said:


> The dullest conversationalist I know is an uncle of mine who's a Rotarian Tory-voting house-owning retired businessman kirk elder.


 
Rotary Club - the organisation for people who find Freemasonry scary (or are women).
As I recall, there's a former Class War bloke living in Thailand who's a Rotarian. Definitely a shift from the sublime to the ridiculous.


----------



## newbie (Nov 5, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Jerry Rubin.


hmm, doubtful.  Whatever he did afterwards, during the years of his notoriety he stirred things up massively.  When the no-mark this thread is concentrating on organises something like kettling (& failing to levitate) the Pentagon or comes out of a demonstration charged with conspiracy/incitement to riot I'll think there may be a comparison to be made.

I've still never noticed her outside the context of this thread.


----------



## Random (Nov 5, 2012)

newbie said:


> I've still never noticed her outside the context of this thread.


 I read Twitter quote a lot, and several people I follow have cited her uncritically. From Swedish anarcholefties, to (I think) William Gibson


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2012)

newbie said:


> I've still never noticed her outside the context of this thread.


 
I have. I've noticed her in the independent, the guardian, the new statesman, the morning star, newsnight, channel 4 news etc


----------



## cesare (Nov 5, 2012)

Prada-Meinhof and keffiyeh wearing.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 5, 2012)

We are all heinze bollah


----------



## newbie (Nov 5, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I have. I've noticed her in the independent, the guardian, the new statesman, the morning star, newsnight, channel 4 news etc


you spend far more time than I do consuming that stuff. 


Which is my point about Rubin.  In his day he was a notorious rabble rouser, a household name, here as well as in the US. She writes stuff for a tiny audience, is an occasional talking head and (like many others) has a twitter following.  His impact was discernable, hers is vanishingly small.

So far


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2012)

newbie said:


> you spend far more time than I do consuming that stuff.
> 
> 
> Which is my point about Rubin. In his day he was a notorious rabble rouser, a household name, here as well as in the US. She writes stuff for a tiny audience, is an occasional talking head and (like many others) has a twitter following. His impact was discernable, hers is vanishingly small.
> ...


I wasn't making any sort of point about Rubin, and i agree his impact was bigger (but we're not just talking about impact here, as if she made an impact it would somehow make her and the shit behind her ok). My point was that _she is mainstream, you might not be._


----------



## Random (Nov 5, 2012)

newbie said:


> you spend far more time than I do consuming that stuff.
> 
> 
> Which is my point about Rubin.  In his day he was a notorious rabble rouser, a household name, here as well as in the US. She writes stuff for a tiny audience, is an occasional talking head and (like many others) has a twitter following.  His impact was discernable, hers is vanishingly small.
> ...


The Yippies were cultural and political activists, not just commentators.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 5, 2012)

discokermit said:


> this is a weird attitude. do you think only the middle class can converse intelligently?


 
No of course I don't. Just had few bad experiences working in really dead end jobs alongside some really bad dickheads.

Don't tell me you haven't been in the same position at some points in your life too?


----------



## love detective (Nov 5, 2012)

because you never get really bad dickheads amongst the middle class?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 5, 2012)

A better sort of dickhead.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 5, 2012)

love detective said:


> because you never get really bad dickheads amongst the middle class?


 
Blatantly, only that's a problem I've not been running into in my last few jobs. When it is, I'll have a good whinge about it too, for balance.


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 5, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> PJ O'Rourke.


 
I found him very amusing


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 5, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Julie Burchill


 
nearest I can think of.


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 5, 2012)

discokermit said:


> this is a weird attitude. do you think only the middle class can converse intelligently?


 
To be fair not a month goes by without me thinking I must spend more time in a trendier part of Manchester with the middle classes.


----------



## binka (Nov 5, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> To be fair not a month goes by without me thinking I must spend more time in a trendier part of Manchester with the middle classes.


pm sent


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 5, 2012)

love detective said:


> because you never get really bad dickheads amongst the middle class?


 


Yes-they're called students.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 5, 2012)

Clive James


----------



## love detective (Nov 5, 2012)

she's compiled a list of the 'best' reporting on hurricane sandy and included her own shitty piece amongst them!

(also every single one of them about new york)


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 5, 2012)

Lady Modesty weeps


----------



## love detective (Nov 5, 2012)

and now after a few people pointing out she's ignored the rest of the caribbean, she's asked people for links to news articles on those places and immediately put them up in her list of 'best' reporting

journalism


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 5, 2012)

Churnalism with an expense account. Burnout that is basically jet lag.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2012)

love detective said:


> and now after a few people pointing out she's ignored the rest of the caribbean, she's asked people for links to news articles on those places and immediately put them up in her list of 'best' reporting
> 
> journalism


naked


----------



## framed (Nov 5, 2012)

Balbi said:


> She's only a little bit communist.


 
Donny and Marie eat yer heart out!

_"I'm little bit country, she's a little bit communist..."_


----------



## discokermit (Nov 5, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> No of course I don't. Just had few bad experiences working in really dead end jobs alongside some really bad dickheads.
> 
> Don't tell me you haven't been in the same position at some points in your life too?


not really. i've had lots of shit jobs but usually get on well with those i work with. most of them have got interesting stories to tell.

i used to know a journalist, he was a bad dickhead.


----------



## rekil (Nov 5, 2012)

Is this sovietpop the one that posts here?  Or used to?


*sovietpop* ‏@*sovietpop*
@*PennyRed* I'm an Irish anarchist - we'd love to invite you to Dublin next year to speak the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair. Should we email you?


----------



## love detective (Nov 5, 2012)

yep, mental


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> *sovietpop* ‏@*sovietpop*
> @*PennyRed* I'm an Irish anarchist - we'd love to invite you to Dublin next year to speak the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair. Should we email you?


IT'S A TRAP


----------



## rekil (Nov 5, 2012)

Ah-maze-ing. As Craig from strictly would say.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> Is this sovietpop the one that posts here? Or used to?
> 
> 
> *sovietpop* ‏@*sovietpop*
> @*PennyRed* I'm an Irish anarchist - we'd love to invite you to Dublin next year to speak the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair. Should we email you?


Now, you shouldn't aiface


----------



## weepiper (Nov 5, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Unless fate intervenes, will be in Rockaways tomorrow helping run a food truck. Pity the poor storm victims who will experience my cooking.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Going to have to call up all my expertise from making hangover breakfasts for large theatre groups in Edinburgh. #eggznbacon


 
surely to god this has to be trolling


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2012)

_Unless fate intervenes, again and again and again_


----------



## rekil (Nov 5, 2012)

> Volunteerism, of course, can be regressive as well as radical. I am reminded of those “broom armies” in London in the middle of the August riots last year, the sea of white, middle-class faced holding up brooms they’d brought to unfamiliar areas of the city, the sweet intention to mop up after a disaster tempered by the idea that the kids from deprived areas who came out to fight the police could just be swept away like so much filth. Like any desperate human impulse, volunteerism can easily be coopted, twisted into something violent, calcifying.


That's ah-maze-ing too.


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> Is this sovietpop the one that posts here? Or used to?


 
Not since the Darlington WSM disaffiliated taking the cream of the platformist tradition on the mainland with them


----------



## rekil (Nov 6, 2012)

newbie said:


> I've still never noticed her outside the context of this thread.


The Telegraph has her at number 55 on their "influential lefties" list. Ahead of Galloway, Tatchell, Alistair Campbell, Caroline Lucas, Monbiot etc, because she _"is without doubt the loudest and most controversial female voice on the radical left, gaining notoriety when she joined student protestors in Millbank Tower, the home of CCHQ, and tweeted live from within the kettle."_


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 6, 2012)

weepiper said:


> surely to god this has to be trolling


 

If she was really ripping it she would be bringing take-out boxes from Firebox, fried locusts to the needy.


----------



## newbie (Nov 6, 2012)

copliker said:


> The Telegraph has her at number 55 on their "influential lefties" list. Ahead of Galloway, Tatchell, Alistair Campbell, Caroline Lucas, Monbiot etc, because she _"is without doubt the loudest and most controversial female voice on the radical left, gaining notoriety when she joined student protestors in Millbank Tower, the home of CCHQ, and tweeted live from within the kettle."_


goodness is she?  well I've obviously missed the zeitgeist.

I'm off to find out who the top fifty lefties are that consign Ali Campbell to such a lowly ranking


----------



## newbie (Nov 6, 2012)

Oh, Milliband. Silly me.


----------



## rekil (Nov 6, 2012)

newbie said:


> I'm off to find out who the top fifty lefties are that consign Ali Campbell to such a lowly ranking


He didn't tweet live from within the kettle you see. Schoolboy error.


----------



## discokermit (Nov 6, 2012)

newbie said:


> I'm off to find out who the top fifty lefties are that consign Ali Campbell to such a lowly ranking


did it give you food for thought?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> not really. i've had lots of shit jobs but usually get on well with those i work with. most of them have got interesting stories to tell.
> 
> i used to know a journalist, he was a bad dickhead.


 
You're reading into it something that isn't there. I've worked with middle-class people and the exact same frustration applied there too. Plenty of cretinous vapid people work in middle-class jobs. I wasn't making a point about class, it was you who assumed on my behalf that "the ability to hold a converation = middle class" coz that's not something I said, or even implied. I just would like to work in _any_ job where you can have a decent conversation with your workmates, coz the last few jobs I've had that's been in really short supply. And I'm well entitled to have whinge about it as well.

I know one or two journalists also. They barely qualify as middle-class as it happens, at least going on how much they earn. Not every journalist earns what Laurie Penny earns, not these days anyway.

I am slowly turning into Roland off Paul Calf's video diaries though I freely admit it.


----------



## imposs1904 (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> did it give you food for thought?


 
only one in ten board members will get that reference.


----------



## love detective (Nov 6, 2012)

Penny said:
			
		

> Teenage kids of color from Brooklyn. Passionate, inspiring


 
look at them all


----------



## articul8 (Nov 6, 2012)

sounds like a Benetton ad


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 6, 2012)

sound like an E4  remake of the Lindsey German Diaries


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

laura said:
			
		

> Teenage kids of color from Brooklyn. Passionate, inspiring


 









> I wear scarves because I hate jackets. With my outfits I can go into a crack den in the morning, then to an expensive dinner at night. The kids like my scarves so they're always disappearing. They sleep with them sometimes. I often have to send word out that I've run out of scarves!


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

Oh fantastic, what were these Teenage kids of color from Brooklyn. Passionate, inspiring - up to that inspired such passion and admiration from Laura? 



> they were behind me in the coffee shop.


----------



## Ole (Nov 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Oh fantastic, what were these Teenage kids of color from Brooklyn. Passionate, inspiring - up to that inspired such passion and admiration from Laura?
> 
> 
> > they were behind me in the coffee shop.​


​Is that real? 

A million miles beyond parody.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

Ole said:


> ​Is that real?
> 
> A million miles beyond parody.


Yep - in full:



> When I say 'stumbled across', I mean 'they were behind me in the coffee shop'. Teenage kids of color from Brooklyn. Passionate, inspiring.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 6, 2012)

american spelling as well


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 6, 2012)

jesus wept.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 6, 2012)

its a funhouse mirror version of met a black man


----------



## discokermit (Nov 6, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> You're reading into it something that isn't there. I've worked with middle-class people and the exact same frustration applied there too. Plenty of cretinous vapid people work in middle-class jobs. I wasn't making a point about class, it was you who assumed on my behalf that "the ability to hold a converation = middle class" coz that's not something I said, or even implied. I just would like to work in _any_ job where you can have a decent conversation with your workmates, coz the last few jobs I've had that's been in really short supply. And I'm well entitled to have whinge about it as well.
> 
> I know one or two journalists also. They barely qualify as middle-class as it happens, at least going on how much they earn. Not every journalist earns what Laurie Penny earns, not these days anyway.
> 
> I am slowly turning into Roland off Paul Calf's video diaries though I freely admit it.


you callin my car a queer?


----------



## the button (Nov 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


>


What a cunt she is.

(That is all )


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> you callin my car a queer?


I saw that - you had the bit where he was talking to John hanna


----------



## the button (Nov 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


>


Lest we forget....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/26/asa-kids-company


----------



## discokermit (Nov 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I saw that - you had the bit where he was talking to John hanna


oh bollocks. i got my characters mixed up. had to watch it again.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

love detective said:


> look at them all


 

When you use the terms 'passionate' or 'inspiring,' you're only one step away from saying 'going forward', and then all hope really is lost.

I bet when she goes to a cafe she says 'Can I get a coffee?'

And this is the person you're all taking seriously.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 6, 2012)

I'm just laughing tbf. In a really serious way, obvs.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

copliker said:


> The Telegraph has her at number 55 on their "influential lefties" list.


 

Definitive proof that the UK left exists only in the minds of right wing and left wing anoraks.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> I'm just laughing tbf. In a really serious way, obvs.


 


It really isn't funny. When older people started mimicking their stupid children and saying, 'Can I get...?,' instead of 'Can I have...?,' it became obvious that Spengler had been right all along.

Some people did issue warnings when everybody started ending statements with a questioning intonation.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> When you use the terms 'passionate' or 'inspiring,' you're only one step away from saying 'going forward', and then all hope really is lost.
> 
> I bet when she goes to a cafe she says 'Can I get a coffee?'
> 
> And this is the person you're all taking seriously.


twat.
saying 'can i get a coffee' betrays nothing of a person's qualities


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> It really isn't funny. When older people started mimicking their stupid children and saying, 'Can I get...?,' instead of 'Can I have...?,' it became obvious that Spengler had been right all along.
> 
> Some people did issue warnings when everybody started ending statements with a questioning intonation.


nobber


----------



## Frances Lengel (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> twat.
> saying 'can i get a coffee' betrays nothing of a person's qualities


 
Yes it does. To say "Can I get..." is to relinquish any claim to be treated with anything other than contempt.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> twat.
> saying 'can i get a coffee' betrays nothing of a person's qualities


 


'Can a get...(anything)', when you mean 'Can I have...' betrays the personality of a twat.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

_Can you get to fuck, why yes sir/madam you can._


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Yes it does. To say "Can I get..." is to relinquish any claim to be treated with anything other than contempt.


 

Orang's just sore because he's realised that it's what he says.

People are so impressionable.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> 'Can a get...(anything)', when you mean 'Can I have...' betrays the personality of a twat.


does it fuck. objecting to it does.


----------



## cesare (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> twat.
> saying 'can i get a coffee' betrays nothing of a person's qualities


"Can I get" invites the response "no. Tell me what you want and I'll get it for you". Or "Go on then, the coffee machine's over there, help yourself". Either way, they look a fool.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Orang's just sore because he's realised that it's what he says.
> 
> People are so impressionable.


I may say it occasionally, but not habitually. there is nothing wrong with it


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> does it fuck. objecting to it does.


 

And he's genuinely annoyed about it.


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

I say "can I get all" the time.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

cesare said:


> "Can I get" invites the response "no. Tell me what you want and I'll get it for you". Or "Go on then, the coffee machine's over there, help yourself". Either way, they look a fool.


not really.
you are getting the coffee from the person serving you.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> I may say it occasionally, but not habitually. there is nothing wrong with it


 


How old are you?


----------



## cesare (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> not really.
> you are getting the coffee from the person serving you.


If I was serving you, and you said "can I get a <whatever>" I would reply "no sir, I'll get it for you"


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

TruXta said:


> I say "can I get all" the time.


 

Like I said, impressionable.

Where have all the individuals gone?


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> And he's genuinely annoyed about it.


aye, ya wanker


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

cesare said:


> If I was serving you, and you said "can I get a <whatever>" I would reply "no sir, I'll get it for you"


then people would think you were a twat


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Like I said, impressionable.
> 
> Where have all the individuals gone?


 
WTF are you on about?


----------



## cesare (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> then people would think you were a twat


Only people like you


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang, do you got into other peoples houses and open their fridge without asking if you can?


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Like I said, impressionable.
> 
> Where have all the individuals gone?


fuck off lletsa. you're the sheep.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Orang, do you got into other peoples houses and open their fridge without asking if you can?


no. why?


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

cesare said:


> If I was serving you, and you said "can I get a <whatever>" I would reply "no sir, I'll get it for you"


 


Yes-'Can I get' implies them coming round the counter and serving themselves. Which, of course, is not usually allowed. Unfortunately, most cafe and bar staff let it go because it's what they say, or, if they're older, it's what they've picked up from their dimbo kids.

The twattishness of modern life increases by the day. Somebody ought to do something.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> no. why?


This _can i get_ stuff is on a par with that. US sitcom stuff. Busy people with phones to their ears _getting stuff._


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> no. why?


 

You ought to, if you want to be consistent.


----------



## discokermit (Nov 6, 2012)

cesare said:


> If I was serving you, and you said "can I get a <whatever>" I would reply "no sir, I'll get it for you"


after serving, has he got a coffee? yes or no?


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> This _can i get_ stuff is on a par with that. US sitcom stuff. Busy people with phones to their ears _getting stuff._


it means the same as 'can i have' these days. get used to it!


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 6, 2012)

I'll have always seemed a bit rude. Oh will you now?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 6, 2012)

if i am not sure if i say _can i get_ or not, does that mean i probably do?  i mean, i'm pretty sure i don't, and am not sure that i can get myself bothered over it, but i still wouldn't like another thing to worry about being judged on.  eek.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> after serving, has he got a coffee? yes or no?


yeah, he went to the counter to get a coffee


----------



## Frances Lengel (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> after serving, has he got a coffee? yes or no?


 
He _has _a coffee, but he hasn't got it himself.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> if i am not sure if i say _can i get_ or not, does that mean i probably do? i mean, i'm pretty sure i don't, and am not sure that i can get myself bothered over it, but i still wouldn't like another thing to worry about being judged on. eek.


it doesn't fucking matter at all. it would only matter if people didn't understand what you were talking about.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> He _has _a coffee, but he hasn't got it himself.


he's gotten (  ) it off someone else


----------



## rekil (Nov 6, 2012)

cesare said:


> If I was serving you, and you said "can I get a <whatever>" I would reply "no sir, I'll get it for you"


Then I'd say 'No need for the sir/madam nonsense. We're all comrades here. This. <gestures panoramically> Is Firebox.'


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Definitive proof that the UK left exists only in the minds of right wing and left wing anoraks.


 
god you're dull.  dull dull dull dull dull.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

They'll be drinking coffee outside and giving kiddies wine before too long.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> it means the same as 'can i have' these days. get used to it!


 

Just because people accept it as such, it doesn't actually mean that it does. The infantilisation of society continues apace.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> How old are you?


39


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 6, 2012)

talking of firebox, Orangs had too many Agitators and is kicking off


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> yeah, he went to the counter to get a coffee


To get someone else to get him/her a coffee. The proper thing is _can i get get a coffee._


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Just because people accept it as such, it doesn't actually mean that it does.


yes it does. that's how language works.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> it doesn't fucking matter at all. it would only matter if people didn't understand what you were talking about.


 
yeah, but going into a shop and saying "give me a cunting coffee you snot-faced bled shitbox" would also be a comprehensible request for a coffee, but not a reasonable one.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> after serving, has he got a coffee? yes or no?


 


No, 'cos the right thinking staff member has seen the light and fucking thrown it over him. (Although he has indeed then 'got' it-and in the most fitting way.)


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

I didn't know lefties were linguistic prescriptivists.


----------



## cesare (Nov 6, 2012)

copliker said:


> Then I'd say 'No need for the sir/madam nonsense. We're all comrades here. This. <gestures panoramically> Is Firebox.'


And I would say "In that case comrade, of course you may have a molotov mocktail. Where would you like it?"


----------



## weepiper (Nov 6, 2012)

TruXta said:


> I didn't know lefties were linguistic prescriptivists.


 
have you been here long?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> yes it does. that's how language works.


Get out of london, quick!


----------



## Frances Lengel (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> yes it does. that's how language works.


 
It doesn't matter how language evolves, saying "Can I get..." is for wankers. You seem an ok guy so for your own good cease the practice forthwith.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> fuck off lletsa. you're the sheep.


 
oh, that's why they're so fucking dull.


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

weepiper said:


> have you been here long?


Not long enough clearly. Oh, depends you where you mean by here?


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> yes it does. that's how language works.


 


What-it works by people mimicking crap actors from bad foreign sitcoms and soaps?


----------



## discokermit (Nov 6, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> He _has _a coffee, but he hasn't got it himself.


he's got a coffee. for fucksake.

people who moan about americanisms just make themselves look like wankers. i talk like i'm from the seventeenth century and where has it got me?


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> he's got a coffee. for fucksake.
> 
> people who moan about americanisms just make themselves look like wankers. i talk like i'm from the seventeenth century and where has it got me?


Into the People's Jag?


----------



## weepiper (Nov 6, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Not long enough clearly. Oh, depends you where you mean by here?


 
Urban. We like nothing better than a row about the correct way to say things.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 6, 2012)

TruXta said:


> I didn't know lefties were linguistic prescriptivists.


 
appropriate language is teh foundation of theory.


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

weepiper said:


> Urban. We like nothing better than a row about the correct way to say things.


I know I know. People's boredom knows no ends.


el-ahrairah said:


> appropriate language is teh foundation of theory.


I see what you did there.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> he's got a coffee. for fucksake.
> 
> people who moan about americanisms just make themselves look like wankers. i talk like i'm from the seventeenth century and where has it got me?


 
It's not so much that it's an Americanism, more that its a wankerism.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 6, 2012)

We need david starkeys take on this thorny issue


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> he's got a coffee. for fucksake.
> 
> people who moan about americanisms just make themselves look like wankers. i talk like i'm from the seventeenth century and where has it got me?


 
boringly, some linguists believe that americans talk more like the seventeeth century english than the english do.


----------



## rekil (Nov 6, 2012)

cesare said:


> And I would say "In that case comrade, of course you may have a molotov mocktail. Where would you like it?"


Outside at table number bolivian neighbourhood assembly, whatever the one with the hookah pipe is called. And can you get a fucking move on.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> It's not so much that it's an Americanism, more that its a wankerism.


 


Surely lots of Yanks hate this crap as well.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> We need david starkeys take on this thorny issue


David has a house in the US so can probably slip between the demotic. Laurie will charge you 5 grand for doing so.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> yeah, but going into a shop and saying "give me a cunting coffee you snot-faced bled shitbox" would also be a comprehensible request for a coffee, but not a reasonable one.


sure, but it's not rude to ask if you can get a coffee!


----------



## cesare (Nov 6, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> It's not so much that it's an Americanism, more that its a wankerism.


Which is how it arose on this LP thread. Cos she said it or was likely to say it. OU is merely setting out to prove the point.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> boringly, some linguists believe that americans talk more like the seventeeth century english than the english do.


West country english at that - best in the world.


----------



## discokermit (Nov 6, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Into the People's Jag?


it's not the peoples, it's mine. the people can fuck off.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> oh, that's why they're so fucking dull.


it was immediately obvious. people cannot hide the bees in their bonnets.


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> it's not the peoples, it's mine. the people can fuck off.


Against the wall, mate.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> sure, but it's not rude to ask if you can get a coffee!


 


Not rude, just plain wrong (in all senses).


----------



## Frances Lengel (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> sure, but it's not rude to ask if you can get a coffee!


 
It's not rude, but it is for twats - Honestly, don't do it.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Not rude, just plain wrong (in all senses).


there is nothing wrong with it at all. buy a new dictionary.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> It's not rude, but it is for twats - Honestly, don't do it.


i usually say something else, but 'can i get' does come naturally sometimes. nowt wrong with it.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

Try to train yourself out of it Orang. And anybody else out there who's constantly involved in making Britain a worse, more twattish place by doing it.

Let's leave it for those with their hair going in all different directions. And wearing those weird jeans with baggy, kind of twisted arses and drainpipe legs.


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

Fuck off LLETSA.


----------



## cesare (Nov 6, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> It's not rude, but it is for twats - Honestly, don't do it.


It's cringey.


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

cesare said:


> It's cringey.


You're just getting old and grumpy.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Try to train yourself out of it Orang. And anybody else out there who's constantly involved in making Britain a worse, more twattish place by doing it.
> 
> Let's leave it for those with their hair going in all different directions. And wearing those weird jeans with baggy, kind of twisted arses and drainpipe legs.


pure LLETSA


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

TruXta said:


> You're just getting old and grumpy.


yup


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 6, 2012)

SHIT! So sorry!


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

I think proletarian democracy's agony aunt might well have some sage words on this question. Not the one above. Stop being silly delroy.


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I think proletarian democracy's agony aunt might well have some sage words on this question. Not the one above. Stop being silly delroy.


I thought she was busy, does she have the thyme?


----------



## cesare (Nov 6, 2012)

Oh. Delroy. Sort it out.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Nov 6, 2012)

Given that the meaning of 'to get' includes to receive/come into the possession of something it makes sense that in a shop/cafe _'Can I get a....... ?'_ is asked.

It's not rude. It's grammatically correct too. This argument is only happening because of the 'snobbery/tribalism' that exists about using expressions/question forms that are more in common usage in the US as opposed to the UK.


----------



## Random (Nov 6, 2012)

Can I get a witness!


----------



## cesare (Nov 6, 2012)

Can I get a vast expanse of copy and paste with that?


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 6, 2012)

LOL delroy


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

Rutita1 said:


> Given that the definition of to get includes to receive/come into the possession of something it makes sense that in a shop/cafe _'Can I get a....... ?'_ is asked.
> 
> It's not rude. It's grammatically correct too. This argument is only happening because of the 'snobbery/tribalism' that exists about using expressions/question forms that are more in common usage in the US as opposed to the UK.


No link?


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

Rutita1 said:


> Given that the definition of to get includes to receive/come into the possession of something it makes sense that in a shop/cafe _'Can I get a....... ?'_ is asked.
> 
> It's not rude. It's grammatically correct too. This argument is only happening because of the 'snobbery/tribalism' that exists about using expressions/question forms that are more in common usage in the US as opposed to the UK.


 


It isn't-as has already been proved, it's part of the dividing line between twats/not twats.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

Rutita1 said:


> Given that the definition of to get includes to receive/come into the possession of something it makes sense that in a shop/cafe _'Can I get a....... ?'_ is asked.
> 
> It's not rude. It's grammatically correct too. This argument is only happening because of the 'snobbery/tribalism' that exists about using expressions/question forms that are more in common usage in the US as opposed to the UK.


Odd how preferences are shoveled into snobberies in this view.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 6, 2012)

Laura needs to say something stupid on twitter rapidly or else this sidetrack is going to bang on for ages


----------



## discokermit (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> It isn't-as has already been proved, it's part of the dividing line between twats/not twats.


obviously not, as you're a twat and some of those agreeing with you aren't twats, they're just making themselves look like twats.


----------



## rekil (Nov 6, 2012)

As long as it's not something about tattoos.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

I couldn't find a single thing by her about unions the other day. Nothing.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Nov 6, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> Laura needs to say something stupid on twitter rapidly or else this sidetrack is going to bang on for ages


 
She's doing her bit.



> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Dear Americans: I understand why some of you don't want to vote. But on behalf of those to whom the outcome matters who can't, please do.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

Rutita1 said:


> She's doing her bit.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Rock hard anarchism.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 6, 2012)

Delroy.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Fuck off LLETSA.


 

Tranlation: 'I (TruXta) have my hair going in all different directions and wear coloured jeans with a twisted baggy arse and drainpipe legs.'


----------



## rekil (Nov 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I couldn't find a single thing by her about unions the other day. Nothing.


Anything about the Kiel mutiny anniversary?


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Tranlation: 'I (TruXta) have my hair going in all different directions and wear coloured jeans with a twisted baggy arse and drainpipe legs.'


Do your trousers not have any colour then? Don't tell me, you wear white linen ones.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Tranlation: 'I (TruXta) have my hair going in all different directions and wear coloured jeans with a twisted baggy arse and drainpipe legs.'


 
Just a nose piercing and a silly hat.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

copliker said:


> As long as it's not something about tattoos.


 


Tattoos (as worn nowadays, even by grannies and toddlers) play their own unique but related part in western decline.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

copliker said:


> Anything about the Kiel mutiny anniversary?


She didn't even comment on the PD expulsion from firebox for its radical commemoration - again.


----------



## rekil (Nov 6, 2012)

Ah no.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Do your trousers not have any colour then? Don't tell me, you wear white linen ones.


 


Coloured as in rust-orange, green or red is what I meant.


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Just a nose piercing and a silly hat.


 
I know. /off to kill myself.


----------



## discokermit (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Tranlation: 'I (TruXta) have my hair going in all different directions and wear coloured jeans with a twisted baggy arse and drainpipe legs.'


translation: 'i (lletsa) cut my hair with one of those comb/razor contraptions i bought out of the paper and wear beige grandad trousers with an elasticated waist.'


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Coloured as in rust-orange, green or red is what I meant.


 
You wear red trousers? Off with your prick.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 6, 2012)

TruXta said:


> I know. /off to kill myself.


 
I've got a nose piercing too, but use a more discreet stud these days.


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> I've got a nose piercing too, but use a more discreet stud these days.


If I need discretion I just remove it all together. It comes off quite easily, also a plus when playing footie.


----------



## rekil (Nov 6, 2012)

At least delroy's cockman is off the page.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> translation: 'i (lletsa) cut my hair with one of those comb/razor contraptions i bought out of the paper and wear beige grandad trousers with an elasticated waist.'


 


I actually look about 29, but like 29 year-olds used to before people became clones of media clones.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

TruXta said:


> You wear red trousers? Off with your prick.


 

Not me, you fool-you.


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Not me, you fool-you.


In that case the answer is no. My trousers are generally blue or black.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

TruXta said:


> In that case the answer is no. My trousers are generally blue or black.


Why?


----------



## discokermit (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> I actually look about 29, but like 29 year-olds used to before people became clones of media clones.


knee breeches and a macaroni hat?


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 6, 2012)

copliker said:


> At least delroy's cockman is off the page.


 

I think the thing up the gentlemns rusty sherriffs badge is called a drilldo.


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Why?


I dunno. I just don't feel right in blue or green trousers. I've had the odd brown ones. Why? Don't tell me you're a white linen man.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 6, 2012)

TruXta said:


> If I need discretion I just remove it all together. It comes off quite easily, also a plus when playing footie.


 
I've got little ball stud thing on a wire.  Wear it all the time and looks good (the other Hurrah likes it anyway).   Didn't want something too big like I used to wear.  

LLETSA will disagree.


----------



## rekil (Nov 6, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> I think the thing up the gentlemns rusty sherriffs badge is called a drilldo.


It appears to come with a lletsa attachment.


----------



## Random (Nov 6, 2012)

Isn't it inevitable, in a time of working class defeat, that people become obsessed with apolitical cultural markers, like personal appearance and trouser colour? Given that there's no clear-cut political alternative it's hardly surprising.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> knee breeches and a macaroni hat?


 


Is this what people looked like round your way before they became clones of media clones? No wonder you say you speak like somebody from four hundred years ago.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

Random said:


> Isn't it inevitable, in a time of working class defeat, that people become obsessed with apolitical cultural markers, like personal appearance and trouser colour? Given that there's no clear-cut political alternative it's hardly surprising.


 


This is political as it gets. Can you imagine a revolution led by people with their hair going in different directions and their trouser arses facing the wrong way?


----------



## Random (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> This is political as it gets. Can you imagine a revolution led by people with their hair going in different directions and their trouser arses facing the wrong way?


Isn't it inevitable, given the modern mass-produced clothing industry, that at many revolutionaries will end up looking like freaks, or fashion victims?


----------



## rekil (Nov 6, 2012)




----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

Random said:


> Isn't it inevitable, in a time of working class defeat, that people become obsessed with apolitical cultural markers, like personal appearance and trouser colour? Given that there's no clear-cut political alternative it's hardly surprising.


What's the correct workers' attire look like these days then?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

> Dear Americans: I understand why some of you don't want to vote. But on behalf of those to whom the outcome matters who can't, please do.


 
All amercians vote Obama. All Americans that this journo has ever met anyway. The outcome is both key and irrelevant in this post. At least there's no demand to vote lib-dem this time.


----------



## discokermit (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Is this what people looked like round your way before they became clones of media clones? No wonder you say you speak like somebody from four hundred years ago.


pre beau brummell, yeh. or was the media invented ten years ago?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

TruXta said:


> What's the correct workers' attire look like these days then?


 
Keep up


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

Random said:


> Isn't it inevitable, given the modern mass-produced clothing industry, that at many revolutionaries will end up looking like freaks, or fashion victims?


 


That's because the revolutionaries don't realise they've been bought and repackaged by capitalism.


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Keep up


Phwoar.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

copliker said:


>


 


Looking daft was still subversive then. Now it's just big business.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 6, 2012)

So sorry. I went to the shop straight after posting it up, didn't even realise what it was til I checked on my phone and saw _that._ It came up as intended on mine!


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> pre beau brummell, yeh. or was the media invented ten years ago?


 

No-that was when everybody became a clone of a media clone.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> So sorry. I went to the shop straight after posting it up, didn't even realise what it was til I checked on my phone and saw _that._ It came up as intended on mine!


You look at some porn to get you in the mood before going to the shops? wtf?


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> You look at some porn to get you in the mood before going to the shops? wtf?


He didn't say what kinda shops he went to did he?


----------



## discokermit (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> That's because the revolutionaries don't realise they've been bought and repackaged by capitalism.


unlike you. you're so clever and classless and free.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 6, 2012)

got to g yourself up to reach upwards to the top shelf for those european three in one hardcore mags with the free dvd


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Nov 6, 2012)

Owen Jones's mate Ellie is also over in the states persuading people to vote for Obama and also suffering from that horrible jet lag thingy: https://twitter.com/MissEllieMae 

Pearls of wisdom include:
 - Most people here are sick of the election.
 -  they're giving out free souvenir footballs! (at a Romney rally)
 - The thing I'm finding hardest is jet lag. Wake up before 7am without fail. Start flagging by about 9pm. I feel about 80.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> unlike you. you're so clever and classless and free.


 

No chains around my feet but I'm not free...


----------



## discokermit (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> No-that was when everybody became a clone of a media clone.


"From the mid 1790s, Beau Brummell was the early incarnation of "the celebrity", a man chiefly famous for _being_ famous—in his case, as a laconically witty clothes-horse."


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> "From the mid 1790s, Beau Brummell was the early incarnation of "the celebrity", a man chiefly famous for _being_ famous—in his case, as a laconically witty clothes-horse."


 


Maybe-but they weren't dressing, walking and talking like him in Wolverhampton. Generally. You had to wait for Slade for that.


----------



## discokermit (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Maybe-but they weren't dressing, walking and talking like him in Wolverhampton. Generally. You had to wait for Slade for that.


we were sans cullottes before he was. he copied us. i only tell you this cuz i luv you.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> It really isn't funny. When older people started mimicking their stupid children and saying, 'Can I get...?,' instead of 'Can I have...?,' it became obvious that Spengler had been right all along.
> 
> Some people did issue warnings when everybody started ending statements with a questioning intonation.


 
When *anyone* says "it became obvious that Spengler had been right all along", it becomes obvious that their mind is disintegrating.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 6, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> twat.
> saying 'can i get a coffee' betrays nothing of a person's qualities


 
You're right. It portrays their lack of the quality known as courtesy.


----------



## Random (Nov 6, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> When *anyone* says "it became obvious that Spengler had been right all along", it becomes obvious that their mind is disintegrating.


Isn't it obvious that on a board like this mental disintegration is inevitable, given the overwhelming media propaganda that we are bombarded with?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 6, 2012)

TruXta said:


> I say "can I get all" the time.


 
You're a furriner though, so you're excused.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> When *anyone* says "it became obvious that Spengler had been right all along", it becomes obvious that their mind is disintegrating.


 

All I'm saying is that the sheer twattishness laid before us at every waking moment indicates that the Decline of the West may well be underway.


----------



## TruXta (Nov 6, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> You're a furriner though, so you're excused.


It's been a while since I had a shave, true.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 6, 2012)

Random said:


> Isn't it obvious that on a board like this mental disintegration is inevitable, given the overwhelming media propaganda that we are bombarded with?


 
You forgot to add a <LLETSA>.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

Great, a lively freewheeling thread is now this bollocks again.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 6, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> West country english at that - best in the world.


 
as a speaker of estuary english, i dispute that severely.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 6, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Just a nose piercing and a silly hat.


 
did someone call me?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 6, 2012)

TruXta said:


> What's the correct workers' attire look like these days then?


 
Darling, I know this little boutique in the Villaaage that sells original donkey jackets and genuine 1970s dustman trousers.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 6, 2012)

discokermit said:


> unlike you. you're so clever and classless and free.


 
and advertising doesn't work on him.  just like laura, his look is his own, unfettered by any influence, except of course, not being one of _THEM_.


----------



## Random (Nov 6, 2012)

OK, we all stop talking about this starting ....

NOW


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

Laura said:
			
		

> It's important that americans do what i want


 



			
				Claire said:
			
		

> I'm in control


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> You're right. It portrays their lack of the quality known as courtesy.


That's not true. People say it courteously.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

Stop it, ffs.


----------



## rekil (Nov 6, 2012)

*Nick Cohen* ‏@*NickCohen4*
@*PennyRed* FFS


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 6, 2012)

The worlds leading anarchist on why bourgeois democracy is important dammit.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 6, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> and advertising doesn't work on him. just like laura, his look is his own, unfettered by any influence, except of course, not being one of _THEM_.


 


Look, just because you might be a clone, it doesn't mean everybody is-nor that everybody who isn't is like Penny Laura. Just try waking up in the morning and thinking 'Don't be a clone today!' Although it seems it may be already too late.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 6, 2012)

Random said:


> OK, we all stop talking about this starting ....
> 
> NOW


Aw, this thread was getting boring. This has been fun.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 6, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Look, just because you might be a clone, it doesn't mean everybody is-nor that everybody who isn't is like Penny Laura. Just try waking up in the morning and thinking 'Don't be a clone today!' Although it seems it may be already too late.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Nov 6, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> as a speaker of estuary english, i dispute that severely.


 
Estuary and West Country have to be serious contenders for the title of worst accents in the UK. Bradford's probably my favourite.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 6, 2012)

that's your name in the book, sunshine.


----------



## weepiper (Nov 6, 2012)

She's just cleaned out a deep fat fryer in the name of 'Sandy aid' and she wants us all to know. So we can club together and get her a medal, I expect.


----------



## love detective (Nov 6, 2012)

from kebab bum finger for a change



> We're at a bar commemorating Abraham Lincoln. The management are all white. The waiters are all black. There's a metaphor there.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 6, 2012)

love detective said:


> from kebab bum finger


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 7, 2012)

weepiper said:


> She's just cleaned out a deep fat fryer in the name of 'Sandy aid' and she wants us all to know. So we can club together and get her a medal, I expect.


 

I bet she did a crap job of it as well. And disposed of the fat in a manner that contavenes local waste disposal regulations.

These people. Stick to handing out rolls and failing to give blood.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 7, 2012)

> "Long day! Estimate served 500 hot meals to people in the Rockaways- for most first hot food in days. How's the election doing?"


----------



## rekil (Nov 7, 2012)

*Ellie Mae O'Hagan* ‏@*MissEllieMae*
Hooray! We're doing shots then heading to the White House to party!


----------



## rekil (Nov 7, 2012)

Progressive.

Activists.


----------



## love detective (Nov 7, 2012)

articul8 said:


>


 
Ellie Mae O'hagan



> 3am in DC. Party atmosphere winding down. Home, bed, and now Romney's out of the way, back to pursuing meaningful left-wing politics


----------



## cesare (Nov 7, 2012)

See also burn-out thread


----------



## love detective (Nov 7, 2012)

meant to ask, what did delroy post in error?


----------



## TruXta (Nov 7, 2012)

love detective said:


> meant to ask, what did delroy post in error?


 
A guy with a rotating dildo up his anus. Quite graphic it was too.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 7, 2012)

love detective said:


> Ellie Mae O'hagan
> 
> 
> "Party atmosphere winding down...meaningful left wing politics blah, blah..."


 
Reminds me of when all the Trots were celebrating Blair's win in '97 or Thatcher being replaced by, er, another Tory leader.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 7, 2012)

TruXta said:


> A guy with a rotating dildo up his anus. Quite graphic it was too.


 
Jesus christ


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 7, 2012)

They really don't like hotlinking, hence the drilldo


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 7, 2012)

who did he try and hotlink to?  fucking 4chan or something...


----------



## rekil (Nov 7, 2012)

In other news, Bragg now appears to back the war in 'Stan because Obama is "waging war against people who murder girls that want to go to school" and when asked if this signalled a Kid Rockesque direction in his career, he responded by boasting that he enjoys "picking holes" in PD's "black and white view of the world".

e2a: might have got this wrong actually, he seems upset at the suggestion that just because he supports obama, then that means he supports the drone strikes  

He supports Obama apart from just about all the stuff done by his admin.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 7, 2012)

Must be bored sitting around on his own in that huge lib-dem palace in dorset.


----------



## rekil (Nov 7, 2012)

He was in Australia, pretending to be woody guthrie.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 7, 2012)

Still adamant that the UK is a classless society?  And that's a fact.


----------



## Bakunin (Nov 7, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Still adamant that the UK is a classless society? And that's a fact.


 
Unfortunately, her understanding of the precise meaning of the word 'fact' is as barely extant as the quality of her prose.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 7, 2012)

I was on about Billy Big Conk.  He stated that 'fact' in his book.  PD asked him about it.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Nov 7, 2012)

copliker said:


> *Ellie Mae O'Hagan* ‏@*MissEllieMae*
> Hooray! We're doing shots then heading to the White House to party!


 


*Ellie Mae O'Hagan* ‏@*MissEllieMae*
Even amidst the Obama euphoria I'm still incredulous that he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
 
*Expand* 

 *Reply* 
 *Retweet* 
 *Favorite*
 

*Hayrr X* ‏@*Hayrr*
all ellie maes are bastards #*aemab*
*Expand*


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 7, 2012)

> leftsplainers


 


Is this activist speak?


----------



## BigTom (Nov 7, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Is this activist speak?


 
mansplainer = a man telling a woman what feminism is / what's sexist so leftsplaining must mean, um, lefties telling other lefties what being a lefty means? But somehow the leftie that is telling other lefties what being a lefty means is in a privileged position that means they can't really understand what being a lefty means/aren't really best placed to say. Which makes no sense.

e2a oh no, I think if this has come from laurie/ellie/etc then it's indicative of their opinion that they are better activists than other people.. who are you to tell me what being a lefty means? I know what being a lefty means, I'm more of a lefty than you because of who I am, stop leftsplaining me ..


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 7, 2012)

actually mansplaining is a legitmate description of any time a man tells a woman something she already knows, especially in too much detail.

bonus points for when it's about driving or politics


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 7, 2012)

x10 bonus points for interrupting a woman when she's in the middle of saying somthing and then finishing her point and making it seem like you're educating her


----------



## love detective (Nov 7, 2012)

x100 for walking like an egyptian up to laurie penny


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Nov 7, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> > leftsplainers
> 
> 
> 
> ...


i think ellie got a lot of grief on twitter for going over for the Obama campaign - this is her retort


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 7, 2012)

I'd be gulping down my urge to laugh if some cunt said leftsplain/er/ing in my presence.  Not my world.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 7, 2012)

is it the same as taylor swifting?


----------



## rekil (Nov 7, 2012)

I was about to say that on balance, Ellie is looking significantly dafter than Laura but it's a damned close run thing.


> It’s election night and I’m a political journalist and I haven’t even checked Twitter because it doesn’t seem very important right now.


----------



## rekil (Nov 8, 2012)

Spoke too soon. Ellie blocks PD on the twitter machine over mild anti-commentariat remarks.




			
				Ellie Mae O'Hagan ‏@MissEllieMae said:
			
		

> I've really been leftsplained at a lot during the US elections. So tired of being treated like a naive fool because I'm pleased Romney lost.






			
				Proletarian Democracy (party of the international working class) said:
			
		

> @MissEllieMae Yeah but the white house do was dead good though wasn't it. Victory to cmbbe O'Hagan!






			
				Proletarian Democracy (party of the international working class) said:
			
		

> @MissEllieMae Meaningful left-wing politics ftw


----------



## love detective (Nov 8, 2012)

copliker said:


> I was about to say that on balance, Ellie is looking significantly dafter than Laura but it's a damned close run thing.


 
That aside, I thought it was a pretty good article, the style of writing didn't seem as forced, cluttered and as unbearable as usual


----------



## rekil (Nov 8, 2012)

love detective said:


> That aside, I thought it was a pretty good article, the style of writing didn't seem as forced, cluttered and as unbearable as usual


It was acceptable until this familiar awful shit.


> These people believe in American Democracy and their place in it in the way that some people believe in the Holy Ghost or Father Christmas. They believe in it desperately, childishly, because they need something to believe in, and the fact that they have little to no evidence that it’s going to do anything for them if it exists at all just makes belief more precious.


There's shit before that, but that's the worst of it.


----------



## Riklet (Nov 8, 2012)

sounds like she's actually getting her hands mucky with the norms, in a pretty tough situation, and for that she gets some respect and commun-is brownie points..


----------



## weepiper (Nov 8, 2012)

Riklet said:


> sounds like she's actually getting her hands mucky with the norms, in a pretty tough situation, and for that she gets some respect and commun-is brownie points..


 
No she doesn't. People like us, and not like her, have to 'get their hands mucky' every day just to put food on the table, but they don't get brownie points or respect. Or the choice to stay in because they're not feeling like it today. They get told they're lazy and entitled at worst and patronised and used by people like Laurie Penny at best.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 8, 2012)

weepiper said:


> No she doesn't. People like us, and not like her, have to 'get their hands mucky' every day just to put food on the table, but they don't get brownie points or respect. Or the choice to stay in because they're not feeling like it today. They get told they're lazy and entitled at worst and patronised and used by people like Laurie Penny at best.


Fuck yes x 10


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 8, 2012)

love detective said:


> That aside, I thought it was a pretty good article, the style of writing didn't seem as forced, cluttered and as unbearable as usual


 
Twatsplained.


----------



## rekil (Nov 8, 2012)

Riklet said:


> sounds like she's actually getting her hands mucky with the norms, in a pretty tough situation, and for that she gets some respect and commun-is brownie points..


It's not unreasonable to assume that she did it so she'd have something to flog. And she sought out that bigwig GQ journo and lied about being an organiser because to paraphrase something GW.Bush said following the tragic events of the 11th of September, through the tears she saw a juicy networking opportunity.


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 8, 2012)

Riklet said:


> sounds like she's actually getting her hands mucky with the norms, in a pretty tough situation, and for that she gets some respect and commun-is brownie points..


 
reminds me of that image of Nigella Lawson cooking at a barbecue. Normally the cook gets a load of smoke in their eyes, charcoal stains all over them, blisters and fat and red wine down  their front but instead Nigella is pictured spotless wearing some sky blue chiffon dress with a bit of perfectly cooked chicken on a barbecue fork being held away from  her as far as possible


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 9, 2012)

> @*sunny_hundal*
> London, I hope you're ready for me. My work here in the USA is done.


https://twitter.com/sunny_hundal/status/266730189298495488


----------



## redsquirrel (Nov 9, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> https://twitter.com/sunny_hundal/status/266730189298495488


Must be coming back to help the LibDems out.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 9, 2012)

do all these twats address tweets to the cities


----------



## cesare (Nov 9, 2012)

Twitter, I am in you.


----------



## rekil (Nov 9, 2012)

They probably do it at home as well. Kitchenette, I am in you!


----------



## cesare (Nov 9, 2012)

Prepare thyself, shower. I shall be in you shortly.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 9, 2012)

You can imagine how their Mother's Day cards read.


----------



## cesare (Nov 9, 2012)

After I have been in the tobacco tin.


----------



## cesare (Nov 9, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> You can imagine how their Mother's Day cards read.


----------



## rekil (Nov 9, 2012)

Found ski boots, off to Cortina for well-earned hols. Adieu under-the-stairs, I love you, but the cleaner needs to do a better job.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 9, 2012)

good morning office chair, have you missed me?


----------



## rekil (Nov 9, 2012)

Zumba class, I am in you.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 9, 2012)

Greetings, Greenland - I am Inuit


----------



## JimW (Nov 9, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Greetings, Greenland - I am Inuit


Oh dear


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 9, 2012)

Ich bin ein blogger


----------



## rekil (Nov 9, 2012)

Just got off the bus. 40A route, never change.


----------



## co-op (Nov 9, 2012)

Top work these last few pages everyone. Proper LOLs.

I haven't got a mobile so I'm protected from this tweeting shite but jesus there are some self important people out there. Mind you I hate to think what I might have become if I'd had these kind of sweeties and jollies thrown in front of me when I was 20. Heh, luckily none were thrown my way.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 9, 2012)

Not having a mobile doesn't protect you from Twitter. Join in the fun!


----------



## co-op (Nov 9, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Not having a mobile doesn't protect you from Twitter. Join in the fun!


 
Well really I should be blessing twitter bcause this thread has been an eye-opener and it's mostly the little throwaway comments that are the ones that are really revealing. I'm a bit embarrassed by the extent to which I've been a naive consumer of "left-wing" journos in the past.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 9, 2012)

Me too!


----------



## cesare (Nov 9, 2012)

I have now been in my GP. Erythromycin, get ready for me.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 9, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> You can imagine how their Mother's Day cards read.


 
Oedipally?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 9, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Oedipally?


Interesting that that was how you chose to interpret it


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 9, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Interesting that that was how you chose to interpret it.


 
Having tried to read Sunny Hundal's interminably self-referential "journalism" previously, I'd long since figured he was *some* sort of motherfucker.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 9, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Having tried to read Sunny Hundal's interminably self-referential "journalism" previously, I'd long since figured he was *some* sort of motherfucker.


Here's hoping Mère Hundal is extant. Nobody wants a Savilised commentariat.


----------



## Bakunin (Nov 9, 2012)

cesare said:


> I have now been in my GP. Erythromycin, get ready for me.


 
Plymouth lasses, I've been in you.

Which explains the painful pissing and where all that pus comes from.


----------



## cesare (Nov 9, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Plymouth lasses, I've been in you.
> 
> Which explains the painful pissing and where all that pus comes from.


Ewww!


----------



## Bakunin (Nov 9, 2012)

cesare said:


> Ewww!


 
My own fault, really. I should have taken the words of a local bootneck as a warning and not as a means to enhance my social circle. As he so quaintly put it:

'Stonehouse is the best part of town if you're looking for a bit of gluebox.'


----------



## cesare (Nov 9, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> My own fault, really. I should have taken the words of a local bootneck as a warning and not as a means to enhance my social circle. As he so quaintly put it:
> 
> 'Stonehouse is the best part of town if you're looking for a bit of gluebox.'


There's not a lot you can say to that  Fortunately my maladies are less ... contagious


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 9, 2012)

cesare said:


> Fortunately my *maladies* are less ... contagious


 
Is that a typo?


----------



## cesare (Nov 9, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Is that a typo?


Are you referring to the seemingly superfluous "ma"?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 9, 2012)




----------



## articul8 (Nov 9, 2012)

cesare said:


> Ewww!


If I had said that I'd have been lynched!


----------



## killer b (Nov 9, 2012)

shocking double standards. you should be ashamed cesare.


----------



## cesare (Nov 9, 2012)

articul8 said:


> If I had said that I'd have been lynched!


 
Why? What did you think he meant?


----------



## Bakunin (Nov 9, 2012)

articul8 said:


> If I had said that I'd have been lynched!


 
Probably.

But I do have the unfair advantage of being universally acknowledged as an idiot and a loon that most Urbanites either ignore or tune out, thereby affording me the option of simply typing whatever I like without all that great a fear of censure owing to the fact that most think I'm too dim and/or barmy to really know what I'm typing.

It's one of the few perks of being mental.


----------



## cesare (Nov 9, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Probably.
> 
> But I do have the unfair advantage of being universally acknowledged as an idiot and a loon that most Urbanites either ignore or tune out, thereby affording me the option of simply typing whatever I like without all that great a fear of censure owing to the fact that most think I'm too dim and/or barmy to really know what I'm typing.
> 
> It's one of the few perks of being mental.


Oh, were you being offensive to me then? I thought you were recounting about catching an STD yourself, not suggesting that I had one.


----------



## Bakunin (Nov 9, 2012)

cesare said:


> Oh, were you being offensive to me then? I thought you were recounting about catching an STD yourself, not suggesting that I had one.


 
I'm absolutely sure that neither of us either is, or indeed has ever been, a pox-ridden, pus-dripping old shagbag.

Welcome to the joys of attempting jovial humour, Aspie-style.


----------



## cesare (Nov 9, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> I'm absolutely sure that neither of us either is, or indeed has ever been, a pox-ridden, pus-dripping old shagbag.
> 
> Welcome to the joys of attempting jovial humour, Aspie-style.


There ya go. I thought you were just having a laugh, with no offence intended. And I was right, thank God.

Don't know why articul8 interpreted it any differently, but he's already on the list on that account so I don't suppose I should be surprised.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 9, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> I'm absolutely sure that neither of us either is, or indeed has ever been, a pox-ridden, pus-dripping old shagbag.
> 
> Welcome to the joys of attempting jovial humour, Aspie-style.


 
I enjoy your humour.

Does that make me mental and/or Aspie?


----------



## redsquirrel (Nov 9, 2012)

cesare said:


> I have now been in my GP.


Surely he/she should be up before the GMC for that!


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 9, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> I enjoy your humour.
> 
> Does that make me mental and/or Aspie?


 
Yes.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 9, 2012)

cesare said:


> Don't know why articul8 interpreted it any differently, but he's already on the list on that account so I don't suppose I should be surprised.


that's the point - I meant nothing personally by it.  But others appear to indict or acquit people for remarks on a personal basis not on the content of what's said.  I haven't *literally* (yet?!) invoked the mental image of Deborah Orr to stop myself ejaculating.  It was a joke, although I do admit to finding her smug expression distinctly unsexy (does anyone disagree!?).  But for this I had the lynch mob out.  Whereas you can have a good old chuckle about giving women painful sexually transmitted diseases such that they emit an unpleasant discharge, and this is OK.  I don't think it would've been if I'd said it, even if I was clearly "having a laugh".


----------



## cesare (Nov 9, 2012)

articul8 said:


> that's the point - I meant nothing personally by it. But others appear to indict or acquit people for remarks on a personal basis not on the content of what's said. I haven't *literally* (yet?!) invoked the mental image of Deborah Orr to stop myself ejaculating. It was a joke, although I do admit to finding her smug expression distinctly unsexy (does anyone disagree!?). But for this I had the lynch mob out. Whereas you can have a good old chuckle about giving women painful sexually transmitted diseases such that they emit an unpleasant discharge, and this is OK. I don't think it would've been if I'd said it, even if I was clearly "having a laugh".


1) You were expressing wank fantasies in a demeaning way about a specific woman - Bakunin wasn't.
2) Bakunin's humour was self deprecating about his *own* piss and pus and how he caught it, not about anyone else's.
3) Bakunin's humour was aimed at the possibility of catching STDs from sex workers, which is a risk depending on the type of sex worker. And as such was aimed at the people that use sex workers, not at the sex workers themselves.
4) If any was needed (and I don't think it was) Bakunin does have some leeway for Aspie-style humour because he has explained this before, and we take notice.
5) You are attempting to justify (1) again, rather than accepting that it was unacceptable.


----------



## Random (Nov 9, 2012)

articul8 said:


> that's the point - I meant nothing personally by it.  But others appear to indict or acquit people for remarks on a personal basis not on the content of what's said.  I haven't *literally* (yet?!) invoked the mental image of Deborah Orr to stop myself ejaculating.  It was a joke, although I do admit to finding her smug expression distinctly unsexy (does anyone disagree!?).  But for this I had the lynch mob out.  Whereas you can have a good old chuckle about giving women painful sexually transmitted diseases such that they emit an unpleasant discharge, and this is OK.  I don't think it would've been if I'd said it, even if I was clearly "having a laugh".


 butthurt


----------



## chilango (Nov 9, 2012)

articul8 said:


> that's the point - I meant nothing personally by it.  But others appear to indict or acquit people for remarks on a personal basis not on the content of what's said.  I haven't *literally* (yet?!) invoked the mental image of Deborah Orr to stop myself ejaculating.  It was a joke, although I do admit to finding her smug expression distinctly unsexy (does anyone disagree!?).  But for this I had the lynch mob out.  Whereas you can have a good old chuckle about giving women painful sexually transmitted diseases such that they emit an unpleasant discharge, and this is OK.  I don't think it would've been if I'd said it, even if I was clearly "having a laugh".



FFS leave it.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 9, 2012)

"wank fantasy"?!  I think that's your imagination


----------



## articul8 (Nov 9, 2012)

anyway, as you were


----------



## cesare (Nov 9, 2012)

articul8 said:


> "wank fantasy"?! I think that's your imagination


As pointed out previously, you must have been trying to cum in order to know that Deborah Orr is unable to make you cum. And for you then to inform us.

*yuk*


----------



## articul8 (Nov 9, 2012)

a) it was not meant literally and b) I was thinking of prelonging the course of sexual intercourse nothing to do with masturbation.   Having said that, the thought of Deborah Orr's face during sex might just spoil the moment altogether.  I should stop digging now...


----------



## cesare (Nov 9, 2012)




----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 9, 2012)

You demonstrate an awe-inspiring level of competence in the field of communications, articul8. Have you ever thought about working in the media? I think you'd be a natural. And you should definitely link to this thread on your LinkedIn profile.


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 9, 2012)

What's wrong with Deborah Orr?


----------



## Treacle Toes (Nov 9, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> After seeing Obama video, Cameron makes inquiries into how exactly human tears are produced, dispatches SPAD to see where he can buy some.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 9, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> What's wrong with Deborah Orr?


she's a bit annoying and entitled


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 9, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> she's a bit annoying and entitled


 
Sufficiently so to prevent orgasm in otherwise healthy young males?


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 9, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Sufficiently so to prevent orgasm in otherwise healthy young males?


i beg your pardon?


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 9, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> i beg your pardon?


 
Such is the charge that has been leveled against her.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 9, 2012)

oh i skimmed that bit cos articul8 was blethering.
dirty bastard.
i have no opinion on ms orr's sex appeal.


----------



## cesare (Nov 9, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Such is the charge that has been leveled against her.


No, it wasn't.


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 9, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> i have no opinion on ms orr's sex appeal.


 
She looks alright to me.

Articul8, justify yourself.


----------



## rekil (Nov 9, 2012)

not this again please


----------



## articul8 (Nov 9, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> What's wrong with Deborah Orr?


a finite existence means I don't have time to answer this adequately
but
1) she's joined the Lib Dems
2) her smug expression (see 1)
3) ...I'm not going there again...


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 9, 2012)

I'm still retching at the thought of articul8 in mid coitus


----------



## cantsin (Nov 9, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> I actually look about 29, but like 29 year-olds used to before people became clones of media clones.


 
the early-mid 70s were halcyon days fashion-wise I'm sure Lletsy, but it's time to let go. Sid Vicious did not die so the likes of you could still dress like David Cassidy as you approached your late 50's.


----------



## Greebo (Nov 9, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I'm still retching at the thought of articul8 in mid coitus


On days like this I just count myself lucky that I've got no mental image of him at all.


----------



## rekil (Nov 10, 2012)

Mental.

*Ellie Mae O'Hagan* ‏@*MissEllieMae*
Waiting for a plane. Will be good to get back to London, where being left wing doesn't mean 'a capitalist who is in favour of gay marriage.'


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 10, 2012)

copliker said:


> Mental.
> 
> *Ellie Mae O'Hagan* ‏@*MissEllieMae*
> Waiting for a plane. Will be good to get back to London, where being left wing doesn't mean 'a capitalist who is in favour of gay marriage.'


 
It would mean petite bourgeoisie over here


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 10, 2012)

cantsin said:


> the early-mid 70s were halcyon days fashion-wise I'm sure Lletsy, but it's time to let go. Sid Vicious did not die so the likes of you could still dress like David Cassidy as you approached your late 50's.


 
Sid Vicious died at the end of the 70s.Most of the early mid 70s were dominated by hippy/glam rock/Paul Calf type fashion.


----------



## cantsin (Nov 10, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Sid Vicious died at the end of the 70s.Most of the early mid 70s were dominated by hippy/glam rock/Paul Calf type fashion.


 
caller, what is your point ?


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 10, 2012)

cantsin said:


> caller, what is your point ?


 
You got your dates wrong, post not valid


----------



## Frances Lengel (Nov 10, 2012)

Punk fashions were more ridiculous than anything that preceded them anyway.


----------



## Greebo (Nov 10, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Punk fashions were more ridiculous than anything that preceded them anyway.


A bit more creative, though.


----------



## nino_savatte (Nov 10, 2012)

Greebo said:


> A bit more creative, though.


Exactly. Style could be created from any household object. Very Situationist.


----------



## cantsin (Nov 10, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> You got your dates wrong, post not valid


 
cassidy - very pre punk , early - mid 70s pop star / sartorial inspiration to LLeta ( possibly ) 
1978 - Sid dies 

so : Sid dies, but LLetsa is still dressing like Cassidy 35 yrs later ( possibly ) , hence "sid didnt die so...blah blah " 
So not sure what you mean....?


----------



## rekil (Nov 10, 2012)

Brown corduroy dreams.


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 10, 2012)

cantsin said:


> cassidy - very pre punk , early - mid 70s pop star / sartorial inspiration to LLeta ( possibly )
> 1978 - Sid dies
> 
> so : Sid dies, but LLetsa is still dressing like Cassidy 35 yrs later ( possibly ) , hence "sid didnt die so...blah blah "
> So not sure what you mean....?


 
Have you never met Llettsa?


----------



## cantsin (Nov 10, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Have you never met Llettsa?


 
no, pure conjecture


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 10, 2012)

cantsin said:


> the early-mid 70s were halcyon days fashion-wise I'm sure Lletsy, but it's time to let go. Sid Vicious did not die so the likes of you could still dress like David Cassidy as you approached your late 50's.


 


I'm not fifty yet-and a lot better looking than David Cassidy.

Think a young Brando crossed with Mark E. Smith circa 1989.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 10, 2012)

copliker said:


> Mental.
> 
> *Ellie Mae O'Hagan* ‏@*MissEllieMae*
> Waiting for a plane. Will be good to get back to London, where being left wing doesn't mean 'a capitalist who is in favour of gay marriage.'


 

It would be interesting to know exactly what it does mean nowadays.


----------



## cesare (Nov 10, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> It would be interesting to know exactly what it does mean nowadays.


Anything to the left of Pinochet.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 10, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> I'm not fifty yet-and a lot better looking than David Cassidy.
> 
> Think a young Brando crossed with Mark E. Smith circa 1989.


 
You look like Norman Wisdom, then?


----------



## cantsin (Nov 10, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> I'm not fifty yet-and a lot better looking than David Cassidy.
> 
> Think a young Brando crossed with Mark E. Smith circa 1989.


 
you hotty


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 10, 2012)

I always pictured LLESTSA as looking like an weary Jon Hurt with a cane. Waving it at people as he denounces the futility of it all.


----------



## Greebo (Nov 10, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> I'm not fifty yet-and a lot better looking than David Cassidy.
> 
> Think a young Brando crossed with Mark E. Smith circa 1989.


That's probably a description by somebody (ie. yourself) who loves you, what about a description provided by somebody a bit more hostile? 

eg on a bad day I look like Heather off Eastenders crossed with Dawn French before the diet.


----------



## rekil (Nov 10, 2012)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
Every time someone tells a writer to 'get a thicker skin', I wonder how Keats would have managed in the age of the internet.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 10, 2012)

copliker said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Every time someone tells a writer to 'get a thicker skin', I wonder how Keats would have managed in the age of the internet.


Quite well. You?

I love the internet, it makes democrat real! Internet: You're shit.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 10, 2012)

Greebo said:


> That's probably a description by somebody (ie. yourself) who loves you, what about a description provided by somebody a bit more hostile?
> 
> eg on a bad day I look like Heather off Eastenders crossed with Dawn French before the diet.


 
I always imagine you looking like this:


----------



## rekil (Nov 10, 2012)

If Keats were here today he'd be hanging around new jersey porn conventions.

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
Location: Exxxotica, New Jersey badlands. Conducted interview with man dressed as enormous foam-rubber 'tasty dick' hotdog.


----------



## love detective (Nov 10, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> @*benhammersley* hey BH when are you in NY/Lon next?




no comment required really


----------



## love detective (Nov 10, 2012)

copliker said:


> If Keats were here today he'd be hanging around new jersey porn conventions.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Location: Exxxotica, New Jersey badlands. Conducted interview with man dressed as enormous foam-rubber 'tasty dick' hotdog.


 
is this something to do with delroy booth?


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 10, 2012)

Here lies a girl whose name was writ in twitter


----------



## rekil (Nov 10, 2012)

Interesting that Laura and chums protested at a Stonewall do a couple of years ago because of something Julie Bindel wrote.



> Bindel was not, in the end, named 'Journalist of the Year' by Stonewall - the honour went to Dr Miriam Stoppard of the Mirror. But will someone please take Julie's pen away before she pokes her eye out with it? Today, in the Guardian, in a piece which contains not one scrap of research but a great deal of bile, she's having a little tantrum, telling the whole queer spectrum to go 'way and just leave normal people like her alone:
> 
> Spouting such paranoid filth in a national newspaper and then demanding not to be held accountable for 'hate-speech' would be funny if it didn't make me want to eviscerate the nearest Guardian editor.


----------



## rekil (Nov 10, 2012)

love detective said:


> is this something to do with delroy booth?


It's all coming together.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 10, 2012)

love detective said:


> is this something to do with delroy booth?


Proper commie grats lad. The day before the german revolution.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 10, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> Here lies a girl whose name was writ in twitter


 

I'm paraphrasing keats here you know, erudition combabes


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 10, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> I'm paraphrasing keats here you know, erudition combabes


Oh god, teenage worrier - yes, all those allusions, we got them etc


----------



## love detective (Nov 10, 2012)

> Ellie Mae O'Hagan ‏@MissEllieMae
> It's amazing how many right-wingers suddenly become bastions of morality when there's a chance to bash a socialist institution.


 
The 'socialist institution' being the BBC

later clarified that because it's publicly owned it's socialist


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 11, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Oh god, teenage worrier - yes, all those allusions, we got them etc


 
well stop being scottish then


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2012)

I think an elected mmber of the bbc trust is a bit socialism.


----------



## love detective (Nov 11, 2012)

> *Ellie Mae O'Hagan* ‏@*MissEllieMae*
> @*JosieLong* @*OwenJones84* please let's go for dinner near hackney downs soon x
> 
> *Ellie Mae O'Hagan* ‏@*MissEllieMae*
> ...


 
looks like it could be SRSLY on for either dinner/brunch/evening food


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 11, 2012)

it'll be oysters and radishes soon.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2012)

I really don't know what to say any more.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2012)

There's nothing, no chink, nothing.


----------



## chilango (Nov 11, 2012)

I unfollowed her. Couldn't face her tweets anymore, even for "laughs".


----------



## rekil (Nov 11, 2012)

It's a testament to her fearlessness and irrepressible journalistic chutzpah that after her staten island rescue attempt was thwarted, she managed to find a way to a new jersey porn convention.

Not a peep out of the figurehead of the London uprisings about the Alfie Meadows trial. Not a peep.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 11, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I really don't know what to say any more.


Desperate scrabbling to be taken seriously by genuine bubblists forgetting her place really


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 11, 2012)

chilango said:


> I unfollowed her. Couldn't face her tweets anymore, even for "laughs".


 


Puzzling that anybody 'follows' anybody on Twitter really.

So twitty middle class pseudo-radicals do twitty middle class things? Is this new? And it's all going to come to the same fucking bad end, isn't it?


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 11, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> I always pictured LLESTSA as looking like an weary Jon Hurt with a cane. Waving it at people as he denounces the futility of it all.


 

I never 'denounce the futility if it all.' What's 'it all' for a start? And how would anybody denounce it?


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 11, 2012)

but you don't deny a resemblance to jon hurt?


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 11, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> but you don't deny a resemblance to jon hurt?


 

I couldn't be more unlike John Hurt.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Nov 11, 2012)

More like Butt-Hurt?

Soz.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 12, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> I never 'denounce the futility if it all.' What's 'it all' for a start? And how would anybody denounce it?


 
you see to be doing a good job.  the lletsa paradox.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 12, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> you see to be doing a good job. the lletsa paradox.


 


Actually, I don't. For a start, nobody seems able to explain what 'it all' even is. Let alone how you denounce it.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 12, 2012)




----------



## TruXta (Nov 12, 2012)

Oh god, I dreaded clicking on this thred as I saw Delroy had just posted. Can't trust you any more, mate


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 12, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Oh god, I dreaded clicking on this thred as I saw Delroy had just posted....


 
 Good, I should hope so


----------



## smokedout (Nov 12, 2012)

love detective said:


> later clarified that because it's publicly owned it's socialist


 
The CIA is a little bit communist


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 12, 2012)

smokedout said:


> The CIA is a little bit communist


Less 'The Company', more 'The Co-op'.


----------



## smokedout (Nov 12, 2012)

ethically sourced water-boarding


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 12, 2012)

Green tariff electrodes


----------



## love detective (Nov 12, 2012)

> *Ellie Mae O'Hagan* ‏@*MissEllieMae*
> @*davidwearing* can we have lunch in the week please? Or actually hang out proper. Maybe barbican or some shit?


words again fail, or some shit


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 12, 2012)

Got a lot of time for wearing - he needs to avoid this shit.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 12, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> Actually, I don't. For a start, nobody seems able to explain what 'it all' even is. Let alone how you denounce it.


----------



## Fedayn (Nov 12, 2012)

> *mollycrabapple* ‏@*mollycrabapple*
> Madrid I'm in you
> Retweeted by *Laurie Penny*
> *   Expand *


 
......


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 12, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> ......


 

Kettering, I am in you. Day in, day fucking out grubbing for work and getting hounded by a4e @these fucking twats


----------



## rekil (Nov 13, 2012)

*mollycrabapple* ‏@*mollycrabapple*
Studio in Russia slapping my Free Pussy Riot poster onto for profit shirts,


----------



## rekil (Nov 13, 2012)

Them rotters milking the protest scene for cash


----------



## weepiper (Nov 13, 2012)




----------



## cesare (Nov 13, 2012)

Discordia decorated V masks next, I bet.


----------



## Idris2002 (Nov 13, 2012)

copliker said:


> *mollycrabapple* ‏@*mollycrabapple*
> Studio in Russia slapping my Free Pussy Riot poster onto for profit shirts,


 
I saw this on Al Jazeera yesterday. I had assumed it was the Crabapple creature cashing in herself. . .


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 14, 2012)

Pussy Riot are shite as well.


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 14, 2012)

have we had chicken teriyaki fields yet


----------



## rekil (Nov 14, 2012)

Penne Laurie


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 14, 2012)

crabapple pie


this is not the firebox thread


----------



## rekil (Nov 14, 2012)

cesare said:


> Discordia decorated V masks next, I bet.


She sells iPhone cases on her site so yeah, merch with doodles of some greek person's graffiti  surely on the way.

 Spud Middleton's comments on LP NS article. Brutal but fair.


> More so than any depth of wanton depravity, any amount of unemployment, penury, destitution, political corruption and rampant inequality, the sign that this country has become truly dysfunctional will be the day Laurie penny appears on, say, Newsnight as more than entertainment or a curiosity. By sheer weight of 'service', these people actually acquire a sort of credibility. I fear in the future we'll have our political and cultural agenda set by public school types suspended in a sort of permanent adolescence, forever striving for a degree of radicalism which will shock the middle-class from which they're trying to disassociate themselves. They're everywhere; it's the future.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 14, 2012)

It's now.


----------



## rekil (Nov 14, 2012)

It'll be even more now than now is.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 14, 2012)

copliker said:


> It'll be even more now than now is.


THEN IS THE NEW NOW


----------



## rekil (Nov 14, 2012)

And...Maybe More?


----------



## weepiper (Nov 14, 2012)

New now, I am in you.


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 14, 2012)

copliker said:


> She sells iPhone cases on her site so yeah, merch with doodles of some greek person's graffiti surely on the way.
> 
> Spud Middleton's comments on LP NS article. Brutal but fair.


 
I like the cut of Spud's jib. His comments over the year on LP have been spot on.


----------



## U N Arrator (Nov 14, 2012)

'More so than any depth of wanton depravity, any amount of unemployment, penury, destitution, political corruption and rampant inequality, the sign that this country has become truly dysfunctional will be the day Laurie penny appears on, say, Newsnight as more than entertainment or a curiosity. By sheer weight of 'service', these people actually acquire a sort of credibility. I fear in the future we'll have our political and cultural agenda set by public school types suspended in a sort of permanent adolescence, forever striving for a degree of radicalism which will shock the middle-class from which they're trying to disassociate themselves. They're everywhere; it's the future.'​​​Exactly right. The anarcholeft, in Britain at least, has served nothing other than a decorative/theatrical purpose for some time now. Politics as entertainment or hobby. The likes of Penny are merely the culmination of a process.


----------



## love detective (Nov 14, 2012)

that comment above is absolutely spot on

trying to come up with a joke for this one....




			
				molly crabapple said:
			
		

> Studio in Russia slapping my Free Pussy


 
....but just can't get a thing out of it


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 14, 2012)

U N Arrator said:


> ​​Exactly right. The anarcholeft, in Britain at least, has served nothing other than a decorative/theatrical purpose for some time now.


 

Decoration, I am you.


----------



## barney_pig (Nov 14, 2012)

love detective said:


> that comment above is absolutely spot on
> 
> trying to come up with a joke for this one....
> 
> ...


Saw that, restrained myself.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 14, 2012)

Sometimes you let the ball sail by, rather than swipe at it. You can get extras that way.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 14, 2012)

Hipster boutique, I am on your shelves


----------



## rekil (Nov 14, 2012)

The only mention of the strikes on Laura's twitter is a crabapple rt, a good one.

*mollycrabapple* ‏@*mollycrabapple*
Keep seeing protesters with the red yellow purple flag of the second Spanish republic, for whom the civil war was fought #*14N*


Otherwise just a load of shit about Terry Pratchett.


----------



## rekil (Nov 14, 2012)

Discworld, I am in you.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 14, 2012)

copliker said:


> Otherwise just a load of shit about Terry Pratchett.


 
Corrected for you:



copliker said:


> Discworld, where am I?!?


----------



## weepiper (Nov 14, 2012)

I see self-promotion of her Pratchett interview takes precedence over the woman in Ireland who died because she was refused an abortion, which merits a single tweet from the supposed queen of feminism herself


----------



## rekil (Nov 14, 2012)

weepiper said:


> I see self-promotion of her Pratchett interview takes precedence over the woman in Ireland who died because she was refused an abortion, which merits a single tweet from the supposed queen of feminism herself


And she gets that totally wrong. 





> She was killed by the misogyny of religious patriarchs.


 Idiot.


----------



## weepiper (Nov 14, 2012)

So today we have a woman dying because of refused abortion, massive strike and protests across Europe, and Gaza being bombed the shit out of by F16s and offshore cannons, and this is the most important thing:

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
Here's the Facebook event for my reading in New York on Saturday. Featuring WORDS about anti-capitalism and fucking.http://www.facebook.com/events/163931887085768/?notif_t=plan_user_joined …


----------



## Riklet (Nov 15, 2012)

copliker said:


> *mollycrabapple* ‏@*mollycrabapple*
> Keep seeing protesters with the red yellow purple flag of the second Spanish republic,_ for whom the civil war was fought_ #*14N*


 
Jesus, how embarrassingly WRONG WRONG WRONG is that.

Nu-history rewriting, I am in you!


----------



## Lo Siento. (Nov 15, 2012)

Riklet said:


> Jesus, how embarrassingly WRONG WRONG WRONG is that.
> 
> Nu-history rewriting, I am in you!


even grammatically so. Hey Molly, a Republic is a thing not a person. Thanks.


----------



## discokermit (Nov 15, 2012)

love detective said:


> that comment above is absolutely spot on
> 
> trying to come up with a joke for this one....
> 
> ...


considering the "in you" meme that's emerging, i should be able to think of one...

...nope...


----------



## rekil (Nov 15, 2012)

weepiper said:


> New now, I am in you.


*National Geographic* ‏@*NatGeo*
Photos: Cuba's new now http://on.natgeo.com/TYajSX


----------



## Balbi (Nov 15, 2012)

Gaza, I am out of you.

Shall be interesting to see Penny's response - it's a big serious grown up complex news issue, not associated with yoot culture etc. She hasn't the heart or competence to actually go there, so expect a report from an Occupation is solidarity with Gaza - linking it to the Occupy movement etc etc.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 15, 2012)

To be honest, about the only thing the people of Gaza have going for them at the moment is that Laurie Penny is on another continent.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 15, 2012)

I can imagine Penny now, heading to Gaza expecting a Yvonne Ridley experience & getting a Yvonne Fletcher one.


----------



## Bakunin (Nov 15, 2012)

Balbi said:


> She hasn't the heart or competence to actually go there.


 
Haven't they suffered enough already?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 15, 2012)

Balbi said:


> I can imagine Penny now, heading to Gaza expecting a Yvonne Ridley experience & getting a Yvonne Fletcher one.


 
Ouch!


----------



## Balbi (Nov 15, 2012)

Actually put me right off my usual lefty journo wank too


----------



## rekil (Nov 15, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Gaza, I am out of you.
> 
> Shall be interesting to see Penny's response - it's a big serious grown up complex news issue, not associated with yoot culture etc. She hasn't the heart or competence to actually go there, so expect a report from an Occupation is solidarity with Gaza - linking it to the Occupy movement etc etc.


You made this happen.

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
Spend today making a video report about Israel and the Information war with @*Timcast*, who has decided to Teach Me Video.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> You made this happen.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Spend today making a video report about Israel and the Information war with @*Timcast*, who has decided to Teach Me Video.


That's Tim Pool, one of those livestreamer types who films people blackbloccing and calls for them to be arrested when they suggest otherwise.


----------



## rekil (Nov 16, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> That's Tim Pool, one of those livestreamer types who films people blackbloccing and calls for them to be arrested when they suggest otherwise.


Sounds a bit like a certain someone from here. Any quotes/links just to make sure?


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> Sounds a bit like a certain someone from here. Any quotes/links just to make sure?


 

not that gorilla bloke?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> Sounds a bit like a certain someone from here. Any quotes/links just to make sure?


 
Pool films blackbloccing, someone objects; Pool's chum(s) demask(s) the objector and demand(s) cops arrest him:



Pool & chums brick it during guns-drawn traffic stop, then commend cops for their professionalism, and finally cross interview each other whilst circlejerking over how they livestreamed the whole thing:


----------



## rekil (Nov 16, 2012)

Mates with Luke Rudkowski the conspiraloon, great.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> You made this happen.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Spend today making a video report about Israel and the Information war with @*Timcast*, who has decided to Teach Me Video.



Puppetmaster, I am you.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 17, 2012)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/nov/16/celebrity-grandparents-and-grandchildren



> *Tony Benn, 87, with granddaughter Emily, 23, who stood to be a Labour MP at 17 and is now an investment banker*
> 
> ...I'm New Labour and I supported the invasion of Iraq. I've always said my interest in politics is nothing to do with my grandfather – no offence, Dan Dan. I got interested before 1997, because I thought the country wasn't on the right track. Public services could have been much better. I realised I was a lot luckier than some of my friends who didn't have the same opportunities as me, and that sat uncomfortably with me. Dan Dan was there in the hall at conference when I gave my first speech, which was really nice.
> 
> ...We all go on holiday as a family a few times a year to the house in Essex – Christmas, Easter and bank holiday weekends. On Christmas Day, we go to Dan Dan's house. He's not the greatest cook. Nothing irritates me about him, but I do wish he'd cook better food for himself.


 
That's right - when she was seven years old she "thought the country wasn't on the right track".

What's "the house in Essex" anyway - some kind of baronial pile?


----------



## articul8 (Nov 17, 2012)

Blairite are like the jesuits - they teach them about privatising public services as soon as they're toilet trained.


----------



## cesare (Nov 17, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Blairite are like the jesuits - they teach them about privatising public services as soon as they're toilet trained.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 17, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Blairite are like the jesuits - they teach them about privatising public services as soon as they're toilet trained.


Although hopefully the Blairites have a better record with toilet-trained toddlers than the Society of Jesus do!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 17, 2012)

cesare said:


>


It'll only be a short while until the Blairites have "SB" after their names.


----------



## cesare (Nov 17, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> It'll only be a short while until the Blairites have "SB" after their names.



Took me a couple of minutes to "get" that, oh dear


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 17, 2012)

"My name is Inigo Loyola. You killed the career of my political father. Prepare to die."


----------



## love detective (Nov 17, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Petition to appoint a new BBC Director General transparently and openly - a vital change. Please do sign!




Penny demonstrating her solid grasp of the key structural position of the media and also an effective agent of change


----------



## JimW (Nov 17, 2012)

By transparently and openly she obviously means from the published lists of former cleverest girls and boys from our marvellous fee-paying schools.


----------



## phildwyer (Nov 17, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/nov/16/celebrity-grandparents-and-grandchildren
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
That'll be five successive generations of the Benn family in parliament.  Must be a record?


----------



## Prince Rhyus (Nov 17, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> That'll be five successive generations of the Benn family in parliament. Must be a record?


 
Hence http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/16/parties-stench-nepotism on Labour nepotism?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 17, 2012)

Nepotism is a distraction - Harris is just annoyed he's not been offered a safe seat yet


----------



## co-op (Nov 18, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> It'll only be a short while until the Blairites have "SB" after their names.


 
I think SA (Society of Anthony) would have a more _unctuous _feel_._


----------



## rekil (Nov 22, 2012)

Crabapple's Madrid thing for Vice.

The doodles are horrible and the first line is ridiculous.


> Any protest, when you're in it, feels like it's going to change the world.


But on the whole, she's miles better than Laura.


----------



## chilango (Nov 22, 2012)

I thought those drawings were actually ok. A lot, lot better than her usual twee self-indulgence. Seemed a little more restrained and straightforward.

Didn't bother reading the piece.


----------



## Riklet (Nov 22, 2012)

I think that's a good article dashed with a few shit bits/wordings ('the riot cops eyed them warily'). that sums up the past few months pretty well, and caputures the feeling of what's happening a little bit too. doesn't read like the quotes have been invented on the AVE either.

I rather like the doodles.


----------



## emanymton (Nov 23, 2012)

copliker said:


> Crabapple's Madrid thing for Vice.
> 
> The doodles are horrible and the first line is ridiculous.
> _Any protest, when you're in it, feels like it's going to change the world_


Not the ones where I'm stood there thinking: for fucks sakes this is embarrassing there are 4 of us.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 25, 2012)

http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2...gle-know-we-value-conformity-more-our-privacy

Laurie reviews Assange's new book - and does an alright job of pushing every button known to set him off. I'll expect Julian's riposte within the next day or so.



> Sometimes a paranoid, to paraphrase William Burroughs, is just a person in possession of all the facts. There is no one on earth for whom this description is more accurate than the WikiLeaks founder, dubious hacker messiah and noted cop-dodger Julian Assange, currently holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy evading extradition on rape allegations in Sweden. Assange knows more than almost anyone about the surveillance and security issues that affect every internet user; that he writes like a jaw-gnawing conspiracy theorist with crippling delusional narcissism doesn’t mean he’s wrong.


 
 @ the last sentence.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 25, 2012)

There's also, potentially, a way for someone inclined to use her 'willing victims' argument in reference to alleged charges


----------



## rekil (Nov 25, 2012)

Stay classy, transatlantic poverty tourism.

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
Writing on welfare, disability cuts and Atos for @*newstatesman*. Would anyone like to chat to me about their personal experience?

Deep conversations, I am not in you.

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
Saturday night ended early. So much writing to do, but my heart longs for fires and drums and deep conversations #*lonely* #*folkie*


----------



## mk12 (Nov 26, 2012)

I once made a fake Myspace page and created a stereotypical posh lefty character called Barnabus Sebag Montefiore. He liked all the usual things: angry Muslims, Palestinian headscarves, poverty tourism and summit hopping.

Laurie Penny is the real thing though. She makes me cringe.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 26, 2012)

I remember that. 

There was also one with some student talking about his 'dream beard.' Was that you as well?


----------



## mk12 (Nov 26, 2012)

Haha not me. I think a few of us created pages like that around the same time.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Nov 26, 2012)

> @*PennyRed*
> I'm hearing the figure of '73 deaths a week' from welfare reforms thrown around, and I can't find the sources for it - can anyone help?


 
Get everyone else to do your research then why dontcha!


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 26, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Get everyone else to do your research then why dontcha!


 

crowdsourcing the facts, pocketing the pay


----------



## rekil (Nov 26, 2012)

Begging a load of randoms on the internet to do your job for you - That's internationalism!

Might as well make this the laugh at Bragg thread as well for now.




			
				Bragg said:
			
		

> You don't have to take sides in the cycle of retribution that is escalating in Gaza and Israel to know that it has to stop


 



			
				Ayesha Mall ‏@Ayesha_Mall said:
			
		

> That's like saying in Apartheid SA we didn't have to take sides. Apartheid Israel is an occupier and oppressor.


 



			
				Bragg said:
			
		

> The ANC weren't firing missiles at Johannesburg


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 26, 2012)

copliker said:


> Begging a load of randoms on the internet to do your job for you - That's internationalism!


 

Everytime I see that phrase I think of that bloke from bullseye going 'Lets see what you could have written' and towing in an article before the bemused faces of the twitterati.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Nov 26, 2012)

Lazycuntism


----------



## Bakunin (Nov 26, 2012)

copliker said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Writing on welfare, disability cuts and Atos for @*newstatesman*. Would anyone like to chat to me about their personal experience?


 
Given that her grasp of honestly reporting the truth in her 'journalism' is about the same as that of an ATOS medical professional writing up an assessment, no.


----------



## redsquirrel (Nov 26, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> That'll be five successive generations of the Benn family in parliament. Must be a record?


She's not actually in parliament yet, so hopefully it won't get past four.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 27, 2012)

mk12 said:


> Haha not me. I think a few of us created pages like that around the same time.


 
Here it is.

Here's yours.


----------



## mk12 (Nov 27, 2012)

I didn't realise it still existed! Barnabus likes "Rage against the Machine, the Levellers, and any African music."


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 27, 2012)

mk12 said:


> I didn't realise it still existed! Barnabus likes "Rage against the Machine, the Levellers, and any African music."


 



> *Why We Should Fight Against Football and Other Backward Vacillations in the Working Class*
> 
> A brilliant and excellent article here from Socialist Review (which is also brilliant) by Chris Bambery, one of the leading members of the Socialist Workers Party:-
> http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj73/bambery.htm
> _"Socialism will not be a society where 22 men still play football (far less where another 30,000 people will pay to watch them) or men and women crash up and down a swimming pool competing against each other and the clock. Physical recreation and play are about the enjoyment of one's body, human company and the environment. Sport is not. "_​_"Naturally socialists understand why people take part in or watch sport. It is an escape from the harsh world in which we live"_​


​​The future's uncertain and the end is always near​​


----------



## articul8 (Nov 27, 2012)

If 22 men (and/or women) can't have a kick around it ain't my revolution


----------



## rekil (Nov 27, 2012)

> swimming pools are increasingly laned-off and extremely competitive, intimidating people who want a leisurely swim up and down and making it impossible for a family or a group of friends to play.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 27, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> crowdsourcing the facts, pocketing the pay


 
Knowing Laura, she thinks getting the facts from the people - little bit communism.


----------



## rekil (Nov 27, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Given that her grasp of honestly reporting the truth in her 'journalism' is about the same as that of an ATOS medical professional writing up an assessment, no.


If it wasn't such a serious issue, the idea of sending her something made up yet plausible would be appealing.


----------



## barney_pig (Nov 27, 2012)

I live to smash capitalism! I build the movement (anti-war, anti-borders, pro-palestine, anti-israel, boycott coke, boycott nestle, boycott marks and spencers, anti-globalisation, anti-consumerism and many many more) 7 days a week. I am a fighter for peacful world, where people will be happy to live with things they need, and people won't be brainwashed by consumerism, and the Daily Mail telling them what to think. As I am privately educated, I know how the Nazi-fascist-ruling class think. We need to form a party of people who don't believe everything they are told by the corporate media and capitalist newspapers. Build the Party, Build the Movement!!!


----------



## barney_pig (Nov 27, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> I live to smash capitalism! I build the movement (anti-war, anti-borders, pro-palestine, anti-israel, boycott coke, boycott nestle, boycott marks and spencers, anti-globalisation, anti-consumerism and many many more) 7 days a week. I am a fighter for peacful world, where people will be happy to live with things they need, and people won't be brainwashed by consumerism, and the Daily Mail telling them what to think. As I am privately educated, I know how the Nazi-fascist-ruling class think. We need to form a party of people who don't believe everything they are told by the corporate media and capitalist newspapers. Build the Party, Build the Movement!!!


Your a star


----------



## Balbi (Nov 27, 2012)

Oh god, that article makes my brain curl up and try and crawl out of my ear. It takes a good idea, that sport is escapism from every day life and just thrashes it into incomprehesible guff.


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 27, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> I live to smash capitalism! I build the movement (anti-war, anti-borders, pro-palestine, anti-israel, boycott coke, boycott nestle, boycott marks and spencers, anti-globalisation, anti-consumerism and many many more) 7 days a week. I am a fighter for peacful world, where people will be happy to live with things they need, and people won't be brainwashed by consumerism, and the Daily Mail telling them what to think. As I am privately educated, I know how the Nazi-fascist-ruling class think. We need to form a party of people who don't believe everything they are told by the corporate media and capitalist newspapers. Build the Party, Build the Movement!!!


----------



## cesare (Nov 27, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> I live to smash capitalism! I build the movement (anti-war, anti-borders, pro-palestine, anti-israel, boycott coke, boycott nestle, boycott marks and spencers, anti-globalisation, anti-consumerism and many many more) 7 days a week. I am a fighter for peacful world, where people will be happy to live with things they need, and people won't be brainwashed by consumerism, and the Daily Mail telling them what to think. As I am privately educated, I know how the Nazi-fascist-ruling class think. We need to form a party of people who don't believe everything they are told by the corporate media and capitalist newspapers. Build the Party, Build the Movement!!!


Journo commodification of anti-capitalism.


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 27, 2012)

x-factor = trash for the sheep


----------



## barney_pig (Nov 27, 2012)

I think I had one of these once...


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 27, 2012)

Workers of all countries unite! (except israeli workers)


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 27, 2012)

and anyone who likes 22 men kicking a ball around and consumeristic programmes like britain's got talent. especially if they're israeli, but even if they're not


----------



## Balbi (Nov 27, 2012)

*grinds teeth at ridiculous notions of sport*


----------



## not-bono-ever (Nov 27, 2012)

I have skimmed most of the 195 pages of this so far- penny red is not a Chris Morris art happening hoax is she ?


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Nov 27, 2012)

not-bono-ever said:


> I have skimmed most of the 195 pages of this so far- penny red is not a Chris Morris art happening hoax is she ?


sadly not, though sometimes it's so brilliant you have to assume it might be


----------



## co-op (Nov 27, 2012)

not-bono-ever said:


> I have skimmed most of the 195 pages of this so far- penny red is not a Chris Morris art happening hoax is she ?


 
*my own arse - I am up you*


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 27, 2012)

> Lisa Egan, a disability rights activist, has come to meet me here because it’s one of the few accessible terminuses on the Hammersmith and City line, and she wants to talk to me about maps.
> Lisa is four foot eight and fast-moving enough in her chair that commuters heading home early have to steer themselves quickly while not-looking at her with the studied not-looking that working Londoners reserve for anyone visibly distressed, disabled, poor, or mentally ill on public transport. Rolling her machine with practiced effort onto the Hammersmith train, Lisa and I talk about the fight to stop the right-wing Coalition government currently squatting in Westminster – the very shiniest stop on the Jubilee line – from slashing welfare benefits and driving the poor and sick out of the city.


----------



## where to (Nov 27, 2012)

There are so many issues with that its not actually clear which one your drawing attention to.


----------



## barney_pig (Nov 27, 2012)

Termini


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 27, 2012)

> Lisa is four foot eight and fast-moving enough in her chair that commuters heading home early have to steer themselves quickly while not-looking at her with the studied not-looking that working Londoners reserve for anyone visibly distressed, disabled, poor, or mentally ill on public transport. Rolling her machine with practiced effort onto the Hammersmith train,


 
she can't help herself can she?


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 27, 2012)

practised effort


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 27, 2012)

frogwoman said:


>


 
And many many more ...  7 days a week.


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 27, 2012)

Buy some of our ethical goods now to fight consumerism.


----------



## Bakunin (Nov 27, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Knowing Laura, she thinks getting the facts from the people - little bit communism.


 
Facts?

FACTS?!

You dare to oppress our latter-day La Passionara with your vile, bigoted, narrow-minded, patriarchal, male-dominated concepts of FACTS?!

You'll be wanting her to corrupt herself with such evils as 'The Truth' and actually giving a toss about things other than her own career and ego if you carry on like that.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 27, 2012)

Bad me. Must go sit on a fork.


----------



## temper_tantrum (Nov 27, 2012)

Westminster isn't the glossiest (or whatever) stop on the Jubilee. That's Canary Wharf. Obviously.


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 27, 2012)

where to said:


> There are so many issues with that its not actually clear which one your drawing attention to.


 
that is the modus operandi though, she is fighting on all fronts so we can see the bigger picture


----------



## weepiper (Nov 28, 2012)

> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> Absolutely bonkers night last night. Had picture taken for Missy magazine. Now have residual sharpie feminist tattoos all over me.


 


> I'm like some sort of Riot Grrl version of Pillow Talk today. Tempted to run to a tattoo shop and get them done permanently.


----------



## love detective (Nov 28, 2012)

_Laurie Penny, 23, never imagined she would find herself enmeshed in a world of poverty_


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Nov 28, 2012)

Laurie Penny on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Gtb4nP_P9cE

"Editor at Large". She is being used but doesn't realise it. I am baffled by her ultra-American pronunciation of the title New Ink wirry (Inquiry to you and me).


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 28, 2012)

managed 45 seconds


----------



## imposs1904 (Nov 28, 2012)

managed 26 seconds

wouldn't that V mask melt if you switched the hob on?


----------



## co-op (Nov 28, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> managed 45 seconds


 
27.

My toes were starting to break.


----------



## weepiper (Nov 28, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> Laurie Penny on YouTube:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Gtb4nP_P9cE


 
False glottal stop at 0.04


----------



## co-op (Nov 28, 2012)

weepiper said:


> False glottal stop at 0.04


 
Mockal stop.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 28, 2012)

the lilly allen school of dropping your accent down several notches


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Nov 28, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> the lilly allen school of dropping your accent down several notches


Yes I noticed the uncomfortable glottal stops. She will have picked that up at school I expect.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 28, 2012)

I'm a wri'er  And later on 'ar'icles'.

I've got a pretty non-descript r.p, taught english, southern voice - I moved a lot as a kid, and never got grounded in a local accent. So, I sound like what a lot of people expect a Tory to sound like. I tried to mock it up a bit as a teenager, as my voice marked me out and I wanted to fit in.

LP's a private educated oxbridge grad, and you can hear her actual voice straining to get out from the layers of shit she's got to chuck on it to make herself feel comfortable in what she's doing.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 28, 2012)

She can't win. The more posh your voice sounds, the more privileged and less in touch you are seen to be. Compensating for that accentuates it.

I've been told I don't know what it was like growing up in a working class family in the 90's - which was funny because I did - and curiously, been told I have no idea what it was like growing up in households in the 80's, 70's, 60's...which also invalidates any points I make. Inverse snobbery 

It's probably I make shit points though - but sometimes I reckon it's down to having a posho voice and quite like having a collar and cuff'd shirt on. Hides my gut


----------



## rekil (Nov 28, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> managed 26 seconds
> 
> wouldn't that V mask melt if you switched the hob on?


 These "deeply unapologetically intellectual young people" are walking talking health and safety nightmares.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 28, 2012)

copliker said:


> These "deeply unapologetically intellectual young people" are walking talking health and safety nightmares.


H&S rules are only meant for us dumb proles.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 28, 2012)

love detective said:


> _Laurie Penny, 23, never imagined she would find herself enmeshed in a world of poverty_


intellectual poverty


----------



## imposs1904 (Nov 28, 2012)

copliker said:


> These "deeply unapologetically intellectual young people" are walking talking health and safety nightmares.


 
or they just eat out a lot.


----------



## love detective (Nov 28, 2012)

kebab bum finger is always going on about arranging dinner with other lefty celebs


----------



## Bakunin (Nov 28, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> or they just eat out a lot.


 






'Blasted lesbians everywhere! They should have labels on them or something.'


----------



## Treacle Toes (Nov 28, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> My interview with Tommy Robinson is finally coming out tomorrow. Watch this space...


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 28, 2012)

Balbi said:


> She can't win. The more posh your voice sounds, the more privileged and less in touch you are seen to be. Compensating for that accentuates it.
> 
> I've been told I don't know what it was like growing up in a working class family in the 90's - which was funny because I did - and curiously, been told I have no idea what it was like growing up in households in the 80's, 70's, 60's...which also invalidates any points I make. Inverse snobbery
> 
> It's probably I make shit points though - but sometimes I reckon it's down to having a posho voice and quite like having a collar and cuff'd shirt on. Hides my gut


 
From the ugly mug thread you do look smart, but sometimes there is also the serial killer thing going on as well. 

Sorry.


----------



## rekil (Nov 28, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> or they just eat out a lot.


Are there sheets of paper on the cooker? It's not right.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 28, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> From the ugly mug thread you do look smart, but sometimes there is also the serial killer thing going on as well.
> 
> Sorry.


 
 Your name will also go on the list.

(it's usually the self taken ones, where i'm not looking at the camera because i'm looking at the screen )


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 28, 2012)

I met balbi once on northampton high street shopping for christmas fripperies and he did not murder me or anyone with me. Although he may have wanted to? Hard to say.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Nov 28, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Clarification: that's Tommy Robinson/Stephen Lennon, the currently imprisoned leader of the EDL, NOT Tom Robinson the gay protest singer.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

Lots and lots of "quotes" in the article.

What an utterly pointless piece, useful only to allow Laura to situate and sell herself as an anti-fascist. Nothing else - apart from feeding the yuppy-vice far-right obsession.

edit: oh yeah, and that laura thinks that you can't be w/c and dress nice or have a nice car, you must live in some crack-hovel and have mud and old fish in your hair or something.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 29, 2012)

i got interviewed by vice the other day.  in order to avoid getting sneered at on the website, i gave sensible boring answers and told them to get to fuck when they asked me stupid questions.  it worked, because they didn't use it.  tommy should have used the same method.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 29, 2012)

Sunday supplement style interview (with an added cringeworthy attempt at AFA style humour?!) She worked so hard to find out such an acute observer of the contemporary British far right - er, her boss.


----------



## rekil (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> What an utterly pointless piece, useful only to allow Laura to situate and sell herself as an anti-fascist.


And "inveterate instigator".


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Sunday supplement style interview (with an added cringeworthy attempt at AFA style humour?!) She worked so hard to find out such an acute observer of the contemporary British far right - er, her boss.


I was going to pick upon the Trilling stuff as well - reminiscent of the Guardian piece about being on benefits (by a usually decent journo) and the subject of the interview just by chance happened to be Laura, a Guardian writer.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 29, 2012)

mind you, Tommy couldn't have used the same method, because he's an idiot.  I liked the bit about Bradford Paki.  Nothing wrong with that per se, but nothing actually right either.  Just fluff, saying lots of things without saying anything.   But are the EDL a spent force or not?  Are the guys running it 'brains' or idiots?  Cannae have it both ways.


----------



## frogwoman (Nov 29, 2012)

Men and women and children of all ages and races sit down in the road to block the route of a phalanx of white guys who, despite what their website says, are doing a terrible job of not looking like your stereotypical fascist skinheads. Hamid grins. He knows that, for now, Unite Against Fascism and other anti-racist groups have won the battle on the streets.


----------



## killer b (Nov 29, 2012)

expensive cologne. 

she's never met any working class people before has she?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

That really is the writing of 16 year old doing their first book. 

_Tommy sweats. His eyes shift from right to left. He senses his masters will not be pleased._


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 29, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Men and women and children of all ages and races sit down in the road to block the route of a phalanx of white guys who, despite what their website says, are doing a terrible job of not looking like your stereotypical fascist skinheads. Hamid grins. He knows that, for now, Unite Against Fascism and other anti-racist groups have won the battle on the streets.


 
Bloody chavs.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

> are doing a terrible job of not looking like your stereotypical fascist skinheads


 
The _your_ here means _hers_, and the hobgoblins of official middle class anti-fascism, as well as the usual unspoken social prejudices of many people from that section of society.


----------



## weepiper (Nov 29, 2012)

Brave, intrepid Laurie. Boldly going into a pub to interview EDL leaders where no brave intrepid upper class Oxbridge journo has gone before.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 29, 2012)

taking her mates with her.  just in case?


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Nov 29, 2012)

...and her (get out of a sticky situ) press card.


----------



## barney_pig (Nov 29, 2012)

"When the opportunity to do this interview came up, I hesitated. As a reporter, I was fascinated by the possibility of getting to see the pocks and pores on the human face of British fascism, but as an anti-fascist, I’m aware that UK organisers have maintained a long tradition of refusing to grant any sort of media or speaking platform to the far-right. The "no platform" principle keeps right-wing extremists on the fringe by denying them the legitimacy they crave. No room for racists, neither in the public conversation nor on the streets. It’s part of a strategy that has been successful in driving back wave after wave of far-right organisations in this country down the years.

So, that’s one reason that this interview will not reproduce any of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s actual opinions about Muslims, immigrants and people of other faiths in Britain. The other reason is that his actual opinions are boring and predictable."

1. UK organisers?
2. What is the point of interviewing someone if you are not going to publish any of his opinions?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

I think you know the answer to 2. barney!


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

> There are more interesting questions – such as why a man who claims to be an authentic, representative voice of “working class” Britain turns up to a meeting in a shiny new BMW 1 series with leather seats, kitted out from top to toe in designer sports gear and reeking of posh cologne.


 
There are more interesting questions - such as why a woman who claims to be an authentic, representative voice of "in brackets" sub-divisions of society turns up in a range of publications with shiny sixth form prose, kitted out in a less believable Theroux faux naivete and reeking of the greek studying student Jarvis Cocker sings about in Common People.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

weepiper said:


> Brave, intrepid Laurie. Boldly going into a pub to interview EDL leaders where no brave intrepid upper class Oxbridge journo has gone before.


 
With two journalism students for safety reason


----------



## barney_pig (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I think you know the answer to 2. barney!


It really was a foolish question wasn't it?


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

Just finished reading - like lots of pieces, so many missed opportunities.


----------



## weepiper (Nov 29, 2012)

it's not about Tommy Robinson at all, it's all about Laurie Penny's opinion of Tommy Robinson.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

It's all about Laurie Penny.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

It's like trash tv - you know when you can predict with accuracy the next step of the article - how there'll be a switch from one to another, actually answering a rhetorical question or bringing in an asian student to the discussion. As played out as the constant woes in Walford. Good journalism should lead you either somewhere you didn't expect or reveal something you didn't know - but it shouldn't so obviously show off that the hack has seen tricks done, and is attempting them in their own work.


----------



## rekil (Nov 29, 2012)

> Leaving Lennon to wolf down his giant steak, which he eats crouched over the plate, as if someone is about to snatch it away from him,


Urgh. How appallingly common. He'd probably be chuffed with the wolf association anyway.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

_Crouched_? He put his feet on the table? Eurgh!

This is someone crouching laura:


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

Laura said:
			
		

> When the opportunity to do this interview came up, I hesitated.


 
No you didn't. _You _initiated the interview, _you_ pestered him for weeks to do it. What a pathetic lie. And one that shows that the queen of the digital age still doesn't quite get how it works.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 29, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> 1. UK organisers?


 
For Laura, one cannot be an anti-fascist without belonging to an organisation. Surely you are aware, comrade, that unless you belong to UAF or HnH you are not a true anti-fascist?



> 2. What is the point of interviewing someone if you are not going to publish any of his opinions?


 
To make yourself look like something you're not - a decent journalist who reports news, not yourself.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

Hunched. Synonym issue.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> It's all about Laurie Penny.


 
It's ALWAYS all about Laurie Penny.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 29, 2012)

copliker said:


> Urgh. How appallingly common. He'd probably be chuffed with the wolf association anyway.


 
As long as it was a white wolf or grey wolf, not if it was a black wolf or red wolf.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

Penny for your thoughts.

(Which will be her blog title/Times column header in twenty years)


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

People should really go back and read her piece on the EDL from september last year (that she mentions in that vice shite). Lots and lots of 'quotes' from people who don't want to give full names and all talking in the exact way that Laura would imagine people like that to speak.



> "You're not allowed to be British in Britain anymore," says Connor's mum, who doesn't want to give her name. I ask her what she means. At first she is hostile -- "what, don't you agree with them?" -- but when I say that I'm a journalist, she visibly relaxes


 

For how much longer is she going to get away with this?

Note she also only 'quotes' white racists, whilst muslims/asians get the laurapathy treatment.


----------



## love detective (Nov 29, 2012)

these mates of hers who have done time in Wandsworth sound made up as well


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

God, those poor journalism students. It'll be like aversion therapy hopefully.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Nov 29, 2012)

weepiper said:


> Brave, intrepid Laurie. Boldly going into a pub to interview EDL leaders where no brave intrepid upper class Oxbridge journo has gone before.


...and buying him lunch.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

love detective said:


> these mates of hers who have done time in Wandsworth sound made up as well


 


> I've got friends who've spent time within its squat brick walls,


 
I reckon she means prison-visiting vicars - "spent time" rather than "done time". Maybe someone could ask her?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

Laura said:
			
		

> There are more interesting questions – such as why a man who claims to be an authentic, representative voice of “working class” Britain turns up to a meeting in a shiny new BMW 1 series with leather seats, kitted out from top to toe in designer sports gear and reeking of posh cologne.


 



			
				Laura said:
			
		

> There remains, however, a stubborn strain of snobbery on the middle-class left that is all the more important to address because it is uncomfortable.


----------



## mk12 (Nov 29, 2012)

HYPOCRITE WARNING


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> edit: oh yeah, and that laura thinks that you can't be w/c and dress nice or have a nice car, you must live in some crack-hovel and have mud and old fish in your hair or something.


 
To be fair butchers, it does piss me off when I hear Lennon and co present themselves as "the authentic voice of the working-class" when he and Kevin are fairly middle class from everything I've seen. If some member of the Labour party was going around describing themselves as the true representative of the downtrodden and dispossessed like these EDL lot do, before turning up to an interview in his flash BMW and wearing expensive designer clobber, I doubt anyone would have a problem with calling them out on it. No-one ever leaps to Billy Bragg's defense when people point out he lives in a mansion.

And yeah to pre-empt you jumping down my throat about this, I fully accept what you're saying, and just because you have a half decent car or wear decent clothes doesn't make you middle-class or whatever. I think Laurie might have a conception of working class that's based on a pretty outdated vision of malnourished chimneysweeps, men with mucky overalls and flat caps etc that much seems clear

But as a general principle, anyone claiming to be a "Voice of the working-class" or even a socialist in much more vague terms, should avoid vulgar and ostentatious displays of personal wealth.

Anyway this quote is just amazing. How she's managed to internally justify giving a platform to Stephen Lennon to herself.



> When the opportunity to do this interview came up, I hesitated. As a reporter, I was fascinated by the possibility of getting to see the pocks and pores on the human face of British fascism, but as an anti-fascist, I’m aware that UK organisers have maintained a long tradition of refusing to grant any sort of media or speaking platform to the far-right. The "no platform" principle keeps right-wing extremists on the fringe by denying them the legitimacy they crave. No room for racists, neither in the public conversation nor on the streets. It’s part of a strategy that has been successful in driving back wave after wave of far-right organisations in this country down the years.
> 
> So, that’s one reason that this interview will not reproduce any of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s actual opinions about Muslims, immigrants and people of other faiths in Britain. The other reason is that his actual opinions are boring and predictable.


_Translation:_ I wanted to do an article on the EDL coz it would help my career, but wanted to keep some semblence of credibility, so had to come up with some absolute bullshit to justify doing it.

Personally I'd have preferred it if she didn't give the fucker a platform in the first place. But seeing as she was determined to give him one anyway, I'd also like to be able to decide for myself whether or not his opinions were boring an predictable, instead of having someone else decide for me and edit them out. Infact Lennon's opinions on Islam, as ugly as they may be, are the only thing worth interviewing him about. They can't be any more boring than everything else in the article.

Then followed by this absolute cracker



> He orders the most expensive steak on the menu, with an enormous plate of cheesy potato skins, and chuckles that this is why he likes to meet left-wing journalists: so he can have dinner on their dollar.


No shit Laurie. Thank god for middle-class leftie journo's, Lennon would've starved months ago without their largesse.

As long as there's a cottage industry of vain journalists prepared to indulge this chump, with a prurient interested in the blood and gore of the far right but with far less interest in the underying political issues that lead to them develping, using whatever contorted logic they can to justify it, I'm sure he'll never go hungry.


----------



## killer b (Nov 29, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> But as a general principle, anyone claiming to be a "Voice of the working-class" or even a socialist in much more vague terms, should avoid vulgar and ostentatious displays of personal wealth.


bullshit. what's ostentatious about designer sportswear & perfume? ffs.


----------



## weepiper (Nov 29, 2012)

Yeah...cos working class people have never gone for ostentatious displays have they...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 29, 2012)

killer b said:


> bullshit. what's ostentatious about designer sportswear & perfume? ffs.


 
I was thinking more of the BMW tbh, what's the point in owning a BMW if not to show off how much money you have? It's not like they're economical to run.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 29, 2012)

I've bought some really nice perfume a few times before, and it cost a lot.


----------



## killer b (Nov 29, 2012)

dunno, i don't drive. two of the (w/c, not well off) lasses in my office drive 'em though. apparently they're good cars.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 29, 2012)

The warehouse manager at work owns a BMW.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I was thinking more of the BMW tbh, what's the point in owning a BMW if not to show off how much money you have? It's not like they're economical to run.


Who says it was his anyway?

Nah, that's just the same stuff that you recognise as bullshit but on a larger scale.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 29, 2012)

killer b said:


> dunno, i don't drive. two of the (w/c, not well off) lasses in my office drive 'em though. apparently they're good cars.


 
Might be good cars but they're stupidly overpriced because of the status of having one.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Might be good cars but they're stupidly overpriced because of the status of having one.


The idiocy is in the idea that someone on a w/c could not afford one - either through their wage or through credit. The _car itself_ and its qualities are irrelevant, as is it _being TR_ seemingly having one.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Who says it was his anyway?


 
You suggesting he's borrowed someone's BMW? Why, to impress Laurie Penny?

Incidentally I remember way back in the day Mark Collett (remember him?) owning a BMW and driving it round Leeds like he was the dogs bollocks, and all the BNP in west yorkshrie hated him for it coz Mark never had a proper job in his life.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> You suggesting he's borrowed someone's BMW? Why, to impress Laurie Penny?
> 
> Incidentally I remember way back in the day Mark Collett (remember him?) owning a BMW and driving it round Leeds like he was the dogs bollocks, and all the BNP in west yorkshrie hated him for it coz Mark never had a proper job in his life.


People do borrow cars. Esp to show off. But it's utterly irrelevant if *HE* did or didn't, beyond it being useful in pointing out the sewage about w/c people in Laura's psyche.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> The idiocy is in the idea that someone on a w/c could not afford one - either through their wage or through credit. The _car itself_ and its qualities are irrelevant, as is it _being TR_ seemingly having one.


 
To be fair actually you've got a point, you can pick up a decent BMW for around a grand.

And I'm basing this on an assumption that it's a nice BMW he's got, could be some old banger.


----------



## chilango (Nov 29, 2012)

I remember years back going up to Tower Collery in South Wales to give the miners a bucket of cash we'd collected for them. The miners (quite understandably) gave me, a scruffy student in tatty army surplus, some very strange looks as they climbed into their BMWs shaking their heads.


----------



## killer b (Nov 29, 2012)

doesn't matter anyway. having nice threads, a good looking motor, looking after yourself etc has long been a feature of many w/c people's lives. to deny that someone is the authentic voice of the working class based on them having these things simply exposes the writer's ignorance. and that's just the first paragraph...


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 29, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Penny for your thoughts.
> 
> (Which will be her blog title/Times column header in twenty five years)


 
corercted for you.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 29, 2012)

how expensive is the most expensive steak in a toby or a beefeaters going to be? a big 15 quid?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

Laurie, of course, didn't use the vice wallet that whole day.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> I've bought some really nice perfume a few times before, and it cost a lot.


 
*adds to list of reasons*

Fascist!


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> corercted for you.


 
Five years? Nah, she'll be a Labour appartchick by then - intentional mispelling there to signify Penny's role of the new way of chickenism - feminism by those who remember liking the Spice Girls when they were five.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 29, 2012)

What percentage of an American Apperal ad featuring a nude pubescent girl does it take to pay for a nazi's lunch anyway?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 29, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Five years? Nah, she'll be a Labour appartchick by then - intentional mispelling there to signify Penny's role of the new way of chickenism - feminism by those who remember liking the Spice Girls when they were five.


 
christ, you're even more cynical than I am.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Five years? Nah, she'll be a Labour appartchick by then - intentional mispelling there to signify Penny's role of the new way of chickenism - feminism by those who remember liking the Spice Girls when they were five.


Nah, her chosen role requires her to remain outside.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 29, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> What percentage of an American Apperal ad featuring a nude pubescent girl does it take to pay for a nazi's lunch anyway?


 
god, that's a clunky sentence.  maybe i ask a journalist where to put the commas.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Nah, her chosen role requires her to remain outside.


 
Yeah and her track record of sticking with it stands testimony to her support for whatever cause she's justifying for her effect.

If Labour get in in 2015, she'll be stuck to some up and coming M.P like Tommy Robinson on a Harvester steak.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 29, 2012)

Anyone going to the totally nagasaki Vice tenth anniversary party tonight?

As one breathless blogger (who also, incidentally, "work at VICE Magazine and [is] a freelance music and beauty journalist and aspiring video presenter... [&] also do[es] a bit of djing") puts it:



> legendary East London magazine VICE is ten years old this week and to celebrate it's foray into being a young teenager


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

I've only heard of VICE on here - it's SugarApe isn't it?


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 29, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> god, that's a clunky sentence. maybe i ask a journalist where to put the commas.


 
it sounds like the first line of an excruciating  joke


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Yeah and her track record of sticking with it stands testimony to her support for whatever cause she's justifying for her effect.
> 
> If Labour get in in 2015, she'll be stuck to some up and coming M.P like Tommy Robinson on a Harvester steak.


Not sure what the first para means.

She won't. Like Toynbee, she has to be outside for the effect of being an independent radical voice to work.

And i still think she believes this shite she writes. The problem is that she thinks she's bakunin when she's actually Sarah Teather/articul8.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

Comma? I never even met her


----------



## co-op (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> The problem is that she thinks she's bakunin when she's actually Sarah Teather/articul8.


----------



## co-op (Nov 29, 2012)

We are all Sarah Teather!


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Not sure what the first para means.


 
That her changeability, her ability to alter her past to strengthen her present combined with her firey passion for this minutes must have revolutionary chic could see her easily swept up in election fever.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

Balbi said:


> That her changeability, her ability to alter her past to strengthen her present combined with her firey passion for this minute's must have revolution could see her easily swept into a stable with the straw and shite.


Ok, get you.In that case same as before from me, she does believe in this stuff. It'll be tempered by 'critical' support for labour and talking at green party events and whatever other groups appear, but her path is not inside the party.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

I never thought i'd be a more cynical bastard than you Butchers  But yeah, yours is more realistic - i'm just having a bad day.


----------



## chilango (Nov 29, 2012)

co-op said:


> We are all Sarah Teather!



Why not

"We are all Articul8"?

Give the lad a break....


----------



## killer b (Nov 29, 2012)

chilango said:


> Why not
> 
> "We are all Articul8"?


 
<shudders>


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> The problem is that she thinks she's bakunin...


 
Collectivist-oriented Bakunin, or Marines-obsessed bakunin?


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

Bakunin the DHSS.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 29, 2012)

chilango said:


> "We are all Articul8"?


 
_Neither American Apparel nor Russia Today but International Pepperism_


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Collectivist-oriented Bakunin, or Marines-obsessed bakunin?


Either way, she's pretty much failing her self-criticism class.


----------



## co-op (Nov 29, 2012)

chilango said:


> Why not
> 
> "We are all Articul8"?
> 
> Give the lad a break....


 
Only just noticed the "articul8" bit there - some super-swift editing by ba I think. But *adopts earnest tone of voice* I _do_ think the more progressive parts of the Lib Dems like Sarah Teather may be part of a future radical gov...er no wait that's just bollocks actually.


----------



## co-op (Nov 29, 2012)

IJ Norlalno said:


> Rubbish. Everybody on the left knows that workers wear Docs and bomber jackets.


 
Proper retro workers wear donkey jackets, anyone who went to an SWP meeting in the 80s knows that.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> She won't. Like Toynbee, she has to be outside for the effect of being an independent radical voice to work.
> 
> And i still think she believes this shite she writes. The problem is that she thinks she's bakunin when she's actually Sarah Teather/articul8.


 
i agree with this completely.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 29, 2012)

Look at discokermit and his smoking jacket, Chinese slippers, driving gloves and Jag.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

He can only afford one chinese slipper. That's proper w/c.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 29, 2012)

IJ Norlalno said:


> Rubbish. Everybody on the left knows that workers wear Docs and bomber jackets.


 
welcome back.


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

Look at Tony Benn with his involuntary hereditary parliamentary succession


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> He can only afford one chinese slipper. That's proper w/c.


Sorry, I just spoilt your gag


----------



## killer b (Nov 29, 2012)

bomber jacket. proper working class togs. 

edit. except it isn't is it. it's a fucking donkey jacket.


----------



## spawnofsatan (Nov 29, 2012)

killer b said:


> bomber jacket. proper working class togs.


 
Wonder how much one with NCB on the back is worth


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Not sure what the first para means.
> 
> She won't. Like Toynbee, she has to be outside for the effect of being an independent radical voice to work.
> 
> And i still think she believes this shite she writes. The problem is that *she thinks she's bakunin when she's actually Sarah Teather/articul8.*


 
Ouch.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 29, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> _Neither American Apparel nor Russia Today but International Pepperism_


 
*Boke*


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 29, 2012)

IJ Norlalno said:


> Rubbish. Everybody on the left knows that workers wear Docs and bomber jackets.


 
Nope, that's Skins.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 29, 2012)

co-op said:


> Proper retro workers wear donkey jackets, anyone who went to an SWP meeting in the 80s knows that.


 
Donkey jackets and Monkey boots or Docs.

Or, if you're a _faux_-retro worker selling copies of _Socialist Worker_, garishly-coloured Kickers.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Sorry, I just spoilt your gag


You've just made a very vexatious enemy my friend.


----------



## Bakunin (Nov 29, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Penny for your thoughts.


 
That's what she offers. Then she recycles your thoughts and personal experiences, claims them as being entirely hers and flogs them in fifth-rate 'journalism' at a fiver a word.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 29, 2012)

IJ Norlalno said:


> No skins were workers.


 
Did I say that?
I surely did not!

Whereas you, my fine young friend, made a post that implied that *all* workers wore bomber jackets.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 29, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> That's what she offers. Then she recycles your thoughts and personal experiences, claims them as being entirely hers and flogs them in fifth-rate 'journalism' at a fiver a word.


 
Bitter?
I am!


----------



## rekil (Nov 29, 2012)

Camila Vallejo and communist party cmbbes on a Chile telly chat show being subjected to a comedy tribute tune. When will we see Laura (inveterate instigator and voice of lost generation) Owen (left wing firebrand) and O'Hagan (...) on Norton?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m19R9SVkx4


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Nov 29, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Anyone going to the totally nagasaki Vice tenth anniversary party tonight?
> 
> As one breathless blogger (who also, incidentally, "work at VICE Magazine and [is] a freelance music and beauty journalist and aspiring video presenter... [&] also do[es] a bit of djing") puts it:


 
The cunts attending that.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 29, 2012)

not even andrew wk can save that.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

This, rather than the bullshit about bankers and so on, is the real crime of a (temporary) financial-capital dominance. These little shits get to do what they want for decades on end.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 29, 2012)

brixton village


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 29, 2012)

is vice one of those magazines meant to be read ironically


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> is vice one of those magazines meant to be read ironically


It's meant to be read in your 20s and 30s and if from a family who can support you for a fair while.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Nov 29, 2012)

i don't think even vice know anymore.  i think it's meant to be read by a knowing, savvy audience who don't engage with traditional brands and ways of thinking, but see themselves as outside of the bllluadgha ruwgnmpawhtmpc;sa fwgn[wrhhawraramhmvtrTVNmassive fucking BELLENDS


----------



## TruXta (Nov 29, 2012)

Some of their docus are mildly entertaining, never even seen the magazine.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

The sunday sport for richer people.

Docos? You mean a) horrible pointless wallowing in look how shit these people are or b) look i'm pissed up abroad?


----------



## TruXta (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Docos? You mean a) horrible pointless wallowing in look how shit these people are or b) look i'm pissed up abroad?


 
Sounds about right.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

The cultural-shit of neo-liberalism.


----------



## TruXta (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> The cultural-shit of neo-liberalism.


Sounds about right.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> The cultural-shit


 
I head upstairs for a cultural shit every fortnight when my _LRB_ pops through the letterbox


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

Long time to wait mind. Saves on the bogroll though.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 29, 2012)

Strong, shiny paper that stands a quick rinse, so it lasts a good week before you start running into trouble.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

That's the problem with kindles- it gets stuck in the corners.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> That's the problem with kindles- it gets stuck in the corners.


You want to get an iPad - smoothed out edges and a wipe-clean screen. Just watch out for foreign objects getting stuck in your jack socket.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

Oh btw, articul8 is live tweeting from Parliament right now!!!!


----------



## TruXta (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Oh btw, articul8 is live tweeting from Parliament right now!!!!


What's he saying?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> You want to get an iPad - smoothed out edges and a wipe-clean screen. Just watch out for foreign objects getting stuck in your jack socket.


Would be ideal but not for petites such as i.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> The cultural-shit of neo-liberalism.


i had a crap at the royal festival hall a couple of days ago. that was definitely a cultural shit.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

TruXta said:


> What's he saying?


I'm in parliament, EVERYONE, I'M IN PARLIAMENT. And some other laboury wank.


----------



## DotCommunist (Nov 29, 2012)

is it still levenson talk or what


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 29, 2012)

democracy, i am in you


----------



## rekil (Nov 29, 2012)

That piece is nearly 3000 words btw. Money for rope.


----------



## killer b (Nov 29, 2012)

'I can see the back of michael meacher's head'


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 29, 2012)

Balbi said:


> It's like trash tv - you know when you can predict with accuracy the next step of the article - how there'll be a switch from one to another, actually answering a rhetorical question or bringing in an asian student to the discussion. As played out as the constant woes in Walford. Good journalism should lead you either somewhere you didn't expect or reveal something you didn't know - but it shouldn't so obviously show off that the hack has seen tricks done, and is attempting them in their own work.


 
remarkably incisive post for you. keep it up


----------



## Balbi (Nov 29, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> remarkably incisive post for you. keep it up


 
*touches forelock* Thank'ee sir, very kind sir.


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 29, 2012)

Balbi said:


> *touches forelock* Thank'ee sir, very kind sir.


 
Citizen to you Balbi, Citizen.


----------



## the button (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I'm in parliament, EVERYONE, I'M IN PARLIAMENT. And some other laboury wank.


#zote


----------



## ska invita (Nov 29, 2012)

tbf to Vice - much as it pains me to defend them - they do reports (docus) on subject areas i havent seen anyone else report on. the way they go about this is often annoying but its a step up from the fashionista stuff they were doing a few years ago (which they still continue with). the music documentaries are particularly good. There was one about one man black metal bands for example.


----------



## Bakunin (Nov 29, 2012)

killer b said:


> 'I can see the back of michael meacher's head'


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> The cultural-shit of neo-liberalism.


 
Neoliberalism as essentially _scheissekultur_.

Sounds about right.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 29, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> I head upstairs for a cultural shit every fortnight when my _LRB_ pops through the letterbox


 
Puts Cinzano on the "liquidate first, ask questions later" list.


----------



## rekil (Nov 29, 2012)

Laura in Germany report. She doesn't do a joey barton sadly. Then again, I only watched 10 seconds, so who knows. 

http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/beitrag/video/1775464/Laurie-Penny-und-die-Wut


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 29, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Puts Cinzano on the "liquidate first, ask questions later" list.


Some of those posh poos are pre-liquidated - and you might want to open a window before you cock your Tokarev lest you ignite some revanchist fumes.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 29, 2012)

copliker said:


> Laura in Germany report. She doesn't do a joey barton sadly. Then again, I only watched 10 seconds, so who knows.
> 
> http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/beitrag/video/1775464/Laurie-Penny-und-die-Wut


Fake hand tattoo


----------



## articul8 (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> . The problem is that she thinks she's bakunin when she's actually Sarah Teather/articul8.


 
Bakunin's politics are closer to Sarah Teather's than mine - they're both dozy cunts with a lot to answer for.


----------



## rekil (Nov 29, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Fake hand tattoo


 I didn't see it and then gave up at the bit where she makes a little anarchy sign.


----------



## barney_pig (Nov 30, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Bakunin's politics are closer to Sarah Teather's than mine - they're both dozy cunts with a lot to answer for.


Whereas you are a towering intellect who never answers for anything.


----------



## chilango (Nov 30, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Bakunin's politics are closer to Sarah Teather's than mine.


 
Many a true word spoken in jest.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Nov 30, 2012)

Subs day!


----------



## cesare (Nov 30, 2012)

*covers eyes*


----------



## The39thStep (Nov 30, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> Whereas you are a towering intellect who never answers for anything.


 
Thought that was The Black Hands role?


----------



## barney_pig (Nov 30, 2012)

The good doctor looms over us all


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 30, 2012)

Loons


----------



## cesare (Nov 30, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Loons


----------



## Riklet (Nov 30, 2012)

copliker said:


> I didn't see it and then gave up at the bit where she makes a little anarchy sign.


 
you haven't seen anything until you see her tagging the wall, and.. wait for it, the fag-to-mouth flick.

cringeworthiness i am in you. properly groaned.


----------



## rekil (Nov 30, 2012)

Victory to Delroy who appears to have kicked off a twitter shitquake of guardian hack whinging. Even Glinner has waded in. Fantastic.


----------



## framed (Nov 30, 2012)

She is a fucking simpleton, but it just goes to show that some Germans will still fall for any old scheisse...


----------



## chilango (Nov 30, 2012)

Shit at graffiti


----------



## framed (Nov 30, 2012)

She's just ruined a perfectly good graffiti wall with her infantile scribblings...

Does spraying cliched symbols on to a bit of paper and then trying to stick it to a wall still count as 'graffiti art'?


----------



## rekil (Nov 30, 2012)

Maybe she was trying to make a "stencil". Fuck knows what kind of shit she filled them with.


----------



## chilango (Nov 30, 2012)

Clearly Crabapple's talents haven't rubbed off on her.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 1, 2012)

copliker said:


> Some of clare solomon's loudhailers.


Stereosolomonic


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 1, 2012)

Solomoronic


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 1, 2012)

copliker said:


> Victory to Delroy who appears to have kicked off a twitter shitquake of guardian hack whinging. Even Glinner has waded in. Fantastic.


 
I had a very dull exchange of emails with Helen Lewis which ended with her _calling me out on my privilige..._

I love it when someone who earns more in a fortnight than I do in a year calls me out on my privilige.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 1, 2012)

wtf why were you privileged? compared to her that is


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 1, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> wtf why were you privileged?


 
Because I disagreed with her presumably.


----------



## rekil (Dec 1, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I had a very dull exchange of emails with Helen Lewis which ended with her _calling me out on my privilige..._
> 
> I love it when someone who earns more in a fortnight than I do in a year calls me out on my privilige.


I see she's a founder of "Booze ‘n’ Schmooze", a "free monthly networking event for young journalists, PRs, other media workers (and now marketing folk)"

One assumes that it's not a Huddersfield thing.

Some of the most intriguing whinges.




			
				owen jones said:
			
		

> their politics are secondary to misanthropy and just not being very nice






			
				helen lewis said:
			
		

> I don't think "the left" or "liberals" are nasty, just this self-appointed group.






			
				graham linehan said:
			
		

> I'll be a bit more specific. The sanctimonious left on Twitter are The Worst






			
				james ball said:
			
		

> They are viscerally, repeatedly, utterly unpleasant in a totally counter-productive way
> 
> That's the worst of several, but seriously. These guys are beneath contempt, and people should say so.
> 
> ...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 1, 2012)

there is no "they" this is all complete imagination. ffs someone who runs a "free monthly networking event for young journalists, PRs, other media workers (and now marketing folk)" (and a vegan crunk night too) accusing a totally dispirate group of people who don't know each other of being in a clique. It's beyond parody.

Owen Jones isn't anything like as bad as the rest of 'em tbh


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 2, 2012)

Owen Jones said:
			
		

> just not being very nice


 



			
				Helen Lewis said:
			
		

> nasty liberal


 



			
				the totally unsanctimonious graham linehan said:
			
		

> The left on Twitter are The Worst


 



			
				james ball said:
			
		

> unpleasant. beneath contempt


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 2, 2012)

Is she that one who was complaining about people being bullied for scabbing?


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 2, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> there is no "they" this is all complete imagination. ffs someone who runs a "free monthly networking event for young journalists, PRs, other media workers (and now marketing folk)" (and a vegan crunk night too) accusing a totally dispirate group of people who don't know each other of being in a clique. It's beyond parody.
> 
> Owen Jones isn't anything like as bad as the rest of 'em tbh


 
They even have their own anthem...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 2, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Is she that one who was complaining about people being bullied for scabbing?


 
Nah that's Lisa Ansell she's just a bit of a marginal crank* and a bit paranoid, i managed to straighten that out amicably in the end.

* A label I'm probably far more suited for, in all honesty. It's my birthday today and look what I'm doing ffs


----------



## gawkrodger (Dec 2, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> The sunday sport for richer people.
> 
> Docos? You mean a) horrible pointless wallowing in look how shit these people are or b) look i'm pissed up abroad?


 
magazine is utter shite. Their online side has had some good bits - eg Their Tattoo Age docos and Epicly Latered.

Have a couple of actually vaguely interesting young journos who do the odd thing here and there


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 2, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> there is no "they" this is all complete imagination. ffs someone who runs a "free monthly networking event for young journalists, PRs, other media workers (and now marketing folk)" (and a vegan crunk night too) accusing a totally dispirate group of people who don't know each other of being in a clique. It's beyond parody.
> 
> Owen Jones isn't anything like as bad as the rest of 'em tbh


 
Owen Jones is an ok guy - His heart's in the right place.

In a battle of the Owens though, Hatherley beats Jones just as surely as rock beats scissors.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 2, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Owen Jones is an ok guy - *His heart's in the right place*.
> 
> In a battle of the Owens though, Hatherley beats Jones just as surely as rock beats scissors.


 
In the Labour Party?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 2, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> In the Labour Party?


 
In Frances' camphorwood keepsake box.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Dec 3, 2012)

> *Sick and tired: the coalition’s war on the disabled and destitute*
> 
> Being sick and tired is no reason not to keep fighting - a growing number of people are refusing to accept this new, cruel reality.


http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2012/11/sick-and-tired-coalitions-war-disabled-and-destitute


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 3, 2012)

Another ar'icle.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 3, 2012)

> It's difficult to stay calm about this. I'm finding it difficult, as someone who has been writing and campaigning about the attack on welfare for four years and more, since I was a caregiver with a severely disabled boyfriend who went through the process of prostrating himself for incapacity benefits that came too late or not at all.


 
Not sure if there is anything this woman hasn't managed to cram in in her career.


----------



## JimW (Dec 3, 2012)

She misheard the lad, he actually castrated himself for the benefit of an incapacity to have conjugal relations with our Laurie.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 3, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Not sure if there is anything this woman hasn't managed to cram in in her career.


Doesn't like to talk about it - just giving back to the little people


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 3, 2012)

She used to write (wri'e?) about it on her blog back in 2009, when she was living in 'poverty.'


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 3, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> She used to write (wri'e?) about it on her blog back in 2009, when she was living in 'poverty.'


 
have you really been reading her since 2009?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 3, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> She used to write (wri'e?) about it on her blog back in 2009, when she was living in 'poverty.'


I thought she might have been talking about Lezard. He's probably impotent from all the booze, and that *might* count as a disability to Laura.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 3, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> have you really been reading her since 2009?


 
A few times.  I think she was pro-Labour back then.  Before becoming a revolutionary.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 3, 2012)

Oh yes, this reminds me of her _homeless period - living in warehouses on a tenner week_


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 3, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> A few times. I think she was pro-Labour back then. Before becoming a revolutionary.


 
Labour, Lib Dems, Anarchist, protest journalist and managing to find all of these contradictory titles useful for self-promoting careerism.

Is there any part of the political spectrum that hasn't been graced with Her majesty's presence on her Tragical Misery Tour?


----------



## articul8 (Dec 3, 2012)

kebab bum finger is on newsnight - talking about tax avoidance


----------



## love detective (Dec 3, 2012)

Richard Murphy's going to have an aneurysm


----------



## articul8 (Dec 4, 2012)

I have some sympathy with him - having Ellie on (with the trendy vicar) plays up to this "young, naive, worthy, idealistic" thing, in contrast to the worldly-wise and expert tax professionals.   Having another sober, grey suited boring looking accountant talk about how the whole thing is a massive fucking scam undermines this.


----------



## rekil (Dec 4, 2012)

This time last year.


> I've lost count of the number of times I've been told that because I have a smartphone and went to a private school, I have no business speaking about social justice.
> 
> At root, this argument is about a fear of ideology: a terror of real political and economic alternatives in a society that would still rather group people into warring tribes based on income and lifestyle. The left is not entirely immune from this sort of lazy reasoning.


Now.

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
@*johnb78* point is that Robinson is a small businessman, and has a pile of money. No working-class hero.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 4, 2012)

laura said:
			
		

> If you follow this blog regularly - well, firstly, thank you, and secondly, I'd seriously urge you to consider subscribing to Red Pepper if you can, or to donate online if you're a web reader. The lovely powers that be let me do pretty much what I want with this blog, but I do write additional stuff for the print edition, and it's an all-round awesome publication which deserves a lot more attention than it's getting.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 4, 2012)

where/when's that from?  Even a stopped clock...


----------



## chilango (Dec 4, 2012)

*points and laughs*

ha ha.


----------



## Random (Dec 4, 2012)

I'm starting to hear the glottal stops when reading now, thanks to ghost


----------



## rekil (Dec 5, 2012)

> I've decided that early next year I'm going to go to Ireland (NI and Republic) to cover abortion rights/radicalism. Who would like to meet?





> I'm more Irish than English - it's also a great excuse to visit all my family


Kewl.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 5, 2012)

Wolfe Tones on the ipod


----------



## rekil (Dec 5, 2012)

IRA, I am in you!

etc


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> > I'm more Irish than English - it's also a great excuse to visit all my family​
> 
> 
> Kewl.


 
Pipebombs for goalposts.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 5, 2012)

The RA, I am up you


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 5, 2012)

Tiocfaidh à la mode


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 5, 2012)

copliker said:


> Kewl.


Didn't Laura claim to be Jewish last year??


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 5, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Didn't Laura claim to be Jewish last year??


 

She was born in a jerusalem street, where the loyal drums do beat and the likud loving feet walked all over her. And every single night when her da would come home tight she'd admonish him for his excess


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 5, 2012)

We are all whichever oppressed group catches our attention this week


----------



## BigTom (Dec 5, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Didn't Laura claim to be Jewish last year??



Pretty sure she said her (great?) grand dad was a Russian Jewish emigrant. Wouldn't stop her other 3 grand parents being Irish of course but i wonder how long it'll be until she has more that 4 Grand parents..


----------



## flypanam (Dec 5, 2012)

Laura should meet Niamh Nic Mhathuna.

Mind you, Women in Ireland have spent fucking ages trying to get the church off their backs, I don't think they'll be too keen on another saviour.


----------



## flypanam (Dec 5, 2012)

BigTom said:


> Pretty sure she said her (great?) grand dad was a Russian Jewish emigrant. Wouldn't stop her other 3 grand parents being Irish of course but i wonder how long it'll be until she has more that 4 Grand parents..


 
Probably an ancestor of Fredrick Douglas too. Got to cover all bases.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 5, 2012)

> I am a feminist of Jewish descent whose relatives live in Israel, and for whom the idea of a Jewish homeland from exile is not a concept of emotional irrelevance.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 5, 2012)

What did the half Israeli Guard in Dublin say to Laura when he nicked her at an abortion protest next year?

"Irish Jew in the name of the law"


----------



## killer b (Dec 5, 2012)

Oof!


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 5, 2012)




----------



## not-bono-ever (Dec 5, 2012)

In one awful way, I have to admire her drive - she has pulled herself up by her bootstraps - Shes carved out a decent life for herself innit - jetting around, talking shite - not bad for an Oxbridge public school girl on the poverty line.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 5, 2012)




----------



## JimW (Dec 5, 2012)

not-bono-ever said:


> I have to admire her drive.


You're only allowed to do that from the other side of the road well beyond the gatehouse or her parents will set the gamekeeper on you.


----------



## Random (Dec 5, 2012)

not-bono-ever said:


> In one awful way, I have to admire her drive - she has pulled herself up by her bootstraps - Shes carved out a decent life for herself innit - jetting around, talking shite - not bad for an Oxbridge public school girl on the poverty line.


 she must be in touch with plenty of friends from private school and oxford who are earning telephone numbers. That probably keeps her feeling edgy and martyred.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 5, 2012)

yeah i swear she said something last year accusing somebody of anti-semitism when they criticised her. that might just be me imagining things tho


----------



## love detective (Dec 5, 2012)

Random said:


> she must be in touch with plenty of friends from private school and oxford who are earning telephone numbers. That probably keeps her feeling edgy and martyred.


 
And she always seems to be in touch, Harri like, with unidentified/unattributed people whose personal situation exactly matches whatever topic she's writing about

(although saying that, apart from her usual appropriating usage of 'our' and 'we' her recent guardian article wasn't too bad, well i mean there wasn't as much wrong with it as is usually the case)


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 5, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> that might just be me imagining things tho


 
There's a lot of money in imagining things.

Ask Penny Dreadful.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 5, 2012)

Random said:


> she must be in touch with plenty of friends from private school and oxford who are earning telephone numbers. That probably keeps her feeling edgy and martyred.


 
Apparently a lot of her friends are hard done by and earning less than Laura herself, according to Laura herself.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 5, 2012)

not-bono-ever said:


> I have to admire her drive...


 
She plays golf, too! Is there no end to her vileness?


----------



## articul8 (Dec 5, 2012)

she'll be voting UKIP soon then


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Dec 5, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Apparently a lot of her friends are hard done by and earning less than Laura herself, according to Laura herself.


 
I suspect that a lot of people wouldn't mind earning less than Laura; whether or not they'd want to be her friend is another question entirely.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 5, 2012)

articul8 said:


> she'll be voting UKIP soon then


 
Only when it becomes a good career move.


----------



## rekil (Dec 5, 2012)

love detective said:


> (although saying that, apart from her usual appropriating usage of 'our' and 'we' her recent guardian article wasn't too bad, well i mean there wasn't as much wrong with it as is usually the case)


 Didn't Sarah Teather, heh, do essentially the same piece a couple of weeks ago? It's just more bottom feeding hackery phoned in from lower manhattan or wherever as she's incapable of going out and finding a story.


----------



## rekil (Dec 6, 2012)

flypanam said:


> Laura should meet Niamh Nic Mhathuna.


She's Niamh Ui Bhriain now as she shacked up with her fancyman like a cheap slattern and apparently she's had SEX at least twice because I've seen her with two children. She would run rings around Laura.



> My book's going to be about feminism and activism and gender anarchy and socialism and sexual deviance and basically all the things I like.
> 
> Actually signed the contract for this book almost 2 years ago, but put it off because needed time to travel, do politics, grow up some more.


It should be a hoot.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 6, 2012)

Listen I'm all for going 'fuck you I won't do what your society has assigned to me by accident of which sperm got to the egg first', but 'gender anarchy'?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 6, 2012)

weepiper said:


> Listen I'm all for going 'fuck you I won't do what your society has assigned to me by accident of which sperm got to the egg first', but 'gender anarchy'?


 
I strongly suspect this boils down to Laura's right to one day say "I'm hetero", the next day say "I'm gay" and the day after that say "I'm bi".

Oh, hold on, she's already claimed all those positions in the last couple of years, hasn't she? Gender anarchy in action!!!


----------



## rekil (Dec 6, 2012)

weepiper said:


> Listen I'm all for going 'fuck you I won't do what your society has assigned to me by accident of which sperm got to the egg first', but 'gender anarchy'?


A brief google suggests that it involves playing at dress up in order to shock you pustulent dullard normals out of your torporific wastelives.


----------



## love detective (Dec 7, 2012)

Penny aged 25 said:
			
		

> Actually signed the contract for this book almost 2 years ago, but put it off because needed time to travel, do politics, grow up some more.


 



			
				Penny said:
			
		

> Laurie Penny, 23, never imagined she would find herself enmeshed in a world of poverty


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 7, 2012)

copliker said:


> A brief google suggests that it involves playing at dress up in order to shock you pustulent dullard normals out of your torporific wastelives.


 
cool, can i dress up as an astronaut?


----------



## love detective (Dec 7, 2012)

> *John W* ‏@*hplyevraftr5OCS*
> Think there must be an alt-universe where @*PennyRed* &@*mollycrabapple* are a superteam fighting injustice. Then realize that it's this one.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 7, 2012)

Im going to dress up as a journalist.


----------



## love detective (Dec 7, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Got an email from a reader saying he plans to kill himself when his disability benefits are cut and can I write about it? No idea what to do


Bet she's secretly hoping he kills himself so she gets a 'better' story


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 7, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Im going to dress up as a journalist.


This actually is what she does - privilege meets personal post-modernism. _I deserve to be everyone i want to be. So i am. _That can be a really healthy and inspiring thing coming from someone with insight, sense, humility and respect for wider society. Coming from her it just inadvertently demonstrates how shallow she is. _I want a pony._


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 7, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Im going to dress up as a journalist.


It's a good look.

Will you be going for the Big Mac...






...or the Little Nev?



Spoiler: Somewhat NSFW


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 7, 2012)

Who's the nekkid chap?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 7, 2012)

is that Paul Mac shortly after drinking the nights takings? Again.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 7, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Who's the nekkid chap?


_NOTW_'s star reporter Neville Thurlbeck demanding to be wanked off (on expenses).


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 7, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> _NOTW_'s star reporter Neville Thurlbeck demanding to be wanked off (on expenses).


What's the story then?


----------



## Balbi (Dec 7, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> This actually is what she does - privilege meets personal post-modernism. _I deserve to be everyone i want to be. So i am. _That can be a really healthy and inspiring thing coming from someone with insight, sense, humility and respect for wider society. Coming from her it just inadvertently demonstrates how shallow she is. _I want a pony._



Spot on.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 7, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> This actually is what she does - privilege meets personal post-modernism. _I deserve to be everyone i want to be. So i am. _That can be a really healthy and inspiring thing coming from someone with insight, sense, humility and respect for wider society. Coming from her it just inadvertently demonstrates how shallow she is. _I want a pony._


She's Katie Price basically.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 7, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> She's Katie Price basically.



That's a tad harsh on Katie Price.


----------



## love detective (Dec 7, 2012)

> *Ellie Mae O'Hagan* ‏@*MissEllieMae*
> .@*MrHarryCole* Funny, first time I met Luke Bozier was at your Christmas party.


mates, all mates


----------



## love detective (Dec 7, 2012)

> *Ellie Mae O'Hagan* ‏@*MissEllieMae*
> "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has."


No room for the masses/ordinary people being the agent of change, only a small elite of privileged kebab bum fingers can do that


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 8, 2012)

Why is she quoting something that's a)wrong and b) a view derived from the elite and privilege soaked life of Mead. (Not to mention the debate over her actual work which at worst has been called academic fraud see (idris for more details) - or working for the RAND corp).


----------



## Random (Dec 8, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Why is she quoting something that's a)wrong and b) a view derived from the elite and privilege soaked life of Mead. (Not to mention the debate over her actual work which at worst has been called academic fraud see (idris for more details) - or working for the RAND corp).


That quote is popular with people who see themselves as thoughtful and committed, and wonder why oh why they are such a small group. As an officer of a union with a membership of hundreds of thousands, why should she be all about this small is beautiful stance? FMC


----------



## rekil (Dec 8, 2012)

1000 words of hatin' on kate'n'wills.


> We are becoming a colder, meaner place, and love, a force that is supposed to be more powerful even than class, is harder than ever to fight for.


We are becoming a place? Have the subs just given up?


> The lesson is: know your place. The lesson is: know your class, and its limits, and who, ultimately, is in charge.


Sounds like a pep talk she'll be giving to a new wave of 30k a year brighton college brats in a few years time.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 8, 2012)

OH JUST FUCK OFF LAURIE. Ta.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 8, 2012)

copliker said:


> Sounds like a pep talk she'll be giving to a new wave of 30k a year brighton college brats in a few years time.


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 8, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Why is she quoting something that's a)wrong and b) a view derived from the elite and privilege soaked life of Mead. (Not to mention the debate over her actual work which at worst has been called academic fraud see (idris for more details) - or working for the RAND corp).


 
Margaret Mead was never accused of academic fraud. The argument was that she had been spoofed by her informants when she was a very young anthropologist working in Samoa.

The accusation came from an ex-student of hers, Derek Freeman, a person who had 'issues', let's say. He claimed that when Samoan women told Mead of their liberated sex lives they were having her on. It's a long, long, long time since I looked at this debate, but some of it revolves around what the definition of sexual activity might be in Samoa as distinct from the United States. If it was more broadly than defined than mere penetrative intercourse, then there may be more truth in the stories Mead collected than Freeman thinks.

One point Freeman dwelt on at length was the existence of a ritual for the symbolic restoration of virginity in Samoa. He argued (again, this is from memory) that this in turn indicated that virginity was a highly valued condition in Samoa. Yet surely if you have to have a ritual to restore that state, wouldn't that indicate that some people at least have a more free and easy attitude to same?

The other point is that by the time Freeman did his own work in Samoa, evangelical missionaries had worked their unique brand of magic on the place.

Should Mead have been more sceptical in her work? Probably - but she was trying to build an entire discipline out of nothing.

The points about privilege, elitism and working for the Rand corporation are true. However, in her defence, I would say that she was no Laurie Penny.

(and she was never really important in UK anthropology)

E2A: Interesting link here:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=margaret-meads-bashers-owe-her-an-a-2010-10-18


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 8, 2012)

Random said:


> That quote is popular with people who see themselves as thoughtful and committed, and wonder why oh why they are such a small group. As an officer of a union with a membership of hundreds of thousands, why should she be all about this small is beautiful stance? FMC


 
The thing with the "revolutionary middle classes" (pffft) is that they're always vanguardists. Always chiefs rather than Indians; always staff officers rather than enlisted men.  They're scum attempting to ride to power by pretending to represent the masses, and that is all most of them are. Ms. finger should know better, given her position, and the fact that she doesn't speaks volumes about who her commitment is to, and it ain't "the workers".


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 8, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> The thing with the "revolutionary middle classes" (pffft) is that they're always vanguardists. Always chiefs rather than Indians; always staff officers rather than enlisted men. They're scum attempting to ride to power by pretending to represent the masses, and that is all most of them are. Ms. finger should know better, given her position, and the fact that she doesn't speaks volumes about who her commitment is to, and it ain't "the workers".


 
He says this as if it's a bad thing.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 8, 2012)

Random said:


> That quote is popular with people who see themselves as thoughtful and committed, and wonder why oh why they are such a small group. As an officer of a union with a membership of hundreds of thousands, why should she be all about this small is beautiful stance? FMC


 
It's a very revealing and interesting quote on her part actually - it will be interesting to see where she ends up in a year or two.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 8, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> The thing with the "revolutionary middle classes" (pffft) is that they're always vanguardists. Always chiefs rather than Indians; always staff officers rather than enlisted men. They're scum attempting to ride to power by pretending to represent the masses, and that is all most of them are. Ms. finger should know better, given her position, and the fact that she doesn't speaks volumes about who her commitment is to, and it ain't "the workers".


 
Thank heavens someone agrees with my view on the anarchist scene. it may have taken you a long time VP but I knew in my heart that you would get there


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 8, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> He says this as if it's a bad thing.


 
It is, my bog-trotting comrade. It is.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 8, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> It's a very revealing and interesting quote on her part actually - it will be interesting to see where she ends up in a year or two.


 
Given that she's already being spoken of as a potential MP, then parliament, although she'll probably spend some time as a policy wonk first, it being an accepted route to having Central Office parachute you intto a safe seat, and all.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 8, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Given that she's already being spoken of as a potential MP, then parliament, although she'll probably spend some time as a policy wonk first, it being an accepted route to having Central Office parachute you intto a safe seat, and all.


 
I think that as much as she might like to get into Parliament it would be unlikely at the moment and the only people likely to hire her as a researcher or whatever are Cryer or McDonnell neither of whom have much clout...

She is one of those who is ruthless enough I think to try to get in but doesn't have the brains frankly.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 8, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I think that as much as she might like to get into Parliament it would be unlikely at the moment and the only people likely to hire her as a researcher or whatever are Cryer or McDonnell neither of whom have much clout...


 
Besides, doesn't McDonnell already have articul8 working in his office?   



> She is one of those who is ruthless enough I think to try to get in but doesn't have the brains frankly.


 
Depends whether Ed wants pliant dupes or thinkers, doesn't it?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 8, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Besides, doesn't McDonnell already have articul8 working in his office?
> 
> 
> 
> Depends whether Ed wants pliant dupes or thinkers, doesn't it?


 
He wants intelligent careerists who will do what they're told while it remains in their interest to do so, Ellie may be a careerist but she is unreliable - pro-occupy and all sorts of random nuttiness...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 8, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> He wants intelligent careerists who will do what they're told while it remains in their interest to do so, Ellie may be a careerist but she is unreliable - pro-occupy and all sorts of random nuttiness...


 
Good point.


----------



## Nice one (Dec 8, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Thank heavens someone agrees with my view on the anarchist scene. it may have taken you a long time VP but I knew in my heart that you would get there


 
laurie pennies are ten a penny in the anarchist scene even amongst the "class struggle" types, in fact more so


----------



## love detective (Dec 8, 2012)

> *Ellie Mae O'Hagan* ‏@*MissEllieMae*
> Sitting in front of a closed Starbucks with young, older, BME women and women with disabilities, made me really proud today




that kebab bum finger system of categorisation in full there - age, ethnicity and able/disabled - take one from each and that's you


----------



## love detective (Dec 8, 2012)

here she is ,right in the middle (for optimum press coverage) of her small group of thoughtful, committed citizens


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 8, 2012)

thats not the middle, its the van


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 8, 2012)

classic middle class sneering from the bloke on the far right second from the front


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 8, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> classic middle class sneering from the bloke on the far right second from the front


 

person just to the right of ellies head looks like a V mask has melted onto her face


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 8, 2012)

I think it's Cher's son out of that film


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 8, 2012)

Or ray parlour


----------



## love detective (Dec 8, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> classic middle class sneering from the bloke on the far right second from the front


 
satisfying lack of whey-faced harridans as well, just old/young BME and disableds


----------



## articul8 (Dec 9, 2012)




----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 9, 2012)

Ah now I can see a whey faced harriden


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 9, 2012)

I wonder if she'd support an occupation of tax-evading westminster school in the name of class-refuge? Or would that be too close to home?


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 9, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Ah now I can see a whey faced harriden


 
nah, she's bronzed, you don't get that sort of patina if you are huddled at home watching prolevision tele and scurrying between menial jobs at sun up and sundown.

pastiness must be earned


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 10, 2012)

Subconscious, I am IN YOU.



> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> 
> ION, I think I'm going to start blogging some of my dreams. The other night I was in an organic hipster cafe where all the meat was human.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 10, 2012)

christ, she even spends her dreams in organic hipster cafes.


----------



## rekil (Dec 10, 2012)

> Tried to meet @jendziura for breakfast.


Jen Dziura, puppet of murrca's death machine! CommunISN'T. Ah, mentioned previously here.


> As a standup comic, she has performed at clubs and colleges nationwide and for the troops in the Middle East, Persian Gulf, and Africa. [...] Camp Arifjan, Kuwait; Camp Buehring, Kuwait; Camp L.S.A., Kuwait; Camp Virginia, Kuwait; Camp Patriot, Kuwait Naval Base; Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar; As Sayliyah, Qatar; Camp Lemonier, Djibouti, Africa; the U.S.S. Enterprise and the U.S.S. Gettysburg, 200 miles off the coast in the Persian Gulf; and Naval Support Activity, Bahrain.


 


> I hesitate before asking, but does anyone know the most reliable stats on the effect of the Swedish Model of prostitution criminalisation?


"Do my job for me for nothing, I'm shit."


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 10, 2012)

copliker said:


> "Do my job for me for nothing."


 
Is she hiring another intern?



> "I'm shit."


 
Can't be her, it betrays far too much self-awareness.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 11, 2012)

More! Magazine said:
			
		

> Hiya Laurie! Are you THE *Laurie Penny* that met Ryan Gosling in NYC? x






			
				Penny Red said:
			
		

> 'met' is rather pushing it.



I'll fucking say.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 11, 2012)




----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 11, 2012)

Can we put the Kingster in here?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/shortcuts/2012/dec/10/leggings-for-men-meggings-trend


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 11, 2012)

He doesn't explain why Dave Wells is sound


----------



## love detective (Dec 11, 2012)




----------



## Sue (Dec 11, 2012)

That either induced seasickness or just general nausea -- not sure which.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 11, 2012)

That's not an uncommon reaction to being megged


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 12, 2012)

S☼I said:


> I'll fucking say.


 
Seconded.

Notice how it's no longer a life-threatening incident once she's been outed for lying about it and it's more useful to admit that her recollection might ascribe greater significance to the alleged incident than those of her alleged saviour.


----------



## Firky (Dec 13, 2012)

Bored.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 13, 2012)

And cue firky getting a twittersquall. I'd do a Johann Hari one, or - no waiy, you've already been called a misogynist.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 13, 2012)

Laurie said:
			
		

> @PennyRed: The internet is a real place. It's where I live, my public space. I don't like feeling that I can't go there without fear of violence.



One for the album.


----------



## rekil (Dec 13, 2012)

> It's upsetting, because I want and need to come back to the UK, but the constant trolling and threats of violence make it hard to work.


 
Laura is like an anti Zainab Al-Khawaja. Also, has molly booted her out? What does this cataclysmic turn of events mean for the future of The New Left.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 13, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> This actually is what she does - privilege meets personal post-modernism. _I deserve to be everyone i want to be. So i am. _That can be a really healthy and inspiring thing coming from someone with insight, sense, humility and respect for wider society. Coming from her it just inadvertently demonstrates how shallow she is. _I want a pony._


 

we all want a fucking pony


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 13, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> The thing with the "revolutionary middle classes" (pffft) is that they're always vanguardists. Always chiefs rather than Indians; always staff officers rather than enlisted men. They're scum attempting to ride to power by pretending to represent the masses, and that is all most of them are. Ms. finger should know better, given her position, and the fact that she doesn't speaks volumes about who her commitment is to, and it ain't "the workers".


 
innit.  and whenever people talk like that i know that they're not including me or mine in that in group.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 13, 2012)

copliker said:


> Jen Dziura, puppet of murrca's death machine! CommunISN'T. Ah, mentioned previously here.
> 
> 
> 
> "Do my job for me for nothing, I'm shit."


 
if she was half the feminist she says she is, she'd know that there was a group called Nordic Model Advocates who are pretty vocal and persuasive.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 13, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> The internet is a real place. It's where I live, my public space. I don't like feeling that I can't go there without fear of violence.


 
Internet, I live in you


----------



## Firky (Dec 13, 2012)

Balbi said:


> And cue firky getting a twittersquall. I'd do a Johann Hari one, or - no waiy, you've already been called a misogynist.


 
Was making a coffee and suddenly my phone started going mad.  I now fantasise about violence to women, deserved cancer and something about nuts magazine I didn't quite get or understand.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 13, 2012)

Horrid. She tweets and tweets until shes thick.


----------



## love detective (Dec 13, 2012)

copliker said:


> Laura is like an anti Zainab Al-Khawaja. Also, has molly booted her out? What does this cataclysmic turn of events mean for the future of The New Left.


 
mental how she can't come back to the UK because someone on the internet is trolling her

(btw firky, i think that thing was out of order mate, there's many ways to have a go at her but that isn't the most effective or clever, she'll come out of it looking better than you will)


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 13, 2012)

none of us can go on the internet without fear of violence.  fortunately it's only internet violence, so nevermind.

also, that reminds me of johnathonbishop's whining.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 13, 2012)

firky said:


> Was making a coffee and suddenly my phone started going mad. I now fantasise about violence to women, deserved cancer and something about nuts magazine I didn't quite get or understand.


 
1.  you kind of did.
2.  you kind of did.
3.  sausages.


----------



## Firky (Dec 13, 2012)

It's actually just a reworded image nicked off another website






Quite afraid to go on the internet now incase someone calls me a twat or worse does a cartoon


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 13, 2012)

i knew i'd seen it before somewhere.


----------



## Firky (Dec 13, 2012)

The original is hate filled misandry


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 13, 2012)

Tbh firky I didn't find it particularly funny myself, it's just witless abuse with an undercurrent of violence at women that makes me uncomfortable. And I know I've criticised Laurie shitloads myself on here, but still there's so much on this thread which is just stalkery and weird.


----------



## framed (Dec 13, 2012)

FFS, it's funny. It is hardly an incitement to violence against women. The bloke being beaten up looks nothing like a woman... or Laurie Penny!


----------



## love detective (Dec 13, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> For every writer and activist, the class we're from matters - but not as much as the class we fight for.


She doesn't have a clue how revealing comments like this are


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 13, 2012)

It made me lol


----------



## Firky (Dec 13, 2012)

I can see people's point that they think I want to smack LP up but it's more of an assault on her politics than her physical self, it's quite easy to understand the allegory (?) behind it, surely?

If only I was Steve Bell.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 13, 2012)

I'm sure you didn't intend it to be a satirical masterpiece, or a sincere relfection of your desire to beat up Laurie Penny, tbh you'd be best off just apologising for any offense caused and putting it behind you i reckon.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 13, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> It's upsetting, because I want and need to come back to the UK, but the constant trolling and threats of violence make it hard to work.


 
Can I take it that attempts at investigative journalism are beyond Penny Dreadful, then? IIRC, one of the common indicators of a journalist really having something to say that's worth hearing is if they face such threats on a fairly regular basis.

And didn't Her Majesty once spout off about how good journalists are supposed to be fearless?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 13, 2012)

surely it was clearly a reference to how beastly socialists and anarchists are towards Laura?


----------



## Firky (Dec 13, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> surely it was clearly a reference to how beastly socialists and anarchists are towards Laura?



You're better at this than me


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 13, 2012)

fearless.


----------



## rekil (Dec 13, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> there's so much on this thread which is just stalkery and weird.


Even if this thread goes on for another 1000 pages you will not see anything weirder than Laura posing in front of that shitty painting.


----------



## framed (Dec 13, 2012)

If she talks shite, is it wrong to tell her that she talks shite?

There's a bit of the drama queen about her claims of 'internet violence'...


----------



## Firky (Dec 13, 2012)

copliker said:


> Even if this thread goes on for another 1000 pages you will not see anything weirder than Laura posing in front of that shitty painting.
> 
> View attachment 26133



It is only when I zoomed in on a phone could I see the detail. Wow, burning police and fat cats


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 13, 2012)

copliker said:


> Even if this thread goes on for another 1000 pages you will not see anything weirder than Laura posing in front of that shitty painting.
> 
> View attachment 26133


 
And y'know people said Arthur Scargill had a big ego, fucking hell you just wait 'til this generation of post-class, neo-liberal Oxbridge Twats currently masquerading as the Voice of the Radical Left in Britain reaches maturity. They'll make Uncle Arthur look bashful by comparison.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 13, 2012)

framed said:


> If she talks shite, is it wrong to tell her that she talks shite?
> 
> There's a bit of the drama queen about her claims of 'internet violence'...


 
1. No, it isn't wrong. It does, however, offend her sense of ego and sense of entitlement while appealing to what seems like something of a martyr complex. Somehow I doubt that the concept of constructive criticism is something she's all that keen to engage with.

2. As far as the 'drama queen' thing goes, see 1 above and also any publicity is good publicity when there's the chance of an extra byline in it. After all, why suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune for free when you can be _paid _to sling together a sixth-form school newspaper-standard account of how you're always suffering baseless misery inflicted by the world's entire supply of online nasties?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 13, 2012)

love detective said:


> She doesn't have a clue how revealing comments like this are


 
That's a beauty.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 13, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> And y'know people said Arthur Scargill had a big ego, fucking hell you just wait 'til this generation of post-class, neo-liberal Oxbridge Twats currently masquerading as the Voice of the Radical Left in Britain reaches maturity. They'll make Uncle Arthur look bashful by comparison.


 


At least Arthur was never (as far as I know) on Twitter.

Capitalism can rest easy when all the 'rebels' are sticking their tongues out at each other on Twitter and so on-making money for capitalists in the process.

Today's society has made satire redundant.


----------



## framed (Dec 13, 2012)

Oh no it hasn't!


----------



## Nice one (Dec 13, 2012)

isn't laurie penny technically working class?


----------



## weepiper (Dec 14, 2012)

Nice one said:


> isn't laurie penny technically working class?


 
_how_?


----------



## Nice one (Dec 14, 2012)

by virtue of her relationship to the means of production. She has to sell her labour power for a wage. Her (creative)  labour goes towards the production of a commodity which is sold for profit.

She is also young and vaguely pretty.


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

Nice one said:


> by virtue of her relationship to the means of production. She has to sell her labour power for a wage. Her (creative) labour goes towards the production of a commodity which is sold for profit.
> 
> She is also young and vaguely pretty.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 14, 2012)

Nice one said:


> by virtue of her relationship to the means of production. She has to sell her labour power for a wage. Her (creative) labour goes towards the production of a commodity which is sold for profit.
> 
> She is also young and vaguely pretty.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 14, 2012)

Nice one said:


> Her (creative) labour.


 
Well, creative is one way of putting it.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

Nice one said:


> by virtue of her relationship to the means of production. She has to sell her labour power for a wage. Her (creative) labour goes towards the production of a commodity which is sold for profit.
> 
> She is also young and vaguely pretty.


 
Technically you could say the same thing about Wayne Rooney y'know.

£120k _a week...._


----------



## Balbi (Dec 14, 2012)

Vanguardianistas all


----------



## Random (Dec 14, 2012)

Nice one said:


> by virtue of her relationship to the means of production. She has to sell her labour power for a wage. Her (creative)  labour goes towards the production of a commodity which is sold for profit.


 Possibly. But she's certainly part of that privileged part of the proletariat often called the middle class; upper, in her case. And we don't know how much capital she owns, since she's not open about her finances. Harry Cole off Guido's website claims she's "loaded", and she's already admitted that she inherited enough money to live in London for a year. Does she have a trust fund? In that case she basically lives largely off the rents from her capital.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Technically you could say the same thing about Wayne Rooney y'know.
> 
> £120k _a week...._


 
He is working class.

Laura may or may not be, I suspect she has far more assets (cue laddish all laddish sniggers) than she implies.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 14, 2012)

Several ponies.


----------



## Random (Dec 14, 2012)

firky said:


> I can see people's point that they think I want to smack LP up but it's more of an assault on her politics than her physical self, it's quite easy to understand the allegory (?) behind it, surely?


 It's a bloody stupid way to put it and it makes you look like a bully; I think you can see this tbh.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> surely it was clearly a reference to how beastly socialists and anarchists are towards Laura?


 
If Laura sees herself as a "left-wing guru", then Shaitan save us all!!!


----------



## Nice one (Dec 14, 2012)

Random said:


> Possibly. But she's certainly part of that privileged part of the proletariat often called the middle class; upper, in her case. And we don't know how much capital she owns, since she's not open about her finances. Harry Cole off Guido's website claims she's "loaded", and she's already admitted that she inherited enough money to live in London for a year. Does she have a trust fund? In that case she basically lives largely off the rents from her capital.


 
this is what i thought. But until we find out for sure her true class background, the main body of criticism seems to be based around that fact that she is:

1. privileged 
2. a journalist who lies.

Is that really worth 207 pages?


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 14, 2012)

Nice one said:


> this is what i thought. But until we find out for sure her true class background, the main body of criticism seems to be based around that fact that she is:
> 
> 1. privileged
> 2. a journalist who lies.
> ...


 
Maybe not but along the way there have been a fair few lols and a good critique of the emergence of a new generation of the "commentariat".

I am sure Laurie Penny would say a lot more about her class background if it was "cred".


----------



## Random (Dec 14, 2012)

Nice one said:


> this is what i thought. But until we find out for sure her true class background, the main body of criticism seems to be based around that fact that she is:
> 
> 1. privileged
> 2. a journalist who lies.
> ...


At least 40 of those pages are simply posts complaining that the thread is too long.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Damn right it's worth it!

And yes, firky that thing was crap and undermines the good parts of the thread - and oddly enough, makes it all about Laura, when close   observers know that it's not.


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

Random said:


> At least 40 of those pages are simply posts complaining that the thread is too long.


At least another 40 is lletsa going on about tattoos.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 14, 2012)




----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 14, 2012)

Nice one said:


> by virtue of her relationship to the means of production. She has to sell her labour power for a wage. Her (creative) labour goes towards the production of a commodity which is sold for profit.
> 
> She is also young and vaguely pretty.


 
Dunno about that - There's something about her appearance that makes me think that if she'd been in the bathroom for a number two, you'd be well advised to give it a fair bit longer than ten minutes before going in after her.


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Several ponies.


 




Random said:


> It's a bloody stupid way to put it and it makes you look like a bully; I think you can see this tbh.


 
I can see that, yup. It started life as Owen Jones but I changed it to LP because of the simple fact she irks me a lot more!


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 14, 2012)

firky said:


> I can see that, yup. It started life as Owen Jones but I changed it to LP because of the simple fact she irks me a lot more!


 


Let it go. Nobody's heard of her.

For a thread dominated by those who put the working class at the centre of their politics, there's a fascination with Laura and her ilk that's completely perplexing when you consider that 99% of working class people (and most other people, too, actually) will live and die without ever hearing about Laura Penny.


----------



## Random (Dec 14, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> For a thread dominated by those who put the working class at the centre of their politics, there's a fascination with Laura and her ilk that's completely perplexing


 The fascination is mostly because her career is a living example of how class power works. I don't expect this to convince you, though, since you've posted the same complaint several times about how you're all confused and perplexed.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 14, 2012)

His mask really has dropped. Same old boring crap.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 14, 2012)

Random said:


> The fascination is mostly because her career is a living example of how class power works. I don't expect this to convince you, though, since you've posted the same complaint several times about how you're all confused and perplexed.


 
I'm not confused really... But why does this matter when her kind only influence each other and a relative handful of online obsessives?

And people say that the internet isn't, on the whole, politically debilitating.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 14, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> His mask really has dropped. Same old boring crap.


 


Says one of those who has penny-wanked his way through 200-odd pages.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 14, 2012)

penny wanked


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 14, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Says one of those who has penny-wanked his way through 200-odd pages.


 
Same old same old. You're boring.


----------



## Random (Dec 14, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> I'm not confused really... But why does this matter when her kind only influence each other and a relative handful of online obsessives?
> 
> And people say that the internet isn't, on the whole, politically debilitating.


See what I mean about the 40 pages of complaining? "What are you all hanging around here for? it's really boring."


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

_Let's go to the ice-rink!_


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 14, 2012)

Random said:


> See what I mean about the 40 pages of complaining? "What are you all hanging around here for? it's really boring."


 


I'm not bothered really. It's just fascinating. In a small way.

But I'll never understand why she's supposed to matter when nobody has heard of her and never will. Least of all the working class.


----------



## Random (Dec 14, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Says one of those who has penny-wanked his way through 200-odd pages.


If we're penny wanking you're the ones picking up the kleenex and sniffing it.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 14, 2012)

Random said:


> If we're penny wanking you're the ones picking up the kleenex and sniffing it.


 

I know. I'm a sad cunt as well.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)




----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 14, 2012)

Penny wank, pound foolish.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

Good grief, I've just discovered this. I'm not sure whether to be flattered or weirded out that you've all spent 208 pages on it. I've no idea why you care so much about my appearance and toilet habits.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Good grief, I've just discovered this. I'm not sure whether to be flattered or weirded out that you've all spent 208 pages on it. I've no idea why you care so much about my appearance and toilet habits.


As if.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 14, 2012)

Twitter update @lauriepenny?


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

Seriously. I mean, 208 pages? Why?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Seriously. I mean, 208 pages? Why?


As if.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Seriously. I mean, 208 pages? Why?


Twitter update, laurie?


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

Must have grown a whole page since you last read the thread.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

Check @pennyred.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 14, 2012)

Is it foxy in a desperate new gambit to stir up some shit?

well I'll be well and truly damned!  Welcome to these strange shores, Laurie!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Good grief, I've just discovered this. I'm not sure whether to be flattered or weirded out that you've all spent 208 pages on it. I've no idea why you care so much about my appearance and toilet habits.


 
I think you should be weirded out to be fair


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

I am! Weirded out, that is.


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I think you should be weirded out to be fair


 
Yeh, I would be. 

If it was the first time I saw it of course.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 14, 2012)

I must have missed the part about toilet habits. Also, I like the 'so-called lefties' bit.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

> Jesus christ, I just found a forum full of so-called lefties speculating about my personal finances and toilet habits.


 
"so-called lefties" - check. 

a))how you really cannot find a better example of the use of cultural capital based on privilege to extend and transmit that privilege into the future 

b) how certain people attempt to recuperate social movements for their own careerists ends (some journos) and how other groups of people help/make this happen (editors, media bosses) and 

c) how politics is reduced in this game to just another fashion, this years fad. In short how the media and the culture they create and reflect works 

d) personal annoyance at the sort of barely disguised pushy middle class self-obsession that we've all seen in our social or work lives being (self) promoted as the voice of a generation (without even going into the infantile divisions this sort of crap assumes).

no check


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

All reduced down to so-called lefties. _Expel them laura. They're fake-lefties_

Just how many pages of this thread have you read Laura?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> All reduced down to so-called lefties. _Expel them laura. They're fake-lefties_
> 
> Just how many pages of this thread have you read Laura?


Steady on son, don't scare her away with your hairy paws.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Expect all discussion now to be _on twitter,_ very short,very infantile and _everyone i know look at the misogynists._


----------



## Lo Siento. (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Good grief, I've just discovered this. I'm not sure whether to be flattered or weirded out that you've all spent 208 pages on it. I've no idea why you care so much about my appearance and toilet habits.


It's not though, is it? It's mainly about your shite politics, stories full of Hari-style "convenient" encounters, and your resemblance to a thousand other "leftie" journos who've parasited off activism and poverty tourism for a little while until they got bored. 

In fact it's not really about you at all. It's about all of your ilk.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Steady on son, don't scare her away with your hairy paws.


She doesn't do discussion with the plebs. She does it _for_ the plebs-right Laura?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> She doesn't do discussion with with plebs. She does it _for_ the plebs-right Laura?


This is what I meant you bastard


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Good grief, I've just discovered this. I'm not sure whether to be flattered or weirded out that you've all spent 208 pages on it. I've no idea why you care so much about my appearance and toilet habits.


 
THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER.


----------



## co-op (Dec 14, 2012)

Lo Siento. said:


> In fact it's not really about you at all. It's about all of your ilk.


 
Bingo. And it's been very interesting.


----------



## co-op (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Good grief, I've just discovered this.


 
Right.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 14, 2012)

If only Margaret Thatcher would start posting here, too.


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 14, 2012)

Nick Lezard goes through her laundry basket for a sniff.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 14, 2012)

I can't tell if we just won or lost the thread


----------



## free spirit (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Check @pennyred.


fair play, you obviously don't vanity search your name on google as often as I thought you might if it's taken you this long to find this thread.

welcome to urban.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

Whilst I appreciate constructive criticism, you're wrong. I work hard every day to make sure I'm working for something bigger and more important than myself in the best way I know how. If my way of doing politics offends you, there are surely better ways to express it than speculating that "something about her appearance that makes me think that if she'd been in the bathroom for a number two, you'd be well advised to give it a fair bit longer than ten minutes before going in after her."


----------



## TruXta (Dec 14, 2012)

Balbi said:


> I can't tell if we just won or lost the thread


Neither, it'll rumble on for a while longer with or without Ms. MoneyPenny.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

"so called lefities"


----------



## TruXta (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Whilst I appreciate constructive criticism, you're wrong.


 
that's us told then.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Whilst I appreciate constructive criticism, you're wrong.* I work hard every day to make sure I'm working for something bigger and more important than myself* in the best way I know how


*really?*
https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/279644902495772673



> If the universe wanted me to write an essay today it wouldn't have given me a copy of the first Hellblazer collection. Just saying.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Whilst I appreciate constructive criticism, you're wrong. I work hard every day to make sure I'm working for something bigger and more important than myself in the best way I know how. If my way of doing politics offends you, there are surely better ways to express it than speculating that "something about her appearance that makes me think that if she'd been in the bathroom for a number two, you'd be well advised to give it a fair bit longer than ten minutes before going in after her."


 
oh that part. Don't mind him, why not address the constructive stuff.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Whilst I appreciate constructive criticism, you're wrong. I work hard every day to make sure I'm working for something bigger and more important than myself in the best way I know how. If my way of doing politics offends you, there are surely better ways to express it than speculating that "something about her appearance that makes me think that if she'd been in the bathroom for a number two, you'd be well advised to give it a fair bit longer than ten minutes before going in after her."


So that's 6 pages read at best. (another 100 by the morning and excuses thought up)


----------



## Balbi (Dec 14, 2012)

Settle in folks. This could go on for a while.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

Thank fuck for that - slipped on the ice and hurt my arse this morning so I can't go out and I'm bored shitless. This thread ought to be good for a couple of hours entertainment now though


----------



## co-op (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Whilst I appreciate constructive criticism, *you're wrong*.


 
All of us?

About everything?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Whilst I appreciate constructive criticism,  there are surely better ways to express it than speculating that "something about her appearance that makes me think that if she'd been in the bathroom for a number two, you'd be well advised to give it a fair bit longer than ten minutes before going in after her."


To be fair that's just one particularly strange person - there is some serious criticism throughout the thread.


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Whilst I appreciate constructive criticism, you're wrong. I work hard every day to make sure I'm working for something bigger and more important than myself in the best way I know how. If my way of doing politics offends you, there are surely better ways to express it than speculating that "something about her appearance that makes me think that if she'd been in the bathroom for a number two, you'd be well advised to give it a fair bit longer than ten minutes before going in after her."


 
Genuine question, Laurie. A couple of pages back there's some critique of Margaret Mead's famous quote about how only a handful of dedicated people can change the world, et cetera. I'd be interested to hear your response to those who find that quote carries a great deal of unexamined baggage, baggage of the most elitist variety to boot.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 14, 2012)

This should be a welcome diversion from my social exclusion assignment.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

I actually can't believe you're now criticising me for not reading and responding to all 209 pages in their entirety. For fuck's sake, I work for a living.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 14, 2012)

Doing what we can only dream of, grubby hands passing copies of the Staggers between us on the shop floor


----------



## co-op (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I actually can't believe you're now criticising me for not reading and responding to all 209 pages in their entirety. For fuck's sake, I work for a living.


 
But you can tell "us" we're wrong without reading it?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Genuine question, Laurie. A couple of pages back there's some critique of Margaret Mead's famous quote about how only a handful of dedicated people can change the world, et cetera. I'd be interested to hear your response to those who find that quote carries a great deal of unexamined baggage, baggage of the most elitist variety to boot.


 
That wasn't her to be fair


----------



## weepiper (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I actually can't believe you're now criticising me for not reading and responding to all 209 pages in their entirety. For fuck's sake, *I work for a living.*


 
bully for you. You are being extremely selective in what you're choosing to notice though.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I actually can't believe you're now criticising me for not reading and responding to all 209 pages in their entirety. For fuck's sake, I work for a living.


 
Where did anyone criticise you for not reading the thread? 

I just made a comment that not every post on this thread is as weird as the "bathroom one"


----------



## TruXta (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I actually can't believe you're now criticising me for not reading and responding to all 209 pages in their entirety. For fuck's sake, I work for a living.


Yet you blithely dismiss everything in this thread.  I'm pretty sure most of us work for a living too.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 14, 2012)

Isn't there that lovely bit mid thread where we monster that chap for making comments about Suzanne Moore? Read that bit.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Genuine question, Laurie. A couple of pages back there's some critique of Margaret Mead's famous quote about how only a handful of dedicated people can change the world, et cetera. I'd be interested to hear your response to those who find that quote carries a great deal of unexamined baggage, baggage of the most elitist variety to boot.


Wasn't her- was another of these types.Which reinforces the wider argument.


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 14, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> That wasn't her to be fair


 
Fair enough, but I'd still like to hear her take on that one.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

co-op said:


> But you can tell "us" we're wrong without reading it?


Indeed.And no, you don't. Not really.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> For fuck's sake, I work for a living.


jesus


----------



## Balbi (Dec 14, 2012)

Never doubt that a small group of committed people can spend time unpacking the layers of issues relating to writing about class issues from a specific platform, without being taken seriously by those on that class platform at all.

Or, this thread.

(May contain irreverance, as serious criticism is hard and depressing)


----------



## weepiper (Dec 14, 2012)

tufty79 said:


> jesus


 
yep... 'so-called lefties'


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

Sure, there are some useful bits of critique in there, but they're hard to pick out amongst the reams of faff, rumour, fabrication and leery sexism, and frankly I'd rather seek constructive criticism from people who aren't also flinging around bullshit around about how my housemates sniff my knickers. I'm not sure if you're aware just how creepy you appear.


----------



## binka (Dec 14, 2012)

fwiw this topic has had an average of fewer than 10 posts per day for 2 years. i wonder how many tweets @lauriepenny averages over the same period?


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I actually can't believe you're now criticising me for not reading and responding to all 209 pages in their entirety. *For fuck's sake, I work for a living.*


 
That's another corker.


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Sure, there are some useful bits of critique in there, but they're hard to pick out amongst the reams of faff, rumour, fabrication and leery sexism, and frankly I'd rather seek constructive criticism from people who aren't also flinging around bullshit around about how my housemates sniff my knickers. I'm not sure if you're aware just how creepy you appear.


 
Oh, I think that particular person is _precisely _aware of how he appears, don't worry!


----------



## TruXta (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Sure, there are some useful bits of critique in there


 
Which?


----------



## inva (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Sure, there are some useful bits of critique in there, but they're hard to pick out amongst the reams of faff, rumour, fabrication and leery sexism, and frankly I'd rather seek constructive criticism from people who aren't also flinging around bullshit around about how my housemates sniff my knickers. I'm not sure if you're aware just how creepy you appear.


i thought you said you didn't have time to read the thread


----------



## Balbi (Dec 14, 2012)

Because as a whole, we endorse all posts on this thread. Yes.

*crosses off monothought clique*


----------



## Balbi (Dec 14, 2012)

This thread is a theatre seat conversation - which includes weird hecklers. Consider your work our performance, and our criticism valid despite hecklers. Try.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Sure, there are some useful bits of critique in there, but they're hard to pick out amongst the reams of faff, rumour, fabrication and leery sexism, and frankly I'd rather seek constructive criticism from people who aren't also flinging around bullshit around about how my housemates sniff my knickers. I'm not sure if you're aware just how creepy you appear.


 
Which bits have you picked out as useful critiques thus far? How far in are you?


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 14, 2012)

@lustbather sends hugs, Laura


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Which bits have you picked out as useful critiques thus far? How far in are you?


 
Alex Callinicos Vs Laurie Penny thread I am in you


----------



## Balbi (Dec 14, 2012)

Have you got to the bits where we praise your work yet? It happens occasionally.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

_You abuse, i critique._


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Whilst I appreciate constructive criticism, you're wrong. I work hard every day to make sure I'm working for something bigger and more important than myself in the best way I know how. If my way of doing politics offends you, there are surely better ways to express it than speculating that "something about her appearance that makes me think that if she'd been in the bathroom for a number two, you'd be well advised to give it a fair bit longer than ten minutes before going in after her."


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

...and there was.


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 14, 2012)

Is Molly walking around yr flat with the heating on full blast?


----------



## free spirit (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I actually can't believe you're now criticising me for not reading and responding to all 209 pages in their entirety. For fuck's sake, I work for a living.


now that's a revelation that never made it into this thread.

If you work for a living and still find time to write the odd article and 13,000 tweets in your spare time, then I'd have to respect that.

Actually, no tbh I'm glad that at least someone's out there reporting on the side of things that you've reported on, and at least you've got some attitude and passion for what you're writing about. You do sometimes come out with some daft stuff as well though, as do we all, but you're in the public eye so it's bound to get picked up on and pulled to bits on here. Rest assured though, we rip each other's daft posts to bits far more than yours.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

_From one lib-dem to another.Ah._


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

Balbi said:


> This thread is a theatre seat conversation - which includes weird hecklers. Consider your work our performance, and our criticism valid despite hecklers. Try.


 
But why? Why should I? 

The valid criticism is all stuff I've heard before and answered elsewhere (http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=13926 here's just one of the places where I talk about journalism and class privilege and what it means and how we can change it). I'm actively involved in a number of campaigns that aim to change and challenge the bourgeois commentariat model. 

But not only do I suspect that that doesn't matter to you, I find it hard to consider any criticism valid when it comes peppered with ugly misogyny and crass schoolboy bullying. You invalidate your own arguments by being frankly creepy and stalkery.

I have to get back to work now.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 14, 2012)

This thread is these chaps, scripted by Judith Butler/Frankie Boyle.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 14, 2012)

Would these be the 'so-called lefties' who:

1. Have been around and involved with various activist and protest groups for many years?

2. Have often worked in full-time jobs and then spent their free time working for one cause or another or perhaps several at the same time?

3. Who've risked (and not infrequently suffered) arrest, court cases and jail for various causes?

4. Who put their own time, effort and money into supporting those causes instead of being paid to merely write about them??

Just for clarification's sake. We'd hate to slate anyone who wasn't a pretend leftie with careerist intentions and a martyr complex, obviously.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 14, 2012)

Unfashionable protest groups.

Un-networked jobs.

Actual risk.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

Balbi said: ↑
_This thread is a theatre seat conversation - which includes weird hecklers. Consider your work our performance, and our criticism valid despite hecklers. Try._​But why? Why should I? 

The valid criticism is all stuff I've heard before and answered elsewhere. The essay on Warren Ellis online is just one of the places where I talk about journalism and class privilege and what it means and how we can change it. I'm actively involved in a number of campaigns that aim to change and challenge the bourgeois commentariat model. 

But not only do I suspect that that doesn't matter to you, I find it hard to consider any criticism valid when it comes peppered with ugly misogyny and crass schoolboy bullying. You invalidate your own arguments by being frankly creepy and stalkery. It's boring. 

I have to get back to work now.


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

Fearless.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

You've also





Bakunin said:


> Would these be the 'so-called lefties' who:
> 
> 1. Have been around and involved with various activist and protest groups for many years?
> 
> ...


 

Your assumption that I haven't done any or, in fact, all of these things is rather sweet.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 14, 2012)

Hi.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Your assumption that I haven't done any or, in fact, all of these things is rather sweet.


Your ignoring the prior points in favour of answering this one is is sweet. Well sweet. As sweet as fucking possible. Sweet.


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> does anyone fancy a frappe?


Who knows, maybe the prof will turn up and the thread will get back 'on topic'.


----------



## love detective (Dec 14, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Unfashionable protest groups.
> 
> Un-networked jobs.
> 
> Actual risk.



*Laurie Penny in April 2012*

“To be an honest political writer or journalist today is constantly to negotiate and re-negotiate the complicated relationship between conviction and orthodoxy, between critical reportage and activism-as-journalism. That relationship never been more fraught than it is now, because the line between activism and media production has become smudged to the point of irrelevance.But there’s a line in the sand, and you cross it when you start making most of your living writing about politics. Because once you have decided that you will always tell the truth you see in front of you, no matter what your bosses say, you have to decide what’s more important: your career or your conscience.” (Laurie Penny, essay on journalism in April 2012)

*Laurie Penny in September 2012*

"That's it. Sorry, guys, but I'm not going back out there today. Really don't want to be arrested and deported just for journalism"


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 14, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> To be fair that's just one particularly strange person - there is some serious criticism throughout the thread.


 
Less of the strange. Though I'll readily admit to not being very clued up about politics - Not into all that facts and figures business, me. I've got a more Croft Original kind of approach in that "One instinctively _knows_".


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Great though francis and firky are the points responded to.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

To Balbi on his point about theatre seat hecklers/valid criticism:

The valid criticism is all stuff I've heard before and answered elsewhere. The essay on Warren Ellis online is just one of the places where I talk about journalism and class privilege and what it means and how we can change it. I'm actively involved in a number of campaigns that aim to change and challenge the bourgeois commentariat model. 

But not only do I suspect that that doesn't matter to you. I suspect that this thread is just a place you lot come to blow off steam by hating on someone you find it convenient to hate, and jesus, I understand that activism is tiring and we all need to relax, but is chilling out by slagging off people who are actually trying to help really the best use of radical downtime? Quite apart from the fact that I happen to be a real person, and not your counter-revolutionary wank-fantasy. I'm a 26-year old woman with a mum and a dad and baby sisters and a job I work hard at and politics I believe in and am prepared to put everything on the line for just as much as any of you. 

I find it hard to consider any criticism valid when it comes peppered with ugly misogyny and crass schoolboy bullying. You invalidate your own arguments by being frankly creepy and stalkery. It's boring. 

I have to get back to work now.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 14, 2012)

things just got weirder

/dot


----------



## Lo Siento. (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> You've also
> 
> 
> Your assumption that I haven't done any or, in fact, all of these things is rather sweet.


Is it? You were advocating a vote for the Lib Dems in 2010, by which time you were already a journo. Pretty safe to assume that you weren't exactly on the political margins prior to beating out a career as a professional leftie.


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> You've also
> 
> 
> Your assumption that I haven't done any or, in fact, all of these things is rather sweet.


 
Number 3 on that list:

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/247797663284740096




> Laurie Penny
> ‏@PennyRed
> That's it. Sorry, guys, but I'm not going back out there today. Really don't want to be arrested and deported just for journalism


----------



## free spirit (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> _From one lib-dem to another.Ah._


It's more down to me thinking it's generally a good thing to have someone in the mainstreamish press prepared to actually get into the thick of it a bit when it's kicking off and report from that perspective, instead of only ever reporting the police version of events from behind police lines.

That's all really.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> To Balbi on his point about theatre seat hecklers/valid criticism:
> 
> The valid criticism is all stuff I've heard before and answered elsewhere. The essay on Warren Ellis online is just one of the places where I talk about journalism and class privilege and what it means and how we can change it. I'm actively involved in a number of campaigns that aim to change and challenge the bourgeois commentariat model.
> 
> ...


 
That started as an answer to me and turned into a whole thread thing right?

I'll read the Ellis essay, although I can't say i'm his biggest fan anyway


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> To Balbi on his point about theatre seat hecklers/valid criticism:
> 
> The valid criticism is all stuff I've heard before and answered elsewhere. The essay on Warren Ellis online is just one of the places where I talk about journalism and class privilege and what it means and how we can change it. I'm actively involved in a number of campaigns that aim to change and challenge the bourgeois commentariat model.
> 
> ...


 
Radical downtime lol like a marketing exec yoghurt weaver hybrid


----------



## Lo Siento. (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> To Balbi on his point about theatre seat hecklers/valid criticism:
> 
> The valid criticism is all stuff I've heard before and answered elsewhere. The essay on Warren Ellis online is just one of the places where I talk about journalism and class privilege and what it means and how we can change it. I'm actively involved in a number of campaigns that aim to change and challenge the bourgeois commentariat model.
> 
> ...


And what does "put everything on the line" mean for a journalist, Laurie? Stop with martyrdom and "just one of the people" schtick, ffs. 
You get arrested it probably boosts your book sales. I get arrested, I get the sack.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

I've risked arrest by doing my job many times. Every time, it's a calculated risk about how important the story you're doing today is compared to all the stories you might not be able to do in the future if you're arrested or get on a blacklist. I have been assaulted by police officers, grabbed and thrown away from the 'wrong' side of official reporting lines and watched my friends beaten bloody, and then I come home to people like you telling me my work is invalid, and I continue to do what I do despite being attacked by so-called comrades because I think those stories need to be told.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 14, 2012)

can we have a quote for the Girder be for your off laurrie? 

/dot


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> You've also
> 
> 
> Your assumption that I haven't done any or, in fact, all of these things is rather sweet.


 
It would be, if that's what I was actually assuming. Which I wasn't.

Your assumption, on the other hand, that we're all a bunch of 'so-called lefties' isn't sweet. It's also dishonest and sneering as many here have spent much of their lives doing all those things without using them as a self-promotional career move.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 14, 2012)

The majority of us have experienced the same, but haven't had a powerful platform to discuss it from. We have to clock in on Monday. No international jet setting  Bugger.

(That's depressed sarcasm btw - and a teeny tiny dig at the occasional plaintive moans about your financial woes - you live in a world that'd be a dream for most )


----------



## inva (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I've risked arrest by doing my job many times. Every time, it's a calculated risk about how important the story you're doing today is compared to all the stories you might not be able to do in the future if you're arrested or get on a blacklist. I have been assaulted by police officers, grabbed and thrown away from the 'wrong' side of official reporting lines and watched my friends beaten bloody, and then I come home to people like you telling me my work is invalid, and I continue to do what I do despite being attacked by so-called comrades because I think those stories need to be told.


and you were forced to sing the internationale


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I've risked arrest by doing my job many times. Every time, it's a calculated risk about how important the story you're doing today is compared to all the stories you might not be able to do in the future if you're arrested or get on a blacklist. I have been assaulted by police officers, grabbed and thrown away from the 'wrong' side of official reporting lines and watched my friends beaten bloody, and then I come home to people like you telling me my work is invalid, and I continue to do what I do despite being attacked by so-called comrades because I think those stories need to be told.


 
It's more that your concern for _people like you_ getting battered seems to far outweigh your concern when it happens to normals - there's plenty of hard evidence to this effect if you care to read the thread rather than looking for the posts by daft twats that allow you to dismiss it all as the rantings of 'so called lefties'


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> To Balbi on his point about theatre seat hecklers/valid criticism:
> 
> The valid criticism is all stuff I've heard before and answered elsewhere. The essay on Warren Ellis online is just one of the places where I talk about journalism and class privilege and what it means and how we can change it. I'm actively involved in a number of campaigns that aim to change and challenge the bourgeois commentariat model.
> 
> ...


Just as i said.Watch twitter get it shortly.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

You know, don't you, that this is why we can't have nice things. Like a revolution.

I'm sure your hearts are in the right place, but collectively you come across like a bunch of creepy bedroom bullies.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 14, 2012)

there are plenty of people being arrested for stuff they believe in who don't go on about it or use it as a career boosting opportunity


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> You know, don't you, that this is why we can't have nice things. Like a revolution.
> 
> I'm sure your hearts are in the right place, but collectively you come across like a bunch of creepy bedroom bullies.


 
Yes. That's the reason. Definitely.

For fuck's sake


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

inva said:


> and you were forced to sing the internationale


 
The internationale is a good fucking tune and I won't hear anything against it.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> You know, don't you, that this is why we can't have nice things. Like a revolution.
> 
> I'm sure your hearts are in the right place, but collectively you come across like a bunch of creepy bedroom bullies.


 
Question:

If we were all permanently blowing sunshine up your arse and praising you to the heavens as though you could do no wrong, would we still come across as being unpleasant and misguided?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

And the burning socialist workers just add to the ambiance


----------



## Belushi (Dec 14, 2012)

Revolutions are a lot of things, nice aint one of them.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> You know, don't you, that this is why we can't have nice things. Like a revolution.
> 
> I'm sure your hearts are in the right place, but collectively you come across like a bunch of creepy bedroom bullies.


This was said. It really was.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> You know, don't you, that this is why we can't have nice things. Like a revolution.
> 
> I'm sure your hearts are in the right place, but collectively you come across like a bunch of creepy bedroom bullies.


 
What will you do come a revolution? Flash the press card?


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 14, 2012)

If it were a revolution, Fresquet's bus would be outside your house, Laura.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> You know, don't you, that this is why we can't have nice things. Like a revolution.
> 
> I'm sure your hearts are in the right place, but collectively you come across like a bunch of creepy bedroom bullies.


 
WTF? I'm in the kitchen.


----------



## spawnofsatan (Dec 14, 2012)

Belushi said:


> Revolutions are a lot of things, nice aint one of them.


 
She'd be too busy on her Blackberry twittering to notice...


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Question:
> 
> If we were all permanently blowing sunshine up your arse and praising you to the heavens as though you could do no wrong, would we still come across as being unpleasant and misguided?


 
Probably creepier though


----------



## Lo Siento. (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> You know, don't you, that this is why we can't have nice things. Like a revolution.
> 
> I'm sure your hearts are in the right place, but collectively you come across like a bunch of creepy bedroom bullies.


 
FYI, collectively, you and your media chums come across as exactly the same as all your predecessors, who never did anything whatsoever for the revolution. It's not "disunity" to recognise things for what they are.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Work = writing. Look on this thread and tremble oh ye _workers_.


----------



## love detective (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> then I come home to people like you telling me my work is invalid, and I continue to do what I do despite being attacked by so-called comrades because I think those stories need to be told.



You and your type are not and will never be our fucking comrade, so called or otherwise


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> The internationale is a good fucking tune and I won't hear anything against it.


 
Do you like to sing it with glottal stops?


----------



## spawnofsatan (Dec 14, 2012)

I expect the call has gone out and Sunny Hundal will be registering here to defend Laurie


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

laura said:
			
		

> You know, don't you, that this is why we can't have nice things. Like a revolution.
> 
> I'm sure your hearts are in the right place, but collectively you come across like a bunch of creepy bedroom bullies.


OK, let's get down to it. Material politics - revolution is stopped because people dislike privilege? Generally and practically privilege is shown to be a driver of revolution. Rather than a retardant.


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 14, 2012)

What did you eat in Harvesters when you had dinner with Stephen Lennon?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 14, 2012)

spawnofsatan said:


> I expect the call has gone out and Sunny Hundal will be registering here to defend Laurie


 
I'll be reading his posts in Sylvester the Cat's voice.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

love detective said:


> You and your type are not and will never be our fucking comrade, so called or otherwise


 
don't be so dour


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Odd how she's morphing into prof callinicnos -_ no sweetie you're doing it all wrong._


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> The internationale is a good fucking tune and I won't hear anything against it.


Welcome Laurie. The internationale is a good tune but it is really hard to get the words to scan to it. Perhaps you know someone who could write new ones. I don't mean in the style of the Billy Bragg version which would pass for a middle of the road non-conformist hymn. But a modern take would be useful.

Are you here as a result of doing a search for that violent cartoon that Firky insulted you with? If so you will have discovered that it was not created by him and was not originally about you. There are several versions around, one with the two attackers being computer nerds into Mac and MS while the victim is into Linux, another with an atheist and a christian attacking someone from some other sect. In all versions of this cartoon the victim although smaller than the attackers is a male with ginger hair not a woman. Firky the re-publisher of the cartoon is a bit of a mixed character - find out more about him on these very boards if you can be bothered.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

A wri'er for the new ink wirry.


----------



## agricola (Dec 14, 2012)

This will be a day long remembered.


----------



## free spirit (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I've risked arrest by doing my job many times. Every time, it's a calculated risk about how important the story you're doing today is compared to all the stories you might not be able to do in the future if you're arrested or get on a blacklist. I have been assaulted by police officers, grabbed and thrown away from the 'wrong' side of official reporting lines and watched my friends beaten bloody, and then I come home to people like you telling me my work is invalid, and I continue to do what I do despite being attacked by so-called comrades because I think those stories need to be told.


can I ask, have you actually spent a night in the cells (or longer) as a result of your actions?

I'm genuinely glad that you are reporting from that side of the police lines, but can you see why this sort of post might grate with other activists who've never been paid for their activism, quite the contrary for most it actually costs serious amounts of money at least in terms of lost income, using up holiday time, or attempting to scrape a living on the dole while campaigning  / building up for big actions?

We all make sacrifices at various stages of our lives / activism, it comes with the territory, along with arrests, police intimidation, police violence etc. You're far from unique in this, but you are almost unique in actually getting paid for it. If you're going to come on here playing the game of 'I'm a bigger activist than you', then you're onto a bit of a looser really tbh.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 14, 2012)

agricola said:


> This will be a day long remembered.


 
You won the lottery?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

free spirit said:


> can I ask, have you actually spent a night in the cells (or longer) as a result of your actions?


 
don't be an utter loon there's a good fella!


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 14, 2012)

agricola said:


> This will be a day long remembered.


 
And possibly turned into a paid blog post, article or column as well.


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

There's a thread about Owen Jones somewhere, Laurie. Might want to give him a headsup. You're not alone.


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> The internationale is a good fucking tune and I won't hear anything against it.


Bragg's version is a travesty.

Er, welcome to u75 btw.

Edit: beaten to it by hocus.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

agricola said:


> This will be a day long remembered.




Bollocks, wanted to get the theme tune but for some reason I can't get the thing that makes it skip to 13.55 to work


----------



## free spirit (Dec 14, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> don't be an utter loon there's a good fella!


sorry, I've obviously not been obsessed enough with her to know the answer to the question.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

free spirit said:


> sorry, I've obviously not been obsessed enough with her to know the answer to the question.


 
jesus it's not that - the fact is your question is irrelevant.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> You know, don't you, that this is why we can't have nice things. Like a revolution.
> 
> I'm sure your hearts are in the right place, but collectively you come across like a bunch of creepy bedroom bullies.



Hear hear. Hating on people doing stuff is rather detractive. Besides, you are the only self-professed radfem journalist that I know of, in mainstream press. That's all.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 14, 2012)

You just fancy her.


----------



## binka (Dec 14, 2012)

*sxip shirey* ‏@*sxipshirey* 
@*PennyRed* The post-colonial need of some English to cut down any anyone who shows a trace of drive, motivation, hope or joy is sad.
*sxip shirey* ‏@*sxipshirey* 
@*PennyRed* Some people who are not doing action have an abusive need to cut down those who are not doing action.


*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
@*sxipshirey* that's an interesting analysis and I'm not sure it's at all inaccurate. Also, x


great stuff


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

wow.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> Hear hear. Hating on people doing stuff is rather detractive. Besides, you are the only self-professed radfem journalist that I know of, in mainstream press. That's all.


No swuxdj word as detractive you parasum.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 14, 2012)

Yeah, of course *rolleyes


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

firky said:


> There's a thread about Owen Jones somewhere, Laurie. Might want to give him a headsup. You're not alone.


This thread would be better without you.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No swuxdj word as detractive you parasum.


 I'm pretty damn sure there is


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> Hear hear. Hating on people doing stuff is rather detractive. *Besides, you are the only self-professed radfem journalist that I know of, in mainstream press.* That's all.


 
Isn't that all the more reason to hold her to account?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

aerial assaults over Libya:


----------



## free spirit (Dec 14, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> jesus it's not that - the fact is your question is irrelevant.


good job you're here to point that out then, I'd hate to think Laurie might have wasted her time answering an irrelevant question.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Isn't that all the more reason to hold her to account?


 fair point. . . some of the hatey stuff oversteps the mark


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 14, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> Hear hear. Hating on people doing stuff is rather detractive. Besides, you are the only self-professed radfem journalist that I know of, in mainstream press. That's all.


 
a radfem who has been known to attack other radfems in her column to push her pro-sex industry nonsense.  very sisterly.


----------



## love detective (Dec 14, 2012)

Laurie Penny aged 25 said:
			
		

> Actually signed the contract for this book almost 2 years ago, but put it off because needed time to travel, do politics, grow up some more.


 


> Laurie Penny, 23, never imagined she would find herself enmeshed in a world of poverty


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

She imagined that_ she was_, for the article. Making Conn look like a lazy cunt as well (great work on Hillsborough)


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> fair point. . . some of the hatey stuff oversteps the mark


 
Yes but to focus only on that is a bit dishonest - there's loads of perfectly valid criticism on this thread - pages of it. And mentioning an essay about someone I've never even heard of doesn't really do it justice.

The 'hatey stuff' just provides a good excuse to either ignore the credible stuff or go attention seeking on twitter - I'd be pleased if Laura doesn't take either of these options and actually engages. I'd also be very surprised sadly.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 14, 2012)

bedroom bullies?  what does that mean?  is it a sexual thing?  have we been accused of poor sexual etiquette as well as being not lefties, post colonialists, not doing action of any sort, and caring for the working classes rather than the champagne classes.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 14, 2012)

also, for the most part, people have been told off for being shits.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 14, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> bedroom bullies? what does that mean? is it a sexual thing? have we been accused of poor sexual etiquette as well as being not lefties, post colonialists, not doing action of any sort, and caring for the working classes rather than the champagne classes.


 
we all hate women apparently. _All_ of us. _All_ women.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

weepiper said:


> we all hate women apparently. _All_ of us. _All_ women.


_Women have no questions. (Or Points)_


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 14, 2012)

an attack on one is an attack on all. 

as a working class man, i therefore assume that when lp has a go at a thread on which i have posted, she is having a go at all working class men.

i was living in a tree for the cause whilst she was still playing with dolls.  i don't need to take this.

*thumps stick on veranda*

*wanders off confused*


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> You know, don't you, that this is why we can't have nice things. Like a revolution.
> 
> I'm sure your hearts are in the right place, but collectively you come across like a bunch of creepy bedroom bullies.


 
This absolutely has to feature in the next issue of Workers' Girder by the way.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

mysoculary.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 14, 2012)

(((nice things)))


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> This absolutely has to feature in the next issue of Workers' Girder by the way.


Almost masthead material.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 14, 2012)

I really, really hope she's going through the thread now. I can't imagine she wouldn't. 

And what I really want for Christmas, Santa, is for some actual engagement with the many, many valid and serious political points in this thread. FFS, it's really fucking tedious to have it whittled down to a Twitter status about trolls, toilet habits and misogyny, and have all the cheerleaders agree _yes how awful it is_ and how _some people don't like a woman with an opinion_ and _this is why the left fail._


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

_I'm sure your hearts are in the right place, but collectively you come across like a bunch of creepy bedroom bullies._






Not standing outside Westminster school 28 grand a year(term?)


----------



## weepiper (Dec 14, 2012)

Being patronised by a 26 year old who claims to hate being patronised is quite something.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

S☼I said:


> I really, really hope she's going through the thread now. I can't imagine she wouldn't.
> 
> And what I really want for Christmas, Santa, is for some actual engagement with the many, many valid and serious political points in this thread. FFS, it's really fucking tedious to have it whittled down to a Twitter status about trolls, toilet habits and misogyny, and have all the cheerleaders agree _yes how awful it is_ and how _some people don't like a woman with an opinion_ and _this is why the left fail._


Yep, for all the quick posts and that, this is it. Won't happen. Couldn't even deal with a shortened version of them


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 14, 2012)

there will be no engagement.  engagement is for the little people.  some people are above engagement.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 14, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> there will be no engagement. engagement is for the little people. some people are above engagement.


 
Maybe she just can't be arsed. It is Friday evening, after all.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> Maybe she just can't be arsed. It is Friday evening, after all.


Always Friday in your world GC.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Always Friday in your world GC.


 
I wish it was.


----------



## alfajobrob (Dec 14, 2012)

weepiper said:


> we all hate women apparently. _All_ of us. _All_ women.


 
I thought she was implying that we are all socially inadequate types who have no lives apart from bullying people on the internet in our respective bedrooms....I may be wrong....hilarious either way.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

So do we.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> So do we.


 
Both of you.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I actually can't believe you're now criticising me for not reading and responding to all 209 pages in their entirety. _For fuck's sake, I work for a living._


 
Is that meant to be some kind of smart-arse dig at the unemployed people on here???

And btw this thread is weird and stalkery and I don't blame you for being freaked out by it's existence. I was saying that long before you turned up in person btw



lauriepenny said:


> You know, don't you, that this is why we can't have nice things. Like a revolution.


 


The gift that keeps on giving....


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 14, 2012)

Oh my, only just caught up with this 


Hi Penny!


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Is that meant to be some kind of smart-arse dig at the unemployed people on here???
> 
> And btw this thread is weird and stalkery and I don't blame you for being freaked out by it's existence. I was saying that long before you turned up in person btw


 
Name the guilty delroy. Name them. You rimjob cunt.


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm sure your hearts are in the right place


So wrong. 




			
				Yeats said:
			
		

> Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Name the guilty delroy. Name them. You rimjob cunt.


 
I've been saying this for fucking ages butchers, for every piece of worthwhile bit of criticism up here there's also leery comments, snide bullying-in-numbers and a lot of other shit I don't like.

"Rimjob cunt" - 

That made me laugh


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

copliker said:


> > Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart
> 
> 
> So wrong.


A terrible beauty is born


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

There's at least 5 pages about stuff that should go up on Firebox's walls. Ban this weird filth.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I've been saying this for fucking ages butchers, for every piece of worthwhile bit of criticism up here there's also leery comments, snide bullying-in-numbers and a lot of other shit I don't like.
> 
> "Rimjob cunt" -
> 
> That made me laugh


NAME THE 52 GUILTY WO/MEN.


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

alfajobrob said:


> I thought she was implying that we are all socially inadequate types who have no lives apart from bullying people on the internet in our respective bedrooms....I may be wrong....hilarious either way.


 
Hey, don't knock it until you've tried it...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> All reduced down to so-called lefties. _Expel them laura. They're fake-lefties_
> 
> Just how many pages of this thread have you read Laura?


 
I hate it when people insinuate that I'm a leftie, it makes me feel all sleazy and disgusting, like I've just been to an SWP meeting.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

Ok sure comrade I'll get right to it


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

They'll all be men - the women have been cowed into silence by all the macho bedroom bullies. They are, after all, very sensitive souls.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 14, 2012)

The Urban 'bedroom bullies', yesterday:


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> I hate it when people insinuate that I'm a leftie, it makes me feel all sleazy and disgusting, like I've just been to an SWP meeting.


 
Not sleazy and disgusting in a really pleasurable sense, then?


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

Journalism is a little bit stalkery.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 14, 2012)

copliker said:


> Journalism is a little bit stalkery.


Only the good sort.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Watching what we be doing - in secret - little bit wtf!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

Laura sharing her wisdom on this thread was a little bit communism.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

TruXta said:


> This is what I meant you bastard


 
If people can't have a sense of humour about their work and/or their politics, they're going to burn out pretty quickly. Look what happened to "happy" Hari.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Laura has just asked me if i want to specimen for NS.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Laura sharing her wisdom on this thread was a little bit communism.


 
All of us are communisn't


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Laura sharing her wisdom on this thread was a little bit communism.


Stealing time back from the union busting new statesman boss. Impressive.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Betty_Rubble said:


> Nick Lezard goes through her laundry basket for a sniff.


 
Which would he pick if given a choice, though: Laundry or a cork?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Hey Laura the NS that you co-edit,it's pro-scabbery,what you doing about it? It's refusal to recognise the NUJ. Anything? If so, what? Great, with who?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> If people can't have a sense of humour about their work and/or their politics, they're going to burn out pretty quickly. Look what happened to "happy" Hari.


This place is worse than most demos in terms of bruises, punches, betrayals and sleepless nights in filthy cells.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> specimen for NS.


 
that's taking piss-taking a bit far.


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> A terrible beauty is born


 
I love this portrait of Laura standing next to a portrait of Laura... For me it portrays the post-colonial impasse that the left finds itself in and the moral abyss of the wage slavery that so many talented writers and artists are forced into by unbridled capitalism... or some other such bollix!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I actually can't believe you're now criticising me for not reading and responding to all 209 pages in their entirety. For fuck's sake, I work for a living.


 
And no-one else does?


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 14, 2012)

weepiper said:


> that's taking piss-taking a bit far.


 
True. 

Why provide a specimen for NS when there's quite enough shit there already?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

weepiper said:


> that's taking piss-taking a bit far.


Took me a few goes to get that, thought i'd fucked up


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)




----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Laura sharing her wisdom on this thread was a little bit communism.


 
Can't you just appreciate that she's _'giving something back'_ to us little people?


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 14, 2012)

Why are people on this thread calling Laurie, Laura? It is supposed to be journalists who get your name wrong.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Sure, there are some useful bits of critique in there, but they're hard to pick out amongst the reams of faff, rumour, fabrication and leery sexism, and frankly I'd rather seek constructive criticism from people who aren't also flinging around bullshit around about how my housemates sniff my knickers. I'm not sure if you're aware just how creepy you appear.


 
As creepy or more creepy than someone whose legend/personal mythology changes to suit the story being written?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 14, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> Why are people on this thread calling Laurie, Laura? It is supposed to be journalists who get your name wrong.


Misogyny.


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

If we're all so misogyny how come the Chile protests thread is particularly focused on the role and travails of young women and schoolgirls? Meanwhile Laura, a feminist who has tweeted from the kettle, hasn't even acknowledged their existence.*

Who is the _real_ misogynist?

*apart from the superb Workers' Girder article she definitely did not write.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> As creepy or more creepy than someone whose legend/personal mythology changes to suit the story being written?


----------



## Dan U (Dec 14, 2012)

i am considerably more leftie than yow


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

Well that cleared things up.


----------



## alfajobrob (Dec 14, 2012)

I'm just hoping this is a trend and we get @Liz Jones on her thread as well.....two insightful journalists!

I'll leave it to the Urban Politerati to be more insightful......the arrogance is astonishing though.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

Polly Filler anyone?


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 14, 2012)

I'm waiting for the day that Mad Mel might show up - that could truly be the stuff of urbans legend.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

Remember when the new statesman ran this advert from a christian group that claimed it could cure gay people of their gayness?






Just out of curiosity if Laurie's still kicking around, did the New Scabsman give back the money they recieved from these people at any point? Or did they take the money and run before issuing a mealy-mouthed apology? Genuinely curious.


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

I'm sure that Laura/Laurie/Dave will find a wealth of material on Urban - _outwith this thread of course_ - that she can plagiarise without credit as part of her salaried 'activism'.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Balbi said: ↑
> _This thread is a theatre seat conversation - which includes weird hecklers. Consider your work our performance, and our criticism valid despite hecklers. Try._​But why? Why should I?


 
Because *if* you're the kind of journalist you claim to be, then you'll realise that engaging with the unbelievers isn't a waste of your time and/or energy, but a route to greater understanding on both sides of the debate.



> The valid criticism is all stuff I've heard before and answered elsewhere. The essay on Warren Ellis online is just one of the places where I talk about journalism and class privilege and what it means and how we can change it. I'm actively involved in a number of campaigns that aim to change and challenge the bourgeois commentariat model.


 
Don't you think that's rather parochial? Wouldn't turning your efforts to changing not just the model, but what the model is founded on, be more rational *and* more fulfilling?



> But not only do I suspect that that doesn't matter to you, I find it hard to consider any criticism valid when it comes peppered with ugly misogyny and crass schoolboy bullying. You invalidate your own arguments by being frankly creepy and stalkery. It's boring.
> 
> I have to get back to work now.


 
You throw around words like "bullying" and "misogyny" far too lightly. I've seen a few examples of nastiness, but actual misogyny on this thread? Nope. Having a pop at "Laurie Penny" is not misogyny. It's not even bullying, because it has *no* leverage on you, except the leverage you give it ("oh look, fans! Evil people on a bulletin board are being nasty to me! I'm psychologically scarred!").


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Betty_Rubble said:


> @lustbather sends hugs, Laura


 
With or without bagels?


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

Too busy researching to reply:

Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
So I'm writing a big ol'essay about journalism and what it means in the wake of leveson, Occupy, etc. What's changing, what needs to change?

7m ago


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 14, 2012)

I hope one day that I too can become a proper leftie with Guardian and New Statesman columns n all that #whoneedsoxbridge


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> You've also
> 
> 
> Your assumption that I haven't done any or, in fact, all of these things is rather sweet.


 
His assumption is actually that you haven't realised that others have been "doing" activism since or before you were in a babygro. You do sometimes present as appearing to believe that activism started in the mid-2000s.


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

framed said:


> I'm sure that Laura/Laurie/Dave will find a wealth of material on Urban - _outwith this thread of course_ - that she can plagiarise without credit as part of her salaried 'activism'.


Thanks to Firky, her wouldbe assassin who kindly tweeted the thread link at her. It'll all turn out nice again.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Balbi said: ↑
> _This thread is a theatre seat conversation - which includes weird hecklers. Consider your work our performance, and our criticism valid despite hecklers. Try._​But why? Why should I?
> 
> The valid criticism is all stuff I've heard before and answered elsewhere. The essay on *Warren Ellis* online is just one of the places where I talk about journalism and class privilege and what it means and how we can change it. I'm actively involved in a number of campaigns that aim to change and challenge the bourgeois commentariat model.
> ...


 
I love Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds too.  Don't recall much class politics in their work though.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

inva said:


> and you were forced to sing the internationale


 
I've always thought that the only people who could be *forced* to sing it were Tories. Anyone else would be happy to, given the sentim,ent of the lyrics!


----------



## Belushi (Dec 14, 2012)

I never really got involved with activism because, well, it all looked a bit smelly and uncomfortable, I wish I'd known about dividing your time between London and New York and the long weekends in Athens with Molly Crabapple, none of you fuckers ever mentioned that bit


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

firky said:


> Too busy researching to reply:
> 
> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> So I'm writing a big ol'essay about journalism and what it means in the wake of leveson, Occupy, etc. What's changing, what needs to change?
> ...


 
For 'research' read _scrolling through relevant threads on Urban_...

Elbows should copyright his posts on those threads before she steals 'em all!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> I love Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds too. Don't recall much class politics in their work though.


 
You mean you can't see the class politics in a song like "red right hand"? For shame, young man! For shame!


----------



## inva (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> I've always thought that the only people who could be *forced* to sing it were Tories. Anyone else would be happy to, given the sentim,ent of the lyrics!


shouldn't that be "sen'iment"?


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

I do have a couple of questions, actually, if anyone can answer them for me:

1.What are you actually hoping to achieve with this thread?

2. If you really do hate my work and everything it stands for, why have you spent 215 pages discussing it, and why do you continue to hang around on my twitter feed and read my articles?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I do have a couple of questions, actually, if anyone can answer them for me:
> 
> 1.What are you actually hoping to achieve with this thread?
> 
> 2. If you really do hate my work and everything it stands for, why have you spent 215 pages discussing it, and why do you continue to hang around on my twitter feed and read my articles?


No, _you_ answer our questions.

1)How many pages of this thread have you bothered to read?

2) What are the good bits of critique that you claimed it contained - and where are they?


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I do have a couple of questions, actually, if anyone can answer them for me:
> 
> 1.What are you actually hoping to achieve with this thread?
> 
> 2. If you really do hate my work and everything it stands for, why have you spent 215 pages discussing it, and why do you continue to hang around on my twitter feed and read my articles?


 
One of your recent articles got some praise on here iirc.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> You know, don't you, that this is why we can't have nice things. Like a revolution.
> 
> I'm sure your hearts are in the right place, but collectively you come across like a bunch of creepy bedroom bullies.


 
The reason people appear to come across like that to you is probably related to your route into journalism. If you'd "come up the hard way", you'd have been inured to any form of bullying after your first 6 months on a local rag, as well as being able to sort criticism from bullying.
And yes, this is a bit of "class struggle" criticism. UK Journalism has spent most its' history in thrall to Oxbridge grads, to the detriment of what gets reported. So much so that people like Hari and yourself are pretty much "token dissenters", employed to give a bit of edge, a bit of whatever the middle class version of "street cred" is, to the outlets you work for.


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I do have a couple of questions, actually, if anyone can answer them for me:
> 
> 1.What are you actually hoping to achieve with this thread?
> 
> 2. If you really do hate my work and everything it stands for, why have you spent 215 pages discussing it, and why do you continue to hang around on my twitter feed and read my articles?


 
We were on a mission to see how many pages it would take for you to bite...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> And the burning socialist workers just add to the ambiance


 
The people or the papers?

(The former please, O Yahweh! The former!)


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

inva said:


> shouldn't that be "sen'iment"?


 
I slur, I don't elide glottals.


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I do have a couple of questions, actually, if anyone can answer them for me:
> 
> 1.What are you actually hoping to achieve with this thread?
> 
> 2. If you really do hate my work and everything it stands for, why have you spent 215 pages discussing it, and why do you continue to hang around on my twitter feed and read my articles?


What other threads on the site have you looked at?


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

"If you'd "come up the hard way", you'd have been inured to any form of bullying after your first 6 months on a local rag."
Actually, I spent a year working for minimum wage at a small mental health industry magazine to support myself through my journalism training course, and then worked as a sub-editor on the Morning Star. Your research appears to be a bit off: I didn't just walk out of university into a job at a national magazine.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> What will you do come a revolution? Flash the press card?


 
The place of the media is always a problem in revolutionary situations, Bish. Are they lackeys of the capitalist scum that employ them, or are they honest strivers trying to change the system from inside, and _simpatico_ with the aims of the revolution?
I tend toward the former answer, because for every one of the latter, there's a dozen of the former.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> "If you'd "come up the hard way", you'd have been inured to any form of bullying after your first 6 months on a local rag."
> Actually, I spent a year working for minimum wage at a small mental health industry magazine to support myself through my journalism training course, and then worked as a sub-editor on the Morning Star. Your research appears to be a bit off: I didn't just walk out of university into a job at a national magazine.


How did you get the morning star job?


----------



## Belushi (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I do have a couple of questions, actually, if anyone can answer them for me:
> 
> 1.What are you actually hoping to achieve with this thread?
> 
> 2. If you really do hate my work and everything it stands for, why have you spent 215 pages discussing it, and why do you continue to hang around on my twitter feed and read my articles?


 
You know what Laurie, I really like the fact that you've come on here to argue the toss because its a real bear pit and that takes some guts. And I think you're sincere in your beliefs and mean well, but amid the slagging off on this thread there is a real point, and that is that even though you dont realise it for some of us you're part of the problem with the British left not part of the solution.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> "If you'd "come up the hard way", you'd have been inured to any form of bullying after your first 6 months on a local rag."
> Actually, I spent a year working for minimum wage at a small mental health industry magazine to support myself through my journalism training course, and then worked as a sub-editor on the Morning Star. Your research appears to be a bit off: I didn't just walk out of university into a job at a national magazine.


So you were earning for that year right?


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

> The internship system is already expensive enough to exclude all but the richest and most fortunate young people from popular jobs. I could pretend, for example, that it's my winning smile and blatant genius which have enabled me to find work as a journalist - but a year's unpaid interning, during which I survived on a small inheritance from a dead relative, had just as much to do with it. Any graduate or school-leaver without the means to support themselves in London whilst working for free can currently forget about a career in journalism, politics, the arts, finance, the legal profession or any of a number of other sectors whose business models are now based around a lower tier of unpaid labour.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> The place of the media is always a problem in revolutionary situations, Bish. Are they lackeys of the capitalist scum that employ them, or are they honest strivers trying to change the system from inside, and _simpatico_ with the aims of the revolution?
> I tend toward the former answer, because for every one of the latter, there's a dozen of the former.


So VP does that mean that come the revolution you will give Laurie Penny a fair trial before shooting her?


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

...jinx!


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I do have a couple of questions, actually, if anyone can answer them for me:
> 
> 1.What are you actually hoping to achieve with this thread?


 
Personally I just find some of the things you say uninentionally hilarious and cringeworthy. It's like watching an episode of Nathan Barley unfold in real time. I mean I was doing the same thing, trying to tear my own face off with embarassment whenever you write something, before I stumbled upon this thread.



lauriepenny said:


> 2. If you really do hate my work and everything it stands for, why have you spent 215 pages discussing it, and why do you continue to hang around on my twitter feed and read my articles?


 
I don't hate all your work, occasionally you've written things I like. I just resent how you've been promoted as this Voice of the Downtrodden, because I've read your stuff and it reads like someone ponitificating about issues she doesn't really understand and about people whose lives she knows nothing about.

I read your articles out of morbid sense of curiosity these days, and because they're unintentionally hilarious.

Also, the whiff Hari-style fabrication and hangs around you like a bad perfume. These are all things I'd thought to myself just reading your work, and clearly there's a few other people who've thought the same thing too, who've managed to coalese around this thread.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> How did you get the morning star job?


 
The normal way. I applied, and then I had an interview.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Belushi said:


> You know what Laurie, I really like the fact that you've come on here to argue the toss because its a real bear pit and that takes some guts. And I think you're sincere in your believes and mean well, but amid the slagging off on this thread there is a real point, and that is that even though you dont realise it for some of us you're part of the problem with the British left not part of the solution.


Belushi is a very nice person, he doesn't pick on people, he doesn't bully, he isn't in a clique - he is saying this to you.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> "If you'd "come up the hard way", you'd have been inured to any form of bullying after your first 6 months on a local rag."
> Actually, I spent a year working for minimum wage at a small mental health industry magazine to support myself through my journalism training course, and then worked as a sub-editor on the Morning Star. Your research appears to be a bit off: I didn't just walk out of university into a job at a national magazine.


 
I haven't claimed that you did, have I?   Surely, though, you're cognisant of the fact that a small industry mag bears very little comparison to what happens at local daily or weekly?
And subbing, while a difficult job, especially if half the journalists are so old they use half a dozen different forms of shorthand between them, doesn't feature quite the same "coal face" exposure as being a lowly cub


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Betty_Rubble said:


> What did you eat in Harvesters when you had dinner with Stephen Lennon?


 
e coli, most likely.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> Welcome Laurie. The internationale is a good tune but it is really hard to get the words to scan to it.


 
Only if you're sober, comrade.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> The normal way. I applied, and then I had an interview.


That's normal? Did i miss it? Normal how?

Why is this the first post of mine that you've replied to? .


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> And subbing, while a difficult job, especially if half the journalists are so old they use half a dozen different forms of shorthand between them, doesn't feature quite the same "coal face" exposure as being a lowly cub


 
I advise you never say that to a sub-editor who's within throwing distance of a stapler, my friend.


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> "If you'd "come up the hard way", you'd have been inured to any form of bullying after your first 6 months on a local rag."
> Actually, I spent a year working for minimum wage at a small mental health industry magazine to support myself through my journalism training course, and then worked as a sub-editor on the Morning Star. Your research appears to be a bit off: I didn't just walk out of university into a job at a national magazine.


 
So it was *you* that was responsible for putting the 'mental' into mental health then?

Sub-editor on the Morning Star... jeez, I wondered why their circulation was dwindling so fast. The demise of the _'socialist countries'_ (sic) and employing *you* seem to have been the final nails in that particular coffin.

You've put me right off buying it as part of my Saturday morning guilt trip now.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Actually, I spent a year working for minimum wage at a small mental health industry magazine to support myself through my journalism training course, and then worked as a sub-editor on the Morning Star. Your research appears to be a bit off: I didn't just walk out of university into a job at a national magazine.


 
Neither did I, I was too busy trying to fit scribbling in and around going to demo's, organising and helping run camps, attending meetings, supporting people who were up in court, doing press releases/letter writing/police liaison work, travelling round the country on my own time and at my own expense and also fetching, carrying and generally making myself useful. Also, even when I was a press spokesman, I ALWAYS avoided using that role to promote *anything* other than the groups I worked with.

Involving myself in causes wasn't something I saw as a career move or a means to pander to my own ego.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I advise you never say that to a sub-editor who's within throwing distance of a stapler, my friend.


Now we're already getting, but i'm a journo - listen to my tales. I'm Ann Leslie.


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 14, 2012)

Take note VP, first up against the wall when the staple gun starts firing. The revolution will not be televised but rather sold as a pamphlet


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

Very good posts from Delroy and Belushi on this thread.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

weepiper said:


> we all hate women apparently. _All_ of us. _All_ women.


 
Are you one of those self-hating women, then?


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> And subbing, while a difficult job, especially if half the journalists are so old they use half a dozen different forms of shorthand between them, doesn't feature quite the same "coal face" exposure as being a lowly cub


 
You do suffer the risk of scribblers publicly blaming you for subbing their work so incompetently that it leaves a false impression, though, to be fair...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

Now I've answered Laurie's questions in good faith, perhaps you'd return the favour and answer a few of mine?

1) What do you think about the spat between the NUJ and the New Statesman? Are you a member of the NUJ?

2) Did the decision to run the advert from the homophobic christian group in the New Statesman make you reconsider working for them? And do you know where the proceeds of said advertisement ended up?

3) Why did you give Stephen Lennon of the EDL a platform, at a point when the EDL is in terminal decline and where his agenda, ie using you and other journalists to try and revive it (whilst getting a good free scran too) was blatant from the outset?

Laurie Penny, she who gives platforms to fascists and who works for a scabbing, homophobic liberal paper, scratching her head with bemusement at why a forum riddled with anarchists, anti-fascists, socialists and trade unionists are often critical of her.

The one thing they definitely don't teach in Oxbridge is self-awareness.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Not sleazy and disgusting in a really pleasurable sense, then?


 
Unfortunately not.


----------



## 8den (Dec 14, 2012)

Laurie, welcome to Urban, Ignore Butchers and Dwyer, have a hob nob, are you firky etc....

Just a caveat please don't think that just because some people are talking about you at length, that you are somewhat important or relevant. There are people on these boards who can hold grudges for periods of time that could only be measured on a geological scale. I mean christ look at the thread title, the OP is about a handbag fight between you, Alex and the SWP, to be any less politically relevant you may as well talk about the SDP. 

Not that I'm necessarily on your side or anything Laurie, it's just like watching chum getting thrown into the sharks.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Belushi is a very nice person, he doesn't pick on people, he doesn't bully, he isn't in a clique - he is saying this to you.





Belushi said:


> You know what Laurie, I really like the fact that you've come on here to argue the toss because its a real bear pit and that takes some guts. And I think you're sincere in your believes and mean well, but amid the slagging off on this thread there is a real point, and that is that even though you dont realise it for some of us you're part of the problem with the British left not part of the solution.


 
I understand that, and thank you for acknowledging. It's kind of funny that you think I'm the 'problem with the British left'. 

Personally, though, I think the problem with the British Left is that the people who are meant to be its best and most fervent fighters waste their time on in-fighting, petty bullying and tearing down anyone who puts their head above the parapet. I think the problem with the British Left is that too many of us would rather attack each other and turn our energy outwards. I think the problem with the British Left is that it's riddled with bitterness and barely acknowledged misogyny. And I think that this thread is the perfect example of all of those things.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I understand that, and thank you for acknowledging. It's kind of funny that you think I'm the 'problem with the British left'.
> 
> Personally, though, I think the problem with the British Left is that the people who are meant to be its best and most fervent fighters waste their time on in-fighting, petty bullying and tearing down anyone who puts their head above the parapet. I think the problem with the British Left is that too many of us would rather attack each other and turn our energy outwards. I think the problem with the British Left is that it's riddled with bitterness and barely acknowledged misogyny. And I think that this thread is the perfect example of all of those things.


 
Nothing to do with class then?


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

8den said:


> Laurie, welcome to Urban, Ignore Butchers and Dwyer, have a hob nob, are you firky etc....
> 
> Just a caveat please don't think that just because some people are talking about you at length, that you are somewhat important or relevant. There are people on these boards who can hold grudges for periods of time that could only be measured on a geological scale. I mean christ look at the thread title, the OP is about a handbag fight between you, Alex and the SWP, to be any less politically relevant you may as well talk about the SDP.
> 
> Not that I'm necessarily on your side or anything Laurie, it's just like watching chum getting thrown into the sharks.


Don't you start you disgusting cunt.

For all Laurie's faults, I doubt we'll see her doing anything as disgraceful as backing the coppers in Genoa, especially the card carrying fascist one who murdered Carlo Giuliani.

Then again, never say never, them commentariats are fickle rascals.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I understand that, and thank you for acknowledging. It's kind of funny that you think I'm the 'problem with the British left'.
> 
> Personally, though, I think the problem with the British Left is that the people who are meant to be its best and most fervent fighters waste their time on in-fighting, petty bullying and tearing down anyone who puts their head above the parapet. I think the problem with the British Left is that too many of us would rather attack each other and turn our energy outwards. I think the problem with the British Left is that it's riddled with bitterness and barely acknowledged misogyny. And I think that this thread is the perfect example of all of those things.


I _don't care_ what you think the problem is with the british left.I KNOW that you're part of the problem. See this thread and it's multi-faceted discussions for why. Or not fucking bother...


----------



## TruXta (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I understand that, and thank you for acknowledging. It's kind of funny that you think I'm the 'problem with the British left'.
> 
> Personally, though, I think the problem with the British Left is that the people who are meant to be its best and most fervent fighters waste their time on in-fighting, petty bullying and tearing down anyone who puts their head above the parapet. I think the problem with the British Left is that too many of us would rather attack each other and turn our energy outwards. I think the problem with the British Left is that it's riddled with bitterness and barely acknowledged misogyny. And I think that this thread is the perfect example of all of those things.


Us told again. This is weak tea, fucking weak tea.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

TruXta said:


> This place is worse than most demos in terms of bruises, punches, betrayals and sleepless nights in filthy cells.


 
Such melodrama!


----------



## Belushi (Dec 14, 2012)

I said '*part* of the problem'


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

Belushi said:


> I said '*part* of the problem'


 
typical sub eh?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

8den said:


> Laurie, welcome to Urban, Ignore Butchers and Dwyer, have a hob nob, are you firky etc....
> 
> Just a caveat please don't think that just because some people are talking about you at length, that you are somewhat important or relevant. There are people on these boards who can hold grudges for periods of time that could only be measured on a geological scale. I mean christ look at the thread title, the OP is about a handbag fight between you, Alex and the SWP, to be any less politically relevant you may as well talk about the SDP.
> 
> Not that I'm necessarily on your side or anything Laurie, it's just like watching chum getting thrown into the sharks.


You used my dying cat to attack me. You're cool.


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I understand that, and thank you for acknowledging. It's kind of funny that you think I'm the 'problem with the British left'.
> 
> Personally, though, I think the problem with the British Left is that the people who are meant to be its best and most fervent fighters waste their time on in-fighting, petty bullying and tearing down anyone who puts their head above the parapet. I think the problem with the British Left is that too many of us would rather attack each other and turn our energy outwards. I think the problem with the British Left is that it's riddled with bitterness and barely acknowledged misogyny. And I think that this thread is the perfect example of all of those things.


----------



## free spirit (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I understand that, and thank you for acknowledging. It's kind of funny that you think I'm the 'problem with the British left'.
> 
> Personally, though, I think the problem with the British Left is that the people who are meant to be its best and most fervent fighters waste their time on in-fighting, petty bullying and tearing down anyone who puts their head above the parapet. I think the problem with the British Left is that too many of us would rather attack each other and turn our energy outwards. I think the problem with the British Left is that it's riddled with bitterness and barely acknowledged misogyny. And I think that this thread is the perfect example of all of those things.


you'd best go and have a word with your slightly younger self then, as it started with your attacks on the SWP and their response to it.*



> _Of course, the old left is not about to disappear completely. It is highly likely that even after a nuclear attack, the only remaining life-forms will be cockroaches and sour-faced vendors of the Socialist Worker. Stunningly, the paper is still being peddled at every demonstration to young cyber-activists for whom the very concept of a newspaper is almost as outdated as the notion of ideological unity as a basis for action._
> 
> _For these young protesters, the strategic factionalism of the old left is irrelevant._


 

*not that many on here haven't said the same thing about the SWP


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

This use of the word "in-fighting" is what gets my back up. Coz it implies we're on "in" the same group or on the same team. I really don't see it that way.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> This use of the word "in-fighting" is what gets my back up. Coz it implies we're on "in" the same group or on the same team. I really don't see it that way.


Who used it?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I do have a couple of questions, actually, if anyone can answer them for me:
> 
> 1.What are you actually hoping to achieve with this thread?


 
What does anyone hope to achieve when they write and read? To inform and to be informed; to tease; to shame; to support, the same as with any thread.



> 2. If you really do hate my work and everything it stands for, why have you spent 215 pages discussing it, and why do you continue to hang around on my twitter feed and read my articles?


 
It's hardly a case of hating your work and everything it stands for, it's far more a case that some of your work, and some of those you work for, is at odds with the person you claim to be, hence the many comments on this thread on just such issues.


----------



## alfajobrob (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> The normal way. I applied, and then I had an interview.


 
I believe he was asking what had happened before you got the job/applied...did you have connections within the paper, or just get it on your own merit


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Who used it?


 


lauriepenny said:


> Personally, though, I think the problem with the British Left is that the people who are meant to be its best and most fervent fighters waste their time on in-fighting, petty bullying and tearing down anyone who puts their head above the parapet.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Who used it?


 
Laura


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Who used it?


 
It's also one of the things James "why don't the left like the police" Ball said, quoted earlier on in the thread.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> So VP does that mean that come the revolution you will give Laurie Penny a fair trial before shooting her?


 
Criminal justice systems and fair trials are _bourgeois_ affectations, comrade!


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

Careful now, violent misogynist fantasies.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Laura


Worthless then.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

Communism isn't about being nice. Communism is a hammer which we use to smash the enemy.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

alfajobrob said:


> I believe he was asking what had happened before you got the job/applied...did you have connections within the paper, or just get it on your own merit


 
Just on my own merit, oddly enough. I've never had any personal or family connections at any paper or magazine I've worked at.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 14, 2012)

1.  what are we hoping to achieve from this thread?

easy, a place where we actually have an area to criticise and critique the constant wave of middle class public school types who tell us they know what is best for the working classes whilst not listening to us, and then have a pop because we disagree and expect us to put aside our problems with your misunderstanding of the needs of the working classes in order to do things your way.  in a way that benefits uh... not us.  two words: New Labour.  that's where it got us, another bucket of sick to drink.  a different flavour of sick, top notch.  stop poncing about being cool and telling everyone what they should do and start spending some time with real people not cool fashionable people.


catharsis.  that's the word i was looking for.

i'm sure you mean well though.  that's a good thing.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Yeah 1.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

Also, my name isn't Laura anymore.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Communism isn't about being nice. Communism is a hammer which we use to smash the enemy.


 @proledem


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Also, my name isn't Laura anymore.


 
Sorry it was a typo, ironically given my comment about sub editors above


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Also, my name isn't Laura anymore.


 
So it was Laura before it was Laurie, was it, Dave?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> i'm sure you mean well though. that's a good thing.


 
At the risk of being called a "rimjob cunt" by butchers again, I know one or two people in real life who've met Laurie, and they all say she's very nice and sincere on a person-to-person basis.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I advise you never say that to a sub-editor who's within throwing distance of a stapler, my friend.


 
I was a subbie on a national daily (for my sins), back in the mid-eighties. What didn't kill me, made me stronger!


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Who used it?


 
Dave


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Also, my name isn't Laura anymore.


Did you throw your medals into the cam?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> At the risk of being called a "rimjob cunt" by butchers again, I know one or two people in real life who've met Laurie, and they all say she's very nice and sincere on a person-to-person basis.


 
You fackin' rimjob cahnt!


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 14, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> At the risk of being called a "rimjob cunt" by butchers again, I know one or two people in real life who've met Laurie, and they all say she's very nice and sincere on a person-to-person basis.


 
So was Hitler. Oh no, he wasn't, was he?


----------



## love detective (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Also, my name isn't Laura anymore.


 
Is this you?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> At the risk of being called a "rimjob cunt" by butchers again, I know one or two people in real life who've met Laurie, and they all say she's very nice and sincere on a person-to-person basis.


So what? What are we talking about here?


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 14, 2012)

I am delighted Laurie Penny has come on to this thread. It has given it a new energy. I will be even more delighted when she moves over to some of the other issues in the Politics Forums and makes contributions there.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 14, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> At the risk of being called a "rimjob cunt" by butchers again, I know one or two people in real life who've met Laurie, and they all say she's very nice and sincere on a person-to-person basis.


 
i sure she is.  most people off the internet have turned out to be nice and sincere.  i don't doubt she means it.  lots of people on the left mean it, but they're still no good for the movement.  like the antisemites and lizard-fighters who infested occupy.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> catharsis. that's the word i was looking for.


 

Thank you for being honest. That's really all you needed to say.


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> So what? What are we talking about here?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

steph said:


> Take note VP, first up against the wall when the staple gun starts firing. The revolution will not be televised but rather sold as a pamphlet


 
It'll take more than a few staples to pierce my thick proletarian hide, comrade steph!
Who's publishing the pamphlet, by the way? I hope it's not the Kate Sharpley Library. I think their layout-wallah goes at the sauce a bit heavily!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> i sure she is. most people off the internet have turned out to be nice and sincere. i don't doubt she means it. lots of people on the left mean it, but they're still no good for the movement. like the antisemites and lizard-fighters who infested occupy.


 
I dunno we could do with some hardened lizard fighters, just in case y'know?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Just on my own merit, oddly enough. I've never had any personal or family connections at any paper or magazine I've worked at.


No. How  did you hear of the job.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> I hope it's not the Kate Sharpley Library. I think their layout-wallah goes at the sauce a bit heavily!


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 14, 2012)

"hungry men must be humble and listen!  they were trying to save their souls"


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> So what? What are we talking about here?


 
Oh aye I'm just saying.

I met Peter Taffe too y'know. He was very nice, bought me a pint.

And my old A-level History teacher, who was invovled in Irish politics on the republican side, during his life had met both Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley. Out of the two, Ian Paisley was far more affable.

Which is astonishing when you consider Paisley literally thought the man was going to burn in hell for all eternity, whereas McGuinness was fighting for his freedom and liberation.

Lesson? It doesn't matter if you're nice.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 14, 2012)

and that's me done.  gnight urban, play nicely.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> You do suffer the risk of scribblers publicly blaming you for subbing their work so incompetently that it leaves a false impression, though, to be fair...


 
One bastard got a new, better-paying job at another paper on the strength of my making his tortured prose readable, the swine! 
The only good thing was that he gave up journalism and went into PR a few years later, thus proving his fitness for a place on THE LIST.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 14, 2012)

Urban75, I am in you


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

love detective said:


> Is this you?


It's incredibly creepy that you found that.
Yes, that's me. I legally changed my surname at the age of 16 to my mother's family name, rather than my father's. A feminist thing. Do you have some sort of problem with that?


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> One bastard got a new, better-paying job at another paper on the strength of my making his tortured prose readable, the swine!
> The only good thing was that he gave up journalism and went into PR a few years later, thus proving his fitness for a place on THE LIST.


 
I did press spokesman work for a couple of groups during my activist days. Does that mean I'm on The List or does my having gone from gamekeeper to poacher save me from making said List?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> It's incredibly creepy that you found that.
> Yes, that's me. I legally changed my surname at the age of 16 to my mother's family name, rather than my father's. A feminist thing. Do you have some sort of problem with that?


medals in the river


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

love detective said:


> Is this you?


 
According to that report, her name was Dave Barnett before she went up to Oxford...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

just a quick reminder



Delroy Booth said:


> Now I've answered Laurie's questions in good faith, perhaps you'd return the favour and answer a few of mine?
> 
> 1) What do you think about the spat between the NUJ and the New Statesman? Are you a member of the NUJ?
> 
> ...


----------



## love detective (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> It's incredibly creepy that you found that.
> Yes, that's me. I legally changed my surname at the age of 16 to my mother's family name, rather than my father's. A feminist thing. Do you have some sort of problem with that?


 
I have absolutely no problem with you changing your name, I do have a problem with the kind of dishonest crap you come out with though about your background, for example:-

*August 2002: *
"Laura hopes to go to Oxford and is interested in the possibility of a career as a writer."

*May 2012: *
"For instance, in 2003, I was informed by a teacher that I would be applying to Oxford. I was the smartest kid in a smart school which needed to boost its Oxbridge figures: there was no question."

So how come in 2012 you lied about being forced to apply to Oxford like you had no choice in it, when ten years previously in an interview for a local newspaper you informed them that you hoped to go to Oxford. Where you lying in 2002 or 2012?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> It's incredibly creepy that you found that.
> Yes, that's me. I legally changed my surname at the age of 16 to my mother's family name, rather than my father's. A feminist thing. Do you have some sort of problem with that?


Where you unaware that this had been put out there before? Think.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

firky said:


> Careful now, violent misogynist fantasies.


 
I'll happily admit to having violent fantasies, but they're not misogynistic, unless David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne, Eric Pickles, Ed Miliband, Liam Byrne and several dozen other neoliberal members of the political classes have undergone gender reassignment recently.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

love detective said:


> I have absolutely no problem with you changing your name, I do have a problem with the kind of dishonest crap you come out with though about your background, for example:-
> 
> *August 2002: *
> "Laura hopes to go to Oxford and is interested in the possibility of a career as a writer."
> ...


 
For fuck's sake. I both wanted AND was encouraged to go. If I hadn't, there'd have been a problem. This petty bullshit is really uninspiring.


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> I'll happily admit to having violent fantasies, but they're not misogynistic, unless David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne, Eric Pickles, Ed Miliband, Liam Byrne and several dozen other neoliberal members of the political classes have undergone gender reassignment recently.


 
What have you got against men Panda, you mad feminist bitch!


----------



## weepiper (Dec 14, 2012)

love detective said:


> I have absolutely no problem with you changing your name, I do have a problem with the kind of dishonest crap you come out with though about your background, for example:-
> 
> *August 2002: *
> "Laura hopes to go to Oxford and is interested in the possibility of a career as a writer."
> ...


 
Mm. I was told I was applying to Oxford and Cambridge too, but I said 'no ta' because I knew it'd be miserable for me coming from my background and went to Edinburgh instead. My school would have killed to get a kid into Oxford. But it was pretty easy to say no if you didn't want to.


----------



## love detective (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> For fuck's sake. I both wanted AND was encouraged to go. If I hadn't, there'd have been a problem. This petty bullshit is really uninspiring.


 
So you wanted to go to Oxford, fine. Why make out in 2012 that you were informed that you would be applying, 'no question'. Why no mention in the 2012 article that you wanted to go? why the omission?

Why did you say that in 2003 you had been informed by a teacher that you would be applying as though it was some kind of imposition put on you, when a year earlier in 2002 you had already expressed your desire to go there?


----------



## alfajobrob (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Just on my own merit, oddly enough. I've never had any personal or family connections at any paper or magazine I've worked at.


 
Really, that makes it even more shocking then.

A nod's as good as a wink to a blind man as my grandad used to say.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> I'll happily admit to having violent fantasies, but they're not misogynistic, unless David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne, Eric Pickles, Ed Miliband, Liam Byrne and several dozen other neoliberal members of the political classes have undergone gender reassignment recently.


 
They haven't yet, but I can always provide assistance involving the top of a well-rusted tin can if that would help at all.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> For fuck's sake. I both wanted AND was encouraged to go. If I hadn't, there'd have been a problem. This petty bullshit is really uninspiring.


It's not supposed to be.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I dunno we could do with some hardened lizard fighters, just in case y'know?


 
Obviously, when I referred to my "thick proletarian hide" earlier, I was in no way confirming or denying that my thick hide is at all reptilian.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 14, 2012)

If only we were kids of colour from that Brooklyn.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

It wasn't an omission, because that article wasn't about me - it was about how private schools construct and perpetuate class privilege. The fact that anyone bright is automatically put on the oxbridge route unless and sometimes even if they raise serious objections is part of that process.


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> For fuck's sake. I both wanted AND was encouraged to go. If I hadn't, there'd have been a problem. This petty bullshit is really uninspiring.


 
The 2012 quote from you suggests that you were coerced by teachers/school in order to take up a place at Oxford, whereas the piece from 2002 reports you as being proactive in applying to Oxford and quite enthusiastic at the prospect.

Sort it out Dave.


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I think the problem with the British Left is that it's riddled with bitterness and barely acknowledged misogyny. And I think that this thread is the perfect example of all of those things.


 
Can you stop calling us misogynists please? Look at the rest of the site ffs. We know you get a load of genuinely awful shit from filth elsewhere but sexism is not tolerated here and in fact one of this thread's large derails was about taking a certain Labour party hack to task about some unacceptable shit he came out with about a LibDem guardian woman (who shall remain nameless for fear of further derail lunacy)


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> It wasn't an omission, because that article wasn't about me - it was about how private schools construct and perpetuate class privilege. The fact that anyone bright is automatically put on the oxbridge route unless and sometimes even if they raise serious objections is part of that process.


How else do they do that? How can you stop it?


----------



## inva (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> It wasn't an omission, because that article wasn't about me - it was about how private schools construct and perpetuate class privilege. The fact that anyone bright is automatically put on the oxbridge route unless and sometimes even if they raise serious objections is part of that process.


i wasn't put on the oxbridge route.
not bright 
edit
oh you said private schools


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

Smartest kid at a smart school.


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> It wasn't an omission, because that article wasn't about me - it was about how private schools construct and perpetuate class privilege. The fact that anyone bright is automatically put on the oxbridge route unless and sometimes even if they raise serious objections is part of that process.


 
_"That's coercion, Sir!"_


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> I did press spokesman work for a couple of groups during my activist days. Does that mean I'm on The List or does my having gone from gamekeeper to poacher save me from making said List?


 
There's a great deal of difference between publicising your own activism on the one hand, and shovelling shit with sugar frosting onto capitalists, their ideas and their products in order to sell them to the public.


----------



## Belushi (Dec 14, 2012)

inva said:


> i wasn't put on the oxbridge route.
> not bright


 
We didn't even have a bloody sixth form


----------



## TruXta (Dec 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Smartest kid at a smart school.


Broken Britain. FEB.


----------



## love detective (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> It wasn't an omission, because that article wasn't about me


 
why mention any personal details about you at all then if it wasn't about you (and by the way, you're articles are _always_ about you, whether you realise it or not)

face facts, you've bene caught out lying, lying about personal circumstances to suit whatever story you happen to be writing about

you will now dress up these exposures as internet bullying and continue to do more of the same of the above


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 14, 2012)

If nothing else, Laurie, if you don't read and understand and even get a VAGUE idea of why this thread exists (this thread which is NOT ostensibly about you and you alone), then just know that a major problem is that for all your causes and shouting and righteous anger etc the perception of you is that you're still one of THEM, speaking first and foremost _about_ and _for_ us, and not _to_ us. Like so many others. It's easy to bounce in and out of other people's struggles. That on its own wouldn't be too much of a problem as far as provoking ire was concerned. But to appropriate these struggles as your own; well, it might fool more impressionable people than on these pages but here it doesn't wash.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

Posh schools aren't 'smart' schools by the way. They churn out exam results, sure, but some of the thickest fuckers I've ever met got straight As at private schools. You don't really need to be smart with the best education money can buy.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

framed said:


> According to that report, her name was Dave Barnett before she went up to Oxford...


 






"You're my wife now, Dave!"


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 14, 2012)

why would it have been a problem not to want to go to oxford? nobody forces you to go, or to apply there, there are people who get offered a place and then turn it down


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

framed said:


> What have you got against men Panda, you mad feminist bitch!


 
That's "mad feminist *bastard*", thanks. 
And it's not ALL men, just right-wing men.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> It wasn't an omission, because that article wasn't about me - it was about how private schools construct and perpetuate class privilege. The fact that anyone bright is automatically put on the oxbridge route unless and sometimes even if they raise serious objections is part of that process.


Why didn't you leave instead of getting on so well that you did  pantos?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Posh schools aren't 'smart' schools by the way. They churn out exam results, sure, but some of the thickest fuckers I've ever met got straight As at private schools. You don't really need to be smart with the best education money can buy.


 
It's not just that though, it's to inculcate the offspring of the wealthy and well-to-do with a bulletproof sense of confidence and self-worth.

The number of times I've heard people with nice RP accents who went to the right schools blathering on with some witless drivel, but getting away with it beacuse of this overwhelming sense of self-assuredness that they say it with, man it fucking infuriates me.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

Sorry, have I hurt your feelings? Let me remind you that I found this thread when I was directed to a cartoon that contained a funny joke about anarchists and socialists beating 'me' up. Let me remind you that I receive real threats of violence on a daily basis, and getting this wasn't funny at all.

How about I stop calling you misogynists when your scraps of reasoned critique aren't awash with spiteful bullshit and comments on my appearance and sneery, creepy sexual comments? How about I stop you calling you misogynists when the so-called left stops attacking any woman at all who dares to show any evidence of ego or confidence in public?

I'm sure that in your hearts you believe you're not misogynists. But you sure as hell seem to hate any woman with a platform. 

That's it. I'm done.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> why would it have been a problem not to want to go to oxford? nobody forces you to go, or to apply there, there are people who get offered a place and then turn it down


 
It's those poor oppressed posh kids being forced to get an education most of us could only dream of 

That's miles worse than the normals, they just get laughed at when they tell their careers advisor they're thinking about A levels.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

copliker said:


> Can you stop calling us misogynists please? Look at the rest of the site ffs. We know you get a load of genuinely awful shit from filth elsewhere but sexism is not tolerated here and in fact one of this thread's large derails was about taking a certain Labour party hack to task about some unacceptable shit he came out with about a LibDem guardian woman (who shall remain nameless for fear of further derail lunacy)


 
_Indie_, IIRC, not the _Guardian_.
"Labour party hack" is accurate, though.


----------



## inva (Dec 14, 2012)

every post on the thread is made by every poster on the thread.

edit

I suppose that makes it ... a little bit communism.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Sorry, have I hurt your feelings? Let me remind you that I found this thread when I was directed to a cartoon that contained a funny joke about anarchists and socialists beating 'me' up. Let me remind you that I receive real threats of violence on a daily basis, and getting this wasn't funny at all.
> 
> How about I stop calling you misogynists when your scraps of reasoned critique aren't awash with spiteful bullshit and comments on my appearance and sneery, creepy sexual comments? How about I stop you calling you misogynists when the so-called left stops attacking any woman at all who dares to show any evidence of ego or confidence in public?
> 
> ...


 
you mean the cartoon that received an almost unanimous 'leave it out, that's wrong' response on this very thread?


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

Belushi said:


> We didn't even have a bloody sixth form


There were 70+ kids in my primary school class.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> That's it. I'm done.


 
I wish.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 14, 2012)

26 posts, all on a thread with their name in the title. Is that a record for a driveby shit-shovelling recuperator?


----------



## Belushi (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Sorry, have I hurt your feelings? Let me remind you that I found this thread when I was directed to a cartoon that contained a funny joke about anarchists and socialists beating 'me' up. Let me remind you that I receive real threats of violence on a daily basis, and getting this wasn't funny at all.
> 
> How about I stop calling you misogynists when your scraps of reasoned critique aren't awash with spiteful bullshit and comments on my appearance and sneery, creepy sexual comments? How about I stop you calling you misogynists when the so-called left stops attacking any woman at all who dares to show any evidence of ego or confidence in public?
> 
> ...


 
Is that all you've got? I was really expecting something more original.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Why didn't you leave instead of getting on so well that you did pantos?


 
Actually, I did leave. I was hospitalised for health problems (anorexia) and spent almost the entirety of my last school year in hospital.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

As said.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 14, 2012)

it's not about women - plenty of people who have replied to this thread are women, and plenty of people have challenged sexist shite, yes, there is sexism on here, but there's a difference between -ah fuck it


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> why would it have been a problem not to want to go to oxford? nobody forces you to go, or to apply there, there are people who get offered a place and then turn it down


 
She was cock-a-fucking-hoop about going to Oxford in 2002, there was never a chance that she would turn down a place there, but in 2012 for the sake of journalistic expediency she invented a story that suggested a degree of coercion in her choice of university.


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> _Indie_, IIRC, not the _Guardian_.
> "Labour party hack" is accurate, though.


Definitely the guardian. I checked in a stalkery fashion.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> But you sure as hell seem to hate any woman with a platform.


 
You really don't get it do you? It's god fuck all - absolutely fuck all - to do with your gender. It's about using your massive privilege (I notice you never talk about class when you're on a privilege one, funny that eh?) as a springboard to becoming the voice of people you'll never understand. It's about you constantly playing the victim when called on it.

And it's about the fucking disgraceful way you use the one or 2 dodgy comments made by twats to smear us all - that's inexcusible.

You're pathetic Laurie. Truly pathetic.


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> That's it. I'm done.


 


You really are hilarious Dave.

Political charlatans like you were very well summed up by James Connolly... _"From nothing, through nothing... to nothing!"_


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Sorry, have I hurt your feelings? Let me remind you that I found this thread when I was directed to a cartoon that contained a funny joke about anarchists and socialists beating 'me' up. Let me remind you that I receive real threats of violence on a daily basis, and getting this wasn't funny at all.
> 
> How about I stop calling you misogynists when your scraps of reasoned critique aren't awash with spiteful bullshit and comments on my appearance and sneery, creepy sexual comments? How about I stop you calling you misogynists when the so-called left stops attacking any woman at all who dares to show any evidence of ego or confidence in public?
> 
> ...


 
What horseshit. Did you even see how this cartoon was treated in this thread? It wasn't cheered, even by those who saw it for what it was. There are also several female posters on this thread alone, let alone elsewhere on this forum, and they are not "attacked" for their gender. AT ALL. 

How about you read the thread, respond to criticisms, actually engage with people, talk to us?

"Woman with a platform." Get down off it for a bit. Eye-level.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

copliker said:


> Definitely the guardian. I checked in a stalkery fashion.


 
Very creepy


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

framed said:


> She was cock-a-fucking-hoop about going to Oxford in 2002, there was never a chance that she would turn down a place there, but in 2012 for the sake of journalistic expediency she invented a story that suggested a degree of coercion in her choice of university.


 
Whilst giving herself a pat on the back for being the smartest kid in a smart school.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 14, 2012)

framed said:


> She was cock-a-fucking-hoop about going to Oxford in 2002, there was never a chance that she would turn down a place there, but in 2012 for the sake of journalistic expediency she invented a story that suggested a degree of coercion in her choice of university.


 
Sounds like she was under a lot of social pressure when she was younger. That could have been part of her illness. Only she really knows.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

S☼I said:


> If nothing else, Laurie, if you don't read and understand and even get a VAGUE idea of why this thread exists (this thread which is NOT ostensibly about you and you alone), then just know that a major problem is that for all your causes and shouting and righteous anger etc the perception of you is that you're still one of THEM, speaking first and foremost _about_ and _for_ us, and not _to_ us. Like so many others. It's easy to bounce in and out of other people's struggles. That on its own wouldn't be too much of a problem as far as provoking ire was concerned. But to appropriate these struggles as your own; well, it might fool more impressionable people than on these pages but here it doesn't wash.


 
Hiya Sticky! Good to see ya!
It's not even as if the appropriation is always done knowingly, but it *is* generally the case that when a "name" attaches themselves to a cause, the cause can suffer because of it. Non-activists only tend to see this sort of thing as "personality does favour to cause", rather than as "personality draws short-term attention to cause and to self, cause suffers in longer term".
And yeah, being spoken for has always stuck in my craw, ever since a paper-selling type back in the '70s told me that "people like you" should be organising politically against the skinheads stalking our estates, rather than kicking the shit out of them.   What the fuck did he know?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Actually, I did leave. I was hospitalised for health problems (anorexia) and spent almost the entirety of my last school year in hospital.


Not because you opposed the privilige (which you oddly think only happened when you were 19  -oh whopaid the fees feom 9t hen?).Oh what tangled web


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> "people like you"


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 14, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> it's not about women - plenty of people who have replied to this thread are women, and plenty of people have challenged sexist shite, yes, there is sexism on here, but there's a difference between -ah fuck it


 
Seriously, that's your answer? Women do it too so it can't be sexist?

Ah, the glorious British left and its powers of persuasive reasoning. Good grief I regret ever having offended you.


----------



## Belushi (Dec 14, 2012)

firky said:


> Whilst giving herself a pat on the back for being the smartest kid in a smart school.


 
While I was the fattest kid in a crap school


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Seriously, that's your answer? Women do it too so it can't be sexist?
> 
> Ah, the glorious British left and its powers of persuasive reasoning. Good grief I regret ever having offended you.


 
it's nothing to do with sexism,


----------



## weepiper (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Seriously, that's your answer? Women do it too so it can't be sexist?
> 
> Ah, the glorious British left and its powers of persuasive reasoning. Good grief I regret ever having offended you.


 
No. Women who bother to try to engage are not treated in the way you are upset about. Men who behave in the same way get the same response on here. It's really nothing to do with gender in this case. Yes there has been some bollocks but it has been challenged robustly.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Seriously, that's your answer? Women do it too so it can't be sexist?
> 
> Ah, the glorious British left and its powers of persuasive reasoning. Good grief I regret ever having offended you.


Atop the xmas tree. Burn it down.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> That's it. I'm done.


 
Not even gonna bother answering these then?



Delroy Booth said:


> Now I've answered Laurie's questions in good faith, perhaps you'd return the favour and answer a few of mine?
> 
> 1) What do you think about the spat between the NUJ and the New Statesman? Are you a member of the NUJ?
> 
> ...


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Sorry, have I hurt your feelings? Let me remind you that I found this thread when I was directed to a cartoon that contained a funny joke about anarchists and socialists beating 'me' up. Let me remind you that I receive real threats of violence on a daily basis, and getting this wasn't funny at all.
> 
> How about I stop calling you misogynists when your scraps of reasoned critique aren't awash with spiteful bullshit and comments on my appearance and sneery, creepy sexual comments? How about I stop you calling you misogynists when the so-called left stops attacking any woman at all who dares to show any evidence of ego or confidence in public?
> 
> ...


 
Translated:

'I don't like being questioned or fact-checked so I'm taking my bat and ball home.'

And for somebody that doesn't like being the subject of insults, you certainly don't seem to mind using them when it suits you. Personally, I don't give a toss about the gender, race, class, geographical location, nationality or any other demographic when it comes to journalists or anyone else. I do give a toss about:

Poor journalism involving low-quality prose, fabrication of 'facts', blaming sub-editors when a journalist is caught out, the hypocrisy of hacks endlessly wanting to stick their nose wherever they want and then complaining when they're subject to similar scrutiny, people using good causes as a career move and ego-boost, people who meet even constructive criticism and comment either by ignoring it or by smearing people as bigots/evildoers/haters/inert insult here, and people who claim to be some self-appointed 'voice of activists' even when the activists concerned wouldn't touch them with a bargepole and hacks who think that they themselves are always the star and whatever story they're covering is less important than they are.


----------



## Belushi (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Seriously, that's your answer? Women do it too so it can't be sexist?
> 
> Ah, the glorious British left and its powers of persuasive reasoning. Good grief I regret ever having offended you.


 
TBF there has been some misogyny on here, but it has been jumped on and I think you're just throwing it as an accusation to ignore the substantive points about your enormously privileged background and why posing as the champion of a working class you don't know might irk people a bit.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 14, 2012)

"the left"


----------



## weepiper (Dec 14, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> "the left"


 
yeah but not the proper left, the brave new young left, only the _so-called_ left. Dusty. Gnarled. Slightly smelly left.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> it's nothing to do with sexism,


 
Good way of avoiding the point though isn't it?

I wonder if we can use our class backgrounds in the same way?

You're only disgreeing with me because you think I'm a stupid prole Laurie


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm sure that in your hearts you believe you're not misogynists. But you sure as hell seem to hate any woman with a platform.


 
Trans: "You're all misogynists. You've dared criticise me, therefore you hate all women".

Get over yourself.


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Seriously, that's your answer? Women do it too so it can't be sexist?
> 
> Ah, the glorious British left and its powers of persuasive reasoning. Good grief I regret ever having offended you.


 
Misogynist.


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

ah fuck it,


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Seriously, that's your answer? Women do it too so it can't be sexist?
> 
> Ah, the glorious British left and its powers of persuasive reasoning. Good grief I regret ever having offended you.


 
I thought you said you was done Dave?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> when the so-called left stops attacking any woman Privately educated Oxbridge graduates at all who dares to show any evidence of ego or confidence in public?
> 
> I'm sure that in your hearts you believe you're not misogynists. But you sure as hell seem to hate any woman Privately educated Oxbridge graduates with a platform.
> 
> That's it. I'm done.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> aerial assaults over Libya:



NFZ was actually demonstrated for in Benghazi.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Good way of avoiding the point though isn't it?
> 
> I wonder if we can use our class backgrounds in the same way?
> 
> You're only disgreeing with me because you think I'm a stupid prole Laurie


 

lumpenz 

/dot


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


>


 
I took the Swappie to mean "working-class oiks with dirt under their fingernails", but he could have meant "greasy Yids" as I was in my "wear a _magen_ David instead of a cocoa tin lid medallion" phase.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 14, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Seriously, that's your answer? Women do it too so it can't be sexist?
> 
> Ah, the glorious British left and its powers of persuasive reasoning. Good grief I regret ever having offended you.



Why not try and engage with the points put to you?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 14, 2012)

Tweet earlier - can't find it now, bit pissed - surmising this thread, being "lefties" attacking our Laurie, must by a process of elimination, be "Blairites". 

ETA: Must be said (I've just found it) surmiser an American. _A new market for Laura._


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

weepiper said:


> yeah but not the proper left, the brave new young left, only the _so-called_ left. Dusty. Gnarled. Slightly smelly left.


 
Is that the same as what articul8 calls "the ultra-left" (i.e. anyone vaguely socialist)?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> NFZ was actually demonstrated for in Benghazi.


 
You can fuck off too.


----------



## alfajobrob (Dec 14, 2012)

Socialist, ImMrOlist?, aNarC15t? Capitilisz?, Sandwcihz'ista I am in you!


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Is that the same as what articul8 calls "the ultra-left" (i.e. anyone vaguely socialist)?


 
Owen Jones was described on BBC This Week last night as "Hard Left". The Overton Window gets smashed.

Hello, VP, by the way. You alright?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Is that the same as what articul8 calls "the ultra-left" (i.e. anyone vaguely socialist)?


 
I think it means those political dinosaurs who drone on about class and that rather than a load of trendy identity politics.


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

She'll be back... an ego like that can't get enough of herself, whether its negative or positive attention she's getting.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

I'm just disappointed she didn't answer my questions 

I feel sorry for class-struggle anarchists, a quick look on the internet tells me that this reformist privilge theory shite is gonna be hegemonic over here in a few years, and all that was once great about anarchism will be forgotten and reduced to a pale imitation of Laurie Penny.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 14, 2012)

framed said:


> She'll be back... an ego like that can't get enough of herself, whether its negative or positive attention she's getting.


 
Do you reckon? She seems to be used to addressing a mass audience rather than individual posters. She barely responded to some posters ardour at all.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> You can fuck off too.


NO. YOU


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I'm just disappointed she didn't answer my questions


 
God loves a trier...


----------



## Crispy (Dec 14, 2012)

A landmark in urban75 history. Sincerely honoured to witness it


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 14, 2012)

framed said:


> She'll be back... an ego like that can't get enough of herself, whether its negative or positive attention she's getting.


 
Fat lot of good it'll do. Like she'll engage with any criticism without immediately crying "misogynist troll" and fucking off again to the nearest frozen TrotSki Yoghurt™ vendor.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Owen Jones was described on BBC This Week last night as "Hard Left". The Overton Window gets smashed.


 
Hard Left? The poor lad is a middling Labourite social democrat who seems to have a good heart. Anyone accusing him of being "Hard left" is frankly a bit Peter Hitchens!



> Hello, VP, by the way. You alright?


 
Getting by, mate.  How's yourself?


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 14, 2012)

Crispy said:


> A landmark in urban75 history. Sincerely honoured to witness it


 
You'd better thank firky


----------



## 8den (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> You used my dying cat to attack me. You're cool.


 
Yeah because I cast the first stone in our little feud. No wait that was you.

See Laurie, Butchers is the kind of person who if petty internet grudges were pennies he would be sorted for his pension.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I think it means those political dinosaurs who drone on about class and that rather than a load of trendy identity politics.


 
Fuck identity politics up the arse with a jackhammer. It was ruinous enough the first time round, given that it pretty much destroyed 3 decades of black solidarity in less than a single decade. I hate to think what a resurgence will do, because just like last time, it'll ignore class in favour of more immediate and perceptible difference.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 14, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Fat lot of good it'll do. Like she'll engage with any criticism without immediately crying "misogynist troll" and fucking off again to the nearest frozen TrotSki Yoghurt™ vendor.


 
Rocky Road to Socialism flavour


----------



## eatmorecheese (Dec 14, 2012)

Crispy said:


> A landmark in urban75 history. Sincerely honoured to witness it


 
Yeah, but it would be nice if she chose to address Delroy's  (and others) straightforward and direct questions... Mind you, finding a thread like this is bound to be a bit freaky and end up feeling like you _personally_ are being attacked. Maybe later, when it's sunk in...? maybe?


----------



## love detective (Dec 14, 2012)

Crispy said:


> A landmark in urban75 history. Sincerely honoured to witness it



I think it's fair to say that our low expectations of Laurie Penny have been met in full


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I feel sorry for class-struggle anarchists, a quick look on the internet tells me that this reformist privilge theory shite is gonna be hegemonic over here in a few years, and all that was once great about anarchism will be forgotten and reduced to a pale imitation of Laurie Penny.


 
No I don't think so.

What I think is actually happening is really interesting privilige theory is forcing itself into the mainstream and basically renewing and revisiitng all the arguments that happened in the eighties with regards to liberation politics and they will be receptive to it *because* it sidelines class politics which had kind of sneaked back in a little to the mainstream in recent years for a variety of reasons.

Of course the privilige stuff (which is not all bollocks imo) will be reflected back into the anarchoid scene which helped smuggle it in in the first place, but the continued marginalisation and decline of class struggle anarchism will be down to class struggle anarchists not other elements of the scene.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

eatmorecheese said:


> Yeah, but it would be nice if she chose to address Delroy's (and others) straightforward and direct questions... Mind you, finding a thread like this is bound to be a bit freaky and end up feeling like you _personally_ are being attacked. Maybe later, when it's sunk in...? maybe?


 
Oh totally. I think I've said this before, if there was a 200+ page thread about me on the internet I'd be in the corner crying.

She's made of sterner stuff than me, at least when it comes to having a bulletproof ego, but then again I didn't have her upbringing. I dread to think what a bastard I might've been if I had....


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I'm just disappointed she didn't answer my questions
> 
> I feel sorry for class-struggle anarchists, a quick look on the internet tells me that this reformist privilge theory shite is gonna be hegemonic over here in a few years, and all that was once great about anarchism will be forgotten and reduced to a pale imitation of Laurie Penny.


 
"Privilege theory" is identity politics with a Hoxton fin, riding a fixie. Anyone older than 35 can probably remember just how badly identity politics fucked over mass politics/politics for the masses, but those who're younger, who don't know their history, they're going to suck that shite in and choke on it.


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> Do you reckon? She seems to be used to addressing a mass audience rather than individual posters. She barely responded to some posters ardour at all.


 
Engaging with us was never on the cards imho. She's politically incapable. She came here to indulge her curiosity and ended up spending most of the night talking about herself. It's what she does best.

She may not always sign-in but I guarantee that she'll be on this thread everyday to indulge her ego and bathe in our 'misogyny'... and she won't be able to resist the odd barb via Twitter.

There's also the melodrama and glamour associated with being 'hated' by Urban's gang of 'misogynists' to consider.... rally round 'the sisters' and all that.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

framed said:


> Engaging with us was never on the cards imho. She's politically incapable. She came here to indulge her curiosity and ended up spending most of the night talking about herself. It's what she does best.
> 
> She may not always sign-in but I guarantee that she'll be on this thread everyday to indulge her ego and bathe in our 'misogyny'... and she won't be able to resist the odd barb via Twitter.
> 
> There's also the melodrama and glamour associated with being 'hated' by Urban's gang of 'misogynists'.... rally round 'the sisters' and all that.


Yep, on that point, i'm off over the road.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 14, 2012)

love detective said:


> I think it's fair to say that our low expectations of Laurie Penny have been met in full


 
Everything I expected - and less*

*apologies to Black Books


----------



## 8den (Dec 14, 2012)

copliker said:


> Don't you start you disgusting cunt.
> 
> For all Laurie's faults, I doubt we'll see her doing anything as disgraceful as backing the coppers in Genoa, especially the card carrying fascist one who murdered Carlo Giuliani.
> 
> Then again, never say never, them commentariats are fickle rascals.


 
Ah yes Urban's Ted Lowe, Copliker.

Yes because stating Carlo Giuliano should bear some responsibility for his actions when he violently attacked a police range rover is *exactly* the same as "backing the coppers" in Genoa. 

For those watching in black and white like copliker, the nuance is behind the pink ball and next to the green. 

Yes, I can't see how anyone who think Urban's a knee jerk reactionary site, when you both bring up the same tired old bullshit, whenever anyone disagrees with you.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> No I don't think so.


 
I really hope not man, but I don't share your optimism



Spanky Longhorn said:


> What I think is actually happening is really interesting privilige theory is forcing itself into the mainstream and basically renewing and revisiitng all the arguments that happened in the eighties with regards to liberation politics and they will be receptive to it *because* it sidelines class politics which had kind of sneaked back in a little to the mainstream in recent years for a variety of reasons.


 
Incidentally the first time I ever came accross this stuff was in the Labour party and NUS, not amongst anarchists. And there it was explicitly linked to sidelining class politics, sometimes in a very direct way.




Spanky Longhorn said:


> Of course the privilige stuff (which is not all bollocks imo) will be reflected back into the anarchoid scene which helped smuggle it in in the first place, but the continued marginalisation and decline of class struggle anarchism will be down to class struggle anarchists not other elements of the scene.


 
The theory itself is fine, it's just how it's been taken up by certain people and used in a practical political way that worries me. And as much as I moan about it, having a ongoing debate about privilige that goes beyond reductionist class is a much much better state of affairs than, say, having serial rapist Gerry Healy demanding blowjobs in exchange for seats on a committee as the most high-profile proponent of the far-left in Britain.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 14, 2012)

framed said:


> Engaging with us was never on the cards imho. She's politically incapable. She came here to indulge her curiosity and ended up spending most of the night talking about herself. It's what she does best.
> 
> She may not always sign-in but I guarantee that she'll be on this thread everyday to indulge her ego and bathe in our 'misogyny'... and she won't be able to resist the odd barb via Twitter.
> 
> There's also the melodrama and glamour associated with being 'hated' by Urban's gang of 'misogynists'.... rally round 'the sisters' and all that.


 
Well, I don't think she was ever going to receive the warmest of welcomes under her username. If she was really bright she'd come back as Deputydawg and start posting in knobbing and sobbing for a bit.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 14, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> Well, I don't think she was ever going to receive the warmest of welcomes under her username. If she was really bright she'd come back as Deputydawg and start posting in knobbing and sobbing for a bit.


She could have came as herself.


----------



## shifting gears (Dec 14, 2012)

Before I scroll through the last 8 pages or so: can someone confirm... Is she really here?


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> "Privilege theory" is identity politics with a Hoxton fin, riding a fixie. Anyone older than 35 can probably remember just how badly identity politics fucked over mass politics/politics for the masses, but those who're younger, who don't know their history, they're going to suck that shite in and choke on it.


 
Laura is SpookyFrank?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I really hope not man, but I don't share your optimism
> 
> .


 
Do not mistake my post for optimisim


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

shifting gears said:


> Before I scroll through the last 8 pages or so: can someone confirm... Is she really here?


 
she was yes (and still is watching us like Mary Mother of God)


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> She could have came as herself.


 
Unlikely. She doesn't appear to know who that is.


----------



## shifting gears (Dec 14, 2012)

Holy fucking shit I just got in from the pub

*rolls sleeves up


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> She could have came as herself.


 
It would be like the Robert Rankin book though where the bloke in the big coat and hat is eventually revealed to be a round wooden sphere of small dimensions inside a fake material person


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> She could have came as herself.


 
Yeah, but plain old Dave Barnett doesn't sound quite so 'leftfield' as Laurie Penny(Red), does it?


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

I don't think Dave would dye his hair (pink anyway).


----------



## eatmorecheese (Dec 14, 2012)

shifting gears said:


> Holy fucking shit I just got in from the pub
> 
> *rolls sleeves up


 
It's been a slice.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 14, 2012)

You're all so _mean_. And _hateful._


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 14, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Unlikely. She doesn't appear to know who that is.


 
Quite common amongst people in their twenties, you old fart.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

8den said:


> Yeah because I cast the first stone in our little feud. No wait that was you.
> 
> See Laurie, Butchers is the kind of person who if petty internet grudges were pennies he would be sorted for his pension.


 
You'd have a few bob yourself, mind.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

8den said:


> Ah yes Urban's Ted Lowe, Copliker.
> 
> Yes because stating Carlo Giuliano should bear some responsibility for his actions when he violently attacked a police range rover is *exactly* the same as "backing the coppers" in Genoa.
> 
> ...


 
I think I'm fortunate enough never to have encountered you before. I'm glad about that - you seem like an unlikeable cunt from your couple of posts on this thread.

Violently attacking a police range rover ffs


----------



## where to (Dec 14, 2012)

now an "in" to internet bullying, trolling, stalking etc. result. next story done. sally bercow solidarity angle too, perfect.

real people? what?


----------



## shifting gears (Dec 14, 2012)

Oh fuck I've only managed 2 pages so far I've already done a little wee on my leg


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

firky said:


> I don't think Dave would dye his hair (pink anyway).


 
Oh I dunno, he has been known to be quite 'whacky' on occasion has our Dave...


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

Post-post-ironic Vice magazine article on misogyny on the way.


----------



## 8den (Dec 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I think I'm fortunate enough never to have encountered you before. I'm glad about that - you seem like an unlikeable cunt from your couple of posts on this thread.
> 
> Violently attacking a police range rover ffs


 
Never let context get in the way of a good irrational 3 minute hate.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

shifting gears said:


> Holy fucking shit I just got in from the pub
> 
> *rolls sleeves up


 
That'll teach you not to crouch in front of the computer screen night after night because of some "social life"


----------



## framed (Dec 14, 2012)

Well, that killed a quiet Friday evening while my better half is out on the work's Christmas night out!

Cheers Dave/Laura/Laurie.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Laura is SpookyFrank?


 
You're a cruel man, Bish!

 but fair!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

8den said:


> Never let context get in the way of a good irrational 3 minute hate.


 
What? Do you need to have a lie down or something?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I think I'm fortunate enough never to have encountered you before. I'm glad about that - you seem like an unlikeable cunt from your couple of posts on this thread.
> 
> Violently attacking a police range rover ffs


 
It was a Land Rover, and he wasn't attacking, he hadn't actually attacked when he had his face shot.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

framed said:


> Well, that killed a quiet Friday evening while my better half is out on the work's Christmas night out!
> 
> Cheers Dave/Laura/Laurie.


 
I was sending telepathic messages to my partner "don't come home too soon" "don't come home too soon".

It's worked as well she's spending the night at her sisters

But what now? Damn Laura left too soon

Now I feel empty inside it was a hollow victory for a hollow little man


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

Who's next?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 14, 2012)

Cameron.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 14, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I was sending telepathic messages to my partner "don't come home too soon" "don't come home too soon".
> 
> It's worked as well she's spending the night at her sisters
> 
> ...


 
Thank firky!


----------



## 8den (Dec 14, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> It was a Land Rover, and he wasn't attacking, he hadn't actually attacked when he had his face shot.


 
Really? There's another thread for this. I really need to go over the idea that you can charge at someone with a fire extinguisher over your head, in self defence, again? 

The idea I put forward is the wild concept that attacking armed police with a blunt object makes you, at least, partially culpable, for your own death. Now we could take about the matter at hand, or we could keep talking about this, which makes my point that some people on urban hold irrational grudges, and arguments for a massive amount of time.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 14, 2012)

firky said:


> Who's next?


 
Who've you got in mind?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Thank firky!


 
Given that he knows my partner and her sister, I do think he may be to blame in some way


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

8den said:


> Really? There's another thread for this. I really need to go over the idea that you can charge at someone with a fire extinguisher over your head, in self defence, again?
> 
> The idea I put forward is the wild concept that attacking armed police with a blunt object makes you, at least, partially culpable, for your own death. Now we could take about the matter at hand, or we could keep talking about this, which makes my point that some people on urban hold irrational grudges, and arguments for a massive amount of time.


 
Fuck off fash boy


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Who've you got in mind?


 
Sting


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 14, 2012)

Totally Off topic:



firky said:


> Who's next?


 
Reminded me of this:



which reminded me of this



which reminded me of this



That's a proper interview


----------



## SLK (Dec 14, 2012)

There's a lot of shit on the thread - and it was inevitable that Laurie Penny would focus on that or the weaker factual points to dismiss the stronger criticisms. It's tempting to say that those people who wrote those things gave her a way out, but she wouldn't have answered the criticisms if the shit was deleted. Her pointing out "look it's all about me" says enough.

It would be a fairly glib point to make (but that won't stop me) that she has basically reinforced the most pertinent criticisms of journalists of her ilk in her interventions in this thread.

I remember contributing to the thread when she wrote her excellent piece on being raped. I'm sure most people on the thread agreed. No doubt she hasn't seen that part of the thread yet.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 14, 2012)

firky said:


> Sting


 
lol


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 14, 2012)

8den said:


> Really? There's another thread for this. I really need to go over the idea that you can charge at someone with a fire extinguisher over your head, in self defence, again?
> 
> The idea I put forward is the wild concept that attacking armed police with a blunt object makes you, at least, partially culpable, for your own death. Now we could take about the matter at hand, or we could keep talking about this, which makes my point that some people on urban hold irrational grudges, and arguments for a massive amount of time.


 
I'd rather just mark you down as a cunt and move on if it's all the same to you.


----------



## Firky (Dec 14, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Given that he knows my partner and her sister, I do think he may be to blame in some way


 
And brother!


----------



## Riklet (Dec 14, 2012)

laurie comes on here objecting to people who think she's just some jumped up private school to oxbridge to internship to media to voice of the radical left definition of privilege 

...by pretty much confirming the existence of that very journey, talking entirely about herself, failing to answer any of the numerous points/criticisms directed at her and then flouncing off because we're all misogynistic destroyers of the left.

i knew i ordered pizza and beer for a reason! hilarity i am in you.  p.s. laurie i liked that recent article about young britons, not bad at all.


----------



## 8den (Dec 14, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'd rather just mark you down as a cunt and move on if it's all the same to you.


 
Go ahead, you're really helping prove my point here.


----------



## shifting gears (Dec 14, 2012)

I started off laughing but ended up almost in tears

much like watching a perfectly weighted rom-com


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 14, 2012)

I must admit, I never actually saw the point of the thread until she turned up. Certainly gave it a focus.


----------



## rekil (Dec 14, 2012)

Never seen someone troll a thread about themselves and flounce that fast before.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 14, 2012)

firky said:


> And brother!


 
yes but he's not hanging out with them tonight.

Jesus it's just as well he never started posting on here because he would have been the missing link between firky and ninjaboy and would have tripled the problems


----------



## Riklet (Dec 15, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> I must admit, I never actually saw the point of the thread until she turned up. Certainly gave it a focus.



i'm pretty amazed it took this long.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> Go ahead, you're really helping prove my point here.


 
another one for the ignore list, good bye numbnuts


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 15, 2012)

Riklet said:


> i'm pretty amazed it took this long.


Insta-copy on a slow news week.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> Go ahead, you're really helping prove my point here.


 
Brilliant.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 15, 2012)

who has started combing their hair ready for their media exposure then?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> Really? There's another thread for this. I really need to go over the idea that you can charge at someone with a fire extinguisher over your head, in self defence, again?
> 
> The idea I put forward is the wild concept that attacking armed police with a blunt object makes you, at least, partially culpable, for your own death. Now we could take about the matter at hand, or we could keep talking about this, which makes my point that some people on urban hold irrational grudges, and arguments for a massive amount of time.


 
If I walk toward you holding a fire extinguisher over my head, and you're sat in a police Landie with wire screens over the windows, how do I pose an imminent threat to you, unless you're a hunter from South Park?
The answer, of course, is that I don't. Given that you're sat in a reinforced vehicle, are wearing riot gear and are armed, I pose no threat to you.
This is basic threat assessment. This is what squaddies were taught (and most of them learned) in Northern Ireland - You don't shoot the bloke fronting up to you, chucking rocks at you or pulling other aggressive shit (unless you're a Para, obviously) because frankly he's not a threat when you have the ability to blow holes in him. There was no *need* for the _Carabinieri_ to shoot.


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

"I Work for a living"


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 15, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> who has started combing their hair ready for their media exposure then?


 
I'm not sure if I'm inspired enough to go on Twatter and see what's going on there. Probably can't be arsed, tbh.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 15, 2012)

You can hear the sneer on "I", can't you?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 15, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> who has started combing their hair ready for their media exposure then?


 
Only my pubes.

(my beard, you dirty bastard )


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 15, 2012)

There does seem to be some snobbery that posting on a website means you're an unemployed waster, but posting on twitter means you're a high-flying mover and shaker. That seems a bit odd.


----------



## framed (Dec 15, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> There does seem to be some snobbery that posting on a website means you're an unemployed waster, but posting on twitter means you're a high-flying mover and shaker. That seems a bit odd.


 
Could you tweet that please, I find these boards so common...


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 15, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Only my pubes.
> 
> (my beard, you dirty bastard )


 


surely pubes only grow on your pubis?

a beard is not pubes you dirty bastard


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 15, 2012)

Guess what, Laurie, old stick. I work for a living, too. It's just I work at home with a 3 year old, doing dishes and cleaning the bathroom and hoovering and playing catch and washing preposterous amounts of clothes and fussing the dog and reading stories and stuff like that. I can also go on the internet now and again. Sorry I've not been to Greece to make art or Brooklyn to see breakdancing black kids and rewriting "We are the world" lately. I've been a bit busy. I can ALWAYS make time to call "bullshit", though.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Dec 15, 2012)

Crispy said:


> A landmark in urban75 history. Sincerely honoured to witness it


 

This was bigger than when that copper showed up here back in the day!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 15, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> surely pubes only grow on your pubis?
> 
> a beard is not pubes you dirty bastard


 
Strictly speaking, facial hair is pubic hair, old feller.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 15, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> This was bigger than when that copper showed up here back in the day!


 
PC Jemima Puddleduck?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 15, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Strictly speaking, facial hair is pubic hair, old feller.


 
leave my old fella out of it


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 15, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> leave my old fella out of it


 
<Dottie>
What about your old dear?</dottie>


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 15, 2012)

This whole, entire thread in pictures:







'I am WOMAN! Hear me ROAR!'






'They don't like it up 'em!'


----------



## killer b (Dec 15, 2012)

Ah, piss off.


----------



## framed (Dec 15, 2012)

Firky's looking pleased with himself...


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)




----------



## rekil (Dec 15, 2012)

I forgot to ask her why her porno mate had a swastika shaved into her pubes. And about the chum who does gigs for the US military.  

Also.


lauriepenny said:


> For fuck's sake, I work for a living.


Laurie is the No Slacking to our Chuckle Brothers.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 15, 2012)

what the suffering fuck??? 

if i shagged somebody, or for that matter, watched porn of somebody with a swastika shaved into their pubes i would probably never feel horny again


----------



## rekil (Dec 15, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> what the suffering fuck???
> 
> if i shagged somebody, or for that matter, watched porn of somebody with a swastika shaved into their pubes i would probably never feel horny again


I have not seen the swastika, I believe it's something to do with marilyn manson.

Elsewhere, Zainab Al-Khawaja was arrested again in Bahrain the other day, the 5th time in a year.


----------



## smokedout (Dec 15, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Just out of curiosity if Laurie's still kicking around, did the New Scabsman give back the money they recieved from these people at any point? Or did they take the money and run before issuing a mealy-mouthed apology? Genuinely curious.


 
or the money new statesman have received from atos over the years who sponsored many of their events - new statesman refused to comment on that particular cosy relationship, perhaps laurie, the welfare rights activist will clear this up


----------



## Fedayn (Dec 15, 2012)

I missed the lecture then?!


----------



## framed (Dec 15, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> I missed the lecture then?!


 
Yep, Dave/Laura/Laurie....Barnett/Penny/Red was here in person tonight to tell us all about herself and how to get a revolution maaaan...


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 15, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> This was bigger than when that copper showed up here back in the day!


 
The one who's now a Libdem or Green something? Ah.


----------



## cesare (Dec 15, 2012)

Laurie - it's really not helpful to scream "misogyny" when faced with what is (arguably, and at worst) low level sexism. You must either be proper protected from the day to day low level stuff (possibly because of your privilege) or you're a fucking drama queen. Save the big best words for appropriate use, otherwise you'll devalue both the words and feminism.


----------



## SLK (Dec 15, 2012)

cesare said:


> Laurie - it's really not helpful to scream "misogyny" when faced with what is (arguably, and at worst) low level sexism. You must either be proper protected from the day to day low level stuff (possibly because of your privilege) or you're a fucking drama queen. Save the big best words for appropriate use, otherwise you'll devalue both the words and feminism.


 
I'm male, so my opinion might not count, but this sounds obviously right to me.


----------



## exiledinwales (Dec 15, 2012)

Got nothing to do with communism or the working class. Clearly politically a bourgeois element.


----------



## cesare (Dec 15, 2012)

exiledinwales said:


> Got nothing to do with communism or the working class. Clearly politically a bourgeois element.


Who you aiming that at?


----------



## agricola (Dec 15, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> This whole, entire thread in pictures:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Surely its:


----------



## JimW (Dec 15, 2012)

Laurie's got the bully pulpit but we're doing the bullying. It's all arse-backwards in the wonderful world of the cocksure middle classes.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 15, 2012)

I think in her head it went like this


----------



## Red Cat (Dec 15, 2012)

I don't really care about Laurie Penny and I'm taking it away from class politics but....

Coming from a mental health perspective of having worked with girls with anorexia, often high achieving public school girls who internalise the perfection and good girlism expected of their class and gender, I can understand that Laurie perhaps has a tendency to feel bullied. Anorexia appears to be an illness that bullies and I would say, as an observer, that those who suffer from it are victims. To what extent this is an internalisation of their social experience I don't know but I think it's likely to be a factor for some in what is a very complex illness. It's also possible that anorexia remains an issue for Laurie, if she was so ill as to be hospitalised, it's something she may have to battle with all her life, the bullies inside.

I don't intend this as some kind of justification of her privilege or her denial of it in expressing her sense of victimhood, but perhaps her very middle classness is shaped by pressures more complex and conflicted than is generally assumed.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 15, 2012)

I don't know about that. But I do think she's smart enough to understand the criticisms, take them on board and use them to improve her journalism. It's a bit of a shame that she's not willing to do this.


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

I think Laurie is simply full of shit.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 15, 2012)

Because her job is essentially doing what many have to struggle to find time to do, it's little wonder that when she takes Yaxley Lennon out for a slap up meal, or fucks around with giant paintings of herself, or directly contradicts herself on issues which form a basis of trust when actually working in protest groups, that people get fucking annoyed.

As work for a living, it's certainly a living. But the work is observational, it's spectatorship of spectacle. The risk is a part of it, enhances the work itself, so ducking the big moments in order to be able to tell the stories later on is admitting that the issues at hand aren't viewed as big enough to qualify as something you'd be willing to take the consequences of observing and recording at the nastiest point. 

As if there's some greater, bigger, possibly even nicer thing on the horizon - a looming future upheaval where the arrest and detention of the journalist will form a concrete mobilising point around the movement of the greater whole. That implies a lack of belief that what you're viewing is going to change anything, it's just ripples on the surface rather than sea change.

Even Molly got arrested, although she certainly made the best of the situation regarding social media and self promotion. I expect that something similar happening to LP would elicit similar reponses in hashtags and articles. For the observed, for those who hold a firm faith in action and accepting consequences, an arrest is a desperate worry for friends and family and the absolute dread of the ultimate effect on employment and other facets of life. 

Being blacklisted/monitored for doing a good job still allows you to do a job, the best in journalism have often made the lists and continued regardless. It's a part of the job. But for those who are active because of pure belief, faith and motivation, for those who give as much of themselves as they can in the little time they have while working for a living, an arrest can mean the end of a job and such stress on a life incomparable to a hashtag and furer article inspiration. And what's really important here is the police know that.

The example of an poster here who was accused of trying to push a police officer under a tube train, falsely, demonstrates how far the knowledge that the majority of activists are taking more of a risk than the journalism/art activist few. Yes, there are stresses, and some could even be equal to the rest of us - but then the freedom and privilege of the life you lead allows it to become a woven part of narrative, fabricated or otherwise.

You have a living to make from your work, so actually work for it.


----------



## Red Cat (Dec 15, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I don't know about that. But I do think she's smart enough to understand the criticisms, take them on board and use them to improve her journalism. It's a bit of a shame that she's not willing to do this.


 
I'm not defending her journalism, I was just responding with thoughts that came to mind reading about bullying. As an aside.


----------



## Nice one (Dec 15, 2012)

speaking as an (uneducated unskilled) working class male it does come across like she is being bullied to fuck here. If there is any serious points to be made it is being lost amongst the flurry of hyperventilation and scrunching up of used kleenex. The two points of contention remain
1. she is privileged
2. she is a journalist who lies

Neither are earth shattering revelations and frankly the level of obessessiveness does come across as a little bit weird.


----------



## Red Cat (Dec 15, 2012)

The other thought that came to mind was thank fuck there aren't many people around to remind me of what an arsehole I was in my twenties.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 15, 2012)

work xmas do last night, and look at what I missed...


----------



## Balbi (Dec 15, 2012)

Just as well. Your Moore moment would have capped it off.


----------



## JimW (Dec 15, 2012)

Nice one said:


> speaking as an (uneducated unskilled) working class male it does come across like she is being bullied to fuck here. If there is any serious points to be made it is being lost amongst the flurry of hyperventilation and scrunching up of used kleenex. The two points of contention remain
> 1. she is privileged
> 2. she is a journalist who lies
> 
> Neither are earth shattering revelations and frankly the level of obessessiveness does come across as a little bit weird.


Point is not about LP particularly, as has been said earlier, but that her career is an example in microcosm of how class is reproduced even in what passes for the progressive movement these days, and that it's debilitating and poisonous.
Plenty of posh people have been good journalists, which they achieved by writing honestly about people and situations without any of the lecturing (ETA mean more the co-opting I think) or self-regard.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 15, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Moore moment.


----------



## poului (Dec 15, 2012)

Getting openly irritated by someone's pathological doucheness when confronted with it amounts to "bullying" now, right? So tiresome.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

Nice one said:


> speaking as an (uneducated unskilled) working class male it does come across like she is being bullied to fuck here. If there is any serious points to be made it is being lost amongst the flurry of hyperventilation and scrunching up of used kleenex. The two points of contention remain
> 1. she is privileged
> 2. she is a journalist who lies
> 
> Neither are earth shattering revelations and frankly the level of obessessiveness does come across as a little bit weird.


Yeah, and you also thought there was no story with Hari. Whilst at the same time being a journo.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

Nice one said:


> speaking as an (uneducated unskilled) working class male it does come across like she is being bullied to fuck here. If there is any serious points to be made it is being lost amongst the flurry of hyperventilation and scrunching up of used kleenex. The two points of contention remain
> 1. she is privileged
> 2. she is a journalist who lies
> 
> Neither are earth shattering revelations and frankly the level of obessessiveness does come across as a little bit weird.


"so called lefties"
"i work for a living"

If all you can see is your points 1 and 2 above then you're trying very hard not to see anything else.


----------



## killer b (Dec 15, 2012)

i wish we were important enough to be soi-disant.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 15, 2012)

Nice one said:


> speaking as an (uneducated unskilled) working class male it does come across like she is being bullied to fuck here. If there is any serious points to be made it is being lost amongst the flurry of hyperventilation and scrunching up of used kleenex. The two points of contention remain
> 1. she is privileged
> 2. she is a journalist who lies
> 
> Neither are earth shattering revelations and frankly the level of obessessiveness does come across as a little bit weird.


 
'speaking as a'


----------



## framed (Dec 15, 2012)

This thread is fucking great!


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

framed said:


> This thread is fucking great!


I went over to rogers in the middle of this last night, and you know what - he didn't care


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

Aahhh!


----------



## Nice one (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Yeah, and you also thought there was no story with Hari. Whilst at the same time being a journo.


 
johann hari. Journalists who lie. Not a revelation.


----------



## framed (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I went over to rogers in the middle of this last night, and you know what - he didn't care


 
Well, more's the pity on him then mate. 

He obviously lacks the clarity of Marxism, like wot we've got, ahem...


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

Nice one said:


> johann hari. Journalists who lie. Not a revelation.


What about "so called leftie" journos who write (no,not just write, but co-edit - that is run) for anti-union mags? Not a revelation. What a nose for a story you have.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 15, 2012)

Nice one said:


> johann hari. Journalists who lie. Not a revelation.


 
I get the sense that you feel world weary at times


----------



## Nice one (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> What about "so called leftie" journos who write (no,not just write, but co-edit - that is run) for anti-union mags? Not a revelation. What a nose for a story you have.


 
which goes back to why you think laurie penny is important enough to spend 2 years documenting her every utterance. And why what she says is at all relevant to you or your life. Who reads her stuff, who does it affect and who are the people most angry at the things she says?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar monty.


----------



## Nice one (Dec 15, 2012)

i'll smoke to that


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

Interesting that the dull processes of how class power works are below you. Now it requires a _revelation_ to pique your interest.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 15, 2012)

Laurie was (not so) secretely delighted to discover this thread.  Confirms her own sense of self-importance/martyr complex


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

A Whole 13 hour since she last tweeted. That must be a record.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 15, 2012)

firky said:


> A Whole 13 hour since she last tweeted. That must be a record.


 
That blissful silence is likely to be replaced by constant shrieking once she sees the link to the Workers' Girder article on Chile that somebody just tweeted to her...


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 15, 2012)

firky said:


> A Whole 13 hour since she last tweeted. That must be a record.


 
Even if you haven't got a phone, please call.


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Even if you haven't got a phone, please call.


 
What was that off again? 

That's going to do my head in.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 15, 2012)

Dunno.  Got it off Lusty.


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

I think it is from a charity appeal. 

See my tears.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 15, 2012)

I'm expecting a follow up to this any time now.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 15, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'm expecting a follow up to this any time now.


 
The thing is, she's right about that. It does exist in depressing numbers, and you do have to have a fantastically thick skin to actually keep expressing yourself and challenging it without wanting to just curl up and die quietly. Like the NF guy who told me in quite specific and frightening terms on a facebook group how if he had his way single mums like me would be forced to work in state-run brothels to earn benefits to look after our kids with. But the thing is this thread is actually _not_ about that at all. Bar one or two numpties, who've been told off and will continue to be told off.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

weepiper said:


> The thing is, she's right about that. It does exist in depressing numbers, and you do have to have a fantastically thick skin to actually keep expressing yourself and challenging it without wanting to just curl up and die quietly. Like the NF guy who told me in quite specific and frightening terms on a facebook group how if he had his way single mums like me would be forced to work in state-run brothels to earn benefits to look after our kids with. But the thing is this thread is actually _not_ about that at all. Bar one or two numpties, who've been told off and will continue to be told off.


Spot on.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Spot on.


 
Agreed. Venom for the sake of venom should be dealt with firmly while solid points are a different matter.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 15, 2012)

weepiper said:


> The thing is, she's right about that. It does exist in depressing numbers, and you do have to have a fantastically thick skin to actually keep expressing yourself and challenging it without wanting to just curl up and die quietly. Like the NF guy who told me in quite specific and frightening terms on a facebook group how if he had his way single mums like me would be forced to work in state-run brothels to earn benefits to look after our kids with. But the thing is this thread is actually _not_ about that at all. Bar one or two numpties, who've been told off and will continue to be told off.


 
I agree completely - but she's already painting this thread as an example of the above. If she had any sense she wouldn't write about this thread because people are likely to want to have a look for themselves and see how dishonest she's been about the whole thing. But I suspect her ego may well demand that she doesn't let go. An article must be written to expose these nasty critics as misogynists etc.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

I do hope so. Then we get the right of reply.


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

I thought it was telling how she didn't name the forum or the thread on twitter. As if she didn't want her 40,000 fans on twitter to see some of the questions and arguments put forwards.


----------



## rekil (Dec 15, 2012)

> lauriepenny was last seen: Viewing thread Self-indulgent pet thread, 5 minutes ago


You're our wife now dave.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

copliker said:


> You're our wife now dave.


----------



## JimW (Dec 15, 2012)

Bit of a reversal to the usual come for the stupid cat pics but end up in a bunfight process poster career. She is a mould-breaker, our Laurie


----------



## Nylock (Dec 15, 2012)

firky said:


> A Whole 13 hour since she last tweeted. That must be a record.


tbf to laurie if she did decide to read this thread from the start, as suggested in replies to her postings, then it would probably take 13 hours to go through the whole thing plus the links to outside material...


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

Not reading this thread though. She didn't read it all last night either. I stayed up to check.


----------



## JimW (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I stayed up to check.


 You could ghost for Hari with this level of honesty.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 15, 2012)

Tempted to reply to it with a link but we'd end up with thousands of trendy sandal wearing Guardianistas descending on the boards 

Just thought of a legitimate reason why she wouldn't want to engage with the many serious points on this thread. There are people on these boards who weren't the smartest kids in smart schools, didn't go to Oxbridge and most of us are over 30. What could the smartest kid from a smart school possible have to learn from a bunch of stale old normals like us?

And by focusing on the daft stuff she's encouraging us to check our privilege. Hopefully we'll all think long and hard about this and stop using our privilege to oppress her - after all, most of us have age privileges over her that completely dwarf any privilege she may get out of being a privately educated Oxbridge graduate with probably the biggest media platform of any self-styled radical in the UK. And anyone who focuses on those irrelevant and negligible privileges doesn't really have a problem with the privileges themselves - they just have a problem with _women _enjoying them 

So leave Laurie alone


----------



## rekil (Dec 15, 2012)

Nylock said:


> tbf to laurie if she did decide to read this thread from the start, as suggested in replies to her postings, then it would probably take 13 hours to go through the whole thing plus the links to outside material...


We should take all the best bits and release it as a book, 'beating the commentariat?' - maybe pad it out with disasterpaint thread pics like this (no doubt a little bit misogyny) one by cesare, john major fucking a grapefruit.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 15, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Because her job is essentially doing what many have to struggle to find time to do, it's little wonder that when she takes Yaxley Lennon out for a slap up meal, or fucks around with giant paintings of herself, or directly contradicts herself on issues which form a basis of trust when actually working in protest groups, that people get fucking annoyed.
> 
> As work for a living, it's certainly a living. But the work is observational, it's spectatorship of spectacle. The risk is a part of it, enhances the work itself, so ducking the big moments in order to be able to tell the stories later on is admitting that the issues at hand aren't viewed as big enough to qualify as something you'd be willing to take the consequences of observing and recording at the nastiest point.
> 
> ...


 
Seems to me that "campaigning journalism" has degenerated into a kind of diarism - a summing up of where you've been and who you've spoken to, as opposed to who/what  you've exposed/you are exposing. It's too easy to just say "I'm against..." and then churn out the same facile set of reasons churned out by every _soi-disant_ "campaigning journalist" who ever used causes as stepping stones to a book deal or a job with better remuneration.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Interesting that the dull processes of how class power works are below you. Now it requires a _revelation_ to pique your interest.


 
Jaded palate.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 15, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I agree completely - but she's already painting this thread as an example of the above. If she had any sense she wouldn't write about this thread because people are likely to want to have a look for themselves and see how dishonest she's been about the whole thing. But I suspect her ego may well demand that she doesn't let go. An article must be written to expose these nasty critics as misogynists etc.


 
I wouldn't mind being labelled as a misogynist if I were one, but it's not the right term. I'm a misanthropist. I hate *everyone* regardless of gender!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 15, 2012)

copliker said:


> You're our wife now dave.


 
Already did that one (with pic) last night.


----------



## poului (Dec 15, 2012)

From this April...



poului said:


> I really, _really_ hope she's somehow seen this thread.


 



Bakunin said:


> Well, I wouldn't even begin to think about speculating on her likely reaction if anyone were to stick a link on her Twitter page.
> 
> That would be most improper.


 



poului said:


> No, she has to chance upon it. Then it seems far less like any sort of personal vendetta she could spin in her head.





killer b said:


> it's very unlikely that she hasn't come across this thread at some point. she'll likely see it as some kind of validation though...


 


Bakunin said:


> Urbanites' General Consensus:
> 
> 'We think you're generally lacking in talent, honesty or integrity and are more than willing to point out the fact. We're also thoroughly pissed off with your self-appointed 'voice of the movement' bullshit, your outright lies, your inability to check facts properly, your ability to ignore solid facts unless they suit your agenda, your tireless (and tiresome) self-promoting and self-aggrandising attitude, your hypocrisy in being deliberately confrontational and then complaining because people confront you and your ever-increasing tendency to take even the most valid and constructive critics and instantly accuse them of miscogyny/sexism/bigotry/insert baseless insult here.'
> 
> ...


 
Yep.


----------



## rekil (Dec 15, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Already did that one (with pic) last night.


I know yeah, but I couldn't help myself, blame mr.framed for introducing the dave thing.


----------



## framed (Dec 15, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> So leave Laurie alone


 

I'll leave Laurie alone, but I'm making no promises about Dave...


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 15, 2012)

Have the guardianistas arrived to defend her yet?


----------



## rekil (Dec 15, 2012)

Clegg should now come on and do a laurie over the 200+ page 'why the Libdems are shit' thread.



> I mean - where do these people find the TIME? 208 pages of personal and political abuse!


----------



## JimW (Dec 15, 2012)

Their weak liberalism will never penetrate the solid outer defences to the monothought clique.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar monty.


 
Monty ! That brings back find memories



> Part 4:
> 
> The sign over the door had been there for years. It read Monty’sVideo shop in red letter on a black background and underneath the name of the shop the rather catching strap line that Monty had invented himself ‘ Independent anarchism to the discerning masses’ For years Monty had provided both locals into routine anarchism and those who travelled from a far looking for something homemade and unusual with his own unique anarchism. However as he looked across the green his brow frowned. The English Anarchist Company were opening a branch of Herbert Reads nearby. And not just any store but a mega one with a drive in.
> 
> ...


----------



## JimW (Dec 15, 2012)

copliker said:


> Clegg should now come on and do a laurie over the 200+ page 'why the Libdems are shit' thread.


And the job-seeker's support thread will come in handy for him soon enough.


----------



## framed (Dec 15, 2012)

Sounds like a job for firky...

Get Cleggers!


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 15, 2012)

What's the monothought clique's party line on this latest LP piece, where she responds to the disabled reader who was threatening to take her own life in protest against the  ConDems?

http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2012/12/you-are-not-scrounger-letter-disabled-reader

I thought it was rather good, actually. . .


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 15, 2012)

JimW said:


> Their weak liberalism will never penetrate the solid outer defences to the monothought clique.


 

"My wings are like a shield of steel".

Can I say I regret making that toilet comment as it did give LP an excuse not to engage with some of the more politically sophisticated posters on here. Although, in fairness I had no way of knowing she was going to turn up in person that very day. Particularly bad timing since I rarely if ever comment on this thread.

Just to clarify though - Suggesting someone looks like they might punch above their weight in the bathroom smells dept has fuck all to do with gender. Ken Barlow, for example, looks like not only would his odure have a half life of several millennia, but he'd actually leave a lightish brown stool floating in the pan, possibly with undigested bits of carrot clearly visible in it's hull.


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

framed said:


> Sounds like a job for firky...
> 
> Get Cleggers!


 
Give me his hashtag and a cartoon. I'll grab the fucker if you lot crucify him. Deal?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

Laura's shit doesn't smell anyway.


----------



## framed (Dec 15, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> View attachment 26203
> "My wings are like a shield of steel".
> 
> Can I say I regret making that toilet comment as it did give LP an excuse not to engage with some of the more politically sophisticated posters on here. Although, in fairness I had no way of knowing she was going to turn up in person that very day. Particularly bad timing since I rarely if ever comment on this thread.
> ...


----------



## rekil (Dec 15, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> What's the monothought clique's party line on this latest LP piece, where she responds to the disabled reader who was threatening to take her own life in protest against the ConDems?
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2012/12/you-are-not-scrounger-letter-disabled-reader
> 
> I thought it was rather good, actually. . .





lauriepenny said:


> For fuck's sake, I work for a living.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 15, 2012)

Fucking hell. has laurie been back?

i do agree about some of the stupid comments, but the fact that she's ignored the political points, plus the fact that this thread is not really about her but about that "milieu" very telling


----------



## SpookyFrank (Dec 15, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> What's the monothought clique's party line on this latest LP piece, where she responds to the disabled reader who was threatening to take her own life in protest against the ConDems?
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2012/12/you-are-not-scrounger-letter-disabled-reader
> 
> I thought it was rather good, actually. . .


 
Wouldn't be surprised to learn that the suicidal person in question was another fabrication tbh.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

You can fuck off and all.


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

SpookyFrank said:


> Wouldn't be surprised to learn that the suicidal person in question was another fabrication tbh.


Maybe not a fabrication but...


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

Firky this isn't about you ffs. Some things aren't.


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 15, 2012)

SpookyFrank said:


> Wouldn't be surprised to learn that the suicidal person in question was another fabrication tbh.


 
Well, perhaps, but it doesn't read like her usual stuff.

E2A: I wonder what the ignored advice referred to above was?


----------



## SpookyFrank (Dec 15, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Well, perhaps, but it doesn't read like her usual stuff.


 
The actual content isn't so bad, but the style of writing is pretty nauseating. Not that there's an easy way to talk to suicidal people without resorting to platitudes and soppy nonsense.


----------



## SpookyFrank (Dec 15, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> E2A: I wonder what the ignored advice referred to above was?


 
Perhaps it was 'please don't publish your response to this person's letter, as that would be in poor taste.'


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Well, perhaps, but it doesn't read like her usual stuff.
> 
> E2A: I wonder what the ignored advice referred to above was?


 
It  made me wonder too, that's why I posted it. She is quite selective in what she responds to.


----------



## BigTom (Dec 15, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> What's the monothought clique's party line on this latest LP piece, where she responds to the disabled reader who was threatening to take her own life in protest against the ConDems?
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2012/12/you-are-not-scrounger-letter-disabled-reader
> 
> I thought it was rather good, actually. . .


 
Generally quite good but bits and pieces really stick out in a bad way:



> . I’m writing to you now not as a journalist, but as a human being, a former carer and a person who has experienced depression


 
So what's this doing in the New Statesman?

which is a shame cos bits like this:



> When society tells you that you are worth less because you are unwell, that’s society’s fault, not yours. They may be pursuing a doctrine of shame, but that doesn’t mean you have to feel ashamed. You have no reason whatsoever to feel ashamed. You are not a burden, and you are not a scrounger - you are just unwell.


 
are good.. 
Like SpookyFrank I really don't like the style of her writing generally.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 15, 2012)

This whole Laurie Penny thing could really put Urban75 on the map!


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 15, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Fucking hell. has laurie been back?
> 
> i do agree about some of the stupid comments, but the fact that *she's ignored the political points, plus the fact that this thread is not really about her but about that "milieu" *very telling



that's not surprising given the offense taken


----------



## rekil (Dec 15, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> This whole Laurie Penny thing could really put Urban75 on the map!


It could be the biggest thing since Kay Burley gave u75 the mention on skynews and made out the place was riot mastermind central.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 15, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> It wasn't an omission, because that article wasn't about me - it was about how private schools construct and perpetuate class privilege. The fact that anyone bright is automatically put on the oxbridge route unless and sometimes even if they raise serious objections is part of that process.


I don't agree. I was offered the chance to apply for Oxford and I declined. The school was fine with it, my parents were fine with it and I was fine with it. But then I went to a state school.


----------



## rekil (Dec 15, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Well, perhaps, but it doesn't read like her usual stuff.
> 
> E2A: I wonder what the ignored advice referred to above was?


Iirc, she was advised to contact the samaritans and mental health professionals as exploiting a vulnerable person in this way is a bit selfish and sick.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

laura said:
			
		

> The fact that anyone bright is automatically put on the oxbridge route


 
I'm cleverer than you. There was no _oxbridge route_ (and the use of that phrase says so much) for _anyone_ at my school. Never mind _automatically_.


----------



## 8den (Dec 15, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> If I walk toward you holding a fire extinguisher over my head,


 
What if you're not walking you're not walking you're charging towards the landrove.



> and you're sat in a police Landie with wire screens over the windows, how do I pose an imminent threat to you, unless you're a hunter from South Park?


 
The screens were already broken during the attack.







See that image, you can clearly see there is no screen, and a window has already been smashed. The mob was attacking the landrover already.



> The answer, of course, is that I don't. Given that you're sat in a reinforced vehicle, are wearing riot gear and are armed, I pose no threat to you.


 
Yes because you're fucking robocop. I'm sure the pilots of the Blackhawks that went down in Somali thought everything would be peachy when their copter went down, after all they were in a reinforced vehicle wearing body armour and armed, so the were naturally invulnerable.



> This is basic threat assessment. This is what squaddies were taught (and most of them learned) in Northern Ireland - You don't shoot the bloke fronting up to you, chucking rocks at you or pulling other aggressive shit (unless you're a Para, obviously) because frankly he's not a threat when you have the ability to blow holes in him. There was no *need* for the _Carabinieri_ to shoot.


 
Yes. I imagine if you're thirty yards away and surrounded my your unit theres no need to shoot. However if you're in a range rover surrounded by a violent mob attacking you, well just be like fucking Gandhi.

Copliker butchers et all misrepresent me, all I've ever said that a degree of culpability falls at Guiliano's feet. You can't be part of vicious violent mob and then not expect the police (particularly a military police based on conscription) armed with firearms not to use deadly force when attacked.


----------



## 8den (Dec 15, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> It was a Land Rover, and he wasn't attacking, he hadn't actually attacked when he had his face shot.


 
Well the make and model is important. 

How do you know he hadn't attacked it before, the sequence of photos aside there's no evidence that Guiliano wasn't part of the mob that attacked the "Land Rover" before the photo was take. It was already damaged. And how do you charge at something with a heavy object over your shoulders and claim it was self defence?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

8den go away with this stuff. Wrong thread.


----------



## 8den (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> 8den go away with this stuff. Wrong thread.


 
Sorry who brought up this shit in the first place, you and your fucking cheerleader squad.* If you don't like my opinion on Laurie, or Laura or whatever, don't start throwing shit at me from Genoa, or whatever when I voice a opinion that seems to disagree with you and your gang.

Oh and for the record, "go away with this stuff" awfully fash for a anarchist there butchs.

*And tell Copliker if he's going to wear the outfit at least shave his fucking legs.


----------



## 8den (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Not reading this thread though. She didn't read it all last night either. I stayed up to check.


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

copliker said:


> Iirc, she was advised to contact the samaritans and mental health professionals as exploiting a vulnerable person in this way is a bit selfish and sick.


 

That may go to some way to explain why I had a couple of MH workers follow me after that comment was retweeted.

This woman DM too but she must have deleted it as it doesn't come up:

https://twitter.com/MentalStudent

I think you could be onto something.

Actually, looking at their page I think they're a poster here!


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/P5iqYuFmzqg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>


 

You embed media via the film link.


----------



## 8den (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> You embed media via the film link.


 
Fixed that already. Point still stands.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> Sorry who brought up this shit in the first place, you and your fucking cheerleader squad.* If you don't like my opinion on Laurie, or Laura or whatever, don't start throwing shit at me from Genoa, or whatever when I voice a opinion that seems to disagree with you and your gang.
> 
> Oh and for the record, "go away with this stuff"* awfully fash* for a anarchist there butchs.
> 
> *And tell Copliker if he's going to wear the outfit at least shave his fucking legs.


 
don't be so stupid


----------



## framed (Dec 15, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> This whole Laurie Penny thing could really put Urban75 on the map!


 
SELL OUT! 

Can we split the advertising revenue?


----------



## 8den (Dec 15, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> don't be so stupid


 
So to be clear, If I respond to this thread, and on topic and have a load of off topic stuff thrown at me, thats okay. But if I respond to this off topic stuff, and butchers tells me thats not relevant, and I point out the hypocrisy, it's "so stupid". 

Really for many urbans if they didn't have double standards they'd have no standards.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> Sorry who brought up this shit in the first place, you and your fucking cheerleader squad.* If you don't like my opinion on Laurie, or Laura or whatever, don't start throwing shit at me from Genoa, or whatever when I voice a opinion that seems to disagree with you and your gang.
> 
> Oh and for the record, "go away with this stuff" awfully fash for a anarchist there butchs.
> 
> *And tell Copliker if he's going to wear the outfit at least shave his fucking legs.


Shall i answer the question. Ok not me - i didn't. Didn't mention it. And then you invented a quote. And now we're here. With you needing to get off this thread.


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

copliker said:


> Iirc, she was advised to contact the samaritans and mental health professionals as exploiting a vulnerable person in this way is a bit selfish and sick.


 





> Andy Barton ‏@onthecouchagain
> @anticameron she is exploiting a clearly vulnerable person. Should have tried to get them to seek help, not stick them in the new statesman


 



> @findlater225 @PennyRed sought advice on here.consensus-refer 2 Samaritans.Hope her selfinterest doesn't harm ths poor person @MrHarryCole


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> So to be clear, If I respond to this thread, and on topic and have a load of off topic stuff thrown at me, thats okay. But if I respond to this off topic stuff, and butchers tells me thats not relevant, and I point out the hypocrisy, it's "so stupid".
> 
> Really for many urbans if they didn't have double standards they'd have no standards.


 
I was commenting on your idiotic use of the term "fash".


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> You know, don't you, that this is why we can't have nice things. Like a revolution.


 
Since when was revolution nice?*


*Real revolutions, I mean, not these fake 'colour' ones or 'springs' where another faction of the same miserable bunch of gangsters get swept to power by those who'll be repaid with favours, the naive, the apolitical and the lost.


----------



## 8den (Dec 15, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> I was commenting on your idiotic use of the term "fash".


 
Actually I used the term "fash" because spanky longhorn, in post 6672, said "fuck off fash boy" directed at me, because I had the temerity to suggest a violent anarchist was at least partially culpable for his death, in Genoa.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> Actually I used the term "fash" because spanky longhorn, in post 6672, said "fuck off fash boy" directed at me, because I had the temerity to suggest a violent anarchist was at least partially culpable for his death, in Genoa.


 
Then take that up with spanky.  I'm commenting on your use of it.


----------



## rekil (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Since when was revolution nice?*
> 
> 
> *Real revolutions, I mean, not these fake 'colour' ones or 'springs' where another faction of the same miserable bunch of gangsters get swept to power by those who'll be repaid with favours, the naive, the apolitical and the lost.


Since she's not coming back, I'll sort of defend her and guess that she doesn't literally mean revolutions are nice, - 'why we can't have nice things' is just one of those annoying meme yokes some people have a habit of lazily drawing on, even when they should know better, especially when they're supposed to be writers and should be striving to avoid cliches and the like.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 15, 2012)

Well I've just found this place. It's an absolute delight. I was only ever aware of la Penny as a mild but largely irrelevant irritant in the Toynbee mode; ie. grossly over privileged, lacking any affinity with genuine deprivation, but hoping that half-arsed stunts in the Orwell "down and Out" trope would somehow overshadow her ridiculously haute bourgeois origins.

This has really opened my eyes...and I've only read 10 pages. What a self-serving, careerist fraud she is. Obviously my assessment is informed by my misogyny and my rank jealousy, but none the less...what a fuckin disgrace she is.
I've read a few of her pieces now. What struck me is the blindingly obvious fact that her overwrought prose style is clearly massively influenced by Hitchens. She must have read everything he wrote. The more of her I read, the more convinced I became. Obviously, she'd never acknowledge the fact, but it's friggin plain as day.

She's very sad on the whole and a political and economic naïf. I especially loved this...
#Precisely, which is why it's so important for journalists to build new networks that undercut old privilege systems.#

Obviously, I'm just one of those unreconstructed dinosaurs who can't come to terms with the fact that a system in which ex public school, Oxbridge types cause the inequality, write about how dreadful it is, and then lead the 'popular' dissent isn't really incestuous...it's just that I'm in thrall to 'old privilege' paradigms and can't see how how liberating and inclusive it is to read the deluded musings of silly little rich girls.


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Well I've just found this place. It's an absolute delight. I was only ever aware of la Penny as a mild but largely irrelevant irritant in the Toynbee mode; ie. grossly over privileged, lacking any affinity with genuine deprivation, but hoping that half-arsed stunts in the Orwell "down and Out" trope would somehow overshadow her ridiculously haute bourgeois origins.
> 
> This has really opened my eyes...and I've only read 10 pages. What a self-serving, careerist fraud she is. Obviously my assessment is informed by my misogyny and my rank jealousy, but none the less...what a fuckin disgrace she is.
> I've read a few of her pieces now. What struck me is the blindingly obvious fact that her overwrought prose style is clearly massively influenced by Hitchens. She must have read everything he wrote. The more of her I read, the more convinced I became. Obviously, she'd never acknowledge the fact, but it's friggin plain as day.
> ...


 
Welcome!


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

copliker said:


> Since she's not coming back, I'll sort of defend her and guess that she doesn't literally mean revolutions are nice, - 'why we can't have nice things' is just one of those annoying meme yokes some people have a habit of lazily drawing on, even when they should know better, especially when they're supposed to be writers and should be striving to avoid cliches and the like.


 

Pity she's not coming back-I was going to mention that I'm pretty much the exception on here in not giving a toss what she does or doesn't get up to as, like nearly everbody else (literally), I wouldn't even know about it, or her, if it wasn't for this thread. And none of it will make any difference to anything anyway.

It's the way it is, suckers.


----------



## _angel_ (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Since when was revolution nice?*
> 
> 
> lauriepenny said:
> ...


 
That quote of hers is class.


----------



## Random (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Pity she's not coming back-I was going to mention that I'm pretty much the exception on here in not giving a toss what she does or doesn't get up to as, like nearly everbody else (literally), I wouldn't even know about it, or her, if it wasn't for this thread. And none of it will make any difference to anything anyway.
> 
> It's the way it is, suckers.


Was that your tenth anniversary clip show?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> What if you're not walking you're not walking you're charging towards the landrove.


 
That doesn't make any sense whatsoever - I have no idea what you're trying to say here.





8den said:


> The mob ... violent mob attacking you... vicious violent mob


 
Fuck off you Peter Hitchens apologist shitcunt.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

Random said:


> Was that your tenth anniversary clip show?


 


Tenth anniversary? I'm new here.


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Tenth anniversary? I'm new here.


 
Speaking from experience that's one of the worst things to say.

Good to see you back though.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

laura 8den father of conservatism said:
			
		

> The mob ... violent mob attacking you... vicious violent mob..swinish multitude...faceless mob


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Guess what, Laurie, old stick. I work for a living, too. It's just I work at home with a 3 year old, doing dishes and cleaning the bathroom and hoovering and playing catch and washing preposterous amounts of clothes and fussing the dog and reading stories and stuff like that. I can also go on the internet now and again. Sorry I've not been to Greece to make art or Brooklyn to see breakdancing black kids and rewriting "We are the world" lately. I've been a bit busy. I can ALWAYS make time to call "bullshit", though.


 

Yes, but Laura may have been to paradise but she's never been to her.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Oh totally. I think I've said this before, if there was a 200+ page thread about me on the internet I'd be in the corner crying.


 
Why? It's more recognition than most people can ever hope for.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

firky said:


> Aahhh!


 


And (ahem) 'youth power's' equivalent of the v-sign turned the other way is the fucking tinny iphone music on the bus in the morning. I'd set the riot police on 'em just for that.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> I get the sense that you feel world weary at times


 


I'm getting increasingly like that. These days I enjoy going to the pub on my own and imagining how I must look to other people sitting over my pint looking cynical and jaded. Sometimes I sigh forcefully.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

Fuck off then ffs.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Fuck off then ffs.


 


I'm going later. The floor will be yours to continue the relentless attack on privilege. From the kitchen table.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

_He had numerous desperate attempts to get back in to talk to people he didn't want to talk to officer. And pockets full of tissues._


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> _He had numerous desperate attempts to get back in to talk to people he didn't want to talk to officer. And pockets full of tissues._


 


I keep experiencing the need to prove to myself that I'm still alive.


----------



## rekil (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> .
> 
> *And tell Copliker if he's going to wear the outfit at least shave his fucking legs.


Now that's a little bit misogyny.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 15, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Well I've just found this place. It's an absolute delight. I was only ever aware of la Penny as a mild but largely irrelevant irritant in the Toynbee mode; ie. grossly over privileged, lacking any affinity with genuine deprivation, but hoping that half-arsed stunts in the Orwell "down and Out" trope would somehow overshadow her ridiculously haute bourgeois origins.
> 
> This has really opened my eyes...and I've only read 10 pages. What a self-serving, careerist fraud she is. Obviously my assessment is informed by my misogyny and my rank jealousy, but none the less...what a fuckin disgrace she is.
> I've read a few of her pieces now. What struck me is the blindingly obvious fact that her overwrought prose style is clearly massively influenced by Hitchens. She must have read everything he wrote. The more of her I read, the more convinced I became. Obviously, she'd never acknowledge the fact, but it's friggin plain as day.
> ...


 
If you build it, he will come


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> I'm getting increasingly like that. These days I enjoy going to the pub on my own and imagining how I must look to other people sitting over my pint looking cynical and jaded. Sometimes I sigh forcefully.


 
Lonely pint syndrome


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 15, 2012)

I can just imagine lletsa doing that  across the pub from nigel irritable looking glum over his copy of the socialist


----------



## 8den (Dec 15, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> That doesn't make any sense whatsoever - I have no idea what you're trying to say here.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
When have I ever apologised for Peter Hitchens you delusional wankstain.


----------



## 8den (Dec 15, 2012)

> father of conservatism said:


 
Are you off your medication again grandad?


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Lonely pint syndrome


 

I like it though.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 15, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I can just imagine lletsa doing that  across the pub from nigel irritable looking glum over his copy of the socialist


 
I get the impression that Nigel would want to be seen reading The Socialist, probably leave a copy behind in case anyone saw one and thought ' I think I will read that'

Where is llettsa these days?


----------



## 8den (Dec 15, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> Then take that up with spanky. I'm commenting on your use of it.


 
Ah so When Spanky uses it it's okay, when I use it, it's naughty, or something. Do you even have a rational coherent thought program running around that feeble withered organ sitting atop your shoulders?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

Off the thread 8den. This one is for exposing the idiocy behind decent people and their help.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> Ah so When Spanky uses it it's okay, when I use it, it's naughty, or something. Do you even have a rational coherent thought program running around that feeble withered organ sitting atop your shoulders?


When did i say it was OK?


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 15, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> I get the impression that Nigel would want to be seen reading The Socialist, probably leave a copy behind in case anyone saw one and thought ' I think I will read that'
> 
> Where is llettsa these days?


 
closer than you think, i reckon!


----------



## 8den (Dec 15, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> When did i say it was OK?


 
I'm just trying to figure out your logic. If I'm correct without double standards you'd have no standards.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> I'm just trying to figure out your logic. If I'm correct without double standards you'd have no standards.


This way please sir.


----------



## 8den (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Off the thread 8den. This one is for exposing the idiocy behind decent people and their help.


 
RAH RAH RAH RAH, I'm butchersapron self appointed sheriff of this thread, and I don't see the irony of trying to bully others about their opinions, while proclaiming myself as a anarchist.


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> How did you get the morning star job?


 
They practically press gang people to be subs on the Morning Star.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> RAH RAH RAH RAH, I'm butchersapron self appointed sheriff of this thread, and I don't see the irony of trying to bully others about their opinions, while proclaiming myself as a anarchist.


Is your mammy away this weekend, is there someone who looks after you who we can talk to?

Off the thread. Now.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> I'm just trying to figure out your logic. If I'm correct without double standards you'd have no standards.


I didn't see the post in question.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> *Real revolutions, I mean, not these fake 'colour' ones or 'springs' where another faction of the same miserable bunch of gangsters get swept to power by those who'll be repaid with favours, the naive, the apolitical and the lost.



why should laurie be lectured by you, with that glib shite?


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 15, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> I am delighted Laurie Penny has come on to this thread. It has given it a new energy. I will be even more delighted when she moves over to some of the other issues in the Politics Forums and makes contributions there.


 
Like you, you mean?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

Fucking hell. Thanks god.


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 15, 2012)

love detective said:


> So you wanted to go to Oxford, fine. Why make out in 2012 that you were informed that you would be applying, 'no question'. Why no mention in the 2012 article that you wanted to go? why the omission?
> 
> Why did you say that in 2003 you had been informed by a teacher that you would be applying as though it was some kind of imposition put on you, when a year earlier in 2002 you had already expressed your desire to go there?


 
McCarthy lives.


----------



## love detective (Dec 15, 2012)




----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

phil
8den

Off the thread. Now.


----------



## cesare (Dec 15, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> What's the monothought clique's party line on this latest LP piece, where she responds to the disabled reader who was threatening to take her own life in protest against the  ConDems?
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2012/12/you-are-not-scrounger-letter-disabled-reader
> 
> I thought it was rather good, actually. . .


Although Susan Archibald's second comment is interesting ...


----------



## 8den (Dec 15, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> I didn't see the post in question.


 
I quoted the post it's 6692.


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> phil
> 8den
> 
> Off the thread. Now.


 
But _why?_

I've hardly started yet. 

Do you really think it's difficult to get a job as a sub-editor on the Morning Star?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

cesare said:


> Although Susan Archibald's second comment is interesting ...


Can't see it, can you help?


----------



## 8den (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Is your mammy away this weekend, is there someone who looks after you who we can talk to?
> 
> Off the thread. Now.


 
Wow. Did you come up with that yourself?



> phil
> 8den
> 
> Off the thread. Now.



No. I won't, what the fuck are you going to do about it butchers? Oh I know, ignore it, and then, in another thread where I disagree with you, in 2 years time, you'll bring up this thread to try and bully me off *that new thread*. Tired and weak old man.


----------



## rekil (Dec 15, 2012)

cesare said:


> Although Susan Archibald's second comment is interesting ...





> Should have REPLIED privately as NOW poor guy might be feeling worse #WHOCONSIDERED #HIS feeling in all this? typical JOURNO who think she done right #justhopeitwasnottakenwrongwaybythepersoninvolved
> 
> There are a lot of people currently feeling the same regarding same issues but I SERIOUSLY feel this was wrong way to go about it my MAIN concern is the person in question got help NOT the JOURNOS story





> I am a disability rights activist and have been for many years, I also work in partnership with the Samaritans, SAMH , Penumbra, Police,NHS and other orgs all over UK although I have not yet worked personally with MIND.
> 
> I spend my whole life campaigning and challenging all political Parties & the medias NEGATIVE constant portrayal of people with disabilities "benefit scrounger" along with others well known activists like Sue Marsh who is well known for her blog http://diaryofabenefitscrounge... and Kaliya Franklin http://benefitscroungingscum.b...
> 
> ...


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> Wow. Did you come up with that yourself?
> 
> 
> 
> No. I won't, what the fuck are you going to do about it butchers? Oh I know, ignore it, and then, in another thread where I disagree with you, in 2 years time, you'll bring up this thread to try and bully me off that new thread. Tired and weak old man.


He'll go away in a minute. Never to be left alone again.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 15, 2012)




----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

Ta. (and to c for the nod)


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 15, 2012)

It makes a change phildwyer being ordered off a thread. He is usually found trying to do that to others.


----------



## love detective (Dec 15, 2012)

weepiper said:


>


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 15, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> It wasn't an omission, because that article wasn't about me - it was about how private schools construct and perpetuate class privilege. The fact that anyone bright is automatically put on the oxbridge route unless and sometimes even if they raise serious objections is part of that process.


Jesus christ, can't you see that this type of nonsense is precisely why lots of people on this thread are criticising you?


----------



## rekil (Dec 15, 2012)

copliker said:


> Even if this thread goes on for another 1000 pages you will not see anything weirder than Laura posing in front of that shitty painting.
> 
> View attachment 26133


Apart from the painting coming alive, trolling the thread then flouncing (after a bit of browsing the pet thread) obv.


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 15, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> It makes a change phildwyer being ordered off a thread. He is usually found trying to do that to others.


 
Now that you mention it, I haven't noticed you contributing anything worthwhile here.

Don't you think there are any other threads here that might be more suitable to your interests and capacities?


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 15, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I don't know about that. But I do think she's smart enough to understand the criticisms, take them on board and use them to improve her journalism. It's a bit of a shame that she's not willing to do this.


 
Hahahaha.

You do not of course really imagine that _anyone_, anyone at all, would benefit from taking the "advice" offered by the assorted exotics who populate this thread.

Do you?


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> I'm new here.


 
Really?


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 15, 2012)

Your contribution has been noted phil.


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

What was it she said about in-fighting?


----------



## framed (Dec 15, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Hahahaha.
> 
> You do not of course really imagine that _anyone_, anyone at all, would benefit from taking the "advice" offered by the assorted exotics who populate this thread.
> 
> Do you?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 15, 2012)

Oh, WHY can't we all just get along? *faints*

I'm just looking forward to the article about this thread. See exactly how it's filtered through the Penny prism.


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 15, 2012)

Don't get me wrong, I love this place and all, but the day I come to U75 for_ advice _is the day the man with the butterfly net finally catches me.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 15, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Hahahaha.
> 
> You do not of course really imagine that _anyone_, anyone at all, would benefit from taking the "advice" offered by the assorted exotics who populate this thread.
> 
> Do you?


 
This is exactly why we took on and beat the 'pro drugs' lobby on here


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 15, 2012)

Apart from when you wanted advice about Reykjavik. Or baby stuff. Or etc


----------



## framed (Dec 15, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Don't get me wrong, I love this place and all, but the day I come to U75 for_ advice _is the day the man with the butterfly net finally catches me.


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 15, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Apart from when you wanted advice about Reykjavik. Or baby stuff. Or etc


 
OK, Reykjavik and baby stuff, I'll give you that.   There's nowhere better on the Web for Reykjavik and the babies.   A person going to Reykjavik with a baby would indeed be reckless if he neglected to consult the wisdom of U75 beforehand.

But for advice on how to live?  For sage wisdom on how to avoid the various pitfalls and calamities that life holds in store for us all?  With respect, I think there are one or two _slightly _more reliable sources.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 15, 2012)




----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 15, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> But for advice on how to live? For sage wisdom on how to avoid the various pitfalls and calamities that life holds in store for us all? With respect, I think there are one or two _slightly _more reliable sources.


 
Where would your first port of call be then, when faced with pitfalls & calamities in life? HEAT magazine online?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 15, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> OK, Reykjavik and baby stuff, I'll give you that. There's nowhere better on the Web for Reykjavik and the babies. A person going to Reykjavik with a baby would indeed be reckless if he neglected to consult the wisdom of U75 beforehand.
> 
> But for advice on how to live? For sage wisdom on how to avoid the various pitfalls and calamities that life holds in store for us all? With respect, I think there are one or two _slightly _more reliable sources.


 
You're allowed to admit you come here for advice. No-one will think _less_ of you. Now stop making it all about you, Laura.


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 15, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Where would your first port of call be then, when faced with pitfalls & calamities in life? HEAT magazine online?


 
I would not seek advice on such matters "online."  I would consult the ancients.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Yes, but Laura may have been to paradise but she's never been to her.



She can't go to her, because it's not yet clear just who her is yet. The narrative's still in the planning stage.
Kinda think the final edit will feature a sort of wise woman whose sheer humanity, compassion and intelligence make her the de facto 'leader' (though not in any traditionally hierarchical or elitist sense) of an anarchist commune, somewhere in Shoreditch, largely composed of doe-eyed  hoodie-clad street urchins who've rejected patriarchal junk capitalism. She'll spend her time dictating gnomic stanzas onto strips of gingham which, when scattered on a favourable breeze, will float to the heavens, scatter then descend in such an order that they form a complete revisionist history of everything; with all contributions of white males revealed in their true light: as part of a ravening and demonic scheme to ....blah fuckin blah etc.


----------



## HST (Dec 15, 2012)

I'm thinking of marketing Laurie Penny voodoo dolls. With instructions and big pins. Want keep the price under a fiver - less if possible - but cover costs. Profits, if any, to some worthwhile cause. Is there much of a market out there - I know Laurie will want some but the rest of the world?


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

Christ, they're all returning.

Alright, ern?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 15, 2012)

Ern has been walking among us for some time.


----------



## cesare (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Can't see it, can you help?




Edit: oops just seen that copliker beat me to it


----------



## Riklet (Dec 15, 2012)

it's the rubashov which gives it away.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> why should laurie be lectured by you, with that glib shite?


 

Benefit of a bit of fucking wisdom for a change.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 15, 2012)

love detective said:


>


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 15, 2012)

firky said:


> Christ, they're all returning.
> 
> Alright, ern?


 
Ern's the new you.


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

I can only bask in his magnificent shadow


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 15, 2012)

Riklet said:


> it's the rubashov which gives it away.



Oh go on then...I'm dying to know...gives what away?
And if you're about to tell me my prose style contains little give-always which reveal me as somebody operating incognito who's pissed you off in the past, then think on this.

A) try going onto any thread or any blog these days and see how long it takes for the existing users queue up to 'out' you as a returning sociopathic hyper-troll
B) such a reception is bound to either drive the newcomer away or piss them off to such an extent that they decide to piss you off in return; thus providing the necessary 'proof' required by the confirmation-bias-prone denizens of such places that they were right in the first place
C) consequently, you're simply helping to maintain and perpetuate "old privilege systems"

So why not leave me alone and go and privatise happiness, or whatever it is that you and your reactionary corporate attack gibbons have up your sleeves next?


----------



## Riklet (Dec 15, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> whatever it is that you and your reactionary corporate attack gibbons have up your sleeves next?


 
yep, just as I thought.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 15, 2012)

Riklet said:


> yep, just as I thought.



You neglected to quote "confirmation-bias-prone denizens of such places..."

In the words of someone you're close to..."yep, just as I thought"

Do you suggest I try to change my style so as not to rouse your 'suspicions'?...blatant 'editorial interference'...just the sorta thing I'd expect from a bastion of "old privilege systems"...in other words..."yep, just as I thought"


----------



## Riklet (Dec 15, 2012)

now you´re getting somewhere!


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 15, 2012)

So who is it then


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 15, 2012)

8den said:


> When have I ever apologised for Peter Hitchens you delusional wankstain.


 
You're an apologist in the same mould as Hicthens you moronic cock doctor.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 15, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Hahahaha.
> 
> You do not of course really imagine that _anyone_, anyone at all, would benefit from taking the "advice" offered by the assorted exotics who populate this thread.
> 
> Do you?


 
Yeah but they were in the minority until you and 8den turned up.

Sir


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 15, 2012)

Yes...but what other way is there?
Shut up?
Go away?
Express myself in a way conducive to not being mistaken with somebody else who I've never read?
Just supposing, for the slightest moment, just for the sake of argument, that you're wrong...and I'm not who you think...and I only ever found this place today...then think how things look from my perspective...and what a dick you sound like.

PS

I'm not who you think and I really did see this site today for the first time. Mind you...I would say that wouldn't I? Confirmation bias...it's everywhere...like God...surrounded by a heavenly throng singing 'Handbags and Glad-rags'


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 15, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> You neglected to quote "confirmation-bias-prone denizens of such places..."
> 
> In the words of someone you're close to..."yep, just as I thought"
> 
> Do you suggest I try to change my style so as not to rouse your 'suspicions'?...blatant 'editorial interference'...just the sorta thing I'd expect from a bastion of "old privilege systems"...in other words..."yep, just as I thought"


Too many middle management types on here


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

Were stalking Laura, Robbie and clicked on the link to this thread? She found it the same way but had a different reaction and welcoming to it.

You do a good impression of somebody, btw.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 15, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> So who is it then


It certainly isn't Ern as was suggested earlier. I don't think this is a returner at all.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 15, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Oh go on then...I'm dying to know...gives what away?
> And if you're about to tell me my prose style contains little give-always which reveal me as somebody operating incognito who's pissed you off in the past, then think on this.
> 
> A) try going onto any thread or any blog these days and see how long it takes for the existing users queue up to 'out' you as a returning sociopathic hyper-troll
> ...


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> It certainly isn't Ern as was suggested earlier. I don't think this is a returner at all.


 

What's 'a returner?'


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> What's 'a returner?'


 
You know like when you do a shit and it looks like it's gone down the u-bend so you avoid flushing in order to save water and stop dolphins dying or something, and then it resurfaces in time for your morning shower? It's like the message board version of that.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 15, 2012)

Only different.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> What's 'a returner?'


Usually someone who was banned but re-registers under another name. Perhaps you are one such. Who knows?


----------



## framed (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> What's 'a returner?'


 
Lost souls returning to the welcoming embrace of Proletarian Democracy...


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> You know like when you do a shit and it looks like it's gone down the u-bend so you avoid flushing in order to save water and stop dolphins dying or something, and then it resurfaces in time for your morning shower? It's like the message board version of that.


 

I usually try and wait until I get to work. Never have a crap on your own time if you can help it.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 15, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> Usually someone who was banned but re-registers under another name. Perhaps you are one such. Who knows?


 
this is exactly the sort of behaviour that drives away would be new members to our community


----------



## love detective (Dec 15, 2012)

_Jesus christ, I just found a forum full of so-called lefties speculating about toilet habits_


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 15, 2012)

firky said:


> Were stalking Laura, Robbie and clicked on the link to this thread? She found it the same way but had a different reaction and welcoming to it.
> 
> You do a good impression of somebody, btw.



Erm...no. Someone told me about it. How obsessive and creepy it was..."208 pages of abuse" etc. Instead, I found it a joy...a thing of beauty...and a useful testament in years to come that there really was reluctance to enlist in the non-judgemental, non-offensive, non-threatening, pan-inclusive, therapeutic, relativistic fuckin utopia to which the Pennys of this world would condemn us.

Also...I'm quite certain I look, sound and write like plenty of other people. I just don't know any of them...either.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> I usually try and wait until I get to work. Never have a crap on your own time if you can help it.


That reminds me of the man who slipped out of work for half an hour to get his hair cut. When he returned his boss complained but the man just replied that it grew in company time so he had it cut in company time.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> I usually try and wait until I get to work. Never have a crap on your own time if you can help it.


 
There was a time when I'd have considered that sage like advice. However, since the outbreak of the worms epidemic at Jacobs' Bakery in 1997 I've had to re-assess.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 15, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> That reminds me of the man who slipped out of work for half an hour to get his hair cut. When he returned his boss complained but the man just replied that it grew in company time so he had it cut in company time.


 
I was told that joke in the 1970s!


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 15, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Erm...no. Someone told me about it. How obsessive and creepy it was..."208 pages of abuse" etc. Instead, I found it a joy...a thing of beauty...and a useful testament in years to come that there really was reluctance to enlist in the non-judgemental, non-offensive, non-threatening, pan-inclusive, therapeutic, relativistic fuckin utopia to which the Pennys of this world would condemn us.
> 
> Also...I'm quite certain I look, sound and write like plenty of other people. I just don't know any of them...either.


I think you may just have outed yourself as a "PC gone mad" type. Please tell me I am wrong.


----------



## Firky (Dec 15, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Erm...no. Someone told me about it. How obsessive and creepy it was..."208 pages of abuse" etc. Instead, I found it a joy...a thing of beauty...and a useful testament in years to come that there really was reluctance to enlist in the non-judgemental, non-offensive, non-threatening, pan-inclusive, therapeutic, relativistic fuckin utopia to which the Pennys of this world would condemn us.
> 
> Also...I'm quite certain I look, sound and write like plenty of other people. I just don't know any them...either.


 
One last question, promise.

What are your thoughts on the boffin Dr. Alice Roberts?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 15, 2012)

Well I for one would like to welcome you Ronnie. So long as you don't turn out to be a UKIP supporting Brian Gerrish enthusiast or anything like that.


----------



## rekil (Dec 15, 2012)

It's misogyny to repost this interesting election result analysis, so stand clear.




			
				lauriepenny said:
			
		

> Nothing can take the shiteating grin off my face today.
> 
> There will be no Tory majority government. Labour kicked back. The Lib Dems held the line, although they didn't make the gains they hoped. The worst-case scenario here is a hobbled Tory minority dragging its bloated, stinking carcase around the Commons until progressives throw enough rocks at it to make it squeal out another election. Yes, they can and probably will do some damage. No, it won't be as bad as it might have been.
> 
> Other bloody brilliant things: Greens get their first MP in Brighton, with party Leader Caroline Lucas taking the seat. UKIP and BNP vote surge isn't as high as predicted, and Griffin suffers a punishing defeat in Barking.


Rockthrowing 'progressives' and the Greens yo. And the BNP's vote increased in Barking by 1500 or something didn't it?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

_The Lib Dems held the line, like wellington._


----------



## love detective (Dec 15, 2012)

copliker said:


> It's misogyny to repost this interesting election result analysis, so stand clear.


 




			
				lauriepenny said:
			
		

> I'm not interested in change. I'm interested in specific transformation: transformation of the parliamentary system through direct challenge to the two-party orthodoxy in this election, transformation of our creaking, illiberal democracy; transformation of the state's attitude to women's issues; nuclear disarmament.
> 
> It is for these reason that I am going to be voting, in my constituency of Leyton and Wanstead, for the Liberal Democrat Party.
> 
> ....the Lib Dems represent the best chance this country has for transformation on a structural level.


----------



## rekil (Dec 15, 2012)

wellington1815 said:
			
		

> I don't know what effect these cat-murdering beige cunts will have upon the tories' all out war on the working class, but, by God, they frighten me.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

star


----------



## shagnasty (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> _The Lib Dems held the line, like wellington._


What without sharpe and his chosen men


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

shagnasty said:


> What without sharpe and his chosen men


I trust them boys, not he


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 15, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> I think you may just have outed yourself as a "PC gone mad" type. Please tell me I am wrong.



Nope. I simply have the dubious honour of affirming an objective reality, one history and an ever diminishing opportunity to establish the return of such notions as solidarity and a genuine civil society. Though she'd claim likewise, Laurie Penny is an obstacle to such aspirations. She doubtless appeals to a small demographic of one-time pony-owning radical feminist pseudo-prole 'activists-and-bloggers', but outside of that circle, she's a bit of a turn-off.

 I attach no more credence to 'feminist epistemologies' or 'queer histories' than I do to 'Jewish Physics'. I don't think you make cohesive societies by erecting fences and demarcating debates in terms of 'valid' participants and modes of expression. 
I'm also a self-destructive drinker and don't wear a hat on my bike...also, the tyres on my car are so thin I don't drive the kids anywhere so they have to walk about in the dark in my none-too-law abiding neck of the woods. And I keep passing out randomly...and fuck knows what that might lead to...so, you're right in the sense that I'm not exactly 'Joe Safety-employee-of-the-week'.

And just now...I'm nipping down the pub...the wife's watching 'the Killing'. Not that I don't like it...just that I can't watch it 'live'...no patience.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 15, 2012)

Welcome aboard Ronnie, I think there are some Hobnobs somewhere.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I attach no more credence to 'feminist epistemologies' or 'queer histories' than I do to 'Jewish Physics'. I don't think you make cohesive societies by erecting fences and demarcating debates in terms of 'valid' participants and modes of expression.
> I'm also a self-destructive drinker and don't wear a hat on my bike...also, the tyres on my car are so thin I don't drive the kids anywhere so they have to walk about in the dark in my none-too-law abiding neck of the woods. And I keep passing out randomly...and fuck knows what that might lead to...so, you're right in the sense that I'm not exactly 'Joe Safety-employee-of-the-week'.
> 
> And just now...I'm nipping down the pub...the wife's watching 'the Killing'. Not that I don't like it...just that I can't watch it 'live'...no patience.


 

This would be a great opening for just the kind of novel I like.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 15, 2012)

tissues


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> This would be a great opening for just the kind of novel I like.


 
You read "The People's Act Of Love" by James Meek? You may or may not like it.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> This would be a great opening for just the kind of novel I like.



Three points:

1)not sure whether to take that as a compliment...or take offence that my life seems fit for nothing more than providing a narrative source for a putative novel that you'd 'like'...I'd probably have to know what sort of novels you like to call that one.

2)on second thoughts...I'm betting you like unreliable narrators who come to an unfeasibly gory end...so..erm...fuck you etc.

3) I might have given the impression earlier that I'm pretty libertarian in my take on public morality...I hold to that...yet I'm drawn sometimes to an identity card scheme for Geordies watching football in the pub. It's wrong...dogs/ two legs/ Dr Johnson etc. where do they get their delusions from?


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Three points:
> 
> 1)not sure whether to take that as a compliment...or take offence that my life seems fit for nothing more than providing a narrative source for a putative novel that you'd 'like'...I'd probably have to know what sort of novels you like to call that one.
> 
> ...


 


No need to be so touchy-it was meant as a compliment. In fact, I might nick it and have a go at writing it myself.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> You read "The People's Act Of Love" by James Meek? You may or may not like it.


 

No. I'll look out for it.


----------



## barney_pig (Dec 15, 2012)

Welcome cmbbe Ronnie, your combination of erudite banter and willingness to start a flame war over imagined trifles will fit right here. Now have you ever heard about a man called Posadas?


----------



## exiledinwales (Dec 15, 2012)

cesare said:


> Who you aiming that at?


 
"PennyRed"


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 15, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> phil
> 8den
> 
> Off the thread. Now.


 

Ha ha ha.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 15, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> No need to be so touchy-it was meant as a compliment. In fact, I might nick it and have a go at writing it myself.



Oh shit. I've get a terrible feeling I've passed out and woken in the middle of an HBO mini series where my life gets 'written' by an online self-publishing fan of picaresque low-life-noir. 
La plus ca change...and whatnot.
Here's the arrangement: I gift you 'my' novel as long as your plot gives me 10 years in the tropical socialist paradise I deserve, shacked up with Beyonce...with a talking otter in the nearby swamp who's the reincarnation of Rosa Luxembourg and Spencer Tracy's secret love child. Also, there's a big mystery explosion.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 15, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Oh shit. I've get a terrible feeling I've passed out and woken in the middle of an HBO mini series where my life gets 'written' by an online self-publishing fan of picaresque low-life-noir.
> La plus ca change...and whatnot.
> Here's the arrangement: I gift you 'my' novel as long as your plot gives me 10 years in the tropical socialist paradise I deserve, shacked up with Beyonce...with a talking otter in the nearby swamp who's the reincarnation of Rosa Luxembourg and Spencer Tracy's secret love child. Also, there's a big mystery explosion.


 

If I write it, you're more likely to end up as Beyonce's online stalker.


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## Frances Lengel (Dec 16, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> If I write it, you're more likely to end up as Beyonce's online stalker.


 
If I wrote it, he'd be on the train on the way to meet Beyonce where he'd make eye contact with a drunken squaddie. Anyway, the squaddie'd get up and head off towards the bogs but not before giving an almost imperceptible head gesture to our eponymous hero who, against his better judgement, follows the squaddie into the bogs. Anyway, our hero enters the bogs to find the squaddie smearing that pink squirty soap onto the head of his proud purple manhood before unceremoniously gripping our hero's shoulders, turning him round and ramming his face up against the mirror over the sink where he's confronted with the image of the agonised contortions of his own red & panting face and the thrusting khaki shillhouette behind him as he's brutally sodomised beyond his wildest imaginings of neither pleasure nor pain.

Later on, as he gets off the train, he's confronted by the horrified shriek of Beyonce who goes "What's that dribbling out of the bottom of your trousers onto your shoes? Is that _spunk_? Don't you know that's really bad for shoe leather?".

That's how my script'd go.


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> If I wrote it, he'd be on the train on the way to meet Beyonce where he'd make eye contact with a drunken squaddie. Anyway, the squaddie'd get up and head off towards the bogs but not before giving an almost imperceptible head gesture to our eponymous hero who, against his better judgement, follows the squaddie into the bogs. Anyway, our hero enters the bogs to find the squaddie smearing that pink squirty soap onto the head of his proud purple manhood before unceremoniously gripping our hero's shoulders, turning him round and ramming his face up against the mirror over the sink where he's confronted with the image of the agonised contortions of his own red & panting face and the khaki shillhouette behind him as he's brutally sodomised beyond his wildest imaginings of neither pleasure nor pain.
> 
> Later on, as he gets off the train, he's confronted by the horrified shriek of Beyonce who goes "What's that dribbling out of the bottom of your trousers onto your shoes? Is that _spunk_? Don't you know that's really bad for shoe leather?".
> 
> That's how my script'd go.


 
Shut up!


----------



## stuff_it (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:
			
		

> Well I for one would like to welcome you Ronnie. So long as you don't turn out to be a UKIP supporting Brian Gerrish enthusiast or anything like that.



Or a particularly well programmed spam-bot.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 16, 2012)

firky said:


> Shut up!


 
Jealous?

Though I will admit I've no idea what the word eponymous means.


----------



## ReturnOfElfman (Dec 16, 2012)

I always wondered why this thread kept going for so long. Now it all falls into place. Congrats everyone.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Dec 16, 2012)

Eh?


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## smokedout (Dec 16, 2012)

it can only go downhill from here


----------



## imposs1904 (Dec 16, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I can just imagine lletsa doing that  across the pub from *nigel irritable looking glum over his copy of the socialist*


 
If he will insist on trying to read it, then it's his own fault.


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## frogwoman (Dec 16, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> If he will insist on trying to read it, then it's his own fault.


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## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

We've had discussions about shit (at least 2), articul8's weird stuff about wanking to a picture of someone's face or whatever it was, and now what appears to be the beginnings of a novel about a bloke who attempts to seduce Beyonce getting taken roughly from behind by a military man (possibly likesfish or sassaferrato, but don't quote me on that). Oh, and there has been at least one post about the SWP and a few about Laurie Penny - as far as I know Urban's very first poster with a (really exhausting, honest) day job in the commentariat.

Good work!

But it's not all praise - discussion of the one topic that enquiring minds insist must be given serious attention - the fart - is conspicuous by its absence. So I'll start. On the way back from the pub tonight my mate Matt flawlessly farted the intro to come on Eileen. I was impressed and disgusted, both at the same time.


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## Frances Lengel (Dec 16, 2012)

Nah, you're not getting it spiney - Here's how it goes...Oh as I withdrew my now limp and useless member from his throbbing hole, I saw it's involuntary twitcthing throb as an invitation to my own perversions


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## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

That's not about farts


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 16, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> If I wrote it, he'd be on the train on the way to meet Beyonce where he'd make eye contact with a drunken squaddie. Anyway, the squaddie'd get up and head off towards the bogs but not before giving an almost imperceptible head gesture to our eponymous hero who, against his better judgement, follows the squaddie into the bogs. Anyway, our hero enters the bogs to find the squaddie smearing that pink squirty soap onto the head of his proud purple manhood before unceremoniously gripping our hero's shoulders, turning him round and ramming his face up against the mirror over the sink where he's confronted with the image of the agonised contortions of his own red & panting face and the thrusting khaki shillhouette behind him as he's brutally sodomised beyond his wildest imaginings of neither pleasure nor pain.
> 
> Later on, as he gets off the train, he's confronted by the horrified shriek of Beyonce who goes "What's that dribbling out of the bottom of your trousers onto your shoes? Is that _spunk_? Don't you know that's really bad for shoe leather?".
> 
> That's how my script'd go.



Well that just goes to show why you're not a successful writer; your plotting is all over the place. Following the opening quoted previously, it's pretty clear that the squaddie would have attracted our hero's attention to reveal a vital secret which moves the narrative on in a far more dynamic and altogether less prurient and squalid manner. Said squaddie has come across information which reveals that a small elite of neocon corporate overlords are preparing humanity for the final stage of capitalist domination. Now, having  stripped away all but the last vestiges of effective democracy, personal liberty, employment rights and recourse to justice and equality, they're about to effect the last stage of he plan: the move to neofeudalism and the wholesale indenture of humanity.

To test whether mankind was ready to be enslaved in this manner, they've conducted various 'experiments' to determine the likely scale of resistance. Intelligence reports have led them to suppose that any opposition is likely to initially manifest itself online. To counter this they've spent years ensuring that all traditional outlets of dissent are dominated by colour supplement lifestyle-porn, tin-hat fanatics or whiny public schoolgirls playing at being radical. Humanity is doomed. Up steps Ronnie R, socialist icon, pisshead and all-round fuck-up to save the day. 

He starts badly by being thrown into jail following a 'misunderstanding' in Greggs over the precise ownership of a corned beef pasty. There he is viciously bundled into a cell with a gibbering wreck of a man who turns out to be an ex member of KLF. Night after night, Ronnie, is forced to endure the deluded rantings of this wretched creature but, gradually, a strange tale emerges...
It seems KLF were secretly tasked with creating an 'installation piece', designed to reveal the depths of society's apathy, cynicism, decadence and credulity. To this end, they'd programmed a prosperous young Oxbridge graduate to believe she was actually a sort of messiah to the downtrodden and victimised, destined to lead us all to the bright uplands of...erm..some vaguely idealised world as channelled by a sixth-form wannabe politico who's smoked too much skunk and is sitting on the wall, expounding his 'theories' while he waits for his mum to pick up...cos 2miles is a long way...and it's dark. Too late, Ronnie's lunatic cell-mate realised that this was no art work...it was part of a secret....etc

Ronnie, after several showdowns with C wing's Mr Big, gains access to a secret laptop and discovers to his horror that our 'installation' has become the Voice of a Generation and vast swathes of mankind hang on her every word. Ronnie notes with horror that as we are drawn ever tighter into the vice of lifelong servitude, rather than resist, we are distracted by random whimsical musings about shite television shows, Top Shop and precise rules of etiquette for the 21st century 'activist-journalist'.

Ronnie must act....and fast...

That's how he plot SHOULD go...then: escape; close call as Ronnie-who's managed to get hold of a case of vodka-is nearly pulverised by Beyonce's tour bus; Beyonce's fierce and demented seduction of Ronnie; then, the 'fight-back' as Ronnie restores the will and belief of a broken people...


----------



## articul8 (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> , articul8's weird stuff about wanking to a picture of someone's face or whatever it was,


interesting that so many people (fallaciously) interpreted my posts about ejaculation in the context of masturbation.  I can only assume it's because you're all a load of wankers.


----------



## emanymton (Dec 16, 2012)

Or maybe they just think you're a wanker


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## articul8 (Dec 16, 2012)

i didn't see that response coming


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## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Well that just goes to show why you're not a successful writer; your plotting is all over the place. Following the opening quoted previously, it's pretty clear that the squaddie would have attracted our hero's attention to reveal a vital secret which moves the narrative on in a far more dynamic and altogether less prurient and squalid manner. Said squaddie has come across information which reveals that a small elite of neocon corporate overlords are preparing humanity for the final stage of capitalist domination. Now, having stripped away all but the last vestiges of effective democracy, personal liberty, employment rights and recourse to justice and equality, they're about to effect the last stage of he plan: the move to neofeudalism and the wholesale indenture of humanity.
> 
> To test whether mankind was ready to be enslaved in this manner, they've conducted various 'experiments' to determine the likely scale of resistance. Intelligence reports have led them to suppose that any opposition is likely to initially manifest itself online. To counter this they've spent years ensuring that all traditional outlets of dissent are dominated by colour supplement lifestyle-porn, tin-hat fanatics or whiny public schoolgirls playing at being radical. Humanity is doomed. Up steps Ronnie R, socialist icon, pisshead and all-round fuck-up to save the day.
> 
> ...


 
Write it. I would definitely read that.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Write it. I would definitely read that.



Thanks for saying so. I'm currently at that tricky stage in the process where the actual production of the novel has to take a back seat while I decide who'll play me in the film...and decide on the exact details of how the spontaneous 'word of mouth' viral marketing campaign will play out. Always best to get the basics sorted first.

I want Ronnie to embody old-fashioned proletarian values, so obviously I'm thinking of Hugh Grant for the role. I've always found that a public school and Oxbridge background allows an actor to fully and convincingly inhabit a working class aesthetic and world-view. I'm just a bit worried there'd be no real chemistry between him and Beyonce. What d'ya reckon?


----------



## emanymton (Dec 16, 2012)

articul8 said:


> i didn't see that response coming


Yep, I was just biting at the obvious set up you made.


----------



## JimW (Dec 16, 2012)

articul8 said:


> i didn't see that response coming


And we don't want to think about you coming either, but you had to raise the topic.


----------



## rekil (Dec 16, 2012)

Those hot Paul Mason journalism tips from about page 150 onwards again. Firebox loonyleft paraphernalia list to follow.



11. Join Workers Power.

12. Leave Workers Power.

13. Use a typewriter while all around you process words.

14. A League of Nations should be set up to guarantee the political and territorial independence of all states.

15. The land of Mexico should be equally divided among its people.

16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class, the immediate communalization of large stores which will be rented cheaply to small tradespeople, and the strongest consideration must be given to ensure that small traders shall deliver the supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.

17. The milky bars are on me.

18. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

19. 

20. The Leader of the plant makes the decisions for the employees and labourers in all matters concerning the enterprise, as far as they are regulated by this law. He is responsible for the well-being of the employees and labourers. The employees and labourers owe him faithfulness according to the principles of the factory community.

21. We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity, or rapine.

22. When you return from a scout, and come near our forts, avoid the usual roads, and avenues thereto, lest the enemy should have headed you, and lay in ambush to receive you, when almost exhausted with fatigues.

23. And thou shalt eat before the LORD thy God, in the place which he shall choose to place his name there, the tithe of thy corn, of thy wine, and of thine oil, and the firstlings of thy herds and of thy flocks; that thou mayest learn to fear the LORD thy God always.

24. It is only natural that when the capable intelligences of a nation, which are always in a minority, are regarded only as of the same value as all the rest, then genius, capacity, the value of personality are slowly subjected to the majority and this process is then falsely named the rule of the people. For this is not rule of the people, but in reality the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy.

25. In the midst of wanton aggression, we yet call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to return to the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, with full and equal citizenship and due representation in its bodies and institutions - provisional or permanent.

26. Under which king, Besonian? Speak, or die.

27. Don't leave your valuables or bag in the care of a random stranger.

28. The USSR steadfastly pursues a Leninist policy of peace and stands for strengthening of the security of nations and broad international co-operation. The foreign policy of the USSR is aimed at ensuring international conditions favourable for building communism in the USSR, safeguarding the state interests of the Soviet Union, consolidating the positions of world socialism, supporting the struggle of peoples for national liberation and social progress, preventing wars of aggression, achieving universal and complete disarmament, and consistently implementing the principle of the peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems. In the USSR war propaganda is banned.

29. Unexpected item in the bagging area.

30. We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right... And if the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the end.

31. Mornington Crescent

32. In the four corners of Quebec, may those who have been disdainfully called lousy Frenchmen and alcoholics begin a vigorous battle against those who have muzzled liberty and justice; may they put out of commission all the professional hold-up artists and swindlers: bankers, businessmen, judges and corrupt political wheeler-dealers....

34. When you're fucking with me you look at the fucking ground, you look at a tree, you look at a bench, you look at any fucking inanimate object, you do not look at any other human being, you slag, do you understand?

35. Heat not a furnace for your own foe so hot that it do singe yourself.

36. You heard me - FLY THIS PLANE TO CUBA!

37. A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all.

38. There is rebellion in the wind...It will be crushed.

39. When insurgency threatens, let power prevail.

40. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-coloured and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

41. Passionate, organized hatred is the element missing in all that we do to try to change the world. Now is the time to spread hate, hatred for the rich.

42. Only she can be strong who knows sorrow and deprivation. Overcoming oneself, and life, leads to strength. And that also leads to clarity.

43. The Company cannot accept responsibility for loss or damage to persons or property while on the Company's buses. Driver below - do not stamp feet.

44. Ambitious careerists may now be disguised as progressives.

45. I will try again in Belgium.

46. This is the greatest manifesto ever written. all you other manifestos better recognise.

47. This here is the wattle, emblem of our land. You can stick in a bottle, or you can hold it in yer hand.

48. Do not eat silica gel.

49. Ways to leave your lover.

50. Love me, I'm a liberal.


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## ViolentPanda (Dec 16, 2012)

Apropos Ms. Penny's accusations of misogyny, I'm reminded of a journalist's sage words:
"It's as if there were a sort of 'prejudging' going on. It's almost like...what's the word? Oh yes. Prejudice."

Hoist by your own petard, Ms. Penny.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Thanks for saying so. I'm currently at that tricky stage in the process where the actual production of the novel has to take a back seat while I decide who'll play me in the film...and decide on the exact details of how the spontaneous 'word of mouth' viral marketing campaign will play out. Always best to get the basics sorted first.


 
Either gareth off the office and the viral campaign can be started by someone using your name stalking pennyred's twitter feed and spamming it with fake news reports that are really excerpts from the book.



Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I want Ronnie to embody old-fashioned proletarian values, so obviously I'm thinking of Hugh Grant for the role. I've always found that a public school and Oxbridge background allows an actor to fully and convincingly inhabit a working class aesthetic and world-view. I'm just a bit worried there'd be no real chemistry between him and Beyonce. What d'ya reckon?


 
Get this lovely lady to play Beyonce - problem solved:


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

By the way, Laura still hasn't done a tweet since she posted the link to that letter to a suicidal disabled benefit claimant (which I thought was pretty good tbh but after reading the stuff from mental health professionals I'm not so sure). That's a full day without twatting - has that ever happened before? I'm wondering if we might have broken her or her internet


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> ...after reading the stuff from mental health professionals I'm not so sure).


 
What's been said?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> What's been said?


 
Apparently she was advised not to publish anything on it because it could affect the individual concerned and that she should instead get in touch with Samaritans and so on. But she went ahead and published anyway - we've only got the bloke's word for it who she apparently asked for advice so there might be more to it but it doesn't look good.


----------



## rekil (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> By the way, Laura still hasn't done a tweet since she posted the link to that letter to a suicidal disabled benefit claimant (which I thought was pretty good tbh but after reading the stuff from mental health professionals I'm not so sure). That's a full day without twatting - has that ever happened before? I'm wondering if we might have broken her or her internet


Relax, it's the weekend - radical downtime!


----------



## JimW (Dec 16, 2012)

Maybe mid-air mid-Atlantic on the way to a raffia-weaving for Syrian peace event in boho Brooklyn?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 16, 2012)

Getting started in journalism: the essential guide.


1)Make sure you say hello to mummy's cleaner now and again. This is known as "a youth spent transgressing traditional social demarcations and engaging in radical discourse with the dispossessed and downtrodden".

2)Make sure you get to Oxbridge.

3) If anyone finds out you had a pony, tell them you only kept it ironically and that your special secret nick name for him was Gramsci.

4)Pretty much make shit up. That way you can even write it before the event. If anyone calls you on it, blame it on misogyny, sectarianism or jealousy.

5) Remember there are literally billions of human beings; and they're always saying stuff to each other. It's entirely possible that as you travel the globe in search of a story, unnamed and unidentified stereotypical 'characters' will pop up at fortunate moments with the perfect apposite quote. And, as we all know, 'entirely possible' is tantamount to reality.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Apparently she was advised not to publish anything on it because it could affect the individual concerned and that she should instead get in touch with Samaritans and so on. But she went ahead and published anyway - we've only got the bloke's word for it who she apparently asked for advice so there might be more to it but it doesn't look good.


 
That may link up with the screen shots of the tweets Firky posted earlier on in this thread.


----------



## audiotech (Dec 16, 2012)

Tom Hanks, as Ronnie Rubashov (aka, LLETSA) and, Meg Ryan, as downtrodden, Penny Red.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 16, 2012)

audiotech said:


> Tom Hanks, as Ronnie Rubashov (aka, LLETSA) and, Meg Ryan, as downtrodden, Penny Red.


Wrong thread? Or even, wrong thread?


----------



## framed (Dec 16, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Getting started in journalism: the essential guide.
> 
> 
> 1)Make sure you say hello to mummy's cleaner now and again. This is known as "a youth spent transgressing traditional social demarcations and engaging in radical discourse with the dispossessed and downtrodden".
> ...


 

This couldn't be a post-ironic Dave, could it?


----------



## killer b (Dec 16, 2012)

audiotech said:


> Tom Hanks, as Ronnie Rubashov (aka, LLETSA) and, Meg Ryan, as downtrodden, Penny Red.


ronnie isn't lletsa.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 16, 2012)

ali said:
			
		

> "Had a lovely weekend spitting on posh people".


----------



## audiotech (Dec 16, 2012)

silence is golden.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 16, 2012)

Practice what thou preach _priest_.


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Apparently she was advised not to publish anything on it because it could affect the individual concerned and that she should instead get in touch with Samaritans and so on. But she went ahead and published anyway - we've only got the bloke's word for it who she apparently asked for advice so there might be more to it but it doesn't look good.


 
Abit of sniffing around on twitter and it appears that several people who are mental health professionals (mainly nurses) told her to get in touch with Samaritans, Mind etc. but rather than heading this advice and taken it on board she used the person's distress as a vehicle for her own self gain.



Mr.Bishie said:


> That may link up with the screen shots of the tweets Firky posted earlier on in this thread.


I found some comments on NS saying similar too but now I am looking for htem I can't find them. Arse!


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 16, 2012)

Little gain,just an example of w_e know best, you know who we mean, us._


----------



## audiotech (Dec 16, 2012)

I shot the sheriff....


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 16, 2012)

Have a sit down then and come back with a point. Because there is one.


----------



## audiotech (Dec 16, 2012)

....of tombstone.


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## butchersapron (Dec 16, 2012)

larua said:
			
		

> In a pile of cast-off jumpers, donated by supporters to keep the protesters warm in the chill October nights – no tents are allowed – I find a faded sweater reading "Obama '08"


For real. They printed that.


----------



## rekil (Dec 16, 2012)

A little bit pathos. Serendipitous pathos.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 16, 2012)

She got cash dollars for that lie.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 16, 2012)

Did she find any teddy bears?


----------



## JimW (Dec 16, 2012)

Child's shoe, shurely?


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

JimW said:


> Child's shoe, shurely?


 
Slightly scorched.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 16, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> For real. They printed that.


 
when i was at occupy someone from HMV came down and donated a box of promotional star wars t-shirts.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 16, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> 4)Pretty much make shit up. That way you can even write it before the event. If anyone calls you on it, blame it on misogyny, sectarianism or jealousy.


 
'Form journalism' in the same style as a form letter, you mean? Write up some piece of outright bullshit with blank bits where you insert names/dates/quotes and a few cliches here and there?

That would mean that Penny Dreadful could churn out reams of poorly-written, fabricated-yet-lucrative garbage while seldom having to indulge in anything so tiresome as fact-checking?

Oh, wait...


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

She's pissed off Judith Wanga.


----------



## rekil (Dec 16, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Penny Dreadful


It's rude to fuck about with her username since she posts here. Dave is probably ok though.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 16, 2012)

firky said:


> She's pissed off Judith Wanga.


How?


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

I'd post a screenshot but it contains bob marley.

http://i.imgur.com/qqbwe.png


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

Hoist by her own petard identity politics.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 16, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> How?


 
Who?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 16, 2012)

Just sat down to watch "The Mummy Returns"...as you do. Some Egyptian guy...son of the desert...and immortal guardian of some piece of sacred shite...has just announced to the clean cut American geezer: "If you don't embrace your past, you have no future."

Profound stuff....no?

"For every writer and activist, the class we're from matters-but not as much as the class we fight for"

Seems the Voice of a Generation speaks with he wisdom of countless generations gone. Except...as Bertrand taught us..

Suppose there is a class of all classes that are not included in themselves. A paradox arises from asking the question of whether this class is in itself. It is a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself. This is Russell's paradox.


----------



## love detective (Dec 16, 2012)

lauriepenny said:
			
		

> all politics are identity politics.


 
what in the name of janet street porter's rotten clitoris is she on


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 16, 2012)

Didn't someone's mam once turn up somewhere (matb?) to tell you to leave her daughter alone?  Thought it was the same person but obviously not.


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

That was binka's mum. She said we had to be nice.




> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> @Badassperger @judeinlondon it's about understanding privilege, not excusing it.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 16, 2012)

Ah right a poster? I thought it was some student journo or something.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

love detective said:


> what in the name of janet street porter's rotten clitoris is she on


 
Misogynist


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 16, 2012)

#@Badassperger @judeinlondon it's about understanding privilege, not excusing it.#

See she's been brushing up on her Marx again..."Theses on Feuerbach", I presume...

"the philosophers have only excused privilege, the point is to...erm...understand it"....nothing about "changing it", you'll notice. 

Self-serving reactionary bourgeois soup dragon.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 16, 2012)

Citizen66 said:


> Didn't someone's mam once turn up somewhere (matb?) to tell you to leave her daughter alone?  Thought it was the same person but obviously not.


 
lusty was lusting over some young lass from RESPECT and someone claiming to be the mum registered and told everyone off. I still stand by the view that it was another poster taking the piss


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

Maidmarion I reckon


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 16, 2012)

lol


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 16, 2012)

Another modern day Mugabe.

wiggo!


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 16, 2012)

"all politics are identity politics"...if all identities are political identities...and every action is a political action...and every object is a political object

All of which become true when 'political' abandons its role as an adjective and transforms into a kind of rhetorical device signifying 'this writer is perceptive, analytical and...like...y'know totally in-tune and switched on'.

As in: "this is Jez, he's really political.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 16, 2012)

love detective said:


> what in the name of janet street porter's rotten clitoris is she on


 
what does this mean?


----------



## weepiper (Dec 16, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> what does this mean?


 
it means love detective's a great big naughty misogynist.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 16, 2012)

weepiper said:


> it means love detective's a great big naughty misogynist.


 
i've been drinking and maybe i don't see the joke but it does come across that way.  have i missed something or what?


----------



## weepiper (Dec 16, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> i've been drinking and maybe i don't see the joke but it does come across that way. have i missed something or what?


 
I don't think you have.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 16, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> "all politics are identity politics"...if all identities are political identities...and every action is a political action...and every object is a political object
> 
> All of which become true when 'political' abandons its role as an adjective and transforms into a kind of rhetorical device signifying 'this writer is perceptive, analytical and...like...y'know totally in-tune and switched on'.
> 
> As in: "this is Jez, he's really political.


 
i guess what it's supposed to be about is having empathy for another's situation, recognising that someone else's experience is not the same as yours, and not deigning to assume that the change that suits you will suit everyone.

of course, what we end up with is middle class privilege claiming socialist bragging rights over actual real alienated labour.


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

> janet street porter's rotten clitoris


 
I'll buy the issue with the forthcoming article if they print that.


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 16, 2012)

'I attach no more credence to 'feminist epistemologies' or 'queer histories' than I do to 'Jewish Physics'. I don't think you make cohesive societies by erecting fences and demarcating debates in terms of 'valid' participants and modes of expression. '

Seriously, thank you. This is all I needed to read to understand that this thread a total and utter reactionary irrelevance.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 16, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> 'I attach no more credence to 'feminist epistemologies' or 'queer histories' than I do to 'Jewish Physics'. I don't think you make cohesive societies by erecting fences and demarcating debates in terms of 'valid' participants and modes of expression. '
> 
> Seriously, thank you. This is all I needed to read to understand that this thread a total and utter reactionary irrelevance.


 
And that's your get out clause well done.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 16, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> 'I attach no more credence to 'feminist epistemologies' or 'queer histories' than I do to 'Jewish Physics'. I don't think you make cohesive societies by erecting fences and demarcating debates in terms of 'valid' participants and Modest of expression. '
> 
> Seriously, thank you. This is all I needed to read to understand that this thread a total and utter reactionary irrelevance.


Some critical engagement would be nice. Like an explanation of why this thread is reactionary?


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 16, 2012)

@lauriepenny,  can i ask whether the disabled reader you responded to in your recent artice also asked you to publish your response and details of their letter/life? if not, did you get their consent?


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 16, 2012)

They did ask, yes. And the piece was edited with the help of The Samaritans.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> 'I attach no more credence to 'feminist epistemologies' or 'queer histories' than I do to 'Jewish Physics'. I don't think you make cohesive societies by erecting fences and demarcating debates in terms of 'valid' participants and modes of expression. '
> 
> Seriously, thank you. This is all I needed to read to understand that this thread a total and utter reactionary irrelevance.


 
Brilliant! Again picking out posts you can take issue with in order to avoid the substantive points raised by others.

Bit dishonest don't you think?

And although the first sentence might be a bit dodgy I think the second is perfectly valid in terms of the kind of identity politics you appear to be so fond of.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> They did ask, yes. And the piece was edited with the help of The Samaritans.


 
I don't think I believe you.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 16, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> They did ask, yes. And the piece was edited with the help of The Samaritans.


thanks for the speedy answer.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 16, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> 'I attach no more credence to 'feminist epistemologies' or 'queer histories' than I do to 'Jewish Physics'. I don't think you make cohesive societies by erecting fences and demarcating debates in terms of 'valid' participants and modes of expression. '
> 
> Seriously, thank you. This is all I needed to read to understand that this thread a total and utter reactionary irrelevance.



Who is this in response to? If you click 'reply' at the bottom right hand side of a post it creates the text in quote tags which makes it easy for readers to follow.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

weepiper said:


> I don't think you have.


 
I thought he was intentionally making a dodgy comment as a joke - a bad taste joke mind. Guess he'll have to answer for himself though.


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

@lauriepenny what is it on the IWCA website that you found racist, in particular this page?


----------



## love detective (Dec 16, 2012)

weepiper said:


> it means love detective's a great big naughty misogynist.


 
not only that, but apparently i'm a racist as well for sending laurie penny a link to an IWCA article on why identity politics are reactionary



> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> @LoveDetective1 @spineynorman78 oh. Oh, I see. You're racist. That makes this so much easier *blocks*


 
It certainly makes it much easier for her to block people who question her shit reactionary politics

you didn't even read the article did you laura?


----------



## HST (Dec 16, 2012)

From my limited knowledge of the Samaritans I'd say they don't proof read or edit copy for the likes of Laurie Penny.


----------



## JimW (Dec 16, 2012)

love detective said:


> you didn't even read the article did you laura?


Why bother when buzz-word bingo has provided such a lucrative career?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 16, 2012)

weepiper said:


> it means love detective's a great big naughty misogynist.


 
Or one of JSP's numerous disgruntled ex-husbands.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 16, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> 'I attach no more credence to 'feminist epistemologies' or 'queer histories' than I do to 'Jewish Physics'. I don't think you make cohesive societies by erecting fences and demarcating debates in terms of 'valid' participants and modes of expression. '
> 
> Seriously, thank you. This is all I needed to read to understand that this thread a total and utter reactionary irrelevance.


I don't particularly blame you for not wanting to engage with anyone in the thread, as it all probably just segues together, though it's not fair to say everyone here is reactionary. Only a few are.


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 16, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Or one of JSP's numerous disgruntled ex-husbands.


 
Love Detective is Normski?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

tufty79 said:


> thanks for the speedy answer.


 
Interesting how that one gets an immediate answer but Delroy's and Butchers's perfectly reasonable and polite questions remain unanswered isn't it?

And can you explain why you blocked me and another twitter user for 'racism' after he posted this article (IWCA piece on the reactionary consequences of state multiculturalism)on twitter and I retweeted it please @lauriepenny?

I hope you realise that the person who posted that is a well respected veteran antifascist - seems libelous to me.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> I don't particularly blame you for not wanting to engage with anyone in the thread, as it all probably segues together, though it's not fair to say everyone here is reactionary. Only a few are.


I thought I told you to fuck off?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 16, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> Some critical engagement would be nice. Like an explanation of why this thread is reactionary?


 
You remember how, about 30 years ago, Neil of "The Young Ones" called everybody a fascist, and Rik denounced any action taken by any person reactionary?
I suspect it's something along those lines.


----------



## love detective (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I thought he was intentionally making a dodgy comment as a joke - a bad taste joke mind. Guess he'll have to answer for himself though.


 
yep, apologies to all who were offended by it, it's from the stable of the kebab bum finger


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

Personally I take offence when someone tells 13,000 people I'm a racist.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 16, 2012)

steph said:


> Love Detective is Normski?


 
Tony James.


----------



## Nice one (Dec 16, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> *You remember how, about 30 years ago*, Neil of "The Young Ones" called everybody a fascist, and Rik denounced any action taken by any person reactionary?
> I suspect it's something along those lines.


 
on the first page of this thread then


----------



## love detective (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Personally I take offence when someone tells 13,000 people I'm a racist.


 
i'm sure laurie penny will be along shortly to explain exactly what was racist in the article that she hasn't read, won't she?

can you do that laura? can you give it a go?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 16, 2012)

love detective said:


> not only that, but apparently i'm a racist as well for sending laurie penny a link to an IWCA article on why identity politics are reactionary


 
I saw that. Absolutely unbelievable. 

Hey Laurie you can't be a liberal and an anarchist at the same time y'know.



love detective said:


> It certainly makes it much easier for her to block people who question her shit reactionary politics
> 
> you didn't even read the article did you laura?


 
Of course she fucking didn't, she saw the title and thought "They don't like multiculturalism, they must be a far-right group" perhaps you should have explained to her where the IWCA came from?

The mind just boggles. This is like when Phil Dickens gave that speech to some conference or whatever, outlining the basic anarchist position against liberal state-led multiculturalism, and all the middle-class fuckwits had some sort of collective breakdown, calling him a racist etc.

That's a guy who spends half his life dodging death threats from maniac scouse nazi's, and a load of fucking middle-class liberals who haven't even so much as lifted a finger to resist the BNP and EDL calling him a racist. Just unbelievable.

EDIT Laurie, I assume you're lurking, by this logic you do realize that you're calling me, and practically every other militant anti-fascist in the country, a racist?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 16, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> I don't particularly blame you for not wanting to engage with anyone in the thread, as it all probably just segues together, though it's not fair to say everyone here is reactionary. Only a few are.


 
Including yourself.


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Personally I take offence when someone tells 13,000 people I'm a racist.


 
Well you will associate yourself with the IWCA.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 16, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> 'I attach no more credence to 'feminist epistemologies' or 'queer histories' than I do to 'Jewish Physics'. I don't think you make cohesive societies by erecting fences and demarcating debates in terms of 'valid' participants and modes of expression. '
> 
> Seriously, thank you. This is all I needed to read to understand that this thread a total and utter reactionary irrelevance.



Don't get me wrong...I'm all for selective and tendentious quoting...but this thread seems to be two years old...and 235 pages long. I've been here for about 36 hours, and appear on about 3 pages. And yet it seems I exemplify the place. How fuckin cool is that! Maybe it's my spiritual homeland. 

As for your comment...erm...you know...whatever. 

PS

Stop makin stuff up.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 16, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> And the piece was edited with the help of The Samaritans.


Did you also consult the Samaritans when you wrote your reply and the article? or just when you edited the final piece? (assuming it was yourself doing the editing?)


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I thought I told you to fuck off?



and i don't listen to shit like that. and that was your reply to a factual statement. and i told you to fuck off instead.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Interesting how that one gets an immediate answer but Delroy's and Butchers's perfectly reasonable and polite questions remain unanswered isn't it?
> 
> And can you explain why you blocked me and another twitter user for 'racism' after he posted this article (IWCA piece on the reactionary consequences of state multiculturalism)on twitter and I retweeted it please @lauriepenny?
> 
> I hope you realise that the person who posted that is a well respected veteran antifascist - seems libelous to me.


 
Racism isn't what you believe it to be, it's what the person throwing the label around believes it to be.
In this case it appears the person throwing the label around believes it to be a convenient way of avoiding engagement with inconvenient truths.


----------



## JimW (Dec 16, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Don't get me wrong...I'm all for selective and tendentious quoting..


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

She'll interview Tommy Robinson but a former AFA group gets no platformed 

and this:

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
@*LoveDetective1* @*spineynorman78* oh. Oh, I see. You're racist. *That makes this so much easier* *blocks*

Is very revealing - much easier to slander than to engage.


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> She'll interview Tommy Robinson but a former AFA group gets no platformed


 
Jeez


----------



## love detective (Dec 16, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Of course she fucking didn't, she saw the title and thought "They don't like multiculturalism, they must be a far-right group" perhaps you should have explained to her where the IWCA came from?


 
This is one reason i have little time for twitter - it empties out and renders impossible even the potential for any kind of substantive and meaningful political discussion, presumably this is why the likes of Penny like it so much


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

firky said:


> Well you will associate yourself with the IWCA.


 


You're a bad, bad man


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 16, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I saw that. Absolutely unbelievable.
> 
> Hey Laurie you can't be a liberal and an anarchist at the same time y'know.


 
perhaps there's some weird cult of Lib-Anarchism, akin to Anarcho-Capitalism and right-libertarianism in it's contradictory nature? 



> Of course she fucking didn't, she saw the title and thought "They don't like multiculturalism, they must be a far-right group" perhaps you should have explained to her where the IWCA came from?
> 
> The mind just boggles. This is like when Phil Dickens gave that speech to some conference or whatever, outlining the basic anarchist position against liberal state-led multiculturalism, and all the middle-class fuckwits had some sort of collective breakdown, calling him a racist etc.
> 
> That's a guy who spends half his life dodging death threats from maniac scouse nazi's, and a load of fucking middle-class liberals who haven't even so much as lifted a finger to resist the BNP and EDL calling him a racist. Just unbelievable.


 
It's easier and more comfortable than challenging your own assumptions, to take that route, though.



> EDIT Laurie, I assume you're lurking, by this logic you do realize that you're calling me, and practically every other militant anti-fascist in the country, a racist?


 
Dammit!! 
Once again I have my nose rubbed in the fact that, as a Jew, I'm cast straight from the Jabotinsky mould!! Damn my self-hating racist ways!

(little bit of identity politics there!  )


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

A racist documentary made by racists.


----------



## rekil (Dec 16, 2012)

Ah fuck it, just no. Here, have a tune instead.





> Everybody at your party
> They don't look depressed
> Everybody's dressin' funny
> Color me impressed
> ...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 16, 2012)

How come Laurie is prepared to answer other people's questions, but refuses to answer mine? I have no presumption at all about your answers and I'm not trying to con you in any way



Delroy Booth said:


> Now I've answered Laurie's questions in good faith, perhaps you'd return the favour and answer a few of mine?
> 
> 1) What do you think about the spat between the NUJ and the New Statesman? Are you a member of the NUJ?
> 
> ...


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 16, 2012)

love detective said:


> This is one reason i have little time for twitter - it empties out and renders impossible even the potential for any kind of substantive and meaningful political discussion, presumably this is why the likes of Penny like it so much


Not just political discussion, any type of discussion. Twitter is vacuous, for the attention seeking.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 16, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Including yourself.



Sure. Whatever


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> and i don't listen to shit like that. and that was your reply to a factual statement. and i told you to fuck off instead.


 
No time for your playschool comments - we're dealing with slanderous comments against 'so called leftists' made by a pseudo-radical journalist and blogger.


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

love detective said:


> This is one reason i have little time for twitter - it empties out and renders impossible even the potential for any kind of substantive and meaningful political discussion, presumably this is why the likes of Penny like it so much


 
You're from the wrong generation, this is tweety12 and laurie can have a nice revolution on her work iphone.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 16, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> How come Laurie is prepared to answer other people's questions, but refuses to answer mine? I have no presumption at all about your answers and I'm not trying to con you in any way


 
It's cos you is black, innit?


----------



## JimW (Dec 16, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> How come Laurie is prepared to answer other people's questions, but refuses to answer mine? I have no presumption at all about your answers and I'm not trying to con you in any way


Sure you've never attempted to have her read an article by Malatesta and been blocked as a fascist?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 16, 2012)

The thing is, she'll still be all incredulous about the fact we don't revere and love her unconditionally, even though she slandered us all as racists. 

I think we should no platform Laurie Penny.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

Thing is, people I work with politically, people from my university - fuck, my black ex-partner and two of the four mixed race kids I helped her bring up (that's my little bit identity politics for you) are on twitter and see stuff on my feed.

It's a fucking disgrace and she really ought to retract that comment.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 16, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> How come Laurie is prepared to answer other people's questions, but refuses to answer mine? I have no presumption at all about your answers and I'm not trying to con you in any way


She didn't answer the question about whether or not she had consent from the disabled letter-writer either.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 16, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> She didn't answer the question about whether or not she had consent from the disabled letter-writer either.


 
Fuck you and your misogyny!


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 16, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> She didn't answer the question about whether or not she had consent from the disabled letter-writer either.


she said they'd asked her to publish their letter/info about them/her response (didn't specify which)

and @delroy booth, fuck knows why i got answered


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> No time for your playschool comments - we're dealing with slanderous comments against 'so called leftists' made by a pseudo-radical journalist and blogger.


 uhhh, *my* playschool comments, as opposed to yours and others, like telling other posters to 'f-off

the person feels that they're responding to various slander against them, so it's all hardly surprising. i was waiting for this to happen


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 16, 2012)

Imagine living in a world where someone who gave the leader of the EDL a platform accuses a member of the most successfull anti-fascist organisation in Post-war britain of being a racist.

Just imagine that.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 16, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Fuck you and your misogyny!


I am a feminist misogynist


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Thing is, people I work with politically, people from my university - fuck, my black ex-partner and two of the four mixed race kids I helped her bring up (that's my little bit identity politics for you) are on twitter and see stuff on my feed.
> 
> It's a fucking disgrace and she really ought to retract that comment.


 
And of course this is another way in which she can use her privilege isn't it? She gets to say that and I have no recourse to come back whatsoever - I don't have a Guardian column or anything in which I can refute these claims, I'm sure if Laura was slandered in such a way she'd be able to call in the lawyers and I can't.

Check your privilege @lauriepenny


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 16, 2012)

oh christ, quoting some new nutcase to tar us all, throwing accusations of racism around at the IWCA and its supporters.... fucking hellfire this is embarrassing to watch.


----------



## love detective (Dec 16, 2012)

i also want to know how it's possible to crouch over a plate whilst eating from it


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> uhhh, *my* playschool comments, as opposed to yours and others, like telling other posters to 'f-off
> 
> the person feels that they're responding to various slander against them, so it's all hardly surprising. i was waiting for this to happen


 
Yes - clearly our criticisms of Laura and her calling me and LD racists are precisely the same.

Fuck off you vacuous twat.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 16, 2012)

love detective said:


> i also want to know how it's possible to crouch over a plate whilst eating from it


 
Someone needs to disasterpaint this


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 16, 2012)

It's not just calling Love Detective and SpineyNorman racists though, is it? It's calling anyone who objects to state-led multiculturalism a racist, which includes like practically every militant anti-fascist I know.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

Yeah but we've been named Spiney Norman is a nickname pretty much everyone I know calls me by and she's just told 13,000 people Spiney Norman is a racist. I don't mind admitting I'm fucking livid.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 16, 2012)

Fuck all this racist misogyny banter.
I've just been told I'm an irrelevance...by a public school Oxbridge graduate
Who'll never be an irrelevance by dint of her money, background and all round nexus of privilege.
I have no platform...no connections...no fuckin money
And I'm a borderline gutter-dwelling jakey
How fuckin dare she..
Talk about 'old privilege systems'...pissing over the veranda etc
And she writes like a female Tom Wolfe...showy purple self-indulgent bollocks.
Fuck you Marie Antoinette


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yeah but we've been named Spiney Norman is a nickname pretty much everyone I know calls me by and she's just told 13,000 people Spiney Norman is a racist. I don't mind admitting I'm fucking livid.


 
I sincerely regret ever having stuck up for her in any way shape or form, on this thread and elsewhere. I'm disgusted by her.

And Spiney, an injury to one is an injury to all, you're absolutely right to be livid. She's used her priviliged platform, itself a product of her class and wealthy background, to call you a racist, knowing full well you're not wealthy or powerful or renowned enough to be able to defend yourself against the allegation. It's malicious bullying of the worst kind.

like I say, no platform to Laurie Penny from this day on.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 16, 2012)

lol @ Ms Red


----------



## JimW (Dec 16, 2012)

> I hold that it is bad as far as we are concerned if a person, a political party, an army or a school is not attacked by the enemy, for in that case it would definitely mean that we have sunk to the level of the enemy. It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work.


Take comfort in the wise words of the Chairman, Spiney.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 16, 2012)

HST said:


> From my limited knowledge of the Samaritans I'd say they don't proof read or edit copy for the likes of Laurie Penny.


 
I should imagine that few people are prepared to do so, given her little habit of blaming sub-editors every time she's caught out on something.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 16, 2012)

love detective said:


> i also want to know how it's possible to crouch over a plate whilst eating from it


 
Rectal dentition?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

JimW said:


> > I hold that it is bad as far as we are concerned if a person, a political party, an army or a school is not attacked by the enemy, for in that case it would definitely mean that we have sunk to the level of the enemy. It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and *paints us as utterly black* and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work.
> 
> 
> Take comfort in the wise words of the Chairman, Spiney.


 
He's a fucking racist too


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 16, 2012)

is this for real? i've got my differences with the iwca, but i'll take them over laurie penny and the twittertariat any day of the week ! Jesus.

people like laurie are the reason why the left is coming to be seen as an utter irrelevance.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 16, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> It's not just calling Love Detective and SpineyNorman racists though, is it? It's calling anyone who objects to state-led multiculturalism a racist, which includes like practically every militant anti-fascist I know.


 
Perhaps she doesn't (and I'm not being sarky for once) know any better? Someone in their mid-20s is pretty much only going to have been exposed to the state version of multiculturalism, and likely won't have experienced what went before. They may have read about what us dinosaurs experienced, but that's not the same as living it, just as most of the people falling in behind this identity politics revival won't have experienced the absolute mess it made of working class politics last time it reared its' unlovely head.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 16, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> Some critical engagement would be nice.


 
Asking a bit much, isn't it, given the standard set so far.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

I'm SP not IWCA so you're a racist too by association frogwoman


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'm SP not IWCA so you're a racist too by association frogwoman


 
yeah i know.

we are all racists

from the river to the sea, racists will be free etc


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 16, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Fuck all this racist misogyny banter.
> I've just been told I'm an irrelevance...by a public school Oxbridge graduate
> Who'll never be an irrelevance by dint of her money, background and all round nexus of privilege.
> I have no platform...no connections...no fuckin money
> ...


 
It's not even purple prose. Purple could be forgiven. It's reductive, shallow non-reflexive (by Christ it's non-reflexive!) pap occasionally enlivened by a glimmer of insight. It's readable, but it's hardly informative. It's "journalism as diary-writing".


----------



## rekil (Dec 16, 2012)

Spiney and LD probably have swastikas shaved into their pubes like that porno woman. Stay classy so-called left.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 16, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Perhaps she doesn't (and I'm not being sarky for once) know any better? Someone in their mid-20s is pretty much only going to have been exposed to the state version of multiculturalism, and likely won't have experienced what went before. They may have read about what us dinosaurs experienced, but that's not the same as living it, just as most of the people falling in behind this identity politics revival won't have experienced the absolute mess it made of working class politics last time it reared its' unlovely head.


 
That's makes perfect sense ViolentPanda until you realise _she's older than me...._



frogwoman said:


> is this for real? i've got my differences with the iwca, but i'll take them over laurie penny and the twittertariat any day of the week ! Jesus.


 
I remember when I first started out in left-wing politics, when I was like 16 or so, and I was coming into contact with the various groups that were around, and although I was interested in Marx and other class-based stuff I also had this nagging feeling a sense that what they were telling me was inadaquet in a very fundamental way. I couldn't express it, I didn't know enough at the time to put my finger on exactly what it was, but

my influences were really limited too. My parents were old Bennite Labour party people, Arguments for Democracy is probably the first political book I ever read, and my dad got me "Stupid White Men" by Michael Moore when I was towards the end of high school which I'm ashamed to say is what got me interested in left-wing books. I bought a Noam Chomsky book, Understanding Power, shortly after, and that was a lot better.

In retrospect, how strange it is that a young English boy had to get into left-wign politics by Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky? Is that the extent to which the British left-wing tradition has been eroded? That my first influences were American imports, that my political culture was a product of American cultural imperialism?

Anyway, it wasn't until I started reading the IWCA website that I really felt that someone was addressing issues that I was coming up against in my every day life, with my mates, in terms that didn't frighten me away coz I hadn't been to university. And I've been critical of them plenty of times since, fucking hell some of the things Joe Reilly says on here occasionally deserve a bit of sincere criticism, but despite that the fact remains I owe a huge amount of my understanding of the world to them. They have done more to further my knowledge of the world than any fucking priviliged Laurie Penny Oxbrdige wanker has, infact it was these people who really put me off the most, I always used to think that "the left" wasn't something for me, it was for them.

/rant over


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 16, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> oh christ, quoting some new nutcase to tar us all, throwing accusations of racism around at the IWCA and its supporters.... fucking hellfire this is embarrassing to watch.



And fuck you too matey...'some new nutcase' indeed...care to quote something to back that up...or did you simply make an online diagnosis, Herr Doktor?

And bear in mind the inherent elitism in failing to correctly identify: irony; mythological, local, cultural or subjective truths; oblique allusions; non-traditional literary devices; or humour. Take the piss, and you're basically bolstering existing power asymmetries. Go for it, you tyrannical muppet.


----------



## JimW (Dec 16, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> They have done more to further my knowledge of the world than any fucking priviliged Laurie Penny Oxbrdige wanker has...


Yeah, but have they ever been kettled in Knightsbridge with a diverse juggling troupe, eh eh?


----------



## rekil (Dec 16, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> oh christ, quoting some new nutcase to tar us all, throwing accusations of racism around at the IWCA and its supporters.... fucking hellfire this is embarrassing to watch.


I don't think he's a nutcase at all. It's just fabulous trolling by Laurie.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yes - clearly our criticisms of Laura and her calling me and LD racists are precisely the same.
> 
> Fuck off you vacuous twat.



So it's twitter that does it then. Yikes.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 16, 2012)

shit knows i've got my disagreements with the IWCA but at least they are sincere, and have actually achieved something and at least they actually care about what they are saying, rather than just trying to appropriate other peoples struggles they know nothing about to shift a few copies of their books and get a job at the guardian


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## JimW (Dec 16, 2012)

But since those other people are largely made up, it's a mostly victimless crime if you discount the political damage.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> So it's twitter that does it then. Yikes.


 
Give it a rest eh?


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 16, 2012)

copliker said:
			
		

> I don't think he's a nutcase at all. It's just fabulous trolling by Laurie.



I thought sock puppet too.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 16, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> It's not even purple prose. Purple could be forgiven. It's reductive, shallow non-reflexive (by Christ it's non-reflexive!) pap occasionally enlivened by a glimmer of insight. It's readable, but it's hardly informative. It's "journalism as diary-writing".



It's totally purple. Purple, florid, overwrought, mawkish, prolix...the fuckin lot...full house..."one hundred and EIGHTEEEE!!"

Agree on the shallow, groundless, clueless etc...yet it's the lack of self-awareness I find staggering, but regardless of the content, it remains the style which first offends...and, sorry, but it's purple.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 16, 2012)

^ This is how I assume the privately educated Oxbridge graduate left views me, and always will, no matter what I do.

With thanks to Lustbather


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 16, 2012)

JimW said:


> But since those other people are largely made up, it's a mostly victimless crime if you discount the political damage.


 
I don't think it is though. The very fact that places like firebox exist and the fact that  articles by the likes of johan hari and laurie penny is what passes for left wing discourse these days is not without political consequences, i'd say its an absolute tragedy tbh. it means that the left is coming to be seen (because it _is_) as the preserve of these types of champagne socialists.


----------



## JimW (Dec 16, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I don't think it is though. The very fact that places like firebox exist and the fact that articles by the likes of johan hari and laurie penny is what passes for left wing discourse these days is not without political consequences, i'd say its an absolute tragedy tbh. it means that the left is coming to be seen (because it _is_) as the preserve of these types of champagne socialists.


I know, it was mostly a way to crowbar in a crack about her whole-cloth fabrication enterprises.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 16, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> And fuck you too matey...'some new nutcase' indeed...care to quote something to back that up...or did you simply make an online diagnosis, Herr Doktor?
> 
> And bear in mind the inherent elitism in failing to correctly identify: irony; mythological, local, cultural or subjective truths; oblique allusions; non-traditional literary devices; or humour. Take the piss, and you're basically bolstering existing power asymmetries. Go for it, you tyrannical muppet.


 
this will do.

you don't appear very well balanced, even by the standards of the standards of p&p. i mean, maybe in real life you're fine, but this is basically nonsense.

though i am interested in how not sharing your sense of humour indicates elitism or disagreement is somehow working with the existing status quo. i'm pretty sure that was the gist of laurie penny's argument. oh noes, they don't agree with me... _not real lefties_.  do you have a pamplet or newsletter i might subscribe to?


welcome back to urban.


----------



## rekil (Dec 16, 2012)

Citizen66 said:


> I thought sock puppet too.


You just never know.


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

blocked 

dummy spat out right the way across twitter.



> @*brianwhelanhack* @*lovedetective1* @*spineynorman78* ...and I don't have time to engage any further with pissed-off haters.


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## Delroy Booth (Dec 16, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I don't think it is though. The very fact that places like firebox exist and the fact that articles by the likes of johan hari and laurie penny is what passes for left wing discourse these days is not without political consequences, i'd say its an absolute tragedy tbh. it means that the left is coming to be seen (because it _is_) as the preserve of these types of champagne socialists.


 
It's probably the main contributing factor to why most working-class people I know have nothing but outright contempt for the left. Because it's inextricably associated with these people.

All this says to me is that the political judgement of most working class people in Britain is in rude health. They're absolutely right to reject this shit.

I'm always going around putting left-wing arguments about, and I get constant abuse from my mates and co-workers for being "a fucking paki-loving commie" for it, but in all seriousness I nag and nag and nag at people with these issues all the time, and truth be told in absraction there's still a surprising and heartening degree of understanding for basic socialist ideas out there. The idea that "the people who work in the factories ought to own and control them, not the bosses" never gets any objections from people when I put it to them. People know that the Tories are arseholes. And even some of the identity politics and privilige theory stuff, which once again as a theory has a lot of merit to it, when I try to squeeze those theories into arguments there's an appreciation of it, that comes from lived experience not just reading about it at uni and importing it from American hyper-liberals.


----------



## love detective (Dec 16, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> this will do.
> 
> you don't appear very well balanced, even by the standards of the standards of p&p. i mean, maybe in real life you're fine, but this is basically nonsense.
> 
> ...



Fuck off


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> I don't think he's a nutcase at all. It's just fabulous trolling by Laurie.


 
soon all this will be hers.


----------



## JimW (Dec 16, 2012)

Should we not hold that guest columnist page in the next Girder after all, then?


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 16, 2012)

love detective said:


> Fuck off


 
whoops.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 16, 2012)

haters be hatin'


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 16, 2012)

firky said:


> blocked
> 
> dummy spat out right the way across twitter.


 
I'm blocked too.  Was expecting it when I asked her why working class people shouldn't have nice things, to be honest.

Yeah, the Voice of the Oppressed sure as shit doesn't like talking to the fuckers, eh


----------



## sihhi (Dec 16, 2012)

love detective said:


> Fuck off



I assume it's you on the Twitter machine, I don't have one but have been following with interest, this quote from 2007 might interest you:


17 Dec 2007: Laurie Penny's blog " I'll always have time for the freaks: the short, the young, the sick, the disabled and disenfranchised, the queers, the sexual deviants, swingers, fetish nutcases and drugged-up hedonists; for the goths and hippies and the geeks; for the Socialists, the Communists, the bickering Far Left beaurocrats, for the poor, and for women, especially those who've caught a glimpse of the nightmare of capitalist gender fascism in which we're living. Freaks are a threat to capitalism. Freaks are a large, deeply fragmented power-base of deviant energy that has long been languishing in the political Deep Woods in these crazy, fucked-up post-2001 times. But we haven't disappeared, and we won't disappear, and we won't vote for you; we never did vote for you. Freaks and politics will collide again in this decade, and when it happens, I plan to be on the frontline, with a bag of glitter make-up and plenty of home-made placards. I hope to see some of you leading the way."


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 16, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> this will do.
> 
> you don't appear very well balanced, even by the standards of the standards of p&p. i mean, maybe in real life you're fine, but this is basically nonsense.
> 
> ...



Yeah?...well you're "basically nonsense" AND unbalanced...and so's your mam. 
And what the fuck does your question refer to...'not sharing'?...where's that from Poindexter?


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> She'll interview Tommy Robinson but a former AFA group gets no platformed
> 
> and this:
> 
> ...


 
Laurie Penny aka Laura Barnett aka @pennyred is a fucking racist.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

firky said:


> blocked
> 
> dummy spat out right the way across twitter.


 
I've had a few shandies and I'll probably regret this tomorrow but I sent my ex a text and told her about this (it's not a weird out of the blue text to an ex before people get scared - we're still good mates) - she signed up to twatter just take her to task. Laurie's blocked her too.

Here are the tweets she was blocked for posting:

8m 

*HaslandEmma* ‏@*EmmaHasland* 
@*PennyRed* explain y the man I lived with 4 5 years is racist please @*spineynorman78* #*blackandproud*

 *  View conversation  * 

 *Reply* 
 *Delete* 
 *Favorite* 
25m 

*HaslandEmma* ‏@*EmmaHasland* 
@*PennyRed* @*brianwhelanhack* you did just call @*LoveDetective1* and @*spineynorman78* racists though. For no good reason.

 *  View conversation  *


----------



## sihhi (Dec 16, 2012)

firky said:


> blocked
> 
> dummy spat out right the way across twitter.



That 'cartoon' was well beyond the line, firky, did you apologise and withdraw it?

Also, in general, if the probably inevitable accusation of sexism, failing to defend women's rights etc, comes up this (and there are others too) from Red Action's archive are all there on record.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 16, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Yeah?...well you're "basically nonsense" AND unbalanced...and so's your mam.
> And what the fuck does your question refer to...'not sharing'?...where's that from Poindexter?


 
well, i'm clearly way too stupid to understand what you're on about.  i can't imagine it's a problem i won't be able to live with.


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I assume it's you on the Twitter machine, I don't have one but have been following with interest, this quote from 2007 might interest you:
> 
> 
> 17 Dec 2007: Laurie Penny's blog " I'll always have time for the freaks: the short, the young, the sick, the disabled and disenfranchised, the queers, the sexual deviants, swingers, fetish nutcases and drugged-up hedonists; for the goths and hippies and the geeks; for the Socialists, the Communists, the bickering Far Left beaurocrats, for the poor, and for women, especially those who've caught a glimpse of the nightmare of capitalist gender fascism in which we're living. Freaks are a threat to capitalism. Freaks are a large, deeply fragmented power-base of deviant energy that has long been languishing in the political Deep Woods in these crazy, fucked-up post-2001 times. But we haven't disappeared, and we won't disappear, and we won't vote for you; we never did vote for you. Freaks and politics will collide again in this decade, and when it happens, I plan to be on the frontline, with a bag of glitter make-up and plenty of home-made placards. I hope to see some of you leading the way."


 
Jesus.

crazy fucked up post 2001 times  

No I did not apologise, would I shite.


----------



## rekil (Dec 16, 2012)

Dave's ignore list here must be huge already. Maybe that's why she has fuck all to say for herself.


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 16, 2012)

a bag of glitter make up, WTJSPRC...


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I've had a few shandies and I'll probably regret this tomorrow but I sent my ex a text and told her about this (it's not a weird out of the blue text to an ex before people get scared - we're still good mates) - she signed up to twatter just take her to task. Laurie's blocked her too.


 
If linking to an IWCA page makes you a racist then being married to one is going to make your ex an even bigger racist, such is Laura's logic


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 16, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> well, i'm clearly way too stupid to understand what you're on about.  i can't imagine it's a problem i won't be able to live with.



Exactly...you're not part of the solution...which is rarely to call someone a 'nutcase', out the blue and apropos of fuck all.
Strange this is...you're right. I'm a fuckin idiot. And even when I go for 'rational', I'm generally too pissed to see it through.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 16, 2012)

firky said:


> Jesus.
> 
> crazy fucked up post 2001 times
> 
> No I did not apologise, would I shite.



Many said, and I agreed, let's tackle the ball not the player. Now, u75 p&p as a whole to 50k followers has been libelled as sexist and nutcase bully zone, the twitter posters have been libelled as racist. I blame myself really.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 16, 2012)

firky said:


> Jesus.
> 
> crazy fucked up post 2001 times
> 
> No I did not apologise, would I shite.


Which is why you don't get what this thread is actually about. So, like, fuck off.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 16, 2012)

A board war with twitter? Who's going to be Michael Caine?


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Which is why you don't get what this thread is actually about. So, like, fuck off.


 

No swuxdj word as detractive you parasum.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 16, 2012)

She appears to have blocked me too and now I can't send any tweets or even log in? Maybe just a bug? A twitterbug?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 16, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> A board war with twitter? Who's going to be Michael Caine?



How about Michael Caine?
Has he died? I miss things.


----------



## rekil (Dec 16, 2012)

Stop helping dave please firky. The cartoon was stupid.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 16, 2012)

I posted that to stress the "I'll always have time for ... for the Socialists, the Communists, the bickering Far Left beaurocrats, for the poor" (17 December 2007).


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 16, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> She appears to have blocked me too and now I can't send any tweets or even log in? Maybe just a bug? A twitterbug?


 
I think the mods should ban her from here. Fucking cheek.


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 16, 2012)

firky said:


> No swuxdj word as detractive you parasum.





firky said:


> No swuxdj word as detractive you parasum.


 
No swuxdj fuck off my thread aall yxoy parasums, Penny isx mine.


----------



## JimW (Dec 16, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I posted that to stress the "I'll always have time for ... for the Socialists, the Communists, the bickering Far Left beaurocrats, for the poor" (17 December 2007).


Small print read "while they're grist to my career-building, after that, who knows where the next junket might take me?"


----------



## sihhi (Dec 16, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> I think the mods should ban her from here. Fucking cheek.



Aren't you a rightist? Why do you care?


If you can't see Blagsta, the issue was

http://i.imgur.com/qqbwe.png

where spiney said: @PennyRed - hoist by her own identity politics http://i.imgur.com/qqbwe.png  my amusement at this probably makes me a misogynist though 

and Laurie Penny ‏replied all politics are identity politics.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

firky said:


> If linking to an IWCA page makes you a racist then being married to one is going to make your ex an even bigger racist, such is Laura's logic


 
And you can stop slandering me too - I've never been married


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 16, 2012)

I fucking said it before, 'Penny', 'Crabapple' and Lezard would have all been hauled out by Fresquet's companeros and summarily shot.

Revolutions can be nice.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 16, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Aren't you a rightist? Why do you care?


 
Jog on, Nick.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 16, 2012)

I've been blocked too now!


----------



## sihhi (Dec 16, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> Jog on, Nick.



You're not, OK my apologies. I've forgotten names and confused you with another.


----------



## rekil (Dec 16, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> She appears to have blocked me too and now I can't send any tweets or even log in? Maybe just a bug? A twitterbug?


You might have been reported or perhaps the software thinks you're a spammer, it happens with newer accounts I think.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 16, 2012)

sihhi said:


> You're not, OK my apologies. I've forgotten names and confused you with another.


 
Good. I was being serious. If she's blocking everybody, then ban her. She's been a bit of a one thread pony so far.


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 16, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I've been blocked too now!


 
Every cloud...those fuckers blocked me months ago. I deleted
my twatter account, cba.


----------



## JimW (Dec 16, 2012)

Golden "Dawn" Ecitrone, we call you, you know


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

I only really got into twitter a few months ago, never realised how easy it was to upset people with massive egos.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 16, 2012)

JimW said:


> Golden "Dawn" Ecitrone, we call you, you know


 
Erfaristo, mein Fuhr..bollocks.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 16, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> Good. I was being serious. If she's blocking everybody, then ban her. She's been a bit of a one thread pony so far.



She hasn't broken any posting rules that I'm aware of. There are unanswered questions such as explaining something about this:

"There's a calculation that I've begun to do whenever I find myself visiting an events hall, or a posh set of offices , or the home of someone over 40. I take in the number and size of the rooms and work out how many of the legion poor and peripatetic young people I know could live in the extra space. ... It's easy when you get the hang of it. The second floor of the RSA, for example, could comfortably house ten young families. The ladies' loos at Thomson Reuters could sleep 16 single people if you knocked out some of the sinks. My own father's bachelor pad could squeeze in eight bodies at substantially higher than the living standards most impoverished London renters enjoy. I'm serious. There's only so much space to go around and with millions of young, poor and precariously employed people struggling to hang on to accommodation, the notion of sharing it out more fairly is hardly a crazy communist plot... I'm currently without secure accommodation for the fourth time this year, and trying desperately to find another hovel within commuting distance of my job. It's draining, and it's debilitating, and it's a daily experience for millions of people with the misfortune to be low earners, or immigrants, or under 30."


----------



## weepiper (Dec 16, 2012)

'hovel'.


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

She's accusing that bloke from the Times a racist and a sexist now, I think, hard to tell - can only see half the conversation.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 16, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> It's totally purple. Purple, florid, overwrought, mawkish, prolix...the fuckin lot...full house..."one hundred and EIGHTEEEE!!"
> 
> Agree on the shallow, groundless, clueless etc...yet it's the lack of self-awareness I find staggering, but regardless of the content, it remains the style which first offends...and, sorry, but it's purple.




It's not all purple (and I especially agree with you w/r to the quote you're alluding to), but that stuff is a product of a culture Laurie is a part of. . . anyway, if LP is as bad as some think she is she'll trainwreck her own career somehow.


----------



## rekil (Dec 16, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> Good. I was being serious. If she's blocking everybody, then ban her. She's been a bit of a one thread pony so far.


This is not the way. She's being disruptive and trollish by not posting anything?


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 16, 2012)

She's managed to ignore pretty much any question of substance put to her so far. You never know, though. No, you do. She won't.


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 16, 2012)

firky said:


> I only really got into twitter a few months ago, never realised how easy it was to upset people with massive egos.





firky said:


> I only really got into twitter a few months ago, never realised how easy it was to upset people with massive egos.


 
Graham Linehan's the best one, and Owen Jones...they are the twattering classes ... follow us you plebs but don't answer back. bag of shite.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 16, 2012)

Also aren't her repeated attacks on Julie Bindel also misogynistic:

26 Nov 2007: 'Giving Feminism a bad name': "Julie Bindel, the headline speaker at this year's anniversary event, spokesperson for the spirit of feminist direct action, genuinely hates men."

If a woman refuses to accept brothels being advertised in magazines, or questions medical establishment's eagerness for surgery in trans-sexual cases, then she 'hates men'. Then lying about interviewing JB for her book, and changing her words from a brief general phone conversation.
I don't agree with all of JB's politics, but wouldn't dream of saying she genuinely hates men.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Dec 16, 2012)

shes savvy enough to ensure she can get some good copy from this thread & twitter - this is a fuckin gold mine for anyone with an opportunistic bent & a large ego.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 16, 2012)

firky said:


> I only really got into twitter a few months ago, never realised how easy it was to upset people with massive egos.


 
Your cartoon was still a load of shit y'know. I don't care how repulsive and vile Laurie Penny is, she's waaay exceeded my expectations btw, but that's just the way I feel about it. You should've apologised for any offence caused and moved on.

I've had loads of people giving me shit accusing me of being in favour of beating up women coz of that fucking cartoon, despite the fact I've never uttered a single word in defense of it. Even you yourself noted how unfair this was, well thanks for noting it comrade but that's hardly any consolation for me, is it?

But yes, it is astonishing. Especially the simpering pathetic narcissistic liberal left in this country, who get very angry at people who don't love and adore them the same way they love and adore themselves, people on the far left who don't recognise how wonderful they are and how they're leading the fucking way for us all!

Laurie Penny, this is how shit she is, took one look at the IWCA website and assumed, because the headline was critical of mult-culturalism, that it must be some far-right racist group. So ignorant is she of the theory behind anti-fascism, and class struggle anarchism, that she assumed it must've been the BNP or something. She had absolutely no idea that these are the very people who put it all on the line, in a way she never had to and never will have to, to get the BNP off the streets.

Then she slandered two people as racists, completely without any justification, despite the fact they're both committed anti-fascists and anti-racists. Does she not realise that accusations like that can costs normal people their jobs? Get them in serious trouble within their communities? What an irresponsible sack of shit.

And rather than show even the slightest trace of contrition of humility, she just systematically blocks people who object to her doing this, accuses literally everyone who objects to this as being a misogynist, completely devaluing the term, turning it into just some buzzword than be thrown at people who dare to criticise you on any level whatsoever.


----------



## rekil (Dec 16, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> She's managed to ignore pretty much any question of substance put to her so far. You never know, though. No, you do. She won't.


A ban would suit her more than us.


----------



## love detective (Dec 16, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Your cartoon was still a load of shit y'know. I don't care how repulsive and vile Laurie Penny is, she's waaay exceeded my expectations btw, but that's just the way I feel about it. You should've apologised for any offence caused and moved on.
> 
> I've had loads of people giving me shit accusing me of being in favour of beating up women coz of that fucking cartoon, despite the fact I've never uttered a single word in defense of it. Even you yourself noted how unfair this was, well thanks for noting it comrade but that's hardly any consolation for me, is it?
> 
> ...


And she still hasn't explained how you can crouch over a plate whilst eating from it


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 16, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Had a quick look - usual spiel, i.e i find you are a racist cunt if you question the capitalist use of diversity through multi-culturalism etc. And brilliantly, she's begging Kenan Malik, probably the most aggressive and articulate critic of multi-culturalism for links so she can understand better - guess when the reading and research is supposed to come Laura? Is it before or after the conclusion? No accusing him of wanting a 'well-behaved white monoculture' is there? Shallow, shallow shallow.


 
From earlier in the thread.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 16, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> She's managed to ignore pretty much any question of substance put to her so far. You never know, though. No, you do. She won't.



Yet she came back, she sought on some level some validation from a bunch of "weirdo" socialists, even when she's an editor at the New Statesman. 
Now she knows if she does try and attend a bookfair or something, people will say hey who are you calling iwca people racist. I'm not sure what but something happened.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> A ban would suit her more than us.


 
Looking at it like that, you're right, of course.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> A ban would suit her more than us.



It would be total victory for her.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Dec 16, 2012)

and we are off

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
Now all the trolls are bitching that I've blocked them. Seriously. What makes these people think I owe them my attention?


----------



## Balbi (Dec 16, 2012)

Mirror mirror.


----------



## smokedout (Dec 16, 2012)

for those who cant read it

 *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
Now all the trolls are bitching that I've blocked them. Seriously. What makes these people think I owe them my attention?


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 16, 2012)

not-bono-ever said:


> and we are off
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Now all *the trolls are bitching* that I've blocked them. Seriously. What makes these people think I owe them my attention?


 
Penny is mine and she owes me a living, but ask her why and she'll spit in your eye.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

Someone ought to ask her if Kenan Malik is a racist too. I would but I've been blocked.


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 16, 2012)

Twoll twoll toll toll gang.


----------



## JimW (Dec 16, 2012)

smokedout said:


> What makes these people think I owe them my attention?


I think it was that "presuming to speak for us" that started it.

ETA: Not you that said it of course, smokedout!


----------



## smokedout (Dec 16, 2012)

gets better, war is coming

 *Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84* 
.@*PennyRed* I love how trolls equate the right to annoy people and force you to listen to their abusive messages with "free speech"


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

not-bono-ever said:


> and we are off
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Now all the trolls are bitching that I've blocked them. Seriously. What makes these people think I owe them my attention?


 
You don't Laurie. But you do owe an explanation as to why you called two committed anti-racists racists.

I'm going to look out for events she's speaking at and go and heckle her mercilessly from now on.


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 16, 2012)

Owen Twat Jones pipes up about twolls now.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 16, 2012)

copliker said:


> You might have been reported or perhaps the software thinks you're a spammer, it happens with newer accounts I think.


Is it permanent? Or will I be able to access my account again tomorrow?


----------



## sihhi (Dec 16, 2012)

"Now all the trolls are bitching that I've blocked them. Seriously. What makes these people think I owe them my attention?" (Laurie Penny, Twitter)

 "I'll always have time for ... for the Socialists, the Communists, the bickering Far Left beaurocrats, for the poor" (17 December 2007).

There's lots that LP could say that's interesting - like the house in Turnpike Lane she lived in 2008-2010, describing at as holding 7 people even though it was meant for 3.
Things were bad, but as a committed left activist, why didn't LP contact the Haringey Housing Action or Haringey Solidarity Group or Haringey Defend Council Housing. Why no record of any activity against it? How many rooms were there? 7 people living in 2 rooms is serious over-crowding. I feel bad that I didn't know about the serious level of overcrowding.

But at the same time there's this account:

"
"There have been many afternoons, in that black and bile-encrusted teatime of the soul, when I've come to on the carpet, my DMs full of vomit, with an HIV-positive transsexual schoolgirl from southend mopping up the bloodstains on my arms and legs with a copy of The Complete Nietzsche, when I've thought to myself, 'why can't I be more like Cheryl Cole?' And yes, there have been times, practising Kuburi rope bondage on a rooftop in Haringay with otherwise well-behaved undergraduates from respectable homes, snorting Ketamine off the shrivelled genitals of today's misspent youth and screaming my latest psychotic break to the sky whilst listening to the music of My Chemical Romance, that I've wept for the latest puffball dress or bikini waxing treatment.... There have been nights, getting my nipples pierced by illegal immigrants in Soho, five fags clamped between my teeth, tripping my tits off on a ground-up-and-snorted copy of Heat magazine, that I've wished that I had the figure of Geri Halliwell or the address book of Jade Goody.... And often I've staggered home from binge-drinking in terrible pubs with my pinko commie bisexual friends, mainlining raspberry flirtinis and gang-raping local members of the landed middle-classes with copies of The Socialist Worker, only to bleed my expensively educated brains away in front of Big Brother 18: Stripper Slaughter Nightmare, and on waking to find the words 'what went wrong?' tattoed into my forearms with a blunt stanley knife, I've wondered...what went wrong? Tell me something I don't know, Tanya [Gold, Guardian journalist], and tell it to me without anodine celebrity name-dropping. Tell me what it's like to be a young (or not so young) woman growing up in a world that wants too much of you. We are infinitely more fucked up than you realise, and infinitely more in control than the trim-taglined world of 'grown-up' journalism can understand or countenance."


----------



## not-bono-ever (Dec 16, 2012)

Shes got a deadline. leave her alone.


----------



## smokedout (Dec 16, 2012)

nope, he's scarpered

*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84* 
@*DelroyBooth* @*johnnyvoid* @*PennyRed* To be honest I read Laurie's tweet and thought she was being baited by usual suspects. I'm stepping out


----------



## sihhi (Dec 16, 2012)

smokedout said:


> nope, he's scarpered
> 
> *Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*
> @*DelroyBooth* @*johnnyvoid* @*PennyRed* To be honest I read Laurie's tweet and thought she was being baited by usual suspects. I'm stepping out




Is someone going to send Owen Jones to this thread via their Twitter machine?


----------



## sihhi (Dec 16, 2012)

Billy Bragg joins in:


54s Billy Bragg: ‏ It's not violating free speech. They're still free to say what they like about you but they can't force you to listen

6s Owen Jones: Exactly.


----------



## Betty_Rubble (Dec 16, 2012)

All the liberal twatters are here.


----------



## JimW (Dec 16, 2012)

Did anyone mention 'free speech'? She's having an argument by numbers with one of her many fictional interlocutors isn't she?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 16, 2012)

not-bono-ever said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> these people


----------



## Athos (Dec 16, 2012)

This is the most fun we've had with an oxbridge educted lib dem who doesn't know which side they're on since Paddick left.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 16, 2012)

I actually am starting to get quite cross about how she keeps crying 'woman hating!' at the slightest thing as an attempt to distract from addressing any criticism of her. And I'm a pretty rabid feminist.


----------



## Firky (Dec 16, 2012)

Owen Jones, backing out


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 16, 2012)

weepiper said:


> I actually am starting to get quite cross about how she keeps crying 'woman hating!' at the slightest thing as an attempt to distract from addressing any criticism of her. And I'm a pretty rabid feminist.


 
Quite right too - she devalues the concept of misogyny every time she does it IMO


----------



## sihhi (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> You don't Laurie. But you do owe an explanation as to why you called two committed anti-racists racists.
> 
> I'm going to look out for events she's speaking at and go and heckle her mercilessly from now on.



I can't make it to this wrong time etc but she returns as a speech-giver at the London School of Economics:

"Public Lecture: Women, Protest and the Nature of Female Rebellion

Speaker: Ms Laurie Penny

Date: Tuesday 22nd January 2013
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

'A talk about women, protest and the nature of female rebellion, when that rebellion must take place on structural as well as personal fronts to be effective. Taking in Pussy Riot and the 2011 uprisings and stretching back to the Paris Commune, a contextual look at how the rage and pride of women is personal, political - and endlessly powerful.' Laurie Penny is a journalist, blogger and author. She is a columnist and reporter for The Independent and has written for The New Statesman, The Guardian, The Nation, Salon and many other publications."

I'll try and find someone who might know someone to ask a question on how accusing anti-racists of being racists qualifies as female rebellion.


----------



## Athos (Dec 16, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Quite right too - she devalues the concept of misogyny every time she does it IMO


 
The girl who cried Wolfie.


----------



## rekil (Dec 16, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> Is it permanent? Or will I be able to access my account again tomorrow?


Steel Icarus had this problem and it got resolved. I'll see if he can help.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 17, 2012)

Hi Blagsta - I've had this problem a few times now. PM if you want, so we don't clog up here with this shite


----------



## gawkrodger (Dec 17, 2012)

Athos said:


> This is the most fun we've had with an oxbridge educted lib dem who doesn't know which side they're on since Paddick left.


 
I laughed.

She's utterly fucking clueless. Cringeworthy to watch


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 17, 2012)

weepiper said:


> I actually am starting to get quite cross about how she keeps crying 'woman hating!' at the slightest thing as an attempt to distract from addressing any criticism of her. And I'm a pretty rabid feminist.


Yes, this really annoys me too, makes me cross. You can tell she's not living in the real world through that alone.

And trolling her? I think she's just validated every negative thing ever said about her on this thread through how she's behaved today. Calling people, committed anti-racists, racists and then refusing to apologise is well out of order.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 17, 2012)

And female rebellion? Fuck the fuck off.

Just for the record @lauriepenny disagreement with you in any context is not misogyny or 'being a hater'.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 17, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Yes, this really annoys me too, makes me cross. You can tell she's not living in the real world through that alone.
> 
> And trolling her? I think she's just validated every negative thing ever said about her on this thread through how she's behaved today. Calling people, committed anti-racists, racists and then refusing to apologise is well out of order.


 
She's come across as a bit spoilt and unpleasant. Vive la revolution.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Also aren't her repeated attacks on Julie Bindel also misogynistic:
> 
> 26 Nov 2007: 'Giving Feminism a bad name': "Julie Bindel, the headline speaker at this year's anniversary event, spokesperson for the spirit of feminist direct action, genuinely hates men."
> 
> ...


 
Yeah, I'm far from in agreement with a lot of what JB comes out with but I've still got quite a bit of time for her though.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 17, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> She's come across as a bit spoilt and unpleasant. Vive la revolution.


Totes spoilt


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> "
> "There have been many afternoons, in that black and bile-encrusted teatime of the soul, when I've come to on the carpet, my DMs full of vomit, with an HIV-positive transsexual schoolgirl from southend mopping up the bloodstains on my arms and legs with a copy of The Complete Nietzsche, when I've thought to myself, 'why can't I be more like Cheryl Cole?' And yes, there have been times, practising Kuburi rope bondage on a rooftop in Haringay with otherwise well-behaved undergraduates from respectable homes, snorting Ketamine off the shrivelled genitals of today's misspent youth and screaming my latest psychotic break to the sky whilst listening to the music of My Chemical Romance, that I've wept for the latest puffball dress or bikini waxing treatment.... There have been nights, getting my nipples pierced by illegal immigrants in Soho, five fags clamped between my teeth, tripping my tits off on a ground-up-and-snorted copy of Heat magazine, that I've wished that I had the figure of Geri Halliwell or the address book of Jade Goody.... And often I've staggered home from binge-drinking in terrible pubs with my pinko commie bisexual friends, mainlining raspberry flirtinis and gang-raping local members of the landed middle-classes with copies of The Socialist Worker, only to bleed my expensively educated brains away in front of Big Brother 18: Stripper Slaughter Nightmare, and on waking to find the words 'what went wrong?' tattoed into my forearms with a blunt stanley knife, I've wondered...what went wrong? Tell me something I don't know, Tanya [Gold, Guardian journalist], and tell it to me without anodine celebrity name-dropping. Tell me what it's like to be a young (or not so young) woman growing up in a world that wants too much of you. We are infinitely more fucked up than you realise, and infinitely more in control than the trim-taglined world of 'grown-up' journalism can understand or countenance."


 
Let's have it right, we've all been there.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 17, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Yes, this really annoys me too, makes me cross. You can tell she's not living in the real world through that alone.



The problem is that she is living in 'the real world'.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 17, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> The problem is that she is living in 'the real world'.


Bollocks is she.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 17, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> The problem is that she is living in 'the real world'.


I don't know any other woman that crys 'misogynist' when she's disagreed with. That's what happens in the real world, people disagree with each other all the time, they don't shout misogynist or racist.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> The problem is that she is living in 'the real world'.


 
Fucking hell. How can you - even you - seriously believe this?


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Fucking hell. How can you - even you - seriously believe this?


 
Doesn't he mean that she is real, she does have influence, however malevolent, and is making her crust in such a self-serving way? That's how I read it. could be wrong.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 17, 2012)

Anyway, enough for me, I have work in the morning. That workers' bomb won't build itself.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 17, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Anyway, enough for me, I have work in the morning. That workers' bomb won't build itself.


 
On barricade duty myself. Schlaf jut, genosse.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 17, 2012)

weepiper said:
			
		

> I actually am starting to get quite cross about how she keeps crying 'woman hating!' at the slightest thing as an attempt to distract from addressing any criticism of her.



she should be bestowed with honorary membership of the tuts. 

actually that's another thread of the year nomination that needs adding.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 17, 2012)

Why does she always go on about smoking roll ups like its cool? You'll regret taking up smoking, sugar - It's the one addiction that you can't come to terms with.


----------



## Nylock (Dec 17, 2012)

I wouldn't be surprised if she came back on for the odd sentence here and there tomorrow, answered the odd non-challenging question and then fucked off back to twitterland to watch this thread expand by yet another 10 pages... U75 trolled by la penny... who'd have thought it....

@pennyred: You also owe spiney and the other antifash you accused of being that which they fight against an apology. Not that it will be forthcoming of course...


----------



## discokermit (Dec 17, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Why does she always go on about smoking roll ups like its cool? You'll regret taking up smoking, sugar - It's the one addiction that you can't come to terms with.


it is cool.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Why does she always go on about smoking roll ups like its cool?


 
For the same reasons Harold Wilson smoked a pipe in public and a cigar in private  At least Tony Benn smoked his pipe for real (and still does, aged 88)

No doubt smoking roll-ups fits in with the image she's trying to construct of herself.


----------



## Riklet (Dec 17, 2012)

omg so cringe


----------



## cockneyreject (Dec 17, 2012)

Fuck me it must be fun less in her circles! <------I know funless be one word....or not! I'm certainly no journo!


----------



## cockneyreject (Dec 17, 2012)

*Alex Callinicos/SWP vs Laurie Penny/New Statesman Facebook handbags*

Discussion in 'UK politics, current affairs and news' started by Prince Rhyus, Dec 25, 2010.

Just an observation ---> Hardly 'current affairs' anymore!


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 17, 2012)

I haven't really been paying much attention of her (or this thread until today) but she reads like a satirical construct of what the wealthy thinks squatters are like. For that audience.


----------



## cockneyreject (Dec 17, 2012)

Citizen66 said:


> I haven't really been paying much attention of her (or this thread until today) but she reads like a satirical construct of what the wealthy thinks squatters are like. For that audience.


 
I think that's the 'market' she's playing too, she cut her niche and she's gonna milk it for all it's worth.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 17, 2012)

cockneyreject said:


> I think that's the 'market' she's playing too, she cut her niche and she's gonna milk it for all it's worth.


 
Well, it is a way to make money. As long as you can deal with the people who see through you.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

Just to switch back to the other party in this thread, has anyone else seen the SWP's internal bulletins, parts 2 and 3? A member of theirs from Leeds has made a very revealing and in my view very perceptive contribution (absolutely nails the CC and the culture that surrounds it) and it wouldn't surprise me if there's another split just down the line - reminds me a lot of the left platform thing that kicked off not long after I left, especially the way the leadership dismiss the concerns in part 3.

I'll stick it up on the PD blog if anyone wants to read it.


----------



## cockneyreject (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> She hasn't broken any posting rules that I'm aware of. There are unanswered questions such as explaining something about this:
> 
> "There's a calculation that I've begun to do whenever I find myself visiting an events hall, or a posh set of offices , or the home of someone over 40. I take in the number and size of the rooms and work out how many of the legion poor and peripatetic young people I know could live in the extra space. ... It's easy when you get the hang of it. The second floor of the RSA, for example, could comfortably house ten young families. The ladies' loos at Thomson Reuters could sleep 16 single people if you knocked out some of the sinks. My own father's bachelor pad could squeeze in eight bodies at substantially higher than the living standards most impoverished London renters enjoy. I'm serious. There's only so much space to go around and with millions of young, poor and precariously employed people struggling to hang on to accommodation, the notion of sharing it out more fairly is hardly a crazy communist plot... I'm currently without secure accommodation for the fourth time this year, and trying desperately to find another hovel within commuting distance of my job. It's draining, and it's debilitating, and it's a daily experience for millions of people with the misfortune to be low earners, or immigrants, or under 30."


 
She's got a real thing about people with a few years on the clock ain't she? Bloody ageist!


----------



## cockneyreject (Dec 17, 2012)

not-bono-ever said:


> and we are off
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Now all the trolls are bitching that I've blocked them. Seriously. What makes these people think I owe them my attention?


 
Trolls? Such an easy get out Laurie, still, why change now?


----------



## ReturnOfElfman (Dec 17, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> That's makes perfect sense ViolentPanda until you realise _she's older than me...._
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Until I went to (an old polytechnic) uni, the only group I knew that were having open political meetings were the BNP (in the working men's club on my street). I find it awful that I had to go to uni to find out about working class politics. These 'socialist' groups seem to spend far too much time on uni campuses than they do in housing estates. If they did go out onto housing estates (doing anything else other than shoving a leaflet through someone's door telling them not to vote BNP) they wouldn't have a clue what to say to people. When I had finished uni and gone back to my home town, it just seemed impossible to do any sort of pro-working-class-community type stuff (similar to what the IWCA have done) because all the leftys wouldn't do anything outside of a city centre or uni campus.


----------



## cockneyreject (Dec 17, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> Well, it is a way to make money. As long as you can deal with the people who see through you.


I think she's shown she can't though...very well.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

ReturnOfElfman said:


> Until I went to (an old polytechnic) uni, the only group I knew that were having open political meetings were the BNP (in the working men's club on my street). I find it awful that I had to go to uni to find out about working class politics. These 'socialist' groups seem to spend far too much time on uni campuses than they do in housing estates. If they did go out onto housing estates (doing anything else other than shoving a leaflet through someone's door telling them not to vote BNP) they wouldn't have a clue what to say to people. When I had finished uni and gone back to my home town, it just seemed impossible to do any sort of pro-working-class-community type stuff (similar to what the IWCA have done) because all the leftys wouldn't do anything outside of a city centre or uni campus.


 
Pretty much exactly the same thing I've been through. So depressng 

And btw It's not like working class communities are oblivious to these idea's, there's definitely people out there who are aware of all this stuff, broadly socialist ideas are not alien to working class communities we just have a mainstream centre-left which views anyone outside their metropolitan little bubble as less than human.

Outside of big cities with a uni and a "scene" the left just doesn't exist in any meaningul form. There's still a residual sympathy for left-wing idea's there, but absolutely fuck all by way of organisation. And if it ever came back to w/c communities, you can bet the likes of Penny would be deeply threatened by it and denouncing it before you can even shout "liberal reformist" at them.

And on that note I must say that there's a few people who give it a go. The Socialist Party where I live give it a good go, as do the local anarchist group, but they're so small and impoverished (and in the SP's case wedded to anachronistic and hopelessly outdated trotskyite theory) that the impact they have is pretty much negliable.

I've got a feeling that a half decent, non-patronising, bit of "common sense socialism" divorced from dense uni jargon and boring middle-class fuckwits is exactly what a lot of people from very poor working class backgrounds are crying out for, but there's just fucking no-one even giving it a go, these idea's have been imprisoned in an academic ghetto that only a select few will ever get access to.


----------



## emanymton (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Just to switch back to the other party in this thread, has anyone else seen the SWP's internal bulletins, parts 2 and 3? A member of theirs from Leeds has made a very revealing and in my view very perceptive contribution (absolutely nails the CC and the culture that surrounds it) and it wouldn't surprise me if there's another split just down the line - reminds me a lot of the left platform thing that kicked off not long after I left, especially the way the leadership dismiss the concerns in part 3.
> 
> I'll stick it up on the PD blog if anyone wants to read it.


I haven't read them, might have a look if you put them up, but I believe said member from Leeds has now been expelled, and he may not be the only one.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 17, 2012)

cockneyreject said:


> Trolls? Such an easy get out Laurie, still, why change now?


 
Trolls seems to now mean people who aren't famous as in

The trolling class
Can kiss my arse
I've got the New Statesman
Job at last.


----------



## rekil (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I've had a few shandies and I'll probably regret this tomorrow but I sent my ex a text and told her about this (it's not a weird out of the blue text to an ex before people get scared - we're still good mates) - she signed up to twatter just take her to task. Laurie's blocked her too.


First laugh of the day. Bravo Emma!


*HaslandEmma* ‏@*EmmaHasland*
@*PennyRed* @*spineynorman78* is a wanker but he's no racist. I ask 2 polite questions about u calling him a racist + u block me. Why?


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 17, 2012)

I was going to say that LPs comments were pathetic but they are far worse than that.

The smearing of committed anti-facists as racist is disgusting and anyone with even an ounce of decency would apologise. But even beyond that the stupid, lazy dismissal of the IWCA piece as racist is not only offensive but shows precisely why the far-right has gained ground in the UK, and why the left is nowhere.

Whether you agree or disagree with the piece (personally I think it's on the money) it deserves to be considered seriously and the people behind it deserve some respect.


----------



## BigTom (Dec 17, 2012)

I don't think she read the article til she was challenged, i think she saw the title, didn't recognise the iwca and assumed anti multiculturalism = far right.
If she knew the iwca she would have challenged the article not called ld and spiney racist surely?

e2a: her reaction is what I'd do if someone linked to a bnp/nf/etc blog, which is why i think the above. But if i didn't know the organisation I'd check them out first.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 17, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I've just been told I'm an irrelevance...by a public school Oxbridge graduate
> Who'll never be an irrelevance by dint of her money, background and all round nexus of privilege.


 
Of course she's an irrelevance. Consumer capitalism and the reduction of the political system to merely managing it has made an irrelevance of all of us. Politicos and non-politicos alike. All that counts now is image.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 17, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I remember when I first started out in left-wing politics, when I was like 16


 

Were you like 16 or actually 16?

Some people on here are like 16 when they're actually 54.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 17, 2012)

BigTom said:


> e2a: her reaction is what I'd do if someone linked to a bnp/nf/etc blog, which is why i think the above. But if i didn't know the organisation I'd check them out first.


And that's why _you_ are not an *coff* award-winning, sinecure-securing, globetrotting, privately schooled, Oxbridge-educated mouthpiece of a movement.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 17, 2012)

Silence is goloden.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> the nightmare of capitalist gender fascism in which we're living.


 

They were all complaining about this on the bus this morning.


Edit-it's Laura's quote not Sihi's.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 17, 2012)

She then stated that she thought the article was racist and the assumptions behind it were racist. I asked her what specifically was racist. Then my account was suspended. Managed to get it back, thanks to SI for help! Apparently I had "abused" the direct mention feature.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 17, 2012)

Fucking _glitter make-up._


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 17, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> She then stated that she thought the article was racist and the assumptions behind it were racist. I asked her what specifically was racist. Then my account was suspended. Managed to get it back, thanks to SI for help! Apparently I had "abused" the direct mention feature.


Silencing critics - what a useful function of privilege!


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> But it's not all praise - discussion of the one topic that enquiring minds insist must be given serious attention - the fart - is conspicuous by its absence. So I'll start. On the way back from the pub tonight my mate Matt flawlessly farted the intro to come on Eileen. I was impressed and disgusted, both at the same time.


 
Oh shit, you're twelve years old.

I feel bad for arguing with you now.


----------



## ska invita (Dec 17, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I've got a feeling that a half decent, non-patronising, bit of "common sense socialism" divorced from dense uni jargon and boring middle-class fuckwits is exactly what a lot of people from very poor working class backgrounds are crying out for, but there's just fucking no-one even giving it a go, these idea's have been imprisoned in an academic ghetto that only a select few will ever get access to.


agree...i know i am (crying out for it)... though i'd be interested how people here would define  "common sense socialism" - perhaps on a new thread if you feel up to it Del.  (Im not sure its common sense socialism thats imprisoned in the academic ghetto....its a different mutant beast rattling around those ivory towers)


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 17, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Were you like 16 or actually 16?
> 
> Some people on here are like 16 when they're actually 54.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

ska invita said:


> agree...i know i am (crying out for it)... though i'd be interested how people here would define "common sense socialism" - perhaps on a new thread if you feel up to it Del. (Im not sure its common sense socialism thats imprisoned in the academic ghetto....its a different mutant beast rattling around those ivory towers)


 
No. I think I've said absolutely loads and loads and too much probably already, I perhaps ought to rein myself in a bit more and give way to others. Besides there's much more knowledgable, experienced and articulate members of this forum than me who would be far better suited to such a task.

And regardless, it would inevitably turn into some petty shit-fight and I don't want the responsibility of having kicked it off over my head


----------



## ska invita (Dec 17, 2012)

fair enough  ....ive had a thread on this territory brewing in my head for a while now, will start one in the new year once ive had some rest


----------



## rosecore (Dec 17, 2012)

I only became aware of this thread as Delroy Booth linked me to it last night after reading Penny's latest debacle. I've never been her biggest fan (her writing style, critiquing things she doesn't understand, e.g. Game of Thrones) I agree mainstream journalism needs better female representation, but anything 'radical' and female typically comes from elite education. (There is nothing wrong with that form of education) I just question when certain people claim to speak for the working class from a position they don't truly understand.

I digress, what really bothered me last night was her flat-out refusal to apologise when she offered no evidence to her claims. Calling somebody racist is a serious accusation, especially when it's based on one link you've posted. (ICWA are hardly Stormfront eh Laurie). Rather than address the questions put to her she focused on why she thought the article was racist and banal but not why she called this person racist. Despite many people vouching for his ant-fascist credentials.

She simply began blocking anyone who questioned her giant leaps in logic, throwing out the troll comments to shut down debate. It worked, Owen Jones (who saw the context of it, later backed out), Billy Bragg, Helen Lewis all jumped on the anti-troll bandwagon without realising the context of her tweets.

Nobody likes to be bullied online, I'm sure some of the abuse she gets is horrible. However, you can't shut down genuine criticism because you started an argument you have no chance of winning.

Instead she made the debate about her. "I don't need to argue with haters" became a rallying call to her allies, the troll card was played. Poor Laurie, stay strong, without ever really addressing the criticisms labelled at her.Out of her depth and looking for a quick way out. Any respect I had for her is now diminished unless she apologies.


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

The problem with elite education is that it educates an elite, who perceive themselves as elite.


----------



## Rob Ray (Dec 17, 2012)

"then worked as a sub-editor on the Morning Star"

As a former co-worker I'd suggest not using your what, three months (if that), "working" for the Star as material for your "I didn't just walk into a national job" schtick. If the Star had operated as a normal workplace you'd have been repeatedly hauled over the coals for failing to show the slightest interest in doing anything which didn't advance the career of Laurie Penny. Did you even join the union in the end? We certainly asked you enough times and this was during a period when it actually mattered.

As for your journalism, it's just a job - one which in your case involves little to no risk unless you forget your get-out-of-kettle-free press card and find yourself swept into the actual front line. There's journalism with real risk attached but you don't do that stuff Laurie "not getting arrested just for journalism" Penny, you do talks for other liberal-left worthies and op-ed pieces with a bit of protest tourism thrown in. That's not activism.

Activism is doing the hard graft, for nothing (in fact usually paying out of your own pocket), for years on end in the hope of building something halfway sustainable. No glamour, no money, lots of sacrifice. It's blind alleys and wasted time and unemployability and sometimes, rarely, criminal records. How many weekends this year have you set aside to help deal with people in trouble and walk them through their options? How many dull-as-fuck meetings have you been at in 2012, volunteering as point person or offering your time to sub and print a leaflet for a campaign, then standing in the street hawking it?

The reason most people are griping on this thread is a quite palpably sensible one - you've used your expensive education and the many, many other class privileges which you are born to as a method of bypassing the drudgery of actual grassroots organising to get into the media set. Having done so, you've repeatedly exploited actual activists so you can pose as "the voice of the left" as part of a well-known career path of parasitism off the back of those who do the actual work. And then, when they call you on such behaviour, you denounce all of them en masse as sexist trolls and demand to know by what right they judge you.

That should not be the question. The question should be by what right do you speak for them?

In fact thinking about it you part-specialise in radical feminist writing right? How about you do something for the Feminist Library down in Lambeth. I don't mean write another piece in the Staggers, I mean volunteer for a couple years as a fundraiser and promoter. You're well networked with wealthy people, and they need £8k a year to meet rent. Do some proper work, get them new digs and _don't_ use it as another line on your wadical Twitter Bio. It won't give you the right to speak for the left, but it'd be a start.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

@cesere the smartest girl in a smart school


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> @cesere the smartest girl in a smart school


That's how she badges herself, isn't it? It probably explains the unconscious entitlement she exudes.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

cesare said:


> That's how she badges herself, isn't it? It probably explains the unconscious entitlement she exudes.


I think her sense of entitlement comes from being that smartest girl, and then after having gone through the whole Oxbridge road turning back and sticking two fingers up at "all of them" whilst clinging to some bastard version of leftie identity, not realising she never left the elite she so proclaims to hate.


----------



## love detective (Dec 17, 2012)

rosecore said:


> I only became aware of this thread as Delroy Booth linked me to it last night after reading Penny's latest debacle. I've never been her biggest fan (her writing style, critiquing things she doesn't understand, e.g. Game of Thrones) I agree mainstream journalism needs better female representation, but anything 'radical' and female typically comes from elite education. (There is nothing wrong with that form of education) I just question when certain people claim to speak for the working class from a position they don't truly understand.
> 
> I digress, what really bothered me last night was her flat-out refusal to apologise when she offered no evidence to her claims. Calling somebody racist is a serious accusation, especially when it's based on one link you've posted. (ICWA are hardly Stormfront eh Laurie). Rather than address the questions put to her she focused on why she thought the article was racist and banal but not why she called this person racist. Despite many people vouching for his ant-fascist credentials.
> 
> ...


 
I think you've succinctly summed up the feelings of many many people there, excellent post and welcome to the thread! 

(I was the one of the two people she called a racist last night btw)


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Must have been a pretty shit school.


----------



## Smokeandsteam (Dec 17, 2012)

emanymton said:


> I haven't read them, might have a look if you put them up, but I believe said member from Leeds has now been expelled, and he may not be the only one.



Yeah, I'd like to have a look at that too SN so post linkage please


----------



## where to (Dec 17, 2012)

The toys were well and truly thrown out the pram last night.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

Smokeandsteam said:


> Yeah, I'd like to have a look at that too SN so post linkage please


 
Me too


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Are you on about the pre-conference bulletins? All here.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

In the aftermath of the Conneticut massacre, Ellie Mae O'Hagan (chief of UK Uncut, Guardian, Red Pepper, bureaucrat in Justice for Colombia, bureaucrat in UNITE's Community wing):



> *Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*
> @*sunny_hundal* Can we just leave the politicking and tactical considerations to one side for now please?
> *Expand*
> 
> ...


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

@Delroy, 

I just saw your post, will reply when I have more time (about to go xmas shopping after this bacon stotty).


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

Ellie Mae's another fucking one.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

She is not chief of UK Uncut though and it's not fair to lump her in with them - she is not involved with the core organising group afaik - she just turned up to their stuff and knows where to stand to get in the photos


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

cesare said:


> Ellie Mae's another fucking one.


Imagine just how shit you have to be to be a shit Laurie Penny.


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Imagine just how shit you have to be to be a shit Laurie Penny.


Wasn't she the one that wrote that handwringing piece a while back in Comment Is Free? About how howwibly activists are treated by the state?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> She is not chief of UK Uncut though and it's not fair to lump her in with them - she is not involved with the core organising group afaik - she just turned up to their stuff and knows where to stand to get in the photos


Yeah, next to polly.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

cesare said:


> Wasn't she the one that wrote that handwringing piece a while back in Comment Is Free? About how howwibly activists are treated by the state?


Yep. Like a modern day Finucane.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 17, 2012)

We are the lumpen trolletariat


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> She is not chief of UK Uncut though and it's not fair to lump her in with them - she is not involved with the core organising group afaik - she just turned up to their stuff and knows where to stand to get in the photos


 
Her claim is that she is "very much involved in" see the start of this


----------



## where to (Dec 17, 2012)

Mae's not as bad as co-opting career builder in chief, Sunny Hundal. Yet another liberal/ labour/democrat/ whatever clown too. 

They remind me of the folk who started supporting Newcastle United in 1995.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Her claim is that she is "very much involved in" see the start of this




That could mean anything though.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Just to switch back to the other party in this thread, has anyone else seen the SWP's internal bulletins, parts 2 and 3? A member of theirs from Leeds has made a very revealing and in my view very perceptive contribution (absolutely nails the CC and the culture that surrounds it) and it wouldn't surprise me if there's another split just down the line - reminds me a lot of the left platform thing that kicked off not long after I left, especially the way the leadership dismiss the concerns in part 3.
> 
> I'll stick it up on the PD blog if anyone wants to read it.


Having just read it, it seems to say a) substitutionism is bad and b) we need some _proper substitutionism_ not this shit substitutionism we have at the minute.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

where to said:


> Mae's not as bad as co-opting career builder in chief, Sunny Hundal. Yet another liberal/ labour/democrat/ whatever clown too.
> 
> They remind me of the folk who started supporting Newcastle United in 1995.


91-92 surely?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

I reckon Ellie Mae is leagues above Laurie Penny in practically every aspect.

Not saying she's above criticism, but compared to Laurie?

There, i said it, now fucking ban me or call me something nasty. I don't give a fuck.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 17, 2012)

This thread keeps on giving.


----------



## where to (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:
			
		

> 91-92 surely?



Not giving them that sort of credit. They move on failure of chief cashcow, not spotting rough diamond/ underdog.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Having just read it, it seems to say a) substitutionism is bad and b) we need some _proper substitutionism_ not this shit substitutionism we have at the minute.


 
I'm just shocked at the person who wrote it, who I've had down as a 100% party hack for ages, more than the content (which is a pretty tame considering how shockingly awful the SWP's internal organising is. A recent ex-SWP member I spoke to a few weeks ago said to me "absolutely anyone in the SWP you've heard of is a complete bastard" )

I must say I laughed at the idea of there being 153 members of the SWP in Leeds  Well comrades, I reckon about 141 one of them are unaware of their membership if that's the case!


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

cesare said:


> The problem with elite education is that it educates an elite, who perceive themselves as elite.


 
Nicking that.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

where to said:


> Not giving them that sort of credit. They move on failure of chief cashcow, not spotting rough diamond/ underdog.


I was living in Dudley when keegan went back- suddenly the place was full of geordies with midlands accents. (and my mate got a Keegan tattoo on his chest that as he's got fatter has morphed into lovejoy)


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I was living in Dudley when keegan went back- suddenly the place was full of geordies with midlands accents. (and my mate got a Keegan tattoo on his chest that as he's got fatter has morphed into lovejoy)


----------



## _angel_ (Dec 17, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> She then stated that she thought the article was racist and the assumptions behind it were racist. I asked her what specifically was racist. Then my account was suspended. Managed to get it back, thanks to SI for help! Apparently I had "abused" the direct mention feature.


heh swarthy had the same thing when he dared to criticize another Independent journalist.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> heh swarthy had the same thing when he dared to criticize another Independent journalist.


That was the ellie mae wasn't it?


----------



## _angel_ (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> That was the ellie mae wasn't it?


He thinks it was David Aaronavitch (sp)?


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> That was the ellie mae wasn't it?


Aaronovitch, apparently


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

God, he was lucky then. Loathsome revisionist slug who i imagine makes a lot of noise when eating. (DA not lusty)


----------



## co-op (Dec 17, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I reckon Ellie Mae is leagues above Laurie Penny in practically every aspect.
> 
> Not saying she's above criticism, but compared to Laurie?
> 
> There, i said it, now fucking ban me or call me something nasty. I don't give a fuck.


 
Yep I was just going to post something similar. UKUncut have done some brilliant stuff I think and helped put the whole "tax debate" in a different place (ie it's about tax dodging now, not all about how "we" should be demanding to pay less). I don't know anything about Ellie Mae O'Hagen except that she's been quite heavily involved in that.

Also, she's written some cringey shit but she's young and all - but she just doesn't radiate me-me-me in the way that LP does. I've been shocked by the revelations in this thread - and how someone so nakedly self-obsessed and stupid and_ obviously_ a liar has been speed-promoted to the inner-circle of mainstream left-wing journalism. Her tantrummy reaction to questions on this thread is all of a piece with that.

It's all learning though - I went and got a copy of the New Statesman as a result of reading this thread - fuck me they have loads of glossy adverts for private fucking schools in there.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

emanymton said:


> I haven't read them, might have a look if you put them up, but I believe said member from Leeds has now been expelled, and he may not be the only one.


 
Someone whose name begins with P? There's also someone from Cambridge who's been put on the 'national membership' and banned from attending branch meetings becuase they didn't like the way they voted in a Unite ballot (some kind of unite election anyway).

And the reply from the CC is an absolute disgrace, I'm quite angry about it - much as I dislike the organization I know some really good people in the SWP and the contempt they're all being shown by the CC is well out of order.

I'm at my mum's with a slow dial up connection so the pdfs will have to wait till I get home this afternoon.

But here's a couple of choice excerpts from the CC's reply:



> And centralism, far from being the opposite of democracy, is the necessary outcome of any democratic decision if it is to be meaningful. The prevailing feature of democracy under capitalism is the separation of debate and voting from any mechanism to make the decisions agreed by the majority binding. So we can vote in a general election but we have next to no control over those we elect or the decisions they take. This is reinforced by the way we participate in bourgeois democracy as atomised individuals without the collective capacity to enforce majority decisions as binding. This structure is reproduced inside the Labour Party, for example, where the decisions of the conference of
> not binding on the parliamentary Labour Party, which is constituted as an independent body.
> 
> A revolutionary party needs a much tighter link between words and deeds than that which exists in the structures of bourgeois democracy. Without centralised decision making the accountability to agreed decisions of both the leadership and membership is weakened.


 
I sort of agree with this - that leaders should be accountable to the membership and bound by the membership's collective decisions. But they're using this to justify the opposite - the membership being bound by the leadership's decisions.



> And the existence of a leadership is a necessity. Uneveness in terms of experience, confidence and clarity of ideas exists not just inside the working class as a whole, but also within the revolutionary party. The more roots the party has inside the working class, the more it is able to intervene in the class struggle, the greater this uneveness will be.


 
So the membership is really fucking thick, with no 'clarity of ideas'. But the working class itself is even thicker, and their thickness is contageous - the more embedded we are in workplaces and w/c communities the more their thickness rubs off on us.

Fucking hell, I can see why people hate trots if this is the way the SWP deal with the issue of 'consciousness' (for full disclosure I'm far from convinced by the orthodox trot line on this).

They're basically saying that the only time you can have democracy is when you're an isolated sect with no roots in the working class and nothing is going on - so the more important the work gets the less democracy is possible or desirable.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 17, 2012)

the biggest lol was "i work for a living"

since when did she do any proper work? i'd love to be paid for writing complete bollocks on twitter.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

co-op said:


> Yep I was just going to post something similar. UKUncut have done some brilliant stuff I think and helped put the whole "tax debate" in a different place (ie it's about tax dodging now, not all about how "we" should be demanding to pay less). I don't know anything about Ellie Mae O'Hagen except that she's been quite heavily involved in that.
> 
> Also, she's written some cringey shit but she's young and all - but she just doesn't radiate me-me-me in the way that LP does. I've been shocked by the revelations in this thread - and how someone so nakedly self-obsessed and stupid and_ obviously_ a liar has been speed-promoted to the inner-circle of mainstream left-wing journalism. Her tantrummy reaction to questions on this thread is all of a piece with that.
> 
> It's all learning though - I went and got a copy of the New Statesman as a result of reading this thread - fuck me they have loads of glossy adverts for private fucking schools in there.


I think all that is very fair. I would say that there is a link between the ellie maes and penny though (beyond the desperate naked networking) as post-penny daft editors now are looking to find people like her. And, when the hammers falls  (and it will fall) its going to be bad on the lot of them.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> God, he was lucky then. Loathsome revisionist slug who i imagine makes a lot of noise when eating. (DA not lusty)


 
He was a member of the New Communist Party (I think, maybe it was the CPB-ML...) until Blair got in and one day after the election he joined the Labour Party and becamse a cheer leader for full on Blairism, a weird over night switch.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 17, 2012)

Cracking tune that.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Having just read it, it seems to say a) substitutionism is bad and b) we need some _proper substitutionism_ not this shit substitutionism we have at the minute.


 
Wasn't meaning so much the tactical stuff as the stuff she says about the way the CC operate, membership, etc.


----------



## where to (Dec 17, 2012)

frogwoman said:
			
		

> the biggest lol was "i work for a living".



What exactly was she trying to say there, (or accidentally said)?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

co-op said:


> Yep I was just going to post something similar. UKUncut have done some brilliant stuff I think and helped put the whole "tax debate" in a different place (ie it's about tax dodging now, not all about how "we" should be demanding to pay less). I don't know anything about Ellie Mae O'Hagen except that she's been quite heavily involved in that.
> .


 
I agree with your assessment of Ellie Mae to some extent - she is at least genuinely working class as well.

However she has not been "heavily" involved with UK Uncut, any more than hundreds of other activists around the country, nor was she a leader in Occupy - but she has very carefully presented herself as such and projected herself in the media as a spokesperson on their behalf.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

Wasn't Ellie Mae involved in Climate Camp?

And apparently she designed the leaflets and propaganda that I've given entrusted to hand out for this Unite Community Union stuff I'm trying to get involved in atm. It's of a very good standard, especially if you're used to to selling The Socialist in windswept desolate high-streets in provincial northern towns, and has gone down well with the general public on the whole. Take the piss if you must, but that's one thing she's contributed that's actually made a tiny little bit of difference in the political work I try to do, one more thing than Laurie Penny's ever contributed.

Of course I don't know if it was her, could've been some underling in Unite who did all the graft, I don't know, but still I don't just want to move on from Laurie Penny to some other relatively high-profile female left activist like we're a plague of locusts.

Then again she did write that really bad piece in the Guardian about the police criminalising dissent, that was a bit penny-esque.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> And apparently she designed the leaflets and propaganda that I've given entrusted to hand out for this Unite Community Union stuff I'm trying to get involved in atm. .


 
It is very good but it definately wasn't her.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Has there been any sightings of the Hari recently?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Wasn't Ellie Mae involved in Climate Camp?


 
so was I for a bit, so were quite a few people - what does it mean?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> so was I for a bit, so were quite a few people - what does it mean?


 
Someone I know described her as "being on the careerist wing of Climate Camp" that's all  thought it was a funny description


----------



## love detective (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Someone ought to ask her if Kenan Malik is a racist too. I would but I've been blocked.


 


> IWCA ‏@IndependentWCA
> @PennyRed @spineynorman78 If this article(http://tinyurl.com/ya3hlvd) is racist then so must this one(http://tinyurl.com/a49ex3) by @kenanmalik,agree?


 


> Kenan Malik ‏@kenanmalik
> @brianwhelanhack Yes, it is easier denounce something as 'racist' or 'sexist' than engage with the issues.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Someone I know described her as "being on the careerist wing of Climate Camp" that's all  thought it was a funny description


 
That probably means as much as anything the people that argued for a coherent approach then


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Has there been any sightings of the Hari recently?


 
Taking time out from Twitter to write his book, apparently. Apart from a couple of posts about the Connecticut shooting, nothing lately.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> so was I for a bit, so were quite a few people - what does it mean?


You were heading up the Tranquility team if i remember right:


> The Tranquillity team are available 24 hours per day to support the camp in challenging oppression, resolving conflict, and keeping to collective decisions. We can arrange access to conflict mediation, and offer a fair and accountable process for dealing with concerns about behaviour. You are very welcome to contact us with any concerns, questions or feedback.
> 
> You can contact us at tranquillity et fucing cetera.
> 
> At the camp, at the Tranquillity tent, around the site (identified by green sashes), or via your neighbourhood Tranquillity reps.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 17, 2012)

_Taking time out from twitter_

 Jesus


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> That probably means as much as anything the people that argued for a coherent approach then


 
Yeah that's pretty much what I thought, you mean the "not crazy wing of Climate Camp" in other words


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> You were heading up the Tranquility team if i remember right:


 
fuck off you cunt


----------



## love detective (Dec 17, 2012)

_you drippy little posh fucks_


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> fuck off you cunt


No now, let's resolve this via midnight mediation.


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Then again she did write that really bad piece in the Guardian about the police criminalising dissent, that was a bit penny-esque.



That was the handwringing piece I was referring to.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

I think you will find I did defend the trauma team or whatever they were called and I stand by that


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> fuck off you cunt


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 17, 2012)

She can't be criticised, either, for some people. Two people have justified her calling LD "racist" now despite having no idea why. "Is he above criticism?" said one. There WASN'T any criticism; that's the whole fucking point.


----------



## BigTom (Dec 17, 2012)

I'd trust Ellie on an action, as an activist I think she is very good even though I don't agree with her politics or the conclusions it sometimes draws her to. There's obviously issues and a debate to be had about the kind of activism she takes part in but what she does she does well and honestly.
As a case in point, Ellie got arrested at fortnum and mason, Laurie left early and Sunny Hundal tweeted about it, probably blogged it too (tbf I actually have no idea but I'd put a strong bet on him not being there). I don't remember Ellie using that arrest to further her career, I'm sure she must have written about the arrest or trials at some point but she never tried to make it about her and as a fellow arrestee who put time and effort into the defence campaign I never felt she tried to hijack, co-opt or use the arrest/trial to talk about herself or further her career.


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

We've all ruined Laurie's Christmas. You cunts.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

BigTom said:


> I'd trust Ellie on an action, as an activist I think she is very good even though I don't agree with her politics or the conclusions it sometimes draws her to. There's obviously issues and a debate to be had about the kind of activism she takes part in but what she does she does well and honestly.
> As a case in point, Ellie got arrested at fortnum and mason, Laurie left early and Sunny Hundal tweeted about it, probably blogged it too (tbf I actually have no idea but I'd put a strong bet on him not being there). I don't remember Ellie using that arrest to further her career, I'm sure she must have written about the arrest or trials at some point but she never tried to make it about her and as a fellow arrestee who put time and effort into the defence campaign I never felt she tried to hijack, co-opt or use the arrest/trial to talk about her or
> further her career.


 
At the end of the day BigTom she might not be perfect, who is, but she doesn't have some giant all-consuming ego like Penny Dreadful has. That goes a long way.

And yeah Owen Jones as well lets just get this one out of the way, Owen actually goes out there and puts forward genuinely convincing and thought-through socialist arguments, and does a good job of it. My 65 year old widowed disabled auntie loves him to bits coz of the shit he gave IDS on Question Time, I think she might have a bit of crush on him (haven't got the heart to tell her  )


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I was living in Dudley when keegan went back- suddenly the place was full of geordies with midlands accents. (and my mate got a Keegan tattoo on his chest that as he's got fatter has morphed into lovejoy)


 
Paris - London - Rome - Berlin
We shall fight, we shall win!
Ian - McShane - Dudley - Sutton
We shall tinker, we shall tut on!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

Wordpess seems to have changed - anyone know how you upload pdfs on there now? It used to be dead easy - there was a library tab on the dashboard and you just clicked on that and could upload - I have no idea how to do it now.


----------



## Ax^ (Dec 17, 2012)

*is going to have to take an hour or 2 out this week and get caught up on this and the other thread*


Looks like you lot have been having fun


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Paris - London - Rome - Berlin
> We shall fight, we shall win!
> Ian - McShane - Dudley - Sutton
> We shall tinker, we shall tut on!


Just need to get eric in there somehow.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 17, 2012)

A nose that size is difficult to keep out


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Wordpess seems to have changed - anyone know how you upload pdfs on there now? It used to be dead easy - there was a library tab on the dashboard and you just clicked on that and could upload - I have no idea how to do it now.


They're all at that link i posted earlier.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> They're all at that link i posted earlier.


 
Oh ok thanks.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Wordpess seems to have changed - anyone know how you upload pdfs on there now? It used to be dead easy - there was a library tab on the dashboard and you just clicked on that and could upload - I have no idea how to do it now.


 
Media > Add New > drag & drop or navigate folders

or

Posts > New Posts > Add Media button > drag & drop or navigate folders via 'Insert Media > Upload Files'

or

same thing for New Page

or via Edit Post/Page.


----------



## love detective (Dec 17, 2012)

does anyone find operating twitter a bit like trying to fly a plane or look after a baby, there's just far too much going on at once

and the present is already in the past before you you realise it's not the future anymore


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

And anyway the shower of subhuman tory detritus Guido Fawkes has this on his blog. I bet he's lurking (hi there, gulag fodder)

http://order-order.com/2012/12/17/n...interns-aware-say-staggers-should-be-ashamed/



> *New Statesman Internship Auctioned for £1,000
> Interns Aware Say Staggers Should be “Ashamed”*
> 
> At the recent Olympics Ball raising money for Britain’s young athletes, the _New Statesman_, that paragon equality of opportunity, auctioned off internships £1,000-a-pop. A great scoop from Dave Lee this lunchtime. _“You will have the chance to contribute your ideas and writing to their hugely popular website”_ gushed Lot 75 with a starting bid of £1,000


 
I'm not quoting any more of the bastard, but according to Intern Aware 1/3 of the editorial staff at the New Statesman are unpaid.

Fucking scab paper, we should be having anti-workfare demo's outside their offices.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> does anyone find operating twitter a bit like trying to fly a plane or look after a baby, there's just far too much going on at once
> 
> and the present is already in the past before you you realise it's not the future anymore


Fucking hate the thing and regret it every time I try and look something up.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> And anyway the shower of subhuman tory detritus Guido Fawkes has this on his blog. I bet he's lurking (hi there, gulag fodder)
> 
> http://order-order.com/2012/12/17/n...interns-aware-say-staggers-should-be-ashamed/
> 
> ...


Paging Mr Bone.


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> does anyone find operating twitter a bit like trying to fly a plane or look after a baby, there's just far too much going on at once
> 
> and the present is already in the past before you you realise it's not the future anymore


It's good for links to info, but you can't really discuss anything. It's the equivalent of shouting something shouty through someone's letterbox and running away.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 17, 2012)

cesare said:


> It's good for links to info, but you can't really discuss anything. It's the equivalent of shouting something shouty through someone's letterbox and running away.


Except the receiver of the letter might not see yours as there are thousands of other letters stuffed into the box


----------



## love detective (Dec 17, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> And anyway the shower of subhuman tory detritus Guido Fawkes has this on his blog. I bet he's lurking (hi there, gulag fodder)
> 
> http://order-order.com/2012/12/17/n...interns-aware-say-staggers-should-be-ashamed/
> 
> ...


 
lol


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

First two paragraphs - open with a masive lie then write about it clumsily.




> On the bus this morning, a young father was distributing pocket money to his three small children. The eldest was kicking the back of my chair in bone-jarringly rhythmic anticipation of being taken to town for a day's shopping, but when he received his small handout, the kicking stopped.
> 
> "I'm not going to spend my £3, Dad," announced the boy, "I'm going to save it, and then I’m going to save all my pocket money, and then I can go to university and get a good job."


Which is why:


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Any interns at Red Pepper? What other 'left-wing' mags are there?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Laura said:
			
		

> Well, precisely. I admire NS's decision to add the disclosure to this piece (I only felt obliged to come clean about my own work) but I think we should focus on the trend as a whole rather than New Statesman in particular.


 
The disclosure was:

(*Disclosure: the New Statesman employs unpaid interns.)

_So,it shouldn't be about the specific paper that i co-edit, just about general trends._


----------



## Joe Reilly (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> So the membership is really fucking thick, with no 'clarity of ideas'. But the working class itself is even thicker, and their thickness is contageous - the more embedded we are in workplaces and w/c communities the more their thickness rubs off on us.


 
Simply add 'racist' ('only the scum on the estates vote BNP') to 'thickness' and there you have it.


----------



## _angel_ (Dec 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> does anyone find operating twitter a bit like trying to fly a plane or look after a baby, there's just far too much going on at once
> 
> and the present is already in the past before you you realise it's not the future anymore


Leave the cryptic comments to the boss!


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> The disclosure was:
> 
> (*Disclosure: the New Statesman employs unpaid interns.)
> 
> _So,it shouldn't be about the specific paper that i co-edit, just about general trends._


 
That does sound like an effort to look like acknowledging the matter without actually acknowledging it in any meaningful sense at all.

The words 'lip service' and 'fobbing off' do spring to mind.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Any interns at Red Pepper? What other 'left-wing' mags are there?


 
Er... http://redpepperinterns.com/

Also what do you all make of Tony Benn visiting private school pupils and teachers for special sessions?

http://www.concordcollegeuk.com/default.asp?page=44&news=419



> Tony Benn visited Concord this week and held an audience with staff and students. He was invited to answer a wide range of questions on the ‘60s social revolution?’ - British society from 1959-1975 – being studied by a group of AS students but also spoke much more widely about his career in politics, his opinions on current affairs and memorable moments including his interview with Ali G!


----------



## articul8 (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Any interns at Red Pepper? What other 'left-wing' mags are there?


 
No need for the 'marks' -we have had people volunteer and occasionally take people on structured internships eg. as part of journalism uni courses - but we don't advertise unpaid internships, and in any case there are no paid editorial staff or shareholders.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

Wouldn't it have been nice if Laurie had come on here, proved the cynics wrong, and actually engaged with us as if we were equal human beings?

I mean I know there's a million and one Tory bastards who are probably worse than her, but I don't see any point in having a running commentary of their shit views. I don't want to engage with them in a conversation, infact the only thing I'm interesting in saying to any of those arshole like Staines or Cole is "Ready, Aim, Fire"


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Er... http://redpepperinterns.com/
> 
> Also what do you all make of Tony Benn visiting private school pupils and teachers for special sessions?
> 
> http://www.concordcollegeuk.com/default.asp?page=44&news=419


Good spot. It seems that there's a network of private school 'boosting' stuff that i never really knew existed. Motivational talks, network offering opps and so on.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Er... http://redpepperinterns.com


http://redpepperinterns.com/

err..I don't know where this is from (I can hazard a good guess given the spelling) but it has nothing to do with us:


> http://redpepperinterns.com/
> *Who is eligible for the program?*
> We’re looking for currently enrolled college juniors and seniors.
> *I’ve already graduated college. Can I apply?*Unfortunately due to Labor Laws, only currently enrolled college students can apply to the internship program.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Oh shit, you're twelve years old.
> 
> I feel bad for losing an argument with you now.


 
Quite right too.

Sir.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

articul8 said:


> No need for the 'marks' -we have had people volunteer and occasionally take people on structured internships eg. as part of journalism uni courses - but we don't advertise unpaid internships, and in any case there are no paid editorial staff or shareholders.


Is that a yes or a no? I note the page that is linked above is all about students - only students? Why

edit: ok that's nothing to do with you then. Ignore.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Er... http://redpepperinterns.com/
> 
> Also what do you all make of Tony Benn visiting private school pupils and teachers for special sessions?
> 
> http://www.concordcollegeuk.com/default.asp?page=44&news=419


 
I'm prepared to give Benn a bit of leeway that I wouldn't normally give anyone else. Coz it's Tony Benn.

And if he's just visiting a school to give a talk that's relatively harmless, isn't it? I presume he's not on retainer or anything. That's what Tony Benn does, he gives talks to people. He gave a talk about the Luddites in Huddersfield not too long ago.

I know that probably makes me a hypocrite, but I probably wouldn't even be a socialist if it hadn't have been for Tony Benn.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

articul8 said:


> err..I don't know where this is from (I can hazard a good guess given the spelling) but it has nothing to do with us:


 
It's from America, a joke, the interns are everywhere - I doubt you'd give us the full details, but nearly everything for money in the media uses interns.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Wouldn't it have been nice if Laurie had come on here, proved the cynics wrong, and actually engaged with us as if we were equal human beings?


Her point was to make sure that we all understand that we are not all equal human beings.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I'm prepared to give Benn a bit of leeway that I wouldn't normally give anyone else. Coz it's Tony Benn.
> 
> And if he's just visiting a school to give a talk that's relatively harmless, isn't it? I presume he's not on retainer or anything. That's what Tony Benn does, he gives talks to people. He gave a talk about the Luddites in Huddersfield not too long ago.
> 
> I know that probably me a hypocrite, but I probably wouldn't even be a socialist if it hadn't have been for Tony Benn.


It's the network those talks are embedded in that counts - not the talker We've already seen Laura giving talks at private schools as favour to ex-teachers.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> He point was to make sure that we all understand that we are not all equal human beings.


 
We're not "serious people?" as James Ball put it?

I said that to Helen Lewis in our stupid pathetic fucking e-mail exchange, just coz I'm not an Oxbridge graduate with a job in the media in London doesn't make me a lesser human being. I'm every bit as politically engaged as these people, except I try to do what I can in very unglamorous places with no fucking money at all. Is that not serious? Doesn't that count?

Christ I've pretty much pissed my life and future prospects away before my mid-20's away so I could be a socialist. I don't think I'll ever get a stable job coz all that time I should've spent networking and intern-ing I spent doing things that I felt mattered. Fucking joke, who wants to employ a 25 year old Barista with a IR and politics degree ffs?

GRIM GRIM GRIM GRIM GRIM


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> We're not "serious people?" as James Ball put it?
> 
> I said that to Helen Lewis in our stupid pathetic fucking e-mail exchange, just coz I'm not an Oxbridge graduate with a job in the media in London doesn't make me a lesser human being. I'm every bit as politically engaged as these people, except I try to do what I can in very unglamorous places with no fucking money at all. Is that not serious? Doesn't that count?
> 
> ...


 
Are you in London, and do you have an extensive network? We probably need some interns after Xmas.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> It's the network those talks are embedded in that counts - not the talker We've already seen Laura giving talks at private schools as favour to ex-teachers.


 
David Aaronovitch does the same thing - a private school despite the name.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bristol-Grammar-School/505971366084103?sk=photos_albums

On interns it's the model in America for the media, architecture, graphic design etc. There's zero way it can be resisted here. The New Republic and Mother Jones both use interns, it's the only way to compete effectively with the rightwing centre magazines that have been doing it ages.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> We're not "serious people?" as James Ball put it?
> 
> I said that to Helen Lewis in our stupid pathetic fucking e-mail exchange, just coz I'm not an Oxbridge graduate with a job in the media in London doesn't make me a lesser human being. I'm every bit as politically engaged as these people, except I try to do what I can in very unglamorous places with no fucking money at all. Is that not serious? Doesn't that count?
> 
> ...


These people.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> David Aaronovitch does the same thing - a private school despite the name.
> 
> https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bristol-Grammar-School/505971366084103?sk=photos_albums
> 
> On interns it's the model in America for the media, architecture, graphic design etc. There's zero way it can be resisted here. The New Republic and Mother Jones both use interns, it's the only way to compete effectively with the rightwing centre magazines that have been doing it ages.


God, BGS -you are entirely right that it's a private school despite the name. Met some well sound people from there as well. Bankys' old school.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> David Aaronovitch does the same thing - a private school despite the name.
> 
> https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bristol-Grammar-School/505971366084103?sk=photos_albums
> 
> On interns it's the model in America for the media, architecture, graphic design etc. There's zero way it can be resisted here. The New Republic and Mother Jones both use interns, it's the only way to compete effectively with the rightwing centre magazines that have been doing it ages.


 
It's also the model increasingly in creative software design, advertising - Red Pepper Land - is an example and publishing.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 17, 2012)

That RPLand ad agency is involved in a facial recognition app to offer personalised discounts and retail offers 

http://redpepperland.com/lab/details/check-in-with-your-face



> *How does it work?*
> 
> Facial recognition cameras are installed at local businesses. These cameras recognize your face when you pass by, then check you in at the location. Simultaneously, your smartphone notifies you of a customized deal based on your Like history.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 17, 2012)

ReturnOfElfman said:


> Until I went to (an old polytechnic) uni, the only group I knew that were having open political meetings were the BNP (in the working men's club on my street). I find it awful that I had to go to uni to find out about working class politics. These 'socialist' groups seem to spend far too much time on uni campuses than they do in housing estates. If they did go out onto housing estates (doing anything else other than shoving a leaflet through someone's door telling them not to vote BNP) they wouldn't have a clue what to say to people. When I had finished uni and gone back to my home town, it just seemed impossible to do any sort of pro-working-class-community type stuff (similar to what the IWCA have done) because all the leftys wouldn't do anything outside of a city centre or uni campus.


 
Exactly the same back in the '70s and '80s.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> That RPLand ad agency is involved in a facial recognition app to offer personalised discounts and retail offers
> 
> http://redpepperland.com/lab/details/check-in-with-your-face


 
Two areas of interns in one!


----------



## JimW (Dec 17, 2012)

Time for the PD Intern Programme - internment without trial for any and all media luvvies who don't run quick enough.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 17, 2012)

So what's the story with the latest SWP expulsions then? Who? Why? What's it about?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

I wonder how many people are on elite level internships compared to people on work program?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> So what's the story with the latest SWP expulsions then? Who? Why? What's it about?


He can run but he can't hide. Or do you mean the lower level stuff like paris, leeds?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

didn't know they had a Paris branch?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> didn't know they had a Paris branch?


They even drink outside cafes.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

in their black polo necks and berets


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 17, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> didn't know they had a Paris branch?


 
The Swappies' international undercover cadre, yesterday:


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Good spot. It seems that there's a network of private school 'boosting' stuff that i never really knew existed. Motivational talks, network offering opps and so on.


 
You didn't know it existed?  How else do you think stupid people get to rule the world?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Talent.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

I didn't know there was this informal sort of network hidden behind the more open stuff. It seems even more disgusting.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 17, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> So what's the story with the latest SWP expulsions then? Who? Why? What's it about?


 
Darlington branch wiped out


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I didn't know there was this informal sort of network hidden behind the more open stuff. It seems even more disgusting.


I'd thought someone like you (no doubt involved in many informal influence networks) would've suspected as much. No barb intended.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 17, 2012)

Shall we all be racist now Father? Only I've a4e on my back and not quite sure how much time I can commit to the old racism Father.



GOOD FOR YOU SPINEY! GOOD FOR YOU! I HATE THE FECKIN GREEKS


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I didn't know there was this informal sort of network hidden behind the more open stuff. It seems even more disgusting.


 
There's a whole series of over lapping networks some of which cross over with the various "activist" ones as well


----------



## FreddyB (Dec 17, 2012)

That Kenan Malik "How to make a riot" extract is genus, never fails in a Here, read this, everything you need to know sort of way.


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I didn't know there was this informal sort of
> network hidden behind the more open stuff. It seems even more disgusting.


 
Last year I read this thing _Skippy Dies, _a very dark Irish novel about abuse and suicide in a feepaying Dublin school. It mentioned in passing that kids in those places get one-on-one careers advice sessions from 'old boys' in e.g. financial services.


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 17, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> Shall we all be racist now Father? Only I've a4e on my back and not quite sure how much time I can commit to the old racism Father.
> 
> 
> 
> GOOD FOR YOU SPINEY! GOOD FOR YOU! I HATE THE FECKIN GREEKS


 
This celibacy is hard for a man.


----------



## ska invita (Dec 17, 2012)

Rob Ray said:


> In fact thinking about it you part-specialise in radical feminist writing right? How about you do something for the Feminist Library down in Lambeth. I don't mean write another piece in the Staggers, I mean volunteer for a couple years as a fundraiser and promoter. You're well networked with wealthy people, and they need £8k a year to meet rent. Do some proper work, get them new digs and _don't_ use it as another line on your wadical Twitter Bio. It won't give you the right to speak for the left, but it'd be a start.


Feminsit LIbrary are desperate for cash, and the Womens Library remains under threat last i heard (a month back) http://historyfeminism.wordpress.co...ibrary-is-under-threat-campaign-and-petition/


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

TruXta said:


> I'd thought someone like you (no doubt involved in many informal influence networks) would've suspected as much. No barb intended.


I'm just too trusting.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I'm just too trusting.


If you're a pessimist you'll only ever have nice surprises.


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

TruXta said:


> If you're a pessimist you'll only ever have nice surprises.





> Cally: My people have a saying: A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken. Avon: Life expectancy must be fairly short among your people.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> He can run but he can't hide. Or do you mean the lower level stuff like paris, leeds?


 
I'm not sure. I know that there's an ongoing row about Mr Fred Perry and that this is related to an ongoing row about sexism in the SWP and that some people have just been expelled, but I've no idea if the last part is anything to do with the first two parts. Why did Paris, Leeds, get the boot?

A few years back, all the gory details would have been all over this place!


----------



## Balbi (Dec 17, 2012)

TruXta said:


> If you're a pessimist you'll only ever have nice surprises.


 






]

No.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

His series only ran for three years,what he know?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

cesare said:


> .


Where's that from?


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

Blakes 7


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

cesare said:


> Blakes 7


Never saw it.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 17, 2012)

JimW said:


> Time for the PD Intern Programme - internment without trial for any and all media luvvies who don't run quick enough.


 
Surely "without trial" goes without saying, comrade? What need have The People of the _bourgeois_ affectation formerly known as the "criminal justice system", when we have The Peoples' Justice?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Surely "without trial" goes without saying, comrade? What need have The People of the _bourgeois_ affectation formerly known as the "criminal justice system", when we have The Peoples' Justice?


Pitchforks for everyone?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I'm not sure. I know that there's an ongoing row about Mr Fred Perry and that this is related to an ongoing row about sexism in the SWP and that some people have just been expelled, but I've no idea if the last part is anything to do with the first two parts. Why did Paris, Leeds, get the boot?
> 
> A few years back, all the gory details would have been all over this place!


Unconnected on the surface, but they are a surprising bunch. On the paris, leeds stuff,given we've got people on here who apparently know the involved _i would hope they're off asking questions and reporting back._


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 17, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Pitchforks for everyone?


'Forks' seem terribly bourgeois and un-PD. I suggest 'People's Pitchsporks'.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Interment _and_ show trial.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> 'Forks' seem terribly bourgeois and un-PD. I suggest 'People's Pitchsporks'.


Sporks? FFS line me up against the wall right now.


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Never saw it.


Anti establishment Star Trek but with a set made of cardboard tubes and crisp wrappers sprayed with Elnett


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Interment _and_ show trial.


If they're under six feet of finest gravel, won't that make the show trial part of it a bit lacking in the visual department?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> If they're under six feet of finest gravel, won't that make the show trial part of it a bit lacking in the visual department?


It would only add.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 17, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Sporks? FFS line me up against the wall right now.


I'm pretty sure you were aleady on the list, no need to queue-jump.

'Don't you know who I am?!'


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

cesare said:


> Anti establishment Star Trek but with a set made of cardboard tubes and crisp wrappers sprayed with Elnett


Oh cheers, have heard it being referenced/mentioned loads of times.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 17, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Never saw it.


 

make the effort. Its weird, dark and yes the effects are largely lol today but it was good TV.


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Oh cheers, have heard it being referenced/mentioned loads of times.



One of the motifs being that CCTV = somewhere approaching the height of state surveillance/threat. This was back in the late 70s/early 80s


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

cesare said:


> One of the motifs being that CCTV = somewhere approaching the height of state surveillance/threat. This was back in the late 70s/early 80s


The innocence of youth eh?


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Interment _and_ show trial.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Or some Communist gardening.


----------



## JimW (Dec 17, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Pitchforks for everyone?


Pitchforks for some, small hammer-bomb-and-sickle flags for others.


----------



## JimW (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> It would only add.


Dig 'em up and do it again, Lord Protector style.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

JimW said:


> Dig 'em up and do it again, Lord Protector style.


Fucking right.


----------



## love detective (Dec 17, 2012)

> Piala Murray ‏@ArielUnbound
> @PennyRed @gozooheck @brianwhelanhack @LoveDetective1@spineynorman78 Big male insecure egos upset by big multi-Human multi-Gender Presences


 
what does this even mean?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> make the effort. Its weird, dark and yes the effects are largely lol today but it was good TV.


4 seasons of 13 eps each.... hmmm. I might get to it in a few years time.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 17, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I'm not sure. I know that there's an ongoing row about Mr Fred Perry and that this is related to an ongoing row about sexism in the SWP and that some people have just been expelled, but I've no idea if the last part is anything to do with the first two parts. Why did Paris, Leeds, get the boot?
> 
> A few years back, all the gory details would have been all over this place!


they're a busted flush now - doesn't really matter


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> what does this even mean?


It's queer and feminist and multi-cultural, you wouldn't get it.


----------



## JimW (Dec 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> what does this even mean?


"I know some buzz phrases that win me arguments with the sort of twats I hang around with, and now use them in place of an argument on all occasions."


----------



## Fruitloop (Dec 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> what does this even mean?


Something to do with self-dribbling jewelled basketballs IIRC


----------



## FreddyB (Dec 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> what does this even mean?


It means twitter is a source of almost limitless drivel from people desperate for approval.


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> what does this even mean?


Haha


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> what does this even mean?


It means _I'm in control_


----------



## JimW (Dec 17, 2012)

I think "multi-gender presence" means you're getting a set of His n Hers towels for Chrimbo.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

JimW said:


> I think "multi-gender presence" means you're getting a set of His n Hers towels for Chrimbo.


Uni-sex eau de toilette?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

> multi-Human multi-Gender Presences


-i.e you're not only racist, you hate queers too. Deepening and darkening.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 17, 2012)

Multi-human - resistance is futile. We are in you.


----------



## JimW (Dec 17, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Uni-sex eau de toilette?


That works better really, avoiding me binary.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

Is this where I have to line up against the wall with my pants down and cheeks spread?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Is this where I have to line up against the wall with my pants down and cheeks spread?


I thought you were norwegian?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I thought you were norwegian?


And?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

TruXta said:


> And?


You know, the war and that.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

Don't geddit. Long weekend, too much fun has scrambled the brains.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 17, 2012)

love detective said:
			
		

> what does this even mean?



That Laurie and Bragg are lizards.


----------



## love detective (Dec 17, 2012)

_A spectre is haunting twitter, the big multi-Human multi-Gender Presences_


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

I, personally, am many humans.


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

love detective said:


> _A spectre is haunting twitter, the big multi-Human multi-Gender Presences_


I keep visualising the Flying Spaghetti Monster with noodly appendages


----------



## love detective (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I, personally, am many humans.


 
and so are my wife


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Christmas presence-bring that shit. Multily.


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 17, 2012)

> Piala Murray ‏@ArielUnbound
> @PennyRed @gozooheck @brianwhelanhack @LoveDetective1@spineynorman78 Big male insecure egos upset by big multi-Human multi-Gender Presences


 
You calling me a fucking bloke, Piala?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

steph said:


> You calling me a fucking bloke, Piala?


 
a sexist bloke too.

Could I interest you in a subscription to Nuts by any chance?


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 17, 2012)

is this the future? we are now free to deflect any criticism of our politics as misogynist, homophobic or racist? Cos if thats the case I'm pretty fucked being a young white prole. Is there a handy label I can attatch to my detractors? I bet there isn't

_rights for whites_


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

_Hello, i write for vice magazin_e.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> is this the future? we are now free to deflect any criticism of our politics as misogynist, homophobic or racist? Cos if thats the case I'm pretty fucked being a young white prole. Is there a handy label I can attatch to my detractors? I bet there isn't
> 
> _rights for whites_


Men's rights!


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 17, 2012)

This stuff just reminds me why I had to get away from these sorts of privilege/identity politic spaces (even as someone who saw/still sees some value in it) - every discussion just got closed down with this sort of 'racist/sexist/homophobic' accusation without barely analysing anything.

And class/capital based stuff was nearly always pushed into the background.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 17, 2012)

cesare said:


> Wasn't she the one that wrote that handwringing piece a while back in Comment Is Free? About how howwibly activists are treated by the state?


 


No-she's the blonde one. Jethro's sister.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Oh god.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Dec 17, 2012)

Billy fucking Bragg to the rescue


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 17, 2012)

I'll give you 3/1 on Glinner getting stuck in within 24 hours


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 17, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Christ I've pretty much pissed my life and future prospects away before my mid-20's away so I could be a socialist.


 

I did that, but being a socialist was entirely incidental to the matter.


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

cesare said:


> It's good for links to info, but you can't really discuss anything. It's the equivalent of shouting something shouty through someone's letterbox and running away.


 
It confuses the f'ck out of me, twitter. I can only really use it and follow it on a proper computer with multiple windows open. It's not meant for discussion though is it, it's more LISTEN TO ME!


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 17, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I think you will find I did defend the trauma team or whatever they were called and I stand by that


A mate of mine was involved with that. He's currently holed up somewhere in Norfolk writing a book on Genoa. Been nearly ten years in the making, I hope it's gonna be worth reading!


----------



## JimW (Dec 17, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> I did that, but being a socialist was entirely incidental to the matter.


Similar, but I felt my politics, such as they were, gave my failure a sheen of nobility.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Me too, i just fell into editing the new statesmen. Wasted life.


----------



## rekil (Dec 17, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> If they're under six feet of finest gravel, won't that make the show trial part of it a bit lacking in the visual department?


Prolederella with their graves as the stage.


----------



## barney_pig (Dec 17, 2012)

Reading la Femme Rouge, I am struck by her resemblance to Violet Elizabeth former paramour of the revolutionary hero Cockers


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 17, 2012)

Fruitloop said:


> Something to do with self-dribbling jewelled basketballs IIRC


DMT addled nonsense.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Fucking hell. How can you - even you - seriously believe this?


 It's like Marcuse's _Two Dimensional Man_. What is being criticized of Laurie is something that comes from a whole journalistic culture.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> It's like Marcuse's _Two Dimensional Man_. What is being criticized of Laurie is something that comes from a whole journalistic culture.


A bit like Marx' Capital: my visit to London.


----------



## JimW (Dec 17, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> It's like Marcuse's _Two Dimensional Man_. What is being criticized of Laurie is something that comes from a whole journalistic culture.


Yeah, I took that to be your point, but think it is the point of the thread too (is for me any way), she's just the prominent example _de jour_ and not backwards in pushing herself forwards as regards issues of interest to people here (I presume).


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> It's like Marcuse's _Two Dimensional Man_. What is being criticized of Laurie is something that comes from a whole journalistic culture.


Imagine if other people had made that point on this thread.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> It's like Marcuse's _Two Dimensional Man_. What is being criticized of Laurie is something that comes from a whole journalistic culture.


 
It's like [insert author and book for intellectual posturing here] glad you came along to tell us cos nobody else had noticed or commented on that.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> It's like [insert author and book for intellectual posturing here] glad you came along to tell us cos nobody else had noticed or commented on that.


I would hope these unnamed so-called individuals got the book name right mind. Or had read it.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> glad you came along to tell us cos nobody else had noticed or commented on that.


 
We're all too thick to see it, you see.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 17, 2012)

JimW said:


> Similar, but I felt my politics, such as they were, gave my failure a sheen of nobility.


 

I wasn't born so much as I fell out, nobody seemed to notice me...


----------



## co-op (Dec 17, 2012)

firky said:


> It confuses the f'ck out of me, twitter. I can only really use it and follow it on a proper computer with multiple windows open. It's not meant for discussion though is it, it's more LISTEN TO ME!


 
Yes I find twitter shit too, even when people are kindly posting screen grabs I can't work out who's talking to who or what. Just LISTEN TO WHAT* I* HAVE TO SAY! - it's the perfect mode of communication for coked-up media tossers, shout loud, shout often, shout with confidence, ignore any responses you don't like, stay 5 seconds ahead, but 5 seconds ahead _permanently_.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> A bit like Marx' Capital: my visit to London.


 

Highgate Cemetery, I am in you


----------



## co-op (Dec 17, 2012)

Also, "this is why we can't have nice things" - that's what a patronising mother says to her children when they are having a tantrum. Hard to get more condescending than that.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> I wasn't born so much as I fell out, nobody seemed to notice me...


 
Did you ever get to see over that hedge then Sam?


----------



## JimW (Dec 17, 2012)

co-op said:


> Yes I find twitter shit too, even when people are kindly posting screen grabs I can't work out who's talking to who or what. Just LISTEN TO WHAT* I* HAVE TO SAY! - it's the perfect mode of communication for coked-up media tossers, shout loud, shout often, shout with confidence, ignore any responses you don't like, stay 5 seconds ahead, but 5 seconds ahead _permanently_.


But how else would I know if Stephen Fry was in a lift or not?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

co-op said:


> Also, "this is why we can't have nice things" - that's what a patronising mother says to her children when they are having a tantrum. Hard to get more condescending than that.


 
As other people have pointed out - it is a bit of a meme/running joke thing...


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Did you ever get to see over that hedge then Sam?


 


No-I wasn't in the suburbs unfortunately.


----------



## co-op (Dec 17, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> As other people have pointed out - it is a bit of a meme/running joke thing...


 
Ah fair enough, there's only so many memes I can keep up with.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

co-op said:


> Also, "this is why we can't have nice things" - that's what a patronising mother says to her children when they are having a tantrum. Hard to get more condescending than that.


Designed to as well - and all based on her knowledge of her relative privilege.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

copliker said:


> First laugh of the day. Bravo Emma!
> 
> 
> *HaslandEmma* ‏@*EmmaHasland*
> @*PennyRed* @*spineynorman78* is a wanker but he's no racist. I ask 2 polite questions about u calling him a racist + u block me. Why?


 
And it does me good like it bloody well should!


----------



## FreddyB (Dec 17, 2012)

firky said:


> It confuses the f'ck out of me, twitter. I can only really use it and follow it on a proper computer with multiple windows open. It's not meant for discussion though is it, it's more LISTEN TO ME!


 
It's a game. Depends on how you want to play it, what you want out of it. Getting blocked by the likes of Hundal, Harri, Penny etc is really easy, you don't even need to go to the bother of making a cartoon of them. They're all followed by thousands of sycophantic no hopers  like the nob head quoted in this thread earlier



> Piala Murray ‏@ArielUnbound
> @PennyRed @gozooheck @brianwhelanhack @LoveDetective1@spineynorman78 Big male insecure egos upset by big multi-Human multi-Gender Presences


 
Which basically translates to "look at me Laurie, I'm your friend, be my friend, I don't like the nasty men either."

Harder is to get them to engage with you while taking the piss and picking up followers from them as you go. Not that there's any point to it, unless you want to sell them a t-shirt that's really a piss take anyway but they're too wrapped up their own egos to notice it. I love it myself, it's all the fun especially when they get it wrong because they've not had time to think it through and their ego becomes a massive handicap preventing them from simply typing "Sorry, got it wrong"


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

Presences my precioussssss


----------



## kavenism (Dec 17, 2012)

co-op said:


> Also, "this is why we can't have nice things" - that's what a patronising mother says to her children when they are having a tantrum. Hard to get more condescending than that.


 

Probably.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 17, 2012)

One tweet to rule them all, one tweet to bind them,
One tweet to bring them all, and in the Darkness bind them.

In the land of London, where the Statesmen lie.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I would hope these unnamed so-called individuals got the book name right mind. Or had read it.



i have read it :/ but, yeah, wrong title. shoot me!

there aren't many ppl you could lure into a fred like this but getting engagement with anyone at all has to be different


----------



## Balbi (Dec 17, 2012)

kavenism said:


> *daft bastardry*


----------



## love detective (Dec 17, 2012)

kavenism said:


> ...


 
jesus fuck, give it a rest


----------



## rekil (Dec 17, 2012)

dave said:
			
		

> "There's a calculation that I've begun to do whenever I find myself visiting an events hall, or a posh set of offices , or *the home of someone over 40*. I take in the number and size of the rooms and work out how many of the legion poor and peripatetic young people I know could live in the extra space.
> 
> I'm currently without secure accommodation for the fourth time this year, and trying desperately to find another hovel within commuting distance of my job. It's draining, and it's debilitating, and it's a daily experience for millions of people with *the misfortune to be low earners, or immigrants, or under 30.*





cockneyreject said:


> She's got a real thing about people with a few years on the clock ain't she? Bloody ageist!


 


JimW said:


> Should we not hold that guest columnist page in the next Girder after all, then?


It's been bumped to make way for a pullout Retro special on bourgeois ageism and middleaged WDS flying columns.


----------



## rekil (Dec 17, 2012)

kavenism said:


> ...


Ta


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

**


----------



## Random (Dec 17, 2012)

kavenism said:


> ***.


Seeing as how this thread is now a discussion with new public interest I think we need to go Zero Tolerance on personal insults, otherwise all the political posts will be dragged down into the stalking shite.

Edit: you're all way ahead of me


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

****


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Random said:


> Seeing as how this thread is now a discussion with new public interest I think we need to go Zero Tolerance on personal insults, otherwise all the political posts will be dragged down into the stalking shite.
> 
> Edit: you're all way ahead of me


Don't help them.


----------



## kavenism (Dec 17, 2012)

copliker said:


> Ta


 
As requested. Sorry that was a bit crude.
Although you might wish to consider how her experiences around that time might explain her leaping to accusations of misogyny and sexism every time she is criticized. There is something there, and it means that there is little chance of reasoning with her when she does it.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Good spot. It seems that there's a network of private school 'boosting' stuff that i never really knew existed. Motivational talks, network offering opps and so on.


 

Also interestingly, Laurie Penny's old school, Brighton College is opening _another_ tax evasion school in the low-tax pro-expatriate wealth-hoarding Middle East monarchies.


"Brighton College, Sussex, is to launch a second sister school in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, to be constructed 160 kilometres from the capital city of Abu Dhabi in Al Ain, the Garden City of the United Arab Emirates.
Brighton College UAE will open in September 2013 and will provide a British-style education across the 3 to 18 age range. The Brighton College curriculum will be taught, leading to the award of GCSEs and A-Levels. Pupils will seek entry to the _leading UK and US universities_. Its stated aim is to become one of the leading schools of the Middle East. ... 

Brighton College Abu Dhabi [its first foreign school] opened in 2011 with 580 pupils. Its roll will increase in September to 900 with the opening of Year 10 and its GCSE programmes. Lord Skidelsky, the leading economist and author, and Chairman of Governors of Brighton College, said: "We have been delighted with the success of Brighton College Abu Dhabi, our first sister school. British private education is currently ranked the best in the world by the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation, well ahead of schools in the United States. France. Germany and elsewhere. We are therefore looking forward to opening our second partner school in the UAE where demand for top quality British-style education is strong." (Independent Schools Magazine, June-July 2012)

Lord Skidelsky, by the way, is the pro-Labour "Keynesian" economist biographer + re-populariser of Keynes (see here  for example)

Basically anglo- tax evaders in Abu Dhabi (also with its Swiss-style bank accounts) get to send their children to an identikit version of a British private school near where they are domiciled, simply with a few extra ruling Muslim aristocrats' children. The school atmosphere and approach is straight from the home model.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

Ah Lord Skidelsky ex SDP, and a author of a Mosely hagiography.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

kavenism said:


> As requested. Sorry that was a bit crude.
> Although you might wish to consider how _her experiences around that time might explain her leaping to accusations of misogyny and sexism every time she is criticized_. There is something there, and it means that there is little chance of reasoning with her when she does it.


 
Why are you applying armchair psychology to LP? It's meaningless and then some. Are we going to start applying the same approach to Sunny Hundal to uncover why he's such a flip-flopping Obama lover (much worse than Laurie Penny) or David Aaronovitch (is he a grade A prick because his dad Sam was a much respected CPGB economist intellectual, who gave his time to Communist Conferences instead of David). It's overwhelmingly with women that this stuff comes out.

PS As anyone sane would sense that media world - having to deal with the likes of Paul Staines and the right-wing blogs - means that much of the time sexism is directed at Laurie Penny (sexism disguised as politics a la David Starkey - in that battle I'm on Laurie's side 100%).


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

It's not the first bit of pop psychology to appear on this thread but yes.


----------



## emanymton (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Someone whose name begins with P? There's also someone from Cambridge who's been put on the 'national membership' and banned from attending branch meetings becuase they didn't like the way they voted in a Unite ballot (some kind of unite election anyway).
> 
> And the reply from the CC is an absolute disgrace, I'm quite angry about it - much as I dislike the organization I know some really good people in the SWP and the contempt they're all being shown by the CC is well out of order.
> 
> ...


I got them from the cpgb website this morning so have only given them a very quick skim.
Yes p but I won't say any more as I don't want to risk causing any problems for anyone. And yes I agree the CC reply is woefully.
This is not the thread for it but just two things from my quick skim.
First this gem from the very top of Page 21 of number 3


> It’s no exaggeration to say that UAF/SWP have been central to Tommy Robinson’s Downfall.


Second looking at the recruitment figures in number 2, I make it 141 union members and 311 students of various ages. Draw your own conclusions. interestingly there seems to be no entry for people not in a union not a student.

Oh, my instinct is that the guy from Cambridge is a bit of a tosser, the sort who makes everyone start groaning every time he speaks in a meeting.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 17, 2012)

emanymton said:


> Second looking at the recruitment figures in number 2, I make it 141 union members and 311 students of various ages. Draw your own conclusions. interestingly there seems to be no entry for people not in a union not a student.


 
why should there be entry for people who don't really exist


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

emanymton said:


> Second looking at the recruitment figures in number 2, I make it 141 union members and 311 students of various ages. Draw your own conclusions. interestingly there seems to be no entry for people not in a union not a student.


 
Yeah, I liked this part:



> The registered membership of the SWP stands at 7,597. This is up on last year’s figure of 7,127, the 2010 figure of 6,587, the 2009 figure of 6,417 and 2008’s of 6,155.


 
The increase is sort of inevitable when you consider that they never, ever remove anyone from the membership lists. Guess they might if you went on a machine gun massacre or something but that's about it. I left in about 2009 I think and didn't just stop my subs - I sent a long, ranting resignation letter to the office  But I assume that the fact they still send me the IBs means I'm still classed as a member!

Sorry, end of derail.


----------



## emanymton (Dec 17, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I'm not sure. I know that there's an ongoing row about Mr Fred Perry and that this is related to an ongoing row about sexism in the SWP and that some people have just been expelled, but I've no idea if the last part is anything to do with the first two parts. Why did Paris, Leeds, get the boot?
> 
> A few years back, all the gory details would have been all over this place!


We were relaying on you to supply all the gory details.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 17, 2012)

It's like the sex offenders register - once you're on the list...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

articul8 said:


> It's like the sex offenders register - once you're on the list...


 
I wouldn't know about that


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 17, 2012)

articul8 said:


> It's like the sex offenders register - once you're on the list...


you're articul8?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

Yes he is - the name to the left of the post is a dead giveaway though to be honest.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I wouldn't know about that


 
Orr do you?


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yes he is - the name to the left of the post is a dead giveaway though to be honest.


meant to be following through his message


----------



## chilango (Dec 17, 2012)

...'cking hell. I go away for the weekend and this is what awaits me?


----------



## killer b (Dec 17, 2012)

yeah, the fourth wall was well and truly trashed over the weekend...


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 17, 2012)

emanymton said:


> We were relaying on you to supply all the gory details.


 
I'm afraid that standards are slipping. I nearly lost the will to live ploughing through the three IBs just there. So many of the contributions are utterly banal nonsense. Each mention of "autonomists" was chipping away another part of my soul. I used to actually _enjoy_ this stuff!


----------



## rekil (Dec 17, 2012)

chilango said:


> ...'cking hell. I go away for the weekend and this is what awaits me?


There will be a test so get stuck in.

Btw, we are unconstrained by bourgeois conceits like "the weekend", we say "radical downtime" now.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> never, ever remove anyone from the membership lists.


wrong. i and five others were removed from the member list of one medium sized branch in one year.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 17, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I. I used to actually _enjoy_ this stuff!


c,mon.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

discokermit said:


> wrong. i and five others were removed from the member list of one medium sized branch in one year.


 
When was that out of interest? I'm basing my comments on the fact that if they didn't see it as necessary to remove me from the list they'd probably never have reason to remove anyone - from talking to older Swappies this is something that's got a lot worse since TC died.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> meant to be following through his message


 
Sorry?


----------



## framed (Dec 17, 2012)

Fuck's sake, you take your eye off this thread for a few hours and it jumps another 10-15 pages...

WAIT FOR MEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 17, 2012)

killer b said:


> yeah, the fourth wall was well and truly trashed over the weekend...


 

the back doors of the fourth estate were smashed in


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 17, 2012)

What you've gotta remember is that Laurie's private education was wasted on her. With her it's all innate. She'd still have been a major political voice and public intellectual if she'd been sent to the local comp...even if she'd been raised by wolves. She's a natural...a fighter...she's got street-smarts, swagger, balls. The bad guys know her and they leave her alone...and she's as sharp as a razor...lightning reactions, and a facility with metaphor which is the rhetorical equivalent of the Bruce Lee 1 inch punch...kerpow!!

In fact, that's how it is with most privately educated people...they're just smart anyway...that's how private schools do so well. They just make sure they recruit all the really smart kids...and luckily their parents can afford it...cos they're smart too...it's all genetics...like Shergar...and Lord Lucan. QED


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

framed said:


> WAIT FOR MEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


 


You're a Laurie Penny sock account and I claim my £5


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 17, 2012)

I hated school. It was shite. Just a load of boring wank all fuckin day. I wouldn't give you tuppence for it. Maybe schools have changed...but I bet they're still shite. My dad used to let me nick off as long as I went to the library for a couple of hours a day. I reckon I'd have been locked up years ago if I'd gone to school every day.
Beyond the principle of the thing, I just can't imagine how you'd bring yourself to fork out to a school. I'd pay to close the bloody things.


----------



## framed (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> You're a Laurie Penny sock account and I claim my £5


 
Shit! Cover blown by inappropriate use of the middle-class _MEEEEEEEE_!


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 17, 2012)

I'm not knocking education. just schools...or maybe just my school...who knows...mind you, it shut about 20 years ago...so maybe I'm wasting my time. But I kinda suspect it isn't just me.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

One thing that is intriguing is how leftie journalists always big up other leftie journalists as being the *best thing*. Here is Sunny Hundal pointing out America Matt Taibi in the Rolling Stone is superior to any activist or academic on the left in this country in analysis of capitalism:


*Alex* ‏@*Potentia_Space*
@*sunny_hundal* I think an understanding of how capitalism works is essential for the development of a strategy to combat austerity


*Sunny Hundal*‏@*sunny_hundal*​
@*Potentia_Space* Matt Taibi / Rolling Stone for eg does a much better job than any radical academic or activist on left in the UK.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> When was that out of interest? I'm basing my comments on the fact that if they didn't see it as necessary to remove me from the list they'd probably never have reason to remove anyone - from talking to older Swappies this is something that's got a lot worse since TC died.


'94.

if you look at their figures, they say they are up 470 members on last year and have recruited 750 so far this year. so 280 must have come off the list.

ther are real arguments to be had about the organisational structure of the swp, extending to the idea of a vanguard party (the real one, not the sloppy caricature) and how revolutionaries organise themselves. you seem to be lapsing into lazy sectarianism, which doesn't do you any good at all.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Sorry?


 'once you're on the sex-offenders register'


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 17, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> 'once you're on the sex-offenders register'


VOE


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 17, 2012)

discokermit said:


> ther are real arguments to be had about the organisational structure of the swp, extending to the idea of a vanguard party (the real one, not the sloppy caricature) and how revolutionaries organise themselves. you seem to be lapsing into lazy sectarianism, which doesn't do you any good at all.


 
Some of the saner contributions to the IBs made pretty much the point SpineyNorman was making, albeit in a less extreme way. The SWP's membership figures constitute organised self-delusion. Every year there's the same exasperated complaints in the IBs about it, because the numbers are just too far out of whack to be plausible.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 17, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Multi-human - resistance is futile. We are in you.


All your base are belong to us.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

discokermit said:


> '94.
> 
> if you look at their figures, they say they are up 470 members on last year and have recruited 750 so far this year. so 280 must have come off the list.
> 
> ther are real arguments to be had about the organisational structure of the swp, extending to the idea of a vanguard party (the real one, not the sloppy caricature) and how revolutionaries organise themselves. you seem to be lapsing into lazy sectarianism, which doesn't do you any good at all.


 
Obviously that was an exaggeration - clearly some people do get taken off - whether it be due to expulsions, high profile resignations, deaths or emigration. But anyone who really thinks the membership list is in any way a reflection of the actual membership is seriously deluding themselves - nobody I know in the SWP thinks this - it's a running joke between them.

And I don't think I am lapsing into sectarianism, lazy or not. In the post you initially replied to what I said about it being almost impossible to be taken off the membership is almost a direct paraphrasing of one of the IB contributions - are SWP members indulging in lazy sectarianism too? 




			
				SWP Internal Bulletin part 2 said:
			
		

> It is well known that the majority of people on the lists are not members (many never were), and that it is easier to squeeze blood from a stone than getting people taken off. These lists are then used as a basis for an assessment of our organisations size, which is clearly going to be completely distorted.


 
I'm actually pretty pragmatic and non-sectarian in my politics. The person I work closest with politically is a member of the SWP. I think this kind of criticism is essential if they're not to continue along the path towards sectarian irrelevance and clearly some of the members do too - with the possible exceptions of the AWL and other weird microsects I'd actually quite like to see the influence of all the far left groups increase. But that's only going to happen if the groups are honest with themselves and the iron grip of the leadership (a problem in all left groups but especially acute in the SWP) is loosened to allow for genuine democratic decision making.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 17, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Some of the saner contributions to the IBs made pretty much the point SpineyNorman was making, albeit in a less extreme way. The SWP's membership figures constitute organised self-delusion. That they know this at some level, even as they ignore the annual burst of complaints about it in the IBs, is implicit in their practice of also including a percentage of "members" who pay any kind of regular subs (31%). This allows the members who care to get some sort of idea of their size while not frightening the horses.


exactly. it's more nuanced than "they never take anyone off the list! lol!".


----------



## framed (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> One thing that is intriguing is how leftie journalists always big up other leftie journalists as being the *best thing*. Here is Sunny Hundal pointing out America Matt Taibi in the Rolling Stone is superior to any activist or academic on the left in this country in analysis of capitalism:
> 
> 
> *Alex* ‏@*Potentia_Space*
> ...


 

That Matt Taibi must be some kind of guy... I'm smitten already!


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 17, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> VOE


which means?

 sorry, i know much less about this stuff


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 17, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> which means?
> 
> sorry, i know much less about this stuff


Voice Of Experience


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

discokermit said:


> exactly. it's more nuanced than "they never take anyone off the list! lol!".


 
Sorry, I'd assumed people would have enough about them to realize that wasn't meant to be taken literally. Clearly I was wrong.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

framed said:


> That Matt Taibi must be some kind of guy... I'm smitten already!


 
I think Sunny does have some kind of America problem - that US people are *smarter* - hence him rating Matt Taibi above all British left intellectuals David Harvey, Ben Fine, Hillel Ticktin, David Yaaffe etc etc.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 17, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> which means?
> 
> sorry, i know much less about this stuff



Victory of the Eathlings

It's a special abbreviation used in anticipation of the day we overthrow the lizard overlords. It's acts as a kind of identifier for members of the global resistance brotherhood. Weren't you told to learn the abbreviations and handshakes before your initiation? That's sloppy. Which sector are you in, and who's your controller?


----------



## discokermit (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Obviously that was an exaggeration - clearly some people do get taken off - whether it be due to expulsions, high profile resignations, deaths or emigration. But anyone who really thinks the membership list is in any way a reflection of the actual membership is seriously deluding themselves - nobody I know in the SWP thinks this - it's a running joke between them.


you missed off "quiet low profile backdoor expulsions". of course no one believes the membership numbers. no one believes the numbers in any left organisation because they are always inaccurate. again, there are arguments to be had here but you blow it by repeating a falsehood.




> And I don't think I am lapsing into sectarianism, lazy or not. In the post you initially replied to what I said about it being almost impossible to be taken off the membership is almost a direct paraphrasing of one of the IB contributions - are SWP members indulging in lazy sectarianism too?


bending the stick, comrade!





> I'm actually pretty pragmatic and non-sectarian in my politics. The person I work closest with politically is a member of the SWP. I think this kind of criticism is essential if they're not to continue along the path towards sectarian irrelevance and clearly some of the members do too - with the possible exceptions of the AWL and other weird microsects I'd actually quite like to see the influence of all the far left groups increase. But that's only going to happen if the groups are honest with themselves and the iron grip of the leadership (a problem in all left groups but especially acute in the SWP) is loosened to allow for genuine democratic decision making.


tadaaa! see, that's better, isn't it?

i love you spiny. let us never have crossed words again.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 17, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Voice Of Experience


oh ok. articul8 is a 'voice of experience


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

articul8 said:


> When I first encountered Ms Penny it was in the company of Mr Hundal. I associate them as part of the same crowd.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 17, 2012)

discokermit said:


> exactly. it's more nuanced than "they never take anyone off the list! lol!".


 
Sure.

It's actually sort of like one of those borderline atheist Anglican Vicars saying grace before everyone starts eating. He doesn't believe in what he's saying and he knows that the other diners don't believe in it and that they know that he doesn't believe in it, but there are forms to be observed, rituals to be performed, traditions to be maintained. The official "membership" figures are a polite, mutually agreeable, fiction. Pointing out that they are a fiction is as unwelcome as some Dawkinsite snarling at the Vicar. Everbody already knows that the grace is an empty ritual, no need to cause a scene.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

discokermit said:


> bending the stick, comrade!






discokermit said:


> i love you spiny. let us never have crossed words again.


----------



## framed (Dec 17, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Sure.
> 
> It's actually sort of like one of those borderline atheist Anglican Vicars saying grace before everyone starts eating. He doesn't believe in what he's saying and he knows that the other diners don't believe in it and that they know that he doesn't believe in it, but there are forms to be observed, rituals to be performed, traditions to be maintained. The official "membership" figures are a polite, mutually agreeable, fiction. Pointing out that they are a fiction is as unwelcome as some Dawkinsite snarling at the Vicar. Everbody already knows that the grace is an empty ritual, no need to cause a scene.


 
Sounds like every revolutionary party that I've been to!


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

An actual illustration in Discordia: Six nights in crisis Athens, that costs money to buy.


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 17, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Voice Of Experience


 
Is that like the Voice of America?

Down with this sort of thing.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


>


That would make a good t-shirt


----------



## chilango (Dec 17, 2012)

Passive smoking kills y'know?


----------



## JimW (Dec 17, 2012)

Not fast enough


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 17, 2012)

JimW said:


> Not fast enough


Now, now, no personal insults.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 17, 2012)

chilango said:


> Passive smoking kills y'know?


coolest bit in the picture though, innit?


----------



## JimW (Dec 17, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Now, now, no personal insults.


Nothing personal about it, I meant the whole lot of 'em


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> An actual illustration in Discordia: Six nights in crisis Athens, that costs money to buy.
> 
> View attachment 26310


 
Look at the contemptuous look in Laura's eyes - she's clearly about to call that lass a vile reactionary misogynistic racist.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> That would make a good t-shirt


 
Communism isn't love etc...


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

JimW said:


> Not fast enough


 
I'm confused.

Perhaps the artist behind it, Molly Crabbapple, will help explain things:

"It's _unconventional for an artist to go see history in person. _It's photographers and journalists who venture into the world. A few brilliant illustrators like Susie Cagle and Joe Sacco have begun to blur the lines, but mostly artists stay politely in their studios. With Discordia, I wanted to help prove that, in a world where a thousand iPhone photos mark each time a cop smashes a protester's skull, illustration still has something to say. The media is battling it out over the limits of objective journalism. But visual art has no pretence of objectivity. It's a definitely subjective and joyous interpretation. Ralph Steadman's spattered Kentucky Derby captured the whisky gentry more accurately than any photo. Art draws the truth from the twitpics."


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

Keep posting these, they're better than onion articles.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> One thing that is intriguing is how leftie journalists always big up other leftie journalists as being the *best thing*.


 
It's like some tiresome endless lefty-media circle jerk really.

Unlike retired war photographer Don McCullin who came out of retirement recently, at the age of 77, to spend a week at the sharp end in Syria:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20710432

McCullin seems, for someone who spent an entire career risking his neck in some of the most dangerous places on the planet, pretty free of ego as well. Which rather puts a comparatively cosy few days in Athens followed a very public tantrum and much lying about critics being racist (when she could be bothered to acknowledge their existence at all, that is) rather in the shade in terms of commitment, integrity and general journalistic standards.

Doesn't it, Ms Penny..?


----------



## rosecore (Dec 17, 2012)

I assume Google translated this Spiegel article well

Doesn't really add anything new to the feminist debate.



> Did you know that the Occupy movement in the USA and England is heavily influenced by queer teenagers who run away from home because they are looking for a quiet place with their sexuality?  In some enclaves of the U.S., it is now okay to be gay - but overall, our societies heteronormative.


 
Anecdotal evidence I assume.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> McCullin seems, for someone who spent an entire career risking his neck in some of the most dangerous places on the planet, pretty free of ego as well. Which rather puts a comparatively cosy few days in Athens followed a very public tantrum and much lying about critics being racist (when she could be bothered to acknowledge their existence at all, that is) rather in the shade in terms of commitment, integrity and general journalistic standards.
> 
> Doesn't it, Ms Penny..?


 
That's an unfair comparison B, Don McCullin is a war photographer it's completely different to experiential gonzo journalism. If you look at Molly Crabbapple she commends Ralph Steadman, who drew the illustrations for Hunter S Thompson's first real gonzo piece in 1970 '_*The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved'*_.
By implication Molly is aiming to do something (intellectually) like Steadman's illustrations to Laurie Penny's Hunter S Thompson-style journalism, that combines several types of journalism - in the piece Molly refers to it has the journalists as protagonists being attacked for not fitting in, general sociological insights set against the wider mentions of the war on Cambodia and Kent State.


----------



## emanymton (Dec 17, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> oh ok. articul8 is a 'voice of experience


It's taken a hell of a long time to get to this 'joke'.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

Anyway you can buy a print of notorious pro-Franco nutcase Salvador Dali for $100, with $10 P&P.

http://www.etsy.com/listing/115886260/salvador-dali-print







Unfortunately I don't see 'garroting young socialists in 1975'  in the For Column - a pass for me.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 17, 2012)

" I wanted to help prove that, in a world where a thousand iPhone photos mark each time a cop smashes a protester's skull, illustration still has something to say."

But wouldn't it kinda say: 'a cop smashes a protestor's skull'? 
If it was skilfully executed it might evoke more. But grown women who pull off artistic reportage in the manner of a 14 year old absent-mindedly doodling in the back of her Geography book, aren't generally to be relied upon for skilful execution. 
I don't know much about what I like but I do know art.


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

That looks suspiciously like Stanley Donwoods' illustrations.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 17, 2012)

firky said:


> That looks suspiciously like Stanley Donwoods' illustrations.



Looks suspiciously like my 14 year old.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 17, 2012)

the curly-wurly writing makes me want to puke. I keep expecting to see little hearts dotting the 'i's.


----------



## JimW (Dec 17, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> But wouldn't it kinda say: 'a cop smashes a protestor's skull'?


Or, more importantly, 'Yeah, yeah, cops, skulls, but look at me, at us!'


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Looks suspiciously like my 14 year old.


It's a phase most grow out of or get better.


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

weepiper said:


> the curly-wurly writing makes me want to puke. I keep expecting to see little hearts dotting the 'i's.



I think it's supposed to look like the old fashioned circus posters.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Anyway you can buy a print of notorious pro-Franco nutcase Salvador Dali for $100, with $10 P&P.
> 
> http://www.etsy.com/listing/115886260/salvador-dali-print
> 
> ...


 
omg that is hideous!


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

Being generous like


----------



## weepiper (Dec 17, 2012)

firky said:


> I think it's supposed to look like the old fashioned circus posters.


 
Well it doesn't. It looks like the sort of thing I tell my 9 year old off for writing her homework in. Obv I am a total _fascist_ though.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 17, 2012)

weepiper said:


> Well it doesn't. It looks like the sort of thing I tell my 9 year old off for writing her homework in. Obv I am a total _fascist_ though.


 
that's worse than the holocaust weeps


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

I've got déjà vu now. I'm sure I remember this conversation


----------



## weepiper (Dec 17, 2012)

cesare said:


> I've got déjà vu now. I'm sure I remember this conversation


 
maybe I said it before


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

weepiper said:


> maybe I said it before


Not just you! All the comments about her drawing style  I think I said it looked a bit like Ronald Searle's and then Idris (I think) said no, someone else. I just can't remember which thread.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

I'm still fucking fuming about what Laura did yesterday by the way. Partly it's because I can think of few worse things to be called than a racist and to be tarred with that brush in front of such a big audience is pretty fucking irritating. But I think it's also the hypocrisy of it all - she's always on about privilege, but then she uses her own obvious and massive privilege to slander me and LD, and by association the IWCA and I guess anyone on the left who dislikes identity politics, then remove any possible opportunity for a right of reply.

It's pretty fucking low and I think it says a huge amount about her - she doesn't have a problem with power - she just has a problem with people other than her and those who think like her exercising it. Fucking Fabian scum.

Anyway, as anyone who knows me in real life would agree, I'm usually a very laid back, mild mannered person who doesn't take life too seriously. But when I feel like it, if I'm pushed too far, I can be a right spiteful, vindictive, grudge bearing bastard when I want to be. Maybe that means I'm multi-human or whatever it was that daft pseud twatted at @lauriepenny - if so the human I am right now is of the vicious, grudge bearing wee bastard persuasion. So I would appreciate any suggestions for revenge.

Obviously they'd have to be non-misogynistic, non-violent etc - because even if I didn't adhere to those principles I'd be loath to allow her any excuse to cry foul play.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 17, 2012)

steph said:


> This stuff just reminds me why I had to get away from these sorts of privilege/identity politic spaces (even as someone who saw/still sees some value in it) - every discussion just got closed down with this sort of 'racist/sexist/homophobic' accusation without barely analysing anything.
> 
> And class/capital based stuff was nearly always pushed into the background.


 
It's so much easier, especially if you're a member of the _bourgeoisie_ whose aim is to surf to power/influence on the back of the class you so desperately want to ride in the vanguard of. Analysing issues of class means having to admit the above not only to yourself, but to your fellow-travellers too.


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

cesare said:


> Not just you! All the comments about her drawing style  I think I said it looked a bit like Ronald Searle's and then Idris (I think) said no, someone else. I just can't remember which thread.



Searle is very generous of you!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 17, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> A mate of mine was involved with that. He's currently holed up somewhere in Norfolk writing a book on Genoa. Been nearly ten years in the making, I hope it's gonna be worth reading!


 
Time flows differently in Norfolk.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

If we think it's bad in this country, the future is in America. This is an article on the US New Inquiry magazine, which Laurie Penny has written for on several occasions.

http://www.rhizzone.net/article/2012/09/29/fuck-new-inquiry-and-other-tales/

I don't agree with its conclusions necessarily and it is quite pretentious and is a hard read, but it is interesting.




> On Sunday 16th September, Doug Henwood posted this on his facebook page: A “very young anarchist pseudo-celebrity” was charging a speaking fee of $5,000 - not including travel and expenses. He then revealed their identity - Malcolm Harris, 23 year-old senior editor of The New Inquiry... But what if this is a symptom of something bigger and more problematic, both at the journal Harris and Rosenfelt run, and within the left itself?


 
I recommend reading it if you have the time, following the links

This is a sample of a reading event of theirs (note the Mao in the :






New York Times article here gives a sense of what these radical evenings are like: 




> The highlight of each salon is a group reading in which each person selects a three-minute reading on the predetermined topic. “We’re reading about ‘failed revolutions’ tonight,” Ms. Rosenfelt reminded the crowd. She started with a passage from “To the Finland Station,” “in which Edmund Wilson couches the inevitable failure of Marxism in Edmund Wilson’s idea of the national and ethnic identity of Marx.” The room exploded in vaudeville-style hoots. Continuing around the circle, Ms. Fitzgerald, the would-be magazine writer, read from “The Cantos,” by Ezra Pound. Mr. Osterweil, the frustrated novelist, read from Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle.” Tim Barker, a junior at Columbia, awkwardly admitted that he, too, had chosen a reading from Debord. (What are the odds?)


 

It goes on:



> Their upbringings tell the story: they are raised in environments riddled with venality and the ethic of accumulation, and they were inculcated with very high expectations for their own lives and careers. No wonder they’re monetising the undying crap out of their disaffection! It’s how they were raised! They were bred to make money and claw their way up poles greasier than any of us could imagine! And none of this is hidden! I just looked up these people on Facebook! No, the real problem lies in the acquiescence of the rest of the left when confronted with this, and the relative ease that these people can ride off the real work of others. _People who are involved in making actual contributions to radical movements will, *for some reason, jump* at the chance to have their material appear in TNI or n+1 or whatever, and as such lend them a *measure of legitimacy.*_ Never mind that the actual political positions that the editorial staffs of these publications hold are usually vapid or incoherent or both - when they are able to hold events that attract figures with a little more gravity (like Doug Henwood or David Graeber), they become embedded in the production of the discourse that shapes where the left is going. The importance of these publications distorts priorities and promotes elitism.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 17, 2012)

god this just sounds like a vision of hell, somebody make it stop


----------



## Belushi (Dec 17, 2012)

Its screaming out for an intervention


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 17, 2012)

I dont want to live any more


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

If you want a picture of the future imagine @lauriepenny lecturing you on privilege - forever.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> god this just sounds like a vision of hell, somebody make it stop


 
Have you read the links FW, these events are advertised as _examinations_ of 'Failed revolutions', it's not just book club in Manhattan.


----------



## barney_pig (Dec 17, 2012)

discokermit said:


> wrong. i and five others were removed from the member list of one medium sized branch in one year.


When I went out I was out straight away, being blanked by old 'friends' within weeks, and never had a ib or anything else again.
 It may have been my ranting resignation letter. Or perhaps my 'forthright' demand for my money back from the Bookmarks club.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 17, 2012)

The picture's shite, but the idea's got mileage. I could do with an intern sketching my life. Be a lot of soulless eyes staring into the abyss and stuff...and me desperately trying to be optimistic when the phone rings, and empty cans and 3 litre plastic bottles.
 But, when all's said and done, that's an 'identity'...and affirming identity is art's new moral purpose. And I would make sure they always drew where I'd put down my keys.
Might even be an idea to get a poet to tag along too...they could kinda obliquely reference where I'd been the night before in a note on the fridge.
Sorted...I love the new gonzo tourism.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I'm confused.
> 
> Perhaps the artist behind it, Molly Crabbapple, will help explain things:
> 
> "It's _unconventional for an artist to go see history in person. _It's photographers and journalists who venture into the world. A few brilliant illustrators like Susie Cagle and Joe Sacco have begun to blur the lines, but mostly artists stay politely in their studios. With Discordia, I wanted to help prove that, in a world where a thousand iPhone photos mark each time a cop smashes a protester's skull, illustration still has something to say. The media is battling it out over the limits of objective journalism. But visual art has no pretence of objectivity. It's a definitely subjective and joyous interpretation. *Ralph Steadman's* spattered Kentucky Derby captured the whisky gentry more accurately than any photo. Art draws the truth from the twitpics."


 

I knew I recognised the style, only its not so brutal and weird as steadman. Theres a different softer take to the lines

ahem


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

The ginger guy in the centre is the 22/3-year-old charging $5,000 exclusive of travel, food and expenses to give a talk about Occupy and anti-capitalism.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 17, 2012)

make it stop


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

Anyone here actually recognise him, a lot of people on here with a lot of years of knowledge?


----------



## framed (Dec 17, 2012)




----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> The picture's shite, but the idea's got mileage. I could do with an intern sketching my life. Be a lot of soulless eyes staring into the abyss and stuff...and me desperately trying to be optimistic when the phone rings, and empty cans and 3 litre plastic bottles.
> But, when all's said and done, that's an 'identity'...and affirming identity is art's new moral purpose. And I would make sure they always drew where I'd put down my keys.
> Might even be an idea to get a poet to tag along too...they could kinda obliquely reference where I'd been the night before in a note on the fridge.
> Sorted...I love the new gonzo tourism.


 
Christ, your initials aren't NB are they? You remind me of someone I know very, very well. In fact the resemblance is uncanny.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> One thing that is intriguing is how leftie journalists always big up other leftie journalists as being the *best thing*. Here is Sunny Hundal pointing out America Matt Taibi in the Rolling Stone is superior to any activist or academic on the left in this country in analysis of capitalism:
> 
> 
> *Alex* ‏@*Potentia_Space*
> ...


 
Wouldn't do for Hundal to admit that someone in the UK that he doesn't know (or more likely has fucked the Lib-Dem cunt off with a boot up his arse) has a clue, so referencing some journo who writes "popular economics" for a rock mag probably appeals to him as a decent face-saver.
As far as I'm aware, some activists etc have given Hundal a fairly wide berth due to his L-D apologism, and his sometimes childish (it seems to be a common disease with these entitled "activist journos") reaction to anything approaching criticism of his work. In his imagination he's a latter-day Fisk or Pilger. In reality he's not even a Nigel fucking Dempster.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 17, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> When I went out I was out straight away, being blanked by old 'friends' within weeks, and never had a ib or anything else again.
> It may have been my ranting resignation letter. Or perhaps my 'forthright' demand for my money back from the Bookmarks club.


looking back, ranting in a public meeting, tearing my party card up, then storming out, may not have done my case any good.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 17, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Christ, your initials aren't NB are they? You remind me of someone I know very, very well. In fact the resemblance is uncanny.


Nope...sorry?


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> The ginger guy in the centre is the 22/3-year-old charging $5,000 exclusive of travel, food and expenses to give a talk about Occupy and anti-capitalism.


What a cunt.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I think Sunny does have some kind of America problem - that US people are *smarter* - hence him rating Matt Taibi above all British left intellectuals David Harvey, Ben Fine, Hillel Ticktin, David Yaaffe etc etc.


 
Plus there's the whole cachet of name-dropping someone that some people might not be aware of - sort of a grow-up(ish) version of the late teenager mocking someone's musical taste by saying "you like them? I liked them before they sold out! Nowadays I prefer *Sonic Death Monkey!".

*Sorry for the film reference.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Nope...sorry?


 
Fair anough, it's just your turn of phrase and love of cheap cider (assuming that's what the plastic bottles contained) rang a bell.

It's more compliment than insult by the way, the bloke I'm thinking of is my older brother and although he does my head in at times I love the daft old fart.


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

Everyone loves cheap cider


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> The ginger guy in the centre is the 22/3-year-old charging $5,000 exclusive of travel, food and expenses to give a talk about Occupy and anti-capitalism.


 
I suppose he would ALSO claim, "I WORK for a living!", eh.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> make it stop


 

OK, look away now, the last one here with Malcolm in red shirt:







Relevant for us is how in America with millions in poverty, these are some of the people dominating brain-heavy left publishing. 


> Malcolm Harris is from Palo Alto (median property value - $1.3m), and went to Palo Alto High School, which is something of a rarity in the United States, being a public school with an 11:1 pupil-teacher ratio... Rachel Rosenfelt went to the private Columbia-affiliated Barnard College. Atossa Abrahamian was apparently educated as some kind of haute-bourgeois throwback, first being educated in Geneva and then attending Columbia University. Sarah Leonard went to Columbia too


 
This is the kind of thing Laurie Penny is encouraging you to pay money to:



"I am a New Inquiry Subscription Drive video and you can too!"

but again some supposed leftist (US probably refering to Maoist Rebel News) idiot has attacked her on misogynistic grounds in the comments. Any useful criticism is killed dead again. (And yes like SN I am upset about the smearing of IWCA and the fact we can't get it together to be direct and non-sexist)


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I'm confused.
> 
> Perhaps the artist behind it, Molly Crabbapple, will help explain things:
> 
> "It's _unconventional for an artist to go see history in person...._"


 
Jesus, what a twat. Artists have been doing that for hundreds of years.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 17, 2012)

weepiper said:


> Well it doesn't. It looks like the sort of thing I tell my 9 year old off for writing her homework in. Obv I am a total _fascist_ though.


 
Misogynist too, I shouldn't wonder.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> make it stop


 
This is why we need the workers' bomb. Even if it doesn't bring about communism it would be guaranteed to kill a few of these cunts. What's a few billion lives worth of collateral damage when the positives are so great?


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

S☼I said:


> I suppose he would ALSO claim, "I WORK for a living!", eh.


 
He does work for a living, he's a managing editor at New Inquiry.

He's also just lost his case over the 2011 Occupy New York protest, when 700 who blocked a motorway were arrested. He had tweeted “They tried to stop us, absolutely did not want us on the motorway” (released from Twitter's deep bowels by court order) even though his defence was that protestors were encouraged to go on the motorway by NYPD in how they were arranged, and not warned not to go on the motorway. He now faces 3 days' community service.


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

Anon mask hanging carefully within shot.

Hanging from a fucking gas hob. The obvious place to keep it safe.


----------



## cesare (Dec 17, 2012)

firky said:


> Anon mask hanging carefully within shot.


And a scribble illustration.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 17, 2012)

firky said:


> Anon mask hanging carefully casually within shot, as if artlessly flung aside, in the rush to make a cup of chai all breathless after a demo like.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> He does work for a living, he's a managing editor at New Inquiry.


 
Up to the mountains and down to the villages with him and his ilk.


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

I thought she said she was smart?


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

cesare said:


> And a scribble illustration.



Title: Misogyny


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> The ginger guy in the centre is the 22/3-year-old charging $5,000 exclusive of travel, food and expenses to give a talk about Occupy and anti-capitalism.


 
socialism is a hob nailed boot stamping on his face for eternity


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 17, 2012)

chances of a decent munch at that do: 0

I bet the cunts have mini fritters on cocktail sticks. Or organic shit, actual shit but made organically from chemical free bumholes. Mixed up with tamarind and grated yam then deep fried in a batter made from elephant spunk.

Fuck me,I'm so hungry I'd eat that right now


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> OK, look away now, the last one here with Malcolm in red shirt:


 
Fuck my old brown boots. What a smug-looking bunch of douchebags.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 17, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Up to the mountains and down to the villages with him and his ilk.


 
If people are interested in him, he's the guy who started the rumour that Radiohead might be playing at the Occupy Wall Street, that got the music press, then Russell Simmons, then the mainstream press in a buzz and sent thousands of people to half-clog up the area. A nice idea and it sort of did the job but next time an actual left-wing band does intend to play somewhere at short notice, it'll be the boy who cried wolf, and makes your protest dependent on celebrities anyway.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Fuck my old brown boots. What a smug-looking bunch of douchebags.


 
and at the risk of sounding beanlike that's the US and they're all white?!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 17, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> socialism is a hob nailed boot stamping on his face for eternity


 
Or the Workers' Zippo igniting his sidies.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 17, 2012)

That woman in the green dress could do with your old brown boots, seeing as she was so pretentious she didn't bother with such an _earthy_ item as footwear.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 17, 2012)

irony squared would be if radiohead played a gig at the wailing wall supported by bjork


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

firky said:


> Anon mask hanging carefully within shot.
> 
> Hanging from a fucking gas hob. The obvious place to keep it safe.


 
The shit scribbles at the back look like a fire hazard too.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 17, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> and at the risk of sounding beanlike that's the US and they're all white?!


 
Yup. One could ask "what do you expect?", but that might be seen as unnecessarily cynical, or perhaps even racist by the lights of Laura and her _haut bourgeois_ ilk.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 17, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Fuck my old brown boots. What a smug-looking bunch of douchebags.


 
It would actually be cathartic to run through there swinging a crowbar and screaming for justice


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 17, 2012)

S☼I said:


> That woman in the green dress could do with your old brown boots, seeing as she was so pretentious she didn't bother with such an _earthy_ item as footwear.


 
She's one of those "milk-white skin, red hair and redder lipstick" arty celtic maiden types, she'd probably re-purpose my boots as conceptual art and sell them to one of her friends for enough money to support her coke habit for 8 weeks.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 17, 2012)

sihhi said:


> The ginger guy in the centre is the 22/3-year-old charging $5,000 exclusive of travel, food and expenses to give a talk about Occupy and anti-capitalism.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 17, 2012)

S☼I said:


> That woman in the green dress could do with your old brown boots, seeing as she was so pretentious she didn't bother with such an _earthy_ item as footwear.


if she was in a sixties french film you'd of had a poster of her on your wall at university.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 17, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> It would actually be cathartic to run through there swinging a crowbar and screaming for justice


 
Given the wooden floor, I think a handful of railroad spikes and a sledgehammer might be more appropriate.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 17, 2012)

discokermit said:


> if she was in a sixties french film you'd of had a poster of her on your wall at university.


 
I didn't go to university.


----------



## Firky (Dec 17, 2012)

discokermit said:


> if she was in a sixties french film you'd of had a poster of her on your wall at university.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 17, 2012)

S☼I said:


> I didn't go to university.


i was making jokey. to make general pointy.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 17, 2012)

discokermit said:


> if she was in a sixties french film you'd of had a poster of her on your wall at university.


 
The French didn't feature many ginges in their films in the '60s, preferring the blondes and brunettes.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 17, 2012)

firky said:


> It's a phase most grow out of or get better.


 
We're back to Pink Floyd and The Doors again!


----------



## discokermit (Dec 17, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> The French didn't feature many ginges in their films in the '60s, preferring the blondes and brunettes.


it was black and white. you cunt. stop trying to spoil my joke.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 18, 2012)

discokermit said:


> i was making jokey. to make general pointy.


 


I'm fighting the urge to look at her directly in case I go all stupid and giddy and that. MUST. NOT. LIKE. ENEMY.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

This is him after a discussion of new leftist material from Zer0 books (which also published Laurie Penny's Meat Market, £9.99, £6.99 68 pages in total 60 pages of writing culled from old columns plus made up interviews).





If anyone cares the book they are discussing is 'Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating, and Other Issues for Men' an analysis of problems facing men in the USA, by Michael Thomsen. Thomsen's own blog is here
which gives us explanations such as: 

"In his recently published memoir, Christopher Hitchens wrote something that encapsulated all of the guilt I feel about my confessional writing. “For those I have loved, or who have been so lenient and gracious as to have loved me, I have not words enough here, and I remember with gratitude how they have made me speechless in return.” When I write, I have a recurring fear of betraying the loyalties of the people I write about. This is bearably nerve-wracking when profiling people or characterizing someone’s work or public opinions—a kind of writing I find painfully boring. The more fruitful and honest confessing of a subjective experience can’t be done with speechlessness on the subjects that matter most. There are subjects I care about, but only because of the people connected to them. To be fully honest about one’s conviction to a subject requires a confession of one’s love for the people behind that given subject. Giving this account honestly often feels like the kind of treachery that’s only possible between people who care for each other the most."


----------



## discokermit (Dec 18, 2012)

S☼I said:


> I'm fighting the urge to look at her directly in case I go all stupid and giddy and that. MUST. NOT. LIKE. ENEMY.


and you will. she looks so carefree and unfettered. she is. ultimately it's not enough.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


>


 


sihhi said:


>





sihhi said:


>


 
My, how overwhelmingly caucasian and well-fed this brave new anti-racist world of Laura and her self-facilitating media node chums looks!

_The whitest girl in a very white school_


----------



## discokermit (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> View attachment 26312


that's his "living the fucking dream" face. cunt.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> This is him after a discussion of new leftist material from Zer0 books (which also published Laurie Penny's Meat Market, £9.99, £6.99 68 pages in total 60 pages of writing culled from old columns plus made up interviews).
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
The man must die. Now.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 18, 2012)

greenvelvetslapheadblazerzebrachairdesertbootposhrug cunts.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> OK, look away now, the last one here with Malcolm in red shirt:


 
I count at least eight people all wearing exactly the same self-satisfied expression


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


>


 
_Another great party at Lenny's_


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> and at the risk of sounding beanlike that's the US and they're all white?!


 
At the risk of patronising everyone here - Class not race! or whatever the slogan is.

There a few African-Americans in the crowd:






That's from the Mao event, but the waistcoat of the woman looks expensive - might not be the whole story.

What's certain is that the place they held the examination of Mao especially the Long March and the Base Areas in the 1930s is a small upmarket hotel called The Jane in Manhattan, some of the staff are photographed here - can't be sure again but looks like quite a mix of cultures:


----------



## gosub (Dec 18, 2012)

Over 700 pages on an impetuous, self serving youth, whom I gather is now a member...so bin the callout thread and give her a chance to grow up


----------



## discokermit (Dec 18, 2012)

lets face it, we all wish we went to parties like that. even though i know that in reality i would make a dick of myself by saying "am" instead of "are" and run out of the room in tears.


they've got some nice clothes as well.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

discokermit said:


> lets face it, we all wish we went to parties like that. even though i know that in reality i would make a dick of myself by saying "am" instead of "are" and run out of the room in tears.


 
They're *not* parties - they're political meetings - it's like a meeting at Firebox taken just a little further down the line. If your base is middle-class academia/culture vultures why not locate somewhere appropriate close to those locations and that hotel is apparently very close to poetry slam events and off-Broadway threatres etc.

Hear him speak, he's at around 14'.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> Anti establishment Star Trek but with a set made of cardboard tubes and crisp wrappers sprayed with Elnett


 
Trevor Hoyle had a hand in writing it. He's mint, him. Vail is a far better peice of prophetic fiction than 1984 could ever hope to be.
www.trevorhoyle.com


----------



## discokermit (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> They're *not* parties - they're political meetings


what? shoes off? looks like a party to me. to be shoeless in a political meeting you'd have to be a massively narcissistic....... oh........


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 18, 2012)

weepiper said:


> Well it doesn't. It looks like the sort of thing I tell my 9 year old off for writing her homework in. Obv I am a total _fascist_ though.


Misogynist 

You are totes oppressing her feminist stylings, weepiper


----------



## SLK (Dec 18, 2012)

I was going to write "the best that can happen from this thread is that LP reads  some criticisms of her, evaluates her position, and realises that the working class can be educated too. The worst is that she turns against said people and becomes more openly entrenched in her milieu"
Then I thought that the "best" and "worst" are not that far apart.

Then some people decided they own the thread, and decided that now that LP has arrived, they have to police the contributions. They didn't think that before; no-one was told to leave the thread before LP turned up. Anyone could post anything.

Perhaps the most telling thing about this thread is how _serious_ it has become to some posters since the person they ridicule turned up.


----------



## smokedout (Dec 18, 2012)

SLK said:


> I was going to write "the best that can happen from this thread is that LP reads some criticisms of her, evaluates her position, and realises that the working class can be educated too. The worst is that she turns against said people and becomes more openly entrenched in her milieu"
> Then I thought that the "best" and "worst" are not that far apart.
> 
> Then some people decided they own the thread, and decided that now that LP has arrived, they have to police the contributions. They didn't think that before; no-one was told to leave the thread before LP turned up. Anyone could post anything.
> ...


 
they still can post anything, but i dont think its unreasonable to ask people saying stupid shit to stop saying stupid shit


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 18, 2012)

SLK said:


> I was going to write "the best that can happen from this thread is that LP reads some criticisms of her, evaluates her position, and realises that the working class can be educated too. The worst is that she turns against said people and becomes more openly entrenched in her milieu"
> Then I thought that the "best" and "worst" are not that far apart.
> 
> Then some people decided they own the thread, and decided that now that LP has arrived, they have to police the contributions. They didn't think that before; no-one was told to leave the thread before LP turned up. Anyone could post anything.
> ...


If you think this thread has become serious then I think you need to reread it - do you really think we're seriously calling each other misogynists, or are we joking?

The only thing we _are_ taking seriously is that LP called two committed anti-fascist anti-racist people, racists, and she WAS serious when she said it, in a public way (twitter) to over 13,000 people. The thread is still waiting for an apology on that one, especially given the ramifications to the ongoing activism of these people. 

Political discussion is just that - discussion. It's not flouncing and screaming 'racist' or 'misogynist' just because someone doesn't agree with your opinion.


----------



## SLK (Dec 18, 2012)

smokedout said:


> they still can post anything, but i dont think its unreasonable to ask people saying stupid shit to stop saying stupid shit


 
OK, so who is saying "stupid shit" (I see that in some cases, but even so) and why have one (it's actually close to one person, but might be two) or two people decided to police the thread now that Laurie Penny has arrived? Why has their "stupid shit" not been asked to stop before?

It only serves to appear that they think she matters. I think to some posters, her arriving on the thread _ really_ matters.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

Tangentially related:

https://twitter.com/CaytlinMoran


----------



## SLK (Dec 18, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> If you think this thread has become serious then I think you need to reread it - do you really think we're seriously calling each other misogynists, or are we joking?
> 
> The only thing we _are_ taking seriously is that LP called two committed anti-fascist anti-racist people, racists, and she WAS serious when she said it, in a public way (twitter) to over 13,000 people. The thread is still waiting for an apology on that one, especially given the ramifications to the ongoing activism of these people.
> 
> Political discussion is just that - discussion. It's not flouncing and screaming 'racist' or 'misogynist' just because someone doesn't agree with your opinion.


 
Don't agree. I've followed the thread from the start. So I agree on 'serious'. It's only since LP arrived that people have been told to get off the thread, and the tone has been one of 'we know what we're talking about; leave us to it' from some.


----------



## SLK (Dec 18, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> If you think this thread has become serious then I think you need to reread it - do you really think we're seriously calling each other misogynists, or are we joking?
> 
> The only thing we _are_ taking seriously is that LP called two committed anti-fascist anti-racist people, racists, and she WAS serious when she said it, in a public way (twitter) to over 13,000 people. The thread is still waiting for an apology on that one, especially given the ramifications to the ongoing activism of these people.
> 
> Political discussion is just that - discussion. It's not flouncing and screaming 'racist' or 'misogynist' just because someone doesn't agree with your opinion.


 
Why are people who have contributed throughout the thread being told to get off it once LP arrived? That's a fine political reaction to bullshit, but it basically didn't exist (beyond a few isolated examples) until LP arrived and a few posters decided that they should have freedom of the thread because no-one else was capable of challenging LP.

The most upsetting thing is that in the main, they were really really shit at it as well.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 18, 2012)

She's trying for a thousand yard stare here isn't she? She _is_ isn't she? Nobody knows the trouble _she's_ seen. Really.

When I first came to this thread I felt a bit sorry for Penstance - I knew nothing of this privelege network & I just thought poor kid's growing up in public. Eye opener this thread's been.


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Trevor Hoyle had a hand in writing it. He's mint, him. Vail is a far better peice of prophetic fiction than 1984 could ever hope to be.
> www.trevorhoyle.com


I'm not familiar with Vail, cheers for the heads up. Here's Hoyle's episode, Ultraworld:


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> I'm not familiar with Vail, cheers for the heads up. Here's Hoyle's episode, Ultraworld:




Vail's mint. Honest to god. And have a look at Rule Of Night as well if you can be arsed - A proper book tht just sums up Rochdale in the 70's.


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

Clearly we need to convene a thread meeting to nominate cbbes to lead this struggle session working group, at least until PD Central give us the latest multitudinous lines.


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

JimW said:


> Clearly we need to convene a thread meeting to nominate cbbes to lead this struggle session working group, at least until PD Central give us the latest multitudinous lines.


I applaud cmbbe SLK's 'police the self-styled thread police' initiative.


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

SLK said:


> OK, so who is saying "stupid shit" (I see that in some cases, but even so) and why have one (it's actually close to one person, but might be two) or two people decided to police the thread now that Laurie Penny has arrived? Why has their "stupid shit" not been asked to stop before?
> 
> It only serves to appear that they think she matters. I think to some posters, her arriving on the thread _ really_ matters.


 
They shit their pants. With rage and joy. Then got drunk.

(f'ing autocorrect)


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

dave said:
			
		

> Of course, the old left is not about to disappear completely. It is highly likely that even after a nuclear attack, the only remaining life-forms will be cockroaches and sour-faced vendors of the Socialist Worker.


.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> I applaud cmbbe SLK's 'police the self-styled thread police' initiative.


*Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, comrade *


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

"Sour-faced"? That's a bit harsh. "Earnest" perhaps.


----------



## SLK (Dec 18, 2012)

That made me laugh. But suffice to say I wonder about those who only seek to police a thread when a 'celebrity' appears. It was suddenly _important_.


----------



## imposs1904 (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> The ginger guy in the centre is the 22/3-year-old charging $5,000 exclusive of travel, food and expenses to give a talk about Occupy and anti-capitalism.


 
strawberry  blonde, surely?

Sorry, but who's paying him 5 grand to speak? I find that bafflingly.


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> strawberry blonde, surely?
> 
> Sorry, but who's paying him 5 grand to speak? I find that bafflingly.


You might sling him 50p to shut up and fuck off.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

JimW said:


> You might sling him 50p to shut up and fuck off.


Like feeding the gas meter only with an additional choking hazard you mean?


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Like feeding the gas meter only with an additional choking hazard you mean?


They meter gas bags too, it seems.


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> Sorry, but who's paying him 5 grand to speak? I find that bafflingly.


That's the fee his 'agent' was quoting at potential clients and he said he didn't know anything about it, but his 'agent' turned out be his flatmate or something.


----------



## imposs1904 (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> That's the fee his 'agent' was quoting at potential clients and he said he didn't know anything about it, but his 'agent' turned out be his flatmate or something.


 
Damn, I live in Brooklyn . . . I have a beard . . . I wear t shirts with ironic statements . . . *and I'm strawberry blonde*. Why don't I know these people?


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> VOE


Fuck off


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> oh ok. articul8 is a 'voice of experience


You too


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> One thing that is intriguing is how leftie journalists always big up other leftie journalists as being the *best thing*. Here is Sunny Hundal pointing out America Matt Taibi in the Rolling Stone is superior to any activist or academic on the left in this country in analysis of capitalism:
> 
> 
> *Alex* ‏@*Potentia_Space*
> ...


Hundal is the worst of them all. LibDem cuntsock


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 18, 2012)

I don't watch Frazier very often. Which series are the stills from? Is the ginger one the long lost younger brother?


----------



## love detective (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'm still fucking fuming about what Laura did yesterday by the way. Partly it's because I can think of few worse things to be called than a racist and to be tarred with that brush in front of such a big audience is pretty fucking irritating. But I think it's also the hypocrisy of it all - she's always on about privilege, but then she uses her own obvious and massive privilege to slander me and LD, and by association the IWCA and I guess anyone on the left who dislikes identity politics, then remove any possible opportunity for a right of reply.
> 
> It's pretty fucking low and I think it says a huge amount about her - she doesn't have a problem with power - she just has a problem with people other than her and those who think like her exercising it. Fucking Fabian scum.
> 
> ...


 
I've also got a huge capacity to hold and act on a rational justified grudge. For some reason though her racist accusations is not the main thing spurring me to do something, the main reason is just her in general,not her specific attacks on me, but who she is, what she does and how she does it, and what that means about the capacity and eagerness of the wider left in general to tolerate time and time again developments that are poisonous and corrosive to it

As someone famous once said _the weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. _Amongst all the dross, this thread is packed full of incisive, pertinent, prescient, revealing and honest criticisms of Laurie Penny that is currently not being used in a productive way, the problem is that most of it is dwarved and hidden both by the dross but also just by the nature of how discussion threads are, which means only the small amount of people who have participated in it is aware of all the gems of solid criticism within it, there's no way in it's current state is it possible of 'gripping the masses' (lol)

So I think a useful (productive? satisfying?) response would be to put together some kind of 'dossier' that extracts and distils all the good stuff from this thread and present it in a structured logical way that can be circulated widely as an honest comprehensive and emotion free account of who she is, what she does and how she does it, leaving no room for the type of get out and avoidance tactics that she employs when asked to respond to the criticisms of this thread itself. We moaned at her for not responding to the substantive points on this thread, but i'd struggle to find the substantive points in around 8,000 posts if I was coming to it cold. More importantly, so would any bystander who holds an open mind on it.

I shouldn't even be thinking about doing anything like this, but it does feel at the moment that it would be a worthwhile thing to do, you up for it?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 18, 2012)

That'd be the best 'revenge.'


----------



## love detective (Dec 18, 2012)

I don't want revenge on her, just for the facts about her to be more widely known so people can then form their own, informed, opinions on her 

It's too one sided at the moment

(although I think that's what you meant anyway)


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 18, 2012)

Yes.  

Hence the word in inverted commas.  It was in reference to Spiney's earlier post.


----------



## Nylock (Dec 18, 2012)

love detective said:


> So I think a useful (productive? satisfying?) response would be to put together some kind of 'dossier' that extracts and distils all the good stuff from this thread and present it in a structured logical way that can be circulated widely as an honest comprehensive and emotion free account of who she is, what she does and how she does it, leaving no room for the type of get out and avoidance tactics that she employs when asked to respond to the criticisms of this thread itself. We moaned at her for not responding to the substantive points on this thread, but i'd struggle to find the substantive points in around 8,000 posts if I was coming to it cold. More importantly, so would any bystander who holds an open mind on it.
> 
> I shouldn't even be thinking about doing anything like this, but it does feel at the moment that it would be a worthwhile thing to do, you up for it?


A good idea. Trouble is, the next time la penny and her cohorts clap eyes on this thread, the word 'dossier' will be seized upon as further evidence of urbanz' 'patriarchal bully-boy tactics and all-round creepyness' ((C)Laurie Penny 2012) and thus a twitter storm of epic proportion will kick off based on how (once again) we are all a bunch of misogynist arseholes down here in P&P (including all the feminists on this thread). =/

Fuck it. Do it.


----------



## love detective (Dec 18, 2012)

I was thinking maybe it could be illustrated as well

Could see if Pavlov's daughter (who did all our MATB artwork) is available to do it


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 18, 2012)

Agree totally Love Detective.

It's not about a personal grudge thing either, I think it'd be an absolutely essential guide to how class power and privilige functions in the media circles of this country.

And excuse me for bringing up age in this, but I have this nightmare that the older I get, the more the kind of shite she comes out with will end up utterly dominating what passes for "left" discourse in this country. For younger people, we've got a real task on our hands to stop this rot before it destroys all that remains of the left. It's utterly pernicious. This stuff alienates pretty much everyone outside an incredibly small group of posh university graduates, and if it becomes synonymous with "anarchism" or "the radical left" it'll lead directly to it's total and utter defeat in the battle of ideas. We can't let that happen, the times we're living in are too critical for that to be allowed to happen. In other words "and deliver us from evil" as someone else famous said 

Besides there's another point here, and even though it's a bit right-on I think it's true, that as awful and obnoxious as she is, it's still not right that people make crude sexist remarks against her. Not only does it undermine those who would wish to make thoughtful critcism of her work, and acts a tool to deflect such criticism, but I don't think _any_ woman should be made to endure witless abuse of that kind, even if that woman is as obnoxious as Laurie Penny. That's a matter of principle to me. So something that would exclusively focus on the politics of it, with no sexist bullshit to detract from it, would be very useful.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

Needs to be clear that it's not about an attack on one individual, but that her case is illustrative of a social type/trend.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 18, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Needs to be clear thAat it's not about an attack on one individual, but that her case is illustrative of a social type/trend.


 
Agreed. She's an archetype of something systematic that is very wrong and must be challenged.

in any democracy worthy of the name the people have the right to hold establishment journalists to account. And just because you claim to be of the radical left, that does not change.


----------



## love detective (Dec 18, 2012)

Yep, it's been highlighted several times on here that she is a product of what we are attacking


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 18, 2012)

discokermit said:


> lets face it, we all wish we went to parties like that.


 

We really fucking don't.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 18, 2012)

SLK said:


> OK, so who is saying "stupid shit" (I see that in some cases, but even so) and why have one (it's actually close to one person, but might be two) or two people decided to police the thread now that Laurie Penny has arrived? Why has their "stupid shit" not been asked to stop before?
> 
> It only serves to appear that they think she matters. I think to some posters, her arriving on the thread _ really_ matters.


 
This isn't true, I'm afraid. People earlier have been told to shut the fuck up when they've been stupid/out of order/derailed the thread. 

And of course it matters that she arrived. One of the main criticisms of Penny _et al _is the disconnect between them and the people they make good capital - in more than one sense of the word - out of writing FOR and ABOUT. For her to bother to turn up at all was something. It wasn't going to work very well, obviously, as there were some _really_ hard questions.


----------



## love detective (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


>



wee revol gets about doesn't he, there he is in the middle with the beige jumper on


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 18, 2012)

love detective said:


> )
> 
> So I think a useful (productive? satisfying?) response would be to put together some kind of 'dossier' that extracts and distils all the good stuff from this thread and present it in a structured logical way that can be circulated widely as an honest comprehensive and emotion free account of who she is, what she does and how she does it, leaving no room for the type of get out and avoidance tactics that she employs when asked to respond to the criticisms of this thread itself. We moaned at her for not responding to the substantive points on this thread, but i'd struggle to find the substantive points in around 8,000 posts if I was coming to it cold. More importantly, so would any bystander who holds an open mind on it.


 

Why though? While I can understand you being pissed off about being called a racist, is it worth all the effort when the only people who will ever hear of Laura and her ilk, let alone take them seriously, are surely those who would have no interest in your kind of politics anyway?


----------



## Balbi (Dec 18, 2012)

Love those rugs though


----------



## Nylock (Dec 18, 2012)

S☼I said:


> For her to bother to turn up at all was something. It wasn't going to work very well, obviously, as there were some _really_ hard questions.


 
It also wasn't going to work very well due to her arrival on this thread via a cartoon that portrayed "her" getting the shit kicked out of her so, tbf, she was primed to see us all as a bunch of hateful misogynist shitheads from the outset. This doesn't mean that i condone her behaviour on arrival here but i reckon it goes _some_ way towards explaining her interactions with people in this thread since she registered. Especially the selective quoting and so forth.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 18, 2012)

Doubt anyone will even try and be interested when the combined lighthouse/foghorn of the new radical left has decreed it to be racist. Nobody likes racists.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 18, 2012)

All that literary party stuff is hideous.


----------



## love detective (Dec 18, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Why though? While I can understand you being pissed off about being called a racist, is it worth all the effort when the only people who will ever hear of Laura and her ilk, let alone take them seriously, are surely those who would have no interest in your kind of politics anyway?


 
why do anything in life LLETSA?

Her antics yesterday has given some an energy and spur to 'do' something about her type in a more constructive way, it's either channel that energy into a more structural critique of the type of people that the system produces, or use it in a more bitter and negative way by just sniping at her as an individual on message boards like this (or even more derivative and pointless to snipe at the people at who snipe at her on messages boards like this, i mean you never seem to tire of telling us about how you're not bothered by her or any of this, why do you bother?)


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 18, 2012)

love detective said:


> why do anything in life LLETSA?
> 
> Her antics yesterday has given some an energy and spur to 'do' something about her type in a more constructive way, it's either channel that energy into a more structural critique of the type of people that the system produces, or use it in a more bitter and negative way by just sniping at her as an individual on message boards like this (or even more derivative and pointless to snipe at the people at who snipe at her on messages boards like this, i mean you never seem to tire of telling us about how you're not bothered by her or any of this, why do you bother?)


 
I think you should go for it, i know weve had our differences in the past but seeing two people i respect smeared by a well known journalist is a position of power (and then being told you are privileged) is beyond disgusting tbh

let me know if there's anything i can do to help out


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> Damn, I live in Brooklyn


Now that's internationalism!


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 18, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> Damn, I live in Brooklyn . . . I have a beard . . . I wear t shirts with ironic statements . . . *and I'm strawberry blonde*. Why don't I know these people?


 
All you need to do is to find a British Voice of a Generation anarchist-multi-human-scribe, be "of color" and do a little dance to inspire them.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> OK, look away now, the last one here with Malcolm in red shirt:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Stay away from rugs, kids


----------



## spawnofsatan (Dec 18, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Stay away from rugs, kids


Its an Incredible string band gig isn't it?


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> Not just you! All the comments about her drawing style  I think I said it looked a bit like Ronald Searle's and then Idris (I think) said no, someone else. I just can't remember which thread.


 
No, I meant that Searle's style was closer to that of Norn Iron cartoonist Rowel Friers - whose work is curiously rare on the web.


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> No, I meant that Searle's style was closer to that of Norn Iron cartoonist Rowel Friers - whose work is curiously rare on the web.


Sorry, I'd forgotten exactly what you said  But at least that confirms that the conversation *did* take place ... Somewhere.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> OK, look away now, the last one here with Malcolm in red shirt:


 
smug iphone using hand wringing needy bleaty liberal scum.This lot will be first against the wall.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

love detective said:


> I've also got a huge capacity to hold and act on a rational justified grudge. For some reason though her racist accusations is not the main thing spurring me to do something, the main reason is just her in general,not her specific attacks on me, but who she is, what she does and how she does it, and what that means about the capacity and eagerness of the wider left in general to tolerate time and time again developments that are poisonous and corrosive to it
> 
> As someone famous once said _the weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. _Amongst all the dross, this thread is packed full of incisive, pertinent, prescient, revealing and honest criticisms of Laurie Penny that is currently not being used in a productive way, the problem is that most of it is dwarved and hidden both by the dross but also just by the nature of how discussion threads are, which means only the small amount of people who have participated in it is aware of all the gems of solid criticism within it, there's no way in it's current state is it possible of 'gripping the masses' (lol)
> 
> ...


 
Great post - we should definitely do this. I'd have been all in favour of going to meetings she's speaking at and throwing lumps of shit at her but that seems like a more productive response!


----------



## killer b (Dec 18, 2012)

fwiw, from my understanding of twitter, she didn't call you a racist to all her followers: when you @ someone on twitter, the only people who can see it are those who are following both participants, or those who are directly viewing your twitter page - so the actual number of people who potentially saw the libel will be much lower than all her followers. (not defending her btw, but for the sake of accuracy)


----------



## weepiper (Dec 18, 2012)

killer b said:


> fwiw, from my understanding of twitter, she didn't call you a racist to all her followers: when you @ someone on twitter, the only people who can see it are those who are following both participants, or those who are directly viewing your twitter page - so the actual number of people who potentially saw the libel will be much lower than all her followers. (not defending her btw, but for the sake of accuracy)


 
That's true but in the ensuing shit-storm lots of other people with lots of followers weighed in (Owen Jones and Billy Bragg for example) meaning anyone who follows both them and Laurie Penny (which will be a lot of people) will have seen their conversations on their feed and could easily have gone to have a look.


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

So what exactly did she say? In the potentially defamatory context, I mean.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> So what exactly did she say? In the potentially defamatory context, I mean.






			
				laurie penny said:
			
		

> @*LoveDetective1* @*spineynorman78* oh. Oh, I see. You're racist. That makes this so much easier *blocks*
> 
> @*brianwhelanhack*@*lovedetective1*@*spineynorman78* ok, to clarify: I think the article is racist, and so is using it as a basis for argument.


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

Have the IWCA taken advice on this? Especially as she published it (via Brian Whelan) to a national, iirc.


----------



## Jon-of-arc (Dec 18, 2012)

SLK said:


> Why are people who have contributed throughout the thread being told to get off it once LP arrived? That's a fine political reaction to bullshit, but it basically didn't exist (beyond a few isolated examples) until LP arrived and a few posters decided that they should have freedom of the thread because no-one else was capable of challenging LP.


 
It's almost as if a certain person is so completely lacking in self awareness that he is happy to accuse LP of attempting to speak on behalf of an entire group of people with no mandate to do so, whilst doing exactly that himself.  It's almost as if he woke up one day and decided that because he knows a lot that he has a right to be an unchallenged arsehole to pretty much anyone he feels like, and that on the same morning a few sycophants decided they were happy to indulge him in this belief.  



SLK said:


> The most upsetting thing is that in the main, they were really really shit at it as well.


 


(delroy blakes efforts were pretty good, mind...)

Anyway, why do people care so much about Laurie Penny?  "It's not about Laura, it's about journalism!" - Bollocks.


----------



## killer b (Dec 18, 2012)

Jon-of-arc said:


> It's almost as if a certain person


 
why are you and SLK being so coy? if you think butchers has something to answer for, call him on it.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Dec 18, 2012)

[quote="Jon-of-arc, post: 11805367 Anyway, why do people care so much about Laurie Penny? "It's not about Laura, it's about journalism!" - Bollocks.[/quote]

Have you ever felt that you're not quite getting it...that somewhere you're missing the point...a nagging awareness that you're just off the pace? 

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## ska invita (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> The ginger guy in the centre is the 22/3-year-old charging $5,000 exclusive of travel, food and expenses to give a talk about Occupy and anti-capitalism.


""No wonder they’re monetising the undying crap out of their disaffection! "" good quote.

There was an interesting class analysis bit done on Occupy Wall Street that adds up with all this http://www.theblaze.com/stories/jon...egation-class-warfare-in-the-occupy-movement/
...had these upstarts holding "horizontal meetings" in private away from the riffraff in the lobby of a bank of all places


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

killer b said:


> why are you and SLK being so coy? if you think butchers has something to answer for, call him on it.


How can they misread _telling dwyer to get off the thread_  so badly 

(hint here jon: i was mocking his own comedic use of just that approach)


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

Jon-of-arc said:


> (delroy blakes efforts were pretty good, mind...)
> 
> .



Delroy Booth and Roj Blake


----------



## Jon-of-arc (Dec 18, 2012)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Have you ever felt that you're not quite getting it...that somewhere you're missing the point...a nagging awareness that you're just off the pace?
> 
> Cheers - Louis MacNeice


 
Sure, but not here.


----------



## Jon-of-arc (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> How can they misread _telling dwyer to get off the thread_ so badly
> 
> (hint here jon: i was mocking his own comedic use of just that approach)


 
And Firky? And 8den?  And me a few weeks back one multiple occassions?


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

Jon-of-arc said:


> And Firky? And 8den? And me a few weeks back one multiple occassions?


That was me that had a go at 8den and I am a bit sorry about it as it led to another pointless derail.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

What was that about infighting on the left?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

Jon-of-arc said:


> And Firky? And 8den? And me a few weeks back one multiple occassions?


Astonishing now that people have become so soppy that someone pointing out the consequences of their actions were actually achieving the opposite of their intended aim and pissing all over other peoples substantive contributions results in such outrage. Or that telling another poster that that their bringing in years old beef to a thread that has nothing to do with it (and i note no outrage at 8den simply making stuff up goes by without any comment or condemnation from you) is a bit shit is somehow verboten. It's almost as if i'm interested in the thread and how and where its going - a bit like you jon eh?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> What was that about infighting on the left?


 
fuck off, we're solid


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> That was me that had a go at 8den and I am a bit sorry about it as it led to another pointless derail.


8den couldn't seem to tell us apart either.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> fuck off, we're solid


You might be, dunno about the rest of these reprobates.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

Anyone noticed any fall-out from the new statesman intern stuff anywhere?


----------



## Jon-of-arc (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Astonishing now that people have become so soppy that someone pointing out the consequences of their actions were actually achieving the opposite of their intended aim and pissing all over other peoples substantive contributions results in such outrage. Or that telling another poster that that their bringing in years old beef to a thread that has nothing to do with it (and i note no outrage at 8den simply making stuff up goes by without any comment or condemnation from you) is a bit shit is somehow verboten. It's almost as if i'm interested in the thread and how and where its going - a bit like you jon eh?


 
You might want to think how you come across at times, if your interest is purely in the discussion.  I used to really enjoy your posts, and, occassionally, sparring with you.  Thought I was learning a bit, and at least being very entertained. Recently ive just felt like im watching....well, what I described above.  Anyway, as you were.


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> 8den couldn't seem to tell us apart either.


 <--- Best leave it at that.


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Anyone noticed any fall-out from the new statesman intern stuff anywhere?


It's not fall-out as such, but if you didn't already know Blears has a private members bill going through: http://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/pm/articles/2012/12/an-end-to-interns.htm


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> <--- Best leave it at that.


(I reckon so too - but remember the anti-policing police have eyes everywhere  )


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> It's not fall-out as such, but if you didn't already know Blears has a private members bill going through: http://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/pm/articles/2012/12/an-end-to-interns.htm


Cheers, can't really see those small measures proposed getting govt time and backing.


----------



## Dan U (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Anyone noticed any fall-out from the new statesman intern stuff anywhere?


 
only guido taking the piss. went for £1,250 apparently and guido posted some examples of the NS and Laurie Penny herself, ripping in to Tories for this practice previously.

^ may be on the thread already am just in the midst of a big catch up.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

Dan U said:


> only guido taking the piss. went for £1,250 apparently and guido posted some examples of the NS and Laurie Penny herself, ripping in to Tories for this practice previously.
> 
> ^ may be on the thread already am just in the midst of a big catch up.


Yep, was discussed a bit. I wonder if the other elements of the cultural-left bubble are going to take up criticisms of what is almost their house-journal, or if, as i suspect is the case, they're all implicated in it so will decide to keep it zipped - leaving the battle-ground clear for right-wingers like Staines.


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Cheers, can't really see those small measures proposed getting govt time and backing.


Yes, probably unlikely and will go the way of most private members bills. Edit: although employment's getting a lot of attention atm, the recent example (this morning) being redundancy reform


----------



## Balbi (Dec 18, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> fuck off, we're solid


----------



## Dan U (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Yep, was discussed a bit. I wonder if the other elements of the cultural-left bubble are going to take up criticisms of what is almost their house-journal, or if, as i suspect is the case, they're all implicated in it so will decide to keep it zipped - leaving the battle-ground clear for right-wingers like Staines.


 
i reckon so. they still union denying at the NS as well?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

Dan U said:


> i reckon so. they still union denying at the NS as well?


I believe so - the NUJ were talking about going for statutory recognition a few years back but that move seems to have dissapeared.


----------



## Dan U (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I believe so - the NUJ were talking about going for statutory recognition a few years back but that move seems to have dissapeared.


 
a bastion of left wing goodness. i'd be proud to be writing for such a publication.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

imposs1904 said:


> strawberry blonde, surely?
> 
> Sorry, but who's paying him 5 grand to speak? I find that bafflingly.


 

It's an asking price for hirers to haggle down.




> Apparently Harris did actually know about the pitch, at the very least. Given $5,000 was possibly at stake, it would seem remiss if his roommate didn’t at least inform him of that too. Additionally, a PDF of promotional material produced by Lavin about Harris was posted, which has now apparently been deleted.


 


The focus the spiel/agency was really promoting was Malcolm Harris being author of  
*Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis*



about which he says 



			
				Malcolm Harris said:
			
		

> A recent piece in the _Times_ discussed the difficult work-lives 20-something graduates are having today, which indicates that the mainstream media is starting to wake up to these realities. The question is, how young people are going to deal with these realities as they move into the work force and live in society? We need to realize what happened and act upon that knowledge. But the current graduates are in an immediately bad spot, so in the book _we show a new workforce attempting to become a part of the solution by solving their own problems. The essays we published provide frames for understanding what is happening and how to act on it. This includes how-tos on starting co-op housing and *co-op businesses*_, a guide to collaborative consumption resources, cheap and easy seed-to-plate recipes, a peek inside the pack of a modern nomad, and instructions on how to find the best roommate.




http://www.fastcompany.com/1799188/millennials-work-and-life-are-about-cooperation-not-competition

It's not inconceivable that some firm with trendy, progressive mindset might want to hire him to show a young workforce, hey here's how you cut down your living costs collectively, perhaps think about setting up a business on the side too.
The point is not that someone would actually pay $5,000. It's about creating the impression that they might because their words are so powerful, as that original article states:



> This picture of TNI as mostly a springboard to PR success or similar is not just rhetoric based on resentment. TNI alumni brazenly move in that direction: Jennifer Bernstein, one of the three founders, is now working for Seattle marketing company 10 Bellevue. Publicist and TNI contributor Lauren Cerand lists them as one of her clients (http://laurencerand.com/projects/) - along with private equity firm Level Equity. Malcolm Harris peddles Malcolm Gladwell-esque cryptocapitalist nonsense about the communal future with Shareable, and paints himself as a PR genius for convincing the world in 2011 that Radiohead were going to play at Occupy Wall Street (not even an original idea - several months earlier in London the anonymous Deterritorial Support Group convinced enough people that Slavoj Žižek would make a joint appearance with Lady Gaga at Birkbeck that he had to issue a public denial).


In a word it's PR, but PR for a specific purpose.
What's important is that participants see nothing wrong with the careerism, as long as it doesn't become liberal. They are as anti-liberal as the posters on u75.




> @rachelrosenfelt only unethical thing I saw in there was labeling Malcolm Harris the Naomi Klein of the 21st century
> — moe tkacik (@moetkacik) September 19, 2012


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Anyone noticed any fall-out from the new statesman intern stuff anywhere?


 
What I find hard to take is the fact the right are doing the running with it.
Note how little attention this is getting compared to "the Staggers uses slave labour, hah hah"




> But it was lot 77 that was arguably the most depressing. _£1000 for a week’s experience in sports journalism_ – with the Cambridge News. The paper will “endeavour to enable the budding writer to attend a live match with one of our journalists to watch how the paper covers sport as it happens”. That live match would likely be at Cambridge United, a struggling non-league team (I’m allowed to say that – I’ve supported the desperate sods for more than 10 years).









This is a local standard capitalist paper but no outrage. My point yesterday was that interning is everywhere - people who have interned are prefered over those who haven't in securing entry level short-term contracts or freelance positions.

http://davelee.me/a-weeks-work-experience-at-a-local-newspaper-thatll-be-1000/


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 18, 2012)

articul8 said:
			
		

> Needs to be clear that it's not about an attack on one individual, but that her case is illustrative of a social type/trend.



I would include other examples alongside her (to prevent her using the sexism get out) such as hari and perhaps bragg seeing as he's volunteered himself.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I believe so - the NUJ were talking about going for statutory recognition a few years back but that move seems to have dissapeared.


I've raised it with the NUJ - which still isn't recognised in the staggers.  Hope to be doing more campaigning against use of interns to replace paid journo staff in the new year


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I've raised it with the NUJ - which still isn't recognised in the staggers. Hope to be doing more campaigning against use of interns to replace paid journo staff in the new year


They really should have sorted this out in 2009 when 14 out of 17 journos there were members. Wonder how many journos are left there now. And am i right in thinking that unpaid interns are not technicaly allowed to replace workers?


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

Citizen66 said:


> I would include other examples alongside her (to prevent her using the sexism get out) such as hari and perhaps bragg stung as he's volunteered himself.


 
I'd be interested in a general analysis ("The new left commentariat") - looking at the conditions of how mainstream media selects them and how they relate to mainstream media, activists and "normals".  Owen, Ellie, that ginger guy, Sunny, Laurie...

Maybe Zer0 will publish it


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> They really should have sorted this out in 2009 when 14 out of 17 journos there were members. Wonder how many journos are left there now. And am i right in thinking that unpaid interns are not technicaly allowed to replace workers?


Didn't know that (re 2009) - they get around any technical restrictions by "abolishing" staff posts, but then getting long-term training internships etc up and they often do much of previous work.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> They really should have sorted this out in 2009 when 14 out of 17 journos there were members. Wonder how many journos are left there now. And am i right in thinking that unpaid interns are not technicaly allowed to replace workers?


 
Is it a case that they had recognition before in the 2000s but then Jason Cowley started chipping away at it and then recognised. What happened?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Didn't know that (re 2009) - they get around any technical restrictions by "abolishing" staff posts, but then getting long-term training internships etc up and they often do much of previous work.


That then should be your campaign point of entry as it widens the issue to how it effects other workers as well rather than just concentrating on the interns and their conditions alone. Good solid cross-shop ground to build from.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Is it a case that they had recognition before in the 2000s but then Jason Cowley started chipping away at it and then recognised. What happened?


Can't quite recall but that does sound about right.

(btw my figure above of 14/17 being NUJ members in 2009 should read 17/19).


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

I'm don't work on the organising side, but yes I think that's right.  Problem in general with the print media is that the climate is so dire people are worrying about their own jobs and often don't want to be seen as trouble makers.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I'm don't work on the organising side, but yes I think that's right. Problem in general with the print media is that the climate is so dire people are worrying about their own jobs and often don't want to be seen as trouble makers.


Easiest way to _ensure_ that they will get trouble that.


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

Well, the three years are up. So the NUJ could make an(other) application to the CAC.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 18, 2012)

The thread was meandering into a confused conclusion until LP arrived. The whetstone.


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

Making things happen.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 18, 2012)

Certainly got the knives out anyway.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Easiest way to _ensure_ that they will get trouble that.


yes but still  - they want the interns to take the lead in organising


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

What do people make of Paul (in then out of Workers' Power) Mason's introduction to Discordia?





> Why. why. why did I give them that book? When I handed Laurie Penny a copy of





> Tom Wolfe's The New Journalism anthology, it was only to show how the masters of the craft of reportage wrote.
> That chapter where Hunter S. Thompson and illustrator Ralph Steadman hit the 1970 Kentucky Derby, amid a haze of racism, pepper spray and blind drunkenness was meant to be a case study, not an instruction manual.
> Anyway, they went to Greece - Laurie and Molly. What they've produced is guaranteed to make the old men in cardigans who write for the mainstream media cough up more spleen, and the art critics shake their postmodernist heads.
> For the first duty of journalism is to record reality. To do that you have to go to ordinary places and see them in an extraordinary way.
> ...


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

We could save time on the dossier by, in tribute to Laura and the rest's new style, making most of it up.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 18, 2012)

Isherwood, Hemingway, Orwell, Penny.

One of these things is not like the other.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

Hemingway is not really someone i'd be recommending for politically engaged reportage either. He didn't even bother making stuff up, he just reported what he was told to by those buying his booze.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 18, 2012)

A lack of journalistic rigor is the new rigor. Mortis.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

I don't like to say it because I quite like Mason but I suspect there's some mutual backscratching involved - he looks like he's plugged into the latest young activist circles and radical feminist/queer politics, and she looks like she has some kind of connection to serious analysis and the voice of the manual working class.  That's the idea.


----------



## Dan U (Dec 18, 2012)

what the fuck does this crap posted by sihhi ^^^ have to do with ordinary people and their day to day struggles in this country.

it is just tourism bollocks. i am in no shape or form what many of you would consider to be very leftwing but ffs this stuff is just fucking terrible.

if you really believe in this then yeah do some journalism, but do some organising, some activism in your local communities. don't ponce around the globe creating abstract bollocks no fucker is going to read outside of your own circle of wankers. how the fuck does that help someone whose vital services are being withdrawn or privatised around them, who can't afford to eat. any of that real stuff. its not glamorous though is it, dealing with deprived pensioners in Yorkshire or immigrants living in over crowded housing in Newham. Has the progress of leftwing politics in Greece been progressed one jot by this crap? Did Greeks on the left not realise their country was fucked? That they have a resurgent rightwing? Did anyone who didn't know any of this read any of this shit?

and then to put yourself on the pulpit of being the 'future of the left' and crack the shits when you get pulled on it.

mind truly blown.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 18, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I don't like to say it because I quite like Mason but I suspect there's some mutual backscratching involved - _*he looks like he's plugged into the latest young activist circles and radical feminist/queer politics, and she looks like she has some kind of connection to serious analysis and the voice of the manual working class.*_ That's the idea.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 18, 2012)

Dan U said:


> don't ponce around the globe creating abstract bollocks no fucker is going to read outside of your own circle of wankers. how the fuck does that help someone whose vital services are being withdrawn or privatised around them, who can't afford to eat. any of that real stuff. its not glamorous though is it, dealing with deprived pensioners in Yorkshire or immigrants living in over crowded housing in Newham.


 
spot on.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

Balbi, get your mind out of the gutter


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

Mason agreed to do a talk for us earlier this year but ended up in Greece with his day-job instead. The lad who contacted him was very impressed by how willing he was to help in any way possible, wouldn't take any money (even expenses iirc) tried to sort out a replacement etc whilst being totally down to earth and not floating above the norms.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 18, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Balbi, get your mind out of the gutter


 
But the stars are so pretty down here.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Mason agreed to do a talk for us earlier this year but ended up in Greece with his day-job instead. The lad who contacted him was very impressed by how willing he was to help in any way possible, wouldn't take any money (even expenses iirc) tried to sort out a replacement etc whilst being totally down to earth and not floating above the norms.


Fair play - I wonder why he thinks the sun shines out of her arse though.  Maybe it's just his effort to be supportive to a younger generation.


----------



## Dan U (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Mason agreed to do a talk for us earlier this year but ended up in Greece with his day-job instead. The lad who contacted him was very impressed by how willing he was to help in any way possible, wouldn't take any money (even expenses iirc) tried to sort out a replacement etc whilst being totally down to earth and not floating above the norms.


 
i've generally got a lot of time for Mason but that is one of the worst bits of psuedo wankery i've read in a very long time


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

discokermit said:


> it was black and white. you cunt. stop trying to spoil my joke.


 
How can you spoil something that wasn't funny in the first place? 

BTW, Colour filmstock was in heavy use by the '50s, even in France.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

Dan U said:


> i've generally got a lot of time for Mason but that is one of the worst bits of psuedo wankery i've read in a very long time


They're dragging him down.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 18, 2012)

surely this thread should now be called Laurie Penny/New Statesman vs Urban75/P&P Twitter handbags


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

Is stuff like this not wanted any longer:-





			
				LP is Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> *My favourite bits of the book were actually the conversations between you two. For instance, the one where Laurie says “People don’t want women with swagger.” Is this book a response to that sentiment?*
> 
> LP: The sad thing about today's world for women artists and writers is that people are going to be vicious and try to tear you down whatever you do. But that's also a little bit liberating, once you realize that no matter how good and small and quiet you try to make yourself, no matter how much you shy away and try to stick to your permitted boundaries as a woman, people are going to hate on you anyway. So you may as well just go for it.
> 
> ...


 

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/democ...rdia-authors-laurie-penny-and-molly-crabapple

Anyway, the conclusion after that heady summer was this in November 2012:


----------



## Dan U (Dec 18, 2012)

PEOPLE AREN'T CALLING YOU SHIT BECAUSE YOU ARE A WOMAN. THEY ARE CALLING YOU SHIT BECAUSE YOU ARE SHIT.

SEE ALSO THAT HARI CHAP.

ffs.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

SLK said:


> I was going to write "the best that can happen from this thread is that LP reads some criticisms of her, evaluates her position, and realises that the working class can be educated too. The worst is that she turns against said people and becomes more openly entrenched in her milieu"
> Then I thought that the "best" and "worst" are not that far apart.
> 
> Then some people decided they own the thread, and decided that now that LP has arrived, they have to police the contributions. They didn't think that before; no-one was told to leave the thread before LP turned up. Anyone could post anything.
> ...


 
Who's been told to leave the thread, and by whom?

Oh, and "fuck off" or similar don't count. They're merely expressions of pissed-offness.


----------



## Dan U (Dec 18, 2012)

coffee spittingly funny



> no matter how good and small and quiet you try to make yourself, no matter how much you shy away and try to stick to your permitted boundaries as a woman, people are going to hate on you anyway


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

This quote complements that vote pic very well.



			
				dave said:
			
		

> These people believe in American Democracy and their place in it in the way that some people believe in the Holy Ghost or Father Christmas. They believe in it desperately, *childishly*, because they need something to believe in, and the fact that they have little to no evidence that it’s going to do anything for them if it exists at all just makes belief more precious.


Also, the quote is way back but she must have been the only person on the twitter that thought Obama was thrashing Romney in the 1st pres debate. All over the place.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

So laurie's not been back here or on Twatter then?


----------



## weepiper (Dec 18, 2012)

she's been back on twitter but has clearly decided to sail on majestically from the racism debacle in the hope it'll go away.


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> So laurie's not been back here or on Twatter then?


She'll be back for the likes and CRI's guinea pig pics.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Hmph. I'd like to see that dossier happen tho, that could be fun to watch. I say fun, but do I mean it?


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> They're dragging him down.


Good to read your earlier - watched his recent thing on Spain last night and was thinking he seems to be getting a bit sucked in.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> So laurie's not been back here or on Twatter then?


No one knows, she blocked everyone.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> No one knows, she blocked everyone.


She ain't blocked me.


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

Dossier sounds good, my suggestion to SP was an open letter to her (CC to the IWCA).

He's also got a very good idea himself but that's one for the future.


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> She ain't blocked me.


That's your failure to draw a clear class line, you horrible liberal vacillator.


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

That's what I'm talking about. 



> That look in Obama's eyes? 'Fuck you, rich boy, I'm smart as hell and this is what I'm best at?' That. Is UNSPEAKABLY sexy.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Just had a peek, she's back to self-promotion. Fair play, it's about the only good use for Twatter anyhoo.


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

Full page open letter in the guardian. How much?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

What is this?

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
Had coffee with @*Dymaxion*. Have now begun recruiting for the Post-Geographical Polyqueer Sex Mafia.

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear.


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> Full page open letter in the guardian. How much?


The cost of your very soul


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2010/03/29/rates-display-guardian.pdf for ad rates


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

Jon-of-arc said:


> Anyway, why do people care so much about Laurie Penny? "It's not about Laura, it's about journalism!" - Bollocks.


 
No, it's about a *type* of journalism which continually crosses the border with fiction; which relates the life and experiences of the author rather than the subject, and merely uses subjects as pegs on which to hang self-referential anecdotage; which happily "lifts" and decontextualises the work and words of others.
And about a specific type of journalist that does this sort of thing: Children of privilege whose experiences have very little in common with the sort of political and social activism they use as a vehicle for their careerism.

Not "Bollocks" at all, in other words.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> No, it's about a *type* of journalism which continually crosses the border with fiction; which relates the life and experiences of the author rather than the subject, and merely uses subjects as pegs on which to hang self-referential anecdotage; which happily "lifts" and decontextualises the work and words of others.
> And about a specific type of journalist that does this sort of thing: Children of privilege whose experiences have very little in common with the sort of political and social activism they use as a vehicle for their careerism.
> 
> Not "Bollocks" at all, in other words.


We are all Laurie Penny.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> She ain't blocked me.


Pfffft, liberal


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> Pfffft, liberal


I just don't use Twitter except for stalking. Anyway, it's apparently about 10K for a full page in the Graun.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 18, 2012)

thats a bit steep


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> thats a bit steep


I was looking to you, yes I was.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 18, 2012)

love detective said:


> why do anything in life LLETSA?
> 
> Her antics yesterday has given some an energy and spur to 'do' something about her type in a more constructive way, it's either channel that energy into a more structural critique of the type of people that the system produces, or use it in a more bitter and negative way by just sniping at her as an individual on message boards like this (or even more derivative and pointless to snipe at the people at who snipe at her on messages boards like this, i mean you never seem to tire of telling us about how you're not bothered by her or any of this, why do you bother?)


 

Fair enough if that's what you want to spend time doing. I'm still at a loss to know, however, why you attach such importance to what these people of the chattering classes do when they won't affect the kind of people you'd presumably still address your politics to in any way.

And so, when you've put Laura in her place those people who follow Laura will notice, as will a handful of messageboard obsessives. The world outside the window will look the same.

And who's this LLETSA that everybody keeps referring to?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

> You can choose not to believe it if you wish, but I am a journalist and I tell the truth. *Sorry if that truth makes you uncomfortable.*
> 
> ...
> 
> The posts you link to, far from being ‘accurate’, are snide, pissy, poorly-written personal attacks. They’re the blog equivalent of calling someone up, heavy-breathing at them down the phone for a while and then getting enraged when they don’t respond. If people want to see me as a cartoon punching-bag, then fine, but they can hardly get pissy at me for refusing to respond to their childish rants. *I have far, far more important things to do*


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

This is Molly Crabbapple in _The New Inquiry_:

"In June, a company I work with flew me out to Amsterdam, ostensibly to create art about the city. But the artists in Dam Square could watercolor a sweeter canal than me. Instead, I drew people. _Escorts and porn filmmakers and digital rights activists and women who co-built artspaces in abandoned bomb shelters. Because artists are the shy kids in the corner, and a sketchpad is a lockpick to the greater world._"
http://thenewinquiry.com/features/amsterdam-demimonde/
offering a bizarrely romanticised version of escort prostitution/sex work for the top layer:





This is sort of how the New Inquiry and the new US left intellectual scene sees itself - a poster by another artist for its sub drive:


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> And who's this LLETSA that everybody keeps referring to?


 
If he's not you he's your intellectual doppelganger.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

Note particularly the top left side of that poster in the style of a flow chart

Celebrities => dead end. Fair enough. OK, but then The New Inquiry on a number of occasions explicitly discusses celebrities in these kinds of terms:




			
				New Inquiry issue 2 said:
			
		

> And since capital is a relation between itself and its opposite, labor (or the revolutionary subject or whatever you’d like to call it), it’s never totally clear whose voice is speaking in these cultural products at any given instant. Is it capital who’s saying, “Now is our time”? Is it labor who’s singing, “till the world ends”? It’s interesting that this last line comes from britney’s latest single, because two strong contenders for her wobbly position as most profitable female pop singer, gaga and ke$ha, occupy these two voices, the one of capital singing to its nemesis and the one of that nemesis singing back to capital. but in a bonus trick, what they sing is a sort of liar’s paradox. Neither can say outright which one it is, because as dialectical poles, each voice depends on the other for its own identity. so we get gaga, whose art is fame, money, and power, saying more or less, “I’m not capital. Capital is a liar.” ke$ha, on the other hand, identifies with the nemesis by seeming to claim, “I am capital. Capital is a liar.” to oppose capital is to try and ramp up its contradictory position, so ke$ha, in glam-prole drag, sings as if she were capital: “we’re taking control / we get what we want / we do what you don’t.” for capital to oppose the proletariat, it must flatter the latter’s freedom from its clutches, so gaga tries: “I’m your biggest fan / I’ll follow you until you love me.” ...
> Capital is ahead of us at the moment, and if you spent any time at the occupations you may have noticed a lot of the occupiers still parroting Christina Aguilera’s dreadlocked “You are beautiful / In every single way.” but the content of popular music, what’s edgy enough to really capture public attention, has changed a lot since Christina topped the charts. The only feeling left for the music industry to sell back to us is crisis, and it makes for really great dance music. You see this play out in the tastes on the radical left: The last explicitly anarchist party I went to promised “plenty of ke$ha” on the facebook invite without a bit of irony. but there’s a kind of aphasia, an inability for these songs to say what they’re about.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> This is Molly Crabbapple in _The New Inquiry_:
> 
> "In June, a company I work with flew me out to Amsterdam, ostensibly to create art about the city. But the artists in Dam Square could watercolor a sweeter canal than me. Instead, I drew people. _Escorts and porn filmmakers and digital rights activists and women who co-built artspaces in abandoned bomb shelters. Because artists are the shy kids in the corner, and a sketchpad is a lockpick to the greater world._"
> http://thenewinquiry.com/features/amsterdam-demimonde/
> ...


They should volunteer for a sex worker street outreach team. Rub out some of that teenage romanticism.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Note particularly the top left side of that poster in the style of a flow chart
> 
> Celebrities => dead end. Fair enough. OK, but then The New Inquiry on a number of occasions explicitly discusses celebrities in these kinds of terms:


Note the construction of the 'us' in that last paragraph.


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

What has the ceiling fan got do with the flow chart (upper right hand corner)?

Trying to work out what that is.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> We are all Laurie Penny.


 
Really? Where's my wonga for my New Statesman column, then?


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 18, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Agree totally Love Detective.
> 
> This stuff alienates pretty much everyone outside an incredibly small group of posh university graduates, and if it becomes synonymous with "anarchism" or "the radical left" it'll lead directly to it's total and utter defeat in the battle of ideas.


 

Thirty years too late, I'm afraid.


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> This is Molly Crabbapple in _The New Inquiry_:..


'Shy kid in the corner' is definitely the first thing springs to mind with her carry-on


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

firky said:


> What has the ceiling fan got do with the flow chart (upper right hand corner)?
> 
> Trying to work out what that is.


 
It's a drone. Have you apologised yet, btw?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Really? Where's my wonga for my New Statesman column, then?


I nicked it.


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> It's a drone. Have you apologised yet, btw?


 
See back there for my reply with regards to that.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

firky said:


> What has the ceiling fan got do with the flow chart (upper right hand corner)?
> 
> Trying to work out what that is.


 
It's supposed to be a UAV/drone, I believe.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> I nicked it.


 
Thieving Viking cunt!!!


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Thieving Viking cunt!!!


That's what we do!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 18, 2012)

firky said:


> What has the ceiling fan got do with the flow chart (upper right hand corner)?
> 
> Trying to work out what that is.


 
it's a drone


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

Well it looks more like a ceiling fan!

Or maybe an orchid.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

Paul Mason via sihhi said:


> ...Anyway, they went to Greece - Laurie and Molly. What they've produced is guaranteed to make the old men in cardigans who write for the mainstream media cough up more spleen, and the art critics shake their postmodernist heads.
> 
> For the first duty of journalism is to record reality. To do that you have to go to ordinary places and see them in an extraordinary way.
> 
> ...


 
etc.

Just as a reminder - they were there no more than a week!

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...cebook-handbags.266196/page-146#post-11581461


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

firky said:


> Well it looks more like a ceiling fan!
> 
> Or maybe an orchid.


 
No-one said it was a well-drawn drone.


----------



## Jon-of-arc (Dec 18, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> No, it's about a *type* of journalism which continually crosses the border with fiction; which relates the life and experiences of the author rather than the subject, and merely uses subjects as pegs on which to hang self-referential anecdotage; which happily "lifts" and decontextualises the work and words of others.
> And about a specific type of journalist that does this sort of thing: Children of privilege whose experiences have very little in common with the sort of political and social activism they use as a vehicle for their careerism.
> 
> Not "Bollocks" at all, in other words.



a VERY specific "type".


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> That's what we do!


 
Vicky the viking doesn't!


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Vicky the viking doesn't!


We don't rate her.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 18, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Thirty years too late, I'm afraid.


 
You are LLETSA and I claim my five pounds.

Now lets get back to the Laurie Penny Oxbridge Clusterfuck shall we?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> You are LLETSA and I claim my five pounds.
> 
> Now lets get back to the Laurie Penny Oxbridge gang-bang shall we?


It'd be better if you refrained from using terms like gang-bang.


----------



## Jackobi (Dec 18, 2012)

firky said:


> What has the ceiling fan got do with the flow chart (upper right hand corner)?
> 
> Trying to work out what that is.


 
It's a drone.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 18, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> You are LLETSA and I claim my five pounds.
> 
> Now lets get back to the Laurie Penny Oxbridge gang-bang shall we?


 
Don't be a twat


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

Jackobi said:


> It's a drone.


You just don't care about all those children in the Middle East killed by ceiling fans


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

Jon-of-arc said:


> a VERY specific "type".


 
Unfortunately not. The self-referential stuff had already crept into the mainstream at the end of the last century, albeit in the more Thompsonesque writings of Will Self, or the rants of Ann Leslie. The "activist"/politically-engaged slant was in place by the mid-00s through the likes of Hari. The media love such "cred"-bestowing _faux_-activist commentators. The _genre_ is growing.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> We don't rate her.


 
Call yourself a Viking? Vicky is a boy!!!


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> She ain't blocked me.



Nor me. She just ignores me when I say anything to her though. Probably rightly  Molly at least replies.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> Nor me. She just ignores me when I say anything to her though. Probably rightly  Molly at least replies.


 
Same here. I've made some blunt remarks, but never insulting, and it seems as though I'm one of the Unpeople already.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

I haven't tried to engage. Guess that makes me a wibewal bystander/cunt.


----------



## Random (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> What's important is that participants see nothing wrong with the careerism, as long as it doesn't become liberal. They are as anti-liberal as the posters on u75.


 I'm confused. So they're a bit like the Living Marxism lot? Pro-capitalist far lefties? The US has it's fair share of third worldist maoist sects as well, are they from that stable?


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> I haven't tried to engage. Guess that makes me a wibewal bystander/cunt.


My liberal comment was tongue in cheek!


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Same here. I've made some blunt remarks, but never insulting, and it seems as though I'm one of the Unpeople already.


It's no skin off my nose, tbf.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> It's no skin off my nose, tbf.


 
Nor mine. I fully agree with anybody ignoring comments that are insulting or spiteful or threatening. What twists my tit is anybody ignoring any criticism, no matter how accurate or fair, if they can ignore it and smear any critic they can't by throwing insults and outright lies at them.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> It'd be better if you refrained from using terms like gang-bang.


 
 would you prefer I said "Oxbridge media clique" or something instead?

Objection noted and put into the minutes, comrade


----------



## Random (Dec 18, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I don't know much about what I like but I do know art.


 Knowing your Manet from your Monet can mean the difference between an internship at the New Statesman and and internment at New Cross, if you know what I mean.


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Nor mine. I fully agree with anybody ignoring comments that are insulting or spiteful or threatening. What twists my tit is anybody ignoring any criticism, no matter how accurate or fair, if they can ignore it and smear any critic they can't by throwing insults and outright lies at them.


I think what's pissing her off is that she's discovered that there's a slightly more radical left than hers already in existence, and she doesn't like it.


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Objection noted and put into the minutes, comrade


With a mental note made to put him up for that cadre's job in the Xinjiang salt pans at the first available opportunity.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> I think what's pissing her off is that she's discovered that there's a slightly more radical left than hers already in existence, and she doesn't like it.


 
I think it's like when you come to the realisation in your early teens that your parents have sex. And *shudder* _enjoy_ it


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 18, 2012)

weepiper said:


> I think it's like when you come to the realisation in your early teens that your parents have sex. And *shudder* _enjoy_ it


 
Not as bad as the realisation dawning on you shortly after joining the Socialist Party out of a misguided sense of nostalgia that your mum only joined coz Derek Hatton was trying to shag her....


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> I think what's pissing her off is that she's discovered that there's a slightly more radical left than hers already in existence, and she doesn't like it.


 
Well, it does rather threaten her self-appointed status as some sort of radical and possibly damages the brand. It probably also annoys her that the lefties in question, aside from being infinitely more genuine than her, don't go along with the charade.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> My liberal comment was tongue in cheek!


Oh I know.


Delroy Booth said:


> would you prefer I said "Oxbridge media clique" or something instead?
> 
> Objection noted and put into the minutes, comrade


Do I have to spell out to you why "gang-bang" is not an appropriate term? Clusterfuck, now there's a better word.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Oh I know.
> 
> Do I have to spell out to you why "gang-bang" is not an appropriate term? Clusterfuck, now there's a better word.


 
We're all getting accused of rampant sexism no matter how carefully we phrase things so, whilst you're totally right, it's a bit a moot point at this stage I reckon.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> I think what's pissing her off is that she's discovered that there's a slightly more radical left than hers already in existence, and she doesn't like it.


I think what she and so many others on the left don't like is the old-school focus on class and the attendant criticisms of identity politics. As soon as anyone goes "yes, LGBT rights are important, but...." then all hell breaks loose.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 18, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> We're all getting accused of rampant sexism no matter how carefully we phrase things so, whilst you're totally right, it's a bit a moot point at this stage I reckon.


 
I dunno Delroy, gang-bang in the usual British context has strong 'rape' overtones. I wouldn't use it.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

Random said:


> Knowing your Manet from your Monet can mean the difference between an internship at the New Statesman and and internment at New Cross, if you know what I mean.


Song by Billy Idol innit


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> We're all getting accused of rampant sexism no matter how carefully we phrase things so, whilst you're totally right, it's a bit a moot point at this stage I reckon.


Do it for me then.


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> I think what she and so many others on the left don't like is the old-school focus on class and the attendant criticisms of identity politics. As soon as anyone goes "yes, LGBT rights are important, but...." then all hell breaks loose.


Not a comfortable conversation to have for many.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> Not a comfortable conversation to have for many.


And I can understand why, but still.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 18, 2012)

weepiper said:


> I dunno Delroy, gang-bang in the usual British context has strong 'rape' overtones. I wouldn't use it.


 
Does it??? 

Ah shit now that's a bit different to what I intended.

I just meant it in a "cliquey" sense more than owt else.


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

weepiper said:


> I dunno Delroy, gang-bang in the usual British context has strong 'rape' overtones. I wouldn't use it.


Maybe the youngsters are co-opting it, like they did with gay.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Does it???
> 
> Ah shit now that's a bit different to what I intended.
> 
> I just meant it in a "cliquey" sense more than owt else.


Are you UK or US? AFAIK US usage is both "rapey" and to do with gangs going out on a rampage.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 18, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Does it???
> 
> Ah shit now that's a bit different to what I intended.
> 
> I just meant it in a "cliquey" sense more than owt else.


 
the first page of a google search for the word will show you what I mean.


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

weepiper said:


> the fisrt page of a google search for the word will show you what I mean.


But wait until you're at work to try that


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> And I can understand why, but still.


It'd be worth discussing if it was possible for main stream feminism (as opposed to "born women only" type feminism) to stop being branded as identity politics, for a start.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> Maybe the youngsters are co-opting it, like they did with gay.


 
Fuck knows, but I give you my word I wouldn't have used it if I thought it had rapey overtones, I promise you that.

So yeah apologies for that, genuine error on my part


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> I think what's pissing her off is that she's discovered that there's a slightly more radical left than hers already in existence, and she doesn't like it.


She's a LD voting, UN air-strike cheering, Obama-orgasming liberal.  Despite all the anarcho-feminist chatter


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 18, 2012)

post a drilldo pick to make up for it


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 18, 2012)

JimW said:


> You just don't care about all those children in the Middle East killed by ceiling fans


 
It's actually the Far East where this is occurring.


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> It's actually the Far East where this is occurring.


They tell you that here too! (ETA, Well, not death but 'you'll catch your death') I was brought up to sleep with the windows open and my Chinese mates think I'm nuts.


----------



## Random (Dec 18, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> make it stop


I'm actually quite politically cheered up by this thread, especially in recent days. It shows that there's a fair few of us on here that can agree and talk usefully about a basic pro-working class politics, even if we do it as part of hating liberals and elitist lefties. It would be great if someone pulled the best bits into an article about lefty class privilege.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

Not in red pepper though please.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Random said:


> I'm actually quite politically cheered up by this thread, especially in recent days. It shows that there's a fair few of us on here that can agree and talk usefully about a basic pro-working class politics, even if we do it as part of hating liberals and elitist lefties. It would be great if someone pulled the best bits into an article about lefty class privilege.


If you've got a spare 10K we can take out a full page in the Graun.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> If you've got a spare 10K we can take out a full page in the Graun.


Let's start a Kickstarter crowdfunding project!


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Let's start a Kickstarter crowdfunding project!


Actually not a bad idea.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 18, 2012)

who wouldn't want to fund an article cunting off fabians in their own paper


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> who wouldn't want to fund an article cunting off fabians in their own paper


I'm in for a tenner.


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> If you've got a spare 10K we can take out a full page in the Graun.


How much to just take out the Graun?


----------



## Dan U (Dec 18, 2012)

how many pages does this thread to need a Part 2.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

JimW said:


> How much to just take out the Graun?


You asking me? Let me get back to you on that one.

Oh, are we talking the building, the people, the organisation or all/a combo?


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> You asking me? Let me get back to you on that one.
> 
> Oh, are we talking the building, the people, the organisation or all/a combo?


Them Chechens still work quite cheap.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 18, 2012)

I will seriously chip in a couple of hundred for that


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Dan U said:


> how many pages does this thread to need a Part 2.


More than 9000. I am in your base, kilin al yr d00dz.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

JimW said:


> How much to just take out the Graun?


 
_We only have to be lucky once_. _You have to be lucky all the time._


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I will seriously chip in a couple of hundred for that


Couple hundred? You call yourself working class? Where'd you get that kinda money from? etc


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Couple hundred? You call yourself working class? Where'd you get that kinda money from? etc


It's OK, he won it on the dogs.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Couple hundred? You call yourself working class? Where'd you get that kinda money from? etc


Selling oregano to Laura's chums.


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Couple hundred? You call yourself working class? Where'd you get that kinda money from? etc


 
Firebox workers' tip tray.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Selling oregano to Laura's chums.


Now that I can get behind. Maybe he could fund an entire page like that - taking money from them to attack them.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

Instead of paying cash money to Rusbridger, I say we groom The Kingster, vest him up with the home brew and send him forth to glory.


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Instead of paying cash money to Rusbridger, I say we groom The Kingster, vest him up with the home brew and send him forth to glory.


The Kingster is our man on the inside. That reminds me, I promised him a PD mug,


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Couple hundred? You call yourself working class? Where'd you get that kinda money from? etc


 
http://videosift.com/video/Arse-Intruding-Dildos-Lock-Stock-and-Two-Smoking-Barrels


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

Bizarre suicide cooking-apron b0mb demolishes liberal mouthpiece


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> The Kingster is our man on the inside. That reminds me, I promised him a PD mug,


There are no PD mugs.


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

I bet maj would do tshirts though


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

Sabcat to the rescue


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> There are no PD mugs.


Something must be done.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> Something must be done.


We need a dumbing down.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> There are no PD mugs.





copliker said:


> Something must be done.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Not in red pepper though please.


why?   In fact, sod it - we won't run the article but gives us 10k and you can have the front cover


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

the bubble said:
			
		

> we won't run the article


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

that was a joke - if it was well researched and made its point we'd run it I'm sure - though I'd probably come under pressure to give her a right of reply


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

From who?

Off your knees! Don't let her bully you.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 18, 2012)

hils


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

I'm sad to say I tried (and failed) to veto an uncritical review of Discordia from going in the Dec/Jan issue. So I could argue it's necessary for balance


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 18, 2012)

firky said:


> Firebox workers' tip tray.


 
Is that before or after Dr Ring Ring unionised them


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> hils


I understand that she is alive with the sound of muses


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> From who?
> 
> Off your knees! Don't let her bully you.


 Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbour?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

_Ooh, we're afraid to go with you articul8 we might get in trouble._


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

If anyone wanted to put in a polemical letter about narcissistic gonzo-tourism (it would save me a job )


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 18, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:
			
		

> Does it???
> 
> Ah shit now that's a bit different to what I intended.
> 
> I just meant it in a "cliquey" sense more than owt else.



that's a love in.

or circle jerk.


----------



## Dan U (Dec 18, 2012)

*Guido Fawkes* ‏@*GuidoFawkes* 
Mother Nature is sexist. @*PennyRed*


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

Can someone who knows how to get your twitter account back when it's been suspended send us a PM please?

Cheers.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Can someone who knows how to get your twitter account back when it's been suspended send us a PM please?
> 
> Cheers.


why's it been suspended - any feedback?


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

articul8 said:


> why's it been suspended - any feedback?


Unsolicited/abuse of the @ probably.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Dec 18, 2012)

theres a shitload of backtracking and arse covering going on in twitter
53s 

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
.@*dieFALKENATOR* well ok, to clarify, I've no idea whether @*LoveDetective1* is racist, but given his record it's safe to assume that he isn't.

 *  View conversation  * 
6m 

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
.@*GuidoFawkes* Guido, debating evolutionary psychology with you is not on my to-do list for today.

 *  View conversation  * 
7m 

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
Maybe it's just wishful thinking? But I think most people, even when they act like dickheads, want and believe themselves to be good-hearted

 *   Expand   * 
8m 

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
I'm sure that most of the people who do sexist things don't feel, in their hearts, that they are sexist, that they believe women inferior.

 *   Expand   * 
9m 

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
I think a lot of it is a question of identity. Personally, whether someone 'is' (e.g.) a sexist is less important to me than their actions.

 *   Expand   * 
12m 

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
Why is it that thinkers on left and right seem happy to be called 'sexist' - but when 'racism' is mentioned they explode + threaten to sue?

 *   Expand   * 
14m 

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
.@*Calderbank* but I didn't call @*LoveDetective1* racist. I thought the person who RTd that article in debate was arguing in a racist way.

 *  View conversation  *


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> Unsolicited/abuse of the @ probably.


He's nicked some punk's cider?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

> Why is it that thinkers on left and right seem happy to be called 'sexist' - but when 'racism' is mentioned they explode + threaten to sue?


 
Now, they aren't and no one threatened to sue. Threatening to sue is something Laura does,


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

I mentioned IWCA having previously employed the services of Carter Ruck.  Think that may have induced a spot of panic


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Can someone who knows how to get your twitter account back when it's been suspended send us a PM please?
> 
> Cheers.


 
Ask Blagsta?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

At least now we're "thinkers". Or you are, I'm not cool enough to join your gang.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> At least now we're "thinkers". Or you are, I'm not cool enough to join your gang.


 
i think she was referring to firky


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

articul8 said:


> why's it been suspended - any feedback?


 Not as far as I'm aware - though I'm not a tech savvy yoot so I wouldn't know where to look for it anyway to be honest.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

not-bono-ever said:


> 14m
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> .@*Calderbank* but I didn't call @*LoveDetective1* racist. I thought the person who RTd that article in debate was arguing in a racist way.
> ...


 
That's me isn't it?


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Now, they aren't and no one threatened to sue. Threatening to sue is something Laura does,


I asked if the IWCA had taken advice, and made the point about publishing. I suppose that if anyone knows that the IWCA have got previous for litigation, they may be concerned.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

probably to your email address you registered with?


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> I asked if the IWCA had taken advice, and made the point about publishing. I suppose that if anyone knows that the IWCA have got previous for litigation, they may be concerned.


they should know - I mentioned the fucking legal firm


----------



## BigTom (Dec 18, 2012)

she has now apologised to LD kind of

Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed

@dieFALKENATOR @LoveDetective1 I just did - until your tweet just now I didn't realise quite how it looked.

Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
.@dieFALKENATOR you're right, the RT-reply system does make it unclear who that was directed at. My mistake, I apologise. @LoveDetective1

umm, what is she talking about here? the RT-reply system? who was it directed at if it wasn't LD? Spiney I could understand her saying this but I can't see how this could have been unclear, unless she is using some weird twitter client.. Surly LD just tweeted a link at her in reply to something She'd said to Spiney or Spiney had said to her?


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

I wonder if she saw my apology?



TruXta said:


> At least now we're "thinkers". Or you are, I'm not cool enough to join your gang.


 
I have been called a few things that end with ER; 'thinker' is not one of them. Cheers Laura!

(I think she maybe referring to me


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

BigTom said:


> she has now apologised kind of
> 
> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> 
> ...


Because otherwise you're left with the improbable explanation that she's making it up as she goes along, which would be totally out of character.


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

She's a poster here. Nothing wrong with posting here to clarify what she meant, and apologise properly if an apology is her intention.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Can someone who knows how to get your twitter account back when it's been suspended send us a PM please?
> 
> Cheers.


Can't work out pm system on my phone so I'll post here.

I logged into Twitter from a desktop pc and there was a messsge about abuse of the @ system. I just had to agree to a statement that i wouldn't "abuse" it again and enter one of those captcha things to prove I'm not a bot. Too me 5 goes, mind.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

BigTom said:


> she has now apologised kind of
> 
> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> 
> ...


 
Yes, when that woman accused her of apropriation I said she'd been hoist by her own identity politics - thought it was ironic that someone who threw this kind of thing around so liberally was actually shown to be doing it herself. She replied saying that all politics are identity politics and then LD tweeted the article, and I retweeted it cos I think it's a really good piece. So apparently I'm the only racist in the village now.


----------



## BigTom (Dec 18, 2012)

JimW said:


> Because otherwise you're left with the improbable explanation that she's making it up as she goes along, which would be totally out of character.


 
I'm prtty sure this is the case but I just want other people to confirm they don't know what she's on about, would be odd on twitter to say something most twitter users will be confused by and not sure what she means, we'll see. She needs to apologise to spiney as well as he was caught up in that tweet.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> She's a poster here. Nothing wrong with posting here to clarify what she meant, and apologise properly if an apology is her intention.


She ain't got the same kinda audience here, wouldn't play into her PR strategy. I wish I was joking.


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yes, when that woman accused her of apropriation I said she'd been hoist by her own identity politics - thought it was ironic that someone who threw this kind of thing around so liberally was actually shown to be doing it herself. She replied saying that all politics are identity politics and then LD tweeted the article, and I retweeted it cos I think it's a really good piece. So apparently I'm the only racist in the village now.


No. Because she clearly stated that the IWCA's article was racist.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 18, 2012)

Her campaigning style in pictures:








'ONWARD, SISTERS! ONWARD! TO GLORY!'





'Meep Meep!'


----------



## weepiper (Dec 18, 2012)

FFs I replied to that half-assed apology saying 'there's still a 'sorry' missing from this tweet' and then 'and what about Spiney Norman?' and she's blocked me


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> Can't work out pm system on my phone so I'll post here.
> 
> I logged into Twitter from a desktop pc and there was a messsge about abuse of the @ system. I just had to agree to a statement that i wouldn't "abuse" it again and enter one of those captcha things to prove I'm not a bot. Too me 5 goes, mind.


 
Cheers mate. Well I've got my account back but my followers/following lists have disappeared - not all that bothered though, I didn't have any followers until Laura called me a racist.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

weepiper said:


> FFs I replied to that half-assed apaology saying 'there's still a 'sorry' missing from this tweet' and then 'and what about Spiney Norman?' and she's blocked me


I saw she used the word "apologies" somewhere in that thread, but cannot for the life of me work out who she's apologising to or what for.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yes, when that woman accused her of apropriation I said she'd been hoist by her own identity politics - thought it was ironic that someone who threw this kind of thing around so liberally was actually shown to be doing it herself. She replied saying that all politics are identity politics and then LD tweeted the article, and I retweeted it cos I think it's a really good piece. So apparently I'm the only racist in the village now.


 
You retweeted it_ in a racist way._

_ _


----------



## killer b (Dec 18, 2012)

weepiper said:


> FFs I replied to that half-assed apology saying 'there's still a 'sorry' missing from this tweet' and then 'and what about Spiney Norman?' and she's blocked me


i think (who can tell though? it's not exactly obvious wtf she's on about) that she still maintains spiney is a racist...


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

I've been blocked


----------



## FreddyB (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> No. Because she clearly stated that the IWCA's article was racist.


And sexist. I don't quite understand what's she's doing.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> No. Because she clearly stated that the IWCA's article was racist.


 
She's apologised (sort of) and in apologizing it looks to me like she's pointed the finger firmly in my direction (presumably in order to retain credibility among her sycophants).


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> No. Because she clearly stated that the IWCA's article was racist.


It was asking her what was racist about it that got me blocked and my account suspended.


----------



## killer b (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> She's apologised (sort of) and in apologizing it looks to me like she's pointed the finger firmly in my direction (presumably in order to retain credibility among her sycophants).


that's what it looks like to me too.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

Fozzie Bear said:


> You retweeted it_ in a racist way._
> 
> _ _


 
Must have done. I'm just a big daft racist me, my racism seeps into everything I do


----------



## weepiper (Dec 18, 2012)

killer b said:


> that's what it looks like to me too.


 
same here.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Cheers mate. Well I've got my account back but my followers/following lists have disappeared - not all that bothered though, I didn't have any followers until Laura called me a racist.



They'll come back in a bit.


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

What's the point of blocking people on twitter when they just need to logout to out to see what was wrote?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

killer b said:


> that's what it looks like to me too.


 
I didn't think I could have any more contempt for her than I did yesterday. Seems I was wrong.


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

For Spiney, Weepiper and all  the glorious Fallen of the Great Patriotic Twitter War of '012:


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Cheers mate. Well I've got my account back but my followers/following lists have disappeared - not all that bothered though, I didn't have any followers until Laura called me a racist.


 

And you were just three more followers awy from being grand wizard of twitter as well


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

I just replied to one of her tweets, let's see if I can get blocked too.


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

> This idea of 'the decline of the young man' and 'the end of men' causing violence, social breakdown - what do you think, Twitter?


 



> Particularly interested to hear from young men on this question. If you'd prefer to email me in private, it's laurie.penny@gmail.com


 

Fill your boots but don't expect a reply.


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

I'm certainly much less of a young man than I used to be. She could be on to something here.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

JimW said:


> I'm certainly much less of a young man than I used to be. She could be on to something here.


After the revolution everyone will be less than 6'.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 18, 2012)

which end are we talking about here? cos mine isn't in decline


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

I've just asked Owen Jones if he'll have a word - doubt it'll help but there's not a lot else I can think of to do.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Ah, she's gone back to identity politics again. Safe ports in a storm and so on.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 18, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> which end are we talking about here? cos mine isn't in decline


 
that's not what it says on the toilet wall in the Albert.


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I've just asked Owen Jones if he'll have a word - doubt it'll help but there's not a lot else I can think of to do.


Why are you asking for his intervention?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 18, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> which end are we talking about here? cos mine isn't in decline


 
that's not what your mum said


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 18, 2012)

firky said:


> I wonder if she saw my apology?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
where was your apology?


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

Yeah, I thought you said you weren't going to apologise, firky?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> Why are you asking for his intervention?


It's Mary he should be asking.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> Why are you asking for his intervention?


 
Cos she won't block him and he pretty much agreed yesterday that it was out of order. I just want the comments withdrawn, I don't much care how it happens.


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> It's Mary he should be asking.


Or St Jude.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Surely there's a patron saint for racists somewhere.


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

St Jude for lost causes, surely?

ETA: Damn you cesare


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> Yeah, I thought you said you weren't going to apologise, firky?


 
I did but when I scrolling through my twitter it appears I had apologised!


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Cos she won't block him and he pretty much agreed yesterday that it was out of order. I just want the comments withdrawn, I don't much care how it happens.


Well, have you reported her for abuse?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> Well, have you reported her for abuse?


 
Is that even possible to do when someone's blocked you? I can't even get onto her page or whatever it's called.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> *I've just asked Owen Jones if he'll have a word* - doubt it'll help but there's not a lot else I can think of to do.


 
Vote labour with no illusions


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 18, 2012)

firky said:


> I did but when I scrolling through my twitter it appears I had apologised!


 
puff


----------



## weepiper (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Is that even possible to do when someone's blocked you? I can't even get onto her page or whatever it's called.


 
https://support.twitter.com/forms/abusiveuser


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Is that even possible to do when someone's blocked you? I can't even get onto her page or whatever it's called.


https://support.twitter.com/forms/abusiveuser


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

There's also this but it costs: http://www.thehelplineservice.co.uk/twitter.html


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 18, 2012)

In the spirit of class solidarity we could cut our losses here


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> In the spirit of class solidarity we could cut our losses here


No classaran


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

cesare said:


> https://support.twitter.com/forms/abusiveuser


 
Thanks. How do you link to a tweet? I've got no idea what to click on to get the link


----------



## weepiper (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Thanks. How do you link to a tweet? I've got no idea what to click on to get the link


 
If you click on 'details' so it opens the tweet by itself, you can then copy and paste the url in the address bar.


----------



## Dan U (Dec 18, 2012)

it's all for a new book apparently.

the decline of men or some shit.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Thanks. How do you link to a tweet? I've got no idea what to click on to get the link


https://support.twitter.com/groups/...-how-to-link-directly-to-an-individual-tweet#


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Thanks. How do you link to a tweet? I've got no idea what to click on to get the link


On the twitter homepage, the direct link to a single tweet is through the timestamp. On something like tweetdeck it's the 'time since tweeted' bit, eg '2m'.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 18, 2012)

@the39thstep


----------



## cesare (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Thanks. How do you link to a tweet? I've got no idea what to click on to get the link


The one I think you want is on 16/12/12 at 20:51 if that helps?


----------



## Balbi (Dec 18, 2012)

Dan U said:


> it's all for a new book apparently.
> 
> the decline of men or some shit.



 

We're going to need a bigger thread.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

Dan U said:


> it's all for a new book apparently.
> 
> the decline of men or some shit.


Didn't Susan Faludi already do that?  Expect great chunks cut+pasted no doubt


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

weepiper said:


> If you click on 'details' so it opens the tweet by itself, you can then copy and paste the url in the address bar.


 
The form doesn't accept it - can someone not blocked do me a huge favour and post or PM a link to it for me?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> https://support.twitter.com/groups/...-how-to-link-directly-to-an-individual-tweet#


 
Doesn't seem to work if they've blocked you - just takes me to a page that says I'm not authorized to view it and when I put it in the form it says I need to post a direct link to the tweet. Fucking hell this is hard!

Edit: it's OK - did what Dave (Cinzano, not the other Dave) said and it worked.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 18, 2012)

Balbi said:


> @the39thstep
> 
> View attachment 26330


 
Thanks and a Merry Xmas to you as well


----------



## FreddyB (Dec 18, 2012)

I'm privileged but I have no power. It's not the same thing you see.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

Yes it won't let me look up "details" though as I'm blocked


----------



## FreddyB (Dec 18, 2012)

Men are so, so much more than stale patriarchal assumptions #feminism

I feel better now about my lack of power


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

FreddyB said:


> I'm privileged but I have no power. It's not the same thing you see.


 
This you mean?

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
Yep. That's the thing. Having privilege is NOT the same thing as having power. Not all privileged people are powerful. @*joshua_eaton*


I assume you can also have power without privilege - that's what Laura's got obviously.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

...and it don't stop.


----------



## FreddyB (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> This you mean?
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Yep. That's the thing. Having privilege is NOT the same thing as having power. Not all privileged people are powerful. @*joshua_eaton*
> ...


Yes that, which was a reply to " *Joshua Eaton* ‏@*joshua_eaton* 
@*PennyRed* So men are told their privileged oppressors, which is true, without having an outlet for the class oppression they get, too."

It's just one big circle of liberal madness.


----------



## killer b (Dec 18, 2012)

FreddyB said:


> Yes that, which was a reply to " *Joshua Eaton* ‏@*joshua_eaton*
> @*PennyRed* So men are told their privileged oppressors, which is true, without having an outlet for the class oppression they get, too."
> 
> It's just one big circle of liberal madness.


i bet he's a nice guy who always gets ignored by the girls too.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Didn't Susan Faludi already do that? Expect great chunks cut+pasted no doubt


Are you thinking of _Stiffed_? Bleachers and _Rambo_ and deskilling in the workplace? That's years old!


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

Trying to catch up here. So we're not racist apart from spineynorman whose racism is growing exponentially but we're all still solidly misogynist. ?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

The nostalgist in me makes me think back wistfully to my first twocking - by Dawn Purvis. What did I ever do wrong, Dawn, why did you leave me out in the cold?


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Are you thinking of _Stiffed_? Bleachers and _Rambo_ and deskilling in the workplace? That's years old!


yes but I assume thesis will be basically the same - with added twitter, cyberporn, etc stuff chucked in


----------



## Balbi (Dec 18, 2012)

Spiney's not racist, his twitter account is tweeting in a racist manner. My spotify's been unbearably nihilist recently.


----------



## killer b (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> Trying to catch up here. So we're not racist apart from spineynorman whose racism is growing exponentially but we're all still solidly misogynist. ?


yup. and she's writing an angry feminist essay as we speak.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

Quick!!! Ben Goldacre's about to flashmob Oxford Street Waterstones - Dave and Glinner are odds-on going to appear too...

https://twitter.com/bengoldacre/status/281089846943023105


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Spiney's not racist, his twitter account is tweeting in a racist manner. My spotify's been unbearably nihilist recently.


My Facebook has been showing existentialist tendencies lately


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

Related news:

_Vice_ has just bought _i-D_. Shit just got real.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> Trying to catch up here. So we're not racist apart from spineynorman whose racism is growing exponentially but we're all still solidly misogynist. ?


 
Do I get to be a misogynist too though? I'll feel left out otherwise 

I have a theory about how I am racist - it involves colonial consciousness and everything. My realtionships with black people haven't been anything to do with friendship or love - instead it's all down to me wanting to civilize them in a kind of culturally imperialist white man's burden kind of way.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Spiney's not racist, his twitter account is tweeting in a racist manner. My spotify's been unbearably nihilist recently.


 
I just gave my twitter a right fucking kicking but every time it comes around it starts banging on about rights for whites and I have to give it another slap


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> which end are we talking about here? cos mine isn't in decline


 
Give it 10 years son.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

_She_ only unfollowed _him_


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> _She_ only unfollowed _him_


 
You wait till Lletsa sees that - more evidence of the decline of civilization.

Take it next week's feature will be on Penny/Spiney/IWCA/LD/Racism gate (need a name for it with gate at the end but think that one can probably be improved on)


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 18, 2012)

What has Ben Goldacre to do with the price of sprouts?


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Do I get to be a misogynist too though? I'll feel left out otherwise
> 
> I have a theory about how I am racist - it involves colonial consciousness and everything. My realtionships with black people haven't been anything to do with friendship or love - instead it's all down to me wanting to civilize them in a kind of culturally imperialist white man's burden kind of way.


I always read your twitter in angry stalin voice because of that pic.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> (need a name for it with gate at the end but think that one can probably be improved on)


 
Great GrateGate


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> I always read your twitter in angry stalin voice because of that pic.


 
No such thing as an angry Stalin voice, our glorious leader does not suffer from such irrational bourgeois emotions as anger


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

> Writing an angry feminist essay in one window and a love letter in another


 
It's relentless isn't it?


----------



## dennisr (Dec 18, 2012)

firky said:


> It's relentless isn't it?


only if you bother


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> No such thing as an angry Stalin voice, our glorious leader does not suffer from such irrational bourgeois emotions as anger


 
Stalin would just smile.  Then representatives of state security would come knocking on your door at three in the morning.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Stalin would just smile. Then representatives of state security would come knocking on your door at three in the morning.


 
'Knocking' is the action of a wasteful dilettante.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 18, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> 'Knocking' is the action of a wasteful dilettante.


 
They'd also be knocking the shit out of you, after you've been bundled into a Black Raven.


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

Aren't all ravens black? It is a bit superfluous, like calling a snowman a white snowman.

I'd be having words with Stalin.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Stalin would just smile. Then representatives of state security would come knocking on your door at three in the morning.


 
Thanks - now I know what to do about Laura


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 18, 2012)

To contribute a bit of criticism...after all, I only came across this thread on Sunday..and there's always a danger of being too close and involved to get a proper perspective, I'd like to say that despite the obvious "2 years and 250 pages on one topic!!" type criticisms that might be levelled, I feel that I should point out that...

A) Usually---outside the tiny bubble of "Oxbridge/ a good friend of daddy's / huge sense of entitlement/ mutual back-scratching"---delusional and mendacious fantasists generally tend to be dismissed from professions requiring any degree of objectivity and integrity. As long as she continues to be indulged by the msm, a thread like this is vital. The damage she does to the left requires that her bullshit is constantly called out. Admittedly, the damage she does is superficial in the sense that she merely fucks up the left's image. As far as I know she's not involved in any organisation as such; preferring as she does " non-hierarchical, non-traditional power structures" ie. gangs of clueless cunts in a state of perpetual adolescence playing at being radical and 'inclusive'. This thread is a vital resource.

B) I've read a lot of it now and it's genuinely entertaining and at times fuckin hilarious.

C) she's almost certainly still reading it and getting really pissed off. Her combination of monumental ego and massive insecurity will be forcing her to look in regularly. And on that basis it's more or less imperative that people continue to take the piss.

I must admit, Laurie Penny had never really registered with me other than another posh cow on the media conveyor belt with an unusually irritating style, a ridiculous little girl voice and a tendency toward precociouness and pouting. But I've actually read some of her stuff in depth and I've discovered just what a bullshitting self-promoter she is. However, I haven't seen anyone pick up on this in the letter to the potential suicide. She writes...

" I’m writing to you now not as a journalist, but as a human being, a former carer and a person who has experienced depression to say: please, please don’t do this."

So when was she a career exactly? Caring carries connotations of years of sacrifice and self denial as opportunities and dreams are surrendered for another's sake. When did she do this? How did it affect her career?
Does she mean she did some baby-sitting once...or some house-sitting which involved feeding a cat? 

WTF is she on about...'carer'? Can you fucking imagine giving up decades, all of your twenties, say, putting any thoughts of a job, career, financial security or a family life aside only to see your 'tragedy' highlighted by a craven self-puffing gobshite like her...while she claims to be in he same boat? How long before she reveals herself as black or Muslim or a paraplegic?
She must be stopped. Don't be diverted people. This thread is a force for good in a fucked up useful-idiot interweb...and every so often it totally cracks me up.


----------



## editor (Dec 18, 2012)

193,000 page views so far for this thread. I wonder how that compares with the New Statesman's circulation.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

redsquirrel said:


> Hundal is the worst of them all. LibDem cuntsock


 
However as one of the main drivers behing leftie blogging, he is still quite well respected.
Here he is with Elly Badcock (ex-SWP, Counterfire)


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 18, 2012)

Badcock snigger


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 18, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> To contribute a bit of criticism...after all, I only came across this thread on Sunday..and there's always a danger of being too close and involved to get a proper perspective, I'd like to say that despite the obvious "2 years and 250 pages on one topic!!" type criticisms that might be levelled, I feel that I should point out that...
> 
> A) Usually---outside the tiny bubble of "Oxbridge/ a good friend of daddy's / huge sense of entitlement/ mutual back-scratching"---delusional and mendacious fantasists generally tend to be dismissed from professions requiring any degree of objectivity and integrity. As long as she continues to be indulged by the msm, a thread like this is vital. The damage she does to the left requires that her bullshit is constantly called out. Admittedly, the damage she does is superficial in the sense that she merely fucks up the left's image. As far as I know she's not involved in any organisation as such; preferring as she does " non-hierarchical, non-traditional power structures" ie. gangs of clueless cunts in a state of perpetual adolescence playing at being radical and 'inclusive'. This thread is a vital resource.
> 
> ...


Didn't she have a disabled friend that she looked after for a while? It may have been a boyfriend. There was some reference to this in one of her pieces. Where this friend has gone and who looks after him now I don't know. As for her voice she can hardly help that. She is young.


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 18, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Badcock snigger


Sexist!


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

editor said:


> 193,000 page views so far for this thread. I wonder how that compares with the New Statesman's circulation.


I'm sure it was around 160,000 on sunday morning. I hope the masses of lurkers piling in for red hot misogynist action aren't too disappointed with stuff like the SWP membership list stats discussion .


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 18, 2012)

firky said:


> Aren't all ravens black? It is a bit superfluous, like calling a snowman a white snowman.
> 
> I'd be having words with Stalin.


 
Yes, but that was their nickname.  You'd be shitting it if they pulled up outside your block of flats, even if they were painted pink with yellow dots, and their passengers were dressed as cute squirrels.


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> ... red 'hot misogynist' action...


My God, not another baseless slur on our bold comrades in the IWCA


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

lauriepenny said:
			
		

> I legally changed my surname at the age of 16 to my mother's family name, rather than my father's. A feminist thing. Do you have some sort of problem with that?


 
I don't, but, do you?





			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> The most successful female artists of our time have perfected the work of chameleon femininity. They are Cinderellas with a new dress for every ball, exchanging personae like lesser mortals change clothes. Nicki Minaj,  Dita Von Teese, and — almost definitively — Lady Gaga, the great fierce fashion ship that launched a thousand faces, whose music has become almost secondary to her wardrobe of identities: the matinee idol, the robot, the bubblegum Harajuku pop princess, the speeded-out Italian-American boyfriend, Joe Calderone, who performed “instead” of Gaga at the 2011 MTV awards, incidentally and mercifully disturbing Justin Bieber for life.... Minaj-Beyoncé-VonTeese-Madonna-Gaga. None of these women artists, significantly, work under the names they were born with. Writing that down_* tugs a little at the hot, private place under the ribs because, of course, neither do I*_; last week, I had coffee with three highly successful women, an artist, a journalist, and an author and fashion blogger, and we looked at each other askance when we realized that all of us had changed our names for work. And we love our work. It is a part of who we are, and _if we have changed ourselves to achieve the freedom to create, that does not make our work somehow less true, less our own._


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 18, 2012)

abukamov in a tutu is still smershin yer kneecaps


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> red hot misogynist action


 
You badcock.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

I don't get that quote at all - is she saying it's bad when lady gaga and others do it but when her and her wadical fwiends do it it's good in some way?

What point does she think she's making?


----------



## free spirit (Dec 18, 2012)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> .@*dieFALKENATOR* you're right, the RT-reply system does make it unclear who that was directed at. My mistake, I apologise.@*LoveDetective1*


I couldn't see this quoted on here yet, and as many are blocked I thought I should post it.

Seems Laurie has apologised now, only mentioning LD by name mind though that probably wasn't deliberate.


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

I want a job as a fashion blogger.

(WTF point is she making htere? utterly confused me?)


----------



## articul8 (Dec 18, 2012)

free spirit said:


> I couldn't see this quoted on here yet, and as many are blocked I thought I should post it.
> 
> Seems Laurie has apologised now, only mentioning LD by name mind though that probably wasn't deliberate.


She's blaming spiney now


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 18, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> Didn't she have a disabled friend that she looked after for a while? It may have been a boyfriend. There was some reference to this in one of her pieces. Where this friend has gone and who looks after him now I don't know. As for her voice she can hardly help that. She is young.



Oh right...so looking after someone 'for a while' is being a carer? If that's the case, does looking after an incontinent, immobile relative who has only a minimal ability to communicate constitute being a carer? Cos I've done that four times...only they used to call it being a parent.
And as for "She is young"....

a) I think you're in danger of being labelled misogynist, having lapsed inadvertently into the well-known patriarchal trope of painting a "strong forceful and informed woman' as a 'silly little girl'...not that you're wide of the mark.
b) if she is to be the media's new darling and choice as voice of the new left, then why have they picked one which sounds like it was scripted by PG Wodehouse? Other than an attempt to reduce the left to abject ridicule, why do they keep touting her as someone worth listening to?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

free spirit said:


> I couldn't see this quoted on here yet, and as many are blocked I thought I should post it.
> 
> Seems Laurie has apologised now, only mentioning LD by name mind though that probably wasn't deliberate.


 
I most definitely was - take a look at the other tweets around the same time. I'm still a disgusting wacist.


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I don't get that quote at all - is she saying it's bad when lady gaga and others do it but when her and her wadical fwiends do it it's good in some way?
> 
> What point does she think she's making?


 
Glad I am not the only one a bit perplexed.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 18, 2012)

Just got my response from twatter - they recommend that I block the user


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 18, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> abukamov in a tutu is still smershin yer kneecaps


 
Nikolai Yezhov's predecessor, Genrikh Yagoda, collected women's underwear.


----------



## FreddyB (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Just got my response from twatter - they recommend that I block the user


To be fair, what did you expect?


----------



## not-bono-ever (Dec 18, 2012)

lauris is smart, very smart,I would not doubt that, but sometimes the turgid leaden prose on the tweets does give the impression of style over actual substance..


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> You wait till Lletsa sees that - more evidence of the decline of civilization.
> 
> Take it next week's feature will be on Penny/Spiney/IWCA/LD/Racism gate (need a name for it with gate at the end but think that one can probably be improved on)


 


The infantilisation of society, actually.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Dec 18, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> b) if she is to be the media's new darling and choice as voice of the new left, then why have they picked one which sounds like it was scripted by PG Wodehouse? Other than an attempt to reduce the left to abject ridicule, why do they keep touting her as someone worth listening to?


That's a big point for me. If she was a smart, articulate working class woman would they let here anywhere near a national newspaper? Of course they wouldn't, as it would interrupt the whole "only middle class bleeding hearts can be revolutionaries" schtick. She's there to play a role... (as are a number of other celebrity leftists, of both genders)


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 18, 2012)

editor said:


> 193,000 page views so far for this thread. I wonder how that compares with the New Statesman's circulation.



Yeah, but, tbf it could be 193 people have viewed it 1,000 times each.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I don't get that quote at all - is she saying it's bad when lady gaga and others do it but when her and her wadical fwiends do it it's good in some way?





SpineyNorman said:


> What point does she think she's making?




The full piece is from _The New Inquiry, _the magazine that does the Mao readings in luxury hotels.





> It seems oddly Protestant to argue, as some feminists do, that somewhere under all that artifice are “real women,” that one can peel away the layers of clothing and makeup and weave and hair and skin and silicone and dig out a “genuine” person, untouched by culture and context. Smart girls know that “real beauty” is just a tag line to sell moisturizer. Walk in high heels for long enough and the bones in your feet really do change shape. Spend enough time living as an efficient office worker, an obedient wife, a high-street fashion knockout and eventually the contours of your personality do change. The idea of the self as something permanent, immutable, seems rather old-fashioned when anyone with an Internet connection can create a personal brand that works differently across multiple platforms, with different backdrops, favorite quotes and family snapshots, just as you might prepare one face to meet your friends and another to meet your father-in-law. Online or offline, this Prufrockian trick is one to which women are more accustomed than men, having been raised to the task since the very first time an adult caught us in ribbons, in feathers, in our mother’s lipstick and said, “Smile for the camera.” The 14-year-old schoolgirls who are ordered to dress in uniform knee skirts and bobby socks in the daytime know perfectly well what they are doing when they post pictures of themselves in underwear taken from above, pulling that face that works so well at a 45-degree angle.


 
Apparently Ru Paul is OK (watch out on that link a few images are borderline, an image refering to 'Harlot Globetrotters' might be deemed racist as well as sexist):




> “May the best woman win.” That’s the tag line of RuPaul’s Drag Race, now in its fourth and most successful season — a manic send-up of everything stern and joyless about makeover-ritual  television. It is self-consciously modelled on Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model, and features RuPaul doing Tyra Banks drag better than Tyra Banks does Tyra Banks in drag. The contestants come from the drag underground in all its rich, subversive history: They are all ages, all races, many of them people of color, many from inner-city backgrounds, some of them former felons. They are uninterested in escaping their class backgrounds; the emphasis is on creativity, pantomimery and fun. Participating, not winning, is the point. The show has become the super bowl for a queer America reminding itself that there was once a gay-rights movement that was not just about middle-class white soldiers and their middle-class white weddings, but about color and defiance and danger.





> In an interview for Curve magazine, RuPaul tells us that drag is “dangerous because it, throughout the ages, has reminded our culture that we are not who we think we are … This is just a temporary package that you’ve put together on this planet and it’s not to be taken seriously. You’re supposed to have fun with it.” In a world where the makeover is a collective ritual and Tyra Banks and Gok Wan are its priests, RuPaul is the heretic preacher, reading culture back to itself in a funny voice. All performed femininity — like all performed masculinity — is a drag race. Cinderella was a drag queen. Margaret Thatcher was a drag queen. Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj and most especially Lady Gaga are drag queens, and doing drag well and self-consciously is always an exercise in queering, no matter what you’ve got between your legs. That kind of drag is what the beauty-industrial complex of advertising, magazines, makeover shows, and music videos are terrified by, and yes, it is queer, and yes, it is feminist.




http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/model-behavior/


----------



## Balbi (Dec 18, 2012)

Oh, it'll be on 'why we can't have nice things'


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 18, 2012)

Lo Siento. said:


> That's a big point for me. If she was a smart, articulate working class woman would they let here anywhere near a national newspaper? Of course they wouldn't, as it would interrupt the whole "only middle class bleeding hearts can be revolutionaries" schtick. She's there to play a role... (as are a number of other celebrity leftists, of both genders)



Yeah...spot on. But in the BBC's and broadsheet's Oxbridge middle-class closed shop there's a distinct element of "they may be lefties, but at least they're our lefties". The media knows that when push comes to shove they'll always know which side of the fence they're really on; the side where they keep the pension plans, the Tuscan villas, the Agas and the Lithuanian nannies.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Not in red pepper though please.


 
Would an article about leftie class privilege even get looked at by a mag that inheres leftie class privilege, though?


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 18, 2012)

articul8 said:


> You too


ok then

once, i remember being asked if i have a  criminal record, and i know it was an insinuation on your part. i remember things sometimes.


----------



## framed (Dec 18, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> ok then
> 
> once, i remember being asked if i have a criminal record, and i know it was an insinuation on your part. i remember things sometimes.


 
Did someone mention criminal records?


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 18, 2012)

I think that Laurie Penny has a bit of a nerve comparing herself to Dita von Teese, and Lady Gaga - I don't know who the Nicki person is, but Von Teese and Gaga are both talented performers in show business. It is normal for show business people to adopt false names. Dita was originally in porn before she became a burlesque artist and adopted her name back then. Lady Gaga is extremely talented as a music writer and performer and to dismiss this as 'almost secondary' to her fashion imagery is to completely under estimate her talent.

I see that LP 'had coffee with three highly successful women' whom she describes by their jobs but does not mention their names. I had understood that she didn't like coffee and prefers tea. While I agree with her that changing their names does not make their work 'somehow less true', it is standard in writing and performing. How does she know what was going through the minds of these successful people in respect of realisations about each others name changes? Did they talk about it or is it just an imagining of Laurie Penny. Also If she has a hot place beneath her ribs then she should see her GP or a pharmacist for some Zantac or similar.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 18, 2012)

free spirit said:


> I couldn't see this quoted on here yet, and as many are blocked I thought I should post it.
> 
> Seems Laurie has apologised now, only mentioning LD by name mind though that probably wasn't deliberate.


 
Even in this she is caught in a lie.

LP: "But I didn't call [LD] a racist."
Some bloke: "But you did, Laurie" (Links to screengrab of now-deleted tweet that reads "Oh. Oh, I see. You're a racist. That makes this so much easier *blocks*")
LP: "Well, ok, to clarify, I've no idea whether [LD] is racist, but given his record it's safe to assume that he isn't."


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

Not just a bit of a nerve, she's from that strange (middle) class of people who are composed entirely of fucking cheek.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 18, 2012)

It's not difficult Dave.   Just one word: sorry.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 18, 2012)

framed said:


> Did someone mention criminal records?



 a bit like that lol


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> The Kingster is our man on the inside. That reminds me, I promised him a PD mug,


 
I felt a bit guilty about linking to him - but the point was to show the systematic nature of Oxbridge media dominance.

However he is now being feted by the Danish embassy http://storbritannien.um.dk/en/news/newsdisplaypage/?newsid=c7a350b5-067b-4ff8-b07f-a207fc6e6f8e.

Money that should be for Danish immigrants is spent on a party function with another Guardian journo interviewing him (I wonder how hard the questions where?)


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 18, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> It's not difficult Dave.   Just one word: sorry.


sorry: where's there whole "Dave Barnett" thing coming from?


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 18, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> It's not difficult Dave. Just one word: sorry.


 

seems to be the hardest word


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Surely there's a patron saint for racists somewhere.


 
St. Tommy of Robinson.


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

dave said:
			
		

> "Well, ok, to clarify, I've no idea whether [LD] is racist,


Thete's a john terryesque quality to that, an attack masked by a fake apology or denial.

Does that sound right? More like the "I've no idea whether the protocols are a forgery" school of attack maybe.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> sorry: where's there whole "Dave Barnett" thing coming from?


 
Laurie Penny's real name is Laura Barnett, so it was decided to call her Dave.
We had a meeting and a vote. Didn't you get the memo?


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 18, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> St. Tommy of Robinson.


 

I bet christmas dinner in jail must be well shit. He'd best opt for the halal choice


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Vote labour with no illusions


 
Always makes me chuckle, that.
Like you could vote Labour *unless* you had illusions.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

Dan U said:


> it's all for a new book apparently.
> 
> the decline of men or some shit.


 
So, another risible ride through Laura's ill-informed opinions, then.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 18, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Laurie Penny's real name is Laura Barnett, so it was decided to call her Dave.
> We had a meeting and a vote. Didn't you get the memo?




lol thanks for the heads  up. am in another party.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

Reading over the twitters from today, this exchange is also confusing:

LP's question is "_This idea of 'the decline of the young man' and 'the end of men' causing violence, social breakdown_ - what do you think, Twitter?"

"LP: I have a huge essay on this I'm working on, it's for my book though so not out till next Autumn... #endofmen

Joshua Eaton: _So men are told their privileged oppressors, which is true, without having an outlet for the class oppression they get, too._

LP: Yep. That's the thing. Having privilege is NOT the same thing as having power. Not all privileged people are powerful."

Joshua Eaton seems to suggest that _working-class men_ are violent/cause social breakdown because they experience class oppression and male privilege. Laurie agrees, sort of suggesting that the _working-class version_ of '_male privilege_' is responsible for violence/social breakdown.

This as an idea totally fails to account for middle-class males' oppression over women, doesn't it? Unless I'm reading it all wrong. Privilege politics is so confusing.

Also capitalism _is_ social breakdown.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Didn't Susan Faludi already do that? Expect great chunks cut+pasted no doubt


 
NO NO NO. You've entirely failed to understand the journalistic process! Laura doesn't "cut and paste", she re-imagines past writings of an author in a conversational format!


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 18, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Always makes me _chuckle_, that.
> Like you could vote Labour *unless* you had illusions.


 
It is rhizomatic, its tendrils spreading and retracting -
To me.
To you.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Reading over the twitters from today, this exchange is also confusing:
> 
> LP's question is "_This idea of 'the decline of the young man' and 'the end of men' causing violence, social breakdown_ - what do you think, Twitter?"
> 
> ...


 
we must have really got to her.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Reading over the twitters from today, this exchange is also confusing:
> 
> LP's question is "_This idea of 'the decline of the young man' and 'the end of men' causing violence, social breakdown_ - what do you think, Twitter?"
> 
> ...


 
That's fucking demented! Privilege is inherently *always* about power over someone. If it weren't, it wouldn't be privilege!


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Reading over the twitters from today, this exchange is also confusing:
> 
> LP's question is "_This idea of 'the decline of the young man' and 'the end of men' causing violence, social breakdown_ - what do you think, Twitter?"
> 
> ...


 
Reminds me of that disgusting attack on the miners by Bea Campbell who seemed to think that picketing was the height of patriarchy


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> It is rhizomatic, its tendrils spreading and retracting -
> To me.
> To you.


 
You need some root-killer, mate. Sodium chlorate do you?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

framed said:


> Did someone mention criminal records?




They of _Gang Bang_ fame


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> Trying to catch up here. So we're not racist apart from spineynorman whose racism is growing exponentially but we're all still solidly misogynist. ?


 
That's about right, you woman-hating bastard!


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 18, 2012)

I'm actually disgusted. In what world are we privileged over laurie penny? LD and spiney are not famous, they are not guardian commentators and dont get to be on newsnight all of the time, so how are they privileged?

bullshit like this just makes a mockery of the idea of racism and sexism tbh.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Do I get to be a misogynist too though? I'll feel left out otherwise
> 
> I have a theory about how I am racist - it involves colonial consciousness and everything. My realtionships with black people haven't been anything to do with friendship or love - instead it's all down to me wanting to civilize them in a kind of culturally imperialist white man's burden kind of way.


 
I wanted to say something, mate, but it never seemed to be the right time, and you always looked so pleased with yourself.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 18, 2012)

Platform, we are undermining you.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Reading over the twitters from today, this exchange is also confusing:
> 
> LP's question is "_This idea of 'the decline of the young man' and 'the end of men' causing violence, social breakdown_ - what do you think, Twitter?"
> 
> ...


 One would be interested to see if there is original material. And seemingly uncritical of the notion of 'social breakdown' (and 'male crisis') etc.. LP isn't an 'academic' as someone called her.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> 'Knocking' is the action of a wasteful dilettante.


 
They knock if they believe you have access to a Peoples' hunting rifle, comrade Dubonnet.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 18, 2012)

Just looked at the New Enquiry piece...she gets worse..

"The markers of psychological health among young women at that time were long hair, pretty dresses, shopping, and makeup. The middle-aged, ponderously paunched male psychiatrists who ran the ward were absolutely in agreement on this point."

"At that time"?...this would be about 2001/ 2002? Presumably somewhere near Brighton? And fat middle aged sadistic authority figures were forcing her to wear pretty dresses and makeup? 
To understand this, I think it's safest to assume she'd possibly just watched "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest", had a few glasses of wine and was so 'empathised' with Jack Nicholson's anarchic rebel and so determined to stress her perpetual victim hood, that when she addressed the keyboard, it just kinda came out that way. Either that or we are forced to believe hat a secret cabal of phallocentric psychiatrists was operating on the South coast in the recent past. Why was it left to Laurie to bring this scandal to light? Was Jimmy Saville involved?

"I needed to get out of that place, and if you wanted to go out the front door and not in a box, you had to play by their rules. You had to smile and eat your meals. You had to be a good girl."

Now she's channelling...erm...Jeanette Winterton? Maya Angelou?

"Look at me...I'm a victim too."
Who actually buys this shite? Do her admirers actually believe her...or do they accept that she's just telling 'mythological' truths'?...sorta feminist parables with herself as plucky hero and survivor which have no use for debased traditional (aka fat white guy) "modes of reality"?

Maybe that's why I don't get her...I always thought bullshit was bullshit...but maybe I just lack nuance and the intellectual contortionism necessary for membership of laurie's new rainbow alliance. Maybe I should just sit down and retell my life as perpetual hero/villain. Like the time I got arrested for striking a blow against  Safeway's degenerate capitalist perversions by doing a runner with all that vodka. And when I took a stand against patriarchy inspired orthodox models of sexual fidelity by getting off with the wife's best mate. Fuck me...I'm a total revolutionary.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I'm actually disgusted. In what world are we privileged over laurie penny? LD and spiney are not famous, they are not guardian commentators and dont get to be on newsnight all of the time, so how are they privileged?
> 
> bullshit like this just makes a mockery of the idea of racism and sexism tbh.


 

It's male privilege that she's talking about, I assume according to the chart, Laurie Penny is equal in the privilege/oppression scales with you because you are both women:


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Joshua Eaton seems to suggest that _working-class men_ are violent/cause social breakdown because they experience class oppression and male privilege. Laurie agrees, sort of suggesting that the _working-class version_ of '_male privilege_' is responsible for violence/social breakdown.
> 
> This as an idea totally fails to account for middle-class males' oppression over women, doesn't it? Unless I'm reading it all wrong. Privilege politics is so confusing.


 
Well, that's kinda the way it reads to me as well sihhi. But, given Penny's seeming inability to even properly understand Love Detective's and SpineyNorman's exchanges with her, it's hard to know!

If that's what she's saying/agreeing, then:

Firstly it fails to account for middle class male oppression over women;
Secondly, its sexist and classist bollocks towards working class men;
Thirdly, surely social breakdown and violence is caused by the effects of capitalism and those that exercise capital/class power, so that's not working class men;
Finally, privilege is all about one group of people's exercise of power over another.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

editor said:


> 193,000 page views so far for this thread. I wonder how that compares with the New Statesman's circulation.


 
Would you believe it's about seven and a half times greater than the circ of the _Staggers_?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Yes, but that was their nickname. You'd be shitting it if they pulled up outside your block of flats, even if they were painted pink with yellow dots, and their passengers were dressed as cute squirrels.


 
To be fair, pink cars with yellow dots, and secret police dressed as squirrels would make my ring open even faster!


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 18, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I'm actually disgusted. In what world are we privileged over laurie penny? LD and spiney are not famous, they are not guardian commentators and dont get to be on newsnight all of the time, so how are they privileged?
> 
> bullshit like this just makes a mockery of the idea of racism and sexism tbh.


Exactly - she is devaluing them, making them seem like trivial concepts instead of the nasty, narrow-minded non-trivial prejudices that many, many people have the misfortune of having to deal with every day.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> It's male privilege that she's talking about, I assume according to the chart, Laurie Penny is equal in the privilege/oppression scales with you because you are both women:
> 
> View attachment 26336


 
Actually being jewish and bisexual i am probably more oppressed than her, but what the fuck?

it's such bollocks though. she has recourse to things that none of us have. she has powerful mates at the guardian and on telly and that. she can afford to spend most of the day talking shite because she has a lot more flexibility in her work etc than we do. she's in a kind of world few on here can actually imagine. She gets listened too for writing crap on the internet, she has a job whereby she mixes with very important and influential people on a day to basis whereas people like LD and spiney do not.

i'm actually disgusted tbh. does she seriously think that she will be treated worse in life, have worse life chances and all that, than them two simply by virtue of being a woman? because she must know that this is complete nonsense.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> The infantilisation of society, actually.


 
How would you know? It's not as if you're LLETSA, is it?


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

steph said:


> Well, that's kinda the way it reads to me as well sihhi. But, given Penny's seeming inability to even properly read Love Detective's and SpinyNorman's exchanges with her, it's hard to know!
> 
> If that's what she's saying, then:
> 
> ...


 
I don't know the figures, is it correct to accept the assertion that working-class males commit more domestic violence than middle-class males? 
Parminder Bhahchu iirc says no it's about equal, whilst Lynne Segal says/said yes.
Importantly though the power of middle-class men over working-class women manifests itself in restricting child benefit increases to under 1% a year for the 3rd year running, cutting nurseries, cutting public women's health facilities (whilst private services are available) - 'structural violence'.


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> we must have really got to her.





ViolentPanda said:


> That's about right, you woman-hating bastard!


You joos. Wily. Troublemakers.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> You joos. Wily. Troublemakers.


 
check your privilege


----------



## chilango (Dec 18, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> ... because she must know that this is complete nonsense.



Ah.

Herein lies the problem.

How would she know it's nonsense?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> I bet christmas dinner in jail must be well shit. He'd best opt for the halal choice


 
Kosher, probably.
Bet the coke he scores inside is better than his usual nose-vim, too!


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 18, 2012)

the very fact that she has access to the networks that enable to get her writing, dire as it is, published in national newspapers, the knowledge of it, the knowledge of how to present yourself on tv and how to make it look like you have a clue what you're talking about on tv, the fact that she's able to divide her time between london and new york and not have to worry about the negative consequences of being arrested but instead look at it as something cool etc ...


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 18, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> she can afford to spend most of the day talking shite because she has a lot more flexibility in her work etc than we do.


 


To be fair, a majority of the population spends the day talking shite.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 18, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Kosher, probably.
> Bet the coke he scores inside is better than his usual nose-vim, too!



kosher is halal and halal is kosher - to most.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 18, 2012)

chilango said:


> Ah.
> 
> Herein lies the problem.
> 
> How would she know it's nonsense?


 
Because she is famous. she appears on tv on a regular basis. she is mates with lots of other important famous people. and she is telling people like us that we are privileged? thats right, we are privileged over HER??


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 18, 2012)

so cool that she avoided it while crabby got a nicking. Would have queered her pitch visa wise to have taken a pinch from US coppers you see.


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I don't know the figures, is it correct to accept the assertion that working-class males commit more domestic violence than middle-class males?
> Parminder Bhahchu iirc says no it's about equal, whilst Lynne Segal says/said yes.
> Importantly though the power of middle-class men over working-class women manifests itself in restricting child benefit increases to under 1% a year for the 3rd year running, cutting nurseries, cutting public women's health facilities (whilst private services are available) - 'structural violence'.


 
I editted my post after you quoted, sorry sihhi.

I've seen both figures to support it being about equal, and those where working class men commit more too.

I think you're totally right though - even if say working class men commit more dv than middle class men, again, its not working class men that have class/capital privilege - and surely class/capital privilege is ultimately responsible for wielding violence and power structurally and systemically over all?

Which kinda highlights where my frustration comes with analysing privilege within liberal identity politics. If the structural/systemic facet of class/capital is basically secondary to granular arguments of various privileges of one group over each other, then 'solutions' can also only ever be applied to fighting those specific aspects of privilege, and never as a whole (i.e. smashing capitalism/class). And ultimately, the former will never be overcome until the latter is.


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

Dave is clearly pursuing her own (ever so demented imho) quasi-autonomous vision of PD's multitudinous positionism theory.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I'm actually disgusted. In what world are we privileged over laurie penny? LD and spiney are not famous, they are not guardian commentators and dont get to be on newsnight all of the time, so how are they privileged?
> 
> bullshit like this just makes a mockery of the idea of racism and sexism tbh.


 
Laura makes the assumption that they're privileged because she's an adherent of identity politics, and therefore supports the idea of a "hierarchy of oppression" whereby any male in a patriarchal society is privileged over *any* female, regardless of that female's social status, earning power etc.

Here in "fuck your identity politics, it's class that matters"-land, we know that in fact it's Laura who needs to "check her privilege", and chuck the whole nonsense of a "hierarchy of oppression" out of the window.
But what do we know? We're state-educated, non-Oxbridge folk who aren't part of the _commentariat_. Our views don't matter.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 18, 2012)

class and gender are both important here.  they massively overlap, with gender inequality a function of capitalism to my mind.  removing patriarchy without removing capitalism, or capitalism without removing patriarchy, would continue to create unequal society.  her analysis is off, in that she sees herself as a victim for being female without recognising her privilege for her class background.  as we all know, historically middle class women given a taste of power tend to side with the patriarchy - else how else would they have come to power.  here she suggests that a male twitter user no-one has ever heard of (no offence intended) somehow has more power than her, simply because of his maleness.  nonsense.  on the other hand, her brand of feminism doesn't include any feminists who don't think prostitution is ace (her words, pseudo-feminists), so it's clear that her brand of feminism is for middle class women with lots of wonderful free empowerfulised choices.  as someone said earlier, what she needs is a few months doing outreach work for street prostitutes.  a friend of mine who works as a campaigner in the field, trying to get funding to provide exit plans for prostitutes, pointed out to me that LP appears to be systematically attacking every different type of feminist one by one, and appears to have fallen out with or written arguments criticising every actual working class feminist 'name' in the UK.  Now, I don't know about you, but I don't think anyone here has used a position of journalistic power to undermine women's safety campaigners.  but that would be because we're mysogynists.  i guess if we started advocating boobjobs and stripping lessons in school we might be good feminists.  not sure what it would take to be good lefties, jollies to greece to gawk at the poverty i spose.



there might be a point in there somewhere.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Actually being jewish and bisexual i am probably more oppressed than her, but what the fuck?


 
I'm pretty sure she is East Europe origin Jewish (but non-observant) and also non-straight:

"Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
Someday, maybe when I'm less under attack, I'll write about being queer and polyamorous, and what that means for me politically. But not now"
https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/192264867313487872

So I think it will need a points decision.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 18, 2012)

i guess, in the end, if she had anything useful or revolutionary to say she'd be given the odd column somewhere now and again to generate clickbait.  instead she is welcomed by the liberal elite because she doesn;t have a position at odds with mainstream liberalism, for all her claims towards anarchism and a-little-bit-communism.  most of us learnt before we left university that a colourful haircut was not the same as anarchism.  even me.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Actually being jewish and bisexual i am probably more oppressed than her, but what the fuck?
> 
> it's such bollocks though. she has recourse to things that none of us have. she has powerful mates at the guardian and on telly and that. she can afford to spend most of the day talking shite because she has a lot more flexibility in her work etc than we do. she's in a kind of world few on here can actually imagine. She gets listened too for writing crap on the internet, she has a job whereby she mixes with very important and influential people on a day to basis whereas people like LD and spiney do not.
> 
> i'm actually disgusted tbh. does she seriously think that she will be treated worse in life, have worse life chances and all that, than them two simply by virtue of being a woman? because she must know that this is complete nonsense.


 
I hate to break it to you, frogs, but Laura is "of Jewish ancestry" (according to her, so make of that what you will  ), as well as having slept both sides of the bed., so you're probably equally oppressed.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 18, 2012)

@bluestreak : I think LP is fond of labels, basically. 

If she is attacking other feminists, does she want to be recognised/viewed as the only 'true' feminist in the village, the only one fighting the good fight against the patriarchy?


----------



## Dan U (Dec 18, 2012)

isn't she Irish as well. or am i getting muddled.


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> most of us learnt before we left university that a colourful haircut was not the same as anarchism. even me.


Some of us ain't been to no university.   (but I did work in one when I was dave's age)


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> kosher is halal and halal is kosher - to most.


 
Unless you're Orthodox in your Islam or Judaism, at which point viewing the two as interchangeable becomes a good reason to stone you to death.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 18, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> I hate to break it to you, frogs, but Laura is "of Jewish ancestry" (according to her, so make of that what you will  ), as well as having slept both sides of the bed., so you're probably equally oppressed.


 
nah. she's never had any trouble as a result of either of those things.


----------



## rekil (Dec 18, 2012)

Dan U said:


> isn't she Irish as well. or am i getting muddled.


"More Irish than English" yes.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I'm pretty sure she is East Europe origin Jewish (but non-observant) and also non-straight:
> 
> "Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> Someday, maybe when I'm less under attack, I'll write about being queer and polyamorous, and what that means for me politically. But not now"
> ...


 

oh god, polyamorous too.  fucking hell, it's like pseud-bingo.  i was polyamorous for a while.  i didn;t know i was.  i was just putting it about.  imagine the shock i had when someone pointed it out.   identity nonsense.  polyamorous just means you can't keep it in your pants and you want a word that gives you an identity for it, so that when your boy or girlfriend gets upset you can point out that you're polyamorous and they're oppressing you for it.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 18, 2012)

Dan U said:


> isn't she Irish as well. or am i getting muddled.


 

in the words of Spike Milligan, _Irish Jew in the name of the law!_


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> Some of us ain't been to no university.  (but I did work in one when I was dave's age)


 
You scholars at the University Of Life tend to learn the lesson about hair a lot younger, I must say.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 18, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Unless you're Orthodox in your Islam or Judaism, at which point viewing the two as interchangeable becomes a good reason to stone you to death.


Yeah, it depends how strict you are . . . But stoning to death?


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 18, 2012)

.


----------



## chilango (Dec 18, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Because she is famous. she appears on tv on a regular basis. she is mates with lots of other important famous people. and she is telling people like us that we are privileged? thats right, we are privileged over HER??



Exactly.

She lives, and has always lived, in a bubble.

And like David Cameron, simply cannot conceive that there is life outside this bubble.

Hence Cameron thinks that most "middle class" people are like him and his mates.

And hence Laura thinks she is the oppressed.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 18, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> @bluestreak : I think LP is fond of labels, basically.
> 
> If she is attacking other feminists, does she want to be recognised/viewed as the only 'true' feminist in the village, the only one fighting the good fight against the patriarchy?


 
i dunno, i don't know what she wants.  i do believe she believes that she is a revolutionary.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I needed to get out of that place, and if you wanted to go out the front door and not in a box, you had to play by their rules. You had to smile and eat your meals. You had to be a good girl.


 
You're right I don't understand this bit either. If the anorexia treatment staff are imposing these rules that's a massive violation of medical ethics.




			
				Laurie Penny on treatment for anorexia said:
			
		

> I needed to get out of that place, and if you wanted to go out the front door and not in a box, you had to play by their rules. You had to smile and eat your meals. You had to be a good girl. That meant *no more trousers*, *no more going out with short hair and no makeup*, a *boyfriend as soon as possible*, and *learning to style your hair and do your eye-liner*. It meant buying different dresses for different occasions, fitting yourself out to have men look at you with lust, learning manners, learning to dip your head and say “Please” and “Thank you” and “Gosh, I don’t know what to think about the war” and “No, one piece of chocolate cake will be more than enough for me.”


 
I am actually shocked that a patient was nudged or cornered to pair up with someone - to my mind it seems massively counter-intuitive to suggest anything like that to someone facing anorexia.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 18, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> Yeah, it depends how strict you are . . . But stoning to death?


 
You've clearly never walked through Muswell Hill after dark on a friday night, playing with a Zippo, have you?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 18, 2012)

Can anyone explain what this is all about?

Hugo Schwyzer "The End of Patriarchy is the BEGINNING of men's opportunity to stop being half-people and to become complete human beings"

which dear Laurie agreed with.


----------



## barney_pig (Dec 18, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> kosher is halal and halal is kosher - to most.


Who aren't Jewish or muslim


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 18, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> So, another risible ride through Laura's ill-informed opinions, then.


 
Surely 'Other people's opinions (well, the bits that aren't entirely fabricated anyway) 'borrowed' and then subtly altered so they seem sufficiently different to the original'?



ViolentPanda said:


> You need some root-killer, mate. Sodium chlorate do you?


 
I tend to buy local, personally:


----------



## chilango (Dec 18, 2012)

On the bright side...

...no one I know in real life has ever heard of her.

She has zero influence amongst the people that matter.

It's not like the mums at play group, or colleagues at work, or my neighbours ever say "hey Chilango! You read the latest Laurie Penny?"

She has never, and will never, be a part of working class struggle or movements of social change.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 18, 2012)

#I'm pretty sure she is East Europe origin Jewish (but non-observant) and also non-straight#

#isn't she Irish as well. or am i getting muddled.#

So she's kinda constructed of genes just as long as they've a history of oppression? Why no Armenian?


#Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got
I'm still, I'm still Penny from the block
Used to have a little, now I have a lot
No matter where I go I know I came from, from...erm...#


----------



## Random (Dec 18, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> "I needed to get out of that place, and if you wanted to go out the front door and not in a box, you had to play by their rules. You had to smile and eat your meals. You had to be a good girl."
> 
> Now she's channelling...erm...Jeanette Winterton? Maya Angelou?
> 
> ...


 she's saying she was sectioned, or subjected to some other kind of forced treatment. If that's true, then why not mythologise it and write up her experiences how she likes? There's little written by mental health system survivors.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> oh god, polyamorous too. fucking hell, it's like pseud-bingo. i was polyamorous for a while. i didn;t know i was. i was just putting it about. imagine the shock i had when someone pointed it out. identity nonsense. polyamorous just means you can't keep it in your pants and you want a word that gives you an identity for it, so that when your boy or girlfriend gets upset you can point out that you're polyamorous and they're oppressing you for it.


 
This suggests you might be guilty of monogamy privilege:


> 5) No one argues that my relationship orientation is impractical, unstable, incompatible with commitment, or otherwise effectively impossible to realize. No one argues that my relationship orientation works better in theory than in practice.


I have no opinion on the matter. I don't know anything about it at all.


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 18, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> #Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got
> I'm still, I'm still Penny from the block
> Used to have a little, now I have a lot
> No matter where I go I know I came from, from...erm...#


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Can anyone explain what this is all about?
> 
> Hugo Schwyzer "The End of Patriarchy is the BEGINNING of men's opportunity to stop being half-people and to become complete human beings"
> 
> which dear Laurie agreed with.


I get that and sort of agree with it tho no doubt would define patriarchy different and its exact place (not sure about 'half-people' either'), but basically take it to mean it does 99% of men no good to be in an unequal dynamic either.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 18, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> Who aren't Jewish or muslim


No - to most Jews and Muslims (in the west anyway) these days. It has that sorta 'glow' about it.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 18, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> Who aren't Jewish or muslim


 
if you're a practicing jew you're probably all right to eat halal meat and many do (although a lot don't), as the slaughter methods are basically exactly the same, but with kosher there's the milk/meat thing as well which the muslims dont have


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 18, 2012)

"If that's true, then why not mythologise it "

Yeah, why not...people do that all the time...only they call it fiction.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 18, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> You've clearly never walked through Muswell Hill after dark on a friday night, playing with a Zippo, have you?



lol. nopes


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> This suggests you might be guilty of monogamy privilege:
> 
> I have no opinion on the matter.


 
My boyf (middle class, poly, queer) has already had this discussion with me, to which we haven't talked about since because I thought it was in itself all very privileged


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 18, 2012)

chilango said:


> On the bright side...
> 
> ...no one I know in real life has ever heard of her.
> 
> ...


 


Fucking bingo! Nine million posts to reach the right conclusion.


----------



## spawnofsatan (Dec 18, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Can anyone explain what this is all about?
> 
> Hugo Schwyzer "The End of Patriarchy is the BEGINNING of men's opportunity to stop being half-people and to become complete human beings"
> 
> which dear Laurie agreed with.


 
She's a half man half biscuit fan?


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 18, 2012)

where's that "toast privilege" blog?


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> You're right I don't understand this bit either. If the anorexia treatment staff are imposing these rules that's a massive violation of medical ethics.
> 
> I am actually shocked that a patient was nudged or cornered to pair up with someone - to my mind it seems massively counter-intuitive to suggest anything like that to someone facing anorexia.


Can you post a link to that please? I'd like to read that piece in its entirety.


Also, here's something she wrote for the  Evening Standard in 2010. As someone who had anorexia as a teenager, this Evening Standard piece feels more 'real, more like it happened as she described it:
http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/health/life-tastes-better-than-skinny-feels-6757213.html

Here's an extract, to contrast with the extract you quoted:


> As I watched the ambulance pull up underneath my window, returning Lianne to hospital, I realised that I had a choice: I could either choose to stay ill and become like Lianne, living out a withered, damaged half-life of hospital stays and self-starvation, or I could dare to contemplate the possibility of a different life. That night, I ate my first proper meal in more than two years.


 
Somewhat different...


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 18, 2012)

barney_pig said:


> Who aren't Jewish or muslim


 

in the big house its better to go halal A) for sheer perverseness and annoyance

B) the meat is less likely to be sweepings from th slaughterhouse floor


Wonder if tommy is on the speshul wing? god knows he risks a twatting and worse from muslim inmates of the gen pop...


----------



## Random (Dec 18, 2012)

JimW said:


> I get that and sort of agree with it tho no doubt would define patriarchy different and its exact place (not sure about 'half-people' either'), but basically take it to mean it does 99% of men no good to be in an unequal dynamic either.


Yes, I also see that point. The male gender role is also a damaging role, policed with force and threats. The physical threats mostly coming from other men, of course...


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Can anyone explain what this is all about?
> 
> Hugo Schwyzer "The End of Patriarchy is the BEGINNING of men's opportunity to stop being half-people and to become complete human beings"


 
Hugo Schwyzer, as far as I can see, is someone who gets to stand on platforms like this:



because he used to take part in domestic violence but no longer

http://studentactivism.net/2012/01/22/hugo-schwyzer-is-still-doing-harm/

hence meaning he "shatters gender myths"


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 18, 2012)

spawnofsatan said:


> She's a half man half biscuit fan?



All she wants for Christmas is the destruction of the patriarchy and a Dukla Prague away kit.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 18, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> Wonder if tommy is on the speshul wing? god knows he risks a twatting and worse from muslim inmates of the gen pop...


 

He'll probably convert to Islam before he comes out. Isn't that the way the script usually goes?


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

Random said:


> Yes, I also see that point. The male gender role is also a damaging role, policed with force and threats. The physical threats mostly coming from other men, of course...


I'm such a liberal I even think being in the boss class does people no good but they don't realise.


----------



## spawnofsatan (Dec 18, 2012)

Can the next thread like this be about Sunny Hundal, he bites like fuck


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 18, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> He'll probably convert to Islam before he comes out. Isn't that the way the script usually goes?


 

'My name, Is George Galloway.I'm here to endorse Tommy Robinson as MP for Luton. So if you're tired of the bankers getting richer, vote tommy. Respect yourself'

2015?


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 18, 2012)

spawnofsatan said:


> Can the next thread like this be about Sunny Hundal, he bites like fuck


 
I could always tweet Liz Jones if that would be helpful.


----------



## Random (Dec 18, 2012)

JimW said:


> I'm such a liberal I even think being in the boss class does people no good but they don't realise.


We need to destroy their systems of power for their own good.

The working class is the Supernanny of history.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Can you post a link to that please? I'd like to read that piece in its entirety.


 
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/model-behavior/

I did link it earlier, I don't think people read thru (my) long posts


----------



## JimW (Dec 18, 2012)

Random said:


> We need to destroy their systems of power for their own good.
> 
> The working class is the Supernanny of history.


I'll have a tear in my eye as I shoot them like Old Shep behind the barn.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 18, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> 'My name, Is George Galloway.I'm here to endorse Tommy Robinson as MP for Luton. So if you're tired of the bankers getting richer, vote tommy. Respect yourself'
> 
> 2015?


 


Seriously, though, converting to Islam is probably the best thing the arsehole could possibly do for himself.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 18, 2012)

Also, her brief stint at the Independent? 
This was her announcement in late-March this year: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/gl5s5r



> The Independent, however, have offered me a job as a full- time columnist and reporter, and I have accepted.
> 
> Because I am in urgent need of some time to sit my bum on a chair and not get up until I've written a book, *I'll start working for the Independent on a part- time basis at the end of April, and then on a full time basis in June*. It's a big step and I'm a bit nervous, but mostly hugely excited.


 
Then, in early October http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/staggers/2012/10/laurie-penny-rejoins-new-statesman



> Laurie Penny is rejoining the New Statesman in the new position of contributing editor.
> 
> *From the beginning of November*, she will write a column for the magazine and a weekly blog for NewStatesman.com.
> 
> *Laurie Penny said: “It has been an honour and a privilege to work with the Independent over the past nine months*, but I am delighted to be rejoining the New Statesman as Contributing Editor. The decision to leave the Independent was a difficult one but this new role offers me a chance to move my writing in a new direction. I am extremely excited to be back at my old stable.”


 
Now, by my calculations, based on her own words she did six months _at most_ at the Independent, probably less if her NS return was being talked about by 10th October this year.

I wonder why?


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> You're right I don't understand this bit either. If the anorexia treatment staff are imposing these rules that's a massive violation of medical ethics.
> 
> 
> 
> I am actually shocked that a patient was nudged or cornered to pair up with someone - to my mind it seems massively counter-intuitive to suggest anything like that to someone facing anorexia.


 
probably a private hospital.  i dunno about nhs anarexia treatment but i've done my time in nhs addiction units and it's dry-you-out ship-you-out.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> This suggests you might be guilty of monogamy privilege:
> 
> I have no opinion on the matter. I don't know anything about it at all.


 
i'm not monogamous.  i'm free to sleep with whoever i like, whenever i like.  provided of course, they want to sleep with me.  i just don't call it a pretty name and claim some sort of identity rights because of it.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 18, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Also, her brief stint at the Independent?
> This was her announcement in late-March this year: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/gl5s5r
> 
> 
> ...


 


I wonder what it's like to be 'hugely excited' or 'extremely excited' so often? Even at her age I was usually just vaguely pissed off all the time.


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 18, 2012)

I so regret turning down that offer from the Indie when they came a calling.

Oh wait...


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> i'm not monogamous. i'm free to sleep with whoever i like, whenever i like. provided of course, they want to sleep with me. i just don't call it a pretty name and claim some sort of identity rights because of it.


 
Ah OK, so I presume you reject the notion that you are suffering from internalised monoamory.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 18, 2012)

Random said:


> she's saying she was sectioned, or subjected to some other kind of forced treatment. If that's true, then why not mythologise it and write up her experiences how she likes? There's little written by mental health system survivors.


 
in my experience it worked like this:  you're in the unit and you're free to go.  however, attempting to leave would result in a section.  in effect it is forced treatment, however, i personally don't feel that it is unreasonable.  she must have got there first, presumably concerned family took her there.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 18, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> I wonder what it's like to be 'hugely excited' or 'extremely excited' so often? Even at her age I was usually just vaguely pissed off all the time.


I bet it's fantabulous *sighs*


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 18, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> in my experience it worked like this: you're in the unit and you're free to go. however, attempting to leave would result in a section. in effect it is forced treatment, however, i personally don't feel that it is unreasonable. she must have got there first, presumably concerned family took her there.


 
I'm informed that you throw chairs through windows AFTER the section is handed down cos that way they can't bill you for property damage


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

Random said:


> she's saying she was sectioned, or subjected to some other kind of forced treatment. If that's true, then why not mythologise it and write up her experiences how she likes? There's little written by mental health system survivors.


 
Are you saying she is mythologising it or not?

I'm not disputing what she's written, it must obviously have been absolute hell for her; just that it's a little unclear - explaining fragments but not the whole story sort of thing which undermines what the reader can draw from it other than anorexia and mental health units are difficult things.


----------



## where to (Dec 18, 2012)

Her biggest problem is that she has no sense of humour. Which is a common trait amongst offence-seeking ultra-liberals types come to think of it.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Ah OK, so I presume you reject the notion that you are suffering from internalised monoamory.


 
Internal self-love?

Would this be a good time to post a drilldo pic?


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Ah OK, so I presume you reject the notion that you are suffering from internalised monoamory.


 
that's about the only mental health diagnosis i haven't previously had.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 18, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> I bet it's fantabulous *sighs*


 

It may be that she's one of those people who never grasps that everything turns out to be a big anti-climax.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 18, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> I'm informed that you throw chairs through windows AFTER the section is handed down cos that way they can't bill you for property damage


 
i was so pumped full of drugs i can remember neither the windows nor the chairs, but i assume both must ahve been present in some form.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

Random said:


> she's saying she was sectioned, or subjected to some other kind of forced treatment. If that's true, then why not mythologise it and write up her experiences how she likes? There's little written by mental health system survivors.


 
She's no Ron Coleman, that's for sure.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

spawnofsatan said:


> She's a half man half biscuit fan?


 
The Smiths, surely?


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Are you saying she is mythologising it or not?
> 
> I'm not disputing what she's written, it must obviously have been absolute hell for her; just that it's a little unclear - explaining fragments but not the whole story sort of thing which undermines what the reader can draw from it other than anorexia and mental health units are difficult things.


 
more of my take on it:  there are some things you don't dredge up more than you have to.  also, it wasn't glamourous, it wasn;t one flew over the cuckoo's nest.  it was boring, and miserable, and sad, and she may have been on lots of valium which effects the short-term memory - she may not ever remember much of it.  craziness is only fun and glamourous when it's liberating.  the bell jar is a great read but once you start to live it you get pretty angry at sylvia plath for ever making it seem so!


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> in my experience it worked like this: you're in the unit and you're free to go. however, attempting to leave would result in a section. in effect it is forced treatment, however, i personally don't feel that it is unreasonable. she must have got there first, presumably concerned family took her there.


 
Although you can't be sectioned for addiction.  You can for any other underlying mental health problems that are agreed to be a danger to yourself or others.  You're right though, informal patients are often informal in name only.


----------



## Nylock (Dec 18, 2012)

copliker said:


> Trying to catch up here. So we're not racist apart from spineynorman whose racism is growing exponentially but we're all still solidly misogynist. ?


Yes, we are. Especially the feminists in this thread...


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 18, 2012)

Tbh I believe her about the anorexia stuff and I don't think it's right for us to go there - even if she is making a thing of it herself, that is her right and it's not our business.

Unlike all the shit she has come out with about everything else.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 18, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> Although you can't be sectioned for addiction. You can for any other underlying mental health problems that are agreed to be a danger to yourself or others. You're right though, informal patients are often informal in name only.


 
that's kind of what i meant, apols if it sounded like i was giving misleading information.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> that's kind of what i meant, apols if it sounded like i was giving misleading information.


 
No worries, I'm just being pedantic!


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 18, 2012)

Woah, this thread has moved on 10 pages since I looked this afternoon. This had better be good.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 18, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Tbh I believe her about the anorexia stuff and I don't think it's right for us to go there - even if she is making a thing of it herself, that is her right and it's not our business.
> 
> Unlike all the shit she has come out with about everything else.


 
fair play.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 18, 2012)

randomish aside:

email to new statesman:



> Hi Helen,
> 
> Please accept my apologies if I am emailing the wrong person about this; it wasn't very clear from New Statesman's website contacts whether there was a general email enquiries address.
> 
> ...


 
response:


> Dear Tufty79,
> 
> Thanks for the email. I’ll get a proper response to you as soon as I can. May I ask if you’re writing as a reader, or for publication?
> 
> Helen


 
can anyone please explain why the last part of Helen's sentence would make any difference to the response i'm going to get?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 18, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Tbh I believe her about the anorexia stuff and I don't think it's right for us to go there - even if she is making a thing of it herself, that is her right and it's not our business.
> 
> Unlike all the shit she has come out with about everything else.



Maybe...but it's hard to believe the treatment consisted in making her put on a dress and make up to reacquaint her with her inner fifties housewife. That's just plain bullshit inserted to support a convoluted rant on applied hyper-counter-poly-victimologised-coerced-identify-larceny-rectificationism.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 18, 2012)

tufty79 said:


> randomish aside:
> 
> email to new statesman:
> 
> ...


 
It wouldn't - but she's asking if you would like the letter published on the letter page to just responded to privately - I would ask for publication myself


----------



## Dan U (Dec 18, 2012)

i case they want to know how honest to be maybe. i don't think it is unreasonable for them to want to know if you are going to publish the response or not. in the same way you would want to be asked before being quoted on something (not that you necc might be of course!)

eta - just seen @Spanky Longhorns response. I may have got wrong end of the stick?


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Tbh I believe her about the anorexia stuff and I don't think it's right for us to go there - even if she is making a thing of it herself, that is her right and it's not our business.


 
I agree and she has written about it, presumably for readers to discuss, and the forced to have a boyfriend, forced to wear dresses instead of trousers _is_ shocking.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 18, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> It wouldn't - but she's asking if you would like the letter published on the letter page to just responded to privately - I would ask for publication myself


ah, yep. that makes sense.


Dan U said:


> i case they want to know how honest to be maybe. i don't think it is unreasonable for them to want to know if you are going to publish the response or not. in the same way you would want to be asked before being quoted on something (not that you necc might be of course!)


as does that.

cheers 

i responded that i was asking _primarily_ as a reader...

i do occasionally contribute to a mental health publication.
i also work for a mental health organisation, have mental health issues, and am a mental health service user.
imo being suicidal is a mental health issue, irrespective of the motivations. i know that there are underlying factors behind it, but..
i think i initially emailed with concerns under all of the above umbrellas except for the writing - it didn't occur to me that i might be doing a piece on it /


----------



## Balbi (Dec 18, 2012)

Right, I know tufty's intentions are good, but i'm inspired to attempt to get a letter in with some subtle PD references.


----------



## Plumdaff (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I am actually shocked that a patient was nudged or cornered to pair up with someone - to my mind it seems massively counter-intuitive to suggest anything like that to someone facing anorexia.


 
My understanding of eating disorder treatment - never worked in it, but know people who have, and know people who've been punters - is that, rather like in addiction treatment, rushing into a relationship would be actively and strongly discouraged. Also, given anorexia is an illness disproportionately suffered by middle and upper class young women in high pressure, high expectation environments she might actually be channelling the pressure she felt internally at the time/was getting from family and peers rather than from staff, as it sounds entirely the opposite to what I would expect them to say. Or she's writing nonsense. Could be that. Think it's more likely to be some good old fashioned transference.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 18, 2012)

Dan U said:


> i case they want to know how honest to be maybe. i don't think it is unreasonable for them to want to know if you are going to publish the response or not. in the same way you would want to be asked before being quoted on something (not that you necc might be of course!)
> 
> eta - just seen @Spanky Longhorns response. I may have got wrong end of the stick?


 
I may have got the wrong end of the stick myself??

If it's as you say I agree.


----------



## Dan U (Dec 18, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I may have got the wrong end of the stick myself??
> 
> If it's as you say I agree.


 
pesky stick!

*shakes fist*


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 18, 2012)

one of my friends has just raised the very valid point that surely they could have started their reply by confirming _whether or not_ they _do_ have a policy..


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 18, 2012)

With reference to LP's anorexia, I want to make it clear that I have absolutely no doubt that she suffered from this condition. I have the utmost sympathy for her and her recovery from it. It was her writing in the quote that sihhi posted that jarred with several other articles she has written on her hospitalisation.

Having read the article in full (here, it's an essay in The New Enquiry: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/model-behavior/), it is clear that she does not seek to present this passage as treatment for anorexia, in the full context of the essay:



> When I was a teenager, for various reasons unimportant to this essay I spent time in an eating-disorders ward. I turned up looking like a 12-year-old boy, with a shaved head, wearing ties, and the draggest drag I could manage with a waist too small for the children’s section, and the first assumption of nearly everyone on the ward was that I must be gay, and that my gayness was clearly the root of all my problems. There was only one thing for it: I would have to be taught to accept my womanhood. And that meant dressing up straight, acting straight, being a proper girl, getting rid of everything about me that was queer and contentious and questioning. If I did this, I would be allowed to go home.
> 
> The markers of psychological health among young women at that time were long hair, pretty dresses, shopping, and makeup. The middle-aged, ponderously paunched male psychiatrists who ran the ward were absolutely in agreement on this point. The latest right-on theories about eating disorders posit the diseases as a method that young women use to escape the stresses of modern femininity. Anorexia nervosa, the logic goes, suspends the traumatic process of becoming a woman, because when you stop eating, when you cut down from 600 to 400 to 200 calories per day, your periods stop, your tits and hips and wobbly bits disappear, and you return to an artificial prepubescent state, complete with mood swings, weird musical obsessions, and, the overpowering impulse to shoplift scrunchies from Woolworth’s. The reason young women and increasing numbers of young men behave like this, the logic goes, is because they’re scared and angry about the gender roles that they are being forced into. The notion that they might have damn good reasons for being scared and angry has not yet occurred to the psychiatric profession.
> 
> I needed to get out of that place, and if you wanted to go out the front door and not in a box, you had to play by their rules. You had to smile and eat your meals. You had to be a good girl. That meant no more trousers, no more going out with short hair and no makeup, a boyfriend as soon as possible, and learning to style your hair and do your eye-liner. It meant buying different dresses for different occasions, fitting yourself out to have men look at you with lust, learning manners, learning to dip your head and say “Please” and “Thank you” and “Gosh, I don’t know what to think about the war” and “No, one piece of chocolate cake will be more than enough for me.”


 
@sihhi : I think you quoted out the passage out of context. The complete essay makes it clear she is talking about gender constructs and gender/sexual identity politics, and the perspectives of others on how the root cause of her anorexia was assumed. 

I don't necessarily agree with everything LP writes about gender/sexual identity politics & anorexia but she raised some interesting points at least - is anorexia a capitalist disease, for example?


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Having read the article in full (here, it's an essay in The New Enquiry: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/model-behavior/), it is clear that she does not seek to present this passage as treatment for anorexia, in the full context of the essay:
> 
> @sihhi : I think you quoted out the passage out of context. The complete essay makes it clear she is talking about gender constructs and gender/sexual identity politics, and the perspectives of others on how the root cause of her anorexia was assumed.


 
I'm sorry, how is that clear at all?

As I read it, psychiatrists in the early 2000s (when she was a teenager) imposed a course of feminine behaviour and clothing for a teenager against her will in some kind of in-patient facility.



> _There was only one thing for it: I would have to be taught to accept my womanhood. And that meant dressing up straight, acting straight, being a proper girl, getting rid of everything about me that was queer and contentious and questioning. If I did this, I would be allowed to go home._
> 
> _The markers of psychological health among young women at that time were long hair, pretty dresses, shopping, and makeup. The middle-aged, ponderously paunched male psychiatrists who ran the ward were absolutely in agreement on this point. _


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

This sentence is still confusing. I understand it as saying her anorexia wouldn't be treated unless she submitted to those commands for 'feminine' behaviour/clothing:

 "_I needed to get out of that place, and if you wanted to go out the front door and not in a box, you had to play by their rules." _


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> This sentence is still confusing. I understand it as saying her anorexia wouldn't be treated unless she submitted to those commands for 'feminine' behaviour/clothing:
> 
> "_I needed to get out of that place, and if you wanted to go out the front door and not in a box, you had to play by their rules." _



Well, it's more than not getting treatment...."and not in a box".....fem up, or you'll only get out in a box.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> This sentence is still confusing. I understand it as saying her anorexia wouldn't be treated unless she submitted to those commands for 'feminine' behaviour/clothing:
> 
> "_I needed to get out of that place, and if you wanted to go out the front door and not in a box, you had to play by their rules." _


 
If you're on a section, this is pretty much how it is.  You do what the consultant says if you want to be discharged.


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 18, 2012)

Yeah, I'm not going to comment at all on her account/experiences, all I can add is that working with consultant psychiatrists as I do and have done (though within gender/sexual health) I can believe it and as Blagsta says, if your sectioned, its very much do what the consultant says to get the treatment/help you need and get discharged - its better than it was but thats still very much the raw deal.


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> This sentence is still confusing. I understand it as saying her anorexia wouldn't be treated unless she submitted to those commands for 'feminine' behaviour/clothing:
> 
> "_I needed to get out of that place, and if you wanted to go out the front door and not in a box, you had to play by their rules." _



She's talking about within a mental health context.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

These are different things. 



Blagsta said:


> You do what the consultant says if you want to be discharged.


 



			
				steph said:
			
		

> its very much do what the consultant says to get the treatment/help you need, or get discharged


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> oh god, polyamorous too. fucking hell, it's like pseud-bingo. i was polyamorous for a while. i didn;t know i was. i was just putting it about. imagine the shock i had when someone pointed it out. identity nonsense. polyamorous just means you can't keep it in your pants and you want a word that gives you an identity for it, so that when your boy or girlfriend gets upset you can point out that you're polyamorous and they're oppressing you for it.


 
Actually, this is a bit of a bull shite. While I have no doubts people claim to be polyamorous to justify sleeping around, I do happen to know people for whom polyamory is a functional, stable relationship pattern. I get that you probably have seen the term abused one too many times, but no need to try and undermine the whole thing. It works fine for some, probably no worse than regular monogamy.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 18, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> If you're on a section, this is pretty much how it is.  You do what the consultant says if you want to be discharged.



But, 10 years ago, were consultants really saying sufferers had to smile and act girlie to show compliance and get their passports stamped?


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 18, 2012)

I'm typing on a phone @sihhi, ive corrected to what I meant in regards you when you're sectioned. Still amounts to the same thing though, the consultant pulls the strings.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 18, 2012)

They were assuming that the root cause of her anorexia was a failure to accept her gay/bi/queer/whatever-label-you-like sexual identity, and that by embracing a more feminine lifestyle (dress, make-up, hair) and (more disturbingly) demure/submissive 1950s housewife mannerisms, she would be 'cured'. I felt it wasn't strictly accurate for that passage to be presented as you did - that the treatment for her was being LP forced into being traditionally ultra-feminine. 

That alone would not deal with the anorexia, especially if the assumption about the root cause was wrong.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

firky said:


> She's talking about within a mental health context.


 
Is the context 'treat and discharge as quickly as possible (there's lots of people who need the beds)' or is it 'my professionalism means i will do it my way however long it takes' (given that wearing trousers isn't linked to anorexia as Laurie Penny points out)?


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> These are different things.


 
Are they?  The consultant will be certain that they are correct in the treatment/help needed.  The patient might not agree.  The consultant usually wins that one.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 18, 2012)

Isn't it rather distasteful to speculate on a stranger's health problems?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> If you're on a section, this is pretty much how it is. You do what the consultant says if you want to be discharged.


Off-topic: I can't say how angry that made me, and still makes me. It makes a mockery of the entire purpose of a psychiatric hospital IMO.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 18, 2012)

.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Isn't it rather distasteful to speculate on a stranger's health problems?


Less so when she has chosen her own life to make a media story of.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> But, 10 years ago, were consultants really saying sufferers had to smile and act girlie to show compliance and get their passports stamped?


 
Dunno tbh.  Although this did come up in class the other week when discussing careplans for an anorexic case study.  The suggestion was made about helping this patient feel good about themselves via makeup, feeling feminine etc.  I raised the point that "feeling feminine" and wearing makeup were very much value judgements and very culturally/socially loaded things.  Careplans should be person centered, but this doesn't always happen.  I can imagine a situation where a certain take on femininity was encouraged on a ward, yes.  Shit practice, but shit practice happens a lot in mental health.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Is the context 'treat and discharge as quickly as possible (there's lots of people who need the beds)' or is it 'my professionalism means i will do it my way however long it takes' (given that wearing trousers isn't linked to anorexia as Laurie Penny points out)?


 
Who knows in this case?


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Less so when she has chosen her own life to make a media story of.


I don't agree.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Isn't it rather distasteful to speculate on a stranger's health problems?


 
Yes.


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Is the context 'treat and discharge as quickly as possible (there's lots of people who need the beds)' or is it 'my professionalism means i will do it my way however long it takes' (given that wearing trousers isn't linked to anorexia as Laurie Penny points out)?



I don't know but even I, author of the cartoon, think this is starting to turn for the worse.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> I don't agree.


Why?


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> They were assuming that the root cause of her anorexia was a failure to accept her gay/bi/queer/whatever-label-you-like sexual identity, and that by embracing a more feminine lifestyle (dress, make-up, hair) and (more disturbingly) demure/submissive 1950s housewife mannerisms, she would be 'cured'. I felt it wasn't strictly accurate for that passage to be presented as you did - that the treatment for her was being LP forced into being traditionally ultra-feminine.


 
However if what others have posted is correct about consultant behaviour, it means the consultant(s) did force that upon a teenage patient.

(I think it's an unclear writing style that's the problem. That's what I'm coming round to.)


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Less so when she has chosen her own life to make a media story of.


 
although this too


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Isn't it rather distasteful to speculate on a stranger's health problems?


It is.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> although this too


It's tricky tho. On the one hand she's brave to put stuff about her MH issues out there. OTOH.... well.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> However if what others have posted is correct about consultant behaviour, it means the consultant(s) did force that upon a teenage patient.
> 
> (I think it's an unclear writing style that's the problem. That's what I'm coming round to.)


 
Not all consultants are like that though.  However, a lot of mental health is about control and imposing certain views on people about their condition.  Its complex.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 18, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Isn't it rather distasteful to speculate on a stranger's health problems?



Yeah...but nobody's doubting the fact of the anorexia, just the course of treatment she describes, which seems at best irrelevant and at worst distinctly harmful.... 

or possibly just 'imaginatively reinterpreted' for artistic/ polemical considerations....sorry, there's a word for that but I can't remember it.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> It's tricky tho. On the one hand she's brave to put stuff about her MH issues out there. OTOH.... well.


 
Yeah, complicated issues.


----------



## ska invita (Dec 18, 2012)

bad taste hasnt stopped this thread yet, cant see what would


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Yeah...but nobody's doubting the fact of the anorexia, just the course of treatment she describes, which seems at best irrelevant and at worst distinctly harmful....
> 
> or possibly just 'imaginatively reinterpreted' for artistic/ polemical considerations....sorry, there's a word for that but I can't remember it.


 
Lots of mental health treatment is distinctly harmful.  Better than it was, but...


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Why?


I don't see why what you said makes speculating on Penny's past mental health any less distasteful.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> I don't see why what you said makes speculating on Penny's past mental health any less distasteful.


Fine.


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 18, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> But, 10 years ago, were consultants really saying sufferers had to smile and act girlie to show compliance and get their passports stamped?



It doesn't suprise me, I've seen all manner of 'corrective' behaviours set down by psychiatrists - especially if any gender/sexuality related issues are 'apparent'.


----------



## chilango (Dec 18, 2012)

This is a bit irrelevant isn't it?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

chilango said:


> This is a bit irrelevant isn't it?


No more than the other pages and pages of drivel.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 18, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Isn't it rather distasteful to speculate on a stranger's health problems?


 
Fine. I'm stopping because it's considered wrong, but I never post on other posters' health (mental or otherwise), this is someone who has long overcome their condition writing about it for educative (examining sexism in the 2000s) purposes. I don't think the article succeeds (that has nothing to do with health or suffering).

edit to add: Writing about it in a free to access publication with her real name, explicitly about her past experiences.


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Yeah...but nobody's doubting the fact of the anorexia, just the course of treatment she describes, which seems at best irrelevant and at worst distinctly harmful....
> 
> or possibly just 'imaginatively reinterpreted' for artistic/ polemical considerations....sorry, there's a word for that but I can't remember it.



I have lots of memories of my recent medical treatment, most of which are probably grossly inaccurate. Such ist he way when you're in highly emotional and full of drugs. I was convinced I was left to lie in my own shit overnight but it turned out that it was only an hour.


----------



## chilango (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> No more than the other pages and pages of drivel.



There is that...


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 18, 2012)

ska invita said:


> bad taste hasnt stopped this thread yet, cant see what would


To paraphrase my preferred colour-named commentator, in many ways this thread is a lot like life.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 18, 2012)

steph said:


> It doesn't suprise me, I've seen all manner of 'corrective' behaviours set down by psychiatrists - especially if any gender/sexuality related issues are 'apparent.



Ok possibly I stand corrected...but it still seems odd...this was the 21st century we're talking about and, speculating admittedly, probably near Brighton. The article sounds more like Donegal circa 1956.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 18, 2012)

It's the writing that's being speculated about, not the fact that she has had anorexia. We all know mental health issues and treatments are complicated and that MH professionals may apply different treatments. Certainly no-one is mocking her illness or doubting this part of her life in any way.

What I'm trying to look at is her viewpoint that anorexia is a) a capitalist disease and b) complicated by gender/sexual identity politics. 

However, comparing and contrasting some of the articles she has written on this topic are slanted heavily towards different readerships - see the New Enquiry piece vs that in the Evening Standard, and I think what they have in common with other pieces she has written on other topics is their chameleon-like nature. I'm not even convinced there is a coherent political standpoint underpinning her work.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> I'm not even convinced there is a coherent political standpoint underpinning her work.


 
Things like these make me think - well, she's only 26, why expect her to have all the answers? OTOH... well.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Actually, this is a bit of a bull shite. While I have no doubts people claim to be polyamorous to justify sleeping around, I do happen to know people for whom polyamory is a functional, stable relationship pattern. I get that you probably have seen the term abused one too many times, but no need to try and undermine the whole thing. It works fine for some, probably no worse than regular monogamy.


 
i'm sure it does work fine for some, it's just that it doesn't really need to be part of one's identity. if i am in a monogamous relationship through choice, am i no longer part of the polygamy identity? am i still in the gang?

e2a actually this is possibly for a different thread.  i'm not sure my own personal revelations regarding this particular identity and my position are entirely relevant.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> i'm sure it does work fine for some, it's just that it doesn't really need to be part of one's identity. if i am in a monogamous relationship through choice, am i no longer part of the polygamy identity? am i still in the gang?


Polyamory is perfectly compatible with monogamous relationships AFAIK. It's the old thing about separating deeds from identity or intention. If the expectation between a regular couple is that the relationship can take more people, then that's polyamory in my book. Anyway.... ain't what the thread's about mate.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Things like these make me think - well, she's only 26, why expect her to have all the answers? OTOH... well.


 
I'm glad the internet wasn't really used much when I was 26.  Imagine all the rubbish I came out with being recorded for posterity!  Its bad enough that I record this rubbish in my 40s!


----------



## fractionMan (Dec 18, 2012)

This thread has taken a new turn of weird.

It was better before.


----------



## joolsxp (Dec 18, 2012)

sihhi said:


> If we think it's bad in this country, the future is in America. This is an article on the US New Inquiry magazine, which Laurie Penny has written for on several occasions.
> 
> http://www.rhizzone.net/article/2012/09/29/fuck-new-inquiry-and-other-tales/
> 
> I don't agree with its conclusions necessarily and it is quite pretentious and is a hard read, but it is interesting.


 
This is why I shouldn't write on uppers...


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> I'm glad the internet wasn't really used much when I was 26. Imagine all the rubbish I came out with being recorded for posterity! Its bad enough that I record this rubbish in my 40s!


Too fucking true. Then again this is her world and always was pretty much (as an adult that is).


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 18, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Things like these make me think - well, she's only 26, why expect her to have all the answers? OTOH... well.


I think she was given a platform and then had adulation thrown her way too early on in her 'career'. She's the Mario Balotelli of slacktivism.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 18, 2012)

I think some of her work is good, some of it isn't, and I think without a solid political standpoint underpinning her work it becomes reduced to that of a diarist, a self-appointed spokesperson for a generation. I hope that her work and writing style will mature because she could do some great pieces.

But, and it's a big but for me, simply labelling herself as an anarcho-feminist and alienating others, especially activists, does her no favours.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 18, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> She's the Mario Balotelli of slacktivism.


Nice try.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 18, 2012)

Look, someone should really be calling me a misogynist by now....


----------



## Firky (Dec 18, 2012)

Baptist


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 18, 2012)

firky said:


> Baptist


How. Very. Fucking. DARE. You.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 18, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> I
> 
> What I'm trying to look at is her viewpoint that anorexia is a) a capitalist disease and b) complicated by gender/sexual identity politics.



Aren't gender/ sexual politics a product of capitalism for her too. Sexuality will melt away in the latte-supping, ciabatta-munching rainbow utopia they're working on right now in the ornately furnished anarchist cells of the upper east side. Sexuality will only appear in history books as a quirky concept from the age of the fat white male rapacious overlords. We'll all be solid and polyamorous and chewing nut cutlets.


----------



## FreddyB (Dec 18, 2012)

I read this piece by her about her experience and thoughts about anorexia http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/mar/11/anorexia-mental-health in 2010 and although it's focus is teenage sufferers it was one of the things I read that helped me understand what a very dear friend of mine was (and to an extent)still is) going through in her later 30's.

I think her politics are shit but for that at least I'm grateful to her.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 18, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Look, someone should really be calling me a misogynist by now....


 
Swappie.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 19, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Swappie.


Posadist.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 19, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Things like these make me think - well, she's only 26, why expect her to have all the answers? OTOH... well.


Yes, that's a fair point, but then is she not portraying herself as having lots of answers and opinions, as being the 'voice of a generation'?


----------



## free spirit (Dec 19, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Yes, that's a fair point, but then is she not portraying herself as having lots of answers and opinions, as being the 'voice of a generation'?


thing is, she quite possibly is a reasonable political voice for a largely politically apathetic generation who suddenly discovered politics and protest 2-3 years ago when they realised the Lib Dems had lied to them about tuition fees, cuts etc.

Remember this is the generation who grew up thinking that Labour were the bad guys for the Iraq war, and barely any memory at all of the Tories in power.

This is no reflection on the long term urban posters around that age, as you're obviously the exception to that.

I'm pretty sure there would also be a fair amount of stuff I wrote 5-10 years ago around the anti-globalisation movement / protests and why weren't the old left in the UK properly involved in that movement that raised similar hackles on here... (I still stand by at least some of that btw)... I can understand the sort of sentiment of someone freshly involved in a high profile global protest movement which has minimal involvement from the traditional left in getting carried away with the apparent action and success of the movement they're involved in and not understanding why other groups aren't jumping excitedly aboard their bandwagon, and jump to the conclusion that they must just be shit activists if they're not getting involved in the stuff they're doing, and / or not understanding the political differences that stop others wanting to get involved.

I guess what I'm saying really though is that she's just a kid, and maybe she should be cut a little slack as some of the animosity on this thread could well be enough to send someone over the edge if they were feeling a bit fragile already when reading it.

I'll no doubt get some shit for this post, but fuck it.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 19, 2012)

@free spirit : I'm 40 soon 

I think it would have been great if she engaged more. Some of her work is genuinely thought-provoking and it would be great to actually have an ongoing discussion with her on a number of topics.


----------



## JimW (Dec 19, 2012)

free spirit said:


> ....
> 
> I guess what I'm saying really though is that she's just a kid, and maybe she should be cut a little slack as some of the animosity on this thread could well be enough to send someone over the edge if they were feeling a bit fragile already when reading it.
> 
> I'll no doubt get some shit for this post, but fuck it.


 
I cut people all the slack in the world for being young and a bit clueless, but then we've again gone away from the actual point here. That's the critique of the class reproduction process LP represents as a typical case and that rather than moving on from youthful gobshitery as we would I suppose all hope to, it's seen as grist to the mill and parleyed into a career, and one riddled with specific issues raised in the thread.
It would actually be encouraging if I could believe that any of this criticism might get taken on board, though obv the only edge you'd want anyone going over was into the sort of self-reflection that stopped you co-opting other's genuine struggles and fabricating news because somehow your continuing career and filling those column inches matters more than any of the causes you affect to espouse.


----------



## free spirit (Dec 19, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> @free spirit : I'm 40 soon
> 
> I think it would have been great if she engaged more. Some of her work is genuinely thought-provoking and it would be great to actually have an ongoing discussion with her on a number of topics.


I'm not that far off myself like.

which is pretty much my point - she's not the voice of my generation, she's really a different generation, although there is some cross-over. She was 10-11 when blair got elected, and wasn't even born when the miners strike was going on ffs.

edited for spelling


----------



## JimW (Dec 19, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> @free spirit : I'm 40 soon
> 
> I think it would have been great if she engaged more. Some of her work is genuinely thought-provoking and it would be great to actually have an ongoing discussion with her on a number of topics.


I think she's done herself no favours in the process either, as going off e.g. Freddy's post above she obviously can write about what she genuinely knows in useful and affecting ways. So more of that and some actual journalism if that's going to be your career.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 19, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> @free spirit : I'm 40 soon
> 
> I think it would have been great if she engaged more. Some of her work is genuinely thought-provoking and it would be great to actually have an ongoing discussion with her on a number of topics.


I tried to get her to go on some of the other forums on here, but apart from glancing at a pet thread she did not bother. I imagine she feels out of her depth on here and keeps away. Mostly she seems just to write lengthy opinion pieces for the publications that she works for. I would imagine as they pay her by the hundred words or so she just keeps developing her original idea until she has achieved the target length. It is a bit like when you have to write an essay for a school assignment. I wish her well. She is just doing a job and is at risk of losing it at short notice in these modern times. If she becomes controversial as a result of this thread she will probably last longer in her job ironically.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 19, 2012)

free spirit said:


> I'm not that far off myself like.
> 
> which is pretty much my point - she's not the voice of my generation, she's really a different generation, although there is some cross-over. She was 10-11 when blair got elected, and wasn't even born when the minors strike was going on ffs.


If you are talking about generations and youth it might be an idea to spell the 'miner's strike' correctly. If all the minors in the country went on strike it would not make a lot of difference apart from leaving the schools empty.


----------



## free spirit (Dec 19, 2012)

JimW said:


> but then we've again gone away from the actual point here.


yeah I get that general point, but there are also a fair amount of the posts about her that are also missing that point, and are basically just direct personal attacks against her. IMO.


----------



## free spirit (Dec 19, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> If you are talking about generations and youth it might be an idea to spell the 'miner's strike' correctly. If all the minors in the country went on strike it would not make a lot of difference apart from leaving the schools empty.


arse.

corrected ta.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 19, 2012)

free spirit said:


> arse.
> 
> corrected ta.


Cheers


----------



## JimW (Dec 19, 2012)

Hocus Eye. said:


> If she becomes controversial as a result of this thread she will probably last longer in her job ironically.


She should thank us really! Other celebs would pay for Twitter trending like this


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 19, 2012)

free spirit said:


> thing is, she quite possibly is a reasonable political voice for a largely politically apathetic generation who suddenly discovered politics and protest 2-3 years ago when they realised the Lib Dems had lied to them about tuition fees, cuts etc.
> 
> Remember this is the generation who grew up thinking that Labour were the bad guys for the Iraq war, and barely any memory at all of the Tories in power.


 
Thing is though, she's older than me, she's older Frogwoman too and a few others, and we didn't go to the top schools she went to either, but we're aware of this. I was aware how bad the Tories were, so really she's got no excuse. Just learn your history and don't be utterly self-absorded, listen to people who lived through these things, don't be arrogant, it's not hard y'know.



free spirit said:


> I guess what I'm saying really though is that she's just a kid, and maybe she should be cut a little slack as some of the animosity on this thread could well be enough to send someone over the edge if they were feeling a bit fragile already when reading it.


 
Y'see I was saying that sort of stuff too, then she turned up here, called us racists and sexist trolls, igonred any attempt to engage with her as an equal participant, no matter how respectful they were, and went on to slander two people I respect as anti-racists in front of her substantial twitter audience. Only when the words "Carter-Ruck" got bandied around did she even show the slightest hint of contrition. I feel a bit less inclined to be sympathetic now for some mad reason.


----------



## JimW (Dec 19, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> then she turned up here, called us racists and sexist trolls, igonred any attempt to engage with as an equal, and slandered two people I respect as racists in front of her substantial twitter audience. I feel a bit less inclined to be sympathetic now for some mad reason.


Ooh yeah, that too.
ETA: Which strikes me as of a piece with the self-absorption/willingness to co-opt/fabricate. And we're sort of letting her off full personal responsibility for that by pointing out that she's a victim of precisely the sort of class background that makes you a self-serving careerist with no shame.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 19, 2012)

free spirit said:


> I'm not that far off myself like.
> 
> which is pretty much my point - she's not the voice of my generation, she's really a different generation, although there is some cross-over. She was 10-11 when blair got elected, and wasn't even born when the miners strike was going on ffs.
> 
> edited for spelling





free spirit said:


> I'm not that far off myself like.
> 
> which is pretty much my point - she's not the voice of my generation, she's really a different generation, although there is some cross-over. She was 10-11 when blair got elected, and wasn't even born when the miners strike was going on ffs.
> 
> edited for spelling



Christ, i feel old.


----------



## rekil (Dec 19, 2012)

Mornin'. 




			
				dave said:
			
		

> Jesus christ, I just found a forum full of so-called lefties speculating about my personal finances and toilet habits. It's 208 pages long.


 
*Michael Pannell* ‏@*MichaelPannell*
@*PennyRed* what I find strange is the 'armchair warriors' questioning the integrity of someone who is actually out there 'doing' .


----------



## ReturnOfElfman (Dec 19, 2012)

someone who is actually getting paid for 'doing'


----------



## Balbi (Dec 19, 2012)

'watching'. actually.

LP can produce some very good pieces of work, but lots of her work is characterised by almost being good but lacking that challenging element which makes good journalism. That's an experience thing.


----------



## chilango (Dec 19, 2012)

copliker said:


> Mornin'.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



...and we're back in the room.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 19, 2012)

uncanny how they all chime with this sort of response- criticism and piss taking on the youtube comment thread for the horrendous launch party video for Firebox drew exactly the same thing 'what are you doing, blah'. If your not north london champers socialist you're fuck all


----------



## rekil (Dec 19, 2012)

Il Dave Is Always Right!


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 19, 2012)

copliker said:


> *Michael Pannell* ‏@*MichaelPannell*
> @*PennyRed* what I find strange is the 'armchair warriors' questioning the integrity of someone who is actually out there 'doing' .


 
That's a fucking peach! 

Twat.


----------



## killer b (Dec 19, 2012)

The idea that people who post about politics on the internet must not be active beyond that is a curious one. What does he think penny is doing?


----------



## Nylock (Dec 19, 2012)

Michel Pannell said:
			
		

> *Michael Pannell* ‏@*MichaelPannell*
> @*PennyRed* what I find strange is the 'armchair warriors' questioning the integrity of someone who is actually out there 'doing' .


...and so the commentariat circle-jerk continues apace...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

free spirit said:


> yeah I get that general point, but there are also a fair amount of the posts about her that are also missing that point, and are basically just direct personal attacks against her. IMO.


 
Yeah well she doesn't get to complain about that since she started libeling people as racists does she? Fuck her.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yeah well she doesn't get to complain about that since she started libeling people as racists does she? Fuck her.


What? One doesn't excuse the other.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

TruXta said:


> What? One doesn't excuse the other.


 
Who said it did?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Who said it did?


You did when you said she doesn't get to complain.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

TruXta said:


> You did when you said she doesn't get to complain.


 
No, I said she didn't get to complain. Not that it excused it.

Fuck her. I despise the horrible little spoilt brat.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)




----------



## rekil (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> No, I said she didn't get to complain. Not that it excused it.
> 
> Fuck her. I despise the horrible little spoilt brat.


Hate hurts the hater more than the hatee. I got that from Mr.Zodiac Mindwarp's novel 'Get Your Cock Out.'


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

TruXta said:


>


 
Roll your eyes all you want. You're not the one being libeled.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Roll your eyes all you want. You're not the one being libeled.


I get that you're fucked off, you've every right to be. That doesn't make it fine for you to say if she's abused she should just suck it up. Have a think eh?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

TruXta said:


> I get that you're fucked off, you've every right to be. That doesn't make it fine for you to say if she's abused she should just suck it up. Have a think eh?


 
Hang on, so people can't take the piss now? Taking the piss is 'abuse'? Have one back


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Hang on, so people can't take the piss now? Taking the piss is 'abuse'? Have one back


 
There's a difference between taking the piss and personal attacks. You said she doesn't get to complain about personal attacks anymore. I take that to mean that if someone called her an anorexic mental cunt, you'd be fine with that.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

TruXta said:


> There's a difference between taking the piss and personal attacks. You said she doesn't get to complain about personal attacks anymore. I take that to mean that if someone called her an anorexic mental cunt, you'd be fine with that.


 
No of course I wouldn't. But nobody has done that have they?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> No of course I wouldn't. But nobody has done that have they?


No, but they could. And tbf there's been more than one occasion on here when criticism of LP as a token has veered well into personal attacks. Anyway.


----------



## Random (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yeah well she doesn't get to complain about that since she started libeling people as racists does she? Fuck her.


For me, it's not about what she deserves, it's about what we deserve. Do we want a thread based on political points that are useful, or based on personal attacks that are empty of political content.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

TruXta said:


> No, but they could. And tbf there's been more than one occasion on here when criticism of LP as a token has veered well into personal attacks. Anyway.


 
Here's the thing - I don't need to consider her feelings to know misogynistic comments, homphobic comments, comments about mental health etc aren't acceptable. Because she's not the only one hurt by stuff like that.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

Random said:


> For me, it's not about what she deserves, it's about what we deserve. Do we want a thread based on political points that are useful, or based on personal attacks that are empty of political content.


 
Depends whether they're funny or not.


----------



## Random (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Here's the thing - I don't need to consider her feelings to know misogynistic comments, homphobic comments, comments about mental health etc aren't acceptable. Because she's not the only one hurt by stuff like that.


Good point, well said


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Here's the thing - I don't need to consider her feelings to know misogynistic comments, homphobic comments, comments about mental health etc aren't acceptable. Because she's not the only one hurt by stuff like that.


Fine, so you essentially retract what you said earlier about her having to suck it up. Good, I'm glad we agree on that.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 19, 2012)

Random said:


> For me, it's not about what she deserves, it's about what we deserve.* Do we want a thread based on political points that are useful, or based on personal attacks that are empty of political content*.


 
That is one of the most difficult choices I have ever had to think about.


----------



## Random (Dec 19, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> That is one of the most difficult choices I have ever had to think about.


I had to put it to a show of hands at last night's mass meeting of the Nordic Communist League.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Fine, so you essentially retract what you said earlier about her having to suck it up. Good, I'm glad we agree on that.


 
No I don't - I said _she _doesn't get to complain any more. I stand by that.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> No I don't - I said _she _doesn't get to complain any more. I stand by that.


I give up.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 19, 2012)

Last in!


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

Random said:


> I had to put it to a show of hands at last night's mass meeting of the Nordic Communist League.


All three of you in the same room?


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

TruXta said:


> There's a difference between taking the piss and personal attacks. You said she doesn't get to complain about personal attacks anymore. I take that to mean that if someone called her an anorexic mental cunt, you'd be fine with that.


It's not nice to call her an anorexic mental cunt, TruX


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

TruXta said:


> I give up.


 
It's really very simple. As far as I'm concerned she lost the right to complain when she smeared me - there's things I won't accept being said about her because they might upset others but what she thinks or feels about it is irrelevant.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> It's not nice to call her an anorexic mental cunt, TruX


I ONLY DID IT BECAUSE SPINEY SAID IT WAS OK *runs out of the room crying and snot flying everywhere*


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> It's really very simple. As far as I'm concerned she lost the right to complain when she smeared me - there's things I won't accept being said about her because they might upset others but what she thinks or feels about it is irrelevant.


I get that. I think you're wrong. Let's leave it at that eh.


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

free spirit said:


> thing is, she quite possibly is a reasonable political voice for a largely politically apathetic generation who suddenly discovered politics and protest 2-3 years ago when they realised the Lib Dems had lied to them about tuition fees, cuts etc.
> 
> Remember this is the generation who grew up thinking that Labour were the bad guys for the Iraq war, and barely any memory at all of the Tories in power.
> 
> ...


Fucking LibDems.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> It's really very simple. As far as I'm concerned she lost the right to complain when she smeared me - there's things I won't accept being said about her because they might upset others but what she thinks or feels about it is irrelevant.


 
Proletarian justice in my book


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Proletarian justice in my book


 
Come the glorious day she's saltmine fodder.

Note for humourless @lariepenny sycophants: that's not a serious threat.


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

I was away from computer all day yesterday, still can't work out what she has or not admitted/apologised to yet

Am i right that below is a rough summary of how it went from my perspective (i can't work out who is saying what to who on twitter)

Me: Here's an article 

LP: Ah, You're a racist

Me: Serious allegation, can you back that up?

LP: That article is racist and sexist (and banal)

Others: You're a dick, you should retract/apologise

LP: I stand by what I said

Others: You should apologise

LP: I never called anyone a racist

Others: Yes you did, you should retract/apologise

LP: I have already apologised

Others: No you haven't

LP: Well, ok, to clarify, I've no idea whether Love Detective is racist


----------



## Random (Dec 19, 2012)

That's how I understand it.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

Looks about right to me.


----------



## rekil (Dec 19, 2012)

"I've no idea whether Love Detective is racist (but probably isn't based on etc)" just says that there's still a reasonable chance that he is racist. It's just a slimy way of slandering LD rather than admitting she's completely wrong. It's nauseating.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> I was away from computer all day yesterday, still can't work out what she has or not admitted/apologised to yet
> 
> Am i right that below is a rough summary of how it went from my perspective (i can't work out who is saying what to who on twitter)
> 
> ...


 
That plus a finger pointed squarely at me - apparently I was arguing in a racist way and retweeted your article in a racist way. You're off the hook but I'm racister than ever.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> I was away from computer all day yesterday, still can't work out what she has or not admitted/apologised to yet
> 
> Am i right that below is a rough summary of how it went from my perspective (i can't work out who is saying what to who on twitter)
> 
> ...


 
Need a similar summary on the Spineynorman situation, could also do with some fridge magnet type illustrations


----------



## BigTom (Dec 19, 2012)

(edit: took too long to type this, it should be in reply to LDs post)

She also said:

LP: I can see how it looked like I called Love Detective a racist but I didn't, it's just confusing because of the RT-reply system

best guess as to what the "RT-reply system" is, she's backtracking to find a way she can claim she didn't call LD racist and somehow thinks that because Spiney RTd the link she can claim she was calling Spiney racist, not LD... I think. It's very unclear. She wouldn't have seen the RT from Spiney, she'd have had the link direct in her mentions and clearly being LD who was tweeting the link. I cba to question her on this cos she hasn't replied to me in the past, though I've avoided being blocked so far.

Fucking stupid, never understand how people find it so hard to hold their hands up and apologise for making a mistake, people generally think so much better of someone when they just admit they were wrong, apologise (and don't repeat the error).


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> That plus a finger pointed squarely at me - apparently I was arguing in a racist way and retweeted your article in a racist way. You're off the hook but I'm racister than ever.


so i posted the article in a way that was initially racist, but now might not be racist but you retweeted it in a way that definitely was and still is racist? you didn't even say anything on the RT though, just retweeted it, how can she get what she said from that?


----------



## inva (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> so i posted the article in a way that was initially racist, but now might not be racist but you retweeted it in a way that definitely was and still is racist? you didn't even say anything on the RT though, just retweeted it, how can she get what she said from that?


so the iwca article is still racist and sexist as far as I know, retweeting a tweet linking to it is racist, but just tweeting the article might not be racist.



			
				laurie penny on twitter said:
			
		

> well, I found the article, and its dismissal of 'identity politics', racist and sexist


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

BigTom said:


> Fucking stupid, never understand how people find it so hard to hold their hands up and apologise for making a mistake, people generally think so much better of someone when they just admit they were wrong, apologise (and don't repeat the error).


 
Thing is though, putting aside the fact that she hasn't really apologised to any of us, her 'apology' has only came about because of 48 hours of sustained pressure and public humiliation from others on twitter telling her she's a dick along with a few of her idols clearly distancing themselves from her, it's not come from her taking some time out, reflecting on and reading about, let alone understanding, what a progressive pro working class critique of state multiculturalism actually means


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> Thing is though, putting aside the fact that she hasn't really apologised to any of us, her 'apology' has only came about because of 48 hours of sustained pressure and public humiliation from others on twitter telling her she's a dick along with a few of her idols clearly distancing themselves from her, it's not come from her taking some time out, reflecting on and reading about, let alone understanding, what a progressive pro working class critique of state multiculturalism actually means


She's got deadlines man! She ain't got time for your petty squabbles. And what's a little racist accusation between friends?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> so i posted the article in a way that was initially racist, but now might not be racist but you retweeted it in a way that definitely was and still is racist? you didn't even say anything on the RT though, just retweeted it, how can she get what she said from that?


What you don't get is that well-remunerated elite independent schools put a lot of work into enhancing the inferential skills of students - basically it's like a super spidey-sense. So whilst you might not realise that you are a racist, Laurie does, whether or not you speak, act or behave in a racist fashion.

A calloused-clawed thug like you probably wouldn't be able to grasp that, so let me put it in terms you might understand:



> Awwight geez? You seen that _X-Men_ film or wot? That fackin _Star Trek_ bloke. That fackin school for 'special kids'. Knowworrimean?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 19, 2012)

BigTom said:


> Fucking stupid, never understand how people find it so hard to hold their hands up and apologise for making a mistake, people generally think so much better of someone when they just admit they were wrong, apologise (and don't repeat the error).


 
This x 9000


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> so i posted the article in a way that was initially racist, but now might not be racist but you retweeted it in a way that definitely was and still is racist? you didn't even say anything on the RT though, just retweeted it, how can she get what she said from that?


 
I have no idea. She's a vile piece of shit though, I know that.


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Need a similar summary on the Spineynorman situation, could also do with some fridge magnet type illustrations


 
someone else will have to do it, i can barely work out what i've said to others on twitter and whether they can see it, let alone what they've said to me

spanky might be able to do one of his powerpoint arrow diagrams like what he did to show the genesis and progeny of the various u75 splits


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> so i posted the article in a way that was initially racist, but now might not be racist but you retweeted it in a way that definitely was and still is racist? you didn't even say anything on the RT though, just retweeted it, how can she get what she said from that?


 
I think the critical factor is Laurie being made aware of your connections with the IWCA and BTF. So she has half apologised to you, but not Spiney. 

All of which is the exact opposite of engaging with the article.


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> so i posted the article in a way that was initially racist, but now might not be racist but you retweeted it in a way that definitely was and still is racist? you didn't even say anything on the RT though, just retweeted it, how can she get what she said from that?


Only RACISTS would retweet something inherently RACIST.

Obv.


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I have no idea. She's a vile piece of shit though, I know that.


 
All those twitterals will be thinking we're like old dinosaurs, still talking about something that was on twitter over 2 whole days ago now


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

Fozzie Bear said:


> I think the critical factor is Laurie being made aware of your connections with the IWCA and BTF. So she has half apologised to you, but not Spiney.
> 
> All of which is the exact opposite of engaging with the article.


 
It's got nothing to do with new information - it's all about saving face.


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

Fozzie Bear said:


> I think the critical factor is Laurie being made aware of your connections with the IWCA and BTF. So she has half apologised to you, but not Spiney.
> 
> All of which is the exact opposite of engaging with the article.


 
Yep,that's the rub - she's still engaging with this in the only way she and her type knows how to, a 'connections' basis, rather than on an understanding of the substance of things


----------



## Random (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> All those twitterals will be thinking we're like old dinosaurs, still talking about something that was on twitter over 2 whole days ago now


This thread is almost moving as fast as Twitter now


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 19, 2012)

Out of interest, what anti-fascist or anti-racist activity has the Red Penace actually undertaken?

Aside, of course, from giving a platform to the sweatyheads?

And which activities have not been paid writing?


----------



## rekil (Dec 19, 2012)

That's not an apology. It's a way of saying 'you're a racist but I can't prove it so I'll just blacken your name a bit.'


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

I'm speaking to my sister this afternoon to find out if there's anything I can do legally about it - reckons she might be able to sort a solicitors letter for me for free. I didn't think it was possible to get this pissed off about something on the internet but I guess you learn something new every day.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 19, 2012)

copliker said:


> ...blacken your name...


Steady


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'm speaking to my sister this afternoon to find out if there's anything I can do legally about it - reckons she might be able to sort a solicitors letter for me for free. I didn't think it was possible to get this pissed off about something on the internet but I guess you learn something new every day.


 
I take it the plea to Owen Jones fell on deaf ears?


----------



## rekil (Dec 19, 2012)




----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> I take it the plea to Owen Jones fell on deaf ears?


 
Yes lol


----------



## inva (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yes lol


maybe you need to appeal to his emotions. tell him you're feeling gutted and would be chuffed if he'd intervene.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'm speaking to my sister this afternoon to find out if there's anything I can do legally about it - reckons she might be able to sort a solicitors letter for me for free. I didn't think it was possible to get this pissed off about something on the internet but I guess you learn something new every day.


 
Spiney - it's up to you what you do and you're absolutely right to be livid, but maybe try sending LP an email directly before going down the legal route?

I'm not an expert, but doing people for libel sounds lengthy, stressful and expensive.


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'm speaking to my sister this afternoon to find out if there's anything I can do legally about it - reckons she might be able to sort a solicitors letter for me for free. I didn't think it was possible to get this pissed off about something on the internet but I guess you learn something new every day.



She'll be fucking quaking in her boots at the prospect of a free solicitor's letter.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yes lol


 
is there a higher body ?


----------



## rekil (Dec 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> She'll be fucking quaking in her boots at the prospect of a free solicitor's letter.


She's worried that brian whelan got annoyed with her, and rightly. She doesn't give a fuck about this thread. Bit weird considering.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 19, 2012)

I'm no Rumpole, but I suspect that discussing your strategy for legal remedy in a place frequented by the object of that strategy might not be the most effective way of doing things


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

copliker said:


> She's more worried that brian whelan got annoyed with her. She doesn't give a fuck about this thread. Bit weird considering.


That's not weird; that's sensible. She's only going to be bothered by potentially adverse "left" publicity.


----------



## BigTom (Dec 19, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Need a similar summary on the Spineynorman situation, could also do with some fridge magnet type illustrations


 
ok so from memory this is what happened:

LP: something about identity politics

Spiney: something in reply

LP: All politics is identity politics

Love Detective: link to IWCA artice

[For those who don't use twitter, LDs link will have appeared in Penny's "mentions" and not in her timeline, assuming she doesn't follow LD. There will have been no way that she could reasonably have been mistaken that it was LD sending the link, unless she is using a weird twitter client.]

Spiney retweets the link

[For those not on twitter, the only way she will have been able to see that Spiney RTd the link is if she (a) followed spiney but not LD or (b) follows both but was logged out when LD tweeted it originally but logged in when Spiney RTd it. In that particular circumstance she could have seen the RT in her timeline, and may have been able to reply to that. A bit of forensics shows me that LD tweeted the link at 11:13am and Spiney RTd it between 11:39am and 11:46am whilst Laurie replied at 12:51pm which doesn't rule out the possibility that she saw spiney RT the link in her timeline, though it seems unlikely and she'd have to have been following Spiney.

Some client(s) when you reply to a something someone has rt'd includes both the original tweeter and the person who retweeted in the reply. I have no idea if she uses that client, but aside from looking at the tweet to see who has rt'd it, I also think it would be impossible to have seen Spiney's RT unless she followed him (which I imagine Spiney can confirm/deny)

There's fuckloads of clients for twitter out there and I've no idea how they all work - there may well be a genuine reason going on here that she's talking about but I don't know what it is and whatever it can only mean that she was definitely 100% calling Spiney racist, if it wasn't directed at LD] 

Laurie then calls LD and Spiney racist ("Oh I see, you're racist, block")

Others chip in saying wtf? you think the IWCA are racist? LD = ex afa etc

Laurie complains to her timeline about the nasty bullies, a few ppl like Owen Jones sympathise then back out as they read the back story

People continue to ask LP why she hasn't apologised, until the point where she almost does it.. almost. But not to Spiney, and in a way that seems to confirm she was calling Spiney racist.
She said "you're right, the RT-reply system does make it unclear who that was directed at. My mistake, I apologise."

[this is the bit I've talked through above that I don't understand what she means. Whatever, if it wasn't directed at LD that means it was directed at Spiney]


Somewhere in this bit someone mentioned to her that IWCA have used Carter Ruck to sue before, and I think she maybe got a bit nervous, hence the attempt to apologise to LD whilst still finding a way to not admit she made a mistake even though that means calling Spiney racist.

It's a proper clusterfuck. everyone makes mistakes, everyone gets things wrong, everyone jumps to incorrect conclusions. That's fine, it happens. Admit the mistake, apologise, move on. It's not unforgivable to be wrong.


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

The Guardian (amongst others) mines this site for journo-fodder though. I know it pisses us off when we don't get credit for it, but sometimes it's helpful. I can imagine some journo having a field day with this if there isn't the usual natural catastrophe over the festive season.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 19, 2012)

It's been a decade since we hit the headlines. Time for a comeback tour.

Someone spring Diesel and pbman, i'll round up Ern and Dubversion. We ride for Fleet Street!


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

Balbi said:


> It's been a decade since we hit the headlines. Time for a comeback tour.
> 
> Someone spring Diesel and pbman, i'll round up Ern and Dubversion. We ride for Fleet Street!


Nah, Badger Kitten did that BBC thing after the London Bombings.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> Nah, Badger Kitten did that BBC thing after the London Bombings.


 
That was more 'poster who also does 7/7' - Paddick was board generated (dis)content.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 19, 2012)

Fuck, I missed a golden opportunity on that post.

_*"We're getting the banned back together!"*_


----------



## rekil (Dec 19, 2012)

Balbi said:


> It's been a decade since we hit the headlines. Time for a comeback tour.


Skynews two years ago, the student kerfuffles. Much amusement as they showed a screenie from a thread here and blurred an important bit of a post to make it look like this was riot hq.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 19, 2012)

BigTom said:


> She said "you're right, the RT-reply system does make it unclear who that was directed at. My mistake, I apologise."
> 
> [this is the bit I've talked through above that I don't understand what she means. Whatever, if it wasn't directed at LD that means it was directed at Spiney]


The bit you don't get is basically her_ it was the subs-fault not mine_ reflex kicking in in a different environment. It does also leave it clear as day that there was not only no apology to norm, but that she was continuing to maintain that he is a racist. And it also leaves, in the most unambiguous terms, the claims that the IWCA article is racist and the implication therefore that the IWCA are racist and the suggestion that attempting to offer serious substantive contributions to ongoing political debates about top-down multi-culturalism mean you can justifiably sideline the participants for racism by the judicious use of your media-power and simple smearing.

Effectively this means people with access to that power get to decide on both the terms of debate and who they will allow to participate. That this is the case can be shown by the obsequious manner in which she had previously asked Kenan Malik to educate her about this persepective. It's ok for him as he's on radio 4 in the papers and is a pretty well known public intellectual. Lines drawn and participants decided.

Now, replay this exercise in exclusion out on the national political stage and what do we get - we get privilege and power excising large swathes of the population from public political debate as their face doesn't fit, and it doesn't fit on the basis of the social prejudices of the privileged and the powerful (and this happens in left groups as well) and then a consequent alienation of that excluded part of the population and class polarisation, with the really really powerful to jump into these gaps with things like top-down multi-culturalism and work on those polarisations even further. This is why such a dismissal as Laura gave whilst seemingly inconsequential has damaging political effects - again, she is a perfect mirror of the social relations and processes that most of us are looking to expose and challenge.


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

Balbi said:


> That was more 'poster who also does 7/7' - Paddick was board generated (dis)content.


I wasn't really anticipating national headlines  More along the lines of content for one of those "multicultural" filler pieces.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> I wasn't really anticipating national headlines  More along the lines of content for one of those "multicultural" filler pieces.


 

...Or yet another bit of diary-filler by Hugh Muir.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 19, 2012)

Anyway, WHERE'S OUR KINGSTER?! 

Grooming ain't wot it used t'be.


----------



## rekil (Dec 19, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Anyway, WHERE'S OUR KINGSTER?!
> 
> Grooming ain't wot it used t'be.


Gimme 24 hours.


----------



## editor (Dec 19, 2012)

It's going to burst through the 200,000 page views count soon!


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 19, 2012)

killer b said:


> The idea that people who post about politics on the internet must not be active beyond that is a curious one. What does he think penny is doing?


 

she's posting on a different internet to us though.  her internet is young, intellectual, committed, vibrant, out there doing things with camera and notebook in hand.

ours is old, dogmatic, tired, dull, sitting at home whinging with cock in hand.

you can tell ours is the old one because we aren't her friends.


----------



## Dan U (Dec 19, 2012)

editor said:


> It's going to burst through the 200,000 page views count soon!


 
have you got a party hat on?


----------



## editor (Dec 19, 2012)

Dan U said:


> have you got a party hat on?


There's a lot to celebrate in this thread.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 19, 2012)

...and one other quick point, this thread kicked off with Laurie pennie attacking the left for not recognising that technology and new forms of communication have effectively flattened out any form of hierarchy or centralisation of power and influence amongst those groups who claim to be challenging power, that _networks_ make that impossible. I think she's just demonstrated how networks are susceptible to hierarchy centralisation and manipulation - how the network itself becomes a functioning part of maintaining that hierarchy and relations of privilege.

Callincicos wins. _Victory to the prof._


----------



## Dan U (Dec 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> ...and one other quick point, this thread kicked off with Laurie pennie attacking the left for not recognising that technology and new forms of communication have effectively flattened out any form of hierarchy or centralisation of power and influence amongst those groups who claim to be challenging power, that _networks_ make that impossible. I think she's just demonstrated how networks are susceptible to hierarchy centralisation and manipulation - how the network itself becomes a functioning part of maintaining that hierarchy and relations of privilege.
> 
> Callincicos wins. _Victory to the prof._


 
i didn't read this post because i have blocked you as i don't like what you are saying.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I think she's just demonstrated how networks are susceptible to hierarchy centralisation and manipulation - how the network itself becomes a functioning part of maintaining that hierarchy and relations of privilege.
> 
> Callincicos wins. _Victory to the prof._


Any network, whether formal, informal, technological or or not can become part of hierarchy and privilege. In fact, its almost bound to happen, and all Twitter etc does is speed up the process.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

copliker said:
			
		

> Skynews two years ago, the student kerfuffles. Much amusement as they showed a screenie from a thread here and blurred an important bit of a post to make it look like this was riot hq.



There was also Fridgemagnet's Cameron app thing on newsnight or somesuch.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 19, 2012)

You mean his expose of nick Robinson's smear of wildcating workers? Or am I confused?


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> The Guardian (amongst others) mines this site for journo-fodder though. I know it pisses us off when we don't get credit for it, but sometimes it's helpful. I can imagine some journo having a field day with this if there isn't the usual natural catastrophe over the festive season.


 

This thread is open to unregistered users and search engines for anyone with access to the internet to see.

This has similiarties to Spiney and Love Detective's experience:

http://thethirdestate.net/2011/01/on-being-called-a-cunt-by-laurie-penny/




> *On being called a cunt by Laurie Penny*
> 
> Last night I attended a debate between AWL organizer Ed Maltby and journalist-cum-activist Laurie Penny. I won’t pretend it was the most interesting debate in the whole world, but nonetheless it was one of a number of fora in which activists are coming together to discuss theoretical issues in the emerging anti-cuts movement. The event culminated, though, with Laurie Penny saying, “we all have to work with people we don’t agree with” and then gesturing at me, “for example, I think Jacob is a cunt.” When it was suggested, after the meeting, by another activist that she offer some kind of apology, her response was, “no, he is a cunt.”
> 
> ...


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> This thread is open to unregistered users and search engines for anyone with access to the internet to see.
> 
> This has similiarties to Spiney and Love Detective's experience:
> 
> http://thethirdestate.net/2011/01/on-being-called-a-cunt-by-laurie-penny/


If you read down in the comments she actually apologises for calling that guy a cunt.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 19, 2012)

does she say he may or may not be a cunt, she doesn't know?


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 19, 2012)

TruXta said:


> If you read down in the comments she actually apologises for calling that guy a cunt.


 
Is that before or after the accusations of ugly misogyny & sexism?


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

She does but it is still another example of her singling shit at people from atop her own soap box.

Did you read all the comments btw? It's all very familiar, LP must be thinking, "Oh not this shit again!" but she doesn't learn.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 19, 2012)

> The Director of Public Prosecutions said people should face a trial only if their comments on Twitter, Facebook or elsewhere go beyond being offensive.
> 
> He said the guidance combats threats and internet trolls without having a "chilling effect" on free speech.


 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20777002

Could still get her for being an internet troll, I guess.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Is that before or after the accusations of ugly misogyny & sexism?


After.


firky said:


> She does but it is still another example of her singling people out from her own soap box.
> 
> Did you read all the comments btw? It's all very familiar, LP must be thinking, "Oh not this shit again!" but she doesn't learn.


Most of them, and yes, it's all very familiar. Familiarly depressin that is.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 19, 2012)

the political and media class, for want of a better word, have a real problem with twitter.

They really hate the fact they have to share this social space with people who don't exist in their little bubble. The whinges about trolling, to my ears, are whinges that there is no longer this distance between them and the great unwashed which has always been in the case previously. It's too popular for them to ignore, but too full of people they have contempt for to enjoy.

Look at Menshn, a twitter for "them" where there would be the appropriate degree of un-approachable-ness between those who matter and the swinish multitude.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 19, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> the political and media class, for want of a better word, have a real problem with twitter.
> 
> They really hate the fact they have to share this social space with people who don't exist in their little bubble. The whinges about trolling, to my ears, are whinges that there is no longer this distance between them and the great unwashed which has always been in the case previously. It's too popular for them to ignore, but too full of people they have contempt for to enjoy.
> 
> Look at Menshn, a twitter for "them" where there would be the appropriate degree of un-approachable-ness between those who matter and the swinish multitude.


 

its amusing to see them make cunts out of themselves. See: Huhne and Diane Abbot. amongst many


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 19, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> They really hate the fact they have to share this social space with people who don't exist in their little bubble. The whinges about trolling, to my ears, are whinges that there is no longer this distance between them and the great unwashed which has always been in the case previously. It's too popular for them to ignore, but too full of people they have contempt for to enjoy.


 
Acceptable ways for the great unwashed to behave on twitter:

a) Sychophancy /follower fodder
b) Promoting you through retweeting
c) Answering queries like _"can anyone hook me up with teenage disability rights activists in Panama?"_


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

Fozzie Bear said:


> Spiney - it's up to you what you do and you're absolutely right to be livid, but maybe try sending LP an email directly before going down the legal route?
> 
> I'm not an expert, but doing people for libel sounds lengthy, stressful and expensive.


 
I've got no idea how to contact her by email - if anyone knows her email address I will do but I'm seeking legal advice anyway.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I've got no idea how to contact her by email - if anyone knows her email address I will do but I'm seeking legal advice anyway.


laurie.penny@gmail.com


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> She'll be fucking quaking in her boots at the prospect of a free solicitor's letter.


 
That's just where it starts. I've got a couple of options I can take after that too.


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I've got no idea how to contact her by email - if anyone knows her email address I will do but I'm seeking legal advice anyway.


 
I posted it a few pages back, she was inviting young men (?) to help her write an essay.

laurie.penny@gmail.com


----------



## TruXta (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's just where it starts. I've got a couple of options I can take after that too.


Good luck whatever route you go down. Hopefully she'll learn something from this.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I've got no idea how to contact her by email - if anyone knows her email address I will do but I'm seeking legal advice anyway.


 
It's laurie.penny@gmail.com (she tweeted it herself yesterday as part of more crowd sourcing for material for her book, not that you would have seen it...)


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

BigTom said:


> ok so from memory this is what happened:
> 
> LP: something about identity politics
> 
> ...


 
The something in reply was:

@*PennyRed* Err... no they're not #*politicalnaif*

that's a little bit racism apparently.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> I'm no Rumpole, but I suspect that discussing your strategy for legal remedy in a place frequented by the object of that strategy might not be the most effective way of doing things


 
What difference does it make?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> What difference does it make?




and  at the whole legal remedy bollocks

make sure you write the email to her in green ink


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 19, 2012)

Back you to the hilt spiney, whatever you choose to do, but don't fuck it over for yourself by getting carried away on here.


----------



## Random (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> and  at the whole legal remedy bollocks
> 
> make sure you write the email to her in green ink


And comic sans


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> What difference does it make?


 
*Make a sound in the east, then strike in the west* (聲東擊西／声东击西, Shēng dōng jī xī)


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

TruXta said:


> If you read down in the comments she actually apologises for calling that guy a cunt.


 
I think I could probably cope without an apology if all she'd called me was a cunt tbh


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> and  at the whole legal remedy bollocks
> 
> make sure you write the email to her in green ink


 
Go fuck yourself.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

Random said:


> And comic sans


 
You too.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 19, 2012)

A sustained critical pisstake of LP and her milieu would be more satisfying than taking legal action.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

It won't get the accusations withdrawn though will it? I'm actually more pissed off now she's apologized to others and not me - she's singled me out because I don't have journos fighting my corner.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> in the big house its better to go halal A) for sheer perverseness and annoyance
> 
> B) the meat is less likely to be sweepings from th slaughterhouse floor
> 
> ...


 
...and pats on the back from half the screws.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> It won't get the accusations withdrawn though will it? I'm actually more pissed off now she's apologized to others and not me - she's singled me out because I don't have journos fighting my corner.


 
She hasn't really apologised to Lovedetective, tbf.

And I'm not convinced that taking legal action will get the accusations withdrawn either.

ETA: Send her an email. If you don't get a response within 48 hours send me a PM and I'll try to take it up with a couple of people who I know that know her.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

Fozzie Bear said:


> She hasn't really apologised to Lovedetective, tbf.
> 
> And I'm not convinced that taking legal action will get the accusations withdrawn either.


 
I guess there's only one way to find out.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I guess there's only one way to find out.


 
Not sure if you saw my edit: ETA: Send her an email. If you don't get a response within 48 hours send me a PM and I'll try to take it up with a couple of people who I know that know her.


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> It won't get the accusations withdrawn though will it? I'm actually more pissed off now she's apologized to others and not me - she's singled me out because I don't have journos fighting my corner.


 
stating that she doesn't know if i'm a racist or not isn't really an apology mate!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Hugo Schwyzer, as far as I can see, is someone who gets to stand on platforms like this:
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Wow, comes across as a guy who likes to construct personal myths while supposedly shattering gender myths.

Love some of the comments on your link, especially the "there's no such thing as misandry, only misogyny and misanthropy" one, though.


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Go fuck yourself.


 
I agree with Spanky, it's not the way I'd choose to do things. Also when I used to get those solicitor's letters from my ISP for dicking about on Usenet, or downloading on napster, I threw them in the bin without reading. They don't really have any clout.

Still if you want to go that way then g'luck!


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 19, 2012)

Fozzie Bear said:


> Not sure if you saw my edit: ETA: Send her an email. If you don't get a response within 48 hours send me a PM and I'll try to take it up with* a couple of people who I know that know her.*


 
get you


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 19, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> get you


 


Fat lot of good it has done me.


----------



## co-op (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> I agree with Spanky, it's not the way I'd choose to do things. Also when I used to get those solicitor's letters from my ISP for dicking about on Usenet, or downloading on napster, I threw them in the bin without reading. They don't really have any clout.
> 
> Still if you want to go that way then g'luck!


 
This, I used to get SLs all the time, took absolutely no notice until they issue a summons, 99% never did and the other 1% never went to court. Seriously unless you are super rich and want to really go after someone, forget civil law, it's there to pretty much guarantee that only the *very very* wealthy can make it work for them.

If she doesn't just bin it, she'll frame it and put on her toilet wall and laugh at you*. Don't give her the opportunity.


* well this is what I'd do


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 19, 2012)

Fozzie Bear said:


> Fat lot of good it has done me.


TBH you getting involved as an intermediary is as likely as anything else to be received by her in the same manner as a courtesy call from Dessie Noonan


----------



## poului (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> This thread is open to unregistered users and search engines for anyone with access to the internet to see.
> 
> This has similiarties to Spiney and Love Detective's experience:
> 
> http://thethirdestate.net/2011/01/on-being-called-a-cunt-by-laurie-penny/


 

I know that bloke from my days at uni. He's not a cunt but I can think of reasons why he would prompt LP to call him one. Being vastly more informed and experienced in left-wing politics is one.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

steph said:


> It doesn't suprise me, I've seen all manner of 'corrective' behaviours set down by psychiatrists - especially if any gender/sexuality related issues are 'apparent'.


 
Sadly, "corrective" often also means "coercive".


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 19, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> TBH you getting involved as an intermediary is as likely as anything else to be received by her in the same manner as a courtesy call from Dessie Noonan


 
That makes it sound a lot more dramatic than it needs to be.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> TBH you getting involved as an intermediary is as likely as anything else to be received by her in the same manner as a courtesy call from Dessie Noonan


 
have you ever met Fozzie?

Not quite the same...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 19, 2012)

co-op said:


> This, I used to get SLs all the time, took absolutely no notice until they issue a summons, 99% never did and the other 1% never went to court. Seriously unless you are super rich and want to really go after someone, forget civil law, it's there to pretty much guarantee that only the *very very* wealthy can make it work for them.
> 
> If she doesn't just bin it, she'll frame it and put on her toilet wall and laugh at you*. Don't give her the opportunity.
> 
> ...


 
But this is what's so monstrously wrong about it all, she knows damn well she can fling this shit at people, and because they weren't born into wealth and privilige like she was that there's little they can do to counter it. She has the platform in the media, and the money to go through the courts if needs be, and so she feels like she can abuse and slander those who are beneath her without risk of comeuppance.

The calculated arrogance of it is sickening, professionally decrying privilige on the one hand then using it as a shield with the other. She deserves her comeuppance, so good luck Spiney whatever you choose to do.

My position is unrelenting merciless war on the narcissistic liberal left, and the rest of the spoilt oxbridge brats in her milieu, no fuckin' quarter.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> have you ever met Fozzie?
> 
> Not quite the same...


 
*hands on hips* Well that's my three minutes as a hardman RUINED, Spanky. Thanks a lot!


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> have you ever met Fozzie?
> 
> Not quite the same...


Since when did facts need to elide with 1,500 words of pure Penace?

This is the New New Journalism! Poetry of Action! Nothing but pen in hand, eCig in mouth and well-digested class privilege in belly - taking the good fight to the enemy, gettin' paid by The Man to write about The Man whilst bein' against The Man, kindof!!! Yeah!!!


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> and  at the whole legal remedy bollocks
> 
> make sure you write the email to her in green ink




I tend to agree on an individual level, there are other (less costly) ways of effectively making the point. But I still think it might be worth the IWCA (as an organisation)  having the benefit of some advice.


----------



## co-op (Dec 19, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> But this is what's so monstrously wrong about it all, she knows damn well she can fling this shit at people, and because they weren't born into wealth and privilige like she was that there's little they can do to counter it. She has the platform in the media, and the money to go through the courts if needs be, and so she feels like she can abuse and slander those who are beneath her without risk of comeuppance.
> 
> The calculated arrogance of it is sickening, professionally decrying privilige on the one hand then using it as a shield with the other. She deserves her comeuppance, so good luck Spiney whatever you choose to do.


 
Seriously I'm not arguing it's right, just that's the way it is. Threatening someone with a libel writ when you haven't got £30,000+ that you can just throwaway if necessary to back it up is real paper tiger stuff, it's picking a fight you can't win imo.

But good luck to you SN with whatever you choose to do.

Personally I think the compilation of the thread that someone suggested is pretty deadly, it's been an eye-opener to me, I started off thinking leave her alone, she may be a bit of a wannabe but she's on the right side. If it's hosted via U75 it will get high up the google ranks. Let people read it and decide for themself, it's revenge but it's also informing people and that has a wider value.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> stating that she doesn't know if i'm a racist or not isn't really an apology mate!


 
I know - sorry pal, don't mean you're off the hook but the way she's singled me out now is really fucking irritating.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

copliker said:


> Mornin'.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
What he's failing (surprise surprise!)to acknowledge is that Laura isn't "doing", she's a _flaneur_, an observer who contributes little, but merely moves through the scenery, absorbing and absorbed by the _ambience_. That she then writes about what she's seen, albeit mostly glossed with _post hoc_ observations and fictions, is merely a further act of nose-thumbing at those whose existence and actions feed her writing.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

Fozzie Bear said:


> She hasn't really apologised to Lovedetective, tbf.
> 
> And I'm not convinced that taking legal action will get the accusations withdrawn either.
> 
> ETA: Send her an email. If you don't get a response within 48 hours send me a PM and I'll try to take it up with a couple of people who I know that know her.


 
Thanks, I've sent her an email - I'll let you know what happens.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> uncanny how they all chime with this sort of response- criticism and piss taking on the youtube comment thread for the horrendous launch party video for Firebox drew exactly the same thing 'what are you doing, blah'. If your not north london champers socialist you're fuck all


 
Recto-lingual intersectionism.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

TruXta said:


> All three of you in the same room?


 
Twas only a phone booth.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> Fucking LibDems.


 
Not me, not in my lifetime.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

TruXta said:


> She's got deadlines man! She ain't got time for your petty squabbles. And what's a little racist accusation between friends?


 
The difference between a kiss on the cheek or a punch in the throat, generally.


----------



## sunnysidedown (Dec 19, 2012)

Legal action? Jesus Christ


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 19, 2012)

co-op said:


> Seriously I'm not arguing it's right, just that's the way it is. Threatening someone with a libel writ when you haven't got £30,000+ that you can just throwaway if necessary to back it up is real paper tiger stuff, it's picking a fight you can't win imo.


 
Yeah I know you weren't mate, but isn't this itself part of the problem? That there are people who are above accountability, never mind just a standard of common decency, getting away with this? Isn't this one of those issues that goes beyond Laurie herself and into the wider issues of the press in this country that this thread, at it's best, has highlighted?

And the sheer egotism of it, I mean fucking hell all this could've been avoided with a sincere apology! Or if she'd had the respect for us to try and come here and look beyond the crass stupid elements at the wider issues.

I keep saying this, but I'm younger than her, and I know at my age I'm going to make loads of mistakes and errors. It's part of life that, so why should I feel embarassed about apologising when I'm wrong?



co-op said:


> Personally I think the compilation of the thread that someone suggested is pretty deadly, it's been an eye-opener to me, I started off thinking leave her alone, she may be a bit of a wannabe but she's on the right side. If it's hosted via U75 it will get high up the google ranks. Let people read it and decide for themself, it's revenge but it's also informing people and that has a wider value.


 
Also think this would be ace. There's important political issues here that go way beyond her as a person, and they should be systematically recorded. I nominate butchers for the job  1) for my own amusement and 2) coz he's written some really insightful, profound things in this thread and on this topic.

Even up to quite a late point I was trying my upmost to be fair, to not get stuck into some group attack on her, not to be vindictive or stalkery, and I feel a bit stupid and naive for being that way now after all this. Big soft bastard that I am I really hoped for better from her than this.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

I second the vote for someone (not me) going through and compiling the good bits of the thread into an article.


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> My position is unrelenting merciless war on the narcissistic liberal left, and the rest of the spoilt oxbridge brats in her milieu, no fuckin' quarter.


 


co-op said:


> Personally I think the compilation of the thread that someone suggested is pretty deadly


 
SpineyNorman, things like the above will be a far more effective, public and satisfying way of 'settling' matters and are far more likely to achieve the desired outcome than a legal action would, if anything she would come out of that better not worse I reckon (martyr, speaking out against 'racism' etc..)


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I second the vote for someone (not me) going through and compiling the good bits of the thread into an article.


 
We should talk about it here first for at least a couple of weeks before actually (if at all ever) doing anything though!

I started to have a go at it this morning, but didn't get past the first few pages before baby started to go ballistic and been tied up with him ever since


----------



## rekil (Dec 19, 2012)

The top review of meat market on amazon was by someone on here wasn't it? The people have spoken.


> Confused dilettantish nonsense, 99 of 126 people found the following review helpful


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> We should talk about it here first for at least a couple of weeks before actually (if at all ever) doing anything though!


 
matb style


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> matb style


 
punctuated with aphorisms.


----------



## co-op (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I second the vote for someone (*not me*) going through and compiling the good bits of the thread into an article.


 
Nor me 
Traditionally gets foisted onto the person who suggested it I think.


----------



## rekil (Dec 19, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> What he's failing (surprise surprise!)to acknowledge is that Laura isn't "doing", she's a _flaneur_, an observer who contributes little, but merely moves through the scenery, absorbing and absorbed by the _ambience_. That she then writes about what she's seen, albeit mostly glossed with _post hoc_ observations and fictions, is merely a further act of nose-thumbing at those whose existence and actions feed her writing.


He was chuffed about finding Che's Guerrilla Warfare. Pure sauce. Who knows, maybe he's the chief of staff of a band of transhumanist insurrectionists. Who are we to judge.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Since when did facts need to elide with 1,500 words of pure Penace?
> 
> This is the New New Journalism! Poetry of Action! Nothing but pen in hand, eCig in mouth and well-digested class privilege in belly - taking the good fight to the enemy, gettin' paid by The Man to write about The Man whilst bein' against The Man, kindof!!! Yeah!!!


 
I thought this was the new new new New Journalism?


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

Amazon is now recommending me books by Laurie Penny and Molly Crabapple 

I only went on to price hoovers!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> SpineyNorman, things like the above will be a far more effective, public and satisfying way of 'settling' matters and are far more likely to achieve the desired outcome than a legal action would, if anything she would come out of that better not worse I reckon (martyr, speaking out against 'racism' etc..)


 
Fair points, given that Laura and her ilk have the advantage of media connections, and could therefore "spin" the entire thing in her favour/yours and norm's detriments. Far better for there to be a metaphorical shrine to her dishonesty, fictionalising and hypocrisy.

Although giving you both a meaningful apology shouldn't be hard for her, if she's still got an honest bone left in her body.


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 19, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> all this could've been avoided with a sincere apology!


 
All what?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

copliker said:


> He was chuffed about finding Che's Guerrilla Warfare. Pure sauce.


 
Probably won't read it, just leave it lying around where it'll be noticed by his fellow-travellers. 



> Who knows, maybe he's the chief of staff of a band of transhumanist insurrectionists. Who are we to judge.


 
I don't know about you, but I'm a prole, which imbues me with an absolute right to judge.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> Amazon is now recommending me books by Laurie Penny and Molly Crabapple
> 
> I only went on to price hoovers!


 
So which one (Laura and/or Maureen book, not hoover!) did you end up buying?


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Although giving you both a meaningful apology shouldn't be hard for her, if she's still got an honest bone left in her body.


 
I don't want an apology from her, it would be less than worthless/meaningless coming from her in the circumstances

I just want her to see that her and her type don't always come out on top when they take short cuts, and for her (and others like her) to learn that stupid actions can often have detrimental consequences


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> I don't want an apology from her, it would be less than worthless/meaningless coming from her in the circumstances
> 
> I just want her to see that her and her type don't always come out on top when they take short cuts, and for her to learn that stupid actions can have very detrimental consequences


 
A fair point. If she'd bothered to read the article, she *possibly* wouldn't have dug herself into the shit so deeply, and wouldn't now be faced with having her nose rubbed in that shit.

I'm trying to work up enough compassion to feel sorry for her, but it's a struggle I'm losing.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 19, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> All what?


 
Leave the thread.

Now.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Leave the thread.
> 
> Now.


 
It's a fair question though isn't it?

What so far has actually come of her refusal to apologise?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 19, 2012)

Because it's left the two people involved nursing a greivance that shouldn't have even been there in the first place. People are talking about legal action ffs, it should never have got to this point, and if Laurie Penny had acted like an adult I don't think it would have.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Because it's left the two people involved nursing a greivance that shouldn't have even been there in the first place. People are talking about legal action ffs, it should never have got to this point, and if Laurie Penny had acted like an adult I don't think it would have.


 
And has that impacted on her in any way?

No I don't think so - the only concrete realistic proposal to crop up on this thread since spineygate is the proposal to compile an article based on the best bits - and that has not be done yet, let alone been published and read, and it probably would have happened anyway...

The only other thing that seems to have happened directly as a result of her refusal to apologise is some faceless nameless people on the internet who have already established their dislike of her getting a little more het up than before.

So "all this" doesn't really seem all that after all, does it?

No offence, but people are getting a little carried away with themselves.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 19, 2012)

She's not 'just a kid' FFS. She's twenty fucking six. I'd been living away from home ten years and had a baby by the time I was twenty fucking six. She doesn't get to use that as an excuse for behaving like a dick.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

If she's too young to be held to account for the shit she spouts then she's too young to be editing a national.


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> faceless nameless people


 
Face v Faceless


----------



## _angel_ (Dec 19, 2012)

weepiper said:


> She's not 'just a kid' FFS. She's twenty fucking six. I'd been living away from home ten years and had a baby by the time I was twenty fucking six. She doesn't get to use that as an excuse for behaving like a dick.


Yeah I was going to say this, I had a two year old by the time I was her age.
She's whatever the female equivalent of a manboy is tho..v


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

a ladygirl?

a ladybird?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> Face v Faceless


 
faceless beans on bean


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 19, 2012)

penny for the guy


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> Yeah I was going to say this, I had a two year old by the time I was her age.
> She's whatever the female equivalent of a manboy is tho..v


 
Girlhag.

Sthkweam and sthkweam until am sthick


----------



## Dan U (Dec 19, 2012)

heh, in her world though 26 yr old people are just thinking about what PHD they want their parents to fund or whether to do that extra gap year in Puerto Rico.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 19, 2012)

Small Question:

She's thrown the insult of 'racist' at our esteemed fellow poster in entirely unambiguous terms.

She then backtracks and claims she has no idea if said poster is racist.

Which leads me to ask why if, as she now claims, she had no idea whether or not our fellow poster is a racist, did she blatantly and publicly call him one in the first place?


----------



## audiotech (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> ...since spineygate...


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

It's a bit like when editor said he had no idea if lusty was a paedophile or not


----------



## _angel_ (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> It's a bit like when editor said he had no idea if lusty was a paedophile or not


That was my first thought on reading that.
And the irony of that thread being at the top of this forum about paedo allegations and living people.


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Because it's left the two people involved nursing a greivance that shouldn't have even been there in the first place. People are talking about legal action ffs, it should never have got to this point, and if Laurie Penny had acted like an adult I don't think it would have.


It's not just the two people. This all flows from an allegation about an article produced by a political party.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 19, 2012)

> *Praise_hell_seitan!* @autonomistaXvX  2d
> wait i just realised @PennyRed called sean birchall racist. yes sean birchall of red action/afa.


----------



## editor (Dec 19, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> That was my first thought on reading that.
> And the irony of that thread being at the top of this forum about paedo allegations and living people.


That wasn't an allegation. It was a simple statement of fact. I know absolutely nothing about the sexual interests of the anonymous internet entity known as lusty or whatever his name was. More importantly, this has absolutely nothing to do with this thread, nor does it have any relation to the statement about 'paedo allegations and living people,' so I'd be obliged if this excellent thread is now not dragged off topic. Thanks.


----------



## _angel_ (Dec 19, 2012)

editor said:


> That wasn't an allegation. It was a simple statement of fact. I know absolutely nothing about the sexual interests of the anonymous internet entity known as lusty or whatever his name was. More importantly, this has absolutely nothing to do with this thread, nor does it have any relation to the statement about 'paedo allegations and living people,' so I'd be obliged if this excellent thread is now not dragged off topic. Thanks.


You said "you couldn't say he wasn't a paedo because you didn't know he wasn't". So it's a bit similar to the pickle LP has got herself into with Love Detective and others.


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 19, 2012)

Fozzie Bear said:


> She hasn't really apologised to Lovedetective, tbf.
> 
> And I'm not convinced that taking legal action will get the accusations withdrawn either.
> 
> ETA: Send her an email. If you don't get a response within 48 hours send me a PM and I'll try to take it up with a couple of people who I know that know her.


Yeah SN, I can understand why you are angry but I really don't think getting the lawyers in is going to help you. Fozzie's suggestion seems a better way - at least at first.


----------



## editor (Dec 19, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> You said "you couldn't say he wasn't a paedo because you didn't know he wasn't". So it's a bit similar to the pickle LP has got herself into with Love Detective and others.


I've no interest in pursuing this pointless, irrelevant and idiotic non-argument.


----------



## radgiesteve (Dec 19, 2012)

editor said:


> That wasn't an allegation. It was a simple statement of fact. I know absolutely nothing about the sexual interests of the anonymous internet entity known as lusty or whatever his name was. More importantly, this has absolutely nothing to do with this thread, nor does it have any relation to the statement about 'paedo allegations and living people,' so I'd be obliged if this excellent thread is now not dragged off topic. Thanks.


 
pedantophile


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Because it's left the two people involved nursing a greivance that shouldn't have even been there in the first place. People are talking about legal action ffs, it should never have got to this point, and if Laurie Penny had acted like an adult I don't think it would have.


 
Don't forget the IWCA.


----------



## _angel_ (Dec 19, 2012)

editor said:


> I've no interest in pursuing this pointless, irrelevant and idiotic non-argument.


I'm not surprised.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

Don't turn this into a bunfight with the mods please. Wrong thread.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 19, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> its amusing to see them make cunts out of themselves. See: Huhne and Diane Abbot. amongst many


 
of course they're stuck with twitter now that luke bozier has turned out to be a massive paedo


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> That this is the case can be shown by the obsequious manner in which she had previously asked Kenan Malik to educate her about this persepective. It's ok for him as he's on radio 4 in the papers and is a pretty well known public intellectual. Lines drawn and participants decided.


 
Crucially I'd add, Kenan Malik is not the IWCA, nor is he lovedetective or spiney. Kenan Malik's mode of action is to encourage white liberals via the medium of Radio 4, his columns and books to go about the project of integration and ‘race relations’ more carefully (immigration levels don’t matter but please no burqa bans). His approach is _not_ about cross-communal non-multiculturalist working-class self-organisation.

Sure there's an overlap in what Kenan Malik and the IWCA might be saying but Kenan's approach is different. His is about encouraging a general soft assimilationist tendency. Hence some of his most trenchant criticism is reserved for Germany:





			
				Kenan Malik said:
			
		

> As a consequence of multicultural policies, Turkish communities became dangerously inward-looking. Without any incentive to participate in the national community, many did not bother learning German. First generation immigrants were broadly secular, and those that were religious wore their faith lightly. Today, almost a third of adult Turks in Germany regularly attend mosque, a far higher rate than among Turkish communities elsewhere in western Europe, and higher than in most parts of Turkey. First generation women almost never wore headscarves. Many of their daughters do. Not only were Turks isolated from mainstream German society, they were also estranged from the communities from which they had originally emigrated, and from the traditional institutions of Islam. Combined with their growing religiosity and inwardness, the increasing isolation of second generation German Turks from social structures in both Germany and Turkey made some more open to radical Islamist tendencies. The recent news of German jihadis in Afghanistan was the inevitable consequence. *At the same time as Germany's multicultural policies encouraged immigrants to be at best indifferent to mainstream German society, at worst openly hostile to it, they also made Germans increasingly antagonistic towards Turks.* The sense of what it meant to be German was in part defined against the values and beliefs of the excluded migrant communities. And having been excluded, it has become easier to scapegoat immigrants for Germany's social ills. A recent poll showed that more than a third of Germans think that the country is "over-run by foreigners" and more than half felt that Arabs were "unpleasant".


 
His argument is that _Germany's multicultural policies_ made Germans _increasingly antagonistic_ _towards Turks_. It's an outright lie, from the 1950s start of the importation of Turkish migrant labour into Germany, there was antagonism, that antagonism manifested itself in those 'policies' - denial of citizenship, relegation into lowest levels of employment, last in first out policies, deportation of non-citizen Turkish trade union agitators. It's a fairytale of happy relations simply blighted by a silly government decision not to grant citizenship.

He also, in general, ignores those immigrants to Britain who _did_ arrive as work permit workers and as non-citizens, non-British Passport holders, and had to tow the line for well over a decade to receive citizenship. They are simply written out of this account of liberal multiculturalism dominating the situation from the 1980s onward. Cypriot immigrants in from 1950s onwards they organise and group together as Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots by themselves without any influence from local councils - a legacy of colonialism. Its before 'multiculturalism' - its internal colonialism.





			
				Kenan Malik said:
			
		

> Germany has taken a different path to a multicultural society from a country like Britain. _In Britain, immigrants arrived not as guest workers but as British subjects. They were excluded from mainstream society not by being deprived of citizenship but because of racism._ The response of the British authorities to such exclusion was, however, the same as that of German authorities – the _encouragement of minority groups to express their identities, explore their own histories_, formulate their own values, pursue their own lifestyles."


 
It's utter lies - since when have British authorities encouraged Cantonese from Hong Kong, or Italians or Bengalis to explore their own histories? It's only one side of history that is very partially funded:- the slow, steady integration of immigrants - see Black History Month. Never why people are here in the first place, beyond a truism.

Malik's history of what happened with the Asian movement is also highly suspect, he blames official local council multiculturalism for its segmentation into Bengali, Urdu, Hindu and Sikh - in fact the tensions within were already there in the alliances that emerged in the 1970s as part of the IWAs, Standing Councils and others.
The splits over the Bangladesh war of liberation, Kashmir/Kargils, Emergency, huge regionalist movements in India in the late 1970s - that had a crucial impact. The IWA split over the question of whether or not Indira should be protested or welcomed in 1975, and then those splits again split in 1982 when Indira visited again after 'democratic rule' was restored in India. It came from within not from pressures of a multicultural state. Malik's argument is that the Asian movement should have moved away from political discussion of the subcontinent i.e. become more 'British' citizen and less 3rd world in their approach.

His history of 1985 also seems very romanticised: "Why did two communities that had fought side by side in 1985 fight against each other 20 years later?"
Many Asian people _did_ see the 1985 riots as mindless violence - not as "fighting side by side", particularly when 2 Asian post office workers were killed as a result of the arson from petrol bombs thrown by (black) rioters. It's not multiculturalism from do gooder white liberal Birmingham Council post-1985 that somehow engineers the Lozells riot 20 years later. It's something to do with the solid economic base of the region changing, one section of Asians going up, and black African unemployment as a result of the decline in industrial employment in the Midlands region. I don't know what the answer is, but Kenan Malik's analysis is suspect - blame it all on multiculturalism.

Many within the Asian movement - what's left of it still true to its principles - question Kenan Malik's commitment more widely. He is not in the AYM any more and hasn't been involved in grassroots action for at least 20 years. He's a writer and academic needing to get on Radio 4. Unsurprisingly, the 'debate' as shaped by Radio 4 and Talk Sport alike, is one between Kenan Malik at one end and Iqbal Sacranie at the other. At the end of the day Kenan Malik is a _liberal_ anti-multiculturalist, and as Arun Kundnani, someone I don't fully agree with either, explains: "Liberal anti-multiculturalism now serves, by default if not intent, to reinforce the ideological underpinnings of today’s racism and imperialism."

None of this means that Kenan Malik is a racist or shouldn't be listened to in the useful things he does say, but it does mean that the IWCA and Kenan Malik are not the same things.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

Would the IWCA coming from a strong republican tradition accept that moves towards Irish language education in Sinn Fein-controlled (whatever the disagreements about Derry are 'irrational and reactionary'




			
				Kenan Malik said:
			
		

> The argument for language preservation is, as I pointed out a decade ago when a similar debate arose (that time about Eyak, an Alaskan language spoken by just one person) irrational and reactionary.


 




			
				Kenan Malik said:
			
		

> 'Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial for a Breton or a Basque to be a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship... than _to sulk on his own rocks_, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world.' So wrote John Stuart Mill more than a century ago. It would have astonished him that in the twenty-first century there are those who think that sulking on your own rock is a state worth preserving.


 
He is a _liberal_, endorsing the idea that to protect and enhance Basque speakership is effectively "irrational and reactionary". Malik's world is one where the language and the perspective of the great (capitalist) powers that can absorb and assimilate migrants (displaced by the force of capital of those great powers) do so calmly and without overreaction.
Migrants move in, on the say-so of those powers, and become full citizens of those powers, without social separation and tensions. The rich still win, but without the mess of immigrant and racial worries.

He wants a "ring-fenced public sphere" ie Britain and the Western states dealing with their immigrant uptakes from the rest of the poor world: 




			
				Kenan Malik said:
			
		

> Political equality only becomes possible with the creation of a ring-fenced public sphere, which everyone can enter as political equals, whatever their cultural, economic or ethnic backgrounds.... Only by establishing _a distinction between the public and the private_ can we forge a relationship between diversity and equality, allowing citizens to have full freedom to pursue their different values or practices in private,while ensuring that in the public sphere all citizens are treated as political equals whatever the differences in their private lives.


Malik never explains what the distinction actually is, but it is fairly clear that teaching Urdu, Welsh or Cornish at a young age is to be considered _private,_demands for state funding are to be dismissed on that basis (unspoken is that French, German, Italian, Spanish remain).
Unwittingly or knowingly, he seeks to confine 'culture' to _consumption choices_ - various food and clothing choices - within a Western state, but to restrict state subsidy of non-mainstream cultural _production_. 
Today, all charities providing services have to be open to all applicants, regardless of their name, so even in Bangladeshi community centres with Bengali names, there are others Somalis, Turks, Poles, benefiting from their English lessons. As much as I've seen of it, what's happened with the cuts is that minority charity grants have been cut the most (in a slow shift towards the idea of 'less multiculturalism'), whilst general charities dealing with disability (days out, respite etc) or legal advice - both English only - have not been cut, proportionately, as severely. So it is not a good time for those outside mainstream services, despite propaganda stating that the state is being drained by interpreters and translations.





			
				Kenan Malik said:
			
		

> My point was, and remains, that the problem of integration is not primarily one of immigration but one of social fragmentation - of the way that the _universalising language of equality_ has been replaced by the divisive language of identity.


 
Malik only wants the language of equality, I don't think there is any real desire for actual equality.
Laurie Penny is turning to a fellow liberal. Engaging with a text on a website that is headed up 'independent working class association' is too much.



The point is that _all demands that are not directed at the rich_ are _illegitimate_ones. They result in the redistribution of resources within the working class - meaning the aggravation and splits within the working-class - it's not only cultural based ones that are the problem. All charities and requests for charities from ordinary people do this - create a world of competing identities (except most of them are not cultural). There are groups for cyclists and groups for car users and car owners, heritage sector and office development sector, natural pursuit sectors vs adventure tourism sector within National Park, hoteliers and farmers - interest groups clashing demanding the re-distribution of resources within/given to the working-class. Each attempts to ingratiate itself in a capitalist manner, by pointing out, in subtle and careful ways, the benefits that will accrue to the business class, after any such re-distribution, most often by talking of 'a national interest'. The side that loses is - unless there is a working-class struggle - is the one with least value to the business class.

The standard trade unions are not immune, their demands are still protectionist and still geared towards ensuring the triumph of British business. A recent was example was a PCS (may be even a 'left', but I am not sure) rep at Heathrow arguing for more immigration officers at Heathrow on the basis of needing to check non-EU people much more thoroughly, and providing a better, quicker passage through for inward investers (so that they didn't go to Schipol) with more staff. 'Don't cut us you rely on us for profits'. All these arguments hack away at working-class politics. Why are only cultural demands the problem?

My feeling is Britain's business class wants to use its plethora of minorities to gain advantages in business terms across the globe, the dual citizens hold the key - see what's happening in India now. Hence, stability must be assured (no major race confrontations, minor skirmishes are OK), but a British perspective and citizenship is also essential (something both liberal multiculturalism and liberal anti-multiculturalism/assimilationism can ensure). 

Liberal anti-multiculturalism is also an advantage for how British populations operate across the world, we don't really see it, but there are still over 700,000 British households in Spain, hundreds of thousands of others working as 'expatriates' across the world. The public and private division underpins the British abroad - they round up properties in southern Turkey and even Black Sea Bulgaria, as long as they don't demand English schools from the state all is well. And why would they need to? They have English-medium schools in virtually every corner of the globe, failing that they have the money for private schools.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 19, 2012)

I could be wrong, but IIRC IWCA dont agree with everything Malik says (and would view it critically and always view it keeping in mind what his background/where he comes from, socially and politically) but just agree/sympathise with quite a lot of his thought and arguments. Could be wrong though!


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

Even though I have contributed to examples of it, I don't see much use in another journalist reporting Laurie Penny's poor writing, or her dismissal of readers as racists. I think her writing style is unclear and _purposefully vague_ to allow left audiences to draw what they seek. I do think many of the anonymous quotations are so perfect as to be suspicious. (I think the same of right-wing journalists too, see Sarah Sands editor-reporter on the Evening Standard, bumping into people in Tottenham who all wanted everyone arrested in August 2011 to be locked up for as long as possible. Sarah Sands is also private school, Kent College, and Oxbridge. She also wrote the infamous 2006 piece 'Emo Cult warning for Parents' warning that emo - emotional hardcore music - leads to suicides - "fact free assertions" on the scale of Dr Jazzz - but no outrage or calls for her to return to cub-level reporting no Sands-gate, in fact she is promoted to be editor of Evening Standard (a newspaper whose owner holidays and enjoys champagne with the mayor imposing austerity over London).

_Dozens_ of other journalists and writers do what Laurie Penny has done, right-wing journalists simply dismiss readers as 'ideological'. In fact that's the standard response to campaign groups like MediaLens that point out to journalists and editors that the voices of ordinary people in Britain, or the victims of British policy in Yemen, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia or wherever are being overlooked. 
This is not wholly a capitalist media issue. It's a left issue - a movement issue. How those who are rich can enter and piggyback on the movement for a very short time and parasite off it ever after. Or why it is that so many 'comrades' become erstwhile comrades when better positions and contracts are offered. How the whole concept of 'left' has been occupied and gentrified to a degree where questioning the family or personal finances of a spokesperson-writer is seen as 'bullying'.

Having said that, I look forward to strikes and shut-downs of the Guardian, the Independent, New Statesman as well as the right-wing press.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I could be wrong, but IIRC IWCA dont agree with everything Malik says but just agree/sympathise with quite a lot of his thought and arguments. Could be wrong though!


 
Yes, so Laurie Penny should deal with ordinary leftists not media ones.


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## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

Is she another dwyer troll?


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 19, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> You said "you couldn't say he wasn't a paedo because you didn't know he wasn't". So it's a bit similar to the pickle LP has got herself into with Love Detective and others.


 
That's more or less what LLETSA got banned for as well - Saying he had no way of knowing if Mrs M was telling the truth or not or somesuch. This thread's not really the place for it, but fuck it can there ever really be a wrong time to shitstir?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 19, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> That's more or less what LLETSA got banned for as well - Saying he had no way of knowing if Mrs M was telling the truth or not or somesuch. This thread's not really the place for it, but fuck it can there ever really be a wrong time to shitstir?


I suspect that that would depend on whether a pro- or anti-management spoon was involved.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Related news:
> 
> _Vice_ has just bought _i-D_. Shit just got real.


 


Vice_ *lives on* _interns. I suspect the same approach will be rolled out to i-D.
A discussion on twitter (where else? ) of interns from Vice.

*Ariana Mozafari* ‏@ariana_mozafari
@Slandr Oh, and I am an "Un-Paid Intern Muthafucka" as well lol. You're so lucky to be working for Vice
Expand
7 Dec*Alekslandr* ‏@Slandr
@ariana_mozafari You should apply. Theyre always looking for free labour and Im out the door end of next week too. U could be my replacement
10:05 AM - 7 Dec 12 · Details
7 Dec*Ariana Mozafari* ‏@ariana_mozafari
@Slandr and I'd LOVE TO ... but I don't live in the UK  You don't even know it's like my dream to work there.
Expand
7 Dec*Alekslandr* ‏@Slandr
@ariana_mozafari Trust me. I'm THE biggest VICE fanboy. I have no interest writing for anyone else. Dreams are made to be broken doe </3


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> This thread's not really the place for it, but fuck it *can there ever really be a wrong time to shitstir?*



if you don't want a useful thread to be closed and thus the topic lose momentum then yeah.


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

I've just asked David Allen Green if the views/allegations of NS contributing editors, are those of the NS too. There's no disclaimer on her twitter profile.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

I'm confused do ld and spiney want there to be threats of litigation?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> I've just asked David Allen Green if the views/allegations of NS contributing editors, are those of the NS too. There's no disclaimer on her twitter profile.


He's a lib-dem member btw - joined _after_ the coalition was formed.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> He's a lib-dem member btw - joined _after_ the coalition was formed.



From where? (politically, not geographically)


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I'm confused do ld and spiney want there to be threats of litigation?


There's no mention of litigation in what I asked him. I asked a general question, which, if he notices it, may result in him "taking note" as they say.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> There's no mention of litigation in what I asked him. I asked a general question, which, if he notices it, may result in him "taking note" as they say.


 
I didn't say you had mentioned litigation.


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I didn't say you had mentioned litigation.


Oh, sorry  I thought you'd inferred that from my preceding post.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 19, 2012)

Citizen66 said:


> From where? (politically, not geographically)


Nowhere i think. Not formally anyway. But not sure on that.


----------



## killer b (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I'm confused do ld and spiney want there to be threats of litigation?


Scroll back past those enormous posts of yours, and you'll (eventually) see that spiney seems to be seriously considering it, and ld not.


----------



## chilango (Dec 19, 2012)

Meanwhile Laura hasn't been seen on here since Sunday.

At least not logged in.

My suspicions are she's dismissed us as do nothings of no importance and is now pretending the thread doesn't exist...


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

Edited: to remove potential copy of a libel post - link remains.

Unfortunately lusty's scattergun is targeted at a good friend of LP in an completely inappropriate fashion in post-1140


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

killer b said:


> Scroll back past those enormous posts of yours, and you'll (eventually) see that spiney seems to be seriously considering it, and ld not.


 
That was my understanding but honestly I didn't want to misunderstand, in rlation to the post i've just made.


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Unfortunately lusty's scattergun is targeted at a good friend of LP in an completely inappropriate fashion in post-1140
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Why quote it and bring it up?

After almost a year has passed?

What does it even have to do with editor?


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> If people start waving around legal stuff is sought, it might turn very ugly.



You surely can't be suggesting that a) lusty has anything to do with here, b) is the voice piece for anyone here; and c) gives a toss?


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

killer b said:


> Scroll back past those enormous posts of yours, and you'll (eventually) see that spiney seems to be seriously considering it, and ld not.



I'd not either. I wouldn't be insulted by an idiot calling me a racist either. I'd be plotting their downfall though, if I had the time.


----------



## radgiesteve (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Unfortunately lusty's scattergun is targeted at a good friend of LP in an completely inappropriate fashion in post-1140
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Offering a bet even if it relates to laundry-sniffing isn't gonna get anyone in court. I'll wager.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> You surely can't be suggesting that a) lusty has anything to do with here, b) is the voice piece for anyone here; and c) gives a toss?


 
I've been taught by moderators that it's hosters who become liable - from all the superinjunction then post-savile threads


----------



## weepiper (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I've been taught by moderators that it's hosters who become liable - from all the superinjunction then post-savile threads


 
He's been banned from here for years and he did it on Twitter.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> Why quote it and bring it up?
> 
> After almost a year has passed?
> 
> What does it even have to do with editor?


 
OK, I'm not going to quote it, and will edit it, but the point is speculation about anyone becomes sabotaged under libel pressure because of certain comments.


----------



## chilango (Dec 19, 2012)

All of which makes the idea of a distilled piece consisting of choice quotes and a critique of Laura for what she is a manifestation of all the more useful.

..and whilst it perhaps shouldn't matter, a brief anonymous summary of the collective track record in struggle of posters contributing would add to it's credibility in the audience that Laura both needs and craves for her career.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

I'm starting too feel a bit sorry for her. I'm guessing that what happened was that there's a yearly quota of 'bright young' Oxbridge types who the 'left liberal' media take on every year but the cup cake, eco-warrior, interior design and gonzo travel writing slots had already been filled by your Arabellas, Jocastas and Quentins. Laurie, feeling excluded and discriminated against decided she'd make the bastards pay by being the spikey radical one who'd bring down the whole fuckin playhouse. Too late did sh realise that a) she's part of the playhouse....and, thus, b) part of the problem.

I'm thinking she's blown it. She's just hitting the age when she could be churning out the pre-natal class, maternity ward, sleepless night, 'aren't toddlers fun' schtick...before hitting the school run/ yummy mummy stage. She's blown that chance. No doubt there's some niece of a Toynbee or Coren tuning up their whimsical prose as we speak to bring us their sideways musings on all that shite. Hard to see where LP goes from here.

She's kinda stuck in permanent adolescent radical mode...and it's starting to get a bit stale. There is no obvious next move. Actual politics is a bit of a non-starter since she doesn't have any actual politics. I suppose the best she can do is write piece describing her fuckin amazement at the fact that she's been getting a fair old wedge all this time from the Independent and NS into a bank account that she knew nothing about...and lo and behold...she can afford somewhere to live. Maybe we can then get a blow by blow account as she tours Camden in search of a polyamorous feminist cooperative mural-painting group to decorate her living room with a montage of her adventures as a revolutionary icon. Then she can get an allotment or some pigs or something and go down the self-reliant/ethical living/grow/ make your own track so beloved of expensively educated rich twats. Obviously she'd get a bit of stick for the hypocrisy and volte face...but she could hardly get more than she's getting right now.

Maybe if everyone promises not to take the piss, she'll fuck off and leave her 'politics' alone and sidle off towards the little bourgeois utopia that's her birthright.


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I've been taught by moderators that it's hosters who become liable - from all the superinjunction then post-savile threads


Yeah, but he didn't post it here - you did


----------



## weepiper (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I'm thinking she's blown it. She's just hitting the age when she could be churning out the pre-natal class, maternity ward, sleepless night, 'aren't toddlers fun' schtick...before hitting the school run/ yummy mummy stage. She's blown that chance. No doubt there's some niece of a Toynbee or Coren tuning up their whimsical prose as we speak to bring us their sideways musings on all that shite. Hard to see where LP goes from here.


 
The rest of your post is ok but this is sexist bollocks.


----------



## chilango (Dec 19, 2012)

...and ageist.


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> OK, I'm not going to quote it, and will edit it, but the point is speculation about anyone becomes sabotaged under libel pressure because of certain comments.


 
Well it happened on twitter so has no relevance


----------



## _angel_ (Dec 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> Yeah, but he didn't post it here - you did


Good point. Remove it if u think its so bad!

He aint on urban so it shouldn't count.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> Yeah, but he didn't post it here - you did


 
I've already removed the quote before you posted.


----------



## radgiesteve (Dec 19, 2012)

weepiper said:


> The rest of your post is ok but this is sexist bollocks.


 
its downright misogyny!  Has this thread taught us nothing?!!


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I've already removed the quote before you posted.


Good.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

weepiper said:


> The rest of your post is ok but this is sexist bollocks.



Nah...it's a well trodden path for liberal female journalists. It's what they do...there's always a 'motherhood' correspondent whose brief is: show us that your 'just like everyone else' while delighting us with your incisive and perceptive take on motherhood. See past issues of the Graun's for he past four decades.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> Good point. Remove it if u think its so bad!
> 
> He aint on urban so it shouldn't count.


 
I didn't post it on urban first someone else did, others quoted/ responded .

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...ew-statesman-facebook-handbags.266196/page-38

I saw it on re-reading the thread looking for an example of things that allow a counter-claim from the other side


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

chilango said:


> ...and ageist.



...and classist?

...and, given the scenario I had in mind all takes place in North London, "locationist"?
It's not like any of this lifestyle porn shite ever emerges from Middlesbrough.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Maybe we can then get a blow by blow account as she tours Camden in search of a polyamorous feminist cooperative mural-painting group to decorate her living room with a montage of her adventures as a revolutionary icon.


almost there now!

as an aside, this is from cahoots' press release:



> Having a safe and suitable place to live is a basic human need and right. This is increasingly difficult to achieve for a lot of people in London. Rent rising much faster than income and the impending changes to Housing Benefit are leading to growing numbers of people in housing poverty....
> 
> Cahoots Collective Housing Co-operative will provide safer, more secure and more affordable accommodation for 14 adults in single occupancy rooms and studios....


'about us'..


> core values: housing for queer/trans with specific recognition of queer/trans people of colour and  with disabilities


sounds all good and well.
from their 'joining' page:


> At this stage we are only seeking members in full time employment.


i've been a bit 'umm.. inclusive. but only if you've got cash' about this 

she'll fit right in


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

tufty79 said:


> almost there now!



She's started already.


----------



## radgiesteve (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I saw it on re-reading the thread looking for an example of things that allow a counter-claim from the other side


 
I detect borderline racism in the way it was typed as well. Just a frisson, maybe passed onto the interwebs through the keyboard it was typed on or the room it was sent from... a discarded rune laying nearby perhaps. Thin edge of the wedge this


----------



## JimW (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> ...
> It's not like any of this lifestyle porn shite ever emerges from Middlesbrough.


"What I'm after, Jocasta, is less your "yummy mummy' and more your 'snoggable Smoggie', yah?"


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 19, 2012)

In case you're all wondering, here's the letter I just sent in response to 'SpineyNorman' (I didn't want to reprint his letter without permission but I'm sure he can post it if he feels it's necessary.'

****

Hi there,
I must say, I find the tone of this email extremely different from the accusatory, jeering words you've flung at me in the past. It's surprising to me. 
You say that you're angry about being called racist. Here are just some of the things you've said about me on Twitter this week:
'apropriating others oppression to ur own ends.'
'political naif'
"weak"

You've participated in a thread that contains, alongside ugly misogyny and threats of violence, the worst kinds of professional slander - that I lie, that I fabricate quotes and stories, that I bought my way into a job I don't deserve - none of which are remotely true. This sort of accusation has a real effect on my ability to do my job. You've encouraged and supported people who have written these things and perpetuated these lies. You seem so emotionally affected and full of rage about the way I reacted to your comments - perhaps that might give you some insight into how I feel every single day when I have to read these lies about me embedded in jeering sexist bullying. And then to have one of the bullies respond with legal threats, demands for attention and apology, when I react with anger, when I call out their unexamined privilege? That's bitterly ironic.

When you started trashing 'identity politics' and retweeted an article that contains, to my mind, the worst sort of left-flavoured unexamined white male privilege (the writer and I are actually engaged in a productive email discussion right now, he admits that some of what he said was wrong) I'm afraid I just lost my cool.  I have no idea if you are, in your heart, a racist or a sexist - I'm sure you're a good person. It's actually interesting to know more about your life. All I had to go on before was a picture of Stalin and a Twitter feed full of hate.  Now I feel I know you a bit more as an individual. Before you were just one of what looked like a faceless mass of haters spreading lies and threats. 

Of course, I know that's not true - probably every one of you is an individual with your own history, your own challenges and secret hurts and triumphs, you've done campaigning work you're rightly proud of, you're a human being with a story. But heres the thing - so am I. You and everyone else on that thread have not treated me as such. Now you're asking that I behave in an empathetic way towards you, when your behaviour towards me has been the absolute opposite. You're asking that I treat you with politeness, respect and humanity, and sensitivity towards how a particular statement might affect your work, when you've shown me the opposite.
Like I say, I've got no idea if you're racist or sexist. I'm sure in your heart you are neither of these things. I have no way of knowing whether what you say about your years of anti-fascist work are true, but I have no reason to disbelieve you. 

On the other hand, I think the way you've all collectively behaved on the urban75 thread is stunningly sexist, as well as racist in its blanket writing-off of 'identity politics'. I think your reaction to the issue of identity politics on Twitter was slightly racist. So yes, I apologise for accusing you, rather than your behaviour. I should have said 'that's a bit racist, maybe you want to think about that' rather than 'you are a racist.' I'm sure you'll agree that even those of us who work tirelessly for equality can sometimes make mistakes. I have, certainly, And if we're unable to call out those mistakes without freaking out and summoning the bloody lawyers, that's surely bad news for the left.

My calling out, however, was poorly phrased. When I wrote those tweets, I was angry, hurt, felt threatened and frightened.  Perhaps this exchange will give you some insight into why I might have felt that way. I'm happy to clarify my response to your tweets on Twitter, but not because of your legal threats. You didn't need to threaten me to get me to apologise. All you needed to do, and this is very, very important, was treat me like a human being.

So here's what I propose: you give me a number I can call you on on the phone or a Skype account we can chat over (sorry, I'm unwilling to give out my private number in this situation), we arrange a time to talk, and we sit down wherever we are in the world and have a conversation - about our lives, about our politics, about what we can learn from each other and from this exchange. When that's done I'm more than happy to offer a retraction, if it's appropriate, and I'm sure it will be.

I look forward to hearing back from you,

Laurie.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

I'm a snogable smoggy.


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

TLDR.

Did you say sorry? Because at first glance it just looks like, ME, ME, ME (again).

I just read it. Fantastic.

You're a lying cunt, Laurie.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

Hello Laurie,

What do you make of NUJ efforts to unionise the New Statesman? How can people in other unions help?


----------



## chilango (Dec 19, 2012)

Quick point Laurie. You saying Spiney might not be a racist but is a sexist bully?

Cos that ain't right either, as I'm sure you'd spot with a careful reading of his posts.


----------



## radgiesteve (Dec 19, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> Laurie.


Are you gonna gen up on the history of the IWCA? Gaping hole in your knowledge of anti-fascism at street and community level that. Pity.


----------



## chilango (Dec 19, 2012)

Also, seeing as you're here.

Any chance of looking beyond the pisstakes and engaging with the, very real, issues behind this thread?


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

I think 





chilango said:


> Also, seeing as you're here.
> 
> Any chance of looking beyond the pisstakes and engaging with the, very real, issues behind this thread?


 
I think we are too late


----------



## lauriepenny (Dec 19, 2012)

chilango said:


> Also, seeing as you're here.
> 
> Any chance of looking beyond the pisstakes and engaging with the, very real, issues behind this thread?


 
No, no chance at all- because I've addressed those issues already, in forums that aren't full of slander, misogyny, violent cartoons and disgusting personal abuse.


----------



## chilango (Dec 19, 2012)

Probably.

Oh well.

Her loss.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

Someone should take her up on that face to face discussion. A million people demanding answers at once on a message board where she is s lone voice won't yield results, I'd wager.


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

Bye then Laurie.

I hope you have a great Christmas. Really.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

Citizen66 said:


> I'm a snogable smoggy.



Where abouts you from...specifically?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 19, 2012)

I don't use twitter because it's full of slander, misogyny, violent cartoons and disgusting personal abuse.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 19, 2012)

Citizen66 said:


> Someone should take her up on that face to face discussion. A million people demanding answers at once on a message board where she is s lone voice won't yield results, I'd wager.


 
That's between her and Spiney, I'd have thought.


----------



## chilango (Dec 19, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> No, no chance at all- because I've addressed those issues already, in forums that aren't full of slander, misogyny, violent cartoons and disgusting personal abuse.



Shame. As I said above it really is your loss.


BTW If you think it's rough here, try living in the world the rest of us have to live in.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Where abouts you from...specifically?





How many stripes do you wear, or is it plain clothes nowadays?


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> That's between her and Spiney, I'd have thought.



Well yeah, he gets first dibs maybe. But he wasn't the only one she slandered iyswim.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

And to be fair...I'm a bit pissed off being told I've written something sexist. Wouldn't that make me a misogynist more or less?
Do you have to be here a long time to earn the actual misogynist tag?


----------



## JimW (Dec 19, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> ...you're a human being with a story. But heres the thing - so am I. You and everyone else on that thread have not treated me as such.


 
We very much have, it's been what sort of story yours is that's been the topic - the salient aspect for our purposes its illustration of the reproduction of class and its attendant privileges and how pernicious that is. Or do you not think so?


----------



## radgiesteve (Dec 19, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME


 this thread appears correct in its criticisms of the blessed martyr after all


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> No, no chance at all- because I've addressed those issues already, in forums that aren't full of slander, misogyny, violent cartoons and disgusting personal abuse.


 
OK, can we talk about internships and Sarah Sands at the Evening Standard, They had a campaign against internships but they use interns for all kinds of admin.

Is it OK to address these questions to you in person after your revolutionary actions from the Commune to today talk for the Ralph Miliband programme at the LSE?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

Citizen66 said:


> How many stripes do you wear, or is it plain clothes nowadays?



Can't tell you. I'm special branch...no I was just asking. I'm in that neck of the woods myself.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Where abouts you from...specifically?



Close to the River Tees. Which is what it means specifically to the North East. So a bit pointless arguing something Southern about it.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 19, 2012)

I wonder if Nick Clegg will show up on the "Why the Lib Dems are Shit" thread?


----------



## Badgers (Dec 19, 2012)

articul8 said:
			
		

> I wonder if Nick Clegg will show up on the "Why the Lib Dems are Shit" thread?



I doubt Dave would let him


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Can't tell you. I'm special branch...no I was just asking. I'm in that neck of the woods myself.



Where abouts?


----------



## radgiesteve (Dec 19, 2012)

Citizen66 said:


> I'm a snogable smoggy.


there's no such thing


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I wonder if Nick Clegg will show up on the "Why the Lib Dems are Shit" thread?


 
He'd have to get permission to post first.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

radgiesteve said:


> there's no such thing



I broke the mould. Mould as in, well, you know..


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

Citizen66 said:


> Where abouts?



Erm...Close to the river Tees. Work in Eston.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

More Southbank really


----------



## chilango (Dec 19, 2012)

Worth highlighting this wot Laurie said...about us all.

"I think the way you've all collectively behaved on the urban75 thread is stunningly sexist, as well as racist in its blanket writing-off of 'identity politics"


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Erm...Close to the river Tees. Work in Eston.


 
Southern puff.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Erm...Close to the river Tees. Work in Eston.



Nice one. I'm other side of the river.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

I think Laurie has gone:



> Viewing thread _Alex Callinicos/SWP vs Laurie Penny/New Statesman Facebook handbags_, 6 minutes ago


 
and this sounds pretty final:



> No, no chance at all- because I've addressed those issues already, in forums that aren't full of slander, misogyny, violent cartoons and disgusting personal abuse.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> I wonder if Nick Clegg will show up on the "Why the Lib Dems are Shit" thread?


he was in the audience* at glastonbury a couple of years for someone performing a poem entitled 'fuck you liberal democrats' - don't see why the internet should be any different 

*strictly speaking, he was due on next. but watching from the sides with a cuppa beforehand


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> Southern puff.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 19, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> the writer and I are actually engaged in a productive email discussion right now, he admits that some of what he said was wrong)


 
Who is that? Kenan Malik or an IWCA person?




> call out those mistakes


 
Do you think you've made serious political mistakes, Laurie? Yay to UN air strikes for example?


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

I assumed she meant LD.


----------



## radgiesteve (Dec 19, 2012)

chilango said:


> Worth highlighting this wot Laurie said...about us all.
> 
> "I think the way you've all collectively behaved on the urban75 thread is stunningly sexist, as well as racist in its blanket writing-off of 'identity politics"


So now everyone's racist and sexist? Except for our saviour, the one who's busy 'doing' for a cushty fee. The silly cu*t [this post relates to sub-editing of course]


----------



## articul8 (Dec 19, 2012)

Citizen66 said:


> I assumed she meant LD.


will be interesting to hear his side of the exchange in that case


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> Who is that? Kenan Malik or an IWCA person?
> 
> 
> 
> Do you think you've made serious political mistakes, Laurie? Yay to UN air strikes for example?


 

She's gone, mate, and is doing this instead:

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
In the studio working, watching @*dondlion* and @*sxipshirey* make beautiful music. Really exciting!

http://www.dongodwin.net/ and http://www.sxipshirey.com/


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 19, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> No, no chance at all- because I've addressed those issues already, in forums that aren't full of slander, misogyny, violent cartoons and disgusting personal abuse.


 
oh ffs.  do one, you liberal misery tourist.


----------



## JimW (Dec 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> will be interesting to hear his side of the exchange in that case


Just so long as the chairs are the same height.


----------



## Dan U (Dec 19, 2012)

i've said fuck all sexist and nor have many, many posters and resent the idea that this thread is such. some daft things have been said at times but i can't recall anything that didn't really get pulled up on by someone at some stage.

on this basis Laurie Penny should stop engaging with twitter, pronto because that is chock full of actual hateful wankers.

i also think her proffered skype call should be a conference call. you can do that on googleplus for nowt. i'll facilitate.


----------



## framed (Dec 19, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> No, no chance at all- because I've addressed those issues already, in forums that aren't full of slander, misogyny, violent cartoons and disgusting personal abuse.


 
Allo Dave, I thought you'd gone for good, or was that just an empty threat? 

While you're here, could you possibly point out, item by item, those posts which you consider to be _"slander, misogyny... and disgusting personal abuse."_

I'll give you the _"violent cartoon"_, although we would call it 'funny' rather than violent. Given that the man being beaten up in the picture is indeed MALE and a natural redhead, while you are female and dare-I-say-it look like you're dyed in the head dept, I reckon you'd be hard pushed to make a case that this is indeed a caricature of your good self. Indeed, _Dave Barnett_ is not even mentioned by name in the cartoon!

Thankfully, most on here seem to have avoided the obligatory 'humour bypass' operation that comes with revolutionary politics. On the evidence of your writing, however, it looks like you were probably fitted with the new humour bypass 'chip' at birth.

_"Slander, misogyny... and disgusting personal abuse."  _

At least offer some evidence to substantiate your claims, please Dave.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

She relates to and can show solidarity to the structural misogyny of working class single mothers consigned to living like hamsters on housing estates because her easy move from private school to Oxbridge to writing career has been questioned by men.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> She's gone, mate, and is doing this instead:
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> In the studio working, watching @*dondlion* and @*sxipshirey* make beautiful music. Really exciting!
> ...


she may come back though - not clear why Twitter is any less susceptible to racism and misogyny.  In fact that's called out on here 99 times out of 100.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 19, 2012)

JimW said:


> Just so long as the chairs are the same height.


they can all have fucking high chairs next time


----------



## radgiesteve (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> I hope you have a great Christmas. Really.


 
ya soft shite. Funny that you post that and all the while your avatar insists to her "I hate you"


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

She loves to mention she is working.


----------



## framed (Dec 19, 2012)

She is an attention seeking child...

To engage with her is to indulge her.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 19, 2012)

merry christmas everyone, we are all misogynist cunts except for spiney who is merely  common and garden racist. Laura Pfennig has spoken.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 19, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> In case you're all wondering, here's the letter I just sent in response to 'SpineyNorman' (I didn't want to reprint his letter without permission but I'm sure he can post it if he feels it's necessary.'
> 
> ****
> 
> ...


 

it would be useful if you could say what, exactly, was racist about the article.  Merely asserting it is, is not a reasoned argument.  If you could show your working out, then maybe a debate could be had?


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> it would be useful if you could say what, exactly, was racist about the article.  Merely asserting it is, is not a reasoned argument.  If you could show your working out, then maybe a debate could be had?



We've just received a letter from the Queen, Blagsta. Don't spoil it.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Nah...it's a well trodden path for liberal female journalists. It's what they do...there's always a 'motherhood' correspondent whose brief is: show us that your 'just like everyone else' while delighting us with your incisive and perceptive take on motherhood. See past issues of the Graun's for he past four decades.


 
That's not what your post read like. It read like 'this is what she_ should_ be doing'. If I misread it I apologise.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

> that I lie, that I fabricate quotes and stories, that I bought my way into a job I don't deserve - none of which are remotely true.


 
We are 





> people who have written these things and perpetuated these lies.






> to have one of the bullies respond with legal threats, demands for attention and apology, when I react with anger, when I *call out their unexamined privilege*? That's bitterly ironic.






> When you started trashing 'identity politics' and retweeted an article that contains, to my mind, the worst sort of left-flavoured unexamined white male privilege




We might be 





> a faceless mass of haters spreading lies and threats.


 given that spiney is one of that.



> *probably* every one of you is an individual with your own history, your own challenges and secret hurts and triumphs, you've done campaigning work you're rightly proud of, you're a human being with a story. But heres the thing - so am I.


 Own up which one of you has no history behind them.



> I think the way you've all collectively behaved on the urban75 thread is stunningly sexist, as well as racist in its blanket writing-off of 'identity politics'.


 
*I am a racist* as is in no particular order: butchers, chilango, copliker, Citizen66, Spanky, angel, cesare, LLETSA, Dot, frogwoman, VP, lovedetective, 39S etc etc. BUT Are the 200,000 views of the thread who failed to spot it and challenge it also?

I am a racist and sexist.


----------



## emanymton (Dec 19, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> _In case you're all wondering, here's the letter I just sent in response to 'SpineyNorman' (I didn't want to reprint his letter without permission but I'm sure he can post it if he feels it's necessary.'_


Hi Laurie. Don't know if you are still reading but never mind, i'll post anyway.

As a reasonably prominent and well know female journalist, and one who writes from a radical angle, you will regularly be subject to vile misogynistic abuse. Frankly I would not even like to try and imagine some of what gets sent to you. I think very few if any of the people who contribute to this thread would disagree with that. Considering the nature of the cartoon which drew your attention to this thread I can however understand why you may have felt if was simply more of the same. And as this is the internet there is misogynistic crap on this thread, but it is routinely challenged, including that very cartoon. Others have suggested that you read over the entire thread, but I won't, this is a very long thread and trying to read it it all would be very, very dull and 90% of it would seem like pointless crap anyway.

I keep a casual eye on this thread, I certainly have not read the whole thing, and I agree with many but not all of the criticisms of your politics, but there is much on here that crosses a line into the personal that I don't feel very comfortable with. I would not expect you to suddenly fall in love with Urban or the posters on this thread. What I ask is that you try to keep a bit more of an open mind about the people on here. I can see why you may have reacted the way you did, but I think you have misinterpreted the nature of this thread.


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

Gah, no need to quote her entire letter. Again and again.


----------



## JimW (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I am a racist and sexist.


At least it's stunning sexism, not that crap sort.


----------



## framed (Dec 19, 2012)

This is the golden girl, the smartiest pants in a drawer full of smarty pants.

You don't question her, she questions YOU...


I get the feeling that we are moving into territory where she feels most comfortable, playing the vulnerable ingenue under attack.

She should just fuck right off and continue to write her appalling articles, she will carry on regardless of any discussion here anyway.

Go indulge yourself somewhere else, you horrible, self-obsessed, middle-class... *CUNT.*

There, is that misogynyst enough for you now Dave?


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 19, 2012)

that dead horse ain't moving, emanymton.


----------



## sleaterkinney (Dec 19, 2012)

> Yay to UN air strikes for example?


 

If you're talking about the Airstrikes that stopped Gadaffi crushing the resistance, where they not a good thing?.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 19, 2012)

i've taken more feminist wanks, to be quite honest.


----------



## emanymton (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> Gah, no need to quote her entire letter. Again and again.


Happy now?


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 19, 2012)

chilango said:


> Worth highlighting this wot Laurie said...about us all.
> 
> "I think the way you've all collectively behaved on the urban75 thread is stunningly sexist, as well as racist in its blanket writing-off of 'identity politics"


Yep now it's not just LD and SN that are racists we all are.

Truly pathetic. Earlier in the thread someone (TruXtra?) said that for whatever her flaws LPs heart was in the right place. It might be for that person but it certainly isn't for me. Her dismissal of the any anti-MC analysis as rascist, her defence of LibDems and Labour, her utter obsession with identity politics and her attacks on those outside the bubble all show that she, and her fellow soft left travellers, are as much part of the problem as the Tories, LibDems and Labour.

We might be able to work with them on specific issues/campaigns but they will never be comrades.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

JimW said:


> At least it's stunning sexism, not that crap sort.


 
Since I largely agree with the article:

I am a racist and a sexist and have left-flavoured unexamined white male privilege.

My new fourteen words.


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

emanymton said:


> Happy now?


 
Aye, thanks


----------



## emanymton (Dec 19, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> that dead horse ain't moving, emanymton.


Maybe not, but no harm in trying.


----------



## emanymton (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> Aye, thanks


I meant to cut it but forgot


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

framed said:


> Go indulge yourself somewhere else, you horrible, self-obsessed, middle-class... *CXXX*


 
Probably the worst thing to say framed



> There, is that misogynyst enough for you now Dave?


 
Why are people calling her Dave?


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 19, 2012)

framed said:


> Go indulge yourself somewhere else, you horrible, self-obsessed, middle-class... *CUNT.*
> 
> There, is that misogynyst enough for you now Dave?


TBH I don't think this type of post really helps. It just allows LP to evade the questions.


----------



## JimW (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Since I largely agree with the article:
> 
> I am a racist and a sexist and have left-flavoured unexamined white male privilege.
> 
> My new fourteen words.


Sort of gets to one of may major beefs with identity politics - I'm embedded in racist and sexist processes and no less immune from them than the next man (bar my amazingly high level of communist consciousness, oh yes) but these are not essential features of anyone's being, and when you argue essentialism that's the same ground as nonsense like racism is it not?


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

@Lauriepenny is used to talking to audiences that already like her or who can only reply with 140 characters and spaces. It is beyond her _smart kid in a smart school_ ability to address people and their questions on an individual basis. She's frightened of being challenged, proved wrong, exposed as a liar, etc. and she interoperates that fear as misogyny.

Fuck her.



redsquirrel said:


> TBH I don't think this type of post really helps. It just allows LP to evade the questions.


She was never and will never answer them.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

Citizen66 said:


> Nice one. I'm other side of the river.



The place where monkeys fear to tread?


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

JimW said:


> Sort of gets to one of may major beefs with identity politics - I'm embedded in racist and sexist processes and no less immune from them than the next man (bar my amazingly high level of communist consciousness, oh yes) but these are not essential features of anyone's being, and when you argue essentialism that's the same ground as nonsense like racism is it not?


 
Can you define essentialism


----------



## chilango (Dec 19, 2012)

She ain't gonna last long as a journo or as an activist if she runs in fear from this thread.


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> She was never and will never answer them.


Maybe not but why give her an easy out. 

Plus I just think it's a bit needless.


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

Fuck sake, I wanted to watch that documentary on typography and I've missed it.

Cheers Laurie


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

weepiper said:


> That's not what your post read like. It read like 'this is what she_ should_ be doing'. If I misread it I apologise.



Nada.


----------



## framed (Dec 19, 2012)

redsquirrel said:


> TBH I don't think this type of post really helps. It just allows LP to evade the questions.


 
Do I care what you think of what I think of what Laurie thinks?

Do I fuck. You can engage with the 'clever girl' if you like. I choose not to.

_



			I think the way you've all collectively behaved on the urban75 thread is stunningly sexist, as well as racist in its blanket writing-off of 'identity politics'.
		
Click to expand...

_She's a CUNT.


----------



## JimW (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Can you define essentialism


I'm no philosopher so probably have it round my neck - but it's this saying 'it's just inherent in being this or that sort of human being that you will be this or that sort of thing, rather than looking at social processes (I mean I don't think the individual is that fixed at all) in history.


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 19, 2012)

@ framed

I'm not asking you to engage with her I'd just prefer it if you cut back on the abuse a bit. Or at least put some thought behind it. Repeatedly calling her a cunt is just a bit crap.


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

I'm interested to hear what the writer of the IWCA article has conceded as "wrong". Beyond that this response from LP is best summarised by Shakespeare as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" .


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

chilango said:


> She ain't gonna last long as a journo or as an activist if she runs in fear from this thread.


 
This board has no power, chilango, only interesting/thoughtprovoking posters (bar conspiracists and right-wingers)
She's been in journalism for a fair few years, and as LLETSA correctly predicted, she will carry on.


----------



## framed (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Probably the worst thing to say framed
> 
> Why are people calling her Dave?


 

LIke Trigger called Rodney, Dave, I refer to Ms Barnett as such.

If she doesn't know her own name we may as well give her one arf arf (a name that is!)


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

framed said:


> LIke Trigger called Rodney, Dave, I refer to Ms Barnett as such.


 
Yes, but that's not her name. Do you call Michael Howard, Mikhail Hecht?


----------



## chilango (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> This board has no power, chilango, only interesting/thoughtprovoking posters (bar conspiracists and right-wingers)
> She's been in journalism for a fair few years, and as LLETSA correctly predicted, she will carry on.



We know this board has no power.

She knows this board has no power.

Yet she's still too chicken to deal with it.

Wait till she goes up against an editor, or a tabloid, or a politician or anyone with real power.

She'll shite it and pick an easier path.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> The place where monkeys fear to tread?



Nah, there's worse before you reach there.


----------



## chilango (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> This board has no power, chilango, only interesting/thoughtprovoking posters (bar conspiracists and right-wingers)
> She's been in journalism for a fair few years, and as LLETSA correctly predicted, she will carry on.



Though having said that...

..if we were of a mind to do so, we could, collectively shred her credibility with the audiences she needs.

Our CV is impressive to the hangers on and fellow travellers that read the liberal media. More impressive than hers.

Her radical pose is all she has in a sea of posh kids desperate to play the role of journo/writer/blogger. Take that away and she has nothing to distinguish herself from a million others...


----------



## sihhi (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> She was never and will never answer them.


 
She's emailing love detective right now.

I was going to ask what she thought of Sunny Hundal earning money for tweeting after the NUJ New Statesman question. I was also going to ask her if she could post a link to the thread - warts and all - so her 60,000 followers could see what was written.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 19, 2012)

she won't come up against anyone with real power because no-one with real power will be threatened by her.  the sort of bluster she comes out with suits entirely the existing power struggles because it is so easy to refute or laugh off.  that's why she spends more time arguing with feminists and the left, her alleged comrades, than she does doing anything else.  her shit is more offensive to us than to them because it misrepresents us and does us damage.


----------



## chilango (Dec 19, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> she won't come up against anyone with real power because no-one with real power will be threatened by her.  the sort of bluster she comes out with suits entirely the existing power struggles because it is so easy to refute or laugh off.  that's why she spends more time arguing with feminists and the left, her alleged comrades, than she does doing anything else.  her shit is more offensive to us than to them because it misrepresents us and does us damage.



Oh she will.

She'll end up pissing an editor off.


----------



## radgiesteve (Dec 19, 2012)

Contacting people individually so she gets to pick what bits get aired on her twitter feed/NS articles. Divide and conquer comrades, the proles must be subdued. The peasants are revolting etc.


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

articul8 said:


> will be interesting to hear his side of the exchange in that case


 
I didn't write that article personally (had some input to it from what i remember though). I've certainly had no communication from Laurie Penny since she called me a racist for posting a link of it to her and then blocked me

I've emailed the person who did write it though to see if her story checks out, i would be amazed if it did though


----------



## framed (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Yes, but that's not her name. Do you call Michael Howard, Mikhail Hecht?


 
Whatchoo talkin about Willis?

Laurie Penny is not her name either...

And I don't know Michael Howard to talk to, but if I ever do meet him I shall of course refer to him as Herr Hecht, or better still... EVA.

Auf Wiedersehen.


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

redsquirrel said:


> Yep now it's not just LD and SN that are racists we all are.


 
Hard to keep up

So I originally was racist, then she didn't know if i was or not, then i wasn't, now i'm back to being one again? and this full circle has been accomplished without one piece of dialogue between her and I


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> More Southbank really


 
What sort of industry do you work in?

There's only about 3 employers in Southbank, I probably know you...


----------



## framed (Dec 19, 2012)

redsquirrel said:


> @ framed
> 
> I'm not asking you to engage with her I'd just prefer it if you cut back on the abuse a bit. Or at least put some thought behind it. Repeatedly calling her a cunt is just a bit crap.


 

I called the cunt a cunt and you're het up about giving her 'a way out', as if she's some kind of fucking revolutionary project in the making!

Catch yerselves on, ffs.

_"Look quickly Quentin, Torquil, Penelope... someone just called me a *cunt* on Urban 75, I won't be able to finish my sherry tonight, I'm afraid, their misogyny has made me feel quite faint!_


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

A blanket dismissal of identity politics is racist?

who knew?
It's at times like this that I curse my feckless and indolent parents for not getting off their arses to earn the kinda dough that would've given me the kind of education where you learn this stuff.
Bastards turned me into a racist.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> I didn't write that article personally (had some input to it from what i remember though). I've certainly had no communication from Laurie Penny since she called me a racist for posting a link of it to her and then blocked me
> 
> I've emailed the person who did write it though to see if her story checks out, i would be amazed if it did though


 
Let us know the answer!


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

Which part of RR's post here is slanderous lies, @lauriepenny?

It is one of the most popular posts on this thread, why do you think that is?



Rob Ray said:


> "then worked as a sub-editor on the Morning Star"
> 
> As a former co-worker I'd suggest not using your what, three months (if that), "working" for the Star as material for your "I didn't just walk into a national job" schtick. If the Star had operated as a normal workplace you'd have been repeatedly hauled over the coals for failing to show the slightest interest in doing anything which didn't advance the career of Laurie Penny. Did you even join the union in the end? We certainly asked you enough times and this was during a period when it actually mattered.
> 
> ...


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> A blanket dismissal of identity politics is racist?


Which AFAIK no one has done anyway.

There has been plenty of criticism of identity politics and multi-culturalism but, from my perspective anyway, no blanket dismissal.

Personally I don't think writing off identity politics completely is helpful, there have been important criticisms of "the left" that have come from a feminist, BME, gay etc perspective. 

It's not identity politics that I have a problem with but the fact that they have been used to remove class from the discussion.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> What sort of industry do you work in?
> 
> There's only about 3 employers in Southbank, I probably know you...



Fuck me...is this thread like a Teesside based operation? I'm ashamed to say I'm in ..erm...education.


----------



## Smokeandsteam (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> I didn't write that article personally (had some input to it from what i remember though). I've certainly had no communication from Laurie Penny since she called me a racist for posting a link of it to her and then blocked me
> 
> I've emailed the person who did write it though to see if her story checks out, i would be amazed if it did though



So who is she now in email contact with and swapping analysis/apologies?

There is only 1 article in question, the IWCA one.


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Fuck me...is this thread like a Teesside based operation? I'm ashamed to say I'm in ..erm...education.


 
Do you ever go to Stockton just to get a feel of what living in a dystopian hell will be like?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Fuck me...is this thread like a Teesside based operation? I'm ashamed to say I'm in ..erm...education.


 
Ok probably don't know you then, I used work in the area though, not there now mind


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> Do you ever go to Stockton just to get a feel of what living in a dystopian hell will be like?


 
What compared to Eston or Southbank lol?


----------



## framed (Dec 19, 2012)

After what she's written of the interchanges on Urban and in her private correspondence with members here, why politically engage with her at all now, either privately or publicly?

There is no desired political 'outcome' to this, as far as I can see. Unless some of you still have that barmy but endearing lefty quality of wanting to 'save' her?

Better to let her write her shite and pull her writing apart imho than to indulge her ego by direct engagement. It attaches undue importance to her journalism imho.

She is not just _of_ another class, she is from another fcuking planet.


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> What compared to Eston or Southbank lol?


 
There's some scenic views around Eston.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> Do you ever go to Stockton just to get a feel of what living in a dystopian hell will be like?



Nah...get all the dystopia I like in Grangetown.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> There's some scenic views around Eston.



I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.


 
you know Ridley Scott based the version of LA in the film on Teesside right?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> you know Ridley Scott based the version of LA in the film on Teesside right?



That was kinda the thrust of the post. But to be fair, if I had to choose between Southbank or the version of LA in Bladerunner...


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> you know Ridley Scott based the version of LA in the film on Teesside right?


 
I think Seaham was used for one of the Alien films too.


----------



## framed (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> There's some scenic views around Eston.


 

I love industrial sites lit up at night, that's a work of art that is!  I served my engineering apprenticeship not far from the oil refinery in Grangemouth and it was a bit like this at night. There was also a constant low level buzzing sound everywhere you went in the town. I stayed at a mate's house in Grangemouth after a bevvy session one night and in the morning I was asking his family how the feck they slept at night with that constant buzzing noise. Their collective reply was,_ "What buzzing noise?"_


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 19, 2012)

kill me....kill me...


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

framed said:


> Their collective reply was,_ "What buzzing noise?"_


 
You know what it still buzzes?


----------



## framed (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> You know what it still buzzes?


 

Yes, it's in my fucking head!


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Dec 19, 2012)

My mother was brought up in the Midlands near to a steelworks. She recalled how at night it lit up the sky with red light and made a loud crashing sound at intervals. She says that when she was young she didn't realise that the noise was part of the steel making process but thought that it was something that the sky did.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> Do you ever go to Stockton just to get a feel of what living in a dystopian hell will be like?


Wasn't it mark smith who when asked what touring in east Germany with the Fall was like said ' it was dirty and depressing it reminded me of living in Middlesbrough '?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Wasn't it mark smith who when asked what touring in east Germany with the Fall was like said ' it was dirty and depressing it reminded me of living in Middlesbrough '?



Middlesbrough grows on you. Takes a while but it has its charms...just keeps them well hidden.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 19, 2012)

I used to live in Darlington as a teenager , occasionally went to Ayrsome park and Middlesbrough crypt . Hartlepool was worse .


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 19, 2012)

love detective said:


> Hard to keep up
> 
> So I originally was racist, then she didn't know if i was or not, then i wasn't, now i'm back to being one again? and this full circle has been accomplished without one piece of dialogue between her and I


 
comrade, the suspicion of racism is enough.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> I used to live in Darlington as a teenager , occasionally went to Ayrsome park and Middlesbrough crypt . Hartlepool was worse .


 
you can't knock Seaton Carew though


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> comrade, the suspicion of racism is enough.



I think the best bet is just to assume everyone's a misogynist and racist until Laurie penny gives them the all clear.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> you can't knock Seaton Carew though


Didn't he write the Fu Manchu novels?


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I think the best bet is just to assume everyone's a misogynist and racist until Laurie penny gives them the all clear.


 
if there is a better way to work out what i should i approve of, twitter has yet to provide it to me.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> I used to live in Darlington as a teenager , occasionally went to Ayrsome park and Middlesbrough crypt . Hartlepool was worse .


 
Were you a member of the youth wing of Darlo WSM?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> you can't knock Seaton Carew though



Or the Bongo


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Or the Bongo


 
Me and Citizen66 are going to go down the Cowpen together soon, to see the pole dancers


----------



## framed (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Middlesbrough grows on you. Takes a while but it has its charms...just keeps them well hidden.


 
I've been in Middlesborough only once, years ago, to speak at a public meeting during the anti-poll tax campaign. All I can remember of the landscape is that it was flat, bleak and desolate, like someone had just come along and planted houses on long abandoned industrial wasteland... Apologies to those who come from there and love the town, but it was one of the most miserable looking places I've ever been to. The folk who lived there were nice though. I hope it's been improved since then.

I couldn't wait to get back to Glasgow!


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Me and Citizen66 are going to go down the Cowpen together soon, to see the pole dancers



Misogynist


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

i was thinking more racist


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

framed said:


> I hope it's been improved since then.


 


oh dear my aching sides

er no it hasn't


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Were you a member of the youth wing of Darlo WSM?



 founder  member of the under 14s External faction .

I was in a scooter gang called the Hurworth Hen and Hatchet Gang though


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

You know the fuckin worst thing about all this. I've only seen two mentions of Southbank in the msm...despite  its status as economic basketcase and all round hellhole... first one was the Asbo boy 'scandal'...remember the 9 year old lad who broke the record?

Then this piece of shite...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/23/britain-not-working-unemployment-middlesbrough

It's by the Guardian's 'social affairs correspondent'...an impeccable liberal...who happens to be married to the Tory MP for Orpington, ex merchant banker and brother of Boris Johnson. 

Basic message of the piece is: it's a bit shit round here...they should all get on their fuckin bikes and open designer cup cake shops in Cheltnam.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> You know the fuckin worst thing about all this. I've only seen two mentions of Southbank in the msm...despite its status as economic basketcase and all round hellhole... first one was the Asbo boy 'scandal'...remember the 9 year old lad who broke the record?
> 
> Then this piece of shite...
> 
> ...


 
I remember that vile shit, she should be strung up the cunt


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I remember that vile shit, she should be strung up the cunt


Wasn't she on University Challenge earlier? Button snarled summat about someone being Boris's sister.


----------



## framed (Dec 19, 2012)

*Amelia Gentleman....*

I wonder whatever gave the impression that this lady might also be a cunt?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I remember that vile shit, she should be strung up the cunt



Yeah...but I'm sure Laurie and her talented artist friend will be up there any minute blogging their 'take' on things. They don't just do sunny and newsworthy places...they'll tackle any location that's been left bereft by capitalism. I'm sure if she's reading this, i'm sure she'll soon be tweeting to find digs at the local polygendered anarchist housing coop. It's just behind the Princess Alice.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

framed said:


> *Amelia Gentleman....*
> 
> I wonder whatever gave the impression that this lady might also be a cunt?



Fuckin hell...will this misogyny never end...it's like a buzzing in my head.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> Wasn't she on University Challenge earlier? Button snarled summat about someone being Boris's sister.


 
dunno but she's not Boris's sister


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> dunno but she's not Boris's sister


Ah, OK


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 19, 2012)

firky said:


> There's some scenic views around Eston.


 

Ahh! The green green gas of home! Love this picture, love this thread. Read the bloody lot without comment or prejudice. Started work on a tapestry, gonna stitch in every post. Frankie Boyle was asked about the closest he had ever come to death and he said 'Middlesbrough'. But he's a cunt and so is Dave (Davina Spart) IMO. Happy to take on the world and let everyone know about it but bottle it here. Fucking shameful. Man up Dave or is that misogynist? The allegations thrown at people here are disgraceful. And the cartoon was a big disappointment, from the way you went on I expected to see some graphic depiction of an Identity Politics Warrior getting a kicking off racists and sexists but it wasn't even about you. Just your stage name put in a caption in a cartoon about something else.

Anyway what I really want to know concerns the letter from the man who wrote to you. The man who was suicidal because of the threat of disability cuts and who wrote to you because he admired your writing, which I find hard to believe. So, how is he? Is he still alive? You must know because you wrote about him and published his letter and your reply and I know you wouldn't have done that without asking his permission. At this stage I'm sure you have some kind of ongoing correspondance with him because you're a compassionate person, you're a 'carer'. If you haven't kept in touch then you're a cunt, if you don't know how he is you're a cunt and if 'he' is a fabrication, a 'device' if you will to showcase your credentials then you are the lowest of the low. You said the Samaritans advised you so I'm sure you're still in touch with them regarding this matter. Is he still alive? Answer this if nothing else.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 19, 2012)

Fucking hell, just got back from the pub. Think this one might have to wait till the morning!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Yeah...but I'm sure Laurie and her talented artist friend will be up there any minute blogging their 'take' on things. They don't just do sunny and newsworthy places...they'll tackle any location that's been left bereft by capitalism. I'm sure if she's reading this, i'm sure she'll soon be tweeting to find digs at the local polygendered anarchist housing coop. It's just behind the Princess Alice.


 
I'd love to see a Molly Crabapple (anyone else hear that as Bart's teacher's surname?) graphic novel about bohemian social workers fighting poverty and crime in tha boro


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> dunno but she's not Boris's sister


 
They're easily identifiable family


----------



## cockneyreject (Dec 19, 2012)

" This sort of accusation has a real effect on my ability to do my job." (La Penny)

Well then I suggest you consider a career change, as as a journo you're going to have a lifetime of accusations and worse.


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> and open designer cup cake shops in Cheltnam.






> @AllyFogg @PennyRed @pastachips my offer to stand you the cupcake of your choice when you visit is still on.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 19, 2012)

two girls one cupcake


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I'd love to see a Molly Crabapple (anyone else hear that as Bart's teacher's surname?) graphic novel about bohemian social workers fighting poverty and crime in tha boro



I'd buy it.
Likewise on the Crabapple name...I always get this image of a sad little pouty Laurie watching from a distance as Molly and Skinner get a bit frisky


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

Ld, what if they can't compromise on the choice of which cupcake you're going to buy between them, eh? Eh?


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 19, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Fucking hell, just got back from the pub. Think this one might have to wait till the morning!


 
Don't tweet whilst pissed for Christ sake


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Don't tweet whilst pissed for Christ sake



On the other hand...


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I'd buy it.
> Likewise on the Crabapple name...I always get this image of a sad little pouty Laurie watching from a distance as Molly and Skinner get a bit frisky


 
I am not really arsed that either of them changed their names. However they've chosen names that are so contrived and nauseating. Like Magenta Devine/


----------



## love detective (Dec 19, 2012)

cesare said:


> Ld, what if they can't compromise on the choice of which cupcake you're going to buy between them, eh? Eh?



Just to clarify that wasn't me who wrote that!


----------



## killer b (Dec 19, 2012)

yeah right.


----------



## cesare (Dec 19, 2012)

killer b said:


> yeah right.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 19, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Molly Crabapple (anyone else hear that as Bart's teacher's surname?)


 
I do now.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 19, 2012)

"Like I say, I've got no idea if you're racist or sexist. I'm sure in your heart you are neither of these things. I have no way of knowing whether what you say about your years of anti-fascist work are true, but I have no reason to disbelieve you."

You may not be sexist " in your heart"...but that's not enough...it's about praxis man...keeping a check on your privilege, and up to date....it's keeping up with the latest potential transgressions...and to do that you've gotta follow the liberal ponificariat. Laurie, Molly and the ginger gimp will be revealing a list of this week's new hate utterances in their latest 3 page pamphlet...£15.99 from any good butcher


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I don't use twitter because it's full of slander, misogyny, violent cartoons and disgusting personal abuse.


 
Personally, I avoid using it as it seems to be populated by arseholes.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

chilango said:


> Shame. As I said above it really is your loss.
> 
> 
> BTW If you think it's rough here, try living in the world the rest of us have to live in.


 
This is going to turn into a "hierarchy of oppression" thing _a la_ Monty Python, isn't it?

"Live in your world? When I were young we got fed a spoonful of warm dogshit and a cup of cat piss, and we were grateful..."

etc etc.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 19, 2012)

fucking hell just got back from a chess match and saw this shite.


@Lauriepenny, i can understand why you're pissed off at this thread. I know you get horrible abuse on twitter etc. I dont think there is a single person on the thread that would condone that. However cant you just look at the criticisms, the majority of which are political and not personal. It is not racist to say that there are problems with state-ran multiculturalism as the IWCA have said. I do not agree with everything the IWCA ever say, and have had plenty of disagreements with them myself. But that article is not racist, quite frankly the kind of hysterical arguments you have put here devalue the meaning of racism.

You are in a position of power over us laurie, power and privilege. We dont all have jobs at the new statesman, we dont all get paid to write bollocks on twitter all day or be jetting off to new york several times a year. You are a celebrity and are earning thousands more than alot of people here will see in their lifetimes, therefore YOU are privileged and not them. I frankly find it appalling how you can say that people such as Love Detective and SpineyNorman are privileged against you when they are not well known or famous (sorry) and dont have access to the kind of power, economic and social that you do. Please just have a look at these criticisms I dont expect you to agree with them but just think about them. I do find it quite concerning that you are not engaging with anything anyone has said even when the majority of people here have been perfectly polite to you and the minority of idiots have been dealt with.

I am frankly quite insulted by you saying that I, and people on this forum who I consider my friends are being labelled as racists whereas i and alot of people here have devoted countless time to fighting racism and for pro working class politics, time which they are not being paid for and often at considerable personal cost, unlike you who is being paid for it.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 19, 2012)

can I have the hammer back now you've finished nailing it love?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 19, 2012)

Damn, working night shifts.

Wake up from a long sleep, and this thread has got even longer in the daylight hours.  So many pages to get through.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 19, 2012)

@Lauriepenny : there are compliments on this thread too, however I take exception as a feminist to being labelled as a misogynist and a racist. At the very least you should apologise to spineynorman in particular and to those on the thread in general for using such politically-charged offensive labels purely because constructive criticism has been made.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> In case you're all wondering, here's the letter I just sent in response to 'SpineyNorman' (I didn't want to reprint his letter without permission but I'm sure he can post it if he feels it's necessary.'
> 
> ****
> 
> ...




The "threats of violence" being the cartoon a single poster put up, and got howled down for putting up, I take it (given that I haven't seen a single post where anyone has threatened to blow a raspberry at you, let alone give you a shoeing)?



> the worst kinds of professional slander - that I lie, that I fabricate quotes and stories, that I bought my way into a job I don't deserve - none of which are remotely true.




Well, it would be more accurate to say that a lot of the negative stuff is based on what other public figures have said about you..

So, was (for example) Julie Bindel slandering you? If so, have you started legal proceedings against her?



> This sort of accusation has a real effect on my ability to do my job. You've encouraged and supported people who have written these things and perpetuated these lies. You seem so emotionally affected and full of rage about the way I reacted to your comments - perhaps that might give you some insight into how I feel every single day when I have to read these lies about me embedded in jeering sexist bullying. And then to have one of the bullies respond with legal threats, demands for attention and apology, when I react with anger, when I call out their unexamined privilege? That's bitterly ironic.




Not to minimise your anguish, but perhaps *you* are getting some valuable insight as to how  people like myself feel every single day when we pick up a paper, switch on the TV or turn on the radio, and hear a journo farting out lies about how we're scroungers; how we could find work if we wanted to; how we're a burden.



> When you started trashing 'identity politics'...




Anyone who "did" activism in the '70s and '80s is well aware of what the ultimate results of identity politics are - an ignoring of political fundamentals in favour of differentiation, which invariably leads to everyone playing a quasi-Hobbesian game of every identity group against every other identity group.  



> and retweeted an article that contains, to my mind, the worst sort of left-flavoured unexamined white male privilege (the writer and I are actually engaged in a productive email discussion right now, he admits that some of what he said was wrong) I'm afraid I just lost my cool. I have no idea if you are, in your heart, a racist or a sexist - I'm sure you're a good person. It's actually interesting to know more about your life. All I had to go on before was a picture of Stalin and a Twitter feed full of hate. Now I feel I know you a bit more as an individual. Before you were just one of what looked like a faceless mass of haters spreading lies and threats.
> 
> Of course, I know that's not true - probably every one of you is an individual with your own history, your own challenges and secret hurts and triumphs, you've done campaigning work you're rightly proud of, you're a human being with a story. But heres the thing - so am I. You and everyone else on that thread have not treated me as such. Now you're asking that I behave in an empathetic way towards you, when your behaviour towards me has been the absolute opposite. You're asking that I treat you with politeness, respect and humanity, and sensitivity towards how a particular statement might affect your work, when you've shown me the opposite.
> Like I say, I've got no idea if you're racist or sexist. I'm sure in your heart you are neither of these things. I have no way of knowing whether what you say about your years of anti-fascist work are true, but I have no reason to disbelieve you.
> ...




I hate to lecture (because it's really not much fun if I'm not being paid), but "writing off" identity politics is neither sexist or racist (or classist). It's merely the eschewal of a failed mode of representation that has been shown through experience to be highly damaging to class solidarity, and to human solidarity in general.  I know identity politics look to be "the great new thing", but the arguments identity politics make have no more solidity than they did 25 and 35 years ago, they're just dressed up in a new discourse.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 19, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Why are people calling her Dave?


 
Because we're misogynists, you ninny!


----------



## smokedout (Dec 19, 2012)

laurie's not my facebook friend anymore 

she was going mental about this thread on facebook btw, more or less accusing urban75 of being a hate site


----------



## Firky (Dec 19, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Damn, working night shifts.
> 
> Wake up from a long sleep, and this thread has got even longer in the daylight hours. So many pages to get through.


 
Just scroll to where LP last posted and save yourself a dozen pages of repetition.


----------



## framed (Dec 19, 2012)

I like the cartoon, violent or otherwise and intended at Dave or not, fuck her and her sensibilities.

And I shall continue to call _Little Ms. Madeupname_ a cunt, if only to annoy some people on here.

I have disengaged...


----------



## Balbi (Dec 19, 2012)

Do I have to throw out all my anti racist stuff now and start going to strip clubs and picking up hookers?


----------



## framed (Dec 19, 2012)

Balbi said:


> Do I have to throw out all my anti racist stuff now and start going to strip clubs and picking up hookers?


 
What? You mean you haven't already been doing that?

There is help available...


----------



## Balbi (Dec 19, 2012)

We are alll Bender Rodriguez


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 19, 2012)

urban75 trip to the tattoo parlour to get a swastika tattoo

and then get a lobster tattooed over it


----------



## Nylock (Dec 20, 2012)

smokedout said:


> laurie's not my facebook friend anymore
> 
> she was going mental about this thread on facebook btw, more or less accusing urban75 of being a hate site


ffs in that case, no-one direct her to s***mf***t or she'll go into terminal meltdown...


----------



## Lo Siento. (Dec 20, 2012)

ironic that it came down to "unexamined privileges", isn't it? Given that we all know where the biggest, fattest one is sat, stinking up the place...


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 20, 2012)

firky said:


> Just scroll to where LP last posted and save yourself a dozen pages of repetition.


 
Read it.  

POOR ME ME ME.


----------



## gosub (Dec 20, 2012)

Nylock said:


> ffs in that case, no-one direct her to s***mf***t or she'll go into terminal meltdown...


Do they have recipes on stormfront? Guess they have pictures of kittens, probably just kittens that look like Hitler but they must have pictures of kittens


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 20, 2012)

gosub said:


> Do they have recipes on stormfront? Guess they have pictures of kittens, probably just kittens that look like Hitler but they must have pictures of kittens


 
yeah there's a subforum devoted to recipes.

for fucks sake dont bring them here


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 20, 2012)

gosub said:


> Do they have recipes on stormfront? Guess they have pictures of kittens, probably just kittens that look like Hitler but they must have pictures of kittens


 
they'd probably view kitten pics as a jew distraction tbh.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

sonderbread


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

shoahtbread


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 20, 2012)

a holocaust chocolate father christmas


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 20, 2012)

eat more fish to aid concentration camps


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> eat more fish to aid concentration camps


 
Off this thread. Now. No really.


----------



## SLK (Dec 20, 2012)

firky said:


> Off this thread. Now. No really.


 
Well he isn't saying what _I_ want him to say now that someone I don't care about but the whole thread is about has been on the thread, so quite right, get off.
Back to the point, here is my view on how the person I don't care about is wrong and should answer my questions, and recognise that _I_ am the most important person on this thread.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

Chocolate Ghetto


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 20, 2012)

poached pear(yan)s


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 20, 2012)

Kris Kringalnacht


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

All of you off now ffs.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 20, 2012)

Nuremberg forest gateau


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 20, 2012)

Stop you're making me _hun_gry


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Kris Kringalnacht


 

Santa is a sworn commie, for real

Dresses in red.

Gives shit away to the people

Keeps many Lists

Says Ho Ho Ho chi minh


So be good for THE SAKE OF THE INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAT


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

Gates of Viennetta


----------



## weepiper (Dec 20, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> Santa is a sworn commie, for real
> 
> Dresses in red.
> 
> ...


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 20, 2012)

Schutzstaffel pancakes


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 20, 2012)

Tattoo-ini with fried lobster


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

white bait with chips


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Nuremberg forest gateau


 


frogwoman said:


> Schutzstaffel pancakes


 


frogwoman said:


> Tattoo-ini with fried lobster


 
That's not fair, you're reading that from a bleedin' cookbook!


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 20, 2012)

Seeing as we're having all this food I vote we also have a similarly-themed film to watch. I suggest the low-budget German 'specialist' epic entitled 'Schindler's Fist.'


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> You know the fuckin worst thing about all this. I've only seen two mentions of Southbank in the msm...despite its status as economic basketcase and all round hellhole... first one was the Asbo boy 'scandal'...remember the 9 year old lad who broke the record?
> 
> Then this piece of shite...
> 
> ...


 
I don't get why it's not mentioned more, either. I grew up in Park End and while _that's _not the best place in the world (you'll probably say it's as bad as Grangetown now, and I was unaware as I lived there), even I was shocked when I saw the state of South Bank etc. I did my driving lessons around there practicing three-point turns and emergency stops, and remember being just shocked at how run down the place was.

Then I had a similar experience the first (and only) time I went to Port Clarence. When you and C66 were talking about where he lived earlier, I was wondering if he was going to say Port Clarence and had to Google it to see if it even existed these days. Apparently it does, but it sounds even worse than I remember. There's was a house for sale for £750 only two months ago...and the owner was unsure it would sell so was considering making it a buy one get one free deal. 

Since moving away, the scale of poverty in the area has been revealed to me, and it makes me sad. And no one's talking about it.


----------



## BigTom (Dec 20, 2012)

Well, that was an apology from Laurie in there.. the whole letter (and that she posted it publicly here) has just left me feeling like I have absolutely no understanding of how Laurie thinks though, can't believe how patronising she is when she says "All you needed to do, and this is very, very important, was treat me like a human being." urgh.

It's still a shame that she hasn't read the thread or is choosing to misrepresent what it is. For people coming here, it's worth having a look backwards from page 208 to find the cartoon that firky posted and read the thread's reaction to it (I don't know what page it was, I know Laurie came here on page 208 as a result of that cartoon). You could also search for a post by Articul8 about Deborah Orr, though I don't think he mentions her name, and then read through the ensuing bunfight as people call out and challenge his comment. There are plenty of examples of sexist/mysogynistic comments on this thread, those are the two I can remember. I'm confident that most if not all of the comments made have been challenged by multiple posters on this thread, as they generally are around the rest of the boards.
Even if we ignore the derails, a lot of this thread isn't about Laurie, but is about other people in similar positions of privilege - Ellie Mae O'Hagan, Sunny Hundal & Owen Jones spring to mind - but as Laurie is the most prominent (and tbf archetypal) example, she's been most prominent in this thread.
It's not about women with a platform. It's about private school, oxbridge educated, middle-class people entirely dominating the platform and then representing themselves (or being represented as) the voice of the working class / voice of the generation or whatever. It's about how the elite reproduces itself through the structures of privilege embedded particularly within Oxbridge, how that affects the narrative/hegemony/discussion/whatever around politics, dissent, activism and so on.
Personally as someone who is a gnats whisker away from the same stuff - middle class, state school, rejected at interview from oxford PPE* but went to redbrick, Russell group Birmingham Uni instead which is equally concerned with the transmission of privilege - this thread has been really interesting for me to read as it's made me realise many things about my own privilege even though cos I never went into politics I've never really taken advantage of it.

I don't know about identity politics, I'm not going to take a position on that, but I find it sad that someone who is so concerned about privilege etc doesn't want to engage with a thread that has - amongst the abuse, the challenges to the abuse, the massive derails, the bunfights about the labour party and everything else - really taken an interesting look at the nature of privilege in the media and how it is transmitted, how the elite reproduces itself in a pretty much natural, unguided, structural manner.

*somewhere there is a nightmare parallel universe where I got accepted to Oxford and am now a scummy left of centre Lib Dem MP. Think Tim Farron or Vince Cable, not even the marginal integrity of Charles Kennedy to vote against the coalition. Sometime I hope to invent some kind of universe jumping machine and go and assassinate that version of me.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 20, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:
			
		

> Me and Citizen66 are going to go down the Cowpen together soon, to see the pole dancers



it's closed I think.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 20, 2012)

That's a great post Tom. And yeah, although she was possibly _never_ going to engage with the serious thread running through the, um, thread, it has at least for me & I suspect most on here been very enlightening and informative on some of the reasons why there seem to be plenty of people with varying readerships queuing up to speak for and about us, but not so many to us, let alone from us.


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 20, 2012)

smokedout said:


> she was going mental about this thread on facebook btw, more or less accusing urban75 of being a hate site


 
It must be getting lonely up there for Penny on that plinth.

As if it even needs to be said, in an internet full of racist/sexist/homophobic and reactionary right-wing shite, urban is one of few places I've ever found myself at home. Like any forum, urban has a large membership and so there's always going to be dicks, but the culture here is that any such behaviour is overwhelmingly called out. For example, on my pet issue of trans related bigotry, I was really heartened recently to see so many people calling out some shit recently from a poster and action taken.

That should never be confused with what is robust discussion where all facets of politics, left or right are heavily analysed and critiqued. Whether its the proliferation of identity politics, the liberal left, shades of anarchism, the SWP or the IWCA, it's all for discussion here - but shouting down positions for them being racist/sexist/etc. (to those once involved in the AFA/RA of all people ffs!) without barely taking time to understand them, or just picking out certain things that have been said because they automatically suit personal/political prejudices (as Penny has done here imo) and then using that to refuse to actively engage with anything else that has been said is what has really riled here.

But its the use of their privilege that really gets peoples backs up, especially for those of us here, many who are engaged and have been engaged in all manner of grassroots working class and left activism. And one where those of us do so without enjoying the privileged platform of writing for, and being payrolled by left-leaning and national media outlets in which to do it.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 20, 2012)

That's the difference between the "doing" left and the "so-called" left. THEY _get things done._


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 20, 2012)

They can fuck off.


----------



## co-op (Dec 20, 2012)

Can someone point me in the direction of *that* cartoon? I've followed the thread more or less from the start but I must have checked out at some point and missed it.

[/disaster tourist mode]


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

It's really not that interesting.


----------



## co-op (Dec 20, 2012)

chilango said:


> It's really not that interesting.


 
I want to wallow in the misogyny. It's the only reason I look at U75.


----------



## BigTom (Dec 20, 2012)

co-op said:


> I want to wallow in the misogyny. It's the only reason I look at U75.


 
work backwards from p208, Firky posted it if you search and look through his posts it might be quickest.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 20, 2012)

co-op said:


> Can someone point me in the direction of *that* cartoon? I've followed the thread more or less from the start but I must have checked out at some point and missed it.
> 
> [/disaster tourist mode]


 
From page 206.


----------



## rekil (Dec 20, 2012)

"7" looks a bit like a T and "5" looks a bit like "S".

If you take the "7" from urban75, and shunt it alllll the way to the (so-called) left (thanks dave, really), you get "7urban5".

TURBANS

!

Now things get interesting. A turban is a man's headdress, worn esp by muslims, hindus, sikhs, and ironic tryhards - forrin blokes basically. Now I don't know whether editor is an even bigger racist and sexist than the rest of us (thanks again dave, really) but at the very least, it all looks a bit passive aggressive dodgy doesn't it?

Makes you think.

Need to do more research as they say on the lizardfighter forums.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

copliker said:


> "7" looks a bit like a T and "5" looks a bit like "S".
> 
> If you take the "7" from urban75, and shunt it alllll the way to the (so-called) left (thanks dave, really), you get "7urban5".
> 
> ...


Didn't storm front used to refer to u75 as such?


----------



## rekil (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> Didn't storm front used to refer to u75 as such?


It's all coming together.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

Regarding the document that was proposed as an article/dossier made from the best bits of this thread...I'd love it if something like that was made, as this thread has been pretty educational for me, and I've only been reading since just before the cartoon.  I'm sure other people would find it useful.  Obviously I couldn't make the thing  as I'm don't have the skillz, but collectively it shouldn't be a problem for those on here who've been following this thread for a while.

So how about a wiki or Google docs type setup, where people could update it as they go?  It would seem less of a task then, and even people like me could help by sifting through the off-topic stuff in here and putting it into a time-line or whatever on the doc/wiki.  Then if someone wants to flesh out a particular bullet point, off they go.  You all know how wikis work, so I don't think this explanation was necessary.  Just a suggestion on how to kick things off, really...

It's New Nu Media Web 2.0 Citizen Journalism and I'm sure the Twitterati would find it particular annoying if it trended amongst 'their' network.


----------



## Random (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> So how about a wiki or Google docs type setup, where people could update it as they go?  It would seem less of a task then, and even people like me could help by sifting through the off-topic stuff in here and putting it into a time-line or whatever on the doc/wiki.  Then if someone wants to flesh out a particular bullet point, off they go.  You all know how wikis work, so I don't think this explanation was necessary.  Just a suggestion on how to kick things off, really...


 TBH I think that would guarantee that it wouldn't get done. Death by committee becomes death by wiki.

Maybe someone could be the author, and others could help by taking on a chunk of 50 pages and c+ping the best bits to them?


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

Random said:


> TBH I think that would guarantee that it wouldn't get done. Death by committee becomes death by wiki.
> 
> Maybe someone could be the author, and others could help by taking on a chunk of 50 pages and c+ping the best bits to them?


 
I see your point, but I reckon wikis DO work.  As I said, I'd be willing to help out on the collating side, but wouldn't feel confident writing.  Others no doubt feel the same.  And with a wiki, there's no waiting for the author to finish...it's up, there, informing people who search for LP, et al, who might also contribute.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Can anyone tell me what skype is? It says something about internet calls when I google it - does that mean on your computer or is it on the phone but using the internet's cables or summat?


----------



## weepiper (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Can anyone tell me what skype is? It says something about internet calls when I google it - *does that mean on your computer* or is it on the phone but using the internet's cables or summat?


 
Basically. Online video conferencing call. You need a webcam and a microphone then you download Skype and you can talk to people on your computer for free.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 20, 2012)

Phone calls on your computer over the internet. Often with webcam.


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

firky's cartoon gets a mention in the telegraph in a 'in defence of laurie penny' article



> People have threatened and insulted her in the very worst terms, and have even gone so far as to post cartoons of her being abused and beaten up......
> 
> ... few get it as badly as Laurie Penny. The fact that anonymous "haters" can spew out such sexually aggressive, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, cowardly, illiterate garbage – to quote the lyrics of that excellent song, which everybody should listen to – with impunity is surely a failure of our society.


 
tables once again turned, laurie ever the victim, once again, the oxford university educated circle closes ranks and defends its own privilege, elitism and right to spout shite without reply

hate to say it firky, but i did tell you it would end up like this


----------



## gosub (Dec 20, 2012)

you can do audio calls as well, thats how all the telesales calls you get from asia are cost effective, and its got its own IM.

Got quite a good app if you have a smartphone, but works best over wifi


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

'radical left wing journalist'


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 20, 2012)

ugh, I dont think I want to read it.

even more reason to write some of what's in this thread into the contents of an article


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 20, 2012)

I'm surprised that people haven't grasped that being called racist, sexist etc etc by the likes of Laura and her chums is probably a badge of honour.

As long as we have class society, you're always going to get these types attaching themselves to 'the movement' (a clue: there is no 'movement' and there may never be again; historical moment gone forever etc.) Some of them probably mean well. They're not going to go away just because a few people dedicate themselves to slagging them off (although I'm not saying people shouldn't do it if that's what they want-it can be highly entertaining.) They're not even addressing the same audience as most of those getting so animated on here.


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> ugh, I dont think I want to read it.
> 
> even more reason to write some of what's in this thread into the contents of an article


and all the comments on that telegraph article are from the point of view that the likes of penny are stereotypical of the left (which i guess they are now, but you know what i mean), that's why she and her type are so fucking corrosive when they become established in this way and debilitate what little is left of left credibility outside of its shitty little ghetto


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> firky's cartoon gets a mention in the telegraph in a 'in defence of laurie penny' article...the oxford university educated circle closes ranks and defends its own privilege, elitism and right to spout shite without reply


 
Well I never!



> Born in London in 1978, Jake graduated with a first in English from St Peter’s College, Oxford, and went on to receive a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Jake is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts, and a Visiting Fellow at Bournemouth University.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> and all the comments on that telegraph article are from the point of view that the likes of penny are stereotypical of the left (which i guess they are now, but you know what i mean), that's why she and her type are so fucking corrosive when they become established in this way and debilitate what little is left of left credibility outside of its shitty little ghetto


 

Another thing that people don't seem to have grasped: if the enemy think Laura and co. are typical of the left, what a shock it would be if another type of left, based where it really belongs, emerged while they were fighting the good fight (from the kitchen table) against the trendy liberal chatterati, and they never even noticed.

And again, it doesn't actually matter, in practical terms, what the swivel-eyed right wing anaroks fighting 'communism' on the internet say about anything or anybody. They're another bunch who are only talking to themselves.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 20, 2012)

Can somebody post a cartoon of Jake Wallis Simons being strangled to death with Michael Gove's intestines.


----------



## Dan U (Dec 20, 2012)

he mentions the incident with David Starkey which, iirc, Starkey got fucking hammered for on this sexist website.

eta - seems i got this wrong.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 20, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Well I never!


He appears to be part of that private school boosting network - former writer in residence at Bedales (the progressive wing of such anti-social behaviour of course).


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Can anyone tell me what skype is? It says something about internet calls when I google it - does that mean on your computer or is it on the phone but using the internet's cables or summat?


 
'Skype' is a company which offers a 'VOIP' - that's 'voice over internet protocol' - service. 'Skype' is also sometimes used generically, in much the same way as 'hoover' or 'poratakabin' are, to refer to all VOIP services.

Basically, instead of your phone being a tin can at one end of the telephone company's long piece of string, with the phone of the person you're calling being the other tin can, yours and their computers are the tin cans, and the whole of the internet is the string. Because you are already connected to (and paying for) the internet, the call costs nothing.

With Skype, you install a bit of software on your computer, and you register an account (for free) under a unique username, which acts much the same as a unique telephone number. You can then make calls to anyone else with a Skype account who is online at the same time as you, for free. You can make voice calls, or video calls (if you have a webcam).

You can also use the Skype system (and other VOIP systems) to access the regular telephony system - ie you can call real telephones, anywhere in the world using your computer. This costs money, because you are accessing telephone company string, but it is (in general) cheaper than just using your mobile or landline. To do this you buy credit from Skype.

Finally, you can also purchase a 'telephone number' from Skype if you want, which can be useful for a variety of reasons. People using mobiles or landlines will be able to dial that number to reach you, just like a regular telephone number.

_This has been a Public Information Post._


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Another thing that people don't seem to have grasped: if the enemy think Laura and co. are typical of the left, what a shock it would be if another type of left, based where it really belongs, emerged while they were fighting the good fight (from the kitchen table) against the trendy liberal chatterati, and they never even noticed.
> 
> And again, it doesn't actually matter, in practical terms, what the swivel-eyed right wing anaroks fighting 'communism' on the internet say about anything or anybody. They're another bunch who are only talking to themselves.


 
for something that doesn't really matter you spend a fair amount of time here telling us it doesn't really matter

you are right though, it doesn't really matter LLETSA, so why do it, it's almost as if you think it matters

(yes, i know it only takes you a minute or so to post a comment here from your kitchen in your undercrackers etc...)


----------



## Random (Dec 20, 2012)

Dan U said:


> he mentions the incident with David Starkey which, iirc, Starkey got fucking hammered for on this sexist website.


No, I don't think we agreed. After seeing the video and hearing about the Thomas Paine Society incident I've personally got a lot of sympathy for Starkey in that clash. And Penny claimed on Twitter that he "attacked" her, when it was just some finger-wagging.


----------



## Dan U (Dec 20, 2012)

Random said:


> No, I don't think we agreed. After seeing the video and hearing about the Thomas Paine Society incident I've personally got a lot of sympathy for Starkey in that clash. And Penny claimed on Twitter that he "attacked" her, when it was just some finger-wagging.


 
ok, i may have misremembered the thread.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 20, 2012)

Dan U said:


> he mentions the incident with David Starkey which, iirc, Starkey got fucking hammered for on this sexist website.


I don't think so! We helped expose the tissue of lies that Penny wove around it.


----------



## Dan U (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Can anyone tell me what skype is? It says something about internet calls when I google it - does that mean on your computer or is it on the phone but using the internet's cables or summat?


 
i know others have said what it is but Skype is brilliant if you have family or friends in far flung places. We use it to communicate for free with Australia all the time and video conferencing is great.

Also Viber is a mobile based version. If you and I both had viber on our mobiles and were on wifi we could ring and text each other for free from anywhere in the world. It is really popular in Asia and Aus but is growing over here now.

/derail


----------



## Dan U (Dec 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I don't think so! We helped expose the tissue of lies that Penny wove around it.


 
ha ha ok see my last post. i should probably read the old thread and stfu


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> for something that doesn't really matter you spend a fair amount of time here telling us it doesn't really matter
> 
> you are right though, it doesn't really matter LLETSA, so why do it, it's almost as if you think it matters
> 
> (yes, i know it only takes you a minute or so to post a comment here from your kitchen in your undercrackers etc...)


 

Compared to the dedicated anti-Lauraites, I rarely post, however. I merely feel compelled to comment now and again on this bizarre obsession with something that both doesn't matter in practical terms and can't be altered anyway, particularly when so much of the energy of the tiny numbers making up those who presumably want to change the society that produces Laura and her ilk is taken up in this way.

'The left' really fell for the great internet con. I mean, look at us, for fuck's sake


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 20, 2012)

Dan U said:
			
		

> i know others have said what it is but Skype is brilliant if you have family or friends in far flung places. We use it to communicate for free with Australia all the time and video conferencing is great.
> 
> Also Viber is a mobile based version. If you and I both had viber on our mobiles and were on wifi we could ring and text each other for free from anywhere in the world. It is really popular in Asia and Aus but is growing over here now.
> 
> /derail



you can install Skype on mobiles too.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Compared to the dedicated anti-Lauraites, I rarely post, however. I merely feel compelled to comment now and again on this bizarre obsession with something that both doesn't matter in practical terms and can't be altered anyway, particularly when so much of the energy of the tiny numbers making up those who presumably want to change the society that produces Laura and her ilk is taken up in this way.
> 
> 'The left' really fell for the great internet con. I mean, look at us, for fuck's sake


 
Who hurt you LLETSA? Who did it to you? Come on, let it out. We understand.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Compared to the dedicated anti-Lauraites, I rarely post, however. I merely feel compelled to comment now and again on this bizarre obsession with something that both doesn't matter in practical terms and can't be altered anyway, particularly when so much of the energy of the tiny numbers making up those who presumably want to change the society that produces Laura and her ilk is taken up in this way.
> 
> 'The left' really fell for the great internet con. I mean, look at us, for fuck's sake


Now and again?_ At least 250 posts_. Probably more as i can't remember all the names you've came back under.


----------



## gosub (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> and all the comments on that telegraph article are from the point of view that the likes of penny are stereotypical of the left (which i guess they are now, but you know what i mean), that's why she and her type are so fucking corrosive when they become established in this way and debilitate what little is left of left credibility outside of its shitty little ghetto


 

thought this comment was spot on:



​*bugalugs*
25 minutes ago

And isn't it a damning indictment of the Left in Britain today that a vapid posturing, infant ex-public schoolgirl like Penny could be considered one of the 100 'most influential'?


----------



## editor (Dec 20, 2012)

I thought this was worth posting again in case anyone missed it (sorry if it's been pea-roasted into infinity).


----------



## rekil (Dec 20, 2012)

killer b said:


> 'radical left wing journalist'


He forgot to add "with unique access" to the saucy riotbabe scene.


> What drags me to the scene of any riot, to any interesting protest currently ongoing, is not just politics, nor thrill-seeking: it's chasing a story that the mainstream press are still not telling properly yet, chasing a an important story, a story to which I currently have unique access as a young person within the movement.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> 'What drags me to the scene of
> Do you think if somebody could just point out that 'the movement' is only imaginary, all this could be cleared up?



If one desires to adorn a mask and post incognito it helps if one doesn't blow their cover by continuing to drag their hobby horse wherever they go.


----------



## gosub (Dec 20, 2012)

comment posted on http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/j...117/in-defence-of-laurie-penny/#disqus_thread

that might want to be recommended


*MentalStudent*
7 minutes ago

Laurie Penny is not above dishing it out herself, such as smearing well known anti-fascist activists as racist, then dismissing all critics as sexist.
http://sabcat.com/disagreeing-...


----------



## rekil (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> ​Do you think if somebody could just point out that 'the movement' is only imaginary, all this could be cleared up?​


Yeah, why hasn't someone thought about doing this?


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Compared to the dedicated anti-Lauraites, I rarely post, however. I merely feel compelled to comment now and again on this bizarre obsession with something that both doesn't matter in practical terms and can't be altered anyway, particularly when so much of the energy of the tiny numbers making up those who presumably want to change the society that produces Laura and her ilk is taken up in this way.
> 
> 'The left' really fell for the great internet con. I mean, look at us, for fuck's sake


 
you keep telling us how little effort it takes you to post here to tell us how it never matters, yet you've posted more times on this thread than I have, yet you moan about how much energy is taken up by, i presume, people like me posting about her

you've taken up more effort here posting about us posting about her than I have posting here about her - so don't get so het up about the 'energy' that is 'taken up' doing this by others, shift some of that concern onto your own 'energy' that is being 'taken up' whinging about it


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> What mask?



If you're not LLETSA you should seek work as his body double.


----------



## Red Storm (Dec 20, 2012)

editor said:


> I thought this was worth posting again in case anyone missed it (sorry if it's been pea-roasted into infinity).




Starkey is a dick and is a dick on that video but I think LP comes across as a bit of a whopper on there.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

> Leveson famously said that, "Some have called [the internet] a 'wild west' but I would prefer to use the term 'ethical vacuum'". He was a bit slow on the uptake, of course, but he was certainly right. Instances of cyber-bullying, such as that of Jessi Slaughter – the 11-year-old girl who was destroyed by hoards of online "haters" – are on the rise, and it seems there is little anybody can do about it. For journalists, coping with negative attention on the internet has become par for the course, unless one is writing solely about sugared almonds. I've been targeted a couple of times myself; I think everybody has.


 
Anybody in the press mentioning levenson outside of context must be killed. There should be a private eye feature on this, like 'warballs'.

Also, he whines like a mule. Oh the internets bullying me. Bringing up a 4chan case as well. Thats like judging the standard of discourse at the bar by using the bog wall graffiti as a guide.


----------



## rekil (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> It's basically ghosts combatting phantoms in a void.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> I don't think I have, but it doesn't matter. It's just that I'm starting to get a bit concerned, like you would about a neighbour who you don't really know but can't help noticing has started behaving a bit oddly.


 
Thank you for your concerns, which have been duly noted.


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> I don't think I have, but it doesn't matter. It's just that I'm starting to get a bit concerned, like you would about a neighbour who you don't really know but can't help noticing has started behaving a bit oddly.


 
well if you want to split hairs, you've posted 250ish under two of the names I know you under, and me 280ish - so if you want to make a case that these 30 posts makes the differences between a lot of energy being exerted by me that concerns you and minimal effort taken up by you to do so then fair enough, seems fairly absurd suggestion to me though


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

through the window and have away with the pension book sam


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 20, 2012)

There is no door, it is a phantom door.

And knocking on it wouldn't make any difference anyway because nobody would hear.

And if they did, it would be pointless.


----------



## Random (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> What do you think I should do, though? Knock on the door or just phone Social Services?


Take us out of ourselves, jolly us up by posting some really hard-hitting political threads.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Burning rag through the letterbox one night, then?


 
There is no letterbox, it is a phantom letterbox.

Or a rag.

Or fire.

And even if there were, it would all be pointless anyway.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

pmsl


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Who said I wasn't LLETSA?



You asked earlier 'who is LLETSA' which is a strange question if it is actually yourself.


----------



## Random (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> The thing is-this IS the hard-hitting political thread. Barrel scraped entirely clean any day now.


Come on. Stop being a whinging parasite and actually contribute something.


----------



## rekil (Dec 20, 2012)

Starkey walking like an egyptian is one of the best bits of the whole thread.


----------



## gosub (Dec 20, 2012)

Red Storm said:


> Starkey is a dick and is a dick on that video but I think LP comes across as a bit of a whopper on there.


Needs the accompany tweets for full effect. Along the lines of poor little old me just got attacked. iirc implied she had been physically attacked and it was entirely unprovoked.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

To be fair to LLETSA/Sam, it is a lot less effort what he's doing, even if he makes more posts.  You can almost copy paste the responses.  The left is dead; this is all pointless; why are you wasting your time on it?

I'm not sure what is wanted, though?  Give up on 'the left' completely?  Stop talking about stuff because we can't change it, so just go along for the ride?


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

gosub said:


> Needs the accompany tweets for full effect. Along the lines of poor little old me just got attacked. iirc implied she had been physically attacked and it was entirely unprovoked.


 
The way she was trying to respond at the end was just like when you know someone's lying.  She was desperately trying to come up with something to say that would put Starkey in the wrong, and her in the right, and the audience were having none of it.

She's a joke.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 20, 2012)

She'd had time to think it through on her second bite at it. First time she was caught on the back foot.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> 'Skype' is a company which offers a 'VOIP' - that's 'voice over internet protocol' - service. 'Skype' is also sometimes used generically, in much the same way as 'hoover' or 'poratakabin' are, to refer to all VOIP services.
> 
> Basically, instead of your phone being a tin can at one end of the telephone company's long piece of string, with the phone of the person you're calling being the other tin can, yours and their computers are the tin cans, and the whole of the internet is the string. Because you are already connected to (and paying for) the internet, the call costs nothing.
> 
> ...


 
Fucking hell - don't think I'll bother with that - I still haven't really sussed twitter out yet.


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> This is the thing, though-I don't want to split hairs. (I can't believe you've counted though; has to go down with the ref's compliation of all the times I've claimed to have been misinterpreted.)


 
took about two clicks and about 20 seconds to find out using the search function - i know you're concerned about that 'energy' being 'taken up' (what exactly do you think are the alternatives that energy could be put to use to out of interest, given your somewhat pessimistic outlook on what is and what isn't possible politically these days) but come on, we all have radical downtime that we like to spend in ways that suits ourselves, stop trying to police how it's spent with your 'concerns'


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> The way she was trying to respond at the end was just like when you know someone's lying. She was desperately trying to come up with something to say that would put Starkey in the wrong, and her in the right, and the audience were having none of it.
> 
> She's a joke.


 
Reminds me of Asher D's merking at the hands of The Stigosaurus


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> The thing is-this IS the hard-hitting political thread. Barrel scraped entirely clean any day now.


 
which you've spend roughly the same time on as I have, yet you keep asking me why i spend so much time on it


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 20, 2012)

Citizen66 said:


> You asked earlier 'who is LLETSA' which is a strange question if it is actually yourself.


 
Never mind.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Fucking hell - don't think I'll bother with that - I still haven't really sussed twitter out yet.


 

skypes easy, a simpleton can master it- i am living proof of this. My nan is in her dotage and knows how to use skype. Its way easier than twitter to work out. Less banal as well.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 20, 2012)

I can see why the mods banned you now tbh you thread-shitting bastard


----------



## rekil (Dec 20, 2012)

Reminder of post #3354, the Karl-Liebknecht-haus genossen predicting dave's attack on antifascists 80 years before it happened. Very prescient.



(click to enlarge obv)


----------



## dennisr (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> What do you do when it's all been said already, and better?


well piss off then


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> Didn't storm front used to refer to u75 as such?


 
I thought they mostly just called us "red cunts" and the like.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 20, 2012)

Goloden is silence?


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Oh no, you've gone all serious, like the ref.
> 
> It's all a bit like that old kids' TV series, Children of the Stones.


 
if serious means replying to your increasingly obsessive obsession with our obsession then yes i suppose I have - see what you've gone and made me do now


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> What do you do when it's all been said already, and better?


 
Reform the old band for a reunion gig featuring your greatest hits from the Red Action discussion board?


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Reminds me of Asher D's merking at the hands of The Stigosaurus




I love that video.  Never gets old.

Also  @ "merking" on a thread about the SWP and Laura Penny


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> Can somebody post a cartoon of Jake Wallis Simons being strangled to death with Michael Gove's intestines.


 
Or, better still, a photo.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> I thought they mostly just called us "red cunts" and the like.


 
Proabably a "jew" or two thrown about, too.  What's weird is the standard of debate is higher with them than LP.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 20, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Or, better still, a photo.


 
This wouldn't be a good time to scan and post some of the more choice images from my collection of nearly 200 true crime books, would it?

On the other hand, if we're thinking of preparing that most enticing dish 'roasted journo with offal' I'd be more than happy to provide an illustrated list of serving suggestions.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

Random said:


> Come on. Stop being a whinging parasite and actually contribute something.


 
Yeah, who does he think he is, Dave Barnett?


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Two of the band are now alkies and the drummer choked on his own vomt.


 
Well that would certainly explain the tedious grinding repetition of your recent output. Have you considered taking up painting instead?


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> I didn't write that article personally (had some input to it from what i remember though). I've certainly had no communication from Laurie Penny since she called me a racist for posting a link of it to her and then blocked me
> 
> I've emailed the person who did write it though to see if her story checks out, i would be amazed if it did though


 
well as expected no one has heard from her, so she has some explaining to do - check IWCA twitter page for our response to her


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 20, 2012)

Anyway....





> *IWCA* ‏@*IndependentWCA* @*PennyRed* you say here http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/alex-callinicos-swp-vs-laurie-penny-new-statesman-facebook-handbags.266196/page-283#post-11810355 … that you were in touch with writer of this http://www.iwca.info/?p=10146
> - what are initials of writer?
> 
> 
> ...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> Proabably a "jew" or two thrown about, too.


 
True, although the Judaeophobia on hard-right sites seems to come and go in waves, whereas the "red peril" is omnipresent.
They're don't use the word "liberal" as a perjorative nearly enough, either.



> What's weird is the standard of debate is higher with them than LP.


 
Most of the boneheads and their brighter siblings don't have well-paying careers to worry about, so let fly with what they actually think, rather than filtering their views through what they think their "public" would like to see.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 20, 2012)

Hey! Kids! It doesn't matter what you are - punks, skins, rastas, mods, rockers, Keith Chegwin even - everybody everywhere, stop snogging and pay attention to me! 'Cause if you're a wild-eyed loner at the gates of oblivion, then hitch a ride with us, 'cause we're riding on the last freedom moped out of nowhere, and we haven't even told our parents what time we're coming home!


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> True, although the Judaeophobia on hard-right sites seems to come and go in waves, whereas the "red peril" is omnipresent.
> They're don't use the word "liberal" as a perjorative nearly enough, either.
> 
> 
> ...


 
Correct on both accounts, of course.  Obama will be the latest threat on right-wing sites at the minute (gun control - might be worth a visit to SF for the lolz) and LP has nothing to gain by debate, so yeah...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> This wouldn't be a good time to scan and post some of the more choice images from my collection of nearly 200 true crime books, would it?


 
I had a mate who used to go up the West End (of London, you parochial types!  ) every couple of weekends, and rob Foyles' bookshop blind. He always went for illustrated true crime books (mostly US imprints) and pathology text books. He made collages of the pictures - even sold a few to fellow "black metallers". 



> On the other hand, if we're thinking of preparing that most enticing dish 'roasted journo with offal' I'd be more than happy to provide an illustrated list of serving suggestions.


 
Served with mixed vegetables _a la_ Hundal (overcooked, overwrought, bland)?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 20, 2012)

She is going to say that she was talking about the Kenan Malik article not the IWCA one.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> Hey! Kids! It doesn't matter what you are - punks, skins, rastas, mods, rockers, Keith Chegwin even - everybody everywhere, stop snogging and pay attention to me! 'Cause if you're a wild-eyed loner at the gates of oblivion, then hitch a ride with us, 'cause we're riding on the last freedom moped out of nowhere, and we haven't even told our parents what time we're coming home!


 
Ben Elton is claiming plagiarism.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Two of the band are now alkies and the drummer choked on his own vomit.
> 
> Actually, maybe I could do it on my own with backing tapes and that. Could put some drum n' bass shit on there.


 
Would have had more pathos if he'd choked on someone elses' vomit.


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> She is going to say that she was talking about the Kenan Malik article not the IWCA one.


 
actually there _might_ be an explanation, will get back in a bit


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> actually there _might_ be an explanation, will get back in a bit


Just checked and i hope she does try to say that she meant Kenan Malik as her reply last night shows this would not really be true:



> When you started trashing 'identity politics' and retweeted an article that contains, to my mind, the worst sort of left-flavoured unexamined white male privilege (the writer and I are actually engaged in a productive email discussion right now, he admits that some of what he said was wrong) I'm afraid I just lost my cool.


 
Would KM be showing "the worst sort of left-flavoured unexamined white male privilege"? Also, we can ask him.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Just checked and i hope she does try to say that she meant KM as her reply last night shows this would not really be true:
> 
> 
> 
> Would KM be showing "the worst sort of left-flavoured unexamined white male privilege"? Also, we can ask him.


 
Stop bullying her with your _reasoning_.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Well I've replied to Laurie - it's up to her if she wants to post my reply on here, but if the emails are to be copied onto here I think we might as well just cut out the email middle man and have the discussion here.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

i'll thank you not to keep linen private. Air it or else I'll have to dosomething productive with my time


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 20, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Would have had more pathos if he'd choked on someone elses' vomit.


 
It would be impossible to tell. You can't really dust for vomit.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> well as expected no one has heard from her, so she has some explaining to do - check IWCA twitter page for our response to her


link? Or what's the name of the twitter account?  NEver mind, found it.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 20, 2012)

@independentWCA i think !


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> @independentWCA i think !


Yup, cheers anyway.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> It would be impossible to tell. You can't really dust for vomit.


 
Not true. Differential comparison of vomit and stomach contents would reveal "alien" matter, and if you wanted to go as far as trace DNA in the stomach acids and enzymes, that would point up having inhaled someone else's vom too.


----------



## stuff_it (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:
			
		

> Didn't storm front used to refer to u75 as such?



You sure they weren't just being northern? T'urbans?


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 20, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Not true. Differential comparison of vomit and stomach contents would reveal "alien" matter, and if you wanted to go as far as trace DNA in the stomach acids and enzymes, that would point up having inhaled someone else's vom too.


 
But, but, that would mean the assessment of modern forensic science offered by the mighty Spinal Tap is completely wrong. How can the mighty Tap be wrong?


----------



## editor (Dec 20, 2012)

sam goloden said:


> Who said I wasn't LLETSA?


Oh, OK. I'll get banning then unless you have anything to say in your defence.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

Several people have mentioned not being able to find the cartoon which is considered by Dave to be a portrayal of violence against women... It is in fact one of those generic cartoons that has been used to portray several different situations in a funny way. I am pretty sure that it started as a PC, MAC & LINUX 'joke'. It is quite obviously a piss-take, far from being a call to arms for sexists.







Well done Firky! 

And the cartoon that it was based on... mountains and molehills spring to mind.


----------



## sam goloden (Dec 20, 2012)

editor said:


> Oh, OK. I'll get banning then unless you have anything to say in your defence.


 
No, nothing m'lud.


----------



## BigTom (Dec 20, 2012)

Well there was already a discussion about the cartoon earlier in the thread, but Firky made the cartoon specific to Laurie, even if it based on something else and she gets an immense amount of misogynistic abuse and threats her way so personally I don't think her reaction to that cartoon was making a mountain out of a molehill.

Firky's post and the ensuing discussion are from a couple of posts in on page 206 http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...w-statesman-facebook-handbags.266196/page-206


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

LLETSA's time has passed. Nothing he can do now would stop him being banned. He has lost all momentum. He may as well give up, save energy.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

BigTom said:


> Well there was already a discussion about the cartoon earlier in the thread, but Firky made the cartoon specific to Laurie, even if it based on something else and she gets an immense amount of misogynistic abuse and threats her way so personally I don't think her reaction to that cartoon was making a mountain out of a molehill.
> 
> Firky's post and the ensuing discussion are from a couple of posts in on page 206 http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...w-statesman-facebook-handbags.266196/page-206


 
I think you credit the precious little petal with a degree of sensitivity that is not apparent in her writing...

Is there any evidence of her receiving "_an immense amount of misogynistic abuse and threats"_ as a result of this cartoon?

I don't look at her twitter or facebook pages, but others here do... Please let us know how many death threats and how much sexist abuse - _as a direct result of that cartoon appearing on Urban_ - Dave has received since the cartoon was posted here. If there have been any threats at all they will surely be there?

If there has been none, there is no case to answer, because the cartoon incited nothing and was not meant to incite anything.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> Is there any evidence of her receiving "_an immense amount of misogynistic abuse and threats"_ *as a result of this cartoon*?


 
That wasn't a claim made by BigTom.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> But, but, that would mean the assessment of modern forensic science offered by the mighty Spinal Tap is completely wrong. How can the mighty Tap be wrong?


 
It's not wrong, it's out of date.


----------



## editor (Dec 20, 2012)

gosub said:


> comment posted on http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/j...117/in-defence-of-laurie-penny/#disqus_thread
> 
> that might want to be recommended
> 
> ...


It's a bit strange that the article make no mention of this thread at all.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 20, 2012)

BigTom said:


> Well there was already a discussion about the cartoon earlier in the thread, but Firky made the cartoon specific to Laurie, even if it based on something else and she gets an immense amount of misogynistic abuse and threats her way so personally I don't think her reaction to that cartoon was making a mountain out of a molehill.


 
yeah agree. She might be terrible in a whole host of ways, but she does have a right to go about her foul business without being on the recieving end of a torrent of sexist abuse. Besides, there's no shortage of legitimate reasons to criticise her and what she does, why stoop to that sort of shit?

It's the blithe dismissal of this thread, and this forum, as being a haven of misogynist abuse that pisses me off though. Because that's not what it is. Just as she dismissed the IWCA article as being racist without even taking the time to read it, or understand the context in which it was written, she's dismissed this thread and everyone here as sexist haters. It's naked contempt. I mean why should we be nice to her when she has such blatant contempt for us all?

All this conveniently excuses her from having to deal with the proper stuff, but lets be real even if there wasn't a trace of sexism present, which in a thread with thousands of replies and hundreds of participants is going to be a tall order, do you really think she'd have reacted any different? I think not.

Take saying "I work for a living" as your initial reaction to seeing this, well, if you're still lurking Laurie, i'm unemployed at the moment, and what fucking of it? How do you expect a young unemployed person, y'know one of those people you've built a career claiming to speak for, to take that comment? I didn't come from a family who could subsidise me living in London whilst I interned my way around the place for years on end. Those options were never on the table for me. Perhaps I should be working at the New Statesman on the work programme for nowt, would that be more to your liking? You can see the real public-school upbringing shine through there. Soon as a bit of criticism is applied, the pretence of radicalism drops Penny reverts back to being a sneering snob.

I don't have a lot to do with my time right now, I accept that, and no I didn't go to fucking Oxbridge, which I suppose makes me untermensh, but I'm not a sexist or a misogynist of any complexion and I've never once on here, or anywhere, engaged in sexist abuse towards her. I've challenged those who have. Not because I'm a "rimjob cunt" but on principle. And I might not be part of that ex-public school dominated London anarcho-fuckwit scene, but I'm no less of a human being for it, and my thoughts and opinions don't deserve to be written off in this way, and neither do all the other people in this thread and on this forum who've contributed in good faith, who I have far more respect for as comrades than I ever will for Laurie fucking Penny.


----------



## BigTom (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> Is there evidence of her receiving "_an immense amount of misogynistic abuse and threats"_ to her as a result of this cartoon?
> 
> I think you credit the precious little petal with a degree of sensitivity that is not apparent in her writing...


 
I'm talking about in general, not as a result of this cartoon, and yes at times if you look on twitter at the @ messages being sent to her it's been pretty nasty and openly misogynistic.

I don't know Laurie so I've no idea how she reacts to this stuff, but having someone say to you "what I want for christmas is for you to be beaten up" is not exactly pleasant is it? Whether it's actually mysogynistic or not depends on the intent of the writer, but for Laurie to perceive it as mysogynstic is totally fair imo, for her to perceive it as in some way threatening is also fair imo, even if I might just ignore it cos it's only on the internet, that's not true for everyone, and without knowing Laurie it's wrong to think she would have just shrugged this off or should have laughed it off or not seen it as mysogynistic because it's a man portrayed in the cartoon, or not seen it as a real threat cos firky is just trolling.


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

I admit I'm very curious now about whether she has further misrepresented* the position about the writer of that article. If she has, she's fucking published it here.





*just being polite


----------



## gosub (Dec 20, 2012)

editor said:


> It's a bit strange that the article make no mention of this thread at all.


not necessarily, she has more twitter followers than this board has members; could well have come across it that way


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> That wasn't a claim made by BigTom.


 
No it wasn't a claim, but he appeared to speculate that she might receive threats and abuse as a result of the cartoon...




> ...even if it based on something else and she gets an immense amount of misogynistic abuse and threats her way so personally I don't think her reaction to that cartoon was making a mountain out of a molehill.


 
Is it Laurie herself who is claiming that the cartoon is designed specifically to invite people to abuse her and threaten her, or are people here actually swallowing this attention seeking _'infamy infamy'_ shite from her?

As I said in another post, she is an ingenue, a little actress well-versed in the practice of political hysterics and overreaction.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

BigTom said:


> I'm talking about in general, not as a result of this cartoon, and yes at times if you look on twitter at the @ messages being sent to her it's been pretty nasty and openly misogynistic.
> 
> I don't know Laurie so I've no idea how she reacts to this stuff, but having someone say to you "what I want for christmas is for you to be beaten up" is not exactly pleasant is it? Whether it's actually mysogynistic or not depends on the intent of the writer, but for Laurie to perceive it as mysogynstic is totally fair imo, for her to perceive it as in some way threatening is also fair imo, even if I might just ignore it cos it's only on the internet, that's not true for everyone, and without knowing Laurie it's wrong to think she would have just shrugged this off or should have laughed it off or not seen it as mysogynistic because it's a man portrayed in the cartoon, or not seen it as a real threat cos firky is just trolling.


 

 I have no doubt that she does receive a lot of personal abuse, primarily as a result of some of her very poor writing.

What I am asking you is to please specify those threats made against her that can be directly attributed to the 'incitement' of this cartoon?


----------



## BigTom (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> No it wasn't a claim, but he appeared to speculate that she might receive threats and abuse as a result of the cartoon...
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Yeah well you've gone back and edited posts now, but that isn't what I was saying, that isn't what I thought you were meaning, you commented on the cartoon itself saying it wasn't specifically at laurie penny, when it clearly is. Just to be clear, I don't think that cartoon has generated any/much misogynistic abuse, and I don't think it was intended to. In your post as it was, and tbh as it has been edited, I took you to be saying that her reaction to the cartoon, saying it was misogynistic and abusive, was over the top. If I've misunderstood that then obviously my posts aren't really in response to what you were saying.

edit: was writing this as you posted above


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

BigTom said:


> Yeah well you've gone back and edited posts now, but that isn't what I was saying, that isn't what I thought you were meaning, you commented on the cartoon itself saying it wasn't specifically at laurie penny, when it clearly is. Just to be clear, I don't think that cartoon has generated any/much misogynistic abuse, and I don't think it was intended to. In your post as it was, and tbh as it has been edited, I took you to be saying that her reaction to the cartoon, saying it was misogynistic and abusive, was over the top. If I've misunderstood that then obviously my posts aren't really in response to what you were saying.
> 
> edit: was writing this as you posted above


 

I think her reaction to the cartoon was calculated, I don't believe for a moment that she felt threatened or intimidated by us. That is borne out, to an extent, by the fact that she came here and engaged in discussion after, and largely a a result of, the offending image being posted.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> I have no doubt that she does receive a lot of personal abuse, primarily as a result of some of her very poor writing.


 
to be honest, if you read a few of her articles and look at the comments attached, there's a lot of it sees to be because she is a) a lefty,and  b) an woman talking about sexism .  And there's a lot of really unpleasant stuff that i've seen that i think justifies her paranoia a little bit.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

More support from the media elite, this time Daniel Finkelstein (LSE, not Oxbridge!)

https://twitter.com/Dannythefink/status/281764761044131840


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 20, 2012)

Oh you just wait 'til the rest of the alumni start circling the wagons. This is nowt

They'll all drop their political differences when it comes to sticking up for their mates. The Daily Telegraph rushing to the defense of Laurie Penny? She'll be editing it within a decade.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

I would like to get Laurie back on here to answer everyone's questions. I think she could learn a fair bit if she does that and I dare say there's a thing or two I and others on here can learn from her. But she's never going to do that while people are defending that cartoon. I agree that it wasn't a genuine threat of violence and that Firky didn't intend to intimidate her but I also think it's plausible, considering the crap she gets from the right and the fact that she doesn't know the kind of character Firky is, that she honestly took it to be so.

I'd quite like to get her back on here to answer some of the questions put to her but she's not going to do that if it doesn't look like people are being fair with her.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

I can't remember Dave making any complaints about this image, which actually does have her face on it and is quite obviously a piss-take from Sabcat, who I suspect are not run off their feet printing _Penny Red_ T-shirts. Despite providing a mugshot of Laurie for every wannabe attacker and potential sexist abuser, there have been no complaints from her. Does she think that this is a loving tribute to her work, or is there no political mileage for her in complaining about this one?







*Laurie Penny Red T-Shirt*

*From: £14.50*
*DESCRIPTION*

Laurie Penny goes to protests, she can get the internet on her phone and she tells us what the police are doing.  She once called someone a cunt and because she’s a keen stamp collector her twitter username is @pennyred and now just like Che everyone’s going to be wearing a Laurie Penny T-shirt.
http://sabcat.com/product/laurie-penny-red-t-shirt/


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I would like to get Laurie back on here to answer everyone's questions. I think she could learn a fair bit if she does that and I dare say there's a thing or two I and others on here can learn from her. But she's never going to do that while people are defending that cartoon. I agree that it wasn't a genuine threat of violence and that Firky didn't intend to intimidate her but I also think it's plausible, considering the crap she gets from the right and the fact that she doesn't know the kind of character Firky is, that she honestly took it to be so.
> 
> I'd quite like to get her back on here to answer some of the questions put to her but she's not going to do that if it doesn't look like people are being fair with her.


She's not gonna do that fair or no fair, it's just not how she works. She knows she can't bullshit her way out of the stuff that's been collated here, so why bother? There's nothing in it for her being here.


----------



## poului (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> More support from the media elite, _*this time Daniel Finkelstein*_ (LSE, not Oxbridge!)


 
If you were doing even half a decent job as a left-wing commentator then people like Daniel Finkelstein would loathe every inch of your being. Jesus wept.


----------



## BigTom (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> I think her reaction to the cartoon was calculated, I don't believe for a moment that she felt threatened or intimidated by us. That is borne out, to an extent, by the fact that she came here and engaged in discussion after, and largely a a result of, the offending image being posted.


 
I can't say this isn't a possibility, or even that it's not likely. I just reckon that stuff like this can get on top of people pretty easily over time,and her immediate reaction to the cartoon could go like that imo without it being calculated, and for whatever reason I'm tending to give her the benefit of the doubt over that, partly just cos I think it's a bit out of order to tell anyone what you want for christmas is them to be beaten up unless you know they are going to know it's a joke.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 20, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> *Take saying "I work for a living" as your initial reaction to seeing this, well, if you're still lurking Laurie, i'm unemployed at the moment, and what fucking of it?*
> 
> 
> *How do you expect a young unemployed person, y'know one of those people you've built a career claiming to speak for, to take that comment?*
> ...


 
Down to brass tacks.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> to be honest, if you read a few of her articles and look at the comments attached, there's a lot of it sees to be because she is a) a lefty,and b) an woman talking about sexism . And there's a lot of really unpleasant stuff that i've seen that i think justifies her paranoia a little bit.


 
Okay, it's par for the course that prominent (even self-promoted) people on the left would receive threats and abuse from the usual suspects, but can any of the abuse and threats be attributed as a direct result of any words or images posted on this board or thread?


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I would like to get Laurie back on here to answer everyone's questions. I think she could learn a fair bit if she does that and I dare say there's a thing or two I and others on here can learn from her. But she's never going to do that while people are defending that cartoon. I agree that it wasn't a genuine threat of violence and that Firky didn't intend to intimidate her but I also think it's plausible, considering the crap she gets from the right and the fact that she doesn't know the kind of character Firky is, that she honestly took it to be so.
> 
> I'd quite like to get her back on here to answer some of the questions put to her but she's not going to do that if it doesn't look like people are being fair with her.


 
Put yourself in her shoes, with her motivations.  What does she have to gain by coming back?  Nothing.  She's already seen as the oppressed underdog in this little spat, and she has right-wing columnists falling over themselves to support her.  She doesn't give a shit about class politics, which is all anyone here wants to 'educate' her in.  She's obsessed with identity politics, which a lot of people here would like her to tone down.  She's totally sorted.  Exactly where she wants to be.  Coming here can only harm her (in her eyes).


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 20, 2012)

editor said:


> It's a bit strange that the article make no mention of this thread at all.



Ergo 'MentalStudent' is a poster (or reader) of here.


----------



## poului (Dec 20, 2012)

poului said:


> If you were doing even half a decent job as a left-wing commentator then people like Daniel Finkelstein would loathe every inch of your being. Jesus wept.


 
I seem to recall a similarly nauseating display of backslapping when she was up against _The Mensch formally known as Bagshawe_ on Newsnight. Absolutely no edge at all.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 20, 2012)

poului said:


> I seem to recall a similarly nauseating display of backslapping when she was up against _The Mensch formally known as Bagshawe_ on Newsnight. Absolutely no edge at all.


 
They know to stick up for their own.


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I would like to get Laurie back on here to answer everyone's questions. I think she could learn a fair bit if she does that and I dare say there's a thing or two I and others on here can learn from her. But she's never going to do that while people are defending that cartoon. I agree that it wasn't a genuine threat of violence and that Firky didn't intend to intimidate her but I also think it's plausible, considering the crap she gets from the right and the fact that she doesn't know the kind of character Firky is, that she honestly took it to be so.
> 
> I'd quite like to get her back on here to answer some of the questions put to her but she's not going to do that if it doesn't look like people are being fair with her.



Personally I don't give a damn whether she comes back or not.

But, if she has any genuine commitment to left-wing politics/protest/radicalism then it is in her interests to do so. She has a lot to learn, and the collective experience here dwarfs anything else she has been exposed to.

As for being fair? Well I agree there are plenty of posts here that are, at best, in poor taste. At worst both offensive and counter-productive. But so what? They don't go unchallenged, and they certainly don't represent the consensus or the main themes of the debate.

If she wants to be either a successful journo or an effective protester she needs to toughen the fuck up frankly. There's real violence and hate out there in real life, and sadly plenty directed at people like her (or at least people like who she seems to aspire to be).

But that's all for her to decide.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 20, 2012)

She might learn something from the exchange with Spiney though, you never know.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> Put yourself in her shoes, with her motivations. What does she have to gain by coming back? Nothing. She's already seen as the oppressed underdog in this little spat, and she has right-wing columnists falling over themselves to support her. She doesn't give a shit about class politics, which is all anyone here wants to 'educate' her in. She's obsessed with identity politics, which a lot of people here would like her to tone down. She's totally sorted. Exactly where she wants to be. Coming here can only harm her (in her eyes).


 
And if she wants to prove you wrong, if she wants to show that she's more concerned about what genuine grass roots activists with genuinely impressive political CVs think about her than right wing columnists, then she knows what she needs to do doesn't she?


----------



## poului (Dec 20, 2012)

_Man up, Penny!_


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> And if she wants to prove you wrong, if she wants to show that she's more concerned about what genuine grass roots activists with genuinely impressive political CVs think about her than right wing columnists, then she knows what she needs to do doesn't she?


You mean write another column for the NS?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> Okay, it's par for the course that prominent (even self-promoted) people on the left would receive threats and abuse from the usual suspects, but can any of the abuse and threats be attributed as a direct result of any words or images posted on this board or thread?


 
not that i'm aware of.  i hope none of our posters are right-wing women-hating rape advocates.


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> She might learn something from the exchange with Spiney though, you never know.



So long as she learns that he isn't racist or a sexist bully and is willing to acknowledge this and give Spiney he apology he deserves then that's all I'd want from that exchange.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 20, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> How do you expect a young unemployed person, y'know one of those people you've built a career claiming to speak for, to take that comment?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 20, 2012)

although there is the argument that such piss-taking creates a culture in which the right-wing women-hating rape advocate feels more powerful, believing that if everyone on the left hates her then their behaviour won't be challenged.  given urban's legendary tolerance for right-wing women-hating rape advocates i think that argument can be safely put to bed now.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> not that i'm aware of. i hope none of our posters are right-wing women-hating rape advocates.


 
Which is exactly my point about her overreaction to the cartoon that appeared here. Everything she does is calculated imho. The cartoon has incited nothing against her, but it did give her a convenient point around which to rally support on her Twitter and Facebook accounts and even managed to elicit the sympathy of a right-wing commentator who mentioned the cartoon but not its source in the Telegraph.

The 'offensive cartoon' is simply another means by which Laurie can promote herself...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

TruXta said:


> She's not gonna do that fair or no fair, it's just not how she works. She knows she can't bullshit her way out of the stuff that's been collated here, so why bother? There's nothing in it for her being here.


 
Maybe you're wrong and maybe she can prove you wrong by coming back on here and answering some of those questions. The ball's in her court isn't it? Does she want to side with right wing journalists or does she want to side with the working class activists who're supposed to be on the same side?


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> And if she wants to prove you wrong, if she wants to show that she's more concerned about what genuine grass roots activists with genuinely impressive political CVs think about her than right wing columnists, then she knows what she needs to do doesn't she?


 
Yeah, but I think she _can't_, even if she wanted to.  She's too invested in what she's already said (I almost said achieved and then realised that's how she'd frame her writing: as achievements  ).  If you get to be '55th most influential person on the left', you can't suddenly say, "I was wrong.  I went on a message board and talked to some people and I realised I wasn't speaking for the people I claimed I was representing."  The about-face would be damaging enough, but the admission that her whole political career so far has been built on rubbish?  She just _couldn't_ do it.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Maybe you're wrong and maybe she can prove you wrong by coming back on here and answering some of those questions. The ball's in her court isn't it? Does she want to side with right wing journalists or does she want to side with the working class activists who're supposed to be on the same side?


Ball's in her court but it's obvious she's not playing ball anymore.


----------



## Red Storm (Dec 20, 2012)

LP said:
			
		

> Why is it that thinkers on left and right seem happy to be called 'sexist' - but when 'racism' is mentioned they explode + threaten to sue?


 
Has this tweet been picked up? Thread is moving so fast I can't keep up.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> Yeah, but I think she _can't_, even if she wanted to. She's too invested in what she's already said (I almost said achieved and then realised that's how she'd frame her writing: as achievements  ). If you get to be '55th most influential person on the left', you can't suddenly say, "I was wrong. I went on a message board and talked to some people and I realised I wasn't speaking for the people I claimed I was representing." The about-face would be damaging enough, but the admission that her whole political career so far has been built on rubbish? She just _couldn't_ do it.


 
That looks like a challenge to me.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 20, 2012)

Red Storm said:


> Has this tweet been picked up? Thread is moving so fast I can't keep up.


Yes, way, way upthread


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> Yeah, but I think she _can't_, even if she wanted to.  She's too invested in what she's already said (I almost said achieved and then realised that's how she'd frame her writing: as achievements  ).  If you get to be '55th most influential person on the left', you can't suddenly say, "I was wrong.  I went on a message board and talked to some people and I realised I wasn't speaking for the people I claimed I was representing."  The about-face would be damaging enough, but the admission that her whole political career so far has been built on rubbish?  She just _couldn't_ do it.



I'm curious as to who exactly she is supposed to be an influence upon? It isn't anyone I've ever met.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

chilango said:


> I'm curious as to who exactly she is supposed to be an influence upon? It isn't anyone I've ever met.


The media.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 20, 2012)

chilango said:


> I'm curious as to who exactly she is supposed to be an influence upon? It isn't anyone I've ever met.


 
LIBERALS. And students. 

Nah, she's just very convenient for right-wingers, in that they can dismiss any political comment, thought or writer as being just like her.


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> The media.



How? In what way?

What difference have her musings made? Even within the bubble?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

I have to say that if I found Daniel Finkelstein and and Jake Wallis Simons fighting my corner against seasoned working class campaigners I'd be asking myself serious questions.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Especially as you'd have thought, under normal circumstances, they'd be far more likely to want to write about unfounded accusations of racism and misogyny (pc gawn mad etc) than about an exceedingly silly cartoon.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

chilango said:


> How? In what way?
> 
> What difference have her musings made? Even within the bubble?


 
Someone mentioned it earlier in this thread, but if she becomes THE face of the left, then what she says is de facto the left position*.  So the challenge to right wing viewpoints comes from a weak position in which class is never an issue.  You might argue that's the case now, but if crap privilege politics is cemented as the only way to express left wing views, then anything further to the left (real class politics) becomes extremism/loony left.

*whoever mentioned this earlier thought it might be a good thing, but I'm not convinced.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Very strange, too, that they've never felt the need to comment on the far, far worse things that turn up on Laurie's twitter feed. It's almost as if they're using her as a tool to attack the left isn't it? Of course I'm not cynical enough to believe that but it's certainly plausible.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> hate to say it firky, but i did tell you it would end up like this


 
Yeah, I hazard a guess it would happen this week or next, either on standalone blog or her own. Didn't expect to see in the Telegraph though. I still don't feel I should apologise for the cartoon (even though it turns out I did and forgot- cheers zopiclone!) as the cartoon is not her as a person, most people 'get' that. I even had tweets from her followers who pretty much told her the same thing but no... it is more convenient for her (and her type) to take it literally. If only I had the artistic panache of Steve Bell or Molly.

Can't access the website yet - but will take a look shortly when get to a computer. I can pretty much guess how it goes... I'd be interested if the author of the article got to be a journalist working on the coal face or is another "automatic Oxbridge route", does anyone know? (E2A Ah, I see Bristles has already dug htat out.)

Got a message of f Sabcat saying something about a blog, again didn't have a chance to look at it so I guess it is the same thing.



Fez909 said:


> Didn't storm front used to refer to u75 as such?


 
I referred to the boards as Turban69 when talking to someone who said it (Urban75) was full of "pakis and puffs", if that is what you're thinking? Was years ago though.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

Danny Finkelstein "I didn't go to either Oxford or Cambridge"


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Very strange, too, that they've never felt the need to comment on the far, far worse things that turn up on Laurie's twitter feed. It's almost as if they're using her as a tool to attack the left isn't it? Of course I'm not cynical enough to believe that but it's certainly plausible.


 
She might be a useful idiot to them.  She's radical in all the wrong ways, so if they can help her become 'the voice of the left' then half their job is done for them.

Hmmm, bit tin-foil that, like.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 20, 2012)

Red Storm said:


> Has this tweet been picked up? Thread is moving so fast I can't keep up.


 
I did reply to that tweet stating that maybe calling people racists and sexists is insulting and defamatory. Her Majesty has yet to do me the basic courtesy of any reply to any tweet I've sent her.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

firky said:


> Yeah, I hazard a guess it would happen this week or next, either on standalone blog or her own. Didn't expect to see in the Telegraph though. I still don't feel I should apologise for the cartoon (even though it turns out I did and forgot- cheers zopiclone!) as the cartoon is not her as a person, most people 'get' that. I even had tweets from her followers who pretty much told her the same thing but no... it is more convenient for her (and her type) to take it literally. If only I had the artistic panache of Steve Bell or Molly.
> 
> Can't access the website yet - but will take a look shortly when get to a computer. I can pretty much guess how it goes... I'd be interested if the author of the article got to be a journalist working on the coal face or is another "automatic Oxbridge route", does anyone know?
> 
> ...


 
Could have been, aye.  And yes, he/she was an Oxbridge shoe-in.


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> Someone mentioned it earlier in this thread, but if she becomes THE face of the left, then what she says is de facto the left position*.  So the challenge to right wing viewpoints comes from a weak position in which class is never an issue.  You might argue that's the case now, but if crap privilege politics is cemented as the only way to express left wing views, then anything further to the left (real class politics) becomes extremism/loony left.
> 
> *whoever mentioned this earlier thought it might be a good thing, but I'm not convinced.



Yeah. That's the effect she really has. But that's not something you can claim to make her the 55th most influential person on the left...


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Fucking hell - don't think I'll bother with that - I still haven't really sussed twitter out yet.



That's a bit of a convoluted explanation. Just imagine it's like having lots of people on the line at once


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Very strange, too, that they've never felt the need to comment on the far, far worse things that turn up on Laurie's twitter feed. It's almost as if they're using her as a tool to attack the left isn't it? Of course I'm not cynical enough to believe that but it's certainly plausible.



No...more than plausible. Taking everything else into account it's the most probable explanation...whether or not  she's actually complicit or just exceedingly  naive and impressionable. I favour the latter. I think she's definitely well meaning; just one of those useful idiots whose idiocy is heightened by inexperience. After all she was shilling for the lib deems a few years back. Her career as an anarcho- femi-syndicalist-activist...or whatever she calls herself is only in its infancy.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 20, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> After all she was shilling for the lib dems a few years back.


 
May 2010, in fact.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> She might be a useful idiot to them. She's radical in all the wrong ways, so if they can help her become 'the voice of the left' then half their job is done for them.


 
A bit like Ulrike Meinhof only much less constructive and a lot more whiney?


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> A bit like Ulrike Meinhof only much less constructive and a lot more whiney?


 
If she starts bombing banks to fight misogyny then I'll be impressed


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

shooting honest workers for de revolooshun- nah, RAF were not good people. CommunIsn't


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

She does have her own equivalent of the "schilli" though....


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> A bit like Ulrike Meinhof only much less constructive and a lot more whiney?


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> A bit like Ulrike Meinhof only much less constructive and a lot more whiney?


Prada Meinhof, more like.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


>


----------



## stuff_it (Dec 20, 2012)

Well, well. Support from the Torygraph no less. Now that there really is some career ending shit.


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

if only.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> LLETSA's time has passed. Nothing he can do now would stop him being banned. He has lost all momentum. He may as well give up, save energy.


 
79 posts 81 likes


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

BigTom said:


> I can't say this isn't a possibility, or even that it's not likely. I just reckon that stuff like this can get on top of people pretty easily over time,and her immediate reaction to the cartoon could go like that imo without it being calculated, and for whatever reason I'm tending to give her the benefit of the doubt over that, partly just cos I think it's a bit out of order to tell anyone what you want for christmas is them to be beaten up unless you know they are going to know it's a joke.


 
stupid cartoon tbh


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> Could have been, aye. And yes, he/she was an Oxbridge shoe-in.


Stromfront have called here turban75 for nigh on a decade


----------



## not-bono-ever (Dec 20, 2012)

fuckin scum. Support by shitbags in the Telegraph. LP you have been exposed for the spoilt charlatan you really are.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Dec 20, 2012)

nice post by delroy on finkels account as well- this mutual tug fest make me fuckin dry heave


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> 79 posts 81 likes


 
I didn't mean to attack his posts.  It was meant as a pastiche of them


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Stromfront have called here turban75 for nigh on a decade


 
Thought so, cheers.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> I didn't mean to attack his posts. It was meant as a pastiche of them


 
Thought it was a run in to him being banned


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Thought it was a run in to him being banned


 
Yep, was playing on that as well.  Obviously I'm not funny


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

I know I'm going to regret saying this, but I don't actually think that it's particularly surprising or wildly unreasonable that L. Penny is hostile to anyone associated with this thread. She really does get a huge amount of unjustified (and often misogynist) abuse online, which is necessarily going to make anyone defensive and/or uninterested in engaging with the content of online criticism. And even leaving that aside, if I came across a thread online with 8,000 comments about what a dickhead I am, I'm pretty sure I'd sulk about it too. Even if thousands of those critical points were fully justified.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I know I'm going to regret saying this, but I don't actually think that it's particularly surprising or wildly unreasonable that L. Penny is hostile to anyone associated with this thread. She really does get a huge amount of unjustified (and often misogynist) abuse online, which is necessarily going to make anyone defensive and/or uninterested in engaging with the content of online criticism. And even leaving that aside, if I came across a thread online with 8,000 comments about what a dickhead I am, I'm pretty sure I'd sulk about it too. Even if thousands of those critical points were fully justified.


Do you regret it now?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Stromfront have called here turban75 for nigh on a decade


 
so i had a little search to see what they say about us.  this was my favourite.

"*Yes, its a jew run site, the bloke that owns it is a 'Welsh' jew as are at least two moderators. They instantly ban anyone who questions their 'politics'.


It claims to be an anarchist protest site, in reality its a money making opportunity, the jew who runs it uses it as an advert for himself and in the process gets lots of work from various bluechip companies including BP and the BBC doing their web design.

They also have a disturbing amount of new breed pc cops who agree with their pro-drugs, blacks can do no wrong, type views."*


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Do you regret it now?


 
Not yet, but it's in the post.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 20, 2012)

"*A few do praise some left-wing groups but most just slag them off as well.
It's as if they think their are to good for these groups.
As if they are some kind of elite & these groups aren't worthy of them."*


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 20, 2012)

"*they all hate each other on the basis of peculiar ideological formulae the unilluminated are not privy to"*


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

This is an odd sort of influence:

Parish councilor says blocking people on Twitter isn't always the best policy as they may have a point and they're engaging you.

Another councillor and cabinet member replies: "Hate people who block you!"

Third person add LP to the conversation saying she has started blocking people due to bad experiences.

Cabinet member immediately backtracks, "well maybe hate was a strong word but it does highly irritate me!"

https://twitter.com/Baz_k/status/281786632137494528

Why would adding LP to the conversation cause an immediately climb down from a view held a politician?  Very odd, they usually never back down.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> so i had a little search to see what they say about us. this was my favourite.
> 
> "*Yes, its a jew run site, the bloke that owns it is a 'Welsh' jew as are at least two moderators. They instantly ban anyone who questions their 'politics'.*
> 
> ...


 

Not only Jews, but Welsh fcuking Jews!!!


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 20, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> "*A few do praise some left-wing groups but most just slag them off as well.*
> *It's as if they think their are to good for these groups.*
> *As if they are some kind of elite & these groups aren't worthy of them."*


 
Sounds about right


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I know I'm going to regret saying this, but I don't actually think that it's particularly surprising or wildly unreasonable that L. Penny is hostile to anyone associated with this thread. She really does get a huge amount of unjustified (and often misogynist) abuse online, which is necessarily going to make anyone defensive and/or uninterested in engaging with the content of online criticism. And even leaving that aside, if I came across a thread online with 8,000 comments about what a dickhead I am, I'm pretty sure I'd sulk about it too. Even if thousands of those critical points were fully justified.


 
You cunting fucking cunt etc


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 20, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> "*they all hate each other on the basis of peculiar ideological formulae the unilluminated are not privy to"*


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> Not only Jews, but Welsh fcuking Jews!!!


 
the worst sort of jews.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> You cunting fucking cunt etc


 
I'm sorry, but I don't talk to homophobes.


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> "*they all hate each other on the basis of peculiar ideological formulae the unilluminated are not privy to"*


We hate the Judean People's fucking Front


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I'm sorry, but I don't talk to homophobes.


 
Are you calling me a puff? 

Laurie, if you're reading this and think you've 'got' me please engage your sense of humour before taking further action.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

I suspect that the racist nonsense came from a quick glance at the IWCA article, or possibly just its title, followed up by a silly refusal to back down when arguing with people she has pretty understandable reason to feel attacked by. Or, perhaps I'm being soft and she really does think, from an American-liberal-identity-politics sort of direction, that criticism of state-multiculturalism is automatically racist.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 20, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> the worst sort of jews.


Self lloathing?


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I suspect that the racist nonsense came from a quick glance at the IWCA article, or possibly just its title, followed up by a silly refusal to back down when arguing with people she has pretty understandable reason to feel attacked by. Or, perhaps I'm being soft and she really does think, from an American-liberal-identity-politics sort of direction, that criticism of state-multiculturalism is automatically racist.



Probably both.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 20, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Self lloathing?


 

that took me a few seconds.  very good.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

..
Curiosity got the better of me so I had a look at her Twitter feed, fuckin 'ell what an endless amount of drivel she posts.

No guesses as to who tweeted this...




> Personally, I've loved a lot of young men who have felt lost, unsure of their role. Not one of them has gone on to shoot up a school.





> Particularly interested to hear from young men on this question. If you'd prefer to email me in private, it's laurie.penny@gmail.com


Is she looking to correspond with a potential mass murderer, or is she just after a new boyfriend?


----------



## Jackobi (Dec 20, 2012)

"If you have the stomach for it, google something like "Laurie Penny hate".
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jakewallissimons/100195117/in-defence-of-laurie-penny/

Okay.







Of the top seven results, LP's Wikipedia, LP's old blog, an article written by LP, and the above quoted Telegraph article. Of the three remaining top results, one is notably entitled 'I hate Laurie Penny', in which the author explains, "The thing I hate most about Laurie Penny is in fact, nothing to do with her, obviously. It’s hating being misrepresented."
It's stomach churning, a comment on one of LP's own articles even states, "I don't hate many people, but Laurie Penny truly does get on my nerves."


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> Is she looking to correspond with a potential mass murderer, or is she just after a new boyfriend?


 
covered 15 pages back. she's writing a book about emasculated men or something.


----------



## editor (Dec 20, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> so i had a little search to see what they say about us. this was my favourite.


Wow. A Welsh Jew?
*checks contents of underpants
No pretty sure that's not me.

I must have forgotten about the BP work too - maybe that was happening when I was playing for Goya Music? Crazy days, for sure.

I remember that some years ago, spineless little fuckwits on that ARRSE site took exception to a thread here that I hadn't even _seen_ (let alone participated in) and decided to get their own back by writing to all my clients to tell them that I supported the cold blooded murder of 'our boys' or some such nonsense.

Still, ever since I became a web tycoon things have worked out fine, although I am still under growing pressure every day to apologise to Boris.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

chilango said:


> Probably both.


 
Possibly so. On a sort of related note, I see that some New Statesman columnist went slightly off-piste in a piece about "Privilege" politics and promptly got monstered on twitter. His actual article wasn't very good and missed most of what's wrong with Privilege theory in favour of hand-wringing about how it's divisive, which effectively set himself up for his peers to chastise him for his possession of a pasty skinned penis. New Statesman then published a response which simply presented criticism of "Privilege" theory as a lack of interest in black, women's, gay, etc liberation.

The interesting thing about this stuff is how quickly its making inroads into British liberalism, from the New Statesmen to, ahem, the Anarchist Federation.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

killer b said:


> covered 15 pages back. she's writing a book about emasculated men or something.


 
Oops!  I don't have a photographic memory that stretches as far back as 15 pages of this interminable thread.

And if I did recall something from 15 pages back I would seriously give some consideration to this...


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

"I don't hate many people, but Laurie Penny truly does get on my nerves."

Reference to nerves, nervosa, hysteria, sexist misogyny


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

killer b said:


> covered 15 pages back. she's writing a book about emasculated men or something.


"The decline of men".


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> Oops!  I don't have a photographic memory that stretches as far back as 15 pages of this interminable thread.
> 
> And if I did recall something from 15 pages back I would seriously give some consideration to this...


 
you should be refreshing every 30 seconds, and not sleeping. no fucking commitment.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 20, 2012)

Well I'm always looking for mixed up young women who are unsure of their role so I can love them. 

I know that sounds a bit iffy...the police certainly thought so. They called it stalking. Mind you, they just don't really get the concept of urban activist bloggers...nor did the magistrate.

 Fuckin sexist bastards.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I know I'm going to regret saying this, but I don't actually think that it's particularly surprising or wildly unreasonable that L. Penny is hostile to anyone associated with this thread. She really does get a huge amount of unjustified (and often misogynist) abuse online, which is necessarily going to make anyone defensive and/or uninterested in engaging with the content of online criticism. And even leaving that aside, if I came across a thread online with 8,000 comments about what a dickhead I am, I'm pretty sure I'd sulk about it too. Even if thousands of those critical points were fully justified.


 
Any views on the content that she publishes or are you just taking an SP version of the Daily Telegraph line


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Any views on the content that she publishes or are you just taking an SP version of the Daily Telegraph line


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Any views on the content that she publishes or are you just taking an SP version of the Daily Telegraph line


 
She's a radical liberal, with all the many faults that implies.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

A Knight in shining armour.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

killer b said:


> you should be refreshing every 30 seconds, and not sleeping. no fucking commitment.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Any views on the content that she publishes or are you just taking an SP version of the Daily Telegraph line


 
Played!


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I suspect that the racist nonsense came from a quick glance at the IWCA article, or possibly just its title, followed up by *a silly refusal to back down when arguing with people she has pretty understandable reason to feel attacked by.* Or, perhaps I'm being soft and she really does think, from an American-liberal-identity-politics sort of direction, that criticism of state-multiculturalism is automatically racist.


 
I can't believe this would be the case.  She has said:


 *Ally Fogg* ‏@*AllyFogg* 
@*pastachips* My own respect for LP goes up every time she admits to having been wrong about something and changing her mind. That's not easy

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
@*AllyFogg* @*pastachips* I believe it's called growing up. No desire to freeze intellectually at the age I got my first column, as some fo. 

See, she's a grown up and can back down when she's wrong.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 20, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> "*they all hate each other on the basis of peculiar ideological formulae the unilluminated are not privy to"*


Tbf, this is kind of true


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> See, she's a grown up and can back down when she's wrong.


 
Except when it comes to misogynystic racists who reject identity politics on Urban.


----------



## editor (Dec 20, 2012)

Facts!
This thread is currently running at something like 11,000 page views per day.
That's nearly 8 page views for every single minute of the day, 24 hours of the day.
That's a lorra lorra page views.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

editor said:


> Facts!
> This thread is currently running at something like 11,000 page views per day.
> That's nearly 8 page views for every single minute of the day.
> That's a lorra lorra page views.


Half of those are LLETSA/Sam G, the rest are Firky.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

firky said:


> Played!


----------



## editor (Dec 20, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Half of those are LLETSA/Sam G, the rest are Firky.


LLETSA/Sam G was escorted from the premises some time ago.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

New Statesman columnist criticises "privilege" theory, while mostly missing the more important problems with it:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2012/12/problem-privilege-checking

Response about how this just shows his own privilege:
http://www.newstatesman.com/voices/2012/12/standing-opposition-dominance-privilege

This whole language has just been adopted wholesale by British liberals almost overnight.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

editor said:


> LLETSA/Sam G was escorted from the premises some time ago.


Oh good.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

editor said:


> Facts!
> This thread is currently running at something like 11,000 page views per day.
> That's nearly 8 page views for every single minute of the day, 24 hours of the day.
> That's a lorra lorra page views.


 
These type of stats will do you no harm next time you tender for those lucrative BP and BBC contracts...


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

editor said:


> LLETSA/Sam G was escorted from the premises some time ago.


 
Then the pageviews must be Laura herself.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Half of those are LLETSA/Sam G, the rest are Firky.


 
I have been inside an MRI and a CAT machine for much of the morning and in a pathology lab for the afternoon. So...

*waves to the elite*


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

editor said:


> LLETSA/Sam G was escorted from the premises some time ago.


 


TruXta said:


> Oh good.


 
what do you find good in that?


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Oh good.


 

He will be back, joke shop plastic nose in place


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> what do you find good in that?


He's a fucking bore and adds fuck all. Plus he broke the rules so fuck him.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> He will be back, joke shop plastic nose in place


I have no doubts.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> New Statesman columnist criticises "privilege" theory, while mostly missing the more important problems with it:
> http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2012/12/problem-privilege-checking


 
^ That's a bit of a shite article for a number of reasons, but I haven't got time to get into them. However one of the articles he links to is much closer to the money imo

http://offbeatempire.com/2012/10/liberal-bullying

This made me laugh



> My big challenge as a publisher is knowing how to respond to this kind of feedback, which comes in almost daily. Sometimes it feels like I have two options:
> 
> Acquiesce to every complaint of anyone anywhere on the internet, until we're putting trigger warnings at the top of posts that mention balloons because some people are globophobic (TRUE STORY!).


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

lletsa is ace. i look forward to his speedy return.


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> He will be back, joke shop plastic nose in place


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

TruXta said:


> He's a fucking bore and adds fuck all. Plus he broke the rules so fuck him.


 
which reason  the first or second?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> which reason the first or second?


He got banned for the second AFAICT.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

What did he actually do wrong (I thought ed was going to show some clemency then  )?


----------



## ska invita (Dec 20, 2012)

poului said:


> If you were doing even half a decent job as a left-wing commentator then people like Daniel Finkelstein would loathe every inch of your being. Jesus wept.


It makes sense really, because this is all about the professional commentariat vs the public commentariat (who can now reply). All these years journalists have been publishing articles and feeling very clever, now each word is ripped apart infront of their eyes from all sides. All journalists are smarting from that regular sting.

and if this all really isnt about laurie but commentariat in general, then this response all fits in with that.



Red Storm said:


> Has this tweet been picked up? Thread is moving so fast I can't keep up.


No stone has been left unturned, you can be certain of that. One thing you can say about this thread is its very thorough - frighteningly so at times 


Nigel Irritable said:


> I know I'm going to regret saying this, but I don't actually think that it's particularly surprising or wildly unreasonable that L. Penny is hostile to anyone associated with this thread. She really does get a huge amount of unjustified (and often misogynist) abuse online, which is necessarily going to make anyone defensive and/or uninterested in engaging with the content of online criticism. And even leaving that aside, if I came across a thread online with 8,000 comments about what a dickhead I am, I'm pretty sure I'd sulk about it too. Even if thousands of those critical points were fully justified.


and at 26 too (ageist!)...BUT this seems part of the job of being a professional commentator/journalist/speaker, particularly in this day of social media. 

The bad side of this is that you have to become very thick skinned to deal with it, which just entrenches self-righteousness and encourages you to draw warmth from other commentators. Thats what i love about urban and forums in general, is that its truly democratic. No post is in itself more valuable than another, even an OP. Not that posters on forums aren't incapable of self-righteousness of course, but at least its played out on a level playing field.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> What did he actually do wrong (I thought ed was going to show some clemency then  )?


 
Search for his member name and look through his previous posts.


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> What did he actually do wrong (I thought ed was going to show some clemency then  )?


trolling a disability thread iirc. i think the post in question have been deleted and i never saw them, so dunno the exact details...


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

firky said:


> Search for his member name and look through his previous posts.


 
Too many people menshn (  ) him. The task is therefore too difficult. I think I remembering it being nonce-related...that'll have to do.

edit: apparently not. fair dos, trolling. Perma-ban seems harsh for that....


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> ^ That's a bit of a shite article for a number of reasons


 
Yes, it certainly is.

What's interesting about it isn't its, rather dreary and superficial, content, but (a) that it appeared in the New Statesman, (b) that they published a "check your privilege" reply and (c) that Twitter was immediately full of English people (not Yanks) calling for the ritual execution of the apostate. It just shows how quickly an entire language and set of political assumptions can be adopted by quite a large milieu.

It wasn't very long ago that we had a bunch of people on here, back when the Anarchist Federation started dabbling with this shit, saying that they hadn't come across this stuff in Britain and, even, that it wouldn't make the jump from Yanko-liberal discourse.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

killer b said:


> trolling a disability thread iirc. i think the post in question have been deleted and i never saw them, so dunno the exact details...


 

he basically said he didn't know if peoples experiences were true or not. Not pleasant, and he never backs out- so.


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

ah, like editor saying he didn't know if swarthy was a nonce or not?


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 20, 2012)

I need to know what happened to M, the person with disabilities who was contemplating suicide because of cuts and wanted to know if Dave would write about their death. Dave was sympathetic and consoling because Dave is a carer. Dave signed off 'Your Friend'. I hope Dave sorted M out with a few quid and followed up with some support because if Dave didn't and just used M's predicament as a means of self promotion, that would be criminal. It's six days since the article in NS which got RT'd a thousand times.

Dear M-, 

A few days ago you wrote to me and told me you were planning to take your own life. You told me that your reasons for this are: because you are frightened about what will happen to you when you lose the disability living allowance you rely on to live independently, and because you want to take a stand against the government’s assault on welfare. 

Since receiving your letter I’ve agonised over what sort of reply to send to you. I hope you found the strength to call one of the helplines I forwarded - Samaritans in particular are a life-saving service - but I felt that something longer was needed, is still needed. I’m writing to you now not as a journalist, but as a human being, a former carer and a person who has experienced depression to say: please, please don’t do this.

I’m writing like this, in public, in part because you spoke about taking your own life as a political statement. You asked if I, as a journalist you respected, would report on your suicide after the fact. I’ve been told by fellow campaigners in the disability rights movement that you’re not alone in thinking that harming yourself in that awful, final way is the only way you have left to make a difference. But that’s not the case. Not yet, not ever.

We’ve never shared a cup of tea together, or laughed together, or hugged each other. I don’t even know what you look like. But I feel like I know you, because I know you feel the same way I feel about what’s going on in this country right now. What I want you to try to understand, if you can just hold on to one thing, is this: you are not a burden. 

When society tells you that you are worth less because you are unwell, that’s society’s fault, not yours. They may be pursuing a doctrine of shame, but that doesn’t mean you have to feel ashamed. You have no reason whatsoever to feel ashamed. You are not a burden, and you are not a scrounger - you are just unwell.
You are not a burden. You are not a scrounger. You are valuable and important because you are human and alive. Believe it. Believe it because that belief is a torch in the darkness of an austerity winter. With love,

Your friend,
Dave

Dave, Please be that torch in the darkness of an austerity winter....for all of us. And tell us M is ok. We need to know.


----------



## smokedout (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> firky's cartoon gets a mention in the telegraph in a 'in defence of laurie penny' article


 


> it has been impossible to read Laurie's status updates without being shocked at the sheer volume and viciousness of the hatred she is subjected to online.


 
key point, his opinion is based on Laurie's status updates, not what actually took place


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

killer b said:


> trolling a disability thread iirc. i think the post in question have been deleted and i never saw them, so dunno the exact details...


 
I don't think he was trolling just being the counter-argument but it was a bit too close to bone for some people so he was banned. Bit harsh IMO, could have locked the thread and told him to piss off.

ANYWAY......


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

TruXta said:


> He got banned for the second AFAICT.


 
So it was good that he got banned for breaking the rules then?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Yes, it certainly is.
> 
> What's interesting about it isn't its, rather dreary and superficial, content, but (a) that it appeared in the New Statesman, (b) that they published a "check your privilege" reply and (c) that Twitter was immediately full of English people (not Yanks) calling for the ritual execution of the apostate. It just shows how quickly an entire language and set of political assumptions can be adopted by quite a large milieu.
> 
> It wasn't very long ago that we had a bunch of people on here, back when the Anarchist Federation started dabbling with this shit, saying that they hadn't come across this stuff in Britain and, even, that it wouldn't make the jump from Yanko-liberal discourse.


 
Yeah i think there was some wishful thinking going on there, this stuff is rife, and it's going to take over anarchism in the next couple of years.


----------



## smokedout (Dec 20, 2012)

Buckaroo said:


> Your friend,
> Dave
> 
> Dave, Please be that torch in the darkness of an austerity winter....for all of us. And tell us M is ok. We need to know.


 
if I was M I'd have asked to borrow a couple of grand


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Yes, it certainly is.
> 
> What's interesting about it isn't its, rather dreary and superficial, content, but (a) that it appeared in the New Statesman, (b) that they published a "check your privilege" reply and (c) that Twitter was immediately full of English people (not Yanks) calling for the ritual execution of the apostate. It just shows how quickly an entire language and set of political assumptions can be adopted by quite a large milieu.
> 
> It wasn't very long ago that we had a bunch of people on here, back when the Anarchist Federation started dabbling with this shit, saying that they hadn't come across this stuff in Britain and, even, that it wouldn't make the jump from Yanko-liberal discourse.


 
I'm confused as to why a few people on this thread have gone out of their way to say they don't dismiss privilege/identity politics completely.  It stuck out to me as I really don't see what privilege politics offers.  I asked on the manarchism thread this question, and the last time I checked it there was no real response.  So if it gives us nothing, and it shuts down debate, why are people not denouncing it in its entirety?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 20, 2012)

what we have to remember is that privilege exists and causes problems.  having some middle class white boy speak for everyone's experience when those experiences were not universal was a major problem at occupy.  thinking otherwise leads, IME, to a bunch of white men sitting around assuming the reason no women or minorities or working class people are with them is because those people aren't interested, rather than the truth which is that these white men and their nonsense alienate those who should be comrades.  occupy 

but, here's the thing, class is important and everything else is a subdivision of that.  descending too far into identity politics generates more light than heat and leads to people one-upping each other with their whos-the-most-oppressed.  and what happens?  some white oxbridge middle classer wins because they have the power to spread their version further.

so what is the fucking point?  let's just not be dicks, not piss around.  if your movement doesn't attract women, or black people, or whoever, then maybe you need to do some work, not develop a complicated theory of privilege that doesn't make a blind bit of difference.


----------



## rosecore (Dec 20, 2012)

> From time to time, one of Laurie's status updates will pop up on my Facebook timeline, reminding me that another world of privileged Left activism is buzzing along in parallel to the mainstream


Corrected him there.


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> I'm confused as to why a few people on this thread have gone out of their way to say they don't dismiss privilege/identity politics completely.  It stuck out to me as I really don't see what privilege politics offers.  I asked on the manarchism thread this question, and the last time I checked it there was no real response.  So if it gives us nothing, and it shuts down debate, why are people not denouncing it in its entirety?



Link?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> So it was good that he got banned for breaking the rules then?


Yes, in this case it was.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

editor said:


> Facts!
> This thread is currently running at something like 11,000 page views per day.
> That's nearly 8 page views for every single minute of the day, 24 hours of the day.
> That's a lorra lorra page views.


 
So that means loads and loads of potential customers for you then you filthy profiteering welsh jew


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Yes, in this case it was.


 
cos you didn't like him or for what he did?


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> cos you didn't like him or for what he did?


Both, just like I said. I think he's a crap poster, and he signed back on using a different nick after being banned. What's your point?


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Yeah i think there was some wishful thinking going on there, this stuff is rife, and it's going to take over anarchism in the next couple of years.


 
Yes, I strongly suspect that British Anarchism is going to be much more vulnerable to it than the rest of the socialist left. The AFed's dabbling and the response over on libcom are indication enough of that, particularly when you remember that those are amongst the more politically serious bits of British anarchism. The lifestyle fruitloops will be completely defenseless. But amusing and all to watch as that will most likely be, if it gets seriously entrenched it could be problematic for everyone in the longer term.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

cesare said:


> Link?


 
to which, the thread on manarchism or the people on here saying identity politics has its place?


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

Anyone got a link to her facebook page?

There's a few Laurie Penny's come up on facebook, but none of them appear to be her.


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

i suspect it won't be public you stalky weirdo.


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> to which, the thread on manarchism or the people on here saying identity politics has its place?


To where you say no-one responded to you.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

cesare said:


> To where you say no-one responded to you.


 
I didn't say no one responded.  In fact, you were one of the people who responded to me (I think!)

What I said is that no one could say how privilege politics helped with anything.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

Juliet Pickering, LP's agent, is awfully quiet on all this.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

cesare said:


> To where you say no-one responded to you.


shit MANarchists say


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Both, just like I said. I think he's a crap poster, and he signed back on using a different nick after being banned. What's your point?


 
Just trying to understand someone who thinks its good posters are ban because they think they are crap posters and then hides behind  saying that they broke the rules. I think I have the measure of you, thanks.


----------



## _angel_ (Dec 20, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Both, just like I said. I think he's a crap poster, and he signed back on using a different nick after being banned. What's your point?


You really shouldn't be banned for being a bit tiresome but he does need to get some new material. Continuously asking why we are all bothering to post about everything, ever, all the time on a message boards, y'know where people come to chat and have opinions and things is just a tad daft.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> You really shouldn't be banned for being a bit tiresome but he does need to get some new material. Continuously asking why we are all bothering to post about everything, ever, all the time on a message boards, y'know where people come to chat and have opinions and things is just a tad daft.


 
absolutely but that is entirely different to what Truxta  was expressing


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Just trying to understand someone who thinks its good posters are ban because they think they are crap posters and then hides behind saying that they broke the rules. I think I have the measure of you, thanks.


No, you're not getting this. I was personally PLEASED that he was banned because I think he's a fuckwit and a bore. I didn't say those were good reasons to ban him per se. He got banned, with good reason AFAICT, initially for something unrelated to this, and banned again as Sam Goloden because he signed back up. There, that clarify it for you?


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

I understand why he was banned thanks.


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> I didn't say no one responded.  In fact, you were one of the people who responded to me (I think!)
> 
> What I said is that no one could say how privilege politics helped with anything.


That's absolutely not the case. There were some very detailed posts on that thread, which basically amounted to a view (amongst other views) that it's the corruption of privilege theory, its misuse/abuse, the tendency for privilege politics to run concurrently (where it does) with class politics rather than being integral, use of it to close down debate, veering too close to/reinventing identity politics of the 70s and 80s etc that poses more of a problem than the theory in itself. You may not have agreed with the responses you got, but it's not fair to make out that no-one pointed out the potential positives of privilege theory.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> You really shouldn't be banned for being a bit tiresome but he does need to get some new material. Continuously asking why we are all bothering to post about everything, ever, all the time on a message boards, y'know where people come to chat and have opinions and things is just a tad daft.


 
In a way, I feel he is right in his central 'thesis'.

But to give up doesn't make sense as it will only make things worse (I believe I've read him saying the only future for the left is to slow down the inevitable).  Given doing _anything_ is relatively pointless, he then says the debate is therefore pointless, so...what next?  No answers there.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> I understand why he was banned thanks.


Then what's your beef? That I personally don't care for his posts, and thought it great he'd been fucked off?


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

killer b said:


> i suspect it won't be public you stalky weirdo.


 
hehe 

Nah, I read earlier that she'd been going mental about this thread on facebook, so I fancied a wee peek.

I thought Dave might be 'public' wherever she was on t'internnet.


----------



## _angel_ (Dec 20, 2012)

TruXta said:


> No, you're not getting this. I was personally PLEASED that he was banned because I think he's a fuckwit and a bore. I didn't say those were good reasons to ban him per se. He got banned, with good reason AFAICT, initially for something unrelated to this, and banned again as Sam Goloden because he signed back up. There, that clarify it for you?


Once again these things are patchy. There are lots and lots of banned posters who come back and don't get rebanned. Do the mods know who they are? maybe sometimes but not always and then there was a sort of amnesty recently. I say 'sort of' because it didnt include everyone.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> Once again these things are patchy. There are lots and lots of banned posters who come back and don't get rebanned. Do the mods know who they are? maybe sometimes but not always and then there was a sort of amnesty recently. I say 'sort of' because it didnt include everyone.


Sure, I know that. It's for the mods to decide, but in this instance I for one am glad to see the back of him. There's no principled stance behind that, just personal dislike.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

cesare said:


> That's absolutely not the case. There were some very detailed posts on that thread, which basically amounted to a view (amongst other views) that it's the corruption of privilege theory, its misuse/abuse, the tendency for privilege politics to run concurrently (where it does) with class politics rather than being integral, use of it to close down debate, veering too close to/reinventing identity politics of the 70s and 80s etc that poses more of a problem than the theory in itself. You may not have agreed with the responses you got, but it's not fair to make out that no-one pointed out the potential positives of privilege theory.


 
Well, as someone coming at this with a clean slate, so to speak, I asked for a description of what privilege theory actually is. Spanky gave a simplified explanation which I understood and was not challenged by anyone on the thread. I assume his explanation was accurate.

Given that's the true meaning of privilege theory, I asked how it could be used. No answer. 4 more pages of rubbish about whether the working classes are to blame for their own obesity. VP showed how it can be used, which is just "check your privilege" and she even admitted it's not especially useful if that's how it is used. No other way of using this tool was given.

It's a way of shutting down debate and nothing else, IMO. I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise.


----------



## _angel_ (Dec 20, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Sure, I know that. It's for the mods to decide, but in this instance I for one am glad to see the back of him. There's no principled stance behind that, just personal dislike.


Like arnie, he'll be back.  Of this we can be sure.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

_angel_ said:


> Like arnie, he'll be back.  Of this we can be sure.


I think you're right there.


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> Well, as someone coming at this with a clean slate, so to speak, I asked for a description of what privilege theory actually is. Spanky gave a simplified explanation which I understood and was not challenged by anyone on the thread. I assume his explanation was accurate.
> 
> Given that's the true meaning of privilege theory, I asked how it could be used. No answer. 4 more pages of rubbish about whether the working classes are to blame for their own obesity. VP showed how it can be used, which is just "check your privilege" and she even admitted it's not especially useful if that's how it is used. No other way of using this tool was given.
> 
> It's a way of shutting down debate and nothing else, IMO. I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise.


Most of the analysis was before you asked that question, I think. Frankly I'd got bored with it becoming a whinging vehicle & excuse for some people to voice their fucking prejudices.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

cesare said:


> Most of the analysis was before you asked that question, I think. Frankly I'd got bored with it becoming a whinging vehicle & excuse for some people to voice their fucking prejudices.


 
I hope you aren't including me in your "some people" there.

I did read through the thread and I was none the wiser.  I'll try to give it another reading sometime to see if I can get anything more out of it.


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> I hope you aren't including me in your "some people" there.
> 
> I did read through the thread and I was none the wiser.  I'll try to give it another reading sometime to see if I can get anything more out of it.


No, I wasn't including you.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 20, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> so what is the fucking point?  let's just not be dicks, not piss around.  if your movement doesn't attract women, or black people, or whoever, then maybe you need to do some work, not develop a complicated theory of privilege that doesn't make a blind bit of difference.



Very true. But any organisation which indulges 'privilege theory' has an automatic advantage given that a woman or a black person or any other 'identity' can show up, get fawned over by middle-aged cunts, told how fuckin awesome they are to have become enlightened in the battle against..er..middle-class white cunts and get to feel 'special'. This way 'privilege checking' becomes self-perpetuating. I suppose the idea is that their solidarity is 'staggered'...so the self-denigrating bourgeois white males are the most solid, then come white females who are solid with all except the white men...to whom they get to feel a bit superior, then, say the black guys or the gays who are solid with all but the...etc. pure fuckin bollocks.
It's class based or it's fuck all.

Mind you, if it wasn't for this tiered brand of solidarity, the middle classes wouldn't get to play in the first place...they'd be reclassed as the fuckin enemy. With privilege theory, they get to join in...feel egalitarian, and get the cushy comment gigs in the Guardian.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

cesare said:


> There were some very detailed posts on that thread, which basically amounted to a view (amongst other views) that it's the corruption of privilege theory, its misuse/abuse, the tendency for privilege politics to run concurrently (where it does) with class politics rather than being integral, use of it to close down debate, veering too close to/reinventing identity politics of the 70s and 80s etc that poses more of a problem than the theory in itself.


 
Yes, there were posts along those lines. And the fundamental problem with them is that they conflate "privilege theory" with "caring about oppressions other than class". The problem is not that privilege theory is misused. It's used exactly as its supposed to be used. The problem is that privilege theory is a particularly unhelpful way of looking at oppressions other than class.

There seems to me to be considerable confusion on this point, as indeed there is about the term "identity politics". Neither privilege theory nor identity politics are synonymous with thinking that other forms of oppression matter. They are particular ways of looking at how those oppressions matter, which rest on certain political assumptions and imply certain political answers. It's not "corruption", its inherent.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Yes, I strongly suspect that British Anarchism is going to be much more vulnerable to it than the rest of the socialist left. The AFed's dabbling and the response over on libcom are indication enough of that, particularly when you remember that those are amongst the more politically serious bits of British anarchism. The lifestyle fruitloops will be completely defenseless. But amusing and all to watch as that will most likely be, if it gets seriously entrenched it could be problematic for everyone in the longer term.


 
I agree with this - and the main reason why the rest of the socialist left won't be infected is cos we're fucking allergic to anything new, which is often a problem but in these kind of cases it's a definite strength. It's kind of like what Dimitri Orlov says about why the USSR coped with collapse better than the USA will, but on a much smaller and essentially irrelevant scale


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Mind you, if it wasn't for this tiered brand of solidarity, the middle classes wouldn't get to play in the first place...*they'd be reclassed as the fuckin enemy.*


 
Well worth repeating in big fuckin print!


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I agree with this - and the main reason why the rest of the socialist left won't be infected is cos we're fucking allergic to anything new, which is often a problem but in these kind of cases it's a definite strength.


 
It's practically a point of principle in the Socialist Party that we squint suspiciously at any new political fad for a minimum of two decades before anyone touches it.

And joking aside, the Trotskyist groups have enough in the way of their own theoretical heritage and internal education and general critical mass to ignore suddenly fashionable ideas if they want to (or go chasing after them if they so decide), while the much more atomised and disparate Anarchist scene is inherently more vulnerable to those fashions, for good or for ill. As the radical liberals go, so too will many of the Anarchists.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 20, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> dunno but she's not Boris's sister


 
She is Boris Johnson's sister in law.


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Yes, there were posts along those lines. And the fundamental problem with them is that they conflate "privilege theory" with "caring about oppressions other than class". The problem is not that privilege theory is misused. It's used exactly as its supposed to be used. The problem is that privilege theory is a particularly unhelpful way of looking at oppressions other than class.
> 
> There seems to me to be considerable confusion on this point, as indeed there is about the term "identity politics". Neither privilege theory nor identity politics are synonymous with thinking that other forms of oppression matter. They are particular ways of looking at how those oppressions matter, which rest on certain political assumptions and imply certain political answers. It's not "corruption", its inherent.



Well I consider Laurie Penny's  use of privilege politics as misuse, and I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree on that.


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

sihhi said:


> She is Boris Johnson's sister in law.


Thank you


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

cesare said:


> Well I consider Laurie Penny's use of privilege politics as misuse, and I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree on that.


 
I'm not going to hector you about it if you can't be bothered having an argument at the moment, but I'm genuinely curious about how Penny is misusing "privilege theory"? She seems to be using it in pretty much exactly the way it is generally used.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 20, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> ...Or yet another bit of diary-filler by Hugh Muir.


Talking of Hugh Muir, is this the same Hugh Muir who ingratiated himself at the _Telegraph_ and _Standard_ with prominent Met Police Press Office-supplied stories on Reclaim The Streets?

The ones with the Orgreave-esque approach to what-happened-when? The ones that liberally (LOL) employed such words and phrases as "agitators", "anarchist yobs", "hijacked", "Left-wing hooligans" etc? The ones that even tried to - stop giggling at the back, please - suggest that RTS was some kind of beard for Red Action?


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I'm not going to hector you about it if you can't be bothered having an argument at the moment, but I'm genuinely curious about how Penny is misusing "privilege theory"? She seems to be using it in pretty much exactly the way it is generally used.


It's not so much "can't be bothered" as having loads of housework to do, presents to sort out etc


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

Good to see at least one Urbanite  hard work on editing LP's wiki page


----------



## rekil (Dec 20, 2012)

lauriepenny said:
			
		

> All I had to go on before was a picture of Stalin and *a Twitter feed full of hate*.


This is of course a massive fucking lie. Disgusting. Gotta cook atm but I'll come back to this later.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> It's practically a point of principle in the Socialist Party that we squint suspiciously at any new political fad for a minimum of two decades before anyone touches it.
> 
> And joking aside, the Trotskyist groups have enough in the way of their own theoretical heritage and internal education and general critical mass to ignore suddenly fashionable ideas if they want to (or go chasing after them if they so decide), while the much more atomised and disparate Anarchist scene is inherently more vulnerable to those fashions, for good or for ill. As the radical liberals go, so too will many of the Anarchists.


 
Having said all that though, if the ones at Sheffield Uni are anything to go by I reckon the swaps will end up getting infected, but then again for as long as I've been aware of them they've not been averse to jumping on liberal bandwagons so that's not much of a surprise.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Good to see at least one Urbanite hard work on editing LP's wiki page


 
I can't see anything out of the ordinary?


----------



## spawnofsatan (Dec 20, 2012)

firky said:


> I can't see anything out of the ordinary?


 
Nor I


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

firky said:


> I can't see anything out of the ordinary?


 
Check the page history. Someone added a bunch of references to this thread and other less than flattering sources, which have since been removed by someone else.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

copliker said:


> This is of course a massive fucking lie. Disgusting. Gotta cook atm but I'll come back to this later.


 
She misconstrues things. 

I can't make my mind up if this is deliberate or if she's a bit thick. More likely she's a manipulative twat.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

firky said:


> She misconstrues things.
> 
> I can't make my mind up if this is deliberate or if she's a bit thick. More likely she's a manipulative twat.


 
Smartest girl in a smart school; 9 A*; Oxford place; voice of a generation....of course she's not a manipulative twat!


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Having said all that though, if the ones at Sheffield Uni are anything to go by I reckon the swaps will end up getting infected, but then again for as long as I've been aware of them they've not been averse to jumping on liberal bandwagons so that's not much of a surprise.


 
They will probably make concessions to it if that's what the people they are looking to recruit believe in (and radical liberal students are an obvious target market), but it seems to me that it's very unlikely to make serious inroads into their official ideology in the short term. 1980s identity politics didn't, after all. And they still don't like the word "feminism", a relic of arguments from the early days of the women's movement.

To misquote Chairman Bob Avakian, Tony Cliff Thought has a lot of elasticity but there's a solid core.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Check the page history. Someone added a bunch of references to this thread and other less than flattering sources, which have since been removed by someone else.


 
Ahh yeah, "Born Laura Barnett".

Well she was and said so herself, not sure why that was deleted but I don't really care either.


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> I'm confused as to why a few people on this thread have gone out of their way to say they don't dismiss privilege/identity politics completely. It stuck out to me as I really don't see what privilege politics offers. I asked on the manarchism thread this question, and the last time I checked it there was no real response. So if it gives us nothing, and it shuts down debate, why are people not denouncing it in its entirety?


Well it depends what you mean by identity politics but as I said previously I certainly think that there have been good criticisms of "the left" that have come from a feminist/BME/gay/etc perspective.

Also it would be deeply stupid and wrong to claim that there haven't been times when socialists/anarchists have discriminated against minority groups, or swept aside their concerns.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> They will probably make concessions to it if that's what the people they are looking to recruit believe in (and radical liberal students are an obvious target market), but it seems to me that it's very unlikely to make serious inroads into their official ideology in the short term. 1980s identity politics didn't, after all. And they still don't like the word "feminism", a relic of arguments from the early days of the women's movement.


 
If this lot stay in the SWP and manage to get anywhere near the leadership it'll be a fucking nightmare. And they have dabbled in identity politics from time to time - look at Respect.

One of the local student swappies recently left, citing an all pervasive culture of brocialism as his reason for leaving, but has since returned. Now I have many, many criticisms of the SWP but how anyone can claim they're chauvinists of any kind is beyond me.


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 20, 2012)

Don't get any of the 'Privilege theory' stuff because I'm an idiot or I can't be arsed reading it or something. Anyway whatever your gig, don't say 'You're a racist' and then end the conversation, block the tweet thing or just fuck off somewhere. If you say 'You're a racist or a sexist or a whatever', that's ok as long as the other person can respond and there can be a discussion. Doesn't really matter how it goes from there but if Dave says 'You're a racist' and then ends the discussion , well that's just slapping the label on and fucking off and it's bullshit. I don't know anyone here, never heard of Dave before this but I know Dave called the Spiney fella a racist and ended the conversation and that's out of order IMO. Don't know about theory stuff but still worried about 'M'.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

firky said:


> Ahh yeah, "Born Laura Barnett".
> 
> Well she was and said so herself, not sure why that was deleted but I don't really care either.


 
The person who restored it...

Andrew Philip Cross (born 1963) has modified or created pages relating to art, film, jazz, literature, the media and the social sciences.

You can contact me via email, see the toolbox on the left, or via twitter @philipcross63.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philip_Cross

*Articles predominantly written by this user*

Paul Dacre, British newspaper editor
Shelagh Delaney, British playwright and screenwriter
Lars Gullin, Swedish jazz saxophonist
Anthony Howard, British journalist
Media Lens, British media analysis website
Stan Tracey, British jazz musician
Peregrine Worsthorne, British journalist

*Heavily 'cleaned up' by this user*

Mary Whitehouse, British Christian morality campaigner


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

redsquirrel said:


> Well it depends what you mean by identity politics but as I said previously I certainly think that there have been good criticisms of "the left" that have come from a feminist/BME/gay/etc perspective.
> 
> Also it would be deeply stupid and wrong to claim that there haven't been times when socialist have discriminated against minority groups, or swept aside their concerns.


 
Sure, both of these points are true. It's just that there's a conflation here between "privilege theory" and/or "identity politics" on the one hand and anti-racism / anti-sexism / gay liberation on the other. Privilege theory and identity politics more broadly are particular ways of approaching oppression, with particular political assumptions and conclusions embedded. They aren't synonymous with taking those forms of oppression seriously.

There's a real confusion in these kinds of discussions where people start taking about the positive features of identity politics or privilege theory when what they actually mean is that it's necessary to oppose homophobia / sexism / racism etc. Something which you can believe while opposing identity politics or privilege theory as approaches to those issues.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> If this lot stay in the SWP and manage to get anywhere near the leadership it'll be a fucking nightmare. And they have dabbled in identity politics from time to time - look at Respect.
> 
> One of the local student swappies recently left, citing an all pervasive culture of brocialism as his reason for leaving, but has since returned. Now I have many, many criticisms of the SWP but how anyone can claim they're chauvinists of any kind is beyond me.


 
Please tell me he didn't really use the term "brocialism".


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

redsquirrel said:


> Well it depends what you mean by identity politics but as I said previously I certainly think that there have been good criticisms of "the left" that have come from a feminist/BME/gay/etc perspective.
> 
> Also it would be deeply stupid and wrong to claim that there haven't been times when socialist have discriminated against minority groups, or swept aside their concerns.


 
For me, though, it's only really identity politics when these concerns trump class - and the best criticisms of some of the things we'd probably all rather forget about the old left all came from a perspective that took class as the central concern. And it has to - the problems faced by working class blacks are not the same as those faced by middle class blacks. Many of the problems they face are very similar to those of the white working class but magnified by prejudice.

My biggest problem with this privilege stuff is that you have to have a fucking phd in it to understand it well enough to know you're not offending anyone. And, in the hands of the (usually white, as often male as female) middle classes, it's just another way to silence working class people who might not get it. It ends up alienating people. It becomes a way for incredibly privileged people to paint working class people who mean no harm to anyone - who just don't understand privilege theory in all its bizarre, context free complexity - as terrible oppressors. I'll have fuck all to do with that.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Buckaroo said:


> Don't get any of the 'Privilege theory' stuff because I'm an idiot or I can't be arsed reading it or something. Anyway whatever your gig, don't say 'You're a racist' and then end the conversation, block the tweet thing or just fuck off somewhere. If you say 'You're a racist or a sexist or a whatever', that's ok as long as the other person can respond and there can be a discussion. Doesn't really matter how it goes from there but if Dave says 'You're a racist' and then ends the discussion , well that's just slapping the label on and fucking off and it's bullshit. I don't know anyone here, never heard of Dave before this but I know Dave called the Spiney fella a racist and ended the conversation and that's out of order IMO. Don't know about theory stuff but still worried about 'M'.


 
I'll do my best to find out about M mate. I'm interested too.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Please tell me he didn't really use the term "brocialism".


 
Yes, yes he did 

It was spooky actually because I heard about it just after the manarchism stuff on here - which was the first time I'd ever heard the term.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 20, 2012)

#Also it would be deeply stupid and wrong to claim that there haven't been times when socialist have discriminated against minority groups, or swept aside their concerns.#

Very true...but also many times when they've imposed discipline inspired by the primacy of class struggle; dismissing identity issues as irrelevant factionalism. Not sure this is discrimination as such...and solidarity, necessarily, means sweeping asides certain concerns of minorities occasionally. 

It's a tewwible tewwible shame for the likes of LP and her 'comrades' but her brand of bourgeois special pleading and socialism are never gonna be compatible.


----------



## Ibn Khaldoun (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Yes, there were posts along those lines. And the fundamental problem with them is that they conflate "privilege theory" with "caring about oppressions other than class". The problem is not that privilege theory is misused. It's used exactly as its supposed to be used. The problem is that privilege theory is a particularly unhelpful way of looking at oppressions other than class.



But it certainly been taken well away from its original context which was slavery and segregation. So is it not a misappropriation to that extent?

Outside of certain forms of social apartheid its use is limited at best (or actually mystifying) but very appropriate in some historical contexts. However it is certainly no use to feminists IMO. Feminists have their own critiques of sexism/female oppression, its specificities etc..


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

Ibn Khaldoun said:


> But it certainly been taken well away from its original context which was slavery and segregation. So is it not a misappropriation to that extent?


 
The widespread (in the US at least) radical liberal use of "privilege" as a lense to view all forms of oppression through is certainly a long way from the original heterodox Maoist theory about the centrality of racism to US capitalism ("White Skin Privilege"), but that appropriation happened a long time before Laurie Penny started using the term.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Dec 20, 2012)

This whole thread has become a depressing pit of cuntishness. Needs locking as far as I'm concerned.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> This whole thread has become a depressing pit of cuntishness. Needs locking as far as I'm concerned.


 
What, you think that the last hundred comments haven't lived up to the high standards set by the previous nine thousand?


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> For me, though, it's only really identity politics when these concerns trump class - and the best criticisms of some of the things we'd probably all rather forget about the old left all came from a perspective that took class as the central concern. And it has to - the problems faced by working class blacks are not the same as those faced by middle class blacks. Many of the problems they face are very similar to those of the white working class but magnified by prejudice.
> 
> My biggest problem with this privilege stuff is that you have to have a fucking phd in it to understand it well enough to know you're not offending anyone. And, in the hands of the (usually white, as often male as female) middle classes, it's just another way to silence working class people who might not get it. It ends up alienating people. It becomes a way for incredibly privileged people to paint working class people who mean no harm to anyone - who just don't understand privilege theory in all its bizarre, context free complexity - as terrible oppressors. I'll have fuck all to do with that.


I agree with all of that - and Nigel's posts above this. Like I said it depends on what you mean by identity politics and I'm no expert in this area.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> View attachment 26397


 
Dave is Cyberdyne Industries?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> This whole thread has become a depressing pit of cuntishness. Needs locking as far as I'm concerned.


 
Why?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 20, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Dave is Cyberdyne Industries?


Family firm.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

TruXta said:


> You mean write another column for the NS?


 
To be fair, anything would be better than another dull-as-fucking-ditchwater Ed Smith column. The wanker can't write a column where he doesn't refer to his sporting career as though playing cricket gave him a unique and meaningful insight into the human psyche.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> What, you think that the last hundred comments haven't lived up to the high standards set by the previous nine thousand?


 
To be honest, I've not paid much attention to the thread until lauriepenny turned up herself. I don't like the idea of a whole load of people ganging up on anyone. It just makes me feel very uncomfortable. I know that not everyone here is acting in a bad way, but the aggregate effect is pretty nasty even if not intended.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 20, 2012)

redsquirrel said:


> I agree with all of that - and Nigel's posts above this. Like I said it depends on what you mean by identity politics and I'm no expert in this area.



Identity politics is a remarkably complex and highly nuanced field. Then again, all you have to remember is this: it's only complex and nuanced because white middle class guilt is complex and nuanced.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Good to see at least one Urbanite hard work on editing LP's wiki page


 
I was reading her wiki entry yesterday.  It seems to consist mostly of links to her own writing.


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> To be honest, I've not paid much attention to the thread until lauriepenny turned up herself. I don't like the idea of a whole load of people ganging up on anyone. It just makes me feel very uncomfortable. I know that not everyone here is acting in a bad way, but the aggregate effect is pretty nasty even if not intended.


But that's a daft complaint to make at this point.
Even if it was true about the thread in general (and its not IMO) it's clearly not true about the last 10 or so pages which haven't been about LP but about identity politics and privilege theory.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> To be honest, I've not paid much attention to the thread until lauriepenny turned up herself. I don't like the idea of a whole load of people ganging up on anyone. It just makes me feel very uncomfortable. I know that not everyone here is acting in a bad way, but the aggregate effect is pretty nasty even if not intended.


 
That's not really what happened though to be fair is it?


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> If this lot stay in the SWP and manage to get anywhere near the leadership it'll be a fucking nightmare. And they have dabbled in identity politics from time to time - look at Respect.
> 
> One of the local student swappies recently left, citing *an all pervasive culture of brocialism* as his reason for leaving, but has since returned. Now I have many, many criticisms of the SWP but how anyone can claim they're chauvinists of any kind is beyond me.


 
What's wrong with broccoli?  One of my favourite vegetables!


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Dec 20, 2012)

redsquirrel said:


> But that's a daft complaint to make at this point.
> Even if it was true about the thread in general (and its not IMO) it's clearly not true about the last 10 or so pages which haven't been about LP but about identity politics and privilege theory.


 
Even the fact the thread exists at this point, knowing that it is directed at one person alone makes it seem bullying and unnecessary.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 20, 2012)

It's not though.


----------



## sleaterkinney (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's not really what happened though to be fair is it?


It was, along digging up her real name and background. That was stalkery and weird. Do you think that kind of behavior will make her change her opinions or what?


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

Norman did not dig up her real name.



ItWillNeverWork said:


> Even the fact the thread exists at this point, knowing that it is directed at one person alone makes it seem bullying and unnecessary.


 
Are you saying because of this thread, we can't have nice things like a revolution?


----------



## Fedayn (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> It was, along digging up her real name and background. That was stalkery and weird. Do you think that kind of behavior will make her change her opinions or what?


 
You must think all journalists are stalkery and weird then....


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Dec 20, 2012)

I'm just putting myself in the shoes of the person it's directed at. I mean for fucks sake, its's over 300 pages about an individual who writes a blog. Not even Jimmy Saville got this.


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> Even the fact the thread exists at this point, knowing that it is directed at one person alone makes it seem bullying and unnecessary.


Like LP you haven't actually read it have you, otherwise you'd know that it isn't and wasn't directed at one person.


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

it isn't directed at her anyway - it's about her (and others of her ilk).


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Dec 20, 2012)

redsquirrel said:


> Like LP you haven't actually read it have you, otherwise you'd know that it isn't and wasn't directed at one person.


 
Of course I haven't read the whole thing; I've got War and Peace, and the yellow pages to get through first. I don't need to read it all to know that it's a boil on the arse of these forums.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> its's over 300 pages about _an individual who writes a blog_..


 er..


----------



## Belushi (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> Of course I haven't read the whole thing; I've got War and Peace, and the yellow pages to get through first. I don't need to read it all to know that it's a boil on the arse of these forums.


 
So you havent read it but you know what it's about?


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Dec 20, 2012)

Belushi said:


> So you havent read it but you know what it's about?


 
Yes.


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> Of course I haven't read the whole thing; I've got War and Peace, and the yellow pages to get through first. I don't need to read it all to know that it's a boil on the arse of these forums.


Well fuck off then and stop trying to claim something you nothing about is something that it isn't


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> Even the fact the thread exists at this point, knowing that it is directed at one person alone makes it seem bullying and unnecessary.


 
Do you react to the Thatcher/Douglas Murray/insert Tory here threads in the same way? The thing is, I bet if you went through it and sorted out the posts that are actually about LP there might be 30 pages or so. The rest is either arguments about going for a poo, in jokes and, once those important questions are out of the way, discussions of the way privilege is transmitted and the ways in which this is reflected in the content produced by 'radical' mainstream journos.

Of course something that happened shortly after she arrived forced me to pay her a little bit more attention. And I guess that if you can call this thread bullying then using your position at the upper end of a power structure, in the case the media - using a privileged media platform to call two committed antiracists racist and then ensure that they had no right to reply - might also be bullying.


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> It was, along digging up her real name and background. That was stalkery and weird. Do you think that kind of behavior will make her change her opinions or what?



It's not meant to change her opinions. It's not even about her opinions. They are largely irrelevant to the point. Her background is central though. It's about how this background affords her power and privilege. About how it (at best) limits her ability to speak for, and to, the people she claims to. About how this background has allowed her, and people like her to act as parasites and build careers on the backs of other people's struggles and suffering.

And most of all it's not about her as a person, as an individual, it's about people like her, and how and why the system creates and perpetuates them.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Dec 20, 2012)

redsquirrel said:


> Well fuck off then and stop trying to claim something you nothing about is something that it isn't


 
I know what it is. It's a thread that contains nasty, hyena like bullying of a girl who has done fuck all to deserve it.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> It was, along digging up her real name and background. That was stalkery and weird. Do you think that kind of behavior will make her change her opinions or what?


 
Its stalkery and weird to look up publically available information about a media celebrity?


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> I'm just putting myself in the shoes of the person it's directed at. I mean for fucks sake, its's over 300 pages about an individual who writes a blog. Not even Jimmy Saville got this.


 
Which particular aspect of the privilege theory did Mr Savile advocate?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> Even the fact the thread exists at this point, knowing that it is directed at one person alone makes it seem bullying and unnecessary.



On the other hand, it suggests that there is a need for an outlet for those who are fiercely opposed to the kind of bullshit identity radicalism which she so ably epitomises. There really aren't too many places where these issues are raised where  can you state your dissent without getting swamped by liberal idiots scweaming wacist or misogyny. It's far from unnecessary.


----------



## Belushi (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> Yes.


 
There we have it


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> It was, along digging up her real name and background. That was stalkery and weird. Do you think that kind of behavior will make her change her opinions or what?


 
Must say that I don't get the obsession with her name either - she changed her name - so what?

And I don't think that stuff was actually dug up - I don't think any of it was really hidden. I agree that it's not especially helpful but that's really not what the thread is about.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Dec 20, 2012)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I know I'm going to regret saying this, but I don't actually think that it's particularly surprising or wildly unreasonable that L. Penny is hostile to anyone associated with this thread. She really does get a huge amount of unjustified (and often misogynist) abuse online, which is necessarily going to make anyone defensive and/or uninterested in engaging with the content of online criticism. And even leaving that aside, if I came across a thread online with 8,000 comments about what a dickhead I am, I'm pretty sure I'd sulk about it too. Even if thousands of those critical points were fully justified.


 

You do have a point - link to the google "hate laurie penny" search and most of the entries are written by reactionary fucks who may well be women hating shitbags. LP does seem to attract this kind of mass reaction from certain quarters- whether she is working the crowd in some kind of double bluff and knows what she is doing, or is utterly oblivious to how toe curlingly needy & cliched some of her stuff reads.

I dont give a shit about LP personally, but I do give a shit when a wealthy Oxbridge grad is feted as an important voice of the left by the media.


----------



## sleaterkinney (Dec 20, 2012)

chilango said:


> It's not meant to change her opinions. It's not even about her opinions. They are largely irrelevant to the point. Her background is central though. It's about how this background affords her power and privilege. About how it (at best) limits her ability to speak for, and to, the people she claims to. About how this background has allowed her, and people like her to act as parasites and build careers on the backs of other people's struggles and suffering.
> 
> And most of all it's not about her as a person, as an individual, it's about people like her, and how and why the system creates and perpetuates them.


So it's not about changing her opinions, it's just an attack on people like her?


----------



## Belushi (Dec 20, 2012)

The issue wasnt her name.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> I'm just putting myself in the shoes of the person it's directed at. I mean for fucks sake, its's over 300 pages about an individual who writes a blog. Not even Jimmy Saville got this.


 
You do know that she has not just attacked individuals on here, calling them racist / sexist but also the IWCA, all of U75 etc?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> I'm just putting myself in the shoes of the person it's directed at. I mean for fucks sake, its's over 300 pages about an individual who writes a blog. Not even Jimmy Saville got this.


 
The real bullying - the stuff with potential real life consequences - was all in the other direction. I don't understand why you're so keen to ignore that obvious, glaring fact.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Danny Finkelstein "I didn't go to either Oxford or Cambridge"


 
Yep, just a *little bit* disingenuous of the fink.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> I'm just putting myself in the shoes of the person it's directed at. I mean for fucks sake, its's over 300 pages about an individual who writes a blog. Not even Jimmy Saville got this.


 
She does more than write a blog.  She's an editor at The New Statesman, has written articles for many daily newspapers, appears on Newsnight etc.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> I know what it is. It's a thread that contains nasty, hyena like bullying of a girl who has done fuck all to deserve it.


 
Forget the bullying part for now - let's focus on the done fuck all to deserve it for now. Care to explain that comment?


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> So it's not about changing her opinions, it's just an attack on people like her?



Yep.

Well, I'd hope it'd move beyond attack to critique. But there you go..


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Dec 20, 2012)

Ahh fuck it. If you can't see the problem with this thread then no amount arguing the toss is going to convince you.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> Ahh fuck it. If you can't see the problem with this thread then no amount arguing the toss is going to convince you.


 
You could try and construct a reasoned argument based on fact?


----------



## Belushi (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> I know what it is. It's a thread that contains nasty, hyena like bullying of a *girl* who has done fuck all to deserve it.


 
She's a 26 year old woman.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> So it's not about changing her opinions, it's just an attack on people like her?


 
I'd say that it was a *discussion* about the political ideas put forward by people like Dave 'Penny Red' Barnett, especially bloggers and journos from her social background, who claim to be 'left-wing activists', but who use their 'theory of privilege' to control and stifle political debate.


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> Ahh fuck it. If you can't see the problem with this thread then no amount arguing the toss is going to convince you.



I can see plenty of problems with the thread.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> Ahh fuck it. If you can't see the problem with this thread then no amount arguing the toss is going to convince you.


 
Cop out. Come on, justify your ignorant comments please.


----------



## co-op (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> I know what it is. It's a thread that contains nasty, hyena like bullying of a girl who has done fuck all to deserve it.


 
Bad effort. That's a really daft comment that could only be made by someone who hasn't read the thread.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> I know what it is. It's a thread that contains nasty, hyena like bullying of a girl who has done fuck all to deserve it.


 
1. The thread taken as a whole is clearly not "hyena like bullying".
2. Laura is a grown woman, not a child. Don't infantilise her.
3. She - and other similar journalists - has done plenty to deserve the opprobrium.


----------



## sleaterkinney (Dec 20, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> Its stalkery and weird to look up publically available information about a media celebrity?


Yeah, when everyone on here uses a pseudonym.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 20, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Yep, just a *little bit* disingenuous of the fink.


He's a leader writer; that, surely, is a prerequisite of the job?


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> Yeah, when everyone on here uses a pseudonym.


only cause it was the prevailing internet fashion when we registered 10 years ago.

my name's joe maclaren. who're you?


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> I know what it is. It's a thread that contains nasty, hyena like bullying of a girl who has done fuck all to deserve it.


Oh fuck off and kiss LPs backside. You'd get on fantastic with her, making shitty untrue allegations about people without even bothering to find out the facts first combined with a total unwillingness to develop an argument.

The couple of time when a poster or two on this thread has got close to 'bullying' the majority of the posters have dealt with it and called that behaviour out.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Dec 20, 2012)

However, I do love her current Wiki page

"In December 2012, Laurie Penny was embroiled in a row on Twitter in which she accused a prominent anti-fascist, and the Independent Working Class Association of being racist. Laurie then went on to smear anyone who disagreed with her as sexist."


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

Belushi said:


> She's a 26 year old woman.


 
He changed it from "individual" to "girl".



See the replies prior to yours.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> Yeah, when everyone on here uses a pseudonym.


 
Including 'Penny Red' and 'Laurie Penny' ?  Both pseudonyms btw.

If you're going to start moaning about people not using their real names here then Dave's moniker does become an issue... as does your own.


----------



## editor (Dec 20, 2012)

killer b said:


> ah, like editor saying he didn't know if swarthy was a nonce or not?


Stop being a disruptive dick and keep me out of this. Thanks.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

I'd really like to know what @sleaterkinney and @ItWillNeverWork think about the accusations of racism this 'girl' (that's a little bit misogyny you know) who's done nothing to deserve this 'bullying' made. I'd like to know what they think about the fact that this afternoon a fourth person questioned me about my 'racism' and that it appears that I'll have to wait until she calls me on Saturday for any kind of retraction. So I can expect to have to have this conversation with more people before then. Because that shit sticks - even afterwards, when I've explained it, there's always a doubt. There must have been something behind it. No smoke without fire.

Especially as I wasn't responsible for any of the stuff you've taken issue with - none of it. So are you really sure about the innocence of this young maiden?

Don't you think acting the white night might actually be a bit insulting to her? She's a 26 year old woman who edits a major magazine, not some snotty nosed little kid who needs you to look after her.


----------



## audiotech (Dec 20, 2012)

FWIW, from where I'm looking this thread, after one of the personality's mentioned in the thread title appeared, degenerated into nasty little hate-fest for a time, fueled by some, ironically privileged themselves, middle-class no-marks, trying, but failing miserably to appear prolier than thou. There were others too, who tbf, came across as boorish oafs.


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

audiotech said:


> FWIW, from where I'm looking this thread, after one of the personality's mentioned in the thread title appeared, degenerated into nasty little hate-fest for a time, fueled by some, ironically privileged themselves, middle-class no-marks, trying, but failing miserably to appear prolier than thou. There were others too, who tbf, came across as boorish oafs.



Do clarify..name names etc.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

Things I don't like about this thread:

Very occasionally there has been some out and out abuse towards her.
I don't like the Dave thing, and it's actually against the site FAQs.
She ignores questions, which is frustrating, but it is her right.
Errr, it moves too fast for me / I can't believe how much time I've spent on it.

That's it, I think.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

killer b said:


> only cause it was the prevailing internet fashion when we registered 10 years ago.
> 
> my name's joe maclaren. who're you?


 
Good to meet you Joe. I'm [name removed because I don't want any more people making the connection between me and 'racist' spineynorman]. Now we've got our names out are we both OK to talk about other people on the internet do you reckon? Or should we ask our two moral guardians first?


----------



## weepiper (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> girl


 
26.


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Good to meet you Joe. I'm *cough*. Now we've got our names out are we both OK to talk about other people on the internet do you reckon? Or should we ask our two moral guardians first?


nearly there. i think your mother's maiden name and the street you grew up on should sort it out.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)




----------



## sleaterkinney (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'd really like to know what @sleaterkinney and @ItWillNeverWork think about the accusations of racism this 'girl' (that's a little bit misogyny you know) who's done nothing to deserve this 'bullying' made. I'd like to know what they think about the fact that this afternoon a fourth person questioned me about my 'racism' and that it appears that I'll have to wait until she calls me on Saturday for any kind of retraction. So I can expect to have to have this conversation with more people before then. Because that shit sticks - even afterwards, when I've explained it, there's always a doubt. There must have been something behind it. No smoke without fire.
> 
> Especially as I wasn't responsible for any of the stuff you've taken issue with - none of it. So are you really sure about the innocence of this young maiden?
> 
> Don't you think acting the white night might actually be a bit insulting to her? She's a 26 year old woman who edits a major magazine, not some snotty nosed little kid who needs you to look after her.


I don't know the ends and outs of the alleged racism, but she came onto this board via a shitty cartoon and got treated badly once here and it's that I'm bothered about.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> I don't like the Dave thing, and it's actually against the site FAQs.


 
Oh FFS... The point I was making with the 'Dave thing' is that the name 'Laurie Penny' is itself an invention, it's not her real name. It's been constructed for purely pretentious political reasons I would hazard to guess. From her politics right down to her 'wadical' choice of name, she is a fake.

But point me in the direction of the rule I am breaking and I might stop calling Dave 'Dave'.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

killer b said:


> nearly there. i think your mother's maiden name and the street you grew up on should sort it out.


 
Actually, thinking about it, I'd rather edit that out if it's OK with you - the last thing I need right now is people who don't know who my internet name refers to joining the dots on spineygate. Were it not for that I'd be more than happy to put my mother's maiden name, the hospital I was born at, my school reports and some childhood holiday snaps up.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> I don't know the ends and outs of the alleged racism, but she came onto this board via a shitty cartoon and got treated badly once here and it's that I'm bothered about.


 
Don't you think that pales into insignificance somewhat compared to what's been thrown in my direction? Where is the moral outrage on that one? I can assure you I'm not making this up - I'll happily get people to substantiate every word if necessary.


----------



## audiotech (Dec 20, 2012)

chilango said:


> Do clarify..name names etc.


 
This forum is infested with middle-class no-marks. They know who they are.


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

ok, edited.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> Yeah, when everyone on here uses a pseudonym.


 
Is everyone on here a media celebrity editing a national magazine, going on Newsnight and having articles in the Telegraph defending them?


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

audiotech said:


> This forum is infested with middle-class no-marks. They know who they are.


still not sure. you'd probably best tell us.


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> I don't know the ends and outs of the alleged racism, but she came onto this board via a shitty cartoon and got treated badly once here and it's that I'm bothered about.


How did she get treated badly when she came here? People asked questions to her and criticised her - that's not bullying. 

Admittedly a couple of posters called her Dave (for some reason which like SN and sihhi I still don't really get) but I'm sorry most posters here, or most places else,  will get far worse than that.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> I don't know the ends and outs of the alleged racism, but she came onto this board via a shitty cartoon and got treated badly once here and it's that I'm bothered about.


she's mugged everyone off in general with misogyny smears and slandered several specific people qrt racism- excuse me while I apply another coat of whitewash to your lance Ser NeverContributedToThisThreadBeforeNow. Let me caprison your horse with fresh bleached linen oh Lord of Only Just Noticed This Thread Now


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 20, 2012)

What's wrong with hyenas.
Lay off the fuckin hyenas.
Speciesist bastards.

Seriously...who or what do they bully?
Any suggestion that authentic hyena behaviour is inspired by anything other than adaptive survival mechanisms is rank anthropomorphism. 
Check your fuckin privilege matey. Hyenas don't have access to the kinda opportunities afforded to white middle class twats. They can't afford precious liberal guilt trips like you...the savannah's an unforgiving place.


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> I don't know the ends and outs of the alleged racism, but she came onto this board via a shitty cartoon and got treated badly once here and it's that I'm bothered about.



It was a shitty cartoon.

BUT she was treated pretty well upon arrival. Then she refused to engage, called us a bunch of racists/sexists and ran away.

Then there was some pretty harsh stuff posted about her by a minority.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

My name is *Harper Rottenrow*...

Maiden names and hospitals accounted for.

With a name like that I must be due a NS column!


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> I don't know the ends and outs of the alleged racism, but she came onto this board via a shitty cartoon and got treated badly once here and it's that I'm bothered about.


 
That's not really what happened.  Yes that cartoon was out of order, however the person who posted it got told this by plenty of people.  Any other sexist or weirdo comments were criticised too.  In what way has she been treated badly?


----------



## sleaterkinney (Dec 20, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> she's mugged everyone off in general with misogyny smears and slandered several specific people qrt racism- excuse me while I apply another coat of whitewash to your lance Ser NeverContributedToThisThreadBeforeNow. Let me caprison your horse with fresh bleached linen oh Lord of Only Just Noticed This Thread Now


Clean out my horse's bun bag while you're at it.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> Oh FFS... The point I was making with the 'Dave thing' is that the name 'Laurie Penny' is itself an invention, it's not her real name. It's been constructed for purely pretentious political reasons I would hazard to guess. From her politics right down to her 'wadical' choice of name, she is a fake.
> 
> But point me in the direction of the rule I am breaking and I might stop calling Dave 'Dave'.


 
I don't care enough to find it, but I believe calling posters by names which aren't actually theirs* is a rule.  I'm not asking you to stop; I'm just saying I don't like it.

*I know she's not _really _called Laurie Penny either.  It's a fucking minefield


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 20, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> Is everyone on here a media celebrity editing a national magazine, going on Newsnight and having articles in the Telegraph defending them?



Well I know I am. But I can only speak for myself.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> I don't care enough to find it, but I believe calling posters by names which aren't actually theirs* is a rule. I'm not asking you to stop; I'm just saying I don't like it.
> 
> *I know she's not _really _called Laurie Penny either. It's a fucking minefield


 
Exactamente Shirley.


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> I know what it is. It's a thread that contains nasty, hyena like bullying of a girl who has done fuck all to deserve it.


That's not true.


----------



## Red Cat (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> I know what it is. It's a thread that contains nasty, hyena like bullying of *a girl* who has done fuck all to deserve it.


 
Check your privilege!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> I don't know the ends and outs of the alleged racism, but she came onto this board via a shitty cartoon and got treated badly once here and it's that I'm bothered about.


 
I'll give you the lowdown on the alleged racism - it was a complete fabrication. That's all there is to it. Other than the use of a privileged media platform to ensure that the complete fabrication went essentially unopposed of course, and has had a direct impact in the real world.


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'll give you the lowdown on the alleged racism - it was a complete fabrication. That's all there is to it. Other than the use of a privileged media platform to ensure that the complete fabrication went essentially unopposed of course, and has had a direct impact in the real world.


I'm not quite sure how anyone could have read the part of the thread after LP turned up and missed the racism accusations, particularly at the same time they _can_ spot bullying.


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> I don't know the ends and outs of the alleged racism, but she came onto this board via a shitty cartoon and got treated badly once here and it's that I'm bothered about.


This is misrepresentation.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Check your fuckin privilege matey.





Red Cat said:


> Check your privilege!


 
These two posts got me thinking -- is Laurie the first person on Urban to say, in earnest, "check your privilege"?


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> These two posts got me thinking -- is Laurie the first person on Urban to say, in earnest, "check your privilege"?


Where did Laurie say "check your privilege"?


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

cesare said:


> Where did Laurie say "check your privilege?"


 
It wasn't an _exact_ "check your privilege", but I think I'm right in remembering her say something like, "unchecked white male privilege" is what made her react the way she did?  Hope I haven't imagined that....


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

redsquirrel said:


> I'm not quite sure how anyone could have read the part of the thread after LP turned up and missed the racism accusations, particularly at the same time they _can_ spot bullying.


 
It's almost like they've either not really read the thread at all or they have read it and intentionally glossed over that part isn't it? It would be unfair to make that assumption though so I'll let the posters in question offer what is probablu an obvious alternative explanation that I'm not quite seeing.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> It wasn't an _exact_ "check your privilege", but I think I'm right in remembering her say something like, "unchecked white male privilege" is what made her react the way she did? Hope I haven't imagined that....


 
She said that in her email to me mate, the one she copied onto here. To be fair, I said it in an almost serious but also kind of taking the piss way earlier in the thread. Does that count?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> I'm confused as to why a few people on this thread have gone out of their way to say they don't dismiss privilege/identity politics completely. It stuck out to me as I really don't see what privilege politics offers. I asked on the manarchism thread this question, and the last time I checked it there was no real response. So if it gives us nothing, and it shuts down debate, why are people not denouncing it in its entirety?


 
Because *in its place* (as a set of tools for analysing social interaction) it's not without utility. What people generally are disagreeing with w/r/t "identity politics", is when "identity politics" replace any and every other mode of analysis, so all that is left is difference, with no focus on commonality or solidarity, no attention paid to how reducing identity to a series of positions on a hierarchy of oppression from which commentators can criticise (but seldom critique) each other merely does power's work for it.
"United we stand, divided we fall", and all that.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> She said that in her email to me mate, the one she copied onto here. To be fair, I said it in an almost serious but also kind of taking the piss way earlier in the thread. Does that count?


 
Well, hers wasn't really on here if it was just a copy of the email.  Perhaps you do take the dubious honour.


----------



## sleaterkinney (Dec 20, 2012)

chilango said:


> It was a shitty cartoon.
> 
> BUT she was treated pretty well upon arrival. Then she refused to engage, called us a bunch of racists/sexists and ran away.
> 
> Then there was some pretty harsh stuff posted about her by a minority.


It happened soon after she started posting, post #6239 for example.
http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...cebook-handbags.266196/page-208#post-11794834


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

I think having the username of a shit 90s band that nobody liked obliges you to take on viewpoints and fight the corner for shit opinions. Even though tossbags at the torygraph beat you to it.


----------



## co-op (Dec 20, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> That's not really what happened. Yes that cartoon was out of order, however the person who posted it got told this by plenty of people. Any other sexist or weirdo comments were criticised too. In what way has she been treated badly?


 
It's an internet bulletin board, anyone who has spent more than about 5 minutes online in their lives knows that you will always get idiotic posts thrown around, for laughs, from misjudgement, out of sudden anger, because someone is genuinely dumb, whatever. How the board deals with that varies but every board has these issues, she's supposed to be the voice of the new tech generation and she thinks that she can hide behind a group denunciation of a whole board based on _one or two comments?_ That's utter bullshit and she knows it.

Anyone who isn't sure what she's doing here on this thread should rewatch the David Starkey debate clip where she demands a "right of reply" to his dig and only then when she's at the microphone does she remember "oh shit, what he said is true" so she just flaps and blusters. It's cringingly hard to watch but it's absolutely her technique here. It's a masterclass in narcissism; "if it makes me look like an arse it CAN'T be true".

At this point in her life she's lucky to get pulled up on this shit - if she doesn't take note of what's being said and change her ways or she's very likely in for a proper public Harigeddon.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

TruXta said:


> Both, just like I said. I think he's a crap poster, and he signed back on using a different nick after being banned. What's your point?


 
Let's get this right: Since he was banned as LLETSA, he's been back under at least 4 other identities. sam goloden wasn't the only one.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> Well, hers wasn't really on here if it was just a copy of the email. Perhaps you do take the dubious honour.


 


SpineyNorman said:


> And of course this is another way in which she can use her privilege isn't it? She gets to say that and I have no recourse to come back whatsoever - I don't have a Guardian column or anything in which I can refute these claims, I'm sure if Laura was slandered in such a way she'd be able to call in the lawyers and I can't.
> 
> Check your privilege @lauriepenny


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> It wasn't an _exact_ "check your privilege", but I think I'm right in remembering her say something like, "unchecked white male privilege" is what made her react the way she did?  Hope I haven't imagined that....



No, exactly, it wasn't an exact:



Fez909 said:


> These two posts got me thinking -- is Laurie the first person on Urban to say, in earnest, "check your privilege"?



Don't give her further ammunition.


----------



## sleaterkinney (Dec 20, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> I think having the username of a shit 90s band that nobody liked obliges you to take on viewpoints and fight the corner for shit opinions. Even though tossbags at the torygraph beat you to it.


Yeah


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Because *in its place* (as a set of tools for analysing social interaction) it's not without utility. What people generally are disagreeing with w/r/t "identity politics", is when "identity politics" replace any and every other mode of analysis, so all that is left is difference, with no focus on commonality or solidarity, no attention paid to how reducing identity to a series of positions on a hierarchy of oppression from which commentators can criticise (but seldom critique) each other merely does power's work for it.
> "United we stand, divided we fall", and all that.


 
This is the bit I'm most confused about, though. As a tool, yes, I can definitely see how it would help you identify oppression due to your privilege over another. However, unless you notice the privileged position you're in (which I'd argue is the default case), the duty is on other people to make you aware that you're abusing your position in some way. This will, in my view, _only _close down discussion. _Never_ open it up, nor give recourse to the perpetrator of the oppression. And if that's the case, then I don't think it's a valid tool.

edit: I mean _isn't _the default case, of course


----------



## Belushi (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> It happened soon after she started posting, post #6239 for example.
> http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...cebook-handbags.266196/page-208#post-11794834


 
That posts actually spot on.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

To be honest I think I'll leave it there - I'm in danger of taking it out on IWNW and SK who, despite clearly making claims about things they know nothing about, aren't responsible for what happened. It's been done to death anyway so I'll save my thoughts on it for LP herself.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

The irony 

edit: this was meant to be @SpineyNorman but you can't quote quotes


----------



## co-op (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> I don't know the ends and outs of the alleged racism, but she came onto this board via a shitty cartoon and got treated badly once here and it's that I'm bothered about.


 
FWIW I think there's a good chance she's been aware of the thread before. U75 threads score highly on google and routinely come up on the first page & I don't believe for a minute that she's never googled herself in the last 2 years.

If she started posting after the cartoon that need mean nothing more than that was her best opportunity to come in as victim rather than perp.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> It happened soon after she started posting, post #6239 for example.
> http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...cebook-handbags.266196/page-208#post-11794834


 
OK, gonna look like a hypocrite now but since I'm already a racist it's hardly going to damage my reputation any further. 

Not being funny or anything but is that really the best example of bullying you could find? It's hardly abusive and since that's _precisely_ what did happen I'm not sure why you've picked it out.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> Yeah, when everyone on here uses a pseudonym.


 
Penny Red is her real name?

In fact Laurie Penny isn't her real name either.


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 20, 2012)

And breathe everyone. Let's talk about Irony...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> The irony
> 
> edit: this was meant to be @SpineyNorman but you can't quote quotes


 
At that time I'd forgotten what my sister did for a living - since then a few options presented themselves 

I'm busy checking my own privilege now though so don't worry about it


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> Well, as someone coming at this with a clean slate, so to speak, I asked for a description of what privilege theory actually is. Spanky gave a simplified explanation which I understood and was not challenged by anyone on the thread. I assume his explanation was accurate.
> 
> Given that's the true meaning of privilege theory, I asked how it could be used. No answer. 4 more pages of rubbish about whether the working classes are to blame for their own obesity. VP showed how it can be used, which is just "check your privilege" and she even admitted it's not especially useful if that's how it is used. No other way of using this tool was given.
> 
> It's a way of shutting down debate and nothing else, IMO. I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise.


 
You calling me a "she"? 



Properly, "check your privilege" is no more or less than saying to someone "have a think about the perspective your point of view comes from". However, it can and IS used by mendacious people to shut down debate, and what *they* are saying, when they tell you to "check your privilege" is "I don't agree with you, but to give the reason would make me look foolish, so instead I'm going to imply that you're exerting cock/age/sexuality (delete as applicable) power over me".


----------



## sleaterkinney (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> OK, gonna look like a hypocrite now but since I'm already a racist it's hardly going to damage my reputation any further.
> 
> Not being funny or anything but is that really the best example of bullying you could find? It's hardly abusive and since that's _precisely_ what did happen I'm not sure why you've picked it out.


No, I was responding to chilango's post saying "_BUT she was treated pretty well upon arrival._"


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> It happened soon after she started posting, post #6239 for example.
> http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...cebook-handbags.266196/page-208#post-11794834


Christ. That is pathetic, BA might have been a bit rude but her didn't abuse her in any way shape or form.

Are you going to go back and read up on the racism accusations or do they not fit in with what you want to believe?


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> It happened soon after she started posting, post #6239 for example.
> http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...cebook-handbags.266196/page-208#post-11794834



Really? I don't think that post was "treating her badly". Not exactly friendly and certainly dismissive, but not out of the ordinary for "robust debate".

Also turned out to be remarkably prescient.


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> This is the bit I'm most confused about, though. As a tool, yes, I can definitely see how it would help you identify oppression due to your privilege over another. However, unless you notice the privileged position you're in (which I'd argue is the default case), the duty is on other people to make you aware that you're abusing your position in some way. This will, in my view, _only _close down discussion. _Never_ open it up, nor give recourse to the perpetrator of the oppression. And if that's the case, then I don't think it's a valid tool.
> 
> edit: I mean _isn't _the default case, of course



Like any tool, it'll be blamed if it gets misused by a bad workman


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> No, I was responding to chilango's post saying "_BUT she was treated pretty well upon arrival._"


 
Come on fella, that's weak as fuck and you know it.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 20, 2012)

Just checked my privilege...seems I need an upgrade.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 20, 2012)

As the Johann Hari circus demonstrated, a dishonest journalist won't come clean unless forced to, and even then it's caveat and proviso and excuse after excuse.

Let's consider some of the practices we're talking about:


Straight-out lying - knowingly saying or writing something that is inaccurate.
Misrepresentation - using available fragments to build up an incorrect overall impression
Misquotation - not accurately reporting the words of a subject
Inaccurate citation - 'borrowing' quotations from elsewhere
Personal advancement - deriving personal pecuniary, cultural or professional benefit from the above (in conflict with claimed political values)
Smearing - falsely accusing others, either with mens rea or not
 
etc


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> You calling me a "she"?
> 
> 
> 
> Properly, "check your privilege" is no more or less than saying to someone "have a think about the perspective your point of view comes from". However, it can and IS used by mendacious people to shut down debate, and what *they* are saying, when they tell you to "check your privilege" is "I don't agree with you, but to give the reason would make me look foolish, so instead I'm going to imply that you're exerting cock/age/sexuality (delete as applicable) power over me".


 
Think he meant vintage paw not you mate.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 20, 2012)

My account is suspended apparently. For being rude to a wikileaks fanboy


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> You calling me a "she"?
> 
> 
> 
> Properly, "check your privilege" is no more or less than saying to someone "have a think about the perspective your point of view comes from". However, it can and IS used by mendacious people to shut down debate, and what *they* are saying, when they tell you to "check your privilege" is "I don't agree with you, but to give the reason would make me look foolish, so instead I'm going to imply that you're exerting cock/age/sexuality (delete as applicable) power over me".


 Exactly, and that's what I mean by misuse/abuse. And that's what Laurie Penny does.


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Not being funny or anything but is that really the best example of bullying you could find? It's hardly abusive and since that's _precisely_ what did happen I'm not sure why you've picked it out.


Aye that is a truly pathetic "example".


----------



## sleaterkinney (Dec 20, 2012)

chilango said:


> Really? I don't think that post was "treating her badly". Not exactly friendly and certainly dismissive, but not out of the ordinary for "robust debate".
> 
> Also turned out to be remarkably prescient.


 "robust debate" it is then.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> My account is suspended apparently. For being rude to a wikileaks fanboy


 
Happened to me yesterday, you just have to click the link to the suspensions service or whatever it was and promise to be a good girl from now on and they'll let you back on.


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

sleaterkinney said:


> "robust debate" it is then.



Yep.

There are plenty of worse posts on here about LP. Some of which are nasty and targeted at her as an individual.

That wasn't one of them.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 20, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> My account is suspended apparently. For being rude to a wikileaks fanboy


 
You'll get it back. I just had to enter some Captcha stuff and agree not to "abuse" (ask Laurie Penny questions) anymore.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> I'm just putting myself in the shoes of the person it's directed at. I mean for fucks sake, its's over 300 pages about an individual who writes a blog. Not even Jimmy Saville got this.


 
Writes a blog, has columns in daily newspapers and a weekly magazine, is an author and appears on current affairs programmes on TV anbd Radio, so *not* just "an individual who writes a blog".


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

co-op said:


> Anyone who isn't sure what she's doing here on this thread should rewatch the David Starkey debate clip where she demands a "right of reply" to his dig and only then when she's at the microphone does she remember "oh shit, what he said is true" so she just flaps and blusters. It's cringingly hard to watch but it's absolutely her technique here. It's a masterclass in narcissism; "if it makes me look like an arse it CAN'T be true".


 
Well spotted Co-op, I missed this video first time around, but the tactic of the ingenue is apparent. If she is proved wrong on any count she resorts to smears and accusations of racism and/or sexism. If that doesn't work, she plays the 'bullied' little schoolgirl.

I cannot stand Starkey, but he chewed her up in this exchange. His only mistake was to aggressively move towards her with the jabbing finger.
That gave her the excuse to cry _"Infamy!"_


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Writes a blog, has columns in daily newspapers and a weekly magazine, is an author and appears on current affairs programmes on TV anbd Radio, so *not* just "an individual who writes a blog".


"Contributing editor" of the New Statesman, no less.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> I know what it is. It's a thread that contains nasty, hyena like bullying of a girl who has done fuck all to deserve it.


 
Given that she's a feminist, she'd probably take issue with you referring to her as a "girl", as well as telling you to stick your patriarchal, paternalistic "white knight" behaviour right up your shitter.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> He's a leader writer; that, surely, is a prerequisite of the job?


 
True but you're generally expected not to be *quite* so obvious.


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

chilango said:


> Yep.
> 
> There are plenty of worse posts on here about LP. Some of which are nasty and targeted at her as an individual.
> 
> That wasn't one of them.




...and said "nasty posts" were not the immediate reaction to LP arriving on the thread. Rather several posters asked her to look beyond the minority of off posts and look at the issues being raised. She point blank refused, and swanned off to twitter to accuse love detective and Spiney of being racists.


----------



## Belushi (Dec 20, 2012)

I think I was very civil to her, and she immediately misrepresented my words in response.


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> His only mistake was to aggressively move towards her with the jabbing finger. That gave her the excuse to cry _"Infamy!"_




Agreed he's a cunt and a prick - but before the video of that was put online, she claimed he'd attacked her or something equally out of proportion with what he did - which was just walk like a rather feeble aggressive Egyptian towards her - once it became clear that there was video footage of it she backed down somewhat on her allegations of what happened

she also back tracked in front of him, he accused her of somethng she denied it and demanded the right to respond, she got the right to respond, he said he had emails confirming his allegations and she then decided she didn't want to respond, it went a bit like this

2:57 Penny: "May I....may i respond to that, I think i have a right of reply to that, erm I personally feel erm...."

3:06 Starkey: "Did you or did you not do what I just said"

3:08 Penny: "I was going to respond to that, but.....

3:27 Starkey: " I have emails"

3:29 Roy Cropper: "Respond to it Laurie"

3:31 Penny: "Actually, no i don't think i'm going to respond to it"


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 20, 2012)

Laurie Penny...just another little liberal journo with a penchant for censorship.

Better than the old sort though...they just sigh benignly and repeat the tired old pretentious homilies while assuring you that your opinion is irredeemably discriminatory and offensive; assuming that because your not "one of us", you're an unrefined pleb who lacks the empathy Oxbridge brings you.

Refreshing, she just puts her fingers in her ears and screams "racist misogyny".


----------



## smokedout (Dec 20, 2012)

not-bono-ever said:


> You do have a point - link to the google "hate laurie penny" search and most of the entries are written by reactionary fucks who may well be women hating shitbags.


 
type hate any vaguely controversial figure into google and you get similar results, try melanie phillips or johann hari

that's the thing about being famous, not everyone will like you.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

audiotech said:


> This forum is infested with middle-class no-marks. They know who they are.


 
Self-hate.

Love it.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Dec 20, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Or, better still, a photo.


 
The camera phone video on youtube. Oh Merry Christmas indeed.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> walk like a rather feeble aggressive Egyptian towards her


 
Racist!


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> Well spotted Co-op, I missed this video first time around, but the tactic of the ingenue is apparent. If she is proved wrong on any count she resorts to smears and accusations of racism and/or sexism. If that doesn't work, she plays the 'bullied' little schoolgirl.
> 
> I cannot stand Starkey, but he chewed her up in this exchange. His only mistake was to aggressively move towards her with the jabbing finger.
> That gave her the excuse to cry _"Infamy!"_




She does a fuckin kickass Kenneth Williams impression...

"Misogyny, misogyny....the've all got it infamy"


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's not really what happened though to be fair is it?


 
Not sure why that poster has turned up here on this thread anyway


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

smokedout said:


> type hate any vaguely controversial figure into google and you get similar results, try melanie phillips or johann hari
> 
> that's the thing about being famous, not everyone will like you.


That's also the thing about social media. All of a sudden the readership get the right of immediate and unmoderated reply. Some journos are finding that hard to handle, so will show journo solidarity for a journalist that says unpopular things and faces a backlash.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 20, 2012)

...walk like a rather feeble aggressive Egyptian towards her"



SpineyNorman said:


> Racist!



"walk like a rather feeble aggressive Egyptian towards her"

Indeed...but isn't it a tad ableist too?
I hate to cast aspersions, but I think the fact you missed that is a sign you might like to consider checking your privilege.


----------



## snadge (Dec 20, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> As the Johann Hari circus demonstrated, a dishonest journalist won't come clean unless forced to, and even then it's caveat and proviso and excuse after excuse.
> 
> Let's consider some of the practices we're talking about:
> 
> ...


 
I think she is guilty of all of those practices from this incident, Misquotation maybe not though.



Keep it up guys, lets leave these Oxbridge cunts in the gutter, fucking privilege opression, it's brocialism of the nth degree, bodyswerving by privilege, yahoo!


WTF is that.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 20, 2012)

Belushi said:


> I think I was very civil to her, and she immediately misrepresented my words in response.


 
She probably had trouble understanding your writing's Polish Taff accent.


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

I just went back to LP's first post here to see what the response to her arrival was and if I remembered it correctly.

Whilst she was, quite rightly, not exactly welcomed with opened arms, she was offered (perfectly civilly) a number of opportunities for sensible discussion. All of which she refused. I kept reading looking for posters to turn on her with abuse and bullying. I gave up after a few pages. It hadn't happened.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> She does a fuckin kickass Kenneth Williams impression...
> 
> "Misogyny, misogyny....the've all got it infamy"


 

The *ingénue* (




/ˈænʒənuː/) is a stock character in literature, film, and a role type in the theatre; generally a girl or a young woman who is endearingly innocent and wholesome. *Ingenue* may also refer to a new young actress or one typecast in such roles. The term comes from the French adjective _ingénu_ meaning "ingenuous" or innocent, virtuous, and candid. *The term may also imply a lack of sophistication and cunning... *The ingenue stereotypically has the fawn-eyed innocence of a child.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 20, 2012)

From the OffBeat Empire article linked to earlier:


> I don't care if your politics are progressive and your focus is on social justice: if you're shouting at people online and refusing to have a dialogue, you're bullying.


Reminds me of someone....


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

Another 3,000 views since I last checked this thread an hour ago. Fkin' hell!


----------



## weepiper (Dec 20, 2012)

firky said:


> Another 3,000 views since I last checked this thread an hour ago. Fkin' hell!


 
200 pages in two years. Another 100 pages since Laurie Penny appeared


----------



## snadge (Dec 20, 2012)

firky said:


> Another 3,000 views since I last checked this thread an hour ago. Fkin' hell!


 
It's gone viral.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 20, 2012)

weepiper said:


> 200 pages in two years. Another 100 pages since Laurie Penny appeared



She's box office gold...that's the problem. 
Hard to say if there's some magnetism thing going on or it's just a train wreck you can't take your eyes away from...although the two are far from mutually exclusive.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

This is what happens when you take on the might of the media.


----------



## ska invita (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> To be honest, I've not paid much attention to the thread until lauriepenny turned up herself. I don't like the idea of a whole load of people ganging up on anyone. It just makes me feel very uncomfortable. I know that not everyone here is acting in a bad way, but the aggregate effect is pretty nasty even if not intended.


Ive read a lot of it - dipped into it in the past but once i got the point i wasnt interested to follow it, and read a lot more recently*...*the fact pretty much every article, post, tweet, plus personal background has been dissected makes me feel very uncomfortable too - angry on occasion (some lines of decency were crossed)- it does_ feel_ a lot like bullying. But then again theres been some really interesting stuff to come out of it, and genuine attempts to broaden it out. Forums aren't perfect I guess, and the messiness is all part of it.


chilango said:


> And most of all it's not about her as a person, as an individual, it's about people like her, and how and why the system creates and perpetuates them.


and


chilango said:


> It's not meant to change her opinions. It's not even about her opinions. They are largely irrelevant to the point. Her background is central though. It's about how this background affords her power and privilege. About how it (at best) limits her ability to speak for, and to, the people she claims to. About how this background has allowed her, and people like her to act as parasites and build careers on the backs of other people's struggles and suffering.
> 
> And most of all it's not about her as a person, as an individual, it's about people like her, and how and why the system creates and perpetuates them.


 
is definitely true, but


ItWillNeverWork said:


> " the aggregate effect is pretty nasty even if not intended"


 <hard to argue against that either - like several posters have said id be physically sick if i found this thread and it had so much stuff about me. It may do all Chilango says but it has gone into depth on her personal life and looked at pretty much every article shes ever written, filling up at least 50% of the pages here, if not more. That concentration in itself feels like bullying. But if you're putting writing in the public domain, that has to invite feedback and if you throw yourself in every spotlight and get up on every platform you have to be prepared for this kind of thing.

I wonder what would ever bring this thread to an end? Its run 2 years already. Seems to me theres appetite to keep watching her every tweet and article for ever. This mooted non-LP article? that would be good, but I cant see it happening. Would be great if it did - or something similiar. The only conclusion would be if Laurie signed up to the board permanently i reckon... Really got stuck in. If you cant beat them join em. Shame that hasnt happened. Cant go in half-arsed.

Failing that maybe a game of armistice football on Christmas Day with Laurie and her gang on one team (Danny Finklestein can go in goal).


Ronnie Rubashov said:


> She's box office gold...that's the problem.
> Hard to say if there's some magnetism thing going on or it's just a train wreck you can't take your eyes away from...although the two are far from mutually exclusive.


ha yeah, it is also interesting to see a clashing of Celebrity Twittersphere vs Proley Forums.


----------



## chilango (Dec 20, 2012)

ska invita said:


> ?.. it is also interesting to see a clashing of Celebrity Twittersphere vs Proley Forums.



Very true. 

Here comes everyone? We shall see...


----------



## krink (Dec 20, 2012)

i started following dave on twitter but i stopped. she's a load of fuckin shit just like all the 'lefty' papers.


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## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

I've been on her twitter feed for only a couple of hours, but if her latest tweet is anything to go by, I shall be joining you in 'unfollowing' her very soon Krink.





> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*





> I DON'T WANT THE WORLD TO SEE MEEEEE, CAUSE I DON'T THINK THAT THEY'D U-UNDERSTAND...*runs to bedroom, slams door, cries, writes in diary*


----------



## TruXta (Dec 20, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Let's get this right: Since he was banned as LLETSA, he's been back under at least 4 other identities. sam goloden wasn't the only one.


Quite possibly, I haven't been keeping tabs.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

Wiki has been restored but I'll send Sab's the screenshot!


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 20, 2012)

@ska invita : this thread isn't all negative, far from it, as I keep pointing out there are compliments on some of her writing and repeated attempts to positively engage with her.

She responded by calling everyone a misogynist and racist. Who's bullying whom?


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 20, 2012)

Fucking hell, I can't keep up with this thread!
12 pages in a few hours!
Has anyone noticed that she describes herself as a 'gentlewoman of fortune'? Doesn't that mean 'pirate'?


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

it means she has a fortune stashed away in her trustfund, i guess?


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

I thought it was a play on the term, "soldier of fortune" a reference to her militant leftism.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 20, 2012)

Maybe it's like soldier of fortune?

ETA: oh no, I'm thinking like firky, at the same time and everything. The liver is taking over my mind as well...


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 20, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> @ska invita : this thread isn't all negative, far from it, as I keep pointing out there are compliments on some of her writing and repeated attempts to positively engage with her.
> 
> She responded by calling everyone a misogynist and racist. Who's bullying whom?


 
Her approach seems to be to ignore criticism when she can, smear and shout down when she thinks she can get away with it and then play the 'woe is me' card when the smearing and shouting down doesn't work. Ignore them, smear them, bully them or if none of those work start with the crocodile tears.

It's dishonest, it's manipulative, it's offensive and it's also an abuse of a public profile that enables her to throw all kinds of shit at people for disagreeing with her while doing her best to inhibit their right to reply. I fully agree with being as firm as necessary with any threats, insults for the sake of insults or hitting below the belt, but that applies as much to her as it does to anyone else and she's rarely averse to adopting dirty tactics and then complaining about suffering the same. I'm not keen on her little habit of making things seem as though people have behaved rather worse than they actually did (I'm no fan at all of Starkey, but he could hardly have been said to have 'attacked' her and IIRC she was the one who hit below the belt by bringing up his personal, private financial and tax matters in the first place).

It's like seeing a boxer complain about the occasional clash of heads while at the same time concealing a horseshoe in their glove.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 20, 2012)

firky said:


> I thought it was a play on the term, "soldier of fortune" a reference to her militant leftism.


 
'Soldier of fortune' also being a euphemism for a mercenary who fights for their own interests before the causes they've signed up to defend...


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 20, 2012)

snadge said:


> I think she is guilty of all of those practices from this incident, Misquotation maybe not though.


 
5/6 from just 33 posts in one day on this thread isn't bad as an example of this journalist's typical workflow.

Given that this is their standard way of working, that they get paid - well paid - for these sorts of things, for inaccurately reporting on real people doing real things in real places; well paid by relatively 'respectable' news organisations; does that not offer some perpective on the depth of feeling?

When someone born out of such a materially, socially privileged background cruises through all fourteen stations of bourgeois benefit, tracing every cliché from private school to Oxbridge degree, then decides to reinvent themself as - for example - a crusading, edgy, voice-of-the-voiceless gonzo journalist, reporting from the frontline (etc)... Then it may seem politic to revise one's past refinements, if only to square the circle.

But if you cannot acknowledge who you yourself are, where you have come from, then why should anyone entrust to your hands their story?


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 20, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> You calling me a "she"?



Sorry, on phone now so can't do proper replies. Just to say that I meant Vintage Paw above. I would never pretend to know your gender unless explicitly told...

If forced at gun point though, I'd have to guess someone named Violet Pansies was definitely a female


----------



## emanymton (Dec 20, 2012)

ska invita said:


> Ive read a lot of it - dipped into it in the past but once i got the point i wasnt interested to follow it, and read a lot more recently*...*the fact pretty much every article, post, tweet, plus personal background has been dissected makes me feel very uncomfortable too - angry on occasion (some lines of decency were crossed)- it does_ feel_ a lot like bullying. But then again theres been some really interesting stuff to come out of it, and genuine attempts to broaden it out. Forums aren't perfect I guess, and the messiness is all part of it.
> 
> and
> 
> ...


I found digging up an old local newspaper story about her school grades really creepy, that would freak anyone out.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 20, 2012)

Im pretty sure gentleman of fortune is a euphemism for privateer.
It did make me think of trust funds though, like killer b


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

just to recap her lies about starkeygate



> Laurie Penny
> @PennyRed
> Was attacked on stage by David Starkey at #edfest. That's what racists do when you call them out on their bigotry. Bit shaken but I'll be ok





> David Goodhart@David_Goodhart
> @PennyRed You weren't attacked, Starkey defended himself from your silly claims that he's a tax-avoiding racist, you messed up a good debate


 
edit: David Goodhart was the moderator/chair of the debate by the way, not just some random on twitter


----------



## ayatollah (Dec 20, 2012)

I have to confess that I'm so old and out of touch with Yoof culture that I've never read anything by Laurie Penny. Saw her once on Newsnight. Didn't come across as the iconic voice of radical yoof to me. Far too polite. I've watched this thread and never understood it's obsessive  hostility to this young  journalist. I get the point made repeatedly, ad nauseam,   by posters that that she irritatingly  poses as the "current  holder of the radical yoof zeitgeist" whilst having a privileged upbringing and connections-assisted entry, (like the majority of journalists), into that well paid profession, and has no record of selfless long term commitment to any progressive causes. Got that - but  umpteen million words by posters to ram home that point ? bit excessive. And whilst a lot of the different variations repeating this point are well made, a speedy skim read through the thread does, I'm afraid, give the overall impression of a bunch of resentful  blokes (overwhelmingly blokes) who'd love to have had the opportunity to use their own undoubted writing skills in journalism, slagging off a successful , posh, pushy, middle class , woman in a distinctly "slap up that bitch" kinda way. It just does - despite the interesting points sprinkled through the thread. That dreadful cartoon, though denounced, is still emblematic of this overall mean  "thread spirit".

As to why Laurie Penny thought, on apresumeably  quickie read of an IWCA article on its distinctive (American sourced)   "take" on " multiculturalism" and "identity politics"  that some IWCA members or co thinkers might be "racists" ? Outrage and blood spattered indignation from the accused.. threats of lawyers. The biters bit.  But why did an intelligent journalist read that article and think that ?     She may be irritating and middle class, but she's not stupid.

 Possibly because the IWCA uses the term "multicultural" in its political analysis in a way that is very different to its usage by 99.999999999% of the UK population.  For most people "multiculturalism" simply means "a tolerance and indeed support  for minority group rights within the wider society", (whether that be based on ethnicity, religion, culture, gender, sexuality, colour . etc). For most of us Lefties, that is a "good thing" -- a slightly more civilized society even within capitalism. Even though we all recognise that it often cuts across the primacy of  self identity by class. It's called "respecting people's beliefs and cultural values" and not expecting everyone , indeed anyone, to identify themselves only in social class terms. Nobody does, or ever will. Doesn't mean a Jew, Muslim or Catholic can't be a good trades unionist though, or take part in the class struggle. The BNP in contrast  is deeply opposed to our "multicultural society" and away from the cameras they really  believe in "all wogs, Gyppos,niggers, Muslims, poofs, Lesbian feminists, commies,  etc ... out -- or indeed possibly into the gas chambers".

 The IWCA in contrast cheekily  claim that the BNP are actually themselves the real  "Multiculturalists" ..( but only  in the same way that the South African apartheid regime was "multiculturalist" .. ie, for complete separation of ethnic groups and White supremacy). The BNP should sue - they really aren't "multiculturalists" by the conventional usage of the term in the UK.    "Multiculturalism for the IWCA is essentially not a progressive social development of the last 40 years or so, but at root  a deliberate capitalist state conspiracy to entrench working class people in their "surface differences" - preventing them from embracing their shared  "working class" identity. This is all a bit "crude neo  Marxism" - as interpreted by a 14 year old Trot.. ie, all minority community self identification other than by social class is "false consciousness" - and a diversion from the class struggle.  Rather crude, and rather arrogantly dismissive of the cultural and religious, sexual,  and cultural values of millions of working class people. All the more peculiar since the IWCA is neither politically Socialist or Marxist. 

That Laurie Penny misinterpreted the peculiar, special, usage by the IWCA of the concept of  "multiculturalism"  is hardly surprising. It is a bit "out there" politically and conceptually.  Many White racists make the same mistake. Maybe the problem lies with the peculiar, non standard, usage the IWCA makes of words like "multiculturalism", and indeed its entire mistaken "take" on the "identity politics" theory itself ?


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

emanymton said:


> I found digging up an old local newspaper story about her school grades really creepy, that would freak anyone out.


 
A lot of people who are prominent journalists in their field, such as Laurie, have had their background looked at and examined as an explanation of how they formulate their opinions and beliefs. Wiki is full of references of people's educational background, what schools they went to etc. It's just in this case it included her grades and her intent to go to Oxford.



DaveCinzano said:


> But if you cannot acknowledge who you yourself are, where you have come from, then why should anyone entrust to your hands their story?


An example of sorts.



Orang Utan said:


> Im pretty sure gentleman of fortune is a euphemism for privateer.
> It did make me think of trust funds though, like killer b


 
Or a reference to her fortunate automatic Oxbridge route.


----------



## 8ball (Dec 20, 2012)

edit: at ayatollah:
Agree with a lot of that, but a lot of the usage of the term 'multicultural' that I see by those on the right falls into what you might call the 'niche definition'.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 20, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Her approach seems to be to ignore criticism when she can, smear and shout down when she thinks she can get away with it and then play the 'woe is me' card when the smearing and shouting down doesn't work. Ignore them, smear them, bully them or if none of those work start with the crocodile tears.
> 
> It's dishonest, it's manipulative, it's offensive and it's also an abuse of a public profile that enables her to throw all kinds of shit at people for disagreeing with her while doing her best to inhibit their right to reply. I fully agree with being as firm as necessary with any threats, insults for the sake of insults or hitting below the belt, but that applies as much to her as it does to anyone else and she's rarely averse to adopting dirty tactics and then complaining about suffering the same. I'm not keen on her little habit of making things seem as though people have behaved rather worse than they actually did (I'm no fan at all of Starkey, but he could hardly have been said to have 'attacked' her and IIRC she was the one who hit below the belt by bringing up his personal, private financial and tax matters in the first place).
> 
> It's like seeing a boxer complain about the occasional clash of heads while at the same time concealing a horseshoe in their glove.


Yes, completely agree, especially about Starkey. She clearly started it, couldn't take the retaliation from him which was factual and backed up by evidence, then tried to play the victim which didn't work and just would not be quiet when the debate chair tried to a) move things on and b) wrap up the debate.

She may be 26 but her behaviour doesn't show it in that instance.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 20, 2012)

emanymton said:


> I found digging up an old local newspaper story about her school grades really creepy, that would freak anyone out.


No one dug it up ffs the name was put on twitter by people who at the time she accused of making threats to her and and members of her family and of posting up explicit pictures of her, but who now is happy receive awards from - and if you put that name in google you come up with a very different story about her and her schools relationship with oxbridge. So you get two for one there. And neither to do with grades.

I wonder how many similar points and crucial contexts you've managed to miss or are unaware of - and if they're the same ones so obviously driving the recent contributions of IWNW and sleaterkinney (though it should be clear that the latter also has long running personal animosities driving him onwards) and maybe others reading but not commenting?


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

The way she harps on about being a good person, a carer, someone who really feels and grieves over people's circumstances reminds me of a poem by Bukowski



> there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
> human being to supply any given army on any given day
> 
> and the best at murder are those who preach against it
> ...


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

we're bringing apartheid into it now. This is through the fucking looking glass


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 20, 2012)

ayatollah said:


> As to why Laurie Penny thought, on apresumeably quickie read of an IWCA article on its distinctive (American sourced) "take" on " multiculturalism" and "identity politics" that some IWCA members or co thinkers might be "racists" ? Outrage and blood spattered indignation from the accused.. threats of lawyers. The biters bit. But why did an intelligent journalist read that article and think that ? She may be irritating and middle class, but she's not stupid.


_She didn't read it_ you div. She used what networked media and social power she has to dismiss it, to smear it and to police who can contribute to political debate and what they may debate about - and on lines drawn transparently from a set of social prejudices that derive from her privileged background. You have entirely missed the point.


----------



## stuff_it (Dec 20, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> Is everyone on here a media celebrity editing a national magazine, going on Newsnight and having articles in the Telegraph defending them?


No thank fuck.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Dec 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> ...and maybe others reading but not commenting?


 
 

Well alright. Yes, I'm lurking, I admit.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

ayatollah said:


> She may be irritating and middle class, but she's not stupid.


 
No, that particular accolade should go to you, you silly old fcuker.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

ayatollah said:


> I have to confess that I'm so old and out of touch with Yoof culture that I've never read anything by Laurie Penny. Saw her once on Newsnight. Didn't come across as the iconic voice of radical yoof to me. Far too polite. I've watched this thread and never understood it's obsessive hostility to this young journalist. I get the point made repeatedly, ad nauseam, by posters that that she irritatingly poses as the "current holder of the radical yoof zeitgeist" whilst having a privileged upbringing and connections-assisted entry, (like the majority of journalists), into that well paid profession, and has no record of selfless long term commitment to any progressive causes. Got that - but umpteen million words by posters to ram home that point ? bit excessive. And whilst a lot of the different variations repeating this point are well made, a speedy skim read through the thread does, I'm afraid, give the overall impression of a bunch of resentful blokes (overwhelmingly blokes) who'd love to have had the opportunity to use their own undoubted writing skills in journalism, slagging off a successful , posh, pushy, middle class , woman in a distinctly "slap up that bitch" kinda way. It just does - despite the interesting points sprinkled through the thread. That dreadful cartoon, though denounced, is still emblematic of this overall mean "thread spirit".
> 
> As to why Laurie Penny thought, on apresumeably quickie read of an IWCA article on its distinctive (American sourced) "take" on " multiculturalism" and "identity politics" that some IWCA members or co thinkers might be "racists" ? Outrage and blood spattered indignation from the accused.. threats of lawyers. The biters bit. But why did an intelligent journalist read that article and think that ? She may be irritating and middle class, but she's not stupid.
> 
> ...


 
You can fuck off too. If you like I'll give you her email so you can convince her of the need for SOCIALISM!


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

As butchers said, she didn't read it. It was an _immediate_ response on twitter, she had no time to read it.


----------



## Geri (Dec 20, 2012)

I just watched that video with David Starkey. My God, what a hideous woman! The rest of the people in her school must have been pretty stupid if she was one of the brightest.


----------



## emanymton (Dec 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No one dug it up ffs the name was put on twitter by people who at the time she accused of making threats to her and and members of her family and of posting up explicit pictures of her, but who now is happy receive awards from - and if you put that name in google you come up with a very different story about her and her schools relationship with oxbridge. So you get two for one there. And neither to do with grades.
> 
> I wonder how many similar points and crucial contexts you've managed to miss or are unaware of - and if they're the same ones so obviously driving the recent contributions of IWNW and sleaterkinney (though it should be clear that the latter also has long running personal animosities driving him onwards) and maybe others reading but not commenting?


If I had the time to dig back through the thread to when it was first posted and check I would, but as I remember it someone on here found the article and then posted it on here I find that rather creepy, and to put it up agin when she turned up on the thread was really silly thing to do it was bound to freak her out, it would me.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

in fairness, most people see a criticism of multiculturalism as ray cyst unless they look at the analysis. Which just goes to show you can't read a title of a link and make judge cos else you end up making a cunt out of yourself


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

Geri said:


> I just watched that video with David Starkey. My God, what a hideous woman! The rest of the people in her school must have been pretty stupid if she was one of the brightest.


 


I find that vid well painfull to watch. On the one hand Starkey is a massive cunt and a frog faced traitor to his roots- but penny is the bigger dick in this exchange.

painful stuff


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

emanymton said:


> If I had the time to dig back through the thread to when it was first posted and check I would, but as I remember it someone on here found the article and then posted it on here I find that rather creepy, and to put it up agin when she turned up on the thread was really silly thing to do it was bound to freak her out, it would me.


 
In place of an argument, you can use the words _'creepy'_ and_ 'stalkery'_ for added emphasis...


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 20, 2012)

emanymton said:


> If I had the time to dig back through the thread to when it was first posted and check I would, but as I remember it someone on here found the article and then posted it on here I find that rather creepy, and to put it up agin when she turned up on the thread was really silly thing to do it was bound to freak her out, it would me.


I suggest that next time you _do_ bother to go and check - you may well find a very different scenario than the one came up with. I've just explained why it was originally linked to and that you appear to have entirely missed the context, missed what it was intended to highlight, and so missed what actually happened. And your response to that is to say that you couldn't be bothered to check before posting, you can't be bothered to check now after clarification is offered - but nonetheless you and you impressions are correct. (And i'm on here about the original link - as you were).


----------



## 8ball (Dec 20, 2012)

Now we see the violence inherent in the system... 

(is what she so nearly said in that debate with Starkey - it's a pity she didn't, really)


----------



## emanymton (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> In place of an argument, you can use the words _'creepy'_ and_ 'stalkery'_ for added emphasis...


In place of an argument you just make shit up.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

emanymton said:


> I find that rather creepy, and to put it up agin when she turned up on the thread was really silly thing to do it was bound to freak her out, it would me.


 
TBF I would be taken back somewhat. She only just got over the fact there was a thread 208 pages long on a forum full of fake lefties talking about her toilet habits.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Dec 20, 2012)

I actually have a lot of sympathy for ayatollah's position there - I think the IWCA's use of "multiculturalism" is confusing and unhelpful in a lot of ways, and if I'd come across it outside of the context of Urban I'd be a lot more suspicious than I am.


----------



## newbie (Dec 20, 2012)

I'm sad to see LLETSA driven out by fellow posters.  Repeatedly outed until the mods had to act because his opinions didn't fit.


----------



## emanymton (Dec 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> I suggest that next time you _do_ bother to go and check - you may well find a very different scenario than the one came up with. I've just explained why it was originally linked to and that you appear to have entirely missed the context, missed what it was intended to highlight, and so missed what actually happened. And your response to that is to say that you couldn't be bothered to check before posting, you can't be bothered to check now after clarification is offered - but nonetheless you and you impressions are correct. (And i'm on here about the original link - as you were).


So it was not a poster on here that found the article and they did not post it on here? Which is all I have climed


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

emanymton said:


> In place of an argument you just make shit up.


 
Where is that then muppet?

You have yet to address yourself to the substance of what is being discussed. You react in exactly the same way as the little ingenue does, which suggests that you are cut from the same cloth, up to and including including over-employment of the 'creepy' word... you fucking creep!


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 20, 2012)

FridgeMagnet said:


> I actually have a lot of sympathy for ayatollah's position there - I think the IWCA's use of "multiculturalism" is confusing and unhelpful in a lot of ways, and if I'd come across it outside of the context of Urban I'd be a lot more suspicious than I am.


She had a few months previously been talking directly to Kenan Malik about his own well known criticisms of multi-culturalism that shares some significant crossover with that the article she condemned as racist. Her dismissal was not based on the content of the IWCA's criticisms, nor her warm response to similar ones from Malik - _but on who they came from. _


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 20, 2012)

FridgeMagnet said:


> I actually have a lot of sympathy for ayatollah's position there - I think the IWCA's use of "multiculturalism" is confusing and unhelpful in a lot of ways, and if I'd come across it outside of the context of Urban I'd be a lot more suspicious than I am.


 
I was suspicious too when I first came across it.  Then I read it and thought about it and changed my opinion.  I think the worst that can be levelled at the article is maybe *ahem* cultural insensitivity.

*ducks*


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

FridgeMagnet said:


> I actually have a lot of sympathy for ayatollah's position there - I think the IWCA's use of "multiculturalism" is confusing and unhelpful in a lot of ways, and if I'd come across it outside of the context of Urban I'd be a lot more suspicious than I am.


 
Regardless LP should know about the IWCA, given her position. You're ambiguous about it, she flat out yelled racist (then later, once she read it, sexist too).


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

emanymton said:


> If I had the time to dig back through the thread to when it was first posted and check I would, but as I remember it someone on here found the article and then posted it on here I find that rather creepy, and to put it up agin when she turned up on the thread was really silly thing to do it was bound to freak her out, it would me.


 
The article had been posted much earlier on the thread, the reason why I quoted it when she turned up here was not to freak her out, it was to clarify if it actually was her before then using the information contained in it to show how she had lied about her past in an article for the independent this year. The reason I posted it was to make sure it was her before using that information, i.e. so that I didn't accuse her of doing something she wasn't guilty off, to ensure I had all the correct information before accusing her of something (and all this is clear from the post itself) - this is something she could do with doing (i.e. checking her facts) before accusing others of stuff


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

FridgeMagnet said:


> I actually have a lot of sympathy for ayatollah's position there - I think the IWCA's use of "multiculturalism" is confusing and unhelpful in a lot of ways, and if I'd come across it outside of the context of Urban I'd be a lot more suspicious than I am.


 
Why not start a thread specifically on MULTICULTURALISM where the Ayatollah can educate us?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 20, 2012)

emanymton said:


> So it was not a poster on here that found the article and they did not post it on here? Which is all I have climed


No - it's not all you have claimed at all. You claimed a series of motivations for the link being posted, which in turn revealed that you actually had no idea of why it was posted, and so have either ignored or misread a whole series of important contextual pointers. Lazy.


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

FridgeMagnet said:


> I actually have a lot of sympathy for ayatollah's position there - I think the IWCA's use of "multiculturalism" is confusing and unhelpful in a lot of ways, and if I'd come across it outside of the context of Urban I'd be a lot more suspicious than I am.


And if you were suspicious, you might read even more carefully. She didn't read it at all. And let's not forget that the IWCA branding's on the link; it doesn't immediately stand out as a fash site does it?


----------



## emanymton (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> Where is that then muppet?
> 
> You have yet to address yourself to the substance of what is being discussed. You react in exactly thes ame way as the little ingenue does, which suggests that you are cut from the same cloth, up to and including including overemployment of the 'creepy' word... you fucking creep!


I'll give you a clue try reading the post you quoted and then try reading what words you said I used. As for the rest of it it;s a joke I am probably from one of the poorest backgounds and one of the mores poorly paid people posting on here.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

emanymton said:


> I'll give you a clue try reading the post you quoted and then try reading what words you said I used. As for the rest of it it;s a joke I am probably from one of the poorest backgounds and one of the mores poorly paid people posting on here.


 
Fuck off and read the posts that you should have before you jumped in to defend Dave.

You said 'creepy' - again - I suggested that you might add 'stalkery' as well for extra emphasis.

Awe there there diddums, I was so poor it was 7 to a kilt in my family too...

Getting your privilege check in first I see...


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 20, 2012)

newbie said:


> I'm sad to see LLETSA driven out by fellow posters. Repeatedly outed until the mods had to act because his opinions didn't fit.


No, he repeatedly and deliberately trolled a disability support thread and repeatedly broke the FAQs. That's why he was banned.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> in fairness, most people see a criticism of multiculturalism as ray cyst unless they look at the analysis. Which just goes to show you can't read a title of a link and make judge cos else you end up making a cunt out of yourself


 
I think there probably is something to that to be honest. But it just shows how detached she is from the world the rest of us (except AYATOLLAH) inhabit. This is gonna sound a bit prolier than thou and cliched but I hear people moaning about multiculturalism all the time when I'm in the pub, at the match or whatever, and just to add in a bit of trottery when I'm on a stall. A lot of the people who come out with it are racist and are using it as a euphemism for brown people living here. But a lot of them are not - a lot really are talking about the exact same thing as the IWCA. They're talking about resources being allocated along ethnic lines, often via unelected 'community leaders' who in reality don't represent ordinary people whose parents happen to have migrated from the same country.

Now, there's two ways we can deal with this. We can just preach to them about WACISM like you would to a 12 year old, but this means alienating people who could otherwise be won over by the left, maybe even driving them closer to the far right. Or we can talk treat them like adults, and find out what the actual issues are behind what they're saying and if it turns out they are racist fuck them off, or if it turns out they're not racist you might even get somewhere.

Which one of these options is more effective politically I wonder?


----------



## emanymton (Dec 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No - it's not all you have claimed at all. You claimed a series of motivations for the link being posted, which in turn revealed that you actually had no idea of why it was posted, and so have either ignored or misread a whole series of important contextual pointers. Lazy.


Seriously what are you on about 'claimed a series of motivations'  I just said I though it was a creepy thing to do and that it would freak anybody out to come across it.


----------



## emanymton (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> Awe there there diddums, getting your privilege check in first I see...


 
Think you'll find you bough it up first. Now about that lying of yours ...


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

emanymton said:


> Think you'll find you bough it up first. Now about that lying of yours ...


 
So go on...


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> Where is that then muppet?
> 
> You have yet to address yourself to the substance of what is being discussed. You react in exactly the same way as the little ingenue does, which suggests that you are cut from the same cloth, up to and including including over-employment of the 'creepy' word... you fucking creep!


 
Emany is saying if they were LP, they've have found that creepy too. That's all.

It's intent isn't meant to be creepy but it would be - just as it would be to find this thread.


----------



## emanymton (Dec 20, 2012)

eta at framed
Oh for fucks sake just go back and read you own post


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

FridgeMagnet said:


> I actually have a lot of sympathy for ayatollah's position there - I think the IWCA's use of "multiculturalism" is confusing and unhelpful in a lot of ways, and if I'd come across it outside of the context of Urban I'd be a lot more suspicious than I am.


 
Let's get one thing straight, there was no exchange where anyone said 'multiculturalism' is bad and expected her to understand the word multiculturalism in a way that she may not currently understand it as

She was sent a link (in response to her unconditional support of identity politics) which contained not a particularly lengthy (4,000 words) intelligent dissection of what state/top down multiculturalism, in practice, actually means for progressive/working class politics. Anyone who read the article could in no way be confused about where it was coming from, what it was arguing for (and against) and whether it was a progressive or reactionary viewpoint

She chose not to engage with the text or argument, but instead to lash out without reading either


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 20, 2012)

emanymton said:


> Seriously what are you on about 'claimed a series of motivations'  I just said I though it was a creepy thing to do and that it would freak anybody out to come across it.


Here:



> I found digging up an old local newspaper story about her school grades really creepy, that would freak anyone out.


 
_Digging up_ carries clear implications - which you go on to intensify with _creepy._ Can you really not see what you're saying here?


----------



## emanymton (Dec 20, 2012)

firky said:


> Emany is saying if they were LP, they've have found that creepy too. That's all.
> 
> It's intent isn't meant to be creepy but it would be - just as it would be to find this thread.


Exactly there is no really substance here, my post had no deeper meaning to it than this.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> Dave.


is it just me who thinks this is fucking pathetic?


----------



## sihhi (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> just to recap her lies about starkeygate


 
I disagree with (Blairite, Blue (restrict immigrants' families) Labour fan) David Goodhart and (Thatcherite, anti-union new young breed economic historian at LSE) David Starkey. Laurie Penny was right to make the case against Starkey for xenophobia, but was mistaken over the tax evasion claim. Laurie Penny did *not* screw up the debate. I am also give to believe David Starkey was embellishing the truth about Laurie Penny's refusal on the grounds of not being paid enough - that is not Laurie Penny's style.
She is not money-obsessed, there's no evidence of that at all. Instead I get a sense of a desire to seen by others as a _crucial_ part of the radical pyramid, and also to _shock rich people_ at the same time - a new version of '_epater le bourgeois'_ what French drug-taking romantic poets of the 19th century called it.

I think it was later proved the Tom Paine Society basically agreed with her side of the story. David Starkey was pointing his finger, making an ultra-reactionary nonsense argument: 'I am David Starkey, I am so smart and fabulous - came from the bottom to get into an elite regional grammar school then Oxbridge, I will wag my finger in your face'. He had zero reason to do so, he could simply have stated 'I am domiciled in Britain' and spoken calmly about Laurie Penny's failure to attend an earlier debate.

But Laurie's tactics were mistaken in that the domicile question could have been brought in her own speaking time, not interrupting Starkey whilst he was speaking. What is anyone meant to do at a discussion of British 'nationhood' and its relevance etc - allow someone who believes in a Tebbit-like vision of nation-states - to speak with_out_ using the word xenophobia?

edited for clarity


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

emanymton said:


> eta at framed
> Oh for fucks sake just go back and read you own post


 
Nothing I said changes the implication of your post.

You think it was 'creepy' that someone 'dug up' an article about LP's past and that it might have 'freaked her out'.

Yeah, that is such a qualified statement from you... fucking hand wringer.

Fuck off enema...


----------



## newbie (Dec 20, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> No, he repeatedly and deliberately trolled a disability support and repeatedly broke the FAQs. That's why he was banned.


he was outed on this thread, over and again


----------



## emanymton (Dec 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Here:
> 
> 
> 
> _Digging up_ carries clear implications - which you go on to intensify with _creepy._ Can you really not see what you're saying here?


Urmmm, I think we have different interruptions of the phrase digging up someone was obviously researching her and found it hence it was dug up as far as I am concerned. Would you been happier if I had sound finding? I can go back and edit the post if you want.


----------



## 8ball (Dec 20, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Laurie Penny did *not* screw up the debate.


 
She bollocks-ed up the debate by starting with an unsubstantiated accusation and then following it up with accusations of racism.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Yeah, got to say that taking Starkey's side would make me just as uncomfortable as, I dunno, a couple of right wing hacks taking my side against a messageboard full of genuine people with genuine pro-working class politics.


----------



## emanymton (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> Nothing I said changes the implication of your post.
> 
> You think it was 'creepy' that someone 'dug up' an article about LP's past and that it might have 'freaked her out'.
> 
> ...


Fuck me your a dick. Butchers I have a lot of respect for, but you can just piss off


----------



## sihhi (Dec 20, 2012)

discokermit said:


> is it just me who thinks this is fucking pathetic?


 
Yes, it is inappropriate. 
Laurie Penny chose to legally change her name on feminist grounds away from her father's surname, and she is referred to as a generic male name because ...  ...


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I disagree with (Blairite, Blue (restrict immigrants' families) Labour fan) David Goodhart and (Thatcherite, anti-union new young breed economic historian at LSE) David Starkey. Laurie Penny was right to make the case against Starkey for xenophobia, but was mistaken over the tax evasion claim. Laurie Penny did *not* screw up the debate. I am also give to believe David Starkey was embellishing the truth about Laurie Penny's refusal on the grounds of not being paid enough - that is not Laurie Penny's style.
> She is not money-obsessed, there's no evidence of that at all. Instead I get a sense of a desire to seen by others as a _crucial_ part of the radical pyramid, and also to _shock rich people_ at the same time - a new version of '_epater le bourgeois'_ what French drug-taking romantic poets of the 19th century called it.
> 
> I think it was later proved the Tom Paine Society basically agreed with her side of the story. David Starkey was pointing his finger, making an ultra-reactionary nonsense argument: 'I am David Starkey, I am so smart and fabulous - came from the bottom to get into an elite regional grammar school then Oxbridge, I will wag my finger in your face'. He had zero reason to do so, he could simply have stated 'I am domiciled in Britain' and spoken calmly about Laurie Penny's failure to attend an earlier debate.
> ...


 
This from the Thomas Pain Society (my emphasis)



> When Penny indicated in the second week of May that she might not be able to get back from the US in time, we tried to find a replacent but couldn’t. We offered to pay her airfare back. By the time she replied to our offer *(with the request for an additional fee)* however, time was too short to do adequate publicity and we cancelled the event.


 
so she did ask for a fee to do the event, something I'm sure she denied doing?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 20, 2012)

emanymton said:


> Urmmm, I think we have different interruptions of the phrase digging up someone was obviously researching her and found it hence it was dug up as far as I am concerned. Would you been happier if I had sound finding? I can go back and edit the post if you want.


What would be the point - one other very quick thing though which shows how that wording lends itself to the reading i put on it. Your post also appeared in the middle of a series of posts suggesting weird, stalkery or bullying type behaviour - in fact it was in response to one saying exactly that and can easily be seen as agreeing with those claims and indeed providing and example of just that behaviour in order to strengthen the case. I'm not going on with this strand now, i'm going to watch a film instead


----------



## 8ball (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> so she did ask for a fee to do the event, something I'm sure she denied doing?


 
She said in the Starkey debate that she had asked for a fee - I've not been reading every page of this monster thread but I thought that was uncontroversial.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Yes, it is inappropriate.
> Laurie Penny chose to legally change her name on feminist grounds away from her father's surname, and she is referred to as a generic male name because ... ...


 
I already explained it. Go read.  There was never any inference about her father or anything else.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

discokermit said:


> is it just me who thinks this is fucking pathetic?


 
Gotta say I don't really get that either.

To be honest, and this is probably just the wet liberal in me coming out, I kind of feel bad for calling her Laura earlier in the thread. I certainly wouldn't call Mohammed Ali Cascius Clay (I get that this isn't quite on the level of slavery but I guess the principle is the same) and not just because he'd spark me the fuck out if I did either.

Fuck me I'm a soppy cunt, I'm kind of a little bit feeling sorry for the person who's got me having to answer questions about my 'racism'.


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

newbie said:


> I'm sad to see LLETSA driven out by fellow posters. Repeatedly outed until the mods had to act because his opinions didn't fit.


 
I was thinking about this earlier, although i was frustruated with his constant whinging about us whinging on here, I called him LLETSA several times purely in the way you would say someone's name while talking/arguing with them, not for the purpose of outing him or getting him banned

I realised after that, that this meant he was brought to the attention of the mods which I wish hadn't happen, as pretty much agree with most of what he says and thought his original ban was completely unfair and unwarranted


----------



## sihhi (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> This from the Thomas Pain Society (my emphasis)
> 
> so she did ask for a fee to do the event, something I'm sure she denied doing?


 
But that fee request as I understood it was as a result of foregone earnings in place X, whereas the debate was to be in place Y.
The whole thing is weird, who leaked this request to Starkey, why it was imperative to have those two speakers at the start.


----------



## stuff_it (Dec 20, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Im pretty sure gentleman of fortune is a euphemism for privateer.
> It did make me think of trust funds though, like killer b


Trust funds = 'independent means'


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

Dave's a nickname, quite a pleasant one considering some of the other things she has been called.


----------



## 8ball (Dec 20, 2012)

firky said:


> Dave's a nickname, quite a pleasant one considering some of the other things she has been called.


 
If you PM her maybe she'll meet you half-way on 'Larry'.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> I already explained it. Go read. There was never any inference about her father or anything else.


your explaination is rubbish. referring to her as dave is inappropriate, unfunny and unhelpful.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yeah, got to say that taking Starkey's side would make me just as uncomfortable as, I dunno, a couple of right wing hacks taking my side against a messageboard full of genuine people with genuine pro-working class politics.


Hey, I'm no fan of Starkey, but her 'debating' was deplorable.


----------



## love detective (Dec 20, 2012)

sihhi said:


> But that fee request as I understood it was as a result of foregone earnings in place X, whereas the debate was to be in place Y.
> The whole thing is weird, who leaked this request to Starkey, why it was imperative to have those two speakers at the start.


 
not sure if that was the case or not - even if it is though, it shows that she's happy to push her politics only if she's compensated for it, not exactly _'putting everything on the line for her politics'_ as she claimed on here earlier


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

I'll stick my oar in on LLESTA too - what he did on that disability thread was seriously out of order. But I like him as a poster - I often agree with him and even when I don't he always makes me think - he's far, far better at making you challenge your assumptions than any of the right wingers who post on here.

And I think sometimes the whole pessimist angle is done in a half joking way - like he's parodying himself.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

discokermit said:


> your explaination is rubbish. referring to her as dave is inappropriate, unfunny and unhelpful.


 
I have no sympathy for her on a political or personal level.

I've read posts here that certainly add to my understanding of where her politics have come from, but I really could not give a fuck about what upsets, freaks out or frightens her. She's an actress playing the part of 'journo activist'.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Hey, I'm no fan of Starkey, but her 'debating' was deplorable.


 
I agree completely. But Starkey was acting like a cock too and as I said, I'd feel pretty uncomfortable taking his side on anything. Be no better than palling up to Daniel Finkelstein on twatter.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

Another for LLETSA. Cantankerous old twat at times but he was great asset to the boards. The ol' dawg got into too many fights in the end.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> I was thinking about this earlier, although i was frustruated with his constant whinging about us whinging on here, I called him LLETSA several times purely in the way you would say someone's name while talking/arguing with them, not for the purpose of outing him or getting him banned
> 
> I realised after that, that this meant he was brought to the attention of the mods which I wish hadn't happen, as pretty much agree with most of what he says and thought his original ban was completely unfair and unwarranted


c'mon though, it's not rocket science. people know what the result of naming him could be.
that's why, next time, people should just keep schtum.


----------



## Fedayn (Dec 20, 2012)

discokermit said:


> your explaination is rubbish. referring to her as dave is inappropriate, unfunny and unhelpful.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

Fedayn said:


>


 

Some of us enjoyed it for a wee while. 

Laurie is to be addressed as Laurie now, or would she prefer Ms Penny?

This is obviously the major issue to come out of the thread... 

And she ain't even fucking here!

Sorry Dave...


----------



## sihhi (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> not sure if that was the case or not - even if it is though, it shows that she's happy to push her politics only if she's compensated for it, not exactly _'putting everything on the line for her politics'_ as she claimed on here earlier


 
This is true, but in the context of that debate the Laurie Penny demands mega-bucks attack by Starkey is one we can't really rely on.


----------



## emanymton (Dec 20, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> What would be the point - one other very quick thing though which shows how that wording lends itself to the reading i put on it. Your post also appeared in the middle of a series of posts suggesting weird, stalkery or bullying type behavior - in fact it was in response to one saying exactly that and can easily be seen as agreeing with those claims and indeed providing and example of just that behaviour in order to strengthen the case. I'm not going on with this strand now, i'm going to watch a film instead


Hope it's a good film 
I see your point, my intention when replying to Ska's post was not so much to agree with all of it but to highlight the one thing that stand out to me as being (in my opinion) significantly across the the line of what is acceptable. I do have some sympathy with Ska's post which was why I quoted it, but I just find the level of interest shown on this thread a little odd for the most part.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> I have no sympathy for her on a political or personal level.
> 
> I've read posts here that certainly add to my understanding of where her politics have come from, but I really could not give a fuck about what upsets, freaks out or frightens her. She's an actress playing the part of 'journo activist'.


actress, little girl, blah blah.
why don't you keep your odd personal anger channelled on the politics, rather than the weird stuff?


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

What's that, Fed?


----------



## newbie (Dec 20, 2012)

love detective said:


> I was thinking about this earlier, although i was frustruated with his constant whinging about us whinging on here, I called him LLETSA several times purely in the way you would say someone's name while talking/arguing with them, not for the purpose of outing him or getting him banned
> 
> I realised after that, that this meant he was brought to the attention of the mods which I wish hadn't happen, as pretty much agree with most of what he says and thought his original ban was completely unfair and unwarranted


thanks for that, I didn't like the thought it was deliberate.

as for agreeing with him, well it's probably not true that we're all LLETSA but I reckon many of us recognise what he says, whether we want to agree or not.


----------



## Fedayn (Dec 20, 2012)

cesare said:


> What's that, Fed?


 
Papa Lazarou from The League of gentlemen. He had a catchphrase "You're my wife now Dave".


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

discokermit said:


> actress, little girl, blah blah.
> why don't you keep your odd personal anger channelled on the politics, rather than the weird stuff?


 
It's my estimation of her approach, nothing weird about it.

There's psychology in it imho and it plays on generating sympathy when she fucks up.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

ItWillNeverWork said:


> This whole thread has become a depressing pit of cuntishness. Needs locking as far as I'm concerned.


 
get off the thread voyuer


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> Papa Lazarou from The League of gentlemen. He had a catchphrase "You're my wife now Dave".


Cheers!


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> You can fuck off too. If you like I'll give you her email so you can convince her of the need for SOCIALISM!


 
Here Here.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

She was an actress actually.


----------



## gosub (Dec 20, 2012)

sihhi said:


> But that fee request as I understood it was as a result of foregone earnings in place X, whereas the debate was to be in place Y.
> The whole thing is weird, who leaked this request to Starkey, why it was imperative to have those two speakers at the start.


Debate was on then off then on again, you'd have to tell Starkey something, and if one of her cited reasons was a reluctance to share a platform,  they may well of massaged the truth.



Still , moving forward next person/group she calls sexist/racist can just ask her for list of who in her opinion isn't to save time and aggravation.

Meanwhile Ms Penny can claim her views are balanced as she is pilloried by both right and left and a couple of new contacts for the addressbook. Bonus.
 Only way she loses is if people stop paying her attention


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> It's my estimation of her approach, nothing weird about it.


but also makes it easier for her and others to level accusations of misogyny against the thread, regardless of your doubtless more nuanced intentions.

Perhaps criticisms that dont use her gender and youth might be more appropriate, and make the conversation more worthwhile for everyone. And you look less like a cunt.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 20, 2012)

Fedayn said:


> Papa Lazarou from The League of gentlemen. He had a catchphrase "You're my wife now Dave".


which, when used after the thread and board have been accused of sexism is tactically naive at best.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

discokermit said:


> actress, little girl, blah blah.
> why don't you keep your odd personal anger channelled on the politics, rather than the weird stuff?


what is the weird stuff?


----------



## Fedayn (Dec 20, 2012)

discokermit said:


> tactically naive at best.


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

When I was at uni people called each other Dave and still fucking did that 'wazzzzup' thing. Wankers.

Suspect that if Laurie was a Larry she'd still be called Dave.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 20, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> in fairness, most people see a criticism of multiculturalism as ray cyst unless they look at the analysis. Which just goes to show you can't read a title of a link and make judge cos else you end up making a cunt out of yourself


 
Yeah, but if I remember correctly you've had a few Laurie Penny moments about the IWCA.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 20, 2012)

I think the New Statesman is part of the problem in all this - it increasingly has a warped vision of what leftism should be about (star-columnists writing the most emotionally-heavy pieces) aswell as an anti-NUJ mindset as brought in by former editor of Granta (liberal literary magazine), Jason Cowley.

Here is Helen Lewis, news editor of the New Statesman, accepting an award on behalf of her columnist from Tony Wang, former corporate lawyer, Europe-wide chief of Twitter.







Previously Wang "worked in the San Francisco headquarters on the revenue, business development, product and international teams. Previously, Tony was managing counsel at Google where he supported its international expansion. Tony started his career in the legal field where he focused on venture capital, M&A, and capital markets."

Tony Wang is striving to make twitter conducive to branding via the tweets themselves - hence driving any 'politics' that was there off it. 




			
				BBC News Report said:
			
		

> Twitter's new European boss has suggested that users who break privacy injunctions by posting on the site could face the UK courts. Tony Wang said people who did "bad things" needed to defend themselves. He warned that the site would hand over user information to the authorities where they were "legally required". Lawyers are challenging Twitter in court to reveal the identities of Twitter users who violated a super-injunction. MP John Hemming named Manchester United footballer Ryan Giggs in Parliament on Monday as the footballer who had used a super-injunction to hide an alleged affair, after Mr Giggs' name had been widely aired on Twitter.


 



			
				Guardian Report said:
			
		

> Wang... said he was "extremely excited" about its potential appeal to advertisers in the UK. Twitter has 3,000 advertisers across the globe and about 70 partners in the UK, he said.


 
From Marketing magazine:



> _Are you still approaching mobile advertising with the softly softly approach?_
> ... We do this through testing and iterating how users engage with mobile ads and also through continuing to put the premium on engaging content. We have a number of algorithms that mean if an ad appears, it is because users are actually engaging with it.


 



> _With the ad products – Promoted Tweets, Trends and Accounts - which ones are you selling more of?_
> We don’t break that out. We are seeing healthy growth with each of the products. It depends on the brand and what they want to accomplish with their campaign. But having Promoted Tweets in the background, very much like brands have search on in the background, is something we are seeing more often.


----------



## framed (Dec 20, 2012)

killer b said:


> but also makes it easier for her and others to level accusations of misogyny against the thread, regardless of your doubtless more nuanced intentions.
> 
> Perhaps criticisms that dont use her gender and youth might be more appropriate, and make the conversation more worthwhile for everyone. And you look less like a cunt.


 

Look, the most interesting part of that _Starkey v Penny_ video for me was not the exchange between Starkey and her, but how she chose to respond when given the stand/stage to herself at the end. She did everything short of turning on the water works (and at one point I thought that was a certainty from the body language she adopted). I can't really take her seriously on any level, so please excuse my scoffing.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 20, 2012)

framed said:


> Look, the most interesting part of that _Starkey v Penny_ video for me was not the exchange between Starkey and her, but how she chose to respond when given the stand/stage to herself at the end. She did everything short of turning on the water works (and at one point I thought that was a certainty from the body language she adopted). I can't really take her seriously on any level, so please excuse my scoffing.


you can't read body language either.


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

Just bored of you throwing your weight around on this thread tbh. Its slightly embarrassing.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Yeah, but if I remember correctly you've had a few Laurie Penny moments about the IWCA.


 

nope, they've had a few moments against mine


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 20, 2012)

I think others will beg to differ.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> what is the weird stuff?


 
That's bizarre - that post came up as an alert for me like it was me you were quoting


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

more posts than The Post your pictures of yourself thread. Any insights into body language there?


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's bizarre - that post came up as an alert for me like it was me you were quoting


 
It was directed at the Discokermit/Killer B comments . i don't want to add to your woes.

I think it's because I was going to reply to one of your earlier posts but changed my mind and deleted.Must be a memory thing.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 20, 2012)

Ah right, thought maybe I was just going a bit doolally.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> It was directed at the Discokermit/Killer B comments . i don't want to add to your woes.
> .


you want to add to mine?


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> I think others will beg to differ.


 

they can't panhandle the truth


----------



## Firky (Dec 20, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> they can't panhandle the truth


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 20, 2012)

firky said:


>


 
Maybe something to do with his naivety that cheers in the nearly million dead in two years.


----------



## cesare (Dec 20, 2012)

What's with the IWCA beef then?


----------



## killer b (Dec 20, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> It was directed at the Discokermit/Killer B comments . i don't want to add to your woes.


 ?


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

still whining about the ukraine eh


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 20, 2012)

mind you it was fairly grim


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 20, 2012)

I was on about 1937-38.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 20, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> "
> Actually, I spent a year working for minimum wage at a small mental health *industry magazine *


the (ahem) penny's just dropped. is that what they are? i've never heard them described as that before 
http://www.oneinfourmag.org/
"One in Four is a ..magazine written by people with mental health difficulties who lived lived through it and found ways around it."


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

discokermit said:


> you want to add to mine?


 
Tell me about them first?


----------



## sihhi (Dec 20, 2012)

If anyone has more information I would like to see it on the shadowy figure of Michael Danson: "Chairman of Progressive Digital Media Group. He founded Datamonitor, an online information company in 1989. In 2000, Datamonitor completed its flotation on the London Stock Exchange and was sold to Informa for £502 million in 2007. Previously Mike was with Strategic Planning Associates where he was a consultant in their technology practice. Mike received an MA degree from Oxford University."

the owner of New Statesman magazine since 2008 when Brown loyalist Geoffrey Robinson sold up.

If anyone has access to this article I'd love to see what it says:
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/media/article3376221.ece


http://www.progressivedigitalmedia.com/digital-media.html

This philanthropy by New Statesman owner Mike Danson, is anything but. It's wealthy Oxbridge graduates giving money to the university they want their child to attend - it's inheritance tax evasion:



> St Anne's receives donation of £1.5million from The Danson Foundation
> The donation from Mike and Helen Danson is the most generous lifetime gift the college has received from a Senior Member. In 2012 the Danson Scholarship will fund around 35-40 students across all years in the college. The timing and size of the donation is particularly significant: with students preparing to bear the cost of £9,000 tuition fees, this donation will underpin Oxford and St Anne’s undertaking that all students with the ability to succeed should have the opportunity to do so, regardless of background. In addition, the Danson Mentoring Scheme will be established to support undergraduates who will most benefit.




I'd _love _Laurie Penny to do a Paul Foot (in the Mirror vs Robert Maxwell) and write a column on Mike Danson and his crappy foundation. Fighting from the inside.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 20, 2012)

killer b said:


> ?


 
Just a question about this weird stuff re Framed that was all.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 20, 2012)

Fighting from the inside, lol.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 21, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Tell me about them first?


my woes? i burnt my face at work today, it's only like a bit of sunburn though. apart from that i'm fine.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 21, 2012)

tufty79 said:


> the (ahem) penny's just dropped. is that what they are? i've never heard them described as that before
> http://www.oneinfourmag.org/
> "One in Four is a ..magazine written by people with mental health difficulties who lived lived through it and found ways around it."


 
I thought it was a patients' support magazine.

Edited: patients is the wrong word to use - I apologise.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 21, 2012)

it's written by / primarily aimed at people with mental health difficulties. not necessarily the same thing as patients 

i think realising she used to write for them makes me even more disgusted by her recent handling of things.

maybe i'm just misunderstanding what an industry magazine is, but i've always thought they were exclusively for professionals


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 21, 2012)

discokermit said:


> my woes? i burnt my face at work today, it's only like a bit of sunburn though. apart from that i'm fine.


 
Glad to hear that


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 21, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Ah right, thought maybe I was just going a bit doolally.


 
it doesn't mean you're not


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 21, 2012)

tufty79 said:


> it's written by / primarily aimed at people with mental health difficulties. not necessarily the same thing as patients
> 
> i think realising she used to write for them makes me even more disgusted by her recent handling of things.


 
I'm not impressed by her doing that either, especially professionals have since come forward via Twitter and made it clear she ignored their advice not to publish that piece. For someone who not infrequently mentions having suffered mental health problems to ignore professional advice by using a fellow sufferer as a means to get another byline does imply that journalistic ethics aren't a higher priority for her than splashing her name across a page.

She should know better, I think she does know better, but if it's a choice between another byline or acting ethically then it's pretty obvious which matters more to her.


----------



## snadge (Dec 21, 2012)

emanymton said:


> As for the rest of it it;s a joke I am probably from one of the poorest backgounds and one of the mores poorly paid people posting on here.


 
In the times of minimal wage, you can't claim that accolade anymore, there are millions waving your 'privilege' banner now.

Maybe poke an eye out then you can jump on another bandwagon.


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

snadge said:


> In the times of minimal wage, you can't claim that accolade anymore, there are millions waving your 'privilege' banner now.
> 
> Maybe poke an eye out then you can jump on another bandwagon.


What's bandwagon about disability?


----------



## stuff_it (Dec 21, 2012)

snadge said:


> In the times of minimal wage, you can't claim that accolade anymore, there are millions waving your 'privilege' banner now.
> 
> Maybe poke an eye out then you can jump on another bandwagon.


Really? I think not. I bet you have indoor plumbing and everything.


----------



## snadge (Dec 21, 2012)

cesare said:


> What's bandwagon about disability?


 
He want's to be a victim.

That is all.

I apologise if I have offended one eyed people but his shite stinks.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 21, 2012)

cesare said:


> What's bandwagon about disability?


^^^This. In my experience, disability is not a choice, and it's not a bandwagon you can jump on and off at will.

@snadge - your 'disability bandwagon' comment was grossly inappropriate.


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

snadge said:


> He want's to be a victim.
> 
> That is all.
> 
> I apologise if I have offended one eyed people but his shite stinks.


 
Err.. you cunt.


----------



## snadge (Dec 21, 2012)

I may have the wrong end of the stick though, if I have I apologise reservedly.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 21, 2012)

snadge said:


> He want's to be a victim.
> 
> That is all.
> 
> I apologise if I have offended one eyed people but his shite stinks.


It's offensive to _anyone_ with a disability, eye-related or not. Including me.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 21, 2012)

snadge said:


> I may have the wrong end of the stick though, if I have I apologise reservedly.


Reservedly? You have reservations about apologising for an extremely offensive comment?


----------



## snadge (Dec 21, 2012)

ok, non reservedly, sometimes my brain just blurts out stuff when I am offended.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 21, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Fighting from the inside, lol.


 
I was serious. Paul Foot managed to stand his ground, partly because the printers would have shut the paper down if people had moved against him. By the early 90s after Wapping that had obviously changed, and although he tried to stay on, he lost.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 21, 2012)

But her?


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 21, 2012)

snadge said:


> ok, non reservedly, sometimes my brain just blurts out stuff when I am offended.


You were offended so you made a disablist comment in return?

That's no excuse.


----------



## snadge (Dec 21, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> You were offended so you made a disablist comment in return?
> 
> That's no excuse.


 
It was meant in a bible reference,said as a response, I realised how offensive it came across as I saw it posted and started to 'damage control'.

Once again my comments were just brain farts, sometimes I do take the time to make coherent replies, other times I make a cunt of myself.


With all this talk of privilege it seems that some people are vying for the paupers table so that their views can have more levity in a discussion.


I blame the Posh Penny Red, who is quickly managing to polish her platform at the detriment of 'what actually matters' it seems to me that it is another right wing ploy to introduce dissent in the left.


Once again I apologise for the disablist remark, in my defence it was a simile in my own mind.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 21, 2012)

snadge said:


> It was meant in a bible reference,said as a response, I realised how offensive it came across as I saw it posted and started to 'damage control'.
> 
> Once again my comments were just brain farts, sometimes I do take the time to make coherent replies, other times I make a cunt of myself.
> 
> ...


There was an earlier quote I took from the Offbeat  Empire piece, which is pretty much what you've said, but I think it bears repeating:


> I don't care if your politics are progressive and your focus is on social justice: if you're shouting at people online and refusing to have a dialogue, you're bullying.


 
If it's a right wing ploy, it's working rather too well...

Thank you for apologising


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 21, 2012)

At work we used to have what was sarcastically called the Heroes' Table, in the canteen.  I never managed to sit at it.


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

Whilst Tina Tuner's  playing on a tinny radio in a greasy canteen.

'We don't need another hero'


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:


> Whilst Tina Tuner's  playing on a tinny radio in a greasy canteen.
> 
> 'We don't need another hero'


Beyond the Thunderdome. The right wing anarchist dystopia.


----------



## stuff_it (Dec 21, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Fighting from the inside, lol.


I've had shits like that.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 21, 2012)

I've unleashed a fair few 'leviathans' in my time, and which have got stuck on their journeys.  Needed to break them in two.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 21, 2012)

Can we please stick to discussing the toilet habits of Ms. Penny, please? This thread is in severe danger of drifting off course.

Thanks.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 21, 2012)

All of two posts.  Lighten up.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 21, 2012)

I just lightened up by about half a stone - had to flush twice to get that bugger round the u-bend!


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

The dead otter.


----------



## stuff_it (Dec 21, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Can we please stick to discussing the toilet habits of Ms. Penny, please? This thread is in severe danger of drifting off course.
> 
> Thanks.


So did some of my shits...


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:


> The dead otter.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 21, 2012)

breather rings on the cable, sign of manly shitting.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 21, 2012)

Teeth marks on the washing basin.


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

"Branded into our very flesh"


----------



## stuff_it (Dec 21, 2012)

...kept throbbing for a good two hours after...


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

> If all women on earth woke up tomorrow morning feeling truly positive and powerful in their own bodies, the economies of the globe would collapse overnight.


----------



## stuff_it (Dec 21, 2012)

cesare said:


>


Dafuq? You made that shit up or someone did.


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

stuff_it said:


> Dafuq? You made that shit up or someone did.


I downloaded Ms Penny's Meat Market to see what the fuss was about


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 21, 2012)

Laurie made it up.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 21, 2012)

cesare said:


> I downloaded Ms Penny's Meat Market to see what the fuss was about


 
While we're on the subject, is it a load of *shit*?


----------



## stuff_it (Dec 21, 2012)

So many facepalmz.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 21, 2012)

Beyond epic facepalm.


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> While we're on the subject, is it a load of *shit*?


I've only got as far as that quote, but it's looking that way.


----------



## editor (Dec 21, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'll stick my oar in on LLESTA too - what he did on that disability thread was seriously out of order. But I like him as a poster - I often agree with him and even when I don't he always makes me think - he's far, far better at making you challenge your assumptions than any of the right wingers who post on here.
> 
> And I think sometimes the whole pessimist angle is done in a half joking way - like he's parodying himself.


But you understand that if a banned poster sneaks straight back in, the mods have absolutely no choice but to ban them, regardless of the fact that some posters may like the person?

There is a set procedure for banned posters to be reinstated, and it starts with them opening up a dialogue with the mods. As you know, we've let back an awful lot of posters over the years - even ones who went right over the top in the past - but when they just rock up with a new ID and carry on posting like nothing's happened, well, that's just taking the piss.


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

newbie said:


> I'm sad to see LLETSA driven out by fellow posters.  Repeatedly outed until the mods had to act because his opinions didn't fit.


Obviously I can only speak for myself, but I didn't perceive it as LLETSA being driven out by fellow posters (although I can see why it could appear that way to you). Yes, it was odd to see him being referred to as LLETSA so categorically but at the time the thread was moving very quickly, plus - and I accept we differ on this point! - posting isn't just words on a screen for some people; these allegations of Ms Penny were both harmful in real life and probably stressful for the people on the receiving end (and their comrades), therefore posting perhaps a little less cautiously.  I really doubt that posters were deliberately driving him out after all these years of knowing him. 

I'm also not sure that he was banned (again  ) because his opinions didn't fit. It was more probably because once it was obvious that he'd started posting again with his false moustache and fake nose, right there on one of the fastest evah threads where Editor's naturally curious and following it, he had to be banned again because of the rules and how you go about getting let back on again. All that permission and apology stuff.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 21, 2012)

He'll be back.


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 21, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I thought it was a patients' support magazine.
> 
> Edited: patients is the wrong word to use - I apologise.


Service user or survivor, depending on your view point.


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> While we're on the subject, is it a load of *shit*?


OK I've finished it now. It's not long, 69 pages including references. No, I wouldn't say it was a load of shit tbf. It's light reading, accessible, popularist type stuff. There's lots to criticise but I don't think it warrants either shrieking or adulation.


----------



## newbie (Dec 21, 2012)

as the editor has so clearly said, " if a banned poster sneaks straight back in, the mods have absolutely no choice but to ban them". 

 but only if they're caught. The mods play cat & mouse but experience suggests that a popular returner, or someone whose ban was widely felt to be unfair, doesn't get pointed at and called out by other posters. Even inadvertently and in the heat of the moment: the instinct not to grass your mates comes into play. 

and you're right, some people do take the stuff on the screen Very Seriously Indeed (the subject is obviously far more complex than a few glib words could cover).   There are ways online words can cause genuine damage as well as simple offence or hurt to the ego, and a prominent icon shouting 'racist' is definitely one of them.


----------



## ska invita (Dec 21, 2012)

cesare said:


> I downloaded Ms Penny's Meat Market to see what the fuss was about


near universally panned i think. There's some through reader reviews out there, such as this one.

Confused dilettantish nonsense, 19 Aug 2011
By
Xaven Taner "Uncompromising progressive" (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (Paperback)
Laurie Penny has been a near ubiquitous figure over the last year. Her status as the "voice of a generation" has seen her career blossom as she is consistently pulled in by the BBC and others to give opinion on everything from the situation in the Middle East to student politics; all this while others of her age group (she's in her mid 20s by the way) have been losing their jobs. Here she attempts to capitalize on her popular credentials by chancing her hand at some feminist theory on the DIY publishing imprint Zero Books.

In short, this is possibly the worst piece of attempted theory I have ever read, and its faults, contradictions, and sheer dilettantish gall are to such an extent that to cover it all would require a text the length of which would justify a book of its own. I will address only the main points which will help illustrate not only that Laurie Penny has no idea what she is writing about, but that her faults stem from the fact that she is ultimately a middle class opportunist flirting with the most superficial and bankrupt autonomist thought.

It's also worth noting that her trite blogger/journalist prose makes this a very painful read. Lines like "The ooze and tickle of realtime sex, which can neither be controlled nor mass-produced and sold back to us, threatens both capital and censorship"(pg16) might get Twitter buzzing, but in a monologue it just looks like nonsense. Her bizarre fixation on descriptives for bodily functions also offer up such pearls as "the eroto-capitalist horror of human flesh", "the panting border between dream and secretion", the "dirt and ooze of female power" and "the meat and stink of my body". Perhaps all this is meant to be arousing, but all she succeeds in doing is make sex appear like a scene from a Hammer horror film. You've got to laugh (after throwing up).

SEX
The central thesis of the book and the one which underpins the majority of her arguments is the claim that capitalism itself has a fear of female flesh. In order to address this claim it is necessary to read it metaphorically; capitalism after all doesn't think anything, its blind self expansion admits of no agency, certainly not one with an irrational fear of female bodies. Therefore in order to justify her claim Penny would have to demonstrate why the invisibility or the degradation of the female body was a necessary structural component of capitalist economy. She utterly fails to do this. Instead she takes this claim as given and proceeds to give us a break down of why advertising, the media (of which she's a part) and pornography are all ways in which this fear is manifest.

I'm in complete agreement that the representations of women in popular culture are unhealthy and predicated on consumerist rather than emancipatory values, however Penny's arguments are thoroughly confused as to the origin and alternative to these representations, and it is here that her essentialist utopianism comes in. There is a tension throughout the book between Penny's rejection of the images of women and female sexuality offered by contemporary capitalism and her continual references to some authentic experience of the body or sex that exists beyond it. She cites both Baudrillard and Lacan in her exposition; however, if Penny's intention was to evoke these thinkers to defend her theses then they were poor choices. Lacan's work in particular stands against such a reading. It is one of the most basic of Lacan's propositions that there is no intelligible experience of the sexualised body prior to that body's alienation within a system of signs. The signifier allows us to make reality intelligible but at the price of never being able to truly signify what we are or desire. In Lacan's terms this is called the barred Subject, or the subject of lack. All signs that we appropriate (or are sold to us) can never truly be the thing in itself and inevitably fall by the wayside as desire moves on to some other object.

In contrast, Penny's notion which continually appears and counts as one of her prime theoretical failures is that underneath all the signs, all the representations and narratives that we are pressured to appropriate, there is some real sex, some un-sublimated authentic sex involving your real body and real sexual identity. This is nothing but another version of the myth of origins positing a thoroughly disalienated self in some distant past where before we were corrupted by the temptations of consumerism we had full access to "sex and sublimity" (pg 16). It's a view that was thoroughly blown out of the water by Foucault over 30 years ago in his History of Sexuality. Penny offer a familiar story, ultimately reducible to religious motifs involving fall and redemption, not to mention the worst kind of utopian autonomous thought (Proudhon being an example). Of course all of this has little to do with materialism.

Indeed, her claim that capitalism runs scared from the female body would seem to be contradicted by pornography itself. Is it not the case that what marks out the ever expanding taxonomy of pornographic representations is an endless fascination with the materiality of the body? Extreme close-ups that appear more like gynaecological examinations, scatological obsessions and any number of genital combinations that test the capacity of the female body to its limits. Penny fails to notice that it's precisely this promise to "show it all" to leave no sexual possibility unexplored that leverages pornography's appeal as the sexual discourse without limits, that offers tailor made satisfaction to fit the polyphony of contemporary desires. The utopian myth of a real encounter with the body is a necessary component that gears pornography as a commodity to such an extent that it can elevate base bodily functions to the level of a sublime object.

Penny also exaggerates the role of pornography in forming a kind of new totality of alienation, one distinct from the "sweaty reality of sex" (pg 14). A more considered view would recognize that pornography is just one (admittedly quite prominent) narrative of sexual relations engaged in a battle of competing hegemonies along with other apparatus such as the church, the state, and numerous other representations circulating in cultural life, all of which vary across nations and ethnicities. After all even Mills and Boon novels are still going strong in 2011! That's not to disparage the claim that pornography has such a strong influence in western society today. I merely point out that the socially constituted nature of sexual practices is nothing new.

CONFESSION
I will gloss over the chapter where she gives the reader a breakdown of her eating disorders as a teenager. This confessional style which while claiming not to glamorise such afflictions does in its form and style do exactly the opposite. This need to tell it all, to confess and leave no part of one's existence concealed is a symptom of the "I Tweet therefore I am" generation which knows no bounds between public and private and whose utterances have been reduced to an endless stream of banal confessions and commentary in sound bite form. This the latest incarnation of confessional discourse that again as Foucault points out has been at the base of power relations and the production of sexualities for near 300 years. The inclusion of this chapter seems designed to give a "realtime" example of how the "eroto-capitalist horror" blights the lives of women. Well at least if you're white and middle class, the demographic that predominantly suffers from eating disorders; a fact she avoids in favour of speaking from a position of false universalism. Eating disorders are a serious problem but Penny only muddies the waters. I will just add that in the book she claims that her problems began after the breakdown of her parents' marriage; not to labour the point but if I were her psychoanalyst I'd probably start there rather than with an analysis of consumer capitalism.

(CONTINUES IN NEXT POST)


----------



## love detective (Dec 21, 2012)

love detective said:


> actually there _might_ be an explanation, will get back in a bit


 
Right, finally has become clear what happened, so need to clarify my previous post on this

The writer of 'that' piece left the IWCA in 2009, so when we checked to see if Laurie had been in touch with anyone, noone had heard from her.

The writer did however get in touch with Laurie (in a personal capacity) as a result of the twitter storm, however she has completely misinterpreted his response to her when she says:-




			
				lauriepenny said:
			
		

> the writer and I are actually *engaged in a productive email discussion* right now, *he admits that some of what he said was wrong*


 
1. In terms of a productive discussion: the writer emailed Laurie after the initial row flared up (to explain why the article is not racist), and received what he calls in his own words as a 'somewhat dismissive response'. He responded with a second email to which she has still not replied.

2. In terms of him admitting he was wrong: this is a gross misrepresentation. What he said was that if he was rewriting the article from scratch, he may have introduced some more nuances and would deal a bit more with the history of identity politics and how it has led to this very specific type of multiculturalism that is being critiqued. He made it very clear to her why this critique of multiculturalism was made and that he fully stands by what he wrote. He also told her about some of his experiences in the IWCA and how that had informed his approach to politics and how it informed the critique in the piece itself.

So, he is now going to be responding to Laurie once again and asking for a full retraction from her about what she said about both the piece originally and her misrepresentation of their subsequent 'discussion' of it.

So, as expected, looks like Laurie has some explaining to do.....

--------------------------
For info, the writer has recently published a number of Red Action/IWCA articles on their local org's blog in 2012. This makes it clear as day that despite no longer being an IWCA member there has been no change of thinking since writing the article

Why we reproduced - Time ‘To Dump’ Multiculturalism by Joe Reilly

Identity in an age of austerity and slump

Also on the topic, he publicly says:



> As for our critique of multiculturalism, that has stayed with us from our days in the IWCA - they have written a fair bit on the subject over the years - http://www.iwca.info/


----------



## ska invita (Dec 21, 2012)

POLITICS
The most important point to make about this book is not that her theories are squiffy or that her style is like a dilettantish sixth-former; it's that from her autonomist utopian theory ultimately springs utterly bankrupt and conservative politics. This fact is made most clear in her discussion of domestic work and the exploitation of immigrants by rich families and employers. Incredibly she claims that the reason such exploitation exists is because men and women can't decide on who does the dishes! Men think it's a women role and those women then employ cheap help to do it for them. The demographic from which these theories emanate is made obvious by this quote: "of the women I spoke to who had found a workable solution to the sharing of domestic work in their household, 90% employed some sort of home help, from a weekly cleaner to a live in au-pair" (pg 60). A workable solution? A privileged middle class solution more like it. These are the people that Penny is writing about and for. This is further illustrated (along with a slavish elevation of lifestyle politics) when she writes: "I know plenty of young women my age, educated and emancipated, who view the baking of immaculate muffins and the embroidering of intricate scarves and mittens as exciting hobbies, pastimes which should be properly performed in high-wasted fifties skirts and silly little pinafores."(pg59) And also "How many times have you heard a home-based women say, her resentment tinged with a hint of pride, that her husband just can't take care of himself - or, if he sometimes deigns to do the dishes, that he's `well trained'."(pg58) Households on the lowest incomes can't afford to have women who stay at home and as for muffins and mittens this is little more than a projection of Penny's own privileged upbringing and environment. None of this has any theoretical value and belongs more in the advice column of Glamour magazine than what is supposed to be a piece of leftist feminist writing.

For the Pièce de résistance we have Penny's solution to the problem of domestic exploitation: "Men and women have been passing the buck for too long. We need to confront our own hypocrisy and find equable, less exploitative solutions to the dichotomy of domestic dysfunction, before more harm is done." (pg 62) That's right, middle class men and women have to sort out a cleaning rota and then there you have it, problem solved! A statement bereft of all class and economic analysis, blind to the fact that it is the economic disparity not the gender disparity that in the last instance puts people into servitude. This statement alone that apes the worst, most confused aspects of liberal thought should be enough to dissuade any left wing group from giving Penny a platform. Here she reveals her dearth of politics in one fell swoop.

Laurie Penny is not alone in being given a platform to spout this kind of rubbish. Since the economic crisis of 2008 a whole host of opportunists have appeared carrying what looks like a red flag but on closer inspection is just a large trust fund. Penny is unique in being quite so inept and yet somehow finding herself put before the masses as an authoritative voice instead of just a silly ill-informed one. Why do the BBC and media elite like to give her a platform? Simple, because she's one of them, an Oxbridge educated careerist who's slightly damaged and far more privileged upbringing makes her from the perspective of the ruling class a prime target to front the increasing waves of discontent sweeping Britain. The official opposition undermining every cause she champions without realizing it herself. That this was even published asks serious questions of the quality control at Zero Books. For anyone interested in the issues Penny fails to address I'd look to the dozens of far more consistent, informed and less self-serving writers out there; there are many of them.


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

ska - there was a link to the amazon page and that review earlier in the thread.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 21, 2012)

love detective said:


> Right, finally has become clear what happened, so need to clarify my previous post on this
> 
> The writer of 'that' piece left the IWCA in 2009, so when we checked to see if Laurie had been in touch with anyone, noone had heard from her.
> 
> ...


 
The Thurrock Heckler looks like a great website, thanks for linking to it.


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

Is this the same Joe Reilly that posts here?


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 21, 2012)

cesare said:


> Is this the same Joe Reilly that posts here?


 
yes


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> yes


Cheers. I bet he's spitting feathers over this.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 21, 2012)

cesare said:


> Cheers. I bet he's spitting feathers over this.


 
extremely thirsty?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 21, 2012)

editor said:


> But you understand that if a banned poster sneaks straight back in, the mods have absolutely no choice but to ban them, regardless of the fact that some posters may like the person?
> 
> There is a set procedure for banned posters to be reinstated, and it starts with them opening up a dialogue with the mods. As you know, we've let back an awful lot of posters over the years - even ones who went right over the top in the past - but when they just rock up with a new ID and carry on posting like nothing's happened, well, that's just taking the piss.


 
Yeah sure, I get that - that post wasn't intended to give you and the mods a hard time. I just think it's a shame that's all.


----------



## killer b (Dec 21, 2012)

lletsa's not really a one for dialogue is he, bless.


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> extremely thirsty?


Cross to the point of spitting feathers cos there's no spittle left


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 21, 2012)

ah dazpower gone mad


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> ah dazpower gone mad


Oddpant rage


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 21, 2012)

Regarding my previous post about publishing the article from the person threatening suicide, a couple of other points spring to mind:

1. That she had professional advice not to publish isn't in any doubt. But did her employers know that she'd been advised not to run the story before she filed it? If they did know and ran it anyway then they're every bit as culpable. If they didn't know (and that would only have been because she didn't tell them) then they should be hauling her firmly over the coals for unprofessional and unethical conduct. Of course journos run stories that some people don't like, that's a part of the job and I'm not against it in principle, but there's, IMHO, no defence for having professional advice to protect a vulnerable person by not running a story and then deciding to run it regardless.

2. Whether she/they realise it or not, it's possible that they've upped the ante in publicity terms. The worst possible thing you can do with someone threatening suicide is to let them know that doing so gets them something they want, in this case a more public hearing of their case. If somebody, anybody, in any context, gets the message that threatening to take their own life is an effective strategy then how much further might that strategy be taken? And what exactly would LP and the NS do if that were to happen?


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 21, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Regarding my previous post about publishing the article from the person threatening suicide, a couple of other points spring to mind:
> 
> 1. That she had professional advice not to publish isn't in any doubt. But did her employers know that she'd been advised not to run the story before she filed it? If they did know and ran it anyway then they're every bit as culpable. If they didn't know (and that would only have been because she didn't tell them) then they should be hauling her firmly over the coals for unprofessional and unethical conduct. Of course journos run stories that some people don't like, that's a part of the job and I'm not against it in principle, but there's, IMHO, no defence for having professional advice to protect a vulnerable person by not running a story and then deciding to run it regardless.
> 
> 2. Whether she/they realise it or not, it's possible that they've upped the ante in publicity terms. The worst possible thing you can do with someone threatening suicide is to let them know that doing so gets them something they want, in this case a more public hearing of their case. If somebody, anybody, in any context, gets the message that threatening to take their own life is an effective strategy then how much further might that strategy be taken? And what exactly would LP and the NS do if that were to happen?


absolutely.

fwiw, i'm _still_ waiting for NS to get back to me with an actual reply about whether they've got any safeguarding type policy/procedure  let alone comment on how LP handled this..


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 21, 2012)

Left Foot Forward, Assistant Editor



> Left Foot Forward is one of the UK’s leading politics websites, specialising in evidence-based coverage of politics, policy and current affairs. We are looking for an Assistant Editor to help take the site to the next level.


 


> You will be expected to contribute to the strategic development of LFF while delivering high quality editorial content *and engaging with readers through social media on a day-to-day basis.*


 


> *You are also likely to gain media exposure in the job.*


 
20 grand to work on a blog? Where do they get the money from?


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 21, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Regarding my previous post about publishing the article from the person threatening suicide, a couple of other points spring to mind:
> 
> 1. That she had professional advice not to publish isn't in any doubt. But did her employers know that she'd been advised not to run the story before she filed it? If they did know and ran it anyway then they're every bit as culpable. If they didn't know (and that would only have been because she didn't tell them) then they should be hauling her firmly over the coals for unprofessional and unethical conduct. Of course journos run stories that some people don't like, that's a part of the job and I'm not against it in principle, but there's, IMHO, no defence for having professional advice to protect a vulnerable person by not running a story and then deciding to run it regardless.
> 
> 2. Whether she/they realise it or not, it's possible that they've upped the ante in publicity terms. The worst possible thing you can do with someone threatening suicide is to let them know that doing so gets them something they want, in this case a more public hearing of their case. If somebody, anybody, in any context, gets the message that threatening to take their own life is an effective strategy then how much further might that strategy be taken? And what exactly would LP and the NS do if that were to happen?


 
Good post.  As to what they'd do?  Depends what they can gain from it.  More suicides means that they were "first to highlight the issue" rather than a catalyst.  Fewer means they "brought the issue out to the public" and their actions possibly saved lives.

Can be spun any way they want to.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Left Foot Forward, Assistant Editor
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Slightly off-topic: can you remember the name of that website where you could look up a company or, I think, think tank, and it would say where the funding came from, who runs it, etc?  I'm sure it used to get posted a lot on here, but I don't remember seeing it for years.  Perhaps it doesn't exist anymore.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Left Foot Forward, Assistant Editor
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
donations.


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Regarding my previous post about publishing the article from the person threatening suicide, a couple of other points spring to mind:
> 
> 1. That she had professional advice not to publish isn't in any doubt.


 

Interested to know about this professional advice not to publish. At  the end of piece it says the Samaritans were involved in the editing?
In any case it was as disgraceful to publish the original letter as the reply. Shameful stuff. Need to know how 'M' is.


----------



## TruXta (Dec 21, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> Slightly off-topic: can you remember the name of that website where you could look up a company or, I think, think tank, and it would say where the funding came from, who runs it, etc? I'm sure it used to get posted a lot on here, but I don't remember seeing it for years. Perhaps it doesn't exist anymore.


PRWatch, Spinwatch or similar?


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 21, 2012)

Buckaroo said:


> In any case it was as disgraceful to publish the original letter..


missed that bit  - got a link please?
(i've only seen the article written as a response to the letter)


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Left Foot Forward, Assistant Editor
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 



> With an emphasis on evidence-based content,


 
Raising the bar there


----------



## nino_savatte (Dec 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Left Foot Forward, Assistant Editor
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Er, Geoffrey Robinson?


----------



## articul8 (Dec 21, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> donations.


From whom?


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

tufty79 said:


> missed that bit  - got a link please?


 
Brain freeze, now not sure if original was published or just referred to in the NS piece. Apologies if not.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 21, 2012)

Buckaroo said:


> Brain freeze, now not sure if original was published or just referred to in the NS piece. Apologies if not.


no worries! the NS piece just referred to it. i think i might properly explode if she'd published the original


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 21, 2012)

TruXta said:


> PRWatch, Spinwatch or similar?


Similar, aye, but I think neither of them.

You could look up studies that were published by think tanks, and see which companies had sponsored them...and which politicians served on directorships etc.

Mind is completely blank.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 21, 2012)

Buckaroo said:


> Interested to know about this professional advice not to publish. At the end of piece it says the Samaritans were involved in the editing?


interesting that it's only stated that they were involved in the editing of the article. @bakunin - do you know anything more about the process? i'm assuming that editing goes on after the piece is written, but before it's published - am i being too simplistic here?

no mention as to whether they were consulted when she sent a personal response to the reader (afaics, that was forwarding 'helplines'. so everything will be fine).


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 21, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> Slightly off-topic: can you remember the name of that website where you could look up a company or, I think, think tank, and it would say where the funding came from, who runs it, etc? I'm sure it used to get posted a lot on here, but I don't remember seeing it for years. Perhaps it doesn't exist anymore.


The one that i postd a month or so back Shut down now i'm afraid - if that's what you mean.  Or maybe you (in fact, pretty sure you do) mean the sourcewatch site


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

tufty79 said:


> no worries! the NS piece just referred to it. i think i might properly explode if she'd published the original


 
Me too! That's if it exists. Something very creepy about all of this.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 21, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> Similar, aye, but I think neither of them.
> 
> You could look up studies that were published by think tanks, and see which companies had sponsored them...and which politicians served on directorships etc.
> 
> Mind is completely blank.


 
Sounds like a really useful site that Fez, if you do find it can you let us know?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 21, 2012)

nino_savatte said:


> Er, Geoffrey Robinson?


Why do you say that?


----------



## nino_savatte (Dec 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Why do you say that?


He's got lots of large. Doesn't he own the New Statesman? I would have thought Left Foot Forward would be right up his street.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 21, 2012)

articul8 said:


> From whom?


 
Have you got your application in?

Donations from all sorts of people - certainly I think some TUs have given wodges in the recent past, though not as much as to Labour List.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 21, 2012)

nino_savatte said:


> He's got lots of large. Doesn't he own the New Statesman? I would have thought Left Foot Forward would be right up his street.


 
No he doesn't own the NS any more


----------



## nino_savatte (Dec 21, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> No he doesn't own the NS any more


I should have said "didn't" instead of "doesn't".


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 21, 2012)

nino_savatte said:


> He's got lots of large. Doesn't he own the New Statesman? I would have thought Left Foot Forward would be right up his street.


He hasn't owned the new statesman for years now, and LFF forward have publicly attacked him a number of times.


----------



## articul8 (Dec 21, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Have you got your application in?
> 
> Donations from all sorts of people - certainly I think some TUs have given wodges in the recent past, though not as much as to Labour List.


Happy where I am ta but looking for funds for red pepper


----------



## BigTom (Dec 21, 2012)

articul8 said:


> From whom?


 
Isn't Left Foot Forward Will Straw's (son of Jack Straw) thing? I should imagine that he has quite a lot of connections to wealthy people who are happy to chuck money towards a coolish seeming lefty think-tank cum new media thing. Also they probably do a reasonable amount of commissioned research type things.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 21, 2012)

tufty79 said:


> interesting that it's only stated that they were involved in the editing of the article. @bakunin - do you know anything more about the process? i'm assuming that editing goes on after the piece is written, but before it's published - am i being too simplistic here?
> 
> no mention as to whether they were consulted when she sent a personal response to the reader (afaics, that was forwarding 'helplines'. so everything will be fine).


 
She put out an appeal on Twitter and recieved a great deal of advice from people in the mental health field and support workers which told her to refer them to support and advice agencies and not to publish. She ignored that advice and published anyway.

I'll refer you to one Twitter feed in particular for openers (relevent tweets start from the 14th of December):

https://twitter.com/onthecouchagain


----------



## articul8 (Dec 21, 2012)

He left a while ago to go to ippr, and is trying to get parliamentary for Hyndburn seat near his old man's


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 21, 2012)

audiotech said:


> This forum is infested with middle-class no-marks. They know who they are.


 
Missed this in between the teleprinter like frenzy of this thread last night and a Guinness and brandy chaser session in  the pub Xmas quiz. What is all this about?


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 21, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> She put out an appeal on Twitter and recieved a great deal of advice from people in the mental health field and support workers which told her to refer them to support and advice agencies and not to publish. She ignored that advice and published anyway.
> 
> I'll refer you to one Twitter feed in particular for openers (relevent tweets start from the 14th of December):
> 
> https://twitter.com/onthecouchagain


cheers! (i've seen her original twitter post, and a fair few of the responses along those lines, but thanks for the onthecouchagain link - i'm nodding fervently at him!)
i actually wanted to clarify whether i'd understood what 'the editing of the article' meant


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 21, 2012)

tufty79 said:


> cheers! (i've seen her original twitter post, and a fair few of the responses along those lines).
> i actually wanted to clarify whether i'd understood what 'the editing of the article' meant


 
Editing is done between a writer submitting a piece and the publication running the story. I often have a little email ping-pong with my editors as I actively encourage them to send me any questions, suggestions and so on and when I get their feedback I then add whatever clarifications they want, expand whatever points they've suggested and generally fulfill any requests or suggestions that they make. It's standard practice for me to do that whenever and however an editor decides they want it done. Once a piece is fully edited and accepted, then it's published.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 21, 2012)

ok, that makes it a lot clearer! thanks!


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> Good post. As to what they'd do? Depends what they can gain from it. More suicides means that they were "first to highlight the issue" rather than a catalyst. Fewer means they "brought the issue out to the public" and their actions possibly saved lives.
> 
> Can be spun any way they want to.


 
It's gonna be hard to spin this. Suicides caused by austerity cuts had already been highlighted. If she'd written a general piece fair enough but this ammounts to intervention and that can't be done in a casual manner and definitely not in public. And the fact that 'M' asked her to write about his/her suicide for political reasons makes this even more sordid. She went public with 'M''s predicament, now she is professionally and morally obliged to go public with the outcome of her intervention.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 21, 2012)

BigTom said:


> Isn't Left Foot Forward Will Straw's (son of Jack Straw) thing? I should imagine that he has quite a lot of connections to wealthy people who are happy to chuck money towards a coolish seeming lefty think-tank cum new media thing. Also they probably do a reasonable amount of commissioned research type things.


 
Perhaps Benji Wegg-Prosser, former batman to Lord Mandelson and latterly a Russian oligarch, has bunged a few quid over.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 21, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> She put out an appeal on Twitter and recieved a great deal of advice from people in the mental health field and support workers which told her to refer them to support and advice agencies and not to publish. She ignored that advice and published anyway.
> 
> I'll refer you to one Twitter feed in particular for openers (relevent tweets start from the 14th of December):
> 
> https://twitter.com/onthecouchagain


 
She'll definitely find it easy to dismiss what that bloke's saying judging by the rest of his twitter feed


----------



## Badgers (Dec 21, 2012)

What did she do before journalism? Just curious as to what coalface experience she has. I am pretty ignorant of this topic so just want some balance.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 21, 2012)

Buckaroo said:


> She went public with 'M''s predicament, now she is professionally and morally obliged to go public with the outcome of her intervention.


 
If I was inclined to gamble on this (which for reasons of decency I'm obviously not) I'd say that the odds of her doing that unless she's forced to are considerably smaller than the odds on her avoiding the subject entirely in the hope that it will simply go away.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> The one that i postd a month or so back Shut down now i'm afraid - if that's what you mean. Or maybe you (in fact, pretty sure you do) mean the sourcewatch site


 
That's the one I was thinking of, sourcewatch. Thanks!

@SpineyNorman FYI


----------



## Badgers (Dec 21, 2012)

Bakunin said:
			
		

> If I was inclined to gamble on this (which for reasons of decency I'm obviously not) I'd say that the odds of her doing that unless she's forced to are considerably smaller than the odds on her avoiding the subject entirely in the hope that it will simply go away.



No claims of any prior work, work experience or volunteering? Guess she does not need the money but surely some life/work experience would give her some basis for writing?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 21, 2012)

Geri said:


> I just watched that video with David Starkey. My God, what a hideous woman! The rest of the people in her school must have been pretty stupid if she was one of the brightest.


 
Just goes to prove the old saw about how being clever doesn't mean you've actually got any sense, though.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 21, 2012)

snadge said:


> He want's to be a victim.
> 
> That is all.
> 
> I apologise if I have offended one eyed people but his shite stinks.


 

i can't speak for all one-eyed people but you're fine, don't worry.


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

Oh FFS, another ten plus pages.

Give it a rest.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 21, 2012)

Badgers said:


> No claims of any prior work, work experience or volunteering? Guess she does not need the money but surely some life/work experience would give her some basis for writing?


i'm going to be interested as to her justification for publishing when she was apparently advised not to..


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 21, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> in fairness, most people see a criticism of multiculturalism as ray cyst unless they look at the analysis. Which just goes to show you can't read a title of a link and make judge cos else you end up making a cunt out of yourself


 
Yep, they see the criticism as of the concept of multiculturalism _per se_, rather than a criticism of how a particular (state-directed) "take" on multiculturalism has played out.


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> He'll be back.


 
Hopefully he'll return with a name which doesn't sound like an 80s soft porn star.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 21, 2012)

newbie said:


> I'm sad to see LLETSA driven out by fellow posters. Repeatedly outed until the mods had to act because his opinions didn't fit.


 
He outed himself this time.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Left Foot Forward, Assistant Editor
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

i might apply for that.  i could be a blogger for 20k a year.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 21, 2012)

Badgers said:
			
		

> No claims of any prior work, work experience or volunteering? Guess she does not need the money but surely some life/work experience would give her some basis for writing?



So nothing written or experience drawn from? Just a wealthy upbringing and and education? Not even a Saturday job? Seems unusual, even the richest and laziest people I have encountered have done some work before settling into a trough job with a parental credit card....


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:


> Hopefully he'll return with a name which doesn't sound like an 80s soft porn star.


 
He's an arse, but he's our arse.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 21, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> i might apply for that. i could be a blogger for 20k a year.


 
"depending on experience" means if you've not done a year working for free, then expect to either work a year for free or fuck off.


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

Badgers said:


> So nothing written or experience drawn from? Just a wealthy upbringing and and education? Not even a Saturday job? Seems unusual, even the richest and laziest people I have encountered have done some work before settling into a trough job with a parental credit card....


 
This is one of the few things she replied to, in response to butchers I think. It's over a hundred pages back so briefly:

I worked at the Morning Star ---> Journalist from the Morning Star turns up and says, "I really hope you don't call that 3 months you were with us working because you were well shit and not even interested in joining the union that we recommended".


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 21, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Yes, it is inappropriate.
> Laurie Penny chose to legally change her name on feminist grounds away from her father's surname, and she is referred to as a generic male name because ... ...


 
...Dave Barnett flows better than Laura Barnett, obviously.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 21, 2012)

Badgers said:


> So nothing written or experience drawn from? Just a wealthy upbringing and and education? Not even a Saturday job? Seems unusual, even the richest and laziest people I have encountered have done some work before settling into a trough job with a parental credit card....


 


> ..actually, my money and privilege are not such that I'm not seriously worried about the future.
> I know people from university whose daddies, mummies and uncles work at big papers, who have walked in to jobs at the Times and the Independent. I was unable to afford the place I was offered on the MA in journalism offered by City University - a standard entry-point to the industry, costing 8,000 per year exclusive of living costs, with no time to work and support yourself - so I settled for a shitty little part-time NCTJ course, and that choice has seriously held me back compared to the people I know who _could_ afford City. Booga-booga personal finger-pointing actually obscures many years of hard work, knockbacks and disappointments because I wasn't lucky enough to have a daddy who worked in the media or a massive personal fortune to draw upon.
> 
> It says a great big deal that someone with my opportunities - middle-class parents, nice school, Oxford -_ still _isn't privileged enough to walk into a feature-writing job without years of being knocked back and getting up again, a process that, let me assure you, is very much ongoing...
> ...


http://pennyred.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/penny-for-your-privilege.html (from 2010)

she graduated in 2007 with an english degree. started work for one in four in autumn 2008, until at least spring 2010, presumably while doing her journalism course. i'd guess that sub-edding at the morning star in 2010 would've happened once she'd finished at the 'shitty' NCTJ


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:


> This is one of the few things she replied to, in response to butchers I think. It's over a hundred pages back so briefly:
> 
> I worked at the Morning Star ---> Journalist from the Morning Star turns up and says, "I really hope you don't call that 3 months you were with us working because you were well shit and not even interested in joining the union that we recommended".


 
Exact words (it's really quite damning):

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...cebook-handbags.266196/page-242#post-11801981


----------



## Badgers (Dec 21, 2012)

So bollocks then?


----------



## not-bono-ever (Dec 21, 2012)

you know the worst thing about this thread ?

I have started to think about things again and thats not good.I was happy being cod left beforehand, now I have seen the light etc

Fuck you LP.

/goes to wash dishes with fury


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 21, 2012)

discokermit said:


> your explaination is rubbish. referring to her as dave is inappropriate, unfunny and unhelpful.


 
You're right.

William would be better.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 21, 2012)

> the day off you haven't had since 2007


 


Besides all the ones spent swanning off to New York and Greece


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:


> Exact words (it's really quite damning):
> 
> http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...cebook-handbags.266196/page-242#post-11801981


 
45 likes


----------



## sihhi (Dec 21, 2012)

Absurd claim, left unchallenged - people being _imprisoned a week_ after Fortnum & Mason.





> Were you part of the protests on 26 March at the March for the Alternative?





> Yes. I went to Fortnum & Mason, but I got there late and there were riot police going in and the protesters were lied to and arrested. The _week after_ that was such a low point - _they were in prison_, being smeared. They were just young people who set this up because they cared. I feel they were really stamped on.


 
People were arrested, detained in police cells, then questioned, charged and bailed on condition of not being in central London the week of the royal wedding - not imprisoned.

http://www.newstatesman.com/comedy/2011/07/vote-feel-uncut-times-doing
Helen Lewis's interview with Josie Long (Oxford, Newstead Wood School - Bromley's premier girls-only grammar school)


This was a classic Helen Lewis piece.




> *How on earth can lefties like football?* _Helen Lewis-Hasteley - 02 February 2011_





> It treats women shamefully and the money’s obscene. Supporting it is just embarrassing.
> 
> Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't believing in equality a key part of being a leftie? So how on earth does anyone square this with supporting football -- a game in which women are nothing more than baubles, gay people apparently don't exist and money is thrown about in a way that would make Gordon Gekko blush? ...
> 
> You are using your spending power to say that the misogyny, the homophobia, the _rewarding of people for a fluke of genetics_ rather than a worthwhile contribution to society -- that's all OK. Or, at least, that you don't care enough about it to find something else to do with your Saturday afternoons. I'm afraid, too, that I don't have any truck with the argument people make that they were "brought up with football" and that it's a great tradition. You're not attending a football match in 1933, or whenever that mythical time was when footballers were horny-handed sons of toil rather than gold-Ferrari-owning ingrates. You're going now. Trust me, the modern world offers other ways for fathers to bond with their sons. And yes, you might have had a poster of Pele or Keegan or Cruyff on your wall as a teenager but you're an adult now and you're expected to justify your decisions. Even the Catholic Church -- hardly the institution with the greatest regard for free thinking -- requires its members to confirm that they want to honour the commitments made on their behalf as children. So _put down the remote_. Tear up your season ticket. Welcome to the modern world.


 
It was removed without warning from the website for being so absurd: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/helen-lewis-hasteley/2011/02/football-women-money

Helen Lewis, as news editor of the New Statesman, is an important figure in all this.






			
				Helen Lewis said:
			
		

> The big issue Hobsbawm needs to address is the idea that networking is unfair: that getting on is about who you know, not what you know. To the outsider, for example, the worlds of politics and journalism can seem positively incestuous. Can anyone not in the club ever join it? Doesn't networking just encourage people to give jobs to people they meet in the pub? At this point, I should declare an interest. For five years I ran regular networking events for young journalists called Schmooze and Booze (older colleagues once suggested setting up a parallel event called Whinge and Binge). It was free, open to anyone who was interested, and held in a central London pub every other month. I hoped that it was fairly egalitarian, levelling the playing field for people who didn't have the advantage of a ready-made network in the form of university papers or postgraduate journalism courses. You could come along, have a drink, and hear about the fortunes of different newspapers, the relative merits of their graduate trainee programmes, and which newsroom was looking for a junior reporter.






			
				Helen Lewis said:
			
		

> Nowadays, I do most of my "networking" (sorry about the scare-quotes, but it is a horrible word) through Twitter. The ecosystem there is full of fascinating niches, and you can tailor your experience to your interests: I regularly talk to feminist bloggers, video game journalists, political reporters and comedy writers. Again, it's more egalitarian: there are fewer gatekeepers between you and the people who you might want to impress, or who might want to impress you. And _because you are just "words on a screen", it actually makes what you know more important. No one knows, or cares, who your parents are or what school you went to. It's about how engaging you are right now_.


Note how Schmooze and Booze http://www.schmoozeandbooze.co.uk/ doesn't exist any more. Broadly things like that are less needed, the most crawling, sycophantic types who retweet the consensus of (physical or internet) publication X can be sourced and recruited into an internship via twitter itself.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/10/secret-of-networking-talking
It's an interview with Julia Hobsbawm, an important Labour progressive and CEO of Editorial Intelligence, the organisation that created The Comment Awards back in 2009 "a core part of the Editorial Intelligence events calendar". It was the Comment Awards with Harry Cole (Gudio Fawkes news editor, Oxbridge naturally) on the panel that Laurie Penny won her award: 









Here is Julia Hobsbawm with David Aaronovitch at their awards.


----------



## Fez909 (Dec 21, 2012)

tufty79 said:


> http://pennyred.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/penny-for-your-privilege.html (from 2010)
> 
> she graduated in 2007 with an english degree. started work for one in four in autumn 2008, until at least spring 2010, presumably while doing her journalism course. i'd guess that sub-edding at the morning star in 2010 would've happened once she'd finished at the 'shitty' NCTJ


 
That extract is actually really good until you get to this bit:



> trying all the while not to give up and bow out to the people with real privilege


 
The fact that she isn't as privileged as the most privileged people in the country means that hers isn't _real privlege._


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:


> Oh FFS, another ten plus pages.
> 
> Give it a rest.


You started it!


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 21, 2012)

Penny said:
			
		

> It says a great big deal that someone with my opportunities - middle-class parents, nice school, Oxford - stillisn't privileged enough to walk into a feature-writing job without years of being knocked back and getting up again, a process that, let me assure you, is very much ongoing...


 
Oh boo fucking hoo.

Graduated from Oxford in (presumably around June) 2007.
Started the Penny Red blog Sept 2007.
First article in Red Pepper - Oct 2007.
First article in Guardian - Mar 2009.
Worked for Morning Star - early 2010.
First article in New Stateman - May 2010.
First article in Indie - Nov 2011.

At some point in those 4 years she also got her NCTJ training in too.

Christ, I can't believe I've just spent 20 minutes doing that.


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

The more I read her writing the more I find her an utterly repulsive, vile, bellowing fuckpig. She really does come across as a horrible person.


----------



## weepiper (Dec 21, 2012)

steph said:


> Oh boo fucking hoo.
> 
> Graduated from Oxford in (presumably around June) 2007.
> Started the Penny Red blog Sept 2007.
> ...


 
You're so _mean_ steph  and _hateful_! I don't want to play with you anymore *takes ball* *goes home*


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 21, 2012)

steph said:


> First article in Red Pepper - Oct 2007.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 21, 2012)

If I was a right wing journalist then she would be a gift. I would keep her in the front line and even support her writing to keep others out the spotlight. Safe in the knowledge that a child with a phone could discredit her in a a heartbeat, leaving a step back up if anyone genuine wanted to fill the dirty void left behind.....


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 21, 2012)

discokermit said:


> my woes? i burnt my face at work today, it's only like a bit of sunburn though. apart from that i'm fine.


 
Lighting your fags with the gas torch again?


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

Badgers said:


> If I was a right wing journalist then she would be a gift. I would keep her in the front line and even support her writing to keep others out the spotlight. Safe in the knowledge that a child with a phone could discredit her in a a heartbeat, leaving a step back up if anyone genuine wanted to fill the dirty void left behind.....


 
Even if you don't have a phone. Please phone.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 21, 2012)

David Aaronovitch?

Lustbather ‏@lustbather
@DAaronovitch Of course your arse being such a cosmopolitan and thinking arse deserve to sit on a bog cleaned gleamed to death


----------



## Random (Dec 21, 2012)

Badgers said:


> If I was a right wing journalist then she would be a gift. I would keep her in the front line and even support her writing to keep others out the spotlight. Safe in the knowledge that a child with a phone could discredit her in a a heartbeat, leaving a step back up if anyone genuine wanted to fill the dirty void left behind.....


Yes, it's not really tinfoil hat to say the right wing journalists like superficial lefties like Penny. They like and support them because they're a left that they can recognise. And one that talks a recognisable language, because it shares a similar class background.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 21, 2012)

If we examine this



> Nowadays, I do most of my "networking" (sorry about the scare-quotes, but it is a horrible word) through Twitter. The ecosystem there is full of fascinating niches, and you can tailor your experience to your interests: I regularly talk to feminist bloggers, video game journalists, political reporters and comedy writers. Again, *it's more egalitarian*: there are fewer gatekeepers between you and the people who you might want to impress, or who might want to impress you. And because you are just "words on a screen", it actually makes what you know more important. No one knows, or cares, who your parents are or what school you went to. It's about how engaging you are right now.


 
The claim that it is egalitarian is nonsense - the structure of the industry is exactly the same- advertisers need satisfaction, a boss or editor oversees the work and the minions are underneath, the only thing different is the technology is produced in computer factories in China. It is perhaps more liberal-meritocratic, as in it allows the boss to better quicker select who is more _worthy. _The grounds for deciding what 'more worthy' remain the domain of the boss.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 21, 2012)

Random said:
			
		

> Yes, it's not really tinfoil hat to say the right wing journalists like superficial lefties like Penny. They like and support them because they're a left that they can recognise. And one that talks a recognisable language, because it shares a similar class background.



Hanging on the old barbed wire


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 21, 2012)

@DAaronovitch let's do lunch darling


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 21, 2012)

Fez909 said:


> "depending on experience" means if you've not done a year working for free, then expect to either work a year for free or fuck off.


 
best fuck off then i spose.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:
			
		

> Even if you don't have a phone. Please phone.



Find me a previous employer or work experience lead and I will. Never waited tables? Worked as a carer? Charity shop/kitchen? Surely she must have done some life experience, not just moved from lecture hall to journalism? With that amount of verbal diarrhoea she must have mentioned something?


----------



## love detective (Dec 21, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> @DAaronovitch let's do lunch darling



kebab bum fingeresque


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

sihhi said:


> If we examine this
> 
> 
> 
> The claim that it is egalitarian is nonsense - the structure of the industry is exactly the same- advertisers need satisfaction, a boss or editor oversees the work and the minions are underneath, the only thing different is the technology is produced in computer factories in China. It is perhaps more liberal-meritocratic, as in it allows the boss to better quicker select who is more _worthy. _The grounds for deciding what 'more worthy' remain the domain of the boss.


Pretty much like most private sector then.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 21, 2012)

Badgers said:


> Find me a previous employer or work experience lead and I will. Never waited tables? Worked as a carer? Charity shop/kitchen? Surely she must have done some life experience, not just moved from lecture hall to journalism? With that amount of verbal diarrhoea she must have mentioned something?


 

claimed to have been on the rock for a year once?


----------



## Badgers (Dec 21, 2012)

DotCommunist said:
			
		

> claimed to have been on the rock for a year once?



Is that information available? Assume she was not living at home during that time?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 21, 2012)

steph said:


> Oh boo fucking hoo.
> 
> Graduated from Oxford in (presumably around June) 2007.
> Started the Penny Red blog Sept 2007.
> ...


 
Graduated in 2008.This is from 2010:



> Laurie Penny, 23, never imagined she would find herself enmeshed in a world of poverty and the grip of the benefit system when she graduated with a 2:1 degree in English from Oxford University in 2008. Even with that name on her CV, she and her contemporaries have found it fiercely difficult to get work.
> 
> "It is hard to think of anybody who graduated with me in 2008 who has a job," she said. "People have tried and not been able to find anything, particularly when the recession hit, and you simply cannot live on £50-a-week jobseeker's allowance."
> 
> ...


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 21, 2012)

> Laurie Penny, 23, never imagined she would find herself enmeshed in a world of poverty and the grip of the benefit system when she graduated with a 2:1 degree in English from Oxford University in 2008. Even with that name on her CV, she and her contemporaries have found it fiercely difficult to get work.
> "It is hard to think of anybody who graduated with me in 2008 who has a job," she said. "People have tried and not been able to find anything, particularly when the recession hit, and you simply cannot live on £50-a-week jobseeker's allowance."
> Penny and her friends found their dreams crumbling soon after graduation. Seven of them crammed into a house meant for three, able to go nowhere and buy nothing, living on cheap food which she says made them ill in the winters. Describing herself now as a welfare activist, she writes and blogs on the plight of the young unemployed, who she says have no voice.
> "We were living like a scene from Withnail & I, except there was no space to move," she said. "It was very miserable. People get very depressed – that level of poverty has a bad effect on your mental health, it makes people feel that nothing will ever get better. I know that is the situation for a lot of people, but for young graduates, middle-class people, it is a real shock. It is not sufficiently recognised at all – how poor the rates are in the benefit system."


http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/apr/30/general-election-unemployment-poverty


----------



## chilango (Dec 21, 2012)

Be interesting to see what sort of person gets that LFF job.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 21, 2012)

I could do with 20k per annum to maintain a blog. How hard can it be.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 21, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> claimed to have been on the rock for a year once?


I have certainly never heard that claim.


----------



## chilango (Dec 21, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> I could do with 20k per annum to maintain a blog. How hard can it be.



Apply then.

We should all apply.

...and then post up our rejections.


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Graduated in 2008.This is from 2010:


 
Maybe I have the time-frame wrong but did she not say she received an inheritance at that time?


----------



## sihhi (Dec 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Graduated in 2008.This is from 2010:


 
No she graduated in 2007, when it's not for mass publication, it's pretty clear that summer 2007 is when she graduated and started her blog straight afterwards September 2007.
http://brokenbottleboy.tumblr.com/p...punch-more-instructions-from-laurie-penny-the
“Hi Mic, you haven’t done your basic research here. Before becoming a full-time writer I worked in a shop, in an office, in a bar, I waitressed my way through university to support myself, I worked in a fast food restaurant and consistently did contract work and odd jobs to support myself through the intern circuit after university. I was moved up in school so I actually graduated in 2007, and didn’t get my first real break in writing or become a ‘commentator’ until late 2010 - and the years in between were full of the anxiety, poverty, and periods of unemployment and hopelessness that are standard for anyone our age without a trust fund and a rolodex of family connections trying to get into the creative industries.

I try to be open about the fact that my parents gave me some support too, because I think it’s a terrible injustice that that often makes more of a difference in the media world than talent. But some people try to use my choice to make a point of that to attack me. I’m sorry you haven’t been as lucky in your quest for a column gig so far, but I don’t think that launching bogus attacks on others who have is the best way to get ahead. You certainly write well  - if you actually want to chat about work, feel free to email me any time.” 

The tumblr post was in response to this article http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...--women-need-to-rise-up-in-anger-7544480.html


> Deeds, not words. _Fewer business lunches, more throwing punches_. Of course, there will be consequences. Those large armed men aren't just there for decoration, and the suffragettes who had their breasts twisted and their bones broken in prison 101 years ago knew that full well.


 
Reading it again, it seems modelled on Malcolm X's we need to stop singing and start swinging


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 21, 2012)

sihhi said:


> No she graduated in 2007, when it's not for mass publication, it's pretty clear that summer 2007 is when she graduated and started her blog straight afterwards September 2007.
> http://brokenbottleboy.tumblr.com/p...punch-more-instructions-from-laurie-penny-the
> “Hi Mic, you haven’t done your basic research here. Before becoming a full-time writer I worked in a shop, in an office, in a bar, I waitressed my way through university to support myself, I worked in a fast food restaurant and consistently did contract work and odd jobs to support myself through the intern circuit after university. I was moved up in school so I actually graduated in 2007, and didn’t get my first real break in writing or become a ‘commentator’ until late 2010 - and the years in between were full of the anxiety, poverty, and periods of unemployment and hopelessness that are standard for anyone our age without a trust fund and a rolodex of family connections trying to get into the creative industries.


 

Easy way out of that _slip_ for her - _the __subs got it wrong in the guardian piece._


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 21, 2012)

Btw, what a bubblicious phrase _intern circuit_ is.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 21, 2012)

I know it was ever thus, but I think all the useful interesting stuff on this thread is getting swamped amongst a lot of trivial shit, and digressions abotu LLETSA and pearosts of Laurie Penny's book reviews etc.

I know it's all very exciting that herself has deemed us worthy of a visit in person, but perhaps we should just calm it down and stop forensically re-going over all this stuff time and time again? There's lots of other far more interesting things to talk about, like Luddites, for example


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 21, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> How hard can it be.


 
I would imagine that it's quite hard work to be fair... It reminds me of when people look at novelists and think "I could do that... if..."


----------



## chilango (Dec 21, 2012)

To be clear I don't hold Laurie's background against her. Nor indeed any of the rich kids who routinely land these sort of careers. It's not their fault. It a system, a set of social, economic and cultural relations. That's what we attack.

They should grasp any opportunity their status gives them and make the most of it.

Just don't whine about how tough it is, or claim to be a voice for us.

Enjoy yourself LP et al, I would in your shoes...


----------



## chilango (Dec 21, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I would imagine that it's quite hard work to be fair... It reminds me of when people look at novelists and think "I could do that... if..."



I bet it's not.


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

No

@ Delroy


----------



## sihhi (Dec 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Btw,what a bubblicious phrase _intern circuit_ is.


 
It's more precise than " _a trust fund and a rolodex of family connections__ "_

I would argue that family connections are not necessarily important in this field, the Oxbridge connection is, however important, random example brought up by googling on the comment awards:

http://www.emma.cam.ac.uk/former/emmanuelsoc/newsletter/nl10/newsletter.html

A private database for old college members:



> The careers database on the Emmanuel website offers the chance for both current and former _students to get in touch for careers advice and networking opportunities_. More than 450 people working in areas from academia and accountancy right through to writers and vets have already added their details. Please could anyone whose job or circumstances have changed since providing their details update their profile. You can add your career details at www.emma.cam.ac.uk/former/careers/.


 
And a talk and chance to network with Hugo Rifkind for £20 each:




> Will Newspapers Survive? - Friday 26 October
> Hugo Rifkind (1995) is a freelance journalist and columnist for The Times and the Spectator. His novel, Overexposure, was published in 2006 and he was named Columnist of the Year at the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards in 2011. Hugo will be talking about the future of the newspapers and media at 5.30pm in the Queen's Building on Friday 26 October. The talk will be followed by a buffet supper in the Old Library.
> _COST: £20_/HEAD


 
Hugo Rifkind - son of Malcolm, Thatcherite destroyer of Scottish industry - that is.

Is it fair to say you need university connections to win the intern circuit grand prix?


----------



## ska invita (Dec 21, 2012)

oh no, im being sucked in.........


tufty79 said:


> http://pennyred.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/penny-for-your-privilege.html (from 2010)




i hadnt seen that before ... im speechless. dont know whether to laugh or cry. The funniest bit is 

It says a great big deal that someone with my opportunities - middle-class parents, nice school, Oxford - *still* isn't privileged enough to* walk into a feature-writing job* without *years of being knocked back and getting up again*, a process that, let me assure you, is very much ongoing...
ffs  

and as for
"Meanwhile, the people above you are holding the door to the next stage firmly shut."
...id love to know what she means by that. Just what job does she think she should be walking into the she hasnt been allowed to yet?


----------



## weepiper (Dec 21, 2012)

ska invita said:


> oh no, im being sucked in.........
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
And all without a trace of irony.


----------



## ska invita (Dec 21, 2012)

weepiper said:


> And all without a trace of irony.


such an earnest young voice...


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 21, 2012)

chilango said:


> I bet it's not.


 
I bet it is.

Obviously there are different levels of difficulty, I used to work in a scrapyard and on building sites, that was hard physically (and normally less money) but I dunno...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 21, 2012)

steph said:


> Oh boo fucking hoo.
> 
> Graduated from Oxford in (presumably around June) 2007.
> Started the Penny Red blog Sept 2007.
> ...


 
I knew people who took up apprenticeships on local papers in the '70s, who *accepted* that in terms of career progression they had to "pay their dues" for 8-10 years before they were likely to get a lowly staff position on a national, unless they happened to break an absolutely ginormous story that went national or (preferably) international.
Ms. Penny doesn't know she's born.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 21, 2012)

chilango said:


> ...Nor indeed any of the rich kids who routinely land these sort of careers...


 
Like Cambridge University's Mic Wright, the Broken Bottle Boy blogger @sihhi quotes?


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 21, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> I knew people who took up apprenticeships on local papers in the '70s, who *accepted* that in terms of career progression they had to "pay their dues" for 8-10 years before they were likely to get a lowly staff position on a national, unless they happened to break an absolutely ginormous story that went national or (preferably) international.
> Ms. Penny doesn't know she's born.


 
". . .  and if you tell that to young people today, they won't believe you."


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 21, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> ". . . and if you tell that to young people today, they won't believe you."


 
Unfortunately true!


----------



## stethoscope (Dec 21, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Like Cambridge University's Mic Wright, the Broken Bottle Boy blogger @sihhi quotes?


 
Oh god he's another one!!

Must have graduated about a year later than Penny and has been news editor and online news editor for Stuff Magazine, and front section editor for Q. Since 2009 he's been freelancing. He's currently chief tech blogger at the Torygraph (first article there August this year), is creative director of an editorial/business consultancy, and yet only wrote that whingefest on his blog back in March?
Fucks sake


----------



## chilango (Dec 21, 2012)

I know somebody from that kinda background (private school, top university etc.) who gets very angry indeed that they can't walk into a journalism job (despite having no experience and no academic background in journalism). They went to such a and such University so therefore they are automatically better qualified etc etc.

It was a frequent drunken rant of theirs.


----------



## chilango (Dec 21, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I bet it is.
> 
> Obviously there are different levels of difficulty, I used to work in a scrapyard and on building sites, that was hard physically (and normally less money) but I dunno...



Nah.

If it was properly hard it wouldn't be a job kept for "certain people"

They'd make us do it for minimum wage!


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 21, 2012)

its not difficult to churn out 1500-4k words per day. Keeping it relevant, well researched and not just vapid toss is the hard bit.

when grauniad journos are getting paid to write about how they drink their cunts coffee though.....


----------



## editor (Dec 21, 2012)

That quarter of a million page view landmark can surely be reached before Christmas!


----------



## _angel_ (Dec 21, 2012)

editor said:


> That quarter of a million page view landmark can surely be reached before Christmas!


Priorities


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 21, 2012)

editor said:


> That quarter of a million page view landmark can surely be reached before Christmas!


 
Even if you haven't got a computer, view. Just view.

Thank you...


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

editor said:


> That quarter of a million page view landmark can surely be reached before Christmas!


 
A 150,000 views in a few days.


----------



## _angel_ (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:


> A 150,000 views in a few days.


Yeah 3/4 of those are probably lletsa in various guises!


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Graduated in 2008.This is from 2010:


 
Funnily enough Oxford University have a website where you can see what the career destination is after getting a degree ie employed/in study/unemployed etc. The table are from 2008-11 , she graduated in 2007/8 but unless some seismic happened to upset the trend its a bit hard to see how 'hardly anyone she knew' didn't get a job as 50% from the English BA are employed with only 2% unemployed. The rest went on to study more.

Wadham College where she studies had just under 8% unemployed

http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/DLHE/Occupationsbycollege?:embed=yes&:toolbar=yes&:tabs=yes


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 21, 2012)

bloke i know who studied with me at middlesex university back at the turn of the century still hasn't got a job yet. too much time worrying about tibet IMO.


----------



## smokedout (Dec 21, 2012)

tufty79 said:


> http://pennyred.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/penny-for-your-privilege.html (from 2010)
> 
> she graduated in 2007 with an english degree. started work for one in four in autumn 2008, until at least spring 2010, presumably while doing her journalism course. i'd guess that sub-edding at the morning star in 2010 would've happened once she'd finished at the 'shitty' NCTJ


 


> That's what you need to do to be a journalist these days. That's the minimum. That's the minimum, _from a starting point of having an Oxford degree and *some savings.*_


 
most people leave university with a debt


----------



## weepiper (Dec 21, 2012)

smokedout said:


> most people leave university with a debt


 
Good spot.


----------



## ska invita (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:


> A 150,000 views in a few days.


 
any new posters though?


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

smokedout said:


> most people leave university with a debt


Oxford is much more expensive too, because you have to pay for a certain number of compulsory dinners (whether you attend or not) plus gowns and a silly hat etc.


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

Compulsory Dinners, really? Fuck that with bells on.


----------



## imposs1904 (Dec 21, 2012)

ska invita said:


> any new posters though?


 
just the one.


----------



## imposs1904 (Dec 21, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> bloke i know who studied with me at middlesex university back at the turn of the century still hasn't got a job yet. too much time worrying about tibet IMO.


 
This bloke?







*showing my age


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 21, 2012)

ska invita said:


> any new posters though?


 
one less


----------



## rekil (Dec 21, 2012)

lauriepenny said:


> I have no idea if you are, in your heart, a racist or a sexist - I'm sure you're a good person. It's actually interesting to know more about your life. All I had to go on before was a picture of Stalin and *a Twitter feed full of hate.*


SpineyNorman signed up to the twitter on Nov 30th and there's only 125 entries, so the "Twitter feed full of hate" only takes a few minutes to read but here's a summary.

The first entry is "Pull my finger", a reference to SN's placard featuring the leader of the party that LP backed in 2010 and which according to her post-election ruminations, "held the line".



Then there's a few entries about Sheffield Unite Community Section collecting money for strikers and an exchange with MIA Labour councillor Jack Scott over his failure to support pickets.

Then RTs of

Skynews (norn iron flegs)
Matthew Goodwin (fashwatcher, on breivik)
Proletarian Democracy (eg "Jack's mam in Jack and the Beanstalk is called Dame Trot")
Sheffield Socialist Party website
Egyptian socialist Gigi Ibrahim commenting on latest ruck with coppers
One of those WW2 accounts
Unite (Remploy job losses story)
Rory McKinnon of the MS (endorsing Proletarian Democracy)
Not much hate so far. Pity for Clegg and annoyance at a labour councillor is about as bad as it gets.

Around the time LP gets sent Firky's shit cartoon, SN responds to LP's idea that 






			
				lauriepenny said:
			
		

> Some people just loathe women with opinions, and women in positions of power. That's what it's about


with



			
				SN said:
			
		

> Maybe it's the positions of power bit and not the woman bit some people take issue with? Not all your critics are misogynists


 
LP finds the U75 thread ("208 pages of personal and political abuse!"), and her chum shirey chips in with some drivel 






			
				sxip shirey said:
			
		

> The post-colonial need of some English to cut down any anyone who shows a trace of drive, motivation, hope or joy is sad.


 
Things hot up!

An incredulous SN calls him a "pseud" and "weirdo" then asks LP why she hasn't responded to the serious posts on U75 and makes the point that



			
				SN said:
			
		

> Using remarks of a couple of idiots to avoid criticism is weak


This goes unanswered but LP uses the word "weak" (stripped of context) as an example of "just some of the things" SN has said about her "on Twitter this week".

SN RTs Delroy's questions (about the New Statesman's anti-union practices and krazy kristian homophobic ads) which LP chose to ignore when she appeared on u75.

SN RTs Michael fucking Moore (lol) and PDs LP parody, then responds to LPs claim that the u75 thread is about her cash and toilet habits



			
				SN said:
			
		

> "That's a lie Laurie. Easy to focus on the bile (whose authors we took 2 task before u turned up) and avoid the politics isn't it?"


 
Some more RTs on the "twitter feed full of hate."

Cesare's "John Major fucking a grapefruit" disasterpaint masterpiece
A story about harassment and burglaries of Chilean journos investigating the dictatorship
Action Housing UK asking the guardian to report on the cuts proposed by Derby Council
SN "trashes" identity politics by linking to a screenie of this exchangebetween LP and @judeinlondon

LP responds to SN with the somewhat bald claim that "all politics are identity politics", so SN fires back! With



			
				SN said:
			
		

> Err... no they're not #politicalnaif


and RTs LD's IWCA link.

LP goes blockhappy, even blocking SN's ex for demanding to know why SN has been slandered as a racist.

SN then has entirely civil exchanges with Billy Bragg and Owen Jones, despite Bragg being a provocative tool, assuming that SN and LD had abused LP. Owen had a chat with SN a few weeks ago at the SP do as it happens. I think that's about right, sorry if I missed anything. The rest of the feed is more regular stuff and I see no need to go through it, and I'm busy as well ffs. There's one bad tempered entry about LP on the entire feed but it's not sent at her and it's posted after she's blocked loads of people.

I'm nearly sorry to say that the "twitter feed full of hate" is a pathetic malicious fiction and Laurie has a bit more explaining to do.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 21, 2012)

el-ahrairah said:


> too much time worrying about tibet IMO.


 
Tell him not to worry, so long as he never puts down more than he can afford to lose.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 21, 2012)

Voice of a generation?

How does this work? I'm sure nobody ever claimed to be the voice of any other generation.
Did she actually claim this?


----------



## love detective (Dec 21, 2012)

The response to Laurie from the writer of the article:-



> *Slandered by the middle class PC left*
> 
> On Tuesday 18th December, it was drawn to my attention that an article I'd written when I was in the Independent Working Class Association (IWCA),Multiculturalism & identity politics – the reactionary consequences and how they can be challenged (http://www.iwca.info/?p=10146), had been described on Twitter by the commentator Laurie Penny as 'racist' and 'sexist'. For those of you who haven't heard of Laurie Penny, her work can be seen here:http://www.penny-red.com/ – I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
> 
> ...


 
Puts a whole different light on the 'productive' discussion that Laurie claims she had with the writer where she claimed he had admitted to being wrong on it

Can you step up now Laurie and start making some apologies, or as Dave says, 'back off, shut the fuck up and leave us to it' (actually apologise, then fuck off)

edit: Dave v Dave!


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

The 'Dave' thing is getting a bit confusing now.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 21, 2012)

Buckaroo said:


> The 'Dave' thing is getting a bit confusing now.


Is it?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 21, 2012)

Laurie Penny has never claimed to speak for the working class. She just reserves the right to correct the working class when they're wrong. After all, she has the benefit of a very expensive education which gives her much greater insight into the relevant issues. Also, since the working class obviously have a much greater degree of authenticity when commenting on their own affairs, they have a distinct advantage over Laurie. They should bear this advantage in mind and check their 'privilege' when engaging in discourse with the middle class 'left'.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 21, 2012)

copliker said:


> SN RTs Michael fucking Moore (lol)


 
In my defence I retweeted Michael Moore ironically, honest - racist is bad enough but I'm buggered if I'm having people think I'm a Michael Moore fan!


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Is it?


 
Yes it is Dave.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 21, 2012)

I'd have thought, for a leading journalist, she'd have known the common dictionary definition of 'productive.'


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> I'd have thought, for a leading journalist, she'd have known the common dictionary definition of 'productive.'


 
Something to do with phlegm.


----------



## love detective (Dec 21, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Laurie Penny has never claimed to speak for the working class. She just reserves the right to correct the working class when they're wrong. After all, she has the benefit of a very expensive education which gives her much greater insight into the relevant issues. Also, since the working class obviously have a much greater degree of authenticity when commenting on their own affairs, they have a distinct advantage over Laurie. They should bear this advantage in mind and check their 'privilege' when engaging in discourse with the middle class 'left'.


 
you jest, but she did pretty much say something close to this once - owen jones started some 'hashtag' (yes i know!) about 'lefty ancestors' - and she complained that it was alienating people like her who did not have any

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/229923967266349056




			
				penny said:
			
		

> that sort of thing has always made me, and a lot of people, feel left out and alienated.


 
and in that same exchange, this classic from the kebab bum finger, showing her firm grasp of a materialist approach to progressive politics



> politics are like religion


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 21, 2012)

love detective said:


> you jest, but she did pretty much say something close to this once - owen jones started some 'hashtag' (yes i know!) about 'lefty ancestors' - and she complained that it was alienating people like her who did not have any
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/229923967266349056
> 
> ...


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 21, 2012)

Shit...fucked that up...shoulda been

#you jest, but she did pretty much say something close to this once - owen jones started some 'hashtag' (yes i know!) about 'lefty ancestors' - and she complained that it was alienating people like her who did not have any#


Oh Jesus wept...yeah, I was takin the piss...but if she follows through on the notion in her tweet, it means that she (or anyone else I suppose) can tell anyone else to check their privilege. I mean I'm always a bit put by those starving African kids with their big pleading eyes cornering the market in sympathy...and thinking they're the last word in suffering. Fair enough...it's tough on them but my local Morrisons just stopped stocking fresh baked focaccia...we've all got problems.


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

Ronnie, learn to quote!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 21, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Shit...fucked that up...shoulda been
> 
> #you jest, but she did pretty much say something close to this once - owen jones started some 'hashtag' (yes i know!) about 'lefty ancestors' - and she complained that it was alienating people like her who did not have any#
> 
> ...


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 21, 2012)

I'm assuming Her Majesty has blocked me seeing none of my tweets to her appear on her feed.


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:


> Ronnie, learn to quote!


 
Check your tech privilege! There should be a practice thread for the under privileged.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 21, 2012)

Kinda unfashionable, these days, but I've got a bit of a soft spot for Walter Benjamin. Bit of an oddball on occasions, but on others remarkably insightful..

"It is memories of enslaved ancestors, not dreams of liberated grandchildren, that drive men and women to revolt"


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
Walter Benjamin.


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

Why is that blue? And what? Is this thread over or what? Thank fuck for that! Not that I care but if we're gonna get a Zillion views or whatever we should crack on. Dave is calling people racist and exploiting suicidal people with disabilities to further her credentials. Some stuff about multi-culturalism, privilege, cartoons, sexism, racism, theory shit, posh fuckers roughing it for a bit of cred, fucking hate the lot of it. Merry Xmas!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 21, 2012)

You missed the stuff about going for a poo - mustn't forget that.


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

Poo. Too true. Check your ablutions.


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

All quiet on the western front Spiney? New to all this, don't get the twatterati gig or who these people are. Don't really care either but I think I know what occured there, the general gist of it. Dave has been well out of order on loads of counts. Don't know how you're gettting on talking to her but the 'M' thing is really getting to me. Need to know what happened to 'M'.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 21, 2012)

Fuck that for a game of soldiers...15 minutes to get served and not enough room to swing a metaphor. Got myself a carry out...four Stella's and half a Smirnhoff...empty house till much later....heaven...pimp my privilege.


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Fuck that for a game of soldiers...15 minutes to get served and not enough room to swing a metaphor. Got myself a carry out...four Stella's and half a Smirnhoff...empty house till much later....heaven...pimp my privilege.


 
Pimp your liver. Four wifebeater and half voddi. Eight cans of Kronsdadt and a bottle of red.Pimp my politics.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 21, 2012)

Erm...ok...not sure if you're telling me I'm a bit of a sad piss head...which limits my 'political effectiveness'. I kinda knew that. 

If there was a  Kronstadt vodka, believe me I'd drink it.


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Erm...ok...not sure if you're telling me I'm a bit of a sad piss head...which limits my 'political effectiveness'. I kinda knew that.
> 
> If there was a Kronstadt vodka, believe me I'd drink it.


 

Well yeah comrade, I'm so pissed I'm watching Titanic, yer man is drawing a picture of that lass' tits. Anyhoo Stella is wifebeater light these days. Not sure if there's a Kronstadt vodka but there fucking should be.


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

Buckaroo said:


> Well yeah comrade, I'm so pissed I'm watching Titanic, yer man is drawing a picture of that lass' tits. Anyhoo Stella is wifebeater light these days. Not sure if there's a Kronstadt vodka but there fucking should be.


 
Draw me like one of your French, girls.


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

I wonder what Molly's toilet habits are like?


----------



## Nylock (Dec 21, 2012)

> *Slandered by the middle class PC left*
> 
> On Tuesday 18th December, it was drawn to my attention that an article I'd written when I was in the Independent Working Class Association (IWCA),Multiculturalism & identity politics – the reactionary consequences and how they can be challenged (http://www.iwca.info/?p=10146), had been described on Twitter by the commentator Laurie Penny as 'racist' and 'sexist'. For those of you who haven't heard of Laurie Penny, her work can be seen here:http://www.penny-red.com/ – I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
> 
> ...


 
...If anyone is still watching this thread from the twitterverse then the above quoted response (link here) deserves to be posted on her feed so she can respond in an honest manner. Or continue to do the equivalent of sticking her fingers in her ears and shouting 'lalalalalalaa i can't hear you!'. Either/or...


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:


> I wonder what Molly's toilet habits are like?




I expect she pisses and shits like anyone else, firky


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 21, 2012)

It wouldnt surprise me if her next article was a hatchet job on the IWCA tbh.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 21, 2012)

Although she probably doesnt have the guts to. thanks for reposting that - got to say its disgusting how she seems to routinely misrepresent what people say. "he admitted it was wrong" ffs!


----------



## love detective (Dec 21, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> It wouldnt surprise me if her next article was a hatchet job on the IWCA tbh.


 
not a chance, she's totally out her depth and has been exposed as a liar and a fraud in terms of the discussion, she doesn't want any more light shone on this whole thing. her strategy now is to pretend none of this ever happened and for it to be drowned out/disappeared through getting back to banal ephemeral twitter activity


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 21, 2012)

One day I'll be flicking around on the remote and I'll see Dave on QI.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 21, 2012)

love detective said:


> not a chance, she's totally out her depth and has been exposed as a liar and a fraud in terms of the discussion, she doesn't want any more light shone on this whole thing. her strategy now is to pretend none of this ever happened and for it to be drowned out/disappeared through getting back to banal ephemeral twitter activity


 
yeah, you're probably right.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Dec 21, 2012)

I can confirm that someone on this thread has indeed linked the IWCA writer's response to said tweeter feed.

The timing of this was indeed #spooky...it appeared not long after LP asked for something rage inducing to overcome feeling lovesick and having writers block. So now it's that response or the NRA speech which will get attention. Personally, i'd give in to love for a change, but that's me.


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

@PennyRed: Internet, please direct me to something rage-inducing and politically urgent enough to fill the squishy, lovesick place in my heart. Ta.

@cesareurban: @PennyRed This should do it: http://thuraltmedia.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/slandered-by-middle-class-pc-left.html?m=1


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

cesare said:


> I expect she pisses and shits like anyone else, firky


----------



## love detective (Dec 21, 2012)

she got it this morning from the IWCA account as well

But answer came there none...


----------



## Balbi (Dec 21, 2012)

Imagine a hand palming a face forever


----------



## love detective (Dec 21, 2012)

cesare said:


> @PennyRed: Internet, please direct me to something rage-inducing and politically urgent enough to fill the squishy, lovesick place in my heart. Ta.
> 
> @cesareurban: @PennyRed This should do it: http://thuraltmedia.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/slandered-by-middle-class-pc-left.html?m=1


 
lol - politically urgent, just when she was about to have a spot of radical downtime


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

cesare said:


> @PennyRed: Internet, please direct me to something rage-inducing and politically urgent enough to fill the squishy, lovesick place in my heart. Ta.
> 
> @cesareurban: @PennyRed This should do it: http://thuraltmedia.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/slandered-by-middle-class-pc-left.html?m=1




Back of the net


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 21, 2012)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
@*cesareurban* yeah, I'm curious that my response to that post hasn't been published yet


----------



## Nylock (Dec 21, 2012)

cesare said:


> @PennyRed: Internet, please direct me to something rage-inducing and politically urgent enough to fill the squishy, lovesick place in my heart. Ta.
> 
> @cesareurban: @PennyRed This should do it: http://thuraltmedia.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/slandered-by-middle-class-pc-left.html?m=1


Brace yourself for the inevitable block cesare...


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

Nylock said:


> Brace yourself for the inevitable block cesare...


Oh aye


----------



## Treacle Toes (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:


> Back of the net


 
You were retweeted as well. That's how I saw it.


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:


> Draw me like one of your French, girls.


 
Just think this picture should be seen again.


----------



## Nylock (Dec 21, 2012)

Buckaroo said:


> Just think this picture should be seen again.


looks like someone's spiked her shisha pipe with opium. Smoking a spliff spiked with the stuff had the same effect on my face as well


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 21, 2012)

cesare said:


> I expect she pisses and shits like anyone else, firky


Five hours, (and who can do it less in?)
By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
The goddess from her chamber issues,
Arrayed in lace, brocades and tissues.
         Strephon, who found the room was void,
And Betty otherwise employed,
Stole in, and took a strict survey,
Of all the litter as it lay;
Whereof, to make the matter clear,
And inventory follows here.
         And first a dirty smock appeared,
Beneath the armpits well besmeared.
Strephon, the rogue, displayed it wide,
And turned it round on every side.
On such a point few words are best,
And Strephon bids us guess the rest,
But swears how damnably the men lie,
In calling Celia sweet and cleanly.
Now listen while he next produces
The various combs for various uses,
Filled up with dirt so closely fixt,
No brush could force a way betwixt.
A paste of composition rare,
Sweat, dandruff, powder, lead and hair;
A forehead cloth with oil upon’t
To smooth the wrinkles on her front;
Here alum flower to stop the steams,
Exhaled from sour unsavory streams,
There night-gloves made of Tripsy’s hide,
Bequeathed by Tripsy when she died,
With puppy water, beauty’s help
Distilled from Tripsy’s darling whelp;
Here gallypots and vials placed,
Some filled with washes, some with paste,
Some with pomatum, paints and slops,
And ointments good for scabby chops.
Hard by a filthy basin stands,
Fouled with the scouring of her hands;
The basin takes whatever comes
The scrapings of her teeth and gums,
A nasty compound of all hues,
For here she spits, and here she spews.
But oh! it turned poor Strephon’s bowels,
When he beheld and smelled the towels,
Begummed, bemattered, and beslimed
With dirt, and sweat, and earwax grimed.
No object Strephon’s eye escapes,
Here petticoats in frowzy heaps;
Nor be the handkerchiefs forgot
All varnished o’er with snuff and snot.
The stockings why should I expose,
Stained with the marks of stinking toes;
Or greasy coifs and pinners reeking,
Which Celia slept at least a week in?
A pair of tweezers next he found
To pluck her brows in arches round,
Or hairs that sink the forehead low,
Or on her chin like bristles grow.
         The virtues we must not let pass,
Of Celia’s magnifying glass.
When frightened Strephon cast his eye on’t
It showed visage of a giant.
A glass that can to sight disclose,
The smallest worm in Celia’s nose,
And faithfully direct her nail
To squeeze it out from head to tail;
For catch it nicely by the head,
It must come out alive or dead.
         Why Strephon will you tell the rest?
And must you needs describe the chest?
That careless wench! no creature warn her
To move it out from yonder corner;
But leave it standing full in sight
For you to exercise your spite.
In vain the workman showed his wit
With rings and hinges counterfeit
To make it seem in this disguise
A cabinet to vulgar eyes;
For Strephon ventured to look in,
Resolved to go through thick and thin;
He lifts the lid, there needs no more,
He smelled it all the time before.
As from within Pandora’s box,
When Epimetheus op’d the locks,
A sudden universal crew
Of human evils upwards flew;
He still was comforted to find
That Hope at last remained behind;
So Strephon lifting up the lid,
To view what in the chest was hid.
The vapors flew from out the vent,
But Strephon cautious never meant
The bottom of the pan to grope,
And foul his hands in search of Hope.
O never may such vile machine
Be once in Celia’s chamber seen!
O may she better learn to keep
Those “secrets of the hoary deep!”
         As mutton cutlets, prime of meat,
Which though with art you salt and beat
As laws of cookery require,
And toast them at the clearest fire;
If from adown the hopeful chops
The fat upon a cinder drops,
To stinking smoke it turns the flame
Pois’ning the flesh from whence it came,
And up exhales a greasy stench,
For which you curse the careless wench;
So things, which must not be expressed,
When plumped into the reeking chest,
Send up an excremental smell
To taint the parts from whence they fell.
The petticoats and gown perfume,
Which waft a stink round every room.
Thus finishing his grand survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away
Repeating in his amorous fits,
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!
         But Vengeance, goddess never sleeping
Soon punished Strephon for his peeping;
His foul imagination links
Each Dame he sees with all her stinks:
And, if unsavory odors fly,
Conceives a lady standing by:
All women his description fits,
And both ideas jump like wits:
But vicious fancy coupled fast,
And still appearing in contrast.
I pity wretched Strephon blind
To all the charms of female kind;
Should I the queen of love refuse,
Because she rose from stinking ooze?
To him that looks behind the scene,
Satira’s but some pocky queen.
When Celia in her glory shows,
If Strephon would but stop his nose
(Who now so impiously blasphemes
Her ointments, daubs, and paints and creams,
Her washes, slops, and every clout,
With which he makes so foul a rout)
He soon would learn to think like me,
And bless his ravished sight to see
Such order from confusion sprung,
Such gaudy tulips raised from dung.


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

Rutita1 said:


> You were retweeted as well. That's how I saw it.


 
By who? I am useless with twitter.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 21, 2012)

swift was a bit weird wasn't he


----------



## Treacle Toes (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:


> By who? I am useless with twitter.


 
'Housing solidarity' IIRC


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 21, 2012)

love detective said:


> not a chance, she's totally out her depth and has been exposed as a liar and a fraud in terms of the discussion, she doesn't want any more light shone on this whole thing. her strategy now is to pretend none of this ever happened and for it to be drowned out/disappeared through getting back to banal ephemeral twitter activity


 


I think you may be right here, but there is every chance her innate arrogance will demand an answer- not a direct one mark ye. A piece about 'those people' that does not reference anyone directly. We'll see.


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

Rutita1 said:


> 'Housing solidarity' IIRC


 
Ta! 

I need to set up the list thing, my feed is so full of new messages (refused to call them tweets) that it's hard to know wtf is going on.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:


> Ta!
> 
> I need to set up the list thing, my feed is so full of new messages (refused to call them tweets) that it's hard to know wtf is going on.


 
Click on 'connect' and you will see who has retweeted, followed and favorited you.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 21, 2012)

Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> The #*NRA* issue has underlined, for me and for many others, the enormity of the gulf between left and right in the USA.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 21, 2012)

There's certainly a gulf between left and right, but it's in reference to space in between ears.


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

I've been given permission from this Liverpool based blogger to post a link to this article: http://propertyistheft.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/the-argument-against-multiculturalism/


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 21, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> Five hours, (and who can do it less in?)
> By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
> The goddess from her chamber issues,
> Arrayed in lace, brocades and tissues.
> ...


 

Nobody is calling her a prostitute but that's beautiful. It's Jonathon Swift (I googled it)

By haughty Celia spent in dressing;
The goddess from her chamber issues...

For which you curse the careless wench;
So things, which must not be expressed,
When plumped into the reeking chest,
Send up an excremental smell

That careless wench! no creature warn her
To move it out from yonder corner;
But leave it standing full in sight

'Such order from confusion sprung, Such gaudy tulips raised from dung'


----------



## Firky (Dec 21, 2012)

cesare said:


> I've been given permission from this Liverpool based blogger to post a link to this article: http://propertyistheft.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/the-argument-against-multiculturalism/


 
That's a good article.q


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

firky said:


> That's a good article.q


Yep, and I think it does a lot to explain why people still have a resistance to/or jump to the wrong conclusion when they see anti-multiculturalism views expressed.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 21, 2012)

That piece is entirely focused on culture,  no class or material basis, nothing about the political motivation of what he calls normative mc. It treats the latter as an extension of an academic discourse rather than a political project underpinned by material demands and motivations. Idealism in short,  with the response being another better idealism.


----------



## cesare (Dec 21, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> That piece is entirely focused on culture,  no class or material basis, nothing about the political motivation of what he calls normative mc. It treats the latter as an extension of an academic discourse rather than a political project underpinned by material demands and motivations. Idealism in short,  with the response being another better idealism.


Maybe he's addressing the specific issue, and has written further on the other matters you mention?


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## rekil (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> In my defence I retweeted Michael Moore ironically, honest - racist is bad enough but I'm buggered if I'm having people think I'm a Michael Moore fan!


It was more about the absurd idea that a "twitter feed full of hate" would include Michael Moore.


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## cesare (Dec 22, 2012)

Look I wasn't offering up that blog piece as some kind of "this is how we should all be anti-multicultarilists" with every nuance built in.  He's someone else on twitter that was annoyed by Penny's "racist" comment and had linked to something he'd written in the past that (I thought) was helpful in addressing her reactionary "racist" comment in the context of advocating that anti-multiculturalism isn't necessarily RACIST and why not.


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## love detective (Dec 22, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> I think you may be right here, but there is every chance her innate arrogance will demand an answer- not a direct one mark ye. A piece about 'those people' that does not reference anyone directly. We'll see.


 
a depoliticised internet trolls piece perhaps, where all political content is emptied out of our criticisms, or conflated with political/misogynist attacks on her from the right


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 22, 2012)

cesare said:


> Look I wasn't offering up that blog piece as some kind of "this is how we should all be anti-multicultarilists" with every nuance built in.  He's someone else on twitter that was annoyed by Penny's "racist" comment and had linked to something he'd written in the past that (I thought) was helpful in addressing her reactionary "racist" comment in the context of advocating that anti-multiculturalism isn't necessarily RACIST and why not.



Dunno about this. I agree...but it's the phrase 'isn't necessarily racist'...which implies in most cases it is. it's even a bit apologetic. I've no doubt that all racists are anti-multiculturalist. How could they fail to be?

Consider: all humans are mammals. It by no means infers all mammals are human; nor any suggestion that a majority of mammals are human...or even that a mammal selected at random has anything but a tiny probability of being human.

Now I'm happy to assent to the claim that all racists are anti-multiculturalist, but again, all the above conditions apply. There is no need to qualify "I'm against multiculturalism" with a statement that I'm not racist. The reason people feel obliged to do so is the absurd and unwarranted belief among the liberal middle classes that they're the only enlightened and basically decent human beings within society...and to be considered a decent person, you need to believe what they do...and they believe that if you're not a full-on cultural relativist, you're basically an unthinking troglodyte. However, there's no logical or empirical basis to this belief and a shit load of evidence to suggest multiculturalism is a busted flush.

There's absolutely no need to keep adding a rider to "I'm against multiculturalism" and all the unfounded assumptions and dogma belong to those who think there is. It's up to them to make their case...and they can't. That's why they resort to slurs and innuendo then fuck off quick and give rational debate the body swerve.


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## butchersapron (Dec 22, 2012)

cesare said:


> Look I wasn't offering up that blog piece as some kind of "this is how we should all be anti-multicultarilists" with every nuance built in. He's someone else on twitter that was annoyed by Penny's "racist" comment and had linked to something he'd written in the past that (I thought) was helpful in addressing her reactionary "racist" comment in the context of advocating that anti-multiculturalism isn't necessarily RACIST and why not.


No worries, and we could throw a whole series of non-scary people who have argued along similar lines at her: Amartya Sen, Paul Gilroy etc - that said, this would surely be pandering to her smear and the way in which it was made (and the function it performs) by arguing look here some other _respectable_ people who you may even pretend to have read say it's ok (and as a bonus one is black and one asian). So i'll not be bothering to help her later bluffing on the issue


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## cesare (Dec 22, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Dunno about this. I agree...but it's the phrase 'isn't necessarily racist'...which implies in most cases it is. it's even a bit apologetic. I've no doubt that all racists are anti-multiculturalist. How could they fail to be


 "Isn't necessarily" is down to me, not down to what he said. Yes, it probably was a bit apologist tbf. To be clearer and less nicey nicey apologist I'm not saying that anti-multicultarilism implies that in most cases it's racist. And I don't agree with your implication that it is. That's your implication not mine, so fuck off.


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## Fozzie Bear (Dec 22, 2012)

LP's responded in the comments:
http://thuraltmedia.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/slandered-by-middle-class-pc-left.html?m=1


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## butchersapron (Dec 22, 2012)

Still with the trick:



			
				laurie said:
			
		

> "this is hugely problematic, as far as I'm concerned. 'identity' politics like race, gender and sexuality are not sideline issues in the class struggle- they ARE the class struggle. I have seen far too many white male radicals claim that 'identity politics' are not relevant to the central issue of economics, claiming- for example- that talk of sexism 'splits' the left.


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## butchersapron (Dec 22, 2012)

And another trick played again - and this after reading the article and being informed of the background of the author and their political activity and that of the IWCA who the article was written for:




			
				Laurie said:
			
		

> That aspect of the piece was what struck me as racist and sexist. I'd stand by that. *I have no idea what's in your heart as regards race and gender.*"


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## killer b (Dec 22, 2012)

Also the assumption that all criticism of her comes from white males (guilty there myself, but many arent...)


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 22, 2012)

How the fuck did it get to be my implication? I've been arguing the exact opposite.
My point is that you seem to be indulging the people who do draw that implication...ie LP and her like minded confederates.
So you fuck off...and check your privilege


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## cesare (Dec 22, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No worries, and we could throw a whole series of non-scary people who have argued along similar lines at her: Amartya Sen, Paul Gilroy etc - that said, this would surely be pandering to her smear and the way in which it was made (and the function it performs) by arguing look here some other _respectable_ people who you may even pretend to have read say it's ok (and as a bonus one is black and one asian). So i'll not be bothering to help her later bluffing on the issue


I'm not familiar with these non-scary people, I don't know who they are.  I might "even pretend to have read"? Wtf? I've either read something or I haven't. She was well out of order in what she said, and to the extent that she might have misunderstood the basis for anti-multicultarism I'll point out why she might have misunderstood it and if I see something that might serve to show her why she's wrong, post that up too. I'm not helping her bluff the issue and I'm certainly not expecting you to.


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## butchersapron (Dec 22, 2012)

killer b said:


> Also the assumption that all criticism of her comes from white males (guilty there myself, but many arent...)


Not only the assumption but using that assumption to facilitate smears against others - again drawing the lines of who can talk in public and what they may talk about. Defining what politics is for everyone else.

There's nothing radical at all left in this ever deeper immersion in identity politics. In fact she's attempting to colonise class politics for identity politics (in the way that Jones did in Chavs but, i think, without meaning to or realising that he was). A corrective dose of Maria Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici etc is prescribed.


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## weepiper (Dec 22, 2012)

She's well and truly nailed her colours up now. Dividing line drawn and understood *shrug*


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## cesare (Dec 22, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> How the fuck did it get to be my implication? I've been arguing the exact opposite.
> My point is that you seem to be indulging the people who do draw that implication...ie LP and her like minded confederates.
> So you fuck off...and check your privilege


Indulging her? Twat.


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## butchersapron (Dec 22, 2012)

cesare said:


> I'm not familiar with these non-scary people, I don't know who they are. I might "even pretend to have read"? Wtf? I've either read something or I haven't. She was well out of order in what she said, and to the extent that she might have misunderstood the basis for anti-multicultarism I'll point out why she might have misunderstood it and if I see something that might serve to show her why she's wrong, post that up too. I'm not helping her bluff the issue and I'm certainly not expecting you to.


 
No, i'm saying that _she_ might not be scared by them and _she_ might even pretend to have read them - not you. And i'm saying that at a later date she may well claim familiarity with them to suggest that she wasn't simply caught out being a lazy smearer using her networked social power but was in fact articulating a well thought through informed critique of the article.


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## butchersapron (Dec 22, 2012)

weepiper said:


> She's well and truly nailed her colours up now. Dividing line drawn and understood *shrug*


Absolutely, and what's even more insulting about this line drawing and attempts to throw sand in our eyes is that she thinks _people like us _are too stupid to see exactly what she's up to or to thick to understand it.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 22, 2012)

cesare said:


> Indulging her? Twat.



Well if you're not indulging her and her warped little world-view, why the need for the "not necessarily"?
You gonna start talking about men and adding "but he's not necessarily a racist? Start that shit and you're making concessions to her.

Cunt.


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## Orang Utan (Dec 22, 2012)

Apparently the further to the centre you are and the higher you are paid, the more deserving of flak you are.


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## The39thStep (Dec 22, 2012)

> Most immigrants come here for a better life than the one they had in their homeland which implies that as they settle in and get on, the sense of identity they originally had develops into something different. When economic times are tough and their dreams can't be realised, the tendency to encourage immigrants to celebrate what they are rather than what they could have become is patronising to them, an admission of defeat that they can't progress and worst of all dangerously divisive. What you then get is an erosion of class identity as all the different ethnic / cultural groups that make up the working class retreat into their own identity instead – the kind of divide and rule the powers that be absolutely love.


 
That is very well put


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## cesare (Dec 22, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No, i'm saying that _she_ might not be scared by them and _she_ might even pretend to have read them - not you. And i'm saying that at a later date she may well claim familiarity with them to suggest that she wasn't simply caught out being a lazy smearer using her networked social power but was in fact articulating a well thought through informed critique of the article.


Ah, ok, I see what you mean. I hope she doesn't claim at a later date to have based her smear on some kind of well thought out critique. There was nothing bloody thought out in what she said, she didn't even read it before labelling ld etc as racist.


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## cesare (Dec 22, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Well if you're not indulging her and her warped little world-view, why the need for the "not necessarily"?
> You gonna start talking about men and adding "but he's not necessarily a racist? Start that shit and you're making concessions to her.
> 
> Cunt.


Read a few pages back, and start also fucking attacking the other people that say they don't altogether agree with everything the IWCA have stated as their position. Then once you've got all the people that don't altogether agree clear, round them all up and  extrapolate those "don't altogether agree" positions into what you've just said to me as "you gonna start talking about men and adding "but he's not necessarily a racist" fucking shite and see how far that fucking stupid extrapolation gets you.


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## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

I've been reading this on the libcom website - This part is particularly good:



> The initial exploration of identity proved useful, providing a greater understanding of the ways in which domination and its specific manifestations (racism, sexism, homophobia) are connected to the state and capitalism. The 1960s were also years of resistance and uprising more generally. These events did not happen separately; instead, they were a part of a larger discontent with society as a whole. However, much as the energy of the 1960s was dissipated into the traditional, rigid forms of activism and managed dissent, so was the revolutionary potential of exploring identity.
> Over time, these movements have left us with organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Human Rights Campaign (HRC), and National Organization for Women (NOW) as the self-proclaimed leaders in the struggle for equality under the law. However, what is interesting to note is that these organizations serve as explicitly political organizations, seeking political equality through political processes. These groups can thus be understood to engage in identity politics.
> *2: Identity Politics and Anti-Identity Politics*
> Given the political effectiveness of these organizations, their model has been emulated by others seeking to reform the current socio-economic order. This has led to identity politics becoming a central part of the contemporary United States political order. This is especially true in the liberal reformist movement, where organizations such as the NAACP, HRC, and NOW are prominent. With their successes in political reform, they (and many other identity-politics organizations) have become embedded in the dominant political discourse. It is here that we encounter one of the main problems of identity politics: the groups which sought to challenge identity-based oppression have instead merely entered into a partnership with those who benefit from oppression. This partnership concerns the ability to define the political agenda for a certain identity. This is clearly demonstrated in the queer community by the HRC, with their push for hate crime laws, marriage, and military service. These demands show that the HRC has accepted the logic of and requested partnership in the government and the marketplace. Essentially, the HRC is fighting for assimilation into, rather than the destruction of, a system that creates and enforces the very oppression they are allegedly struggling against.
> ...


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## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

Give it a rest eh ronnie?


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## sihhi (Dec 22, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> No worries, and we could throw a whole series of non-scary people who have argued along similar lines at her: Amartya Sen, Paul Gilroy etc - that said, this would surely be pandering to her smear and the way in which it was made (and the function it performs) by arguing look here some other _respectable_ people who you may even pretend to have read say it's ok (and as a bonus one is black and one asian). So i'll not be bothering to help her later bluffing on the issue


 

Are posts here for the benefit of her or for us? 

Cesare has no reason to apologise, as a piece it's hit and miss. The author gives only two examples of multiculturalism - one is an example used in another context in a piece on liberal imperialism as justified with reference to gay rights. It mostly attacks German liberal Muslim feminists, the Pink News etc with some criticism of Peter Tatchell as Britain's super-activist speaking on behalf of migrant homosexuals - on solid grounds. If you read what the trio wrote, they are not defending Sacranie - they are attacking the manner in which Tatchell makes his calls for UAF to disassociate from MCB. The other example is the owner of the Socialist Unity (lol!) English Parliament fan Andy Newman making an irrelevant historical truism point after a blog post. ... And that's it. 

I reject this point below, 'cultural relativism' as Idris will explain no doubt, has meant different things to different people, and I am sure it existed in 'philosophy' before 1945: 





> However, it was after World War II and with the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the concept of cultural relativism expanded into the philosophical sphere. Thus, people saw cultural relativism as synonymous with moral relativism, the conclusion of this line of thought being that all cultures are both separate and equal, and that all value systems, however different, are equally valid.


 
It turns absurd here:



> This is the simplest of ideas and yet the most often overlooked. Too many people think that we either allow people to hold to distinct cultural identities or we have a central value system. Diversity is placed in opposition to “one law for all.” But, of course, there is no reason that we can’t uphold basic, universal values whilst allowing people to pray, dress, talk, or cohabit differently. And what are those basic, universal values? In essence, freedom and equality. The freedom to live without coercion or violence, as long as you don’t impose the same upon others, and to do so without others having an artificial advantage over you, or you over them.


 
There is a very good reason we can't uphold basic, universal values such as freedom and equality, it's because we have won neither freedom nor equality, for us to be able to uphold these things. 

No one has yet done a really thorough job of pinning down where cultural promotion ends and 'multiculturalism' begins, and more importantly, what it all means for social struggle/class struggle today. 
Nor has anyone fully examined whether it might be the case that the middle-class of migrant groupings will still prosper from a trend towards 'community cohesion' and 'common values' away from separate ethnic minority projects.
After all, it is the middle-class of the immigrants - that have the most convenient means (money and nice housing) to cohere with their partners in the middle-class of white Britain. For parts of the working-class, maintaining any form of jointly-produced 'culture', when social conditions (short-term tenancies, long working hours, limited socialised childcare, longer demands for job-seeking, more conditions on council leases, fear of robberies by known associates, fear of drug influences upon children) are deteriorating, is an uphill battle.

Why should we suspect that the local state has any interest in mobilising working-class groups (that it normally seeks to diffuse and keep sedated) by genuine long-term, sustained, inter-communal activity? More likely, the central state will usurp the mantle of 'community cohesion' in an attempt to form an intelligence relationship with those 'extreme' elements of young Muslims - ie the PREVENT agenda.

The IWCA piece is not fault-less either:





> The liberal left is unable to understand that there is nothing progressive in unthinkingly encouraging people to simply celebrate what they are. This is particularly the case when reactionary and backward social practices not only go unchallenged but are excused on the basis that they are an ‘integral part of the culture’. This unthinking encouragement for ethnic minorities to celebrate what they are is at odds with *the prime motive of any immigrant which is to start a new life in a new country and to leave the past behind*. The major failure of the left was promoting this uncritical celebration of culture for pretty much every ethnic and religious minority while at the same time, strongly condemning and such expression of pride from the white working class majority.


 
That idea in the middle - in italics - at odds with reality, and has now been ammended in the response Thurrock IWCA Dave has given to Laurie Penny. I have done a few interviews with the generation of immigrants from mainland Turkey who came in the 1970s and 1980s (not Cypriots) and the motives for leaving the home country were almost wholly about trying to provide money for families and extended families at  home. Leaving the past behind was the last thing on anyone's mind - the past and the home country remain the fixation for decades afterwards. It leads to a form of minority national approach in politics - a basic total disinterest in all destination country politics, except on issues or figures where a change might benefit the home country.
In the case of Kurds who start arriving towards the end of the 1980s, it's precisely _not_ to leave the past behind, that they seek to revive Kurdish language and culture from the outside - in states where Kurdish nationalism is not seen as a state security threat.

The IWCA piece does not give any examples of "reactionary and backward social practices" being "excused on the basis that they are an ‘integral part of the culture’". It does happen, but it needs to be explained more fully. 
As for the criticism that there is "nothing progressive in _unthinkingly_ encouraging people to simply celebrate what they are" - one could apply this everywhere. Simply celebrating what they are: Sinn Fein celebrating being culturally Irish and culturally republican. Durham Miners Gala's celebrating being from an area that used to have a fair proportion of miners in it. Is it possible to 'thinkingly' encourage people to "celebrate what they are", or not? It's left unanswered.

On Laurie Penny's laughable response: 





> "I certainly don't expect you to listen to me. I expect, in fact, a lot more weary, baseless trolling and rumour-spreading. _The only conceivable way this would stop would be if I stopped what I'm doing, ceased to have a public voice_, and advocated for another straight white male columnist to take my place. There are plenty of them around, most of them both far more highly paid and with far more centrist views than me, and I've always wondered why the British Left doesn't spend more of its energy attacking them instead. The awful thing is - I think I know."


 
Let's remember that on Woman's Hour 2011 special Laurie Penny was selected as the figure in a room full of women to analyse 2011 and the public disorder of that year. So in a programme dedicated to women, Laurie Penny was selected above any other working-class woman.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 22, 2012)

cesare said:


> Read a few pages back, and start also fucking attacking the other people that say they don't altogether agree with everything the IWCA have stated as their position. Then once you've got all the people that don't altogether agree clear, round them all up and  extrapolate those "don't altogether agree" positions into what you've just said to me as "you gonna start talking about men and adding "but he's not necessarily a racist" fucking shite and see how far that fucking stupid extrapolation gets you.



Yeah I could do that. But I'm not going to because what I'm objecting to is the use of the phrase "not necessarily racist" which is symptomatic of a mindset which feels it has to apologise for its stance against multiculturalism. I doubt anybody would claim that 'multiculturalism' hasn't had its benefits. That said, this is only the case if you regard multiculturalism as containing every single anti racist and ecumenical initiative over the years. 

I was assuming we were discussing multiculturalism as a set of policies and protocols aimed at preserving and affirming distinct cultural beliefs and practices for their own sake as inherently good in themselves. And in this sense it's pure bullshit and I make no apology for saying so.

And as for 'attacking', I think you're being just a fuckin tad disingenuous. I started my first post with a statement that I didn't altogether agree with the tone of your comment; it was you who weighed in with the 'fuck offs' and 'twats'. I'm pretty sure you couldn't give a flying fuck whether we stop slagging each other off or not; any more than I could. However, I think we're closer on this than you seem to think. So in that spirit: happy Xmas, you prick.


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## Treacle Toes (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I've been reading this on the libcom website - This part is particularly good:


 
It is interesting yes and a great reminder that regardless of who we are, how we 'identify' and for whatever reason, reflecting on and checking why and how our own _priviledge_ manifests is fundamental. IMO without this process of personal reflection, we most often do reinforce a flawed system of labelling/identifying/characterising and inherent hierarchies.


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## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

laurie penny said:
			
		

> I don't think you're racist. I certainly don't think the IWCA is racist. And I certainly don't expect you to listen to me. I expect, in fact, a lot more weary, baseless trolling and rumour-spreading. The only conceivable way this would stop would be if I stopped what I'm doing, ceased to have a public voice, and advocated for another straight white male columnist to take my place. There are plenty of them around, most of them both far more highly paid and with far more centrist views than me, and I've always wondered why the British Left doesn't spend more of its energy attacking them instead. The awful thing is - I think I know.


 
Is anyone else getting sick to the fucking back teeth of this? Tell you what I'd like you to be replaced by Laurie? Another female writer, but a working class one. There's a few on this thread who could do that job very, very well.

And why don't the 'british left' (whatever that is) spend more time attacking them? Simple - they don't pretend to speak for us.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 22, 2012)

Rutita1 said:


> It is interesting yes and a great reminder that regardless of who we are, how we 'identify' and for whatever reason, reflecting on and checking why and how our own _priviledge_ manifests is fundamental. IMO without this process of personal reflection, we most often do reinforce a flawed system of labelling/identifying/characterising and inherent hierarchies.



Don't like the condescending and hectoring tone of this...whoever wrote it needs to check their privilege...as does anyone who adopts the right to lecture others...or basically do or say anything.
In fact, I'm not bothered if the whole world starts checking its privilege. It's window dressing. Fact is, some people need their privileges downgrading whether they acknowlege them or not. I thought that's what socialism is.


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## Mrs Magpie (Dec 22, 2012)

To be honest I'd never heard of her until this thread popped up and I can't pretend to have read this thread either. Anyway, I found one of her pieces and it was about disability and I can truly say if I have come across her in a situation where I have a drink in my hand, I'm going to do an Anna Ford.


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## Firky (Dec 22, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> That is very well put



I thought the article as a whole articulated the whole debate in a clear and understandable way that anyone can understand.


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## sihhi (Dec 22, 2012)

Laurie Penny responding to Thurrock IWCA Dave said:
			
		

> 'identity' politics like race, gender and sexuality are not sideline issues in the class struggle- they ARE the class struggle. The splits i've seen mainly come when (eg) men become angry at being confronted with their own unexamined privilege, and that was what came across in the article to me- claiming that a universality of approach, a denial of difference and privilege, would somehow help the left. That aspect of the piece was what struck me as racist and sexist. I'd stand by that. I have no idea what's in your heart as regards race and gender." So yes, that's the basis for my contention that there are issues of unexamined privilege at the heart of the 'anti-multiculturalism' argument on the far left. I think that unexamined privilege is the basis for a great deal of the *strange hatefest going on on the British left right now against anyone who dares to put forward anti-capitalist ideas whilst not being a straight, working-class white guy* - as if anyone else isn't the 'real left'.
> 
> I don't think you're racist. I certainly don't think the IWCA is racist. And I certainly don't expect you to listen to me. I expect, in fact, a lot more weary, baseless trolling and rumour-spreading.* The only conceivable way this would stop would be if I stopped what I'm doing, ceased to have a public voice, and advocated for another straight white male columnist to take my place. There are plenty of them around, most of them both far more highly paid and with far more centrist views than me*, and *I've always wondered why the British Left doesn't spend more of its energy attacking them instead.* The awful thing is - I think I know.


 
Here's a hint: those other columnists do not distort events, make up quotes, 'fake interviews' and blame it on unnamed subs.


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## Treacle Toes (Dec 22, 2012)

As an aside it's why I have a dislike of ' cultural anthropology' and much prefer interactions with representations of individuals/communities/geneologies from their own perspective and on their own terms.


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## sihhi (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Is anyone else getting sick to the fucking back teeth of this? Tell you what I'd like you to be replaced by Laurie? Another female writer, but a working class one. There's a few on this thread who could do that job very, very well.


 
I don't want Laurie Penny to be replaced, I think working-class women writers could happily replace all the male columnists on pretty much any paper and I wouldn't care a fig. Laurie Penny could then remain, letting working-class women describe sexism and classism from a working-class perspective and Laurie Penny could start attack the centres of privilege . 

In fact of course none of any that is going to happen, and Laurie Penny is not going to be removed from her post. It's not going to happen - she brings a readership, her twitter followers are far higher than other New Statesman figures like Mehdi Hasan (43,000) or Helen Lewis (23,000). New Statesman with about 25,000 subscribers has more of a chance of converting the twitterati into paid subscribers with Laurie Penny than anyone else on their books.


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## Treacle Toes (Dec 22, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Don't like the condescending and hectoring tone of this...whoever wrote it needs to check their privilege...as does anyone who adopts the right to lecture others...or basically do or say anything.
> In fact, I'm not bothered if the whole world starts checking its privilege. It's window dressing. Fact is, some people need their privileges downgrading whether they acknowlege them or not. I thought that's what socialism is.


 
There wasn't a condesending/lecturing tone in the way I wanted to present my experiences/opinions so I ask you not to project one onto it if at all possible. I include myself in it of course as I am not an island. I used the first person, it denoted that my opinions are my own. I used 'we' to present opinions that I have experienced to be true for myself and others. I don't mind if you disagree with me.

As for 'downgrading priviledge', it is also my experience/opinion that it will never happen in any meaningful way unless 'individuals' engage willingly in the process of it, anything else is IMO 'window dressing' and doing so in a 'detached/defensive' survival mode.


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## Firky (Dec 22, 2012)

The huge quotes of text make this thread difficult to read on a phone.


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## sihhi (Dec 22, 2012)

firky said:


> The huge quotes of text make this thread difficult to read on a phone.


 
(((Fancy phone owning privilege)))


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## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I don't want Laurie Penny to be replaced, I think working-class women writers could happily replace all the male columnists on pretty much any paper and I wouldn't care a fig. Laurie Penny could then remain, letting working-class women describe sexism and classism from a working-class perspective and Laurie Penny could start attack the centres of privilege .
> 
> In fact of course none of any that is going to happen, and Laurie Penny is not going to be removed from her post. It's not going to happen - she brings a readership, her twitter followers are far higher than other New Statesman figures like Mehdi Hasan (43,000) or Helen Lewis (23,000). New Statesman with about 25,000 subscribers has more of a chance of converting the twitterati into paid subscribers with Laurie Penny than anyone else on their books.


 
OK, I probably could have put that better - but what I'm saying is that my dislike of her politics and her journalism has nothing whatsoever to do with her gender or sexual orientation. And that if I were asked who I would like to replace her that would be my answer - a working class woman.

Somewhere on this thread there's a tweet of hers where she says she'd like to see more disabled, black and trans women in journalism - but no mention of class at all. This is the problem with identity politics - it makes it all about these subjective identities, allowing the most privileged members of these groups to be made spokespersons for the group as a whole. But these are the people whose interests are most easily met by the system.

Capitalism can, quite easily, handle this - all it has to do is create a black/female/queer/insert minority here elite and integrate it into the existing power structures. And all this really does is strengthen the system, creating a black etc middle class that serves to hide the inequalities and oppressions that continue to be an integral part of that system. In the language of multiculturalism these are the community leaders.

It does fuck all for those right at the shitty end - the working class blacks, queers, women, etc. In fact it often makes things worse for them. Initiatives like affirmative action can create resentment towards these groups as it can appear that they are being given preferential treatment (whilst in truth this is not the case the perception is, nonetheless, there). And guess who this resentment is taken out on - not the elites.

That's why Laurie Penny and anyone like her can never be an effective voice for women, queers or anyone else. She's no more qualified to speak for them than I am. Because she benefits from those power structures to a far greater extent even than me, with all my 'unexamined white male privilege'.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Don't like the condescending and hectoring tone of this...whoever wrote it needs to check their privilege...as does anyone who adopts the right to lecture others...or basically do or say anything.
> In fact, I'm not bothered if the whole world starts checking its privilege. It's window dressing. Fact is, some people need their privileges downgrading whether they acknowlege them or not. I thought that's what socialism is.


 
I think you've misunderstood her mate. She was agreeing with the piece I just posted a quote from and that piece argues precisely that.

I took rutita's post to be more directed at the likes of Laurie Penny than the likes of us.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 22, 2012)

Rutita1 said:


> There wasn't a condesending/lecturing tone in the way I wanted to present my experiences/opinions so I ask you not to project one onto it if at all possible. I include myself in it of course as I am not an island. I used the first person, it denoted that my opinions are my own. I don't mind if you disagree with me.
> 
> As for 'downgrading priviledge', it is also my experience/opinion that it will never happen in any meaningful way unless 'individuals' engage willingly in the process of it, anything else is IMO 'window dressing' and doing so in a 'detached/defensive' survival mode.



Fair enough. There was a fair amount of projection on my part. I'm a bit irritable this morning for various reasons.

However, the idea that change will come about once those with privilege acknowledge it, recognise it as a problem and decide to voluntarily redress the balance seems, given the historical record, a little wide eyed. You might also same the same about those without revolting and removing privilege by compulsion...but that seems far more likely...has a precedent...and is what I thought the left was all about.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> OK, I probably could have put that better - but what I'm saying is that my dislike of her politics and her journalism has nothing whatsoever to do with her gender or sexual orientation. And that if I were asked who I would like to replace her that would be my answer - a working class woman.
> 
> Somewhere on this thread there's a tweet of hers where she says she'd like to see more disabled, black and trans women in journalism - but no mention of class at all. This is the problem with identity politics - it makes it all about these subjective identities, allowing the most privileged members of these groups to be made spokespersons for the group as a whole. But these are the people whose interests are most easily met by the system.


 
Not attacking you, I agree. I was thinking along the lines of Laurie Penny could serve a useful role even as a confessional/personal mode of journalist if she concentrated on private schools and Oxbridge and how they operate. Like a more thorough version of her Dispatches programme.


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## Athos (Dec 22, 2012)

@lauripenny said:

"I certainly don't expect you to listen to me. I expect, in fact, a lot more weary, baseless trolling and rumour-spreading. The only conceivable way this would stop would be if I stopped what I'm doing, ceased to have a public voice, and advocated for another straight white male columnist to take my place. There are plenty of them around, most of them both far more highly paid and with far more centrist views than me, and I've always wondered why the British Left doesn't spend more of its energy attacking them instead. The awful thing is - I think I know."

Yeah, I know why too. It's because you divert attention away from - and thereby damage - genuine left-wing struggle i.e. a class based movement, by seeking to displace class in favour of identity politics. Centrist columnists don't, because they don't have the power to do so; they haven't positioned themselves as the voice of the left.

You do so because, on grounds of gender and sexuality, you can portray yourself as one of the oppressed; whereas, on grounds of class, as a well paid, middle-class hack, you're firmly in the other camp. What's worse is that you seem to want to take on the role of the oppressed as a business opportunity; for you to make money from the niche you've carved out for yourself as the voice of the radical left, the public perception of the radical left must be perverted to your own conception of it. As well as this being insulting to those who are genuinely oppressed, people don't take kindly to you damaging a cause they've fought for earnestly and made great sacrifices for, so that you can make a quick buck. Their disdain is heightened by the fact that, for all your claims, you don't appear to sacrifice anything or even do much - you just write about what others do - and the little that you do tends to be paid.

These are legitimate criticisms and not based on sexism; for you to seek to avoid having to respond to them by smearing those who dare to make them as sexists is a cheap trick. And, when those people have a record of putting themselves on the line for anti-fascism and anti-racism, people become understandably angry.


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## Treacle Toes (Dec 22, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Fair enough. There was a fair amount of projection on my part. I'm a bit irritable this morning for various reasons.


 Fair enough, thanks for that. 



> However, the idea that change will come about once those with privilege acknowledge it, recognise it as a problem and decide to voluntarily redress the balance seems, given the historical record, a little wide eyed.


 Yes, I can see why you think that. I wasn't however saying that it's the only way change can 'happen'. Again, my opinions are biased because they reflect my ideas about what 'meaningful' is. I am sure of one thing. I don't have all the answers.



> You might also same the same about those without revolting and removing privilege by compulsion...but that seems far more likely...has a precedent...and is what I thought the left was all about.


 
Given the current discussion on the thread and how often people that fall in to this description 'the left' disagree ...I think there's a strong argument in looking at/reflecting on how using this terminology can translate to reforcing the very same system/hierarchy. It's a minefield though as we have limited language/terminology and it all exists in relationship to something else, has 'historical' personal and collective association etc.


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## bluestreak (Dec 22, 2012)

if you throw out class then you're no different from those people who think that racism isn't important because they're white, that gender equality isn't important because they're male, you're just another person who refuses to acknowledge the privileges of their position and other people's oppression.


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## Idris2002 (Dec 22, 2012)

Re: sihhi's point about cultural relativism above.

The short answer is that a) the concept is indeed highly contested, b) it does not necessarily imply (IMO) moral relativism, and c) it has a long history going back at least to Montaigne's essay on cannibalism from the (IIRC) 1590s. (You could probably identify 'cultural relativism' in Herodotus, even).


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## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

sihhi said:


> 'Privilege' speak is back.


 
Here it is, the tweet I was talking about. In fact it's worse than I remembered - she's encouraging precisely the kind of assimilation I was talking about a couple of posts ago. She's not saying the structures need to be changed - rather that members of minority groups should be represented at the top ('promoted').


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## Treacle Toes (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I think you've misunderstood her mate. She was agreeing with the piece I just posted a quote from and that piece argues precisely that.
> 
> *I took rutita's post to be more directed at the likes of Laurie Penny than the likes of us.*


 
Not at LP directly/only, but yes more so to those that have a _platform_ like she does for pretty much all of the reasons given by others on the thread so far.

That said...I do stand by my 'we can all check ourselves' perspective. Including us, here on Urban and any other forum/platform we engage with.


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## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

Rutita1 said:


> Not at LP directly/only, but yes more so to those that have a _platform_ like she does for pretty much all of the reasons given by others on the thread so far.
> 
> That said...I do stand by my 'we can all check ourselves' perspective. Including us, here on Urban and any other forum/platform we engage with.


 
I think I get what you mean - like sometimes when I'm in meetings with younger, less confident people when I disgree with them I don't necessarily respond as 'robustly' as I would with someone of my own age and experience. But that's just not being a dick really isn't it? I don't think you need a theory to back it up.


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## bluestreak (Dec 22, 2012)

my missus looked at that and said "what about working class women?"

end of thread, basically.  what about working class women?


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## Treacle Toes (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I don't think you need a theory to back it up.


 Quite. The _not being a dick_ thing is about power dynamics IMO, in context I mean. Someone will link to theory I'm sure  which is fine, just as long as it's not the only way discussion/analysis of these things are valued.  Again, my bias and i'm aware of it.


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## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

Maybe I've been misunderstanding the identity politics liberals all along. If male genitalia = the height of privilege maybe they're just encouraging us to check our testicles for lumps? Very sensible if you ask me.


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## Athos (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Here it is, the tweet I was talking about. In fact it's worse than I remembered - she's encouraging precisely the kind of assimilation I was talking about a couple of posts ago. She's not saying the structures need to be changed - rather that members of minority groups should be represented at the top ('promoted').


 
Getting black trans women to join her at the top of the heap suits her interests; it means that the heap remains - rather than it being distributed amongst the working class.


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## The39thStep (Dec 22, 2012)

Identity politics are not THE class struggle, in fact they are quite the reverse.


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## Athos (Dec 22, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> my missus...


 
Misogynist!


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## goldenecitrone (Dec 22, 2012)

Athos said:


> Misogynist!


 
missusogynist, surely?


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## Athos (Dec 22, 2012)

goldenecitrone said:


> missusogynist, surely?


 
 Missusogenius!


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## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

@Buckaroo I'm expecting a phone call in a couple of hours time - after that I'll hopefully be able to give you an update on how 'm' is.

Interesting that she's had time to reply to Dave. I wonder if that's got anything to do with him having a media platform (however small)? Only she claimed not to have the time to discuss anything with me until this afternoon. Even though those accusations are still there on her twitter feed for all to see. Even though the number of people who've asked me about my 'racism' is now 6. I do wonder how many just haven't bothered asking, instead assuming it's true since it came from the voice of the left and not an 'enemy'? How many haven't seen me to ask? How many political opponents (a campaign I'm involved in at the moment is taking on the council head on and they know who we are) have noted it?

But none of that matters when compared to the prospect of Laurie Penny having to lose  face by admitting she made a terrible mistake.


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## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

Athos said:


> Getting black trans women to join her at the top of the heap suits her interests; it means that the heap remains - rather than it being distributed amongst the working class.


 
Precisely.


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## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

'When economic times are tough and their dreams can't be realised, the tendency to encourage immigrants to celebrate what they are rather than what they could have become is patronising to them, an admission of defeat that they can't progress and worst of all dangerously divisive.'



The39thStep said:


> That is very well put


 
You reckon?

To me it seems to be saying that immigrants shouldn't 'celebrate what they are' (presumably their ethnicity--but why shouldn't they celebrate that?) but rather 'what they could have become' (which is what? British? Wealthy? Why should they celebrate any of that?)

If that is what it's saying, ıt's reprehensible (at best). If that's not what it's saying, it's badly written.


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## The39thStep (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> 'When economic times are tough and their dreams can't be realised, the tendency to encourage immigrants to celebrate what they are rather than what they could have become is patronising to them, an admission of defeat that they can't progress and worst of all dangerously divisive.'
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Sorry don't understand what you are saying is reprehensible


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## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Sorry don't understand what you are saying is reprehensible


 
I'm saying it's reprehensible to suggest that immigrants should not celebrate their own ethnicity but should rather celebrate being (or becoming, or the possibility of becoming) British.  Reprehensible _at best._


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## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

This is also confusing (at best):

'... a point that was made quite often to me on the doorstep by white working class men and women was why was it when every other culture was encouraged to celebrate their identity, when they wanted to celebrate their English / British identity, they were dismissed as racist. For the record, the majority of these people had no problem with other cultures celebrating their identity, all they wanted was a chance to celebrate their own.'

Are we seriously supposed to believe that white people are being prevented from celebrating their identity? Or that they are being called racist when they do so?

White people may certainly be called racist when they celebrate their _ethnic _identity (i.e. being white). But that's surely fair enough, right?

Or are we to understand that the article _advocates_ white people celebrating their whiteness? Surely not... but in that case, it's not making itself very clear at all.


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## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

Just to make my own position clear:

I think it's good for black people to celebrate being black.

But I think it's bad for white people to celebrate being white.

Is there anyone here who would disagree with that?

I'll explain why I hold my position if I need to. But I'm assuming (or at least hoping) that I don't need to.


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## Treacle Toes (Dec 22, 2012)

Impossible to agree/disagree seeing as though myself, and many others don't conform to living, identify ourselves and then interact with the world around us solely in terms of Black people' and 'White people' or 'good' and 'bad'. Those polarisations are part of 'a' problem IMO.

ETA: It's not difficult, using those terms _I_ don't exist as a human being, an ethnicity, a person. Physically, biologically, culturally, politically nor experientially


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## sihhi (Dec 22, 2012)

I think this episode - u75/u75 posters on twitter against Laurie Penny and her denunciations of u75 - is now over

Let's examine again the basis




> for my contention that there are issues of unexamined privilege at the heart of the 'anti-multiculturalism' argument on the far left. I think that unexamined privilege is the basis for a great deal of the *strange hatefest going on on the British left* right now against anyone who dares to put forward anti-capitalist ideas whilst not being a straight, working-class white guy - as if anyone else isn't the 'real left'.


 
it is 






			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> 'identity' politics like race, gender and sexuality are not sideline issues in the class struggle- they ARE the class struggle. I have seen far too many white male radicals claim that 'identity politics' are not relevant to the central issue of economics, claiming- for example- that talk of sexism 'splits' the left. The splits i've seen mainly come when (eg) men become angry at being confronted with their own unexamined privilege, and that was what came across in the article to me- claiming that _a universality of approach, a denial of difference and privilege, would somehow help the left_. That aspect of the piece was what struck me as racist and sexist. I'd stand by that. I have no idea what's in your heart as regards race and gender.


 

This bit - the "strange hatefest going on on the British left right now against anyone who dares to put forward anti-capitalist ideas" against leftist middle-class people, leftist women, leftist non-whites (does it include white immigrants?) and non-straight leftists - I don't see at all.
Is Laurie Penny conflating genuine leftist base anger against leftie celebrities and middle-class leftists with other forms of discrimination?
It's an absolute caricature of the left that only "a straight, working-class white guy" is ever listened to.
It's the kind of nonsense the New Realists of the 1980s and Blairists of the 1990s routinely wheeled out. 
If I wanted to stick my neck out I'd say that in the left (and in general, maybe)... it is middle-class men being listened to instead of working-class men; middle-class women being listened to instead of working-class women; middle-class immigrants being listened to instead of working-class immigrants. 

Laurie Penny states that the article's claim that a "_universality of approach, a denial of difference and privilege, would somehow help the left"_ is a bogus one. We don't find out what Laurie Penny's approach is, though.

My only slight criticism of the IWCA piece is it doesn't go far enough in explaining: "As a consequence of this, we oppose funding for initiatives that are restricted to particular ethnic and cultural groups as they undermine community solidarity. We support efforts to end discrimination, with the aim being equal treatment for all."

I agree with the principle of equal treatment for all, but "initiatives that are restricted to particular ethnic and cultural groups" needs more. For a start, these sorts of initiatives are increasingly not funded by the local state at all. If you look at the foreign language lunch clubs and immigrant women's groups - they are sustained almost entirely by subscriptions and private donations. As the state cuts its funding, this type of private philanthropy remains as the only diminished source.

The contours of society are determined by funding for initiatives that are restricted to or highly benefit particular superior classes:- (bank bailouts, Arts Council and its several dozen millions subsidising the Royal Opera House, expenditure on European cultural programmes - particularly Spanish, German, French etc, high-speed rail link with soaring ticket prices, new airport terminals, development money for the gentrification of inner city estates etc etc). The aim could be to oppose class-based funding/projects _on whole working class grounds_, and to more critically examine any funding for minority-heavy groups - on worldwide working-class grounds (yeah I know).

Some 'open to all initiatives' - without a word like Punjabi or Harambee in them - open to all Christian play-schemes, sports for youth, weekend schools, peace events - can weaken positive working-class principles and (by a culture of blaming the feckless uninterested, or of target meeting in order to attract funding) more so than divisive ethnic formations. 
Having said all of that, there are a raft of ethnic and religion based organisations - even apparently progressive formations of self-identified communities - are deeply dangerous. So what do I know.


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## frogwoman (Dec 22, 2012)

Great posts sihhi.


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## love detective (Dec 22, 2012)

sihhi said:


> If I wanted to stick my neck out I'd say that in the left (and in general, maybe)... it is middle-class men being listened to instead of working-class men; middle-class women being listened to instead of working-class women; middle-class immigrants being listened to instead of working-class immigrants.


 
bingo - and as a result the working class have quite rightly stopped listening to the left


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## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

Rutita1 said:


> Impossible to agree/disagree seeing as though myself, and many others don't live, identify ourselves and the interact with the world around us solely in terms of Black people' and 'White people' or 'good' and 'bad'. Those polarisations are part of 'a' problem IMO.


 
You and I both know that 'race' is a myth.  But the division of society along spurious racial lines is a historical and social fact.  There is no point pretending it does not exist, and there is even less point pretending that there are no consequences to falling into one racial category or another.

That is why it is reprehensible to suggest that white people are somehow being oppressed because they are not being allowed to 'celebrate their culture.'  And that is why it is reprehensible to suggest that immigrants should celebrate being British rather than their ethnic origins.

If indeed the article was suggesting such things.  It isn't clear enough to say for sure.


----------



## Athos (Dec 22, 2012)

Also, this isn't just a question of whether or not Laurie's identity politics approach undermines a class based movement.

Even if we accept her position that a focus on the privilege associated with particular identities is central to class struggle, there's still the question of her hypocrisy and self-interest in focussing on some identities and privileges (e.g. gender and sexuality) and failing to recognise her own privilege (e.g. private school, oxbridge, media contacts etc) which is quite obviously more pertinent to class struggle.


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## The39thStep (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Just to make my own position clear:
> 
> I think it's good for black people to celebrate being black.
> 
> ...


 
You have just explained entirely why the far right do well compared to he liberal left


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

love detective said:


> bingo - and as a result the working class have quite rightly stopped listening to the left


 
And started listening to... who, exactly?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 22, 2012)

Mrs Magpie said:


> To be honest I'd never heard of her until this thread popped up and I can't pretend to have read this thread either. Anyway, I found one of her pieces and it was about disability and I can truly say if I have come across her in a situation where I have a drink in my hand, I'm going to do an Anna Ford.


 
With Penny playing the Aitken role.


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## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> You have just explained entirely why the far right do well compared to he liberal left


 
First of all, they don't.

Second, how have I explained any such thing?

Do you think it would be alright for white people to celebrate being white?  Is that the kind of thing you'd like to see happening?

Or do you think that British people are somehow being prevented from celebrating their Britishness?  Is that a gaping hole in our cultural fabric as far as you're concerned?

Or what?


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## frogwoman (Dec 22, 2012)

not this shit again


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## cesare (Dec 22, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> You have just explained entirely why the far right do well compared to he liberal left


Are you saying that the BNP/EDL (for examples) are the far right?


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## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> I'm saying it's reprehensible to suggest that immigrants should not celebrate their own ethnicity but should rather celebrate being (or becoming, or the possibility of becoming) British. Reprehensible _at best._


 
Good job nobody has said that then isn't it you disingenuous fool? Who said anything about them celebrating being British? And I'd say that it's always better to organize along class rather then ethnic lines. What say you sir?

I don't care if people want to celebrate any kind of identity - that's their right. I do have a problem when the state gets involved and appoints people to be spokespersons of that identity, defining what that identity should be etc. And I have a problem when self-styled lefties present this as some kind of progressive challenge to the system.


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## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

This is a serious thread phil, I'd be grateful if you took your silliness elsewhere.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 22, 2012)

This has turned into quite an informative discussion. But it should just stop because it's heading for the inexorable conclusion that unless you're middle-class and a self-identifying progressive, acknowledged as such by others of the same ilk, then in any wider public sphere you're always gonna be suspect; potentially misogynistic, racist, homophobic, whatever. This is because the 'wider public sphere' is under the complete domination of middle class relativist progressives, since this is the official ideology of global capitalism.

Continuing to engage with the likes of Dave & Co ltd is basically a case of looking for the continual approval of the self-appointed arbiters of ideological purity. Apart from anything else, you're walking through a minefield, blindfolded. At any fuckin moment, the news will wing its way in from the ginger cunt, from a chaise longue in some plush 'anarchist' Manhattan duplex that you can't say X, Y or Z this week and if you do, you're a racist or a phallocentric Neanderthal rape condoner. Bingo...game over...Oxbridge 'wins' another debate


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## love detective (Dec 22, 2012)

Athos said:


> Also, this isn't just a question of whether or not Laurie's identity politics approach undermines a class based movement.
> 
> Even if we accept her position that a focus on the privilege associated with particular identities is central to class struggle, there's still the question of her hypocrisy and self-interest in focussing on some identities and privileges (e.g. gender and sexuality) and failing to recognise her own privilege (e.g. private school, oxbridge, media contacts etc) which are quite obviously more pertinent to class struggle.


 
She seems to justify this (to herself) by not seeing privilege per se as the problem that needs to be rooted out, fought against and destroyed

the logical conclusion of her twisted usage of 'unexamined privilege' implicitly separates out privilege into 'good' and 'bad' types (the later being the 'unexamined' which her critics from the left are accused of having), and because she's written a vacuous puff piece about 'checking' and 'examining' her own privilege, this then removes her privilege from being a problem and leaves her free to crusade against the real problem, this so called unexamined privilege

the whole thing is totally idealist and almost becomes an academic exercise, it's not about changing material conditions of privilege but about examining things laboratory style, not in order to change them, but in order to justify them whilst condemning others for imaginary privileges which relatively speaking do not exist


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> not this shit again


 
What do you mean 'again?'

This article, or response, or whatever it is, has only just been linked to from this thread.  The one which announces:

''... a point that was made quite often to me on the doorstep by white working class men and women was why was it when every other culture was encouraged to celebrate their identity, when they wanted to celebrate their English / British identity, they were dismissed as racist. For the record, the majority of these people had no problem with other cultures celebrating their identity, all they wanted was a chance to celebrate their own.''

And it's the same article that seems to discourage immigrants from celebrating their ethnicity, suggesting instead that they should celebrate being British.  Or seeming so to suggest at least.

One does not have to be Laurie Penny to find such suggestions reprehensible.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 22, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Here's a hint: those other columnists do not distort events, make up quotes, 'fake interviews' and blame it on unnamed subs.


 
One thing the second part of your quote from _La Pennionara_ indicates is that Laura sees inhabiting her "othered" identity - non hetero/bi; female; activist - as significantly important in "validating" and legitimating her various positions, rather than the stories themselves doing so.


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## DotCommunist (Dec 22, 2012)

one does not simply have to be laurrie penny


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 22, 2012)

It's also interesting to see how Laurie Penny's Wikipedia entry is being censored of any criticism, on the grounds that her own Twitter feed is not objective. Yet most of the article consists of links to her own blog.


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## Athos (Dec 22, 2012)

love detective said:


> She seems to justify this (to herself) by not seeing privilege per se as the problem that needs to be rooted out, fought against and destroyed
> 
> the logical conclusion of her twisted usage of 'unexamined privilege' implicitly separates out privilege into 'good' and 'bad' types (the later being the 'unexamined' which her critics from the left are accused of having), and because she's written a vacuous puff piece about 'checking' and 'examining' her own privilege, this then removes her privilege from being a problem and leaves her free to crusade against the real problem, this so called unexamined privilege
> 
> the whole thing is totally idealist and almost becomes an academic exercise, it's not about changing material conditions of privilege but about examining things laboratory style, not in order to change them but in order to justify them whilst condemning others for imaginary privileges which relatively speaking do not exist


 
Yeah.  As if 'examining' privilege means that it ceases to exist!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> You and I both know that 'race' is a myth. But the division of society along spurious racial lines is a historical and social fact. There is no point pretending it does not exist, and there is even less point pretending that there are no consequences to falling into one racial category or another.
> 
> That is why it is reprehensible to suggest that white people are somehow being oppressed because they are not being allowed to 'celebrate their culture.' And that is why it is reprehensible to suggest that immigrants should celebrate being British rather than their ethnic origins.
> 
> If indeed the article was suggesting such things. It isn't clear enough to say for sure.


 
No I doesn't you silly sod. It says that there is a perception that this is the case. And, just like the fiction of race, this perception becomes a social fact too.

And stop being such a coward - if you've got something you want to say then say it. Give over with the insinuations.


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## ViolentPanda (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Here it is, the tweet I was talking about. In fact it's worse than I remembered - she's encouraging precisely the kind of assimilation I was talking about a couple of posts ago. She's not saying the structures need to be changed - rather that members of minority groups should be represented at the top ('promoted').


 
"Back in the day" that was known as "tokenism", and those that practiced it were universally derided by the left *and* the right.
In most instances I can recall, it generally appeared to further "other" already-othered individuals.


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## chilango (Dec 22, 2012)

weepiper said:


> She's well and truly nailed her colours up now. Dividing line drawn and understood *shrug*



This.


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## The39thStep (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> First of all, they don't.
> 
> Second, how have I explained any such thing?
> 
> ...


 

You not even arguing against the content of he article  but you have managed to entirely polarise the issue on  ethnicity not culture.
Try what you said on anyone say in the queue at the supermarket, butchers or in a pub.



> I think it's good for black people to celebrate being black.
> 
> But I think it's bad for white people to celebrate being white.


 
White bad/black good is what springs to mind.


----------



## love detective (Dec 22, 2012)

Athos said:


> Yeah. As if 'examining' privilege means that it ceases to exist!


 
It does seem to be the logical conclusion of her position, or perhaps it would be fairer to say that she seems to take the wholly idealist view that examining it is enough to negate the negative effects of it, so that privilege itself still exists but purely as a result of looking at it through a microscope it is turned into good privilege which can then be used for progressive and 'good' ends - she's said in the past that the fact that she comes from a privileged background helps to make her a better activist (better than all the rest!)

so what 'we' need is not the end of privilege in society but actually more of it, just a different kind, a good kind - her kind


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> No I doesn't you silly sod. It says that there is a perception that this is the case. And, just like the fiction of race, this perception becomes a social fact too.


 
A perception that _what_ is the case? That white people are being oppressed because they're not allowed to celebrate being white?

And this perception leads to white people not being allowed to celebrate being white in fact?

Is that what you're saying? If not, please clarify.

Or try this instead. I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I think it might help people see where you're coming from if you could answer these two simple questions.

A. Do you think white people should celebrate being white?

B. Do you think black people should celebrate being black?

Your responses to these two simple questions will tell us all we need to know. Not just Spiney, anyone.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 22, 2012)

cesare said:


> Are you saying that the BNP/EDL (for examples) are the far right?


 
They would be part of it along with UKIP and others. I don't buy the notion of black culture or white culture but even if I accepted that there was Phil is arguing for supporting one against another.Its not only divisive but a gift to those who wish to divide and rule( which of course is exactly the mirror image of Phils position)


----------



## Firky (Dec 22, 2012)

This thread has started to turn really interesting again. I am working my way through that essay Idris mentioned.


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> You not even arguing against the content of he article but you have managed to entirely polarise the issue on ethnicity not culture.


 
How have I done that?



The39thStep said:


> Try what you said on anyone say in the queue at the supermarket, butchers or in a pub.


 
Why?  How do you think people in such venues might respond? 



The39thStep said:


> White bad/black good is what springs to mind.


 
And you disagree with that, do you?  You believe that white people should celebrate white history and white culture, just as black people celebrate black hıstory and culture?  Do you?

DO YOU?  Is that REALLY what you believe?  IS IT?


----------



## sihhi (Dec 22, 2012)

love detective said:


> bingo - and as a result the working class have quite rightly stopped listening to the left


 
This is a key point when someone like Kenan Malik is wheeled out as a suitable spokesman for working-class ethnic minorities.

...but yes stopped listening because the left aren't listening...

I've felt, in even situations with working-class origin people in the majority, leftist or campaign meetings feel like 'work when a manager gets talking' at best or 'student seminar' at worst with people making asides at how boring it all is, telling someone new as a joke 'if you feel like jumping out the window, you can leave if you want to'... never saw that person again. (Reverse is smother with kindness/attention/pity... oh-my-god it's a working-class person)
Me, I always stick out at anything to do with anything environmental, and these are all things with as local a focus as possible, I end up saying something like 'concentrating _first_ on how to stop working-class consumption is stupid'... you're like an unwanted diversion. So I don't bother anymore. Ditto stuff like Up-The-Anti - I would try to avoid going and would never invite any other friend along. 

In the very worst circumstances - not very often, granted - I've been rebuked for using the wrong word. Once by someone older (a man) not to use 'immigrant' and 'immigrant people', then by someone younger (a woman, involved in the Occupy City of London camp) after a joint meeting, just chatting, not to use the term 'Third World'.
I can't begin to imagine how hard it must be for working-class people who have experience of middle-class people _only_ as annoying busybodies (schoolteachers, housing officers, social workers, managers) to put up with the left. Not to mention how, in struggle, working-class people will often be the ones facing the eye of the storm, whilst the middle-class - by virtue of specialised skills - law, academic hobbies, journalism etc - or family riches will often escape the worst.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> How have I done that?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Which black people are you on about or do they all look the same to you?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I think I get what you mean - like sometimes when I'm in meetings with younger, less confident people when I disgree with them I don't necessarily respond as 'robustly' as I would with someone of my own age and experience. But that's just not being a dick really isn't it? I don't think you need a theory to back it up.


 
It (going easy on someone less experienced) *can* and does sometimes bleed into a form of paternalism, though, especially when "practiced" at a collective level. I can recall a bit of this happening when "Respect" first started, although that was also based on not alienating the Trots' new allies.
I also have much personal experience of individuals saying to me "I don't want to receive special treatment. I just want to be treated equally". Unfortunately, if "allowance-making" is a standard interactional strategy, then it institutionalises a form of "special treatment" that *then* sets a precedent for further "special treatment", and becomes a stick for some elements of the polity to beat other elements over the head with.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> A perception that _what_ is the case? That white people are being oppressed because they're not allowed to celebrate being white?
> 
> And this perception leads to white people not being allowed to celebrate being white in fact?
> 
> ...


 
Well if we're straying into dwyer idealist land I'd say that I'd rather people celebrated who they were rather than what they were.

Back in the real world, I don't think white people should celebrate being white. And in order to answer the question of whether people should celebrate being black that would depend on what you mean by 'being black' really. If by 'celebrating being black' you mean they should celebrate, say, struggles against racist oppression then yes, of course.

But if by celebrating being black you mean they should celebrate when a black person becomes a CEO, even though it makes fuck all difference to ordinary blacks, and in fact merely reinforces the system that shits all over black people from a great height, then I'm not sure that is something to be celebrated.

The thing is phil, I agree that these perceptions are wrong and unjustified. But they exist and they have a political impact. And you define your response politically too.

I'm concerned about overcoming all forms of prejudice. And the most effective way to do that, in my view, is to get working class people of all ethnicities, cultures, sexualities, genders, etc fighting together on the things that affect all of us. When this happens those prejudices are overcome and barriers are broken down. So the question then becomes how best to encourage this. And I'd say a political system that encourages people to fight for resources along ethnic etc lines isn't going to help at all.

I've already been accused of racism by one over-privileged twat phil. You can get to fuck if you think I'm going to let another Oxbridge wanker do it too. Especially as I've helped raise 4 mixed race kids and seen real racism up close and personal. It's not a game, it's not about proving who's the purest and cleverest. These are real issues with real consequences and frankly you attitude towards it all makes me sick. You're just another fucking tourist.


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Which black people are you on about or do they all look the same to you?


 
Any black people at all.

I'll try again.

A.  Do you think it is good for black people to celebrate black culture?

B.  Do you think it is good for white people to celebrate white culture?

See, if anyone asks me those questions, I have no problem responding.  I think it is very good for black people to celebrate black culture.  And I think it is very bad for white people to celebrate white culture.

Not only that, I consider the answers to those questions to be _shibboleths.  _Yes, _shibboleths.  _That is why I would like you and Spiney to answer them, please.


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I don't think white people should celebrate being white.


 
That's all we wanted, thank you.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> It (going easy on someone less experienced) *can* and does sometimes bleed into a form of paternalism, though, especially when "practiced" at a collective level. I can recall a bit of this happening when "Respect" first started, although that was also based on not alienating the Trots' new allies.
> I also have much personal experience of individuals saying to me "I don't want to receive special treatment. I just want to be treated equally". Unfortunately, if "allowance-making" is a standard interactional strategy, then it institutionalises a form of "special treatment" that *then* sets a precedent for further "special treatment", and becomes a stick for some elements of the polity to beat other elements over the head with.


 
I was meaning more that I don't swear and shout at them like I might with others - when someone's not spoken before and someone comes back at them in an aggressive way it can put them off completely. But I wouldn't disrespect them by going easy on their arguments and I certainly wouldn't go easy on you just cos you're a disabled person


----------



## love detective (Dec 22, 2012)

has she been on the blower yet spiney?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> That's all we wanted, thank you.


 
The royal "we" again, phil?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I was meaning more that I don't swear and shout at them like I might with others - when someone's not spoken before and someone comes back at them in an aggressive way it can put them off completely. But I wouldn't disrespect them by going easy on their arguments and I certainly wouldn't go easy on you just cos you're a disabled person


 
That's okay. I wouldn't go easy on you just because you're a northerner.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> That's all we wanted, thank you.


 
Are you using the royal we now sir?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> That's okay. I wouldn't go easy on you just because you're a northerner.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

love detective said:


> has she been on the blower yet spiney?


 
Nope. My bet is either no phone call or a call right in the middle of the fucking match.


----------



## fogbat (Dec 22, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> It's also interesting to see how Laurie Penny's Wikipedia entry is being censored of any criticism, on the grounds that her own Twitter feed is not objective. Yet most of the article consists of links to her own blog.


*cough*Hari*cough*


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Good job nobody has said that then isn't it you disingenuous fool? Who said anything about them celebrating being British?


 
As I say, I'm not sure what Thurrock was actually saying.  But here:

''When economic times are tough and their dreams can't be realised, the tendency to encourage immigrants to celebrate what they are rather than what they could have become is patronising to them, an admission of defeat that they can't progress and worst of all dangerously divisive.''

The reference to ''what they could have become'' is the one I found confusing.  What could it mean, in this context, other than ''British'' or ''assimilated'' or just possibly ''rich?''  I find it reprehensible to suggest that any of these are worth celebrating.



SpineyNorman said:


> And I'd say that it's always better to organize along class rather then ethnic lines. What say you sir?


 
I agree.

But it is important to remember what many here seem to be forgetting in their (not entirely unwarranted) frenzy of class hatred:  The _logical _contradiction is not between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but between capital and labor.  To concentrate obsessively on class, as many here do, is to risk losing sight of that vital point.  All that can come of an _exclusively _class based analysis is _sans-cullotisme enrage _of the kind that we now see before us.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> As I say, I'm not sure what Thurrock was actually saying. But here:
> 
> ''When economic times are tough and their dreams can't be realised, the tendency to encourage immigrants to celebrate what they are rather than what they could have become is patronising to them, an admission of defeat that they can't progress and worst of all dangerously divisive.''
> 
> The reference to ''what they could have become'' is the one I found confusing. What could it mean, in this context, other than ''British'' or ''assimilated'' or just possibly ''rich?'' I find it reprehensible to suggest that any of these are worth celebrating.


 
What they are is in often poor, working class victims of prejudice. What they could become is equal members of a just social order. Who said anything about British, assimilated, rich or any of those things?


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> But it is important to remember what many here seem to be forgetting in their (not entirely unwarranted) frenzy of class hatred: The _logical _contradiction is not between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but between capital and labor. To concentrate obsessively on class, as many here do, is to risk losing sight of that vital point. All that can come of an _exclusively _class based analysis is *sans-cullotisme enrage *of the kind that we now see before us.


 
Rage without pants, phil?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> But it is important to remember what many here seem to be forgetting in their (not entirely unwarranted) frenzy of class hatred: The _logical _contradiction is not between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but between capital and labor. To concentrate obsessively on class, as many here do, is to risk losing sight of that vital point. All that can come of an _exclusively _class based analysis is _sans-cullotisme enrage _of the kind that we now see before us.


 
You don't even understand the concepts you're talking about here though phil. And since it's not us that brought up the issue of privilege that seems a little unfair. The problem with privilege theory and identity politics is that it individualizes the issues in precisely the way you claim to oppose.


----------



## cesare (Dec 22, 2012)

I'll just put my head above the parapet again to remark that I'm not particularly averse to a spot of sans-cullotisme enrage.

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255/la/sans-culottes.html


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Rage without pants, phil?


 
Actually what we are witnessing here is little more than _Pere Duchesnisme._


----------



## Treacle Toes (Dec 22, 2012)

cesare said:


> I'll just put my head above the arapet again to remark that I'm not particularly averse to a spot of sans-cullotisme enrage.
> 
> https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255/la/sans-culottes.html


 
...anything to do with the origin of the phrase 'all mouth and no trousers'?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

If it can only be expressed in Latin it's not proper proletarian rage 

Get to fuck with your public school rage!


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 22, 2012)

I'll leave Phil to spend the day telling black people ( any will do apparently)how he supports them celebrating their culture ( reminds me of that Play for Today when some village invited a cricket team from Brixton to play them to celebrate third world day) Meanwhile I am off down the pub to watch some football and to chat to normal people. ( prob be hideously white or if not probably white on the inside)


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 22, 2012)

I'm not sure if I know what "white culture" is. 

I had falafel for lunch though. 

And I'm off to see some mates play reggae later. I think some of them will be white and some of them will be black.


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> What they are is in often poor, working class victims of prejudice. What they could become is equal members of a just social order. Who said anything about British, assimilated, rich or any of those things?


 
Pish, that's not what the article suggests at all.  It suggests that there is something wrong with, as it might be, a Jamaican immigrant to England celebrating the culture of Jamaica.

That much is clear.  Not quite so clear is what the article recommends celebrating instead.  I don't want to think it means ''Britishness,'' but I'm afraid that seems more plausible than your suggestion that it means ''members of a just social order.''  The context just doesn't support that reading.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Pish, that's not what the article suggests at all. It suggests that there is something wrong with, as it might be, a Jamaican immigrant to England celebrating the culture of Jamaica.
> 
> That much is clear. Not quite so clear is what the article recommends celebrating instead. I don't want to think it means ''Britishness,'' but I'm afraid that seems more plausible than your suggestion that it means ''members of a just social order.'' The context just doesn't support that reading.


 
I think you're putting words in the author's mouth there phil. Didn't you once very nearly get into trouble for misrepresenting the IWCA?


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> If it can only be expressed in Latin it's not proper proletarian rage
> 
> Get to fuck with your public school rage!


 
Did she ring you in the end spiney?


----------



## cesare (Dec 22, 2012)

Rutita1 said:


> ...anything to do with the origin of the phrase 'all mouth and no trousers'?


Dunno.


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> You don't even understand the concepts you're talking about here though phil. And since it's not us that brought up the issue of privilege that seems a little unfair.


 
Who is this ''us'' of which you speak?



SpineyNorman said:


> The problem with privilege theory and identity politics is that it individualizes the issues


 
That is why I have never advocated either of them.


----------



## FreddyB (Dec 22, 2012)

Some cultural ideas, practices and traditions are shit. A person's culture is not some inherent thing they carry around with them until the day they die.

Edit: That was supposed to be a reply to phildwyer


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Who is this ''us'' of which you speak?


 
The people on this thread. The people you're trolling.





phildwyer said:


> That is why I have never advocated either of them.


 
Why, then, are you using their logic in your arguments?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Did she ring you in the end spiney?


 
Not yet but I don't want to be unfair - she's explained that it's very early over there and asked if I'm free in 10 minutes - I've asked if she's free after 5 so I can listen to the match  and I await her reply.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Not yet but I don't want to be unfair - she's explained that it's very early over there and asked if I'm free in 10 minutes - I've asked if she's free after 5 so I can listen to the match  and I await her reply.


Very early where?


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Meanwhile I am off down the pub to watch some football and to chat to normal people. ( prob be hideously white or if not probably white on the inside)


 
Funnily enough, the ''normal people'' in my local aren't white. Each to his own though eh?


----------



## weepiper (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Funnily enough, the ''normal people'' in my local aren't white. Each to his own though eh?


 
Considerably less racist than_ yow._


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Funnily enough, the ''normal people'' in my local aren't white. Each to his own though eh?



Wish I lived in Barbados


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

FreddyB said:


> Some cultural ideas, practices and traditions are shit. A person's culture is not some inherent thing they carry around with them until the day they die.
> 
> Edit: That was supposed to be a reply to phildwyer


 
I've no idea why you think I'd disagree with either of your points here.


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Why, then, are you using their logic in your arguments?


 
The logic of ''privilege theory'' or ''identity politics?''

Never have used either, never would.  There are alternatives available between the extremes of cultural relativism and xenophobia.


----------



## cesare (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Actually what we are witnessing here is little more than _Pere Duchesnisme._


I'm trying, I'm really trying, to envisage the IWCA as the vanguard of revolutionary times


----------



## love detective (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Not yet but I don't want to be unfair - she's explained that it's very early over there and asked if I'm free in 10 minutes - I've asked if she's free after 5 so I can listen to the match  and I await her reply.



How can you think of football at a time like this


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> If it can only be expressed in Latin it's not proper proletarian rage


 
Latin.  _Formıdable!_


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

cesare said:


> I'm trying, I'm really trying, to envisage the IWCA as the vanguard of revolutionary times


 
We could do worse than remember the lessons of the Latin Revolutıon.


----------



## cesare (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Not yet but I don't want to be unfair - she's explained that it's very early over there and asked if I'm free in 10 minutes - I've asked if she's free after 5 so I can listen to the match  and I await her reply.


Who's meant to be ringing you?


----------



## cesare (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> We could do worse than remember the lessons of the Latin Revolutıon.


Oh, I thought you were drawing comparisons between the IWCA's position and the French Revolution.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

Well I just got my call - she's going to retract the accusation which is all I was really bothered about.

I completely forgot to ask about 'M' but I've just emailed her about it and hopefully she'll get back to me with some news about it.

For information, she assures me that she has never had a trust fund.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

cesare said:


> Who's meant to be ringing you?


 
LP


----------



## FreddyB (Dec 22, 2012)

SPiney isn't racist, it's official. The voice of the left has spoken.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Very early where?


 
New York.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

love detective said:


> How can you think of football at a time like this


 
Priorities mate


----------



## Athos (Dec 22, 2012)

love detective said:
			
		

> It does seem to be the logical conclusion of her position, or perhaps it would be fairer to say that she seems to take the wholly idealist view that examining it is enough to negate the negative effects of it, so that privilege itself still exists but purely as a result of looking at it through a microscope it is turned into good privilege which can then be used for progressive and 'good' ends - she's said in the past that the fact that she comes from a privileged background helps to make her a better activist (better than all the rest!)
> 
> so what 'we' need is not the end of privilege in society but actually more of it, just a different kind, a good kind - her kind


 
You're spot on. That's the natural conclusion of that line of thinking.

To me, identity politics seem divisive except insofar as privilege theory could have a place inside working class movements, to ensure that such movements are inclusive of the whole class. But such an approach should never be more than a means to an end - the end being class struggle. The problem comes when people fetishise identity politics, making them the end in themselves, and class struggle subordinate to them.

The obvious reason for them doing so is that class struggle is anathema to the interests of the loudest advocates of identity politics. Nothing encapsulates this better than privately educated, well-connected, well paid, trans-atlantic jet-setting 'activists.'


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

cesare said:


> Oh, I thought you were drawing comparisons between the IWCA's position and the French Revolution.


 
I was. The ''Latin'' bit was a joke.

My point was that class hatred alone can only get you so far.  Approximately as far as 1794, to be exact.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> New York.


It's 5 hours behind, not ten. It's 10am there, 'very early' my arse.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

FreddyB said:


> SPiney isn't racist, it's official. The voice of the left has spoken.


 
I'm not racist and wednesday are 1-0 up. It doesn't get much better than this


----------



## Firky (Dec 22, 2012)

How are you going to celebrate your absolution, Spiney?

(10am on a Saturday is far too early to get up TBF)


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

Not sure where the apologies on both sides thing comes from but I really cannot be arsed to argue.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 22, 2012)

FreddyB said:


> SPiney isn't racist, it's official. The voice of the left has spoken.


Has she tweeted it to he 50,000+ followers too?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

Yes.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 22, 2012)

firky said:


> How are you going to celebrate your absolution, Spiney?
> 
> (10am on a Saturday is far too early to get up TBF)


Yes but she was making out it was the middle of the night. 

I might have got up at 1pm today (insomnia till after 4)...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

firky said:


> How are you going to celebrate your absolution, Spiney?
> 
> (10am on a Saturday is far too early to get up TBF)


 
Soon as the match ends and my mum takes over with the kids I'm off to the chippy, then it's guinness and a massive spliff 

I've been invited to the Socialist Worker Student Society Christmas social tonight but one accusation of bigotry is quite enough for one week so I think I'll decline that one


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 22, 2012)

For posterity:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> It was a misunderstanding, there were apologies on both sides. Talking to @*spineynorman78* was very positive - and I normally hate the phone.
> 
> *Expand*
> ...


----------



## Firky (Dec 22, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Yes but she was making out it was the middle of the night.
> 
> I might have got up at 1pm today (insomnia till after 4)...


 
Jet lag (her not you)? 

I had terrible insomnia last night and read until about 4 but still woke up just after 9... so I am yet again tired and bleurgh! I have zopiclone but it makes me very forgetful and cotton headed the next day.




SpineyNorman said:


> Soon as the match ends and my mum takes over with the kids I'm off to the chippy, then it's guinness and a massive spliff
> 
> I've been invited to the Socialist Worker Student Society Christmas social tonight but one accusation of bigotry is quite enough for one week so I think I'll decline that one


 

The notorious racism inherent at swappy bashes is disgusting, the snowman is a hideously white and male. A symbol of white male power.

You're best off not going


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 22, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> For posterity:
> 
> 
> > *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> > Just had a useful phone discussion with @*spineynorman78*. He asked me to clarify that I do not now consider him racist. I'm happy to do so.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

firky said:


> Jet lag (her not you)?
> 
> I had terrible insomnia last night and read until about 4 but still woke up just after 9... so I am yet again tired and bleurgh! I have zopiclone but it makes me very forgetful and cotton headed the next day.


 
I had them when I was doing a detox once - it was the aftertaste I couldn't handle - like sucking on a lump of copper.







firky said:


> The notorious racism inherent at swappy bashes is disgusting, the snowman is a hideously white and male. A symbol of white male power.
> 
> You're best off not going


 
It's not so much the all pervasive culture of brocialism as jealous socially inadequate swappy males denouncing me as a misogynist if I cop off with a lass


----------



## Athos (Dec 22, 2012)

FreddyB said:
			
		

> SPiney isn't racist, it's official. The voice of the left has spoken.



No smoke without fire, though.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I had them when I was doing a detox once - it was the aftertaste I couldn't handle - like sucking on a lump of copper.
> 
> It's not so much the all pervasive culture of brocialism as jealous socially inadequate swappy males denouncing me as a misogynist if I cop off with a lass


 
Misogynist!!!


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 22, 2012)

Athos said:


> No smoke without fire, though.


Meaning what, exactly?


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 22, 2012)

So spiney isn't a racist anymore? what the fuck- I looked up to him as an ubermenschen example of strong white pride and now it turns out he was never that into racism anyway?

This is worse than learning about how Gamesmaster stole christmas.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 22, 2012)

Somebody needs to do a downfall parody about Hitler discovering Spiney isn't racist


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> There are alternatives available between the extremes of cultural relativism and xenophobia.


 
and we're back to the broad church of Don't Be A Dick.  Come join us.  We are many, and we've got a pot luck buffet...


----------



## Nice one (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> For information, she assures me that she has never had a trust fund.


 
technically working class

CLASS POWER!


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 22, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> It's 5 hours behind, not ten. It's 10am there, 'very early' my arse.


 
it's not my revolution if i can't sleep in on the weekend.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 22, 2012)

I don't know where to turn anymore. Spiney is now officially not a big racist, patrick moore is dead, all the books about hitler slag him off. Where now? we are in undiscovered country. It is a new dawn.


----------



## phildwyer (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> It's not so much the all pervasive culture of brocialism as jealous socially inadequate swappy males denouncing me as a misogynist if I cop off with a lass


 
I know a guy (a former and quite possibly even current poster here) who was _expelled _from the SWP for ''coppıng off wıth a lass'' at a socıal event.

How do they reproduce?


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> I know a guy (a former and quite possibly even current poster here) who was _expelled _from the SWP for ''coppıng off wıth a lass'' at a socıal event.
> 
> How do they reproduce?


 

freshers week


----------



## Athos (Dec 22, 2012)

equationgirl said:
			
		

> Meaning what, exactly?



Meaning that, by slandering Spiney in the first place, the harm is done, notwithstanding that it is somewhat ameliorated by her subsequent withdrawal. I think I could have expressed it better with "mud sticks." Certainly didn't mean to imply there's any doubt about Spiney. Apologies to anyone who read it that way.


----------



## cesare (Dec 22, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


>


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 22, 2012)

is it the angle or has Neville decided to sport the same tash as Adolf


----------



## Firky (Dec 22, 2012)

Athos said:


> Meaning that, by slandering Spiney in the first place, the harm is done, notwithstanding that it is somewhat ameliorated by her subsequent withdrawal. I think I could have expressed it better with "mud sticks." Certainly didn't mean to imply there's any doubt about Spiney. Apologies to anyone who read it that way.


 
Spiney said the same words you did shortly after Laurie Penny called him a racist.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 22, 2012)

Shall we all be racist now Father?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> I know a guy (a former and quite possibly even current poster here) who was _expelled _from the SWP for ''coppıng off wıth a lass'' at a socıal event.
> 
> How do they reproduce?


 
It's a dialectical process comrade


----------



## Firky (Dec 22, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> Shall we all be racist now Father?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'm not racist and wednesday are 1-0 up. It doesn't get much better than this



You're still a misogynist though, yeah?


----------



## love detective (Dec 22, 2012)

So according to Penny and in the eyes of her 55,000 followers, SpineyNorman has apologised to her


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

2-0 now!


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 22, 2012)

A self-serving non-apology apology from a proven dissembler, a class enemy and a professional narcissist - better than a slap in the face? Please bang out 1,500 words by 6pm, usual rates apply.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

love detective said:


> So according to Penny and in the eyes of her 55,000 followers, SpineyNorman has apologised to her


 
Pretty much yeah. I've got rid of the racist accusations though so I'm calling it a win.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> You're still a misogynist though, yeah?


 
Everyone already knew that though so I'm not that arsed


----------



## rekil (Dec 22, 2012)

Another lie for the collection but no proof of this one. Clever. Disgusting but clever.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

'M' news:


> A friend has phoned the police in Northhants (where he's from) but no word as yet. His emails were really quite distressing. It seems like he lives with his mum and stepdad, though, so at least he isn't alone.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 22, 2012)

Has she also unblocked you, SN?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 22, 2012)

copliker said:


> Another lie for the collection but no proof of this one. Clever. Disgusting but clever.


The cleverest lie in a very disgusting litany.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> 'M' news:


that isn't quite what i expected. should've posted 'this is what i thought might happen, and hoped wouldn't'



> A friend has phoned the police in Northhants (where he's from) but no word as yet. His emails were really quite distressing. It seems like he lives with his mum and stepdad, though, so at least he isn't alone.


why on earth did she get a friend to make the call?
'living with your mum and stepdad' doesn't mean an automatic support network 

i'm full of lurgy at the minute, and woke up this afternoon in a thrashy sweat, after dreaming that LP had managed to get a job as a support worker where i work, after threatening to sue if she wasn't offered the post (discrimination over her lack of privilege, and did we not see how _well_ she dealt with that reader?). get out of my head, penny red


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 22, 2012)

In Northants you are always alone


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 22, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> In Northants you are always alone


----------



## radgiesteve (Dec 22, 2012)

She still didn't use the word 'Sorry' though. Phrased it so she can pretend it was a misunderstanding. Still owes the IWCA and rest of the forum an apology, incorporating the word sorry. The overpaid lazy idiotic lying cunt. <---Oh sorry about that!


----------



## Athos (Dec 22, 2012)

.


----------



## Firky (Dec 22, 2012)

radgiesteve said:


> She still didn't use the word 'Sorry' though. Phrased it so she can pretend it was a misunderstanding. Still owes the IWCA and rest of the forum an apology, incorporating the word sorry. The overpaid lazy idiotic lying cunt. <---Oh sorry about that!


 
LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF MYSELF!


----------



## Athos (Dec 22, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> In Northants you are always alone


Cobblers!


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 22, 2012)

radgiesteve said:


> She still didn't use the word 'Sorry' though. Phrased it so she can pretend it was a misunderstanding. Still owes the IWCA and rest of the forum an apology, incorporating the word sorry. The overpaid lazy idiotic lying cunt. <---Oh sorry about that!



Love means never having to say your sorry


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

S☼I said:


> Has she also unblocked you, SN?


 
yes


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 22, 2012)

This made me chuckle

*Laura Byrnes* ‏@*Laura_Byrnes* 
@*PennyRed* @*spineynorman78* Wow he did a great job of making it all about your statement instead of the issue you were discussing


*Spiney Norman* ‏@*spineynorman78* 
@*Laura_Byrnes* What issue might that be Laura? More than happy to discuss it with you.


*Laura Byrnes* ‏@*Laura_Byrnes* 
@*spineynorman78* no thanks dude


*Spiney Norman* ‏@*spineynorman78* 
@*Laura_Byrnes* Thought as much.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 22, 2012)

Throwing toys around rather than having any kind of discussion seems to be the in thing right now.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 22, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Throwing toys around rather than having any kind of discussion seems to be the in thing right now.


 
NO IT FUCKING ISN'T.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 22, 2012)

sihhi said:


> I can't begin to imagine how hard it must be for working-class people who have experience of middle-class people _only_ as annoying busybodies (schoolteachers, housing officers, social workers, managers) to put up with the left. Not to mention how, in struggle, working-class people will often be the ones facing the eye of the storm, whilst the middle-class - by virtue of specialised skills - law, academic hobbies, journalism etc - or family riches will often escape the worst.


 
Thanks for your posts sihhi, always good to see you around.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 22, 2012)

Just looked at twitter for pretty much the first time. Decided to see for myself...no surprises.

This caught my eye..Dave offered:

#So, who else thinks that Christmas officially begins the first time you hear 'Fairytale of New York' playing in December?#


"I could have been someone 
Well so could anyone..."

Wonder if she sings along to those lines

Not looking again. I'm losing interest in her tbh. In fact I doubt I'll post about her again...unless she crops up somewhere in the discussion.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 22, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> yes


 
Then can you ask her to unblock me. I'm _distraught_ she lumped me in with you racists.


----------



## smokedout (Dec 22, 2012)

Nice one said:


> technically working class
> 
> CLASS POWER!


 
no she just had savings after leaving oxford and a small inheritance


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 22, 2012)

'son, I want you to have these unscratched scratchcards. Also there is a Marillion album in vinyl I have been saving for you'

my inheritance. And my older brother will get the Marrilion album as well.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 22, 2012)

he's welcome to it though. Always a poor mans genesis


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 22, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> my inheritance. And my older brother will get the Marrilion album as well.


 


> Lavenders red, Penny Penny, lavenders violet
> When we are smeared, Penny Penny
> You will be silent


----------



## Belushi (Dec 22, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> he's welcome to it though. Always a poor mans genesis


 
You say that now but its exactly the kind of thing that starts family feuds


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 22, 2012)

Just popping in to give a heads up to those dedicating lots of time to this that what cd freeleech has started.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 22, 2012)

Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> Heading back to the UK tomorrow. Tired and drained emotionally and physically. Being without a place to live is so wearing.


 
You should try having no place to live and no means of getting anywhere, kid. I did it for a while in the early 90s with no choice, and it was a bit more than fucking _wearing._


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 22, 2012)

Belushi said:


> You say that now but its exactly the kind of thing that starts family feuds


 

If looks could kill he probably will in wills without frontiers, dadrock without tears


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 22, 2012)

#Heading back to the UK tomorrow. Tired and drained emotionally and physically. Being without a place to live is so wearing.#

Normally I'd offer, but we're going round my mam's.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 23, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> #Heading back to the UK tomorrow. Tired and drained emotionally and physically. Being without a place to live is so wearing.#
> 
> Normally I'd offer, but we're going round my mam's.


 

I feel so sad for her, how is she going to find a place to live when she earns more in a week than most of us scratch per quarter


----------



## Athos (Dec 23, 2012)

Nowhere to sleep.  Must be like being a day girl amongst boarders.


----------



## BlackJamaican (Dec 23, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> What do you mean 'again?'
> 
> This article, or response, or whatever it is, has only just been linked to from this thread. The one which announces:
> 
> ...


 
No BlackGuys are involved in this thread.....your all having a pointless discussion!!


----------



## Athos (Dec 23, 2012)

BlackJamaican said:


> No BlackGuys are involved in this thread.....your all having a pointless discussion!!


What makes you think that no black guys are involved?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 23, 2012)

BlackJamaican said:


> No BlackGuys are involved in this thread.....your all having a pointless discussion!!



I'm no expert. I'm a recent arrival...but I think it's under quota on Chinese, Asians,Scousers and trans black women too. Then again, wouldn't it be great to know they're here but they just didn't feel the need to say so. Maybe they haven't had the message that it was...drumroll...all about class. I wonder why not? I wonder which message took its place?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 23, 2012)

BlackJamaican said:


> No BlackGuys are involved in this thread.....your all having a pointless discussion!!


And you know the ethnicity of all the posters on this thread ...how?

I suspect you're making assumptions. A bit dodgy, that. A little bit racism.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 23, 2012)

phildwyer said:


> Just to make my own position clear:
> 
> I think it's good for black people to celebrate being black.
> 
> ...


----------



## Nice one (Dec 23, 2012)

smokedout said:


> no she just had savings after leaving oxford and a small inheritance


 
so laurie penny really is the michael foot of her generation?


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 23, 2012)

S☼I said:


> You should try having no place to live and no means of getting anywhere, kid. I did it for a while in the early 90s with no choice, and it was a bit more than fucking _wearing._


 
Wearing? Yep, it's wearing all right. Especially for anyone lacking independent means, pretty sizeable annual earnings compared to most people, a high public profile and a circle of groupies who can always be relied on to provide crash space. It's also pretty wearing for anyone who's got a substance problem and is trying not to relapse, or a mental health problem, or they've had their benefits sanctioned and/or taken away completely leaving them with nothing at all to live on except other people's kindness.

Yes, LP, it's definitely _wearing_...


----------



## Geri (Dec 23, 2012)

BlackJamaican said:


> No BlackGuys are involved in this thread.....your all having a pointless discussion!!


 
Interesting that your focus is on black _men_. What about women, eh?


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 23, 2012)

I was wondering about Mike Danson and "progressive media", the owner of the New Statesman, the one who ordered the de-recognition of the NUJ. Given this sort of thing is typical of harder edged companies who don't think twice about pushing the boundaries (see also their use of unpaid interns) if they were not above a little bit of tax avoidance as well? The BBC/civil service style possibly - that is paying their employees via a personal company that (off-payroll engagements ) that leaves the employee paying corporation tax (21%) rather than the higher income tax they would be liable for. Anyone know anything about how they/he/them operate?


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 23, 2012)

Geri said:
			
		

> Interesting that your focus is on black men. What about women, eh?



Guys can sometimes mean women too in a collective sense.


----------



## rosecore (Dec 23, 2012)

I wish I could get paid to write about a Tumblr site. The issue is once again misogyny online, this blog has decided to publicly shame men on the website who object to being 'friend zoned' and lament against 'sluts'.Well, not always.



> The site is compelling, in a gross sort of way. Reading it fills you with a righteous rage that quickly starts feeling icky when you realise a few of the chaps on there haven't actually said anything overtly sexist - they're just a bit overweight and ungroomed and feeling sorry for themselves and wondering why 'women' (by which they mean 'women they fancy') won't consider having sex with 'nice guys' (by which they mean 'men very much like me', by which they mean ‘me’).
> For a lot of these ‘nice guys’ who can’t get dates, it looks like nothing a shave and a bit of positive self-talk couldn't cure. Unfortunately for those of us who believe in the basic decency of the species, many of these chaps seem instead to have translated their fear of rejection, their loneliness and humiliation, into active misogyny, a savage self-pitying resentment which must make perfect sense at 4am on a lonely weeknight whilst flicking between OkCupid and RedTube.com but which makes rather less when exposed to the cold pixel glare of internet disapprobation.


http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2012/12/note-nice-guys-ok-cupid

Yes, there are plenty of guys on there who express no sexist or misogynistic viewpoints, some are clearly deeply shy, self-concious, and probably struggle socially to engage with women. (I'm making my own broad assumptions here). Dating sites are hard work, I've had my ups and downs with them, rejection comes far easier when the ratio of men to women is heavily favoured to the former. So, that lovely message you spent ages writing might not get read or responded to. Yes,  both men and women have every right to not respond to your profile for number of reasons. Writing your profile can also be a challenge - do I write paragraphs?  Do I try to be humorous? Will I wonder in the obscurity of a few words? 

For a lot of guys (including myself in the past) there is no guide for writing these profiles. I will make no excuses for the unsavoury profiles featured on that Tumblr. Out of the screenshots of profiles they no may longer exist (or been updated) she makes a gross generalisation that in this 'rage' they are all turning to porn. No wonder they objectify!

There is a really nasty bullying tone to this Tumblr, it seems any person who looks overweight is fair game, despite there being a lack of misogyny involved.
http://niceguysofokc.tumblr.com/post/38276039209
http://niceguysofokc.tumblr.com/post/38272747127/can-we-get-some-sorrowful-violin-music-in-the
http://niceguysofokc.tumblr.com/post/38306352421/submitted-by-disgustinggirl
http://niceguysofokc.tumblr.com/post/38385901801/they-only-see-them-for-procreation
http://niceguysofokc.tumblr.com/post/38263257125/that-was-almost-a-sentence-good-work
http://niceguysofokc.tumblr.com/post/38232700328/oh-no
http://niceguysofokc.tumblr.com/post/38223671207

For the good work it does, this Tumblr is really rather nasty, this article is an excuse for Laurie to be self-indulgent about a blog that doesn't deserve half the praise it does.

I even put it to her on Twitter.




> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Here's the link: http://niceguysofokc.tumblr.com/
> 
> stunned by how much of a blind rage this 'friend zone' thing seems to send guys into.
> ...


 
I'm slightly disappointed she hasn't been more critical of some of the posts on the blog. Especially after that comment.


----------



## BlackJamaican (Dec 23, 2012)

Geri said:


> Interesting that your focus is on black _men_. What about women, eh?


 
I didn't say black men....comon Guys....my name is Hector Reva and this my life!


----------



## Athos (Dec 23, 2012)

butchersapron said:
			
		

> I was wondering about Mike Danson and "progressive media", the owner of the New Statesman, the one who ordered the de-recognition of the NUJ. Given this sort of thing is typical of harder edged companies who don't think twice about pushing the boundaries (see also their use of unpaid interns) if they were not above a little bit of tax avoidance as well? The BBC/civil service style possibly - that is paying their employees via a personal company that (off-payroll engagements ) that leaves the employee paying corporation tax (21%) rather than the higher income tax they would be liable for. Anyone know anything about how they/he/them operate?



I don't know about them specifically, but I'd be surprised if any company of that size did not organise its affairs to minimise its liability to tax. 

And I wonder whether ths line of thinking highlights the 'bad' capitalists, whereas the reality is that what they do (i.e. anything they can to maximize profits, no matter the social cost) is inherent in capitalism per se.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 23, 2012)

Athos said:


> I don't know about them specifically, but I'd be surprised if any company of that size did not organise its affairs to minimise its liability to tax.
> 
> And I wonder whether ths line of thinking highlights the 'bad' capitalists, whereas the reality is that what they do (i.e. anything they can to maximize profits, no matter the social cost) is inherent in capitalism per se.


Bollocks to that, _name and shame is the name of the game and i wanna play the game with you_ - there's no contradiction to having a having wider view of how things arise (and tax-avoidance is not really a structural motivating factor for capital as it goes) and wanting to nail specific individual or groups. Do you turn down wage rise unless all workers across all industries get the same?


----------



## Athos (Dec 23, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Bollocks to that, _name and shame is the name of the game and i wanna play the game with you_ - there's no contradiction to having a having wider view of how things arise (and tax-avoidance is not really a structural motivating factor for capital as it goes) and wanting to nail specific individual or groups. Do you turn down wage rise unless all workers across all industries get the same?


 
Yes.  I suppose you're right, as long as people _do_ recognise the bigger picture.  My fear, having spoken to people in UKuncut is that this isn''t always the case.  And, if it is to be one or the other, I'd rather see people trying to avoid the iceberg than rearranging the deckchairs.


----------



## Firky (Dec 23, 2012)

This is getting odd now.

Amazon recommends me books by Molly and Laurie, and the Android's app store is suggesting that I subscribe to New Statesman. Fuck you Google and your cookies.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Dec 23, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> Some women can also be black even when they're not. Attitude is all.




Is this a joke?


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 23, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> he's welcome to it though. Always a poor mans genesis


 
the esistence of genesis makes us all poorer.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 23, 2012)

@rosecore i think that sire is hilarious and full of nice guys who get pissed off because they don't want to be just friends with women.  also, you'll note that most of them think that no doesn't mean no, that there are times they are entitled to take sex, and so on and so forth.  i think it makes some very good points about what some blokes think being a nice guy is.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 23, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> No. It's a well-established fact. I could probably also be in the Rolling Stones or the Who without being able to play an instrument. As I say, it's all about attitude.


 
i agree with this.  technically i'm a tubby white essex man, but in attitude i'm actually Bikini Kill.  All of them.  At once.


----------



## bluestreak (Dec 23, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> I've been in the Clash in my mind all the way through my adult life. The only black member of a leading 'punk' band.


 
wasn't that the thinking that led to Big Audio Dynamite?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 23, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> No. It's a well-established fact. I could probably also be in the Rolling Stones or the Who without being able to play an instrument. As I say, it's all about attitude.



I find all this very reassuring. All my adult life I've considered myself the reincarnation of Antonio Gramsci, only with bionic limbs which make me a full on killing machine. I drink to dull the constant desire to wipe out the forces of reaction...because I took an oath never to use my powers unless there was a threat of immediate danger. And, of course, I'm black.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 23, 2012)

BlackJamaican said:


> I didn't say black men....comon Guys....my name is Hector Reva and this my life!


 
You said "black guys". That kind of implies "black men", Hector.
For a PR person, you don't seem particularly diplomatic. More gaffe-prone.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 23, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> the esistence of genesis makes us all poorer.


 
Just as the existence of Leviticus makes most of us worthy of death, bro.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 23, 2012)

bluestreak said:


> wasn't that the thinking that led to Big Audio Dynamite?


 
Or "Big Audio Loadashite" as I generally think of them.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 23, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> Yes, that was down to me. I put the suggestion in a Christmas card to Mick Jones.


 
Even Hell won't take you after such a crime against music. You'll be doing your time in Purgatory, along with the unchristened, the supernatural beings and the tax collectors.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 23, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Even Hell won't take you after such a crime against music. You'll be doing your time in Purgatory, along with the unchristened, the supernatural beings and the tax collectors.


Just out of curiosity, where do the tories go if tax collectors end up in purgatory?


----------



## lazyhack (Dec 23, 2012)

So, who _else_ knows Laurie Penny's real name?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 23, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Just out of curiosity, where do the tories go if tax collectors end up in purgatory?


 
Nowhere. Their souls (if such shrivelled, maggot-ridden things can be called souls) are obliterated, removed from the Wheel of Life.

It's only fair.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 23, 2012)

lazyhack said:


> So, who _else_ knows Laurie Penny's real name?


 
Besides anyone who's read this thread, or can put 2 and 2 together from _La Pennionara's_ many articles, you mean?


----------



## lazyhack (Dec 23, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Besides anyone who's read this thread, or can put 2 and 2 together from _La Pennionara's_ many articles, you mean?


Oh, is it also buried inside this 327 page _'she is not a person of note'_ epic?


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 23, 2012)

327 pages! It was only 208 last week!


----------



## Red Storm (Dec 23, 2012)

it was on her wiki but its since been removed. You can see it in the history.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 23, 2012)

lazyhack said:


> Oh, is it also buried inside this 327 page _'she is not a person of note'_ epic?


 
You really are a lazy hack, aren't you?

That's not what the thread is about, but hey, Heaven forfend you actually do a bit of research and read some of it so you know what you're talking about, eh?

Muppet.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 23, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> 327 pages! It was only 208 last week!


 
Don't worry, most of that is just pages and pages of people abusing you, mate.


----------



## lazyhack (Dec 23, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> You really are a lazy hack, aren't you?
> 
> That's not what the thread is about, but hey, Heaven forfend you actually do a bit of research and read some of it so you know what you're talking about, eh?
> 
> Muppet.


 
Sorry, will print it out now and try get through it over Christmas.


----------



## Jon-of-arc (Dec 23, 2012)

its barnett.


----------



## love detective (Dec 23, 2012)

lazyhack said:


> So, who _else_ knows Laurie Penny's real name?


 
read on from here


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 23, 2012)

love detective said:


> read on from here


No, I think you mean read on from here.


----------



## lazyhack (Dec 23, 2012)

love detective said:


> read on from here


Fuck... It's come a long way over the last few weeks. I think registering on Urban and the drawn-out reverse ferret after calling you/iwca a racist are definitely signs of some sort of decline.

Hope she's started using a notepad or dictaphone for those tricky interviews.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 23, 2012)

lazyhack said:


> Hope she's started using a notepad or dictaphone for those tricky interviews.


 
Her interviewees probably already do.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 23, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Her interviewees probably already do.



I'd love her to interview me. I'd tell her my life story with scrupulous candour...at least the bits I remember. I'd love to see what she made of it and considered to be my motives. I like to call myself a socialist, broadly speaking-but I doubt she'd consider me one. I like football, big tits and binge drinking and I'm entirely unconvinced by identity politics...so, in reality, I'm probably some piece of ur-fascist scum preceded by a hash tag. But at least I've finally found out.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 23, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I'd love her to interview me. I'd tell her my life story with scrupulous candour...at least the bits I remember. I'd love to see what she made of it and considered to be my motives. I like to call myself a socialist, broadly speaking-but I doubt she'd consider me one. I like football, big tits and binge drinking and I'm entirely unconvinced by identity politics...so, in reality, I'm probably some piece of ur-fascist scum preceded by a hash tag. But at least I've finally found out.


 
All you need to do is tweet her an article about something or other. Then she'll call you a racist or bigot of some description. Then she blocks you, everyone who knows you and anyone who points out that retweeting an article about the footballing career of Dalian Atkinson does not a racist make. Then later on, after you've threatened her with either legal action,  a proper job or having to live without parties in swanky Notting Hill flats she'll get in touch and ring you up for a dialogue. Then you can do the interview over the phone


----------



## Athos (Dec 23, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:
			
		

> I'd love her to interview me. I'd tell her my life story with scrupulous candour...at least the bits I remember. I'd love to see what she made of it and considered to be my motives. I like to call myself a socialist, broadly speaking-but I doubt she'd consider me one. I like football, big tits and binge drinking and I'm entirely unconvinced by identity politics...so, in reality, I'm probably some piece of ur-fascist scum preceded by a hash tag. But at least I've finally found out.



#heteronormative misogynist!


----------



## BlackJamaican (Dec 23, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> You said "black guys". That kind of implies "black men", Hector.
> For a PR person, you don't seem particularly diplomatic. More gaffe-prone.


 
Don't worry about what is 'implied', my friend....just concentrate on what is said...it's less work for the brain!

A 'PR' person......you know how to make a man smile!  Loving you already.

Regards,
BlackJamaican


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 23, 2012)

BlackJamaican said:


> Don't worry about what is 'implied', my friend....just concentrate on what is said...it's less work for the brain!
> 
> 
> BlackJamaican



How do you imply things without say saying something? I make statements all the time whose purpose is largely unrelated or in direct contradiction to the ostensible meaning. But you've still got to say something.

"It's not you; it's me."

"No, really...it was fascinating"

"Racist!"


----------



## love detective (Dec 23, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> All you need to do is tweet her an article about something or other. Then she'll call you a racist or bigot of some description. Then she blocks you, everyone who knows you and anyone who points out that retweeting an article about the footballing career of Dalian Atkinson does not a racist make. Then later on, after you've threatened her with either legal action, a proper job or having to live without parties in swanky Notting Hill flats she'll get in touch and ring you up for a dialogue. Then you can do the interview over the phone


 
Then you can apologise to her


----------



## BlackJamaican (Dec 23, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> How do you imply things without say saying something? I make statements all the time whose purpose is largely unrelated or in direct contradiction to the ostensible meaning. But you've still got to say something.
> 
> "It's not you; it's me."
> 
> ...


 
I think your mistaking me for an intelligent guy....Why give me a Rubic's cube mentally to deconstruct and rebuild into something I can understand....I tried and can't make any sense of what you want me to gain or understand from your appreciated reply.

If I say 'black guys' I am not implying "black men" I'm saying 'black guys'  So don't give me a hard time about saying black men (I'm not saying this was you) when I didn't.   That's all I'm saying.....I don't want to fight about this....I'm having enough trouble elsewhere on this site.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 23, 2012)

What is the difference between a black guy and a black man? And why do you call yourself BlackJamaican?


----------



## ska invita (Dec 23, 2012)

its one harold bishop init


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 23, 2012)

It's a fucking idiot whoever it is


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 23, 2012)

ska invita said:


> its one harold bishop init


Why would you think that?


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 23, 2012)

Whoever he is, he's a prick and and a homophobe and a sexist creep and possibly a racist. He deserves short shrift


----------



## BlackJamaican (Dec 23, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> What is the difference between a black guy and a black man? And why do you call yourself BlackJamaican?


 
Hello Orang Utan, your in a questioning mood this evening!

No difference to your first question

As for why I call myself BlackJamaican..... thank you for asking....after nearly six months on this site your the first one to ask.....you deserve a box of chocolates just for that!

BlackJamaican is a name of a chess opening, just like the French Defence or maybe the Scandinavian, that's all....I play it very well.  So I called my handle that when I joined this site.  So now you understand why I say my name is not related to my colour or ethnicity!

Regards,
BlackJamaican


----------



## ska invita (Dec 23, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Why would you think that?


BJs avatar






oneharoldbishop's






what can i say, im an art connersuier, and i can tell that penmanship a mile off. plus the mad posts.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 23, 2012)

BlackJamaican said:


> Don't worry about what is 'implied', my friend....just concentrate on what is said...it's less work for the brain!


 
I can't possibly do that. You may choose to believe that language conveys only the message bound up in the words actually used, but the way you use them is informative too, as I'm sure you know.



> A 'PR' person......you know how to make a man smile! Loving you already.
> 
> Regards,
> BlackJamaican


 
Of course I know how to make a man smile. I'm a man. We're simple creatures to please.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 23, 2012)

BlackJamaican said:


> BlackJamaican is a name of a chess opening, just like the French Defence or maybe the Scandinavian, that's all....I play it very well. So I called my handle that when I joined this site. So now you understand why I say my name is not related to my colour or ethnicity!
> 
> Regards,
> BlackJamaican


Once upon another lifetime did you know an urbanite called J? To clarify, I'm not saying that you're him, but Brixton's a small place and there are only so many competent chess players.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 23, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> <snip>Of course I know how to make a man smile. I'm a man. We're simple creatures to please.


Neither that simple nor always so easily pleased.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 23, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Neither that simple nor always so easily pleased.


 
I am (the latter, not the former!).


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 24, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Once upon another lifetime did you know an urbanite called Justin?


Mentioning that name is a bannable offence!


----------



## Greebo (Dec 24, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Mentioning that name is a bannable offence!


And you've just quoted it.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 24, 2012)

Greebo said:


> And you've just quoted it.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 24, 2012)

ska invita said:


> BJs avatar
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I still don't see why you would think that. He was here before 1hb was here and has a totally different posting style


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 24, 2012)

love detective said:


> Then you can apologise to her


 
In the twitter edition anyway


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 24, 2012)

BlackJamaican said:


> Hello Orang Utan, your in a questioning mood this evening!
> 
> No difference to your first question
> 
> ...


Righty ho. 
This still doesn't explain why you are an arsehole


----------



## ska invita (Dec 24, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> I still don't see why you would think that. He was here before 1hb was here and has a totally different posting style


posting style has same hallmarks i think, like posts in the bandwasting thread. wont post more here as its just a big derail


----------



## discokermit (Dec 24, 2012)

BlackJamaican said:


> BlackJamaican is a name of a chess opening, just like the French Defence or maybe the Scandinavian, that's all....I play it very well. So I called my handle that when I joined this site. So now you understand why I say my name is not related to my colour or ethnicity!


what are the moves and where has it been played?


----------



## BlackJamaican (Dec 24, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Righty ho.
> This still doesn't explain why you are an arsehole[/quote
> 
> Orang Utan, I still like you regardless of your spicy language....but it's really not necessary.  There is no explanation as to why....I just am (naturally).


----------



## BlackJamaican (Dec 24, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Once upon another lifetime did you know an urbanite called J? To clarify, I'm not saying that you're him, but Brixton's a small place and there are only so many competent chess players.


 
You sound cool Greebo I've read mosts of your post but I don't know J I'm new to Brixton....but come down to the museum and say hello one day.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 24, 2012)

ska invita said:


> posting style has same hallmarks i think, like posts in the bandwasting thread. wont post more here as its just a big derail


Nah, you're barking up the wrong tree.
1hb isn't banned and BJ registered before he stopped posting and has a totally different MO


----------



## discokermit (Dec 24, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Once upon another lifetime did you know an urbanite called J? To clarify, I'm not saying that you're him, but Brixton's a small place and there are only so many competent chess players.


j isn't in brixton and i don't believe has anything to do with a chocolate museum.


----------



## SLK (Dec 24, 2012)

Oh nothing.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 24, 2012)

discokermit said:


> j isn't in brixton and i don't believe has anything to do with a chocolate museum.


 
Indeed he lives in Spain


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 24, 2012)

discokermit said:
			
		

> what are the moves and where has it been played?



There's a YouTube vid on it.


----------



## Firky (Dec 24, 2012)

SLK said:


> Oh nothing.


 
It was an accurate summary of this thread.

Laura Barnett AKA Laurie Penny,

I hope for 2013 you stop telling lies, manipulating what people said, grow up and wake up, but also thanks for being so egotistical that you could not resit to bite and get covered in shit.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 24, 2012)

Citizen66 said:


> There's a YouTube vid on it.


there are three, all by the same person, describing two different openings. so, not an opening that's really recognised by anyone else but the feller who did the vid seems nice enough.


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 24, 2012)

I didn't actually watch it.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 24, 2012)

discokermit said:


> there are three, all by the same person, describing two different openings. so, not an opening that's really recognised by anyone else but the feller who did the vid seems nice enough.



Doesn't matter. The BlackJamaican is easily countered by the Transverse Latvian Defence or the Bolivian Shuffle. No serious player has opened with the BlackJamaican since Rodriguez tried it on Schevchenkov back in 92.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 24, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Doesn't matter. The BlackJamaican is easily countered by the Transverse Latvian Defence or the Bolivian Shuffle. No serious player has opened with the BlackJamaican since Rodriguez tried it on Schevchenkov back in 92.


you're not good enough for chess jokes.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 24, 2012)

discokermit said:


> you're not good enough for chess jokes.



No, you're probably right...then again, it wasn't really a chess joke; more of a riff on made-up bullshit terminology. There again, chess is notorious for its rank misogyny. How many women are in the top 100 ranked players?...exactly. Pure fuckin discrimination.
In fact, even mentioning chess in a public forum is akin to announcing membership of the patriarchy's inner circle.

 So check your privilege mate....see what I did there?...what was that you were saying?...something about, erm...can't do chess jokes?

How'd ya feel now?


----------



## discokermit (Dec 24, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> No, you're probably right...then again, it wasn't really a chess joke; more of a riff on made-up bullshit terminology. There again, chess is notorious for its rank misogyny. How many women are in the top 100 ranked players?...exactly. Pure fuckin discrimination.
> In fact, even mentioning chess in a public forum is akin to announcing membership of the patriarchy's inner circle.
> 
> So check your privilege mate....see what I did there?...what was that you were saying?...something about, erm...can't do chess jokes?
> ...


yeh, that's a little bit better, as you've turned it into a politics joke, which you're a bit more conversant with. moral of the story: stick to what you know.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 24, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Doesn't matter. The BlackJamaican is easily countered by the Transverse Latvian Defence or the Bolivian Shuffle. No serious player has opened with the BlackJamaican since Rodriguez tried it on Schevchenkov back in 92.


Mornington Crescent!


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 24, 2012)

discokermit said:


> yeh, that's a little bit better, as you've turned it into a politics joke, which you're a bit more conversant with. moral of the story: stick to what you know.



Not sure about that tbh. What would the Internet look like if everyone stuck to what they knew? It'd be a lot less entertaining...and who'd have even heard of Laurie Penny? She'd be writing an obscure little blog about kittens, cupcakes and tie-died headbands.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 24, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Mornington Crescent!



Illegal move. The Bolivian shuffle involves opening with the queen's pawn gambit then closing the District line. So you'd have to go via Gloucester Road then take a bus to Blackfriars before sacrificing your bishop.


----------



## discokermit (Dec 24, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Not sure about that tbh. What would the Internet look like if everyone stuck to what they knew?


it'd be great.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 24, 2012)

discokermit said:


> it'd be great.


 
I dunno about that, I'd never get to post anything ever


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 24, 2012)

discokermit said:


> it'd be great.



And a very quick read.


----------



## love detective (Dec 25, 2012)

Update from Dave (our dave, not their dave)

No surprise that she retreats when confronted with some substance



> UPDATE
> 
> In case any of you are wondering why the debate on here appears to have ground to a halt, here's why... After Laurie Penny posted her response (see above), she then blocked herself from using this site. She informed me of this in reply to an e-mail I sent saying I'd responded in some length to her points. She said that if I wanted her to read my response, it would have to be sent by e-mail – this was duly done. Her reply to my response was patchy and completely avoided the core issues I'd raised with her regarding my experience in the IWCA and how that informed the writing of the article on multiculturalism. On that basis, I concluded that there was no point in banging my head against a brick wall by continuing the 'dialogue' with her. For the record, this is the last e-mail I sent her:
> 
> ...


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> No surprise that she retreats when confronted with some substance


 
Given her basic lack thereof, I'd agree with you.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 25, 2012)

Got to admit what she's done there is pretty clever - used the whole identity politics/privilege discourse to set the agenda, individualizing everything, so that rather than discussing the actual issues Dave is reduced to having to point out why and how he is less privileged than Laurie. The arguments can't stand on their own merit - you have to be 'speaking as a'.

It means that rather than anything serious actually getting discussed we just get an 'I'm considerably more oppressed than you' discussion. I therefore propose that we set up a privilege scoring system, so that immediately upon meeting someone you can compare scores and if they're more privileged than you then you can demand that they accept your arguments since the less privileged one must by definition be correct.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 25, 2012)

love detective said:


> Update from Dave (our dave, not their dave)
> 
> No surprise that she retreats when confronted with some substance


As weepiper said earlier in the thread (think it was weepiper) - we're all clear where we stand now aren't we?

(I think we were before this thread to be honest, but to see such real life conformation is cheering)


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 25, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Got to admit what she's done there is pretty clever - used the whole identity politics/privilege discourse to set the agenda, individualizing everything, so that rather than discussing the actual issues Dave is reduced to having to point out why and how he is less privileged than Laurie. The arguments can't stand on their own merit - you have to be 'speaking as a'.
> 
> It means that rather than anything serious actually getting discussed we just get an 'I'm considerably more oppressed than you' discussion. I therefore propose that we set up a privilege scoring system, so that immediately upon meeting someone you can compare scores and if they're more privileged than you then you can demand that they accept your arguments since the less privileged one must by definition be correct.


I reckon we should get back to pulling her inadequate articles and activity apart. A practical critique of her understanding.

Happy xmas David Lammy.


----------



## smokedout (Dec 26, 2012)

Penny's future

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/26/my-inner-anarchist-lost-out-bourgeois


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 26, 2012)




----------



## elbows (Dec 26, 2012)

Ah I just posted that to the Guardian thread. Its 'special' indeed, and it would be spiffing to see Penny Posture respond to it.

Emblazon your bras with nine A stars, fret about the men who steal from cars.
Sharpen your pen and you'll go far, I think someone spunked in my caviar.


----------



## barney_pig (Dec 26, 2012)

"Fucking hippies! We're going to bum you in your tents"


----------



## smokedout (Dec 26, 2012)

I like him


----------



## Firky (Dec 26, 2012)

Not Laura Barnett but someone who's even shitter, Ellie May (loves to lunch with darlings) who declares solidarity with the ASLEF but has no idea why.



> Much #solidarity to ASLEF union today. Striking for decent pay - a commendable way to spend Boxing Day.


 


> @MissEllieMae um. No we're not. We want boxing day with our families. The pay request is high so it gets refused.


 


> @severedelays you're saying you deliberately put in for pay that would get refused so you could go on strike and be at home?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 26, 2012)

Seen your trouble-making.  Lusty does it better. 

She likes having a 'lovely time' with 'darlings,' doesn't she.


----------



## Firky (Dec 26, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Seen your trouble-making. Lusty does it better.
> 
> She likes having a 'lovely time' with 'darlings,' doesn't she.


 

She's obsessed with it.




> Had lunch with @giles_fraser. Tourist comes over and innocently asks him "Excuse me, do you know the way to St Paul's?"


 


> @WillardFoxton are we lunching darling?


 
"lunching darling"

fuckin' hell


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 26, 2012)

She called Owen Jones darling a few days ago.


----------



## Firky (Dec 26, 2012)

.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 26, 2012)




----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 26, 2012)

or 'St' Owen Jones as we now have to call him since he made IDS get a bit areated on tele.


----------



## Firky (Dec 26, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


>



It is boxing day and I am getting myself wound up by knobs like Jonnie Marbles calling for automation of the tube to stop strikes.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 26, 2012)

Why did he mean by that? Overpaid wankers? He did some horrendously disingenuous backtracking and said he meant the bosses should be automated, not the workers, but that wouldn't make sense, would it?


----------



## Firky (Dec 26, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Why did he mean by that? Overpaid wankers? He did some horrendously disingenuous backtracking and said he meant the bosses should be automated, not the workers, but that wouldn't make sense, would it?



Because he has to get the bus.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Dec 26, 2012)

firky said:


> Because he has to get the bus.


----------



## Firky (Dec 26, 2012)

Best gif ever


----------



## Treacle Toes (Dec 26, 2012)

firky said:


> Best gif ever


 
I am more than a bit in love with it, feels almost dirty to admit that. It's like a embarressing old crush that hits the spot regardless.

/feminism
/privilege


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 26, 2012)

Rutita1 said:


> I am more than a bit in love with it, feels almost dirty to admit that. It's like a embarressing old crush that hits the spot regardless.
> 
> /feminism
> /priviledge


Check your privilege


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 26, 2012)

firky said:


> Because he has to get the bus.


 
Same on the fucking TV news, wankers whining little kids who've had their lollipops nicked, because they had to take a bus. Boo-fucking-hoo, you cunts!


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 26, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Same on the fucking TV news, wankers whining little kids who've had their lollipops nicked, because they had to take a bus. Boo-fucking-hoo, you cunts!


I know - so many people use the bus every day, all over the country, it's hardly a big deal. Or do only poor people use the bus now, because I didn't get the memo about this...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 26, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> I know - so many people use the bus every day, all over the country, it's hardly a big deal. Or do only poor people use the bus now, because I didn't get the memo about this...


 
I think half these arsewipes believe Thatcher's old dictum about "only people who have failed take buses".
Fuck 'em all with a conger eel!


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 26, 2012)

Well I love buses. Some of the most memorable and formative moments in my life have taken place on buses. I should use them more. These days it's generally when I go to the pub after work and get pissed on my all too frequent 'bad days',  then have to catch the bus home.  Just got back home on the bus.  

Here's what a misogynist I am; I'm gonna slag off the mother-in-law.

If you got a handful of cotton wool, put it on a table, put a biggish encyclopaedia on top, stacked a palette of bricks on top of that, left it for a year then got it out and put it between two pieces of polystyrene, you'd have a virtual clone of the turkey sandwich she handed me earlier...and I fuckin told her so. Cue me standing at the bus stop in the rain...managed to grab a bottle of brandy on the way out...sister in law slips me a spliff...happy fuckin days...staunch bunch of punters on the bus...Christmas type bonhomie prevails.

adeste fideles...no pasaran


----------



## wtfftw (Dec 26, 2012)

I can't afford the tube.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 26, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> I think half these arsewipes believe Thatcher's old dictum about "only people who have failed take buses".
> Fuck 'em all with a conger eel!


As I don't drive, the only way to get to work is to liftshare or the bus + a short walk. No liftshare at the moment so bus it is. I'm a failure in that I'm not the CEO of a multinational corporation, but fuck it, I really don't want Thatcher thinking I'm a success because that means I've probably royally shafted many, many people.


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 26, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> As I don't drive, the only way to get to work is to liftshare or the bus + a short walk. No liftshare at the moment so bus it is. I'm a failure in that I'm not the CEO of a multinational corporation, but fuck it, I really don't want Thatcher thinking I'm a success because that means I've probably royally shafted many, many people.


 

TBF she was only talking about men who were 26 who should account themselves as failures if they took the bus. So either get yersel a chauffeur or hitch a ride with the likes of Paul Daniels, you'll like it, not a lot! etc


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 26, 2012)

wtfftw said:


> I can't afford the tube.


i don't even live near a tube


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 26, 2012)

Buckaroo said:


> TBF she was only talking about men who were 26 who should account themselves as failures if they took the bus. So either get yersel a chauffeur or hitch a ride with the likes of Paul Daniels, you'll like it, not a lot! etc


I'm neither a man nor 26, so I guess I'm ok. A chauffeur would be awesome, but extortionate, given that I do have a disability and would love to be driven to work every day.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 26, 2012)

wtfftw said:


> I can't afford the tube.


Same here, most of the time.


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 26, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> I'm neither a man nor 26, so I guess I'm ok. A chauffeur would be awesome, but extortionate, given that I do have a disability and would love to be driven to work every day.


 
I'd say we're just about all failures by Thatch's doctrine. What you should do is become a CEO, become RICH!


----------



## Firky (Dec 26, 2012)

Buckaroo said:


> TBF she was only talking about men who were 26 who should account themselves as failures if they took the bus. So either get yersel a chauffeur or hitch a ride with the likes of Paul Daniels, you'll like it, not a lot! etc



Jonnie Marbles is a 26 year old female?


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 26, 2012)

thanks to @Frankie Jack for directing me to the latest 'M' update.. 



> Was just contacted by 'M', to whom I wrote this letter two weeks ago http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2012/12/you-are-not-scrounger-letter-disabled-reader …. He's doing better and being looked after  #*phew*
> 
> 4:04 PM - 26 Dec 12


----------



## love detective (Dec 26, 2012)

wonder if she had a 'productive' discussion with him like she tried to pretend she did with Dave


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 26, 2012)

love detective said:


> wonder if she had a 'productive' discussion with him like she tried to pretend she did with Dave


 
Obviously not. 'M' mailed her with suicidal intent and she showcased her credentials with a well publicised critique of the effects of austerity cuts on people with disabilities, ignoring the advice of professionals not to publish and had the audacity to sign off as 'Your friend'. This time she responds with 'Phew' (thank fuck he hasn't topped himself cos then I'd have a difficult time explaining my role in his death.)
She should have a 'productive' discussion with 'M' and at least sort the bloke out with some cash as financial problems seemed to be part of his difficulties. Then she could write a piece about how she saved his life.


----------



## Firky (Dec 26, 2012)

tufty79 said:


> thanks to @Frankie Jack for directing me to the latest 'M' update..



You couldn't c&p it could you? Website isn't loading here for some reason.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 26, 2012)

firky said:


> You couldn't c&p it could you? Website isn't loading here for some reason.


 
"Was just contacted by 'M', to whom I wrote this letter two weeks ago http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2012/12/you-are-not-scrounger-letter-disabled-reader …. He's doing better and being looked after  #*phew*

4:04 PM - 26 Dec 12"


----------



## Firky (Dec 26, 2012)

Ah, that explains it 

Brain fart, carry on.


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 26, 2012)

apparently she didn't call the police _herself_ in the first place because she was in the usa. i didn't realise their telephone systems were down for a bit.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 26, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Fuck 'em all with a conger eel!


 
I'll see your conger ell, and raise you ramming a lionfish up their arses:


----------



## smokedout (Dec 27, 2012)

tbf something like that happened to me recently and whilst i stayed in touch with the person i didnt contact the police, it was difficult to know what to do, but if there's no immediate threat there isn't much the police can do and the person concerned was already in touch with mental health services

the last people i even considered contacting were the fucking samaritans and it never remotely occurred to me to turn it into a piece for my blog


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 27, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> I'll see your conger ell, and raise you ramming a lionfish up their arses:


 
I see your lionfish and raise you a porcupine:


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 27, 2012)

A lionfish trumps a porcupine every time!


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 27, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> A lionfish trumps a porcupine every time!


It most certainly does not.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 27, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> It most certainly does not.


It does! Way more painful


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 27, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> It does! Way more painful


How is a lionfish more painful than a _porcupine, _ffs?


----------



## Meltingpot (Dec 27, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> How is a lionfish more painful than a _porcupine, _ffs?


 
Poison injected from the spines.

I don't really know about lionfish, but a stonefish sting is extremely painful, almost certainly more so than a porcupine - because its spines inject poison when they penetrate the skin, and I'd guess the same is true of lionfish too,


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 27, 2012)

Cos of its venom.
I think in the animal kingdom, only the box jellyfish is more painful.
Porcupine quills will only hurt where they penetrate. They're not venomous.
ETA: I may have been thinking of the stonefish Meltingpot mentioned, but the point still stands


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 27, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> How is a lionfish more painful than a _porcupine, _ffs?


 
Clipped from: http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2002-11/jf/feature/index.php



*The Effects*

Again, while stories of death by lionfish are common, it has been impossible for me to find a single documented case of such after an extensive search of medical literature. Other authors have reported the same results. This does not mean that it has never happened, but it implies that death by lionfish is exceptionally rare or unrecognized. It may in fact be limited only to those victims that might display some sort of allergic reaction, or to those that suffer from a fatal infection related to the wound.

Conversely, in the vast majority of cases, the predominant effects of a sting are nothing more than severe pain and swelling (edema) in the area around the puncture. Some victims have experienced systematic responses such as nausea, dizziness, muscle weakness, shortness of breath, hypotension, and headache brought on by the venom, or as a reaction to the level of pain, or both, but that's about it. In the worst of cases when medical treatment has been administered, some blistering and/or tissue loss (necrosis) has been experienced in the wound area, but this is very uncommon.


That's what happens with external stings. The effects of someone taking a (presumably extreme) dislike to someone else and ramming a lionfish up their trumpet are probably somewhat more unpleasant.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 27, 2012)

@bakunin

In that case, I raise you a Portugese Man'O War:



From the wikipedia article:


> The stinging, venom-filled nematocysts[13] in the tentacles of the Portuguese man o' war can paralyze small fish and other prey. Detached tentacles and dead specimens (including those that wash up on shore) can sting just as painfully as the live creature in the water and may remain potent for hours or even days after the death of the creature or the detachment of the tentacle.[14]
> 
> Stings usually cause severe pain to humans, leaving whip-like, red welts on the skin that normally last 2 or 3 days after the initial sting, though the pain should subside after about an hour. However, the venom can travel to the lymph nodes and may cause, depending on the amount of venom, a more intense pain.[citation needed] A sting may lead to an allergic reaction. There can also be serious effects, including fever, shock, and interference with heart and lung function. Stings may also cause death,[15] although this is extremely rare. Medical attention may be necessary, especially if pain persists or is intense, there is an extreme reaction, the rash worsens, a feeling of overall illness develops, a red streak develops between swollen lymph nodes and the sting, or either area becomes red, warm and tender.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 27, 2012)

I raise you a bullet ant. End of contest.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...an-tried-150-different-varieties-science.html


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 27, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> I raise you a bullet ant. End of contest.
> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...an-tried-150-different-varieties-science.html


But can you die from that? Portuguese Man'O War wins otherwise.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 27, 2012)

I raise you both my mum's dog - been eating leftover sprouts and stuffing for 3 days now and she's absolutely lethal!


----------



## tufty79 (Dec 27, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> I raise you both my mum's dog - been eating leftover sprouts and stuffing for 3 days now and she's absolutely lethal!


i might eat a load of 'diabetic' chocolate and volunteer...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 27, 2012)

When my cousin was on morphine after a motorbike accident and laxatives weren't helping that stuff was the only thing that could relieve his constipation.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 27, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> But can you die from that? Portuguese Man'O War wins otherwise.


pain is the key factor here not lethality


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 27, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> A lionfish trumps a porcupine every time!


 
Ah, but does it trump a stonefish?


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 27, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Ah, but does it trump a stonefish?


Do keep up


----------



## spawnofsatan (Dec 27, 2012)

Blue ringed octopus


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 27, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> It does! Way more painful


 
Problem is that it's often quickly fatal.
So, I have to ask: are you in favour of giving these people an easy death, or summat?


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 27, 2012)

Lionfish rarely kill 
This is way better than dissecting Penny's arsedribblings


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 27, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> But can you die from that? Portuguese Man'O War wins otherwise.


 
Why would you want them to die when their pain can be exquisitely drawn-out?


----------



## elbows (Dec 27, 2012)

For some reason I believe this vicious beast is more appropriate for the subjects of this thread.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 27, 2012)

This is like some documentary on Bravo..."Deadliest...something or other"

What's next? ...
Grizzly Bear V Tiger?...Superman v Jesus? 
Laurie Penny v Reality?


----------



## Red Storm (Dec 27, 2012)

The scientist who tested stings to compare rates the bullet ant.


----------



## Badgers (Dec 27, 2012)

Red Storm said:
			
		

> The scientist who tested stings to compare rates the bullet ant.



He chose a strange calling.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 27, 2012)

Godspeed you, painscienceguy


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 27, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Why would you want them to die when their pain can be exquisitely drawn-out?


Because it take a long time for them to die. It is not a quick death.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 27, 2012)

The Boats is the worst way to die i reckon. I think the Sumerians or some other ancient civilisation practised it.
You get tied between two boats and covered in honey, then the insects come and eat you.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 27, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Because it take a long time for them to die. It is not a quick death.


 
Fair enough then!

(takes eqg's name off of "the list")


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 27, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> The Boats is the worst way to die i reckon. I think the Sumerians or some other ancient civilisation practised it.
> You get tied between two boats and covered in honey, then the insects come and eat you.


 
That's if a wandering honey badger doesn't scent you!


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 27, 2012)

Fuck, it's worse than I remember:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaphism


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 27, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Fuck, it's worse than I remember:
> http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaphism


My, that is bad.

We're almost benevolent in comparison.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 27, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Fair enough then!
> 
> (takes eqg's name off of "the list")


I was the LIST!!!!!! 

Now that's just mean, VP.


----------



## Firky (Dec 27, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Fuck, it's worse than I remember:
> http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaphism


 
Sounds like a German club.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 27, 2012)

firky said:


> Sounds like a German club.


A very alternative club.


----------



## Firky (Dec 27, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> A very alternative club.


Privileged gentleman's club.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 27, 2012)

firky said:


> Privileged gentleman's club.


I think those are very expensive.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 27, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Ah, but does it trump a stonefish?


 
Toadfish beats Stonefish.


----------



## Superdupastupor (Dec 28, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Fuck, it's worse than I remember:
> http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaphism


 
History is the autobiography of a mad man.


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 28, 2012)

Quick question: was the New Statesman always anti-union, or is the current ban on the NUJ there relatively recent?


----------



## Treacle Toes (Dec 28, 2012)

Superdupastupor said:


> History is the autobiography of a mad man.


 
'History'...is at best a geneology....more than one exists


----------



## cesare (Dec 28, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> Quick question: was the New Statesman always anti-union, or is the current ban on the NUJ there relatively recent?


They can't ban the NUJ by the way. They can only refuse to voluntarily recognise them, and it's now open to the NUJ to attempt the involuntary recognition route via the CAC.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Dec 28, 2012)

http://thuraltmedia.blogspot.com/2012/12/blundering-into-political-minefield.html

A good follow up post.


----------



## cesare (Dec 28, 2012)

Bit weird what he's saying about the "anarchist movement" though. As far as I could see, the ones I'm aware of were hardly queuing up to support LP and some went out of their way to say so. Some of them actually on this thread. Plus, I'm still not convinced that Privilege Theory has been taken up wholesale by anarchist groups and AFEDs stance (for example) is far from clear. I wonder if Dave thinks all anarchists are like LP.


----------



## love detective (Dec 28, 2012)

cesare said:


> Bit weird what he's saying about the "anarchist movement" though. As far as I could see, the ones I'm aware of were hardly queuing up to support LP and some went out of their way to say so. Some of them actually on this thread. Plus, I'm still not convinced that Privilege Theory has been taken up wholesale by anarchist groups and AFEDs stance (for example) is far from clear. I wonder if Dave thinks all anarchists are like LP.


 
he's only talking about 'certain sections' of the anarchist movement, not all of them

since leaving the IWCA he's been involved with things like WAG, ALARM, etc.. and has become much more supportive of anarchism in general

so it's self criticism from an involved point of view pretty much, not a general misconception of things as a result of distance from it (like penny does!)


----------



## cesare (Dec 28, 2012)

love detective said:


> he's only talking about 'certain sections' of the anarchist movement, not all of them
> 
> since leaving the IWCA he's been involved with things like WAG, ALARM, etc.. and has become much more supportive of anarchism in general
> 
> so it's self criticism from an involved point of view pretty much, not a general misconception of things as a result of distance from it (like penny does!)


Ta, ld. That makes more sense now you explain it. It's not really how it comes across in that article though.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 28, 2012)

cesare said:


> Bit weird what he's saying about the "anarchist movement" though. As far as I could see, the ones I'm aware of were hardly queuing up to support LP and some went out of their way to say so. Some of them actually on this thread. Plus, I'm still not convinced that Privilege Theory has been taken up wholesale by anarchist groups and AFEDs stance (for example) is far from clear. I wonder if Dave thinks all anarchists are like LP.


Good old Laura, the Labour-supporting anarchist!


----------



## cesare (Dec 28, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Good old Laura, the Labour-supporting anarchist!


Didn't butchers say she's a bloody LibDem now or summat?  in any event, she's clearly not read the bit about electoral politics


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 28, 2012)

cesare said:


> Didn't butchers say she's a bloody LibDem now or summat?  in any event, she's clearly not read the bit about electoral politics


 
She's all over the place! In the run-up to the election she was Lib-Dem, only to mysteriously swap over to Labour and claim that she'd *always* supported Labour when it became obvious the Yellow Tories were going to go into coalition with the Blue Tories, not the red Tories.


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 28, 2012)

cesare said:


> They can't ban the NUJ by the way. They can only refuse to voluntarily recognise them, and it's now open to the NUJ to attempt the involuntary recognition route via the CAC.


 
So the NS was unionised in the past, then?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 28, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Good old Laura, the Labour-supporting anarchist!


 
lots of anarchists have at least voted Labour at various times though, which is support of a kind.

Laura did vote Libdem in 2010 but is clearly back in the Labour fold now.


----------



## cesare (Dec 28, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> She's all over the place! In the run-up to the election she was Lib-Dem, only to mysteriously swap over to Labour and claim that she'd *always* supported Labour when it became obvious the Yellow Tories were going to go into coalition with the Blue Tories, not the red Tories.




Ah, different sequence but same bloody outcome to all intents and purposes. I must admit I'd never paid her much attention til recently, but has she ever stated that she's an anarchist? I thought she described herself as an activist which is often very different cf Occupy


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 28, 2012)

'Anarchist' is what hippies are called these days.

Apologies to any actual anarchists.


----------



## cesare (Dec 28, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> So the NS was unionised in the past, then?


No idea tbh.  But if the NUJ tried the CAC route before when the last row took place, they have to wait 3 years before making another application. I did skim-trawl back through all the CAC decisions back to approx 2008 but an application from the NUJ wasn't immediately apparent, so maybe they've never tried to force the issue.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 28, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> lots of anarchists have at least voted Labour at various times though, which is support of a kind.


 
Really? Take a poll, did you?  



> Laura did vote Libdem in 2010 but is clearly back in the Labour fold now.


 
And pretending to have never been smitten by the liberal-democratic virus. The minx.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 28, 2012)

cesare said:


> No idea tbh. But if the NUJ tried the CAC route before when the last row took place, they have to wait 3 years before making another application. I did skim-trawl back through all the CAC decisions back to approx 2008 but an application from the NUJ wasn't immediately apparent, so maybe they've never tried to force the issue.


 
I don't believe they have been to arbitration over this


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 28, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Really? Take a poll, did you?


 
I have spoken to quite a few who have voted Labour at various times and say they would again in various circumstances.

I can't recall LP ever calling herself an anarchist for that matter.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 28, 2012)

cesare said:


> Ah, different sequence but same bloody outcome to all intents and purposes. I must admit I'd never paid her much attention til recently, but has she ever stated that she's an anarchist? I thought she described herself as an activist which is often very different cf Occupy


 
She's occasionally self-described as an anarcho-/anarcha-feminist


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 28, 2012)

cesare said:


> I wonder if Dave thinks all anarchists are like LP.


 
He'd be the biggest cunt on the planet if he thought that, even for a moment


----------



## cesare (Dec 28, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I don't believe they have been to arbitration over this


I'd be interested to know why not (if anyone knows).


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 28, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> 'Anarchist' is what hippies are called these days.
> 
> Apologies to any actual anarchists.


 
lol


----------



## cesare (Dec 28, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> She's occasionally self-described as an anarcho-/anarcha-feminist


Christ


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 28, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I have spoken to quite a few who have voted Labour at various times and say they would again in various circumstances.


 
I'm trying my best not to chortle at your tbaldwinesque response of "quite a few". 



> I can't recall LP ever calling herself an anarchist for that matter.


 
She hasn't, only as anarcho-thingummies. Easier to claim at a later date that you didn't mean you were an anarchist, just that you found the ideas of anarchism appealing (as some copper had it).


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 28, 2012)

also shes the anarcho queer sex mafia or something


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 28, 2012)

cesare said:


> Christ


 
Doesn't mean she is. By their philosophy shall ye know them, and as far as Laura's philosophy goes, it seems to be "feed me! Feed me your stories so that I can represent them as moments of struggle!".


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 28, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> also shes the anarcho queer sex mafia or something


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 28, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> also shes the anarcho queer sex mafia or something


 
I think that just means she swings every which way from the chandelier.


----------



## Firky (Dec 28, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> She's occasionally self-described as an anarcho-/anarcha-feminist


 
A gentlewoman of fortune.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 28, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> I'm trying my best not to chortle at your tbaldwinesque response of "quite a few".


 
I have probably spoken to more than you have


----------



## Firky (Dec 28, 2012)

> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> All this speculation on the death of Thatcher is a little premature, given that we haven't found even half the horcruxes yet.
> Retweeted 425 times


 
What's a horcrux? 







Maybe not but what about class?


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 28, 2012)

Just stumbled across this parody - https://twitter.com/lauriefacts

Shame it hasn't tweeted in over a year


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 28, 2012)




----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 28, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I have probably spoken to more than you have


 
That's nice for you, dear.


----------



## love detective (Dec 28, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I can't recall LP ever calling herself an anarchist for that matter.


 
you should have a word with sovietpop, she's invited her to speak at the dublin anarchist bootsale


----------



## Firky (Dec 28, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I have spoken to quite a few who have voted Labour at various times and say they would again in various circumstances.
> 
> I can't recall LP ever calling herself an anarchist for that matter.


 
I have!



> This is the Anarchist Lesbian Mod look. Jacket by Charity Shop. Badge by Solfed. Thousand-yard-stare by Writing. twitpic.com/agz385


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 28, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> That's nice for you, dear.



The point is you are quite wrong about voting, Labour, and anarchism.

You should probably stick to what you know, like guns and stuff.


----------



## Firky (Dec 28, 2012)

love detective said:


> you should have a word with sovietpop, she's invited her to speak at the dublin anarchist bootsale


 
Sovietpop's sound though?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 28, 2012)

firky said:


> I have!



That's just a look, not an ideological position.


----------



## love detective (Dec 28, 2012)

firky said:


> Sovietpop's sound though?


 
exactly, which makes you think she doesn't know much about her, hence the word


----------



## love detective (Dec 28, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> That's just a look, not an ideological position.


 
that's as deep as you get with her though, a look


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 28, 2012)

firky said:


> What's a horcrux?


 
Something that stores part of someone's soul. Concept created by JK Rowling in the Harry Potter books:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horcrux#Horcruxes


----------



## Firky (Dec 28, 2012)

love detective said:


> exactly, which makes you think she doesn't know much about her, hence the word


 
Ahh, got you now.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 28, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> The point is you are quite wrong about voting, Labour, and anarchism.
> 
> You should probably stick to what you know, like guns and stuff.


 
Post of the fuckin' year


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 28, 2012)

I reckon this thread should die, fuck LP, we got Spanks instead


----------



## Greebo (Dec 28, 2012)

firky said:


> What's a horcrux? <snip>


It's a JK Rowling term for an object you hide your soul or life force in so that you can survive mortal injury to your body, as long as the object is intact, that is (she didn't invent the idea - it features in some very old folk tales).


----------



## Firky (Dec 28, 2012)

> lauriepenny was last seen: Wednesday at 10:44 PM


 
Still checking the thread on Boxing Day. How big is that fucking ego!


----------



## love detective (Dec 28, 2012)

in her pj's


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 28, 2012)

Greebo said:


> It's a JK Rowling term for an object you hide your soul or life force in so that you can survive mortal injury to your body, as long as the object is intact, that is (she didn't invent the idea - it features in some very old folk tales).


 
Laurie Penny is Noel Edmonds!


----------



## Greebo (Dec 28, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Laurie Penny is Noel Edmonds!


Deal, or no deal?


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 28, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Deal, or no deal?


 
Ooooo...Deal!


----------



## Firky (Dec 28, 2012)

Actually that one is below the belt even for me


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Dec 28, 2012)

love detective said:


> in her pj's



In firky's dreams


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 28, 2012)

Greebo said:


> It's a JK Rowling term for an object you hide your soul or life force in so that you can survive mortal injury to your body, as long as the object is intact, that is (she didn't invent the idea - it features in some very old folk tales).


More importantly, how does one obtain a horcrux? It could be handy to have one...


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 28, 2012)

firky said:


> Actually that one is below the belt even for me


Bad firky.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 28, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Deal, or no deal?


 
_The Late, Late Vuelos De La Muerte_


----------



## Firky (Dec 28, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Bad firky.


 
There is some truth in what I said though, she ignored the advice of several mental health professionals.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 28, 2012)

firky said:


> There is some truth in what I said though, she ignored the advice of several mental health professionals.


You're right, she did - for an article. 

What has she done since in the name of disability activism?


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 28, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> _The Late, Late Vuelos De La Muerte_


 
That comes up in top spot on a google search


----------



## Firky (Dec 28, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> You're right, she did - for an article.
> 
> What has she done since in the name of disability activism?


 
Coined a couple of hashtags?


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 28, 2012)

firky said:


> Coined a couple of hashtags?


I'm sure she's singlehandedly changed the plight of those with disabilities in the UK then.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 28, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> I'm sure she's singlehandedly changed the plight of those with disabilities in the UK then.


 
Yep! Hadn't you heard?


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 28, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Yep! Hadn't you heard?


No, didn't get that twitter communique. My bad. I hang my head in shame.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 29, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> That comes up in top spot on a google search


Congratulations Mr Bishie, you won a prize for posting the 10,000th post (above) on this thread.

I don't know what the prize is but I'm sure LP will personally present it to you


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 29, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Congratulations Mr Bishie, you won a prize for posting the 10,000th post (above) on this thread.
> 
> I don't know what the prize is but I'm sure LP will personally present it to you


 
Woohoo! 

She asked me to delete a photo that I took once - on a demo in Brighton!

But here's one I took earlier, with rollie attitude!


----------



## elbows (Dec 29, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


>


 
Argh I forgot all about her! Could have been vaguely interesting if she hadnt imploded so quickly, although Im not entirely sure how well I remember that trainwreck tv.


----------



## cesare (Dec 29, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> The point is you are quite wrong about voting, Labour, and anarchism.
> 
> You should probably stick to what you know, like guns and stuff.


To be fair, active participation in electoral politics will always be a compromise (and/or machiavellian) position for anarchists. How could it be otherwise? That's not to say that there aren't good reasons for occasionally doing so especially at local rather than national level, but it's more of a Marx/anarchist hybrid. I can see why many anarchists would just reject it entirely, iyswim.

And in the context of discussing LP's flim-flamming between one reformist (at best) statist party to another, it seems entirely reasonable (to me) to question whether she's an anarchist *at all* of whatever flavour.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 29, 2012)

cesare said:


> And in the context of discussing LP's flim-flamming between one reformist (at best) statist party to another, it seems entirely reasonable (to me) to question whether she's an anarchist *at all* of whatever flavour.



She's an anarchist, in the sense that she tends to readily support movements whose only unifying feature is a hash tag. Apparently this makes  them 'non- hierarchical', inclusive and demotic; or so she claims. This notion relies on the conceit that we're witnessing a new phenomena of 'web dissent'...which seems to involve a bunch of middle class faux-radicals trying to look committed by competing to post the wittiest and hippest slogans which proclaim their life-long resistance to bourgeois capitalism. 
This suits her down to the ground. The emphasis on the lack of structure or hierarchy saves her from ever having to endorse or commit to a definite position or policy and gives her the opportunity to remain perpetually in opposition to whatever she wants while promoting her 'work' and log-rolling on behalf of other wonderfully 'talented' activists. We see this, and particularly her lack of traditional politics, when she is called upon to defend or justify a stance. Her approach takes two typical forms: scream "racist!"; scream "misogynist"

That this whole enterprise is basically an attempt at the viral marketing of a small collective of deluded, pointless and apolitical 'creatives' seems lost on her...and her admirers. Equally absent is any acknowledgement of the enormous irony which allows her to monopolise the commentary through her access to the MSM while always stressing the lack of leadership or figureheads within these movements...the most she seems to do is suggest-in that gonzo self-depricating manner these people adopt- that her position, with due allowances for her privileged start in life, is ultimately down to her fromidible intelligence and talent.
I think the basic moves are: look out for a likely (and suitably hip and wholesome) campaign; appropriate; cash in.

If any of this is a 'flavour of anarchism', I'd suggest umami. Either that or something that relies on E numbers and a group of diners who've failed to spot the empress at the top of the table is butt-naked.


----------



## Firky (Dec 29, 2012)

oh ronnie...



elbows said:


> Argh I forgot all about her! Could have been vaguely interesting if she hadnt imploded so quickly, although Im not entirely sure how well I remember that trainwreck tv.


 
Is that Obama stood behind her (Kitten wasn't it?)?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 29, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Woohoo!
> 
> She asked me to delete a photo that I took once - on a demo in Brighton!
> 
> But here's one I took earlier, with rollie attitude!


 
Another thing I don't get about the trendies - why on earth would anyone in their right mind who can afford to buy straights smoke roll ups?


----------



## cesare (Dec 29, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Another thing I don't get about the trendies - why on earth would anyone in their right mind who can afford to buy straights smoke roll ups?


Fewer chemicals and don't stink as much?


----------



## ReturnOfElfman (Dec 29, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Another thing I don't get about the trendies - why on earth would anyone in their right mind who can afford to buy straights smoke roll ups?


 
They're better?


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 29, 2012)

its a blatant affectation. Even lezzard is on the cutters choice- why not go whole hog and forgo the oysters and vodka and instead swap it for luncheon meat and tins of Ace cider


----------



## Blagsta (Dec 29, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Another thing I don't get about the trendies - why on earth would anyone in their right mind who can afford to buy straights smoke roll ups?


they taste better


----------



## redsquirrel (Dec 29, 2012)

Blagsta said:


> they taste better


Yep, sorry SN I think you're talking tripe on this.


----------



## JimW (Dec 29, 2012)

Top improvement to my quality of life (sad to relate ) in 2012 was finding a place in Beijing I could get a regular supply of rolling baccy rather than the horrible straights.


----------



## ReturnOfElfman (Dec 29, 2012)

JimW said:


> Top improvement to my quality of life (sad to relate ) in 2012 was finding a place in Beijing I could get a regular supply of rolling baccy rather than the horrible straights.


I noticed that they're hard to find on the mainland but seem to see loads of people in Hong Kong smoking rollies (well all the anarcho types I hung around with down there anyway)


----------



## kavenism (Dec 29, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> She's an anarchist, in the sense that she tends to readily support movements whose only unifying feature is a hash tag. Apparently this makes them 'non- hierarchical', inclusive and demotic; or so she claims. This notion relies on the conceit that we're witnessing a new phenomena of 'web dissent'...which seems to involve a bunch of middle class faux-radicals trying to look committed by competing to post the wittiest and hippest slogans which proclaim their life-long resistance to bourgeois capitalism.


 
It's easy to be non-hierarchical when you have absolutely no power or influence whatsoever. Mediocrity is a great leveller.


----------



## Firky (Dec 29, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Another thing I don't get about the trendies - why on earth would anyone in their right mind who can afford to buy straights smoke roll ups?


 
Taste nicer, less harmful (?) and it's also cheaper. They're all at it


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 29, 2012)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> The point is you are quite wrong about voting, Labour, and anarchism.


 
The point is that you claim to know "considerably more anarchists that voted Labour than yow!". I'm merely making the point that *your* experience doesn't necessarily translate to a trend. _Capisce_?



> You should probably stick to what you know, like guns and stuff.


 
Not bad, as condescension goes, but a little bit lazy with the "and stuff" comment. You'd do such much better if you applied yourself. I'm going to have to give you a "B" for this term. Now pull yourself together. We both know you're capable of an "A+".


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 29, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Laurie Penny is Noel Edmonds!


 
Not yet, Bish. Not yet.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 29, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> More importantly, how does one obtain a horcrux? It could be handy to have one...


 
According to J.K. Rowling, you have to kill someone. It's the only thing that can break the soul.
Then you imbue an object with that broken-off piece of your soul.

So, a decent reason for political assassination *besides* politics, then!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 29, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> You're right, she did - for an article.
> 
> What has she done since in the name of disability activism?


 
Hopefully, she'll read your comment and be cursed by the song "what have you done for me lately?" as an earworm.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Dec 29, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Another thing I don't get about the trendies - why on earth would anyone in their right mind who can afford to buy straights smoke roll ups?


 
It's a very trendy thing to do, they make you appear salt of the earth guvnor.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> Basically, it's the same people who buy organic bread.


Not entirely, I buy organic wholemeal when there's money to spare for it.  But not tobacco, rolling or otherwise.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 29, 2012)

Rollups stink even worse than normal fags


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Rollups stink even worse than normal fags


Particularly if the baccy's a bit old - but Drum and Camel are the worst smelling IME.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> Basically, it's the same people who buy organic bread.


 what if you make it yourself?


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> Oh.


How can I put this?  A lot of bread is eaten here.  My reasons are more to do with knowing about pesticide residues being higher in wholemeal, and being in a household with somebody who (being already sick) needs to avoid poisons where reasonable.  It's not about class or image.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> It's OK, I really don't mind that you buy organic bread. Or anybody else.


Whether you mind or not is irrelevant - just bear in mind that wanting to buy less harmful food is something which people on benefits want as much as anyone else.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Dec 29, 2012)

Greebo said:


> How can I put this? A lot of bread is eaten here. My reasons are more to do with knowing about pesticide residues being higher in wholemeal, and being in a household with somebody who (being already sick) needs to avoid poisons where reasonable. It's not about class or image.


 
It is for some people.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> It is for some people.


Lucky them, to have the choice.


Rocky Chevalier said:


> I never said they didn't. Lighten up.


Nor did I say that you did.  BTW love the irony of you telling me to lighten up.


----------



## JimW (Dec 29, 2012)

I will strenuously resist any revisionist attempts to paint my rolly smoking as a pose just because some horrible media types have joined in. I am the salt of the earth they want to be associated with, I'll have you know.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 29, 2012)

the thought of lezzard in his undercrackers eating a radish is still with me


----------



## JimW (Dec 29, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> the thought of lezzard in his undercrackers eating a radish is still with me


 




The horror! The horror!


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> It's amazing how little most people appreciate what fun you can have with pessimism.


So you wouldn't include yourself with "most people" then?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 29, 2012)

Roll ups are fucking horrible, they make me cough up brown snot and give me headaches.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> I never been like most people.<snip>


You wouldn't believe how many people say that; it's as common a phenomenon as people who describe themselves as mad turning out to be quite boring as well as sane.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> If you think you're the only sane person around, does that mean you're really mad? If so, it means all the idiots at work are sane.


'All the idiots at work'? Nice.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> If you think you're the only sane person around, does that mean you're really mad? If so, it means all the idiots at work are sane.


Quite possibly. As for "the idiots at work", it could be argued that those who are well-adjusted to an unhealthy or harmful environment (such as being exploited) to appear happy there must be maladapted.

This of course, doesn't apply to people who are happy working in a place where they are treated well, like the people they're working with, and who enjoy their work.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> You wouldn't think it was nice from where I'm standing.


I was being sarcastic. Your attitude is leaving a lot to be desired.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> Ever heard the term 'happy daft?'


No.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> Ever heard the term 'happy daft?'


Yes, but in reality it holds as much truth as a clown's painted on smile.


----------



## rekil (Dec 29, 2012)

lletsa back already?


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 29, 2012)

copliker said:


> lletsa back already?


Looks like it.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 29, 2012)

copliker said:


> lletsa back already?


 

cunningly he's changed his posting style and his obsessions in order to not get rumbled again. Oh wait, he hasn't.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> Figures.


How old are you, LLETSA?


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> Don't know about him, but I'm 50 next year. And fucking hating it.


Age is a state of mind - your physical condition is another story.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> I'm just gonna knock 15 years off my real age. Easily done for me.<snip>


Ethics aside for one moment, you may think you're in pretty good condition for your age but some things are a dead giveaway.  eg hands.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Dec 29, 2012)

Greebo said:


> Age is a state of mind - your physical condition is another story.


 
Sounds like the kind of thing people say when they don't like the fact they're getting old...


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Sounds like the kind of thing people say when they don't like the fact they're getting old...


Infer all you like.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> I can always wear gloves.


All the time? That's not weird at all.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> (I'm not actually going to do it.)


 
Gosh, really?


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 29, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> She's all over the place! In the run-up to the election she was Lib-Dem, only to mysteriously swap over to Labour and claim that she'd *always* supported Labour when it became obvious the Yellow Tories were going to go into coalition with the Blue Tories, not the red Tories.


 
'Yes, readers, these are my undiluted, unapologetic and entirely inviolate political principles!'

'But, if you don't like them (which might cost me my cushy media jobs and lucrative deals), I've got others...'


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> (I'm not actually going to do it.)


Nobody said that you were enough of a creep to do so.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> Do you think you might be taking all this a bit seriously?


I'm taking this as seriously as you are sweetie - no more, no less.


----------



## Firky (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> You can always tell you've riled a woman when she starts calling you sweetie.


 
And then there was a FIIIREFIGHT


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> You can always tell you've riled a woman when she starts calling you sweetie.


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> You can always tell you've riled a woman when she starts calling you sweetie.


Me? Riled? No, that was a warning.  So far.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 29, 2012)

Rocky Chevalier said:


> A warning? Oh no.


Why do you keep coming back?


----------



## Citizen66 (Dec 29, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Why do you keep coming back?


 
To remind us all that he doesn't want to be here and that he needs to be banned to prevent it from happening.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Dec 29, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Woohoo!
> 
> She asked me to delete a photo that I took once - on a demo in Brighton!
> 
> But here's one I took earlier, with rollie attitude!


 
On the left of Laurie is Zoe Stavri, a mate of Laurie's who I don't think has come up in this thread before. http://www.independent.co.uk/biography/zoe-stavri http://stavvers.wordpress.com https://twitter.com/stavvers

Met her briefly on a demo. Only read some of her writing (mostly feminist stuff, some stuff on rape, a few Jimmy Savile articles) but from what I can tell she seems infinitely more sensible than LP, imo. Seemingly coming from a similar place as LP but without the all-about-me rhetoric. A better example perhaps?


----------



## Greebo (Dec 29, 2012)

Citizen66 said:


> To remind us all that he doesn't want to be here and that he needs to be banned to prevent it from happening.


At some level, he thrives on the way that he can interract with people who aren't always of like mind here.


----------



## SLK (Dec 29, 2012)

Brixton Hatter said:


> On the left of Laurie is Zoe Stavri, a mate of Laurie's who I don't think has come up in this thread before. http://www.independent.co.uk/biography/zoe-stavri http://stavvers.wordpress.com https://twitter.com/stavvers
> 
> Met her briefly on a demo. Only read some of her writing (mostly feminist stuff, some stuff on rape, a few Jimmy Savile articles) but from what I can tell she seems infinitely more sensible than LP, imo. Seemingly coming from a similar place as LP but without the all-about-me rhetoric. A better example perhaps?


 
I used to follow her on twitter. Had no idea she was a friend of LPs and thought she came from here!! Can't remember why I unfollowed her.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 29, 2012)

She's mates with that Jonnie Marbles chap too iirc.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 29, 2012)

I like Stavvers' blogs. She blocked me on Twitter in my previous account for questioning Laurie's account of Starkey's "attack" on her, because you should "always believe abused people". That's really the problem I have with a lot of the left/anarchist/etcs on there. Too entrenched in their isms and quite probably a little too studenty and m/c. Though I neither know what I mean really nor am sure how accurate I am with such a statement.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 30, 2012)

Balbi said:


> She's mates with that Jonnie Marbles chap too iirc.


 
Is he the end-in-himself who slagged off the tube drivers for going on strike?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 30, 2012)

He didn't, ffs.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 30, 2012)

Ok, I was only asking.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 30, 2012)

The commentariat are in a proper twitter flap over criticism of Caitlin Moran - the gangs all there Moran, Ball, Martin, Lewis - defending their own records as progressive.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 30, 2012)

And almost all of them are being told to check their privilege


----------



## cesare (Dec 30, 2012)




----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 30, 2012)

What does 'check your privilege' mean?


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 30, 2012)

S☼I said:


> He didn't, ffs.


Did he not? Looked like it to me. He proposed replacing staff with robots, but then 'clarified' by saying he meant the managers, but that wouldn't make sense.


----------



## cesare (Dec 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> What does 'check your privilege' mean?


It's all here: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/shit-manarchists-say.294600/


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> What does 'check your privilege' mean?


 

look at your own class, race and gender and asses your socioeconomic standard and power relation wrt your interlocutor

its a shit fucking american import that should have died with the Weathermen of the 60s new left movement who chiefly banged on about white skin privilege

it does have limited value in encouraging self evaluation but its starting to become a tool for closing of discussion while everyone goes prolier than thou or some shit

identity politics writ large. fuck the world


----------



## Balbi (Dec 30, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Did he not? Looked like it to me. He proposed replacing staff with robots, but then 'clarified' by saying he meant the managers, but that wouldn't make sense.


 
And he's well known for making perfect sense all of the time, and never making misjudged attempts at comedy.


----------



## Balbi (Dec 30, 2012)

If their critics keep this up, one of them's going to go 'I don't know WHY I bother'


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 30, 2012)

The privilige police are out in force today on twitter, Owen Jones has just been called an oppressor 

If this carries on all night I'm gonna need more popcorn


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 30, 2012)

lol


----------



## Balbi (Dec 30, 2012)

It's a lovely counter beat to LP's own use of privilege speak to defend her own position. That's the problem with language, anyone can use it.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 30, 2012)

cesare said:


> It's all here: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/shit-manarchists-say.294600/


So it's just like saying 'wtf do you know? You're posh' ??


----------



## sihhi (Dec 30, 2012)

Owen Jones comparing himself to gulaged RSDLPers .

"Owen Jones ‏@OwenJones84
@tofuturehumans @WailQ I was accused of being an oppressor. This is how Stalinists attacked left-reformists in the Third Period era."

Do people here find Jonny Marbles funny?

Anarchist Zoe Stavri attacking present-day coordinated letter-writing, suggesting that letter-writing worked in the past:
http://www.newstatesman.com/voices/2012/12/standing-opposition-dominance-privilege


> It doesn’t help that the tactics which may have historically worked - the marches, the
> boycotts, the coordinated letter-writing campaigns - don’t really work so well any more, as
> time marches on and the system develops resilience to these approaches. As it stands, those
> in power are comfortably conserving their social order, and making themselves a little more
> ...


 
Handing in a coordinated written open letter, plus signatories, here:
http://unlockdemocracy.org.uk/blog/entry/8000-supporters-say-no-to-more-expenses-scandals


> On Friday, we wrote an open letter to John Bercow, asking him to avoid a return to the
> bad old days of expenses scandals. We were concerned, because it felt like it was Groundhog
> Day, with John Bercow looking set to repeat the mistakes of his predecessor by seeking to
> prevent the disclosure of expenses information about who MPs were renting from. 8,147 of you
> ...


 
No wonder hardly anyone/noone takes anarchism seriously, having said that Owen Jones, Helen Lewis, Johnny Marbles and George Monbiot are far worse.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 30, 2012)

Johnny Marbles? Isn't he an anarchist? Y'know the guy who pied murdoch in the face.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 30, 2012)

it was foam on a paper plate and then murdochs missis got tasty on him.


----------



## cesare (Dec 30, 2012)

I'm just reeling with the concept of these so-called anarchists petitioning the fucking state


----------



## sihhi (Dec 30, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Johnny Marbles? Isn't he an anarchist? Y'know the guy who pied murdoch in the face.


 
Yes that's him Jonnie Marbles is the correct spelling, actually name is Jonathan May-Bowles.

He is a comedian and does stuff like the UK Uncut stand up on the big London marches:







just as Johann Hari did:


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 30, 2012)

This is why I'm not an anarchist. Because when I think of Anarchist I see Laurie Penny and Johnny May-Bowles.


----------



## cesare (Dec 30, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> This is why I'm not an anarchist. Because when I think of Anarchist I see Laurie Penny and Johnny May-Bowles.


I thought you had more nous than that


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 30, 2012)

cesare said:


> I thought you had more nous than that


 
I really wish it weren't so.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine being stuck in a room listening to very plummy voices going on and on and on about each other's privilige, about which words are allowed, subdividing the world into ever smaller autonomous communities until every individual idiosyncrasy is consdered a form of privilige, abuse or direct oppression, forever.


----------



## cesare (Dec 30, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I really wish it weren't so.
> 
> If you want a vision of the future, imagine being stuck in a room listening to very plummy voices going on and on and on about each other's privilige, about which words are allowed, subdividing the world into ever smaller autonomous communities until every individual idiosyncrasy constitutes is consdered a form of privilige, abuse or direct oppression, forever.


Thankfully I can avoid all that for the most part, and consider this thread an occasional dose of masochism.


----------



## Firky (Dec 30, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> Johnny Marbles? Isn't he an anarchist? Y'know the guy who pied murdoch in the face.


 
Jonnie Marbles, the anarchist. Who's response to the tube strikes was "overpaid bastards, they should automate it all with robots, imagine a robot boris" or something like that. You could smell nothing but burning rubber as he back peddled that one.

He's occasionally funny but mostly a prick.

I guess their heart is in it.... :-\

This picture does make me laugh though, the look on his face


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 30, 2012)

firky said:


> Jonnie Marbles, the anarchist. Who's response to the tube strikes was "overpaid bastards, they should automate it all with robots, imagine a robot boris" or something like that. You could smell nothing but burning rubber as he back peddled that one.
> 
> He's occasionally funny but mostly a prick.
> 
> ...


What did he get for the pie incident? I can't remember.


----------



## love detective (Dec 30, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> What did he get for the pie incident? I can't remember.


 
people feeling sorry for murdoch and a distraction away from the real issues, that's what he got


----------



## Firky (Dec 30, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> What did he get for the pie incident? I can't remember.


 
Mostly sympathy for Murdoch as it was said to be a viscous assault on a vulnerable old man. 

(Yes I know)


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 30, 2012)

love detective said:


> people feeling sorry for murdoch and a distraction away from the real issues, that's what he got





firky said:


> Mostly sympathy for Murdoch as it was said to be a viscous assault on a vulnerable old man.
> 
> (Yes I know)


Kind of backfired on him a bit then. Although I guess it gave him some publicity/notoriety.


----------



## Firky (Dec 30, 2012)

Aye but like you said, _"What did he get for the pie incident? *I can't remember.*"_


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 30, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> What did he get for the pie incident? I can't remember.


 
6 weeks in chokey.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 30, 2012)

firky said:


> Aye but like you said, _"What did he get for the pie incident? *I can't remember.*"_


True. 

I saw some of the caitlin moran stuff on twitter last night - it was quite funny


----------



## Firky (Dec 30, 2012)

Caitlin's biggest talent is pulling faces and doing impressions of inflatable sex dolls.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 30, 2012)

S☼I said:


> 6 weeks in chokey.


Ooops.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 30, 2012)

firky said:


> Caitlin's biggest talent is pulling faces and doing impressions of inflatable sex dolls.


You forgot her talent for too much eyeshadow


----------



## sihhi (Dec 30, 2012)

Please stop being rude about Caitlin Moran's appearance.
Before we are all pilloried for sexism here is Oxbridge former head of NUS 'Brownite' Wes Streeting, now a Labour councillor in Redbridge, explaining how radical he is:



> @Marshajane @owenjones84 I'm a radical at heart. I've had a good few days of my mum evangelising about Marx, Cuba and democracy.


 
https://twitter.com/wesstreeting/status/285410773323350017


----------



## imposs1904 (Dec 30, 2012)

firky said:


> Caitlin's biggest talent is pulling faces and doing impressions of inflatable sex dolls.


 
A fine looking woman.


----------



## Firky (Dec 30, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Please stop being rude about Caitlin Moran's appearance.
> Before we are all pilloried for sexism here is Oxbridge former head of NUS 'Brownite' Wes Streeting, now a Labour councillor in Redbridge, explaining how radical he is:
> 
> 
> ...


 
It's obviously her camera pose, everyone has one. Hers is just as radical as she is. 

Caitlin if you're reading this, keep it shut, you'll swallow a fly!


----------



## sihhi (Dec 30, 2012)

Firky, this part is the problem:


firky said:


> doing impressions of inflatable sex dolls


----------



## sihhi (Dec 30, 2012)

Also, she's not a self-declared leftist, hence very different from Owen Jones, Laurie Penny, Jonny Marbles, Ellie Mae O'Hagan, Zoe Stavri, George Monbiot etc who, in different ways, do call for total social change and a non-class society.





			
				Caitlin Moran said:
			
		

> _I don’t campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes_; I don’t really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality. You just have to make sure that everyone — because things would get fucking boring if it’s the same shit as the past 10,000 years. I mean, you genuinely can’t tell the difference between white, middle-class straight men’s faces. You could put like 50 of them in a room and unless they’ve got interesting facial scars or are wearing a distinctive hat, I could not tell you the difference among any of them. They all just look the same.


 
And so is even less likely to read this thread compared to LP.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 30, 2012)

> I mean, you genuinely can’t tell the difference between white, middle-class straight men’s faces. You could put like 50 of them in a room and unless they’ve got interesting facial scars or are wearing a distinctive hat, I could not tell you the difference among any of them.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 30, 2012)

sihhi said:


> Owen Jones comparing himself to gulaged RSDLPers .
> 
> "Owen Jones ‏@OwenJones84
> @tofuturehumans @WailQ I was accused of being an oppressor. This is how Stalinists attacked left-reformists in the Third Period era."
> ...


 
So these people aren't so much "anarchists" as they are "social democrats who like calling themselves something edgy". 

What a bunch of entitled cunts!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 30, 2012)

cesare said:


> I'm just reeling with the concept of these so-called anarchists petitioning the fucking state


 
Beautiful in its absurdity, isn't it?


----------



## cesare (Dec 30, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Beautiful in its absurdity, isn't it?


What's even more absurd is that they'd probably be scratching their collective heads in confusion if they read that criticism


----------



## killer b (Dec 30, 2012)

this caitlin moran clusterfuck sounds like it could be a fun read, but it's very difficult to follow twitter sensations after the fact. anyone do me a short precis?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 30, 2012)

firky said:


>


 
A Marxist, eh.


----------



## killer b (Dec 30, 2012)

i think it's just a humorous t-shirt slogan tbf.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 30, 2012)

killer b said:


> this caitlin moran clusterfuck sounds like it could be a fun read, but it's very difficult to follow twitter sensations after the fact. anyone do me a short precis?


She wrote an article in the times but most of it was behind the paywall. The only bit visible was a paragraph taken out of context and a huge bunfight has ensued.


----------



## cesare (Dec 30, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> A Marxist, eh.


I'll never become a Marxist cos Caitlin Moran and the like are Marxists etc


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 30, 2012)

no one ever says what happens to the boys when they are brought to the yard. Shades of katyn I feel.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 30, 2012)

cesare said:


> I'll never become a Marxist cos Caitlin Moran and the like are Marxists etc


 
?


----------



## cesare (Dec 30, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> ?


Oh, I was just picking up from what Delroy posted earlier; I'll never be an anarchist cos LP etc are. Same sort of thing. I went anarchist, eh? And you went Marxist, eh?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 30, 2012)

Annakisseds ...


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 30, 2012)

killer b said:


> i think it's just a humorous t-shirt slogan tbf.


 
Aside from that glibness, it isn't even 'humorous.'


----------



## killer b (Dec 30, 2012)

well, no - of course not. it's a slogan on a t-shirt after all.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 30, 2012)

Which was my point before.


----------



## killer b (Dec 30, 2012)

ok.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 30, 2012)

Exactly.


----------



## stuff_it (Dec 30, 2012)

killer b said:


> i think it's just a humorous t-shirt slogan tbf.


It's probably Primarni...


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Dec 30, 2012)

killer b said:


> i think it's just a humorous t-shirt slogan tbf.


 
That this is even needed to pointed out says a lot about this thread...


----------



## Balbi (Dec 30, 2012)

Its from t shirt hell.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 30, 2012)

It didn't need pointing out.  A throwaway post, and shit gets serious.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 30, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Aside from that glibness, it isn't even 'humorous.'





killer b said:


> well, no - of course not. it's a slogan on a t-shirt after all.





Captain Hurrah said:


> Which was my point before.





killer b said:


> ok.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 30, 2012)

Very good.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 30, 2012)

check the poker faces all round


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 30, 2012)

Post 10108 needs helpful reiterating.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 30, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Post 10108 needs helpful reiterating.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 30, 2012)

looks like uncle joe has had the last hotdog from the tin. Typical.


----------



## cesare (Dec 30, 2012)

On your marks ...


----------



## Red Cat (Dec 30, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> check the poker faces all round


 
I used to think that poker faced meant that someone had a sharp and pointy face and never smiled. I thought this until I was about 38.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 30, 2012)

killer b said:


> this caitlin moran clusterfuck sounds like it could be a fun read, but it's very difficult to follow twitter sensations after the fact. anyone do me a short precis?


 

OK well here goes.

Helen Lewis posts this  defence of Caitlin Moran putting foot in mouth on several occasions. It's filled with the typical sensationalism that Helen Lewis provides 

It manages to big up 2 second generation immigrant journalists, that she bravely commissioned. Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi, the Hackney journalist who explained 'Before the riots in August, I was oblivious to any serious tensions between East London’s wildly differing communities' and Bim Adewunmi. It almost paints herself as someone battling for a working-class perspective within feminism.





> Exhibit D. She “literally couldn’t give a shit about racism”.
> I have to address this one, because it’s provoked some actual, proper debates that were worth having, about popular _feminism’s dominance by white middle-class women_. (There are two here, by Bim Adewunmi and Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi, both _writers I respect and have commissioned_ _on the NS site_.)


 
So amidst these foibles the one Helen Lewis concentrates most upon is the charge of racial small-mindedness, for Caitlin Moran failing to take a screenwriter to task for her failure to include any black characters in a show set in heavily black Brooklyn.

Helen Lewis using "Let’s hurry this along, because this is making me lose the will to live" to examine the other non-black racism charges (can't think of a better phrase) is pretty much a loaded water balloon waiting to be pricked by someone. It's almost as if it's crafted by Helen Lewis to do so. 

(Note that no criticisms about Caitlin Moran's classist assumptions, straw mans or how facile Caitlin Moran's 'how it's OK to have a cleaner' spiel are even addressed.)

Anyway once released onto twitter it makes people annoyed, at which point Helen Lewis says she would like to see more non-heterosexual people as journalists.

Martha Robinson PhD neuroscientist at UCL's centre mocks Helen Lewis, at which point Owen Jones jumps into attack "elitist puritanical ultras" meaning Martha.







Owen Jones continues in this general vein, Martha Robinson calls his behaviour oppressive
which leads to his assertion that "self-righteous self-appointed, ultra-pure elitists" - could mean anyone really swp, the separatist 'queer' squatting scene, iww, most of u75 p&p, radical feminists - must be opposed.






He accuses a critic of his, as displaying Stalinist behaviour for stating
"@OwenJones84 @Kosmogrrrl @helenlewis I don't think you're 'impure'. I think you're fundamentally wrong. And _contribute to oppression_."

Someone else points out that Owen Jones' criticisms don't actually make much sense.






It meanders nowhere for a while, with our Delroy doing his best.

Interestingly, the existing-media-power-structure-appointed 'left' journalists half begin to close ranks around Helen Lewis, with the annoying CUS-educated (exclusive private school in Dublin) writer Graham Linehan doing it in soft focus:






This brings out the (sensational) line from Laurie Penny "I spend _a lot_ of time justifying to self and others why I'm _allowed to write at all_. Maybe unhelpful" (Is it the writing or the editorship?)

Dorian Lynskey (also from a family of private school students, but at least tackled it once) then chips in to tell Laurie Penny, if the writing is honest (to whom? for what?), it's all OK. 

In conclusion, let us all consider Owen Jones's final word on it all: "[Calling someone Stalinist] was a response to being accused of contributing to oppression. I said it was Third Period"


----------



## killer b (Dec 30, 2012)

thanks for that.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 30, 2012)

Surely by saying she's allowed to write it just continues the elitism of journalism of this sort? Who's saying she isn't allowed to write? Why does she think she's not allowed?

Is it another attempt to project unity with the working class?


----------



## love detective (Dec 30, 2012)

i still don't have a clue what happened

seems weird though that owen jones and company are moaning about self appointed, self righteous elitists undermining progressive politics and speaking on behalf of others without their consent, isn't that what they do?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 30, 2012)

To be honest this is all hurting my head. I'm having trouble figuring out which side to root for.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 30, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> To be honest this is all hurting my head. I'm having trouble figuring out which side to root for.


 
I think that's what's called a win-win, at least if you're mainly interested in it as entertainment.


----------



## love detective (Dec 30, 2012)

surely to be entertained you at least need to have a scooby what's actually going on

all that stuff just seemed like white noise


----------



## Balbi (Dec 30, 2012)

Delroy Booth said:


> I think that's what's called a win-win, at least if you're mainly interested in it as entertainment.



Wasp lands on a nettle. Somethings going to get stung, but you don't give a fuck who.

The delicious blinkeredness of Jones, Lewis et all complaining of a self appointed elite undermining collective action sates my absurdist hunger.

No, sorry, he refers to it as "the struggle". To remain on the bestseller list


----------



## Red Cat (Dec 30, 2012)

I take it people aren't fans of Chavs then?

What's wrong with it? Apart from him being middle class.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 30, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> To be honest this is all hurting my head. I'm having trouble figuring out which side to root for.


 

Mutual destruction seems to preferred outcome - not sure if that means rooting for both sides or neither though


----------



## Balbi (Dec 30, 2012)

Red Cat said:


> I take it people aren't fans of Chavs then?
> 
> What's wrong with it? Apart from him being middle class.



I liked it. Bought a copy for my dad for christmas.

He's on the twat tweet train though. And this clouds centred on the NS.


----------



## love detective (Dec 30, 2012)

Red Cat said:


> I take it people aren't fans of Chavs then?
> 
> What's wrong with it? Apart from him being middle class.


 
a few threads about it/him here and here and here


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 30, 2012)

SpineyNorman said:


> Mutual destruction seems to preferred outcome - not sure if that means rooting for both sides or neither though



I read it...don't think I cared enough to work out what was going on..but it seemed dramatic. Maybe this is the start of the schism that will destroy the whole...er...'revolution'. Which faction will the proletariat support do you think?


----------



## Balbi (Dec 30, 2012)

Well, H Lewis just informed her followers that Dr Brooke Magnanti (belle de jour) can fuck right off.



There's an awful lot of infighting up on that pedestal.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 30, 2012)

Both sides of the argument bring out the worst in each other. There's much better grounds to criticise these people, as the gatekeepers of acceptable left discourse in this country, than interminably calling on privilige to do it. But then it's incredible how these journos instinctively circle the wagons once under the slightest bit of criticism. The way these people have reacted is hysterical, I mean Owen Jones talking about self-appointed elites and so on is a laughable notion when you consider he's one the most high profile left journalist/commentators there is (But the Stalinist jibe was great, that's Owen's inner trot momentarily escaping.)


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 30, 2012)

Now Mediocre Dave is getting stuck in. World turned upside down.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 30, 2012)

When do we take up arms?


----------



## Balbi (Dec 30, 2012)

Armchairs, this is a popcorn event.

There'll certainly be curt dismissals and blankings at the next party Harry Cole hosts no doubt.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 30, 2012)

Mr.Bishie said:


> When do we take up arms?


Typical pro-able bodied cant


----------



## Balbi (Dec 30, 2012)

This all stems from Helen Lewis riding her tumblr into the middle of a highly charged argument and then not conveying her own argument very well and spending the rest of the day circling the wagons and hollering because people involved in the argument unpicked what she'd said.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Dec 30, 2012)

Red Cat said:


> I take it people aren't fans of Chavs then?
> 
> What's wrong with it? Apart from him being middle class.


 
I enjoyed Chavs, although it's very nostalgic and Labourist, and I think he deserves credit for its success. I think his articles are generally pretty good.

It's been said on here before but even Laurie Penny writes things that are good and insightful every now and then. It's not about just slating everything they ever write or tweet for the sake of it.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 30, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> So these people aren't so much "anarchists" as they are "social democrats who like calling themselves something edgy".
> 
> What a bunch of entitled cunts!


 
Sums up 95% of the anarchist scene , well done


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 30, 2012)

I wondered what Batitusta was doing after he retired form football


----------



## Red Cat (Dec 30, 2012)

love detective said:


> a few threads about it/him here and here and here


 
Thanks.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Dec 31, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I read it...don't think I cared enough to work out what was going on..but it seemed dramatic. Maybe this is the start of the schism that will destroy the whole...er...'revolution'. Which faction will the proletariat support do you think?


 
Whichever one is most racist and misogynistic probably - way too much unexamined white male privilege among the proles IMO.


----------



## rosecore (Dec 31, 2012)

I was very annoyed at certain 'lefties' like James Ball and Jonathan Haynes of the Guardian implying we were 'too stupid' to get Moran's offensive satire. The constant back-slapping, inside jokes, blind defence of each other is really embarrassing (Linehan, Jones, Penny, Lewis, Ball, etc) whenever they get criticised. Hilarious to watch their castles wash away over such points.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

rosecore said:


> I was very annoyed at certain 'lefties' like James Ball and Jonathan Haynes of the Guardian implying we were 'too stupid' to get Moran's offensive satire. The constant back-slapping, inside jokes, blind defence of each other is really embarrassing (Linehan, Jones, Penny, Lewis, Ball, etc) whenever they get criticised. Hilarious to watch their castles wash away over such points.


It's just an upper-class version of urban really, the only difference being we don't get £40k contracts to write about ridiculous subjects or tweet incessantly from positions of zero knowledge.


----------



## free spirit (Dec 31, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> It's just an upper-class version of urban really, the only difference being we don't get £40k contracts to write about ridiculous subjects or tweet incessantly from positions of zero knowledge.


do we not?

I'd been assuming my cheques were just getting lost in the post.


----------



## exiledinwales (Dec 31, 2012)

Jesus these twatters are totally deluded. That line about third period Stalinism was jokes. What a bunch of fucking morons.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 31, 2012)

Red Cat said:


> I take it people aren't fans of Chavs then?
> 
> What's wrong with it? Apart from him being middle class.


 
its got some nice lines. bit ABC but then itis handholding the middle classes through why they shouldn't cunt the poor off. 'socially acceptable liberal bigotry' is a good un


----------



## elbows (Dec 31, 2012)

Never mind check your privilege, they could use some check your princials, check your priorities, and less check your navel.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 31, 2012)

Balbi said:


> There's an awful lot of infighting up on that pedestal.


 
Well, it's a pedestal, there's only room for one.

As long as you're posh, had an expensive education, are insatiably self-promoting and egotistical, dishonest when it suits you and are generally 'one of us' obviously. The proles, however much more talent, astuteness and integrity they may have, can fuck right off, obviously.


----------



## Red Cat (Dec 31, 2012)

It's all easy enough to avoid. I don't use twitter and since having kids I find it hard to read newspapers. The latter I tend to regret but maybe there are some positives after all, I don't know who these people are. Unless it's essential that we take them on? They don't seem very important to me. I guess I've missed the point of the thread, but do they matter?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

Was there a winner in the end?
Did they all agree on who was most 'entitled' to have an NS blog...maybe some one-legged black trans female who's in a coma? Cos if so, then her 'entitlement' will bestow an enormous privilege...and we'd have to start all over again.
Normally, when a theory or set of protocols keeps yielding internal contradictions or circular arguments like this, it's dismissed as 'wrong' or a paradox...and people drop it. 

Additionally...what happens if we all decide to adopt privilege and intersectionality and this results in a whole new rainbow commentariat...only they're shit...boring, clunky stylists who are logically challenged and prone to pathological self-promotion?
Will criticism be dismissed as racist, misogynist, trans phobic as happens now...or will the targets of criticism feel justified in ignoring it as it'll be coming from persons of greater privilege?

It's all gone wrong...it's stupid children playing with semtex while thinking it's playdough...and I seriously hope Alan Sokal is, right now, busy working on a 'paper' or a set of Privilege Top Trumps.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 31, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> It's all gone wrong...it's stupid children playing with semtex while thinking it's playdough...and I seriously hope Alan Sokal is, right now, busy working on a 'paper' or a set of Privilege Top Trumps.


 
Given that I'm a bipolar Aspie with chronic asthma, diabetes, high blood cholesterol and probable epilepsy, does that automatically entitle me to a leading and highly-paid opinion column syndicated everywhere on the planet and a series of increasingly lucrative career opportunities?

Or does it entitle me to be spoken for by self-appointed 'voices of the movement' who'll then pocket the cash and recycle my words and thoughts as their own because I'm obviously too impaired to be allowed free use of either?


----------



## cesare (Dec 31, 2012)

Red Cat said:


> It's all easy enough to avoid. I don't use twitter and since having kids I find it hard to read newspapers. The latter I tend to regret but maybe there are some positives after all, I don't know who these people are. Unless it's essential that we take them on? They don't seem very important to me. I guess I've missed the point of the thread, but do they matter?


I go through fits and starts with this myself. Periods of "of, ffs, ignore it" (which is very, very easy to do) and then at other times I take on board butcher's (I think? apologies if it was someone else) very good point that this shit infects how people perceive left wing politics especially when it's rife throughout social media; and from that point of view it should be countered.


----------



## Red Cat (Dec 31, 2012)

I'm a bit of a social media resister (old fogey) so it's hard for me to get a handle on how powerful or otherwise this is.


----------



## elbows (Dec 31, 2012)

Red Cat said:


> I'm a bit of a social media resister (old fogey) so it's hard for me to get a handle on how powerful or otherwise this is.


 
Its not clear to me that the social network stuff actually adds to their readership. ie the people who read their tweets are probably the same group who would read their articles in the media. Mostly tens of thousands of followers rather than hundreds of thousands.


----------



## cesare (Dec 31, 2012)

Red Cat said:


> I'm a bit of a social media resister (old fogey) so it's hard for me to get a handle on how powerful or otherwise this is.


Well, it's TV too. Owen Jones popping up on QT for example. And they seem to have more followers reading every ill-conceived 140 character soundbite than the readership of their various rags. Off the top of my head I think LP has about 55,000 followers on Twitter. Then you have all these bloody awards where they award and applaud each other, with the attendant publicity etc

Edit: although Elbows has just put the readership/followers ratio in better perspective


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Given that I'm a bipolar Aspie with chronic asthma, diabetes, high blood cholesterol and probable epilepsy, does that automatically entitle me to a leading and highly-paid opinion column syndicated everywhere on the planet and a series of increasingly lucrative career ?



I'm not seeing female...or trans...or black or Muslim...so I think you know the answer. I think you're only option is the 'traditional route'. So were you the brightest kid in your private school?


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 31, 2012)

and the book launches. Don't forget the book launches.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> and the book launches. Don't forget the book launches.



Or the spontaneous 'happenings'


----------



## elbows (Dec 31, 2012)

With the exception of certain tv performances, I still dont think any of that stuff really adds to their reach in any meaningful way. Very few people I know have heard of any of them, let alone listened to them.


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 31, 2012)

cesare said:


> Well, it's TV too. Owen Jones popping up on QT for example. And they seem to have more followers reading every ill-conceived 140 character soundbite than the readership of their various rags. Off the top of my head I think LP has about 55,000 followers on Twitter. Then you have all these bloody awards where they award and applaud each other, with the attendant publicity etc
> 
> Edit: although Elbows has just put the readership/followers ratio in better perspective


Owen Jones has already been on national BBC radio twice today alone - and specifically as the face/voice of the left, and so by extension, to many this is what pro-working class politics looks like and why this left says nothing to them about their life.

(Bit mangled that post but rushing here)


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

elbows said:


> With the exception of certain tv performances, I still dont think any of that stuff really adds to their reach in any meaningful way. Very few people I know have heard of any of them, let alone listened to them.



Yeah but very few people check their privilege with the appropriate frequency. Once they do, they'll just love being told they need to regard themselves as decadent tyrants by a bunch of Oxbridge pseudo-gobshites with cushy little writing gigs. I think we're looking at the golden dawn of egalitarianism.


----------



## Red Cat (Dec 31, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Owen Jones has already been on national BBC radio twice today alone - and specifically as the face/voice of the left, and so by extension, to many this is what pro-working class politics looks like and why this left says nothing to them about their life.
> 
> (Bit mangled that post but rushing here)


 
I _do_ still listen to the radio but I hadn't noticed him.

It looks like I'm going to have to pay more attention


----------



## cesare (Dec 31, 2012)

Red Cat said:


> I _do_ still listen to the radio but I hadn't noticed him.
> 
> It looks like I'm going to have to pay more attention


I hadn't realised just how much coverage he's getting either.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

Red Cat said:


> It looks like I'm going to have to pay more attention



Exactly...check your privilege. If you had you'd realise he's more or less prescribed reading and listening.


----------



## Nice one (Dec 31, 2012)

Red Cat said:


> I _do_ still listen to the radio but I hadn't noticed him.
> 
> It looks like I'm going to have to pay more attention


 
not paying attention to owen jones - like the vast majority of ordinary working class people then


----------



## Smokeandsteam (Dec 31, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Owen Jones has already been on national BBC radio twice today alone - and specifically as the face/voice of the left, and so by extension, to many this is what pro-working class politics looks like and why this left says nothing to them about their life.
> 
> (Bit mangled that post but rushing here)



No, that it. In a nutshell.


----------



## elbows (Dec 31, 2012)

Check your privet hedge.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 31, 2012)

or your privy ledge


----------



## elbows (Dec 31, 2012)

Puss-filled wedge.

Irrelevant dredge.

Ego sledge.


----------



## cesare (Dec 31, 2012)

Nice one said:


> not paying attention to owen jones - like the vast majority of ordinary working class people then


Because the vast majority of ordinary working class people don't watch TV, listen to the radio etc?


----------



## killer b (Dec 31, 2012)

leafing through the guardian this morning (  ) i found in the latest column by brooker the following:




> *Cry Troll* (crye troll) *verb*. Of a celebrity, to claim any member of the public uttering even the mildest criticism is nothing but an attention-seeking "troll" whose pitiful so-called existence is several rungs below that of the lowliest silverfish. *See also* _Freedom of Screech_.


 
who could he be talking about?


----------



## Nice one (Dec 31, 2012)

cesare said:


> Because the vast majority of ordinary working class people don't watch TV, listen to the radio etc?


 
Do they pay attention to what owen jones et al have to say for themselves though?


----------



## cesare (Dec 31, 2012)

Nice one said:


> Do they pay attention to what owen jones et al have to say for themselves though?


Some will, some won't. But in any event I think it filters into perceptions of what "the Left" represent for normal people ie irrelevant for the most part.


----------



## Athos (Dec 31, 2012)

Drivel                   Edge


----------



## Smokeandsteam (Dec 31, 2012)

cesare said:


> Some will, some won't. But in any event I think it filters into perceptions of what "the Left" represent for normal people ie irrelevant for the most part.



Exactly. When people think of the left at all, when they do hear voices 'opposing' the status quo, they hear Jones et al.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 31, 2012)

I've not been following the latest thing with Jones at all. Whats he done?


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 31, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I've not been following the latest thing with Jones at all. Whats he done?


 

uttered the fatefull cry of 'ultra left purists' for starters. Allways the mark of the butthurt or the black hand


----------



## Nice one (Dec 31, 2012)

Smokeandsteam said:


> Exactly. When people think of the left at all, when they do hear voices 'opposing' the status quo, they hear Jones et al.


 
seriously who does? Who are these people? (...apart from bbc producers).


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 31, 2012)

Nice one said:


> seriously who does? Who are these people? (...apart from bbc producers).


Normal leftish leaning people who read the guardian and the new statesman and who are not involved in activism for the far left. So quite a lot of people.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I've not been following the latest thing with Jones at all. Whats he done?



He checked his privilege, but he was in a hurry and missed a bit.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

The awkward cling-on bit which sticks to the rim and can only be reached with the ultra-pure Toilet Duck of honest introspection.


----------



## rekil (Dec 31, 2012)

Check yr Dave L. Gedge


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 31, 2012)

check ya meat and two veg


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

Result

Thought you were out of beer?
Check the back of your fridge

(Based on a very recent real-life incident-I fuckin love this time of year-peace, goodwill and problem drinking gets the body swerve for a few precious days)


----------



## Athos (Dec 31, 2012)

Check your levels Midge.


----------



## smokedout (Dec 31, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Normal leftish leaning people who read the guardian and the new statesman and who are not involved in activism for the far left. So quite a lot of people.


 
there's nothing normal about reading the new statesman


----------



## Athos (Dec 31, 2012)

Check these swivel lids.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 31, 2012)

check your kids


----------



## Athos (Dec 31, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> check your kids


 
Check your wife.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 31, 2012)

smokedout said:


> there's nothing normal about reading the new statesman


It's pretty normal to read it in the same way it's normal to read The Spectator.
They are both reasonably high circulation news magazines


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 31, 2012)

Kid_Eternity said:


> That this is even needed to pointed out says a lot about this thread...


 
Much as your comment says a lot about you, dear boy.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 31, 2012)

love detective said:


> i still don't have a clue what happened
> 
> seems weird though that owen jones and company are moaning about self appointed, self righteous elitists undermining progressive politics and speaking on behalf of others without their consent, isn't that what they do?


 
How can you say such things!!!???
Isn't it obvious that by the action of paying attention to the witterings of Jones, Penny _et al_, they believe that *we* consent to their attempts to represent us?

At least, that's the impression I come away with, every time I read an article by any of these _soi-disant_ activists and radicals.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 31, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> To be honest this is all hurting my head. I'm having trouble figuring out which side to root for.


Whoever neckshots them?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 31, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> Sums up 95% of the anarchist scene , well done


 
I won't say you're starting to sound like a broken record.







"Starting" would, after all, be a misrepresentation.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 31, 2012)

elbows said:


> Never mind check your privilege, they could use some check your princials, check your priorities, *and less check your navel*.


 
I don't know about that. A little fucking reflexivity from this bunch wouldn't go amiss in my opinion.

Can you imagine if this bunch had to submit themselves to revolutionary self-criticism? They wouldn't have the self-awareness needed!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 31, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Given that I'm a bipolar Aspie with chronic asthma, diabetes, high blood cholesterol and probable epilepsy, does that automatically entitle me to a leading and highly-paid opinion column syndicated everywhere on the planet and a series of increasingly lucrative career opportunities?
> 
> Or does it entitle me to be spoken for by self-appointed 'voices of the movement' who'll then pocket the cash and recycle my words and thoughts as their own because I'm obviously too impaired to be allowed free use of either?


 
No, your middle-aged honkiness erases any brownie points you get for the other factors, just like my middle-aged honkiness erases mine. Basically, we could be tramps and the likes of Laura and her fellow-travellers will still tell us to "check our privilege" with their own special lack of self-awareness.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> To be honest this is all hurting my head. I'm having trouble figuring out which side to root for.



I think that possibly, the idea that there is a side to root for...or even any meaningful binary opposition in play...is a sign that there are protagonists out there who've yet to give their privilege a full audit.
Once they have, all differences of opinion will dissolve and we shall beat our swords into ploughshares.
At that point, the need for a radical commentariat will disappear and they'll probably get jobs on Radio 1.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 31, 2012)

Red Cat said:


> I'm a bit of a social media resister (old fogey) so it's hard for me to get a handle on how powerful or otherwise this is.


 
I'm not sure that the "power" isn't mostly inherent to "the powerful" using it to disseminate info. For every "rebel" twitter that has broken news, we have a hundred twitters from media darlings pushing their own agenda from under a veneer of rebelliousness.

Personally, I can't be arsed with it because I've seen little evidence that people, even those who write as a profession, can articulate themselves properly in 140-character bites. I like my arguments to have meat in them.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 31, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Owen Jones has already been on national BBC radio twice today alone - and specifically as the face/voice of the left, and so by extension, to many this is what pro-working class politics looks like and why this left *says nothing to them about their life.*


 
To which I say "hang the blessed deejay".


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 31, 2012)

Red Cat said:


> I _do_ still listen to the radio but I hadn't noticed him.
> 
> It looks like I'm going to have to pay more attention


 
To be fair, he's got one of those radio voices that makes me tune him out unless I make a concerted effort to listen. He sort of chirps, like PR people do.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 31, 2012)

killer b said:


> leafing through the guardian this morning (  ) i found in the latest column by brooker the following:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Frankly, none of the people he *is* talking about are self-aware enough to realise that it *them* he's talking about.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 31, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> uttered the fatefull cry of 'ultra left purists' for starters. Allways the mark of the butthurt or the black hand


 
That phrase *always* makes me think of The Black Hand.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 31, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> I won't say you're starting to sound like a broken record.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
How would you describe it then?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 31, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> How would you describe it then?


 
Why would I bother describing it/them? I'm not the one with the bee in my bonnet who keeps repeating the same hackneyed phrase about the "anarchist scene".

That's you, that is.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 31, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I think that possibly, the idea that there is a side to root for...or even any meaningful binary opposition in play...is a sign that there are protagonists out there who've yet to give their privilege a full audit.


 
I worry that this confusion is down to my own resistance to self-criticism


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 31, 2012)

Our transatlantic friends have given us a new horse to back - I present Chris Mackowski.



> Chris Mackowski writes because he has to. It’s in him and it gots to get out.
> 
> He likes to feed his head, too. His head is _very_ hungry, so he’s always putting stuff in it—which explains his rather voracious regiment of reading. But rather than leave all that reading crammed in his head, he writes his book reviews as a way to further engage the books and share what he’s learned from them with anyone who might be foolish enough to pay attention.
> 
> By day, Chris is a college professor at St. Bonaventure University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. By night, he writes. He writes and writes and writes and writes. It’s in him, and it gots to get out. His award-winning features and commentaries have appeared in newspapers and magazines and on radio, he’s written several award-winning plays, he’s authored a couple books, and he’s currently at work on a series of books for the National Park Service about the battlefields of central Virginia.


 
As he blogs:



> *Uganda Journal: Into my Heart of Darkness*
> 
> In the morning, I leave for Africa.
> 
> ...


 
It's a long shot, but it might just pay off.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 31, 2012)

discussing uganda


----------



## rekil (Dec 31, 2012)

He teaches PR bollocks.



> Persuasive Writing and Rhetoric
> 
> Description:
> An upper-level writing course for students interested in public relations. Concentration on the finer points of wordsmithing in the context of a variety of public relations functions such as promotional copywriting, speechwriting, media relations and quote-crafting. A scrutiny of word choice, phrasing and organization to create maximum deliberate effect. Includes an ethical component to understand how rhetorical choices can lead to intentional and unintentional consequences.


----------



## Athos (Dec 31, 2012)

The horror!  The horror!


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 31, 2012)

> Includes an ethical component


 
fair trade shillcraft


----------



## Athos (Dec 31, 2012)

Hand-woven strawmen.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Dec 31, 2012)

good find.  unleash hell!


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 31, 2012)

co-op hell


----------



## rekil (Dec 31, 2012)

> I’m heading to Uganda for twelve days, for reasons that still remain vague


Betcha he's wangled a saucy wee earner from the gov.


----------



## editor (Dec 31, 2012)

Can this thread make a quarter of a million page views before the year is about?
And has Laurie Penny ever heard of the Streisand Effect?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

Will he be wearing skinny jeans?  I believe they're the appropriate attire for such blogging adventures.


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 31, 2012)

> that wind from well back in my childhood


 

gaviscon


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 31, 2012)

editor said:


> Can this thread make a quarter of a million page views before the year is about?
> And has Laurie Penny ever heard of the Streisand Effect?


 
It will need about six posts a minute, so probably not.


----------



## editor (Dec 31, 2012)

Buckaroo said:


> It will need about six posts a minute, so probably not.


Page VIEWS, m'lad.


----------



## Buckaroo (Dec 31, 2012)

editor said:


> Page VIEWS, m'lad.


 
oh yeah! well in that case it's in the bag! ten a minute, piece of piss!


----------



## sihhi (Dec 31, 2012)

Athos said:


> Drivel Edge


 

That's brilliant. I think you win a general internet award.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 31, 2012)

love detective said:


> a few threads about it/him here and here and here


 
I have posted on that thread but - in short Owen Jones: 'Against Hazel Blears but alongside Hazel Blears too!'


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 31, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> I wondered what Batitusta was doing after he retired form football


 
President of Cuba, if memory serves.


----------



## Idris2002 (Dec 31, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Our transatlantic friends have given us a new horse to back - I present Chris Mackowski.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
When I was young there were still a few spaces on the map that hadn't been filled in yet, and I used to put my finger on them and say 'one day I'll go there'.

But I shan't now, the glamour's off.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 31, 2012)

Even with a bare twelve Ugandan days, he'll be smashing Royaltea's gonzo holiday record!


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

Serious question...I'm off to the pub in half an hour. Gotta in by 9 to fuckin baby sit.
Anyway...privilege: where do we stand re. Dead people? Can we slag them off or is that just an abuse of existence privilege?
And what about Thatcher...now she's a walking cabbage?


----------



## eatmorecheese (Dec 31, 2012)

DaveCinzano said:


> Even with a bare twelve Ugandan days, he'll be smashing Royaltea's gonzo holiday record!


 
What a blog. Has made me angry and a little bit sick at the same time. The first reply to it is spot on.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 31, 2012)

ViolentPanda said:


> Why would I bother describing it/them? I'm not the one with the bee in my bonnet who keeps repeating the same hackneyed phrase about the "anarchist scene".
> 
> That's you, that is.


 
_That's me in the corner_. _That's me in the spotlight_. _Losing my religion_ *...*


----------



## ViolentPanda (Dec 31, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> _That's me in the corner_. _That's me in the spotlight_. _Losing my religion_ *...*


 
Michael Stipe you ain't!


----------



## Cornetto (Dec 31, 2012)

A slight resemblance


----------



## snadge (Dec 31, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> And what about Thatcher...now she's a walking cabbage?


 
Watch it, that's abusing grave pissing privilege.


----------



## The39thStep (Dec 31, 2012)

Cornetto said:


> A slight resemblance


 
I have never quite worked out if I look like anyone famous. MATB lot said Putin but I thought that was unfair.


----------



## ymu (Dec 31, 2012)

Owen Jones has his faults, but he is head and shoulders above the rest of this sorry bunch. It's concerning to see him luvvying up, but he's young and does seem to have decent fundamentals and some capacity to learn.

He made a bad error in not going to see the IWCA when he was a couple of miles down the road writing _Chavs_; his magnificent response to the racist Starkey post-riots was marred by his incredibly lame defence of black contribution to Britain (music and sport was all he could muster ); he could and should have done a few years in the real world given that he criticises the culture of going straight into politics with fuck all experience (in mitigation, it was _Chavs_ wot launched him into the spotlight, and he shouldn't be criticised for writing up stuff he worked on whilst at university - but he didn't have to take _all_ the jobs offered off the back of it).

On Twitter, he is consorting with his peer group from Oxbridge and the media, and it's cringeworthy. But what he publishes is pretty decent compared to other 'left' commentators with a mainstream platform.

As for this privilege stuff, isn't the whole point of it to recognise all sources of power, not fucking rank them? A white working-class man may have more power (on average) than a black working-class man, but he is considerably less powerful (on average) than a black middle-class woman.

One of the problems for the Oxbridge types, as I know from painful experience, is dealing with crippling middle-class guilt. Jones is upfront about his class privilege and his analysis is class-based and sound. But a lot of these people are on the left because they want to be liked by poor people, not because they 'get' the politics. That is why they are so easily distracted by the killing of brown people abroad and so absent from community and workplace action at home. And most of them cannot bring themselves to admit the full extent of their privilege: they can't help who their parents are, their heart is in the right place, and that's enough.

They're so busy denying their privilege they never get to realise that it is not enough. It doesn't mean they can't ever be taken seriously on the left, but they have to work at it. They have to realise that being more confident and articulate does not mean they have more knowledge. That being highly educated does not make you well-informed. And the million and one other differences in life experience and the unquestioned assumptions that they have to get their heads around before they can presume to speak for anyone.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Dec 31, 2012)

> His head is very hungry, so he’s always putting stuff in it—which explains his rather voracious *regiment of reading*...
> 
> ...He writes and writes and writes and writes. It’s in him, and it gots to get out.



Come on, people, this is basic stuff.

_Chris Mackowski's head - I am in you_


----------



## cesare (Dec 31, 2012)

The39thStep said:


> I have never quite worked out if I look like anyone famous. MATB lot said Putin but I thought that was unfair.


Ah, those were the days.  Remember Ronstadt and tiny ice picks thrown at those with Trot tendencies.


----------



## snadge (Dec 31, 2012)

> As for this privilege stuff, isn't the whole point of it to recognise all sources of power, not fucking rank them? A white working-class man may have more power (on average) than a black working-class man, but he is considerably less powerful (on average) than a black middle-class woman.


 
What I get from all this is that the working class do not even bother about any of this privilege shite, it is the likes of the middle/upper class wankers that are trying to discord decent voices by pigeonholing and ranking people, this is probably why I blew up earlier in the thread and got pulled for it.

For which I aplogise once again for.


----------



## rekil (Dec 31, 2012)

editor said:


> Can this thread make a quarter of a million page views before the year is about?
> And has Laurie Penny ever heard of the Streisand Effect?


Not a chance unless Laurie comes back to troll her own thread a bit more, or a drunken billy bragg turns up.


----------



## snadge (Dec 31, 2012)

copliker said:


> Not a chance unless Laurie comes back to troll her own thread a bit more, or a drunken billy bragg turns up.


 
I was at a miner's benefit do during the miner's strike and Billy Bragg was headlining, he came on stage and started doing his heavy political speech, my mate Swizz, cupped his hands together and shouted at him, 'shut the fuck up and sing'.


----------



## ymu (Dec 31, 2012)

snadge said:


> What I get from all this is that the working class do not even bother about any of this privilege shite, it is the likes of the middle/upper class wankers that are trying to discord decent voices by pigeonholing and ranking people, this is probably why I blew up earlier in the thread and got pulled for it.
> 
> For which I aplogise once again for.


I agree with that but there is another side of that coin. Unions dominated by white working-class men, way back when unions had power and used it, had no incentive to fight for immigrants who were perceived to be threatening jobs (however counter-productive excluding them might be) or for women to receive equal access to and pay in the workplace. There was a need for the rest of the class to stick up for ourselves you know, 'specially as we massively outnumber you privileged fuckers. 

The over-articulate, under-empathetic middle-class types could get that. And they dominated the discourse until everyone else fucked off and left them to it. But the pendulum doesn't have to swing all the way back to the point that it's not even possible to discuss 'privilege' in the serious parts of the left.

My partner was the only black member of a left sect. They made sure he spoke at meetings, they had a black member you see. But they only ever got him involved otherwise if they wanted drugs or dodgy gear for a benefit gig. When he raised the distinct lack of black members, he was told that class subsumes race. "Well, yeah. But doesn't that mean you should have loads of black members?"

The sniping is fun, but there's some serious issues here.


----------



## cesare (Dec 31, 2012)

The only time I've seen Billy Bragg live we slipped out in the interval and didn't go back in. Rachel Unthank and the Winterset had been on by then, which was the only reason for going tbf.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Given that I'm a bipolar Aspie with chronic asthma, diabetes, high blood cholesterol and probable epilepsy, does that automatically entitle me to a leading and highly-paid opinion column syndicated everywhere on the planet and a series of increasingly lucrative career opportunities?
> 
> Or does it entitle me to be spoken for by self-appointed 'voices of the movement' who'll then pocket the cash and recycle my words and thoughts as their own because I'm obviously too impaired to be allowed free use of either?


Maybe some of should play disability top trumps to work out who is the real voice of the movement...


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

And Chris Man-whatever his name is, it's _regimen _of reading material, not regiment.


----------



## Nice one (Dec 31, 2012)

snadge said:


> I was at a miner's benefit do during the miner's strike and Billy Bragg was headlining, he came on stage and started doing his heavy political speech, my mate Swizz, cupped his hands together and shouted at him, 'shut the fuck up and sing'.


 
shouting for 'which side are you on' no doubt?


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 31, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> And Chris Man-whatever his name is, it's _regimen _of reading material, not regiment.


 

One does expect better from someone who just _has_ to write.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 31, 2012)

ymu said:


> One of the problems for the Oxbridge types, as I know from painful experience, is dealing with _crippling middle-class guilt_.


 
How can middle-class guilt cripple anything? Most of these people don't feel much guilt and have less shame.



> But a lot of these people are on the left because they _want to be liked by poor people_, not because they 'get' the politics. That is why they are so easily distracted by the killing of brown people abroad and so absent from community and workplace action at home.


 
Very, very few from Oxbridge are 'on the left'. But taking the Oxbridge graduates Owen Jones, Laurie Penny and George Monbiot, using your phrase, it's about them _liking/ wanting_ _to like_ 'poor people'. That's the key part.
If LP wanted to be liked, why is her last exit on this board so final; why does OJ call those who don't like pronouncements Third Period and Stalinist; why does GM write such a caricature of an article? None of that is the behaviour of those desperate to be liked by people.




> They're so busy denying their privilege they never get to realise that it is not enough.


 
They're not 'denying' their 'privilege'. In their own analysis, on their own terms, they've sorted it out, they're the ones admitting their privilege, it's _others_ that have to do the same.


----------



## Nice one (Dec 31, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Normal leftish leaning people who read the guardian and the new statesman and who are not involved in activism for the far left. So quite a lot of people.


...the graduate without a future, the newly proletarianised middle class, the squeezed middle, everyone in fact, except the ordinary working class.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> One does expect better from someone who just _has_ to write.


One does - if you have to write (and write and write and write) at least proof-read it before you publish it.


----------



## Orang Utan (Dec 31, 2012)

Nice one said:


> ...the graduate without a future, the newly proletarianised middle class, the squeezed middle, everyone in fact, except the ordinary working class.


Well yes of course. But there is a substantial group of people who unquestioningly read the newspapers and magazines this lot write in. I'm not sure they have much influence on either the working classes or the powers that be.


----------



## ymu (Dec 31, 2012)

sihhi said:


> How can middle-class guilt cripple anything? Most of these people don't feel much guilt and have less shame.


Of course most rich fuckers have no shame, but those that are attracted to the left, usually as teenagers, are usually ashamed of their privilege and want to downplay it. All those public school scholarships ...





sihhi said:


> Very, very few from Oxbridge are 'on the left'. But taking the Oxbridge graduates Owen Jones, Laurie Penny and George Monbiot, using your phrase, it's about them _liking/ wanting_ _to like_ 'poor people'. That's the key part.
> If LP wanted to be liked, why is her last exit on this board so final; why does OJ call those who don't like pronouncements Third Period and Stalinist; why does GM write such a caricature of an article? None of that is the behaviour of those desperate to be liked by people.


That's who I meant by "Oxbridge types". Those on the 'left commentariat' or in New Labour.

And I'm talking about why they were attracted to the left in the first place. not how they behave once they're 'established'. They're supremely confident, born and raised for this, and in denial about the degree to which their privilege matters. They're in this weird kind of self-reinforcing bubble.



sihhi said:


> They're not 'denying' their 'privilege'. In their own analysis, on their own terms, they've sorted it out, they're the ones admitting their privilege, it's _others_ that have to do the same.


Can't remember my precise wording, but I was referring to them being _in denial_ about the true extent of their privilege, especially that part of it conferred on them by an accident of birth.


----------



## killer b (Dec 31, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> there is a substantial group of people who unquestioningly read the newspapers and magazines this lot write in.


not sure if William counts as a substantial group of people tbf.


----------



## love detective (Dec 31, 2012)

ymu said:


> he could and should have done a few years in the real world given that he criticises the culture of going straight into politics with fuck all experience (in mitigation, it was _Chavs_ wot launched him into the spotlight, and he shouldn't be criticised for writing up stuff he worked on whilst at university - but he didn't have to take _all_ the jobs offered off the back of it).


 
bear in mind though that he was working as a parliamentary researcher/MP's lackey for 4 years prior to Chavs coming out, so he didn't get those political jobs off the back of Chavs - he went straight from oxford into politics, something that you rightly point out he criticises others for doing, in his book


----------



## DotCommunist (Dec 31, 2012)

in happier news his puddle deep overview of hillsborough will need revising because since the publication of that book steps towards proper justice have been made


----------



## ymu (Dec 31, 2012)

love detective said:


> bear in mind though that he was working as a parliamentary researcher/MP's lackey for 4 years prior to Chavs coming out, so he didn't get those political jobs off the back of Chavs - he went straight from oxford into politics, something that you rightly point out he criticises others for doing, in his book


Ah, cheers. Got my timeline confused.

_<Owen Jones makes self-deprecating joke about youthful appearance>_


----------



## sihhi (Dec 31, 2012)

ymu said:


> And I'm talking about why _they were attracted to the left in the first place_. not how they behave once they're 'established'. They're supremely confident, born and raised for this, and in denial about the degree to which their privilege matters. They're in this weird kind of self-reinforcing bubble.


 
I can accept that - just not sure how far it goes - this wanting to be liked by poor people when they start out leftwards. There's many other ways to achieve that (being liked by the poor) - general charity stuff etc would probably work better than being a megaphone-marcher.
Perhaps it's more as seeing other cool people of a similar class, wanting to join in - usually at university not teenage years. Oxbridge might be different, Oxbridge has much less 'student activism' compared to the London universities or Essex or Brighton. I don't see any teenage upper-class leftists.
If it _was_ about guilt then it would be US SWP style "salting" solely working in basic industry with fellow comrades (not that that's necessarily the right way).


----------



## ymu (Dec 31, 2012)

They're hardly _upper_ class. 

The Oxford Union is for the career political types - I doubt more than half the students bother joining it - and the NUS is for 'the left'. They organise a fair bit, bring motions, and organise coaches to marches. It varies a lot from college to college. Some are a lot more leftwing and active than others.

The Lady Bountiful thing doesn't work. That would be to acknowledge and display their privilege. These types live in squats 6 days a week and then go home for laundry and Sunday lunch. _They're in denial_.


----------



## smokedout (Dec 31, 2012)

sihhi said:


> How can middle-class guilt cripple anything? Most of these people don't feel much guilt and have less shame.
> 
> 
> They're not 'denying' their 'privilege'. In their own analysis, on their own terms, they've sorted it out, they're the ones admitting their privilege, it's _others_ that have to do the same.


 
that's how you know you've checked your privilege enough, you stop feeling guilty


----------



## snadge (Dec 31, 2012)

Orang Utan said:


> Well yes of course. But there is a substantial group of people who unquestioningly read the newspapers and magazines this lot write in. I'm not sure they have much influence on either the working classes or the powers that be.


 

None of these cunts care about the working class, all they care about is their career.

That is why they alienate the working class with divides.


----------



## Bakunin (Dec 31, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> One does - if you have to write (and write and write and write) at least proof-read it before you publish it.


 
Would this be a time to mention to LP and her ilk little things like fact-checking, putting other people's well-being before a juicy byline, not plagiarising and not falsifying and/or misquoting the people they actually did speak to rather than making up whole interviews with people they've never even met?

Or would demanding proper professional standards be oppressing the poor little darlings with honesty and ethics?


----------



## sihhi (Dec 31, 2012)

ymu said:


> They're hardly _upper_ class.


Owen Jones no - public-sector Labour-minded middle-class. But George Monbiot and Laurie Penny their families are well above that. 



> The Oxford Union is for the career political types - I doubt more than half the students bother joining it - and the NUS is for 'the left'. They organise a fair bit, bring motions, and organise coaches to marches. It varies a lot from college to college. Some are a lot more leftwing and active than others.


So it is possible to be non-political before as a teenager and swing left _there_, suggesting the radicalisation doesn't happen in teenage years.



> The Lady Bountiful thing doesn't work. That would be to acknowledge and display their privilege. These types _live in squats 6 days a week and then go home for laundry and Sunday lunch_. _They're in denial_.


But that can't be from guilt then. Guilt would mean either helping someone poor enter an empty you've secured/re-connected or allowing them to stay in your home you have your lunch at.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 31, 2012)

I dont think guilt comes into it for the likes of laurie penny


----------



## snadge (Dec 31, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> I dont think guilt comes into it for the likes of laurie penny


 
No it is career, she is divisive scum.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 31, 2012)

she just wants to get a job out of it. at the guardian.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 31, 2012)

smokedout said:


> that's how you know you've checked your privilege enough, you stop feeling guilty


 /   How does it work for race then? Are there people genuinely feeling guilty that they were born white and born in Britain? Really?
'Privilege' as understood in the context of privilege politics doesn't mean 'guilt', it's a number of other things right. I'm still trying to understand how it operates - it does get more and more confusing the deeper you go. It's still a rubbish name and I prefer the old labels of systemic or structural (anti-)sexism, racism and sexual chauvinism.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Dec 31, 2012)

http://www.afed.org.uk/blog/state/3...rivilege-theory--from-the-womens-caucus-.html

I got sent this. I don't really understand it all, to be honest, being a thick prole divvy and all, but it does seem rather a long way from almost every instance I've seen of people being asked to check their privilege. I dunno, I just loathe buzzwords like all this stuff. Mansplaining, privilege, trigger warnings...


----------



## snadge (Dec 31, 2012)

frogwoman said:


> she just wants to get a job out of it. at the guardian.


 
I personally think these type of cunts want to make a movement out of it, not just a career, to make money of the the subjugation of their lessers and divide the working class, they are racists and sexists at the heart of it.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

Bakunin said:


> Would this be a time to mention to LP and her ilk little things like fact-checking, putting other people's well-being before a juicy byline, not plagiarising and not falsifying and/or misquoting the people they actually did speak to rather than making up whole interviews with people they've never even met?
> 
> Or would demanding proper professional standards be oppressing the poor little darlings with honesty and ethics?


Misogynistic oppressor, oppressing with your demands for professional standards.


----------



## love detective (Dec 31, 2012)

sihhi said:


> /  How does it work for race then? Are there people genuinely feeling guilty that they were born white and born in Britain? Really?


----------



## sihhi (Dec 31, 2012)

S☼I said:


> http://www.afed.org.uk/blog/state/3...rivilege-theory--from-the-womens-caucus-.html
> 
> I got sent this. I don't really understand it all, to be honest, being a thick prole divvy and all, but it does seem rather a long way from almost every instance I've seen of people being asked to check their privilege. I dunno, I just loathe buzzwords like all this stuff. Mansplaining, privilege, trigger warnings...


 
Oh God that AF document again I made about 4 posts on that document here if you are interested

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/shit-manarchists-say.294600/page-21

 noting amongst other things, how it read like a straight import from the US liberal arts college (and probably Ivy League) left, because it refers to Puerto Rico instead of any British or European examples about colonial situations, and it's analysis of 'class privilege' was very weak.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 31, 2012)

love detective said:


>


 
Not to labour the point ld, but that's one example and probably the only one I've ever seen. It's from an specifically Christian organisation which had a sort of run-in of events for a while leading up to the 2007 anniversary of the Act of Parliament against Atlantic slave transportation.

For various reasons they wanted to recreate the chapters in Isaiah about “your sons and daughters coming from afar” (4),  “foreigners will rebuild your walls” (10) and “the sons of your oppressor will come bowing before you.” (14) - to prove that the Christian church was a bond between all humanity sort of thing and is against slavery (disputed amongst theologians).

http://www.lifelineexpedition.co.uk/mota/repairers.htm

That's one set of trips to Africa by a tiny group of people for a specifically religious aim, where the 'guilt' or more accurately an expression of guilt for a few hours followed by a feast of togetherness was expressed for a week at most. It has become totemic because they look so silly with the mic and all, but I don't see any evidence of guilt feelings amongst middle-class people, neither on a class basis or a race basis.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 31, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> and the book launches. Don't forget the book launches.


 
And the lunches, darling.


----------



## sihhi (Dec 31, 2012)

For anyone who is interested this is the Caitlin Moran article for The Times (pay-walled to provide _quality_ journalism according to several professors):




> _Our Future is Terrifying without Equality_
> _Equality is not humanity’s cashmere bedsocks. It’s not a present. It’s a necessity_
> 
> When I first started being serious about being a bleeding heart pinko liberal lefty right-on lover of women, gays, disableds, mentals, the working class, transsexuals and all the ethnics – apart from the Chinese, obviously. It’s difficult to trust them. They’re a cruel race. Or is that supposed to be the Japanese? I can never remember – I did it because it seemed to be the right thing. The polite thing. The noble thing.
> ...


 
It is a very weak article, almost spitefully anti-leftist. It seems to say 'capitalists aren't a problem, it's other (Third World) countries just not being civilised or stable, dammit'.
And it is odd, to say the least, how _certain _races become the butt in a joke presumably targetted at liberal condescension: "When I first started being serious about being a bleeding heart pinko liberal lefty right-on lover of women, gays, disableds, mentals, the working class, transsexuals and all the ethnics – apart from the Chinese, obviously. It’s difficult to trust them. They’re a cruel race. Or is that supposed to be the Japanese? I can never remember – I did it because it seemed to be the right thing."


----------



## snadge (Dec 31, 2012)

> That's one set of trips to Africa by a tiny group of people for a specifically religious aim, where the 'guilt' or more accurately an expression of guilt for a few hours followed by a feast of togetherness was expressed for a week at most. It has become totemic because they look so silly with the mic and all, but I don't see any evidence of guilt feelings amongst middle-class people, neither on a class basis or a race basis.


 
Called the María Eva Duarte de Perón momen*t, *these awful tyrants with their OWN privilege or their own twisted view through privileged education think that they still have an address with the working class, call them racist when they don't like how they react, these pretenders, that disguise themselves with 'privilege' or ' identity' camouflage and try and tell people at the the thin edge of the wedge how to fucking act*.*

First up against the wall.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

sihhi said:


> For anyone who is interested this is the Caitlin Moran article for The Times (pay-walled to provide _quality_ journalism according to several professors):
> 
> It is a very weak article, almost spitefully anti-leftist. It seems to say 'capitalists aren't a problem, it's other (Third World) countries just not being civilised or stable, dammit'.
> And it is odd, to say the least, how _certain _races become the butt in a joke presumably targetted at liberal condescension: "When I first started being serious about being a bleeding heart pinko liberal lefty right-on lover of women, gays, disableds, mentals, the working class, transsexuals and all the ethnics – apart from the Chinese, obviously. It’s difficult to trust them. They’re a cruel race. Or is that supposed to be the Japanese? I can never remember – I did it because it seemed to be the right thing."


 
I thought that was an awful article, and the 'joke' about Chinese/Japanese just summed it up for me, really. If paywalls ensure quality, I dread to think what else is out there.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 31, 2012)

that's fucking hideous.


----------



## frogwoman (Dec 31, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> And the lunches, darling.


 
less business lunches, more throwing punches


----------



## Lo Siento. (Dec 31, 2012)

sihhi said:


> For anyone who is interested this is the Caitlin Moran article for The Times (pay-walled to provide _quality_ journalism according to several professors):
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Also mind-numbingly dumb. I mean, whatever humanity's greatest resource is it patently _isn't _"brains". Ask most people who the most creative capitalist of the last 10 years was, and half of them would say Steve Jobs. That is, a man who invented nothing, not one single thing, beyond a marketing campaign. Whose "wealth creation" consisted of doing what capitalists have done for about 100 years now - getting working class people to repetitively do the same task over and over again really quickly for 12 hours a day to make products cheap enough for him to generate a profit on something his "creativity" had naff all to do with.

Under capitalism, the vast majority of productive labour remains dedicated to building, assembling, sewing, moving, digging, sowing and picking. Like fuck does capitalism need or want the ideas, inventions and better ways of doing things of the billions of people doing the things that make their wealth.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

"When I first started being serious about being a bleeding heart pinko liberal lefty right-on lover of women, gays, disableds, mentals, the working class, transsexuals and all the ethnics – apart from the Chinese, obviously"

If this is meant to be satire, then it offends against the first rule; which is surely: never be flippant about an oppressed minority which can't eat its own babies when in desperate straits. Obviously, the working class can no longer reproduce...and if they do, just where are they hiding? My cleaner's Latvian FFS!...tried for an 'indigenous'...even offered a Gregg's loyalty card with the bus fare supplement.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 31, 2012)

What's Caitlin Moron (see what I did, do ya, eh, eh?) ever done? Been a presenter on some shit sub-"The Word" "post pub" type programme (Naked City, if memory serves) in the early 90's. And wrote a shit book. Fuck knows how she expects to ever be taken seriously.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

How do so many people get to write such utter drivel AND get it published?

This type of 'journalism' is nothing better than the ramblings of an emo teenager.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 31, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> How do so many people get to write such utter drivel AND get it published?
> 
> This type of 'journalism' is nothing better than the ramblings of an eno teenager.


 
An emo teen who should've got it out of her system years ago by painting her bedroom black.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> What's Caitlin Moron (see what I did, do ya, eh, eh?) ever done? Been a presenter on some shit sub-"The Word" "post pub" type programme (Naked City, if memory serves) in the early 90's. And wrote a shit book. Fuck knows how she expects to ever be taken seriously.


She became a Fellow at Aberystwyth university in July 2012 too.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 31, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> She became a Fellow at Aberystwyth university in July 2012 too.


 
What does being a fellow actually entail - There;s probably a joke in there, but serious question.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Dec 31, 2012)

She probably said it was AMAZEBALLS.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> What's Caitlin Moron (see what I did, do ya, eh, eh?) ever done? Been a presenter on some shit sub-"The Word" "post pub" type programme (Naked City, if memory serves) in the early 90's. And wrote a shit book. Fuck knows how she expects to ever be taken seriously.



Not sure she expects to tbf. I think she just wants be a laugh...taking an off-beat, sideways, left-field, whimsical look at things.

Thing is: post-irony...everybody does this as a matter of course...for most people under 30, it's the very prism through which they view the world...everything takes its place in a collage of self-deprecation, knowing cynicism and a world-weary fatalism...even 12 year-olds.

I think the notion of somebody doing it for pay, for the benefit of a smallish elite of Times-subscribing, irony-free, 'heteronormative' bank managers is a touch bizarre; like getting remunerated for farting or breathing all day without a break. And she's a retard...and I've read precisely two paragraphs of her writing.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> What does being a fellow actually entail - There;s probably a joke in there, but serious question.


It's just an honorary degree - she doesn't actually have to do anything.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Not sure she expects to tbf. I think she just wants be a laugh...taking an off-beat, sideways, left-field, whimsical look at things.
> 
> Thing is: post-irony...everybody does this as a matter of course...for most people under 30, it's the very prism through which they view the world...everything takes its place in a collage of self-deprecation, knowing cynicism and a world-weary fatalism...even 12 year-olds.
> 
> I think the notion of somebody doing it for pay, for the benefit of a smallish elite of Times-subscribing, irony-free, 'heteronormative' bank managers is a touch bizarre; like getting remunerated for farting or breathing all day without a break. And she's a retard...and I've read precisely two paragraphs of her writing.


Don't use the word 'retard' as a perjorative please. It's offensive.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 31, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> It's just an honorary degree - she doesn't actually have to do anything.


 
Ah right, cornflake packet then. Still, it's another string to her non existant bow. Thanks for explaining though.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Dec 31, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Don't use the word 'retard' as a perjorative please. It's offensive.


 

Yeah, I agree with that - Ronnie's a pretty funny poster, but there's enough words to choose from without resorting to retard.


----------



## snadge (Dec 31, 2012)

Stop giving these people platforms.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

Frances Lengel said:


> Ah right, cornflake packet then. Still, it's another string to her non existant bow. Thanks for explaining though.


No worries, happy to help.

I was more worried that she was actually teaching vacuous crap at a university, and was glad to see that is not the case.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

snadge said:


> Stop giving these people platforms.


What people? The 'celeb class war warriors'?


----------



## ymu (Dec 31, 2012)

sihhi said:


> > Currently, believing in societal equality suggests that you have made a moral, selfless decision to redistribute privilege. It is a decision to be good.


_I'm a leftie because I am good and moral and willing to be worse off to make you, poor people, better off._

Monbiot does this one a lot too.


----------



## snadge (Dec 31, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> What people? The 'celeb class war warriors'?


 
The identity politicoes and maybe the privilege dividers, the rest of them are hangers on.

Nothing has been said in this very viewed thread that actually helps the working class.

Fucking nothing.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

snadge said:


> The identity politicoes and maybe the privilege dividers, the rest of them are hangers on.
> 
> Nothing has been said in this very viewed thread that actually helps the working class.
> 
> Fucking nothing.


Do the 'working class' need or even want help?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Don't use the word 'retard' as a perjorative please. It's offensive.



Yeah...good point. I'm a complete twat. It's just that I was reading my diary from when I was 13 and saw an entry about someone 'being a retard' and I thought it sounded kinda cool and transgressive, maybe. So I slipped it in to try and look edgy. You're right, I made a total prick of myself.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

What I mean is, has anybody actually had conversations with many members of the working class and asked them these questions?

To be honest, I think the biggest thing that anybody can do at the moment is stop the benefits reforms, stop making the cuts which affect those in our society most and and stop taking from the poor to make the rich feel better.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Yeah...good point. I'm a complete twat. It's just that I was reading my diary from when I was 13 and saw an entry about someone 'being a retard' and I thought it sounded kinda cool and transgressive, maybe. So I slipped it in to try and look edgy. You're right, I made a total prick of myself.


Well, back in the 1980s nobody batted an eyelid at the use of the word, but times have changed and words like 'lame' and 'retard' are unacceptable in a negative context.

Fair play to you for recognising that you were a prick.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Well, back in the 1980s nobody batted an eyelid at the use of the word, but times have changed and words like 'lame' and 'retard' are unacceptable in a negative context.
> 
> Fair play to you for recognising that you were a prick.




No. Fair play to you. Just thought I'd see how that went down.

http://helenlewiswrites.tumblr.com/private/39164543605/tumblr_mftd1spuUT1rpijql



#Exhibit A. “She used the word ‘retard’.”

Yes, she did. In How To Be A Woman, Moran writes: 

“I am, by and large, boundlessly positive. I have all the joyful ebullience of a retard.”

I’m not surprised people found this offensive. But - and I never seem to hear Moran’s critics mention this - she has apologised fully for it. She told the Hairpin:

with the word “retard” which I had in the book, that was a quote from my diary when I was thirteen. I know that the word is offensive now.

I wrote the book in such a hurry, and when it was pointed out that it was just kind of sitting there not in the context of what I’d said when I was thirteen, we immediately pulled it, issued a massive apology, and I would never use that again.


This sounds a lot like “listening to critics”, incidentally.#

Sorry. I'm just a bit bored. Was just seeing if I would be let off for listening to critics...which probably makes me even more of a prick. I blame the drink...as I would.


----------



## snadge (Dec 31, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Do the 'working class' need or even want help?


 

Yes we do, why on earth why we shouldn't, luckily I have been shafted by middle class bastards all my life, trying to fight for my right to do something that even the middle class bastards don't even know.

Some of us workers also have education and that is why we detest middle class, also upper class spartacus.

I am a minority though, most of my comrades want too drop me in the shite for their own satisfaction.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 31, 2012)

equationgirl said:


> Do the 'working class' need or even want help?


 
We need a spark - & the whole shit house will burn.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

Fuckin hell

Adam Ant's just popped up on my telly. He's alive and dressed like a pirate.

Was he good once?..asks the 12 year old.

 Erm...? No ...but it's Adam Ant.

Oh, right.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Dec 31, 2012)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Fuckin hell
> 
> Adam Ant's just popped up on my telly. He's alive and dressed like a pirate.
> 
> ...


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Dec 31, 2012)

I can sing as good as Bobby Womack.


----------



## equationgirl (Dec 31, 2012)

snadge said:


> Yes we do, why on earth why we shouldn't, luckily I have been shafted by middle class bastards all my life, trying to fight for my right to do something that even the middle class bastards don't even know.
> 
> Some of us workers also have education and that is why we detest middle class, also upper class spartacus.
> 
> I am a minority though, most of my comrades want too drop me in the shite for their own satisfaction.


Ok, so you want help, but what help do you want? I'm not saying the working class shouldn't have help but it sounds very Victorian to assume that help is wanted.


----------



## snadge (Jan 1, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Ok, so you want help, but what help do you want? I'm not saying the working class shouldn't have help but it sounds very Victorian to assume that help is wanted.


 
The world has become very Victorian all of a sudden.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

snadge said:


> The world has become very Victorian all of a sudden.


On the threads about benefit cuts and disability assessments, it's been suggested that workhouse reintroduction can't be far behind...


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 1, 2013)

snadge said:


> The world has become very Victorian all of a sudden.



For which, read: "paternalistic bourgeois imperialst capitalist"...and yet we endow it with a feminine sobriquet. Shame on our collective deficiency in failing to present ourselves duly privilege checked...which, somewhat 'ironically', could be abbreviated "PC".

Check my punctuation...and my privilege in a pear tree.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 1, 2013)

So why's this check yr privilege stuff...why does it have to be in all this language I don't use? I've no probs someone saying "You're being a bit out of order, mate" if I ever am, so why make it all sound like fucking Nadsat or some shit?


----------



## love detective (Jan 1, 2013)

fucking hell, ant music!


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

S☼I said:


> So why's this check yr privilege stuff...why does it have to be in all this language I don't use? I've no probs someone saying "You're being a bit out of order, mate" if I ever am, so why make it all sound like fucking Nadsat or some shit?


Because dressing it up in fancy language makes those it use it seem oh-so-knowledgeable and 'right-on' and at the forefront of political thought, in my opinion, when really they know fuck all and are trying to hide it.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 1, 2013)

S☼I said:


> So why's this check yr privilege stuff...why does it have to be in all this language I don't use? I've no probs someone saying "You're being a bit out of order, mate" if I ever am, so why make it all sound like fucking Nadsat or some shit?



Isn't that the point? If you could put it in terms in common usage it'd be annihilated in minutes. This way it remains an esoteric /invite-only area of discourse. You've gotta be on the plateau to even get your hotdog a sight of the bonfire. You're in the foothills with a tin of Spam and a blunt Swiss Army fork.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 1, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> On the threads about benefit cuts and disability assessments, it's been suggested that workhouse reintroduction can't be far behind...


 
If there was only ships still in them docks - Or (more pertinent to me) if Mather and Platts was still open - That'd have made heroin redundant. What the _fuck_ have they done to us?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> If there was only ships still in them docks - Or (more pertinent to me) if Mather and Platts was still open - That'd have made heroin redundant. What the _fuck_ have they done to us?


The company I work for used to employ several thousand people just in the Glasgow site, now it's a few hundred. You can see the effect it's had on the surrounding area. It's run down and has an aura of hopelessness.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 1, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> If there was only ships still in them docks - Or (more pertinent to me) if Mather and Platts was still open - That'd have made heroin redundant. What the _fuck_ have they done to us?



They didn't tell us Hayek had it right, only "The Road to Serfdom" was reverse psychology.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 1, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Isn't that the point? If you could put it in terms in common usage it'd be annihilated in minutes. This way it remains an esoteric /invite-only area of discourse. You've gotta be on the plateau to even get your hotdog a sight of the bonfire. You're in the foothills with a tin of Spam and a blunt Swiss Army fork.


 
Quite. I read this earlier: "Any more white men who dislike privilege theory and intersectionality, please unfollow. Also, if possible, stop breathing."


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 1, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> They didn't tell us Hayek had it right, only "The Road to Serfdom" was reverse psychology.


 

I've never read him, if you can be arsed give us the inside skinny.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 1, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Quite. I read this earlier: "Any more white men who dislike privilege theory and intersectionality, please unfollow. Also, if possible, stop breathing."



Jesus wept

Well yeah...that kinda sums it up.
I'm a white guy...First they came for the...


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 1, 2013)

Aye. So much obviously wrong with a statement like that.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 1, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> I've never read him, if you can be arsed give us the inside skinny.



He reckoned it was the Socialists that did it in the library with the ice-pick

..while all the time it was Colonel Mustard in the pantry with the corporate hegemony...
And now we're bit parts in a Tolstoy novel...fetishising funny shaped potatoes.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 1, 2013)

...and yet there was  that dullard who used to pull his kex down in the Apollo. He was Socialist. Well, his discoloured underpants were.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 1, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> ...and yet there was  that dullard who used to pull his kex down in the Apollo. He was Socialist. Well, his discoloured underpants were.



Were they deepest red? Had they shrouded oft the martyred dead? Or were they simply testament to the constant effluvia which we must confront and emit? 
Judge not, lest....etc

They also serve who only shit themselves
Or drink themselves into a satisfactory conclusion


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 1, 2013)

And with that, she finally does one.

So remember have a lucky time in 2013...and check your Umbongo...they drink it in the Congo.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> *And with that, she finally does one.*
> 
> So remember have a lucky time in 2013...and check your Umbongo...they drink it in the Congo.


What do you mean?


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> she just wants to get a job out of it. at the guardian.


 
Hope she lasts longer than she did at the Independent.


----------



## Blagsta (Jan 1, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Quite. I read this earlier: "Any more white men who dislike privilege theory and intersectionality, please unfollow. Also, if possible, stop breathing."



Wtf is "intersectionality"?


----------



## snadge (Jan 1, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Wtf is "intersectionality"?


 

Right on way of saying non identity I think.


----------



## Mrs Magpie (Jan 1, 2013)

I have no idea what intersectionality means either. I did hear a good anecdote about someone who met LP at a party and had no idea who she was which caused LP to be a bit off with her to the merriment of other guests who think she's up her own arse.


----------



## Mrs Magpie (Jan 1, 2013)

When I was originally told this anecdote I had no idea who she was either. The penny has finally dropped, as it were.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 1, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Wtf is "intersectionality"?


Intersections of, for example, feminism, non-whiteness, sexuality, gender, disability.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 1, 2013)

Mrs Magpie said:


> I did hear a good anecdote about someone who met LP at a party and had no idea who she was which caused LP to be a bit off with her to the merriment of other guests who think she's up her own arse.


 
It's bad of me, but I hope that's true.


----------



## Mrs Magpie (Jan 1, 2013)

Well, I got it from the horse's mouth (not Laurie Pony, the guest who'd never heard of her).


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 1, 2013)

Intersectionality:








if you get three Os in a row you get to have class based prejudices. There is also a version where being rich, attending the best schools, the best unis, having the best jobs, the best private health care, the best access to elite networks etc count as Os. There's also the one that a lot of the people who've been talked about over the last few pages play, that's a mix of both of the above ones.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Intersectionality:
> 
> 
> 
> ...




A strange game.

The only winning move is not to play.

How about a nice game of chess?


----------



## Athos (Jan 1, 2013)

Blagsta said:
			
		

> Wtf is "intersectionality"?



It's a password to the cabal. Those who don't understand it (i.e. the vast majority of people) don't get to access the discourse. They use this nonsense (and other rhetorical devices) to identify one another, and to conceal the absence of any substance. Like the emperors' new clothes.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 1, 2013)

Shibboleth, surely?


----------



## Athos (Jan 1, 2013)

Balbi said:
			
		

> Shibboleth, surely?



Exactly that.


----------



## rekil (Jan 1, 2013)

Me in March 2011 said:
			
		

> Give her a few years and she'll be churning out guff about how lefties are all useless jealous wankers who hate success and don't understand human nature and the like, because she used to be one until she grew up and so on.


Halfway there already.


lauriepenny said:


> Personally, though, I think the problem with the British Left is that the people who are meant to be its best and most fervent fighters waste their time on in-fighting, petty bullying and tearing down anyone who puts their head above the parapet. I think the problem with the British Left is that too many of us would rather attack each other and turn our energy outwards. I think the problem with the British Left is that it's riddled with bitterness and barely acknowledged misogyny. And I think that this thread is the perfect example of all of those things.


Happy new year Laura!

PS. There are forrins on this board.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 1, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Wtf is "intersectionality"?


 

It's a concept designed by a black American, middle-class, feminist legal scholar called Kimberle Crenshaw in 1988/9.






Their organisation (from which the image is from) is the AAPF which features on its board several law PhDs and lawyers, a union international officer sell-out, a sociologist who studied in America and UCL at the head of a progressive media foundation, a former (Soros) OSI figure, an anti-racism instructor for the US military (essential to stop the buds of soldier resistance sprouting), and a senior figure at multi-million burglar-alarm firm Tcyo International. 

http://aapf.org/mission/board-of-directors/

Nearly all of them are either stationed in _universities_ or at the _top reaches of "nonprofits"_ ie charities, except the final figure Lydia Mallett whose day job is the role at Tyco.



> Lydia G. Mallett, PhD is Vice President of Staffing and Diversity, Tyco International, where she has responsibility for the strategic design and implementation in support of the organization’s total staffing requirements. In addition Dr. Mallett is responsible for developing and implementing a corporate-wide diversity strategy addressing issues such as workforce representation and retention, and work-life effectiveness. In that role, she also counsels Tyco’s senior executives in helping them devise and carry out diversity initiatives aligned with business objectives. Prior to joining Tyco in 2004, she was Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer at General Mills where she developed and implemented a senior management accountability strategy and expanded a senior management co-mentoring strategy for women and people of color. Ms. Mallett holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, a Master’s degree in Labor/Industrial Relations, and a Doctorate degree in Social Psychology, all from Michigan State University. She is active with several organizations, including the Executive Leadership Council, National Coalition of 100 Black Women (previous National President), The Conference Board Council of Global Diversity & Inclusion Executives and is a Board Member of the Feminist Press.


 
Cue privilege analysers': 'Marx & Engels owned a factory'


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 1, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Quite. I read this earlier: "Any more white men who dislike privilege theory and intersectionality, please unfollow. Also, if possible, stop breathing."


 
It's an absolutely natural comment from someone committed to identity politics, though - the hegemony of *your* identity group.
Because that *is* what identity politics and privilege theory, bound as they are by human action, ultimately resolve to: Not equality for all regardless of identity, but hegemony for your group, and those groups that your group are _simpatico_ with.  I'm not implying genocidal intent here, by the way, but rather that if you *start* from a premise that a group or groups should be excluded from even basic consideration, you merely construct a new mechanism of othering, which you then dress up by claiming that it redresses "ancient wrongs".

I suspect that the author of that comment, in common with many of these fine people, has about as much reflexivity as a breezeblock.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 1, 2013)

copliker said:


> Halfway there already.
> 
> Happy new year Laura!
> 
> PS. There are forrins on this board.


 
"British Left": Never-had-to-worry-about-getting-a-British-passport-privilege. LOLjoke

I'd love to know who "the people who are meant to be its best and most fervent fighters" means.
This whole god-damned thread came from her calling the SWP as cockroaches as a joke
Before that, she was friends with the SWP:


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 1, 2013)

snadge said:


> Right on way of saying non identity I think.


 
Just a new way of presenting the fairly obvious fact that none of us have what you might call a homogeneous personal identity, pointing out that our personal identities are made up of various facets - class (although that one gets left out by most modern-day "thinkers", the twats), gender, ethnicity, age, health status, sexuality etc.
Of course, what intersectionality often misses is that personal identity is even more faceted than that, that personal idenity also comprises of choices: The football team you choose to support; the music you like; the way you choose to dress. People who gob on about intersectionality don't really like to acknowledge *quite* how diverse identities are, though. It puts a crimp in the easy pigeonholing. After all, it's far harder to pigeonhole a white male, a black females or an Asian intersex if you acknowledge that beneath the label lies a complex individual who *shouldn't* be reduced to being the sum of that label.

</rant off>


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 1, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Intersections of, for example, feminism, non-whiteness, sexuality, gender, disability.


 
Don't oppress me with your definitions!!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 1, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Shibboleth, surely?


 
Now now, we're not Lindsey German.


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

I have only scrolled back and read the last few pages... have I moissed anything?


----------



## emanymton (Jan 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> "British Left": Never-had-to-worry-about-getting-a-British-passport-privilege. LOLjoke
> 
> I'd love to know who "the people who are meant to be its best and most fervent fighters" means.
> This whole god-damned thread came from her calling the SWP as cockroaches as a joke
> Before that, she was friends with the SWP:


Sorry to play the pedant but the video is from Marxism 2011, but this thread was started in 2010.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 1, 2013)

firky said:


> I have only scrolled back and read the last few pages... have I moissed anything?


 
someones tweeted about how disliking privilege theory makes you an OWM.plus 'intersectionality' no, me nieher


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

Cheers, dot. Has anyone mentioned _kyriachy_ yet, if not can I bags it to look clever?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 1, 2013)

firky said:


> Cheers, dot. Has anyone mentioned _kyriachy_ yet, if not can I bags it to look clever?


 
seen it mentioned before but what is it?


----------



## spawnofsatan (Jan 1, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> someones tweeted about how disliking privilege theory makes you an OWM.plus 'intersectionality' no, me nieher


 
Whats an OWM?


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

Oppressed white male.

Not entirely sure to be perfectly honest with you, froggy. I know it's to do with how societies are built around dominant controlling groups / oppression and that's about it really. I think it is synonymous with intersectionality but I will no doubt be told it isn't and that I am wrong about kyriarchy too.

One of those words that sticks in your head.

Edit to add:

Linky:


When people talk about patriarchy and then it divulges into a complex conversation about the shifting circles of privilege, power, and domination -- they're talking about kyriarchy. When you talk about power assertion of a White woman over a Brown man, that's kyriarchy. When you talk about a Black man dominating a Brown womyn, that's kyriarchy. It's about the human tendency for everyone trying to take the role of lord/master within a pyramid. At it best heights, studying kyriarchy displays that it's more than just rich, white Christian men at the tip top and, personally, they're not the ones I find most dangerous. There's a helluva lot more people a few levels down the pyramid who are more interested in keeping their place in the structure than to turning the pyramid upside down... So when we talk about woman asserting power over other womyn, we're talking kyriarchy. When you witness woman trying to dominate, define, outline the "movement" or even what an ally should be - that's the kyriarchal ethos strong at work.

http://www.deeplyproblematic.com/2010/08/why-i-use-that-word-that-i-use.html


----------



## spawnofsatan (Jan 1, 2013)

firky said:


> Oppressed white male.
> 
> Not entirely sure to be perfectly honest with you, froggy. I know it's to do with how societies are built around dominant controlling groups / oppression and that's about it really. I think it is synonymous with intersectionality but I will no doubt be told it isn't and that I am wrong about kyriachy too.
> 
> ...


 
Sure sounds like kyriarchy to me


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 1, 2013)

It's great having a dense new jargon you can use to intellectually belittle and intimidate those who don't understand it, who didn't go to uni and study critical theory for years and get access to this American way of thinking, it really keeps the scum away from radical politics.

It's the language that've created for themselves that I hate most of all. Whatever you think of the theory, the way it's expressed is atrocious.


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> It's great having a dense new jargon you can use to intellectually belittle and intimidate those who don't understand it, who didn't go to uni and study critical theory for years and get access to this American way of thinking, it really keeps the scum away from radical politics.
> 
> It's the language that've created for themselves that I hate most of all. Whatever you think of the theory, the way it's expressed is atrocious.


 
Yes.

I nearly posted I haven't heard the word _intersectionality_ outside of uni and that was when I first heard the word _kyriarchy_ too. Don't think I have used either term since as people look baffled.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 1, 2013)

Most of them didn't and don't do critical theory (and none of this stuff is to do with critical theory, which would be contemptuous of this stuff despite exhibiting the same sort of _everyone else is the problem __attitude_) or even know what it is - they do english or history.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 1, 2013)

You could jusy say "you can't reduce everything down to class" for example. I mean that's just common sense isn't it?

Capitalism is a gendered economic system, it relies on racial priviliges and heirachies, I don't think you can effectively challenge capitalism unless you do take on these facts and treat them with the due respect, but the idea that "oh we'll overthrow capitalism then it'll be ok for women, racism will no longer exist" nah that's just bollocks. I suppose if _something_ is challenging that vulgar Marxist way of looking at the world then fine, but surely there's a better way to do it than identity politics top trumps? The whole thing is such an individualist way of looking at the world, and so much of the time it just reeks of liberalism to me, even when it's masquerading as anarchism.

It will be a lot worse at alienating ordinary people than even the most tautological and obtuse Trot bullshit, I don't know anyone outside of a tiny minority of students I knew at uni who are into this stuff, and I can't see it getting any traction. If anything it might fuck up anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles that takes place, and drive people into the arms of the far-right, who use language anyone can relate to and promote a much less esoteric brand of identity politics that relies on well-established tropes that are implicitly understood in our political culture, not constructing new ones with you and your 6 mates.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Most of them didn't and don't do critical theory (and none of this stuff is to do with critical theory, which would be contemptuous of this stuff despite exhibiting the same sort of _everyone else is the problem __attitude_) or even know what it is - they do english or history.


 
Just a quick note, I'm aware of that, that was my experience of it at uni too. I just like taking the piss out of Critical Theory people. Like the lad on Twitter I told him to fuck off and get a neon big sign with ADORNO to put over his head for when he's out and about, just so everyone knows he's been to uni and read dead clever books with long words in it.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> It will be a lot worse at alienating ordinary people than even the most tautological and obtuse Trot bullshit, I don't know anyone outside of a tiny minority of students I knew at uni who are into this stuff, and I can't see it getting any traction. If anything it might fuck up anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles that takes place, and drive people into the arms of the far-right, who use language anyone can relate to and promote a much less esoteric brand of identity politics that relies on well-established tropes that are implicitly understood in our political culture, not constructing new ones with you and your 6 mates.


 
Why would it alienate 'ordinary people' _more_ than trot bullshit? They're both seen as pointy-headed irrelevances - if ever mentioned.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Most of them didn't and don't do critical theory (and none of this stuff is to do with critical theory, which would be contemptuous of this stuff despite exhibiting the same sort of _everyone else is the problem __attitude_) or even know what it is - they do english or history.


 
This stuff - intersectionality or kyriarchy - isn't at all part of any history syllabuses.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Why would it alienate 'ordinary people' _more_ than trot bullshit? They're both seen as pointy-headed irrelevances - if ever mentioned.


 
It wouldn't.

But the importation from America is interesting and it suggests outright cross-class alliances might be made in the future once the recession deepens.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Why would it alienate 'ordinary people' _more_ than trot bullshit? They're both seen as pointy-headed irrelevances - if ever mentioned.


 
If not more, than at least on a par with, the worst bits of Trotskyite wankery. Personally when trying to put these idea's to people I know and am friends with, the privilige theory stuff is just laughed at as pretentious crap, whereas Trot stuff is seen as nerdy and a bit pathetic, not to mention quite old fashioned sounding. I think it's probably understood by people easier though.


----------



## Athos (Jan 1, 2013)

sihhi said:
			
		

> This stuff - intersectionality or kyriarchy - isn't at all part of any history syllabuses.



Which is possibly why its so poorly thought through.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This stuff - intersectionality or kyriarchy - isn't at all part of any history syllabuses.


I wasn't suggesting that it was - or part of any syllabus at all. I was saying that this is what these type of people seem to have studied at their elite/private liberal arts colleges.


----------



## Athos (Jan 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:
			
		

> Why would it alienate 'ordinary people' more than trot bullshit? They're both seen as pointy-headed irrelevances - if ever mentioned.



On the face of it, it's even more divisive.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It wouldn't.
> 
> But the importation from America is interesting and it suggests outright cross-class alliances might be made in the future once the recession deepens.


Yes, the derivation is important - it essentially is a way that posh (private liberal arts colleges and the stupid games that people who see themselves as politicos - students and faculty both) seek to force others into not only recogising them as key to any social change, but as a leader in the game of social change through a collective denial of material conditions and realities and their consequences - including, directly for them. Inherently cross-class.


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This stuff - intersectionality or kyriarchy - isn't at all part of any history syllabuses.


 
My tutor was John Molyneux which is why I probably came across the terms. 

Very nice bloke btw.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Jan 1, 2013)

Posh words which we don't understand. Pass me the fucking shot gun & let the lead do the talking


----------



## sihhi (Jan 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I wasn't suggesting that it was - or part of any syllabus at all. I was saying that this is what these type of people seem to have studied at their elite/private liberal arts colleges.


 
In America yeah and also women's studies.

In Britain leftie students having studied history tend to be Labour - harder versions of Tristram Hunt.

It seems part of some syllabuses - especially at Masters level taught courses.
So there are whole events in German universities with anglo links that are focused _just_ on intersectionality 

http://www.cgc.uni-frankfurt.de/intersectionality/programme.shtml


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> harder versions of Tristram Hunt.


Articul8?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

I think what words like intersectionality and kyriarchy show is that you can make up a 'language' to describe your way of pigeonholing the world around you.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 1, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I think what words like intersectionality and kyriarchy show is that you can make up a 'language' to describe your way of pigeonholing the world around you.


More to _exclude_ the world around you,and the people in it. It's perfect bubble language.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> More to _exclude_ the world around you,and the people in it. It's perfect bubble language.


Good point - it's about exclusion, not inclusion, of the world from your bubble. Cheers butchers


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Posh words which we don't understand. Pass me the fucking shot gun & let the lead do the talking


 
They don't want the likes of you anyway, so jog on, male scum.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

This thread is ace, I'm learning lots.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

firky said:


> They don't want the likes of you anyway, so jog on, male scum.


I don't think they want any of us, to be honest.


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

Bet you can't wait to use those words at Firebox over a cup of Agitator.


----------



## cesare (Jan 1, 2013)

firky said:


> Cheers, dot. Has anyone mentioned _kyriachy_ yet, if not can I bags it to look clever?


You can only look clever if you spell it correctly.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

firky said:


> Bet you can't wait to use those words at Firebox over a cup of Agitator.


I'm not going to be anywhere near Firebox soon, so no. Is it still going?


----------



## sihhi (Jan 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Yes, the derivation is important - it essentially is a way that posh (private liberal arts colleges and the stupid games that people who see themselves as politicos - students and faculty both) seek to force others into not only recogising them as key to any social change, but as a leader in the game of social change through a collective denial of material conditions and realities and their consequences - including, directly for them. Inherently cross-class.


 
I'm thinking the outright 'charitify'-ication of _all_ social struggles. Making mission statements and inclusivity statements for all and any campaign, seeking funding from other masters.

As soon as a compromise deal that still shafts everyone is offered, accepting it if it is attacking an 'oppressed group' slightly less than attacking everyone else is a big achievement.
With the student occupations on Palestine a while back - as soon as token annual scholarships were offered to like 4 Palestinian students - _who had already completed university _there was a split. Some were 'no let's hold on longer and force some actual disclosure from university managements'. In the end those who wanted the scholarships and not _total disruption of university life _won out, and the 'occupations' (seizures of unused rooms in some cases) ended.

What's to stop scholarships for Somali female students being part of the official way of university life?
(I'm thinking in a higher education thing, because that's where this stuff is.)
An 'intersectional' approach says yeah Somali students in higher education are necessary they are at a critical intersection - Muslim, refugee, women. Whereas the traditional Labourist/some Marxist approach says reduce fees for all - we don't want scholarships, stick 'em.
Both sides can end up unable to agree on a common platform - so nothing is won.

Also There are syllabuses that do do 'intersectionality' - it's a module in its own right in lots of universities in the US, not all posh liberal arts colleges. If you google intersectionality syllabus you get straight away




> PDF]
> Intersectionality - University of Maryland
> www.bsos.umd.edu/socy/syllabi/socy729_pcollins.pdfFile Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View
> Patricia Hill Collins – DRAFT - SOCY729. Page 1. 9/10/2012. Intersectionality. SOCY 729. Advanced Topics in Social Theory. University of Maryland. Fall 2012 ...
> ...


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I'm not going to be anywhere near Firebox soon, so no. Is it still going?


 
More than likely, it has only been open a few monhts. I'd go, out of curiosity and because it can't be as bad as we have made it out to be.




cesare said:


> You can only look clever if you spell it correctly.


 
Aye, it's not a word that I am familiar with so typos happen. I spelt it correctly the second time around though


----------



## cesare (Jan 1, 2013)

There are apparently two new "isms" to throw into the mix, now too.

Classtivism and specifism.


----------



## snadge (Jan 1, 2013)

firky said:


> Aye, it's not a word that I am familiar with so typos happen. I spelt it correctly the second time around though


 
Who gets the rights on spelling a new made up word, maybe if we all spell it Firky's way from now on whist using it frivolously all over the internet, OUR spelling will be the norm.


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

Classtivism flows off the tongue so eloquently.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

cesare said:


> There are apparently two new "isms" to throw into the mix, now too.
> 
> Classtivism and specifism.


New year, new 'isms'?

So what are these ones then?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

I think I want to invent some isms of my own.


----------



## cesare (Jan 1, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> New year, new 'isms'?
> 
> So what are these ones then?


Fuck knows. I gave up reading the articles they were in.


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I think I want to invent some isms of my own.


Spellingism. I am being oppressed by a spelliarch.


----------



## Athos (Jan 1, 2013)

cesare said:
			
		

> You can only look clever if you spell it correctly.



Firky rejects your literate-normative spelling privilege.

Eta: he beat me to it!


----------



## cesare (Jan 1, 2013)

Athos said:


> Firky rejects your literate-normative spelling privilege.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 1, 2013)

By the way Laurie Penny's favourite work she ever did in 2012 was this:




> London, baby, you’re beautiful just the way you are. It’s tempting to see the city the way it sees itself sometimes, as an ageing diva, swelling and spreading and prone to hot flashes, painfully aware of losing its international relevance. London forgets that there is witchcraft in these old bones, and dirt, and the sort of power that accretes in any filthy old body with a tendency to consume its own young.


 




> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> I wrote well over a hundred essays and articles in 2012, but this is my favourite. London, Underground: for @newinquiry http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/london-underground/ …


 

Where she lives with Nick Lezzard is a 'hovel'.




> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> THE HOVEL I AM IN YOU. Finally home after months of travelling. @nicklezard has hugs coming at him from all over the shop.


 
Nothing of the exchanges here impacted on her year:





> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> In 2012 I got a job, took a bus across the USA, went to Greece and wrote a book, got heartbroken several times, and I don't regret a thing.


Yes Laurie Penny, you win, well played.


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

Athos said:


> Firky rejects your literate-normative spelling privilege.
> 
> Eta: he beat me to it!


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

She posted a photo of her hovel (maybe on twitter?), it's a room big enough for a double bed (complete with full linen) and is quite modest but a mile away from being a hovel, but she's probably never even been in a damp council flat with no room for a fridge let alone a double bed.


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

The hovel


----------



## weepiper (Jan 1, 2013)

firky said:


> The hovel


 
no amount of artfully unmade bedlinen can hide the nice clean wall-to-wall fitted carpet and lack of black mould up the wall, chuck.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Jan 1, 2013)

There's a fucking window & a bed for starters. Hovel fail.


----------



## cesare (Jan 1, 2013)

Athos said:


> Firky rejects your literate-normative spelling privilege.
> 
> Eta: he beat me to it!


He only beat you cos he sneakily edited 

I'm not sure that posting pictures of LP's bedroom is a good idea, btw.


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

cesare said:


> He only beat you cos he sneakily edited
> 
> I'm not sure that posting pictures of LP's bedroom is a good idea, btw.


 
It's on her blog and on her twitter.

I wouldn't post if she hadn't put it out in the public domain.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 1, 2013)

Also it's in Marylebone isn't it? How much rent is she paying on a small double room in a shared flat there?


----------



## cesare (Jan 1, 2013)

firky said:


> It's on her blog and twitter.


So what?


----------



## discokermit (Jan 1, 2013)

firky said:


> she's probably never even been in a damp council flat with no room for a fridge let alone a double bed.


council flats are usually quite spacious. especially in comparison to privately rented equivalents.


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

> I wouldn't post if she hadn't put it out in the public domain.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

@sihhi

Did you read the London 2012 essay she wrote? It was quite good, but again, she uses the plight of a disabled person as part of her work. This person was concerned she would lose her benefits after an Atos assessment.

Does LP ever do any follow-up articles on the people she writes about, or is she uninterested in their plight once her writing is finished?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 1, 2013)

That London underground essay was very reminiscent of Mieville and Gaiman's writings on London to be honest, I'm thinking particularly Kraken and Neverwhere.

ETA or maybe Morrison in the Invisibles which is blates her and her NY chums bible


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

I like Neverwhere.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 1, 2013)

_London is a city of contrasts  _Fucking lazy drivel.


----------



## killer b (Jan 1, 2013)

Are there any cities that aren't?


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> _London is a city of contrasts  _Fucking lazy drivel.


 
Lazy but true.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 1, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> Lazy but true.


Indeed, even want-wits like you could have written something so lazy.


----------



## love detective (Jan 1, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> That London underground essay was very reminiscent of Mieville and Gaiman's writings on London to be honest, I'm thinking particularly Kraken and Neverwhere.
> 
> ETA or maybe Morrison in the Invisibles which is blates her and her NY chums bible



Don't say blates


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 1, 2013)

_we used to dream of living in a hovel_


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 1, 2013)

Oh god


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Indeed, even want-wits like you could have written something so lazy.


 
I'm sure sad saps like you would be hanging on every word I wrote.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 1, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> I'm sure sad saps like you would be hanging on every word I wrote.


Step one: know your market.


----------



## discokermit (Jan 1, 2013)

killer b said:


> Are there any cities that aren't?


birmingham. it's all shit.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Jan 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> _we used to dream of living in a hovel_


 
Who said that?


----------



## cesare (Jan 1, 2013)

Mr.Bishie said:


> Who said that?


A take on the Yorkshire Men sketch, I presume. Footlights privileged scum etc.


----------



## Athos (Jan 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> _London is a city of contrasts  _Fucking lazy drivel.


It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> _London is a city of contrasts  _Fucking lazy drivel.


Sounds like the start of one my English essays written as a teenager.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> _London is a city of contrasts  _Fucking lazy drivel.



'Contrasts' is indeed lazy. Nor does it do justice to the extreme levels of deprivation, inequality and structural oppression.

London is a city of intersectionality.


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

> I was in Seattle, and I'd just come back from yet another interview for a job I didn't get, when yet again I'd been told I was a stong candidate, that I was qualified, brilliant at what I do - I am brlliant at what I do - and named runner-up. Not one of those people I was beaten by was a person of colour, and not one of them was female. And that night I dreamed that I was in my hotel room, and in walked Hilary Clinton.


----------



## Athos (Jan 1, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> 'Contrasts' is indeed lazy. Nor does it do justice to the extreme levels of deprivation, inequality and structural oppression.
> 
> London is a city of intersectionality.


 
So is Milton Keynes.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 1, 2013)

firky said:


> I was in Seattle, and I'd just come back from yet another interview for a job I didn't get, when yet again I'd been told I was a stong candidate, that I was qualified, brilliant at what I do - I am brlliant at what I do - and named runner-up. Not one of those people I was beaten by was a person of colour, and not one of them was female. And that night I dreamed that I was in my hotel room, and in walked Hilary Clinton.


 
Who wrote that cloo?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

I'm brilliant at what I do, and on several occasions I've also been runner-up for positions. It doesn't mean I'm being oppressed.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 1, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I'm brilliant at what I do, and on several occasions I've also been runner-up for positions. It doesn't mean I'm being oppressed.


 
me too

My mum told me


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Who wrote that cloo?


 
PWOPA NORTY!

It's Laurie Penny talking about how she forced Hilary Clinton to finger fuck her.




> Don't the Jungians say that you're meant to represent every person who appears in your dream? In walked Hilary Clinton, and she was a maid, too, like Jennifer Lopez in that movie, Maid in Manhattan. And I forced her to finger-fuck me. She wasn't enjoying it - I mean, I was practically raping her. It was like -'
> 
> At this point, Commie Girl makes a hand gesture that I can't quite bring myself to describe.


 
Utterly


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 1, 2013)

firky said:


> PWOPA NORTY!
> 
> It's Laurie Penny talking about how she forced Hilary Clinton to finger fuck her.
> 
> ...


 
I think it was commie girl saying that...


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

firky said:


> PWOPA NORTY!
> 
> It's Laurie Penny talking about how she forced Hilary Clinton to finger fuck her.
> 
> Utterly


That's well old, from 2008.


----------



## Firky (Jan 1, 2013)

Aye, I found it when I googled her bed 



Spanky Longhorn said:


> I think it was commie girl saying that...


 
Doesn't make it any less bizarre.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 1, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I'm brilliant at what I do, and on several occasions I've also been runner-up for positions. It doesn't mean I'm being oppressed.



I had an interview about 9 months back. I'm alright at what I do...most days.Unfortunately, I get bored in interviews if they're more than 15 minutes or so. But I was a runner up for a position....5th.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I had an interview about 9 months back. I'm alright at what I do...most days.Unfortunately, I get bored in interviews if they're more than 15 minutes or so. But I was a runner up for a position....5th.


Are you being oppressed though? Maybe you're not getting these jobs because you're being oppressed, or maybe you're not being oppressed enough and need more oppression. It's hard to tell.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 1, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Are you being oppressed though? Maybe you're not getting these jobs because you're being oppressed, or maybe you're not being oppressed enough and need more oppression. It's hard to tell.



Yeah I'm definitely oppressed. Doesn't 'intersectionality' make constant 360 24/7 oppression an inevitablility? It's everywhere...like god.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 1, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Yeah I'm definitely oppressed. Doesn't 'intersectionality' make constant 360 24/7 oppression an inevitablility? It's everywhere...like god.


I think it depends on your exact intersectionality...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I'm thinking the outright 'charitify'-ication of _all_ social struggles. Making mission statements and inclusivity statements for all and any campaign, seeking funding from other masters.
> 
> As soon as a compromise deal that still shafts everyone is offered, accepting it if it is attacking an 'oppressed group' slightly less than attacking everyone else is a big achievement.
> With the student occupations on Palestine a while back - as soon as token annual scholarships were offered to like 4 Palestinian students - _who had already completed university _there was a split. Some were 'no let's hold on longer and force some actual disclosure from university managements'. In the end those who wanted the scholarships and not _total disruption of university life _won out, and the 'occupations' (seizures of unused rooms in some cases) ended.
> ...


 
I'm not sure that's true, if you look at it from the perspective of those who, at a specific place of learning, have adopted an intersectional approach. Their proxies (in your example female Somali Muslim students) don't benefit, but the intersectioneers *do*. The failure to achieve an outcome via their proxies in fact proves to them the successs of their analysis. They failed not because they are wrong, but because their cause was overwhelmed by the privilege exerted by others.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> So is Milton Keynes.


 
The great thing about Milton Keyes is that the regular layout makes destruction by artillery really easy.


----------



## barney_pig (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> I agree with that but there is another side of that coin. Unions dominated by white working-class men, way back when unions had power and used it, had no incentive to fight for immigrants who were perceived to be threatening jobs (however counter-productive excluding them might be) or for women to receive equal access to and pay in the workplace. There was a need for the rest of the class to stick up for ourselves you know, 'specially as we massively outnumber you privileged fuckers.
> 
> The over-articulate, under-empathetic middle-class types could get that. And they dominated the discourse until everyone else fucked off and left them to it. But the pendulum doesn't have to swing all the way back to the point that it's not even possible to discuss 'privilege' in the serious parts of the left.
> 
> ...


And yet those white dominated unions did fight for immigrants, like the nur members who broke the colour bar on the rail in the early 60s, or the thousands of white male unionists who fought for the grunwicks strikers.
When I was in the swap, I was the only train driver in the party, railway fraction meetings consisted of me, a half dozen tube workers and some wonks from the tssa. Working class members like me were almost entirely presented as "trade union militants" at party meetings, never as party members.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I'm not sure that's true, if you look at it from the perspective of those who, at a specific place of learning, have adopted an intersectional approach. Their proxies (in your example female Somali Muslim students) don't benefit, but the intersectioneers *do*. The _failure to achieve an outcome via their proxies in fact proves to them the successs of their analysis_. They failed not because they are wrong, but because their cause was overwhelmed by the privilege exerted by others.


 
This is where it all goes floppy.

1 If the weight of privilege (solidarity from people marginally richer, paler, with better immigration status) 99 times out of a 100 - deflects and tarnishes struggles from the focused-on intersectional group, then surely the intersectional group should be left to get along with it alone. 

2 Scratching my head here but the kind of thing where this has come up in any meaningful sense the past year has been benefits and claimants' action. (I'd add no one used the term privilege).
Some said a benefits group should be for benefit claimants only, with material by and for work programme and JSA. Others said no anyone should be able to join and should direct most of its material on non-claimants.
I think in the end the first option won because of practicality. But.... that doesn't mean struggles have been won - in fact it's the opposite.
2ii A privilege analysis would say the first option always, I think, and that non-claimants people in work should write leaflets and organise claimants for claimant goals, as non-voting _allies_ in the struggle of the claimant intersection.

3. The more I think and I have thought long and hard since LP, the more 'privilege' is like a wand to wave at a leftist argument you don't like. 
This what irritates about Laurie Penny - leave aside the blaming the subs, and show-off parts, the white and not so white lies.
It's A. refuse to engage with the argument on multi-culturalism that Dave Thurrock 
B. accuse him/her of 'lefty-flavoured unexamined white privilege'
C. stand by the interview of tan-shop owner Tommy EDL _again_ (as if their voices haven't been heard what with Paxman interviews, Telegraph interviews, Daily Star columns)


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> And yet those white dominated unions did fight for immigrants, like the nur members who broke the colour bar on the rail in the early 60s, or the thousands of white male unionists who fought for the grunwicks strikers.
> When I was in the swap, I was the only train driver in the party, railway fraction meetings consisted of me, a half dozen tube workers and some wonks from the tssa. Working class members like me were almost entirely presented as "trade union militants" at party meetings, never as party members.


A colour bar that was instigated by workers originally, no? Has there been much militant union support for female pay equality in workplaces that have more male than female workers? How is the struggle for equal pay going?

As for the SWP, that's exactly what I'm talking about. The dominance of middle-class activists fetishising the working-class without ever being part of it. That's what the middle-class left does.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 2, 2013)

She gets everywhere. Saw this video on a blog I look at now and then. It's of a meeting in New York and an absolute masterclass in how to fuck up a potentially interesting forum discussion - the moderator spends a self indulgent 20 minutes asking questions that one suspects add up to his personal views, then only gives the speakers 10 minutes to respond to the 20 minute long questions 

But Laurie asks a question at 1.37.30 - fair enough to ask why all the panel were white males but why ask the panel? It's hardly their fault.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> A colour bar that was instigated by workers originally, no? Has there been much militant union support for female pay equality in workplaces that have more male than female workers? How is the struggle for equal pay going?


Actually, in all my research on post-war trade unionism I've seen no evidence of trade unions demanding a colour bar, beyond the occasional isolated local official. TUC's official policy is opposition to racial discrimination from 1955 Congress.

You can certainly argue that trade unions didn't do enough to combat racism, but arguing that they instigated colour bars is historically inaccurate.

(as to pay equality, there's several instances where largely male workforces supported women's pay claims and the opening up of employment opportunities to women - Morris Cowley and Ford Dagenham being two examples off the top of my head)


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> She gets everywhere. Saw this video on a blog I look at now and then. It's of a meeting in New York and an absolute masterclass in how to fuck up a potentially interesting forum discussion - the moderator spends a self indulgent 20 minutes asking questions that one suspects add up to his personal views, then only gives the speakers 10 minutes to respond to the 20 minute long questions
> 
> But Laurie asks a question at 1.37.30 - fair enough to ask why all the panel were white males but why ask the panel? It's hardly their fault.



They mostly live there. If that's all she has to offer the debate ,then fly me out there Laurie.


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> Actually, in all my research on post-war trade unionism I've seen no evidence of trade unions demanding a colour bar, beyond the occasional isolated local official. TUC's official policy is opposition to racial discrimination from 1955 Congress.
> 
> You can certainly argue that trade unions didn't do enough to combat racism, but arguing that they instigated colour bars is historically inaccurate.
> 
> (as to pay equality, there's several instances where largely male workforces supported women's pay claims and the opening up of employment opportunities to women - Morris Cowley and Ford Dagenham being two examples off the top of my head)


I didn't say the unions demanded the colour bar, I said the workers did.

I know there are instances where female pay equality has been supported. How often has it been entirely neglected?

I can't work out if the unions were even involved in this case. All the reports I can find make it sound like a private legal action. Was it?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

Unison were yes.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Unison were yes.


 
Indeed, all the public sector unions have been nationally.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> I didn't say the unions demanded the colour bar, I said the workers did.
> 
> I know there are instances where female pay equality has been supported. How often has it been entirely neglected?
> 
> I can't work out if the unions were even involved in this case. All the reports I can find make it sound like a private legal action. Was it?


 
Unison are quoted at least once in that article.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> I didn't say the unions demanded the colour bar, I said the workers did.


Well, both statements are equally wrong. I mean, there's plenty of evidence that individual workers objected to working with immigrants, but there's no record that comes to my mind of workers taking collective action to enforce a colour bar (I've a dim recollection that there might have been one brief incident on the buses in the West Midlands at some point in the '50s), nor even of it being demanded.

Any workplace that operated a colour bar (and again, to my knowledge, the conscious formation of such workplace discrimination was not as common as you might imagine) in post-war Britain did so because management was hiring that way, either out of their own prejudice or often because of their projected prejudice (rightly or wrongly) on to their workforce ("I'd love to hire a black, but the lads wouldn't have it").

Put it this way, in The Making of the Black Working Class by Ron Ramdin, which is certainly a book that would've pulled no punches on such practices had they existed, makes no accusations of the above sort whatsoever.





> I know there are instances where female pay equality has been supported. How often has it been entirely neglected?


By whom? In comparison to what? Unions have done more for female pay equality than probably any other type of organisation. Certainly a great deal more than cross-class feminist groups ever did



> I can't work out if the unions were even involved in this case. All the reports I can find make it sound like a private legal action. Was it?


 
Well, it's based on an agreement between the government and the trade unions. So, yeah.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jan 2, 2013)

and all of the above is not to suggest that either trade unions, or union activists and militants have always done brilliantly in combatting racism and sexism at work. In fact, what they achieved in spite of their shortcomings (in contrast to the meagre achievements of many of their critics), rather illustrates the point that whatever the issue, class unity and sharing a common purpose has proved way more effective than dividing ourselves off into special interest groups.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

Just to put in here before it's mentioned, the bristol boycott (and the brum one) was against management, despite the TG's attempts to make it otherwise. And it was understood as this locally.

(edit:and a social boycott in those terms - and now- means a class boycott)


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Unison are quoted at least once in that article.


They're quoted, but not as being behind the legal action which won the case. That's why I'm asking.


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> Well, it's based on an agreement between the government and the trade unions. So, yeah.


This case arose because that agreement wasn't implemented by Birmingham City Council. That's why I'm asking if there was union involvement in _enforcing_ the judgement. We've had an Equal Pay Act since 1970, but that doesn't mean much in the absence of action to enforce it.



Lo Siento. said:


> and all of the above is not to suggest that either trade unions, or union activists and militants have always done brilliantly in combatting racism and sexism at work. In fact, what they achieved in spite of their shortcomings (in contrast to the meagre achievements of many of their critics), rather illustrates the point that whatever the issue, class unity and sharing a common purpose has proved way more effective than dividing ourselves off into special interest groups.


I've not said any different. Just pointing out that there was a reason that equality struggles came to the fore in the 1970s; it wasn't solely down to the vacuous middle-class left pushing identity politics because they couldn't get to grips with class issues.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> They're quoted, but not as being behind the legal action which won the case. That's why I'm asking.


Well, the legal action refers to the "single status" agreement that the unions negotiated for both equal pay AND payouts to workers who had already left their jobs who had been discriminated against. So whether they were paying this particular lawyer or not, it was because of collective bargaining that the council's obligation existed in the first place!


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Yeah, like I said, it's enforcing the agreements that matters.

Anyone know much about Action4Equality? I can't find much about them except a specifically Scottish blog. It has this to say at the end of an article about the victory in Brum:


> The pattern is always the same - big council employers and trade unions that should know better, who have been aware of the problem for years - but things only change once Action 4 Equality appears on the scene.


 
I'm not taking that at face value, being well acquainted with the history of middle-class types swooping in and taking credit for the years of unglamorous struggle done by others, but it does rather imply that the unions were not involved in taking this action. I'd like to know what they were doing and why it was less effective (if it was less effective and not part of the cumulative victory which other people are taking credit for).


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> This case arose because that agreement wasn't implemented by Birmingham City Council. That's why I'm asking if there was union involvement in _enforcing_ the judgement. We've had an Equal Pay Act since 1970, but that doesn't mean much in the absence of action to enforce it.


Sadly the unions' shitness in taking direct action to enforce workers' rights in modern Britain is far from limited to matters of equal pay (although I seem to recall some strike action around single status over the years)



> I've not said any different. Just pointing out that there was a reason that equality struggles came to the fore in the 1970s; it wasn't solely down to the vacuous middle-class left pushing identity politics because they couldn't get to grips with class issues.


I don't think anyone is arguing that struggles for equality weren't/aren't important, just about how they fit into political activity.


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Well yes, the unions are shit. But the state of women's pay suggests that they are more shit for some than others, no? Or were so utterly shit for women before the 1970s that despite having been brilliant for the last forty years women's pay still lags a long way behind.

I realise that there are some very sound analyses on this from the serious left but in the rush to denounce 'identity politics', the nuance is often lost. That's all.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Well yes, the unions are shit. But the state of women's pay suggests that they are more shit for some than others, no? Or were so utterly shit for women before the 1970s that despite having been brilliant for the last forty years women's pay still lags a long way behind.
> 
> I realise that there are some very sound analyses on this from the serious left but in the rush to denounce 'identity politics', the nuance is often lost. That's all.


I'm not sure where you are losing the nuance, tbh. I've not disputed the historic shortcomings of class-based organisations and groups re: race and gender. I've just said that they achieved a good deal more on that front than the groups self-consciously practising "identity politics". 

Equal pay is a great example. Cross-class feminist groups had been talking about work and gender for more than a century before the Equal Pay Act. A group of working class women, trade unionists, go on strike for equal pay and suddenly the union bureaucrats and politicians are falling over themselves to legislate. Class unity gets stuff done.


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> I'm not sure where you are losing the nuance, tbh. I've not disputed the historic shortcomings of class-based organisations and groups re: race and gender. I've just said that they achieved a good deal more on that front than the groups self-consciously practising "identity politics".
> 
> Equal pay is a great example. Cross-class feminist groups had been talking about work and gender for more than a century before the Equal Pay Act. A group of working class women, trade unionists, go on strike for equal pay and suddenly the union bureaucrats and politicians are falling over themselves to legislate. Class unity gets stuff done.


 
I don't disagree with any of that. I am perfectly well aware that class unity preceded identity politics, like I said:



> The over-articulate, under-empathetic middle-class types could get that [equality struggles]. And they dominated the discourse until everyone else fucked off and left them to it. But the pendulum doesn't have to swing all the way back to the point that it's not even possible to discuss 'privilege' in the serious parts of the left.


The backlash against identity politics is entirely justified, but has the potential to damage class unity. That's all.


----------



## Nice one (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> I didn't say the unions demanded the colour bar, I said the workers did.
> 
> I know there are instances where female pay equality has been supported. How often has it been entirely neglected?
> 
> I can't work out if the unions were even involved in this case. All the reports I can find make it sound like a private legal action. Was it?


 
there is the example of over 1,000 women workers who were actively discriminated against in terms of pay by sunderland city council (in collusion with the unions) who won their case last year. 
http://www.freedompress.org.uk/news/2012/03/07/women-win-in-the-workplace/


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Thanks for that.

I have a vague recollection of a similar background to the case in Brum; that the unions weren't pushing for equal pay for women (or rather, for actually applying the law on equal pay for women) because it would drag men's pay down.

Can't find the reports I'm thinking of though, so I might be wrong.


----------



## Nice one (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Thanks for that.
> 
> I have a vague recollection of a similar background to the case in Brum; that the unions weren't pushing for equal pay for women (or rather, for actually applying the law on equal pay for women) because it would drag men's pay down.
> 
> Can't find the reports I'm thinking of though, so I might be wrong.


 
that's exactly the situation in sunderland. The unions signed an agreement with the council to reinforce the pay disparity. The women originally brought a case against both the unions and the council but came to an agreement with the union in order to focus on winning the equal pay awards.


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Yeah. Found this blog detailing the background to the case and the Single Status agreement. Union collusion with councils appears to have been widespread:


> Whatever may have been fondly imagined, Single Status could never be cost-neutral. With (in Birmingham) men earning up to four times more than women doing identically pay-graded jobs, there would be losers as well as winners, with local authorities having to find very large sums of money on top of their required efficiency savings, and without jeopardising their primary task of improving local services. They had to devise and negotiate a more expensive unified structure, and compensate those discriminated against under the existing regime, while also ensuring that the now ‘downgraded’ bin men and road sweepers would not be penalised excessively – either through pay cuts or the withdrawal of the supposedly output-based bonus payments that tended to be the preserve of male-dominated jobs.
> 
> Righting a major long-term injustice is inevitably difficult, but 10 years was a fair time-frame. Nevertheless, in 2010, three years after the deadline, one in five councils had still not implemented a Single Status Agreement. Few emerge from the saga with much credit. Ministers set no staged timetable, enabling them to refuse to provide extra funding for back-pay settlements. They also capped, initially at a hopelessly inadequate £200 million, the total ‘capitalisation’ sum councils could borrow against their own assets: a figure that, even in 2006, would barely have covered the then estimated costs of Birmingham City Council alone.
> 
> ...


----------



## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

To my mind, a lot of this boils down to the fact that unequal pay doesn't only serve capitalists' interests insofar as it keeps the overall wage bill down, but also insofar as it militates against working class solidarity i.e. by introducing gender-based divisions.  To that end, identity politics plays into capital's hands.  Fundamentally, equal pay is class issue, not merely a gender issue.


----------



## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> To my mind, a lot of this boils down to the fact that unequal pay doesn't only serve capitalists' interests insofar as it keeps the overall wage bill down, but also insofar as it militates against working class solidarity i.e. by introducing gender-based divisions.  To that end, identity politics plays into capital's hands.  Fundamentally, equal pay is class issue, not merely a gender issue.


Not just equal pay, but the whole issue of work paid and unpaid including domestic and caring.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> A colour bar that was instigated by workers originally, no? *Has there been much militant union support for female pay equality in workplaces that have more male than female workers?* How is the struggle for equal pay going?
> 
> As for the SWP, that's exactly what I'm talking about. The dominance of middle-class activists fetishising the working-class without ever being part of it. That's what the middle-class left does.


 
The Tricos dispute in the late 70s early 80s springs to mind.


----------



## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Not just equal pay, but the whole issue of work paid and unpaid including domestic and caring.


Yes, the issue of the reproduction of labour power.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 2, 2013)

killer b said:


> Are there any cities that aren't?


 
Lincoln.


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> The Tricos dispute in the late 70s early 80s springs to mind.


And Laurie Penny worked her way up via a subs job at the Morning Star.

Is it really so difficult to acknowledge that some members of the working-class have had, and continue to have, better union representation than others?


----------



## rekil (Jan 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> less business lunches, more throwing punches


In light of recent events, especially her pathetic performance here where her appalling reading comprehension skills and various other deficiencies were exposed and confirmed, this april 2011 piece makes for an amusing read. The laughable lie about her "unique access" was already posted, but I'd overlooked the parts where she "reports" on the Bristol fracas, boasts about her bravery, and the somewhat delusional image she has of her role, record and capabilities.


> There was a vast disparity between MSM coverage of the riot and what thousands of us watched live online that night. I held back from writing a report until, reading the BBC and Guardian coverage the next morning, I realised that noone in the sparsely occupied Bank Holiday press rooms was feeling inclined to dig beyond the official police statement that day. In the age of Twitter, we should be able to do better than that- so I hurried out a piece based on eyewitness accounts and as much insider info as I could collate.
> 
> [...]
> 
> ...


----------



## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> And Laurie Penny worked her way up via a subs job at the Morning Star.
> 
> Is it really so difficult to acknowledge that some members of the working-class have had, and continue to have, better union representation than others?



There's loads of stuff around the Working Women's Charter Campaign in the 70s and what happened with the TUC which I'll dig out if I have time.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> And Laurie Penny worked her way up via a subs job at the Morning Star.
> 
> Is it really so difficult to acknowledge that some members of the working-class have had, and continue to have, better union representation than others?


 
Not sure why a reference to a CV that is at best economics with the truth is applied to what was a very difficult but hard won industrial dispute in which both men and women sacrificed wages for what they believed to be a just cause.  Sometimes things work in practise that wouldn't in theory especially if one is of the view that such working class solidarity ( especially in the bad old 70s according to a recent thread on Urban) requires the benefit of identity politics which in this case would have been totally divisive.















http://ourhistory-hayes.blogspot.co.uk/2007/07/trico-equal-pay-strike-1976-trico-equal.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bishopsgate/5509214870/lightbox/

Good union representation is what you get when you organise and fightback, and if you don't get it then change the leadership.


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Laurie Penny's mendacity about her CV is precisely the point.

Listing isolated disputes where the unions have acted for the whole of the class in a context where unions have also conspired with employers to screw over parts of the class, is no more convincing than Laurie Penny defending herself against accusations of class privilege by claiming that she worked her way up from the bottom.

And yes, we know that we only get representation when we organise and fightback. Hence all those pesky -isms.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:
			
		

> Laurie's mendacity about her CV is precisely the point.
> 
> Listing isolated disputes where the unions have acted for the whole of the class in a context where unions have also conspired with employers to screw over parts of the class, is no more convincing than Laurie Penny defending herself against accusations of class privilege by claiming that she worked her way up from the bottom.
> 
> And yes, we know that we only get representation when we organise and fightback. Hence all those pesky -isms.



Those pesky isms(the ones being thrown around by the sort of people this thread is directed at anyway) aren't coming out of struggle, but from a top down competitive use of them.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Laurie Penny's mendacity about her CV is precisely the point.
> 
> Listing isolated disputes where the unions have acted for the whole of the class in a context where unions have also conspired with employers to screw over parts of the class, is no more convincing than Laurie Penny defending herself against accusations of class privilege by claiming that she worked her way up from the bottom.
> 
> And yes, we know that we only get representation when we organise and fightback. Hence all those pesky -isms.


 
Do you really think unions act for the whole of class somehow on auto pilot? Some of  most militant struggles normally entail a fight against the union leadership.

Do me a favour and put down your back copies of Spare Rib and read a bit about the history of working class struggle, always against the odds. In fact go and read a bit about pesky isms when they had some of the Councils in the 80s.


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Those pesky isms(the ones being thrown around by the sort of people this thread is directed at anyway) aren't coming out of struggle, but from a top down competitive use of them.


I've not said otherwise. I've argued that the struggle for equality within the class got co-opted by the middle-class loudmouths because it was more comfortable for them than class issues. And that the backlash against shallow identity politics is in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Parts of the serious left do have a decent analysis but if that was making it through to action, women and minorities would be over-represented amongst the membership. I don't see that happening, but I might be wrong.


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Do you really think unions act for the whole of class somehow on auto pilot? Some of most militant struggles normally entail a fight against the union leadership.
> 
> Do me a favour and put down your back copies of Spare Rib and read a bit about the history of working class struggle, always against the odds. In fact go and read a bit about pesky isms when they had some of the Councils in the 80s.


I'm aware of that. Like I said, that's why women and minorities had to get militant in the first place.

I don't even know what Spare Rib is, but I'm guessing it's a reference to Eve and therefore a feminist magazine? Nice putdown, well done.


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## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> I've not said otherwise. I've argued that the struggle for equality within the class got co-opted by the middle-class loudmouths because it was more comfortable for them than class issues. And that the backlash against shallow identity politics is in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
> 
> Parts of the serious left do have a decent analysis but if that was making it through to action, women and minorities would be over-represented amongst the membership. I don't see that happening, but I might be wrong.


I didn't say that you did. I was attempting to cut these clowns off from historically claiming participation/leading role in these struggles by virtue of having an ism - and thus to stop them writing their leading role into the future struggles around these issues.

It being about class doesn't just mean middle class issues/demands/needs being substituted for working class ones (or co-opted as you put it)- it means their voices dominating. That's an ism that a lot of people are still struggling over. That's one reason the 'serious left' doesn't appear in those forums and media dominated by these people. Hence this thread and the disgust at the people who do get to do that.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I didn't say that you did. I was attempting to cut these clowns off from historically claiming participation/leading role in these struggles by virtue of having an ism - and thus to stop them writing their leading role into the future struggles around these issues.
> 
> It being about class doesn't just mean middle class issues/demands/needs being substituted for working class ones (or co-opted as you put it)- it means their voices dominating. That's an ism that a lot of people are still struggling over. That's one reason the 'serious left' doesn't appear in those forums and media dominated by these people. Hence this thread and the disgust at the people who do get to do that.



I suppose it's arguable, but if it hadn't been for Thatcher and her anti-union legislation; the chances are that the TUC/trade union leadership might well have been changed from within to be more representative of the working class as a whole.


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## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> I suppose it's arguable, but if it hadn't been for Thatcher and her anti-union legislation; the chances are that the TUC/trade union leadership might well have been changed from within to be more representative of the working class as a whole.


Just as a quick aside on that, and i know i always mention it, but it really is important - the 74-79 period, the one we are sold as seeing the turning of the working classes back on the unions, membership actually went up and went up quite steeply (iirc).


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Just as a quick aside on that, and i know i always mention it, but it really is important - the 74-79 period, the one we are sold as seeing the turning of the working classes back on the unions, membership actually went up and went up quite steeply (iirc).


I think what they're trying to sell is part and parcel of the anti-union spiel that underpins (and continues to underpin) anti-union measures designed to split/atomise the working class into more easily ruled segments. It's utter bollocks that the working class were turning against the unions. However some parts of the working class were demanding more of the unions and that increasing militancy got channelled away from class solidarity by way of eg the strength of the unions, into single issue stances & identity politics helped along by the top down mythmakers.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Just as a quick aside on that, and i know i always mention it, but it really is important - the 74-79 period, the one we are sold as seeing the turning of the working classes back on the unions, membership actually went up and went up quite steeply (iirc).


 
I have seen figures, can't find them now though that peak public disatisfaction with the trade unions coincided with peak membership, which I would lazily assume broadly indicated polarisation.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I have seen figures, can't find them now though that peak public disatisfaction with the trade unions coincided with peak membership, which I would lazily assume broadly indicated polarisation.


The more of a threat they became to capital, the more they were demonised.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> I think what they're trying to sell is part and parcel of the anti-union spiel that underpins (and continues to underpin) anti-union measures designed to split/atomise the working class into more easily ruled segments. It's utter bollocks that the working class were turning against the unions. However some parts of the working class were demanding more of the unions and that increasing militancy got channelled away from class solidarity by way of eg the strength of the unions, into single issue stances & identity politics helped along by the top down mythmakers.


 
It's also important to note that all the major trade unions in the UK have very active sections to represent women, black workers, disabled, LGBT, young etc - and that these were formed exactly because union members realised that the unions were prioritising some workers over others and there was a need for other members to organise together to promote their interests.

This was correct in my view and I would say most of the problems with these sections are simply down to their replication of existing structures and modes of poliics and action rather than down to them being divisive or seperatist or whatever.


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## elbows (Jan 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Just as a quick aside on that, and i know i always mention it, but it really is important - the 74-79 period, the one we are sold as seeing the turning of the working classes back on the unions, membership actually went up and went up quite steeply (iirc).


 
And Carry On at Your Convenience was the first box office failure of the series.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

One last post from me for the moment - it's also important to remember that when issuing broad brushstroke criticisms of the union movement, they tend to be large and unwieldy organisations containing many different and sometimes competing interests, as well as being political organisations - it does take time for people to have and win debates within such organisations - it is never certain that any large even vaguely democratic organisation is going to come to the correct view on any given issue at any given time without lots of discussion and falling out and mistakes.

The same would be true in my view for any genuinely mass democratic militant union movement.


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## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I have seen figures, can't find them now though that peak public disatisfaction with the trade unions coincided with peak membership, which I would lazily assume broadly indicated polarisation.


Can't talk for the polling figures as not seen them (though i would note they are not as hard as membership figures) but if that's the case, yes broad polarisation in a time of economic crisis - but class movement away away from the traditional party into something that was seen as defending those class interests (inaccurately as we know).


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> The more of a threat they became to capital, the more they were demonised.


 
totes


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> It's also important to note that all the major trade unions in the UK have very active sections to represent women, black workers, disabled, LGBT, young etc - and that these were formed exactly because union members realised that the unions were prioritising some workers over others and there was a need for other members to organise together to promote their interests.
> 
> This was correct in my view and I would say most of the problems with these sections are simply down to their replication of existing structures and modes of poliics and action rather than down to them being divisive or seperatist or whatever.



Generally, at what point did the major unions start to have these active sections? In the back of my mind I have around mid 90s onwards ?


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## ViolentPanda (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> A colour bar that was instigated by workers originally, no?


 
No, by management who didn't approve of the idea of people from the "black" community wearing *their* uniform and representing *their* company.



> Has there been much militant union support for female pay equality in workplaces that have more male than female workers? How is the struggle for equal pay going?


 
Historically, or presently?



> As for the SWP, that's exactly what I'm talking about. The dominance of middle-class activists fetishising the working-class without ever being part of it. That's what the middle-class left does.


 
Fetishisation isn't the right word. They don't fetishize us, they fetishize the *power* that we represent - the power *they* want, the power they expect to attain by having us as the cannon fodder in their revolution. Typical vanguardism.[/quote]


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> It's also important to note that all the major trade unions in the UK have very active sections to represent women, black workers, disabled, LGBT, young etc - and that these were formed exactly because union members realised that the unions were prioritising some workers over others and there was a need for other members to organise together to promote their interests.
> 
> This was correct in my view and I would say most of the problems with these sections are simply down to their replication of existing structures and modes of poliics and action rather than down to them being divisive or seperatist or whatever.


Hmm. I think that was fine 40 years ago. The existence of separate sections still today says to me that not much progress has been made. Looks a lot like the failure of top-down multiculturalism to me.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> totes


??


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> ??


Totally. Like blates is blatantly.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Totally. Like blates is blatantly.


 
I feel old.


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## ViolentPanda (Jan 2, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> Actually, in all my research on post-war trade unionism I've seen no evidence of trade unions demanding a colour bar, beyond the occasional isolated local official. TUC's official policy is opposition to racial discrimination from 1955 Congress.
> 
> You can certainly argue that trade unions didn't do enough to combat racism, but arguing that they instigated colour bars is historically inaccurate.


 
Yep. The (IIRC Rotherhithe/Bermondsey) dockers who marched for Powell in the late '60s/early '70s were an abberation compared to their fellow dockers elsewhere, for example.



> (as to pay equality, there's several instances where largely male workforces supported women's pay claims and the opening up of employment opportunities to women - Morris Cowley and Ford Dagenham being two examples off the top of my head)


 
Same as the Scottish Hillman Imp plant.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> I feel old.


You and me both


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## elbows (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> I feel old.


 
Mind the generation gap, its another cheap attempt to divide the multitude.


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## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

How do you think poor old laurie feels? At least yous aren't carrying the entire weight of the world on your underprivileged shoulders.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Generally, at what point did the major unions start to have these active sections? In the back of my mind I have around mid 90s onwards ?


 
I think some black  and women's sections in particular started a lot earlier - mid Eighties, same as Labour etc would be my guess.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> One last post from me for the moment - it's also important to remember that when issuing broad brushstroke criticisms of the union movement, they tend to be large and unwieldy organisations containing many different and sometimes competing interests, as well as being political organisations - it does take time for people to have and win debates within such organisations - it is never certain that any large even vaguely democratic organisation is going to come to the correct view on any given issue at any given time without lots of discussion and falling out and mistakes.
> 
> The same would be true in my view for any genuinely mass democratic militant union movement.



It hasn't exactly helped that many of them have actively become large and unwieldy organisations *on purpose* seeking to replicate corporate behemoths on the basis that weight of numbers in total equals strength. Many grass roots members haven't seen this move towards large hierarchical structures as being helpful on a day to day basis in the workplace.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Hmm. I think that was fine 40 years ago. The existence of separate sections still today says to me that not much progress has been made. Looks a lot like the failure of top-down multiculturalism to me.


 
Really?

I dunno - I think it says lots of progress has been made, but loads still has to be made, and any progress that has been maintained has to be defended - the price of equality is eternal vigilance.

These sections are not comparable to top down multiculuralism or feminism or whatever as they were created and are led by the workers who self identified a need for them (and obviously bureaucrats but even they generally come from the same sections themselves).

Which is not to say of course that they don't buy into and reflect the problems of top down multiculturalism but that's because it is the only thing on offer.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I think some black  and women's sections in particular started a lot earlier - mid Eighties, same as Labour etc would be my guess.


Which suggests the adoption of multiculturalism within the fabric of the unions themselves.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> It hasn't exactly helped that many of them have actively become large and unwieldy organisations *on purpose* seeking to replicate corporate behemoths on the basis that weight of numbers in total equals strength. Many grass roots members haven't seen this move towards large hierarchical structures as being helpful on a day to day basis in the workplace.


 
Exactly right.  Too many have softened their message, to increase their numbers.  But the move away from a willingness to take any sort of militant action has actually weakened their position.


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## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> Exactly right. Too many have softened their message, to increase their numbers. But the move away from a willingness to take any sort of militant action has actually weakened their position.


Where was the willingness historically? It rarely existed. They are not that sort of body. Militant reformism has always been forced on them via politics.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> It hasn't exactly helped that many of them have actively become large and unwieldy organisations *on purpose* seeking to replicate corporate behemoths on the basis that weight of numbers in total equals strength. Many grass roots members haven't seen this move towards large hierarchical structures as being helpful on a day to day basis in the workplace.


 
I think this is a misrepresentation of what happened actually  - there are two processes at work in parallel that both lead to organisational inertia.

1. There is a professional bureaucracy that seeks to perpetuate and defend its position (and that can be subdivided into various broad camps - but all with that essential element in common), and some members will see building a complex corporate structure as part of that, although they are on the decrease in my view as people wake up to the power of combining network theory with organising as ways of reducing democracy.

2. The need for the union movement to create democratic structures for lay activists to organise themselves (by idenity, industry, sector, workplace, geographical area etc) which have come together piecemeal in different ways in different unions, some of which have then merged further complicating the issue and where no committee, branch, sector group or industrial joint committee or whatever is prepared to abolish itself or it's conferences, meetings, forums etc...

I make no value judgements on either and I don't think either are "bad" however they are clearly not adequate to face the challenges of the future - and they will change - though not necerssarily in the right way or in time.

On the size thing - there seems to be two equally valid schools of thought.

A. Small, proffessional unions that are generally 'apolitical' and focussed can create a clear and strong identity and win real influence in a single relatively skilled industry which is immune from offshoring/undercutting etc.

B. One (or two or three) big union(s).


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Where was the willingness historically? It rarely existed. They are not that sort of body. Militant reformism has always been forced on them via politics.


 
I agree to some extent.  But - putting it very crudely -  surely the most militant are the most likely to already be in a union, such that the extension of membership to less militant workers has the effect of 'watering down' militancy?


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> Exactly right. Too many have softened their message, to increase their numbers. But the move away from a willingness to take any sort of militant action has actually weakened their position.


 
Nope - unions soften their message because activists and the wider membership either don't feel the need to harden it - or because their leadership successfully mobilise to dampen down attempts to harden it by a militant minority, or because of a combination of those.

The fact is in most sectors most of the time union members or potential members do not share the aspirations of the far left, or a belief that militant tactics can help them achieve the aspirations they do have.

Exactly the same as the rest of the population amazingly.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> I agree to some extent. But - putting it very crudely - surely the most militant are the most likely to already be in a union, such that the extension of membership to less militant workers has the effect of 'watering down' militancy?


 
Absolutely not no.

Union members join because they want representation if they get a problem at work, and see it as an insurance policy if they joined because they were the most militant we would have nearly 6 million supporters of militancy out there.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Nope - unions soften their message because activists and the wider membership either don't feel the need to harden it - or because their leadership successfully mobilise to dampen down attempts to harden it by a militant minority, or because of a combination of those.
> 
> The fact is in most sectors most of the time union members or potential members do not share the aspirations of the far left, or a belief that militant tactics can help them achieve the aspirations they do have.
> 
> Exactly the same as the rest of the population amazingly.


 
I wonder if some union leaderships don't see success in terms of the size of their membership, and try to stifle some of the more radical elements so as not to put off less militant potential members.


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## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> I agree to some extent. But - putting it very crudely - surely the most militant are the most likely to already be in a union, such that the extension of membership to less militant workers has the effect of 'watering down' militancy?


Not  sure i follow you here. What do you agree with to some extent and what does the rest of it mean?


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## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> I wonder if some union leaderships don't see success in terms of the size of their membership, and try to stifle some of the more radical elements so as not to put off less militant potential members.


But, if you see mass membership as watering down then it's irrelevant who is the leadership? It's just what unions do.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Absolutely not no.
> 
> Union members join because they want representation if they get a problem at work, and see it as an insurance policy if they joined because they were the most militant we would have nearly 6 million supporters of militancy out there.


 
You don't think that those in a union are more likely to show some level of militancy than those who have chosen not to be?


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> I wonder if some union leaderships don't see success in terms of the size of their membership, and try to stifle some of the more radical elements so as not to put off less militant potential members.


 
Yes of course that happens quite a lot - however that doesn't mean that union members are some vast untapped army of militants that would only back mass direct action or a general strike if radicals could only reach out to them.


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## frogwoman (Jan 2, 2013)

Surely it's a good thing that more people are in unions (or if they're not, are organised in some way) though?


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> But, if you see mass memberships as watering down then it's irrelevant who is the leadership? It's just what unions do.


 
Don't get me wrong, I don't see mass membership as a problem in itself.  Rather I see that making it the goal of union activity to be problematic.


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## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> You don't think that those in a union are more likely to show some level of militancy than those who have chosen not to be?


What are the union membership figures like in France? I think that you're building up what being in a union means  a bit here.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> You don't think that those in a union are more likely to show some level of militancy than those who have chosen not to be?


 
In some cases yes - the RMT, teaching etc - however their combined membership is probably less than 20% of total union membership.

The rest however no and why  should they?


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Yes of course that happens quite a lot - however that doesn't mean that union members are some vast untapped army of militants that would only back mass direct action or a general strike if radicals could only reach out to them.


 
I agree.  I made no such claim.


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## ViolentPanda (Jan 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Just as a quick aside on that, and i know i always mention it, but it really is important - the 74-79 period, the one we are sold as seeing the turning of the working classes back on the unions, membership actually went up and went up quite steeply (iirc).


 
...and was grist to the mill of the likes of Joseph, Ridley and Neave. They were able to point to union power and say to Thatcher "do you want to be the next Ted Heath, humiliated by the unions? If not, you've got to break them".
Too many people, even those who should know better (given how many times the likes of us correct them on their poor understanding of recent political history), find it easier to believe the "sending the country to the dogs, dead lying unburied in the street, mortuaries full of rubbish" _schtick_ the media inserted into the discourse back in '79.
Of course, a TUC membership dominated by a desire to support Labour, with heads of TUs feeling increasingly "entitled" as to political sinecures for doing so, has also meant that for many trades unions real struggle is difficult - the union heirarchies are more focused on suppressing internal dissent than they are on achieving anything for the general membership.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Surely it's a good thing that more people are in unions (or if they're not, are organised in some way) though?


 
Yes.


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## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> Don't get me wrong, I don't see mass membership as a problem in itself. Rather I see that making it the goal of union activity to be problematic.


That _is_ the goal though. Monopoly of control of labour.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> In some cases yes - the RMT, teaching etc - however their combined membership is probably less than 20% of total union membership.
> 
> The rest however no and why should they?


 
But is that minority status a product (at least in part) of the widening of the appeal of union membership which some unions have pursued at the expense of a commitment to militancy?


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Surely it's a good thing that more people are in unions (or if they're not, are organised in some way) though?


 
Yep - people need to join or start unions and organise to establish good representation and negotiation frameworks which can demonstrate the effectiveness of workers sticking together and taking some control over their economic lives however small, the job of a trade union is not to bring about a revolutionary change in society.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That _is_ the goal though. Monopoly of control of labour.


 
As a means to end, though; not as the end in itself, surely?


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## frogwoman (Jan 2, 2013)

It seems to me that seeing mass membership as "watering down" the unions message is basically missing the point of what unions are about, unions aren't about starting a revolution but they are about achieving representation at work, they are not the be and end all of organising but you can't expect them to be made up of revolutionaries only. not sayinng you are but if they were only reserved for the "most militant" seems to me that most people would, rightly, pay no attention to them as it would be substitutionist bollocks


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## ViolentPanda (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I have seen figures, can't find them now though that peak public disatisfaction with the trade unions coincided with peak membership, which I would lazily assume broadly indicated polarisation.


 
Look at the printed media of the era. I won't claim that you couldn't open a paper without finding an article demonising the unions, but it certainly *felt* that way - an ever-present onslaught aimed at convincing people that the unions were selfish, that they achieved nothing for the electorate as a whole, just for their own sectarian selves (obviously missing the entire point of being in a membership organisation.  ) - because that was what those with power wanted represented. That it coincided with a leader of the Conservative party who held the working classes in complete contempt and would have sold her own orifices on a nightly basis if it had helped destroy the trades unions that were such a threat to her party was just the icing on the cake for power.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> But is that minority status a product (at least in part) of the widening of the appeal of union membership which some unions have pursued at the expense of a commitment to militancy?


 
No of course not, I'm not sure what you're getting at to be honest...

You seem to think unions or the union movement or even the bureacracies are a vast homogonous entity that acts in a coldly rational manner at all times and that they would achieve their goals better with either a mass passive membership or small militant membership??


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## frogwoman (Jan 2, 2013)

And besides i think the fact that basically everyone i meet who is in unison is so pissed off with them (for example) is a reason why mass membership alone is not "watering it down" also some of the smaller professional unions have never been on strike and still havent


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Really?
> 
> I dunno - I think it says lots of progress has been made, but loads still has to be made, and any progress that has been maintained has to be defended - the price of equality is eternal vigilance.
> 
> ...


I'm really not seeing anything different in that story from the one that gave us top-down multiculturalism.


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## elbows (Jan 2, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Look at the printed media of the era. I won't claim that you couldn't open a paper without finding an article demonising the unions, but it certainly *felt* that way - an ever-present onslaught aimed at convincing people that the unions were selfish, that they achieved nothing for the electorate as a whole, just for their own sectarian selves (obviously missing the entire point of being in a membership organisation.  ) - because that was what those with power wanted represented. That it coincided with a leader of the Conservative party who held the working classes in complete contempt and would have sold her own orifices on a nightly basis if it had helped destroy the trades unions that were such a threat to her party was just the icing on the cake for power.


 
My mum still rants loudly when this happens today, such as in recent years when the tv news started going on about Labour being subservient to unions, as if unions were a couple of rich blokes living secretly on a small island.


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## ViolentPanda (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> The more of a threat they became to capital, the more they were demonised.


 

The more threat they became to the (then) "new" perception of capitalism (neoliberalism), the more they were demonised. That's not to say that "social democracy" had reached an accommodation with trade unionism, but there was at least a tacit acknowledgement that the arguments of both sides of the labour equation had legitimacy. Neoliberalism preferred to have room to replace that with a Regency-era criminalising anti-unionism.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

elbows said:


> My mum still rants loudly when this happens today, such as in recent years when the tv news started going on about Labour being subservient to unions, as if unions were a couple of rich blokes living secretly on a small island.


 
Labour is subservient to Tupac and Branson?


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> I'm really not seeing anything different in that story from the one that gave us top-down multiculturalism.


 
In what way?


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## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> As a means to end, though; not as the end in itself, surely?


What end? Revolution? No,that's not what unions do or are for. Wining better conditions within capitalism - yes.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What end? Revolution? No,that's not what unions door are for. Wining better conditions within capitalism - yes.


 
exactly if there was a movement with 6 million members in this country which was committed to a workers revolution we would know about it.


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> In what way?


I thought it was fairly obvious from the link I gave:



> Why did two communities that had fought side by side in 1985 fight against each other twenty years later? The answer lies largely in the policies introduced by Birmingham City Council after the original riots of 1985. The council borrowed the GLC blueprint to create a new political framework through which to reach out to minority communities. It created nine so-called ‘Umbrella Groups’, organizations based on ethnicity and faith, which were supposed to represent the needs of their particular communities and help the council develop policy and allocate resources. They included the African and Caribbean People’s Movement, the Bangladeshi Islamic Projects Consultative Committee, the Birmingham Chinese Society, the Council of Black-led Churches, the Hindu Council, the Irish Forum, the Vietnamese Association, the Pakistani Forum and the Sikh Council of Gurdwaras.


 
The unions appear to have done exactly the same thing. With the same dismal results.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> I thought it was fairly obvious from the link I gave:
> 
> 
> 
> The unions appear to have done exactly the same thing. With the same dismal results.


 
Oh right so government creating ethnic/cultural umbrella bodies for their residents is the same as union members with specific interests coming together to create self organised groups and win rights to representation and establish their own structures is the same thing?

*I am in no way saying the unions don't buy in to much of top down multiculturalism given that it is all that is on offer


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## Smokeandsteam (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> I agree to some extent.  But - putting it very crudely -  surely the most militant are the most likely to already be in a union, such that the extension of membership to less militant workers has the effect of 'watering down' militancy?



No. Trade union membership is now largely centred in the public sector for historical reasons. It is almost dead in the private sector where leverage might actually exist (see RMT on trains/underground for an exception to the rule) and in the areas of lowest pay, highest incidence of insecurity - service sector jobs in guarding, cleaning, shop work etc - trade unionism is utterly irrelevant. 

Joining a union largely depends on if one exists where you work.


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Oh right so government creating ethnic/cultural umbrella bodies for their residents is the same as union members with specific interests coming together to create self organised groups and win rights to representation and establish their own structures is the same thing?
> 
> *I am in no way saying the unions don't buy in to much of top down multiculturalism given that it is all that is on offer


How is the union bureaucracy any different from government in this analogy?

I'm not talking about them buying into top-down multiculturalism. I am saying that their response to minority members getting a bit antsy (with the support of the majority membership) was to set up separate groups for them and keep them separate.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What end? Revolution? No,that's not what unions do or are for. Wining better conditions within capitalism - yes.


 
I'm not sure I necessarily agree that there is no role for unions in bringing about revolution.  But, that aside, even insofar as their focus is winning concessions from capitalism, my point was that many unions' leaderships seem to have lost sight of that goal, and judge success on weight of numbers, rather than what those numbers can achieve.  I'm all in favour of wider union membership, but because of the potential it has, not as an end in itself.


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## Smokeandsteam (Jan 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> It seems to me that seeing mass membership as "watering down" the unions message is basically missing the point of what unions are about, unions aren't about starting a revolution but they are about achieving representation at work, they are not the be and end all of organising but you can't expect them to be made up of revolutionaries only. not sayinng you are but if they were only reserved for the "most militant" seems to me that most people would, rightly, pay no attention to them as it would be substitutionist bollocks



Spot on. Unions are not, never have been and never will be potentially revolutionary organisations. Their purpose is normally defensive and always within a capitalist framework.


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## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> I'm not sure I necessarily agree that there is no role for unions in bringing about revolution. But, that aside, even insofar as their focus is winning concessions from capitalism, my point was that many unions' leaderships seem to have lost sight of that goal, and judge success on weight of numbers, rather than what those numbers can achieve. I'm all in favour of wider union membership, but because of the potential it has, not as an end in itself.


You just said wider membership meant watered down militancy! And again, they haven't lost sight of that goal - it never was their goal. Their goal isn't to do themselves out of their role.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> It seems to me that seeing mass membership as "watering down" the unions message is basically missing the point of what unions are about, unions aren't about starting a revolution but they are about achieving representation at work, they are not the be and end all of organising but you can't expect them to be made up of revolutionaries only. not sayinng you are but if they were only reserved for the "most militant" seems to me that most people would, rightly, pay no attention to them as it would be substitutionist bollocks


 
I agree.  Clearly, you and Spanky (and maybe Butch) have missed the thrust of my point (which I guess must be more my fault than yours).  I'm not against mass unionism; rather, I was being critical of the leadership of some unions who see memberships figures as the be all and end all.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> How is the union bureaucracy any different from government in this analogy?


 
How are they the same?



> I'm not talking about them buying into top-down multiculturalism. I am saying that their response to minority members getting a bit antsy (with the support of the majority membership) was to set up separate groups for them and keep them separate.


 
The bureaucracy did not generally just hand structures down to members - members who wanted them argued for them and votes were held among delegates at conferences in general over a period of several years...

They are not seperate from the rest of the union, generally members of regional women's or black committees have to be nominated from their branches, certainly in the big 3 unions.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> You just said wider membership meant watered down militancy! And again, they haven't lost sight of that goal - it never was their goal. Their goal isn't to do themselves out of their role.


 
When I made the 'watered down' point, I did use the caveat that it was a crude way of putting it.  But I suppose you're right about what unions' leaders' goals are; maybe I'm being a little idealist about what I think they ought to be!


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> I agree. Clearly, you and Spanky (and maybe Butch) have missed the thrust of my point (which I guess must be more my fault than yours). I'm not against mass unionism; rather, I was being critical of the leadership of some unions who see memberships figures as the be all and end all.


 
I haven't missed the thrust of argument, I think you have missed the thrust of ours.

Unions are there to provide a framework for workers to get independent representation for individual and collective issues and carry out collective bargaining over pay and conditions.

What political and campaigning work is carried out by them is in order to strenghten those core objectives through introducing legislation to support said objectives.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> When I made the 'watered down' point, I did use the caveat that it was a crude way of putting it. But I suppose you're right about what unions' leaders' goals are; maybe I'm being a little idealist about what I think they ought to be!


 
It's not just about the goals of their leaders though - it's also about the goals and aspirations of the members which is basically better conditions at work, and that is it and often very modest improvements to or defence of conditions.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I haven't missed the thrust of argument, I think you have missed the thrust of ours.
> 
> Unions are there to provide a framework for workers to get independent representation for individual and collective issues and carry out collective bargaining over pay and conditions.
> 
> What political and campaigning work is carried out by them is in order to strenghten those core objectives through introducing legislation to support said objectives.


 
Collective bargaining has two elements.  Numbers, and a willingness to act.  My point was that the leadership of some unions has focused disproportionately on the former, at the expense of undermining the latter.  I continue to wonder whether the net effect isn't to weaken the unions' position.


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> How are they the same?


Did the union bureaucrats not have to allow it to happen?



Spanky Longhorn said:


> The bureaucracy did not generally just hand structures down to members - members who wanted them argued for them and votes were held among delegates at conferences in general over a period of several years...


I'm sure there were plenty of 'community leaders' bending politicians ears too.



Spanky Longhorn said:


> They are not seperate from the rest of the union, generally members of regional women's or black committees have to be nominated from their branches, certainly in the big 3 unions.


I didn't say they were in entirely separate unions. Top-down multiculturalism is aimed at British citizens.

You honestly can't see this analogy, or just don't want to?


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> It's not just about the goals of their leaders though - it's also about the goals and aspirations of the members which is basically better conditions at work, and that is it and often very modest improvements to or defence of conditions.


 
Yeah, fair enough - I agree with all that.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> Collective bargaining has two elements. Numbers, and a willingness to act. My point was that the leadership of some unions has focused disproportionately on the former, at the expense of undermining the latter. I continue to wonder whether the net effect isn't to weaken the unions' position.


 
No collective bargaining has multiple elements that all add up to one thing from the point of view of the union - leverage.

Leverage is not just determined by density and organisation, but also (for both sides) by confidence, public support, organisational culture, balance of partnership, knowledge and information, resources etc.


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## Frances Lengel (Jan 2, 2013)

firky said:


> The hovel


 
TBF that is minging, horrible carpet and curtain (not cutains, _one_ curtain), the skirting board needs a wipe and I don't think much of the bedclothes either. If that was my bedroom, I'd be ashamed to show it to the internet.

Sash windows are always nice though - But the numpty's put fucking _stickers_ on hers.


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## Das Uberdog (Jan 2, 2013)

presumably the room's in central London too though so that has to be taken into consideration... probably costs a grand a week to rent


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> No collective bargaining has multiple elements that all add up to one thing from the point of view of the union - leverage.
> 
> Leverage is not just determined by density and organisation, but also (for both sides) by confidence, public support, organisational culture, balance of partnership, knowledge and information, resources etc.


 
Yes, I realise it's a multi-faceted thing, which is why I was at pains to stress that what I said was crude.  But, I still feel my central point is sound, and that leverage depends (at least in part) on a willingness to act, and not just on numbers; and that union leaders seem to have missed that point.

I understand your point, but I disagree. And am happy to agree to do so.


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## Smokeandsteam (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> Collective bargaining has two elements.  Numbers, and a willingness to act.



I'm not certain the argument is quite so simple. For example the threat of limited action by a small group of train drivers can have far more impact than sustained action by a large number of, say, librarians. The balance of forces is made up of a number of factors of which numbers and a willingness to act are only part. Agreed that nothing is possible without the latter though.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Did the union bureaucrats not have to allow it to happen?
> 
> I'm sure there were plenty of 'community leaders' bending politicians ears too.
> 
> ...


 

1. To some extent.
2. Elected union reps and conference delegates are in no way comparable to self or government appointed community leaders and to compare them as such is a little bit offensive in my view.
3. I did not imply you did - you did however imply a degree of seperation which in my experience (at different levels in 4 different unions) is not present.

And if you're going to suggest I'm being dishonest just because I don't agree with you - you can fuck off, I thought you were better than that.

I am in no way defending the current set up - what I am saying is that it is not the same as government imposed multiculturalism it has it's own set of flaws and limitations which sometimes overlap with that (unsurprisingly), and it needs to be criticised on it's own terms - which is basically that it replicates all the other weaknesses of the union movement within a subsection of members.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Smokeandsteam said:


> I'm not certain the argument is quite so simple. For example the threat of limited action by a small group of train drivers can have far more impact than sustained action by a large number of, say, librarians. The balance of forces is made up of a number of factors of which numbers and a willingness to act are only part. Agreed that nothing is possible without the latter though.


 
This is it basically.

I have personal experience of a group of petrol tanker drivers who got pretty much whatever they asked for because they had a skilled job and couldn't be replaced easily and if they refused to drive would cause an oil refinary to get backed up and possibly have to be shut down which cannot be allowed to happen.

They were no more militant and certainly no more left wing than your average librarian but they had far more power in the workplace due to specific circumstances, politics simply did not come into it.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 2, 2013)

Das Uberdog said:


> presumably the room's in central London too though so that has to be taken into consideration... probably costs a grand a week to rent



Yeah, but she only lives there ironically...if she had her way, she'd follow her heart and squat in Middlesbrough...to be nearer to her supporters. She's forced into the belly of the beast by forces of patriarchy.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

Smokeandsteam said:


> ... For example the threat of limited action by a small group of train drivers can have far more impact than sustained action by a large number of, say, librarians...


 
I agree. And that's a big part of what I'm saying.  I just wish that union leaders would recognise this more, rather than turn the unions into anodyne behemoths.  But, as has been pointed out, the leaders are going to act in their own interests.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Given that she could buy a house in Middlesbrough for the amount it costs to rent for two weeks in Marylebone no need to to squat, she could buy a house and get a load of bright young things to move in and create a magazine/comic/website for free...


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Smokeandsteam said:


> I'm not certain the argument is quite so simple. For example the threat of limited action by a small group of train drivers can have far more impact than sustained action by a large number of, say, librarians. The balance of forces is made up of a number of factors of which numbers and a willingness to act are only part. Agreed that nothing is possible without the latter though.


Well, yes. But what happens when the small group of railwaymen becomes a very large group of railwaymen? Are they just as likely to take strike action as the small group were?

I don't think Athos is saying anything more complicated than that it is difficult to attract a mass membership whilst remaining militant, because the masses are not very militant.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> I agree. And that's a big part of what I'm saying. I just wish that union leaders would recognise this more, rather than turn the unions into anodyne behemoths. But, as has been pointed out, the leaders are going to act in their own interests.


 
I really don't get what you're saying here??

Generally those workers who can organise purely on the strenght of their control of the supply chain generally do, and those who have to take a different tack generally do...


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Well, yes. But what happens when the small group of railwaymen becomes a very large group of railwaymen? Are they just as likely to take strike action as the small group were?
> 
> I don't think Athos is saying anything more complicated than that it is difficult to attract a mass membership whilst remaining militant, because the masses are not very militant.


 
The railway workers are a large group already within their industry they have high density, the union is smaller because the workforce is smaller.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I really don't get what you're saying here??
> 
> Generally those workers who can organise purely on the strenght of their control of the supply chain generally do, and those who have to take a different tack generally do...


 
It's about a willingness to exercise control of the supply chain.


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## Smokeandsteam (Jan 2, 2013)

As an aside the entire industrial strategy of the fake left union leaders, like Serwotka etc, has been based on 1 day set piece stoppages of their entire membership rather than sustained targeted action by smaller groups of their members who possess genuine leverage. 

It's almost as if they don't want to win their disputes. Perhaps this is the point that Athos is making?


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> 1. To some extent.
> 2. Elected union reps and conference delegates are in no way comparable to self or government appointed community leaders and to compare them as such is a little bit offensive in my view.
> 3. I did not imply you did - you did however imply a degree of seperation which in my experience (at different levels in 4 different unions) is not present.
> 
> ...


I'm not saying you're being dishonest, I'm just surprised that the analogy is not obvious.

Being obvious is not the same as being right. I'm quite prepared to accept that the way the unions do it promotes class unity. I have yet to see any evidence that this is true. This kind of stuff suggests that it isn't, but hey, maybe this is the fastest progress possible and they have actually implemented a model that includes rather than marginalises.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Well, yes. But what happens when the small group of railwaymen becomes a very large group of railwaymen? Are they just as likely to take strike action as the small group were?
> 
> I don't think Athos is saying anything more complicated than that it is difficult to attract a mass membership whilst remaining militant, because the masses are not very militant.


That's part of what I'm saying.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

Smokeandsteam said:


> As an aside the entire industrial strategy of the fake left union leaders, like Serwotka etc, has been based on 1 day set piece stoppages of their entire membership rather than sustained targeted action by smaller groups of their members who possess genuine leverage.
> 
> It's almost as if they don't want to win their disputes. Perhaps this is the point that Athos is making?


 
 That's part of what I'm saying, too.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> I'm not saying you're being dishonest, I'm just surprised that the analogy is not obvious.
> 
> Being obvious is not the same as being right. I'm quite prepared to accept that the way the unions do it promotes class unity. I have yet to see any evidence that this is true. This kind of stuff suggests that it isn't, but hey, maybe this is the fastest progress possible and they have actually implemented a model that includes rather than marginalises.


 
It's not obvious because it's two very different situations - which is basically that at least in the union movement however flawed it is about working class people with a particular self identified set of needs organising together to fight to change their own class organisations to take those needs into account rather than running off and uniting in cross class groups outwith the union movement

Obviously the process takes time and will win victories in one area and lag in another the stuff in the post you link to was quite a while ago now, and was actually one of the first victories in what has been a flawed national victory for women in the TU movement (despite all the problems with it which are all down to the inherent problems in the TU movement and not self organisation specifically).

nothing you have posted suggests my initial claim is wrong - that progress has been made but a lot still needs to be done, or that the structures of the TU movement are inadequate in toto to deal with capitalism as currently structured and that it will need to reorganise but that self organisation will still need to play a key role in any genuinely effective reorganisation.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> That's part of what I'm saying.


 
Yes but it's apples and oranges.


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Yes but it's apples and oranges.


 Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour.


 
The problem is that it relatively easy to reach the low hanging fruit of the orange tree (pay rise on the railways) and much harder to pluck the apple from it's tree (oppose library closures).


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> The problem is that it relatively easy to reach the low hanging fruit of the orange tree (pay rise on the railways) and much harder to pluck the apple from it's tree (oppose library closures).


 
Harder still when the focus is on recruiting more and more fruit pickers, whilst discouraging any of them from going up the ladder.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Athos said:


> Harder still when the focus is on recruiting more and more fruit pickers, whilst discouraging any of them from going up the ladder.


 
That's not what's happening though - there are far fewer orange trees and given their popularity and the importance of frozen orange juice futures to our economy means that the orange pickers have far more power than five times as many apple pickers in the thousands of orchards around the land, and with people being able to simply order fresh apples off the internet as well...

ETA: and the apple pickers know that which is why they look askance at the people selling 'Orchard Worker' and demanding taller ladders irrespective of what their "leaders" are doing...


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## Athos (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> That's not what's happening though - there are far fewer orange trees and given their popularity and the importance of frozen orange juice futures to our economy means that the orange pickers have far more power than five times as many apple pickers in the thousands of orchards around the land, and with people being able to simply order fresh apples off the internet as well...
> 
> ETA: and the apple pickers know that which is why they look askance at the people selling 'Orchard Worker' and demanding taller ladders irrespective of what their "leaders" are doing...


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## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

There's a lot to say and it's the last day when I can post on these boards for a while.

First The Past
1 As technology moved on and capitalism began needing more of a workforce and women started entering the workplace - it became crucial for male trade unionists to organise women which could only be best done on the basis of equal access to all jobs and grades and equal pay. By 1976, 50% of mothers are in paid employment in some form. It is even higher for single women.
The division and segregation the workplace is imposed by ruling-class norms forced downwards.
Two years after the Equal Pact in 1976-77, you still have stuff like this appearing all over the place from official managements and ruling-class bodies:
“the work of a filing clerk... this work is sometimes given to a junior, an office has only itself to blame if it does not care to see that the person responsible for filing really does know what she is doing and why”
“Recruitment of Young Men in the BBC in London: Computer Operations... interesting career for young men”
“work of a shorthand typist... no doctor will necessarily expect his new secretary to understand medical terms without explaining, or telling her where to look them up”

It was the same thing with colour bars imposed by managements often informally with no paper records at all.
Unions obviously collude with this behaviour in many instances - but it's management imposed division.
But importantly, standard feminism even women within trade unions were dismissive of working-class women below. UPW did have women as reps - particularly at Mount Pleasant and on the phones and in clerical side - and none of them any more than the UPW leadership tried to oppose the persecution of the London militants who tried to organise a London-wide strike in support of Grunwicks strikers (could have brought forward the 'winter of discontent' by 2 years).

Grunwicks itself is full of recrimination, but the base of unions (inevitably under capitalism only 18 months after the Sex Discrimination Equal Pay 1975 Act) with men as the majority was much more supportive than the leaderships.

2 Male supported Equal Pay strikes actions

The Equal Pay legislation was used in several instances to completely re-order structures at work.
In the context of pay freezes in some firms men had pay frozen and women were placed onto those rates.
An improvement - equality, but both men and women received sub-inflation increases - so good and bad.

Other firms solidified the segregation by marking out separate grades with separate pay. It was firms doing this by and large not unions.

The male-supported struggles that came against the practices were wider than just Trico's -
Cockburn Valves, General Motors are strikes with full male participation. The threat of strikes all over AUEW divisions ensures equal pay changes in Electrolux, Zenith Carburettors, Tress and elsewhere. Sometimes after the failure of tribunals, which allow the grades loophole to be exploited. Courtauld's sees strikes at several plants securing regrading and equal pay.

Other events like Garner Steak House, various quickly defeated and hence long-forgotten textiles strikes see low-paid men fighting for low-paid women - and vice versa obviously - but because of the structure of unions they do not see the support they deserve. There's a fear of turning X into new Grunwick's, of scuppering Labour's government, of putting 'Britain' out of business. So the strike pay is minimal and the support is almost purposefully absent.
As mentioned, just about every successful struggle is against some layer of TU bureaucracy aswell as the firms.

Internally, the unions that seemed to take promotion and training of reps most seriously were AUEW-TASS and Actors' Equity plus various parts of TGWU.
So, all in all, the behaviour of unions leaves much to be desired on sexual equality grounds. This would have been mitigated by positive discrimination within unions, but not wholly overcome. (AUEW had a positive education and training scheme for women well before 1975.) Given that unions endorse the principle 'fair day's pay for fair day's work' inevitably the struggle of unions screws people/members at the bottom women, migrants new into the labour force, and low-paid unskilled workers. (A good book on this is Twilight Robbery Trade Unions and Low Paid Workers).

That's inherent in all unions, even women dominated ones, bringing us to today:

Today.
1 Unions are now not white male working-class bodies, but have large women memberships and women reps. There is now a woman TUC Gen Sec and women reps outnumber male ones in UNISON trumpeted by U magazine recently it suggests it's not the accent, colour or sex composition of the unions that's the problem but the bureaucratic and pro-capitalist approaches. Would 50-50 wholly representatives overcome that - in part maybe, but not totally.
2 Equal pay - as in the total absence of job segregation via socialised pregnancy and childcare - requires total social change and the no standard unions can produce that. 'Standard' feminism suggests women in board-rooms and women trade union leaders once promoted by general reform-campaigns (where is the social power for this - never answered?) an equalised reality at work will emerge as a result.
It fails to appreciate that cleavages between women at the top (of the union or company) and women below will inevitably emerge. This has sort of happened in UCU after the election of a women gen sec a slate of women on its council, and a majority of women as members at least in its FE division), some assumed that the concerns of women (in the least paid, most insecure contracts) would improve after merger and new training money from the higher-education subs, in fact the opposite has happened. The casualisation continues and increases, whilst the morale and instinct to join amongst women and male non-members remains high (not blaming them).

3 The historic equal pay cases today are a function of the general (sexist) capitalist approach of trade unions. To win equal pay on historic pay claims doesn't help the union in the eyes of the employer or in terms of the unions' own system of working within capitalism (get subscriptions and mediate conflict so you can offer something to the employer in the here and now).
There's still hundreds of thousands - not an exaggeration - of women who worked in the textile industries in the 1970s and 1980s who don't have work pensions at all, and whose contributions were systematically under-recorded, screwed up or just absent. Dozens of bankrupt firms and dodgy firms. There are women who are still missing actual pay from the 1980s. Are the lawyers taking up the case? No. Are unions? No. Are mainstream feminist movements? No. (It doesn't mean lawyers, unions and feminist organisations have nothing to offer anyone).

If we're serious about a consistent criticism of trade unions we could well argue on the grounds of why no support to young workers (in apprentice or junior roles) or disabled workers. Certainly disabled workers that are members of trade unions could very well argue that they have given more to trade unions that they, as a category of people, have ever received in return. Those marginal to the labour market are not introduced into the labour market by unions. All of this should be part and parcel of any serious class-based critique of trade unions. Standard (hate the word bourgeois) feminist critiques and immigrant critiques unless they have a solid understanding of who imposed what can all to simply collapse into a critique that says 'get immigrants and women as full-timers and higher and things will get better (for who?) as a result' - missing out the key part their militancy on behalf of/from working-class immigrants and women.

It's simply not a given that minorities dominating a union bureaucracy result in more _militant struggle_ - the only real way to get really representative unions (representative of the working-class).



Brings it onto
Numbers
1 Union membership peaks at the end of Thatcher's first year at 13.3million at an overall density of 57% of workforce.
It is, as described, something that happens in spite of the recession driving out people from work (and membership) from 1976-79. If you plot the late seventies you see overall employment flatlining or contracting, at the same time as overall membership is increasing - in part caused by closed shop systems that come into place with the TULR. The trade union movement still - even at its height - doesn't really break into the bedrock layers of agricultural workers, service workers and small-workplace workers. The missing 43% of the employed is largely made up by the middle-class professions on the one hand, the self-employed (including lump construction), part-time workers, small workplace workers and the lowest rungs of the legal economy (small warehousing, cleaning firms, hotels'n'tourism, textiles, food processing etc) aswell as those in non-union large firms like IBM on the other.

In general there's no way for it to break the lower areas so - if it was able to organise those places freely and happily, it would have been powerful enough to overturn the whole system.

Similarly, if unions were fully representative bodies of migrants and disabled people by comparison with the general population, that would by definition imply strong _constantly struggling_ _constantly absorbing_ bodies, whereas they are bodies that try to damp down struggle and act in a sectional manner to ingratiate themselves with capitalists.


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## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

On: 





> It's simply not a given that minorities dominating a union bureaucracy result in more militant struggle - the only real way to get really representative unions (representative of the working-class).


 
We wont get militant struggle by simply declaring genuine (purposeful to migrants/women) struggle is impossible unless you have wholly representative memberships in your unions.
Positive training especially for non-university people of all colours and increased membership of separate sections will come with struggle.


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> It's not obvious because it's two very different situations


That's why it's an analogy.



Spanky Longhorn said:


> which is basically that at least in the union movement however flawed it is about working class people with a particular self identified set of needs organising together to fight to change their own class organisations to take those needs into account rather than running off and uniting in cross class groups outwith the union movement


I don't have a problem with "organising together to fight to change their own class organisations". I'm just wondering how long the fight is supposed to take, cos they're still separate and that's a bit fucked up after 40 years of working on the problem.



Spanky Longhorn said:


> Obviously the process takes time and will win victories in one area and lag in another the stuff in the post you link to was quite a while ago now, and was actually one of the first victories in what has been a flawed national victory for women in the TU movement (despite all the problems with it which are all down to the inherent problems in the TU movement and not self organisation specifically).


The post I linked referred to events which happened in the last decade. The unions actively colluding with employers to undermine the single status agreement they were supposed to be implementing. The single status agreement that was made necessary by the failure to implement the Equal Pay Act of three decades earlier.



Spanky Longhorn said:


> nothing you have posted suggests my initial claim is wrong - that progress has been made but a lot still needs to be done, or that the structures of the TU movement are inadequate in toto to deal with capitalism as currently structured and that it will need to reorganise but that self organisation will still need to play a key role in any genuinely effective reorganisation.


The structures need to change, but not the ones that echo divide and rule? I disagree.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> That's why it's an analogy.
> 
> I don't have a problem with "organising together to fight to change their own class organisations". I'm just wondering how long the fight is supposed to take, cos they're still separate and that's a bit fucked up after 40 years of working on the problem.
> 
> ...


 
See now this is better at least argue against an aproximation of what is happening.

Single Status is far more complicated than what you're saying actually - but what it boiled down to is it affected unions ability to ensure the smooth running of capitalism, so it took a while for the movement to collectively deal with it...



> The structures need to change, but not the ones that echo divide and rule? I disagree.


 
I clearly said all structures need to change (which obviously incudes self organised groups) - self organisation is not the same as divide and rule, do you really think a group of disabled workers who feel their colleagues are not taking their issues seriously should not organise themselves to convince them to - and then continue to organise to ensure things don't slip back or new situations that arise can't be dealt with?


----------



## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> The post I linked referred to events which happened in the last decade. The *unions actively colluding with employers to undermine the single status* agreement they were supposed to be implementing. The single status agreement that was made necessary by the failure to implement the Equal Pay Act of three decades earlier.


 
Unions are actively colluding in all sorts of ways now, colluding to let English lessons for house-wife (domestic labour) immigrant women be cut, so that English for new immigrants in work scenarios ESOL for WORK remains protected. Colluding to let new entrants to pension schemes be disadvantaged whilst the broad whole of the membership on earlier.

About the equality re-grading challenges was that it potentially left many worse off under management impositions, hence some unions were content to go along with the status quo:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/apr/18/pay-cut-workers-recession




> Almost 1,700 workers – around a quarter of the staff – at Rochdale Council, were told by letter just before Christmas that they face significant pay cuts following a pay review. Under the plans, 1,694 (25% of the total staff) will have their wages reduced. The average drop in pay will be £2,300 – which comes into force within the next 12 months. The letters and subsequent dispute have left morale at the council "lower than rock bottom", says Helen Harrison, branch secretary of Rochdale Unison. "The equal pay act was fought for for years, but no one intended that staff would see pay cuts as a result." She says many of the staff who face losing pay are devastated. "These are not city high-flyers. These are normal working people, mostly at the lower end of the pay spectrum. How are they supposed to accept a £4,000 pay cut?"


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I think this is a misrepresentation of what happened actually  - there are two processes at work in parallel that both lead to organisational inertia.
> 
> 1. There is a professional bureaucracy that seeks to perpetuate and defend its position (and that can be subdivided into various broad camps - but all with that essential element in common), and some members will see building a complex corporate structure as part of that, although they are on the decrease in my view as people wake up to the power of combining network theory with organising as ways of reducing democracy.
> 
> ...


Misrepresentation? I'll let that one pass in the interest of friendly co-operation, whilst clocking it with a sticky out tongue smiley.

You've missed out the other two processes from your analysis, namely

3) the role of the unions is modify the employers' demands to their members; and 

4) the handing over of many workplace disputes to the judiciary.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Misrepresentation? I'll let that one pass in the interest of friendly co-operation, whilst clocking it with a sticky out tongue smiley.
> 
> You've missed out the other two processes from your analysis, namely
> 
> ...


 
I agree with 3 and 4 can I assume you agree with 1 and 2?

If so I think we have an understanding to move forward with, and I will go back to consult my fellow posters before coming back with something that attempts to meet both our aspirations.


----------



## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I agree with 3 and 4 can I assume you agree with 1 and 2?
> 
> If so I think we have an understanding to move forward with, and I will go back to consult my fellow posters before coming back with something that attempts to meet both our aspirations.



You can't assume I agree with anything unless I specifically say so, brother. And I'll not be conceding any points until I've downed tools for a while and made myself a hot drink and had a fag.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> You can't assume I agree with anything unless I specifically say so, brother. And I'll not be conceding any points until I've downed tools for a while and made myself a hot drink and had a fag.


 
Will anyone back you up though? And how will that look to all the poor lurkers who rely on the posts you provide?

Also shouldn't you have provided alternative 1 and 2's rather than contiuing the sequence which surly suggests and acceptance of them and a desire to go beyond rather than to ignore?


----------



## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Will anyone back you up though? And how will that look to all the poor lurkers who rely on the posts you provide?


Back me up in what? As for lurkers, they're people that either don't have the interest or the confidence to post. They're as likely to be relying on your posts, as mine, or anyone else's.


----------



## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Will anyone back you up though? And how will that look to all the poor lurkers who rely on the posts you provide?
> 
> Also shouldn't you have provided alternative 1 and 2's rather than contiuing the sequence which surly suggests and acceptance of them and a desire to go beyond rather than to ignore?


And as for your edit, note that I said I was going to have a hot drink and fag before I specifically agreed with them or not, so don't jump the gun to assuming I agree or disagree with them.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> And as for your edit, note that I said I was going to have a hot drink and fag before I specifically agreed with them or not, so don't jump the gun to assuming I agree or disagree with them.


 
Is it an authorised tea break?


----------



## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> That's why it's an analogy.
> 
> _*I don't have a problem with "organising together to fight to change their own class organisations".*_ I'm just wondering how long the fight is supposed to take, cos they're still separate and that's a bit fucked up after 40 years of working on the problem.


 
It's not my place to tell women workers what to do, in the 1970s in Italy working-class women were fed up of the discrimination and began _*organising separately*_ as working-class womens' unions/'nuclei'. It was effective on its own terms, abortion within a few years, massively increased pregnancy allowances, lots of other things too. Then there was a series of setbacks - heavy repression amongst other things - in the later 70s and 80s, and that organisation was weakened.
It's just tactics - separate sometimes, together sometimes - aiming in the same direction always. Cross-class alliances - immigrant or women - I do have reservations about.


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

There aren't classes within unions?

My point is not that these separate groups should never have formed. It is that they should have made themselves obsolete a long time ago, if their function was to create class unity.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> There aren't classes within unions?


 
define class in this context


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> define class in this context


Really?

You liked sihhi saying this:


> But importantly, standard feminism even women within trade unions were dismissive of working-class women below.


 
but I have to walk you through what it means?

Jog on.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Really?
> 
> You liked sihhi saying this:
> 
> ...


 
you're pressumably suggesting there _are_ classes within unions, I was wondering what you meant by that - I understand what sihhi is saying and agree with him, so no need to ask - I don't know what you mean, and you unpacking a little bit could help me understand your question...


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Is it an authorised tea break?


Fuck authorisation.

Right, having had my first hot drink and fag I've come back this. I don't disagree with 1 and 2 as far as they go. But unless you factor in 3 and 4 it's not approaching a complete picture (to the extent that a complete picture is possible). 

Where I disagree is your division into two schools of valid thought, because there are more valid schools of thought than that including neither one or two, or a more effective combination of both.

What grass roots members want are mainly (a) effective collective bargaining for terms and conditions that includes/is relevant to all jobs in their workplace and (b) effective representation for individual and collective disputes. Yes?


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> you're pressumably suggesting there _are_ classes within unions, I was wondering what you meant by that - I understand what sihhi is saying and agree with him, so no need to ask - I don't know what you mean, and you unpacking a little bit could help me understand your question...


 
Pretty sure I am using the term in the same sense as sihhi. In terms of the workplace, a highly skilled woman has more in common with a highly skilled man than she does with a low-skilled woman. Hence the lack of progress made solely on the basis of having more women in positions of power within unionism. People with power abuse it, regardless of whether they look like the traditionally dominant group or not.

The EHRC estimated the pay gap for middle-class women who have kids as 4%, compared to 58% for working-class women. Which group do you think dominates in the women's sections?


----------



## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

It's not really my place to say why cross-class alliances for women will not work in the long run for working-class women. But in the case of immigrants - the cross-class alliances have been a 'FAIL'.

On the surface it looks better and better.
There are more immigrant MPs from the traditional sources (subcontinent, West Africa and India) than ever before. Plus, the first ever Chinese immigrant politician, Anna Lo, (admittedly only in devolved politics) was elected in 2007 a massive breakthrough and Meral Ece became the first ever Turkish-speaking politician in 2010. But the kinds of people promoted are middle-class people, or in the case of Meral Ece working-class who became middle-class by virtue of the cross-class alliances of anti-racism in the 1980s.

At first a librarian (working-class) then co-opted onto Islington Council's Race Equality Unit, then chief officer for Haringey Community Health Council - in its 1980s high-watermark Bernie Grant era - displaying its commitment to anti-racist healthcare.
Then a Labour councillor in Hackney, whilst doing anti-racist, 'Turkish community' project management work. Labour in Hackney screws itself by hiding a paedophile, half of its councillors become Lib Dems including her. Carries on becomes a Cabinet member in the council for health when Lib Dems win control, does well enough to get appointed by Harriet Harman onto the Home Office's Ethnic Women Councillors Taskforce (anyone remember it?), eventually gets appointed as a Lord.

But by this time the working-class connection is completely severed even though it was probably there in the Race Equality Unit days - wouldn't have been chosen if it wasn't. (Does anyone remember what Islington was like in the 1980s)

The maiden speech in the House of Lords in 2010 hits all the right notes, slave "heritage", loyal service to the 'good parts' of 'empire', the anti-Nazi World War crusade, the childhood of poverty, the work ethic of migrants, inner London in the old days, against poverty, pro-'rich social diversity', immigrants still ending up poor and in crime, terrible damage to mentally-ill immigrants, "disproportionate numbers" etc etc etc


> My father, a Turkish Cypriot and a Muslim, came to this country in 1948 as a young man from Cyprus to seek work. He had *served as a policeman during the 1940s*, when Cyprus was a British colony. My mother arrived in 1952 to stay with her *brother, who had settled in the UK after serving in the British forces* during the Second World War. He had been* captured by the Nazis* and held in a *prisoner-of-war camp* until the end of the war. My maternal *grandfather, Abdullah, was the son of a slave*, who was captured as a young man in the Sudan and sold to a Cypriot merchant. In later life he was given his freedom and went on to marry my Turkish great-grandmother.
> My parents were married in London. They brought with them the* extraordinary work ethic* that many post-war *migrants* shared when they came to Britain. I was born in Islington, well* before it became a byword for the chattering classes*. I went to school with children from some of the *most deprived backgrounds* and spent my school holidays with my family in Turkey and Cyprus. My early *formative years* have left me with a *lifelong passion for*, and *commitment* to, championing the cause of a* more equal society*. Islington is still a place with *extremes of poverty* and wealth and, in common with other London boroughs, *great inequalities*. I hope therefore to contribute to future debates on the *rich social diversity* of modern-day Britain. The topic today is of immense importance and one that presents our society with *huge challenges*, so I am very grateful to be able to make a contribution to this debate. The London Borough of Islington, where I served as a councillor until May this year, has two prisons- Holloway and Pentonville- the latter, I was told, being the largest prison in Europe. I had the opportunity to visit these prisons on a number of occasions and to talk to both staff and offenders. I was a member of the PCT board when it took over responsibility for primary healthcare in those prisons. As has already been mentioned, the prison population in England and Wales stands at a record high. Overwhelming evidence highlights that there are now more people in prison with long-standing mental health problems and learning disabilities than ever before, as mentioned earlier by my noble friend Lord Thomas. Many of *these people end up in prison because, as the staff told me, there is simply nowhere else to send them*. Many *prisons lack the resources* that they need to conduct full psychiatric assessments of those they receive, while a wider concern is that too often *prisons use segregation units to hold people who are seriously ill* until a transfer can be arranged. Of *ongoing concern* is the *over-representation of prisoners from minority ethnic groups* - just under 27 per cent of the prison population, many of whom had undiagnosed mental health conditions until they came into contact with the criminal justice system.


 
It's all 'correct', but completely inert, and was by chance proved so in 2011 when tweeting:







Middle-class woman attacking 'chav' woman.
This is ultimately what municipal anti-racism produces.

Unless 'privilege politics' really sorts itself out, it's a new version of something that's been around before and doesn't end well.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 2, 2013)

From a expenses account in pre-dictatorship  hungary. Above me i can little bits of some digital shit or something.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> The EHRC estimated the pay gap for middle-class women who have kids as 4%, compared to 58% for working-class women. Which group do you think dominates in the women's sections?


 
What is the gap for single women- and single middle-class vs working-class women?


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## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> From a expenses account in pre-dictatorship hungary. Above me i can little bits of some digital shit or something.




That's the most mystic comment you've ever made. 
You also have/had a reputation of making generally mystic comments.


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What is the gap for single women- and single middle-class vs working-class women.


Good question. They didn't report it IIRC.

And I've just realised I misreported that stat. They gave the overall pay gap as 16% and then estimated the % of lifetime earnings lost by women who had children as 4% and 58% respectively.

I'll go dig out the report.


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## 8ball (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That's the most mystic comment you've ever made.
> You also have/had a reputation of making generally mystic comments.


 
There just be a smiley for 'I'm dropping the acid now, will re-commence making sense in approx. 18 hours'.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That's the most mystic comment you've ever made.
> You also have/had a reputation of making generally mystic comments.


 
These holy men speak in riddles.

Butchers, yesterday:


----------



## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What is the gap for single women- and single middle-class vs working-class women?


And single mothers w/c v m/c perhaps more pertinently.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> And single mothers w/c v m/c perhaps more pertinently.


 
If anyone does know what are the true numbers of single fathers? Is it 8% or 12% of the total single-parent household population? 

Also, what proportion of households with children use childcare at a paid-for facility?

Genuine questions btw.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

8ball said:


> There just be a smiley for 'I'm dropping the acid now, will re-commence making sense in approx. 18 hours'.


 
It sounds like he's entered an archive full of documents from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but _is on a phone_.


----------



## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> If anyone does know what are the true numbers of single fathers? Is it 8% or 12% of the total single-parent household population?
> 
> Also, what proportion of households with children use childcare at a paid-for facility?
> 
> Genuine questions btw.


I think you'd need to modify the households question to factor in w/c v m/c to get answers that mean anything in terms of normal incomes.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> What grass roots members want are mainly (a) effective collective bargaining for terms and conditions that includes/is relevant to all jobs in their workplace and (b) effective representation for individual and collective disputes. Yes?


 
As I said in a previous post


----------



## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> As I said in a previous post


And as a result of 3 and 4 they're not doing that effectively enough anymore. And as a result of 4 in particular there're going to be some big problems this year when the ever-increasing judiciary role in resolving workplace disputes ceases for the most part to be free.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Pretty sure I am using the term in the same sense as sihhi. In terms of the workplace, a highly skilled woman has more in common with a highly skilled man than she does with a low-skilled woman. Hence the lack of progress made solely on the basis of having more women in positions of power within unionism. People with power abuse it, regardless of whether they look like the traditionally dominant group or not.
> 
> The EHRC estimated the pay gap for middle-class women who have kids as 4%, compared to 58% for working-class women. Which group do you think dominates in the women's sections?


 
Ok well skilled workers are not a different class to unskilled workers.

Having said that certainly broadly speaking it is fair to say that skilled workers tend to be more effective at organising within the unions generally, and of course that includes within the the self organised groups - it is one of the ways I referred to previously in which the self organised groups can replicate the wider problems within the union movement.

Of course this is partly over come by unions also organising workers based on sector and occupation - for instance having formal or informal structures for say cleaners and catering staff which have the ability to deliver training and genuine representation within existing structures for generally lower paid members, also reserved seats on committees for low paid members.

Which then feeds into to the whole over complication thing we have already covered, and the need to change the way we organise at all levels.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> And as a result of 3 and 4 they're not doing that effectively enough anymore. And as a result of 4 in particular there're going to be some big problems this year when the ever-increasing judiciary role in resolving workplace disputes ceases for the most part to be free.


 
Yes as I covered in a previous post when I said the structures are no adequate to deal with all the new challenges


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> I'll go dig out the report.


 
How fair is Britain

Numbers given from page 411- in the main report, but it's a review based on multiple sources and doesn't report on non-mothers compared to mothers directly.





> The level of earnings penalty that women face as a result of having children
> varies greatly between better and worse educated women. Those with degrees are
> estimated to face only a 4% loss in lifetime earnings as a result of motherhood,
> while mothers with mid-level qualifications face a 25% loss and those with no
> qualifications a 58% loss.(109)


 
The reference is to page 15 of Metcalf, H., 2009. Pay gaps across the equality strands: a review. Research Report 14 Manchester: Equality and Human Rights Commission. (.pdf)

which itself references Joshi, H. (2002) ‘Production, reproduction, and education: women, children, and work in a British perspective’, Population and Development Review, 28, 3: 445-74 (free registration)


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Ok well skilled workers are not a different class to unskilled workers.
> 
> Having said that certainly broadly speaking it is fair to say that skilled workers tend to be more effective at organising within the unions generally, and of course that includes within the the self organised groups - it is one of the ways I referred to previously in which the self organised groups can replicate the wider problems within the union movement.
> 
> ...


Oh right. It's not a class distinction. Just some other kind of power dynamic based on economic clout.

There's loads of reasons high-skilled workers are more effective at organising - longer-term more secure contracts, more likely to be full-time, more power over management, more time because they're less likely to be working more than one job and more likely to be able to afford childcare.

Which is why low-skilled women have been done no favours by being lumped in with high-skilled women.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> How are they the same?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Although we should always bear in mind that bureaucracy tends toward inertia, which generally indicates that anyone wanting to even slightly alter/amend the _status quo_ will have to struggle harder than they *should* need to in order to do so.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 2, 2013)

Smokeandsteam said:


> Spot on. Unions are not, never have been and never will be potentially revolutionary organisations.


 
History speaks differently, even here in the UK. Just because there seems nothing stirring presently, doesn't mean there hasn't been and won't be again.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Although we should always bear in mind that bureaucracy tends toward inertia, which generally indicates that anyone wanting to even slightly alter/amend the _status quo_ will have to struggle harder than they *should* need to in order to do so.


 
no - leadership always tends towards inertia the bureaucracy just helps to reinforce but otherwise I agree.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 2, 2013)

Smokeandsteam said:


> As an aside the entire industrial strategy of the fake left union leaders, like Serwotka etc, has been based on 1 day set piece stoppages of their entire membership rather than sustained targeted action by smaller groups of their members who possess genuine leverage.
> 
> It's almost as if they don't want to win their disputes. Perhaps this is the point that Athos is making?


 
It's also to do with having to operate on the right side of restrictive laws around industrial action, or see the unions' (i.e. the meberships') assets sequestrated.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Oh right. It's not a class distinction. Just some other kind of power dynamic based on economic clout.


 
Yes.



> There's loads of reasons high-skilled workers are more effective at organising - longer-term more secure contracts, more likely to be full-time, more power over management, more time because they're less likely to be working more than one job and more likely to be able to afford childcare.


 
Yes I agree.



> Which is why low-skilled women have been done no favours by being lumped in with high-skilled women.


 
Which is why the various structures and groupings have tried to come up with ways to ameliorate it - they are clumsy and complicated ways because that's how big capitalist bureacracies work.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Yes as I covered in a previous post when I said the structures are no adequate to deal with all the new challenges


Which takes us back full circle to where you said that it's difficult for unions to get democratically agreed decisions quickly implemented (or words to that effect) and I said, well that particular issue has a lot to do with structural decisions that they've made themselves in terms of creating corporate behemoth structures, which you disagreed with.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Which takes us back full circle to where you said that it's difficult for unions to get democratically agreed decisions quickly implemented (or words to that effect) and I said, well that particular issue has a lot to do with structural decisions that they've made themselves in terms of creating corporate behemoth structures, which you disagreed with.


 
No I didn't, unless I misunderstood


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> If anyone does know what are the true numbers of single fathers? Is it 8% or 12% of the total single-parent household population?
> 
> Also, what proportion of households with children use childcare at a paid-for facility?
> 
> Genuine questions btw.


Single parenthood might be covered in the EHRC report.

Dunno where you'd find the figures for childcare, but the cost of it must be a major contributor to the pay-gap being so much smaller for middle-class mothers. If you earn enough to pay a nursery or child-minder (without also needing to cut your hours or take a more flexible job) having children doesn't affect your lifetime earnings very much.

Free childcare is key for equality, I think. If men were as likely as women to take responsibility for childcare then the pay-gap might more or less disappear*, but there'd still be half the country put at a massive economic disadvantage. It's a bit like social mobility vs income equality - we're focusing on the wrong thing (capital is quite happy for us to keep playing musical chairs, as long as we don't demand that the shitty chairs are made as good as the comfy ones).

*Not saying it would, but it might; notoriously difficult area to research and I don't know what assumptions Joshi made yet, I haven't the energy to work through it right now.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> There aren't classes within unions?
> 
> My point is not that these separate groups should never have formed. It is that they should have made themselves obsolete a long time ago, if their function was to create class unity.


 
Class stratification of membership has become a bigger issue since the consolidation of unions into "super-unions" over the last 30 years, IMO. It could be that the mechanism supposed to reinforce the ability to "get the job done" for the membership has actually made it harder to do so. Unions before then were much more job/trade-specific, which was why you originally had dozens of different railway unions: One for the boiler-makers; one for the engine drivers; one for the firemen; one for the guards; one for the janitorial staff etc etc. Now I think there's about a round half dozen.
So, I'm not sure that "class unity", in the way you seem to mean it, was ever a primary ambition. Unity of the *local* class (at that time in industrial settings often meaning male employees, with their families meekly fellow-travelling) against an employer, sure, but not so much as part of an over-arching struggle.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> *Not saying it will; notoriously difficult area to research and I don't know what assumptions Joshi made yet, I haven't the energy to work through it.


 
Remind me next week and I will dig out some figures I had which basically suggested everyone would be a winner with free childcare and that some circles with the Labour leadership are taking it seriously.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> No I didn't, unless I misunderstood


Well you said that I'd misrepresented the position, which I took as disagreeing with me. And then your representation was half the story so I added the other half. And we still haven't covered non TU work struggle which is an interesting conversation itself


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Well you said that I'd misrepresented the position, which I took as disagreeing with me. And then your representation was half the story so I added the other half. And we still haven't covered non TU work struggle which is an interesting conversation itself


 
In that case I must have misrepresented you  at least partially - I think I've said consistantly on this thread that the structures are not fit for purpose and it is them and inertia that are the real problems in the union movement - not a lack of belief in revolution now...

Yes non TU work struggle is really interesting - and is always a good reminder to everyone of what a union actually is -

_A group of workers coming together to take action to defend and promote their interests collectively..._


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Class stratification of membership has become a bigger issue since the consolidation of unions into "super-unions" over the last 30 years, IMO. It could be that the mechanism supposed to reinforce the ability to "get the job done" for the membership has actually made it harder to do so. Unions before then were much more job/trade-specific, which was why you originally had dozens of different railway unions: One for the boiler-makers; one for the engine drivers; one for the firemen; one for the guards; one for the janitorial staff etc etc. Now I think there's about a round half dozen.
> So, I'm not sure that "class unity", in the way you seem to mean it, was ever a primary ambition. Unity of the *local* class (at that time in industrial settings often meaning male employees, with their families meekly fellow-travelling) against an employer, sure, but not so much as part of an over-arching struggle.


I'm not arguing that class unity was a primary ambition. I'm responding to people who didn't like me saying that the unions were and still are a bit shit for class unity.

I read summat a while back about the move from skills-based unions to workplace-based being in response to corporations bypassing the unions and training their own workforces?

Now it's so easy to bypass workplace unions, what sort of reorganisation would combat that? And how do we make it happen?


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

Will those going on about class stratification within unions please provide an example or explanation of what they mean?

How is a middle manager in local government a different class to a cleaner in local government?

If it is purely down to economic and social power does this mean that a male senior social worker is a different class to a female social work assistant?

Is an illegal immigrant cleaner in a hotel a different class to the crane opperator on the building site next door?


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Are you arguing that class is a simple binary distinction, with no power differentials between people who fall on either side of the [has to work for a living]/[does not have to work for a living] line?

Does the middle-manager who can easily afford childcare experience the pay-gap in the same way as a woman who cannot afford childcare? Or will she automatically understand and empathise purely because she's a woman, despite never having experienced earning less than her childcare costs?

I don't buy that. Sorry.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Are you arguing that class is a simple binary distinction, with no power differentials between people who fall on either side of the [has to work for a living]/[does not have to work for a living] line?
> 
> Does the middle-manager who can easily afford childcare experience the pay-gap in the same way as a woman who cannot afford childcare? Or will she automatically understand and empathise purely because she's a woman, despite never having experienced earning less than her childcare costs?
> 
> I don't buy that. Sorry.


 
I'm asking what you think


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## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Will those going on about class stratification within unions please provide an example or explanation of what they mean?
> 
> How is a *middle manager in local government* a different class to a cleaner in local government?
> 
> ...


 
If you accept the division that ruling-class hires and fires and working-class is hired and fired.
Then some roles that are for hire, help the ruling-class make those decisions about hiring and firing.
The past 30 years has seen more people more layered out into more a pyramid structure of helping the ruling-class above. 
So middle managers in local government definitely monitor the performance of workers below, definitely have input in the restructurings (90-days everyone, make everyone reapply for new but fewer posts) that seem to go on every year nowadays.
Occasionally, they get restructured too so they are kept on their best behaviour and do their function properly, but not to the same degree.


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## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Are you arguing that class is a simple binary distinction, with no power differentials between people who fall on either side of the [has to work for a living]/[does not have to work for a living] line?


 
I don't think anyone is arguing that, are they?


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I'm asking what you think


 
I've just told you.


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I don't think anyone is arguing that, are they?


That would appear to depend on semantics.


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## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> I read summat a while back about the move from *skills-based unions to workplace-based* being in response to corporations bypassing the unions and training their own workforces?


 
I don't follow what exactly is grouped as the first versus the later.

Where did the T&GWU fit in? What is UNITE now? What is GMB? In fact where do all unions fit in?


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> In that case I must have misrepresented you  at least partially - I think I've said consistantly on this thread that the structures are not fit for purpose and it is them and inertia that are the real problems in the union movement - not a lack of belief in revolution now...
> 
> Yes non TU work struggle is really interesting - and is always a good reminder to everyone of what a union actually is -
> 
> _A group of workers coming together to take action to defend and promote their interests collectively..._



Ie it doesn't have to be a TRADE union. TRADE unions were what they were (and some of them still are) and there's nothing wrong with that. But Trade doesn't necessarily equal class especially in the highly skilled trades.


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## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

> Single parenthood might be covered in the EHRC report.
> 
> Dunno where you'd find the figures for childcare, but the cost of it must be a major contributor to the pay-gap being so much smaller for middle-class mothers. _If you earn enough to pay a nursery or child-minder (without also needing to cut your hours or take a more flexible job) having children doesn't affect your lifetime earnings very much._


 
That's my commonsense view too, but it might be wrong.




> _Free childcare is key for equality_, I think.


It's the first step.




> If *men were as likely as women to take responsibility for childcare* then the pay-gap might more or less disappear*, but there'd still be half the country put at a massive economic disadvantage.


 
In this theoretical world, a new pay gap might emerge between couples with and couples without children.
There's no reason why the costs of childcare will be imposed upwards if men participate in its wholly and unreservedly (not that they shouldn't do that).


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> In this theoretical world, a new pay gap might emerge between couples with and couples without children.
> There's no reason why the costs of childcare will be imposed upwards if men participate in its wholly and unreservedly (not that they shouldn't do that).


Again I think it would be helpful to make a differentiation between w/c and m/c here.


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I don't follow what exactly is grouped as the first versus the later.
> 
> Where did the T&GWU fit in? What is UNITE now? What is GMB? In fact where do all unions fit in?


 
I don't know enough union history to answer that! 

VP described it happening here:



ViolentPanda said:


> Class stratification of membership has become a bigger issue since the consolidation of unions into "super-unions" over the last 30 years, IMO. It could be that the mechanism supposed to reinforce the ability to "get the job done" for the membership has actually made it harder to do so. Unions before then were much more job/trade-specific, which was why you originally had dozens of different railway unions: One for the boiler-makers; one for the engine drivers; one for the firemen; one for the guards; one for the janitorial staff etc etc. Now I think there's about a round half dozen.


 
Although I think the process started around the turn of the last century. Presumably due to Fordism and development of the modern corporation.


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## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Again I think it would be helpful to make a differentiation between w/c and m/c here.


 
A small pay gap for mc a large one for w/c.

In general I believe privatised child-rearing and the primacy of the household unit are central to Western capitalism. I can't see it changing without other massive changes cracking happening at the same time, so it's a bit hypothetical.
It's impossible to live like a super-extended family, if you're on benefits you get asked where what income is coming from.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> A small pay gap for mc a large one for w/c.
> 
> In general I believe privatised child-rearing and the primacy of the household unit are central to Western capitalism. I can't see it changing without other massive changes cracking happening at the same time, so it's a bit hypothetical.
> It's impossible to live like a super-extended family, if you're on benefits you get asked where what income is coming from o


Which is why I think it's better to differentiate between w/c and m/c when asking these questions (putting aside the argument about modern day class demarcations). Lots of working class use extended family for childcare though, which is another reason why it's so hard to get proper figures. Ordinary people can't always afford privatised childcare unless they're truly isolated (which of course happens but you can't just assume it), so although there isn't the same extent of extended family caring provision that there was a hundred years ago it's still very much there which is why getting hard figures is so difficult because the reporting just isn't even set up that way.


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## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Which is why I think it's better to differentiate between w/c and m/c when asking these questions (putting aside the argument about modern day class demarcations). Lots of working class use extended family for childcare though, which is another reason why it's so hard to get proper figures. Ordinary people can't always afford privatised childcare unless they're truly isolated (which of course happens but you can't just assume it), so although there isn't the same extent of extended family caring provision that there was a hundred years ago it's still very much there which is why getting hard figures is so difficult because the reporting just isn't even set up that way.


 
That's why I asked if anyone had reliable figures, I agree with everything you're saying.
I meant privatised as in the opposite of genuinely socialised - so unpaid neighbour childcare as much as the posh private centres that ring you up every time your baby starts sneezing - sure start grants are only free for a year i think (even then they are drawn by extraction from surplus of the wider workforce, as all 'free' government services are).


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> In this theoretical world, a new pay gap might emerge between couples with and couples without children.
> There's no reason why the costs of childcare will be imposed upwards if men participate in its wholly and unreservedly (not that they shouldn't do that).


There already is a pay gap between couples with and without children. Mitigated to some extent by child benefit and child tax credits.

I didn't argue that the costs would be imposed upwards if men took more responsibility. I don't see any reason to believe that this would happen.

Parents who stay at home whilst a partner works will earn less when they re-enter the workplace, be less likely to have any career progression upon entering the workplace, won't have been able to contribute to a pension, and if the partner fucks off they are really screwed. If your work has been to stay at home and make it possible for your partner to go out to work, they take all the accumulated earnings potential with them.

Replacing some impoverished women with some impoverished men might be a blow for equality, but it doesn't leave us any better off as a class.

Hence, free childcare.


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## love detective (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> (even then they are drawn by extraction from surplus of the wider workforce, as all 'free' government services are).


 
as would be the case in a genuinely socialist/communist society - surplus labour would still be required/extracted from labour at both the individual and societal level


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## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

> There already is a pay gap between couples with and without children. Mitigated to some extent by child benefit and child tax credits.


There is but it's not taken seriously as an 'issue' which must be reformed or addressed.



> I didn't argue that the costs would automatically be imposed upwards. I don't see any reason to believe that this would happen.


I didn't say you had but the author of that paper seemed to be suggesting it, by implying a resolution of problems by simply splitting childcare 50-50 men-women.




> Parents who stay at home whilst a partner works will earn less when they re-enter the workplace, won't have been able to contribute to a pension, and if the partner fucks off they are really screwed. If your work has been to stay at home and make it possible for your partner to go out to work, they take all the accumulated earnings potential with them.


Yes, I agree, lots of single mum households face this.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That's why I asked if anyone had reliable figures, I agree with everything you're saying.
> I meant privatised as in the opposite of genuinely socialised - so unpaid neighbour childcare as much as the posh private centres that ring you up every time your baby starts sneezing - sure start grants are only free for a year i think (even then they are drawn by extraction from surplus of the wider workforce, as all 'free' government services are).


I think it's nigh on impossible to get reliable figures because the agendas of those reporting are often driven by m/c interests. And whenever I see the latest "statistics" I get very terse and fuck off and back in the real world


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

love detective said:


> as would be the case in a genuinely socialist/communist society - surplus labour would still be required/extracted from labour at both the individual and societal level


Ie someone's always going to take the piss/extract the labour value


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> There is but it's not taken seriously as an 'issue' which must be reformed or addressed.


Child benefit and child tax credits do address it. Not enough, I grant you.



sihhi said:


> I didn't say you had but the author of that paper seemed to be suggesting it, by implying a resolution of problems by simply splitting childcare 50-50 men-women.


Ah, OK. I didn't link to a paper in that post - Joshi 2002?

From an identity politics point of view, that would be fine. But it is precisely parallel to the liberal obsession with social mobility: _we don't care how many people are living in abject poverty, as long as everyone gets a fair shot at being privileged._

Some kinds of feminism are like that, but not any kind I want to be part of.


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## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

love detective said:


> as would be the case in a genuinely socialist/communist society - surplus labour would still be required/extracted from labour at both the individual and societal level


 
Yes, but it is happening under capitalist terms now, so that the value of the labour extracted (from foreign workers as much as Britain-bounded ones) doesn't equal what you get - and Sure Start schemes are under massive cuts aswell as being means-tested.


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## love detective (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Ie someone's always going to take the piss/extract the labour value


 
No not because of that, it's just a fundamental fact that regardless of the way of organising society, surplus labour will always be required/extracted

just because surplus labour exists in a society though doesn't mean that that society is necessarily exploitative (at the individual or social level) however

All societies whether pre-capitalist, capitalist or 'communist' will have surplus labour as the basis of their existence, reproduction & development. So the existence of surplus labour in and off itself tells us nothing about the nature of that society - what tells about the nature of that society is the way in which the surplus labour is extracted, the form which it then takes, and the manner & basis of its distribution

On its own it's like saying 'air is needed in society' i.e. it doesn't really tell us anything specific/useful about that society (other than the obvious)


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## Smokeandsteam (Jan 2, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> It's also to do with having to operate on the right side of restrictive laws around industrial action, or see the unions' (i.e. the meberships') assets sequestrated.



No, unions can still take targeted action over sustained periods lawfully. What would be unlawful would be action deemed as 'secondary'. It's hard to see where the current tactic of one day periodic strikes followed by months of inactivity can lead - except to demoralisation, defeat and yet more disengagement.


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## SpineyNorman (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Ie someone's always going to take the piss/extract the labour value


 
In practice probably. But even in theory, even if nobody is taking the piss, there would still be a need for the surplus to be extracted and redistributed so that we can care for the elderly and infirm, hospitals, education, etc. The question is who extracts/controls the surplus and how.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

No (ymu). Child benefits and child tax credits subsidise employers not paying enough. It's as simple as that.


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Ie someone's always going to take the piss/extract the labour value


Not necessarily. Collective purchasing via taxation is a great deal more efficient than individual purchasing (true under a system with no money or wages as much as one with money and wages), and some output has to be reinvested to ensure future output. You can take profits out of the picture, but a system where workers keep literally everything they produce seems closer to Ayn Rand than anything the left might come up with.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Not necessarily. Collective purchasing via taxation is a great deal more efficient than individual purchasing (true under a system with no money or wages as much as one with money and wages), and some output has to be reinvested to ensure future output. You can take profits out of the picture, but a system where workers keep literally everything they produce seems closer to Ayn Rand than anything the left might come up with.


Point me toward where I said that workers should keep everything that they produce, please.


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## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Child benefit and child tax credits do address it. Not enough, I grant you.
> 
> Ah, OK. I didn't link to a paper in that post - Joshi 2002?


 
Yes Heather Joshi on the basis of 1958 and 1970 'cohorts' of women I think.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> In practice probably. But even in theory, even if nobody is taking the piss, there would still be a need for the surplus to be extracted and redistributed so that we can care for the elderly and infirm, hospitals, education, etc. The question is who extracts/controls the surplus and how.


I agree. But in practice someone is always taking the piss, and it's usually people with power and money.


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## sihhi (Jan 2, 2013)

love detective said:


> No not because of that, it's just a fundamental fact that regardless of the way of organising society, surplus labour will always be required/extracted
> 
> just because surplus labour exists in a society though doesn't mean that that society is necessarily exploitative (at the individual or social level) however


 
It's workers having to pay for the childcare services via tax contributions and lower wages.
It's not a very good system anyway - relying on unpaid L1/L2 trainees as much as paid workers (hear less about it on the news due to media fixation on media/creative industry interns).


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> No (ymu). Child benefits and child tax credits subsidise employers not paying enough. It's as simple as that.


As does every other benefit. Parents are entitled to additional benefits, which does mitigate the with/without children pay gap.

Not sure you could call child benefit a subsidy to employers when it was universal. It just redistributed from the childless to parents. I would support that even if everyone was earning enough to bring up eight kids in Westminster without state help.

But the point is ... couples with children do get some reduction in the pay gap via child benefit and child tax credits. They do not, as a couple, face the same kind of pay gap problem as women the main child-carer faces.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It's workers having to pay for the childcare services via tax contributions and lower wages.
> It's not a very good system anyway - relying on unpaid L1/L2 trainees as much as paid workers (hear less about it on the news due to media fixation on media/creative industry interns).


Not just childcare but also domestic and caring labour.


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Point me toward where I said that workers should keep everything that they produce, please.


It's how I read this (in the context of the post it quoted)


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> It's how I read this (in the context of the post it quoted)


Me saying that someone's always going to take the piss/extract the labour value is not the same as saying that workers shouldn't contribute to the care of the young, old, infirm and impoverished. When I say someone's always going to take the piss/extract the labour value I mean that "someone" will always try and make a profit for themselves at the expense of the class.


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## SpineyNorman (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Not necessarily. Collective purchasing via taxation is a great deal more efficient than individual purchasing (true under a system with no money or wages as much as one with money and wages), and some output has to be reinvested to ensure future output. You can take profits out of the picture, but a system where workers keep literally everything they produce seems closer to Ayn Rand than anything the left might come up with.


 
Nah it's not - Rand would still have the extraction of surplus value through capitalist relations of production. Rousseau's absolute state of nature is the only example of anything like that in political thought that I can think of. A system where people secure the full fruits of their own labour and nothing else - and he doesn't think it's possible to ever go back to that once you've got society. And that's the rub - you can't reproduce society without redirecting the social surplus.

Maybe some of the weirder mutialist anarchists want something like that though, I'm not sure.


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Me saying that someone's always going to take the piss/extract the labour value is not the same as saying that workers shouldn't contribute to the care of the young, old, infirm and impoverished. When I say someone's always going to take the piss/extract the labour value I mean that "someone" will always try and make a profit for themselves at the expense of the class.


 
That makes a lot more sense. That meaning didn't come across in the context of the post you quoted.

But yes, I agree. Any system which requires decent people to be in charge is doomed to fail.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> That makes a lot more sense. That meaning didn't come across in the context of the post you quoted.
> 
> But yes, I agree. Any system which requires decent people to be in charge is doomed to fail.


Were you talking to me there?


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

Yeah, sorry. *shakes fist at spiney*

Edited for clarity.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Yeah, sorry. *shakes fist at spiney*
> 
> Edited for clarity.


OK. But I also don't agree that "any system which requires decent people to take charge is doomed to fail" either. Those are your words, not mine. What I *do* think is that Capitalism will continue to create a system of profit making at the expense of the working class, and that we should be very wary of dressing up benefits (and then concurrently witholding them plus demonising those that need them) as an acceptable alternative for fully paying for the labour produced by the working class.


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> OK. But I also don't agree that "any system which requires decent people to take charge is doomed to fail" either. Those are your words, not mine. What I *do* think is that Capitalism will continue to create a system of profit making at the expense of the working class, and that we should be very wary of dressing up benefits (and then concurrently witholding them plus demonising those that need them) as an acceptable alternative for fully paying for the labour produced by the working class.


Yes, they are my words. I was expanding on why I agree with you. The conclusion I draw from the inevitability of power being abused is that any system which requires decent people to be in charge is doomed to fail.

I can't see any of the things I'm talking about happening under capitalism anyway, but if I could ... I would not want to demand that parents be paid more because it would put them at a disadvantage relative to other workers, and I do think that the rest of society should financially support those who are bringing up the next generation that all of us will rely on in our old age. That means I'm stuck with something that looks a bit like child benefit.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Yes, they are my words. I was expanding on why I agree with you. The conclusion I draw from the inevitability of power being abused is that any system which requires decent people to be in charge is doomed to fail.
> 
> I can't see any of the things I'm talking about happening under capitalism anyway, but if I could ... I would not want to demand that parents be paid more because it would put them at a disadvantage relative to other workers, and I do think that the rest of society should financially support those who are bringing up the next generation that all of us will rely on in our old age. That means I'm stuck with something that looks a bit like child benefit.



Which system is it that requires decent people to be in charge, and can we vote/not vote for it?


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## love detective (Jan 2, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> In practice probably. But even in theory, even if nobody is taking the piss, there would still be a need for the surplus to be extracted and redistributed so that we can care for the elderly and infirm, hospitals, education, etc. The question is who extracts/controls the surplus and how.


 
And it's not just looking after the elderly/infirm/children/non 'productive' workers in the here and now that it would be required for - surplus labour would always have to be extracted in the here & now to be 'spent' on things that generally only benefit future generations (even in capitalist/non progressive ways of organising society this has to happen, so you'd expect it to happen even more in a more progressive mode of organising society)

so it would be required for the investment in the ongoing development of social productivity in the here and now to provide/cater for more production in the future (both for increases in population in the future and also just general advances in living standards as society becomes more civilised for all etc. development of new energy sources, solutions to long run environment problems etc..)

also any society would also have to produce more than what was required for social consumption in the here & now so that it can safeguard itself against times of shortage, disasters, wars, and any other interruptions in 'normal' social reproduction etc..


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Which system is it that requires decent people to be in charge, and can we vote/not vote for it?


 
Maybe it would help if I reworded for clarity?

Any system which requires decent people to be in charge is doomed to fail _the population that it serves_.

You can't vote for it because capitalism is never going to allow a free vote on its own abolition. And neither is any other system run by people with power who don't want to lose it and have a say in the matter.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Maybe it would help if I reworded for clarity?
> 
> Any system which requires decent people to be in charge is doomed to fail _the population that it serves_.
> 
> You can't vote for it because capitalism is never going to allow a free vote on its own abolition. And neither is any other system run by people with power who don't want to lose it and have a say in the matter.



I get the feeling (maybe I'm wrong?) that you're referencing to how things might work within capitalism which is inherently a reformist position ie state socialism v state free socialism


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

I can't see any way to prevent the abuse of power under capitalism. You're saying you can?


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> I can't see any way to prevent the abuse of power under capitalism. You're saying you can?


I advocate mitigating the effects of capitalism whilst working to overthrow it.


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## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

That's nice. Doesn't explain why you thought I might be advocating a form of capitalism where no one can abuse their power. How could any such thing exist?


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> That's nice. Doesn't explain why you thought I might be advocating a form of capitalism where no one can abuse their power. How could any such thing exist?


Listen to you with your put downs, that you got so very narky with 39thstep earlier. "That's nice" - fuck off


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## weepiper (Jan 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> If anyone does know what are the true numbers of single fathers? Is it 8% or 12% of the total single-parent household population?
> 
> Also, what proportion of households with children use childcare at a paid-for facility?
> 
> Genuine questions btw.


 
Gingerbread says there are 2 million single parents in the UK and 8% or 186,000 are fathers

They don't seem to have exact numbers for single parents using paid childcare, but it says 'Of those using childcare, 46 per cent said it was informal' so 54% must be paid for.

http://www.gingerbread.org.uk/content.aspx?CategoryID=365


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## weepiper (Jan 2, 2013)

My personal thoughts on this btw, are that if they would stop harassing single parents to go back to work when their children are younger and younger (it's going to be when your youngest child is one year old soon  ), there would be more paid hours going round for other people who are not taking care of children. It's another way of depressing wages and keeping unemployment, or at least full-time work anyway, high for everyone.


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## smokedout (Jan 2, 2013)

weepiper said:


> My personal thoughts on this btw, are that if they would stop harassing single parents to go back to work when their children are younger and younger (it's going to be when your youngest child is one year old soon  ), there would be more paid hours going round for other people who are not taking care of children. It's another way of depressing wages and keeping unemployment, or at least full-time work anyway, high for everyone.


 
but they can all get jobs as cleaners and child minders for the middle class mums (that's what identity politics without a class foundation has won - more housework)


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

smokedout said:


> but they can all get jobs as cleaners and child minders for the middle class mums (that's what identity politics without a class foundation has won - more housework)


Most normal women aren't that keen on being the subject of unpaid labour and there's no shocker there.


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## smokedout (Jan 2, 2013)

if you're poor looking after kids and housework isn't labour, its worklessness


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## weepiper (Jan 2, 2013)

smokedout said:


> if you're poor looking after kids and housework isn't labour, its worklessness


 
This is what it boils down to. If you're middle class staying at home with your children is laudable. If you're poor it's laziness.


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## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

smokedout said:


> if you're poor looking after kids and housework isn't labour, its worklessness


This is what they try and convince you of. That looking after kids isn't work and that housework isn't work - they try and convince you that it's part of life and you shouldn't complain about it all falling on your shoulders because that's what you should do as part of life's fucking rich pattern.  Fuck that.


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## smokedout (Jan 2, 2013)

I think the point I was getting at is the devaluation of childcare - when its your own kid, and the loss of the right to raise your child at home unless you are rich (whichever gender you are), has not necessarily been such great gain for working class women - and that's what was conceded in the name of middle class gains won through identity politics


----------



## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I think the point I was getting at is the devaluation of childcare - when its your own kid, and the loss of the right to raise your child at home unless you are rich (whichever gender you are), has not necessarily been such great gain for working class women - and that's what was conceded in the name of middle class gains won through identity politics


Not disagreeing but I'd add in (as I said earlier) other caring roles as well.


----------



## sleaterkinney (Jan 2, 2013)

After seeing how much work my nephew is I have no idea how single parents cope full stop. Childcare down here costs around £70 a day and that's leaving your kid in a room with other kids not all of whom will have the same sleeping pattern so it's not going to get rest.


----------



## ymu (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Listen to you with your put downs, that you got so very narky with 39thstep earlier. "That's nice" - fuck off


Apologies. I couldn't see what your post had to do with the one it was responding to and was a bit frustrated. I can see where the misunderstanding came in now. Still should have found a better way to say it. Sorry.

No apologies for cunting off the Spare Rib comment though. Sick and tired of that style of putdown any time a woman says something a bloke doesn't like.

I am gonna fuck off though. Way past my bedtime.


----------



## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Apologies. I couldn't see what your post had to do with the one it was responding to and was a bit frustrated. I can see where the misunderstanding came in now. Still should have found a better way to say it. Sorry.
> 
> No apologies for cunting off the Spare Rib comment though. Sick and tired of that style of putdown any time a woman says something a bloke doesn't like.
> 
> I am gonna fuck off though. Way past my bedtime.


There's probably more to unite than divide on this thread. I'd still fucking dismantle stuff than reform it though :wink:


----------



## Red Cat (Jan 2, 2013)

weepiper said:


> This is what it boils down to. If you're middle class staying at home with your children is laudable. If you're poor it's laziness.


 
Well, we all know poor women have thick kids who don't need the kind of creative and stimulating experiences required by their middle class counterparts. What must they do all day?


----------



## weepiper (Jan 2, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Well, we all know poor women have thick kids who don't need the kind of creative and stimulating experiences required by their middle class counterparts. What must they do all day?


 
oh true, after all my children are only going to grow up to work on the till at Asda or cleaning floors if they're lucky, so they don't _need_ me at home the same way those delicate children who're going to grow up to be investment bankers and MPs do


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 2, 2013)

ymu said:


> Apologies. I couldn't see what your post had to do with the one it was responding to and was a bit frustrated. I can see where the misunderstanding came in now. Still should have found a better way to say it. Sorry.
> 
> No apologies for cunting off the Spare Rib comment though. Sick and tired of that style of putdown any time a woman says something a bloke doesn't like.
> 
> ...



Apologies for having the temerity to disagree with someone who happens to be a woman.


----------



## Red Cat (Jan 2, 2013)

weepiper said:


> oh true, after all my children are only going to grow up to work on the till at Asda or cleaning floors if they're lucky, so they don't _need_ me at home the same way those delicate children who're going to grow up to be investment bankers and MPs do


 
Can poor children even be considered children? After all, the research over the past few decades shows us just how extremely able very young children are. Some people even say that they are like little scientists in their attempts to understand and act on the world. In this respect, is it not more accurate to describe the poor child as a blob?


----------



## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

weepiper said:


> oh true, after all my children are only going to grow up to work on the till at Asda or cleaning floors if they're lucky, so they don't _need_ me at home the same way those delicate children who're going to grow up to be investment bankers and MPs do


It's a good job you don't actually believe that and won't pass it on to your kids. My parents did actually believe that the only way out of working on the till forever was education. They weren't right but I understand why they thought that. I fucked off the whole education thing in their face then spent 30 years trying to get to the same place without it.


----------



## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Apologies for having the temerity to disagree with someone who happens to be a woman.


No I love you to bits probably more than anyone on here, and hardly ever pull you up no matter what you say about anything repeatedly, but you did pull a woman put down stunt there.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> It's a good job you don't actually believe that and won't pass it on to your kids. My parents did actually believe that the only way out of working on the till forever was education. They weren't right but I understand why they thought that. I fucked off the whole education thing in their face then spent 30 years trying to get to the same place without it.


 
Unfortunately even getting a good degree hasn't got me out of 'working on the till forever'. Which was kind of my point


----------



## cesare (Jan 2, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Unfortunately even getting a good degree hasn't got me out of 'working on the till forever'. Which was kind of my point


It's the same point eh. That a good education doesn't necessarily get anyone out of working on the tills forever


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 2, 2013)

My parents were adamant me and my brothers were going to university. No ifs, no buts. we were going. As it turned out, I couldn't wait to go, but I often thought what would have happened if I hadn't gone.

Both my parents had worked straight after leaving school. Dad worked in a car plant and Mum had a selection of office/admin jobs, before leaving work to have children.

I think they had both bought into the 'a degree will see you right' myth but even by the early 90s when I went off to uni it was becoming clear to me at 18 that a degree wasn't an automatic passport to a job for life.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> It's the same point eh. That a good education doesn't necessarily get anyone out of working on the tills forever


 
Yep. And it's also the proof that actually you can't automatically always drag yourself up by the bootstraps if you'd just _try_ a bit harder [/Iain Duncan Smith]


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 2, 2013)

It's starting to become obvious that upper levels of management are closed off to me because I don't have an MBA. I don't want one, I think they are no substitute for business experience.


----------



## cesare (Jan 3, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Yep. And it's also the proof that actually you can't automatically always drag yourself up by the bootstraps if you'd just _try_ a bit harder [/Iain Duncan Smith]


Yes that fucking pull yourself up by the bootstraps makes me want to stab things. But that's what I tried to do not to please the like of IDS but to make my parents proud because they worked so hard to try and give me a start in life.

Edit: and they did what they believed in at the time, and you'll do what you believe in now. There's a difficult  point along the way for working class parents. Encourage your kids to do the most and be the best they can be and make sacrifices for them to do that; or hold firm to the class, never do anything or go beyond it eg by way of being a boss in some way or highly skilled profession or academia etc.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 3, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Will those going on about class stratification within unions please provide an example or explanation of what they mean?
> 
> How is a middle manager in local government a different class to a cleaner in local government?
> 
> ...


In most workplace situations where the union covers a disparate workforce, it's parts of the workforce that do the stratifying,  usually on a top-down basis. 
It's never (in the minds of such people) only about economic and social power, it's also about perception. About how those inside the union attempt to differentiate between themselves for (ironically)  instrumental reasons.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 3, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Can poor children even be considered children? After all, the research over the past few decades shows us just how extremely able very young children are. Some people even say that they are like little scientists in their attempts to understand and act on the world. In this respect, is it not more accurate to describe the poor child as a blob?


 
I know your post was half joking, but it has caused me to get this half formed nonsense off me chest. Fuck knows why it is that working class kids (especially working class girls) do really well at infants and junior school (comparably better than their middle class counterparts), but then it all goes to ratshit after age 11 and staring at senior school. Well, I think I know why, but I doubt I've got the words to express it.

Buy your kids gold though, from an early age as possible, if you're on means tested benefits always have your savings in the form of jewelry - I bought my god daughter a solid gold necklace that spelled out the letters of her name - I'm quite proud of that. Fuck all to do with anything though.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 3, 2013)

It's all about indoctrination, Frances. Where stuff starts to go wrong is when you move beyond the basics of education and start "programming" children for their future role. You can't rely on benevolent teachers (not least because they're assaulted on all sides by bureaucracy) and dedicated parents helping the kids because they're often going to be fighting other battles, so there's an increasing weight of shit militating against working class kids achieving.  Is it deliberate? In my opinion it at least partially is. The middle and upper classes will ALWAYS seek to reproduce themselves at our expense.


----------



## redsquirrel (Jan 3, 2013)

I heard a perfect example of the worthlessness of identity politics yesterday on the Today program. The new leader of the TUC arguing for a quota for women in boardrooms.

Because such a policy is just what your members are crying out for. Even more stupidly she seemed to be trying to defend this moronic policy from the position that women bring different skills to the boardroom.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

redsquirrel said:


> I heard a perfect example of the worthlessness of identity politics yesterday on the Today program. The new leader of the TUC arguing for a quota for women in boardrooms.
> 
> Because such a policy is just what your members are crying out for. Even more stupidly she seemed to be trying to defend this moronic policy from the position that women bring different skills to the boardroom.


I really don't agree with a quota in boardrooms. There's no reason for it, business or otherwise, and it devalues any woman on a board and everyone then thinks she's there to fill a quota regardless of ability.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 3, 2013)

more workers reps in boardrooms. Less shareholders. In fact, make them do a shift on the floor


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 3, 2013)

Fewer business lunches, more throwing punches, as Dave would say.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 3, 2013)

cesare said:


> No I love you to bits probably more than anyone on here, and hardly ever pull you up no matter what you say about anything repeatedly, but you did pull a woman put down stunt there.


 
Might have pulled a put down a feminist stunt but nothing to do with gender. I am not even sure who is what on here.


----------



## 8ball (Jan 3, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> It's starting to become obvious that upper levels of management are closed off to me because I don't have an MBA. I don't want one, I think they are no substitute for business experience.


 
MBA? 

Can't you just wear a sandwich board with 'idiot' on it?


----------



## Red Cat (Jan 3, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> I know your post was half joking


 
I was thinking of the difference in the view of women on benefits and mc women looking after their children and I thought that beyond the obvious scapegoating of women entitled to benefits there's also an unspoken view that poor children don't have the same needs. I was also thinking that despite all the research showing how able babies and young children are, how driven they are to grow and do things for themselves, how little they need adults to 'teach' rather than facilitate, how very far from blobs they are, their care is still seen as unskilled physical women's work. Education (intellectual and social skills) takes place outside the home, care (wiping bums) takes place within it.

I read a lovely book written in the 80s recording observations of children in the home with their mothers. The research was based on challenging the idea of working class language deficit, that working class kids were attending nurseries or pre-schools with less language ability than their middle class peers, and argued and showed that working class kids have equally complex conversations with their mothers in their homes and that their mothers were equally attuned to helping their children understand the world through talking. What differed was confidence in talking to staff in institutions. Aswell as the class aspect, or rather linked to the class aspect, I liked that it challenged the idea that 'education' takes place outside of the home, by showing that young children have more interesting conversations with the people who understand them, know all about their life, rather than staff in a nursery who are presumed to have skills the mother lacks. Of course, stated like that, it's obvious isn't it? And yet childcare in the home done by women continues to be seen as unskilled and/or natural.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 3, 2013)

redsquirrel said:


> I heard a perfect example of the worthlessness of identity politics yesterday on the Today program. The new leader of the TUC arguing for a quota for women in boardrooms.


 
Frances O'Grady. She's an improvement on the inert mass that was Brendan Barber, but she's still wedded to the classic Labour tradition of believing that gradualist reform is a panacea.



> Because such a policy is just what your members are crying out for. Even more stupidly she seemed to be trying to defend this moronic policy from the position that women bring different skills to the boardroom.


 
A slightly different *perspective*, perhaps, but the skills brought to the board room are always the same - control and exploitation.

Unfortunately, her argument shows where she is coming from, and it's from an accommodationist direction. The same old Labour-supporting "let's not rock the boat with radical demands" reformism that's already patently failed for the last 30 years.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 3, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I really don't agree with a quota in boardrooms. There's no reason for it, business or otherwise, and it devalues any woman on a board and everyone then thinks she's there to fill a quota regardless of ability.


 
Reduces everything to tokenistic gestures.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 3, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> more workers reps in boardrooms. Less shareholders. In fact, make them do a shift on the floor


 
Workers' Councils, not Works Councils!


----------



## rekil (Jan 3, 2013)

Crabapple bothers Seville squatters for fucking Vice.



> We sang half forgotten Spanish civil war songs. A Las Barricadas indeed.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

Half-forgotten? Half never known.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

This really happened:



> We smoked a joint in front of a photo of Che smoking a cigar, like some fractal of revolutionary kitsch. In incompetent Spanish, I asked Marco what the end goal of his, and Somonte's struggle was. "It's like the myth of Sisyphus," Marco said. Sisyphus was one of those ancient Greeks who were too clever for the gods' tastes. The gods sentenced him to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity. When he got near the top, the boulder would roll down again.
> 
> "But Sisyphus loses." I answered.
> 
> "I don't have a date in mind for the revolution." Marco said, drawing in his smoke.


 
Also, Sisyphus didn't lose as such (*and the private arts college knowledge is kicking in here), he just didn't win yet. He needs external help.


----------



## Favelado (Jan 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Crabapple bothers Seville squatters for fucking Vice.


 
http://www.vice.com/read/rubber-bullets-in-the-streets-of-madrid

I've just read this and it gives zero insight into the situation in Madrid or in Spain in general. It's got its fair share of errors too. She hasn't even got the initials of the party currently in power in Spain right.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

subs fault, creatives create.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 3, 2013)

> hard-faced manual laborers


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

Flat capped noble buffoons. Like in the books and that.


----------



## rekil (Jan 3, 2013)

> along socialist *principals.*


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

_Seymour!_


----------



## rekil (Jan 3, 2013)

> the Spanish Civil War (that deadly romantic struggle between fascism and the leftist Second Republic),


Too busy swooning to fight properly.


----------



## rekil (Jan 3, 2013)

> We smoked a joint in front of a photo of Che smoking a cigar, like some fractal of revolutionary kitsch.


Now that's radical downtime.


----------



## snadge (Jan 3, 2013)

> I tried to help with the dishes, but, as with most practical skills, I failed.


 
What the fuck?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 3, 2013)

how do you fail to do the washing up? seems legit


----------



## weepiper (Jan 3, 2013)

snadge said:


> What the fuck?


 
 her mind's on higher things.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 3, 2013)

I can't get over the way the dispossessed take over-privileged, posturing, politically illiterate 'creative' types to their very blossom...every time. Do they possess some kinda peasant folk-instinct which senses the solidarity and compassion?

I fuckin loved the 'couldn't wash-up' business'.

Do not fuss comrade  señorita...your place in ze  struggle eez not here in ze  kitchen wiz us simple folks...your gifts are wasted here, your role eez to rouse ze whole world to our plight.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 3, 2013)

now I've got 'Crab-apple in adulusia' to the tune of 'Spanish Bombs' stuck in my head.


----------



## Belushi (Jan 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Crabapple bothers Seville squatters for fucking Vice.


 
Isn't that where Stanley Edwards is?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 3, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> cant quote for some reason


 
is that the complimentary version of "whey-faced harridans"?


----------



## lauriepenny (Jan 3, 2013)

The analysis of pictures of my bedroom is really creepy, guys. I'm really sorry for having a window and a bed, though. Am I not allowed to write about class politics if I have a window and a bed? Should I knock out the window and sleep on the floor? 

Anyway, your dismissal of 'identity' politics is getting desperate. You seem really, really anxious to convince yourselves that only the politics of white working class men is actually relevant to economic and social struggle. Those of us who are and who fight for women, people of colour and minorities don't call it 'identity politics', by the way. We just call it 'politics.'

Agree with you about women in boardrooms, though. Terrible straw woman of a non-argument that elides the reality of gender oppression.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 3, 2013)

Racist.


----------



## rekil (Jan 3, 2013)

Evenin'.


----------



## Firky (Jan 3, 2013)

I thought it was a hovel not a bedroom. Do make your mind up.

Now you will swan off again like Lady Muck because you're too afraid to engage with the scary fake lefties.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 3, 2013)

way to miss the point as usual


----------



## lauriepenny (Jan 3, 2013)

Apols for typos, by the way, writing this on a phone.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

@lauriepenny

Yes, the whole 'women in the boardroom' quota stuff really makes me angry. I feel that I'll never be judged solely on my merits, no matter how hard I work. I think it's also insulting to women who are already on boards.


----------



## rekil (Jan 3, 2013)

Proof I can't be a misogynist btw. I backed Nina Zilli and her amazing radfem anthem in last year's eurovision. 



But she let the side down.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

@lauriepenny: Also, don't post any photos publically on the internet unless you want them dissected endlessly, by anybody. Because somewhere in the world, someone doesn't like your bedspread.

Anyway, it was an objection to the word 'hovel', given than there's some on this thread who are paying rent to landlords who can't fix mould/damp problems.

I like that you've returned


----------



## lauriepenny (Jan 3, 2013)

Well exactly- claiming that more women in the boardrooms will somehow solve gender equality conveniently brushes over the fact that the boardrooms are still the problem. It's feminism as a decoy for rampant neoliberalism, and I hate it. I honestly couldn't care less about women in the boardrooms. When are people going to start asking en masse whether a female cleaner, as opposed to a female banker, can 'have it all'?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Anyway, your dismissal of 'identity' politics is getting desperate. You seem really, really anxious to convince yourselves that only the politics of white working class men is actually relevant to economic and social struggle. Those of us who are and who fight for women, people of colour and minorities don't call it 'identity politics', by the way. We just call it 'politics.'
> .


 
You are the only imposing that view. It stinks. You stink. You are rancid.


----------



## love detective (Jan 3, 2013)

i'd rather ask why can't a cleaner as opposed to a banker 'have it all'


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

> You seem really, really anxious to convince yourselves that only the politics of white working class men is actually relevant to economic and social struggle.


 
Let's see some evidence of this. One single post. Just one.


----------



## lauriepenny (Jan 3, 2013)

For the record it wasn't me that called it the Hovel- it's Nick's name for the house, I think he used to be a lot richer once. It's pretty grim and the landlord won't fix the bathroom and it's bloody cold, but it's still the nicest place I've lived in London by some way.


----------



## cesare (Jan 3, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> @lauriepenny
> 
> Yes, the whole 'women in the boardroom' quota stuff really makes me angry. I feel that I'll never be judged solely on my merits, no matter how hard I work. I think it's also insulting to women who are already on boards.


The use of quota systems for *any* position doesn't tend to go well. Someone gets discriminated against with positive discrimination as well as the negative kind.


----------



## lauriepenny (Jan 3, 2013)

I'm just saying, I find that a bit silly too.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Well exactly- claiming that more women in the boardrooms will somehow solve gender equality conveniently brushes over the fact that the boardrooms are still the problem. It's feminism as a decoy for rampant neoliberalism, and I hate it. I honestly couldn't care less about women in the boardrooms. When are people going to start asking en masse whether a female cleaner, as opposed to a female banker, can 'have it all'?


So, let's see you take on rather than talk for the fawcett society.


----------



## lauriepenny (Jan 3, 2013)

Quota systems really aren't the problem. Structural inequality is the problem.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Well exactly- claiming that more women in the boardrooms will somehow solve gender equality conveniently brushes over the fact that the boardrooms are still the problem. It's feminism as a decoy for rampant neoliberalism, and I hate it. I honestly couldn't care less about women in the boardrooms. When are people going to start asking en masse whether a female cleaner, as opposed to a female banker, can 'have it all'?


I am an engineer. I do not describe myself as a female engineer because a man wouldn't describe himself as a male engineer. To describe someone's job or profession in context with their gender, and tie the two together, is the antithesis of what feminism set out to do.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Quota systems really aren't the problem. Structural inequality is the problem.


What does that mean?


----------



## weepiper (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Quota systems really aren't the problem. Structural inequality is the problem.


 
zomg we're getting somewhere at last


----------



## lauriepenny (Jan 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> So, let's see you take on rather than talk for the fawcett society.


 Um, I've written loads of articles and a book and given umpteen talks about precisely this topic, the erasure of class consciousness in modern feminism.


----------



## cesare (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Quota systems really aren't the problem. Structural inequality is the problem.


They're part of the problem. They're like using sticking plaster on a broken arm, and then finding out that there's also an allergy to elastoplast.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Well exactly- claiming that more women in the boardrooms will somehow solve gender equality conveniently brushes over the fact that the boardrooms are still the problem. It's feminism as a decoy for rampant neoliberalism, and I hate it. I honestly couldn't care less about women in the boardrooms. When are people going to start asking en masse whether a female cleaner, as opposed to a female banker, can 'have it all'?



Have all of what? I really hate to break this to you but 'having it all' is not all it's made out to be...and I should know; I'm a white guy. I think what's needed is some kinda bottom-up anarcho-syndicalist spontaneous sit in..or on..or down, till the world comes to its senses and we all get an Audi and our kids go to private schools.
Obviously, I lack your book-learning and economic literacy, but that's the way I see it.
So how d'ya like them apples missie?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

Is it though? Erased from modern feminism, I mean.


----------



## lauriepenny (Jan 3, 2013)

So you mean- quota systems are a problem because people who don't benefit don't like them?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Um, I've written loads of articles and a book and given umpteen talks about precisely this topic, the erasure of class consciousness in modern feminism.


No you haven't. You've written lots whilst doing it. Whilst _being that erasure._


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

cesare said:


> They're part of the problem. They're like using sticking plaster on a broken arm, and then finding out that there's also an allergy to elastoplast.


I'm always amazed that time and time again, quotas are suggested as a way of overcoming the problem, like they're something new.


----------



## cesare (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> So you mean- quota systems are a problem because people who don't benefit don't like them?


Nobody benefits from tokenistic gestures.


----------



## lauriepenny (Jan 3, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> , but that's the way I see it.
> So how d'ya like them apples missie?



Are you literally a comedy chauvinist from a 1950s American musical?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> So you mean- quota systems are a problem because people who don't benefit don't like them?


What do you mean by quoata system first off then?


----------



## cesare (Jan 3, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I'm always amazed that time and time again, quotas are suggested as a way of overcoming the problem, like they're something new.


Aye.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> So you mean- quota systems are a problem because people who don't benefit don't like them?


No, quota systems are a problem because they don't encourage equality, they encourage tokenism.

If I'm get put on the company board to satisfy a quota, people aren't going to take me seriously.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

I want to be recognised for the skills that I have and the good job I do. Not my gender so the CEO can tick a box and say he's got a woman on the board.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Are you literally a comedy chauvinist from a 1950s American musical?



Yes...literally

Do you know what literally means, btw?


----------



## Firky (Jan 3, 2013)

"only the politics of white working class men is actually relevant"

I know you make stuff up - but why that in particular? Does this somehow go back your IWCA cock up?

What I am really asking is how could you come to that conclusion if you've read this thread or even outside of it on this forum?


----------



## lauriepenny (Jan 3, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> No, quota systems are a problem because they don't encourage equality, they encourage tokenism.
> 
> If I'm get put on the company board to satisfy a quota, people aren't going to take me seriously.


 

I get that worry, which is why quota systems of (eg) 30 percent women in a workplace are insulting. But how do you know the men in any workplace got their jobs on merit, rather than inbuilt bias in their favour?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 3, 2013)

Oh god, so there's to be no comment on peoples- and I mean peoples, not just people you'd like to think oppose the idea of privilege theory- just someone posted a pic of your quotidian room hur hur we must all be shitty trolls and opressed white males etc.

theres quite a bit here since you swanned off to do work, like none of us do OBVIOUSLY, regarding the role of unions and gender politics within unions. Meat and issues.

You'll not bother with that though I suppose. Far easier to dismiss it completely os someone reposted a pic you'd already posted on the internets and then off for Bengali Chai at Firebox ffs


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

God this stuff makes me cross


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I get that worry, which is why quota systems of (eg) 30 percent women in a workplace are insulting. But how do you know the men in any workplace got their jobs on merit, rather than inbuilt bias in their favour?


I bet you _get_ lots of worries but still support top-down state lead pro-capital responses.


----------



## poului (Jan 3, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> No, quota systems are a problem because they don't encourage equality, they encourage tokenism.


 
I'd go even further than that actually, the presence of quotas in so many professions are held up as a sign of progress when they're far from it. They're a depressing insistence that there's some issues surrounding perceptions of ethnic and gender groups that still need to be addressed. They wouldn't be necessary otherwise.


----------



## lauriepenny (Jan 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I bet you _get_ lots of worries but still support top-down state lead pro-capital responses.



Um, in a word, no.


----------



## rekil (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> You seem really, really anxious to convince yourselves that only the politics of white working class men is actually relevant to economic and social struggle.





butchersapron said:


> Let's see some evidence of this. One single post. Just one.


.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Um, in a word, no.


So how do you want to do this then?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Um, in a word, no.



Any elaboration coming along?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I get that worry, which is why quota systems of (eg) 30 percent women in a workplace are insulting. But how do you know the men in any workplace got their jobs on merit, rather than inbuilt bias in their favour?


That's tricky. I work in a technical environment, so more men than women are inevitable anyway. But that's mostly down to gender role conditioning at an early age. I was always told I could do anything I wanted, but I know women who have been conditioned to think that their only options are admin jobs or being a wife/mother. If more girls are encouraged to explore maths/sciences from primary school level, they'll be more women in technical roles. 

The split of women to men is very discipline-specific, even in the engineering profession. Mechanical engineering rarely has more than 15-20% women at degree level, whereas chemical/civil engineering is almost 50:50. Maths is even 50:50 at postgrad level in some unis, which is great.


----------



## inva (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Anyway, your dismissal of 'identity' politics is getting desperate. You seem really, really anxious to convince yourselves that only the politics of white working class men is actually relevant to economic and social struggle. Those of us who are and who fight for women, people of colour and minorities don't call it 'identity politics', by the way. We just call it 'politics.'


who do you fight for laurie penny?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

laurie penny said:
			
		

> You seem really, really anxious to convince yourselves that only the politics of white working class men is actually relevant to economic and social struggle.


 
The politics of hate.


----------



## snadge (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> The analysis of pictures of my bedroom is really creepy, guys. I'm really sorry for having a window and a bed, though. Am I not allowed to write about class politics if I have a window and a bed? Should I knock out the window and sleep on the floor?


 
Don't put stuff into the Public Domain as someone with such a large following if you don't want it commented on.



lauriepenny said:


> Anyway, your dismissal of 'identity' politics is getting desperate. You seem really, really anxious to convince yourselves that only the politics of white working class men is actually relevant to economic and social struggle. Those of us who are and who fight for women, people of colour and minorities don't call it 'identity politics', by the way. We just call it 'politics.'


 
And we call it opportunities for all, jobs for all, you just divide and snipe.


----------



## Athos (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Anyway, your dismissal of 'identity' politics is getting desperate. You seem really, really anxious to convince yourselves that only the politics of white working class men is actually relevant to economic and social struggle. Those of us who are and who fight for women, people of colour and minorities don't call it 'identity politics', by the way. We just call it 'politics.'


 
This is just downright dishonest.  I doubt that you could point to single post in which that sentiment is expressed or even implied, by anyone, let alone the majority of contributors to this thread.  Could you?

I'd hoped that you might have learned a lesson from slandering Spiney, yet here you are again implying the same thing, albeit you've not actually accused anyone by name.  Cowardly, and downright dishonest.

And it demonstrates that you've not bothered to read the many pages of serious discussions e.g. the recent discussion about minorities and unions.  Lazy, cowardly, and downright dishonest.

I'm glad that you are here, and hope that you'll engage sensibly.  For starters, how about this: do you honestly believe that any critique of identity politics is essentially racist?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 3, 2013)

> Those of us who are and who fight for women, people of colour and minorities don't call it 'identity politics', by the way. We just call it 'politics.'


 













thank god you are there to articulate what normal w/c left wingers do as standard while doing jobs to pay the rent and juggling kids and leading non-oxbridge bubble normal lives. You saint


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 3, 2013)

Why do you fear working class people Laurie?


----------



## lauriepenny (Jan 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> So how do you want to do this then?



Respectfully, with people who actually have a clue about my work and don't fling about rude baseless accusations then expect me to respond as if they've got a valid argument.

But since that doesn't appear to be an option, I'll be off. Some of you lot still don't seem to understand that I don't have any sort of moral duty to answer your stupid questions or respond to your lies.

Sad really, I actually thought we were getting somewhere.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 3, 2013)

#We call it politics#

Is the switch to the first person plural a creative writing device you kids are taught these days, btw? Does it heighten the narrative in some way...or do you actually feel you're speaking for a genuine flesh and blood demographic...and if so, could you describe these people...or even put a name to them?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Respectfully, with people who actually have a clue about my work and don't fling about rude baseless accusations then expect me to respond as if they've got a valid argument.
> 
> But since that doesn't appear to be an option, I'll be off. Some of you lot still don't seem to understand that I don't have any sort of moral duty to answer your stupid questions or respond to your lies.
> 
> Sad really, I actually thought we were getting somewhere.


No, how? You mean through the state and top down.


----------



## rekil (Jan 3, 2013)

Just missing the numerous PMs of support.


----------



## wtfftw (Jan 3, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Oh god, so there's to be no comment on peoples- and I mean peoples, not just people you'd like to think oppose the idea of privilege theory- just someone posted a pic of your quotidian room hur hur we must all be shitty trolls and opressed white males etc.
> 
> *theres quite a bit here since you swanned off to do work, like none of us do OBVIOUSLY, regarding the role of unions and gender politics within unions. Meat and issues.*
> 
> You'll not bother with that though I suppose. Far easier to dismiss it completely os someone reposted a pic you'd already posted on the internets and then off for Bengali Chai at Firebox ffs


(my bold as can't cut) 

I've been finding that bit really interesting. Definitely worth reading.


----------



## inva (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Respectfully, with people who actually have a clue about my work and don't fling about rude baseless accusations then expect me to respond as if they've got a valid argument.


your accusations have always been entirely well founded of course. you're a one you are


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> with people who actually have a clue about my work


 
Your work involves not having a clue about the people you claim to speak for.


----------



## cesare (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Respectfully, with people who actually have a clue about my work and don't fling about rude baseless accusations then expect me to respond as if they've got a valid argument.
> 
> But since that doesn't appear to be an option, I'll be off. Some of you lot still don't seem to understand that I don't have any sort of moral duty to answer your stupid questions or respond to your lies.
> 
> Sad really, I actually thought we were getting somewhere.


You seem to be remarkably selective in your reading of the discussion here.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

_Too rude for laurie._


----------



## Firky (Jan 3, 2013)

I like the way she calls it 'work' as though it has some worth. 

Oh well, off to watch TV.


----------



## JimW (Jan 3, 2013)

If only we had a "valid argument" like Laurie's, which boils down to shouting racist and sexist at anyone even slightly disconcerted by the promotion of yet another middle class gobshite as the voice of the left.


----------



## 8ball (Jan 3, 2013)

You lot just like being horrible to white, posh, middle-class people.


----------



## rekil (Jan 3, 2013)

Back to polite twitter and engaging with vermin like Harry Cole.


----------



## snadge (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Respectfully, with people who actually have a clue about my work and don't fling about rude baseless accusations then expect me to respond as if they've got a valid argument.


 
Your work? All I can see from your work is that it divides the people that matter, I bet you can't do the washing up either.



lauriepenny said:


> But since that doesn't appear to be an option, I'll be off. Some of you lot still don't seem to understand that I don't have any sort of moral duty to answer your stupid questions or respond to your lies.


 
You have a moral duty to address your accusations though.



lauriepenny said:


> Sad really, I actually thought we were getting somewhere.


 
Until you stop thinking you are the 'smartest' kid from a 'smart' school, you won't get anything.


----------



## editor (Jan 3, 2013)

I've no real opinion about Laurie but, looking back, surely she must agree that this is awful stuff:
http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/laurie-pennys-diary-6390227.html


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

That's a shame, I was starting to have a dialogue with LP about gender/role politics.

@lauripenny : hope you read my posts, see you next time.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

firky said:


> I like the way she calls it 'work' as though it has some worth.
> 
> Oh well, off to watch TV.


Slactivism


----------



## 8ball (Jan 3, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> @lauripenny : hope you read my posts, see you next time.


 
She'll reappear faster if you post a picture.
She likes pictures.


----------



## JimW (Jan 3, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> That's a shame, I was starting to have a dialogue with LP about gender/role politics.
> 
> @lauripenny : hope you read my posts, see you next time.


You need to get yourself a TUC-funded mentoring role for crap "journalists". All aboard the gravy train!


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

JimW said:


> You need to get yourself a TUC-funded mentoring role for crap "journalists". All aboard the gravy train!


No, I work for a living.

It was nice to see her respond a little - soon she'll be here for hours like the rest of us.


----------



## JimW (Jan 3, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> No, I work for a living.
> 
> It was nice to see her respond a little - soon she'll be here for hours like the rest of us.


She could have a great future at the Workers' Girder if only she'd embrace chuckleism.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 3, 2013)

Was that actually Laurie Penny?
She seems very sensitive for an urban guerrilla. One would almost suspect she was stuck for an answer.


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 3, 2013)

Talking of moral duty, I wonder how 'M' is, still alive? Hope she's looking after or at least keeping in touch with her 'friend'.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

JimW said:


> She could have a great future at the Workers' Girder if only she'd embrace chuckleism.


It's the only thing that makes sense, chuckleism.


----------



## 8ball (Jan 3, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> Talking of moral duty, I wonder how 'M' is, still alive? Hope she's looking after or at least keeping in touch with her 'friend'.


 
Nobody mention Skyfall.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> Talking of moral duty, I wonder how 'M' is, still alive? Hope she's looking after or at least keeping in touch with her 'friend'.


And the other disabled people she's interviewed for other articles, it's not just one, although M is probably the worst off.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Respectfully, with people who actually have a clue about my work and don't fling about rude baseless accusations then expect me to respond as if they've got a valid argument.
> 
> But since that doesn't appear to be an option, I'll be off. Some of you lot still don't seem to understand that I don't have any sort of moral duty to answer your stupid questions or respond to your lies.
> 
> Sad really, I actually thought we were getting somewhere.


It's not about _your work_ btw it's about how capital has used female entry to the labour market in order to restructure whilst using the rhetoric of female emancipation as cover. Stop being so self -obsessed.


----------



## cesare (Jan 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It's not about _your work_ btw it's about how capital has used female entry to the labour market in order to restructure whilst using the rhetoric of female emancipation as cover. Stop being so self -obsessed.


I think her actual understanding/knowledge is limited in addition to the lack of lived experience class-wise (obviously she can't help the class she was born into, but she could do a lot more to educate herself).


----------



## rekil (Jan 3, 2013)

8ball said:


> She'll reappear faster if you post a picture.
> She likes pictures.


----------



## _angel_ (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Well exactly- claiming that more women in the boardrooms will somehow solve gender equality conveniently brushes over the fact that the boardrooms are still the problem. It's feminism as a decoy for rampant neoliberalism, and I hate it. I honestly couldn't care less about women in the boardrooms. When are people going to start asking en masse whether a female cleaner, as opposed to a female banker, can 'have it all'?


No swuxdj word as detractive you parasum.


----------



## Athos (Jan 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It's not about _your work_ btw it's about how capital has used female entry to the labour market in order to restructure whilst using the rhetoric of female emancipation as cover. Stop being so self -obsessed.


 
Out of interest, would you rather she was here and involved in some of the discussions on the p&p forum, or not?


----------



## Favelado (Jan 3, 2013)

"Warm jazz was playing"


----------



## Smokeandsteam (Jan 3, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> - soon she'll be here for hours like the rest of us.



Cautiously dipping her toe in, getting flamed, coming back for more.... It's a familiar pattern.


----------



## past caring (Jan 3, 2013)

Warm jizz, morelike.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Jan 3, 2013)

Favelado said:


> "Warm jazz was playing"


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

Athos said:


> Out of interest, would you rather she was here and involved in some of the discussions on the p&p forum, or not?


Could not give a shit. Thread is not about her, it's about social power, exists either way.


----------



## cesare (Jan 3, 2013)

Athos said:


> Out of interest, would you rather she was here and involved in some of the discussions on the p&p forum, or not?


She is either very arrogant in thinking that she can't learn to expand from the one dimensionality of what she expresses/writes, or she doesn't have the confidence to do so. I think it's possibly the former. I could understand her not reading the entire thread when she originally started posting; but there's no excuse for not keeping up since then, if she wants to be taken seriously.


----------



## Athos (Jan 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Could not give a shit. Thread is not about her, it's about social power, exists either way.


 
Increasingly, it has become about her, though.


----------



## Firky (Jan 3, 2013)

Athos said:


> Out of interest, would you rather she was here and involved in some of the discussions on the p&p forum, or not?


 

I don't know to be honest. If she actually engaged with arguments then yes, if she went off in a huff with a fat lip like a stroppy teen then no. She needs to wind her arrogance in though before it would be possible to talk toher.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 3, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> The analysis of pictures of my bedroom is really creepy, guys. I'm really sorry for having a window and a bed, though. Am I not allowed to write about class politics if I have a window and a bed? Should I knock out the window and sleep on the floor?
> 
> Anyway, your dismissal of 'identity' politics is getting desperate. You seem really, really anxious to convince yourselves that only the politics of white working class men is actually relevant to economic and social struggle. Those of us who are and who fight for women, people of colour and minorities don't call it 'identity politics', by the way. We just call it 'politics.'
> 
> Agree with you about women in boardrooms, though. Terrible straw woman of a non-argument that elides the reality of gender oppression.


 
You realise that just because people don't like identity politics that doesn't mean they don't think it's worth fighting for womens and minority rights don't you Laurie? Identity politics is just one specific (and IMO ineffective and counter-productive) way of fighting for those rights.


----------



## Firky (Jan 3, 2013)

cesare said:


> She is either very arrogant in thinking that she can't learn to expand from the one dimensionality of what she expresses/writes, or she doesn't have the confidence to do so.


 
I think it is a bit of confidence too, it must be quite intimidating to have all these white working class men talking about the dynamics and intricacies of class power. I've been posting here 10 years and still read some threads instead of getting involved.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

Athos said:


> Increasingly, it has become about her, though.


No it hasn't.

Did i give the wrong answer btw?


----------



## rekil (Jan 3, 2013)

Spineynorman of "twitter feed full of hate" infamy, you are too late.


----------



## Athos (Jan 3, 2013)

firky said:


> I don't know to be honest. If she actually engaged with arguments then yes, if she went off in a huff with a fat lip like a stroppy teen then no. She needs to wind her arrogance in though before it would be possible to talk toher.


 
I'm a bit ambivalent, too.  I don't think there's much point in her dropping in every few pages to slander us all, then flouncing when she's called on it.  But I do think there could be some value in exploring the thoughts of someone who defines herself as part of the 'left', even though, on the face of it, I disagree with pretty much everything she says.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 3, 2013)

firky said:


> I think it is a bit of confidence too, it must be quite intimidating to have all these white working class men talking about the dynamics and intricacies of class power. I've been posting here 10 years and still read some threads instead of getting involved.


 
Yes, it is, and it took me a good long time before I'd do more than read. But it's not intimidating because 'they're white working class men'. It's intimidating because it's lots of people that know a lot about what they're talking about between themselves. There's a lot to learn.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 3, 2013)

Athos said:


> I'm a bit ambivalent, too. I don't think there's much point in her dropping in every few pages to slander us all, then flouncing when she's called on it.


 
It reminds me of Foxyred tbh


----------



## past caring (Jan 3, 2013)

Athos said:


> I'm a bit ambivalent, too. I don't think there's much point in her dropping in every few pages to slander us all, then flouncing when she's called on it. But I do think there could be some value in exploring the thoughts of someone who defines herself as part of the 'left', even though, on the face of it, I disagree with pretty much everything she says.


 
I'm sure your local Labour Party councillor holds regular surgeries, if that's your bag.


----------



## Athos (Jan 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> No it hasn't.
> 
> Did i give the wrong answer btw?


 
No right or wrong answer; I didn't have an agenda - I was genuinely interested in what you thought.


----------



## past caring (Jan 3, 2013)

weepiper said:


> It reminds me of Foxyred tbh


 
You think she's really a feller?


----------



## weepiper (Jan 3, 2013)

past caring said:


> You think she's really a feller?


----------



## Firky (Jan 3, 2013)

The WCM was said in tongue and cheek but I think you know that


----------



## Athos (Jan 3, 2013)

past caring said:


> I'm sure your local Labour Party councillor holds regular surgeries, if that's your bag.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 3, 2013)

firky said:


> The WCM was said in tongue and cheek but I think you know that


 
stop oppressing me


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Yes, it is, and it took me a good long time before I'd do more than read. But it's not intimidating because 'they're white working class men'. It's intimidating because it's lots of people that know a lot about what they're talking about between themselves. There's a lot to learn.


^^^This. It's only the last year that I've felt confident enough to start participating more actively in the politics forum threads. It is intimidating, but there's lots of interesting stuff to learn. 

The thing about urban is that it allows anyone to join in the debate.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

firky said:


> The WCM was said in tongue and cheek but I think you know that


Misogynistic oppressor


----------



## Firky (Jan 3, 2013)

Yeah well I didn't pass comments on her unmade bed linen, (theres a whiff of sexism in that sentence)


----------



## snadge (Jan 3, 2013)

firky said:


> Yeah well I didn't pass comments on her unmade bed linen, (theres a whiff of sexism in that sentence)


 
whiffing unmade bed linen is the Firky I love .


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 3, 2013)

editor said:


> I've no real opinion about Laurie but, looking back, surely she must agree that this is awful stuff:
> http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/laurie-pennys-diary-6390227.html


 


> People eat food out of skips and wear out their trainers running away from the police.


 
Where I come from people eat food out of plates and bowls and that. Always thought they were uncivilized in that London but now I have proof.

And round here the ones who wear out their trainers running from OB don't usually need to scavenge for food - they just flog the wallet they got chased for robbing and go to the chippy.

People are much, much more sensible in the north.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 3, 2013)

firky said:


> Yeah well I didn't pass comments on her unmade bed linen, (theres a whiff of sexism in that sentence)


 
What does sexism smell like? Only if it's a bit like stale trumps there's a whiff of it in my unmade bed linen too.


----------



## Athos (Jan 3, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Where I come from people eat food out of plates and bowls and that. Always thought they were uncivilized in that London but now I have proof.
> 
> And round here the ones who wear out their trainers running from OB don't usually need to scavenge for food - they just flog the wallet they got chased for robbing and go to the chippy.
> 
> People are much, much more sensible in the north.


*Regionalist*!


----------



## Firky (Jan 3, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What does sexism smell like? Only if it's a bit like stale trumps there's a whiff of it in my unmade bed linen too.


 
Smells like the north when coal was still burnt.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What does sexism smell like? Only if it's a bit like stale trumps there's a whiff of it in my unmade bed linen too.


Like a mixture of BO and testosterone, going by some of the meetings I've been in.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Spineynorman of "twitter feed full of hate" infamy, you are too late.


 

Not my fault, I was busy examining my privilege


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 3, 2013)

firky said:


> Smells like the north when coal was still burnt.


 
I quite like that tbh. Does that make me a sexist?


----------



## Favelado (Jan 3, 2013)

firky said:


> Smells like the north when coal was still burnt.


 
They don't still burn coal in your town? Fake Northerner.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 3, 2013)

In a general sense, shouldn't adherents of identity politics tend to be more accommodating to a diversity of opinion; accepting contrary opinion as inevitable? It's certainly paradoxical but those of a more universalist bent, or at least those who look for commonality before affirming difference, seem to be far more objective and comfortable with plurality...or at least less inclined to run off shouting insults.

All she was doing was engaging in a shared rehearsal of the standard arguments against quotas...piss taking or an actual enquiry into the amorphous twilight of her economic position seem to freak her out...none of it reached what you might call debate or even argument. Fuck knows what would have happened in that case.

Fair play to her though.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 3, 2013)

firky said:


> Yeah well I didn't pass comments on her unmade bed linen, (theres a whiff of sexism in that sentence)


 
I did & I make no apologies for it - Thing is, it could be a nice little room, that. Paint the walls a lilac-y/purple type colour, later that carpet off and get a blue corduroy effort, give the skirtings a lick of paint - Just do 'em white, it will make a difference, fuck the curtain off as well and just hang a piece of green net type material on a bit of curtain wire - I know purple /lilac are on the red spectrum and red & green should ne'er be seen, but I reckon that'd work. How much'd that cost? Less than a oner anyway. It might involve going skint for a fortnight, but a fortnight skint's a price worth paying for a nice room that you can be proud of.

Sack that shiny green quilt cover off as well, it's shininess makes it look cheap.

And now go back to an intelligent and informed political discussion. From which I am, by definition, excluded.


----------



## JimW (Jan 3, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Like a mixture of BO and testosterone, going by some of the meetings I've been in.


I thought I told you to keep my recipe for that new 'left chic' aftershave (hopefully salad dressing at Firebox too) a secret


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 3, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Like a mixture of BO and testosterone, going by some of the meetings I've been in.


 
You forgot brylcreem, dandruff, unwashed wool trousers and the suggestion of  stale dried cum.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> You forgot brylcreem, dandruff, unwashed wool trousers and the suggestion of stale dried cum.





JimW said:


> I thought I told you to keep my recipe for that new 'left chic' aftershave (hopefully salad dressing at Firebox too) a secret


There goes the PD's product line too.

No reason why we still can't flog it to Firebox at an extortionate mark-up


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

Is lack of privilege actually a privilege?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 3, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> ^^^This. It's only the last year that I've felt confident enough to start participating more actively in the politics forum threads. It is intimidating, but there's lots of interesting stuff to learn.
> 
> The thing about urban is that it allows anyone to join in the debate.


 
You should have started posting ages ago then - judging by your contribution on this thread and the workers girder (lol) thread you've got plenty to offer the debate.

(That might come across as patronizing but I promise that's not how it's intended - it's not in my nature to flatter)


----------



## rekil (Jan 3, 2013)

JimW said:


> I thought I told you to keep my recipe for that new 'left chic' aftershave (hopefully salad dressing at Firebox too) a secret


PD has a gender neutral fragrance line (and advert treatment) already, courtesy of Rory MacKinnon - Savagely Communism.


----------



## past caring (Jan 3, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> You should have started posting ages ago then - judging by your contribution on this thread and the workers girder (lol) thread you've got plenty to offer the debate.
> 
> (That might come across as patronizing but I promise that's not how it's intended - it's not in my nature to flatter)


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 3, 2013)

past caring said:


>


 
How the fuck did you get hold of my wedding snaps? 

Who is that by the way?


----------



## past caring (Jan 3, 2013)

Someone help him, eh?

Fucking whippersnappers.


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## snadge (Jan 3, 2013)

Dame Edna.


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## Buckaroo (Jan 3, 2013)

Les Patterson. Sir Les Patterson (Barry Humphries AKA Dame Edna)


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## butchersapron (Jan 3, 2013)

Aus cultural ambassador, one of the few people left telling it like it was.


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## SpineyNorman (Jan 3, 2013)

snadge said:


> Dame Edna.


 
Ah, I remember Dame Edna - just didn't recognize her dressed as a fella 

That's not trans-phobic is it?


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 3, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Ah, I remember Dame Edna - just didn't recognize her dressed as a fella
> 
> That's not trans-phobic is it?


 
If you're saying it then yes it is is!


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 3, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> You should have started posting ages ago then - judging by your contribution on this thread and the workers girder (lol) thread you've got plenty to offer the debate.
> 
> (That might come across as patronizing but I promise that's not how it's intended - it's not in my nature to flatter)


Why thank you, that means a lot to me, and no, it's not patronising 

I've really learned a lot from this thread and others in this forum, and that's down to all the posters on here. Thank you - here's to more learning in 2013.

Forward comrades!


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## Bakunin (Jan 4, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> So you mean- quota systems are a problem because people who don't benefit don't like them?


 
No, they're a problem because they encourage tokenism, people ending up in a job they may not be fit for because they tick a box on a piece of paper instead of having the ability to do the job in question. Which, not surprisingly, leads to an understandable resentment on the part of those who actually ARE good at a job and don't get it precisely because they DON'T tick some box on a piece of paper somewhere. They also enable employers to have a token insert-demographic-here and then state they have and actively follow the idea of equal opportunities while in reality doing nothing of the kind.

Can't really break it down any simpler than that.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 4, 2013)

once more salient points are ignored in favour of laurrie giving it the biggun about how we are creepy trolls. This shit gets old. Sponsor my trip to palestine or be forever condemned as a lumpen chauvinist. These cunts do my nut in.


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## ymu (Jan 4, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> No, they're a problem because they encourage tokenism, people ending up in a job they may not be fit for because they tick a box on a piece of paper instead of having the ability to do the job in question. Which, not surprisingly, leads to an understandable resentment on the part of those who actually ARE good at a job and don't get it precisely because they DON'T tick some box on a piece of paper somewhere. They also enable employers to have a token insert-demographic-here and then state they have and actively follow the idea of equal opportunities while in reality doing nothing of the kind.
> 
> Can't really break it down any simpler than that.


 
The counter to that is that if certain groups are under-represented in a workplace then they cannot be hiring the best people for the job (all else being equal, which it often isn't). This is why women who don't have babies (and some who do) often get promoted faster than men in male-dominated workplaces, if the discrimination only applies at the hiring stage but performance is what is judged after that (big if). They had to be better than the men (on average) to get the job in the first place.

As I understand it this is the thinking behind positive discrimination as used in the US. No quotas, but if two or more equally suitable candidates are found then the deciding factor is minority status. Easily abused in both directions, of course, but not an unreasonable approach IMO.

That's not to say that quota systems are appropriate, especially not as a quick fix. The problem isn't always at the hiring stage, it's during education and training. If a particular type of work has never been seen as a possibility by the under-represented groups, there won't be enough of them training to do it for a quota system to make any sense and it certainly will lead to rightfully aggrieved people being denied jobs that they were better suited for.

The more important work is done in schools. Like abolishing domestic science and encouraging girls to do 'boys subjects' like maths and physics. That, eventually, provides a more equally sized pool of qualified candidates for training/university, and then a more equally sized pool of candidates for jobs.

Even with these sorts of measures, quota systems make little sense. In the absence of equal responsibility for childcare, women will often choose jobs that will allow motherhood more easily. Gynaecology is the most male-dominated specialty in medicine, and it's not all for creepy reasons (although some of it is). The main reason is that the shift patterns are bloody awful and incompatible with parenthood, unless you have a partner taking responsibility for the kids. Male domination of the oil-rigs is presumably down to the same reasons - when all else is not equal, these jobs are not attractive to women.

Of course, the women with the loudest voices have fewer problems with childcare and higher financial expectations. Their primary concern is having equal access to jobs and status, so issues like childcare get neglected and we end up with the madness we have now. Double-income families having no more disposable income than a single wage provided in the 1970s, and single income families drowning because housing and other costs have been pushed through the roof by the double-income middle-classes.


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## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

In the UK we already have provision for positive action in a tie-break situation (a tie-break between two equally qualified candidates) to allow justification for recruitment and/or promotion in giving preference to the person with a protected characteristic. The Equality Act also provides for one type of action not being discrimination for the purposes of the Act; that of allowing disabled people to be treated more favourably than others.

Pre the Equality Act, there was already provision for a limited amount of positive action allowing greater access to facilities for access to training for particular work (this applied to sex and race).

Not quota systems though.


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## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

Of course, even the limited amount of flexibility there was for positive action was open to mis-use back in the day. This happened much more in the public sector than private or third sectors; but I imagine some of us can remember local government (for example) using "we are currently under-represented in the following areas" to recruit in such a way that there was a perception of quota filling going on even though they usually stopped short of positive action becoming positive discrimination.

These practices and the resulting perception fed nicely into the negative aspects of multiculturalism, and provided grist for the mill in terms of backlash.


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## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

ymu said:


> The more important work is done in schools. Like abolishing domestic science and encouraging girls to do 'boys subjects' like maths and physics. That, eventually, provides a more equally sized pool of qualified candidates for training/university, and then a more equally sized pool of candidates for training/university, and then a more equally sized pool of candidates for jobs.



Personally I don't agree that domestic science should be abolished in schools. Children need to be equipped with skills for all aspects of their adult lives not just paid work. Also, abolishing domestic science feeds into the devaluing of domestic work. What I do think, though, is that all aspects of domestic science should be taught to all children. Food and nutrition, laundry and cleaning, household money management, DIY and repairs, first aid, child and pet care, gardening etc, (and I haven't listed these most obvious examples in any particular order of importance).


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## ymu (Jan 4, 2013)

Yes, I agree. But when it existed, it was for girls whilst boys were sent off to do woodwork or DT.


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## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

ymu said:


> Yes, I agree. But when it existed, it was for girls whilst boys were sent off to do woodwork or DT.


I think that may have depended upon the school, and the time. In the mixed comp that I went to in the early 70s domestic science (or home economics as it was called then) was taught to boys and girls alike in mixed classes. That covered cooking and laundry/cleaning. The split happened with dressmaking v metal/wood work although to be fair boys weren't prevented from doing dressmaking and girls weren't prevented from doing metal/woodwork. There were just fewer boys/girls in the "opposite" classes, much fewer.

ETA: and in the single sex grammar I went to for the second half of my secondary schooling, there were no domestic science classes at all of any description, and even art was considered at bit frivolous


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## 8ball (Jan 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Is lack of privilege actually a privilege?


 
Victim privilege.


----------



## 8ball (Jan 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> Personally I don't agree that domestic science should be abolished in schools. Children need to be equipped with skills for all aspects of their adult lives not just paid work. Also, abolishing domestic science feeds into the devaluing of domestic work. What I do think, though, is that all aspects of domestic science should be taught to all children. Food and nutrition, laundry and cleaning, household money management, DIY and repairs, first aid, child and pet care, gardening etc, (and I haven't listed these most obvious examples in any particular order of importance).


 
In the late 1980s when I was in school we were taught how to wire plugs, stuff about loan interest, basic nutririon, first aid, how to change a wheel etc.  I got the impression we were bending the National Curriculum a bit by the way wiring a plug got squeezed into Physics, mind. 

Do they not do this any more (I know that in England they didn't do a lot of this even back when I was in school)?

Of course we covered all the skills necessary for paid work too ie. showing up on time and not asking awkward questions...


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## BigTom (Jan 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> Personally I don't agree that domestic science should be abolished in schools. Children need to be equipped with skills for all aspects of their adult lives not just paid work. Also, abolishing domestic science feeds into the devaluing of domestic work. What I do think, though, is that all aspects of domestic science should be taught to all children. Food and nutrition, laundry and cleaning, household money management, DIY and repairs, first aid, child and pet care, gardening etc, (and I haven't listed these most obvious examples in any particular order of importance).


 
tbf much of this is still taught - the 3 schools I worked in a couple of years ago all taught cooking/nutrition, two of them did sewing (and the 3rd may have done, I was only there for a term), they all did budgeting/money management as part of tutoring / pshe (it's called something different now, I forget). I think child (and maybe pet) care was also done as part of pshe stuff (along with sex education, drugs and so on). DIY & repairs gets done in whatever they call CDT classes (again I forget - "design technology" maybe?). One of the schools offered pupils certificated first aid courses, they may well all have done some first aid in pshe.
Also, PE teaches about (umm..) body science (er.. there's a proper word here) which includes some nutritional stuff focused around exercise needs.
Never split by gender though, except PE.


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## ymu (Jan 4, 2013)

Wiring a plug was part of our physics curriculum too.

I remember a few days later the hoover bust and I checked the fuse by swapping it with the one in the kettle. My dad got home and I told him the hoover was bust and that it wasn't the fuse. He gave me a cynical look and asked me how I knew it wasn't the fuse and then he looked all proud.


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## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

It's good that it hasn't been abolished. How it's incorporated seems to be different but it sounds pretty sensible. I don't know enough about how it works in education now though.


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## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

ymu said:


> Wiring a plug was part of our physics curriculum too.
> 
> I remember a few days later the hoover bust and I checked the fuse by swapping it with the one in the kettle. My dad got home and I told him the hoover was bust and that it wasn't the fuse. He gave me a cynical look and asked me how I knew it wasn't the fuse and then he looked all proud.


My mum taught me how to wire plugs


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## Red Cat (Jan 4, 2013)

I don't think there are easy solutions to the child care issue in capitalism or any industrial society. Prior to industrialisation, childcare was done alongside other work with other people. Now, we have the isolation of childcare whether that's in a domestic setting or a nursery employing low paid women, both are cut off from the world of other work and involve a very circumscribed view of childhood and a concomitant devalued view of what it means to look after children. 

I'm in favour of free child care but I wonder who would be employed to care for the children? What kind of facilities are deemed essential? Would the children be allowed to take risk? Participate in 'adult' activity, learn to cook, hammer nails? How educated would the staff be? What kind of education do they need? Views of children and childhood and childcare are informed by observation and research but are also ideological. There are very different views of young children internationally - who decides which view is the most appropriate, appropriate for who, serving whose needs?


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## weepiper (Jan 4, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> I don't think there are easy solutions to the child care issue in capitalism or any industrial society. Prior to industrialisation, childcare was done alongside other work with other people. Now, we have the isolation of childcare whether that's in a domestic setting or a nursery employing low paid women, both are cut off from the world of other work and involve a very circumscribed view of childhood and a concomitant devalued view of what it means to look after children.
> 
> I'm in favour of free child care but I wonder who would be employed to care for the children? What kind of facilities are deemed essential? Would the children be allowed to take risk? Participate in 'adult' activity, learn to cook, hammer nails? How educated would the staff be? What kind of education do they need? Views of children and childhood and childcare are informed by observation and research but are also ideological. There are very different views of young children internationally - who decides which view is the most appropriate, appropriate for who, serving whose needs?


 
yep this is true. The whole thing is based on mothers 'going out to work' and anything else being just not good enough. It doesn't really suit anyone the way things work just now. Except for the bosses of course.


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## ymu (Jan 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> My mum taught me how to wire plugs


Pretty sure my dad had taught my twin brother by then. He wasn't the most enlightened of souls as a young man.


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## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

ymu said:


> Pretty sure my dad had taught my twin brother by then. He wasn't the most enlightened of souls as a young man.


Neither was mine. Plus there were periods of time when he wasn't around so a lot fell to my mum.


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## Firky (Jan 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> My mum taught me how to wire plugs


 
Same here, my dad is feck useless with anything practical. Typical academic, can't even put up a shelf without taking a day off to prepare.

Although he was always given the job of things like skinning and gutting rabbits, unblocking the toilet, and cleaning the gutters.


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## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

firky said:


> Same here, my dad is feck useless with anything practical. Typical academic, can't even put up a shelf without taking a day off to prepare.
> 
> Although he was always given the job of things like skinning and gutting rabbits, unblocking the toilet, and cleaning the gutters.


My dad does a lot more nowadays including decorating, which he'd never do when I was a kid.


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## redsquirrel (Jan 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> You realise that just because people don't like identity politics that doesn't mean they don't think it's worth fighting for womens and minority rights don't you Laurie? Identity politics is just one specific (and IMO ineffective and counter-productive) way of fighting for those rights.


Precisely nobody on this thread has argued that women, BME, trans-genered people etc, don't face prejudice and that we should fight such discrimination.

The discussion has been how identity politics/privilege theory are used to attack the working class, and whether there is anything useful in them at all.


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## Firky (Jan 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> My dad does a lot more nowadays including decorating, which he'd never do when I was a kid.


With regards to decorating he was given the job of painting the ceiling and glossing. Everything else was my mum, especially the wallpapering. He'd still be there now if he was allowed to paper.

Gotta say though, the pair of them with the help of one of my friends decorated my house top to bottom in a weekend without my knowledge. I only told my mum what I wanted and she remembered it, came back on the Monday and everything was painted. Couldn't believe it. Second best present ever 


My dad's still quite poorly so it's my mum / brothers that do it all now. Frustrating.


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## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

Sorry your dad's still poorly, firks.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

This is a bit odd. I do everything...unless it needs a CORGI cert or something. Not as bad as my dad, mind. He even fixes his own shoes. He's got a pair from 1968 which he wears most days. We also used to eat all sorts of crap when I was a kid...weird thing is it's fashionable now. I brought this girl round when I was about 15. We were going to the pictures....Think it was Quadrophenia...She nipped up to the bathroom before we left and started screaming like a banshee...we ran up and she was just pointing at the bath and gibbering. My dad hadn't told me it was one of his 'cookery nights'...he was soaking 5 pigs' heads prior to their 4 hour simmer and transformation into pies and brawn.


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## Mr.Bishie (Jan 4, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> ...he was soaking 5 pigs' heads prior to their 4 hour simmer and transformation into pies and brawn.


 
The good ole days...


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## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2013)

thing is checking your privilege etc is actually a really useful concept when used correctly, and there have been times when certain elements of the left have completely ignored issues of racism or sexism within its ranks, you can see this now in the case of julian assange for example and the reaction to the case by well known figures such as george galloway (yer i know he's not real far left but he is seen as such by many people).

however, to say that everyone who questions the theory behind it, or who questions the way it is used by you and the rest of the liberal/trendy left journalistic bubble laurie, is racist and sexist, plainly shows you have no concept of what you are arguing about


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## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

I think I would have been a bit "yuk" at 5 pigs' heads in the bath too. It was bad enough with big pots of simmering unbleached/scraped tripe being cooked for the dogs.


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## Firky (Jan 4, 2013)

I remember when I was a little kid my mum would buy a pigs head from the market, boil it up in a big pan before finishing it off in the oven. Fucking rank.

Still eating war food in the 80s.


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## ymu (Jan 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> thing is checking your privilege etc is actually a really useful concept when used correctly, and there have been times when certain elements of the left have completely ignored issues of racism or sexism within its ranks, you can see this now in the case of julian assange for example and the reaction to the case by well known figures such as george galloway (yer i know he's not real far left but he is seen as such by many people).
> 
> however, to say that everyone who questions the theory behind it, or who questions the way it is used by you and the rest of the liberal/trendy left journalistic bubble laurie, is racist and sexist, plainly shows you have no concept of what you are arguing about


 
It would be a lot more useful if it was applied to class as often as it should be. @lauriepenny, check _your_ fucking privilege.


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## SpineyNorman (Jan 4, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> This is a bit odd. I do everything...unless it needs a CORGI cert or something. Not as bad as my dad, mind. He even fixes his own shoes. He's got a pair from 1968 which he wears most days. We also used to eat all sorts of crap when I was a kid...weird thing is it's fashionable now. I brought this girl round when I was about 15. We were going to the pictures....Think it was Quadrophenia...She nipped up to the bathroom before we left and started screaming like a banshee...we ran up and she was just pointing at the bath and gibbering. My dad hadn't told me it was one of his 'cookery nights'...he was soaking 5 pigs' heads prior to their 4 hour simmer and transformation into pies and brawn.


 
Yeah I'm the same, can't remember ever calling pros in to fix anything. I'm a bit shit with wiring but I just get my old man to do that for me.

Corgi pisses me off cos mine's well out of date now (and I never had any household appliances anyway) so it means that one of the things I'm best qualified for I can't fucking do. I used to love doing gas, me. I'd pressure test it when nobody was looking and then go round with a lighter pretending it was how I checked for leaks lol


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## barney_pig (Jan 4, 2013)

I remember being a toddler and having live lobsters clacking their pincers on the floor of the kitchen whilst my mum got the big Calderon up to the boil.
 ( the fishermen would drop a couple off on the way back from unloading on the quay.
 I also remember a class at primary school on how to change a washer on a tap.


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## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

Gas safe register has replaced corgi now, spiney


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## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2013)

she lives in a bubble where everyone is mates with each other and those connections help get her jobs and tv appearances and it means that her views get listened to, a big part of that is to do with what school and university they went to and what opportunities they were given within those environments.which in turn was affected by parental expectations etc 

its quite sickening especially because alot of their writing is just in jokes between the others and saying constantly how great each other all are. and this is the left in the 21st century? really? ffs


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

His other big favourite was ox heart...like footballs. And 'boiling fowl' which were ropey old chickens you had to boil for 2 hours before you could get your teeth into them. They looked especially unappetising. If you think of your average chicken as, say, Michael Buble, then these little fuckers were Iggy Pop.

And I should add, in deference to my dad:"tripe...for the dogs!! Blasphemy!". That said I never eat it any more if I can help it...just never had the nerve to tell him it's rank...especially honeycomb.


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## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

That dog tripe was the green furry stuff that stank, btw. Not the pale honeycomb stuff.

Edit: like this https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=u...oAQ&biw=1024&bih=644#biv=i|6;d|F0QtO0tp1aSlsM:  7th image


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> That dog tripe was the green furry stuff that stank, btw. Not the pale honeycomb stuff.
> 
> Edit: like this https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=u...oAQ&biw=1024&bih=644#biv=i|6;d|F0QtO0tp1aSlsM:  7th image



Point taken.


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## weepiper (Jan 4, 2013)

blurgh. My granpa was partial to tripe and pig's trotters.


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## killer b (Jan 4, 2013)

i keep trying pigs trotters, but have yet to find a way of making them nice.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

Best bit was the home brew. I stopped a few years back when we needed the space. Mind you, I'm not sure if I know anyone who makes their own beer anymore apart from me dad.


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## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

All these types of foods are now being sold to the middle classes at extortionate prices in fancy restaurants  Which I find very bloody amusing actually.


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## weepiper (Jan 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> All these types of foods are now being sold to the middle classes at extortionate prices in fancy restaurants  Which I find very bloody amusing actually.


 
It always happens eventually. Oysters used to be poverty food.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

Although, tbh...I say it was a space issue, but it was gettin so cheap if you bought the 3 litre own brand cider.


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## Fez909 (Jan 4, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Best bit was the home brew. I stopped a few years back when we needed the space. Mind you, I'm not sure if I know anyone who makes their own beer anymore apart from me dad.


Home brew is now popular with the middle classes. See the rather large ginger beer thread on this forum for evidence


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

Fez909 said:


> Home brew is now popular with the middle classes. See the rather large ginger beer thread on this forum for evidence



Oh shit...seems the bourgeoisie has appropriated my childhood.
Have they started hanging around bus-stops with Party 7s and bottles of Thunderbird and moaning about how shit everything else...cos that'll be next...mark my words.


----------



## killer b (Jan 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> It always happens eventually. Oysters used to be poverty food.


the increase in expense in oysters is down to their relative scarcity now rather than trend though isn't it? you can still pick up pigs trotters for 50p a pop at my local market. (mind you, it's only £1.75 for three oysters on the stall opposite, so they aren't _that_ expensive...)


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## SpineyNorman (Jan 4, 2013)

When I was a kid my dad used to make a fucking bang on hotpot with neck of lamb. I'm drooling just thinking about it. It was that cheap that the butcher used to sometimes give him it free with his bacon and sausages. Thanks to Jamie fucking Oliver every middle class tosser in the world's buying it now and the price has gone through the roof. So it's gone from being a really cheap dish to a luxury one, he hardly ever makes it any more.


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## Fez909 (Jan 4, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Oh shit...seems the bourgeoisie has appropriated my childhood.
> Have they started hanging around bus-stops with Party 7s and bottles of Thunderbird and moaning about how shit everything else...cos that'll be next...mark my words.



I'd argue that it was down to the proletarianisation of the MC but it's not as if these things are cheap. The fact the MC desire them is usually enough to increase the price of something. 

If the MC are pricing the WC out of foodstuffs, then what will the WC do?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> When I was a kid my dad used to make a fucking bang on hotpot with neck of lamb. I'm drooling just thinking about it. It was that cheap that the butcher used to sometimes give him it free with his bacon and sausages. Thanks to Jamie fucking Oliver every middle class tosser in the world's buying it now and the price has gone through the roof. So it's gone from being a really cheap dish to a luxury one, he hardly ever makes it any more.



And lamb shanks...they're fuckin 3 or 4 pounds a piece these days.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

Fez909 said:


> I'd argue that it was down to the proletarianisation of the MC but it's not as if these things are cheap. The fact the MC desire them is usually enough to increase the price of something.
> 
> If the MC are pricing the WC out of foodstuffs, then what will the WC do?



Yeah...some of them are even moving into 'hovels' for the erm..'authenticity'...looks like it'll holes and sceptic tanks for the rest of us.


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## DaveCinzano (Jan 4, 2013)

Fez909 said:


> If the MC are pricing the WC out of foodstuffs, then what will the WC do?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 4, 2013)

ymu said:


> Wiring a plug was part of our physics curriculum too.
> 
> I remember a few days later the hoover bust and I checked the fuse by swapping it with the one in the kettle. My dad got home and I told him the hoover was bust and that it wasn't the fuse. He gave me a cynical look and asked me how I knew it wasn't the fuse and then he looked all proud.


My dad is proud because I have my own tool box and power tools. I think he is slightly concerned that neither of my brothers don't (they're not very practical).


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

I just looked at LP's latest piece in the NS, which tbf..isn't bad. However, why's it taken her so long?I would imagine there have been 20 such articles on CIF, Liberal Conspiracy etc.
Maybe that's all she does...summarise anything she agrees with, pick up on any opportunities to have a go at 'mainstream liberal commentators'...as though she's something different, then add a bit of outrage in florid prose. Fuckin money for old rope. Who couldn't pull that off?
That's probably the key to her 'smartness'...diligently doing homework, and actually reading the 'set texts'...which is fair enough..but not exactly 'gonzo' or a sign that she actually indulges in original thought.


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## equationgirl (Jan 4, 2013)

firky said:


> With regards to decorating he was given the job of painting the ceiling and glossing. Everything else was my mum, especially the wallpapering. He'd still be there now if he was allowed to paper.
> 
> Gotta say though, the pair of them with the help of one of my friends decorated my house top to bottom in a weekend without my knowledge. I only told my mum what I wanted and she remembered it, came back on the Monday and everything was painted. Couldn't believe it. Second best present ever
> 
> ...


Oh no, nothing too serious I hope?

{{{firky's dad}}}


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## Fez909 (Jan 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> My dad is proud because I have my own tool box and power tools. I think he is slightly concerned that neither of my brothers don't (they're not very practical).



It's good that attitudes are changing with this sort of thing. When I lived with my ex-gf, all the tools belonged to her and I was fine with that.

Her Dad couldn't get his head around it , though, and constantly quizzed me on subjects such as why I wasn't interested in sheds.


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## equationgirl (Jan 4, 2013)

Fez909 said:


> It's good that attitudes are changing with this sort of thing. When I lived with my ex-gf, all the tools belonged to her and I was fine with that.
> 
> Her Dad couldn't get his head around it , though, and constantly quizzed me on subjects such as why I wasn't interested in sheds.


And why aren't you interested in sheds? 

Sheddist


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

Fez909 said:


> It's good that attitudes are changing with this sort of thing. When I lived with my ex-gf, all the tools belonged to her and I was fine with that.
> 
> Her Dad couldn't get his head around it , though, and constantly quizzed me on subjects such as why I wasn't interested in sheds.



The one great regret of my life is that I'm not a shed owner. Makes me suspect I'm not a real man...probably why I go around with my privilege unchecked and contributing to structural misogyny or whatnot. I hope you're listening Laurie Penny...when you finally get around to putting together an economic policy. Priority #1: buy every adult male a shed.


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## equationgirl (Jan 4, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> The one great regret of my life is that I'm not a shed owner. Makes me suspect I'm not a real man...probably why I go around with my privilege unchecked and contributing to structural misogyny or whatnot. I hope you're listening Laurie Penny...when you finally get around to putting together an economic policy. Priority #1: buy every adult male a shed.


Ah but look at the inbuilt gender privilege in your statement - it should be: buy every adult regardless of gender a shed, not just the men.


----------



## love detective (Jan 4, 2013)

lets put the she back in shed


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> lets put the she back in shed


Oooh love it.

@copliker: perhaps PD could do something with this as their economic policy?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 4, 2013)




----------



## 8ball (Jan 4, 2013)

My 3 year old nephew had wanted a shed for over a year and was over the moon when he got one for Christmas.  On Christmas day the whole family were taken for a tour round the shed - I felt like Gandalf in Frodo's house.

I only use my shed for storing the barbecue.

Horses for courses.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Ah but look at the inbuilt gender privilege in your statement - it should be: buy every adult regardless of gender a shed, not just the men.



Au contraire...I had in mind the complete reverse. While the men are in their sheds, brewing their beer or whittling their salad stirrers, the babes can be organising down the pub for their assault on the board-rooms as a precursor to the dismantling of capitalism from within. 
I think you're too much in thrall to identity. Giving everybody a shed is accommodationist and symptomatic of the sort of futile gradualism which undermines us all...how long would it be before the colour supplements would be advertising fair-trade ethical sheds?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> lets put the she back in shed



There's no he in shed?


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Oooh love it.
> 
> @copliker: perhaps PD could do something with this as their economic policy?


A Shed Is A Machine For Pottering About In.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2013)

when men were men and sheds were sheds


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> A Shed Is A Machine For Pottering About In.


_More pottering, less posturing_


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2013)

your right, the shed has been written out of the majority of discourse on contemporary marxist dialectics, which is a shameful distortion of Leninist writings. Where else are we going to put the hammers and sickles in?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> your right, the shed has been written out of the majority of discourse on contemporary marxist dialectics, which is a shameful distortion of Leninist writings. Where else are we going to put the hammers and sickles in?



Rich people?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Rich people?


 
yeah but what if it rains and they get rusty? our revolution can't be destroyed by corrosive elements


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> _More pottering, less posturing_


Book on the way already. The Shedmale Eunuch. £9.99 - Oppenheimer Books. 60 pages and some saucy pics of Laurie's swastika pubes pornpal.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 4, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> The one great regret of my life is that I'm not a shed owner. Makes me suspect I'm not a real man...probably why I go around with my privilege unchecked and contributing to structural misogyny or whatnot. I hope you're listening Laurie Penny...when you finally get around to putting together an economic policy. Priority #1: buy every adult male a shed.


 
I used to have one on the allotment but the feudal based allotments committee served me a notice on the grounds it was a hazard to would be burglars. Felt like  half a person ( note gender free wording) without it. These days I am mostly in the garage but its just not the same.

Might invest in a greenhouse for the sake of transparancy


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall SHED the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has SHED his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun.


----------



## Blagsta (Jan 4, 2013)

We have a garage. I keep my old house records in it.


----------



## Blagsta (Jan 4, 2013)

My garage records are in the house btw.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 4, 2013)

I dread to think where you keep your fuckstep tunes.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 4, 2013)

Check your privelege attack on the New Zealand older mens sheds movement (http://menssheds.org.nz/) in the Tranaki Dail News



> "Bottom line, the thing that really sticks in my craw is the fact that men, particularly white ones, are seldom aware of just how easy their life really is, and has been, by sheer virtue of the fact that they have dangly bits. The world has been their oyster but yet some of them still want their subsidised man cave to hole up in. Poor babies... Where am I going with this? Well, rather than ask the public to help fund older male wants versus needs, the very few men wanting this shed could always go out and volunteer face-to-face with the public. That would really assist with their sense of wellbeing and get them out of the house - a constant refrain of the Men's Shed."


 
http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/opinion/6748348/Worthier-ways-for-Mens-Shed


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 4, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> His other big favourite was ox heart.


 
animal organs, you are in me


----------



## weepiper (Jan 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> lets put the she back in shed


 


Ronnie Rubashov said:


> There's no he in shed?


 
identity politics. You're too narrowly focussed on the 'he' and the 'she' in shed to see that there is no 'us'.


----------



## Favelado (Jan 4, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> My garage records are in the house btw.


 
Where do you keep your lounge music?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Check your privelege attack on the New Zealand older mens sheds movement (http://menssheds.org.nz/) in the Tranaki Dail News
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/opinion/6748348/Worthier-ways-for-Mens-Shed




Strange times we live in. But tbh, I'm not exactly receptive to the concept of a communal shed (menz or otherwise). My shed would be my shed.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 4, 2013)

You need to be sheducated.


----------



## Firky (Jan 4, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Might invest in a greenhouse for the sake of transparancy


 
Get out!


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> When I was a kid my dad used to make a fucking bang on hotpot...


Spiney, you've just made me want hotpot!  Mum used to make a bang-on one too. Haven't had it for years. It's on the menu tonight for me and ms hatter. All I need now is some of my dad's homebrew. I might surprise Ms Hatter and serve it in the shed outside....


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 4, 2013)

The debate goes on:


> *Gary Cooper*
> 489 Posts
> Wed, 23rd March 2011, 12:36pm
> Colleen & Darren A and All e-Shed Men >
> ...


http://www.theshedonline.org.au/discussions/topic/1036


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

Shedidarity Forever


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 4, 2013)

No war but the shed war


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 4, 2013)

A shed
Completed
Will never be defeated


----------



## Favelado (Jan 4, 2013)

¡El pueblo shedido - jamás será vencido!


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 4, 2013)

Socialist sheds not conservatories for the rich


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

We'll keep The Shed Flag flying here.


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## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

Has butcher's got one?

Abashed?


----------



## weepiper (Jan 4, 2013)

Sheds are proper bourgeois anyway. You have to be able to afford a place with a garden. Same as garages. I'll allow a shed on an allotment.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

And all I ask is a tall shed and a star to steer her by...
And...obviously...somewhere to put the shed


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jan 4, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Strange times we live in. But tbh, I'm not exactly receptive to the concept of a communal shed (menz or otherwise). My shed would be my shed.


Rubashov, 'your' shed is the 'People's Shed'. Get your boots on. It's off to the re-alignment camp for you.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Sheds are proper bourgeois anyway. You have to be able to afford a place with a garden. Same as garages. I'll allow a shed on an allotment.


 
your ultra-left workerism is beneath you "comrade"


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2013)

we're going to have to expel you from the shed for squaddism, we must slowly build the shed not use the rusty tools contained within it straight away in some sort of capitulation to workerist chauvinism


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

Hocus Eye. said:


> Rubashov, 'your' shed is the 'People's Shed'. Get your boots on. It's off to the re-alignment camp for you.



Fair cop...have they got sheds in this camp of yours?


----------



## Fez909 (Jan 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Sheds are proper bourgeois anyway. You have to be able to afford a place with a garden. Same as garages. I'll allow a shed on an allotment.


 
Then occupy their sheds, comrade!  All property is theft!

(Sheds left vacant can be squatted as they do not come under the new laws against squatting dwellings.)


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Socialist sheds not conservatories for the rich


 
we must abandon labour's leaky old shed and build a new workers shed big enough to put all of the working class in it


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2013)

For a 24 hour public sector shed


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

#Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.#

...except sheds


----------



## weepiper (Jan 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> we must abandon labour's leaky old shed and build a new workers shed big enough to put all of the working class in it


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2013)

"can you get the hammer out of the shed?" 
"that's not my role in the party"


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> The analysis of pictures of my bedroom is really creepy, guys. I'm really sorry for having a window and a bed, though. Am I not allowed to write about class politics if I have a window and a bed? Should I knock out the window and sleep on the floor?


 
It's more that the reality doesn't do the description as a "hovel" justice. Where's the mould, the thick ingrained grime and the tar-like nicotine staining? Where's the foetid pile of rotting rags that serve as bedding? Frankly, I'm disappointed!



> Anyway, your dismissal of 'identity' politics is getting desperate. You seem really, really anxious to convince yourselves that only the politics of white working class men is actually relevant to economic and social struggle. Those of us who are and who fight for women, people of colour and minorities don't call it 'identity politics', by the way. We just call it 'politics.'


 
Crap differentialism. We are, as the Tories are fond of pretending, "all in it together", whatever our gender, sexuality, ethnicity or religious conviction. We're all bound together by an over-arching issue - our relative positions on the "class ladder".
Obviously, it ill-behooves you to acknowledge this, given your own *relatively* higher position than a significant minority (perhaps even a majority) of the population, but that doesn't make it any less relevant. You have "power", and a relationship to power, that few of my ilk can (if we wished to) aspire to, and yet you attempt to paper over that fact in favour of representing yourself as an oppressed crusader, without acknowledging that oppression too is relative.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 4, 2013)

The Russian government still looks after a restored shed that V. I. Lenin hid in for a few days in the summer of 1917.  Not far from lake Razliv.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2013)

have you heard of a man called trotsky? he had a shed you know


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 4, 2013)

looks like even some of the literary left are turning their back on identity politics.  http://shiftmag.co.uk/?p=679


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Is it though? Erased from modern feminism, I mean.


 
If by "class consciousness" we mean peoples' awareness of the constraints imposed by differential class positions, then "erased from party political discourse entirely" is more like it. It's not just an issue for feminism, it's an issue for anyone and everyone.  Much of the time the issue is missing because those with power to control the discourse around class, deem that it should be so.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> have you heard of a man called trotsky? he had a shed you know


 
He kept an icepick alongside his shovel, fork and how.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Sheds are proper bourgeois anyway. You have to be able to afford a place with a garden. Same as garages. I'll allow a shed on an allotment.


Not to mention that lickspittle class traitor _Arthur 'Two Sheds' Jackson..._


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I get that worry, which is why quota systems of (eg) 30 percent women in a workplace are insulting. But how do you know the men in any workplace got their jobs on merit, rather than inbuilt bias in their favour?


 
You *can't* know.
However, to *assume* that because bias is possible, that it always takes place, is just as insulting as you say a quota system is - as such an assumption naturalises male duplicity into a trait inherent to all males.


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)




----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

8ball said:


> You lot just like being horrible to white, posh, middle-class people.


 
You say that like it's a bad thing!


----------



## 8ball (Jan 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> You say that like it's a bad thing!


 
Some of my best friends are white and middle-class! 

(don't know many proper poshos, though)


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> have you heard of a man called trotsky? he had a shed you know


 
There's one of the Moscow trials of the 1930s. The defendants were called the Shed Seven, named after the little building in which a cell of Trotskyite-Fascist terrorists was discovered, secretly plotting to assassinate members of the Soviet government.


----------



## _angel_ (Jan 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Sheds are proper bourgeois anyway. You have to be able to afford a place with a garden. Same as garages. I'll allow a shed on an allotment.


Nah not really. Council houses have nice big gardens here in Leeds.
_Garages_ are bourgeois tho because it's assuming you will have a car.


----------



## _angel_ (Jan 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> Has butcher's got one?





Knowledge shed?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> Nah not really. Council houses have nice big gardens here in Leeds.
> _Garages_ are bourgeois tho because it's assuming you will have a car.



Having a car is bourgeois? You sure? I've got a car...but I haven't got a garage or even space for a shed in the yard.


----------



## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> You *can't* know.
> However, to *assume* that because bias is possible, that it always takes place, is just as insulting as you say a quota system is - as such an assumption naturalises male duplicity into a trait inherent to all males.


And to take that point one stage further ...

Bias isn't just possible, it's probable. Everyone does it, consciously or not. And not all bias equates to unlawful discimination either, it can be as simple as preferring a candidate with gardening as a hobby as opposed to, say, playing a musical instrument.

But because bias can result in perpetuating imbalances in the workplace; recruitment, reorganising, training, promotion etc have to be looked at carefully. So for example someone should be looking at job descriptions/person specs ( at whatever stage) and saying "hang on, you don't need a degree for this" "you don't need 3 years work experience to do that, a school leaver could do it" "you don't stop being able to do that job at 65" "you don't need written and spoken English for that" and so on. There's a whole raft of checks and measures that should be in place to try and address structural inequalities.

Not box ticking. Not gathering (intrusive) data by way of EO monitoring forms then filing the forms in a dusty corner. Not quotas instead of (as unbiased as possible) merit.

None of it happens overnight and working towards a situation where you don't have to spend bloody hours arguing why women are just as capable as men of taking an inside leg measurement has taken decades to achieve. So LP swanning up and tritely advocating quota systems which are already proven to fail, just shows the depth of her lack of understanding. And it's pretty bloody galling to say the least.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> And to take that point one stage further ...
> 
> Bias isn't just possible, it's probable. Everyone does it, consciously or not. And not all bias equates to unlawful discimination either, it can be as simple as preferring a candidate with gardening as a hobby as opposed to, say, playing a musical instrument.
> 
> ...


Excellent post, cesare 

I will say this in LP's defence - she's 26 and might never have heard of quotas before. This might well be the first time she's encountered the idea in a practical situation. I'm not sure I had, to be fair.

That's not to say there isn't a wealth of information about this topic out there - there is, and a lot of research showing why quotas don't work. Perhaps now @lauriepenny will research quotas and write an article about why they don't work.


----------



## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Excellent post, cesare
> 
> I will say this in LP's defence - she's 26 and might never have heard of quotas before. This might well be the first time she's encountered the idea in a practical situation. I'm not sure I had, to be fair.
> 
> That's not to say there isn't a wealth of information about this topic out there - there is, and a lot of research showing why quotas don't work. Perhaps now @lauriepenny will research quotas and write an article about why they don't work.


She may well never have heard of quotas before, there's no harm in that. The harm is in having an opinion based on no or superficial knowledge and then saying not having quotas is "silly"


----------



## ymu (Jan 4, 2013)

@kabbes is good on this. Helped turn his City workplace from largely male to 50/50, and they did it by looking at every stage of the recruitment process, including how the people they sent to careers fairs were conducting themselves.

Fuck all point in a quota if the workplace itself is hostile to <insert underprivilege here>.


----------



## _angel_ (Jan 4, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Having a car is bourgeois? You sure? I've got a car...but I haven't got a garage or even space for a shed in the yard.


Nah you're not listening. Garages or houses built with driveways are (like my mums) round here none were built with drives and garages as it was assumed that people who live in council houses wouldn't have cars.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> She may well never have heard of quotas before, there's no harm in that. The harm is in having an opinion based on no or superficial knowledge and then saying not having quotas is "silly"


I did like that bit - 'silly'


----------



## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

ymu said:


> @kabbes is good on this. Helped turn his City workplace from largely male to 50/50, and they did it by looking at every stage of the recruitment process, including how the people they sent to careers fairs were conducting themselves.
> 
> Fuck all point in a quota if the workplace itself is hostile to <insert underprivilege here>.


 
Re-organising is another classic and this is another area where decent union representation can do a great deal. Part of the consultation process should be demanding to see the job descriptions/person specs for the new roles and screening those for bias. It's often missed.


----------



## ymu (Jan 4, 2013)

ymu said:


> @kabbes is good on this. Helped turn his City workplace from largely male to 50/50, and they did it by looking at every stage of the recruitment process, including how the people they sent to careers fairs were conducting themselves.
> 
> Fuck all point in a quota if the workplace itself is hostile to <insert underprivilege here>.


Quoting myself to add that class is just as important as all the other 'privilege' categories. This is an interestimg interview with a working-class City worker, who commuted every day from oop North because she was determined to take the money and run and never get sucked into doing it because lifestyle demanded she continue.



> Voices of finance: IT business analyst (vice president level)
> 
> "I have never encountered sexism, it's a really meritocratic place, finance, it's one of the cool things about working here, plus the international element. There are people from Israel, the US, Germany, Australia, South Africa… You hear all these different languages, you get to ask people about their countries and religions.
> 
> ...


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 4, 2013)

"White middle-class man knows perfect white middle class man for the job"

or, in a form lp might understand better

"white liberal oxbridge editor knows perfect white liberal oxbridge writer for the job"


----------



## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

Ah yeah, exactly (el). Word of mouth advertising. Recruiting more people "like us" so this workplace remains "like us".


----------



## BigTom (Jan 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> And to take that point one stage further ...
> 
> Bias isn't just possible, it's probable. Everyone does it, consciously or not. And not all bias equates to unlawful discimination either, it can be as simple as preferring a candidate with gardening as a hobby as opposed to, say, playing a musical instrument.
> 
> ...


 
Agree with all this, but Laurie didn't advocate quota systems did she? I've had a quick look back and I couldn't see a post where she did - she said she didn't like the whole women in boardrooms thing, and "quotas are not the problem, structural inequality is the problem" and agreed quotas encourage tokenism.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> Ah yeah, exactly (el). Word of mouth advertising. Recruiting more people "like us" so this workplace remains "like us".


 
Most building work is by word of mouth but that hasn't stopped its workforce changing


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Agree with all this, but Laurie didn't advocate quota systems did she? I've had a quick look back and I couldn't see a post where she did - she said she didn't like the whole women in boardrooms thing, and "quotas are not the problem, structural inequality is the problem" and agreed quotas encourage tokenism.



She'd have a job on justifying quotas. If there was a quota for commentators in the msm, then there wouldn't be a slot for a public school/ Oxbridge candidate till about 2035.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 4, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/04/high-rail-fares-strangers-on-trains

LP's latest article - mostly sensible, although mostly obvious to many on urban especially those in the transport forum.


----------



## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Agree with all this, but Laurie didn't advocate quota systems did she? I've had a quick look back and I couldn't see a post where she did - she said she didn't like the whole women in boardrooms thing, and "quotas are not the problem, structural inequality is the problem" and agreed quotas encourage tokenism.


I'm referring to #10753 and her response at #10754. And proposed quotas (for women in boardrooms in this context) *are* a problem.


----------



## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Most building work is by word of mouth but that hasn't stopped its workforce changing


True. But the point isn't that one thing on its own (word of mouth advertising) is responsible for structural inequality, it's lots of aspects of which word of advertising is one and not always the largest one depending on industry etc


----------



## Firky (Jan 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/04/high-rail-fares-strangers-on-trains
> 
> LP's latest article - mostly sensible, although mostly obvious to many on urban especially those in the transport forum.


 
She's interviewed the EDL a couple of weeks back, I was going to read the article but then I realised it was Vice magazine. I don't think I could stomach a double whammy of shit that day so bookmarked it to read later.

Occasionally she will write something that is actually quite good. It's when she doesn't have to make stuff up, (such as when she fabricated a jumper. She was at some occupy protest and miraculously found an Obama 08 tshirt that in a nearby gutter, no doubt wrapped around a child's shoe) and talks about things she does actually have some insight into... beyond asking Twitter to write her essays.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> I'm referring to #10753 and her response at #10754. And proposed quotas (for women in boardrooms in this context) *are* a problem.


 
ok, I didn't really understand her post #10754 tbh, as a response to your post I don't see it advocating quota systems, but arguing that quota systems don't discriminate against anyone. I wasn't sure what it was a response to though when I read through the thread.


----------



## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

BigTom said:


> ok, I didn't really understand her post #10754 tbh, as a response to your post I don't see it advocating quota systems, but arguing that quota systems don't discriminate against anyone. I wasn't sure what it was a response to though when I read through the thread.


I'm still not sure that she sees that quota systems *do* discriminate against people, and that they *are* a problem, tbh.


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

> *Who is your favourite author of all time and why?*
> 
> I reject the premise of the question. But if you locked me in a room for a month and told me I was only allowed to read the works of one author, I'd probably go for the entire works of Terry Pratchett - hilarious, moving, deeply inventive and furiously moral.


*Blinks*

lol

And there's more.


> I've always suspected that those of us who live our young lives through books get a head start when we finally explode into the world, hungry for love and adventure and sex and danger, because we've read all the instructions first.


'Headstarts' have nothing to do with 30k a year schools and attendant networks and privileges eh? Get to fuck.


----------



## TruXta (Jan 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> *Blinks*
> 
> lol


 
I won't hear a word against Pratchett you humourless doink.


----------



## Firky (Jan 4, 2013)

Not about to berate someone for their choice in books but if I was a big fan of Terry Pratchett...I'd probably keep that to myself.


----------



## TruXta (Jan 4, 2013)

firky said:


> Not about to berate someone for their choice in books but if I was a big fan of Terry Pratchett...I'd probably keep that to myself.


Now you're on the list too.


----------



## Firky (Jan 4, 2013)

If you're reading him for the first time then he is quite good, inventive and funny. Then by the time you're reading a third TP book you've realised that it's the same jokes and ideas repeated differently. He's not a shit author by any means but I don't think he's amazing. He's popular because he's accessible and easy to build up a collection.


----------



## TruXta (Jan 4, 2013)

firky said:


> If you're reading him for the first time then he is quite good, inventive and funny. Then by the time you're reading a third TP book you've realised that it's the same jokes and ideas repeated differently. He's not a shit author by any means but I don't think he's amazing. He's popular because he's accessible and easy to get into.


And there's nothing wrong with that. It's literary candy, probably not great in massive quantities, but very fulfilling as a quick snack.


----------



## Firky (Jan 4, 2013)

Like a Cream Egg it's something you rapidly get sick of.

What books of TP's are moving, out of interest? I have read about half a dozen and none struck me as moving?


----------



## TruXta (Jan 4, 2013)

firky said:


> Like a Cream Egg it's something you rapidly get sick of.


Once a year is about right.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 4, 2013)

Or a deep-fried Mars Bar. No thanks.


----------



## TruXta (Jan 4, 2013)

200 pages of Pratchett vs 200 pages of LP, I know which one I'd go for.


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

TruXta said:


> I won't hear a word against Pratchett you humourless doink.


Furiously moral.


----------



## TruXta (Jan 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> Furiously moral.


Him, me or you? He is for sure.


----------



## TruXta (Jan 4, 2013)

firky said:


> What books of TP's are moving, out of interest? I have read about half a dozen and none struck me as moving?


 
Moving? Didn't say that did I? I think they're amusing at best, and a bit lackadaisical at worst.


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

firky said:


> If you're reading him for the first time then he is quite good, inventive and funny. Then by the time you're reading a third TP book you've realised that it's the same jokes and ideas repeated differently. He's not a shit author by any means but I don't think he's amazing. He's popular because he's accessible and easy to build up a collection.


Decent pulp stuff for kids. I gave mine away years ago. She should've said Eoin Colfer.


----------



## Firky (Jan 4, 2013)

She could have said Ian Banks which would have been worse.



TruXta said:


> Moving? Didn't say that did I? I think they're amusing at best, and a bit lackadaisical at worst.


 
Laurie said they were moving, I was wondering if you were aware if any that were moving.


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

firky said:


> Laurie said they were moving, I was wondering if you were aware if any that were moving.


Moving Pictures.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 4, 2013)

should have gone for the pretentious angle and said rushdie


----------



## weepiper (Jan 4, 2013)

firky said:


> She could have said Ian Banks which would have been worse.
> 
> 
> 
> Laurie said they were moving, I was wondering if you were aware if any that were moving.


 
Actually 'Nation' (non-Discworld) is pretty moving.


----------



## Firky (Jan 4, 2013)

The Long Earth never really got moving.


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> should have gone for the pretentious angle and said rushdie


Complete set of Horrible Histories. Moving, funny and furiously moral.


----------



## TruXta (Jan 4, 2013)

firky said:


> She could have said Ian Banks which would have been worse.
> 
> 
> 
> Laurie said they were moving, I was wondering if you were aware if any that were moving.


My bad. I don't know that his Discworld books are all that moving.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 4, 2013)

firky said:


> *She could have said Ian Banks w*hich would have been worse.
> 
> 
> 
> Laurie said they were moving, I was wondering if you were aware if any that were moving.


 

or Ken Mcloed, posadist splitter.


----------



## TruXta (Jan 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Actually 'Nation' (non-Discworld) is pretty moving.


Did you read it for the kids? Never got around to it meself.


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Him, me or you? He is for sure.


I just like how 'furiously moral' drips with toynbee tilt-headed liberalism.


----------



## TruXta (Jan 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> I just like how 'furiously moral' drips with toynbee tilt-headed liberalism.


Oh for sure. I don't share his politics, but at least he's not shy about them.


----------



## Firky (Jan 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> I just like how 'furiously moral' drips with toynbee tilt-headed liberalism.


 
"Unashamedly exotic."


----------



## JimW (Jan 4, 2013)

Aggressively non-confrontational.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 4, 2013)

"'ve always suspected that those of us who live our young lives through books get a head start when we finally explode into the world, hungry for love and adventure and sex and danger, because we've read all the instructions first."

i was a bookish youth and i think she's right about the hunger.  however, if i'd read the instructions first i imagine i wouldn't have spent so much time in hospital


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

Furiously Moral.


----------



## JimW (Jan 4, 2013)

I loved books as a lad and grew up in a house full of them, then exploded into a world of alternating unemployment and semi-skilled manual labour. The romance of it all!


----------



## TruXta (Jan 4, 2013)

JimW said:


> I loved books as a lad and grew up in a house full of them, then exploded into a world of alternating unemployment and semi-skilled manual labour. The romance of it all!


If you hadn't read all those books it would've been *skilled* manual labour. Tut tut.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

Why am I not surprised her favourite books are firmly in the fantasy genre and notoriously popular with teenagers?


----------



## JimW (Jan 4, 2013)

TruXta said:


> If you hadn't read all those books it would've been *skilled* manual labour. Tut tut.


I was a furniture-maker's apprentice to start off with, with your skilled Holy Grail gleaming in the distance, but most of his business came from city types rich in the 80s boom and he had to go back to working alone after the crash back then. *Sniff* *Violins*


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

...and every page drips with bourgeois liberal sensibility


----------



## TruXta (Jan 4, 2013)

JimW said:


> I was a furniture-maker's apprentice to start off with, with your skilled Holy Grail gleaming in the distance, but most of his business came from city types rich in the 80s boom and he had to go back to working alone after the crash back then. *Sniff* *Violins*


Sucks. I'd love to be good with my hands, but I've the hand-eye coordination of a snake.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 4, 2013)

JimW said:


> I loved books as a lad and grew up in a house full of them, then exploded into a world of alternating unemployment and semi-skilled manual labour. The romance of it all!


 
you obviously didnt read them properly


----------



## JimW (Jan 4, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Sucks. I'd love to be good with my hands, but I've the hand-eye coordination of a snake.


Yep, would have been a good life I reckon - love the idea of a trade you just get better at as time goes by, and he did a lot of lovely bespoke stuff too to his own design. I wasn't particularly gifted myself, and never got much past glorified tea-boy and sanding monkey. Can still hang a door is about all


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> View attachment 27190
> 
> Furiously Moral.


Has he borrowed someone else's coat?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 4, 2013)

JimW said:


> Can still hang a door is about all


 
Damn the reactionary working classes - what's wrong with rehabilitation?


----------



## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

I also was a bookish youth growing up surrounded by them. My explosion into the world consisted of donning a Tesco overall (very fetching pink and white checked nylon iirc) and working on the tills. The most romantic highlight was probably the morning that I went to work via 2 buses as normal, and walked the length of the shop towards the staff canteen only to be stopped by the Deli Manager and told I had no business working fulltime until I'd learned to dress myself. Skirt caught up in knickers.


----------



## TruXta (Jan 4, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Damn the reactionary working classes - what's wrong with rehabilitation?


Took me a second to work that one out


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 4, 2013)

firky said:


> Like a Cream Egg it's something you rapidly get sick of.
> 
> What books of TP's are moving, out of interest? I have read about half a dozen and none struck me as moving?


Monstrous regiment was pretty good, and I enjoy the Guards' series, but I'd never describe any of them as 'moving'.

The last book I read that was moving I can't bring myself to read again - 'Singled Out', about the two million single women who suddenly found themselves without the prospect of marriage after WWI and the political, economic and social changes that resulted. What moved me was the interviews reproduced from some of these women, and the hardships they'd had to endure - like being sacked because a man was coming from the war and needed his job back but not having any recourse in law.

Well worth a read.


----------



## Favelado (Jan 4, 2013)

firky said:


> Like a Cream Egg it's something you rapidly get sick of.


 
Depends where you put them.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> And to take that point one stage further ...
> 
> Bias isn't just possible, it's probable. Everyone does it, consciously or not. And not all bias equates to unlawful discimination either, it can be as simple as preferring a candidate with gardening as a hobby as opposed to, say, playing a musical instrument.


 
True, but Ms. Penny isn't talking about the natural bias that *everyone*, including her, exert. She's pretty much stating that men inhere a duplicity specifically based on gender - that they'll always favour other men over women because of this inherent trait.



> But because bias can result in perpetuating imbalances in the workplace; recruitment, reorganising, training, promotion etc have to be looked at carefully. So for example someone should be looking at job descriptions/person specs ( at whatever stage) and saying "hang on, you don't need a degree for this" "you don't need 3 years work experience to do that, a school leaver could do it" "you don't stop being able to do that job at 65" "you don't need written and spoken English for that" and so on. There's a whole raft of checks and measures that should be in place to try and address structural inequalities.
> 
> Not box ticking. Not gathering (intrusive) data by way of EO monitoring forms then filing the forms in a dusty corner. Not quotas instead of (as unbiased as possible) merit.
> 
> None of it happens overnight and working towards a situation where you don't have to spend bloody hours arguing why women are just as capable as men of taking an inside leg measurement has taken decades to achieve. So LP swanning up and tritely advocating quota systems which are already proven to fail, just shows the depth of her lack of understanding. And it's pretty bloody galling to say the least.


 
When I was in the CPSA the union heirarchy made noises about getting a number of female branch reps commensurate with the overall percentage of female membership, but soon had to backtrack when they realised that they'd made assumptions about how much personal time female members would have free to deal with union matters, not having factored in stuff like familial responsibilities.
As you say, you can't just graft this stuff on, you have to construct fairness and equity from the ground up, or else you're just patching rot.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Depends where you put them.


 
There was a bloke in my year whose younger brother was notorious for supposedly eating a creme egg from his girlfriend's twat. Sort of a 1970s version of Mick 'n' Marianne's Mars bar.


----------



## love detective (Jan 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> I also was a bookish youth growing up surrounded by them.


 
Other than a book written by an Aberdeen casual, I don't think I read a book until I was in my mid to late twenties - had to explode into life without the head start of the instruction manual

#universityoflife


----------



## Favelado (Jan 4, 2013)

I was just talking about the fridge  VP you sick bastard.


----------



## love detective (Jan 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> There was a bloke in my year whose younger brother was notorious for supposedly eating a creme egg from his girlfriend's twat. Sort of a 1970s version of Mick 'n' Marianne's Mars bar.


 
not related, but a guy called tommy gray who i went to school with could blow smoke out his ears

(he also once wore a tank top underneath his shirt)


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> Nah you're not listening. Garages or houses built with driveways are (like my mums) round here none were built with drives and garages as it was assumed that people who live in council houses wouldn't have cars.


 
Pretty much all the local authority social housing I've lived in, built between the '50s and '70s, has had on-street parking at best, and even then, there was usually only enough spaces for about 20-25% of households to park a single vehicle.


----------



## Firky (Jan 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> There was a bloke in my year whose younger brother was notorious for supposedly eating a creme egg from his girlfriend's twat. Sort of a 1970s version of Mick 'n' Marianne's Mars bar.


 
What did they do for the other 48 weeks of the year?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> not related, but a guy called tommy gray who i went to school with could blow smoke out his ears
> 
> (he also once wore a tank top underneath his shirt)


 
I find the second fact far more disturbing than the first!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

firky said:


> What did they do for the other 48 weeks of the year?


 
Celibacy, one presumes.


----------



## Firky (Jan 4, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> Nah you're not listening. Garages or houses built with driveways are (like my mums) round here none were built with drives and garages as it was assumed that people who live in council houses wouldn't have cars.


 
All the gardens here have been paved, every house has a satellite dish and some of them (residents) even smoke. The fucking opulence.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> There was a bloke in my year whose younger brother was notorious for supposedly eating a creme egg from his girlfriend's twat. Sort of a 1970s version of Mick 'n' Marianne's Mars bar.


How to get thrush in one easy lesson.


----------



## killer b (Jan 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> There was a bloke in my year whose younger brother was notorious for supposedly eating a creme egg from his girlfriend's twat. Sort of a 1970s version of Mick 'n' Marianne's Mars bar.


Didn't you witness a lad in your year buggering a dog on tooting beck common too? Dunno what they put in the water round there...


----------



## Athos (Jan 4, 2013)

Greebo said:
			
		

> How to get thrush in one easy lesson.



It's chicken and egg.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

killer b said:


> Didn't you witness a lad in your year buggering a dog on tooting beck common too? Dunno what they put in the water round there...


 
Darren the dogbummer. 
It wasn't any dog, either, it was his family dog. 
I still reckon that he'll never turn up for any class reunion-type event because he *knows* he'd be greeted with barks and questions about what pets he has. 
E2A: It wasn't just me who witnessed it, it was about half a dozen classmates *and* a couple of non-school acquaintances!


----------



## Favelado (Jan 4, 2013)

I like to think I've helped develop the debate somewhat here.


----------



## love detective (Jan 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> *Blinks*
> 
> lol
> 
> ...


 
she's modest with it as well



> I'm not the best-read person I know by any means, but because of the way I read I'm one of the widest-read


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

#I'm not the best-read person I know by any means, but because of the way I read I'm one of the widest-read#

Does she mean widest-read of the people she knows...or like,one of the widest read people, full stop?
Is she widely-read? I genuinely don't have a clue. How would you even tell?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 4, 2013)

if its all of Pratchett's oeuvre you could do that in a year with change spare to fit in harry potter.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

Greebo said:


> How to get thrush in one easy lesson.


 
Yep!!!


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> she's modest with it as well


Just wow.  The toxic fucking fraud.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> #I'm not the best-read person I know by any means, but because of the way I read I'm one of the widest-read#
> 
> Does she mean widest-read of the people she knows...or like,one of the widest read people, full stop?
> Is she widely-read? I genuinely don't have a clue. How would you even tell?



Although, now I think about it, I'm one of the widest-read of all the people I know...and the best at dominoes..and Sean Connery impressions...and my education cost fuck all (at point of delivery)


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> #I'm not the best-read person I know by any means, but because of the way I read I'm one of the widest-read#
> 
> Does she mean widest-read of the people she knows...or like,one of the widest read people, full stop?
> Is she widely-read? I genuinely don't have a clue. How would you even tell?


 
To me, "widely-read" has always meant "reads across a wide range of subjects", as opposed to "reads a lot of authors". My dad reads a lot of authors, but the range of subjects is narrow - thriller books are all he'll read, pretty much.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> To me, "widely-read" has always meant "reads across a wide range of subjects", as opposed to "reads a lot of authors". My dad reads a lot of authors, but the range of subjects is narrow - thriller books are all he'll read, pretty much.



She doesn't say 'widely', she says 'widest'...I thought she was talking about the number of people who read her stuff...erm, i mean 'work'..no?
Possibly not...that'd be a bit presumptuous...even for for.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

Although, if she was talking about breadth of reading rather than size of readership,...why wouldn't best-read mean 'widest-read'?

Does she put a premium on specialisation?...strange kinda judgement for a free-wheeling, eclectic anarchist?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> Other than a book written by an Aberdeen casual, I don't think I read a book until I was in my mid to late twenties - had to explode into life without the head start of the instruction manual
> 
> #universityoflife


 
Until I was 24 the only book I read had 6 2nd class stamps in it


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> She doesn't say 'widely', she says 'widest'...I thought she was talking about the number of people who read her stuff...erm, i mean 'work'..no?
> Possibly not...that'd be a bit presumptuous...even for for.


 
Well, I'm taking "widest read" to be the equivalent of "I've read across considerably more subjects than yow!", as a claim for her own writings to be the most widely read among her peers would probably get caught up on Owen Jones' bigger book sales and equally-read articles.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 4, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Until I was 24 the only book I read had 6 2nd class stamps in it


What sort of bohemian dilettante down your ends could afford a book of six, eh?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Although, if she was talking about breadth of reading rather than size of readership,...why wouldn't best-read mean 'widest-read'?
> 
> Does she put a premium on specialisation?...strange kinda judgement for a free-wheeling, eclectic anarchist?


 
Back in the hoary mists of antiquity when I got my state education, "well-read" or "best read" meant "they've read the literary and historical classics", pretty much.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> What sort of bohemian dilettante down your ends could afford a book of six, eh?


 
Someone whose dad was on the game?


----------



## weepiper (Jan 4, 2013)

I read everything I could get my hands on as a kid but I don't recall exploding into life when I got a shitey minimum wage job at Olympus Sport tbh. Or even once I got to university and started working in a bike shop. I still read tons of stuff. It doesn't make me any better or more successful than people who don't.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 4, 2013)

I hated The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists cos I am a smug liberal middle class cunt and thus got bogged down in such issues as style, sentimentality and readability. 

(Since we are all talking about books randomly)


I also know that I will never read Capital cos it's just too damn hard.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Back in the hoary mists of antiquity when I got my state education, "well-read" or "best read" meant "they've read the literary and historical classics", pretty much.


And mine. I've barely read any of the literary greats like Chekov. It's just not my thing. But I read widely in that I read across a wide range of subjects. I've been reading more political stuff recently so I don't make an idiot of myself on this and other politics threads.

One thing I think you need when reading is an open mind - to be accepting of new ideas and information, of different views and viewpoints - and I'm not convinced laurie penny's writings demonstrate that she does.


----------



## imposs1904 (Jan 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> Other than a book written by an Aberdeen casual, I don't think I read a book until I was in my mid to late twenties - had to explode into life without the head start of the instruction manual
> 
> #universityoflife


 
I remember that book. Pinkish cover?

I preferred Colin Ward's Steaming In. Who knew Britain's most famous anarchist could be so tasty at the Clock End?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Someone whose dad was on the game?


Or whose Dad had won a ton down the bookies


----------



## Athos (Jan 4, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> I also know that I will never read Capital cos it's just too damn hard.


 
Don't be too hard on yourself.  Laurie won't read it either, and she's the voice of the left.


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

Athos said:


> Don't be too hard on yourself. Laurie won't read it either, and she's the voice of the left.


You see the vid of her trolling David Harvey? Amazing scenes. 

Check your privilege so-called professor.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

Athos said:


> Don't be too hard on yourself.  Laurie won't read it either, and she's the voice of the left.



Harold Wilson used to boast about not having read it, but having read Hayek. It does get a bit like wading through treacle in your wellies. I never finished it.


----------



## Athos (Jan 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> You see the vid of her trolling David Harvey? Amazing scenes.
> 
> Check your privilege so-called professor.


 
No.  Got a link?


----------



## love detective (Jan 4, 2013)

imposs1904 said:


> I remember that book. Pinkish cover?
> 
> I preferred Colin Ward's Steaming In. Who knew Britain's most famous anarchist could be so tasty at the Clock End?


 
Yep, Jay Allan - think it was the first of its kind at the time


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> You see the vid of her trolling David Harvey? Amazing scenes.
> 
> Check your privilege so-called professor.


Do you mean David Starkey?

ETA. I see she has form against Professors. Or people named David.


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

Athos said:


> No. Got a link?





SpineyNorman said:


> She gets everywhere. Saw this video on a blog I look at now and then. It's of a meeting in New York and an absolute masterclass in how to fuck up a potentially interesting forum discussion - the moderator spends a self indulgent 20 minutes asking questions that one suspects add up to his personal views, then only gives the speakers 10 minutes to respond to the 20 minute long questions
> 
> But Laurie asks a question at 1.37.30 - fair enough to ask why all the panel were white males but why ask the panel? It's hardly their fault.



This do.

Harvey chaired a thing in NY around that time featuring students from Canada and Chile. I'm amazed that Laurie didn't turn up to troll that as well. 'Vallejo, you're doing it wrong.'


----------



## Red Cat (Jan 4, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> Nah you're not listening. Garages or houses built with driveways are (like my mums) round here none were built with drives and garages as it was assumed that people who live in council houses wouldn't have cars.


 

Ours isn't ex LA, I don't think, but ex housing authority, late 60s, and we have a block of garages ( I mean a garage within a block not the whole block). I didn't think they were _that_ unusual.


----------



## JimW (Jan 4, 2013)

imposs1904 said:


> ....
> 
> I preferred Colin Ward's Steaming In. Who knew Britain's most famous anarchist could be so tasty at the Clock End?


 
I'll show you...oof...town and country...argh...planning...biff...


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 4, 2013)

Note her not asking the same question of her panel here or of many other that she participated in.

Note also the claim that she's a fan of the work of Kliman, Mattick and Goldner. _Really_ laurie? _Really_?

And note the new york accent.

That's really embarassing actually, totally out of her depth intellectually there, no idea of what this series of events were supposed to concern (namely, detailed analysis of whole period of economic and social development) not just shouting how radical you are  - and by implication, that others aren't. Clear evidence of paucity of reading and lack of breadth of reading and understanding on show there.


----------



## imposs1904 (Jan 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> She gets everywhere. Saw this video on a blog I look at now and then. It's of a meeting in New York and an absolute masterclass in how to fuck up a potentially interesting forum discussion - the moderator spends a self indulgent 20 minutes asking questions that one suspects add up to his personal views, then only gives the speakers 10 minutes to respond to the 20 minute long questions
> 
> But Laurie asks a question at 1.37.30 - fair enough to ask why all the panel were white males but why ask the panel? It's hardly their fault.




I wanted to go to that meeting but couldn't get a babysitter at such short notice. Has the organisers of the meeting, the Platypus Society, turned up in the UK yet? Maybe it's just me but they come across as the smuggest gits since the RCP in its clipboard-on-the-high-street heyday.


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

You know what would happen if somebody asked her something like that (questioning her radicalism) at one of her dos and pointed out that she backed the Libdems, Nato, unspeakably sexy Obama, etc etc.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 4, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Ours isn't ex LA, I don't think, but ex housing authority, late 60s, and we have a block of garages ( I mean a garage within a block not the whole block). I didn't think they were _that_ unusual.


I live two streets over from an area of social housing built in the 1970/80s as part of of regeneration of some streets in Glasgow. It's well laid-out with a couple of small play-areas for children and green spaces as well as a private rear garden for each property (mainly terraced two and three-storey dwellings, with some sheltered housing), but no garages and not a huge amount of parking.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 4, 2013)

imposs1904 said:


> I remember that book. Pinkish cover?


 
_Bloody Casuals_ is that?


----------



## imposs1904 (Jan 4, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> _Bloody Casuals_ is that?


 
Yep. I could remember the author's name but couldn't remember the book title. I must have bought it in Sportspages on Charing Cross Road.


----------



## cesare (Jan 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> Other than a book written by an Aberdeen casual, I don't think I read a book until I was in my mid to late twenties - had to explode into life without the head start of the instruction manual
> 
> #universityoflife


That reminds me of my brother. Brought up in the same environment as me (my mum had 3 of us within 3.5 years) so very similar age and also surrounded by books. But no interest in books at all. Didn't start reading from choice until his 30s. His instruction manual was Haines and he commandeered any spare spot with dismantled pistons and oily rags.


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

Brighton College library is fierce swanky. None of my schools even had one.



> Brighton College Senior School Library is committed:
> 
> To encourage pupils to develop reading and research skills to access information efficiently, to evaluate information critically and competently, and use it accurately and creatively, encouraging them to become independent learners with the aim to raise user autonomy and information literacy.


Bit of a fail.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Note her not asking the same question of her panel here or of many other that she participated in.


 
Here is Laurie Penny summing up her talk on the effects of modern capitalism in her own trade - her own area of expertise - where she has worked at since the age of 21. The event hosted by Counterfire (owners of Firebox), Who Runs Britain? Media, Power and Democracy.



Please check my transcribing against it, suggest any punctuation improvements




			
				Laurie Penny in 2011 said:
			
		

> The problem of the monopoly of ideas is over because of the net. You can't have that one paper any more. We're not living in a few-to-many world, obviously we're in a period of change, we're making the transition between papers and the net but now the fact is that anybody can write and put their ideas out there, the sphere of debate that increasing numbers of us live in is one where anybody can write where the cost of entry into journalism is very, very low.
> This brings us onto the other issue which is journalism as a labour issue which is very, very important to think about. Obviously you've got writing on the internet which is done for free, and a lot of journalists are terrified at the moment 'Oh my god, what's this going to do to our salaries, we can't have our villas in Tuscany any more, oh no' which I think is a bit disgusting in many ways.
> But it's very important to see journalism as a labour issue because control over ideas and control over your own ideas as equivalent to control over the means of production. I was calling a friend recently I was saying 'They want me to write about fluffy things, they want me to write about, and I don't know whats happening to my column and she said 'Laurie you've got to see this as not an issue about whether you're a good writer or not,  you've got to see this as an issue of labour, as an issue of your work.'
> Now a lot of journalists don't think about it in that way partly because journalism is such a competitive industry and it's so, it's increasingly controlled by this hand-down system of internships which what you're [a questioner] talking about because the professionalisation of politics is also the professionalisation of journalism. Very, very hard to get into mainstream journalism unless you have an internship, unless you have that money, and it means increasingly it's not just... obviously at the top you have your Rebekah Brooks but the next generation it looks like it's going to be even more the sons and daughters of the elite who are entering into that profession. Power talking to itself. So very important to see journalism as a labour issue, very important to challenge the monopoly of power talking to itself at the top, and to understand and organise ideas, within journalism like control over the means of production and means of producing your words, your ideas but also it's not necessarily all bad because the idea of centralised media monopoly controlling the message is going to break down because of the internet.


 
I'd be wary in case some of the discussion on this thread on women and capitalism features as part of her new work - the full-length book on women, work and capitalism. 




			
				Laurie Penny on journalism in 2012 as a 26-year-old assistant to Helen Lewis in the New Statesman said:
			
		

> Because in a world of 24-hour news cycles and instagram, good writing, and *good, clear, original thinking, still matter*, are still worth something. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself, because I’ve got a good fifty years of rent checks still to make. I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know whether what I’m trying to do, and what some of the most audacious, inspiring young people I’ve had the privilege to meet over the past two years are trying to do is worth all that much in the long run. *There’s always a chance, isn’t there, that my affection for my friends and colleagues makes the best efforts of our young lives loom larger in the heart than their ultimate significance deserves. Privately, though, I doubt it.**I believe in fearless journalism, and I believe that it will continue, and I have seen it change the world in the most daring and intimate ways*.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Or whose Dad had won a ton down the bookies


 
Didn't happen with my dad's luck!


----------



## sihhi (Jan 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> Brighton College library is fierce swanky. None of my schools even had one.
> 
> Bit of a fail.


 
Not a fail at all:




> I started reading feminist books around the age of ten, and from there I went on to read a lot of philosophy and social history, but I was still in love with fantasy and horror - it was about this time that I discovered the works of Anne Rice, and I remember my first girlfriend and I swapping and sharing two things, The Female Eunuch and The Vampire Lestat, and getting extremely excited by both. At about 13 I started ploughing through the works of Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, as well as getting heavily into comics, and into poetry - I loved the modernists, but also a great deal of really old, traditional stuff, ballads and ancient fairy stories. I also read a lot of plays around this time, and I started going through the works of Shakespeare quite systematically. I'm lucky, because *the town where I grew up* had a *small Shakespeare festival down at the old castle*, so whenever there was a play on I would take the dog for a walk behind the castle wall, sit on the wall and watch the plays for free!
> At 15 I started reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire, which led me to the Beats, which led me into that whole seam of 1950s-1960s American literature, into psychedelia and sex and zen and transcendence, all of which were extremely alien to me as I'd barely had an alcoholic drink at 15, much less drugs or a f**k. I was a late starter in a lot of ways. But I've always suspected that those of us who live our young lives through books get a head start when we finally explode into the world, hungry for love and adventure and sex and danger, because we've read all the instructions first.


 
Lewes - 'stockbroker suburbs' - ie a commuter town is very posh.

HSBC took a a load of US taxpayer funds via their subsidiaries - injected over three quarters of a million into the UK division to remain a "good bank" "not reliant on state assistance" etc. They are funding assisted places - scholarships into Brighton College and elsewhere, the model based on a Brighton College partnership system.
Quietly announced last year, started this academic year:




> HSBC announce £12 million scholarship programme
> 29 Nov 2011
> HSBC is to provide funding of more than £12 million over five years to help more than 200 bright students attend leading schools and universities in England. HSBC's Scholarship Programme is designed to support education for students who have strong academic potential but come from disadvantaged areas and backgrounds.


 


> Working in six of the UK's largest cities, the Scholarship Programme will fund over 100 places at 20 leading independent schools for Years 12 and 13, over the next five years. This programme builds on an _existing successful pilot between Kingsford Community School and Brighton College, which has been running for four years_. During this time eight students from Kingsford School, located in a deprived inner-city area of London, have attended Brighton College, a leading independent school. All of the students on this HSBC Scholarship Programme who have completed their sixth form studies have gone on to win places at leading universities.
> ...
> This extension is a response to independent research commissioned by HSBC, undertaken by Professor Steve Hodkinson, former Vice Chancellor of Brunel University, which concluded that the Bank could make a significant difference to the 'learning futures' of young people through a programme of targeted educational philanthropy


http://www.newsroom.hsbc.co.uk/press/release/hsbc_announce_12_million_schol

One of the schools is David Willetts' old school the 7th highest-performing A-Level school in the country King Edwards School, the premier private school in the Midlands. It has its own scholarship+assisted place scheme which HSBC has added to this academic year 2012/13.

http://www.kes.org.uk/assisted-places.html




> If your family income is less than £20,000, you might qualify for a free place.
> If your family income is £30,000, you might only pay about £1,000 per annum.
> If your family income is £50,000. you might only pay about £4,000 per annum.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

#At least, that’s what I’m telling myself, because I’ve got a good fifty years of rent checks still to make.#

"Rent checks to make"..."it's up to yooooooo..nu yoik, nu yoikkkk"!


----------



## weepiper (Jan 4, 2013)

It's a bit  tbh. You don't learn about love and sex and danger from reading about them in books. You learn by _doing_ them surely.


----------



## love detective (Jan 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Note also the claim that she's a fan of the work of Kliman, Mattick and Goldner. _Really_ laurie? _Really_?
> 
> That's really embarassing actually, totally out of her depth intellectually there


 
I can't bear to watch the thing again to confirm, but she said something like she hadn't learnt a thing from listening to them speak at the session

we've all got our criticisms of marxist academics (male and female - something she doesn't seem to get) but thought that was an arrogant as fuck thing for someone like her to say, just shows how out of her depth she is that she can so publicly display it without realising it


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 4, 2013)

doing the mark oaten grip there as well


----------



## bluestreak (Jan 4, 2013)

Lewes eh?  Explains a lot.


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Not a fail at all:


I meant that if the library is supposed to "develop reading and research skills to access information efficiently, to evaluate information critically and competently, and use it accurately and creatively", then it has failed because evidently, Laura here cannot do any of those things.


----------



## love detective (Jan 4, 2013)

laurie penny said:
			
		

> because control over ideas and control over your own ideas are equivalent to control over the means of production


 
no it's not, you fucking tool


----------



## bluestreak (Jan 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> It's a bit  tbh. You don't learn about love and sex and danger from reading about them in books. You learn by _doing_ them surely.


 
for me, as a young knowitall, the knowledge i got from reading about them was the same.  of course, now i'm prematurely aged by life, and i know that i only learnt a bit of theory, most of it fictionalised by white middle class men who hadn't lived it!


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

bluestreak said:


> most of it fictionalised by white middle class men who hadn't lived it!



Sublime


----------



## rekil (Jan 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> I can't bear to watch the thing again to confirm, but she said something like she hadn't learnt a thing from listening to them speak at the session


I think she started by saying that the panel just told her things she already knew (about how capitalism works) then contradicted herself at the end by saying she learned a great deal.  PD cite her as a pioneer of multitudinous positionism.


----------



## bluestreak (Jan 4, 2013)

and ridiculous.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

"most of it fictionalised by white middle class men who hadn't lived it!"

...and a fitting reminder of the progress we've made...now women get a go.


----------



## _angel_ (Jan 4, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Ours isn't ex LA, I don't think, but ex housing authority, late 60s, and we have a block of garages ( I mean a garage within a block not the whole block). I didn't think they were _that_ unusual.



Happen they were forward thinking or later. These houses here are older 30s! I did live in a block of council flats that had some garages but
I know also they were built privately and purchased later by the council.


----------



## love detective (Jan 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> I think she started by saying that the panel just told her things she already knew (about how capitalism works) then contradicted herself at the end by saying she learned a great deal. PD cite her as a pioneer of multitudinous positionism.


 
I thought she meant that she hadn't learnt a thing listening to the discussion of the panel (as she, as a 26 year old, has more accumulated theoretical & analytical knowledge than 4 people who have spent all their adult life researching this kind of stuff), but had learnt something by seeing what the make up of the panel was, i.e...deep breath... white men, spit...

thing is, if she'd criticised it for being a very academic exercise, as analysis for the sake of analysis rather than as a means to something else, she would have had a point, but as usual she can barely even make out a single instance of a tree let alone the fucking wood


----------



## sihhi (Jan 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Note her not asking the same question of her panel here or of many other that she participated in.


What got me there was 'old white male' versus 'young people'
You could almost say of that episode: 'In a climate like this, no older person woman writer can tell his her own story without immediately being expected also to tell everyone else’s - and that’s part of the way older leftists who lived through real struggle women writers are dismissed today, by the publishing industry, by the television industry, by everyone with a stake in packaging the truth'

Has that same question been asked of her own friends? Or only of left-wing fellow comrades  competitors in the brain-worker sphere?

http://instagram.com/lauriepenny (Not stalking, she tweeted it to public. Obvious truth for someone of the internet era: if you make it public on the internet *and* stick your name next to it, people will discuss it)





			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> Anyway, your dismissal of 'identity' politics is getting desperate. You seem really, really anxious to convince yourselves that only the politics of white working class men is actually relevant to economic and social struggle. Those of us who are and who fight for women, *people of colour *and minorities don't call it 'identity politics', by the way. We just call it 'politics.'


Do working-class women or working-class immigrants (avoiding 'minorities', double avoiding 'people of colour')
believe that Laurie Penny is fighting for them?
No. of Laurie Penny analyses of first and second generation immigration in Britain and its relation to class politics - 0
Interviews 'anti-Muslim immigrant far-right truth-speaker socks it to London journo' format in neo-quasi-ironic magazine - 1.
If you look at the instagram it gives you Laurie Penny's several photos of the guy whose friend was charging $5,000 for a lecture of his - Malcolm Tucker of the _New Inquiry_.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 4, 2013)

Hmmm. I was reading one of her PennyRed blog posts from 4th , and something struck me as a little odd:


> I’ve just come back from volunteering down the street at the Williamsburg Church emergency blood drive. Right now New York is in a blood crisis. When the hospitals were evacuated during the storm, there was no time to collect the blood left in storage banks when the power went out, and by the time they got everyone to safety, that blood had rotted. Now they need new blood desperately.


The Red Cross issued a press statement at that time:
http://www.redcross.org/news/article/Sandy-Forces-Cancellation-of-About-300-Blood-Drives


> So far, the cancellations have resulted in a shortfall of more than 9,000 blood and platelet donations across 14 states that would otherwise be available for those needing transfusions. The situation may worsen as the storm continues to move and in its aftermath.
> 
> The Red Cross did move blood and blood products to those areas most likely to be affected by Sandy so that the blood needs of people in those communities could be met. However, the long- term impact of power outages and blood drive cancellations is expected to be significant.


I don't think it's quite the situation as painted. The cancellation of blood stock replenishment drives would have had more of an impact than the power going out, to my mind.


----------



## love detective (Jan 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> If you look at the instagram it gives you Laurie Penny's several photos of the guy whose friend was charging $5,000 for a lecture of his - Malcolm Tucker of the _New Inquiry_.


 
I bet the four panel members of that 'radical interpretations of the crisis' session that she lambasted for their privilege and critcised them for being white and male didn't charge a penny for doing it

yet here she is fawning over a white male (and let's face it a massive fucking bellend cunt) who has the arrogance to charge five grand a pop just to hear him speak


----------



## sihhi (Jan 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> I meant that if the library is supposed to "develop reading and research skills to access information efficiently, to evaluate information critically and competently, and *use it* *accurately and creatively*", then it has failed because evidently, Laura here cannot do any of those things.


 
It _is_ accurate and creative on ruling-class class terms: hand-plucking appropriate writers from the blogsphere to become the New Statesman, making the NATO bombing of Libya an _act of solidarity_, promoting electronic-based gonzo journalism publishing via Discordia (cutting out the labour costs of actually printing anything - victory to the brain-worker!), encouraging people to attend university in spite of higher fees: 'To hell with the Gradgrinds – go to university', considering sex work purely as 'work like any other' but with bad things that will magically disappear with new legalised brothels and adverts, discussing cultural products like Game of Thrones only in terms of surface content not conditions of production - all fresh and exciting ruling class ideas, particularly potent when _dressed up as_ criticism and analysis from a _superior_ Marxist perspective that considers _privilege_.

All the posters on this thread are actually educating her, not Brighton College. She keeps reading this because she knows there's good stuff here and she hives it off as her own work and the cycle just goes on.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> here she is fawning over a white male (and let's face it a massive fucking bellend cunt) who has the arrogance to charge five grand a pop just to hear him speak


 
Hey, those who control their own means of production have to stick together.


----------



## bluestreak (Jan 4, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> "most of it fictionalised by white middle class men who hadn't lived it!"
> 
> ...and a fitting reminder of the progress we've made...now women get a go.


 
it's true, i have books by white middle class women too these days.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> I bet the four panel members of that 'radical interpretations of the crisis' session that she lambasted for their privilege and critcised them for being white and male didn't charge a penny for doing it
> 
> yet here she is fawning over a white male (and let's face it a massive fucking bellend cunt) who has the arrogance to charge five grand a pop just to hear him speak


 
If you look at 
http://instagram.com/lauriepenny

You see a fair amount about the post-Oxford lifestyle (ignoring the none of my fellow graduates had work lies of earlier):






Greenall's Gin £20 a bottle normally. It's not cheap stuff.
Real cricket bat. Trinket art on the bookshelves. Penguin Modern Classics Bag. Is it wrong to attack Nick Lezard's waistcoat.


----------



## love detective (Jan 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> If you look at
> http://instagram.com/lauriepenny
> 
> You see a fair amount about the post-Oxford lifestyle (ignoring the none of my fellow graduates had work lies of earlier):
> ...


 
every single one of the photos on there is 'hideously white'


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

bluestreak said:


> it's true, i have books by white middle class women too these days.



Well I hope for the sake of your privilege index they were'n't white and privately educated.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

Don't shoot till you see the white of their eyes


----------



## Balbi (Jan 4, 2013)

Is this thread really going to examine all of her social media leavings?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> not related, but a guy called tommy gray who i went to school with could blow smoke out his ears
> 
> (he also once wore a tank top underneath his shirt)


 
There was a kid at my school who could put a 5p up his nose and then cough it up out of his mouth. At the time it was the most impressive thing I had ever seen and I wanted to grow up to be like him. I've never quite got over the disappointment of not doing.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 4, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Is this thread really going to examine all of her social media leavings?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> There was a kid at my school who could put a 5p up his nose and then cough it up out of his mouth. At the time it was the most impressive thing I had ever seen and I wanted to grow up to be like him. I've never quite got over the disappointment of not doing.


 
to be honest the sense of that underpins your every post on here.


----------



## love detective (Jan 4, 2013)

5p's were pretty big back in the day remember


----------



## JimW (Jan 4, 2013)

You're nobody in the nose-coin game til you've done a thrupenny bit, mind.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 4, 2013)

imposs1904 said:


> I wanted to go to that meeting but couldn't get a babysitter at such short notice. Has the organisers of the meeting, the Platypus Society, turned up in the UK yet? Maybe it's just me but they come across as the smuggest gits since the RCP in its clipboard-on-the-high-street heyday.


 
It was the arrogant smugness (if that's the right term) of the moderator that got me - gave himself longer to introduce the speakers than they, all of them together, had to respond. That's student wadicals for you - there's similar know all, done nothing twats at Sheffield right now.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 4, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Is this thread really going to examine all of her social media leavings?



Leavings...


----------



## sihhi (Jan 4, 2013)

So the instagram - 'I see only ..... people here, where are the ...... people?'

What about this birthday party Laurie Penny attended with:

elite pornographic performer Stoya (woman of the 'industry' 2009 friends with James Deen) ardent defenders of the sex industry:



> With porn DVD sales down due to free streaming websites, e.g. YouPorn, is the industry in trouble? Is the internet more attractive as a result to get the word out?
> Parts of the industry are definitely changing. However, adult novelty sales are reportedly up, and Digital Playground is hiring new staff and expanding.


 
Jen Dziura


> tour of the Middle East in which she entertained the troops at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait; Camp Buehring, Kuwait; Camp L.S.A., Kuwait; Camp Virginia, Kuwait; Camp Patriot, Kuwait Naval Base; Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar; As Sayliyah, Qatar; Camp Lemonier, Djibouti, Africa; the U.S.S. Enterprise and the U.S.S. Gettysburg, 200 miles off the coast in the Persian Gulf; and Naval Support Activity, Bahrain.


Artist Nicole Apteker, neo-Russian Constructivist artist big enough to get solo shows on both Coasts of the US:



> Solo Exhibitions
> Expanded Taxonomy New York City, NY 2012 Devotion Gallery
> Accelerated Uproot & From A Great Height San Francisco, CA 2011 Urban Solutions
> New Exploration Paper San Francisco, CA 2011 Satellite 66
> ...


 

Shariar Shadab "filmmaker, illustrator, animator, experimental film, underground cinema, political upheaval, demegration of social constructs, and change NYC/SYD"
Art curator Samantha Levin

Burlesque school organiser and burlesque performer Veronica Varlow $69 for 3 hours (US min wage $7.25/hr)

Degrading and misogynistic 'pin-up' photogrpaher Burke Heffner - (Warning NSFW)

Illustrators Zelda Devon and Kurt Higgins


> Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon live in a pocket-sized apartment in Brooklyn, where they collect neat, weird things. Their home is abundant with books, old furniture, mismatched teacups, and a cat named Cipher. They illustrate stuff for money so they can continue to invent stories, buy shoelaces, watch puppet shows, and eat sandwiches.


 



			
				Molly Crabapple said:
			
		

> Teetering Bulb (1/2 Kurt Huggins, 1/2 Zelda Devon) is a super powered illustration team decamped in a tiny Brooklyn apartment. With an razor-disciplined yet lushly evocative style and a client list from Vertigo to Random House, they’re poised for Art Stardom. I got to chat with them on design. teamwork, and the mechanics of drawing a boob.


 
Larisa Fuchs, owner of a business, Gemini & Scorpio, that does singles parties in New York

$30 entry to a former warehouse in Brooklyn


> Dress code and inspiration [you MUST dress to the theme/no street attire]: black and white formal or cocktail wear of any era (gray/silver ok); elaborate hats, masks, fans and parasols; horse race scene in My Fair Lady (Capote's inspiration); original B+W Ball guests; pop-art/constructivism/De Stijl; circus/cabaret/freakshow. If you must have another color accent, make it minimal and red. Masks preferred but not required. Dress code more relaxed after 2am.


 
http://www.katelanfoisy.com/blog/2012/5/15/dreams-are-real-041-happy-birthday-to-me.html






This is where Molly Crabbapple and Laurie Penny go to in New York, when not attending David Harvey and Crisis of Capitalism forums, the world they charm and promote.

Laurie Penny choosing to attack the David Harvey panel (said nothing about race) and all of urban75 p&p (unexamined lefty flavoured white privilege).

Yet she keeps winning.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2013)

outside the shed, pissing in


----------



## love detective (Jan 4, 2013)

_Laurie Penny, 23, never imagined she would find herself enmeshed in a world of poverty_

unbearable smug cunts the lot of them


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 4, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> to be honest the sense of that underpins your every post on here.


 
5p nose privilege


----------



## weepiper (Jan 4, 2013)

Amazing. If you listen really hard you can actually hear the braying coming from that photo.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 4, 2013)

imposs1904 said:


> I wanted to go to that meeting but couldn't get a babysitter at such short notice. Has the organisers of the meeting, the Platypus Society, turned up in the UK yet? Maybe it's just me but they come across as the smuggest gits since the RCP in its clipboard-on-the-high-street heyday.


 
Platypus people have been over here but they mostly seem to be making firm friends with the CPGB crowd so are unlikely to have much impact, I might be imagining it but I think this board's own the black hand may also be in touch with them...


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Amazing. If you listen really hard you can actually hear the braying coming from that photo.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 4, 2013)

bluestreak said:


> Lewes eh? Explains a lot.


 
'Born and bred' Lewes talking about how they made £100,000 last year.

http://www.lewesbonfire.co.uk/forum/Post/Re: price of houses/114124


----------



## love detective (Jan 4, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Platypus people have been over here but they mostly seem to be making firm friends with the CPGB crowd so are unlikely to have much impact, I might be imagining it but I think this board's own the black hand may also be in touch with them...


 
they did a thing at the spectacularly misnamed 'up the anti' conference thing with such lumanaries as the weekly worker's hillilililil tintin and the lawyer from breaking bad


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> If you look at
> http://instagram.com/lauriepenny
> 
> You see a fair amount about the post-Oxford lifestyle (ignoring the none of my fellow graduates had work lies of earlier):
> ...


 
The bloke in the twatty wastcoat looks like a smack dealer who lived down the street from me in Chesterfield. The kid the the foreground looks like he's been sampling his wares.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> The bloke in the twatty wastcoat looks like a smack dealer who lived down the street from me in Chesterfield. The kid the the foreground looks like he's been sampling his wares.


 
Nick Lizard the crack dealer


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Nick Lizard the crack dealer


I wouldn't say that unless he has been convicted - you know how libel-lawsuit happy these people are.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 5, 2013)

yeah that's a bit libellous tbh


----------



## sihhi (Jan 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> The bloke in the twatty wastcoat looks like a smack dealer who lived down the street from me in Chesterfield. The kid the the foreground looks like he's been sampling his wares.


 
The waiscoat man is Nick Lezard of 'hovel' fame.
He has given talks (rather fancily called 'salons' at literary clubs such as Peirene (£10 to members and £20 to non-members) 

http://www.peirenepress.com/events/salon/2013_salons

One such event in 2011









> Peirene Press is an award-winning boutique publishing house with an extra twist, based in London. We are committed to first class European literature in high quality translation. Our books are beautifully designed paperback editions, using only the best paper from sustainable British sources. Affordable, timeless collector items. And because literature - both reading and writing - can be a lonely affair, Peirene hosts a wide range of regular literary events, from informal coffee mornings to exciting literary salons and _*tailor-made,* *exclusive*_ events.
> Peirene’s Books
> Peirene specializes in contemporary European novellas  in English translation. All our books are best-sellers and/or award winners in their own countries. We only publish books of less than 200 pages that can be read in the same time it takes to watch a DVD.


 
As an aside, Peirene is _both_ Lottery-funded and Arts Council-funded (worth remembering like when ages ago an unaccompanied (meaning young) refugees 'art therapy' short-term project was attacked in the press as a disgrace to the principles of the lottery).


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 5, 2013)

weepiper said:


> yeah that's a bit libellous tbh


 
yeah sorry I meant smack dealer

ETA: and just to be clear it was a reference to the smack dealer in Chesterfield who looks a bit like Lezard not a suggestion that the guardian's best literary critic is involved in the procurement, sale or other distribution of illegal substances


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> yeah sorry I meant smack dealer


even in jest, I really wouldn't say that, the site can ill-afford a libel suit.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

See, that's a bit clearer.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 5, 2013)

Nick Lezard actually uses the term the Hovel - not our cruddy hovel, but "the Hovel"

http://www.newstatesman.com/lifesty...ive-–-and-it-was-my-robust-indifference-shamp





			
				Nick Lezard said:
			
		

> But something, in my case, had to give and what gave was my robust indifference to shampoo. True, a significant part of my decision about which shampoo to buy still resides in how much it looks like it will stand up on its end without leaking so that you don’t have to wait five minutes before the last bits come out of the nozzle; but I have also started looking a bit more carefully at what claims are being made for each bottle.
> 
> As it happens, in the Hovel, where two men and two women regularly shower, though not together, there are about 12 bottles of hair things ranged around the bathtub. I shall, for purposes of space, restrict myself to the L’Oréal Elvive products. The Nutri-Gloss shine shampoo contains, we are told, “the secret to glossy shine”. Full Restore, although now mostly full of water, is for “weak, limp, damaged hair”. (I bought this one and I think my hair got a bit offended, and then depressed, by the description.) Then there is Colour Protect “caring conditioner”, but that rather suggests that other conditioners are uncaring, does it not? They give your hair a rushed, distracted condition and then piss off, leaving it feeling cheap and used.
> 
> Then there’s the age-defying conditioner, already mentioned, which buys your hair a sports car and gets it a younger girlfriend. Finally, the Damage Care shampoo, which was the only one on the rack at the chemist’s that looked like it had any common ground at all with the age-defying conditioner. It’s got to this point: that I’ve now started worrying whether my conditioner and my shampoo will get on with each other. (My daughter, marvelling at the _*array of different kinds of shampoo for different hair types in Waitrose*_ the other day, asked, “don’t they make any shampoo for dirty hair?”)


 
The Hovel-dwellers who _shop at Waitrose_. 

(Cue: Can't ordinary working-class people shop at Waitrose? Why do you have a problem with minorities shopping where they like?)

I think I dislike Nick Lezard more.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 5, 2013)

Waitrose is practically a workers coop though


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## smokedout (Jan 5, 2013)

Waitrose is a LOT communism


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## love detective (Jan 5, 2013)

Waitrose is like a middle class version of hooters

I'm sure they discriminate on how you look when employing, it's always full of dainty young english rose types


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## smokedout (Jan 5, 2013)

love detective said:


> Waitrose is like a middle class version of hooters
> 
> I'm sure they discriminate on how you look when employing, it's always full of dainty young english rose types


 
how do you know?


----------



## love detective (Jan 5, 2013)

Because I go there to check out all the dainty young english rose types

(sometimes you need a rest from the tesco catford crew!)


----------



## sihhi (Jan 5, 2013)

smokedout said:


> Waitrose is a LOT communism


 
Does he name and implicitly attack Iceland here: 






			
				Nick Lezard on yuletide said:
			
		

> buying vast amounts of vol-au-vents from Iceland is not my idea of what Christmas should be about


specifically to spread the Waitrose Revolution? 

Also, where does quoting Christopher Hitchens for truth fit in on the communism scale? A little, too much or just right?





			
				Nick Lezard on yuletide said:
			
		

> The late Christopher Hitchens once described it as living in a one-party state where you've got images of the dear leader and songs you can't escape from, even in your own home.


 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/23/christmas-love-or-hate-it-conversation


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## smokedout (Jan 5, 2013)

love detective said:


> Because I go there to check out all the dainty young english rose types


 
racist


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## love detective (Jan 5, 2013)

yeah but not unexamined racism so it can pass


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## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

There's a Waitrose near me but I can only afford to go there for a treat. It is a lot more expensive than other supermarkets.

Usually it's Tesco along the road, or the corner shop.


----------



## Favelado (Jan 5, 2013)

Well, at least you're not digging out of the bins of Carrefour at night like some of my neighbours.

Cue 4 Yorkshiremen.


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## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Well, at least you're not digging out of the bins of Carrefour at night like some of my neighbours.
> 
> Cue 4 Yorkshiremen.


I don't even want to go to Tesco, given their shitty record on all sorts of things, like supplier exploitation and enthusiasm for workfare, but I need to eat. I can't afford to buy lunch at work everyday.


----------



## cesare (Jan 5, 2013)

Up early? Experiencing oppression that LP can't provide a salve for?

Well comrades, tune into freeview Yesterday channel 19 for an entertaining documentary on Trotsky getting ice-picked. 6am.


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## cesare (Jan 5, 2013)

That was quite good. Not very long but lots of archive footage, and interesting.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Yet she keeps winning.


----------



## Blagsta (Jan 5, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> There's a Waitrose near me but I can only afford to go there for a treat. It is a lot more expensive than other supermarkets.
> 
> Usually it's Tesco along the road, or the corner shop.


There aren't any in Birmingham.


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## lauriepenny (Jan 5, 2013)

This is just getting extremely creepy and stalky. Going through everything I do on social media for evidence of my life, my friends, speculating about how my friends live, how I live, my school, where I grew up. Please tell me how this is actually contributing for one second to useful political discourse?


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## Red Cat (Jan 5, 2013)

She seems out of her depth class wise too to me. She doesn't appear to me to have the confidence and unmistakable sense of entitlement of the upper middle class people I've met or those that appear in her photos. I suspect she fears everyone will find out she's a fraud, all this pissing people off and posturing is a smokescreen.

I don't like what she represents but she comes over to me like a vulnerable teenager. If someone gave her a massive advance to write some novels I suspect she'd be quite happy to retreat into a world of fiction.


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## Red Cat (Jan 5, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> This is just getting extremely creepy and stalky. Going through everything I do on social media for evidence of my life, my friends, speculating about how my friends live, how I live, my school, where I grew up. Please tell me how this is actually contributing for one second to useful political discourse?


 
You pissed a lot of people off here who are considerably older and more experienced than you. You behaved like a manipulative teenager.

ETA: That makes it sound like it's an act of revenge. What I meant was that you can't just attack people in the way that you did and expect no comeback, in fact that's what you wanted IMO. It used to be called shit stirring, a better description than trolling.


----------



## Blagsta (Jan 5, 2013)

Tbf Laurie, you've put it all out there, written about it, made yourself into a celebrity. Don't claim outrage when other people then read it and comment!


----------



## Red Cat (Jan 5, 2013)

I found you behaviour really strange actually, odd. I wondered what you gained by doing what you're doing.


----------



## olenyok (Jan 5, 2013)

@lauriepenny you've publicised exhaustive detail about your life, not just online like people do with fb, but in some of the most public fora going. You've done it in the name of politics which affect us all, and you've got paid for a great deal of it.

It's utterly absurd to pretend that people then discussing it is even remarkable, let alone nefarious. Are you even believing any of it, or is it just a forward momentum which has to be maintained so stuff doesn't fall apart?


----------



## Blagsta (Jan 5, 2013)

You claim to be some kind of expert on social media and the internet ffs. Didn't you realise that all that stuff you post online about your life is then available for anyone to look at and comment on?

For the "smartest kid in a smart school", you're being a bit...well...thick.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 5, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> This is just getting extremely creepy and stalky. Going through everything I do on social media for evidence of my life, my friends, speculating about how my friends live, how I live, my school, where I grew up. Please tell me how this is actually contributing for one second to useful political discourse?



I kinda agree here. It is starting to look obsessive and, frankly, a bit like overkill. I was persuaded you're a fraud way back...entirely unsuited and unqualified to speak on behalf of the people you champion.
Maybe it's necessary, however, so that there's a body of evidence attesting to the total disparity between your version of yourself and the reality. Otherwise, what future is there for meaningful reportage...when any public-school radical can reinvent themselves as a campaigning 'left-wing' journalist and waltz about being free and easy with the actualite, completely unchallenged?
Although possibly my obsession with what I like to call the truth is only another degenerate facet of my privilege.


----------



## Red Cat (Jan 5, 2013)

olenyok said:


> Are you even believing any of it, or is it just a forward momentum which has to be maintained so stuff doesn't fall apart?


 
The celebrity's new clothes.


----------



## _angel_ (Jan 5, 2013)

.


----------



## Red Cat (Jan 5, 2013)

Anyway, I feel uncomfortable having even posted what I've posted. This is all very weird, so I was trying to make sense of it. I'm not going to delete my posts but I wish I hadn't posted them.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 5, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> There aren't any in Birmingham.



Hall green and harborne


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## Blagsta (Jan 5, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Hall green and harborne


They're not real places, just delusions while staring out the window of the number 11


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 5, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> You claim to be some kind of expert on social media and the internet ffs. Didn't you realise that all that stuff you post online about your life is then available for anyone to look at and comment on?
> 
> For the "smartest kid in a smart school", you're being a bit...well...thick.



Yeah...that's a good point. It's not as though there isn't a bit of form in terms of commentators being called on their hypocrisy (see: history). Actually providing other people with the evidence of your own hypocrisy is a new development...but an inevitable consequence of social media. Why fight it?


----------



## rekil (Jan 5, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> This is just getting extremely creepy and stalky. Going through everything I do on social media for evidence of my life, my friends, speculating about how my friends live, how I live, my school, where I grew up. Please tell me how this is actually contributing for one second to useful political discourse?


We're doing something on elite private education, the recuperation of social movements and the reproduction of cultural capital and power. It's going to be furiously moral, and a little bit communism.

There will be illustrations too.

Btw, here is one of those oldies you tried to troll, visiting one of the occupied schools in Chile, a forrin place. Note the presence of women and teenagers. They and their objectives are a million miles away from you, your mates and what you all do.



(English bits at 9:20ish)

There's also a thread on Kliman here. Worth a skim the next time you have a go at trolling them oldies.


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## Nice one (Jan 5, 2013)

copliker said:


> ... elite private education, the recuperation of social movements and the reproduction of cultural capital and power.


 
lots of people do that? Why laurie penny in particular? Why her? Why so much time and energy on someone who says nothing to you about your life?


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## DotCommunist (Jan 5, 2013)

hang the blessed DJ


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 5, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> This is just getting extremely creepy and stalky. Going through everything I do on social media for evidence of my life, my friends, speculating about how my friends live, how I live, my school, where I grew up. Please tell me how this is actually contributing for one second to useful political discourse?


 
For a celebrity to court publicity and then complain about intrusive acts of the press is hypocrisy.

For a hack (and I am one) to court publicity and then complain about intrusive acts of others is, frankly risible hypocrisy.

Many hacks (not all, by any means, personally I don't regard gossip-mongering as proper journalism) love to stick their noses into the lives of others and then accuse them of hypocrisy for courting publicity and then moaning when they can't turn off the tap whenever and however it suits them. You're a hack. Complaining about intrusiveness when your relentless self-promotion knows no bounds, your approach to hard fact seems to be whatever you've already decided has happened and what paints you in a good light, and you'd no doubt screech 'Hypocrisy!' at some celeb/politician/insert media tart here making any similar complaints about you is, frankly, utterly ridiculous.

Regarding useful political discourse, hacks like exposing people who parade themselves as being something other than they really are for personal gain and profit. Well, so do legitimate political activists who are pig-sick of self-appointed 'voices of the movement' using other people's hard graft and willingness to put themselves at considerable personal risk as a leg up the career ladder or some 'Prada Meinhof'-style ego-boost.

For myself, it's nothing personal. I just don't like fakery, I don't like what I call 'crowdsurfers' using other people's sweat and effort for their own personal gain and I particularly loathe them when they start whining about how awful it is that not everybody agrees with whatever bill of goods they're trying to sell and, shock horror, has the audacity to bring up the fact on a public forum where, within reason and legality, we're not required to cover things up to save anyone's delicate little ego. That includes all the posters here which, seeing as you are one, also happens to include you.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 5, 2013)

Nice one said:


> lots of people do that? Why laurie penny in particular? Why her? Why so much time and energy on someone who says nothing to you about your life?


Maybe 'she' (and the construction of 'she') says something about wider society (and specific parts of it), _how_ it operates, to whose benefit and that all that combines to impact on the lifes of people here in various ways.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 5, 2013)

love detective said:


> Waitrose is like a middle class version of hooters
> 
> I'm sure they discriminate on how you look when employing, it's always full of dainty young english rose types


Not in the branches I've been to.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> There was a kid at my school who could put a 5p up his nose and then cough it up out of his mouth. At the time it was the most impressive thing I had ever seen and I wanted to grow up to be like him. I've never quite got over the disappointment of not doing.


 
What makes you thınk you dıdn't?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 5, 2013)

Nice one said:


> lots of people do that? Why laurie penny in particular? Why her? Why so much time and energy on someone who says nothing to you about your life?



I thought that when people helped you check your privilege, you were meant to accept it as a well-intended gift. So what's her problem?


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 5, 2013)

_Dress code more relaxed after 2am._

Bastards.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 5, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> What makes you thınk you dıdn't?


 
Because I can't put a 5p up my nose and cough it up obviously.


----------



## olenyok (Jan 5, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Please tell me how this is actually contributing for one second to useful political discourse?


 
Oh, ok, missed the question in there because it's tone was of a rhetorical one.

The contribution being made relates to the contradiction between your presentation as someone who speaks on political and economic issues with authority, and representatively of disenfranchised people, and the reality that you don't really know what you're talking about. The expensively promoted illusion that you're voicing some of the best stuff that the left has to offer is an oppression of those suffering the injustices it tries to address. Discomforting though it doubtless is, revealing the charlatanism in your work and public presentation is liberating activity which improves the prospects of capitalism's victims.

And it can't be kept impersonal – you don't do that, and power is always personal in the first place.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Because I can't put a 5p up my nose and cough it up obviously.


 
How do you know?


----------



## Belushi (Jan 5, 2013)

I'd rather we left off the photos etc.  It's counterproductive, does look stalkey, and she's a poster now and it isn't usually acceptable to post up pictures of other posters lives even if they are in the public domain. I think there might be more to gain through attempting to engage with her on the issues as equationgirl has done.


----------



## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

Journalist who has grown up as part of the 'online generation' uses award winning online journal (to reach a wide audience) as an extension to their 'work'. Then gets the hump when said journal is used as part of the critique.

Well I can fully understand why you / Laurie would feel a bit uncomfortable about it, but you know Laurie, you did put it out there because you have a massive ego and you love nothing more than people talking and cooing about you. The whole purpose of putting all that online and making it public is you want people to see it.

I wonder if you will be like Tony Benn at his age, 80 odd year old and smoking rollies before a speech you make to middle class festival goers? Somehow I can't imagine it.

Oh and this thread and everyone here is not attacking you personally but what you represent, I still don't think you have got that.


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## SpineyNorman (Jan 5, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> How do you know?


 
Cos I've got about 2 quid stuck up my left nostril


----------



## weepiper (Jan 5, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I'd rather we left off the photos etc. It's counterproductive, does look stalkey, and she's a poster now and it isn't usually acceptable to post up pictures of other posters lives even if they are in the public domain. I think there might be more to gain through attempting to engage with her on the issues as equationgirl has done.


 
yes, we just all end up in an indignant rage loop. It doesn't really help anything change. It might help if @lauriepenny started engaging with other threads on the forum too.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 5, 2013)

firky said:


> Oh and this thread and everyone here is not attacking you personally but what you represent, I still don't think you have got that.


 
The bedroom stuff does kind of cloud that message though, I agree with belushi. She probably shouldn't have put it online if she didn't want people to comment on it but that doesn't mean we _have _to comment on it does it?


----------



## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

I never said that we have to comment on it.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 5, 2013)

I wasn't suggesting that you had - just don't think it's helpful is all, makes it all about the individual rather than what they represent.


----------



## binka (Jan 5, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I think there might be more to gain through attempting to engage with her on the issues as equationgirl has done.


i dont think there'd be much to gain from that tbh. it's pretty clear she doesn't really know what she's talking about and isn't interested in anything anyone here might have to say


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## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

Bit curt with you, norman, sorry. Belushi is right but there's more to it than ogling over photos of her - if LP actually took time to think for a moment she would see that. However I believe she only objects to it because it is being used to criticise when she's more used to flattery and sycophantic tweets from her instagram snaps than anything else.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I wasn't suggesting that you had - just don't think it's helpful is all, makes it all about the individual rather than what they represent.



That's true. But what...or who...does she represent?...other than being 'the voice of the left'?
Jumping on fashionable banwagons isn't really a coherent position. Also, whenever 'names' engage on a thread they're generally inhibited by a number of factors:

1) a nagging feeling that: "shouldn't I be getting paid for this?"
2) an inability to comprehend that once they "have spoken", no fundamental shift has taken place
3) a belief that dissent is a sign of ignorance, racism, misogyny etc

I think it would be great if she engaged in discussion. I just don't think her notion of discussion is the same as yours; I think she'd regard it as dispensing her wisdom for 'charity'. I think you'd be disappointed by the result and probably branded a racist again within a couple of exchanges.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> There was a bloke in my year whose younger brother was notorious for supposedly eating a creme egg from his girlfriend's twat. Sort of a 1970s version of Mick 'n' Marianne's Mars bar.


 
what's the point of that?


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 5, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Until I was 24 the only book I read had 6 2nd class stamps in it


 
Plenty of pictures.Did you finish it?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 5, 2013)

The tramps' buffet in Waitrose is best of all supermarkets. You can get posh meats discounted from pounds to pennies.
So if you are skint and live near a Waitrose, you are lucky. 
That is all.


----------



## love detective (Jan 5, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I think you'd be disappointed by the result and probably branded a racist again within a couple of exchanges.



And then have to apologise to her again like the last time


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 5, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> The tramps' buffet in Waitrose is best of all supermarkets. You can get posh meats discounted from pounds to pennies.
> So if you are skint and live near a Waitrose, you are lucky.
> That is all.


 

its not a well represented chain in these parts, and the few branches that are seem to have trained their security bods and installed a prole radar. Might check out the cheapness meats though, first I've heard of that.


----------



## rekil (Jan 5, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I'd rather we left off the photos etc. It's counterproductive, does look stalkey, and she's a poster now and it isn't usually acceptable to post up pictures of other posters lives even if they are in the public domain. I think there might be more to gain through attempting to engage with her on the issues as equationgirl has done.


I'd (still) like to know what they were thinking when this atrocity was created. Look at it. Gaze and despair ye so-called lefties.





> This is the first painting I've done that hasn't been scooped up by collectors yet, so if you're interested, get in touch.


Still unsold


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## Orang Utan (Jan 5, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> its not a well represented chain in these parts, and the few branches that are seem to have trained their security bods and installed a prole radar. Might check out the cheapness meats though, first I've heard of that.


You can get a whole side of salmon down the front of your tracky bottoms if you're wearing the right kind


----------



## olenyok (Jan 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> The bedroom stuff does kind of cloud that message though, I agree with belushi. She probably shouldn't have put it online if she didn't want people to comment on it but that doesn't mean we _have _to comment on it does it?


 
If LP's inextricable work/self-presentation serves the interests of capital, for example as a star/celebrity journalist/personality cult for people to silently hand over their agency to, this seems like deciding that capital is allowed to operate in personal dimensions, to humanise and disguise itself, but we're going to censor ourselves from talking about it as such.

The impression of familiarity (eg bedroom photo) is a vital disguise technique used to sell music, soup - why not in promoting misleading authority figures and the corollary of disempowerment? Or misrepresentations of left wing critiques? It's always better if the celebrity spokespeople believe in the product, and more vital when they are the object of attempts at commodification. Backing away altogether from discussing LPs faux-private life as transmitted at us is actually a retreat from the political. She wouldn't mind for a second anyone commenting on it positively.

This is a replay of the attempts to switch the focus to her personality, but one which is disguised as an attempt to switch the focus away from that.


----------



## Red Cat (Jan 5, 2013)

firky said:


> Well I can fully understand why you / Laurie would feel a bit uncomfortable about it, but you know Laurie, you did put it out there because you have a massive ego and you love nothing more than people talking and cooing about you. The whole purpose of putting all that online and making it public is you want people to see it.
> 
> I wonder if you will be like Tony Benn at his age, 80 odd year old and smoking rollies before a speech you make to middle class festival goers? Somehow I can't imagine it.
> 
> Oh and this thread and everyone here is not attacking you personally but what you represent, I still don't think you have got that.


 
I don't think many of us would be able to make those distinctions if it was us who was being talked about as the representation. Especially as her actions re.this thread have shown her in a very, very poor light. It's been a bit of both really hasn't it?

I don't think she has a massive ego, I think she's insecure. People who are really sure of themselves don't need constant affirmation. I don't think it's right to get too personal online about a stranger but I'm going to say it again, she seems quite vulnerable to me. And I can't forget that she's only fairly recently recovered from anorexia. All this doesn't sit right with me.


----------



## One_Stop_Shop (Jan 5, 2013)

I'm sure you can have a massive ego and be insecure though can't you, but I'm no Freud! But as a general point you are right that people with a massive amount of confidence often don't need affirmation. But then again where as Cameron and Clegg seem totally sure of themselves like typical public school boys, Osbourne seems to come across as totally insecure. Under all that public school confidence I think a lot of those types do have an insecurity, maybe around the issues of being abandoned at boarding school, who knows.

In the main I agree with Red Cat that it's better to stick to the ideas than a person. I can see why people would get wound up with LP given what she's said on here and as a journo, but on the grand scale of things?

Having said that she has avoided all the serious stuff. A few questions were asked about if she is in the NUJ, what she through of various issues in the publications she has worked for etc and she has ignored all of them.

Also she is talking about privalige but ignores any class basis. Would that be by any chance because she is from a privaliged background? It's ridiculous to think that identiy politics alone cover what power relations can be. A middle class woman can often have huge power relations over a working class man for instance. Or you can get bosses from a BME background who oppress all their workers no matter what their gender, race etc Why won't LP even acknowledge that?

Then she said people on here are saying that only white working class men can be oppressed, when no-one has said anything like that as far as I can see. Of course gender, race, sexuality etc are huge issues, but at the same time that's all underpinned and mixed in with class oppression. For instance the experience of a middle class woman is very different from a working class woman. LP does seem to have many of the condesending attitudes that many middle class people have, and doens't seem to realise that she is totally unable to understand the lives of many oppressed people she claims to speak for. Indeed as she hasn't got a clue what it is like to be working class, she seems to just shunt the issue of class over to one side.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 5, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> You can get a whole side of salmon down the front of your tracky bottoms if you're wearing the right kind


TMI


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 5, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> I don't think she has a massive ego, I think she's insecure. People who are really sure of themselves don't need constant affirmation. I don't think it's right to get too personal online about a stranger but I'm going to say it again, she seems quite vulnerable to me. And I can't forget that she's only fairly recently recovered from anorexia. All this doesn't sit right with me.



Massive egos and insecurity are hardly mutually exclusive. And what you're suggesting seems to be to give her a free pass to write or post whatever she wants, however misguided, outlandish or confected without challenge...and given her fragile disposition, maybe that would be the most responsible thing. Then again, there's always the alternative used by the knowing and privilege-conscious: if you find yourself posting something which might upset her by challenging something she's written or said, then simply preface your comment with a trigger warning.

(TRIGGER WARNING: includes content that may upset those with fragile egos and massive sense of entitlement)

Should do the job


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 5, 2013)

One_Stop_Shop said:


> Osbourne seems to come across as totally insecure. Under all that public school confidence I think a lot of those types do have an insecurity, maybe around the issues of being abandoned at boarding school, who knows.


 
I was chatting to a civil servant over Christmas who reckoned that Tory MPs were far more popular than Labour MPs amongst the civil service and that Osborne was the most popular MP of all. They can't all have gone to school with him, can they?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 5, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> This is just getting extremely creepy and stalky. Going through everything I do on social media for evidence of my life, my friends, speculating about how my friends live, how I live, my school, where I grew up. Please tell me how this is actually contributing for one second to useful political discourse?


 
The "new media" that you're a proponent of is a double-edged sword. If you write about yourself and effectively autobiographise your life across the web, print media and on twitter, then how can you possibly be surprised if that autobiography/self-publicising generates comment?
How does it contribute to useful political discourse? That's simply answered: It contributes to the likes of me broadening the understanding of the likes of me that our salvation lies with ourselves, not with idle vessels who wear the latest cause like a sloganeering tee-shirt, to be cast off when the next cause comes along, and not with the vanguardists.


----------



## One_Stop_Shop (Jan 5, 2013)

I learnt that phrase "trigger warning" recently. I have to say that I do find the middle class, and often studenty, attempts to fight oppression quite irritating sometimes. They invent these types of phrases yet seem totally unaware of their own prejudices, and especially their own class prejudices. They also seem totally unaware that most of the genuine victories against oppression and bigotry have come from working class action, not an article in the New Statesman. That kind of working class action they are very unlikely to ever be a part of, or ever even really understand.

I'll never forget when I went to university and was told by these earnest middle class types that I couldn't be a socialist because I was wearing gold jewellery and Nike clothing. You couldn't make it up.

Not a real lefty. Obviously. The real issue is that private school kids are getting pressured in to going to Oxbridge. Brings a tear to the eye.


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## One_Stop_Shop (Jan 5, 2013)

> I was chatting to a civil servant over Christmas who reckoned that Tory MPs were far more popular than Labour MPs amongst the civil service and that Osborne was the most popular MP of all. They can't all have gone to school with him, can they?


 
No idea and not sure what that's got to do with him being insecure or not. Also not sure he is very popular with most of the country.


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## ViolentPanda (Jan 5, 2013)

firky said:


> Bit curt with you, norman, sorry. Belushi is right but there's more to it than ogling over photos of her - if LP actually took time to think for a moment she would see that. However I believe she only objects to it because it is being used to criticise when she's more used to flattery and sycophantic tweets from her instagram snaps than anything else.


 
I think it's more basic than that. I remember being in my twenties and being political. I was convinced that MY version of political reality was the *right* version. Mostly I was convinced of that because the alternatives were such toss, but I grew out of it because I deliberately challenged my own views as much as I challenged the views of others. That has *got* to be harder to do *and to see* when you can get almost instant reinforcement that your own views are right from your blog-readers and twitter followers.


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## ViolentPanda (Jan 5, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> I was chatting to a civil servant over Christmas who reckoned that Tory MPs were far more popular than Labour MPs amongst the civil service and that Osborne was the most popular MP of all. They can't all have gone to school with him, can they?


 
!) You're talking about mid-level and senior Civil Servants.

2) It's not so much about popularity w/r/t Osborne being a good bloke. What it tends to mean is that he's easy to work for and isn't arrogant or rude (or is less arrogant and rude than his peers).

3) I'm not surprised that he might be easier to work for/with than his Labour predecessors. Cameron made very clear to his people while still in opposition that they shouldn't alienate the Civil Service in the way that new Labour had, but rather go out of their way to cultivate them.


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## Red Cat (Jan 5, 2013)

One_Stop_Shop said:


> I'm sure you can have a massive ego and be insecure though can't you, but I'm no Freud! But as a general point you are right that people with a massive amount of confidence often don't need affirmation. But then again where as Cameron and Clegg seem totally sure of themselves like typical public school boys, Osbourne seems to come across as totally insecure. Under all that public school confidence I think a lot of those types do have an insecurity, maybe around the issues of being abandoned at boarding school, who knows.


 
Yes, you're right, of course it's not that simple or deterministic. The poise that results from a lifetime of social, economic and political entitlement can co-exist with deep personal insecurities.


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## cesare (Jan 5, 2013)

On the subject of "trigger warnings" is it only me that finds these demands for demarcated safe spaces annoying? Surely all spaces should be safe unless there's a clear risk (of arrest, or violence, or whatever) which is highlighted.


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## DotCommunist (Jan 5, 2013)

I think what irks me about it all is this conflation of having a platform to express left views (through a certain prism!), a platform denied to the majority, being touted as 'doing something'. Being at the barricades and writing a book about it. Tweeting while Greece burns.

I'm a crap socialist, I don't do enough reading, I only ever march when its affordable or frogz drags me along and my only contribution to the 'cause' is to try and convince people about the iniquity of the system when politics is discussed. And with my set its a 5 beers down discussion, so nailing jelly to the wall.


But there are people on here, missis included, who do a lot more thinking and doing. Plenty on here  have lived struggles. LP dismisses them as trolls. She's a glib phrase merchant. 

the arcana of kryptonite theory or whatever its called is deliberately isolating to the w/c.Old labour chauvinist, reactionary lumpen etc etc et fucking cetera

the examination of minutia regarding Daves personal life does allow her to cry 'creepy troll' but her refusal to engage with the more serious tangents on this thread is telling.


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## Red Cat (Jan 5, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Massive egos and insecurity are hardly mutually exclusive. And what you're suggesting seems to be to give her a free pass to write or post whatever she wants, however misguided, outlandish or confected without challenge...and given her fragile disposition, maybe that would be the most responsible thing. Then again, there's always the alternative used by the knowing and privilege-conscious: if you find yourself posting something which might upset her by challenging something she's written or said, then simply preface your comment with a trigger warning.
> 
> (TRIGGER WARNING: includes content that may upset those with fragile egos and massive sense of entitlement)
> 
> Should do the job


 
Narcissism is probably a better word for massive ego and that does tend to go along with insecurity. But regardless of your take on it, she has had a very serious and often fatal mental illness.

I'm not giving her a free pass at all, I've agreed with the political criticisms, and I don't like what I've seen or heard of her, but I don't think she's that powerful. She reminds me of an annoying teenager, she doesn't appear to be that smart and she's not that articulate. I already said that she was a shit stirrer and provoked the very things she attacks. But I disagree that she has a massive sense of entitlement - she seems pretty ordinary middle-class to me and often out of her depth. She's not ruling class is she?


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## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

WTF is a trigger warning, another manarchist phrase I have mixxed?


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## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

Harry Haller said:


> Jesus Christ. My mam could make a balls of doing us some fish fingers.


 
My mum ruined Christmas dinner this year, she was so drunk she could not open the tin of spam.

PFWC.


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## barney_pig (Jan 5, 2013)

Harry Haller said:


> Jesus Christ. My mam could make a balls of doing us some fish fingers.


My mums bad cooking is a legend in our family, though cooking lobster is not much more difficult than boiling an egg, although eggs don't wriggle as they go in the water.


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## DotCommunist (Jan 5, 2013)

firky said:


> My mum ruined Christmas dinner this year, she was so drunk she could not open the tin of spam.
> 
> PFWC.


 

my brother wasn't allowed to my house this christmas because he called mum a cunt on the phone and was to prideful to take it back just to keep the yule peace.

I ate my chrismas feast alone while ma slept off two bottles of cheap fizz. Pulled a cracker with the dog who was angered by the snapping noise but made short work of the small plastic comb. Small enough to be a pube comb. Doctor Who was scorchio good, so the day was not lost.


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## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

This is going to turn into another Four Yorkshiremen sketch.


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## Favelado (Jan 5, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Well, at least you're not digging out of the bins of Carrefour at night like some of my neighbours.
> 
> Cue 4 Yorkshiremen.


 
Well. It's been coming for a couple of pages.

We were so poor that one birthday my mum told me she hadn't bought me a present because she had "bought me some socks last week."

That is true but I'm telling you because I want your pity.


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## DotCommunist (Jan 5, 2013)

firky said:


> This is going to turn into another Four Yorkshiremen sketch.


 

christmas is rubbish though unless you are a kid or have a kid. In the hinterlands of knocking 30 males its just an excuse to get pished and eat imo.


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## Favelado (Jan 5, 2013)

However, I'm from Lancashire and Yorkshire can fuck right off.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 5, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> . But I disagree that she has a massive sense of entitlement - she seems pretty ordinary middle-class to me and often out of her depth. She's not ruling class is she?



Not sure i agree here. I think she's a massive sense of entitlement to the extent that she clearly expects...not exactly deference...but a special premium accorded to her views. Wasn't there something about "if you'd read my work, you'd know that.."?...which implies that a knowledge of her work is a must for any cutting-edge lefty...as well as the suggestion that to have read it is to concur with its self-evident logic.

So why does she expect her writing to be given a greater weight than that of others?... can you imagine her response if someone had replied: "yes Laurie, but if you'd been following my work..."
Does she think she's earned the right to be taken seriously because she's got a column in the NS...because she's Oxbridge...because she was the smartest kid in a very expensive school...or because there's a hard core of impressionable idiots who fuckin swoon about everything she writes?

And, appropriately enough...if we switched to post-structuralist or deconstructionist terminology, what she seems to expect for her own 'work' is that it is 'privileged' over that of 'decentred' alternatives. In those terms she regards her brand of leftism...identity, single one-off hip agendas and an infatuation with an anarchist aesthetic...to be the mainstream of left-wing thought; rather than a bunch of hipster tourists striking poses before they bow to the inevitable mortgage and pension plan. You'll know it's come full circle in a few years when the Guardian supplement carries her breathless justification for hiring a nanny so she can continue her vital work on empowering oppressed women.


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## Red Cat (Jan 5, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Not sure i agree here. I think she's a massive sense of entitlement to the extent that she clearly expects...not exactly deference...but a special premium accorded to her views. Wasn't there something about "if you'd read my work, you'd know that.."?...which implies that a knowledge of her work is a must for any cutting-edge lefty...as well as the suggestion that to have read it is to concur with its self-evident logic.


 
Yes, you're right she does have a sense of entitlement. And it is that entitlement that was being challenged on this thread. It just feels more shaky than solid to me. Anyway, I'm not able to convey what I mean because it comes from a sense of her, which may be wrong, and doesn't really alter anything politically anyway.

I just can't get over how small she seems in comparison to the attacks on us. Here in Brum the council are closing down 5 children's homes with the lie that it's better for them to be in foster homes despite there not being enough foster homes available for them to go to. Some of the most vulnerable children in our society are going to lose their home (however imperfect) and this upsets and angers me so much and makes me feel so powerless.....and Laurie Penny just seems so irrelevant.


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## BigTom (Jan 5, 2013)

firky said:


> WTF is a trigger warning, another manarchist phrase I have mixxed?


 
trigger warning = the (usually linked) content has stuff about rape/abuse/whatever that might trigger emotional reactions from bad memories / anxiety or ptsd type problems for people who have experienced similar traumatic events so they don't read it / are prepared for reading it before they do.


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## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

BigTom said:


> trigger warning = the (usually linked) content has stuff about rape/abuse/whatever that might trigger emotional reactions from bad memories / anxiety or ptsd type problems for people who have experienced similar traumatic events so they don't read it / are prepared for reading it before they do.


 
Thanks, so it's like the a warning. That's fair enough I guess, not one I'd choose to heed: I prefer to confront my fears and anxieties than avoid them, but it is hard to do sometimes. Especially when the most seemingly innocent things can spark something off.

The Neon Roberts affair resonated quite loudly with me. Watching the news and all of a sudden a massive smack to the face with a sledge-hammer.


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## SpineyNorman (Jan 5, 2013)

love detective said:


> And then have to apologise to her again like the last time


 
Fuck off


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 5, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Yes, you're right she does have a sense of entitlement. And it is that entitlement that was being challenged on this thread. It just feels more shaky than solid to me. Anyway, I'm not able to convey what I mean because it comes from a sense of her, which may be wrong, and doesn't really alter anything politically anyway.
> 
> I just can't get over how small she seems in comparison to the attacks on us. Here in Brum the council are closing down 5 children's homes with the lie that it's better for them to be in foster homes despite there not being enough foster homes available for them to go to. Some of the most vulnerable children in our society are going to lose their home (however imperfect) and this upsets and angers me so much and makes me feel so powerless.....and Laurie Penny just seems so irrelevant.



Well yeah..she is irrelevant, or should be, but she has been accorded this special status by the msm either from laziness (simply because she looks the part and writes like an angry student and already has a profile-largely thanks to her background) or because she suits everybody's purpose (noisy but ultimately political incompetent and toothless; a focus for righteous but aimless indignation; a posturing stunt-pulling naïf) 

I think she feels this pseudo-status she's been granted entitles her to a special hearing, particularly on the left. That there are huge sections of the left who consider her a useful idiot seems to dismay her. But rather than trying to understand why she prefers to blithely dismiss them as unreconstructed 70s sitcom characters wallowing in unexamined privilege, racism and sexism...which is basically patronising, lazy and intellectually dishonest.

As to the vulnerability which you seem to sense, I agree. She sometimes strikes me as a bit flaky. I'm sure I've even seen her say somewhere that her online persona was originally adopted and modelled on a riot grrl cartoon character and bore little relation to the real her. It may be that she's taken the whole thing too far and possibly the character has taken over and led her to say and do things 'in character' that don't really apply in reality. Perhaps it's time for her to rein it all in a bit, try some serious journalism and start reporting some objective facts instead of a per-ordained self-serving narrative. I think that way, the criticism might stop and, with it, any danger of a melt down.


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## SpineyNorman (Jan 5, 2013)

olenyok said:


> If LP's inextricable work/self-presentation serves the interests of capital, for example as a star/celebrity journalist/personality cult for people to silently hand over their agency to, this seems like deciding that capital is allowed to operate in personal dimensions, to humanise and disguise itself, but we're going to censor ourselves from talking about it as such.
> 
> The impression of familiarity (eg bedroom photo) is a vital disguise technique used to sell music, soup - why not in promoting misleading authority figures and the corollary of disempowerment? Or misrepresentations of left wing critiques? It's always better if the celebrity spokespeople believe in the product, and more vital when they are the object of attempts at commodification. Backing away altogether from discussing LPs faux-private life as transmitted at us is actually a retreat from the political. She wouldn't mind for a second anyone commenting on it positively.
> 
> This is a replay of the attempts to switch the focus to her personality, but one which is disguised as an attempt to switch the focus away from that.


 
Is it bollocks - you sound like one of Laurie's mates. 

I'm not interested in her bedroom and I don't consider it a particularly fruitful line of discussion. This is taken by you to be some kind of sophisticated means of shutting down debate? Fuck off 

To use your capital analogy looking at the bedroom is like focusing on bankers' cocaine habits instead of the ways in which they facilitate capital accumulation.


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## SpineyNorman (Jan 5, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> That's true. But what...or who...does she represent?...other than being 'the voice of the left'?
> Jumping on fashionable banwagons isn't really a coherent position. Also, whenever 'names' engage on a thread they're generally inhibited by a number of factors:
> 
> 1) a nagging feeling that: "shouldn't I be getting paid for this?"
> ...


 
She's not going to enagage in the discussion whatever we do really. And what she represents is the way in which the establishment promote their own 'progrieesives' who act as gatekeepers of radical debate. Because she enjoys the one privilege whose destruction would entail the destruction of the system itself it means the focus is only on causes that can potentially be coopted by capital, as she has been.


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## smokedout (Jan 5, 2013)

Nice one said:


> lots of people do that? Why laurie penny in particular? Why her? Why so much time and energy on someone who says nothing to you about your life?


 
tbf johann, owen, billy bragg, in fact most of them who claim to be voices of the left have been given a kicking on here at some point.  I don't recall any bedroom shots befpre, but then polly toynbee doesnt post up pictures of her bedroom on the internet to try and convince people how proly she is


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## cesare (Jan 5, 2013)

If we want her to engage; there are better ways of doing it than giving her ammunition not to.

If we don't want her to engage; there are more interesting conversations to be had than about her lifestyle eg why people like her and her ilk are so damaging, and furthering working class struggle despite them.

Edit: also, as someone else said, she is a poster now. Sunny Hundal isn't though. He deserves some attention.


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## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> On the subject of "trigger warnings" is it only me that finds these demands for demarcated safe spaces annoying? Surely all spaces should be safe unless there's a clear risk (of arrest, or violence, or whatever) which is highlighted.


 
trigger warnings originally were to do with descriptions of traumatic events or thoughts i think. you have them a lot in psychological forums (or you did). so if somebody was describing something that happened to them they would put a trigger warning at the top of the post to warn people that it was on a distressing topic and other people might be distressed by it. Or if somebody on the website had a phobia of spiders (for example) and the persons post was about an encounter with a spider then they would put a trigger warning on it.

I don't really think it has any place in political discourse tho, it has its place in things like the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, but even then. And I suffer from a condition that is partially all about avoidance of things or events i am scared of (or things which might be traumatic) it strikes me that these kind of warnings could just facilitate avoidance behaviours which i have enough of a problem with anyway. The aim should be to overcome anxiety and not indulge it or use it as an excuse.


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## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> If we want her to engage; there are better ways of doing it than giving her ammunition not to.
> 
> If we don't want her to engage; there are more interesting conversations to be had than about her lifestyle eg why people like her and her ilk are so damaging, and furthering working class struggle despite them.
> 
> Edit: also, as someone else said, she is a poster now. Sunny Hundal isn't though. He deserves some attention.


Can we still discuss her work?


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## cesare (Jan 5, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Can we still discuss her work?


That's up to everyone, my earlier post was just what I thought   For myself I'd be happy to discuss her work, but I'm not sure that there's a great deal to be said because there's not much to it yet. I downloaded and read that 69 page one, are there others?


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## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

just another thing while we're on the topic.

indulging anxiety etc by warning somebody if they're going to see something they don't want to see or the like, is actually really harmful to somebodys recovery from having an anxiety disorder. it can be useful if you have a panic attack every time you say think about spiders, in terms of gradually introducing you to the object of your fear so that eventually you can sit with a tarantula in your lap and not be too traumatised by it. But once that point is reached (and hopefully before) warning someone every time they're going to see or do something they don't like is actually really fucking harmful. it means that you never fully learn to deal with it because every time it is viewed as some big deal that you have to be carefully warned about. that is why you shouldn't really reassure sufferers of ocd when asked "did I lock the door" or whatever, you should say something like "well i dunno" or whatever just so you learn to live with the uncertainty. Putting trigger warnings on everything just reinforces the idea in peoples minds that they can't live with things and they are too weak or whatever to handle everything, which is actually a result of the anxiety disorder anyway, and reinforces the fear and low self esteem created by it.

i frequently suffer badly with ocd btw, and i wish i could take my own advice at times. but the best times when i've managed to get over stuff that i was scared of is when i wasn't properly "prepared" for any of this shit


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## One_Stop_Shop (Jan 5, 2013)

My living room looks quite nice. Mainly IKEA. Not a proper lefty.


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## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> That's up to everyone, my earlier post was just what I thought  For myself I'd be happy to discuss her work, but I'm not sure that there's a great deal to be said because there's not much to it yet. I downloaded and read that 69 page one, are there others?


I read some of her stuff from her blog, but I wasn't overly impressed by that. It felt sensationalist, as of some of the facts had been exaggerated or extrapolated, like the stuff with the blood banks.


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## rekil (Jan 5, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Can we still discuss her work?


LP's work. Running around Chicago trying to leech onto anti-NATO protests shortly after cheering NATO on. Now _that's_ creepy and stalkery. Creepy and stalkery internationalism.


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## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

One_Stop_Shop said:


> My living room looks quite nice. Mainly IKEA. Not a proper lefty.


My living room is a tip.


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## One_Stop_Shop (Jan 5, 2013)

> My living room is a tip.


 
Proper lefty then.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> Edit: also, as someone else said, she is a poster now. Sunny Hundal isn't though. He deserves some attention.



Hallelujah! Yeah so true. And just to keep things in proportion, I think it's fair to say that if LP has been given a kicking then Hundal needs to be hung, drawn and eighthed. His pretentions and self-regard leave Laurie Penny looking like some kinda model of humility and restraint.
I'm pretty sure he has fantasies where the faithful queue up to touch the hem of his donkey jacket as cure for unexamined privilege, or whatever the 21st century concerned liberal equivalent of leprosy is...this week. 
And best of all...he's not just a deluded wishful thinker, he's genuinely thick. Any interviewer or discussion just has to go remotely off-script and he's floundering about like a beached porpoise.


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## SpineyNorman (Jan 5, 2013)

I've got solid wood tables, bookcases and cabinets in my front room. And a leather sofa. I'm practically a Tory I reckon.

I don't own any of it and have to do maintenance on the flats to knock the rent down to a rate I can afford but that's not the point - my front room is nice so I'm like royalty or something.


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## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

oh, and you don't fucking WANT a serious, life-destroying anxiety disorder btw its not something you want to parade around to show how right on you are, you don't WANT to have it control your life and be the type of person that even has to _think_ about "trigger warnings" and the like, any more than you want to have aids or be in a wheelchair. I've lost loads of friends, had problems with work, education etc because of this. It's not some fucking thing that you can talk about to boost your privilege credentials. It is not a fashion accessory, it can destroy people's life, their health etc, and calling for special treatment does not help the sufferer, it only makes it worse.


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## One_Stop_Shop (Jan 5, 2013)

Solid wood and leather sofa  you definitely aren't a proper lefty! I don't wear it anymore, but I used to wear a sovereign ring. I felt I was moving in the right direction at that point, but then the IKEA furniture has set me back to square one 

On a serious note while I find these kind of middle class radicals irritating quite a bit of the time, I don't think they are of any real significance most of the time. I've never even heard of Hundal for instance and when there is any serious working class reistance (sadly it's not great from that point of view at the moment), then these kind of figures will be a total irrelevance. They may be of interest to Guardian readers but what influence do they have in reality?


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## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)




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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 5, 2013)

One_Stop_Shop said:


> They may be of interest to Guardian readers but what influence do they have in reality?



More than you realise. If the BBC want a lefty perspective...it's LP or Owen Jones...Sky call in Hundal. If your interest in politics consists in no more than watching or listening to the news, then these people are the fuckin left.


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## One_Stop_Shop (Jan 5, 2013)

frogwoman I agree with a lot of what you have said. I also have suffered very badly with anxiety and depression over the years and had the same kind of problems that you have mentioned, including losing a job. While I can see what you are saying about special treatment, it depends what you mean. For instance I think that schools, colleges, universities and workplaces should all make "reasonable adjustments". Often with mental health issues they just aren't recognised as being valid and then is a lot of prejudices around it. My employer has been making massive cuts, and there is no doubt that disabled people are being hit disproportionately. One steward in my work (who is amazing) organised a demonstration outside one of our workplaces to stop two disabled workers getting the sack (and won!), and part of the case she put forward was that the employer should make reasonable adjustments (see here: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...lambeth-demonstration-tomorrow-friday.278382/). I actually cried when I found out she had won that case, as I knew if they had of got the sack they may well never have worked again given the unemployment rates for disable people.

Totally off topic now but how UNITE and the GMB sold out the Remploy workers who now face mass redundancy makes my blood boil.


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## One_Stop_Shop (Jan 5, 2013)

That a fair point actually Ronnie, maybe I'm underestimating it. I do a lot of political and trade union work and hadn't heard of Hundal, but then don't watch Sky news much (no reason for not watching it, just don't). But have seen Owen Jones loads in the last year, they seem to bring him out for so many shows now. I do find that really irritating. On Question TIme I don't see why at least one or two of the places around the table can't just be ordinary people.


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## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

oh yeah I completely agree with that. I would never put down having ocd when they ask about disabilities in a job application, because i am scared that it would mean that nobody would hire me, and that fear isn't a result of the ocd, it is something that actually happens. i think that mental health is way too stigmatised and assumed to be the sufferers' fault. I also agree about how employers should be more understanding, i also think that a lot of anxiety etc is related to life, work etc, ie its not something that just happens, there is always a cause behind it.

what i mean is that in terms of recovery it can be well damaging to warn people every time they're about to be exposed to something nasty. coz it makes them feel that they can't cope.and also watch that video about what that guy is saying about "identifying" with the ocd (or whatever the anxiety disorder is) and wanting to do whatever it says that we should do, as i think this is very true



One_Stop_Shop said:


> frogwoman I agree with a lot of what you have said. I also have suffered very badly with anxiety and depression over the years and had the same kind of problems that you have mentioned, including losing a job. While I can see what you are saying about special treatment, it depends what you mean. For instance I think that schools, colleges, universities and workplaces should all make "reasonable adjustments". Often with mental health issues they just aren't recognised as being valid and then is a lot of prejudices around it. My employer has been making massive cuts, and there is no doubt that disabled people are being hit disproportionately. One steward in my work (who is amazing) organised a demonstration outside one of our workplaces to stop two disabled workers getting the sack (and won!), and part of the case she put forward was that the employer should make reasonable adjustments (see here: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...lambeth-demonstration-tomorrow-friday.278382/). I actually cried when I found out she had won that case, as I knew if they had of got the sack they may well never have worked again given the unemployment rates for disable people.
> 
> Totally off topic now but how UNITE and the GMB sold out the Remploy workers who now face mass redundancy makes my blood boil.


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## One_Stop_Shop (Jan 5, 2013)

Will check the video out. The job I left because of my depression/anxiety, I actually went back to the same employer five years later. And because I'd been honest at the time I had to have medical assessments when I went back, even though my employment record showed I'd been working for years. The same as you I've never put it down on the have you got a disability bit on job forms because you know it will lead to discrimination rather than any understanding. I think things have got slightly better, but not a lot.


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## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

I really recommend checking out those videos, not just for ocd but for any anxiety disorder, the guy is very good and very easy to listen to and what hes saying is very good advice and very interesting.


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## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

I'd watch them again and again and again and again (sorry) 

I dunno... I think if you wrap others and yourself up in cotton wool it can be more damaging but everyone is different and reacts differently so I don't thinky ou can really say if TW are bad or good.


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## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)




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## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

Yeah, compulsively seeking out things you're scared of or triggered off by isn't so good either. I've done that before in the past.


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## tufty79 (Jan 5, 2013)

fwiw, i've really appreciated trigger warnings being posted - ptsd context rather than ocd here, dunno how different that is?

re discrimination.. with my current job (and the last one, come to think of it), i was straight with 'em in my application/interview about my mh history/disability status. i'm not sure that i'd have been considered/taken on if they hadn't been a mh organisation though


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## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> fwiw, i've really appreciated trigger warnings being posted - ptsd context rather than ocd here, dunno how different that is?
> 
> re discrimination.. with my current job (and the last one, come to think of it), i was straight with 'em in my application/interview about my mh history/disability status. i'm not sure that i'd have been considered/taken on if they hadn't been a mh organisation though


 
yer i think ptsd is a bit different. not sure though!


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## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

They're both anxiety disorders.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

One_Stop_Shop said:


> frogwoman I agree with a lot of what you have said. I also have suffered very badly with anxiety and depression over the years and had the same kind of problems that you have mentioned, including losing a job. While I can see what you are saying about special treatment, it depends what you mean. For instance I think that schools, colleges, universities and workplaces should all make "reasonable adjustments". Often with mental health issues they just aren't recognised as being valid and then is a lot of prejudices around it. My employer has been making massive cuts, and there is no doubt that disabled people are being hit disproportionately. One steward in my work (who is amazing) organised a demonstration outside one of our workplaces to stop two disabled workers getting the sack (and won!), and part of the case she put forward was that the employer should make reasonable adjustments (see here: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...lambeth-demonstration-tomorrow-friday.278382/). I actually cried when I found out she had won that case, as I knew if they had of got the sack they may well never have worked again given the unemployment rates for disable people.
> 
> Totally off topic now but how UNITE and the GMB sold out the Remploy workers who now face mass redundancy makes my blood boil.


Point to note: it's not that they should make reasonable adjustments for those with disabilities, it's that they have to by law. But the adjustment itself has to be a sensible adjustment:

Here's a PCS summary:
http://www.pcs.org.uk/en/equality/d...lkit/understanding_reasonable_adjustments.cfm

For example, a reasonable adjustment and one actually backed up by case law is the separation of absence into absences related to the disability and absences unrelated to the disability. So if I've had 14 days absence in the last year, but 10 days was related to chronic kidney disease and 4 days was related to a virus, only the 4 days should be counted for the purposes of absence management. 

Congratulations to your shop steward for winning her fight, that's awesome


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## Delroy Booth (Jan 5, 2013)

oh she's been back. How wonderfully unpredictable.

Any chance of answering those 3 questions I asked you from the first time you stumbled upon this thread? Or do you only take questions from rich people?

Actually no fuck that, and fuck you Laurie Penny. I don't want your answers. At this point there's nothing you could possibly do to salvage any kind of respect or comradery from me.

I really do hope you fuck off properly but I suspect you'll be back, like a moth attracted to a lighbulb you're ego will demand you come on here and make repeated attempts to make us all see the error of our ways and repent. Never, ever, going to happen btw. At least not from me. Not now. You've gone from being a stuck-up celebrity left-winger, who I used to read for shits and giggles and who used to make me cringe, to being someone I think of as a political opponent, and who I dislike quite intensely from the way you've treated people on this board. I wouldn't be any more inclined to want to engage with Laurie Penny than I would want to engage with James Delingpole or Simon Heffer tbh. I think she's worse than Sunny Hundal. Hundal's a pompous liberal, but I think Laurie Penny is a total fraud and a public liability for the whole left. I tell you now if these people are our ambassadors then we're hopelessly fucked. If you had to invent some grotesque caricature of a left-wing writer, oblivious to their own privilige whilst obsessing about everyone else's, someone invented by a spook in mi5,like a clone whose job it was to descredit the left and make it (even more of) a joke to the voting public, then you'd come out with something very much like Laurie Penny.

Yours sincerely, an unemployed socialist from huddersfield in his mid-20's.

PS I've never once said anything sexist about Laurie Penny ever and I don't like it when other people have. But it hasn't made even the slightest bit of fucking difference she's never going to answer my questions. I could be as polite and charming as anyone and it still wouldn't matter, so why fucking bother?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 5, 2013)

Anyway, trigger warnings seems pretty sensible to me on the whole, but I did read an article where someone wrote that they'd recieved emails demanding that a trigger warnings be attached to an article about balloons because there's such a thing as globophobia.

There's a phobia of ladders, I can't remember it's name but I'm sure it exists, a friend of mine who worked as a scaffolder has it. I dunno if he got diagnosed with a specific phobia or just a more general anxiety disorder, but he used to work with ladders daily and now can't set a single foot on one, and gets visibly nervous when even around them. I'm gonna ask him if he thinks there's should be trigger warnings on articles or stories that include ladders. It'd be interesting to see what his take on the whole thing is.


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## Das Uberdog (Jan 5, 2013)

there's been an rash of badly placed 'trigger warnings' mainly in the 'privelige politics' tumblr blogs circuit in the last year or so though, which i think gives the 'trigger warnings' a different context. from being a medical and quite specific warning it's turned in some circles into a cliched phrase attached to anything from waffly long blogs voyeuristically pondering on gender identities to anything remotely related to sex - and as frogwoman suggests above, often it seems that many of these individuals are attributing 'trauma triggers' to themselves as a fashion accessory. i've even seen the shortened use of the word 'trigger' used casually in fb conversations, usually disapprovingly relating to an article or something else posted.

imo 'trigger warnings' should retain their technical usage specifically relating to severe and often quite personalised instances of trauma, and not generalised into a cheap catch-all for anything deemed _risque_ - which is what often happens. in most cases i think the use of an old-fashioned disclaimer is more apt


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

is the aim to promote recovery (ie not to get nervous around ladders, to treat ladders as a normal non threatening object) or to continue avoiding them and avoiding situations where he might be around them or might see them?to entrench that feeling of fear?


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## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

Das Uberdog said:


> there's been an rash of badly placed 'trigger warnings' mainly in the 'privelige politics' tumblr blogs circuit in the last year or so though, which i think gives the 'trigger warnings' a different context. from being a medical and quite specific warning it's turned in some circles into a cliched phrase attached to anything from waffly long blogs voyeuristically pondering on gender identities to anything remotely related to sex - and as frogwoman suggests above, often it seems that many of these individuals are attributing 'trauma triggers' to themselves as a fashion accessory. i've even seen the shortened use of the word 'trigger' used casually in fb conversations, usually disapprovingly relating to an article or something else posted.
> 
> imo 'trigger warnings' should retain their technical usage specifically relating to severe and often quite personalised instances of trauma, and not generalised into a cheap catch-all for anything deemed _risque_ - which is what often happens. in most cases i think the use of an old-fashioned disclaimer is more apt


 
yep.


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## cesare (Jan 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yep.


Yep from me too.

It's not helpful to overuse trigger warnings, they should be occasional/properly thought out so they don't become the subject of ridicule "please phone, even if you don't have a phone" or ignored, or even harmful. The "safe spaces" thing is similar.

ETA: doing things to thoughtlessly highlight difference and make people tiptoe round doesn't make societal changes in a constructive way. Unless we move to revolutionary times, changes will be slower and structural, but deeper seated, hopefully.


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## Captain Hurrah (Jan 5, 2013)

Das Uberdog said:


> imo 'trigger warnings' should retain their technical usage specifically relating to severe and often quite personalised instances of trauma, and not generalised into a cheap catch-all for anything deemed _risque_ - which is what often happens. in most cases i think the use of an old-fashioned disclaimer is more apt


 
Indeed.


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## rekil (Jan 5, 2013)

_'Me creo punky y alternativa
Y no me importa lo que tu me digas
La disciplina es mi enemiga
Y la anarquia mi forma de vida'_

Kel, the Chilean Laura, is a little bit communism, except for the bit at the end, too much self-awareness.


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## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

For those of us not fluent in Castilian?


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## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

Das Uberdog said:


> there's been an rash of badly placed 'trigger warnings' mainly in the 'privelige politics' tumblr blogs circuit in the last year or so though, which i think gives the 'trigger warnings' a different context. from being a medical and quite specific warning it's turned in some circles into a cliched phrase attached to anything from waffly long blogs voyeuristically pondering on gender identities to anything remotely related to sex - and as frogwoman suggests above, often it seems that many of these individuals are attributing 'trauma triggers' to themselves as a fashion accessory. i've even seen the shortened use of the word 'trigger' used casually in fb conversations, usually disapprovingly relating to an article or something else posted.
> 
> imo 'trigger warnings' should retain their technical usage specifically relating to severe and often quite personalised instances of trauma, and not generalised into a cheap catch-all for anything deemed _risque_ - which is what often happens. in most cases i think the use of an old-fashioned disclaimer is more apt


 
Aahh, thanks as well! Much clearer understanding now. I did not realise it had become a term that was thrown around carelessly.


----------



## spawnofsatan (Jan 5, 2013)

firky said:


> For those of us not fluent in Castilian?


 
Same lyrics as 'Pump up the bitter' by Stars on 45 (pints)


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## cesare (Jan 5, 2013)

firky said:


> For those of us not fluent in Castilian?


The Proletarian Democracy despises simplistic assumptions of language skills in their communiques, comrade.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 5, 2013)

Trigger warning

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4381454.stm


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## cesare (Jan 5, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Trigger warning
> 
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4381454.stm


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## rekil (Jan 5, 2013)

firky said:


> For those of us not fluent in Castilian?


She's punky and alternative, she don't care what you say, discipline is her enemy, and anarchy is her way of life, man. And so on.


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## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

I saw Roger Lloyd Pack reading T.S Elliot and he was excellent.

Whole thing was terribly face.


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## Captain Hurrah (Jan 5, 2013)

copliker said:


> She's punky and alternative, she don't care what you say, discipline is her enemy, and anarchy is her way of life, man. And so on.


 
vomits.


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## ViolentPanda (Jan 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> On the subject of "trigger warnings" is it only me that finds these demands for demarcated safe spaces annoying? Surely all spaces should be safe unless there's a clear risk (of arrest, or violence, or whatever) which is highlighted.


 
While I can see the request/demand for safe physical spaces as being a natural concomitant to wanting a psychologically-safe zone, it doesn't seem to occur to many of those demanding them that in some of the _locales_ they demand them, the environment rather than privilege makes them difficult or impossible.
I was horrified when I first heard about the prevalence of attempted sexual assault and harrassment at Occupy! London and its' New York sibling, but I was also horrified that nothing had been planned, and that some sort of Utopian "it'll be alright on the night" _schtick_ had been in play. In that sort of situation "safe spaces" are emotionally and physically necessary.
That said, there's also a facet of the demand that is political and can be (either deliberately or unintentionally) exclusionary -  "there must be a safe space for ***add your identity group here***" - and is aimed at securing advantage/privilege in the name of addressing the same.


----------



## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

I wonder if she ever found an Obama 08 hoodie, she could write a song?


----------



## cesare (Jan 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> While I can see the request/demand for safe physical spaces as being a natural concomitant to wanting a psychologically-safe zone, it doesn't seem to occur to many of those demanding them that in some of the _locales_ they demand them, the environment rather than privilege makes them difficult or impossible.
> I was horrified when I first heard about the prevalence of attempted sexual assault and harrassment at Occupy! London and its' New York sibling, but I was also horrified that nothing had been planned, and that some sort of Utopian "it'll be alright on the night" _schtick_ had been in play. In that sort of situation "safe spaces" are emotionally and physically necessary.
> That said, there's also a facet of the demand that is political and can be (either deliberately or unintentionally) exclusionary -  "there must be a safe space for ***add your identity group here***" - and is aimed at securing advantage/privilege in the name of addressing the same.



I believe that many in the Occupy movement underestimated that it might be hi-jacked by people that use the V mask as a mask for carrying out sexual assault, anti-semitism, conspiracy theory and various other cuntish aspects under cover.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 5, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> More than you realise. If the BBC want a lefty perspective...it's LP or Owen Jones...Sky call in Hundal. If your interest in politics consists in no more than watching or listening to the news, then these people are the fuckin left.


 
Says it all about Sunny Boy that he's the go-to guy for Sky. A left-liberal wedded to parliamentary democracy is probably all the Murdoch drones can manage without spontaneously combusting.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> While I can see the request/demand for safe physical spaces as being a natural concomitant to wanting a psychologically-safe zone, it doesn't seem to occur to many of those demanding them that in some of the _locales_ they demand them, the environment rather than privilege makes them difficult or impossible.
> I was horrified when I first heard about the prevalence of attempted sexual assault and harrassment at Occupy! London and its' New York sibling, but I was also horrified that nothing had been planned, and that some sort of Utopian "it'll be alright on the night" _schtick_ had been in play. In that sort of situation "safe spaces" are emotionally and physically necessary.
> That said, there's also a facet of the demand that is political and can be (either deliberately or unintentionally) exclusionary - "there must be a safe space for ***add your identity group here***" - and is aimed at securing advantage/privilege in the name of addressing the same.


 
if there is a "safe space" for whatever it is then surely that does not address why the rest of it is _unsafe_.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 5, 2013)

My great uncle Stan went to the states in the 50s. Worked his way over to California and even got some work as an extra in westerns. He had to come back home though. He got injured when he was knocked over by Roy Roger's horse. Mind you, they weren't as clued up privilege-wise back then.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 5, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Hallelujah! Yeah so true. And just to keep things in proportion, I think it's fair to say that if LP has been given a kicking then Hundal needs to be hung, drawn and eighthed. His pretentions and self-regard leave Laurie Penny looking like some kinda model of humility and restraint.


 
Plus his occasional, sometimes overwrought playing of the race card



> I'm pretty sure he has fantasies where the faithful queue up to touch the hem of his donkey jacket as cure for unexamined privilege, or whatever the 21st century concerned liberal equivalent of leprosy is...this week.


 
Ah, but can he heal King's Evil? 



> And best of all...he's not just a deluded wishful thinker, he's genuinely thick. Any interviewer or discussion just has to go remotely off-script and he's floundering about like a beached porpoise.


 
Last time I said "Hundal is thick", I got told off because "Sunny has a degree in economics". My correspondent was a bit nonplussed when I said "thanks for proving my point".


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

I do not think that the response to sexual harassment and a culture of its acceptability among certain parts of the left and the occupy movement should be a call for "safe spaces" where people will not be sexually harassed. as you have to _ask for it_ rather than it being a given. nobody should be sexually harassed and calling for a safe space within a space that should fuckin be safe anyway is pointless and actively harmful. get my point?


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## Red Cat (Jan 5, 2013)

Das Uberdog said:


> there's been an rash of badly placed 'trigger warnings' mainly in the 'privelige politics' tumblr blogs circuit in the last year or so though, which i think gives the 'trigger warnings' a different context. from being a medical and quite specific warning it's turned in some circles into a cliched phrase attached to anything from waffly long blogs voyeuristically pondering on gender identities to anything remotely related to sex - and as frogwoman suggests above, often it seems that many of these individuals are attributing 'trauma triggers' to themselves as a fashion accessory. i've even seen the shortened use of the word 'trigger' used casually in fb conversations, usually disapprovingly relating to an article or something else posted.


 
O brave new world that has such people in it!


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## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> I believe that many in the Occupy movement underestimated that it might be hi-jacked by people that use the V mask as a mask for carrying out sexual assault, anti-semitism, conspiracy theory and various other cuntish aspects under cover.


 
the answer to sexual assault, anti-semitism, racism, misogyny and the like should not be "let's create a space where none of this happens". Fuck's sake.


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## love detective (Jan 5, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Anyway, trigger warnings seems pretty sensible to me on the whole, but I did read an article where someone wrote that they'd recieved emails demanding that a trigger warnings be attached to an article about balloons because there's such a thing as globophobia.
> 
> There's a phobia of ladders, I can't remember it's name but I'm sure it exists, a friend of mine who worked as a scaffolder has it. I dunno if he got diagnosed with a specific phobia or just a more general anxiety disorder, but he used to work with ladders daily and now can't set a single foot on one, and gets visibly nervous when even around them. I'm gonna ask him if he thinks there's should be trigger warnings on articles or stories that include ladders. It'd be interesting to see what his take on the whole thing is.



My mate had a phobia of those brushes that are used to sweep the streets

He should have had a trigger warning


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## cesare (Jan 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> if there is a "safe space" for whatever it is then surely that does not address why the rest of it is _unsafe_.


Well that's the big point innit. Surely we should be demanding that all spaces are safe unless they're it's specifically unsafe/has risks.

Demanding otherwise is a race to the bottom argument, and fuck that.


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## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

this is how zionism started


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## cesare (Jan 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> the answer to sexual assault, anti-semitism, racism, misogyny and the like should not be "let's create a space where none of this happens". Fuck's sake.


That's exactly my point about this designated "safe space" bollocks.


----------



## love detective (Jan 5, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Trigger warning
> 
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4381454.stm



didn't see this before I did my trigger joke

feel like such an arse now


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 5, 2013)

Del Boy fell through a bar where the hatch had been raised up by a barmaid, should have had a Trigger warning


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## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> the answer to sexual assault, anti-semitism, racism, misogyny and the like should not be "let's create a space where none of this happens". Fuck's sake.


 
I remember watching this documentary about some hippy commune in Sweden I think it was. They basically had that idea - create a self containted community where none of that was supposed to exist. What happened was the opposite. abuse, bullying and theft became rife and everyone was too afraid to upset the apple cart of the community and do anything about. Eventually it imploded.

It reminded me of the cults you get in America where everything is kept internal and dealt with internally.


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## cesare (Jan 5, 2013)

If someone sexually assaults me, I do not want to be told it was my fault for venturing outside of the "safe space" area.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 5, 2013)

In an unsafe society there can be no safe spaces


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## love detective (Jan 5, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Del Boy fell through a bar where the hatch had been raised up by a barmaid, should have had a Trigger warning



Do you see what happened there? He's gone to lean on a part of the bar and (and here's the funny bit), it wasn't there

So he's only gone and fallen through the gap where the bit of the bar that he thought was there, wasn't


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## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

Please don't wheel out Stewart Fucking Lee.


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## Buckaroo (Jan 5, 2013)

There's a difference between 'safe space' on t'internet', just words and that and safe physical space, let's have a dry, no drink/drugs/crazy talk/fisticuffs place, that kind of thing, isn't there?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Anyway, trigger warnings seems pretty sensible to me on the whole, but I did read an article where someone wrote that they'd recieved emails demanding that a trigger warnings be attached to an article about balloons because there's such a thing as globophobia.


 
Is it more important that somebody is helped to overcome their fear and lead a normal life where they aren't shitting themselves all the time over things like balloons, cats, becoming contaminated, locking/unlocking doors or everyone hating them or should illnesses that impede social and emotional life be indulged over things like balloons and things like that?

anxiety disorders are never content when they are catered to. engineering it so the sufferer never has to confront the object of their fear just makes the anxiety more debilitating when they are confronted with it. it will just take more and more and more. if you ask people to say check the front door is locked a certain number of times you will have to check it again anyway. it will not help you lead a normal life. quite the opposite. being helped to avoid balloons and the mention of them will not make you less scared of them, in fact the fear will end up controlling your life more and more and more.


----------



## love detective (Jan 5, 2013)

firky said:


> Please don't wheel out Stewart Fucking Lee.



I don't think you understand

He's went to lean on something that wasn't even there


----------



## cesare (Jan 5, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> In an unsafe society there can be no safe spaces


Exactly. None of it's safe so why create artificial ones (which are a target for easy abuse) rather than just make sure people are properly informed so they can make their own choice.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 5, 2013)




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## Delroy Booth (Jan 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> While I can see the request/demand for safe physical spaces as being a natural concomitant to wanting a psychologically-safe zone, it doesn't seem to occur to many of those demanding them that in some of the _locales_ they demand them, the environment rather than privilege makes them difficult or impossible.
> I was horrified when I first heard about the prevalence of attempted sexual assault and harrassment at Occupy! London and its' New York sibling, but I was also horrified that nothing had been planned, and that some sort of Utopian "it'll be alright on the night" _schtick_ had been in play. In that sort of situation "safe spaces" are emotionally and physically necessary.
> That said, there's also a facet of the demand that is political and can be (either deliberately or unintentionally) exclusionary - "there must be a safe space for ***add your identity group here***" - and is aimed at securing advantage/privilege in the name of addressing the same.


 
This is right, and the occupy example is perfect for illustrating it. The assumption that the potential sexual assault wasn't going to be an issue at various Occupy gathering was stupid. You get a feeling based on that, although I don't know if it's true, the organisers were mainly middle class men who simply weren't thinking about those problems at all. Probably had their minds on higher things. There's always been predatory people fringe in left groups, whether it's anarchists trots greens or whoever, so something should've been organised from the beginning but nowt was. The fact that sexual assaults took place and were hushed up in some cases was demonstration of how bad these initial assumptions can be. Against this sort of backdrop I can see why people demand safe spaces, although we shouldn't lose sight of the fact we ought to be working to make safe spaces unnecessary.

This should really be seperated from the way in which some people cynically and deliberately develop this into a more abstract idea, that practically every concievable identity group should be treated like an exclusive political unit, and I think that's quite dangerous. It's more than just exclusionary, it can be used direct way create little heirachies and sub-divisions, it can be used in a practical way to secure privilige of various kinds, it's used in a political way all the time within political parties as a part of power struggles, within pretty much all bureaucratic organisations, civil service, i mean it goes on and on.


----------



## love detective (Jan 5, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


>


over and over again


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## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


>


 
Creating her own legacy.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 5, 2013)

what is it with ginger Welsh Social Democrats?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

firky said:


> I remember watching this documentary about some hippy commune in Sweden I think it was. They basically had that idea - create a self containted community where none of that was supposed to exist. What happened was the opposite. abuse, bullying and theft became rife and everyone was too afraid to upset the apple cart of the community and do anything about. Eventually it imploded.
> 
> It reminded me of the cults you get in America where everything is kept internal and dealt with internally.


 
link?


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 5, 2013)

Has anyone got a gif of ernestolynch tripping over a prone crackhead in Sutton?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 5, 2013)




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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 5, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> My great uncle Stan went to the states in the 50s. Worked his way over to California and even got some work as an extra in westerns. He had to come back home though. He got injured when he was knocked over by Roy Roger's horse. Mind you, they weren't as clued up privilege-wise back then.



Fuck this...I'm off for a bevvy. Not sure anymore. Might be an age thing...might just not have been funny. 
But if you're under 45...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkg2C_EIea0


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## BigTom (Jan 5, 2013)

Is there a difference between a "safe space" and a group having a safer spaces policy? Cos the latter is useful when you need to kick dickheads out of something/somewhere cos you can tell the wussy liberals/wanky anarchists that they've broken agreed policies.

It's very easy to get people to agree that no racism/sexism/etc is acceptable, but hard to get some people to take action to hold some accountable or exclude them. Easier if you've pre agreed that it should happen before it actually does.


----------



## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

Christ, Froggy. Now you're asking, it was years ago!


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## frogwoman (Jan 5, 2013)

_I demand a safe space where there is no anti-semitism. In Palestine, the safest space of all _


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## Nice one (Jan 5, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Is there a difference between a "safe space" and a group having a safer spaces policy? Cos the latter is useful when you need to kick dickheads out of something/somewhere cos you can tell the wussy liberals/wanky anarchists that they've broken agreed policies.
> 
> It's very easy to get people to agree that no racism/sexism/etc is acceptable, but hard to get some people to take action to hold some accountable or exclude them. Easier if you've pre agreed that it should happen before it actually does.


 
that was always my understanding. 'House rules' basically


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## Delroy Booth (Jan 5, 2013)

Nice one said:


> that was always my understanding. 'House rules' basically


 
Stalinist


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> I believe that many in the Occupy movement underestimated that it might be hi-jacked by people that use the V mask as a mask for carrying out sexual assault, anti-semitism, conspiracy theory and various other cuntish aspects under cover.


 
I'm not convinced that it was under-estimation. I lean more toward the view that they simply didn't think through the ramifications of what they were doing. No strategy, no tactics except "be here", and all the shouts out to people who could actually *organise *seemed to come after the occupations were established. Even the Swappies aren't that soapy, Utopian or dim.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 5, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Is there a difference between a "safe space" and a group having a safer spaces policy? .


 
Yes.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> if there is a "safe space" for whatever it is then surely that does not address why the rest of it is _unsafe_.


 
Which is why, with regard to Occupy! specifically, I've lamented the lack of strategy or tactics on the part of the originators of the Occupy! protests. It's great to dream the dream, but you have to make sure that protesters are secure, just like you have to make sure there are adequate personal hygeine facilities if you're going to be there more than a night.
As a general question, i.e. "why is there a general need for safe spaces?", there are more than enough factors (sexism, genderism, racism, classism etc etc etc) to choose from as culprits that feed such a need. That being so, it's irksome when someone declares a safe space is necessary not because they're threatened or have been threatened, but in order to score brownie points with some clique or other.


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## tufty79 (Jan 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> link?


this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Together_(2000_film) 
(edit: probably barking up the wrong tree)


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 5, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Together_(2000_film)


 
it's not a documentary.

Brilliant film though.


----------



## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

I am wondering if it was Freetown in Denmark now but that doesn't feel right

There was a lot of big blonde men


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## ViolentPanda (Jan 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I do not think that the response to sexual harassment and a culture of its acceptability among certain parts of the left and the occupy movement should be a call for "safe spaces" where people will not be sexually harassed. as you have to _ask for it_ rather than it being a given. nobody should be sexually harassed and calling for a safe space within a space that should fuckin be safe anyway is pointless and actively harmful. get my point?


 
Quite.
I'd go a bit further and say it behooves the community where such harrassment takes place to "police" it, up to and including deterring the harrasser physically as a last resort.


----------



## cesare (Jan 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I'm not convinced that it was under-estimation. I lean more toward the view that they simply didn't think through the ramifications of what they were doing. No strategy, no tactics except "be here", and all the shouts out to people who could actually *organise *seemed to come after the occupations were established. Even the Swappies aren't that soapy, Utopian or dim.


Well yeah. They aren't even clear about what they *do* want so fuck knows why we should assume that they were clear about what they didn't. That's not to say there isn't any value in undirected "let's fuck shit up" but once the novelty value's over people will just ignore it, move them on,be nice to them, sweep them under the carpet, etc unless they get their act together.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> the answer to sexual assault, anti-semitism, racism, misogyny and the like should not be "let's create a space where none of this happens". Fuck's sake.


 
Of course it shouldn't! In a perfect world it wouldn't be. Even in our imperfect world, such stuff can be (mostly) excluded through planning and through setting out participation guidelines, without the need for a "declaration of right-on-ness" being made.  Safety should be built into what we do, not just be an afterthought after the event.
The other thing is that we need to acknowledge that objectively nowhere is ever fully safe, and that there'll always be a bigot or pervert around who tries to bend the situation to their advantage. We need to make sure that "safe space" doesn't facilitate their actions.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> When I was a kid my dad used to make a fucking bang on hotpot with neck of lamb. I'm drooling just thinking about it. It was that cheap that the butcher used to sometimes give him it free with his bacon and sausages. Thanks to Jamie fucking Oliver every middle class tosser in the world's buying it now and the price has gone through the roof. So it's gone from being a really cheap dish to a luxury one, he hardly ever makes it any more.


 
Hotpot/neck of lamb update: apparently it's virtually impossible to get neck of lamb now. The posers don't like the bone (best bit IMO - we used to pick the meat off them then suck the marrow out of the middle - yum!) so they fillet it now, only way to get it on the bone is to order it from a butcher or a farmers market or something like that. Apparently oxtail is going the same way. As my dad put it, 'that fucking Jamie Oliver - every time he cooks something on the telly the price doubles.'

Hotpot was a cheap convenience food when my dad was a kid and it was a fairly cheap dish when I was a kid too. So now I'm wondering if in 30 years or so there'll be a public schoolboy with a mockney accent cooking fish fingers and chips on the telly, blindly followed by middle class posers with the associated rise in price putting iceland beyond the pocket of the common man.


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Of course it shouldn't! In a perfect world it wouldn't be. Even in our imperfect world, such stuff can be (mostly) excluded through planning and through setting out participation guidelines, without the need for a "declaration of right-on-ness" being made. Safety should be built into what we do, not just be an afterthought after the event.
> The other thing is that we need to acknowledge that objectively nowhere is ever fully safe, and that there'll always be a bigot or pervert around who tries to bend the situation to their advantage. We need to make sure that "safe space" doesn't facilitate their actions.


 
What do we do about the bigots and the perverts even when we take action to secure 'safe space'?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 5, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> What do we do about the bigots and the perverts even when we take action to secure 'safe space'?


 
As I said in post #11341, if they start their shit then we "police" them, up to and including physical deterrence or removal. I know that will probably come across as oppressive to some of the more Utopian anti-caps etc, but it's one of the reasons even the Trots etc steward their marches and meetings - it prevents the bigots and perverts from getting a footing.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 5, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Yes.


 
So could somehwere with a safer spaces policy could have a "safe space" where umm, what? the safer spaces policy is actually enforced? that doesn't make any sense.. Does a "safe space" refer to a place where only women (or presumably lgbt/immigrants/trans/whatever) are allowed?


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> As I said in post #11341, if they start their shit then we "police" them, up to and including physical deterrence or removal. I know that will probably come across as oppressive to some of the more Utopian anti-caps etc, but it's one of the reasons even the Trots etc steward their marches and meetings - it prevents the bigots and perverts from getting a footing.


 
With you all the way. More than that, whenever 'human nature' gets thrown into the mix, the raised conscioussness, awareness, empathy which gets patronised as 'political correctness' becomes the group think of 'You're out of order'. At the same time though what structures do we have to deal with serious crimes and allegations of serious crimes.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 5, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Waitrose is practically a workers coop though


Waitrose are fucking cunts. I used to work for them age 16-18. All the 'workers co-op' stuff is a bag o'shite. Workers were called 'partners' cos they got a _supposed_ share of the profits at the end of the year. But if you were a part-time worker (e.g. Saturdays only, or part time, or whatever) you didn't get _anything. _There was "performance related pay" which meant if you sucked up to the manager or flirted with him, you got a pay rise from £2.20 per hour to £2.80 per hour (wow!) whereas those of us who stuck up for ourselves got a pay rise from £2.20 per hour to £2.22 per hour. CUNTS. 
Workers' co-op MY FUCKING ARSE. Fuck Waitrose.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> While I can see the request/demand for safe physical spaces as being a natural concomitant to wanting a psychologically-safe zone, it doesn't seem to occur to many of those demanding them that in some of the _locales_ they demand them, the environment rather than privilege makes them difficult or impossible.
> I was horrified when I first heard about the prevalence of attempted sexual assault and harrassment at Occupy! London and its' New York sibling, but I was also horrified that nothing had been planned, and that some sort of Utopian "it'll be alright on the night" _schtick_ had been in play. In that sort of situation "safe spaces" are emotionally and physically necessary.
> That said, there's also a facet of the demand that is political and can be (either deliberately or unintentionally) exclusionary - "there must be a safe space for ***add your identity group here***" - and is aimed at securing advantage/privilege in the name of addressing the same.


There was the horrendous case of the woman who was assaulted here in Glasgow at the Occupy event. Similar story.

I found the thread - she was six months pregnant at the time:
http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/woman-raped-at-occupy-glasgow.283207/


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 5, 2013)

firky said:


> Oh and this thread and everyone here is not attacking you [@lauriepenny] personally but what you represent, I still don't think you have got that.


Amen.

But I think it's clear we've got LP's number now. We've done it to death. We should keep an eye on her, but isn't it time we started examining the likes of Sunny Hundal etc a bit more as well?




firky said:


> This is going to turn into another Four Yorkshiremen sketch.


*FOUR* Yorkshiremen? When I were a lad we only had two Yorkshireman and really it was only 1.5 cos one of them only had half a leg and had to sleep outside in the coal scuttle so my little sis could go to Brighton College


----------



## olenyok (Jan 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Is it bollocks - you sound like one of Laurie's mates.
> 
> I'm not interested in her bedroom and I don't consider it a particularly fruitful line of discussion. This is taken by you to be some kind of sophisticated means of shutting down debate? Fuck off
> 
> To use your capital analogy looking at the bedroom is like focusing on bankers' cocaine habits instead of the ways in which they facilitate capital accumulation.


 
Your post wasn't taken by me to be some sophisticated means of shutting down debate. Her last intervention was though, and that's what I thought it was clear I was referring to - eg by calling it a replay of the previous attempts. I apologise, I should have made it clearer by chopping off "This is" and replacing it with "Her post is", which I thought of doing but was too lazy to.

There's overlap between banker's cocaine habits and their money habits physiologically, and psychologically as ways of making an unpredictable world seem controllable. Like with LP's bedroom/"hovel" being presented as some kind of poverty, capital accumulation is being furthered in an apparently personal domain. It's allowing them to stay awake and emotionally numb enough to fuck people over isn't it ? If bankers get hassled more over their money hunger as a medical issue by doctors it might be quite helpful - a back door through the defences.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Is it more important that somebody is helped to overcome their fear and lead a normal life where they aren't shitting themselves all the time over things like balloons, cats, becoming contaminated, locking/unlocking doors or everyone hating them or should illnesses that impede social and emotional life be indulged over things like balloons and things like that?


 
Up until recently I'd only ever seen trigger warnings used on pages which were specifically for abuse survivors because for people with ptsd it can triggers flashbacks etc.  I dont see any need for them outside of that kind of semi-therapeutic environment tbh


----------



## smokedout (Jan 5, 2013)

BigTom said:


> So could somehwere with a safer spaces policy could have a "safe space" where umm, what? the safer spaces policy is actually enforced? that doesn't make any sense.. Does a "safe space" refer to a place where only women (or presumably lgbt/immigrants/trans/whatever) are allowed?


 
up north when I was growing up lots of pubs still had tap rooms, which were considered men only and a lounge - swearing and that kind of thing was banned in the lounge which would have a carpet and stuff, and usually not allow work clothes - perhaps a safe space is something like that


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

olenyok said:


> Y<snip> If bankers get hassled more over their money hunger as a medical issue by doctors it might be quite helpful - a back door through the defences.


 
One, that makes no sense whatsoever and two, it's never going to happen because a lot of doctors are well-off and are more likely to feel sympathy with the bankers than the left wingers.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Jan 5, 2013)

smokedout said:


> Up until recently I'd only ever seen trigger warnings used on pages which were specifically for abuse survivors because for people with ptsd it can triggers flashbacks etc.  I dont see any need for them outside of that kind of semi-therapeutic environment tbh


They are all over the place - I come across "trigger warnings" just reading random blogs about comics all the time. I also agree with all the above that they're not needed in most cases and are often exceptionally patronising.


----------



## 8115 (Jan 5, 2013)

firky said:


> WTF is a trigger warning, another manarchist phrase I have mixxed?


 
I appreciate the moment has kind of passed.

But basically (as I understand it) a human response to an unpleasant mental image is mild panic, continuing up to severe panic and distress in some situations (so, for instance, someone who had been mugged might find it very difficult to walk near the place where they were mugged without severe distress etc etc).

Someone would use a trigger warning if they wanted to share something (a picture, a part of their own experience that was graphic or whatever) but appreciated that it might cause a large amount of distress to someone sensitive to (or even not sensitive to) this type of image or description.

I don't think it *can* be casually used really, because why would you post graphic material carelessly, iyswim.


----------



## olenyok (Jan 5, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> One, that makes no sense whatsoever and two, it's never going to happen because a lot of doctors are well-off and are more likely to feel sympathy with the bankers than the left wingers.


 
Medical opinion which would underpin doctors actually hassling their poor, afflicted banker-patients about it within doctor patient relationships is already developing though.
The premise seems simple, I don't understand why you say it makes no sense whatsoever.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...rrupt-scientists-claim-addictive-cocaine.html

I agree about the likely class sympathies of doctors, but they wouldn't need to feel sympathy for left wingers, just a little bit perhaps for their money-power junkie banker patients.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

olenyok said:


> Medical opinion which would underpin doctors actually hassling their poor, afflicted banker-patients about it within doctor patient relationships is already developing though.
> 
> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...rrupt-scientists-claim-addictive-cocaine.html
> 
> I agree about the likely class sympathies of doctors, but they wouldn't need to feel sympathy for left wingers, just a little bit perhaps for their money-power junkie banker patients.


That article proves nothing of the sort. Dr Ian Robertson is an academic doctor (PhD) not a medical doctor.


----------



## love detective (Jan 5, 2013)

8115 said:


> Someone would use a trigger warning if they wanted to share something (a picture, a part of their own experience that was graphic or whatever) but appreciated that it might cause a large amount of distress to someone sensitive to (or even not sensitive to) this type of image or description.
> 
> I don't think it *can* be casually used really, because why would you post graphic material carelessly, iyswim.


 


Spoiler


----------



## Red Cat (Jan 5, 2013)

olenyok said:


> doctors actually hassling their poor, afflicted banker-patients about it within doctor patient relationships


 
Doctors _hassling_ 

About _it_? About what?


----------



## olenyok (Jan 5, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> That article proves nothing of the sort. Dr Ian Robertson is an academic doctor (PhD) not a medical doctor.


 
What is the "of the sort" which you think I'm trying to prove? I'm countering your (so far unsupported) assertion that money-power as an object of addiction "makes no sense whatsoever". I'm not trying to prove there's any kind of medical consensus already operative. I could replace "Medical opinion" with "academic opinion" in my post and it would communicate what I was trying to just as well.

Why did you say that "If bankers get hassled more over their money hunger as a medical issue by doctors it might be quite helpful - a back door through the defences" makes no sense whatsoever ? It seems straightforward premise.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

olenyok said:


> What is the "of the sort" which you think I'm trying to prove? I'm countering your (so far unsupported) assertion that money-power as an object of addiction "makes no sense whatsoever". I'm not trying to prove there's any kind of medical consensus already operative. I could replace "Medical opinion" with "academic opinion" in my post and it would communicate what I was trying to just as well.
> 
> Why did you say that "If bankers get hassled more over their money hunger as a medical issue by doctors it might be quite helpful - a back door through the defences" makes no sense whatsoever ? It seems straightforward premise.


If you didn't mean 'medical opinion' why did you say it? 

I said it makes no sense because your premise does not make any sense. Doctors are not there to 'hassle' patients about anything, medical or otherwise, and unless the 'money hunger' was causing medical problems a GP would be unlikely to see them in the first place. And as for a back door through defences - whose/what defences?


----------



## Red Cat (Jan 5, 2013)

I think s/he means defences like a fortress, like a Big Greedy Bank Fortress, rather than Freudian ones, but it took a while to work that out.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> I think s/he means defences like a fortress, like a Big Greedy Bank Fortress, rather than Freudian ones, but it took a while to work that out.


It's late, but I don't get it.


----------



## Red Cat (Jan 5, 2013)

Instead of attacking the City with big sticks we can just get the docs to hassle their banker patients into giving up their money addiction. Straightforward, see?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Instead of attacking the City with big sticks we can just get the docs to hassle their banker patients into giving up their money addiction. Straightforward, see?


I get that, thanks for explaining.

Still don't think it would happen though.


----------



## Red Cat (Jan 5, 2013)

It's not a suggestion I've ever heard before.


----------



## Firky (Jan 5, 2013)

olenyok said:


> Your post wasn't taken by me to be some sophisticated means of shutting down debate. Her last intervention was though, and that's what I thought it was clear I was referring to - eg by calling it a replay of the previous attempts. I apologise, I should have made it clearer by chopping off "This is" and replacing it with "Her post is", which I thought of doing but was too lazy to.
> 
> There's overlap between banker's cocaine habits and their money habits physiologically, and psychologically as ways of making an unpredictable world seem controllable. Like with LP's bedroom/"hovel" being presented as some kind of poverty, capital accumulation is being furthered in an apparently personal domain. It's allowing them to stay awake and emotionally numb enough to fuck people over isn't it ? If bankers get hassled more over their money hunger as a medical issue by doctors it might be quite helpful - a back door through the defences.


 


olenyok said:


> Medical opinion which would underpin doctors actually hassling their poor, afflicted banker-patients about it within doctor patient relationships is already developing though.
> The premise seems simple, I don't understand why you say it makes no sense whatsoever.
> 
> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...rrupt-scientists-claim-addictive-cocaine.html
> ...


 
Perplexing.

I don't have a clue what you are talking about.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 5, 2013)

firky said:


> Perplexing.
> 
> I don't have a clue what you are talking about.


I thought it was just me being a bit thick and not understanding


----------



## Firky (Jan 6, 2013)

Don't breathe a sigh of relief just yet, we both could be thick.


----------



## Firky (Jan 6, 2013)

That Daily Mail article looks like it is about people who get hooked on adrenalin, dopamine and other neurotransmitters. So they seek out and repeat behaviours that fulfil that need.

I didn't read it beyond the second paragraph before my Jazzz klaxon went off.

E2A: Maybe that was unfair as this is actually science.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 6, 2013)

firky said:


> That Daily Mail article looks like it is about people who get hooked on adrenalin, dopamine and other neurotransmitters. So they seek out and repeat behaviours that fulfil that need.
> 
> I didn't read it beyond the second paragraph before my Jazzz klaxon went off.
> 
> E2A: Maybe that was unfair as this is actually science.


Well, Science as reported by the Daily Mail, and there was no link to the original study.


----------



## Firky (Jan 6, 2013)

Still don't get what cocaine, bankers hungry for money, Laurie Penny's hovel and doctors have in common though. 

They're all UMC?


----------



## Blagsta (Jan 6, 2013)

firky said:


> That Daily Mail article looks like it is about people who get hooked on adrenalin, dopamine and other neurotransmitters. So they seek out and repeat behaviours that fulfil that need.
> 
> I didn't read it beyond the second paragraph before my Jazzz klaxon went off.
> 
> E2A: Maybe that was unfair as this is actually science.



Its well understood that cocaine (in fact most drugs) taps into the brain's reward mechanism (dopamine). That article seems arse about tit though. Cocaine is as addictive as power is what it should say.


----------



## Firky (Jan 6, 2013)

That's what I gathered - hence the comment about the Jazzz element, crowbar the findings to fit into what you want.


----------



## olenyok (Jan 6, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> If you didn't mean 'medical opinion' why did you say it?


 
A doctor with an opinion on a physiological process - addiction - is medical enough for me to be comfortable, in day to day usage, calling it medical opinion in the sense that it relates to a medical phenomenon. You've highlighted a rather more precise sense in which it isn't. Ok. I don't think you've picked up on anything which affects at all the simple response I was putting forward to you there. I.E, money power as an object of addiction makes enough more sense than "no sense whatsoever" that this 'academic' doctor is happy to put it forward, too.

Doctors clearly do hassle people about stuff - again, replace "hassle" with "advise" and the case I'm making remains exactly the same, but perhaps with word choice somewhat more to your taste. My doctor's hassled (/advised) me about overeating, smoking, getting stressed about my work, sleep pattern, lack of excercise, for years, all off his own bat without me soliciting any of it.

GPs see people for patient reported symptoms including very general ones, which as yet have no diagnosis, all the time. Acid reflux is a diagnosis one of my family was given stomach ache, and over months, after the doctor's suggestion, it became clear it was triggered almost exclusively by job-stress. So your argument that they wouldn't see anyone unless it had been somehow established beforehand "the 'money hunger' was causing medical problems" doesn't accurately reflect the sequence in which GPs do things. The patient only has to provide the symptoms, not the link between symptom and cause. And addiction causes all sorts of symptoms.

If, hypothetically, DSM-6, or whatever, ends up putting money-power in it's basket of things it's possible to be addicted to, then that category of diagnosis will be available to GPs. I've read that doctors are talking about internet addiction as a candidate for a diagnosis. Would that make no sense at all, or perhaps just a little ?

It all seems straightforward enough - if it's feasible that doctors decide that the physiological and psychological processes involved in compulsive relations to the internet or money-power similar enough to their template of addiction, or another of their diagnostic categories, from what point of authority are you saying that the prospect 'makes no sense at all' ?

Back door defences - just a figurative way of saying if capital doesn't give up power when confronted with injustice, maybe it will give some up because wielding it is making practitioners ill ... enough to switch jobs to something less destructive or demand less exploitative working practices. There were reports of young bankers bursting into tears during the height of the credit crunch and their bosses perplexed at the vulnerability. Perhaps their situation is ripe for doctors to provide the voice of authority they need to confirm suspicions that their jobs are making them sick.


----------



## Blagsta (Jan 6, 2013)

It's a rather, ermmm, fanciful argument.


----------



## Firky (Jan 6, 2013)

I am off to bed or I'll still be up at 4am but kudos for originality.


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## Firky (Jan 6, 2013)

The thread that keeps on giving.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 6, 2013)

olenyok said:


> A doctor with an opinion on a physiological process - addiction - is medical enough for me to be comfortable, in day to day usage, calling it medical opinion in the sense that it relates to a medical phenomenon. You've highlighted a rather more precise sense in which it isn't. Ok. I don't think you've picked up on anything which affects the simple response I was putting forward to you there. I.E, money power as an object of addiction makes enough more sense than "no sense whatsoever" that this 'academic' doctor is happy to put it forward, too.
> 
> Doctors clearly do hassle people about stuff - again, replace "hassle" with "advise" and the case I'm making remains exactly the same, but perhaps with word choice somewhat more to your taste. My doctor's hassled (/advised) me about overeating, smoking, getting stressed about my work, sleep pattern, lack of excercise, for years, all off his own bat without me soliciting any of it.
> 
> ...


You're new to this forum, so I'll go a bit easy on you, but to be honest your explanation of the GP-patient relationship is extremely patronising. I'm fully aware of what a GP does, when a patient seeks their advice and what constitutes medical opinion. Quoting a Daily Mail article by someone who isn't a medical doctor, about a scientific study for which no other information is given and a hypothetical link between addiction and power does not count as evidence or support for your point.


----------



## olenyok (Jan 6, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> You're new to this forum, so I'll go a bit easy on you, but to be honest your explanation of the GP-patient relationship is extremely patronising. I'm fully aware of what a GP does, when a patient seeks their advice and what constitutes medical opinion. Quoting a Daily Mail article by someone who isn't a medical doctor, about a scientific study for which no other information is given and a hypothetical link between addiction and power does not count as evidence or support for your point.


 
Well, I don't share these views, either. But I've a report due in monday, and have to disentangle from everything else/not sleep till that's in, so I won't be replying anymore, at least until well after no one's interested any longer.


----------



## emanymton (Jan 6, 2013)

olenyok said:


> Well, I don't share these views, either. But I've a report due in monday, and have to disentangle from everything else/not sleep till that's in, so I won't be replying anymore, at least until well after no one's interested any longer.


I think most people stopped being interested a while ago.


eta I feel a little bit bad for saying this


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 6, 2013)

olenyok said:


> <snip>
> 
> Back door defences - just a figurative way of saying if capital doesn't give up power when confronted with injustice, maybe it will give some up because wielding it is making practitioners ill ... *enough to switch jobs to something less destructive or demand less exploitative working practices. There were reports of young bankers bursting into tears during the height of the credit crunch and their bosses perplexed at the vulnerability. Perhaps their situation is ripe for doctors to provide the voice of authority they need to confirm suspicions that their jobs are making them sick*.


 
Interesting edit there. Can you substantiate these reports of bankers bursting into tears?

Forgive my lack of sympathy for the poor bankers. It's a brutal, highly competitive career. It chews people up and spits them out. But that's known. It's been known for a long time, no-one tries to pretend otherwise. It's highly competitive because the rewards are perceived to be great, in terms of both money and benefits such as private healthcare, company cars, profit-sharing, bonuses etc. 

Why should GPs stand up and say that working in the financial sector should come with a health warning when the the effects of workplace stress for any occupation are already well known?


----------



## cesare (Jan 6, 2013)

Medicalisation as a form of social control isn't new. Suggesting using it to control bankers (a) lets bankers off the hook; and (b) would further affirm its use on all of us as a method of control. No, I don't think it's a good idea.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 6, 2013)

So we wouldn't have to worry about capitalism and smashing the state and all that jazz if everyone got the right medicine?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 6, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> So we wouldn't have to worry about capitalism and smashing the state and all that jazz if everyone got the right medicine?


More likely capitalism could run amok while we were sedated and under control


----------



## cesare (Jan 6, 2013)

Just as an overview (not source etc) the wiki entry is quite interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicalization

Although it focuses on the medical aspect rather than the political.


----------



## cesare (Jan 6, 2013)

The overuse of trigger warnings/designated safe spaces feeds into this, of course. More sophisticated and covert forms of kettling, and ones that we're encouraged to use on ourselves.


----------



## Athos (Jan 6, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> This is just getting extremely creepy and stalky. Going through everything I do on social media for evidence of my life, my friends, speculating about how my friends live, how I live, my school, where I grew up. Please tell me how this is actually contributing for one second to useful political discourse?


 
I agree with you; there's little value in dissecting the minutiae of your online footprint.

And I regret the way that you have become one of the principal subjects of debate in this thread (albeit largely as a cipher for the phenomenon that you represent).  Mostly, I regret it because you don't have that much significance to the serious discussion which takes place on these boards, or across the 'left' generally.  But also, partly because some of the individual remarks were a bit close to the mark, and partly because even the more innocuous pisstaking (amongst which I consider some of my own jibes) could have a fairly oppressive effect when taken together.  As much as I disagree with a lot of what you say, and as much as I dislike the elite liberal commentariat of which you are a part, ultimately, you are not the principal enemy, and I bear you no malice.  I share some of Red Cat's discomfort about some of what has gone on in this thread, especially as you are a young person with some vulnerability.

But, you need to accept the lion's share of the responsibility for the personal nature of what has gone on.  It's hard not to be personal when talking about your work, because you have made yourself and your image part of the brand; there are plenty of writers whose ideas I disagree with, but I don't know what they look and sound like, where they live, and who their friends are.  If you're going to put that stuff out there to cultivate a public face, then it's going to be scrutinised.

More specifically, the only way people could engage with you on this thread is on a personal basis; you have not been willing to engage on any other level.  Had you come here to contribute to "useful political discourse" then I'm sure people would have engaged with you on that level (I think equationgirl came closest to doing so).  But I get the impression that your MO is to make pronouncements rather than enter debate; in fact, you appear to be affronted when anyone offers a counter-opinion.  Furthermore, you often make things personal in your interactions with others e.g. the Starkey row and your criticisms of Harvey et al for being old white men.  But, nevertheless, should you still wish to enter into political discourse (on this and other threads), it's not too late.  And, as much as I disagree with you, I actually hope that you do engage.  

And I hope that you have seen that, even on this thread, there's been some really interesting discussion.  I think you got off on the wrong foot here by jumping to conclusions about about what this place (and it's population) is like.  In fairness to you, I can understand how that might happen; I know that you must be used to being abused by idiots on Twitter etc.  But it doesn't follow that anyone who disagrees with you is a troll, or a misogynist etc.  Maybe we all need to focus on ideas a bit more, rather than personalities and egos.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 6, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I've got solid wood tables, bookcases and cabinets in my front room. And a leather sofa. I'm practically a Tory I reckon.
> 
> I don't own any of it and have to do maintenance on the flats to knock the rent down to a rate I can afford but that's not the point - my front room is nice so I'm like royalty or something.


 
we could do with some pictures of peoples living rooms to test out this theory


----------



## Athos (Jan 6, 2013)

Harry Haller said:
			
		

> Laurie gets sent to the headmaster.



You've let yourself down, and you've let the school down.

Could try harder.


----------



## rekil (Jan 6, 2013)

Harry Haller said:


> It really doesn't. It doesn't affect anybody much, really.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 6, 2013)

cesare said:


> Medicalisation as a form of social control isn't new. Suggesting using it to control bankers (a) lets bankers off the hook; and (b) would further affirm its use on all of us as a method of control. No, I don't think it's a good idea.


 
Nay to medicalisation, yay to the bastinado!


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 6, 2013)

Harry Haller said:


> What do you think is happening right now?


 
You saying some of these posters are sedated?


----------



## past caring (Jan 6, 2013)




----------



## rekil (Jan 6, 2013)




----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 6, 2013)

Just thinking about this privilege stuff - one thing that I've never seen it address is ugliness. I've been an ugly bastard all my life and we're constantly kept down by our more aesthetically pleasing oppressors. Ugly people are criminally under-represented in the modelling, porn and sex industries in particular. Fair enough we're over-represented in darts, rugby and shot put but those are not particularly prestigeous so we're 'allowed' that as a kind of tokenistic gesture.

I want to see ugly quotas in all sectors of the economy.

I would also like to see similar initiatives for the flatulent, another cause very close to my heart. And my arse.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 6, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Just thinking about this privilege stuff - one thing that I've never seen it address is ugliness. I've been an ugly bastard all my life and we're constantly kept down by our more aesthetically pleasing oppressors. Ugly people are criminally under-represented in the modelling, porn and sex industries in particular. Fair enough we're over-represented in darts, rugby and shot put but those are not particularly prestigeous so we're 'allowed' that as a kind of tokenistic gesture.
> 
> I want to see ugly quotas in all sectors of the economy.
> 
> I would also like to see similar initiatives for the flatulent, another cause very close to my heart. And my arse.


 
I dunno that ugly ginner cunt who charges 5k a time to talk about his hols seems fairly priviliged...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 6, 2013)

Token gestures to make the system seem fair - you're like those people who claim there's no sexism in Britain cos Thatcher was prime minister


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 6, 2013)

Actually I do think you're right spiney, in general people who are better looking are able to be more confident and get better jobs, especially if they're men and have had other advantages in life. However there are plenty of ugly people in politics, which was known as "showbiz for ugly people" for a long time. Politics is pretty much the only way for an ugly person to become famous.


----------



## bluestreak (Jan 6, 2013)

*unrelated*

that's me done.


----------



## Athos (Jan 6, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Just thinking about this privilege stuff - one thing that I've never seen it address is ugliness. I've been an ugly bastard all my life and we're constantly kept down by our more aesthetically pleasing oppressors. Ugly people are criminally under-represented in the modelling, porn and sex industries in particular. Fair enough we're over-represented in darts, rugby and shot put but those are not particularly prestigeous so we're 'allowed' that as a kind of tokenistic gesture.
> 
> I want to see ugly quotas in all sectors of the economy.
> 
> I would also like to see similar initiatives for the flatulent, another cause very close to my heart. And my arse.


 
The ugly face of anti-racism.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 6, 2013)

Athos said:


> The ugly face of anti-racism.


 
check your privilege


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 6, 2013)

Anyway a far more pressing problem, one of my cats needs to check her privilege because my other cat does not have a meow. How does she think he feels when she starts meowing, rubbing it in his face that he can't meow. Although she is female so that is probably all right and she can probably carry on.

In any case all cats need to check their privilege because they have tails and we don't, how do they think we feel NOT HAVING A TAIL


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 6, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Actually I do think you're right spiney, in general people who are better looking are able to be more confident and get better jobs, especially if they're men and have had other advantages in life. However there are plenty of ugly people in politics, which was known as "showbiz for ugly people" for a long time. Politics is pretty much the only way for an ugly person to become famous.


 
Yeah exactly - obviously I was joking but it's funny cos it's true.

Although I've noticed recently, at least in the UK, that the ugly politician thing is starting to change, at least right at the very top. Cameron, Clegg, Blair, etc although not exactly supermodels do have a lot of time spent on their appearances. And if you look at the criticism Brown got, despite certainly being no worse than any of those three, a lot of it focused on his appearance and so on. Miliband gets those kinds of comments too. It's part of the whole style over substance thing really I guess.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 6, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Anyway a far more pressing problem, one of my cats needs to check her privilege because my other cat does not have a meow. How does she think he feels when she starts meowing, rubbing it in his face that he can't meow. Although she is female so that is probably all right and she can probably carry on.
> 
> In any case all cats need to check their privilege because they have tails and we don't, how do they think we feel NOT HAVING A TAIL


 
*avoids cracking the obvious nob gag*


----------



## Firky (Jan 6, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Anyway a far more pressing problem, one of my cats needs to check her privilege because my other cat does not have a meow. How does she think he feels when she starts meowing, rubbing it in his face that he can't meow. Although she is female so that is probably all right and she can probably carry on.
> 
> In any case all cats need to check their privilege because they have tails and we don't, how do they think we feel NOT HAVING A TAIL


 
Some cats are too up their own arse to meow IME.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 6, 2013)

firky said:


> Some cats are too up their own arse to meow IME.


 
the vet said his meow never developed.


----------



## Firky (Jan 6, 2013)

Sorry but that got a real "LOL"


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 6, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yeah exactly - obviously I was joking but it's funny cos it's true.
> 
> Although I've noticed recently, at least in the UK, that the ugly politician thing is starting to change, at least right at the very top. Cameron, Clegg, Blair, etc although not exactly supermodels do have a lot of time spent on their appearances. And if you look at the criticism Brown got, despite certainly being no worse than any of those three, a lot of it focused on his appearance and so on. Miliband gets those kinds of comments too. It's part of the whole style over substance thing really I guess.


 
It's also worth pointing out that the difference between an "ugly" person and a "good looking" person can be more down to the time and money spent on excercise and grooming products rather than anything biological and that is related to time and income quite often.

As a not bad looking bloke it's not something I've ever worried about too much though...


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 6, 2013)

firky you need to check your privilige btw

in fact I bet you check it at least three times a day


----------



## Firky (Jan 6, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> firky you need to check your privilige btw
> 
> in fact I bet you check it at least three times a day


 
If I was some kind of self publishing egotistical arsehole I'd post it to a thread with other arseholes.


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 6, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Anyway a far more pressing problem, one of my cats needs to check her privilege because my other cat does not have a meow. How does she think he feels when she starts meowing, rubbing it in his face that he can't meow. Although she is female so that is probably all right and she can probably carry on.
> 
> In any case all cats need to check their privilege because they have tails and we don't, how do they think we feel NOT HAVING A TAIL


 
It's a Tail of two Kitties.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 6, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Actually I do think you're right spiney, in general people who are better looking are able to be more confident and get better jobs, especially if they're men and have had other advantages in life. However there are plenty of ugly people in politics, which was known as "showbiz for ugly people" for a long time. Politics is pretty much the only way for an ugly person to become famous.


 
Exactly why I have concentrated on my career rather than politics


----------



## Athos (Jan 6, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> check your privilege


 
Ahhh, that's where you're wrong.  As someone with a face like a blind cobbler's thumb, I am allowed to use the word ugly.  In fact, I'm reclaiming it.  I'm like NWA for mingers.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 6, 2013)

firky said:


> If I was some kind of self publishing egotistical arsehole I'd post it to a thread with other arseholes.


 
everyone has seen it already


----------



## HST (Jan 6, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Just thinking about this privilege stuff - one thing that I've never seen it address is ugliness. I've been an ugly bastard all my life and we're constantly kept down by our more aesthetically pleasing oppressors. Ugly people are criminally under-represented in the modelling, porn and sex industries in particular. Fair enough we're over-represented in darts, rugby and shot put but those are not particularly prestigeous so we're 'allowed' that as a kind of tokenistic gesture.
> 
> I want to see ugly quotas in all sectors of the economy.
> 
> I would also like to see similar initiatives for the flatulent, another cause very close to my heart. And my arse.


 
Frank Zappa: 
*“I have an important message to deliver to all the cute people all over the world. If you're out there and you're cute, maybe you're beautiful. I just want to tell you somethin' — there's more of us UGLY MOTHERFUCKERS than you are, hey-y, so watch out.”*


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 6, 2013)

Like the working class. But the pretty ones engage in divide and rule. Darts players looking down on shotputters. Gingers looking down on spotty people. Mr. Muscle lookalikes looking down on fat blokes and so on.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 6, 2013)

Harry Haller said:


> Rock stars. I mean, have you ever looked at Roxy Music, for instance? Or the Faces?
> 
> And footballers. Look at Rooney for fuck's sake.


I used to have nightmare about Bryan Ferry when I was a kid.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 6, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I used to have nightmare about Bryan Ferry when I was a kid.


 
Don't ever watch Breakfast on Pluto then


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 6, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Don't ever watch Breakfast on Pluto then


Noted.


----------



## Firky (Jan 6, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Don't ever watch Breakfast on Pluto then


 
Cillian Murphy


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 6, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> It's part of the whole style over substance thing really I guess.


 
Which has infected politics across the spectrum. Exhibit a: the subject of this thread.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 6, 2013)

Mingers of the world unite


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 6, 2013)

firky said:


> Cillian Murphy


 
I like him normally but found him really irritating in that, almost a transphobic caricature


----------



## Firky (Jan 6, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I like him normally but found him really irritating in that, almost a transphobic caricature


 
I have only seen the trailer but he instantly reminded me of...

He is a good looking woman is wor Murphy.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 6, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Mingers of the world unite


 

thats the UN Security Council that is


----------



## Athos (Jan 6, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Mingers of the world unite


.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 6, 2013)

Harry Haller said:


> Rock stars. I mean, have you ever looked at Roxy Music, for instance? Or the Faces?
> 
> And footballers. Look at Rooney for fuck's sake.


Top-poster on the thread now. Round of applause for harry.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 6, 2013)

glass bead game?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 6, 2013)

Harry Haller said:


> Not distracting you from the Great Struggle from the kitchen table, is it?


Nope. You might get 1000 by feb if this pathetic rate of personal decline holds.

_Well done._


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 6, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I like him normally but found him really irritating in that, almost a transphobic caricature


 
Did you ever see him in Retreat? Odd little film, but not bad for a tight budget.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 6, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> Did you ever see him in Retreat? Odd little film, but not bad for a tight budget.


 
no must say I haven't


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 6, 2013)

Harry Haller said:
			
		

> Personal decline? I haven't stopped washing or eating or anything.
> 
> Have you ever thought that you might take some stuff a bit too seriously?



Yes I have. Now this thing where you say the same thing over and  over?


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 6, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> no must say I haven't


 
Lots of twists and turns and has a good ending, if you ever get the chance to see it. May be a bit hard to track down though.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 6, 2013)

Harry Haller said:
			
		

> Sorry, I keep forgetting that you're in charge here.



Why? Free


----------



## 8115 (Jan 6, 2013)

I don't even really understand this thread.  It's like watching Waiting for Godot.


----------



## Firky (Jan 6, 2013)

8115 said:


> I don't even really understand this thread. It's like watching Waiting for Godot.


 
Who's the misanthrope? O_O


----------



## Athos (Jan 6, 2013)

8115 said:


> I don't even really understand this thread. It's like watching Waiting for Godot.


That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.


----------



## Das Uberdog (Jan 6, 2013)

Athos said:


>


 
you forgot to put a trigger warning with that


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 6, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> Lots of twists and turns and has a good ending, if you ever get the chance to see it. May be a bit hard to track down though.


 
I'll keep an eye out, cheers.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 6, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I used to have nightmare about Bryan Ferry when I was a kid.


 
I thought he looked very suave for the first three albums, so much so I was lying in bed with a woman who I had met and she asked me 'who would you want to be if you weren't you' and I said somewhat naively ' I wish I was Bryan ferry' and she said 'so do I .'

I thought to myself 'she's a bit odd wanting to be a bloke.'

Then five years later it clicked one night in the pub.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 6, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> I thought he looked very suave for the first three albums, so much so I was lying in bed with a woman who I had met and she asked me 'who would you want to be if you weren't you' and I said somewhat naively ' I wish I was Bryan ferry' and she said 'so do I .'
> 
> I thought to myself 'she's a bit odd wanting to be a bloke.'
> 
> Then five years later it clicked one night in the pub.


----------



## One_Stop_Shop (Jan 6, 2013)

The woman in the picture is presumably Russian. I saw a documentary not that long ago about how hard life is for most working class people in Russia, with the near total collapse of a lot of the welfare state, with whole towns and villages been reduced to a handful of people. Along with this has been a huge rise in alcholism.

A hard life does take it's toll, as someone said above. I'm not sure how funny it is putting a picture like that up and taking the piss out of them is.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 6, 2013)

One_Stop_Shop said:


> The woman in the picture is presumably Russian. I saw a documentary not that long ago about how hard life is for most working class people in Russia, with the near total collapse of a lot of the welfare state, with whole towns and villages been reduced to a handful of people. Along with this has been a huge rise in alcholism.
> 
> A hard life does take it's toll, as someone said above. I'm not sure how funny it is putting a picture like that up and taking the piss out of them is.


 
fuck off you miserable cunt

*and for what it's worth Tim Curry is not a Russian woman


----------



## One_Stop_Shop (Jan 6, 2013)

I'm not feeling that miserable at the moment to be fair.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 6, 2013)

One more weekend of forcing myself do a false log-in about stuff that no one cares about so i can tell them that i don't care about them not caring about it. I don't know why i bother sometimes.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 6, 2013)

One_Stop_Shop said:


> A hard life does take it's toll, as someone said above. I'm not sure how funny it is putting a picture like that up and taking the piss out of them is.


 
its funny to laugh at chavs when they're old and foreign


----------



## One_Stop_Shop (Jan 6, 2013)

You what butchersapron?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 6, 2013)

Not you ffs


----------



## One_Stop_Shop (Jan 7, 2013)

Fair enough. I'll go back to being miserable.

By the way what was the result of the SWP vs Laurie Penny?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 7, 2013)

You and LETTSA +900. Well done.


----------



## Athos (Jan 7, 2013)

One_Stop_Shop said:
			
		

> The woman in the picture is presumably Russian. I saw a documentary not that long ago about how hard life is for most working class people in Russia, with the near total collapse of a lot of the welfare state, with whole towns and villages been reduced to a handful of people. Along with this has been a huge rise in alcholism.
> 
> A hard life does take it's toll, as someone said above. I'm not sure how funny it is putting a picture like that up and taking the piss out of them is.



You're right; I've removed it. And I apologise.

Whilst it wasn't posted with malice, it doesn't behove a man who has had the privilege of a lifetime of NHS dental care to mock the teeth of a worker who has not.

A nudge from someone effectively saying "you might want to rethink that" seems a sensible way to deal it. Contrast that to the all too frequent screams of "check your privilege" that some would have employed. And then used to avoid engaging in debate.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 7, 2013)

Athos said:


> A nudge from someone effectively saying "you might want to rethink that" seems a sensible way to deal it. Contrast that to the all too frequent screams of "check your privilege" that some would have employed. And then used to avoid engaging in debate.


 
Yep. 

I have a feeling I was - and I'm using the word sarcastically here, having just made it up - _worksplained_ to the other day. Some student said "no-one likes working for their dinner" and "any truly free person would not want to work". I said I fucking loved working in a factory, cos I did, often. 

No reply, of course.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 7, 2013)

copliker said:


> She's punky and alternative, she don't care what you say, discipline is her enemy, and anarchy is her way of life, man. And so on.


 
me creo punky 
y no te voy a mentir 
lo que pienso de ti 
te lo digo en la cara 
me creo punky 
y te lo hago sentir 
del modo punk 

yo no soy trater 
ni hiphopera 
yo no soy indi 
no soy rockera 
yo no soy emo 
ni pokemona 
yo nunca sigo 
lo que esta de moda


----------



## Favelado (Jan 7, 2013)

God that's awful.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 7, 2013)

S☼I said:


> I said I fucking loved working in a factory, cos I did, often.


 
Who wouldn't love being part of making the workers' bomb reality? Gives me a warm, tingly feeling inside knowing that I'm doing my bit (though TBF that might be more to do with my lead-lined undercrackers wearing out).


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 7, 2013)

S☼I said:


> I said I fucking loved working in a factory, cos I did, often.
> 
> No reply, of course.


 
The times I have best enjoyed my job it has been when working in warehouses or on building sites in situations where we have felt like we had a genuine bit of control over the day to day grind and could make the time to muck about a bit as well, lots of solidarity helps...

Once we flooded a warehouse floor and raced counterbalance forlifts around daring each other to spin them in circles and drive over big chunks of pallet so they would nearly tip over but then right themselves.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 7, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Gives me a warm, tingly feeling inside knowing that I'm doing my bit.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 7, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Just thinking about this privilege stuff - one thing that I've never seen it address is ugliness. I've been an ugly bastard all my life and we're constantly kept down by our more aesthetically pleasing oppressors. *Ugly people are criminally under-represented in the* modelling, *porn and sex industries* in particular. Fair enough we're over-represented in darts, rugby and shot put but those are not particularly prestigeous so we're 'allowed' that as a kind of tokenistic gesture.


 
Tis true!

(((((token Ron Jeremy)))))


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 7, 2013)

"erotic capital"


----------



## TruXta (Jan 7, 2013)

Plenty of "ugly" people in porn!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 7, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> One more weekend of forcing myself do a false log-in about stuff that no one cares about so i can tell them that i don't care about them not caring about it. I don't know why i bother sometimes.


 
That's a pretty accurate impression, tbf.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 7, 2013)

I'm old enough to remember when porn had comedy links between scenes, like a fat camp bloke on a swing or playing a tuba


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 7, 2013)

Athos said:


> You're right; I've removed it. And I apologise.
> 
> Whilst it wasn't posted with malice, it doesn't behove a man who has had *the privilege of a lifetime of NHS dental care* to mock the teeth of a worker who has not.
> 
> A nudge from someone effectively saying "you might want to rethink that" seems a sensible way to deal it. Contrast that to the all too frequent screams of "check your privilege" that some would have employed. And then used to avoid engaging in debate.


 
TBF, I think that the sentence I've highlighted should read "...the *relative* privilege of a lifetime of NHS dental care...".
Strictly for the sake of accuracy, you understand?


----------



## Nice one (Jan 7, 2013)

smokedout said:


> its funny to laugh at chavs when they're old and foreign


 
aye, and female shop workers who just happen to be employed by waitrose.

_How easily the masks slip_


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 7, 2013)

Harry Haller said:


> As I said to the referee, I'm sorry if it gets in the way of the important work you're doing here.


 
You're giving yourself airs and graces by thinking that you're anything more than a tedious, repetitive mild distraction, Elizabeth.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 7, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> I'm old enough to remember when porn had comedy links between scenes, like a fat camp bloke on a swing or playing a tuba


 

really?  but wouldn't that put you off your stroke?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 7, 2013)

confessions of usually involved comedy. The slap to the tickle so to speak


----------



## Fez909 (Jan 7, 2013)

Harry Haller said:


> Well I've never pretended to be one of the big guns of the revolution (never leave the house faction.)


 
Before you get banned again, I just wonder what you think people should be doing?  You've said in the past (I think) that the war is over, socialism is dead, never again to revive.  And I think I remember you saying the best to hope for from the left is a slowing down of the attacks on the working classes and the consolidation of neo-libralism (or whatever it was you said has 'won').

I know debating on a message board isn't going to change anything, but if you think nothing _can _be changed, then why such an issue with it?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 7, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> really?  but wouldn't that put you off your stroke?


Aye, I presume people were usually done with by the time one scene is over and needed a bit of a break before regathering their enthusiasm.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 7, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> confessions of usually involved comedy. The slap to the tickle so to speak


They weren't porn. They were just British 70s equivalents of Porky's/American Pie movies


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 7, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> They weren't porn. They were just British 70s equivalents of Porky's/American Pie movies


 





'Mornin' love. You want some cream with that?'


----------



## rosecore (Jan 7, 2013)

Stephen Lennon's been sent to prison for 10 months. Not that the EDL weren't already discredited. Make's Penny interview with him all the more pointless. Giving a platform to a now convicted criminal.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 7, 2013)

tbh i'm not sure that's a reasonable criticism.  it was as pointless as it was possible to be even before.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 7, 2013)

rosecore said:


> Stephen Lennon's been sent to prison for 10 months. Not that the EDL weren't already discredited. Make's Penny interview with him all the more pointless. Giving a platform to a now convicted criminal.


What % of the population do you think have a criminal conviction? Males esp.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 7, 2013)

i looked up the answer to that.  it was more than i expected.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 7, 2013)

Yep


----------



## cesare (Jan 7, 2013)

And breaking down that figure in %age proportion to relative population also


----------



## Athos (Jan 7, 2013)

rosecore said:
			
		

> Stephen Lennon's been sent to prison for 10 months. Not that the EDL weren't already discredited. Make's Penny interview with him all the more pointless. Giving a platform to a now convicted criminal.



That's why I no platformed Nelson Mandela.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 7, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Plenty of "ugly" people in porn!


 
big cocks though, another privilige


----------



## TruXta (Jan 7, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> big cocks though, another privilige


This is why Japanese porn is better for white blokes.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 7, 2013)

racist


----------



## TruXta (Jan 7, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> racist


Pah, you know its true.


----------



## Favelado (Jan 7, 2013)

Something's kicking off again on Laurie's Twitter. Stalking accusations aimed at Alex Wickham.


----------



## TruXta (Jan 7, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Something's kicking off again on Laurie's Twitter. Stalking accusations aimed at Alex Wickham.


 


> How dare you criticise anyone else's feminism?


Yes, how dare he.


----------



## Favelado (Jan 7, 2013)

I have no idea who Alex Wickham is. I didn't know who Laurie Penny was before I saw this thread.


----------



## TruXta (Jan 7, 2013)

Favelado said:


> I have no idea who Alex Wickham is. I didn't know who Laurie Penny was before I saw this thread.


Guido Fawkes of blogging fame.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 7, 2013)

Not him, the other one, the posh Edinburgh graduate who she took an award off a few months back. After accusing him - this hairy loon - of posting sex pics of her and then threatening her family.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 7, 2013)

Athos said:


> That's why I no platformed Nelson Mandela.



I've thought long and hard about no-platforming people. Basically, I don't like the idea of doing it to anyone who's words reflect the reality as they see it...however they see it. The people I'd block are the ones whose outpourings don't relate to anything objective or even tangible. Instead, their words just make up a commentary on the constant psychodrama running through their heads.

Obviously, this distinction is often fuzzy; it's sometimes a bit of a subjective call...and that's a drawback. But on the plus side you'd never have to listen to the likes of LP, Hundal, Eric Pickles, the EDL or guy down my local who likes Elvis a bit too much and whose missus looks like Myra Hindley.


----------



## TruXta (Jan 7, 2013)

> I'm not your unpaid intern, @*WikiGuido*


 Tempted to poke her about NS/NUJ and all that but I can't be bothered. She'd only ignore me anyways.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 7, 2013)

Is she in the NUJ now?


----------



## TruXta (Jan 7, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Is she in the NUJ now?


Dunno.


----------



## ymu (Jan 7, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Something's kicking off again on Laurie's Twitter. Stalking accusations aimed at Alex Wickham.


She's complaining about him allowing comments like this to remain on the site:



> Anonymous says:
> January 7, 2013 at 1:46 pm
> What you need is a large throbbing organic thing attached to a man slipped into your lady parts to make you understand why you’re a woman… I’m not a misogynist by the way, I love women, I just hate women who think all men are bastards.
> 
> http://order-order.com/2013/01/07/red-len-and-laurie-follow-in-gaddafis-footsteps/


 
Whilst I think she's being a bit precious given the small amount of time elapsed since the comments (which are not pre-moderated) were made, and as far as I can see the misogyny is getting slapped down by others (haven't read it all), it would be really fucking depressing to see this thread take the piss out of these tweets in all the wrong ways. The right ways are fine, of course.


----------



## Belushi (Jan 7, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> confessions of usually involved comedy. The slap to the tickle so to speak


 
I fucking hate those movies. Ten months I did a paper round before realising that I'd been lied to and British suburbia wasn't inhabited by bored housewives ready to rip the clothes off any young man that came calling


----------



## Favelado (Jan 7, 2013)

Comments are dumb beyond belief. She might as well let them stay there they're that idiotic.


----------



## Dan U (Jan 7, 2013)

as wrong as those comments are i did just do a lol when she accused him of attention seeking.

pot meet kettle.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 7, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Comments are dumb beyond belief. She might as well let them stay there they're that idiotic.



Of course she should...that way they give 'substance' to the little fantasy world in her head where she's the plucky manga heroine battling for freedom against the pillaging, raping, oppressing white male horde. The fact that it's a just one sad inadequate fuck-up-who's been slapped down anyway-should never be allowed to detract from her 'worldview'.

This is why I'm glad I got out and about as a kid...and wasn't one of those bookish 'live-in-my-head' nerdy types. They never really get to grips with reality. Everything's viewed through a prism of empathetic imagination forged alone in a teenage bedroom and never assayed against reality. Not that it's a problem...unless they get themselves a comment gig in the liberal press or end up as the 'voice of the left'.

Seriously...only let your kids read non-fiction till they're 25...or if they insist, then for every hour spend ploughing through turgid teenage fantasy literature, make sure they're  out the house playing football or nicking scrap metal or whatever for at least two hours.


----------



## ymu (Jan 7, 2013)

Yeah, that is the kind of piss-taking that isn't warranted. It is a simple fact that women writers online have to deal with the kind of violent and sexual abuse that is rarely directed at men, and she has had to deal with a lot of it. It's not one sad fuck-up and if you think it is, you have not been paying attention.

This does look to me like attention-seeking, given that the comments are not pre-moderated, haven't been up for long and are being challenged rather than built on. But there's no need to pretend that there's not actually any problem with violent sexual abuse directed at women online. There is, and it is very well documented. If your cynicism requires a source for that, I'll dig one up for you.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 7, 2013)

ymu said:


> Yeah, that is the kind of piss-taking that isn't warranted. It is a simple fact that women writers online have to deal with the kind of violent and sexual abuse that is rarely directed at men, and she has had to deal with a lot of it. It's not one sad fuck-up and if you think it is, you have not been paying attention.
> 
> This does look to me like attention-seeking, given that the comments are not pre-moderated and haven't been up for long. But there's no need to pretend that there's not actually any problem with violent sexual abuse directed at women online. There is, and it is very well documented. If your cynicism requires a source for that, I'll dig one up for you.



You may have a point but tbh, since she's extended her definition of 'abuse' to cover anything with remotely contravenes what she's said then she's kinda blown her case as far as I can see. Also..a) the two replies immediately beneath take 'anonymous' to task...and b) it's Guido...and taking that as in any way typical is ludicrous...it's a stomping ground for Tory gobshites who never made it out the playground.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 7, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> confessions of usually involved comedy. The slap to the tickle so to speak


 
Nah, no comedy in those films whatsoever.


----------



## ymu (Jan 7, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> You may have a point but tbh, since she's extended her definition of 'abuse' to cover anything with remotely contravenes what she's said then she's kinda blown her case as far as I can see. Also..a) the two replies immediately beneath take 'anonymous' to task...and b) it's Guido...and taking that as in any way typical is ludicrous...it's a stomping ground for Tory gobshites who never made it out the playground.


I've said all that myself. I'm just asking that people not stray into trivialising/denying the existence of serious misogynistic abuse directed at female writers in their rush to pour score on Laurie Penny. In much the same way that I'd ask people not stray into trivialising/denying the existence of -isms in their rush to pour score on identity politics.

Baby/bathwater etc etc.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 7, 2013)

Agree with that ymu, misogyny is quite a topical er ... topic at the moment withthe SWP split and so on, and people wonder how predators manage to rise to high positions within the left ...


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 7, 2013)

For what it's worth there is plenty of sexism on the left, dont think anyone who mentions it is some kind of bubble twat, not that anyone is saying that obviously, but just making the point, especially coz of recent events. i think talking about her should just extend to discussions of her views, identity politics etc being bullshit.


----------



## Dan U (Jan 7, 2013)

some guido comments get moderated, not sure if they have key words or what but i've said a few things, normally about Harry Coles mum or something and it says 'this comment is awaiting moderation' but it pretty much always appears.

they hide behind the 'we don't moderate' thing quite a bit, whoever owns the Guido troll at anyone time sometimes posts a response as well.


----------



## ymu (Jan 7, 2013)

Well, if that comment was pre-moderated, he should be ashamed of himself. But then again he is a Tory; they have no shame.


----------



## Dan U (Jan 7, 2013)

ymu said:


> Well, if that comment was pre-moderated, he should be ashamed of himself. But then again he is a Tory; they have no shame.


 
bizarrely he used to do the PR for Sunrise raves in the late 80s. funny lot r/w libertarians. from that to Nigel Farages #1 cheerleader.

i better eta that - according to wiki anyway.


----------



## ymu (Jan 7, 2013)

DanU said:


> bizarrely he used to do the PR for Sunrise raves in the late 80s. funny lot r/w libertarians. from that to Nigel Farages #1 cheerleader.
> 
> i better eta that - according to wiki anyway.


 
They are a weird bunch. Nick Cohen's theory:



> NickCohen4
> Right wing frustrations @edwestonline "You’re far, far more likely to get lucky at a protest about the “cuts” than one against immigration"


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 7, 2013)

ymu said:


> I've said all that myself. I'm just asking that people not stray into trivialising/denying the existence of serious misogynistic abuse directed at female writers in their rush to pour score on Laurie Penny. In much the same way that I'd ask people not stray into trivialising/denying the existence of -isms in their rush to pour score on identity politics.
> 
> Baby/bathwater etc etc.



Ok...and I'm not disagreeing. So how do you feel about people making the point that some female writers...who are, as you say subjected to appalling abuse...nevertheless employ the fact of this abuse to disparage their critics when there is no misogyny in play so much as an awkward point they don't want to deal with?..because once you see the the Internet as teeming with male sociopaths you start to posit motivations behind justified critiques which simply aren't there. And most posters aren't fucked up misogynists...and most of what LP writes is completely challengeable on rational grounds but is dismissed on the basis that the person making the challenge has an ulterior degenerate motive.

Your dictum makes the above point hard to convey and plays into the hands of those who would use the existence of racism and misogyny as a coverall to opt out of ever defending or substantiating a contentious point...not that you're wrong.


----------



## rekil (Jan 7, 2013)

ymu said:


> I'm just asking that people not stray into trivialising/denying the existence of serious misogynistic abuse directed at female writers in their rush to pour score on Laurie Penny.


 Already addressed way back in the thread. Though she did choose to ignore this when it was pointed out to her. She has far more interest in yakking with the scum than she has in answering questions here.


copliker said:


> She does get loads of genuinely creepy shit from right wing filth tbf.





Spanky Longhorn said:


> Yeah I can't actually bring myself to take the piss on twitter for fear of being lumped in with the scum.





chilango said:


> Maybe PD should leap to her defence against the common enemy? You know like the Red Army did for us during the war....


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i think talking about her should just extend to discussions of her views, identity politics etc being bullshit.



I think that's impossible. She sees herself and is obviously regarded by others as 'political'; and Politics is...and always has been about far more than somebody's views. It's about bullshit stuff like image, fashion, appearance, accent, presentation but other important stuff like personal integrity, consistency and a willingness to take on criticism.


----------



## Athos (Jan 7, 2013)

DanU said:
			
		

> some guido comments get moderated, not sure if they have key words or what but i've said a few things, normally about Harry Coles mum or something and it says 'this comment is awaiting moderation' but it pretty much always appears.
> 
> they hide behind the 'we don't moderate' thing quite a bit, whoever owns the Guido troll at anyone time sometimes posts a response as well.



It's an automatic thing, done by the machine, based on key words. So someone can deliver an ugly message as long as avoid the obvious bad words. Which would explain the curious vocabulary used in the post in question.


----------



## Athos (Jan 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:
			
		

> I think talking about her should just extend to discussions of her views, identity politics etc being bullshit.



Whilst I don't agree with this entirely - I think qualities like consistency and honesty are where personality and politics become inseparable - I think we should avoid anything which gives an easy out i.e. a righteous excuse to avoid tackling substantive criticisms.


----------



## ymu (Jan 7, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Ok...and I'm not disagreeing. So how do you feel about people making the point that some female writers...who are, as you say subjected to appalling abuse...nevertheless employ the fact of this abuse to disparage their critics when there is no misogyny in play so much as an awkward point they don't want to deal with?..because once you see the the Internet as teeming with male sociopaths you start to posit motivations behind justified critiques which simply aren't there. And most posters aren't fucked up misogynists...and most of what LP writes is completely challengeable on rational grounds but is dismissed on the basis that the person making the challenge has an ulterior degenerate motive.
> 
> Your dictum makes the above point hard to convey and plays into the hands of those who would use the existence of racism and misogyny as a coverall to opt out of ever defending or substantiating a contentious point...not that you're wrong.


I think you can criticise the mode of action without denying reality or trivialising the impact it has.

And I think you have to acknowledge that being repeatedly abused by misogynists might make it hard to distinguish it from genuine criticism, if that criticism is robustly or poorly worded, or bundled in with a load of genuinely dodgy comments (eg this thread).

I do think she chucks around identity-based accusations far too easily (eg spineygate as well as this latest spat), and devalues the accusation in the process. But you have to deal with that in exactly the same way as the bigoted comments she's complaining about - delete them (ie ignore) or have the patience to respond without sinking to the same level.

This is why identity politics is such a headfuck. It devalues precisely what it is supposed to stand for.


----------



## ymu (Jan 7, 2013)

copliker said:


> Already addressed way back in the thread. Though she did choose to ignore this when it was pointed out to her. She has far more interest in yakking with the scum than she has in answering questions here.


I was re-addressing it lest we stray anew. 

Agree entirely that she's using it to avoid the hard questions.


----------



## Firky (Jan 7, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Is she in the NUJ now?


 
Even if she said she was would you believe her?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 7, 2013)

firky said:


> Even if she said she was would you believe her?


 No...but it'd probably be the misogyny talking


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 7, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I fucking hate those movies. Ten months I did a paper round before realising that I'd been lied to and British suburbia wasn't inhabited by bored housewives ready to rip the clothes off any young man that came calling


 
when i had my paper-round i was genuinely invited inside by a middle-aged woman in a see-through neglige when i went knocking to ask for the paper bill.  i scarpered.  i was 12 and unprepared for that sort of thing.


----------



## Firky (Jan 7, 2013)

neglige, that's something you never see these days. it's all onsies and fucking panda hoodies.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 7, 2013)

firky said:


> neglige, that's something you never see these days. it's all onsies and fucking panda hoodies.


 
cute though



el-ahrairah said:


> when i had my paper-round i was genuinely invited inside by a middle-aged woman in a see-through neglige when i went knocking to ask for the paper bill. i scarpered. i was 12 and unprepared for that sort of thing.


 
At 12 I would certainly have ventured inside to see what happened.


----------



## Firky (Jan 7, 2013)

Make their toes curl by shagging them in a onsie.


----------



## cesare (Jan 7, 2013)




----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 7, 2013)

ETA: two facepalms simultaneously - that's more facepalm than a double Picard


----------



## Athos (Jan 7, 2013)




----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 7, 2013)




----------



## cesare (Jan 7, 2013)




----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 7, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> At 12 I would certainly have ventured inside to see what happened.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 7, 2013)

Is that Laurie and Nick?


----------



## Favelado (Jan 7, 2013)

firky said:


> neglige, that's something you never see these days. it's all onsies and fucking panda hoodies.


 
At Christmas I was back home. My grandad was giving me a lift somewhere. The streets were empty and it was hammering it down with rain. Not a soul to be seen. Then out of nowhere a 14 year old lad made his way across the road in front of us dressed in a tiger onsie and wellies. The onsie had ears and a tail and everything. It was the full Tigger. The kid had a face like a smacked arse however. The contrast between his miserable countenance and the frivolity of his get-up, combined with his nonchalence at marching around dressed as a jungle animal was a bit disturbing.

It was the first time I had seen a onsie too. It's the best evidence of the UK being in cultural decline since someone at work told me that they'd started a TV channel in Britain called Dave and I refused to believe them.

This is on topic right?


----------



## Firky (Jan 7, 2013)

Epic facepalming 1


You guys are the greatest


----------



## Firky (Jan 7, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Is that Laurie and Nick?


 
There's a special circle in hell just for you


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 7, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Yep.
> 
> 
> I have a feeling I was - and I'm using the word sarcastically here, having just made it up - _worksplained_ to the other day. Some student said "no-one likes working for their dinner" and "any truly free person would not want to work". I said I fucking loved working in a factory, cos I did, often.
> ...


 

Update:

I _did_ get a reply. 

"No one wants to 7 am to do Labour for someone else for the privilege of eating"

"I did. I liked working hard all week for money to spend."

"What did you lika about working hard all week for money to spend?"

"Working with people, collectively. Sense of jobs well-done. Tasks as ends in themselves. That and money to blow on the weekend and buy nice stuff for tea"

"None of these things require wage labour to exist. Wage labour probably makes them harder. Did you actually enjoy the part where you had to sell your labour or run out of money?"

Etc. Theory, theory, theory. And there's the disconnect. Lads I worked with in factories didn't give a fuck about the concept of selling your labour, who owns the means of production, identity politics, kyriarchy, othering, man/white/left/black/worksplaining. Thinking that something was a bit rotten they they put a load of hours in getting mucky for £250 a week while the boss drove a Morgan didn't stop us all oohing and aahing over the thing in the factory car park. Having a decent wedge in your pocket on a Friday to go down the boozer with and up the football Saturday didn't stop anyone moaning about the tax paid out of our wages nor did it stop us being happy with how it helped. And knowing the factory QA who did fuck-all earned twice as much as most of us didn't stop us being proud, sometimes, of the job(s) we did. It's all very well speaking in terms of pure theory about what people should feel about their labour being exploited but it's not just as simple as reading out of a textbook, is it?

Sorry if I've not made myself clear, like; I never went to university and I only read fiction and biographies and that.


----------



## rekil (Jan 8, 2013)

R4's Womens Hour at 10am if anyone can be bothered. It will stink.


> What is the best way for women to engage in the political process? March and shout loudly or lobby and persuade for change? Journalist Laurie Penny and Charlotte Vere, founder of Women On, a campaign group for women in the economy, join us to discuss.


----------



## Firky (Jan 8, 2013)

copliker said:


> R4's Womens Hour at 10am if anyone can be bothered. It will stink.


 
Is that today (tuesday)?

Actually am not bothered, I have better things to be doing than listening to that spoilt brat. 

(will listen to it anyway as I know waht I am like)


----------



## rekil (Jan 8, 2013)

firky said:


> Is that today (tuesday)?


Yes. I do hope the suffragettes get a mention.


----------



## Firky (Jan 8, 2013)

copliker said:


> Yes. I do hope the suffragettes get a mention.


 
Emily Davison was from my home town, I have more in common with her than LP! But they both went to Oxford so maybe not.


----------



## mrs quoad (Jan 8, 2013)

She's on R4 / Women's Hour at this very second...


----------



## BigTom (Jan 8, 2013)

So I've been invited to the @politicsinbrum 2nd birthday party  All the local twitterati will be there - @politicalhackUK - a labour councillor - @brumpolitics - an a level politics teacher and (possibly ex) lib dem - bloggers from The Chamberlain Files and more! Soon I'll be the "voice of the left" in the midlands.. or maybe the "voice of youth", I'm only 33 you know!

I'm sure she sent this DM to everyone she followed, when I saw it I shuddered a bit thinking of this thread and the wider media commentariat etc. and how this is also reflected in some way at a local level. I won't be attending, I expect it'll be as bad as art exhibition openings but without some art to enjoy.


----------



## brogdale (Jan 8, 2013)

mrs quoad said:


> She's on R4 / Women's Hour at this very second...


Liberal 'feminist' argues with Socialist feminist.
Only one winner there!


----------



## smokedout (Jan 8, 2013)

maybe it'll be like when they put her up against louise mensch on newsnight to discuss feminism in the tory party, which should have been a rout.  instead they appeared to discover they had lots in common and got on spiffingly.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 8, 2013)

brogdale said:


> Liberal 'feminist' argues with Socialist feminist.
> Only one winner there!


I would have listened properly but was too busy having breakfast and getting some of the housework out of the way.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 8, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Is that Laurie and Nick?


 
Metaphorically speaking!


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> maybe it'll be like when they put her up against louise mensch on newsnight to discuss feminism in the tory party, which should have been a rout. instead they appeared to discover they had lots in common and got on spiffingly.


 
Class always sides together in the end.  Their interests are too similar.


----------



## rekil (Jan 8, 2013)

Greebo said:


> I would have listened properly but was too busy having breakfast and getting some of the housework out of the way.


You didn't miss anything. Just the usual ignorant spoofing. Something about slutwalks and surprise surprise, the suffragettes. Good game good game.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 8, 2013)

firky said:


> Emily Davison was from my home town, I have more in common with her than LP! But they both went to Oxford so maybe not.


 
Yeah, Ladies wearing sashes and that.  

It's a pity so many working class women who were a part of such struggle (and as socialists) still remain in obscurity.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 8, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Update:
> 
> I _did_ get a reply.
> 
> ...


 
I put tins of corned beef on a shelf most nights, but still like a bit of theory.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 8, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> I put tins of corned beef on a shelf most nights, but still like a bit of theory.


 
Aye, but not to the exclusion of all other matters and I expect you'd agree it's not really cognitively dissonant to both rail against the capitalist system and be pleased with having done a good job and having a few quid for it*.

*I have checked my privilege and sincerely hope I am not coming across worksplaining to you


----------



## Firky (Jan 8, 2013)

I didn't catch LP on Radio 4, too busy bathing with my rubber duck.



Captain Hurrah said:


> It's a pity so many working class women who were a part of such struggle (and as socialists) still remain in obscurity.


 
It's not just limited to that though, there's Ada Lovelace, all the women at Bletchley Park (who's names are so unfamiliar I don't know any) etc.

I'd rather starve than subject myself to corned beef!


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 8, 2013)

firky said:


> I didn't catch LP on Radio 4, too busy bathing with my rubber duck.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Corned beef is more attractive than part-time purgatory, or workfare. 

And I was on about women literally at the bottom, and what they fought for, at great risk to themselves and their families.  Not what the uppers are supposed to have done on their behalf.


----------



## Favelado (Jan 8, 2013)

firky said:


> I didn't catch LP on Radio 4, too busy bathing with my rubber duck.


 
I notice that "u" and "i" are close enough on the keyboard to facilitate typos.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 8, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> And I was on about women literally at the bottom, and what they fought for, at great risk to themselves and their families. Not what the uppers are supposed to have done on their behalf.


 
like this

http://www.keele.ac.uk/history/currentundergraduates/tltp/WOMEN/SUMMERFI/TEXT/SUMER29B.HTM

But you hear all about the suffragettes and nothing about working class women's action


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 8, 2013)

I remember a good book on textile workers in Lancashire: One Hand Tied Behind Us - The Rise of the Women's Suffrage Movement.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 8, 2013)

BRHG did a great pamphlet Votes for Ladies: The Suffragette Movement 1903-1914 (brief summary here) - have a look at the slides here (pdf).



> “a working woman's movement is of no value; working women are the weakest position of the sex; how could it be otherwise? Their lives are too hard, their education too meager to equip them for the contest. Surely it is a mistake to use the weakest for the struggle. We want picked women, the very strongest and the most intelligent.”


----------



## smokedout (Jan 8, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Aye, but not to the exclusion of all other matters and I expect you'd agree it's not really cognitively dissonant to both rail against the capitalist system and be pleased with having done a good job and having a few quid for it*.
> 
> *I have checked my privilege and sincerely hope I am not coming across worksplaining to you


 
in fairness to a lot of younger kids the idea of having done a good job and got a decent few quid for it is now missing one vital component


----------



## rekil (Jan 8, 2013)

Laura and tory woman: 15:30 - 23:30 

It's really fucking bad.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 8, 2013)

firky said:


> It's not just limited to that though, there's Ada Lovelace, all the women at Bletchley Park (who's names are so unfamiliar I don't know any) etc.


 
Let's have, in all seriousness, a mention for the female field agents of the Special Operations Executive, who did (and did as well as anybody) a job which a lot of people (male or female) would have run a country mile away from.


----------



## rosecore (Jan 8, 2013)

Laurie was on Novara Radio (Aaron Peters and James Butler) discussing class and journalism. I''m sure it will posted on their Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/pages/NovaraMedia/404716342902872


----------



## nino_savatte (Jan 8, 2013)

copliker said:


> Laura and tory woman: 15:30 - 23:30
> 
> It's really fucking bad.


Aye, it was a shocker. LP sounded like one of those irritating squeaky toys you give your dog to chew on.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 8, 2013)

weepiper said:


> like this
> 
> http://www.keele.ac.uk/history/currentundergraduates/tltp/WOMEN/SUMMERFI/TEXT/SUMER29B.HTM
> 
> But you hear all about the suffragettes and nothing about working class women's action


 

yup - another part of British ( Scots ) history, along with the entire red Clydeside period that seems pretty much airbrushed from most textbooks on teh great War era


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 8, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> yup - another part of British ( Scots ) history, along with the entire red Clydeside period that seems pretty much airbrushed from most textbooks on teh great War era


Along with everything to do with Ireland pre-second World War. 

Even the Clydebank blitz is barely mentioned - the whole town bar a few tenement blocks destroyed, leveled.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 8, 2013)

rosecore said:


> Laurie was on Novara Radio (Aaron Peters and James Butler) discussing class and journalism. I''m sure it will posted on their Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/pages/NovaraMedia/404716342902872


 
up at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkin...ters/audio-new-media-and-british-commentariat

couldn't listen to more than ten minutes, like listening to a load of full of themselves posh arsewipes talking too loudly on the table next to you in the chandos after a demo


----------



## 8ball (Jan 9, 2013)

copliker said:


> Laura and tory woman: 15:30 - 23:30
> 
> It's really fucking bad.


 
I don't think it reflects well on her that she fucks off before the cookery bit.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 9, 2013)

rosecore said:


> Laurie was on Novara Radio (Aaron Peters and James Butler) discussing class and journalism. I''m sure it will posted on their Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/pages/NovaraMedia/404716342902872


 
16 minutes in and there have been a couple of allusions to journalism-as-privilege where you can hear wor Penny "um-umming" as though a question about her privileged background and meteoric career is about to be dropped on her...which has as yet not been asked.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 9, 2013)

30 minutes in and there's some fantastic hole-digging about championing the Lib Dems because she was "angry at Labour for starting the attack on welfare". But then "I actually voted Labour myself". And another reference to living in a house where "we" were all affected by the changes to benefits.

And a whole load of shite about "I've been growing and maturing so of COURSE I've had tons of different political standpoints and been in lots of different movements" etc etc. Most people DON'T get paid for political writing while they're figuring out which pot to shit in, though.

This is vaguely interesting stuff, but with execrable chin-stroking. Pretend intellectuals impressing each other with their pretend intellectualism. And all mates, as is revealed in the course of the cosy chat.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 9, 2013)

The idea that the lib-dem support was a flash-in-the-pan moment of anger at labour party attacks on the welfare state falls down on a number of levels (supporting the party that you think needed to be electorally punished for example) but the most relevant one would be that the call to lib-dem arms was published on the sunday before the election, _alone_ it could be taken as evidence of a passing anger rectified on the thursday of the election - however, when placed alongside this (hideous*) piece from two months before that i think some questions can be honestly asked:



> I will not be taking part directly, because I’m already planning to use my own vote to assist one of the liberal PPCs in Leyton and Wanstead.


 
Four days before this, Clegg gave his infamous Why I admire Margaret Thatcher interview:




			
				the leader of the lib-dems said:
			
		

> 'I'm 43 now. I was at university at the height of the Thatcher revolution and I recognise now something I did not at the time: that her victory over a vested interest, the trade unions, was immensely significant.
> 'I don't want to be churlish, that was an immensely important visceral battle for how Britain is governed.'


 
And articles like this from the following month demonstrating pretty embarrassing:



> Britain's first televised leaders' debate has irrevocably altered both the terms and the style of British politics. The debate, which was broadcast last night a mere fifty years after American audiences first got the chance to watch their prospective leaders tear each other into elegant shreds on air, shone a spotlight on the languishing art of British political rhetoric, with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg trouncing his opponents in the tradition of our most dazzling Enlightenment speakers.
> 
> ...
> 
> ...


 
For the record, I think it's fine to admit that you voted for the lib-dems, that you were mugged by them (and by yourself) if you recognise that this is what took place - if you've looked at the logic that you offered to yourself and others when you urged people to vote for them or defended voting for them and worked out where you went wrong and why - that's not a ground to attack someone. Refusal to do the above - sure.

____________________________________________
*





> suffrage is the pivotal right. If you opt out of the one effort that makes you a relevant civic entity, you have forfeited your right to complain about anything the government does, and you have betrayed all the other young people who do want the right to be heard. Generations of suffragettes, civil rights protesters and trades unionists did not fight and die so that you could sit on the sofa thinking about how the government never listens to you.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 9, 2013)

> Perhaps ******* is a "yunnie" Young Urban Narcissist
> 
> According to the DSM-IV, a person with “narcissistic personality disorder” is characterized by exhibiting at least five of the following:
> *1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance—i.e. grandiosity (exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)*​*2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love*​
> ...


http://www.williamsburgobserver.org/2012/09/25/spiritual-home-of-the-yunnie/

I read this somewhere else.....and for some reason it made me think of this thread


----------



## Firky (Jan 9, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> when placed alongside this (hideous*)


 
Out of interest how many people here heard of this? First I have.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 9, 2013)

firky said:


> Out of interest how many people here heard of this? First I have.


The Give your Vote campaign or the intention to vote lib-dem in march?


----------



## Firky (Jan 9, 2013)

The campaign, I followed the link in that article and I see that it has all kinds of media logos to make it look like it's a big thing, but when you press it there's only half a dozen links. 

Since people here are quite informed and follow such things I was wondering if I was alone in being totally ignorant of it.


----------



## Firky (Jan 9, 2013)

The GYVC Facebook group:



> People Talking About This
> 2


 
Haha. Question answered,


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 9, 2013)

firky said:


> The campaign, I followed the link in that article and I see that it has all kinds of media logos to make it look like it's a big thing, but when you press it there's only half a dozen links.
> 
> Since people here are quite informed and follow such things I was wondering if I was alone in being totally ignorant of it.


Never heard of it outside of that link myself - i suspect it's a rip-off my my _sell your vote_ campaign from 97 (iirc).


----------



## Firky (Jan 9, 2013)

> the most mind-boggling, most potentially revolutionary ideas [GYVC] to come out of the internet age in Britain so


 
There's one of those Willy Wonka sarcasm memes in there.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

nino_savatte said:


> Aye, it was a shocker. LP sounded like one of those irritating squeaky toys you give your dog to chew on.


 
So, she sounds like Michael Gove, then?


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

Maybe the SWP will be sending Martin Smith round to have a quiet word.

All in the spirit of the age, of course. Young Spirit. SWP Spirit. Spreading the love.


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## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

Spreading the love in the typical SWP sort of way, of course.


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## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

nino_savatte said:


> Aye, it was a shocker. LP sounded like one of those irritating squeaky toys you give your dog to chew on.


 
Really? Maybe you should let Martin Smith know  -  give him something to think on while he's on his way.


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

8ball said:


> I don't think it reflects well on her that she fucks off before the cookery bit.


 
Whatever are you suggesting? Voluntarily reducing her marriage potential?

What other recommendations would you have for her?


----------



## J Ed (Jan 9, 2013)

copliker said:


> Laura and tory woman: 15:30 - 23:30
> 
> It's really fucking bad.


 
To paraphrase Bakunin slightly - if Laurie Penny didn't exist, Mi5 would have to invent her


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> Spreading the love in the typical SWP sort of way, of course.


Hmmm.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 9, 2013)

Back to the lib-dem spur of the moment stuff:



> Right now, I pay half my meagre salary to live in a room the size of a normal person's toilet (we suspect it used to be a toilet before a dodgy landlord modded the place) in an overcrowded houseshare in inner London, the fourth such houseshare I've lived in since moving here in 2007. Nobody does enough washing up, everyone gets on each other's nerves, and we all have to pretend not to hear each other's shagging sounds through the paper-thin walls. We are also family. We play music together, cook together, discuss politics, write together, share smokes and paperbacks and ideas. _We may not be related, *but we're enough of a family to have agreed to put up a sign in the window endorsing the Liberal Democrats, and we are voters too.*_


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## weepiper (Jan 9, 2013)

Huh. Is that the house that Nick owns? You'd think he'd give her mate's rates.


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## butchersapron (Jan 9, 2013)

Don't think it is that one no.


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## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Back to the lib-dem spur of the moment stuff:


Now you must be getting Martin Smith really angry.


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## Steel Icarus (Jan 9, 2013)

Imagine that. Mates living in a shared house, like a family. The subtext is _look at how we're having to live._


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## weepiper (Jan 9, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Imagine that. Mates living in a shared house, like a family. The subtext is _look at how we're having to live._


 
Yup. Like Gavanndra Hodge being so terribly _bohemian_ by having two little kids sharing a room. It smacks of playing at it


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## J Ed (Jan 9, 2013)

I also love the way in which she acts as if she and her friends are the first people to have discovered sex and drugs.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 9, 2013)

And yet more royal "we" action. 

It's clear that unlike maybe Toynbee who perhaps genuinely doesn't see the clash between making a fucking mint writing about and speaking for working class and unemployed people, Laurie is very careful how she's perceived. She has a brand to maintain, after all. In that radio chat with Peters and Butler there were times where she had to correct herself so she didn't say something that might harm that brand. Maybe she was internally checking her privilege and then choosing the correct thing to say for her audience, like a Terminator with what she STILL gleefully refers to as "weird hair"( as if this is one of the cornerstones of her radicalism). Laurie knows full well how she's criticised and for what, and spends time manoeuvring around these potential pratfalls. Such is the life of a "popular" political columnist*

*word purposefully chosen


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## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I also love the way in which she acts as if she and her friends are the first people to have discovered sex and drugs.


But she IS, isn't she?


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 9, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I also love the way in which she acts as if she and her friends are the first people to have discovered sex and drugs.


 
Pppeople try to ppput us down.


----------



## Firky (Jan 9, 2013)

The same libdems that voted the benefits cap. Repugnant. When will they learn that the libdems are the slimiest of the three major parties?


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 9, 2013)

S☼I said:


> And yet more royal "we" action.
> 
> It's clear that unlike maybe Toynbee who perhaps genuinely doesn't see the clash between making a fucking mint writing about and speaking for working class and unemployed people, Laurie is very careful how she's perceived. She has a brand to maintain, after all. In that radio chat with Peters and Butler there were times where she had to correct herself so she didn't say something that might harm that brand. Maybe she was internally checking her privilege and then choosing the correct thing to say for her audience, like a Terminator with what she STILL gleefully refers to as "weird hair"( as if this is one of the cornerstones of her radicalism). Laurie knows full well how she's criticised and for what, and spends time manoeuvring around these potential pratfalls. Such is the life of a "popular" political columnist*
> 
> *word purposefully chosen


 
The main difference is that Toynbee doesn't think or pretend that she is part of the working class, she writes from the perspective that is clearly observational and sympathetic.


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## Steel Icarus (Jan 9, 2013)

Aye, she is. It's part of the Penny brand to be as near as possible to the downtrodden, eh.


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## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

S☼I said:


> And yet more royal "we" action.
> 
> It's clear that unlike maybe Toynbee who perhaps genuinely doesn't see the clash between making a fucking mint writing about and speaking for working class and unemployed people, Laurie is very careful how she's perceived. She has a brand to maintain, after all. In that radio chat with Peters and Butler there were times where she had to correct herself so she didn't say something that might harm that brand. Maybe she was internally checking her privilege and then choosing the correct thing to say for her audience, like a Terminator with what she STILL gleefully refers to as "weird hair"( as if this is one of the cornerstones of her radicalism). Laurie knows full well how she's criticised and for what, and spends time manoeuvring around these potential pratfalls. Such is the life of a "popular" political columnist*
> 
> *word purposefully chosen


You speak of "her privilege": what is this?

Yes, she went to Brighton College, but was that paid for by the college, was she a scholarship gal? I don't know. Do you?

As far as going to Oxford Uni, that's not being privileged: she didn't buy her place, entry is competitive (with quasi-quotas for those without the highest 'A'-level grades), so she got there as a result of her OWN efforts. That's not been privileged, that's the result of working hard, applying herself. (In many ways going to a so-called elite uni can be a burden, rather than a privilege, as it denies the student an everyday interaction with the variety of people making up Britain today.)

For all we know she may be carrying the rich man's burden. (And after all, she's only 26  -  something Martin Smith is fully aware of.)

Just saying.


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## weepiper (Jan 9, 2013)

not enough facepalms.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 9, 2013)

weepiper said:


> not enough facepalms.


Still, I was having a crap day at work, it was good for a chortle or two


----------



## cesare (Jan 9, 2013)

Perhaps she is engaging after all?


----------



## ymu (Jan 9, 2013)

Laurie, is that you?


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## butchersapron (Jan 9, 2013)

Our parents' excesses.



> After the crash of autumn 2008, Generation Y realised with a rush of horror that no matter how good we were or how relentlessly we hammered our minds and bodies into the grooves laid out for us by our parents and teachers, everything was definitely not going to be fine. Instead, we are going to spend our lives paying for* our parents' excesses,* who have bequeathed us a broken economy, a stagnant job market and a planet that's increasingly on fire. This sudden understanding of just how blithely our future has been mortgaged has been festering for a full 18 months, and now a rash of books has broken out, angry and sore, across the body politic.


 
What was my parents excesses? I think they must have done it in secret.


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## Fruitloop (Jan 9, 2013)

My dad was arrested for knocking off a policeman's helmet. Does that count?


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## butchersapron (Jan 9, 2013)

Fruitloop said:


> My dad was arrested for knocking off a policeman's helmet. Does that count?


We are going to spend our lifes paying for that shit.


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Our parents' excesses.
> 
> 
> 
> What was my parents excesses? I think they must have done it in secret.


It seems Martin Smith's excesses were done in secret but are now leaking out.


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

Fruitloop said:


> My dad was arrested for knocking off a policeman's helmet. Does that count?


only if he was convicted


----------



## weepiper (Jan 9, 2013)

Fuck's sake for someone who used to be a copy editor her grammar's awful too



> spend our lives paying for our parents' excesses, who have bequeathed us


----------



## Fruitloop (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> only if he was convicted


I believe that he was.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> It seems Martin Smith's excesses were done in secret but are now leaking out.


Seriously, there's another thread if you want to go and make the same point over and over. Not that you'll be here that long.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 9, 2013)

Fruitloop said:


> My dad was arrested for knocking off a policeman's helmet. Does that count?


 
You dad was Bertie Wooster?


----------



## Firky (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> You speak of "her privilege": what is this?
> 
> Yes, she went to Brighton College, but was that paid for by the college, was she a scholarship gal? I don't know. Do you?
> 
> ...



Are you Laurie?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 9, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Our parents' excesses.
> 
> 
> 
> What was my parents excesses? I think they must have done it in secret.


 
My parents have bought a double fronted fridge with a cooler and ice dispenser that is quite excessive.


----------



## Fruitloop (Jan 9, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> You dad was Bertie Wooster?


Didn't he steal one? A step in a more radical direction, that.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 9, 2013)

Fruitloop said:


> Didn't he steal one? A step in a more radical direction, that.


 
So you're saying your dad was basically a less radical Bertie Wooster then?


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Seriously, there's another thread if you want to go and make the same point over and over. Not that you'll be here that long.


Well, that's very friendly. And thanks for the old news. Maybe Martin Smith has given you the behaviour modification treatment too.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> Really? Maybe you should let Martin Smith know - give him something to think on while he's on his way.


Yeah, maybe I'll do that.


----------



## Fruitloop (Jan 9, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> So you're saying your dad was basically a less radical Bertie Wooster then?


Apparently so.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 9, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Fuck's sake for someone who used to be a copy editor her grammar's awful too


 
Maybe she's doing her own sub-editing because nobody else is willing to take the blame when she's caught out again.


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


>


Isn't that Fred West? Worrying, to say the least.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jan 9, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> So, she sounds like Michael Gove, then?


I think most dogs would spit Gove out tbh.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> Isn't that Fred West? Worrying, to say the least.


 
It's either a young Fred West, or a young Phillip Hollobone M.P.


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Something's kicking off again on Laurie's Twitter. Stalking accusations aimed at Alex Wickham.


Maybe it's not Alex she should be worried about. Maybe.

Just saying.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> Maybe the SWP will be sending Martin Smith round to have a quiet word.
> 
> All in the spirit of the age, of course. Young Spirit. SWP Spirit. Spreading the love.


 
Mr. Poloshirt on his own? That'd be amusing.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 9, 2013)




----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 9, 2013)

Something else just struck me about the radio thingy - a small thing, but quite telling in so far as Laurie's chameleoning around for the position of most advantage (if this is fearless then my cock's a kipper). In there she says "quote COMMENTARIAT unquote" with an almost audible eye-roll, as if it's such a stupid fucking word she would never use it herself. Apart from in the speech she gave upon acceptance of the award from among others the Fawkes blog twats: 




			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> Social media has been an energising and empowering force for the British commentariat, rearranging some of the old hierarchies and allowing young people and those outside the mainstream press to amplify voices that would otherwise go unheard.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 9, 2013)

i dont know who this newbie is but they're creepy as fuck.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 9, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Mr. Poloshirt on his own? That'd be amusing.


 
read that back to yourself mate.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> Maybe it's not Alex she should be worried about. Maybe.
> 
> Just saying.


 
Neither strange nor true...just dull.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Huh. Is that the house that Nick owns? You'd think he'd give her mate's rates.


 
What, and forego a half-dozen bottles of _vin rouge_ a week? Not likely!

Her room is a damn sight larger than a standard bog, too, unless her idea of the size of a normal bog is 8ft x 5ft plus.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> read that back to yourself mate.


 
I have.

...and?


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## frogwoman (Jan 9, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I have.
> 
> ...and?


 
given what martin smith is suspected of i don't think its particularly amusing to imagine him alone with anyone


----------



## nino_savatte (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> Maybe the SWP will be sending Martin Smith round to have a quiet word.
> 
> All in the spirit of the age, of course. Young Spirit. SWP Spirit. Spreading the love.


Did you say "Spirit of the Age"? Probably before your time but chew on this one.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Imagine that. Mates living in a shared house, like a family. The subtext is _look at how we're having to live._


 
To be fair, Sticky, it's becoming more and more a standard housing trope, what with almost zero availability of social housing, plus static or increasing private rents and house prices.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 9, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> What, and forego a half-dozen bottles of _vin rouge_ a week? Not likely!
> 
> Her room is a damn sight larger than a standard bog, too, unless her idea of the size of a normal bog is 8ft x 5ft plus.


 
I _think_ the room she compared to was in a shared house, NOT the one in Lezard's gaffe. _That_ one she compared to a hovel. Which I expect compared to what she has been used to most of her life is one. To me it looks much nicer than about half of the rooms I lived in during a few years moving around shared houses.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> given what martin smith is suspected of i don't think its particularly amusing to imagine him alone with anyone


 
I was more thinking of the implications for a bloke who only likes to "get stuck in" when he's in control or he's mob-handed. Martin Smith visiting someone alone, someone not dependent on him or beholden to him, would probably mostly result in a slapping for him.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 9, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> To be fair, Sticky, it's becoming more and more a standard housing trope, what with almost zero availability of social housing, plus static or increasing private rents and house prices.


 
Aye, I know. Can't help but detect an undercurrent of "why should _Oxbridge_ graduates have to live like this?".


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 9, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Aye, I know. Can't help but detect an undercurrent of "why should _Oxbridge_ graduates have to live like this?".


 
of course it is because that's what her politics amount to.


----------



## Firky (Jan 9, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Aye, I know. Can't help but detect an undercurrent of "why should _Oxbridge_ graduates have to live like this?".



And why can't they be spokespersons of *insert group* because they're standing on the outside looking in.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Our parents' excesses.
> 
> 
> 
> What was my parents excesses? I think they must have done it in secret.


 
I believe that for us proletarian types, "our parents' excesses" are basically "mum went to bingo, dad went to the bookies".


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

Fruitloop said:


> My dad was arrested for knocking off a policeman's helmet. Does that count?


 
Only if it was the helmet of his cock, not his head-protector.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> You speak of "her privilege": what is this?
> 
> Yes, she went to Brighton College, but was that paid for by the college, was she a scholarship gal? I don't know. Do you?
> 
> ...


 

You cant help what school you go to and to a lesser extent/ up to a point, the same is true of University at 18 or whatever.You cant help being born M/C.Shes blates very clever, but I have yet to read anything that isnt uninspired & derivative - this isnt the birth of a New Hitchens, despite the fawning of media to get her take on things.

Its the gleeful donning of this media friendly, acceptable , lefty commentary image and radical branding that this self promoting, needy 26 year old works so hard at is what get on people tits.

innit


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> My parents have bought a double fronted fridge with a cooler and ice dispenser that is quite excessive.


 
To the workers' re-education holiday park with them, comrade!


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 9, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I believe that for us proletarian types, "our parents' excesses" are basically "mum went to bingo, dad went to the bookies".


And in my family the game of chance had a better return at lower outlay.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> Well, that's very friendly. And thanks for the old news. Maybe Martin Smith has given you the behaviour modification treatment too.


 
It's also alleged that he gave your mother some.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Aye, I know. Can't help but detect an undercurrent of "why should _Oxbridge_ graduates have to live like this?".


 
Fuck undercurrents! I've seen and heard enough cases of her peers actually saying this shit to the media to believe it's an overt current!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> of course it is because that's what her politics amount to.


 
Defence of privilege is very often the basis for middle-class politics. That or the belief that the individual is part of a vanguard.


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

copliker said:


> You didn't miss anything. Just the usual ignorant spoofing. Something about slutwalks and surprise surprise, the suffragettes. Good game good game.


Any truth in the rumour that the Headquarters of the Class Struggle (SWP Towers) will be slutwalked this Friday?


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Mr. Poloshirt on his own? That'd be amusing.


That's all we need!, shout the Disputes Cttee. in unison (they're all staunch trade unionists, you know).


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

firky said:


> neglige, that's something you never see these days. it's all onsies and fucking panda hoodies.


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Mr. Poloshirt on his own? That'd be amusing.


Wouls she be in a panda onsie though?


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

Hoodie down?


----------



## Fruitloop (Jan 9, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> To the workers' re-education holiday park with them, comrade!


 
Bagsy the fridge.


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> given what martin smith is suspected of i don't think its particularly amusing to imagine him alone with anyone


The panda is being sarcastic  -  after all, it's a violent panda!

Sense of humour failure, send for the doctor!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

Fruitloop said:


> Bagsy the fridge.


 
Expropriating the goods of the _bourgeoisie_ for general use is only to be applauded, comrade. The _kulaks_ won't miss it where they're going!


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 9, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Expropriating the goods of the _bourgeoisie_ for general use is only to be applauded, comrade. The _kulaks_ won't miss it where they're going!


 






'For winter sports visit snowy Belbaltlag, part of the Gulag Group. 250,000 wooden beds. One bath. Cuisine by a former chef on a lifer. Huge staff always attentive and vigilant. Once visited, NEVER left...'


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 9, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i dont know who this newbie is but they're creepy as fuck.


 
which one.  there's about three suddenly popped up here.


----------



## barney_pig (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> The panda is being sarcastic  -  after all, it's a violent panda!
> 
> Sense of humour failure, send for the doctor!


You arenew here, bit of advice, rape jokes are not appreciated. Please read the nonce thread concerning the naming of people who have been charged with any offence.


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> You cant help what school you go to and to a lesser extent/ up to a point, the same is true of University at 18 or whatever.You cant help being born M/C.Shes blates very clever, but I have yet to read anything that isnt uninspired & derivative - this isnt the birth of a New Hitchens, despite the fawning of media to get her take on things.
> 
> Its the gleeful donning of this media friendly, acceptable , lefty commentary image and radical branding that this self promoting, needy 26 year old works so hard at is what get on people tits.
> 
> innit


I'd never heard of Ms Penny until today. From the few of her articles that I've read you are correct in saying her work is uninspiring & derivative. She's boring &, more importantly, naive, even for a 26 year old.

I find it dispiriting such an untalented person gets so much attention. Her efforts so far deserve only to be ignored. She should be left alone for a decade or so to give herself an opportunity to acquire some fundamental learning.

Obviously, in all likelihood, she won't take advantage of this opportunity: she strikes me as shallow, needy, self-loathing (not narcissistic), insecure; she has found a little fame, is greatly gladdened by this, & will do what she has to do to stay in the weak limelight shining upon her.

It doesn't surprise me she found release in anorexia, & I'm sure that is just one episode of 'failing' in her life so far & in her life to come. She will probably pen more than one volume of misery memoir  -  let's just hope Martin Smith doesn't make an appearance. It would not surprise me if in these memoirs she were to write of having been a prostitute  - partly out of undertaking fieldwork for some articles, partly out of a way to cope with her insecurity, her need to be liked, & her self-loathing.


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> You arenew here, bit of advice, rape jokes are not appreciated. Please read the nonce thread concerning the naming of people who have been charged with any offence.


I'm not joking. Stange you saw it as a joke. That's worrying.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 9, 2013)

Let's get rid of this one then.


----------



## killer b (Jan 9, 2013)

jesus. shut the fuck up.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> It doesn't surprise me she found release in anorexia, & I'm sure that is just one episode of 'failing' in her life so far & in her life to come. She will probably pen more than one volume of misery memoir - let's just hope Martin Smith doesn't make an appearance. It would not surprise me if in these memoirs she were to write of having been a prostitute - partly out of undertaking fieldwork for some articles, partly out of a way to cope with her insecurity, her need to be liked, & her self-loathing.


 
you, sir, are a prick.


----------



## StrangeButTrue (Jan 9, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> It's also alleged that he gave your mother some.


That's out of character, coming from you. We expect violence!


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> I'd never heard of Ms Penny until today. From the few of her articles that I've read you are correct in saying her work is uninspiring & derivative. She's boring &, more importantly, naive, even for a 26 year old.
> 
> I find it dispiriting such an untalented person gets so much attention. Her efforts so far deserve only to be ignored. She should be left alone for a decade or so to give herself an opportunity to acquire some fundamental learning.
> 
> ...


 
Added unpleasant to boring, heading towards dire.

Louis MacNeice


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 9, 2013)

You sure showed them commies sbt


----------



## elbows (Jan 9, 2013)

Who is this alpha fail, brimming with testosterwrong? Ugly and unacceptable.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> It doesn't surprise me she found release in anorexia, & I'm sure that is just one episode of 'failing' in her life so far & in her life to come. She will probably pen more than one volume of misery memoir  -  let's just hope Martin Smith doesn't make an appearance. It would not surprise me if in these memoirs she were to write of having been a prostitute  - partly out of undertaking fieldwork for some articles, partly out of a way to cope with her insecurity, her need to be liked, & her self-loathing.


Okay, that is particularly nasty. Add in the rape jokes and naming and this is one newbie who I think might be advised to look elsewhere.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> I'd never heard of Ms Penny until today. From the few of her articles that I've read you are correct in saying her work is uninspiring & derivative. She's boring &, more importantly, naive, even for a 26 year old.
> 
> I find it dispiriting such an untalented person gets so much attention. Her efforts so far deserve only to be ignored. She should be left alone for a decade or so to give herself an opportunity to acquire some fundamental learning.
> 
> ...


 
How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways. I loathe thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal hate. I loathe thee to the level of every day's Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I loathe thee freely, as men strive for right. I loathe thee purely, as they turn from praise. I loathe thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I loathe thee with a loathing I seemed to lose With my lost saints. I loathe thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after thou steppest feet first, alive and fully conscious, into an industrial meat grinder.

(With apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning).

Or, alternatively, fuck off out of here you miserable little cunt and take your foulness with you.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

StrangeButTrue said:


> That's out of character, coming from you. We expect violence!


 
Violence can be verbal as well as physical, little banned person.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jan 9, 2013)

Was SBT banned for the content of their posts or for being a returner/second identity?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 9, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Our parents' excesses.
> 
> 
> 
> What was my parents excesses? I think they must have done it in secret.


 
I dunno but my old man ate a whole Chinese set meal for 3 once. I reckon that's what she's on about.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 9, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Was SBT banned for the content of their posts or for being a returner/second identity?
> 
> Cheers - Louis MacNeice


 

it as clearly an embittered ex swappie


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 9, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> it as clearly an embittered ex swappie


You serious? You can't pick the far-righters out yet?


----------



## rosecore (Jan 9, 2013)

firky said:


> Out of interest how many people here heard of this? First I have.


First time I've seen that article. Did Give Your Vote pay her for it?


----------



## Firky (Jan 9, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Was SBT banned for the content of their posts or for being a returner/second identity?


 
Isn't one of the rules here, "don't be a cock"?

I have no problem with right wingers posting here - see Sas - but SBT was a cock with it. Reckon he was a returner myself. Wind up artist.

Seems a bit harsh being banned thgough.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Jan 9, 2013)

I don't know if it was a returner or not - I suspect not - but I didn't go to any great lengths to check. Not really necessary.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 9, 2013)

The guy hosting that radio programme is Aaron Peters:



> A similar view comes from Aaron Peters, 26, a former member of David Miliband’s Labour leadership campaign team with a tendency to pull an Incredible Hulk act when out on protests. “Parliamentary politics is basically over – it’s dead,” he says.


 
http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2011/01/student-protesters-young

He's the guy who described himself as a: 





butchersapron said:


> "dissent entrepeneur"


 



			
				Aaron Peters said:
			
		

> After all, one only has to go on Twitter to see that #solidarity is trending. The mood music is decisively shifting left and the tools of the information age and Net 2.0 mean even the little guy on the street can really turn up the volume.


Is #solidarity really trending? Can the little guy really do that?

Some posters have attacked me for pointing out LP's family lived in Lewes (something she has mentioned on twitter), that some of her associates (not blood relations) in America are businesspeople catering to the alternative crowd (something again visible from twitter, the links are there if you use twit-tunnel) and linking to her instagram account (something she popularised on twitter).

Re-posting what she has already posted has been declared "creepy" and "stalky". I understand now what the problem is, in that although I have never actually seen LP and simply reposted what she posted elsewhere, that re-posting itself might encourage the kind of vile dribble above.
So again, let's play the ball not the player - asking questions and pointing out the hypocrisies only, and not use sexism and able-ism against her as a target, because that will only backfire and weaken "the movement".

For some others LP being 26 and having once had but is completely cured from a mental illness (as explained in her own journalist output) means a need to shift to softer-left figures. There's a danger of ex-sufferers becoming ongoing sufferers for ever with this approach, but nonetheless - Sunny Hundal.

The only sensible thing you can say about him is 'Down with Sunny Hundal' All of him: his 'New Britishness'!' - his 'citizenship on the say-so of Miliband', his Indian unitarism 'certain Indian states have a  problem' , his Fabianism, his vote Tory for civil liberties advice in 2008 (now deleted off the internet - smarter than LP when it comes to online history), his Obama-ism, his publicly telling off UK Uncut for doing a protest outside a coalition MP's home (MP's family wasn't in) for being like stalkers - ie "stalky". He has nothing - he is nothing.

Perhaps the thread could be named into something more sensible not about the figures by name, but about the process.

On "stalky", this write-up of student protests in 2011 going on about how one student is the real organiser doing it all, could be understood in sinister terms:



> “People died at the Brixton riots in 1981,” Ben mutters. “People might die today. We all know what’s at stake.” There is a resolved silence as they pad their jackets with protective cardboard and scribble lawyers’ numbers on their arms. Peters calls for silence as Techie Sam puts a YouTube clip on the projector. A well-known actor’s voice floods the hall, reciting from Henry V: “We few, we happy few, we band of We stand until we’re forced to the ground, crushed under a heap of bodies brothers;/ For he to-day that sheds his blood with me/ Shall be my brother . . .” Ten hours later, many of these same teenagers will stagger back from the protest with blood running down their faces. “Whatever happens now, everything has changed,” 23-year-old Sarah tells me as we walk to the march assembly point. “We’ve changed. Politics is the main topic of conversation. Demanding our rights has became normal.” In the occupied college building, education is not a commodity, but an intimate weapon of social change, and Sarah seems to understand that better than anyone else. She grew up on a working farm in South Wales; she wears sensible fleeces and non-designer spectacles. Only gradually, after spending time with the occupiers, do you realise that it is this soft-spoken geography student, not the more dramatic male activists, who is running the show, organising the meetings, making sure the younger ones are listened to.


 

Isn't it creepy to do this to people?


> Ben Beach is the Justin Bieber of the new left: a baby-faced riot messiah from Bethnal Green in east London with a tendency to hog the megaphone at demonstrations.


 
Or to have serious pieces illustrated with photography like this? Obviously staged, obviously trying to make the students appear like clowns. Note I'm not saying that this is LP's intention unlike a right-wing hatchet job.



with particularly obtuse strap lines


----------



## Athos (Jan 9, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Was SBT banned for the content of their posts or for being a returner/second identity?
> 
> Cheers - Louis MacNeice


He could have been the first returner not accused of being LLESTA


----------



## sihhi (Jan 9, 2013)

Here's Nick Lezard explaining a few things:





			
				Nick Lezard on 'How to be a Literary Critic' said:
			
		

> When I graduated, I was either overqualified or underqualified for jobs. When I did finally get a job it was with a publisher called the Folio Society, which meant I was basically writing blurbs for books which were either classic or interesting or both, so I did most of the reading I should have done at university. I sent something off on spec. to the Spectator. It was a review of a novel by Elmore Leonard, which hadn’t appeared in print in the UK and was sent to me by an American friend. The Spectator’s Literary Editor had a reputation for allowing more maverick opinion into its pages than its rival, the New Statesman, which I now currently write for. They ran it and slowly, slowly, I built up a portfolio of stuff and got a few cuttings. _*Getting to know people doesn’t hurt. A new newspaper started called the Sunday Correspondent and its Literary Editor was an old tutor of mine. It wasn’t quite nepotism*_ because he thought I was lazy and useless. However, I think he knew that I liked criticism so I did a weekly paperback round-up column for them, which was quite fun. So a certain amount of luck is involved. But if you do something that’s good enough then people will take notice. I started writing about all sorts of things. It was a good time really because there was a lot more of a market for that sort of thing. Articles were longer. The Independent was a broadsheet and so was the Sunday Correspondent. I tended to like writing about the wanky stuff like spending a day at Rough Trade records or going and seeing various punks, weirdos, freaks, ravers, people putting on illegal gigs and hanging out with them. That’s fun to do if you’ve the energy and the time to do it and the outlook, but really the outlook. I don’t know how difficult or easy that is now, I imagine it’s not getting any easier. There’s still an enormous amount of print out there but not all of it is being paid for.


 
It wasn't quite nepotism. So there you go. FULL MERITOCRATISM.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 9, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Or to have serious pieces illustrated with photography like this? Obviously staged, obviously trying to make the students appear like clowns. Note I'm not saying that this is LP's intention unlike a right-wing hatchet job.
> 
> View attachment 27331
> 
> ...


 
Not much time, but this is hideous on so many levels.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 9, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Here's Nick Lezard explaining a few things:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
His old tutor thought he was "useless and lazy". Quite a fair judge of character, then.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 9, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Not much time, but this is hideous on so many levels.


 
the way i look at it, if your movement is being sold with images like this, then there is no way it's actually threatening anyone. 

actually, that looks like an afternoon in the Foundry.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 9, 2013)

having read your whole post @sihhi, i think part of the issue here is that LP herself doesn't realise that that sort of photography and journalism makes activism look like a joke.  she's bought into rebellion via politics but not theory, experience, critique.  its an unexamined pose because she still has faith in journalism, the system, middle class solidarity.  so she fetishises young activists and rebellious images - the activist as product - whilst trying to find an identity that fits her, desperately not wanting to be left out of the media circle-jerk or being one of the stail dull old lefties who are actually poor and have real jobs out of necessity and are booooring and probably monogamous too.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 9, 2013)

christ, that is never going to get into the big book of wisdom is it?  i need a subeditor.  *advertises for intern*


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 9, 2013)

I've just noticed something, having looked through a bit of her 'archive'. Most of the people she's talking about are probably genuinely committed, skint and are indeed facing a bleak future. They were protesting from the heart, with no thought of fame, profit or notoriety. So why the fuck do I get the feeling that if I met them I'd want to smack them in the mouth?

That's what she's done. That's her crime. I've been skint, socialist and angry all my puff...and yet, when I read her take on a bunch of young, idealistic..admittedly middle class-but that's not actually a crime..protestors, fighting rampant inequality, I turn into a fuckin Mail reader. That's how bad she is. That's what she does. Her fuckin self-puffery, ignorance, arrogance and blatant tourism is toxic. She pollutes everything she writes about.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 9, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i need a subeditor. *advertises for intern*


 
WANTED: INTERN.

CRITERIA: Must be prepared to offer crash space at no notice, take the blame for anything and everything I want to palm off on someone else who lacks the profile to fight back, who can tolerate toxic levels of hubris, dishonesty, lack of integrity, naked self-promotion, automatic smearing of anyone who thinks differently to me and/or doesn't agree with me in my 'approved' fashion, who will mindlessly back me up on Twatter when I'm in deep shit (a regular gig, that), and will put up with all manner of self-pitying, narcissistic bullshit as and when I deem it useful. 

Must be prepared to work for below minimum wage, preferably for free (great way to boost your own profile, especially if you've a desperate desire to be permanently known as the world's most incompetent sub-editor) and be a complete doormat on demand.

Strong stomach and iron-clad ignorance of how much you'll probably be fucking up your own career essential. Immediate start.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 9, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Immediate start.


 
I've warmed the toilet seat for you boss.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 9, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> His old tutor thought he was "useless and lazy". Quite a fair judge of character, then.


 
More of Nick Lezard's tips on how to be a newspaper critic:


> You can ignore the literary quality altogether and maybe go off on a sociological angle or bring in a bit of amateur psychoanalysis; what does this say about our society when something is so popular, or why is it so popular? You’ve got to know a bit about everything, basically. Means you’re never bored and you know lots of stuff and you’re never stuck for conversation at a party. *Never have I felt the need to go on any course or anything. The whole idea fills me with contempt.* Find the writer that makes you desperate to read the next sentence and try to pick that up through a kind of osmosis. Don’t necessarily try to ape but try to get the feel of that kind of thing. Look at the reviews that you like or the reviewers that you like or the writers that you like and then learn from that. Orwell’s essay-writing is very good. He didn’t have a degree. But then he was George Orwell. It’s possible that strategy would work now.


 
So we can learn going on courses is bad for literary critics - it dulls the authenticity.

But for freelancers of the comment variety, the Guardian has a weekend-long course for £300 on how to operate a blog:



> Mark Jenkins is a Senior UX designer and blogger. He currently works for Shopcade, a social commerce app that provides a unique, relevant shopping experience. Throughout his career, Mark has worked at and with some fantastic companies including Time Out, Hilton International, The Virgin Group, Fallon London and HTPSE.
> As the founder of a small UK blog collective, he runs UK Street Art and Friedmylittlebrain with group of 9 contributors. The two blogs have previously been named as the No.1 "UK Art Blog", No. 1 "UK Urban Lifestyle Blog" and No. 1 "Dance/DJ Blog" respectively.
> 
> Date: Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 February 2013
> ...


 
A different 3-hour course from a former Guardian freelancer explains how to find ideas for £95:

http://www.journalism.co.uk/course-for-freelance-journalists-searching-for-ideas/s339/




> *Out of thin air: How to find hundreds of new ideas every day*
> An evening course to tell you how to come up with ideas worth pitching to commissioning editors
> 
> Course tutor: Ellie Levenson
> ...


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 9, 2013)

god i hate this planet sometimes.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 9, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> god i hate this planet sometimes.


I don't, just some of the humans on it.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 9, 2013)

liberal


----------



## Greebo (Jan 9, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> liberal


Wash your mouth out with soap and water.


----------



## Firky (Jan 9, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Here's Nick Lezard explaining a few things:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Haha! Wasn't quite nepotism 

Reminds me of this classic from the Guardian, it's worth reading the whole article for a laugh!




> *Meet Max Gogarty - 19, from north London, spends his money on food, booze and skinny jeans, writes for Skins in his spare time. He's off to India and Thailand to have a good time, and you can join him in his weekly blog.*
> 
> At the minute, I'm working in a restaurant with a bunch of lovely, funny people; writing a play; writing bits for Skins; spending any sort of money I earn on food and skinny jeans, and drinking my way to a financially blighted two-month trip to India and Thailand. Clichéd I know, but clichés are there for a reason.
> 
> ...


 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/blog/2008/feb/14/skinsblog

And this is the best bit, the wiki article on Nepotism. The only example of it existing in business.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepotism



> One-time Guardian contributor Max Gogarty has also been accused of taking advantage of family connections to achieve success disproportionate to his ability; his father, Paul Gogarty, is a frequent travel writer for the newspaper.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 9, 2013)

#Out of thin air: How to find hundreds of new ideas every day#

ie. how to come up with perspectives on the latest lifestyle pap or designer junk which appeal to worthy mc liberals. 

If there's a black guy who works in the shop...make sure you mention how his ma came over from Guyana, worked 12 hour shifts wiping geriatric backsides amid appalling racism...and yet look at me now, flogging ethical raffia muesli-baskets in Cheltnam...chalk another little win to identity politics.

The woman who first thought up the idea of avocado vinegrette was a...er...woman...and 100 years ago, all vinegrette designers were men...and suffragettes and shit....yay Guardian's woman's page

And the fella who runs the make-your-own yurt courses did five years in his twenties...it was the decent screws..."the ones who listened to ya"...and the cultural studies tutor who turned him around...#RedemptivePowerOfLiberalism

Frankly the actual content doesn't matter...long as it's expressed in a knowing, feel-good, superior, roll-your-eyes-at-the-guache-lumpen-racist-majority manner.

This is why the Nick bloke gets the gig. With him, it's innate. He was just born a smug fuckin smartarse snob....except that he's obviously a marxist....theoretically...if you're "intelligent"enough to decode the louche irony.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 9, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/09/dont-care-if-born-woman



> The same with "intersectionality", the new buzzword. Though not that new: I know my bell hooks. It means we must understand our own privilege: the multiple oppressions of race, class, culture and sexuality. I speak as a white woman of privilege, though I was indeed born in the wrong body. It should have been Gisele Bündchen's.
> 
> Intersectionality is good in theory, though in practice, it means that no one can speak for anyone else. It is the dead-end where much queer politics, feminist politics and identity politics ends up. In its own rectum. It refuses to engage with many other political discourses and becomes the old hierarchy of oppression.



Is the correct answer Suzanne Moore.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 9, 2013)

I like Suzanne Moore sometimes though I'm sure sihhi or butchers can come along with examples of why she is a twat as well


----------



## Balbi (Jan 9, 2013)

It was nice to see someone using a platform to call shenanhigans on the whole dodgy practice. 

Even if she is doing it because someone criticised her for using a brazilian transsexual as an example of the ideal female body. 

At least she didn't criticise her detractors by invoking further privilege etc - just a clearish 'for fucks sake, focus on what matters'.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 10, 2013)

she's getting flamed on twitter, she just asked johnnie marbles if he's the cream pie pratt 

there'll be chablis spilt by bedtime


----------



## smokedout (Jan 10, 2013)

*Polly Toynbee* ‏@*pollytoynbee* 
Johann Hari, one the best, is no plagiarist. Save your wrath for the abominartions and harrassments by the Murdoch/Mail press.
Retweeted by *Aaron Peters*

they're all in it together!

(actually aaron is slagging her off so i take that bit back)


----------



## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

A 'classic' Suzanne Moore piece declaring herself *not* middle-class:




> New Statesman, December 18, 1998
> 
> _Down and out in the class war; Suzanne Moore notes the death of the working-class hero - destroyed by drink, drugs, sex and violence - but still hopes for working-class heroines. _
> 
> ...


----------



## Firky (Jan 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> *Polly Toynbee* ‏@*pollytoynbee*
> Johann Hari, one the best, is no plagiarist. Save your wrath for the abominartions and harrassments by the Murdoch/Mail press.
> Retweeted by *Aaron Peters*
> 
> ...


 
It amuses me no end how these lot back slap and back stab each over twitter. It's worse than here


----------



## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

firky said:


> It amuses me no end how these lot back slap and back stab each over twitter. It's worse than here


 
On his twitter Aaron Peters the Miliband and PhD guy who hosted LP's show becomes a sort of anti-Sunny Hundal: this picture:- his chest and Hundal's face


----------



## Firky (Jan 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> On his twitter Aaron Peters the Miliband and PhD guy who hosted LP's show becomes a sort of anti-Sunny Hundal: this picture:- his chest and Hundal's face


 
I saw that he had that as his background on twitter but I did not realise who's chest it was, good god! What goes on in their head??


----------



## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

firky said:


> I saw that he had that as his background on twitter but I did not realise who's chest it was, good god! What goes on in their head??


 
I don't know. 
Do you want to ask him to give a reply on twitter?

I like Owen Jones's background:






Johnny Marbles has this as his picture:






Aaronovitch has his every answer-a-revolutionary moment of gameshow failure:


----------



## Balbi (Jan 10, 2013)

Transphobia's the new black.

Or, rather, entirely linguistically purism is the objective, and using commonly understood references whoch in any way infringe upon any other identity group is exploitation/phobia/hatred of that group and is therefore not allowed and must be addressed above and beyond any other points raised - regardless of whether or not there is more that unites than divides.

One does not simply speak outside of ones identity and privilege. Which is very close to there being no such thing as society.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 10, 2013)

Or rather - some journalists write things that I agree with, and then the next week make me ragemonster out with something I don't agree with. The fact that so many 'names' within the activist/left/journo community are j'accuse'ing like a bunch of blind farters, and in the case of Jonnie Marbles lamenting 'so that's another person I have to cross off my increasingly short list of halfway decent people'. The fact that the people they're willing to include, listen to, engage with have to meet their approval is the hierarchy of oppression writ large.

"I care about x more issues than you, therefore your y issue is less relevant and how dare you only mention z in passing/for comic effect"

The whole mess is because she referred to the ideal female body being that of a 'brazilian transsexual' and the criticism is she shouldn't have used that example because lots of brazilian transsexuals are murdered as a result of transphobia, and she's aiding that oppression. Which is fucking nuts.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 10, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Transphobia's the new black.
> 
> Or, rather, entirely linguistically purism is the objective, and using commonly understood references whoch in any way infringe upon any other identity group is exploitation/phobia/hatred of that group and is therefore not allowed and must be addressed above and beyond any other points raised - regardless of whether or not there is more that unites than divides.
> 
> One does not simply speak outside of ones identity and privilege. Which is very close to there being no such thing as society.


 
I've been thinking exactly that. How very Thatcherite. The individual is the most important, above all other things. Only when every individual is pigeonholed and every difference catalogued can we get on with that other business of making a more egalitarian society. Which might admittedly mean talking to people who don't talk exclusively in abstractions (shudder).


----------



## Balbi (Jan 10, 2013)

It's the individual issue over the collective. It's not enough to be mindful or sensitive, everything that is written or said or done must be processed and checked to ensure it doesn't contribute to oppression of others, offending their identity, denigrating their privilege etc. 

Theory, carried to an absurd extreme.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 10, 2013)

> _Intersectionality is good in theory, though in practice, it means that no one can speak for anyone else. It is the dead-end where much queer politics, feminist politics and identity politics ends up. *In its own rectum.* It refuses to engage with many other political discourses and becomes the old hierarchy of oppression._





Balbi said:


> Is the correct answer Suzanne Moore.


LP's mates are going absolutely bananas on Twitter about this


----------



## Balbi (Jan 10, 2013)

It's the theory banner bearers, they get ever so annoyed when theory meets practice and gets its arse kicked by experience.

It's alright to exist on theory, to live by it, as long as you don't meet anyone who disagrees with you. You know, like people.

I'm waiting for LP's mates to start with some subtle, or not so subtle, ageism.

Although I am starting to read up a bit more on intersectional stuff.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 10, 2013)

I can be a bit of a moody bastard, but when I'm on form and being reasonable I tend to think I like to treat people as I would wish to be treated...courteous, respectful etc. But, to be honest, I'm not sure just how much 'research' I'm expected to undertake to ensure I don't fall foul of any of the potential pitfalls surrounding identity/intersectionality. If somebody told me I needed to go and educate myself about their particular self-selected identity because I'd inadvertently offended them, I'd regard that as presumptuous and a fuckin liberty...not just that; it seems quite the thing lately to describe an unintentional offence against identity X as Xphobic rather than the result of a lack of awareness. It seems that failing to keep oneself at the 'cutting-edge' of intersectionality is regarded as wilful ignorance and discrimination.

This is just bollocks. As adherents of this kinda stuff seem to be constructing ever more intricate systems of identity and concomitant offences against them, it's unreasonable to expect people to keep abreast of developments; especially as the finer points of etiquette seem to be formulated by cabals of righteous adolescent muppets and then handed down from on high via twitter. Fuck that.

That said, I'm not advocating going back to the days of Love thy Neighbour. I can even remember a PE teacher who would stand on the touch line screaming 'nancy-boy' or 'you big girl's blouse' at anyone who missed a tackle...and who once commiserated with a black lad's poor performance with a javelin with a "I thought you people were good at chuckin them things". But there has to be a fuckin limit.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 10, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> That said, I'm not advocating going back to the days of Love thy Neighbour. I can even remember a PE teacher who would stand on the touch line screaming 'nancy-boy' or 'you big girl's blouse' at anyone who missed a tackle...and who once commiserated with a black lad's poor performance with a javelin with a "I thought you people were good at chuckin them things". But there has to be a fuckin limit.


 
I praise your progressive, modern approach.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> That said, I'm not advocating going back to the days of Love thy Neighbour. I can even remember a PE teacher who would stand on the touch line screaming 'nancy-boy' or _*'you big girl's blouse'*_ at anyone who missed a tackle...and who once commiserated with a black lad's poor performance with a javelin with a "I thought you people were good at chuckin them things". But there has to be a fuckin limit.


 
There are people in the education system who still do use this kind of quasi-sexist insult, except in an "ironic way".

In the meantime, more modern communism from Nick Lezard:





			
				Nick Lezard said:
			
		

> If you’re standing in my neck of the woods, it’s lovely, but only millionaires or the inordinately fortunate live there. If you live, as do my children, in Shepherd’s Bush, then it’s dreadful. I was stationed there [Shepherd's Bush] for 17 years or so before being thrown out and it has got scuzzier and scarier as the years have gone by. I used to take some pride in living in a place that was resistant to gentrification, but the Bush takes this idea too far. Walk the streets outside commuter hours and you will not lack for the company of the deranged, the extravagantly drunk, the incredibly smelly, and the wannabe gangsta barely controlling a slobbering pit bull at the end of a leash. (Boy, do those animals raise the tone of a neighbourhood. Viz magazine calls them “shit machines” and, as in so many matters it touches on, is right on the money.) And Shepherd’s Bush isn’t even nearly the worst part of London. This kind of thing is exacerbated, or you notice it more because you’re on foot more, when there’s a Tube strike. As I drove my son and three of his friends back from a school cricket match, they asked me what the latest strike was about. I went into a long and perhaps alarming rant about how though most of the time I was generally in favour of industrial action, in this case the RMT’s bewildering demand to reinstate one Tube driver who was dangerously incompetent and another who was accused of being a thief surpassed my comprehension; and that the only plausible explanation was that Bob Crow was a secret government lackey, employed to discredit the trade union movement by forfeiting any sympathy the public might have had for the rest of their demands.


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## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

> most of the time I was generally in favour of industrial action, in this case


 
it inconvenienced me


----------



## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

Notice how few picked up in the piece Suzanne Moore was _attending a dinner with Iain Duncan Smith_!:




> In this country, the red warning lights were flashing at the last election when women were largely invisible except as trophy wives. Women’s “issues” are still something to be tacked onto another ministerial department. The ideas of quotas is still abhorrent to those born to rule: white men. Those who refute social engineering are themselves the products of the best social engineering money can buy: public school and then Oxbridge. Oh yes, I know there are token women and the Top Trump always remains Margaret Thatcher. Having often featured myself as a token woman, I find the role an insult in 2012. _At a dinner with Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions charged with reforming the benefits system, I heard him telling the assembled guests what it was like being a single parent, I sat silent, waiting to be asked my views, as I am one. A scarlet flush was spreading across my chest._ This was far from post-coital colour. My blood was rising. The anger could not be swallowed. I left the table.
> 
> This kind of action is not fashionable. We cloak our vitriol in humour. I get it. I do it too. Caitlin Moran’s bestselling How to Be a Woman is a brilliantly funny read because it is so warm and not really very angry towards men. We can all be dudes. But former Sex Pistol John Lydon’s chant , “anger is an energy”, is still my cri de coeur. The cliché is that female anger is always turned inwards rather than outwards into despair. We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – _that of a Brazilian transsexual._ We are angry that men do not do enough. We are angry at work where we are underpaid and overlooked. This anger can be neatly channelled and outsourced to make someone a fat profit. Are your hormones okay? Do you need a nice bath? Some sex tips and an internet date? What if, contrary to Sex and the City, new shoes do not fill the hole in your soul? What if you aspire to another model of womanhood than the mute but beautifully groomed Kate Middleton? What if your anguish is not illogical but actually bloody spot on? Maybe your man can read Men’s Health and use the “11 ways to deal with an angry woman” advice. Eye contact and admitting you are were wrong come into it! Who knew? Those more vulnerable, the women in our midst going without dinner so the kids can eat, are they going to be helped by talking of anger as an issue of intimacy? The Etonian clones abandoned these women long ago and are producing policies that directly target them.


 
That tells us something about the media.

The clause - the only reference to transexuals - is unnecessary and ill-advised, even though it's playing on a positive stereotype.


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## SpineyNorman (Jan 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> In the meantime, more modern communism from Nick Lezard:


 
Wow, is he LP's (former?) housemate and Derbyshire crack dealer lookalike or is that someone else? I can't keep up with all these names. They should all be given the same surname or something just to make it easier to identify them.


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## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

Lezard is her current housemate. He of the vodka and radishes habit


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## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> it inconvenienced me




He certainly doesn't like being inconvenienced:




			
				Nick Lezard in 2008 said:
			
		

> So, there I was, idling late at night in front of the telly, when on came the late film: John Schlesinger's 1967 work, Far from the Madding Crowd. Julie Christie! Terence Stamp! Alan Bates! Peter Finch! Cinematography by Nicolas Roeg! Screenplay by Frederic Raphael, which would probably then be pretty faithful to Hardy's novel! As I say, it was late, but I didn't have to get up early the next day. I was in the country myself at the time, and thought that this would be just the ticket. And it so nearly was. But just as the dialogue started, up popped a fat little man in a highly anachronistic shirt, who started gesticulating wildly in the bottom-right-hand corner of the screen. Oh, bollocks, I thought. It's the sign-language man again. It's not always a fat man in a red shirt. Sometimes it's a woman in a frumpy dress. Sometimes it's a woman in a plain but tasteful dress. Sometimes it's a man in a white shirt. Once, I distinctly recall, it was a man in a purple shirt. But they all had this in common: they were rendering the dialogue in sign language for the deaf, and they were completely ruining the film. (And sometimes it's not even a film they're ruining, but a piece of late-night telly hokum which would otherwise be a nice guilty pleasure.) I have put up with this phenomenon on occasion, but never for very long; there is a limit to the length of time one can watch a film with one eye closed and one's thumb extended in an attempt to blot out the little man in the corner. For when a film has been panned and scanned to make it fit the small screen, he ends up filling rather a large percentage of the action. At one point he was covering Julie Christie's face in its entirety. I don't know about you, but I find the sight of Julie Christie's face considerably more pleasurable than that of a portly homunculus making expansive gestures, not all of which, one suspects, are capable of conveying the nuances of Thomas Hardy's words, as mediated by the cunning intelligence of Frederic Raphael. As for what Nicolas Roeg might have to say about what he was doing to his cinematography, one shudders to think. It is, of course, laudable that an effort is being made to include the deaf in the potential audience for television. But at this cost? Please, someone, answer me this: what the hell is wrong with subtitles? Are the schedulers catering for deaf people who cannot read English? Or who cannot read, full stop? There is, I admit, a certain symmetry in trying to get the illiterate to watch a film based on a Thomas Hardy novel, as illiteracy or near-illiteracy features in more than one of them, but it is not, I suspect, a symmetry intended by the kind people at ITV2.


 
Also what do u75 make of "the kind of people at ITV2"? Is that just old-fashioned snobbery or an attack on the capitalist media - I'm not sure what's what.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 10, 2013)

#Walk the streets outside commuter hours and you will not lack for the company of the deranged, the extravagantly drunk, the incredibly smelly, and the wannabe gangsta barely controlling a slobbering pit bull at the end of a leash.#

Well I'm detecting a distict ableist vibe..."deranged"...surely 'cognitively diverse' or some such. I'm also picking up an elitist cast of mind regarding personal hygiene. Most incriminating, though, is his disparagement of the lumpen proletariat. The correct response is to engage with them to enable consiousness of their exploited role within the wider bourgeois political-economy...not takin the piss outta their staffies.

He's not my kinda communist...In fact,in my fantasy-state  he'll be Gulag fodder...or collecting trolleys in ASDA's car park...in East Kilbride.

Just a useless middle-class cunt...trying desperately to be a bit of a character and a notorious contrarian. There seems to be a bit of an escalating arms-race among the contenders to the position of Hitchen's heir. They're all a bunch of shitehawks.


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## Orang Utan (Jan 10, 2013)

Are you accusing Nick Lezard of being a communist?


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## SpineyNorman (Jan 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> He certainly doesn't like being inconvenienced:
> 
> 
> 
> Also what do u75 make of "the kind of people at ITV2"? Is that just old-fashioned snobbery or an attack on the capitalist media - I'm not sure what's what.


 
I don't know but if anyone ever needed to check their privilege it's him - and how could someone so right on as LP live with someone who dismisses the needs of deaf people like that? Talk about double standards - she'd have jumped on that if any of us had said it.


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## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

> I went into a long and perhaps alarming rant about how though most of the time I was generally in favour of industrial action, in this case the RMT’s bewildering demand to reinstate one Tube driver who was dangerously incompetent and another who was accused of being a thief surpassed my comprehension


 
Lezard is willing to dismiss democratically taken union decisions based on accusations when it causes him grief. Whats the line about liberals? Vaguely onside on a good day, bang to the right when it affects them directly


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 10, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Are you accusing Nick Lezard of being a communist?



Yeah fuck it...why not? He's a self-aware, politically conscious prole who just had the misfortune of being born into a slough of bourgeois privilege...just like his mates. He deserves your sympathy...not your derision.


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## butchersapron (Jan 10, 2013)

Maybe his privileges (westminister then oxbridge) is of the same type that holds penny and others back?


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## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Maybe his privileges (westminister then oxbridge) is of the same type that holds penny and others back?


 
No, he's a 'laureate of the low life' and he gives a helping hand to struggling 'Tertullians' like Will Self:

Will Self and Nick Lezard visit a no-nonsense Leicester Square restaurant (New Statesman, Mike Danson era)




			
				Will Self August 9 2010 said:
			
		

> You can't get realer when it comes to meals than chowing down with the Statesman's own *laureate of the low life, Nick Lezard*. I've known Nick for years (ever since, in fact, he compared my prose to that of the classical emeticist Tertullian), and together we've eaten some memorable meals, including that Highland police-evading delicacy poulet au hashish, but in recent years - as his column amply confirms - Nick has fallen on hard times. True, he never exactly lived high on the hog, but now he barely scrapes by low on the streaky. It would have been unfair to subject Nick to the snail sorbets and caviar casseroles served up at London's top tables - let alone stick him with the bill - so I suggested that we rendezvous at the Stockpot near Leicester Square. The Stockpot is one of a mini-chain of three restaurants offering plain, wholesome British cuisine (with a few Italian fripperies) at scandalously low prices. You can have a three-course meal for two at the Stockpot, with wine, for well under 40 quid. Unbelievable, no? I mean, in most West End restaurants you can barely get a maître d' to sneer at you for that kind of money. I'm not altogether certain what the genesis of the Stockpot was, but all three outlets have a powerful ambience of having been there since time out of mind. Granted, the Stockpot is a metropolitan phenomenon, but I like to think that every British city still has its equivalent: somewhere that dishes up liver and bacon, bubble and squeak, fish and chips - all the binary conjunctions that once made up the bedrock of the British diet before the creation of chicken tikka masala. I often used to eat at the branch (now closed) on Basil Street, behind Harrods, which was much frequented by cabbies, and there was nothing more comforting than watching these cockney knights of the open road spoon down their jelly and custard while inveighing against wobbly modernity. I pressured Nick towards the liver and bacon with onion gravy and veg - a snip at £6.50; while I had chicken Kiev with rice and veg - a relatively expensive £7.90. I say "pressured" because I wanted to know what the liver and bacon was like, without having to eat it myself. But then I'm like that in relation to a lot of experiences, both sensual and aesthetic. I also want to know what the foam night at Space is like, but I have no intention of going. Jules Verne picked up on this tendency over a century ago, when he remarked of Phileas Fogg that he was the kind of Englishman who sends his manservant to see the sights for him.
> Passepartout also had the whitebait to start with, at my insistence. He enjoyed both heartily. "Um, um," he ummed, "this is really quite good - you should try some." And I did, just to please him. My soup wasn't too bad either, giving the lie to that school of thought which says you can spend all day making soup only to end up with something that tastes marginally worse than what you get out of a can. However, with the chicken Kiev, I hit the culinary rumble strip and juddered to a halt. Like The Towering Inferno and Earthquake, chicken Kiev was an integral part of the early 1970s. They were disaster movies; it was disaster cuisine - a great lowering lump of crap chicken, filled with garlic butter and herbs before being coated in breadcrumbs and fried. Chicken Kiev felt anachronistic at its inception. Forty years on, I felt as if I were in a 1970s episode of Doctor Who in which cavaliers duelled with cyborgs. Nick was faring no better with his liver and bacon; it had begun promisingly - the meat was tender and tasty - but soon ploughed into the escape lane filled with onion gravy. We tried to stimulate our jaded palates by putting these plates aside and ordering peach-and-apple pie with custard (£2.95), and chocolate sponge pudding with chocolate custard (£3.20), but it was too late - we were stuffed. The only thing we had any appetite for was the bill, which came in at £40, allowing a generous 20 per cent tip for the waitress.
> I say "we" had an appetite for the bill, but in the spirit of this column I must tell it like it is: I'd gone out without enough cash, and obviously the Stockpot hasn't heard of plastic - yet. So, _*Nick was obliged to pay the greater part of the bill. No wonder he's down and out.*_


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## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

> I say "pressured" because I wanted to know what the liver and bacon was like, without having to eat it myself. *But then I'm like that in relation to a lot of experiences, both sensual* and aesthetic.


 
made an exception for the brown


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## cesare (Jan 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> There are people in the education system who still do use this kind of quasi-sexist insult, except in an "ironic way".
> 
> In the meantime, more modern communism from Nick Lezard:


That actually wound me up rather than just thinking "oh, ffs" which is my usual reaction to LP.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> made an exception for the brown


 
I don't get that line, but I think you are wholly right on the inconvenienced angle - as this from the Guardian 'back when it was sort of OK' in 1997 suggests:





			
				Nick Lezard said:
			
		

> Parking Mad
> 
> We do not think enough about parking, which is silly. For parking is to driving as death is to life: a supremely significant moment of definition, of closure, of release. The journey is not over until you have parked, as anyone who has driven round and round a town centre for a bewildering and increasingly surreal three and a half hours trying to find some kind of space could tell you. In this sense, parking is not only like death: it's like the afterlife, specifically the one imagined by Dante in his Purgatorio (which involved a lot of going round and round until eventual salvation). Of course, if you have not yet found a space, you are not in purgatory, you are in hell. It was not always like this.
> [... some stuff about the good old pre-1960 days before parking meters ...]
> ...


 
It could be ironic though, so I am not sure, perhaps he isn't inconvenienced at all.


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## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I don't get that line, but I think you are wholly right on the inconvenienced angle - as this from the Guardian 'back when it was sort of OK' in 1997 suggests:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

I was quoting self there- he wants others to take the sensuous risks except when he fancied some heroin


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 10, 2013)

Anyway, why are we taking potshots at Penny's housemate? Who cares what he thinks or does? It's enough to criticise the arsedribblings that she writes


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## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I was quoting self there- he wants others to take the sensuous risks except when he fancied some heroin


 
I got the quote but  at me. I totally forgot Will Self got busted for doing heroin on Tony Blair's jet


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## cesare (Jan 10, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Anyway, why are we taking potshots at Penny's housemate? Who cares what he thinks or does? It's enough to criticise the arsedribblings that she writes


The over-arching point (I think) is about the effect that she (and her ilk) have on people's perception of Left politics. Therefore examples of her ilk - and Lezard is definitely one - are as apposite as are the examples of her's.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 10, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Anyway, why are we taking potshots at Penny's housemate? Who cares what he thinks or does? It's enough to criticise the arsedribblings that she writes



Yeah, but he's probably a wonderfully constructive critic of her doings, sounding board and occasional editor. She wants to impress him. Which explains a lot. Someone needs to make her realise: if you  structure your prose with a constant eye on the approval of a sneering hypocritical dick, it's gonna show.


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## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Anyway, why are we taking potshots at Penny's housemate? Who cares what he thinks or does? It's enough to criticise the arsedribblings that she writes


 

because he's part of the general set here, smug liberal bubbleman champers socialist


----------



## Firky (Jan 10, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Anyway, why are we taking potshots at Penny's housemate? Who cares what he thinks or does? It's enough to criticise the arsedribblings that she writes


 
Well there's a risk that by focussing on Laurie that it will look like bullying, secondly Laurie and her peer group are some of the most prominent people of 'the left' in mainstream media. The result is that people's perception of the left is that of privileged liberals with no real substance.


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## Firky (Jan 10, 2013)

God, I quoted Orang, went to the loo - came back and typed up my reply to find half a dozen people have replied to him!

This thread is hellish.


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## Orang Utan (Jan 10, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Yeah, but he's probably a wonderfully constructive critic of her doings, sounding board and occasional editor. She wants to impress him. Which explains a lot. Someone needs to make her realise: if you  structure your prose with a constant eye on the approval of a sneering hypocritical dick, it's gonna show.


You are assuming a hell of a lot. So much that your post is worthless


----------



## rosecore (Jan 10, 2013)

Balbi said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/09/dont-care-if-born-woman
> 
> 
> 
> Is the correct answer Suzanne Moore.


 
Suzanne Moore, using a Penny tactic (and I'm sure others of the privileged left)

https://twitter.com/suzanne_moore/status/289464052923654145


> Fire walk with me. I asked for solidarity in face of horrendous attacks on all genders. Many prefer to abuse me. This makes me sad not sorry


No apology for her disgusting transphobia on Twitter. She's the real victim here of course.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That tells us something about the media.
> 
> The clause - the only reference to transexuals - is unnecessary and ill-advised, even though it's playing on a positive stereotype.



I might argue that the stereotype's not entirely positive as pneumatic hyper sexual femininity representations tend not to be.

Or I could just call you transphobic, if I want to be lazy and shut down discussion.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 10, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> You are assuming a hell of a lot. So much that your post is worthless


 
Not really - it is entirely likely that it's the case, when I've shared houses with people with similar interests we have done the same, and I know other people do


----------



## Balbi (Jan 10, 2013)

rosecore said:


> Suzanne Moore, using a Penny tactic (and I'm sure others of the privileged left)
> 
> https://twitter.com/suzanne_moore/status/289464052923654145
> 
> No apology for her disgusting transphobia on Twitter. She's the real victim here of course.



Her toys out of the pram on twitter is bad - but she's not wrong about intersectionality being good theory, and implementable in some ways - but falls down in many others.

I suppose it's the instant accusation of transphobia. There's an argument to be had that those experiencing oppression of one form or another, alien to the person who may have inadvertently supported that oppression, doesn't have to educate or inform when highlighting that contribution to that oppression - but that does lead to rather a lot of heat, light and shrapnel - and no real progress.

If anything, Moore's got the tin helmet on and hunkered in the trench.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

Even Will Self refers to it as a hovel - the name Nick Lezard has given the home he's been renting in Marleybone since his divorce - so in that respect Laurie Penny was "right":

All this garlic has turned us into a vast army of urbanely middle-class undead
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture...ned-us-vast-army-urbanely-middle-class-undead




> Nick Lezard, whom I met at Prezzo for one of our twice-per-lustrum inter-columnar suppers, told me that prezzo means “price” in Italian. Nick is good at languages but he couldn’t be certain whether this restaurant chain was named after the common nounal form of the word, or the verbal one “priced”, which prezzo can also mean.
> ...
> A litre! What kind of a weirdo goes into a chain restaurant on a Wednesday evening and drinks enough mineral water to leach the amino acids from his brain? Well, quite a lot of them actually – the joint was packed, and on almost every table there several bottles of the pricey fizz (£3.95). We ordered crab cakes (£5.65 x2), Nick said he would “try” the lasagne (£9.75), and I risked the Pollo Siciliana (£12.50), which was glossed on the menu as “Chargrilled chicken breast, prosciutto ham and plum tomato slices baked with our own blend of cheese”. In the event, both dishes looked like blobs of cheesy gloop – mine had the consistency and warmth of flip-flops left out in English summer sun, Nick’s was cold in the middle. “Has it been microwaved?” I asked him and he grimly replied, “I suspect not even that.”
> 
> ...


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 10, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> You are assuming a hell of a lot. So much that your post is worthless



What a strange statement. It's true I've made assumptions, but in the case that they're all factual then it's a valid hypothesis concerning the state of the universe. As things stand it's an informed hypothesis, supported by all manner of evidence. It's science FFS!!!...and you say it's worthless.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Even Will Self refers to it as a hovel - the name Nick Lezard has given the home he's been renting in Marleybone since his divorce - so in that respect Laurie Penny was "right":
> 
> All this garlic has turned us into a vast army of urbanely middle-class undead
> http://www.newstatesman.com/culture...ned-us-vast-army-urbanely-middle-class-undead


 
Prezzo is fucking shit


----------



## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

Balbi said:


> I might argue that the stereotype's not entirely positive as pneumatic hyper sexual femininity representations tend not to be.
> 
> Or I could just call you transphobic, if I want to be lazy and shut down discussion.


 
No, it's not positive no stereotype is, but I was thinking how Suzanne Moore would have intended it to come across, I didn't phrase it well. I don't think that part of her sentence was harmless. She could have said 'fair cop' and asked the NS to remove those 5 words and that's it. Instead it's become a storm from a teacup.


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## Balbi (Jan 10, 2013)

Choose your privilege.

I've got 12


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## Balbi (Jan 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> No, it's not positive no stereotype is, but I was thinking how Suzanne Moore would have intended it to come across, I didn't phrase it well. I don't think that part of her sentence was harmless. She could have said 'fair cop' and asked the NS to remove those 5 words and that's it. Instead it's become a storm from a teacup.



Aye, thanks for clarifying that. She meant it as a throwaway comment, but it got pulled up and highlighted in a way to provoke a similarly aggressive response. Starting a discussion by calling someone transphobic is ending the discussion and starting the argument.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

I would like Nick Lezrd to exchange his hovel for the one I'm moving into in Corby. Hovel vs Hovel.


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## smokedout (Jan 10, 2013)

it's clumsy a bit ignorant and it seems a strange place for her to make a stand, but its hardly 'disgusting transphobia'


----------



## J Ed (Jan 10, 2013)

Julie Bindel seems to be supporting Suzanne Moore, kiss of death there.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 10, 2013)

Balbi said:


> View attachment 27378
> 
> Choose your privilege.
> 
> I've got 12


 
what a bunch of arse.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> it's clumsy a bit ignorant and it seems a strange place for her to make a stand, but its hardly 'disgusting transphobia'



So goes the polarisation of debate. In a time where there are no alternatives apparently, it's acceptable that if you in any way endorse or contribute towards any particular ideology or oppression than you therefore endorse all forma to the extreme and must be treated in a manner as if you have, in fact, taken part in all or some of them. It's dangerously stupid, as it leaves no room for discussion, exchange of experience and most importantly compromise and cooperation. Just lots of people shouting at each other for the weaknesses percieved by others.

Now, you can say a lot about the fuckers who genuinely oppress us at a state level, but they're far too disciplined to fall into this particular quagmire of group flagellation.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

Balbi said:


> View attachment 27378
> 
> Choose your privilege.
> 
> I've got 12


 
Wow. 

It's sort of where some of this stuff is going 

http://themasterstools.tumblr.com/post/40107984832/why-be-aware-of-whiteness



> I’m a woman, I’m white and I’m British. Growing up, my family had enough money for me to have what I needed, and more. I’m cisgender. I got a great education. Even though I’m queer, I date cismen too. I’m able-bodied, and I’m neurotypical. My nonmonogamy is easy to hide. I’m fat, but I’m the ‘acceptable’ kind of fat most people can get over. *Aside from the fact I’m a ciswoman, I get to navigate the world in a way that means the world just works for me. In the simplest terms: I benefit from racism, capitalism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and heteronormativity. This happens whether or not I want it to.*
> 
> All women are not the same. If you look at the list of attributes I just gave, you’ll see that I’m not just a woman. I’m a privileged woman, whose class and ethnicity and physical ability have completely and utterly dictated how I experience my society in a positive way. The first step in becoming a less shitty person was understanding and then believing that not everyone is like me. The second step was listening to the people who are expressing the ways in which they are not like me. The third step was, and still is, figuring out how to facilitate change for the people who are not like me. My privilege means I will mess up again and again. I will, consciously or otherwise, project my needs and experiences onto people whose needs and experiences are different to mine. The process by which you try and try to divest yourself of your own shittiness means you have to know that. Privilege means your rightness is reinforced often, and more women like me need to have their wrongness shown the hell up.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 10, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Julie Bindel seems to be supporting Suzanne Moore, kiss of death there.


 
that'll help


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 10, 2013)

Balbi said:


> View attachment 27378
> 
> Choose your privilege.
> 
> I've got 12


 
while that list has some value it's a bit daft to put them all on an equal footing and independent of each other surely? "disabilities" ffs. as if they are all the same.

also, something like "literacy" is so related to class anyway, because people who find it more difficult to read and are part of the upper and upper middle classes are able to be given more help, and there is a lot more time to give them help, both when they are at school and during adult life, where they are a lot more likely to be aware of the public and private support services on offer.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Aye, thanks for clarifying that. She meant it as a throwaway comment, but it got pulled up and highlighted in a way to provoke a similarly aggressive response. Starting a discussion by calling someone transphobic is ending the discussion and starting the argument.


 
Part of me thinks Suzanne Moore over-acted in a massive way on purpose, almost as if she wanted to be the centre of a shit-storm like with her Anders Breivik piece:




			
				Suzanne Moore said:
			
		

> The quiet, almost sterile way in which the Norwegians are listening to him personifies the "muscular liberalism" that David Cameron once spoke of. Breivik's ideology may be difficult to listen to, but not because it is incoherent. Precisely the opposite: it is familiar. This is a problem for all of us, right or left. I wish I lived in a world where I didn't have to hear gross generalisations about Islam and creeping sharia or see an increase in antisemitism, hear fantasies about feminism going too far, and where people didn't feel their own culture to be "swamped". I wish the word "war" wasn't thrown around all the time – the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on red tape. I wish that everything really was run by "cultural Marxists". I wish my neighbour, who has lived here for 50 years and whose grandchildren tell me she prays for me, had learned English and left the house sometimes.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

Balbi said:


> View attachment 27378
> 
> Choose your privilege.
> 
> I've got 12


 

The goatse of communism is needed here


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 10, 2013)

Balbi said:


> View attachment 27378
> 
> Choose your privilege.
> 
> I've got 12



Yep...12. Who knew? I'm a fuckin overlord. How come I haven't got a pot to piss in two weeks out of every month. Something fundamentally fucked with that system. I seem to have acquired some sort of privilege oppression...I'm a victim.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

why does the white line carry the label racism. What the fucks going on with that graphic


----------



## Balbi (Jan 10, 2013)

I think in the same way Moore misread Butler (Yes, I've read Gender Trouble, who wants to fucking touch me  ) about performative being the same as performance, that as an academic theory, Intersectionality is being reduced to be better understood on a wider scale.

That's dangerous - because complex ideas are complex for a reason. If you try and turn them into a christmas cracker politic, then you're losing the examples of that theory's exponents which provide context. Any academic theory applied without a decent context can mutate hideously.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 10, 2013)

also, something like institutionalised anti-semitism or racism is a lot more easier to overcome if you are literate, you have the ability to leave that situation, if you have money, and are well educated enough to know what your options are. Which leads back to economic discrimination as well. You can tell that that chart is completely designed for an american/british context as well. I have experienced anti-semitism, homophobia etc but I would not ever suggest that what I have experienced is as bad as somebody living in say moldova, where discrimination of this kind is fucking rife, and short of leaving the country hardly any employment opportunities available, especially for working class people (who tend not to be able to afford to leave).


----------



## Athos (Jan 10, 2013)

Balbi said:


> View attachment 27378
> 
> Choose your privilege.
> 
> I've got 12


 
Stop oppressing me just 'cos I only got 11!


----------



## weepiper (Jan 10, 2013)

I have eight 'privileges' and three disadvantages. But it's still a bunch of arse, doesn't include loads of ways in which someone can be disadvantaged in life and puts some on equal footing with others which is clearly bollocks.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 10, 2013)

And I hope 'intersectionality' derives from ' intersecting axes of..'. 'Intersecting axes' is pure tautology. Axes, by definition, intersect. 'Intersecting' is irrelevant; it's superfluous.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

weepiper said:


> what a bunch of arse.


 
Yes. And How are fertile people privileged compared to non-fertile people? 
An childless infertile couple vs single mum. Control your variables and produce your results.

While we're at it we could say it ignores non-orphan privilege and living in an area with plenty of parking privilege that's the only direction this sort of thing can head in.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 10, 2013)

It's interesting how this is used as a debatecloser. LP tries it on this thread, where if we look at theold diagram there she's a shitload more privileged than oppressed. And that's what'll happen in time - people will hawkishly watch articles and statements, and attack over single points. Moore may just be the start, I reckon a lot of the banter between the commentariat will disappear when they realise they're being judged by the standards they are holding others to.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> also, something like institutionalised anti-semitism or racism is a lot more easier to overcome if you are literate, you have the ability to leave that situation, if you have money, and are well educated enough to know what your options are. Which leads back to economic discrimination as well. You can tell that that chart is completely designed for an american/british context as well. I have experienced anti-semitism, homophobia etc but I would not ever suggest that what I have experienced is as bad as somebody living in say moldova, where discrimination of this kind is fucking rife, and short of leaving the country hardly any employment opportunities available, especially for working class people _(who tend not to be able to afford to leave)._


 
This is the problem with privilege theory, it tells immigrants who _have_ left to another country you're underprivileged here, in your own country you would be privileged so get back.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 10, 2013)

Surely young people also get discriminated against in the workplace


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 10, 2013)

Variation within groups is more significant than difference between groups and that's it....leaving aside materialistic, biological dualism and other shit.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 10, 2013)

i got 10 and am oppressed 5 different ways

help help i'm being repressed


----------



## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

Balbi said:


> It's interesting how this is used as a debatecloser. LP tries it on this thread, where if we look at theold diagram there she's a shitload more privileged than oppressed. And that's what'll happen in time - people will hawkishly watch articles and statements, and attack over single points. Moore may just be the start, I reckon a lot of the banter between the commentariat will disappear when they realise they're being judged by the standards they are holding others to.


 
Like you point out, I find the gender deviant axis absurd, if not faintly sinister. I also think in some circumstances age is more privileged than youth and sometimes vice versa - depends what you're doing what you're trying to access.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Yes. And How are fertile people privileged compared to non-fertile people?
> An childless infertile couple vs single mum. Control your variables and produce your results.
> 
> While we're at it we could say it ignores non-orphan privilege and living in an area with plenty of parking privilege that's the only direction this sort of thing can head in.


 
I think in countries like moldova where women are expected to get married and have lots of kids early they are. However this has nothing necessarily to do with fertility itself, it's to do with sexism (which is worsened by economic reasons tbh)


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

no class axes at all on that graph- useless


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 10, 2013)

There is, but it's just depicted as one among many!


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

I've checked my privilege. I'm a working class white male of good education. Not got a pot to piss in and from a history of substance abuse and semi-criminal associations. But my cock and balls and my skin colour place me as king of the social castle right.


----------



## Belushi (Jan 10, 2013)

Balbi said:


> View attachment 27378
> 
> Choose your privilege.
> 
> I've got 12


 
Whats that, the fucking Wheel of Oppression? 

It's awesome. I'm going to print a copy out, laminate it and then carry it around with me and whip it out when I need to check somenes privilege,


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> There is, but it's just depicted as one among many!


 

so poverty is just another identity group eh!


----------



## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I think in countries like moldova where women are expected to get married and have lots of kids early they are. However this has nothing necessarily to do with fertility itself, it's to do with sexism (which is worsened by economic reasons tbh)


 
And in a country like Britain (which is where "intersectionality" is treated seriously by parts of its academia and radical movement) and a working-class family with more than 4 children is considered "greedy", and every extra child gives you less child benefit?


----------



## Balbi (Jan 10, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I've checked my privilege. I'm a working class white male of good education. Not got a pot to piss in and from a history of substance abuse and semi-criminal associations. But my cock and balls and my skin colour place me as king of the social castle right.



As LP said. Just because you're powerless doesn't mean you don't have privilege.

This leads down a fucking ugly road where those who are said to have privilege but are actually trying to effect change because of their dire situation get criticised for privilege, not focusing on the issues of the oppressed or criticised for not being active enough to use their privilege. 

Tumblr's no academic playground, but i've seen a few people complaining that feminism should focus its politics away from white middle classes and centre on the marginalised women. That until they are equal with white middle class female, any further attempts at equality will only enforce oppression fro. Privileged feminists and women against those marginalised. 

It's a horrendous way to stop any action dead in its tracks. If it takes hold seriously, it'll be schismatic in the same way 'i'm more dogmatically socialist than yow' has been.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Whats that, the fucking Wheel of Oppression?
> 
> It's awesome. I'm going to print a copy out, laminate it and then carry it around with me and whip it out when I need to check somenes privilege,


 


it could be like that darts program 'Lets see what you could have won'

as they tow out an internship at the graun


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

Balbi said:


> As LP said. Just because you're powerless doesn't mean you don't have privilege.


 

I'll keep that in mind as I crawlon my knees to Corby job centre for my pittance


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 10, 2013)

pfft. Im a 10 - if I was a looker who wasnt neutered and a few years younger I would be KING OF THE WORLD

what a load of shite


----------



## Belushi (Jan 10, 2013)

Are there enough oppressions there for a set of Top Trumps?


----------



## Athos (Jan 10, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I'll keep that in mind as I crawlon my knees to Corby job centre for my pittance


 
If you can crawl, you can work [/ATOS]


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Are there enough oppressions there for a set of Top Trumps?


 

if we expanded it a little there would be. Living with Lezard +100 for that card


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 10, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> it could be like that darts program 'Lets see what you could have won'
> 
> as they tow out an internship at the graun



Bullseye's a lesson in life.

It's how I first learned to recognise that strange mix of emotions known as the 'what the fuck am I gonna do with a speedboat' feeling.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

Athos said:


> If you can crawl, you can work [/ATOS]


 

They should recruit Arnie 'If you can bleed you can work. That includes _you_ females'


----------



## Balbi (Jan 10, 2013)

This isn't Top Trumps, it's Magic: The Gathering.

How about Privilege: The Intersectionaling.

*rings PD offices*


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 10, 2013)

I think that chart needs an additional point-scoring system for each privilege to complicate things further


----------



## Balbi (Jan 10, 2013)

Like golf. The lowest score wins.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 10, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Are there enough oppressions there for a set of Top Trumps?


 
As it would be a race to as few points as possible surely it would be Bottom Trumps


----------



## Balbi (Jan 10, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> As it would be a race to as few points as possible surely it would be Bottom Trumps



Homophobe


----------



## BigTom (Jan 10, 2013)

Balbi said:


> This isn't Top Trumps, it's Magic: The Gathering.
> 
> How about Privilege: The Intersectionaling.
> 
> *rings PD offices*


 
definitely going to try to work some kind of game out of this. Not sure. Top Trumps is obvious, or some kind of set collection game (where you could aim to collect all the oppressions or all the privileges for your character type thing).
Something more like M:TG, I dunno.. the name is fantastic though. Has to be done on that basis alone. Will photoshop something tomorrow maybe anyway.

e2a: I have 9 privileges and 3 oppressions.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 10, 2013)

BigTom said:


> definitely going to try to work some kind of game out of this. Not sure. Top Trumps is obvious, or some kind of set collection game (where you could aim to collect all the oppressions or all the priveliges for your character type thing).
> Something more like M:TG, I dunno.. the name is fantastic though. Has to be done on that basis alone. Will photoshop something tomorrow maybe anyway.


 
Spin the Bottle. Or Roulette.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 10, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> I think that chart needs an additional point-scoring system for each privilege to complicate things further



I think that's the idea. You make a point at the appropriate length along each axis then connect them in a spider diagram. 

Maximal privilege would be defined as the upper half of a regular icosakaitetragon...and maximal oppression the lower.

That's a little known feature of the 'theory'.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 10, 2013)

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/12298/privilege


----------



## cesare (Jan 10, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> As it would be a race to as few points as possible surely it would be Bottom Trumps


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

the cardgame where you seek to have no points whatsoever is called 'shithead'


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 10, 2013)

There are a LOT of weird political board games out there.
My mum made us stop playing Monopoly and made me go to some weird bookshop in Leeds to buy this game and play it instead:
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/113397/the-grain-drain
It was shit.

This could be fun:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1510/class-struggle

Probably not though


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 10, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> There are a LOT of weird political board games out there.
> My mum made us stop playing Monopoly and made me go to some weird bookshop in Leeds to buy this game and play it instead:
> http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/113397/the-grain-drain
> It was shit.
> ...


that first one looks fucking terrible


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 10, 2013)

I want to have a game of Junta


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 10, 2013)

This one is the best though:


----------



## weepiper (Jan 10, 2013)




----------



## smokedout (Jan 10, 2013)

Suzanne Moore blatantly loving this - i think she's doing that ha im winning on the internet look at me thing whilst looking a bit stupid that most of us got out of our system on here about ten years ago


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 10, 2013)




----------



## frogwoman (Jan 10, 2013)




----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 10, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I want to have a game of Junta


I like the look of these two:
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/12333/twilight-struggle
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/80446/weimar-german-politics-1929-1933
A friend of mine actually has them.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 10, 2013)

you have got to be fucking joking


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 10, 2013)

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37699/stalins-stash 
"

Description Edit | History
Stalin is dying in the hospital. Quickly! Steal his money!

Designed around the concept of shadenfreude (enjoyment in the misfortune of others) and Sociopolitical Economics, Stalin's Stash pits up to 4 players against each other in a vie for Stalin's secret treasure. Players build tunnels under Moscow while stealing each other's money, collapsing the tunnels with Molotov Cocktails to earn bonuses and stall other players, all while paying union dues and managing equal worker's salaries." 
Sorry, MASSIVE digress


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> you have got to be fucking joking


That is the teeny tiniest tip of a great big humungous iceberg


http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1617/icebergs


----------



## cesare (Jan 10, 2013)

The board game equivalent of longcat


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 10, 2013)

what happened to a nice game of chess


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> what happened to a nice game of chess


http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/85165/chess-2-the-sequel


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


>


 
You think that's bad..?

http://urbantitan.com/eight-most-controversial-board-games/


----------



## sihhi (Jan 10, 2013)

I blame Balbi's idea.


----------



## tufty79 (Jan 10, 2013)

that is fucking genius


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 10, 2013)

Love it, even without LP on it (  )


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 10, 2013)

Oh god please tell me the welfare game is still available


----------



## Bun (Jan 10, 2013)

That is god like.


----------



## Nice one (Jan 11, 2013)

firky said:


> Well there's a risk that by focussing on Laurie that it will look like bullying, secondly Laurie and her peer group are some of the most prominent people of 'the left' in mainstream media. The result is that people's perception of the left is that of privileged liberals with no real substance.


 
what people? Who?


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> There's an argument to be had that those experiencing oppression of one form or another, alien to the person who may have inadvertently supported that oppression, doesn't have to educate or inform when highlighting that contribution to that oppression


 
No there isn't.

You probably mean that there's an argument to be had that aliens experiencing persons of one form or another wouldn't have to educate, inform or otherwise address in any way those who may (or may not) have inadvertantly supported the kind of contribution to the oppression in the present.

But I don't think there is one of those either.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 11, 2013)

*1. Serial Killer: the board game*
*​*
This extremely grim affair was created by serial killer enthusiast Tobias Allen in the early 90s and was quickly banned in Canada. The board game was packaged in a body bag and the objective was to kill as many people (originally babies until Mr Allen realised he may have pushed it a bit far) and ensuring capture by police only took place in U.S. states without the death penalty. Unsurprisingly the game is now (officially at least) unavailable to buy.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

As far as I can see, intersectional feminism is basically feminism that considers all second wave stuff as done, criticises the majority of feminists for being too white, rich and eurocentric. Instead it should include women of colour, women from non-western backgrounds, differently abled, trans women and women who don't fit into those categories.

Because if anyone is left behind, feminism is oppressing.

It's a bit like a cool new gang, who criticise everyone else for being in a gang - even if some of them have actually made great steps in community engagement and progress. Because it doesn't meet their standards. I suspect the majority of those trashing feminism as a white middle class womens movement are white middle class women, and have an intersectional theory based view on all of the work that feminism has done involving all of the groups highlighted above.

What's a bit odd is that lots, not all, feminist groups are open to all women. There's the usual grumbling argument over trans women, but you don't resolve that by declaring the argument to be oppressive. And by highlighting the multiple forms of oppression that a black woman might suffer over a white woman, you can make people aware of the different struggles within a movement - but how does that translate into action? 

And where, where is any analysis of class beyond the idea that feminism is just a rich western white girls game?

Reductionist, leading to absurdity and broad brush dismissal of complex and hard fought for gains.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

http://crunkfeministcollective.word...ealia-banks-and-white-gay-cis-male-privilege/

Then I read this, and just get lost in the stacking cups nature of the argument. Well, as she's got less privilege and more oppression, what she said WASN'T homophobic but an assertion of herself using the language of oppression. Wait, what the fuck? That's the hierarchy of oppression right there.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 11, 2013)

> White gay cis men have cultural access to the bodies of black women and blackfemmes, cultural access that black women and black femmes do not have in relation to white gay cis male bodies. This cultural access allows white gay cis men to caricature black femininities, through mannerisms and voice intonations, as rambunctiously depraved and outlandish. It is a form of ontological mockery that reinforces dehumanizing narratives and racist tropes about black femininities. Perez Hilton, who personifies a homonormative politic, has systematically tapped into the cultural access to which I refer at various points in his career




Haven't got a fucking clue what a lot of that even means, to be honest


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 11, 2013)

what the fuck is an "anti-oppression practitioner"?


----------



## weepiper (Jan 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> what the fuck is an "anti-oppression practitioner"?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 11, 2013)

I suppose this means the next time I play a club match it will mean that if I lose I will have won anyway because the opponent has the privilege of being better at chess than I am


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 11, 2013)

They're all speaking in a language I don't understand.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jan 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> what the fuck is an "anti-oppression practitioner"?


Pretty similar to a dissent entrepreneur (or whatever that schmuck, Peters, calls himself), one would imagine.


----------



## Athos (Jan 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I suppose this means the next time I play a club match it will mean that if I lose I will have won anyway because the opponent has the privilege of being better at chess than I am


 
Are you playing black or white?


----------



## Belushi (Jan 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I suppose this means the next time I play a club match it will mean that if I lose I will have won anyway because the opponent has the privilege of being better at chess than I am


 
Oppression is inherent in a game where White always goes first


----------



## Athos (Jan 11, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> They're all speaking in a language I don't understand.


 
Shibboleth.  These people make their living speaking to each other like this.  If anyone could do, they'd be out of a job.  Not least of all becase it would quickly be shown up as Emperor's New Clothes stuff.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> http://crunkfeministcollective.word...ealia-banks-and-white-gay-cis-male-privilege/
> 
> Then I read this, and just get lost in the stacking cups nature of the argument. Well, as she's got less privilege and more oppression, what she said WASN'T homophobic but an assertion of herself using the language of oppression. Wait, what the fuck? That's the hierarchy of oppression right there.


 
I guess saying 'they were both being dicks' wouldn't get enough attention.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 11, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Oppression is inherent in a game where White always goes first


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 11, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I guess saying 'they were both being dicks' wouldn't get enough attention.


 

Or cunts. Hang on. I mean silly-billies.


----------



## Athos (Jan 11, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Oppression is inherent in a game where White always goes first


 
What about the White Queen v the Black King. You've overlooked the intersectionality.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 11, 2013)

Athos said:


> What about the Black Queen v the White King. You've overlooked the intersectionality.


 
surely vice versa?


----------



## Athos (Jan 11, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> surely vice versa?


 
Fuck, that lost a bit in the execution, didn't it?!

My wife's gone to Jamaica.... Bugger!

Have edited it now, though.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Haven't got a fucking clue what a lot of that even means, to be honest


 
Basically, because gay men use the language of black women and stereotypes in parody etc (like saying 'daaaayum', talking of baby mama's and other stereotypes) and black women don't do that (apparently) about gay men (which I have a whole set of problems with, because they do). The use of stereotypes of black women and black femmes is dehumanising etc

And Perez Hilton, whose blog I am aware of in the same way I am aware of drains, has used this language and caricatures in his self promotion. And he's homonormative, sort of the acceptable face of gayness. So he's used those stereotypes, and gay men use those stereotypes in their speech. And it's a one way street, because black women and femmes don't have access to white gay male cis stereotypes and ontological stuff. Which is wrong, because they do.

I do like how within minutes someone's pointed out that under the definition of the writer, Hilton's actually not white - he's latino/cuban. But he gets a pass into white privilege anyway apparently because of his power, stemming from the blog. It shows up the problem with having to label every part of someone's identity, and consider every element of their person before determining the oppressor/oppressed dynamic - because the minute you get it wrong, you're excluding an element and contributing to their oppression. Also interesting to see how a black disabled queer anti-oppression activist managed to assume Hilton was white. Not very intersectional of you chap.

It also means you have to break down everyone's actions by their identity, and in this case excuse the oppressed's actions. Azaelia Banks was wrong here, like Suzanne Moore was wrong with her lopping bits off comments. But the author's excused her behaviour by relating it to a struggle and context that couldn't have been further from Banks' mind when she tweeted that Hilton was a 'messy faggot'.

Sometimes a 'fuck you' isn't indicative of a pre-eminent rape culture. And a cigar's for smoking.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I guess saying 'they were both being dicks' wouldn't get enough attention.


 
Misandryist, transphobic, misogynyst. This game is easy, but rubbish.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 11, 2013)

I've got a headache.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Misandryist, transphobic, misogynyst. This game is easy, but rubbish.


 
You missed out homophobe.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

Shit.

*wanders off to the intersectional naughty step*

Also, weirdly - I sort of get their arguments, I can follow them and see what they're doing. I just think they're wrong. You can spend hours chasing your tail on it though. Take that discussion - Banks apologised for anyone being indirectly offended by her comments, and GLAAD (No, not from Portal) took her to task over her comments - and it was resolved.

But with intersectionality, the arguments can never stop - and action can never start.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 11, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Haven't got a fucking clue what a lot of that even means, to be honest


Black women be they straight or not, are more frequently portrayed in culture (including the media) than white gay men, therefore it's easier for a white gay man to convincingly drag up as a black woman than the other way around.


----------



## Athos (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Shit.
> 
> *wanders off to the intersectional naughty step*
> 
> Also, weirdly - I sort of get their arguments, I can follow them and see what they're doing. I just think they're wrong.


 
Your negative use of the word 'step' betrays your nulcear-familynormativeness.  Check your privilege!


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Black women be they straight or not, are more frequently portrayed in culture (including the media) than white gay men, therefore it's easier for a white gay man to convincingly drag up as a black woman than the other way around.


 
Somone's not seen White Chicks.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Somone's not seen White Chicks.


Somebody hasn't had the time to do so.  Check your privilege.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

Trust me, that film's definitely on the oppressed axis.


----------



## rekil (Jan 11, 2013)

PD should host an intersectionality film festival or something. There must be pots of cash to be made from this caper.


----------



## Athos (Jan 11, 2013)

copliker said:


> PD should host an intersectionality film festival or something. There must be pots of cash to be made from this caper.


There you go again, oppressing the blind!


----------



## rekil (Jan 11, 2013)

Athos said:


> There you go again, oppressing the blind!


There will be facilitators on hand to provide a running commentary and point out instances of privilege.

100 quid to listen to (or watch) someone talk over Lenny Henry's True Identity. Oh yes.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Trust me, that film's definitely on the oppressed axis.


It has a homophobic slant to it though. It's all so confusing


----------



## Athos (Jan 11, 2013)

copliker said:


> There will be facilitators on hand to provide a running commentary and point out instances of privilege.


 
Ahhh, but what if they're deaf too?

I could get to enjoy this intersectionality and identity politics - a chance to say a lot without saying anything, innit.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

It's a great way to divert anything into an identity/privilege discussion.

I mean, the biggest boost it got was the debate over Lena Dunham's Girls and its lack of non-white characters. That's been rumbling on for 8 months or so, with the ire directed at Dunham, not examining why you don't get a lot of non-white writers/directors getting shows on television.

The Hulk puts it quite nicely...



> BUT THE LARGER POINT IS THAT IT'S OFF TOPIC. ESPECIALLY WHEN THE SHOW IS REALLY TRYING TO FOCUS OTHER UNDERREPRESENTED IDEAS. AT BEST IT'S NOTHING MORE THAN A VALID QUESTION FOR THE SHOW'S FUTURE (AGAIN, ONE EPISODE). AT WORST? IT'S AKIN TO WONDERING WHY _*DO THE RIGHT THING*_ DIDN'T DO A BETTER JOB COVERING THE INTRICACIES OF THE STOCK MARKET.
> IT'S JUST NOT WHAT THE SHOW IS ABOUT. AFTER ALL, WE DIDN'T MIND THAT THE ENTIRE CAST OF _*FREAKS AND GEEKS*_ WAS WHITE.


 
http://badassdigest.com/2012/04/18/film-crit-hulk-smash-hulk-vs.-the-girls-criticism/

Now that's a stand up and knock it down one - television as a whole's got a problem with representation.

But it's the ability to be able to take an element of discussion, one not vital to the main point, and use intersectionality as a tool to widen the debate until it loses all structure and integrity. The question's a hard one for writers and artists to address without seeming exclusive. "Why doesn't your work include x group, of which you are not a member and exert privilege over" - "Because it doesn't, and addressing that group wasn't my point" - Well, your point is invalid unless you can include x group" - "Well go fuck yourself then".

Which goes back to Suzanne Moore's New Statesman article, which is not about wanting the body of a Brazilian transsexual - but is about feminism providing a platform for solidarity against the cuts. But the way the discussion got diverted into two words - that's a bit worrying.

What could have been bloggers, writers, journalists discussing how to better work together against a very real threat to society, is instead a discussion about privilege, identity and intention. About people inside and outside of the commentariat discussing what was meant by certain words, used in a certain context. How some people are no longer credible.

And the thing that poses the threat rumbles on, unabated.

Intersectionality is one hell of a weapon if you want to shut down, divert, dilute and de-orientate debate, discussion and action.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 11, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Oh god please tell me the welfare game is still available


 
Nah, made in 1980, out of production shortly after I should imagine - still around on ebay occasionally though by the looks of things - one "near complete") went for $30 in October:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Public-As...me-offensive-rare-near-complete-/230863267665

I've seen a kickstarter in the past year or so for a game based on a demonstration/riot where on side plays the police and the other the demonstrators, looked kind of interesting but I can't remember what it was called.
There was also one based on the Seattle 99 WTO meeting: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4190/battle-of-seattle.

I'm vaguely working on a game called "Trot Wars" where each player plays as a trot, starting together in the same group. The game can be won under co-operative conditions (bring about revolution) or individual conditions (get the most glory for yourself and the group you are going to create through splits, mergers and more splits.).
Glory comes through selling papers and building the party obviously.

I have no idea about the mechanics of the game yet, I just like the tension you see in any political grouping really, but I know trot groups and it seems particularly bad there, between the aims and desires of the groups as a whole and the aims and desires of the individual groups within them.
So I'm envisaging a game which forces splits on people and then gets you points by doing things like hijacking other groups demonstrations, declaring losses as victories etc... people coming together in broad fronts on particular campaigns but then each trying to grab the glory of all the points available from that campaign and stuff.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 11, 2013)

I would definitely buy that game


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 11, 2013)

Sounds like a decent scenario/theme for a game! The mechanics involved in even the simplest of games are complicated. Don't you have to use loads of algorithms n shit? (Sorry, maths is not my strong point)


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

You live that game


----------



## rekil (Jan 11, 2013)

Any lefty chess sets out there? Paper sellers as pawns, that kind of thing.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 11, 2013)

with the CC as the king? important but not very powerful and vulnerable to being checkmated


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 11, 2013)

articul8 could be the knight, good at swerving in unexpected directions


----------



## rekil (Jan 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> with the CC as the king? important but not very powerful and vulnerable to being checkmated


Yeah, and entryist as queen?


----------



## rekil (Jan 11, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> articul8 could be the knight, good at swerving in unexpected directions


I see Laura's greek holiday got a positive review in Red Pepper.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 11, 2013)

ok we have to do this


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 11, 2013)

http://beerandscifi.wordpress.com/2...cialism-chess-sets-free-street-interventions/


----------



## barney_pig (Jan 11, 2013)

Available from irregular miniatures in a variety of scales
"RIOT BATTLEPACKS -  for revolting people from Watt Tyler to Watts.
 (Riot Battlepacks do not include the rules, which you can buy separately)

RIOT RULES by Matthew Hartley

£3.00

6mm POLL TAX REBELS - PART I IN MEDIEVAL TIMES

Unhappy peasants, Lord and his forces, looting and fire markers

£6.00

6mm REVENGE - A NAPOLEONIC SOLO GAME

Lynchers, the local JP, the local security forces and a wagon and the "French" captives

£6.00

6mm REVOLUTION IN CENTRAL AMERICA

Lots of Revolutionaries and looters, Military Junta forces, fire and looting markers

£11.00

6mm URBAN STREETS IN MODERN TIMES

Lots of looters, Security Forces, reporters, Fire Engines and fire and looting markers

£24.00"


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 11, 2013)

The only party with the correct theory and analysis for the working class has produced the only range of board games suitable for the toiling masses. This Proletarian Democracy chess set combines intellectual fun with the Leninist theory of the revolutionary vanguardist party. The pawns represent the footsoldiers of the Party carrying the paper to the other side of the board, and thus to revolution, the knights represent ultra-left reformist opportunists swerving from one position to the next, the king represents the Central Committee, all-important but vulnerable to being checkmated. The queen represents the all-important theory of entryism while the bishops stand for dogmatic petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, seemingly long-ranging but limited to one colour of square. The rooks stand for the straightforward Marxist road, rejecting the twin perils of opportunism and reformism.​​Hours of fun for all new recruits!​


----------



## rekil (Jan 11, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> http://beerandscifi.wordpress.com/2...cialism-chess-sets-free-street-interventions/


There's a very pricey collectors item norn iron one.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 11, 2013)

I found a folder of broadsheet left-wing journalism from the 1990s (I knew it was somewhere - LOL).
This was Nick Lezard going on holiday to investigating Poland in 1992. 




> A few minutes later, one of the young crooks challenged me to a game of pool. In any country, the fine details of the rules of pool vary from bar to bar, and Pawel didn't know any of them. The people I was playing pool with didn't know any English, so Pawel was translating terms he didn't even know in Polish. We played two bizarre games until the young crooks started beating each other up.
> ''Does this happen often?'' I asked Pawel later on. ''I mean, do Polish people often talk to strangers in bars?''
> Pawel shrugged and looked off into the middle distance. ''This is the first time in my life this has ever happened to me.'' I felt slightly guilty, as if I had brought a curse with me.
> The next night, which was Shrove Tuesday, Pawel took me to a party. It is a popular night for parties in Poland, but I got the impression that Poles will throw parties at the drop of a hat. It was identical to the student parties I used to go to: the music was an eclectic trawl through rock and dance music history, the kitchen was packed, no one touched the food until a mass attack of the munchies at about midnight and the most beautiful girl in the room didn't even look at me. I also complained a lot about the recession in England.
> The next day I had to go to Krakow to meet my next assignment. I'd picked Elizabeth, art historian, born in 1960. ''I am single and I have a lot of free time,'' she said. As she firmly advised me to stay in a hotel, rather than stay at her place, I guessed that she wasn't using the book as a Lonely Hearts column. The express train to Krakow takes only two and half hours, but leaves at 6.50am. The taxi Pawel had ordered never showed up, but there were plenty at the rank near his flat. (A word about Polish taxis. You will first meet them at the airport, where you will be surrounded by about a hundred men all saying ''Taxi, taxi'' at you until you're actually on the bus. Drivers have to learn the Knowledge the way London cabbies do, but a million zlotys - about £50 - is, for most examiners, a respectable substitute for experience. They are pricey, even for Westerners, and, as most of Warsaw's suburbs look identical, a trip from one flat to another by taxi needs patience, money, and someone who knows the way. You learn to try and do without taxis whenever possible.)


 


> Poles mostly prefer the free market. I saw a Warsaw tram painted in shocking pink, advertising Barbie dolls. Along the streets there are mini-markets selling virtually anything. Shop displays are so eclectic as to suggest a horror vacui, a hangover from the bad old days of communism, when you displayed anything you had to sell. In Krakow I saw a shop window with (next to each other) a pair of braces, a bottle of two-stroke oil and a doctor's stethoscope, all of them apparently brand-new. Meanwhile, Camel and Marlboro slug it out for the soul of Poland. Everything is covered in their livery: trams, newsagents, shop-fronts, billboards. Western companies are interested in Poland, but sometimes it seems as if it is only the companies selling rubbish who are really interested. And if you have been living off undercover received images of the West for half a century, you become more vulnerable to the most easily assimilated, decadent and virulent form of Western culture there is: kitsch. Maybe you can tell how at ease a country is with itself by the tenacity of its cuisine; a Martian in Warsaw or Krakow could conclude that the Polish national dish is pizza. I spent what seemed like hours in Krakow trying to find kazsa - a delicious black pudding - and kaszanka - buckwheat - and had to give up. For good authentic Polish cuisine you will have to find a family that will cook it for you or go to the Daquise in London. Back in Warsaw, Pawel decided to give a party. It was his name-day - the anniversary of his christening - which is as important a day in your calendar as your birthday. He invited only about eight or nine of his friends, but they were the kind of friends who make you think that there are, in fact, about 30 people there instead. I invited everyone back to England so they could see how terrible the recession was. The next day, Pawel took me to see the Jim Jarmusch film Stranger than Paradise. Jarmusch is popular in Poland. Poles are industrious ironists - the ground for irony, is, after all, fertile - and they like the idea of films which make America look like what most Westerners think Poland looks like - grainy, monochrome and sad. Pawel's friend Malgorzata, a beautiful girl, had just returned from nine months away and seemed to be in shock. ''This city. Warsaw. It looks horrible. Everything is grey-green. What is that word that means earth mixed with water?'' ''Mud,'' I offered. ''Yes,'' she said, ''that's it. Everything looks like mud.'' She had been in England and had inadvertently overstayed her visa by a month. She was almost in tears as she said how this meant she would probably never be able to go to England again. Of course, she suggested, I could always marry her. I showed her Poland: People to People. ''I think I should put my name in the next edition,'' she said. Jim Haynes's book is, I had to conclude, a little work of inspiration. In Europe, Europe Hans Magnus Enzensburger spent three baffling days in Warsaw before he admitted the need for a guardian angel, and you will need one, too, as you stumble against the Polish language's sloshed phonetics (a little German might help if you're ever marooned). Whenever I showed people the book in Poland, I asked if they'd have minded being in it themselves. No, they said. These people are nicer than us. The only miserable thing that happened to me in Poland was my departure. I wondered if there was some way of swapping the Polish and British populations. Imagine if Britain was full of people who would walk a mile in tight shoes to do you a favour. (It's not simply economics: several times I had to argue tiresomely with them just to buy them a drink.) Maybe I should take up Malgorzata's proposal after all.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 11, 2013)

The only party with the correct theory and analysis for the working class has produced the only range of board games suitable for the toiling masses. This Proletarian Democracy chess set combines intellectual fun with the Leninist theory of the revolutionary vanguardist party. The pawns represent the footsoldiers of the Party carrying the paper to the other side of the board, and thus to revolution, the knights represent ultra-left reformist opportunists swerving from one position to the next, the king represents the Central Committee, all-important but vulnerable to being checkmated. The queen represents the all-important theory of entryism while the bishops stand for dogmatic petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, seemingly long-ranging but limited to one colour of square. The rooks stand for the straightforward Marxist road, rejecting the twin perils of opportunism and reformism.

Hours of fun for all new recruits!


----------



## BigTom (Jan 11, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Sounds like a decent scenario/theme for a game! The mechanics involved in even the simplest of games are complicated. Don't you have to use loads of algorithms n shit? (Sorry, maths is not my strong point)


 
You can if you want, quite a lot of games are based on maths and algorithms, sometimes these just feel like they have a theme pasted on top. It's not the only way to do it though, because you can play test through to finding the balance you need in a game. Getting it right isn't easy, but I've made a couple of games that are quite decent just by working from the theme down to the mechanics and then back up again, tweaking, changing and removing stuff. (that probably doesn't make sense but I don't know how else to express it...)

So with Trot Wars, I'm imaging that it's going to be a card based game, with cards that let you do stuff like arrange paper sales, demonstrations, meetings along with other things like denouncements, splits, hijacks and so on. You collectively work towards revolution but also towards personal glory. Points are accumulated for yourself and the party through selling papers and attracting new members. But those points are split between all the players in that group, so split and take members with you and you'll get more points from each paper sale etc.. 

I dunno, it's very embryonic, what I need to do is write out a load of these cards and just play a game with very few rules, just a turn order and how you score points and see what comes to mind. Anytime I'm thinking about a game I want the mechanics to reflect the theme so although I'm never aiming for realism, it does feel somewhat like whatever the theme is about. The mathematical approach produces very balanced games (and I will use it at times if there are asymettries in the game (eg: different players having different powers - so if there are cards that could only be used by a particular player, there needs to be the same number of cards available specific to each player - or those cards need to be worth the same number of points or whatever).
Algorithms can also be useful for looking at starting/finishing player advantages - there are I'm sure really interesting games where one player/strategy has the advantage in the early game but a different player/strategy has it in the late game - by the end they are balanced but in mid game it appears highly biased in favour of one player/strategy. I can't think of an example at the moment though.

btw, an explansion pack for Trot Wars will be "Liberals and Anarchists" ... 

frogwoman if/when I get it worked out, one of the reasons I wanted to do it as a card game rather than a board game is that it's easy to do it as a print and play / print on demand version and make it freely/cheaply accessible. I think that if it was well done and fun and played in a way that those on the left recognised in their own groups and poked the right amount of fun at it, then there'd be a few people who'd like to play it.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 11, 2013)

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danhodges/100197754/

*voms*  i haven't found this "Blairite cuckoo" before.  But now he's on the list.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 11, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Nah, made in 1980, out of production shortly after I should imagine - still around on ebay occasionally though by the looks of things - one "near complete") went for $30 in October:
> http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Public-As...me-offensive-rare-near-complete-/230863267665
> 
> I've seen a kickstarter in the past year or so for a game based on a demonstration/riot where on side plays the police and the other the demonstrators, looked kind of interesting but I can't remember what it was called.
> ...


 
not suitable for children under 10?


----------



## BigTom (Jan 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> The only party with the correct theory and analysis for the working class has produced the only range of board games suitable for the toiling masses. This Proletarian Democracy chess set combines intellectual fun with the Leninist theory of the revolutionary vanguardist party. The pawns represent the footsoldiers of the Party carrying the paper to the other side of the board, and thus to revolution, the knights represent ultra-left reformist opportunists swerving from one position to the next, the king represents the Central Committee, all-important but vulnerable to being checkmated. The queen represents the all-important theory of entryism while the bishops stand for dogmatic petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, seemingly long-ranging but limited to one colour of square. The rooks stand for the straightforward Marxist road, rejecting the twin perils of opportunism and reformism.​​Hours of fun for all new recruits!​


 
Genius 
I've had a very quick look and I'm surprised that I can't easily find a chess set like the norn ireland one for marxists - marx and engels as the king and queen, Gramsci and Lukacs as knights, Luxembourg and Lenin as rooks etc.. you could do that for the back line whilst keeping paper sellers as the pawns.

The PD Games and Theory Division is growing nicely!


----------



## sihhi (Jan 11, 2013)

Nick Lezard on Nepal in 1991:



> A farewell to Freak Street; Nepal, once the hippies' paradise, is now the haunt of climbers and trekkers. Nicholas Lezard gets high without the hashish


 


> When you arrive in Kathmandu and look at what most restaurants have on offer, you would be forgiven for thinking the national dish is apple strudel. Nepal might be one of the world's poorest countries, but the people do know how to make Westerners feel at home. Nepalis love tourists: the words ''wel come'' (invariably spelt like that) appear above every shop, restaurant and guest house.


 


> A word about rickshaws: these pose problems for sensitive Westerners.


 


> A rickshaw ride is also morally exhausting. You are torn between compassion for the driver, whose effort on your behalf makes you feel like a Bolshevik caricature of a capitalist, and compassion for yourself. Half-way to your destination you get off and pay him slightly more than the sum you agreed before setting off. And the moment you do get off, you are surrounded by other rickshaw drivers, all going ''Rickshaw, rickshaw,'' at you until you give up and get on one all over again.


 


> Try not to take high-tech Goretex walking boots: if you travel by Aeroflot they will be stolen. This is more of an annoyance than a disaster as there are plenty of shops in town where you can rent all conceivable kinds of mountaineering equipment.


 


> On the return journey, which is downhill, you will probably fall off while swerving to avoid a child selling you a melon - so wear stout clothing. I didn't, and got to see the Nepali emergency medical service at first hand. Treatment is quicker than the NHS, the doctors are excellent and you can haggle with them over the number of stitches they are going to put into your knee. He wanted four, I asked for two, we settled for three.


 


> Even in the deserted areas, the plant life has a kind of urgent, energetic purpose that you scarcely see anywhere else. Nepal's countryside looks like the English countryside, cubed.


 


> Many of the hotels are run by former Gurkhas, comfortably Anglophile and capable of making a mean cup of tea. Lakeside has an extraordinary, tropical shanty-town atmos- phere: the buildings are made of tin and straw thatch, with fairy lights strung about.


 



> The place is almost like an unspoilt Bali, if you can accept that an unspoilt Bali would have Mexican restaurants. (I would not recommend eating in one of these, by the way. There was something in my cheese and bean burrito that left me half-dead for three days. It gave me a chance to rest my knee.)
> If you find the idea of Western restaurants serving apple strudel depressing, comfort yourself with the thought that the best treks start from here, and the beaten track, whether you are in the middle of Kathmandu or Pokhara, is never hard to get off.


 




> Nepal is at an interesting stage in its development. It might not have an infrastructure left over from a colonial past, but the Nepalis make up for it in the lengths they will go to in order to make visitors welcome, even though they have only been doing it since 1959.


 


> With return flights costing as little as £450 and a chance to experience a lifestyle that is almost free once you get there, the country is all set to be the next big, hip tourist destination: less frenetic than India, less ideologically suspect than taking advantage of Tibet. Already tourists come back complaining that the place is not what it was. It is worth going now, while you can still say you were there when the country was unspoilt.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 11, 2013)

*voms again*


----------



## rekil (Jan 11, 2013)

It's almost as if The Lez forced the maoists to kick off the people's war by the power of sheer prickery.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

*toddles off to read more about intersectionality*

But from what I have read, imagine a whiny Carl Sagan saying "to create an apple pie, you must first create the universe" to a group of people that includes cordon bleu chefs and starving children.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 11, 2013)

copliker said:


> It's almost as if The Lez forced the maoists to kick off the people's war by the power of sheer prickery.


 


Here's Lezard attacking tourists (inauthentic ones ??) in that article linked earlier:




> There was another one of those stupid studies, reported on last week in some of the papers, that London has not made it into even the top 50 of the world’s most liveable cities. The knee-jerk response to this is scorn. Yeah, right, that’s why no one wants to live here, property prices are so low, and it doesn’t take 15 minutes to get down the steps of Baker Street station because they are clogged with gawping, idiotic tourists.
> (I know it is wrong to judge a book by its cover but these tourists are idiotic. You know they couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel, not only because of their zombie-paced, shuffling gait – one sometimes wishes one were a New Yorker so one could be rude to them with impunity – but also because they all eat in McDonald’s. What kind of _degenerate Morlock_ goes all the way to a foreign city and then stuffs his pimply face with a Big Mac?)


 
http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2009/06/shepherd-bush-london-city

A Morlock is a reference to the cannibalistic animal-like underground race (descended from industrial workers) in the future in H G Well's The Time Traveller.


----------



## gosub (Jan 11, 2013)

copliker said:


> Any lefty chess sets out there? Paper sellers as pawns, that kind of thing.


 
 First to lose their king and queen wins?


----------



## Firky (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> *toddles off to read more about intersectionality*


 
Don't you have any regard for your own mental well being?


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

Mentalist


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

*Helen Lewis* ‏@*helenlewis* 
Hilarious. "Argue for hours about which journo is more privileged: fun for all your Twitter followers" http://proletariandemocracy.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/pd-privilege.jpgletariandemocracy.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/pd-pri… … ht @*trillingual*

Own up comrades, who tweeted her.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I blame Balbi's idea.


Now endorsed by _New Statesman_'s Daniel Trilling 

https://twitter.com/trillingual/status/289721898651230208


----------



## rekil (Jan 11, 2013)

sihhi 

http://proletariandemocracy.wordpre...he-intersectionalising-new-card-game-from-pd/

(Endorsed and RTd by Daniel Trilling from the new statesman)


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Own up comrades, who tweeted her.


 
Damn you, TLP


----------



## BigTom (Jan 11, 2013)

gosub said:


> First to lose their king and queen wins?


 
There's a standard variant of Chess called "Suicide Chess" where the aim is to force your opponent to take your pieces and whoever gets them all taken first is the winner, not specifically to losing the King and Queen though but could and no doubt has been adapted (at least for losing the King, that's kind of obvious given the aim of Chess)


----------



## cesare (Jan 11, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Now endorsed by _New Statesman_'s Daniel Trilling
> 
> https://twitter.com/trillingual/status/289721898651230208


LP's retweeted that


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

*dons tin helmet*


----------



## rekil (Jan 11, 2013)

*Rhona MacKenzie* ‏@*rkmackenzie*
Warning: This may enrage you: RT "@*ProletarianDem*: Privilege: The Intersectionalising - New Card Game From PD http://wp.me/p2npJh-ip ”


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

*gets flame proof suit on*


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 11, 2013)

Lol. Loads of people seizing on it either to say how unfunny it isn't. Which makes it even funnier.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 11, 2013)

oh lol lol


----------



## cesare (Jan 11, 2013)

copliker said:


> *Rhona MacKenzie* ‏@*rkmackenzie*
> Warning: This may enrage you: RT "@*ProletarianDem*: Privilege: The Intersectionalising - New Card Game From PD
> http://wp.me/p2npJh-ip ”



Ha ha


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 11, 2013)

If this kicks off another twitter shitstorm can someone else be the racist this time please?


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

I'm certainly stopping giving you ideas. If i'd taken this to the NS, I could have been given a bloody column


----------



## weepiper (Jan 11, 2013)

*Helen Lewis* ‏@*helenlewis*
@*WeekWoman* It's made by left-wingers to take the piss out of the lack of diversity in the commetariat. They have a point.
*Details* 

 *Reply* 
 *Retweet* 
 *Favorite*

3m​

*Week Woman* ‏@*WeekWoman*
@*helenlewis* I realise it's made by soi-disant left-wingers, but it sounds more to me like it's mocking the concept of asking for more
*Details*
2m​

*Week Woman* ‏@*WeekWoman*
@*helenlewis* diversity / asking for more awareness of diversity from the commentariat to me. That's what I found disturbing.
*Details*
56s​

*Helen Lewis* ‏@*helenlewis*
@*WeekWoman* Isn't the point that diversity is limited to one thing in each case? As in, there are "acceptable" diversities


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

weepiper said:


> *Helen Lewis* ‏@*helenlewis*
> @*WeekWoman* It's made by left-wingers to take the piss out of the lack of diversity in the commetariat. They have a point.
> *Details*
> *Reply*
> ...


We are so lucky having all these super clever people to tell us _what it all means_


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

Interesting interpretations. It's not an attack on diversity, it is an absurd extreme of a theory and it is meant to be a joke.

The instant NOT FUNNY. WHITE. PRIVILEGE. reaction demonstrates exactly the issues i've been ploughing up.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 11, 2013)

'soi-disant' 'commentariat'


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 11, 2013)

LOLOLOL I may expire


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

weepiper said:


> 'soi-disant' 'commentariat'


Ouinquocrats


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 11, 2013)

just wait til LP get to work on this retweet, then you will be sorry


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 11, 2013)

What does soi-distant (or even disant) mean anyway? Always makes me think of Soap Distant, that hollow earth Robert Rankin character.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 11, 2013)

You can tweet them that It is mocking the idea of a fuckin "commentariat" in the first place.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> just wait til LP get to work on this retweet, then you will be sorry


RT? This is 1500 words money-in-the-bank, one-hour-before-filing GOLD.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What does soi-distant (or even disant) mean anyway? Always makes me think of Soap Distant, that hollow earth Robert Rankin character.


'So-called', but so saying it in French makes it sound plus vrai.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Interesting interpretations. It's not an attack on diversity, it is an absurd extreme of a theory and it is meant to be a joke.


 
Stop oppressing people with stunted senses of humour


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

Having to resist the urge to explain how it's not what she wants it to be.

Oh, brava froggy, brava! 

 *frog woman * ‏@*hrb264* 
Message to the commentariat, @*ProletarianDem* is not mocking diversity, we are mocking YOU


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 11, 2013)

Just checked my privilege by the way. I've got 10 privileges and 3 oppressions. And I found a lump that I'm going to have to ask the doctor to check out.


----------



## rekil (Jan 11, 2013)

Better put out something on Multitudinous Positionism just to mix things up a bit more.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Just checked my privilege by the way. I've got 10 privileges and 3 oppressions. And I found a lump that I'm going to have to ask the doctor to check out.


 
So that's +10 -3 = 7 but your suspect growth gives you a lumpenprole POWER POINT of +/-2 (depending on the argument and who you're intersectionalising with).


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jan 11, 2013)

Can we add a funny/humourless axis to the intersectional wheel? It would bring new meaning to the word humourist.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## fractionMan (Jan 11, 2013)

thread continues to deliver 

*Week Woman* ‏@*WeekWoman*
Wow. This is actually not at all hilarious. It is however horrifically smug & entitled http://proletariandemocracy.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/pd-


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 11, 2013)

the irony.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 11, 2013)

excellent work comrades!


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

*passes tin helmet to froggy*


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 11, 2013)

Im sorry, but those tweeters really are po faced disparaging wankers - I dont think they like someone mocking ( i.e understanding ) their big words and facile posturing.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 11, 2013)




----------



## weepiper (Jan 11, 2013)

Still lolling at someone using 'soi-disant' with a straight face


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jan 11, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Still lolling at someone using 'soi-disant' with a straight face


 
Surely you mean a visage impassible.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

In fairness, froggy's tweet did settle the ire of that particular tweeter. They did say that PD should have been more explicit. That's the point of good satire though.

Hold up, more coming in.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 11, 2013)

Being unable to laugh at yourself is the mark of a wrongun


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> In fairness, froggy's tweet did settle the ire of that particular tweeter. They did say that PD should have been more explicit. That's the point of good satire though.


_Let no ire be settled till the last tumblrist has been hung from the wifi repeater pole with the guts of the last tweetocrat_


----------



## Belushi (Jan 11, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Being unable to laugh at yourself is the mark of a wrongun


 
I've just realised there's no ginger spoke on the Wheel of Oppression, I'm fucking outraged on your behalf


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

Belushi said:


> ...no ginger spoke...


 
Quite right - seen & not heard, etc.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

Ah right. The complaint is now that our satire could have been done better, as twitter is not good for indicating the context of things. Which is, as i've just pointed out, a problem with arguing on twitter and certainly not a reason to stop doing it.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 11, 2013)

Also where are gypsies on the wheel of oppression? a pretty big thing to miss out


----------



## fractionMan (Jan 11, 2013)

The wheel of infinite spokes


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

Ok, @weekwoman doesn't *do* 140 characters.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 11, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Quite right - seen & not heard, etc.


Ginger prejudice is a difficult one to address as it only tends to be white males that suffer from it, this confusing the parameters of the wheel of privilege


----------



## BigTom (Jan 11, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I've just realised there's no ginger spoke on the Wheel of Oppression, I'm fucking outraged on your behalf


 
We're saving that for the expansion pack! Gotta make that cash, money for the workers' bomb.


----------



## fractionMan (Jan 11, 2013)

Some spokes should be longer than others.


----------



## Belushi (Jan 11, 2013)

and the Meek, even God thinks they have a tough time of it


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

post tweets people- especially the humourless ones


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Ah right. The complaint is now that our satire could have been done better, as twitter is not good for indicating the context of things. Which is, as i've just pointed out, a problem with arguing on twitter and certainly not a reason to stop doing it.


How typically arrogant of the privileged creators of Proletarian Democracy to make satire that stupid people cannot comprehend. There's another two spokes to your wheel - stupid/clever


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

Belushi said:


> and the Meek, even God thinks they have a tough time of it


 

earth inheritance privilege


----------



## BigTom (Jan 11, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> Some spokes should be longer than others.


 
Concept design for the special anniversary edition of Privilege: The Intersectioning.. this is a 3D version of the privilege "wheel" taking better into account the often confusing and multiple intersectioning nature of oppression and privilege better than any 2D model ever could:







All that is needed now are some motors so that the spikes can move in and out over time as our understanding of the heirarchy of oppression deepens, allowing us to more closely define the interlocking matrices of domination that exist in the world around us.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

I believe some of the commenters think PD wrote the wheel/spokes of the privilege domination element.

I've just pointed out it's from a textbook on intersectionality.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 11, 2013)

Yeah, they haven't spotted that, have they?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 11, 2013)

Funnily enough, I'm reading Iain M Banks' The Player Of Games, which is about a hierachical civilisation in which whoever wins an absurdly complicated game becomes Emperor. Their 3D model of a privilege wheel would be even more complicated cos they have three sexes


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> I believe some of the commenters think PD wrote the wheel/spokes of the privilege domination element.
> 
> I've just pointed out it's from a textbook on intersectionality.


Which would - fantastically - _make intersectionality _"horrifically smug & entitled". Genius.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 11, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Funnily enough, I'm reading Iain M Banks' The Player Of Games, which is about a hierachical civilisation in which whoever wins an absurdly complicated game becomes Emperor. Their 3D model of a privilege wheel would be even more complicated cos they have three sexes



hmm.. I think we're going to need to base this on a hypercube


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

Brian Whelan's just tweeted, and Linehan's got it. PD, this is the moment.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 11, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Nah, made in 1980, out of production shortly after I should imagine - still around on ebay occasionally though by the looks of things - one "near complete") went for $30 in October:
> http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Public-As...me-offensive-rare-near-complete-/230863267665
> 
> I've seen a kickstarter in the past year or so for a game based on a demonstration/riot where on side plays the police and the other the demonstrators, looked kind of interesting but I can't remember what it was called.
> ...


 
I've sourced an appropriate image for the box cover, if that helps at all...


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

BigTom said:


> hmm.. I think we're going to need to base this on a hypercube


No, because in reality not all lines are equal


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 11, 2013)

the fact is though that its not surprising they thought that wheel was so fucked up because it is. who the fuck says "old" and "unattractive" and "deviancy" are signs of a lack of privilege? could they not have chosen more pc terms to describe their theory in?


----------



## BigTom (Jan 11, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> No, because in reality not all lines are equal


 
 That's why I said "base". Also, I don't really know what a hypercube is, except that it's some kind of hypothetical multi-dimensional mathematical shape thing with weird and confusing properties that can't really be expressed in the real world (much like a Klein Bottle) because we don't have enough dimensions or something.
But I'm sure that communist aliens have the technology to create multiple dimensions - another sign that Posadas was right comrades! When the commie space aliens come, they will be able to give use the technology to create the multi-dimensional privelege matrix wheels that we need to properly classify the heirarchy of oppression and all be able to check our privileges appropraitely. It'll be kind of like confession for catholics.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> who the fuck says "old" and "unattractive" and "deviancy" are signs of a lack of privilege?


 
Somebody who never met Lord Boothby.

Which rules out the Kray Twins, for starters...


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jan 11, 2013)

I like how some of them haven't realised that the reason the satire was "too subtle" was precisely because _they_ were the type of people being skewered


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

when you use privilege theory to shut down an argument you now get to say your opponent has been broken on the wheel


/cloak


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> when you use privilege theory to shut down an argument you now get to say your opponent has been broken on the wheel
> 
> 
> /cloak


Just be careful not to suggest that it is done 'like a butterfly', lest you leave yourself open to charges of transphobia by way of gyandromorphism.


----------



## Firky (Jan 11, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> just wait til LP get to work on this retweet, then you will be sorry


 
She was online at about 4am this morning or yesterday morning, just me and her. So she too has insomnia or she's off swanning about NYC again. Doesn't she worry about her carbon foot print? Not only does she live a jetset life she wastes paper every time an article is printed. Polar bears are up in arms about it, but that is their white bear privilege.


----------



## Firky (Jan 11, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> thread continues to deliver
> 
> *Week Woman* ‏@*WeekWoman*
> Wow. This is actually not at all hilarious. It is however horrifically smug & entitled http://proletariandemocracy.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/pd-


 
Someone needs to leave a breadcrumb trail to this thread again, am not sticking my neck (hoho!) out again.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

firky said:


> She was online at about 4am this morning or yesterday morning, just me and her. So she too has insomnia or she's off swanning about NYC again. Doesn't she worry about her carbon foot print? Not only does she live a jetset life she wastes paper every time an article is printed. Polar bears are up in arms about it, but that is their white bear privilege.


 

and their right to bear arms


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jan 11, 2013)

firky said:


> Someone needs to leave a breadcrumb trail to this thread again, am not sticking my neck (hoho!) out again.


it's brilliant that anyone could be so lacking in self-awareness that they should accuse an attack on lefty journos of being "smug and entitled"


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

Back in Suzanne Moore land - she's deleted her twitter, and Moran, Jones etc are circling wagons.

 *Caitlin Moran* ‏@*caitlinmoran* 
When someone who's generally for the good uses one word you disagree with & you destroy them,you terrify the next generation of commentators

@*caitlinmoran*: For those who thought they were furthering social progress by abusing Suzanne Moore until she left Twitter: you weren't.

*Caitlin Moran* ‏@*caitlinmoran* 
Suzanne wrote this brilliant piece on the future of feminism http://bit.ly/UFQJ0w  & got picked up for her use of "Brazilian transsexual."

*Caitlin Moran* ‏@*caitlinmoran* 
Which I think is a perfectly valid, non-prejorative descriptor of female body ideals. And she was hounded by a very small, vocal group.

Given the flak Moran's copped for her own white cis gendered brand of feminism (check me out, shibboleth me up) - basically, that's going to make it worse.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Back in Suzanne Moore land - she's deleted her twitter, and Moran, Jones etc are circling wagons.


who to root for? Lefty journalist or the identity politicians?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Back in Suzanne Moore land - she's deleted her twitter, and Moran, Jones etc are circling wagons.


 

for those of us who don't understand twitter please post. I want to see what the St Owen of The Left has to say


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> for those of us who don't understand twitter please post. I want to see what the St Owen of The Left has to say


 
Check your lazy privilege.


----------



## wtfftw (Jan 11, 2013)

@OwenJones84Re: Suzanne Moore. Some of us on left need to find way of disagreeing with / educating each other which doesn't mean declaring all out war


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

wtfftw said:


> @OwenJones84Re: Suzanne Moore. Some of us on left need to find way of disagreeing with / educating each other which doesn't mean declaring all out war


 
He's not wrong there.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

wtfftw said:


> @OwenJones84Re: Suzanne Moore. Some of us on left need to find way of disagreeing with / educating each other which doesn't mean declaring all out war


 

it's like kautsky vs the soviets all over again


----------



## fractionMan (Jan 11, 2013)

> Incidentally, this month, which has involved me starting an exciting new job at The Independent, has also been full of more than the usual catalogue of attacks, rapebombing, slut-shaming, death threats, professional slanders, right-wing trolls, libertarian trolls, *soi-disant* radical trolls and mad people with vendettas, including former comrades, trying to push false stories about me into the gossip press. I try not to let it get to me, but sometimes it does get difficult. Despite all this I've managed to keep producing, but that might not have been the case without the support of a lot of wonderful people, friends and colleagues and near-strangers. I am massively grateful to everyone who has offered me their solidarity over the past few weeks - you know who you are, and I hope you know that your efforts are more than appreciated. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love you.




all the way back in april last year. barf

http://pennyred.blogspot.co.uk/[/quote]


----------



## rosecore (Jan 11, 2013)

wtfftw said:


> @OwenJones84Re: Suzanne Moore. Some of us on left need to find way of disagreeing with / educating each other which doesn't mean declaring all out war


It's another meltdown for 'lefty' columnists right now. Others like David Banksy and Fleetstreet Fox are fighting to defend Moore.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> *Caitlin Moran* ‏@*caitlinmoran*
> When someone who's generally for the good uses one word you disagree with & you destroy them,*you terrify the next generation of commentators*


 
I like the sound of that.

Quake in thy designer boots, o flukeworms in the intestines of the class!


----------



## sihhi (Jan 11, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> I like the sound of that.
> 
> Quake in thy designer boots, o flukeworms in the intestines of the class!


 
Julie Burchill is in on it now: "Transexual mob telling Suzanne Moore how to write makes me think of the Black & White Minstrels telling Usain Bolt how to run"


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

transexual mob

for fucks sake


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Jan 11, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> I like the sound of that.
> 
> Quake in thy designer boots, o flukeworms in the intestines of the class!


 
Wrong kind of terror. 

Has LP said anything about the Suzanne Moore debacle?

I think Moore is alright (as journos go) because she used to play her children Test Dept records to help them get to sleep and once left a nice comment on my blog when I took the piss out of her for standing as a candidate in the local elections.

Plus she used to post good Youtube links on twitter when she was pissed.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 11, 2013)

So can anyone fill me in on the Suzanne Moore thing? I saw the article posted above with a comment about brazilian transsexuals, from what I gather some people pulled her up on her language and then she went on a proper transphobic rant  (something about lopping dicks off?) which culminated in her writing an article defending her transphobic remarks  because we should all be focusing on fighting the cuts.
Is this vaguely right?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 11, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Julie Burchill is in on it now: "Transexual mob telling Suzanne Moore how to write makes me think of the Black & White Minstrels telling Usain Bolt how to run"


 
That does sound well dodgy to be honest - dunno if it's intended but the minstrels comparison suggests she thinks they're putting on a performance, pretending to be something they're not, like the minstrels did - I don't know who she is so it might just be a bad choice of words rather than intentional nastiness. And that's without even getting into the term 'transexual mob'.


----------



## rosecore (Jan 11, 2013)

> *Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*
> @*das__ich* @*donne_mark* @*casi_insurgente* @*Jewvenile1312* @*dead_cells* Hello hierarchy of oppression! Shh silly women, trans people get worse!


----------



## BigTom (Jan 11, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> transexual mob
> 
> for fucks sake


 
better than a trainsexual mob which is how I read it first  Not sure what a trainsexual is - someone who is turned on by trains, but do they want to fuck trains or fuck whilst in trains? A trainsexual mob would presumably be intent on an orgy which could be a bit annoying or rather fantastic depending on your mood (and whether they are trying to fuck the train or each other, and whether you're allowed to join in or not), whilst you are coming (lol) home from work on the 18:18 from Euston.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 11, 2013)

BigTom said:


> So can anyone fill me in on the Suzanne Moore thing? I saw the article posted above with a comment about brazilian transsexuals, from what I gather some people pulled her up on her language and then she went on a proper transphobic rant (something about lopping dicks off?) which culminated in her writing an article defending her transphobic remarks because we should all be focusing on fighting the cuts.
> Is this vaguely right?


 
Yeah, think so - and I didn't know about this context when I read the later article, which I thought was pretty good (and it is tbh, just a shame it she'd already spoilt it by being a dick).

Again I feel like it should be pointed out that privilege theory is just a pseud's way of saying don't be a dick, and is sometimes used to mask things, making out the person who's being a dick is in fact the victim of the person they're being a dick to. Or something.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 11, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> That does sound well dodgy to be honest - dunno if it's intended but the minstrels comparison suggests she thinks they're putting on a performance, pretending to be something they're not, like the minstrels did - I don't know who she is so it might just be a bad choice of words rather than intentional nastiness. And that's without even getting into the term 'transexual mob'.


 
I read it as saying that those who are criticising aren't trans, and even if they were they wouldn't know what they are talking about.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 11, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Not sure what a trainsexual is - someone who is turned on by trains, but do they want to fuck trains or fuck whilst in trains? A trainsexual mob would presumably be intent on an orgy which could be a bit annoying or rather fantastic depending on your mood (and whether they are trying to fuck the train or each other, and whether you're allowed to join in or not), whilst you are coming (lol) home from work on the 18:18 from Euston.


 
There's got to be a boxcar willy joke in there somewhere but I can't for the life of me work out what it is.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 11, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> There's got to be a boxcar willy joke in there somewhere but I can't for the life of me work out what it is.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 11, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> That does sound well dodgy to be honest - dunno if it's intended but the minstrels comparison suggests she thinks they're putting on a performance, pretending to be something they're not, like the minstrels did - I don't know who she is so it might just be a bad choice of words rather than intentional nastiness. And that's without even getting into the term 'transexual mob'.


 
The whole thing is dodgy from both sides. What exactly are the real aims on both sides. 
It looks a lot like established commentariat (led by Caitlin Moran, backed up Nick Cohen, Owen Jones) vs younger student wishing-to-be-commentariat (Zoe Stavri and the 'transexuals are just the same as women, must be allowed in all women-only spaces' blogger types)
The one non-sport non-music trend on twitter is Suzanne Moore leaving Twitter.

United Kingdom Trends · Change
#Mention25CutePeopleOnTwitter
Suzanne Moore
#RylanHQ
Nuri Sahin
#FollowFriday
Dortmund
#nowplaying
#ThingsIGetAlot
Les Mis
Sounds

Fuck Twitter.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 11, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> Wrong kind of terror.
> 
> Has LP said anything about the Suzanne Moore debacle?
> 
> ...


 
It was a _general election_ and someone described her tongue-in-cheek as 'everything wrong with north Hackney today'


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Jan 11, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It was a _general election_ and someone described her tongue-in-cheek as 'everything wrong with north Hackney today'


 
So it was: http://www.uncarved.org/blog/2010/04/election-selection/

I think Moore correctly identified that there was a lot of resentment against Hackney Concil in general and Diane Abbott specifically. She did a fair bit of door knocking and listening too.

She got 258 votes, to Diane Abbott's 25,0000.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> Wrong kind of terror.


 
I smell trainsphobia


----------



## sihhi (Jan 11, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> So it was: http://www.uncarved.org/blog/2010/04/election-selection/
> 
> I think Moore correctly identified that there was a lot of resentment against Hackney Concil in general and Diane Abbott specifically. She did a fair bit of door knocking and listening too.
> 
> She got 258 votes, to Diane Abbott's 25,0000.


 


This was her response 




> SUZANNE MOORE says:
> April 30, 2010 at 11:35 pm
> "All fair points….but where did you get that pic? Never seen it before! (_No columnist would be an MP for money_ so the ward councillor jibe doesnt make sense. Local base does) Suzanne x"


 
In fact several columnists and journalists have become MPs over the years in the modern era.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Check your lazy privilege.


 

who died and made you Stephanie


----------



## smokedout (Jan 11, 2013)

BigTom said:


> I read it as saying that those who are criticising aren't trans, and even if they were they wouldn't know what they are talking about.


 
no birchill's position is that trans-women are self-mutilated men and that trans men are self hating women


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 11, 2013)

smokedout said:


> no birchill's position is that trans-women are self-mutilated men and that trans men are self hating women


 
Yeah, I seem to remember her employing the phrase "black and white minstrels" in pretty much the context you've described when she had a column in the guardian.


----------



## rosecore (Jan 11, 2013)

The shitstorm continues:



> *Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*
> @*krasejc* Pro tip: I've never claimed to be the "spokesman" of anyone, but yes I'm vile liberal counter-revolutionary scum and THE REAL ENEMY
> 
> *Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*
> ...


----------



## sihhi (Jan 11, 2013)

rosecore said:


> The shitstorm continues:


 
with added bluster why the reference to the KPD all the time?




> Owen Jones ‏@OwenJones84
> @krasejc The irony is there is literally no-one as macho and implicitly riddled with male chauvinism on Twitter as some of the ultra-lefts
> 
> @krasejc Pro tip: I've never claimed to be the "spokesman" of anyone, but yes I'm vile liberal counter-revolutionary scum and THE REAL ENEMY
> ...


----------



## Balbi (Jan 11, 2013)

Bindel's referred to it as both a mob and cabal in correspondance. The idiot.


----------



## love detective (Jan 11, 2013)

Penny's latest piece on the SWP debacle gets off to a cracking start



> The Socialist Workers' Party, for those who aren't familiar with it already, is a political organisation of several thousand members which has been a prominent force on the British left for more than 30 years. They are at the forefront of the fight against street fascism in Britain


 


> They are not a fringe group: they matter.


 
and she couldn't resist shoehorning in this thinly disguised retort to her recent run in with us here - nice one penny, capitalising on a rape case as a way to massage your own fragile ego about you being pulled up as an utter fraud



> That unwillingness to analyse our own behaviour can quickly become dogma. The image is one of petty, nitpicking women attempting to derail the good work of decent men on the left by insisting in their whiny little women's way that progressive spaces should also be spaces where we don't expect to get raped and assaulted and slut-shamed and victimised for speaking out, and the emotions are rage and resentment: why should our pure and perfect struggle for class war, for transparency, for freedom from censorship be polluted by - it's pronounced with a curl of the upper lip over the teeth, as if the very word is distasteful - 'identity politics'? Why should we be held more accountable than common-or-garden bigots? Why should we be held to higher standards?


 
and a massive strawman to end with



> Equality isn't an optional add-on, a side-issue to be dealt with after the revolution's over. There can be no true democracy, no worthwhile class struggle, without women's rights. The sooner the left accepts that and starts working the enormous stick of priggishness and prejudice out of its collective backside, the sooner we can get on with the job at hand.


----------



## Fedayn (Jan 11, 2013)

love detective said:


> Penny's latest piece on the SWP debacle gets off to a cracking start


 
So it starts terribly and gets worse?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 11, 2013)

Yeah this is all very amusing...but hardly surprising. It's identity politics in a nutshell. There is no coherence. It has no self-consistent logic. Unless you consider an ineluctable impulse to rip itself apart to be logical. It has to happen...every time.

Why the fuck can't they see this?

In political discourse, a sight of identity, privilege, intersectionality...take your pick...takes the place of Checkov's gun. Once it's seen, it has to be fired...the novelty being that it's aimed squarely at its own temple.


----------



## Athos (Jan 11, 2013)

love detective said:


> Penny's latest piece on the SWP debacle gets off to a cracking start
> 
> and she couldn't resist shoehorning in this thinly disguised retort to her recent run in with us here


 
Just when I think there's nothing she could say that would surprise me!  I'm beginning to think she's a spoof, and we've all been trolled.


----------



## love detective (Jan 11, 2013)

Fedayn said:


> So it starts terribly and gets worse?


 
afraid it does, have went back and edited my original post as I read through it!


----------



## Firky (Jan 11, 2013)

Am getting off twitter. Does my head in.


----------



## Athos (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> It's a great way to divert anything into an identity/privilege discussion.
> 
> I mean, the biggest boost it got was the debate over Lena Dunham's Girls and its lack of non-white characters. That's been rumbling on for 8 months or so, with the ire directed at Dunham, not examining why you don't get a lot of non-white writers/directors getting shows on television.
> 
> ...


 
Like crossing the Atlantic to attend a meeting at which some of the left's leading thinkers set out their ideas, only to refuse to engage with them, on the basis that the ideas were expounded by old, white men.

 Or coming to a political discussion board and rather than addressing the serious political points made therein, focusing on the gender of the posters.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 11, 2013)

love detective said:


> afraid it does, have went back and edited my original post as I read through it!


 
Do you think this true, ld?



> There is, however, a _stubborn refusal to accept and deal with rape culture_ that is unique to the left and to progressives more broadly. It is precisely to do with the idea that, by virtue of being progressive, by virtue of fighting for equality and social justice, by virtue of, well, virtue, we are somehow _above being held personally accountable_ when it comes to issues of _race, gender and sexual violence_.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 11, 2013)

love detective said:


> Penny's latest piece on the SWP debacle gets off to a cracking start


 
It's almost as if someone is goading IWCA on purpose after the run-in with Dave Thurrock.



> They are at the forefront of the fight against street fascism in Britain.


----------



## Firky (Jan 11, 2013)

I have just read that NS article, love det' posted. Do you think she consciously chose to exploit the SWP saga? I don't know, man. She may use the fragility of a man's MH problems for her own gain and go against MH professional's advice, but rape? 

As much as I don't like her, I am going to put that one down to total lack of awareness more than anything.


----------



## Firky (Jan 11, 2013)

Thought this sums it up quite neatly:



> *Abi ‏@AbiWilks*
> .@jamesrbuk If you're a trans woman how are you supposed to stand in solidarity with someone calling you a man "with their dick cut off"?!


----------



## rosecore (Jan 11, 2013)

firky said:


> I have just read that NS article, love det' posted. Do you think she consciously chose to exploit the SWP saga? I don't know, man. She may use the fragility of a man's MH problems for her own gain and go against MH professional's advice, but rape?
> 
> As much as I don't like her, I am going to put that one down to total lack of awareness more than anything.


 
Maybe more of a "I need to be the first journalist to cover this story".


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 11, 2013)

Is Identity Politcs becoming the new Godwins law ?


----------



## Belushi (Jan 11, 2013)

Maybe we should add a journo-non journo spoke to the wheel of oppression..


----------



## Firky (Jan 11, 2013)

rosecore said:


> Maybe more of a "I need to be the first journalist to cover this story".


 
Aye, that's a point.


----------



## Favelado (Jan 11, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> Is Identity Politcs becoming the new Godwins law ?


 
That's the kind of thing the Nazis used to ask.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Maybe we should add a journo-non journo spoke to the wheel of oppression..


 

or maybe it could be like that bit of card you stick in between the spokes to make the rattling noise as you ride

disclaimer: i haven't done that since i was at least 18


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

Athos said:


> ...focusing on the gender of the posters.


 
Not so much _focusing_ as _presupposing_ based on one's own argument.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 11, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> *1. Serial Killer: the board game*
> 
> *
> 
> ...


Do you own that?


----------



## sihhi (Jan 11, 2013)

firky said:


> I have just read that NS article, love det' posted. Do you think she consciously chose to exploit the SWP saga?


 
I don't think this is conscious exploitation, but the article with LMU students in occupation of rooms in the campus was on those lines. What does the photograph give other than 'Hah look how evil they are with their faces covered'. That's what the standard media does, someone trying to assist struggles should re-think the whole approach. 



This piece and others at the time really established her. She had contacts with the Zoe Stavri-Jonny Marbles end of the world obviously.

And now it's along the lines of 'the left has an inability to face up to its identity politics weaknesses'
where it's not soft nationalism/unionism:


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 11, 2013)

Balbi said:


> As far as I can see, intersectional feminism is basically feminism that considers all second wave stuff as done, criticises the majority of feminists for being too white, rich and eurocentric. Instead it should include women of colour, women from non-western backgrounds, differently abled, trans women and women who don't fit into those categories.
> 
> Because if anyone is left behind, feminism is oppressing.
> 
> ...


I have some very interesting conversations with one of the men I work with about feminism. He's married to a militant feminist activist and has two equally militant feminist daughters.


----------



## rekil (Jan 11, 2013)

Athos said:


> I agree with you; there's little value in dissecting the minutiae of your online footprint.
> 
> And I regret the way that you have become one of the principal subjects of debate in this thread (albeit largely as a cipher for the phenomenon that you represent). Mostly, I regret it because you don't have that much significance to the serious discussion which takes place on these boards, or across the 'left' generally. But also, partly because some of the individual remarks were a bit close to the mark, and partly because even the more innocuous pisstaking (amongst which I consider some of my own jibes) could have a fairly oppressive effect when taken together. As much as I disagree with a lot of what you say, and as much as I dislike the elite liberal commentariat of which you are a part, ultimately, you are not the principal enemy, and I bear you no malice. I share some of Red Cat's discomfort about some of what has gone on in this thread, especially as you are a young person with some vulnerability.
> 
> ...


Athos and the rest of the misogyny rabble so-called left here scan the heavens for La Pennionara's next flypast and leaflet drop.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

copliker said:


> Athos and the rest of the misogyny rabble so-called left here scan the heavens for La Pennionara's next flypast and leaflet drop.
> 
> View attachment 27410


Just look at those gendered brutes, genetically predestined for violence, punching themselves in their heads!


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 11, 2013)

copliker said:


> PD should host an intersectionality film festival or something. There must be pots of cash to be made from this caper.


Please, please, please do a poster promoting the insectionality film festival to raise funds for the bomb


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 11, 2013)

Wtf is rapebombing?


----------



## Firky (Jan 11, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I don't think this is conscious exploitation, but the article with LMU students in occupation of rooms in the campus was on those lines. What does the photograph give other than 'Hah look how evil they are with their faces covered'. That's what the standard media does, someone trying to assist struggles should re-think the whole approach.
> 
> This piece and others at the time really established her. She had contacts with the Zoe Stavri-Jonny Marbles end of the world obviously.
> 
> ...


 

I am going to give her pass on that SWP article because I don't think even LP would use something like rape as a springboard. 

I like your posts sihhi, the way you include pictures. Is your twitter in Turkish or Greek (showing my ignorance)?

(my grandma had that wallpaper in her kitchen >_<)


----------



## rekil (Jan 11, 2013)

firky said:


> I like your posts sihhi,


A few paragraph breaks would be nice. Dunno about anyone else but I have trouble with large blocks of text.


----------



## Firky (Jan 11, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Wtf is rapebombing?


 
Fuck knows, another demonstration of language which alienates people. Kyriarchy etc. If I was to hazard a guess I'd say spiking people's speed with ket and sexually assaulting them


----------



## rekil (Jan 11, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Please, please, please do a poster promoting the insectionality film festival to raise funds for the bomb


I'll have a go at something over the weekend. Need film submission ideas. True Identity is ideal.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

copliker said:


> I'll have a go at something over the weekend. Need film submission ideas. True Identity is ideal.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 11, 2013)

Or a double bill:






 vs


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 11, 2013)

firky said:


> She was online at about 4am this morning or yesterday morning, just me and her. So she too has insomnia or she's off swanning about NYC again. Doesn't she worry about her carbon foot print? Not only does she live a jetset life she wastes paper every time an article is printed. Polar bears are up in arms about it, but that is their white bear privilege.


 
she is busy

"Every five minutes I spend responding to some random dick-swinging troll on the internet is five minutes not spent researching the legitimacy of international adoption, or working on my book, or answering emails, or reading journals, or going to solidarity meetings, or snatching the occasional bit of downtime, or doing the washing up, or digging little bits of fluff out of my belly button, all of which are activities more deserving of my immediate attention than a small tribe of bitchy online hate-weasels."

http://pennyred.blogspot.co.uk/2011_05_01_archive.html


----------



## rekil (Jan 11, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Just look at those gendered brutes, genetically predestined for violence, punching themselves in their heads!


The Left Needs A New Salute (1000 words on why the raised fist should be replaced with something less macho like a wiggly fingers _coo-eee_ greeting. Easy money.)


----------



## cesare (Jan 11, 2013)

rosecore said:


> Maybe more of a "I need to be the first journalist to cover this story".


Definitely.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 11, 2013)

copliker said:


> A few paragraph breaks would be nice. Dunno about anyone else but I have trouble with large blocks of text.


 noted but no promises  

Laurie Penny must think we are all worse than the BDSM scene (ugh!)

http://pennyred.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/whipping-boys.html



> Whipping boys: a post for International Fetish Day
> 
> 
> 
> ...


----------



## Firky (Jan 11, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> she is busy
> 
> "Every five minutes I spend responding to some random dick-swinging troll on the internet is five minutes not spent researching the legitimacy of international adoption, or working on my book, or answering emails, or reading journals, or going to solidarity meetings, or snatching the occasional bit of downtime, or doing the washing up, or digging little bits of fluff out of my belly button, all of which are activities more deserving of my immediate attention than a small tribe of bitchy online hate-weasels."
> 
> http://pennyred.blogspot.co.uk/2011_05_01_archive.html


 
Fuck me, that's just given me the green light to troll her more


----------



## cesare (Jan 11, 2013)

I quite like "hate-weasel" though 

You bunch of otter, otter, bastards.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 11, 2013)

firky said:


> Fuck knows, another demonstration of language which alienates people. Kyriarchy etc. If I was to hazard a guess I'd say spiking people's speed with ket and sexually assaulting them


Kyriachy? And WTF is CIS?


----------



## tufty79 (Jan 11, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> WTF is CIS?


 
'where an individual's self-perception of their gender matches their sex'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisgender

(i was told by someone that it meant 'comfortable in skin/self' )


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 11, 2013)

Oh, finally, I am something. I am a cis! Or a cyst.


----------



## Athos (Jan 11, 2013)

cesare said:


> I quite like "hate-weasel" though
> 
> You bunch of otter, otter, bastards.


 
That stoat-ally unfair!


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 11, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Wtf is rapebombing?


Doesn't seem to be a commonly used term for anything, looks like an LP made-up word.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 11, 2013)

copliker said:


> I'll have a go at something over the weekend. Need film submission ideas. True Identity is ideal.


I'll have a think about some suitable films.

Thank you


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 11, 2013)

Mask has to be one of them.
A white ginger ugly young man with a congenital abnormality, with a transgendered biker mum.
OK, she's not TG, but she's played by Cher.


----------



## Firky (Jan 11, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Doesn't seem to be a commonly used term for anything, looks like an LP made-up word.


 
If you google it, only our Penny and counterfire (lol) use it.

However following it's mention on here I reckon this thread will be now included.

She also takes photos of the books she is reading to look all intellectual and right on. I am starting to warm to the lass, I must admit, she's a troll 

Worryingly she has several books I do including one I am reading now, the Atrocity Archives after Amazon kept trying to flog me Stross 

http://instagram.com/p/UU4VhkFb0B/


----------



## BigTom (Jan 11, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Please, please, please do a poster promoting the insectionality film festival to raise funds for the bomb





copliker said:


> I'll have a go at something over the weekend. Need film submission ideas. True Identity is ideal.


----------



## love detective (Jan 11, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Do you think this true, ld?



To say there is a 'rape culture' on the left is absurd

That's not to deny though that some lefties are rapists, and just like rape in wider society those crimes are not reported or dealt with, but to talk about it as a 'culture' is just pure hyperbole


----------



## love detective (Jan 11, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It's almost as if someone is goading IWCA on purpose after the run-in with Dave Thurrock.



I don't think so - i think it just shows once again the distance between penny and what she writes about


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 11, 2013)

copliker said:


> The Left Needs A New Salute (1000 words on why the raised fist should be replaced with something less macho like a wiggly fingers _coo-eee_ greeting. Easy money.)


 
Jazz hands.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 11, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Do you own that?


 
Thankfully, it's not one that I'd even consider owning.



copliker said:


> Athos and the rest of the misogyny rabble so-called left here scan the heavens for La Pennionara's next flypast and leaflet drop.
> 
> View attachment 27410


 





One Solution...


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 11, 2013)

love detective said:


> I don't think so - i think it just shows once again the distance between penny and what she writes about


she strikes me as a bit like zoolander but without the social conscience.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 11, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Kyriachy? And WTF is CIS?



Kyriachy is describing a situation where a small number of people have power/domination, and they come from a variety of backgrounds - it came from recognising that patriarchy is not right for describing a world in which women can be in power, and in which men may not be oppressors.. I'm not sure what was wrong with oligarchy for this word tbh thinking about it now, but it does describe something that is worth noting when you come from identity politics - which is that it's all very complicated really.

Cis in latin is the opposite of trans, so when academics I guess were looking for word to describe people born in the right body, they logically thought let's see what antonyms trans has in latin and went for cis. I've only ever seen it written down though, does anyone know if it's pronounced with a hard or soft C? I've assumed hard cos I think that's how latin does Cs


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Jazz hands.


 

jazz mags

hang on, this isn't word association...


----------



## Firky (Jan 11, 2013)

love detective said:


> To say there is a 'rape culture' on the left is absurd
> 
> That's not to deny though that some lefties are rapists, and just like rape in wider society those crimes are not reported or dealt with, but to talk about it as a 'culture' is just pure hyperbole


 
It actually plays straight into the EDL's hands as well because they've capitalised on the SWP thing at the moment and are saying exactly that.


----------



## cesare (Jan 11, 2013)

Athos said:


> That stoat-ally unfair!


Vermin, not ermine


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

firky said:


> It actually plays straight into the EDL's hands as well because they've capitalised on the SWP thing at the moment and are saying exactly that.


 

it seems counter productive to point out the frequency of wrong uns in their ranks at this time, lest it descend into nonce trumps.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 11, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Kyriachy is describing a situation where a small number of people have power/domination, and they come from a variety of backgrounds - it came from recognising that patriarchy is not right for describing a world in which women can be in power, and in which men may not be oppressors.. I'm not sure what was wrong with oligarchy for this word tbh thinking about it now, but it does describe something that is worth noting when you come from identity politics - which is that it's all very complicated really.
> 
> Cis in latin is the opposite of trans, so when academics I guess were looking for word to describe people born in the right body, they logically thought let's see what antonyms trans has in latin and went for cis. I've only ever seen it written down though, does anyone know if it's pronounced with a hard or soft C? I've assumed hard cos I think that's how latin does Cs


 
I saw someone refer to 'Cis-ters' the other day so I'm assuming it's a soft c.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 11, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I saw someone refer to 'Cis-ters' the other day so I'm assuming it's a soft c.







a cister recently


----------



## Firky (Jan 11, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> it seems counter productive to point out the frequency of wrong uns in their ranks at this time, lest it descend into nonce trumps.


 
It's not even a frequency though - well no more than any other group. It happens, like it happens anywhere.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 11, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I saw someone refer to 'Cis-ters' the other day so I'm assuming it's a soft c.


also i've never heard cisalpine gaul pronounced kisalpine


----------



## wtfftw (Jan 11, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Jazz hands.


Deaf applause is like jazz hands.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

wtfftw said:


> Deaf applause is like jazz hands.


 

now I'm wondering how deaf audiences pull off the slow mocking handclap mrsfran


----------



## tufty79 (Jan 11, 2013)

wtfftw said:


> Deaf applause is like jazz hands.


 
so's agreement hand signals for consensus decision making


----------



## mrsfran (Jan 11, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> now I'm wondering how deaf audiences pull off the slow mocking handclap mrsfran


 
One-on-one, you fingerspell H-A-H-A but with tiny little movements and a sarcastic look on your face. Larger scale, basically slow jazz hands. With a sarcastic look on your face.


----------



## Firky (Jan 11, 2013)

ignore.

pasted the wrong link.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 11, 2013)

Hang on professor...I still don't this whole left thing...do you

recognise your state of oppression, see that you're not alone  and look to cast of your oppressor....or spend your time listing in detail the particular ways in which your uniquely oppressed and then vie on twitter for the lowest rung on the ladder?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 11, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> also i've never heard cisalpine gaul pronounced kisalpine


 
It's certainly is soft C


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 11, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Hang on professor...I still don't this whole left thing...do you
> 
> recognise your state of oppression, see that you're not alone and look to cast of your oppressor....or spend your time listing in detail the particular ways in which your uniquely oppressed and then vie on twitter for the lowest rung on the ladder?


 
We have nothing to lose but our memes


----------



## ska invita (Jan 11, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Laurie Penny must think we are all worse than the BDSM scene (ugh!)
> 
> http://pennyred.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/whipping-boys.html


From what I understand of that scene thats a very fair write up as it goes. Incredible to think that BDSM is still illegal in the UK in this day and age.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

ska invita said:


> From what I understand of that scene thats a very fair write up as it goes. Incredible to think that BDSM is still illegal in the UK in this day and age.


 

and the person complicit in the whipping can be nicked for it as well


----------



## ska invita (Jan 11, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> and the person complicit in the whipping can be nicked for it as well


...and people do get done...raids take place i hear.


----------



## Athos (Jan 11, 2013)

What's the punishment for masochism?


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 11, 2013)

Athos said:


> What's the punishment for masochism?


----------



## emanymton (Jan 11, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


>



That just scared my cat you bastard , she was happily purring away on my lap but shot of to the door to try and get out the moment the singing started


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 11, 2013)

emanymton said:


> That just scared my cat you bastard , she was happily purring away on my lap but shot of to the door to try and get out the moment the singing started


you shouldn't have pressed play then should you?


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 11, 2013)

emanymton said:


> That just scared my cat you bastard , she was happily purring away on my lap but shot of to the door to try and get out the moment the singing started








emanymton and friend recently


----------



## Brainaddict (Jan 11, 2013)

The ongoing success of this thread is comforting somehow, like knowing that not only do bears shit in the woods, but they go back to the same place in the woods to shit every time.


----------



## Firky (Jan 11, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> The ongoing success of this thread is comforting somehow, like knowing that not only do bears shit in the woods, but they go back to the same place in the woods to shit every time.


 
200 pages, each with 30 posts per page, in less than six weeks and an extra 200,000 views. Mental.


----------



## Brainaddict (Jan 11, 2013)

It's not that I think she's good. She's a poor and dishonest writer and seriously lacks awareness of her position and how to deal with that. But that said, there's really not much more to be said. 

But if urban75 weren't misdirecting its political rage what on earth would the world be coming to?

I also suspect, I'm sorry to say, that a male writer with the same characteristics would not attract the same level of bile. Chewy thought for ya.


----------



## Belushi (Jan 11, 2013)

Yeah, 'cos we loved Hari round here.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

hari got beasted here


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 11, 2013)

fuck you belushi, getting there first you bastard


----------



## Favelado (Jan 11, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> hari got beasted here


 
Did he come on here?


----------



## rekil (Jan 11, 2013)

edit: nah


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 11, 2013)

We're not exactly massive Hundal fans either.

This is not about gender - and it's quite insulting to suggest that we're criticising her because of her gender - it's about integrity and honesty and having the guts to say 'I don't know much about identity politics/intersectionality/whatever' so I'm going to learn about it before writing about it' instead of making it up/exaggerating/extrapolating from the one thing somebody else said on the subject.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 11, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> I also suspect, I'm sorry to say, that a male writer with the same characteristics would not attract the same level of bile. Chewy thought for ya.


 
LLETSA said that _ages_ ago.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 11, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> I also suspect, I'm sorry to say, that a male writer with the same characteristics would not attract the same level of bile. Chewy thought for ya.


not original and rather derivative


----------



## Brainaddict (Jan 12, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> hari got beasted here


Mmm, if I remember rightly most of the attention happened after proven cases of plagiarism, which is a rather different thing. I don't think he got the same level of attention for his everyday writing. I suppose I can't prove that Laurie gets more attention for being a young woman leftie writer but I shall continue to suspect. Sorry for the lack of originality.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 12, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> Mmm, if I remember rightly most of the attention happened after proven cases of plagiarism, which is a rather different thing. I don't think he got the same level of attention for his everyday writing. I suppose I can't prove that Laurie gets more attention for being a young woman leftie writer but I shall continue to suspect. Sorry for the lack of originality.


 
Neither can I prove that you spend your spare time masturbating over the corpses of badgers but, well...


----------



## Firky (Jan 12, 2013)

If you can be arsed, Brainaddict, I don't blame you if can't. But take a look back from about page 208, it is made quite clear several times that it has nothing to do with what sex Laurie is and everything to do with what she is.

If anything I believe "we" are conscious that it could look like she's getting pasting because of being female. No proof for this of course, only over a decade of posting on urban and having a good 'feel' for the place... urban can sometimes feel quite sanctimonious.

I don't think anyone has called her a cunt for instance and that is the bog standard insult for people on urban.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 12, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> Mmm, if I remember rightly most of the attention happened after proven cases of plagiarism, which is a rather different thing. I don't think he got the same level of attention for his everyday writing. I suppose I can't prove that Laurie gets more attention for being a young woman leftie writer but I shall continue to suspect. Sorry for the lack of originality.


You have no idea what this thread is actually about or what happened on it. You are also utterly wrong about Hari. But thanks for the oafish sense of entitlement (_these sort of people must be doing this sort of thing, people like me can safely assume that, then admonish them fo doing so -for *my *lazy assumption_), came across very well.


----------



## Athos (Jan 12, 2013)

Brainaddict said:
			
		

> It's not that I think she's good. She's a poor and dishonest writer and seriously lacks awareness of her position and how to deal with that. But that said, there's really not much more to be said.
> 
> But if urban75 weren't misdirecting its political rage what on earth would the world be coming to?
> 
> I also suspect, I'm sorry to say, that a male writer with the same characteristics would not attract the same level of bile. Chewy thought for ya.



Why do you suspect that?


----------



## BigTom (Jan 12, 2013)

There's also a decent sized thread for Owen Jones


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 12, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I've just realised there's no ginger spoke on the Wheel of Oppression, I'm fucking outraged on your behalf


I think someone at the NS is reading this thread:
http://www.newstatesman.com/nelson-jones/2013/01/should-ginger-bashing-be-considered-hate-crime


----------



## Riklet (Jan 12, 2013)

_"soi distant_ is not a proletarian word, such grey-area indecisive posturing is symptomatic of uncertain bourgeois duality and conflicted liberal internal anguish.  

we cannot allow such a smudging tone to tarnish our valued struggle to break our class enemies upon the workers' wheel, our bone-crushing tool employed by the productive class to smash the smug entitlement of the commentariat using their own spokes of intersectionality."

all we need now now is video tape communiques delivered to Al Jazeera.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 12, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> Mmm, if I remember rightly most of the attention happened after proven cases of plagiarism, which is a rather different thing. I don't think he got the same level of attention for his everyday writing. I suppose I can't prove that Laurie gets more attention for being a young woman leftie writer but I shall continue to suspect. Sorry for the lack of originality.


 
Not true on here, mate. Long before his plagiarism was revealed, people on here were having a pop about the frequency with which he supported his everyday stories with/hung his everyday stories on anonymous anecdote.


----------



## Favelado (Jan 12, 2013)

He was a better read than Laurie as well wasn't he? I suppose fiction always adds vigour to your writing but he seemed better in terms of style and tone.

A wanker of course. I'm not saying otherwise.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 12, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> I think someone at the NS is reading this thread:
> http://www.newstatesman.com/nelson-jones/2013/01/should-ginger-bashing-be-considered-hate-crime


 
you have got to be fucking joking.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 12, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> you have got to be fucking joking.


! check your privilege!


----------



## Belushi (Jan 12, 2013)

Favelado said:


> He was a better read than Laurie as well wasn't he? I suppose fiction always adds vigour to your writing but he seemed better in terms of style and tone.
> 
> A wanker of course. I'm not saying otherwise.


 
Definitely.  Laurie's articles often read as if they've been produced in five minutes, I suspect Hari puts more effort in.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Definitely.  Laurie's articles often read as if they've been produced in five minutes, I suspect Hari puts more effort in.



Do you think so? I get the impression she's pored over every word and phrase repeatedly. Look at the way she is in interviews. She repeatedly stumbles over what she's saying, gets tongue-tied and goes to great lengths to insert prearranged puns, jokes or 'biting' phrases...all a bit lame and contrived. Her speech has no natural flow. She's a striver, not a natural stylist. Her prose has that overworked feel which acquires a sort of ersatz unprocessed quality only through repeated reworking.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 13, 2013)

Aye - if she's stopping in _conversation with her bezzers on the radio _to make sure she says ONLY the "right" things for the brand then you can be sure she does it with her red pen of justice.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> Mmm, if I remember rightly most of the attention happened after proven cases of plagiarism, which is a rather different thing. I don't think he got the same level of attention for his everyday writing. I suppose I can't prove that Laurie gets more attention for being a young woman leftie writer...



Well that's obviously true...but that's why she gets the criticism. She is...let's face it...in either national or global terms the product of a hyperprivileged upbringing and education. At some point, she clearly decided being 'a young woman leftie writer' would best suit as her particular schtick. Now this obviously presented problems given that it was a little incongruous with her background. It is precisely her attempt to dismiss this incongruity which causes the responses she gets. It infects everything she writes; makes it seem contrived, self-serving and insincere.

In order to present herself as somehow personally involved in the struggles she describes she seems to have decided she needed a back story dripping with oppression. Obviously, not getting the pony you wanted or the trials of a stultifying adolescence trapped in the stockbroker belt don't really cut the Colman's. So, instead, we get her lifelong battle with patriarchal tyranny...and the time she and a few of her Oxbridge compemporaries had to live on cold beans, huddling around a 60 watt bulb to stay alive...all blown up into patently fantastical proportions. Hence the ridicule she attracts.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/13/julie-burchill-suzanne-moore-transsexuals

Julie Birchill decides the way to defuse the situation is to use ALL the offensive words towards trans women and trans me, with a good helping of rubbishing gender politics.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/13/julie-burchill-suzanne-moore-transsexuals
> 
> Julie Birchill decides the way to defuse the situation is to use ALL the offensive words towards trans women and trans me, with a good helping of rubbishing gender politics.


 
Typical Birchill.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Julie Burchill is in on it now: "Transexual mob telling Suzanne Moore how to write makes me think of the Black & White Minstrels telling Usain Bolt how to run"


 
Can you remember where was this quote was from? cos she used it in the Guardian CiF piece that was published last night and is apparently in the print edition of the Observer today, and it really confused me when I read it, cos I knew I'd seen it before.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

In response, the always excellent trans woman Juliet Jacques has linked to the following...

http://bit.ly/V2vaHB, http://bit.ly/V2uMZA

And her series on transitioning is very, very good.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/juliet-jacques?INTCMP=SRCH


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

Without being offensive towards people with mental health issues; are Bindel, Burchill and Moore fucking nuts?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Without being offensive towards people with mental health issues; are Bindel, Burchill and Moore fucking nuts?



Possibly...but I think they're making a point about intersectionality and the background of the majority of media commentators...only in a manner which will guarantee them a load more page hits and a few more columns by stoking the flames. They're not so stupid they don't realise what they're doing.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

It's going to bite them in the arse though, there wasn't a trans-mob/cabal - but there will be now.

"I'm passionate about x subject so to demonstrate it I will use words that are offensive to y and z to demonstrate my anger"


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

I'm actually amazed the Guardian allowed it to stand. They know it's offensive, but they obviously just want the attention. Maybe trans women have joined the working class as a group who are open to acceptable abuse from their 'betters'?


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Without being offensive towards people with mental health issues; are Bindel, Burchill and Moore fucking nuts?


 
As a clinically-diagnosed loonspud I'd find it more offensive if you posted that we were all like those three.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 13, 2013)

> The brilliant writer Suzanne Moore and I go back a long way. I first met her when she was a young single mother living in a council flat; she took me out to interview me about my novel Ambition (republished by Corvus Books this spring, since you ask) for dear dead City Limits magazine. "I've got an entertaining budget of £12.50!" she said proudly. "Sod that, we're having lobster and champagne at Frederick's and I'm paying," I told her. Half a bottle of Bolly later, she looked at me with faraway eyes: "Ooo, I could get to like this…" And so she did.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Without being offensive towards people with mental health issues; are Bindel, Burchill and Moore fucking nuts?


It's not my specialist subject but I do know that Bindel has a long-running issue with trans people - well, women at least - for which she's been regularly and deservedly slated in the past.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> "I'm passionate about x subject so to demonstrate it I will use words that are offensive to y and z to demonstrate my anger"


 
P.S.  Please buy my new book. It's available in all crap booksellers and a few of the better ones who don't realise how appalling it is. Even if you're illiterate, read. Just read. And give me some money. Thank you...


----------



## cesare (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/13/julie-burchill-suzanne-moore-transsexuals
> 
> Julie Birchill decides the way to defuse the situation is to use ALL the offensive words towards trans women and trans me, with a good helping of rubbishing gender politics.



The Ab Fab version of feminism.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

cesare said:


> The Ab Fab version of feminism.



Now that is inspired


----------



## rosecore (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/13/julie-burchill-suzanne-moore-transsexuals
> 
> Julie Birchill decides the way to defuse the situation is to use ALL the offensive words towards trans women and trans me, with a good helping of rubbishing gender politics.


What hate speech. Shame on The Observer for allowing it to be published.


----------



## rekil (Jan 13, 2013)

Laura's chum, blogger and Independent columnist Stavri yesterday.


> And the commentariat inevitably close ranks, because Moore's hate speech is apparently somehow OK and she's a victim here.


Today.


> Yes, I'm on holiday but Julie fucking Burchill made me so cross I had to blog on how inevitable it was


Do these bubble clowns not get that they are the commentariat, part of the self-orbiting problem. She'd chew her legs off for a guardian gig.

stoopit question really


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

copliker said:


> Do these bubble clowns not get that they are the commentariat, part of the self-orbiting problem. She'd chew her legs off for a guardian gig.



No...but to be fair, that's not only a failing among self-styled middle-class radical frauds...I sometimes find myself berating the failings of various hopeless drunks I happen to know...often in the small hours as I crack open another Special Brew.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

@JananGanesh: The ruckus over Suzanne Moore's comments is identity politics eating itself.

Someone's caught on.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> @JananGanesh: The ruckus over Suzanne Moore's comments is identity politics eating itself.
> 
> Someone's caught on.



Nah...you can't blame identity politics. It's cis women who are the problem...they just aren't authentically female enough...and it's about time they were told.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

Little over 2 hours and 630 comments on Burchill's piece...which features ads from Sky broadband, Direct Line and American Express Gold cards.

Odd....where're  the ads for Lidl and Primark? So many of the comments are for people claiming to be working class feminists.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 13, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Nah...you can't blame identity politics. It's cis women who are the problem...they just aren't authentically female enough...and it's about time they were told.


Well no-one gave me a booklet about being 'authentically female'


----------



## rekil (Jan 13, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> For fuck's sake, I work for a living.


 


I just got reminded of it today so it might as well go in here.


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Little over 2 hours and 630 comments on Burchill's piece...which features ads from Sky broadband, Direct Line and American Express Gold cards.
> 
> Odd....where're the ads for Lidl and Primark? So many of the comments are for people claiming to be working class feminists.


 
Ads are specific to the person viewing the page, so in actual fact those adverts say more about you than the people leaving comments.

When I go to that page I get adverts for donkey jackets, hobnailed boots, tripe, Wonga loans and union lines:


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> It's going to bite them in the arse though, there wasn't a trans-mob/cabal - but there will be now.
> 
> "I'm passionate about x subject so to demonstrate it I will use words that are offensive to y and z to demonstrate my anger"


 
tbh there was and is a very vocal trans lobby.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> tbh there was and is a very vocal trans lobby.



Oh yeah, there is - but starting with inflammatory language about a small group who take enough shit as it is, and then hitting lots of nasty language that has been used against them, well - it's just dumbfounding.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

Never thought i'd say this but our Laurie's gone after Bindel and done a good job of it too.

@bindelj: @PennyRed @bindelj Not promoting, saying what is true, that it was a long time coming as a response after the hatred doled out by some trans

"Saying what is true" - that's a Littlejohn tactic right there.


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

All Laurie is doing is jumping on the bandwagon that will benefit her the most, there is no benevolence in that woman. She's entirely self promoting, exploitative, and you have been duped.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Never thought i'd say this but our Laurie's gone after Bindel and done a good job of it too.
> 
> @bindelj: @PennyRed @bindelj Not promoting, saying what is true, that it was a long time coming as a response after the hatred doled out by some trans
> 
> "Saying what is true" - that's a Littlejohn tactic right there.


Bindel accused LP in 2011 of falsely claiming that she had interviewed her for her book. All may not be as it seems.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

firky said:


> All Laurie is doing is jumping on the bandwagon that will benefit her the most, there is no benevolence in that woman. She's entirely self promoting, exploitative, and you have been duped.



LP could get that comment from bindel, us non-media platform types couldn't. Useful idiot innit.


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

Do you ever forget anything Butchers?


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

I am increasingly convinced butchersapron is like Mycroft, the HOLMES 4 in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, the product of a terminally bored supercomputer.


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 13, 2013)

Some stuff about Bindel-Pennygate here

http://madamjmo.blogspot.ie/2011/07/laurie-penny-looking-familiar.html


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

firky said:


> Ads are specific to the person viewing the page, so in actual fact those adverts say more about you than the people leaving comments.
> 
> When I go to that page I get adverts for donkey jackets, hobnailed boots, tripe, Wonga loans and union lines:



Is that right? So how did they know I'd been thinking about an Amex gold card? Is it because I read all the interctional stuff and so they figure I'm from Islington?


----------



## rekil (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Never thought i'd say this but our Laurie's gone after Bindel and done a good job of it too.
> 
> @bindelj: @PennyRed @bindelj Not promoting, saying what is true, that it was a long time coming as a response after the hatred doled out by some trans
> 
> "Saying what is true" - that's a Littlejohn tactic right there.


What butchers said, also, Laurie stalked Bindel for a bit a while back - proper creepy stalking - turning up at a stonewall do to shout at her and everything.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 13, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Is that right? So how did they know I'd been thinking about an Amex gold card? Is it because I read all the interctional stuff and so they figure I'm from Islington?


Can't be; I got Directline, Eurostar, and American Express.  Very wide of the mark.


----------



## Favelado (Jan 13, 2013)

I read LP's blogpost and thought it a put forward a robust case and was a much better piece of writing than other work of hers I've read.

edit - I've just seen the posts about Bindel's claims. If that's true it's another article ruined.


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Is that right? So how did they know I'd been thinking about an Amex gold card? Is it because I read all the interctional stuff and so they figure I'm from Islington?


 

Cookies.

I went on Amazon the otehr week and it was recommending me Laurie Penny's book and historic books on Oxford uni. I should have taken a screen pic because it tickled me.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

firky said:


> Cookies.
> 
> I went on Amazon the otehr week and it was recommending me Laurie Penny's book and historic books on Oxford uni. I should have taken a screen pic because it tickled me.



Yeah...fair enough...but I look at CIF maybe 3 times a month. In fact the last couple of times I looked it was following links from here to LP articles. Does that mean there's an algorithm somewhere which matches Laurie Penny to American Express? Does she know?


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

I don't think LP would have a credit card - she's loaded and does not need to buy things on credit.

Plus she is um, like against erm.. that stuff, like banks and money, and erm... shit yeah, quick... roll a fag.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 13, 2013)

firky said:


> I don't think LP would have a credit card - she's loaded and does not need to buy things on credit.
> 
> Plus she is um, like against erm.. that stuff, like banks and money, and erm... shit yeah, quick... roll a fag.


I bet she gets paid in Bitcoin....


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 13, 2013)

If there was any justice she'd be paid in fucking buttons.


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 13, 2013)

She should be paid by cheque then she could check her cheques etc...i'll get my coat.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Oh yeah, there is - but starting with inflammatory language about a small group who take enough shit as it is, and then hitting lots of nasty language that has been used against them, well - it's just dumbfounding.


 
it is.  it's quite a debate in radfem politics that goes back years and years and years.  i can appreciate both sides of it tbh.  i think everyone should stop trying to score points against other oppressed groups and stop trying to take over each others debates.


----------



## cesare (Jan 13, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> If there was any justice she'd be paid in fucking buttons.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 13, 2013)




----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 13, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> If there was any justice she'd be paid in fucking buttons.


 
Don't know what the button would have to say about that!


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> it is.  it's quite a debate in radfem politics that goes back years and years and years.  i can appreciate both sides of it tbh.  i think everyone should stop trying to score points against other oppressed groups and stop trying to take over each others debates.



Exactly...isn't that identity politics in a nutshell: only members of a particular group should speak on the issues affecting that group.

Which kinda raises an awkward problem or two for many of those who actively support identity/ intersectionality etc. Say for instance you'd been born into an affluent middle-class background, attended a public school, then Oxbridge; just what would be the natural constituency about which you were entitled to speak?


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Exactly...isn't that identity politics in a nutshell: only members of a particular group should speak on the issues affecting that group.
> 
> Which kinda raises an awkward problem or two for many of those who actively support identity/ intersectionality etc. Say for instance you'd been born into an affluent middle-class background, attended a public school, then Oxbridge; just what would be the natural constituency about which you were entitled to speak?




*clutches head*

Intersectionality isn't about that though, it's basically observing and charting relationships between different forms of oppression etc experienced simultaneously by individuals and attempting to resolve the inequality through either reducing the power of the labels of identity and discrete support lingustics provides differing oppressions. Or it's about categorising everything and creating a detailed understanding of how individual forms of oppression in racism/sexism/etc are expressed in society, and then working to reduce and remove them. Or it's a mix of the two.

 It's not a game where whoever's the most oppressed wins. It's an academic theory focusing on developing an understanding of the internal dynamics of individuals with differing background within a collective, and making allowances that your experience will be different from other who are not like you and being willing to listen, learn and be informed of when you have often inadvertantly said something which might offend someone, and to be able yo do the same to others.

It's, using phallocentric terms, "DON'T BE A DICK TO PEOPLE WHO ARE DIFFERENT TO YOU, RECOGNISE THEIR EXPERIENCES ARE VALID". Not top trumps. And the fact it comes down to that is typical of this idea that academic theories, whose precis gives people a nice fluffy inclusivity idea and promotes defining identities (in the categorically complex model), which hasn't been rigorously applied in academia, gets co-opted without doing the next bit, which is reading the contextual stuff.

*rips out hair*

This whole stupid argument's based around an entitled second wave feminist refusing to accept she'd offended someone, and then her friends supporting her in acting in a way which, if I had behaved like that to them, would have had me tarred and feathered and called all sorts. Because it's easier to write 'brazilian transexual' than 'pnuematic hypersexed feminine form', because it's easier to take the name of an academic theory and either claim it, or dismiss it, without actually recognising whether or not it can be applied appropriately, because people appear to believe that there's no middle ground between a Grazia column and Derrida.

*howls at the moon*

Its about inclusive debate, shared experience and sharing experience. The 'well you're x so you can't talk about y' thing is the antithesis of it. It should be, 'if you're x and you talk about y, be prepared for y to set you right on the things you don't know about, and don't get in a strop about it'. Yes there'll be anger, reacting to percieved intentional baiting is - but if you want to do intersectionality and talk outside of uour experiences, you've got to accept you'll get it wrong AND you'll get called on it. And then have a constructive dialogue about it. 

*runs into the woods*


----------



## cesare (Jan 13, 2013)

The commentariat tend toward the Grazia column binary though. Meeja innit.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/13/julie-birchill-bullying-trans-community

This.


----------



## cesare (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/13/julie-birchill-bullying-trans-community
> 
> This.


That's very good.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

Bit hyperbolic in places, but certainly much more cool headed consideration than Burchill.


----------



## cesare (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Bit hyperbolic in places, but certainly much more cool headed consideration than Burchill.


Yeah well, there's always going to be some hyperbole deployed to make a point. It happens on this thread too. But the piece wasn't dripping with it considering the provocation.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> *clutches head*
> 
> Intersectionality isn't about that though, it's basically observing and charting relationships between different forms of oppression etc experienced simultaneously by individuals and attempting to resolve the inequality through either reducing the power of the labels of identity and discrete support lingustics provides differing oppressions. Or it's about categorising everything and creating a detailed understanding of how individual forms of oppression in racism/sexism/etc are expressed in society, and then working to reduce and remove them. Or it's a mix of the two.
> 
> ...



Isn't that what I said though?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/13/julie-birchill-bullying-trans-community
> 
> This.


Glad someone from oxbridge has finally spoken out about it.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Isn't that what I said though?



Yeah, i'm still in the developer mode for my understanding.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 13, 2013)

Julie bindel and julie burchill have always been dodgy about this issue, as has suzanne moore iirc. Look at the whole radfem2012 conference debacle for example


there are some fucking cesspools out there once you get into the extreme end of "radical feminism" (how these people define it, i mean), they have basically turned feminism into nationalism. It's really scary.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Sort of, it's if they use it, like LP did to shut down discussion or like Moore did, to dismiss it entirely - then they're doing it wrong,



So if a writer decided to opine on behalf of a group of people oppressed by something which the writer hadn't experienced, like...say...being poor and having grown up poor, and someone who was skint picked them up on it, you're saying the writer should sit back and listen?...perhaps even welcome the insight? This is intersectionality?
So how does screaming misogynist fit in...or is that perhaps allowed if the writer's female and it's a man who tried to set her straight on a few points?...cos that's 'mansplaining' as I understand it?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 13, 2013)

No idea why such naked transphobia is tolerated in the guardian and why they keep getting column space. as smokedout says even the daily mail wouldn't print this shit.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> they have basically turned feminism into nationalism. It's really scary.



That's very well put.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 13, 2013)

It's true, have a look for "radfemhub" and similar sites where these peoples work is promoted if you can stomach it. Theres no other way to describe it. Horrible stuff.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Jan 13, 2013)

Tbh I think whoever approved Burchill's chucking-out-time rant must have had something against Moore. In theory it could have acted as a distraction, changing the focus from Moore to Burchill, but I don't think it's going to do that - it just aligns her with the Transphobic Bloc.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> So if a writer decided to opine on behalf of a group of people oppressed by something which the writer hadn't experienced, like...say...being poor and having grown up poor, and someone who was skint picked them up on it, you're saying the writer should sit back and listen?...perhaps even welcome the insight? This is intersectionality?
> So how does screaming misogynist fit in...or is that perhaps allowed if the writer's female and it's a man who tried to set her straight on a few points?...cos that's 'mansplaining' as I understand it?



I'm new to this, not setting up as anything other - they're good points. And yeah, they should. And mansplaining is explaining things differently to a woman than you would a man, or explaining feminist experiences to feminists - I think.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> I'm new to this, not setting up as anything other - they're good points. And yeah, they should. And mansplaining is explaining things differently to a woman than you would a man, or explaining feminist experiences to feminists - I think.


 
Mansplaining is a man telling a woman how she should be a feminist I think.


----------



## TheHoodedClaw (Jan 13, 2013)

This is a good open letter, I think. It's moving anyway. It's aimed at Suzanne Moore, but has wider resonance:

http://www.divamag.co.uk/category/comment/an-open-letter-to-suzanne-moore.aspx

NB: I have idea of Paris' educational background - approach with care


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Mansplaining is a man telling a woman how she should be a feminist I think.



Yes dear


----------



## TheHoodedClaw (Jan 13, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Tbh I think whoever approved Burchill's chucking-out-time rant must have had something against Moore. In theory it could have acted as a distraction, changing the focus from Moore to Burchill, but I don't think it's going to do that - it just aligns her with the Transphobic Bloc.


 
I thought Moore and Burchill hated each other anyway? Wasn't that what the whole "fuck-me shoes" thing was about years ago?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> I'm new to this, not setting up as anything other - they're good points. And yeah, they should. And mansplaining is explaining things differently to a woman than you would a man, or explaining feminist experiences to feminists - I think.



So if I want to make a point about feminism to a feminist, can't I simply preface my point with:"understand that the following is a man's perspective on feminism and, furthermore, a point that you can't authentically comment on because you're not a man" and then say whatever I want?
Or can't I do that because I'm in the 'oppressor class' in this instance?
What about a black guy...or a black gay guy?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Julie bindel and julie burchill have always been dodgy about this issue, as has suzanne moore iirc. Look at the whole radfem2012 conference debacle for example
> 
> 
> there are some fucking cesspools out there once you get into the extreme end of "radical feminism" (how these people define it, i mean), they have basically turned feminism into nationalism. It's really scary.


It is scary. And disgraceful. I'd never describe myself as a radical feminist purely because of people like this. They are going against everything feminism stands for with their divisive behaviour. Feminism is not about judging some women to be more equal than others, or saying that some women aren't 'real women', and it's most certainly not about hating men.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 13, 2013)

TheHoodedClaw said:


> I thought Moore and Burchill hated each other anyway? Wasn't that what the whole "fuck-me shoes" thing was about years ago?


AFAIK that was Moore v Greer.


----------



## TheHoodedClaw (Jan 13, 2013)

Greebo said:


> AFAIK that was Moore v Greer.


 
 of course. Damn my failing memory.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Mansplaining is a man telling a woman how she should be a feminist I think.


 
We need a splaining word for when stuck up oxbridge twats try and tell everyone else about oppression. Etonsplaining? Islingtonsplaining? Fireboxsplaining? PennyRedsplaining?


----------



## Greebo (Jan 13, 2013)

TheHoodedClaw said:


> of course. Damn my failing memory.


An understandable mistake, given that Greer accused Moore (with her fuck me shoes) of siding with lipstick lesbians like Julie Burchill, and Moore sniped back about Greer's bird's nest hair.

So nice that, while the battle was still to be even halfway won on the issue of women's unpaid work, feminists could find time to fight over appearance.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> So if I want to make a point about feminism to a feminist, can't I simply preface my point with:"understand that the following is a man's perspective on feminism and, furthermore, a point that you can't authentically comment on because you're not a man" and then say whatever I want?
> Or can't I do that because I'm in the 'oppressor class' in this instance?
> What about a black guy...or a black gay guy?



The whole 'say whatever I want' bit of it is what gets me. It's not about saying whatever you want, or just sticking a disclaimer or dismissing criticsm of offensive views - Moore did that, and Burchill.

You know that's not the right thing to do.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> We need a splaining word for when stuck up oxbridge twats try and tell everyone else about oppression. Etonsplaining? Islingtonsplaining? Fireboxsplaining? PennyRedsplaining?





SpineyNorman said:


> We need a splaining word for when stuck up oxbridge twats try and tell everyone else about oppression. Etonsplaining? Islingtonsplaining? Fireboxsplaining? PennyRedsplaining?



Nah...it's obvious...remember your privilege

Checksplaining


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

Oh, but essentially, intersectionality as an applied theory in real life is on bambi legs - there's not the weight of academic work or application for there to be too many solid answers. Which allows a lot of messing around.


----------



## TheHoodedClaw (Jan 13, 2013)

Greebo said:


> So nice that, while the battle was still to be even halfway won on the issue of women's unpaid work, feminists could find time to fight over appearance.


 
That's a good analogy for a lot of progressive politics.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 13, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> Typical Birchill.


Fantastic trolling though - firky would be proud

The Grauniad/Observer now need to troll as much as the Daily Mail do, in order to increase vital web-based ad revenues, given they are up the shitter financially.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 13, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> We need a splaining word for when stuck up oxbridge twats try and tell everyone else about oppression. Etonsplaining? Islingtonsplaining? Fireboxsplaining? PennyRedsplaining?


 

cuntsplaining


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 13, 2013)

The thing is though, this idea that people should just say what they want if they're part of an oppressed group, and be as aggressive as they want in doing so (please correct me if I'm getting that wrong) is just stupid and apolitical. It's clearly counterproductive - it's just going to alienate people who, were they treated with a bit of respect and were you to try and find common cause with - would probably be on your side.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 13, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> The thing is though, this idea that people should just say what they want if they're part of an oppressed group, and be as aggressive as they want in doing so (please correct me if I'm getting that wrong) is just stupid and apolitical. It's clearly counterproductive - it's just going to alienate people who, were they treated with a bit of respect and were you to try and find common cause with - would probably be on your side.


 
It also completely ignores the fact that people in "oppressed groups" can also be cunts, we are all the product of capitalist society and will have internalised some of the values and other social prejudices no matter how oppressed we are.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 13, 2013)

So when Laurie sent me that email where she said 'I think I know where you're going wrong with identity politics' - was that cuntsplaining or checksplaining? I'm confused


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> The whole 'say whatever I want' bit of it is what gets me. It's not about saying whatever you want, or just sticking a disclaimer or dismissing criticsm of offensive views - Moore did that, and Burchill.
> 
> You know that's not the right thing to do.



I'm not looking for a reason to say whatever I want in order to offend. I'm trying to see if the theory on which the whole thing rests could reasonably object to someone who did under its own terms. I don't think it can...not in the way I've seen it explained. Obviously, outright gratuitous abuse is inexcusable regardless...but I'm not even sure that minor group-specific objections fare any better...unless you resort to an expectation of basic courtesy.
If the whole thing's just being courteous then that's fine...courtesy always did involve knowing different things upset different people...why the new name...and theorising...and 'experts'?...who must be really nice people, now I think about it.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 13, 2013)

I think that the radfems are as bad as, if not worse than, misogynists. They make me really cross.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> It also completely ignores the fact that people in "oppressed groups" can also be cunts, we are all the product of capitalist society and will have internalised some of the values and social prejudices no matter how oppressed we are.


 
And that, when you go far enough down the rabbit hole, we're all in oppressed groups.

I'm an ugly ex-junkie and you're all cunts, especially the lasses


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> The thing is though, this idea that people should just say what they want if they're part of an oppressed group, and be as aggressive as they want in doing so (please correct me if I'm getting that wrong) is just stupid and apolitical. It's clearly counterproductive - it's just going to alienate people who, were they treated with a bit of respect and were you to try and find common cause with - would probably be on your side.



Which is my point. Don't be a dick in challenging, and don't be a dick in being challenged. But also, context is king. There's adifference between challenging a UKIP member and a new member of an activist group, between your friends and family and someone giving you grief in the street.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I'm not looking for a reason to say whatever I want in order to offend. I'm trying to see if the theory on which the whole thing rests could reasonably object to someone who did under its own terms. I don't think it can...not in the way I've seen it explained. Obviously, outright gratuitous abuse is inexcusable regardless...but I'm not even sure that minor group-specific objections fare any better...unless you resort to an expectation of basic courtesy.
> If the whole thing's just being courteous then that's fine...courtesy always did involve knowing different things upset different people...why the new name...and theorising...and 'experts'?...who must be really nice people, now I think about it.



It seems to be courtesy, understanding and support - including and considering more. And being willing to take a moment from your righteous dispensing of fire at a target, for someone to ask you to make a minor change to make the fire more inclusively aimed.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 13, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> So when Laurie sent me that email where she said 'I think I know where you're going wrong with identity politics' - was that cuntsplaining or checksplaining? I'm confused


Oxbridgesplaining


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 13, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> And that, when you go far enough down the rabbit hole, we're all in oppressed groups.
> 
> I'm an ugly ex-junkie and you're all cunts, especially the lasses


I love you too spiney


----------



## Greebo (Jan 13, 2013)

TheHoodedClaw said:


> That's a good analogy for a lot of progressive politics.


And don't I wish that it wasn't.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 13, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> We need a splaining word for when stuck up oxbridge twats try and tell everyone else about oppression.<snip>


Tossplaining


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 13, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Oxbridgesplaining


OXBRAINING


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 13, 2013)

Twittersplaining


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 13, 2013)

you'llgetfarmersfromtoomuchstraining


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 13, 2013)

Windinyournecksplaining


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 13, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Twittersplaining


Twattersplaining


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 13, 2013)

i think i might have to take back what I said earlier in the thread about Zoe Stavri possibly being more sensible than LP:



12 Jan​

*Another Angry Woman* ‏@*stavvers*
Just think. If Moore had just apologised for her initial comment, we could have all moved on with our lives.
 
*Expand*
 

Are people gonna spend the whole of 2013 moaning about this? Don't they realise they are being trolled to fuck by all and sundry? It's a good debate, but it's got to the point where journos are simply arguing with each other for ego/revenge points, and nothing changes in the real world.

Which is partly the point of this whole thread.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 13, 2013)

maybe I'll get poshsplained after saying that


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 13, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> And that, when you go far enough down the rabbit hole, we're all in oppressed groups.
> 
> I'm an ugly ex-junkie and you're all cunts, especially the lasses


 
Dead on mate and all those Feminazis are mingers anyway, except for the Brazilian trannies, they're hot, not that i'm a gaylord or anything and most of them are mixed race and stuff anyway, and not even real women! Fucking hell, it all gets so bloody complicated!


----------



## weepiper (Jan 13, 2013)

elitesplaining? advantisplained? headstartboughtbydaddysplaining?


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

Twitter is recommending me someone called @SmashKyriarchy

I daren't look


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 13, 2013)

firky said:


> Twitter is recommending me someone called @SmashKyriarchy
> 
> I daren't look


LOOK!!!! the monothought clique commands you.


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

Ah, they're American. They're forgiven.


----------



## rekil (Jan 13, 2013)

Abfabiansplaining


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 13, 2013)

firky said:


> Ah, they're American. They're forgiven.


Yanksplaining.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

Chamsplagning.


----------



## rekil (Jan 13, 2013)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
Re: Burchill, transmisogyny and bullshit. Don't worry, guys and girls, I'm on this. *rolls up sleeves*


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

> Nicholas Lezard ‏@Nicklezard
> Someone's taken the "leftwing" out of my (teeny-weeny-weeny) Wikipedia entry!


----------



## rekil (Jan 13, 2013)

make it stop


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

copliker said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Re: Burchill, transmisogyny and bullshit. Don't worry, guys and girls, I'm on this. *rolls up sleeves*


 
FUCK OFF.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 13, 2013)

copliker said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Re: Burchill, transmisogyny and bullshit. Don't worry, guys and girls, I'm on this. *rolls up sleeves*


Oh, goody.


----------



## TheHoodedClaw (Jan 13, 2013)

firky said:


> FUCK OFF.


 
You fancy her, you do


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

copliker said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Don't have any suicidal men to exploit or accusations of rape, so will use this, please retweat me.


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

TheHoodedClaw said:


> You fancy her, you do


 
I fancy hanging her and her kind from a tree.


----------



## elbows (Jan 13, 2013)

Having not looked at twitter during the time period in question, how am I now supposed to get a sense of what sorts of messages made Moore quit twitter anyway? Help!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 13, 2013)

copliker said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Re: Burchill, transmisogyny and bullshit. Don't worry, guys and girls, I'm on this. *rolls up sleeves*


 
She's going to hovelsplain them.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 13, 2013)

elbows said:


> Having not looked at twitter during the time period in question, how am I now supposed to get a sense of what sorts of messages made Moore quit twitter anyway? Help!


Storify is your friend in such circumstances for making a start on finding out what happened:

http://storify.com/leftytgirl/suzanne-moore-timeline-of-trans-misogynistic-twitt


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Windinyournecksplaining


 
You can fuck off too


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 13, 2013)

*Frankie Boyle*‏@*frankieboyle*
If anything, the emotional, irrational reaction of transsexuals to Suzanne Moore's article shows once and for all that they are real women.

Sexist bastard ffs!


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Storify is your friend in such circumstances for making a start on finding out what happened:
> 
> http://storify.com/leftytgirl/suzanne-moore-timeline-of-trans-misogynistic-twitt



Re-reading that's painful now - they weren't shutting down debate, it was two fucking words


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 13, 2013)

if everyone stopped wasting all their time arguing on Twitter, we could have nice things, like a revolution


----------



## BigTom (Jan 13, 2013)

firky said:


> Ah, they're American. They're forgiven.


 
She's not American, she's a 17 (or 18?) yr old from London and she's alright - involved with or around alarm and solfed.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 13, 2013)

I think firky might be getting mixed up with some anarchist prick in the States who Lusty likes to wind up.


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

BigTom said:


> She's not American, she's a 17 (or 18?) yr old from London and she's alright - involved with or around alarm and solfed.


 
She has Colarado as her location, I never looked in at her page only the pop up thing you get which tells you their name and location (twittercast app).


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> I think firky might be getting mixed up with some anarchist prick in the States who Lusty likes to wind up.


 
I think he was winding up militant muslims the other week


----------



## BigTom (Jan 13, 2013)

firky said:


> She has Colarado as her location, I never looked in at her page only the pop up thing you get which tells you their name and location (twittercast app).


 
Just looked and yeah she does but she definitely isn't - check the last few tweets and you'll see a reference to PE a-level.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 13, 2013)

firky said:


> I think he was winding up militant muslims the other week


 
'cuddly.'

That particular anarchist is an embarrassing shit, though.  A good example of why working class people won't touch that stuff with a barge pole.


----------



## elbows (Jan 13, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Storify is your friend in such circumstances for making a start on finding out what happened:
> 
> http://storify.com/leftytgirl/suzanne-moore-timeline-of-trans-misogynistic-twitt


 
Ta very much 

I'm tempted to conclude that far from being bullied off of twitter, she simply made a complete arse of defending herself and then melted.


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> 'cuddly.'
> 
> That particular anarchist is an embarrassing shit, though. A good example of why working class people won't touch that stuff with a barge pole.


 
Indeed. There's not much choice out there between them and the others, if Owen is the best of the bunch god fucking help us.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 13, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> 'cuddly.'
> 
> That particular anarchist is an embarrassing shit, though. A good example of why working class people won't touch that stuff with a barge pole.


 
Tip of the iceberg that one is. That group is well on the way into degenerating into a cult, don't pay them much heed. If guardian journo's want to click-bait them MailOnline style to generate some revenue let them, this lot will go head first into it without giving a second thought to how they're being used.

And "Cuddly" is a prick I once caught him tweeting about "the alleged perpertrators of 9/11" (Dog-whistle for _Mossad did 9/11_) and when I challenged him on it he deleted the tweet.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 13, 2013)

Not to slag all annakisseds mind,  but fuck me.  He likes to smash this, and smash that.  He'd be getting smashed in the mouth if he did that shit near some of my workmates.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 13, 2013)

firky said:


> I fancy hanging her and her kind from a tree.


Bit harsh.


----------



## Firky (Jan 13, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Not to slag all annakisseds mind, but fuck me. He likes to smash this, and smash that. He'd be getting smashed in the mouth if he did that shit near some of my workmates.


 
I suspect he's full of shit and is probably an Estate Agent or something.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 13, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Not to slag all annakisseds mind, but fuck me. He likes to smash this, and smash that. He'd be getting smashed in the mouth if he did that shit near some of my workmates.


 
Yeah well when I think of "Anarchist" the first thing that pops into my head is Jonny May-Bowles. Class War was a long, long time ago. Things have changed.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Julie bindel and julie burchill have always been dodgy about this issue, as has suzanne moore iirc. Look at the whole radfem2012 conference debacle for example
> 
> 
> there are some fucking cesspools out there once you get into the extreme end of "radical feminism" (how these people define it, i mean), they have basically turned feminism into nationalism. It's really scary.


 
I reckon Kenan Malik's spiel about "radical" being used where "fundamentalist" is more appropriate applies here.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 13, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I think that the radfems are as bad as, if not worse than, misogynists. They make me really cross.


 
And like misogynists do, they'll excuse their misandry.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 13, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> And like misogynists do, they'll excuse their misandry.


 
it isn't just men they hate, it's everyone who doesn't agree 100% with them. they seem to hate straight women and transsexuals more than they hate men.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> it isn't just men they hate, it's everyone who doesn't agree 100% with them. they seem to hate straight women and transsexuals more than they hate men.


 
I think that's totally unfair froggy.


----------



## Fedayn (Jan 13, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I think that's totally unfair froggy.


 
On who?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 13, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I think that's totally unfair froggy.


 
to be fair they really fucking do hate men tho.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

There's certainly examples of them being absolutely fucking atrocious to both groups - but that shouldn't characterise them all


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> it isn't just men they hate, it's everyone who doesn't agree 100% with them. they seem to hate straight women and transsexuals more than they hate men.


 
Which is why "fundamentalist" is a much better description of their outlook than "radical".


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 13, 2013)

BigTom said:


> She's not American, she's a 17 (or 18?) yr old from London and she's alright - involved with or around alarm and solfed.


 
Not sure that those groups are safe for unaccompanied people of that age.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 13, 2013)

they're only a minority of feminists, tbf


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 13, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I think that's totally unfair froggy.


 
You're only saying that because you don't 100% agree with her.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 13, 2013)

Fedayn said:


> On who?


 
the idea that radfems just hate everyone on some hierarchical basis. I wouldn't call myself a radfem at all but i know plenty of women who do and they don't all hate men. Or straight women or transexuals. Don't let the strident middle class Burchills and Bindels talk for all of them.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> You're only saying that because you don't 100% agree with her.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 13, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Bit harsh.


 
Knowing firky, he probably means "hanging" in some kind of sex-swing modelled on something he saw on a documentary about the Playboy Mansion.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Jan 13, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Don't let the strident middle class Burchills and Bindels talk for all of them.


They are pretty poor exemplars of human beings, let alone radical feminists.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 13, 2013)

weepiper said:


> the idea that radfems just hate everyone on some hierarchical basis. I wouldn't call myself a radfem at all but i know plenty of women who do and they don't all hate men. Or straight women or transexuals. Don't let the strident middle class Burchills and Bindels talk for all of them.


yeah sorry, i know that website doesn't speak for everyone who calls themselves a radical feminist. its a disgrace that these people are appropriating the language of feminism to their own purposes.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> they're only a minority of feminists, tbf


 
What is the majority made up of?


----------



## Fedayn (Jan 13, 2013)

weepiper said:


> the idea that radfems just hate everyone on some hierarchical basis. I wouldn't call myself a radfem at all but i know plenty of women who do and they don't all hate men. Or straight women or transexuals. Don't let the strident middle class Burchills and Bindels talk for all of them.


 
They're fucking nutjobs, as exemplified by those who toe the PinV line...


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 13, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> What is the majority made up of?


Really sensitive men.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 13, 2013)

weepiper said:


> the idea that radfems just hate everyone on some hierarchical basis. I wouldn't call myself a radfem at all but i know plenty of women who do and they don't all hate men. Or straight women or transexuals. Don't let the strident middle class Burchills and Bindels talk for all of them.


 
The humourous thing being that both Burchill and Bindel see themselves as utterly working-class, despite living in middle-class areas and being in professions.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> its a disgrace that these people are appropriating the language of feminism to their own purposes.


 
I can agree with that.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 13, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> What is the majority made up of?


 
women who are simply concerned about equality of the sexes and so on i'd imagine, feminism is a pretty wide ranging thing and these people are only in a minority.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 13, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Really sensitive men.


 
Yep. They have to use factor 50, apparently.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

I've got a radfem mate who won't countenance trans women in her feminist action groups and believes it's about sex, the specialness of women in childbearing and such. It starts and stops at Dworkin.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 13, 2013)

Balbi said:


> I've got a radfem mate who won't countenance trans women in her feminist action groups and believes it's about sex, the specialness of women in childbearing and such. It starts and stops at Dworkin.


 
yeah this is the kind of thing i mean, that, and the PinvV mentalness, i dont mean every radical feminist, because obviously radical feminism means lots of different things depending on who it is ...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yeah sorry, i know that website doesn't speak for everyone who calls themselves a radical feminist. its a disgrace that these people are appropriating the language of feminism to their own purposes.


 
That's always the way, though. You find a rhetoric that suits the promotion of your message, and you use it, whether or not it's accurate. In this case those appropriating the language are feminist, but don't make clear that they're not *representive* of feminism as a whole.

And why would they make that clear? As a "fringe", the trans-loathing feminists don't want to represent themselves as a fringe, they want people to get the impression that they represent a current in modern feminism, not a piss-dribble down the leg of modern feminism.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> women who are simply concerned about equality of the sexes and so on i'd imagine, feminism is a pretty wide ranging thing and these people are only in a minority.


 
what about women who don't see themselves as feminists but who are concerned about equality of the sexes?  I know quite a few  like who don't want anything to do with what they see as feminism.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 13, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I can agree with that.


 
yeah sorry i didn't mean to imply that everyone believes this type of stuff, sorry if my post came across that way.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 13, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> what about women who don't see themselves as feminists but who are concerned about equality of the sexes? I know quite a few like who don't want anything to do with what they see as feminism.


 
i think a lot of that will be due to the damage done by stuff like this ...


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

A corruption of that Jeff Daniels' line in newsroom.



> They may call themselves radical feminists, but radical feminists shouldn't.


 
They're reactionary, surely, if they're just sticking to their version of feminism?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 13, 2013)

It's 'radical feminism' because it _gets to the root_.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 13, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> It's 'radical feminism' because it _gets to the root_.


 
It's not really anything i recognise as feminism tho. they refer to themselves as radical feminists tho ...


----------



## Balbi (Jan 13, 2013)

Get your fucking knife away from my root


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 14, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> And like misogynists do, they'll excuse their misandry.


 
Their misandry is, however, entirely justified because...


----------



## audiotech (Jan 14, 2013)

My ex was a radfem, as were most of her friends at the time. They all shared a house in a women's co-op. I was invited round for tea.  That was a tester for a sole man I can tell you! Mary Wollestonecraft, Dworkin, Shiela Rowbotham, Egyptian feminists et al. I read widely on the subject. A number of co-op members, who defined themselves as lesbians, had men on the side. I kid you not. Did I read somewhere that _Beyond the Fragments_ is being republished?


----------



## BigTom (Jan 14, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Not sure that those groups are safe for unaccompanied people of that age.



Well i only know stuff from twitter but afaik people from those groups supported her through a period of homelessness last year into housing and back to college.
I'd hope that there are enough responsible and thoughtful adults amongst them to ensure that she is safe, and from afar they look to have taken their responsibilities towards an unaccompanied teenager seriously.
She's not the only 16-18 yr old radicalised by ema & tuition fee stuff, there's four or five of that age i know from twitter/demos in London, who are all friends, who seem to be around alarm and solfed. Not sure why but i feel like that makes a difference too.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

audiotech said:
			
		

> My ex was a radfem, as were most of her friends at the time. They all shared a house in a women's co-op. I was invited round for tea.  That was a tester for a sole man I can tell you! Mary Wollestonecraft, Dworkin, Shiela Rowbotham, Egyptian feminists et al. I read widely on the subject. A number of co-op members, who defined themselves as lesbians, had men on the side. I kid you not. Did I read somewhere that Beyond the Fragments is being republished?



You've never actually read it have you?


----------



## audiotech (Jan 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> You've never actually read it have you?


 
Many years ago now.

_Spare Rib_ monthly too.

Edit: Interesting article from _Feminist Review _(1980)_. The Long and Winding Roads (Reflections on Beyond the Fragments)._


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

audiotech said:


> Many years ago now.
> 
> _Spare Rib_ monthly too.
> 
> Edit: Interesting article from _Feminist Review _(1980)_. The Long and Winding Roads (Reflections on Beyond the Fragments)._


Have you read it?


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 14, 2013)

audiotech said:


> My ex was a radfem, as were most of her friends at the time. They all shared a house in a women's co-op. I was invited round for tea.  That was a tester for a sole man I can tell you! Mary Wollestonecraft, Dworkin, Shiela Rowbotham, Egyptian feminists et al. I read widely on the subject. A number of co-op members, who defined themselves as lesbians, had men on the side. I kid you not. Did I read somewhere that _Beyond the Fragments_ is being republished?


 
That's all they will have wanted; some smart arse bloke reading up on feminism so that he can make out he is enlightened


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 14, 2013)

I just questioned someone who in response to this bit of an article by Stella Duffy



> I find the term "intersectionality" to be both classist and educationalist - or rather, not the term itself but the way the (Suzanne Moore) Twitter fight had people using it as if everyone knew what they meant. Working-class me, non-academic me, often finds those terms daunting


...


> that tone of debate, especially when it gets very academic, not only shuts me out, but also makes me feel badly-educated, incapable of engaging, and stupid


 
said it "does that horrible thing "wahhh understanding other people's struggles is too hard for me because WORKING CLASS".

I said I reckon the article doesn't say that, and it's a valid point about inaccessible language, then some other person patronised me, and told me I'd be first against the wall  and then blocked me.

Rather proved the article's point I think.

http://stelladuffy.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/headparapet/


----------



## weepiper (Jan 14, 2013)

S☼I said:


> I just questioned someone who in response to this bit of an article by Stella Duffy
> 
> 
> ...
> ...


 
oh ffs. I was reading that article the other day and thinking 'yep... yep... yep' as I read it.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 14, 2013)

Moore responds in the comments on that piece



> "Thank you Stella and thank you for the great discussion here. I was rude and angry and not at all polite. I had been told amongst other things I should be decapitated, have a dank odour and worse that I support the EDL???
> Words are my job. Trans language and the binary language of Cis etc I reject. I question this kind of dogma. In my real life remember that? Guess what I likes some trans people and not others ? Just like all people.
> A lot of the attack on me is that I should have been more polite . Sorry but thats where I won’t back down. Polite to people who wish me dead but have not bothered to read what I wrote. No I am not lady like in this way. I am human and the abuse got to me. If you want to engage with “powerful journalists” dont expect them never to have any feelings?
> I have great fun on twitter and thats also part of the problem. My flip humour does not work for the literal minded and thats life I guess.
> ...


 
all of them, me, me fucking me on and on and on


----------



## Balbi (Jan 14, 2013)

It's almost as if she knows she's made a mistake, but is prevaricating around the subject and bringing in consequences of her own actions as excuses for her actions. Essentially, it's a childs apology.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 14, 2013)

Yeah, she should at least have had the grace by now to say sorry I fucked up, but now of course it's far too late for it to sound sincere. And as far as I saw it happen, she started kicking off the minute someone challenged about the "Brazilian Transsexuals" thing, rather than saying "Alright, I'll take that on board".

Fucking hell, I'm sounding like I'm into privilege checking or some shit


----------



## cesare (Jan 14, 2013)

It's not privilege checking to observe that someone's been stupid and hasn't got the grace to put it right.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 14, 2013)

Not so much privilege as just 'don't be a twat'


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 14, 2013)

cesare said:


> It's not privilege checking to observe that someone's been stupid and hasn't got the grace to put it right.


 
Yeah, this is how I feel about all this kind of stuff. You don't need to be told to check yr privilege - cos that comes with a whole set of assumptions. Just don't be a twat to people. Same thing. Why the scoldy language? I can't think of anyone I know that if told to check their privilege wouldn't be either confused (and then you have to have "don't be a twat to people" put in someone else's language, not yours, and on their terms) or just burst out laughing at the pretentiousness of it.

ETA Great minds etc, Balbi.


----------



## cesare (Jan 14, 2013)

The Queeriodical comment on the Stella Duffy piece was useful.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 14, 2013)

It's a tiny error turned into a mountain of self-righteousness on both sides, Julie Burchill being the most glaring example


----------



## cesare (Jan 14, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Yeah, this is how I feel about all this kind of stuff. You don't need to be told to check yr privilege - cos that comes with a whole set of assumptions. Just don't be a twat to people. Same thing. Why the scoldy language? I can't think of anyone I know that if told to check their privilege wouldn't be either confused (and then you have to have "don't be a twat to people" put in someone else's language, not yours, and on their terms) or just burst out laughing at the pretentiousness of it.
> 
> ETA Great minds etc, Balbi.



I think the useful part of privilege checking is reminding yourself to check your own, not telling other people to do it.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 14, 2013)

cesare said:


> The Queeriodical comment on the Stella Duffy piece was useful.


 
Ta, I'll find that later then. 3 yr old now pestering me for her "computer time"


----------



## fractionMan (Jan 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It's a tiny error turned into a mountain of self-righteousness on both sides, Julie Burchill being the most glaring example


 
some grey bloke ftw


----------



## cesare (Jan 14, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Ta, I'll find that later then. 3 yr old now pestering me for her "computer time"


You just need to scroll down through the comments! Once the lass has her go on the pooter


----------



## audiotech (Jan 14, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> That's all they will have wanted; some smart arse bloke reading up on feminism so that he can make out he is enlightened


 
I dropped in the the word patriarchy a few times.


----------



## audiotech (Jan 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Have you read it?


 
I know what you're saying, but I'm waiting for solicitors (shit happens) to call and I've a course to attend for the first time today, so you'll have to excuse me.

Edit: Bollocks! A blanket of snow is forming up here.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I think that the radfems are as bad as, if not worse than, misogynists. They make me really cross.


 
they're really not that bad.  i know a load of them and they're definitely on the side of good.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> they're really not that bad. i know a load of them and they're definitely on the side of good.


the road to hell is paved with good intentions


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 14, 2013)

audiotech said:


> Edit: Bollocks! A blanket of snow is forming up here.


a blanket? do you mean it is snowing?


----------



## Balbi (Jan 14, 2013)

cesare said:


> I think the useful part of privilege checking is reminding yourself to check your own, not telling other people to do it.


 
It's standpoint stuff - if you know your own identity, it'll allow you to be less of an idiot when interacting with people with different experiences. If you want to be though.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> it isn't just men they hate, it's everyone who doesn't agree 100% with them. they seem to hate straight women and transsexuals more than they hate men.


 
this is definitely not true.  though i disagree with their stance on transsexuals, i understand the theory behind it.  they are ok with straight women, though disappointed that their views are not more widely appreciated!  but that applies to pretty much every interest group!


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> this is definitely not true. though i disagree with their stance on transsexuals, i understand the theory behind it. they are ok with straight women, though disappointed that their views are not more widely appreciated! but that applies to pretty much every interest group!


so now they're just an interest group.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Don't let the strident middle class Burchills and Bindels talk for all of them.


 
Julie Bindel isn't middle class.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yeah sorry, i know that website doesn't speak for everyone who calls themselves a radical feminist. its a disgrace that these people are appropriating the language of feminism to their own purposes.


 
so you're telling them what being a feminist is now? 

their purpose is complete and total social and cultural female equality.  you may disagree with their methods or theory but they most definitely are feminists.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> so you're telling them what being a feminist is now?
> 
> their purpose is complete and total social and cultural female equality. you may disagree with their methods or theory but they most definitely are feminists.


 
What about the ones who talk about the "PinV" stuff?


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 14, 2013)

Remarkably outside of the commeentariat gold fish bowl there is a much better Twitter row around Joey Barton


> *Joseph Barton* @Joey7Barton 22h
> @Tim_Burgess have you ever thought why the ethnic demographic has,over a prolonged period of time, done so well in the UK? Prepared to graft


----------



## Balbi (Jan 14, 2013)

Some of them, like in all groups, are absolutely batshit though


----------



## weepiper (Jan 14, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Remarkably outside of the commeentariat gold fish bowl there is a much better Twitter row around Joey Barton


Been following that. Criticising benefits claimants from the position of earning £70k a week.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> It's 'radical feminism' because it _gets to the root_.


 
it's radical because it is not _liberal_.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 14, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Been following that. Criticising benefits claimants from the position of earning £70k a week.


 
I await the 'but Barton's been nicked for street violence, and done time, he's oppressed working class' comment.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 14, 2013)

Balbi said:


> I await the 'but Barton's been nicked for street violence, and done time, he's oppressed working class' comment.


He's an attention-seeking fud.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> the road to hell is paved with good intentions


 
*shrug*


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> so now they're just an interest group.


 
in the same way that any movement is.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> it's radical because it is not _liberal_.


 
To use your analysis: why are you trying to tell radicals what radical means.

Being a passive supporter of the Labour Party is radical, dammit.

http://lead4women.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/302/

"I absolutely agree that Ed has been the most pro-feminist leader the party has ever had (I am a lifelong supporter of Labour by the way)"


----------



## sihhi (Jan 14, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Remarkably outside of the commeentariat gold fish bowl there is a much better Twitter row around Joey Barton


 
Hardly a row, more like one arrogant rich footballer no one else likes.




> Joseph Barton ‏@Joey7Barton
> My 'farmfoods' tweet offended lots o people. That delights me. Whilst I'm at it, claiming benefits isn't a life choice. Get a job...
> 
> 12 Jan Joseph Barton ‏@Joey7Barton
> Great this twitter, its lets people whose mums work in farmfoods whilst claiming benefits, have a pop at successful folk like me? Brilliant.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> in the same way that any movement is.


utterly pointless for you to say it then


----------



## cesare (Jan 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> What about the ones who talk about the "PinV" stuff?



That's just short for Penis In Vagina isn't it? Is there something else going on?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 14, 2013)

cesare said:


> That's just short for Penis In Vagina isn't it? Is there something else going on?


 
yeah it is but if you look on some of these blogs there is some mental stuff about it.


----------



## cesare (Jan 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yeah it is but if you look on some of these blogs there is some mental stuff about it.


What sort of mental stuff?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 14, 2013)

cesare said:


> What sort of mental stuff?


 
stuff about how piv stops people caring about women's equality because they "love orgasms" too much, that sort of thing


----------



## Balbi (Jan 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> in the same way that any movement is.


 
True, every movement has its kooks, and they can get pretty nasty - the anti-gender radfems material I have read is just awful distortions of their various percieved enemies. Which can be boiled down to anything with a cock or who had one in some cases. Not all, but some.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> stuff about how piv stops people caring about women's equality because they "love orgasms" too much, that sort of thing


 
Orgasms are the opiate of the stealing the duvet afterwards masses.


----------



## cesare (Jan 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> stuff about how piv stops people caring about women's equality because they "love orgasms" too much, that sort of thing


Just sounds a bit silly


----------



## audiotech (Jan 14, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> a blanket? do you mean it is snowing?


 
Yes, and laying. For example: I'm now going to have to remove the blanket of snow covering the car for the second time today.

The solicitors haven't rung yet either.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 14, 2013)

cesare said:


> Just sounds a bit silly


 
yeah i know, i don't think it's representative of the majority of feminists


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 14, 2013)

cesare said:


> That's just short for Penis In Vagina isn't it? Is there something else going on?


 
Careful there may be minors on here


----------



## cesare (Jan 14, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Careful there may be minors on here


Getting their birds and bees ed from the internet


----------



## cesare (Jan 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yeah i know, i don't think it's representative of the majority of feminists


I'd be very surprised if it was


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 14, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Careful there may be minors on here


or miners or mynahs


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 14, 2013)

cesare said:


> Just sounds a bit silly


 
I am old enough to remeber a period when if as a male you were at a lefty party you had a dilemna that if you started dancing with a woman with fem earings that you might be accused of taking their space and then if you erred on the side of caution they would tell you that you didn't show any interest in them. I used to spend most of the time in the kitchen.


----------



## cesare (Jan 14, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> I am old enough to remeber a period when if as a male you were at a lefty party you had a dilemna that if you started dancing with a woman with fem earings that you might be accused of taking their space and then if you erred on the side of caution they would tell you that you didn't show any interest in them. I used to spend most of the time in the kitchen.


Sounds like the sort of party I would have swerved


----------



## cesare (Jan 14, 2013)




----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> What about the ones who talk about the "PinV" stuff?


 
I dunno because I don't know what that is.  Sorry.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> To use your analysis: why are you trying to tell radicals what radical means.
> 
> Being a passive supporter of the Labour Party is radical, dammit.
> 
> ...


 
whoever said it was consistent?


----------



## sihhi (Jan 14, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> I am old enough to remeber a period when if as a male you were at a lefty party you had a dilemna that if you started dancing with a woman with fem earings that you might be accused of taking their space and then _if you erred on the side of caution they would tell you that you didn't show any interest in them_. I used to spend most of the time in the kitchen.


 
How Did this happen? In what way? It's not my era so more light would be helpful,

today on the 1980s feminism, opinions tend towards two extremes either
a. describing it as a separatist diversion:- womens' groups frequently attacking cross-gender leftist groups of not caring about womens' issues but then attacking them for discussing women's problems; exceedingly strict (no male boys over 12) policies in the squatted womens' refuges from domestic violence/collectives.
b. saying the negative picture 1980s feminism is wholly a subsequent exaggeration trying hard and picking out single bad examples to tar the whole lot.

There's so much myth and counter-myth it's hard to tell the wood from the trees.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

the way i look at it is that feminism needs to both marxist and radical (by which i mean, not liberal).  if you miss out on either of those strands you're not getting it right.  of course, that leads me open to charges of telling feminists what feminism is.  but such is life.  you can't avoid stepping on egos in the pursuit of being pure in theory and practise being correct winning arguments on the internet.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> How Did this happen? In what way? It's not my era so more light would be helpful,
> 
> today on the 1980s feminism, opinions tend towards two extremes either
> a. describing it as a separatist diversion:- womens' groups frequently attacking cross-gender leftist groups of not caring about womens' issues but then attacking them for discussing women's problems; exceedingly strict (no male boys over 12) policies in the squatted womens' refuges from domestic violence/collectives.
> ...


 
I am a big advocate of the subsequent exageration approach.

Seriously I will give this some thought and get back later , obviously it will be a mixed picture and sometimes you remember the bad times more than the good.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2013/01/20130122t1830vSZT.aspx

*Women, Protest and the Nature of Female Rebellion*

*Ralph Miliband Programme: movement, protest and social change*

_Date:_ Tuesday 22 January 2013 
_Time:_ 6.30-8pm 
_Venue:_ Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
_Speaker:_ Laurie Penny
Taking in Pussy Riot and the 2011 uprisings, and stretching back to the Paris Commune, a contextual look at how the rage and pride of women is personal, political – and endlessly powerful.
Laurie Penny is a journalist, blogger and author. She is currently a columnist and reporter for _The Independent_.



I thought she got a p45 from the indie?


----------



## Balbi (Jan 14, 2013)

London-centric fuckers


----------



## weepiper (Jan 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2013/01/20130122t1830vSZT.aspx
> 
> *Women, Protest and the Nature of Female Rebellion*
> 
> ...


 
 Ugh. Hate it. Hate this being spoken for by people who know nothing of our lives pish.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> stuff about how piv stops people caring about women's equality because they "love orgasms" too much, that sort of thing


isn't pivo the czech for beer?


----------



## 8ball (Jan 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> stuff about how piv stops people caring about women's equality because they "love orgasms" too much, that sort of thing


 
So this is a case of radical feminists annexing the 'women, they love it up 'em' line it it? :confusing:


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> Julie Bindel isn't middle class.


 
Depends how you define class, doesn't it?


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 14, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> isn't pivo the czech for beer?


 
Yep. Plural. Tri piv prosim vas.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 14, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Depends how you define class, doesn't it?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2013/01/20130122t1830vSZT.aspx
> 
> *Women, Protest and the Nature of Female Rebellion*
> 
> ...


 
I'm sure Dave has done that speech before!


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 14, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> isn't pivo the czech for beer?


Yep - it is also the serbo-croat for beer: Dva pivo molim


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 14, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I'm sure Dave has done that speech before!


It's an excellent opportunity to create a speech based around all her personal anecdotes...


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 14, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> It's an excellent opportunity to create a speech based around all her personal anecdotes...


 
Actually that would be brilliant. Like a greatest hits. Singing the Internationale, that time she crashed the ash, the deux ex machina incident with Ryan Gosling, how David Starkey dropkicked her off a stage otherwise filled with people chanting "Lau-RIE, Lau-RIE", How Everyone Is a Racist Especially Those Nasty Anti-Racists, and how she single-handedly saved a suicidal man's life by concentrating really, really hard on a copy of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book personally signed by the Dean of her old college.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Depends how you define class, doesn't it?


 
i suppose so.  her background is certainly working class.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i suppose so. her background is certainly working class.


 
While her current status is firmly middle.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

How are "public lectures" helping 'to advance his [miliband] spirit of free social inquiry'? Two years ago, Saif Gaddafi gave a Miliband Programme lecture - in fact David Held turned the Programme into a bit of a corrupt prop to all sorts of dodgy people and ideas. Great tradition to be following in.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2013/01/20130122t1830vSZT.aspx
> 
> *Women, Protest and the Nature of Female Rebellion*
> 
> ...


Another example of how the more remote something is the more liberals like it. No mention there of eg women in the six counties or women in the miners strike.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

Here's the man the lecture venue is named after:



> Behind the crackdown are primarily Bahraini troops but also the Peninsula Shield Force, a joint military cooperation force between the Gulf States. This includes the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that have deployed police officers and soldiers to gun down civilian protesters. The army of the UAE was established by the late Sheikh Zayed, and if that doesn't ring a bell them here we go: Sheikh Zayed was dictator of the UAE until his death in 2004. Apart from sponsoring holocaust-denying conferences and permitting the gross exploitation of workers (particularly from India and Pakistan) who are used as slave-like labour, he also illegalised homosexuality.


----------



## articul8 (Jan 14, 2013)

Ralph will be spinning - like when they got Saif Gaddafi to give the Miliband lecture. (edit - already referred to up thread)


----------



## rekil (Jan 14, 2013)

_Cmbbe Zayed checking his privilege yesterday._


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 14, 2013)

He's got a lot to check


----------



## rekil (Jan 14, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> He's got a lot to check


According to the intersectionality wheel, apart from being dead, he's probably still less privileged than everybody here. Makes you think.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

I take it there must be some _benefits_ to performing in a room named after someone who made homosexuality illegal?


----------



## rekil (Jan 14, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> Another example of how the more remote something is the more liberals like it. No mention there of eg women in the six counties or women in the miners strike.


She hasn't logged in for a week but she's probably lurking, so you never know, she might pinch a few ideas from here to take the bare look off what will be one hell of a shit talk. Come on lauriepenny, do some bullshitting about Cumann Na mBan or chilean schoolgels.


----------



## rekil (Jan 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I take it there must be some _benefits_ to performing in a room named after someone who made homosexuality illegal?


A nice cup of tea.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> While her current status is firmly middle.


 
true.  i don't doubt her commitment to working class women.  working class men i don't think she's so keen on, except as a proxy by which to annoy middle class men.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I take it there must be some _benefits_ to performing in a room named after someone who made homosexuality illegal?


 
the pay?


----------



## love detective (Jan 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> true. i don't doubt her commitment to working class women. working class men i don't think she's so keen on, except as a proxy by which to annoy middle class men.


 
what evidence have we seen to support her commitment to working class women? (whatever commitment to them actually means)


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> the pay?


Well, there's gadaffi and Sheikh Zayed money floating around - someone has to get it.


----------



## articul8 (Jan 14, 2013)

contextual analysis of the Paris Commune?  OK <hopes for the best, fears the worst>


----------



## cesare (Jan 14, 2013)

"Rage and pride"


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

articul8 said:


> contextual analysis of the Paris Commune? OK <hopes for the best, fears the worst>


wtf do you think the best could possibly look like?


----------



## rekil (Jan 14, 2013)

cesare said:


> "Rage and pride"


And tea! *giggles


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

_"Rage and pride" in the Horst house._


----------



## cesare (Jan 14, 2013)

Rage and pride and nice things


----------



## articul8 (Jan 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> wtf do you think the best could possibly look like?


In LPs case?  Probably that she'd at least read something credible on the period and wasn't trying to wing it.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

articul8 said:


> In LPs case? Probably that she'd at least read something credible on the period and wasn't trying to wing it.


Not much distance between best and worst in that case. There is no best in this case though.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

Here's one for you to do LP, if you want to _shura_ up your reputation. Filipino women slaved in the UAE -  indian, pakistani, bengali  -they do the lot, your hosts. How about a talk on their _endless power._


----------



## TruXta (Jan 14, 2013)

Apropos of nothing, but Sheikh Zayed is still revered in the UAE as the Father of the Nation. His face and name is everywhere.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

For getting rid of the queers?


----------



## TruXta (Jan 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> For getting rid of the queers?


That too I guess. But in reality more for leading the former Trucial States into a new federation and taking it from the middle ages to the modern era economically (not socially or politically) in about 40 years.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

he won a Champions Of The Earth award in 2005.  "Earth, Air, Fire, Water, _OIL!_"


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

Missed out the STEEL


----------



## TruXta (Jan 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> he won a Champions Of The Earth award in 2005. "Earth, Air, Fire, Water, _OIL!_"


Sheikh Zayed? He died in 2004


----------



## rekil (Jan 14, 2013)

TruXta said:


> That too I guess. But in reality more for leading the former Trucial States into a new federation and taking it from the middle ages to the modern era economically (not socially or politically) in about 40 years.


Slavery, indentured labour and prostitution ftw.


----------



## rekil (Jan 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Missed out the STEEL


*Mark Steel* ‏@*mrmarksteel*
Excellent article by @*PennyRed* on the appalling business at the SWP http://goo.gl/I5tbC  Shall we try and create something a bit less shite?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

copliker said:


> Slavery, indentured labour and prostitution ftw.


Let's take it to the the lecture theatre!


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

copliker said:


> *Mark Steel* ‏@*mrmarksteel*
> Excellent article by @*PennyRed* on the appalling business at the SWP http://goo.gl/I5tbC Shall we try and create something a bit less shite?


He failed to grasp the new perspective years ago. Not part of the IS tradition, despite 20 years membership. Political education.


----------



## TruXta (Jan 14, 2013)

copliker said:


> Slavery, indentured labour and prostitution ftw.


Yep, all structured within aggressive and criminally charged capitalism.


----------



## rekil (Jan 14, 2013)

All back to Bragg's to create something a bit less shite.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

copliker said:


> All back to Bragg's to create something a bit less shite.


Bagsy the RAF duvet!


----------



## ska invita (Jan 14, 2013)

interesting take ive not heard before on why the SWP is the way it is:


> *Paid full-time leaders of “Leninist” groups stay in power for many years and decades; they accumulate huge gaps in their resumes and professional development that make returning to the labor market almost impossible; therefore, they have a very personal stake in maintaining their paychecks and livelihoods which are derived from their office.*
> 
> So they institute closed slate systems to make their removal all but impossible; they expel dissidents; they prevent horizontal communication and discussion between branches of the organization; they appoint reliable yes-men and yes-women to positions of power over the membership; and they accuse anyone who objects to any of this of being anti-Leninist and opposed to democratic centralism, as if these practices remotely resemble those of Lenin or the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party!
> http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=4691


----------



## rekil (Jan 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Bagsy the RAF duvet!


*Billy Bragg* ‏@*billybragg*
Brewing up with Pennyred pic.twitter.com/TwaTSx


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

uh


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 14, 2013)

ska invita said:


> interesting take ive not heard before on why the SWP is the way it is:


 
When I said much the same on here several years ago about the SWP CC caring more about keeping the racket going and glibly conning the membership than about revolution, I got scolded for being a "conspiracy theorist".


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 14, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Sheikh Zayed? He died in 2004


 
fucking wikipedia fucks.


----------



## audiotech (Jan 14, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> I am old enough to remeber a period when if as a male you were at a lefty party you had a dilemna that if you started dancing with a woman with fem earings.....


 
I see femjewellery has moved on since those heady days.....


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 14, 2013)

ska invita said:


> interesting take ive not heard before on why the SWP is the way it is:


 
Interesting as in crackers?


----------



## Firky (Jan 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> he won a Champions Of The Earth award in 2005.  "Earth, Air, Fire, Water, _OIL!_"



Posthumous or a typo?


----------



## ska invita (Jan 14, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Interesting as in crackers?


do they not have a very personal stake in maintaining their paychecks and livelihoods which are derived from their office?


----------



## Random (Jan 14, 2013)

TruXta said:


> That too I guess. But in reality more for leading the former Trucial States into a new federation and taking it from the middle ages to the modern era economically (not socially or politically) in about 40 years.


IIRC Zaid was handed the leadership of Abu Dhabi by the local British representative, who deposed Zaid's brother c1966 for being unwilling to turn AD into a petrostate.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 14, 2013)

firky said:


> You can fuck off too



Ooh...fuck me...an angry face. Better not mess with you.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 14, 2013)

Been thinking about this whole business of privilege/intersectionality and how it creates divisions between groups and people who should be showing solidarity in a common cause. Not sure it's altogether a bad thing tbh because there are quite a few of them I don't want to be solid with...and it's quite convenient that they should reject me first on spurious pseudo-academic grounds than I should have to say: "actually, no thanks...I think you're a total fraudulent posturing twat."


----------



## Firky (Jan 14, 2013)

copliker said:


> *Billy Bragg* ‏@*billybragg*
> Brewing up with Pennyred pic.twitter.com/TwaTSx


 
That link doesn't work here.


----------



## love detective (Jan 14, 2013)

twat


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 14, 2013)

audiotech said:


> I see femjewellery has moved on since those heady days.....


I wish my Marxist Feminist Dialectic brought all the boys to the yard


----------



## rosecore (Jan 14, 2013)

She's being interviewed for Radio Dispatch about the Burchill incident. I think they will post it online tomorrow.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 14, 2013)

http://www.leftfootforward.org/2013/01/comment-on-feminism-and-the-suzanne-moore-controversy/

Can't decide what I think of this. One of its themes seems to be a wish for accessible, non academic, non specialised language...but it contains the likes of this..."This just needlessly problematises solidarity and divides those who are fighting the good fight against societal injustice into blocks of oppressed and non-oppressed. The protest space is necessarily subjective, sure, but it is also a space for fighting the greater good in union."

I liked this bit though..."Inherent to dismissing Moran and Suzanne Moore as un-feminist is snobbery, followed by a desire to academicise the real lives of women living in an unequal society, and to maintain the differentiation between oppressed and non-oppressed via the vehicle of narcissistic guilt."

But even this is just a bit bollocks. Ultimately, judging Moore and Moran by the standards adopted by the self-appointed intersectionality constabulary is a category error. They write in broad strokes in a matter of fact, humorous manner. Subjecting them to the kind of scrutiny applied by the self-righteous pedlars of 'cutting-edge' feminism is just silly.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 14, 2013)

rosecore said:


> She's being interviewed for Radio Dispatch about the Burchill incident. I think they will post it online tomorrow.



I might try wacking up the bass...see if she makes more sense when she sounds like she's over 14.


----------



## love detective (Jan 14, 2013)

don't touch that dial


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 14, 2013)

touch that dial even if you can't touch that dial


----------



## love detective (Jan 14, 2013)

even if you don't have a dial, please don't touch it


----------



## rekil (Jan 14, 2013)

firky said:


> That link doesn't work here.


It's from the future. That's a little bit détournement or something.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 14, 2013)

ska invita said:


> do they not have a very personal stake in maintaining their paychecks and livelihoods which are derived from their office?


 
Done any research into their turn over and where they go?


----------



## youngian (Jan 14, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> you started dancing with a woman with fem earings that you might be accused of taking their space and then if you erred on the side of caution they would tell you that you didn't show any interest in them.


 
Are you Larry David?


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 14, 2013)

youngian said:


> Are you Larry David?


 
Is he funny?


----------



## youngian (Jan 14, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Is he funny?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 14, 2013)

I can imagine finding that funny.


----------



## ymu (Jan 15, 2013)

The Observer has withdrawn the Burchill clickbait: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jan/14/observer-withdraws-julie-burchill-column


----------



## Balbi (Jan 15, 2013)

http://www.penny-red.com/post/40595682748/on-feminism-transphobia-and-free-speech


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 15, 2013)

And not a mention of her doing a talk at a venue paid for and named after a dictator who outlawed homosexuality. That shit don't matter - this twitter shit is.


----------



## love detective (Jan 15, 2013)

Balbi said:


> http://www.penny-red.com/post/40595682748/on-feminism-transphobia-and-free-speech


 



			
				laurie penny said:
			
		

> It comes down to essentialism, and essentialism, as Suzanne Moore rightly pointed out in a recent Guardian column, is always conservative


 
she's bang on about this, but does she realise that the identity politics that she unconditionally cheerleads are firmly grounded in essentialism, and are therefore conservative and reactionary


----------



## weepiper (Jan 15, 2013)

> What precise form the disruption is supposed to take has not been explained, partly because it has never happened, ever


 
It's happening right now in glorious technicolour, because everyone's attention is firmly on this row instead of the reasonable points Suzanne Moore was trying to make in the original article, which have been _completely fucking eclipsed_ because she made a bad choice of analogy and instead of holding her hands up and apologising for that, she backed herself into a corner and started biting anyone who approached. Shitstorm ensues. I see the Guardian has taken that Burchill piece down but left up the disgraceful abuser apologist article about paedophilia from the other week.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> It's happening right now in glorious technicolour, because everyone's attention is firmly on this row instead of the reasonable points Suzanne Moore was trying to make in the original article, which have been _completely fucking eclipsed_ because she made a bad choice of analogy and instead of holding her hands up and apologising for that, she backed herself into a corner and started biting anyone who approached. Shitstorm ensues. I see the Guardian has taken that Burchill piece down but left up the disgraceful abuser apologist article about paedophilia from the other week.


What was that one?


----------



## weepiper (Jan 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What was that one?


 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/03/paedophilia-bringing-dark-desires-light


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/03/paedophilia-bringing-dark-desires-light


Ta!
I see the mob trope to the fore.



> "There are a lot of people," she says, "who say: we outlawed homosexuality, and we were wrong. Perhaps we're wrong about paedophilia."


 
No there ain't.


----------



## articul8 (Jan 15, 2013)

I don't think either article should be taken down.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> I don't think either article should be taken down.


 
I don't think either article should have been published.


----------



## articul8 (Jan 15, 2013)

I think, though obviously and consciously dealing with highly problematic stuff, the one on paedophilia is a worthwhile piece (although there are aspects of the views expressed that I'd be extremely uncomfortable with).  Burchill is just being an offensive rent-a-gobshite.  Which is why they pay her?


----------



## weepiper (Jan 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> I think, though obviously and consciously dealing with highly problematic stuff, the one on paedophilia is a worthwhile piece (although there are aspects of the views expressed that I'd be extremely uncomfortable with). Burchill is just being an offensive rent-a-gobshite. Which is why they pay her?


 
this explains some of my problems with it

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/t...s-massive-error-of-judgment-over-paedophilia/


----------



## ymu (Jan 15, 2013)

The guy that wrote the paedophilia piece is surprised people have taken it as endorsing the practice. He was commissioned to review what was known, that's all. He says in hindsight he'd have included a disclaimer saying that he didn't endorse certain views but hadn't thought it would be necessary.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 15, 2013)

Looks to me like he only 'reviewed' one side of the 'debate'.


----------



## articul8 (Jan 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> this explains some of my problems with it
> http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/t...s-massive-error-of-judgment-over-paedophilia/


 
You see, some of those critics just want a total prohibition on all thought or consideration of the topic.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 15, 2013)

It's just massively irresponsible at the moment when there's so many cases of entrenched institutional abuses coming out.


----------



## killer b (Jan 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Looks to me like he only 'reviewed' one side of the 'debate'.


quite. the opening paragraph makes no mention of the actual authors of the submission (except via the link which many people wouldn't bother to click) - which would completely change a reader's view of the statement...


----------



## articul8 (Jan 15, 2013)

I would've thought it is entirely appropriate to try to understand better the nature of what those instances might have in common, and how it relates (or doesn't) to normal adult sexuality


----------



## weepiper (Jan 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> I would've thought it is entirely appropriate to try to understand better the nature of what those instances might have in common, and how it relates (or doesn't) to normal adult sexuality


 
*shrug*

I see it the same way I see Laurie Penny taking EDL Tommy out for a steak. Publishing the results teaches us nothing useful


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> I would've thought it is entirely appropriate to try to understand better the nature of what those instances might have in common, and how it relates (or doesn't) to normal adult sexuality


Is that what you think the article does?


----------



## articul8 (Jan 15, 2013)

killer b said:


> quite. the opening paragraph makes no mention of the actual authors of the submission (except via the link which many people wouldn't bother to click) - which would completely change a reader's view of the statement...


No, that's very true - I didn't know an organised group of pro-paedophiles was affiliated to Liberty's forerunner!  (was Harriet Harman working for them at the time )


----------



## 8ball (Jan 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Looks to me like he only 'reviewed' one side of the 'debate'.


 
What's the other side of the 'debate'?

Should he have burned down a podiatrist's office for the sake of balance?


----------



## articul8 (Jan 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Is that what you think the article does?


Not as such, no.  But I thought it raised some interesting if uncomfortable questions about the subject - eg. problematising the relation between desire and sexual abuse


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> No, that's very true - I didn't know an organised group of pro-paedophiles was affiliated to Liberty's forerunner! (was Harriet Harman working for them at the time )


Hewitt was gen sec at the time - Harman came after but i believe the same basic position was maintained.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jan 15, 2013)

8ball said:


> What's the other side of the 'debate'?
> 
> Should he have burned down a podiatrist's office for the sake of balance?


 
What an ignorant post.

Louis MacNeice


----------



## killer b (Jan 15, 2013)

that wiki article on PIE is quite an eye opener. the 1970s were a different world.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 15, 2013)

8ball said:


> What's the other side of the 'debate'?
> 
> Should he have burned down a podiatrist's office for the sake of balance?


Well, _he_ said that debate rages, then gave one side of the debate - that paedophilia isn't necessarily harmful etc. If there was another side to what he called the 'debate' (that it is necessarily damaging etc) then i didn't get to see it in his review. Maybe i missed it? Did you see it?

You should be ashamed of that last line btw.


----------



## 8ball (Jan 15, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> What an ignorant post.


 
Yes, trying to understand anything starts from a position of ignorance.


----------



## articul8 (Jan 15, 2013)

killer b said:


> that wiki article on PIE is quite an eye opener. the 1970s were a different world.


Charles Napier, the former chairman of PIE is the half-brother of John Whittingdale, the Tory MP and chair of the media select committee


----------



## 8ball (Jan 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Well, _he_ said that debate rages, then gave one side of the debate - that paedophilia isn't necessarily harmful etc. If there was another side to what he called the 'debate' (that it is necessarily damaging etc) then i didn't get to see it in his review. Maybe i missed it? Did you see it?


 
He does say there is no general consensus on this.  I take it you mean there are important studies he has glossed over.  Do you feel this is some kind of advocacy piece?



butchersapron said:


> You should be ashamed of that last line btw.


 
That was more a reference to the Telegraph claptrap.  Feeling the content is unbalanced is a valid concern, and something that should be brought up in response to this, but saying you have no argument against the content but that the tone is insifficiently florid sums up a lot about what I hate about that paper.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jan 15, 2013)

8ball said:


> Yes, trying to understand anything starts from a position of ignorance.


 
Who is torching the podiatrist and why?

Louis MacNeice


----------



## sihhi (Jan 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Ta!
> I see the mob trope to the fore.
> 
> 
> ...


 




> If the complexity and divergence of professional opinion may have helped create today's panic around paedophilia, a media obsession with the subject has done more: a sustained hue and cry exemplified by the News of the World's notorious "name and shame" campaign in 2000, which brought *mobs on to the streets* to demonstrate against the presence of shadowy monsters in their midst.


 
Reminds me of the comment pieces at the time. Was this ever 'apologised' for?

WHY I AM SO SCARED OF PAULSGROVE WOMAN: THERE ON TV WERE THE MUMS (NO DADS), SHOULDERS TATTOOED, FACES STUDDED. NEVER HAS THE SOCIAL DIVIDE SEEMED SO WIDE
That's Britain for you. Across the channel they got the French Revolution, liberte, egalite, fraternite (and a bit of head-chopping), and all we got were the Gordon Riots and mobs stoning Catholics. So when working-class women and their children take to Portsmouth's streets, it isn't in support of the NHS, or to demand better nurseries, but out of a desire to hang, burn or castrate some of their neighbours. This depressing failure of the proletariat to perform their historical task is slightly reminiscent of those days in 1968, when dockers and meat-porters marched - not for socialism or against the Vietnam war - but in support of Enoch Powell.
Watching Paulsgrove Woman at work over the last few days has re-emphasised for me how scared I am of a certain part of our society - as terrified, certainly, as ever the Victorian bourgeoisie were of the poor of Seven Dials. There on TV were the mums (no dads), faces studded, shoulders tattooed, too-small pink singlets worn over shell-suit bottoms, pallid faces under peroxided hair telling tales of a diet of hamburgers, cigarettes and pesticides.
And they'd taught their three-year-old kids (on whose behalf all this was supposedly being done) to chant slogans about hanging and killing. Paulsgrove Woman, I felt, was of an alien race to me. No wonder the BBC employed anthropologists with cut-glass accents to interpret these people for the sake of bemused viewers. Never has the social divide seemed so wide. And they were having fun. The glee with which two young women hurled telephonic abuse at a supposed offender put me in mind of the smiling faces you see in lynching photographs from the Old South. It's an evil pleasure, this - especially when there's very little interest in guaranteeing that the next victim is actually guilty of the (very general) offence with which they are charged. The sentiment exposed by one mother of three (where was her husband?) said it all. "I'd like to see 'em all castrated," she told the camera, "And I don't mean chemically." In other words, the enjoyment to be had from the offender's suffering was every bit as important as the objective of preventing reoffending. If not more. I was reminded of the scene in Zola's Germinal when the capitalist's genitals were ripped off by the mob.
Nevertheless the Paulsgrove phenomenon is interesting, if only because it involves one of the least listened to and inarticulate sections of society. I hear the atavistic hatred in the shrill voices, but I hear other things as well. Many of these women have cause to feel dumped on. Almost all paedophiles are men; a significant number of the women are single mothers, some of whom have been mistreated or abandoned by men. They're used to feeling like the bottom of the social heap. Yet here are blokes living among them whom even they can despise, and on behalf of the one thing that does belong to them: their children. A telling comment from one interview was that drug-dealing had now become part of the scenery in Paulsgrove, but that paedophilia never would be; they may have failed in every other way to protect their families, but not in this.
If the women of Paulsgrove have lumped together the guilty with the innocent, they have only behaved in the same way as, and using similar language to, that of the popular chat-shows and newspaper columnists. This is not a discriminating age, interested in the tedious adumbration of fact. And for one brief moment - emphasised by their involvement yesterday in "negotiations" - they have been empowered, even if only to smash windows, terrify neighbours and alarm the police. They have also, whether they know it or not, been shown an unusual degree of leniency by the law. Those leading the campaign, which has involved car-burnings, assaults and threats to the local MP, should, if possible, be prosecuted and punished. Pour decourager les autres, as they don't say in Paulsgrove.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Reminds me of the comment pieces at the time. Was this ever 'apologised' for?
> 
> WHY I AM SO SCARED OF PAULSGROVE WOMAN: THERE ON TV WERE THE MUMS (NO DADS), SHOULDERS TATTOOED, FACES STUDDED. NEVER HAS THE SOCIAL DIVIDE SEEMED SO WIDE
> That's Britain for you. Across the channel they got the French Revolution, liberte, egalite, fraternite (and a bit of head-chopping), and all we got were the Gordon Riots and mobs stoning Catholics. So when working-class women and their children take to Portsmouth's streets, it isn't in support of the NHS, or to demand better nurseries, but out of a desire to hang, burn or castrate some of their neighbours. This depressing failure of the proletariat to perform their historical task is slightly reminiscent of those days in 1968, when dockers and meat-porters marched - not for socialism or against the Vietnam war - but in support of Enoch Powell.
> ...


 
Jesus, who wrote that?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 15, 2013)

That's an appalling article.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 15, 2013)

Aaronovitch.


----------



## killer b (Jan 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Jesus, who wrote that?


aaronovich.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 15, 2013)

8ball said:


> He does say there is no general consensus on this. I take it you mean there are important studies he has glossed over. Do you feel this is some kind of advocacy piece?


Look this is quite simple - ymu said that the author had defended himself from criticisms (presumably criticisms that it was an advocacy piece) by pointing out that it was simply a review piece, a review of the debates and positions from those professionally and academically concerned with the issue. Fine, _i have no problem with that whatsoever_, i merely pointed out that he appeared to only review one side of what he termed the debate, that his review is partial at best. You cannot do an adequate review of what you yourself term a debate by only reviewing the work of one side of that debate. I now have no idea - _after reading his review piece_ if there is body of opinion that argues the opposite to those he talked to.

A different point: any discussion in the article that moves away from the specialists, any discussion of the people this effects and what they think and feel is framed in terms of mobs, in terms of ignorance and an attitude of _leave it to us_ - which is precisely what lead to what happened in portsmouth and somerset a few years back.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Jan 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Jesus, who wrote that?


David Aaronovitch in the Indie.


----------



## the button (Jan 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Jesus, who wrote that?


David Aaronovich, in The Independent.

Edit: FM got in there first, because he simply couldn't be arsed to type the word "Independent."


----------



## TruXta (Jan 15, 2013)

Has anyone said Aaronovich yet?


----------



## weepiper (Jan 15, 2013)

I HEARD YOU


----------



## the button (Jan 15, 2013)

Hmmm. Sounds like David Aaronovich to me.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 15, 2013)

the button said:


> David Aaronovich, in The Independent.
> 
> Edit: FM got in there first, because he simply couldn't be arsed to type the word "Independent."


 
I got there first, I think you'll find.  I couldn't be arsed even typing Indie.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Jan 15, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> I got there first, I think you'll find.  I couldn't be arsed even typing Indie.


Or quoting


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 15, 2013)

Lusty was using that piece to wind up 'Davey' on twatter a few weeks back.


----------



## the button (Jan 15, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Or quoting


Broken Britain.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 15, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Lusty was using that piece to wind up 'Davey' on twatter a few weeks back.


 
it's amazing. Five paragraphs of that hoiking-up noise you make to work up a good mouthful as you gob on someone.


----------



## 8ball (Jan 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Look this is quite simple - ymu said that the author had defended himself from criticisms (presumably criticisms that it was an advocacy piece) by pointing out that it was simply a review piece, a review of the debates and positions from those professionally and academically concerned with the issue. Fine, _i have no problem with that whatsoever_, i merely pointed out that he appeared to only review one side of what he termed the debate, that his review is partial at best. You cannot do an adequate review of what you yourself term a debate by only reviewing the work of one side of that debate. I now have no idea - _after reading _his review piece if there is body of opinion that argues the opposite to those he talked to.
> 
> A different point: any discussion in the article that moves away from the specialists, any discussion of the people this effects and what they think and feel is framed in terms of mobs, in terms of ignorance and an attitude of _leave it to us_ - which is precisely what lead to what happened in portsmouth and somerset a few years back.


 
I'm not sure which 'side' is which on this - the Telegraph article was more concerned with tone than content (implying their ides of the 'other side' of the debate was the side that abandons reason), but if the content is ropey (which it may well be), then isn't that the point of starting a debate, so it can be carried forward.

I thought the way a lot of people feel about abuse of this kind generally (if this is what you mean by the 'other side' was summed up quite succintly in this bit...

" Mccartan uses O'Carroll's book Paedophilia: the Radical Case in his teaching as "it shows how sex offenders justify themselves". Findlater says the notion that a seven-year-old can make an informed choice for consensual sex with an adult is "just preposterous. It is adults exploiting children." Goode says simply: "Children are not developmentally ready for adult sexuality," adding that it is "intrusive behaviour that violates the child's emerging self-identity" and can be similar in long-term impact to adults experiencing domestic violence or torture."

But I agree that in terms of space covered in the article there is more given to talk about the lack of research and consensus, and there's a good bit of anecdotal and speculative stuff.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> it's amazing. Five paragraphs of that hoiking-up noise you make to work up a good mouthful as you gob on someone.


 
Vile.  Not the women of Paulsgrove.


----------



## 8ball (Jan 15, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> David Aaronovitch in the Indie.


 
I think I've only seen him talk bollocks on the telly - is this par for the course for him?


----------



## sihhi (Jan 15, 2013)

Yes and the newspaper did not apologise, the commenter did not apologise and it furthered in a very real way Blair's New Deal, the 'respect agenda', class-skewed parenting orders (but not jobs or money) for families:

A FULL WALLET DOESN'T MEAN YOU HAVE A SOFT HEAD




> For some reason two beggars, Bill and Ben, have taken up residence on my high street. We've always had Big Issue sellers, but these two aren't doing anything. Nor are they alcoholics, as far as I can tell. They have all their limbs and they don't shout or mutter, or execute spectacular slumps on to the roadway. Bill is 30-ish and plump, with a blond pigtail, and Ben is in his early twenties, with his hair in short dreadlocks and his face set in a pleasant smile. And all morning long they sit in their allotted doorways and matter-of-factly request change or- if they spot a smoker- cigarettes. It's almost as though they were stallholders, selling the exercising of charitable impulses to passers-by. I rather resent them. The least one of them could do, if they really want my cash, is to contract some disfiguring illness. And, without going all Jack Straw about it, I can't see what they're doing there. Unemployment in the area is pretty low, and there are cards in lots of the shop windows looking for labour.
> It could be that each of them is indeed suffering from some hidden affliction which forces them to beg, but my strong feeling is that they ought to be working. So if I've got any money to spare, then Bill and Ben are not getting it. Far better to give it to the Barnardos people, who - in their green tabards - have been laying mass siege to this area during the last three weeks. Bill and Ben would go mad over Gordon Brown. Yesterday the Chancellor strolled happily down the sunlit high street of the British economy, openly celebrating the achievement of the golden scenario: low inflation plus steady growth. As he did so, every school, hospital, local authority, public sector trade union leader and spending minister mentally declared this autumn to be one long flag day for their own good cause.
> ...
> As it happens, the Chancellor's speech coincides with one of those cyclical debates that we have in Britain about poverty. Film crews and investigative journalists are jamming into the sink estates and failing schools of the nation, and sending us back terrible reports about how the excluded are getting on. Three weeks ago, for example, the BBC screened The Eyes of a Child, which took a series of terrible cases of deprivation, and then made the claim that "these children speak for five million others". The implication of the film was that some kind of massive redistribution was required, to bring those currently below the poverty line above it.
> ...


 


again and again:


BLAME THE RESIDENTS OF SIGHTHILL, NOT THEIR VICTIMS

Every now and again, almost like Victorians hunting the source of the Nile, we rediscover a part of our own country. Not on purpose, of course, but by highly publicised accident. These days it isn't an encounter between Dr Livingstone and Mr Stanley which focuses our attention on savage lands, but the murder of a Nigerian boy here, or a Kurdish immigrant there. Teams of reporters and politicians make tracks for the local vicars, no- good boyos and inspectors of police. What we have discovered, surely, is that asylum-seekers are not the problem. Sighthill is not a dump because of asylum-seekers and Burnley is not poor because of Pakistanis. Glasgow City Council may be wise to appoint a mediator to assist in reducing tensions in Sighthill, but the mediation that is needed is not between Scots and foreigners, but between the hopeless and the rest of us.

Sometimes when I write something like the above, a letter or an e-mail will arrive asking me whether, as an affluent journalist, I would be so bloody happy to have 1,200 asylum-seekers arrive in my area? This is always a misconceived question, because, first, the residents of Camden include far more asylum-seekers than that; and, second, it does nothing to challenge my real prejudices. I would far rather have 1,200 asylum-seekers than 1,200 residents of Sighthill. I could happily imagine a population exchange in which we swapped half a million Afghans, Kurds, Turks, Palestinians etc for every BNP voter, sending them off to the land of the Taliban. We would get all those women desperate for education, and they would get the violent, boastful boys and _shell-suit hippos of Paulsgrove and Oldham, with their total resistance to the idea of being schooled._


This continued behaviour is at least as ugly as Burchill, several degrees worse than Suzanne Moore whose article included a throwaway stereotype (admittedly an unhelpful sexualised one) only about the _body shape_ (not behaviour or habits) of a certain group of transsexuals, yet there's never been an apology or retraction.

The last sentence pretty clearly states women in Paulsgrove, Portsmouth are hippos (metaphor for fat - unable to control their diets- and lazy), BNP voters and resist all forms of education.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 15, 2013)

what a cunt.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 15, 2013)

See also the sainted bell in the guardian at the same time:


----------



## ymu (Jan 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Look this is quite simple - ymu said that the author had defended himself from criticisms (presumably criticisms that it was an advocacy piece) by pointing out that it was simply a review piece, a review of the debates and positions from those professionally and academically concerned with the issue. Fine, _i have no problem with that whatsoever_, i merely pointed out that he appeared to only review one side of what he termed the debate, that his review is partial at best. You cannot do an adequate review of what you yourself term a debate by only reviewing the work of one side of that debate. I now have no idea - _after reading his review piece_ if there is body of opinion that argues the opposite to those he talked to.
> 
> A different point: any discussion in the article that moves away from the specialists, any discussion of the people this effects and what they think and feel is framed in terms of mobs, in terms of ignorance and an attitude of _leave it to us_ - which is precisely what lead to what happened in portsmouth and somerset a few years back.


I think it was more poorly written than anything else. Like a cut'n'paste job without much linking argument. I think it did explore the issue from a variety of angles though and some stuff, eg Circles UK, is important and certainly at the forefront of thinking on how to deal with it.

It was poorly written though, for sure.


----------



## articul8 (Jan 15, 2013)

> _heir total resistance to the idea of being schooled._



ie. their incomprehensible failure to cough up school fees for a decent boarding school


----------



## weepiper (Jan 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> ie. their incomprehensible failure to cough up school fees for a decent boarding school


 
or their having figured out earlier than the rest of us that their life opportunities will be shite whether or not they go to school and learn to be good little employees


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 15, 2013)

aaronovitch has given me the mid afternoon rage.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> See also the sainted bell in the guardian at the same time:


 
I have a folder of pre-2003 stuff which I hunted to find Lezard stuff, it has a lot on the incidents and how the Guardian screwed up at the time.

The Guardian's article:




> 'Child abuser speaks out over mob fury: Vigilantes are driving offenders underground, warns Portsmouth paedophile on run for his life'
> 
> Children yesterday among the boarded-up doorways and paint slogans of the Paulsgrove estate, Portsmouth, where Victor Burnett used to live Photograph: Sean Smith
> 
> ...


 

The News of the World article (probably embellished but with the essential truth that the Guardian did not point out) in response to the Guardian's interview, interviewing instead a mother from Paulsgrove:



> "Burnett told our boys he moved down from London when his marriage broke up and that he missed his kids. Now we know the truth I've been physically sick with thoughts of what he could have done." Former taxi driver Burnett, 55, who this week spoke out against our campaign in The Guardian, has spent 14 years in jail for sex offences. But when he moved to Paulsgrove local parents were kept in the dark about his past, leaving him free to forge new friendships with youngsters. Carole said: "After it came out he was a paedophile, one of my sons told me Burnett put on porn movie in front of them and showed them a sex toy. He told my eldest he was getting pictures of children from a friend and asked if he wanted some."


 
I remember searching at the time and not finding a single proper interview with a Paulsgrove resident in the Guardian until Dave Hill returned there to do an 'update' piece in 2001.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 15, 2013)

firky said:


> Posthumous or a typo?


 
wikipedia.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 15, 2013)

aaronovitch


----------



## TruXta (Jan 15, 2013)

Urinovitch.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 15, 2013)

I believe the phrase 'whey faced harridans' made its first appearance on here during that time


----------



## Balbi (Jan 15, 2013)

Ah, halogen days.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 15, 2013)

Life seemed so much simpler back then. The working class were low-brow scum and nice liberal commentators said so. These days you just don't know where you stand. Obviously, you're still scum...but in so many different multi-layered, interconnecting ways. In fact, you're scum piled on scum bubbling on top of a cauldron of steaming scum. Such are the joys of intersectionality combined with the new-style hyper-condescension wrought by self righteous adolescents who've gone straight from public schools, via Oxbridge to major media platforms.


----------



## Favelado (Jan 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Reminds me of the comment pieces at the time. Was this ever 'apologised' for?
> 
> WHY I AM SO SCARED OF PAULSGROVE WOMAN: THERE ON TV WERE THE MUMS (NO DADS), SHOULDERS TATTOOED, FACES STUDDED. NEVER HAS THE SOCIAL DIVIDE SEEMED SO WIDE
> That's Britain for you. Across the channel they got the French Revolution, liberte, egalite, fraternite (and a bit of head-chopping), and all we got were the Gordon Riots and mobs stoning Catholics. So when working-class women and their children take to Portsmouth's streets, it isn't in support of the NHS, or to demand better nurseries, but out of a desire to hang, burn or castrate some of their neighbours. This depressing failure of the proletariat to perform their historical task is slightly reminiscent of those days in 1968, when dockers and meat-porters marched - not for socialism or against the Vietnam war - but in support of Enoch Powell.
> ...


 
Disgusting.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 15, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Disgusting.


 
I still don't get - 12 years on - the pesticides remark.

Is it that women on council estates eat fruit with high pesticide content because organic is too expensive?
Or is it that they are so lazy and depressed they often engage in suicide attempts with pesticide?
Or some reference to drugs I don't understand?

There on TV were the mums (no dads), faces studded, shoulders tattooed, too-small pink singlets worn over shell-suit bottoms, pallid faces under peroxided hair telling tales of a diet of hamburgers, cigarettes and_ pesticides_.


----------



## Favelado (Jan 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I still don't get - 12 years on - the pesticides remark.
> 
> Is it that women on council estates eat fruit with high pesticide content because organic is too expensive?


 
I think it's this.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 15, 2013)

Favelado said:


> I think it's this.


 
Yes, but that would suggest the women were eating _massive_ amounts of non-organic fresh fruit and veg (the highest in pesticide content), and that would go against "a diet of hamburgers" since hamburgers don't contain pesticides - they might contain other chemicals but no pesticides.


----------



## love detective (Jan 15, 2013)

you shouldn't expect bigotry to be rational sihhi


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 15, 2013)

shit like that makes you realise that the indy/graun/fabian set essentially view the w/c as some tameable but alien force. Like they overdosed on Matty Arnold and came out the other side


----------



## weepiper (Jan 15, 2013)

They don't get a veg  box delivered. The horror!


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> They don't get a veg box delivered. The horror!


Have you seen the price of veg boxes? There's no tatties in them due to the tattie crop shortage this year!

Colleague at work gets one every week.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 15, 2013)

love detective said:


> you shouldn't expect bigotry to be rational sihhi


 
Aaronovitch is against bigotry in all its forms. This was in 2002 when he was discussed as a replacement for the daily Radio 2 discussion and comment show (Jeremy Vine, fee-paying Epsom College along with his brother, got the job).





			
				Aaronovitch said:
			
		

> This is a clear difficulty for me - an _*opinionated columnist with a view about everything*_. As one newspaper put it: "Would the BBC let someone broadly aligned with Blairism be a key interviewer during elections and the euro referendum?" However, *I never found that impartiality proved to be a problem when I worked at the BBC before.* No one has no views. What you can sometimes get, when reading listeners' comments, is a slight generational difference.
> 
> Then there is the current prejudice that writers may not broadcast, nor broadcasters write. At least, not well. Sometimes this is true, but more often this is professional jealousy. On radio, at any rate, I think I am a decent broadcaster with an acceptable voice. And - on my day - I can be better than good. So when Matthew Bannister, the former BBC head of radio, writes in The Times that Young's "successor (has) the formidable challenge of replacing a true broadcasting institution", I feel I can do this. Not by ditching the Young format, but by evolving it.
> 
> ...


 
Note that his opinions weren't a problem at all in the BBC when he did work there in the 1990s.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I still don't get - 12 years on - the pesticides remark.
> 
> Is it that women on council estates eat fruit with high pesticide content because organic is too expensive?
> Or is it that they are so lazy and depressed they often engage in suicide attempts with pesticide?
> ...



I think it's the organic thing, plus "hamburgers" has the dual purpose of demonstrating a reliance on fast food which offends against the more authentic and wholesome "sitting down to a family meal" and middle-class revulsion at American culture. I think 'cigarettes' speaks for itself while the tattoo-piercing-tawdry clothing-pallid complexion has an age old pedigree dating at least to the time some urbane roman consul stood on Hadrian's wall and wrote a scathing epistle to his good friend Biggus Dickus describing the depravities of the painted barbarian hordes. This piece exemplifies a condescending bourgeois trope which has been with us since the dawn of time.


----------



## rekil (Jan 15, 2013)

Not exactly in a position to sneer at anyone's appearance is he?



_Oxbridge opinionmonger man - 80's hair, wheezing unshaven faces pocked with booze broken capillaries, transmogrifying Manningchins, teenager clobber, zip busting bulging guts and manbags brimming with screeds and twattery. _


----------



## Blagsta (Jan 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> I would've thought it is entirely appropriate to try to understand better the nature of what those instances might have in common, and how it relates (or doesn't) to normal adult sexuality


 
Problem is, that article doesn't look at the research which shows the massive damage caused by child sexual abuse.  The depression, psychosis, personality disorder, substance misuse, self harm, suicide etc.


----------



## Blagsta (Jan 15, 2013)

8ball said:


> *He does say there is no general consensus on this.* I take it you mean there are important studies he has glossed over. Do you feel this is some kind of advocacy piece?
> 
> 
> 
> That was more a reference to the Telegraph claptrap. Feeling the content is unbalanced is a valid concern, and something that should be brought up in response to this, but saying you have no argument against the content but that the tone is insifficiently florid sums up a lot about what I hate about that paper.


There is a consensus.


----------



## fractionMan (Jan 15, 2013)

Graham speaks on the subject


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I still don't get - 12 years on - the pesticides remark.
> 
> Is it that women on council estates eat fruit with high pesticide content because organic is too expensive?
> Or is it that they are so lazy and depressed they often engage in suicide attempts with pesticide?
> ...


 
Does he not mean cheap (possibly market-bought) perfume/deodorant? That's what I reckon anyway.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 15, 2013)

somegreybloke ftw


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 15, 2013)

copliker said:


> Not exactly in a position to sneer at anyone's appearance is he?
> 
> View attachment 27541
> 
> _Oxbridge opinionmonger man - 80's hair, wheezing unshaven faces pocked with booze broken capillaries, transmogrifying Manningchins, teenager clobber, zip busting bulging guts and manbags brimming with screeds and twattery. _


Oh yes, he's a complete picture of health. What a judgemental arsehole.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 16, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Oh yes, he's a complete picture of health. What a judgemental arsehole.


 
Isn't it just - I'd never be so tasteless as to wish cancer or AIDS or somesuch on someone, but given those afflictions happen to people every day then surely it'd be a mercy if a worthless piece of crap like Aaronovitch was struck down in the place of a decent person. Shitehill FTW.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 16, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> Isn't it just - I'd never be so tasteless as to wish cancer or AIDS or somesuch on someone, but given those afflictions happen to people every day then surely it'd be a mercy if a worthless piece of crap like Aaronovitch was struck down in the place of a decent person. Shitehill FTW.


What makes these 'commentators' think they can pass judgements on people like this? It's not journalism - there's no story or news - and it's incredibly crass at best. So what if people live on Sighthill (probably less now the flats next to the railway have gone). 

I'd rather have people from Sighthill next door rather than Aaronvitch any day. Wanker that he is.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 16, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> What makes these 'commentators' think they can pass judgements on people like this? It's not journalism - there's no story or news - and it's incredibly crass at best. So what if people live on Sighthill (probably less now the flats next to the railway have gone).
> 
> I'd rather have people from Sighthill next door rather than Aaronvitch any day. Wanker that he is.


 
So would I. And he slagged off Oldham - Doubtless without ever having set foot in the town. As you say , it's not journalism, it's just some trumpet who's made me as angry as he's made you - I'd love to put him on the spot and ask him how he can write off whole communities - You never get the chance though. Check out the link below though, it'll make you laugh if nowt else.

www.gairspace.org.uk/media/thoreau.swf

Aaronovitch clumsily fitted the toy soldiers that fell out of his botty in a state of near asphyxiation with miners lamps in a doomed attempt to pass them off as potholers who'd innocently taken a wrong turn and been overcome by methane. We know the truth though, Aaronovitch, we _saw_ you. Dirty bastard. Allegedly.


----------



## Riklet (Jan 16, 2013)

i know commenting on her personal habbits has been at times extremely tasteless in this thread, but fellow cmmdes n cmbbes will see that a recent blog reveals an upgrade from the humble roll-up to the tailor made.

slowly but surely the deceit is dragged into the light, where the shadows of privilege  are laid bare.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 16, 2013)

Riklet said:


> i know commenting on her personal habbits has been at times extremely tasteless in this thread, but fellow cmmdes n cmbbes will see that a recent blog reveals an upgrade from the humble roll-up to the tailor made.
> 
> slowly but surely the deceit is dragged into the light, where the shadows of privilege are laid bare.


 
PFWC smoke sterling superkings anyway.


----------



## Riklet (Jan 16, 2013)

_"for the workers' tab!"_


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 16, 2013)

malboro lights I'll be bound. truly the cunts choice, that or the hard to find lucky strikes


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 16, 2013)

Camel?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 16, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> malboro lights I'll be bound. truly the cunts choice, that or the hard to find lucky strikes


 
I used to smoke the full-strength ones in Russia because I could afford them there, and I wasn't sure sometimes if they were counterfeit.  Lucky Strikes are for hipster scum, aren't they.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 16, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Camel?


 
A proper smoke for proper people.

Especially the old-school unfiltered in the foil crush packs.

Mmmmmm, Camels...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 16, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> A proper smoke for proper people.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 16, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> I used to smoke the full-strength ones in Russia because I could afford them there, and I wasn't sure sometimes if they were counterfeit. Lucky Strikes are for hipster scum, aren't they.


 
Luckies are big in america but yes, here they are for cunts.


Malboro now clocking in at near 6-7 quid for a twenty box are clearly the smoke for people who have too much money.


----------



## JimW (Jan 16, 2013)

There used to be this little baccy shop in town that sold all the old brands you thought had disappeared years back, so every Friday when I got my pay packet I'd be trying Navy Cut and Woodbines as a treat.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 16, 2013)

copliker said:


> Oxbridge opinionmonger man - 80's hair, wheezing unshaven faces pocked with booze broken capillaries, transmogrifying Manningchins, teenager clobber, zip busting bulging guts and manbags brimming with screeds and twattery.


 
That's the most disarmingly honest OKCupid profile ever.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 16, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> A proper smoke for proper people.<snip>
> 
> Mmmmmm, Camels...


Ye gods, I always thought their smoke reeked of camel dung and wet wool, thanks a bundle for the reminder.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 16, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Ye gods, I always thought their smoke reeked of camel dung, thanks a bundle for the reminder.


Don't get the hump


----------



## killer b (Jan 16, 2013)

i smoke(d) luckies


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 16, 2013)

killer b said:


> i smoke(d) luckies


 

please report to your nearest re-education centr for immediate reproletrianisation


----------



## killer b (Jan 16, 2013)

lamberts or rollies, or get to fuck eh?


----------



## weepiper (Jan 16, 2013)

killer b said:


> lamberts or rollies, or get to fuck eh?


All PFWC women I know smoke Lambert and Butler menthol. You may laugh at the menthol but it's true


----------



## killer b (Jan 16, 2013)

what does PFWC mean?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 16, 2013)

Proper Fucking Working Class?  I thought it was just FWC.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 16, 2013)

copliker said:


> manbags brimming with screeds and twattery.


 
poetry


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

After the dust had settled more than a dozen sex offenders were removed from Paulsgrove and, as far as I can tell, placed in adult-only council B&Bs and 'tighter' monitoring (never wholly explained), the _New Statesman_ gave over its central essay (2500 words) to analyse the wider political and social trends. The result:

What are we doing to our children? Parents dress as teenagers while pushing their toddlers into trashy adulthood.

In the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent, there was a baby in a buggy. About nine months old, she had a rounded, contented appearance of the kind that makes people smile. I was sitting nearby and I smiled, but then suddenly stopped. I had noticed *a heavy gold bracelet on her fat wrist*. The next thing I noticed was *an earring* in her pierced ear. The baby's charm had gone, to be *replaced by my revulsion*. It was a sense of prematurely and unnecessarily *defiled* nature. The baby had been pushed, before her time, into *trashy adulthood*. She had had no choice in the matter. And then, on television, I saw footage of the anti-paedophile demonstrations in Portsmouth. A woman was asked why they were hounding these people. 'They are not people, they are animals,' she replied. 'And we put down animals normally.'

There was a picture in the papers the next day of a small boy holding a sign. It read: 'Don't house them, HANG THEM.' Most of the women on these demonstrations seemed to have brought their children along. Some of the news footage showed impromptu classes forming in which the children were taught to chant anti-paedophile slogans. One little girl was listening while her mother was being interviewed. She was around nine or ten. She wore large, gold earrings, and her face was heavily made up.

These days, people don't like to be told what to do; they hate the idea of any imposed morality or agreed standard of behaviour. Yet they wish to retain the capacity for moral outrage. So they teach their children the language of hate and vengeance, they dress them like tarts and they take them out to hound paedophiles - sometimes to death. They also hound innocents whom they mistakenly take to be paedophiles. It *does not seem to bother them*.

This recent hysteria, prompted by the News of the World's campaign to name and shame paedophiles, is indistinguishable from a medieval witch-hunt. *It is no good saying that paedophiles exist, whereas witches do not*, because, to the medieval mind, witches certainly existed. They also represented a uniquely threatening incarnation of evil. So, if someone were a witch, normal restraints could - should - be removed. She should be killed. Paedophiles are the new witches. Confronted with a paedophile, outraged citizens can abandon normal restraints. Demonstrations are organised, houses are attacked, cars are burned. Who can doubt that, if the NoW campaign had continued, one or more paedophiles would have been lynched by the mob? [...]

From Rwanda and Cambodia to the streets of London, terrible things are done by terrible people that do not attract the attention of the mob. *Where were the demonstrations in Eltham* against those who were known locally to have murdered Stephen Lawrence? But murderers, rapists, muggers, the agents of genocide and tyranny, are not hounded by the angered masses. *Only paedophiles are hunted down*. They are also, it is said, isolated in prisons because other prisoners hold them in particular contempt. *Paedophiles are the outcasts among the outcasts, the untouchables*. Why should this be? What is it about paedophilia that can unite the mob and provide a focus for the desire for vengeance? The answer lies in our peculiarly exalted idea of childhood. And this, in turn, is the product of a depraved and deracinated culture.

People know there is no moral consensus, and they resent any suggestion that there should be one. In the present political climate, they know also that their passing moods - sometimes glorified as 'the will of the people' - are of lasting political significance. This is a recipe for mob rule, and it is a direct product of new Labour's supine populism; government by focus group and by tabloid headlines is a not entirely polite way of describing mob rule.

In such a climate, where people feel they have power but lack any strong feelings about how it should be deployed, they will seize on the easiest and most vulnerable target. And what, in a fragmented society, is the one good on which we can all agree? Childhood. Childhood becomes the one communal good, and its abuse, therefore, is the one agreed evil.

In this, the *anti-paedophile mob is encouraged by the infantilising effects of moronic mass entertainment*, from soap operas to Arnold Schwarzenegger films. These serve to identify the easy excitements and unthinking wonder of childhood as some kind of human ideal. Equally, the sentimentalism of the mass media in an inanely populist political climate finds its quickest, simplest expression in the glorification of the child. All these media say the same thing - the child is the icon of virtue for a society that does not wish to grow up.

What is deeply wrong about this is that childhood is meaningless if it is not a preparation for adulthood. Childhood is wonderful not because it is a thing in itself, but precisely because it is a state of innocent wonder at the complex human and natural world into which the child is to be inducted. But if we find our only conception of virtue in the child, then there will be no adult world into which it can be inducted. Human life becomes a falling-off, a decline into the empty misery of adulthood. The child is effectively told that it is only worthwhile to remain a child. Growing up is pure loss.

But what of this other, apparently contradictory, phenomenon? That *baby* had been pushed into *premature adulthood*, and that *girl on the Portsmouth demonstration was pierced and primped like a tart*. [...]

Meanwhile, from the other direction, adults are dressing younger. [...] Old women grotesquely ape the sports styles of the young. There is now no way of dressing in a distinctively old manner, because it is unacceptable to be old. Oldness is not a condition that can be openly embraced, and dignity is a forgotten virtue.

Both impulses - sexualised children and the rejuvenated old - seem to be converging on some mid-point where childish sensation-seeking and adult sexuality can be merged. We want sex and we want childhood, and so *we create the perpetually randy toddler*. What we do not want are clear distinctions, rites of passage, a hierarchy of human development. We want everything to be the same. And yet, driven by some essential need for evil, we also want the paedophile as villain, so that we can pretend we really do think that childhood is different.

This is an aspect of a more general desire to eradicate boundaries. What follows, I warn you, may seem like a digression, but I don't think it is. The summer sales were still on when I was in the Bluewater shopping centre. In the House of Fraser men's department, all the sale goods had been hung on a long line of racks. This is the centre's upmarket store, so the usual suspects were listed on the labels [...] All the clothes, whatever their label, were the same - the same baggy, long-sleeved T-shirts; the same tight, short-sleeved shirts; the same semi-transparent sweaters; the same khakis and jeans; the same short, zipper jackets.

[...] on that clothes rail, there really was no choice. Fashion houses, in spite of the oddities we may see on the catwalks, cannot actually afford the risk of offering us genuine choices. They all sniff the same perfumed wind, and then they all produce the same kinds of things because that is what they think the market wants. Meanwhile, at the other end of the process, the consumer looks at the magazines and decides to buy those things. Any company that tried to do something radically different would be cutting itself off from the mass market. That is, after all, what fashion is - a kind of uniform. To be fashionable means to conform. [...]


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 16, 2013)

i just multi vommed.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

It concludes

There are two questions. First, *why do people choose from such a narrow range of clothes*? Second, why do they attempt to erase the passages of their lives by making the young old and the old young?

Well, in both cases, they are eliminating distinctions. And, in both cases, they are afraid. [...] To be completely outside fashion is to send the message: 'I am nothing like any of you.' To send that message is dangerous: it courts loneliness, an especially frightening prospect. If your clothes don't make sense to people, then they proclaim that you are beyond sense: you are illegible. And that means no sex, no friendship, nothing. [...]

The elision of the ages, meanwhile, is also a response to the fear of difference. For the old, appearing young is a way of saying: 'I am not a person who is nearer death.' The young, who are still under parental influence, are prematurely aged to reinforce this tranquillising thought. [...]

At this point, the connection with the paedophilia demonstrations should be clear. At the most obvious level, the cause - like the non-choice of clothes - provides* a crude unity in the midst of incomprehensible diversity*. But, at a deeper level, fashion is now an aspect of the excessive glorification of childhood. There is, in effect, only one fashion. It changes every season out of financial necessity, but only marginally. This one fashion is that of the early teen, and it is embraced from babyhood to senility. People want to become children precisely because of their glorification of childhood as the only virtuous state.

In a world in which there are, increasingly, no borders, frontiers, walls or restrictions, people will be driven to construct their own. They find themselves belonging nowhere, and so they invent forms of belonging. These forms are crude: rather than new hierarchies of age, everybody is made to belong to one age; rather than a multiplicity of consumption, *everybody consumes the same. Crudest of all are the anti-paedophile demonstrations*: acts of social *unification based on persecution*; *mob politics* that treats law and *reason with contempt*. [...]

*People don't know they are doing this because they think they are free.* *They think they are free because they are told they are free*, and their *apparent choices are glorified as the will of the people*. But the *will of the people turns out to be either a dull uniformity* or, in the case of the paedophilia hysteria, a *vengeful, anarchic irrationality*. A *baby with an earring*, a *ten-year-old in a boob tube*, a *pensioner in a shell suit* - it is the *end of difference*, the *impossibility of imagination*, the *loss of sense*, the *abandonment of aspiration*, the *end*, not the beginning, *of choice* and, worst of all, the *abject failure to engage rationally with evil*.

In 1984, O'Brien tells Winston Smith that, if he wants to imagine the future, he should picture a boot smashing forever into a face. I say: if you want to imagine the future, picture a gang of identically dressed toddlers baying for blood that is, quite possibly, yours.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi: Who wrote that article?


----------



## Random (Jan 16, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> sihhi: Who wrote that article?


Would you be shocked if I told you it was a privately-educated oxbridge journalist?


----------



## Random (Jan 16, 2013)

http://www.newstatesman.com/node/138386

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Appleyard


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## DaveCinzano (Jan 16, 2013)

Random said:


> Would you be shocked if I told you it was a privately-educated oxbridge journalist?


SHOCKED FACE


----------



## Random (Jan 16, 2013)

“Bryan Appleyard, you’re a clever guy…” Jeremy Paxman


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## Firky (Jan 16, 2013)

This is a corker:

Couple of us were asking Jonathon May-Bowles about his love for a guide on, "how to talk to trans people" - preaching to the converted etc. When he came up with this beaut:




> Jonnie Marbles ‏@JonnieMarbLes
> @henrypath firky anyway, I'll leave you to your white, male, cis, middle class frustrations. Have a great day.


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## Captain Hurrah (Jan 16, 2013)

Random said:


> “Bryan Appleyard, you’re a clever guy…” Jeremy Paxman


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## butchersapron (Jan 16, 2013)

**too late**


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## DaveCinzano (Jan 16, 2013)

Random said:


> “Bryan Appleyard, you’re a clever guy…” Jeremy Paxman


 
He definitely looks like he failed the sweaty palms test when shown a photo array of perpetually randy toddlers.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

Random said:


> “Bryan Appleyard, you’re a clever guy…” Jeremy Paxman


 
When did Jeremy Paxman say that? 


He used to be more popular as a left-liberal columnist then compared to now. He has under 3,500 followers on twitter, but sill reports this kind of detail:


https://twitter.com/BryanAppleyard/status/290734992223526912



*Bryan Appleyard*‏@*BryanAppleyard*​
Went to see Quartet in Fakenham. Audience was older than the cast, like watching Django in a cinema full of slaves.


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## Frances Lengel (Jan 16, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> sihhi: Who wrote that article?


 
A total fucking weirdo.


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## DotCommunist (Jan 16, 2013)

ever read paxmans book on 'the English'? its full of little nuggets about history and so on but class struggle doesn't get a look in. No diggers, no peasants revolt, nothing. Just an eternal village green perspective


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## Frances Lengel (Jan 16, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> ever read paxmans book on 'the English'? its full of little nuggets about history and so on but class struggle doesn't get a look in. No diggers, no peasants revolt, nothing. Just an eternal village green perspective


 
Paxman's an arsehole anyway. An even lower form of life than the absolutely stomach-turning Stephen Fry.


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## Random (Jan 16, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> An even lower form of life than the absolutely stomach-turning Stephen Fry.


 Hey, leave it! :x


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## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> ever read paxmans book on 'the English'? its full of little nuggets about history and so on but class struggle doesn't get a look in. No diggers, no peasants revolt, nothing. Just an eternal village green perspective


 
No, but it doesn't surprise me. If you've watched Ian Hislop's history of British emotions and the stiff upper lip. 'There was no violence in the General Strike and police playing football with strikers was the norm, back then there was a stiff upper lip' (happened once).

Here is Aaronovitch mate-y interviewing Gove, wifi provided so people who own smart laptops can tweet away as it goes on:


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## butchersapron (Jan 16, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> ever read paxmans book on 'the English'? its full of little nuggets about history and so on but class struggle doesn't get a look in. No diggers, no peasants revolt, nothing. Just an eternal village green perspective


In that sense it's entirely accurate for who he's talking for and to then. Something that you (well me) get off those pieces sihhi posted is just how strongly they feel that _this is their country, this is their society _the rest of us are just here to make up the numbers, to do the stuff that allow them to do the really important stuff. Almost like they imagine they are in a classical greek polis and they are the citizens - the only ones entitled to vote, to deliberate on public policy, to construct and participate in _culture._


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## DotCommunist (Jan 16, 2013)

paunch vs pratt

amicably


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## DotCommunist (Jan 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> In that sense it's entirely accurate for who he's talking for and to then. Something that you (well me) get off those pieces sihhi posted is just how strongly they feel that _this is their country, this is their society _the rest of us are just here to make up the numbers, to do the stuff that allow them to do the really important stuff. Almost like they imagine they are in a classical greek polis and they are the citizens - the only ones entitled to vote, to deliberate on public policy, to construct and participate in _culture._


 

yes and they re-enforce it by these sort of books, articles and talks. An ongoing process of both revisionism and reproduction in which the values of their class are reproduced for the future and stamped upon the past.

and the rest of us can go fucking whistle.


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## Firky (Jan 16, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> ever read paxmans book on 'the English'? its full of little nuggets about history and so on but class struggle doesn't get a look in. No diggers, no peasants revolt, nothing. Just an eternal village green perspective


 
It's fucking horrible, it is "us" and "them". That's about it.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

This is another classic - at the same awards ceremony where Helen Lewis collected the awards from the boss of Twitter Europe - on right is 'use capitalist advertising for good' Julia Hobsbawm.


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## butchersapron (Jan 16, 2013)

Ah, so _that's_ what Communist kids turn out like.


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## Random (Jan 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Ah, so _that's_ what Communist kids turn out like.


 Hobbers should have sent them to a boarding school in the USSR 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




It's almost as though class trumps politics


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This is another classic - at the same awards ceremony where Helen Lewis collected the awards from the boss of Twitter Europe - on right is 'use capitalist advertising for good' Julia Hobsbawm.


 
suited hippo


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## Firky (Jan 16, 2013)

Land Rover, Jaguar, Vodafone, big big names.


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## rekil (Jan 16, 2013)

David pouring his curves into that suit. Tailors everywhere sob into their hands.


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## Random (Jan 16, 2013)

Please, sihi, don't post that picture again. It give me the fear.


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## Firky (Jan 16, 2013)

She has that Walt Disney scary headmistress look to her.


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## DotCommunist (Jan 16, 2013)

firky said:


> She has that Walt Disney scary headmistress look to her.


 
thats just the nose, some of us are afflicted with hooked noses.


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## Random (Jan 16, 2013)

It's both of them. The unbearable smugness of being.


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## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> In that sense it's entirely accurate for who he's talking for and to then. Something that you (well me) get off those pieces sihhi posted is just how strongly they feel that _this is their country, this is their society _the rest of us are just here to make up the numbers, to do the stuff that allow them to do the really important stuff. Almost like *they imagine they are in a classical greek polis* and they are the citizens - the only ones entitled to vote, to deliberate on public policy, to construct and participate in _culture._


 
In the case of Bryan Appleyard, they become convinced they are the ones to make decisions because they studied diligently in Oxford. From a search done in 2003 of the phrase 'working class' in editorials and left commentators on the Independent and Guardian:





			
				Brian Appleyard in 1999 said:
			
		

> With the decline in faith in an immortal soul and the loss of faith even in the Enlightenment ideal of the moral absolute of the human agent, we turned to science to provide us with a more solid form of human assessment. Impressed by the apparent success of the results, we came to accept intelligence as the primary human faculty. And yet those results revealed deep inequalities. So, if we really believe in the centrality of intelligence, then we must really believe in fundamental human inequalities. We must really believe in our own ability to say that some people are ultimately better than others.
> 
> Gould's egalitarian response is to say science is wrong. But that compounds the problem -- not least because his apparent position is incredible. Everybody knows that science will inevitably reveal fundamental biological inequalities between people.
> 
> The real issue is whether we can rise above our science and our statistics and maintain our sense of the moral absolute of individuals as ends, not means, whose ultimate status we are not competent to judge. In this sense, Gould is absolutely right to speak of the tragedy of a life crushed by "a limit imposed from without". People are more than their intelligence, however measured, just as they are more than the speed with which they run, their attractiveness or the size of their bank balances. Remembering that, amid this cascade of research -- this talk of cognitive stratification and these earnest assessments of worldly success -- will be the most difficult task.


 




			
				Brian Appleyard in 1996 said:
			
		

> We are, it is routinely said, a class-ridden society. Americans sneer at our insidious, divisive rituals, the progressive left damns us for our failure to
> escape from an imperial past, and the economic right plots against our class-based institutions, the better to project us into a globalised, free market culture. In fact, nobody ever says anything good about class - the system is universally agreed to be a bad thing.
> 
> But, somehow, class survives. One reason for this is our infinite capacity for hypocrisy. We practise class distinctions even as we mouth our socially
> ...


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## Captain Hurrah (Jan 16, 2013)

Clever guy.


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## butchersapron (Jan 16, 2013)

I seem to remember him doing a review of Michael Collins Book The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class years ago that sort of suggested that he got it. Maybe not fully or how it related to him and his life but at least partially.

edit: here it is. Hmm, not quite as i remembered.


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## 8ball (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> In the case of Bryan Appleyard, they become convinced they are the ones to make decisions because they studied diligently in Oxford. From a search done in 2003 of the phrase 'working class' in editorials and left commentators on the Independent and Guardian...


 
What point are you trying to make with the 1999 and 1996 quotes?


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## Random (Jan 16, 2013)

I smell artistic corporatism conservatism.


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## Random (Jan 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I seem to remember him doing a review of Michael Collins Book The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class years ago that sort of suggested that he got it. Maybe not fully or how it related to him and his life but at least partially.
> 
> edit: here it is. Hmm, not quite as i remembered.


He quotes this GK Chesterton quote while apparently ignoring the fact that he is one of those rich shits who work to demoralise the poor. Anyway, you can see why the ideal of this GKC version of the poor would sit well with a corporativist conservative.

“We are always ready to make a saint or prophet of the educated man who goes into cottages to give a little kindly advice to the uneducated,” he wrote. But the real saints and prophets – those of the middle ages – were uneducated men “who walked into grand houses to give a little kindly advice to the educated.” The wisdom of the poor was once deployed to moralise the rich; now that of the rich is used to demoralise the poor.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

8ball said:


> What point are you trying to make with the 1999 and 1996 quotes?


 
some context to his subsequent assault on 'shell suit pensioners'.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

Random said:


> I smell artistic corporatism conservatism.


 
But he's definitely Labour and was left critical of Blair, unlike Aaronovitch who was a Blair cheerleader throughout.


----------



## 8ball (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> some context to his subsequent assault on 'shell suit pensioners'.


 
I can't see how the 1999 quote relates (bog standard anti-science rant with possible delusions of 'philosopher kinghood' - there was a lot of it about at the time), and the 1996 one just looks like tangentially related fuckwittery (ie. he seems to be arguing that class is morally irrelevant and looks to be completely ignorant as to its material underpinnings).

Unless by 'context' you just meant confirmation of twattery.


----------



## Random (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> But he's definitely Labour and was left critical of Blair, unlike Aaronovitch who was a Blair cheerleader throughout.


Blair was a philistine corporativist conservative. Apppleyard has an aesthetic appreciation of class, and feels the pain of the WC.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

8ball said:


> I can't see how the 1999 quote relates (bog standard anti-science rant with possible delusions of _*'philosopher kinghood'*_ - there was a lot of it about at the time), and the 1996 one just looks like tangentially related fuckwittery (ie. he seems to be arguing that class is morally irrelevant and looks to be completely ignorant as to its material underpinnings).


 
You have it there, 1999 is a really long piece about genetics and society, where ultimately his position is that _he_ and others like him are able to look at humans as ends and not means - unlike the pure scientists. 1996 sees an approach saying class is an irremovable fact of human life, there's nothing anyone can do. The judgement on Residents Against Paedophiles and ear-piercers comes from a similar place - the working-class -potential 'mob' - will always be with us, they must be controlled for their own children's good (seeing humans as 'ends not means'). I dunno. You win.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 16, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Ye gods, I always thought their smoke reeked of camel dung and wet wool, thanks a bundle for the reminder.


 
I started on them when I was university. I didn't mind people snaffling tho odd one out of my B&H, but it got to the point where people took them without even asking or saying anything.

Hands stopped appearing in the corner of my eye after I switched to unfiltered Camels.


----------



## 8ball (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> 1996 sees an approach saying class is an irremovable fact of human life, there's nothing anyone can do.


 
Ah right, I figured the 1996 one was mainly setting up class as some kind of 'charming diversity' between people (having been separated from any kind of moral stigma), which somehow misses the fact that class makes life shit for a lot of people ('but they don't know anything else, dear, they're not like us').

But when he says the problem only manifests when people want to change class - I can see where you're coming from on that point.



sihhi said:


> I dunno. You win.


 
Do I get the toaster?


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

For the "more attention on Sunny Hundal" posters earlier:







A couple of months ago at Labour Conference British Humanist Association's fringe meeting at 

2 Labour left MPs, 2 BHA officials I think? and Polly and Sunny.

It's called a 'No-Prayer Breakfast' and you can see the croissants, partially covered by Sunny's hand, and the black handkerchiefs/paper towels:


----------



## Random (Jan 16, 2013)

That looks even worse than a bad meeting at the anarchist bookfair


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## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

Random said:


> That looks even worse than a bad meeting at the anarchist bookfair


 
Worse or better than the 2011 comment award show:






Suzanne Moore and Matthew Dancona in the audience:


----------



## Random (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Worse or better than the 2011 comment award show:


 Who do these liberals think they are? Hundall against a background of Barclays and jaguar. What would  we think of a woodcut of Thomas Paine at an event sponsored by the East India Company?


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

Random said:


> Who do these liberals think they are? Hundall against a background of Barclays and jaguar. What would we think of a woodcut of Thomas Paine at an event sponsored by the East India Company?


 
Barclays don't sell weapons to 'dictators'  they just fund people who do.

Anyway that was early in 2011 when Sunny Hundal won the independent blogger award for Liberal Conspiracy.

Then by November 2011

http://thecreativediarist.com/2011/...rds-runner-up-digital-journalist-of-the-year/






Don't want to attack the student there at all, but Sunny is half playing the role of a mini-gatekeeper for the next generation:



> The night finished with drinks at the Big Chilli House in Islington. The best part of the night was getting the opportunity to speak to the _*judge of my category, Sunny Hundal*_. He gave me loads of great feedback and really encouraged me to keep on with what I’m doing.


 
And like LP he is considered as the spokesperson of a generation for the more 'moderate' crowd, hence him being invited to a panel of the Fabian Society:

http://www.youngfabians.org.uk/blog...ration-crisis-panel-at-the-fabian-conference/

Also note on that conference is Luciana Berger, a voice for "working-class women" in Liverpool who won the selection in 2010 by dodgy deals against the wishes of the local party.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> A couple of months ago at Labour Conference British Humanist Association's fringe meeting at
> 
> 2 Labour left MPs, 2 BHA officials I think? and Polly and Sunny.


 
They are Andrew Copson (BHA Chief Exec) and Naomi Phillips (Chair of Labour Humanists).


----------



## rekil (Jan 16, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> That's the most disarmingly honest OKCupid profile ever.


Cumface profile pic and everything.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

copliker said:


> Cumface profile pic and everything.
> 
> View attachment 27574


 
He's not gonna like you after that


----------



## weepiper (Jan 16, 2013)

'celebrities have the right to a private life' but apparently working-class women don't. Without some pasty baggy-eyed smug over-entitled fuck coming along and taking the piss out of their clothes, eating habits and parenting skills.


----------



## Firky (Jan 16, 2013)

weepiper said:


> 'celebrities have the right to a private life' but apparently working-class women don't. Without some pasty baggy-eyed smug over-entitled fuck coming along and taking the piss out of their clothes, eating habits and parenting skills.



Say what you see, say what you see.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

weepiper said:


> 'celebrities have the right to a private life' but apparently working-class women don't. Without some pasty baggy-eyed smug over-entitled fuck coming along and taking the piss out of their clothes, eating habits and parenting skills.


 
He's going to have a word with that now.






Probable Aaronovitch response:




			
				davidaaronovitch said:
			
		

> That writing was ages ago, in order to "raise the level of debate" anyway. I am writing from a position detached reason that objectively can only assist the working class. Where I'm forced to live - in Hampstead - the local councillors _are_ Tory. Fighting the Tory beast is important, isn't it? I work for a living trying to do that.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> And like LP he is considered as the spokesperson of a generation for the more 'moderate' crowd, hence him being invited to a panel of the Fabian Society:
> 
> http://www.youngfabians.org.uk/blog...ration-crisis-panel-at-the-fabian-conference/
> 
> Also note on that conference is Luciana Berger, a voice for "working-class women" in Liverpool who won the selection in 2010 by dodgy deals against the wishes of the local party.


 
Penny got to talk to the fabian conference too. Not that one though.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Penny got to talk to the fabian conference too. Not that one though.


 
Hadn't thought of that but you are right - in early 2011 even. 




> 4. Winning the argument: what can we learn about movement politics from the right?
> What can we learn from the right’s success in campaigning and grassroots advocacy on the web, particularly in the environment, and how should the left respond?
> Speakers: James Crabtree, Comment Editor, Financial Times, Jon Cruddas MP, Matthew Elliott, Chief Executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, Chuka Umunna MP, Tim Montgomerie, Editor of Conservative Home, Laurie Penny, The New Statesman.


 



> 2. Fairness after the cuts: How do campaigners deal with the deficit?
> What strategies do poverty and welfare campaigners need to take this year and in the longer-term to sustain public support?
> Speakers: Brendan Barber, TUC General Secretary, Tom Clark (the Guardian), Sunny Hundal, Liberal Conspiracy & False Economy, Deborah Mattinson, BritainThinks,  Trevor Phillips, Chair of Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).


 
http://www.fabians.org.uk/events/850/
In fairness to LP, being on a platform with James Crabtree, Matthew Elliott, Tim Montgomerie, Chuka and Cruddas would make me wilt too.


----------



## articul8 (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Also note on that conference is Luciana Berger, a voice for "working-class women" in Liverpool who won the selection in 2010 by dodgy deals against the wishes of the local party.


She used to be in my CLP - from the very poshest part of the borough obviously.


----------



## Firky (Jan 16, 2013)

Laurie is on R4 again tomorrow talking about Birchill. Turn your bass up and put the dogs in another room.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> 2. Fairness after the cuts: How do campaigners deal with the deficit?
> What strategies do poverty and welfare campaigners need to take this year and in the longer-term to sustain public support?
> Speakers: Brendan Barber, TUC General Secretary, Tom Clark (the Guardian), Sunny Hundal, Liberal Conspiracy & False Economy, Deborah Mattinson, BritainThinks, Trevor Phillips, Chair of Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).
> .


 
interesting that none of those people are actually welfare campaigners or claimants


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 16, 2013)

firky said:


> Laurie is on R4 again tomorrow talking about Birchill. Turn your bass up and put the dogs in another room.


 
New generation of in yer face commentator attacks, mauls & consumes body of old generation of in yer face commentator- the cycle continues, nothing changes, free lunches are had


----------



## Firky (Jan 16, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> New generation of in yer face commentator attacks, mauls & consumes body of old generation of in yer face commentator- the cycle continues, nothing changes, free lunches are had



Mobius loop. 

Maybe cynical but she's in the slip stream of Birchill and enjoying it.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 16, 2013)

I think Birchill would eat her alive in a face to face, judging by other PR shoddy live performances - I take it that Bircvhill isnt going to be at R4 at the same time ?


----------



## rekil (Jan 16, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> I think Birchill would eat her alive in a face to face, judging by other PR shoddy live performances - I take it that Bircvhill isnt going to be at R4 at the same time ?


Yeah, in a row, Burchill would do to Laura what Camille Paglia did to her a while back, only more so. Laura has no weapons, nothing. That's today btw.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

firky said:


> Mobius loop.
> 
> Maybe cynical but she's in the slip stream of Birchill and enjoying it.


 
More like the Great Commentariat Mobius Chess Battle.

http://www.chessvariants.org/shape.dir/moebius.html







This was the interview - listen from 33 minutes in - 

http://www.breakthruradio.com/#/post/?dj=johnandmolly&post=2801&blog=92


On balance yes, gender (and the nuclear family) shouln't exist, but only class-based anti-capitalism will overthrow them.

However if 'essentialism' is so wholly wrong - it can only mean it's OK for Middle Eastern women to bleach skin to look more white? 
It must also mean it's acceptable for working-class people to adopt middle-class behaviour and send children to grammar schools, or private schools on scholarships. It must also be 'OK' for people to undergo cosmetic operations for the purpose of looking less foreign as happens in America with correcting the upper facial features of East Asian migrants. If you want to not be who you are born, who is anyone to judge etc


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 16, 2013)

copliker said:


> Yeah, in a row, Burchill would do to Laura *what Camille Paglia did to her* a while back, only more so. Laura has no weapons, nothing. That's today btw.


 
What was that then?


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 16, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What was that then?


 
here somewhere

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/7986481/fights-of-the-feminists/


----------



## love detective (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> and you can see the croissants, partially covered by Sunny's hand


 
The car is on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows
And you can see the croissants, partially covered by Sunny's hand

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death
And you can see the croissants, partially covered by Sunny's hand

The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles
And you can see the croissants, partially covered by Sunny's hand

The buildings tumbled in on themselves
Mothers clutching babies
Picked through the rubble
And pulled out their hair
And you can see the croissants, partially covered by Sunny's hand

I open up my wallet
And it's full of blood


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What was that then?


 
In 1993 almost 20 years ago: 




> 24 Mar 93
> Dear Professor Paglia,
> Fuck off you crazy old dyke.
> Always,
> Julie Burchill


 
http://privat.ub.uib.no/BUBSY/burchill.htm

If Burchill had used only one insult against transgender people it would have been alright.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 16, 2013)

Ah right, thought copliker meant that Paglia had done it to Dave Laurie.


----------



## killer b (Jan 16, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Ah right, thought copliker meant that Paglia had done it to Dave Laurie.


he did. it is like a radical columnists version of _the human centipede_ tbf.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> However if 'essentialism' is so wholly wrong - it can only mean it's OK for Middle Eastern women to bleach skin to look more white?
> It must also mean it's acceptable for working-class people to adopt middle-class behaviour and send children to grammar schools, or private schools on scholarships. It must also be 'OK' for people to undergo cosmetic operations for the purpose of looking less foreign as happens in America with correcting the upper facial features of East Asian migrants. If you want to not be who you are born, who is anyone to judge etc


 

The good thing about not being an essentialist is that you can be anything you want and anyone who says otherwise needs to check their goddam privilege.

This makes a mockery of safe spaces.  It also broadly allows for the cognitive dissonance of the subjects of this thread.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> here somewhere
> 
> http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/7986481/fights-of-the-feminists/


 
God, what an article from Guardian contributor Tanya Gold although has an interesting aside on LP




> Newspaper columnists accusing each other of elitism and attention-seeking is a game that will always end in stalemate. Ideally, women who define themselves as feminists should want the same thing; more of everything for women — money, orgasms, sweeties, books about vaginas. If Naomi Wolf wants to write a love letter to her vagina, or earlobe, or knee, I will applaud her. Wolf is a hot, rich feminist with great boobs, and her cares are those of the hot, rich feminist with great boobs. Better orgasms are not a terrible thing to want, even if there is more to want; of course Vagina is niche.
> Feminists love to fight, because many of us are writers, neurotics, professional screamers and builders of straw men. Good columns are rarely fair; I doubt Naomi Wolf daydreams she is our leader, as Janice Turner wrote, and I doubt Wolf ‘won’t be able to rest easy until all of womankind has heard her gospel and has started having sex that is not just pleasurable, but worthwhile’, as Zoe Heller wrote, with a murderous italic, in the New York Review of Books. But oblivious malice, it seems, is the way we debate. *Laurie Penny once wrote she wanted to slap me with a wet fish because we disagree about the inherent health of prostitution as a career choice, even though I made her risotto, and it was delicious.*
> How dirty we get! The Wolf Affair, although riveting, pales next to the great Susan Sontag/Camille Paglia match of 1993, which is still, if I may type the word, the daddy.


----------



## rekil (Jan 16, 2013)

killer b said:


> he did. it is like a radical columnists version of _the human centipede_ tbf.


_Humyn_ centipede. 

Is humyn even a thing?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 16, 2013)

it sounds like a vegan staple


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 16, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Luckies are big in america but yes, here they are for cunts.
> 
> 
> Malboro now clocking in at near 6-7 quid for a twenty box are clearly the smoke for people who have too much money.


 
Biggest twat-ciggies are definitely American Spirit. I haven't smoked for nigh on 20 years, but they were twat-smokes then, and are still twat-smokes now.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 16, 2013)

copliker said:


> _Humyn_ centipede.
> 
> Is humyn even a thing?


 
it should be.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 16, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> The good thing about not being an essentialist is that you can be anything you want and anyone who says otherwise needs to check their goddam privilege.


 
Don't get that.


----------



## Firky (Jan 16, 2013)

Well am never going to be able to listen to dead flag blues quite the same way again.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 16, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Biggest twat-ciggies are definitely American Spirit. I haven't smoked for nigh on 20 years, but they were twat-smokes then, and are still twat-smokes now.


 
Unlike four of five packs of these bastards every day:


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 16, 2013)

the hands down hardest smoke I've ever had was from pentonville smokers pack. Half ounce of pipe tobacco. You are not a man till you've smoked pipe tobacco through a jailhouse issue rizla.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 16, 2013)

articul8 said:


> She used to be in my CLP - from the very poshest part of the borough obviously.


 
Berger was woeful with reference to student politics (her partiality when the SOAS anti-semitism claims were aired was astounding), and apparently isn't a brilliant constituency MP. Not quite of Louise Mensch awfulness, but who is?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 16, 2013)

firky said:


> Mobius loop.
> 
> Maybe cynical but she's in the slip stream of Birchill and enjoying it.


 
Lets just hope Burchill doesn't guff.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 16, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> *I think Birchill would eat her alive in a face to face*, judging by other PR shoddy live performances - I take it that Bircvhill isnt going to be at R4 at the same time ?


 
Stoutist!!  Check your sizeist privilege!


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Don't get that.


 
If you take an essentialist viewpoint of left-wing politics, you might be forced to concede that (for example) anarchism and voting liberal don't fit together. an left-wing essentialist might put more weight of importance on class analysis than tweeting, but without an essentialist viewpoint you can tweet and pretend it's the same thing. Ditto identity groups - you don't need to be an oppressed minority but you can claim the right to be one and it's exactly the same thing.  and the best bit is that anyone who criticises you is not only criticising everyone in your assumed group, but is also an essentialist and therefore probably a bigot.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 16, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> the hands down hardest smoke I've ever had was from pentonville smokers pack. Half ounce of pipe tobacco. You are not a man till you've smoked pipe tobacco through a jailhouse issue rizla.


 
Strangely enough, I can therefore call myself a man.  Although that's gender essentialism, so I'm officially a woman too.  If I want to be.


----------



## Firky (Jan 16, 2013)

Someone on here was called an essentialist leftie earlier


----------



## Favelado (Jan 16, 2013)

10 Regal King Size please.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 16, 2013)

firky said:


> Someone on here was called an essentialist leftie earlier


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


>


 
Remind me, which one's PJ and which one's Duncan?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 16, 2013)

Random said:


> That looks even worse than a bad meeting at the anarchist bookfair


If you like I could post up the audio* to an event called 'What's The Blogging Story?' I went to in Bristol.

Sunny, obviously, was on the top table wearing his 'Liberal Conspiracy' bigwig hat, along with Belle du Jour/Brooke Magnanti, Roy Greenslade (who spent an inordinate amount of time stick up for his mate Andrew Marr and his injunction preventing people mentioning that he'd been shtupping a woman not his wife), plus that Donnacha DeLong chap from the NUJ, Steve Baxter (now a _New Statesman_ blogger) and Sarah Ditum (who writes the 'Paperhouse' blog).



_* Actually, no. It's rather dull._


----------



## Firky (Jan 16, 2013)

Stephen Baxter the author?

I see him most days in the paper shop, I never knew that.

Been in his house (quite a modest house).


Different baxter, I just wondered he's a shite author so...


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 16, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Lets just hope Burchill doesn't guff.


 
She's another one who looks like you'd be well advised to give a fair bit longer than ten minutes to.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I seem to remember him doing a review of Michael Collins Book The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class years ago that sort of suggested that he got it. Maybe not fully or how it related to him and his life but at least partially.
> 
> edit: here it is. Hmm, not quite as i remembered.


 
Good book though .


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 16, 2013)

I heard Laurie Penny on the radio this afternoon. She's not especially articulate. She stumbles repeatedly, contradicts herself and seems to specialise in bizarre non-sequiturs. Best of her, her schtick seemed to be that the 'British commentariat is an incestuous cabal' who have failed to understand the new digital paradigm like our plucky heroine. She seemed to be making a bid for a permanent column in the guardian since she's clearly a young outsider who's not tied in to the mutual appreciation society of existing commentators. 

Given her background, and that of Burchill and Moore, this is a worrying development. I can't decide if I find the notion that she's a new broom sweeping away a calcified self-intrested elite hilarious or offensive...poor little public school Laurie denied her rightful place by two working class dinosaurs...however demented.

It's also a bit odd when dismissing cabals and vested interests to continually answer questions using 'we'..."the British commentariat  as WE call it"..."WE call it click bait"...and apparently editors are unaware of "Activist space where WE' are talking about..."

Who is this WE she's talking about?...'her' generation?...the left...of which she's the spokesperson? ..or her new cabal of Oxbridge mates who would make a much better job than the old-guard. She's a fuckin idiot...no self awareness...nothing to say save a predecided set of buzzwords and cliches and a seeming inability to express herself orally. A fuckin joke.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 16, 2013)

the british commentariat is an incestuous cabal? coming from her?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 16, 2013)

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/media/media_20130116-1730a.mp3

Seriously listen...she's fuckin hopeless.

From 22:25


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 16, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/media/media_20130116-1730a.mp3
> 
> Seriously listen...she's fuckin hopeless.
> 
> From 22:25


 
She should lay off the helium, she sounds like Noddy (off Noddy and Big Ears...no Juggist offence to Big Ears intended)


----------



## redsquirrel (Jan 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> God, what an article from Guardian contributor *Tanya Gold* although has an interesting aside on LP


Dreadful Israel apologist and maybe an even worse writer than LP (worse hair too).


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 16, 2013)

I was just watching the Attenborough thing on Africa. Some kinda birds came on who apparently "mate for life". My youngest lad's mate was round and he shouts "result!"...?  Then..."what...don't they ever sleep or eat or shit?"

I'm looking at him feeling all kinda Michael Gove.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 16, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> She should lay off the helium, she sounds like Noddy (off Noddy and Big Ears...no Juggist offence to Big Ears intended)



I think I'd have picked the Big Ears version without the hint. There's only him and Noddy Holder afaik...and I don't think anyone would have gone that way. Are there other Noddies I've missed?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jan 16, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/media/media_20130116-1730a.mp3
> 
> Seriously listen...she's fuckin hopeless.
> 
> From 22:25


 
Bit inconsistent, it should have never been published but also not be taken down?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 16, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I think I'd have picked the Big Ears version without the hint. There's only him and Noddy Holder afaik...and I don't think anyone would have gone that way. Are there other Noddies I've missed?


Him from _Byker Grove_


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 16, 2013)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Bit inconsistent, it should have never been published but also not be taken down?



Yeah, that's odd. But I don't think she has the ability to listen to the question and form a coherent answer while remembering the finely honed and brilliant phrases she thought up before hand. They all sort of come out all together, half-arsed and poorly sequenced. She's a fuckin flake.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 16, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Him from _Byker Grove_



Fuck...forgot


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 16, 2013)

the bloke who plays Jax the cobain look-a-like in Sons of Anarchy started his career on byker byker byker grove *annoying laugh*


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 16, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Fuck...forgot


 
Probably sounds more like Holder than that fella tbf. And as they were talking about transexuals, according to the sex slang dictionary a 'Noddy' is a non-operative transexual (something to do with nodules) so erm....that's interesting or something.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Jan 16, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Yeah, that's odd. But I don't think she has the ability to listen to the question and form a coherent answer while remembering the finely honed and brilliant phrases she thought up before hand. They all sort of come out all together, half-arsed and poorly sequenced. She's a fuckin flake.


 
She's certainly not skilled in deploying a soundbite.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 16, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> Probably sounds more like Holder than that fella tbf. And as they were talking about transexuals, according to the sex slang dictionary a 'Noddy' is a non-operative transexual (something to do with nodules) so erm....that's interesting or something.



Should you have said that? ...you may have just started a twitterthing. I hope you've got Julie Burchill's number.


----------



## kavenism (Jan 16, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> Probably sounds more like Holder than that fella tbf. And as they were talking about transexuals, according to the sex slang dictionary a 'Noddy' is a non-operative transexual (something to do with nodules) so erm....that's interesting or something.


Nothing to do with wearing a red hat with a bell on the end and driving a little toy car? That's no fun at all.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 16, 2013)

She can't help having a daft voice though. Give her shit for the things that matter - Like having a cheap and nasty looking shiny green quilt cover. Saying that though it's probably raw silk or something. Mind you can you machine wash silk? Coz I'm thinking if you can't it'd be a nightmare trying to get spunkstains out of silk bedclothes.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 16, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> <snip>can you machine wash silk? Coz I'm thinking if you can't it'd be a nightmare trying to get spunkstains out of silk bedclothes.


Yes - low temperature, delicate cycle, short spin, no bio, no bleach, no problem.  But why bother when you could just avoid shooting your load over the duvet cover in the first place?


----------



## love detective (Jan 16, 2013)

articul8 may be able to help with that


----------



## Greebo (Jan 16, 2013)

For the record, none of the bedding here is silk.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 16, 2013)

love detective said:


> articul8 may be able to help with that


I always suspected he'd be enough to put anyone off their stroke.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 16, 2013)

Greebo said:


> I always suspected he'd be enough to put anyone off their stroke.


 
Misandrist


----------



## Greebo (Jan 16, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Misandrist


A tad inaccurate; I don't dislike all men, let alone all the ones I've ever interracted with, but articul8 is an urbanite of the male persuasion whose posts just happen to also be disliked.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 18, 2013)

Here's a thing...

http://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/tweeting-suzanne-moore-a-random-sample/#comment-17952

Maybe 2013 is the year identity politics slips while chasing its tail and accidentally gets its head rammed right up its arse.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 19, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Here's a thing...
> 
> http://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/tweeting-suzanne-moore-a-random-sample/#comment-17952
> 
> Maybe 2013 is the year identity politics slips while chasing its tail and accidentally gets its head rammed right up its arse.


 
Eh, I've read all sorts of defences of this stuff tonight. Main gist being "SHE'S got a voice, WE don't, so in this case misogyny is justified - after all The Powers That Be are oppressing us by calling for polite discourse."


----------



## Balbi (Jan 19, 2013)

That gender trender site is dodgy as fuck though - buckets of transphobia, outing, posting of addresses etc.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 19, 2013)

Balbi said:


> That gender trender site is dodgy as fuck though - buckets of transphobia, outing, posting of addresses etc.


 
Oh aye, it's dreadful. It's getting really ugly. If I can use that word without being called an enemy of whatever.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 19, 2013)

Suzanne Moore's left twitter again after retweeting that link. Self-immolation


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 19, 2013)

It's odd, cos this kind of stuff in The Mail would've been written off as par for the course, I think. Why expect, ahem, more from the Grauniad or an M/C journo or what have you?


----------



## Balbi (Jan 19, 2013)

I think it's partially the manner of not actually apologising, and then making it worse. Mail columnists never say they're sorry, because they make their £££ from people with similar views. Moore's managed to cunt off a proportion of previous nodders and hmmm'ers of her work, and is just making it worse.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 19, 2013)

Rape, lol.


----------



## ymu (Jan 19, 2013)

And that's one of the reasons why it may be hard to get an apology. When so many people reach straight for the sexist insults and violent sexual imagery, it's hard to listen to what more reasonable people have to say. The sincere and polite individuals concerned aren't aware that they're part of a braying mob because they can't see them, or if they can, aren't necessarily thinking about the impact of them joining in regardless of how sincere their need to comment is.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 19, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Rape, lol.


 
yeah, really helping the cause there. That's not uncommon either.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 19, 2013)

weepiper said:


> yeah, really helping the cause there. That's not uncommon either.


 
Aye - that account's obviously a troll - in the now-sadly-missed sense of the word - but guess how many of The Getalong Gang have steamed in on that comment?


----------



## ymu (Jan 19, 2013)

That is why those who are anti-identity politics should stamp on this shit each and every time it appears from someone claiming to be on the left. All too often they seem too afraid of being accused of practising identity politics themselves to stand up to it.

I know many do. I also know many don't. And some actively feed this crap via their shaky grasp of the arguments.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 19, 2013)

weepiper said:


> yeah, really helping the cause there. That's not uncommon either.


 
it's fucking grim, and if you look at his twitter feed it's full of it and i don't deny that has a psychological impact

but that is what the internet is like, everyone here knows that and has the ability to filter out that kind of shit and not use it to close down genuine argument


----------



## smokedout (Jan 19, 2013)

ymu said:


> That is why those who are anti-identity politics should stamp on this shit each and every time it appears from someone claiming to be on the left. All too often they seem too afraid of being accused of practising identity politics themselves to stand up to it.


 
Its difficult though, because calling it out is basically what they want (as is allowing it to define a debate)

there's stuff that should be called out, but nasty dickheads trolling for lulz are probably best ignored imo


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 19, 2013)

ymu said:


> And that's one of the reasons why it may be hard to get an apology. When so many people reach straight for the sexist insults and violent sexual imagery, it's hard to listen to what more reasonable people have to say. The sincere and polite individuals concerned aren't aware that they're part of a braying mob because they can't see them, or if they can, aren't necessarily thinking about the impact of them joining in regardless of how sincere their need to comment is.



This is a point that is all too seldom made re. 'Braying mobs'. They're often made up of perfectly sincere individuals who have been outraged by a particular contentious viewpoint. When this viewpoint has been expressed by some middle-class liberal 'worthy', what tends to happen is that all the other 'worthies' in the echo-chamber circle the wagons against what they see as a rabid barbarian  horde. At no point do they stop to think: 'hang on...I seem to have upset a few hundred thousand people...maybe I should reconsider the implications of what I said'. Instead, the size and force of the opposition tends to confirm them in their minority position, since it's always been a given for them that they're part of that thin red line holding out against those vicious nihilist proles.

This helps explain the tenacity of identity and the more excessive features of state multiculturalism. In the face of mounting evidence that it's been a calamity, a smallish set of useful idiots, convinced that they're bang on the side the angels really can't be shifted either by rational argument, empirical evidence or widespread opposition. And of course the forces of capital can't believe their fuckin luck. Not only do they reap the rewards of such a divisive philosophy; they don't actually have to do a fuckin thing; step forward LP, Owen Jones and the other deluded liberals to do the job for them. 

Sweet.


----------



## ymu (Jan 19, 2013)

smokedout said:


> Its difficult though, because calling it out is basically what they want (as is allowing it to define a debate)
> 
> there's stuff that should be called out, but nasty dickheads trolling for lulz are probably best ignored imo


 
I know it's what (some of them) want in the short-term. In the long-term, making it socially unacceptable will reduce the incidence to genuine trolls + right-wing cunts, not genuine trolls + right-wing cunts + lefties who aren't sure of their ground and thus pollute the proper arguments coming from the rest of the left.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 19, 2013)

for sure call out the lefties, i just mean the people like rape knobhead are best not engaged with generally


----------



## Balbi (Jan 19, 2013)

Articul8's favourite columnist presents the argument where everyone goes home happy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/19/feminism-trans-women-female-enough


----------



## Balbi (Jan 19, 2013)

http://www.thefrisky.com/2013-01-18...t-man-like-me-cares-about-transgender-rights/

This too.


----------



## Nice one (Jan 19, 2013)

ymu said:


> And that's one of the reasons why it may be hard to get an apology. When so many people reach straight for the sexist insults and violent sexual imagery, it's hard to listen to what more reasonable people have to say. The sincere and polite individuals concerned aren't aware that they're part of a braying mob because they can't see them, or if they can, aren't necessarily thinking about the impact of them joining in regardless of how sincere their need to comment is.


 
you talking about this thread?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 19, 2013)

Balbi said:


> http://www.thefrisky.com/2013-01-18...t-man-like-me-cares-about-transgender-rights/
> 
> This too.



#Here’s why I take transgender issues personally…
Because I or someone I love might get cancer at some point, and a trans person who is capable of discovering the cure is otherwise occupied defending their right to exist.
I live in a world that needs leadership, and a smart, tireless trans person who should maybe be President is busy arguing that they deserve basic human respect.
I want to drive a fucking flying car someday, and the trans person who might invent it is stuck responding to Guardian editorials that treat them like they’re subhuman.#

Fuckin priceless.

That's why I've been calling for the immediate release of Ian Brady and Peter Sutcliffe for decades. I kinda suspect that between the two of them, they might be able to breed a three-legged chicken that can whistle Danny Boy while playing the spoons.


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 19, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> #Here’s why I take transgender issues personally…
> Because I or someone I love might get cancer at some point, and a trans person who is capable of discovering the cure is otherwise occupied defending their right to exist.
> I live in a world that needs leadership, and a smart, tireless trans person who should maybe be President is busy arguing that they deserve basic human respect.
> I want to drive a fucking flying car someday, and the trans person who might invent it is stuck responding to Guardian editorials that treat them like they’re subhuman.#
> ...


 
That fella is definitely taking the piss....'I might never invent a process that turns carbon emissions into funk soul hits of the 70's.'


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## BigTom (Jan 19, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> #Here’s why I take transgender issues personally…
> Because I or someone I love might get cancer at some point, and a trans person who is capable of discovering the cure is otherwise occupied defending their right to exist.
> I live in a world that needs leadership, and a smart, tireless trans person who should maybe be President is busy arguing that they deserve basic human respect.
> I want to drive a fucking flying car someday, and the trans person who might invent it is stuck responding to Guardian editorials that treat them like they’re subhuman.#
> ...


 
That's not analagous at all, Sutcliffe, Brady and that have shown themselves to be cunts of the highest order, they are locked up because they are serial killers, and it can be quite reasonably shown that all serial killers are a danger to other people and should be locked up.
The same is not true of trans people (substituting danger for whatever is right in terms of transphobia), and whilst it's a vomitsome argument with a serious defect - which is that you can suppose a trans person who doesn't discover the cure for cancer could still be a fine target for abuse - I don't think your objection to it is right.


----------



## ymu (Jan 19, 2013)

Nice one said:


> you talking about this thread?


No.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 19, 2013)

BigTom said:


> That's not analagous at all, Sutcliffe, Brady and that have shown themselves to be cunts of the highest order, they are locked up because they are serial killers, and it can be quite reasonably shown that all serial killers are a danger to other people and should be locked up.
> The same is not true of trans people (substituting danger for whatever is right in terms of transphobia), and whilst it's a vomitsome argument with a serious defect - which is that you can suppose a trans person who doesn't discover the cure for cancer could still be a fine target for abuse - I don't think your objection to it is right.



No. It isn't. I was pointing out the weakness of that line of argument by taking it to an extreme. In fact, it's not really an argument at all and I kinda hope the guy was takin the piss. That said, there's no reason to suspect that serial killers are any less likely to be superstar oncologists than trans people...or indeed transgender serial killers.


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## Frances Lengel (Jan 19, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> No. It isn't. I was pointing out the weakness of that line of argument by taking it to an extreme. In fact, it's not really an argument at all and I kinda hope the guy was takin the piss. That said, there's no reason to suspect that serial killers are any less likely to be superstar oncologists than trans people...or indeed transgender serial killers.


 


Fuck me.

Not that I'm a fan - Thomas Harris is a proper reactionary twat.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 19, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> No. It isn't. I was pointing out the weakness of that line of argument by taking it to an extreme. In fact, it's not really an argument at all and I kinda hope the guy was takin the piss. That said, there's no reason to suspect that serial killers are any less likely to be superstar oncologists than trans people...or indeed transgender serial killers.


 
I think your extreme takes it too far away from the original tbh, "serial killers" as a group is a very different prospect to "trans people" as a group, I don't think it's reasonable to take the argument that way, since everyone in the group "serial killers" has done something which is reasonably considered to be worth locking people up for, the same cannot be said of the group "trans people" who may or may not have done things which are worth abusing them for, but if they have done something that's worth abusing them for then it won't be for being trans, it'll be something else they've done.
Very easy to dismiss your line of argument I think, better ways to argue against their line - trans people are people and therefore deserve to be treated the same as other people, regardless of what they may or have achieved. A trans person who does an admin job in an office is just as valuable as a trans person who discovers the cure for cancer, and just as worthy (? that word sounds horrible) of not facing abuse for being a trans person.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 19, 2013)

BigTom said:


> I think your extreme takes it too far away from the original tbh, "serial killers" as a group is a very different prospect to "trans people" as a group, I don't think it's reasonable to take the argument that way, since everyone in the group "serial killers" has done something which is reasonably considered to be worth locking people up for, the same cannot be said of the group "trans people" who may or may not have done things which are worth abusing them for, but if they have done something that's worth abusing them for then it won't be for being trans, it'll be something else they've done.
> Very easy to dismiss your line of argument I think, better ways to argue against their line - trans people are people and therefore deserve to be treated the same as other people, regardless of what they may or have achieved. A trans person who does an admin job in an office is just as valuable as a trans person who discovers the cure for cancer, and just as worthy (? that word sounds horrible) of not facing abuse for being a trans person.



Well I couldn't fault any of that...and nor do I wish to in any way disparage trans people. My beef is with the mode of argument...namely group X should not suffer discrimination because a member of group X may go on to perform outstanding feat Y.
This argument is a fuckin mess...and as you say it should instead take the form: group X should not suffer discrimination because every member of group X is also a member of humanity and thus entitled to the same considerations as every other...etc.

Nor am I trying to suggest there's any correlation between being trans and being a serial killer any more than I'm trying to suggest there's any correlation between being trans and not being a serial killer. In fact, I'd rather get away from any discussion of distinct groups altogether because identity politics boils my fuckin piss.

However, your suggestion that taking arguments to extremes is somehow suspect does go against literally centuries of the employment of reduction ad absurdum...and I'd resist the suggestion that it isn't a valuable tool in the critique of identity.


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## BigTom (Jan 19, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Well I couldn't fault any of that...and nor do I wish to in any way disparage trans people. My beef is with the mode of argument...namely group X should not suffer discrimination because a member of group X may go on to perform outstanding feat Y.
> This argument is a fuckin mess...and as you say it should instead take the form: group X should not suffer discrimination because every member of group X is also a member of humanity and thus entitled to the same considerations as every other...etc.
> 
> Nor am I trying to suggest there's any correlation between being trans and being a serial killer any more than I'm trying to suggest there's any correlation between being trans and not being a serial killer. In fact, I'd rather get away from any discussion of distinct groups altogether because identity politics boils my fuckin piss.
> ...


 
Yeah, just to be clear I didn't think or mean to suggest that you were disparaging trans people or comparing them to serial killers or anything like that, I just thought your line of argument against that stuff was seriously flawed - that's not to say that reductio ad absurdum is not useful in all cases, I just think it doesn't work here - and tbh, often it goes too far and doesn't really illuminate a flaw in the argument that is being made.

The argument is indeed a mess and on that we totally agree.


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## sihhi (Jan 19, 2013)

BigTom said:


> trans people are people and therefore deserve to be treated the same as other people


 
This is where it gets complicated. What does 'the same' mean?  For all the heat and fire since Moore-gate I've seen close to no discussion about what that means.

In the case of homosexuality, it's easier - in a nutshell - homosexuals should be able to partner, marry and adopt the same as everyone else. 

For transgender issues, the main area of demands - overwhelmingly dominated by male-to-female transgender people (only about 5% of transgender individuals are female to male)

1 for males to be able to reassign themselves legally as female - and then even demand the right to work in female only rape counselling centres (a case in Canada).

2 for trans-gender children to receive hormonal drugs on the NHS (some even demand operations on the NHS at this early stage - even though there are estimates of 1 in 10 seeking re-surgery after the initial genital surgery because the root causes of the desire to 'be a woman' aren't resolved). 
The operation can lead to complications (and obviously leaves the patient infertile) which leads onto

3 for trans-gender people to have uninhibited access to women-only feminist conferences and feminist spaces - even ones that are about child-birth, gynaecological health and child-rearing (I wish they didn't have to be women's issues but they are).

What is the same and what isn't - what's it being compared with? It's complex and confusing - unlike the glibness of that article - everyone can agree the Guardian article not an editorial as it claims was wrong where does that leave things?


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## BigTom (Jan 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This is where it gets complicated. What does 'the same' mean? For all the heat and fire since Moore-gate I've seen close to no discussion about what that means.
> 
> In the case of homosexuality, it's easier - in a nutshell - homosexuals should be able to partner, marry and adopt the same as everyone else.
> 
> ...


 
Yeah definitely, and I don't have any real answers to that. It's complex and confusing pretty much gets it I think, all I can say is that it feels right to me that a transwoman is a woman, a transman is a man, and that they were born in the other body is irrelevant to anything other than that there might be medical stuff which is particular to trans people that I have no idea about I suppose.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 19, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Yeah definitely, and I don't have any real answers to that. It's complex and confusing pretty much gets it I think, all I can say is that it feels right to me that a transwoman is a woman, a transman is a man, and that _they were born in the other body is irrelevant_ to anything other than that there might be medical stuff which is particular to trans people that I have no idea about I suppose.


 
Well to some women on perfectly valid grounds it's not and I can accept that, it's a shame because Burchill's article has done any critical thinking about the issue a massive disservice.


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## ymu (Jan 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This is where it gets complicated. What does 'the same' mean? For all the heat and fire since Moore-gate I've seen close to no discussion about what that means.
> 
> In the case of homosexuality, it's easier - in a nutshell - homosexuals should be able to partner, marry and adopt the same as everyone else.
> 
> ...


1. Same deal as any other woman making those demands.

2. That's unethical doctors. I had a brief fling with an FTM 16 year old who had been started on hormones before he was told about what the surgery involved. He was stuck in limbo with a deep voice, hairy face and big tits. This was 25 years ago, but there's a case coming up to court about these sorts of medical abuses now.

3. So the fuck what? They're women. I have no more right to say what a 'real' woman is than Netanyahu has to say what a 'real' Jew believes.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This is where it gets complicated. What does 'the same' mean?  For all the heat and fire since Moore-gate I've seen close to no discussion about what that means.
> 
> In the case of homosexuality, it's easier - in a nutshell - homosexuals should be able to partner, marry and adopt the same as everyone else.
> 
> ...



I'd have thought 'the same' would mean should expect to live their lives without gratuitous abuse based on their situation. But you're right. Their 'situation' encompasses exactly the issues you mention. But it seems that some or most trans people and others would regard your raising these issues as constituting de facto abuse purely by dint of the implicit suggestion that they weren't wholly or authentically female. I wouldn't know where the fuck to start. You see I've sympathy with the arguments that gender's a) a social construct b) a neurobiological state and c) a spectrum. Nor have I ever seen a convincing argument that I should favour any of the three above another.

Where I really do have a problem is 1) with the idea that as a 'cis male' my speculation on the topic is in and of itself irrelevant, worthless and an abuse of my 'privilege'
2) with anyone, even trans people, who dogmatically demand that their definition of gender trumps all others...often out of purely theoretical considerations.

However...and no doubt I'm abusing my privilege and demonstrating a distinct lack of nuance in saying this...the idea that 'biology' doesn't come into it strikes me as ridiculous...sometimes you've gotta go with your gut.


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## sihhi (Jan 19, 2013)

ymu said:


> 1. _Same deal_ as any other woman making those demands.
> 
> 2. That's unethical doctors. I had a brief fling with an FTM 16 year old who had been started on hormones before he was told about what the surgery involved. He was stuck in limbo with a deep voice, hairy face and big tits. This was 25 years ago, but there's a case coming up to court about these sorts of medical abuses now.
> 
> 3. So the fuck what? _They're women_. I have no more right to say what a 'real' woman is than Netanyahu has to say what a 'real' Jew believes.


 
I don't know enough to take a side in the dispute. I've read parts of what Bindel has written and the responses at the time by Kaveney with the whole Stonewall picket affair and I'm unable to come to a conclusion. Some women feminists like Bindel (and others) do not consider trans women women in the same way as other women. 
It's not something that's only 25 years ago, something similar to your anecdote happens today
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/britains-youngest-sex-swap-patient-wants-1403321

What I'm saying is that the Suzanne Moore affair has left me even more confused and bewildered by both sides - some of those tweets are horrific and Burchill's response was, well, Burchill.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 19, 2013)

ymu said:


> 3. So the fuck what? They're women. I have no more right to say what a 'real' woman is than Netanyahu has to say what a 'real' Jew believes.



Yeah, but you just did. Unless you're drawing a distinction between 'women' and 'real women'. You might as well say: "if they want to call themselves women, then they're women...there's no discussion to be had"...in the middle of a discussion about what is a woman.

I'm not disagreeing even. I'm happy to consider some who thinks of themselves a woman as just that. But I wouldn't consider that my view to be definitive or shut down valid debate.


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## sihhi (Jan 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> For transgender issues, the main area of demands


 
I want to clarify that my post was about the main area of demands that _cause friction with feminists_.
Opposition to bullying in schools, discrimination in employment and access to all services is something that should be uncontroversial.


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## ymu (Jan 19, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I'd have thought 'the same' would mean should expect to live their lives without gratuitous abuse based on their situation. But you're right. Their 'situation' encompasses exactly the issues you mention. But it seems that some or most trans people and others would regard your raising these issues as constituting de facto abuse purely by dint of the implicit suggestion that they weren't wholly or authentically female. I wouldn't know where the fuck to start. You see I've sympathy with the arguments that gender's a) a social construct b) a neurobiological state and c) a spectrum. Nor have I ever seen a convincing argument that I should favour any of the three above another.
> 
> Where I really do have a problem is 1) with the idea that as a 'cis male' my speculation on the topic is in and of itself irrelevant, worthless and an abuse of my 'privilege'
> 2) with anyone, even trans people, who dogmatically demand that their definition of gender trumps all others...often out of purely theoretical considerations.
> ...


 
1. As a 'cis male' it is impossible for you to know what it is like to be a woman, cis or otherwise. It's not so much about not being allowed to have an opinion, as having the courtesy to "shut the fuck up and listen" first. And that goes for anti-trans 'feminists' too; they speak for very few women anyway.

2. There's more than one side to that coin. My take on it is that trans women cannot know what it is like to have been born and brought up a girl/woman. They are frequently shocked at how they are treated once they start living as a woman. That will create problems with communication and unspoken assumptions carried over from being brought up male, but it's not like cis-women are a monolith with identical experiences simply because they are women. They are living as women and are experiencing most if not all the problems cis-women face plus a bunch of others to boot; they have a unique insight into how sexism affects their lives which cis-women cannot be fully aware of and could gain a great deal from learning about; denying a tiny minority the support of the sisterhood and leaving them to fight their own battles is a cunt's trick.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 19, 2013)

ymu said:


> 1. As a 'cis male' it is impossible for you to know what it is like to be a woman, cis or otherwise. It's not so much about not being allowed to have an opinion, as having the courtesy to "shut the fuck up and listen" first.



Erm...hang on. Couple of points.
1) I thought I'd pretty much made clear I'd 'checked my privilege' on this one and acknowledged my lack of expertise.
2) as regards 'listen first', I along with many others I suppose have followed this extensively lately. Are you saying, my opinion's never valid?...or do I need say 10 years' worth of listening...maybe a Phd..before venturing an opinion? You seem to be telling me this is a closed area of discourse for me...and I'm rejecting that line outta principle, as I'd reject any area of discourse as closed to anyone...as part of my rejection of identity politics as a whole.

Incidentally, I wasn't lookin for a row...and if I've pissed anyone off, I'm regretful about that. But, while acknowledging trans people have a far tougher daily battle with the world than I do, I'm stickin up for my right to talk about anything.


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## smokedout (Jan 19, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> You see I've sympathy with the arguments that gender's a) a social construct b) a neurobiological state and c) a spectrum. Nor have I ever seen a convincing argument that I should favour any of the three above another.


 
none of these things really precludes the others from being true


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## sihhi (Jan 19, 2013)

This was the submission 





Ronnie Rubashov said:


> as regards 'listen first', I along with many others I suppose have followed this extensively lately


 
More importantly _who_ to listen to.

I've been trying to listen ever since the Stonewall award to Julie Bindel and the picket of the awards ceremony, and it seems to me there are (sometime quite fundamentally) opposed and clashing facts and views. Sheila Jeffreys sees the "transgendering of children" (her phrase) as a harmful cultural practice. (Some even compare it to ritalin over-use - I think that's too far but Im not sure). Meta magazine, at least what I gathered from the Lees-Bindel interview, think it's acceptable because the age of puberty, at least in the west, is going down.


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## ymu (Jan 19, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Erm...hang on. Couple of points.
> 1) I thought I'd pretty much made clear I'd 'checked my privilege' on this one and acknowledged my lack of expertise.
> 2) as regards 'listen first', I along with many others I suppose have followed this extensively lately. Are you saying, my opinion's never valid?...or do I need say 10 years' worth of listening...maybe a Phd..before venturing an opinion? You seem to be telling me this is a closed area of discourse for me...and I'm rejecting that line outta principle, as I'd reject any area of discourse as closed to anyone...as part of my rejection of identity politics as a whole.
> 
> Incidentally, I wasn't lookin for a row...and if I've pissed anyone off, I'm regretful about that. But, while acknowledging trans people have a far tougher daily battle with the world than I do, I'm stickin up for my right to talk about anything.


1. "Shut the fuck up and listen" was not aimed at you personally. It's a quote from a blog written by a bloke about his 'lightbulb moment', realising just how different the world is for women. (A workmate asked him to walk her to her car late at night and he was wtf?  until he thought about it.)

2. Again, I'm not having a pop at you, I am trying to answer your questions. Some men get short shrift because they assert their own opinion repeatedly regardless of what the women in the conversation are telling them. You rarely see a feminist on here take exception to posts by people like Violent Panda or kabbes, because they don't do this. (Apologies to all the other great posters I've not name-checked.)


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 19, 2013)

smokedout said:


> none of these things really precludes the others from being true



No indeed. And I also notice I missed d) that gender is self defined which again isn't mutually exclusive with the others.


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## ymu (Jan 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This was the submission
> 
> More importantly _who_ to listen to.
> 
> I've been trying to listen ever since the Stonewall award to Julie Bindel and the picket of the awards ceremony, and it seems to me there are (sometime quite fundamentally) opposed and clashing facts and views. Sheila Jeffreys sees the "transgendering of children" (her phrase) as a harmful cultural practice. (Some even compare it to ritalin over-use - I think that's too far but Im not sure). Meta magazine, at least what I gathered from the Lees-Bindel interview, think it's acceptable because the age of puberty, at least in the west, is going down.


This is a very good, if brief, history which makes some interesting points which bear on this question:  When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?

Can't really quote from it because the relevance to this topic kind of builds throughout. And lays the blame squarely on capitalism, obv.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 19, 2013)

ymu said:


> 1. "Shut the fuck up and listen" was not aimed at you personally. It's a quote from a blog written by a bloke about his 'lightbulb moment', realising just how different the world is for women. (A workmate asked him to walk her to her car late at night and he was wtf?  until he thought about it.)
> 
> 2. Again, I'm not having a pop at you, I am trying to answer your questions. Some men get short shrift because they assert their own opinion repeatedly regardless of what the women in the conversation are telling them. You rarely see a feminist on here take exception to posts by people like Violent Panda or kabbes, because they don't do this. (Apologies to all the other great posters I've not name-checked.)



Yeah...sorry about that...wasn't sure if you were havin a go or not and, unfortunately, I've always been a get-your-retaliation-in-first type...dunno why, it's never done me any favours.
As for point 2, I can see that but my issue is not with feminism per se or transgender politics, it's with identity politics in a larger sense, which...and I know this is to some extent a generalisation...seems to be the preserve of the middle-class pseudo-left who appear to think we live in a 'post-class' era, and lumps me in with the chairman of Goldman Sachs as a straight white ultra privileged cis male. That fucks me off cos it's a ridiculous state of affairs and the categorisation is patently useless since it lacks any coherence with reality. In fact, I can't see any purpose to it other than to allow the likes of Laurie Penny to write shit like "we on the left have always...." as though the 'we' placed her within some unbroken continuity of working class struggle. In this sense, identity politics is a cynical vehicle of appropriation.


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## Balbi (Jan 19, 2013)

Power and platforms are the key to differentiating. 

Sorry, been out in the snow playing.


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## ymu (Jan 19, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Yeah...sorry about that...wasn't sure if you were havin a go or not and, unfortunately, I've always been a get-your-retaliation-in-first type...dunno why, it's never done me any favours.
> As for point 2, I can see that but my issue is not with feminism per se or transgender politics, it's with identity politics in a larger sense, which...and I know this is to some extent a generalisation...seems to be the preserve of the middle-class pseudo-left who appear to think we live in a 'post-class' era, and lumps me in with the chairman of Goldman Sachs as a straight white ultra privileged cis male. That fucks me off cos it's a ridiculous state of affairs and the categorisation is patently useless since it lacks any coherence with reality. In fact, I can't see any purpose to it other than to allow the likes of Laurie Penny to write shit like "we on the left have always...." as though the 'we' placed her within some unbroken continuity of working class struggle. In this sense, identity politics is a cynical vehicle of appropriation.


We've done this a few times. This is probably the clearest explanation I've managed of what I am trying to say, with help from Frances who says the first part of it. (from another thread):



ymu said:


> Frances Lengel said:
> 
> 
> > ...
> ...


----------



## smokedout (Jan 19, 2013)

incidentally if anyone fancies a twitter hate mob then everyone's having a go @PhilipHensher over this piece of shit

he stropped off last night, but might be back


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 19, 2013)

smokedout said:


> incidentally if anyone fancies a twitter hate mob then everyone's having a go @PhilipHensher over this piece of shit
> 
> he stropped off last night, but might be back


 
The same thick cunt who said an English Vice-Roy should be appointed to run Afghanistan


----------



## smokedout (Jan 19, 2013)

oh this ones going to be fun




> For once, we had glorious weather on Saturday for Gay Pride. I walked and partied with two dozen friends; we had a total ball, and kept bumping into old friends and making new ones. The whole thing ended with everyone dancing their socks off in Soho Square.
> 
> Going home, I'd more or less forgotten about the England game; it was startling, after all that good humour, to come up against an ugly crowd, throwing rubbish bins and yelling obscenities. One man had been hit by a bottle, and blood was pouring down his face and shirt.
> 
> Let's see. In the course of the day, we came across a group of Christians, bearing placards protesting in the most critical terms. What do you think they felt strongly against? The mindless infliction of violence because of a football result? Or a lot of people having a harmless time in the sun, celebrating their community in a way which couldn't possibly hurt anyone else? Yup, you got it in one.


 
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...ory-repeats-itself-in-afghanistan-406662.html


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## smokedout (Jan 19, 2013)

> There is an immense saving to be made, however, and it has to be faced, sooner or later. In my view, the railways are overstaffed to a huge degree. A third of employees could be sacked with no effect on services whatsoever.
> 
> I travel regularly on First Great Western trains down to Exeter from London, and from Exeter to Topsham. At Exeter Central, there are always four people standing at the ticket barriers. What are they doing? One of them seems to be explaining how to place your ticket in the machine. Another is offering to sell you tickets. The other two don't seem to be doing anything. Half a mile away, at Exeter St Davids, there are four more people standing at another set of ticket barriers. God knows why, or why a town the size of Exeter needs two fully staffed railway stations.
> 
> ...


----------



## sihhi (Jan 19, 2013)

smokedout said:


> oh this ones going to be fun


 

Hensher the hero of 2011:

I'm a bleeding-heart liberal - so, what am I to make of these sickening scenes?

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...o-make-of-these-sickening-scenes-2337148.html




> The riots of 1981, most commentators and thinking people would have told you, were the product of rage among the underclasses, the unemployed, the young whose future was in the process of being destroyed. Who, in this apocalyptic scenario, could think primarily of the shopkeepers?
> Thirty years later, to a certain degree, it was all about shops. The liberal response to riot, disorder and violence is to withhold blame, and look for causes. Other people might call for floggings at the first sign of a broken window, a rude word called across a street. But we liberals try always to see how far deprivation of culture or means might have led to what must surely be a sign of distress at some level. Understand and improve is the liberal's motto, not isolate and protect.
> But it was so hard to see what distress was driving the destruction, and the looters were highly selective in their acquisitions. The first targets, at every site, were the sites of teenage desire: sportswear shops and electrical goods emporiums. One of the most startling images of the early stages of the riots was of Shereka Leigh, a 22-year-old woman, apparently taking some trainers out of the box in Tottenham and trying them on in the street. "Crap trainers, too," a friend said, rather missing the point.
> At the riots at Clapham Junction, every shop in the precinct was targeted and attacked – except Waterstone's bookshop. What was the liberal mind to make of a riot which looked like shopping by other means?


 



> The liberal urge to understand, explain, improve and cure ran up against a problem that did not exist in 1981: there just was no unified cause. We stayed away from Mark Duggan, posing with fingers in a silly revolver pose, as a proximate cause. Did anything unite the looters except, mostly, their youth? A looter strikes directly at something the liberal holds dear, the community. It took Brixton years to recover from the riots. Who, now, would open a shop in Tottenham, or could afford to? Businesses will be bankrupted, or just withdraw quietly. Useful chain stores will wonder whether that part of town is worth their investment. And a part of a city slowly withers."
> 
> Throw the book at them," I said on social media, and a brave, liberal soul took me on. Yes, she said: throw literacy at them, libraries, reading. That will do them the world of good; prison will damage them further. What the liberal was faced with in August 2011 was a frightening abyss: a catastrophic action motivated, perhaps, by the shallowest and least idealistic of desires; an action of destruction and selfishness which seemed, for a moment, universal rather than the motions of an angry – perhaps rightly angry – minority. What to do about that? No one had the faintest idea. All we can do is what we do best – just go on talking.


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## ymu (Jan 19, 2013)

_I travel so much I know everything about the railways. Revenue protection and passenger safety? Pfft! And of course you don't need a security guard on hand when a ticket machine is being opened up. The useful bloke can look after himself, especially when the only other person at the station is busy selling tickets and dealing with dodgy turnstiles and making sure disabled passengers and those with luggage can access the platform._

(I know fuck all about the railways, so I hope I'm not miles off da troof. )


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## free spirit (Jan 19, 2013)

yep - bang would go any hope of passenger assistance for the elderly and infirm, or proper breaks for the staff on shift, or the ability to cope with more than 1 train at once etc.


----------



## ymu (Jan 19, 2013)

It's almost as if they've never done a real job.


----------



## rekil (Jan 20, 2013)

Useless.

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
Hey Twitter, help me out. I'm looking for lectures and documentaries on the Paris Commune available online. And related things...


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 20, 2013)

The case of the person who thought the world revolved around her:

http://www.penny-red.com/post/41043615041/things-for-eyes-20-01-2012-love-the-left-hurt-and


----------



## love detective (Jan 20, 2013)

^^ Word count

I - 21 times
me/my/mine - 10 times


----------



## weepiper (Jan 20, 2013)

copliker said:


> Useless.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Hey Twitter, help me out. I'm looking for lectures and documentaries on the Paris Commune available online. And related things...


 
what do you expect from someone who comes from an intern culture? You get your unpaid minions to do the legwork.


----------



## tufty79 (Jan 20, 2013)

copliker said:


> Useless.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Hey Twitter, help me out. I'm looking for lectures and documentaries on the Paris Commune available online. And related things...


is this for the talk she's doing on tuesday? bit late, innit?


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 20, 2013)

love detective said:


> ^^ Word count
> 
> I - 21 times
> me/my/mine - 10 times


 
She doesn't even no what year it is either!


----------



## love detective (Jan 20, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> She doesn't even no what year it is either!


 
well it's been a right humdinger of a fortnight by all accounts


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 20, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> The case of the person who thought the world revolved around her:
> 
> http://www.penny-red.com/post/41043615041/things-for-eyes-20-01-2012-love-the-left-hurt-and


 


> Between the SWP’s rape-court scandal and Julie Burchill’s transmisogyny, I’ve been working hard in my essaying and reading this week in particular to negotiate some useful ways forward


 
Don't know about anyone else but I can't wait for LP to tell me, along with the oppressed masses of the world, what these useful ways forward might be. I'm sure it won't be anything predictable like embracing identity politics or anything like that.


----------



## love detective (Jan 20, 2013)

Is she still making you do a weekly call?

is essaying even a word?


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Don't know about anyone else but I can't wait for LP to tell me, along with the oppressed masses of the world, what these useful ways forward might be. I'm sure it won't be anything predictable like embracing identity politics or anything like that.


 
Pretty sure that her main agenda is the way forward for her career.The rest of the world is but a convenient stepping stone for me-me-me.

 Apparently if you turn up to her lecture on Pussy Riot and the Paris Commune you become more qualified :


> This event has been certified for CPD purposes by the Continuing Professional Development Certification Service


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 20, 2013)

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/miliband/Home.aspx

#Public Lecture: Women, Protest and the Nature of Female Rebellion

Speaker: Ms Laurie Penny

Date: Tuesday 22nd January 2013
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

'A talk about women, protest and the nature of female rebellion, when that rebellion must take place on structural as well as personal fronts to be effective. Taking in Pussy Riot and the 2011 uprisings and stretching back to the Paris Commune, a contextual look at how the rage and pride of women is personal, political - and endlessly powerful.'#

So she agrees to give a lecture...on something she knows fuck all about...then panics and asks for help. She's a fuckin fraud...who it seems can't even use google. As it goes, I know plenty about the Paris Commune...cos I've read my Marx...unlike her, it seems, the 'voice of the left'... who regularly lectures on 'Marxism'. 

You couldn't make this shit up. But luckily you don't have to.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 20, 2013)

She likes posing with lit cigarettes rather than Amber Leaf rollies these days.


----------



## rekil (Jan 20, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> is this for the talk she's doing on tuesday? bit late, innit?


Any old last minute spoofy shit will do - hasn't done her much harm thus far.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 20, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Pretty sure that her main agenda is the way forward for her career.The rest of the world is but a convenient stepping stone for me-me-me.
> 
> Apparently if you turn up to her lecture on Pussy Riot and the Paris Commune you become more qualified :


 
Hang on, you can get a qualification for going to a talk for which it appears LP intends to do all her research on youtube? On a topic that's almost certainly covered with more accuracy and in greater depth every week in branch meetings of various lefty and anarcho groups (this is a reflection on the paucity of her analysis, not the strength of theirs).

Fucking hell.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 20, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/miliband/Home.aspx
> 
> #Public Lecture: Women, Protest and the Nature of Female Rebellion
> 
> ...


 
Yeah but you're not really qualified to talk about Marxism cos you're white and male. Like Harvey, Kliman and Mattick.


----------



## love detective (Jan 20, 2013)

dont' forget about Goldner


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 20, 2013)

love detective said:


> Is she still making you do a weekly call?
> 
> is essaying even a word?


 
She's neglecting me completely - it's like I don't exist 

Might have to say something racist on twitter to put that right 

Isn't essaying that thing they do when they certify the purity of gold?


----------



## love detective (Jan 20, 2013)

copliker said:


> That any old last minute spoofy shit will do hasn't done her much harm thus far.


 
Bet she was disappointed when she found out Les Mis wasn't about the Paris Commune


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 20, 2013)

love detective said:


> dont' forget about Goldner


 
Who?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 20, 2013)

Ah, those 'you're not qualified to talk about that, I went on such and such a course' twats, as well.


----------



## love detective (Jan 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Who?


 
wasn't he the fourth member of the panel?


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Hang on, you can get a qualification for going to a talk for which it appears LP intends to do all her research on youtube? On a topic that's almost certainly covered with more accuracy and in greater depth every week in branch meetings of various lefty and anarcho groups (this is a reflection on the paucity of her analysis, not the strength of theirs).
> 
> Fucking hell.


 
Yes but those lefty and anarcho groups are still soul searching about transphobia and sexism


----------



## agricola (Jan 20, 2013)

love detective said:


> is essaying even a word?


 
Dunno, assaying is, but that word has links to titration so it may be sexist and therefore I dont want to mention it.


----------



## love detective (Jan 20, 2013)

they should seriously ration the amount of tits around and not in a sexist way


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yeah but you're not really qualified to talk about Marxism cos you're white and male. Like Harvey, Kliman and Mattick.



Obviously...cos Marx was a woman from Brighton who went to public school and Oxford...so that 'discourse' is outta bounds for the likes of me. I should learn my place and defer to my betters. It's football, Stella, Asda's cider and woodwork for me. I'm gettin a bit uppity again and, for that, I'm truly sorry.


----------



## agricola (Jan 20, 2013)

love detective said:


> they should seriously ration the amount of tits around and not in a sexist way


 
reactionary titrants are the bane of the assaying world


----------



## rekil (Jan 20, 2013)

agricola said:


> Dunno, assaying is, but that word has links to titration so it may be sexist and therefore I dont want to mention it.


The "Winkler" Titration method. Could it be any more phallic and patriarchy?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 20, 2013)

copliker said:


> The "Winkler" Titration method. Could it be any more phallic and patriarchy?
> 
> View attachment 27843



Yeah...if it missed the bottle, splashed all over the floor then left the seat up.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 20, 2013)

copliker said:


> Useless.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Hey Twitter, help me out. I'm looking for lectures and documentaries on the Paris Commune available online. And related things...


A 'please' and 'thank you' would be nice if you're expecting other people to trawl the internet doing your research for you. Manners cost nothing.


----------



## ymu (Jan 20, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Pretty sure that her main agenda is the way forward for her career.The rest of the world is but a convenient stepping stone for me-me-me.
> 
> Apparently if you turn up to her lecture on Pussy Riot and the Paris Commune you become more qualified :


The meaningless process known as Continuing Professional Development. Collect your Brownie points here. No way no how is it a qualification. It's a hoop.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 20, 2013)

love detective said:


> Is she still making you do a weekly call?
> 
> *is essaying even a word*?


 
I don't think it is, but I'm not a journo so what do I know.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 20, 2013)

ymu said:


> The meaningless process known as Continuing Professional Development. Collect your Brownie points here. No way no how is it a qualification. It's a hoop.


 
Can you collect hoops?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 20, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Can you collect hoops?


Only hula hoops


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 20, 2013)

love detective said:


> wasn't he the fourth member of the panel?


 
Yeah, it was an attempt at a joke


----------



## ymu (Jan 20, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Can you collect hoops?


It's for people like medics or social workers who are working in a field where your original training is not going to be good enough for a lifetime in work. They're supposed to get a certain number of points a year to prove they're keeping up to date in their field.

So, each and every meaningless crappy meeting vying for attention amongst all the other meaningless crappy meetings applies for as many CPD points as it can possibly justify in order to attract people to their meaningless events. And meaningless events are a great place to hobnob with like-minded ladder-climbers whilst listening to some pretentious wankers droning on about the latest unproven theory you can implement in your shitty practice without giving it a moment's thought.

It can be used intelligently, and to force employers to give time for genuine CPD. But it is easily abused. As evidenced above.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 20, 2013)

ymu said:


> It's for people like medics or social workers who are working in a field where your original training is not going to be good enough for a lifetime in work. They're supposed to get a certain number of points a year to prove they're keeping up to date in their field.
> 
> So, each and every crappy meeting vying for attention applies for as many CPD points as it can possibly justify in order to attract people to their meaningless events. And meaningless events are a great place to hobnob with like-minded ladder climbers whilst listening to some pretentious wankers wanking on about the latest unproven theory you can implement in your shitty practice without giving it a moment's thought.
> 
> It can be used intelligently, and to force employers to give time for genuine CPD. But it is easily abused. As evidenced above.


 
Right, I am not turning up if that is the case. What about the SWP's Marxism , does that qualify?


----------



## ymu (Jan 20, 2013)

It certainly could. I had to apply for points for a meeting once (a meeting that was the first of a series that changed practice worldwide and significantly improved the practice of gynaecological oncology, I hasten to add). Think I googled CPD to work out how to apply. You might have to decide which awarding body is appropriate for the meeting. They will give guidance on how many points per hour for different types of activity. You make up some bullshit to justify maximum pointage, fill in the aplication form and they say OK.


----------



## ymu (Jan 20, 2013)

Here ya go: CPD has a website for all your blagging needs


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 20, 2013)

ymu said:


> Here ya go: CPD has a website for all your blagging needs


 
Cheers. I will get Discokermit to fill it in.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 20, 2013)

ymu said:


> Here ya go: CPD has a website for all your blagging needs


copliker : comrade, surely PD could use this to our advantage?PD could offer CPD courses on all aspects of the works' bomb making


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 20, 2013)

We could run a CPD course that explains the productivity gains working by the workers clock can offer. Obviously we'll leave out the part about it actually making you lose profits by altering the consciousness of your workers, leading to all out indefinite strike action and stuff, or the way it subtly alters all social structures, accelerating the inevitable march towards communism. I think it's a goer and may even cause a revolution as a convenient by-product


----------



## sihhi (Jan 20, 2013)

ymu said:


> _*It's for people like medics or social workers who are working in a field where your original training is not going to be good enough for a lifetime in work*_. They're supposed to get a certain number of points a year to prove they're keeping up to date in their field.
> 
> So, each and every meaningless crappy meeting vying for attention amongst all the other meaningless crappy meetings applies for as many CPD points as it can possibly justify in order to attract people to their meaningless events. And meaningless events are a great place to hobnob with like-minded ladder-climbers whilst listening to some pretentious wankers droning on about the latest unproven theory you can implement in your shitty practice without giving it a moment's thought.
> 
> It can be used intelligently, and to force employers to give time for genuine CPD. But it is easily abused. As evidenced above.


 
It's also for teachers of all sorts and even nursery workers. 

My guess is this talk will be CPD for the teaching PhD students.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 20, 2013)

Would this CPD stuff be suitable for Captain Hurrah?


----------



## ymu (Jan 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It's also for teachers of all sorts and even nursery workers.
> 
> My guess is this talk will be CPD for the teaching PhD students.


Yes. It's for just about every type of professional.

Apart from academics. I think.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 20, 2013)

ymu said:


> Well, yes. It's for just about every type of professional.
> 
> Apart from academics. I think.


 
It used to be called training but that was considered not separate enough from rote workers.

So now teachers often get CPD - management-imposed "discussion points", and admin staff get training - management-imposed "discussion points".


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 20, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Would this CPD stuff be suitable for Captain Hurrah?


 
?


----------



## sihhi (Jan 20, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Right, I am not turning up if that is the case. What about the SWP's Marxism , does that qualify?


 
Skegness used to qualify but Marxism is now a non-CPD compulsory training event.


----------



## ymu (Jan 20, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Cheers. I will get Discokermit to fill it in.


Wonder if MPs can use CPD. I bet loads of them would blag them over to their second main jobs. There's sites you can email-shot the lot of them, I think.


----------



## ymu (Jan 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Skegness used to qualify but Marxism is now a non-CPD compulsory training event.


We need a dislike button.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 20, 2013)

From https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/293114881559908353


> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> In Dublin next week. I've been told to go to a place called....Panty Bar?
> 
> 29m Scarlett Nymph ‏@scarlettnymph
> ...


 
Laurie Penny will be reporting on one of Dublin's smart gay nightclubs, quite central close to the Liffey.

Here's what pisses me off about complaints about people looking at LP's social media. LP uses social media to promote an image of a thrill-seeking, close to the bone revolutionary bringing the word of the alternatives to the 'masses' in the Guardian/New Statesman (epater le bourgeoisie) - social media is, in part, how LP does it. 
If you ignore the public twitter instagram stuff, you're ignoring what's being cultivated. At times it's not too dissimilar from a musician like Olly Murs tweeting people his tour itinerary, length of his stay, so people can tweet him what to do in their home town, although there are important differences.


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> From https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/293114881559908353
> 
> 
> Laurie Penny will be reporting on one of Dublin's smart gay nightclubs, quite central close to the Liffey.
> ...


 
Laurie Penny can sing?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 21, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Laurie Penny can sing?


 
 She's a dab hand at the Internationale, so I hear


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 21, 2013)

Owen Jones wants a new 'movement' on the left, but he can't even get a workers' breakfast of porridge together 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...ft-to-counter-capitalisms-crisis-8459099.html

*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*
So far today I've learned I can't make porridge and my right-wing critics can't read.
*Details*


----------



## Random (Jan 21, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Owen Jones wants a new 'movement' on the left, but he can't even get a workers' breakfast of porridge together
> 
> http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...ft-to-counter-capitalisms-crisis-8459099.html
> 
> ...


Every cook can govern! 

... oh... shit.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 21, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Yeah...sorry about that...wasn't sure if you were havin a go or not and, unfortunately, I've always been a get-your-retaliation-in-first type...dunno why, it's never done me any favours.
> As for point 2, I can see that but my issue is not with feminism per se or transgender politics, it's with identity politics in a larger sense, which...and I know this is to some extent a generalisation...seems to be the preserve of the middle-class pseudo-left who appear to think we live in a 'post-class' era, and lumps me in with the chairman of Goldman Sachs as a straight white ultra privileged cis male. That fucks me off cos it's a ridiculous state of affairs and the categorisation is patently useless since it lacks any coherence with reality. In fact, I can't see any purpose to it other than to allow the likes of Laurie Penny to write shit like "we on the left have always...." as though the 'we' placed her within some unbroken continuity of working class struggle. In this sense, identity politics is a cynical vehicle of appropriation.


 
La Pennionara actually mentioned class in a non post-class way in friday's _New Statesman_.


----------



## killer b (Jan 21, 2013)

how is it possible to not be able to make porridge?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 21, 2013)

you'd have to be some sort of cack-handed fool to not be able to boil some oats in milk ffs


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 21, 2013)

pinch of salt obvs


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 21, 2013)

copliker said:


> Useless.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Hey Twitter, help me out. I'm looking for lectures and documentaries on the Paris Commune available online. And related things...


 
She should just get herself a copy of "On the Paris Commune". It was written by some liberal bloke, I think. Howard Marks?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 21, 2013)

sticking dried fruit in it is the mark of the cunt though


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 21, 2013)

I think Owen Jones was using 100% milk, instead of the workers' ratio of 50:50 milk and water, thereby displaying his petit bourgeois tendencies


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> sticking dried fruit in it is the mark of the cunt though


 
What about chopped sausage?


----------



## cesare (Jan 21, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> I think Owen Jones was using 100% milk, instead of the workers' ratio of 50:50 milk and water, thereby displaying his petit bourgeois tendencies


Petit bourgeois use all water, HACTUALLY


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 21, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> I think Owen Jones was using 100% milk, instead of the workers' ratio of 50:50 milk and water, thereby displaying his petit bourgeois tendencies


 
I wonder what Proletarian Democracy's position(s) is/are on the different milks? Is full-fat a _bourgeois_ affectation, or a necessary part of the workers' diet, to build strength in them for the revolution? Is fully-skimmed a capitalist plot to deprive the workers of adipose deposits?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 21, 2013)

I thought the line that was _milk is murder_ had already been promulgated last week?


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 21, 2013)

_Heifer knows I'm miserable now_.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I wonder what Proletarian Democracy's position(s) is/are on the different milks? Is full-fat a _bourgeois_ affectation, or a necessary part of the workers' diet, to build strength in them for the revolution? Is fully-skimmed a capitalist plot to deprive the workers of adipose deposits?


 

skimmed is theft, reminiscent of Thatchers theft- same price for less of the baic fat needed to fuel the brawny arms of the proletariat. 

Also amphetamine is a capitalist plot to erode your teeth and force you into the uncaring arms of failed doctors


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> What about chopped sausage?


 

savoury porridge is hunnish


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 21, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I thought the line that was _milk is murder_ had already been promulgated last week?


 
It was, but then someone realised that Morrissey had said it, and got worried about PD's credibility being damaged, so it was blamed on "subversive elements that have since been liquidated".


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> savoury porridge is hunnish


 
Slav.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 21, 2013)

what about mamaliga?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 21, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> what about mamaliga?


 

sounds like a scientific name for a portion of the BRAINZ


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> sounds like a scientific name for a portion of the BRAINZ


 
oatmeal porridge from moldova lol, it's nice, got a drunk video of myself somewhere going on about how much i like it


----------



## wtfftw (Jan 21, 2013)

Perfectly possible to fuck up porridge in a microwave.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 21, 2013)

wtfftw said:


> Perfectly possible to fuck up porridge *in a microwave.*


 



only if you are one of those people who leaves it unnatended, like people who think its OK to leave a chip pan unnatended 'I only popped out for a slash'


5 dead in house fire


----------



## wtfftw (Jan 21, 2013)




----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> What about chopped sausage?


 
vom


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 21, 2013)

Hi Twitter

I'm fitting a new clutch. Can someone tell me how to open the bonnet...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 21, 2013)

Hi twitter, supposed to be writing an essay on whether the 1880s marked turning point in thinking on the social question in Britain but I can't be arsed - can someone do it for me?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 21, 2013)

Hi twitter, can somebody copy and paste something into a spreadsheet for me?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 21, 2013)

Hi Twitter

Send me suggestions on how I can come over as a bit more 'prole'...holding a fag and trying to look mean and enigmatic isn't really doin the job.


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 21, 2013)

I want to draw a picture of an identity politics warrior. Does anyone on Twitter know where I could get some crayons?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 21, 2013)

Hi twitter, just laid a massive cable and realised I don't have any bogroll - can someone go and pick some up for me?


----------



## tufty79 (Jan 21, 2013)

have any urban people actually gone to tonight's talk. oh, hang on, it's monday.. are any urban people actually going to tomorrow's talk?
i'm having one of my cursing-being-200-miles-from-london moments. i would absolutely LOVE for someone to ask why she left her homework until almost the night before, and then expected other people to do it for her..


----------



## barney_pig (Jan 21, 2013)

Hi twitter, I have to write a 2000 word phd proposal by next Friday, any ideas?
If it works for her, why not for me?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 21, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> have any urban people actually gone to tonight's talk. oh, hang on, it's monday.. are any urban people actually going to tomorrow's talk?
> i'm having one of my cursing-being-200-miles-from-london moments. i would absolutely LOVE for someone to ask why she left her homework until almost the night before, and then expected other people to do it for her..



It's worse than that. Knowing nothing about the Paris Commune, she has none the less pre-decided it provides ample illustration of "a contextual look at how the rage and pride of women is personal, political - and endlessly powerful." Now, whether it does or not, her analysis cannot be objective since she is bound to arrive at a pre-decided outcome. I think this kinda sums up her approach to 'journalism': she simply 'sees' and says something she'd already decided upon...and that simply isn't journalism. At best it's propaganda and at worst 'fiction'. Either way, considering what happened to Hari, she's living a charmed life.

As it goes, I think her 'reading' of women's participation rests upon a highly tendentious and exaggerated entry on Wikipedia and she's gonna find herself rather disappointed when she drills for detail...not that this'll stop her. 

Do people pay to attend this lecture?


----------



## tufty79 (Jan 21, 2013)

nope.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 21, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> nope.



That's a shame...cos I'm not even going, and I want my money back anyway.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 21, 2013)

I'd pay not to listen to a squeaky toy plate up crowd sourced shit about the paris commune. Mind you, if anyone wants to recc a book on it I''d welcome suggestions. At present I'm only wikeducated on the subject.

the rage will have to wait for another day, I've got too much else on


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 21, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> It's worse than that. Knowing nothing about the Paris Commune, she has none the less pre-decided it provides ample illustration of "a contextual look at how the rage and pride of women is personal, political - and endlessly powerful." Now, whether it does or not, her analysis cannot be objective since she is bound to arrive at a pre-decided outcome. I think this kinda sums up her approach to 'journalism': she simply 'sees' and says something she'd already decided upon...and that simply isn't journalism. At best it's propaganda and at worst 'fiction'. Either way, considering what happened to Hari, she's living a charmed life.
> 
> As it goes, I think her 'reading' of women's participation rests upon a highly tendentious and exaggerated entry on Wikipedia and she's gonna find herself rather disappointed when she drills for detail...not that this'll stop her.
> 
> Do people pay to attend this lecture?


 
I can't help wondering whether chucking her a load of obvious cobblers that could be instantly disproved with a few Google searches, then seeing how much of it is regurgitated as 'fact' might be vaguely interesting.


----------



## Sue (Jan 21, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> I think Owen Jones was using 100% milk, instead of the workers' ratio of 50:50 milk and water, thereby displaying his petit bourgeois tendencies


 
Oh, I was brought up on 100% water and lots of salt...


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 21, 2013)

How _handy_, Mr Mason has just (as in this minute) had this published in history workshop journal:

Why it was Kicking off Then



> Journalist and author Paul Mason shares his fascination with the “unruly women” of the Paris Commune, and describes how digital evidence has begun to enrich the work of historians.
> 
> Almost as soon as the last petrol bomb was thrown, and even as the alleged throwers were being marched through Versailles, stripped to the waist to identify them as female, the ideological battle over the role of women in the Paris Commune of 1871 began.
> 
> ...


 
What's going on here then? See also:



> Paul Mason’s latest book Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere was published by Verso in 2012. His play about the women of the Paris Commune, “Defeat”, is currently in development.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 21, 2013)

Here's what's going on...

Paul Mason on twitter...8 hours ago

@Dymaxion @PennyRed and me in one coffee bar. Certain blogs gonna explode now.

He does the research, writes the book...she uses his stuff...gets him the exposure...win, win...the useful idiot liberal elite scratching each others' backs like there's a fuckin shingles epidemic in Soho

This shite is dishonest, venal and the reason the 'left' is disappearing up its own arse...while the left can't get a fuckin sniff of a comment piece and the beeb won't touch it with a bargepole...cos they never went to Oxbridge and, actually: "they sound a bit Bolshie and are very careless with their aitches and never mention identity."


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 21, 2013)

this is blates a wind up. No-one would post a request for info on a subject like 48 hours before an earth shattering lecture.She is an expert on teh Paris commune anyway im sure.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 21, 2013)

be interesting to see how much of her presentation is lifted straight from her contacts work.


----------



## Firky (Jan 21, 2013)

Paul Mason bought me a Danish pastry. Laurie would never buy me a Danish pastry. 

Anyway. Miss Penny is only doing what she has always done, crowd sourcing research. Sometimes she'll ask whimsically and other times, like the above, quite bluntly. There's nothing wrong with it as such. as a student or when reading upon something you know nothing about... 

Therein lies the problem. Isn't she the go to person, the fountain of knowledge and insight, not her sycophantic followers on twitter?


----------



## cesare (Jan 21, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> How _handy_, Mr Mason has just (as in this minute) had this published in history workshop journal:
> 
> Why it was Kicking off Then
> What's going on here then? See also:



He did the equivalent of her jaunt to Greece etc to write the Kicking Off book. But he's a proper journalist who can also write. I daresay he sees himself as her mentor and she strokes his ego.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 21, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> be interesting to see how much of her presentation is lifted straight from her contacts work.


 
Paul Mason going downhill. He did some fucked up bullshit a year after the riots last summer. There's our people - good or ill - still in jail and it's all a flap to him. Anyone can be as radical as they like about events over a hundred and forty years ago. China's official Communist Party Foreign Comradeship society holds an annual Commune remembrance event. Proper talks proper social history fists in the air so bloody what.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 21, 2013)

cesare said:


> He did the equivalent of her jaunt to Greece etc to write the Kicking Off book. But he's a proper journalist who can also write. I daresay he sees himself as her mentor and she strokes his ego.



You sure someone with an ego like hers strokes other people's?


----------



## cesare (Jan 21, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> You sure someone with an ego like hers strokes other people's?


Sure of it. She uses people.


----------



## rekil (Jan 21, 2013)

Ellie doesn't like Obama and the Dems anymore. No more white house pissups for YOU maybe.

*Ellie Mae O'Hagan* ‏@*MissEllieMae*
All of you fawnmaster generals, dry your eyes after Obama's speech and read this http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/09/obama-drop-blind-devotion …


----------



## Firky (Jan 21, 2013)

What did Paul say last summer, regarding the riots? . Last year is a bit of a blank for me. 

A link will do


----------



## Firky (Jan 21, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> You sure someone with an ego like hers strokes other people's?


Like was said earlier, mobius loop effect.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 21, 2013)

firky said:


> What did Paul say last summer, regarding the riots? . Last year is a bit of a blank for me.
> 
> A link will do


 
It was just a superficial lame Newsnight piece I can't find it.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/books-poetry/interviews/kicking-off-the-revolution.16877788 

Unless this above is a hatchet job from the Sunday Herald, Paul Mason's approach shares a lot of similarities with Laurie Penny's ideas.




> While Twitter and Facebook have changed "the dynamics of protest", the protesters are changing too. The rigidities of the old Left – the seemingly endless marches, the inky newspapers – have given way to a new, mobile, educated generation disillusioned with a system that offers little prospect of stable employment. These "graduates with no future" – point number one on that seminal Newsnight blog – occupy a vanguard role in Mason's analysis: the similarities between the young, secular liberals in Tahrir Square, Cairo, and the occupiers in University College London, he argues, are greater than their differences.
> 
> "This generation was already different – they live in a networked world. Their motto is 'information wants to be free'. Now they find that their futures have been dashed, the jobs they were taught to expect aren't there any more." For Mason, the network changes everything: new, decentralised modes of communication allow protesters to directly challenge traditional structures and ideas in new, unexpected ways. Over time the power of the network will, he says, defeat the sclerotic hierarchies of established politics.
> 
> "Mainstream politics stands in danger of quite rapidly being dissolved by the new political mood." A lifelong trade unionist with a passionate commitment to social justice that has defined his career, Mason predicts the changing of the political guard more in expectation than trepidation: "The impact on politics of the networked generation is going to be very interesting. Eventually those on the streets will look to parties and to politics – that's when we'll start to see changes."


 
If they're mobile it's because they're rich - the occupations in the universities were all in the sub-top tier universities the non-Oxbridge - the nervous elite particularly 'worthless' arts subjects (but note not a single examination boycott - the exams being the product of the university the reason why capitalists invest money into the higher. Apparently this means mainstream politics is in danger of quite rapidly being dissolved? Where?


> Mason, whose last book, Meltdown, was subtitled "The end of the age of greed", was preparing to fly to the US, which he contends could be the next country to "kick off". "It will take a lot for the poor of the US to rise up – but if they do, hold on to your hat," he says with the calm assurance of a man who has become an expert in spotting a storm brewing on the global horizon.


 
Hold on to whose hat? Where? 




> Mason says what is happening today is nothing short of a "fundamental change in politics and society". As he writes in the introduction to the book: "We're in the middle of a revolution caused by the near collapse of free-market capitalism combined with an upswing in technical innovation, a surge in desire for individual freedom and a change in consciousness about what freedom means."


 
What near collapse? A crisis in profitability is not near collapse. 'Change in consciousness about what freedom means' - sounds all empty to me.



> The blog became the catalyst for Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere, Mason's lively, thought-provoking 10-chapter jaunt through a world in tumult. "It's not just a set of musings. It's more like a series of glimpses into what's happening around the world," he remarks of the book, which opens in a garbage collector's house in Cairo and ends among slum protestors in Manila, with our engaging correspondent popping up everywhere from Bakersfield, California, to Syntagma Square, Athens, in between.


 
It's plane and hotel hopping in order to breathlessly write from the sidelines, just with more economic input than Laurie Penny.



> From Marx and Smith, Mason moved on to the current generation's most obvious antecedents: the thinkers who inspired the 1968 student revolts, most notably the doyen of Situationism, Guy Debord, who argued that capitalism has replaced genuine social life with an inauthentic "spectacle". "I wish mainstream politicians today had a little more exposure to those sorts of ideas. It might allow them to think a little bit more freely through the problems that they are confronting right now," Mason says. With one ear to the street and another to the boardroom, he knows better than most the sheer scale of the challenge facing politicians today. On the day the Sunday Herald spoke to the broadcaster, the latest bailout deal for Greece hung in the balance, with bankers' bonuses dominating the news headlines.


 
He wants politicians receive exposure to Debord. Why? So that they can better mould and lop the unnecessary bits off spectacle capitalism.


----------



## Firky (Jan 21, 2013)

Ty, will read that later.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 22, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> vom


 
You think that's vomworthy? How about savoury oatmeal with chopped onions and sausage mixed in, served with a fried egg on top?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 22, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> It's worse than that. Knowing nothing about the Paris Commune, she has none the less pre-decided it provides ample illustration of "a contextual look at how the rage and pride of women is personal, political - and endlessly powerful." Now, whether it does or not, her analysis cannot be objective since she is bound to arrive at a pre-decided outcome. I think this kinda sums up her approach to 'journalism': she simply 'sees' and says something she'd already decided upon...and that simply isn't journalism. At best it's propaganda and at worst 'fiction'. Either way, considering what happened to Hari, she's living a charmed life.
> 
> As it goes, I think her 'reading' of women's participation rests upon a highly tendentious and exaggerated entry on Wikipedia and she's gonna find herself rather disappointed when she drills for detail...not that this'll stop her.
> 
> Do people pay to attend this lecture?


 
I'll lend her my copy of "On the Paris Commune" by K. Marx if she asks nicely. It's a russian hardback edition and everything!


----------



## Firky (Jan 22, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> You think that's vomworthy? How about savoury oatmeal with chopped onions and sausage mixed in, served with a fried egg on top?


Sounds ok.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 22, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I'd pay not to listen to a squeaky toy plate up crowd sourced shit about the paris commune. Mind you, if anyone wants to recc a book on it I''d welcome suggestions. At present I'm only wikeducated on the subject.
> 
> the rage will have to wait for another day, I've got too much else on


 
"On the Paris Commune" by Karl Marx, my friend.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 22, 2013)

firky said:


> Sounds ok.


 
It was the onions that did for me. Sausage and egg is fine, but onions for breakfast?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 22, 2013)

Sue said:


> Oh, I was brought up on 100% water and lots of salt...


 
Ah, *ruling* class-style!


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jan 22, 2013)

got to hand it to her, if I'm doing a paper I spend a month of full-time research on it, even when I'm familiar with the topic, because I'm scared of looking like a tit if I get an awkward question at the end... bowling up and chatting shit about one of the most studied events in history off the back of max two days investigation via twitter recommendations is certainly... err... brave.


----------



## cesare (Jan 22, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Ah, *ruling* class-style!


Gruel isn't something I particularly associate with the ruling class, tbf.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 22, 2013)

cesare said:


> Gruel isn't something I particularly associate with the ruling class, tbf.


  MORE?! You ask for MORE


----------



## cesare (Jan 22, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> MORE?! You ask for MORE


Mudfog was Northampton, apparently!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 22, 2013)

cesare said:


> Gruel isn't something I particularly associate with the ruling class, tbf.


 
They totally love to emulate the proletariat, food-wise. Hence all the "peasant" dishes in the pricey restaurants (and subsidised canteens  ) that they use. Eating gruel for breakfast makes 'em feel like they're "connected" to us.

Only by a rope around their neck, with me pulling on the other end, comrade!


----------



## JimW (Jan 22, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> got to hand it to her, if I'm doing a paper I spend a month of full-time research on it, even when I'm familiar with the topic, because I'm scared of looking like a tit if I get an awkward question at the end... bowling up and chatting shit about one of the most studied events in history off the back of max two days investigation via twitter recommendations is certainly... err... brave.


If you'd have gone to the right school and college you too could be an over-confident bullshitter - evens the facts of history bow down before the great adventure that is you and your life for the posh!


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 22, 2013)

Didn't Lo Siento go to a public school?


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jan 22, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Didn't Lo Siento go to a public school?


 I did. Obviously the wrong one!


----------



## cesare (Jan 22, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> They totally love to emulate the proletariat, food-wise. Hence all the "peasant" dishes in the pricey restaurants (and subsidised canteens  ) that they use. Eating gruel for breakfast makes 'em feel like they're "connected" to us.
> 
> Only by a rope around their neck, with me pulling on the other end, comrade!


Is that why brown bread's so expensive?


----------



## JimW (Jan 22, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> I did. Obviously the wrong one!


No money back guarantee if you're not editing a Sunday by your mid twenties?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 22, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> I did. Obviously the wrong one!


 
Being an academic (you are one aren't you?), teaching and researching stuff you're really interested in beats my job, tho.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 22, 2013)

cesare said:


> Is that why brown bread's so expensive?


 
Yep. The guilty desire of the ruling classes to sample the fare of the workers, if not the burden of the workers, makes our daily bread, coarse and brown (and interesting) though it is, more expensive. What better reason to liquidate the bastards! For the workers' Hovis!!!


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 22, 2013)

JimW said:


> If you'd have gone to the right school and college you too could be an over-confident bullshitter - evens the facts of history bow down before the great adventure that is you and your life for the posh!


 

Yup

comprehensive school & eventual low ranked University as an alternative to joining the army/ long term dole  vs being groomed for entry into the elite at a private school does make a big difference to confidence

My mrs does hold the position that if I had gone to private school and used my brains properly, things would have been very different ( not in a good way !) intead of a cynical scowling lefty wanker with a penchant for confrontation.


----------



## ymu (Jan 22, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> Yup
> 
> comprehensive school & eventual low ranked University as an alternative to joining the army/ long term dole vs being groomed for entry into the elite at a private school does make a big difference to confidence
> 
> My mrs does hold the position that if I had gone to private school and used my brains properly, things would have been very different ( not in a good way !) intead of a cynical scowling lefty wanker with a penchant for confrontation.


She's absolutely right. A lot of our administrators would do the job better than a lot of our academics. We know this because they routinely outperform the supposedly well-educated in the training they take part in (we make it open to everyone).

This is partly because the way we do education damages people's ability to critique sources or admit uncertainty. They're afraid of contradicting a published author or admitting that they might not know something. But a lot of it is simply because there is a mismatch between aptitude and career.

Mechanics who should be surgeons and surgeons who should be mechanics. That will only end when we give mechanics the same respect as we give surgeons. Whilst there are these stark differences in the rewards for different sorts of jobs, those who can give their kids advantages in getting them will.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 22, 2013)

LOL



*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
@*OwenJones84* and me are lost in Soho. Thus proving that the left has no sense of direction.
Favorited by ScriptoniteDaily
*Expand* 


 *Reply* 
 *Retweet* 
 *Favorite* 



 *More*


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 22, 2013)

Owen Jones in soho makes me think of a schoolboy in a sex shop


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jan 22, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Being an academic (you are one aren't you?), teaching and researching stuff you're really interested in beats my job, tho.


Not yet, but hopefully one day


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 22, 2013)

So Laurie Penny really is a lost tourist - in more ways than one 

Wonder if Owen was helping her with her speech...?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 22, 2013)

I can't take the piss at all every time I go to london I spend a considerable chunk of my time lost wandering around bewildered and getting in people's way on the tube.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 22, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I can't take the piss at all every time I go to london I spend a considerable chunk of my time lost wandering around bewildered and getting in people's way on the tube.


These cunts _are_ london though.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 22, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> So Laurie Penny really is a lost tourist - in more ways than one
> 
> Wonder if Owen was helping her with her speech...?


 


needs a 40 a day habit to bring it down a few octaves


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 22, 2013)

Has anyone seen this epetition being passed around by Mohammed Ansar? He's tweeting it at Suzanne Moore and a load of other people.

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/43752



> *Full registration for UK users of social media*
> 
> Responsible department: Department for Culture, Media and Sport
> We the undersigned, urge the government and CPS to make UK use of social media subject to full registration.
> ...


 
This is all lustbathers fault.


----------



## fractionMan (Jan 22, 2013)

I blame bonathon jishop.

Also, it'd never work.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 22, 2013)

We should also ban pubs, as they are used for spreading wacist jokes


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 22, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> needs a 40 a day habit to bring it down a few octaves


----------



## Idris2002 (Jan 22, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Has anyone seen this epetition being passed around by Mohammed Ansar? He's tweeting it at Suzanne Moore and a load of other people.
> 
> http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/43752
> 
> ...


 
That crazy lustbather!


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 22, 2013)

I've got about 20,000 words to finish by the start of April. Can I just put out a Twitter appeal to get someone else to do most of the work, claim it under my own byline and then foist it back on them by blaming a carp sub-editor if it turns out to be shite?

No? Thought not...


----------



## Firky (Jan 22, 2013)

Even her new twitter profile pic is effete.

Leopard skin jacket and fag, like a proper working class woman, yeah!!! Or a cheap Bett Lynch, how post-modern and ironic!!


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jan 22, 2013)

JimW said:


> No money back guarantee if you're not editing a Sunday by your mid twenties?


 
Unfortunately not. Of the people I still know who went there and are now nearly 30, there's 2 TEFL teachers (including me), a Morning Star journalist (my brother), a quantity surveyor, a charity worker and a paintball instructor. Although apparently until recently there was someone from my school in the cabinet, so the connections must have been there if I'd known how to work them...


----------



## Sue (Jan 22, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Ah, *ruling* class-style!


 
Scottish parents with four kids and not much money style more like...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 22, 2013)

I don't think I'm in touch with anyone from my old school now but when I was I think I was the most successful (in terms of careers anyway) and I was a pipe fitter back then so hardly a high flyer - rest were either on the dole or minimum wage.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 22, 2013)

Sue said:


> Scottish parents with four kids and not much money style more like...


 
Yeah, but it's how the wealthy scumbags also like to eat it, so they can feel like they're real people, not just fake plastic middle-class scum.


----------



## Sue (Jan 22, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Yeah, but it's how the wealthy scumbags also like to eat it, so they can feel like they're real people, not just fake plastic middle-class scum.


 
Never heard that before. To be honest though find it a bit too rich when people make it with milk (and don't get me started on people who add honey/sugar/banana/anything that's not salt...)


----------



## smokedout (Jan 23, 2013)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
People honestly don't understand the levels of misogyny women face in the British press these days. I do think it's particularly bad in UK.

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
For instance: after my talk today, online speculation about whether @*paulmasonnews* or @*OwenJones84* had actually done the research for me.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 23, 2013)

criticising laurie, the worst misogyny in the world


----------



## Firky (Jan 23, 2013)

smokedout said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> People honestly don't understand the levels of misogyny women face in the British press these days. I do think it's particularly bad in UK.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> For instance: after my talk today, online speculation about whether @*paulmasonnews* or @*OwenJones84* had actually done the research for me.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 23, 2013)




----------



## Belushi (Jan 23, 2013)

Jesus fucking Christ you couldn't make it up


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 23, 2013)

brilliant


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jan 23, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> I've got about 20,000 words to finish by the start of April. Can I just put out a Twitter appeal to get someone else to do most of the work, claim it under my own byline and then foist it back on them by blaming a carp sub-editor if it turns out to be shite?
> 
> No? Thought not...


Actually, you should do it. Get the twitterati to retweet your request to all their mates, weave a thousand soundbites together, and bob's your uncle: 20,000 words


----------



## rekil (Jan 23, 2013)

Ah fuck off.

http://countersummit.eu/category/speakers/

Feb 15th. Organised by SP MEP Paul Murphy. Laura happy to be on the bill with so many smelly white oldies? 



> Speakers
> 
> 
> Owen Jones, Author of “Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class.”
> ...


----------



## Firky (Jan 23, 2013)

> Tommy Sheridan
> 
> Comments Off


----------



## Balbi (Jan 23, 2013)

If this thread's causal to that tweet, then this thread is now Jiminy Cricket


----------



## Random (Jan 23, 2013)

Balbi said:


> If this thread's causal to that tweet, then this thread is now Jiminy Cricket


PR should respond with a link to this thread.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jan 23, 2013)

smokedout said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> People honestly don't understand the levels of misogyny women face in the British press these days. I do think it's particularly bad in UK.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> For instance: after my talk today, online speculation about whether @*paulmasonnews* or @*OwenJones84* had actually done the research for me.


 If you don't want people to speculate about you doing your own research, don't crowd-source tips 2 days before the talk ffs.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 23, 2013)

smokedout said:


> criticising laurie, the worst misogyny in the world


 
Deserving of only the most extreme of comedy punishments...


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 23, 2013)

smokedout said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> People honestly don't understand the levels of misogyny women face in the British press these days. I do think it's particularly bad in UK.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> For instance: after my talk today, online speculation about whether @*paulmasonnews* or @*OwenJones84* had actually done the research for me.


 
What research?


----------



## Belushi (Jan 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What research?


 
Misogynist


----------



## articul8 (Jan 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What research?


 
Yes, she's perfectly capable of recruiting her own unpaid interns to do it


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 23, 2013)

smokedout said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> For instance: after my talk today, online speculation about whether @*paulmasonnews* or @*OwenJones84* had actually done the research for me.


 
Why, was her talk actually interesting, coherent, fact-packed with slightly less rampant self-promotion and containing fewer plugs for various other bits of tat she's hawking round?

I could understand if people noticed the difference, to be fair.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 23, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Yes, she's perfectly capable of recruiting her own unpaid interns to do it


I'm suggesting that reading a few essays _is not research at all._


----------



## rekil (Jan 23, 2013)

PD getting emails from Bangladesh's national garment workers federation. Even crap made-up joke groups are better at feminism and communism than Laura.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 23, 2013)

copliker said:


> PD getting emails from Bangladesh's national garment workers federation. Even crap made-up joke groups are better at feminism and communism than Laura.


Build it and they will come.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jan 23, 2013)

copliker said:


> PD getting emails from Bangladesh's national garment workers federation. Even crap made-up joke groups are better at feminism and communism than Laura.


 
And they say humour doesn't translate cross-culturally.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 23, 2013)

the legacy of pan-chucklism crosses all borders


----------



## weepiper (Jan 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I'm suggesting that reading a few essays _is not research at all._


You, you, you beastly woman-hater!


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 23, 2013)

you have got to be fucking joking. saying somebody didn't do their research is not some sort of sexist slur ffs.


----------



## Red Storm (Jan 23, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Build it and they will come.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 23, 2013)

I imagine when tutors at her posh uni asked for bibliography that was considered weird and stalky.


----------



## cesare (Jan 23, 2013)

weepiper said:


> You, you, you beastly woman-hater!


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 23, 2013)

Has this talk happened then?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 23, 2013)

It kind of makes sense within Penny's own fantasy land. She's pretty much perfect - she knows what's going down at all times. So why would anyone criticise her unless it was because she's a woman?

She's basically the essence of all women congealed into one person so if you criticise her you're having a go at all women.

I think she's genuinely so self-absorbed that she really doesn't think there's any reason, other than misogyny, to criticise her.


----------



## Firky (Jan 23, 2013)

> Laurie Penny @PennyRed
> 
> Like, seriously. We need a campaign. A real one. What should it look like? #takebackthenet it's beyond time for women to Take Back The Net. Cyberspace is real space and it's ours, too. Who's up for it?


 

Like, seriously.


----------



## rekil (Jan 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Has this talk happened then?


Last night. But it nearly didn't go ahead because, hmm. 

*Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin* ‏@*nnimhaoileoin*
The internet is becoming less and less safe for women. Penny nearly had to miss talk bc of online threats. #*lsewomen*


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Has this talk happened then?


----------



## killer b (Jan 23, 2013)

The logic, presumably is that by suggesting Jones or whatsisname did her research (two men) were implying that she isn't able to do it herself cause she's a woman. Tenuous.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I'm suggesting that reading a few essays _is not research at all._


 
c'mon now Butchers, you know that even if Laurie had invented a time machine, gone back to the paris commune (or rather a few years before, for the neccessary context of course), and then come back to regale us with her tales of life as a parisian genderqueer woman surviving in the Paris Commune, scraping by on elephant steaks and zebra burgers (yeah, vegan I know but when times are tough and the zoo is the only supermarket around...), and keeping warm by burning revolutionary handbills whilst singing _the inernationale_, you'd still be criticising her for not having read some boring essay by some stuff old white man telling us what stuffy old white men did in the Paris commune, and you know it, you massive misogynst you! In fact, such is your misogyny that you'd probably go so far as to suggest that she made it all up, because only a man could invent something as awesome as a time travel machine.


----------



## Random (Jan 23, 2013)

copliker said:


> Last night. But it nearly didn't go ahead because, hmm.
> 
> *Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin* ‏@*nnimhaoileoin*
> The internet is becoming less and less safe for women. Penny nearly had to miss talk bc of online threats. #*lsewomen*


Such threats do happen. There's no need to think that it's always us being talked about, when someone says the word Internet.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 23, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> last night


Cheers, podcasts of previous lectures are available on the site, so eyes open for this one. _We're coming Laurie._

I note that articul8's boss and well known intellectual Hilary Wainwright has also previously spoke at the dictators palace.


----------



## Firky (Jan 23, 2013)

killer b said:


> The logic, presumably is that by suggesting Jones or whatsisname did her research (two men) were implying that she isn't able to do it herself cause she's a woman. Tenuous.


 
That is what she is saying:



> Laurie Penny @PennyRed
> 
> No, I don't get men to research or write my talks and articles for me. Yes, I'm a serious journalist. I know, with these tits and everything


 
A serious journalist.

Did she join the union as a serious journalist?


----------



## rekil (Jan 23, 2013)

Random said:


> Such threats do happen. There's no need to think that it's always us being talked about, when someone says the word Internet.


Hence the 'hmm'. But I sense she was also a bit afraid of someone turning up and 'trolling', ie, asking her hard questions and making her look shit.


----------



## Random (Jan 23, 2013)

copliker said:


> Hence the 'hmm'. But I sense she was also a bit afraid of someone turning up and 'trolling', ie, asking her hard questions and making her look shit.


If someone has said online threats, and said that they made them worried about physical threats, I think it's well off to suggest that it's just trolling, or compare it to our pisstaking.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 23, 2013)

Random said:


> If someone has said online threats, and said that they made them worried about physical threats, I think it's well off to suggest that it's just trolling, or compare it to our pisstaking.


But that may well be precisely the stuff that is being put around by the other side. I'm not saying that it is, but given what we've seen with our own eyes i would not be surprised if this is what took place (which doesn't mean that there were not other proper threats as well). A sort of useful amalgam.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 23, 2013)

any idea what these threats were ?


----------



## rekil (Jan 23, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> any idea what these threats were ?


Dunno. Any idea what this site was?



> Really glad to see that the vile site that's been attacking me, Mary Beard and others has been shut down. Disgusting misogynist bullying.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 23, 2013)

Oh no. Norman has been taken to task and given a proper slap





12h 

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
For instance: after my talk today, online speculation about whether @*paulmasonnews* or @*OwenJones84* had actually done the research for me.
 *   Expand   * 

13m 

*Spiney Norman* ‏@*spineynorman78* 
@*PennyRed* At it again. Disgraceful. Context? Requests 4 videos/lectures on commune 2 days b4 = asking others 2 do research. Grow up.
 *   Expand   * 

4m 

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
@*spineynorman78* um- I just wanted something nice to watch while I cleaned my room. Your assumption that I hadn't done the reading says a lot

 *  Hide conversation  *


----------



## Firky (Jan 23, 2013)

Probably old Linux, windows and Apple memes.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 23, 2013)

> If someone has said online threats, and said that they made them worried about physical threats, I think it's well off to suggest that it's just trolling, or compare it to our pisstaking.


 
Suzanne Moore has had online threats from certain 'MTF' transsexuals see further up and this was apparently her response to LP, I can't vouch for its accuracy:

http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1358510890.html




> Posted by Tony S on January 18, 2013, 12:08 pm
> 
> Via Facebook:
> 
> ...


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 23, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> Oh no. Norman has been taken to task and given a proper slap
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

fuckin' lol.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 23, 2013)

Haha she was definitely trying to wing it at the last minute, her defensive reaction gives it away. I can tell,  you can't bullshit a bullshitter


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Jan 23, 2013)

copliker said:


> Dunno. Any idea what this site was?


 
"Don't Start Me Off": http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jan/23/mary-beard-website-abusive-closes


----------



## BigTom (Jan 23, 2013)

copliker said:


> Dunno. Any idea what this site was?


 
The website was called "Don't Start Me Off"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jan/21/mary-beard-suffers-twitter-abuse


----------



## BigTom (Jan 23, 2013)

damn you fozzie bear :shakes fist:


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 23, 2013)

oh shit I remember Don't Start Me Off that was a horrible website


----------



## Firky (Jan 23, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> fuckin' lol.


 
I read Durruti whilst hoovering my "hovel".


(I am not very good at lying).


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Jan 23, 2013)

Random said:


> If someone has said online threats, and said that they made them worried about physical threats, I think it's well off to suggest that it's just trolling, or compare it to our pisstaking.


 
And I think, to give LP due credit, she hasn't made that comparison afaik. I think she signed on here because she felt we had some common ground and/or was fascinated by our withering critiques. I doubt she signed up as a poster on Don't Start Me Off.


----------



## Random (Jan 23, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Haha she was definitely trying to wing it at the last minute, her defensive reaction gives it away. I can tell,  you can't bullshit a bullshitter


 I can't tell, tbh. Although I'd guess that doing the reading would also tell you which nice videos on the Commune there were.


----------



## mk12 (Jan 23, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> oh shit I remember Don't Start Me Off that was a horrible website


 
Stewart Lee does a bit in his most recent stand up show where he reads off online abuse he has received on websites like DSMO. It's so vicious.



> "I hate Stewart Lee with a passion. He's like Ian Huntley to me." Wharto15, Twitter


 


> "Stewart Lee, I will shove my thick cock in your throat you gay lord." Hiewy, Youtube


 


> "Lee spastic cunt." Anon, dontstartmeoff.com


----------



## sihhi (Jan 23, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> oh shit I remember Don't Start Me Off that was a horrible website


 
UKIPers:




> Rachel Bull 0.88
> Bonnie Chebs1.24
> Anti-Spack Friday1.55
> Laurel and Hardy1.57
> ...


 



> AnnoyanceRating
> James Corden11.00
> Burglars10.96
> Smack Heads10.96
> ...


 
It's not an internet problem it's a right wing internet problem.

http://www.dont-start-me-off.com/OrigIndex.php


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Jan 23, 2013)

Josie Long was on twitter earlier saying she'd been subject to "threats of violence and sexual violence" over a period of years on DSMO, but had been too intimidated to do anything about it.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 23, 2013)

Random said:


> I can't tell, tbh. Although I'd guess that doing the reading would also tell you which nice videos on the Commune there were.


 
I don't care that much either either way, if she's tried to blag it by reading wikipedia or something then I can't help but admire the sheer gall of it, I wouldn't dare. But then again just blagging your way through life is what the best schools train you in. They always get away with it 

Allow me to be devils advocate, maybe she was simply trying to get her legions of followers to read On the Paris Commune by Marx or something? Just earnestly trying to stimulate a bit of interest in the topic before her talk? And we, because of the way every word Penny ever puts onto social media is poured over and deconstructed, have incorrectly read into it something that wasn't there? And then Laurie will victoriously deliver a highly original and barnstorming talk on the Paris Commune, and make everyone here look like fools for doubting her upmost professionalism? We shall see.

Still think calling misogyny on pointing out the crowd-sourcing research is out of line. This thread even at it's worst doesn't deserve to be lumped in with Don't Start Me Off and the like that's ridiculous.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 23, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> Josie Long was on twitter earlier saying she'd been subject to "threats of violence and sexual violence" over a period of years on DSMO, but had been too intimidated to do anything about it.


 
It's a site for rightwing people who think they are better than everyone else.

http://www.dont-start-me-off.com/CelebInfo.php?celeb_id=445&SHOW_OLD_COMMENTS=true




> 80% of people are stupid. As long as you always bear this in mind, most things make sense.
> - Ricardo    (22/12/12 12:12, 13:12 HGT)  Report as offensive
> 
> Bendy face is on QI sneering at Christianity. I look forward to him ridiculing Islam during Eid. Or I would if he wasn't a cowardly fucking worm.
> ...


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 23, 2013)

Sihhi is on the money here i think (and i'd never heard of this site before today) - are people like Beard, long etc criticising it for being right-wing or for being 'the internet'? Why was it shut down, on what grounds?


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Jan 23, 2013)

I agree that it's right wing, but I think that might not be the aspect I focussed on if people were posting stuff threatening to rape me.

From the Guardian piece it looks like the site owners decided to close it:

"After much thought we have decided to close the site. It's been great fun but our job is now done. We wish to thank everyone who we've had the privilege to know and to banter with. We wish you all the best for the future,"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jan/23/mary-beard-website-abusive-closes


----------



## mk12 (Jan 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Sihhi is on the money here i think (and i'd never heard of this site before today) - are people like Beard, long etc criticising it for being right-wing or for being 'the internet'? Why was it shut down, on what grounds?


 
I wouldn't say it was explicitly right-wing. Some of its "twats of the week" included Nick Clegg for being a "judas", Chris Moyles, Cameron ("If it wasn't for the fact that the British public have become some apathetic, and the unions so useless, we'd have hung him from a lamp-post by now") etc.

The "twat of the week" list really doesn't seem too dissimilar to one that this site would likely produce.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 23, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> I agree that it's right wing, but I think that might not be the aspect I focussed on if people were posting stuff threatening to rape me.
> 
> From the Guardian piece it looks like the site owners decided to close it:
> 
> ...


Absolutely, there's no moral condemnation aimed at them from for responding in that individual manner (if they did).


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Jan 23, 2013)

mk12 said:


> I wouldn't say it was explicitly right-wing. Some of its "twats of the week" included Nick Clegg for being a "judas", Chris Moyles, Cameron ("If it wasn't for the fact that the British public have become some apathetic, and the unions so useless, we'd have hung him from a lamp-post by now") etc.
> 
> The "twat of the week" list really doesn't seem too dissimilar to one that this site would likely produce.


 
I think it's that petit-bourgeois "small man syndrome" that rubs up against outright fascism.

I'd not heard of the site before today either, but the things that were quoted about Mary Beard reek of deep-seated problems with female bodies.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 23, 2013)

> Like, seriously. We need a campaign. A real one. What should it look like? #*takebackthenet*


 
@*PennyRed* Will it involve unpaid interns, or just ones going below minimum wage?


----------



## Balbi (Jan 23, 2013)

Guardian check out checking their privilege, and do a shit job.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/23/check-your-privilege-not-trump-card

And Helen Lewis is being silenced! Silenced!

http://storify.com/helenlewis/how-privilege-checking-shuts-down-discussion#publicize


----------



## sihhi (Jan 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Sihhi is on the money here i think (and i'd never heard of this site before today) - are people like Beard, long etc criticising it for being right-wing or for being 'the internet'? Why was it shut down, on what grounds?


 
Not shut down - normal people deciding that's enough. Have a listen here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pztjh


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 23, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Guardian check out checking their privilege, and do a shit job.
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/23/check-your-privilege-not-trump-card
> 
> ...


 
Someone's been on the PD blog


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 23, 2013)

Anyone else noticed that when Laurie's getting ready to do some Oxbridgesplaining she always starts it off with an 'um'?

*Spiney Norman* ‏@*spineynorman78*
@*PennyRed* At it again. Disgraceful. Context? Requests 4 videos/lectures on commune 2 days b4 = asking others 2 do research. Grow up.

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
@*spineynorman78* um- I just wanted something nice to watch while I cleaned my room. Your assumption that I hadn't done the reading says a lot


*Brogan Pinko* ‏@*pinkobrogan*
@*PennyRed* @*spineynorman78* why not put the radio on like most people or is it because you are lying?

*Brogan Pinko* ‏@*pinkobrogan*
@*PennyRed* @*spineynorman78* "Hey Twitter, help me out. I'm looking for lectures and documentaries on the Paris Commune" - thats not cleaning

*Spiney Norman* ‏@*spineynorman78*
@*PennyRed* Of course u did. Agree it says a lot. Just not what u think it says. It's possible 2 think you're shit without reference 2 gender.

*bunnyrabble* ‏@*bunnyrabble* 
@*PennyRed* that guy is a _dick_. you don't owe him an explanation! fucking angry fappers

*Spiney Norman* ‏@*spineynorman78*
@*bunnyrabble* Great how the Laurie Penny sycophants dive in and defend her without a clue what's going on. You're like a cult.

Sounds like bunnyrabble thinks that all men are wankers. I mean, she's right in my case but it's the principle innit


----------



## JimW (Jan 23, 2013)

Fuck me Spiney, you are such a racist. Call me!


----------



## weepiper (Jan 23, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> @*spineynorman78* um- I just wanted something nice to watch while I cleaned my room. Your assumption that I hadn't done the reading says a lot




not only are you a massive racist spiney you're also a GIANT misogynist.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 23, 2013)

weepiper said:


> not only are you a massive racist spiney you're also a GIANT misogynist.


 
Can't help it - I am, after all, white male and working class. She needs to check her anti-racist/sexist privilege on that one I reckon.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 23, 2013)

You have a point Spiney:
from a couple of weeks ago...


lauriepenny said:


> Um, I've written loads of articles and a book and given umpteen talks about precisely this topic, the erasure of class consciousness in modern feminism.


 
On research, you can gauge the masses of research done for _Discordia_ by the whole _bibliography_ AND _further reading_ coming to a single page.

1 recent article from an academia journal

1 blog

1 short NPR item

AK Press's 2 books - (just the one order?, 1 one of which is mostly based on the blog)

1 blog post about ancient literature classic

2 _articles_ from major US publications

1 crappy Dan Hind book about the media

1 crappy compilation by Tom (American workers are so rich class doesn't matter to them anymore, the 70s are the Me Decade everyone is selfish ha ha!) Wolfe

2 classics in literature (one ancient, one modern)


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 23, 2013)

#@spineynorman78 yeah, I saw. yr problem with LP's identitarian feminism predates that, though, no?#

"Identitarian"....fuck me, that's one for the album.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 23, 2013)

Identitarian intersectionality?

Disestablishmentidentitarianism.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 23, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> #@spineynorman78 yeah, I saw. yr problem with LP's identitarian feminism predates that, though, no?#
> 
> "Identitarian"....fuck me, that's one for the album.


 


Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Identitarian intersectionality?
> 
> Disestablishmentidentitarianism.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 23, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> It kind of makes sense within Penny's own fantasy land. She's pretty much perfect - she knows what's going down at all times. So why would anyone criticise her unless it was because she's a woman?
> 
> She's basically the essence of all women congealed into one person so if you criticise her you're having a go at all women.
> 
> I think she's genuinely so self-absorbed that she really doesn't think there's any reason, other than misogyny, to criticise her.



SuperTroll-misogynistic-expialidocious..Um-diddle-diddle-um-diddleye


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 23, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> SuperTroll-misogynistic-expialidocious..Um-diddle-diddle-um-diddleye


 
Cracking stuff Ronnie! How about 'SuperTroll-misogynistic sexists are atrocious...'


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 23, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> Cracking stuff Ronnie! How about 'SuperTroll-misogynistic sexists are atrocious...'



Yep...Beats mine.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 23, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> #@spineynorman78 yeah, I saw. yr problem with LP's identitarian feminism predates that, though, no?#
> 
> "Identitarian"....fuck me, that's one for the album.


 
Identitarian isn't actually a word is it?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 23, 2013)

Actually...since, as someone pointed out about, LP starts her 'Oxbridgeplaining' with an 'um'...I think her next tweet should read...

Um-diddle-diddle-um-diddleye...Super Troll misogynistic sexists are atrocious

But that means I've turned into one of those sycophantic freaks who do all her 'work' for her. 

Mind you, I reckon if she tried to sound Cockney, she'd sound just like Dick Van Dyke...I can just picture her dressed up like a chimney sweep.


----------



## J Ed (Jan 23, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Actually...since, as someone pointed out about, LP starts her 'Oxbridgeplaining' with an 'um'...I think her next tweet should read...
> 
> Um-diddle-diddle-um-diddleye...Super Troll misogynistic sexists are atrocious
> 
> ...


 
She does try to put a vaguely cockney sounding accent on at times, doesn't she?


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 23, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Identitarian isn't actually a word is it?



Is now...and it's a fuckin cracker. And I speak as a world-renowned intersectionologist...'world-renowned', at least, in the sense of down my local.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 23, 2013)

J Ed said:


> She does try to put a vaguely cockney sounding accent on at times, doesn't she?



Innit though


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 23, 2013)

Is it 'estuary' like wot Bliar did.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 23, 2013)

J Ed said:


> She does try to put a vaguely cockney sounding accent on at times, doesn't she?


 
When she rang me she felt it very important to impress on me that it was the real deal. It doesn't sound that way but then again 'speaking as' someone who divided his formative years between Chesterfield and Peterborough when I'm pissed I sound like a plastic brummie. I'm mixed accent 

So check your consistent accent privilege


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 23, 2013)

firky said:


> Like, seriously.


There are not enough facepalms in the world.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 23, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> When she rang me she felt it very important to impress on me that it was the real deal. It doesn't sound that way but then again 'speaking as' someone who divided his formative years between Chesterfield and Peterborough when I'm pissed I sound like a plastic brummie. I'm mixed accent
> 
> So check your consistent accent privilege



I lost my car in Chesterfield once. Went to a party and got cabbaged. Spent 4 hours looking for it next morning. Rang the missus and told her it'd been nicked. She told me to keep looking. Rang her back two hours later and she finally decided to remind me I'd gone on the bus.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 23, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> I lost my car in Chesterfield once. Went to a party and got cabbaged. Spent 4 hours looking for it next morning. Rang the missus and told her it'd been nicked. She told me to keep looking. Rang her back two hours later and she finally decided to remind me I'd gone on the bus.


 
When I first passed my driving test I nicked my parents spare car keys went to Sainsburys where they were shopping and moved their car to the other side of the massive car park on a really busy Friday evening and then went home.

My parents thought they had gone mental.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 23, 2013)

My youngest just gave me an avatar...and read about the car thing...her and the wife are pissing themselves in the kitchen. In answer to "why did you marry him?", I've just heard: "god knows...but, he wrote me a poem". Fucked if I remember. I'd ask, but I'd probably die of embarrassment.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 23, 2013)

From the postings on #LSEwomen on twitter, seeing idiot prof Robin Archer aswell.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 24, 2013)

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/disagree-with-me-sure-but-dont-wish-me-dead-8463835.html

what a cunt


----------



## Balbi (Jan 24, 2013)

Not sure where it goes, but Bindel slagged off Trigger Warnings this morning - think she might have been aiming at their overuse, but ended up slating the lot. Moore jumped in to her defence, and is now telling people to 'stop telling her off'.



I believe Bindel's also annoyed that she's being mistaken for Burchill.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 24, 2013)

smokedout said:


> http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/disagree-with-me-sure-but-dont-wish-me-dead-8463835.html
> 
> what a cunt


 
That fucking Moore propelled myth that the fury was focused on two words rather than her nasty attacks afterwards rolls onwards. Her platform's allowed her to shape the story in whichever way she wants.

Which I wrote a bit about here.


----------



## agricola (Jan 24, 2013)

smokedout said:


> http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/disagree-with-me-sure-but-dont-wish-me-dead-8463835.html
> 
> what a cunt


 
Whoever called her a "_latte-slurping knob_" must have been someone off here, surely.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 24, 2013)

him

(it might have been me btw)


----------



## smokedout (Jan 24, 2013)

closest I'm likely to get to being published in The Independent  (fake fucking toff was mine as well)


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 24, 2013)

smokedout said:


> closest I'm likely to get to being published in The Independent  (fake fucking toff was mine as well)



You could always submit an article and tell the editor you've just come down from Oxford, your trust fund's running out and you're vewy wadical. You can write about the pain and humiliation a young left wing graduate goes through when their gonzo gap year journal fails to find a publisher...and how it's like a y'know corporate plot to keep consciousness raising writing from the public...cos you write about the kinship and empathy you felt with the simple folk who cleaned your beach hut...and how spiritual and at-one with nature they were and how they regarded you as a brother and stuff. And that's pretty much communism and that's why the straight-laced neo-liberal suits won't let the masses read it. And if you were a woman, it'd be misogyny and so they need to check their privilege cos you slept on some girl's floor once which makes you pretty much an honourary member of the sisterhood and shit and that's pretty intersectional in anyone's book. 

You'd have a regular column and be the new voice of the left in no time.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 24, 2013)

The response is pretty mind blowing tbh, I wonder if Hensher actually thinks what he's written there or is just going along with what seems to be the trend at hte moment of write shit article then claim that all the criticisms of it amounted to "I'm going to kill you by choking you to death with your own penis".

There were two bits in the article that particualry made me want to slap Hensher, and I was quite reasonable about his first article:



> What led to trouble was that I did suggest that some assessment was necessary.


 
err.. has anyone who is opposed to ATOS/WCA actually said there should be no assessments? This is one of the most annoying myths perpetrated by those who support the ATOS/WCA process, making it out like we're mad and want there to be no tests and no ongoing support for disabled people ("warehousing").



> The thing is that I do know about incapacity. I know how mental health can make it impossible to work. I also know that, in many cases, the incapacity retreats, with or without government benefits, and the full ability to work slowly returns. I have learnt that it is apparently unacceptable to say anything other than that illness is in every case indefinitely extended, and that no option other than a permanent retreat from work can ever be envisaged or discussed. I don’t believe it. It is not, necessarily, the mark of a “twat” or a “cunt” to suggest otherwise


 
Now in his original article he said this:



> There are thousands off work with depression, even anxiety. In most cases, depression is incapacitating only for months, or even weeks.


 
Now I responded to this, by letting him know that I've been depressed for at least 23 years and that my severe depressive episodes during that time have lasted 2-4 years, and that this is pretty much the same for the people I closely know who also suffer from clinical depression. I've known a couple of bi-polar people too, and their depressive episodes have been shorter, maybe a few weeks to 6 months/1 year.. but then they've had the manic episodes too.
I don't think I really know anyone whose depressive episodes have only lasted for a few weeks tbh, though I wouldn't want to suggest that they don't exist.
It's madness to say that what I said was suggesting that illness in every case is indefinitely extended, but that his suggestion of weeks/months is out by an order of magnitude and that in my experience it is not most people who have shorter episodes, this is in fact unusual.

I've reached a point with my depression where my coping strategies are good enough that I could deal with regular work, though I've been lucky to be self-employed and able to vary hours when I've been in a depressive episode. I know how much harder that is when you've got fixed hours or no job at all. 
When someone says most cases of depression are only incapacitating for a short time it adds to the stigma around it, it's an invisibile disability obviously and there's already enough people who think depression is just feeling unhappy, no idea what it really means, think it's easy to fake and that anyone who says they are depressed for a long time is just milking it/choosing to be depressed/not depressed any more but realising they can stay on esa.

It's total fucking bullshit that he can say what he says with no awareness of what it means and then claim he knows about incapacity, about mental health. If he did he would never have said those things, and if he was a halfway decent person he would have responded with understanding of why people had reacted against it.
Philip Hensher needs to check his sanity privilege


----------



## ymu (Jan 24, 2013)

The original article also claims that there must be lots of fakers because claims are becoming more frequent and vary between areas.

They're becoming more frequent because we're getting better at keeping people alive with disability, especially premature babies (hence the rise in learning difficulties also), heart disease and cancer.

And the rate of disability varies by area because people impoverished by disability have to move somewhere affordable (as well as differences in industrial causes of disability, differences in healthcare available in poor vs rich areas, and the fact that poverty causes depression and exacerbates disability).

His ignorance (in both sense of the word) is astounding.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 24, 2013)

ymu said:


> The original article also claims that there must be lots of fakers because claims are becoming more frequent and vary between areas.
> 
> They're becoming more frequent because we're getting better at keeping people alive with disability, especially premature babies (hence the rise in learning difficulties also), heart disease and cancer.
> 
> ...



http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/data...store-pharmaceuticals-industry#zoomed-picture

Big shock. Look at the big prescription areas. I suppose Norfolk's there cos it's basically so fuckin depressing.


----------



## ymu (Jan 24, 2013)

This thread has some more on the way the stats are distorted to convince the likes of the very stupid Philip Hensher: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/demolition-of-the-stats-behind-the-anti-disability-claimant-propaganda.278398/


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## smokedout (Jan 24, 2013)

ymu said:


> The original article also claims that there must be lots of fakers because claims are becoming more frequent and vary between areas.
> 
> They're becoming more frequent because we're getting better at keeping people alive with disability, especially premature babies (hence the rise in learning difficulties also), heart disease and cancer.


 
the number of people on ESA/IB (which is what he's talking about) has been falling consistently for over ten years


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## ymu (Jan 24, 2013)

Have you demolished him on your blog yet smokedout? It's a much better place to set out the arguments. You get enough attention to force a more considered response, I think.

Oh yes, you have.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 24, 2013)

As it happens, I'm right in he middle of a 'blackspot', next to a purple as well as adjoining a 'no data'. The 'no data' is Stockton...which I think we can assume takes on a shade so dark that black can't do it justice...kinda 'anti-light'. Luckily, I'm actually at that point in my life where urban blight has a strong aesthetic appeal. I buzz off it. 

Or to be more accurate, I block it out and only really engage with it fully after a couple of 3 litre bottles of ASDA's finest. Then I'm lord of all I survey...the land where brutalist architecture reached its logical conclusion. 

But seriously, environment and lack of light and 'big skies' are significant factors.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 24, 2013)

In 2006 Hensher says "One of the consolations of middle age is, surely, not caring very much what people think." In that spirit: Philip Hensher - a walking coma of wasted genetic material - is a crybaby arsehole.

Laurie Penny's talk is here -

I will listen to it again before commenting properly but 

"Particularly on the internet, which is where we go to organise, it's not the reason we organise, all these headlines over the last couple of years facebook is causing revolution. Um it's not that simple guys but the internet is certainly public space, it's absolutely where we go to organise and form our movements and make communities happen and the internet is becoming a less and less safe space for women um I don't think anybody can disagree that that's happening right now, I _almost _(heavy stress on first syllable) had to not come to this talk actually because I had various online stalkers threaten to come and disrupt or hurt me and it was very scary. Um anybody, anybody with a public profile online faces this kind of this, people are spiteful, violent, intimidating, women are being chased off public spaces online, chased off political spaces online, women across the spectrum but particularly women on the left um and um it's become this trenchant violent and frustrated sexual hatred and I feel that online is the place where it's most obvious that women's space within the movement whatever this movement is, is still contested."

Response: Name the threatening sexists and their emails - let's make mince meat out of these misogynists.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 24, 2013)

> Um it's not that simple guys


she's doing it again


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 24, 2013)

thing is there is some nasty fucking shit on the internet like people saying that people should be raped and so on, and people tend to think that the anonymity gives them a right to say all sorts of shit.

that's not what's happening here though and of course i think we'll hear more and more of this sort of thing over the next few years and it's going to tie into the whole agenda of trying to police the internet.

Also most of the prosecutions probably wont involve ordinary people but celebrities complaining over somebody taking the piss out their hair or something.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 24, 2013)

You think repression on the level of china etc can't happen here, it can because it begins with stuff like this.I do agree that people who send death threats etc should be dealt with by the courts but there are already laws to deal with that and we know due to the woeful response by law enforcement to crimes like rape, stalking, etc, that it will be dealt with inadequately.

this "trolling" shit would be and is used to try and shut down online criticism.


----------



## Belushi (Jan 24, 2013)

There is some unacceptable shit hurled around on the net but what they're really complaining about, and I don't just mean Laurie, is the end of deference. Newspapers are dying, the internet is the future and on the internet the readership answers back, disagrees, argues. You live and die by the strength of your arguement and research and if it's duff it will get ripped to shreds.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 24, 2013)

the very structure of the net precludes effective censorship though, even the much wanked about great firewall can be bypassed with a VPN and a determined user.


If there had been strong state influence at the ground floor designing this haphazard thing then maybe- but too late now. Its a system designed for information exxchange and theres not much too be done about that now by states who don't like what information is being exchanged


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## frogwoman (Jan 24, 2013)

Yeah most of the people will never get prosecuted even those who say really unacceptable shit, the whole idea though is to introduce the idea that slagging somebody off online is A Bad Thing tho


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> In 2006 Hensher says "One of the consolations of middle age is, surely, not caring very much what people think." In that spirit: Philip Hensher - a walking coma of wasted genetic material - is a crybaby arsehole.
> 
> Laurie Penny's talk is here -
> 
> ...


I don't agree that women are being chased out off the internet at all. Where's her evidence that any women, let alone those on the left, have been 'chased off ' in this way?


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 24, 2013)

While I thoroughly agree that the web is home to some downright undesirables, there's no ignoring that, has anyone else spotted the logic fail in her complaining about being picked on by groups of 'haters' and then seemingly thinking that gathering her own bunch of sycophants to shout down anyone passing adverse comment is a good idea?


----------



## nino_savatte (Jan 24, 2013)

smokedout said:


> http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/disagree-with-me-sure-but-dont-wish-me-dead-8463835.html
> 
> what a cunt


There's zero comparison between him and Mary Beard, who's all right in my book. Hensher's a dick.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 24, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> thing is there is some nasty fucking shit on the internet like people saying that people should be raped and so on, and people tend to think that the anonymity gives them a right to say all sorts of shit.
> 
> that's not what's happening here though and of course i think we'll hear more and more of this sort of thing over the next few years and it's going to tie into the whole agenda of trying to police the internet.
> 
> Also most of the prosecutions probably wont involve ordinary people but celebrities complaining over somebody taking the piss out their hair or something.


 
I bet Katie Price gets more shit on an average day then laurie has had in her online life, but as has been said, its not about the really nasty shit, it's about people she considers on her side not accepting her laying down the law - that's what makes her angry, not EDL trolls and green ink dickheads


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## frogwoman (Jan 24, 2013)

I'M IN CONTROL HERE!


----------



## ymu (Jan 24, 2013)

nino_savatte said:


> There's zero comparison between him and Mary Beard, who's all right in my book. Hensher's a dick.


 
Mary Beard aims at the misogynists, not everybody who is critical. Big difference.


----------



## rekil (Jan 24, 2013)

Numerous emails of support. Check.

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
Every so often when I've forgotten why I do all this, I get an email from a teenage girl asking for advice and it makes everything better.


----------



## Firky (Jan 24, 2013)

Stacey Dooley reminds me of Laurie Penny.

Dooley went to Greece too. Same sort of moronic shit but aimed at a slightly different audience.

To be honest I've never watched her for more than three minutes as she has a horrible whiny voice and is shocked and appalled every little thing. It makes for difficult viewing. But beyond the presentation there's really not much difference between Dooley and Penny, there's no real substance to either of them.



> In the first episode of the series Stacy visits Greece to see how austerity measures have dramatically affected the lives of young Greeks, leaving many unemployed, angry and all unsure about their futures. In the second episode Stacey heads to Ireland to where she meets a group of young protesters angry at the financial mess they have inherited and in the final episode she travels to Japan where an entire generation have experienced two decades of an economic slump.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jan 24, 2013)

ymu said:


> Mary Beard aims at the misogynists, not everybody who is critical. Big difference.


Aye, very true.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 24, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> this "trolling" shit would be and is used to try and shut down online criticism.






Belushi said:


> There is some unacceptable shit hurled around on the net but what they're really complaining about, and I don't just mean Laurie, is the end of deference



Precisely...after the 'years of struggle', she feels she's earned some respect...and the braying mob had better learn their place or they can fuck right off her Internet. It's only the tragedy of her congenital self-awareness deficiency that prevents her seeing she's coming across like Hyacinth Bucket on a hen night in Liverpool.

But she's gotta put up or shut up. Name, shame or shut your yap.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 24, 2013)




----------



## ymu (Jan 24, 2013)

firky said:


> Stacey Dooley reminds me of Laurie Penny.
> 
> Dooley went to Greece too. Same sort of moronic shit but aimed at a slightly different audience.
> 
> To be honest I've never watched her for more than three minutes as she has a horrible whiny voice and is shocked and appalled every little thing. It makes for difficult viewing. But beyond the presentation there's really not much difference between Dooley and Penny, there's no real substance to either of them.


That's ridiculous. Since when was Dooley a sneering Oxbridge type who already knows it all? She's the exact fucking opposite, even if she is being used by the Oxbridge types who commission her to do the innocent abroad thing.


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## Bakunin (Jan 24, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> View attachment 28082


----------



## smokedout (Jan 24, 2013)

ymu said:


> That's ridiculous. Since when was Dooley a sneering Oxbridge type who already knows it all? She's the exact fucking opposite, even if she is being used by the Oxbridge types who commission her to do the innocent abroad thing.


 
id never heard of her and in just 2 minutes of watching something on youtube its obvious she's nothing like Laurie - was quite shocked that the beeb had given someone like her a serious slot


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## Firky (Jan 24, 2013)

£10 loads of replies from people saying they have never heard of her but defend her all the same.



ymu said:


> That's ridiculous. Since when was Dooley a sneering Oxbridge type who already knows it all? She's the exact fucking opposite, even if she is being used by the Oxbridge types who commission her to do the innocent abroad thing.


 
You quoted me but never seemed to read it:



> I've never watched her for more than three minutes.


 
I know fuck all about her, she simply reminds me of LP (the brief moments I have caught her on TV). Obviously you're more informed than me and by the sounds of it not only watched her 'work' but, Googled her educational background etc. I haven't, nor have I any wish to. But I have seen her briefly on BBC 3 where she's whined in a little girly voice that it's terrible that X Y or Z can't have "nice things" and how terrible the world is and for that she reminded me of LP.

There's often no real logic to why people / objects remind you of something.


----------



## Firky (Jan 24, 2013)

To clarify why she reminds me of LP, I should probably say it comes across as a much of a hobby for Dooley as it does Laurie. Yet, admittedly I can't really say one way or another as I know fuck all about her or have watched her for any length of time.

Is she decent then, ymo? Most stuff on BBC3 is best avoided



smokedout said:


> id never heard of her


 
I win!


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## smokedout (Jan 24, 2013)

no you fucking don't, you posted after i'd said it you daft twat


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## tufty79 (Jan 24, 2013)

I saw stacey dooley's  documentary about 'gay conversion therapy' in the states a few months back.. I thought it was going to be terrible and ended up suprised by how good it was, and how well she came across.. I've been told that the prog she did about luton/the edl (i think?) is worth watching as well.
/my 2p


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## Firky (Jan 24, 2013)

smokedout said:


> no you fucking don't, you posted after i'd said it you daft twat


 
How long have you been on forums and you still don't know how they work? In the time it has taken me to point out the painfully obvious to you in this post, people could have replied.


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## smokedout (Jan 24, 2013)

yeah right


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## Firky (Jan 24, 2013)

As tufty has just demonstrated.

yeah right... defeated by logic and truth, damn my predictability.


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## ymu (Jan 24, 2013)

firky said:


> To clarify why she reminds me of LP, I should probably say it comes across as a much of a hobby for Dooley as it does Laurie. Yet, admittedly I can't really say one way or another as I know fuck all about her or have watched her for any length of time.
> 
> Is she decent then, ymo? Most stuff on BBC3 is best avoided
> 
> ...


She started out on a programme where they took a group of consumer-oriented young people to India to live and work in the same conditions as the people who make the stuff we buy. Essentially, reality star made good.

From what I've seen of the latest series, they use her as the (genuinely) innocent interviewer to build up the argument they want to make. The style is a bit Louis Theroux without the knowingness.

Not immune from criticism, but a million miles from what this thread is about.


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## smokedout (Jan 24, 2013)

in cases of dispute it comes down to the time stamp obviously

anyway don't want a fight about it, i've argued with owen jones, sonia poulton, deborah orr and philip hensher this week, normals don't really do it for me anymore


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## frogwoman (Jan 24, 2013)

i always thought sonia poulton was allright, what's she done?


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## smokedout (Jan 24, 2013)

she's gone all david icke (really, posting links from his site and bigging up lawful rebellion)


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## frogwoman (Jan 24, 2013)

smokedout said:


> she's gone all david icke (really, posting links from his site and bigging up lawful rebellion)


 
Are you fucking serious?? Why?


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## smokedout (Jan 24, 2013)

fuck knows, she's exposing elite paedo rings and got caught up in it


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## ymu (Jan 24, 2013)

Crying fucking shame that. She's got some decent stuff into the Mail.


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## Firky (Jan 24, 2013)

Time stamp is only useful if you know how long it took a person to type their post and if they went to the loo / made a coffee / petted the dog or whatever q



ymu said:


> She started out on a programme where they took a group of consumer-oriented young people to India to live and work in the same conditions as the people who make the stuff we buy. Essentially, reality star made good.
> 
> From what I've seen of the latest series, they use her as the (genuinely) innocent interviewer to build up the argument they want to make. The style is a bit Louis Theroux without the knowingness.
> 
> Not immune from criticism, but a million miles from what this thread is about.


 
You've got me intrigued now, maybe I was a bit harsh. I just saw "BBC 3" and some lass turning her nose up when a bunch of kids from a shanty town gave her a cuddle and getting quite visibly upset in Greece - which I don't believe were 'real' tears. I can't imagine her being anything like Theroux but you have me interested enough to watch her and see if she still reminds me of LP. I bet she does though ¬


You can tell immediately she's not one of the Oxbridge types anyway, not with that accent, cor blimey. It's real too (to my northern ears at least)


----------



## cesare (Jan 24, 2013)

smokedout said:


> in cases of dispute it comes down to the time stamp obviously
> 
> anyway don't want a fight about it, i've argued with owen jones, sonia poulton, deborah orr and philip hensher this week, normals don't really do it for me anymore


----------



## Firky (Jan 24, 2013)

> Two separate journeys to Nepal and the Ivory Coast took Stacey to the heart of the modern day phenomenon of child labour. The two part series Kids For Sale: Stacey Dooley Investigates aired in October 2009. Her investigations, Kids with Guns, and Child Sex Trafficking In Cambodia launched on BBC3 in autumn 2010 to* rave reviews,*


 
Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to judge.


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## smokedout (Jan 24, 2013)

council estate girl from luton according to wiki, i say we make her our voice in the media, not laurie


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## Firky (Jan 24, 2013)

Why is it OK for the New Statesman's Laurie Penny to ignore professional advice from MH workers regarding a man who is feeling suicidal but not Ms Dooley?



> The BBC3 documentary that broke all the rules on reporting suicide
> 
> Stacey Dooley's programme was ill-judged and offensive, says Chris Atkins.


 

http://www.newstatesman.com/broadcast/2012/07/bbc3-documentary-broke-all-rules-reporting-suicide


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## smokedout (Jan 24, 2013)

because she's our new leader (really we had a meeting and everyone decided its all cool, she's innocent)

i meant stacey not laurie, obviously


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## ymu (Jan 24, 2013)

firky said:


> Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to judge.


There's still an agenda behind the programmes, and that agenda is still set by the 'liberal elite'. But she is a breath of fresh air, IMO. There's a humanity about her that comes from not having pre-judged the issue or assuming she already knows everything there is to be said and, like Theroux, she lets people tell their own stories.


----------



## Firky (Jan 24, 2013)

You fancy her.

Don't have these docu reality TV stars start off as runners for the BBC or is that a myth?


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## ymu (Jan 24, 2013)

firky said:


> Why is it OK for the New Statesman's Laurie Penny to ignore professional advice from MH workers regarding a man who is feeling suicidal but not Ms Dooley?
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/broadcast/2012/07/bbc3-documentary-broke-all-rules-reporting-suicide





> My personal opinion is that it was shockingly bad taste to have such a sombre and serious subject approached in a lightweight “yoof” tone.


In other words, presented by a young working-class person. How dare she presume to investigate the problems of other young working-class people.


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## ymu (Jan 24, 2013)

firky said:


> You fancy her.


You're right. It is the only conceivable reason why a woman off the telly might get praise. It's not like she's gonna be good for anything else.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 24, 2013)

firky said:


> Why is it OK for the New Statesman's Laurie Penny to ignore professional advice from MH workers regarding a man who is feeling suicidal but not Ms Dooley?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Because I doubt Stacey Dooley was, or currently is, working for the New Statesman. Laurie Penny certainly was, hence it's something that the seniors at the NS won't touch with a bargepole unless they have to.


----------



## Firky (Jan 24, 2013)

ymu said:


> In other words, presented by a young working-class person. How dare she presume to investigate the problems of other young working-class people.


 
I can't be arsed to do it from my tablet but I'll do it tomorrow if I remember, and that is to take the points raised in that article and apply them to the ones in LP's article regarding the suicidal man.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 24, 2013)

firky said:


> I can't be arsed to do it from my tablet but I'll do it tomorrow if I remember, and that is to take the points raised in that article and apply them to the ones in LP's article regarding the suicidal man.


 
Mind if I rip it off and publish it on a blog under my own byline before blaming the whole mess on a sloppy sub-editor?


----------



## Firky (Jan 24, 2013)

Do what you want you_ latte slurping nob_. 


I Hate having to use smilies all the time so people understand you're tkaing the piss.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 24, 2013)

firky said:


> Do what you want you_ latte slurping nob_.
> 
> 
> I Hate having to use smilies all the time so people understand you're tkaing the piss.


 
Annoying, isn't it, the over-use of smilies.


----------



## Firky (Jan 24, 2013)

I call it "doing a William"


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## sihhi (Jan 24, 2013)

That description of the show looks pretty grim, I don't know who she is really, but she's not a voice for the left on Newsnight, Women's hour, Sky News, major published media etc. Perhaps her work be discussed in the TV forum?

Laurie Penny, prominent voice of modern socialism:

feminists [inspired by Pussy Riot] are "amplifying the rebellion in their own hearts, and we're talking about our countries and our lives wherever women and young I first came to anti-capitalism thourgh feminism and I first came to it as a child too young to understand what either of those things meant. But it always seemed logical to me that the root of women's oppression was economic, and the root of economic oppression was capitalist. Sorry I'm going back through my notes because I've changed it around a little bit. Um but right now it's really we're told aren't we that women have come far enough and it's important to have this kind of perspective so at my age fifty years ago at my age um 26 my grandmother was a recent immigrant with five kids and another one on the way and she was shackled by a religion to a violent alcoholic husband who she'd married in wartime to escape the Ireland where she lived and she wouldn't have called herself a feminist but feminism was what began has begun to win for me and my sisters - I mean my actual sisters not my theoretical sisters - the birthright of all women in the 21st century which is the one the birthright that women and sorry the birthright that conservatives across the world are actively trying to confiscate right now, which is the right to freedom from domestic drudgery and sexual violence the right not to have to rely on a man to keep you, the right to live your life without worrying whether or not you are pretty enough or well behaved enough to stop your boss or your husband getting sick of you, the right to be socially, sexually, financially independent. And I wonder if the yearning I get when, is anybody else here a sci-fi nerd [audience response] yeah yeah I watch a lot of Battlestar Galactica and um I find myself, oh I love Starbuck I love me some Starbuck, but um, sorry, but when, does anybody get that feeling when you watch battles in space or those films of space battles when you think oh I'm not quite sure what it is I'm wanting and that impossible yearning is what I imagine that my grandmother and women her age felt watch people like me going to university and having boyfriends before marriage, travelling to other countries and dancing all night and wearing your short skirts and for her and for women like her my life and our lives are science fiction, it's weird and it's frightening and it's enabled by technology and I see women of my generation handling it as casually as an extra on Star Trek might handle one of those palm computers on Star Trek that looked exciting in the 1970s and now they look like Nokia Smartphones from 1999."

"So here we go... Yeah, slutwalks! Who was on the slutwalk? Oh come on [audience response] Yeah, yeah, great, great, slutwalks were brilliant, and um again it's I was lucky enough to, I was lucky enough to speak at the slutwalks last year and the slutwalks for me were for me they seemed like the beginning of an enhanced consciousness about sexual freedom and social freedom for women because suddenly you had young women and old women women all across the world reacting suddenly to this idea that we should not wear short skirts if we don't want to be raped that a police officer in Toronto [said] suddenly it seemed like saying enough that's it that's just the last little thing and there was this massive upsurge of women and men all over the world and it was like nothing else but a pride march, a pride march is what it was about the acceptance of fighting for women's right to be sexual, to live freely like men do, to not live in fear of rape and sexual violence, and the newspapers didn't report this enough but it was massively keyed into anti-austerity to anti-capitalism as the feminist movement originally always was there we go it was joyful and it was brilliant, and it's absolutely an indictment on how inadequate bourgeois middle-class feminism has become that there were columnists and organisers across the UK and the US saying we're not sluts we don't want to be sluts what are they saying and this is disgraceful we're nice women oooh nno no slut is a really important word I'm so glad people are taking it back, in the way we took queer back because the original meaning of the word slut was a domestic drudge, a servant the idea that women who are underpaid and lowpaid and working as servants. The idea of slut pride is also about working-class pride. It's about taking something that is tossed to us and made to make us feel small and ashamed and taking that back and saying no this is how we want to live our lives we need to be able to do it freely without punishment and yeeaah. Anybody who that is? Anybody recognise her? That's Selma James who is the leader of the, who originated the wages for housework campaign back in 1972 um and has been active in the anti-racist and women's movements for over fifty years I was actually lucky enough to interview her last week and I've got that in the New Statesman this week if you wanna read it or just read it online, no I didn't say that but that's what I do So she Selma James is one of these people whose ideas are coming back into fashion because what she's always said is that money and economics and power are what the women's movement are really about that's what sexual freedom is about that's what gender revolution is about"


----------



## smokedout (Jan 24, 2013)

did she really just conflate the struggle for women's rights with wanting a spaceship or did i imagine it


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 24, 2013)

smokedout said:


> did she really just conflate the struggle for women's rights with wanting a spaceship or did i imagine it


You didn't imagine it.

I think she needs to work on her oration skills a bit.


----------



## cesare (Jan 24, 2013)

That was painful to read.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 24, 2013)

smokedout said:


> did she really just conflate the struggle for women's rights with wanting a spaceship or did i imagine it


 
I don't know, but Barry will be pleased


----------



## Firky (Jan 24, 2013)

The [audience response] bitis horrible.


----------



## rekil (Jan 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Laurie Penny's talk is here -


I liked this bit at about 10 mins in. The 'ums' have been removed. 


> Paul Mason wrote that the archetypal facilitator, organizer in these new movements is an educated young woman taking the lead, speaking, and that was true. On every march and every occupation in those first weeks and months of the new movements, certainly in the UK, young smart women and girls were there as spokespeople as facilitators as leaders.


_Cue pics __on the massive screen __of Molly's mad painting of Laura, Clare Solomon and various fellow posho mates. _


----------



## cesare (Jan 24, 2013)

smokedout said:


> did she really just conflate the struggle for women's rights with wanting a spaceship or did i imagine it




I was watching Star Trek before she was even a twinkle. Actually right back slap in the middle of second wave feminism. But I can't remember equating Star Trek to the women's movement.

Hmm. I'd have a fraction more time for that sort of analogy if she was reading Sherri Tepper or Le Guin tbh.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 24, 2013)

Spokespeople? Shouldn't that have been spokespersons?


----------



## Firky (Jan 24, 2013)

She hates her young age being brought into it - apart from when she uses it as an excuse to get out of something.

Dunno who said it but it was along the lines of, "a patronising child who hates being patronised."


----------



## weepiper (Jan 24, 2013)

> the archetypal facilitator, organizer in these new movements is an educated young woman taking the lead, speaking, and that was true. On every march and every occupation in those first weeks and months of the new movements, certainly in the UK, young smart women and girls were there as spokespeople as facilitators as leaders.


 
Is it just me that hears the implicit sneer at working class women here?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> I was watching Star Trek before she was even a twinkle. Actually right back slap in the middle of second wave feminism. But I can't remember equating Star Trek to the women's movement.
> 
> Hmm. I'd have a fraction more time for that sort of analogy if she was reading Sherri Tepper or Le Guin tbh.


I recommended her a great book about single women and feminism, bet she hasn't read that either. Shame, it's a really good book.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 24, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Is it just me that hears the implicit sneer at working class women here?


Nope - it's there. Also the sneer at those of us who aren't in our twenties anymore.


----------



## ymu (Jan 24, 2013)

Oh well, if they're women they'll automatically know what other women think, and because women are congenitally better than men and would never turn into oppressors if the power were all in their hands, that must make it all right.

Jebus.


----------



## cesare (Jan 24, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Is it just me that hears the implicit sneer at working class women here?


Educated, smart and young as elitist rightful leaders, sorta thing.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 24, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Is it just me that hears the implicit sneer at working class women here?


 
In among the 'ums' above, she referred to herself as working class.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 24, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> In among the 'ums' above, she referred to herself as working class.


 
this bit?



> The idea of slut pride is also about working-class pride. It's about taking something that is tossed to us and made to make us feel small


----------



## cesare (Jan 24, 2013)

I can understand "um" when presenting, especially if a bit ill-prepared/lacking in confidence because it's thinking time and a lot of people unused to presenting do it. It adds to the lack of coherency when transcribed though! And especially daft to do it on purpose ie to write it eg in tweets.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 24, 2013)

If anyone wants to compare Selma James with lp have a good listen to this brilliant and inspiring interview:
http://www.againstthegrain.org/search/node/Selma James


----------



## sihhi (Jan 24, 2013)

firky said:


> The [audience response] bitis horrible.


 
I don't understand, anyway I'm bemused by the talk:

"I mean I first rediscovered feminism through the internet, right, I first realised that there was an enormous community of people like me who- difficult bitches who felt and thought like me out there because of the internet because of things like Feministing and the F-Word and PandaGone and communities like that and I think that women everywhere women are finding each other and talking to each other about politics in a new and important way because of, because the internet allows us to, alright? And that's important in organising women's protests, but as I said the internet is the most [heavy stress] violently misogynistic public space that we have right now. This is a serious, _enormous _problem [heavy stress] , women are being chased out of public space online, women are being chased out of organising online because we're afraid. We're made to feel afraid of violence, of retribution either physical violence or psychic violence. Bullying on the internet is incredibly easy and people believe that it is OK people believe that sexual violence on the internet is not real violence and at the moment I feel like we're approaching a tipping point we're not there quite yet but I feel like we're approaching a tipping point in terms of women's right to be in that space. We need to take back the net like we had a take back the night because, um oh I just, just made that up, let's copywrite it. Um we really do need a fightback from women in those spaces there I've done a bit of writing about sexism online but if you'd like to come and talk to me afterwards I can point you in the direction of a couple of campaigns."


----------



## rekil (Jan 24, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> In among the 'ums' above, she referred to herself as working class.


Worth requoting that bit.


> The idea of slut pride is also about working-class pride. It's about taking something that is tossed to us and made to make us feel small and ashamed and taking that back and saying no this is how we want to live our lives we need to be able to do it freely without punishment and yeeaah.


 
Fees per term for the right proper working class Brighton College. And oh look you get membership of the past pupils support club thing thrown in and everything.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> If anyone wants to compare Selma James with lp have a good listen to this brilliant and inspiring interview:
> http://www.againstthegrain.org/search/node/Selma James


 
Angela Davis when she was a Communist tore into the idea of wages for housework as a meaningful working-class goal to organise around, instead focusing on demanding socialised free childcare_ outside the privatised home_ as a more meaningful one.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 24, 2013)

copliker said:


> Fees per term for the right proper working class Brighton College. And oh look you get membership of the past pupils support club thing thrown in and everything.


 
The cost of her hairdos are probably out of the reach of working class people.


----------



## cesare (Jan 24, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> The cost of her hairdos are probably out of the reach of working class people.


I reckon she's more likely to make a "sight more working class than yow" point by bigging up buying a bottle of Clairols in Superdrug and getting pink dye all over the bathroom of the hovel.


----------



## past caring (Jan 24, 2013)

I am failing to see any connection here so that 'slut pride' is also 'working-class pride' - what the fuck does she even think she's on about?


----------



## past caring (Jan 24, 2013)

Unless it's some assumption on lp's part that, you know, working-class women all _like it_.

Or something equally mad.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 25, 2013)

cesare said:


> I reckon she's more likely to make a "sight more working class than yow" point by bigging up buying a bottle of Clairols in Superdrug and getting pink dye all over the bathroom of the hovel.


 
Something else she would lie about.


----------



## cesare (Jan 25, 2013)

past caring said:


> I am failing to see any connection here so that 'slut pride' is also 'working-class pride' - what the fuck does she even think she's on about?



There isn't a connection. Unless she equates "slut" with working class.


----------



## Belushi (Jan 25, 2013)

I like the way she equates being educated and being smart.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 25, 2013)

past caring said:


> I am failing to see any connection here so that 'slut pride' is also 'working-class pride' - what the fuck does she even think she's on about?


 
She's trying to say slutwalks are taking back the original meaning of the word 'slut' which was a non-sexual insult at a working-class woman, you dirty little slattern because you spend your life cleaning out coal ranges kind of thing, which is frankly bollocks. Slutwalk's got nothing to do with that.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 25, 2013)

copliker



> The idea of slut pride is also about working-class pride. It's about taking something that is tossed to us and made to make us feel small and ashamed and taking that back and saying no this is how we want to live our lives we need to be able to do it freely without punishment and yeeaah.


 
Nick Lezard did the same thing with "slob".

https://twitter.com/Nicklezard

"Writer, boulevardier, *slob*, bon vivant, vulgarian."





Slob Pride. Worldwide.


----------



## cesare (Jan 25, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Something else she would lie about.


Nah, she probably is and would be _outraged_ at any allegations that she's not. The bigger lie lies in aping what she perceives as characteristics of the working class, and thinking she won't get called on it.


----------



## past caring (Jan 25, 2013)

weepiper said:


> She's trying to say slutwalks are taking back the original meaning of the word 'slut' which was a non-sexual insult at a working-class woman, you dirty little slattern because you spend your life cleaning out coal ranges kind of thing, which is frankly bollocks. Slutwalk's got nothing to do with that.


 
Like what I said then.

So she's proper bonkers in the nut, this one, as well as the bluffer, dim-wit, snob and fraud that we've already identified her as being.


----------



## Firky (Jan 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I like the way she equates being educated with being smart.


 
People do, I've seen it on here, "braindead northern housewives" being a fairly recent one and as such it largely goes unnoticed. It's one of those assumptions that gets my back up more than most. Also not quite the same but Owen Jones and his "braindead trolls" aren't braindead trolls, they're usually people with a legitimate criticism of something he said - but unfortunately for them they're just another username on twitter and not a name in the paper.

/derail


----------



## rekil (Jan 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I like the way she equates being educated and being smart.


She said that's what Paul Mason wrote but it'd have to be checked I spose.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 25, 2013)

Cleverest girl in the cleverest school, because only girls who go to clever schools are smart and opinionated. Or capable of leadership.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I like the way she equates being educated and being smart.


 
It's common, sadly.  Reminds me of a student who once tried to shut me down by saying he had an A level in history.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 25, 2013)

smokedout said:


> did she really just conflate the struggle for women's rights with wanting a spaceship or did i imagine it


 
I want a space ship too. Does that mean I'm gonna have to stop being a misogynist and get into feminism and that?


----------



## smokedout (Jan 25, 2013)

no, you can be captain kirk


----------



## sihhi (Jan 25, 2013)

Slut's non-sexual working-class (servant, domestic worker) meaning died out in the 17th century.
The sexual meaning alongside slattern preceded that meaning and is still in use today alongside and since the 19th century words derived from slut like sluttish and 20th century slutty.

More generally, I find the idea that 'slut' is the female opposite of what (presumably working-class) men do to be inaccurate and absurd.

Some - and it is not all by any means in non-heterosexual communities - _tried_ to use it meaning proudly polyamorous ie having multiple partners at the same time - in the 1990s.

Weirdo liberal professor Slavoj Zizek once tried to reclaim the word 'terror' - that the left should be proudly and openly calling itself 'terrorist'.


----------



## cesare (Jan 25, 2013)

smokedout said:


> no, you can be captain kirk


I found out this week that Gene Roddenberry was accused of only writing in Lieutenant Uhura cos they were having an affair


----------



## Firky (Jan 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Weirdo liberal professor Slavoj Zizek


 
I just started a thread on his Pervert's Guide to the Cinema.



http://www.thepervertsguide.com/about.html


----------



## Idris2002 (Jan 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> S
> 
> Weirdo liberal professor Slavoj Zizek once tried to reclaim the word 'terror' - that the left should be proudly and openly calling itself 'terrorist'.


 
I'm always amused by the way people don't get that Zizek is engaged in a total wind-up and piss-take.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 25, 2013)

Balbi said:


> I believe Bindel's also annoyed that she's being mistaken for Burchill.


 
wouldn't you be?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 25, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I don't agree that women are being chased out off the internet at all. Where's her evidence that any women, let alone those on the left, have been 'chased off ' in this way?


 
I believe her.  Because I've got a number of friends involved in feminist campaigning and have seen the levels of abuse they get, blogs taken down by hacking, people following them around the internet trying to shut down debate or misrepresent them etc.  It was certainly an eye-opener.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 25, 2013)

firky said:


> You fancy her.
> 
> Don't have these docu reality TV stars start off as runners for the BBC or is that a myth?


 
Pretty much true, from what I'm told.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 25, 2013)

i think the slutwalks were a good idea fwiw. but come on the likes of laurie are just as likely to slag off people for the way they dress as anyone.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 25, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> I believe her. Because I've got a number of friends involved in feminist campaigning and have seen the levels of abuse they get, blogs taken down by hacking, people following them around the internet trying to shut down debate or misrepresent them etc. It was certainly an eye-opener.


 
Yeah I agree with this - I have no doubt that she does get some really disturbing shit sent to her and I don't blame her one bit for not wanting to just accept it. What pisses me off is the way she seems to be trying to imply that this thread is a part of that. Even the most ill-considered post on here doesn't deserve to be lumped in with that shite.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yeah I agree with this - I have no doubt that she does get some really disturbing shit sent to her and I don't blame her one bit for not wanting to just accept it. What pisses me off is the way she seems to be trying to imply that this thread is a part of that. Even the most ill-considered post on here doesn't deserve to be lumped in with that shite.


 
well, because to her this thread is all a part of it.  Remember, to her everyone who doesn't agree with her is either a misogynist or not a real feminist.  There is no other alternative.  To her there is absolutely no difference between disagreement with her politics and hatred of women.  Because she is right.  Therefore any criticism must be misogyny.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 25, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> well, because to her this thread is all a part of it. Remember, to her everyone who doesn't agree with her is either a misogynist or not a real feminist. There is no other alternative. To her there is absolutely no difference between disagreement with her politics and hatred of women. Because she is right. Therefore any criticism must be misogyny.


 
I don't know whether you're half joking there but I think that's exactly how she sees things.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 25, 2013)

Slutwalks are new, and therefore involve her, and therefore are *a good thing*. In on the ground floor style stock speculation. Especially given the old guard of Burchill, Bindel and Moore are having some issues adopting to the e-wifi-blogcast-podtooth age of direct analysis and criticism of their work.

Calculating.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 25, 2013)

Um, actually I really _believe_ in the struggle and think my work is _IMPORTANT_ in ensuring a comfortable career platform until I get Brute'd and shuffle off to the Mail.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 25, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Um, actually I really _believe_ in the struggle and think my work is _IMPORTANT_ in ensuring a comfortable career platform until I get Brute'd and shuffle off to the Mail.


 
'These are my inviolate, deeply-held principles, readers. But if you don't like them, I've got others...'


----------



## Balbi (Jan 25, 2013)

Highlights the odd point of view from a few journalists, that their radical youth and ideologies excuses their defiant ignoring/criticising of the radical youth and their ideologies of today. They did their work in the seventies and eighties, and are still fighting those issues - which do need to be fought, but not to the exclusion of everything else.

Considering a line of enquiry as to how seriously the columnists claiming 'language policing' take the issues they approach - or are they just using them as a basis to hang a few jokes and a bit of self-reference off? I am pretty certain that's trolling though.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 25, 2013)

smokedout said:


> the number of people on ESA/IB (which is what he's talking about) has been falling consistently for over ten years


 
Probably falling for the old swizz where claimant count is cited and represented as recipient count (about 500,000-700,000+ less).


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 25, 2013)

Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> We need to take back the net like we had a take back the night because, um oh I just, just made that up, let's copyright it.


 
For what reason? Either she thinks things she says in conversation are so great they should be hers alone, or cos there's money to be made there? That's a great tell, that - bank manager on speed dial.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 25, 2013)




----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 25, 2013)

Tangentially:

http://storify.com/AlexanderVelky/my-protest-history/


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 25, 2013)




----------



## cesare (Jan 25, 2013)




----------



## Balbi (Jan 25, 2013)

That's ace


----------



## Firky (Jan 25, 2013)

Amazing


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 25, 2013)

arf.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jan 25, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Tangentially:
> 
> http://storify.com/AlexanderVelky/my-protest-history/


So all that that shows is that Velky did not understand the politics of the day - which is still the politics of today. The purpose of the petition was to enable his local SWP to collect up names and addresses for potential recruitment. He was not suitable recruiting material though and self selected his way out of that.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 25, 2013)

#I first came to anti-capitalism thourgh feminism and I first came to it as a child too young to understand what either of those things meant. #

...and to young too realise that the Lib Dems weren't a major force in the struggle against capitalism? Or was the Lib Dem period brought on after her childhood radicalism had been tamed by Oxford? Odd...I think most people's politics reach their radical and 'egalitarian' peak during their late teens and early twenties, particularly as students. She seems to be claiming her own political trajectory went...

Instinctive childhood anti capitalism and proto-feminism...Lib Dem early twenties...sudden conversion to a sort of anarcho-femo-"individuarian"-"socialism" and 'voice of the left'

...which is odd, unless of course...drumroll...it's more retrospective fantasising.

There are a couple of things that may account for it, mind, and I genuinely don't know.

a) was the Sussex stockbroker belt a hotbed of Trotskyist agitation in the early 90s...amongst the per-teens?
b) does Oxford have a record of moderating the politics of radical socialist undergraduates, converting them to an accommodationist and gradualist orthodoxy, which they reject a few years after graduation when the inheritance has been spent?

I genuinely don't know the answer to these questions. If the answer is yes, then her account would be credible.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 25, 2013)

This is  a bit fucked up. In fact that's full- on fucked up.

However, on the off chance she tweeted that out the blue, seemingly apropos of nothing much, I conclude that she may have been reading this thread and decided to demonstrate that she really does get hateful misogynistic abuse. Not sure that it tells us much about the volume of such stuff, but it's hard to deny that one's a fuckin outrage. In fact, I'm not sure it isn't actionable. That said, she still needs to persuade that it's that sorta stuff she's on about and not reasonable criticism; and I still think the incongruity of her background and her stated beliefs and their supposed motivation is a legitimate topic of discussion.

Also, supposing the appearance of that comment following recent posts on here is not a coincidence...and she seems influenced by it...I think it's about time I let her in on a secret that she might like to share with her wealthy fan base...

The true benchmark of socialist ideological purity and working class chic is ownership of Ronnie Rubashov's 1998 Fiesta. Only 167000 miles and a snip at £15000. Also, the largish dent on the near-side wing was the result of a wild kick by Hugo Chavez on his recent visit to Middlesbrough. It was a spontaneous reaction to news of the French intervention in Mali. I was a bit pissed off but he touched me on the shoulder and said: "sorry Ron mate, but Westen Imperial arrogance gets me that way. I replied "nada, Hugo mate, I feel your pain." It's virtually a socialist icon, would look good in Shoreditch and, anyway, two wipers and third gear are overrated virtues...if not bourgeois pretentious as far as I'm concerned.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 25, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> This is a bit fucked up. In fact that's full- on fucked up.
> 
> However, on the off chance she tweeted that out the blue, seemingly apropos of nothing much, I conclude that she may have been reading this thread and decided to demonstrate that she really does get hateful misogynistic abuse. Not sure that it tells us much about the volume of such stuff, but it's hard to deny that one's a fuckin outrage. In fact, I'm not sure it isn't actionable. That said, she still needs to persuade that it's that sorta stuff she's on about and not reasonable criticism; and I still think the incongruity of her background and her stated beliefs and their supposed motivation is a legitimate topic of discussion.


 
Ricardo - the owner of the site is a fucking rightwing idiot

As posted earlier:



> 80% of people are stupid. As long as you always bear this in mind, most things make sense.
> - Ricardo (22/12/12 12:12, 13:12 HGT) Report as offensive
> 
> Bendy face is on QI sneering at Christianity. I look forward to him ridiculing Islam during Eid. Or I would if he wasn't a cowardly fucking worm.
> - Ricardo (21/12/12 22:38, 23:38 HGT) Reply Report as offensive


 
Everything about him screams sneering misogynistic idiot.



> I saw this a couple of weeks ago whilst gym bound. Well, well, luv a duck and bless my soul. Some silly slag of a girl accused another unconvincing pupil of rape. Now, I had always assumed that under such circumstances a school would immediately call the police, who would arrive, take statements and carry out a thorough medical examination. Not so, it would seem. I now know that the correct procedure is for everyone to run around the corridors in a Benny Hillesque fashion and shout at each other without troubling either the parents or the law. It's essential for at least one dinner lady to be involved in the fracas too. In fact, by law you must have a speaker system equiped that plays this, the minute somebody gets raped.
> - Ricardo (18/11/09 21:34, 22:34 HGT) Reply Report as offensive



http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...lebInfo.php?celeb_id=5587+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk

'Ha ha ha. Police sort out rapists, nothing to see here.'

The site has always had a problem with _all feminists _(or people who might be like Mary Beard) not just Laurie Penny

This exchange over Germaine Greer sums up the site - if you try and break the consensus over feminists-are-dumb-*********s this is what happens:



> most of the comments above are f*cking disgusting, whether or not you like germaine greer (and i doubt any of you actually know her) is no excuse to make immature, pathetic jokes about rape. scum the lot of you.
> - Guest (02/10/11 17:01, 18:01 HGT) Reply Report as offensive
> Fuck off and get over it. Who'd rape that cunt anyway?
> - Honest George (02/10/11 17:20, 18:20 HGT) Report as offensive


Cache here http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QXjZIi9c4Y8J:www.dont-start-me-off.com/CelebInfo.php?celeb_id=222&SHOW_OLD_COMMENTS=true &cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk


I'll stress again my posts about LP and anyone else posted on this thread is to highlight left-wing (and personal) hypocrisy (something which all genders can be guilty of):- living the life, using 'the movement' below you to propel you.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I'll stress again my posts about LP and anyone else posted on this thread is to highlight left-wing (and personal) hypocrisy (something which all genders can be guilty of):- living the life, using 'the movement' below you to propel you.



Well yeah. All true, except...and I may be guilty of projection here and a touch of generalisation...is the movement really from 'below' as such? I'm sure when EP Thompson talked of 'history from below' he wasn't talking about about the 'struggle' of a bunch of middle-class hangers-on and hipster radicals. I think she serves as a kind of style guide in this sense. There is doubtless a considerable mass of bright qualified, largely middle-class, young people who've found themselves in a kind of stasis career-wise and feel a sense of justified grievance and resentment...understandably. But there's no reason why they shouldn't ground their dissent in these terms.

Ironically, their 'voices' seem to be doing very nicely expressing something else entirely: a sort of weird critique which largely swerves the obvious economic analysis and instead paints a narrative that's an amorphous mash-up of identity politics, pseudo-anarchism and a working-class aesthetic; albeit an idealised bourgeois version of that aesthetic.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 25, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Well yeah. All true, except...and I may be guilty of projection here and a touch of generalisation...is the movement really from 'below' as such? I'm sure when EP Thompson talked of 'history from below' he wasn't talking about about the 'struggle' of a bunch of middle-class hangers-on and hipster radicals.


 
I don't see the relevace of EPT. 
There were many people, most of them not from places like Lewes, who took part in student demos - but only a few got selected to write left-wing columns that featured the phrase 'my generation'. 


UK Uncut is a bit different that always had a weird nostalgia middle-class nerve centre controlling its publicity.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> There were many people, most of them not from places like Lewes, who took part in student demos - but only a few got selected to write left-wing columns that featured the phrase 'my generation'.


 
Yup, this exactly. There were plenty of working class kids who left school on the day of those anti-war marches, but it's funny how it's the ones who went to private school who end up making careers of the back of their "radicalism".


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I don't see the relevace of EPT.
> There were many people, most of them not from places like Lewes, who took part in student demos - but only a few got selected to write left-wing columns that featured the phrase 'my generation'.
> 
> 
> UK Uncut is a bit different that always had a weird nostalgia middle-class nerve centre controlling its publicity.



The EP bit was a reference to 'below'...'History from Below' being very much his schtick. I was disputing that her support was from below in that sense ie. that she possesses a significant working class following...significant in the sense of 'any'.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 25, 2013)

Shit. Just read that again. In case it seems otherwise, I should state I'm a big fan of EP.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 25, 2013)

Oh fuck me. Now this.. 

She's clarifying what she means by 'slut'. That's not a coincidence. Her twitter output now seems to be largely dictated by criticism from this thread.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 25, 2013)

The internet can bring out the nasty side of people  lauriepenny I'm sorry you've received threats from that odious right-wing shit. 

I guess I've been lucky in my internet dealings and other than a couple of occasions on here, urban has been a safe place to express opinions and for the large part a place of equality.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 25, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Oh fuck me. Now this..View attachment 28123
> 
> She's clarifying what she means by 'slut'. That's not a coincidence. Her twitter output now seems to be largely dictated by criticism from this thread.


If she is reading the thread, she might be lurking as a guest - she hasn't logged in since the 5th.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 25, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> If she is reading the thread, she might be lurking as a guest - she hasn't logged in since the 5th.



Well, I'd guess she is. If you look back, the reaction to her talk consisted to a large extent in whether she was overstating the level of misogynist abuse she gets and her questionable use of 'slut' and her dubious  association of slut with 'working-class'...which was probably just a piece of poor judgement and general ignorance. I just think those last two tweets were in response. If not, then a remarkable coincidence.
 It's like she's being flown by remote control...a kinda drone.

Let's see...

Laurie...Owen Jones just said your mam's a fat cow and you're an upper class fraud.

Now I'll sit back and watch the 'new left' rip itself to bits.


----------



## Superdupastupor (Jan 25, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Yup, this exactly. There were plenty of working class kids who left school on the day of those anti-war marches, but it's funny how it's the ones who went to private school who end up making careers of the back of their "radicalism".


 
I had a 'bed protest' that day. Wish i'd gone in- sounded great fun- the Head and and Assistant Heads tried to block all the school gates thus ensuring that everyone leapt at the chance for a mass break out and march on the US embassy.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 25, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> If she is reading the thread, she might be lurking as a guest - she hasn't logged in since the 5th.


 
Must be lurking then - how else did she know about the speculation that Paul Mason and Owen Jones researched her shit talk for her?


----------



## Balbi (Jan 25, 2013)

Think we're a bit navel gazey - that slutshaming stuff is based around the Mary Beard blog and news stuff.

And the article's from 2010.


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I'll stress again my posts about LP and anyone else posted on this thread is to highlight left-wing (and personal) hypocrisy (something which all genders can be guilty of):- living the life, using 'the movement' below you to propel you.


 
True in every word.

No decent person will condone threats and abuse for the sake of it, but using other people's efforts and risks taken by them as a career move and dressing that up in some 'Prada-Meinhof' radical chic to hide the careerism and self-promotion frankly turns my stomach.


----------



## ymu (Jan 25, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Think we're a bit navel gazey - that slutshaming stuff is based around the Mary Beard blog and news stuff.


That, and the very human tendency to get pushed to extremes in arguments like this. Identity politics co-opted equality struggles and the reaction has, all too often, been to dismiss the struggles themselves not just the wanky, divisive approaches to them. The serious left has a decent analysis, but it's not always obvious.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 25, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Think we're a bit navel gazey - that slutshaming stuff is based around the Mary Beard blog and news stuff.
> 
> And the article's from 2010.


 
Hang on...so out the blue, she happens to recall an article from 2010? Why exactly...unless it's to counter accusations on here about her association of 'slut' and 'working class; and I quote..LP:" The idea of slut pride is also about working-class pride."

To which..the reponse was:



weepiper said:


> Is it just me that hears the implicit sneer at working class women here?


 


past caring said:


> I am failing to see any connection here so that 'slut pride' is also 'working-class pride' - what the fuck does she even think she's on about?


 


sihhi said:


> Slut's non-sexual working-class (servant, domestic worker) meaning died out in the 17th century.
> The sexual meaning alongside slattern preceded that meaning and is still in use today alongside and since the 19th century words derived from slut like sluttish and 20th century slutty.
> 
> More generally, I find the idea that 'slut' is the female opposite of what (presumably working-class) men do to be inaccurate and absurd.
> ...


 


cesare said:


> There isn't a connection. Unless she equates "slut" with working class.


 
So why does she suddenly tweet what she did? Together with the thing from 'Don't get me started' to prove she's a victim who needs to reclaim the net?

Don't get me wrong, I fuckin love coincidences with probabilities of astronomical proportions, and I'm off my fuckin head, but if that's 'navel gazey', I'm a fuckin cheese sandwich. Why else does she tweet that from nowhere? She must lurk here.


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## SLK (Jan 25, 2013)

You seem more obsessed with her than anyone else to be honest - and her above what she represents.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 25, 2013)

ymu said:


> That, and the very human tendency to get pushed to extremes in arguments like this. Identity politics co-opted equality struggles and the reaction has, all too often, been to dismiss the struggles themselves not just the wanky, divisive approaches to them. The serious left has a decent analysis, but it's not always obvious.


 
She doesn't need pushing...she trades on those extremes. It's her bread and butter.

And as for the 'serious left', its analysis is decent because its analysis is grounded in the shitty, 'crooked timber', desperate, red in tooth and claw nature of humanity; not some fucked-up ideological, I wanna Guardian column and impress my peers theorising.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 25, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> True in every word.
> 
> No decent person will condone threats and abuse for the sake of it, but using other people's efforts and risks taken by them as a career move and dressing that up in some 'Prada-Meinhof' radical chic to hide the careerism and self-promotion frankly turns my stomach.


 

Let's recap. LP on activism against education cuts, a cardboard-cut of all the people mentioned.

Asians (all second-generation immigrants?) who are afraid of displeasing their parents.

"All that aspiration was pretty much for nothing when there are no jobs," says Amit, 18, a computer science student from Medway. "This fight is so much more important than blind careerism. Just don't tell my parents I said that."

Former traditional left politicos who think the radical movement is 'everywhere'.


A similar view comes from Aaron Peters, 26, a former member of David Miliband's Labour leadership campaign team with a tendency to pull an Incredible Hulk act when out on protests. "Parliamentary politics is basically over - it's dead," he says. ... Peters is quietly informed that he is, in fact, wearing a T-shirt from Topman. He immediately rips it off and stands shirtless on Oxford Street, stating that, even in sub-zero temperatures, one does not need exploitatively made clothes if one has the right ideals. Peters and Beach are the sort of leader that this staunchly leaderless movement would otherwise have. ... "They said it couldn't happen; they said that students could never mobilise like this," says Peters who, thankfully, was fully dressed for the visit to UCL by Cruddas. "Well, now we're everywhere. This is just the beginning."


Immature people.


""It's snowing!" says one of the students, interrupting a debate on police brutality to rush over to the window. "It's snowing!" These members of the so-called lost generation press their faces against the glass, or hurry towards the doors to go outside and catch fat, frozen snowflakes on their tongues. These young people have been radicalised extremely quickly."


Swappies who shout through loudspeakers for too long.

“I object to politicians using the term parliamentary democracy, because I don't think we have one any more," says Ben Beach, 21, an architecture student who has been awake for 28 hours when we first meet. “No one has the balls to stand up and represent the people they're meant to represent. We're about to be made to pay for a financial crisis that we had no part in creating. Education and welfare are being destroyed to pay for a £1.4trn bank bailout that wasn't our fault." Ben Beach is the Justin Bieber of the new left: a baby-faced riot messiah from Bethnal Green in east London with a tendency to hog the megaphone at demonstrations."


Aristocrats.

"Eventually a three-piece suit is procured by way of a young man whom I'll call "Peregrine", a barman and student at a local college who also happens - he reveals shyly in the third week - to be an aristocrat, which is why he is always asking everyone for money. Outside the Brown event, Beach gets a phone call from Peregrine. "Um, Ben, you may want to check out that waistcoat before you go past security, OK?" Peregrine says. "I think there's some, like, acid in the lining."

Farmowners.



"In the occupied college building, education is not a commodity, but an intimate weapon of social change, and Sarah seems to understand that better than anyone else. She grew up on a working farm in South Wales; she wears sensible fleeces and non-designer spectacles.
Only gradually, after spending time with the occupiers, do you realise that it is this soft-spoken geography student, not the more dramatic male activists, who is running the show, organising the meetings, making sure the younger ones are listened to. "This is like a family," is how Sarah puts it on the blog. "That's the beauty of it. It's the sense that anyone can speak and be listened to; like any of these people I didn't know last week would come to my rescue if I needed it." ...
That night, on 9 December, in front of a line of mounted police, as tens of thousands of protesters surge past the barriers into Parliament Square, I find myself standing next to Sarah, watching her throw up her hands to protect herself and others from a hail of batons. Sarah's sensible fleece is flecked with blood, but she stands firm until the police run their horses into the crowd, pushing the protesters into a pen with nowhere to run. We stand until we are forced to the ground, crushed under a writhing, kicking heap of bodies. I grab Sarah's arm and we go down together."



Foreign fees-paying (sub-text: rich) art students (from Greece with a thirst for ... ).


"A young art student from Athens - 22-year-old Margarita, dressed in denim, and a whizz with video installations - was persuaded to lead the British protesters in a chant of solidarity. She shouted a line in Greek and the Brits - the loudest of them a squatter with a thick Glasgow accent - chanted it back as best they could. On the long journey home, Margarita was asked precisely what they'd been shouting. "Oh, it's just something we say in Athens when the police beat us," she said, smiling. “It translates something like, 'Cops, cops, you're all murderers, we hope you die.'" Members of the "media relations working group" turned pale."


Shy (cowardly?/timid?) non-politicals who - in under two weeks - "profess" "libertarian tendencies".




"Techie Sam wasn't political two weeks earlier. A shy, stocky young man who looks older than 22 and professes libertarian tendencies, he got involved after his girlfriend, Jenny, was caught in the front line as police launched a horse-charge against student protesters outside 10 Downing Street on 24 November. After Jenny was trampled and traumatised, Techie Sam realised that "peaceful protest was no longer an option. I feared for my safety if I dared to go on the streets, so I decided to offer my particular skill set to the movement and to help in the way I know how." He now finds himself working so many hours a day that he's taken to sleeping in a roll of blankets under his desk in the room at UCL."

Working-class (male - check, older - check) that love how middle-classes "really care"



"Jack, 30, a mature student from Gateshead. "When we bailed out the banks, young people realised that capitalism had screwed us all. But after Millbank, the possibility of resistance became real."...
They come from all over the country, from across the world, and from different backgrounds, defying every stereotype of the privileged, white, middle-class, male student radical. "I left school at 16 and worked in a carpet warehouse, and my political involvement was community volunteering - the 1980s recession never really ended in the north-east," says Jack. “Until Millbank, I used to think that student politics was just a lot of liberal wankers, frankly. But this lot really care about workers - they care about ordinary people, they're *liaising with* unions and community organisers. It's not just about student fees. It's about fighting the cuts as a whole, and insisting that education, job security and welfare support are every person's right."


All mobilised by the progressive-stack of consensus decision making (voting is bad, hand gestures and autonomous working groups WTF? good)

"Instead, the UCL occupation, and the movement as a whole, pursues a policy of consensus-based decision-making, an anarchist organising structure that gained credibility with the rise of green protest. Under this system, which involves hand gestures and autonomous working groups, there is no central leadership to report to. This means that everyone is allowed the chance to speak, and that _the voices of women and younger pupils are given priority._ It also means that direct action can be effected quickly, without any need for the bitter, arthritic infighting that blighted the student protests of the 1960s and, more recently, the Stop the War movement."

Note how that clashes that in the LSE lecture LP was saying women weren't given an equal voice, weren't given priority in the education movement or 'Occupy' or anywhere.







http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2011/01/student-protesters-young





> Web editor's note: An earlier version of this article wrongly attributed Sarah's quotes, which come from her blog of the occupation. This has now been updated.


Hmmm....


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 25, 2013)

SLK said:


> You seem more obsessed with her than anyone else to be honest - and her above what she represents.


 
Possibly...and I'm relatively new to this...but the more you read, the more obscene it all appears...and that's disregarding the patently obvious issue of the subject of the thread. Apart from all else, she so fuckin symptomatic of the problems with the left and the 'left liberal media' that I can't help it. Like I say, she's a symptom, the rancid boil. I'm not saying she's the pathogen; that was contracted 50..60 years back.
You think she has any redeeming features?


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 25, 2013)

And shouldn't any decent, self and socially aware person be 'obseessed' with what she represents?


----------



## ymu (Jan 25, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> She doesn't need pushing...she trades on those extremes. It's her bread and butter.
> 
> And as for the 'serious left', its analysis is decent because its analysis is grounded in the shitty, 'crooked timber', desperate, red in tooth and claw nature of humanity; not some fucked-up ideological, I wanna Guardian column and impress my peers theorising.


The decent analysis frequently suffers in translation, is what I'm saying. Stooping to her inane level, mirror image, baby/bathwater, yada yada.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 25, 2013)

Sunny Hundal is fighting the class war 

*We can win the ‘class war’*




> For the Democrat Third Way and New Labour generation, raising taxes on the richest and asking them to pay their fair share of taxes, in proportion to how much income they earned, had become a taboo. But no longer does this have to be the case. President Obama didn’t just want to raise taxes: his entire campaign was based on what Republicans referred to as ‘class war’. And significantly he won.
> ...
> Ed Miliband faces a similar situation. The Conservatives have shown themselves to be out of touch by cutting taxes at the top. His Labour party have to appeal to voters who are worried about the national debt. The national mood overwhelmingly favours raising taxes on the richest to pay their fair share. The idea that such an electoral strategy can’t work because it’s “against aspiration” is no longer valid – times have changed.


 
Sunny Hundal is fighting the 'class war'.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 25, 2013)

ymu said:


> The decent analysis frequently suffers in translation, is what I'm saying. Stooping to her inane level, mirror image, baby/bathwater, yada yada.


 
No major diversion, but her innane level seems to be gaining traction...New Statesman, Indy, Guardian, Radio 4. So not 'stooping' effectively amounts to condoning the entire package. The alternative is to give up, piss all over my entire life and accept that she is 'the left'. Fuck that.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 25, 2013)

" His Labour party have to appeal to voters who are worried about the national debt."

Yeah...that's me. I can't sleep at night because  my worries about the national debt eat at my soul. Sometimes at the end of the month, when I can't afford the petrol and I'm putting two hours on my day by getting the bus, it's not the waste of my time and the weight of mortality that eats at me...it's the national debt.
Sunny Hundal could stick his head and both hands in a 50 kilo sack of chickpeas and my girl's goldfish would still have more claim to a finger on the pulse.


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## ymu (Jan 25, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> No major diversion, but her innane level seems to be gaining traction...New Statesman, Indy, Guardian, Radio 4. So not 'stooping' effectively amounts to condoning the entire package. The alternative is to give up, piss all over my entire life and accept that she is 'the left'. Fuck that.


 
"Not stooping" means applying a decent political analysis rather than becoming her "mirror image" and throwing the anti-sexist "baby out with the bathwater" of identity politics.

ie there is no need to trivialise or deny the existence of the unacceptable abuse that is routinely dished out to 'minority' writers in order to criticise the way she abuses the over-riding class privilege that she cannot bring herself to admit that she has.


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## Bakunin (Jan 25, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Sunny Hundal could stick his head and both hands in a 50 kilo sack of chickpeas and my girl's goldfish would still have more claim to a finger on the pulse.


 
Sunny Hundal's successfully found fewer pulses than 'Bones' McCoy:


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 26, 2013)

ymu said:


> "Not stooping" means applying a decent political analysis rather than becoming her "mirror image" and throwing the anti-sexist "baby out with the bathwater" of identity politics.
> 
> ie there is no need to trivialise or deny the existence of the unacceptable abuse that is routinely dished out to 'minority' writers in order to criticise the way she abuses the over-riding class privilege that she cannot bring herself to admit that she has.



Again..no argument. So where am I doing that? I take the position that I'm trivialising the worst excesses of a drama queen who extrapolates admittedly heinous abuse to paint all criticism in the same light. 
But, apart from the one instance, which I reposted and condemned, I'm relying on her word that its a constant stream. 

Here's the thing, re abuse: any walk down the road, trip to the shops, walk to school involves me, the missus and the kids facing threats from any number of smack-head cunts, general purpose loons and 10 a penny meatheads giving off far more than 'online abuse'. Seriously, I fuckin laugh at 'online abuse'. I've had a baseball bat and a machete near the door for as long as I can remember. Fortunately, I'm massive and fairly handy. To quote Hank Scorpio, "walk a mile in my moccasins"...then give me some schlum about 'virtual threats'.  I've got 4 kids. I'm never at peace while one of them is out the house. I live in a fucked up dystopian pile of bullshit. Seriously, call me on it...come and visit, but don't tell me I belittle threats...I belittle fuckin tourists who play it for advantage and credibility.


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## FridgeMagnet (Jan 26, 2013)

> any walk down the road, trip to the shops, walk to school involves me, the missus and the kids facing threats from any number of smack-head cunts, general purpose loons and 10 a penny meatheads giving off far more than 'online abuse'


What? No it doesn't. What fucking rubbish.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 26, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> What? No it doesn't.



Doesn't it? Where do you live? 50 odd houses down my  street. 2 stabbings, 1 rape and two burned out cars since Xmas. Never seen a single copper. They turn up in a transit mob handed and piss off ASAP.


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## ymu (Jan 26, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Again..no argument. So where am I doing that? I take the position that I'm trivialising the worst excesses of a drama queen who extrapolates admittedly heinous abuse to paint all criticism in the same light.
> But, apart from the one instance, which I reposted and condemned, I'm relying on her word that its a constant stream.
> 
> Here's the thing, re abuse: any walk down the road, trip to the shops, walk to school involves me, the missus and the kids facing threats from any number of smack-head cunts, general purpose loons and 10 a penny meatheads giving off far more than 'online abuse'. Seriously, I fuckin laugh at 'online abuse'. I've had a baseball bat and a machete near the door for as long as I can remember. Fortunately, I'm massive and fairly handy. To quote Hank Scorpio, "walk a mile in my moccasins"...then give me some schlum about 'virtual threats'. I've got 4 kids. I'm never at peace while one of them is out the house. I live in a fucked up dystopian pile of bullshit. Seriously, call me on it...come and visit, but don't tell me I belittle threats...I belittle fuckin tourists who play it for advantage and credibility.


 
I'm not accusing you of anything. I am answering points you raise in response to my posts.


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## FridgeMagnet (Jan 26, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Doesn't it? Where do you live? 50 odd houses down my  street. 2 stabbings, 1 rape and two burned out cars since Xmas. Never seen a single copper. They turn up in a transit mob handed and piss off ASAP.


You can't ever walk down the street to the shops without being threatened by smackheads and loons? Bollocks. Shut up.


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## ymu (Jan 26, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> What? No it doesn't. What fucking rubbish.


Well, we fucking do. Where do you live?


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## FridgeMagnet (Jan 26, 2013)

ymu said:


> Well, we fucking do. Where do you live?


Every walk to the shops or out of your house involves you facing threats from crackheads and etc etc?


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 26, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> What? No it doesn't. What fucking rubbish.



Seriously...what the fuck are you talking about? You think we all live in Cheltnam? Get up to Croxteth, Peterlee, Southbank, Grangetown then read the hand wringing shite in the liberal press on intersectionality without either laughing, wanting to gag or thinking you're deluded.


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## FridgeMagnet (Jan 26, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Seriously...what the fuck are you talking about? You think we all live in Cheltnam? Get up to Croxteth, Peterlee, Southbank, Grangetown then read the hand wringing shite in the liberal press on intersectionality without either laughing, wanting to gag or thinking you're deluded.


Did you read an article about Hackney in the Guardian? Or watch one of those Professor Green videos maybe.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 26, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> You can't ever walk down the street to the shops without being threatened by smackheads and loons? Bollocks. Shut up.



Yes...but the wife can't. And the kids can't. And after dark, all bets are off. I live in Middlesbrough. Look it up...it's a fuckin joke. Then look up "Cleveland Police"...and think what 'calling the cavalry' amounts to. Wake up.


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## ymu (Jan 26, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Every walk to the shops or out of your house involves you facing threats from crackheads and etc etc?


It's not so bad during the day, but then we live right on the high street so there's not much of a journey and it's busy enough to feel safe. At night, it feels threatening. The boy does most of the after dark shop trips because of it, and there's always an incident. Sometimes it's the black kids facing down the Poles, sometimes it's blokes asking him where to find a prostitute, sometimes it's a racist giving him shit.

One of the poorest boroughs in the country. What do you think it's like?


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 26, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Did you read an article about Hackney in the Guardian? Or watch one of those Professor Green videos maybe.



Fuck off. Come and have a look if you like. In fact, go out on your own for an hour or two then tell me I'm making it up. In fact reassure me I'm just being 'dramatic'.


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## FridgeMagnet (Jan 26, 2013)

ymu said:


> It's not so bad during the day, but then we live right on the high street so there's not much of a journey and it's busy enough to feel safe. At night, it feels threatening. The boy does most of the after dark shop trips because of it, and there's always an incident. Sometimes it's the black kids facing down the Poles, sometimes it's blokes asking him where to find a prostitute, sometimes it's a racist giving him shit.
> 
> One of the poorest boroughs in the country. What do you think it's like?


He's making a mug out of you.


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## ymu (Jan 26, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> He's making a mug out of you.


What?


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 26, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> He's making a mug out of you.



Actually, I withdraw the "fuck off". That was out of order. But I stand by the rest. And I'm used to it. 
You're doubting my everyday reality and if you want to come and see it, feel free.
Where do you live btw?


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## smokedout (Jan 26, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> He's making a mug out of you.


 
sounds pretty familiar to me, colourfully expressed but ive lived in places like that, not many places in london like that, but when i was younger a walk through where i lived late at night regularly involved some sort of uninvited confrontation, no reason to think its any different now


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## smokedout (Jan 26, 2013)

and i got the living shit kicked out of me more than once because someone didnt like my face/what i was wearing/who i knew, so yeah, internet violence lol


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## FridgeMagnet (Jan 26, 2013)

smokedout said:


> sounds pretty familiar to me, colourfully expressed but ive lived in places like that, not many places in london like that, but when i was younger a walk through where i lived late at night regularly involved some sort of uninvited confrontation, no reason to think its any different now


Come on - "any walk down the road, trip to the shops, walk to school involves me, the missus and the kids facing threats from any number of smack-head cunts". This is not real. This is Death Wish shit.

_Ooooh the missus_


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## Favelado (Jan 26, 2013)

Can't walk in the park 'cos it's crazy after dark.


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## Belushi (Jan 26, 2013)

I've lived in London for twenty years, mostly areas with bad reputations, and hardly ever felt unsafe, generally if you leave other people alone they'll leave you alone. The same isnt true of some other places in the UK I've lived or visited.


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## smokedout (Jan 26, 2013)

possibly over the egging the pudding a bit, but the essence of what he says is bang on in some places.  depends a lot who you are as well, ive known a couple of older folk who local kids have taken a dislike to who get unbelievable amounts of shit


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## Belushi (Jan 26, 2013)

smokedout said:


> possibly over the egging the pudding a bit, but the essence of what he says is bang on in some places. depends a lot who you are as well, ive known a couple of older folk who local kids have taken a dislike to who get unbelievable amounts of shit


 
Totally. I think you're coming across as a bit naive about this tbh fridgey.


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## ymu (Jan 26, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I've lived in London for twenty yearrs, mostly areas with bad reputations, and hardly ever felt unsafe, generally if you leave other people alone they'll leave you alone. The same isnt true of some other places in the UK I've lived or visited.


I lived (albeit briefly) in what I was later told was the dodgiest part of Brixton and never felt threatened. I can't be sure how much is due to my rapidly disappearing naivety after growing up in a village with a population of less than 70 but this is the first time in my life that I have felt reluctant to go out alone at night, and the first time the boy has actively tried to stop me.

London is not the rest of the country.


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## Belushi (Jan 26, 2013)

smokedout said:


> and i got the living shit kicked out of me more than once because someone didnt like my face/what i was wearing/who i knew, so yeah, internet violence lol


 
A (then) mate of mine once battered some poor guy in Peterborough town centre because he was wearing a poncho


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 26, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Come on - "any walk down the road, trip to the shops, walk to school involves me, the missus and the kids facing threats from any number of smack-head cunts". This is not real. This is Death Wish shit.



No it isn't. Where do you live? Apart from anything else, you seem to think Hackney is the be-all-and -end-all of social dysfunction. Hate to break it to you, but Hackney is the liberal press's idea of 'rough'. Diane Abbott lives in Hackney FFS.
Get up to the less publicised parts of any Northern city and take a pleasant stroll after dark for an hour or two. 
I'm perfectly aware this is turning into a 4 Yorkshireman scenario, but I've fuckin bitten now and either you're telling me I'm a liar or you're telling me I'm being dramatic. I'm telling you I'm being objective. It's pure shite where I live. I'd move tomorrow if I could and I'm late 40s and looking at old age like a turkey looks at Christmas.


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## FridgeMagnet (Jan 26, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Totally. I think you're coming across as a bit naive about this tbh fridgey.


I really did LOL at that.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 26, 2013)

smokedout said:


> possibly over the egging the pudding a bit, but the essence of what he says is bang on in some places.  depends a lot who you are as well, ive known a couple of older folk who local kids have taken a dislike to who get unbelievable amounts of shit



I'll concede I may be over egging on my own behalf, but I'm 6' 3", 16 stone and not at all flabby. I've got a 14 year old daughter. When she goes out, I'm a nervous fuckin wreck...with good reason.


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## ymu (Jan 26, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> I really did LOL at that.


Well, it's true.


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## sihhi (Jan 26, 2013)

ymu said:


> "Not stooping" means applying a decent political analysis rather than becoming her "mirror image" and throwing the anti-sexist "baby out with the bathwater" of identity politics.
> 
> ie there is no need to trivialise or deny the existence of the unacceptable abuse that is routinely dished out to 'minority' writers in order to criticise the way she abuses the over-riding class privilege that she cannot bring herself to admit that she has.


 
I think wires might have been crossed here.
Sexist (or racist etc etc) abuse and stereotyping is unacceptable in any form.
LP - as a woman - is not part of a minority - but part of a 'half'.
The question is how it should be handled online and in real life.
No one could not support a scenario where racist or sexist postings were wiped clean by a "take back the net" campaign as suggested by LP, however the roots of the thing lie in the socialisation of the family, and right-wing politics. right-wing internet sites contain the most sexism by far, unsurprisingly - I see anti-socialism as the fundamental basis on which sexism, racism etc are moulded.

Here's the centre right - in the form of Guido Fawkes - laughing about a male Golden Dawn striking a female KKE MP.

I count around a score of sexist comments, up to a dozen racist or chauvinist ones.
http://order-order.com/2012/06/07/greek-extremists-attack-each-other-literally/

Again as with DSMO, when someone urges a shade of sanity they are pounced:




> Anonymous says: greek extremists didnt attack each other, you arse. a left wing mp threw papers, a fascist mp – male – punched on. the violence was from the right
> 
> Oh dear says: Calm down dear, he slapped the fat slob and by Greek accounts she deserved it.
> There was no ‘right’ in the fight it was the national socialists vs the international socialists, in other words a lefty bitch slapping.
> ...


 
If you go on the far right obviously it's amplified significantly:- Warning far right
http://vnnfo rum.com/showthread.php?t=139845

I don't see it on the left on the internet to any comparable degree - either the centre left or the far left - the ideas or their implications of postings can of course sexist or racist, but I get little sense of sustained rape myths, sex or race-based put downs or jokes.

So I see it as largely a right-wing arseholes problem. The struggle against internet sexism can only really win by real life struggle against sexism and capitalism which is why I disagree with LP declaring that the "internet which is where we organise" - if that's the case then it's a losing endeavour. The internet is where I have a bit of think on politics, where I laugh at political clowns but that's it - that's all I'm interested in really. Organisation on the internet not gonna happen - trying to go on these rightwing sites or on twitter to stop these people posting or sending stupid emails is something of a wild goose chase.

There will always be internet inbox 'hate' or threats - don't want to compare it to real life spitting, swearing, loud guffawing race-based laughter in the open, attacks, burglaries, strikebreaker threats, because they are different things, all those things are different things. But If we give one another confidence to carry on, then the effects of racist or sexist internet postings can be overcome, while the real battle beyond can be waged, victory in which will wipe away the human disgraces.

On London areas, whilst most areas are absolutely fine, sub-areas _can_ be a different story - the wrong cul-de-sac in Northumberland Park where you live, or the wrong lawn and side alley by a block in Upper Edmonton and you will get it immediately from kids/teenagers/sometimes older, ongoing intermittent verbal molestation, threats, goading, baiting physical behaviour (litter, stone tossing) from early evening onwards - always making your kids go in twos, never letting women unaccompanied. But another cul-de-sac a few streets down might be completely fine.

PS: There's zero evidence to suppose LP has looked at this thread in making her twitter posts - this thread is just a look at what these people have been doing. LP spoke about slutwalks being working-class pride at the LSE talk, it's hardly surprising to discuss promote an old article about "slut-shaming" on twitter. There's no reason for obsession about any media figure, only those obsessed with the modern media (guilty as charged) would find it any more than 'noteworthy but meh'.


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## smokedout (Jan 26, 2013)

Belushi said:


> A (then) mate of mine once battered some poor guy in Peterborough town centre because he was wearing a poncho


 
i'm trying not to post this, but that is kind of fair enough


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## SLK (Jan 26, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> And shouldn't any decent, self and socially aware person be 'obseessed' with what she represents?


 
No, you numpty. I mean that you're obsessed with her. That's it. Not with what she represents. That's how it comes across to me.


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## Belushi (Jan 26, 2013)

smokedout said:


> i'm trying not to post this, but that is kind of fair enough


 
It was 1989 and Peterborough wasnt exactly cosmopolitan. My mate seemed to take it as a personal affront.

It took me another five years but i escaped in the end


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 26, 2013)

In fact...what the fuck is this thread about? You all just jealous cos LP got the gig you were after? She pisses me off cos I'm living in a modern day Dickensian East End and any chance of a political reprieve is sliding down the plug hole...mainly because the likes of her don't even know about me and would treat me like something she trod in. Why head for the North East when Athens is on the cards?..and since she's 'the left' these days, me and hundreds of thousands of others don't exist, don't count and only get a mention when a small but vocal bunch of islamophobic gobshites decide to smash up some shops. That's what I am to the liberal media...a potential EDF thug.


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## smokedout (Jan 26, 2013)

anyone wearing a poncho needs to be taught that they aren't Clint Eastwood


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 26, 2013)

SLK said:


> No, you numpty. I mean that you're obsessed with her. That's it. Not with what she represents. That's how it comes across to me.



Well that's you, you fuckin prick. Have a look and see what percentage of my posts mention her directly. I don't know what you'd discover..tell me. then again, fucked if I care how I 'come across to you' tbh...it's all about what she represents, and what she represents isn't doing me or anyone else any favours.


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## SLK (Jan 26, 2013)

Of course it is. Hence the personal nature of your posts.


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## nino_savatte (Jan 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Sunny Hundal is fighting the class war
> 
> *We can win the ‘class war’*
> 
> ...


 
That bowtie is so 70s.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 26, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> In fact...what the fuck is this thread about? You all just jealous cos LP got the gig you were after? She pisses me off cos I'm living in a modern day Dickensian East End and any chance of a political reprieve is sliding down the plug hole...mainly because the likes of her don't even know about me and would treat me like something she trod in. Why head for the North East when Athens is on the cards?..and since she's 'the left' these days, me and hundreds of thousands of others don't exist, don't count and only get a mention when a small but vocal bunch of islamophobic gobshites decide to smash up some shops. That's what I am to the liberal media...a potential EDF thug.


 
Could be worse, Sunny Hundal is fighting the class war from a telephone in Washington DC.



> In October last year, I persuaded an anti-Mexican racist to vote for Obama, had to put the phone down on a woman who insisted on describing the process of ‘partial-birth abortion’ as “Obama is killing those babies”, and had to persuade one Catholic woman that, despite what her local church says, she wouldn’t go to hell for voting for Obama. Only the victory party makes the long, frustrating pleas worth it.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 26, 2013)

SLK said:


> Of course it is. Hence the personal nature of your posts.



Oh sorry pal...you should have told me you were an eminent psychologist with the ability to divine motivation from the 'personal nature' of someone's prose.
Then again, what if I just take it 'personally'?
Then again, what if you're just a total prick?


----------



## SLK (Jan 26, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Oh sorry pal...you should have told me you were an eminent psychologist with the ability to divine motivation from the 'personal nature' of someone's prose.
> Then again, what if I just take it 'personally'?
> Then again, what if you're just a total prick?


 
Fireflies.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 26, 2013)

Belushi said:


> It was 1989 and Peterborough wasnt exactly cosmopolitan. My mate seemed to take it as a personal affront.
> 
> It took me another five years but i escaped in the end


 
bradford was very divided with the punks/goths/heavy metal people and bikers (and fuck did we need the bikers) all kind of bunched up in a few pubs around the university, which wasnt very fair and meant quite a lot of students got hurt

but outside of the internal fighting, which there was quite a lot of, there was a long running feud with bradford ointment (the bradford city local firm who were very nf at the time) and a local muslim gang who ran lots of the curry houses and cab ranks in the area, due to some stabbing that might once of happened to someone at some point

it was insanely violent, and if you drank in the city centre at night then you'd be dragged into it. when i moved to london everyone went on about how 'rough' it was going to be and put me in touch with various dodgy geezers if i got in trouble - i couldnt believe when i got settled and realised southerners really are soft as shite.


----------



## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 26, 2013)

SLK said:


> Fireflies.



Get yourself a shopping trolley and take a ride down a cobbled hill, it might just shake the chicken shit out your ears.


----------



## ymu (Jan 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> LP - as a woman - is not part of a minority - but part of a 'half'.


Hence the scare quotes around 'minority' to indicate that it was a useful abbreviation rather than a strictly accurate description. Having said that, simple population statistics do not indicate representation - if they did the working class would be in charge. Women are not equally represented in the media in terms of numbers, or the roles they play, or the longevity of their careers. They are not equally represented in any profession that brings money, glamour or power and women who achieve these positions are subjected to vile torrents of abuse by threatened male psyches.

In this sense, they are a minority. Not as much of a minority as the working class, but there is no need to trivialise sexism in order to make that point. It doesn't help anything to pretend that there is zero truth underlying the childish histrionics of the identity crowd. It just makes the serious left look as shit as the inane right.

This post is based solely on the response you made to my post, not other stuff you've posted on this thread. I was not aiming at anyone, just adding to what someone else said on this and now responding to responses to that post. I've observed this happening on the left far more widely than on this thread and I think it is important to address that.


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## ymu (Jan 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I don't see it on the left on the internet to any comparable degree - either the centre left or the far left - the ideas or their implications of postings can of course sexist or racist, but I get little sense of sustained rape myths, sex or race-based put downs or jokes.


I never joined a grouplet (being a walking middle class cliche, I came to left politics via single issue stuff). But my partner did. He'd sit in a meeting where it was all pro-feminist sensitivity and let's set up a woman's caucus (heaven forbid they be allowed to feel equally heard in plenary). As soon as they were down the pub, it was get yer tits out for the lads. That and being made to speak at every meeting (see, we have a black member!) but never actually consulted about anything apart from how to get drugs or some dodgy gear for a gig was why he left in disgust.

The right is all about abusing power relations. It is not surprising there. On the left it is fucking inexcusable. And the extreme reaction against identity politics does lead some lefties to some seriously fucked up attitudes with respect to identity-related issues. IME, obv.


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 26, 2013)

Erm...I'm a bit aware I've got a bit personal tonight and I apologise for that. Think it might be for the best if I fucked off for a while. However, I'm a bit pissed, as I often am...and it's a problem I'm well aware of...but I absolutely stand by the description of my locale. It certainly isn't some kinda inverted snobbery or wall pissing thing. It's desperate and genuinely dangerous and I'm frankly amazed that people doubt that there aren't many such parts of this country...I lived in London for 10 years and never, in all that time, felt as liable to recieve a good kicking as every time I leave my house now...if I were old or young or female or infirm I'm sure those feelings would be amplified 10 fold...and, if that isn't real and relevant and brutally honest privilege checking, I'm fucked if I know what is. And I may be flippant in saying this but if I could shift with the family to somewhere normal and get all my threats online I'd be happy as a pig as shit.


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## Belushi (Jan 26, 2013)

> Think it might be for the best if I fucked off for a while.


 
I hope you mean just for tonight mate. 

We get way more personal round here than you've been tonight


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## ymu (Jan 26, 2013)

There's nothing wrong with your posting Ronnie. You have a particular style, which is very funny and good to read. It pushes the OTT buttons cos that's your style, but I don't think you have anything to apologise for or feel embarrassed about. No more than (prolly less than) the average poster on a heated thread anyways.


----------



## Random (Jan 26, 2013)

ymu said:


> There's nothing wrong with your posting Ronnie. You have a particular style, which is very funny and good to read. It pushes the OTT buttons cos that's your style, but I don't think you have anything to apologise for or feel embarrassed about. No more than (prolly less than) the average poster on a heated thread anyways.


 Yes! Would very much enjoy reading Ronnie's take on other topics on U75 as well. He's so funny that at first I thought he must be a professional author.


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## barney_pig (Jan 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That description of the show looks pretty grim, I don't know who she is really, but she's not a voice for the left on Newsnight, Women's hour, Sky News, major published media etc. Perhaps her work be discussed in the TV forum?
> 
> Laurie Penny, prominent voice of modern socialism:
> 
> ...


Certainly has expanded my knowledge of the Paris commune


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## Ronnie Rubashov (Jan 26, 2013)

ymu said:


> There's nothing wrong with your posting Ronnie. You have a particular style, which is very funny and good to read. It pushes the OTT buttons cos that's your style, but I don't think you have anything to apologise for or feel embarrassed about. No more than (prolly less than) the average poster on a heated thread anyways.



Well, thanks for saying that but looking at it, I was sitting here getting myself really wound up...and I pride myself on not doing that. The one thing that'll always push the button though is being told I'm lying, especially about something as real and personal as that and it's all too real but...whatever.





Random said:


> Yes! Would very much enjoy reading Ronnie's take on other topics on U75 as well. He's so funny that at first I thought he must be a professional author.



Again, thanks for the compliment but therein lies the problem. I've been told similar things before and people can't seem to accept that my location, financial situation and 'career' marry up to my prose style.  There's a simple reason for this and I know three or four people in the same boat. When I was younger a benevolent state afforded me the opportunity for several years uninterrupted reading and study, with my own room, meals and utilities thrown in. All I had to do was to help move some stuff from A to B...and get caught. 

This has left me one of the best read people I know (not an idle boast, just a factual statement, 4 years, 10 or so hours a day, 365...do the Maths) but, ironically, fuck all chance of actually applying my knowledge to any useful end other than spraffing away on the Internet...so that's what I do from time to time. Until last night I'd never actually got so wound up by it. I really think I'm gonna give it a miss for a while. Several people tell me I should lay off threads like this and start a blog and I may give that a go, but tbh I think I come on places like this because at least they have a readership and there's nothing more frustrating than working away when your output just becomes another needle in the haystack...I might even go back to watching the telly and shouting at Newsnight.


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## Balbi (Jan 26, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Hang on...so out the blue, she happens to recall an article from 2010? Why exactly...unless it's to counter accusations on here about her association of 'slut' and 'working class; and I quote..LP:" The idea of slut pride is also about working-class pride."
> 
> To which..the reponse was:
> 
> ...


 
You want some pickle on that sandwich?


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## goldenecitrone (Jan 26, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> That's what I am to the liberal media...a potential EDF thug.


 
I had you down as npower.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 26, 2013)

Most energy comapnies could be left or right wing organisations...


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## DotCommunist (Jan 26, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Most energy comapnies could be left or right wing organisations...


 

British Gas political dissidents, jews and trade unionists?


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## Frances Lengel (Jan 26, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Erm...I'm a bit aware I've got a bit personal tonight and I apologise for that. Think it might be for the best if I fucked off for a while. However, I'm a bit pissed, as I often am...and it's a problem I'm well aware of...but I absolutely stand by the description of my locale. It certainly isn't some kinda inverted snobbery or wall pissing thing. It's desperate and genuinely dangerous and I'm frankly amazed that people doubt that there aren't many such parts of this country...I lived in London for 10 years and never, in all that time, felt as liable to recieve a good kicking as every time I leave my house now...if I were old or young or female or infirm I'm sure those feelings would be amplified 10 fold...and, if that isn't real and relevant and brutally honest privilege checking, I'm fucked if I know what is. And I may be flippant in saying this but if I could shift with the family to somewhere normal and get all my threats online I'd be happy as a pig as shit.


 
Only one person made a dick of themselves by accusing you of lying. And then going on about _Hackney_ (wherever the fuck that's supposed to be).

If you feel like the best thing you can do is have a bit of a rest then that's what you must do, but you are one of the funniest and most clued up posters on here and you will be missed.


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## goldenecitrone (Jan 26, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> Only one person made a dick of themselves by accusing you of lying. And then going on about _Hackney_ (wherever the fuck that's supposed to be).
> 
> If you feel like the best thing you can do is have a bit of a rest then that's what you must do, but you are one of the funniest and most clued up posters on here and you will be missed.


 
Hackney's in London. I'm sitting in it. Anyway, I agree with Frances.


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## DotCommunist (Jan 26, 2013)

theres bit of hackney that are a bit roughouse but not Beirut and other bits which are 'respectable' and you see jewish folk with those furry hats wandering about.


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## sihhi (Jan 26, 2013)

ymu said:


> I never joined a grouplet (being a walking middle class cliche, I came to left politics via single issue stuff). But my partner did. He'd sit in a meeting where it was all pro-feminist sensitivity and let's set up a woman's caucus (heaven forbid they be allowed to feel equally heard in plenary). As soon as they were down the pub, it was get yer tits out for the lads. That and being made to speak at every meeting (see, we have a black member!) but never actually consulted about anything apart from how to get drugs or some dodgy gear for a gig was why he left in disgust.
> 
> The right is all about abusing power relations. It is not surprising there. On the left it is fucking inexcusable. And the extreme reaction against identity politics does lead some lefties to some seriously fucked up attitudes with respect to identity-related issues. IME, obv.


 
Have to respond quickly on this.

I was posting about the campaign LP wanted 'take back the net' _targetting online misogyny. _I think it's an basically empty campaign - to be supported yes, but basically empty because the sites where online misogyny (or racism) is prevalent is *not* where 'online organisation' happens (not that online organisation actually matters to working-class participants). 

Re your partner's experience. No left group needs to be using drugs at all - it's in invitation for police repression - I think that member was wise to leave ASAP. Being _made to_ speak at every meeting as an esteemed immigrant/woman/homosexual etc *is* identity politics. They wouldn't call it identity politics but that's what it is - _requiring_ contributions on the say of others - on the basis of surface identity.

It's not too dissimilar from having a "progressive stack" by "consensus decision making" (as LP promotes in the New Statesman analysis of student movement) - immigrants and women speak first/for longer at a meeting seems a dangerous idea - with all kinds of backlash opportunities for the right.

Chairing should be rotated to give equal access to all, in general all roles as far as possible should be rotated. An issue in 'activist politics' that shouldn't be forgotten is middle-class monopolisation of soft roles (media and press work, publicity and propaganda formation, strategy meetings) while working-class participants are relegated to only 'donkey' or dangerous work (door-knocking, delivery, picket standing, creche provision), even where the aims are properly anti-sexist and pro-working-class. 

I could cite examples but that would be dangerous on a public board, it happens - and women and immigrants (for capitalist society reasons are more likely to be 'working-class' or 'unskilled') are sidelined. 
In real life it's a massive problem - online it's not so much... that's the point I was making, don't want to see it twisted.


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## Belushi (Jan 26, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> theres bit of hackney that are a bit roughouse but not Beirut and other bits which are 'respectable' and you see jewish folk with those furry hats wandering about.


 
When it rains some of them wear these giant shower cap things over the furry hats


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## Greebo (Jan 26, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Well, thanks for saying that but looking at it, I was sitting here getting myself really wound up...and I pride myself on not doing that. The one thing that'll always push the button though is being told I'm lying, especially about something as real and personal as that and it's all too real but...whatever.
> <snip>
> Until last night I'd never actually got so wound up by it. I really think I'm gonna give it a miss for a while. Several people tell me I should lay off threads like this and start a blog and I may give that a go, but tbh I think I come on places like this because at least they have a readership and there's nothing more frustrating than working away when your output just becomes another needle in the haystack...I might even go back to watching the telly and shouting at Newsnight.


Take a break from here if you must, or just from this section of urban.  But don't kid yourself that your posts won't be missed.  It's the mix of different people with differing experiences and opinions which makes this place what it is, instead of akin to playing chess against yourself.


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## weepiper (Jan 26, 2013)

This sort of belongs here as much as anywhere else I think, because it's the headmaster of Wellington moaning about how hard kids from his school have it when they try to get into Oxbridge

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/educatio...s-is-hatred-that-dare-not-speak-its-name.html



> He said: "From our perspective it looks as if some public school students are being discriminated against at the final hurdle. It's painful because we are seeing some excellent candidates who would go on to get firsts who are not getting offers, about 10 this year.
> "Was that different to when I was at Oxford 35 years ago? Yes. I don't think anyone gave a toss back then where you came from, only that you were good enough to go."


 


By the by, my dad, son of a joiner and grew up in a council house, applied for Oxford, having passed his 11-plus aged 9 and being a straight A student ever since. His entrance exam was the only test he's ever failed in his life.


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## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2013)

The author used to be the 'master tutor' (i.e posh headmaster) of Penny's old school.


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## weepiper (Jan 26, 2013)

That's why I said it belongs here...


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## cesare (Jan 26, 2013)

Apparently if you pass the entrance exam you don't need to go through the interviewing process - which is where (I imagine) the subjective "like us" measures start creeping in.


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## weepiper (Jan 26, 2013)

cesare said:


> Apparently if you pass the entrance exam you don't need to go through the interviewing process - which is where (I imagine) the subjective "like us" measures start creeping in.


 
well, yeah... the reason my dad thought he failed was that he'd been involved in a serious car crash two weeks beforehand (in which he lost all 8 front teeth). You can bet if he'd been a private schoolboy strings would have been pulled to allow him to resit.


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## cesare (Jan 26, 2013)

weepiper said:


> well, yeah... the reason my dad thought he failed was that he'd been involved in a serious car crash two weeks beforehand (in which he lost all 8 front teeth). You can bet if he'd been a private schoolboy strings would have been pulled to allow him to resit.


Yep


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## ymu (Jan 26, 2013)

cesare said:


> Apparently if you pass the entrance exam you don't need to go through the interviewing process - which is where (I imagine) the subjective "like us" measures start creeping in.


They abolished the exam a while ago AFAIK. Cambridge had when I was applying to university (1984) and it was optional for Oxford. It was very much the worst part of an elitist system. An exam taken two terms before A levels which was harder than A levels and for which private and especially public schools would train pupils for intensively. My school refused to support my application because I refused to do the exam. It was a fucking scam.

Whether or not working class students were put at a disadvantage in the interview route depended on the college and subject. If the tutors doing the interviewing wanted more working class students to get in, it was a lot easier. I wasn't working class but they wanted more women at that time too and they gave me a low offer based on A level results.

The same group of interviewers accepted my best mate despite her having no maths O' level because her school had been too shit to get her through it. That meant they got no LEA fees for her. Then they failed to give her the support she would need to get through first year exam in economics (which she could then give up) and she got kicked out for failing it. Stupid liberals. I think she was too embarrassed to tell anyone she was struggling because we never knew and her tutor clearly didn't care (she was a posh, useless old cunt who only had the teaching gig because her husband was a prof). A posh kid who failed history in the same year and college was allowed to stay because his dad paid for a new boat house.

Horrible place.


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## BigTom (Jan 26, 2013)

no exam when I applied to Oxford in 97. My 6th form college (Henley on Thames, so far from a typical state 6th form, though a wide catchement area so not completely middle class, and no really posh people cos they all went to private schools) had someone who helped with oxbridge applications and we were directed to apply for particular colleges that had had people from our college before or were known to accept higher state school applicants than other colleges.


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## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2013)

This is how they do it now:



> An Oxford college is being sued for discriminating against poor students by forcing applicants to prove they can pay tens of thousands of pounds towards fees and living costs before taking up places.


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## ymu (Jan 26, 2013)

BigTom said:


> no exam when I applied to Oxford in 97. My 6th form college (Henley on Thames, so far from a typical state 6th form, though a wide catchement area so not completely middle class, and no really posh people cos they all went to private schools) had someone who helped with oxbridge applications and we were directed to apply for particular colleges that had had people from our college before or were known to accept higher state school applicants than other colleges.


 
What your school can do like that makes a big difference. Schools with no experience of or teachers with insights into the Oxbridge application process are at a big disadvantage.

Not that improving social mobility is any kind of answer. Fairness is not equality, it just leaves a slightly different composition of people at the top and the same people on the scrapheap.


----------



## ymu (Jan 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This is how they do it now:


There are about 30 colleges. They are all responsible for their own admissions procedures. Some will do it like that, but you might as well say that the admissions procedures for Newcastle say something about how Durham does it.

Some colleges give lower offers for medical students from state schools, based on research which shows that working-class students get better degree results than private school counterparts if they got the same A level results.


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## butchersapron (Jan 26, 2013)

I wasn't suggesting that this is a blanket policy - i was suggesting that it's one way that one college does it. They may do it more formally but the financial pressure element is always there in selection - on the student and from the college to the student.


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## ymu (Jan 26, 2013)

Aye.

All of this is tinkering around the edges as far as I'm concerned. Oxford and Cambridge would both be much better at what they do if they could rid themselves of the elitist stench; there's no way they are admitting the students with the greatest academic potential.

But nothing will change whilst we fetishise academic potential above everything else. It's important to have people pushing back the boundaries of knowledge, but they're worth fuck all without people turning that knowledge into material wealth (in which I include less tangible leisure activities; the arts are as important as the sciences). The rewards on offer for highly educated types (for a very restricted definition of "educated") means that privileged parents will always make sure their children get the best shot.

Abolish private schools and the children of the educated middle-class will still have an advantage because their parents can help them more and know people who can help them more. The children of the ill-educated toffs will get private tutors. And people who start out with the most disadvantages in life will still be very likely to remain the most disadvantaged.

Social mobility doesn't matter. Social equality does.

(Not trying to lecture you, butchers. Just a useful opportunity to say it.)


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## Delroy Booth (Jan 26, 2013)

ymu said:


> They abolished the exam a while ago AFAIK. Cambridge had when I was applying to university (1984) and it was optional for Oxford. It was very much the worst part of an elitist system. An exam taken two terms before A levels which was harder than A levels and for which private and especially public schools would train pupils for intensively. My school refused to support my application because I refused to do the exam. It was a fucking scam.
> 
> Whether or not working class students were put at a disadvantage in the interview route depended on the college and subject. If the tutors doing the interviewing wanted more working class students to get in, it was a lot easier. I wasn't working class but they wanted more women at that time too and they gave me a low offer based on A level results.
> 
> ...


 
Eurgh. Made me think of this quote from the acknowledgements of an interesting book called _A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience_ written by a working class guy from Rotherham called Simon J. Charlesworth, who went to Cambridge and clearly hated it. Some choice quotes



> _*Acknowledgments*_
> 
> This part of the book must have particular significance for someone who ordinarily should never have written one. There is something tragic in achieving literacy to encounter, time and again, the disinterest of publishers and journals alike and one's exclusion from the sites that give sense to the practices of culture... ... After so much unemployment and the waste of so much of my time, it is difficult to feel that what is written here has any value.
> 
> ...


----------



## rekil (Jan 26, 2013)

weepiper said:


> This sort of belongs here as much as anywhere else I think, because it's the headmaster of Wellington moaning about how hard kids from his school have it when they try to get into Oxbridge
> 
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/educatio...s-is-hatred-that-dare-not-speak-its-name.html


 
http://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/3363605668



> Anthony Seldon is a LEGEND. He was my history teacher, and is a personal mentor. He's a lot of the reason I am like I am...


 
You can say that again Laura!


----------



## ymu (Jan 26, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Eurgh. Made me think of this quote from the acknowledgements of an interesting book called _A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience_ written by a working class guy from Rotherham called Simon J. Charlesworth, who went to Cambridge and clearly hated it. Some choice quotes


That's very familiar. There was a group of working-class students at my college who formed a defensive knot to keep the toffs at bay. They were subjected to some appalling treatment by the deeply unpleasant toff group, as was everyone, including the random lesser toff that got singled out every term to be their internal whipping boy. A friend of my flatmate, lovely boy, got involved with them and ended up in long-term psychiatric care. It's a kind of psychological bullying you just don't see anywhere else.

I knew some of the working-class group individually, but not as a group. I shared a bottle of 80% proof Bacardi with one of the guys at a party some time after we left and he said "you always hated me" and I said "no, you assumed I would hate you so you hated me first" and he said "yeah, that's actually true". Can't blame him. The atmosphere was fucking poison, and you could feel it the moment you stepped through the gates on day one.


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## mrs quoad (Jan 26, 2013)

ymu said:


> There are about 30 colleges. They are all responsible for their own admissions procedures. Some will do it like that, but you might as well say that the admissions procedures for Newcastle say something about how Durham does it.
> 
> Some colleges give lower offers for medical students from state schools, based on research which shows that working-class students get better degree results than private school counterparts if they got the same A level results.


I don't know of any college, or any course within any college, that doesn't rely on interviews. I've known a few people who've been involved in UG admissions interviews across a range of subjects ('general admissions' senior fellows, languages, hard sciences, physics / maths, engineering... erm. Probably more).

IIRC, all of them have talked about looking for the 'something extra' that is about 'innate capacity / intuition / genius / the Oxbridge factor,' which (interviewers believe / assert) isn't schooled and which isn't interview training. [e2a: someone who shits themselves / says virtually nothing in an interview is likely to be fucked from the off, though. And being _used _to being in a 15th century oak-panelled room, talking to fellows in an Oxbridge college, is something that many people kinda won't ever have access to, or the ability to prepare for.]

In practice, IMO that leads to a lot of mythologising and self-justification. Eton seems to be incredibly good at selecting people with 'that something extra' at the age of 8 (or whatever), for example, with - a couple of years ago - 44% making it to Oxbridge (IIRC). And I've known a couple of junior interviewers who've been quite explicit that their leads / seniors are pretty clearly old school tie, and've been looking for other people who 'feel right' in that vein. It's a relatively unaccountable process, so those decisions are likely to be the ones that're carried.

There're also additional (social) filters and justifications - there was a G2 report a year or so back in which a reporter sat in on Cam fellows sifting through papers. There were justifications like 'she's already been failed by the school, so would struggle at Cam'; 'wouldn't fit in'; 'would be unfair on her to give her a chance, she'd be better suited to another less strenuous / stressful university'; etc. When in practice, if x college really wanted to, it'd be *easily* able to find the resources to give people who'd been 'let down by their school' additional intensive support.

And then there's the presumption that once people've been accepted, the right choices were made, because there's a belief that the system is pretty damned extraordinary if not _quite _perfect (because the interviewers are prety damned extraordinary, if not _quite _perfect). So inordinate pastoral and additional academic support is given to those who've already made it in (that's what Oxbridge is, tbf), the requisite proportion of firsts is given within each group / year, and the system continues to justify itself to itself with only occasional barkings from off stage left.

I'm inclined to think that you could probably dump the entire cohort of successful applicants and take on a full cohort of 'second-choice' candidates; or dump the entire cohort of private school kids and take on only state educated kids for a year; and... well... it'd be interesting to see (IMO) if that had any effect on grades, completion rates, etc whatsoever.



ymu said:


> Aye.
> 
> All of this is tinkering around the edges as far as I'm concerned. Oxford and Cambridge would both be much better at what they do if they could rid themselves of the elitist stench; there's no way they are admitting the students with the greatest academic potential.


Yeah. But... when I've said something similar in the past... people've pointed out that Oxbridge is embedded in and representative of the social systems. It highlights broader corruption / problems by distilling and focusing them, but is not particularly unique in the way it works. It's a component in a system. And is unlikely to be 'fixable' as a standalone entity whilst the same systemic problems continue to be prevalent / dominant / manifested.

We've recently had a list of internships sent round, being offered / promoted by former college members. (I'm guessing they're mostly unpaid - though it doesn't state that on the list). Oxbridge is just a refinement of earlier biases, corruptions, elitisms and injustices, that're then given the Oxbridge stamp of approval, and which then migrate to the elitist corners of the wider world.



> But nothing will change whilst we fetishise academic potential above everything else.


tbf, I came to Cam thinking that it *was* about a neutral fetishisation of academic potential. I now find it really difficult to take that notion seriously, because assessments of 'academic potential' seem to be so heavily filtered by class / privilege. (And then those assessments are retrospectively justified because of the good academic outcomes of people who have extraordinary levels of resourcing poured into their HE).

I don't feel particularly qualified to enter into the politics of this - fully aware I'm inexcusably ignorant. And I'm a MC / privately educated white male at Cambridge, which makes me even more cautious of how much / what I've got to offer  But, well - Cam has certainly been an eye-opener about the way quite a lot of 'things' / social processes work.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 26, 2013)

Ronnie Rubashov said:


> Let's see...
> 
> Laurie...Owen Jones just said your mam's a fat cow and you're an upper class fraud.


 
And that Sunny Hundal bummed her mum.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 26, 2013)

smokedout said:


> sounds pretty familiar to me, colourfully expressed but ive lived in places like that, not many places in london like that, but when i was younger a walk through where i lived late at night regularly involved some sort of uninvited confrontation, no reason to think its any different now


 
I used to live on Clapham Park estate in the '80s, which was like a condensation of every tabloid scare-story about "sink estates" and "drug dens" (as they used to be called B.C. [before crack]) into a dozen acres of crumbling urban housing stock, and it was pretty much like that for everyone who lived there.
Same where Greebo and I live now. It used to be a crime pit (we had more serious crimes on our small estate in 1999 than the entirety of the Tulse Hill estate, with about 5 times as many housing units, for the same year), although it's better now (possibly due to the higher average age of most tenants).


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 26, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Come on - "any walk down the road, trip to the shops, walk to school involves me, the missus and the kids facing threats from any number of smack-head cunts". This is not real. This is Death Wish shit.
> 
> _Ooooh the missus_


 
Depends where you live. If you have the misfortune to live somewhere where the main gathering area for the local heroin-users "waiting for the man" happens to be on your route to the local shops/amenities then it *can* be an everyday experience. If those lurkers happen to be crack-users then the threats can be verbal as well as merely hanging in the air in some kind of miasma of menace.


----------



## cesare (Jan 26, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I used to live on Clapham Park estate in the '80s, which was like a condensation of every tabloid scare-story about "sink estates" and "drug dens" (as they used to be called B.C. [before crack]) into a dozen acres of crumbling urban housing stock, and it was pretty much like that for everyone who lived there.
> Same where Greebo and I live now. It used to be a crime pit (we had more serious crimes on our small estate in 1999 than the entirety of the Tulse Hill estate, with about 5 times as many housing units, for the same year), although it's better now (possibly due to the higher average age of most tenants).


Similar here. Little Siberia early/mid 70s and the Clockwork Orange estate late 70s/early 80s and my folks are still there. Both of those are better now and yep I think you're right that higher average age (but also better transportation links) might have made a difference.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 26, 2013)

smokedout said:


> anyone wearing a poncho needs to be taught that they aren't Clint Eastwood


 
I'm afraid that anyone in a poncho reminds me of the skinny moustachio'd chap in "Citizen Smith".


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 26, 2013)

smokedout said:


> bradford was very divided with the punks/goths/heavy metal people and bikers (and fuck did we need the bikers) all kind of bunched up in a few pubs around the university, which wasnt very fair and meant quite a lot of students got hurt
> 
> but outside of the internal fighting, which there was quite a lot of, there was a long running feud with bradford ointment (the bradford city local firm who were very nf at the time) and a local muslim gang who ran lots of the curry houses and cab ranks in the area, due to some stabbing that might once of happened to someone at some point
> 
> it was insanely violent, and if you drank in the city centre at night then you'd be dragged into it. when i moved to london everyone went on about how 'rough' it was going to be and put me in touch with various dodgy geezers if i got in trouble - i couldnt believe when i got settled and realised southerners really are soft as shite.


 
Better central heating means less of a need to warm up through fighting.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 27, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This is how they do it now:


Been a busy boy this lad.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 27, 2013)

Damien Shannon! No fuckin' way. 

He spent every minute he was at Salford Uni filing FOI requests and sending crankish emails to the Vice Chancellor. Has anyone here heard of the Gary Duke case? It's been covered in Private Eye. He's an SWP member from Salford who they wouldn't let finish his PhD coz of his involvement in the anti-cuts protests at Salford uni. Damien was involved in helping with that, specifically with FOI requests to the senior staff. If I remember right, the uni once raided his room campus trying to find god-knows-what, he got quite a hard time to be honest. He's a good lad, even if he is a bit of a Tory. Last I heard he had a job with the civil service, but I'm not surprised still upto his old tricks. 

He ran as the Lib Dem council candidate (from his own mouth "They're desperate, they'll run anyone, no waiting list, nothing") for Irwell Riverside in Salford against another serial FOI pest Gary Tumulty of the BNP back in 2010. Between them they must have the most number of Freedom of Information requests of any council ward in England.


----------



## ymu (Jan 27, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Been a busy boy this lad.


 
Misread that the first time, sorry. That *is* university-wide policy for postgrads. Nothing to do with St Hugh's. It's only undergraduates who apply through the college system.

All postgrads have to prove they have fees plus ten grand a year to live on. Most non-rich postgrads are funded by grants rather than loans, but proof of access to loans is fine AFAIK. Bizarrely, running out of money to live on is not considered a good enough reason for suspending postgrad studies so if you do, you're fucked unless you can dig up some medical excuse.

Postgraduate places have always been dominated by overseas students because rich people the world over want to send their kids to Oxford. Unlike the undergraduate entrance, postgrads are pretty much guaranteed a place if they have the money. The number of British postgrads depends on the number of grants being dished out by the various grant-awarding bodies (fewer since their funding was cut) and the accessibility of loans for shorter courses which people are more likely to be able to fund for themselves.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 27, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Come on - "any walk down the road, trip to the shops, walk to school involves me, the missus and the kids facing threats from any number of smack-head cunts". This is not real. This is Death Wish shit.


 
Hang on, you used to live in Philadelphia.  So you'll know that the above is true of approximately 50% of that city.  Is London all that different these days?


----------



## Firky (Jan 27, 2013)

ymu said:


> That's very familiar. There was a group of working-class students at my college who formed a defensive knot to keep the toffs at bay. They were subjected to some appalling treatment by the deeply unpleasant toff group, as was everyone, including the random lesser toff that got singled out every term to be their internal whipping boy. A friend of my flatmate, lovely boy, got involved with them and ended up in long-term psychiatric care. It's a kind of psychological bullying you just don't see anywhere else.
> 
> I knew some of the working-class group individually, but not as a group. I shared a bottle of 80% proof Bacardi with one of the guys at a party some time after we left and he said "you always hated me" and I said "no, you assumed I would hate you so you hated me first" and he said "yeah, that's actually true". Can't blame him. The atmosphere was fucking poison, and you could feel it the moment you stepped through the gates on day one.


 
Nothing like your experience but when I was looking around prospective unis I had a trip to Warwick. Within an hour of being on campus I felt out of place and very conscious of my accent. The thought of spending three years there... no way. I am not even PFWC.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 27, 2013)

firky said:


> Nothing like your experience but when I was looking around prospective unis I had a trip to Warwick. Within an hour of being on campus I felt out of place and very conscious of my accent. The thought of spending three years there... no way. I am not even PFWC.


Yep. Same at Edinburgh - the only people who wanted to speak to me were staff. The thought of spending time there not speaking to anyone brought me out in a cold sweat.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jan 27, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Yep. Same at Edinburgh - the only people who wanted to speak to me were staff. The thought of spending time there not speaking to anyone brought me out in a cold sweat.


 
I think I told this story on MATB, but it's relevant here also. Sitting in my room in QUB I had a knock on the door from a colleague who was in a bit of a panic. The reason for his panic was that he'd found this young lad sitting on the step outside our building, either comatose or dead.

I went out and we rang for an ambulance, and he revived just as the ambulance arrived. He was obviously in a bad state - tripping on something or other - but as he had no visible injury, the ambo men couldn't insist that he went with them. He refused to go with them, so we brought him inside and sat him down.

I asked him what the problem was, and he started talking about killing himself. When I asked him why, he said "well I've had trouble making friends". Well, why is that, I said.

In a very posh accent, not just posh for Belfast, but _posh, _he said, "Oh, these people . . . they're beneath me".

OK. . . _I think I see where you're doing it wrong. . . _


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 27, 2013)

I went to Manchester University and it was fucking brilliant.


----------



## Firky (Jan 27, 2013)

I went to UoL.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 27, 2013)

firky said:


> I went to UoL.


 
Not UoHK?


----------



## Belushi (Jan 27, 2013)

I went to a new uni full of people who'd either failed their A levels or done access courses, had a great time


----------



## Firky (Jan 27, 2013)

No 

goldenecitrone


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 27, 2013)

I went to another uni in Edinburgh, and loved it.


----------



## Firky (Jan 27, 2013)

Yeh, I loved uni. It may have been a waste of time in some regards but it was certainly some of the best years of my life - great memories 

Half the reason I chose the university I did was because it was near the sea and was then one of the few places in the UK which had broadband


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 27, 2013)

firky said:


> Yeh, I loved uni. It may have been a waste of time in some regards but it was certainly some of the best years of my life - great memories
> 
> Half the reason I chose the university I did was because it was near the sea and was then one of the few places in the UK which had broadband


 
Yep. I studied the completely wrong subject, but I met some great people and really woke up to some aspects of the world. And it was all free. Poor bastards now.


----------



## Belushi (Jan 27, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> Poor bastards now.


 
Aye, so many people I know were the first generation in their family to go to University, now thanks to the tories they may well be the last.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 27, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Aye, so many people I know were the first generation in their family to go to University, now thanks to the tories they may well be the last.


 
And the Lib Dems. Anti-education cunts.


----------



## cesare (Jan 27, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> And the Lib Dems. Anti-education cunts.


Not anti-education. Anti-affordable-education.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 27, 2013)

i think the proposed country-wide reintroduction of grammar schools can only be a bad thing as well


----------



## Firky (Jan 27, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> Yep. I studied the completely wrong subject, but I met some great people and really woke up to some aspects of the world. And it was all free. Poor bastards now.


 


Belushi said:


> Aye, so many people I know were the first generation in their family to go to University, now thanks to the tories they may well be the last.


 


> Laurie Penny: ...<snip> I enjoyed an expensive education....


 
Just keeping things on topic - we have much in common. 

Alas it matters where you enjoyed yourself more than what you did.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jan 27, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> And the Lib Dems. Anti-education cunts.


And the Labour party - look at their record.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 27, 2013)

i probably worked harder for my sociology a level than i have for anything else in my life and also learned the most of it from any school subject. supposedly thats a mickey mouse subject as well.


----------



## Firky (Jan 27, 2013)

My A-levels (psychology, philosophy, biology - dropped out of law, far too hard) were much harder than anything I did at university.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 27, 2013)

anyway i've been doing some cover supervisor work in schools in the local area, hopefully will get some more this yer, and all the kids are hard working and want to learn. to listen to the tory party you would think all schools are like beirut and it fucking depresses me how they are trying to get rid of coursework and gcses which despite their faults are still better than the fuckin "international baccaluriat" and all of the things which can often make kids enthusiastic about learning and replace it with some pre-1950s ideological bullshit. I enjoyed doing coursework at gcse more than writing an exam which you could easily fuck up on a particular day


----------



## Firky (Jan 27, 2013)

I don't know what to make of that one. In some subjects I preferred an exam and in others I preferred course work.

TBH it's over 15 years since I left and school and there's so much that has changed since then I don't think I am really qualified to have an opinion. There was no internet when a were a lad, and essays were written by hand.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 27, 2013)

LP's off to Cairo. No, really.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 27, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Aye, so many people I know were the first generation in their family to go to University, now thanks to the tories they may well be the last.


This was me. My grandad was dead proud I went to uni in Scotland. At this rate even selling a kidney won't get you a uni education.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 27, 2013)

Balbi said:


> LP's off to Cairo. No, really.


No way.


----------



## Firky (Jan 27, 2013)

She's asking for fashion tips on what to wear from "Egypt people" [sic] and if anyone wants to hang out.

Someone recommended mace :dacepalm:


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 27, 2013)

firky said:


> My A-levels (psychology, philosophy, biology - dropped out of law, far too hard) were much harder than anything I did at university.


 
Yup I feel the same way, I also reckon I got a better standard of teaching at too Huddersfield New College than at Salford uni, with one or two exceptions.


----------



## Firky (Jan 27, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Yup I feel the same way, I also reckon I got a better standard of teaching at too Huddersfield New College than at Salford uni, with one or two exceptions.


 
The teaching at Newcastle College was awful when I was there. My Law teacher was a rampant alcoholic and would drink in lessons. She'd also take us down to the canteen for a lecture so she could smoke. Really quite sad in retrospect - someone should have intervened. Maybe someone did but I sometimes wonder what happened to her.


----------



## Firky (Jan 27, 2013)

> Karrie Kehoe @KarrieKehoe
> 
> @PennyRed You have the most amazing life! You were in my home city this weekend and next stop Cairo! Have a great time! #Jealous


----------



## weepiper (Jan 27, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Yep. Same at Edinburgh - the only people who wanted to speak to me were staff. The thought of spending time there not speaking to anyone brought me out in a cold sweat.


 
I went to Edinburgh. The open day and most of first year were _horrible_. Then I found some people like me


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 27, 2013)

She always asks if people want to hang out.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 27, 2013)

Pointing out the obvious, but the twitterati won't be able to provide her with the insight into the actual action. But may constitute her sources.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 27, 2013)

less pussy riot more football riot


----------



## Firky (Jan 27, 2013)

C





equationgirl said:


> She always asks if people want to hang out.


 
I wouldn't hang out with randoms I met on twitter, especially considering some of the abuse she gets. There's some right fucking oddballs out there on twitter. If someone did a Jonathan May-Bowels to her she'd shit herself. To hell meeting some random in Cairo!!


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 27, 2013)

firky said:


> C
> 
> I wouldn't hang out with randoms I met on twitter, especially considering some of the abuse she gets. There's some right fucking oddballs out there on twitter. If someone did a Jonathan May-Bowels to her she'd shit herself. To hell meeting some random in Cairo!!


Exactly - and given some of the nasty threats she's received I'm surprised she isn't more cautious about publicly displaying her plans.


----------



## Firky (Jan 27, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Exactly - and given some of the nasty threats she's received I'm surprised she isn't more cautious about publicly displaying her plans.


 
The cynical side of me wonders if it is premeditated titillation for her hate mongers. The more abuse, the more she puts her hand in the fire, the more she is revered by her sycophantic followers on twitter. Or perhaps she rightly believes that she should be able to announce her plans on twitter without the threat of harm.

It's a bit of a conundrum.

Must be nice to go to suddenly decide to go to Cairo. If you and I were going to Cairo it would be planned, saved up for, and anticipated months if not years in advance. She suddenly announces it one day as if it was no different to going to the shop. Must be nice to have that kind of privilege and lifestyle or work in an environment where that sort of thing is normal. Could be in Cairo next week, New York the week after that and then back to the hovel in London. Hard life. 

The other half, eh?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 27, 2013)

firky said:


> The cynical side of me wonders if it is premeditated titillation for her hate mongers. The more abuse, the more she puts her hand in the fire, the more she is revered by her sycophantic followers on twitter. Or perhaps she rightly believes that she should be able to announce her plans on twitter without the threat of harm.
> 
> It's a bit of a conundrum.
> 
> ...


Definitely - and in both our cases don't forget all the medical preparation we'd have to do, vaccinations, supplies, meds. Not just a case of popping round the corner at all.


----------



## rekil (Jan 27, 2013)

Balbi said:


> LP's off to Cairo. No, really.


We/PD have a man in Cairo - The Kingster.


> Patrick Kingsley is the Guardian's Egypt correspondent.


Our/PD traps are just too good.

Maybe.


----------



## Sue (Jan 27, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I used to live on Clapham Park estate in the '80s, which was like a condensation of every tabloid scare-story about "sink estates" and "drug dens" (as they used to be called B.C. [before crack]) into a dozen acres of crumbling urban housing stock, and it was pretty much like that for everyone who lived there.
> Same where Greebo and I live now. It used to be a crime pit (we had more serious crimes on our small estate in 1999 than the entirety of the Tulse Hill estate, with about 5 times as many housing units, for the same year), although it's better now (possibly due to the higher average age of most tenants).


 
Lived there in the mid/late 90s for a couple of years. The block I was in (one of the tower blocks) wasn't too bad and was kind of on the edge of things but some of the other blocks were in a shocking state. When people at work asked where I lived and I said 'Clapham', they used to think I was posh.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jan 28, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Yup I feel the same way, I also reckon I got a better standard of teaching at too Huddersfield New College than at Salford uni, with one or two exceptions.


 
Standard of teaching at my college was better than it is at my uni too - and Sheffield's in the Russell Group.

The apprenticeship I did when I first left school was miles more difficult than my degree has been. Half the kids on my course here wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes doing that. Fortunately for them they're not generally the kind of kids who'd ever _need _to survive an apprenticeship.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 28, 2013)

firky said:


> The teaching at Newcastle College was awful when I was there. My Law teacher was a rampant alcoholic and would drink in lessons. She'd also take us down to the canteen for a lecture so she could smoke. Really quite sad in retrospect - someone should have intervened. Maybe someone did but I sometimes wonder what happened to her.


 
she is now the principal


----------



## Greebo (Jan 28, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> she is now the principal


The Peter Principle strikes again.


----------



## _angel_ (Jan 28, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> anyway i've been doing some cover supervisor work in schools in the local area, hopefully will get some more this yer, and all the kids are hard working and want to learn. to listen to the tory party you would think all schools are like beirut and it fucking depresses me how they are trying to get rid of coursework and gcses which despite their faults are still better than the fuckin "international baccaluriat" and all of the things which can often make kids enthusiastic about learning and replace it with some pre-1950s ideological bullshit. I enjoyed doing coursework at gcse more than writing an exam which you could easily fuck up on a particular day


A mixed approach is best. There's obviously only so much you can impart in a three hour exam (thinking essay type subjects). An exam might work best for Maths but not so much English or History.
We didn't do an exam in English so I had 1 and half years of coursework not taking it seriously and the last few months of getting As. If it'd been an exam I could have got an A but because I wasn't taking it seriously my marks were lower with 100% coursework.
Anyone who thinks coursework is automatically "easier" misses the point. But the cheating thing is always a worry.


----------



## cesare (Jan 28, 2013)

"Account for the division of Europe in 1945 and show how this division affected the administrative arrangements made in 1945 for (a) Germany; and (b) Austria. How did power blocs develop in Western Europe and Eastern Europe in the years 1945-1954 and on what European issues did these power blocs quarrel?"

"Explain how Europe came to be divided by the Iron Curtain after 1945. How far, and for what reasons had Western Europe moved towards economic and military co-operation by 1954? What progress towards similar co-operation had been made in Eastern Europe by this date?"

Two sample O level questions from 1977/78. Bloody glad I'm not doing it nowadays


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

firky said:


> Must be nice to go to suddenly decide to go to Cairo. If you and I were going to Cairo it would be planned, saved up for, and anticipated months if not years in advance.


 
It costs about 200 quid to get to Cairo, and is so cheap once you're there that you actually spend less than you would in London.


----------



## ymu (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> It costs about 200 quid to get to Cairo, and is so cheap once you're there that you actually spend less than you would in London.


Not if you still had rent and bills to pay back in London.


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

£200 of disposable income that many people don't have.



cesare said:


> "Account for the division of Europe in 1945 and show how this division affected the administrative arrangements made in 1945 for (a) Germany; and (b) Austria. How did power blocs develop in Western Europe and Eastern Europe in the years 1945-1954 and on what European issues did these power blocs quarrel?"
> 
> "Explain how Europe came to be divided by the Iron Curtain after 1945. How far, and for what reasons had Western Europe moved towards economic and military co-operation by 1954? What progress towards similar co-operation had been made in Eastern Europe by this date?"
> 
> Two sample O level questions from 1977/78. Bloody glad I'm not doing it nowadays


My mate did A-level further math's and his uncle who was some physicist in the Royal Navy (probably nuclear subs!) couldn't do his math's homework.

It was just a pile of letters and symbols to me.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

ymu said:


> Not if you still had rent and bills to pay back in London.


 
Well obviously you sublet.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

firky said:


> £200 of disposable income that many people don't have.


 
You could earn it in a week.


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

You _could_ earn £2k in a day.


----------



## cesare (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> You could earn it in a week.


Someone on minimum wage would find it hard to earn that net, and extra (disposable), in a week.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> You could earn it in a week.


 
Just get yourself down the docks.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

cesare said:


> Someone on minimum wage would find it hard to earn that net, and extra (disposable), in a week.


 
You not telling me that an able-bodied, intelligent young man such as Firky couldn't put his hands on 200 quid if he really wanted to, in today's London?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 28, 2013)

200 quid is a lot when you've only got a tenner or twenty spare after everything else (your life) is paid for.


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

Oh, Dwyer 

You can't troll a troll.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> 200 quid is a lot when you've only got a tenner or twenty spare after everything else (your life) is paid for.


 
Get a job in a pub for a month or so innit.

Anyway you can get to Cairo for less than that.


----------



## cesare (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> You not telling me that an able-bodied, intelligent young man such as Firky couldn't put his hands on 200 quid if he really wanted to, in today's London?


I think there are many people who would find it hard to get £200 extra in a week, in London.


----------



## ymu (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> You could earn it in a week.


Of course! Low pay and unemployment are voluntary. Poverty is a lifestyle choice.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 28, 2013)

It's all getting a bit Atomic Suplex now.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jan 28, 2013)

ymu said:


> Of course! Low pay and unemployment are voluntary. Poverty is a lifestyle choice.


 
 Phil will even lend you the bike.


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

£150 a week on cheese.

FWIW if I was going to spend £200 on a flight it wouldn't be to Cairo. I'd go Barcelona or Eastern Europe. Would love ot go to Croatia.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 28, 2013)

firky said:


> £150 a week on cheese.


 
Times are tough.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

ymu said:


> Of course! Low pay and unemployment are voluntary. Poverty is a lifestyle choice.


 
Nobody's saying that.

I'm saying that an able-bodied young man can find 200 quid without too much bother, in today's London or anywhere else in the Western world.


----------



## ymu (Jan 28, 2013)

Ah, that massive shortage of people applying for jobs.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

ymu said:


> Ah, that massive shortage of people applying for jobs.


 
Not a job.  200 quid.

Anyway, you can hitch-hike to Cairo.


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 28, 2013)

You can take the Night boat to Cairo, Istanbul for 500 quid, fifty for a catamarran to Jordan then walk the rest of the way but that would be madness. But if you care about the environment etc


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 28, 2013)

even if you can earn 200 quid in a week that predisposes that you've got other money to pay for other shit. also don't forget that although it might be cheap in cairo we're tlking about the flight being 200 quid, you will still have to withdraw money once your there and the bank charges overseas aint cheap.


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

FFS, now I have Madness in my head.

_It's just gone noon, half past monsoon on the banks of the river nile, boat half a float, coxswan with a toothless smile_


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> even if you can earn 200 quid in a week that predisposes that you've got other money to pay for other shit. also don't forget that although it might be cheap in cairo we're tlking about the flight being 200 quid, you will still have to withdraw money once your there and the bank charges overseas aint cheap.


 
Well all I know is you meet working-class Brits all over the world, probably more than any other nation in fact, so they manage to get there somehow, Lord knows it's a terrible mystery though.


----------



## Random (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Well all I know is you meet working-class Brits all over the world, probably more than any other nation in fact, so they manage to get there somehow, Lord knows it's a terrible mystery though.


Are you on Twitter, phil? I think you could get some excellent piss-taking done


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Random said:


> Are you on Twitter, phil?


 
No way, this here is bad enough...


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

That's the thing, he (phil) has burnt all his coal on Urban. No more shall his trolls work!


----------



## ymu (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Well all I know is you meet working-class Brits all over the world, probably more than any other nation in fact, so they manage to get there somehow, Lord knows it's a terrible mystery though.


Working-class does not mean dirt poor.

That is not the same as saying that _anyone_ could find £200 + expenses to swan off at the drop of a hat, still less blow it on a vanity trip to Egypt. One third of the workforce earn less than £15k gross. Don't you think most might have more pressing things to do with a £200 windfall, let alone the lost earnings?


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

Why do so many people find it difficult to get £200 together for their kid's Christmas presents, I mean they have a year to sort it out for crying out loud? 

/pd


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 28, 2013)

but


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 28, 2013)

Surely a sufficiently motivated young cove could easily get hold of more than £200 at short notice? 
A few grand i reckon.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Well all I know is how to feed my oh so needy ego by trolling.


 
I'll chuck you this morsel but no more.

Cheers  - Louis MacNeice


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 28, 2013)

Thread now boring again. 

Not because of you Louis, of course.


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 28, 2013)

On a 200 quid flight to Cairo, does that include a handjob off an assassin's girlfriend?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Not a job. 200 quid.
> 
> Anyway, you can hitch-hike to Cairo.


Yes, because that's a sensible thing to do dwyer  Do fuck off.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 28, 2013)

Yes, you can get to Cairo for £232 return from London, if you want to travel next month and you don't mind a stopover in Rome for a night.

If you want to go tomorrow for a fortnight it's £313 and a night in Amsterdam.

There are more expensive options that go direct, starting at £335.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 28, 2013)

Stop it!


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> It costs about 200 quid to get to Cairo, and is so cheap once you're there that you actually spend less than you would in London.


 
Who's that with? I saw £330 with Alitalia to fly out on Saturday for two weeks. Not sure if I'd want to be in Cairo at the moment though.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:
			
		

> *It costs about 200 quid to get to Cairo*, and is so cheap once you're there that you actually spend less than you would in London.


 
does that include a handjob from an assassins girlfriend in the price


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 28, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Stop it!


Who? What?


----------



## Greebo (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> You could earn it in a week.


Maybe you could. Whether it involves you doing something dangerous, unpleasant or immoral is another matter.


Idris2002 said:


> Just get yourself down the docks.


I rest my case.


phildwyer said:


> You not telling me that an able-bodied, intelligent young man such as Firky couldn't put his hands on 200 quid if he really wanted to, in today's London?


If he was ruthless and had next to no self respect, maybe he could. Whether he should isn't the same thing, and you know it.


frogwoman said:


> even if you can earn 200 quid in a week that predisposes that you've got other money to pay for other shit. also don't forget that although it might be cheap in cairo <snip>you will still have to withdraw money once your there and the bank charges overseas aint cheap.


Agreed about needing to find a lot more than £200. OTOH no need for bank charges if you travel with cash withdrawn in advance stuffed into hidden pockets or your underwear - which gets a bit sweaty.


DotCommunist said:


> does that include a handjob from an assassins girlfriend in the price


I have very little doubt that dwyer would find a way to persuade her into paying him for giving him that, or he thinks he might.


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> It costs about 200 quid to get to Cairo, and is so cheap once you're there that you actually spend less than you would in London.


 
On that 200 quid flight to Cairo, do you get to go in the cockpit? Have you ever seen a grown man naked, Phil?


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Yes, because that's a sensible thing to do dwyer  Do fuck off.


 
_I _didn't say it was sensible. It was Firky who expressed the desire to go to Cairo, while lamenting what seems to him the complete impossibility of his ever attaining that goal.



firky said:


> Must be nice to go to suddenly decide to go to Cairo. If you and I were going to Cairo it would be planned, saved up for, and anticipated months if not years in advance. She suddenly announces it one day as if it was no different to going to the shop. Must be nice to have that kind of privilege and lifestyle or work in an environment where that sort of thing is normal. Could be in Cairo next week, New York the week after that and then back to the hovel in London. Hard life.
> 
> The other half, eh?


 
I merely pointed out to him that a trip to Cairo really isn't the beyond the bounds of possibility, at least not for a young single man. If he really can't earn 200 quid, I noted, it is entirely possible to hitch-hike.

But it would appear that you cannot even imagine doing such an incredible thing, which I must say is not entirely surprising in view of the general range and tenor of your posts as a whole.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 28, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Who? What?


Why are you even bothering to address its points seriously? Greebo too.
Don't feed it!


----------



## Greebo (Jan 28, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Why are you even bothering to address its points seriously? Greebo too.
> Don't feed it!


Last week I had neither the time nor the energy, today OTOH...


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Agreed about needing to find a lot more than £200.


 
You could easily spend a month in Cairo for 300 quid, including rent, amenities, food and moderate entertainment.  Which is a lot less than you'd spend in London, thus saving you back the cost of the flight and more.

Also you can buy clothes, jewelery etc and sell it when you get back. 



Greebo said:


> OTOH no need for bank charges if you travel with cash withdrawn in advance stuffed into hidden pockets or your underwear - which gets a bit sweaty.


 
Yep, I don't use credit cards in the third world anyway.



Greebo said:


> I have very little doubt that dwyer would find a way to persuade her into paying him for giving him that, or he thinks he might.


 
I didn't think I might but I did.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> You could easily spend a month in Cairo for 300 quid, including rent, amenities, food and moderate entertainment. Which is a lot less than you'd spend in London, thus saving you back the cost of the flight and more.
> 
> Also you can buy clothes, jewelery etc and sell it when you get back.<snip>


With what shall I buy it?  Also, your idea of what I live on in London is way off the mark.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Greebo said:


> With what shall I buy it?


 
Stuff like that is really cheap in the _souks _of Arabia.  You'd make a 1000% profit, it'd be worth it just for a few scarves, baubels, trinkets and the like.  Guatemala is also good for this.


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

Yes dwyer.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> Who's that with? I saw £330 with Alitalia to fly out on Saturday for two weeks. Not sure if I'd want to be in Cairo at the moment though.


 
The price I saw was to Luxor, it was a "flight only" package deal with, I believe, Thompson... or similar British agent anyway. 

And I assume you can get from Luxor to Cairo for next to nothing.  I think it would be a great time to be there, obviously you'd have to watch your back and that....


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

Yes dwyer.

The tenor of my posts which quite recently mentioned how I spent several months in North America and Canada, parts of Europe - sometimes just for a weekend etc. But this isn't about me is it? It's about you, being bored on a Monday night. I don't blame you, I used to wind people up on here too.

You're usually better at trolling than this mind.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

firky said:


> Yes dwyer.


 
You lack initiative young man.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 28, 2013)

Can we get this shit off the thread? What you think stuart?


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

firky said:


> The tenor of my posts which quite recently mentioned how I spent several months in North America and Canada, parts of Europe - sometimes just for a weekend etc.


 
That wasn't directed at you, it was at EquationGirl.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Can we get this shit off the thread? What you think stuart?


 
Aye.  Back to the _serious _business.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Aye. Back to the _serious _business.


That wasn't directed at you, it was at all sorts of you idiots.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Stuff like that is really cheap in the _souks _of Arabia. You'd make a 1000% profit, it'd be worth it just for a few scarves, baubels, trinkets and the like. Guatemala is also good for this.


"Really cheap" still needs more money than I could easily get hold of in any way which I'd be comfortable with or capable of. Also, in my case, you forget that I'd have to factor in the cost of either dumping VP on his parents or paying gods know how many agency workers to do what I usually do.

That raises the amount to be found by at least another £1,000. And, when I got back, yes, I could sell that stuff for far more than I paid out for it; however, it'd be docked pound for pound from my benefits and VP's, not to mentions disqualifying VP from free prescriptions. How do you like my odds of turning an easy profit?

Check your privilege - of being male, of mobility etc.


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

Bwoah! 



> @*PennyRed*
> People who travel often and alone: what are your favourite books to read on the road?


 



> Dan Hodges ‏@DPJHodges
> @PennyRed "Chavs". Unputdownable...


 



> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> @DPJHodges I reread it recently! @OwenJones84


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> The price I saw was to Luxor, it was a "flight only" package deal with, I believe, Thompson... or similar British agent anyway.
> 
> And I assume you can get from Luxor to Cairo for next to nothing. I think it would be a great time to be there, obviously you'd have to watch your back and that....


 
About £5 on the train. It would certainly be interesting to chat to some ordinary Egyptians about what's going on. Think I'll leave it for a while though.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That wasn't directed at you, it was at all sorts of you idiots.


 
That wasn't directed at you, it was more like a scream into the abyss.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Greebo said:


> "Really cheap" still needs more money than I could easily get hold of in any way which I'd be comfortable with or capable of. Also, in my case, you forget that I'd have to factor in the cost of either dumping VP on his parents or paying gods know how many agency workers to do what I usually do.
> 
> That raises the amount to be found by at least another £1,000. And, when I got back, yes, I could sell that stuff for far more than I paid out for it; however, it'd be docked pound for pound from my benefits and VP's, not to mentions disqualifying VP from free prescriptions. How do you like my odds of turning an easy profit?
> 
> Check your privilege - of being male, of mobility etc.


 
Hang on a second, you guys went to Berlin I believe?


----------



## Greebo (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Hang on a second, you guys went to Berlin I believe?


You have no idea how long it took to find the money for that or sort out the logistics. Cairo isn't feasible (nor anywhere else 3rd world).


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Greebo said:


> You have no idea how long it took to find the money for that or sort out the logistics. Cairo isn't feasible (nor anywhere else 3rd world).


 
Fair enough.  I did specify that we were discussing an able-bodied, single young man here...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Nobody's saying that.
> 
> I'm saying that an able-bodied young man can find 200 quid without too much bother, in today's London or anywhere else in the Western world.


 
You can fuck right off.

EDIT I'm a single, able-bodied young man, and getting the bus to Huddersfield instead of begging one of my friends for a lift seems like an outrageous extravegance, never mind going to fucking Cairo. I've been living on a £700 tax rebate, not even the dole, since the New Year, and that's got to last me until I can find a job. £200 might as well be £2,000 or £20,000 for me right now.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 28, 2013)

firky said:


> Bwoah!


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> On that 200 quid flight to Cairo, do you get to go in the cockpit? Have you ever seen a grown man naked, Phil?


 
No, but I have seen the inside of a Turkish prison...


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> You can fuck right off.
> 
> EDIT I'm a single, able-bodied young man, and getting the bus to Huddersfield instead of begging one of my friends for a lift seems like an outrageous extravegance, never mind going to fucking Cairo. I've been living on a £700 tax rebate, not even the dole, since the New Year, and that's got to last me until I can find a job. £200 might as well be £2,000 or £20,000 for me right now.


 
I understand that, but how long will it be until you find a job, assuming you're willing to travel anywhere?


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Fair enough. I did specify that we were discussing an able-bodied, single young man here...


You do know firky isn't in the best of health right now, don't you, hence the comment I made earlier about medical preparations? Sometimes it isn't *just* about finding the money however easy you may think that is.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Fair enough. I did specify that we were discussing an able-bodied, single young man here...


Firky may be mobile, single, young, and male, but you've forgotten that he's still recovering from a major operation.

Also, how refreshingly unexpected of you to cite an example who is assumed to be hale, pale, and male.  I had hoped for better from you.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I understand that, but how long will it be until you find a job, assuming you're willing to travel anywhere?


Define "anywhere". Define where you personally would draw the line. Assume that you have no social capital; no favours you can call in, no wealthy or well to do relatives, no useful contacts, and nothing you could easily sell to raise enough cash in a hurry.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> You do know firky isn't in the best of health right now, don't you


 
No, I didn't know that, and I'm sorry to hear it.  Get well soon Firky...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I understand that


 
If you did then you'd understand why your "£200 is fuck all" shtick get's the reaction it does. There is no act too demeaning, vile or humiliating at this point in time that I wouldn't consider doing it for £200. Try me.



phildwyer said:


> but how long will it be until you find a job, assuming you're willing to travel anywhere?


 
Willing to travel? yes. Able to travel? Not necessarily. I don't drive, I live in an isolated part of an isolated valley which doesn't have particularly good public transport links. I can get to Huddersfield by bus, but not those other well-known employment hotspots, where they're crying out for more unemployed young people to fill all the available jobs, Wakefield or Barnsley. I can get to Holmfirth by bus, but even if I stood busking in the middle of Holmfirth humming the _Last of the Summer Wine_ theme tune I'd never make £200. Trust me. Leeds and Machester would be a round trip of like £30 ish, which if you're on the dole means _half your weekly income_ or currently for me around _10% of all my money in the world_. Which isn't really my money, it's all just overdraft, and it's money they want back and keep sending my threatening letters saying how they're just gonna start lowering it regardless of what I do. In such a situation can you see how someone talking about £200 as if it's nothing might be slightly irritating?

Oh god what am I doing even fucking replying you fucking troll


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Define "anywhere". Define where you personally would draw the line. Assume that you have no social capital; no favours you can call in, no wealthy or well to do relatives, no useful contacts, and nothing you could easily sell to raise enough cash in a hurry.


 
Well "I personally" wouldn't draw the line anywhere, having lived and worked on four continents.  Emigration's the obvious and traditional solution to the problems people are having in today's UK.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> There is no act too demeaning, vile or humiliating at this point in time that I wouldn't consider doing it for £200. Try me.


 
No ta, I believe you.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 28, 2013)

And this, it comes to this. Thanks all.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Well "I personally" wouldn't draw the line anywhere, having lived and worked on four continents. Emigration's the obvious and traditional solution to the problems people are having in today's UK.


 
I never thought I'd say this and it brings me no pleasure to do so, but fuck off Dwyer. I'd draw the line at a 90 minute journey on public transport.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 28, 2013)

Black holes are observable by the manner in which they distort light and pull surrounding objects into them, often with destructive force. The last three pages remind me that the ignore function creates a similar effect.


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

You don't need to explain yourself to anyone, Delroy, you know that of course but...

Can we get back to LP and scum like her?


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> I never thought I'd say this and it brings me no pleasure to do so, but fuck off Dwyer. I'd draw the line at a 90 minute journey on public transport.


 
I'm not saying emigration's a good thing, please note.

I'm saying it's the "obvious and traditional solution."  Meaning historically and empirically, not ethically or even pragmatically.

Which it is, isn't it?


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I'm not saying emigration's a good thing, please note.
> 
> I'm saying it's the "obvious and traditional solution." Meaning historically and empirically, not ethically or even pragmatically.
> 
> Which it is, isn't it?


 
Fair enough.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Well "I personally" wouldn't draw the line anywhere, having lived and worked on four continents. Emigration's the obvious and traditional solution to the problems people are having in today's UK.


Emigration from the UK is out if you have to factor in medical costs or a disability, trust me on this.


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> I never thought I'd say this and it brings me no pleasure to do so, but fuck off Dwyer. I'd draw the line at a 90 minute journey on public transport.


 
I used to get the bus to college, two hours in the mornings and 90 minutes in the evening (less traffic), I don't know how the fuck I did it for two years to be honest. Soul destroying and to add insult to injury my A-levels were really hard!


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 28, 2013)

firky said:


> You don't need to explain yourself to anyone, Delroy, you know that of course but...
> 
> Can we get back to LP and scum like her?


 
Yeah I know. Thing is I'm dead easy to troll coz I get carried away like a fucking child - and I'm at a point where "oh he's young" doesn't really cut it as an excuse.

But yes, lets move on and get back to picking the peanuts out of Laurie Penny's twitter excretions.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 28, 2013)

She'll be gutted that the last however many pages haven't been about her.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Emigration from the UK is out if you have to factor in medical costs or a disability, trust me on this.


 
Really? 

A lot of Americans with chronic illness retire to Mexico, precisely because their disability costs are far lower there.  I'm sure Brits could do the same.  As long as you can physically make it to the border, obviously.  But they don't even check your passport there, and no doctor would ever ask for ID, so I don't see why not.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 28, 2013)




----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

firky said:


> I used to get the bus to college, two hours in the mornings and 90 minutes in the evening (less traffic), I don't know how the fuck I did it for two years to be honest. Soul destroying and to add insult to injury my A-levels were really hard!


 
The bus is no problem, you can read on the bus.  I used to _drive _90 minutes each way to work, had to rely on "talking books..." that was tough...


----------



## 8115 (Jan 28, 2013)

I used to walk 4 miles to school in the snow.


----------



## 8115 (Jan 28, 2013)




----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 28, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> If you did then you'd understand why your "£200 is fuck all" shtick get's the reaction it does. There is no act too demeaning, vile or humiliating at this point in time that I wouldn't consider doing it for £200. Try me.


 
If anyone's got £200 lying around private message me for details. Thx


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> The bus is no problem, you can read on the bus. I used to _drive _90 minutes each way to work, had to rely on "talking books..." that was tough...


 
Tough? Well the sound of someone else's voice.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 28, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Emigration from the UK is out if you have to factor in medical costs or a disability, trust me on this.


I'd love to be like LP, travel to New York at the drop of the hat, even to work in the US would be fantastic experience. My medical history would probably make private healthcare difficult to come by, and with US employment law the way it us I can't take the risks. So no emigration for me.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Really?
> 
> A lot of Americans with chronic illness retire to Mexico, precisely because their disability costs are far lower there. I'm sure Brits could do the same. As long as you can physically make it to the border, obviously. But they don't even check your passport there, and no doctor would ever ask for ID, so I don't see why not.


 
 and


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> If anyone's got £200 lying around private message me for details. Thx


 


Delroy Booth said:


> There is no act too demeaning, vile or humiliating at this point in time that I wouldn't consider doing it for £200. Try me.


 
Do you have a webcam?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Do you have a webcam?


 
Is that some sort of joke? No I don't have a webcam. Or a Ferrari either whilst I'm at it.

EDIT: In all seriousness I could get one if I had too.


----------



## Libertad (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Really?
> 
> A lot of Americans with chronic illness retire to Mexico, precisely because their disability costs are far lower there. I'm sure Brits could do the same. As long as you can physically make it to the border, obviously. But they don't even check your passport there, and no doctor would ever ask for ID, so I don't see why not.


 

Fantasy Island or Fraggle Rock?


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> No I don't have a webcam.


 
Well then how can we see you perform the degrading and humiliating actions of which you boast yourself capable? 

We'll need proof before we hand over 200 quid.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Really?
> 
> A lot of Americans with chronic illness retire to Mexico, precisely because their disability costs are far lower there. I'm sure Brits could do the same. As long as you can physically make it to the border, obviously. But they don't even check your passport there, and no doctor would ever ask for ID, so I don't see why not.


Don't make me dig out a handful of "sweetie"s. If you think I haven't spent a lot of time and energy looking at the feasibility of leaving the UK (at least until the ConDems are out) you're very much mistaken.

It's not a viable option. And I'm not the only highly skilled and educated benefit claimant for whom it's not a viable option.  Fuck it, even working in the UK isn't a viable option.  I've done the maths.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Don't make me dig out a handful of "sweetie"s. If you think I haven't spent a lot of time and energy looking at the feasibility of leaving the UK (at least until the ConDems are out) you're very much mistaken.
> 
> It's not a viable option. And I'm not the only highly skilled and educated benefit claimant for whom it's not a viable option.


 
I guess just because Mexico's health system is better than the US, doesn't mean it's better than the UK's... I'd move there myself if I got ill and the only other option was US public health care... but I'd take the UK National Health over either of them...


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I'd love to be like LP, travel to New York at the drop of the hat, even to work in the US would be fantastic experience. My medical history would probably make private healthcare difficult to come by, and with US employment law the way it us I can't take the risks. So no emigration for me.


 
She'd probably turn around and say it isn't her whim to go to NYC, Cairo or Dublin (where she is now), and I am sure this sort of lifestyle is tiring and not as glamorous as it sounds but it is still a luxury. A luxury that most people will never experience. All she essentially does is go to a trendy city, send a few tweets and write a shit article when she gets back. That's it! She actually gets paid for that and if anyone dare pulls her up on it she says you're attacking women's right to birth control and are a sexist pig or a troll.

Of course it isn't limited to Laura Penny, there's that massive Cambridge prick Patrick Kingsley too. He's one of the worst journalists I have read and he swans about defecating all over the place in the name of the Guardian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_(Cambridge)



> In November 2009, the paper won six prizes at the Guardian Student Media Awards, was nominated for a further two, and former editor Patrick Kingsley was named Student Journalist of the Year.


 
Coincidental that he now works for the Guardian, eh?

Proper lefties, not 'fake lefties'. What she really meant is people who've had an elite education.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I guess just because Mexico's health system is better than the US, doesn't mean it's better than the UK's... I'd move there myself if I got ill and the only other option was US public health care...


How's your medical Spanish? How do you fancy your chances of getting somebody with memory problems to remember enough of it?   Not just for the usual minor ailments, I'd need immunology in Spanish, neurology in Spanish, orthopaedics in Spanish etc.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Greebo said:


> How's your medical Spanish?


 
_Mucho mejor de lo que debería ser...._



Greebo said:


> How do you fancy your chances of getting somebody with memory problems to remember enough of it?


_No muy bien companera, porque...?_


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 28, 2013)




----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

Why the Badger?


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 28, 2013)

Why not?


----------



## Belushi (Jan 28, 2013)

firky said:


> She'd probably turn around and say it isn't her whim to go to NYC, Cairo or Dublin (where she is now), and I am sure this sort of lifestyle is tiring and not as glamorous as it sounds but it is still a luxury. A luxury that most people will never experience. All she essentially does is go to a trendy city, send a few tweets and write a shit article when she gets back. That's it! She actually gets paid for that and if anyone dare pulls her up on it she says you're attacking women's right to birth control and are a sexist pig or a troll.


 
I'm sure it's entirely coincidental that all the big stories are happening in hip tourist destinations. What on earth would a left wing journalist find to write about in somewher like, say, Wigan?


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jan 28, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I'm sure it's entirely coincidental that all the big stories are happening in hip tourist destinations. What on earth would a left wing journalist find to write about in somewher like, say, Wigan?


 
Pies.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 28, 2013)

St. Helens has better pies than Wigan anyway, even though Pimblett's no longer exists.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> _Mucho mejor de lo que debería ser...._
> 
> 
> _No muy bien companera, porque...?_


We interrupt this thread to bring you ropey Spanish for the day:
Lo siento querido, mi español es casi inexistente en este momento porque estoy tratando de aprender palabras suficientes polacos antes del verano. Por lo tanto, hice trampa y lo tradujo con google. 

Si tuviera que trasladarse a México yo tendría que saber médico españolas, lo mismo que mi marido. Yo no voy a dejarlo atrás.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 28, 2013)




----------



## equationgirl (Jan 28, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I'm sure it's entirely coincidental that all the big stories are happening in hip tourist destinations. What on earth would a left wing journalist find to write about in somewher like, say, Wigan?


Don't think I've ever seen her write anything about anywhere North of Watford in the UK to be honest. If she has it's hidden well.

Plenty to write about in Glasgow or Lanark or Coulport or Macclesfield or Preston or....


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> St. Helens has better pies than Wigan anyway, even though Pimblett's no longer exists.


 


Belushi said:


> I'm sure it's entirely coincidental that all the big stories are happening in hip tourist destinations. What on earth would a left wing journalist find to write about in somewher like, say, Wigan?


 
I have to disagree, ol' beans! I can well imagine her hitch-hiking to Wigan as per phildwyer's suggestion merely so she could write an article entitled:



.
*The Road to Wigan Pier*, by Laurie Penny.


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

Down and Out in Paris and London, by Laurie Penny is more likely though. An epic story of struggle as she slept on a fellow trendy journalists' "hovels" in Paris and London. Living on nothing but her inheritance.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 28, 2013)

The Condition Of The Working Class In England, by Laurie Penny


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

How To Tweet Friends and Block Critics, By Laurie Penny.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 28, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Why not?


 
Because it makes you look a bit twee and affected, perhaps?

The truth is that if you'd started hitching to Cairo at the beginning of this thread, you'd practically be there by now. But you'd rather just sit here spewing garbage and spouting nonsense, posting meaningless images, heaping and piling up your trash until it engulfs any hint of a point you might once have been trying to make.

_That _is why Laurie Penny has made you look so silly and pathetic here. She must certainly be laughing now...


----------



## emanymton (Jan 28, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I'm sure it's entirely coincidental that all the big stories are happening in hip tourist destinations. What on earth would a left wing journalist find to write about in somewher like, say, Wigan?


Fucking scab town!!


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 28, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Don't think I've ever seen her write anything about anywhere North of Watford in the UK to be honest. If she has it's hidden well.
> 
> Plenty to write about in Glasgow or Lanark or Coulport or Macclesfield or Preston or....


 
Yeah but you don't get legions of twitter followers saying this:



> Karrie Kehoe @KarrieKehoe
> 
> @PennyRed You have the most amazing life! You were in my home city this weekend and next stop Batley! Have a great time! #Jealous


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 28, 2013)




----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 28, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Fucking scab town!!


 
Which is where the pie-eaters thing comes from.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pie-eater



> 1. pie-eater
> Person from Wigan.
> 
> Nothing to do with the large number of pies eaten in Wigan but to do with a miner's strike in the 1920's when all the pits in WIgan and Leigh went on strike. The Wiganers went back and broke the strike, the "Leythers" continued to strike and got better pay and conditions. Therefore the Wiganer's had to "eat humble pie"... so it's a term of abuse from Leythers to Wiganers. The hostility between the two towns stretches back hundreds of years to the civil war when Wigan was Royalists and Leigh were Parliamentarian and continues to this day.
> ...


 
They do eat quite a lot of pies in Wigan though I can assure you. I remember Saints rugby fans singing:

"Central Park is falling down, falling down, central park is falling own, my fair lady.
Build it up with pie and peas, pie and peas, pie and peas, build it up with pie and peas, my fair lady"


----------



## emanymton (Jan 28, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Which is where the pie-eaters thing comes from.
> 
> http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pie-eater
> 
> ...


I really want to know if being called pie eaters led to them eating more pies? Some useless academic somewhere should do a study.


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

I have never been to Wigan but my mental picture of it is that it is shit.


----------



## 8115 (Jan 28, 2013)

Home of Northern Soul.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 28, 2013)

firky said:


> I have never been to Wigan but my mental picture of it is that it is shit.


 
Whenever I think of Wigan Pier I think of this, not Orwell:

,

And then the sensation of being rushing on MDMA and being too pissed to walk _at the same time_ comes flooding back to me, which is quite nauseating.


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

Well I never, I had you down as some straight laced stude, Del. 

That is proper charver music btw! It has a donk and everything (and is f'ing awful).


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 28, 2013)

I am these these days but back then I was feral. I drink a lot of tea and smoke a pipe these days to be more of a Bennite, y'know like that bloke from the International Bolshevik Tendency shaves a bald-patch into his head and grew a goatee so he looks more like Lenin. 

And I sincerely loved all that shitty Wigan Pier and Scouse house and niche and all that stuff when I was like 16. That and Slipknot. out of the two I'm way more embarassed about liking Slipknot.


----------



## Firky (Jan 28, 2013)

Not sure if you have gone up or down in my opinion all of a sudden


----------



## Idris2002 (Jan 29, 2013)

firky said:


> Why the Badger?


 
We don't need no stinkin' badgers.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 29, 2013)

Lord Monbiot checks his priv (or doesn't).

_(less priv more predge_)


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 29, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Lord Monbiot checks his priv (or doesn't).
> 
> _(less priv more predge_)


 
A silly article.  Seems only just to have noticed British class system.  Then blames it for belligerence of British state, failing to notice that such belligerence has often been shared by states without such a class system, eg Soviet Union.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Jan 29, 2013)

http://www.tatler.com/the-tatler-list/p/laurie-penny


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 29, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Just get yourself down the docks.


 
Ha'penny a go, or do you reckon firky could get a penny a go?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 29, 2013)

> she was all over the Occupy movement


 
Yeah.


----------



## cesare (Jan 29, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> http://www.tatler.com/the-tatler-list/p/laurie-penny


Linking to that raises her profile every time someone clicks on it


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 29, 2013)

So what though - it's out of our hands now. We can't have a thread about this idiots without linking to their sickening idiocies.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 29, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> On a 200 quid flight to Cairo, does that include a handjob off an assassin's girlfriend?


 
Surely phil has surpassed that one by now, and has been fellated in Business Class by a female ninja who's narked at her botfriend and willing to take phil's rancid member in her mouth to get back at the boyfriend (who is obviously a plumber for MOSSAD)?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 29, 2013)

#3 Well done laurie.



> The Conservative MP for Richmond Park has it all. Brains, beauty, convictions and mega-bucks, although he's prone to being a tad argumentative. There is little not to like.


----------



## cesare (Jan 29, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> So what though - it's out of our hands now. We can't have a thread about this idiots without linking to their sickening idiocies.


That's not one of her idiocies though, it's the Tatler fame listing


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 29, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Yes, because that's a sensible thing to do dwyer  Do fuck off.


 
Now now! Personally, I find the idea of dwyer hitch-hiking from Barry Island to Cairo very appealing. Think of all the potential there is for him to be horribly molested by lonely truckers or local farmers!


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 29, 2013)

cesare said:


> That's not one of her idiocies though, it's the Tatler fame listing


if the argument is that clicking on links about her reproduces her (which it does) then we are fucked. Anyway, let's get her #1 to show what she really is and what she really represents.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 29, 2013)

firky said:


> She'd probably turn around and say it isn't her whim to go to NYC, Cairo or Dublin (where she is now), and I am sure this sort of lifestyle is tiring and not as glamorous as it sounds but it is still a luxury. A luxury that most people will never experience. All she essentially does is go to a trendy city, send a few tweets and write a shit article when she gets back. That's it! She actually gets paid for that and if anyone dare pulls her up on it she says you're attacking women's right to birth control and are a sexist pig or a troll.
> 
> Of course it isn't limited to Laura Penny, there's that massive Cambridge prick Patrick Kingsley too. He's one of the worst journalists I have read and he swans about defecating all over the place in the name of the Guardian.
> 
> ...


 
I so want to snare Mr. Kingsley and take a set of shears to that fucking mop on his head!


----------



## cesare (Jan 29, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> if the argument is that clicking on links about her reproduces her (which it does) then we are fucked. Anyway, let's get her #1 to show what she really is and what she really represents.


I'll get RSI


----------



## smokedout (Jan 29, 2013)

http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2013/01/take-back-net-its-time-end-culture-online-misogyny

thing is, and I don't mean this as some poor men thing, everyone who publishes online gets abuse, threats of violence etc regardless of gender - that doesn't mean the misogyny doesn't exist, but that it isn't the driver for a lot of nasty stuff online

whats actually taking place is the way real people speak is being replicated on the internet, and the way real people speak in pubs, in their front rooms etc reflects the misogyny in society. 

that is the debate, whether its okay for people to speak online in the way they might in private, especially as on places like twitter the target of their abuse (or criticism, bad jokes etc) may happen to read it

I just don't understand what standing up to this misogyny online looks like, and whether it should specifically be attacked as something novel and outside of everyday sexism

and there has to be an acceptance that men get a different flavour of unpleasant shit, that some of the abuse comes from other women, and without some form of new laws it cant really be prevented. 

and also tbh granted in my lived experience as a man, i couldnt give a fuck about wankers that threaten me or slag me off on the internet


----------



## smokedout (Jan 29, 2013)

and I can't help coming back to the idea of tap rooms in pubs, which werent necessarily men only, but where swearing, coarse/sexual language was permitted that would get you thrown out of the lounge bar, which was a space for the ladies who werent expected to have to listen to such rough talk

and never thought that was particularly progressive myself


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 29, 2013)

smokedout said:


> and also tbh granted in my lived experience as a man, i couldnt give a fuck about wankers that threaten me or slag me off on the internet


 
Maybe so, but still no-one should have to put up with the level graphic sexual violence that Laurie Penny has directed at her. I'd feel the same way about anyone. And just coz it's something you feel capable of being shrugging off doesn't necessarily mean everyone else can do the same, or that's it's tolerable. I say that as someone Laurie no doubt puts in the same category as the creeps on Don't Start Me Off.

but yeah your other points are spot on. There's misogyny on the internet and twitter is because there's misogyny in society, you might prevent people from expressing it online by using draconian legislation or campaigns or whatever but surely the goal would be to challenge sexist sentiment in the first instance, rather than preventing it from being expressed publicly? Political correctness hasn't stopped racism, has it?

I have a suspicion that a lot of people who are shocked by the levels of violent misogyny on twitter/internet must come from quite sheltered backgrounds, because as vile as it is I've heard worse in my everyday life. That's not to try and belittle it, that's just a fact of life. Violent racist and sexist imagery, often as "banter" but a lot of truth is said in jest, was something that was a routine part of my life and totally normalised amongst my peers growing up. I'm sure there's others here who can say the same. It's exactly the same with people who get outraged at the EDL tweeting racism, as if they're not out in public doing the same thing every day! The difference is certain people are never going to encounter that sort of stuff in their lives, until they get onto twitter and suddenly finding themselves sharing a social media platform with people who do talk and act like that. That's not aimed at Penny per se, that's a general observation.

Ultimately good luck to the campaign, even if it is something being doing primarily to promote one individual's career, because there might be a lot of people who aren't self-serving careerists who can take it and make some good come from it. Of course it won't be them that get the credit, but still.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 29, 2013)

Such delicate flowers would certainly be shocked by some of the things said by people I've worked alongside.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 29, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> _That _is why Laurie Penny has made you look so silly and pathetic here. She must certainly be laughing now...


 

you been at the rubbing alcohol again?


----------



## weepiper (Jan 29, 2013)

I'm not a delicate flower, but I have been genuinely frightened by some things men have said to me on the Internet (not here)


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 29, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I'm not a delicate flower, but I have been genuinely frightened by some things men have said to me on the Internet (not here)


 
Did I say you were?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jan 29, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> http://www.tatler.com/the-tatler-list/p/laurie-penny


 

she is rated "ta-daa".  i don't know what that means.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 29, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Did I say you were?


There's a general tone developing.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 29, 2013)

weepiper said:


> There's a general tone developing.


 
What tone is that?


----------



## weepiper (Jan 29, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> What tone is that?


Not from you specifically. Not even just on this thread. That if you want to mix it with the big boys there's a level of shit you'll just have to put up with.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 29, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Not from you specifically. Not even just on this thread. That if you want to mix it with the big boys there's a level of shit you'll just have to put up with.


 
Nowhere have I said that. But I do think that Delroy has a point. There are some people who have lived quite sheltered lives and their level of shock seems to reveal their naivety about what actually goes on in the world, the views people hold, and the openness and ways in which they express them. Ever worked with a vile racist who knows you've got an Asian girlfriend? There's banter and then there's something else. It's not to be accepting of it (although sadly at times you have to when knowing to pick your battles as an individual), but to be grimly aware of it, square in the face, some people more than others, day to day. There are indeed some delicate little flowers out there. And a lot of these other people haven't been 'big boys' in my experience, but sad, relatively powerless (in the grand scheme of things) men.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 29, 2013)

Ach... I can't quite articulate this properly. 'big boys' was metaphorical there really. It's hard to talk about this kind of thing without coming across as ' wah wah you should be making allowances for me so I can join in' which is I think what people think LP is doing.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 29, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Not from you specifically. Not even just on this thread. That if you want to mix it with the big boys there's a level of shit you'll just have to put up with.


 
i really hope that's not the impression i'm giving, more that if you say things in public that are politically controversial you will cop a lot of shit and i'm not really sure how that can be legislated against, or if it should be

and that shit will be flavoured with the prejudices of your opponents, whether thats racism, misogyny, homophobia etc, look at the class based shit the EDL gets from people like Laurie's mates


----------



## weepiper (Jan 29, 2013)

smokedout said:


> i really hope that's not the impression i'm giving, more that if you say things in public that are politically controversial you will cop a lot of shit and i'm not really sure how that can be legislated against, or if it should be
> 
> and that shit will be flavoured with the prejudices of your opponents, whether thats racism, misogyny, homophobia etc, look at the class based shit the EDL gets from people like Laurie's mates


Ok that's fair enough, I understand what you mean better now.


----------



## smokedout (Jan 29, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Ach... I can't quite articulate this properly. 'big boys' was metaphorical there really. It's hard to talk about this kind of thing without coming across as ' wah wah you should be making allowances for me so I can join in' which is I think what people think LP is doing.


 
i find it difficult because i think both the two extremes of the argument - that women are delicate little flowers and should be treated differently in political discourse, or that women should just accept whatever misogynist crap that's thrown at them if they want do politics - are both bullshit


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 29, 2013)

When I said delicate little flowers I was talking about both men and women.


----------



## Firky (Jan 29, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Nowhere have I said that. But I do think that Delroy has a point. There are some people who have lived quite sheltered lives and their level of shock seems to reveal their naivety about what actually goes on in the world, the views people hold, and the openness and ways in which they express them. Ever worked with a vile racist who knows you've got an Asian girlfriend? There's banter and then there's something else. It's not to be accepting of it (although sadly at times you have to when knowing to pick your battles as an individual), but to be grimly aware of it, square in the face, some people more than others, day to day. There are indeed some delicate little flowers out there. And a lot of these other people haven't been 'big boys' in my experience, but sad, relatively powerless (in the grand scheme of things) men.


 

"Why can't we have a nice revolution?"

I understand what weepier is saying and I understand what you are saying. That's not to say it is right but it is certainly to be expected - unless you have been brought up, wrapped in cotton wool and then it probably is all the more harrowing when you do come across it. Is it desensitisation or acceptance...?

To be honest I don't know how some people watch the news at night without falling to pieces.

Typing in bath, sorry for typos - wet hands


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 29, 2013)

firky said:


> Typing in bath, sorry for typos - wet hands


 
Fuckin' hell! Why would you want to be on the internet when you're in the bath!

I'll never understand smartphones, having it on you all the time, the temptation to reply to something on the internet when you should be having a break. My mam's a teacher and she was telling me when you confiscate a kid's smartphone off them, you can visibly see them start to fidgit and panic and get neurotic if they're parted from their phones for more than 5 minutes. There's something worrying about that, although I can't put my finger on it.

When I last had my own place I didn't even have a telly in my room let alone something that you can get the internet on. It doesn't help me sleep when I'm surrounded by bright dazzling contraptions A few books and that's it, that room was for sleeping and shagging in, not for entertainment.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jan 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> that room was for sleeping and shagging in, not for entertainment.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 29, 2013)

Ha!


----------



## Firky (Jan 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Fuckin' hell! Why would you want to be on the internet when you're in the bath!


 
From time to time I get really bad muscular pain in my abdomen, couple of codeine and a long soak in a hot both usually sorts it out. There's only so long I can stare at the grout before I get bored so take my Nexus in with me. I don't really 'do' phones (why am I telling you this!?).



> that room was for sleeping and shagging in, not for entertainment.


 

Read that back to yourself 

From upper middle class Laurie Penny's bed linen to the habits of Delroy in his PFWC bedroom. Butches will rage!

My bedroom is strictly for bedroom activities but the most excitement it has seen in the last year is what happens in the books I am reading. Like many things in my bedroom it is largely fictional.

E2A:

Damnit, sparky!


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 29, 2013)

firky said:


> My bedroom is strictly for bedroom activities but the most excitement it has seen in the last year is what happens in the books I am reading. Like many things in my bedroom it is largely fictional.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 29, 2013)

firky said:


> Read that back to yourself


 
There's an "are you not entertained, is this not why you are here" gladiator meme in that somewhere I'm sure of it.



firky said:


> From upper middle class Laurie Penny's bed linen to the habits of Delroy in his PFWC bedroom. Butches will rage!


 
I think the technical term for that is "result"


----------



## Firky (Jan 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> There's an "are you not entertained, is this not why you are here" gladiator meme in that somewhere I'm sure of it.


----------



## mrs quoad (Jan 30, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> she is rated "ta-daa". i don't know what that means.


From the front page of the list:


----------



## J Ed (Jan 30, 2013)

Laurie Penny is being criticised for using the word lunatic in her NS column - http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2013/01/this_minimally

She's going crazy all over twitter about having said it


----------



## cesare (Jan 30, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Laurie Penny is being criticised for using the word lunatic in her NS column - http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2013/01/this_minimally
> 
> She's going crazy all over twitter about having said it


Wait till this current furore dies down, then pile in with the criticisms of her ageist language


----------



## Bakunin (Jan 30, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Laurie Penny is being criticised for using the word lunatic in her NS column - http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2013/01/this_minimally
> 
> She's going crazy all over twitter about having said it


 
In fairness, it's nice to see that there are the glimmerings of the idea that mental health (or problems therewith) isn't, or shouldn't be, a stick for beating people with.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 30, 2013)

Aye.


----------



## Firky (Jan 30, 2013)

Her responses will be along the lines of, "I was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital as a child, I, more than anyone am aware of the power of this word. Blah to fucking blah." Which well maybe but you don't see people who were once confined in a wheelchair throwing the word cripple around. It isn't the first time she's shown no thought for people with mental health problems so this comes as no surprise. Also the people who pull her up will be trolls and blocked where as those who support / accept and support her apology will be retweeted. It is so fucking VOMIT!

(Well aware that I use words like 'nutter' but I am not the one writing articles in the NS).

*insert ad hominem attack*

This reminds me. I was called an invalid the other day. Another word you may like to add to your repertoire, lauriepenny 

Can't get twitter on my internet, have to use my phone - think they have properly blocked my IP address.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 30, 2013)

Getting individuals to moderate their speech and so on has it's merits, but i don't see it as a basis on which to attack systematic and institutional exploitation, sexism, racism and so on. Political correctness has not stopped racism. It's astonishing the extent to which people can only think in purely individualist ways, as if by making subtle changes to the way they act as individuals they can actually challenge things that exist on a institutional basis, like checking priviliges, raising awareness is something that will affect change in and of itself. It reminds me of the way in which Live 8 assuaged the individual guilt of all those conscience stricken middle-class liberals, who's 1st world lifestyle indirectly depends upon global inequailty and exploitation, and channelled any sort of nascent political activity that might have given rise to into some sterile narcissistic festival. Then they all go home, pat themselves on the back and say "we helped make poverty history by, er, just being there, and erm, having our awareness raised" as if some huge narcissistic corporate sponsored rock concert where everyone has a great time is in any way capable of making poverty history. You want to make poverty history? Then it will take long, protracted, boring, selfless struggle, which will be resisted violently by those in power. It would take a revolution to make poverty history, and despite what Laurie Penny says revolutions aren't nice things, look at Syria. That's what revolutions look like - ugly, violent, chaotic, no clear-cut good guys and bad guys. Even if you wanted to do something less than that, say a campaign aimed at taming global capitalism, you'll be able to tell how effective it is by how much shit you get from the established media - conversely the extent to which they're willing to indulge you should be a good barometer of how ineffective and harmless what you're doing ultimately is.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 30, 2013)

Let's take a detour. Last night, because I couldn't sleep (incidentally a vestige of some mental health problems of my own, caused by over-zealous consumption of stimulant drugs during puberty) I came accross two pictures on flickr by joanamary who, as we can see, is one of those criticising Laurie Penny for use of "ableism" in her article. The pictures were of two of her mates, posing with their tongues pressed into the underside of their lips as if to signify "retard" and the title was "more retards" or something along those lines. Then there was another one, which is perhaps even more revealing, which was a picture she'd taken an advert for some white Reebok classics which contained a minor punctuation error, which was entitled "by chavs for chavs" and had a little whinge about how stupid advertising people were. I can't link you the photo's coz she's gone and deleted them now.

I checked her profile and there she was, giving the it the big 'un about how using "able-ism" is wrong and linking an article around explaining why it's wrong around. so I linked the photo's back to her and a few other randoms on her timeline, and asked "I'm more interested in the origins of these pics" just to see what she had to say. I wasn't even rude or confrontational or anything, I felt it's only fair to give someone the chance to explain themselves before piling in there. But I thought the replies were quite revealing:



> *Jo* ‏@*jonanamary*
> @*DelroyBooth* @*akvltghost* @*spiraltastic* @*safarazzz* @*salvey1* @*smallcat* @*lisa_witch* thank you for flagging that up. I'll edit and make a note.
> 
> *Jo* ‏@*jonanamary*
> ...


 
Now at this point, even though I'm willing to accept that she's changed her views and don't wanna push it, the word "classism" gets my back up so I replied with



> *Delroy Booth* ‏@*DelroyBooth*
> @*jonanamary* @*AKvltGhost* Fair enough, although I'm not keen on the word "classist" personally
> 
> *Delroy Booth* ‏@*DelroyBooth*
> ...


 
Kid gloves, as you can see. Not trying to be an arsehole. Trying to show the inherent weaknesses in that perspective of looking at the world. It continues, with @akvltghost (he of "Var of Piss" fame) adding a few things to stick up for her.



> *Jo* ‏@*jonanamary*
> @*DelroyBooth* @*akvltghost* ta. I'll amend as soon as I'm up because the mobile flickr page = unusable. & genuine thanks for flagging those up.
> 
> *Jo* ‏@*jonanamary*
> ...


 
I don't even feel like giving her too much of a hard time for this, she's clearly embarassed about what she's written in the past, and god knows I've probably written stupid and witless things too at one point or another, as have we all at some point. But the emphasis on the individual, the way in which it's helped her personally grow, how her individual words are "a drop in the ocean of Kyriachy" and by extension removing them a minor victory against the Kyriachy, it boggles my mind. This notion of moderating your language, rather than it being a basic common courtesy and something you do to prevent people becoming alienated by those who are inconsiderate and who don't think before opening their mouths, but a form of political action in itself. Are people of my generational psychologically incapable of thinking of the world in terms of collective action or something? I mean whatever happened to old fashioned socialist concepts of solidarity and fellowship, that went beyond (or at least tried to, not always very well) individualism and united people from all kinds of backgrounds in a common cause that went beyond their individualism? Did all that die in the 80's, and am i some atavistic relic for being reluctant to throw myself in with this lot? Who was it who said "There's no such thing as society, just individuals and their identities" it's on here, but it's very prescient. This is the excrement produced when radicalism is eaten and digested by a generation of hegemonic neo-liberalism. That's Laurie Penny. They'll eat her alive anyway, they'd all kill for a job at the New Statesman, middle-class envy and jealousy is a big thing. They all want that life.

Incidentally I notice that Jo's into Black Metal and can I just say from personal experience there is no form of music, or sub-culture, that's more homogenus, middle class and white than Black Metal. I can remember when there was a black metal band in Manchester who were courting the far-right blood and honour crowd - British Freedom Fighters (Wigan Mike's lot, remember them) used to turn up to their gigs and stuff at fairly high profile venues in Manchester. And the overwhelming reaction was one of staring and their shoes and hoping it'd go away, or total indifference, or amongst a few open support and pleasure that they were there. They couldn't give a fuck.


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## ymu (Jan 30, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Nowhere have I said that. But I do think that Delroy has a point. There are some people who have lived quite sheltered lives and their level of shock seems to reveal their naivety about what actually goes on in the world, the views people hold, and the openness and ways in which they express them. Ever worked with a vile racist who knows you've got an Asian girlfriend? There's banter and then there's something else. It's not to be accepting of it (although sadly at times you have to when knowing to pick your battles as an individual), but to be grimly aware of it, square in the face, some people more than others, day to day. There are indeed some delicate little flowers out there. And a lot of these other people haven't been 'big boys' in my experience, but sad, relatively powerless (in the grand scheme of things) men.


All of that is very true, but I think that the point being made is that for some people there is no need for an Asian girlfriend or even to have expressed an opinion directly about racism in order to attract this kind of abuse. Just being a woman expressing opinions in public (outside of the format of Page 3) is enough. It's not 'deserved' or in any way justified in either case but (so the argument goes) it is not motivated by quite the same thing and if the only option is to (even just strategically) keep your head down, this means remaining invisible.

Replace 'woman' with any 'minority' group and perceptions remain the same. That at least some of the abuse is motivated by the identity of the writer and not the arguments being made. A white male writer might well receive the same type and volume of abuse motivated by the opinions they express but they don't get the same volume of abuse motivated by identity.

Whether or not this is a true perception requires some digging. I've not seen any attempts at quantifying it, just some 'minority' bloggers coming out and saying "I'm not deleting this crap any more, I want people to see it" and some white male bloggers professing shock at the content and volume of the abuse compared to that which they receive. Maybe they never wrote about anything remotely controversial to the straight, white, able-bodied, male psyche and it would be exactly the same response if they did. I dunno.

As you say, this sort of stuff nearly always comes from sad powerless individuals. It's one of the things that makes them fucking frightening. The only power they have is in their fists.

And that does, of course, arise from a much broader and much less visible power dynamic relating to class (including who gets a platform in the first place). In a very unequal society and a political environment which constantly demands we point the finger at those less fortunate than ourselves (blame the poor not the profits that rely on their existence; blame the immigrants not the bosses that exploit them; blame the rioters not the police that bully and neglect their communities) and can only make minorities more equal by making _some_ others less equal, it'd be a fucking shock if there wasn't a backlash from _some_ of those who are losing ground and powerless to stop it.

It's clearly silly to say that white men don't get _any_ of this sort of abuse, but that doesn't mean that there is no truth whatsoever in the idea that some people suffer abuse because of their identity and not their actions. I'd be surprised if it turned out to be otherwise. I'd also be fucking amazed if the identity crowd managed to work out that this is a result of their failed analysis and not fucking proof that it is right.


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## phildwyer (Jan 30, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I have a suspicion that a lot of people who are shocked by the levels of violent misogyny on twitter/internet must come from quite sheltered backgrounds, because as vile as it is I've heard worse in my everyday life.


 
It's a matter of gender more than class.  Women didn't know men talked like that, but men have always known...


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## ymu (Jan 30, 2013)

To some extent, that is true Phil. But this is not a men-only conversation that is now being overheard by women thanks to the internet; this is being directed at women. I don't think it's any different to the kind of misogynistic abuse most women have experienced offline (usually when there are no randoms around to overhear it, ditto with racists IME).

What is different, I think, is the sheer volume of it (suddenly every embittered type can vent without needing to be in the same physical space and away from anyone else who might hear it) and the apparent social acceptability when others join in instead of being repelled by it. The extent to which others join in or, instead, attack the embittered types probably varies a great deal by subject and readership.



Delroy Booth said:


> *Delroy Booth* ‏@*DelroyBooth*
> @*jonanamary* @*AKvltGhost* Fair enough, although I'm not keen on the word "classist" personally
> 
> *Delroy Booth* ‏@*DelroyBooth*
> ...


I know what you are saying here but I'm not 100% convinced I agree with how you've said it.

I don't have an awful lot of time for white people who claim that anti-white racism is exactly the same thing as anti-black racism, or blokes that claim _Loose Women_ is proof that men are now the downtrodden sex. 'Classism', as with every other -ism, is the abuse of power by the more powerful group(s).

The same term that is generally used to describe the abuse of power (eg racism, sexism, homophobia) is also generally used to describe backlash from the less powerful (eg anti-white racism, anti-male sexism, heterophobia), but I don't think these are describing the same thing at all. There's a difference between an upsetting but fleeting incident and a society-wide pattern of behaviour that systematically damages someone's life chances. Those who claim that the meaning is identical in both directions are generally members of the more powerful group seeking to claim equal victimhood as a result of losing some of their ability to abuse that power.


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## Steel Icarus (Jan 30, 2013)

firky said:


> Her responses will be along the lines of, "I was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital as a child, I, more than anyone am aware of the power of this word. Blah to fucking blah." Which well maybe but you don't see people who were once confined in a wheelchair throwing the word cripple around. It isn't the first time she's shown no thought for people with mental health problems so this comes as no surprise. Also the people who pull her up will be trolls and blocked where as those who support / accept and support her apology will be retweeted. It is so fucking VOMIT!


 



			
				Someone on Twitter said:
			
		

> fascinating to watch @*PennyRed* tying herself in knots over a 'lunatic' slip. reminds me of 80s university over-inclusivism. never mind.







			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> No actually as a person with history of mental health problems myself I would have been upset to read that elsewhere. Legitimate.


 



			
				Ultracrepidarian said:
			
		

> *It's* *almost* *as* *if* *Laurie* *Penny* did this deliberately to show Moore et al how easy it would have been to, you know, not be a total dick.


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## Blagsta (Jan 30, 2013)

Blimey, you should hear some of the banter in mental health teams from CPNs!


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## Captain Hurrah (Jan 30, 2013)

ymu said:


> All of that is very true, but I think that the point being made is that for some people there is no need for an Asian girlfriend or even to have expressed an opinion directly about racism in order to attract this kind of abuse. Just being a woman expressing opinions in public (outside of the format of Page 3) is enough. It's not 'deserved' or in any way justified in either case but (so the argument goes) it is not motivated by quite the same thing and if the only option is to (even just strategically) keep your head down, this means remaining invisible.
> 
> Replace 'woman' with any 'minority' group and perceptions remain the same. That at least some of the abuse is motivated by the identity of the writer and not the arguments being made. A white male writer might well receive the same type and volume of abuse motivated by the opinions they express but they don't get the same volume of abuse motivated by identity.
> 
> ...


 
I appreciate that. I was talking more about people (both men and women) who not only have never experienced such things (yet), or at least in such an everyday way and at a level which they find shocking rather than 'shit, this is how it is for me most of the time' but believe in the idea that it can be made to go away through such a thing as political correctness and/or the mere policing of language.

Racism is alive and well. Sexism is alive and well. Class inequality is alive and well.

And I'm very well aware of the things you're talking about wrt class and power, perhaps much better than you in some of its more everyday, but negative respects. Anything from the barely-concealed contempt and fobbing off from a (female Pakistani) NHS consultant who's supposed to be advising me on an operation, to the ignorant, prejudiced (female) academic who talks to me 'normally' before finding out my occupation, then treats me like an idiot. It's not their sex that bothers me, it's their class. It must be even more shit for working class girls and women (not getting into silly games where public school children protest and say what about me while using a crude two-class analysis) who haven't had some class-based sense of entitlement instilled in them from an early age and instead have serious material disadvantages heaped upon their already 'inferior' social position.

And as Ronnie said before, to an elite-educated liberal I'm just some _thing_ to fear, another chav or thug, a potential member of the EDL, even though the Other Hurrah comes from a country the most ignorant of them probably couldn't spell the name of let alone point to on a map.


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## Steel Icarus (Jan 30, 2013)

It's fascinating and irritating in equal measure, all this dissembling of language, I reckon. In the boozer if my mate's just bought a double to go with his pint and it's only half two in the afternoon I might well say something like "Why you on the shorts already you loon?".

"Um...the epithet 'loon' is a truncated version of the archaic and kyriarchal term 'lunatic'. I'd appreciate you finding less offensive terminology to reflect your incredulity at the contents of this round of drinks."

I'm not saying I go around being thoughtless and rude to people. The frustration with this stuff, on the contrary, is cos I've been doing it for ever, and then a bunch of Mr. Logics arrive with their handbooks everytime someone says something that someone somewhere might find upsetting and "ums" follow. Bubbly.

frogwoman - did you see this: http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2013/01/why-i-dont-agree-trigger-warnings

relevant to something you were saying a lot earlier in the thread.

Article posted yesterday and within a couple of hours loads of people on (yeah, I know) Twitter were getting ready to write angry responses to it. And with a definite sense of glee that they had another opportunity to do so.


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## Balbi (Jan 30, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Blimey, you should hear some of the banter in mental health teams from CPNs!



I don't think there's a profession where you deal with people where the clientele aren't reffered to in some seriously iffy terms. In my job, the cases that make you want to chew someones face off in fury and frustration are usually thickly brushed with dark humour. It's either that or just become completely dispirited.


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## Bakunin (Jan 30, 2013)

Balbi said:


> I don't think there's a profession where you deal with people where the clientele aren't reffered to in some seriously iffy terms. In my job, the cases that make you want to chew someones face off in fury and frustration are usually thickly brushed with dark humour. It's either that or just become completely dispirited.


 
True. I'm used to bootneck humour which tends to exist on another level of foulness. It\s just their way of dealing with what they see and do.


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## Balbi (Jan 30, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> True. I'm used to bootneck humour which tends to exist on another level of foulness. It\s just their way of dealing with what they see and do.



You've gotta laugh, or things get broken


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## ymu (Jan 30, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> I appreciate that. I was talking more about people (both men and women) who not only have never experienced such things (yet), or at least in such an everyday way and at a level which they find shocking rather than 'shit, this is how it is for me most of the time' but believe in the idea that it can be made to go away through such a thing as political correctness and/or the mere policing of language.
> 
> Racism is alive and well. Sexism is alive and well. Class inequality is alive and well.
> 
> ...


I don't think there's any perhaps about it, Captain - you do know it much better than I do. I see it from precisely the opposite point of view. The police who were crawling all over our car trying to find evidence that it had been stolen, who then switched to crawling in the gutter in the rain trying to change the tyre for us as soon as I turned up. When I turned up to sign onto a new doctor getting handed a form to fill in without further comment, whilst the woman right after me in the queue was interrogated about her family members, told that they'd all have to sign on with the new surgery if she wanted to, and that her husband would have to take (unpaid) time off work to do it.

FWIW, doctors tend to assume everyone is stupid (I sat in on a GP lecturing his students recently: "remember, 5% of your patients will be more intelligent than you are!"  ) and I've never had much luck persuading them otherwise.


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## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

S☼I said:


> frogwoman - did you see this: http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2013/01/why-i-dont-agree-trigger-warnings
> 
> relevant to something you were saying a lot earlier in the thread.


 
Absolutely spot on.


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## Firky (Jan 30, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Blimey, you should hear some of the banter in mental health teams from CPNs!



You should hear the gallows humour of paramedics and RGNs. 

I am sure you're well aware why this happens too. You're not daft.

Haven't read this thread. Had about an hours sleep, woken up by a bloke ripping next doors roof up and I have no fuse for my coffee grinder that has packed in. First world middle class problems.


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## Brixton Hatter (Jan 30, 2013)

LPs grovelling apology here if anyone's interested: http://www.penny-red.com/post/41858644191/ableism-and-apologies

Whilst I think it can be useful deal with issues like this, it's a shame the seemingly huge amount of effort put in to minor spats over language etc can't be channelled into something more real & productive.


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## Balbi (Jan 30, 2013)

Suzanne Moore's placed herself on the platform of...

@suzanne_moore: I call out "Calling out" . I call it inane narcissism actually.Moral superiority dressed in clothes of martyrdom.

@bindelj: @suzanne_moore amen sister. In fact I am calling out everyone for a privilege check right now, WITHOUT a prior trigger warning

----

Lines drawn then.


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## love detective (Jan 30, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> LPs grovelling apology here if anyone's interested: http://www.penny-red.com/post/41858644191/ableism-and-apologies


 



			
				laurie penny said:
			
		

> we also need to get used to taking ownership of our mistakes


 
Here's a summary of Laurie taking ownership of her mistakes earlier:-


> Me: Here's an article
> 
> LP: Ah, You're a racist
> 
> ...


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## BigTom (Jan 30, 2013)

S☼I said:


> frogwoman - did you see this: http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2013/01/why-i-dont-agree-trigger-warnings
> 
> relevant to something you were saying a lot earlier in the thread.
> 
> Article posted yesterday and within a couple of hours loads of people on (yeah, I know) Twitter were getting ready to write angry responses to it. And with a definite sense of glee that they had another opportunity to do so.


 
ah so that's why people were talking about trigger warnings last night.. anyway I tried to have a conversation about my concerns about trigger warnings and failed to get my points across on twitter and it's been on my mind and I wrote this this morning (before seeing the article), I thought I was going to tweet it but it ended up being too long, I'm going to drop it here instead:

I have two issues with trigger warnings, both concerned with them becoming enabling.

When I first came across TWs it was when I was trying to self-diagnose 15-20 yrs ago on relatively clinical/psych focused mailing lists and forums.

There TWs were used very tightly when there was a graphic description of something like rape or child abuse.

The discussion around the use of TWs always included discussion about how avoidance could be bad and the issues of enabling.
Now I don't see discussion around trigger warnings the issue of enabling and avoidance raised or discussed

I think this is a problem. To me, TWs used to say "If you have triggers about X, be prepared before reading this that it may trigger. If you want to avoid reading it that is your choice but it's not necessarily the right thing to do"

Now they seem to say "If you have triggers about X, avoid reading this because it might trigger" and I think that's a change for the worse, is enabling, and is a problem.

The second is with TWs spreading. Now they seem to be used for any personal account of rape/abuse no matter how vague. I assume that's a change that has come from the direction of survivors in which case it's how it should be, but the danger is that spread continues with people who aren't survivors overusing TWs.

To take it to the extreme, obviously we can't put TWs on every tweet, as they lose all meaning. But the discussion around TWs is "you must use TWs" and "there can be no objections to TWs".

Everyone's MH is different, and lots of things can trigger people, to different extents of seriousness. You can't know what is going to trigger someone or how bad it will be for them so do you put TWs on every link? Of course not.

I've seen very little discussion about where the line is drawn, I don't believe that it's true that someone said there should be a TW on a link about balloons because of people with a phobia of balloons but if it did happen (and not as a joke) then that to me shows a clear problem with the way TWs are heading towards being used.

Already I think people are creeping to using them when an article talks about rape/abuse in almost any way. Sometimes the title of the article has the word rape in it, and there's no accounts of rape or descriptions in the article, but there's a TW with it. What does the TW tell you that the title of the article doesn't? imo nothing. But it does cloud things when someone puts a TW on article with a graphic description, if TWs get overused then someone doesn't know what they can expect in the article because it covers too broad a set of possibilities - this then doesn't really give them any information, and thus no real choice.

When you put this together with a discourse that doesn't discuss the problems of enabling and avoidance, then when people are wondering "should this have a TW" they'll always put it in because there is no argument against using TWs, no reason why they might not be helpful to someone. And that is a problem too.


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## Pickman's model (Jan 30, 2013)

surely she should be penny dreadful and not penny red


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## krink (Jan 30, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Whilst I think it can be useful deal with issues like this, it's a shame the seemingly huge amount of effort put in to minor spats over language etc can't be channelled into something more real & productive.


 
I always think if this is all they have to complain about then they really _haven't_ got anything to complain about. I'm trying to feed, cloth, house 5 of us on 15 grand a year. I'm really not bothered if someone says 'loon'.


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## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

BigTom said:


> ah so that's why people were talking about trigger warnings last night.. anyway I tried to have a conversation about my concerns about trigger warnings and failed to get my points across on twitter and it's been on my mind and I wrote this this morning (before seeing the article), I thought I was going to tweet it but it ended up being too long, I'm going to drop it here instead:
> 
> I have two issues with trigger warnings, both concerned with them becoming enabling.
> 
> ...


 
This.


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## butchersapron (Jan 30, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> LPs grovelling apology here if anyone's interested: http://www.penny-red.com/post/41858644191/ableism-and-apologies
> 
> Whilst I think it can be useful deal with issues like this, it's a shame the seemingly huge amount of effort put in to minor spats over language etc can't be channelled into something more real & productive.


Left-big hitters at home in minor cultural spats (on behalf of the poor and oppressed blah blah), the right cracks on with more material matters. What _a wonderful subdivision._


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## Balbi (Jan 30, 2013)

At the beating heart of debate


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## Steel Icarus (Jan 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Left-big hitters at home in minor cultural spats (on behalf of the poor and oppressed blah blah), the right cracks on with more material matters. What _a wonderful subdivision._


 
Ah, but you see, once The Left has sorted out all the nasty words, everyone's checked their privilege and knows where they are on the Wheel of Infinite Intersectionality, everything that's wrong with the world will simply go away. (I've seen more than a few variations on this theme after Suzanne Moore said something about the bigger picture of fighting the Tories being more important.)


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## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

It is enabling. It is helping people remain trapped in a prison of anxiety.


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## Random (Jan 30, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> surely she should be penny dreadful and not penny red


Ahem! http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...facebook-handbags.266196/page-25#post-9852244


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## Pickman's model (Jan 30, 2013)

Random said:


> Ahem! http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...facebook-handbags.266196/page-25#post-9852244


yes, i know: and i thought i'd have another plug at it as no one seems to have taken onboard the suggestion


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## smokedout (Jan 30, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Ah, but you see, once The Left has sorted out all the nasty words, everyone's checked their privilege and knows where they are on the Wheel of Infinite Intersectionality, everything that's wrong with the world will simply go away. (I've seen more than a few variations on this theme after Suzanne Moore said something about the bigger picture of fighting the Tories being more important.)


 
or the left will look up from its naval gazing to discover melanie philips and toby young have taken over the world


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## Steel Icarus (Jan 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> It is enabling. It is helping people remain trapped in a prison of anxiety.


 
What you've done there is you've made the mistake of thinking your point of view is relevant. You're not in the in-crowd, are you, who decide trigger warnings have to be put everywhere because "where's the harm in putting one" and "If even one person is prevented from having a flashback then that's good enough for me". 

Jesus, I saw a trigger warning because of the word "idiot" the other day.


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## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

It does not prevent people from having flashbacks. It makes them worse. It stops them living a normal life.


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## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

S☼I said:


> What you've done there is you've made the mistake of thinking your point of view is relevant. You're not in the in-crowd, are you, who decide trigger warnings have to be put everywhere because "where's the harm in putting one" and "If even one person is prevented from having a flashback then that's good enough for me".
> 
> Jesus, I saw a trigger warning because of the word "idiot" the other day.


 
These people make me sick.


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## DaveCinzano (Jan 30, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> surely she should be penny dreadful and not penny red





Random said:


> Ahem! http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...facebook-handbags.266196/page-25#post-9852244


 
I'm still blindly hoping Red Penace will catch on 

I'll also take the long odds on Lorra Pennies, lost cause that it is.


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## BigTom (Jan 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> It does not prevent people from having flashbacks. It makes them worse. It stops them living a normal life.


 
It can (imo often does),  but there are times and places when avoidance is the right thing to happen - but only ever when that avoidance has been accompanied by a discussion and examination to make sure that you aren't hiding from something you shouldn't be. In some ways, having been both enabled and enabler wrt depression & bipolar respectively, this is a concern for anyone who is supporting someone with MH issues in a big way as well as the MH sufferer themselves.
It's not quite relevant here but the most important thing anyone said to me was "you don't get confident by not doing the things you aren't confident about".

e2a: This is more relevant to someone you are supporting personally, not people you don't know on the internet. I can't even begin to think round the issues of enabling when it's people you don't personally know.



S☼I said:


> What you've done there is you've made the mistake of thinking your point of view is relevant. You're not in the in-crowd, are you, who decide trigger warnings have to be put everywhere because "where's the harm in putting one" and "If even one person is prevented from having a flashback then that's good enough for me".
> 
> Jesus, I saw a trigger warning because of the word "idiot" the other day.


 
a trigger warning for "idiot", wtf? I guess this was somewhere on twitter was it? I don't get how any kind of context could justify that tbh, like I said above if the use of trigger warnings becomes ubiquitous they become useless - even the spread away from graphic description to any personal account clouds what they are telling you, going beyond that, well what's the point of them anymore.


----------



## Firky (Jan 30, 2013)

Random said:


> Ahem! http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...facebook-handbags.266196/page-25#post-9852244


 
Not at all relate but...



firky said:


> Has anyone mentioned _kyriachy_ yet, if not can I bags it to look clever?





> Jo ‏@jonanamary
> as their continuing presence on my flickr account adds more drops to te ocean of oppression/kyriarchy.


 


(Del' didn't use the word but that jonana mary)

They do like their words no one uses.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 30, 2013)

BigTom said:


> a trigger warning for "idiot", wtf? I guess this was somewhere on twitter was it? I don't get how any kind of context could justify that tbh, like I said above if the use of trigger warnings becomes ubiquitous they become useless - even the spread away from graphic description to any personal account clouds what they are telling you, going beyond that, well what's the point of them anymore.


 
Sorry, my mistake, the tweet is





			
				Jonanamary said:
			
		

> (TW for ableism) Moore also blithely uses the word "moron", because that's totally ok too amirite??? (Hint: it's highly oppressive.)


----------



## BigTom (Jan 30, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Sorry, my mistake, the tweet is


 
 oh man, that is a prime example of the failure of understanding of trigger warnings.. I mean seriously, the trigger here is the word "moron" but it's in the tweet, there's not even any chance for someone to avoid it, let alone before we even start talking about how trigger warnings come from PTSD and anxiety order discussion forums (afaik) and should be limited to really severe things because otherwise like FW says we are just making people worse and enabling them to not live a normal life.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 30, 2013)

Yeah, I challenged her about its use for this quite minor thing...and got an explanation of what trigger warnings are.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 30, 2013)

I'm mean not like obviously but I'm laughing tbh. Going to have a look at her explanation...


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

Lets have a trigger warning if you try to go out of your house.


----------



## Blagsta (Jan 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> It does not prevent people from having flashbacks. It makes them worse. It stops them living a normal life.


Yes, there's a lot to this. In mental health work, recovery is considered to largely be about acceptance of one's situation, normalisation of emotional states, exploration of distress and distressing events. Avoiding things tends to keep one stuck. Although of course you have to have enough resilience and emotional support to engage in this process.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

Avoidance and reassurance seeking are massive obstacles to recovery (as far as that is possible, but even to management of the condition). thats what i was told a few years ago anyway.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

S☼I said:


> What you've done there is you've made the mistake of thinking your point of view is relevant. You're not in the in-crowd, are you, who decide trigger warnings have to be put everywhere because *"where's the harm in putting one" and "If even one person is prevented from having a flashback then that's good enough for me".*
> 
> Jesus, I saw a trigger warning because of the word "idiot" the other day.


 
Don't have much to say about this, except you've hit the nail on the head:- the person(s)/situation(s) that caused the initial trauma are responsible for the 'flashbacks'. 
It's not the responsibility of people discussing a different matter to stop unknown others (who?) having flashbacks.

On the recent non-furore.







LP becomes a good example at dealing with being 'called out'. 

Who the hell are 'Tips for Radicals'? Why should radicals take examples from journalists who lie about them and interview far-right leaders?

I had a look and found out that privilege can mean whatever you want it to mean:

http://tipsforradicals.tumblr.com/post/41711399884/you-need-the-theory-the-class-struggle-must-be

'You need the theory: the class struggle must be intersectional'

"Obviously it’s a false dichotomy: any decent analysis involving privilege puts intersectionality (i.e. that the way in which different privileges overlap creates a complex and multi-layered structure of social advantages and disadvantages) at its centre. Privilege isn’t inherently binarist - privileged vs oppressed - any more than Marxist economic analysis is (employer vs employee). Without an intersectional analysis, you will end up only focusing only on those with the loudest voice, and ignoring the “most oppressed” by the capitalist system we live in."


Privilege _isn't_ "binarist", so I can be both privileged on one axis and non-privileged. I mean what the hell. 
Also, my view, 'in the movement' and 'in the capitalist media':- middle-class immigrants have the loudest voice, working-class immigrants have close to none.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

although the whole idea of "curing" it is also problematic coz it ends up with you beating yourselfover the head over the fact that you can't "cure it" and becoming a whole depressive spiral where you feel worse and worse over the fact that you are still ill.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Avoidance and reassurance seeking are massive obstacles to recovery (as far as that is possible, but even to management of the condition). thats what i was told a few years ago anyway.


 
I'd agree with that (from the perspective of depression). Agorophobia (that's the right word isn't it? when you can't go outside) is the ultimate end point of avoidance (though I'm not suggesting it's only place it comes from). Self-pity is a fucking killer and has to be challenged, and avoidance and reassurance do not do this, they do the opposite, say that the self-pity is fine, that avoidance is fine. So where do you draw the line, best not leave the house because something might trigger me, there might be something I can't cope with.
But there's a judgement call to be made, I struggle really badly in unstructured social situations, especially parties. There's been times when I've pushed myself to go out rather than avoid the situation and it's been the wrong decision. There's also been times I've been out where I've wanted to stay home and it's been right to go out.
Being able to make that call requires recognition that avoidance can be wrong and harmful even if it seems right and feels nice. Trigger warnings in the way they seem to be getting used now just don't have that recognition.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

BigTom said:


> I'd agree with that (from the perspective of depression). Agorophobia (that's the right word isn't it? when you can't go outside) is the ultimate end point of avoidance (though I'm not suggesting it's only place it comes from). Self-pity is a fucking killer and has to be challenged, and avoidance and reassurance do not do this, they do the opposite, say that the self-pity is fine, that avoidance is fine. So where do you draw the line, best not leave the house because something might trigger me, there might be something I can't cope with.
> But there's a judgement call to be made, I struggle really badly in unstructured social situations, especially parties. There's been times when I've pushed myself to go out rather than avoid the situation and it's been the wrong decision. There's also been times I've been out where I've wanted to stay home and it's been right to go out.
> Being able to make that call requires recognition that avoidance can be wrong and harmful even if it seems right and feels nice. Trigger warnings in the way they seem to be getting used now just don't have that recognition.


 
yeah, me too. Its a judgement call and sometimes with parties etc it is right not to go out. you cant always assume that it will be though.


----------



## Blagsta (Jan 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Avoidance and reassurance seeking are massive obstacles to recovery (as far as that is possible, but even to management of the condition). thats what i was told a few years ago anyway.


I'm using a rehabilitation definition of recovery rather than a medical one. Its much more about acceptance and management than cure and elimination of symptoms.


----------



## BigTom (Jan 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> although the whole idea of "curing" it is also problematic coz it ends up with you beating yourselfover the head over the fact that you can't "cure it" and becoming a whole depressive spiral where you feel worse and worse over the fact that you are still ill.


 
fuck cures. I don't even think about cures for my depression anymore. coping strategies are what exist, and these can be so effective they come close to a cure, but it's always there, like suicide, I think about suicide pretty much every day, I'm not going to kill myself, I have coping strategies that mean that won't happen, but I can't stop the thoughts.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> I'm using a rehabilitation definition of recovery rather than a medical one. Its much more about acceptance and management than cure and elimination of symptoms.


 
Good.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

BigTom said:


> fuck cures. I don't even think about cures for my depression anymore. coping strategies are what exist, and these can be so effective they come close to a cure, but it's always there, like suicide, I think about suicide pretty much every day, I'm not going to kill myself, I have coping strategies that mean that won't happen, but I can't stop the thoughts.


 
yeah thinking about the fact that i might never be cured really fucked me in the first few years after being diagnosed with this. It's bullshit, as Blagsta says it should be about acceptance and management.


----------



## JimW (Jan 30, 2013)

BigTom said:


> IAgorophobia (that's the right word isn't it? when you can't go outside)...


No, that's a fear of getting into arguments with Greek people


----------



## Blagsta (Jan 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Good.


That's pretty much the angle mental health nursing is coming from these days.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 30, 2013)

JimW said:


> No, that's a fear of getting into arguments with Greek people


Outside


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 30, 2013)




----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

Who on earth just "chats" with MPs? (a wag would say something about MPs who send their kids to private school)


----------



## fractionMan (Jan 30, 2013)

*barf*


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 30, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> *barf*


How about this for afters:



> Take, for example, David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, who I’ve mentioned on this blog before. He’s one of the first truly interesting politicians I’ve met, and in the space of half an hour the man made me want to smack him in the face and managed to raise all the little hairs on the back of my neck with a sudden lust for social change. Gleeful and slightly manic in the way that only a real politics junkie can be, Lammy is an expansive orator with a soundbite for every occasion (‘a strong economy is not enough – we need a good society!’ is one that I’ve now counted in five different speeches). He’s the young gun from outside the nepotistic cesspool of Westminster who finds himself ‘wheeled in’, in his own words, ‘to talk to angry young black men or angry young white men’ or, indeed, to any audience requiring a politician young people can relate to. He’s frighteningly clever, annoyingly inspiring, and the patronising git knows it, too. I hate him, I hate his terrible smug face, I hated him from the moment he opened his mouth, and I would vote for him in any election you care to mention, because he’s an uniquely talented politican who cares about the poor and the disenfranchised and the young and the desperate almost as much as he cares about stroking his own ego, and that’s a hell of a lot.


 
Following line is great too:



> The Fabian Society. What an odd place for me to be doing a work placement. The Fabians are stuffy and weird and broiling with reformist energy, and if you took away their kettle and their chocolate biscuits the whole hundred-year-old organisation would implode in twenty-four hours. I have a massive amount of respect for them, because they are for things as well as against things, even if most of what they are for is getting important people into a room together to talk about welfare reform, child poverty and human rights, feeding them enough coffee to keep them sharp and then listening very, very carefully to what is said. I’m here to learn, because I believe in quiet socialist revolution, in radical systemic change. I’m here to learn, because I’m happy to stomp around and shout with my big fuckoff socialist-feminist boots on until I’m hoarse and aching, but I won’t stomp through blood in the streets. No thanks. What the hell can we do but try to change people’s minds?


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 30, 2013)

oxbridge chums innit


sihhi said:


> Who on earth just "chats" with MPs? (a wag would say something about MPs who send their kids to private school)


 
both oxbridge innit

Whats the point of discourse with the grimy masses, when you can make a living chatting with the connected and well educated.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

The sorriness battle rages on: 'Hugely sorry'


----------



## Random (Jan 30, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> both oxbridge innit
> 
> Whats the point of discourse with the grimy masses, when you can make a living chatting with the connected and well educated.


 It's rather that she knows that Abbot represents media access and career progression. But fucking hell. A true radical would burn their boats with someone like Abbot. A true politician would stay carefully cordial. But who writes "love x", for FUCK's SAKE?


----------



## weepiper (Jan 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> How about this for afters:
> 
> 
> 
> Following line is great too:


 
Hold on just a sec, I need to wipe the spew off the walls so I can go again.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

Random said:


> It's rather that she knows that Abbot represents media access and career progression. But fucking hell. A true radical would burn their boats with someone like Abbot. A true politician would stay carefully cordial. But who writes "love x", for FUCK's SAKE?


 
It's worth pointing out that Diane Abbott has long been seen as dead to what's left of the serious black anti-racist movement that hasn't become a charity or a business.
It's the bloody intersectional midde-classers who are trying to revive her.


----------



## Random (Jan 30, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Hold on just a sec, I need to wipe the spew off the walls so I can go again.


She uses tea and biscuits like some kind of Black Hand revolutionary mark. Anarcha-tweed.


----------



## ymu (Jan 30, 2013)

Random said:


> It's rather that she knows that Abbot represents media access and career progression. But fucking hell. A true radical would burn their boats with someone like Abbot. A true politician would stay carefully cordial. But who writes "love x", for FUCK's SAKE?


Someone who feels the need to make the communication public despite the perfectly usable Direct Message function (given that Abbott follows her). _Look, I'm talking to important people! In parliament! Vote Lib Dem Labour!_


----------



## Random (Jan 30, 2013)

ymu said:


> Someone who feels the need to make the communication public despite the perfectly usable Direct Message function (given that Abbott follows her). _Look, I'm talking to important people! In parliament! Vote Lib Dem Labour!_


Exactly.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

Sorry is the easiest word.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

Random said:


> She uses tea and biscuits like some kind of Black Hand revolutionary mark. Anarcha-tweed.


 

Reminds me of tea on a desert island, bell hooks - middle-class university professor - is the companion.

http://feministing.com/2012/10/06/the-feministing-five-laurie-penny/




> LP: My mum’s shepherd’s pie, which she calls ‘”away day pie,” because it was what she used to make for me and my sisters to heat up while she was on training courses. Infinite quantities of proper strong tea (I’ve decided this is a cold desert island, but if it isn’t I’ll drink it anyway out of spite and homesickness). If it has to be a famous feminist, I think bell hooks would be great company, but if the shepherd’s pie ran out I’d have real trouble eating her, so I’ll have to go for Sarah Palin, whose repeated misuse of the f-word would only make her taste more delicious.


 

On the LP front, remember these guys - the New Inquiry where LP is a contributing editor - the UK arm if you like:









> Over four decades before the emergence of “The 99%,” fictional rock star Max Frost told
> America's youth they were “The 52%” and it was time to act like a majority. The evening will
> include a screening of the 1968 youth-power exploitation film Wild in the Streets, followed by a
> panel discussion on the intersection of pop music, filmed spectacle, and revolutionary politics,
> ...


 
This is their new artwork.
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	





I don't know if it's unfair to have a go at it? Can someone identify the bits on the Medusa?

There is 
Isaac Newton(?), ??? , Samuel Beckett, T S Eliot, ???, James Baldwin and C L R James.

Who are the other two? It sort of says (considerably) 'more educated than you' but not sure.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 30, 2013)

James baldwin is the mopey looking bloke in the middle isn't it?


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

Looks a bit dodge if you ask me.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 30, 2013)

> a panel discussion on the intersection of pop music, filmed spectacle, and revolutionary politics


 
Jesus Christ.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 30, 2013)

I always see this



> Laurie Penny is a UK-based columnist and activist


 
but don't have any idea what she is actually active in. Anyone?


----------



## rekil (Jan 30, 2013)

No women in it. Misogynist filth. Except the one at the bottom but being on the bottom is a bit misogyny as well.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 30, 2013)

I can see Paddy off Emmerdale.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> James baldwin is the mopey looking bloke in the middle isn't it?


 
It is, you're right.

I thought Fanon of this standard picture.






 Isaac Newton might be wrong.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 30, 2013)

copliker said:


> No women in it. Misogynist filth. Except the one at the bottom but being on the bottom is a bit misogyny as well.


 
No no. It's _anti_-misogynist. Her head is full to bursting with all these important men that most of you can't identify, instead of crochet and kittens.


----------



## articul8 (Jan 30, 2013)

Random said:


> It's rather that she knows that Abbot represents media access and career progression. But fucking hell. A true radical would burn their boats with someone like Abbot. A true politician would stay carefully cordial. But who writes "love x", for FUCK's SAKE?


she's hated by most of whats left of the left in parliament


----------



## Random (Jan 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> but don't have any idea what she is actually active in. Anyone?


 She's an activist in the journalists' pub and a journalist in the activists' pub.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I always see this
> but don't have any idea what she is actually active in. Anyone?


 
The student occupations mainly, _not_ the NUJ as Rob Ray pointed out.


----------



## killer b (Jan 30, 2013)

Random said:


> But who writes "love x", for FUCK's SAKE?


I do. Is it not allowed? 

love x


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 30, 2013)

articul8 said:


> she's hated by most of whats left of the left in parliament


Penny or Abbot?


----------



## rekil (Jan 30, 2013)

Wiggy could be Jonathan Swift. "Bombast and buffoonery, by nature lofty and light, soar highest of all." True m8.


----------



## rekil (Jan 30, 2013)

Fuck it, the whole bit is worth quoting.


> The whining passions and little starved conceits are gently wafted up by their own extreme levity to the middle region, and there fix and are frozen by the frigid understandings of the inhabitants. Bombast and buffoonery, by nature lofty and light, soar highest of all, and would be lost in the roof if the prudent architect had not, with much foresight, contrived for them a fourth place, called the twelve-penny gallery, and there planted a suitable colony, who greedily intercept them in their passage.


----------



## Firky (Jan 30, 2013)

Black shirt, red cravat. Big fopping hair and thick rimmed glasses.

Fashion is as important too you know?

Love
x 

sihhi
cant quote again


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

copliker said:


> Wiggy could be Jonathan Swift. "Bombast and buffoonery, by nature lofty and light, soar highest of all." True m8.


 
Again I think you're probably right - I thought Newton as in starter of the Western Englightenment and spreader of colonialism then Fanon as the counter-blast stemming from it.

This is how TNI contributors see themselves



> Itoro Udoko Photographer / Filmmaker / Writer / Philosopher / Cultural Theorist / Nashville, TN. Seeking authentic pursuits of the mind. I like to create things.


http://thenewinquiry.com/author/itoroudoko/
http://thecreativeroutine.tumblr.com/ (if you click without a page-style overrider)
This is _meaningful _clothing:


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This is _meaningful _clothing:


 
No it isn't. It looks shit.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 30, 2013)

Remember that left-wing fashion blog a while ago?  Was that for real, or a piss take?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 30, 2013)

copliker said:


> Wiggy could be *Jonathan Swift*. "Bombast and buffoonery, by nature lofty and light, soar highest of all." True m8.


 

coprophiliac and hater of the flesh


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> No it isn't. It looks shit.


 
I think that is _looksism._

He told you 'Support grassroots!'
If roll-up trouser style is unwanted, shorts on top of trouser leggings is possible.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I think that is _looksism._
> 
> He told you 'Support grassroots!'
> If roll-up trouser style is unwanted, shorts on top of trouser leggings is possible.


 
that looks hideous ffs! What is the matter with them? Fair enough if its the depths of winter and you're just packing on as many layers as you can but they're not even doing that!


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Remember that left-wing fashion blog a while ago? Was that for real, or a piss take?


 
I still don't know. 

http://farleftfashion.tumblr.com/post/39849791820/forget-factionalism-in-fighting-and-privilege

Forget factionalism, in-fighting and privilege, one of the biggest stains on the student far-left is how some of the LAAAAAADs choose to dress. Let’s take a moment to look at this photo and try not to cry.
The jogging bottoms, the rain macs, the shabby trainers and.. hey, is that guy wearing the Pali flag as a baby bib?
The only commendation here is Nathan Akehurst’s excellent military jacket. We’re pretty sure the guy next to him is Edward Maltby in 30 years time and the one next to him is Liam Burns with a beard and keffiyeh disguise…


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> that looks hideous ffs! What is the matter with them? Fair enough if its the depths of winter and you're just packing on as many layers as you can but they're not even doing that!


 
Imagine the scum attending that.


----------



## ymu (Jan 30, 2013)

Reminds me of those Diesel adverts.



> *Diesel is launching its autumn/winter collection with the line "Action! For Successful Living", and a press campaign that shows a series of protests for change.*
> 
> The Amsterdam-based agency KesselsKramer has created the above-the-line work with EHS Brann developing a website (www.diesel. com) which centres on the theme of taking action.
> 
> ...


 
Gawd, they're going viral.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Imagine the scum attending that.


 
They're in Nashville, but they charge $22 for a flimsy cloth 'headband'

"These headbands have been a hot commodity! Very retro-chic in a wide range of graphics. Get yours for $22."
https://www.facebook.com/localhoneynashville


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 30, 2013)

> Model and activist Ella Raff is fastly becoming one of FLF’s faves, positively smoldering in solidarity with coal miners. Ella recently became a hit dressing like a toff as part of a ‘posh protest’ in order to dismiss the inaccuracy that ‘lefty = badly dressed’. We wish her well in her modelling and campaigning, especially in her work championing free education.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

*



			Action! For Successful Living
		
Click to expand...

*


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 30, 2013)

That lad in the faux bolshevik civil war greatcoat is one of the leading *SEYMOUR!*-ites. Oxbridge and former youth parliament member.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

neither the tory right or the non-intersectional, tired old working class left, but a new radical protest movement for creative change, a movement for Action!


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


>


 

Ella Raff is on twitter here:

https://twitter.com/ellaraff

https://twitter.com/ellaraff/status/292960172949782529

'St Hugh's College being sued for taking financial concerns into postgrad allocation of places is absurd. Absolutely NOT the fault of the > college or the university for not having the funding, and it is TRUE, what is the point in offering a place when it is bound to be rejected > applicant's claim that they would have worked during their time is absurd, completely impossible and definitely > compromising rigorous academic standards of postgraduate work. don't blame the university, blame the government which has cut funding for postgrads > agree that it is an absurd situation but think unis particularly oxbridge doing as good a job as they can to mitigate.'

Attacking the legal challenge to Oxford by that student earlier.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I think that is _looksism._
> 
> He told you 'Support grassroots!'
> If roll-up trouser style is unwanted, shorts on top of trouser leggings is possible.


 

depressingly, the grungers style has come back around. Fuck you, the march of years, fuck you


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 30, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Yes, there's a lot to this. In mental health work, recovery is considered to largely be about acceptance of one's situation, normalisation of emotional states, exploration of distress and distressing events.


 
In other words, finding out you weren't really ill in the first place...?


----------



## weepiper (Jan 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Ella Raff is on twitter here:
> 
> applicant's claim that they would have worked during their time is absurd, completely impossible and definitely > compromising rigorous academic standards of postgraduate work.


 
Nice. I worked in a shop a minimum of two days a week throughout my degree and got a First. Guess I'd better self-combust now.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jan 30, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


>


 
FFS


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Ella Raff is on twitter here:
> 
> https://twitter.com/ellaraff
> 
> ...


 
Solidarity.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Nice. I worked in a shop a minimum of two days a week throughout my degree and got a First.


 
It's for postgraduates hence different standards of *rigour* are meant to apply.

Note '_*particularly*_ oxbridge doing as good a job as they can'.


----------



## Blagsta (Jan 30, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> In other words, finding out you weren't really ill in the first place...?


If you want a discussion on the nature of mental health, start a new thread.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 30, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> FFS


 
WTF as well.  At how glib and posh and ... well, just how _shit_ it is.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Reminds me of tea on a desert island, bell hooks - middle-class university professor - is the companion.
> 
> http://feministing.com/2012/10/06/the-feministing-five-laurie-penny/
> 
> ...


 
Pope not Newton, and Borges next to Beckett.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It's for postgraduates hence different standards of *rigour* are meant to apply.
> 
> Note '_*particularly*_ oxbridge doing as good a job as they can'.


And her twitter account says oxford/cambridge. Both.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 30, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> If you want a discussion on the nature of mental health, start a new thread.


 
You were discussing it.  Don't discuss it if you don't want it discussed.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 30, 2013)

What's with the red neckerchiefs? Are they off to rob the railroad after or something?


----------



## articul8 (Jan 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Penny or Abbot?


Abbot - I've no idea what - if anything - they think of Penny


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That lad in the faux bolshevik civil war greatcoat is one of the leading *SEYMOUR!*-ites. Oxbridge and former youth parliament member.


 
He forgot to mention where he was a Youth Parliament Member _for_.



> Nathan Akehurst, MYP for Kensington and Chelsea, said: "Congratulations to Lily on her election. I'm looking forward to working with her this year and hope that we'll both be able to make a difference for all the young people who live and go to school in Kensington and Chelsea."


 
http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/pressrelease/pressreleasepage.aspx?id=3730

It's actually Kensington and Chelsea, but the Chelsea bit is missing in his twitter bio.




> Nathan Akehurst
> @nathanakehurst
> Socialist, student, Oxonian, blogger, would-be journo/author. Ex-Member of Youth Parliament for Kensington. All opinions those of Steve, my Galapagos tortoise.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 30, 2013)

Five grand a chat and his mate have got faces that need punching.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> He forgot to mention where he was a Youth Parliament Member _for_.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Both from Holland Park shool, the socialists stronghold/eton.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 30, 2013)

It wouldn't take long, would it, for any British Revolution to descend into a class pogrom.... _a la _Marat, Pol Pot...


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Both from Holland Park shool, the socialists stronghold/eton.


 
I believe - not sure - its reputation as a leftwing stronghold is exaggerated. Its catchment area is immediately around it ie Chelsea and west of Westminster and so has very rich people as its parents, plus it can select 10% of its intake.

Unsurprisingly, it has facilities like this on-site.






Tony Benn sent his children there.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 30, 2013)

Milibands and other labour bigwigs too.

edit: governors have voted for academy status now as well.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> WTF as well. At how glib and posh and ... well, just how _shit_ it is.


 
I think it is a party look at the food behind, so the bin-bag fashion sort of makes sense I think

Nathan 'Socialist, student, Oxonian, blogger, would-be journo' (his words, not mine) Akehurst on the SWP's democracy:

"The party's democracy impressed me and it was something I was pleased to be a part of- what I think remains the healthiest and most vibrant democracy of the parties on the British far left. Not that it is a wise idea to ever measure oneself against opponents alone- the strive for success is, in a Weberian fashion, its own goal (except that success in moulding a revolutionary party has much greater, ambitious, and more idealistic endpoints.). This preamble is there to not only reaffirm my own dedication to socialist politics but the highlight the shock and betrayal I and many others in the organisation felt over the intervening weeks between the pre-party conference period and now."


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Milibands and other labour bigwigs too.


 
Milibands? The two Milibands went to Haverstock School, similar vibe but for the rich of Hampstead.
Their own children are still at primary school age.

Also Holland Park School is not just for Labour

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/diary/the-feral-beast-helenas-secret-passion-8165970.html




> Boasting alumni such as Hilary Benn and Polly Toynbee, Holland Park School is sometimes known as the "socialist Eton". So there was much eyebrow-raising when Michael Gove made a visit to the London comprehensive last week, not in his capacity as Edu- cation Secretary but as prospec- tive parent. I can disclose that he is considering sending his son to the school, as the Goves live in the catchment area. Gove himself was both state and privately educated, although most of his friends went to Eton. The move would be unusual for a Tory minister; figures show that 50 per cent of Notting Hill residents send their children to feepaying schools. Controversially, the local council has just spent £60m on a swanky new building for the school. Only last year, Mr Gove was attacking architects for "creaming off" money that could be better spent on teaching. That should make him popular at the school gates.


 
I think it was £80m but am not sure.


----------



## articul8 (Jan 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I think it is a party look at the food behind, so the bin-bag fashion sort of makes sense I think
> 
> Nathan 'Socialist, student, Oxonian, blogger, would-be journo' (his words, not mine) Akehurst on the SWP's democracy:


 Does "Oxonian" mean you come from Oxford or you're an alumnus?


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 30, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Does "Oxonian" mean you come from Oxford or you're an alumnus?


Not sure but if he comes from Kensington and Chelsea and went to oxford (he did/does) i'd suggest the latter.


----------



## articul8 (Jan 30, 2013)

maybe Kensington is just his town-house?


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

articul8 said:


> maybe Kensington is just his town-house?


 
No evidence at all there.

Top poem featuring Mad Chris Knight's burning canvas theatre Trojan Horse.

http://march26tahrir.wordpress.com/...hurst-inspired-by-shelleys-masque-of-anarchy/




> One day, and in the early spring
> When dissent had spread an angry wing,
> The crowd stopped and invited me,
> To join their tragic comedy.
> ...


----------



## Firky (Jan 30, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


>


 
Jesus. Fucking. Titty. Christ.


----------



## Firky (Jan 30, 2013)

Now the site of the biggest ASDA in Northumberland.

Makes me cringe that those pair of cunts have reduced it to that.


----------



## Pickman's model (Jan 30, 2013)

butchersapron: they're to aim at


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

firky said:


> Now the site of the biggest ASDA in Northumberland.
> 
> Makes me cringe that those pair of cunts have reduced it to that.


 
It was your point about _fashion _that started this all.

 A better view of Nathan's Soviet military coat complete with star badge and F**K FEES sign.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 30, 2013)

> `And these words shall then become
> Like Oppression's thundered doom
> Ringing through each heart and brain,
> Heard again -- again -- again--
> ...


----------



## love detective (Jan 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What's with the red neckerchiefs? Are they off to rob the railroad after or something?


 
am wondering whether his face would serve as an obstacle to articul8 ejacul8ing


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What's with the red neckerchiefs? Are they off to rob the railroad after or something?


 
The 'Dad's Platinum Card in the Hole in the Wall Gang'.


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

More Akehurst poetry. Perhaps the New Inquiry should do a critical evaluation:




> He cuts a lonely figure, that border guard at midnight,
> His wisps of cigarette smoke curl into the smoke from today's fight,
> Israeli troops in a garden of exiles,
> Their rifles came from Capitol Hill,
> ...


 
http://nathan-akehurst.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/flotilla.html

Bombs from the MOSSAD? WTF?


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

love detective said:


> am wondering whether his face would serve as an obstacle to articul8 ejacul8ing


 
Nathan says:



> We ran the gauntlet, lost the race,
> They struck Innocence in the face,
> Handcuffed him to ignominy,
> In the shadow of Nelson’s Victory.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Nathan says:


 
Is 'Innocence' a metaphor for Nathan here? *hopeful*


----------



## sihhi (Jan 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Milibands and other labour bigwigs too.
> 
> edit: governors have voted for academy status now as well.


 
That was over a year ago. The most important anti-streaming all-years comprehensive school in the Labour strategy in its war against selective and private education - willingly suiciding itself.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jan 30, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


>


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Jan 30, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


>


 
One of the security guards at a cheap Moscow hotel I stayed at was like the chaps in that pic.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That was over a year ago. The most important anti-streaming all-years comprehensive school in the Labour strategy in its war against selective and private education - willingly suiciding itself.


 
Looking back, it's quite amazing that the middle class--sections of it at least--ever endorsed the principle, let alone the practice, of comprehensive education.

I rarely see it defended these days, even in principle. It evidently doesn't even _occur_ to the likes of Diane Abbott that the comprehensive system might have some intrinsic merit. And if it doesn't occur to her, imagine how far it is from the imagination of a Cameron or Clegg...

... which is of course what gives rise to the kind of class hatred expressed on this thread, by fostering an utter absence of connection, knowledge or understanding between the British masses and the privately-educated "top" 10% or so.

At least the real toffs--Etonians and the like--acknowledge and respect that difference, which is why the working class and the aristocracy have enjoyed a degree of understanding and even mutual sympathy in the UK. But the privately-educated middle class don't even know enough about other classes to know that everyone isn't (and doesn't) like them.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jan 30, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> One of the security guards at a cheap Moscow hotel I stayed at was like the chaps in that pic.


 
I don't know if I've told you this story before, but the first time I was in Moscow my local contacts showed me around the city centre and at the end of our tour, I said come back to my hotel, I'll stand you a drink at the bar.

We were halfway across the lobby when we were challenged by the security guys, who told us NYET to guests having guests in the bar.

I think we ended up in a Texas-style steakhouse in the end (but only for beer, not steak). Anyway, they told me that they didn't think Russia was like that anymore.

E2A:

Actually, I think this is the original version of that pi


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 30, 2013)

articul8 said:


> she's hated by most of whats left of the left in parliament


 
Is that coz she shafted John McDonnell when she ran for leaders (in exchange for a shadow cabinet position)?

Anyway did you know that Laurie Penny is an anagram of Purely Inane? And that Delroy Booth is an anagram of Booty Handler.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jan 30, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Delroy Booth is an anagram of Booty Handler.


Misogynist.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 30, 2013)

Of course in my mind the word Booty Handler is someone who looks after a pirate's stash. Why I am shocked and appalled that it has some other sexual connotation. Not being a disgusting pervert the thought hadn't even crossed my mind Idris...


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I believe - not sure - its reputation as a leftwing stronghold is exaggerated. Its catchment area is immediately around it ie Chelsea and west of Westminster and so has very rich people as its parents, plus it can select 10% of its intake.
> 
> Unsurprisingly, it has facilities like this on-site.
> 
> ...


 
_Comp: A Survivor's Tale_ by John-Paul Flintoff is a moderately diverting memoir of a middle-class schoolboy placed there by liberal parents.


----------



## ymu (Jan 30, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Of course in my mind the word Booty Handler is someone who looks after a pirate's stash. Why I am shocked and appalled that it has some other sexual connotation. Not being a disgusting pervert the thought hadn't even crossed my mind Idris...


 
Too many letters.

Booty Holder.

yum


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 30, 2013)

love detective said:


> am wondering whether his face would serve as an obstacle to articul8 ejacul8ing


 
I believe it's called 'Cock Bloccing' - non-violent wrist action protection.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 30, 2013)




----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 30, 2013)

ymu said:


> Too many letters.
> 
> Booty Holder.
> 
> yum


 
Shit you're right too!


----------



## krink (Jan 30, 2013)

i know you've moved on a bit this afternoon but here's the only type of trigger warning I'm interetsed in:


----------



## Firky (Jan 30, 2013)

Cajun Boxmaster sounds like a pornstar not a KFC meal.


----------



## Buckaroo (Jan 30, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Looking back, it's quite amazing that the middle class--sections of it at least--ever endorsed the principle, let alone the practice, of comprehensive education.
> 
> I rarely see it defended these days, even in principle. It evidently doesn't even _occur_ to the likes of Diane Abbott that the comprehensive system might have some intrinsic merit. And if it doesn't occur to her, imagine how far it is from the imagination of a Cameron or Clegg...
> 
> ...


 
Quite, they don't want their kids mixing with the mentals and if you can pay for it why wouldn't ya? Nothing wrong with the comprehensive system that a few psychometric tests and a healthy awareness of identity polit...no fuck it, that doesn't work. Almost. Like an appreciation of fine wine, art or something, the choice of telling what you don't care for, of choosing the company you'd rather not keep. That's the style. Class.


----------



## phildwyer (Jan 30, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> Quite, they don't want their kids mixing with the mentals and if you can pay for it why wouldn't ya? Nothing wrong with the comprehensive system that a few psychometric tests and a healthy awareness of identity polit...no fuck it, that doesn't work. Almost. Like an appreciation of fine wine, art or something, the choice of telling what you don't care for, of choosing the company you'd rather not keep. That's the style. Class.


 
That's why some parents where I grew up would pay lots of money to send their kids to the local, expensive but crap, private school... just so they wouldn't have to mix with the kids from the "sink" estate who formed part of the local comprehensive's population... although the comp actually got better exam results... it's about class rather than (or rather _as_) education.

"When Christopher Hitchens was a small boy in Portsmouth, England, he overheard his parents arguing about the cost of sending him to an expensive private school. His father said it was beyond the family's means, and his mother countered with the devastating line, "If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it." In fact Hitchens, a thoroughly honest writer, admits he isn't exactly sure what wording she used. She may have said "ruling class" or "establishment," but whichever it was, he says he was definitely on his mother's side at the time."
​http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Hitch-22-A-Memoir-by-Christopher-Hitchens-3263251.php#ixzz2JUQDEeVK​


----------



## Fedayn (Jan 30, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> That's why some parents where I grew up would pay lots of money to send their kids to the local, expensive but crap, private school... just so they wouldn't have to mix with the kids from the "sink" estate who formed part of the local comprehensive's population... although the comp actually got better exam results... it's about class rather than (or rather _as_) education.
> 
> "When Christopher Hitchens was a small boy in Portsmouth, England, he overheard his parents arguing about the cost of sending him to an expensive private school. His father said it was beyond the family's means, and his mother countered with the devastating line, "If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it." In fact Hitchens, a thoroughly honest writer, admits he isn't exactly sure what wording she used. She may have said "ruling class" or "establishment," but whichever it was, he says he was definitely on his mother's side at the time."
> ​http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Hitch-22-A-Memoir-by-Christopher-Hitchens-3263251.php#ixzz2JUQDEeVK​


 
Some might say he never really left her side ie the ruling class for long.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 30, 2013)

That's common. The kids who went to the nearest private school to where I live were getting a shit education at a hefty price. The standard of teaching is crap. The local comprehensive was a good school, although I didn't get on very well there coz I was a nightmare pupil and didn't realy bother turning up much past year 10, but it's a good school on the whole and y'know what dare I say it it was fairly middle class as far as comprehensive schools go. The fact that someone would pay thousands of pounds a year to avoid that kind of comprehensive education, even in a comprehensive that's quite middle-class and get's good results, it can only be pure snobbery. They're actually giving their kids a shitter education just so they can make the right contacts and get the right social skills and so on.

Not only that, but there's a large number of kids I knew who've come through the private school (Quegs in Wakefield) that now have real problems socialising. The fact it's two most notable alumni of that school are the acid bath murderer and the crossbow cannibal speaks volumes imo. It's an all boys school and to this day there's people I know who went there who are in the their mid 20's who still cannot hold a conversation with a girl, it's like being 12 and stuck in a state of arrested development. Doesn't socialising your kids so that they can function in the world have some kind of value? The thing is, I don't suppose I have the requisite social skills and affectations that would enable me to cope in the London media Booze and Schooze mileu, any more than they could cope with my life at the moment. I suppose that's what they're being taught, how to exist in the upper echelons of British society. It's training for being the ruling class. Private education is the means by which the rich and powerful perpetuate their privilige through the generations.

On the plus side I used to make some good money selling them really shady bags of weed, coz they all had parents who just threw money at them instead of, y'know, raising and caring for them and stuff, and didn't realise what things were actually worth. I was earning more money at 15 doing that than I am the moment, which has freaked me out a bit now I think about it


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 30, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Nice. I worked in a shop a minimum of two days a week throughout my degree and got a First. Guess I'd better self-combust now.


Me too - worked in the library 20 hours a week for the four years of my PhD. It's nice to know the work is actually a pile of crap.

And it is the fault of the college for not securing the funding.


----------



## Sue (Jan 30, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


>


 
For some reason, makes me think of Zoolander...


----------



## Greebo (Jan 30, 2013)

Sue said:


> For some reason, makes me think of Zoolander...


It's the eyes and lips.


----------



## Sue (Jan 30, 2013)

Greebo said:


> It's the eyes and lips.


 
Blue Steel we are in you.


----------



## Greebo (Jan 30, 2013)

Sue said:


> Blue Steel we are in you.


Not Magnum?


----------



## Sue (Jan 30, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Not Magnum?


 
Working up to that...


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 30, 2013)

Sue said:


> Blue Steel we are in you.


We're really, really ridiculously good-looking


----------



## goldenecitrone (Jan 30, 2013)

Fedayn said:


> Some might say he never really left her side ie the ruling class for long.


 
His mother committed suicide when he was 24.


----------



## ymu (Jan 30, 2013)

_ie the ruling class_


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

I worked all through uni with various jobs. i would have been all right without it but it definitely helped and others i know who did not work through uni have found it a lot harder to get any sort of work ever since. oxford doesn't allow you to work when you're there iirc and i think that's a fucking disgrace, because if you need the money how are you supposed to get it. and even if you dont at the time you're going to need when you leave uni and try to get a job and find that you can't because you haven't been working.

unless you're laurie penny.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> oxford doesn't allow you to work when you're there iirc and i think that's a fucking disgrace, because if you need the money how are you supposed to get it.


 
It's blatantly a way of weeding out the wrong sort.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 30, 2013)

a lot of employers actually look for things like working during studying because it shows you are able to work hard, be punctual, balance different things etc. not having any sort of work history while at uni does damage your chances of getting a job but i suppose they dont give a fuck about that.


----------



## equationgirl (Jan 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I worked all through uni with various jobs. i would have been all right without it but it definitely helped and others i know who did not work through uni have found it a lot harder to get any sort of work ever since. oxford doesn't allow you to work when you're there iirc and i think that's a fucking disgrace, because if you need the money how are you supposed to get it. and even if you dont at the time you're going to need when you leave uni and try to get a job and find that you can't because you haven't been working.
> 
> unless you're laurie penny.


To be fair I had to get departmental approval for my p/t library work. It was approved because I was a mature student, I had a mortgage and it was in the uni library. The library also made an exception when they hired me as they didn't hire students as desk staff, but again, I was a mature student (29) so they were cool about it.

I loved that job, it was the best job I've ever had.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I worked all through uni with various jobs. i would have been all right without it but it definitely helped and others i know who did not work through uni have found it a lot harder to get any sort of work ever since. oxford doesn't allow you to work when you're there iirc and i think that's a fucking disgrace, because if you need the money how are you supposed to get it.


 
It's based on the assumption you should be rich enough not to need to lower yourself to working like a mere commoner if you want to go to Oxford. It's got nothing to do with "concentrating fully on your studies" it's just a way of keeping the poors out, as Damien Shannon has exposed. That's what that fool in the Coal not Dole outfit was defending earlier on, whether or not she knows it. And the irony is Damien Shannon is no lefty, but understands this, whereas that "Model/activist" Ella Raff in the smouldering "lets play dressing up as a dirty prole" outfit would appear to have some pretension of being a left-wing radical but defends the means by which colleges exclude on the basis of income.


----------



## 8ball (Jan 30, 2013)

weepiper said:


> It's blatantly a way of weeding out the wrong sort.


 
It used to be normal for universities but has been dropped by most as it has become a necessity for so many.  When I was at Uni they officially disapproved but understood that some people needed to get enough money in to be there despite grants (which still existed to some degree), loans etc.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 30, 2013)

8ball said:


> It used to be normal for universities but has been dropped by most as it has become a necessity for so many. When I was at Uni they officially disapproved but understood that some people needed to get enough money in to be there despite grants (which still existed to some degree), loans etc.


 
I don't recall it even occurring to me to tell the university I was working


----------



## yield (Jan 30, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Pope not Newton, and Borges next to Beckett.


It's Voltaire in the wig not Pope. You're right about Borges.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 30, 2013)

Of course it doesn't hurt for the bosses to have a ready supply of students available as cheap disposable labour...


----------



## 8ball (Jan 30, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I don't recall it even occurring to me to tell the university I was working


 
I don't remember if you were expected to tell them at my Uni, just that it was expected that you didn't do more than a certain amount, which was work of a different kind to what a lot of students do now (eg. I did odd bits of bar work and some bits of lab work here and there, but you wouldn't have expected to see students on the till in Sainsbury's for example).


----------



## kavenism (Jan 31, 2013)

sihhi said:


> He forgot to mention where he was a Youth Parliament Member _for_.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
He’s a complete child in my opinion. Goes out with someone I used to work with in Counterfire and who am still mates with. Perhaps I’m ill-disposed from the last time I met up with them; I took them to a nice pub in Richmond and he proceeded to walk out with the pub’s communal game of risk under his arm. Putz.


----------



## killer b (Jan 31, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> a lot of employers actually look for things like working during studying because it shows you are able to work hard, be punctual, balance different things etc. not having any sort of work history while at uni does damage your chances of getting a job but i suppose they dont give a fuck about that.


It isn't such a problem for Oxbridge grads, tbf.


----------



## cesare (Jan 31, 2013)

Me: I thought Oxford think that they're better than Cambridge though?
Button: They don't refer to it by name. It's "the tertiary college in the fens"


----------



## Balbi (Jan 31, 2013)

Gamekeeper turns, er....

Suzanne Moore took offence that the Spectator had an all male panel on Leveson, despite Evan Harris only taking part after two female panellists couldn't make it. Cue much twitter outrage on her behalf.


----------



## barney_pig (Jan 31, 2013)

It is odd, but I am sure that somewhere it was mentioned that full time students weren't to work more than a few hours a week; never even thought about it, I work 28-32 hours a week at Sainsburys throughout my BA and my MA, and if I am ever accepted for a phd, will probs do the same again, as well as working 24/7 fostering.
Btw as far as style goes http://workerdandy.blogspot.co.uk/?m=1


----------



## articul8 (Jan 31, 2013)

Not sure about Oxbridge, but most PhDs in know have to spend plenty of hours working - teaching, marking, etc.


----------



## mrs quoad (Jan 31, 2013)

I was invited to trial for Cambridge men's heavyweight rowing. I turned it down because of the required hours [e2a: amongst other things, tbf  Like the attitude].

Two training sessions per day, 6 days per week.

The first one is in Ely - so you're minibussed out (driving time 30mins each way? Not including 'getting everyone's shit together' time) for 1-2hrs (?) on the water. With an additional hour or two of weights / boathouse training in the afternoon (can't recall if that's 1 or 2hrs). Add in a minimum of 10 mins to the departure point / boathouse, and that's another 40 mins of cycling each day. On top of 1hr being driven in a minibus, and 2-4hrs training. Each day.

Lightweights and women don't get a minibus (though tbf might not also have so many afternoon sessions), so they get the train to Ely then cycle to the river.

Erm. So putting that much time into _paid _work might not be acceptable. And a fair few academics might resent what rowing / other sports do to their students. But if you're putting that much time into exhausting yourself *before* even beginning to sit down to work each day, that's just fine! High prestige, even. My college's master would've absolutely loved to have a couple of his students rowing for one of the blue boats!

I'll add: I'd be utterly fucking useless if I even tried to work after the morning session. Let alone the afternoon. No functioning brain cells whatsoever.


----------



## butchersapron (Jan 31, 2013)

And as for the scum with jobs and families doing OU courses...


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 31, 2013)

the cox lol


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 31, 2013)

Anyone interested?



> MASTERCLASSES
> 
> At the offices of the London Review of Books
> Saturday 9 March, £75
> ...


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 31, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Anyone interested?


 
When I saw the £75 I thought that was what they were paying for the day and I could easily do that and would like to apply. However it's not them paying us is it?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 31, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Anyone interested?


 

I could make a killing hanging around flogging people kleenex


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 31, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> When I saw the £75 I thought that was what they were paying for the day and I could easily do that


----------



## weepiper (Jan 31, 2013)

Re the misogynist cuntery on the internet thing, James Delingpole just tweeted Toby Young unfavourably reviewing Suzanne Moore's article on Gove/free schools, and said Toby Young had 'given her such a good seeing-to she'll have to walk bow-legged for weeks'. He's deleted it now, but_ really_? He's on fucking Question Time tonight. That's how acceptable this sort of crap is.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jan 31, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> And as for the scum with jobs and families doing OU courses...


 
What about the prisoners doing OU courses...what is that all about?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 31, 2013)

Delingpoles vermin though, actual vermin- we know that. Good point about him being on qt though- the closest thing to a left wing view is supplied by owen jones and milkwater liberals


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 31, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Delingpoles vermin though, actual vermin- we know that. Good point about him being on qt though- the closest thing to a left wing view is supplied by owen jones and milkwater liberals


 
Indeed. Whereas Delingpole is a proper out-there, batshit, libertarian space cadet cuntshovel mooncalf.

Also this BBC Extra Guest they have tweeting live during the programme for an "alternative" viewpoint...right, left or in the middle, I think it's been Oxbridge everytime bar twice; Harry Cole who went to Edinburgh and someone else who went to Durham.


----------



## cesare (Jan 31, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Indeed. Whereas Delingpole is a proper out-there, batshit, libertarian space cadet cuntshovel mooncalf.
> 
> Also this BBC Extra Guest they have tweeting live during the programme for an "alternative" viewpoint...right, left or in the middle, I think it's been Oxbridge everytime bar twice; Harry Cole who went to Edinburgh and someone else who went to Durham.


Nah. Sunny Hundal's Uxbridge, not Oxbridge.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 31, 2013)

cesare said:


> Nah. Sunny Hundal's Uxbridge, not Oxbridge.


 
Nicely done. Yeah, I was forgetting Hundal. Would that it was always so easy. 

Alright, Oxbridge, and those who wished they'd gone there.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 31, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Re the misogynist cuntery on the internet thing, James Delingpole just tweeted Toby Young unfavourably reviewing Suzanne Moore's article on Gove/free schools, and said Toby Young had 'given her such a good seeing-to she'll have to walk bow-legged for weeks'. He's deleted it now, but_ really_? He's on fucking Question Time tonight. That's how acceptable this sort of crap is.


 
I was just coming to post that - the editor of the Telegraph's apologised, and Delingpole's apologised profusely.

*suzanne moore* ‏@*suzanne_moore* 
I haven't deleted THAT tweet. I haven't accepted the so-called apology. I dont play by their 'gentleman's rules'. Let's see.

And then, when Ian Gallagher explained the above...


*suzanne moore* ‏@*suzanne_moore* 
@*gallaghereditor* you condone? ‏@*JamesDelingpole* @*toadmeister* gives Suzanne Moore such a seeing-to she'll be walking bow-legged for months
 *   Expand   * 

4m 

*Tony Gallagher* ‏@*gallaghereditor* 
@*suzanne_moore* obviously not. An appalling comment. He is right to have deleted & apologised profusely
 *   Expand   * 

    3.
1m 

*suzanne moore* ‏@*suzanne_moore* 
@*gallaghereditor* I appreciate that thank you and will think further on what action I will be taking.

Hints of legal action - the rich protestors retreat.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 31, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Hints of legal action - the rich protestors retreat.


 
TBF spiney norman made similar 'hints' on here, and I have no reason to think him a 'rich protestor'


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 31, 2013)

Not sure this is a _profuse_ apology from Delingpole




			
				Pencil Neck said:
			
		

> I'm sorry, Suzanne, my Tweet was over the top. I've used it on with ref to men before, but I realise with women it's wrong.


----------



## weepiper (Jan 31, 2013)

Martin Rowson the cartoonist's replies were good 


Martin Rowson ‏@MartinRowson
@JamesDelingpole @toadmeister Maybe. Should still go & fuck himself. You can then joke about his prolapsed rectum slapping round his knees


Martin Rowson ‏@MartinRowson
@JamesDelingpole @toadmeister Or was that a bit stromng? Tho obviously absolutely fine for you to write like that about women, eh James?


----------



## cesare (Jan 31, 2013)

Delingpole doesn't really _get_ that rapey language ain't a good look, full stop.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 31, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> TBF spiney norman made similar 'hints' on here, and I have no reason to think him a 'rich protestor'


 
He's in on it too now, he's got Laurie Penny's number 







I think Moore's having a bit of a wobble about the security of her position at the minute.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 31, 2013)

yeah that wasn't an apology it was an appeal to 'I'm sorry I forgot this wasn't the mens bar and ladies are present' etc.


----------



## cesare (Jan 31, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> yeah that wasn't an apology it was an appeal to 'I'm sorry I forgot this wasn't the mens bar and ladies are present' etc.


It makes him look worse, not better.


----------



## Balbi (Jan 31, 2013)

cesare said:


> It makes him look worse, not better.


 
 Bozier'd.


----------



## frogwoman (Jan 31, 2013)

what makes me sick is that they're all mates and that this is a playground squabble. when you're mates with delingpole it's time to have a word surely


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 31, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> what makes me sick is that they're all mates and that this is a playground squabble. when you're mates with delingpole it's time to have a word surely


 
Are they mates? No idea if they are or not, or whether it's just some kind of journo camaraderie of the sort we're told goalkeepers have.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 31, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Are they mates? No idea if they are or not, or whether it's just some kind of journo camaraderie of the sort we're told goalkeepers have.


RCP/Living Marxism/IoI fellow traveller & professional contrarian TV producer Martin Durkin is a fan of both Delingpole and Young (and others):



> In our newspapers, at the moment, we have fantastically popular, radical writers like James Delingpole and Janet Daley and Rod Liddle and Toby Young and Simon Heffer and Melanie Philips. I am often asked why, on our TVs, we don’t we see much of these enormously popular columnists


 
http://www.martindurkin.com/short-thoughts/kiss-goodbye-james-delingpole

So maybe there is an actual secret club


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 31, 2013)

> I am often asked why, on our TVs, we don’t we see much of these enormously popular columnists


 
has he confused 'enormously popular' with 'enormous bellends'?


----------



## weepiper (Jan 31, 2013)

We don't see much of them on tv? Is he taking the fucking piss?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 31, 2013)

weepiper said:


> We don't see much of them on tv? Is he taking the fucking piss?


 
They're ALL taking the piss.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jan 31, 2013)

S☼I said:


> They're ALL taking the piss.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jan 31, 2013)




----------



## Balbi (Jan 31, 2013)

Although if Young, Moore, Bindel, Burchill, Uncle Delingpole and all decide to eat each other.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jan 31, 2013)

love detective said:


> am wondering whether his face would serve as an obstacle to articul8 ejacul8ing


 
Or a spur?


----------



## articul8 (Jan 31, 2013)

oral ejaculation of vomit is all


----------



## DotCommunist (Jan 31, 2013)

deborah orr
keeps wolf from door
when ejaculation is premature


C. Articul8


----------



## articul8 (Jan 31, 2013)

Haiku's aren't meant to rhyme are they?


----------



## Greebo (Jan 31, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Haiku's aren't meant to rhyme are they?


rhyme isn't needed
but five seven five pattern
is desirable


----------



## articul8 (Jan 31, 2013)

deborah orr's face
can keep wolf from door
no ejaculation


----------



## cesare (Jan 31, 2013)

articul8 said:


> deborah orr's face
> can keep wolf from door
> no ejaculation



.


----------



## Orang Utan (Jan 31, 2013)

articul8 said:


> deborah orr's face
> can keep wolf from door
> no ejaculation


4
5
6


----------



## smokedout (Jan 31, 2013)

articul8 said:


> deborah orr's face
> can keep wolf from door
> no ejaculation


 
you think it's funny now?


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jan 31, 2013)

articul8 said:


> deborah orr's face
> can keep wolf from door
> no ejaculation


She is not paid to be a beauty star, her face is not relevant to her work as a columnist. Feel free to attack the latter. Excuse me if I don't play the haiku game.


----------



## articul8 (Jan 31, 2013)

Neither is Richard Seymour's but don't see posters getting criticised for commenting on its smugness.


----------



## articul8 (Jan 31, 2013)

smokedout said:


> you think it's funny now?


Self-referential haiku's are, yes


----------



## smokedout (Jan 31, 2013)

I'm sure delingpole thinks he was just being funny and everyone else is wrong as well


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jan 31, 2013)

LLETSA? Is that you?


----------



## The39thStep (Jan 31, 2013)

I miss LLetsa


----------



## Sue (Jan 31, 2013)

I completely missed whatever it was that happened to LLetsa...


----------



## smokedout (Jan 31, 2013)

he went on the road


----------



## ymu (Jan 31, 2013)




----------



## killer b (Feb 1, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Neither is Richard Seymour's but don't see posters getting criticised for commenting on its smugness.


Christ. Can you really not see the difference?


----------



## smokedout (Feb 1, 2013)

*suzanne moore* ‏@*suzanne_moore* 
RT abuse, boycott these papers and blogs, use Malicious Communications Act. Report threats to police, Name and Shame Join me in stopping it

call the cops, more laws, i really dont like the way this is going (especially as this site was accused of being a hate site by lp on facebook and philip hensher was recently claiming threats of violence that never existed)


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 1, 2013)

smokedout said:


> *suzanne moore* ‏@*suzanne_moore*
> RT abuse, boycott these papers and blogs, use Malicious Communications Act. Report threats to police, Name and Shame Join me in stopping it
> 
> call the cops, more laws, i really dont like the way this is going (especially as this site was accused of being a hate site by lp on facebook and philip hensher was recently claiming threats of violence that never existed)


 
Serves us right for disagreeing with our superiors, eh?


----------



## smokedout (Feb 1, 2013)

the last roar of the dying commentariat, and poor laurie and owen only just made it into the club, so they'll roar loudest


----------



## Greebo (Feb 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> LLETSA? Is that you?


Who fuckin' cares?  Just as long as whoever it is can behave themself this time around.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Feb 1, 2013)

Welcome back LLETSA.  Good to see you around again.


----------



## co-op (Feb 1, 2013)

Frank Zoschenko said:


> One thing's clear after 454 pages: Laurie Penny has beaten that Tasmin Ormond woman out of sight for the award of chief brake on the revolution.


 


The clincher.

Welcome back. Can I be your replacement pessimist while you're away? I do believe the left is totally fucked in the UK for the forseeable.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 1, 2013)

co-op said:


> The clincher.
> 
> Welcome back. Can I be your replacement pessimist while you're away? I do believe the left is totally fucked in the UK for the forseeable.


 
So do most of the regular posters though


----------



## co-op (Feb 1, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> So do most of the regular posters though


 


We are all LLETSAs now.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Feb 1, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Delingpoles vermin though, actual vermin- we know that. Good point about him being on qt though- the closest thing to a left wing view is supplied by owen jones and milkwater liberals


 someone pointed out the other day that Nigel Farage has been on it more times in the last few years than all the trade unions leaders put together. (not that I think trade union leaders are great, but Farage represents far fewer people than they do)


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 1, 2013)

co-op said:


> We are all LLETSAs now.


I'm not.


----------



## co-op (Feb 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I'm not.


 
You like tattoos?


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 1, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> someone pointed out the other day that Nigel Farage has been on it more times in the last few years than all the trade unions leaders put together. (not that I think trade union leaders are great, but Farage represents far fewer people than they do)


 

the beeb does its best to ignore union activty these days, unless its fuel, or some airport strike where they can interview some cunts who've had to reschedule their two weeks in the seychelles


----------



## J Ed (Feb 1, 2013)

Alex Callinicos hilariously freaking out on facebook



> *Yes, forgive me for sinning against the Holy Internet: mea culpa.* Thanks to Paul LeBlanc for making a serious contribution to the discussion (something shamefully absent to date). Two observations: (i) LeBlanc ignores my stress on the importance of the united front, where we work on many issues with a broad spectrum of forces, including the likes of Owen Jones; (ii) Lenin's practice, we both agree, was very variable. I'm dubious about extrapolating from what he said when in a common party with the Mensheviks and treating this as eternal wisdom. 1917 redefined the nature of revolutionary politics. Of course there was room for debate within this framework, as there is definitely within that defining the political basis of the SWP, as anyone who has followed our recent history knows. But it is always necessary to define the limits of diversity, and the parameters of comradely debate. That in itself is a political choice - not just for the SWP, but for the ISO and other revolutionary organizations. No amount of playing holier than thou (I'm not accusing Paul of this but it's true of plenty of others) can evade this choice.


----------



## co-op (Feb 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Alex Callinicos hilariously freaking out on facebook


 
Gotta say I've seen freakier freak outs in my time.


----------



## cesare (Feb 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Alex Callinicos hilariously freaking out on facebook


The voice of the working class. Lol.


----------



## cesare (Feb 1, 2013)

co-op said:


> Gotta say I've seen freakier freak outs in my time.


It's a bore out, not a freak out.


----------



## J Ed (Feb 1, 2013)

I just liked his comments about the Holy Internet


----------



## cesare (Feb 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I just liked his comments about the Holy Internet


And there's a certain sang-froid to accepting blame then proceeding to explain why he wasn't to blame.


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 1, 2013)

Owen Jones is a force now, what like gravity or something


----------



## imposs1904 (Feb 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I just liked his comments about the Holy Internet


 
 I think the Prof is basically of the view that the internet shouldn't be for oiks.


----------



## Firky (Feb 1, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> I miss LLetsa


 
I do too.


----------



## the button (Feb 1, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Owen Jones is a force now, what like gravity or something


Chuffed.


----------



## cesare (Feb 1, 2013)

the button said:


> Chuffed.


Unlike Freedom Bookshop, which is ...


----------



## the button (Feb 1, 2013)

Gutted.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 1, 2013)

chaffed


----------



## Firky (Feb 1, 2013)

Is that Freedrom Press? I just started a thread on that, moments ago. Fucking hell.

Lucky that didn't take into an inferno.

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/freedom-press-firebombed.305769/


----------



## the button (Feb 1, 2013)

firky said:


> Is that Freedrom Press? I just started a thread on that, moments ago. Fucking hell.
> 
> Lucky that didn't take into an inferno.


It is indeed.


----------



## cesare (Feb 1, 2013)

the button said:


> Gutted.



Yep.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 1, 2013)

co-op said:


> Gotta say I've seen freakier freak outs in my time.


 
"Zappa fan thinks you just haven't heard the right album yet."


----------



## Firky (Feb 1, 2013)

They (Freedom) are accepting donations as they had no insurance.


----------



## the button (Feb 1, 2013)

Not even fire can destroy Martin's "Anarchist Quiz Book."


----------



## weepiper (Feb 1, 2013)

the button said:


> Gutted.


----------



## mrs quoad (Feb 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> It's based on the assumption you should be rich enough not to need to lower yourself to working like a mere commoner if you want to go to Oxford. It's got nothing to do with "concentrating fully on your studies" it's just a way of keeping the poors out, as Damien Shannon has exposed. That's what that fool in the Coal not Dole outfit was defending earlier on, whether or not she knows it. And the irony is Damien Shannon is no lefty, but understands this, whereas that "Model/activist" Ella Raff in the smouldering "lets play dressing up as a dirty prole" outfit would appear to have some pretension of being a left-wing radical but defends the means by which colleges exclude on the basis of income.






			
				college email just in! said:
			
		

> May Ball tickets will go on sale at 22:00 on Sunday. Standard tickets are £120 and dining tickets are £160. Dining includes a Champagne reception with a four-course meal - book early to avoid disappointment, as these tickets will go extremely quickly!


(It doesn't mention anywhere in the email that it'll be black tie. No need to state the obvious!)


----------



## Firky (Feb 2, 2013)

> Need #FridayReads? Try Discordia by Penny & Crabapple, like Tornado-Chasers, running towards political chaos.


 
That is the last time I click on a trending hashtag.

(I don't molly mind Molly)


----------



## barney_pig (Feb 2, 2013)

"This seems a little bit fiddly, I know, but there are good reasons why it’s set up like this for now. I was just down at the bookshop helping out and dropping off some supplies, and the damage to all those rare books is just horrible to see. "
Attagirl!


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 2, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> "This seems a little bit fiddly, I know, but there are good reasons why it’s set up like this for now. I was just down at the bookshop helping out and dropping off some supplies, and the damage to all those rare books is just horrible to see. "
> Attagirl!


Damage to books is hard to see, to be fair.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 2, 2013)

Rare books though?


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Rare books though?


'Rare' books, I think.

The newspaper archive is rare, given that it was one of the few intact sets still in existence, not sure about the rareness of the rest of the stock.


----------



## barney_pig (Feb 2, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> "This seems a little bit fiddly, I know, but there are good reasons why it’s set up like this for now. I was just down at the bookshop helping out and dropping off some supplies, and the damage to all those rare books is just horrible to see. "
> Attagirl!


Reminiscent of her Herculean efforts to save the victims of the New York hurricane


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 2, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> "This seems a little bit fiddly, I know, but there are good reasons why it’s set up like this for now. I was just down at the bookshop helping out and dropping off some supplies, and the damage to all those rare books is just horrible to see. "


 
Cue an 'exclusive' in some lefty rag or other.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 2, 2013)

that is terrible, dont know if i can afford to get to London this week because i've had no work since last friday but will do my best to come down at some point.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I wonder he describes his 800 year old 30+ grand a year private school as "a minor independent school"?


 
Raise the red banner!

Our Old Abingdonian friend Menshevik Mitchell today sticks his righteous bayonet into private school teachers who are taking big money offers to leave the UK: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/03/private-school-teachers-david-mitchell


----------



## rekil (Feb 3, 2013)

> Housing crisis again. I'm so bloody sick of this. I wish I could afford to live somewhere stable.


Pro-tips. Stop your bratty fucking moaning, look for a normal job, share a place with normals in a normals area, do your shit opinion mongering in your spare time.


----------



## Firky (Feb 3, 2013)

ah fukc it.


----------



## mk12 (Feb 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Pro-tips. Stop your bratty fucking moaning, look for a normal job, share a place with normals in a normals area, do your shit opinion mongering in your spare time.


 
Is that Laurie Penny moaning?


----------



## rekil (Feb 3, 2013)

mk12 said:


> Is that Laurie Penny moaning?


Yes.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 3, 2013)

Has the lez booted her out?


----------



## mk12 (Feb 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Yes.


 
"Housing crisis"? So she's homeless is she? Being moved into a shitty B&B room by the council? Having a curfew set by the council?


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Has the lez booted her out?


 
Or she couldn't keep up with his "edgy" lifestyle?


----------



## Belushi (Feb 3, 2013)

Now she's an urbanite she could try the flatshare thread.


----------



## rekil (Feb 3, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Now she's an urbanite she could try the flatshare thread.


Someone who isn't blocked, tweet or email her the link?


----------



## Greebo (Feb 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Someone who isn't blocked, tweet or email her the link?


I would do anything for love, but I won't do that.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 3, 2013)

Greebo said:


> I would do anything for love, but I won't do that.


 
I always thought Meatloaf was singing about an act that is still banned in many states of the USA.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 3, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Now she's an urbanite she could try the flatshare thread.


 
Or put a call for a room in somewhere less like Marylebone.

http://www.roombuddies.com/preview/rooms/greater-london/london/dagenham

Perhaps it's a hidden call for squatted places to offer her a place to feed into new articles.


----------



## Greebo (Feb 3, 2013)

<derail alert>


Idris2002 said:


> I always thought Meatloaf was singing about an act that is still banned in many states of the USA.


No, this is what he claimed that he won't do: "never forget the way you feel right now", "never forgive myself if we don't go all the way tonight", "never do it better than I do it with you, so long, so long" and sooner or later he won't be screwing around.  </derail>


----------



## rekil (Feb 3, 2013)

Greebo said:


> I would do anything for love, but I won't do that.


Does that sound a bit like Ken Boothe's Everything I Own or am I completely tone deaf?


----------



## Greebo (Feb 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Does that sound a bit like Ken Boothe's Everything I Own or am I completely tone deaf?


Just that one line has a similar tune line and rhythm, well spotted.


----------



## Orang Utan (Feb 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Does that sound a bit like Ken Boothe's Everything I Own or am I completely tone deaf?


Meatloaf innit. Though I think he was talking about rimming.


----------



## Belushi (Feb 3, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Meatloaf innit. Though I think he was talking about rimming.


 
Nah, he's not that vanilla. It's gotta be wolfbagging.


----------



## Orang Utan (Feb 3, 2013)

Or munging


----------



## Greebo (Feb 3, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Meatloaf innit. Though I think he was talking about rimming.


Check the lyrics I quoted.


----------



## Orang Utan (Feb 3, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Check the lyrics I quoted.


What?


----------



## Greebo (Feb 3, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> What?


post 13649


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 3, 2013)

I've just realised I haven't had actual meatloaf in decades. We used to eat it all the time when we were trying to assimilate to Canadian culture.


----------



## Orang Utan (Feb 3, 2013)

Greebo said:


> post 13649


I saw that. What? Did you think I really thought the song was about rimming. Stop spoiling fun with earnestness!


----------



## Greebo (Feb 3, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> <snip>Stop spoiling fun with earnestness!


Even if I enjoy it?


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Pro-tips. Stop your bratty fucking moaning, look for a normal job, share a place with normals in a normals area, do your shit opinion mongering in your spare time.


 
Or, more sarcastically:

'Yep, those hostels are pretty grim, depressing and soul-destroying places aren't they?'


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 3, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Or, more sarcastically:
> 
> 'Yep, those hostels are pretty grim, depressing and soul-destroying places aren't they?'


Or move back home with the 'rents, y'know like everyone else under the age of 35 is supposed to do (according to the government).


----------



## Orang Utan (Feb 3, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Even if I enjoy it?


Then you're not being earnest and are deliberately ruining other people's jokes


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 4, 2013)

There's been some interesting twitter arguing with Laurie Penny, who seems to be endorsing the Nick Cohen article on the inherent sexism of the far-left, and Owen Jones. There's too much to quote, but it's worth looking at. The argument being that the left is inherently sexist, more sexist than society at large, and sexist specifically because it is the left, because it is based on the centrality of working-class politics. Owen disagreed with this. Meanwhile, Nick Cohen leans back in his chair, laughs and lights at cigar to celebrate a job well done.

Luckily, because Owen Jones lives in London and is therefore a fellow human being, Laurie's offered to meet up and discuss it over some food with him. But she's very disappointed in him.

Next up after Nick Cohen solves sexism within left organisations, Douglas Murray and Richard Littlejohn give advice on how to be proper anti-fascists and to finally rid all traces of racism from left organisations forever.

Becuse as we all know, political correctness beat racism in the 80's and it will beat sexism too.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> There's been some interesting twitter arguing with Laurie Penny, who seems to be endorsing the Nick Cohen article on the inherent sexism of the far-left, and Owen Jones. There's too much to quote, but it's worth looking at. The argument being that the left is inherently sexist, more sexist than society at large, and sexist because it is the left. Owen disagreed. Nick Cohen leans back in his chair, laughs and lights at cigar.
> 
> Luckily, because Owen Jones lives in London and is therefore a fellow human being, Laurie's offered to meet up and discuss it over some food with him. But she's very disappointed in him.
> 
> Next up after Nick Cohen solves sexism within left organisations, Douglas Murray and Richard Littlejohn give advice on how to be proper anti-fascists and to finally rid all traces of racism from left organisations forever.


 
It's like a reminder of how rubbish it used to be when you were off school sick, with only tedious shit like _A Country Practice_ and _Sons & Daughters_ on telly


----------



## articul8 (Feb 4, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> It's like a reminder of how rubbish it used to be when you were off school sick, with only tedious shit like _A Country Practice_ and _Sons & Daughters_ on telly


Don't forget _The Sullivans - _that always seemed to be on


----------



## Frances Lengel (Feb 4, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> It's like a reminder of how rubbish it used to be when you were off school sick, with only tedious shit like _A Country Practice_ and _Sons & Daughters_ on telly


 
Shortland Street was alright though.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 4, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Don't forget _The Sullivans - _that always seemed to be on


That was okay though, the jungle stuff helped balance out the Home Front bits.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 4, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> Shortland Street was alright though.


I think I remember the big fella in that as an enforcer in a New Zealand gangster comedy called _Stick Men_ (which basically stole the plot of _Lock, Stock_ only with pool instead of poker).


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 4, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> That was okay though, the jungle stuff helped balance out the Home Front bits.


And it had someone in it called Noni Hazlehurst.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 4, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> Shortland Street was alright though.


 
Where Temeura Morison got his big break, I think. When I was in Aotearoa there was a lot of fanfare about him rejoining the Shortland cast.


----------



## love detective (Feb 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Luckily, because Owen Jones lives in London and is therefore a fellow human being, Laurie's offered to meet up and discuss it over some food with him. But she's very disappointed in him.


 
I think when _they_ talk about tea they actually mean cups of tea, not having your tea


----------



## Firky (Feb 4, 2013)

One day Delroy is going to go mad from following all those twittering cnuts.


----------



## articul8 (Feb 4, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> That was okay though, the jungle stuff helped balance out the Home Front bits.


I only remember the home front bits


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> I think when _they_ talk about tea they actually mean cups of tea, not having your tea


 
It's things like that which would prevent me from ever getting a job in the media I suspect.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 4, 2013)

TRIGGER WARNING FOR OUTRAGEOUS SELF-DEPRICATING ABLEISM



firky said:


> One day Delroy is going to go mad from following all those twittering cnuts.


 
one day? I'm nuttier than squirrel shit from it already.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> TRIGGER WARNING FOR OUTRAGEOUS SELF-DEPRICATING ABLEISM
> 
> one day? I'm nuttier than squirrel shit from it already.


 
To be honest following exchanges like this one would make anyone crazy:

Owen Jones: SWP rape crisis tells us about SWP leadership and little else, despite Nick Cohen's attempt to drag wider left into it http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/03/far-left-no-place-feminists-rape

Laurie Penny: no, actually, I don't think that's right at all. The left has an enormous unacknowleged problem with sexism and sexual violence

Shedden: Worse that the right's? Or is it just no better than the rest of society (when one would hope it was)?

Owen Jones: After all the left includes women who have dedicated their whole lives to fighting for women's liberation

Laurie Penny: of course it does - and those women frequently face abuse and marginalisation from notional comrades

Owen Jones: But surely not abuse from most - and certainly not treated on the whole anything like the SWP in this outrageous instance

*Laurie Penny: I have seen and experienced sexism within almost every left org I've been part of.*

Owen Jones: To be honest I was just arguing sexism is rampant in a sexist society and the left is not unique or specific SWP crisis applicable

Laurie Penny: I think the left really is a specific case. I've seen and experienced it myself.

Owen Jones: Do you mean the left is itself uniquely sexist, and more so than society as a whole?

David 'shell-suited hippos' Aaronovitch: A little intrusion. The left was as uninterested in sexism as the right till the 70s. Some Leninists never caught up.

Owen Jones: My mum was on the left from 60s onwards and wholly interested in sexism for a start

Laurie Penny: women have always fought sexism on the left. That doesn't mean there's not a big problem. Jeez.

Owen Jones: But I'm not arguing otherwise. I was saying it's rampant on the left because it's rampant in society

Laurie Penny: but as others have said, that's the argument that's always used to dismiss sexism on the left.

Dr_Tad: Here in Australia there is sexism on the Left (reformist & radical) but considerably less than in general society.

[Diversion into discussion about Australia]

Karen Pickering: I wish left critiques of the market had more traction (I believe them!) but not at the expense of women.

Owen Jones ‏: Women are central to those critiques. In lowest paid work, most likely to be hit by austerity etc

Owen Jones: Agree sexism had to be ceaselessly fought on left. Women central to many modern left critiques though

Laurie Penny: 'women central to many modern left critiques.' Please, please think about what you just said. Many?

Owen Jones ‏: In that not enough modern left critiques say anything about women's rights?

Laurie Penny : *sigh* we'll chat about this. I'm about to fly. Disappointing.

Owen Jones ‏: Why is that disappointing? Women are still airbrushed out of existence in some left stuff. That's my point

Owen Jones : But I've said repeatedly in this conversation that sexism is endemic on the left and has to be fought

Laurie Penny‏: it's not just about representation, though, is it.

Owen Jones: I was responding to Karen's specific point about women being missing from left critiques of the market

Owen Jones: No, which is why I've said endemic left sexism has to be fought. I was responding to Karen's point

Nick 'Iraqi women are my comrades' Cohen (that was an actual line he used, according to a reliable source, in an AWL discussion about the Iraq war)


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 4, 2013)

sihhi : she's really not understanding anything Own is saying, is she? And still no answer about the left being more sexist than society in general.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 4, 2013)

How can you have any sort of meaningful or substantive discussion in single line back like that? It's like watching 70s computer ping pong.

And what orgs has penny been in?


----------



## Balbi (Feb 4, 2013)

Owen and Laurie debate the issues of the day.


----------



## killer b (Feb 4, 2013)

Balbi said:


> View attachment 28552
> 
> Owen and Laurie debate the issues of the day.


Christ. I was just watching that.


----------



## Balbi (Feb 4, 2013)

killer b said:


> Christ. I was just watching that.



Not that you weren't already, but you just got a bit cooler in my eyes.


----------



## killer b (Feb 4, 2013)

The kids are obsessed with it. The exes choice, not mine sorry.


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 4, 2013)

maid marion and her merry men?

with nick cohen doing tony robinsons role


----------



## Firky (Feb 4, 2013)

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/02/north-gutted-press-look-away

*As the North is gutted, the press look away​*
Newcastle is to cut 100% of its art funding, but the southern-dominated media can't report it.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> How can you have any sort of meaningful or substantive discussion in single line back like that? It's like watching 70s computer ping pong.
> 
> And what orgs has penny been in?


 
I tried to make it as clear as possible, mate. C+Ped then did search+delete for all the @ signs.




equationgirl said:


> sihhi : she's really not understanding anything Own is saying, is she? And still no answer about the left being more sexist than society in general.


 
I agree, if the left *is* genuinely more sexist than society in general, then it would make sense to publicise any and all forms of sexism and outright sex-based harassment as far as possible so that it can be reduced. Unless that is you don't really want open active leftism to expand but want people to simply consider themselves 'left but not too left' (ie read columns in the Independent).

I'm interested in what left groups she's been involved in too. 


More generally, there is a desire to make the movement perfect, completely "representative of society" in every aspect of its representation _except_ its class aspect. Private schoolers can climb to the summit as the mouthpiece of "women", former parliamentary researchers can be the leaders in organising the pseudo-coalescence of the left, some squatters can come from families with several properties, some environmental direct action leaders can be sons and daughters of aristocrats... none of this raises much concern. 

More generally, capitalism means that no movement will be purely proportioned to include representative ratios of minorities. It's chasing a mirage to try and make it perfectly proportional simply by "addressing issues" via a hashed up form of media privilege politics.

Also we're not told what it is about _other than_ representation, which is part of it. Am I exaggerating to say the extent of the criticism is that a "progressive stack" should be used in meetings and in general 'there should be more women in the left' (a circular assertion).




> Laurie Penny: 'women central to many modern left critiques.' Please, please think about what you just said. Many?
> Owen Jones ‏: In that not enough modern left critiques say anything about women's rights?
> Laurie Penny : *sigh* we'll chat about this. I'm about to fly. Disappointing.
> Owen Jones ‏: Why is that disappointing? Women are still airbrushed out of existence in some left stuff. That's my point
> ...


 

Though I don't like him, OJ is correct to say 'women central to many modern left critiques' but not all, as in women are in all left critiques but sometimes just as a "working class" (that includes him, her them and those over there of both genders) other (many) times as explicitly gender-differentiated analyses. Sometimes the first category can airbrush working-class women but not necessarily, sometimes an airbrush is needed if the picture you are painting is about something else.

If you are discussing the marketisation of water and utilities in 1990s and its effects today in a short article for anti-cuts activists, you won't necessarily talk about women and men, you might seek to airbrush the gender issue for that article, just as you might airbrush the immigrant issue etc etc.
Obviously women should be employed in the power generation industry, obviously the costs should be borne by those who have reaped the rewards of the Major and Blair era, but it's not immediately relevant to something about the rising cost of bills, so it can be legitimately airbrushed.


----------



## editor (Feb 4, 2013)

Over a quarter of a million page impressions for this thread.


----------



## redsquirrel (Feb 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> David 'shell-suited hippos' Aaronovitch: A little intrusion. The left was as uninterested in sexism as the right till the 70s. Some Leninists never caught up.


It's the slug so I don't know why I'm bothering but this is just absolute rubbish isn't it, I mean even the briefest of glances at the history of the left show's it to be total tripe.



firky said:


> http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/02/north-gutted-press-look-away
> 
> 
> *As the North is gutted, the press look away*​
> ...


It was the lead story on the Guardian website a couple of days ago.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Feb 4, 2013)

Dear Penny

Sometimes when the left ( whatever that is ), gives you short shrift, it may not always be sexist, it may just be that they dont like what you do.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 6, 2013)

Camilla said:


> who#s that tennis player?


Is it Ivan Lendl? Do I win a prize?


----------



## Belushi (Feb 6, 2013)

editor said:


> Over a quarter of a million page impressions for this thread.


 
Letting Firky back in is already paying off


----------



## editor (Feb 6, 2013)

Camilla said:


> what prize do you want me to give you?


Why are you talking to yourself?


----------



## editor (Feb 6, 2013)

Camilla said:


> coz everyone is ignoring me


That's because you're coming over like a needy nutter.


----------



## Orang Utan (Feb 6, 2013)

It looks like you are talking to yourself, editor. Have you removed Camilla's posts? What did they say?


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 6, 2013)

Well, it wasn't LLETSA's most glorious return that's for sure - really let himself go recently.


----------



## JimW (Feb 6, 2013)

Back once again for the renegade master.


----------



## Random (Feb 6, 2013)

JimW said:


> Back once again for the renegade master.


With the ill behaviour


----------



## JimW (Feb 6, 2013)

Power to the people!


----------



## Random (Feb 6, 2013)

JimW said:


> Power to the people!


I feel a thread coming on: "Communist slogans hidden in banal pop music"


----------



## rekil (Feb 6, 2013)

JimW said:


> Back once again for the renegade master.


I be jonezin' for the muthashittin' nuisance bling bling
Flexed to drop some bombs 'fore the banhammer swings
Mods be moanin' when they look up me IP
I'll be back with the same shit over'n'over
Soon as I'm a down this chablis


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 6, 2013)

Morrissey?


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 6, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Morrissey?


 
Ewan McColl, I think.


----------



## rekil (Feb 6, 2013)

Remember when Moz called rap 'crap', because it rhymes see, and referred to Prince as Ponce. Proper wilde man.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 6, 2013)

copliker said:


> Remember when Moz called rap 'crap', because it rhymes see, and referred to Prince as Ponce. Proper wilde man.


 
It says nothing to me about my life.


----------



## cesare (Feb 6, 2013)

Just retweeted by Sarah Ditum. The merciless prism of Equality.


----------



## fractionMan (Feb 6, 2013)

Random said:


> I feel a thread coming on: "Communist slogans hidden in banal pop music"


All right stop collaborate and listen


----------



## Sue (Feb 6, 2013)

Name check for 'radical journalist Laurie Penny' by Paul Mason...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/05/arab-spring-global-revolution?INTCMP=SRCH


----------



## Lo Siento. (Feb 6, 2013)

Sue said:


> Name check for 'radical journalist Laurie Penny' by Paul Mason...
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/05/arab-spring-global-revolution?INTCMP=SRCH


name-checked her at the talk I went to recently as well (along with SolFed )


----------



## SpineyNorman (Feb 6, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> And what orgs has penny been in?


 
The only left orgs she's been in are labour and the lib dems


----------



## SpineyNorman (Feb 6, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> Dear Penny
> 
> Sometimes when the left ( whatever that is ), gives you short shrift, it may not always be sexist, it may just be that they dont like what you do.


 
I seriously do think this is a big part of it. She thinks the only possible motovation for thinking she's shit and giving her a bit of stick for it must be misogyny. All stems from her delusions of adequacy.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Feb 6, 2013)

cesare said:


> Just retweeted by Sarah Ditum. The merciless prism of Equality.View attachment 28651


 
What's that supposed to represent? We'd all realise we were all gay if only we viewed life through the merciless prism of equality?


----------



## cesare (Feb 6, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What's that supposed to represent? We'd all realise we were all gay if only we viewed life through the merciless prism of equality?


No idea


----------



## weepiper (Feb 6, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What's that supposed to represent? We'd all realise we were all gay if only we viewed life through the merciless prism of equality?


 
Tory MP Edward Leigh said in Parliament during the Equal Marriage debate that he feared the 'Merciless Prism Of Equality'. Someone thought they should illustrate it


----------



## cesare (Feb 6, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Tory MP Edward Leigh said in Parliament during the Equal Marriage debate that he feared the 'Merciless Prism Of Equality'. Someone thought they should illustrate it


Oh, is that what it is! There was no context that I could see.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Feb 6, 2013)

Ah makes sense now, I thought it might be a diagram about intersectionality or something like that.


----------



## Firky (Feb 7, 2013)

cesare said:


> Just retweeted by Sarah Ditum. The merciless prism of Equality.View attachment 28651


 
There better be ashit Pink Floyd joke in this.

No. No


----------



## ymu (Feb 7, 2013)

If you want to post here, a careful consideration of the attitude that got you banned and a heartfelt, meaningful apology to the mods should do the trick.

If you cannot bring yourself to do that, fuck off.


----------



## Orang Utan (Feb 7, 2013)

ymu said:


> If you want to post here, a careful consideration of the attitude that got you banned and a heartfelt, meaningful apology to the mods should do the trick.
> 
> If you cannot bring yourself to do that, fuck off.


What?


----------



## ymu (Feb 7, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> What?


It's LLETSA.

EDIT: Or was. All evidence has been disappeared.

Sorry firky if you thought that was aimed at you.

 at mods for not tidying up after themselves.


----------



## Orang Utan (Feb 7, 2013)

Oh right, it's just that post seemed to come out of nowhere


----------



## ymu (Feb 7, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Oh right, it's just that post seemed to come out of nowhere


It did look that way.

I'm so sorry firky. Unfortunate coincidence that it ended up coming straight after a poster who it could feasibly refer to.


----------



## Firky (Feb 7, 2013)

I didn't notice!


----------



## ymu (Feb 7, 2013)

Phew!


----------



## cesare (Feb 7, 2013)

I saw that earlier post that ymu responded to. Why was it deleted rather than just banning him, it wasn't an offensive post


----------



## ymu (Feb 7, 2013)

cesare said:


> I saw that earlier post that ymu responded to. Why was it deleted rather than just banning him, it wasn't an offensive post


New policy for LLETSA alter egos.


----------



## Pickman's model (Feb 7, 2013)

cesare said:


> I saw that earlier post that ymu responded to. Why was it deleted rather than just banning him, it wasn't an offensive post


you should seek medical attention due to the toxick miserablism in all lletsa post-alikes' posts


----------



## cesare (Feb 7, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> you should seek medical attention due to the toxick miserablism in all lletsa posts


Funnily enough, that one wasn't particularly miserabilist


----------



## Pickman's model (Feb 7, 2013)

cesare said:


> Funnily enough, that one wasn't particularly miserabilist


Those are the most dangerous sort


----------



## cesare (Feb 7, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> Those are the most dangerous sort


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 8, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> In a cafe off Tahrir talking post left/right politics with some friends who believe in a new kind of #*classwar*. Posters of martyrs on wall.


----------



## Balbi (Feb 8, 2013)

A new kind of classwar. Verily doth Karl and Fred tremble in their tombs.


----------



## weepiper (Feb 8, 2013)

REAL left. Not that _fake_ left that just goes round boring old housing estates and workplaces addressing ordinary people's concerns.


----------



## Balbi (Feb 8, 2013)

For too long the class war has raged from the bottom up and top down! Comrades, we are oppressed both by those above and below. NOW IS THE TIME FOR ACTION, NOW IS THE TIME FOR THE TWO FRONT WAR. As was Napoleon, Hirohito and Hitler's glory, so shall be ours. THE TIME IS NOW. NO WAR BUT THE MIDDLE CLASS WAR (on everyone else, once my Ocado delivery's arrived).


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Feb 8, 2013)

Perhaps it's a class war for all those who did really well at school against the mediocraties and worse who are holding them back; top of the class war.

One thing is for certain, it won't be a community based pro-working class war, waged by and for the working class; that's the road to sexism and racism that is.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## Belushi (Feb 8, 2013)

> _post left/right politics_


 

A third way?


----------



## Balbi (Feb 8, 2013)

Belushi said:


> A third way?


 
The right to be stinking rich and lecture the poor on what they're doing wrong while quoting Goldman, Friedman and Marx.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

Anderson style Openly Classist?

Laufenberg style National Bolshevism beyond left and right but class war by the proletarian nations on the bourgeois nations?

Evolian 3rd poistionism?

Or a dilettante war against those who think in terms of class and class analysis - i.e what she already doing.


----------



## Balbi (Feb 8, 2013)

The war on filing deadlines.


----------



## Random (Feb 8, 2013)

It's probably Egyptians who see the Arab nationalists as the left, and the Islamists as the right, and reject both


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

Random said:


> It's probably Egyptians who see the Arab nationalists as the left, and the Islamists as the right, and reject both


You think she's ran into some left-communists? Very unlikely - what's more likely is that she is very confused.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> You think she's ran into some left-communists? Very unlikely - what's more likely is that she is very confused.


 
Or trying to find/create a position where she can dissociate herself with past left failures, while still claiming to be part of the same emancipatory tradition...she wouldn't be the first person looking for this easy way out of some difficult questions.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

True...or she may mean the lib-dems again.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> what's more likely is that she is very confused.


 
Confused, and also perhaps hyping up something that for the rest of us would simply be "talking a load of bollocks with some mates about politics in a caff".


----------



## fractionMan (Feb 8, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> top of the class war.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> Confused, and also perhaps hyping up something that for the rest of us would simply be "talking a load of bollocks with some mates about politics in a caff".


Funny she should do that in tahir: Twitter Devolutions: How social media is hurting the Arab Spring.



> First, there's the general tendency toward exaggeration and hyperbole, which has arguably cost Egyptian activists (in particular) a certain amount of credibility. There's a reason why the catchphrases "it's never as bad as it seems on Twitter" and "the Tahrir bubble" caught on. I still remember the first time I was driving around a perfectly calm, absolutely normal Cairo while reading a Twitter feed describing apocalyptic clashes and mayhem. So do a lot of others. Social media loves a crisis, and it loves morality tales with a clear good guy and bad guy -- preferably identifiable in 140 characters.


 
(Not a general recommend on the text mind)


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

Reminds me, has anyone heard or seen her voice opposition to private schools? Don;t think i have, and her mentions of her marvelous school and teachers have got me wondering. People who consider themselves of the liberal-left but owe a lot to their private schooling are often pretty odd on this.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 8, 2013)

Can't see the article m8 says youve got to sign up


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Reminds me, has anyone heard or seen her voice opposition to private schools? Don;t think i have, and her mentions of her marvelous school and teachers have got me wondering. People who consider themselves of the liberal-left but owe a lot to their private schooling are often pretty odd on this.


 
I thought she did in one article, though I might be thinking of somebody else!


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Can't see the article m8 says youve got to sign up


One i linked to? Seems to work for me - anyone else?


----------



## weepiper (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> One i linked to? Seems to work for me - anyone else?


 
wants me to sign in too.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I thought she did in one article, though I might be thinking of somebody else!


 
rigour


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 8, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> rigour


 
of the mortis variety


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

Ah, i think it only allows a certain number of free reads from any one link, Tbh i quoted the mist apt bit anyway, the rest is really about building national democratic consensus blah blah


----------



## phildwyer (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Reminds me, has anyone heard or seen her voice opposition to private schools? Don;t think i have, and her mentions of her marvelous school and teachers have got me wondering. People who consider themselves of the liberal-left but owe a lot to their private schooling are often pretty odd on this.


 
Yes, and they almost ınvarıably send theır own chıldren to prıvate schools.

I do remember LP referrıng to herself as havıng been 'lucky' to attend a 'nıce' school (I'm 99% certaın those were her very words).  Thıs does rather suggest that she's mıssed the poınt.

I'm thınkıng of bannıng her from thıs thread anyway.  I don't thınk eponymous people should be able to contrıbute to theır own threads, ıt smells of corruptıon.  Anyone object before the hammer falls?


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Feb 8, 2013)

Lots of hyperbole during the 2011 London riots too. Including my local cornershop being turned over by a gang of hoodies, which was certainly news to the people working there.

Obviously the twitterati thrive on exagerration, hype, up to the minute exclusives, being in the thick of the action etc.

ETA: Someone was saying the other night that taxi drivers were just as important as the internetz for spreading info during the arab spring.


----------



## rekil (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Reminds me, has anyone heard or seen her voice opposition to private schools? Don;t think i have, and her mentions of her marvelous school and teachers have got me wondering. People who consider themselves of the liberal-left but owe a lot to their private schooling are often pretty odd on this.


Just the once I think, not very convincing either. 


> Any Education Minister who was remotely serious about tackling educational inequality in this country would start by removing the tax-exempt status of British private schools, with a view to dismantling them altogether – but Gove has no interest in doing that. He was simply reminding the pupils of Brighton College of what they learn, in my experience, every day. He was reminding them what team they're on.



http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...on-but-im-still-not-on-your-team-7737823.html


----------



## Random (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> You think she's ran into some left-communists? Very unlikely - what's more likely is that she is very confused.


Or newly politicised people who're not at home with either political bloc


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

Random said:


> Or newly politicised people who're not at home with either political bloc


But there simply is not these two blocs anyway.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> Lots of hyperbole during the 2011 London riots too. Including my local cornershop being turned over by a gang of hoodies, which was certainly news to the people working there.
> 
> Obviously the twitterati thrive on exagerration, hype, up to the minute exclusives, being in the thick of the action etc.
> 
> ETA: Someone was saying the other night that taxi drivers were just as important as the internetz for spreading info during the arab spring.


My mates just finished his phd on the 80s riots, he reckons bus drivers and taxi drivers figured prominently in the circulation of info there - as did pirate radio in some places.


----------



## phildwyer (Feb 8, 2013)

Here's the precıse quote I was gropıng for:

"The idea that nobody can really be a socialist if they were lucky enough to go to a private school is wilful stupidity."

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...on-but-im-still-not-on-your-team-7737823.html

That's a bıt of a gıveaway, though I bet none of her colleagues nor edıtors at the _Indy _would have notıced.  Why would anyone consıder ıt 'lucky' to go to a prıvate school?  There's only one reason I can thınk of, and ıt doesn't reflect too well on LP's egalıtarıanısm.

Anyway, hearıng no objectıons and havıng been flooded wıth PMs of support, I've decıded to recommend that LP be banned from takıng any further part ın thıs thread whatsoever, wıth ımmedıate effect and wıthout any possıbılıty of parole.  She ıs of course free to post elsewhere on the boards, subject to the usual restrıctıons.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

copliker said:


> Just the once I think, not very convincing either.
> 
> 
> http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...on-but-im-still-not-on-your-team-7737823.html


I think we may have to investigate further.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 8, 2013)

> I was informed by a teacher that I would be applying to Oxford. I was the smartest kid in a smart school which needed to boost its Oxbridge figures: there was no question


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> My mates just finished his phd on the 80s riots, he reckons bus drivers and taxi drivers figured prominently in the circulation of info there - as did pirate radio in some places.


 
Sounds good!

Someone else (this was at a radical history meeting) said that taxi drivers also played a big part in spreading early hip hop in New York...


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 8, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> Sounds good!
> 
> Someone else (this was at a radical history meeting) said that taxi drivers also played a big part in spreading early hip hop in New York...


 
In Newcastle they play a big role in spreading herpes


----------



## weepiper (Feb 8, 2013)

> needed to boost its Oxbridge figures


 


> Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Dr Seldon claimed that 62 pupils in the sixth form at Wellington are academically capable of getting into Oxbridge, but due to “discrimination”, he expects only 20 to be successful.


 
20 kids from one year getting into Oxbridge and it's not 'enough'.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 8, 2013)

That actually sounds like bollocks tbf. The bit about how she was forced to apply to oxford I mean. I went to a state grammar school at the age of 16 which was probably pushier (and had better results) than most of the private schools in the area and nobody was told they "had to" apply to oxford.


----------



## phildwyer (Feb 8, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> Sounds good!
> 
> Someone else (this was at a radical history meeting) said that taxi drivers also played a big part in spreading early hip hop in New York...


 
It's certaınly true that NYC cabbıes ın the 80s were usually blastıng Publıc Enemy... eıther that or Mozart... ın those days ıt wasn't even unusual for the drıver to pass round a splıff... how tımes change...


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

God, imagine your school having _Oxbridge figures - _and figures that_ needed boosting._


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Feb 8, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> In Newcastle they play a big role in spreading herpes


 
Hope it clears up soon.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 8, 2013)

In Cyprus after independence taxi drivers did play key roles in both sides of the communal conflict as almost no one else had cars they were used to drive combat units round, ferry equipment etc


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> God, imagine your school having _Oxbridge figures - _and figures that_ needed boosting._


 
I think it's bullshit.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I think it's bullshit.


Of course it, we showed that earlier in the thread where we posted up her saying that _her_ aim was to go to Oxford and do english then become a writer - this was when she had the best results in the south or something at gcse.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Feb 8, 2013)

Well it might have been her aim and then she had a change of heart when filling out the form and then was coerced into it by her school?

Like with that voting libdem thing?


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

Damn these coercers!


----------



## sihhi (Feb 8, 2013)

The privilege card game got supported by the wrong crowd   .







Not as good anymore, but there we are.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Feb 8, 2013)

Nuclearise your brain.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Damn these coercers!


 
OXBRIDGE: They're inside for us, we're outside for them


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Feb 8, 2013)

LOL, forgot about this one too:


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Feb 8, 2013)

Fucking hell


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 8, 2013)

Balbi said:


> For too long the class war has raged from the bottom up and top down! Comrades, we are oppressed both by those above and below. NOW IS THE TIME FOR ACTION, NOW IS THE TIME FOR THE TWO FRONT WAR. As was Napoleon, Hirohito and Hitler's glory, so shall be ours. THE TIME IS NOW. NO WAR BUT THE MIDDLE CLASS WAR (on everyone else, once my Ocado delivery's arrived).


 
'YES, COMRADES! AS YOUR FEARLESS (SELF-APPOINTED) LEADER, I AM DETERMINED TO FIGHT TO THE VERY LAST DROP OF _YOUR_ BLOOD!'

Can I get a double-shot mochachino with that..?


----------



## sihhi (Feb 8, 2013)

> Also there were the so-called peace celebrations in 1919. Our elders had decided for us that we should celebrate peace in the traditional manner by whooping over the fallen foe. We were to march into the school-yard, carrying torches, and sing jingo songs of the type of ‘Rule Britannia’. The boys — to their honour, I think — guyed the whole proceeding and sang blasphemous and seditious words to the tunes provided. I doubt whether things would happen in quite that manner now. Certainly the public schoolboys I meet nowadays, even the intelligent ones, are much more right-wing in their opinions than I and my contemporaries were fifteen years ago.


----------



## love detective (Feb 8, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> laurie said:
> 
> 
> 
> > _I was informed by a teacher that I would be applying to Oxford. I was the smartest kid in a smart school which needed to boost its Oxbridge figures: there was no question_


 
As mentioned, when she was on here she was confronted with her two different versions of the truth



love detective said:


> *August 2002:*
> "Laura hopes to go to Oxford and is interested in the possibility of a career as a writer."
> 
> *May 2012:*
> ...


 
her answer seemed to admit that she was lying in 2012




			
				penny said:
			
		

> For fuck's sake. I both wanted AND was encouraged to go. If I hadn't, there'd have been a problem. This petty bullshit is really uninspiring.


 
to which I replied




			
				love detective said:
			
		

> So you wanted to go to Oxford, fine. Why make out in 2012 that you were informed that you would be applying, 'no question'. Why no mention in the 2012 article that you wanted to go? why the omission?


 
She then cleared up things comprehensively be replying thusly




			
				penny said:
			
		

> It wasn't an omission, because that article wasn't about me


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 8, 2013)

there was also talk of how weird and stalky it was to have dug up that old article.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

And?


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 8, 2013)

and that was part of the exchange. Mind, the whole thread had been deemed creepy and stalkerish already iirc.


----------



## love detective (Feb 8, 2013)

she's now uncritically retweeting EDL statements on an enemy's enemy basis


----------



## 8ball (Feb 8, 2013)

love detective said:


> she's now uncritically retweeting EDL statements on an enemy's enemy basis
> 
> View attachment 28761


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

Beyond left and right...


----------



## weepiper (Feb 8, 2013)

Christ alfuckingmighty.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Feb 8, 2013)

She's now apologising for retweeting the EDL because she didn't notice the source.

I find this curious, as she was able to detect traces of teh racisms in seemingly inoffensive tweets from our own Lovedetective and Spiney in a trice.


----------



## weepiper (Feb 8, 2013)

Didn't notice it being from EnglishDefenceLeague @OfficialEDL and having the hashtag #EDL?


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

Deliberate calculated attempt to make people notice she is in Egypt.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Feb 8, 2013)

In Egypt and "on the move".


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

Not indenial (i got that in first!)


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Not indenial (i got that in first!)


 
And with a rare outburst of humour, too.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

A comic without honour


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 8, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> In Egypt and "on the move".


 
Sounds like one of my great-uncles.

Although the 'El Alamein Experience' wasn't the most enjoyable package tour he could have chosen.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

Last 30 minutes timeline is hilarious: _how dare some editor somewhere tell me that i'm not a massively courageous woman_ - one minute later, _i can't talk i'm in the middle of a riot _


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 8, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> She's now apologising for retweeting the EDL because she didn't notice the source.
> 
> I find this curious, as she was able to detect traces of teh racisms in seemingly inoffensive tweets from our own Lovedetective and Spiney in a trice.


 
Is that in the same way that Hari not noticing he was one of the greatest forgers since Orwell's Ministry of Truth?


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 8, 2013)

Kate Adie reporting on  the class struggle


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> A comic without honour


 
We're _alternative_ comedians. That means we're not fucking funny.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 8, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> We're _alternative_ comedians. That means we're not fucking funny.


With great


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 8, 2013)

timing.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

Bet you had a few seconds sweat then...


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 8, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> I'm kinda running through a protest right now. @*thatsatanicpony* @*alexwintermute*


----------



## Random (Feb 8, 2013)

Umm... I'm kinda gonna


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

_There must be some kinda way out of here_


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 8, 2013)

Like, yikes, Scoobs


----------



## weepiper (Feb 8, 2013)

Running yet mysteriously able to compose and send tweets.


----------



## cesare (Feb 8, 2013)

Catching her breath, breathlessly


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

_Hari, oh hari we call  on your great spirit to gird this young fighter_


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

cesare said:


> Catching her breath, breathlessly


Please catch your breath even if you can't catch your breath


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 8, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Running yet mysteriously able to compose and send tweets.


 
to be fair i've sent texts while running.


----------



## Random (Feb 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> to be fair i've sent texts while running.


But anyone with their smartphone out while in a tense protest is kinda an idiot


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

Random said:


> But anyone with their smartphone out while in a tense protest is kinda an idiot


Or takes it.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 8, 2013)

Random said:


> But anyone with their smartphone out while in a tense protest is kinda an idiot


 
i don't have a smartphone.


----------



## cesare (Feb 8, 2013)

Utterly fearless


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i don't have a smartphone.


That's where you're going wrong. See. That's all it takes. You can get the internet on it and everything.


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> to be fair i've sent texts while running.


 
Very basic multi tasking in my book


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

I think we need the _not getting arrested just for journalism_ quote quite soon


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That's where you're going wrong. See. That's all it takes. You can get the internet on it and everything.


 
you can get the internet on my phone as well, but only certain sites, and i can't log in to urban because it says the file is too big


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> to be fair i've sent texts while running.


 
I feel old


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 8, 2013)

i guess i'm running ahead of the class again


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 8, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I feel old


I'll teach you how to send them next time i see you. You CAN do it.


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 8, 2013)

She was very concerned but then reassured about the gender quota in black bloc earlier


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 8, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> black bloc


 
racist


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I'll teach you how to send them next time i see you. You CAN do it.


 
I dunno I'm just about to get a touch screen phone for the first time...


----------



## cesare (Feb 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> racist


Calumny heaped on male posters


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 8, 2013)

cesare said:


> Calumny heaped on male posters


 
very strong feminine side


----------



## cesare (Feb 8, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> very strong feminine side


"Well-known Member"


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 8, 2013)

feminists all feminists


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 8, 2013)

cesare said:


> "Well-known Member"


 
I must get that seen to


----------



## cesare (Feb 8, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> feminists all feminists


Feminists heaping calumny on the poor menz


----------



## cesare (Feb 8, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> I must get that seen to


----------



## love detective (Feb 8, 2013)




----------



## cesare (Feb 8, 2013)

Kinnock falling in the sea
Penny doing a tena lady fall out of a cab


----------



## Pickman's model (Feb 8, 2013)

cesare said:


> Kinnock falling in the sea
> Penny doing a tena lady fall out of a cab


first time as tragedy, second time as farce


----------



## cesare (Feb 8, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> first time as tragedy, second time as farce


Kinnock gets a wet bum, Penny's on her arse


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> _Hari, oh hari we call  on your great spirit to gird this young fighter_


Now that's comedy! 

All praise to Johann!


----------



## rekil (Feb 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> to be fair i've sent texts while running.


While running like an egyptian?


----------



## Greebo (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Or takes it.


One of the few advantages of being female is that very few people are going to search your bra or crop top for gadgets like smartphones, and breast tissue squishes, making whatever you hide less likely to stick out.  OTOH I'll concede that taking your smartphone out to use it during the active part of a riot or demo is somewhat unwise.


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I think we need the _not getting arrested just for journalism_ quote quite soon


 
Prada Gellhorn.


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 9, 2013)

She got teargassed today, that can't have been fun


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 9, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> She got teargassed today, that can't have been fun


Horrible thing, can get over with in 5 mins tops, less.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 9, 2013)

I bet she didn't anyway, she probably just saw some people get teargassed from a few streets away.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Feb 10, 2013)

Um, she was tear gassed and, like, you thinking she might not have been because she's been shown to be a liar in the past is like kinda misogynistic.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 10, 2013)

I'm mispennyistic


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 10, 2013)

> It turns out "people who tweet articles by Laurie Penny" is a good filter for who to unfollow.


https://twitter.com/GameOver_Again/status/300704073190088705

Harsh but fair


----------



## Nylock (Feb 11, 2013)

*Alexander Young* ‏@*GameOver_Again* 
As is "fan of Jamie Oliver", it turns out.


----------



## Firky (Feb 11, 2013)

Nylock said:


> *Alexander Young* ‏@*GameOver_Again*
> As is "fan of Jamie Oliver", it turns out.



Dp


----------



## Firky (Feb 11, 2013)

Nylock said:


> *Alexander Young* ‏@*GameOver_Again*
> As is "fan of Jamie Oliver", it turns out.



He's also just taken an old, shit, tired and recycled twitter dig and got the thumbs up for it, certain twist of irony going on in the post above yours and inside his head. So fuck if someone re tweets an article of hers? Least it shows that after 150 characters they can still hold their concentration.


----------



## Firky (Feb 11, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I bet she didn't anyway, she probably just saw some people get teargassed from a few streets away.



Smelling it in the air is the same as being teargassed and you can make the rest up.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Feb 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> to be fair i've sent texts while running.


 
I have sent a text about running....and it is the only text I have ever sent.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## Nylock (Feb 11, 2013)

firky said:


> He's also just taken an old, shit, tired and recycled twitter dig and got the thumbs up for it, certain twist of irony going on in the post above yours and inside his head. So fuck if someone re tweets an article of hers? Least it shows that after 150 characters they can still hold their concentration.


Not being overly familiar (or bothered about) twitter, i had no idea it was a shit, recycled dig, i just quoted it as it was on their feed and raised a smile. Although this thread has become about LP, it isn't _all_ about LP.


----------



## 8den (Feb 11, 2013)

For Laura;

Pro: Not a terrible article on abortion in Ireland http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/irel...ly-wont-change-a-thing?utm_source=vicetwitter

Con: Fucking terrible title. Underground Abortion Railroad? There are nearly a hundred flights from Ireland to the UK a day, never mind the fucking ferry. Jesus. Hyperbolise much?

Con: This article http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2013/02/dear-vatican-i-would-be-pope-love-laurie-penny



> *Laurie Penny has GCSE Latin and a collection of ridiculous hats, plus years of experience dealing with in-fighting and intrigue (on the British Left). There is literally no reason she couldn't be Pope. Except for the Catholic thing. And the woman thing*


 
Jesus GCSE Latin? Why don't you stick a kick me sticker on your back love?


----------



## cesare (Feb 11, 2013)

Vacuous, I am in you.


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 11, 2013)

> *years of experience dealing with in-fighting and intrigue (on the British Left)*


o rly


----------



## 8den (Feb 11, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> o rly


 
She'll use probably cite this thread as supporting evidence.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 11, 2013)

8den said:


> Underground Abortion Railroad?


 
Middling name for a band, shit headline for an article.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 11, 2013)

8den said:


> She'll use probably cite this thread as supporting evidence.


 
she doesn't do citations.


----------



## weepiper (Feb 11, 2013)

8den said:


> For Laura;
> 
> Pro: Not a terrible article on abortion in Ireland http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/irel...ly-wont-change-a-thing?utm_source=vicetwitter
> 
> ...


 
I've got Standard Grade and higher Latin, want to kick me too?


----------



## Random (Feb 11, 2013)

8den said:


> Con: Fucking terrible title. Underground Abortion Railroad? There are nearly a hundred flights from Ireland to the UK a day, never mind the fucking ferry. Jesus. Hyperbolise much?


 There's about zero chance she wrote the headline herself.


----------



## 8den (Feb 11, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I've got Standard Grade and higher Latin, want to kick me too?


 
No, but you're not going around presenting yourself as Laurie Penny does in the national press are you?


----------



## 8den (Feb 11, 2013)

Random said:


> There's about zero chance she wrote the headline herself.


 
Probably, but at least she should have had some input into it.


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 11, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> she doesn't do citations.


 
Terrible, those minimum wage sub editors.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 11, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I've got Standard Grade and higher Latin, want to kick me too?


 
"you'll draw back a stump"


----------



## Firky (Feb 11, 2013)

I did GCSE Latin, everyone did in their first year and you could then choose to drop it after the second year (y10).



Nylock said:


> Not being overly familiar (or bothered about) twitter, i had no idea it was a shit, recycled dig, i just quoted it as it was on their feed and raised a smile. Although this thread has become about LP, it isn't _all_ about LP.


 
Was more a go Alex than you, having a go at someone because they happened to like a LP article than you. Laurie Penny is a compulsive liar but uses that flaw to spin a yarn with. If she did satire or something she'd probably be quite good at it.


----------



## love detective (Feb 11, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> @*benhammersley* Ben, when are you in London, and when are we drinking?


 
all in it together



> In general, I write and consult on the effects of the internet on society, foreign policy, business, and culture. I help people understand the modern world, and where it is taking us. Here are some things people have written about me.
> 
> Specificially, I’m currently the UK Prime Minister’s Ambassador to TechCity, London’s Internet Sector; Innovator in Residence at the Centre for Creative and Social Technologies at Goldsmiths, University of London; A non-resident fellow of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institute in Washington D.C; A member of the European Commission High Level Group on Media Freedom; A fellow of the European Policy Centre in Brussels; A contributing editor of the UK edition of WIRED magazine, and a non-executive director of Digital Jersey Ltd. Incidentally, here is my biography on Wikipedia, and LinkedIN, and I’m @benhammersley on Twitter.
> 
> ...


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 11, 2013)

8den said:


> Jesus GCSE Latin? Why don't you stick a kick me sticker on your back love?


 
Asinus es. Nothing wrong with GCSE Latin.


----------



## love detective (Feb 11, 2013)

firky said:


> If she did satire or something she'd probably be quite good at it.


 
No she would not, she'd be and is fucking awful at it - just read that latest piece for evidence

Doing good satire and being extremely un self aware do not go hand in hand


----------



## love detective (Feb 11, 2013)

In keeping with the keeping of good company, she's on the same side as Edwina Currie and Boris Johnson's sister at this debate at Oxford University - whole panel totally revolutionary in makeup as well



> *This House Believes That We Are All Feminists Now*
> 
> 
> _Celebrating 50 Years of Women in The Oxford Union _
> ...


----------



## killer b (Feb 11, 2013)

love detective said:


> all in it together


post left/right politics.


----------



## Libertad (Feb 11, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Asinus es. Nothing wrong with GCSE Latin.


 
Asinus es sed Mary Portas?


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 11, 2013)

love detective said:


> In keeping with the keeping of good company, she's on the same side as Edwina Currie and Boris Johnson's sister at this debate at Oxford University - whole panel totally revolutionary in makeup as well


 
The Laurie Penny biopic will have to be called "What's Wrong with This Picture?"


----------



## 8den (Feb 11, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Asinus es. Nothing wrong with GCSE Latin.


 

I did Classics for my leaving Cert. I just thought it was funny is all.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 11, 2013)

8den said:


> I did Classics for my leaving Cert. I just thought it was funny is all.


 
LTN = SRS BSNS


----------



## 8den (Feb 11, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> LTN = SRS BSNS


 
SRS WTF?


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Feb 11, 2013)

> *years of experience dealing with in-fighting and intrigue (on the British Left)*


An afternoon spent arguing with Spiney and Love Detective on u75


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 11, 2013)

Romani ite domum.


----------



## Libertad (Feb 11, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Romani ite domum.


 
Racist


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 11, 2013)

Libertad said:


> Racist


 
What have the Romans ever done for us?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 11, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> What have the Romans ever done for us?


Gave us candles?


----------



## Firky (Feb 11, 2013)

love detective said:


> No she would not, she'd be and is fucking awful at it - just read that latest piece for evidence
> 
> Doing good satire and being extremely un self aware do not go hand in hand


 
I think her biggest obstacle would be the two way dialogue. She is fucking awful at it. Conquer that and we've got a... wait for it, wait... a great laureate.

Sorry.


----------



## love detective (Feb 11, 2013)

LauraShite more like


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Feb 11, 2013)

That off Lusty?


----------



## love detective (Feb 11, 2013)

I sometimes make them up myself you know!


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 11, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> An afternoon spent arguing with Spiney and Love Detective on u75


 
Is that why she's too busy to deal with honest criticism and fair comment?


----------



## toggle (Feb 11, 2013)

Bakunin posting.

I just added this comment to her latest bilge about the Pope:

'While I have no fondness for Catholicism, I do have some fondness for accuracy and not, through either poor research or wilful ignorance, giving the false impression that the Pope was a Nazi simply by being a member of the Hitler Youth. Membership was compulsory and, if memory serves, Pope Benedict promptly deserted after a very brief period as a front-line soldier therein. This is a matter of public record and established fact. If he'd been picked up by Nazis after deserting, the least he could expect was to be thrown inoto a composite infantry unit called a 'Kampfgruppe' ('battle group') or, more likely, simplt shot by the roadside or left dangling from the nearest tree or lamppost bearing a placard stating he was a deserter who'd betrayed his country.

To not state this indicates poor or non-existent research. Either that or a deliberate smear knowing that Pope Benedict, whatever other faults he might have, is not and never was a committed Nazi.'


I'll be curious as to whether or not it actually makes it past moderation.


----------



## love detective (Feb 12, 2013)

radical journalist watch



> 15-17 Feb // Wadham College, Oxford
> 
> _Free and open to all_.
> 
> ...


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 12, 2013)

the north east of england as a quidditch pitch? I dont want to live on this planet any more


----------



## weepiper (Feb 12, 2013)

You made that Quidditch pitch bit up, didn't you? Please tell me you made that bit up.


----------



## love detective (Feb 12, 2013)

i don't even know what it means!


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 12, 2013)

It's the game they play in harry potter BUT WHY GOD BUT WHY


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 12, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> It's the game they play in harry potter BUT WHY GOD BUT WHY


 
It's a CHILDREN'S BOOK. It's for CHILDREN.

WHY DO GROWN ADULTS INSIST ON READING IT?


----------



## love detective (Feb 12, 2013)

if it's any help, it's a session which is part of the oppositional geography panel alongside a redefinition of left-wing identity in contemporary cuban music making, both of these are being held in the Okinaga Room


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 12, 2013)

Seriously is this shit supposed to be relevant or current or something? It's about 5 years out opf date?


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 12, 2013)

love detective said:


> if it's any help, it's a session which is part of the oppositional geography panel alongside a redefinition of left-wing identity in contemporary cuban music making, both of these are being held in the Okinaga Room


 
What about the ritual clowning?


----------



## weepiper (Feb 12, 2013)

love detective said:


> if it's any help, it's a session which is part of the oppositional geography panel alongside a redefinition of left-wing identity in contemporary cuban music making, both of these are being held in the Okinaga Room


Shoot the lot of them.


----------



## Fez909 (Feb 12, 2013)

I know what quidditch is but still don't get it.

What do they mean?


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 12, 2013)

That MP appears to have a good copybook though- against trident, ID cards, labours anti terror laws etc.


whats that- moderately FOR the smoking ban. Salt mines.


----------



## weepiper (Feb 12, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> That MP appears to have a good copybook though- against trident, ID cards, labours anti terror laws etc.
> 
> 
> whats that- moderately FOR the smoking ban. Salt mines.


Actually he's ok, he's just tweeted that he's going to table an opposition to whatever IDS comes up with to try and get round the new workfare judgement


----------



## love detective (Feb 12, 2013)

Oxford Radical Forum said:
			
		

> We view re-energising popular discussion and action on the left a necessity. Our belief in the need for an event in Oxford bringing together progressive politics stems both from a conviction in the continued and critical relevancy of Marxist and leftist ideas and theory and from the sad and persistent weakness of focused or organised progressive political organisation locally and nationally, despite such pressing conditions of political and economic crisis, and despite the very many who would under more favourable circumstances participate in such interventions. Therefore we are hosting again this forum which will continue to address these issues and draw in individuals from the two universities in Oxford, the city and beyond to consider critically ideas about social progress and transformation. Ultimately ORF seeks to contribute to a critical culture of left debate, theory and action, as well as to cement political and intellectual links between individuals and groups who will have a basis upon which to work in the future


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Feb 12, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> It's a CHILDREN'S BOOK. It's for CHILDREN.
> 
> WHY DO GROWN ADULTS INSIST ON READING IT?


No need to shout. I am reading a childrens' book at the moment, it is "A Complete History Of Art". Despite being aimed at children, it is most interesting. It is by EH Gombrich, famous for "The Story of Art" aimed at adults. I also read Wind in the Willows as an adult. Most people experience Harry Potter through film and video I suspect. I saw one video about him and that was enough.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Feb 12, 2013)

It doesnt matter what the quiddich means in this example ( or any fucking example as far as I can see )- its another way of excluding the unwwashed masses by the use of big fucking words and made up abstract concepts, so the literati can engage in a mutual tug fest in private.


----------



## Firky (Feb 12, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> the north east of england as a quidditch pitch? I dont want to live on this planet any more


 
What in the name of JSPRC is a quidditch pitch? No do google am on a tablet and lazy.


----------



## Firky (Feb 12, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> It's the game they play in harry potter BUT WHY GOD BUT WHY


 
Oh that! Well yeah, I guess we do.

http://www.alnwickcastle.com/explore/film-and-tv


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 12, 2013)

I've got nothing against grown ups reading childrens books but why choose one thats essentially a repressed midle clas fantasy about running away to boarding school away from all the 'muggles' (thats code fore peons btw). also she can't write for shit


----------



## sihhi (Feb 12, 2013)

I like how non-anglo people don't get names. 




> Oxford Left Review: Student movements past and present
> Jamie Woodcock (NUS Exec); George Paizis (’68 Veteran); *Ecuadorian student*.


 
Are there words for this? 



> Ethical Lunch! (By donation)


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 12, 2013)

carry out from firebox


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 12, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> It doesnt matter what the quiddich means in this example ( or any fucking example as far as I can see )- its another way of excluding the unwwashed masses by the use of big fucking words and made up abstract concepts, so the literati can engage in a mutual tug fest in private.


 
He says this as if it's a bad thing.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 12, 2013)

<< _We view re-energising popular discussion and action on the left a necessity. Our belief in the need for an event in Oxford bringing together progressive politics stems both from a conviction in the continued and critical relevancy of Marxist and leftist ideas and theory and from the sad and persistent weakness of focused or organised progressive political organisation locally and nationally, despite such pressing conditions of political and economic crisis, and despite the very many who would under more favourable circumstances participate in such interventions. Therefore we are hosting again this forum which will continue to address these issues and draw in individuals from the two universities in Oxford, the city and beyond to consider critically ideas about social progress and transformation. Ultimately ORF seeks to contribute to a critical culture of left debate, theory and action, as well as to cement political and intellectual links between individuals and groups who will have a basis upon which to work in the future. _>>


----------



## Belushi (Feb 12, 2013)

Because what the left really needs at the moment is more fucking debate.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 12, 2013)

fucking "anarchism and animals"?


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 12, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> fucking "anarchism and animals"?


 
Unfortunate choice of expletive there, frogs.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 12, 2013)

firky said:


> What in the name of JSPRC is a quidditch pitch? No do google am on a tablet and lazy.


 
As ld pointed out it's Zer0 books who published _Laurie Penny's Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism_ - 68 small-size pages of reheated articles (originally £9.99 now down to £7).

Also _After Pornified: How Women Are Transforming Pornography & Why It Really Matters _by Anne Sabo, and Richard Seymour's pompous _The __Meaning of David Cameron._




> Zer0 Books Panel (1): Oppositional Geography Agata Pyzik (Images of the East and West in Popular Culture During the Cold  War); Tom Astley (A Redefinition of Left-Wing Identity in Contemporary Cuban Music Making); Alex Niven (The North East of England as a Quidditch Pitch)


 

The author Alex Niven is a comment hero for the Guardian on all things North-East, he is the figure that represents you, firky,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/03/geordies-cheryl-cole-geordie-shore

"Cheryl Cole, who risks becoming a Jade Goody for the 2010s"


----------



## sihhi (Feb 12, 2013)

love detective said:


> if it's any help, it's a session which is part of the oppositional geography panel alongside a redefinition of left-wing identity in contemporary cuban music making, both of these are being held in the Okinaga Room


 
It's a sad fact that the left in the education sphere is pushed to conducting its events in the higher end universities. Although there are academics from both Oxford and Oxford Brookes, it is held in a room in Oxford named after the dean of Japan's premier private university.


----------



## Favelado (Feb 12, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> It's a CHILDREN'S BOOK. It's for CHILDREN.
> 
> WHY DO GROWN ADULTS INSIST ON READING IT?


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 12, 2013)

sihhi said:


> As ld pointed out it's Zer0 books who published _Laurie Penny's Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism_ - 68 small-size pages of reheated articles (originally £9.99 now down to £7).
> 
> Also _After Pornified: How Women Are Transforming Pornography & Why It Really Matters _by Anne Sabo, and Richard Seymour's pompous _The __Meaning of David Cameron._
> 
> ...


 
they also published gilad atzmon's book iirc. Yeah nice one for the "marxist and leftist ideas".


----------



## sihhi (Feb 12, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> they also published gilad atzmon's book iirc. Yeah nice one for the "marxist and leftist ideas".


 

Yes.







They still published despite the protests. It came with an endorsement by US capitalist IR theory realist John Mearsheimer co-author of _The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy_ -a/k/a everything America does bad in the Middle East is AIPAC's fault.

Anne Sabo's book is basically a pro-pornography tract dressed up as something academic.
Richard Seymour's is thin to the point of nothing.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 12, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Yes.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Scum.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 12, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Scum.


 
Mearsheimer or Zer0?

They tried to make amends for publishing Atzmon by proving how antiracist they were with Dave Hann's (author of No Retreat) Physical Resistance: 100 Years of Fighting Fascism. 

Alex Niven on the importance of Zer0: 
"Things like John Peel dying, and the NME turning into a musical supplement of Heat magazine, and the marketisation of academia, and the literary scene being reduced to a catalogue of awards ceremonies and PR spectacles really hit the counterculture hard in the last two or three decades. The blogosphere seemed to reawaken an oppositional critical tradition at a crucial moment."
suggests they take the idea of a counter-culture seriously.

This

"SS: How do you see the relationship between pop music and "criticality" these days?
OWEN HATHERLEY: The writing many of us encountered in the music press in (roughly) the 80s-mid 90s was exemplary in its combination of mass audience, unpatronising erudition, politicisation and fearless, sometimes experimental prose, and it is in lots of ways a model for what we tried to do with Zer0."

suggests they're explicitly basing themselves on the NME and Melody Maker in the early 1990s.

They also had a series of lectures in Oxford University's Taylor Institute.

"Zer0 Books has injected wit, wisdom, and energy into an otherwise moribund intellectual scene. Putting a stamp on the early 2010s, a series of provocative, ebullient texts (by writers such as Mark Fisher, Owen Hatherley, Nina Power, and Carl Neville) have bypassed a staid publishing industry to bring fresh, radical ideas to a popular readership.
While liberal Britain has become increasingly inured, lifestyle-obsessed, and forgiving of the excesses of neoliberalism, Zer0 has helped to reinstate an empowered critical avant-garde. The Zer0 model has provided a new blueprint for cultural and theoretical writing, one that exposes the hermeticism, careerism, and sheer sterility of much modern academic discourse.
The 2011-12 Zer0 Lecture Series at Oxford aims to provide a forum for the dissemination and debate of forthcoming or recently published Zer0 texts. Taken together, the six sessions represent a summary of the full range of cultural writing in the UK at the start of the new decade: from the philosophy of video games, to the failures of 19th century architecture; from the class politics of the band Pulp, to future possibilities in avant-garde music making; from the ethics of sexual exhibitionism to the shortcomings of the BBC and the Guardian newspaper."
http://zerobookslectures.wordpress.com/
Basically they are attacking people for the "hermeticism, careerism, and sheer sterility of much modern academic discourse" by producing stuff that will get into the reviews pages of the broadsheets because there's titles about superhero movies, TV cop/crime shows and the band Pulp. 
Some of it is probably OK, some excusable but this is where it leads:
_Superactually: Micro-Essays on Post-Ironic Life_: "A bunch of tiny essays on life after irony, this is a book to help smart people feel hip and hip people feel smart."
"This is a book of short, provocative essays. Some are on fun topics in pop culture (hackers, dubstep, cat memes, thinking green, parkour, and the girl next door). Others are takes on technical topics in social theory (sensation, hype, discrimination, imagination, and *the typical*). This is a book to help smart people feel hip and hip people feel smart."
http://www.zero-books.net/books/superactually
We await to be told what the typical is by Zer0.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 12, 2013)

Both.


----------



## emanymton (Feb 12, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I like how non-anglo people don't get names.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I think it is probably just that they don't have a specific individual named yet. Which does lead to the amusing idea of them running around trying to find an Ecuadorian student, any Ecuadorian student.
As I random aside Jamie Woodcock is on the SWP NC, and is one on the ones in the new faction. I have no idea about his background but he sounds bloody posh.


----------



## love detective (Feb 12, 2013)

....even if you don't have an Ecuadorian student, please send an Ecuadorian student....


----------



## Belushi (Feb 12, 2013)

I know a Peruvian window cleaner if thats any good.


----------



## love detective (Feb 12, 2013)

i've got an Indian software developer on stand by


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 12, 2013)

we must have vibrancy


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 12, 2013)

Ecuadorian = oppressed, student= at forefront


----------



## sihhi (Feb 12, 2013)

I wouldn't mind if the vibrancy was achieved by actually having ordinary people.

So the Polish representative at Oxford Radical Forum is Agata Pyzik - here pictured alongside Owen Hatherley (friend and key figure in Zer0) - at a lecture about Polish politics.






(audience of an event hosted by 'Critical Practice Chelsea' - the left-wing set within Chelsea College of Art & Design. http://criticalpracticechelsea.org/...ublic:_insights_into_the_Polish_public_sphere )

Her blog is called 'Poor Sexy East' http://poorsexyeast.tumblr.com 
The book being written is called _Poor but Sexy_. It's obviously using irony based on the right-wing media soundbite from a speech by the mayor of Berlin talking about East Berlin, but it just sort of clashes.

Often, not always, the non-British are not really representative _due to class reasons_ of their linguistic communities.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 12, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I wouldn't mind if the vibrancy was achieved by actually having ordinary people.
> 
> So the Polish representative at Oxford Radical Forum is Agata Pyzik - here pictured alongside Owen Hatherley (friend and key figure in Zer0) - at a lecture about Polish politics.


 
"Women workers in my country have _balls of steel this size._"


----------



## sihhi (Feb 12, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> "Women workers in my country have _balls of steel this size._"


 
That's unnecessary Idris, unless I'm reading you wrong. 

It could equally well have been Owen Hatherley talking about the importance of Sheffield via Jarvis Cockers proletarian imagery etc.






Owen Hatherley on holiday in Naples.


----------



## cesare (Feb 12, 2013)

The audience look a bit bored.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Feb 12, 2013)

Must have my pic taken with my hands in the air like a proper intellectual, like.


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 12, 2013)

you aren't an intellectual till you've been snapped mid-jazhanding


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Feb 12, 2013)

Folded legs, clasped chins.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 12, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That's unnecessary Idris, unless I'm reading you wrong.


 
Did I go too far?


----------



## Pickman's model (Feb 12, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Must have my pic taken with my hands in the air like a proper intellectual, like.


 





yeh, i'll make sure there's a picture of you with your hands in the air.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Feb 12, 2013)

You talkin' to me?


----------



## Pickman's model (Feb 12, 2013)

Captain Hurrah said:


> You talkin' to me?


i don't see anybody else here


----------



## love detective (Feb 12, 2013)

The 'digerati'



> Women thrive on Twitter, Facebook and so on, yet at the same time are subject to levels of abuse that seems different in tone and content to what is directed at men. Our panel of leading editors, writers and digerati will lead the discussion, which will be followed by networking drinks.
> WHEN: February 12, 2013
> WHERE: Weston Roof Pavilion, Level 6, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX (nearest tube Waterloo or Embankment)
> TIME: 6.30pm -8.30
> ...


----------



## Pickman's model (Feb 12, 2013)

love detective said:


> The 'digerati'


and what about dolees? do they have to fork out more than students to hear penny's words of wisdom?

you're not going to get a flash mob there at those prices, ld


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 12, 2013)

I don't even know what that is!


----------



## goldenecitrone (Feb 12, 2013)

Digital cliterati.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 12, 2013)

do they not realise that anyone who actually knows what it is (which is not many people) use the term twitterati and commentariat as terms of abuse?


----------



## sihhi (Feb 12, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> and what about dolees? do they have to fork out more than students to hear penny's words of wisdom?
> 
> 
> you're not going to get a flash mob there at those prices, ld


 

That's almost an insult on working-class women! 

What female claimant would want to listen to:

Sue Llewellyn, businessperson at Ultra Social the "consultancy" firm she founded.
Advises people how to twitter. Tweets stuff like: 
"Social media training for the folks at BBC Radio 3 all week. Totally love the blend of old and new architecture and media."
http://ultrasocialuk.tumblr.com/post/22243072879/social-media-training-for-the-folks-at-bbc-radio-3

Helen Keegan, businessperson and advertising and mobiles-market-share-increase consultant:
"Today, Helen is a specialist consultant in mobile marketing, advertising and media working on a wide variety of projects including developing mobile strategies, analysing trends, creating products and services, and implementing initiatives for a wide variety of clients including NewsCorp, Teletext, The English National Opera, Dagen, Egmont, BBC and Vodafone to name but a few. She also advises mobile start-ups on their business strategy and marketing efforts and helps mobile network operators and handset manufacturers with their developer relations programmes. Helen wrote the Guide to Mobile Marketing and Advertising, published by Tanla Mobile in February 2008"

She's also the founder of Mobile Monday.
Example: "Bringing the Shoreditch mobile community together since 2012. Events every few months in East London. Part of the global Mobile Monday family."

"Creative Mobile Fight Club
Ever wondered how the creative thought process works behind the scenes? What inspires the top Shoreditch creatives? Well.. our next event is showcasing just this. Four Creative Directors from the Ditch will inspire, shock and get your creative juices" 

http://momoshoreditch.blogspot.co.uk

Eva Simpson, now columnist at the Times, but for years was a "3am girl" at the Mirror - editorial team for celebrity before joining the Sun's 'celebrity' and 'girls' team.

Helen Lewis-Hasteley, who smartly dropped the double barreled surname now just Helen Lewis was propelled to the top of the New Statesman features team with the Mike Danson buyout and the Jason Cowley editorial coup. 

at the same time.


----------



## Pickman's model (Feb 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That's almost an insult on working-class women!
> 
> What female claimant would want to listen to:
> 
> ...


seems to me an emetick would be cheaper, of more lasting utility, more pleasurable and not entail such a long journey.


----------



## phildwyer (Feb 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> "Things like John Peel dying... really hit the counterculture hard in the last two or three decades.


 
Where will we be if Mick Jagger pegs it?


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 13, 2013)

toggle said:


> Bakunin posting.
> 
> I just added this comment to her latest bilge about the Pope:
> 
> ...


 
Surprise, surprise. I can't find it on the comments stream.


----------



## Firky (Feb 13, 2013)

It's her party and she will cry if she wants to.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 13, 2013)

Sunny Hundal - a walking parody of himself. He just wants leftists to lie so he can be more happy:

"Sunny Hundal ‏@sunny_hundal
I'm betting some people on the left will still complain that Obama avoided addressing climate change"



post soon


----------



## Greebo (Feb 13, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Where will we be if Mick Jagger pegs it?


The same place "we" are now, his shoes were probably filled some time ago.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 13, 2013)

so much Bellendism


----------



## 8den (Feb 13, 2013)

Good post Bakunin there are a tremendous amounts of things the pope has done either as a cardinal or as Pontiff that exposes his willingness to subvert the clause of justice to save the church face.


----------



## treelover (Feb 14, 2013)

sussex-university-occupation-escalates
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/mortarboard/2013/feb/13/sussex-university-occupation-escalates

Massive anti-privatisation student protest, fighting for the lowest paid at Sussex Uni,

Just thought I would post this here, must say I was surprised at the numbers even if it is ephemeral, as I thought the student movemnt was dead, after all these are paying 30,000 for their education, as its her old stomping ground maybe Laura will get down there to report if she can ...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 14, 2013)

Fresh off the tweeter, and much to butchers chagrin another isolated quote from Penny:



> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> First time I've seen the workings of the Oxford Union. There is really a whole other world of privilege I didn't see when I studied here.


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 14, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> _*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* _
> _First time I've seen the workings of the Oxford Union. There is really a whole other world of privilege I didn't see when I studied here._


 
Funny, I could have sworn that proper journalists were supposed to be observant.


----------



## weepiper (Feb 14, 2013)

She's just tweeted 'I'm sorry, who are you?' to Alex Massie because he said this:



> alexmassie ‏@alexmassie
> The REAL victims of the Iraq War? Laurie Penny & assorted other whining left-wing narcissists: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/alex-massie/2013/02/the-iraq-wars-real-victims-laurie-penny-and-the-narcissistic-left/ …


 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Massie_(journalist)

lol


----------



## emanymton (Feb 14, 2013)

weepiper said:


> She's just tweeted 'I'm sorry, who are you?' to Alex Massie because he said this:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


His article is shit though.


----------



## weepiper (Feb 14, 2013)

emanymton said:


> His article is shit though.


 
Oh yeah, but her response is revealing - straight onto the 'your opinion is only worth anything if you're famous'. I suppose after all he only went to a little_ provincial_ boarding school.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 14, 2013)

Does it ever cross these people minds that there is a option *NOT TO ADDRESS THE OXFORD UNION?*

Crudass' up next.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Does it ever cross these people minds that there is a option *NOT TO ADDRESS THE OXFORD UNION?*
> Crudass' up next.


----------



## Firky (Feb 14, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Funny, I could have sworn that proper journalists were supposed to be observant.


 
Was about to say the same thing!


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 14, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Oh yeah, but her response is revealing - straight onto the 'your opinion is only worth anything if you're famous'. I suppose after all he only went to a little_ provincial_ boarding school.


And a _provincial_ university.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 14, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> And a _provincial_ university.


 
Reminds me of when she came onto here and had a good Telegraph style whinge about "some of us have jobs y'know, you workshy feckless dolescum."

A provincial uni? My god, the horror!


----------



## not-bono-ever (Feb 14, 2013)

He did apply to cambridge x2 though, and got rejected.


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 14, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> He did apply to cambridge x2 though, and got rejected.


So? TCD is still one of the best unis in the world.


----------



## Firky (Feb 14, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Oh yeah, but her response is revealing - straight onto the 'your opinion is only worth anything if you're famous'. I suppose after all he only went to a little_ provincial_ boarding school.


 
She'd have known exactly who it was, it's a one of the disses that kids use online, "who are you?". A bit like when she said, "this is why we can't have nice things". That's another internet thing, she's part of the first generation who grew up when the internet saturation started to increase. It's part of their language and identity. I think that is partly why you hear kids like Laurie literally say the words, "OH EM GEE".

Actually, that's another group for the wall: people who say "OH EM GEE".


----------



## not-bono-ever (Feb 14, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> So? TCD is still one of the best unis in the world.


 
just saying like- mebbes penny the red doesnt rate him cos of this


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 14, 2013)

firky said:


> She'd have known exactly who it was, it's a one of the disses that kids use online, "who are you?". A bit like when she said, "this is why we can't have nice things". That's another internet thing, she's part of the first generation who grew up when the internet saturation started to increase. It's part of their language and identity. I think that is partly why you hear kids like Laurie literally say the words, "OH EM GEE".
> 
> Actually, that's another group for the wall: people who say "OH EM GEE".


 
Yeah I remember going to visit a friend of mine at University of East London about 2 years ago and there were people in his campus using the word "lol" as if it's a word. I don't generally give a fuck about young people using stupid phrases, if I'm not mistaken those sort of acronyms and shorteners have been used for ages before the internet anyway, but that really pissed me off. I think it's to do with the people who are appropriating it, and what they're trying to say about themselves by doing so, than the word itself.

If you want a vision of the future of discourse in politics go and have a lurk on 4chan.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 14, 2013)

In pk world lol


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 14, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> So? TCD is still one of the best unis in the world.


 
I know someone at home who has a colleague whose son failed to get into TCD - he got into DCU instead, which is a perfectly respectable institution (as Irish unis go).

Apparently this brat has decided to blame his failure to clear the TCD hurdle on the JOOZ, and is now a keen fan of anti-semitic internet conspiracy theories.

I'm not making this up. I wish I was.


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I know someone at home who has a colleague who's son failed to get into TCD - he got into DCU instead, which is a perfectly respectable institution (as Irish unis go).
> 
> Apparently this brat has decided to blame his failure to clear the TCD hurdle on the JOOZ, and is now a keen fan of anti-semitic internet conspiracy theories.
> 
> I'm not making this up. I wish I was.


No way


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 14, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> No way


 
Way.


----------



## Firky (Feb 14, 2013)

Uh, uhhh, yeah, cummun, this for the Gs n hustlas

Penny Penny Penny can't you see
Sometimes your words just hypnotise me
And I just love your flashy ways
Guess that's why they broke, and you're so paid


----------



## Firky (Feb 14, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> If you want a vision of the future of discourse in politics go and have a lurk on 4chan.


 
It's mad to think that sites like 4chan have actually influenced some people's personality. Yet when I think about it isn't. Urban's probably had quite an impact on me, in fact I know it has - for better and worse. Posted here throughout my provincial university years, work years, dole years, and then banned for four


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 15, 2013)

Dear Mr El-Ahrairah​ 

Celebrity journalism course
Location: Dalston
Want to interview the stars? Top film and entertainment journalist Lisa Marks (Guardian, Marie Claire, Grazia, Red, and former Daily Mirror editor) teaches you to source stories, interview a celebrity, pitch to editors, and deliver compelling copy.​


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 15, 2013)

vomvomvom


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> My mates just finished his phd on the 80s riots, he reckons bus drivers and taxi drivers figured prominently in the circulation of info there - as did pirate radio in some places.


I learnt last night also that the boys on the milk floats were key info circualtors. No that they were doing it, but that they were a key part of that night time economy that means that you're out the door at four and seeing lots of people as the day goes.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 15, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Fresh off the tweeter, and much to butchers chagrin another isolated quote from Penny:


 
so i emailed a friend to test the veracity of this story.



Hey you, is it possible to spend years at oxford without knowin about the union?

response:

"I don't think so. They're pretty prominent even if you intentionally have nothing to do with them because they're Tory scum (like I did)."

make of that what you will.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

She was well into the extra-curricular side as well - loom at her pantos for example.


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 15, 2013)

can't believe they had assange adress them vi video link. Its just surreal- our student union got a gig from Richard Blackwood (who was allegedly funny once). International fugitive from rape charges beats that like rock beats scissors


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

They allowed galloway in the front doors.


----------



## Libertad (Feb 15, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> can't believe they had assange adress them vi video link. Its just surreal- our student union got a gig from Richard Blackwood (who was allegedly funny once). International fugitive from rape charges beats that like rock beats scissors


 
Richard Blackwood has never been funny.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

REVOL was ok.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 15, 2013)

Libertad said:


> Richard Blackwood has never been funny.


The shit-sieving thing was moderately amusing.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 15, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> can't believe they had assange adress them vi video link. Its just surreal- our student union got a gig from Richard Blackwood (who was allegedly funny once). International fugitive from rape charges beats that like rock beats scissors


 
We got Bez from the Happy Mondays "DJ-ing" that's about the best celeb Salford uni managed to attract


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 15, 2013)

and a shortage of E's was reported in the salford area on that day


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

Other way round.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> In pk world lol


 

the world's angriest theme park.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 15, 2013)

The Laurie Penny bullshit-o-meter started ringing today as a routine response to this article http://www.newstatesman.com/politic...gainst-iraq-war-and-i-learned-lesson-betrayal

In particular this sentence - "For me, at the age of 16, there were a lot of firsts on 15 February 2003: first truancy" which is all well and good until you remember than 15th of February was, er, a Saturday. But then it was pointed out "she might've gone to boarding school" aah ok. Did she? Here would appear to be the place to find out. I thought she only had the £6k-a-year minimum access wristband, not the VIP one. Could anyone clarify

Anyway quick note on the article - It reminded me of the Slavoj Zizek reviews of action/apocalypse films like Deep Impact, where essentially the whole world has to die so that some white middle-class American family can be together (with another subtext, that the only thing that can lead to some sort of all-encompassing global solidarity is for the whole world to perish, but I digress). All those Iraqi kids had to die so that Laurie could go on her voyage of personal growth and enlightenment. Pathological narcissism, honed by years of elite education and media indulgence, that's my diagnosis.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

She wasn't there'


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

Bad democracy!


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

> The bus to London from the centre of town...


 
You don't know the famous place that they go from?


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

> I bagged a seat at the back alongside some older students who chatted about the first Gulf war and the international oil lobby.


 
No you didn't,


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

> One of them, I remember, was carrying a handmade placard with a picture of a woman’s pubic triangle luxuriously adorned with real, glued-on human hair and the legend “The Only Bush I’d Trust Is My Own”.


 
No you didn't, that's you using a real thing that happened elsewhere and suggesting that it happened to you.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 15, 2013)

everything she says is lies it's like reading a Hari article in stereo


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

Oh god, an editor let this through:



> As London began to materialise out of its dowdy, drawn-out suburbs


 
Then i went to headmasters office.


----------



## co-op (Feb 15, 2013)

> _Editor's note: This piece originally stated that Nato went to war in Iraq. The error has been corrected. _


----------



## co-op (Feb 15, 2013)

> As London began to materialise out of its dowdy, drawn-out suburbs


 
Blatant disrespect for Saarf London and all Crystal Palace fans.


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 15, 2013)

co-op said:


> Blatant disrespect for Saarf London and all Crystal Palace fans.


 
Would this be the time to mention that on of my forebears holds the record for the most goals scored against Crystal Palace in a single game?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 15, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Would this be the time to mention that on of my forebears holds the record for the most goals scored against Crystal Palace in a single game?


yes


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 15, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> yes


 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syd_Puddefoot

Once put seven past their keeper in a single game. And didn't do badly in general, careerwise.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> She wasn't there'


 

man

/dc


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> man
> 
> /dc


The article's just another example of the thousand word stare than comes to define the true Polly Filler columnist.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 15, 2013)

vomvomvomvomvom.  i might need to stop reading this thread.


----------



## Firky (Feb 15, 2013)

firky said:


> She'd have known exactly who it was, it's a one of the disses that kids use online, "who are you?". A bit like when she said, "this is why we can't have nice things". That's another internet thing, she's part of the first generation who grew up when the internet saturation started to increase. It's part of their language and identity. I think that is partly why you hear kids like Laurie literally say the words, "OH EM GEE".
> 
> Actually, that's another group for the wall: people who say "OH EM GEE".


 
I claim my ten pounds



> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Got to hotel. Asked if I could 'log in'. #*icomefromtheinternet*


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 15, 2013)




----------



## Firky (Feb 15, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


>


 
She looks better in that photo than the ones where she poses with her effete rolled up cigarette.


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 15, 2013)

firky said:


> effete rolled up cigarette.


 
Indeed, it is effete.

I used to get through four or five packs a day of these, proper workers' smokes:


----------



## Blagsta (Feb 15, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Indeed, it is effete.
> 
> I used to get through four or five packs a day of these, proper workers' smokes:


 
What?  A ponce's fag.





now there's a proper proley fag


----------



## Libertad (Feb 15, 2013)




----------



## Firky (Feb 15, 2013)

My granny smoked woodbines. With the tip snapped off.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 15, 2013)

or gtfo.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

Tell the truth to the kids.


----------



## Libertad (Feb 15, 2013)




----------



## weepiper (Feb 15, 2013)

with a packet of these for Christmas


----------



## Firky (Feb 15, 2013)

Clay pipe with more dried nettle than tobacco


----------



## Libertad (Feb 15, 2013)

weepiper Classy


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Feb 15, 2013)

firky said:


> My granny smoked woodbines. With the tip snapped off.


 
My Nan smoked Woodbines, fingers like carrots she had - they were certainly sold without tips. Did Woodbine ever sell tipped?


----------



## Firky (Feb 15, 2013)

Mr.Bishie said:


> My Nan smoked Woodbines, fingers like carrots she had - they were certainly sold without tips. Did Woodbine ever sell tipped?


 
I don't know to be perfectly honest. I was in single fingers when my granny smoked.I thought fags had to have a tip on by law?


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 15, 2013)

Mr.Bishie said:


> My Nan smoked Woodbines, fingers like carrots she had - they were certainly sold without tips. Did Woodbine ever sell tipped?


 
Yes, they sold Woodbines with cork filters.

I also present the sheer ultimate, ultimate in rough fags which I got off a Russian sailor in Plymouth and felt like a chlorine gas attack:

Reacl machorka fags with cardboard filters:






Spent a whole evening on these and spent the later part of the night wheezing like a pair of bellows and chundering hideously.


----------



## Firky (Feb 15, 2013)

> Noted for its strong unfiltered cigarettes, the brand was popular in the early 20th century, especially with soldiers during World War I and World War II.* A **filtered version was launched in the United Kingdom in 1948, but was discontinued in 1988.*


----------



## Red Cat (Feb 15, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> What? A ponce's fag.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
My mum smokes them. About 40 a day.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Yes, they sold Woodbines with cork filters.
> 
> I also present the sheer ultimate, ultimate in rough fags which I got off a Russian sailor in Plymouth and felt like a chlorine gas attack:
> 
> ...


Fag belt.


----------



## Blagsta (Feb 15, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> My mum smokes them. About 40 a day.


 
See?  I'm right.


----------



## Firky (Feb 15, 2013)

When I was at school some people would pick up discarded regal and B&H fag packs to put lambert and butler in. If you smoked L&B's you were a scummer.

Anyone remember the L&B adverts and how they tried to get rid of that PFWC image by having a bloke on a bilboard getting his L&B sparked up by a butler?


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 15, 2013)

To be lit with an authentic (AUTHENTIC, mind you) WWI lighter fashioned from an empty cartridge case (preferably one used for fragging an officer, obviously).


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 15, 2013)

firky said:


> Anyone remember the L&B adverts and how they tried to get rid of that PFWC image by having a bloke on a bilboard getting his L&B sparked up by a butler?


 

Yeah, I used to pass one on Botanic Avenue all the time. Did you think the butler looked like Capt. Mainwaring?


----------



## Firky (Feb 15, 2013)

Now you mention it.


----------



## Firky (Feb 15, 2013)

They're worse than I remember.


----------



## Orang Utan (Feb 15, 2013)

My parents used to smoke unfiltered gauloises cos they are Francophile ponces


----------



## weepiper (Feb 15, 2013)

This is my Granpa






No idea what kind of fag it is because by the time I knew him he smoked a pipe.


----------



## killer b (Feb 15, 2013)

your gramps is so cool.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 15, 2013)

firky said:


> When I was at school some people would pick up discarded regal and B&H fag packs to put lambert and butler in. If you smoked L&B's you were a scummer.
> 
> Anyone remember the L&B adverts and how they tried to get rid of that PFWC image by having a bloke on a bilboard getting his L&B sparked up by a butler?


 
i remember them.  i smoked L&Bs at school, and indeed until my early 20s (unless i was too poor, in which case it was baccy).  most kids smoked B&H, but lamberts were cheaper.  my mate Jim, in an effort to be classy, smoked Embassy Number Ones because he thought they were posh.


----------



## Firky (Feb 15, 2013)

I smoked Regal until they changed the blend and started smoking B&H. I later started smoking rollies and any bootleg baccy. Then I ended up only smoking the holy toke and now I don't smoke at all (apart from the occasional blunt). Fascinating.

I wonder how Laurie got on this evening with her lecture on Radical Journalism?


----------



## Orang Utan (Feb 15, 2013)

Never understood how people preferred rollies over fags. So stinky


----------



## weepiper (Feb 15, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Never understood how people preferred rollies over fags. So stinky


 
They're cheaper and they go out if you put them down rather than burning away. This can be useful


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> This is my Granpa
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Bit old to be mucking around in the kiddies' playground


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 15, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> My parents used to smoke unfiltered gauloises cos they are Francophile ponces


 
OI!

I'll probably end up on those for the best part of two weeks this coming June. Although I will have the defence of actually being in France.


----------



## Orang Utan (Feb 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> They're cheaper and they go out if you put them down rather than burning away. This can be useful


But they taste and smell shite, are hard to make and don't produce that lovely plume of smoke out of one's lungs like a proper fag


----------



## weepiper (Feb 15, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> hard to make


 
haddaway and shite man.


----------



## Firky (Feb 15, 2013)

I wouldn't post that pic up, weeps, it'll end up in an article. "I sat with this man on the girder".


----------



## Orang Utan (Feb 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> haddaway and shite man.


Well I've never made a satisfactory one


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Feb 15, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i remember them.  i smoked L&Bs at school, and indeed until my early 20s (unless i was too poor, in which case it was baccy).  most kids smoked B&H, but lamberts were cheaper.  my mate Jim, in an effort to be classy, smoked Embassy Number Ones because he thought they were posh.


L&B are quite pricey now iirc, which I find funny - not "premium fag" level, but above the cheap stuff. Once they've got people on to a brand, they raise the prices to exploit those who have brand loyalty, and then launch a new line of budget fags.


----------



## Orang Utan (Feb 15, 2013)




----------



## Blagsta (Feb 15, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Never understood how people preferred rollies over fags. So stinky


They taste better.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 15, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> L&B are quite pricey now iirc, which I find funny - not "premium fag" level, but above the cheap stuff. Once they've got people on to a brand, they raise the prices to exploit those who have brand loyalty, and then launch a new line of budget fags.


 
i hope they taste better.  i' surprised i don't have lung cancerr already.  my mate smoked l&b gold until he gave up.  if you turned one upside down all the baccy fell out.


----------



## Orang Utan (Feb 15, 2013)

Nah, they taste too sweet and not smoky enough


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 15, 2013)

also, OU is wrong on this.


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 15, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> What? A ponce's fag.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 







Commonly known as 'lambert and desperate' amongst the playground snout-snobs.


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 15, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Well I've never made a satisfactory one


 

This points to a moral failure on your part and says nothing about roll ups.

I'm an Amber Chief man myself, you get a real lungbuster for the price-per-fag of 30p


----------



## imposs1904 (Feb 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> This is my Granpa
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

whatever happened to Joboxers? They were good.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Feb 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> with a packet of these for Christmas


 
Ha! I used to get a packet of these every New Year's Eve. But every cunt wanted one, like, so I stopped.

Rest of the time it was Drum or Samson baccy off the docks.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

Gold label next. Lady brew.


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 15, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Ha! I used to get a packet of these every New Year's Eve. But every cunt wanted one, like, so I stopped.


 
That's why I started on the Camels. I didn't mind people poncing my B&H until they started taking them without even asking so I started on unfiltered Camels instead.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I'd notice hands come near the pack and then scuttle away as if to say:

'I'll wait until TOMORROW to get lung cancer, thank you...'


----------



## Steel Icarus (Feb 15, 2013)

I rarely smoked tailor-mades, made me feel awful in the morning. Mind you when I did, e.g. when I'd gone out and run out of baccy I'd have Marlboros and although the smoke was a lovely grey-blue colour they made my throat swell up the next day.

I'm really glad I stopped, though. Not a single fag for over 2 years, now.


----------



## weepiper (Feb 15, 2013)

S☼I said:


> I'm really glad I stopped, though. Not a single fag for over 2 years, now.


 
 three months for me. The Sobranies and Benny Hennies were my Nan btw, I used to smoke Lambert and Butler menthols.


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 15, 2013)

Che Guevara says 


> A smoke in times of rest is a great companion to the solitary soldier.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Feb 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> three months for me. The Sobranies and Benny Hennies were my Nan btw, I used to smoke Lambert and Butler menthols.


 
Ah, gotcha. Well, well done. The gaps between me really fancying a fag are up to about every couple of months, now. 

So, Penny - is the rollies thing a pose, or what?


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

An electric middle class ciggy


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 15, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Ah, gotcha. Well, well done. The gaps between me really fancying a fag are up to about every couple of months, now.
> 
> So, Penny - is the rollies thing a pose, or what?


Do you really want to be here?


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 15, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Che Guevara says


 

I bet after he'd finished with the dolphins he used to stick a massive spliffin their blowhole. Like a gentleman, letting the cetacean have first twos on it


----------



## Steel Icarus (Feb 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Do you really want to be here?


 
What?


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 16, 2013)

S☼I said:


> What?


Where?


----------



## past caring (Feb 16, 2013)

You are all fucking girls.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Feb 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Do you really want to be here?


 
Yes, I do. Why are you asking me this?


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 16, 2013)

past caring said:


> You are all fucking girls.


 





As I have said before on this thread, you are not a real man untill you have smoked Samson pipe tobacco through a rizla and then coughed up your spleen


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 16, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Yes, I do. Why are you asking me this?


Maybe best not be here then. Want to be bored?


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 16, 2013)

urgh 'formaldehyde' sounds like french for what keeps my pickled maquaque corpse from rotting


----------



## past caring (Feb 16, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> As I have said before on this thread, you are not a real man untill you have smoked Samson pipe tobacco through a rizla and then coughed up your spleen


 
Mate, three times smoked OH probably beats it, tbh.


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 16, 2013)

past caring said:


> Mate, three times smoked OH probably beats it, tbh.


 

Old Holburn tastes and feels like its been pre-smoked even fresh from the packet


----------



## Steel Icarus (Feb 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Maybe best not be here then. Want to be bored?


 
This is boring, mate, cos it seems you're having a go but somehow won't say what the problem is.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 16, 2013)

S☼I said:


> This is boring, mate, cos it seems you're having a go but somehow won't say what the problem is.


The problem for me right now is you talking waffly old man bollocks.


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 16, 2013)

I stand four-square behind the mighty fags of Mother Russia.


----------



## weepiper (Feb 16, 2013)

we're _all_ talking waffly old man bollocks. why are you singling one poster out?


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 16, 2013)

I was blocked on her Twatter feed.

***DRUM ROLL***

'And now, direct from the House of Penny Dreadful, this latest quality item that deals with those inconvenient questions, suggestions of falsified reporting, non-existent fact-checking, malicious and knowingly dishonest insult, libellous allegations of bigotry and various other signs of the next desperately fame-hungry and talentless wannabe, this season's must have for anyone caught blatantly lying and not wanting to face facts...'





'Another quality item from British Journalism!'

'British Journalism: Best in the world...'


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 16, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> I stand four-square behind the mighty fags of Mother Russia.


 

KGBenson and Hedges? Gullagoise? MAlboroygh Lit untill he burns- or maybe even Burn The American Embassy No1


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 16, 2013)

Now these fags really will kill you:






That's because this pack is a copy of the KGB's infamous double-barrelled 'cigarette gun' (as deliverd to the West by defecting KGB hitman Niolai Khoklov in 1954) which contained a hidden button that fired two razor-edged .22 bullets filled with potassium cyanide.

Dying for a fag..?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 16, 2013)

Do they still sell Death smokes?


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 16, 2013)

Only  to jitteer twats so they can put them on the intenet


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> jitteer


 
what?? Go to bed butchers


----------



## Kuke (Feb 16, 2013)

firky said:


> I smoked Regal until they changed the blend and started smoking B&H. I later started smoking rollies and any bootleg baccy. Then I ended up only smoking the holy toke and now I don't smoke at all (apart from the occasional blunt). Fascinating.
> 
> I wonder how Laurie got on this evening with her lecture on Radical Journalism?


 
I'll hear all about it tomorrow, for some reason I passed up on the stellar line-up of Callinicos and LP at ORF today.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Feb 16, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> I stand four-square behind the mighty fags of Mother Russia.


 


DotCommunist said:


> KGBenson and Hedges? Gullagoise? MAlboroygh Lit untill he burns- or maybe even Burn The American Embassy No1


 
Nyet.  

_Belomorkanal_.






Proper hardcore Russian smokes.


----------



## Superdupastupor (Feb 16, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> KGBenson and Hedges? Gullagoise? MAlboroygh Lit untill he burns- or maybe even Burn The American Embassy No1



what's that? 20 royals? ... 20 royal SUPERKINGS.   ......

Lemme stop you right there before you storm the winter palace .

Or not.

Fil yer boots.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Feb 16, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Would this be the time to mention that on of my forebears holds the record for the most goals scored against Crystal Palace in a single game?


 
Absolutely!

Cheers - Louis MacNecie


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Feb 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Gold label next. Lady brew.


 
Just leave Gold Label alone...it's for old men as well as ladies.

Cheers and bottoms up - Louis MacNeice


----------



## JimW (Feb 16, 2013)

It was half Guinness, half Gold Label all round on giro day in the pub I worked in. A proper treat for anyone, man, woman young or old.


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 16, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> what?? Go to bed butchers


My guess would be 'hipster' - hipster twats.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 16, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Indeed, it is effete.
> 
> I used to get through four or five packs a day of these, proper workers' smokes:


 
Pah, second only to Lucky Strike as a cigarette for pretend-proletarians.


----------



## Firky (Feb 16, 2013)

Nearly a full 24 hours have passed since Laurie last had a bowel movement on twitter. I am getting a bit of a cold turkey here. Guess it was a heavy night of radical journalism, champagne and quaffing; still in bed with a hangover. 

Come on Laurie, I am bored.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 16, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> What? A ponce's fag.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Prior to L & B, the "proper" prole-smoke was


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 16, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> My mum smokes them. About 40 a day.


 
Given your username, it'd have been more poetic if she'd smoked a well-known prole-fag of yesteryear:


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 16, 2013)

weepiper said:


> This is my Granpa


 
Should be titled "granpa piper helps build a non-poncey adventure playground for the local youth".


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 16, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Commonly known as 'lambert and desperate' amongst the playground snout-snobs.


 
Probably the ultimate in playground cigarette snobbery in my "year" at school was one bloke who smoked these:






"Them is 'burd smokes' ", we told him, but he kept on buying 'em.


----------



## Firky (Feb 16, 2013)

Laurie's had a bowel movement:



> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Does anyone have a recording of me challenging Alex Callinicos on rape-apologism-apologism last night?


 
Now this as me intrigued. I would like to hear this myself.


----------



## Libertad (Feb 16, 2013)

JimW said:


> It was half Guinness, half Gold Label all round on giro day in the pub I worked in. A proper treat for anyone, man, woman young or old.


 
Not in The Woolpack though Jim. Gold Label came in "nips", a third of a pint. Laurie (Lee) bought me a pint of Gold Label for my sixteenth birthday, I was as sick as a pup in the churchyard for the rest of the afternoon.

First mention in this thread of a Laurie with true Socialist credentials. None of this flying down to Cairo to have a sniff about, Laurie Lee *walked* to Spain.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 16, 2013)

Libertad said:


> Not in The Woolpack though Jim. Gold Label came in "nips", a third of a pint. Laurie (Lee) bought me a pint of Gold Label for my sixteenth birthday, I was as sick as a pup in the churchyard for the rest of the afternoon.
> 
> First mention in this thread of a Laurie with true Socialist credentials. None of this flying down to Cairo to have a sniff about, Laurie Lee *walked* to Spain.


 
And if you tell that to the young people today, they won't believe you. More lefty fags:






I wonder if he had a fag after shooting that 14 year old kid?


----------



## cesare (Feb 16, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Prior to L & B, the "proper" prole-smoke was


My fags of choice at school. Not king size though!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 16, 2013)

cesare said:


> My fags of choice at school. Not king size though!


 
I couldn't find a pic of the "proper size" No. 6 or No. 10s.


----------



## cesare (Feb 16, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I couldn't find a pic of the "proper size" No. 6 or No. 10s.


 Airbrushed from history.


----------



## Libertad (Feb 16, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I couldn't find a pic of the "proper size" No. 6 or No. 10s.


 
http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...cebook-handbags.266196/page-468#post-11979549


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 16, 2013)

cesare said:


> Airbrushed from history.


The sterling school of falsification.


----------



## JimW (Feb 16, 2013)

Libertad said:


> Not in The Woolpack though Jim. Gold Label came in "nips", a third of a pint. Laurie (Lee) bought me a pint of Gold Label for my sixteenth birthday, I was as sick as a pup in the churchyard for the rest of the afternoon.
> 
> First mention in this thread of a Laurie with true Socialist credentials. None of this flying down to Cairo to have a sniff about, Laurie Lee *walked* to Spain.


You have me on a technicality  We did the generous half of Guinness in a pint glass, then you'd slowly pour your Gold Label in, which was a third of a pint as you say. Think people called it a Black Velvet tho the real one uses champagne I think.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 16, 2013)

They have stuff on draught in the forest now?


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 16, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I couldn't find a pic of the "proper size" No. 6 or No. 10s.








re-branded at some point as 'embassy special filter'

real lung-beaters as I recall. Never to be used in a spliff

/dc


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 16, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> re-branded at some point as 'embassy special filter'
> 
> real lung-beaters as I recall. Never to be used in a spliff


 
This is dotcom posting, right?


----------



## Libertad (Feb 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> They have stuff on draught in the forest now?


 
The Forest?


----------



## Libertad (Feb 16, 2013)

Thread fulfils it's true métier as a receptacle of fag porn.


----------



## Firky (Feb 16, 2013)

I wish I never mentioned Laurie's effete fag.


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 16, 2013)

theres really a site called ciggarettepedia. Will the last person to leave the internet please turn off the router


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 16, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> This is dotcom posting, right?


 
yeah will be him unless i did it while asleep lol


----------



## Frances Lengel (Feb 16, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> re-branded at some point as 'embassy special filter'
> 
> real lung-beaters as I recall. Never to be used in a spliff
> 
> /dc


 
They were alright in a spliff - If you used a single kingsize, a full embassy filter fitted in just right.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 16, 2013)

i go off the internet for five minutes etc


----------



## emanymton (Feb 16, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> re-branded at some point as 'embassy special filter'
> 
> real lung-beaters as I recall. Never to be used in a spliff
> 
> /dc


My mum's fag of choice.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 17, 2013)

copliker said:


> Useless.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> Hey Twitter, help me out. I'm looking for lectures and documentaries on the Paris Commune available online. And related things...


 
This sort of thing seems to be spreading:



> *Sunny Hundal* ‏@*sunny_hundal*
> Has anyone researched if cuts to housing benefit could bankrupt landlords, crash housing market and de-stabilise banks? Seems plausible.


 
https://twitter.com/sunny_hundal/status/303228490080202752


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 17, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> This sort of thing seems to be spreading:
> 
> 
> 
> https://twitter.com/sunny_hundal/status/303228490080202752


 
capitalism in inevitably causing harm to the foundations of its own system shocker


----------



## Firky (Feb 17, 2013)

Crowdsourcing isn't anything new or contagious. Sunny isn't doing anything out of the ordinary for a journalist of his calibre.


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 17, 2013)

firky said:


> Crowdsourcing isn't anything new or contagious. Sunny isn't doing anything out of the ordinary for a journalist of his calibre.


And we all know what his calibre is.


----------



## Firky (Feb 17, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> And we all know what his calibre is.


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 17, 2013)

> Has anyone researched if cuts to housing benefit could bankrupt landlords


 
and has anyone researched if it would cause mass gnashing of teeth, wailing and beating of breast if that did happen?


----------



## Libertad (Feb 18, 2013)

> Flat hunting is the worst. London rents are brutal right now.


 
"https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/303496009030455296"

Poor lamb.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 18, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> and has anyone researched if it would cause mass gnashing of teeth, wailing and beating of breast if that did happen?


 
She should read the Guardian's professional housing network site...


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 18, 2013)

I wonder what zany mismatched odd couplesque housemate lezzard will be saddled with next.


----------



## Firky (Feb 18, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I wonder what zany mismatched odd couplesque housemate lezzard will be saddled with next.


 
Someone who's slightly left-field, contrived, not exactly loaded but well networked to the "important people", pretends to like sci-fi, smoker and articulated. 

Remember the hovel thing? "It's not me that calls it the hovel, it's Nick, Nick, Nick. I only said it because he did." 

What a good friend and potential flat mate she is to have. Will lie and blame her actions and behaviour on you. Like a spoilt kid.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 18, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I wonder what zany mismatched odd couplesque housemate lezzard will be saddled with next.


 
Likely new housemate:

Another 20-something female bohemian middle class journalist 

Unlikely new housemates:

His own kids


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 18, 2013)

Libertad said:


> "https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/303496009030455296"
> 
> Poor lamb.


I'd be more gutted for her if there wasn't reports of the some those poorest in London being decanted out of the city as far afield as Liverpool because of the housing benefits cap. 

Penny has some choice in where she lives and who she lives with. She will most likely have a bedroom to herself (unless of her own choosing). Tell that to benefit claimants facing finding an extra hundred pounds or more a week.


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 18, 2013)

First it was research, now it's property...



> On that note, if anyone in LDN has a decent place to rent, let me know. The situation is reasonably urgent.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Feb 18, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> First it was research, now it's property...


 
Any London council tenant affected by the bedroom tax should get right in there with an offer of a room.


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 18, 2013)

Also - 'reasonably urgent'? No. Something is either urgent or not. 'Reasonably pressing' perhaps, or 'becoming urgent', but not a combination of the two.


----------



## brogdale (Feb 18, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> Any London council tenant affected by the bedroom tax should get right in there with an offer of a room.


 


Reminds me; fraudster Shapps glibly offered up this take in a lodger 'solution' on the news the other night, and I thought what impact would the rent recieved from a lodger have on folks benefits etc?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 18, 2013)

Libertad said:


> "https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/303496009030455296"
> 
> Poor lamb.


 
has she been kicked out the hovel?  smoking in bed?  musical differences?  not doing the washing up?


----------



## Libertad (Feb 18, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> has she been kicked out the hovel? smoking in bed? musical differences? not doing the washing up?


 
She lied about her references.


----------



## Firky (Feb 18, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Also - 'reasonably urgent'? No. Something is either urgent or not. 'Reasonably pressing' perhaps, or 'becoming urgent', but not a combination of the two.


 
Someone needs to ask her what sort of price she was looking at so they can help


----------



## Libertad (Feb 18, 2013)

Penny is now about to lay in to Owen Jones over an article he wrote about Galloway which she hasn't read properly.

She demands that Jones picks up his phone.

It's on Twitter but cba to link to it.


----------



## Libertad (Feb 18, 2013)

> @*OwenJones84* seriously mate we need to talk, and not on Twitter. Please pick up your phone!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 18, 2013)

mentalist


----------



## Firky (Feb 18, 2013)

We need to discuss this over the phone = damage limitation.

Think of our image, Owen.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 18, 2013)




----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 18, 2013)




----------



## equationgirl (Feb 18, 2013)

Even if you don't have a phone, Owen, please pick up the phone.


----------



## rosecore (Feb 18, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> The Left should learn from Galloway? @*OwenJones84*, wtf? I would have thought you know precisely why GG has been demonised. And justly so.
> *Helen Lewis* ‏@*helenlewis*
> @*PennyRed* @*OwenJones84* Thought his point that GG gets more support than you'd expect a repellent sexist to was clear, myself…
> ...


 
Crisis over, she simply didn't get the article right away.


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 18, 2013)

firky said:


> We need to discuss this over the phone = damage limitation.
> 
> Think of *my* image, Owen.


Fixed it for you.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 18, 2013)

She can't even read - there aren't many qualifications for being a writer but surely reading is one of them


----------



## Firky (Feb 18, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Fixed it for you.


 
Aye.

I bet Owen was looking at his phone ring on silent thinking, "Oh fuck off, Laura and just READ IT"


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 18, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> She can't even read - there aren't many qualifications for being a writer but surely reading is one of them


Reading and writing being the two main ones I would have thought.

What did she do at uni again?


----------



## smokedout (Feb 18, 2013)

damage limitation successful

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
@*helenlewis* @*owenjones84* I didn't get it until Owen explained it to me on the phone. I get that that's what he meant


----------



## Firky (Feb 18, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Reading and writing being the two main ones I would have thought.
> 
> What did she do at uni again?


 
Quaff and have run-away teenage bisexuals anoint her cut knees after a hard night of drinking and snorting ket. If you believe her blog.

Way back last year (back before I posted 'that' cartoon) she was wittering on about how someone called her a pixie. She took a bit of an objection to it and vented it all out on twitter. Then one her ex Oxford pals said something like, "but Laurie, we'd all call you Pixie at Uni, it was your nickname?".

Plastic penny. Faker than green gold.


----------



## Libertad (Feb 18, 2013)

Is Penny really as humourless as she comes across? Maybe she needs a little re-education at the Emma Goldman summer camp.


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 18, 2013)

Libertad said:


> Is Penny really as humourless as she comes across? Maybe she needs a little re-education at the Emma Goldman summer camp.


She's probably just trying to be taken very seriously.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 18, 2013)

The breath taking gall of her

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
I believe that @*OwenJones84* is a feminist ally who has had some problems expressing himself lately. I'm taking him for tea. Tea fixes things


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Feb 18, 2013)

She only read the headline, not the whole article. Last time she took a quick glance at something, she assumed the IWCA was fash.


----------



## cesare (Feb 18, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> The breath taking gall of her
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> I believe that @*OwenJones84* is a feminist ally who has had some problems expressing himself lately. I'm taking him for tea. Tea fixes things



He'll be gutted


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 18, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> She only read the headline, not the whole article. Last time she took a quick glance at something, she assumed the IWCA was fash.


 
Are English comprehension leaves a little to be desired in someone claiming to be a serious journalist, IMHO.


----------



## weepiper (Feb 18, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> The breath taking gall of her
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> I believe that @*OwenJones84* is a feminist ally who has had some problems expressing himself lately. I'm taking him for tea. Tea fixes things


 
 perhaps if she fucking _listened_ to what people were saying...


----------



## mrs quoad (Feb 18, 2013)

firky said:


> Way back last year (back before I posted 'that' cartoon) she was wittering on about how someone called her a pixie. She took a bit of an objection to it and vented it all out on twitter. Then one her ex Oxford pals said something like, "but Laurie, we'd all call you Pixie at Uni, it was your nickname?".




 I don't dislike my magic anarcho-feminist pixie voice. YOU CAN HAVE THREE WISHES AS LONG AS THEY ARE ALL #FULLCOMMUNISM.



Not sure how authentic that is


----------



## Sue (Feb 18, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> The breath taking gall of her
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> I believe that @*OwenJones84* is a feminist ally who has had some problems expressing himself lately. I'm taking him for tea. Tea fixes things


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 18, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> She only read the headline, not the whole article. Last time she took a quick glance at something, she assumed the IWCA was fash.


I was hoping she had learnt from her mistake in that episode. Evidently not.


----------



## Firky (Feb 18, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> The breath taking gall of her
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> I believe that @*OwenJones84* is a feminist ally who *has had some problems expressing himself* lately. I'm taking him for tea. Tea fixes things


 
 

That's exactly the thing I'd say if I was on a troll.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 18, 2013)

_who has had some problems expressing himself_

That's sinister. Think about what she's saying there, it's orwellian.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 18, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> _who has had some problems expressing himself_
> 
> That's sinister. Think about what she's saying there, it's orwellian.


 
You need to chill out mate you've been taking twitter a bit seriously today


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 18, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> The breath taking gall of her
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> I believe that @*OwenJones84* is a feminist ally who has had some problems expressing himself lately. I'm taking him for tea. Tea fixes things


 
I f he's having problems then isn't he suffering enough already?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 18, 2013)

it was either tea with Lawrie or lunch with Ellie-May


----------



## chilango (Feb 18, 2013)

She's a fucking idiot. Seriously,

The fact that people pay her to write her crap should set alarm bells ringing about just what role she plays...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 18, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> You need to chill out mate you've been taking twitter a bit seriously today


 
It's more than just a hobby, it's a calling.


----------



## Firky (Feb 18, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> You need to chill out mate you've been taking twitter a bit seriously today


 
I have warned him, but he's so keen!


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 18, 2013)

Tea doesn't fix fuck all, coffee and cannabis doesn't fix anything either, its just better

Being patronised by Laura of a cup of wankers brew- some shte earl grey or something- isn't going to fix even a broken kinder egg toy


----------



## Firky (Feb 18, 2013)

> So @jamiekilstein is playing all this week at the Soho theatre. If you want your faith in feminist men restored, you should go. #comedy


 
Jamiekilstein is Followed by *Jonnie Marbles* and *mollycrabapple*.

Oh, I wonder if that is coincidental? No other 'lefty' I follow seems to have heard of him. How odd.


----------



## weepiper (Feb 18, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Tea doesn't fix fuck all, coffee and cannabis doesn't fix anything either, its just better
> 
> Being patronised by Laura of a cup of wankers brew- some shte earl grey or something- isn't going to fix even a broken kinder egg toy


 
Middle class bollocks anyway. Everyone knows that what you do when you want to sort out a difference of opinion is get pissed together


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 18, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Middle class bollocks anyway. Everyone knows that what you do when you want to sort out a difference of opinion is get pissed together


 

traditionally followed by a fight and/or a crap shag


----------



## Sue (Feb 18, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> traditionally followed by a fight and/or a crap shag


 
Bag of chips surely?


----------



## weepiper (Feb 18, 2013)

Sue said:


> Bag of chips surely?


 
not mutually exclusive


----------



## Sue (Feb 18, 2013)

weepiper said:


> not mutually exclusive


 
Oh. Maybe that's where I've been going wrong all these years...


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 18, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Tea doesn't fix fuck all, coffee and cannabis doesn't fix anything either, its just better
> 
> Being patronised by Laura of a cup of wankers brew- some shte earl grey or something- isn't going to fix even a broken kinder egg toy


 
She knew her last public speech was going badly when the usherette came round at the interval with a tray of cyanide capsules.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Feb 18, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Also - 'reasonably urgent'? No. Something is either urgent or not. 'Reasonably pressing' perhaps, or 'becoming urgent', but not a combination of the two.


 
Poor English from someone who writes for a living does rankle.


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 18, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> Poor English from someone who writes for a living does rankle.


Exactly.


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 18, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> traditionally followed by a fight and/or a crap shag





Sue said:


> Bag of chips surely?





weepiper said:


> not mutually exclusive


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 18, 2013)

I think my cat would have a lot to say about intersectionality in professional and public spheres and would have some very important insights into the state of radical politics today.


----------



## Balbi (Feb 19, 2013)

That Jones article is basically the 'Galloway a huge pustule ridden fuckknuckle, but the boy gives good rhetoric' argument isn't it?

Edit - oh, it's more than that. It's sort of, kind of aimed at the identity politics and lingustic gymnastics squad. The right have better, simpler narratives because their narratives tend not to include the margins - just a big rolling snowball of white, middle class comfort. The left need to come up with equally simple stories but include everyone.

The problem with simple stories is that it relies on established tropes - scroungers, immigrants etc. And utlising simple tropes can get you the support of Burchill if you're not careful.


----------



## BigTom (Feb 19, 2013)

Something that stuck out for me in that article was he thought people in the audience of question time are "non-politicos". Maybe they're not quite from the westminster village but it's telling about how small his world is that he thinks non-politicos would apply for tickets to be in the question time audience.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 19, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Something that stuck out for me in that article was he thought people in the audience of question time are "non-politicos". Maybe they're not quite from the westminster village but it's telling about how small his world is that he thinks non-politicos would apply for tickets to be in the question time audience.


 
actually that's a really good point.  by the standards of the man on the clapham omnibus, being in the audience of Question Time is pretty much as political as it is possible to be, but by the standards of the commentariat they're outside of the whole thing.  the commentariat identify more with the political classes than with the people - and why indeed shouldn't they.  journalists, writers, they all went to the same schools and universities and have the same lifestyles and outlooks and indeed are pretty interchangeable.  and think we're a different fucking species to be ruled over or dictated to through columns, spoken on behalf of but never asked for our opinions.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 19, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Something that stuck out for me in that article was he thought people in the audience of question time are "non-politicos". Maybe they're not quite from the westminster village but it's telling about how small his world is that he thinks non-politicos would apply for tickets to be in the question time audience.


They're supposed to allocate on the basis of this questionaire - in reality they dish tickets out to the parties. When i was in labour i was in branch 30 miles outside of the big bristol branches which had hundreds of members, yet when QT was in bristol we still got around 20 tickets. God knows how many the bristol branches got.


----------



## killer b (Feb 19, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> They're supposed to allocate on the basis of this questionaire - in reality they dish tickets out to the parties. When i was in labour i was in branch 30 miles outside of the big bristol branches which had hundreds of members, yet when QT was in bristol we still got around 20 tickets. God knows how many the bristol branches got.


tomb-five-hundred-thousand-soldiers?


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 19, 2013)

Oops, pasted wrong text in link. Fixed now.


----------



## killer b (Feb 19, 2013)

sounds like an interesting book fwiw


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 19, 2013)

killer b said:


> sounds like an interesting book fwiw


It's fantastic - there's a rubbish pdf of it here.


----------



## killer b (Feb 19, 2013)

nice one, cheers.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Feb 19, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> When i was in labour


 
Never realised. Was it a boy or a girl?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 19, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> and has anyone researched if it would cause mass gnashing of teeth, wailing and beating of breast if that did happen?


 
Daft thing is, even a div like Hundal could work out, with a few days of simple research that only landlords in areas with flat demand for private sector housing will suffer, the rest will simply shift from taking non-working HB claimants (including "engineering" their existing HB tenants out of their homes by giving them notice to quit) to further up the benefits "food chain". Yet again the poor take a portion up the khyber, and all Sunny cares about is the landlord class. *HIS* class.

As for causing wailing, gnashing of teeth, beating of breast, one can only hope it causes worse trauma to the minority that will be affected.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 19, 2013)

rosecore said:


> Crisis over, she simply didn't get the article right away.


 
The brightest girl at a bright school didn't get it?
Fuck, I wasn't the brightest boy in my class, let alone my entire school, but *I* got it straight away, when I read it!
I'm now labouring under the less-than-vague suspicion that La Pennionara didn't actually read the article at all until *after* having a pop at Jones.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 19, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> She only read the headline, not the whole article. Last time she took a quick glance at something, she assumed the IWCA was fash.


 
You'd think she'd learn her lesson, but these middle-class types never do. No humility.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 19, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> it was either tea with Lawrie or lunch with Ellie-May


 
A nice _shish_ for lunch with kebab bum finger.


----------



## Random (Feb 19, 2013)

I've had a revelation and realised what she's doing. Penny Red is a gonzo political journalist, in the same way that Hunter Thompson was a gonzo sports journalist.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 19, 2013)

Random said:


> I've had a revelation and realised what she's doing. Penny Red is a gonzo political journalist, in the same way that Hunter Thompson was a gonzo sports journalist.


 
Put the crack pipe down, Random.


----------



## Libertad (Feb 19, 2013)

Random said:


> Penny Red is a gonzo political journalist,


 
She would be if she was Italian.


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 19, 2013)

Random said:


> I've had a revelation and realised what she's doing. Penny Red is a gonzo political journalist, in the same way that Hunter Thompson was a gonzo sports journalist.


 

There is a whiff of the Steadman about Crabapples scrawls as well...


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 19, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> There is a whiff of the Steadman about Crabapples scrawls as well...


 
In her fucking dreams is there a whiff of Steadman about her scrawls.


----------



## Fruitloop (Feb 19, 2013)

There really is, isn't there.

Or at least, there wants to be.


----------



## killer b (Feb 19, 2013)

Random said:


> I've had a revelation and realised what she's doing. Penny Red is a gonzo political journalist, in the same way that Hunter Thompson was a gonzo sports journalist.


that's specifically what she claimed wrt that greece book she did with crabbaple wasn't it?


----------



## phildwyer (Feb 19, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Fuck, I wasn't the brightest boy in my class, let alone my entire school


 
You weren't even the brightest boy in your Y-fronts.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 19, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> You weren't even the brightest boy in your Y-fronts.


 
Fuck off, dwyer.


----------



## Random (Feb 19, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Put the crack pipe down, Random.


I'm serious. Read HPT's account of how he's stuck in a hotel room, sweating, too high to get out and actually cover the football game. He wastes the whole day and night then, minutes before his deadline he realises the way out, and simply copies his report of last year's match, replacing only the names of the team. If twitter had existed he'd have crowdsourced his material instead.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 19, 2013)

Random said:


> I'm serious. Read HPT's account of how he's stuck in a hotel room, sweating, too high to get out and actually cover the football game. He wastes the whole day and night then, minutes before his deadline he realises the way out, and simply copies his report of last year's match, replacing only the names of the team. If twitter had existed he'd have crowdsourced his material instead.


He did that because he was great and his previous piece was probably good enough for two years anyway - she does it because she is an intellectually lazy dullard whose been told she's clever her whole life.


----------



## Random (Feb 19, 2013)

killer b said:


> that's specifically what she claimed wrt that greece book she did with crabbaple wasn't it?


Yes, and at the time I thought she was just using a rather odd and badly fitting analogy with HPT and Stedman's work, in order to sex up the project. Now I realise it all makes sense when you realise that Fear and Loathing is actually the story of an attempt to _cover a motorbike race_, and HPT and Stedman were ostensibly trying to cover the Kentucky Derby. I have no doubt that Penny and Molly covered the Greek working class movement with the same degree of accuracy and professionalism as Hunter and Ralph covered that horse race.


----------



## killer b (Feb 19, 2013)

if she did it with such a prodigious intake of drugs, i'll tip my hat to her. a couple of ouzos in a sidestreet bar is falling well short of her heroes though.


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 19, 2013)

also doing gonzo for Rolling Stone is pretty cool. For the staggers. not so much


----------



## Greebo (Feb 19, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> You weren't even the brightest boy in your Y-fronts.


You claim to have got into them? If so, I doubt you were the brighter one.


----------



## gosub (Feb 19, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> also doing gonzo for Rolling Stone is pretty cool. For the staggers. not so much


no, what made it cool was it was original


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 19, 2013)

exactly.  it was a great idea, the first time.  every other time it is a shit self-indulgent nonsense.


----------



## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

Evan Wright's articles in the Rolling Stone were good - they led to the TV series Generation Kill.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4123158


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 19, 2013)

I preferred Sam Snort's column in Hot Press.


----------



## Bert Trautmann (Feb 19, 2013)

Wow. Not sure what I think about this. Glad to see there's a thread largely devoted to exposing the scandal that is Laurie Penny, but it's just too long. I'm sure that it'll prove an invaluable resource one day; once she's established herself as a political and cultural fixture and somebody decides to chart her rise to greatness. In that spirit, I'll just park the following here from here recent piece on how the usual speculation and punditry on Iraq fails to acknowledge the profound effect the war had on...um...Laurie Penny.

First, she claimed it was a NATO war. The piece was altered later and a note was placed at the bottom from an editor explaining that the error had been corrected. No mention however that to have assumed it was NATO that led the invasion amounts to either a complete misunderstanding of the entire war and its build-up or an admission that the author knew fuck all about Iraq, but felt qualified to pronounce regardless; bypassing the conventional research stage.
Secondly, we get this: "For me, at the age of 16, there were a lot of firsts on 15 February 2003: first truancy, first solo trip to London, first time seeing democracy rudely circumvented."
This is especially odd since the march took place on a Saturday during half term. One is forced to wonder just how she managed to play truant.

Now I'm not sure if in a few years, stuff like this will even matter; whether facts will have any real and determinate significance in the journalism and commentary of the future. It seems at present as if the trend points otherwise. She's been caught out at least as often as Hari now yet is able to dismiss criticism by claiming her accusers are tiresome and pedantic or indeed just petty misogynists splitting hairs about unimportant shit like the truth; the truth no doubt regarded, in this context, as a conspiracy conjured up by a neocon patriarchy to throw a spanner in the works of Laurie Penny's worldview. You can sense how desperate they are to fuck with hr crusade; so desperate in fact that they resort to the most underhand and oppressive tactics available ie. revealing that she makes it all up.

Now I can see how if were a member of small cabal of the global megarich industrial, political and corporate elite, Laurie Pennie would be exactly the sort of campaigning Journalist I'd want on my case: narcissistic, dishonest, politically naive and self-serving and devoted above all to a battleground of semiotics rather than anything so concrete as raising working class living standards. But why do the rest of the so-called left indulge her? She's a walking, talking own-goal. An accident waiting to happen again. Seeing her take to a keyboard must feel like watching Wile E Coyote strap rockets onto his roller skates.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 19, 2013)

Welcome to the boards bert, good first post - hope the necks feeling a bit better.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 19, 2013)

Can someone out there buy cadre Trautmann a drink, please?


----------



## Libertad (Feb 19, 2013)

Bert Trautmann said:


> Secondly, we get this: "For me, at the age of 16, there were a lot of firsts on 15 February 2003: first truancy, first solo trip to London, first time seeing democracy rudely circumvented."
> This is especially odd since the march took place on a Saturday during half term. One is forced to wonder just how she managed to play truant.


 
She was at boarding school. Excellent post though Bert.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 19, 2013)

Why would anyone tell Diane Abbott about where they're moving? Unless they're Michael Portillo (no misogyny intended).







"Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed

Who lives in Dalston and what's good in Dalston? #housemoving"


----------



## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

"Seeing her take to a keyboard must feel like watching Wile E Coyote strap rockets onto his roller skates."




Good thing about Dalston is that Stokie is just up the road.


----------



## killer b (Feb 19, 2013)

firky said:


> "Seeing her take to a keyboard must feel like watching Wile E Coyote strap rockets onto his roller skates."


yes, a fine turn of phrase. filed for future use (not here  ).


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Why would anyone tell Diane Abbott about where they're moving? Unless they're Michael Portillo (no misogyny intended).
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

I find abbot/portillos bipartisan wuv quite touching in a way.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 19, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I find abbot/portillos bipartisan wuv quite touching in a way.


 
I just feel sorry for Porto's Spanish republican da.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 19, 2013)

firky said:


> Good thing about Dalston is that Stokie is just up the road.


 

Stokie is the most horrible place on earth.  it should be nuked.  loathsomely smug middle class wankers everywhere with their organic bicycle shops and artisan haircuts.  FUCK OFF FUCK OFF FUCK OFF.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 19, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> Stokie is the most horrible place on earth. it should be nuked. loathsomely smug middle class wankers everywhere with their organic bicycle shops and artisan haircuts. FUCK OFF FUCK OFF FUCK OFF.


 
Aren't the police meant to be incredibly bent there as well?


----------



## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> Stokie is the most horrible place on earth. it should be nuked. loathsomely smug middle class wankers everywhere with their organic bicycle shops and artisan haircuts. FUCK OFF FUCK OFF FUCK OFF.


 
That's applicable for all of orth London.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 19, 2013)

firky said:


> That's applicable for all of orth London.


 
some places are worse than others.  Stokey is a dystopian vision of the future,  where the guardian readers have ascended to power and everywhere is Stepford Yuppies pretending to be a) interesting, and b) good human beings whilst actually being bubble-dwelling parasites like the last day of Rome.  horrible place. 

Abney Park Cemetery is nice though.  you ahve to brave lattegeddon to get to it though.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 19, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Aren't the police meant to be incredibly bent there as well?


 
dunno, i've only seen them moving on beggars.  although i did get into a street-fight in Stokey in 1997, fuelled by absinthe and stella.  i recall that the police merely broke it up and sent us on our way.  it was a different place back then.  i doubt you can get a pint of stella there anymore.  artisan brews from brooklyn, yes, fucking honey coloured ales brewed in hoxton by friends that tosspot from blur, almost certainly.  a simple pint of stella pffft.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 19, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> dunno, i've only seen them moving on beggars. although i did get into a street-fight in Stokey in 1997, fuelled by absinthe and stella. i recall that the police merely broke it up and sent us on our way. it was a different place back then. i doubt you can get a pint of stella there anymore. artisan brews from brooklyn, yes, fucking honey coloured ales brewed in hoxton by friends that tosspot from blur, almost certainly. a simple pint of stella pffft.


 
In fairness, Stella is terrible stuff.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 19, 2013)




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## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

I like Stokie because it is the part of London I know best and am most familiar with. Going back about 6 or 7 years now though - I am sure it has got worse in teh way you describe. Church Street always used to seem a bit out of place.


There's something on Channel 4 starting soon: Day in the Life of a Fried Chicken Shop. I heard it was in Stokie so I am going to watch it.


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## DotCommunist (Feb 19, 2013)

it's grim up north london. South of the river every time. At least there you'll be mugged by proles rather than mugged by gastropub prices


----------



## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

firky said:


> There's something on Channel 4 starting soon: Day in the Life of a Fried Chicken Shop. I heard it was in Stokie so I am going to watch it.


 
Oh it is in Clapham. I will be having words with my little bird.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/...ife-in-a-day/episode-guide/series-1/episode-1


----------



## Plumdaff (Feb 19, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> it's grim up north london. South of the river every time. At least there you'll be mugged by proles rather than mugged by gastropub prices


 
South London's changed. See threads on here ad nauseum.

Anyway on topic, isn't Laurie exactly what happens when, as LiamO's 'killed by praise' thread describes you just tell someome their are very clever throughout their childhood. Except because of her level of priviledge this will just continue her entire life, rather than being cruelly bashed out of her by experience in early adulthood.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 19, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> some places are worse than others. Stokey is a dystopian vision of the future, where the guardian readers have ascended to power and everywhere is Stepford Yuppies pretending to be a) interesting, and b) good human beings whilst actually being bubble-dwelling parasites like the last day of Rome. horrible place.
> 
> Abney Park Cemetery is nice though. you ahve to brave lattegeddon to get to it though.


 
Suzanne Moore agrees with you on the Cemetery and that Church Street is no good:

Jump to 7:20 here


----------



## Plumdaff (Feb 19, 2013)

firky said:


> Oh it is in Clapham. I will be having words with my little bird.
> 
> http://www.channel4.com/programmes/...ife-in-a-day/episode-guide/series-1/episode-1


 
Clapham High Street on a weekend night is fucking hideous. A perfect storm of twattery. That show will be appalling - which is presumably exactly what Channel 4 will want.


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## goldenecitrone (Feb 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Suzanne Moore agrees with you on the Cemetery and that Church Street is no good:
> 
> Jump to 7:20 here




Not seen her mooching around for a while now. My favourite memory of Abney Park cemetery is walking through one week day and seeing loads of police with search dogs amongst the graves. They didn't so much as smile when I asked them if they'd found a body.


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## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Suzanne Moore agrees with you on the Cemetery and that Church Street is no good:
> 
> Jump to 7:20 here


 
DAMN YOU, Sihhi 

She's obviously never been to the kebab shop


----------



## goldenecitrone (Feb 19, 2013)

firky said:


> DAMN YOU, Sihhi
> 
> She's obviously never been to the kebab shop


 
That is a good kebab shop. Far superior to my local Chickpizz.


----------



## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> That is a good kebab shop. Far superior to my local Chickpizz.


 
It does the best kebab I have ever had.

Pretty sure William Booth of Sally Slave Army is buried in that cemetery too. Should we put him on work fare after ATOS say he's fit for work?


----------



## goldenecitrone (Feb 19, 2013)

firky said:


> It does the best kebab I have ever had.
> 
> Pretty sure William Booth of Sally Slave Army is buried in that cemetery too. Should we put him on work fare after ATOS say he's fit for work?


 
He is indeed. And Edgar Allen Poe once went to school on Church Street in what is now the very pleasant Fox Reformed.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 19, 2013)

Bert Trautmann said:


> But why do the rest of the so-called left indulge her? She's a walking, talking own-goal. An accident waiting to happen again. Seeing her take to a keyboard must feel like watching Wile E Coyote strap rockets onto his roller skates.


 
I get the same feeling with her best friend, companion in Greece, US radical:

http://mollycrabapple.com/2013/02/19/coming-to-london


"The Story
Conway Hall
25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL
Friday, February 22, 2013
Event runs 10am-4pm
I go on at 12:00pm. I’m going to talk about art and politics.

London School of Economics
Women Writing History @ LSE and Gender Institute Literary Festival
Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
The London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
1-2:30pm
I’ll be speaking about Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and ideas about men’s and women’s art. Free, but you have to reserve tickets online"

_The Story_ all sold out (how?) at £65 tickets for 6 hours is to listen to these people:

"Diane Coyle runs the consultancy Enlightenment Economics. She is Vice Chair of the BBC Trust, a member of the Migration Advisory Committee, was a member of the Browne Review of higher education funding, and was on the Competition Commission for eight years.

I asked Rob [Manuel] to talk at The Story because I love B3ta, but since asking him he’s written about cliched attitudes to ‘the bottom half of the internet’ and what this says about attitudes to class in online culture

Alecky Blyth is a playwright and screenwriter who won a Time Out Award for her first play, Come Out Eli, and was selected as one of Screen International’s Stars of Tomorrow in 2007.

Laura Dockrill is the author and illustrator of Mistakes In The Background, Ugly Shy Girl and Echoes, and has recently signed a three book deal for Darcy Burdock, a new ‘tween’ series of books with Random House Children’s division- the first of the series comes out in Jan 2013. Laura also resurrects her words on the stage performing poetry spanning festivals to bookshops; including London Literary Festival, Big Chill, E4 Udderbelly, Latitude and Domino festival in Brussels.

Fiona [Romeo] produced content and experiences for brands like the BBC, Disney, and the Science Museum.

Alex Balfour joined the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) as Head of New Media in 2006. At LOCOG he built a team from scratch that delivered 77 digital channels including london2012.com, two mobile apps, ticketing, volunteering, education, online shop, mobile apps and social media presences to a worldwide audience of over 150m, including 15m app downloads and 112m unique website users during the Olympic and Paralympic Games."

From http://thestory.org.uk/who-will-be-there/


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## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

Molly doesn't irritate me half as much as the famous three: Our Owen, Penny Liar and Sunny H.



goldenecitrone said:


> He is indeed. And Edgar Allen Poe once went to school on Church Street in what is now the very pleasant Fox Reformed.


Is Leo's Cafe still there? You got a canny plate of scran in Leo's.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 19, 2013)

firky said:


> Molly doesn't irritate me half as much as the famous three: Our Owen, Penny Liar and Sunny H.


 
Sunny Hundal is on his own plane of extreme arrogance.


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## DotCommunist (Feb 19, 2013)

sundial


----------



## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Sunny Hundal is on his own plane of extreme arrogance.


 
Any idea who the person is in the bottom right?


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## DotCommunist (Feb 19, 2013)

Harry Potter


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## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

I was thinking Aaron Porter after a few pies. Too much hair though.

Sue Perkins?


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## frogwoman (Feb 19, 2013)

That's hari surely?


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## goldenecitrone (Feb 19, 2013)

firky said:


> Is Leo's Cafe still there? You got a canny plate of scran in Leo's.


 
I think so. Didn't notice anything new there last time I was in the Jolly Butcher's.


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## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> I think so. Didn't notice anything new there last time I was in the Jolly Butcher's.


 


el-ahrairah said:


> i doubt you can get a pint of stella there anymore. artisan brews from brooklyn, yes, fucking honey coloured ales brewed in hoxton by friends that tosspot from blur, almost certainly. a simple pint of stella pffft.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Feb 19, 2013)

firky said:


>


 
You wouldn't recognise the Butcher's if you haven't been there for a while. It's actually a pretty good pub. No more Karaoke on a week night though.


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## sihhi (Feb 19, 2013)

Need good captions for this:






and this:


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## Lo Siento. (Feb 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> London School of Economics
> Women Writing History @ LSE and Gender Institute Literary Festival
> Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
> The London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE
> ...


Incidentally, well done for LSE for taking the brave decision to have an event on Women Writing History without any historians at all, despite it being a discipline in which there are many prominent women.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Need good captions for this:


 


> RESPECT THE COCK! TAME THE CUNT!


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## sihhi (Feb 19, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> Incidentally, well done for LSE for taking the brave decision to have an event on Women Writing History without any historians at all, despite it being a discipline in which there are many prominent women.


 
It's not about history as such.

"In celebration of LSE’s acquisition of the Women’s Library, our distinguished panel will discuss _the role of women in literature, the arts and academia today._"

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2013/02/LitFest20130227t1300vSZT.aspx

which makes Crabapple's topic of Rivera and Kahlo even more baffling.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 19, 2013)

This blog gets weirder and weirder: 
"Meet our new crush: Fred Holston, son of Alabaman communist Henry Holston and the ultimate solidarity sartorialist. He has an unending collection of beautiful boots that truly ice the cake of his ravishing, revolutionary look."


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 19, 2013)

Someone needs to point out that that 7 pairs of boots is not 'an unending collection'.


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## killer b (Feb 19, 2013)

i've got more boots than him.


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## killer b (Feb 19, 2013)

and a better hat.


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## Delroy Booth (Feb 19, 2013)

Those boots don't look very practical for a revolutionary I have to say.


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## cesare (Feb 19, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Those boots don't look very practical for a revolutionary I have to say.


Could give someone a sharp jab in the shins with the pointy ended ones, I suppose. Maybe they're steel toed pointy ends?


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## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

That poor dog. Stuck in the same room as him. 

Will nayone think ovtha dergs,man?


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## Steel Icarus (Feb 19, 2013)

Not sure he's saying himself he's a revolutionary. No idea though why anyone would think that, after all here he is posing with designers, models, Dita Von Teese, outside a Prada shop, etc 

http://elementsboutique.wordpress.com/2012/08/30/fashions-night-out-dj-fred-holston/


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## Delroy Booth (Feb 19, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Not sure he's saying himself he's a revolutionary.


 
Does the word revolutionary mean something else, like a style or something, these days? Damn young 'uns *waves fist at sky

someone described me as  being "prole kitsch" the other day coz I was banging on about Luddites or something, that's what you get called if you're into class politics.


----------



## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Those boots don't look very practical for a revolutionary I have to say.


 
They're not PFWC NCB boots, nor is that a donkey jacket.


----------



## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

I can't help but think of Bubble when I look at him.


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## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> someone described me as being "prole kitsch" the other day


 
The lustbather?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 19, 2013)

firky said:


> The lustbather?


 
Nah this guy



> *Guattari Jaguar* ‏@*TomWaits4NoMan*
> @*sredniivashtaar* @*DelroyBooth* stop indulging in prole-kitsch identity polictics you Owen Jones loving Trots


----------



## cesare (Feb 19, 2013)




----------



## sihhi (Feb 19, 2013)

firky 

Molly Crabapple's thing is all hype. Crabapple does use galleries and has use exhibitions based on sales repeatedly. As this from Laurie Penny's friend back in 2006 Warren Ellis proves

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=1785

BUT the image she likes to project is this:

http://schedule.sxsw.com/2013/events/event_IAP2793


"Molly Crabapple - visual artist, and Kim Boekbinder - musician, are both champions of the crowd funding age. Both have received international praise and recognition for their groundbreaking work in their respective mediums, as well as the way they run their careers. Though they work in different fields what the two have in common is that they have both built their careers on their own: no management, booking, labels, or galleries of any kind have made possible what they do. Yet they both make a living as full time artists in a world where we are told that fewer and fewer people are paying for music and art.

Molly Crabapple discusses circumventing the rigid gallery system which favors the sale of large and expensive works of art over the quick, passionate, and current work of such a prolific artist."

The game is given away with the "Hacking the Crowd: Artists as Entrepreneurs" title.
Also her manifesto is meaningless. Quick art is not necessarily socially important art or "good" art (whatever that means). As this demonstrates IMO of course.

http://arrestedmotion.com/2009/02/dr-sketchy-anti-art-school-with-ron-english (NSFW)

These people - Sunny, Molly and the rest - want celebrity status.

They try to softly attach themselves to established leftie/liberal/bohemia celebrities so that they all cross-big up one another. That's the only way I can understand LP tweeting that she is moving to Dalston to  Diane Abbott.


----------



## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

From sihhi's link:



> We also found out that the anti-art school was not only a sketch party with some very attractive peeps hanging out, drinking and sharpening their drawing skills localized to New York.Â Dr. Sketchy’s is actually all over the globe.Â From London to Melbourne, Tokyo to Scotland, there may be a Dr. Sketchy’s near you. Throw in the fact that every Dr. Sketchy’s in NYC happens to be at a burlesque bar with plenty of “liquid inspiration” flowing to keep the drawing party kicking.Â Make sure to visit their website and join in the fun.


 
"Peeps hanging out"

AAAAHHH!

I am more tolerable to Molly because unlike her mate I do think she is very obviously talented and does have a real skill. I wouldn't call her a good artist - she's no better or worse than many an art student. She is very lucky, most "artists" can't afford to prance about the way she does. I don't believe she actually needs to produce anything to live - that is her 'art' is not her main source of income. She must do a few hours behind a bar or cleaning like other artists? (pfft!)

The photos on that website are so typical of what to expect too.

Why you wearing a hat indoors and jeans obviously too tgiht

(Never heard of Dr Sketchy and I sort of follow arty stuff)


----------



## sihhi (Feb 19, 2013)

firky said:


> From sihhi's link:
> 
> "Peeps hanging out"
> 
> ...


 
LP is also talented. She does write well, step-by-step investigation is not her deal. But for stoking up middle-class passion / anger  "it's time to get angry" she's one of the very best - that is a real skill.


----------



## Firky (Feb 19, 2013)

She knows her audience and her audience love her.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 19, 2013)

firky said:


> She knows her audience and her audience love her.


 

She is most twitter-followed of all New Statesman journalists. Her audience is also the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (the German equivalent of the Fabian Society  )

https://twitter.com/grrrlsarestrong/status/303883426879111169

and 4chan - the weird guys behind 'Anonymous' that occasionally down a government website for half a day - there's an offer from them for her to go on their boards ! ?

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/303914110947581952


----------



## cesare (Feb 19, 2013)

I didn't realise that 4chan are behind Anonymous.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 19, 2013)

They aren't, not really. 4chan is just the cesspit of the internet.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 19, 2013)

cesare said:


> I didn't realise that 4chan are behind Anonymous.


 
Anonymous kind of grew from it but there is no formal connection


----------



## smokedout (Feb 19, 2013)

given she called urban a hate site, a live chat on 4chan may come as a bit of an eye opener


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 19, 2013)

smokedout said:


> given she called urban a hate site, a live chat on 4chan may come as a bit of an eye opener


 
We could always engage her in debate about slandering Urbanites like that.


----------



## smokedout (Feb 19, 2013)

she did it in secret, back when we were still facebook friends, I bet good money she'd deny it


----------



## Bakunin (Feb 19, 2013)

smokedout said:


> she did it in secret, back when we were still facebook friends, I bet good money she'd deny it


 
Par for the course, though, with her. Although I'd suggest that simply fact-checking her output and asking her to explain her many and varied differences with established fact might still be a vaguely fun way to spend an evening if I didn't have anything better to do. Nothing malicious, false or spiteful for the sake of it, just asking for explanations as to why her versions of event and interpretations of established fact conflict so much and so often with so many other people's sounds fair.


----------



## phildwyer (Feb 20, 2013)

firky said:


> Why you wearing a hat indoors and jeans obviously too tgiht


 
Because she is little better than a brazen hussy?

A disgrace is what I call it.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 20, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Someone needs to point out that that 7 pairs of boots is not 'an unending collection'.


 
He also doesn't seem to have a clue how to clean his footwear properly.


----------



## Firky (Feb 20, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Because she is little better than a brazen hussy?
> 
> A disgrace is what I call it.


 
She?


----------



## phildwyer (Feb 20, 2013)

firky said:


> She?


 
Innit.

Wouldn't have been allowed in my day.


----------



## Firky (Feb 20, 2013)

An interesting turn of phrase by Molly, "guttersnipe".

*mollycrabapple* ‏@*mollycrabapple*
They're hanging blowups of my art tonight at The Savoy for a Brit Awards afterparty. Going to go, feel like guttersnipe in palace.


----------



## love detective (Feb 20, 2013)

_"In which @owenjones84 and me have solidarity-tea (solidaritea?). *Because fighting the good fight can be lonely work*"_

Not sure what is worse, their two smug faces in the photo or the putrid conception of what she thinks progressive politics is about in the quote that accompanies it


----------



## weepiper (Feb 20, 2013)

Oh God. I _want_ to like Owen Jones, I really do.


----------



## smokedout (Feb 20, 2013)

is he getting younger?

how come he's getting younger


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 20, 2013)

smokedout said:


> is he getting younger?
> 
> how come he's getting younger


Witchcraft and sorcery. FACT.


----------



## smokedout (Feb 20, 2013)

come to think of it you never see tony benn now owen's turned up


----------



## Firky (Feb 20, 2013)

Our Owen suffers from the same genetic disorder as myself. Upon reaching 18 years of age you do not look any older with each year that passes.

It's great. You only need to shave three or four times a week for example.

E2A: I am amazed she hasn't turned the book the other way round so we can read the spine and what dribble she is pretending to read.


----------



## JimW (Feb 20, 2013)

He's perhaps taken "left wing communism, an infantile disorder" a bit too literally.


----------



## Firky (Feb 20, 2013)

Marked card 



firky said:


> An interesting turn of phrase by Molly, "guttersnipe".
> 
> *mollycrabapple* ‏@*mollycrabapple*
> They're hanging blowups of my art tonight at The Savoy for a Brit Awards afterparty. Going to go, feel like guttersnipe in palace.


 
@*mollycrabapple* why would you feel like guttersnipe you're well posh and used to such functions?

*mollycrabapple* ‏@*mollycrabapple*
@*Firky* Oh man, are you going to dissect my tweets on that obsessive message board fan thread you have on Laurie and all her friends?

*mollycrabapple* ‏@*mollycrabapple*
@*Firky* but to answer, the poshest parties I've been at, I've been hired entertainment. Which, while pretty good work, is still the help


----------



## Libertad (Feb 20, 2013)

* Follows Firky's Twitter account *


----------



## brogdale (Feb 20, 2013)

firky said:


> Our Owen suffers from the same genetic disorder as myself. Upon reaching 18 years of age you do not look any older with each year that passes.
> 
> It's great. You only need to shave three or four times a week for example.
> 
> E2A: I am amazed she hasn't turned the book the other way round so we can read the spine and what dribble she is pretending to read.


 
Looks suspiciously like the back of Heywood (Third Edition).

Any GovPol takers? (Route B...natch)


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 20, 2013)

It's Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation i think. Pretty sure.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 20, 2013)

Can you tell that just by looking at the barcode butchers?


----------



## brogdale (Feb 20, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It's Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation i think. Pretty sure.


  And she thinks we're creepy obsessives!


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 20, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Can you tell that just by looking at the barcode butchers?


I've shifted boxs and boxes of the thing all around the place for the last few years. And it is a fantastic book.


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 20, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Oh God. I _want_ to like Owen Jones, I really do.


 
He looks like the sort of person who would prefer a packed lunch to al fresco dining.


----------



## Libertad (Feb 20, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> He looks like the sort of person who would prefer a packed lunch to al fresco dining.


----------



## Firky (Feb 20, 2013)

Owen was chuffed when the bill arrived and he had to say good by to her. Unfortunately he has trouble expressing himself so it looks like he is smiling and happy to be in her presence.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 20, 2013)

Has this one been done yet? It was  .

http://www.itv.com/thismorning/life/bottom-touching-debate


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 20, 2013)

is she wearing a fedora?


----------



## goldenecitrone (Feb 20, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Can you tell that just by looking at the barcode butchers?


 
Plus, the first 1,000 editions had a giveaway beard on the front cover.


----------



## Firky (Feb 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Has this one been done yet? It was  .
> 
> http://www.itv.com/thismorning/life/bottom-touching-debate


 
The biggest prick out of those three has to be Schofield. 

She's not wrong - didn't watch it all as it is obvious as to what she'd say. Why would you? I'd put money on that anyone here wouldn't feel the need to give a lass a tap on the arse as she walked by. Maybe 20 year ago but that kind of thing is becoming less common, isn't it?

Just trying to think of how some of my friends would react if I gave their arse a stroke.... black eyes and bust lips.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 20, 2013)

It's not the _content_ of the arguments or the discussion that's the key here, it's that she (and by extension all the other penny types) are now starting to dominate even this sort of space for public debate - rather than say, a single mother forced into work by active labour market measures and trapped there who is forced to out up with a gropey-feely boss as the financial consequences would be too much to bear. The branding is working and now pushing _the product_ into ever-expanding areas. And of course, the other journo - Liz Fraser - also attended private school and oxbridge.


----------



## Sue (Feb 20, 2013)

love detective said:


> _ *Because fighting the good fight can be lonely work*"_
> 
> Not sure what is worse, their two smug faces in the photo or the putrid conception of what she thinks progressive politics is about in the quote that accompanies it


 
I can feel the blood, sweat, tears and personal sacrifice from that quote alone.


----------



## Sue (Feb 20, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Witchcraft and sorcery. FACT.


 
Picture in the attic?


----------



## not-bono-ever (Feb 20, 2013)

she is fucking everywhere. LP is the future of media friendly left commentariat. fuckin hell.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Feb 20, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> is she wearing a fedora?


 
There's something wrong about someone wearing a hat indoors...


----------



## Firky (Feb 20, 2013)

Kid_Eternity said:


> There's something wrong about someone wearing a hat indoors...


 
It is one of her many contrived idiosyncrasies.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Feb 20, 2013)

Laurie Penny's _hat_?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Feb 20, 2013)

Dunno about that...it just looks odd whenever anyone does tbh.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 20, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It's not the _content_ of the arguments or the discussion that's the key here, it's that she (and by extension all the other penny types) are now starting to dominate even this sort of space for public debate - rather than say, a single mother forced into work by active labour market measures and trapped there who is forced to out up with a gropey-feely boss as the financial consequences would be too much to bear. The branding is working and now pushing _the product_ into ever-expanding areas. And of course, the other journo - Liz Fraser - also attended private school and oxbridge.


 
The _framing_ of the content is important. That being a sexist Jeremy Irons quote starting the thing up. Then the complete imbecility of the male host and the absurd 'ha ha it's a joke with us' at the end etc.

The executive producer of This Morning is _*Fiona Keenaghan*_ who is also 
"Controller, Daytime & Lifestyle
Fiona Keenaghan oversees and manages the production and commercial aspects of the ITV Studios Daytime slate.

Fiona joined ITV in 2000 as Producer/Director on Tonight with Trevor McDonald and was responsible for landing many of the exclusive interviews which established the show as a success.  She went on to edit _*Loose Women*_ during its infancy before returning to Tonight as Deputy Editor and then Editor. In 2006 she became an Executive Producer within _*Granada Factual*_ where _*she created the series Ann Widdecombe Versus*_ and the high profile RTS nominated Billy Connolly: Journey to the Edge of the World.  In 2008 she took over as Controller of Daytime restructuring all aspects of the department resulting in a resurgence of success and expansion for the established brands _*This Morning; Loose Women and The Jeremy Kyle Show*_  as well as wide ranging commercial and international opportunities including a US deal for _*Jeremy Kyle*_."

From a journalistic background producing McDonald, now happily into producing this poison.


----------



## Libertad (Feb 20, 2013)

BBC Question Time @bbcquestiontime
RT @BBCExtraGuest: Pleased to announce that this week's Extra Guest is @PennyRed. She'll be with us tomorrow night for #bbcqt.

Deep joy.


----------



## weepiper (Feb 20, 2013)

Libertad said:


> BBC Question Time @bbcquestiontime
> RT @BBCExtraGuest: Pleased to announce that this week's Extra Guest is @PennyRed. She'll be with us tomorrow night for #bbcqt.
> 
> Deep joy.


 
An Oxbridge graduate is BBCExtraGuest? You _surprise_ me.


----------



## goldenecitrone (Feb 20, 2013)

Libertad said:


> BBC Question Time @bbcquestiontime
> RT @BBCExtraGuest: Pleased to announce that this week's Extra Guest is @PennyRed. She'll be with us tomorrow night for #bbcqt.
> 
> Deep joy.


 
Should be worth a watch. I usually watch it anyway for the first 30 minutes.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 20, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> Should be worth a watch. I usually watch it anyway for the first 30 minutes.


She's not on the program - she's commenting on it on twitter for the BBC for taxpayer money.


----------



## Firky (Feb 20, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> She's not on the program - she's commenting on it on twitter for the BBC for taxpayer money.


 
Not sure if you're taking the piss?

I hope you are.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 20, 2013)

Nope, that's what BBC QT extra guest is.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 20, 2013)

Do they get paid for it? Fuck me


----------



## goldenecitrone (Feb 20, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> She's not on the program - she's commenting on it on twitter for the BBC for taxpayer money.


 
It sounds a bit like the sign language bits on the news for deaf people. The twitter version for people with the attention span of a heavy coke user.


----------



## Greebo (Feb 20, 2013)

Kid_Eternity said:


> There's something wrong about someone wearing a hat indoors...


Only if male.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 20, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Do they get paid for it? Fuck me


 
Sunny Hundal.

Sky News pay Sunny Hundal to tweet during Murnaghan. 

The Guardian pay Sunny Hundal to type a bit about whether it's right or not for Sky News to pay Sunny Hundal to tweet during Murnaghan.

Sunny Hundal says "They don't tell me what I can or cannot say", defending freedom of speech, he notes "I have criticised the BBC and Sky many times, and so far they haven't black-balled me" 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/24/ethical-pay-bloggers-tweet











To quote their hero: 
'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a BBCNews24 interview on top of a Hundal face — forever.'

(Also that BBC caption makes no sense - if it's elected it as representative/or/not as the Commons so how can that be feared?  )


----------



## Firky (Feb 20, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Do they get paid for it? Fuck me


 
It's more depressing that a platform such as QT is reduced to 150 characters from someone such as her. Be interesting to break down the cost and see what they get per post (refuse to say the T word).


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 20, 2013)

Are you utterly self-absorbed? Has your humdrum priviliged upper-middle-class upbringing prevented you from developing any meaningful sense of identity beyond commodities? Is pretending to be working class not working out for you? Do you have a really shit or non-existant personality and need to compensate? Then worry not, all your problems can be solved, with a twat hat:





















For just £500 (or 10% of whatever's left in your trust fund) you too can be the talk of the scene, and hide the fact you're a shallow empty vapid husk of middle-class ennui and narcissism! Make cheques out to "Delroy Booth" - the first 50 orders get the book "how to grow a beard" (retail £75) by esteemed hipster beardologist Delroy Booth for free!


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Feb 20, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Laurie Penny's _hat_?


Laurie Penny's hat.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 20, 2013)

Don't take my word for it, just ask one of our many satisfied customers:

_"My son was getting picked on by bigger boys in the Harrow rugby team, but since he got his twat hat they all think he looks like Ricky Hatton!"_


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Feb 20, 2013)

Bang up job when it comes to "this isn't a weirdly obsessed thread"


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 20, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Bang up job when it comes to "this isn't a weirdly obsessed thread"


 
Lighten up, I'm just taking the piss out of hipsters and their hats. Couldn't give a shit about Laurie Penny's hat. At all. Not even her grandad's antique topper.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 20, 2013)

How is Sunny Hundal even a left-wing spokesperson?

http://www.libdemvoice.org/the-inde...sake-of-our-energy-and-environment-32277.html


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 20, 2013)




----------



## Steel Icarus (Feb 20, 2013)

Libertad said:


> BBC Question Time @bbcquestiontime
> RT @BBCExtraGuest: Pleased to announce that this week's Extra Guest is @PennyRed. She'll be with us tomorrow night for #bbcqt.
> 
> Deep joy.


 
http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mb8wbhaXfc1rwc6t5.gif


----------



## Steel Icarus (Feb 20, 2013)

weepiper said:


> An Oxbridge graduate is BBCExtraGuest? You _surprise_ me.


 
Aye, I think there's only been 4 or 5 in a series of 19 so far that haven't been Oxbridge graduates. And one of those was Durham, and another was fat fucking tool Harry Cole.


----------



## Orang Utan (Feb 21, 2013)

You lot are getting a bit carried away. Who cares what fucking hat people wear? P


----------



## Balbi (Feb 21, 2013)

This thread.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 21, 2013)

Nah this thread jumped the shark when Laurie turned up. Nothing's gonna beat that (unless Brian Paddick shows up in the naked thread or something)


----------



## flypanam (Feb 21, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> she is fucking everywhere. LP is the future of media friendly left commentariat. fuckin hell.


 
She's the Tony Slattery of the luvvy left commentariat. She's ubiquitous now. In ten years she'll appear as a guest on ready stedy cook, her first gig in five years.


----------



## co-op (Feb 21, 2013)

sihhi said:


> How is Sunny Hundal even a left-wing spokesperson?
> 
> http://www.libdemvoice.org/the-inde...sake-of-our-energy-and-environment-32277.html


 

"For the sake of our energy and our environment"?  

What Yeo and co. mean by this is lets spend tens of billions on nuclear power. The idea that this is "de-carbonising" our energy production is literally absurd. There is intelligent and well-researched evidence out there that suggests that if you properly account for the carbon costs of mining and milling uranium, guaranteeing future supplies of it and dealing with the waste, clean gas is quite probably responsible for lower carbon emissions than nuclear.

I really wonder whether people like Hundal are just useful fools in this kind of drip-drip pro-nuclear propaganda or if they are actually paid up mouthpieces. It's just not possible to believe that a "de-carbonisation policy" and nuclear power are easily compatible. The case can be _made_, but anyone who knows anything about the subject can see it's highly controversial.


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Are you utterly self-absorbed? Has your humdrum priviliged upper-middle-class upbringing prevented you from developing any meaningful sense of identity beyond commodities? Is pretending to be working class not working out for you? Do you have a really shit or non-existant personality and need to compensate? Then worry not, all your problems can be solved, with a twat hat:
> 
> SNIP
> 
> For just £500 (or 10% of whatever's left in your trust fund) you too can be the talk of the scene, and hide the fact you're a shallow empty vapid husk of middle-class ennui and narcissism! Make cheques out to "Delroy Booth" - the first 50 orders get the book "how to grow a beard" (retail £75) by esteemed hipster beardologist Delroy Booth for free!


 
If only LLETSA had lived to see this.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 21, 2013)

Kid_Eternity said:


> There's something wrong about someone wearing a hat indoors...


 
http://fedorasofokc.tumblr.com/ is why i brought it up.  a project she has previously lauded.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 21, 2013)

a friend sums this up:

"
she tweeted a pic of her and owen jones having make-up tea (they fell out because he wrote an article abut George Galloway which she didn’t read properly and thought was about how great Galloway was and she had a massive go at him and he defended himself and she still didn’t read the article and kept having a go at him and all the other twitterati finally managed to get it through to her that he had not said what she said he said and she conceded that owen jones might not have been as clear as he could have done so she invited him to tea so he could apologise) and then they tweeted a pic of them looking abut 12 having a post clear the air tea and cakes cuddle and she was wearing a fedora because sex-pest chic is so now.

And this is what passes for the dialectic these days. 

"


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 21, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> is she wearing a fedora?


 
Looks like, although the brim is fairly skimpy and the crown has no shaping visible in the pic.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 21, 2013)

Sue said:


> Picture in the attic?


 
Human transferance victim in cellar, probably. That way Owen can be as degenerately Dorian Gray as he wishes, *and* get his rocks off looking at the the results that his degeneracy has had on his captive. Perversion layered on perversion!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 21, 2013)

Kid_Eternity said:


> There's something wrong about someone wearing a hat indoors...


 
Apart from anything else, it's been seen as appalling manners throughout the class spectrum for about 150 years.


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Apart from anything else, it's been seen as appalling manners throughout the class spectrum for about 150 years.


 

what about the skullcap eh?eh?


----------



## Idris2002 (Feb 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Perversion layered on perversion!


 
And with a fresh new minty taste!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> what about the skullcap eh?eh?


 
Mostly for religious observance, and are "minimalist" headwear. A felt Fedora (or Trilby or Homburg) isn't.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Apart from anything else, it's been seen as appalling manners throughout the class spectrum for about 150 years.


 
racist


----------



## ViolentPanda (Feb 21, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> racist


 
Go boil a _yarmulke_!


----------



## Steel Icarus (Feb 21, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> "
> she tweeted a pic of her and owen jones having make-up tea (they fell out because he wrote an article abut George Galloway which she didn’t read properly and thought was about how great Galloway was and she had a massive go at him and he defended himself and she still didn’t read the article and kept having a go at him and all the other twitterati finally managed to get it through to her that he had not said what she said he said and she conceded that owen jones might not have been as clear as he could have done so she invited him to tea so he could apologise) and then they tweeted a pic of them looking abut 12 having a post clear the air tea and cakes cuddle and she was wearing a fedora because sex-pest chic is so now.
> 
> And this is what passes for the dialectic these days.
> ...


 
Plenty of other people steamed in on him, too, stavvers, jonanamary, etc, to tell him how his article on Galloway reduced his rape apologism to the same level as being a cat on Big Brother and when he said he didn't think so he was called all sorts of shit; sexist, dismissive, superior, all that, prompting Angry Blogs and an argument that lasted TWO FUCKING DAYS. And yet dare to mention to any of these fuckers that perhaps during these two days another 5 children's centres or a hospital have closed or old people have been told to go back to University or that maybe, just _maybe _their time might be better spent fighting the government it's all sneers to the pump.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 21, 2013)

fair enough, i neither read the article nor the twitter shitstorm that followed.   still, if they're at least arguing over the issues then we might be making progress.


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 21, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> You lot are getting a bit carried away. Who cares what fucking hat people wear? P


 
That sort of lacklustre thinking explains  why you wear trainers rather than shoes


----------



## imposs1904 (Feb 21, 2013)

smokedout said:


> is he getting younger?
> 
> how come he's getting younger


 
I was thinking the same. There's a C86 band out there missing its bass player.


----------



## Greebo (Feb 21, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> That sort of lacklustre thinking explains why you wear trainers rather than shoes


And that substandard reasoning probably explains why you wear shoes instead of trainers.


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 21, 2013)

Greebo said:


> And that substandard reasoning probably explains why you wear shoes instead of trainers.



And that flawed hypothesis probably explains that you have never asked me what I wear.


----------



## Greebo (Feb 21, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> And that flawed hypothesis probably explains that you have never asked me what I wear.


Sweetie, I've never asked because as long as I don't have to see you naked, I couldn't give a toss.


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 21, 2013)

Each to their own  Sugar .Personally  I take a bit of pride in my appearance.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 21, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Each to their own Sugar .Personally I take a bit of pride in my appearance.


 
Smells like bourgeois individualism to me!


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 21, 2013)

Calvin Klein


----------



## Firky (Feb 21, 2013)

> Paul Mason ‏@paulmasonnews
> Looking forward to @PennyRed appearance as off camera guest on #bbcqt - hope trolls have had their medication


----------



## Libertad (Feb 21, 2013)

firky said:


>


 
I just read that as well, found it strange coming from Mason. Rumours that Penury got the gig through Diane Abbott's best offices.


----------



## Firky (Feb 21, 2013)

I think Mason might have been taking the piss slightly as it was slightly out of character. 

Still staggered she's getting paid to knock out a few posts on twitter during QT.


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 21, 2013)

In what way would it be out of character?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 21, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> a friend sums this up:
> 
> "
> she tweeted a pic of her and owen jones having make-up tea (they fell out because he wrote an article abut George Galloway which she didn’t read properly and thought was about how great Galloway was and she had a massive go at him and he defended himself and she still didn’t read the article and kept having a go at him and all the other twitterati finally managed to get it through to her that he had not said what she said he said and she conceded that owen jones might not have been as clear as he could have done so she invited him to tea so he could apologise) and then they tweeted a pic of them looking abut 12 having a post clear the air tea and cakes cuddle and she was wearing a fedora because sex-pest chic is so now.
> ...


 
Here's a pretty accurate summary of this week's outrage

http://notsobigsociety.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/feminism-the-left-and-unnecessary-twitter-feuds/


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Feb 21, 2013)

firky said:


> I think Mason might have been taking the piss slightly as it was slightly out of character.
> 
> Still staggered she's getting paid to knock out a few posts on twitter during QT.


 
Nah - He's sound but this was a lefty journo defending someone he sees as a comrade... I disagree with him on this but that doesn't mean it's out of character.


----------



## sihhi (Feb 21, 2013)

And we're off:

"Laurie Penny ‏@BBCExtraGuest: Ooh, we're off! Question Time has Occupied St Pauls!"

"BBC Question Time ‏@bbcquestiontime
@DougMackDodds asks: Why is potential demise of pollinating insects at hands of neonicotinoids not an international emergency? #bbcqt

Laurie Penny ‏@BBCExtraGuest: world governments don't care that the bees are disappearing. But they should. Ask The Doctor (Tennant era)"

 Isn't this meant to assist people who can't afford a TV license?


----------



## Firky (Feb 21, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> In what way would it be out of character?





Spanky Longhorn said:


> Nah - He's sound but this was a lefty journo defending someone he sees as a comrade... I disagree with him on this but that doesn't mean it's out of character.


 
I don't mind him at all but I was surprised to see that tweet, don't know why, I guess because I think he's sound I also expected him to also think that Laurie is a charlatan.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 21, 2013)

Have you been reading this thread at all?


----------



## Firky (Feb 21, 2013)

> Sunny Hundal ‏@sunny_hundal
> Vince Cable says IDS plan to restrict benefits for families with more than two children "will not happen". Good on him #bbcqt


----------



## Libertad (Feb 21, 2013)

Mason may have been referring to the right wing trolls who are showing up on the feed.


----------



## Firky (Feb 21, 2013)

Libertad said:


> Rumours that Penury got the gig through Diane Abbott's best offices.


 
 "Spot on from Abbot" and "loving Abbots face".

I have had to turn it off, doing my head in.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 21, 2013)

God shes well ensconced in the political/media bubble aint she.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 21, 2013)

What did she think was "spot on from Abbot"? That for anyone to be genuine british like she is that you have to be "proud of the country" and "love the royal family"?


----------



## sihhi (Feb 21, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What did she think was "spot on from Abbot"? That for anyone to be genuine british like she is that you have to be proud of the country and "love the royal family"?


 
If I did twitter, this is what I'd post:

Laurie Penny ‏@BBCExtraGuest
'Class is the issue, not race.' BOOM. #bbcqt

> What are you exploding? 

Laurie Penny ‏@BBCExtraGuest
The question of immigration and 'integration' keeps coming up on #bbcqt. We're clearly a nation deeply confused about who and what we are.

> Incision. Surgical.

Laurie Penny ‏@BBCExtraGuest
London's multiculturalism is the best thing about this city, and always has been. #bbcqt #proudlondoner

> aka 'I am considerably more multicultural than yow'

Laurie Penny ‏@BBCExtraGuest
This is what unspoken anxiety over end of the British Empire looks like. We violently imposed 'our' culture on others for centuries #bbcqt 

> _You_ are the ongoing imposition.


----------



## Firky (Feb 21, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What did she think was "spot on from Abbot"?


 
She (Abbot) said that benefit payments are paltry.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 21, 2013)

why is she mates with all of these people? can she not see that if she wants to make some criticisms of class or whatever its a good idea not to be mates with the people exploiting everyone else


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 21, 2013)

First time I have watched that programme for ages and can see why.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 21, 2013)

I never watch it. You get more political insight from my cats who have spent the last ten minutes rooting around in a bag of SP leaflets


----------



## sihhi (Feb 21, 2013)

Paul Mason has us told: 

‏@paulmasonnews
Being British: @bbcquestiontime Hate fascism, love whippets (or any dogs), love kebabs, ignore public rudeness; endure defeat, up to a point


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 21, 2013)

So lets et this straight she is not on the programme but is being paid to tweet about it wtf ???


----------



## Firky (Feb 22, 2013)

I know, I presumed the extra quest would at least be in the studio.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Feb 22, 2013)

Diane Abbott - she who ran for Labour party leadership explicitly to fuck over John McDonnell getting on the ballot, in exchange for a place in the shadow cabinet? That Diane Abbott? Yeah, her. She's a disgrace, but you have gotta hand it to her she's got the ambitious careerism down to a fine art. Going to cambridge certainly does help with this sort of stuff it would seem. No-one should be surprised to see Penny and Abbott as kindred spirits.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 22, 2013)

the whole thing is just absolutely pathetic tbh. How the hell can they see themselves as in any way radical?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Feb 22, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Paul Mason has us told:
> 
> ‏@paulmasonnews
> Being British: @bbcquestiontime Hate fascism, love whippets (or any dogs), love kebabs, ignore public rudeness; endure defeat, up to a point


 
that sounds like my mum, except the bit about kebabs.


----------



## butchersapron (Feb 22, 2013)

And the next post is some 





frogwoman said:


> the whole thing is just absolutely pathetic tbh. How the hell can they see themselves as in any way radical?


By defining and shaping the world around them. And they do.


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Feb 23, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Apart from anything else, it's been seen as appalling manners throughout the class spectrum for about 150 years.


 
Yeah I think that may be it, it seems oddly rude. I know that's bullshit rationally but it just doesn't look right.


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 23, 2013)

> Laurie Penny  @*PennyRed*
> Napped, had an amazing dream. Only realised whilst writing it down that I had dreamed the plot of Wim Wenders' 'Wings Of Desire'.
> 9:07 PM - 22 Feb 13


 
If only she had had that dream 30 years ago. Great to dream like great people dream


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 23, 2013)

for fucks sake


----------



## Greebo (Feb 23, 2013)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Yeah I think that may be it, it seems oddly rude. I know that's bullshit rationally but it just doesn't look right.


AFAIK it's based on the custom (at one time) for women to cover their hair if in a church - men OTOH were required to bare their heads.


----------



## The39thStep (Feb 23, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> for fucks sake


 
I did the same last week , turned out to be the Big Lebowski with some minor improvements


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Feb 23, 2013)

Greebo said:


> AFAIK it's based on the custom (at one time) for women to cover their hair if in a church - men OTOH were required to bare their heads.


 
I see...wouldn't surprise me tbh.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Feb 23, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> If only she had had that dream 30 years ago. Great to dream like great people dream


 
That's what you get from a voice of the left and smartest kid in a smart school - a higher standard of dream. The rest of us have to make do with that dream where you're in a very public space, with everyone looking at you, and suddenly realise you've got no trousers on. That's why I'll never write for the new ink wirry.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 23, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's what you get from a voice of the left and smartest kid in a smart school - a higher standard of dream. The rest of us have to make do with that dream where you're in a very public space, with everyone looking at you, and suddenly realise you've got no trousers on. That's why I'll never write for the new ink wirry.


 
that wasn't a dream - that's why you're on the register

/dotcommie posting


----------



## Frances Lengel (Feb 24, 2013)

I had a dream that Alan Turner off Emmerdale Farm was sheltering from a napalm-strafing helicopter in an abandoned tin bath on an allotment with a tarpaulin pulled over himself. He ended up getting burnt beyond recognition and being stretchered off by the red cross and was heard to ask "What the _hell_ happened?". Upon which my dad, who didn't feature in the dream apart from supplying the voiceover, was heard to remark that Turner sounded "Surprisingly lucid". Then I woke up and I'd done a white wee wee.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Feb 24, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> I had a dream that Alan Turner off Emmerdale Farm was sheltering from a napalm-strafing helicopter in an abandoned tin bath on an allotment with a tarpaulin pulled over himself. He ended up getting burnt beyond recognition and being stretchered off by the red cross and was heard to ask "What the _hell_ happened?". Upon which my dad, who didn't feature in the dream apart from supplying the voiceover, was heard to remark that Turner sounded "Surprisingly lucid". Then I woke up and I'd done a white wee wee.


A sure fire contender for Post of the Year.


----------



## Firky (Feb 24, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's what you get from a voice of the left and smartest kid in a smart school - a higher standard of dream. The rest of us have to make do with that dream where you're in a very public space, with everyone looking at you, and suddenly realise you've got no trousers on. That's why I'll never write for the new ink wirry.


 
The going to school in your pyjamas dream.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Feb 24, 2013)

firky said:


> The going to school in your pyjamas dream.


 
Sometimes mine had an added twist too. I'd go and find some trousers to put on but as soon as I did I'd find that trousers had magically appeared on my legs. But the second the other trousers were out of sight they'd vanish again, so I was doomed to be trouserless


----------



## Firky (Feb 24, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Sometimes mine had an added twist too. I'd go and find some trousers to put on but as soon as I did I'd find that trousers had magically appeared on my legs. But the second the other trousers were out of sight they'd vanish again, so I was doomed to be trouserless


 
As well as the pyjamas at school dream I have a reoccurring dream where I am driving a car naked and can't get home. My clothes are beside me on the passengers seat but when I go to stop and get changed I can't, and the clothes aren't there. It is at that point I usually wake up


----------



## Firky (Feb 24, 2013)

> Penny Laurie ‏@PennyShred
> I feel like the Jaime Oliver of politics. Going into schools and trying to change peoples attitudes for their own good.


 


> On my way to the BBC to pitch for a new talk show called 'Penny For Your Thoughts'.


 


> Each week I interview a famous socialist while sucking abstractedly on an electronic fag.


 


> There'll be some features too...I haven't worked out what yet, as we're still in the planning stage. Any ideas please pitch.


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 24, 2013)

Cheeky mare, asking people for ideas so she can pitch them to the BBC for a paid show.


----------



## frogwoman (Feb 24, 2013)

didn't somebody on here say they'd thought she'd soon be presenting programme with that title


----------



## Libertad (Feb 24, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Cheeky mare, asking people for ideas so she can pitch them to the BBC for a paid show.


 
Not so. Look a little closer.


----------



## tufty79 (Feb 24, 2013)

i was absolutely taken in for a minute... 

_penny shred_?


----------



## goldenecitrone (Feb 24, 2013)

Penny Lame. Laurie Penny discusses the ATOS regime with Oscar Pistorius.


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 24, 2013)

Libertad said:


> Not so. Look a little closer.


Ah, I see...


----------



## DotCommunist (Feb 24, 2013)




----------



## Firky (Feb 24, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i was absolutely taken in for a minute...
> 
> _penny shred_?


 
It's great 



> Starbucks still doing their eggnog latee, or was that a xmas special? Gonna find out. Will use their wireless to tweet #ukuncut updates.


 


> If you have withdrawal from the sound of my soothing voice, try tinnitus.


 


> It's a warzone here. Going to take cover in Wokinabox and have some noodles.


----------



## Firky (Feb 24, 2013)

> I'm brushing Morocco oil into my hair. I like to do my bit to keep the Arab Spring alive.


 
Some of the others are a bit sus.


----------



## love detective (Feb 24, 2013)

pretty shit parody imo


----------



## equationgirl (Feb 24, 2013)

love detective said:


> pretty shit parody imo


Oh I don't know, it's quite accurate and funny. How long before she kicks off about it though, and accusing them of being misogynistic?


----------



## love detective (Feb 24, 2013)

each to their own but i don't think it's either  accurate or funny

and when the thing being parodied is Penny (and company) there is not much point in parodying it, parody is redundant/superfluous


----------



## Firky (Feb 24, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> How long before she kicks off about it though, and accusing them of being misogynistic?


 
Some of the posts on the account or a bit sus'

There's a couple of fake LP accounts out there. There used to be a good (well it made me laugh) one of Stewart Lee but I can't find it now.


----------



## mrs quoad (Mar 1, 2013)

> 15 hrs
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> I'm not going to tell you who it is because all your guesses are giving me ideas for future interviews.
> ...


----------



## Firky (Mar 6, 2013)

*Money has its own gravity:when it disappears, it takes everything with it*​​*Nicholas Lezard's "Down and Out" column*​​*I head along to the cashpoint, as one does, it tells me that my account has insufficient funds for the transaction I’d suggested. I’d wanted to take out £30. Well, I thought, that’s happened a little earlier in the month than I’m accustomed to. Much earlier, in fact.*
So that was the end of my evening out. And when you find that you cannot even afford to buy a copy of the _Big Issue_ you think: just how substantial is the difference between the vendor and yourself? Not as much as you’d like, is the answer – which in itself is not a helpful or healthy thought.​ 


*Nicholas Lezard* ‏@*Nicklezard*
On being middle-class broke. I hope you don't find this self-pitying, dear Twitter. Not meant to be. Just how it is.




http://www.newstatesman.com/lifesty...vitywhen-it-disappears-it-takes-everything-it


----------



## weepiper (Mar 6, 2013)

Fuck off and die in a hole, Nick Lezard. Love, someone who actually lives that shit.


----------



## Firky (Mar 6, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Fuck off and die in a hole, Nick Lezard. Love, someone who actually lives that shit.


 
Steady, he's not so far off being one of those homeless people who stand in foul weather all day selling a shit magazine and being looked down upon. Poor little lamb, his pay doesn't last the month. The horror 

It's fucking unbelievable that he can even write that piece. He apologies at the end for no jokes. It is a joke. The cunt.


----------



## Firky (Mar 6, 2013)

When one is locked into a consumer society, as people of my class and upbringing are, however much one affects to despise consumerism and avoid its seductions, this drip-drip of anxiety leads to shame.

You have no shame.


----------



## weepiper (Mar 6, 2013)

firky said:


> When one is locked into a consumer society, as people of my class and upbringing are, however much one affects to despise consumerism and avoid its seductions, this drip-drip of anxiety leads to shame.
> 
> You have no shame.


 
It doesn't lead to anxiety and shame for _my_ sort, because we're brought up to _expect_ it, of course


----------



## Firky (Mar 6, 2013)

He can't go to see Zero Dark 30 - that's an example he gives of being poor. The best example he can think of.

What a cock.


----------



## Random (Mar 6, 2013)

The media elite think they are poor and that they live in hovels. No wonder they have no shame about speaking for the working class.


----------



## BigTom (Mar 6, 2013)

wow. he went to a cashpoint *expecting* to have money in his bank and thinks he is poor. I mean when I was earning around £15k/yr I usually ran out of money by the end of the month, but I never considered myself to be poor because I was never hungry, never scraping together pennies to buy pasta cos it makes you feel full, never behind on rent and worried about homelessness. I am just constantly amazed by how these people's brains work they seem aware and yet, yet, not a fucking clue. not one.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Mar 6, 2013)

I spoke to a Nigel Farage type once who said that he was poor quite poor - in fact he was seriously considering selling off one of the flats he owned in London.


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 6, 2013)

Lezard thinks he's big issue style skint cos he couldn't go to the pictures? pass me the shotgun


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Mar 6, 2013)

And who could forget this beauty, from _The Guardian_ in 2009:


----------



## weepiper (Mar 6, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> And who could forget this beauty, from _The Guardian_ in 2009:


 
Shoot one. HTH.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Mar 6, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> And who could forget this beauty, from _The Guardian_ in 2009:


 
It's _Sophie's Choice_ for higher rate tax payers.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## brogdale (Mar 6, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Shoot one. HTH.


 
Kinder than even considering sending one to the hell-hole comp


----------



## weepiper (Mar 6, 2013)

brogdale said:


> Kinder than even considering sending one to the hell-hole comp


 
we're all in this together and we must make some tough decisions.


----------



## BigTom (Mar 6, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Shoot one. HTH.


 
Sell one for their organs and meat, that'll pay for the holiday this year too.


----------



## brogdale (Mar 6, 2013)

weepiper said:


> we're all in this together and we must make some tough decisions.


 
True. I heard some minister on QT saying that the national debt thingy is just like running a household budget; you can't go on and on spending more than you have...can you ladeeez? I hadn't thought about it like that before; it all makes sense now. i had no idea that macro-economics was so easy.


----------



## weepiper (Mar 6, 2013)

For a bit of balance

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/03/youll-never-live-common-people



> During my homelessness, I showered at the public facilities in King’s Cross station at £3.50 (later rising to £5) a pop. I saved 20p coins all week and took my clothes to an expensive launderette on a Sunday. I estimate I spent around £2,000 on such basic hygiene during that time; much more than I needed for a deposit and first month’s rent. But I had no choice. I couldn’t afford for work to catch on. I woke up at six every morning, went out through a side alley, showered, shaved, dressed and came back pretending to “open up” for people waiting outside the building. Dissembling was my full time job; being ashamed my hobby.


----------



## Firky (Mar 6, 2013)

He should have gone to McDonalds by Kings X and had a wash in the bogs like everyone else. 

That isn't such a bad article TBF.


----------



## Nylock (Mar 6, 2013)

weepiper said:


> For a bit of balance
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/03/youll-never-live-common-people


I'm kind of glad there are no comments to that article. I can just imagine the tiresome parade of sneering nastiness that rightwing trolls would gleefully air in response to such a piece .


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 6, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Sell one for their organs and meat, that'll pay for the holiday this year too.


 
TBF, being middle class and *so much more* _forward-thinking_ than we peasants are, he'd probably sell the better-looking one at an hourly rate to any paedos he works with. That way he can extract maximum surplus value from them.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 6, 2013)

brogdale said:


> True. I heard some minister on QT saying that the national debt thingy is just like running a household budget; you can't go on and on spending more than you have...can you ladeeez? I hadn't thought about it like that before; it all makes sense now. i had no idea that macro-economics was so easy.


 
That sort of fuckwitted comprehension of economics always makes me think that the speaker has a degree in the subject.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Mar 6, 2013)

Follow hashtag #nuswomens13 if your intersectionality levels are low (and apparently Laura failed to show up).


----------



## phildwyer (Mar 6, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Lezard thinks he's big issue style skint cos he couldn't go to the pictures? pass me the shotgun


 
Thread continues to re-enact the French Revolution....


----------



## Firky (Mar 6, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Thread continues to re-enact the French Revolution....


 
je suis malade. I need to see a quack,


----------



## Idris2002 (Mar 6, 2013)

Nous sommes TOUS malarde.


----------



## Favelado (Mar 6, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> That sort of fuckwitted comprehension of economics always makes me think that the speaker has a degree in the subject.


 
I know Krugman is still a capitalist pig-dog to some on here but he does take down a Tory who comes out with the "economy is like a household" line here.
From last year.


----------



## Idris2002 (Mar 6, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Fuck off and die in a hole, Nick Lezard. Love, someone who actually lives that shit.


 
Hang on, a minute. . . do we know _why _LP moved out of the "hovel"?


----------



## Nice one (Mar 6, 2013)

weepiper said:


> For a bit of balance
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/03/youll-never-live-common-people


 
what's the diffeence between this fella and laurie penny?


----------



## Macabre (Mar 6, 2013)




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## Firky (Mar 6, 2013)

Nice one said:


> what's the diffeence between this fella and laurie penny?


It doesn't sound made up for a start.


----------



## Nice one (Mar 6, 2013)

firky said:


> It doesn't sound made up for a start.


 
you know it's his pitch for an updated withnail an i, don't you.

In terms of CLASS POWER and what he represents, what's the difference?


----------



## Firky (Mar 6, 2013)

Nice one said:


> you know it's his pitch for an updated withnail an i, don't you.


 




> In terms of CLASS POWER and what he represents, what's the difference?


 
Very little, which is what this thread is essentially about (when we're not going through their twitter leavings).


----------



## treelover (Mar 6, 2013)

Just heard Kate Nash on BBC 3's Free Speech, she was very very good.

and yes, she does seem 'posh'


----------



## treelover (Mar 6, 2013)

Sad to see the jerk from the Adam Smith Institute as popular in the voting bar as Kate...


----------



## treelover (Mar 6, 2013)

weepiper said:


> For a bit of balance
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/03/youll-never-live-common-people


 
Alex is a very good writer..


----------



## binka (Mar 6, 2013)

brogdale said:


> True. I heard some minister on QT saying that the national debt thingy is just like running a household budget; you can't go on and on spending more than you have...can you ladeeez? I hadn't thought about it like that before; it all makes sense now. i had no idea that macro-economics was so easy.


its a fair comparison. whenever i run out of money i just print some more - surely thats what everyone does


----------



## treelover (Mar 6, 2013)

Anyone watching Free Speech?, its incredible that the Adam Smith Inst has been so influential...


----------



## Nice one (Mar 6, 2013)

firky said:


> It doesn't sound made up for a start.


 
a more convincing liar then


----------



## smokedout (Mar 6, 2013)

Nice one said:


> a more convincing liar then


 
its hard to know what he could have been doing in his office job with his background in law and economics and left him with new statesman and cif columns three years later, but paid so badly he couldnt get his shit together to get a place for over a year


----------



## smokedout (Mar 6, 2013)

if I was being really cynical I'd wonder why he didnt just take any old cheap shit he could get or try get a place in a hostel, surely these options wouldnt be beneath him if he was as desperate as he suggests


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 6, 2013)

Nice one said:


> you know it's his pitch for an updated withnail an i, don't you.
> 
> In terms of CLASS POWER and what he represents, what's the difference?


 
Do you spot any differences? In terms of CLASS POWER and what he represents?


----------



## Nice one (Mar 7, 2013)

smokedout said:


> its hard to know what he could have been doing in his office job with his background in law and economics and left him with new statesman and cif columns three years later, but paid so badly he couldnt get his shit together to get a place for over a year


 
for 5 months of that year of living without a home he was on tour with the national theatre. He also ran his own theatre company during that time, acted in films.


----------



## Nice one (Mar 7, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Do you spot any differences? In terms of CLASS POWER and what he represents?


 
Gender? A less punchable face?


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 7, 2013)

So, any serious reply? Or was that it?  For such a searching and revealing question? Really?


----------



## smokedout (Mar 7, 2013)

Nice one said:


> for 5 months of that year of living without a home he was on tour with the national theatre. He also ran his own theatre company during that time, acted in films.


 
going on holiday is a little bit homelessness


----------



## weepiper (Mar 7, 2013)

It's not as if this is the first time he's talked about it. Ok so he wasn't sleeping rough on the street but I think that experience probably gives him far more of a right to talk about this stuff than anything that's happened or is likely to happen to Nick Lezard or Laurie Penny.


https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/149121642243698688


----------



## smokedout (Mar 7, 2013)

I'm not denying he had a shit time and he writes about it well and with far more integrity than Laurie

But his problems seem as much to be about alienation, lack of contacts/friends/family as poverty, that's not to undermine them, but the tone of his piece is about how poverty is a different country etc - poverty is about having no money.  I just can't see why someone working in what sounds like quite a good job would end up in that situation for so long unless they had unrealistic expectations of the type of housing they should have.

And no matter how much someone felt they had to keep up appearances, no-one living in poverty would spend £3.50 on a shower every morning as he says he did.

(I don't think he's the same as Laurie by the way in terms of CLASS POWER, and he's a much more honest writer who has a degree of humility that LP really lacks, but he's still not really an authentic voice of real poverty)


----------



## articul8 (Mar 7, 2013)

weepiper said:


> It's not as if this is the first time he's talked about it. Ok so he wasn't sleeping rough on the street but I think that experience probably gives him far more of a right to talk about this stuff than anything that's happened or is likely to happen to Nick Lezard or Laurie Penny.
> 
> 
> https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/149121642243698688


 
Call me a grizzeld old cynic but it does come across c. Down and Out in Paris and London - like he was storing up experiences for added liberal press kudos


----------



## weepiper (Mar 7, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Call me a grizzeld old cynic but it does come across c. Down and Out in Paris and London - like he was storing up experiences for added liberal press kudos


 
For more than a year?


----------



## weepiper (Mar 7, 2013)

smokedout said:


> (I don't think he's the same as Laurie by the way in terms of CLASS POWER, and he's a much more honest writer who has a degree of humility that LP really lacks, but he's still not really an authentic voice of real poverty)


 
Agreed. I was just trying to say I don't think he's quite in the same box he's being lumped into.


----------



## smokedout (Mar 7, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Call me a grizzeld old cynic but it does come across c. Down and Out in Paris and London - like he was storing up experiences for added liberal press kudos


 
no it doesnt, it sounds like he was a middle class kid in a strange city who went through a really rough time before he found his feet


----------



## Greebo (Mar 7, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Call me a grizzeld old cynic but it does come across c. Down and Out in Paris and London - like he was storing up experiences for added liberal press kudos


If one of your resources is direct experience, why wouldn't you choose to use it at the most profitable or effective time?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Mar 7, 2013)

smokedout said:


> no it doesnt, it sounds like he was a middle class kid in a strange city who went through a really rough time before he found his feet


 
So what?
The fact is that his account of his experience sounds true and will resonate with the slightly better paid working class who still think they're not in danger of sliding into poverty and it does chime with the experiences of those who have been through similar.

He is not claiming to be the voice of a generation or owt, just telling a story that shows it could happen to _*you*_


----------



## ymu (Mar 7, 2013)

Favelado said:


> I know Krugman is still a capitalist pig-dog to some on here but he does take down a Tory who comes out with the "economy is like a household" line here.
> From last year.



"Why can't all these young people just become entrepreneurs?"

Umm, because there's not enough money around for many of them to succeed?

2.5 million unemployed, 1 million part-timers looking for more work, 1.5 million parents and disabled people looking for work.

Let's say they need to clear £6k on average to survive with tax credits; they'd need to turn over £12k (as entrepreneurs) to get that kind of income (on average).

£12k x 5 million people is £60bn. Who is going to spend that kind of money? It's being sat on by private companies who won't invest it.

Tories see unemployment as voluntary and think that the way to manage a recession is let wages get low enough for workers to be more attractive to exploit. Already signs that this is happening:



> Why more jobs may be bad news for British workers
> 
> Recessions are usually job killers, so the way in which the UK economy has created new jobs at a time when growth has been so weak has baffled the experts. Employment is up even though national output has been flat over the past year.
> 
> ...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Mar 7, 2013)

that Paul Krugman video is astonishing on so many levels. Really does show the right up for what they're about, couldn't give a fuck about deficits and such, they just see that as a _casus belli _to continue with the same political project they've been pushing down our throats for the last 35 years - to privatise everything and to fundamentally change the social contract so that the government no longer accepts any obligations toward the welfare of it's citizens. Even when it's pointed out that these austerity measures don't work _even in fiscal terms_ they still cling to the dogma, because what matters much more than fiscal responsibility is an ideological battle they have to win, even if it damages capitalism in the process.


----------



## agricola (Mar 7, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> that Paul Krugman video is astonishing on so many levels. Really does show the right up for what they're about, couldn't give a fuck about deficits and such, they just see that as a _casus belli _to continue with the same political project they've been pushing down our throats for the last 35 years - to privatise everything and to fundamentally change the social contract so that the government no longer accepts any obligations toward the welfare of it's citizens. Even when it's pointed out that these austerity measures don't work _even in fiscal terms_ they still cling to the dogma, because what matters much more than fiscal responsibility is an ideological battle they have to win, even if it damages capitalism in the process.


 
That may be how the naive elements of the right see things, but of course the rest of them know that all the policies of the last thirty-five years have been directed towards enriching themselves at the states expense, and guaranteeing that they will continue to be enriched irrespective of what happens.


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 7, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> that Paul Krugman video is astonishing on so many levels. Really does show the right up for what they're about, couldn't give a fuck about deficits and such, they just see that as a _casus belli _to continue with the same political project they've been pushing down our throats for the last 35 years - to privatise everything and to fundamentally change the social contract so that the government no longer accepts any obligations toward the welfare of it's citizens. Even when it's pointed out that these austerity measures don't work _even in fiscal terms_ they still cling to the dogma, because what matters much more than fiscal responsibility is an ideological battle they have to win, even if it damages capitalism in the process.


The dynamics to look at here is the state/capital _then_ both vs labour. The former (i.e state strategists, which is not the same as capital) can only lead to so much much damage to the wider system before it impacts on the balance of forces in the latter - then both of the first are in trouble. It's really important not to see this is terms of correct policies but in more fluid terms.


----------



## ymu (Mar 7, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> that Paul Krugman video is astonishing on so many levels. Really does show the right up for what they're about, couldn't give a fuck about deficits and such, they just see that as a _casus belli _to continue with the same political project they've been pushing down our throats for the last 35 years - to privatise everything and to fundamentally change the social contract so that the government no longer accepts any obligations toward the welfare of it's citizens. Even when it's pointed out that these austerity measures don't work _even in fiscal terms_ they still cling to the dogma, because what matters much more than fiscal responsibility is an ideological battle they have to win, even if it damages capitalism in the process.


 
Except it doesn't damage capitalism. The right believes that recession is a good thing because destruction of capital restores the rate of profit (wages get cheaper relative to elsewhere and enough businesses go bust that competition is reduced).



> Yet recessions do happen. Why? In the 1970s the leading freshwater [aka Chicago school -ymu] macroeconomist, the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, argued that recessions were caused by temporary confusion: workers and companies had trouble distinguishing overall changes in the level of prices because of inflation or deflation from changes in their own particular business situation. And Lucas warned that any attempt to fight the business cycle would be counterproductive: activist policies, he argued, would just add to the confusion.
> 
> By the 1980s, however, even this severely limited acceptance of the idea that recessions are bad things had been rejected by many freshwater economists. Instead, the new leaders of the movement, especially Edward Prescott, who was then at the University of Minnesota (you can see where the freshwater moniker comes from), argued that price fluctuations and changes in demand actually had nothing to do with the business cycle. Rather, the business cycle reflects fluctuations in the rate of technological progress, which are amplified by the rational response of workers, who voluntarily work more when the environment is favorable and less when it’s unfavorable. Unemployment is a deliberate decision by workers to take time off.
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


That belief about unemployment is clearly reflected in Tory policy, but those pulling their austerian strings actually welcome recession; hence their imperviousness to arguments about how to end it. It does also meet the ideological end of shrinking the state, but it is fully grounded in the economic theory of the right, they just can't afford to express it in those terms.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 7, 2013)

smokedout said:


> going on holiday is a little bit homelessness


 
Only if you're kipping under the sky in all weathers and risking getting pissed on or worse by ignorant fucks.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Mar 7, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Only if you're kipping under the sky in all weathers and risking getting pissed on or worse by ignorant fucks.


 
Have you ever been to Benidorm?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 7, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I'm not denying he had a shit time and he writes about it well and with far more integrity than Laurie
> 
> But his problems seem as much to be about alienation, lack of contacts/friends/family as poverty, that's not to undermine them, but the tone of his piece is about how poverty is a different country etc - poverty is about having no money. I just can't see why someone working in what sounds like quite a good job would end up in that situation for so long unless they had unrealistic expectations of the type of housing they should have.
> 
> And no matter how much someone felt they had to keep up appearances, no-one living in poverty would spend £3.50 on a shower every morning as he says he did.


 
Depends on how you've been brought up, in my experience. Some people feel an almost existential need to be clean, others know you can make do with a whore's bath every second day (washing of 'pits and bits).



> (I don't think he's the same as Laurie by the way in terms of CLASS POWER, and he's a much more honest writer who has a degree of humility that LP really lacks, but he's still not really an authentic voice of real poverty)


 
In my own experience, "real" poverty isn't just about having no dosh, it's about having little or no prospect of bettering your situation in the short to medium term, however bright you are, and however hard you try; it's about not having a system of contacts/"friendship network" that can ease your situation; it's about being *forced* to look into the abyss, and hopefully about gobbing in the eye of whatever looks back at you from the abyss. It's about "getting by" because you *have* to "get by".


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 7, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Have you ever been to Benidorm?


 
Yep, and "worse".


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 7, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Call me a grizzeld old cynic but it does come across c. Down and Out in Paris and London - like he was storing up experiences for added liberal press kudos


 
You don't mean to say that he does exactly what most journos and aspiring authors are taught to do, do you? 

The horror! The horror!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 7, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> So what?
> The fact is that his account of his experience sounds true and will resonate with the slightly better paid working class who still think they're not in danger of sliding into poverty and it does chime with the experiences of those who have been through similar.
> 
> He is not claiming to be the voice of a generation or owt, just telling a story that shows it could happen to _*you*_


 
TBF, for some people, it's never really *stopped* happening (although he's a reasonable illustration of how easy the slide from comfort to relative hardship can be).
This is why I hate standard historical narratives that set out a "history as progress" story. As long as I can remember there has been an "underclass" of homeless people. The number and social composition changes (most violently between the mid-eighties and mid-nineties), but the situation itself doesn't. If social progress was as real as it is implied to be, then why this ongoing situation (outwith rightwing explanations that attribute such situations to individual fecklessness)?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Mar 7, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> TBF, for some people, it's never really *stopped* happening (although he's a reasonable illustration of how easy the slide from comfort to relative hardship can be).
> This is why I hate standard historical narratives that set out a "history as progress" story. As long as I can remember there has been an "underclass" of homeless people. The number and social composition changes (most violently between the mid-eighties and mid-nineties), but the situation itself doesn't. If social progress was as real as it is implied to be, then why this ongoing situation (outwith rightwing explanations that attribute such situations to individual fecklessness)?


 
I know but - there is also a need to bring the potentialities of poverty home to the people who don't realise how close they are to it - and there's a lot of people out there who think they're alright but in reality are only a couple of paychecks or a relationship break up away from this


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 7, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I know but - there is also a need to bring the potentialities of poverty home to the people who don't realise how close they are to it - and there's a lot of people out there who think they're alright but in reality are only a couple of paychecks or a relationship break up away from this


 
Abso-fucking-lutely! It's the volume of ignorance that depresses me, not least because some of it is willful - people not wanting to see what's in front of their noses - when acknowledgement of the sheer precarity of social life for many of us might be one of the best weapons against the ongoing *worsening* of that precarity. Okay, so the media and the pols (and those they work for) are culpable, but so are "we" too, if we glibly accept the promise of jam tomorrow as a worthwhile substitute for shit today.


----------



## smokedout (Mar 7, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> In my own experience, "real" poverty isn't just about having no dosh, it's about having little or no prospect of bettering your situation in the short to medium term, however bright you are, and however hard you try; it's about not having a system of contacts/"friendship network" that can ease your situation; it's about being *forced* to look into the abyss, and hopefully about gobbing in the eye of whatever looks back at you from the abyss. It's about "getting by" because you *have* to "get by".


 
that's fair enough, but it doesn't really tally with him being on tour with the National Theatre and running a theatre company at the time


----------



## smokedout (Mar 7, 2013)

"Alex gave up a legal career in 2007 in order to act full-time. His roles include Solness in Ibsen's _ Master Builder _ and Malvolio in _Twelfth Night_. He recently did a rehearsed reading of _The Serpent's Wedding_, as The Serpent, for Mukul Ahmed at the Southwark Playhouse.Sturdy Beggars is the brain-child of Alex and V Lewis and they ran the company as joint artistic directors until 2008. For Sturdy Beggars he has been The King in _Princess Ivona_ by Gombrowicz at the Workhouse Theatre, the title character in Shakespeare's _Othello_ at the Pacific Playhouse and most recently Mimis in _The Overnight Visitor_ by Loula Anagnostaki. He has played Hercules in his first feature film due for release this year and can be currently seen in _ The Wolfman_ for Universal. Alex made his directing debut for Sturdy Beggars in 2008 with David Mamet's _Boston Marriage_ and teaches at The Poor School. He made his National Theatre debut in 2009 as Riaz in Hanif Kureishi's _The Black Album_ which then went on National tour."

this is living like common people?


----------



## Firky (Mar 7, 2013)

He_ is_ a better liar than Laurie!


----------



## killer b (Mar 7, 2013)

do you know any actors smokedout? it's totally possible to have an impressive looking CV while living a life of hand to mouth poverty. most actors i've ever known have been utterly skint most of the time, especially when they mainly work in theatre.


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## weepiper (Mar 7, 2013)

With the exception of going on tour in 2009 that's all before the period that he said he was homeless though. He isn't pretending to have grown up poor or anything, the article basically is all about how easy it is to fall on hard times even when you think you're ok so I don't get why everyone is so 'a_ha_! But look at _this_!' tbh.


----------



## Firky (Mar 7, 2013)

killer b said:


> do you know any actors smokedout? it's totally possible to have an impressive looking CV while living a life of hand to mouth poverty. most actors i've ever known have been utterly skint most of the time, especially when they mainly work in theatre.


 
I think that was Nice One's Withnail and I reference earlier.

Also isn't actor / writer / life style coach / artist / web consulant - really a way of saying, "if I wasn't middle class and well networked I'd be on the dole" ? I know that is a massive generalisation but whilst these people may not be especially well off they're never going to face the same kind of poverty as you or anyone else on this thread.


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## smokedout (Mar 7, 2013)

killer b said:


> do you know any actors smokedout? it's totally possible to have an impressive looking CV while living a life of hand to mouth poverty. most actors i've ever known have been utterly skint most of the time, especially when they mainly work in theatre.


 
after leaving his legal career he went to the poor school (fees nearly £8k a year, no student loans/grants available) and then went on to found a theatre company

i'm not denying his experiences, but this is not an experience of poverty but of someone quite well off roughing it for a bit whilst they pursued an ambition


----------



## treelover (Mar 7, 2013)

He seems quite nuanced compared to many of his generation, i like him, I think he has integrity, we still need some new Jack Common's though..


----------



## smokedout (Mar 7, 2013)

weepiper said:


> With the exception of going on tour in 2009 that's all before the period that he said he was homeless though. He isn't pretending to have grown up poor or anything, the article basically is all about how easy it is to fall on hard times even when you think you're ok so I don't get why everyone is so 'a_ha_! But look at _this_!' tbh.


 
i think its a fair enough piece, except that he is claiming to have lived in the other country that is poverty, when in fact he has only had a very slight taste of it and knew it wouldnt last forever


----------



## Firky (Mar 7, 2013)

It also goes further than that too, middle class people are more likely to have assets, such as a mice car, a house, cupboards and a freezer full of food that can last six weeks. Have suitable clothes, live in a 'nice' area with decent schools - which in turns helps their employability. If you're on the dole and live on a known estate or part of town you are less likely to find work, have a wardrobe full of work clothes and christ forbid you have an accent of some kind.

Being skint and middle class is a damn site easier than being skint and workign class.


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## Firky (Mar 7, 2013)

treelover said:


> He seems quite nuanced compared to many of his generation


 
What?


----------



## ymu (Mar 7, 2013)

You have a point, smokedout. He acknowledges half of it with:



> I was homeless from 3 January 2009 to 27 April 2010. Through a combination of circumstances – a landlord not returning a deposit, a spell of illness, a bad break-up, a change of job – I ended up destitute. I couldn’t claim benefits, as I was working. I was turned down for help with housing as I lacked a “sufficient local connection”. I slept in a smelly sleeping bag in a rat-infested cupboard of the office in which I worked.
> 
> I had always espoused socialist sensibilities. I had always been sympathetic to those less fortunate than me. But the basic economic concept of Scarcity was academic construct rather than unforgiving reality. The fact is that I had never truly understood poverty until that January day. I thought it was having little in the fridge or raiding the jar for coppers at the end of the month or not being able to afford basic things for your home. Then I experienced having no fridge, no jar, no home, nothing.


But that is only part of it. I heard someone explain it once as the difference between being poor and being broke. Broke is a temporary state of affairs; you have the social capital and skills to expect better some time in the future. Poor is being stuck with no prospect of things ever getting better.


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## weepiper (Mar 7, 2013)

firky said:


> It also goes further than that too, middle class people are more likely to have assets, such as a mice car, a house, cupboards and a freezer full of food that can last six weeks. Have suitable clothes, live in a 'nice' area with decent schools - which in turns helps their employability. If you're on the dole and live on a known estate or part of town you are less likely to find work, have a wardrobe full of work clothes and christ forbid you have an accent of some kind.
> 
> Being skint and middle class is a damn site easier than being skint and workign class.


 
This is all true. I have the dubious pleasure of being skint and working class and now living in a fairly posh middle class area (by accident - friend of a friend of a friend had a flat to let just at the time I had to move into Edinburgh, I've been on Housing Benefit in and out of work since I moved in nearly 4 years ago). That's not much fun either but at least my kids get to go to a 'nice' school. It makes the yawning gap between our and their friends' families' lifestyles really obvious though. I had a look at the Child Poverty maps that have been doing the rounds... my council ward is 5% living in poverty. I don't know if it's better than living in an area where everyone's in the same boat as you. I spend a lot of my time walking around resenting the other people that live here. When the private schools let out especially.


----------



## treelover (Mar 7, 2013)

firky said:


> It also goes further than that too, middle class people are more likely to have assets, such as a mice car, a house, cupboards and a freezer full of food that can last six weeks. Have suitable clothes, live in a 'nice' area with decent schools - which in turns helps their employability. If you're on the dole and live on a known estate or part of town you are less likely to find work, have a wardrobe full of work clothes and christ forbid you have an accent of some kind.
> 
> Being skint and middle class is a damn site easier than being skint and workign class.


 
as you will know, its social/cultural capital..


----------



## sihhi (Mar 7, 2013)

Why, Laurie Penny, why? Why are you matey with this brand of stale vermin? 

https://twitter.com/DanHannanMEP/status/309711815246483456

*Daniel Hannan* ‏@*DanHannanMEP*
I don't know about you, @*PennyRed*, but I find Starbucks tea surprisingly - even annoyingly - good.

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
@*DanHannanMEP* not IMO! It's too often made from stale bags and thrice-boiled water. Ok if you ask for two bags.


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## smokedout (Mar 7, 2013)

not the only one

*Jenny Jones* ‏@*GreenJennyJones* 
Now here's an unusual group of wonderful ppl: @*DanHannanMEP* Kate Hoey, me, Mark Seddon. http://twitpic.com/c8xoj2


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## Firky (Mar 7, 2013)

Jenny Jones is so shit she listed coming third in the mayoral elections as part of her achievements. Which is like saying she was the first of the winners.


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## sihhi (Mar 7, 2013)

smokedout said:


> not the only one
> 
> *Jenny Jones* ‏@*GreenJennyJones*
> Now here's an unusual group of wonderful ppl: @*DanHannanMEP* Kate Hoey, me, Mark Seddon. http://twitpic.com/c8xoj2


 
Jenny Jones does not claim to be a socialist, just a green.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Mar 7, 2013)

smokedout said:


> not the only one
> 
> *Jenny Jones* ‏@*GreenJennyJones*
> Now here's an unusual group of wonderful ppl: @*DanHannanMEP* Kate Hoey, me, Mark Seddon. http://twitpic.com/c8xoj2


 
Bubble


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## articul8 (Mar 7, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Bubble


where the fuck have they been tarted up like that (*nb "tarted up" is used as a gender neutral non-derogotary term)


----------



## smokedout (Mar 7, 2013)

articul8 said:


> where the fuck have they been tarted up like that (*nb "tarted up" is used as a gender neutral non-derogotary term)


 
how can tarted up be a gender neutral non-derogatory term?


----------



## Nice one (Mar 7, 2013)

weepiper said:


> With the exception of going on tour in 2009 that's all before the period that he said he was homeless though. He isn't pretending to have grown up poor or anything, the article basically is all about how easy it is to fall on hard times even when you think you're ok so I don't get why everyone is so 'a_ha_! But look at _this_!' tbh.


 
no the national theatre tour (and a long stint in london) was from july 2009 to nov 2009. He was one of the lead actors. Also during the time he was homeless he put on three plays with his own theatre company, acted in two other plays and acted in two feature films. 

Fair play to him. He's gave up a successful career in law to do what he loves.


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## killer b (Mar 7, 2013)

smokedout said:


> how can tarted up be a gender neutral non-derogatory term?


it can be, if a8 wants it to be hard enough.


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## frogwoman (Mar 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Why, Laurie Penny, why? Why are you matey with this brand of stale vermin?
> 
> https://twitter.com/DanHannanMEP/status/309711815246483456
> 
> ...


 
shes mates with that cunt wtf ??? I actually thought for a brief period from her posts on here (the fact that she registered on here etc) that she did have some integrity, even tho it was very little


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## killer b (Mar 7, 2013)

they're all mates. university debating society innit.


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## frogwoman (Mar 7, 2013)

yer but i'd have thought traitorous corrida loving racist dan hannan would be a bridge too far.


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## el-ahrairah (Mar 7, 2013)

think again!


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## weepiper (Mar 7, 2013)

Nice one said:


> no the national theatre tour (and a long stint in london) was from july 2009 to nov 2009. He was one of the lead actors. Also during the time he was homeless he put on three plays with his own theatre company, acted in two other plays and acted in two feature films.
> 
> Fair play to him. He's gave up a successful career in law to do what he loves.


 
This is like Owen Jones all over again  is it too much to ask that there might be a lefty journo I don't have to despise? It's all rather depressing. He seems like a decent sort most of the time though, he's certainly got a lot more humility and time for people at the sharp end than Laurie Penny does.


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## frogwoman (Mar 7, 2013)

OK maybe not but I'd have thought he'd be the type of person she'd make a career out of hating.


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## frogwoman (Mar 7, 2013)

Innit


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## sihhi (Mar 7, 2013)

Less conciliatory language!

"The European Parliament has just passed a resolution on human rights. As usual, its report was a litany of nagging demands about abortion law, same-sex unions, the status of asylum seekers and so on." Daniel Hannan

"16 trillion dollars is an inexpressible sum I just do not have the vocabulary to begin to convey the seriousness of that figure... it's therefore to me quite extraordinary as a friend of America and of American democracy to come here and find people talking about gay marriage and Todd Aiken* and all these kind of, I'm not saying these might not be important issues at another time but given the immediacy and urgency of this issue [the US national debt]" Daniel Hannan

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/89703066806390784

Well exactly. @*HackneyAbbott* is a pro-choice advocate and comrade; I respectfully believe the language needs to be less conciliatory

*Todd Aitken is the rightist Hannan ally who carried on defending his position that victims of "legitimate rape" would instinctively "shut down" any possible pregnancy, hence avoiding the need for any abortion procedure. Hence on this basis every medical figure assisting in abortion was a "terrorist".


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## seventh bullet (Mar 7, 2013)

treelover said:


> we still need some new Jack Common's though.


 
And less Owen Joneses.

There'll be a fair few about, but sadly won't be heard in the mainstream media.


----------



## Nylock (Mar 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> not the only one
> 
> *Jenny Jones* ‏@*GreenJennyJones*
> Now here's an unusual group of wonderful ppl: @*DanHannanMEP* Kate Hoey, me, Mark Seddon. http://twitpic.com/c8xoj2


tbf anyone who includes themselves alongside shitweasels like Dan Hannan as part of a group of 'wonderful people' ought to be strung up by their entrails... Dan Hannan is not a 'wonderful' person, he is a 'terrible' person, in fact he is one of the 'very worst' people


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## ViolentPanda (Mar 8, 2013)

articul8 said:


> where the fuck have they been tarted up like that (*nb "tarted up" is used as a gender neutral non-derogotary term)


 
"Spruced up" or "given a respray" would be more gender-neutral.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yer but i'd have thought traitorous corrida loving racist dan hannan would be a bridge too far.


 
You know how sometimes, just seeing a picture of a person makes you feel antipathy toward them, even though you know nothing about them? Hannan provoked that from me the first time I saw a picture of him. Then, having heard his weird squeaky voice and the crap he spoke in it, I knew I was justified in my desire to set about his balding dome with ping-pong bat studded with nails.

Skidmark Murray, too.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 8, 2013)

killer b said:


> they're all mates. university debating society innit.


 
All spunking onto the same biscuit.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 8, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> And less Owen Joneses.
> 
> There'll be a fair few about, but sadly won't be heard in the mainstream media.


 
"Fewer", not "less", ffs!


----------



## Idris2002 (Mar 8, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> All spunking onto the same biscuit.


 
Such exquisite imagery.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 8, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Such exquisite imagery.


 
Trying to make any public school-types feel at home, that's all.


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## seventh bullet (Mar 8, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> "Fewer", not "less", ffs!


 

How anal.


----------



## Orang Utan (Mar 8, 2013)

Less is better than fewer and a perfectly acceptable substitute!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 8, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> How anal.


 
Nope, anal would have been explaining the difference between "less" and "fewer", and why "fewer" is correct.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 8, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Less is better than fewer and a perfectly acceptable substitute!


 
Only if you're a northerner, ginger or are a shaved simian masquerading as human.

Blimey, 3/3 OU!


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## seventh bullet (Mar 8, 2013)

I'll make a note of asking for your help when getting round to reading Marx's Capital.


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## seventh bullet (Mar 8, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Nope, anal would have been explaining the difference between "less" and "fewer", and why "fewer" is correct.


 
Just a general observation.


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## Orang Utan (Mar 8, 2013)

Only a cunt would insist on saying, 'ten items or fewer'


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## ViolentPanda (Mar 8, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Only a cunt would insist on saying, 'ten items or fewer'


 
You're right.

Thing is, I'm not saying that "fewer" should replace "less" in every context, just in the context of seventh bullet's post, so why would I *want* to insist on saying "ten items or fewer"?


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## seventh bullet (Mar 8, 2013)

People innit.


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## Firky (Mar 8, 2013)

> Some quotes from 10 pages back.


 

IIRC correctly from the wiki article I just read and am now about to impart on you. If that doesn't work I will quote what you said and slightly reword it or make a pedantic and unnecessary alteration to make it look like you were wrong and I was right.



A predictable response will follow.


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## treelover (Mar 9, 2013)

''*Radical Feminist* ‏@*RadicalFeminist* 
Male thugs brought in to end @*Reclaim_it* occupation of Women's Library. Brutality is the fundamental tool of male politics #*IWD* #*whatmendo*''


From an occupier of the now evicted protest at the Womans Library, like the 70's/early 80's again, very unhelpful comment imo...


----------



## Bakunin (Mar 9, 2013)

treelover said:


> ''*Radical Feminist* ‏@*RadicalFeminist*
> Male thugs brought in to end @*Reclaim_it* occupation of Women's Library. Brutality is the fundamental tool of male politics #*IWD* #*whatmendo*''


 
Incisive, intelligent reportage from the Twatterati as ever.


----------



## Firky (Mar 9, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Incisive, intelligent reportage from the Twatterati as ever.


 
I unfollowed Helen Flanagan because all she talks about is shoes, lipstick, footballers :/

Serves me right for watching I am a Celebrity Get Me Outta Here.


----------



## Favelado (Mar 9, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> "Fewer", not "less", ffs!


 
Usage is king. Less is now fine.


----------



## Idris2002 (Mar 9, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> People innit.


They're the worst.


----------



## Buckaroo (Mar 9, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Usage is king.


 
King Usage is a fucking parasite.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Mar 9, 2013)

Why does a mouse when it spins? because the higher the fewer.

FWIW, I never thought "tarted up" was a wrong thing to say. Mind you, I once said "Paki" & got bollocked for it.


----------



## ymu (Mar 9, 2013)

Tarted up is fine, context-dependent, IMO.

Paki can be, but rarely is.


----------



## JimW (Mar 9, 2013)

What about "done up like a pox-doctor's clerk"? Always liked that.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Mar 9, 2013)

JimW said:


> What about "done up like a pox-doctor's clerk"? Always liked that.


 
"Up and down like a bride's nightie"?


----------



## JimW (Mar 9, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> "Up and down like a bride's nightie"?


That's a good un too but we need non-dodgy ways to comment on appearance here


----------



## Delroy Booth (Mar 9, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> "Up and down like a bride's nightie"?


----------



## Greebo (Mar 9, 2013)

JimW said:


> What about "done up like a pox-doctor's clerk"? Always liked that.


"dressed with all the restraint of a magpie on acid"


Frances Lengel said:


> "Up and down like a bride's nightie"?


"up and down like a yoyo"


----------



## Frances Lengel (Mar 9, 2013)

Greebo said:


> "dressed with all the restraint of a magpie on acid"
> 
> "up and down like a yoyo"


 
Yeah but "up n down like a brides nightie" recognises female sexuality without passing judgement or somesuch. I reckon anyway.


----------



## JimW (Mar 9, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> Yeah but "up n down like a brides nightie" recognises female sexuality without passing judgement or somesuch. I reckon anyway.


Blatant acceptance of the patriarchal institution of marriage. Should be "up and down like the sleeping garment of a party to a civil partnership".


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## Mrs Magpie (Mar 9, 2013)

Greebo said:


> "dressed with all the restraint of a magpie on acid"


----------



## Mrs Magpie (Mar 9, 2013)

Anyway, Laurie Penny was not someone who impinged much on my radar and since this thread I've read a lot more of her to get a feel of what she's like/stands for etc. She comes across as hugely judgemental seasoned with lashings of middle-class guilt. Which makes her lash out at people she sees as middle-class. And she seems very young and naive. Perhaps she'll mellow when she's come out of her very self-aware bubble and seen a bit more of life. You're allowed to make a tit of yourself until you're 30ish. Practically everyone does.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Mar 10, 2013)

Mrs Magpie said:


> Anyway, Laurie Penny was not someone who impinged much on my radar and since this thread I've read a lot more of her to get a feel of what she's like/stands for etc. She comes across as hugely judgemental seasoned with lashings of middle-class guilt. Which makes her lash out at people she sees as middle-class. And she seems very young and naive. Perhaps she'll mellow when she's come out of her very self-aware bubble and seen a bit more of life. You're allowed to make a tit of yourself until you're 30ish. Practically everyone does.


 
That's why I can't help having a bit of sympathy for her, she's growing up in public.


----------



## weepiper (Mar 10, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> That's why I can't help having a bit of sympathy for her, she's growing up in public.


 
Grumble grumble mid fucking twenties IS grown up grumble grumble moan middle class affectation I left home when I was 16 grumble.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Mar 10, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Grumble grumble mid fucking twenties IS grown up grumble grumble moan middle class affectation I left home when I was 16 grumble.


 
Fairy Nuff


----------



## Mrs Magpie (Mar 10, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Grumble grumble mid fucking twenties IS grown up grumble grumble moan middle class affectation I left home when I was 16 grumble.


Me too...straight into low-paid work, but on the other hand it was relatively easy to find affordable accommodation even in London.


----------



## Nice one (Mar 10, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> That's why I can't help having a bit of sympathy for her, she's growing up in public.


 


you're joking right? She's pure fucking evil. _Rancid._ Top table in terms of CLASS POWER. And i'm glad this thread is here to remind us of the fact day after day after day.


----------



## Orang Utan (Mar 10, 2013)

she's hardly evil. just silly


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 10, 2013)

Elvis Clegg said:


> Few of Laurie's generation will ever grow up properly. How can you grow up when you don't even come out of (an increasingly vacuous) education system until you're twenty-odd? By then it's already too late. When you get paid to go to a big holding pen masquerading as a college (and even the younger lecturers can't write a coherent sentence) because there are no jobs?
> 
> Take a look around you. This is the society where middle-aged women dye their hair bright pink. Retired men go round wearing shorts and trainers. And they're the ones who lived through a time when everything was relatively real. What are things going to look like in thirty years (if we're still here)? It doesn't bear thinking about.


 
Back so soon?


----------



## Idris2002 (Mar 10, 2013)

Elvis Clegg said:


> Few of Laurie's generation will ever grow up properly. How can you grow up when you don't even come out of (an increasingly vacuous) education system until you're twenty-odd? By then it's already too late. When you get paid to go to a big holding pen masquerading as a college (and even the younger lecturers can't write a coherent sentence) because there are no jobs?
> 
> Take a look around you. This is the society where middle-aged women dye their hair bright pink. Retired men go round wearing shorts and trainers. And they're the ones who lived through a time when everything was relatively real. What are things going to look like in thirty years (if we're still here)? It doesn't bear thinking about.


 
That's the spirit! We've all missed you so.

Here's a good one: there's a couple in my building which consists of a wife who dies her hair "French prostitute red" and a husband who has his entire left arm covered in bright tatooes.

I met them bringing their kids home from school one day, and I thought "this is truly pathetic. . . the illustrated man there has a wife and two kids and I on the other hand have NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING."


----------



## Idris2002 (Mar 10, 2013)

Elvis Clegg said:


> Probably for the best in the long run.


 
Let's keep telling ourselves that, amidst the lonely watches of the night.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 10, 2013)

Mrs Magpie said:


>


Okay then, "dressed with all the restraint of a a jackdaw on acid".


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 10, 2013)

Nice one said:


> you're joking right? She's pure fucking evil. _Rancid._ Top table in terms of CLASS POWER. And i'm glad this thread is here to remind us of the fact day after day after day.


She's not evil. Hitler was evil, Laurie's just growing up in an age where all her mistakes are documented. She might be a bit silly and naive but she's not evil.


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 10, 2013)

Elvis Clegg said:


> She sometimes has a bit of an evil look on her face but it's probably just wind.


Hello LLETSA, how _nice_ of you to drop by.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Mar 10, 2013)

Elvis Clegg said:


> Few of Laurie's generation will ever grow up properly. How can you grow up when you don't even come out of (an increasingly vacuous) education system until you're twenty-odd? By then it's already too late. When you get paid to go to a big holding pen masquerading as a college (and even the younger lecturers can't write a coherent sentence) because there are no jobs?
> 
> Take a look around you. This is the society where middle-aged women dye their hair bright pink. Retired men go round wearing shorts and trainers. And they're the ones who lived through a time when everything was relatively real. What are things going to look like in thirty years (if we're still here)? It doesn't bear thinking about.


 
Ah now c'mon LLETS, your first paragraph makes sense, but what objection can you possibly have towards middle aged women dying their hair whatever colour they want? Or old blokes wearing Rayners? I agree about the shorts though, don't inflict your nobbly and etoliated pins on me please.


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 10, 2013)

he's gone again


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 10, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> he's gone again


I'll live.


----------



## treelover (Mar 10, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Back so soon?


 
Lletsa?


----------



## Idris2002 (Mar 10, 2013)

treelover said:


> Lletsa?


Those fingers in my hair
That sly come hither stare
That strips my conscience bare
Its LLETSA

And Ive got no defense for it
The heat is too intense for it
What good would common sense for it do

Cause it's LLETSA, wicked LLETSA
And although, I know, it's strictly taboo

When you arouse the need in me
My heart says yes indeed in me
Proceed with what your leading me to


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 10, 2013)

treelover said:


> Lletsa?


LLETSA.


----------



## treelover (Mar 10, 2013)

of course, sorry.....


----------



## _angel_ (Mar 10, 2013)

Aw let him stay  on this time, hes like a pet Victor Meldrew.


----------



## Idris2002 (Mar 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> LLETSA.


LLETSA, the babe they called LLETSA,
he grew, he grew, and grew,
grew up to be, grew up to be,
a boy called LLETSA. A boy called LLETSA,
he had arms, and legs, and hands, and feet,
the boy, whose name was LLETSA.

And he grew, he grew, grew, and grew,
grew up to be, yes, he grew up to be,
yes, his name was LLETSA, a teenager called LLETSA.

And his face became spotty, yes, his face became spotty,
and his voice dropped down low,
and things started to grow, on young LLETSA and so,
he was certainly no, no girl named LLETSA,
not a girl named LLETSA.

And he started to shave, and have one of the wrist,
and want to see girls, and go out and get pissed,
a man called LLETSA, this man called LLETSA,
the man they called LLETSA, this man called 

LLLLEEEEEEEETTTTTSSSSSAAAAAA


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 10, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> LLETSA, the babe they called LLETSA,
> he grew, he grew, and grew,
> grew up to be, grew up to be,
> a boy called LLETSA. A boy called LLETSA,
> ...


*applauds*


----------



## _angel_ (Mar 10, 2013)

Deleted 
Disappeared?
It's a bit like Pinochet innit?


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 10, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> Deleted
> Disappeared?
> It's a bit like Pinochet innit?


I don't think he's been beheaded or anything, just his sockpuppet accounts.


----------



## _angel_ (Mar 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I don't think he's been beheaded or anything, just his sockpuppet accounts.


For someone who keeps registering on the same forum to tell us we're all wrong about everything but he can't be arsed... he seems to be reasonably arsed about us 
I couldn't even be arsed to work out how to re register when I was banned.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

Why do people take delight in grassing LLETSA up? Fucking touts.

Even if it was him, so what?! He's not Fred West.


----------



## ymu (Mar 10, 2013)

He generally grasses himself up. But besides that, the only reason he keeps needing to reregister is that he refuses to apologise for taking the piss out of disability hate-crime. He's not Fred West, no, but he is supposed to be a grown adult.


----------



## _angel_ (Mar 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> He generally grasses himself up. But besides that, the only reason he keeps needing to reregister is that he refuses to apologise for taking the piss out of disability hate-crime. He's not Fred West, no, but he is supposed to be a grown adult.


I don't think he should have been banned for that - he was already spectacularly losing the said argument. It's better to out argue someone than ban them for disagreeing with you.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

He hasn't even got a chance to apologise before people go running to teacher and these people are supposed to be grown adults?

Can't even remember what he was supposed (or did) to have said.

Not the thread for this but it's as boringly repetitive as his appearances and outing.


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> He hasn't even got a chance to apologise before people go running to teacher and these people are supposed to be grown adults?
> 
> Can't even remember what he was supposed (or did) to have said.
> 
> Not the thread for this but it's as boringly repetitive as his appearances and outing.


He could apologise at any time by emailing the mods.

He did not believe that disability hate crime existed and started calling people liars.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

Meh.

I have heard arguments against classifying some crimes as hate crimes by SCOPE and NSPCC of all people but I forget the details - it was back on MATB. It was food for thought and again not really the thread for it.

Keep him banned if you want but grassing? Haddawaynshite!


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 10, 2013)

I didn't grass him.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Mar 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> She's not evil. Hitler was evil, Laurie's just growing up in an age where all her mistakes are documented. She might be a bit silly and naive but she's not evil.


 
Although I would say her selfishness, narcissism, thirst for self-promotion and willingness to do whatever it takes to defend her wadical image regardless of the consequences for others can often be difficult to distinguish from the less extreme forms of evil.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

I know you didn't, but as soon as someone new posts on this thread the chants of LLETSA! LLETSA! Start.

Anyway, back to media bubbles and Laurie Penny's battle cries on twitter.

equationgirl


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 10, 2013)

who has actively grassed though? People just went 'lol its lletsa again'

this has happened before but his fake nose and tash stayed in place cos no mod clocked it. For a bit.

Did anyone actually press the stasi button here?


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

Laurie Pol Pot Penny.


----------



## ymu (Mar 10, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> I don't think he should have been banned for that - he was already spectacularly losing the said argument. It's better to out argue someone than ban them for disagreeing with you.


I generally agree with that. The problem is that this can turn them into very effective trolls, which was highly inappropriate for that thread. Mrs M saw red and I don't blame her.

Like every other bannee, all he has to do is apologise for being a dick and he can have login back.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> Like every other bannee, all he has to do is apologise for being a dick and he can have login back.


 
Sometimes it takes a bit more than that if you anger the gods. I doubt Swarthy will ever be allowed back for example. With good reason. He is like Fred West.

LLETSA was a wanker in that thread; perhaps, but he had made far more of a contribution than not outside of that thread. I for one miss him.

(know the thread you are on about now but TBH I only really skim read it at the tme)


----------



## ymu (Mar 10, 2013)

Sometimes, yes. Possibly now true in LLETSA's case, but it was not true at the point he was banned (AFAIK).


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 10, 2013)

there are people who aren't banned who've done and said a lot worse than lletsa. Like a certain ukip-supporting poster and his rape apologism.


----------



## ymu (Mar 10, 2013)

Presumably because they're not stupid enough to carry on after a mod has asked them to shut the fuck up. Plenty do get banned in those circumstances; three on one thread last week, all of them back and posting under their own names again this.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

Three? Was that gromit the greasy, JC2 and ?


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> Presumably because they're not stupid enough to carry on after a mod has asked them to shut the fuck up. Plenty do get banned in those circumstances; three on one thread last week, all of them back and posting under their own names again this.


 
sometimes the mods dont see what they've wrote tho.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

ANYWAY...


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 10, 2013)

What has David Starkey said about the whole LLETSA situation?


----------



## _angel_ (Mar 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> I generally agree with that. The problem is that this can turn them into very effective trolls, which was highly inappropriate for that thread. Mrs M saw red and I don't blame her.
> 
> Like every other bannee, all he has to do is apologise for being a dick and he can have login back.



Yeah it really does take a bit more than asking nicely tbh!


----------



## sihhi (Mar 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> ANYWAY...


 

Sunny Hundal - the man who gave Laurie Penny her media break on Liberal Conspiracy.


----------



## ymu (Mar 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> sometimes the mods dont see what they've wrote tho.


Well, no. They're not paid to read each and every post made. They're not paid at all. There's no point trying to argue that LLETSA shouldn't have been banned because others have got away with worse.

Besides, I've never seen anyone get away with ignoring a direct warning from a mod and getting away with it. I'm not a fan of the ban hammer but there's a limit to how much they can do to protect threads that others want to use for serious discussion if a poster is determined to continue being a dick on them.


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Sunny Hundal - the man who gave Laurie Penny her media break on Liberal Conspiracy.


 
as the old saying goes you're never as serious as when you say you're joking ...


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Sunny Hundal - the man who gave Laurie Penny her media break on Liberal Conspiracy.


 
More than an element of truth in that joke, he probably does miss the Blair days.


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 10, 2013)

Counting LOL

Hundal is not a genius.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Mar 10, 2013)

This seems to fit on this thread. Laurie Penny like levels of me, me, me from Richard Seymour of the SWP (not for long though lol):




			
				SEYMOUR! said:
			
		

> McDonald's had better sign me up for an advertising campaign, because I am _loving it_.  _Newsweek_, having mysteriously overlooked my previous work, has just reviewed _Unhitched_.  _Newsweek_ is massive; therefore I am massive.  Fuck Bono.  Fuck Bob Geldoff.  The next _Live 8_ is hosted by me.  And what a review.  It is the most deliciously splenetic fanboy tribute to unreasoning hysteria that it has ever been my pleasure to glhttp://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/alex-callinicos-swp-vs-laurie-penny-new-statesman-facebook-handbags.266196/page-487#post-12043158oat about.  I wasn't prepared for an opportunity like this, but I won't pass it up all the same.


----------



## JimW (Mar 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Sunny Hundal - the man who gave Laurie Penny her media break on Liberal Conspiracy.


"Fairness", the meaningless drivel of the liberal fuck. Equal access to private school to all who can pay.


----------



## redsquirrel (Mar 10, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> Aw let him stay on this time, hes like a pet Victor Meldrew.


He fucking loves being banned.


----------



## Nice one (Mar 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> She's not evil. Hitler was evil, Laurie's just growing up in an age where all her mistakes are documented. She might be a bit silly and naive but she's not evil.


 
all her mistakes seem to be documented here. For over 2 years on a daily basis. That's a lot of time and energy expended on someone who's just a bit silly and naive.


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 10, 2013)

Nice one said:


> all her mistakes seem to be documented here. For over 2 years on a daily basis. That's a lot of time and energy expended on someone who's just a bit silly and naive.


Are you sure you've grasped the concept of a forum?


----------



## Greebo (Mar 10, 2013)

Nice one said:


> all her mistakes seem to be documented here. For over 2 years on a daily basis. That's a lot of time and energy expended on someone who's just a bit silly and naive.


Think of this thread's subject as a somewhat unhelpful Marriage Guidance Counsellor who manages to get the warring couple to agree on one thing - that he/she is useless at his/her job.


----------



## ymu (Mar 10, 2013)

Nice one said:


> all her mistakes seem to be documented here. For over 2 years on a daily basis. That's a lot of time and energy expended on someone who's just a bit silly and naive.


Five posts a day on average would be a lot of time and energy for one poster, but hardly for dozens of them.

The way it works is, people read an article and think "oh, that would be of interest to that thread on urban, I shall go and post a link along with a line or two saying what I think about it", and then other people see it on new posts and they read it and some of them respond if they think they have anything useful to say.

And lo, the thread did develop.


----------



## Nice one (Mar 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> Five posts a day on average would be a lot of time and energy for one poster, but hardly for dozens of them.
> 
> The way it works is, people read an article and think "oh, that would be of interest to that thread on urban, I shall go and post a link along with a line or two saying what I think about it", and then other people see it on new posts and they read it and some of them respond if they think they have anything useful to say.
> 
> And lo, the thread did develop.


 
Replies: 14,603
Views: 380,573
Those are impressive figures


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 10, 2013)

Nice one said:


> Replies: 14,603
> Views: 380,573
> Those are impressive figures


Over two years? Not especially considering some of the threads on here.


----------



## Orang Utan (Mar 10, 2013)

It's not just about one person - tis multifaceted


----------



## Nice one (Mar 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Over two years? Not especially considering some of the threads on here.


over two years is an impressive figure


----------



## JimW (Mar 10, 2013)

Nice one said:


> over two years is an impressive figure


Thanks, I like to think i played my part. And I've done it again!


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 10, 2013)

Nice one said:


> over two years is an impressive figure


But if you view different threads and keep going back to the LP one, each visit is a page view, so no, it's not.


----------



## JimW (Mar 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> But if you view different threads and keep going back to the LP one, each visit is a page view, so no, it's not.


Don't spoil it, I've never been involved in anything impressive before.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

The thread was pretty much dead up until Christmas anyway. About 300,000 of those impressions were made since then.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Think of this thread's subject as a somewhat unhelpful Marriage Guidance Counsellor who manages to get the warring couple to agree on one thing - that he/she is useless at his/her job.


----------



## editor (Mar 10, 2013)

Nice one said:


> Replies: 14,603
> Views: 380,573
> Those are impressive figures


Not as impressive as:
Replies: 34,597
Views: 882,320
for a thread started around the same time. These are busy boards!


----------



## 8115 (Mar 10, 2013)

editor said:


> Not as impressive as:
> Replies: 34,597
> Views: 882,320
> for a thread started around the same time. These are busy boards!



That's got to be one of the busiest threads ever though. Up there with dinner. I do think this thread is a bit out order tbh.


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 10, 2013)

8115 said:


> That's got to be one of the busiest threads ever though. Up there with dinner. I do think this thread is a bit out order tbh.


In what way is it out of order?


----------



## 8115 (Mar 10, 2013)

.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Mar 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> He generally grasses himself up. But besides that, the only reason he keeps needing to reregister is that he refuses to apologise for taking the piss out of disability hate-crime. He's not Fred West, no, but he is supposed to be a grown adult.


 
Soz for arriving late to the party, but did old LLETS really take the piss out of disability hate crime? I don't think he did really. And he's from miles platting which, according to the pretty good Ian Hough is the electric fence that separates quadrant one from quadrant two.

www.thenamelessthing.com/four-quadrants-of-manchester

miles platting is quite an exhilerating, beautiful and thrilling place and LLETSA's from there - That's all I need to know.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

8115 said:


> That's got to be one of the busiest threads ever though. Up there with dinner. I do think this thread is a bit out order tbh.


 


8115 said:


> .


Why is this thread out of order?

Laurie and her peers are public speakers and a self appointed leaders / critics of the left. They're here to shepherd the working classes and preach to "us", this is "our" response. Fuck bum licking.


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 10, 2013)

it's not just about one person it's about that entire milieu. sunny hundal owen jones molly crabapple the whole lot of them.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

Don't forget Nick Lez' - the putrid puss filled boil who compares himself with big issue sellers because he spunked his wage before pay day on skinny lattes and taxis.


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> it's not just about one person it's about that entire milieu. sunny hundal owen jones molly crabapple the whole lot of them.


Aye it's about the whole commentariat and their presumptive way of speaking for us without asking our opinions.


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 10, 2013)

8115 said:


> .


Why did you edit your post - I didn't get to read what you wrote


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 10, 2013)

In fairness though I don't think it's a problem that's confined to the commentariat (although its certainly magnified x10000 in that bubble). I think a lot of left-wing parties and activist groups and so on end up producing bubbles whose conditions are isolated from everyone else (i'm including myself/this place in this btw).


----------



## 8115 (Mar 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Why did you edit your post - I didn't get to read what you wrote


 
Sorry. Not being very good at articulating myself today and I don't want to write things which I don't want to stand by if that makes sense.

I just feel like the continual criticism might be a bit upsetting, it gets quite personal sometimes.

That's pretty much exactly what I wrote.


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 10, 2013)

I think that activist/bubble thing has been touched on before but I reckon it's a topic for another thread.


----------



## 8115 (Mar 10, 2013)

I do laugh myself sometimes, fwiw.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

I don't really give a toss about hurting the feelings of the echelons of the upper-middle-class liberal elite.

"Gutted".


----------



## Nice one (Mar 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> it's not just about one person it's about that entire milieu. sunny hundal owen jones molly crabapple the whole lot of them.


 
i'd like to think that was the case (and i'd throw alex andreou in there as well), but really it's not. Most of the vitriol is directed at her, almost out of compulsion - from what she writes to the clothes she wears and the place she lives to the places her has visited. The question is, if she's not that important why all the attention? If she is that important, why is she important?


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> I don't really give a toss about hurting the feelings of the echelons of the upper-middle-class liberal elite.
> 
> "Gutted".


 

and chuffed when you manage to get a twitterbite


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

Must be terribly uncomfortable sitting on that wire fence, nice one.



DotCommunist said:


> and chuffed when you manage to get a twitterbite


 
I think there's like a builder's black list but for media bubbles and our names are on it.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 10, 2013)

Nice one said:


> <snip>Most of the vitriol is directed at her, almost out of compulsion - from what she writes to the clothes she wears and the place she lives to the places her has visited. The question is, if she's not that important why all the attention?<snip>


Because those things are what LP appears to think it's important to write about.


----------



## Nice one (Mar 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> Must be terribly uncomfortable sitting on that wire fence, nice one.


 
just find it weird. Call it the LLETSA defence


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

Yeh, she said it was weird too (or creepy, I forget).

It is a bit odd that she uploads a picture of her bed on twitter, effectively asking for people to comment on it, then get's the hump when that happens.

She doesn't make her bed. Disgusting.


----------



## Nice one (Mar 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> Yeh, she said it was weird too (or creepy, I forget).


 
and stalkery.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

You should see the files we have in the back room. Graphic shots of her sipping tea in Greece.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> <snip>It is a bit odd that she uploads a picture of her bed on twitter, effectively asking for people to comment on it, then get's the hump when that happens.


First rule of the internet - if you don't want it ever repeated or commented on, don't post it.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

I agree though, it would freak me out a bit if I saw a 500 page long thread with nearly half a million views going through my internet bowel movemnts.

Yet she's part of the internet generation who grew up with it as a child so maybe not. She knows how to use it to her advantage/

E2A:

There are a few posts on here where she is actually being congratulated, same goes with our Owen.  Owen was briefly a hero amongst some people on here because he made IDS squirm a bit for a couple of moments. I Don't think Sunny has ever been complimented though - not that I am aware of.


----------



## Nice one (Mar 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> I agree though, it would freak me out a bit if I saw a 500 page long thread with nearly half a million views going through my internet bowel movemnts.
> 
> Yet she's part of the internet generation who grew up with it as a child so maybe not. She knows how to use it to her advantage.


 
the thing is why is she important enough to expend all this energy on? I'm not really interested in her, in a positive or negative way, she isn't writing for me and i'm not her intended audience, i'm just amazed there is all this interest in detailing her online activity, as if it mattered.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 10, 2013)

treelover said:


> Lletsa?


 
Who else?


----------



## 8115 (Mar 10, 2013)

Nice one said:


> the thing is why is she important enough to expend all this energy on? I'm not really interested in her, in a positive or negative way, she isn't writing for me and i'm not her intended audience, i'm just amazed there is all this interest in detailing her online activity, as if it mattered.


 
It's a meme.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

Nice one said:


> the thing is why is she important enough to expend all this energy on? I'm not really interested in her, in a positive or negative way, she isn't writing for me and i'm not her intended audience, i'm just amazed there is all this interest in detailing her online activity, as if it mattered.


 
You're still focusing on Laurie, it isn't just her. It is the whole bunch of them.

Laurie probably gets the focus of it on here because her name is in the title and she spews the most shite.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> Why do people take delight in grassing LLETSA up? Fucking touts.
> 
> Even if it was him, so what?! He's not Fred West.


 
No-one ever needs to grass the daft cunt. His own prose and fixation with certain subjects does that for him.


----------



## Zabo (Mar 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> Laurie and her peers are public speakers and a self appointed leaders / critics of the left. They're here to shepherd the working classes and preach to "us", this is "our" response. Fuck bum licking.


 
Thank You. It needs to be repeated loud and often. I am sick to death of these condescending, pseudo intellectuals stating rehashed history. Yes, Penny, Jones et al., we are all so fucking stupid that we need to be told about the glaring obvious.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> as the old saying goes you're never as serious as when you say you're joking ...


 
"Many a true word is spoken in jest".


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 10, 2013)

Nice one said:


> over two years is an impressive figure


 
Your problem, my friend, is that you have the true anarchist's conception of numbers, where we believe that any figure over 100 is "impressive".


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> Why is this thread out of order?
> 
> Laurie and her peers are public speakers and a self appointed leaders / critics of the left. They're here to shepherd the working classes and preach to "us", this is "our" response. Fuck bum licking.


 
Frankly, they see themselves (in a romantic rather than politically-pragmatic way) as a vanguard to a true form of socialism, if only the damn proles would listen to them with the same intensity and belief that the middle classes do!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> Don't forget Nick Lez' - the putrid puss filled boil who compares himself with big issue sellers because he spunked his wage before pay day on skinny lattes and taxis.


 
Whenever I read anything by Nick lezard, the voice in my head is of Rob Newman's repulsive Jarvis the Pervert character.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> In fairness though I don't think it's a problem that's confined to the commentariat (although its certainly magnified x10000 in that bubble). I think a lot of left-wing parties and activist groups and so on end up producing bubbles whose conditions are isolated from everyone else (i'm including myself/this place in this btw).


 
Thing is, they have similar aims when you think about it (convincing people that a particular "path" is the right one/the best choice), so it's not surprising if the produce similar *and* overlapping bubbles.


----------



## JimW (Mar 10, 2013)

It runs in cycles now this thread, must be about the fifth time someone's come on to make the argument Nice One is now. Probably means Spiney is due to be accused of something heinous within the next couple of pages until a phone chat with LP fails to clear it up.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Whenever I read anything by Nick lezard, the voice in my head is of Rob Newman's repulsive Jarvis the Pervert character.


 
That character was brilliant 

 "I do my bit for the local parish, I don't want to come over all Mother Theresa. Well..."


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 10, 2013)

Nice one said:


> and stalkery.


 
Like a head of celery?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> That character was brilliant
> 
> "I do my bit for the local parish, I don't want to come over all Mother Theresa. Well..."


 
"What's that you ask, little homeless girl? What brings me here? The likes of you, my dear, the likes of you...."


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

She's such a fucking liar anyway and a patronising twat.



> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> I spend lots of time discussing issues like this with male comrades who actually want to learn, not just shout down. Never time wasted.


 
The subtext to that is rank. LISTEN TO ME AND I WILL TEACH YOU.

Learning is a two way process you odious twat.



> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> Sort of a 'silly questions room'. Chatham house rules. Comments MODERATED to all hell.


 
A bit like your twitter, NS pieces and blog, eh? What a cunt.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 10, 2013)

Nice one said:


> the thing is why is she important enough to expend all this energy on? I'm not really interested in her, in a positive or negative way, she isn't writing for me and i'm not her intended audience, i'm just amazed there is all this interest in detailing her online activity, as if it mattered.


 
It's what she represents, what she exemplifies: A thoroughly middle-class take on life that aims to appropriate working-class sentiment and culture for its' own purposes, that "does" activism but always miraculously manages to derive more benefit from bog-standard, even quotidian activism, than anyone who doesn't "do" activism, but rather live it.
The reason people look at the detail of her activity is because of the large potential it holds for exposing hypocrisy and downright fibs. Similar attention to Johann Hari exposed him as a fantasist.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> "What's that you ask, little homeless girl? What brings me here? The likes of you, my dear, the likes of you...."


 
"All those poor little boys, sleeping rough, naked skin on the pavement... it's enough to make one, *inhales cigarette* "

Brilliant stuff.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 10, 2013)

JimW said:


> It runs in cycles now this thread, must be about the fifth time someone's come on to make the argument Nice One is now. Probably means Spiney is due to be accused of something heinous within the next couple of pages until a phone chat with LP fails to clear it up.


 
How about beastiality this time round, stir the animal rights folks up?


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

I actually can't read her twitter for too long, it makes me seethe. Our Owen and Molly Crapapples I have a bit of patience for but her and Nick Lez are vile creatures.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 10, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> "What's that you ask, little homeless girl? What brings me here? The likes of you, my dear, the likes of you...."


It was worse than that - he said "little homeless person" and he was addressing a head of indeterminate sex sticking up out of a heap of blankets etc.


----------



## Firky (Mar 10, 2013)

Greebo said:


> It was worse than that - he said "little homeless person" and he was addressing a head of indeterminate sex sticking up out of a heap of blankets etc.


 
Google images isn't forthcoming but I thought this was good


----------



## Greebo (Mar 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> Google images isn't forthcoming but I thought this was good <snip>


Oh gods!


----------



## Zabo (Mar 11, 2013)

"@PennyRed My loyalty to winter as a concept is being severely tested right now. Just saying."

At last I know what is absent from my life. A conceptual framework for the seasons. It's not going to be easy. How to reconcile my indifference to autumn and my unswerving and undying loyalty to summer? Not sure how I can fit the rain in to the framework. Maybe I should write to Michael Fish and seek his help? I bet he's well up on the dialectics of isobars.

'And tonight's weather will be more conceptual than usual for this time of the year. There is a very wet conceptual front moving in from Siberia. Time to put up your free trade umbrella so as not to get drowned in concepts.'


----------



## Firky (Mar 11, 2013)

Don't, Zabo. It is really bad for your mental wellbeing. People should not be exposed to more than six tweets a day or one NS article a week.
\


----------



## Nice one (Mar 11, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> It's what she represents, what she exemplifies: A thoroughly middle-class take on life that aims to appropriate working-class sentiment and culture for its' own purposes, that "does" activism but always miraculously manages to derive more benefit from bog-standard, even quotidian activism, than anyone who doesn't "do" activism, but rather live it.


 
but this equally applies to the vast majority of anarchists, including class struggle anarchists. When you have a room full of posh twat anarchists telling you what it means to be working class while hiding their public school backgrounds you know you have problems. When you hear laurie penny saying stuff on twitter, well frankly it's just another voice in the ether.



ViolentPanda said:


> The reason people look at the detail of her activity is because of the large potential it holds for exposing hypocrisy and downright fibs. Similar attention to Johann Hari exposed him as a fantasist.


 
but why is this important? It is not as though ordinary people don't know journalists are liars:

*Ipsos feb 2013 poll:*
_British public trust not to tell the truth:_
_politicians (in general) - 77%_
_bankers - 75%_
_journalists - 72%_
_mps in general - 70%_
http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchp...an-estate-agents-bankers-and-journalists.aspx


----------



## Firky (Mar 11, 2013)

Nice one said:


> but this equally applies to the vast majority of anarchists, including class struggle anarchists. When you have a room full of posh twat anarchists telling you what it means to be working class while hiding their public school backgrounds you know you have problems.


 
I don't think anyone will disagree with that but is possible to be posh and not have inherent MC values. Similary it's also possible to be WC and a complete arse. The problem arises when you get a one way version, 'listen to me, I know best, that is why I am on the platform and not you'. A lot of people on this thread aren't hewn from the coal face, myself included, but do have enough experience and interaction with WC that can identify with them. Where as it is obvious the likes of Jones' really doesn't have a clue and merely look up on WC as a specimen, a palette to paint their work with.

(I did get called a WC communist once but am not - they were just a posh twat  )




> but why is this important? It is not as though ordinary people don't know journalists are liars:
> *Ipsos feb 2013 poll:*
> _British public trust not to tell the truth:_
> _politicians (in general) - 77%_
> ...


 
I think when people voted for that poll they weren't thinking of the likes of the people discussed in this thread. More the Richard Little Johns of the world.


----------



## Firky (Mar 11, 2013)

Where's sihhi when you need him, he can explain it far better than anyone here? Even if he does have problems with Richard 'Legend' Medely he's a good poster.


----------



## seventh bullet (Mar 11, 2013)

Anarchism to me just looks like a (very privileged) middle class youth subculture.  What went wrong?


----------



## smokedout (Mar 11, 2013)

Nice one said:


> the thing is why is she important enough to expend all this energy on? I'm not really interested in her, in a positive or negative way, she isn't writing for me and i'm not her intended audience, i'm just amazed there is all this interest in detailing her online activity, as if it mattered.


 
she styles herself as the voice of the left, goes on telly a lot and is quite annoying, it would be unusual if there werent long threads on left/radical leaning political boards about her, that's what the internet's like


----------



## Firky (Mar 11, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> Anarchism to me just looks like a (very privileged) middle class youth subculture. What went wrong?


 
The rebel yell became the rebel sell, man.

*vomit*






(actually it's not such a bad book, read worse)


----------



## SpineyNorman (Mar 11, 2013)

Nice one said:


> the thing is why is she important enough to expend all this energy on? I'm not really interested in her, in a positive or negative way, she isn't writing for me and i'm not her intended audience, i'm just amazed there is all this interest in detailing her online activity, as if it mattered.


 
Why are these boards so important that we expend so much energy on them? Why is it not being so important so important that you have to expend so much energy telling us it's not important?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Mar 11, 2013)

Firky said:


> I don't think anyone will disagree with that but is possible to be posh and not have inherent MC values. Similary it's also possible to be WC and a complete arse. The problem arises when you get a one way version, 'listen to me, I know best, that is why I am on the platform and not you'. A lot of people on this thread aren't hewn from the coal face, myself included, but do have enough experience and interaction with WC that can identify with them. Where as it is obvious the likes of Jones' really doesn't have a clue and merely look up on WC as a specimen, a palette to paint their work with.


 
Not sure that's quite true for Jones. His dad was the militant fulltimer in Sheffield so he'd have been far from well off. I think he has more of a genuine commitment to the politics too. That says more about how shit they are than how good he is though.


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 11, 2013)

if I had a thread of near 500 pages all about me I'd probably shit myself with hapiness. Then If I read it it would be you cunts detailing my every flaw and failure and I would have a little cry


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 11, 2013)

Firky said:


> I think there's like a builder's black list but for media bubbles and our names are on it.


 

Of all the things I am banned from which include two snooker halls, one restaurant and a hungry horse pub- the bubble is not one I weep about. Wouldn't mind the wages though!


----------



## Greebo (Mar 11, 2013)

smokedout said:


> she styles herself as the voice of the left, goes on telly a lot and is quite annoying, it would be unusual if there werent long threads on left/radical leaning political boards about her, that's what the internet's like


Indeed.  LP is to urban as "King Kev" and other self-styled and self-appointed leaders are to the pagan scene.  The threads reduce them back to the size they always were instead of the size they'd like to be.


----------



## tufty79 (Mar 11, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Indeed.  LP is to urban as "King Kev" and other self-styled and self-appointed leaders are to the pagan scene.  The threads reduce them back to the size they always were instead of the size they'd like to be.


I'll be adding a few more suggestions for re-sizing shortly.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 11, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> I'll be adding a few more suggestions for re-sizing shortly.


Much as I'm against capital punishment...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 11, 2013)

Nice one said:


> but this equally applies to the vast majority of anarchists, including class struggle anarchists. When you have a room full of posh twat anarchists telling you what it means to be working class while hiding their public school backgrounds you know you have problems.


 
"Trustafarian"-types are the reason I'm non-aligned, and have been for 3 decades. Mockney accents tend to distract me. 



> When you hear laurie penny saying stuff on twitter, well frankly it's just another voice in the ether.


 
Nah. Most people in the "twattersphere" don't also have a selection of print and broadcast media outlets to retail their voice through, unlike the likes of Penny, Hundal etc.




> but why is this important? It is not as though ordinary people don't know journalists are liars:
> 
> *Ipsos feb 2013 poll:*
> _British public trust not to tell the truth:_
> ...


 
Knowing/believing that *all* journos are a bit douchebaggish and dishonest (a popular cultural trope almost as old journalism itself, to be fair!) is different from recognising/acknowledging that a *particular* journalist, especially one that says things that might chime with you (if you happen to be a middle-class liberal), routinely manipulates the facts to suit not only their publisher's view, but their own too.


----------



## Firky (Mar 11, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Not sure that's quite true for Jones. His dad was the militant fulltimer in Sheffield so he'd have been far from well off. I think he has more of a genuine commitment to the politics too. That says more about how shit they are than how good he is though.


 
I don't doubt his commitment and he can be _quite*_ good at times, like Laurie Penny can. That thing he wrote about his old man losing a job past middle age was good for example.

(*listened to a presentation of his last year and it was pretty good TBF and he didn't say any of his favourite words).


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Mar 11, 2013)

> “A woman’s free speech is the mini-skirt of the internet”, says British author and blogger Laurie Penny


 


http://re-publica.de/en/news/rp13-speaker-laurie-penny-and-internets-mini-skirt


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 11, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> http://re-publica.de/en/news/rp13-speaker-laurie-penny-and-internets-mini-skirt


It's a reasonable analogy, I think. Whereas in the past women were heckled and abused for their attire (the miniskirt) they are now being heckled and abused for voicing their opinions on the internet.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Mar 11, 2013)

Nice one said:


> but this equally applies to the vast majority of anarchists, _*including*_ class struggle anarchists.


 
No it doesn't as you well know.

For some reason you have become disillousioned with your old life and politics, that's fair enough; me too - but don't blame it on your former comrades.


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 11, 2013)

Hey london media activist bubble types have to defend other london media bubble types.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Mar 11, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> It's a reasonable analogy, I think. Whereas in the past women were heckled and abused for their attire (the miniskirt) they are now being heckled and abused for voicing their opinions on the internet.



Makes more sense now, Ta!


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 11, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> Makes more sense now, Ta!


No worries - I think it lost something when she made it short and punchy. I did think it was good but clumsily expressed.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Mar 11, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> No worries - I think it lost something when she made it short and punchy. I did think it was good but clumsily expressed.


 
lucky she's not paid for her writing


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 11, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> lucky she's not paid for her writing


oh, wait....


----------



## Firky (Mar 12, 2013)

I am still in shock that the extra guest on QT gets paid to tweet.


----------



## BigTom (Mar 12, 2013)

Firky said:


> I am still in shock that the extra guest on QT gets paid to tweet.



I'm not sure this is right, Richard Murphy was the guest last week and he said the bbc didn't pay his expenses let alone a fee. 

Perhaps he's just a bad negotiator, I was surprised he didn't get expenses.


----------



## JimW (Mar 12, 2013)

BigTom said:


> I'm not sure this is right, Richard Murphy was the guest last week and he said the bbc didn't pay his expenses let alone a fee.
> 
> Perhaps he's just a bad negotiator, I was surprised he didn't get expenses.


The expenses being the cost of leccy while you have your telly on, or are you supposed to travel to the studio to make you tweets?


----------



## Firky (Mar 12, 2013)

BigTom said:


> I'm not sure this is right, Richard Murphy was the guest last week and he said the bbc didn't pay his expenses let alone a fee.
> 
> Perhaps he's just a bad negotiator, I was surprised he didn't get expenses.


 
I was going off what butchers said. 

I know she was at the BBC studios because she moaned about their computers being old or slow.


----------



## BigTom (Mar 12, 2013)

JimW said:


> The expenses being the cost of leccy while you have your telly on, or are you supposed to travel to the studio to make you tweets?



You're in the bbc building in London according to Richard Murphy, he said he traveled from Norfolk or Norwich (can't remember where he lives) on the train to do it and didn't even get his ticket paid.
I'll see if I can find the tweets for links when I'm on a computer later.


----------



## JimW (Mar 12, 2013)

BigTom said:


> You're in the bbc building in London according to Richard Murphy, he said he traveled from Norfolk or Norwich (can't remember where he lives) on the train to do it and didn't even get his ticket paid.
> I'll see if I can find the tweets for links when I'm on a computer later.


That seems a bit mad - would have thought if there was any value to the role at all it would be someone more like a viewer's tribune sat at home like the rest of us.


----------



## Firky (Mar 12, 2013)

They're probably worried incase you accidentally tweet your Angry Birds score if you did it from home.


----------



## BigTom (Mar 12, 2013)

Here are the tweets: https://twitter.com/RichardJMurphy/status/309964685195751425



> “@HenryPath: @RichardJMurphy I enjoyed your tweets ... [as] Extra Guest - were you offered a fee for doing it?” No! Not even train fare


 
and https://twitter.com/RichardJMurphy/status/309965708723384320



> @HenryPath I live in Norfolk and had to do it at the BBC


 
(none of this means that Laurie wasn't paid of course)


----------



## Firky (Mar 12, 2013)

I am sure if you asked her, she'd give a civil answer, one that wouldn't be aggressively defensive. 

Or make some hilarious quip how she was paid - in tea. LOL.


----------



## coley (Mar 12, 2013)

Nearly 500 pages, certainly provokes a response, whoever she is


----------



## butchersapron (Mar 12, 2013)

How many factual errors can *YOU* spot:

The SWP and rape: why I care about this Marxist-Leninist implosion

(Article doesn't really say much either beyond the political banalities, not sure why it exists or why it needs to exist)


----------



## Balbi (Mar 12, 2013)

Because now it's been commented on _by someone who matters_ in her young hip activist wordslinger demographic.


----------



## smokedout (Mar 12, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Because now it's been commented on _by someone who matters_ in her young hip activist wordslinger demographic.


 
title says it all: The SWP and rape: *why I care* about this Marxist-Leninist implosion


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 12, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Because now it's been commented on _by someone who matters_ in her young hip activist wordslinger demographic.


 
Yep. You can't expect an opinion to be valid unless the professor of the opinion is (by Twitter follower count) valid, eh


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 12, 2013)

.


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 12, 2013)

I agree


----------



## Balbi (Mar 12, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I agree



The opinion is therefore now proper urbans.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Mar 12, 2013)

There's also a bit of a clash between Penny's views on the SWP's role on "the left" between this bit from the latest article




> The SWP is small, but it has been a significant organising force on the British left for more than 30 years, taking a leading role in coalitions like Stop the War, Unite Against Fascism and, recently, the fight against austerity in the nation's poorest communities.




and this from 2010 http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/02/17/resignations-rivalry-and-the-future-of-the-left/




> The SWP has been at the forefront of every attempt to scupper cohesion on the left over the past decade,




And on a petty level I really like the overblown verbiage of the penultimate paragraph of that second piece, especially the misuse of "recalcitrant".


----------



## J Ed (Mar 12, 2013)

This Owen Jones article is a bit too self-involved but he gives the EDL sympathiser Douglas Murray a well deserved kicking http://www.newstatesman.com/world-a...ing-me-distract-damning-un-report-israel-gaza


----------



## Firky (Mar 18, 2013)

Sunny's indepth anaylsis of The Sun - 5 sentences and a photo of RM.

No real background or thought into hone why this is significant or anything. He gets paid for this..? 



> Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh’s phone was stolen in October 2010 and she immediately reported it to the police.
> 
> In June 2012, she is informed by the police that the Sun newspaper accessed texts from her stolen phone not long after it was stolen.
> 
> ...


 
http://liberalconspiracy.org/2013/03/18/why-the-sun-hacking-of-labour-mp-is-so-significant/


----------



## tufty79 (Mar 19, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> randomish aside:
> 
> email to new statesman:
> 
> ...


epic bump on this bit!
managed to miss a reply from helen, from a couple of months ago.



> Sorry for the lack of response. It’s probably best to contact our head of HR, Chris Denning:


journalists' personal responsibility and confirming whether they've procedures in place = an hr issue? really?

i'll get asking..


----------



## killer b (Mar 23, 2013)

salute to muscovyduck - that's a mammoth task you're embarked on. see you sometime next week.


----------



## tufty79 (Mar 23, 2013)




----------



## love detective (Mar 23, 2013)

killer b said:


> salute to muscovyduck - that's a mammoth task you're embarked on. see you sometime next week.


 
_There is no royal road to the laurie penny thread, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits_


----------



## DaveCinzano (Mar 23, 2013)

killer b said:


> salute to muscovyduck - that's a mammoth task you're embarked on. see you sometime next week.





tufty79 said:


>


killer b has _x_ new likes
tufty79 has _y_ new likes
Where
_y_ = 0
_x _> _y_


----------



## Balbi (Mar 23, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> killer b has _x_ new likes
> tufty79 has _y_ new likes
> Where
> _y_ = 0
> _x _> _y_



 I did notice.


----------



## tufty79 (Mar 23, 2013)

i didn't mean it like that
i read killer b's post as a bit 'the ducks quack at midnight' - should've used my confusedface.

sorry, i clearly shouldn't be allowed on the internet at the minute.


----------



## Favelado (Mar 23, 2013)

I really like Laurie's recent article in the New Statesman.

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-poli...ectness-just-try-being-rude-about-margaret-th


----------



## emanymton (Mar 23, 2013)

Hang on Tufty just got banned? how come? I didn't think he/she were serious about not being allowed to use the internet.


----------



## Firky (Mar 23, 2013)

She's probably asked to be banned.


----------



## barney_pig (Mar 23, 2013)

Firky said:


> She's probably asked to be banned.


That's right, blame the victim


----------



## Firky (Mar 23, 2013)




----------



## SpineyNorman (Mar 23, 2013)

Favelado said:


> I really like Laurie's recent article in the New Statesman.
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-poli...ectness-just-try-being-rude-about-margaret-th


 
That's not bad actually - though I'm struggling to avoid the temptation to have a go at her on twitter for using the term 'the disabled', a term that I happen to know a lot of disabled people find really offensive and I can see why they do too.


----------



## emanymton (Mar 23, 2013)

Why resist the temptation. But if you do it it must be done is a pleasant, supportive but patronising why.

Something like. Laura I know you mean well, but I am afraid I must tell you many people find the term the disabled rather offensive.


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 23, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's not bad actually - though I'm struggling to avoid the temptation to have a go at her on twitter for using the term 'the disabled', a term that I happen to know a lot of disabled people find really offensive and I can see why they do too.


 

Invite her round for some disabilitea

I'll be gutted if you don't. Or chuffed if you do.

/dc


----------



## SpineyNorman (Mar 23, 2013)

Bugger - I can't do it anyway cos she's blocked me again - when the fuck did that happen


----------



## Firky (Mar 23, 2013)

Did you ever question her, ask her for clarification or have the audacity to perhaps criticise her? That'll do it. She's very precious.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Mar 23, 2013)

Most around here probably aren't aware but she once called me a racist and we had a little bit of a disagreement over it, after which I was blocked. But then I was unblocked when she had a sudden realisation that I wasn't in fact racist and she was keen to stress that this had nothing to do with me pointing out that this constituted libel and implying that I may seek legal advice.

Afterwards she said something about people on here being misogynists - think it was when someone suggested she was lazy and not prepared to do her own serious research for a talk on the paris commune. This was especially misogynistic considering that all she'd done was ask people to do her research for her on twitter. I pointed out that maybe it was _her _people had a problem with and not women - that it was possible to think she was shit without being sexist. This is the only thing I can think of that may have moved her to block me once again.

She'll probably take the fact that I only just noticed as being misogynistic too - I mean, I'd have noticed straight away and complained if Owen Jones or someone had blocked me


----------



## Firky (Mar 23, 2013)

She also misread one of Our Owen's articles (can't remember exactly what, something to do wit Galloway IIRC) and of course it was Owen who was in the wrong and not explaining himself properly*. Everyone else who read the article got what Owen was getting at.

Smartest girl in a school of smart girls.


*they made  up over tea at Starbucks.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Mar 23, 2013)

Your cynicism over that is why we can't have nice things - like revolution. Tea fixes things you see.


----------



## Firky (Mar 23, 2013)

Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed 
The Left should learn from Galloway? @OwenJones84, wtf? I would have thought you know precisely why GG has been demonised. And justly so.

Helen Lewis ‏@helenlewis 
@PennyRed @OwenJones84 Thought his point that GG gets more support than you'd expect a repellent sexist to was clear, myself…

Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed 
@helenlewis @owenjones84 I didn't get it until Owen explained it to me on the phone. I get that that's what he meant.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Mar 23, 2013)

Firky said:


> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> The Left should learn from Galloway? @OwenJones84, wtf? I would have thought you know precisely why GG has been demonised. And justly so.
> 
> Helen Lewis ‏@helenlewis
> ...


 
I seem to recall a later tweet saying that Owen was having problems making himself understood (rather than Laurie having problems with basic comprehension, or if you want to assume the worst intentionally misunderstanding in order to gain extra intersectionality cred) and her saying that they were going for tea to sort it out because tea fixes things.


----------



## Firky (Mar 23, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I seem to recall a later tweet saying that Owen was having problems making himself understood (rather than Laurie having problems with basic comprehension, or if you want to assume the worst intentionally misunderstanding in order to gain extra intersectionality cred) and her saying that they were going for tea to sort it out because tea fixes things.


 
Maybe I am being a bit unnecessarily scathing of Laurie but I think her tea drinking is as effete as her rollie smoking.

I haven't read it yet but Hazel Robinson hates Laurie Penny too and nails it:

http://piratemoggy.tumblr.com/post/26135869284/tmi-confessions-friday-i-hate-laurie-penny

I am C&P it here because it's quite difficult to read on that website for me, the paragraphing has gone a bit skew-wiff but I CBA to fix it 




> *TMI confessions Friday: I hate Laurie Penny*
> 
> I do. I don’t normally hate things because I did a degree in war and found that generally, hate leads to genocide but in the least threatening way possible after that frontload, I really hate Laurie Penny. I’m not proud of myself. It’s 90% me and at least 7% people recommending her articles to me. Of the 90%, most is a sobbing inability to articulate myself politically anymore and an intense and lingering feeling of academic and moral failure. But… I have feelings. And I’m allowed to have them. Even if they’re unreasonable. Especially because they’re unreasonable, on the internet.
> 
> ...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Mar 23, 2013)

That's pretty good!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Mar 23, 2013)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 
I believe that @*OwenJones84* is a feminist ally who has had some problems expressing himself lately. I'm taking him for tea. Tea fixes things


----------



## Firky (Mar 23, 2013)

I've read that rant I C&P before come to think of it, maybe on here.



SpineyNorman said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> I believe that @*OwenJones84* is a feminist ally who has had some problems expressing himself lately. I'm taking him for tea. Tea fixes things


 


I will give her this, she is certainly unintentionally amusing.

Need to do my sort-of-weekly check of NS to see what Lezard and that have been up to. Why do we like making ourselves angry?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Mar 23, 2013)

Her twitter is sort of like the not so secret diary of Laurie Penny, aged 26 3/4.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 24, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Her twitter is sort of like the not so secret diary of Laurie Penny, aged 26 3/4.


You mean other people did it first and better?


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 24, 2013)

I really liked that article Firky, thanks for posting it. I would love to read more of her writing


----------



## Firky (Mar 24, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I really liked that article Firky, thanks for posting it. I would love to read more of her writing


 
Here you go, she has quite a good style. Hazel Robinson is her name if you're interested:

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/author/piratemoggy/


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 24, 2013)

This excellent 

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/12/festive-baco/#more-22454

No politics though, in this piece. But still good. I'd give this person a proper column any day. I think she lives in an actual hovel too, sadly.


----------



## Firky (Mar 24, 2013)

Hazel is probably one of those fake lefties who hates women though


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 24, 2013)

Firky said:


> Hazel is probably one of those fake lefties who hates women though


 boo


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 24, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's not bad actually - though I'm struggling to avoid the temptation to have a go at her on twitter for using the term 'the disabled', a term that I happen to know a lot of disabled people find really offensive and I can see why they do too.


 
I mentioned on another thread last week that I e-mailed Workers' Power for using "the disabled", gave them a bit of a bollocking. 

The e-mailed me back saying they'd amended their article, and were really sorry for implying that disabled people were some sort of homogeneous group.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Mar 24, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> killer b has _x_ new likes
> tufty79 has _y_ new likes
> Where
> _y_ = 0
> ...



You made it


----------



## muscovyduck (Mar 24, 2013)

Okay this thread is possibly the best one ever. Just gotten to page 208 - that was a major plot twist. 
This forum is my favourite form of procrastination so far.


----------



## muscovyduck (Mar 24, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> You made it


Nah, got two tabs open because that page was too much for me and I needed a small break


----------



## DaveCinzano (Mar 24, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Nah, got two tabs open because that page was too much for me and I needed a small break


*Disappointed face*


----------



## Firky (Mar 24, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Okay this thread is possibly the best one ever. Just gotten to page 208 - that was a major plot twist.


 


Just another 300 pages for you to go through.


----------



## killer b (Mar 24, 2013)

Still less than halfway there.


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 24, 2013)

And once you've got to the end there will probably be another 300 pages to go.


----------



## Firky (Mar 24, 2013)

If Laurie just turned up on page 208 that means he has the flurry of bad puns to wade through too


----------



## killer b (Mar 24, 2013)

dunno, bit of a lull on atm. We need to tempt her back somehow.


----------



## muscovyduck (Mar 24, 2013)

Firky said:


> If Laurie just turned up on page 208 that means he has the flurry of bad puns to wade through too


 
check yo privilege, I am female


----------



## muscovyduck (Mar 24, 2013)

where is the pun


----------



## JimW (Mar 24, 2013)

I just think it really stretched credibility with that twist starting page 420 where it turns out she's Richard Littlejohn's long-lost love child.


----------



## Firky (Mar 24, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> check yo privilege, I am female


 
I don't need to check my privilege I went to Oxford 



killer b said:


> dunno, bit of a lull on atm. We need to tempt her back somehow.


She won't fall for the same trick twice. Maybe tea at Starbucks would do it or a big wedge of cash, that always works.


----------



## Firky (Mar 24, 2013)

Nylock said:


> tbf to laurie if she did decide to read this thread from the start, as suggested in replies to her postings, then it would probably take 13 hours to go through the whole thing plus the links to outside material...


 
How long has it taken you so far muscovyduck ?


----------



## muscovyduck (Mar 24, 2013)

It feels like forever. Although _I don't work for a living_ so she's probably still at page 128 or something


----------



## killer b (Mar 24, 2013)

Since sometime on Friday afternoon I reckon


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 24, 2013)

Firky said:


> I don't need to check my privilege I went to Oxford
> 
> 
> She won't fall for the same trick twice. Maybe tea at Starbucks would do it or a big wedge of cash, that always works.


What if we promised her a (non-existent) room in a swanky non-hovel?


----------



## muscovyduck (Mar 24, 2013)

I remember that disabled person thing she wrote. That was when I began to have an opinion on her which was more than "She seems okay I guess" and that opinion wasn't very positive. Something seemed off, probably because she was using it for money.

We've just had an ASDA delivery and I am legit sitting here with popcorn reading the thread. I have a deadline tomorrow ffs


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 24, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> I remember that disabled person thing she wrote. That was when I began to have an opinion on her which was more than "She seems okay I guess" and that opinion wasn't very positive. Something seemed off, probably because she was using it for money.
> 
> We've just had an ASDA delivery and I am legit sitting here with popcorn reading the thread. I have a deadline tomorrow ffs


Thread will still be here after your deadline, but I love you have actual popcorn


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 24, 2013)

Also, welcome muscovyduck


----------



## Firky (Mar 24, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> What if we promised her a (non-existent) room in a swanky non-hovel?


 
It would have to be in some trendy location such as NYC, Athens or Cairo. It takes a lot to get this girl out of London or London out of the girl, darling, what what *braying laugh*


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 24, 2013)

Nowhere more trendy than Tribeca, although Brooklyn is viewed as pretty cool these days.


----------



## muscovyduck (Mar 24, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Thread will still be here after your deadline, but I love you have actual popcorn


Yes but this is far more interesting than organising everything I've done over the past few weeks into a coherent order


----------



## DaveCinzano (Mar 24, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> We've just had an ASDA delivery and I am legit sitting here with popcorn reading the thread. I have a deadline tomorrow ffs


 
In situations like this, you just have to ask yourself:



> What would Laura do?


 
And, as we well know, the answer is CROWDSOURCE YOUR SOLUTIONS.


----------



## The39thStep (Mar 24, 2013)

killer b said:


> dunno, bit of a lull on atm. We need to tempt her back somehow.


 
Don't mention that cartoon of her being beaten up, for chrisakes


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 24, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Don't mention that cartoon of her being beaten up, for chrisakes


Or send her a link to an IWCA article, we all know how she reacted to that.


----------



## muscovyduck (Mar 24, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> And, as we well know, the answer is CROWDSOURCE YOUR SOLUTIONS.


 
To be fair, the desperate ramblings about making cushions I'll have to write in order to meet the pass criteria for this project will probably bring more to the world than the diary of a mid-twenty year old upper-middle class 'feminist' who would probably have only managed Tumblr fame was it not for the fact she realised journalism is more stable career.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Mar 24, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I mentioned on another thread last week that I e-mailed Workers' Power for using "the disabled", gave them a bit of a bollocking.
> 
> The e-mailed me back saying they'd amended their article, and were really sorry for implying that disabled people were some sort of homogeneous group.


 
Somehow I suspect that you wouldn't get such a humble and respectful response from our Dave, especially as you're a misogynist urban dweller


----------



## Bakunin (Mar 24, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Somehow I suspect that you wouldn't get such a humble and respectful response from our Dave, especially as you're a misogynist urban dweller


 
Something tells me that humility and respect aren't Penny Dreadful's strong suits.


----------



## Nylock (Mar 24, 2013)

Firky said:


> How long has it taken you so far muscovyduck ?


..that some sort of dig at me or genuine curiosity?


----------



## Firky (Mar 24, 2013)

Nylock said:


> ..that some sort of dig at me or genuine curiosity?


 
No! And also... Eh? Why would it be a dig at you, I haven't even quoted you? 

Oh, I did quote you! Yeh, it was curiosity, I've been getting likes from 200 pages back and spotted your post init.


----------



## Nylock (Mar 24, 2013)

ah, fair enough


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 24, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Somehow I suspect that you wouldn't get such a humble and respectful response from our Dave, especially as you're a misogynist urban dweller


 
Went to the wrong uni(s) too, mind!


----------



## Firky (Mar 24, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Something tells me that humility and respect aren't Penny Dreadful's strong suits.


 
I don't know, she's very sycophantic to her flock.


----------



## Greebo (Mar 25, 2013)

Firky said:


> I don't know, she's very sycophantic to her flock.


VP is very far from being part of any flock, unless you mean a herd of goats.


----------



## frogwoman (Mar 25, 2013)

Greebo said:


> VP is very far from being part of any flock, unless you mean a herd of goats.


 
Personal goats?


----------



## Greebo (Mar 25, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Personal goats?


Wild ones.


----------



## phildwyer (Mar 25, 2013)

killer b said:


> dunno, bit of a lull on atm. We need to tempt her back somehow.


 
I tried banning her already.

Still, maybe worth another go. Laurie Penny, you're banned from posting on this thread ever again. Don't even think of coming back here, because you can't. Ever. We don't want you here. There is no place for you on this thread.  Go away.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 25, 2013)

Firky said:


> I don't know, she's very sycophantic to her flock.


 
Get the flock out of here!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Mar 25, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Wild ones.


 
Personal wild goats, though.


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 25, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Personal wild goats, though.


Not wild personal ones?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Mar 25, 2013)

muscovyduck is still heroically working his/her way through this thread - on page 252 now. There's still a bit of excitement left but once you get past about page 350, after the unexpected resolution (or was it?) of spineygate, the rest is something of an anticlimax.


----------



## muscovyduck (Mar 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> muscovyduck is still heroically working his/her way through this thread - on page 252 now. There's still a bit of excitement left but once you get past about page 350, after the unexpected resolution (or was it?) of spineygate, the rest is something of an anticlimax.


STOP WITH THE SPOILERS


----------



## muscovyduck (Mar 26, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> I second the vote for someone (not me) going through and compiling the good bits of the thread into an article.


 
Well. You could've told me about this in advance. I'd have been happy (and not going out of my way at all) to help out here


----------



## Firky (Mar 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> muscovyduck is still heroically working his/her way through this thread - on page 252 now. There's still a bit of excitement left but once you get past about page 350, after the unexpected resolution (or was it?) of spineygate, the rest is something of an anticlimax.


 
I just got a like from the duck from earlier on the thread, I had a look to see where they were up to:

Page 278 of 493 6,444 more messages...


----------



## cesare (Mar 26, 2013)

Firky said:


> I just got a like from the duck from earlier on the thread, I had a look to see where they were up to:
> 
> Page 278 of 493 6,444 more messages...


My last duck like was that page too. I keep looking to see which one she's liked next


----------



## muscovyduck (Mar 26, 2013)

this thread is so special 
i know i keep saying it but it's true


----------



## SpineyNorman (Mar 26, 2013)

As a result of this thread I was called an 'e-lebrity' by people who were supposed to be my friends 

E-lebrity ffs


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 26, 2013)

theres some deep cretaceous period liking going on here. I think the only older like i ever had was Santino obscurely digging back to 2005 to like a post where I admitted coming second in a battle of wits with a coffee machine


----------



## muscovyduck (Mar 26, 2013)

Not sure if that dossier was ever done but the best place might be a Tumblr with a submit button. There's plenty of blogs there already dedicated to stuff like that but based on models and the 1nt3rn3t f4m0u5


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> As a result of this thread I was called an 'e-lebrity' by people who were supposed to be my friends
> 
> E-lebrity ffs


 

e-lerprosy more like


----------



## Balbi (Mar 26, 2013)

E-rpes.


----------



## muscovyduck (Mar 26, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> theres some deep cretaceous period liking going on here. I think the only older like i ever had was Santino obscurely digging back to 2005 to like a post where I admitted coming second in a battle of wits with a coffee machine


Challenge accepted.


----------



## Bakunin (Mar 26, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I admitted coming second in a battle of wits with a coffee machine


 
DotCommunist, yesterday...


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 26, 2013)

Laurie tweeted NOT ONE SINGLE THING about the Sussex Uni demonstration yesterday. For someone keen on protesting, I would have thought she'd have been all over it.


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 26, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Challenge accepted.


I'd forgotten about the thread foray into Painful Stings Top Trumps at the end of last year


----------



## Bakunin (Mar 26, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Laurie tweeted NOT ONE SINGLE THING about the Sussex Uni demonstration yesterday. For someone keen on protesting, I would have thought she'd have been all over it.


 
Was there a decent byline in it for her? Was it 'sexy' in terms of column inches? Was Brighton simply too hard to reach from her London abode?

Am I being overly cynical?


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 26, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Was there a decent byline in it for her? Was it 'sexy' in terms of column inches? Was Brighton simply too hard to reach from her London abode?
> 
> Am I being overly cynical?


To be fair, her tweets have said she's been not very well over the past few days, so even if she wasn't well enough to visit the demo in person, she could have retweeted a few.

And I would contend that there were ample bylines and sexy column inches available for a number of articles.


----------



## Firky (Mar 26, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Laurie tweeted NOT ONE SINGLE THING about the Sussex Uni demonstration yesterday. For someone keen on protesting, I would have thought she'd have been all over it.



Sussex uni isn't cosmopolitan or trendy. Plus "Sussex uni demonstration" takes up valuable characters when you're only limited to 150.


----------



## killer b (Mar 26, 2013)

how is sussex uni not cosmopilitan? it's in fucking brighton...


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 26, 2013)

Firky said:


> Sussex uni isn't cosmopolitan or trendy. Plus "Sussex uni demonstration" takes up valuable characters when you're only limited to 150.


Tis fairly radical as far as unis go though. I think she would have gotten a lot of positive feedback had she bothered her arse about it. Oh well, her loss.


----------



## equationgirl (Mar 26, 2013)

killer b said:


> how is sussex uni not cosmopilitan? it's in fucking brighton...


To be fair it's on it's on the outskirts at Falmer not near the trendy centre.


----------



## cesare (Mar 26, 2013)

Brighton's where she grew up, and iirc she's been involved in Sussex uni stuff before. There's probably a reason for not seemingly being involved, pointless to speculate.


----------



## J Ed (Mar 26, 2013)

cesare said:


> Brighton's where she grew up, and iirc she's been involved in Sussex uni stuff before. There's probably a reason for not seemingly being involved, pointless to speculate.


 
She's spoken at the occupation so she is involved!


----------



## Firky (Mar 26, 2013)

She's ill init. 

It's not exactly Brighton


----------



## treelover (Mar 30, 2013)

Laura was just on BBC The Papers, they were discussing DS/Grant Schapp's new 'evidence' that nearly a million ESA claimants had decided to not go for a medical/failed as evidence there were too many bogus fiddlers or over-claimers, Penny went off on one and was very incisive:, pointing out the ruthless nature of the ATOS test and that it was designed to make people fail and that people were too ill to through the whole appalling and brutal process, good for her..


----------



## Firky (Mar 31, 2013)

What was their response?


----------



## Libertad (Mar 31, 2013)

Schapp's "evidence" probably includes ESA claimants like myself who were never called for an ATOS medical, just shunted straight into the WRAG group. I know, I should have appealed.


----------



## toggle (Mar 31, 2013)

Libertad said:


> Schapp's "evidence" probably includes ESA claimants like myself who were never called for an ATOS medical, just shunted straight into the WRAG group. I know, I should have appealed.


 
probably would include Bakunin, who got was waiting for them to get round to assessing him for esa when he moved in with me and we both lived off my student finance for a while.


----------



## Libertad (Mar 31, 2013)

I wish I knew then what I know now.


----------



## DotCommunist (Mar 31, 2013)

Libertad said:


> I wish I knew then what I know now.


 

when I was younger


----------



## Libertad (Mar 31, 2013)

*Goes off to listen to Rod*


----------



## brogdale (Mar 31, 2013)

Libertad said:


> *Goes off to listen to Rod*


 
'..had known..'?

Maybe it didn't scan?


----------



## smokedout (Apr 1, 2013)

treelover said:


> Laura was just on BBC The Papers, they were discussing DS/Grant Schapp's new 'evidence' that nearly a million ESA claimants had decided to not go for a medical/failed as evidence there were too many bogus fiddlers or over-claimers, Penny went off on one and was very incisive:, pointing out the ruthless nature of the ATOS test and that it was designed to make people fail and that people were too ill to through the whole appalling and brutal process, good for her..


 
in other words she missed a glaring open goal, which is that people stopped claims because their illness was short term or they died

bit of research and she could have blown him out of the water, that's why having people like her as our spokespeople, with no idea how people really live, or any fucking understanding of the benefits system, is a problem


----------



## smokedout (Apr 1, 2013)

would have taken her 5 mins to look at the info linked from the tory press release that put this out yesterday, and notice that 14,000 claims for people with cancer ended before they were assessed, now why might a claim for someone with cancer end abruptly?


----------



## agricola (Apr 1, 2013)

smokedout said:


> would have taken her 5 mins to look at the info linked from the tory press release that put this out yesterday, and notice that 14,000 claims for people with cancer ended before they were assessed, now why might a claim for someone with cancer end abruptly?


 
IDS would probably say that they were faking it.


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 1, 2013)

killer b said:


> how is sussex uni not cosmopilitan? it's in fucking brighton...


Brighton is hardly cosmopolitan.


----------



## toggle (Apr 1, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Brighton is hardly cosmopolitan.


 
it is compared to just about everywhere else along the south coast


----------



## 8ball (Apr 1, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Brighton is hardly cosmopolitan.


 
It's the San Francisco of the South East!


----------



## Favelado (Apr 1, 2013)

8ball said:


> It's the San Francisco of the South East!


 
Yeah but up on the Fylde Coast we've got LANCS VEGAS.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 1, 2013)

Depends on what is meant by cosmopolitan. It's certainly one of the whitest places i've ever been. Sussex uni has fucking loads of foreign students though - and i my experience a fair few of them are of the diplomats daughter type.


----------



## toggle (Apr 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Depends on what is meant by cosmopolitan. It's certainly one of the whitest places i've ever been. Sussex uni has fucking loads of foreign students though - and i my experience a fair few of them are of the diplomats daughter type.


 
You obviously don't get quite how stuck in the 50's a lot of the south is (or at least was when i left). brighton is a LOT different to it's surrounds. even if ti's not as like London as some people there want to pretend.


----------



## ymu (Apr 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Depends on what is meant by cosmopolitan. It's certainly one of the whitest places i've ever been. Sussex uni has fucking loads of foreign students though - and i my experience a fair few of them are of the diplomats daughter type.


Brighton is the only very white area of the country that my partner is willing to live in. It's the only very white place he's been where he doesn't get made to feel like a freak. It's an outlier, and not just because of the university. We don't know anyone from the university, AFAIK.

It's not because it's posh. The posher the area the worse the problems he experiences. Portsmouth excepted because of the Navy.

I don't know why it's an outlier, beyond having a very strong tradition of left political activism, but I suspect that the activism is because it is an outlier, not the cause of it.


----------



## BigTom (Apr 2, 2013)

smokedout said:


> would have taken her 5 mins to look at the info linked from the tory press release that put this out yesterday, and notice that 14,000 claims for people with cancer ended before they were assessed, now why might a claim for someone with cancer end abruptly?


 
Additionally, a quick glance shows just over 60,000 people with various fractures, and 40,000 people signed off for surgical treatment who didn't complete the assessment phase, and I'm sure if you looked through you'd find many more cases where people are signed off for something for a relatively short time, and get better before they are assessed.

One general question I have about the stats is how they are recorded when someone has multiple conditions? For instance there were people on ESA with acne which I find hard to understand (but trust doctors to know things I don't) but I'm wondering if that is actually someone has acne + other conditions and really it's the other conditions that qualify them for ESA but are they are counted under all their conditions or just one, and if it's just one how is that decided?


----------



## Firky (Apr 2, 2013)

toggle said:


> You obviously don't get quite how stuck in the 50's a lot of the south is (or at least was when i left). brighton is a LOT different to it's surrounds. even if ti's not as like London as some people there want to pretend.


 
Gosport.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 2, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Additionally, a quick glance shows just over 60,000 people with various fractures, and 40,000 people signed off for surgical treatment who didn't complete the assessment phase, and I'm sure if you looked through you'd find many more cases where people are signed off for something for a relatively short time, and get better before they are assessed.
> 
> One general question I have about the stats is how they are recorded when someone has multiple conditions? For instance there were people on ESA with acne which I find hard to understand (but trust doctors to know things I don't) but I'm wondering if that is actually someone has acne + other conditions and really it's the other conditions that qualify them for ESA but are they are counted under all their conditions or just one, and if it's just one how is that decided?


Certainly on the small bit of research I've done on the subject, multiple conditions are handled very badly if at all. The system simply isn't set up to cope with an individual having more than one health condition and indeed complications of those conditions. It could even be that the system lists them all alphabetically, and for statistical purposes only the first-listed is used (which would account for 'acne' in some cases).

The ATOS LIMA software is a system of drop-down menus, and the software itself is not designed to handle multiple complex health problems, and certainly not mental health issues.


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 3, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Brighton is hardly cosmopolitan.


 
Quite a lot of vegetarians and that sort of thing


----------



## brogdale (Apr 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Depends on what is meant by cosmopolitan. It's certainly one of the whitest places i've ever been. Sussex uni has fucking loads of foreign students though - and i my experience a fair few of them are of the diplomats daughter type.


 
Though, coming from Croydon, I've often shared your perception of central Brighton's 'whiteness', the reality doesn't really appear to fit that perception. The 2011 Censal data shows that, as a whole district, Brighton's ethnicity profile is not radically different from Croydon & the South London suburbs and certainly in marked contrast to  most of the South Coast:-





More of that here.

WRT the 'diplomats daughters' D)...yes, I think from second-hand, recent reports there's some truth in that, but I think most Unis are now attempting to tap the valuable Overseas market.


----------



## andysays (Apr 3, 2013)

brogdale said:


> Though, coming from Croydon, I've often shared your perception of central Brighton's 'whiteness', the reality doesn't really appear to fit that perception. The 2011 Censal data shows that, as a whole district, Brighton's ethnicity profile is not radically different from Croydon & the South London suburbs and certainly in marked contrast to most of the South Coast:-
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Not sure about the conclusions you're drawing from that info as presented, given that all areas with 3.3% and above are lumped in together.

That could mean that the Brighton area has about 3.5%, whereas many areas in London probably have at least ten times that. Maybe it's cosmopolitan compared to other parts of the south coast, but in comparison to areas of London I'm familiar with (which just about includes Croydon), I'm not convinced.


----------



## BigTom (Apr 3, 2013)

smokedout said:


> would have taken her 5 mins to look at the info linked from the tory press release that put this out yesterday, and notice that 14,000 claims for people with cancer ended before they were assessed, now why might a claim for someone with cancer end abruptly?


 
Have you got a link to the press release itself or to the page that the DWP data you've linked to comes from? I'm trying to find it but I can't find the press release at all and that xls table apparently should be on this page but it isn't.

There's also this document related to this:
http://statistics.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd5/rports2011-2012/rrep762.pdf

from which this quote is quite helpful for thinking about why people close their claim before assessment:



> The most common reason people gave for withdrawing their ESA claim was that their condition had improved and so they had closed their claim, either returning to work or claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA)


 
also



> A fairly widespread reason for claims being closed by Jobcentre Plus was that the claim for ESA was income-based, and that the customer’s partner had started work. ESA claims had also ended for a variety of other reasons including extended periods abroad, and claiming Maternity Allowance.


 
from p15-17


----------



## smokedout (Apr 3, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Have you got a link to the press release itself or to the page that the DWP data you've linked to comes from? I'm trying to find it but I can't find the press release at all and that xls table apparently should be on this page but it isn't.


 
dont think it was published anywhere, someone sent it to me

*Nearly 1 million people drop incapacity benefit claim before medical test*​878,300 people claiming incapacity benefit – more than a third of the total – have chosen to drop their benefit claim entirely rather than face a medical assessment, new figures have revealed.  http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/workingage/esa_wca/esa_wca_jan2013_tables.xls
To date, a total of 1.44 million Incapacity Benefit reassessments were carried out by doctors. Of those, the majority, 837,000 (55 per cent), were found fit to work immediately, with a further 367,300 (23.9 per cent) able to do some level of work. Only 232,800 people (15.1 per cent) were classified by doctors to be too ill to do any work at all (DWP, _Outcomes of Work Capability Assessments_, 22 January 2013,  link).
Whilst the figures show that not a single person with a terminal illness has been classified as able to work, injuries such as ‘sprains and strains’, ‘repetitive strain injury’, ‘allergic reactions’, ‘blisters’ and ‘acne’ have seen big reductions in the numbers of people claiming benefit (DWP, _Analysis of WCA outcomes_, 12 September 2012,  link).
Conservative Party Chairman Grant Shapps said:

“Welfare makes up a third of this country's spending - so it's our job to make sure it's getting to the people who really need it.

“Our reforms are about freeing people from a system of dependency that's trapped them and their families for decades - and people are getting back into work as a result.

“These figures demonstrate how the welfare system was broken under labour and why our reforms are so important.”

ENDS


----------



## treelover (Apr 3, 2013)

That is shameful, when are statisticians going to speak out?, they did during the Thatcher years..

and why are so many people who have 'failed' silent?


----------



## BigTom (Apr 3, 2013)

smokedout said:


> dont think it was published anywhere, someone sent it to me
> 
> *Nearly 1 million people drop incapacity benefit claim before medical test*​878,300 people claiming incapacity benefit – more than a third of the total – have chosen to drop their benefit claim entirely rather than face a medical assessment, new figures have revealed.  http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/workingage/esa_wca/esa_wca_jan2013_tables.xls
> To date, a total of 1.44 million Incapacity Benefit reassessments were carried out by doctors. Of those, the majority, 837,000 (55 per cent), were found fit to work immediately, with a further 367,300 (23.9 per cent) able to do some level of work. Only 232,800 people (15.1 per cent) were classified by doctors to be too ill to do any work at all (DWP, _Outcomes of Work Capability Assessments_, 22 January 2013,  link).
> ...


 
cheers, that answers my question as to where the 800k figure came from as it's from the first link in that, to January's figures not the last link to september ones which you posted up earlier.. oddly the figures are not as detailed.

So looking at the data..

262k - so nearly 1/3rd of people who closed claims before the assessment phase were logged under "Mental and behavioural disorders"

I'm guessing that a lot of this will be short term stuff, people signed off for depression for a few months or similar (I have no idea how things like schizophrenia or agorophobia or anything else might come and go).

Other big categories are: Injury, poisoning and certain other consequences of external causes (181k) - likely all short term stuff that would never be expected to last the 13 weeks before the assessment phase kicks in, let alone make it to assessment itself.

Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified (124k) - this is an odd one, I don't really understand it, but I imagine a lot of this will be things that appear and the disappear with no apparent explanation. 

and Diseases of the Musculoskeletal system and Connective Tissue (96k) - don't know what this would cover.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 3, 2013)

BigTom said:


> cheers, that answers my question as to where the 800k figure came from as it's from the first link in that, to January's figures not the last link to september ones which you posted up earlier.. oddly the figures are not as detailed.
> 
> So looking at the data..
> 
> ...


My bets for the last item would be the following, for example, and in all degrees of severity:

Arthritis of any kind, which would likely include rheumatoid, osetoarthritis and Ankylosing spondylitis
MS
Bursitis
Brittle Bone Disease
Ehlers–Danlos syndrome - hypermobile joints which can dislocate with the merest movement
Back pain (which could be anything from a soft tissue injury through to spinal degeneration and extreme curvature)
Marfan syndrome
Stickler syndrome
Alport ayndrome
Lupus
Here's a healthcare manual with a more comprehensive list:
http://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/musculoskeletal_and_connective_tissue_disorders.html

As for the 'symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings', sounds like the medical equivalent of 'miscellaneous' to me. Clear evidence that there is something wrong but no idea what it is/doesn't conform to expected textbook symptoms. Could also mean pre-diagnosis, although I'd be surprised if that were the case for more than a handful of cases.

Poisons could mean things like asbestos exposure and the attendant diseases. Bound to be a lot of those given how prevalent its use was.


----------



## ymu (Apr 4, 2013)

treelover said:


> That is shameful, when are statisticians going to speak out?, they did during the Thatcher years..
> 
> and why are so many people who have 'failed' silent?


The national statistician has created many headlines by scolding ministers in public. This is the public archive of correspondence: http://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/reports---correspondence/correspondence

Write to him?

On acne and other apparently trivial reasons for being off sick, this is like the appalling stuff a couple of years ago where the Mail was scoffing at people for being on disability for asthma or diarrhoea, completely ignoring the fact that asthma is life-threatening for a minority with very severe disease or serious sequelae, and the diarrhoea is likely Crohn's or ulcerative colitis.

Acne can be severe enough to limit the ability to live a normal life, as well as being a side-effect of some treatments. It is rare, but it happens.

Also worth noting that ESA is the sick-pay system for the growing group of self-employed people. There will be lots of short-term sign-ons because that's one of the purposes of it. It's why the assessment phase takes 13 weeks to complete; there's no point in assessing everyone immediately because many will never be long-term let alone forever claimants.


----------



## ymu (Apr 4, 2013)

BigTom said:


> and Diseases of the Musculoskeletal system and Connective Tissue (96k) - don't know what this would cover.


Back injuries, bone breaks, torn or damaged muscles too. Lots of short-term stuff that usually heals fairly quickly in there, I think. Like most of the rest of it, where the condition is not life-threatening.

This "unemployment and sickness as permanent characteristics" style propaganda has to break down soon. There's nearly a million people who know these stats refer to them and their legitimate period of sick leave, and between them they know most of the rest of us. Ditto for those losing DLA, many of whom will be forced out of workplaces who do not want to lose them. There are just too many people being fucked over for this not to touch most of our lives personally if not directly. They can' sustain this, once enough people realise that the targets are people just like them.

There's a nice story somewhere about a guy who was speaking to a group of elderly Americans about Mitt Romney's "47% are takers who pay no federal income tax" remark and asked what they thought, and they approved. Until he asked how many of them paid federal income tax, and they realised that Romney was talking about them. It's a really useful focus of counter-propaganda, IMO.

Anyone got the skillz to redo that Uncle Sam poster? IDS: he's targeting YOU, sorta thing.


----------



## treelover (Apr 4, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/04/where-are-the-activists-austerity?CMP=twt_gu

Laura has written an article on the amazing Sussex Occupation in the Guardian


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## tenniselbow (Apr 4, 2013)

treelover said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/04/where-are-the-activists-austerity?CMP=twt_gu
> 
> Laura has written an article on the amazing Sussex Occupation in the Guardian


 
"First they came for the students"


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 4, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> "First they came for the students"?


 
Hyperbole is one of Penny Dreadful's strong suits.

Honesty, accuracy, integrity and a sense of proportion? Not so much.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 4, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> "First they came for the students"?


Yep, that is a terrible and revealing of what aspect of austerity is visible to her.

Look at the bit under the headline as well, dangerous stuff to spread:



> Protesters face violence, arrest and serious charges. Only the brave dare face this savage suppression


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 4, 2013)

Yep, no sense of history or politics here. Just the breathless excitement of brave young 'uns and truncheons and the mean old state.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 4, 2013)

Also, seems to endorse specialists in dissent in the guise of _activists_, a spectaularisation almost.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Also, seems to endorse specialists in dissent in the guise of _activists_, a spectaularisation almost.


 
that's what is fucking us over

also do you ever find that these people go on about benefit claimants, cuts etc in the same way people do if they are talking about saving the whale or some shit like that?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 4, 2013)

...and _fantastically, spectacularly _we find  laurie recommending:



> The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord - The situationist bible; a book that was passed from hand to grimy activist hand in 1968, and remains of equal importance to today's young dissidence. _A book about the nature of capitalist reality and the imagery of alienation._


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## butchersapron (Apr 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> that's what is fucking us over
> 
> also do you ever find that these people go on about benefit claimants, cuts etc in the same way people do if they are talking about saving the whale or some shit like that?


Classic imperial philanthropism.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> ...and _fantastically, spectacularly _we find laurie recommending:


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 4, 2013)

where's the class analysis ffs?

oh, wait...


----------



## treelover (Apr 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> that's what is fucking us over
> 
> also do you ever find that these people go on about benefit claimants, cuts etc in the same way people do if they are talking about saving the whale or some shit like that?


 
Laura has indeed wrote quite a lot on benefits, etc her ex was disabled, afaik..


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## butchersapron (Apr 4, 2013)

treelover said:


> Laura has indeed wrote quite a lot on benefits, etc her ex was disabled, afaik..


You missed the 2nd part of the post, the key bit.


----------



## Firky (Apr 4, 2013)

> And shame on us, even in these cowardly times, if we don't support those with the courage to take a stand.


 
Finishes the article by congratulating herself. Fucking hell.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> ...and _fantastically, spectacularly _we find laurie recommending:


 
The Debord reference is perfect.

One thing that's characterized Laurie's writing from her early blogging days is this paradigm of inter-generational conflict. It made a certain sense in her early blog posts about how utterly, totally unfair  it was that she couldn't break through into the London media and how hard life was for young Oxbridge grads trying to make their way in the world. Now that she's writing about serious stuff like austerity and attacks on the working class, these inter-generational tantrums waft around her political analysis, such as it is, like a fuzzy hangover.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 4, 2013)

I've been trying for a long time to put my finger on whats wrong with a lot of quite well meaning activist types and why I find them quite annoying sometimes, now i think i have found it. It's the entire way they talk about and relate to people like they are some sort of endangered species rather than actually asking them what they want and treating them like they are people with opinions - and most of all like they are nothing to do with THEM but like something separate.


----------



## rekil (Apr 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Also, seems to endorse specialists in dissent in the guise of _activists_, a spectaularisation almost.


Even then, her views on _activists_ are well weird.

Laura in Jacobin


> A fair few articles I’ve filed from the frontlines of the global protest movements over the past couple of years have featured young men at moments of crisis and violence lighting up cigarettes dramatically, exhaling meaningfully and saying something cheesy and rousing. This is not a coincidence. This is because, at moments of social interest and in the presence of an averagely attractive woman who seems suddenly very interested in their ideas, your garden-variety young male activist, anarchist or student troublemaker has the tendency to produce a cigarette, light it dramatically and say something they think is deep. They do this because it makes them look cool and sometimes gets them laid. I promise you, I’ve seen it happen.


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## butchersapron (Apr 4, 2013)

Oh jesus she never learns - does  really believe that we would believe this sean exists?



> I shared a smoke with a gang of lads who weren’t more than twenty, whipping out the recorder from time to time to collect quotes for the piece I was writing. I began to ask them about their politics, their understanding of economics, when one of them, an 18-year-old high-school dropout called Sean, whipped out a dollar bill from his pocket, set light to it and used it to light his cigarette. ”That’s debt, and that’s what we do with it,” he said. He wasn’t a rich kid, not by anyone’s standards. He owned the clothes he was standing in, a rucksack full of random belongings and half a cigarette.
> 
> He needed that dollar. But he burned it anyway.


 


> Several months after that Chicago bus trip, I saw Sean again, sleeping on the streets of New York, outside Wall Street, in the dead of winter. I remembered how I’d laughed at his trick with the dollar. I remembered how he was so pleased with himself, how he told me about the new life he was hoping to build somewhere on the West Coast where the streets were warm.


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## tenniselbow (Apr 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I've been trying for a long time to put my finger on whats wrong with a lot of quite well meaning activist types and why I find them quite annoying sometimes, now i think i have found it. It's the entire way they talk about and relate to people like they are some sort of endangered species rather than actually asking them what they want and treating them like they are people with opinions - and most of all like they are nothing to do with THEM but like something separate.


 
I think I know what you're getting at, frogwoman. Can you give some more specific examples to explain a little more? From my perspective this has always seemed like an issue of social class and life experience of activists, and undoubtedly the kind of (non)dialogue you describe is related to this.


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## tenniselbow (Apr 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> "frontlines of the global protest movements"


 

Kapuściński can sleep easy.


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## tufty79 (Apr 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I've been trying for a long time to put my finger on whats wrong with a lot of quite well meaning activist types and why I find them quite annoying sometimes, now i think i have found it. It's the entire way they talk about and relate to people like they are some sort of endangered species rather than actually asking them what they want and treating them like they are people with opinions - and most of all like they are nothing to do with THEM but like something separate.


well fucking said.


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## frogwoman (Apr 4, 2013)

its hard to provide specific examples but its just a general attitude from a lot of people (not all!!) especially the likes of laurie penny etc, like a lot of the time its like they're talking about animals in a rainforest or something if you know what i mean and they're talking about it from the perspective of not really knowing what they're on about. Like about how terrible it is that "nobody cares" and like not bothering to ask or know anything about the people they're speakin for or even talking to them.


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## J Ed (Apr 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Yep, that is a terrible and revealing of what aspect of austerity is visible to her.
> 
> Loo at the bit under the headline as well, dangerous stuff to spread:


 
If I was the state, that's exactly the sort of stuff I'd want the likes of Laurie to be putting out.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Oh jesus she never learns - does really believe that we would believe this sean exists?


 
Do you reckon he hangs out with the homeless libertarian man she gives fags to?


----------



## ymu (Apr 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> its hard to provide specific examples but its just a general attitude from a lot of people (not all!!) especially the likes of laurie penny etc, like a lot of the time its like they're talking about animals in a rainforest or something if you know what i mean and they're talking about it from the perspective of not really knowing what they're on about. Like about how terrible it is that "nobody cares" and like not bothering to ask or know anything about the people they're speakin for or even talking to them.


 
I remember one at university, upon finding out that my boyfriend was black: Oh, that's really _good_.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> its hard to provide specific examples but its just a general attitude from a lot of people (not all!!) especially the likes of laurie penny etc, like a lot of the time its like they're talking about animals in a rainforest or something if you know what i mean and they're talking about it from the perspective of not really knowing what they're on about. Like about how terrible it is that "nobody cares" and like not bothering to ask or know anything about the people they're speakin for or even talking to them.


 
Yeah I largely agree. Certainly true of a lot of the activists I've known. 

The endangered species analogy is actually not a bad one for a certain strain of left-liberal (I'm thinking of a Toynbee archetype here): there's definite sympathy there but on the other hand they can't exactly speak for themselves, can they? Plus it's really a matter of our own virtue; how we treat them, how good we are.

For the average middle class "radical" activist, it might be more fairly seen as just a massive cultural gulf that they're unwilling or unable to bridge?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Do you reckon he hangs out with the homeless libertarian man she gives fags to?


 
Laura met them both when she was round at Johann's crib taking tea with Lord Lucan one hot summer afternoon in back in December '68 whilst Nye was teaching Owen the chords to the dubstep version of The Internationale.


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 4, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> a massive cultural gulf that they're unwilling or unable to bridge?


six of one, half a dozen of the other.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 4, 2013)

yeah, and to be fair i probably started off a bit like that, i've had several years of shitty jobs etc to get it out of me tho, so i can really appreciate how different a "middle class" job is to many other ones a lot of the time

i'd imagine a lot of these people would probably get a bit of a rude shock when they get into an actual job!


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## tufty79 (Apr 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yeah, and to be fair i probably started off a bit like that, i've had several years of really shitty jobs to get it out of me tho, so i can really appreciate how different a "middle class" job is to many other ones a lot of the time
> 
> i'd imagine a lot of these people would probably get a bit of a rude shock when they get into an actual job!


ime they end up working for ngo's, community organisations and workers co-ops. so it never happens (at least with the ones i was living/friends with). the shock they expressed at my experience of 'normal' interview questions, employment/recruitment procedures, and what work entailed was just gobsmacking.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 4, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> Yeah I largely agree. Certainly true of a lot of the activists I've known.
> 
> The endangered species analogy is actually not a bad one for a certain strain of left-liberal (I'm thinking of a Toynbee archetype here): there's definite sympathy there but on the other hand they can't exactly speak for themselves, can they? Plus it's really a matter of our own virtue; how we treat them, how good we are.
> 
> For the average middle class "radical" activist, it might be more fairly seen as just a massive cultural gulf that they're unwilling or unable to bridge?


 
Not really anything new though, is it? Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier is full of the same, and worse, attitudes.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Not really anything new though, is it? Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier is full of the same, and worse, attitudes.


 
Yep.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Not really anything new though, is it? Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier is full of the same, and worse, attitudes.


 
Didn't Orwell edit out the working class activists whom he decided didn't fit the profile he was trying to put forward?


----------



## treelover (Apr 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Not really anything new though, is it? Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier is full of the same, and worse, attitudes.


 

to a degree, different time and sensibility, and he did write disparagingly about the 'sandal wearers' etc...


----------



## love detective (Apr 4, 2013)

laurie penny said:
			
		

> the tendency to produce a cigarette, light it dramatically and say something they think is deep


 
Laura's blog & twitter profile pic until recently


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 4, 2013)

I wonder how much easier it'd be to work out how real some of these stories Laurie Penny has included in her writing if there were people in New York present who knew the politics and the area in depth. I bet there's loads of subtle giveaways we're missing. Handy being sent abroad then reporting back to a British audience.

I was arguing with John Rees on twitter frogwoman have a look at these little encounters. I know I'm a world class idiot on twitter but is this an example of what you're on about? I was giving him a hard time over Stop the War and everything else and this https://twitter.com/JohnWRees/status/319457181500055552 ? was his reply. https://twitter.com/JohnWRees/status/319459811878137858 this too after I called him a professional trot. 

I suppose the thing I've learned is that it takes a certain amount of income and economic independence to be an "activist" anyway - you just can't do this occupying uni buildings indefinitely malarky if you're immobile, skint, on workfare, all the rest of it, no matter how worthy the cause. So I think it becomes a sort of scene which draws on people who are lucky enough to have that middle-class support net, people who implicitly know that they can make certain choices like going down to St Pauls with a tent and occupying, because certain consequences aren't going to happen to them. It's not even their fault, it's just the way they are. It disproportionately draws in people who've been born and bred never knowing anything but financial security, and like anyone reacting to their environment they behave differently because of it, even if they consciously aware of their own privilige.

Now I know it's not always like that, and I know a lot of activisty type people who do this stuff sacrifice a lot to go and occupy something, I know not everyone in that millbank re-union mileu is middle-class, this is just a tendency I've observed over time.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 4, 2013)

I just think it's interesting how often it is that the same activists, like Rees and Penny, seem to head similar sorts of groups and movements over and over. The sort of people with the talent and resources to wreck, but not enough to create something useful.

If they didn't exist, the state would have to invent them...


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Now I know it's not always like that, and I know a lot of activisty type people who do this stuff sacrifice a lot to go and occupy something, I know not everyone in that millbank re-union mileu is middle-class, this is just a tendency I've observed over time.


The _sacrifice_ is part of the problem.


----------



## rekil (Apr 4, 2013)

The somewhat overwhelmed PD games division should do a Commentariat game. Use your social capital wisely, latch onto popular campaigns, up your ppw and bag as many media gigs as fast as possible.

'Goodness gracious, I've inherited £X. Now I can fund a yearlong Guardian and/or Labour internship.'
'Epic fail - caught making up quotes - I miss 3 turns and pay £X for journalism course in america or somewhere.'

Well that's me out of ideas.


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## sihhi (Apr 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The _sacrifice_ is part of the problem.


 
Who is sacrificing what?
A middle-class figure like LP from Lewes, family of dual parent high income lawyers who sent all 3 children to private school sacrificing a spell in prison is easier than other people.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Who is sacrificing what?
> A middle-class figure like LP from Lewes, family of dual parent high income lawyers who sent all 3 children to private school sacrificing a spell in prison is easier than other people.


The mental conception _on the part of activists_ that the activists are sacrificing themselves for others leads to horrible problems in how they relate to non-activists and odd ideas about what constitutes political activity.


----------



## love detective (Apr 4, 2013)

laurie penny said:
			
		

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> 5h​I am reading, because right now it feels needful, Rebecca Solnit's 'Hope In The Dark', telling activists: "it's always too soon to go home."


 



			
				laurie penny Sep 2012 at Occupy Protest said:
			
		

> "That's it. Sorry, guys, but I'm not going back out there today. Really don't want to be arrested and deported just for journalism"


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> The somewhat overwhelmed PD games division should do a Commentariat game. Use your social capital wisely, latch onto popular campaigns, up your ppw and bag as many media gigs as fast as possible.
> 
> 'Goodness gracious, I've inherited £X. Now I can fund a yearlong Guardian and/or Labour internship.'
> 'Epic fail - caught making up quotes - I miss 3 turns and pay £X for journalism course in america or somewhere.'
> ...


Like Monopoly but with different publications making up the spaces on the board - call it Commentopoly (because they want to own all the media comments).


----------



## cesare (Apr 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The mental conception _on the part of activists_ that the activists are sacrificing themselves for others leads to horrible problems in how they relate to non-activists and odd ideas about what constitutes political activity.


Martyrdom for gratitude. Redemption shit.


----------



## rekil (Apr 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Like Monopoly but with different publications making up the spaces on the board - call it Commentopoly (because they want to own all the media comments).


Should be a bit more varied than another Monopoly clone I think, with room for choices about how you use your social capital and that. Commentopoly is good though.


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I just think it's interesting how often it is that the same activists, like Rees and Penny, seem to head similar sorts of groups and movements over and over. The sort of people with the talent and resources to wreck, but not enough to create something useful.
> 
> If they didn't exist, the state would have to invent them...


look at climate camp, no dash for gas and dale farm activists. sorry, i mean a specific activist heavily and visibly involved in all three campaigns.
ndfg are currently trying to drum up support for dale farm under their 'climate change campaigning' hat.

the same person (edit: i am referring to a specific individual, who yes, i do have extreme issues with these days) ends up on the front page of the guardian being arrested for those three campaigns time after time after time. they keep a scrapbook of their press clippings, for specific 'look at how awesome i am' moments with visitors, and use their position to get extra financial help from politically sympathetic individuals.. i am not naming them, so fuck confidentiality (and that has been their attitude towards me so far, so..)
they are risking, in terms of their 'action' actions, fuck all other than being bored in a cell (or their abseiling ropes failing. which, fair enough, does take balls) - their job within their workers co-op is secure, they've mates that will pay their rent if they get sent to prison, and their tenancy has been secure for years.
in terms of their personal actions, they assume that everyone around them will be sympathetic with what they do/have done. and it's turning out to be the case. even when they've done the indefensible.

/rant. i'm stepping away from the thread now for my own mental wellbeing, and that of everyone else *insert sheepish emoticon*
i apparently have a 'laurie penny' trigger warning and 'activist wankers' trigger warning to remind myself of


----------



## sihhi (Apr 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The mental conception _on the part of activists_ that the activists are sacrificing themselves for others lead to horrible problems in how they relate to non-activists and odd ideas about what constitutes political activity.


 
I agree, I think it's worth stopping this stuff in its blocks: in what sense are 99% of activists sacrificing anything at all? 
The basic problem is their feeling that the orders below need to be tutored before society can be turned over.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 4, 2013)

'It feels _needful_'? Dreadful archaic sentence designed to make her seem extra smart.


----------



## rekil (Apr 4, 2013)

She should call Kenan Malik a great big racist.

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/multiculturalism-and-its-discontents/


----------



## sihhi (Apr 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> look at climate camp, no dash for gas and dale farm activists.
> ndfg are currently trying to drum up support for dale farm under their 'climate change campaigning' hat.
> 
> the same person ends up on the front page of the guardian being arrested time after time after time.
> they are risking fuck all other than being bored in a cell - their job within their workers co-op is secure, they've mates that will pay their rent if they get sent to prison, and their tenancy has been secure for years.


 
It's not always the same person, but yes a minority do have whole spare houses, in the case of some of the Climate Camp group!


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 4, 2013)

.


----------



## ymu (Apr 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> The somewhat overwhelmed PD games division should do a Commentariat game. Use your social capital wisely, latch onto popular campaigns, up your ppw and bag as many media gigs as fast as possible.
> 
> 'Goodness gracious, I've inherited £X. Now I can fund a yearlong Guardian and/or Labour internship.'
> 'Epic fail - caught making up quotes - I miss 3 turns and pay £X for journalism course in america or somewhere.'
> ...


Someone did this for medicine. Get Peered! I'll see if I can find it to provide a handy template to plagiarise inspire you.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> ...and _fantastically, spectacularly _we find laurie recommending:


 
Oh, for crying out bloody loud!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 4, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> "First they came for the students"


 
Pastor Neimoeller is gnashing his ghostly teeth at her appropriation of his creation.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 4, 2013)

Firky said:


> Finishes the article by congratulating herself. Fucking hell.


 Activist journos always use self-reacharound conclusions, dontcher know?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I've been trying for a long time to put my finger on whats wrong with a lot of quite well meaning activist types and why I find them quite annoying sometimes, now i think i have found it. It's the entire way they talk about and relate to people like they are some sort of endangered species rather than actually asking them what they want and treating them like they are people with opinions - and most of all like they are nothing to do with THEM but like something separate.


 
They're very similar to vanguardists in that respect.
"Come along, peasants. Follow our leadership and all shall be well, but don't expect to dine at the same table!".


----------



## ymu (Apr 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> The somewhat overwhelmed PD games division should do a Commentariat game. Use your social capital wisely, latch onto popular campaigns, up your ppw and bag as many media gigs as fast as possible.
> 
> 'Goodness gracious, I've inherited £X. Now I can fund a yearlong Guardian and/or Labour internship.'
> 'Epic fail - caught making up quotes - I miss 3 turns and pay £X for journalism course in america or somewhere.'
> ...


 
Inspiration. (Link is to one of the authors' website, so you can ask permission if inspiration becomes plagiarism.)


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Oh, for crying out bloody loud!


 
"This reading list may not make you happy, but it might just make you *brave*."


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Pastor Neimoeller is gnashing his ghostly teeth at her appropriation of his creation.


 
She'll probably paraphrase the end as well.

'Then they came for me and there was nobody left to speak out for me (apart from a motley selection of rent-a-quote wiberal hacks charging exhorbitantly by the word, while claiming all this nastiness happened to them personally, of course).'


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> If I was the state, that's exactly the sort of stuff I'd want the likes of Laurie to be putting out.


 
If you were the state, you'd be a bit easier to smash than the one Laura shills for.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 4, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> "This reading list may not make you happy, but it might just make you *brave*."


 
I remember the first time I perused that "reading" list, which had films and songs on it too. I e-mailed her courtesy of the NS, asking if she meant I was supposed to read the film scripts and lyric sheets, but she never replied. 

Last time I read Debord, mind you ('90s), it just made me sleepy. I can read Bourdieu or Foucault with nary a yawn, but not Guy!


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The mental conception _on the part of activists_ that the activists are sacrificing themselves for others leads to horrible problems in how they relate to non-activists and odd ideas about what constitutes political activity.


 
like a sort of jesus complex?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> like a sort of jesus complex?


Not really, more the idea that _we_ do politics for _them _- it's _our_ role. The other side of the role is that they leave us to it. Politics is what _we_ do.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Not really, more the idea that _we_ do politics for _them _- it's _our_ role. The other side of the role is that they leave us to it. Politics is what _we_ do.


 
that sounds familiar.


----------



## rekil (Apr 5, 2013)

Yet more work for the PD games and toys division I'm afraid.

There are 'war journalist' dolls out there.



But why a man? Why war? Why not a woman? Why not a tea-swigging, e-cig puffing woman on the frontlines of the global protest movements?


----------



## imposs1904 (Apr 5, 2013)

copliker said:


> Yet more work for the PD games and toys division I'm afraid.
> 
> There are 'war journalist' dolls out there.
> 
> ...


 
I've never seen Di Caprio so lifelike in a role.


----------



## BigTom (Apr 5, 2013)

copliker said:


> Should be a bit more varied than another Monopoly clone I think, with room for choices about how you use your social capital and that. Commentopoly is good though.



There's potentially an interesting game mechanic here which this could have and that's one where players choose their starting background and this acts as a handicap system.
Build a properly tactical game on top of that and you can either have a game where skill levels are evened out or one where some people (rich parents, oxbridge, daddy edits the telegraph) have an early game advantage where others (working class, left school at 16) get advantages in the mid/late game.

This all fits thematically, and would be interesting... it's going in my note pad of ideas


----------



## BigTom (Apr 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I've been trying for a long time to put my finger on whats wrong with a lot of quite well meaning activist types and why I find them quite annoying sometimes, now i think i have found it. It's the entire way they talk about and relate to people like they are some sort of endangered species rather than actually asking them what they want and treating them like they are people with opinions - and most of all like they are nothing to do with THEM but like something separate.



I think you can go a step further with this tbh.
If you're friends with people or spend a fair amount of time with someone you don't need to ask them what they want, you know from being part of their lives.
To a lesser extent if you're part of a community you get the same thing as your concerns will often be shared by other people. 
"Activists" though have their only community with other "activists" and can never even come close to not needing to ask people what they want, and subsequently I can't see such people/groupings/attitude (I'm struggling fit the right word here) ever helping to bring about a situation where no-one is asking what anyone else wants cos people are self organising and don't need to be asked.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 5, 2013)

yer my point is that its not just that they need to ask it's that they don't and just assume they know everything.


----------



## BigTom (Apr 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yer my point is that its not just that they need to ask it's that they don't and just assume they know everything.


 
I'm not disagreeing with you at all  I think it's not quite this / more than this though - they don't think they know everything but their only community is other activists so these are the people they ask when they don't know. They are not really even part of the other communities they might belong to, like at work if they have a normal job, because they see themselves as seperate. Other people at work are just people to be complained about to other activists or surprised by if they happen to show a correct view then confused about like how can they see this but not that? 
They have entirely separated themselves from the communities they see themselves as helping and maintain that separation rigidly, their personal lives and political lives have become one and the same but in a way that separates themselves from other people. I'd rather the personal/political divide gets broken down but in a way that happens because you are not separated from other people.

Although I recognise that asking people what they want is not just something that always needs to happen it's also the right way to do things, there is within that an inherent (risk of) separation (I'm going to ask people what they want then I can do it for them) which exists that imo we should be aiming to remove. The ideal state is one in which we don't ask people what they want either because their lives and ours are interlinked enough that we share concerns / are aware of each others concerns or because other people will tell us and all we need to do is listen and discuss. The first bit can never exist in totality, only for a fairly small number of people (maybe hundreds at most, maybe not even that - there's some really interesting stuff about psychology of groups and how many friends and acquantances and stuff people have, I can only remember that 5-10, 100 and 600-700 were fairly significant and often repeating sizes of groups).

The second I'd like to believe it can and as long as you are asking people what they want and listening to them you are doing something that hopefully works towards that, but doing the listening part requires you to see the other person as part of your community.


----------



## love detective (Apr 5, 2013)

BigTom said:


> I think you can go a step further with this tbh.
> If you're friends with people or spend a fair amount of time with someone you don't need to ask them what they want, you know from being part of their lives.
> To a lesser extent if you're part of a community you get the same thing as your concerns will often be shared by other people.
> "Activists" though have their only community with other "activists" and can never even come close to not needing to ask people what they want, and subsequently I can't see such people/groupings/attitude (I'm struggling fit the right word here) ever helping to bring about a situation where no-one is asking what anyone else wants cos people are self organising and don't need to be asked.


 
I agree with what you're getting at - but there's a danger of making an enemy out of explicit 'asking' - an avoidance of 'asking' can lead to the exact same thing that we rightly criticise penny and co for. It's not so much asking in itself that's a problem, it's more who is doing the asking, how they do it and what they then do after that

A core part of the IWCA pilot schemes were questionnaire & consultative based canvassing - as once you go beyond a handful of people, while you may have a good idea what the most pressing issues & concerns are, the asking thing does a number of good things. It creates and stimulates engagement and discussion about those very issues and possible solutions, encourages collective ownership of the problem, shows people that they are not the only ones with the same concerns, and also can pick up things that are not immediately on the radar of others. For example one survey led thing of another group in Glasgow, revealed that the biggest annoyance amongst women surveyed was that it was near on impossible for washing machines to be used effectively above a certain floor due to poor water pressure/pumps. Off the back of that a campaign was organised to force the council to install appropriate pumps which solved the problem. Small wins like that on unexpected issues that were not immediately on the radar builds confidence in people and the idea of self organising around other issues. The very fact that the starting point is not promising to build castles on the sand is what gives these kind of approaches the potential to achieve the capacity to gain some kind of momentum and genuine bottom up strength

Another thing about asking (and then engaging) is that it subjects your own beliefs & theories to a fairly vigorous testing and forces you to reassess these if it appears they are not fit for purpose. For example, entangling the perception of the connection between social/economic problems and race/ethnicity. When you genuinely ask people about stuff (people outside the own self selecting groups that most lefties/progressives belong to), it's never going to be the nice clean un-contradictory outlook that you get through purely living in a world of disconnected liberal theory. Not that the likes of Penny and co would ever be stood on a doorstep in a working class community, but if they were you can imagine their reaction to anyone who, when asked, talked about these problems through the prism of race/ethnicity. A progressive class bassed and uncompromising critique of multiculturalism is far better than just writing people off from the get go as lost cause and racist. Likewise other prickly issues like working class on working class anti-social behaviour can't just be magicked away by talk of capitalism makes them do it - they require real engagement with, but sometimes it can be easier to avoid these topics, by not asking!


----------



## flypanam (Apr 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Pastor Neimoeller is gnashing his ghostly teeth at her appropriation of his creation.


 
As is Alan Ginsburg lAURA has written a poem for the '50 shades of feminism' collection based, on...wait...You won't believe it...Howl.


----------



## andysays (Apr 5, 2013)

flypanam said:


> As is Alan Ginsburg lAURA has written a poem for the '50 shades of feminism' collection based, on...wait...You won't believe it...Howl.


 
I'm trying to imagine what that might be like:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked wearing "hipster" hats,

dragging themselves through the negro (note - check with one of my many black friends for the most acceptable current expression) streets at dawn looking for an angry fix of self-righteous liberal moralism,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking and drinking tea, don't forget the tea in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flatshares with other members of their faux-radical bohemian literary network floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz (should this perhaps be updated to something more contemporary,or left for its original flavour?),

Please add your own suggestions. This might be worthy of a whole thread of its own...

(edited to hopefully make the line spacing work better)


----------



## J Ed (Apr 5, 2013)

love detective said:


> A progressive class bassed and uncompromising critique of multiculturalism is far better than just writing people off from the get go as lost cause and racist. Likewise other prickly issues like working class on working class anti-social behaviour can't just be magicked away by talk of capitalism makes them do it - they require real engagement with, but sometimes it can be easier to avoid these topics, by not asking!


 
What is the general opinion of the IWCA critique of multiculturalism on Urban? I read it recently and I thought it was pretty brilliant, I don't imagine that it's a narrative that people outside of student unions and the tiny minority who benefit financially from state multiculturalism would object to either.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 5, 2013)

flypanam said:


> As is Alan Ginsburg lAURA has written a poem for the '50 shades of feminism' collection based, on...wait...You won't believe it...Howl.


 
Fucking hell, Ginsberg McGonagalled by Penny. That's going to be some car-crash!!


----------



## sihhi (Apr 5, 2013)

flypanam said:


> As is Alan Ginsburg lAURA has written a poem for the '50 shades of feminism' collection based, on...wait...You won't believe it...Howl.


 

Here she is at that event.









3rd from left Natasha Walter, a leftist but managed to claim Thatcher represents something good in one of her books. At the podium is psychotherapist-psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, just behind to her left is Rachel Holmes, senior manager at Amazon for a while, now a writer. To Orbach's right Radio 4 hero Sandi Toksvig, behind Toksvig is Labour actor Juliet Stevenson house in Hampstead (LOL) who also was a strong supporter of anti-MMR doctor Andrew Wakefield.

To Toksvig's left Egyptian liberal novelist Ahdaf Soueif, then New Labour crony Dame Jude Kelly, then I think?? Baronness Red Helena Kennedy ??. 

Right on the bottom is LP.


----------



## flypanam (Apr 5, 2013)

Andy you're close, but here is a sample of her poetry. Its called Saudade btw.

"There are more of us than you think, kicking off our high-
heeled shoes to run and being told not so fast

The best minds of my generation consumed by craving, furious
half naked starving--

Who ripped tights and dripping make up smoked alone in bed-
sits bare mattresses waiting for transfiguration.

Who ran half dressed out of department stores yelling that we
didn't want to be good and beautiful..."


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 5, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What is the general opinion of the IWCA critique of multiculturalism on Urban? I read it recently and I thought it was pretty brilliant, I don't imagine that it's a narrative that people outside of student unions and the tiny minority who benefit financially from state multiculturalism would object to either.


 
As you can guess, that means the likes of Ms. Penny have reacted to it somewhat shrilly.


----------



## cesare (Apr 5, 2013)

I sincerely hope that "the best minds of [her] generation" are working on alternative power solutions rather than running half dressed out of department stores.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 5, 2013)

_Who ripped tights and dripping make-up smoked alone in bedsits bare mattresses waiting for transfiguration_

_Who ran half-dressed out of department stores yelling that we didn't want to be good and beautiful_

_Who glowing high and hopeful were the last to leave the gig our skin crackling with lust and sweat and pure music_

_Who wrote poetry on each other's arms and cared more about fucking than being fuckable_

Who wants more?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> _Who ripped tights and dripping make-up smoked alone in bedsits bare mattresses waiting for transfiguration_
> 
> _Who ran half-dressed out of department stores yelling that we didn't want to be good and beautiful_
> 
> ...


 
Needs more references to drinking 3 quid cups of tea in Starbucks


----------



## cesare (Apr 5, 2013)

Who glowed high and hopeful? You did! You did!

Shoot that poison arrow through my heart


----------



## sihhi (Apr 5, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Needs more references to drinking 3 quid cups of tea in Starbucks


 
_Who worked until our backs stiffened and our limbs sang with the memory of misbehaviour that was what it was to be a woman_
_Who dared to dance until dawn and were drugged and raped by men in clean T-shirts and woke up scared and sore to be told it was our fault_
_Who swallowed bosses' patronizing side-eyes stole away from violent broken boys in the middle of the night and vowed never again to try to fix the world one man at a time_
_Who slammed down the tray of drinks and tore off our aprons and aching smiles and went scowling out into the streets looking for change_


----------



## J Ed (Apr 5, 2013)

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...attresses waiting for transfiguration&f=false

Oh god, she called it saudade. This really is too much.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Who wants more?


 
_"Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of his audience members died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council, survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilization, leaped straight up through his neck and throttled his brain._ _The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Laurie Penny of The Wiberal Media Bubble, Islington, England,[2]* in the destruction of the planet Earth*."_

Better the destruction of the planet Earth than enduring any more of that, ta muchly.


----------



## Firky (Apr 5, 2013)




----------



## J Ed (Apr 5, 2013)

This poetry is offensively bad, she really does have zero self-awareness.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 5, 2013)

Other contributors include 
Jane Czyzselska, editor of Diva; Joan Bakewell, managed to interview Blair about faith on Radio 3 in 2009 failing to ask about either Iraq or Afghanistan LOL!, Camila Batmanghelidjh anti-union 'carer for kids' endorsed by bank foundations and private schools, millionaire Highgate mansion-dweller Lib Dem MP Lynne Featherstone, author Linda Grant with a careful propaganda line for the IDF,  Alissa Quart boss of pubishing company Atavist; Lib Dem Jeanette Winterson; liberal Turkish author (popular in the West because she studied/taught n the USA) Elif Shafak.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 5, 2013)

Ginsberg was a supporter of NAMBLA, apparently.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 5, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Ginsberg was a supporter of NAMBLA, apparently.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 5, 2013)

A fun joke: "However, was considering releasing my own perfume later in the year. 'Rancor' By Laurie Penny. Smells like teabags, tear gas + sweat."

Back to politics LP says the BBC trashes polyamory in this tweet 

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/320166329535569921

Refering to this article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-21753195

I don't see what the BBC has done wrong in that article, can anyone help out?


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> A fun joke: "However, was considering releasing my own perfume later in the year. 'Rancor' By Laurie Penny. Smells like teabags, tear gas + sweat."
> 
> Back to politics LP says the BBC trashes polyamory in this tweet
> 
> ...


 
Yea, it's chatting shite.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> A fun joke: "However, was considering releasing my own perfume later in the year. 'Rancor' By Laurie Penny. Smells like teabags, tear gas + sweat."
> 
> Back to politics LP says the BBC trashes polyamory in this tweet
> 
> ...


 
I think the BBC article is nasty, but it's interesting that Penny only chooses to comment on the way in which the welfare state is being beaten with this particular stick when she can get an angle in that mentions a particularly obscure identity politics subgroup.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 5, 2013)

polyamory ≠ polygamy


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 5, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> polyamory ≠ polygamy


----------



## cesare (Apr 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> A fun joke: "However, was considering releasing my own perfume later in the year. 'Rancor' By Laurie Penny. Smells like teabags, tear gas + sweat."
> 
> Back to politics LP says the BBC trashes polyamory in this tweet
> 
> ...



I suppose they presented it in the context of a nuclear family with the man as head of the household; and from there extrapolating that the women were more at risk of an abusive man. As if polyamory relationships were run on harem principles.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 5, 2013)

Firky said:


>


----------



## love detective (Apr 5, 2013)

J Ed said:


> This poetry is offensively bad, she really does have zero self-awareness.


 
I thought at first it was something that had been dug up from when she was early teens or something and thought it was a bit off to slag her off about it, but it's recent stuff, jesus fuck


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> I suppose they presented it in the context of a nuclear family with the man as head of the household; and from there extrapolating that the women were more at risk of an abusive man. As if polyamory relationships were run on harem principles.


 
I feel like the article does a pretty good job of explaining the concept and being even-handed to be fair. It's true that it focuses on the likelihood of gendered power imbalances but this seems like a pretty straightforward and important point to me. I see nothing wrong with polyamory in principle but I find it hard to see how equality can truly be found in such relationships in the society in which we live.


----------



## love detective (Apr 5, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What is the general opinion of the IWCA critique of multiculturalism on Urban? I read it recently and I thought it was pretty brilliant, I don't imagine that it's a narrative that people outside of student unions and the tiny minority who benefit financially from state multiculturalism would object to either.


 
over time it had pretty much been generally accepted as the only sensible class based take on m/c


----------



## cesare (Apr 5, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> I feel like the article does a pretty good job of explaining the concept and being even-handed to be fair. It's true that it focuses on the likelihood of gendered power imbalances but this seems like a pretty straightforward and important point to me. I see nothing wrong with polyamory in principle but I find it hard to see how equality can truly be found in such relationships in the society in which we live.



I don't think the likelihood of gendered power imbalances necessarily increases with polyamorous relationships, or that women are more likely to find themselves in an abusive relationship because of it; which is what I took from the tenor of the piece.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> I don't think the likelihood of gendered power imbalances necessarily increases with polyamorous relationships, or that women are more likely to find themselves in an abusive relationship because of it; which is what I took from the tenor of the piece.


 
Yeah I see your point. It seems to me though that coercion _into _these forms of relationship due to power imbalances is more likely than in two-person relatinships.

I guess the link to the Philpott case is the most damaging point from a perspective that aims to be more open to different forms of relationship.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 5, 2013)

flypanam said:


> As is Alan Ginsburg lAURA has written a poem for the '50 shades of feminism' collection based, on...wait...You won't believe it...Howl.


 
Allan Ginsberg the famous mysogynist and supporter of NAMBLA?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 5, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> polyamory ≠ polygamy


 
Rereading, I can see the article at whole could be considered a distraction from wider child protection issues and a gender-divided society.

On yr point isn't 'polygamy' (one man, multiple female partners) a subset of polyamory? Is Thom Brooks wholly wrong to say "Both polygamy and polyamory are more likely, in practice, to privilege men over women” If singlehood > 1-1 marriage > polygamous marriage in terms of equality between male and female, where does polyamory fit in? Don't quite get it all myself.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Rereading, I can see the article at whole could be considered a distraction from wider child protection issues and a gender-divided society.
> 
> On yr point isn't 'polygamy' (one man, multiple female partners) a subset of polyamory? Is Thom Brooks wholly wrong to say "Both polygamy and polyamory are more likely, in practice, to privilege men over women” If singlehood > 1-1 marriage > polygamous marriage in terms of equality between male and female, where does polyamory fit in? Don't quite get it all myself.


 
Polygamy is where one person has multiple spouses.
Polyamory is relationship anarchy.

Burn me.


----------



## cesare (Apr 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Rereading, I can see the article at whole could be considered a distraction from wider child protection issues and a gender-divided society.
> 
> On yr point isn't 'polygamy' (one man, multiple female partners) a subset of polyamory? Is Thom Brooks wholly wrong to say "Both polygamy and polyamory are more likely, in practice, to privilege men over women” If singlehood > 1-1 marriage > polygamous marriage in terms of equality between male and female, where does polyamory fit in? Don't quite get it all myself.


I haven't read what Thom Brooks has to say on the matter, or how he arrived at that conclusion; but his premise seems to be based on polyamorous relationships being primarily heterosexual.


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 5, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Polygamy is where one person has multiple spouses.
> Polyamory is relationship anarchy.
> 
> Burn me.


----------



## rekil (Apr 5, 2013)

I demand that editor asks lauriepenny to do a poetry reading at offline.


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 5, 2013)

copliker said:


> I demand that editor asks lauriepenny to do a poetry reading at offline.


quick! start a change.org petition!

please


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> _Who ripped tights and dripping make-up smoked alone in bedsits bare mattresses waiting for transfiguration_
> 
> _Who ran half-dressed out of department stores yelling that we didn't want to be good and beautiful_
> 
> ...


 
Please G-d no! Have you no pity?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 5, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Polygamy is where one person has multiple spouses. Polyamory is relationship anarchy. Burn me.


 
Relationship anarchy.   You'll need to explain.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> _Who worked until our backs stiffened and our limbs sang with the memory of misbehaviour that was what it was to be a woman_
> _Who dared to dance until dawn and were drugged and raped by men in clean T-shirts and woke up scared and sore to be told it was our fault_
> _Who swallowed bosses' patronizing side-eyes stole away from violent broken boys in the middle of the night and vowed never again to try to fix the world one man at a time_
> _Who slammed down the tray of drinks and tore off our aprons and aching smiles and went scowling out into the streets looking for change_


 
You evil evil bastard. I'm going to have to lobotomise myself with a fruit knife now, to make the misery and despair recede!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Relationship anarchy.  You'll need to explain.


 
Have you read "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Heinlein? If so, the "water families" in there are an example of polyamory - multiple people in a group all married to each other.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Relationship anarchy.  You'll need to explain.


 
Here let me Google that for you http://lmgtfy.com/?q=relationship+anarchy


----------



## flypanam (Apr 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> Allan Ginsberg the famous mysogynist and supporter of NAMBLA?


 
Yup, thats who I meant.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 5, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Here let me Google that for you http://lmgtfy.com/?q=relationship anarchy


Polyamory isn't the same as relationship anarchy.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> Who glowed high and hopeful? You did! You did!
> 
> Shoot that poison arrow through my heart


 
I think the third line of the chorus ("You think you're smart. Stupid! Stupid!") suite La pennionara better.


----------



## cesare (Apr 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Have you read "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Heinlein? If so, the "water families" in there are an example of polyamory - multiple people in a group all married to each other.


Marion Zimmer Bradley's another author that dealt with the subject, also gender relationships and family/community etc


----------



## cesare (Apr 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Polyamory isn't the same as relationship anarchy.


Depends what DrRingDing means by relationship anarchy, surely?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 5, 2013)

Good lord, what an arrogant concept, "relationship anarchy" - the flipside of it being everyone else is a state-authoritarian-relationship mug/sheeple/enemy.


----------



## cesare (Apr 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I think the third line of the chorus ("You think you're smart. Stupid! Stupid!") suite La pennionara better.


I was going to move onto Rip It Up And Start Again next.


----------



## JimW (Apr 5, 2013)

She has inspired me, poetry is clearly the medium for our message:

There was a young woman from Brighton,
Who was posh and quite painfully right-on;
She spoke for the youth
Though a stranger to truth
In prose hardly fit to wipe shite on.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 5, 2013)

love detective said:


> I thought at first it was something that had been dug up from when she was early teens or something and thought it was a bit off to slag her off about it, but it's recent stuff, jesus fuck


 
Jesus is dead. He killed himself after sihhi posted the second slice of doggerel.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 5, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Good lord, what an arrogant concept, "relationship anarchy" - the flipside of it being everyone else is a state-authoritarian-relationship mug/sheeple/enemy.


 
You're still fucked off the BBC called you middle class.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> Depends what DrRingDing means by relationship anarchy, surely?


Of course, but normal usage AFAIK is for the two to mean separate things. Polyamorists (or the few I've talked to anyway) definitely separate between partners and non-partners.


butchersapron said:


> Good lord, what an arrogant concept, "relationship anarchy" - the flipside of it being everyone else is a state-authoritarian-relationship mug/sheeple/enemy.


Quite!


----------



## cesare (Apr 5, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Good lord, what an arrogant concept, "relationship anarchy" - the flipside of it being everyone else is a state-authoritarian-relationship mug/sheeple/enemy.


He might have actually meant anarchy as opposed to anarchism, I suppose.


----------



## cesare (Apr 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Of course, but normal usage AFAIK is for the two to mean separate things. Polyamorists (or the few I've talked to anyway) definitely separate between partners and non-partners.



You can have chaos between multiple partners, surely?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 5, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Good lord, what an arrogant concept, "relationship anarchy" - the flipside of it being everyone else is a state-authoritarian-relationship mug/sheeple/enemy.


 
that's one of things i hated about it.  in a heterosexual monogamous relationship?  then you're a tool of the state and patriarchy.  how ugly is that.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> You can have chaos between multiple partners, surely?


ANARCHY IS NOT CHAOS

But you know this


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> I don't think the likelihood of gendered power imbalances necessarily increases with polyamorous relationships, or that women are more likely to find themselves in an abusive relationship because of it; which is what I took from the tenor of the piece.


 
Yup, same here. While it *can* mean a power imbalance when polygamy is practiced within an institutional setting (Mormonism for example) where the writ only runs one way (i.e. single male, many wives), it's not *necessarily* abusive.
She's quite narrowminded, is Laura.


----------



## cesare (Apr 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> ANARCHY IS NOT CHAOS
> 
> But you know this


No. Anarchism is not chaos.


----------



## cesare (Apr 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Yup, same here. While it *can* mean a power imbalance when polygamy is practiced within an institutional setting (Mormonism for example) where the writ only runs one way (i.e. single male, many wives), it's not *necessarily* abusive.
> She's quite narrowminded, is Laura.


I thought that her criticism of the BBC's piece was because that's exactly how they portrayed it?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 5, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Here let me Google that for you http://lmgtfy.com/?q=relationship anarchy


 
For the benefit of others

The first two hits gives a manifesto - hard to understand:




> Build for the lovely unexpected
> Being free to be spontaneous — to express oneself without fear of punishments or a sense of burdened “shoulds” — is what gives life to relationships based on relationship anarchy. Organize based on a wish to meet and explore each other — not on duties and demands and disappointment when they are not met.


 
The third gives pictures.

The fourth gives wikipedia












> Anarchists-A in a heart is a symbol of relationship anarchy
> Relationship anarchy, which do not divide relationships of partners and non-partners, but have a more flexible approach to relationships where everything is allowed so long as everyone can accept the agreement.


 
It still sounds confusing but I sort of get it.


----------



## cesare (Apr 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Polyamory isn't the same as relationship anarchy.


He's edited his post


----------



## TruXta (Apr 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> He's edited his post


Anarchist!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> I thought that her criticism of the BBC's piece was because that's exactly how they portrayed it?


 
Well, their pet "expert", but her criticism wasn't isn't exactly comprehensive, either.
Maybe I expect too much from the twitter format.


----------



## cesare (Apr 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Well, their pet "expert", but her criticism wasn't isn't exactly comprehensive, either.
> Maybe I expect too much from the twitter format.


Ah, I couldn't be arsed with looking at the whole exchange. I just saw LP saying the piece was wrongheaded or summat.


----------



## rekil (Apr 5, 2013)

flypanam said:


> Andy you're close, but here is a sample of her poetry. Its called Saudade btw.
> 
> "There are more of us than you think, kicking off our high-
> heeled shoes to run and being told not so fast
> ...


 It's like a bad parody of the Girder parody.


> While today we young people may be blown like zephyrs on the howling winter winds of impenitent patriarchy, our anvil eyed gaze is fixed e’er forward, when we shall ride the shimmering breezes of spring’s dancing tomorrows.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 5, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> You're still fucked off the BBC called you middle class.


You mean a shit BBC thing that said i was in 'the precariat'? Yeah, fuming mate, mate.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> Ah, I couldn't be arsed with looking at the whole exchange. I just saw LP saying the piece was wrongheaded or summat.


 
Usual BBC thing of finding a single "authority" to hang the article from.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 5, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> You mean a shit BBC thing that said i was in 'the precariat'? Yeah, fuming mate, mate.


 
ask him if he's organised the Firebox workers yet


----------



## J Ed (Apr 5, 2013)

Owen Jones smashing Harry Cole on Sky over Philpott. What an odious worm Harry Cole is.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 5, 2013)

this may be slightly related but the sort of way i'm thinking of these activists behave, i'm reminded of the thing i read ages ago on the UCSJ site about an american guy working for an NGO who wanted to do some research about "the last jews of eastern europe" and contacted various people in those countries, and nobody took part because nobody wants to be a "last jew".

anyway.

that relationship anarchy thing is so stupid. You're not making a political statement by what type of relationship you have. Unless its some sort of super religious "man at the head of the house" type bollocks. And it doesnt mean that people who have a heterosexual monogamous relationship are conservative or support patriarchy, isn't the whole idea of patriarchy that it is a structural phenomenon and by having a certain type of relationship it doesn't mean you are free of it (I disagree with the radfems on a lot of things but one thing they do get right is how certain lesbian relationships can end up replicating patriarchal dynamics and structures).


----------



## treelover (Apr 5, 2013)

[/QUOTE]this may be slightly related but the sort of way i'm thinking of these activists behave, i'm reminded of the thing i read ages ago on the UCSJ site about an american guy working for an NGO who wanted to do some research about "the last jews of eastern europe" and contacted various people in those countries, and nobody took part because nobody wants to be a "last jew".
[/QUOTE]

There is something quite moving about that..


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 5, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> ask him if he's organised the Firebox workers yet


 
Get back to posting my little ponies.


----------



## treelover (Apr 5, 2013)

There was a former poster on here who was into all the above, became a RW libertarian...

Oh and maybe in the light of this thread, I shouldn't note that much of his concubine were very very young...


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 5, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Polygamy is where one person has multiple spouses.
> Polyamory is relationship anarchy.
> 
> Burn me.


 
Burned!


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 5, 2013)

treelover said:


> There was a former poster on here who was into all the above, became a RW libertarian...
> 
> Oh and maybe in the light of this thread, I shouldn't note that much of his concubine were very very young...


 
Are you insinuating folk that do poly stuff are really just right wing paedo-nonces?


----------



## Firky (Apr 5, 2013)

Pampas grass.


----------



## treelover (Apr 5, 2013)

one individual, don't know any other, not naming them either...




> Pampas grass.


 
had to google that, the things you learn...


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 5, 2013)

Firky said:


> Pampas grass.


I try not to remember that there was some in the front garden of one of the places I lived as a child....


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 5, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I try not to remember that there was some in the front garden of one of the places I lived as a child....


 

Same, and the glass fruitbowl that never had any fruit in it


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 5, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Same, and the glass fruitbowl that never had any fruit in it


*shudder*


----------



## Firky (Apr 5, 2013)

A bottle of Malibu is another tell tale sign,


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 5, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Same, and the glass fruitbowl that never had any fruit in it


 
Was there an always well-polished glass-topped coffee table too, Dotty?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 5, 2013)

treelover said:


> There is something quite moving about that..


 
Yes, and its an example of how people see themselves that is so different to how activists, however well meaning frequently see them. The article was saying that they actually found that sort of talk insulting and demeaning when they had no intention and did not think of themselves as being the "last" at all.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 5, 2013)

if somebody started addressing me in those terms I'd be furious tbh. ymu was saying I tihnk either on this thread or another one about how somebody when finding out her bf was black like "oh, that's really good". Like you're doing them a favour. That is still fucking racism ffs.

Yet the likes of laurie do it to people who work in the jobs ive worked and who have a similar working situation to myself, "the precariat" or whatever, like treat it like sort of exotic species. Like they are something that has to be saved like you would save a - agh. And then wwhen these people do have the odd bit of fun or "cultural interests" or whatever well they cant be that badly off can they.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 5, 2013)

BigTom said:


> I'm not disagreeing with you at all  I think it's not quite this / more than this though - they don't think they know everything but their only community is other activists so these are the people they ask when they don't know. They are not really even part of the other communities they might belong to, like at work if they have a normal job, because they see themselves as seperate. Other people at work are just people to be complained about to other activists or surprised by if they happen to show a correct view then confused about like how can they see this but not that?


 
I think that's something everyone tends to do, whether they're activists or not to be honest. We're not the only people to have strong views on stuff  I think though the important point is that a lot of activists dont have "correct views" on everything, I know I fucking don't. So therefore being like "why do they see this and not that" is a question people could equally ask about people involved in political activism and at different times and different places


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 5, 2013)

Laurie self described as precariat once. Nearly spat my tea out


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 5, 2013)

yeah i mean i know i'm in a much better position than a lot of other people i know. To her its become like another fucking identity group though. To identify with and not think about what she's saying.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> if somebody started addressing me in those terms I'd be furious tbh. ymu was saying I tihnk either on this thread or another one about how somebody when finding out her bf was black like "oh, that's really good". Like you're doing them a favour. That is still fucking racism ffs.
> 
> Yet the likes of laurie do it to people who work in the jobs ive worked and who have a similar working situation to myself, "the precariat" or whatever, like treat it like sort of exotic species. Like they are something that has to be saved like you would save a - agh. And then wwhen these people do have the odd bit of fun or "cultural interests" or whatever well they cant be that badly off can they.


 
That fucking BBC class calculator thing saying I can't possibly be 'precariat' unless I don't use facebook or go to museums. Another cheek on the same arse as this shit.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 5, 2013)

Every fucker's on facebook ffs. You're probably more likely to be middle class if you're not on it


----------



## ymu (Apr 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It still sounds confusing but I sort of get it.


Not sure I'm fully following this train, but I think the comparison to polygamy is that, in practice, polyamory frequently consists of a bloke that wants to sleep around but still have his tea on the table when he gets home. Just about every documentary I've ever seen on the subject includes at least one polyamorous group where the women have very little sexual freedom, whilst also including some genuine examples of polyamory. Not that documentary-makers are going to give us an unbiased peek into what forms actually dominate in the real world, but there are definitely examples of the term being abused as a cover for polygamy without the paperwork, and it fits with my experience of boyfriends who wanted polyamory. Not so keen when I was keen because it meant I could sleep around too.


----------



## ymu (Apr 5, 2013)

love detective said:


> over time it had pretty much been generally accepted as the only sensible class based take on m/c


Yes. I'm surprised there haven't been more responses to this. I am not IWCA and I am happy to confirm that this is the case on these here boards, and elsewhere AFAIK J Ed.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 5, 2013)

treelover said:


> one individual, don't know any other, not naming them either...


 
Well there's a few folk here that do polyamory. Not right wing or nonces.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Lib Dem Jeanette Winterson;


 
Really? A Lib Dem?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 6, 2013)

its this whole idea that if you have a "normal" job or lifestyle then you must be boring or not have very much going on upstairs


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 6, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Really? A Lib Dem?


A particularly sophisticated one it appears:



> And here in the UK, we voted in a Tory government because Labour had become incompetent and unelectable. I voted LibDem, and that was a mistake, but I had to vote for someone.


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 6, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


>


 
I opened my front door in just my underpants to a couple of smartly dressed Mormons once. Sadly, they never returned.


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 6, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> You mean a shit BBC thing that said i was in 'the precariat'? Yeah, fuming mate, mate.


 
I was very disappointed there was no intelligentsia class


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 6, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> I opened my front door in just my underpants to a couple of smartly dressed Mormons once. Sadly, they never returned.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 6, 2013)

Is that the same Jeannette Winterson, author of 'Stone Gods'

Thats slightly tainted my recent enjoyment of said book if so


----------



## love detective (Apr 6, 2013)

who knows where those underpants are now


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 6, 2013)

are you sure she is a lib-dem and didn't just vote for them? she didnt seem to me to be the type


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 6, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Here are anarchists being _____________* at the Cuts Cafe
> 
> 
> 
> ...



i forgot about this.
they should do a slam with laurie.


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 6, 2013)

love detective said:


> who knows where those underpants are now


 
down the back of someone's mother's sette in Ryazan probably


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 6, 2013)

"Cuts Cafe" is not the best choice of name imo, no offence to the people involved but would you call something "Atos cafe" or "bedroom tax cafe"? come on


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 6, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> "Cuts Cafe" is not the best choice of name imo, no offence to the people involved but would you call something "Atos cafe" or "bedroom tax cafe"? come on


 
shite menu as well


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 6, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> are you sure she is a lib-dem and didn't just vote for them? she didnt seem to me to be the type


 

looks like its just that, one of many eejits who voted lib dem to punish labour. Theres someone on here who voted lib dem out of those motives and excuses it with 'I'm in Abbots ward, its a labour safe seat'

which makes no sense.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 6, 2013)

who's that, Laurie Penny?


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 6, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> are you sure she is a lib-dem and didn't just vote for them? she didnt seem to me to be the type


 
She's totally the type.  I always said she was crap.


----------



## rekil (Apr 7, 2013)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*5 Apr​It's worth reminding that not only is @*OwenJones84* doing Labour's work for them, he's doing it ON HIS OWN, with no team behind him. #*hero*


----------



## rekil (Apr 7, 2013)




----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

he's like a modern day robin hood only with no merrie men /dc


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 7, 2013)

copliker said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> 5 Apr​
> It's worth reminding that not only is @*OwenJones84* doing Labour's work for them, he's doing it ON HIS OWN, with no team behind him. #*hero*


Makes the whole thread worth it again. Blue checked shirt.


----------



## rekil (Apr 7, 2013)

She's sort of right about Owen doing a job for Labour but not in the way she thinks.

I don't doubt that she sees herself in the same heroic role as well.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 7, 2013)

Thank goodness Owen is there to protect the left flank so that Harman can talk about 'broods' of welfare scroungers.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

shut up laurie you absolute moron


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

copliker said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> 5 Apr​It's worth reminding that not only is @*OwenJones84* doing Labour's work for them, he's doing it ON HIS OWN, with no team behind him. #*hero*


 



stop talking laurie and do everyone a favour


----------



## treelover (Apr 7, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/20/chile-student-rebel-camila-vallejo





Thinking on a global level, What about Camila Vallejo, Chilean student leader(received death threats), now standing for national elections, for the Communists, young beautiful, always on social media, travelling the world with her 'message' is she in the L/P frame?


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Apr 7, 2013)

"Bravo!"


----------



## Nice one (Apr 7, 2013)

copliker said:


> She's sort of right about Owen doing a job for Labour but not in the way she thinks.
> 
> I don't doubt that she sees herself in the same heroic role as well.


 
kleenex fodder for the masses





*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  5 Apr
It's worth reminding that not only is @*OwenJones84* doing Labour's work for them, he's doing it ON HIS OWN, with no team behind him. #*hero*
 


*Owen Jones* ‏@*OwenJones84*  5 Apr
@*PennyRed* Ah come off it. You're a hero. But I genuinely feel more optimistic than ever - reckon we can win this with enough determination x
 


*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  5 Apr
@*OwenJones84* *hug* do you really think so?



*- ∷ = ∴ -∵ ∷ ∴* ‏@*thmsbsh*  5 Apr
@*PennyRed* @*OwenJones84* you guys are BOTH heroes to us all xxx


----------



## andysays (Apr 7, 2013)

treelover said:


> Thinking on a global level, What about Camila Vallejo, Chilean student leader(received death threats), now standing for national elections, for the Communists, young beautiful, always on social media, travelling the world with her 'message' is she in the L/P frame?


 
Does she drink tea and smoke roll-ups?


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 7, 2013)

treelover said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/20/chile-student-rebel-camila-vallejo
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Vallejo the Chilean Penny? IT IS TO LAUGH.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 7, 2013)

treelover said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/20/chile-student-rebel-camila-vallejo
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Is she also polyamorous and bisexual? Since she's in the Chilean Communist Party, she probably hasn't spent nearly enough time ensuring that she can credibly claim that she is in as many identity politics subgroups as possible. I bet she's never even done a freestyle anti-cuts rap.


----------



## cesare (Apr 7, 2013)

copliker said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*5 Apr​It's worth reminding that not only is @*OwenJones84* doing Labour's work for them, he's doing it ON HIS OWN, with no team behind him. #*hero*



*chuffed*


----------



## Lo Siento. (Apr 7, 2013)

Nice one said:


> kleenex fodder for the masses
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Laurie, Owen, if either of you are still on here and reading this, still wondering why this long thread exists... Here it is. Right here.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 7, 2013)

treelover said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/20/chile-student-rebel-camila-vallejo
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
I don't reckon so no, I certainly don't have my finger on the pulse of Chilean politics but I get the impression that Vallejo is the real deal, someone who really has put her neck on the line rather than trying to appropriate (using ID politics discourse against ID politickers ftw) other peoples' struggles to boost her ego and reputation.

And her membership of the CP suggests she's not a trendy jump on every liberal bangwagon going clash of generations/genders/anything but class twat either.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Apr 7, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I don't reckon so no, I certainly don't have my finger on the pulse of Chilean politics but I get the impression that Vallejo is the real deal, someone who really has put her neck on the line rather than trying to appropriate (using ID politics discourse against ID politickers ftw) other peoples' struggles to boost her ego and reputation.
> 
> And her membership of the CP suggests she's not a trendy jump on every liberal bangwagon going clash of generations/genders/anything but class twat either.


Stalinist bureaucrat though. [/Sectarian's Sectarian]


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 7, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I don't reckon so no, *I certainly don't have my finger on the pulse of Chilean politics* but I get the impression that Vallejo is the real deal, someone who really has put her neck on the line rather than trying to appropriate (using ID politics discourse against ID politickers ftw) other peoples' struggles to boost her ego and reputation.
> 
> And her membership of the CP suggests she's not a trendy jump on every liberal bangwagon going clash of generations/genders/anything but class twat either.


 
Don't hide that lamp under a bushel


----------



## _angel_ (Apr 7, 2013)

Rarira Dempsey said:


> I
> 
> 
> I'm not and I'm not.
> ...


You don't actually have to post your real name, photos and pictures of you doing things that would get you sacked/ arrested.
Yet so many people do  , and younger than me who supposedly grew up understanding much more about technology than me.


----------



## _angel_ (Apr 7, 2013)

Rarira Dempsey said:


> That's because the younger generation have been systematically turned stupid. You only have to look at the haircuts to see there's no hope.


Even I can edit my privacy settings and definitely NOT use my real name. But I'm sort of trying to hide from a slightly stalkerish ex.


----------



## _angel_ (Apr 7, 2013)

Rarira Dempsey said:


> There's a couple of barmaids round here I'd like to become my stalkers, but the idea never seems to occur to 'em.


Does your OH know this


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 7, 2013)

Rarira Dempsey said:


> There's a couple of barmaids round here I'd like to become my stalkers, but the idea never seems to occur to 'em.


That comes across as a bit creepy to be honest.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 7, 2013)

Nice one said:


> kleenex fodder for the masses
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Mass reacharound!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 7, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Is she also polyamorous and bisexual? Since she's in the Chilean Communist Party, she probably hasn't spent nearly enough time ensuring that she can credibly claim that she is in as many identity politics subgroups as possible. I bet she's never even done a freestyle anti-cuts rap.


 
Bet she's never had to sing a verse of _the internationale_ in order to convince a Swappie paer-seller to give her a freebie copy, either.


----------



## ska invita (Apr 7, 2013)

> I genuinely feel more optimistic than ever - reckon we can win this with enough determination x


Win what?


----------



## Sue (Apr 7, 2013)

ska invita said:


> Win what?


 
The fight? The struggle? A goldfish?


----------



## Libertad (Apr 7, 2013)

A peerage.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 7, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Bet she's never had to sing a verse of _the internationale_ in order to convince a Swappie paer-seller to give her a freebie copy, either.


 





'Ahhhh, Socialist Worker. My favourite magazine. Soft, strong and thoroughly absorbent...'


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 7, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Mass reacharound!


 

whose the fuck-haired third contributor?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 7, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> whose the fuck-haired third contributor?


 
Someone who wants to bask in the reflected glory of the selfless martyrs.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

For fucks sake. who in their right mind would think penny was a hero?


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> For fucks sake. who in their right mind would think penny was a hero?


Her thousands of followers?'


----------



## Firky (Apr 7, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> whose the fuck-haired third contributor?


Musician. Thinker. Occasional poet.

thmsbsh is the guise by which Thomas Bush goes when on the internet. A lack of vowels makes everything quicker, even if it never quite works phonetically.

Educated at the University of Leeds and Goldsmiths, University of London, he spent four years and a lot of money learning how to write music, but has not quite worked out why to do such a thing.

Tom likes to write in the third person. He was once on University Challenge.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Her thousands of followers?'


 
but loads of people press follow on twitter it doesn't mean they give a shit about what the person is saying. not me btw, i dont have penny on twitter


----------



## sihhi (Apr 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> For fucks sake. who in their right mind would think penny was a hero?


 

To answer your question, people "_who write poetry on each other's arms and care more about fucking than being fuckable"_


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> To answer your question, people "_who write poetry on each other's arms and care more about fucking than being fuckable"_


 
I bet loads of people do that and they've never heard of Laurie Penny


----------



## sihhi (Apr 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I bet loads of people do that and they've never heard of Laurie Penny


 
People - young or young at heart - who are left-liberal, middle class, and literature fans.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> People - young or young at heart - who are left-liberal, middle class, and literature fans.


 
My mum fits those categories, i bet you a tenner that she's never heard of laurie penny though let alone consider her a hero (if she has it's probably because i was going on about it). She doesnt write poetry on her arm tho and I doubt she'd consider her a hero though


----------



## J Ed (Apr 7, 2013)

Writing poetry on your arm is seriously fucking narcissistic


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 7, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Writing poetry on your arm is seriously fucking narcissistic


 
Mate they were calling each other Heroes earlier on. Y'know Super-Heroes who's martyrdom and hard work (and elite eduction) is going to save the poor from the Tories single-handedly. We're way beyond a bit of narcissism


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 7, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> whose the fuck-haired third contributor?


 
Some sad arselicker.


----------



## love detective (Apr 7, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Mate they were calling each other Heroes earlier on. Y'know Super-Heroes who's martyrdom and hard work (and elite eduction) is going to save the poor from the Tories single-handedly. We're way beyond a bit of narcissism


 
we're at the stage of tattooing a line from Nietzsche over our cunts


----------



## sihhi (Apr 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> My mum fits those categories, i bet you a tenner that she's never heard of laurie penny though let alone consider her a hero (if she has it's probably because i was going on about it). She doesnt write poetry on her arm tho and I doubt she'd consider her a hero though


 
'hero' means 'great fellow' in this kind of 'banter'.

I doubt Owen Jones would big up LP any more than Lezard would.







Where are you going with your stab against her popularity?
She has just been considered one of the world's top 50 feminists by Susie Orbach, that's pretty good going.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> To answer your question, people "_who write poetry on each other's arms and care more about fucking than being fuckable"_


 
4 Real.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 7, 2013)

Fucking hell the roll-ups! Why the roll-ups? What do they want a fucking "true prole" medal or something? You'll get your fucking true prole medal when you're dead from lung cancer at 35.


----------



## rosecore (Apr 7, 2013)

copliker said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> 5 Apr​It's worth reminding that not only is @*OwenJones84* doing Labour's work for them, he's doing it ON HIS OWN, with no team behind him. #*hero*


 
She makes the classic mistake of assuming Labour speak for the working classes. They don't. They haven't done for a long time. When did the left have such an identity crisis that its come down to this?


----------



## rekil (Apr 7, 2013)

The Lez In A Fez. In waitrose apparently. Skint no more?


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 7, 2013)

rosecore said:


> She makes the classic mistake of assuming Labour speak for the working classes. They don't. They haven't done for a long time. When did the left have such an identity crisis that its come down to this?


 
When the new leftie Twitterati became a bunch of Islington-centric teenagers with minimal experience of actual struggle, the ability to say absolutely nothing of any real substance (but say it loudly enough to drown out anybody who actually knows what they're talking about) and started displaying the collective political knowledge, wisdom and articulacy of a boiled potato.


----------



## eatmorecheese (Apr 7, 2013)

Nice one said:


> kleenex fodder for the masses
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 






Fuck Yeah.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Fucking hell the roll-ups! Why the roll-ups? What do they want a fucking "true prole" medal or something? You'll get your fucking true prole medal when you're dead from lung cancer at 35.


 

Malboro Lights are the true sign off those who can afford to smoke made fags, and lucky strike are the sign of the cunt.

American Spirit baccy is hippy smokes.

Of course cutters choice, as smoked by Laurie and Lezared in that pic is not that much cheaper than real fags.

It is of course all part of the boho artist edgy cunt image. Some of us buy our baccy smuggled and rejoice that a 50g pouch costs only 7-8 pounds on the black (lunged) market

it's the prole chic that extends as far as smoking choices and artfully dropped aitches and calling their cushty london flat 'the hovel'

five weeks on a proper estate eating own brand museli and pasta for these scum! Its like the salt mines option but kinder.

/DC


----------



## sihhi (Apr 7, 2013)

A few months to go, early July Lezard's new book  - _Bitter Experience Has taught me - Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury_ comes out.

Penury = being poor. Publisher's blurb:

"In 2007, Nicholas Lezard was kicked out of his home, for reasons we need not go into here. Since then he has been obliged to muster whatever scant internal resources he has - and to pay child support - while maintaining an entirely essential wine habit. From being the adult father in a household with three children he has had to relearn the art of being just one member of a shared home, as if he was a student all over again. His housemates have included his great friend Razors, the psychopath with a heart of gold, and Laurie Penny, the brilliant feminist journalist and campaigner who still would prefer not to empty the bins. He hopes this account of his adventures and misadventures in love, alcohol and games of Night Cricket played against the wall of the local church will be a comfort and an inspiration to all feckless male dolts in similar positions. And an Awful Warning for those who are, as yet, not."


----------



## J Ed (Apr 7, 2013)

rosecore said:


> She makes the classic mistake of assuming Labour speak for the working classes. They don't. They haven't done for a long time. When did the left have such an identity crisis that its come down to this?


 
Think less 'is this logical?', think more 'what can I convincingly say that would make me look cool at a party?'


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 7, 2013)

Firky said:


> Musician. Thinker. Occasional poet.
> 
> thmsbsh is the guise by which Thomas Bush goes when on the internet. A lack of vowels makes everything quicker, even if it never quite works phonetically.
> 
> ...


 

aaarg


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Malboro Lights are the true sign off those who can afford to smoke made fags, and lucky strike are the sign of the cunt.
> 
> American Spirit baccy is hippy smokes.
> 
> ...


 
Or you could just, you know, give up smoking.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Malboro Lights are the true sign off those who can afford to smoke made fags, and lucky strike are the sign of the cunt.
> 
> American Spirit baccy is hippy smokes.
> 
> ...


 
You don't think dickhead media whore hipsters would go so far as to be seen puffing on roll-ups in public and then spend their private moments enjoying perfumed Sobranie tailor-mades while hoping nobody will get a mobile phone pic of them doing so, do you?

Would they really descend that far into the abyss of the pretend-proletariat?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 7, 2013)

copliker said:


> The Lez In A Fez. In waitrose apparently. Skint no more?
> 
> View attachment 31158


 

I see he is looking at the actimel range rather than going for the special order monbiotic range


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 7, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Or you could just, you know, give up smoking.


 
You're not my real dad


----------



## Sue (Apr 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> A few months to go, early July Lezard's new book - _Bitter Experience Has taught me - Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury_ comes out.
> 
> Penury = being poor. Publisher's blurb:
> 
> "In 2007, Nicholas Lezard was kicked out of his home, for reasons we need not go into here. Since then he has been obliged to muster whatever scant internal resources he has - and to pay child support - while maintaining an entirely essential wine habit. From being the adult father in a household with three children he has had to relearn the art of being just one member of a shared home, as if he was a student all over again. His housemates have included his great friend Razors, the psychopath with a heart of gold, and Laurie Penny, the brilliant feminist journalist and campaigner who still would prefer not to empty the bins. He hopes this account of his adventures and misadventures in love, alcohol and games of Night Cricket played against the wall of the local church will be a comfort and an inspiration to all feckless male dolts in similar positions. And an Awful Warning for those who are, as yet, not."


 
 Well this truly is the thread that keeps on giving.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> A few months to go, early July Lezard's new book  - _Bitter Experience Has taught me - Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury_ comes out.
> 
> Penury = being poor. Publisher's blurb:
> 
> "In 2007, Nicholas Lezard was kicked out of his home, for reasons we need not go into here. Since then he has been obliged to muster whatever scant internal resources he has - and to pay child support - while maintaining an entirely essential wine habit. From being the adult father in a household with three children he has had to relearn the art of being just one member of a shared home, as if he was a student all over again. His housemates have included his great friend Razors, the psychopath with a heart of gold, and Laurie Penny, the brilliant feminist journalist and campaigner who still would prefer not to empty the bins. He hopes this account of his adventures and misadventures in love, alcohol and games of Night Cricket played against the wall of the local church will be a comfort and an inspiration to all feckless male dolts in similar positions. And an Awful Warning for those who are, as yet, not."



'Obliged' to contribute to towards the kids he himself "bred" - outrageous!


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 7, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> You're not my real dad


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 7, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> 'Obliged' to contribute to towards the kids he himself "bred" - outrageous!


----------



## JimW (Apr 7, 2013)

copliker said:


> The Lez In A Fez. In waitrose apparently. Skint no more?
> 
> View attachment 31158


As if by magic, a shoplifter appeared...


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 7, 2013)

JimW said:


> As if by magic, a shoplifter appeared...


 
just like that


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> A few months to go, early July Lezard's new book - _Bitter Experience Has taught me - Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury_ comes out.
> 
> Penury = being poor. Publisher's blurb:
> 
> "In 2007, Nicholas Lezard was kicked out of his home, for reasons we need not go into here. Since then he has been obliged to muster whatever scant internal resources he has - and to pay child support - while maintaining an entirely essential wine habit. From being the adult father in a household with three children he has had to relearn the art of being just one member of a shared home, as if he was a student all over again. His housemates have included his great friend Razors, the psychopath with a heart of gold, and Laurie Penny, the brilliant feminist journalist and campaigner who still would prefer not to empty the bins. He hopes this account of his adventures and misadventures in love, alcohol and games of Night Cricket played against the wall of the local church will be a comfort and an inspiration to all feckless male dolts in similar positions. And an Awful Warning for those who are, as yet, not."


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 7, 2013)

copliker said:


> The Lez In A Fez. In waitrose apparently. Skint no more?
> 
> View attachment 31158


Did that pic come from either Exaro or Cafcass?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 7, 2013)

Sue said:


>


 
 A possible adventure from anarchist Stewart Home's blog:

"I’ve known Nick for some time now. ... When I turned up fashionably late at The Duke of Wellington in Crawford Street, Nick asked: “Where’s Tom McCarthy?” I’d introduced him to Tom, so it became my job to phone McCarthy and find out why he wasn’t present. Sickness was the answer. Nick had plenty of old friends around for his birthday drinks. ... 
Samson seemed to be enjoying herself and I had a bit of a laugh by bringing up one of her friends and calling him Trike (a deliberate mispronunciation on my part). I didn’t let on that I’d met him at the launch of a Joe Boyd book and he’d been banging on about his connection to Pink Floyd. This old school rock group are of no interest to me – but Samson has sung with them and co-written some Floyd songs in recent years (although she’s best known as a journalist).
Ultimately I didn’t have much to say to Samson and vice versa. It only occurred to me later that I should have told her that while I found her son Charlie Gilmour swinging off a flag at the student demos in 2010 mildly amusing, it is much better to burn the Union Jack…. Maybe Nick was right and if Tom McCarthy had been present we’d have had more cross-talk – given three very different cultural and social perspectives. I didn’t bother telling Samson my mother (Julia Callan-Thompson) saw Pink Floyd quite a few times in London back in the sixties when Syd Barrett was still in the band (way before Samson’s involvement)…
Anyway the booze flowed freely and everyone at Nick Lezard’s birthday drink up had a good time"


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 7, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> You don't think dickhead media whore hipsters would go so far as to be seen puffing on roll-ups in public and then spend their private moments enjoying perfumed Sobranie tailor-mades while hoping nobody will get a mobile phone pic of them doing so, do you?
> 
> Would they really descend that far into the abyss of the pretend-proletariat?


 
Harold Wilson smoked a cigar in private and a pipe in public. Some things never change...


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> A possible adventure from anarchist Stewart Home's blog:
> 
> "I’ve known Nick for some time now. ... When I turned up fashionably late at The Duke of Wellington in Crawford Street, Nick asked: “Where’s Tom McCarthy?” I’d introduced him to Tom, so it became my job to phone McCarthy and find out why he wasn’t present. Sickness was the answer. Nick had plenty of old friends around for his birthday drinks. ...
> Samson seemed to be enjoying herself and I had a bit of a laugh by bringing up one of her friends and calling him Trike (a deliberate mispronunciation on my part). I didn’t let on that I’d met him at the launch of a Joe Boyd book and he’d been banging on about his connection to Pink Floyd. This old school rock group are of no interest to me – but Samson has sung with them and co-written some Floyd songs in recent years (although she’s best known as a journalist).
> ...


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> 'hero' means 'great fellow' in this kind of 'banter'.
> 
> I doubt Owen Jones would big up LP any more than Lezard would.
> 
> ...


 
Who is Susie Orbach? Ive never heard of her. And look at Lez and his massive glass of wine. And how can you be one of the world's "top 50 feminists"


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> It is of course all part of the boho artist edgy cunt image.


 
This is it. It's all image. Everything they do and say, from the forced glottal stops to the posing with roll-ups, it's cringeworthy.

Next time I get some stabbing pains in my chest and cough up some blood-speckled lung butter, and reflect on how I've spent 5-10% of my income for the last 10 years on a product designed to slowly kill me, I'll console myself by looking at how cool Penny looks with her worker's "it's a little bit communism" rolly and maybe it won't feel so bad.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Who is Susie Orbach? Ive never heard of her. And look at Lez and his massive glass of wine. And how can you be one of the world's "top 50 feminists"


 
Feminist psychotherapist, had a few books published by Virago. Also treated Princess Di. Had a regular column in the Guardian back in the early 90s.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Feminist psychotherapist, had a few books published by Virago. Also treated Princess Di. Had a regular column in the Guardian back in the early 90s.


 
So a celebrity feminists basically? These people


----------



## Red Cat (Apr 7, 2013)

She wrote _Fat is a Feminist Issue_. She's a psychotherapist who set up the Women's Therapy Centre in the 70s


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

the whole "top 50 feminists" is just so stupid though, like it's a competition


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> So a celebrity feminists basically? These people


I think I'd call her high profile, rather than celebrity. She's written for a number of magazines and newspapers over the years. She's also written these books:
Fat is a Feminist Issue II (1982)
Understanding Women: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Approach (1983) (written with Luise Eichenbaum)
What Do Women Want? Exploding the Myth of Dependency (1983) (written with Luise Eichenbaum)
Hunger Strike: The Anorectic's Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Time (1986)
Bittersweet: Love, Competition & Envy in Women's Friendships (1987), published as Between Women in US (written with Luise Eichenbaum)
What’s Really Going on Here (1995)
Towards Emotional Literacy (1999)
The Impossibility of Sex (1999)
On Eating (2002)
Bodies (2009)


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> the whole "top 50 feminists" is just so stupid though, like it's a competition


Now that, I will agree, is a bit silly. After all, how does one become 'a top 50 feminist'? Is there a points mechanism each year for approved feminist activities perhaps?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> And how can you be one of the world's "top 50 feminists"


 
Be a part of the Virago/Little Brown 50 Shades of Feminism anthology, as selected by Orbach and Lisa Appignanesi.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 7, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Now that, I will agree, is a bit silly. After all, how does one become 'a top 50 feminist'?


 
I suspect going to a private school would be a good place to start.

Not for the likes of you y'know equationgirl.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

"Germaine Greer and Bell Hooks are tied for the top spot this week for two weeks in a row. Edging into 3rd place is Andrea Dworkin with "Men Possessing Women" while Catherine McKinnon with her new hit "Against Pornography" has knocked Naomi Wolf into no.11 after a solid three-week run."


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> "Germaine Greer and Bell Hooks are tied for the top spot this week for two weeks in a row. Edging into 3rd place is Andrea Dworkin with "Men Possessing Women" while Catherine McKinnon with her new hit "Against Pornography" has knocked Naomi Wolf into no.11 after a solid three-week run."


----------



## Firky (Apr 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Who is Susie Orbach? Ive never heard of her. And look at Lez and his massive glass of wine. And how can you be one of the world's "top 50 feminists"


 
Orbach is Penny in thirty years (actually thats not true)


----------



## JimW (Apr 7, 2013)

Our sister nearly broke into the feminist top 50 but she conceded a late penalty in extra time against germaine greer in the play-offs so will have to start from scratch again next season.


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 7, 2013)

JimW said:


> Our sister nearly broke into the feminist top 50 but she conceded a late penalty in extra time against germaine greer in the play-offs so will have to start from scratch again next season.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 7, 2013)

I find Lezard an odd media person. He tweets this with Latin to his daughter in public (who then corrects him, I am not blaming her)

"Ah, wine o'clock. Nunc est bibendum. And also nunc est fumendum, come to think of it. (@MissEarlGrey, is that correct?)"
Is it just me who finds it odd?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I find Lezard an odd media person. He tweets this with Latin to his daughter in public (who then corrects him, I am not blaming her)
> 
> "Ah, wine o'clock. Nunc est bibendum. And also nunc est fumendum, come to think of it. (@MissEarlGrey, is that correct?)"
> Is it just me who finds it odd?


 

It's almost certain that nicks kids call him by his first name and have done since aged 7


----------



## killer b (Apr 7, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> It's almost certain that nicks kids call him by his first name and have done since aged 7


Is that a bad thing? I call my folks by their names, always have done...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 7, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> 4 Real.


 
Richey Manic occurred to me, too, but we both know Laura isn't Richey, and isn't 4 real.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I find Lezard an odd media person. He tweets this with Latin to his daughter in public (who then corrects him, I am not blaming her)
> 
> "Ah, wine o'clock. Nunc est bibendum. And also nunc est fumendum, come to think of it. (@MissEarlGrey, is that correct?)"
> Is it just me who finds it odd?



Which leads us to this...



> Just taught my 12yo brother what 'cis', 'intersectionality' and 'rape culture' mean, and listed his privileges he has to address. Progress!



https://mobile.twitter.com/MissEarlGrey/status/320148766734827520


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 7, 2013)

killer b said:


> Is that a bad thing? I call my folks by their names, always have done...


 

cards marked


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 7, 2013)

copliker said:


> The Lez In A Fez. In waitrose apparently. Skint no more?
> 
> View attachment 31158


 
Looking at fucking actimel, the ponce twat!


----------



## killer b (Apr 7, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Which leads us to this...
> 
> 
> 
> https://mobile.twitter.com/MissEarlGrey/status/320148766734827520


That's a joke, surely? She's taking the piss out of her dads former lodger...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 7, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Which leads us to this...
> 
> 
> 
> https://mobile.twitter.com/MissEarlGrey/status/320148766734827520


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 7, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Looking at fucking actimel, the ponce twat!


 

be fair, actimel is really good for getting ones shitpipes going of a morning


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 7, 2013)

yakult also


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 7, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> be fair, actimel is really good for getting ones shitpipes going of a morning


 
My shitpipes are already running like the stopcock has busted, thanks very much! It's like pissing out of your ringpiece!


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 7, 2013)

killer b said:


> That's a joke, surely? She's taking the piss out of her dads former lodger...


She's coming to Bristol


----------



## rekil (Apr 7, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Looking at fucking actimel, the ponce twat!


It offers a bit of relief from the effects of heavy boozing - man in the pub said so.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 7, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Looking at fucking actimel, the ponce twat!


 
LP's stickers:






Lezard's hats











LOL


----------



## J Ed (Apr 7, 2013)

What is it with cunts and hats? Nigel Falange, George Galloway, Laurie Penny, Yvonne Ridley, Lez... they're all at it.


----------



## rekil (Apr 7, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> And look at Lez and his massive glass of wine.


Hey, wine is a little bit anarchism. Anarkos Rosso Puglia.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 7, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Lez... they're all at it.


 
Lezard, a twitter user, attacks twitter:

"Its unreflective instantaneousness encourages neurotic behaviour in both the tweeters and the twatted (seriously, the Americans have proposed that "twatted" should be the past participle of "tweet", which is the only funny thing about the whole business); it encourages us in the delusion that our random thoughts, our banal experiences, are significant. It is masturbatory and infantile, and the amazing thing is that people can't get enough of it – possibly because it IS masturbatory and infantile.

Answering the question: "Why do so many people seem to like Twitter?" Twitter itself does not say: "Because people are idiots with a steadily decreasing attention span, and 140 characters is pretty much all anyone has space for in their atrophied brains any more," but instead, "People are eager to connect with other people and Twitter makes that simple."
...
Oh God, that it should have come to this. Centuries of human thought and experience drowned out in a maelstrom of inconsequential rubbish (and don't tell me about Trafigura – one good deed is not enough, and an ordinary online campaign would have done the trick just as well). It is like some horrible science-fiction prediction come to pass: it is not just that *Twitter signals the end of nuanced, reflective, authoritative thought* – it's that no one seems to mind.
And I suspect that it's psychologically dangerous. We have evolved over millions of years to learn not to bore other people with constant updates about what we're doing (I'm opening a jar of pickles ... I'm picking my nose ... I'm typing out a message on Twitter ...) and we're throwing it all away. Twitter encourages monstrous egomania"


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 7, 2013)

the twitterari are so ready to cunt twitter off the minute they fuck themselves up on it 'thats it! i shall tweet no more!'

three weeks later..


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> LP's stickers:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
stole christmas


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 7, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> My shitpipes are already running like the stopcock has busted, thanks very much! It's like pissing out of your ringpiece!


 
TMI fella. Next you'll be telling me you've named your chalfonts (if I had them I'd call them 'the grapes of wrath')


----------



## J Ed (Apr 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Lezard, a twitter user, attacks twitter:
> 
> "Its unreflective instantaneousness encourages neurotic behaviour in both the tweeters and the twatted (seriously, the Americans have proposed that "twatted" should be the past participle of "tweet", which is the only funny thing about the whole business); it encourages us in the delusion that our random thoughts, our banal experiences, are significant. It is masturbatory and infantile, and the amazing thing is that people can't get enough of it – possibly because it IS masturbatory and infantile.
> 
> ...


 
I just wish I could gift this man self-awareness.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 7, 2013)

> it's that no one seems to mind


 
except everyone ever whose complained about 140 character cunts like you with your 'organic book fair I am in you' bullshit


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 7, 2013)

'Salt mines, I am in you'

hopefully coming soon, followed by

'Lime pit I am in you'

In twisted pose bloated with pain no man can understand #leonardcohen


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Lezard, a twitter user, attacks twitter:
> 
> "Its unreflective instantaneousness encourages neurotic behaviour in both the tweeters and the twatted (seriously, the Americans have proposed that "twatted" should be the past participle of "tweet", which is the only funny thing about the whole business); it encourages us in the delusion that our random thoughts, our banal experiences, are significant. It is masturbatory and infantile, and the amazing thing is that people can't get enough of it – possibly because it IS masturbatory and infantile.
> 
> ...


 
People have been signalling the end of nuanced reflective thought and the downfall of mankind since Aristotle ffs


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

> It is masturbatory and infantile, and the amazing thing is that *people can't get enough of it* – possibly because it IS masturbatory and infantile.


 
so he's basically just jealous


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 7, 2013)

Nice one said:


> kleenex fodder for the masses
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Fucking Hell.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 7, 2013)

The dangerous thing is the guy responding. They might just be taking the piss between themselves a wee bit for all we know, but the fans don't see it like that. That's real hero-worship right there and it's dangerous.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 7, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> The dangerous thing is the guy responding. They might just be taking the piss between themselves a wee bit for all we know, but the fans don't see it like that. That's real hero-worship right there and it's dangerous.


 
fuck off and chill out


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 7, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I suspect going to a private school would be a good place to start.
> 
> Not for the likes of you y'know equationgirl.


Certainly not, not with my state school education


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 7, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> fuck off and chill out


 
I'm definitely going to drop dead of a massive heart attack before I'm 40 whilst ranting about Laurie Penny.

My last words will be "This is why we cant' have nice things - like a revolution" then I'll clutch my chest and fall over into a table full of moet and cutters choice


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 7, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I'm definitely going to drop dead of a massive heart attack before I'm 40 whilst ranting about Laurie Penny.
> 
> My last words will be "This is why we cant' have nice things - like a revolution" then I'll clutch my chest and fall over into a table full of moet and cutters choice


 
Adult Coronary Care Unit I am in you


----------



## Firky (Apr 7, 2013)

Gutted.


----------



## treelover (Apr 7, 2013)

I have spoken to a variety of people of all ages/backgrounds, to a man and woman they think Owen Jones is great and an asset to the left, make of that what you will..


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 7, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What is it with cunts and hats? Nigel Falange, George Galloway, Laurie Penny, Yvonne Ridley, Lez... they're all at it.


 
hats replace having an actual personality.  i've been fooling people for years that way.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

andysays said:


> Does she drink tea and smoke roll-ups?


 
she smokes tea and drinks rollups

to be alternative like


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 7, 2013)

Darren Quantock said:


> In the pub on Saturday night there was a bloke about 40 with a full beard and a strand of turquoise in his hair. Some people may think it makes him interesting.


 
i bet he has a large selection of hats for all occasions.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 7, 2013)

Darren Quantock said:


> In the pub on Saturday night there was a bloke about 40 with a full beard and a strand of turquoise in his hair. Some people may think it makes him interesting.


 
really old hippy off of matb


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 7, 2013)

Darren Quantock said:


> No-it'd hide the turquoise. There was also a student who'd come out in a onesy (sp.) I'd heard of these things but didn't know what they looked like until somebody told me that's what it was.
> 
> Wow, this area's getting wackier, I thought.


 
tattoos as well obviously


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 7, 2013)

Nobody gives a shit about Owen Jones. Most people don't have a clue who he is.
People are tripping if they think he has any influence


----------



## stuff_it (Apr 7, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Now that, I will agree, is a bit silly. After all, how does one become 'a top 50 feminist'? Is there a points mechanism each year for approved feminist activities perhaps?


Possibly, just in case I am saving up a big pile of old bras to chuck on the bonfire come November.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 7, 2013)

was it the albert?


Darren Quantock said:


> Don't know, he left his jacket on. It was vibrant in there though. Really vibrant.


----------



## Nice one (Apr 7, 2013)

Darren Quantock said:


> I speak to a lot of people and nobody's ever mentioned him. I tend to get this feeling that if I were to do so, either nobody would have heard of him or they wouldn't be bothered one way or the other.
> 
> Nor about Laurie. I don't think grown adults usually worry too much about young, shouty individuals...


 


Orang Utan said:


> Nobody gives a shit about Owen Jones. Most people don't have a clue who he is.
> People are tripping if they think he has any influence


 
isn't this what lletsa said back on page 3 of this thread?


----------



## Orang Utan (Apr 7, 2013)

Well spotted!


----------



## Nice one (Apr 7, 2013)

Orang Utan said:


> Well spotted!


----------



## Greebo (Apr 7, 2013)

Nice one said:


> isn't this what lletsa said back on page 3 of this thread?


At the risk of being tautologous, nice one, Nice one.


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 8, 2013)

treelover said:


> I have spoken to a variety of people of all ages/backgrounds, to a man and woman they think Owen Jones is great and an asset to the left, make of that what you will..


 
Best post ever


----------



## barney_pig (Apr 8, 2013)

copliker said:


> Hey, wine is a little bit anarchism. Anarkos Rosso Puglia.


Such a joy!
What a shower of cunts


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 8, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Harold Wilson smoked a cigar in private and a pipe in public. Some things never change...


----------



## _angel_ (Apr 8, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I'm definitely going to drop dead of a massive heart attack before I'm 40 whilst wanking over Laurie Penny.


 
fixed


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 8, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> fuck off and chill out


 
You won't be saying that when Laura and Chuffie appoint Thomas Bush "peoples' commissar in charge of rooting out seditious elements", and his lackeys show him a hard copy of you not taking him and the Glorious Leaders seriously!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 8, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I'm definitely going to drop dead of a massive heart attack before I'm 40 whilst ranting about Laurie Penny.
> 
> My last words will be "This is why we cant' have nice things - like a revolution" then I'll clutch my chest and fall over into a table full of moet and cutters choice


 
A very nice death tableau, mr. booth!


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 8, 2013)

Laurie: "RIP Margaret Thatcher. Whatever you think of her she will remain a political giant. End of an era."


----------



## flypanam (Apr 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Laurie: "RIP Margaret Thatcher. Whatever you think of her she will remain a political giant. End of an era."


 
Fucking hell. It's all there, everything she is, it's all there.


----------



## Random (Apr 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Laurie: "RIP Margaret Thatcher. Whatever you think of her she will remain a political giant. End of an era."


You're shitting me


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 8, 2013)

Random said:


> You're shitting me


 
Surely you're not surprised by this one?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 8, 2013)

flypanam said:


> Fucking hell. It's all there, everything she is, it's all there.


Sorry, i shouldn't have posted that - that was her mate David lammy. *NOT LAURIE*. Bad move on my part. Thought was funny, isn't. Few too many rushed early beers.


----------



## Random (Apr 8, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Surely you're not surprised by this one?


Ha!


----------



## rekil (Apr 8, 2013)

Mealy-mouthed shite for real.




			
				lauriepenny said:
			
		

> There's a lot more to say about Margaret Thatcher, but not on Twitter, and not today.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Laurie: "RIP Margaret Thatcher. Whatever you think of her she will remain a political giant. End of an era."


 
No way she actually said this?


----------



## Random (Apr 8, 2013)

copliker said:


> Mealy-mouthed shite for real.


Forming ranks with the Owen Jones no-party bloc.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 8, 2013)

copliker said:


> Mealy-mouthed shite for real.


Wow - actually yes, it should be today. It should be now.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 8, 2013)

Random said:


> Forming ranks with the Owen Jones no-party bloc.


They weren't invited anyway.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 8, 2013)

thats amazingly shit


----------



## sihhi (Apr 8, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> thats amazingly shit


 
She could have just, you know, not tweeted anything.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 8, 2013)

sihhi said:


> She could have just, you know, not tweeted anything.


 

no, she really couldn't have


----------



## rekil (Apr 8, 2013)

I'd love it if she got turned away from a Thatcher death party.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Wow - actually yes, it should be today. It should be now.


 
Thatcher herself would have looked on approvingly when she burnt a copy of the Socialist Worker and sang the internationale


----------



## sihhi (Apr 8, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> no, she really couldn't have


 
What do you mean? - if there is someone you hate and all those around you also hate that person but because of some personal moral or religious thing prefer not to vocalise your joy at their death - OK, in which case say nothing.

Don't implicitly judge those with a different religion/personal moral barometer with "today is not the day".


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 8, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What do you mean? - if there is someone you hate and all those around you also hate that person but because of some personal moral or religious thing prefer not to vocalise your joy at their death - OK, in which case say nothing.
> 
> Don't implicitly judge those with a different religion/personal moral barometer with "today is not the day".


 
think he means that she really cant keep her mouth shut lol.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 8, 2013)

This was her on thatcher a few years back- i can't disagree wit the general point, but note the insulting of the wider pop and their capabilities ("The Iron Lady and her cronies instigated the junk-food principle of politics, whereby hungry, needy people will invariably swallow something that isn't good for them if it has a recognisable cartoon face on it")


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 8, 2013)

yep frog


----------



## sihhi (Apr 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> think he means that she really cant keep her mouth shut lol.


 
But managed to be tight-lipped _on this vey thread_ when it came to discussing any aspects of her coverage of NoNATO, Hurricane Sandy, Millbank, student occupations, Greece etc./ trade union politics within the New Statesman / making up "interviews" with other feminists.


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 8, 2013)

opps. tipsypost


----------



## sihhi (Apr 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This was her on thatcher a few years back- i can't disagree wit the general point, but note the insulting of the wider pop and their capabilities ("The Iron Lady and her cronies instigated the junk-food principle of politics, whereby hungry, needy people will invariably swallow something that isn't good for them if it has a recognisable cartoon face on it")


 
"Thatcher was no more a feminist than Bradley from S Club 7 was ghetto"

Why choose the only second generation immigrant  member of S Club 7 to drive home this point.
Thoughtless metaphor privilege.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 8, 2013)

No more dancing tomorrows for thatcher.

Or any tomorrows at all


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 8, 2013)

Oct 2010



> Like any self-respecting tactless teenage reds, my friends and I long ago started a kitty with which to buy booze and party streamers in the event that the Iron Lady should suddenly shuffle off this mortal coil. How impish of us. Tonight, though, it seems that Mrs Thatcher is going to have the last laugh.


 


> Tell you what, though: let's dig out the party hats anyway. The protests of charities, the public sector, the unemployed, the unions, women's rights organisations and a sizeable chunk of the people haven't scared the coalition into reconsidering their cuts, but a big, menacing hoedown to remind them just how hatefully parts of the nation nurse the memory of Thatcherism just might. Cheap, yes -- but not as cheap as the Tories.


 
Let's see shall we.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 8, 2013)

so the commenteriat are reconing we should all make sad faces or something? this is why they are waste cunts.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 8, 2013)

sihhi said:


> "Thatcher was no more a feminist than Bradley from S Club 7 was ghetto"
> 
> Why choose the only second generation immigrant member of S Club 7 to drive home this point.
> Thoughtless metaphor privilege.


That is so dodgy isn't it. I missed the implications of that at first.


----------



## rekil (Apr 8, 2013)

Just saw a miner's wife on skynews saying that Thatcher was "scum". The povs are a bit too off-message for owen, laurie etc I fear.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That is so dodgy isn't it. I missed the implications of that at first.


 

LOL, I am not actually mad - it was a bubblegum pop group - he is now a producer. His mum and dad were part of Lovers Rock Reggae group the Cool Notes in the 1980s.

But since when does stuff like: "likes: pizza ,CDs, sleeping, Arsenal, Jamaican food,computer games and women! dislikes:wake up calls ,Maths , sports" become pretending to be "ghetto" (whatever that word really means in this context)


----------



## Balbi (Apr 8, 2013)

SHE WALKS AMONG US.

*Laurie Penny* @PennyRed
Went to the impromptu Brixton street party to get some quotes. Packed. Writing a piece later.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Apr 8, 2013)

To get some quotes?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 8, 2013)

Balbi said:


> SHE WALKS AMONG US.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* @PennyRed
> Went to the impromptu Brixton street party to get some quotes. Packed. Writing a piece later.


 
I wonder if it's going to include accusations of misogyny...


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 8, 2013)

Balbi said:


> SHE WALKS AMONG US.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* @PennyRed
> Went to the impromptu Brixton street party to get some quotes. Packed. Writing a piece later.


 
Attended in journalistic capacity only. Who gets tea from KFC ffs?

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
7m​The samba band has started. Retreated to the KFC to get tea and unfreeze my fingers.

Looking forward to the definitive write-up of the voice of Generation Millenial's take on this.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 8, 2013)

Brian Whelan ‏@brianwhelanhack33m
Oh no, LP has arrived..


----------



## Sue (Apr 8, 2013)

So, I reckon she's going to happen on someone who wasn't even born when Maggie was in power but felt compelled to celebrate her demise having been brought up on stories of the miner's strike by his/her good old grandad who was a miner and saw it all at first hand. 'If only there had been more people prepared to stand and fight,' s/he tells me, lighting up his/her last rollup, 'The country wouldn't been in the mess it is today. If only there had been more people like you, Laurie.'

Or maybe a Chilean exile or two?


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 8, 2013)

_My prediction:_
huddled drunken masses, passing roll-ups, mournful lone trombone outside the Ritzy cinema, evocative of a weak and old left
popped into KFC for a cup of tea; workers there didn't know what the gathering was about; we've seen a generational shift since Mrs T passed from power
without the energy LP's witnessed on the frontlines of the global protest movements; we need to recognize our failures
these parties were controversial, and not entirely advised (nod to friends in mainstream press) but Thatcher was a polarizing figure
we need to talk seriously about her legacy, that's the conversation, not partying
first woman prime minister but you know that wasn't _actually_ a good thing for women because she did really bad things
her main inheritance though: a blighted generation 
they truly are Thatcher's children, we saw them rioting in 2011, at Occupy etc
she claimed to create a property owning democracy, they're just trying to get a foothold in society 
but this generation is unable to dream of buying a home; have to be content with shared hovels and grimy sinks
promoted upward mobility but that is a joke: it's so hard to get into elite jobs even if you've had a privileged background
etc


----------



## Greebo (Apr 8, 2013)

Balbi said:


> SHE WALKS AMONG US.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* @PennyRed
> Went to the impromptu Brixton street party to get some quotes. Packed. Writing a piece later.


Gosh.  Should we feel honoured?


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 8, 2013)

Sue said:


> So, I reckon she's going to happen on someone who wasn't even born when Maggie was in power but felt compelled to celebrate her demise having been brought up on stories of the miner's strike by his/her good old grandad who was a miner and saw it all at first hand. 'If only there had been more people prepared to stand and fight,' s/he tells me, lighting up his/her last rollup, 'The country wouldn't been in the mess it is today. If only there had been more people like you, Laurie.'
> 
> Or maybe a Chilean exile or two?


 
Possibly some 'unnamed Falklands veteran' from some farcically-named supposed military unit, maybe.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 8, 2013)

I got a snap of her in Windrush Sq but it wouldn't really behoove me to post it up here.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 8, 2013)

I've got to say she's a lot shorter than I expected tho. Which was actually a bit annoying. I imagined her a bit taller, more haughty and regal.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 8, 2013)

TruXta said:


> I've got to say she's a lot shorter than I expected tho. Which was actually a bit annoying. I imagined her a bit taller, more haughty and regal.


 
mussolini was a bit smaller than everyone thought as well


----------



## TruXta (Apr 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> mussolini was a bit smaller than everyone thought as well


Don't put words into my mouth!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 8, 2013)

sihhi said:


> "Thatcher was no more a feminist than Bradley from S Club 7 was ghetto"
> 
> Why choose the only second generation immigrant member of S Club 7 to drive home this point.
> Thoughtless metaphor privilege.


 
That is actually racist, breath taking really


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 8, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Possibly some 'unnamed Falklands veteran' from some farcically-named supposed military unit, maybe.


Like that episode of Bottom?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 8, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> That is actually racist, breath taking really


 

generally on a par with calling the bloke a bounty bar. Done totally without thinking as well. Amazing


----------



## brogdale (Apr 8, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> _My prediction:_
> huddled drunken masses, passing roll-ups, mournful lone trombone outside the Ritzy cinema, evocative of a weak and old left
> popped into KFC for a cup of tea; workers there didn't know what the gathering was about; we've seen a generational shift since Mrs T passed from power
> without the energy LP's witnessed on the frontlines of the global protest movements; we need to recognize our failures
> ...


 
UR LP AICMFP


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 8, 2013)

Brixton LP is in you.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 8, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Brixton LP is in you.


Is she fuck. She's way too tiny for that.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 8, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Is she fuck. She's way too tiny for that.


Well she was in the KFC, so....

Brixton KFC LP is in you.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 8, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Well she was in the KFC, so....
> 
> Brixton KFC LP is in you.


Maybe she was peeved she wasn't getting any attention?


----------



## shifting gears (Apr 8, 2013)

Is that s club 7 quote for real?

If so that should be fucking seized upon,  it's a disgrace.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 9, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Maybe she was peeved she wasn't getting any attention?


More than likely, I suspect.

I await her article on the Thatcher Death Party in Brixton with bated breath.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 9, 2013)

...and don't forget to vote lib-dem.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 9, 2013)

Don't celebrate

why the fuck not? Its not as though anyone has anything to be particularly cheerful about and that's partly down to her. Loads of people are happy about this regardless of "what people think".


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 9, 2013)

Gutless bastards, how are you supposed to fight back with this pious whinging? How are you going to break a media line? A media narrative, a police narrative - _ a police line?_ Pathetic.


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 9, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> _My prediction:_
> huddled drunken masses, passing roll-ups, mournful lone trombone outside the Ritzy cinema, evocative of a weak and old left
> popped into KFC for a cup of tea; workers there didn't know what the gathering was about; we've seen a generational shift since Mrs T passed from power
> without the energy LP's witnessed on the frontlines of the global protest movements; we need to recognize our failures
> ...


 
nothing about students in there


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 9, 2013)

"the only real answer to cynicism is activism"

oh for fuck's sake. are people not allowed to be happy every now and again?


----------



## rekil (Apr 9, 2013)

Professional entertainer Billy Bragg there, being annoyed by spontaneous displays of unregulated morale-boosting 'fun'.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 9, 2013)

Owen and billy have said we have to go to bed early tonight.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 9, 2013)

Balbi said:


> SHE WALKS AMONG US.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* @PennyRed
> Went to the impromptu Brixton street party to get some quotes. Packed. Writing a piece later.


 
i was told she was there but i either didn't see her, or didn't recognise her - new hat maybe?  which is a shame, as i wanted to get a "fan pic" for this thread.  you know, to make it really weird and stalkerish just the way she likes it.


----------



## sunnysidedown (Apr 9, 2013)




----------



## rekil (Apr 9, 2013)

bragg said:
			
		

> If you keep this pressure on
> Just don't be surprised
> If I keep summoning up my dignity
> While you're roughing up my pride
> ...


Sounds threatening. Hold him back!


----------



## J Ed (Apr 9, 2013)

SWSS candidate Tomas Evans for VP of the NUS was called a rape apologist during a speech at the NUS conference and hundreds of people walked out because they refused to hear him speak.

Apparently he started his speech with a defence of the SWP's DC, not a very smart move to say the least.


----------



## StrangeCat (Apr 9, 2013)

I remember Laurie from Oxford. I didn't actually know her as such; although I'm sure we must have spoken, however briefly. I sort of remember her as being a bit geeky and 'fantasy-based'; very pleasant and friendly; and, of course, small. Being small was her thing; almost as though being small was her greatest achievement.


I should stress this:  she is tiny. If it does all turn to shit, writing wise, there'll always be panto.


I'm posting here because I'm really intrigued at the level of prominence she's acquired. I sort of gather that we await her piece on Mrs Thatcher as the definitive and quintessential assessment; from somebody who must have been about 4 or 5 when she left power; from somebody privately educated; raised in the heart of the stockbroker belt. How does this come to pass?


It's always possible that there are lacunae in my recent social history. I may well have missed the massive de industrialisation of West Sussex; the pit closures, the lock-outs, the loss of the furnaces, the haunted look on the faces of the women and kids as they saw their menfolk humiliated and unmanned, denied the dignity of honest labour and forced into the city, the law or some other dead-end, deunionised, unregulated career. Possibly, Laurie retains some sort of folk memory of foraging on slag-heaps, the steel galas, the working men's clubs; the whole panoply of proletarian culture.
Then again, maybe her position as spokesperson and unofficial historian of the left owes more to the glib, facile and sensationalist nature of our MSM. It seems that these days an Oxbridge background and an occasional nod to the hipgeist is all it takes to become an authority on anything that takes your fancy; knowledge, experience, personal affinity or actual involvement etc having been rendered subservient to a willingness to churn out quirky, shock-based rants.


It's not that I mind. To me, it's all one with the fucked-up and surreal quality of just about everything I see and read these days. And I sort of like her. I also like Wayne Rooney. I'd probably still like him if he was writing a column on opera or differential equations or cosmology. And, if Steven Hawking passed away, you can bet It'd be Wayne's column I'd turn to for the last word on the guy's achievements and significance. Really...why not? That's how things roll these days...apparently. I think this should be more widely appreciated. Her prominence is simply symptomatic of the entire dumbing down of literally everything.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 9, 2013)

Pretty much nailed it in many respects. Apart from...



StrangeCat said:


> I sort of gather that we await her piece on Mrs Thatcher as the definitive and quintessential assessment


 
That's not why we are eagerly awaiting it. 

And I think the Hawking column will probably be Brian Cox rather than Wayne, right? While he's a little bit irritating in his science-coolness, he's no Oxbridge lad and he knows his stuff.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 9, 2013)

StrangeCat said:


> I remember Laurie from Oxford. I didn't actually know her as such; although I'm sure we must have spoken, however briefly. I sort of remember her as being a bit geeky and 'fantasy-based'; very pleasant and friendly; and, of course, small. Being small was her thing; almost as though being small was her greatest achievement.


 
Welcome to the boards StrangeCat but I don't understand this -  "being small was her thing" - what are you saying here?

"I should stress this: she is tiny. If it does all turn to shit, writing wise, there'll always be panto."
 Also here ???


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 9, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Welcome to the boards StrangeCat but I don't understand this - "being small was her thing" - what are you saying here?
> 
> "I should stress this: she is tiny. If it does all turn to shit, writing wise, there'll always be panto."
> Also here ???


 
To be fair, I have known individuals for whom smallness was an important part of their identity. Not sure of the relevance here though. Bit pejorative.


----------



## love detective (Apr 9, 2013)

StrangeCat do you have any amusing or revealing anecdotes to tell about your time at Oxford with Penny?


----------



## StrangeCat (Apr 9, 2013)

"Welcome to the boards StrangeCat but I don't understand this - "being small was her thing" - what are you saying here?"

I'm just saying she's small...tiny...and she plays on it...like it's a 'thing' to be, or have achieved. Not sure really. It's hard to explain. Some people are small as a physiological state. Some people are small but also take possession of their smallness as though it's a valuable and worthwhile attribute...a bit like Giant Haystacks. He was more than big. Being big was his 'thing'.

""I should stress this: she is tiny. If it does all turn to shit, writing wise, there'll always be panto."
Also here ???"

I was thinking 'Snow White', possibly with Natalie Kennedy as Snow White.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 9, 2013)

StrangeCat said:


> "Welcome to the boards StrangeCat but I don't understand this - "being small was her thing" - what are you saying here?"
> 
> I'm just saying she's small...tiny...and she plays on it...like it's a 'thing' to be, or have achieved. Not sure really. It's hard to explain. Some people are small as a physiological state. Some people are small but also take possession of their smallness as though it's a valuable and worthwhile attribute...a bit like Giant Haystacks. He was more than big. Being big was his 'thing'.
> 
> ...


 
I don't understand its relevance though, it's an odd barb to begin with almost as if you're trying to induce nasty comments about physical appearance from posters, which can later be categorised as sexist, in order to prove right her exiting and not answering a number of unanswered questions.


----------



## StrangeCat (Apr 9, 2013)

love detective said:


> StrangeCat do you have any amusing or revealing anecdotes to tell about your time at Oxford with Penny?


 
Nope. Just remember seeing her now and again. I didn't really have anything to do with her...or many other people really. I found it all a bit lame tbh. Just about got a degree. I'm currently working at Kwikfit. I blame my lack of networking skills and the fact that I found too many there pretentious poseurs. I don't think I lacked the self-confidence which the privately educated students exhibited, ostentatiously and at every given opportunity, it's more that my confidence exhibited itself largely in terms of surly and dismissive piss taking; which was naturally diagnosed as a massive chip on the shoulder etc. but it was really just that so much of it was truly, mind-blowingly facile.

Anyway, I've no regrets and now I can change tyres and fit exhausts. So everyone's a winner.
I just really can't take this country seriously these days. Laurie Penny's current standing is part of this. I don't blame her or dislike her (she really is very nice, in her way..or was-from what I saw). I just can't for the fucking life of me understand how _she_ got to be this left wing icon. I find it stunning.


----------



## StrangeCat (Apr 9, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I don't understand its relevance though, it's an odd barb to begin with almost as if you're trying to induce nasty comments about physical appearance from posters, which can later be categorised as sexist, in order to prove right her exiting and not answering a number of unanswered questions.


 
Yeah, fair comment. Not my intention. More that my one abiding memory is her size I suppose. She's small. And I really don't have anything against small people, not as far as I can tell. I'm not quite as clued up on privilege checking as I might be, but I can't detect any sizist tendencies through introspection. I'm not that big myself. Average, I suppose.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 9, 2013)

StrangeCat said:


> I just can't for the fucking life of me understand how _she_ got to be this left wing icon. I find it stunning.


 

It's alright, StrangeCat, don't worry. She really isn't a left wing icon you know.

She is fashionable and useful for the narrow, trendy London media set. She speaks mainly to a small group of young middle class radicals. With some of whom she shares a massively myopic vision of what passes for ordinary life in this country as well as great ignorance of the political histories and traditions of our left and left politics in general. And an arrogance that can see her speak down to and ignore some of the incredibly well-educated, auto-didactic (see the theory board), knowledgeable posters on Urban, who happen to have a heck of a lot more life and political experience than her, as evidenced from page 208 of this thread. The disrespect is palpable and it is the one thing from her which really made me angry (apart from censoring a very insightful and polite critique of her position on multiculturalism [admittedly repeating the work of others, some of whom are around these parts] from her blog many years ago ). And I dare say many of us have seen characters like this before. In fact the media is littered with them. Who use their faux-radicalism against the establishment, while befriending and networking with truly disgusting but powerful figures. And then comes the drift, and the inevitable "compromises" and the leaving behind of childish things, and the settling of accounts and accommodations... 

Phew, well anyway back to work


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 9, 2013)

If somebody's moved to the right I don't know why they don't just say "I've moved to the right" (its hardly as though this never happens) rather than make mealy mouthed excuses about it. They might still have worthwhile things to say occasionally, probably more so now that they aren't pretending any more.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 9, 2013)

Our Owen's "I actually know Tony Benn" was unintentionally hilarious.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 9, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> If somebody's moved to the right I don't know why they don't just say "I've moved to the right" (its hardly as though this never happens) rather than make mealy mouthed excuses about it. They might still have worthwhile things to say occasionally, probably more so now that they aren't pretending any more.


 
There's probably some good psychological theory to explain this. Personally I'm sure Laurie totally believes in where she is politically now and will continue to do so wherever her views go. But it's surely difficult to make sense of contradictory politics. Rationalizing it in various ways is always going to be easy from whatever position one later adopts, though I imagine there has to be some psychic difficulty that goes along with this.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 9, 2013)

loads of people move to the right (or further to the left) from being politically active. If she thinks thatcher was a great feminist icon why not just say so and not add all this other shit.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 9, 2013)

that owen jones and billy bragg thing, such a load of bollocks, just confirms everyone's image of these cunts as a load of sanctimonious party police

"humour distracts from the struggle comrade"


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 9, 2013)

StrangeCat said:


> I'm currently working at Kwikfit...





StrangeCat said:


> ...now  I can change tyres and fit exhausts.


----------



## rekil (Apr 9, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> that owen jones and billy bragg thing, such a load of bollocks, just confirms everyone's image of these cunts as a load of sanctimonious party police
> 
> "humour distracts from the struggle comrade"


We should have a go at him for using this sort of violent language and imagery to sell his wares. This macho posturing serves to dehumanise and alienate entire swathes of the population and demeans us all. 


> Ding ding, round one as Billy comes out punching like the political heavyweight that he is with this unique collection of songs which offer the Right out for a fight then sticks a head butt on them when they're not ready.


----------



## love detective (Apr 9, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


>


 
are you suggesting we can get better than a quick fit fitter and they're not the boys to trust?


----------



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 9, 2013)

If anyone can Laurie can write an excellent piece on Thatcher.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 9, 2013)

Kid_Eternity said:


> If anyone can Laurie can write an excellent piece on Thatcher.


Why?


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Apr 9, 2013)

copliker said:


> I'd love it if she got turned away from a Thatcher death party.


I saw her at the Brixton Thatcher death party too, she was standing near us. She didn't appear to be going round interviewing people - just standing there with a look of wonder on her face, and smoking rollies. She wasn't around long - 20 mins at best from what I could see. I was quite tempted to go on a little wind-up, but I thought it wasn't the day for it


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 9, 2013)

love detective said:


> are you suggesting we can get better than a quick fit fitter and they're not the boys to trust?


I hasten to add that I am not personally impugning StrangeCat, only expressing scepticism that anyone at KwikFit can actually fit an exhaust properly


----------



## rekil (Apr 9, 2013)

Bhaskar Sunkara said:
			
		

> Some German pub refers to Jacobin as a "hipster" magazine. That's okay, I find the firebombing of Dresden hilarious.


 
He's referring to Taz.de.

Earlier today....




			
				Bhaskar Sunkara said:
			
		

> Also pleased to have mollycrabapple in jacobinmag today! On being an artist and her turn to politics.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 9, 2013)

copliker said:


> He's referring to Taz.de.
> 
> Earlier today....


 
who is this cunt and what does he want?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 9, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> who is this cunt and what does he want?


 
Steady on, he just wants superstar basketballers to have massive wage contracts and endorsements etc as expressed in his article (their capitals) JEREMY LIN IS NOT GREEDY, YOU'RE JUST STUPID


----------



## JimW (Apr 9, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> ...She wasn't around long - 20 mins at best from what I could see...


So now we know roughly how long it takes for her to make a "quote" up.


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 9, 2013)

StrangeCat said:


> "Welcome to the boards StrangeCat but I don't understand this - "being small was her thing" - what are you saying here?"
> 
> I'm just saying she's small...tiny...and she plays on it...like it's a 'thing' to be, or have achieved. Not sure really. It's hard to explain. Some people are small as a physiological state. Some people are small but also take possession of their smallness as though it's a valuable and worthwhile attribute...a bit like Giant Haystacks. He was more than big. Being big was his 'thing'.
> 
> ...


 
Pixie like?


----------



## Libertad (Apr 9, 2013)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  54s
If anyone has any details about pre-arrests for Thatcher's funeral, please contact me at laurie.penny@gmail.com. Am keeping track.

Thank fuck for that.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 9, 2013)

Libertad said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  54s
> If anyone has any details about pre-arrests for Thatcher's funeral, please contact me at laurie.penny@gmail.com. Am keeping track.
> 
> Thank fuck for that.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 9, 2013)

Libertad said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  54s
> If anyone has any details about pre-arrests for Thatcher's funeral, please contact me at laurie.penny@gmail.com. Am keeping track.
> 
> Thank fuck for that.


 
Love how you caught that one in under 55 seconds


----------



## Libertad (Apr 9, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> Love how you caught that one in under 55 seconds


 
Luck of the draw.


----------



## rekil (Apr 9, 2013)

andysays said:


> Does she drink tea and smoke roll-ups?


BREAKING: Camila makes an unidentified hot drink at the start of this vid. My money is on bovril. She smokes fags but doesn't go on and on about it all the time for some reason. hth


----------



## Sue (Apr 9, 2013)

copliker said:


> BREAKING: Camila makes an unidentified hot drink at the start of this vid. My money is on bovril. She smokes fags but doesn't go on and on about it all the time for some reason. hth




But what about her hat situation?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 10, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/321755771488575488


----------



## Sue (Apr 10, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/321755771488575488


 
You couldn't make it up...


----------



## rosecore (Apr 10, 2013)

Self-awareness? Nah.


----------



## rekil (Apr 10, 2013)

Sue said:


> But what about her hat situation?


Last seen wearing a wide floppy brimmed one at slain trade unionist's funeral. Also been known to rock a teacosy type thing, a Neruda/fisherman style cap and of course her Proletarian Democracy issue hardhat.


----------



## Firky (Apr 10, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/321755771488575488



She is a massive dick.


----------



## andysays (Apr 10, 2013)

copliker said:


> BREAKING: Camila makes an unidentified hot drink at the start of this vid. *My money is on bovril.* She smokes fags but doesn't go on and on about it all the time for some reason. hth


 
I don't think that's bovril. Since when does anyone keep bovril in its own little ceramic jar? I reckon it's instant coffee.

(please note: storing instant coffee in a special ceramic container rather than just the original jar strikes me as a petit bourgeois affectation; we'll have to watch out for reformist tendencies in this one, comrades)


----------



## andysays (Apr 10, 2013)

Sue said:


> But what about her hat situation?


 


copliker said:


> Last seen wearing a wide floppy brimmed one at slain trade unionist's funeral. Also been known to rock a teacosy type thing, a Neruda/fisherman style cap and of course her Proletarian Democracy issue hardhat.


 
She's also been seen sharing a platform with those of a "hipster hat" tendency; again, we'll have to check this doesn't develop into adopting these tendencies herself...






Anyway, although I'd much rather look at pictures of Camila, maybe we should return at this point to the subject at hand.


----------



## agricola (Apr 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> She is a massive dick.


 
Not really, loads of officers probably got their cancelled rest days reinstated just on the strength of that tweet.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 10, 2013)

agricola said:


> Not really, loads of officers probably got their cancelled rest days reinstated just on the strength of that tweet.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Apr 10, 2013)

LOL


----------



## love detective (Apr 10, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/321755771488575488


 
They all seem to have that same sense of activist un self aware importance



> Another Angry Woman ‏@stavvers
> 
> Hey, police, since you're scanning social media let it be known that I've plans for next Weds that don't involve Thatcher's funeral at all.


 
Let it be known!


----------



## killer b (Apr 10, 2013)

love detective said:


> They all seem to have that same sense of activist un self aware importance


the responses from people on twitter are almost as embarrassing tbh.


----------



## rekil (Apr 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> who is this cunt and what does he want?


I quite like Jacobin and the pressures to put shit stuff in it so it stays afloat have to be appreciated but Molly's article was basically an advert for an exhibition of her pictures next week and that's why Laura is going to be in NY instead of stalking people at thatcher's funeral.




			
				mollycrabapple @mollycrabapple 8 Apr said:
			
		

> Having a special opening for Kickstarter backers who pledged $100+ w/ @stoya in a bathtub full of Molly-money, styled like Marie Antoinette


----------



## J Ed (Apr 10, 2013)

https://twitter.com/IainDale/status/321758441808986112


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 10, 2013)

doesn't he run the "conservative home" blog?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 10, 2013)

copliker said:


> I quite like Jacobin and the pressures to put shit stuff in it so it stays afloat have to be appreciated but Molly's article was basically an advert for an exhibition of her pictures next week and that's why Laura is going to be in NY instead of stalking people at thatcher's funeral.


 
It's interesting how much these two talk about Stoya and try to associate an American porn actress with their social media presence. I think they do it for the same reason that Laurie constantly refers to herself sexually, it's a marketing technique. Car companies drape women over their cars, they are doing the same thing but with their tweets!


----------



## ymu (Apr 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> doesn't he run the "conservative home" blog?


That's Tim wotsisname. Dale is a Tory blogger though.


----------



## rekil (Apr 10, 2013)

andysays said:


> I don't think that's bovril. Since when does anyone keep bovril in its own little ceramic jar? I reckon it's instant coffee.
> 
> (please note: storing instant coffee in a special ceramic container rather than just the original jar strikes me as a petit bourgeois affectation; we'll have to watch out for reformist tendencies in this one, comrades)


Maybe she buys refill packets instead of new jars everytime? That's what I do.


andysays said:


> She's also been seen sharing a platform with those of a "hipster hat" tendency; again, we'll have to check this doesn't develop into adopting these tendencies herself...


Here's Camila's da checking Laura's twitter to see if she's given his daughter the mention yet. His hat is acceptable but the scarf draped over the shoulder is a no no. Asking for trouble.


----------



## ymu (Apr 10, 2013)

copliker said:


> Maybe she buys refill packets instead of new jars everytime? That's what I do.


You can get refills for Bovril? 

My dad always had it on toast so I don't really think of it as a drink. It's better than marmite!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 10, 2013)

andysays said:


> I don't think that's bovril. Since when does anyone keep bovril in its own little ceramic jar? I reckon it's instant coffee.
> 
> (please note: storing instant coffee in a special ceramic container rather than just the original jar strikes me as a petit bourgeois affectation; we'll have to watch out for reformist tendencies in this one, comrades)


 
I can't watch the clip right now, but I would assume it's maté in the ceramic jar


----------



## ymu (Apr 10, 2013)

That's not a mark on my screen and you don't mean coffee-mate. What's maté?


----------



## Greebo (Apr 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> That's not a mark on my screen and you don't mean coffee-mate. What's maté?


Yerba Mate - a South American herb infused and drunk as a tea. AFAIK high in guaranine; similar effects to caffeine (mild stimulant, mild appetite suppressant and mild diuretic) but not caffeine therefore more acceptable to healthfreaks.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> You can get refills for Bovril?
> 
> My dad always had it on toast so I don't really think of it as a drink. It's better than marmite!


 

I've made a hot drink from marmite before. It's like the old beef tea thing. Good for the guts


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 10, 2013)

JimW said:


> So now we know roughly how long it takes for her to make a "quote" up.


 
For hacks, anybody taking that long to fake a quote really is a talent-free zone.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 10, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/IainDale/status/321758441808986112


 
Nevermind https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/322002611291189248


----------



## andysays (Apr 10, 2013)

copliker said:


> Maybe she buys refill packets instead of new jars everytime? That's what I do


 
I happily bow to your superior bovril knowledge.



copliker said:


> Here's Camila's da checking Laura's twitter to see if she's given his daughter the mention yet. His hat is acceptable but the scarf draped over the shoulder is a no no. Asking for trouble


 
Is that really her dad? I think that hat's borderline, TBH, but maybe difference cultural norms operate in Chile. I certainly don't want to be accused of Euro-centrism in my assessment of what's stylistically appropriate.

But purely from a practical point of view that scarf is, as you say, asking for trouble in any close combat/street fighting situation...


----------



## andysays (Apr 10, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Yerba Mate - a South American herb infused and drunk as a tea. AFAIK high in guaranine; similar effects to caffeine (mild stimulant, mild appetite suppressant and mild diuretic) but not caffeine therefore more acceptable to healthfreaks.


 
Putting "yerba mate" into the Sainsburys website search engine comes up with three different suggestions:

*Nestlé Coffeemate *
*Aussie Shampoo, Colour Mate*
Mates Condoms
Doesn't look like I'll be sampling it anytime soon.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 10, 2013)

StrangeCat said:


> I just can't for the fucking life of me understand how _she_ got to be this left wing icon. I find it stunning.


 
A mix of assiduous self-promotion, cashing in of social capital, and outright blagging _a la_ Johann Hari.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Our Owen's "I actually know Tony Benn" was unintentionally hilarious.


 
And to which the only reasonable reply is to ask "but Owen, does Tony Benn actually know *you*?".


----------



## Libertad (Apr 10, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> And to which the only reasonable reply is to ask "but Owen, does Tony Benn actually know *you*?".


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 10, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> A mix of assiduous self-promotion, cashing in of social capital, and outright blagging _a la_ Johann Hari.


 
It certainly wasn't for quality, thoughtful, intelligent reportage.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 10, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> It certainly wasn't for quality, thoughtful, intelligent reportage.


 
Or for taking responsibility for what she writes. Remember the blaming of sub-eds, and then excusing herself by saying "but I was a subbie once!"? What was great was that someone who was at the Morning Star when she was supposedly a trainee subbie tore her a new one, mentioning she was always off looking for opportunities for self-promotion, rather than proofing prose.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 10, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Or for taking responsibility for what she writes. Remember the blaming of sub-eds, and then excusing herself by saying "but I was a subbie once!"? What was great was that someone who was at the Morning Star when she was supposedly a trainee subbie tore her a new one, mentioning she was always off looking for opportunities for self-promotion, rather than proofing prose.


 
The Resistable Rise Of Penny Dreadful.


----------



## rekil (Apr 10, 2013)

Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed said:
			
		

> Glenda Jackson MP lays it down with a tirade against Thatcherism in 'tribute' debate. Finally, a politician with guts


Jackson (and Diane Abbott) abstained from the workfare vote last month. Anything else on their voting records that makes Laura look silly?


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Apr 10, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/321755771488575488


 
 at urbz piling in on that one


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 10, 2013)

Thora has just admitted/remembered now that the brain fog caused by Polish Special Brew has finally lifted that when she was a little bit tipsy towards the end of the Chelsea Road Thatcher party, she began hurling abuse about Laurie Penny and Owen Jones. Hurled at whom she is a little hazy on, seeing as neither were there.


----------



## Greebo (Apr 11, 2013)

Got a photo of Owen Jones being given a dressing down by an older and much more cynical urbanite.  No, you lot don't get to see it, (not in this section anyway) but I'll treasure it.


----------



## ymu (Apr 11, 2013)

You short of PMs or summat? Go on, send us it.


----------



## rekil (Apr 11, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Got a photo of Owen Jones being given a dressing down by an older and much more cynical urbanite.


?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 11, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Yerba Mate - a South American herb infused and drunk as a tea. AFAIK high in guaranine; similar effects to caffeine (mild stimulant, mild appetite suppressant and mild diuretic) but not caffeine therefore more acceptable to healthfreaks.


 
More importantly loads of people in the Southern Cone drink it, and it's not a posers drink there - it tastes like strong green tea


----------



## Greebo (Apr 11, 2013)

ymu said:


> You short of PMs or summat? Go on, send us it.


It'll go in the North London Drinks (witch is dead) thread, once I've resized it.


----------



## rekil (Apr 13, 2013)

andysays said:


> Is that really her dad? I think that hat's borderline, TBH, but maybe difference cultural norms operate in Chile. I certainly don't want to be accused of Euro-centrism in my assessment of what's stylistically appropriate.


That's her da yeah, he says he was arrested 3 times during the dictatorship. Camila is 3 months pregnant apparently. Laura probably thinks that's a little bit patriarchy or something.


> But purely from a practical point of view that scarf is, as you say, asking for trouble in any close combat/street fighting situation...


Or a revolving door or getting out of a car situaton.

Anyways.



			
				lauriepenny said:
			
		

> Competitively ridiculous pro- and anti-Thatcher headlines today. This isn't so much rewriting history as an argument on a toilet wall.


Ah, the old both sides are as bad as each other bollocks. Full liberalism.


----------



## rekil (Apr 13, 2013)

*mollycrabapple* ‏@*mollycrabapple*1h​People in the same room at my show opening last night- @*PennyRed* @*SalmanRushdie* @*stoya* @*paulmasonnews* @*joweldon*


----------



## stuff_it (Apr 13, 2013)

andysays said:


> Putting "yerba mate" into the Sainsburys website search engine comes up with three different suggestions:
> 
> *Nestlé Coffeemate *
> *Aussie Shampoo, Colour Mate*
> ...


Only shop at Sainsburys then? 



https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sour...2k&fp=39b43565ce2354da&ion=1&biw=1920&bih=936


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 13, 2013)

old salman gets about doesn't he


----------



## love detective (Apr 13, 2013)

copliker said:


> *mollycrabapple* ‏@*mollycrabapple*
> 1h​
> People in the same room at my show opening last night- @*PennyRed* @*SalmanRushdie* @*stoya* @*paulmasonnews* @*joweldon*


 


> *tmronin*
> For @mollycrabapple's #shellgame opening tomorrow, this is #stoya's entire costume




http://instagram.com/p/X-TR9aCJ71/


----------



## JimW (Apr 13, 2013)

love detective said:


> http://instagram.com/p/X-TR9aCJ71/


They'll need someone with a mop following Salman to keep the drool in check.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 13, 2013)

Our Laurie is a proper celeb, like.


----------



## love detective (Apr 13, 2013)

> Stoya ‏@stoya
> ...@dpxxx wanted me to tell you that Adult Dvd Empire is having a porno with me in it sale http://www.adultdvdempire.com/582988/stoya-pornstars.html?partner_id=10009061&utm_source=ADE&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=twitter …


 


> Insatiable Stoya in her first Double Penetration scene! Bad Girls 5 explodes with hard pounding lust as Stoya, Tori Black, Rebeca Linares, Jenny Hendrix and Angelina Armani reveal their naughty nympho obsessions. They go where good girls fear to tread, ready to take on the big cock boys, lapping up every thick drop of their nasty, orgasmic fantasies!


 
http://www.adult**dvdempire.com/1556281/bad-girls-5-dvd-blu-ray-combo-porn-movies.html


----------



## rekil (Apr 13, 2013)

www.newrepublic.com/article/112903/molly-crabapple-and-occupy-wall-street-protest-art


> ...these artists are dedicated to a more democratic art world, and a more democratic world in general.
> 
> The 29-year-old artist Molly Crabapple is part of this vanguard. Until a couple years ago, Crabapple, born Jennifer Caban in Far Rockaway, Queens, was best known for her burlesque art and—because of its highly adult content and her background as a stripper—pigeonholed as a sex artist. But when her Occupy Wall Street images went worldwide, all that changed. Crabapple was suddenly both a graphic artist for the movement and an emblem of the way that art could break out of the gilded gallery. Her poster for the May Day General Strike, for example, depicts a woman, bathed in light like an Eastern Orthodox icon, but solid and human as Diego Rivera’s workers.
> 
> Crabapple’s work, argues BBC editor Paul Mason, who last year wrote about Crabapple, Mark Read, and other young artists, in “Does Occupy Signal the Death of Contemporary Art?” speaks to what might “replace contemporary art. … It is of the world of graphic novels, graffiti, posters, body art, cross- genre performance art.” With her graphic reportage from Greece and Seville, he tells me, “Molly bent the genre some more with these impromptu interventions into journalism: blood on the floor in Athens, anarchist run farms in Spain, a grungy court scene in Manhattan.”


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 13, 2013)

one handed reportage from mason eh


----------



## JimW (Apr 13, 2013)

Breaking out of the gilded gallery so she can charge back in with the terms substantially improved. Canny chancer.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 13, 2013)

copliker said:


> www.newrepublic.com/article/112903/molly-crabapple-and-occupy-wall-street-protest-art


 
Well, if this doesn't overthrow capitalism I don't know what will!


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## tenniselbow (Apr 13, 2013)

Has this one been done? _"A New England" by Molly Crabapple_
[edit: removed massive repeated image for sake board members' of scroll function]
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112903/molly-crabapple-and-occupy-wall-street-protest-art#


----------



## rekil (Apr 13, 2013)

www.azcentral.com/ent/celeb/articles/2009/06/06/20090606marilyn-manson-customises-hair.html?nclick_check=1


> Marilyn Manson shaved a swastika into his new porn star girlfriend's pubic hair.
> 
> The controversial rocker — who has been involved in an on/off relationship with "The Wrestler" actress Evan Rachel Wood — is dating Serb-Scottish adult movie star Stoya, who allows him to customize her intimate body hair.


Shocking.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 13, 2013)

yes, at length. It's like hogarth seen through the lense of a fucking twat


----------



## rekil (Apr 13, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> Has this one been done?


Oh yes. It's even in that new republic story.


----------



## Firky (Apr 13, 2013)

copliker said:


> www.newrepublic.com/article/112903/molly-crabapple-and-occupy-wall-street-protest-art


 
More money to be made from that than hoping someone will buy a piece from a gallery or an online art store. She's also got the shitty, art school pretentious blurb to go with it I see and best of all, it's written by someone else:

_“Molly bent the genre some more with these impromptu interventions into journalism: blood on the floor in Athens, anarchist run farms in Spain, a grungy court scene in Manhattan.”_


What's he get out of it, soiled costume above? I bet Mark Oaten would pay good money for that jock strap if it had been worn by an incontinent rent boy. 

I don't dislike her artwork, I think she is does have a talent and is very creative... it's just a bit contrived, there's no real depth to it. It's as though she chose to do this kind of art rather than it being an expression IYSWIM. Sorry, am rambling


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## Firky (Apr 13, 2013)

There's a very active mod on this thread.


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## DotCommunist (Apr 13, 2013)

Firky said:


> More money to be made from that than hoping someone will buy a piece from a gallery or an online art store. She's also got the shitty, art school pretentious blurb to go with it I see and best of all, it's written by someone else:
> 
> _“Molly bent the genre some more with these impromptu interventions into journalism: blood on the floor in Athens, anarchist run farms in Spain, a grungy court scene in Manhattan.”_
> 
> ...


 

I've enjoyed some of her pencil stuff, it's curvy and yes going for a steadman with less edge. Some of it is just shite tho.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 13, 2013)

I think her art all looks the same. She may be trying to make a political statement with it but it doesn't have enough impact in my opinion. Like firky says, there's no depth.


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## tenniselbow (Apr 13, 2013)

Agree. Most of her work looks like that of a steady-handed Steve Bell not working to a daily deadline


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## tenniselbow (Apr 13, 2013)

"I’m told that it’ll happen whether I want it to or not: no matter how many communiqués I read or marches I go on, by 35 I’ll be voting for the Liberal Democrats"

I thought she had accomplished this by the age of *24*?


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 13, 2013)

Also, this: "In 1968 Ulrike Meinhof wrote: “Columnism is a personality cult. Through columnism, the left-wing position . . . is reduced to the position of one individual, an isolated individual, to the views of an original, outrageous, nonconformist individual, who can be co-opted because, in being alone, they are powerless." It’s worth noting that, a few years later, Meinhof decided that armed insurrection was a more efficient route to the revolution she wanted to see and helped form the militant Red Army Faction. For Meinhof, the pen may have been mightier than the sword but home-made explosives got the job done quicker. She was wrong about at least one thing: columnists do still have power."


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## Firky (Apr 13, 2013)

The only resemblance her work has to Steve Bell is the aesthetics that have a cartoonish feel to it. She lacks the panache, depth and insight that Steve Bell does. There's something quite middle of the road about it and safe as though she doesn't want upset the apple cart and alienate her intended customer (I hesitate not to use the word audience). She is the rebel sell not the rebel yell which is what American counter-culture is built on.

I think she'll get better as she gets older. I'd buy something of hers as an investment for the future but not something to keep.


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## tenniselbow (Apr 13, 2013)

Firky said:


> The only resemblance her work has to Steve Bell is it has a cartoonish quality to it. She lacks the panache, depth and insight that Steve Bell does. There's something quite middle of the road about it and safe as though she doesn't want upset the apple cart and alienate her intended customer (I hesitate not to use the word audience). She is the rebel sell not the rebel yell.
> 
> I think she'll get better as she gets older.


 
Oh yes, I totally agree with you on the first point; just meant the aesthetics are similar. None of the content. Not sure about your second point.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 13, 2013)

Steve Bell demonstrating his panache, depth and insight:


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## Firky (Apr 13, 2013)

I like her work enough to want to like it more if that makes sense. She also has more self awareness than her mate, which isn't that difficult. She just got in with the wrong crowd


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## tenniselbow (Apr 13, 2013)

Good retort, butchers! That is ugly. Really ugly.


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## tenniselbow (Apr 13, 2013)

The most surprising thing about that Bell cartoon is that he spelt paedophile correctly.


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## Firky (Apr 13, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Steve Bell demonstrating his panache, depth and insight:


 
That's a picture of the inside of Dylan's head.

I knew someone would pull me up on saying he had panache. He does gets it wrong as you have demonstrated but he also on occasions gets it right. That's not to say I think he is good but he has what Molly lacks. Anyone can see that.

I thought you'd be in London or out in Bristol celebrating?


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## DotCommunist (Apr 13, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> The most surprising thing about that Bell cartoon is that he spelt paedophile correctly.


 

deary me


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 13, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> deary me


 
??? The rest of the cartoon is a gross caricature of the working class; illiteracy would have completed the picture.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 13, 2013)

you are assuming the thick proles can't spell peed correctly right?


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## tenniselbow (Apr 13, 2013)

Nope, see above (sorry I edited to clarify).

I am not assuming this. I am saying that given the class-hatred displayed in Bell's cartoon I would have expected this assumption to be included as well.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 13, 2013)

ah fair enough fella


----------



## love detective (Apr 13, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> "I’m told that it’ll happen whether I want it to or not: no matter how many communiqués I read or marches I go on, by 35 I’ll be voting for the Liberal Democrats"
> 
> I thought she had accomplished this by the age of *24*?


 
Even worse, this




			
				laurie penny said:
			
		

> When they bother to engage with their readers, they do so with deep distaste, outraged that mere civilians have dared to answer back.


 
describes her exact reaction to criticism she received on here, by her readers

and this is just breathtakingly un self aware




			
				laurie penny said:
			
		

> The elitism and entitlement that have long poisoned the British commentariat are beginning to disappear


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 13, 2013)

love detective said:


> Even worse, this
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Spot on LD!

It's almost like Laurie is doing this kind of gross self-parody and demonstrating such a lack of self-awareness deliberately. At some point in the future she's going to come out as a performance artist and reveal her whole journalistic career to have been one big postmodern joke on us all...


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 13, 2013)

love detective said:


> Even worse, this
> 
> 
> 
> describes her exact reaction to criticism she received on here, by her readers


 
She's got a bad case of 'Hack's Disease.' The chief symptoms of which are a rock-solid belief that whatever issue they're writing ALWAYS leads back, in some way to them writing about themselves, a belief that THEY are the story instead of just a scribbler covering the ACTUAl story and an equally rock-solid belief that life would be so much easier for fearless guardians of free speech, free press and democracy in general if only the damned peasants wouldn't insist on having their own views on everything instead of just blowing sunshine up the patient's arse instead.

See also the terribly-contagious and seldom-cured 'Self-Adorational Media Circle Jerk Syndrome' the terminal symptoms of which are for the sufferer to disappear entirely up their own arse, becoming a shallow, vapid, rampantly egomaniacal parody of a proper scribbler while developing the incurable delusion that a story isn't worth even noticing until they themselves appear as the self-appointed leader of the publicity parade.


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## rekil (Apr 13, 2013)

Shit. Someone (ld?) beat me to responding via PD twitter machine about the lib dem lie, but fuck it, it's gone up anyway. She doesn't read or respond to the comments anyway.


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## tenniselbow (Apr 13, 2013)

I've occasionally felt a bit bad for Laurie at the constant critiques here, thinking to myself: "is this why we can't have nice things?" So it's nice to have the frequent reminders from LP's end that actually it's all OK and well deserved.


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## rosecore (Apr 13, 2013)

> I’m told that it’ll happen whether I want it to or not: no matter how many communiqués I read or marches I go on, by 35 I’ll be voting for the Liberal Democrats and by 70, presuming my hate-hardened arteries make it that far, I’ll be screeching about immigrants from an enormous throne made of my clippings, clutching a set of pearls that once belonged to Maggie Thatcher. This is nonsense.


 
Top rated comment:



> Informal Subsumption
> Laurie, you wrote this on your blog on 1st May 2010 - "It is for these reason that I am going to be voting, in my constituency of Leyton and Wanstead, for the Liberal Democrat Party." So far from voting liberal democrat by the time you get to 35, you were doing it a good ten years earlier at the age of 24/25


Haha.


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## Superdupastupor (Apr 13, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Yerba Mate - a South American herb infused and drunk as a tea. AFAIK high in guaranine; similar effects to caffeine (mild stimulant, mild appetite suppressant and mild diuretic) but not caffeine therefore more acceptable to healthfreaks.


 
health freaks are deluding themselves if they think mate doesn't contain caffeine or any other xanthine that is found in coffee.



andysays said:


> Putting "yerba mate" into the Sainsburys website search engine comes up with three different suggestions:
> 
> *Nestlé Coffeemate*
> *Aussie Shampoo, Colour Mate*
> ...


 
urushop.co.uk for all ur mate needs. Also shops that sell a wide range of herbal teas will usually have yerba mate in teabags- to get a taste for it/ see if you like it.


Spanky Longhorn said:


> More importantly loads of people in the Southern Cone drink it, and it's not a posers drink there - it tastes like strong green tea


 
I guess that makes me a poser


----------



## sihhi (Apr 14, 2013)

Yiannis: LP and MC's journalist translator-guide
Georgia Sagri: performance artist who was naked outside one of an important Athens university - scene of the 1973 uprising as a work of art back in 1999, then left to pursue art dreams in USA. See a 2008 exhibition here
Daphne: A person at a party Georgia invites LP and MC to.

The thing you have to remember about Georgia Sagri is that her reputation precedes her. She's That Girl. the one everyone has an opinion about. She's the artist girl from Athens who became famous for sitting naked in a box in front of the Polytechnic University. The anarchist girl from a wealthy family who went to New York. made friends with some theorists, and helped to start Occupy Wall Street. l'd met her fleetingly in America at the side of a protest, dressed all in black, and it seemed immediately obvious that when the terrible film of the Occupy movement in America is inevitably made. Georgia Sagri will be the one played by Angelina Jolie, which makes little sense as she's a small, round-shouldered, pixie-faced woman. Yiannis tells us that we shouldn't talk to her, that she has nothing to do with the real Greece, that she's irrelevant, a poser. This just makes me keener to nail her down for a long interview.

We meet in a modestly pretentious cafe-bookshop in Exarcheia where, after cold coffee has been secured and a stack of cigarettes rolled, Yiannis and Georgia begin a curt, intense discussion in Greek, of the type generally undertaken by people trying to hard to overlook small, signiﬁcant differences in socio-political outlook that nonetheless continue to hang in the air like a fart in the room. Eventually I ask them to please, for God's sake, if you can't say anything nice, at least say it in English. I am deservedly mocked, and Georgia launches into a dissection of the failures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, as she is recently returned from six years' work as an activist in New York.

Georgia looks sad, and so does Molly: we've all seen, in our many ways, how these gorgeous. transient communities can open up and then vanish, beaten back by police and fracturing under the pressure of internal disagreements. We talk about the intense joy you got in those temporary tent cities, in student occupations, in protest camps: the sense that a world beyond capitalism is possible, that it can happen in microcosm right now, and all it takes it a bit of courage and guts.

Georgia takes us to a party at the top of an unmarked building. From the balcony, as the light fades. Athens is all dark high rises hazed in a shallow bowl of pollution with the Aegean twinkling in the distance. We start to talk about cities - the ones we've loved and lived in and had to leave. Molly, collapsed from heat exhaustion on the patio, will never really understand because if you snapped her in half it would probably read ‘New York‘ down the middle like a stick of rock. ‘That's part of why I love her.‘ I explain to Yiannis.

‘New York, I mean. It's the sort of place you fall for even though you know everyone else has too and you don't even care. She's big and bold and tarty and you hold out for as long as possible and then somewhere between Bushwick and sunset over Chinatown you just give in. Even though you know she's never going to love you back.'

‘I mean. London will always be my city. but we‘ve been having problems lately. it's like the passion's gone.‘ I say, warming to my topic. ‘I just feel like we need to see other people for a while. I know all her ins and outs and strange drinking by-laws, and she knows I'll be back one day. She's that sort of city.’

‘Well, if that‘s true, then I suppose Athens is Yiannis thinks for a moment Athens is the drunk girl who turns up to your party, makes out with everyone and trashes your house.‘ At this point Georgia Sagri bounds out of the kitchen, grabs his face, kisses him hard on the mouth, and then kisses me. Her breath tastes like lemon vodka and she throws back her head and laughs.

It's five minutes to midnight. One of the indistinguishable bald, bearded Greeks has removed his trousers and begun to dance in just his socks and tightie whities in the knee-jabbing manner of a man having a series of grand mal shocks. Under his feet a small black poodle squeals in delight. There is something Satyrish about him: he was the one to bring the enormous hollowed-out watermelon full of suspicious gunge, which is a broadly representative sample of the dashed dreams of middle-class Athenian youth are currently guzzling through kiddie-straws.

All the young ladies wear the sort of ﬂoppy ﬂoral micro-dresses which would be an acts of masochism anywhere further away from the equator, and the air is hot and heavy with sex. A drunk girl named Daphne is running around with Christmas tinsel in her hair, shedding a trail of foil sparkles that stick sweatily to everybody's skin. Acting out: that's what springs to mind. There are cultural dialects of sexuality and where Northern Europe and America tend to congratulate themselves on their omnipornographic frankness, sensuality itself remains buttoned-down and buttoned-up. Whereas in the South, a sheer slip of conservatism skims lightly over the easy possibilities of flesh. Nobody needs, in short, to get blind fumbling drunk to get on with things.

The drugs that deﬁne a generation or a movement tend to mimic its teetering ups and downs: the sixties, after all, were a hell of a trip. But we don't live in the sixties. and right now the drug is MDMA and its derivatives.

The quantities of MDMA and its equivalents on offer amongst Athens' precarious youth are stunning, as they have been in London. in New York. in Madrid and everywhere I've watched the roller coaster of radicalisation pummel through the certainties of what it once meant to grow up in late capitalism. Not just because it's cheap, although that helps. A four-dollar pill, knarly though it may be, will last you all night when you can't afford enough beer to get out of your head. The pure, charging high of it, the uncontainable excitement, the confidence to dance all night, dance for ever, followed by the crashing lows that last for days of nervous depression. the full-body exhaustion, the hopeless hunt through trails of trash television looking for comfort: it's the emotional curve of post-crash neo-liberal lassitude in a pill, the promise of endless striving and reward that contains its own mortifying full stop.

It is, quite literally, a debt drug. MDMA increases the flow of serotonin, the love-chemical, the body's own natural happy-drug, in the brain, but borrows it against future reserves of the stuff, which then run morbidly low right through Blue Monday and Suicide Tuesday. The ecstasy craze began, ﬁttingly, in the 1990s. Now the drugs are worse but the hunger is still there, and the comedown is becoming unbearable, and no amount of trash television will soothe the chill in the heart.

After we part ways, Yiannis walks home through Exarcheia. There, a few streets away from the apartment block, he runs into the sort of trouble that often befalls known journalists travelling alone where there's an armed cop on every street comer. The sort of trouble that later, when the bruises have faded, he makes me promise not to write about directly, lest he get into much, much more. The first we hear about it is a hammering on our door at eight in the morning. Yiannis fairly falls through it, white as a sheet and sober, having been up all night in a police cell. His phone is gone. and he's bruised, and he doesn't want to go home to his girlfriend because he doesn't want to upset her. I make tea, because it's what you do at times like this, and because it's what small British women do when they are considering what form vengeance will take.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 14, 2013)

The tea thing is _really fucking annoying._


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 14, 2013)

Aye. The prose is dreadful, too. Chocka with terrible phrases "Her breath tastes like lemon vodka and she throws back her head and laughs." and this gem " the enormous hollowed-out watermelon full of suspicious gunge, which is a broadly representative sample of the dashed dreams of middle-class Athenian youth are currently guzzling through kiddie-straws."


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 14, 2013)

And again with the rolled cigarettes. Nicotine shibboleth, as Fish from Marillion would describe it


----------



## rekil (Apr 14, 2013)

> indistinguishable bald, bearded Greeks


Little bit racism.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 14, 2013)

> Now the drugs are worse but the hunger is still there, and the comedown is becoming unbearable, and no amount of trash television will soothe the chill in the heart.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 14, 2013)

> as she is recently returned from six years' work as an activist in New York.


 
work as an activist?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 14, 2013)

Laurie is just writing about herself, isn't she?


----------



## Belushi (Apr 14, 2013)

Exarcheia is really hip. How come she never hangs out in places like Merthyr Tydfil..


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Laurie is just writing about herself, isn't she?


 
See Dr. Bakunin's previous diagnoses of her professional condition above.


----------



## rekil (Apr 14, 2013)

Has Paul Mason lost his mind?


----------



## love detective (Apr 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Laurie is just writing about herself, isn't she?


 



			
				laurie said:
			
		

> Yiannis tells us that we shouldn't talk to her, that she has nothing to do with the real Greece, that she's irrelevant, a poser


----------



## J Ed (Apr 14, 2013)

I was thinking more about the bragging about sex, roll ups, drug use and tea drinking lol

Do Greeks even drink tea that much?


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## love detective (Apr 14, 2013)

I would hazard a guess that Penny has hardly taken any drugs in her life - doesn't stop her desperately trying to write dramatically about it from a falsified position of being more personally involved/informed, but then again that's her all over isn't it, whatever the topic


----------



## J Ed (Apr 14, 2013)

But the description of MD as a literal debt drug made her sound so knowledgeable


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 14, 2013)

love detective said:


> I would hazard a guess that Penny has hardly taken any drugs in her life - doesn't stop her desperately trying to write dramatically about it from a falsified position of being more personally involved/informed, but then again that's her all over isn't it, whatever the topic


 
Verily, she is the font from which all bullshit flows...


----------



## Firky (Apr 14, 2013)

Didn't she wake up following a ketamine bender with a 15 year old trans-gender run away anointing her scabby knees after a hard days protesting against sexism in Soho with bohemian friends? I am sure I remember reading that lie, but I can't remember if it was her or not.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 14, 2013)

love detective said:


> I would hazard a guess that Penny has hardly taken any drugs in her life - doesn't stop her desperately trying to write dramatically about it from a falsified position of being more personally involved/informed, but then again that's her all over isn't it, whatever the topic


 
It's easy to do the drugs bit of the role, I bet she has.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 14, 2013)

Oh god, now I remember when she was tweeting about how she smoked weed with rich people as if she was uncovering the great conspiracy that rich people take drugs too

Which is a bit confusing in and of itself, I thought private schools were full of drugs, she must have seen plenty of other posh people taking them?


----------



## Favelado (Apr 14, 2013)

Respect for having a dealer whose stuff is so good his 4 dollar pills last the entire night. Not easy to find.


----------



## love detective (Apr 14, 2013)

Favelado said:


> It's easy to do the drugs bit of the role, I bet she has.


 
You may be right, but to me her character/personality doesn't come across as the type who could handle losing what little control they have over their own sense of self. Far too naturally paranoid, needy, emotionally fragile and lacking in self confidence (disguised by huge dollops of surface level extreme self confidence) to be comfortable with purposefully & regularly bringing on any kind of significant & prolonged altered state that she can't control

Although I guess there's plenty of people that fit that description that do, but her, nah it doesn't come across like that's the case


----------



## love detective (Apr 14, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Respect for having a dealer whose stuff is so good his 4 dollar pills last the entire night. Not easy to find.


 
I was going to comment on that as well - back in early 90's when e's were £20/25 and nothing like as cut up with other shit as they are now, you could maybe get away with one lasting the lion's share of the night, but now?

The only drug that was ever capable of lasting the whole night (and usually far too long!) that you could get for under a fiver was acid


----------



## Belushi (Apr 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I thought private schools were full of drugs, she must have seen plenty of other posh people taking them?


 
Some of the biggest caners I've ever met have been ex-public schoolboys. Usually those types go into the city but when they decide to drop out they do so with a vengence.


----------



## ymu (Apr 14, 2013)

Money, innit.


----------



## treelover (Apr 14, 2013)

weepiper said:


> The tea thing is _really fucking annoying._


 
Trendy teashops are springing up everywhere, loads in Manchester


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 14, 2013)

its self consciously little bit orwell with his samovar and his grassing


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 14, 2013)

> I make tea, because it's what you do at times like this, and because it's what small British women do when they are considering what form vengeance will take.


 
This bit really wound me up. As if she's taking vengeance on the Greek police ffs.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 14, 2013)

copliker said:


> Has Paul Mason lost his mind?


 
He's just hanging out


----------



## love detective (Apr 14, 2013)

just ordinary working class people coming together in their communities to serve their own collective benefit - that's what Penny is embedded in right now






(plus some of them, like soya for example, are ready to take on the big cock boys)


----------



## J Ed (Apr 14, 2013)

love detective said:


> just ordinary working class people coming together in their communities to serve their own collective benefit - that's what Penny is embedded in right now
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Come the revolution, anyone who refuses to dye their hair will be immediately shot as a counter-revolutionary


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 14, 2013)

galloway has nicked all the Just for Men to keep his beard in the style it was once accustomed


----------



## J Ed (Apr 14, 2013)

https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/323265018151985152

lol


----------



## love detective (Apr 14, 2013)

_



_
_just going about their day to day lives, organising in their communities, doing what they can to resist attacks on them from state & capital_


----------



## J Ed (Apr 14, 2013)

love detective said:


> _just going about their day to day lives, organising in their communities_


 
This is so new and radical and revolutionary, surely these unprecedentedly taboo-smashing events must herald the final crisis of capitalism


----------



## love detective (Apr 14, 2013)

they did say they have people in their ranks who are ready to take on the big cock boys


----------



## J Ed (Apr 14, 2013)

A 21st Century Storming of the Bastillee if ever I saw one


----------



## love detective (Apr 14, 2013)

they are the 99% apparently


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> This is so new and radical and revolutionary, surely these unprecedentedly taboo-smashing events must herald the final crisis of capitalism


 
it probably does to be fair but not in the way they think.


----------



## treelover (Apr 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> This is so new and radical and revolutionary, surely these unprecedentedly taboo-smashing events must herald the final crisis of capitalism


 

Isn't all this just Tom Wolfe's 60's radical chic revisited ?
albeit on a much smaller scale, I've seen plenty of this stuff done by middle class girls in Brighton, etc..


I remember reading that in the 60's a big house in St Johns' Wood has left wing murals on its side, anyone heard of this..


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 14, 2013)

love detective said:


> just ordinary working class people coming together in their communities to serve their own collective benefit - that's what Penny is embedded in right now
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Is that Jacob Rees-Mogg on the right there?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 14, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Is that Jacob Rees-Mogg on the right there?


 
He looks familiar, isn't he the rich 'anarchist' that used to beat his partners and now makes money from talking about how he's a reformed character?


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> He looks familiar, isn't he the rich 'anarchist' that used to beat his partners and now makes money from talking about how he's a reformed character?


 
Fuck knows, he looks like a wanker though.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> This is so new and radical and revolutionary, surely these unprecedentedly taboo-smashing events must herald the final crisis of capitalism


 
Nah, the final crisis of capitalism might herald the end of all those highly lucrative media and arts career opportunities.

Couldn't have that, now could they..?


----------



## love detective (Apr 14, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Is that Jacob Rees-Mogg on the right there?


 
It's Jesse Sheidlower 'editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary'


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 14, 2013)

An oxbridge boy. And _possibly_ a big cock boy.


----------



## JimW (Apr 14, 2013)

Massive bell-end at least seems incontrovertible.


----------



## Libertad (Apr 14, 2013)

So shiny.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 14, 2013)

Laurie Penny writes an article that is ostensibly about Greece, but is actually about her and her cool friends impossibly debauched boho lifestyle. A small fanclub of people who aspire to this then buy the New Statesman and read Laurie Penny's articles so they can feel close to this lifestyle, feel like they're a part of the scene too. And look she follows me on twitter, I'm legitimately part of it too! Grubby victorian street urchins pressing their face against the glass of the royal carriage to feel close to the royal family....

At any rate, any sort of radical political allegience is just another affectation, like the rollies, like the tea etc. People ask why she writes like that, it's because that's what she's selling, the lifestyle. The politics is neither here nor there - as her more serious attempts to deal with politics have exposed.

In some ways I wouldn't mind. If it was totally apolitical Liz Jones for the Left then I'd probably never have given a shit. It's the idea that there's somehow a profound political vision that underpins it, that is vastly superior to anything we ourselves (as mere normals) would be able to think up.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 14, 2013)

work as an activist by that do they mean a full-timer in a trot party or something?


----------



## Firky (Apr 14, 2013)

love detective said:


> just ordinary working class people coming together in their communities to serve their own collective benefit - that's what Penny is embedded in right now
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

Don't really like to have a go at what people look like... but they look so fucking posh. I'd put money on it she has a braying laugh.


----------



## Firky (Apr 14, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> If it was totally apolitical Liz Jones for the Left.


 
Ouch!


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> work as an activist by that do they mean a full-timer in a trot party or something?


It means all the shite on the right here when you click on artists statement and CV. Note all the scholarships, note the bourgeois foundations that support her, note the life lived entirely within these places.


----------



## Firky (Apr 14, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> In some ways I wouldn't mind. If it was totally apolitical Liz Jones for the Left then I'd probably never have given a shit. It's the idea that there's somehow a profound political vision that underpins it, that is vastly superior to anything we ourselves (as mere normals) would be able to think up.


 

Ouch!


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 14, 2013)

It's barbs like that which have seen me banned from the comment section of the New Statesman firky. Probably for my own good tbf.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It means all the shite on the right here when you click on artists statement and CV. Note all the scholarships, note the bourgeois foundations that support her, note the life lived entirely within these places.


 
i'm looking. It's loads of group dance exhibitions and other shite

what's this shit got to do with "activism"


----------



## J Ed (Apr 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i'm looking. It's loads of group dance exhibitions and other shite
> 
> what's this shit got to do with "activism"


 
You've never met people who don't differentiate between the two?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 14, 2013)

Theres no political content to it though it's just self promotion. If she's an artist why doesnt she just say so?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 14, 2013)

Radical politics - an excuse for the middle-classes to get dressed up in costume and put those years of dance classes to good use.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i'm looking. It's loads of group dance exhibitions and other shite
> 
> what's this shit got to do with "activism"


 
Absolutely fuck all.

It's just a wiberal, arty circle jerk (with cash incentives for the commercially minded) that would be fine if they promoted it as such, but isn't fine at all when they try and dress it up as being meaningful activism intended to somehow benefit anybody but themselves, their bank accounts and their egos.

It's an ego trip and a chance for them to make a few quid off the backs of actual activist folk by dressing this kind of bullshit in the clothes of meaningful action, inflating their egos still further and pocketing whatever cash they can make off it in the process.

Nothing more.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 14, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Radical politics - an excuse for the middle-classes to get dressed up in costume and put those years of dance classes to good use.


 
Seen this for years in student politics and never really understood the desire to hold constant dances and flashmobs but this makes a lot of sense


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Seen this for years in student politics and never really understood the desire to hold constant dances and flashmobs but this makes a lot of sense


 
see also: Poetry slams. Street theatre. Any others that I'm missing?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 14, 2013)

http://idiommag.com/2011/04/bad-memory-interview-with-georgia-sagri/


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 14, 2013)

*GS:* Bored about what? I have no interest of expecting something to happen. It is already happening and if it doesn’t I’ll make it happen. My work _Are you ready?_ [a screensaver in which the letters in the phrase constantly de- and recompose] is not cynical in the way colonial westernized thinking understands cynicism. It is about training and processing. Tactical methods are based in training. The point here is not how to occupy the center during the event, there is no center to be occupied, but how in the moment of the event you won’t end up speaking someone else’s scripts or becoming the tool for another’s strategy. I am very concerned about how that can happen, it is a questioning. Also I am more interested of peripheral actions, the unexpected ones, the hidden when it is exploded, the unreasoning.

wait...what?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 14, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> see also: Poetry slams. Street theatre. Any others that I'm missing?


 
Ceilidhs?


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> *GS:* Bored about what? I have no interest of expecting something to happen. It is already happening and if it doesn’t I’ll make it happen. My work _Are you ready?_ [a screensaver in which the letters in the phrase constantly de- and recompose] is not cynical in the way colonial westernized thinking understands cynicism. It is about training and processing. Tactical methods are based in training. The point here is not how to occupy the center during the event, there is no center to be occupied, but how in the moment of the event you won’t end up speaking someone else’s scripts or becoming the tool for another’s strategy. I am very concerned about how that can happen, it is a questioning. Also I am more interested of peripheral actions, the unexpected ones, the hidden when it is exploded, the unreasoning.
> 
> wait...what?


 
Just mark it as pretentious rich prat talking shit.


----------



## treelover (Apr 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It means all the shite on the right here when you click on artists statement and CV. Note all the scholarships, note the bourgeois foundations that support her, note the life lived entirely within these places.


 
That's par for the course for many artists, I have a Hungarian friend who spends her non working time(she works 12 hours in bars, etc) hunting down scholarships, bursaries, etc around the world.

ah, you mean political activists/artists..


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I was thinking more about the bragging about sex, roll ups, drug use and tea drinking lol
> 
> Do Greeks even drink tea that much?


 
They're torn. They love both tea and coffee, but realise that the Turk love tea and coffee too.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 14, 2013)

love detective said:


> I would hazard a guess that Penny has hardly taken any drugs in her life - doesn't stop her desperately trying to write dramatically about it from a falsified position of being more personally involved/informed, but then again that's her all over isn't it, whatever the topic


 
She comes across as an "Anadin in a can of pepsi" kind of gal.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 14, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Verily, she is the font from which all bullshit flows...


 
I thought that was Dunked-in Shit's arse?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 14, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> This bit really wound me up. As if she's taking vengeance on the Greek police ffs.


 
I bet she "makes tea" with teabags, too!

(he said, censoriously, although hoping he hadn't insulted too many Urbanite teabag-users)


----------



## rekil (Apr 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/323265018151985152
> 
> lol


Maybe Paul Mason bought it.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> *GS:* Bored about what? I have no interest of expecting something to happen. It is already happening and if it doesn’t I’ll make it happen. My work _Are you ready?_ [a screensaver in which the letters in the phrase constantly de- and recompose] is not cynical in the way colonial westernized thinking understands cynicism. It is about training and processing. Tactical methods are based in training. The point here is not how to occupy the center during the event, there is no center to be occupied, but how in the moment of the event you won’t end up speaking someone else’s scripts or becoming the tool for another’s strategy. I am very concerned about how that can happen, it is a questioning. Also I am more interested of peripheral actions, the unexpected ones, the hidden when it is exploded, the unreasoning.
> 
> wait...what?


 
I think she's either talking (metaphorically) about doing a really big shit, or she's just talking shit. I can't decide which.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Apr 14, 2013)

love detective said:


> I would hazard a guess that Penny has hardly taken any drugs in her life - doesn't stop her desperately trying to write dramatically about it from a falsified position of being more personally involved/informed, but then again that's her all over isn't it, whatever the topic


 
LP is savvy enough to know that banging on about personal drug experiences could be the difference between a media career with slots on BBC breakfast/ this morning vs churning out tiresome drivel online/ the Guardian.


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## butchersapron (Apr 14, 2013)

Interesting that over here she = richard and judy guest, over there she =?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 15, 2013)

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1bo9lw/i_am_molly_crabapple_an_artist_who_documents/

She just comes over as so dislikeable, but also completely apolitical 

It's good to know that Laurie is familiarising herself with Proletarian culture, though...



> [–]*mollycrabapple* [S] 4 points 9 days ago (*5*|*1*)
> 
> I gross six figures a year, but expenses like giving my employees benefits chip away at that. Generally it's a matter of working for free for the righteous and charging lots to for profit places.
> If you want to marry me you have to fight Fred first


----------



## ymu (Apr 15, 2013)

Oh no, not employees chipping away at _her_ hard-earned wedge.


----------



## Belushi (Apr 15, 2013)

Overheads


----------



## ymu (Apr 15, 2013)

So unfair on the revenue, having to pay the plebs.


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## frogwoman (Apr 15, 2013)

She can go fuck herself. I hate people like this.


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## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

I reckon we should try and get her employees into the IWW (she is constitutionally barred) and case some trouble for her. In fact, that is a good idea for exposing all the parasites in the pics above and who flutter around this social circle (it used to be called occupy NY).


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## JimW (Apr 15, 2013)

She'll have mentioned that thinking it casts her in a good light if my experience of US discourse is anything to go by - i.e. "I am good boss who pays benefits" as opposed to "bad boss" who doesn't. The rebel artist indeed.


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## ymu (Apr 15, 2013)

Sounds good butchersapron, but it might depend on who the employees are? I'm guessing starry-eyed 'interns' and cheap art students who are looking for a leg up from working for her?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> For fucks sake. who in their right mind would think penny was a hero?


 
We have evidence - her commissioning editor Helen Lewis: 

"The other surprising experimental highlight was the long free verse by Laurie Penny, of this parish. Previously, I would have said that a feminist poem sounded about as appealing as a Vogon one but Penny’s scalpel-sharp observation is here complemented by some rhetorical fireworks... It could have been excruciating; instead, it’s intoxicating."


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 15, 2013)

The publishing industry is so full of nepotism ffs.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

ymu said:


> Sounds good butchersapron, but it might depend on who the employees are? I'm guessing starry-eyed 'interns' and cheap art students who are looking for a leg up from working for her?


I wasn't seriously suggesting it to be fair, i'd just like to see crabapple get told she couldn't join the IWW.


----------



## Firky (Apr 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> She can go fuck herself. I hate people like this.


 
Yeh, reading that has changed my opinion somewhat.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 15, 2013)

Firky said:


> Yeh, reading that has changed my opinion somewhat.


 
I am suspicious of some of her claims - her own website bio: "Molly Crabapple is an artist living in New York. She learned to draw in a Parisian bookstore, and once sketched her way into a Turkish jail."

But an interview reveals something more normal:



> I kept going back, and eventually went to France and England and Bulgaria, Morocco, Romania…all the fuck everywhere. I went a lot of places and spent quite a few months in Turkey, which led to the infamous being put in a Turkish jail quote.”
> Molly pauses for a second, laughing. “I think that had more to do with the Western girl thing than the drawing thing. In Turkey they have this institution called Jandarma, the military police. There’s a mandatory draft in Turkey. These boys are into the army and put in the middle of Kurdistan, with nothing to do and a population that doesn’t really like them. There’s nothing to do, there’s no war…they just sit around all day hassling people for their papers. If there was ever an argument against having a draft, Turkey is a good example.
> “One of the things Turkish boys do is watch American programs like Baywatch, which is all about how easy Western girls are. So, they see some dumb Western girl like myself mooning around, and they think ‘score!’.
> “There were a lot of Amnesty International issues at the time. There had been a civil war with the Kurds there, and Turkey doesn’t get the idea of ethnic diversity, and it’s really bad. So, if there’s a Western girl who’s just drawing they go ‘What the fuck? What’s she doing?’ They detained me for a bunch of hours, and asked me if, in the U.S., girls wore miniskirts.” Molly lets out another laugh.


 
Jandarma take people to police station cells - they operate (mostly rural) police stations and border points. To be put _in jail_ is pretty unlikely - would need a charge for sketching military facilities.


----------



## rekil (Apr 15, 2013)

> So, Helen Lewis subbed Jan Moir's attack on Stephen Gately in the Daily Mail. Figures.


Anyone see this?


----------



## ymu (Apr 15, 2013)

It does figure, but ... source?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 15, 2013)

I just want to know why she is considered a political artist, sure she makes a vague comment here or there that might be considered political, like in the above she seems sort of against conscription but she is distinctly less political than people who wouldn't ever think to refer to themselves as political.

I also like the idea that Turkish soldiers detaining a white American tourist is indicative of a lack of Turkish progress on multiculturalism.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I wasn't seriously suggesting it to be fair, i'd just like to see crabapple get told she couldn't join the IWW.


 
I want Molly to get picketed while Laurie is drinking tea in Starbucks with her.


----------



## rekil (Apr 15, 2013)

ymu said:


> It does figure, but ... source?


@adjykritik on the twitter - ('Writer and SolFed member interested in political economy and intersectional feminism. Founder of The @OccupiedTimes') linked to a source ehich appears to be a deleted twitter account.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

ymu said:


> It does figure, but ... source?


Think it came from Brooke Magnanti originally but now deleted (unless some people have wrong end of the stick, as it now appears to trace back to someone in solfed - the same one in coplikers post)


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

Now,_ at least_ one person on here is an anarchist _and_ knows Brooke Magnanti...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> work as an activist by that do they mean a full-timer in a trot party or something?


 
Working as a full timer in a trot party requires genuine political commitment so I doubt it!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> > It is already happening and *if it doesn’t I’ll make it happen*...*The point here is not how to occupy the center during the event*...


 
Might as well just come out and say something like 'for me, activism is all about self-promotion.'


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 15, 2013)

I fucking despair of anything changing with people like this using something that is destroying everyones lives as way to promote themselves and secure their place in the top table so they can actually carry on doing it. What a sorry state of affairs.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 15, 2013)

When is "ATOS - The Musical" coming out?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I fucking despair of anything changing with people like this using something that is destroying everyones lives as way to promote themselves and secure their place in the top table so they can actually carry on doing it. What a sorry state of affairs.


 
Reading stuff about intelligence operations in the labour movement during the Cold War, it makes me wonder how much of this stuff happens organically and how much is directed in some way or another, think about those scholarships...


----------



## sihhi (Apr 15, 2013)

Molly Crabapple said:
			
		

> I never worked day jobs. I always had weird gigs. So my first art thing was I convinced a coffee shop owner to let me draw his favorite jazz figures for 100 bucks. My first non-art things … I have so many of them, but I was paid by a fine artist who was doing a thing at P.S. 1. As a conceptual art piece, I was supposed to go up to people and whisper in their ears: “This is the life.” But he didn’t tell the security guards and I was almost thrown out of the place. They just thought I was a creepy stalker.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 15, 2013)

She is just awful.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

I wish that i always _just_ had weird gigs. Like Petronella Wyatt _just_ ended up a privileged sack of shit journo.

That just says it all, so dismissive, so arrogant, so unaware of the whole network of social relations that it requires to be put in place for her life to _just_ happen.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 15, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Reading stuff about intelligence operations in the labour movement during the Cold War, it makes me wonder how much of this stuff happens organically and how much is directed in some way or another, think about those scholarships...


 
There's a multi-volume book still to be written on *that* subject. Just the interconnections between various endowments and scholarships funded (either directly or indirectly) by the Congress for Cultural Freedom would fill a book.  Then you've got all the "prizes" funded by "fellow-travellers" of the US intelligence community - the at-one-remove likes of Rand, which all feeds back into the same pot of piss.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

This sort of thing: Hey, Mister, you want dirty book? (about Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders)

edit: sorry, just noticed not full essay there, let me see what i can do


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2013)

the helen lewis twitter kerfuffle is quite curious. i'd not have even noticed if all her mates hadn't suddenly started going on about it as if everyone was already aware of the details. do they assume that if you're following one of 'em, you're following them all?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

killer b said:


> the helen lewis twitter kerfuffle is quite curious. i'd not have even noticed if all her mates hadn't suddenly started going on about it as if everyone was already aware of the details. do they assume that if you're following one of 'em, you're following them all?


The hidden strings since they were at uni then interns now masters of the commentariat all together


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2013)

i just want to stab everyone involved tbh.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 15, 2013)

killer b said:


> the helen lewis twitter kerfuffle is quite curious. i'd not have even noticed if all her mates hadn't suddenly started going on about it as if everyone was already aware of the details. do they assume that if you're following one of 'em, you're following them all?


 
Yeah but they _actually know_ tony benn.


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2013)

i don't think owen has weighed in yet. only a matter of time though...


----------



## sihhi (Apr 15, 2013)

Molly Crabapple said:
			
		

> My art’s been on everything from theatre curtains to perfume bottles, children’s books and body paint. When Dirtee Hollywood approached me and gave me complete aesthetic freedom to corrupt their T-shirt line with curvaceous Victorian tarts, I was in heaven.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> My art’s been on everything from theatre curtains to perfume bottles, children’s books and body paint. When Dirtee Hollywood approached me and gave me complete aesthetic freedom to corrupt their T-shirt line with curvaceous Victorian tarts, I was in heaven.​


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

Dirtee Hollywood:



> DL: [Laughs] I was definitely hoping for celebrities to wear it, but not just any celebrity, the right celebrities that effectively market our brand, message and vision. And it absolutely helps with distribution and marketing, however at the end of the day Dirtee Hollywood is for anyone who appreciates our quality and art.


 
Laurie:



> The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord - The situationist bible; a book that was passed from hand to grimy activist hand in 1968, and remains of equal importance to today's young dissidence. A book about the nature of capitalist reality and the imagery of alienation.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


>


 




			
				Molly Crabapple said:
			
		

> I'm asking for your help to afford creating the work, renting a New York storefront, paying for supplies, staffing, gambling chips, girls to bathe in bathtubs of fake money, and six-foot-tall panels to paint. In return, you can get access to every aspect of making these giant paintings.  While I'm making Shell Game, I want you with me. I'll be keeping a backers-only blog, and livestreaming my painting sessions. Kickstarter rewards include prints, studies, watercolor drawings and concept doodles - plus fake money, prints, cameos, poker chips, brushes, studio visits, and a VIP opening to experience the art with a select cast of my favorite reprobates.
> When I finish all 9 giant paintings, I'm going to email the $8000 backers with images of all of them, and ask them to choose which one they want.  Paintings will be available on a first-come first serve basis. The Great American Bubble Machine has been snapped up by early backers.  Sorry.  But everything else will be of a similar aesthetic (large central figure, scampering crowd of surrealist animals, stage, hyper-detail, the same size, and the same quality.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

Hey molly, get into victorian opium, all the cool kids are doing it.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 15, 2013)

> Sorry, we couldn't retrieve user @helenlewis - That user does not exist


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This sort of thing: Hey, Mister, you want dirty book? (about Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders)
> 
> edit: sorry, just noticed not full essay there, let me see what i can do


 
here


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Dirtee Hollywood:
> 
> 
> 
> Laurie:


 
Can somebody get these people to fuck off now


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> here


Ta, forgot to actually look after saying i would


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Ta, forgot to actually look after saying i would


 
That's a pretty good book as well, I have been reading loads of stuff like that recently


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 15, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> There's a multi-volume book still to be written on *that* subject. Just the interconnections between various endowments and scholarships funded (either directly or indirectly) by the Congress for Cultural Freedom would fill a book. Then you've got all the "prizes" funded by "fellow-travellers" of the US intelligence community - the at-one-remove likes of Rand, which all feeds back into the same pot of piss.


 


butchersapron said:


> This sort of thing: Hey, Mister, you want dirty book? (about Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders)
> 
> edit: sorry, just noticed not full essay there, let me see what i can do


 
And this one is pretty good as well. In fact I have quite a few books about this kind of thing. I'll go and have a look.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 15, 2013)

And a decent essay on the same sort of subject here


----------



## Dan U (Apr 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> ...


 
who are the cunts who fork out money for this shit.

and how do i speak to them about the squirrels in their loft.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

Dan U said:


> who are the cunts who fork out money for this shit.
> 
> and how do i speak to them about the squirrels in their loft.


They're the sons and daughters of the rich, esp of the people who benefited from the recent dominance of financial capital. And crabapple and others have spotted a market they are going to milk for all they can.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 15, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> There's a multi-volume book still to be written on *that* subject. Just the interconnections between various endowments and scholarships funded (either directly or indirectly) by the Congress for Cultural Freedom would fill a book. Then you've got all the "prizes" funded by "fellow-travellers" of the US intelligence community - the at-one-remove likes of Rand, which all feeds back into the same pot of piss.


 
Lobster Magazine is also worth looking at on this kind of thing. Very interesting to read about 'The British American Project' and it's membership. 

This is exactly the kind of thing I have been reading about all year. Maybe I should write the book.


----------



## Dan U (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> They're the sons and daughters of the rich, esp of the people who benefited from the recent dominance of financial capital. And crabapple and others have spotted a market they are going to milk for all they can.


 
bringing down the system, one shit piece of art at a time.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 15, 2013)

Dan U said:


> who are the cunts who fork out money for this shit.


 
Middle class people who visit galleries like the Smart Clothes Gallery:







with this kind of art:


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 15, 2013)

no fuck off


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Reading stuff about intelligence operations in the labour movement during the Cold War, it makes me wonder how much of this stuff happens organically and how much is directed in some way or another, think about those scholarships...


To be honest, a good chunk of the post-war labour movement globally was established by the US - the Japanese unions for example, and they were encouraged to strike and be militant in order to push up labour costs as against those of US based capital.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 15, 2013)

two more:

Covert Network: Progressives, The International Rescue Committee and the CIA

Haven't read this one but I have seen it referenced in quite a few places, especially when David Miliband resigned as MP to join the International Rescue Committee (interesting to note that DM is also a leading member of the British American Project)

Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute

This one is interesting. Rather than an investigative outsider look at Think Tanks, this one is by one of the founders of the Adam Smith Institute, but there still some very telling bits in it

Some of the books by Peter Dale Scott are quite interesting as well.

It's quite difficult to find decent stuff about this subject, because there is such a fine line between well referenced research and 'conspiracy theory' 

I won't post any more though unless anyone is interested


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 15, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> Lobster Magazine is also worth looking at on this kind of thing. Very interesting to read about 'The British American Project' and it's membership.
> 
> This is exactly the kind of thing I have been reading about all year. Maybe I should write the book.


 
I own every copy of Lobster bar one. Was a subscriber from about issue 15.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 15, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I own every copy of Lobster bar one. Was a subscriber from about issue 15.


 


Only started reading it a few years ago. Nothing quite like it!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This sort of thing: Hey, Mister, you want dirty book? (about Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders)
> 
> edit: sorry, just noticed not full essay there, let me see what i can do


 
I once tried to map the British end of this between circa 1955-1985, but got hopelessly bogged down somewhere in the late '60s. It's such a massive subject, and (to use a massive cliche) what we know is probably the tip of a very big, very ugly iceberg.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> no fuck off


 
Careful you don't become a horrifying roommate and delay/thwart a budding revolutionary left-wing artist, see below.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

100 years after dada these clowns chase after _being an artist  _


----------



## TruXta (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> 80 years after dada these clowns chase after _being an artist  _


What makes you think dada had any impact apart from a tiny corner of popular culture? That, after all, is what these people are embroiled in. Representational art hardly died from being hit with a signed urinal either.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

TruXta said:


> What makes you think dada had any impact apart from a tiny corner of popular culture? That, after all, is what these people are embroiled in. Representational art hardly died from being hit with a signed urinal either.


Their massive influence - look at modern art for example and please try and tell me, them and the tradition they kicked off in the 20th century was only a minor influence. Secondly, what on earth makes you think that having a minor influence (as you suggest) makes dada's criticisms of the very idea of art wrong?


----------



## TruXta (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Their massive influence - look at modern art for example and please try and tell me, them and the tradition they kicked off in the 20th century was only a minor influence. Secondly, what on earth makes you think that having a minor influence (as you suggest) makes dada's criticisms of the very idea of art wrong?


A minor influence on popular culture, was what I said. Not modern art. Modern art itself is a tiny corner of popular culture IMO. Especially if you look at popular participation in and creation of said, compared to literature, music, film and TV.

I didn't comment on the value of dada's criticisms btw.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

TruXta said:


> A minor influence on popular culture, was what I said. Not modern art. Modern art itself is a tiny corner of popular culture IMO. Especially if you look at popular participation in and creation of said, compared to literature, music, film and TV.
> 
> I didn't comment on the value of dada's criticisms btw.


A massive influence on popular culture as well. And you were the one who then went onto to keep it confined to 'art'.

What made you respond in the way that you did to my post? What of it was you challenging?


----------



## TruXta (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> A massive influence on popular culture as well. And you were the one who then went onto to keep it confined to 'art'.
> 
> What made you respond in the way that you did to my post? What of it was you challenging?


 The implication that dada had killed off "the artist" of course. The artist is alive and kicking.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

TruXta said:


> The implication that dada had killed off "the artist" of course. The artist is alive and kicking.


That wasn't the implication. The artist continues. That it _shouldn't_ was the implication.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 15, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Representational art hardly died from being hit with a signed urinal either.


 
What's that to do with the price of fish? There's no reason why it should. MC's art is 90% representational. The left wing of the artist world first under Dada then far-left German USPD and KPD influence (pre-Stalinisation), then under (mostly French) Trotskyist influence had begun abandoning the idea of named artist art, whilst retaining social themes at the same time as rebellion at a middle-class art world.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That wasn't the implication. The artist continues. That it _shouldn't_ was the implication.


Oh OK. Seemed to me that you were broadly endorsing that implication - that it shouldn't. No?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

Of course it shouldn't.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 15, 2013)

And I'll leave it at that.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Then what was the point of your post that I initially quoted? Why bring dada into it?


I think that you're misreading my shouldn't. I was endorsing the implication that it shouldn't.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I think that you're misreading my shouldn't. I was endorsing the implication that it shouldn't.


See edit. (you're right)


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Now,_ at least_ one person on here is an anarchist _and_ knows Brooke Magnanti...


 
knows personally or knows professionally, as it were?


----------



## TruXta (Apr 15, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> knows personally or knows professionally, as it were?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> knows personally or knows professionally, as it were?


Trapped now - if i say professionally it means punter and i say personally it means punter. And both also mean in medical role.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 15, 2013)

i'm sure someone, somewhere, can come up with a spirited defence of pimping from the anarchist perspective.

in fact, if it hasn't already happened...  the IWW allow sex-workers in, hopefully not pimps though....


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Trapped now - if i say professionally it means punter and i say personally it means punter. And both also mean in medical role.


 
best not answer then


----------



## Firky (Apr 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I am suspicious of some of her claims - her own website bio: "Molly Crabapple is an artist living in New York. She learned to draw in a Parisian bookstore, and once sketched her way into a Turkish jail."
> 
> But an interview reveals something more normal:
> 
> ...


 
Maybe she's employed by the PKK as an artist and that is why she was jailed


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 15, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> in fact, if it hasn't already happened... the IWW allow sex-workers in, hopefully not pimps though....


 
Yes in the Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves IU 340.

So do the GMB actually.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 15, 2013)

allow pimps in?


----------



## TruXta (Apr 15, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Yes in the Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves IU 340.
> 
> So do the GMB actually.


That one that Cher set up?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 15, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> allow pimps in?


 
IWW only allow sex workers, GMB have a sex workers branch and pimps can join APEX


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 15, 2013)

a union for pimps. Lordy.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 15, 2013)

TruXta said:


> That one that Cher set up?


 
She set up the Union of Vocoder Operators and Allied Singers


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 15, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> a union for pimps. Lordy.


 
No LORDY is the Local Opportunists, Ripoff merchants, and Decietful Yoot union


----------



## J Ed (Apr 15, 2013)

https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/323785674903937024

One percent world problems


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 15, 2013)

TruXta said:


> A minor influence on popular culture, was what I said.


 
Dada had an enormous influence on popular culture, ignorant fool.

http://www.amazon.com/Lipstick-Traces-History-Twentieth-Century/dp/0674535812


----------



## TruXta (Apr 15, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Dada had an enormous influence on popular culture, ignorant fool.
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/Lipstick-Traces-History-Twentieth-Century/dp/0674535812


You wouldn't know popular culture if it fucked you up the arse, Prof. Eng. Lit.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Apr 15, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Dada had an enormous influence on popular culture, ignorant fool.
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/Lipstick-Traces-History-Twentieth-Century/dp/0674535812


 
Yes it has. But that book is shit.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 15, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> Yes it has. But that book is shit.


 
It seems dated today, but it was way ahead of its time when first published.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

It wasn't phil.


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2013)

TruXta said:


> You wouldn't know popular culture if it fucked you up the arse, Prof. Eng. Lit.


you too by the looks of it, tbf.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It wasn't phil.


 
Alright, it popularized ideas that had previously been the preserve of the avant-garde then.

Anyway the point is that Truxta is an ignorant fool.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 15, 2013)

killer b said:


> you too by the looks of it, tbf.


Just doing my bit for the beef-stew! But go on then - show me how dada has had such a tremendous influence on popular culture.


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Just doing my bit for the beef-stew! But go on then - show me how dada has had such a tremendous influence on popular culture.


fuck, I cant be arsed doing that. Just wanted to get a dig in.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 15, 2013)

killer b said:


> fuck, I cant be arsed doing that. Just wanted to get a dig in.


Fair enough YOU GIANT CUNTFACE


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2013)

Maybe later then. On my phone atm which doesn't really lend itself to lengthy discussions on art & pop culture...


----------



## TruXta (Apr 15, 2013)

killer b said:


> Maybe later then. On my phone atm which doesn't really lend itself to lengthy discussions on art & pop culture...


No rush, fella, take your time.

/scarpers


----------



## rekil (Apr 15, 2013)

Laura loves her boss, her MP and the teachers at her 30k a year school. Meet the new left everybody, a walking talking twittering void of smug obsequiousness.




			
				LauriePenny said:
			
		

> Right. My boss and my ex, both of whom I love, are scrapping painfully and publicly on Twitter. You will forgive me for backing away


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

Lewis = boss, who = ex?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

And she loves her boss. She's not getting in the IWW either.


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2013)

Stavvers is her ex I think. Certainly looks that way from the timing of tweets.


----------



## rekil (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Lewis = boss, who ex?


Dunno. There were loads of them in the row.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

_Polyinternery_


----------



## rekil (Apr 15, 2013)

It's all one big amorphous mass that feeds on our revulsion.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 15, 2013)

minor twitter earthquake. Privilges were checked. Helen Lewis deactivated her account. Louise Mensch timed it perfectly and backed Helen Lewis. Kiss of death.

Just a total mess


----------



## J Ed (Apr 15, 2013)

Notice how Laurie still hasn't written an article about Thatcher while the right-wing media is in overdrive trying to white wash her legacy, nor did she write anything about the demonisation of the welfare state over Phillpot until a BBC article said something vaguely nasty about polyandry and even then didn't comment at all on the class or social aspect of the case beyond the polyandry aspect. She still has plenty of time to congratulate herself on opposing the coalition, talk about herself as a columnist and party with millionaire artists and porn actresses in New York.

Reminds me of libertarians, really, not that bothered about opposing the government until her freedoms are threatened or an identity politics group that she is a member of is criticised. Everyone else can get fucked.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 15, 2013)

post tweets for those of us who cba to dig out old login details

Delroy Booth


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2013)

Lewis has deleted her account, so its not that easy to piece together. I did some digging at lunchtime so I think ive worked it out, but tbh its not that interesting. If no-one else has bothered ill post some when I get home.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 15, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/323785674903937024
> 
> One percent world problems


Nice to see her thank everyone that helped make it all happen. Not.


----------



## ymu (Apr 15, 2013)

A search for @helenlewis works. Shouldn't need a login for that.

Life may be too short though.


----------



## cesare (Apr 15, 2013)

Is this what kicked it off?

http://helenlewiswrites.tumblr.com/private/47859091039/tumblr_ml72547vSl1rpijql


----------



## rosecore (Apr 15, 2013)

It seems the Lewis saga revolves around her refuses to pull a Storify she made *after* the person in question apologised and wanted it removed. Stavvers made one of several polite requests that went unanswered. I guess they have a history of arguing amongst each other on Twitter over intersectionality and being sensitive to language.

http://storify.com/helenlewis/how-privilege-checking-shuts-down-discussion
http://storify.com/stavvers/my-tweets-to-helen-lewis

Blog about it: notalwaysthequietone.tumblr.com/post/48039614767/a-long-blogpost-about-the-helen-lewis-twitterstorm

Why people took issue with Lewis' Tumblr post:




> And that, to be blunt, is what I often feel when I talk about feminism online. Yesterday I saw someone mocked for not knowing that “WoC” was an acronym for “woman of colour”. (Why should they? It’s an American phrase. When did you last hear it on the _Ten O’Clock News_?)
> Others might not know whether to use BME (black and minority ethnic) or “non-white”. There are people in Britain who are not remotely transphobic but _have no idea_ that “tranny” is not acceptable to many trans people.


 

and



> One of the concepts that we find hardest as humans is the idea of a sliding scale. We feel, instinctively, there ought to be solid principles that you can hang your hat on. So: sexist, racist, homophobic language is bad. But who decides that? The affected groups themselves? What if two women have different opinions on whether something is sexist? Or, harder, what if one gay person finds a phrase homophobic and the vast majority of their non-gay friends don’t? If language is a consensus, who gets the casting vote?


http://helenlewiswrites.tumblr.com/private/47859091039/tumblr_ml72547vSl1rpijql

Seems like a dramatic Suzanne Moore Twitter de-activation plan for maximum drama. Ensuring any legitimate criticism was simply referred to trolling and Lewis was "shouted off" Twitter. (Pretty sure Moran said that).


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2013)

cesare said:


> Is this what kicked it off?
> 
> http://helenlewiswrites.tumblr.com/private/47859091039/tumblr_ml72547vSl1rpijql


No, although thats what her friends are trying to make out.


----------



## cesare (Apr 15, 2013)

killer b said:


> No, although thats what her friends are trying to make out.


What kicked it off then?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

I'm not reading any of that shit. Everyone involved in whatever it is means nothing. No offence rose.

Still interested in the moir thing.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 15, 2013)

For those who don't want to trawl though twitter looking up this controversy Helen Lewis wrote this http://helenlewiswrites.tumblr.com/private/47859091039/tumblr_ml72547vSl1rpijql about the culture of aggressive language policing and so forth that we've discussed on here before. A couple of people who are well into privilige checking objected to the article, presumably one of which is Laurie's ex although I don't actually care enough to look it up personally, which led to some in Lewis's journo mileu jumping on top of them accusing them of bullying her. She deactivates twitter account. Accusations of her bullying intensify. This take on it here is worth a read http://notalwaysthequietone.tumblr....g-blogpost-about-the-helen-lewis-twitterstorm Like with other shitstorms I'm left looking at it wanting both sides to lose. Which they do. The accusation of bullying is a bit OTT in my opinion, someone with Lewis's position in the professional media with pals to stick up for her is in a much stronger position to dish out the abuse than a few random twitter people fond of privilige checking. Bullying in this case is "not agreeing fully with my beliefs" which we've seen before too from journo's. And I say that as someone who's generally not very keen on privilige theory or owt, just basing that on how these twitter spats tend to work. http://chillercold.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/how-to-survive-being-wrong-on-the-internet/ This got linked up in the mileu, clearly well-intentioned but I think is an example of the problem. Really obtuse language, there's a problematic and an intersectionality and in the end it reads like a collection of buzzwords thrown together to say in 2,000 words something that could feasilbly be said in 500*, in language that's much easier to understand. I can't be the only person in the world who wants to claw his own eyeballs out at the prose. This is without making any indepth pronouncements about the validity of intersectionality or whatever.

Laurie Penny's backing out because she doesn't want to bite the hand that feeds, unlike most of the people angry at Helen Lewis she's been smart enough to build a career out of paying lipservice radical intersectionality and naturally doesn't want to fuck that up by attacking her own boss, but on the other hand doesn't want to lose what's left of her cred in those circles by publically sticking up for her. Remember, her career (for now) depends on her being "the voice of the new generation" they can't continue to spin that if even her own crowd don't like her. An undercurrent here is some don't like her because, like has been said on here before, some of 'em would bite your leg off to be a commentisfree hack just like Laurie. To go to Greece and live that life etc. And it's not like she hasn't deliberately built that audience up by writing what she does, so an article about Greece becomes a mini-story about herself and who got off with who with politics as a backdrop. Time to move on?

* edit to acknowledge Penny-esque levels of self-awareness


----------



## rosecore (Apr 15, 2013)

> *Alex Andreou* ‏@*sturdyAlex*  2h
> Soon, the left-leaning UK contingency of Twitter, will be three idiots telling each other off for using ANY actual words.
> 
> *Alex Andreou* ‏@*sturdyAlex*  2h
> @*bc_tmh* I read the piece in question. I agree with it and RT'd it. She is a colleague and a friend and I stand by her totally.


 
Missing the point somewhat.


----------



## ymu (Apr 15, 2013)

Life is, most definitely, too short.


----------



## rosecore (Apr 15, 2013)

That Tumblr piece was not the issue, the Storify was. Surprised Lewis still hasn't removed it.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 15, 2013)

handbags and shitbags then


----------



## JimW (Apr 15, 2013)

Not related, but Mary Beard got some right loathsome shit off AN Wilson (was it? they all meld into one) for daring to be an older woman on his telly.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 15, 2013)

JimW said:


> Not related, but Mary Beard got some right loathsome shit off AN Wilson (was it? they all meld into one) for daring to be an older woman on his telly.


 
AA Gill


----------



## JimW (Apr 15, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> AA Gill


I should delete my false accusation and apologise but I'm trying to up my social media profile by becoming the centre of a twitter-storm


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Still interested in the moir thing.


 
Is this is the rumour that Helen Lewis sub-edited Jan Moir's infamous article on the death of Stephen Gately from Boyzone?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

Can anyone point out a one of them who is not oxbridge?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Is this is the rumour that Helen Lewis sub-edited Jan Moir's infamous article on the death of Stephen Gately from Boyzone?


Catch up. Yes.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 15, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Is this is the rumour that Helen Lewis sub-edited Jan Moir's infamous article on the death of Stephen Gately from Boyzone?


 
If that has any basis in reality why is she already not a persona non grata?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

J Ed said:


> If that has any basis in reality why is she already not a persona non grata?


Because no one has backed it up yet.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 15, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> handbags and shitbags then


 
That your poor old grandad had to sweat to buy you.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

It seems odd, diff papers.


----------



## ymu (Apr 15, 2013)

JimW said:


> Not related, but Mary Beard got some right loathsome shit off AN Wilson (was it? they all meld into one) for daring to be an older woman on his telly.


AA Gill. He does it every few months. Creepy cunt. *shudders*

I think there was a whole gang of them hurling abuse when she was last on Question Time. Really nasty shit. She deals with it remarkably well.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 15, 2013)

Pretty sure Molly Crabapple on Jezebel is Molly Crabapple:

comment fits in with her bio of having visited Turkey and Morocco:



> Middle Eastern street harassment is an entirely different breed of harassment than US harassment. US harassment involves being called "mamacita" or "nice tits" or told to smile on command. It's the occasional ass grab, creepy look, or, possibly, a guy rubbing against you on the subway. It sucks. We all get it alot, especially in summer. But its manageable.
> Harrassment in Turkey and Morocco (what I've personally experienced, and this was while dressed extremely modestly) involved being followed for hours. It involves packs of guys stalking you, not leaving you alone even if you scream at them. It involves constant, screaming declarations of love, and sexual propositions. It involves being heavily groped every time you're in a crowd. You feel like you're walking a gauntlet when you go out, and if you stop on a park bench or at a cafe, dudes converge on you. It involves everyone, including cops you're reporting a theft to, and guys who you thought you were having nice, platonic, 10 minute talks with, assuming you're available to fuck, and jumping on you accordingly.


 
Also Obama supporter in 2008:


> A few hundred for Obama 9/23/08 5:29pm


 
Interestingly in terms of anti-capitalist action and ideas, here defending  "booth babes".
[Ugly convention derived from the 1950s onwards - young women hired on single contracts for trade/business/culture fairs or shows (without any experience/position in said industry) to try and attract visitors to a particular booth and sale]




			
				Molly Crabapple said:
			
		

> I've both worked at a booth babe and hired a ton of booth babes to promote my table at comics conventions, and here are my thoughts.
> 1. It's very hard work to be perky and knowledgeable after 12 hours of dealing with the socially inept while wearing uncomfortable shoes.
> 
> 2. Being a booth babe isn't a terrible job. It's usually 15-20 bucks an hour, which is twice what you make at a retail job. And, maybe I was an exceedingly stupid girl, but as I remember, there aren't alot of good jobs for 18-21 year olds. Since you're young, you don't have a degree and you usually don't have much in the ways of skills and experience. So you end up doing shitty service industry jobs for crap pay. Thank god you can at least use your youthful good looks to get out of that. Then, as you get older you pick up skills, get your degree, and outgrow the "hot chick" jobs. I'm happy I'm no longer working any naked model/booth babe/gogo dancer/club chick jobs, but man am I glad they were there to save me from McDonalds.
> ...


 
As you get older you pick up skills, get your degree, and outgrow the "hot chick" jobs.


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2013)

cesare said:


> What kicked it off then?


Rosecore has it the right way round as far as I can tell.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

It's all made up mate. It's fantasy. It's alt-capitalism with cultural capital as kickstarter point. It's hideous, so hideous.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> As you get older you pick up skills, get your degree, and outgrow the "hot chick" jobs.


 
Well, duh, everyone else is just lazy. She's got hers, why ain't you got yours?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 15, 2013)

copliker said:


> Laura loves her boss, her MP and the teachers at her 30k a year school. Meet the new left everybody, a walking talking twittering void of smug obsequiousness.


 
Also loves other people's MPs like David Lammy




			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> I would vote for him in any election you care to mention, because he’s an uniquely talented politican who cares about the poor and the disenfranchised and the young and the desperate almost as much as he cares about stroking his own ego, and that’s a hell of a lot.


----------



## love detective (Apr 15, 2013)

killer b said:


> Rosecore has it the right way round as far as I can tell.


 
Even after reading all those explanations I still don't have a clue what has happened and who it has happened to

And is there really someone called Mary Beard? It shouldn't be funny, but it is


----------



## J Ed (Apr 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Also loves other people's MPs like David Lammy


 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2013/apr/10/margaret-thatcher-mps-pay-tribute-live

Lammy says he also spent time when he was growing up in Peterborough. [He was at a choir school there.] In Peterborough he met people who were inspired by Thatcher, he says. They got the "Tell Sid" brochures and took up her invitation to buy shares.

There were two great revolutions in the twentieth century, he says. The first was about spreading personal freedom, and that is associated with Nelson Mandela. But the second was about spreading economic freedom, and Thatcher was at the heart of that.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

Beard is private school oxbridge type on the BBC train - got some grief from other posh people.


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2013)

love detective said:


> Even after reading all those explanations I still don't have a clue what has happened and who it has happened to
> 
> And is there really someone called Mary Beard? It shouldn't be funny, but it is


if I can be arsed I'll post when I get home. Beard is that white haired tv historian all the left liberals love.


----------



## JimW (Apr 15, 2013)

Rather a Mary Beard who has at least bothered to have an academic career than a Dan Snow who is just his father's son, you ultra-leftist deviationists  Communism will of course see us all pedalling around Rome interpreting the gravestones.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It's all made up mate. It's fantasy. It's alt-capitalism with cultural capital as kickstarter point. It's hideous, so hideous.


 
How is the cultural capital built up? Why some but not others? 

LP is prominent in discussing the future of anticapitalists see her appearances on "Novara, the Resonance FM discussion show on anarchism, anti-capitalism and the future of the left".

She does consider Molly Crabapple an important inspiration as here: 
"Naomi Klein, the writer Bonnie Greer, the brave young women of Pussy Riot, Arundhati Roy, the comedian Josie Long, Selma James, the screenwriter Lena Dunham, the French feminist Valerie Solanas, the British writer Nina Power – am I allowed to say Annie Lennox, MIA and Lady Gaga? –  and of course Molly Crabapple, an artist and total badass with whom I co-authored my latest book, Discordia"



love detective said:


> Has this been posted yet about Molly Crabapple?
> She raised $65,000 from devotees on the internet so she could paint 9 pictures
> edit: and the money was raised in just three days from initial appeal


 
This post from June last year is what got opened at the Smarter Clothes Gallery a few days ago. The kickstarter lovedective linked to features this _ironic redbaiting _as part of the Q+A:



> _Q: Is Shell Game dirty commie pinko propaganda?_
> A: Maybe a little. But you'll find the same scampering fat cats, tentacles, and surreal details that are always in my work. So my fans who could care less about world affairs should still like it.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> How is the cultural capital built up? Why some but not others


 
Because it 's effectively the same as money +time.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 15, 2013)

I make no comment. I merely link you to this guardian story:



> "Blood and sperm. The perfect mix," says a tattooed hippy, as he licks both off his hands, having just had sex with a woman in front of a small audience in a Berlin basement. "Life-giving fluids we are all so afraid of. We're so afraid of ourselves! It's all organic." It's not everyone's idea of popular entertainment, but this scene can be experienced at a safe distance in a new documentary, F*ck for Forest, detailing the activities of the group of the same name (without the asterisk). They enjoy confronting society with sex, nudity and bodily fluids, but what Fuck for Forest (FFF) really want to do is save the world. So this isn't just pervy performance art; it's also fundraising.


 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/11/green-sex-activists-documentary?INTCMP=SRCH


----------



## sihhi (Apr 15, 2013)

Part of it could be explained by us relying on institutions capitalist in structure in left-wing media/intellectual culture (Morning Star, New Left Review, Verso, Zer0, New Statesman - all of it).

So after Zer0 giving an advance for LP. This guy Dan Franklin -  Random House's digital publisher - essentially gave a special kind of advance - advance with travel money to visit Greece.



> 2. What has been your biggest achievement in your career so far?
> 
> ...Actually, the last two things I’ve worked on, A Clockwork Orange for iPad and Discordia by Laurie Penny and Molly Crabapple – and publishing them either side of the same weekend – that was an achievement!
> 
> ...


 
Random House gives one of the most important episodes of the worldwide post-2008 recession, and the history of the EU to 2 people who don't speak any Greek and visit for between 3-5 days.

It's not impossible to find a young Greek woman keeping a diary asking her to trim it down, someone else to add a bit of explanation for a specifically British audience and have someone translate it.
Random House a capitalist institution - its concerns are _marketing to the left_ market not actual usefulness to the left or truth or plain non-metaphor writing.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Pretty sure Molly Crabapple on Jezebel is Molly Crabapple:
> 
> comment fits in with her bio of having visited Turkey and Morocco:
> 
> ...


 
This is horrible mate just horrible


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It's not impossible to find a young Greek woman keeping a diary asking her to trim it down, someone else to add a bit of explanation for a specifically British audience and have someone translate it.
> Random House a capitalist institution - its concerns are _marketing to the left_ market not actual usefulness to the left or truth or plain non-metaphor writing.


 
all the publishing houses are like that tho ...


----------



## weepiper (Apr 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> As you get older you pick up skills, get your degree, and outgrow the "hot chick" jobs.


 
Good lord.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 15, 2013)

rosecore said:


> It seems the Lewis saga revolves around her refuses to pull a Storify she made *after* the person in question apologised and wanted it removed. Stavvers made one of several polite requests that went unanswered. I guess they have a history of arguing amongst each other on Twitter over intersectionality and being sensitive to language.
> 
> http://storify.com/helenlewis/how-privilege-checking-shuts-down-discussion
> http://storify.com/stavvers/my-tweets-to-helen-lewis
> ...


 
Why is this important? Its just people arguing on the internet? I dont understand why this has to become a major issue of the day.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 15, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I make no comment. I merely link you to this guardian story:
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/11/green-sex-activists-documentary?INTCMP=SRCH


 
am looking forward to that film. watching some idiot hippies go lord of the flies in the jungle should be a giggle.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 15, 2013)

Why would they think that anyone outside the narrow medium of a few tens of their twitter followers want to know about their arguments on the internet? When butchers calls articul8 a cunt (or vice versa) it isn't front page news in the new statesman and the guardian is it, and this is exactly the same thing, so wtf!


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 15, 2013)

Storm in a Starbucks' teacup, anyone?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Good lord.


 
some of us still get the hot chick jobs


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Why is this important? Its just people arguing on the internet? I dont understand why this has to become a major issue of the day.


 
I don't get it it either. I have been trying.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 15, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> Storm in a Starbucks' teacup, anyone?


 

Agitators all round


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 15, 2013)

Imagine seeing this headline at the front page of the guardian: "Butchers slates articul8 in multi-thread forum "auto-labourism" debacle"

It would never happen would it! But they're quite happy to report their own twitter spats as if they are news ffs


----------



## Firky (Apr 15, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I make no comment. I merely link you to this guardian story:
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/11/green-sex-activists-documentary?INTCMP=SRCH


 
That's what happens when hippies or left alone - they go feral.


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Why is this important? Its just people arguing on the internet? I dont understand why this has to become a major issue of the day.


it isn't important. but it's a vaguely interesting look into their world. and the lewis / penny / david allen green / moran etc axis of tweeters has far more than just tens of followers, hence why it's blown up.

one thing: looks to me that lewis is desperately trying to alter the narrative of this bollocks to her being driven off twitter for writing an article mildly critical of intersectionality or whatever, rather than that of her misrepresenting some kid and being called out on it, then throwing her toys out of the pram - the moran tweet (Registering my strongest possible unhappiness that Helen Lewis has been screamed off Twitter for writing this: http://helenlewiswrites.tumblr.com/private/47859091039/tumblr_ml72547vSl1rpijql…) has been retweeted by pretty much all the usual suspects - and as you can see from this thread, it seems to have been accepted by most casual observers.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 15, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Good lord.


 
don't want to push it too far but there is a nasty undertone to this comment of hers to another poster on a comment thread about 'Girls Gone Wild' payment (comments are confusing - hard to follow - but she is the one posting here - comment seems to be cut off halfway through):




			
				Molly Crabapple said:
			
		

> And if a smart chick does show her boobs to GGW or make out with her best friend for attention? So what! It doesn't take away from her IQ or ability to get shit done. Sexiness (even tanned, Maxim sexiness) is not incompatable with smarts. The only people who are negatively affected by this are women too dumb to monetize their hotness or cultivate anything about themselves besides being hot. Most women (like most men) are never going to be astrophysicists. It's more productive to give financial and media support to articulate, brilliant


----------



## J Ed (Apr 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> don't want to push it too far but there is a nasty undertone to this comment of hers to another poster on a comment thread about 'Girls Gone Wild' payment (comments are confusing - hard to follow - but she is the one posting here - comment seems to be cut off halfway through):


 
This is just awful. "Monetize their hotness"? This isn't left-wing politics, this is Thatcherism with brothels.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 15, 2013)

crabapple said:
			
		

> The only people who are negatively affected by this are women too dumb to monetize their hotness or cultivate anything about themselves besides being hot


----------



## Spoon decker (Apr 15, 2013)

La plus ca change...

From 1978: EP Thompson's "Poverty of Theory" attacking Althusser for, in effect, reducing Marxism to a  self-indulgent brand of cultural criticism...

I can understand why one might see the following as retaining contemporary relevance:

[Althusserian/Critical Theory]....has now lodged itself in a a particular social couche, the bourgeois lumpen-intelligentsia: aspirant intellectuals, whose amateurish intellectual preparation disarms them before manifest absurdities and elementary philosophical blunders, and whose innocence in intellectual practice leaves them paralyzed in the first web of scholastic argument which they encounter; and bourgeois, because while many of them would like to be 'revolutionaries,' they themselves are the products of a particular 'conjuncture' which has broken the circuits between intellectuality and practical experience (both in real political movements and in the actual segregation imposed by contemporary institutional structures), and hence they are able to perform imaginary revolutionary psycho-dramas (in which each outbids the other in adopting ferocious verbal postures) while in fact falling back upon a very old tradition of bourgeois elitism....
http://home.ku.edu.tr/~mbaker/CSHS503/ThompsonPovertyofTheory.pdf pp3/4




Although Ms Penny and her milieu represent a particularly egregious and nauseating example of pseudo-radical dilettantism, there's nothing new about them. They are simply the most recent incarnation of the phenomenon. Each generation distinguishes itself by a) outdoing their forebears in the extremity of their radicalism b) denouncing said forebears as bourgeois useful idiots. Helen Lewis (didn't her name have two barrels once?) seems to have been recast as 'middle-aged', out of the loop and an unwitting stooge of the patriarchy...which seems a bit unfair tbh. Not that she didn't have it coming...so fuck her. Who the fuck is she anyway? A while back she was writing breathless bollocks about video games...and, now, all of a sudden, she's a political analyst and leftish stalwart?


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2013)

jesus. that's like something drews girlfriend would say.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 15, 2013)

What a horrible piece of work she is.


----------



## Firky (Apr 15, 2013)

killer b said:


> jesus. that's like something drews girlfriend would say.


 
Have you not read it? It's really ugly:



> the other ladies are interchangeable bleached blondes with fake tits or empty-headed brunettes with long, flowing hair.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 15, 2013)

I tried to monetize my hotness once, didn't work though.


----------



## killer b (Apr 15, 2013)

ah,_ that's_ what that picture was about. i get it now.


----------



## JimW (Apr 15, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I tried to monetize my hotness once, didn't work though.


Both turned out to be illusions by your analysis was it, Phil?


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 15, 2013)

JimW said:


> Both turned out to be illusions by your analysis was it, Phil?


 
I'll monetize it yet so I will.


----------



## JimW (Apr 15, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I'll monetize it yet so I will.


There's a joke about interest in here somewhere but I'm failing to come up with it.


----------



## Thora (Apr 15, 2013)

So what did Helen Lewis actually write that got her into trouble?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 15, 2013)

Firky said:


> Have you not read it? It's really ugly:


 
That's not her that's Jezebel's Jessica G.

But the "monetize hotness" (sorry) thing is something that MC started doing 2006 onwards see here NSFW some images there


Then an Obama supporter in 2007/2008








But then started adapting harder left imagery from 2008 onwards





even whilst receiving sponsorship from Whitelines (like the US version of Daler Rowney - major art-paper manufacturing firm).






Heavy use of the DDR Latin American guerila Tamara / SLA Patty Hearst black beret - but with a personalised art school business badge







Straight through to outright anarcho-syndicalist features in lots of details - with lots of borrowings from protest movements 'Live Your Greece in Myth' again (see earlier posts)


----------



## Greebo (Apr 15, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I'll monetize it yet so I will.


In your dreams.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 15, 2013)

bit fash


----------



## Balbi (Apr 15, 2013)

Is that an actual thing?


----------



## Spoon decker (Apr 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> bit fash



Not really. Even the fash can spell "propaganda" 
Bit of a fail for a 'political artist'.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 15, 2013)

I know it's obviously not as bad but this Molly Crabapple stuff is like socialist blackface isn't it?


----------



## weepiper (Apr 15, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I know it's obviously not as bad but this Molly Crabapple stuff is like socialist blackface isn't it?


 
Yes. Taking the piss out of us by dressing up as us for lols and money.


----------



## JimW (Apr 15, 2013)

Why the misspelling of propaganda? It's not like some pun on prop works better with "propoganda". Inquiring minds really couldn't give a fuck, tho.


----------



## andysays (Apr 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


>


 
So how do you orgainse a spontaneous act, exactly?


----------



## weepiper (Apr 15, 2013)

JimW said:


> Why the misspelling of propaganda? It's not like some pun on prop works better with "propoganda". Inquiring minds really couldn't give a fuck, tho.


 
I think she's just not very good at spelling. See 'organziing' above


----------



## sihhi (Apr 15, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I know it's obviously not as bad but this Molly Crabapple stuff is like socialist blackface isn't it?


 
But MC is vehemently opposed to those who take 'art' (slogans, graffiti art, illustrations, symbols and metaphors) from working-class traditions to re-package it for other middle-class consumers.

See here in full flow




			
				Molly Crabapple said:
			
		

> I can never get behind Lichtenstein. It's just cultural appropriation of comic art, that's lauded by the same people who dismiss illustrators as talentless hacks. If the people who he stole his images from were getting the applause and credit, that would be great. However, taking something that working class, underpaid people who were often stripped of their copyright did, and recontextualizing it to sell it to the same people who sneer at them is just crap.


 
I dislike Roy Lichtenstein intensely, but it's not _just_ cultural appropriation of comic art - the "copies" are specific limp-liberal anti-war _transformations_ of the very worst militarist jingoistic bilge e.g. DC Comics' All-American Men of War is carefully changed into Whaam! in 1962 and other works too- he does the comic book stuff for around 5 years from 1960-1965. What's the argument that comic book illustrators should also receive payment for his sales?

Goodness knows but it's clear that MC is following the exact same formula of the very worst of the pop artists in trying to create an artist brand in all areas of cultural reproduction (high art - the Laurie Penny tableau, murals, all sorts of textiles, pop up books, sketching books, colouring-in books, copiable prints, videos of producing the art, life drawing classes, meeting the artist or an offshoot in the shape of a "booth babe",  bottle design, nightclub sets, pins, badges, trinkets all the way up to fake money and named artist-focused performance art):

The aim is to create an artist-led Empire




with a stylised trademark - bubbles for joining or ending discrete objects, smooth curvy shapes for human form, squiggly lettering or snail spiral squiggles - that can then be sold for $50 a pop





or cartoon versions of animals at $225 a pop - reduced price


----------



## Firky (Apr 16, 2013)

Hashtags and @ twitter on everyfingthing.


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## J Ed (Apr 16, 2013)

.


----------



## rekil (Apr 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> This is just awful. "Monetize their hotness"? This isn't left-wing politics, this is Thatcherism with brothels.


Monetize Your Trotness.


----------



## love detective (Apr 16, 2013)

someone should tweet laurie penny something about how some women are too dumb to capitalise on their physical/youthful look and see if she agrees or disagrees


----------



## Balbi (Apr 16, 2013)

Common People with an etsy account. Jarvis won't be happy.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 16, 2013)

It really is the 'rebel sell' writ large. Be edgy enough to stand out from other fame-hungry wannabes, but not so edgy that whatever you're pushing won't appeal to mainstream buyers. Purport to have meaningful political convictions, but don't let those deeply-held convictions stop you from picking up lucrative commercial opportunities. Be just meaningful enough to have the hipster crowd and well-meaning wiberals think you're deep and thoughtful, but don't be so meaningful that they have to think more than it takes them to sign your cheques. Throw those ingreditents into the publicity pot, add lashings of assiduous self-promotion while purporting to be overwhelmingly shy or maybe a little dismissive (not so dismissive that people don't buy your product), attend the right events and be seen with the right people, quote the right philosophers, artists, writers and song lyrics and, presto, a nice, lucrative career with the added bonus of perpetual adoration from people who don't spot that you're as shiny as a Bangkok Rolex and about as genuine.


----------



## rosecore (Apr 16, 2013)

Nothing sells 'your' revolution better than re-appropriating art you saw in that comic book that promoted Alan Moore's vision of anarchism.

Anyone seen the film Chasing Amy? The character of Hooper X (despite being a gay black man) feels he needs to sell the image of militancy to promote his comic book 'White Hating Coon'. As he must sell the image to sell the book. I see a similar business model.


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## Balbi (Apr 16, 2013)

"What's a nubian?"


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

_Monetzie your hotness_






_The rest of you empty-headed fucks don't deserve to be considered._


----------



## rosecore (Apr 16, 2013)

Motonize the revolution.


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## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

_i'm all about that money_


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## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

_The change of form, C—M—C, by which the circulation of the material products of labour is brought about, requires that a given value in the shape of a commodity shall begin the process, and shall, also in the shape of a commodity, end it. The movement of the commodity is therefore a circuit. On the other hand, the form of this movement precludes a circuit from being made by the money. The result is not the return of the money, but its continued removal further and further away from its starting-point. So long as the seller sticks fast to his money, which is the transformed shape of his commodity, that commodity is still in the first phase of its metamorphosis, and has completed only half its course. But so soon as he completes the process, so soon as he supplements his sale by a purchase, the money again leaves the hands of its possessor. It is true that if the weaver, after buying the Bible, sell more linen, money comes back into his hands. But this return is not owing to the circulation of the first 20 yards of linen; that circulation resulted in the money getting into the hands of the seller of the Bible. The return of money into the hands of the weaver is brought about only by the renewal or repetition of the process of circulation with a fresh commodity, which renewed process ends with the same result as its predecessor did. Hence the movement directly imparted to money by the circulation of commodities takes the form of a constant motion away from its starting-point, of a course from the hands of one commodity-owner into those of another. This course constitutes its currency (cours de la monnaie).    _


----------



## rosecore (Apr 16, 2013)

> Debate watch party & Molly Crabapple viewing (Debate Watch Party - old)
> On October 15th, the Museum of Sex is doing a special viewing of "Politics" by Molly Crabapple. After you see the art, you can watch the presidential debates the way god intended- on a big screen, surrounded by sexy friends.
> 
> If you're suffering election fatigue, you can wield your pencils instead, drawing the beautiful Gal Friday in a patriotic Dr. Sketchy's event hosted by none other than Molly Crabapple.


Making the politics of Obama sexy. (2008). https://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gshxg3


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## Balbi (Apr 16, 2013)

It's a bit, or it's a lot, like a local arts scene decided to have a go at McDonalds corporatism.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 16, 2013)

rosecore said:


> you saw in that comic book that promoted Alan Moore's vision of anarchism.


 
Good spot hadn't noticed it myself but yes, here with a nod to Black Bloc:






the masks reappear in lots of details:







In terms of Lichtenstein style copying with stylisation, lots of MC's art is straight stylisation from photographs






from this famous photograph






Is the MC dividing line it's OK to copy from photos but not from comics - it's very hard to pin down a line.

Most of the thinking seems to be _about the artist_, not the production except in so far as it is raise money from the pool of admirers - cut out the middle man of galleries and foundations - once completed the produced art can be placed anywhere like galleries or protest sites like OWS.




> “Art is often raised on the back of wealth, and wealth is often raised on immorality.” — Molly Crabapple, SXSW 2013


 
This is analysing a discussion about new funding techniques.



> Also speaking at SXSW was the artist and writer Molly Crabapple, who spoke with the musician Kim Boekbinder on the panel ‘Hacking the Crowd: Artists as Entrepreneurs’. Crabapple, like Palmer, is one of crowdsourcing’s pioneers, having funded numerous art projects through Kickstarter, most recently Shell Game, which (rather ironically, for an exhibition of paintings themed around the global financial meltdown) raised $63,000, doubling its initial goal. Crabapple, one sometimes feels, revels in confusing superficial onlookers—a radical artist shouldn’t have a mercenary sensibility about their career, at least not openly. But as Crabapple put it, “as any strawberry picker can tell you, hard work and nothing else is a fast road to nowhere.”
> Crabapple has no problem asking fans for financial assistance, because as anyone who has gruesome knowledge of the gallery system and its related parasites will know, the alternative is none too different: standing in front people in suits, asking for money. As she said at 2011’s Cusp Conference in Chicago, “The other thing that Week In Hell [another Kickstarter project of Crabapple’s] and other crowdfunded art projects are doing is they’re making art collecting an egalitarian endeavour. One of the big things that galleries have over individual artists is they have access to people with money. I don’t know people who can drop fifty thousand dollars…”
> Crabapple also challenged those romantic conceptions of how an artist should conduct themselves (usually formulated by people who aren’t artists), and articulated why such engagement what necessary in an arena like crowdsourcing. “That sort of evil, internet-obsessed, constantly self-marketing career-bot thing is what allows you to do work without the constraints of dealing with an institutional client, or without the constraints of dealing with a museum or a corporation.”


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

rosecore said:


> Making the politics of Obama sexy. (2008).https://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gshxg3


Making _partiotism_ hip.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

Balbi said:


> It's a bit, or it's a lot, like a local arts scene decided to have a go at McDonalds corporatism.


Whilst being sponsored by burger-king and saying that it's all about becoming macdonalds and crowding out any public visibility for any other perspective.

Filth. Pure fucking filth. And this isn't just a question of differing politics as with Owen Jones, this is about _values_.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 16, 2013)

She is very sexy, even though her politics is a turn off.  It's making my head hurt


----------



## rosecore (Apr 16, 2013)

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects...-game-an-art-show-about-the-financial-meltdow

She obviously has some rich fans to get $8,000 and $5,000 donations.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

articul8 said:


> She is very sexy, even though her politics is a turn off. It's making my head hurt


Oh god.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 16, 2013)

She's attractive, as long as you completely take out the context of how she lives her life and the things she does.

So, you know, completely judging her on her looks, phwoar 

Just like Maggie was just an old lady and is worthy of respect for that, Molly's worth a leer. Fucks sake!


----------



## rosecore (Apr 16, 2013)

Molly Crabapple: for the generation that discovered anarchism from the V for Vendetta movie.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 16, 2013)

rosecore said:


> Molly Crabapple: for the generation that discovered anarchism in V for Vendetta.


 
The film version /


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

It ain't much more sophisticated in the graphic novel to be fair.


----------



## rosecore (Apr 16, 2013)

Balbi said:


> The film version /


I love the graphic novel, but it really did not tell me a great deal about anarchism.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Filth. Pure fucking filth. And this isn't just a question of differing politics as with Owen Jones, this is about _values_.


 
That's pretty harsh, I think their values are similar - both OJ and MC ride above the work of others to 'popularise' (or 'make accessible') 'movements' to middle-class audiences.

It is confusing because it's harder to pin down MC's ideas. Here's the closest from 2012 introducing the Shell Game - after the wave of radicalisation visiting Britain, Spain, Greece, being arrested on the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street:

http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/mar/15/comment-medici-crowd

(droput of state school means dropout from an art school/art university)




> Plus, galleries scared me. I was the dropout of a rather cruddy state school. I had a past as a fetish model. I didn't dress right or talk right or have the right degrees. Academic art writing made me squirm. Worse, I worked as an illustrator, which in the mainstream art world was like a neon stamp of "Not Legit" on my forehead.
> So I found myself with fourteen thousand twitter followers and a brain punch-drunk on ideas that I wanted to express while they were still relevant. The snot-nosed punk kid inside of me said this: Fuck it. Stop asking for permission. Do it yourself.


 



> We're living in a time where the structures around artistic endeavor are, for better or worse, mutating. Record labels, newspapers, publishing houses, and movie studios are collapsing like flan left in the heat. Yet in many ways, the art world has remained the same. This is because only a relatively small amount of people can afford to buy original art, and only a select few galleries have access to these people.
> Banksy, the British street artist, says it best: "The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires."
> Government projects like the WPA once allayed some of this. But arts funding is now a joke in the US, and the specialized skill and language that goes into applying for grants is so labor intensive to acquire that you're often better off just working a dayjob.


 



> Rewards from each category were bundled together into packages, so that someone who donated $20 got livestreams (access), and fake money I designed (art object). The plan was met with some skepticism. Most people asked what I would do with the paintings if they didn't sell. That didn't concern me.  I just wanted to be able to make them without going broke. When I pressed the launch button on Shell Game's Kickstarter. I feared a rather public failure. But after a few compulsive days on Twitter, and with the signal amplification of some friends with large followings, I had raised fifty thousand dollars. Fuck yeah gold and glittering art. Fuck yeah populism.


 
All fine OK but the conclusion explains that the only innovation is for _named artists who already have a name following_



> My plan for crowd-funding art isn't for everyone. Buying and selling diamond encrusted skulls will probably remain the domain of the 1%. But for working artists like me, who have a substantial following that isn't made of millionaires, this may be just as good an option as chasing gallery approval.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

**


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That's pretty harsh, I think their values are similar - both OJ and MC ride above the work of others to 'popularise' (or 'make accessible') 'movements' to middle-class audiences.
> 
> It is confusing because it's harder to pin down MC's ideas. Here's the closest from 2012 introducing the Shell Game - after the wave of radicalisation visiting Britain, Spain, Greece, being arrested on the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street:
> 
> ...


 
I think you've just given a fair representation of her values across the last two pages - and i don't think it's to popularise radical ideas, it's to use radical ideas to popularise herself. It's about as reactionary and pro-status quo position as it's possible to come to - and to do it through the _guise_ of artist...in 2013?


----------



## cesare (Apr 16, 2013)

I think they're trying to create a modern day Bloomsbury Group


----------



## sihhi (Apr 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I think you've just given a fair representation of her values across the last two pages - and i don;t think it's to popularise radical ideas, it's to use radical ideas to popularise herself. It's about as reactionary and pro-status quo position as it's possible to come to - and to do in through the _guise_ of artist...in 2013?


 
could well say the same thing of Owen Jones - what do his writing and calls for a movement of Labour(-led)-Trotsykists-Greens-Nats actually mean? Who is _Chavs_ really for? It's not to popularise radical ideas, it's to use radical ideas to popularise OJ. 
A movement like Owen wants will cement the position of figures like him. 
OJ is doing it through the guise of journalist/rabble-rouser (and Labour Party has a union link!)... in 2013?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 16, 2013)

Owen Jones backs conferences at the QE2 Centre in Westminster £8 minimum entry for one day.

This is Molly Crabapple at the Hyatt in Austin Texas for the SXSW festival.







As part of the festival, with probably similar ticket costs to Owen Jones ideas.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> could well say the same thing of Owen Jones - what do his writing and calls for a movement of Labour(-led)-Trotsykists-Greens-Nats actually mean? Who is _Chavs_ really for? It's not to popularise radical ideas, it's to use radical ideas to popularise OJ.
> A movement like Owen wants will cement the position of figures like him.
> OJ is doing it through the guise of journalist/rabble-rouser (and Labour Party has a union link!)... in 2013?


Don't really agree mate, OJ wants to help re-establish an outdated form of social-democracy through his words - that's his primary motivation. Any public recognition of him - rather than the ideas - is welcome but incidental for him. MC is fully about public recognition and celebrity for her not for any politics (not even sloppy and incoherent politics). That day that OJ has an event entirely dedicated to people coming in and simply looking at him is the day they are then the same - the worst you'll get with him is a puppy-dog willingness to have his pic taken with other people.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

I've talked at events (never paying ones though) would this make me the same as crabapple and jones?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

Came across this earlier as well and meant to post it.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I've talked at events (never paying ones though) would this make me the same as crabapple and jones?


 
What kind of question is this? The point is about the type of big bang ticketed events that Owen Jones was justifying a few weeks ago.

We'll disagree it's becoming like a parlour game - OJ or MC who is worse. I still think Sunny Hundal would win.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Apr 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It is confusing because it's harder to pin down MC's ideas.


 
I think this is precisely _because_ the ideas are secondary to the self-promotion.

Indeed, the vaguer the ideas, the bigger the potential audience.

Whereas with Owen Jones the self-promotion is secondary to the ideas. (Or rather the self-promotion relies on the ideas, rather than his "hotness" / status as a wild child of revolution.)


----------



## Balbi (Apr 16, 2013)

Contrasting OJ & Crabapple is good really. Jones may be a bit wrong, but he's not trying to monetise his very existence, appearance and every scrap of work. There's a genuine, if naive, belief that his ideas (while being cashed in with the book etc) are part of an ideal he has which means he speaks for free at events, joins in and publicises the event as a journalist/activist without pushing too much of his semi-celebrity onto the issues.

Crabapple's events are about Crabapple, the ideas subsumed in the Crabapple funding. They're praising her for suckering people into donating cash to her, to continue to promote herself. It's a weird cult of the self which has nothing at the core. Even Koresh had a philosophy, Billy Graham had god.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Oh god.


 sense of humour bypass much?


----------



## Balbi (Apr 16, 2013)




----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

articul8 said:


> She is very sexy, even though her politics is a turn off. It's making my head hurt


Stop rubbing it then.

That better?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 16, 2013)

rosecore said:


> I love the graphic novel, but it really did not tell me a great deal about anarchism.


 
yes, i was very glad that i read it years after George Woodcock introduced me to anarchism, rather than as an impressionable wanky teenager.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 16, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Contrasting OJ & Crabapple is good really. Jones may be a bit wrong, but he's not trying to monetise his very existence, appearance and every scrap of work. There's a genuine, if naive, belief that his ideas (while being cashed in with the book etc) are part of an ideal he has which means he speaks for free at events, joins in and publicises the event as a journalist/activist without pushing too much of his semi-celebrity onto the issues.
> 
> Crabapple's events are about Crabapple, the ideas subsumed in the Crabapple funding. They're praising her for suckering people into donating cash to her, to continue to promote herself. It's a weird cult of the self which has nothing at the core. Even Koresh had a philosophy, Billy Graham had god.


 
I'll concede I was maybe too harsh on Owen Jones. But Crabapple's point is that to earn any kind of wage in art production, you _have to_ be named _and_ popularise the name. It's virtually impossible to receive a sum of money for a cogent socially engaged work without an artist name/anonymously. Hence her ideal is to take the popularisation out of the hands of the established galleries and to do it via the internet (and the earlier more unsavoury bit by part-sexualising something which for centuries has been completely non-sexual - life drawing in Dr Sketchy's Art School). It does appeal to a lot of middle-class less prestigious art school graduates.

Different terrain but not too far from how Owen Jones' approach also picks up steam amongst certain types of people - people who don't want "the British economy" to haywire itself via a series of non-union-controlled, unskilled-heavy strikes/refusals to cooperate with new government rules.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Stop rubbing it then.
> 
> That better?


 Much


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 16, 2013)

articul8 said:


> sense of humour bypass much?


 
"humourless feminazis"


----------



## gosub (Apr 16, 2013)

social bungee jumper


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Came across this earlier as well and meant to post it.


 
blimey.

when guy debord died i had never heard of him, but i was so impressed by the obituary in the paper that i stuck it up on the noticeboard in the sixth form common room.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 16, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> blimey.
> 
> when guy debord died i had never heard of him, but i was so impressed by the obituary in the paper that i stuck it up on the noticeboard in the sixth form common room.


What he the chap from Mother Love Bone that inspired Temple Of The Dog?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 16, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> What he the chap from Mother Love Bone that inspired Temple Of The Dog?


 


deep man.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 16, 2013)

rosecore said:


> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects...-game-an-art-show-about-the-financial-meltdow
> 
> She obviously has some rich fans to get $8,000 and $5,000 donations.


 
Why does a millionaire need to do kickstarter projects? Stupid question I suppose since Homebase and Tesco take people forced on to workfare.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 16, 2013)

cesare said:


> I think they're trying to create a modern day Bloomsbury Group


 
With or without the sexual peccadilloes, though?

E2A: Who plays the Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington roles?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 16, 2013)

articul8 said:


> sense of humour bypass much?


 
You keep having these delusions that you've engaged in humour.
Are you getting treatment?


----------



## cesare (Apr 16, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> With or without the sexual peccadilloes, though?


I've no idea!


----------



## TruXta (Apr 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I've talked at events (never paying ones though) would this make me the same as crabapple and jones?


Are you hot? Please say yes.


----------



## Badgers (Apr 16, 2013)

TruXta said:
			
		

> Are you hot? Please say yes.



Sexist


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Are you hot? Please say yes.


Little monetization potential here i'm afraid.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Little monetization potential here i'm afraid.


There's a niche for everything, mate.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 16, 2013)

Spare some change for a poor monetisation prospect guvnor?


----------



## barney_pig (Apr 16, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> a union for pimps. Lordy.


I always thought that was the TSSA


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 16, 2013)

I'm hot as fuck so you'd all best give me your money. Otherwise we won't be able to have nice things - like a revolution.


----------



## rosecore (Apr 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That's pretty harsh, I think their values are similar - both OJ and MC ride above the work of others to 'popularise' (or 'make accessible') 'movements' to middle-class audiences.
> 
> It is confusing because it's harder to pin down MC's ideas. Here's the closest from 2012 introducing the Shell Game - after the wave of radicalisation visiting Britain, Spain, Greece, being arrested on the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street:
> 
> ...


 
Strikes me as the worst excesses of the Occupy movement, where comfortably white middle class folk could re-appropriate themselves in a social movement. The vanity of protest. There are many great people I'm sure involved in the Occupy movements who will never get anywhere near the attention she will.

By her own admission (and talent) she only got 'x' amount of donations because she happened to have friends on Twitter with a sphere of influence. There is nothing radical. She simply used an existing system of power to satisfy her artistic demands. There's nothing really to salute here. Maybe she does have some interesting ideas about Occupy and the current political climate. I haven't seen anything yet. I'm happy to be proved wrong.

The radicalisation of convenience.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 16, 2013)

rosecore said:


> By her own admission (and talent) she only got 'x' amount of donations because she happened to have friends on Twitter with a sphere of influence. There is nothing radical. She simply used an existing system of power to satisfy her artistic demands. There's nothing really to salute here. Maybe she does have some interesting ideas about Occupy and the current political climate. I haven't seen anything yet. I'm happy to be proved wrong.


 
I expect her answer would be something in terms of letting her produced 'art' magnify what's already there - that she's not a theorist just giving some emotional punch - not satisfactory answers.

Owen Jones is however completely set on turning something like UK Uncut (that has similar problems as Occupy in UK) wholly straight into middle-class Labour or a pressure group.

I am giving MC the benefit of the doubt, if you like, because of the absence of open political statements now.


----------



## rosecore (Apr 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I expect her answer would be something in terms of letting her produced 'art' magnify what's already there - that she's not a theorist just giving some emotional punch - not satisfactory answers.
> 
> Owen Jones is however completely set on turning something like UK Uncut (that has similar problems as Occupy in UK) wholly straight into middle-class Labour or a pressure group.
> 
> I am giving MC the benefit of the doubt, if you like, because of the absence of open political statements now.


 
I'm prepared to give her a chance also. At least she's no Eoin Clarke either, trying to hijack the bedroom tax protests for his own Labour Left.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 16, 2013)

One of you is Molly


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

rosecore said:


> I'm prepared to give her a chance also. At least she's no Eoin Clarke either, trying to hijack the bedroom tax protests for his own Labour Left.


I'm not. _Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down _


----------



## rosecore (Apr 16, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> One of you is Molly


Honestly, I had never heard of Crabapple until of her association with Penny or this thread. I maintain my criticisms of her. However, if she wants to prove me wrong, that's fine.

There is already a multitude of upper-middle class individuals happy to cash-in on working class struggles, protest and movements. 

I'm happy to ignore this vapid art bubble created by Crabapple.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 16, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> One of you is Molly


 

we are all molly crabapple


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 16, 2013)

i'm not


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

I am.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

99% of me anyway.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I'm not. _Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down _


 
Actually I'm with you now after skimming for her politics to find this lunacy:



> The Communist Party considered easel paintings, as opposed to murals, bourgeois, because they could only have one owner.


 
I am not much of a fan of Kara Walker - praised by the US art establishment, but MC thinks she is part of the top 2 of current artists:



> I want to give particular mention to two artists who, because of their scale and their social conscience, I see as the heirs to Diego Rivera. Kara Walker is an African American artist who does classic, black-paper silhouettes on a massive scale. Her intricate shadows offer treacherously beautiful looks at slavery’s horrors. SWOON is a New York street artist. She makes giant, graceful woodblock prints of average people, and then risks arrest as she wheat-pastes them in public spaces around the world.


 
likes reclaiming the n-word as in her pieces







which plays around with racialist depictions of US blacks:


----------



## chilango (Apr 16, 2013)

All this nauseating bullshit reminds me why I've no desire at all to pursue my career as an artist.


----------



## rosecore (Apr 16, 2013)

Laurie has written 4,000 words on Thatcher.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 16, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> we are all molly crabapple


 
no you


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 16, 2013)

rosecore said:


> Laurie has written 4,000 words on Thatcher.


 
"all work and no play makes Laurie a dull girl"

"all work and no play makes Laurie a dull girl"

"all work and no play makes Laurie a dull girl"

"all work and no play makes Laurie a dull girl"

Etc.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

_4000 words_. Even the number of words she writes is arrogant wrong and insulting.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 16, 2013)

Wow, 4000 words, that's so many! It's like a book or something!!


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Wow, 4000 words, that's so many! It's like a book or something!!


 
Or two _undergraduate_ (sniff) essays.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 16, 2013)

Who is she handing 4000 words in to anyway? New Statesman? What poor unpaid intern is going to have to make them into a readable article of appropriate length?


----------



## articul8 (Apr 16, 2013)

she writes over-length deliberately so she can blame the sub for any flak she cops


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

8 pages!


----------



## barney_pig (Apr 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> 8 pages!


Both sides!


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 16, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> Both sides!


 
double spaced


----------



## J Ed (Apr 16, 2013)

I'm glad that she's taking the afternoon off btw, hanging out at art exhibitions with millionaire porno-Thatcherites must be tiring.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 16, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> double spaced


 
4000 words double-spaced is about 14 A4 pages.


----------



## love detective (Apr 16, 2013)

it will be a tedious blend of all the mediocre, critique by numbers, left stuff that has come out so far, with a few added swear words, couple of mentions of vaginas, couple of made up stories, the usual self referential stuff about laurie herself (and possibly her vagina), the quote about blair, some cringe inducing stuff about miners and 'the north' and probably at least 500 words or so of introspective stuff about how angry she is which explains why it's taken this long for her to write something about it (nothing to do with the fact of course that she didn't have the guts, insight, connection or ability to actually pen something sooner without first reading everything that's been written so far and lifting from that)


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 16, 2013)

rosecore said:


> Laurie has written 4,000 words on Thatcher.


 
hurray, let the facepalming begin....


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 16, 2013)

it's not up yet.  but there is a column advertised as "What's The Point Of An Opinion Columnist These Days?", which i kind of hoped would simply be a link to this thread, but actually she says:

"To be a columnist today is no longer to stand on a stage alone, reciting marvellous soliloquies while a paying audience waits to applaud. Apart from anything else, few publications can now afford to fork out the kinds of salaries that make principled writers lose perspective. Being a columnist today is more like being a street performer – collecting coins in a battered suitcase, telling stories about a better world and understanding that the audience might change the story."

fucksake.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 16, 2013)

Btw, Laurie, if you're reading this, this is how it's done:



> Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."
> I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
> Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."
> It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.
> ...


 
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/



> If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

Seymour managed 15 000 the day after.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Seymour managed 15 000 the day after.


 
I was genuinely surprised to learn that Seymour is still in his early 20s.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 16, 2013)

x20 at self

All my posting about MC's _possible_ currents of anticapitalism - was after all arrested when returning to the pavement was demanded by an NYPD thug - blown to a dozen pieces in one fairly vile nationalist-capitalist swoop.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I was genuinely surprised to learn that Seymour is still in his early 20s.


So was he


----------



## J Ed (Apr 16, 2013)

Some of what Seymour writes isn't bad, I really liked Unhitched.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> So was he


 
Is that what they call the cunning of the dialectic?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> x20 at self
> 
> All my posting about MC's _possible_ currents of anticapitalism - was after all arrested when returning to the pavement was demanded by an NYPD thug - blown to a dozen pieces in one fairly vile nationalist-capitalist swoop.



That's just rotten.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


>


----------



## Balbi (Apr 16, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> it's not up yet. but there is a column advertised as "What's The Point Of An Opinion Columnist These Days?", which i kind of hoped would simply be a link to this thread, but actually she says:
> 
> "To be a columnist today is no longer to stand on a stage alone, reciting marvellous soliloquies while a paying audience waits to applaud. Apart from anything else, few publications can now afford to fork out the kinds of salaries that make principled writers lose perspective. Being a columnist today is more like being a street performer – collecting coins in a battered suitcase, telling stories about a better world and understanding that the audience might change the story."
> 
> fucksake.


 
Do she mean that whole argument I put to her when she arrived on this thread, which she subsequently entirely rejected as not being representative of the situation?



Alex Callinicos/SWP vs Laurie Penny/New Statesman Facebook handbags


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 16, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Do she mean that whole argument I put to her when she arrived on this thread, which she subsequently entirely rejected as not being representative of the situation?


 
we only have your word on that, of course.  (best screen cap that shit before it disappears)...


----------



## J Ed (Apr 16, 2013)

https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/324194880173780993

Many a true word said in jest?


----------



## Balbi (Apr 16, 2013)

Did Laurie just move herself closely to the Crabapple model?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/324194880173780993
> 
> Many a true word said in jest?


 
well, she's avoiding the answer so i imagine she knows it'll make her look bad!


----------



## J Ed (Apr 16, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> well, she's avoiding the answer so i imagine she knows it'll make her look bad!


 
I asked her again in the hope I would get a serious answer and then she blocked me


----------



## rekil (Apr 16, 2013)

love detective said:


> it will be a tedious blend of all the mediocre, critique by numbers, left stuff that has come out so far, with a few added swear words, couple of mentions of vaginas, couple of made up stories, the usual self referential stuff about laurie herself (and possibly her vagina), the quote about blair, some cringe inducing stuff about miners and 'the north' and probably at least 500 words or so of introspective stuff about how angry she is which explains why it's taken this long for her to write something about it (nothing to do with the fact of course that she didn't have the guts, insight, connection or ability to actually pen something sooner without first reading everything that's been written so far and lifting from that)


And tea. There will be tea.


----------



## rekil (Apr 16, 2013)

rosecore said:


> Honestly, I had never heard of Crabapple until of her association with Penny or this thread.


We had her number from the off. I think this was the first mention of her here.



DotCommunist said:


> If the revolution is 'delicious' vegan snacks and laurie penny stamping on my balls forever then count me out.





copliker said:


> It involves a smattering of her self orbiting hipster mates as well.


Need photographer to shoot me doing free sketches at occupy wall street, 5-7 today. Scotch + art


----------



## Nice one (Apr 16, 2013)

rosecore said:


> There is already a multitude of upper-middle class individuals happy to cash-in on working class struggles, protest and movements.


 
class struggle anarchists


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

How's the treehouse doing?


----------



## Nice one (Apr 16, 2013)

how's fishponds library?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

Centre of sedition.


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 16, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Btw, Laurie, if you're reading this, this is how it's done:
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/



Thompson was a genius in describing loathing.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 16, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Btw, Laurie, if you're reading this, this is how it's done:
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 16, 2013)

This _monetize your hotness_ stuff, it's the mirror image of neo-liberalism, monetize everything that was previously not monetized - capital's internal enclosures. Commodify everything including  yourself. It's capitals logic presented as _choice_.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 16, 2013)

There was a description somewhere of Discordia being akin to Thompson's work with Steadman. Seriously.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This _monetize your hotness_ stuff, it's the mirror image of neo-liberalism, monetize everything that was previously not monetized - capital's internal enclosures. Commodify everything including - yourself. It's capitals logic presented as _choice_.


 
disgusting


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 16, 2013)

In the 'monetize your hotness' vein, guess who has a registered trademark in the UK...
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tmcase/Results/1/UK00002567604

DR. SKETCHY'S ANTI-ART SCHOOL
Status                     Registered
Relevant dates
Filing date                        22 December 2010
Date of entry in register    01 April 2011
Renewal date                   22 December 2020

List of services

Class 41Educational services, namely, conducting workshops and seminars in figure drawing; entertainment services, namely, organizing and conducting live performance art events that feature live performers, dancers and models posing for groups of artists.
Name and Address details

Owner(s) name                Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art Group LLC
                                     14 Maiden Lane, #7, New York, NY 10038,
                                     United States of America 
Incorporation state          New York


----------



## J Ed (Apr 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This _monetize your hotness_ stuff, it's the mirror image of neo-liberalism, monetize everything that was previously not monetized - capital's internal enclosures. Commodify everything including yourself. It's capitals logic presented as _choice_.


 
She has gotten one of her employees to make snarky comments to me on twitter, _monetize your opinions of others_


----------



## J Ed (Apr 16, 2013)

The more I think about it the more the _monetize your hotness_ comment reminds me of the 15 Million Merits episode of Black Mirror. Make pornography of yourself for your betters or you are just ugly and lazy and don't want to get ahead in life.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> The more I think about it the more the _monetize your hotness_ comment reminds me of the 15 Million Merits episode of Black Mirror. Make pornography of yourself for your betters or you are just ugly and lazy and don't want to get ahead in life.


 
that one really really really got under my skin


----------



## Zabo (Apr 16, 2013)

*PROF. CALLINICOS IS WERY ANNOYED INDEED*​ 
*Oh the inconvenience, the expense, it really is too bad……………*​​LETTER TO ORGANIZING COMMITTEE OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM CONFERENCE, DELHI​​Dear Organizing Committee,​​I was very surprised to receive your communication. You ask me ‘to withdraw [my] decision to attend’. But I only made that decision in response to an invitation to participate in your conference. So what you are in fact doing is withdrawing your invitation, as is indicated by the fact that you have already deleted me from the conference programme. I think you should take full responsibility for the decision you are actually taking.​​I understand of course how important the issue of rape and sexual violence is in India, especially after last December’s gang rape and murder in Delhi. It is also a very important question in Britain, and for me personally, as it is for the Socialist Workers Party. We are strongly committed to women’s liberation. We took the rape allegations against a leading member extremely seriously; the controversy over how the party handled these allegations is indicative of that seriousness. The special conference that we recently held to resolve this controversy has set up a committee to review our procedures, and we intend to use this to reinforce our efforts to combat the oppression of women.​​It is not for me to judge how grave the danger of disruption to your conference is. But an appeal circulated by an academic at JNU does not reflect well intellectually or morally on those agitating against my presence at the conference. This document is a farrago of nonsense that treats allegations as proven fact, cites tendentious opinion pieces as ‘reports’, and includes the laughable assertion that ‘the journal Historical Materialism is allied, and … is known to be principally operated by Socialist Workers Party members and supporters’.​​Since this is a conference sponsored by Historical Materialism, let me remind you that I am a longstanding supporter of the journal and, along with Marxist intellectuals of many political tendencies, a member of its International Advisory Board. I have tried to support HM’s development both in Britain and internationally. Your decision damages HM’s commitment to promote Marxist theoretical development independently of organized political alignments.​​So I regret your decision – not just for this reason, but also because I value my long-standing connections with the Marxist intellectual left in India. In taking this decision, based directly or indirectly on interested misrepresentations of debates inside the SWP, you run the risk of compromising your own intellectual and political integrity.​​This is to say nothing of the personal inconvenience and expense you are exposing me to by withdrawing your invitation a week after you had circulated a programme that included me as chairing one session and speaking at another, and barely a week before I was due to fly to India. This is quite unacceptable in what is meant to be an academic conference, and it is also not how socialists should behave towards one another.​​In comradeship,​Alex Callinicos​​http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/prof-callinicos-is-wery-annoyed-indeed/​


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 16, 2013)

we had this on the swappie implosion thread last week


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 16, 2013)

> *Occupy London* ‏@*OccupyLondon*
> If anyone has details about pre-arrests for #*Thatcher*'s funeral, please contact @*PennyRed* at laurie.penny@gmail.com. Keeping track #*olsx*
> 
> *33* Retweets
> ...


The rather more practical Kevin Blowe adds this below:


> *Kevin Blowe* ‏@*copwatcher*
> .@*OccupyLondon* If anyone has details about pre-arrests for #*Thatcher*'s funeral, contact @*GBCLegal* / @*policemonitor* so arrestees get support
> 
> 
> ...


In other words, 50% more twidiots think it's more important to get written about by a self-facilitating media gnome than to give a heads-up to legal support.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This _monetize your hotness_ stuff, it's the mirror image of neo-liberalism, monetize everything that was previously not monetized - capital's internal enclosures. Commodify everything including yourself. It's capitals logic presented as _choice_.


 

Commodify/monetise. Middle classes are better at commodifying/monetising the self than others (MC's original name was Jennifer Caban and aged just 17 she is given a job/place to stay in world-famous Paris bookshop Shakespeare&Co):


mollycrabapple: I was 17 when I came to Shakespeare and Co. George Whitman invited me to stay. It changed my life. It made my life. It taught me the possibilities of generosity, of openness, of daring, of shaping the world that is into the world you want. When I stayed at Shakespeare and Company, it was filled with roaches. We had to use the public showers and my hair would freeze into icicles on the way back. I was too shy to speak to people much, so I'd curl in the corners and draw them- this gorgeous cast of artists and ballerinas and slumming writers and escaping Chinese dissidents. George was very old but seemed like he would live forever. It was the first place I ever really saw the raw possibilities of life in action.
_possibilities of_ ... _shaping the world that is into the world you want_


Does this just happen to anyone? From the exchange posted earlier here



Q: So it's fair to say that as a successful artist with a significant following, that you wield more than a bit of power. What do you think is the responsibility that that power comes with? Do you think that that responsibility is universal, specific to its origins (artist, singer, journalist, etc), or tailored to each person individually? Finally: What responsibilities would you like to take on in the future, but you feel you currently lack the power to shoulder?

mollycrabapple: Not to exploit people's good will or be a raging dick. Last part, dear god, no idea.




Q: How do you make your art a full time career without giving up integrity? Do you think all artists should be striving to live off their work?

mollycrabapple: Depends what you mean by integrity. For me, I've chosen people who I would never work for, and havent' worked for them. But i have no problem doing ads for a liquor company or a nightclub or a lipstick brand. I think that if you're out about your beliefs and defined in your aesthetic, the people who you don't like probably won't like you either, and you won't have to worry about selling out. However, I also think that the whole making a living off of art is a brutal business that involves so many more skills than drawing. If you just want to draw, draw, and find another means of supporting yourself. You'll love drawing all the more for it




Prospective artist Q: ... There seems to be a crossroad where I need to choose if I should try to develop my name and reputation through completed jobs or developing my own projects. Also any advice on how a new artist should start to develop a following, like using twitter or tumblr? Thanks!

mollycrabapple: They're actually one in the same. A marketable portfolio is a consistent portfolio, so the art director doesn't have to wonder which out of eight styles you're going to pull out. Do your own work. Do completed jobs. Do everything. When you're young and energetic is the time to work yourself harder than you ever thought you could take. Developing a following? Post work. Post about things that interest you besides art. Talk like a human. Or a robot. But just not a brand-bot





But the final conclusions are rather blurred - to say the least - commodify yourself to fight against large corporations like Walmart: ? 





LP and MC will continue



> Discordia was my idea. Someday we need to run off together again to drink whiskey and make words and make art, but we haven't decided where yet. We weren't worried for ourselves, but the morning our fixer Yiannis showed up at our room after being arrested, we were very worried for him.


 


> Working alone lets me be a crazy person control freak feral disagreeable artist, but people like Laurie Penny, Warren Ellis, or Kim Boekbinder push my work in ways I never could have done myself.


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## BigTom (Apr 16, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> The rather more practical Kevin Blowe adds this below:
> 
> In other words, 50% more twidiots think it's more important to get written about by a self-facilitating media gnome than to give a heads-up to legal support.



Except that occupy London has 39,000 followers to cop watchers 4,800 so the occupy London tweet was bound to get retweeted more. You could happily argue it should have been RTd about 200 times just to be even with cop watcher.


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## Firky (Apr 16, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Btw, Laurie, if you're reading this, this is how it's done:
> 
> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/


 
That's quality.


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## killer b (Apr 16, 2013)

that supposed richard nixon quote is one of my favourite things HST ever made up. 

_that's_ how you fabricate quotes, laurie!


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## sihhi (Apr 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Make pornography of yourself for your betters or you are just ugly and lazy and don't want to get ahead in life.


 
It is odd along those lines. Marquis de Sade - a brutal authoritarian if ever there was one - is apparently part of the antiauthoritarian canon.



> I wrote to the anarchist prisoners whose zines I found through Factsheet Five. During class, I devoured the antiauthoritarian canon— Marquis de Sade, and Maximum Rock 'n' Roll, and Revolutionary Suicide. Books hid neatly under my desk.


 
I find the use of the verb here very odd/troubling:



> By then, I had an older boyfriend to fuck some perspective into me. Better able to hide my desires, I was left mostly untouched. I graduated early. Nothing as an adult, no brokenness, no breakups, no illnesses, was as bad as childhood.


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## sihhi (Apr 16, 2013)

This is what $64,000 + gets you - the full Shell Game







Salman Rushie left, Amanda Palmer right
I am not sure what to make of the pose.





Stoya left, 2 guys right - what's the image on the Union Jack ? 
What is the guy in the middle carrying?

NSFW below  http://25.media.tumblr.com/f48cb0663a13b71271dae9b72a714290/tumblr_mlb1969kMa1qzocfyo10_1280.jpg


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## killer b (Apr 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What is the guy in the middle carrying?


ipad, purse, cocktail


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## Casually Red (Apr 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It is odd along those lines. Marquis de Sade - a brutal authoritarian if ever there was one - is apparently part of the antiauthoritarian canon.
> 
> 
> :


 
de sade is a liberal icon, one reason i distrust liberals so much .


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## muscovyduck (Apr 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


>


 
I spy Laurie Penny!


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## equationgirl (Apr 16, 2013)

Maybe for the Shell Game her pieces are supposed to be all the same...


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## SpineyNorman (Apr 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This is what $64,000 + gets you - the full Shell Game


 
I used to have a spirit level that was absolutely identical to the one in that pic but it got nicked out of my shed


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## tenniselbow (Apr 17, 2013)

.


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## TruXta (Apr 17, 2013)

_nervous titters from the back_


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## weepiper (Apr 17, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> predominantly male posters


 
I really don't think that's true.


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## rosecore (Apr 17, 2013)

When did legitimate debate have misogynistic overtones? It was merely a criticism many held of about appropriating radical politics to sell their own profile more. I make no excuses for those that commented on her appearance but to imply a blanket assumption a variety of posters it's simply unfair. I'd like to think such comments would be called out by people, we are intelligent enough for that.

In a thread this size, of course it's going to occasionally divert to other people.


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## equationgirl (Apr 17, 2013)

I think if this thread solely focused on Laurie or Prof Alex, then it would be rather weird and creepy.

The reason, in my opinion anyway (as a female poster), that the debate has looked at the creative outpourings of others - such as Molly Crabapple and Sunny Hundal to name but two - is that their work claims to be some form of positioning on behalf of the working class when in fact it monetises their struggle for personal gain. This is something in common with the work of LP.

As a feminist I find her 'monetising the hotness' strategy both entrepreneurial and disturbing at the same time.


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## equationgirl (Apr 17, 2013)

'Monetising the hotness' has been used to varying degrees of success by Katie Price and others, it's not a new strategy per se.


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## TruXta (Apr 17, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> 'Monetising the hotness' has been used to varying degrees of success by Katie Price and others, it's not a new strategy per se.


It's one of the oldest.


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## phildwyer (Apr 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This _monetize your hotness_ stuff, it's the mirror image of neo-liberalism, monetize everything that was previously not monetized - capital's internal enclosures. Commodify everything including yourself. It's capitals logic presented as _choice_.


 
American schoolkids are now seriously taught how to develop their "personal brand."  No-one sees anything wrong with it.


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## phildwyer (Apr 17, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> 'Monetising the hotness' has been used to varying degrees of success by Katie Price and others, it's not a new strategy per se.


 
It's the oldest profession in fact.


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## ymu (Apr 17, 2013)

Misogyny?

Do people really have so little understanding of power relations these days?

Astonishing. Truly fucking astonishing. You insult all right-thinking women with this banal crap. For fuck's sake.


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## ymu (Apr 17, 2013)

Sorry. That was harsh. I like you, I really do, tenniselbow. I like the cut of your political jib, to the best of my memory. And I respect your sincerity, but i think you're way off the mark here.

I've skimmed in places but read most of it when I am in full on reading good shit mode and I think this thread was the very first one (and still the only one) to more or less universally respond positively to early feminist critique (from a class-driven making the whole idea of -isms redundant sort of position, natch) and stick to it.

I'm proud of this thread and the posters on it. There are dozens of both elsewhere I am disgusted by.


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## tenniselbow (Apr 17, 2013)

.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 17, 2013)

.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 17, 2013)

.


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## ymu (Apr 17, 2013)

It is inevitable that things wil get close to the edge (and a tiny number of twats will try to push it over, or someone will accidentally it) because the default societal thing is woman-bashing. But we are demeaning her faux-class-based, parodying Citizen Smith level middle-class sneeriness. And the monetising divisiveness cuntery thing.

I made this whole argument in teuchter[courtesy tag teuchter, don't feel obliged to remain for the ritual slaughter]'s Thatcher sexism thread. It's rough around the edges and in twenty years time we'll no doubt think better, and hopefully more intelligently about these things. When 'joking' becomes joking, maybe then we can worry more about the subtler ins-and-outs of objectification as criticism. But right now, I want the neanderthals and the faux-left identity spivs to be the targets of feminist over-sensitivity.

I argued the opposite for Stacey Dooley, because she was getting cunted off as an empty-headed E4 yoof presenter, when actually she is a photogenic working-class kid who got lucky and is doing good (for others as well as, inevitably, herself) with that luck.

She's a working-class Louis Theroux, without the faux innocence. It's real, un-ego'ed innocence. She builds the argument from the bottom up with a form of very neutral, open but subtly, non-cynically guided questioning, and often returns to people she listened to passively and sympathetically, often empathetically, early on in the doco, to confront them with her new perspective, a messenger from others, and an honest one. Skillful, fun, engaging, brilliant, proper youth-programming. She's how all of it should be.

I can be accused of bringing up pretty marginal shit, I put my hands up to that. But I always ask politely first time, and if their reaction is la la la I can't hear you, I think a swift yet content-laden kicking and (if feasible given the context) a quick exit is the right way to go. You did the first part of that, but thanks for not giving me a swift kicking!

Boys, we have ourselves a thinker! 

[I'm a patronising twat (it was bred into me ). That wasn't intended to be, but it's definitely ambiguous. It's the non-thinkers who are stalking me all over the place and it is 100% compliment and respect.]

And plaudits to equationgirl for being the first to spot this (is my memory failing me again? I should check, but she told me about this thread-turn in the first place cos we was chatting elsewhere at the time so she gets ;em anyways. )


----------



## andysays (Apr 17, 2013)

I blame Emma Goldman.

Too many middle-class faux-radicals have half-read her statement:

"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution"

and decided that being a fucking "performance artist" (which is kind of what Lol Penz is as well) is not only a revolutionary act, but *the most* revolutionary act...


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## Balbi (Apr 17, 2013)

The only person focusing on Molly's appearance was articul8, the rest of the discussion is purely based around the deeply disturbing idea of 'Monetising your hotness', and in that little phrase - we're focusing on the monetising, as portrayed alongside supposed protest politics and identity, as an image to be capitalised.

It's not leery, or phwoar, it's a genuine annoyance/disbelief/examination of an appropriation of a form of political discourse, an adoption of the actions and significant social and cultural shared experiences of those fighting against capitalism, for equality, for self-expression et al for a purely capital gain approach.

Putting price tags on protest, wrapping yourself in a red and black flag and flashing a bit of leg to get the funding in. All reduce the potential power of the actual protest itself, all occupy a space in which genuine political movements should occupy, all are reactionary burlesque.


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## andysays (Apr 17, 2013)

rosecore said:


> Laurie has written 4,000 words on Thatcher.


 
How many of those words are about Thatcher and how many are about Laurie herself, I wonder...


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## andysays (Apr 17, 2013)

J Ed said:


>




So how long have those two been lurking on Urban then...


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## DotCommunist (Apr 17, 2013)

also its not a 'dodgy turn' to be accurate, crabobble has been mentioned on this thread a few times alongside ownen jones and various other commenteriat/bubble/assorted twats.


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## ymu (Apr 17, 2013)

Interesting to be reminded of the Nixon-hate in the context of this and the Thatcher-based sexism thread. If it miaows it might be a cat but sometimes it is a big angry lioness and her mates protecting their brood and you should let them get on with it. Within limits that are not too difficult to work out when the edge is neared.

And articul8 has form for this, and has been told off for this, and is too dim careerist to take the hint.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 17, 2013)

TruXta said:


> _nervous titters from the back_


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 17, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> ownen jones and various other commenteriat/bubble/assorted twats.


 
I'd never heard of Owen Jones before this thread, but my curiosity piqued, I just watched him on YouTube.  He's excellent. I've no idea why people here dislike him.


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## frogwoman (Apr 17, 2013)

most of the people commenting on old molly have been women.

i doubt she's the only one involved in this monetisation of everything, the thing is tho i have real problems with this type of "activism"


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## ymu (Apr 17, 2013)

andysays said:


> So how long have those two been lurking on Urban then...


The emptiness of rolling news and 24 hour live coverage of often banal events, the pestering of 'victims' and hounding of families and the need to just keep opening their ignorant mouths. The need to fill time with inane jabber and any old self-publicising cunt who is dying to perform for the camera and earn a living off screwing other people out of theirs. And the over-whelming, desperate, need to be loved before they get scrapped for younger models.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 17, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> most of the people commenting on old molly have been women.
> 
> i doubt she's the only one involved in this monetisation of everything, the thing is tho i have real problems with this type of "activism"


 
I just can't get past the use of "entrepreneur" as a positive.


----------



## andysays (Apr 17, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> Fair play, ymu. I enjoy your postings too. I agree there's loads of good contributions on this thread but for me the turn to Molly just doesn't smell right.


 
I think the turn to Molly is a bit of a mis-direction as well (though I've kind of gone along with it, so am not claiming blamelessness).

Ultimately, she's interesting only as a manifestation of a tendency rather than as a subject in herself, and that interest soon gets exhausted (has already in my opinion).

I don't think it's actually misogynistic, though her explicit use of "monetising her hotness" maybe throws up a couple of gender related questions:

Is it easier for a vaguely attractive young women to do this than an equally vaguely attractive young man?

Is it more "necessary" for a young woman to do this to to get herself noticed/taken seriously (sic) than an equivalent young man?

I'll have to leave those burning issues for now as I'm off to work...


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 17, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I'd never heard of Owen Jones before this thread, but my curiosity piqued, I just watched him on YouTube. He's excellent. I've no idea why people here dislike him.


 

Owens allright, its his labourite pipe dreams that cause dismay and annoyance I think. He came to prominence through his book 'Chavs: the demonization of the working class' which is a good read if a bit obvious in places. Best bit in it is where he compare/contrasts the treatment in press of the Mcanns compared to the treatment of that Karen woman who hid her kid under a bed for the money.

The level of vitriol directed not at one individual but her whole community was astonishing. Op Ed comment piees going as far to talk of breeding controls for the poor etc whereas the mcanns ere treated quite differently......see also philpot


----------



## andysays (Apr 17, 2013)

ymu said:


> The emptiness of rolling news and 24 hour coverage of often banal events, the pestering of 'victims' and hounding of families and the need to just keep opening their ignorant mouths. The need to fill time with inane jabber and any old self-publicising cunt who is dying to perform for the camera and earn a living off screwing other people out of theirs.


 
Yeah, I knew that.

But sometimes, being self-critical, there can be a tendency for some of us here (including me) to get sucked into the inane jabber shit as well.


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2013)

andysays said:


> Yeah, I knew that.
> 
> But sometimes, being self-critical, there can be a tendency for some of us here (including me) to get sucked into the inane jabber shit as well.


it's ok, we're doing this for free. we can talk about what we like.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 17, 2013)

killer b said:


> it's ok, we're doing this for free. we can talk about what we like.


 
speak for yourself, I monetized my sarkiness ages ago and get paid a direct wage from the server fund.


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## Badgers (Apr 17, 2013)

Dunno. Sound's sexist to me


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## killer b (Apr 17, 2013)

you're coming accross as a bit of a snide prick atm badgers. if you've got a problem, tackle it head on eh?


----------



## Badgers (Apr 17, 2013)

killer b said:
			
		

> you're coming accross as a bit of a snide prick atm badgers. if you've got a problem, tackle it head on eh?



Sexist


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## DotCommunist (Apr 17, 2013)

Badgers said:


> Dunno. Sound's sexist to me


 
that apostrophe is not parsable in either contractive or possessive, sort it out.


----------



## Badgers (Apr 17, 2013)

DotCommunist said:
			
		

> that apostrophe is not parsable in either contractive or possessive, sort it out.



Sorry  

But next time can you send me a spiteful PM to settle a trivial matter?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 17, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I'd never heard of Owen Jones before this thread, but my curiosity piqued, I just watched him on YouTube. He's excellent. I've no idea why people here dislike him.


 
I really like him too, which is why I'm so frustrated when he tells me to vote Labour!


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I really like him too, which is why I'm so frustrated when he tells me to vote Labour!


 
He thinks if the right kind of people vote for Labour 'we' can change it from within. Bless him. For someone as smart as he is, he is stupid.


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## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> Fair play, ymu. I enjoy your postings too. I agree there's loads of good contributions on this thread but for me the turn to Molly just doesn't smell right.


 
Your liberal sensibilities are perhaps getting in the way of legitimate criticisms and debate. 

Go down that path and you'll soon be modifying your language, "as not to offend the delicate ladies". Also, you're quite new so probably (understandably) haven't read this thread from start to finish, if you had, you'd see that it more of an attack on Laurie Penny and her ilk, that is why there's mentions of Nick Lez', Ellie, Sunny and other bubbles. Couple that together with the fact there is an awful lot of women criticising Laurie and her kind on this thread, then what you said earlier isn't true either.

FWIW I rather naively though Molly Crabapple wasn't so bad but because of this thread and research into her by both men and women, my opinion has changed from - well intentioned muppet into another egotistical maniac who's only left wing because it lets her bring in a six figure income and swan about the globe. Fuck her and her kind.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 17, 2013)

It's like she was actually anywhere she writes about

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/04/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-margaret-thatcher


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## phildwyer (Apr 17, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I really like him too, which is why I'm so frustrated when he tells me to vote Labour!


 
That is slightly suspicious.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 17, 2013)

S☼I said:


> It's like she was actually anywhere she writes about
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/04/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-margaret-thatcher


 
i thought she was singing her praises a few days ago? 
I'm at work so i don't want to click on any laurie penny crap


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 17, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i thought she was singing her praises a few days ago?
> I'm at work so i don't want to click on any laurie penny crap


 
It's crap, pointless both sides are as bad as each other crap.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 17, 2013)

Lordy, to sum up: opens with some invented quotes, you're all horrible and nasty style argument, an illustration of how this horribleness came about is given by her talking to a 23 year old guardian journalist on the basis that she was originally from south wales and is possibly the only person penny knows with that background (but still a guardian journo - note, this is not at attack on her, beyond this i know nothing about her), then some more you're all horrible and simple and a laughable last paragraph that attempts to offer some gravitas but looks like a child predicting doom.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 17, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> It's the oldest profession in fact.


 
i've always had a problem with this statement.  i mean, prostitution isn't a profession unless there's some sort of professional standards board of which i am unaware.  and secondly, if we assume that a profession = a job, how do people know it is the oldest.  do all sources agree on this?  _citation needed_.

i suspect people want to believe that so that they can pretend that there is some sort of historical tradition to prostitution, rather than it being indicative of values and power dynamics within the society.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 17, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i've always had a problem with this statement. i mean, prostitution isn't a profession unless there's some sort of professional standards board of which i am unaware. and secondly, if we assume that a profession = a job, how do people know it is the oldest. do all sources agree on this? _citation needed_.
> 
> i suspect people want to believe that so that they can pretend that there is some sort of historical tradition to prostitution, rather than it being indicative of values and power dynamics within the society.


 
If memory serves, historically the three oldest professions are those of the prostitute, the spy and the mercenary soldier. Which is a somewhat depressing comment on human nature.


----------



## cesare (Apr 17, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i've always had a problem with this statement.  i mean, prostitution isn't a profession unless there's some sort of professional standards board of which i am unaware.  and secondly, if we assume that a profession = a job, how do people know it is the oldest.  do all sources agree on this?  _citation needed_.
> 
> i suspect people want to believe that so that they can pretend that there is some sort of historical tradition to prostitution, rather than it being indicative of values and power dynamics within the society.


You doubt that bartering for sex in the absence of goods predates selling labour?

Professional Standards Boards monetize standards.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 17, 2013)

farmer, mother and hunter are the oldest professions. Everyone knows that. The accepted three need money (or barter) to pay for them which can only come from the real oldest proffesion.

Bet the proper oldest is 'chasing an animal till it falls off a cliff'


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 17, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> If memory serves, historically the three oldest professions are those of the prostitute, the spy and the mercenary soldier. Which is a somewhat depressing comment on human nature.


 
A profession is a paid occupation, so the oldest profession must therefore be a minter who makes the money.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 17, 2013)

Nah, it's 'thwomping someone until you get what you want' - or in modern terms, Communications Director.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 17, 2013)

S☼I said:


> It's like she was actually anywhere she writes about
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/04/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-margaret-thatcher


 
that's a lot of words to say nothing.  also, she left before i did and i wasn't still there at 9pm.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 17, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> that's a lot of words to say nothing. also, she left before i did and i wasn't still there at 9pm.


 
In fairness, about the only thing she's especially good at is writing endlessly turgid, overblown screeds that go on forever while seldom saying anything at all of any real substance.


----------



## Ax^ (Apr 17, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> that's a lot of words to say nothing. also, she left before i did and i wasn't still there at 9pm.


 
did she claim to have turn up to the one in brixton as well

seems weird for someone who thinks it odd to celebrate the occasion


----------



## rekil (Apr 17, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> that's a lot of words to say nothing. also, she left before i did and i wasn't still there at 9pm.


Paid by the word so just mugging the new statesman to pay for her hols really.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 17, 2013)

Ax^ said:


> did she claim to have turn up to the one in brixton as well
> 
> seems weird for someone who thinks it odd to celebrate the occasion


She was there, I have proof.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 17, 2013)

copliker said:


> Paid by the word so just mugging the new statesman to pay for her hols really.


 
Well, if you're paid by the word then it makes good commercial sense to be as long-winded and turgid as possible. Except when it comes to unwittingly making yourself the McGonnagall of the protest 'scene', obviously.


----------



## Ax^ (Apr 17, 2013)

TruXta said:


> She was there, I have proof.


 
cool beans


----------



## cesare (Apr 17, 2013)

Ax^ said:


> did she claim to have turn up to the one in brixton as well
> 
> seems weird for someone who thinks it odd to celebrate the occasion


"Abhorrently appropriate"


----------



## teuchter (Apr 17, 2013)

ymu said:


> I made this whole argument in teuchter[courtesy tag teuchter, don't feel obliged to remain for the ritual slaughter]'s Thatcher sexism thread.


 
For the record what ymu did was not just make an argument but also try and slur me personally as a misogynist. That's the level she is operating at.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 17, 2013)

TruXta said:


> She was there, I have proof.


 
i think it was mentioned on this thread earlier.  she was there for about 20 minutes.  according to her tweets she retreated to KFC to drink tea.

i didn't see here, but i didn't see truxta either.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 17, 2013)

.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 17, 2013)

That's three articles rolled into one, with none of them making anything close to a point. It's the ballooning of the issue, attempting what every other fucking hack has done - WHAT DOES THIS SAY ABOUT BRITAIN? Are we simply pointing out the historical record, or our own personal experiences, or is what we're talking about representative of a bigger broader sweep of history which moves away from the truth, the painful reality and into the comforting safe fucking arms of airy fairy theory and bullshit.

WHAT DOES THIS SAY? WHAT DOES IT MEAN? And writing it in a way so that it actually says nothing, it actually means nothing. It's just commentary, the fucking track on the dvd with the sound man and the chap who made the tea discussing Thatcher's fine bone china set. That no-one in their right mind listens to. She's on a huge platform, with a rapt audience and she stands up and tells a story which is equivalent to that time you thought you'd lost your keys and got worried but then you found them.

Section 1: The funeral - Oh, isn't it all choreographed, obligatory Falklands reference, families damaged by Thatcher and onto a quick useless flail at stop and search.

Section 2: Thatcher Death Party - Lots of these people weren't even born, nasty right wing press, obligatory note that the left at a party can't decide on a single message -if only there was somewhere ready to unite them goes unspoken there.

Section 3: Bloody Politics - Tory bashing, followed by oh, isn't it tribal. There's no middle ground is there, and everyone's getting mean and horrible. But these stories need to be told, even if it's in a manner which doesn't tackle the actual underlying issues at stake or offer solutions, and preferably by a young journalist being paid by the word.

Arse.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 17, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i've always had a problem with this statement. i mean, prostitution isn't a profession unless there's some sort of professional standards board of which i am unaware. and secondly, if we assume that a profession = a job, how do people know it is the oldest. do all sources agree on this? _citation needed_.
> 
> i suspect people want to believe that so that they can pretend that there is some sort of historical tradition to prostitution, rather than it being indicative of values and power dynamics within the society.


 
Prostitution predates unpaid sex.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 17, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Prostitution predates unpaid sex.


 
citation needed.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 17, 2013)

or at least, explanation needed.


----------



## treelover (Apr 17, 2013)

just read Laura's article, with some exceptions, I don't recognise the criticisms of it, I thought it was ok..


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 17, 2013)

.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 17, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i think it was mentioned on this thread earlier. she was there for about 20 minutes. according to her tweets she retreated to KFC to drink tea.
> 
> i didn't see here, but i didn't see truxta either.


Yes you did, but you ignored* me you arrogant tosser 

*probably forgot what I look like


----------



## Balbi (Apr 17, 2013)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGH

You can go after Thatcher with the vengance of a furious titan if you want, it's fucking commentary journalism - it'd be nice to see someone break from the anodyne shit. Don't even bother to style yourself after a Thompson, and stop fucking quoting your mate Warren Ellis, because you're just not that good at it. Your anger is manufactured, your language declawed, you're a neuteured acceptable rebel and you're not going to be able to escape that now.

But you could have snapped Thatcher's myth, hacked the legs off Cameron and Osborne, smack Miliband with them and trample on Clegg on the way out if you so chose to. And done it with the evidence, the numbers, the facts - given 4000 words of furious proof.

But you didn't. You just c&p'd every other fucking article going about it and spun it to show you'd been down on street level.

Right wing journalism doesn't get me this annoyed, because it's fucking good at what it does. Missed opporfuckingtunities. And if anyone says, well you do better, I intend to have a good bloody go.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 17, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Yes you did, but you ignored* me you arrogant tosser
> 
> *probably forgot what I look like


 
sorry  you're probably right about that....  my apologies.


----------



## treelover (Apr 17, 2013)

> There was an enormous cheer. There was also some consternation. Other hooded figures climbed up and fixed the spelling, so that it read: "MARGARET THATCHERS DEAD". The hoods and masks might have been a little excessive but, on the other hand, one never really knows any more what is and is not illegal when it comes to the merest squeak of indecorous behaviour on the streets of London.
> 
> After some more discussion, this became: "MARGARET THATCHERS DEAD. LOL". And then, five minutes later: "MARGARET THATCHERS DEAD, COMMUNISM IS THE KEY". There followed a pause for sectarian debate up on the ledge, while the police officers in attendance stared up, confused, and the wording changed again, this time to: "EQUALITY IS THE KEY". The argument heated up, aided by some chanting and booing by more radicalised sections of the crowd below, and eventually a compromise was reached. "MARGARET THATCHERS DEAD - COMMUNITEY [sic] IS THE KEY".


 
actually, that is funny and is a bit life of Brian...


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 17, 2013)

.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 17, 2013)

I'll go and breathe into a paper bag for a bit now.



Sorry.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 17, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> "Some things don't change in this country and one of them is the way the far left chooses the opportune moment to make itself look like a Monty Python sketch."
> 
> Will we ever escape this tired cliche?


 
I just pictured John Cleese - a lifelong Liberal - rubbing his hands and cackling with glee.


----------



## Nice one (Apr 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Centre of sedition.


 
what they've increased the broadband connection speed?


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 17, 2013)

.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 17, 2013)

treelover said:


> just read Laura's article, with some exceptions, I don't recognise the criticisms of it, I thought it was ok..


Tell us what you got from it then, and point out where the criticisms or wrong or inaccurate.


----------



## rekil (Apr 17, 2013)

From the comments.


> Skyler • 20 minutes ago −
> 
> Penny, you are lying. I never said that to you. Why are you rewording what I said.
> 
> ...


Uh oh. If legit.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 17, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> I pretty much agree with all of this, Balbi. I guess I would say that a discussion doesn't have to be leery or phwoar to have misogynistic overtones. My point really concerned, first, the levels to which posters have been delving into the details of Molly's life, and second, her status as a pretty insignificant figure in a cultural scene crowded with gobshites. I agree she seems highly irritating, self-obsessed, and politically hypocritical but, unlike Sunny, Owen, Laurie, the Prof, etc, she doesn't have the kind of status to merit the kind of attention she's getting. And I really don't think she does "occupy a space in which genuine political movements should occupy"...


 
She might not have the same status insofar that she is not a columnist, although her exhibitions attract people like Rushdie and Mason, but she is earning millions of dollars off of the back of people who are actually trying to make a difference and work towards a better world while she works towards promoting a kind of pornographic hyper-neoliberalism. I think that's significant and worth commenting on and analysing.


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

The quote (or rather the made up quote):

"Now that Thatcher's dead, we thought we'd start reversing her policies one by one - so we're starting with free milk handouts," said Sky, a student giving out quarter-pints of semi-skimmed from a shopping bag, who must have been born after Thatcher gained her "Milk Snatcher" moniker. "It's my parents' grudge, really," Sky admitted. "But looking at the world we're living in now, I understand that a lot of it evolved from her policies."

Screen shot for archives:


----------



## TruXta (Apr 17, 2013)

Utterly unsurprising if true I guess, but still depressing.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 17, 2013)

> They had come to Brixton from Durham and Belfast and every wasted inner-city and former industrial town where today's young adults grew up being told that, whatever else they were doing, they would bloody well have a shindig when Maggie died


 

urgh


----------



## J Ed (Apr 17, 2013)

Firky said:


> The quote (or rather the made up quote):
> 
> "Now that Thatcher's dead, we thought we'd start reversing her policies one by one - so we're starting with free milk handouts," said Sky, a student giving out quarter-pints of semi-skimmed from a shopping bag, who must have been born after Thatcher gained her "Milk Snatcher" moniker. "It's my parents' grudge, really," Sky admitted. "But looking at the world we're living in now, I understand that a lot of it evolved from her policies."
> 
> Screen shot for archives:


 
Making up quotes to smear people for having the temerity to oppose Thatcher. Disgusting.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 17, 2013)

What's worse about that piece is that LP is implying she's older than this Sky and can see through her and delegitimize her - "must have been born after Thatcher [...]"...


----------



## cesare (Apr 17, 2013)

How many young people flew in from Durham and Belfast for this impromptu street party then?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 17, 2013)

TruXta said:


> What's worse about that piece is that LP is implying she's older than this Sky and can see through her and delegitimize her - "must have been born after Thatcher [...]"...


 
The fact that she's parroting right-wing memes shows exactly the kind of people she spends her time with.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 17, 2013)

For the bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie life is a party. Every weekend they have one. The proletariat doesn’t have parties. Only rhythmic funerals. That is going to change. The exploited will have a grand party. Memory and guillotines. Sensing it, acting it certain nights, inventing edges and humid corners, is like caressing the acidic eyes of the new spirit.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 17, 2013)

cesare said:


> How many young people flew in from Durham and Belfast for this impromptu street party then?


I'm guessing 0 - nil - zero.


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

cesare said:


> How many young people flew in from Durham and Belfast for this impromptu street party then?


 
Well to fly from Durham you'd have to take the train to Newcastle then the metro to the airport. Which would take about two hours. In that time you could just get a train to London and be there within two and a half hours.


----------



## Nice one (Apr 17, 2013)

pic of young lad giving out free milk at brixton thatcher party. Yer man skyler?









http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/making-friends-at-thatchers-hate-wake


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 17, 2013)

cesare said:


> How many young people flew in from Durham and Belfast for this impromptu street party then?


 

If I wrote it they had come


do me a favour


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 17, 2013)

he is wearing five visible layers of clothing


----------



## cesare (Apr 17, 2013)

Firky said:


> Well to fly from Durham you'd have to take the train to Newcastle then the metro to the airport. Which would take about two hours. In that time you could just get a train to London and be there within two and a half hours.



Logistically and financially I suspect that it's a tissue of fakery (her claim)


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 17, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> For the bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie life is a party. Every weekend they have one. The proletariat doesn’t have parties. Only rhythmic funerals. That is going to change. The exploited will have a grand party. Memory and guillotines. Sensing it, acting it certain nights, inventing edges and humid corners, is like caressing the acidic eyes of the new spirit.


 
Not knocking this comment, just asking, like - was it translated from the French?


----------



## 8ball (Apr 17, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> he is wearing five visible layers of clothing


 
Useful if you want to lose the fuzz several times.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 17, 2013)

.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 17, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Not knocking this comment, just asking, like - was it translated from the French?


 
Not sure if from the French, but it is from the Infrarealist Manifesto here


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 17, 2013)

Think it is from the Spanish actually


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

cesare said:


> Logistically and financially I suspect that it's a tissue of fakery.


 
It's a pain in the arse, you wouldn't do it. You'd just get the train from Durham down to Kings X but even then it would cost a small fortune to buy a ticket on the day and given that it was cold, wet and horrible...


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 17, 2013)

TruXta said:


> What's worse about that piece is that LP is implying she's older than this Sky and can see through her and delegitimize her - "must have been born after Thatcher [...]"...


It goes a bit deeper than that i think, what this article demonstrates in the split in her thinking between the mass of people (the class if you like) as victims, as people who simply have things imposed on them, as objects rather than as subjects - as a collectivity incapable of acting for itself apart from in warped and perverted forms of reaction, a mass of misery, and on the other the glamorous leading activists and journalists and artists and beautiful people who are the real subject of history, the people who do have the power to change society, the leaders. The implied vanguardism is here is pretty naked.

I suspect that i would see something very different in this picture than her:






I see a community that has recognised shared interests and recognised attacks on those interests and where they come from, i see collective activity spreading across all manner of cultural or local divisions. I see a way out in that. Penny (and others who have taken the same tack over the last week), i suspect would see only this, only victims:



> It's becoming a colder, meaner, harder place. Margaret Thatcher was wrong: there is such a thing as society, and it's bloody annoyed, bitter and desperate and dancing on the grave of a broken old tyrant because there's nothing else to dance about.


----------



## cesare (Apr 17, 2013)

I also see a load of fucking journalists in the way.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 17, 2013)

terribly arch that article. So very 'observer' and psuedo perspective having.

Full of faux tiredness and detachment. It conspires with itself to be anodyne ffs.

and so very careful as well. If ever there was a chance for the self proclaimed voice of left youth to say something bitey it was now. Lost, like words in the statesman. 'Its to bad she won't write. But who does?'

etc etc


----------



## J Ed (Apr 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It goes a bit deeper than that i think, what this article demonstrates in the split in her thinking between the mass of people (the class if you like) as victims, as people who simply have things imposed on them, as objects rather than as subjects - as a collectivity incapable of acting for itself apart from in warped and perverted forms of reaction, a mass of misery, and on the other the glamorous leading activists and journalists and artists and beautiful people who are the real subject of history, the people who do have the power to change society, the leaders. The implied vanguardism is here is pretty naked.


 
Exactly, this is also the sort of mentality that allows her to make up quotes with a clean conscience.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 17, 2013)

teuchter said:


> For the record what ymu did was not just make an argument but also try and slur me personally as a misogynist. That's the level she is operating at.


 
It's truly terrible to slur you as a misogynist.

Especially given that you're an equal-opportunity slimeball.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 17, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Exactly, this is also the sort of mentality that allows her to make up quotes with a clean conscience.


 
With a clean conscience and permanently incompetent sub-editor who, despite their many and repeated blunders, never seems to be fired.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 17, 2013)

Balbi said:


> AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGH
> 
> You can go after Thatcher with the vengance of a furious titan if you want, it's fucking commentary journalism - it'd be nice to see someone break from the anodyne shit. Don't even bother to style yourself after a Thompson, and stop fucking quoting your mate Warren Ellis, because you're just not that good at it. Your anger is manufactured, your language declawed, you're a neuteured acceptable rebel and you're not going to be able to escape that now.
> 
> ...


 
Expose the truth, and she'd do herself out of what is, despite her protestations to the contrary, a very comfortable living, so her anodyne-but-laced-with-an-occasional-home-truth formula will be what she sticks to, right up until she's offered a safe seat by Labour.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 17, 2013)

Nice one said:


> what they've increased the broadband connection speed?


 
Nope. Amphetamine sulphate in the tea.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 17, 2013)

copliker said:


> From the comments.
> 
> Uh oh. If legit.


 
What do you mean, "uh oh"? It'll be the subby's fault!


----------



## TruXta (Apr 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It goes a bit deeper than that i think, what this article demonstrates in the split in her thinking between the mass of people (the class if you like) as victims, as people who simply have things imposed on them, as objects rather than as subjects - as a collectivity incapable of acting for itself apart from in warped and perverted forms of reaction, a mass of misery, and on the other the glamorous leading activists and journalists and artists and beautiful people who are the real subject of history, the people who do have the power to change society, the leaders. The implied vanguardism is here is pretty naked.
> 
> I suspect that i would see something very different in this picture than her:
> 
> I see a community that has recognised shared interests and recognised attacks on those interests and where they come from, i see collective activity spreading across all manner of cultural or local divisions. I see a way out in that. Penny (and others who have taken the same tack over the last week), i suspect would see only this, only victims:


 
I dunno if I see a way out - I'm a pessimist - but other than that: spot on.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 17, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> What do you mean, "uh oh"? It'll be the subby's fault!


 
As I recently pointed out on the comments section.


----------



## rosecore (Apr 17, 2013)

What clunky prose. Who subbed this? For such a long piece, it could have done with some refining since it did not actually add anything new to the debate. Penny could have offered something different, maybe even a feminist critique, or something that felt like her opinion. Not simply reporting on what's already happened.




> Her political legacy lives on and it's that legacy that is really being debated in the escalating frenzy around who gets control of the funeral narrative.
> 
> commentators on the left and right were so quick to publish pieces variously condemning, praising or condemning the praise of Thatcher's legacy


 



> All of the responses were planned, as were the responses to those responses.


 



> It's a folk memory thing, a tribal thing, passed down from parents to children in places where jobs in mines and steelworks and factories used to be passed down instead.


 


> You will understand a lot more about Britain when you understand that across the country, perfectly normal families - families


----------



## treelover (Apr 17, 2013)

cesare said:


> I also see a load of fucking journalists in the way.


 

better they are there than not?


----------



## cesare (Apr 17, 2013)

treelover said:


> better they are there than not?



What are they adding in these days of mobile phone cameras and social networks?


----------



## TruXta (Apr 17, 2013)

cesare said:


> What are they adding in these days of mobile phone cameras and social networks?


Analysis, leadership, public resistance, comfort?


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 17, 2013)

rosecore said:


> What clunky prose. Who subbed this? For such a long piece, it could have done with some refining since it did not actually add anything new to the debate. Penny could have offered something different, maybe even a feminist critique, or something that felt like her opinion. Not simply reporting on what's already happened.


 
Re: the "tribal politics" thing. "Tribal" is used here to portray those under examination as in some way primitive, backward, less evolved, less intelligent and essentially irrational


----------



## cesare (Apr 17, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Analysis, leadership, public resistance, comfort?



I don't look to journalists for leadership. As for the rest, well the overall coverage of Thatcher's funeral says it all, really.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 17, 2013)

cesare said:


> I don't look to journalists for leadership. As for the rest, well the overall coverage of Thatcher's funeral says it all, really.


 No one gets my jokes.


----------



## 8ball (Apr 17, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Re: the "tribal politics" thing. "Tribal" is used here to portray those under examination as in some way primitive, backward, less evolved, less intelligent and essentially irrational


 
But only for on one side of the equation.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 17, 2013)

8ball said:


> But only for on one side of the equation.


 
Indeed. Penny is indeed more evolved than the rest of us - note her advanced psi powers, and her prehensile tail.


----------



## cesare (Apr 17, 2013)

TruXta said:


> No one gets my jokes.


Sorry  As you might have noticed, editor thinks I'm humourless because I didn't get his 70s style "joke" so it seems I'm suffering from a loss of SOH day.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 17, 2013)

cesare said:


> Sorry  As you might have noticed, editor thinks I'm humourless because I didn't get his 70s style "joke" so it seems I'm suffering from a loss of SOH day.


It's not you, it's me. #narcissist


----------



## cesare (Apr 17, 2013)

TruXta said:


> It's not you, it's me. #narcissist


Cos no-one gets your jokes


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 17, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Re: the "tribal politics" thing. "Tribal" is used here to portray those under examination as in some way primitive, backward, less evolved, less intelligent and essentially irrational


 
little bit racism.


----------



## lauriepenny (Apr 17, 2013)

You lot are hilarious. Really. The number of hours you've wasted ranting, hyperventilating and making up rubbish about me and stalking my friends is no doubt an enormous loss to the British left.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> You lot are hilarious. Really. The number of hours you've wasted ranting, hyperventilating and making up rubbish about me and stalking my friends is no doubt an enormous loss to the British left.


 
What's your response to my point about your misuse of the concept of "tribal"?


----------



## cesare (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> You lot are hilarious. Really. The number of hours you've wasted ranting, hyperventilating and making up rubbish about me and stalking my friends is no doubt an enormous loss to the British left.



So it's ok for you to observe and write about people, but not us, eh?


----------



## lauriepenny (Apr 17, 2013)

I'm particularly impressed that you've managed to do it all one-handed, too. Hate-wanking won't damage your eyesight, only your perspective.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm particularly impressed that you've managed to do it all one-handed, too. Hate-wanking won't damage your eyesight, only your perspective.


 
Can you try again? That doesn't really answer my question.


----------



## JimW (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> ... ranting, hyperventilating and making up rubbish ...


I considered using the quote function and entirely re-writing the content in a tribute to your style, but instead I'll just note you're not exactly a complete stranger to those activities yourself, are you?


----------



## Libertad (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> You lot are hilarious. Really. The number of hours you've wasted ranting, hyperventilating and making up rubbish about me and stalking my friends is no doubt an enormous loss to the British left.


 
You're quite the expert at making things up though aren't you?


----------



## cesare (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm particularly impressed that you've managed to do it all one-handed, too. Hate-wanking won't damage your eyesight, only your perspective.


The voice of experience?


----------



## chilango (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm particularly impressed that you've managed to do it all one-handed, too. Hate-wanking won't damage your eyesight, only your perspective.



What on earth is "hate-wanking"?


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> You lot are hilarious. Really. The number of hours you've wasted ranting, hyperventilating and making up rubbish about me and stalking my friends is no doubt an enormous loss to the British left.


 
Oh, has Your Majesty deigned to acknowledge that not everybody worships you again?

What's brought this on?


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 17, 2013)

chilango said:


> What on earth is "hate-wanking"?


 
Well, you see chilango, when two internet users hate each other very much. . .


----------



## rekil (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> You lot are hilarious. Really. The number of hours you've wasted ranting, hyperventilating and making up rubbish about me and stalking my friends is no doubt an enormous loss to the British left.


Journalism is a little bit stalkery. Welcome back! Reminder that this is what this thread's about.  



butchersapron said:


> a))how you really cannot find a better example of the use of cultural capital based on privilege to extend and transmit that privilege into the future
> 
> b) how certain people attempt to recuperate social movements for their own careerists ends (some journos) and how other groups of people help/make this happen (editors, media bosses) and
> 
> ...


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 17, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Can you try again? That doesn't really answer my question.


 
Yet answer came there none.


----------



## rekil (Apr 17, 2013)

Balbi in Dec 2012 said:
			
		

> This thread is a theatre seat conversation - which includes weird hecklers. Consider your work our performance, and our criticism valid despite hecklers. Try.


Also a reminder that you appear to have drawn inspiration from this very thread. You're welcome.



			
				LP said:
			
		

> "To be a columnist today is no longer to stand on a stage alone, reciting marvellous soliloquies while a paying audience waits to applaud. Apart from anything else, few publications can now afford to fork out the kinds of salaries that make principled writers lose perspective. Being a columnist today is more like being a street performer – collecting coins in a battered suitcase, telling stories about a better world and understanding that the audience might change the story."


----------



## Lo Siento. (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm particularly impressed that you've managed to do it all one-handed, too. Hate-wanking won't damage your eyesight, only your perspective.


You keep telling yourself that's what it's all about, and that after a whole century of careerists making a living off "oppression tourism", YOU are the exception.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 17, 2013)

.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 17, 2013)

.


----------



## JimW (Apr 17, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> Laurie, I consider this kind of offensive insult-throwing to be a vicious contribution to the stigmatization of onanists. It is highly offensive to my identity group. So wrong-headed!


That's not actually "tennis" elbow then, is it?


----------



## TruXta (Apr 17, 2013)

Another 200 pages then?


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 17, 2013)

.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 17, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> Come on now, Laurie. Please deign to lower yourself and answer the questions put to you on this thread. Engage with the plebs like you promised you would in your most recent article about yourself. Please have the debate.


----------



## chilango (Apr 17, 2013)

She can't.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 17, 2013)

What was the question again?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> You lot are hilarious. Really. The number of hours you've wasted ranting, hyperventilating and making up rubbish about me and stalking my friends is no doubt an enormous loss to the British left.


 
Do one, you corporate misery-tourist liar.


----------



## cesare (Apr 17, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> What was the question again?


I think Idris got in first with his anthropologist question.


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2013)

then i think someone wanted to know what a hate-wank was.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 17, 2013)

cesare said:


> I think Idris got in first with his anthropologist question.


 
What anthropologist question?


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 17, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> What anthropologist question?


 
What exactly _is _hate-wanking?

Enquring minds want to know.


----------



## chilango (Apr 17, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> What's your response to my point about your misuse of the concept of "tribal"?


This question phildwyer


----------



## rekil (Apr 17, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Exarcheia is really hip. How come she never hangs out in places like Merthyr Tydfil..


Good question.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 17, 2013)

.


----------



## chilango (Apr 17, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> What exactly _is _hate-wanking?
> 
> Enquring minds want to know.



First time I've been called an enquiring mind....


----------



## cesare (Apr 17, 2013)

killer b said:


> then i think someone wanted to know what a hate-wank was.


No I got in next with mine. Then it all turned to the monetisation of hate wanking. I think.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 17, 2013)

.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 17, 2013)

We can't have a revolution because the monty python left are too busy arguing which Frank Turner song should soundtrack it.


----------



## tenniselbow (Apr 17, 2013)

.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 17, 2013)

when i was a lad being a leftie was all about socialism, solidarity, and sensible shoes.  now it's all about burlesque and being ambivalent about margaret thatcher. 

now i'm old left, unfashionable, and the reason we can't have a revolution where we can all monetise our hotness (except ugly birds) and drink KFC tea all day.

*sighs*


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 17, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> I thought it was because butchers was being mean to Laurie?


 
not bad going for a man in a wheelchair.


----------



## Libertad (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm particularly impressed that you've managed to do it all one-handed, too. Hate-wanking won't damage your eyesight, only your perspective.


 

And this is what passes for dialectical materialism is it lauriepenny?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 17, 2013)

what's made up? these are your and your friends own words you twat


----------



## J Ed (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> You lot are hilarious. Really. The number of hours you've wasted ranting, hyperventilating and making up rubbish about me and stalking my friends is no doubt an enormous loss to the British left.


 
You know, I don't think that much of private schools but you have to admit that they do what they do very well. You have so much self-confidence, no matter the facts or situation.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> You lot are hilarious. Really. The number of hours you've wasted ranting, hyperventilating and making up rubbish about me and stalking my friends is no doubt an enormous loss to the British left.


 
Almost as great a loss as you and your plastic political activist/journo/hack/whatever's most lucrative and ego-boosting this week mates coining it in off the efforts of people who care enough about the world to try improving it a little.

Almost, in fact, as great a problem to the British left as people outside the mildly-pink liberal circles you inhabit thinking that the rest of the British left in any resemble you.

If you stick your head out a trench, expect to be shot at. You've stuck your head farther out than most, but what do you do when the bullets start flying? You whine about it and not especially truthfully either.

You exploit people and situations when it's career-advancing (how is that suicidal gentleman whose story you made full use of, by the way?), your prose is hyperbolic, littered with inaccuracies (it wasn't NATO invading Iraq, for starters), you engage only with people who are fawning enough while ignoring criticism when you can and deliberately misrepresenting your critics whenever you feel like it, you're arrogance is as vast as your self-awareness is miniscule and I've noticed a vindictive streak when you think you can get away with that as well.

You're about as genuine as a Bangkok Rolex and the shine has come off just as quickly.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 17, 2013)

Interestingly, the Staggers has taken the link to the article off their website front page


----------



## J Ed (Apr 17, 2013)

Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> If this really is you, do email me at laurie.penny@gmail.com and I'll happily send you a transcript. I'd be interested to hear what you think you said and how it differs from what I wrote here. To prove it's you, please tell me the name of the friend you were with. I suspect, however, that this is yet another attempted right-wing attempt to discredit my work. They're becoming boring.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 17, 2013)

J Ed said:


>


 
What's an 'attempted right wing attempt'?


----------



## cesare (Apr 17, 2013)

Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it infamy etc


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2013)

An attempted attempt.


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

Ah yes, a transcript. That infallible method of documentation. Everyone knows a text file can't be edited.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 17, 2013)

The thing is that Laurie could be telling the truth, but based on past performance it's a bit the boy who cried wolf. The New Statesman obviously agrees since the link has been pulled from the main page.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 17, 2013)

Interesting, LP claims to have both audio and transcripts. And Firky, that was you snarking away about Urban surely?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 17, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Laurie Penny said:
> 
> 
> 
> > If this really is you, do email me at laurie.penny@gmail.com and I'll happily send you a transcript.


 
Would it not make more sense to send the (portion of the) recording at issue?

ETA:

Slow hands on fast-moving thread.


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2013)

Wonder why she dropped in today... Was it after that comment was posted I wonder?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm particularly impressed that you've managed to do it all one-handed, too. *Hate-wanking won't damage your eyesight*, only your perspective.


 
Not true. After reading this I thought I'd be safe to have a rage induced five knuckle shuffle over video footage of Thatcher's speeches. I got a bit of jizz in my eye and now I can't see a fucking thing.

And it's all your fault - I trusted you Laurie, you're supposed to be the smartest kid in a smart school, leading all us stupid proles to the promised land. But you failed me 

I don't think I'll ever be able to trust anyone again


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 17, 2013)

Possibly interesting thing earlier - LPs replies to the person claiming to have been the person she talked to, were posted under the name 'fraziel' - 'fraziel' seems to appear in just about every NS article somewhere, but never actually where i can find it when i go to the article, apart from a few times in comments where they appear to be some sot of scots nationalist. Any ideas? Or is this just some journo or website technical thing?


----------



## Nice one (Apr 17, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> when i was a lad being a leftie was all about socialism, solidarity, and sensible shoes. now it's all about burlesque and being ambivalent about margaret thatcher.
> 
> now i'm old left, unfashionable, and the reason we can't have a revolution where we can all monetise our hotness (except ugly birds) and drink KFC tea all day.
> 
> *sighs*


 
to be honest with you mate if you were a class struggle anarchist (london branch) it would be all fixie bikes, ironic moustaches and skinny fit jeans. Coupled with a private school education, posh university and £30k job courtesy of your dad's company.

Whatever laurie penny is, CLASS POWER resides far closer to home


----------



## cesare (Apr 17, 2013)

Nice one said:


> to be honest with you mate if you were a class struggle anarchist (london branch) it would be all fixie bikes, ironic moustaches and skinny fit jeans. Coupled with a private school education, posh university and £30k job courtesy of your dad's company.
> 
> Whatever laurie penny is, CLASS POWER resides far closer to home


What a load of bollocks


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 17, 2013)

Do you reckon we'll get a massive increase in views on this thread like last time Laurie turned up? Be good to get a bit more traffic for the site.

Or do I need to get her to call me a racist again?


----------



## rekil (Apr 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Possibly interesting thing earlier - LPs replies to the person claiming to have been the person she talked to, were posted under the name 'fraziel' - 'fraziel' seems to appear in just about every NS article somewhere, but never actually where i can find it when i go to the article, apart from a few times in comments where they appear to be some sot of scots nationalist. Any ideas? Or is this just some journo or website technical thing?


Do you mean 'Drimble'? I'm sure I saw something a bit weird earlier... Username can be changed with Disqus.


----------



## rosecore (Apr 17, 2013)

It certainly wasn't posted under her original name to begin with.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 17, 2013)

copliker said:


> Do you mean 'Drimble'? I'm sure I saw something a bit weird earlier... Username can be changed with Disqus.


Nah, the ones that now have the name laurie penny peviously had the name 'fraziel' but fraziel is supposed to be someone else (who co-incidentally "voted lib dem for the first and last ever time at the election" )


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Possibly interesting thing earlier - LPs replies to the person claiming to have been the person she talked to, were posted under the name 'fraziel' - 'fraziel' seems to appear in just about every NS article somewhere, but never actually where i can find it when i go to the article, apart from a few times in comments where they appear to be some sot of scots nationalist. Any ideas? Or is this just some journo or website technical thing?


 
It is a website thing to draw visitors to the website in order to increase page requests - which in turn allows them to charge more for adspace. I have noticed it before when searching for stuff on NS. It's really annoying.

But having a look, it looks like Laurie is Fraziel?


----------



## rosecore (Apr 17, 2013)

It was Fraziel. It did seem odd somebody could be so critical of her article but then claiming she had the transcript of the interview. Perhaps NS has a strange login system.


----------



## rekil (Apr 17, 2013)

I don't think Laurie is using sockpuppets on her own ar'icle's comment threads but 'I seen what I seen (I think)'.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 17, 2013)

copliker said:


> I don't think Laurie is using sockpuppets on her own ar'icle's comment threads but 'I seen what I seen (I think)'.


Why and how is she posting as fraziel then - i don't get it.

But if she is this other person then there could be some fun on the way - who knew she wanted to ban the burqa for instance?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Why and how is she posting as fraziel then - i don't get it.
> 
> But if she is this other person then there could be some fun on the way - who knew she wanted to ban the burqa for instance?


 
I don't think that's her, views are way out of whack for even an anonymous Laurie Penny after a few drinks, the writing style is completely different too.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 17, 2013)

Nor do i, but it still leaves open how and why she was posting using this other persons log-in.


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2013)

shared computer. They'll be hot-desking at the staggers.


----------



## andysays (Apr 17, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> farmer, mother and hunter are the oldest professions. Everyone knows that. The accepted three need money (or barter) to pay for them which can only come from the real oldest proffesion.
> 
> Bet the proper oldest is 'chasing an animal till it falls off a cliff'


 
According to my well-thumbed copy of "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond, the first domestications of plants and animals happened in around 8,500 BC, so farmers have been around for just over 10,000 years by now. Hunter gathering is arguably as old as human history, but as it was carried out by everyone, it probably doesn't count as a profession, which suggests some division of labour.

In all seriousness, I don't see how prostitution can have existed in any meaningful way before farming progressed to the point to allow the generation of a significant surplus of food and a significant division of labour.

Edit: this comment seems sadly irrelevant now I've read the rest of the thread


----------



## rekil (Apr 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Why and how is she posting as fraziel then - i don't get it.
> 
> But if she is this other person then there could be some fun on the way - who knew she wanted to ban the burqa for instance?


I thought 3 things; either it's a bug on their end, it's a browser bug, or it's a sockpuppet. It can't be a browser bug as it looks like several people saw the same thing. Sockpuppet is easy, as many disqus accounts as you like. But if you log in with the 'wrong' one, and then change the display name, it should change on all other posts on the site as well. 

I don't see how it could be a bug on the site end really.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 17, 2013)

S☼I said:


> It's like she was actually anywhere she writes about
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/04/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-margaret-thatcher


 
Just reading the comments on that - overwhelmingly negative - does anyone who reads her stuff actually like it?


----------



## rekil (Apr 17, 2013)

killer b said:


> shared computer. They'll be hot-desking at the staggers.


Laura's still in nooyawk! Unless it was someone logging in on her behalf? 

Helen Lewis back on twitter btw.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 17, 2013)

I also like the idea that asking millionaire Molly Crabapple about the working conditions of her employees is harassment, I guess workfare protesters are harassing Tesco too then?


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 17, 2013)

From LP's article:


> Kids in hoods leaped on to the awning, removed the letters advertising that day's showing and rearranged them into the words: "MARGRET THATCHERS DEAD".
> 
> There was an enormous cheer. There was also some consternation. Other hooded figures climbed up and fixed the spelling, so that it read: "MARGARET THATCHERS DEAD". The hoods and masks might have been a little excessive but, on the other hand, one never really knows any more what is and is not illegal when it comes to the merest squeak of indecorous behaviour on the streets of London.
> 
> After some more discussion, this became: "MARGARET THATCHERS DEAD. LOL". And then, five minutes later: *"MARGARET THATCHERS DEAD, COMMUNISM IS THE KEY".* There followed a pause for sectarian debate up on the ledge, while the police officers in attendance stared up, confused, and the wording changed again, this time to: "EQUALITY IS THE KEY". The argument heated up, aided by some chanting and booing by more radicalised sections of the crowd below, and eventually a compromise was reached. "MARGARET THATCHERS DEAD - COMMUNITEY [sic] IS THE KEY".


 
Ok, which PD comrade did that to the Ritzy, Brixton film advertising listing?


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 17, 2013)

Own up now, which of you little scamps started making veiled references to Urban-related stuff on that article's comments section?


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 17, 2013)

I'm amazed she popped in. I think she must pop in quite frequently even if she doesn't post.

I still think it's a real shame she doesn't engage more with us or answer more questions. It would be good to actually have a debate with her because I think she would learn a lot and perhaps she would be a lot less distant from those she claims to represent.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 17, 2013)

The phrase in the conclusion today has echoes from other LP work.

In telling even a tiny part of it, I find myself afraid for the country I was born in. It's becoming a* colder, meaner, harder place.* Margaret Thatcher was wrong: there is such a thing as society, and it's bloody annoyed, bitter and desperate and dancing on the grave of a broken old tyrant because there's nothing else to dance about. And you can't help suspecting that that's just what Maggie would have wanted. (Today)

Then there’s another young couple I used to know, again just a few years younger than Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge. They met at college, fell in love, were planning to get married and have children, but one of them suffered from a painful physical disability that worsened the more she worked to build them a home together. Her partner watched her struggle to claim disability benefits, like millions of others, watched her self-esteem slowly eroded by the gruelling process of applying for sickness support under the new punitive welfare system, and failing, time and time again. She watched her slide into depression and despair. They could only afford one small room to share. There was no money left over for them to leave the house, not even for a pair of tickets to the cinema. Sometimes young love survives that sort of hardship, and sometimes it shrivels. They broke up, and barely speak anymore.
This is a story that’s being repeated, with different actors and the same terse, tragic theme, all over the country this year. These are the love stories you don’t see, the ones where poverty and hard city winters and the heart-hammering unfairness of life in modern Britain get in between a young girl and her prince or princess. Because the truth is that fairytales are harder and harder to find in this country. Do not be fooled by the flag-wagging and fist-pumping. *We are becoming a colder, meaner place*, and love, a force that is supposed to be more powerful even than class, is harder than ever to fight for. (Why should we pretend to be delighted by Kate's pregnancy?, NS)


We talk about the way it feels to want so fucking badly to change a world that's closing on your future like a hot fist, to want it so much that your stomach twists with anxiety and you work until you're sick and you're given pills to stop the panic and they just make you a different sort of sick. This is the secret. This is what our generation knows better than its parents. Not sex. because that's old news, and you can never fuck your way to freedom. It's the pressure in the head and the heart. It's the way it feels to grow up striving alone and know that that will never be enough, not ever.
There's that pressure in the head, here in this field, tonight. I can feel it in the middle of these bright, tiny stalls of T-shirts and leaflets, in the middle of this shadow-play of radical politics trying to cohere. I don't know if it's the heat, or the medication wearing off, or if it's just Greece, just now: the sense that something vast and terrible is moving its terrible bulk into being, *a crueller, colder world* that cannot be stopped with fists or placards or words painted on the walls of a city.(Discordia)

It's the same approach that they're taking with higher education: gradually removing public funding and making individuals pay more so that while the service doesn't improve, it's no longer the responsibility of the state. Education, healthcare, welfare and now transport: all things that were once considered part of our collective inheritance, all being sold off piece by piece to cut costs in the short term and change the nature of civil society in the long term into *something harder, meaner, more desperate. *(Why rising train fares are bad for Britain, Guardian)

Shame is a form of state violence, but so long as people have the strength to fight for human dignity in an age of austerity, *a poorer, meaner society,* a society built on humiliation, may yet be held at bay. (Shame has become our stick for beating the poor, NS)

It's like yelling at a brick wall. Britain is about to become a *colder, darker place.* (Twitter)

I say: the world is *getting colder and meaner*, and there are too many of us now for anybody to hold back the culture revolution that’s coming. So bring it. Tell me I’m a slut, tell me I’m a joke, tell me I’m a stupid little girl, tell me I’m upsetting the natural order. We upset nothing. You, you with your wars and your big spending and your bigotry and your cruelty and your constant fucking lies, you broke it. Now sit the fuck down and see what we’re going to build with the pieces. (Identity politics and the internet: we're not in Kansas anymore, Liberal Conspiracy)

LP rarely gives the British left direct advice - but 'stop worrying about middle-class domination of left-wing (esp female) voices' is part of it - instead, _worry about Britain's self-conception_:

In fact, I think I’m in a unique position to empathise with the current crisis in Britishness, as being a person from the UK in 2010 is not dissimilar to the rather embarrassing emotional trajectory of being a sensitive young person in one's early twenties. You’re broke, and making bad choices about your money; you’re unsure who your friends are and worried about a future whose outer edges you can barely imagine; you spend your time guiltily re-examining all those horrendous things you did when the world was younger and meaner, but the navel-gazing is interrupted by bursts of shocking arrogance and gleeful, dirty pride. You had such plans and ambitions, and now the world seems to be moving on without you, leaving you behind; you long most of all for a sense of narrative coherence, for a certain story to tell about who you are and where you’re going. It is *right for the left to worry about Britain’s self-conception*, because it affects every aspect of our policy, from the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and dark hints by Cameron about working with America “for an Iran without the bomb”, to the costly renewal of Trident, and the coalition’s indulgence of the City of London at the expense of the people of Britain. (Britain’s summer of angst, NS)


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 17, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm particularly impressed that you've managed to do it all one-handed, too. Hate-wanking won't damage your eyesight, only your perspective.


 
Why immediately think everyone is wanking over you and your mates?  That seems an odd thing to come to mind on a thread about political criticisms.


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Interesting, LP claims to have both audio and transcripts. And Firky, that was you snarking away about Urban surely?


 
No, that was posted two hours ago so around 6pm. If you look at the screenshot I posted the time is 1pm. That is someone pretending to be me. 

Anyone want to own up?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 17, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Why immediately think everyone is wanking over you and your mates? That seems an odd thing to come to mind on a thread about political criticisms.


 
To be fair to Laurie articul8 probably was. Maybe she walked into the Red Pepper office when he was on his vinegars?


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 17, 2013)

Firky said:


> No, that was posted two hours ago so around 6pm. If you look at the screenshot I posted the time is 1pm. That is someone pretending to be me.
> 
> Anyone want to own up?


 
In fairness it could have been anyone who's read bits of this thread.


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

Christ, I read all the comments. She's getting a bit of a pasting. Can't be pleasant for the lass to be mocked and receive so much criticism; probably why she turned up here full of piss and vinegar.

Easily solved though (and not with a cup of tea).



Bakunin said:


> In fairness it could have been anyone who's read bits of this thread.


It is someone who calls her Laura, I have my suspicions. There's only a handful of people who call her Laura. She usually gets Laurie, Penny, Dave or Gobshite.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 17, 2013)

It can't be easy getting that much negativity on a regular basis, to be fair, but living a life in the public eye will invite comment whether it's warranted or not.


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> It can't be easy getting that much negativity on a regular basis, to be fair, but living a life in the public eye will invite comment whether it's warranted or not.


 
Especially when your mate Owen gets praise from the same people who rubbish her work.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 17, 2013)

Firky said:


> Especially when your mate Owen gets praise from the same people who rubbish her work.


 
At the risk of a pasting, isn't he genuinely a better journalist who means it more than Laurie?

Feel a bit nervous about possible replies.


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The phrase in the conclusion today has echoes from other LP work.


 
"The fewer the words that fully communicate or evoke the intended idea, the more effective the communication is" - Mark Twain (had to look it up to make sure I was right and not making a quote up  )


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 17, 2013)

Firky said:


> Christ, I read all the comments. She's getting a bit of a pasting. Can't be pleasant for the lass to be mocked and receive so much criticism; probably why she turned up here full of piss and vinegar.


 
I suspect she understands that a negative reaction is a lot better than none. It can even be better than a positive reaction. Julie Burchill would be forgotten today if she hadn't driven the entire readership of the NME absolutely insane with rage throughout the late '70s. Good journos thrive on hostility.


----------



## chilango (Apr 17, 2013)

Favelado said:


> At the risk of a pasting, isn't he genuinely a better journalist who means it more than Laurie?
> 
> Feel a bit nervous about possible replies.


 
Yes.


----------



## chilango (Apr 17, 2013)

Firky said:


> It is someone who calls her Laura, I have my suspicions. There's only a handful of people who call her Laura. She usually gets Laurie, Penny, Dave or Gobshite.


 
Wasn't me.


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

Favelado said:


> At the risk of a pasting, isn't he genuinely a better journalist who means it more than Laurie?
> 
> Feel a bit nervous about possible replies.


 
Owen has his faults but he is. I think he's strongest when he is on the spot, live radio / TV. He's always well researched, informed and can debate. Where as Penny calls people a cunt on a public platform or stands there like like 1 O'clock half struck.

http://thethirdestate.net/2011/01/on-being-called-a-cunt-by-laurie-penny/

*On being called a cunt by Laurie Penny*


Last night I attended a debate between AWL organizer Ed Maltby and journalist-cum-activist Laurie Penny. I won’t pretend it was the most interesting debate in the whole world, but nonetheless it was one of a number of fora in which activists are coming together to discuss theoretical issues in the emerging anti-cuts movement. The event culminated, though, with Laurie Penny saying, “we all have to work with people we don’t agree with” and then gesturing at me, “for example, I think Jacob is a cunt.” When it was suggested, after the meeting, by another activist that she offer some kind of apology, her response was, “no, he is a cunt.”​


----------



## Belushi (Apr 17, 2013)

chilango said:


> Wasn't me.


 
It was him Firks.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 17, 2013)

One thing I notice when I read her articles is that you don't even have to be thinking very hard or even know that much to find the mistakes. Wasn't "managed decline" a term used with specific reference to Liverpool in a government document? It wasn't about inner cities areas in general and certainly not about inner London ones.

It's all so clumsy.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 17, 2013)

Firky said:


> Owen has his faults but he is. I think he's strongest when he is on the spot, live radio / TV. He's always well researched, informed and can debate. Where as Penny calls people a cunt on a public platform or stands there like like 1 O'clock half struck.
> 
> http://thethirdestate.net/2011/01/on-being-called-a-cunt-by-laurie-penny/
> 
> ...


 

What a tosser.


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

Belushi said:


> It was him Firks.


 
It wasn't who I thought it was then (Norman)!


----------



## J Ed (Apr 17, 2013)

Favelado said:


> One thing I notice when I read her articles is that you don't even have to be thinking very hard or even know that much to find the mistakes. Wasn't "managed decline" a term used with specific reference to Liverpool in a government document? It wasn't about inner cities areas in general and certainly not about inner London ones.
> 
> It's all so clumsy.


 
You also get the impression that whatever you think about his conclusions Owen actually cares about what he writes, he is from a trade unionist background, whereas Laurie could be writing about anything it just so happens that she has found this particular schtick she can _monetize_.


----------



## chilango (Apr 17, 2013)

Firky said:


> It wasn't who I thought it was then (Norman)!



No, really, it wasn't me.

I call her Laura though and wanted to eliminate myself from enquiries...


----------



## Favelado (Apr 17, 2013)

J Ed said:


> You also get the impression that whatever you think about his conclusions Owen actually cares about what he writes, he is from a trade unionist background, whereas Laurie could be writing about anything it just so happens that she has found this particular schtick she can _monetize_.


 
I totally agree.


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

> After a quick bit of googling I came across a article by Laurie showing joy at per emotive arrests on suspicion of future trouble of the EDL, one rule for one, criticism of the left when they have pre arrests eh Laurie, also unless there's Section 60 stops for crowd control ,which I've not heard in the news ,has been authorised, Jst because the Standard says there's going to be 'sweeping stop and search' doesn't make it true,
> 
> Your comment that Brixton erupted several Times during Thatchers time ,it was only twice,
> 
> ...


----------



## Nice one (Apr 17, 2013)

J Ed said:


> You also get the impression that whatever you think about his conclusions Owen actually cares about what he writes, he is from a trade unionist background, whereas Laurie could be writing about anything it just so happens that she has found this particular schtick she can _monetize_.


 
does he represent his class though?


----------



## killer b (Apr 17, 2013)

Nice one said:


> does he represent his class though?


4th grade? yeah.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 17, 2013)

Favelado said:


> One thing I notice when I read her articles is that you don't even have to be thinking very hard or even know that much to find the mistakes. Wasn't "managed decline" a term used with specific reference to Liverpool in a government document? It wasn't about inner cities areas in general and certainly not about inner London ones.
> 
> It's all so clumsy.


 
Yep - it's lazy, insulting crap. And so easy for defenders of Thatcher to refute, giving the impression that the only way you can refute the idea that Thatcher was the saviour of Britain is to make shit up.

Any one of us on these boards could have produced better. Much better. Which brings us back to the point about posh school and Oxbridge social networks enabling mediocre writers to get into that kind of position. (Maybe a little bit unfair, there are a couple of topics on which she does write very well - but this definitely isn't one of them)


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 17, 2013)

Thatcher had quite a long and effective managed decline as well.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 17, 2013)

Firky said:


> > Lastly ' thatcher crushed the spirit of the working class taking on the unions in one bloody fist


 
That's another inaccuracy - Thatcher was as successful as she was in taking on the unions precisely because she _didn't _take them on all at once.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 17, 2013)

The whole thing is dodgy mate:

"This victory was always going to be a pyrrhic one and the people here were determined to warm their faces by the fire as it died."

Pyrrhic for what? For who? How? No one thought protesting Thatcher's media beatification would bring down the coalition.

This bit - what does it mean? 

"David Cameron's cabinet has completed the largest project of redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich in centuries."
Cameron has done this more successfully than Blair, than Thatcher, than Asquith, than Lloyd George, than Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin, than all the other imperialist era prime ministers.
"The funeral celebrations are gross and the headlines are gross and the death parties are gross"
Death parties are not gross when the dead is Thatcher, they are a normal thing - what happened when Franco died and when Nixon died. Bla bla


----------



## TruXta (Apr 17, 2013)

She's certainly putting a fresh spin on the phrase "the personal is political". It's her disgust that's important, much like the Tories are complaining about "disgusting lefties".


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's another inaccuracy - Thatcher was as successful as she was in taking on the unions precisely because she _didn't _take them on all at once.


 
I am guessing that comment is why she is blaming her pasting on right wing trolls because it does have a whiff of tory about it. 

Wish there was a suitable emoticon for the above!


----------



## sihhi (Apr 17, 2013)

The line has been changed unless I am getting it all wrong

"Thatcher took on organised labour and won, crushing the unions and the spirit of the British working class in one manicured fist."




SpineyNorman said:


> Yep - it's lazy, insulting crap. And so easy for defenders of Thatcher to refute, giving the impression that the only way you can refute the idea that Thatcher was the saviour of Britain is to make shit up.


 
As other posters prob know better than me, Thatcher helped set in train capitalist regeneration schemes for parts of certain inner cities like the Docklands and the famous LDDC.


----------



## emanymton (Apr 17, 2013)

killer b said:


> Wonder why she dropped in today... Was it after that comment was posted I wonder?


She suspected the comment may be from someone on here and came to check?


----------



## Odrade (Apr 17, 2013)

After reading a great deal of this thread it seems quite clear to me what's going on here. I'm not going to ask you to check your privilege on this one, you had much rather check your ressentiment. I know it's a classical far-right argument, but it seems to be such a precise analysis of this discussion that it would be cheap to dismiss it outright.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 17, 2013)

1st post.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 17, 2013)

'politics of envy'.

Damn right I'm envious. Is there a problem with that?


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

Pop psychology is for winners.

I'd love to walk into an job where I can post shit to the internet and get paid for it. Imagine if each one of my likes was a quid!


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 17, 2013)

Odrade said:


> After reading a great deal of this thread it seems quite clear to me what's going on here. I'm not going to ask you to check your privilege on this one, you had much rather check your ressentiment. I know it's a classical far-right argument, but it seems to be such a precise analysis of this discussion that it would be cheap to dismiss it outright.


 
I don't think anyone's disputing that this thread is driven by envy and resentment

It couldn't really get much more obvious could it?

The salient question is whether that envy and resentment are justified.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 17, 2013)

'Politics of envy'...an inferred/direct statement/arguement used to undermine and ridicule another for calling out self-serving and exploitative behaviour... I could add that to a wiki if you like. I shan't bother though.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 17, 2013)

Odrade said:


> After reading a great deal of this thread it seems quite clear to me what's going on here. I'm not going to ask you to check your privilege on this one, you had much rather check your ressentiment. I know it's a classical far-right argument, but it seems to be such a precise analysis of this discussion that it would be cheap to dismiss it outright.


 
Maggie? Is that you?


----------



## rekil (Apr 17, 2013)

Surely, the thread is being driven by the idea that people doing things badly is funny?


----------



## Odrade (Apr 17, 2013)

If the whole point of this nitpicking is using some random person as a prugelknabe for your own feelings of inadequacy, it seems somewhat unfair towards the random person. And ressentiment is obviously a more or less legitimate, and at any rate a powerfull, source of any rebellion, but if you leave it unchecked, it makes you stupid.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 17, 2013)

Odrade said:


> If the whole point of this nitpicking is using some random person as a prugelknabe for your own feelings of inadequacy, it seems somewhat unfair towards the random person. And ressentiment is obviously a more or less legitimate, and at any rate a powerfull, source of any rebellion, but if you leave it unchecked, it makes you stupid.


 
You believe you have worked out the 'whole point' (because there's only one) of this thread and know the motives/feelings of every single person who has posted on it?


----------



## redsquirrel (Apr 17, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> What exactly _is _hate-wanking?
> 
> Enquring minds want to know.


Maybe it's what happens after you've monterised your hotness?


----------



## Belushi (Apr 17, 2013)

everyones just randomly picked on Laurie and the criticisms of her journalistic dishonesty are just 'nitpicking'... er okay.

Anyway, use some more long words, I'm interested in learning what else you've covered at Uni this semester


----------



## Firky (Apr 17, 2013)

Pop psychology and foreign verbosity! You did P&P at Oxford and I claim my five deutsche mark.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 18, 2013)

I am more concerned that Odrade joined yesterday and has read this whole thread since then. It was such lovely weather today too.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> It wasn't who I thought it was then (Norman)!


 
Fuck off


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 18, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> I am more concerned that Odrade joined yesterday and has read this whole thread since then. It was such lovely weather today too.


No way did they do the entire thread in a day. Takes about a week, probably longer now.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> After reading a great deal of this thread it seems quite clear to me what's going on here. I'm not going to ask you to check your privilege on this one, you had much rather check your ressentiment. I know it's a classical far-right argument, but it seems to be such a precise analysis of this discussion that it would be cheap to dismiss it outright.


 
Ms Crabapple I presume?

The link to the wiki definition of ressentiment was a nice touch.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 18, 2013)

*waves to Molly*

Could be Stoya instead.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

You don't need to be registered to read this thread. Could be coincidence but I suspect this is one of Laurie's bohemian mates because they turned up within hours of Laurie.

It's not Molly, Molly can't spell for toffee.


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 18, 2013)

I wake up from a long sleep (after doing a shit job Penny will never have to do) and find loads of pages to get through. So, she returned only to not answer criticisms of her and her bobo mates, eh.  Surprising.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> Pop psychology and foreign verbosity! You did P&P at Oxford and I claim my five deutsche mark.


 
I looked up prugelknabe and it just means "whipping boy". So we have a direct translation for it in English and using the German is fucking stupid. There are foreign words that merit use in English but only if they don't have a worthy or succinct equivalent.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

Oh. I'm so full of saudade! Whatever am I to do?


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Oh. I'm so full of saudade! Whatever am I to do?


----------



## weepiper (Apr 18, 2013)

Favelado said:


> I looked up prugelknabe and it just means "whipping boy". So we have a direct translation for it in English and using the German is fucking stupid. There are foreign words that merit use in English but only if they don't have a worthy or succinct equivalent.


 
Yes, but using it marks you out as_ better_ than everyone who has to look it up. Different. A unique special terribly clever little flower


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 18, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> No way did they do the entire thread in a day. Takes about a week, probably longer now.


 
Yes, that is clear for the reason you say and their rather flimsy analysis of the thread and those posting on it.
Mostly, I was just mimicking their faux worry.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


>




I love the sketch where he goes out to that random town near Glasgow and it's a huge mad adventure for him.


----------



## rekil (Apr 18, 2013)

No envy here really. I actually know Tony Benn.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 18, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Yes, but using it marks you out as_ better_ than everyone who has to look it up. Different. A unique special terribly clever little flower


Bairn. Kirk.

Doesn't really work does it.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 18, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Oh. I'm so full of saudade! Whatever am I to do?


 
I'd be interested to know how Laurie thinks saudade is pronounced...


----------



## Odrade (Apr 18, 2013)

English is my second language, thus foreign verbosity or whatnot - and no one wins any bets about Oxford and P&P (whatever that is). Anyway - fair point with the thread not all being about the ressentiment-thing, it just seemed strange to me that no one had pointed out such an obvious streak to this whole conversation. I did have a lot of fun reading through this stuff (though I did not read all of it, or even most), and there are many interesting points that I do agree with. It just seems unfair to lay all of it on Laurie Pennys doorstep - what is she supposed to do with the middle-class-oxbridge-stuff? Constantly apologize? Shut up? Someone made the same point in this tread about Lena Dunham - why is she to bear the responsibility for something that only makes sense as a problem on a systemic level? 

And it's not pop psychology - it's pop philosophy - so much more fun.


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> what is she supposed to do with the middle-class-oxbridge-stuff? ... Shut up?


 
That would be nice.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Yes, but using it marks you out as_ better_ than everyone who has to look it up. Different. A unique special terribly clever little flower


 
Yeah, you thick fuck, Favelado. Fancy not knowing what the German word for whipping boy is. God. Don't they teach you anything in state comprehensives?


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I'd be interested to know how Laurie thinks saudade is pronounced...


 
We are just handing this stuff to her, I see a new assignment/commission coming, perhaps she can learn here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/13/rio-favela-development-brazil-slums_n_2467975.html


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> English is my second language, thus foreign verbosity or whatnot - and no one wins any bets about Oxford and P&P (whatever that is). Anyway - fair point with the thread not all being about the ressentiment-thing, it just seemed strange to me that no one had pointed out such an obvious streak to this whole conversation. I did have a lot of fun reading through this stuff (though I did not read all of it, or even most), and there are many interesting points that I do agree with. It just seems unfair to lay all of it on Laurie Pennys doorstep - what is she supposed to do with the middle-class-oxbridge-stuff? Constantly apologize? Shut up? Someone made the same point in this tread about Lena Dunham - why is she to bear the responsibility for something that only makes sense as a problem on a systemic level?
> 
> And it's not pop psychology - it's pop philosophy - so much more fun.


 
Is German your first language then? If you write English like that and you're not bilingual because of your family or upbringing congratulations.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> We are just handing this stuff to her, I see a new assignment/commision coming, perhaps she can learn here:
> 
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/13/rio-favela-development-brazil-slums_n_2467975.html


 
What kind of arsehole would go and live in a Rio slum and blog about it?

Ahem.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> And it's not pop psychology - it's pop philosophy - so much more fun.


 
Personally I think it's more fun when you recognise the crossover/similarities of the two. Especially when handing out such a generalised 'diagnosis' of what you believe to be a group of people's (many posters on this thread) psychological processes and existential nuerosis like you did with your first post.

To begin with you positioned yourself as the expert, with the ability to posit, ponder and answer all of the important questions we are clearly too 'jealous' to realise.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> Yeah, you thick fuck, Favelado. Fancy not knowing what the German word for whipping boy is. God. Don't they teach you anything in state comprehensives?


 
Assisted places scheme me, sadly. Being a poor kid at a private school will turn you socialist for life I promise you.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

SPLITTER!


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> SPLITTER!


 
I was called "dosser" at school by the rich kids and "posh twat" by the kids from the state school on the walk home because of my blazer.

The memories still hurt. Hold me.


----------



## Nylock (Apr 18, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> You lot are hilarious. Really. The number of hours you've wasted ranting, hyperventilating and making up rubbish about me and stalking my friends is no doubt an enormous loss to the British left.


Here we fucking go again, just as the thread was losing momentum as well....


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

You can't be 100% in these things but Odrade looks like a possible sock-puppet.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

Didn't seem worth a thread of its own so I thought I'd stick it here. Old Holborn on twitter was posting all kinds of vile shit about Hillsborough victims and James Bulger on the 15th. The scousers have found out who he is and dropped his docs all over the internet 

He's gone AWOL and left his wife to take the flack. The coward.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 18, 2013)

Questions:
Who _are_ the British left?
Does LP include herself in that description?
Surely if you are happy to and defend calling someone a cunt Laurie you surely respect another person's right to disagree with you/your approach?


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Didn't seem worth a thread of its own so I thought I'd stick it here. Old Holborn on twitter was posting all kinds of vile shit about Hillsborough victims and James Bulger on the 15th. The scousers have found out who he is and dropped his docs all over the internet
> 
> He's gone AWOL and left his wife to take the flack. The coward.


 
On my Blocked list, has been for a while, life is too short.


----------



## Ax^ (Apr 18, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Questions:
> Who _are_ the British left?
> Does LP include herself in that description?
> Surely if you are happy to and defend calling someone a cunt Laurie you surely respect another person's right to disagree with you/your approach?


Also why the emphasis on British


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> On my Blocked list, has been for a while, life is too short.


 
I'd only ever heard the name mentioned on here and a couple of blogs before tonight but I'd seen enough to know he was a vile piece of shit. Obviously thought he'd be able to hide behind that mask for ever so it's quite amusing to see him getting his.


----------



## Nylock (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> If the whole point of this nitpicking is using some random person as a prugelknabe for your own feelings of inadequacy, it seems somewhat unfair towards the random person. And ressentiment is obviously a more or less legitimate, and at any rate a powerfull, source of any rebellion, but if you leave it unchecked, it makes you stupid.


Cool Story!


Got any more?


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'd only ever heard the name mentioned on here and a couple of blogs before tonight but I'd seen enough to know he was a vile piece of shit. Obviously thought he'd be able to hide behind that mask for ever so it's quite amusing to see him getting his.


 
Crikey. Everything on him available to see.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'd only ever heard the name mentioned on here and a couple of blogs before tonight but I'd seen enough to know he was a vile piece of shit. Obviously thought he'd be able to hide behind that mask for ever so it's quite amusing to see him getting his.


 
He did a 4thought thing where he bragged about making fun of dead kids. Horrible. http://www.4thought.tv/themes/has-social-networking-changed-our-morality/old-holborn--2


----------



## Ax^ (Apr 18, 2013)

.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


> He did a 4thought thing where he bragged about making fun of dead kids. Horrible. http://www.4thought.tv/themes/has-social-networking-changed-our-morality/old-holborn--2


 
Says he'd die to defend his right to do it too. Wonder if he'd say that now?


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> English is my second language, thus foreign verbosity or whatnot - and no one wins any bets about Oxford and P&P (whatever that is). Anyway - fair point with the thread not all being about the ressentiment-thing, it just seemed strange to me that no one had pointed out such an obvious streak to this whole conversation. I did have a lot of fun reading through this stuff (though I did not read all of it, or even most), and there are many interesting points that I do agree with. It just seems unfair to lay all of it on Laurie Pennys doorstep - what is she supposed to do with the middle-class-oxbridge-stuff? Constantly apologize? Shut up? Someone made the same point in this tread about Lena Dunham - why is she to bear the responsibility for something that only makes sense as a problem on a systemic level?
> 
> And it's not pop psychology - it's pop philosophy - so much more fun.


We're not laying it all at Laurie's doorstep by any means.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Didn't seem worth a thread of its own so I thought I'd stick it here. Old Holborn on twitter was posting all kinds of vile shit about Hillsborough victims and James Bulger on the 15th. The scousers have found out who he is and dropped his docs all over the internet
> 
> He's gone AWOL and left his wife to take the flack. The coward.


What a spineless excuse of a human being. I hope his divorce papers are forthcoming.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Didn't seem worth a thread of its own so I thought I'd stick it here. Old Holborn on twitter was posting all kinds of vile shit about Hillsborough victims and James Bulger on the 15th. The scousers have found out who he is and dropped his docs all over the internet
> 
> He's gone AWOL and left his wife to take the flack. The coward.


 
Link, am on a tablet and its a PIA jumping apps n shizzle


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> Link, am on a tablet and its a PIA jumping apps n shizzle


 Old Holborn's docs


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

He looks like a fucking wrong 'un too


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Old Holborn's docs


 
Cheers, you're a real pal, Firky


----------



## Nylock (Apr 18, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> We're not laying it all at Laurie's doorstep by any means.


I suppose that's the trouble with taking exception to the distortions and fabrications of narcissists who are representative of a wider milieu of privileged tossbags speaking as 'the voice of...'. Whether it's journos misrepresenting their sources, artists telling people that if they don't monetise their looks they're just plain stupid or trustafarian hipster 'radicals' spending their waking hours divided between posting trite one-liners on twitter* and partying hard with the rest of the bohos; it's not about the colossal experiential divide between these people and those they appear to 'represent', instead it's all about _them_. Attack everything that's wrong about what they represent, and you attack them personally because they _are_ what they represent -and no amount of rationale or linking to salient examples will convince them otherwise.

It's worse than tragic, it's fucking desperate. =/



*Caveat: Yes, there are also sound people on trite-er as well...


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

Well, that wedding photo's a great mental image for first date sex when you want to perform for a bit longer. I reckon that's another 15 minutes right there.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)




----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Old Holborn's docs


 
Is this him boasting about selling his house for £10,000,000 ?

http://grumpieroldmen.co.uk/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6587&start=0


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> Is this him boasting about selling his house for £10,000,000 ?
> 
> http://grumpieroldmen.co.uk/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6587&start=0


 
Looking at the date, I suspect he's the one who bought it. 

Actually that's bollocks. But I don't _think _they sold it. The way his missus was panicking before she took her twitter account down suggested it was still their home. Plus he's not a director 'oop north' any more - my suspicion is they didn't manage to sell it and then he changed his job and they moved back.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> Is this him boasting about selling his house for £10,000,000 ?
> 
> http://grumpieroldmen.co.uk/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6587&start=0


Ebay pulled the listing quite quickly so no.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Looking at the date, I suspect he's the one who bought it.


 
Sorry, I meant buying. Blame the zopiclone and drambuie night cap 

If he bought that this year the Stamp Duty on it would be..... £700,000.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

Can't find any reference to that hall, loada shite.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> Can't find any reference to that hall, loada shite.


Same here. Twat that he is.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

From a dead domain he used to run:
HUNKYDORY.BIZ 

```
Registrant Name:                            bob ambridge
Registrant Organization:                    bob ambridge
Registrant Address1:                        Farqham Hall
Registrant City:                            Heathfield
Registrant State/Province:                  East Sussex
Registrant Postal Code:                      TN218YW
Registrant Country:                          UNITED KINGDOM
Registrant Country Code:                    GB
Registrant Phone Number:                    +44.7787571462
Registrant Email:                            robert_ambridge@hotmail.com
```


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 18, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Same here. Twat that he is.


 
Billy Bullshit.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

Or he's sad enough to name his semi-detached a hall and list it as such on ebay but they pulled it. 

Fuck knows.


----------



## Odrade (Apr 18, 2013)

Nylock said:


> I suppose that's the trouble with taking exception to the distortions and fabrications of narcissists who are representative of a wider milieu of privileged tossbags speaking as 'the voice of...'. Whether it's journos misrepresenting their sources, artists telling people that if they don't monetise their looks they're just plain stupid or trustafarian hipster 'radicals' spending their waking hours divided between posting trite one-liners on twitter* and partying hard with the rest of the bohos; it's not about the colossal experiential divide between these people and those they appear to 'represent', instead it's all about _them_. Attack everything that's wrong about what they represent, and you attack them personally because they _are_ what they represent -and no amount of rationale or linking to salient examples will convince them otherwise.
> 
> It's worse than tragic, it's fucking desperate. =/
> 
> ...


 
These people obviously do not "represent" the working class, or "the left" (whatever that is) in any adequate way. And they might be wankers. And? Why should they be held responsible for representing any one other than themselves? It just seems to me that the working class is in every way responsible and capable of representing itself. And if that does not seem to be happening in an adequate way, the working class is responsible for that failing. To project the responsibility of representation on some random, young middle-class-oxbridge journalist(s) - regardless if they delude themselves to believe that this is something they are actually doing - seems to me to be a declaration of failure. The working class is not some pitiable five year old who has to beg representation from random middle-class journalists. It's the largest and best organized faction of a modern capitalist society. Or at least it should be. But then again, I'm from Norway, so that's how we do these things. It seems that you've lost the plot.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> Can't find any reference to that hall, loada shite.


 
I think I know what's going on. I've looked that postcode up and it's a close with 8 houses on it - nice but certainly not £10,000,000 worth. But Farqham Hall might = fuck 'em all? Would fit with his antisocial individualism. He'll have given the house the name, but really it's 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 or 8 [name of close]. I won't give the name of the close here but I wouldn't expect anyone would have any trouble finding it.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 18, 2013)

Just a quick one. Seaneen Molloy, quoted in the Laurie Penny article, is by a stunning co-incidence also an aspiring writer and blogger and looks keen on a career in journalism, and is one Laurie's twitter pals ie https://twitter.com/brain_opera/status/320300981646684160 . It would be nice to hear a quote from someone who's outside the London writer/blogger/acitivist clique every once in a while. So there's Rhian Jones and Seaneen Molloy. And someone else who may or may not be accusing her of lying. It might be worth going through some of Laurie's other articles and checking the quotes from people for evidence of mutual backscratching and schmoozing.

Here's her website http://seaneenmolloy.co.uk/?page_id=8



> Seaneen Molloy is the velveteen rabbit…
> Oh, I don’t like the third person.
> I’m Seaneen Molloy, and this is my website. Welcome, please take a look around, even though there’s nothing here at the moment. It is the proverbial empty ghosthouse, it maybe spooks you a little, possibly a once-alive person once trod here, and now every time you hear the squeak of your foot, you imagine you’re being haunted…
> I’m a writer. I write another blog called Mentally Interesting which I hastily deleted when it surpassed 1.5 million hits, and I’ve also written for BBC Ouch, One in Four Magazine and the Observer.
> I had a play made about my blog- surreal, yes. You may have heard my Belfast braw-ing speaking on the radio, if so, I apologise. If you’d like me to write for you and toss pennies into my coffers, get in touch! You can contact me via the form on the contact page, or via anne.elk@gmail.com. I am also represented by Lizzy Kremer of David Higham literary agency, so you can contact her, too!


 
It's never easy to write your own "about me" thing, but she does ok there I think. Building a personal brand comes easier to some than others. I daresay being comfortable with rank egotism is something that comes easier to public schoolkids than the rest of us. My personal brand, for example, is pretty atrocious and a travesty and an embarassment. The only consolation is it's an improvement on my real-life personality 

And I'd like to add, having read her blog on a number of occasions it's worth pointing out that Molloy, in my opinion at least, is an infintely better writer than Laurie Penny with much more to say. Not saying it's perfect or beyond criticism or owt, but I don't feel like I'm being lied to when I read that stuff, or feel that i'm in danger of cringing myself to death. She writes with an assuredness that comes from lived experience, not voyeuristically milking others trials and tribulations to build a career. It should be the likes of Penny kissing her arse, not the other way round. Molloy is far more deserving of a national media platform than Penny, but then again I don't reckon Molloy went to a very posh school and then Oxbridge. She's definitely not as good at monetising her personal brand. They're good at that the rich kids. Thatcher's children y'see. It's almost like an instinct - they see a greasy pole and they know how to climb up it.


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> Or he's sad enough to name his semi-detached a hall and list it as such on ebay but they pulled it.
> 
> Fuck knows.


 
He got his cock out with 'Yeah, but look what I've got' and it backfired? Even eBay laughed at him, it seems.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I think I know what's going on. I've looked that postcode up and it's a close with 8 houses on it - nice but certainly not £10,000,000 worth. But Farqham Hall might = fuck 'em all? Would fit with his antisocial individualism. He'll have given the house the name, but really it's 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 or 8 [name of close]. I won't give the name of the close here but I wouldn't expect anyone would have any trouble finding it.


 
In fact I've just done a bit more google detective work and found the address. I have no idea why I've bothered really but there you go.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I think I know what's going on. I've looked that postcode up and it's a close with 8 houses on it - nice but certainly not £10,000,000 worth. But Farqham Hall might = fuck 'em all? Would fit with his antisocial individualism. He'll have given the house the name, but really it's 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 or 8 [name of close]. I won't give the name of the close here but I wouldn't expect anyone would have any trouble finding it.


 
Yeah I saw it.I also noticed the pampas grass.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> Yeah I saw it.I also noticed the pampas grass.


 
Have you figured out what number they live at yet?

I feel like a stalker lol


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

No, but you can tell me (pm) whilst I be really naughty and scab a whisky


----------



## JimW (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> ... Why should they be held responsible for representing any one other than themselves?...


That's the point, you pillock! If they were a bog-standard Oxbridge journo, while that would also be a sad example of class reproduction, they wouldn't get the same treatment here if they were doing the basics of investigation, interview and writing. But Laurie Penny and her crowd are appropriating the struggles of others - it's not projecting the responsiibility onto them, it's hoping to God they'll stop doing it, fuck off and do something proper instead. I mean, Misha Glenny (to pick a name of a journo whose book I read recently) is a posh boy, I have some political problems with some of his writing, but by and large he's had a respectable media career as far as they go in our crap society.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

Self proclaimed voice of a generation and tribune of the modern left and Odrade is seriously asking why they should be held responsible for representing anyone other than themselves?


----------



## Odrade (Apr 18, 2013)

JimW said:


> That's the point, you pillock! If they were a bog-standard Oxbridge journo, while that would also be a sad example of class reproduction, they wouldn't get the same treatment here if they were doing the basics of investigation, interview and writing. But Laurie Penny and her crowd are appropriating the struggles of others - it's not projecting the responsiibility onto them, it's hoping to God they'll stop doing it, fuck off and do something proper instead. I mean, Misha Glenny (to pick a name of a journo whose book I read recently) is a posh boy, I have some political problems with some of his writing, but by and large he's had a respectable media career as far as they go in our crap society.


 
Impressive with what turned out to be an actual Norwegian insult! Still an insult, though, but I can live with that. So the problem is not that they should represent "the left" in a better way, but that they should stop acting as if the working class is some charity case that needs representing by uninformed random middle-class people without any actual understanding of working class politics or experience? Seems more fair, as points go.

Anyway, I stand by the Dunham point, if you happen to be a middle class, Oxford student, you should still be free to make your points and live your life, without being held responsible for every systemic injustice that goes into this "privilege" thing english-and-sweedish-speaking-people seems to have going on for themselves.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 18, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> We're not laying it all at Laurie's doorstep by any means.


 
The problem is with the British establishment as a whole (and that includes the Left). When the British establishment casts around for a radical, subversive voice to express popular opposition to the Tories they come up with.... a public-school educated Oxbridge graduate. Again. As always.

It's not the fault of the individual in question. But it is infuriating nonetheless.


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> A profession is a paid occupation, so the oldest profession must therefore be a minter who makes the money.


People couldn't get paid before money?

I'll give you a blowjob if you feed me for a week. Deal?


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2013)

teuchter said:


> For the record what ymu did was not just make an argument but also try and slur me personally as a misogynist. That's the level she is operating at.


If you prefer, the act of creating a thread to take the piss out of anti-sexism whilst hypocrisy-hunting anti-Thatcherites without ever once recognising the misogyny of the Thatcherite drooling and their ludicrous promotion of a song about wanking over her, is a misogynist one.

You acted like a misogynist and, misogyny not being considered a permanent, immutable, characteristic, that makes you a misogynist.

Or someone too ignorant, and wilfully so, to understand what misogyny is. If we're going to be charitable about it.

I seem to recall suggesting that you actually just don't know what the term means, because you set up a whole thread for it yet failed to post any egregious examples (of which there are now at least six, the worst insta-edited on request, because P&P doesn't tolerate misogyny even if there are enough unthinkers on the rest of the boards that we're still stuck in the 1990s with childish neanderthals screaming to be allowed to stay there).


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i've always had a problem with this statement. i mean, prostitution isn't a profession unless there's some sort of professional standards board of which i am unaware. and secondly, if we assume that a profession = a job, how do people know it is the oldest. do all sources agree on this? _citation needed_.
> 
> i suspect people want to believe that so that they can pretend that there is some sort of historical tradition to prostitution, rather than it being indicative of values and power dynamics within the society.


I'm not sure it's an evidence-based statement. Its truth or otherwise (whether historical or semantical) doesn't really alter its meaning. So its a bit of a pointless thing to ponder on. Unless the actual point is something you don't want to address.

(Not an accusation, just an observation that focusing on semantics or language or pinning down a difficult to pin down fact when none of these affect the point being made, is the kind of thing that people often send themselves running in pointless circles over, and it is a useful distracting tactic for those who don't want to discuss the point. See: bigots with delicate sensibilities over obscene language. I won't address what you say unless you say it politely. Then I will ignore it until you are swearing at me again. Rinse and repeat.)

See, for example, this multiway spirited defence of someone labelling me a feminazi (from the anecdote that started it).

Am I wrong to be pissed off about this kind of thing?


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2013)

> "It's my parents' grudge, really," Sky *admitted*. "But looking at the world we're living in now, I understand that a lot of it evolved from her policies."


She admitted it. She didn't say it at the start of a perfectly sound political argument, she admitted it.

Pure spin journalism, posh tabloid. She'll end up writing click-bait for the Mail.


----------



## andysays (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> Pop psychology is for winners.
> 
> I'd love to walk into an job where I can post shit to the internet and get paid for it. Imagine if each one of my likes was a quid!


 
I hope that's not the way Odrade is being paid; it hasn't yet broken its duck. Might as well be on Workfare 

(You, on the other hand, would be having to look at setting up FirkyCommentingLtd as a way of minimising your tax liability )


----------



## andysays (Apr 18, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Assisted places scheme me, sadly. Being a poor kid at a private school will turn you socialist for life I promise you.


 
I can see parallels here with being the smartest kid in a smart school...


----------



## Nice one (Apr 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Self proclaimed voice of a generation and tribune of the modern left and Odrade is seriously asking why they should be held responsible for representing anyone other than themselves?


 
does laurie penny represent the same class as own jones?


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

andysays said:


> I can see parallels here with being the smartest kid in a smart school...


 
Bastard.


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2013)

Nice one said:


> does laurie penny represent the same class as own jones?


No. And?


----------



## andysays (Apr 18, 2013)

ymu said:


> People couldn't get paid before money?


 
Obviously people *could* get paid before money. But the other assumption in this is that there is someone with a surplus of food (or whatever) who is willing to exchange it for sex. What have they done to acquire this surplus and might that count as a profession?



ymu said:


> I'll give you a blowjob if you feed me for a week. Deal?


 
You might need to re-think your rates there, I suspect that would be over-monetising your hotness...


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Ms Crabapple I presume?
> 
> The link to the wiki definition of ressentiment was a nice touch.


I thought they couldn't spell.


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> You don't need to be registered to read this thread. Could be coincidence but I suspect this is one of Laurie's bohemian mates because they turned up within hours of Laurie.
> 
> It's not Molly, Molly can't spell for toffee.


This person can't spell resentment.


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'd only ever heard the name mentioned on here and a couple of blogs before tonight but I'd seen enough to know he was a vile piece of shit. Obviously thought he'd be able to hide behind that mask for ever so it's quite amusing to see him getting his.



I tried engaging him in a discussion about individualism a while ago, he showed himself to be completely incapable of engaging. A total joke.


----------



## andysays (Apr 18, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> This person can't spell resentment.


 
I think you need to go back and re-read that part of the thread a little more carefully


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Old Holborn's docs




Ha ha ha!


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 18, 2013)

andysays said:


> I think you need to go back and re-read that part of the thread a little more carefully


I think you need a sense of humour.


----------



## cesare (Apr 18, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> I think you need a sense of humour.


----------



## andysays (Apr 18, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> I think you need a sense of humour.


 
I do have a sense of humour, but it occasionally lets me down. Apologies if this is one of those times


----------



## cesare (Apr 18, 2013)

andysays said:


> Obviously people *could* get paid before money. But the other assumption in this is that there is someone with a surplus of food (or whatever) who is willing to exchange it for sex. What have they done to acquire this surplus and might that count as a profession?



Robbing. Hoarding. Killing a bigger animal than they could eat at once. Sowing more than needed against the risk of adverse weather, then reaping unexpectedly large amount. Ability to access glut of difficult to get at foodstuffs. Etc


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 18, 2013)

andysays said:


> I do have a sense of humour, but it occasionally lets me down. Apologies if this is one of those times


No worries. I'm not as funny as I like to think.


----------



## andysays (Apr 18, 2013)

cesare said:


> Robbing. Hoarding. Killing a bigger animal than they could eat at once. Sowing more than needed against the risk of adverse weather, then reaping unexpectedly large amount. Ability to access glut of difficult to get at foodstuffs. Etc


 
All of those are possible ways of getting your hands on a surplus, true.

What I'm trying to get at is that when everyone is living a collective more-or-less hand to mouth existence in hunter-gatherer/primitive communist societies, there is very little possibility of any one individual being able to accumulate a significant surplus and being able to exchange it for non-food items like blow jobs...

It's only with the advent of farming that surpluses were generated, any division of labour (aka professions) was possible, and societies became more complicated with the emergence of embryonic class systems.

Farming must pre-date prostitution as a profession.


----------



## cesare (Apr 18, 2013)

andysays said:


> All of those are possible ways of getting your hands on a surplus, true.
> 
> What I'm trying to get at is that when everyone is living a collective more-or-less hand to mouth existence in hunter-gatherer/primitive communist societies, there is very little possibility of any one individual being able to accumulate a significant surplus and being able to exchange it for non-food items like blow jobs...
> 
> ...


But not everyone in hunter-gatherer societies was able (at all times) to go and hunt and gather for themselves. So the basis of the collective sharing would be based on communal needs such as child rearing, and caring for the old/sick. Exchange isn't necessarily based on surplus.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 18, 2013)

ymu said:


> People couldn't get paid before money?
> 
> I'll give you a blowjob if you feed me for a week. Deal?


 
not the same thing, no they couldn't.


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2013)

None of this changes the meaning of the old adage. It's an interesting topic in its own right, but surely the meaning that is intended to be conveyed is more important than the semantic definitions and economic history?

It would actually be interesting to discuss _why_ it is the oldest profession.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 18, 2013)

It isn't.


----------



## killer b (Apr 18, 2013)

i think it's just a rather misogynist statement that relies on the assumption that women will only fuck men if they want something.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 18, 2013)

Adam & Eve y'all.


----------



## andysays (Apr 18, 2013)

ymu said:


> None of this changes the meaning of the old adage. It's an interesting topic in its own right, but surely the meaning that is intended to be conveyed is more important than the semantic definitions and economic history?
> 
> It would actually be interesting to discuss _why_ it is the oldest profession.


 
Why it's *claimed* to be the oldest profession and (originally) by whom


----------



## rekil (Apr 18, 2013)

Laurie and Owen get the mention on conservative home.



> The lost tribes of British politics – day 3: the Labour left and the palaeo-socialists
> 
> 5. The Labour Left
> 
> ...


----------



## Balbi (Apr 18, 2013)

Owen Jones meets that category. Wouldn't say Laurie does. Labour actually engage with Jones, whereas they wouldn't give Penny the time of day.


----------



## Dillinger4 (Apr 18, 2013)

It's because she is too radical


----------



## rosecore (Apr 18, 2013)

> "It's my parents' grudge, really," Sky admitted. "But looking at the world we're living in now, I understand that a lot of it evolved from her policies."
> 
> *young punks and activists handing out beer and their parents' grudges*
> 
> Thatcher-hatred isn't confined to the intermittently organised left. It's a folk memory thing, a tribal thing, passed down from parents to children


 
Another thing I found problematic about the piece was Penny's insinuation that young people can't really have a true opinion on Thatcher because they are inherited beliefs and grudges of their parents. Intentional or not, there's a subtle mocking in there I'm sure.The first person she interviews admits this is the case. Those on the right made the same spurious argument. Such a lazy thing to write.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 18, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Owen Jones meets that category. Wouldn't say Laurie does. Labour actually engage with Jones, whereas they wouldn't give Penny the time of day.


I'd say he engages with labour, they don't engage with him - they don't have to, he's doing a great job of convincing many young people that there is no other road to change anything but through voting labour thereby helping make it actually happen, whilst the party fails to sign up to or support any of the things he gives as the reason for voting labour.


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2013)

killer b said:


> i think it's just a rather misogynist statement that relies on the assumption that women will only fuck men if they want something.


I don't see it that way at all.

I think it's because all societies to date have been patriarchal (exceptions heavily disputed, it doesn't matter, quibble away but it's irrelevant to the argument). Men are leaders and women are possessions for the purpose of bearing babies.

Women always know the child is theirs. Men cannot be sure.

So patriarchs who believe in the importance of blood-lines (which is something of a historical continuity, AFAIK) need to keep their women from fucking anyone else, if they want to them to bear their children, or marry them off to a respectable family.

So women must be prevented from having sex. FGM is one way to do it. Making them cover up so men don't get turned on by them and try to do something about it is another way. Capital punishment for being raped is a good 'un.

In 20th century Britain, the evolution of these archaic attitudes is probably best summed up by Barbara Cartland: at marriage, women should be virgins and men should be experienced.

Which is basically saying "we need a class of prostitutes to keep middle-class men happy and middle-class women virgins".

Hence the routine raping of female workers by their bosses and superiors, a situation which continues however many sets of societal blinkers we are wearing. Nice girls don't do that, and other women don't matter.


----------



## killer b (Apr 18, 2013)

ok. well, i think it's a lot simpler than that. but this isn't really the thread for a lengthy discussion on the matter imo.


----------



## cesare (Apr 18, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I'd say he engages with labour, they don't engage with him - they don't have to, he's doing a great job of convincing many young people that there is no other road to change anything but through voting labour thereby helping make it actually happen, whilst the party fails to sign up to or support any of the things he gives as the reason for voting labour.


I'm going to try and memorise this post cos it gets the point across so well. Do you think his effect is worse than LP's btw?


----------



## TruXta (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> These people obviously do not "represent" the working class, or "the left" (whatever that is) in any adequate way. And they might be wankers. And? Why should they be held responsible for representing any one other than themselves? It just seems to me that the working class is in every way responsible and capable of representing itself. And if that does not seem to be happening in an adequate way, the working class is responsible for that failing. To project the responsibility of representation on some random, young middle-class-oxbridge journalist(s) - regardless if they delude themselves to believe that this is something they are actually doing - seems to me to be a declaration of failure. The working class is not some pitiable five year old who has to beg representation from random middle-class journalists. It's the largest and best organized faction of a modern capitalist society. Or at least it should be. But then again, I'm from Norway, so that's how we do these things. It seems that you've lost the plot.


Aslak Sira Myhre?


----------



## Greebo (Apr 18, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Adam & Eve y'all.


And Lilith.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 18, 2013)

cesare said:


> I'm going to try and memorise this post cos it gets the point across so well. Do you think his effect is worse than LP's btw?


Absolutely.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 18, 2013)

Greebo said:


> And Lilith.


 

and steve


----------



## TruXta (Apr 18, 2013)

Considering LP has voted/favoured LibDems I'd say Owen's pull for Lab seems the greater?


----------



## rekil (Apr 18, 2013)

Surely Owen will get a Labour job offer if they get in, special advisor or communicatons team bigwig or something. It'd be a bit daft to leave him outside. He'd be useful for going on telly and saying 'Labour can't undo all the tory damage overnight' over and over.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 18, 2013)

cesare said:


> I'm going to try and memorise this post cos it gets the point across so well. Do you think his effect is worse than LP's btw?


 
To answer in a bit more detail than just 'absolutely':

One simple reason is that there is actual politics that you can do if you agree with him, you can join labour and put forward a motion on re-nationalisation or something and get it debated locally or whatever, or sponsor an initiative for the trades council to consider - it's a politics that offers some form of personal and collective involvement whereas LPs stuff is just this is what _i_ did, _me_, not _you_, and i'm not going to offer you anything beyond that.

I remember when we opened the bookshop two best-sellers in those first weeks were Chav's and some LP one, the chavs one is still selling well now and no one asks about LP anymore, plus the people who bought chavs are still around, a lot of them might now be in the labour orbit, but they're still around. And i think that's because of that offer of involvement his stuff contains.


----------



## cesare (Apr 18, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> To answer in a bit more detail than just 'absolutely':
> 
> One simple reason is that there is actual politics that you can do if you agree with him, you can join labour and put forward a motion on re-nationalisation or something and get it debated locally or whatever, or sponsor an initiative for the trades council to consider - it's a politics that offers some form of personal and collective involvement whereas LPs stuff is just this is what _i_ did, _me_, not _you_, and i'm not going to offer you anything beyond that.
> 
> I remember when we opened the bookshop two best-sellers in those first weeks were Chav's and some LP one, the chavs one is still selling well now and no one asks about LP anymore, plus the people who bought chavs are still around, a lot of them might now be in the labour orbit, but they're still around. And i think that's because of that offer of involvement his stuff contains.



So what he does (and does well) is encourage a route into current electoral politics which as we know aren't serving the working class.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 18, 2013)

cesare said:


> So what he does (and does well) is encourage a route into current electoral politics which as we know aren't serving the working class.


That's it in a nutshell - and LP isn't offering a route anywhere. Key difference in impact (immediate or potential) on real world as a result.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 18, 2013)

ymu said:


> Am I wrong to be pissed off about this kind of thing?


 
Not at all.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> After reading a great deal of this thread it seems quite clear to me what's going on here. I'm not going to ask you to check your privilege on this one, you had much rather check your ressentiment. I know it's a classical far-right argument, but it seems to be such a precise analysis of this discussion that it would be cheap to dismiss it outright.


 
well done.  thanks for the wiki link.  us uneducated plebs would never have got what you were on about otherwise.  perhaps an IP check might not go astray on this one... editor?


----------



## cesare (Apr 18, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That's it in a nutshell - and LP isn't offering a route anywhere. Key difference in impact (immediate or potential) on real world as a result.


And so he can afford to indulge LP in these tea-drinking making up sessions, because the relatively minimal impact it has for her vanity is so much more publicity and impact for him. For example, and just as an aside.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 18, 2013)

cesare said:


> So what he does (and does well) is encourage a route into current electoral politics which as we know aren't serving the working class.


 
These people could "start" out believing what he saysgetting involved in Labour etc and end up coming to their own conclusion (hopefully that it's bollocks, but maybe that it isn't) so in that sense owen jones could actually be doing some good couldn't he?

or am i being naive?


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Apr 18, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> These people could "start" out believing what he saysgetting involved in Labour etc and end up coming to their own conclusion (hopefully that it's bollocks, but maybe that it isn't) so in that sense owen jones could actually be doing some good couldn't he?
> 
> or am i being naive?


 
I was going to post something like that too... but I think it is just as likely that someone could be inspired to get involved with "look at me!" activisty type politics (or rather hipsterish activisty posing) by reading LP and then realise that is a dead end and move on to better things.

I think butchers is right in that OJ's aims are more pernicious than LP's. But where people end up will of course depend on other factors.

That is a bit wooly though...


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2013)

killer b said:


> ok. well, i think it's a lot simpler than that. but this isn't really the thread for a lengthy discussion on the matter imo.


I'd agree, if it wasn't the only thread on the boards where is is possible to discuss it.

Should I try mumsnet?


----------



## cesare (Apr 18, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> These people could "start" out believing what he saysgetting involved in Labour etc and end up coming to their own conclusion (hopefully that it's bollocks, but maybe that it isn't) so in that sense owen jones could actually be doing some good couldn't he?
> 
> or am i being naive?



People do come to their own conclusions but quite often it's through disillusionment and by then the damage (perpetuating the party machine) is done, I suppose.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 18, 2013)

owens raising consciousness, but only as far as labourism


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I'd say he engages with labour, they don't engage with him - they don't have to, he's doing a great job of convincing many young people that there is no other road to change anything but through voting labour thereby helping make it actually happen, whilst the party fails to sign up to or support any of the things he gives as the reason for voting labour.


 
I think you'll have a more than adequate response to this but isn't Jones agitating for a left-wing alternative to Labour and actually wanting to bring about another road to change? Or did he just write one article saying that once and that's the sum total of it?

It's the latter isn't it?


----------



## killer b (Apr 18, 2013)

ymu said:


> I'd agree, if it wasn't the only thread on the boards where is is possible to discuss it.
> 
> Should I try mumsnet?


be my guest.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> what's made up? these are your and your friends own words you twat


 
For an Oxbridge English grad, she doesn't do too well at discourse analysis, does she?


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 18, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Who _are_ the British left?


this lot 
sorry, just jumping back a few weeks to the discussion about the left/activists/the line between them and everyone else..

event:






> "Moderation in temper is always a virtue
> But moderation in principle is always a vice"
> (T Paine, The Rights of Man)
> and the home of the radical to meet, to plot, to drink, to commiserate the woes of work, to flirt with the potential of change has always been The Public House.
> ...


 
what the staggering fuck?
a 10 minute intro to the bedroom tax. with the rest of the evening booked for getting pissed and making sure that they claim a large chunk of visibility credit on saturday.

this was a celebration of thatcher's funeral by self-identified 'workers in and for the community'

which was them and their mates. in a basement. the one waving the 'orgreave' placard has described what happened there as involving 'activists' foremost, miners after.

and they all think the sun shines out of our laurie's arse.

leeds is well pissing me off at the minute


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


>


 
WTF is "an attempted rightwing attempt" when it's at home? Some kind of weird fetishistic never-ending failed circle-jerk?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 18, 2013)

it's not just leeds.  check out these prannies.

http://www.artangel.org.uk//projects/2013/party_for_freedom/people_vs_freedom/public_gatherings


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Possibly interesting thing earlier - LPs replies to the person claiming to have been the person she talked to, were posted under the name 'fraziel' - 'fraziel' seems to appear in just about every NS article somewhere, but never actually where i can find it when i go to the article, apart from a few times in comments where they appear to be some *sot of scots nationalist*. Any ideas? Or is this just some journo or website technical thing?


 
That's a very prejudiced way of looking at ScotNats. Not all of them are sots!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

Nice one said:


> to be honest with you mate if you were a class struggle anarchist (london branch) it would be all fixie bikes, ironic moustaches and skinny fit jeans. Coupled with a private school education, posh university and £30k job courtesy of your dad's company.


 
So, you're not at all bitter as _per_ the events of last year, then?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Do you reckon we'll get a massive increase in views on this thread like last time Laurie turned up? Be good to get a bit more traffic for the site.
> 
> Or do I need to get her to call me a racist again?


 
Or a misogynist. Either is fine.


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 18, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> this lot
> sorry, just jumping back a few weeks to the discussion about the left/activists/the line between them and everyone else..
> 
> event:
> ...




Students, swearing.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Nah, the ones that now have the name laurie penny peviously had the name 'fraziel' but fraziel is supposed to be someone else (who co-incidentally "voted lib dem for the first and last ever time at the election" )


 
So basically it's all a bit Hari/Rose, then?


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 18, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> Students, swearing.


nope. wrong.
Seasoned, professional activists/radical routes and worker co-op members swearing. not a sniff of student among 'em. unless you count the performance poets


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

double post


----------



## lazythursday (Apr 18, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> what the staggering fuck?
> a 10 minute intro to the bedroom tax. with the rest of the evening booked for getting pissed and making sure that they claim a large chunk of visibility credit on saturday.


 
As someone who hasn't been to a political meeting in donkey's years, I'm not sure this approach is totally bad. I'd much rather go along to something that sounds sociable and where I can easily escape if necessary. If it's my cup of tea I can then get a bit more involved. And I can then go to the bedroom tax demo the next day and actually know people, rather than stand around on the edge feeling a bit of a tit while some trot shouts into a microphone. 

Now I'm not saying these guys have sound politics but they've at least manage to design a political meeting that sounds like fun.


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 18, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> nope. wrong.
> Seasoned, professional activists/radical routes and worker co-op members swearing. not a sniff of student among 'em. unless you count the performance poets


 
I've never met a 'professional activist' before.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 18, 2013)

tufty79 said:


>




Cringe cringe cringe cringe


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 18, 2013)

lazythursday said:


> As someone who hasn't been to a political meeting in donkey's years, I'm not sure this approach is totally bad. I'd much rather go along to something that sounds sociable and where I can easily escape if necessary. If it's my cup of tea I can then get a bit more involved. And I can then go to the bedroom tax demo the next day and actually know people, rather than stand around on the edge feeling a bit of a tit while some trot shouts into a microphone.
> 
> Now I'm not saying these guys have sound politics but they've at least manage to design a political meeting that sounds like fun.


fair point. all the local/community meetings that hands of our homes have organised in the last six months have merely provided tea 

(and yes, this is me btw )


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 18, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> I've never met a 'professional activist' before.


they're fun.
right. sorry for the derail, i just wanted to explode grumpily somewhere for a minute.


----------



## treelover (Apr 18, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> Students, swearing.


 
The guy with the long hair, Merrick, is not a student, and he has done lots of good work..


----------



## J Ed (Apr 18, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/18/are-you-too-white-rich-straight-to-be-feminist the commentariat is eating itself


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 18, 2013)

treelover said:


> The guy with the long hair, Merrick, is not a student, and he has done lots of good work..


aye. got some of it into the 'penguin book of 20th century protest' too.

look out for his upcoming book on peter wells. he managed to track down and doorstep people who didn't want to be found, and as a result one of them is now in therapy . he forgot to think about the consequences of his actions (in m's own words).


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

Favelado said:


> At the risk of a pasting, isn't he genuinely a better journalist who means it more than Laurie?
> 
> Feel a bit nervous about possible replies.


 
Why? 

I think they both "mean it", but OJ brings a depth of political and historical understanding to his writing that's missing from LP's writing. I might not agree with what he says (what with him being a "vote labour with no illusions" kind-of-guy, a position I find very difficult to reconcile with reality!), but he says it reasonably well, and he doesn't do disingenuousness on anything like the scale of other "bubblers".


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 18, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> they're fun.


 
A social worker who sometimes posts here had some PhD radical social change uni lecturer mate turn up on his BMX to a Leeds student pub a few years ago.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Cringe cringe cringe cringe


 
Good grief, 2 mins hate?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

Belushi said:


> It was him Firks.


 
No it wasn't.

*You* are Spartacus!!!


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Apr 18, 2013)

treelover said:


> The guy with the long hair, Merrick, is not a student, and he has done lots of good work..


 
I've known Merrick for about 20 years. He has done _lots_ of good things.

I think he is still a bit "studenty" though, especially in some of his cultural projects (for example the radio show he did about ten years ago).

We've had a couple of lengthy discussions about it  , and I still care about him a great deal.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

Favelado said:


> One thing I notice when I read her articles is that you don't even have to be thinking very hard or even know that much to find the mistakes. Wasn't "managed decline" a term used with specific reference to Liverpool in a government document? It wasn't about inner cities areas in general and certainly not about inner London ones.
> 
> It's all so clumsy.


 
Yep, that was certainly the genesis of the term. Came to light the 30 year rule stuff declassified at the end of 2011. Howe (then chancellor) on Liverpool.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Why?


 
My politics are very similar to Owen's - I feel like a shocking left-wing Trot most times I'm at a wedding or something and talking to some randomer but I'm a far-right pig-dog on U75.


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 18, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> aye. got some of it into the 'penguin book of 20th century protest' too.
> 
> look out for his upcoming book on peter wells. he managed to track down and doorstep people who didn't want to be found, and as a result one of them is now in therapy . he forgot to think about the consequences of his actions (in m's own words).



Who is Peter Wells?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

copliker said:


> No envy here really. I actually know Tony Benn.


 
The real boast is when you can say "Tony Benn knows *me*".


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 18, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> The real boast is when you can say "Tony Benn knows *me*".


 
"Lloyd George knew my mother".


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 18, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Who is Peter Wells?


 

miscarriage of justice (i might be using the wrong words there, i've not had coffee), now dead. other people from his life aren't though.
wiki: 'Wells was a young man who had been imprisoned for sex with an 18-year-old man. Had his partner been a woman it would have been legal, but the gay age of consent was 21 as opposed to 16 for heterosexuals'.

http://dustonthestylus.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/tom-robinson-glad-to-be-gay-79-mp3.html


> Have you heard the story about Peter Wells​Who one day was arrested and dragged to the cells​For being in love with a man of 18​The vicar found out they’d been having a scene​The magistrates sent him for trial by the Crown​He even appealed but they still sent him down​He was only mistreated a couple of years​Cos even in prison they look after the queers​


 
*joins the 'ive known m for 20 years' club*
actually, make that seventeen, otherwise i'd have been_ horrendously_ young.


----------



## andysays (Apr 18, 2013)

lazythursday said:


> Now I'm not saying these guys have sound politics but they've at least manage to design a political meeting that sounds like fun.


 
Sounds like fun?

There will be plenty of time for fun after the revolution, comrade. What's required now is for all committed members of the class to surrender their individuality to the Vanguard Party.

Less fun; more paper sales.


----------



## andysays (Apr 18, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> nope. wrong.
> Seasoned, professional activists/radical routes and worker co-op members swearing. not a sniff of student among 'em. unless you count the performance poets


 
Have you ever tried to count the performance poets, though?

There's fucking loads of them for a start, and they absolutely refuse to stand still for long enough to be counted - too hung up on their own artistic expression...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> These people obviously do not "represent" the working class, or "the left" (whatever that is) in any adequate way. And they might be wankers. And? Why should they be held responsible for representing any one other than themselves? It just seems to me that the working class is in every way responsible and capable of representing itself. And if that does not seem to be happening in an adequate way, the working class is responsible for that failing.


 
It must be nice to be able to entirely elide the idea of social capital and the imbalances between the classes that it causes from your intellectual repertoire.



> To project the responsibility of representation on some random, young middle-class-oxbridge journalist(s) - regardless if they delude themselves to believe that this is something they are actually doing - seems to me to be a declaration of failure. The working class is not some pitiable five year old who has to beg representation from random middle-class journalists. It's the largest and best organized faction of a modern capitalist society. Or at least it should be.


 
Yes, it should. Odd how so much legislation has been produced in the last 30 years that serves to stop or slow us organising or even expressing solidarity withe ach other. One would almost think that *might* have something to do with the current situation where _faux_-rebellious members of the chattering classes believe that they can stand as a vanguard for us!



> But then again, I'm from Norway, so that's how we do these things. It seems that you've lost the plot.


 
Or perhaps you're being culturally-imperialistic, and/or confusing your rather smaller polity with our rather larger one, and believing that your solutions would flawlessly scale up so as to be amenable to being applied here?


----------



## TruXta (Apr 18, 2013)

He's a fucking embarassment to my country.


----------



## chilango (Apr 18, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> These people could "start" out believing what he saysgetting involved in Labour etc and end up coming to their own conclusion (hopefully that it's bollocks, but maybe that it isn't) so in that sense owen jones could actually be doing some good couldn't he?
> 
> or am i being naive?



I dunno about doing some "good", but he's certainly a more enticing figure than LP and so is his politics.

That is one of the dangerous bits.

LP offers absolutely nothing. Pure parasitism. 

Though her increasingly obnoxious character, like the other nauseating examples in her milieu, will no doubt turn plenty of curious people away from the idea of the "left" as any sort of vehicle for change.

Jones otoh is the opposite. He comes across as an approachable, even affable, nice guy with plenty of common sense. He says plenty of things, which on the surface at least, are pretty reasonable. And he often says them well. 

Hmmm.


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2013)

andysays said:


> (You, on the other hand, would be having to look at setting up FirkyCommentingLtd as a way of minimising your tax liability )


You know he's recovering from an operation, right? You know there are housebound people posting all over these boards, right? You're aware that people not like you exist and use their time in different ways because they have different choices, right?

You don't listen. You should.

Yeah, I know. I'm going off on one for trivial shit again. I mean, what's the point in refusing to accept the rich, white, straight, cis, able-bodied male point of view? They're the leaders of our class, right? No point in challenging that.

/fuck off


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2013)

killer b said:


> be my guest.


For a discussion of class-based feminism?

Did it need a  on the end to make the point clear?


----------



## andysays (Apr 18, 2013)

ymu said:


> You know he's recovering from an operation, right? You know there are housebound people posting all over these boards, right? You're aware that people not like you exist and use their time in different ways because they have different choices, right?
> 
> You don't listen. You should.
> 
> ...


 
No, I didn't know that Firky was recovering from an operation (hope that's going well, Firky)

But yes, I know all the other stuff you mention.

Are you suggesting that my comment carries with it a suggestion of criticism of someone for spending too much time here or making too many posts, because if so you're totally wide of the mark (and totally out of order for jumping to such an unwarranted conclusion).


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

TruXta said:


> He's a fucking embarassment to my country.


 
Wasn't that raving rightist "libertarian" who graced us with his presence a couple of years ago also one of your fellow-countrymen?


----------



## Nylock (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> These people obviously do not "represent" the working class, or "the left" (whatever that is) in any adequate way.


Thanks for letting me in on that one, Captain Obvious.



Odrade said:


> And they might be wankers. And? Why should they be held responsible for representing any one other than themselves?


Because the worst examples of this group are held up and lauded as representatives of others rather than just themselves and when they are trotted out to speak on 'our' behalf it's inevitably embarrassing and says very little about struggle but a whole heck of a lot about them and their works.



Odrade said:


> It just seems to me that the working class is in every way responsible and capable of representing itself. And if that does not seem to be happening in an adequate way, the working class is responsible for that failing. To project the responsibility of representation on some random, young middle-class-oxbridge journalist(s) - regardless if they delude themselves to believe that this is something they are actually doing - seems to me to be a declaration of failure. The working class is not some pitiable five year old who has to beg representation from random middle-class journalists. It's the largest and best organized faction of a modern capitalist society. Or at least it should be. But then again, I'm from Norway, so that's how we do these things. It seems that you've lost the plot.


The working class may be an organised force to be reckoned with in Norway -but we are not fucking Norway. Not being from Norway, i have no idea what your government has spent it's North Sea Oil wealth on since the late '70s but over here in the UK we are fully aware of what our government spent a significant amount of those oil revenues on: The atomisation of society, the destruction of our manufacturing base (which was a part of the source of power for our unions (a united 'society' being another part)), the crushing of the trades union movement and the breaking of the working class by evil divide and rule/every man for himself tactics.

I'm glad life for you is so good in Norway, that you have a working class that is an organised force to be reckoned with and that you feel eminently qualified to speak about political life here in the UK. However, if I were you, I'd pray to whatever deity you hold dear that you never have a prime minister like Margaret Thatcher and the gallery of sneering hubristic cunts and smug arseholes that followed her. Pray it never happens to you, because if it does -what we have to tolerate here is your future.


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2013)

andysays said:


> No, I didn't know that Firky was recovering from an operation (hope that's going well, Firky)
> 
> But yes, I know all the other stuff you mention.
> 
> Are you suggesting that my comment carries with it a suggestion of criticism of someone for spending too much time here or making too many posts, because if so you're totally wide of the mark (and totally out of order for jumping to such an unwarranted conclusion).


Yes, that is what I am suggesting, from the perspective of someone who is semi-housebound due to disability and largely unemployed for the same reasons.

You're free to explain what you actually meant by it, of course. I can't say I care any more. You have repeatedly demonstrated that you just don't get why your perspective is simply inadequate for addressing an issue that affects people with a completely different perspective and I'm not going to disrupt this thread any more. There's dozens of fucked up ones you can trawl through to find the gems you need. I'll not be doing your homework for you.

I'm not saying don't respond to this, only that I'm going to stop posting on this thread for a while because I am not in the habit of being the troll, nor persisting with circular arguments in an off-topic thread. It's off-topic and I don't know how many more ways I can explain it to you so I won't bother trying again.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 18, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Wasn't that raving rightist "libertarian" who graced us with his presence a couple of years ago also one of your fellow-countrymen?


 
Wassisname...onanist? 

Yeah. Norway. A whole country of individual bad apples


----------



## TruXta (Apr 18, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Wasn't that raving rightist "libertarian" who graced us with his presence a couple of years ago also one of your fellow-countrymen?


The Onarchist? Yeah.


----------



## andysays (Apr 18, 2013)

ymu said:


> Yes, that is what I am suggesting, from the perspective of someone who is semi-housebound due to disability and largely unemployed for the same reasons.
> 
> You're free to explain what you actually meant by it, of course. I can't say I care any more. You have repeatedly demonstrated that you just don't get why your perspective is simply inadequate for addressing an issue that affects people with a completely different perspective and I'm not going to disrupt this thread any more. There's dozens of fucked up ones you can trawl through to find the gems you need. I'll not be doing your homework for you.
> 
> I'm not saying don't respond to this, only that I'm going to stop posting on this thread for a while because I am not in the habit of being the troll, nor persisting with circular arguments in an off-topic thread. It's off-topic and I don't know how many more ways I can explain it to you so I won't bother trying again.


 
You come out with a lot of good, well-argued stuff, but every now and again you come out with some of the most arrogant, opinionated and presumptuous shit I have ever read.

This is one of these times.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Wassisname...onanist?


 
Yeah, or Onan the Barbarian or whatever he was called. 



> Yeah. Norway. A whole country of individual bad apples


 
I don't think they're *all* bad.

Just most of 'em.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

TruXta said:


> The Onarchist? Yeah.


 
For a nation with a small population, you certainly produce some interesting characters.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 18, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> For a nation with a small population, you certainly produce some interesting characters.


Just trying to keep up with the neighbours.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 18, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Just trying to keep up with the neighbours.


 
You'll never beat IKEA! You'll never beat IKEA!


----------



## TruXta (Apr 18, 2013)

Balbi said:


> You'll never beat IKEA! You'll never beat IKEA!


We're not even trying. We have the oil, they can keep fucking IKEA.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 18, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> This person can't spell resentment.


 
I think you'll find they are referring specifically to _ressentiment, _a term popularized by that well-known philosopher Nietzschey.

Idiot.


----------



## spawnofsatan (Apr 18, 2013)

Have they removed comments from the Newstatesman piece, or is it just my crap laptop?


----------



## Dan U (Apr 18, 2013)

re: the Old Holborn stuff from earlier, i know its a bit off topic but it would appear those 'thick scousers' are busy exacting their revenge. Is alleged employer have nuked there twitter account and a Director has emailed at least one person saying they are 'investigating'..

could be a classic biter/bit


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 18, 2013)

spawnofsatan said:


> Have they removed comments from the Newstatesman piece, or is it just my crap laptop?


 
Comments section doesn't appear on mine either.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

CBA to scroll back the last few pages but I see the Newstates man has deleted all the criticism Laurie Liar was getting for her latest article.

Laurie's response was:


----------



## spawnofsatan (Apr 18, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Comments section doesn't appear on mine either.


 
Cheers, must have been that Firky that caused it


----------



## JimW (Apr 18, 2013)

Comments seem to be missing on all their blog posts by various authors, having a click round. Obviously all part of the massive Penny-lies-gate cover-up. Or a technical glitch. Someone call Jazz.
ETA: And back now!


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

What happens when a reporter is found out to be lying and sexing up the story?

The comments section seems to be a disqus plugin and it had failed to load. It is back now.


----------



## treelover (Apr 18, 2013)

andysays said:


> Sounds like fun?
> 
> There will be plenty of time for fun after the revolution, comrade. What's required now is for all committed members of the class to surrender their individuality to the Vanguard Party.
> 
> Less fun; more paper sales.


 

Some of the older SWP comrades were going crazy at the Plug Thatch party..


----------



## treelover (Apr 18, 2013)

TruXta said:


> He's a fucking embarassment to my country.


 
only two people from that country and they are at each others throats..


----------



## JimW (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> I have seen the NS do that before or vaporise an article entirely - much like the Daily Mail does.
> 
> Bit of a bugger for that Skyler though - unless they replied with evidence of what was actually said and the NS pulled the comments.
> 
> What happens when a reporter is found out to be lying and sexing up the story?


Comments were definitely back when I looked just, with that Sky one voted top. And some bloke called Firky mentioning Urban? You should sue (or post the transcripts).


----------



## spawnofsatan (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> What happens when a reporter is found out to be lying and sexing up the story?
> 
> The comments section seems to be a disqus plugin and it had failed to load. It is back now.


 
Excellent, now I can finally see what you said.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> The real boast is when you can say "Tony Benn knows *me*".


 
Tony said, "WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? YOU HAVE TO SPEAK UP, YOUNG MAN. I CAN'T HEAR YOU. WHAT? WHAT? OWEN WHO?"


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

JimW said:


> Comments were definitely back when I looked just, with that Sky one voted top. And some bloke called Firky mentioning Urban? You should sue (or post the transcripts).


 
It is someone off here, spawny, Norman and cilango are all suspects


----------



## JimW (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> It is someone off here, spawny, Norman and cilango are all suspects


I've just watched Scott and Bailey so I know how to deal with this. You need to organise a house to house, collect the CCTV and wait for the results of the post mortem, whilst having an extra-marital affair.


----------



## spawnofsatan (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> It is someone off here, spawny, Norman and cilango are all suspects


 
Well you would have thought they'd have come up with something a bit more biting than that.


----------



## teuchter (Apr 18, 2013)

ymu said:


> If you prefer, the act of creating a thread to take the piss out of anti-sexism whilst hypocrisy-hunting anti-Thatcherites without ever once recognising the misogyny of the Thatcherite drooling and their ludicrous promotion of a song about wanking over her, is a misogynist one.
> 
> You acted like a misogynist and, misogyny not being considered a permanent, immutable, characteristic, that makes you a misogynist.
> 
> ...


 
Your accusation of misogyny relies entirely upon your speculation and assumptions about my motivations in posting the thread. The thread was not posted to take the piss out of anti-sexism, it was posted to highlight the fact that language which would not usually be accepted on U75 was being passed over when used against Thatcher. By all means take issue with that assertion and tell me it's nonsense if you want. Which you did on the thread (and I still disagree with you) but then you started with these accusations of misogyny. An accusation needs to be supported by evidence in proportion to its seriousness, and you don't have that, which is why I have called it a slur. There are plenty of things you could accuse me of based on my posting history here but misogyny is not one of them. And your argument that the fact I haven't explicitly commented on u75 about the misogyny of Thatcher supporters - which is by definition outwith the scope of my thread - is somehow significant is, frankly, feeble. Are we all to be assumed to approve of anything that we haven't specifically commented on on u75?

I'm not sure which thread you are on about when you talk about the "whole thread" I set up on the subject of misogyny, by the way.


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> It is someone off here, spawny, Norman and cilango are all suspects


 
Quality comments.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 18, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> ...I think he is still a bit "studenty" though, especially in some of his cultural projects (for example the radio show he did about ten years ago)...


 
Well _I_ like RSHB


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 18, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I think you'll find they are referring specifically to _ressentiment, _a term popularized by that well-known philosopher Nietzschey.
> 
> Idiot.



Another one lacking a sense of humour today.


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 18, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Well _I_ like RSHB


aye. councillor barry massive will always have a special place in my heart.


----------



## cesare (Apr 18, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Another one lacking a sense of humour today.


I think you should read the post more closely etc


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 18, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Another one lacking a sense of humour today.


 
Yes, yet _another _one.  It's funny how no-one ever gets your jokes isn't it?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 18, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> Quality comments.


 
Well you *would* think that, wouldn't you?


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> It is someone off here, spawny, Norman and cilango are all suspects


 
It's definitely not me posting under the name Firky. On that comments page I remain an International Man of Mystery.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Apr 18, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Well _I_ like RSHB


 
I liked it too, but apparently had this to say about it in the year 2000:



> Occassionally slips into quoterama student humour, but is generally a damn fine, nay ESSENTIAL listen.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 18, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> I liked it too, but apparently had this to say about it in the year 2000:


 
In 2000 I was _always_ In The McFucking Mood


----------



## Balbi (Apr 18, 2013)

muscovyduck, did you make it?


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> It's definitely not me posting under the name Firky. On that comments page I remain an International Man of Mystery.


----------



## killer b (Apr 18, 2013)

you can tell bakunin cos he calls her penny dreadful loike he does here.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

JimW said:


> I've just watched Scott and Bailey so I know how to deal with this. You need to organise a house to house, collect the CCTV and wait for the results of the post mortem, whilst having an extra-marital affair.


 
I had to google that and I have had my privileges checked for I assumed Scott & Bailey to be two blerks. 

Anyway, my humble means makes me more of an Oliver Mellors type who sweeps women above his class off their feet.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 18, 2013)

killer b said:


> you can tell bakunin cos he calls her penny dreadful loike he does here.


 
You've just ruined my material. There I was, preparing a series of posts designed to tease and amuse the posters with my hidden, secret identity and then you go and out me.

I am slightly dispeased. I shall retire from this realm in a state of high dusgeon, high dudgeon I say, until another opportunity arises to showcase my satirical sharpness and comedic genius..

*Swirls cape and vanishes into a conveniently-appearing cloud of thick fog*

'I SHALL RETURN! MOO-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAAAAAA...'


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 18, 2013)

cesare said:


> I think you should read the post more closely etc



Arggghh.  Phil 1 Me 0


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 18, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Yes, yet _another _one.  It's funny how no-one ever gets your jokes isn't it?


Well i just missed yours.


----------



## cesare (Apr 18, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Arggghh.  Phil 1 Me 0


----------



## spawnofsatan (Apr 18, 2013)

NS comment by allneckandknob!


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> I had to google that and I have had my privileges checked for I assumed Scott & Bailey to be two blerks.


That's not a check on your privileges, that is a reminder of one that you have. I get the same reminder in reverse.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 18, 2013)

This Helen Lewis stuff is festering away still on twitter btw it's not died down.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 18, 2013)

Aye, Zoe Williams' piece was a wonderful bit of fence sitting. Defended Lewis, Moore & Moran before sort of accepting their critics had a point.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (Apr 18, 2013)

spawnofsatan said:


> NS comment by allneckandknob!


 
I wonder who that is


----------



## Balbi (Apr 18, 2013)

http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2...ollecting-coins-hat-and-dodging-angry-racists

 STAHP.



> I count myself extremely lucky to have grown up as a political writer in the age of the internet. *Suddenly, where once there were only a few privileged pundits talking to each other and expecting the proles to listen, there are writers from all walks of life producing dazzling, meaningful prose and finding their audience*. I’m part of a growing cohort of reporters and columnists who are not surprised when our readers chat to us like old friends, correct our mistakes or call us unprintable things in the comment section – because we started out online and have never experienced anything else.


 
 

STAHP.



> To be a columnist today is no longer to stand on a stage alone, reciting marvellous soliloquies while a paying audience waits to applaud. Apart from anything else, few publications can now afford to fork out the kinds of salaries that make principled writers lose perspective. Being a columnist today is more like being a street performer – collecting coins in a battered suitcase, telling stories about a better world and understanding that the audience might change the story.
> 
> *It’s hard work, because you’re competing with everyone else on the block, including the drunk, deranged old racist shouting abuse and the naked exhibitionist who doesn’t ask for money, and you have to move fast to avoid the pelted sandwiches and, occasionally, the police.* In other words, it’s an exciting time to be a writer.


 
STAHP!


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

Mr.Bishie said:


> I wonder who that is


 
You wenka


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 18, 2013)

Favelado said:


> I think you'll have a more than adequate response to this but isn't Jones agitating for a left-wing alternative to Labour and actually wanting to bring about another road to change? Or did he just write one article saying that once and that's the sum total of it?
> 
> It's the latter isn't it?


He's openly arguing that any change has to and can only come through labour and got very wound up by suggestions that it might come from outside (- that it _could_ only come from outside labour, which is the reality, but that it _might - _even that was too much for him and he went out of his way to make sure that _everyone_ (you never know who might be listening after all, future employers esp) understood that he was not and does not call for either a split from or a challenge to labour.


----------



## treelover (Apr 18, 2013)

Jones is getting a wider audience that you would think and admiration, just spoke to a senior person in the Methodist church and she told me they think Owen is great..


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 18, 2013)

treelover said:


> Jones is getting a wider audience that you would think and admiration, just spoke to a senior person in the Methodist church and she told me they think Owen is great..


 
If only he would use his powers for good and not for evil.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 18, 2013)

As far as I know he's said it would be self-defeating to break from Labour *now*, not that this would always and inevitably be the case.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

"Senior person in the methodist church" would that be god or Jesus?


----------



## killer b (Apr 18, 2013)

treelover said:


> Jones is getting a wider audience that you would think and admiration, just spoke to a senior person in the Methodist church and she told me they think Owen is great..


No, thats exactly the audience we'd expect.


----------



## cesare (Apr 18, 2013)

articul8 said:


> As far as I know he's said it would be self-defeating to break from Labour *now*, not that this would always and inevitably be the case.


Which is similar to what you've said, if I've understood you correctly.


----------



## where to (Apr 18, 2013)

I still think he's an entryist.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 18, 2013)

articul8 said:


> As far as I know he's said it would be self-defeating to break from Labour *now*, not that this would always and inevitably be the case.


No he didn't - and if he did he was using the same weasel logic as you - ensuring a break never happens whilst saying you would _of course welcome a meaningful break._

Also, this thread has got too wanky and oh _aren't i naughty everyone talk about me_ over the last few pages.


----------



## chilango (Apr 18, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Also, this thread has got too wanky and oh _aren't i naughty everyone talk about me_ over the last few pages.



Lie down with dogs eventually you'll get fleas...

...or something.


----------



## love detective (Apr 18, 2013)

articul8 said:


> As far as I know he's said it would be self-defeating to break from Labour *now*, not that this would always and inevitably be the case.


 
_Give me chastity and continence, but not yet_


----------



## Odrade (Apr 18, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> It must be nice to be able to entirely elide the idea of social capital and the imbalances between the classes that it causes from your intellectual repertoire.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
There seems to be an inherent contradiction between wanting the working class to rule society or at least rebel against the current order, and understanding the working class as this weak intellectually challenged group lacking "social capital" (which is such a rubbish term, btw), and therefore needing to be represented by the educated middle classes. And I do understand that I probably should "check my Scandinavia privilege", but the contradiction between understanding the working class as a "client base" that needs representation and lacks "social capital" or whatnot, and seeing the working class as the political vanguard of society, stands regardless.


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 18, 2013)

Balbi said:


> muscovyduck, did you make it?


Flicking between the beginning and end of the thread. I don't think I'll make it. You'll have to go on without me.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 18, 2013)

No one here is arguing for such a division. Who and what has led you to imagine that they do? That's a commendably confused post.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 18, 2013)

The New Statesman drinks rat piss and offers the later vomit as 'exciting' content:

Boris Johnson in the New Statesman this week: "Happy birthday, dear Staggers, and vive la différence."


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 18, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Flicking between the beginning and end of the thread. I don't think I'll make it. You'll have to go on without me.


 
'Then it's farewell, mon brave. For in the Urban Legion you must march or die...'


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> There seems to be an inherent contradiction between wanting the working class to rule society or at least rebel against the current order, and understanding the working class as this weak intellectually challenged group lacking "social capital" (which is such a rubbish term, btw), and therefore needing to be represented by the educated middle classes. And I do understand that I probably should "check my Scandinavia privilege", but the contradiction between understanding the working class as a "client base" that needs representation and lacks "social capital" or whatnot, and seeing the working class as the political vanguard of society, stands regardless.


 
Who said we wanted to be represnted by middle class columnists? We don't. That's the point of this thread - a point you're missing by such a distance that it's difficult to avoid the suspicion that it's deliberate.


----------



## killer b (Apr 18, 2013)

what the fuck?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 18, 2013)

Ordure thinks were all thick as shit, at least thats the message I'm receiving here.


----------



## rosecore (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> There seems to be an inherent contradiction between wanting the working class to rule society or at least rebel against the current order, and understanding the working class as this weak intellectually challenged group lacking "social capital" (which is such a rubbish term, btw), and therefore needing to be represented by the educated middle classes. And I do understand that I probably should "check my Scandinavia privilege", but the contradiction between understanding the working class as a "client base" that needs representation and lacks "social capital" or whatnot, and seeing the working class as the political vanguard of society, stands regardless.


 
You miss the point of this thread more than Laurie it seems.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 18, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/324935785390428160

New article about how all criticisms of Laurie Penny are sexist + Urban75 is a hive of racists incoming


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/324935785390428160
> 
> New article about how all criticisms of Laurie Penny are sexist + Urban75 is a hive of racists incoming


 
Beware the posters of Urban...


----------



## J Ed (Apr 18, 2013)

In other news, Guido Fawkes is retweeting Old Holborn's comment "TopTip. When sending death threats to my phone, withhold your number might be a good idea #ThickScousers" - this will be interesting.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


> In other news, Guido Fawkes is retweeting Old Holborn's comment "TopTip. When sending death threats to my phone, withhold your number might be a good idea #ThickScousers" - this will be interesting.


 
Let me get this straight - old holborn is giving people advice on how to hide your identity when sending out messages that you wouldn't want to be held responsible for?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 18, 2013)

I can't believe he's still sending out messages like that when he knows that it's putting his wife and children in danger.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Beware the posters of Urban...


 
If that happens it will be cheap, petty and dishonest revenge. Wayyy back there were some inappropriate comments but there has been a tonne of legitimate criticism of her poor (maybe worse than just poor without getting libellous )journalism, cowardice and hypocrisy. The fall-out could totally backfire too. Have Private Eye picked up on her yet? They got someone similar not so long back.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 18, 2013)

Favelado said:


> If that happens it will be cheap, petty and dishonest revenge. Wayyy back there were some inappropriate comments but there has been a tonne of legitimate criticism of her poor (maybe worse than just poor without getting libellous )journalism, cowardice and hypocrisy. The fall-out could totally backfire too. Have Private Eye picked up on her yet? They got someone similar not so long back.


 
Do they pay for submissions to Pseud's Corner?


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Do they pay for submissions to Pseud's Corner?


 
She has already been in it according to the below article.

Actually, article about Penny-bashing salient to the thread. Maybe it's already in here but forgive me for not wading though it all.

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/blog_comments/penny_bashing


----------



## rosecore (Apr 18, 2013)

Hasn't she already wrote something similar? http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...is-the-miniskirt-of-the-internet-6256946.html


----------



## J Ed (Apr 18, 2013)

LP obviously does get some really nasty stuff though, reading through the comments section of when Guido Fawkes wrote something about her is awful, people talk about how she should be raped. If people were writing things like that about me online I would have problems taking legitimate criticism.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 18, 2013)

rosecore said:


> Hasn't she already wrote something similar? http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...is-the-miniskirt-of-the-internet-6256946.html


 
Wow, the bit in that about Toby Young...


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 18, 2013)

i agree there is some nasty shit out there. it's not because it's her though it's because some people have a problem with any woman's opinion being expressed and those people don't only stick to their corner of the internet they post on all sorts of websites. the internet is a great thing but it also allows all sorts of people to vent their spleens. i remember posting on fash forums as a teenager (yeah i know, but i was young and naive) and some people on there telling me i should get raped, others making online passes at me and so on. those types of experiences have left me proper hating the fash, hate them way, way more than i should to be honest.

i think if you view it in a way that they dont just hate "you" that they are actually just cunts to everyone then it helps to put it in perspective to be honest.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 18, 2013)

conversely the level of unacceptable shit she does get from the right allows her to mentally sideline all criticism as online bullies. The closest concession our crit has ever been given to legitimacy is 'soi-disant radical trolls'. Another sub-division of a hate crowd.


----------



## where to (Apr 18, 2013)

J Ed said:
			
		

> Wow, the bit in that about Toby Young...



Where?


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

"Soi-disant" means "self-styled" Google says. Understood by less than 5% of the population and not even more accurate than its native language equivalent. It's a very bad habit of many journos.

I might start a thread. It's that serious.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 18, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> conversely the level of unacceptable shit she does get from the right allows her to mentally sideline all criticism as online bullies. The closest concession our crit has ever been given to legitimacy is 'soi-disant radical trolls'. Another sub-division of a hate crowd.


 
And what's the betting anything quoted from here would be used selectively while anything slapping the unacceptable posts down won't even get a mention?


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


> LP obviously does get some really nasty stuff though, reading through the comments section of when Guido Fawkes wrote something about her is awful, people talk about how she should be raped. If people were writing things like that about me online I would have problems taking legitimate criticism.


More than lip service should be paid to stopping this shit, you say?


----------



## Odrade (Apr 18, 2013)

rosecore said:


> You miss the point of this thread more than Laurie it seems.


 
My original point was that this discussion seems to contain quite a bit of ressentiment, or bad faith if you will. What seems to happen when bad faith takes place is that one projects the responsibility for ones own agency on some other person or group, in this case Laurie Penny in particular and the middle class commentariat in general. As if these persons are in some way hindering the true agency for "the left". Then I was trying to point out that the working class is quite capable of voicing its own concerns on its own premises, not being a five year old charity case but the supposed vanguard of politics, and if that is the case Laurie Penny cannot possibly be victimizing such a powerful faction of society. The middle class commentariat might be annoying and deluded, but they do not - in any relevant way - stand in the way for the agency of the working class or "the left". The way you seem to be discussing this stuff appears to me to contain a story of victimization of the working class by some irrelevant journalists, such a story hinders a precise understanding of the working class as a political agent with full responsibility for its own actions and politics, and it contains a shirking of responsibility for ones own agency.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 18, 2013)

where to said:


> Where?


 
Oops, I meant here http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/blog_comments/penny_bashing


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 18, 2013)

ymu said:


> More than lip service should be paid to stopping this shit, you say?


 
You know my opinion on obviously sexist or misogynistic posts and trolling.


----------



## rosecore (Apr 18, 2013)

The abuse Laurie receives is certainly disgusting but I wish she would engage with genuine criticism more.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 18, 2013)

in between the large amounts of piss taking and mockery there is a kernel of bitter ressentiment 

sticklegruber


----------



## J Ed (Apr 18, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> conversely the level of unacceptable shit she does get from the right allows her to mentally sideline all criticism as online bullies. The closest concession our crit has ever been given to legitimacy is 'soi-disant radical trolls'. Another sub-division of a hate crowd.


 
Sure, but to what extent do you think she is purposely doing that? I genuinely don't know but if I was getting that sort of abuse on a regular basis I might have some difficulty differentiating the legitimate criticism from the abuse, especially if I thought (with some justification) that the volume of abuse I was getting was because of my gender.


----------



## ymu (Apr 18, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> You know my opinion on obviously sexist or misogynistic posts and trolling.


Because you pay more than lip service, yes.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

Favelado said:


> She has already been in it according to the below article.
> 
> Actually, article about Penny-bashing salient to the thread. Maybe it's already in here but forgive me for not wading though it all.
> 
> http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/blog_comments/penny_bashing


 
I wonder if that is *the* Ellie in the comments.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> My original point was that this discussion seems to contain quite a bit of ressentiment, or bad faith if you will. What seems to happen when bad faith takes place is that one projects the responsibility for ones own agency on some other person or group, in this case Laurie Penny in particular and the middle class commentariat in general. As if these persons are in some way hindering the true agency for "the left". Then I was trying to point out that the working class is quite capable of voicing its own concerns on its own premises, not being a five year old charity case but the supposed vanguard of politics, and if that is the case Laurie Penny cannot possibly be victimizing such a powerful faction of society. The middle class commentariat might be annoying and deluded, but they do not - in any relevant way - stand in the way for the agency of the working class or "the left". The way you seem to be discussing this stuff appears to me to contain a story of victimization of the working class by some irrelevant journalists, such a story hinders a precise understanding of the working class as a political agent with full responsibility for its own actions and politics, and it contains a shirking of responsibility for ones own agency.


 
Said with the condescending manner of the annoying and deluded middle class commentariat. Patronising snob.

Out of interest, what would you suggest is the best way to criticise Laurie et al?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> My original point was that this discussion seems to contain quite a bit of ressentiment, or bad faith if you will. What seems to happen when bad faith takes place is that one projects the responsibility for ones own agency on some other person or group, in this case Laurie Penny in particular and the middle class commentariat in general. As if these persons are in some way hindering the true agency for "the left". Then I was trying to point out that the working class is quite capable of voicing its own concerns on its own premises, not being a five year old charity case but the supposed vanguard of politics, and if that is the case Laurie Penny cannot possibly be victimizing such a powerful faction of society. The middle class commentariat might be annoying and deluded, but they do not - in any relevant way - stand in the way for the agency of the working class or "the left". The way you seem to be discussing this stuff appears to me to contain a story of victimization of the working class by some irrelevant journalists, such a story hinders a precise understanding of the working class as a political agent with full responsibility for its own actions and politics, and it contains a shirking of responsibility for ones own agency.


This is rather different from your hilarious post here in which you argued



> There seems to be an inherent contradiction between wanting the working class to rule society or at least rebel against the current order, and understanding the working class as this weak intellectually challenged group lacking "social capital" (which is such a rubbish term, btw), and therefore needing to be represented by the educated middle classes. And I do understand that I probably should "check my Scandinavia privilege", but the contradiction between understanding the working class as a "client base" that needs representation and lacks "social capital" or whatnot, and seeing the working class as the political vanguard of society, stands regardless.


 
What both posts demonstrate is a lack of understanding of how the role of one of the levels that you recognise is formed, operates and transmits itself on the exact basis of speaking for the other. It has a material effect, and one based around the continued existence of privilege. It's not hard to see - it's not hard to see who owns and works for the papers, it's not hard to demonstrate that this closely aligns with certain interests and classes and that tends to self-select who gets to further these interests. And it's not hard to see who these inter-meshing ownership and selection issues exclude the working class. Unless of course, you are some, it's all a level playing field, pull your socks up type. In this model of the media the working class are necessarily present only as victims or folk-devils. You are miles off.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


> *Sure, but to what extent do you think she is purposely doing that?* I genuinely don't know but if I was getting that sort of abuse on a regular basis I might have some difficulty differentiating the legitimate criticism from the abuse, especially if I thought (with some justification) that the volume of abuse I was getting was because of my gender.


 

because its convenient? I'd say a lot. Refusal to engage even the politest of discussions when here as a poster.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 18, 2013)

rosecore said:


> The abuse Laurie receives is certainly disgusting but I wish she would engage with genuine criticism more.


 
Agreed. The problem is that ALL criticism is written off as abuse, responded to with accusations of racism, misogyny, stalking and general bigotry, she seldom deigns to even acknowledge critics even exist except to throw smears about like confetti and still adopts an air of being persecuted regardless of what criticism has actually been levelled. By all means, let's deal firmly and quickly with the obviously hateful and deliberately foul stuff, no problem with that at all. But let's not see fair (if sometimes harshly-delivered) comment and criticism being shut down under a barrage of false accusations directed at anybody saying anything that isn't to Her Majesty's liking.

If comment and criticism are harsh but fair then that's fine. When anything vile rears its head then we can stamp on it hard and fast. But let's not conflate the former with the latter as they're clearly not the same.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I can't believe he's still sending out messages like that when he knows that it's putting his wife and children in danger.


 
His ego is more important


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> My original point was that this discussion seems to contain quite a bit of ressentiment, or bad faith if you will. What seems to happen when bad faith takes place is that one projects the responsibility for ones own agency on some other person or group, in this case Laurie Penny in particular and the middle class commentariat in general. As if these persons are in some way hindering the true agency for "the left". Then I was trying to point out that the working class is quite capable of voicing its own concerns on its own premises, not being a five year old charity case but the supposed vanguard of politics, and if that is the case Laurie Penny cannot possibly be victimizing such a powerful faction of society. The middle class commentariat might be annoying and deluded, but they do not - in any relevant way - stand in the way for the agency of the working class or "the left". The way you seem to be discussing this stuff appears to me to contain a story of victimization of the working class by some irrelevant journalists, such a story hinders a precise understanding of the working class as a political agent with full responsibility for its own actions and politics, and it contains a shirking of responsibility for ones own agency.


 
Fuck off you patronising twat.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 18, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Agreed. The problem is that ALL criticism is written off as abuse, responded to with accusations of racism, misogyny, stalking and general bigotry, she seldom deigns to even acknowledge critics even exist except to throw smears about like confetti and still adopts an air of being persecuted regardless of what criticism has actually been levelled. By all means, let's deal firmly and quickly with the obviously hateful and deliberately foul stuff, no problem with that at all. But let's not see fair (if sometimes harshly-delivered) comment and criticism being shut down under a barrage of false accusations directed at anybody saying anything that isn't to Her Majesty's liking.
> 
> If comment and criticism are harsh but fair then that's fine. When anything vile rears its head then we can stamp on it hard and fast. But let's not conflate the former with the latter as they're clearly not the same.


 
Perfect.


----------



## Firky (Apr 18, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Agreed. The problem is that ALL criticism is written off as abuse, responded to with accusations of racism, misogyny, stalking and general bigotry, she seldom deigns to even acknowledge critics even exist except to throw smears about like confetti and still adopts an air of being persecuted regardless of what criticism has actually been levelled. By all means, let's deal firmly and quickly with the obviously hateful and deliberately foul stuff, no problem with that at all. But let's not see fair (if sometimes harshly-delivered) comment and criticism being shut down under a barrage of false accusations directed at anybody saying anything that isn't to Her Majesty's liking.
> 
> If comment and criticism are harsh but fair then that's fine. When anything vile rears its head then we can stamp on it hard and fast. But let's not conflate the former with the latter as they're clearly not the same.


 
She does get some harsh stuff said about her, to such an extent she says she fears for her safety in public IIRC. Refusing to engage with criticism is probably part of her defence against the arseholes that wish physical harm on her.

But we can only speculate as she won't address any of us and when she does turn up here, loads of people jump on her with a thousand questions.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> My original point was that this discussion seems to contain quite a bit of ressentiment, or bad faith if you will. What seems to happen when bad faith takes place is that one projects the responsibility for ones own agency on some other person or group, in this case Laurie Penny in particular and the middle class commentariat in general. As if these persons are in some way hindering the true agency for "the left". Then I was trying to point out that the working class is quite capable of voicing its own concerns on its own premises, not being a five year old charity case but the supposed vanguard of politics, and if that is the case Laurie Penny cannot possibly be victimizing such a powerful faction of society. The middle class commentariat might be annoying and deluded, but they do not - in any relevant way - stand in the way for the agency of the working class or "the left". The way you seem to be discussing this stuff appears to me to contain a story of victimization of the working class by some irrelevant journalists, such a story hinders a precise understanding of the working class as a political agent with full responsibility for its own actions and politics, and it contains a shirking of responsibility for ones own agency.


The only person offering ressentiment or bad faith in your unusual/crude reading of it (or more accurately, them as they are not the same thing philosphically), is LP herself her. Who else has argued that the only reason we can't have nice things like revolution is people criticising her? Who else is insulating herself from criticisms by doing so?


----------



## Nice one (Apr 18, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> So, you're not at all bitter as _per_ the events of last year, then?


----------



## Odrade (Apr 18, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The only person offering ressentiment or bad faith in your unusual/crude reading of it (or more accurately, them as they are not the same thing philosphically), is LP herself her. Who else has argued that the only reason we can't have nice things like revolution is people criticising her? Who else is insulating herself from criticisms by doing so?


 
This. What has she got to do with this? How is there any connection between the two? If she in someway can be said to be offering bad faith, how is this relevant? Is she some spring-rite-offering that lets everyone else of the hook?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 18, 2013)

Firky said:


> She does get some harsh stuff said about her, to such an extent she says she fears for her safety in public IIRC. Refusing to engage with criticism is probably part of her defence against the arseholes that wish physical harm on her.
> 
> But we can only speculate as she won't address any of us and when she does turn up here, loads of people jump on her with a thousand questions.


 
not saying its justified or owt but having physical harm wished on you sort of comes with the territory of being a journalist and with being in the public eye. you're going to (indeed you should) piss off people and some of them are going to be pretty powerful.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> This. What has she got to do with this? How is there any connection between the two? If she in someway can be said to be offering bad faith, how is this relevant? Is she some spring-rite-offering that lets everyone else of the hook?


What?


----------



## cesare (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> This. What has she got to do with this? How is there any connection between the two? If she in someway can be said to be offering bad faith, how is this relevant? Is she some spring-rite-offering that lets everyone else of the hook?


Eh?


----------



## cesare (Apr 18, 2013)




----------



## J Ed (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> This. What has she got to do with this? How is there any connection between the two? If she in someway can be said to be offering bad faith, how is this relevant? Is she some spring-rite-offering that lets everyone else of the hook?


 
Instead of being verbose and boring, why don't you just get to whatever point you're trying to make?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 18, 2013)

The gap between what s/he thinks is being argued and what is actually being argued is huge - but possibly understandable. The gap between the reality of and the image s/he has of how media and politics works in this country is astronomical - and most def not understandable.


----------



## Odrade (Apr 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Instead of being verbose and boring, why don't you just get to whatever point you're trying to make?


 
That was the point. The one about the offering and the of the hook. So I wont be belaboring it any more.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 18, 2013)

Odrade said:


> That was the point. The one about the offering and the of the hook. So I wont be belaboring it any more.


 
That wasn't a point at all. It was just you missing the point again and saying something weird and irrelevant while using the language of a tedious pseud.


----------



## TruXta (Apr 18, 2013)

It's OK Geir, just take it down a notch.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Apr 18, 2013)

S☼I said:


> It's like she was actually anywhere she writes about
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/04/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-margaret-thatcher


LOL my soundsystem gets a mention in Laurie's article. I've finally arrived 



el-ahrairah said:


> i think it was mentioned on this thread earlier. she was there for about 20 minutes. according to her tweets she retreated to KFC to drink tea.
> 
> i didn't see here, but i didn't see truxta either.


She was standing almost next to us! I really had to resist the urge to wind her up...


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 19, 2013)

I thought she made a couple of good points in her latest article, before she got a bit verbose. Plus her latest tweet rightly points out that the DM is trolling women with Samantha Brick stories. Shame that this valid point was followed with some misogynstic shit about her being 'irrelevant because of her vagina' from some wanker 

I'm intrigued by her next piece...


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 19, 2013)

We really need to create a Tumblr or Wordpress which collects all the criticism of her into one place so it's easier for people to read through than a 500+ page thread. Especially if she's still lurking.


----------



## Nylock (Apr 19, 2013)

Jesus, i've been just about keeping up with this thread for so long i stopped looking at the page count.. 542 pages!


----------



## Belushi (Apr 19, 2013)

I'm going to invite her to the next North London drinks, Owen was a smash hit at the last one


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 19, 2013)

she wouldn't be frequenting your old man boozers


----------



## J Ed (Apr 19, 2013)

What a truly horrendous person http://bastardoldholborn.blogspot.co.uk/2008/01/coons-and-muslims.html

The number 2 libertarian blogger in the UK too, apparently.


----------



## Belushi (Apr 19, 2013)

J Ed said:


> The number 2 libertarian blogger in the UK too, apparently.


 
That's a bit like being Britain's second tallest midget tbf though


----------



## cesare (Apr 19, 2013)

He looks as though he's trying to present himself as part of Anonymous. I wonder if they know


----------



## Nylock (Apr 19, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What a truly horrendous person http://bastardoldholborn.blogspot.co.uk/2008/01/coons-and-muslims.html
> 
> The number 2 libertarian blogger in the UK too, apparently.


"number 2" is right... And wtf are 'viscous jack russels'?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 19, 2013)

laurie said:
			
		

> Nine days ago, Margaret Thatcher died in a suite at the Ritz and the country lost its wits. Her political legacy lives on and it's that legacy that is really being debated in the escalating frenzy around who gets control of the funeral narrative. This isn't about Thatcher. It never really was: not the parties, not the screeching pundits, not the ludicrous battle to get the song 'Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead. Actually, it's about us. It's about Britain and about the battle for control of the national narrative. Thatcher's death has become the occasion for a grand psychodrama of a vicious and divided nation.


 
So _pick a fucking side._


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Apr 19, 2013)

Bloody hell, I leave this thread for a few days and it takes me a whole evening to catch up  

Can't believe I missed LP turning up on the thread _again. _It seems I am more likely to meet her in real life than on here. I must work on that wind-up spiel of mine.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 19, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> So _pick a fucking side._


 
It's not ours.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 19, 2013)

weepiper said:


> It's not ours.


It's not, and from the tone of her recent things, she's starting to understand that. Not that she'll do anything about it.


----------



## ska invita (Apr 19, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Can't believe I missed LP turning up on the thread _again. _


what post # was that ?


----------



## cesare (Apr 19, 2013)

ska invita said:


> what post # was that ?


http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...cebook-handbags.266196/page-529#post-12154893


----------



## killer b (Apr 19, 2013)

Vicious & divided. _ Britain, a country of contrasts..._


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 19, 2013)

killer b said:


> Vicious & divided. _ Britain, a country of contrasts..._


London/NYC/Brighton _a city of contrasts. _She did proper journo school too.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Apr 19, 2013)

Slightly OT, but one of the most amusing thing of the past few days was LP's mates - Stavvers, Johnny Marbles et al - all proclaiming their pleasant surprise at not being "lifted by the pigs" in advance of Thatcher's funeral, e.g.


*Another Angry Woman* ‏@*stavvers*
17 Apr​Hey everyone, i didn't get dawn-raided!

*Expand*


As if writing a few articles for the Independent put you in the MI5 category of 'dangerous seditionist'


----------



## JimW (Apr 19, 2013)

cesare said:


> http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...cebook-handbags.266196/page-529#post-12154893


Turned up for twenty minutes and left when she found we don't have a KFC. Shame as we needed another posh journo for our Wicker Man this Spring Rite burning.


----------



## cesare (Apr 19, 2013)

JimW said:


> Turned up for twenty minutes and left when she found we don't have a KFC. Shame as we needed another poh journo for our Wicker Man this Spring Rite burning.


Not FWC enough


----------



## cesare (Apr 19, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> London/NYC/Brighton _a city of contrasts. _She did proper journo school too.


I'd love to run some of her purple through some plagiarism software


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Apr 19, 2013)

Also picked up a few new words this week:

"threadjacking" - when someone disagrees with you 
"hetsplaining" - when someone straight disagrees with you


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 19, 2013)

cesare said:


> I'd love to run some of her purple through some plagiarism software


We'll get her yet, just waiting for the balloon to hit the right size...it's coming.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Apr 19, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> So _pick a fucking side._


4000 words and she still manages to sit on the fence. Lots of implicit criticism of people being too young to remember Thatcher - despite the fact she was born in 1988 and wouldn't remember her either. Wierd.

The thing that annoyed me most about that article was her assertion that someone was giving out "quarter pints of milk" - what the fuck is a quarter pint of milk?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 19, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Slightly OT, but one of the most amusing thing of the past few days was LP's mates - Stavvers, Johnny Marbles et al - all proclaiming their pleasant surprise at not being "lifted by the pigs" in advance of Thatcher's funeral, e.g.
> 
> 
> *Another Angry Woman* ‏@*stavvers*
> ...


That Pat Finucane never had to deal with this level of oppression.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 19, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> 4000 words and she still manages to sit on the fence. Lots of implicit criticism of people being too young to remember Thatcher - despite the fact she was born in 1988 and wouldn't remember her either. Wierd.
> 
> The thing that annoyed me most about that article was her assertion that someone was giving out "quarter pints of milk" - what the fuck is a quarter pint of milk?


A 142ml bottle of milk. Which doesn't exist. Maybe she has a cow/pony she milks?


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Apr 19, 2013)

ska invita said:


> what post # was that ?


She turned up, chucked a couple of comments in, then ran away. Just like last time.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 19, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> As if writing a few articles for the Independent put you in the MI5 category of 'dangerous seditionist'


 
You know they're properly interested in you when Customs pull you on your way _out_ of the UK.

Which was a tad curious.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 19, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> 4000 words and she still manages to sit on the fence. Lots of implicit criticism of people being too young to remember Thatcher - despite the fact she was born in 1988 and wouldn't remember her either. Wierd.
> 
> The thing that annoyed me most about that article was her assertion that someone was giving out "quarter pints of milk" - what the fuck is a quarter pint of milk?


She must have meant half pint surely...


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 19, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> 4000 words and she still manages to sit on the fence. Lots of implicit criticism of people being too young to remember Thatcher - despite the fact she was born in 1988 and wouldn't remember her either. Wierd.


Yep, 4000 words to say that the protests are really against thatcherism and then to fail to support them. Tells us and the people in the pic below all they need to know about Laurie Penny


----------



## weepiper (Apr 19, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> 4000 words and she still manages to sit on the fence. Lots of implicit criticism of people being too young to remember Thatcher - despite the fact she was born in 1988 and wouldn't remember her either. Wierd.
> 
> The thing that annoyed me most about that article was her assertion that someone was giving out "quarter pints of milk" - what the fuck is a quarter pint of milk?


 
School milk came in third of a pint bottles.


----------



## cesare (Apr 19, 2013)

There were some normal pint cartons around but she's making a reference to the little glass bottles that used to be free for school kids. But they were a 1/3 not a 1/4 of a pint.

edit: weeps beat me to it


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Apr 19, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> She must have meant half pint surely...


There's not even half pints nowadays - these are pints:






She's obviously a Waitrose 2 litre kinda gal 


E2A: this is a really important point. Milk. Paging PD.....


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 19, 2013)

But no one was giving them out. It's AN ERROR!!! Indicative of general rubbishness - and it took her all week to write it.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Apr 19, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> A 142ml bottle of milk. Which doesn't exist. Maybe she has a cow/pony she milks?


She's certainly milking something....


----------



## cesare (Apr 19, 2013)

School milk was fucking revolting, it used to be left out in the playground in the sun until the milk monitor gave the fucking rancid stuff out and you were made to drink it. Ungrateful wretch.

edit: and (my personal aversion to the stuff aside) no-one ever mentions that Wilson snatched it first.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Apr 19, 2013)

butchersapron said:


>


Cheers for that - until today I'd only seen the photo of everyone _waiting _for the effigy/coffin to be burnt. Now I have closure. 

Is it Ashington?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 19, 2013)

Goldthorpe - loads of pics


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Apr 19, 2013)

cheers


----------



## chilango (Apr 19, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> We'll get her yet, just waiting for the balloon to hit the right size...it's coming.



What's Johann Hari up to these days?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 19, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> But no one was giving them out. It's AN ERROR!!! Indicative of general rubbishness - and it took her all week to write it.


 
We used to get 3rd of a pint cartons of milk in Southampton when I was a kid (early eighties), the council paid for it.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 19, 2013)

Kids under five still get a free third of a pint carton for every day they're at nursery for two hours or more. But yeah it was never a quarter pint and no-one was handing out quarter pints when Thatcher died. People were handing out plastic cups of milk in Glasgow, dunno about London.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 19, 2013)

Odrade said:


> There seems to be an inherent contradiction between wanting the working class to rule society or at least rebel against the current order, and understanding the working class as this weak intellectually challenged group...


 
Who's done that? Very few people posting on this thread, many of whom are working class themselves (perhaps only the middle classes post on bulletin boards in Norway?).



> ...lacking "social capital" (which is such a rubbish term, btw)...


 
Your like or dislike of the term is irrelevant. What matters is the ideas the term conveys. Does the UK's proletariat as a whole have less of a handle on securing a "fair share" due to lacking the communicative and social networks of influence enjoyed by the _bourgeoisie_? Yes. In fact the entire turn to provision of "equality of opportunity" in British politics served to mask the fact that access to opportunity is never equal.



> ...and therefore needing to be represented by the educated middle classes. And I do understand that I probably should "check my Scandinavia privilege", but the contradiction between understanding the working class as a "client base" that needs representation and lacks "social capital" or whatnot, and seeing the working class as the political vanguard of society, stands regardless.


 
There are two issues:
1) That the working class lack the degree of social capital that the middle classes are able to accrue, and
2) That members of those middle classes see the working class as a *vehicle* for their own vanguardism, rather than as a vanguard in and of themselves.

The _bourgeoisie_ don't want the working class to develop and follow their own politics. They want to manufacture a politics, usually some form of reformist endeavour, for us to follow. That's why there are media people pushing the "vote Labour with no illusions" line, while ignoring the fact that Labour are no longer representative of the working class *if* they ever were, and that Labour are as committed to neoliberalism as any other mainstream political party.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 19, 2013)

Odrade said:


> This. What has she got to do with this? How is there any connection between the two? If she in someway can be said to be offering bad faith, how is this relevant? Is she some spring-rite-offering that lets everyone else of the hook?


 
This thread is (as you'd know if you'd bothered to read it before generously offering your opinions) not about LP, but about what she signifies - the journalistic and political _milieu_ she represents, so it's very much *not* a case of sacrificing her and letting her ilk off the hook.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 19, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> We really need to create a Tumblr or Wordpress which collects all the criticism of her into one place so it's easier for people to read through than a 500+ page thread. Especially if she's still lurking.


 
The thread isn't merely "criticism of her", though. It's criticism of the _milieu_; of other journalists who do the same thing. The thread itself is only titled as it is because someone reported a particularly wince-making and funny example of the _ouvre_ of that _milieu_ that happened to be by her rather than Hundal, Hari or some other self-mythologiser.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 19, 2013)

Nylock said:


> "number 2" is right... And wtf are 'viscous jack russels'?


 
Runny dog lackeys?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 19, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:
			
		

> members of those middle classes see the working class as a *vehicle* for their own vanguardism, rather than as a vanguard in and of themselves.


 
And this is true whether or not they're aware of it consciously, right? A Diet version of born-to-rule, _we know best. _Cos I'm still not sure how conscious, say, to pluck a name out of the air at random, Laurie Penny is that the mere fact of her privileged upbringing has channeled her a certain way. She might "admit" that privilege - hard not to - but I'm not sure she's addressed how it's shaped her. It's still given "yay, me" caveats such as how smart she is and how she's got every job she's ever had through interview. 




			
				ViolentPanda said:
			
		

> The _bourgeoisie_ don't want the working class to develop and follow their own politics. They want to manufacture a politics, usually some form of reformist endeavour, for us to follow. That's why there are media people pushing the "vote Labour with no illusions" line, while ignoring the fact that Labour are no longer representative of the working class *if* they ever were, and that Labour are as committed to neoliberalism as any other mainstream political party.


 
Or worse, the LibDems. Nah, you can't let the working class have their own identity and politics - and writers. Fuck no. The bubble people would have no-one to lend their expertise to.


----------



## Nylock (Apr 19, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> WThe _bourgeoisie_ don't want the working class to develop and follow their own politics. They want to manufacture a politics, usually some form of reformist endeavour, for us to follow. That's why there are media people pushing the "vote Labour with no illusions" line, while ignoring the fact that Labour are no longer representative of the working class *if* they ever were, and that Labour are as committed to neoliberalism as any other mainstream political party.


"We can't have the working class develop their own politics and write about it from their perspective -the working class ought to be _working_ ffs"


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 19, 2013)

Nylock said:


> "We can't have the working class develop their own politics and write about it from their perspective -the working class ought to be _working_ ffs"


 
Besides, how would our readers we understand their guttural language and graffiti manifestos?


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 19, 2013)

But Laurie's a wri'er. For the new ink wirry. Ar'icles and that.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 19, 2013)

S☼I said:


> And this is true whether or not they're aware of it consciously, right? A Diet version of born-to-rule, _we know best._


 
Yes. A latter-day version of _noblesse oblige_ for the middle classes, pretty much. 



> Cos I'm still not sure how conscious, say, to pluck a name out of the air at random, Laurie Penny is that the mere fact of her privileged upbringing has channeled her a certain way.


 
Well, one of the issues I have with this, is that it's so deeply infiltrated into the ideas and practices of "being middle class", is that it's arguably difficult, if not impossible, for middle class "actors" to recognise their privilege (let alone check it  ), because they're so acculturated to it, that it's not on their psychological horizon.



> She might "admit" that privilege - hard not to - but I'm not sure she's addressed how it's shaped her. It's still given "yay, me" caveats such as how smart she is and how she's got every job she's ever had through interview.


 
While, of course, not acknowledging that "doing" interviews often serves as a venue not so much to represent yourself as the person on your CV, but to establish those interconnections that social capital means invariably exist between the parties to the interview. 
In which case, "smartness" is a concern secondary to employing "someone who thinks as I do".



> Or worse, the LibDems. Nah, you can't let the working class have their own identity and politics - and writers. Fuck no. The bubble people would have no-one to lend their expertise to.


 
Good lord! We can't have that!!!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 19, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> But Laurie's a wri'er. For the new ink wirry.


 
By fuck, but I hate Mockney accents, most of all from politicians whose closest encounter to Bow bells is flying out from City Airport.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 19, 2013)

https://twitter.com/sethmnookin/status/325124502814068737 (re-tweeted by Laurie)

Some self-awareness please...


----------



## barney_pig (Apr 19, 2013)

S☼I said:


> And this is true whether or not they're aware of it consciously, right? A Diet version of born-to-rule, _we know best. _Cos I'm still not sure how conscious, say, to pluck a name out of the air at random, Laurie Penny is that the mere fact of her privileged upbringing has channeled her a certain way. She might "admit" that privilege - hard not to - but I'm not sure she's addressed how it's shaped her. It's still given "yay, me" caveats such as how smart she is and how she's got every job she's ever had through interview.
> 
> 
> 
> Or worse, the LibDems. Nah, you can't let the working class have their own identity and politics - and writers. Fuck no. The bubble people would have no-one to lend their expertise to.


A small sliver of his were those interminable discussions in the SWP in 80s about why there was no such thing as proletarian culture


----------



## J Ed (Apr 19, 2013)

Liverpool Echo covers Old Holborn.

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/live...r-and-murder-of-james-bulger-100252-33199461/


----------



## J Ed (Apr 19, 2013)

Also http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-22216613

As disgusting as Old Holborn is, I always find stories about the police investigating and arresting people for things they have said over twitter very worrying. It's not long since a lad in West Bradford got prosecuted for being anti-military. Also, remember the lad arrested for posting a picture of a burning poppy on twitter? These prosecutions seem to be getting more frequent and I don't know how far away we are from living in a country where anti-government sentiment is criminalised.


----------



## Firky (Apr 19, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Kids under five still get a free third of a pint carton.


 


butchersapron said:


> A 142ml bottle of milk. Which doesn't exist. Maybe she has a cow/pony she milks?


My heart sings that you didn't sat 200mls  They do little 200ml bottles and cartons, I have only seen them in healthcare catering but they'll be available to schools and canteens.

They do 150mls to, sure of it. They're sold to pour onto breakfasts.


----------



## cesare (Apr 19, 2013)

Firky said:


> My heart sings that you didn't sat 200mls


I was sad enough to do the conversion last night  197ml iirc


----------



## articul8 (Apr 19, 2013)

I hate to say anything remotely good about Thatcher- but I asbolutely loathed school milk - as they used to leave a crate of little bottles out in the sunshine, and we wouldn't get it until like 11am or something, by which time  (in the summer) it was rank.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 19, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Also http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-22216613
> 
> As disgusting as Old Holborn is, I always find stories about the police investigating and arresting people for things they have said over twitter very worrying. It's not long since a lad in West Bradford got prosecuted for being anti-military. Also, remember the lad arrested for posting a picture of a burning poppy on twitter? These prosecutions seem to be getting more frequent and I don't know how far away we are from living in a country where anti-government sentiment is criminalised.


 
I agree completely. Instead of reporting him the OB they should have just found him and given him some 'stern words'.


----------



## cesare (Apr 19, 2013)

articul8 said:


> I hate to say anything remotely good about Thatcher- but I asbolutely loathed school milk - as they used to leave a crate of little bottles out in the sunshine, and we wouldn't get it until like 11am or something, by which time  (in the summer) it was rank.


That's got nothing to do with Thatcher. Or, if it has, it's got equally as much to do with Wilson of course.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 19, 2013)

No was just saying I was happy not to have to drink school milk.  Of all the things she's rightly hated for doing, this isn't the one I'd prioritise!


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 19, 2013)

articul8 said:


> No was just saying I was happy not to have to drink school milk. Of all the things she's rightly hated for doing, this isn't the one I'd prioritise!


 
I got milk in primary school until about age 9. this was early-to-mid 1990's. I agree it's not the worst thing she ever did by any stretch, but you can't deny the symbolism, stealing milk from the mouths of children etc


----------



## JimW (Apr 19, 2013)

Firky said:


> ...


This is the sort of unacceptable hoarding that is playing havoc with our Five-Year Plan.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 19, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I got milk in primary school until about age 9. this was early-to-mid 1990's. I agree it's not the worst thing she ever did by any stretch, but you can't deny the symbolism, stealing milk from the mouths of children etc


yes fair do's


----------



## smokedout (Apr 19, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Well, one of the issues I have with this, is that it's so deeply infiltrated into the ideas and practices of "being middle class", is that it's arguably difficult, if not impossible, for middle class "actors" to recognise their privilege (let alone check it  ), because they're so acculturated to it, that it's not on their psychological horizon.


 
I think its almost impossible for anyone to really see their own privilege, to the point that you even forget what is was like to not have privilege when you acquire some - just like on giroday you immediately forget how shit its been being skint the last few days and then act in a way which means the same thing will happen

I think its a brain thing


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 19, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I think its almost impossible for anyone to really see their own privilege, to the point that you even forget what is was like to not have privilege when you acquire some - just like on giroday you immediately forget how shit its been being skint the last few days and then act in a way which means the same thing will happen
> 
> I think its a brain thing


 
TBF, I know from experience that the giro thing isn't so much a human inability as a defence mechanism against having to acknowledge how shit your life currently is, whereas forgetting/eliding your own privilege seems to be more a deliberate action to place oneself as a victim of privilege rather than someone who benefits from it. The former appears to be a rational psychological self-defence mechanism, whereas the latter appears to be an instrumental decision to protect yourself from feeling like a hypocrite.


----------



## Firky (Apr 19, 2013)

smokedout said:


> just like on giroday you immediately forget how shit its been being skint the last few days


 
Aahh, king for an afternoon. Wonderful feeling. Then you pay this and that, get some food, treat yourself to a 4 pack of beer and a pack of fags. Only to wake the next day skint.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 19, 2013)




----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

The Malcolm Harris - managing editor at the New Inquiry - featured in earlier posts.


butchersapron said:


> I bet lib-com are well happy to have stuff by this parasite in their library.


 


copliker said:


> That Malcolm Harris character got caught trying to charge $5k to talk occupy wank. , Fantastically posh background natch.


 
Him here http://www.urban75.net/forums/goto/post?id=11804567#post-11804567

He's just written an outstandingly obtuse piece for his intellectual magazine _So You Want to Be a #Longreads Superstar _discussing nonfiction writing in the age of the internet
After going on about various sex-based things he concludes:

"The problem is that _engaging an audience, no matter the media_, _has an erotic element._ Like anyone who commands attention, a writer controls and manipulates bodies, but as this new form of online writing — so far defined more by its readers than innovations in construction — develops, both sides are still clumsy with the steps."

and it includes the (I think) ironic sidenote "And shame on the writers who would rather be right than read; they’re even worse."


----------



## chilango (Apr 20, 2013)

Ha ha what a dick.

Any more on him?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> "And shame on the writers who would rather be right than read; they’re even worse."


 
Wow! Am I misreading that or taking it out of context or is he making out that including inaccuracies in your writing in order to get a wider readership is some kind of virtue? And that those who believe in such trivial things as honesty, accuracy and intellectual integrity are, what? snobs?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Wow! Am I misreading that or taking it out of context or is he making out that including inaccuracies in your writing in order to get a wider readership is some kind of virtue? And that those who believe in such trivial things as honesty, accuracy and intellectual integrity are, what? snobs?


 
It's irony - he's saying the opposite - that writers that do this are being played for career boosting traffic.



> Too often writers are stuck using “the personal is political” as the singular excuse for so-called confessional work, as if the pronoun ‘I’ always needed justification outside of first-person novels. In trying to wedge all nonfiction into the journalist or scholar’s bargain, we end up writers and readers alike stepping on each other’s toes. No one wants to be the fool. Readers don’t want to be used for career-boosting traffic, and in this media environment (and economy), writers would by and large rather be read and shared for what they perceive as the “wrong” reasons than misunderstood or ignored for the right ones. And shame on the writers who would rather be right than read; they’re even worse.So we pull each other to the floor in an attempt to be the one left standing, to be the one who gets it instead of the one getting got. Neither side wants to be caught in earnest alone. Essayists tend to pander to an imagined Internet reader they learn to resent in advance, and a readership that senses this bad faith responds in kind. We misread and are misread.


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

A lot of pics of Malcom Harris I have seen he's wearing expensive clothes, such as a tailored shirt black shirt with a red cravat or a Harris tweed jacket. Always immaculate and well dressed, a bit non sequitur to the posts above I know but you don't get to dress like that by doing free speeches.


----------



## chilango (Apr 20, 2013)

Pah!

I don't misread.

Especially not shite like that.


----------



## chilango (Apr 20, 2013)

Firky said:


> A lot of pics of Malcom Harris I have seen he's wearing expensive clothes, such as a tailored shirt black shirt with a red cravat or a Harris tweed jacket. Always immaculate and well dressed, a bit non sequitur to the posts above I know but you don't get to dress like that by doing free speeches.



I've got a Harris tweed jacket.

Cost me £20 second hand.


----------



## chilango (Apr 20, 2013)

...but I digress.

This Malcolm Harris.what have we got on him so far?


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

Subsidise porn and help prevent sexual assault, surely not? 

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2009

Why Is This Man Supporting Porn At UM?



> Why is Malcolm Harris, perennial loser in school elections, making taxpayer subsidized porn a central issue in his campaign to become president of Maryland's student government?
> 
> He really should be asked how he can justify this nonsense in the context of a campaign that claims it will reduce sexual assaults on the UM campus and stop the University contractors from using "sweatshop" labor practices considering the well documented social pathologies that stem from pornography.
> 
> Even if he doesn't think that the production of porn is degrading to the women involved or that it encourages some men, usually physically unattractive and socially inept losers. to dehumanize women, or that women in porn often have no more options than a woman working in a "sweatshop" somewhere were there are lots of brown people he can patronize, he should realize that there is more than a free speech issue here and he's not Larry Flynt.


 


http://redmaryland.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/why-is-this-man-supporting-porn-at-um.html


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

Firky said:


> Subsidise porn and help prevent sexual assault, surely not?
> 
> WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2009
> 
> ...


 
That is just bizarre.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

Firky said:


> Subsidise porn and help prevent sexual assault, surely not?


 
Subsidise videos and pics of racist attacks/graffiti and help prevent racism.

Haven't really searched him but the bit in his piece about exhibitionism and circumstantial evidence that internet forms have helped reduce actual exhibitionism sort of goes with that.




> When I read “My Gucci Addiction,” Buzz Bissinger’s unexpected shopaholic leather-daddy confession in GQ, the first thing I thought of was a smiling, spritely man on a computer screen, masturbating with a pair of spotless white tennis shoes. I was at a college party, huddled drinks in hand with a bunch of friends around a laptop open to the Chat Roulette. We talked to an on-duty German military officer about the Red Army Faction and watched an insistent 14-year-old prove his joint-rolling skills before we hit upon the shoe masturbator. His mic was off, but he communicated nonverbally that he wanted us to watch him jerk off using a pair of sneakers on his hands. Requests like these were blamed for the swift death of Chat Roulette, but in the obituaries we rarely heard about the exhibitionists who were successful, who found curious and willing audiences. We told him to go for it, and boy did he.
> ...
> 
> Not that writerly exhibitionism — or a paraphilic attachment to leather gloves, for that matter — is as new as online shopping. Long after all his writing was lost to history, the Greek cynic Diogenes remained famous in philosophy classes for masturbating in public. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in addition to his work on the social contract, published stories about masturbating, had a habit of exposing himself to maidens in alleys, and enjoyed a good spanking. Indecent exposure is a fetish older than leather pants or the printed word, but its modes of expression have changed: The ability to reach millions of potential viewers with the click of a mouse have made this the golden age of showing your junk to other people.
> ...


----------



## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

Firky said:


> Subsidise porn and help prevent sexual assault, surely not?
> 
> WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2009
> 
> ...


 
Ugh.

Well, he would fit in well with the Penny-Stoya-Crabapple Axis of Neoliberal Pornography. Maybe they can start a boothbabe workfare programme so that all those lazy jealous girls don't get away with not _monetizing_ their hotness.


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

He likes talking about porn and tumblr. Not really looking too deeply into it all but C&Ping stuff as I come across it:



> What’s nice is that advances in consumer electronics have made high-quality images and video easier to produce. So any photographer — or even any college couple with a nice cell phone — has access to the entire means of pornographic production and distribution. An anticorporate porn movement seems more possible than ever. Maybe we are the porn we’ve been waiting for.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 20, 2013)

what the actual fuck?


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

chilango said:


> ...but I digress.
> 
> This Malcolm Harris.what have we got on him so far?


He speaks at chi-chi literary salons with people wearing tweed.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

oh wow man, they have their own means of production lol


----------



## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

NM, he's just making fun of people for being 46...


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> stalking my friends


 
Stalking is a vicious crime - I want nobody to be a part of it.
Is it stalking your friend by posting their advert for Samsung?




Monetise their fame?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Wow, this Malcolm Harris is 46.


 
He is 23  article that someone posted here earlier  
http://www.rhizzone.net/article/2012/09/29/fuck-new-inquiry-and-other-tales/


----------



## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

Comments from someone sympathetic to Occupy:

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=33338.0

Malcolm Harris.  Christ, What An Asshole.



> I didn't know this until I started looking into it, but, apparently, Malcolm Harris is the "vanguard" of the Occupy Movement.  A self-aggrandizing twenty something anarchist-marketing-hipster crossbreed, Harris is everything that is wrong with Occupy.
> 
> Harris charges $5000 (hotel and travel not included) to talk about anarchism and the 99%.  Harris also describes himself as the "Naomi Klein of the 21st century", which must come as something of a surprise to the (still living, still writing) Naomi Klein.
> 
> ...


----------



## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> He is 23 article that someone posted here earlier
> http://www.rhizzone.net/article/2012/09/29/fuck-new-inquiry-and-other-tales/


 
Yeah, I got confused, he was actually making fun of someone for being 46... which is.. uh.. an interesting debating tactic.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Comments from someone sympathetic to Occupy:
> 
> http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=33338.0
> 
> Malcolm Harris. Christ, What An Asshole.


 

another one jhoves into the bellend radar and set alarm bells ringing.




> *Malcolm "Mister GoLightly" Harris* is a New York based creative consultant, humanitarian, luxury brand ambassador and *curator-of-cool*. Though he thrives on being a jack-of-all-trades his primary purpose is to live his life as a vehicle for social change. Malcolm’s innate passion for art, fashion, music, and entrepreneurship along with his extensive and diverse global social network are all means to support one simple aspiration – _"to make the world a more beautiful and much better place for all of her inhabitants."_


 
ambassador, you are spoiling us.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

monetize your rebellion maaan


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Subsidise videos and pics of racist attacks/graffiti and help prevent racism.
> 
> Haven't really searched him but the bit in his piece about exhibitionism and circumstantial evidence that internet forms have helped reduce actual exhibitionism sort of goes with that.
> 
> ...


 
Surely if the trend began in the mid 80s it can't be down to the internet. It wasn't really widespread until the turn of the century and even then, without broadband, you couldn't get images or videos to a wide audience. Seems desperate to prove something he _wants_ to be true.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

plus everybody stopped calling them flashers and started using more appropriate words like 'nonce' years ago. There was a meeting.


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> oh wow man, they have their own means of production lol


 
He's seedy:



> When we withdraw from capital, can we bring our vibrators? Our handcuffs, and rope, and ball gags, and nipple clamps? Our movies, our cameras, our sexting? Our recreational Viagra, our birth control pills, our condoms? Our kinks, our fetishes? If we’re frolicking nude in the Italian countryside, can we still have sex atop a quaking dryer or hear the echoing jangle of a belt undone in an empty alley? Can we bring the chaotic bundles of symptoms and cyborg parts we call our selves, haunted and half-broken as they are?


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> monetize your rebellion maaan


He seems to have done that

'This luxury 100% cashmere from ethically farmed organic fair trade goats by VeryExpensiveBrandName? I don't like them but I'm being paid to wear it as their brand ambassador'


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Stalking is a vicious crime - I want nobody to be a part of it.
> Is it stalking your friend by posting their advert for Samsung?
> 
> 
> ...







			
				Molly said:
			
		

> You can never be the coolest kid in New York City and I think that makes you a better person


 
WTF is this? I don't believe she's a real person. She's an inventive advert for a sequel to Nathan Barley where he's ousted from trashbat.cock and replaced by a woman.


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

Sometimes I think these people aren't even real, the universe is just trolling me


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Subsidise videos and pics of racist attacks/graffiti and help prevent racism.
> 
> Haven't really searched him but the bit in his piece about exhibitionism and circumstantial evidence that internet forms have helped reduce actual exhibitionism sort of goes with that.


 


> Virtually impossible to prove exhibitionists are using the Internet to find willing viewers instead of exposing themselves to unwilling passers-by.


 
Then why use / mention it


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

_American university student politics._



Firky said:


> WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 2009
> 
> Why Is This Man Supporting Porn At UM?


 
Turns out they did actually show a porn film Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge 


> on Monday night, which was followed by a discussion on free speech by lawyers and professors. Only half an hour of the two-and-a-half-hour film was shown - but the students had made their point.
> ...
> For the Student Power Party coalition, the push to go ahead with the film despite threats was to show that they would not be bullied. 'It's a great opportunity to have more of a dialogue on free speech and the role of pornography in society,' said Malcolm Harris, one of the organizers, adding that Harris was also invited, but declined.


 


spent over a thousand dollars on the campaign

http://www.diamondbackonline.com/article_c7aea174-a0d7-5afa-b230-e33a0a55410d.html




> The party raised $1,187.52 and spent $1,040.29, mainly on T-shirts and printed materials, according to the new report. The discrepancy between the reports was due to an accounting error in the first report, Student Power Party Campaign Manager Bob Hayes wrote in an e-mail.


 
a leftist-liberal coalition - sample discussion:



sample manifesto



> Malcolm Harris, an active member of more than three student groups on campus, will lead the Student Power Party as the candidate for President of the Student Body. Harris, along with 60 enthusiastic, talented, and organized student leaders on the SPP ticket  are excited to change the face of the SGA. The SPP will make the first step in placing power in the hands of students who have the reputation of getting things done and out of the hands of student politicians who craft the illusion of promises without action


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

chatroullette has made real life flashing go the way of hedge porn.


----------



## Belushi (Apr 20, 2013)

That's fucking it, I'm becoming a Maoist


----------



## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

I'm still getting over this cunt being against the Chicago teachers' labour rights because he thinks that schools are a prison. I kind of want him to die.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

In that mollycrabapple advert I did wonder if they were going to show how the phone could be used to take copies of anything interesting found in a book. In a bookshop.

I was glad they did not


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

Malcolm Harris is the worst one out of all of them I reckon. Worse than Laurie, Molly, Owen, Sunni and Elly Mae all rolled into one.

He must be stopped. I don't care how it's done but the man is an affront to decency.


----------



## Belushi (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I'm still getting over this cunt being against the Chicago teachers' labour rights because he thinks that schools are a prison. I kind of want him to die.


 
I dont think any reasonable person could disagree that he needs bayonetting.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I'm still getting over this cunt being against the Chicago teachers' labour rights because he thinks that schools are a prison. I kind of want him to die.


He was probably freeschooled


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

let me get this right, this fuckstick spent nearl 600 pounds of real money so as to show a dirty film to a  large audience

lol at 'only half an hour was aired' thats about the longest any porn film ever gets watched for, not counting fast forwarding etc.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Malcolm Harris is the worst one out of all of them I reckon. Worse than Laurie, Molly, Owen, Sunni and Elly Mae all rolled into one.
> 
> He must be stopped. I don't care how it's done but the man is an affront to decency.


He is the Hugh Hefner of Occupy Wall Street.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I dont think any reasonable person could disagree that he needs bayonetting.


 
We need to make sure his death is as slow as possible though - which means that at least as much effort must be put into keeping him _alive _as is put into making him suffer. Some of them Chicago teachers must have doctors as partners - maybe they'd volunteer to help us in our noble quest?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I'm still getting over this cunt being against the Chicago teachers' labour rights because he thinks that schools are a prison. I kind of want him to die.


 

a re-education camp would show him the subtle difference between school and prison


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> a re-education camp would show him the subtle difference between school and prison


 
By combining the two - it's dialectical so he ought to appreciate it.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> let me get this right, this fuckstick spent nearl 600 pounds of real money so as to show a dirty film to a large audience
> 
> lol at 'only half an hour was aired' thats about the longest any porn film ever gets watched for, not counting fast forwarding etc.


 
One reference to hedge-porn and then one to "fast-forwarding" in the same thread. You're a sepia-tinged pathway back to the 1980s. Wanna come round  mine and play Manic Miner?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> ambassador, you are spoiling us.


 
That's someone different as visible here - they share the same name http://malsirrah.com

The Malcolm Harris that LP shared an event with in New York is the one who tweeted :  "If prison guards went on strike, would we accept it if they said it was for the good of the prisoners?" in the midst of the Chicago strike against the state effectively turning all schools into charter ones and destroying the AFT


----------



## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That's someone different as visible here - they share the same name http://malsirrah.com
> 
> The Malcolm Harris that LP shared an event with in New York is the one who tweeted : "If prison guards went on strike, would we accept it if they said it was for the good of the prisoners?" in the midst of the Chicago strike against the state effectively turning all schools into charter ones and destroying the AFT


 
Scum


----------



## Belushi (Apr 20, 2013)

I actually am fucking furious. Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the ghetto uprising when men, women and children were slaughtered on the streets of Warsaw resisting the Nazis.  Every day around the world people are killed, rot in prison cells and sacrifice their homes and livelihoods attempting to build a better world.

And then some rich kids poncing around the hip areas of new York and London claim that they are the left? Really?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That's someone different as visible here - they share the same name http://malsirrah.com
> 
> The Malcolm Harris that LP shared an event with in New York is the one who tweeted : "If prison guards went on strike, would we accept it if they said it was for the good of the prisoners?" in the midst of the Chicago strike against the state effectively turning all schools into charter ones and destroying the AFT


 

ah cheers for the clarification. The bloke I quoted from was in the Huff so I assumed it was yer man.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

This is good https://www.evernote.com/shard/s203...noteGuid=96f99c75-cae7-4855-a7af-6a2e71975733



> yesterday marked Occupy’s one year anniversary, and there’s nothing to show for that brief, and briefly-glorious cultural eruption but a memorable slogan stuck in our heads, like a jingle from a toilet paper ad. There’s nothing to hang on to, hardly even a memory to wrap yourself around. All that remain are what Occupy began with: A clever jingle or two, and the launching of a handful of anarchist “brands.”
> 
> One of these vile anarcho-marketing brands is a twenty-something hipster named Malcolm Harris. To me, the Occupy Movement will always be conflated with Malcolm Harris and the brand of marketing-concocted “anarchism” that he represents. And that’s bad, because one look at Malcolm Harris—his anarcho-hipster sneer, his marketing-guy hipster glasses—and you’ll be reaching for the nearest can of pepper spray.
> 
> ...


 


> The email from Malcolm Harris’ agent to the Occupy Redlands coordinator has to be read in its entirety to be believed:
> _From: Rxxxxxl Rxxxxx Date: October 25, 2011 1:04:42 PM PDT
> To: …@gmail.com
> Subject: Malcolm Harris_
> ...


​


----------



## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

Is the state playing any role here? If they aren't, they'd have to invent a Malcolm Harris...


----------



## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

> “Who’s against the strike at all? I’m against education, not labor strikes…”
> 
> “I don’t think teachers by and large like or care very much about the kids in their classrooms. The unions, even less. Rahm, not at all.”
> 
> Look, no one actually likes kids or we wouldn’t put them in jailish schools and make them ask to pee and take tests and line up to eat, okay”


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> This is good https://www.evernote.com/shard/s203...noteGuid=96f99c75-cae7-4855-a7af-6a2e71975733
> 
> 
> 
> ​


 
Digerati lol

The Radiohead thing stinks IMO - loads of kids will have spent money they couldn't really afford to get there to see them, only to find that some fucking oxygen thief hipster scumcunt made it all up to promote the occupy movement himself. That's really going to win them over to the 'cause' isn't it?

I think it tells us a bit about how they think though. Social change doesn't happen because disenfranchised people are pulled into collective action - it happens because a few dedicated middle class types make it happen. [insert that quote Ellie Mae posted about a handful of dedicated and brilliant people being the only thing that's ever brought about positive change here] And so if they need to shit on a load of kids to get media attention so be it.

Cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 20, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I actually am fucking furious. Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the ghetto uprising when men, women and children were slaughtered on the streets of Warsaw resisting the Nazis. Every day around the world people are killed, rot in prison cells and sacrifice their homes and livelihoods attempting to build a better world.
> 
> And then some rich kids poncing around the hip areas of new York and London claim that they are the left? Really?


 
Completely agree with you there mate. They see it as a game. They want to make a game out of it when this is a serious fucking business.

They are not our comrades.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

On Malcolm Harris

He voted Obama in 2008, but became an leftist at University of Maryland whilst being part of the new SDS there and helped found Washington DC's SDS:




> To mark the anniversary of the war in Iraq, for instance, Washington area SDS members held a “Funk the War” dance party at the offices of companies the organization sees as profiting from combat.
> “We dance, we throw glitter. It’s a really good time,” said Bob Hayes, a mechanical engineering student at Maryland, who along with Harris helped found the chapter there.
> “At the same time we send the message that students are no longer accepting this war and that war based on empire, or war in general, is not something we can tolerate,” Hayes said.
> Hayes said he and Harris started an SDS chapter because they wanted to belong to a group that approached issues “from a different direction than other groups that existed already.”
> ...


 

Then an anarchist afterwards



> A: I grew up in Palo Alto, California, which is sometimes mistakenly referred to as "Stanford University, California." After graduating in three years with good behavior from the University of Maryland with a degree in English and politics, I lucked into the job at Shareable (thanks Craigslist). That was about a year ago now. In a lot of ways it's a continuation of what I was doing in college, which included a lot of activism around student debt and a weekly column for the school paper on university politics. The struggles that erupted at the University of California campuses my last year of school over tuition hikes juxtaposed with the financial crisis and resulting recession had a deep effect on my thinking and what I wanted to do with my newly unemployed self.


 
heavily influenced by 1970s Italian autonomism/workers struggles



> I like to think of the relationship between something like Share or Die and so-called post-fordist theory (a strand of heterodox Marxism focused on terms like "multitude," "the common," and precarity) as neither causal nor coincidental. The understanding of precarity in the collection doesn't come (mostly) from reading about it; it comes from the writers' experience being the precariat. Theory coming out of the academy has played an important role in Europe in articulating both problems and solutions, but considering the degree to which the American university system adheres to market logic, I'm skeptical of the role it has to play. The best analyses don't come from cloistered dissertation research; in Italy, where a lot of this thought is coming from, the foundations were developed through workers' struggle in the late '70s.


 
As an anarchist, his friend and now magazine co-creator Rachel Rosenfelt wrote this on behalf of Lavin speakers agency to a person from Occupy Redlands (a town in more rural California):




> From: Rachel Rosenfelt Date: October 25, 2011 1:04:42 PM PDT
> To: …@gmail.com
> Subject: Malcolm Harris
> 
> ...


 
Interestingly, Malcolm quickly exited the Lavin roster when that email was shared, claimed he had no idea he was being marketed for $5,000 - essentially dumped it all on Rachel who also left soon after.

This is Rachel:




> Rachel Rosenfelt is the founder, publisher and Editor-in-Chief of The New Inquiry. In addition to her work for TNI, Rachel is an independent media consultant for small press publishers, independent producers, and digital media non-profits specializing in educational technology. Most recently, Rachel has developed public programming in collaboration with organizations such as Google NYC, Tumblr, BOMB Magazine, Lapham's Quaterly and New Directions Publishing.She holds a degree in Women's Studies from Barnard College.
> 
> Courses Taught: GLIB 5831 Contemporary Approaches to 21st C. Publishing
> Email: rosenfrd@newschool.edu


 
But Molly Crabapple is still part of the field there at Lavin




> Molly Crabapple has been described as “a brilliant and principled artist” by BoingBoing, but she has also written for CNN and Vice magazine, on subjects including the Spanish general strike, her former career as a pinup model, and her arrest during Occupy Wall Street. At age 22, she founded Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, a chain of alternative drawing classes that now has branches in 140 cities, and has produced events at venues including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Brooklyn Museum.
> 
> Crabapple’s books include Discordia (with Laurie Penny), the forthcoming Straw House, and Week in Hell, based on a recent project in which she locked herself in a hotel room, covered the walls in paper, and produced 270 square feet of art. “Shell Game,” her series of large-scale paintings about the revolutions of 2011, will be shown in the Spring of 2013.
> 
> Crabapple’s work is in the permanent collection of the New York Historical Society, the Rubin Museum of Art, and the Groucho Club (London), and has been shown in exhibitions at venues including New York University, the Riverside Art Museum in Los Angeles, and Cabinet des Curieux in Paris. She was one of the main artistic voices of Occupy Wall Street. Crabapple has also hosted documentaries for France’s ARTE television channel, and she regularly speaks to institutions around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the London School of Economics.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> This is good


 
I've reposted with Rosenfelt's name still there.

This is his honors thesis http://destructural.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/a-war-of-juxtaposition.pdf







His writing then was full of odd stuff - this from 2007 speaks about simply powering through lives after a graduation.



> It’s not necessarily that the Over-Generation is apathetic. We just don’t have the time to plan major insurrection. Between classes and honor society and community service and beer-pong tournaments, who has time to build Molotov cocktails? Wharton only accepts 13.6 percent of applicants. Plus, mom and dad might not approve, and they’re the ones who pay the bills. So we put our heads down and study, powering through college, then graduate school, then the rest of our lives, without the time or imagination to dream of a different world.


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## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

This, comrades, is why we need the workers' bomb


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

Wonder what mark he got for that? And why journal papers are something he ignored except for one forthcoming reference?


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## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

So a highly educated m/c geezer thinks that classrooms are a prison.


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## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I'm still getting over this cunt being against the Chicago teachers' labour rights because he thinks that schools are a prison. I kind of want him to die.





SpineyNorman said:


> Malcolm Harris is the worst one out of all of them I reckon. Worse than Laurie, Molly, Owen, Sunni and Elly Mae all rolled into one.
> 
> He must be stopped. I don't care how it's done but the man is an affront to decency.





Belushi said:


> I dont think any reasonable person could disagree that he needs bayonetting.


 


SpineyNorman said:


> We need to make sure his death is as slow as possible though - which means that at least as much effort must be put into keeping him _alive _as is put into making him suffer. Some of them Chicago teachers must have doctors as partners - maybe they'd volunteer to help us in our noble quest?


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## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> So a highly educated m/c geezer thinks that classrooms are a prison.


 
One can only conclude that he's got plenty of experience of the former and none of the latter. Come the glorious day we will rectify that.

And presumably he also thinks that his mum making him eat his greens and tidy his room is a violation of his human rights.


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

Who's Helena Fitzgerald, I notice he's (Malcolm Harris) often photographed with her, drops her name etc. ?

Body language suggests they know each other very well.

(stripy toff blazer FTW)


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

Firky said:


> Who's Helena Fitzgerald, I notice he's (Malcolm Harris) often photographed with her, drops her name etc. ?
> 
> Body language suggests they know each other very well.
> 
> (stripy toff blazer FTW)


 
Look at him. Just look at him. The smug cunt. If that's not a face that's begging to be slapped I don't know what is


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Digerati lol
> 
> The Radiohead thing stinks IMO


 
I am going to have to come back that when I get more time as I am a huge RH fan


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Look at him. Just look at him. The smug cunt. If that's not a face that's begging to be slapped I don't know what is


My first thought too


----------



## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

Firky said:


> Who's Helena Fitzgerald, I notice he's (Malcolm Harris) often photographed with her, drops her name etc. ?
> 
> Body language suggests they know each other very well.
> 
> (stripy toff blazer FTW)


 
They look very similar, I'm not going to google them and just assume they have some weird incestuous relationship like I imagine all privately educated people do


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> a re-education camp would show him the subtle difference between school and prison


 
Don't joke in that way with him he will physically threaten you

"I remember at one of The New Inquiry‘s posh, super-exclusive literary salons on the Upper East Side (shortlist and all) that Pam managed to finagle us into, I made some throwaway, offhand remark that so enraged Malcolm that he physically threatened me. Which becomes much funnier once you consider the height and size differential between us. I had criticized the idea of purely local agricultural production as a viable alternative to global networks of food distribution, to which he raised some ill-informed objection about what was to be done with the “kulaks” (rather pronouncedly mispronouncing the word), assuming with smug condescension that Soviet history would be something I was utterly ignorant about.
He was wrong. In what was admittedly a pretty childish move, I calmly corrected his pronunciation of the word and jokingly assured him that there was no kulak problem at all: Obviously (obviously!), they’d be sent East and we’d just let the GULag sort them out. This bit of pedantry and black humor on my part — which, it’s true, was probably in poor taste — pissed him off to the point that he advised me to “insurrect” my “ivy league education.” Not that I hold it against him, but coming from Malcolm, who graduated from an expensive private school*, this all seemed a bit “rich.” For some reason it was just really funny to me, and I burst out laughing at his suggestion.
This didn’t improve his mood. He then told me that if I did not voluntarily leave the party, he would “make me.” I was unimpressed, and so we ended up staying another half-hour or so while he fumed and paced back and forth in the corner. Needless to say, my name was removed from the VIP list of approved invitees, so this was the last of the two literary salons they held that I was able to attend."

Harris didn't attend private school, as here:



> "Malcolm Harris is from Palo Alto (median property value - $1.3m), and went to Palo Alto High School, which is something of a rarity in the United States, being a public school with an 11:1 pupil-teacher ratio."


 
More generally his plans around twitter involve using it to combat racism by having a 'dog' account not say anything but simply '_bark_' at colour-blind instances of racism ie when when ordinary white Americans say something that's not racist but simply the result of cultures not having fully merged or shared together.

http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-208/feature-malcolm-harris/



> The account served a second purpose: as a sort of anti-racist hunting dog. @Anti_Racism_Dog quickly attracted a lot of like-minded followers who understood the dynamics at play. Whenever it would start barking at another user, this was a cue to the dog’s followers to troll the offender as well. There’s only so much one dog can do alone. Colour-blind racism is particularly dangerous because it isn’t immediately visible as such. It provokes good-faith discussion from liberals about what counts as racism, muddying the water. But @Anti_Racism_Dog’s strategy draws new lines about what constitutes acceptable discourse on race, placing colour-blind racists on the other side by speaking to them like an animal. What would be taken as totally insane in flesh space can be infuriatingly clever online.


 
Apparently, this means stopping the situation where



> Structural injustices thrive when the micro-interactions that constitute them are hidden from view.


 
One other option for twitter was creating rumour storms and weirdness that will disrupt the system.
Here is a post from his blog from 2010

http://destructural.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/please-stand-up




> “In Russia, that Narodnik-Anarchists would sometimes forge a ukase or manifesto in the name of the Czar; in it the Autocrat would complain that greedy lords & unfeeling officials had sealed him in his palace & cut him off from his beloved people. He would proclaim the end of serfdom & call on peasants & workers to rise in His Name against the government.
> 
> Several times this ploy actually succeeded in sparking revolts.” - Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Don't joke in that way with him he will physically threaten you
> 
> "I remember at one of The New Inquiry‘s posh, super-exclusive literary salons on the Upper East Side (shortlist and all) that Pam managed to finagle us into, I made some throwaway, offhand remark that so enraged Malcolm that he physically threatened me. Which becomes much funnier once you consider the height and size differential between us. I had criticized the idea of purely local agricultural production as a viable alternative to global networks of food distribution, to which he raised some ill-informed objection about what was to be done with the “kulaks” (rather pronouncedly mispronouncing the word), assuming with smug condescension that Soviet history would be something I was utterly ignorant about.
> He was wrong. In what was admittedly a pretty childish move, I calmly corrected his pronunciation of the word and jokingly assured him that there was no kulak problem at all: Obviously (obviously!), they’d be sent East and we’d just let the GULag sort them out. This bit of pedantry and black humor on my part — which, it’s true, was probably in poor taste — pissed him off to the point that he advised me to “insurrect” my “ivy league education.” Not that I hold it against him, but coming from Malcolm, who graduated from an expensive private school*, this all seemed a bit “rich.” For some reason it was just really funny to me, and I burst out laughing at his suggestion.
> ...


 
Sounds like the yes men or whatever they call themselves.


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Look at him. Just look at him. The smug cunt. If that's not a face that's begging to be slapped I don't know what is


 

He's got his fingers in the pie of Tumblr, it's another thing (aside porn, sex, nudity, and Fitzgerald) he drops as often has he can.  But it is porn he likes best, he keeps coming back to it again and again.

_"The cover-shoot for Sasha’s movie is too much for Vince to handle. All those faceless male bodies and sculpted muscles constitute a giant fucking machine; their hairless, sterile flesh is as efficient as it is hollow. When Vince tells Sasha that what she does makes him sick, she tells him that “guys like you, that wanna fuck all sorts of girls just for the fun of it."_​ 
And what the fuck does this even mean?
​_“Like the reader of Milton’s Paradise Lost who sympathizes with Satan, only to be reminded of his own fallen nature, the viewer is implicated in Ari’s shaming. Up until this point, his bravado has seemed a mask for a family man trying to succeed in a cut-throat industry, but at the end of season seven, he is finally revealed as a bladder of bile kept animate through unadulterated aggression. His true face is the lie, and the viewers fell for it too.”  _​


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

I bet he has some interesting files on his Apple Macbook and iPhone. The dirty cunt. He's like a ginger Woody Allen with twice the sleaze.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 20, 2013)

what's he doing quoting the anarcho-nonce hakim bey?


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## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

Helena Fitzgerald is a New Inquiry article contributor (amongst others) and was a contributing editor. Certainly of the same circles as Harris although a quick scan of her Twitter shows he's not making a lot of tweets to her other than about New Inquiry matters.


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## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

This caught my eye, just posting it here to remind myself to take a look at it later along with hte Radiohead thing.

Looks like a piss take out of him

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/malcolm-harris/fd9b4ac47855d2cb11bac1da96702d5ccb9051df/



> *Malcolm Harris and the Occupy Swindle*​


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Helena Fitzgerald is a New Inquiry article contributor (amongst others) and was a contributing editor. Certainly of the same circles as Harris although a quick scan of her Twitter shows he's not making a lot of tweets to her other than about New Inquiry matters.


 
Aahh a bit of nepotism (they do look similar)


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> what's he doing quoting the anarcho-nonce hakim bey?


 
He is promoting the idea that a fake twitter account for NUS head Aaron Porter with it promoting physical occupation of university space is a good thing to do.

Hence saying Radiohead will play at the Occupy Wall Street park is also a good thing to do.

Just like ultra-esers and narodniks in tsarist era issuing ukazi from the tsar encouraging rebellion against landlords.

None of these things ever promote boy who cried wolf syndrome or encourage detachment and fixation on powers from above.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 20, 2013)

They don't see anything wrong with commodification. They don't understand why they shouldn't be "entrepreneurs" who "market" themselves as a "brand."


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi Palo Alto is a very wealthy enclave though (thanks to incoporation of the city) it's a private _town_, with less than 70,000 highly educated, extremely wealthy residents.

I doubt Palo Alto High School is a true public school at all.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

re: discussion a few pages earlier about privately educated leftists who use things like flashmobs for activism - a privately educated 'anarchist' at my uni who's going to be a sabb next year is talking about how he's made a Foucault finger puppet who inspired him to write a dissertation about why "contemporary hip-hop isn't very good because neoliberalism". ffs

Big fan of Laurie Penny. Naturally.


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## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

Radiohead have a song called Palo Alto about it's MC utopia 

equationgirl

In a city of the future​It is difficult to concentrate​Meet the boss, meet the wife​Everybody's happy​Everyone is made for life​​In a city of the future​It is difficult to find a space​I'm too busy to see you​You're too busy to wait​​But I'm okay, how are you?​Thanks for asking, thanks for asking​But I'm okay, how are you?​I hope you're okay too​​Everyone one of those days​When the sky's California blue​With a beautiful bombshell​I throw myself into my work​I'm too lazy, I've been kidding myself for so long​​I'm okay, how are you?​Thanks for asking, thanks for asking​But I'm okay, how are you?​I hope you're okay too​


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## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> re: discussion a few pages earlier about privately educated leftists who use things like flashmobs for activism - a privately educated 'anarchist' at my uni who's going to be a sabb next year is talking about how he's made a Foucault finger puppet who inspired him to write a dissertation about why "contemporary hip-hop isn't very good because neoliberalism". ffs
> 
> Big fan of Laurie Penny. Naturally.


That sounds a bit like a breakdown, to be honest. Is he ok?


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> re: discussion a few pages earlier about privately educated leftists who use things like flashmobs for activism - a privately educated 'anarchist' at my uni who's going to be a sabb next year is talking about how he's made a Foucault finger puppet who inspired him to write a dissertation about why "contemporary hip-hop isn't very good because neoliberalism". ffs
> 
> Big fan of Laurie Penny. Naturally.


 
I remember John Molyneux saying never write about your favourite band or genre of music for a dissertation because it'll not even be properly read.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> re: discussion a few pages earlier about privately educated leftists who use things like flashmobs for activism - a privately educated 'anarchist' at my uni who's going to be a sabb next year is talking about how he's made a Foucault finger puppet who inspired him to write a dissertation about why "contemporary hip-hop isn't very good because neoliberalism". ffs
> 
> Big fan of Laurie Penny. Naturally.


 
Who's that? (PM if necessary)


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## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Who's that? (PM if necessary)


 
Sam Rae - he's gonna be education officer


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## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

'Education Needs a Rae of Sunshine'

Another one for the bayonet.


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## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> inspired him to write a dissertation about why "contemporary hip-hop isn't very good because neoliberalism". ffs


 


> Ever got an essay back that you really thought was first class but got a 2:2, and none of your lecturers have taken the time to explain why?


 
Does he really have to ask?


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I'm still getting over this cunt being against the Chicago teachers' labour rights because he thinks that schools are a prison. I kind of want him to die.


 
Here's what Chicago teachers, students and parents are up against:



> As you may have heard, Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently jetted in from his Utah ski vacation to tell the city—particularly south- and west-siders—that he'd done them a big favor by closing 54 of their schools.
> That meant that 30,000 children would be moved into new schools. But to hear the mayor tell it, more money would be available for things like air-conditioning, libraries, and computers when the Chicago Public Schools didn't have to spend so much heating all those unneeded buildings.
> It's an interesting approach to public education—helping low-income children by turning their undercrowded classrooms into overcrowded ones.


 
If you can stomach it, there's more where that came from at this link:

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicag...ing-rahm-emanuel-closings/Content?oid=9203188

(Rahm Emanuel was one of the key figures in the early years of the Obama White House, btw).

In general, one thing I've seen crop up sometimes in debates on education is the claim that the school system as we know it is a product of states' military needs. The usual case cited is that of Prussia after it's awful defeat in the battle of Jena in 1807. After that, Prussia did expand a compulsory state school system - but what this meme ignores is the fact that Prussian teachers were heavily involved in the revolution of 1848. What I mean by this is that the relationship between public education and state power is a lot more ambivalent than this point of view allows for.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> some fucking oxygen thief hipster scumcunt


 
Who is worse - this kind of anarchist or a Labourist radical like Sunny Hundal?



Firky said:


> I remember John Molyneux saying never write about your favourite band or genre of music for a dissertation because it'll not even be properly read.


Malcolm Harris on music defending a musician with homophobic lyrics (213 f-words on one album)



> It’s out of this therapist’s office that Odd Future’s music emerges, half-joking about being half-joking. Tyler used the framing device of a self-voiced school counselor in his debut mixtape Bastard, and returns to the technique in Goblin, the first Wolf Gang album sold in stores. Even though some of Tyler’s slogans (“Kill people/Burn shit/Fuck school”) are reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s adolescent rejectionism, his adult antagonist is no authoritarian. The counselor’s attitude is more like Tyler’s critics, spouting knowing condescension with a dose of liberal tolerance. As the ‘two’ of them discuss Tyler’s fame in the album’s title track intro, he defends his colorful language: “You’re gonna have to cut down on that ‘faggot’ word, that’s very, that’s a bad word-” “I’m not homophobic” “I mean, I don’t think you are-” “Faggot.”


 


> Odd Future is the articulation of antagonism in a nation that swears it doesn’t have any. Against Glee’s sing-song commercial pluralism and Gaga’s tolerant biological determinism, Wolf Gang screams that a world with so much suffering must have deeper conflicts, of the existential fear that being “born this way” is the problem. This contemporary collective version of Dostoevsky’s underground man is a rebuke to Dan Savage’s state-approved historical view “it gets better.” If adulthood is free from the agonies of youth, why do adults produce such violently sad children? When Earl calls himself a “rapist in training,” asking if he hates women is the wrong question. The inventor of adolescence G. Stanley Hall wrote that “youth is prophecy,” and Odd Future is no exception, they’re the dark promise of the shape of things to come.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> re: discussion a few pages earlier about privately educated leftists who use things like flashmobs for activism - a privately educated 'anarchist' at my uni who's going to be a sabb next year is talking about how he's made a Foucault finger puppet who inspired him to write a dissertation about why "contemporary hip-hop isn't very good because neoliberalism". ffs
> 
> Big fan of Laurie Penny. Naturally.


 
Will he resign to make way for a female candidate? 

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/salma-haidrani/sexist-world-student-elections_b_2753750.html



> Despite more than half of the student population constituting of females, it is astounding that a female President has not been elected to power in 10 years. And unfortunately it appears as if the vicious cycle of female under-presentation will repeat itself for the eleventh year, with two male candidates at present vying for the role. But it isn't merely the role of President which will soon be occupied by a male student which serves to highlight the endemic gender inequality on campus, but women's under-representation in the majority of leadership positions at my Union. At present, a mere two of the six Student Officers are occupied by women, with the Women's Officer only available to the female student body to stand for.


----------



## Nice one (Apr 20, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> sihhi Palo Alto is a very wealthy enclave though (thanks to incoporation of the city) it's a private _town_, with less than 70,000 highly educated, extremely wealthy residents.
> 
> I doubt Palo Alto High School is a true public school at all.


 
bit like owen jones and his education - not private but certainly the poshest school in the poshest area


----------



## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Will he resign to make way for a female candidate?
> 
> http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/salma-haidrani/sexist-world-student-elections_b_2753750.html


 
Probably not, the (white) women's councillor said that she had never been more angry than she was at the sabb election this year when everyone she saw that everyone who was elected was white. She didn't offer to resign her seat for someone who wasn't white, of course.

This privilege theory BS is what passes for radical politics here.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

Firky said:


> He likes talking about porn and tumblr. Not really looking too deeply into it all but C&Ping stuff as I come across it:


 
Such an odd interview, Malcolm seems to think camera phones/nude pictures should be newsworthy in general



> with the celebrity sex tape what we have is more celebrities behaving like normal people than normal people behaving like celebrities. As Us Weekly reminds us: They’re just like us! And people have recorded themselves having sex, no doubt, for as long as the technological capacity has existed. The celebrity sex tape doesn’t so much normalize the making of sex tapes but the discussion of them in public. Camera phones mean nude pictures, but it’s newsworthy only if the media can link it to public figures or crime.


 
But blackmail via nude photographs doesn't matter to Malcolm



> no one like the idea of creepy exes showing nude pictures of them to their friends. But eventually no one is going to care. So our flirting and sexual practices change in relation to technology — so what? The cops and parents will get over kids sending each other “show-me-yours” pics. No one is better about getting blasé about such things than teenagers. There’s nothing wrong with it.
> 
> Helena: But what about when they grow up? Who wants pictures of themselves at 18 —
> 
> ...


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

Is it me, or is Malcolm Harris unusually obsessed with porn.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Is it me, or is Malcolm Harris unusually obsessed with porn.


 
And also a cunt, mustn't forget that part.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Is it me, or is Malcolm Harris unusually obsessed with porn.


 

hasn't even the decency to be ashamed of it.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> hasn't even the decency to be ashamed of it.


Or at least shut the fuck up about it. He'll get a name for himself as a creepy sex pest if he keeps going on about it. Are there not enough anti-capitalist things he can write about?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

God, he really is close to being a nutter - something on the edges of an insurrectionist anarchist:

"There was an anti-IMF consulta in DC, and representatives from all over the world were discussing what actions their communities would take locally. Person by person, they detailed comprehensive plans for direct actions, balancing risks and possible rewards, the various statements they would be making, the composition of coalitions, etc. These kinds of meetings can stretch on and on, and are often filled with all sorts of bullshit posturing and rarefied code words. In short, they can be insufferable. The discussion finally gets around to a Greek anarchist group.  The Greeks are internationally known for being especially militant (and awesome). Their spokesman addresses the assembly and says simply, “We will make total destroy.” Everyone looks incredulous and confused. The Greek spokesman, fearing he has miscommunicated, excuses himself to confer with his group. He speaks with them in hurried Greek, and the rest of the assembly seems relieved that there will be further explanation. After the short clarification, the spokesman turns to the room again and says, “Yes, we will make total destroy.”
That phrase, bridging the gap between strategy and tactic, has become a slogan. “Make total destroy” is a step past the ossified anti-neoliberal struggles, with their summits and counter-summits, and summits to plan the counter-summits. Eschew bureaucracy, embrace bricks."


This is from the L A Review of Books - America's second most intellectually prestigious general intellectual magazine after the NYRB - a review of James Scott's _Two Cheers for Anarchism:_

"Compare these examples of infrapolitics to the story of Jamal Thomas as related in the pamphlet Union of Arsonists, put out by The Phoenix Class War Council. Thomas was a Domino's Pizza employee who was unjustly fired after being mugged on the job. When he recovered from his injuries, Thomas went from one Domino's location to another in his old uniform, claiming to be an inspector, and proceeded to burn them all down. His sabotage actions don't fit into Scott's narrative, because it's hard to imagine how they'd benefit him, or lead to anything resembling progress: Domino's being much more likely to upgrade their fire insurance than reassess employee grievance procedures. Although Scott mentions episodes of structural change marked by "riots, attacks on property, unruly demonstrations, theft, arson, and open defiance," such revolutionary instances are neither theoretically or practically his concern. Like neoliberalism itself, Scott’s “infrapolitics” are anchored in an everlasting capitalist present, which can’t comprehend an attack on its very premises.

If, as the maxim goes, there are no revolutionaries before the revolution, then by the same token there are no anarchists before anarchy either. This is what happens when you try and live like an anarchist under capitalist liberal democracy: you get Scott, or you get Hedges. Either your resistance teaches new tricks and lends legitimacy to the structures you detest, or you get cut out like a cancer, regardless of your supposed rights. Netroots and Kickstarter or batons and pepper spray: if the capitalism doesn't get you, the riot police will. All too often it's both: the occupations got clubbed out of the parks into the ballot booths; Pussy Riot landed themselves in prison and Hot Topic simultaneously. Scott says nothing about how to live under such intolerable circumstances, or how to bring them to an end, though he does allude vaguely to some future time when we might need something more than infrapolitics.
...
Though it shares a family resemblance with the passive-aggressive rebellion that interests Scott, revolutionary politics requires the drawing of lines of antagonism through the here and now. Not just through the designation of illegitimate authorities, but also the identification of comrades and contestation across the divide. It's the difference between a politics and an opinion. What the sky will look like on the big day, Scott doesn't reveal. In the meantime, he's just a guy walking to work faster."


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

I think 

_Eschew bureaucracy, embrace bricks_ 

has better internal rhyme than

_Fewer business lunches, more throwing punches_


----------



## Bun (Apr 20, 2013)

Perhaps we could raise the money to have him killed on Kickstarter. It's how he would want to go, I'm sure.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

we should monetize that. Kickbucketer, the crowd sourced funding for assassinations. I'll give a tenner to see the pope downed, who is with me?


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> we should monetize that. Kickbucketer, the crowd sourced funding for assassinations. I'll give a tenner to see the pope downed, who is with me?


Old pope or new pope? Both popes?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Sam Rae - he's gonna be education officer


 
Didn't recognise the name so I did a google image search. I have somehow managed to avoid him but I can now confirm that he looks like a cunt. If we subject this information along with with the information on the post-modernist glove puppet to a ruthless materialist analysis I think we can safely conclude that he in fact is a cunt. And a massive on at that.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

LP recommended Debord's The Society of The Spectacle, Malcolm Harris uses it to analyse more gangster rap music, but fails:




> Gucci’s delusion is that he can bridge the traumatic rift between exchange and use values by returning to the point of separation — purchase. But this is a repetition of disappointment, as Guy Debord reminds in The Society of The Spectacle: “The object that is glamorous in the spectacle becomes vulgar the moment it enters the consumer’s home.” Shiny new buys fade quickly into a consumer’s total collected “stuff,” “crap,” or “shit.” Vulgar indeed. Consumers must be self-sacrificing lovers; in order for Homo Economicus to function properly, s/he must desire money not for what it can bring, but truly for itself, and then let it go circulate. The impossible urge to reconcile the two drives brings on a spiral of disgust and renunciation, leaving nothing but the temporary relief of trips to the store, to be repeated unto death. As Gucci puts it tragically:
> 
> I need another hoe/my old hoe was the truth
> I had to let her go/she kept naggin’ bout my goons
> ...


 
Since when does homo economicus  - bedrock of neoliberal economic assumptions -  require anybody at all to "desire money not for what it can bring, but truly for itself"?


----------



## Favelado (Apr 20, 2013)

Bun said:


> Perhaps we could raise the money to have him killed on Kickstarter. It's how he would want to go, I'm sure.


 
He'd probably consider his death to be so post-modern that he'd think himself to be the one laughing at us. A delicious grin of irony spreading across his smug face as he's thrown atop the bonfire.

Only briefly though, as the screaming for mummy would commence soon after.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> we should monetize that. Kickbucketer, the crowd sourced funding for assassinations. I'll give a tenner to see the pope downed, who is with me?


 
Monbiot has already done that for arrests - _monetise your protest!_

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/25/bounty-blair-war-criminal-chilcot


----------



## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> LP recommended Debord's The Society of The Spectacle, Malcolm Harris uses it to analyse more gangster rap music, but fails:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
What a twat, that's just what the world needs - an upper-middle-class parasite applying a pseudo-Marxist analysis of pop music for the amusement of other upper-middle-class fellow travellers.


----------



## nino_savatte (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> LP recommended Debord's The Society of The Spectacle, Malcolm Harris uses it to analyse more gangster rap music, but fails:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Debord must be spinning in his grave.


> *The situationist bible;* a book that was passed from hand to grimy activist hand in 1968,


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What a twat, that's just what the world needs - an upper-middle-class parasite applying a pseudo-Marxist analysis of pop music for the amusement of other upper-middle-class fellow travellers.


 
He's an anarchist insurrectionist/Debordist so his conclusions are more off-beat.

Hence he's happy with rapper who use the word f--got 231 times in one short album and bigs up Gucci Mane over other "conscious" rap musicians:



> This total absence of loyalty is the problem with Gucci’s “girl,” but it’s also what makes her so fantastic. As the universal vehicle of exchange she “ain’t got no limitations,” including him. The key line, as quoted in the title, “She’ll go to war with anybody/She don’t give a fuck” brings out both sides of this dilemma. He raps it with admiration, but “anybody” is fully inclusive. “Makin’ Love to The Money” has a tragic structure: Gucci has a girl he loves, but she’s always looking to leave and he knows he won’t be able to hang on. It’s in a long musical tradition, less “Make It Rain,” more “Mustang Sally.” But mixed with the money obsession that can’t help but displace any other object of erotic drive, the two forms produce a strangely beautiful mutant hybrid child. While some “conscious” rappers rail against the profit motive, it’s Gucci Mane who expresses the loneliness, fear, and cruelty that come with avarice.


 
_beautiful mutant hybrid child_:




> She bought me AKs call it Desert Eagles
> Cocaine hammer pills meth its stupid regal
> I took her from her ex yea he kinda cheap
> The very day she left we started beefin'
> ...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

Firky said:


> Does he really have to ask?


 
Ha!


----------



## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> He's an anarchist insurrectionist/Debordist so his conclusions are more off-beat.
> 
> Hence he's happy with rapper who use the word f--got 231 times in one short album and bigs up Gucci Mane over other "conscious" rap musicians:
> 
> ...


 
He's one of those privilege theory types that think that homophobia isn't a big deal when it's coming from people who aren't white, isn't he?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> He's one of those privilege theory types that think that homophobia isn't a big deal when it's coming from people who aren't white, isn't he?


 
Is he? Goodness knows. 

Does an analysis of white millionare pop star Ke$ha here 




> Ke$ha goes through a comparatively lengthy examination of her preparation (pedicures on her toes, trying on her clothes, boys on phones, etc.) for the party that she predicts will not end. The first phrase of the chorus (“Don’t stop”) is then a surprise non-sensical injunction. How can we stop that which has yet to start? The titular refrain “tik tok” is an unceasing reminder of finitude even though “the party don’t stop,” the second time the command not to stop appears in a 29-word chorus.
> The most revealing lyrical juxtaposition may be the song’s most famous: “The party don’t start ’til I walk in/Don’t stop…” Upon entering a party for which she has been preparing until this point, a party that does not exist as such until her appearance, Ke$ha’s first command is not to stop what has only begun through this order which is her commencing entrance. The performative utterance that brings the Party Unto Death into being also announces its end. So although she insists on the party’s infinite duration – or commands it – Ke$ha does so through constant reference to its finitude (e.g. “Now, now, we go until they kick us out, out/Or the police shut us down, down.”) Her “looking away from” is really a look “toward the end.” The clock’s ”tik tok” is the sound of a slow inevitable dying that constitutes the Party Unto Death since its beginning.


 
Ke$ha's favourite item is glitter:




> To mark the anniversary of the war in Iraq, for instance, Washington area SDS members held a “Funk the War” dance party at the offices of companies the organization sees as profiting from combat. “We dance, we throw *glitter*. It’s a really good time,” said Bob Hayes, a mechanical engineering student at Maryland, who along with Harris helped found the chapter there.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

Guilt well and truly established. I think the only question that remains is whether a united front with fascists could be justified if it offered us the chance to rid the world of such people.


----------



## emanymton (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> He's one of those privilege theory types that think that homophobia isn't a big deal when it's coming from people who aren't white, isn't he?


I think he just likes porn and shit music and knows people who like porn and shit music and had figured it he can make money by spewing a radical and intellectual sounding rationalization for it.


----------



## emanymton (Apr 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Guilt well and truly established. I think the only question that remains is whether a united front with fascists could be justified if it offered us the chance to rid the world of such people.


The true way is to pitch them in a Battle Royale against each other while we sit back with popcorn, and then mop up any left over.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Guilt well and truly established. I think the only question that remains is whether a united front with fascists could be justified if it offered us the chance to rid the world of such people.


 

never!


----------



## where to (Apr 20, 2013)

He's just a wanker. Who cares.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> never!


 
Fucking liberal!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

where to said:


> He's just a wanker. Who cares.


 
Don't you dare try and blame this on wanking


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

to a degree I sympathise with 'who cares', but as I posted earlier this is the future of what will happen to protests etc here if writers/thinkers/movers and shakers aren't kept under control or anonymous/non-celebrity.
Harris was as one of the organisers behind the first Occupy Wall Street street demo and was part of the meetings to set up a Park and inform the media they were doing so in a careful pre-arranged fashion - although one freelancer for the New York Times lost/non-renewed her contract there because she was seen as non-objective too pro-OWS.
Of course lots of ordinary people also started just coming in aswell and it had something of a life of its own. He for various reasons became something of an important figure as a spokesperson/writer for the 'radical' pro-resist the police eviction by force wing.

To such an extent that he appeared on platforms about the future
See here with Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer and others:



Very keen on exciting demos and exciting actions, he fell out with Henwood and others when the email came out about the $5000 speaking fee.

But LP and the New Inquiry haven't broken with him and he and they are all part of this burgeoning write and publish left-wing critique on why OWS went wrong/ tackle the spectacle better next time/ use the enemy's spectacle against itself crowd on the East Coast.


----------



## cesare (Apr 20, 2013)

Most normal people don't relate to this shit and anti-shit anyways.


----------



## emanymton (Apr 20, 2013)

cesare said:


> Most normal people don't relate to this shit and anti-shit anyways.


I don't know I quite like a good shit with a nice satisfying splash as it hits the water.


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Is it me, or is Malcolm Harris unusually obsessed with porn.


 
It is a reoccurring theme with him, definitely. It is an unabashed too, he tries to make it a bit high-brow but it's mostly an excuse to talk about porn with no real consistency in his opinions. Read a few of his articles now and none of them seem good, I can't see why he is so highly regarded by people. Laurie Penny is a lying gobshite but she does have her moments, this guy is diabolical.

Alarm bells ringing.


----------



## cesare (Apr 20, 2013)

emanymton said:


> I don't know I quite like a good shit with a nice satisfying splash as it hits the water.


It's good entertainment  But I fucking defy anyone to take it to the jobcentre for light relief.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I'm still getting over this cunt being against the Chicago teachers' labour rights because he thinks that schools are a prison. I kind of want him to die.


 

He has/had an odd thing about education - he was a student leader of SDS, narrowly lost the election to be UMD's student union president by 88 votes in favour of wider and better university education no cuts etc.

But here I don't think there is any irony - I think he really does mean forget/screw the curriculum at secondary level - the alienated resisters will rise up all the better: 

"The way American History is taught, at least as it was taught in an Advanced Placement class with a strong teacher in a liberal public school five years ago, involves acknowledging a bunch of the pain and suffering on which this country was founded and thrived, but to frame it as somewhat inevitable, as part of the inevitable march of history. Teachers describe resistance movements as historical curiosities rather than real alternatives. MLK gets his shout-out, but if Malcolm X gets a paragraph then it’s about his violence and relation to the Nation of Islam.  The other night I was watching Reds and during a scene about the Palmer Raids, I remembered that I’d learned about those in school. I had never made an emotional connection between an organized program of repression perpetrated by the U.S. government and that thing I had to remember for that midterm in high school. Teaching kids about the dark parts of American history in a classroom is the best way to make sure they don’t care about them. My dream now is students in El Paso forming an underground Enlightenment reading group, passing around dog-eared copies of Diderot and Locke. Not that likely, but maybe slightly more than yesterday. I don’t know, maybe it will piss off some liberal teacher enough for her to pull out the People’s History copy left on her shelf from college and lend it to a curious student. In the mean time, good riddance to the social contract and empiricism.

What this news item does end up doing is get a lot of liberals to start defending Thomas fucking Jefferson and his bullshit Enlightenment values. Instead, _I’ll be working with my new allies on the right at heightening the contradictions_ and _alienating students past the breaking point_. See, at first I thought the 10 conservative BoE members were just nutball ideologues, but then I read this sentence in the Times story, “Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” Get rid of any mention of tolerant America’s pluralistic founding and then teach the kids about Huey and Bobby? Well done comrades, well done."

Hence to equate screws with teachers works for him, because once teachers' salaries get cut via the right they'll be even more annoying/harsh to students, upping the alienation anti.


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

Going to leave this one here:

“If you can’t turn it into money, it isn’t cultural capital.” — Malcolm Harris


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/176930854214451200

Malcolm Harris: If you can't turn it into money, it's not cultural capital.


----------



## cesare (Apr 20, 2013)

Google skillz ahoy


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/176930854214451200
> 
> Malcolm Harris: If you can't turn it into money, it's not cultural capital.


Damn firky, are our intenal organs communicating again?


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Damn firky, are our intenal organs communicating again?


 
Starting to get spooky now 

*looks over shoulder*


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

The New Inquiry are hosting an event tonight at the gallery where Molly Crabapple's Shell Game is being exhibited. Helena's going. And if the facebook event listing isn't made private, we can all go


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

Malcolm Harris on a news article about one of the Boston bombers:


> In the space of like a couple hundred words this story quotes the aunt saying he both was and wasn't a devout Muslim


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/176930854214451200
> 
> Malcolm Harris: If you can't turn it into money, it's not cultural capital.


 
How does that gel with his column for the UMD paper Adults: Ruining society for the rest of us




> Frequent readers might think I'm referring to the marginal Republican party or the larger capitalist bourgeoisie. I'm not. Nor am I talking about Democrats, academics, immigrants or the media. I'm talking about the group that is responsible for the state of the world that my fellow students and I will inherit: adults.
> Sure, President George W. Bush did a lot of damage himself, but he was aided and abetted by the whole country's adult population. Not only did they not rise up and overthrow the government after the second war of choice the president committed our soldiers to, but they re-elected him because the other guy seemed a little too French. A lot of adults didn't vote for Bush, but they've shown themselves to be completely unreasonable in their reactions. Revolutions, or at least riots, have been justified by far less.



all adults arae culpable for the Bush era - and the conclusion is:



> Ironically, we may have to look to the past for the answer to our problem. First appearing in 1968's Wild in the Streets — a film about a teen rock star who gets the voting age reduced to 15, doses Washington's water with LSD and gets elected president — one of the 1960's most enduring and useful clichés offers us a guideline we could now use again: "Don't trust anyone over 30."


 
The more I see, the more I think he is a complete whack - like needing psychological help - unless it is all irony in which case I don't want to read anything ever again.
Can you Firky invite him to discuss some issues on this thread - I think he might be impressed that limey twats want him to clarify his statements about Gucci Mane.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 20, 2013)

We should appeal to his vanity. We can reference Odd Future collective members (e.g. Mellowhype) and combine them with Worker's Girder style pseudo-Marxist statements. This will pique both the hipster twat and second-rate intellectual in him.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> How does that gel with his column for the UMD paper Adults: Ruining society for the rest of us
> 
> 
> 
> ...


It would be good if he came over to discuss things 

Wait, isn't LP in New York at the moment? ETA: Yes, she is. Wonder if she'll go to this event at the gallery?


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi I will give it a go, sure. Molly was one step ahead of me when I tried to get her to answer some questions on here. I think she already saw the thread - begrudgingly credit to her she did answer my query on twitter without dismissing me as a right wing troll. I don't like to use the word 'nutter' to describe people with MH problems but he does come across as one!


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

Favelado said:


> We should appeal to his vanity. We can reference Odd Future collective members (e.g. Mellowhype)


 
Good idea there's a MellowHype song called - 'F*** The Police' - fans of the New Inquiry want you to do a rap music special on its relationship to insurrectionary anarchism.

Or else I suggest going the J Ed route and asking him for his thoughts on Chief 'I don't like' Keef and his sexist/misogynistic content.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

Firky said:


> sihhi I will give it a go, sure. Molly was one step ahead of me when I tried to get her to answer some questions on here. I think she already saw the thread - begrudgingly credit to her she did answer my query on twitter without dismissing me as a right wing troll. I don't like to use the word 'nutter' to describe people with MH problems but he does come across as one!


 
Edit: I'm not reading properly, give it a go


----------



## cesare (Apr 20, 2013)

.


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

My tact was going to be to simply to ask him if him if he'd like to contribute some of his opinions to an anarchist forum; there's a lot of people interested in his work.


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

Something was said


----------



## J Ed (Apr 20, 2013)

I don't think he would contribute to u75 unless he was paid tbh, then again Molly did an IAMA on reddit for free...


----------



## cesare (Apr 20, 2013)

Firky said:


> My tact was going to be to simply to ask him if him if he'd like to contribute some of his opinions to an anarchist forum; there's a lot of people interested in his work.


This isn't an anarchist forum.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 20, 2013)

cesare said:


> This isn't an anarchist forum.


Yeah but it was started by one of the leading anarchists of the nineties


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

Firky said:


> *My tact* was going to be to simply to ask him if him if he'd like to contribute some of his opinions to an anarchist forum; there's a lot of people interested in his work.


 
first time for everything etc


----------



## cesare (Apr 20, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Yeah but it was started by one of the leading anarchists of the nineties


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

cesare said:


> This isn't an anarchist forum.


 

Who cares, so long as he can be lured here for a shoeing its all good


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 20, 2013)

The last really satisfying incidence of complete shoeage was Onarchy who went and cried into his own blog about what cunts we all are

halcyon days


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> The last really satisfying incidence of complete shoeage was Onarchy who went and cried into his own blog about what cunts we all are
> 
> halcyon days


Is his blog still up?


----------



## Firky (Apr 20, 2013)

cesare said:


> This isn't an anarchist forum.


 
I know that, it is the lure to get him here.




DotCommunist said:


> Who cares, so long as he can be lured here for a shoeing its all good


 

Snap!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> The last really satisfying incidence of complete shoeage was Onarchy who went and cried into his own blog about what cunts we all are
> 
> halcyon days


who and where?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 20, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Yeah but it was started by one of the leading anarchists of the nineties


 






Along with Fergo getting teaed at the Bookfair, that's made my day


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> The last really satisfying incidence of complete shoeage was Onarchy who went and cried into his own blog about what cunts we all are
> 
> halcyon days


 
Urban at its best that thread.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> who and where?


 
Called himself Onarchy - I think his name was Onar Am or something like that, a Norwegian librarian blogger who wanted to set up floating utopias.

This is the thread: The neoliberal vision of the future

Onarchy starts posting here


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Called himself Onarchy - I think his name was Onar Am or something like that, a Norwegian librarian blogger who wanted to set up floating utopias.
> 
> This is the thread: The neoliberal vision of the future
> 
> Onarchy starts posting here


 
He's still attacking Dawkins from the atheist free market right 

http://onarki.no/blogg/2013/04/the-selfish-gene-myth/


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> He's still attacking Dawkins from the atheist free market right
> 
> http://onarki.no/blogg/2013/04/the-selfish-gene-myth/


 
That's utterly fruitbat - just flatly asserts that Darwin said and thought all kinds of things that he certainly didn't say and almost certainly didn't think. Then again, should we really be surprised?

Look at the comments though - it appears that plenty of people are taken in by it. But it also makes me wonder, considering the number of posters making numerous very lengthy comments, do these sorts spend their entire lives on the net talking about impossiblist politics or something?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Apr 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> do these sorts spend their entire lives on the net talking about impossiblist politics or something?


 
oh the irony!


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

I am not bloody dealing with him I do want Malcolm here - he's a modern American youth and I don't know any such people. Question 1: Malcolm how could you not know a speaking agency was charging $5000 for a talk? 2. Why your focus on Kesha?




> And Ke$ha says “I am capital. Capital is a liar” ... You see this play out in the tastes on the radical left: The last explicitly anarchist party I went to promised “plenty of Ke$ha” on the Facebook invite without a bit of irony. Of course there’s also a kind of aphasia though, an inability for these songs to say what they’re about. Instead we have evocations of desires, specifically the bringing about of chaos, the control necessary to destroy control, running through the street, etc.


 
3. What does this mean? - since when has subversion of images or attacks on billboards been about drawing circled As?



> We as anticapitalists have to trouble the relationship established during the counterglobalization movement between cultural products and left resistance. What good is culture jamming when the giant subway ads already read “RAGE” with a circled A? I think there’s an answer, and it’s no longer about injecting new stuff or emphasizing implicit consequences. It’s about revealing and contextualizing what’s already very much there.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 20, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> oh the irony!


 
Opened myself up for that one! 

Seriously though, just have a look at the number and length of comments on there - incredible.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 20, 2013)

_"it would be pretty crazy if people ripped those ads off the wall and showed up to the march with them on sticks. Reappropriate the reappropriated!"_

No, you'd just be a series of walking advertisement for that particular brand - a funny one first time round maybe but then pretty boring.

_"I would love to go on a march with Rihanna at my back reminding me “there’s only one thing on my mind/ who’s gonna run this town tonight.” Keeps you focused. If someone took these insurrectionary fragments and stitched them together into a dance megamix, we’d have a genuinely dangerous piece of music. Could even the most innocent of bystanders resist the pure form when they’ve been fed the adulterants for so long?"_

My guess is none of the fans of the originals would like your remix and no bystander pedestrian would simply join your march as a result.

_No wonder we don’t trust ourselves with mortgages, spouses, children, or state power: The crisis generation knows that it’s not stable. We’re “dynamite” “about to blow.”_

Why are you entrusted with a magazine?


----------



## chilango (Apr 20, 2013)

God. He sounds awful.

3rd or 4th hand post Situ pretensions utterly absent of any awareness.

Someone bring him here.


----------



## Greebo (Apr 20, 2013)

Favelado said:


> One reference to hedge-porn and then one to "fast-forwarding" in the same thread. <snip>Wanna come round mine and play Manic Miner?


Only if you go down on me while we wait for the game to load at snail's pace. 


SpineyNorman said:


> Look at him. Just look at him. The smug cunt. If that's not a face that's begging to be slapped I don't know what is


I try not to judge by appearances, but sometimes it's extremely difficult not to.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 21, 2013)

_As retweeted 1 March 2013 "Do today's teens even know that smashing capitalism is an option?"_ 

This kind of question will clearly not raise any teenagers' hackles - instead it will bring them onto your side in their droves

What they should do is read magazines like the New Inquiry - which will explain that there being no options means that smashing capitalism is an option.

_During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a futile act, because those who might hear you have already been persuaded to commit to a “biopolitical paradigm of distraction” that immerses them in “affective pursuits and fantasies of economic advancement.” Everyone is busy looking for or fantasizing about situations, for self-serving alternatives. ... __This may put you in an uncomfortable situation — but what other choice do you have? Whether you fag on at flesh, forge ahead avowedly single, or labor through a relationship, you end up powering the standardized, homologated and commodified mechanisms that oppress you. But if Guy Debord and his merry band had anything to teach the world, it is always to welcome impending situations, particularly those whose kairos may afford opportunity to rediscover the singular pleasures of the body in a way that doesn’t put money in someone else’s pocket._


----------



## weepiper (Apr 21, 2013)

What the fuck is this primped up little fop doing to smash capitalism anyway?


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 21, 2013)

weepiper said:


> What the fuck is this primped up little fop doing to smash capitalism anyway?


Nothing as far as I can see.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 21, 2013)

weepiper said:


> What the fuck is this primped up little fop doing to smash capitalism anyway?


 
When he was a leftist SDS leader at his university he was pushing the drive for dressing up in his column Halloween Take your chance break the rules, does that count?

_Always wondered what it feels like to wear a skirt? Go for it! Kind of like the idea of being dressed fully in leather? No problem! Want to act like your costume? Why not? It's Halloween! The only way you can really attract angry stares is not dressing up at all._
_Halloween is our annual safety valve. Once a year, we have the opportunity to blow off all the steam that builds up in 364 days of conformist clothing and behavior. Halloween reveals that, when we throw off preconceived notions of appropriate dress and behavior, everyone has more fun. Also, there's candy. And yet the real world seems to be colliding with my treasured day of apparel anarchy._
_..._
_Almost everyone was comfortably past puberty, and so Halloween became about what everything becomes about in high school: sex. Don't get me wrong: As a 15-year-old, having your school full of sexy nurses or sexy cowgirls or sexy unicorns (okay, not as many unicorns as I would have liked) seemed like a daydream. But as the years went on, before I noticed, I had stopped dressing up. Maybe it was the public school system killing my imagination, or maybe I was just distracted wondering how girls planned to skirt the dress code and still come to school as dominatrices, but I couldn't come up with a good costume anymore._


----------



## J Ed (Apr 21, 2013)

He talks a lot about people under 18 in sexual situations.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> let me get this right, this fuckstick spent nearl 600 pounds of real money so as to show a dirty film to a large audience
> 
> lol at 'only half an hour was aired' thats about the longest any porn film ever gets watched for, not counting fast forwarding etc.


 
was done as part of a struggle for free speech (isn't it always like this when in public?)




> Imagine watching a pornographic movie. Now, imagine watching one surrounded by 200 of your peers, five university administrators and dozens of media members - all in the name of free speech.
> Despite not endorsing the screening of the triple-X film, Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge, university administrators still attended the Student Power Party's screening of the first 30 minutes of the movie last night in Susquehanna Hall. Administrators allowed the screening to occur despite threats by state senators that they would cut funding for the university.
> As administrators sat in the back row watching the hardcore porn unfold, students cheered, groaned and giggled at the graphic scenes in the short portion of the 138-minute film. Though only a fraction of the film, the segment was still explicit and included two different sets of threesomes - one with "Devil Stick Willy" and two blondes in corsets.


 
Clearly, free speech can't be discussed without actually playing the film.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Wonder what mark he got for that? And why journal papers are something he ignored except for one forthcoming reference?


 
He got honours - that's the highest any teacher can award at university. He is quite clearly very clever - which makes his whole teachersrison guards analogy and full alienation from school:route to collective-working-class-power  approach so weird.

This is his tumblr:

http://destructural.tumblr.com/post/3613556211/fuck-they-schools-veeurbanite-lmao-haha possibly NSFW

There's a picture there of someone probably disturbed, probably being bullied (upside down crosses are part of the US Satanic Church's symbols) but Malcolm sees it as "fuck they schools" - unless I'm reading it all wrong.

The good news Malcolm is in favour of abandoning all feelings of awkwardness:



> Office labor and marriage are not necessary for human beings, and neither are the feelings they engender. Awkwardness may offer “its own kind of grace,” as work did in previous centuries, but when I think of other potential moods of togetherness — solidarity, adventure, eros, and if we’re lucky, even agape — it becomes an intolerable dispossession. Arise, then, comrades, you have nothing to lose but your awkwardness!


 
Hence his entry on this thread will allow him an opportunity to effect his vision in reality. Malcolm will not squirm but see entering this thread as an _adventure_ and persuade the many doubters - as yet _no one_ has said youse lot've gone too far, leave the poor lad alone. 

IMO after reading his outpourings, he is equal with Sunny Hundal in vileness.


----------



## redsquirrel (Apr 21, 2013)

cesare said:


> Most normal people don't relate to this shit and anti-shit anyways.


No but surely fuckwits like this turn off any normal people from getting involved in projects. I mean I think Occupy was destined to be a utter waste of time but amount of idiots, egomaniacs, conspiraloons etc that infected it probably either turned some decent people off entirely or sent them down political dead ends.


----------



## treelover (Apr 21, 2013)

> I mean I think Occupy was destined to be a utter waste of time but amount of idiots, egomaniacs, conspiraloons etc that infected it probably either turned some decent people off entirely or sent them down political dead ends


 

Freemen conference in Manchester this weekend is a sell out


----------



## J Ed (Apr 21, 2013)

treelover said:


> Freemen conference in Manchester this weekend is a sell out


 
Jesus 

Got any links/info on that?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 21, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Subsidise videos and pics of racist attacks/graffiti and help prevent racism.
> 
> Haven't really searched him but the bit in his piece about exhibitionism and circumstantial evidence that internet forms have helped reduce actual exhibitionism sort of goes with that.


 
Malcolm appears to be reasonably successful at monetising his gitness, doesn't he?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 21, 2013)

Firky said:


> He likes talking about porn and tumblr. Not really looking too deeply into it all but C&Ping stuff as I come across it:


 
So basically Malcolm like to play the fleshy piccolo to gonzo-ish "real-life couples" porn.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 21, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Comments from someone sympathetic to Occupy:
> 
> http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=33338.0
> 
> Malcolm Harris. Christ, What An Asshole.


 
I find the words "militant vegan trustafarian anarchist Borg" strangely moving and beautiful, and an excellent description of Harris's "lifestyler" milieu.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> So basically Malcolm like to play the fleshy piccolo to gonzo-ish "real-life couples" porn.


 

Bet he has all the back issues_ Readers Wives_


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> monetize your rebellion maaan


 
Worst thing is these cunts think they've invented this shit.
Back when The Clash wrote about it 35+ years ago, the line "They got Burton suits, ha, you think it's funny. Turning rebellion into money" was apt. Now, you'd have to delete "Burton suits" and paste in "Savile Row", though.


----------



## treelover (Apr 21, 2013)

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=33338.0

That site appears to be the soul brother/sister of urban75, the p/p bit anyway..


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 21, 2013)

looks like an illuminatus!
fan board?


----------



## Nice one (Apr 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Worst thing is these cunts think they've invented this shit.
> Back when The Clash wrote about it 35+ years ago, the line "They got Burton suits, ha, you think it's funny. Turning rebellion into money" was apt. Now, you'd have to delete "Burton suits" and paste in "Savile Row", though.


 
to be fair though strummer was a posh lad who went to public school singing about weller who was a working class kid from woking. So according to the Fishponds Library Classometer that makes strummer the laurie penny of punk. Or sumfink.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> So a highly educated m/c geezer thinks that classrooms are a prison.


 
Perhaps he realises that those currently in the classroom will be the ones sounding his death-knell in a few years, when they drag him screaming from his bed to do his compulsory work allocation at the Peoples' Salt Excavation Project in New Jersey.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 21, 2013)

Firky said:


> Who's Helena Fitzgerald, I notice he's (Malcolm Harris) often photographed with her, drops her name etc. ?
> 
> Body language suggests they know each other very well.
> 
> (stripy toff blazer FTW)


 
Christ, it's a whole fucking hallfull of smug! Look at those facial expressions, let alone the "entitled" body language many of them are giving off!
Good spot on Harris's body language, although the woman's arm is almost uncomfortably drawn back, so perhaps she's not quite as fond of Malcolm, as Malcolm (with his open, angled legs) is of her?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 21, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> what's he doing quoting the anarcho-nonce hakim bey?


 
Repatriating the toss of another hipster tossrag?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 21, 2013)

Firky said:


> It is a reoccurring theme with him, definitely. It is an unabashed too, he tries to make it a bit high-brow but it's mostly an excuse to talk about porn with no real consistency in his opinions. Read a few of his articles now and none of them seem good, I can't see why he is so highly regarded by people. Laurie Penny is a lying gobshite but she does have her moments, this guy is diabolical.
> 
> Alarm bells ringing.


 
"Unabashed". Fnarr!!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 21, 2013)

Firky said:


> Going to leave this one here:
> 
> “If you can’t turn it into money, it isn’t cultural capital.” — Malcolm Harris


 
If Bourdieu were still alive, he'd open Harris's head up like an over-ripe melon for such a crass statement.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 21, 2013)

J Ed said:


> He talks a lot about people under 18 in sexual situations.


 
He does, doesn't he?


----------



## _angel_ (Apr 21, 2013)

Firky said:


> Who's Helena Fitzgerald, I notice he's (Malcolm Harris) often photographed with her, drops her name etc. ?
> 
> Body language suggests they know each other very well.
> 
> (stripy toff blazer FTW)


Oh God!


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 21, 2013)

Every time I see that picture I want to punch him in the fucking face, really hard 

No doubt this will reported back to him by the party faithful as misandrist hate speech.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 21, 2013)

Nice one said:


> to be fair though strummer was a posh lad who went to public school singing about weller who was a working class kid from woking. So according to the Fishponds Library Classometer that makes strummer the laurie penny of punk. Or sumfink.


 
Strange how you elided Mick Jones from consideration. Couldn't have been because it'd ruin your thesis, could it?


----------



## Favelado (Apr 21, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> Oh God!


 
Ripe for a caption.

"SHITUATIONIST"

or

"THE HACIENDA MUST BE GILT"

You lot can do better I'm sure.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 21, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> Oh God!





equationgirl said:


> Every time I see that picture I want to punch him in the fucking face, really hard
> 
> No doubt this will reported back to him by the party faithful as misandrist hate speech.


 
You have spotted Death Himself sitting second from the right in the second row, right?

He is, hopefully, taking notes on who will fall next to the scythe. . .


----------



## agricola (Apr 21, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> Oh God!


 
Maybe its just me but for some reason that picture just makes me think of _White Mischief_.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 21, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> You have spotted Death Himself sitting second from the right in the second row, right?
> 
> He is, hopefully, taking notes on who will fall next to the scythe. . .


 
Looks more like Eric Sykes, to me, but there's nothing to say Death can't look like Eric Sykes, is there?


----------



## Favelado (Apr 21, 2013)

Someone let a Buggles tribute act in as well.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 21, 2013)

cesare said:


> Most normal people don't relate to this shit and anti-shit anyways.


 
It's because they're not part of the shitterati.


----------



## Nice one (Apr 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Strange how you elided Mick Jones from consideration. Couldn't have been because it'd ruin your thesis, could it?


 
mick didn't sing the words, but if you want to tidy it up - close pals with ex-public school kids from posh backgrounds - the owen jones of punk


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 21, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> what's he doing quoting the anarcho-nonce hakim bey?


 
nonces are ok if they're cool, didn't you get the memo?


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 21, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> nonces are ok if they're cool, didn't you get the memo?


I think Savile got it.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 21, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> nonces are ok if they're cool, didn't you get the memo?


 
John Peel. That's the one that stings. Home truths.


----------



## love detective (Apr 21, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> You have spotted Death Himself sitting second from the right in the second row, right?
> 
> He is, hopefully, taking notes on who will fall next to the scythe. . .


 
Looks like he's got his eyes fixed on 'young' revol68 at the other end of the couch for his next victim


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 21, 2013)

yeah, it took me some time in my twenties to accept that one.  not john peel, i said, excuses i came up with.  but it's bollocks.  he was a nonce.  a nonce who introduced me to some good music and played some good shows but a nonce.  so he was for the camps, just like hakim and alan and that fucking shitbird harris, who's continued existance proves that there is no natural justice.  after all, in a sane world he'd have been kicked to death in the town centre by enraged citizens.  and still might be if he comes to the uk.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 21, 2013)

Nice one said:


> mick didn't sing the words, but if you want to tidy it up - close pals with ex-public school kids from posh backgrounds - the owen jones of punk


 

He did on 'Should I stay or Should I go?'


----------



## Nice one (Apr 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> He did on 'Should I stay or Should I go?'


 
he certainly had a go 

But it was strummer who gave us the sardonic "huh" as he sang the words about turning rebellion into money. Strummer who turned his cutural capital - his posh school, his privileged education, his families wealth and social status into punk rock rebellion. If laurie penny is deserving of hostility for her obvious class privileges then why not all the others?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 21, 2013)

Nice one said:


> he certainly had a go
> 
> But it was strummer who gave us the sardonic "huh" as he sang the words about turning rebellion into money. Strummer who turned his cutural capital - his posh school, his privileged education, his families wealth and social status into punk rock rebellion. If laurie penny is deserving of hostility for her obvious class privileges then why not all the others?


 

Dying of hep c and making an overt celebration of punks debt to reggae means he is beyond reproach and I will chinese burn the fuck out of anyone who says different


----------



## flypanam (Apr 21, 2013)

I've been struggling to remember who Malcy Harris reminds me of.

Then it dawned on me it's Artie Ziff from The Simpsons.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 21, 2013)

Nice one said:


> If laurie penny is deserving of hostility for her obvious class privileges then why not all the others?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 21, 2013)

deep.


----------



## Libertad (Apr 21, 2013)

Favelado said:


> John Peel. That's the one that stings. Home truths.


 
Very good.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Dying of hep c and making an overt celebration of punks debt to reggae means he is beyond reproach and I will chinese burn the fuck out of anyone who says different


Undiagnosed heart condition - probably brought on my all the port and pheasant he consumed.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 21, 2013)

I would have said that the principle difference lies in the fact that the clash were good. This lot are shit.

Good is always better than shit.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 21, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> deep.


 
Nice one asked a question.  I answered it.


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 21, 2013)

Marvellous poetry from Anna Chen, pretty much the nearest I have seen to The Waste Land



> Margaret Thatcher Died at the Ritz
> _by Anna Chen 8th April 2013_
> Margaret Thatcher died at the Ritz.
> It fits.
> ...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 21, 2013)

Profound


----------



## J Ed (Apr 21, 2013)

Better than Laurie's Saudade...


----------



## Favelado (Apr 21, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Better than Laurie's Saudade...


 
She never said that to be fair. It was just me mocking.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 21, 2013)

Favelado said:


> She never said that to be fair. It was just me mocking.


 
It's the title of her poem!

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...EwAA#v=onepage&q=laurie penny saudade&f=false


----------



## Favelado (Apr 21, 2013)

J Ed said:


> It's the title of her poem!
> 
> http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=EXU-vlWBHgIC&pg=PA27-IA2&lpg=PA27-IA2&dq=laurie penny saudade&source=bl&ots=eOk5q1irR3&sig=AVwOzbcBAWXEk4kCd59Ejz1tGuI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6V10UZyCBejS0QWmyoHQAQ&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=laurie penny saudade&f=false


 
That's an extraordinary coincidence then. I chose it as a word I knew to take the piss out of her with and she's actually used it in a poem?

Wow, how weird.


----------



## Nice one (Apr 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I would have said that the principle difference lies in the fact that the clash were good. This lot are shit.
> 
> Good is always better than shit.


 
goes with out saying good is always better than shit. I love strummer, i love the clash but still doesn't change the fact strummer and laurie penny share the same class background, the same privilege.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 22, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Marvellous poetry from Anna Chen, pretty much the nearest I have seen to The Waste Land


 
That would probably work well as a performance piece. And it's a damn sight better than Amanda Palmer's A Poem for Dzokhar, which is worthy of the great Rik The People's Poet himself:

http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/77087877.html

I used to be quite keen on Amanda P. What was I thinking?


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 22, 2013)

I think vandalism is poetic.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 22, 2013)

Is it just me, or does stuff like this (on intersectionality) make anyone else despair? http://kotaku.com/5910857/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is


----------



## articul8 (Apr 22, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Marvellous poetry from Anna Chen, pretty much the nearest I have seen to The Waste Land


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 22, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> That would probably work well as a performance piece. And it's a damn sight better than Amanda Palmer's A Poem for Dzokhar, which is worthy of the great Rik The People's Poet himself:
> 
> http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/77087877.html
> 
> I used to be quite keen on Amanda P. What was I thinking?


 


> *Lines on the Death of Chairman Mao*
> 
> So.
> Farewell then
> ...


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 22, 2013)

The boys are on the wagon,
The girls are on the shelf.
Their common problem being,
That they aren't someone else.


----------



## fractionMan (Apr 22, 2013)

That photo has made me a little bit sick


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 22, 2013)

The anarchists are on the ice
Shot by Lenin which wasn’t nice
In the freezing Russian cold
There is a story which must be told
About Kronstadt

In the Russian snow the sailors said to Lenin go
But Trotsky was not afraid
A revolution he had made
So if you are down and you feel sad
You won’t feel as down or bad
As the anarchists did at Kronstadt

It must be said
There were some dead
And that isn’t very pleasant
But Russia’s better Red
Than run by Whites and peasants


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 22, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> The boys are on the wagon,
> The girls are on the shelf.
> Their common problem being,
> That they aren't someone else.


 
That has to be one of my favourites. Brilliant production from Martin Hannet as well.


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 22, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> The anarchists are on the ice
> Shot by Lenin which wasn’t nice
> In the freezing Russian cold
> There is a story which must be told
> ...


 
Very early Girls Aloud Demo  B side. Very rare


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 22, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Is it just me, or does stuff like this (on intersectionality) make anyone else despair? http://kotaku.com/5910857/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is


 
A little bit - If only because material privilige, ie money and class, is (quite deliberately) totally ignored and how it presents all oppression as something which takes place exclusively within a framework of individuals and their identities. It makes you wonder what difficulty "being poor regardless of identity" would be in this analogy. Thatcher's children strike again - radicalism in the era of hegenomic neoliberal individualism. The priviliges and power relationships involved in fulfilling basic human needs, ie food water shelter, don't seem to count for very much. I also think the way in which (some, but not all) people present arguments about priviliges and so on are just spouting banal truisms wrapped up in intersectional jargon and buzzwords. Like that article, you'll get no argument from me about the advantages being straight white hetero male brings, and certainly making sure those advantages are known by straight white men is useful, if a bit tiresome for men like me. But it's hardly a new radical insight, is it? I could've told you that when I was 14 and my favourite TV show was Robot Wars.

However even if it does annoy people I think it's necessary to keep people on their toes, even if it's tiresome at times, and if it can lead to people behaving more considerately and showing a bit of self-awareness it'll be worth it. I have my doubts about how effective that is going to be as a means by which to challenge oppression which is de-personalised and institutional in nature. My guess is privilige checking will be about as effective at fighting patriachy/kyriachy as political correctness has been in fighting racism. 

I think I'd worked out a lot of things they're discussing on here of my own volition by the time I was in my late teens. For instance, talking shit. I'm good at it - world class bullshit artist me. Natural born. I've talked shit and bored everyone to death at meetings before. It took me a few years to develop a sense of self-awareness and to rein myself, but I did (more or less) in the end. The key thing to remember is the difference is I'd get my bullshit indulged in a way non-white, non-male participants would not. It's quite hard to swallow that your perpetuating something quite nasty when you're, in all sincerity, just being young and a bit naive, not consciously perpetuating privilige, but when explained in a non-condescending way it actually makes sense. The danger is it won't be explained in a non-condescending way, that it'll start with an "Um... actually" and probably have "problematic" instead of problem and a load of words you're not sure what they mean but they sure as hell make you feel stupid. I don't think doing that will help deal with privilige any more than standing in front of someone who uses politically incorrect language and shouting "HITLER!" whilst pointing in their faces will deal with racism.

I don't think that sort of deep hostility to any vaguely materialist concept of oppression is shared by everyone who's into smashing the Kyriachy, certainly there is no basis for it in theory or any good reason I can see why it's inconsistent with a materialist approach to fighting oppression, I suppose it's a matter of emphasis and presentation at stake here. If you're middle-class and have grown up in a bubble of financial security, never knowing what's like to go without or go hungry, I suppose it'd be quite easy to take for granted that privilige begins and ends with identity politics. There is a material basis for gender and racial oppression, capitalism relies on a gendered and racialised class system, but it's one that gets overlooked quite often within this tendency of thought, and amongst some there's actually a virulent hostility to any sort of class politics (not my comrades etc). Perhaps that's a reaction to decades of seeing feminist and anti-racist struggles negated and seen as distractions from the all-encompassing class struggle, perhaps it's because it draws in quite a lot of very middle-class people who are keen to play down the importance of material wealth as a source of privilige in favour of identities because of their own material privilges. There's a lot going on there.

That's quite a lot of writing for what was meant as a quick one-sentence comment so I might have to edit bits out if I've not given it the proper thought. I hate writing things things off the top of my head coz I always get the feeling I'm gonna come back 30 mins later and go "nope, you've got it all wrong, what an idiot"


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Apr 22, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Very early Girls Aloud Demo B side. Very rare


 
Which was itself a cover of the Chuckle Brothers' original as featured on their Sill Me Silly You EP.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 22, 2013)

yep, girls aloud developed and then extended the chuckle brothers' theoretical framework in ways they could not have imagined


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 22, 2013)

Thanks Delroy, that's a good post, and not too long. I'll come back to it later cos right now my daughter is insisting it's her turn for the PC


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 22, 2013)

_It is often said that ‘the germ of girls aloud was in chucklevision at its beginning’. Well, I have no objection. Only, chucklevision also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious Popstars: the Rivals series ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is that very sensible? _


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 22, 2013)

Nice one said:


> goes with out saying good is always better than shit. I love strummer, i love the clash but still doesn't change the fact strummer and laurie penny share the same class background, the same privilege.


 
But that's where the similarity ends. Enjoying privilege while pretending to be oppressed by those who haven't had the life chances she's had is pretty much all there is to consumer radicals like LP and co.

There was a lot more to Strummer and The Clash than that. And JS had humility, he didn't always just want to talk about himself. They can't help the background they come from - it's what they do with it that matters. It's a bit of a bizarre comparison if you ask me.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 22, 2013)

Indeed, where has LP came out and attacked private schooling? Nowhere as far as i can tell - we have though been treated to her swanning around them post-education doing talks for her fav teachers and supporting the exclusive networks of privilege that these places are designed to produce and maintain.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 22, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Indeed, where has LP came out and attacked private schooling? Nowhere as far as i can tell - we have though been treated to her swanning around them post-education doing talks for her fav teachers and supporting the exclusive networks of privilege that these places are designed to produce and maintain.


 
No, she said how _lucky_ she was to have gone to public school while commenting about the unfairness of the system, iirc.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 22, 2013)

If memory serves, Strummer described his public school years as "seven years in the joint".


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 22, 2013)

S☼I said:


> No, she said how _lucky_ she was to have gone to public school while commenting about the unfairness of the system, iirc.


 
Apols, here's the actual quote, although it says the same thing more-or-less 




			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> The idea that nobody can really be a socialist if they were lucky enough to go to a private school is wilful stupidity – and yet, and yet, and yet.


 

in here http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...on-but-im-still-not-on-your-team-7737823.html


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 22, 2013)

Note the aggressive forcing of the argument that "that nobody can really be a socialist if they were lucky enough to go to a private school" into the mouths of all who think it may tell us something about how privilege works in this country, something she clearly doesn't yet get given the multitude of sins covered up by her odious 'lucky'.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 22, 2013)

i'm currently working in a private college mostly for international students and i'm just finding the whole thing quite depressing to be honest. there are a fair few entitled little shits but there are some who plainly have extremely dysfunctional family setups despite (or probably because of) their parents massive wealth.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 22, 2013)

Penny/Orwell makes an interesting (if flattering, for her) comparison.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> There was a lot more to Strummer and The Clash than that. And JS had humility, he didn't always just want to talk about himself. They can't help the background they come from - it's what they do with it that matters. It's a bit of a bizarre comparison if you ask me.


 
The Clash weren't journalists, reporters and intellectuals - and definitely not part of today's set. There's lots that could be said about them and about 70s and 80s music and class.
What is the argument being made - does it apply to people like Michael Mansfield was at Highgate and part of its Cadet Force? Plenty of left-wing and pro bono left lawyers had/have rich mums and dads. 
Is all that's being done - just picking out the birth and childhood classes of declared left individuals? Is content/nuance of their adult output not examined at all on this thread?

Lenin's father was an OFSTED chief for the whole of Simbirsk province, attended the most privileged school in his area Simbirsk  Gimanzia where Feodor Kerensky, father of the pro-war liberal Kerensky, was headteacher. He managed to still get to Kazan University, if Lenin had been a muzhik peasant and was at peasant school he would a) never had anything more than primary school and b) even if he had by rare chance gone to secondary school, any relation to a narodnik assassin would mean he would have been barred from all universities. Hence ignore and deride every aspect of him.
Is this level Lenin should be discussed, with zero reference to people's adult behaviour?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 22, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Note the aggressive forcing of the argument that "that nobody can really be a socialist if they were lucky enough to go to a private school" into the mouths of all who think it may tell us something about how privilege works in this country, something she clearly doesn't yet get given the multitude of sins covered up by her odious 'lucky'.


 
It's a very odd paragraph:

"In the world of inherited wealth and privilege which people like Michael Gove exist to defend, money and class are more important than ideology, and everyone is divided up into warring tribes based roughly on how much money their parents have. It follows that whatever your professed values, if you come from a fortunate background, you must secretly wish to further the interests of the class in which you were born. The idea that nobody can really be a socialist if they were lucky enough to go to a private school is wilful stupidity – and yet, and yet, and yet."

I think LP thinks that Michael Gove is saying something which he isn't saying - Gove wants an atomised declassed society _not_ warring tribes - the bedrock of capitalist firms will mean the rich will stay rich in his free school academy choice and competition meritocratic ideal.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 22, 2013)

flypanam said:


> I've been struggling to remember who Malcy Harris reminds me of.
> 
> Then it dawned on me it's Artie Ziff from The Simpsons.


 
uncanny.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 22, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I think LP thinks that Michael Gove is saying something which he isn't saying - Gove wants an atomised declassed society _not_ warring tribes - the bedrock of capitalist firms will mean the rich will stay rich in his free school academy choice and competition meritocratic ideal.


 
Absolutely, and this is something that really annoys me, the idea that the tories and he faction of capital they represent want some sort of private army mad max society with a very clear outside policed by them to keep those who understand and act on their collective interests at bay - this type of stuff totally misunderstands what they are trying to do - they don't want even a hint of wider collective interests, expressed in whatever fashion. It's a very old-fashioned (and not in the good way) of trying to grasp their motivations and their initiatives - not helpful whoever it's coming from.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 22, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> That would probably work well as a performance piece. And it's a damn sight better than Amanda Palmer's A Poem for Dzokhar, which is worthy of the great Rik The People's Poet himself:
> 
> http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/77087877.html
> 
> I used to be quite keen on Amanda P. What was I thinking?


 
holy shit, what the fuck drugs is she doing these days?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 22, 2013)

The New Statesman where LP is an editor is all over the place on private education.

Hence this kind of lunacy 


Another columnist says "Private schools are becoming antisocial enclaves for the super rich" _becoming._

I don't think it's _too_ complicated.

For everyone: send your own and encourage others to (and defend) local non-selective schools and the comprehensive approach at all times.
For those of the wrong class: If you were 'born' with a family containing capitalist wealth/elements and went to private school - relinquish all the physical capital: extra land/shares/houses/money for the good of the movement - the 'social capital' will get dissipated in due course as a result, and based on your adult decision to aggressively defend comprehensive education.

What you _shouldn't_ do is :- after having retained your social capital to land a position at the Independent quote positively from your old live-in headmaster at your private boarding school as offering anything sensible to say about curriculum issues:





			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> "Studying the empire is important, because it is an international story, but we have to look at it from the perspective of those who were colonised as well as from the British perspective," said the historian and political biographer Anthony Seldon, who is also Master of Wellington College. "We live in an interconnected world, and one has to balance learning about British history with learning about other cultures."
> The ways in which schools and governments structure and promote stories about a country's past, the crimes they conceal and the truths they twist, have a lasting effect on young minds. It is not for nothing that the most fearsome dictators of the 20th century, from Hitler to Chairman Mao, altered their school history curriculums as a matter of national urgency.


 
Tip to LP (I think still reading this, win all the fame and money you want, but get it right) _Anthony Seldon _is the person whose distortions of history matter more in the struggle against Gove than Mao's and Hitler's. Hitler's syllabuses ended in 1945 and Mao's ended in 1972 and were comprehensively buried in 1980 with the rehabilitation of Confucius, the liberal Western missionaries and Sun Yat Sen.

What Anthony Seldon has been doing ever since _The Heath Government, 1970-1974: A Reappraisal _and probably a lot longer is offering Heathist Seldonism alongside revisionist Croslandite Labour as the decent sensible way forward hacked away by a tacit alliance of horrid ultras on both sides. Vicious re-writing and moulding the past for very dangerous purposes (supporting New Labour)


Do you agree Lo Siento. or am I getting it all wrong?

What Seldon is trying to do is rescue British capitalism - securing contracts for British firms in the subcontinent and Africa needs some nuance, subtlety and cultural awareness otherwise the PRC will continue to win.

That's what

_We live in an interconnected world, and one has to balance learning about British history with learning about other cultures._

this means


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 22, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> holy shit, what the fuck drugs is she doing these days?


 
Laxatives. "And then this house will become a shrine, and all the punks and skins and rastas will gather and say - how can Rik be dead when we still have his poetry?"


----------



## Frances Lengel (Apr 22, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> holy shit, what the fuck drugs is she doing these days?


 
You don't know what drugs she's doing.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 22, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> You don't know what drugs she's doing.


 
no, i don't.  you can tell because i asked what drugs she was doing/


----------



## Frances Lengel (Apr 22, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> no, i don't. you can tell because i asked what drugs she was doing/


 
Yeah but....oh, never mind.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 22, 2013)

oh wait, i get it now. very good 

short-term memory not what it was


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 22, 2013)

Pollution
All around
Sometimes up
And sometimes down
But always
Around

Pollution are you coming to my town
Or am I coming to yours
We're on two different buses pollution
But we're both using petrol!


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 22, 2013)

...


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 22, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Hence this kind of lunacy


 
I think you've missed the point.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Apr 22, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Do you agree Lo Siento. or am I getting it all wrong?
> 
> What Seldon is trying to do is rescue British capitalism - securing contracts for British firms in the subcontinent and Africa needs some nuance, subtlety and cultural awareness otherwise the PRC will continue to win.


 
Not read him, so you're on firmer ground than I am. Wasn't Seldon an enthusiastic Blairite though?


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 22, 2013)

Delroy Booth

http://melissa-fix.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/privileged-problems.html?spref=tw


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 22, 2013)

Morons - and not morons looking for a collective way out of the various social cleavages that exist, but rather in using them for their own personal leverage.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 22, 2013)

As I've said before that's my main problem with intersectionality and privilege checking/obsession, it's focusing on what makes us different rather than finding out what we share, descending into one-upmanship and points scoring and navel gazing.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 22, 2013)

That and the fact it's fuck-all use to most people and designed to be clique-friendly.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 22, 2013)

What drives me crazy about privilege theory is that privilege theory types seem to think that an idea or an argument put forward by one person can be considered incorrect, but the same idea put forward by someone else who is considered less privileged can be correct.

I've had someone argue one point with me one day, and then take the opposite extreme the next (which I also disagreed with). When I asked why they had done that, they told me it was because they were corrected by someone who was 'less privileged' than me. The whole experience was utterly bewildering since they knew absolutely nothing about my own socioeconomic background and I knew nothing about the person who had corrected the privilege theory type, so I couldn't even try and play oppression olympics with them!


----------



## agricola (Apr 22, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Morons - and not morons looking for a collective way out of the various social cleavages that exist, but rather in using them for their own personal leverage.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 22, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> 1min​I can't stop thinking about that mission to mars. It's a one-way ticket to set up a new colony. Would you take it? I might...


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 22, 2013)

I was thinking about applying for that


----------



## love detective (Apr 22, 2013)

On Penny's behalf?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 22, 2013)

nah, it was an idea id like half entertained as in "oh it would be quite cool" sort of thing

i might apply on her behalf though


----------



## J Ed (Apr 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I was thinking about applying for that


 
It could be a reality TV show or a film or something - Laurie Penny Goes to Mars: In Space No One Can Hear Your Privilege Checking


----------



## Favelado (Apr 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I was thinking about applying for that


 
We could have a go at some kind of U75 project where we build a spacecraft ourselves - people always have scrap lying around and they always say the Apollo missions got to the moon on a computer with about 8k of memory. Someone must have a Spectrum in the garage still. We can have a whip-round for petrol or liquid oxygen or whatever fuel you need too. I reckon we could at least get you out of orbit and then you could take it from there - see what happens.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 22, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What drives me crazy about privilege theory is that privilege theory types seem to think that an idea or an argument put forward by one person can be considered incorrect, but the same idea put forward by someone else who is considered less privileged can be correct.
> 
> I've had someone argue one point with me one day, and then take the opposite extreme the next (which I also disagreed with). When I asked why they had done that, they told me it was because they were corrected by someone who was 'less privileged' than me. The whole experience was utterly bewildering since they knew absolutely nothing about my own socioeconomic background and I knew nothing about the person who had corrected the privilege theory type, so I couldn't even try and play oppression olympics with them!


 
as someone who isnt priviliged id like to suggest that anyone who believes in that wanky shite should be kicked around the pavement until they stop coming out with it .


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 22, 2013)

agricola said:


>


You've been dying to use that one haven't you?


----------



## barney_pig (Apr 22, 2013)

Favelado said:


> We could have a go at some kind of U75 project where we build a spacecraft ourselves - people always have scrap lying around and they always say the Apollo missions got to the moon on a computer with about 8k of memory. Someone must have a Spectrum in the garage still. We can have a whip-round for petrol or liquid oxygen or whatever fuel you need too. I reckon we could at least get you out of orbit and then you could take it from there - see what happens.


The American/ soviet space race was a byproduct of the Cold War nuclear competition. Proletarian Democracy(star fraction) has been utilising the expertise of our atomic development teams in constructing a viable orbital vehicle (definitely NOT a ICBM!!). If the interstellar communist combabes won't come to us then we have to go to them.


----------



## JimW (Apr 22, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> The American/ soviet space race was a byproduct of the Cold War nuclear competition. Proletarian Democracy(star fraction) has been utilising the expertise of our atomic development teams in constructing a viable orbital vehicle (definitely NOT a ICBM!!). If the interstellar communist combabes won't come to us then we have to go to them.


A sort of "to me, to you" expedition, as it were?
anyhow, finally a use for Kickstarter, funding Laurie's trips to another planet instead of just this different world she lives in to the rest of us.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 22, 2013)

And here we have the problem: Re: that piece on intersectionality someone else pleads with Laurie:

"Laurie where are you with this? a lengthy piece from you on intersectionality might help address the injustices at play..."

so a privileged journo can write a piece about a piece written by a privileged journo. In house, in house...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 22, 2013)

it's nasty stuff this. Laurie's right in the middle of it saying nowt.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 22, 2013)

S☼I said:


> And here we have the problem: Re: that piece on intersectionality someone else pleads with Laurie:
> 
> "Laurie where are you with this? a lengthy piece from you on intersectionality might help address the injustices at play..."
> 
> so a privileged journo can write a piece about a piece written by a privileged journo. In house, in house...


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## weepiper (Apr 22, 2013)

A lengthy piece on intersectionality from Laurie Penny or any of the rest of them has never helped address any of the injustices at play. And never will.


----------



## barney_pig (Apr 22, 2013)

JimW said:


> A sort of "to me, to you" expedition, as it were?
> anyhow, finally a use for Kickstarter, funding Laurie's trips to another planet instead of just this different world she lives in to the rest of us.


http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/miniongames/the-manhattan-project-board-game?ref=search
Covert pd funddrive


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 22, 2013)

weepiper said:


> A lengthy piece on intersectionality from Laurie Penny or any of the rest of them has never helped address any of the injustices at play. And never will.


 

Oh, they don't mean the injustices meted out to the poor & working class. Just the one where someone's been forced off twitter because of something someone said about them on twitter.


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## frogwoman (Apr 22, 2013)

forced off twitter ffs

I'm still waiting for that exclusive in the new statesman about butchers and articul8's latest spat


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## frogwoman (Apr 22, 2013)

international news: spymaster speaks candidly about his views on casually red's views on the malvina's

this is the type of level these people are at


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## J Ed (Apr 22, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Oh, they don't mean the injustices meted out to the poor & working class. Just the one where someone's been forced off twitter because of something someone said about them on twitter.


 
A spectre is haunting Islington...


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 22, 2013)

""he's just an auto-labourist prick" says butchers, staring pointedly into his tea. "He didn't have a leg to stand on the latest Ed Miliband thread." Is this what the left has come to, I ask, as a man on the corner hands out quarter pints of milk"


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 22, 2013)

followed by a full-page article an in depth analysis "Tories who have defriended me on facebook and stopped replying to my texts"


----------



## J Ed (Apr 22, 2013)

Next week: a completely true anecdote about a Serbian investment banker who wears Hoxha t-shirts that asked me to buy shares in his startup!


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I was thinking about applying for that


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 22, 2013)

most of the time i think Stalin was a prick, but then i read about these wankers and i start wondering were there these types back in the day..and maybe thats what sent him over the edge . Because all i can think about at the minute are gulags


----------



## sihhi (Apr 22, 2013)

'Privilege' is a hyper-personalised anti-chauvinism. Its internet manifestation appears to rest on twitter arguments based around minor indiscretions just two words in the case of Suzanne Moore - 'Brazilian transexual' used in a positive fashion meaning thin and conventional beautiful (unhelpful but not requiring blanket twitter death wishes - not saying because I want to protect SM's feelings but to build a wider anti-chauvinist mindset - no one wins).

'Intersectionality' is not a useful import from USA. It means either nuanced or considerate - but it is blown up and used 'your socialism/feminism is not intersectional' precisely to alienate the non-university educated, people could just as well say 'your socialism/feminism needs to consider ... ' .

'of colour' is another import. My in-law family doesn't see why it should it be applied when a shorter single word already exists. As for other non-white associates I have, I don't even want to ask them whether it should be applied to them - one question was enough. There is a sense I get that newer nonwhite immigrants have not been asked whether they wish to be considered 'people of colour' or 'women of colour'. And where does it leave the Irish travellers, Turks or Iranians who are white? Not 'of colour' certainly, but then what?

One Point: How often do we hear demands for anti-racism to be intersectional? That class should play some stronger or - in my opinion - the main role in the creation and organisation of anti-racist or anti-xenophobic alliances. That cross-class bodies like Unite Against Fascism or Stop the EDL/SDL or - create opportunities for backlash as much as they 'stop fascism'. That articles like the one Laurie Penny wrote for VICE while interviewing the EDL leader can do nothing but provide a free slap-up meal for that leader and his chums, and confirm pre-existing backlash sentiment against the 'detached, multicultural' London liberal media.

Also: How often is even the intersectional 'race conscious' socialism/feminism actually based around structural targets? The whole case seems to revolve around whether or not Mary Beard, BBC presenter and Oxford don, did or did not say something racist. But that's hardly a meaningful central line of attack, Mary Beard as an Oxford don perpetuates a backwards approach to capitalist classics education (also highly elitist, so inevitably against immigrants because of reality under which they arrive to this country). So her worldview will be fixed on doing well for Britain - it's a structural thing not a personal foible.

There is no structural attack on capitalist universities that reproduce chauvinism and national borders. To do so would have to involve setting aside questions of privilege (who is more privileged? foreign students - foreign government scolarships + super-higher fees or British students - high fees?). There's an ingrown debate about whether or not X did or did not check their privilege in responding to a false accusation of overt racism.

It's slowly coming down to: Hunt instances of 'colour-blind racism' (ie white people failing to mention nonwhite people) in public utterance, overcoming actual, structural racism-in-the-instructions-and-the-reality in the immigration service and benefits system and army can continue.

The idea of a progressive stack - as at Occupy Wall Street - where visibly Asian and black people - are given first chance to speak and extra turns by a person chairing a meeting could be dangerous. Not because 'OMG what about the reverse racism!' - it won't solve anything like racism and it's a gimmick.

But because of the complications it presents to 'poorer' 'union-density-weaker' parts of the 'native' white working class. The image can easily be turned into immediately 'Oh, charming they'd rather give the microphone to middle-class Asian people than those like me who are actually suffering'. It actively invites the playing of oppression olympics - whilst asserting throughout that such an outcome is impossible. And when oppression olympics is played it becomes 'intersectionality/ checking your privilege, you're doing it wrong'

After contact with teachers and managers parts of the white working class feel like they are another race (just like other working class people) - but with the progressive stack to those people it can seem one set the foreign parts being listened to first - exacerbating backlash sentiments 'people who have not been here long are given lots of council housing points because they produce large families, white families who have worked 20 years but with only 1 child don't get any - the foreigner comes first in this land, now' [I will chase down a quote by Don McCullin where he says being fully working-class with no redeeming features of middle-class input is like being another race]
NB: Here is a progressive stack in operation:



Any thoughts on the exchange in the video from Richmond Virginia?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 22, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Any thoughts on the exchange in the video from Richmond Virginia?


 
Looks like a bunch of white people trying to show off to each other how not racist they are and who is the most not racist. Really awkward to watch, sort of like Peep Show. Also not unlike student politics here...


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Any thoughts on the exchange in the video from Richmond Virginia?


Will reply on the excellent longer points tmw - where would Fred Hampton get bumped up to by the self-appointed organisers list?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 23, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Looks like a bunch of white people trying to show off to each other how not racist they are and who is the most not racist. Really awkward to watch, sort of like Peep Show. Also not unlike student politics here...


It's hideous, it makes my skin crawl. 

At least some of this filth had he guts to attack OTC stuff in the 70s.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 23, 2013)

I was going to bed but that shit has got me riled. The weathermen _all professors_ - this is your victory Ayers and Dohrn, to reduce all opposition to this individualised shit and to make sure it's passes your composition tests. You smiling fucking cunts. Guess whose left inside? Guess what their class privilege got them?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 23, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Looks like a bunch of white people trying to show off to each other how not racist they are and who is the most not racist. Really awkward to watch, sort of like Peep Show. Also not unlike student politics here...


 
Here is the foundation for this kind of thing as explained by Allison "I am good at giving a damn" Burtch:



> Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly operates under a revolutionary “progressive stack.” A normal “stack” means those who wish to speak get in line. A progressive stack encourages women and traditionally marginalized groups speak before men, especially white men. This is something that has been in place since the beginning, it is necessary, and it is important.
> 
> “Step up, step back” was a common phrase of the first week, encouraging white men to acknowledge the privilege they have lived in their entire lives and to step back from continually speaking. This progressive stack has been inspiring and mind-boggling in its effectiveness.


 
This join-authored by Emily Welty, Matthew Bolton, and Nick Zukowski 'Occupy Wall Street as a Palimpsest: Overview of a Dynamic Movement'



> In the course of meetings, Occupy often employs a technique called "progressive stack." This is a way of creating a list of speakers that gives preference to people who have been historically marginalized. Progressive stack allows the voices of women, people of color, disabled people, and other groups to be highlighted and to ensure their narrative is written into the OWS palimpsest. Part of the progressive stack is the idea of "step up, step back," which encourages the participation of historically marginalized people (including women, people of color,  LGBTQ  individuals, disabled individuals, very old or very young people).


 
In addition to white males receiving one go to speak while others (not sure if white women count )
get multiple goes, a further innovation apparently was the whole assembly repeating what people are saying for the purposes of audibility, but doing so _extra_ loudly for nonwhite speakers.


----------



## Nice one (Apr 23, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> But that's where the similarity ends. Enjoying privilege while pretending to be oppressed by those who haven't had the life chances she's had is pretty much all there is to consumer radicals like LP and co.
> 
> There was a lot more to Strummer and The Clash than that. And JS had humility, he didn't always just want to talk about himself. They can't help the background they come from - it's what they do with it that matters. It's a bit of a bizarre comparison if you ask me.


 
well strummer certainly went out of his way to hide his middle class background. For a reason.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Apr 23, 2013)

fucking hell, that video is grim.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 23, 2013)

The responses in the comments here are (mostly) pretty healthy


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 23, 2013)

Nice one said:


> well strummer certainly went out of his way to hide his middle class background. For a reason.


Fill us in then jacko. What was that reason?


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 23, 2013)

Marvellous that peoples ides are defined not by what they might think but what their body tells us.


----------



## Nice one (Apr 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Fill us in then jacko. What was that reason?


 
fuck knows mate. History is littered with posh lads pretending to be working class.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 23, 2013)

Nice one said:


> History is littered with posh lads pretending to be working class.


 
Far more the other way round tbf.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 23, 2013)

That video makes me feel fucking sick. This, ultimately, is what this divisive obsessed with the self bollocks ends up as.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The weathermen _all professors_ - this is your victory Ayers and Dohrn, to reduce all opposition to this individualised shit and to make sure it's passes your composition tests. You smiling fucking cunts.


 
What are you on about now?  Why blame the Weathermen?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 23, 2013)

I cant believe there is actually a person called mary beard


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> ...in using them for their own personal leverage.


 
The same song the middle classes have always sung.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 23, 2013)

Nice one said:


> well strummer certainly went out of his way to hide his middle class background. For a reason.


 
You're taking the piss!!
Strummer's background was known about back when he was in The 101ers, never mind The Clash. Nobody cared, because he'd been living in a squat, alienated from his family for years, by then. Mark Perry took the piss out of him because he used to slip back into a Public School accent when he got riled. 
You know why we didn't care? Because the music resonated, regardless of the source!


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Any thoughts on the exchange in the video from Richmond Virginia?





fucking fuck..thats the last straw..the last one. There isnt a gulag remote enough or cold enough .

I think after watching that I have absolutely nothing in common with those people, in fact theyre my enemy, i hate them, I refuse to be on the same side  and I now want to officially resign from _the left_ and then get in contact with my relative in the NYPD and encourage him to pepper spray fuck out of those twats like its going out of fashion . Im actually sorry now I never emigrated and joined the fuzz over there back in the 80s.
Bastards . No good lousy hippy bastards .

Hope killing, time wasting, attention seeking , shite talking , counter revolutionary, fifth columnist, weirdo hippy vegan bastards .

Those are my thoughts just at the moment . I may revise them after I calm down a bit . But not by much .


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 23, 2013)

J Ed said:


> The responses in the comments here are (mostly) pretty healthy



Oh fucking hell


----------



## sihhi (Apr 23, 2013)

Transcribed because I think it gives a glimpse of how the weird (to my eyes) hand gestures can give weight to those accustomed to using them - the activist core with years of uni or activism-as-leisure experience will win - 9 times out of 10:







Now the guy in the middle is going to say something that's unpopular with others but the chair doesn't allow that full thought to be communicated, that guy also doesn't use any hand signals, not one of the in crowd - looks more of a townie than others not a bad thing. His turn is interrupted by someone else and another male takes over to suggest that people who don't accept the progressive stack are _*not being respectful*_ of anti-racism/anti-sexism/anti-classism.

Chair (W): Some people are new here, I just want some people to be aware of what's going on is that they [Occupy New York] do things by a consensus which means everyone gets to be heard (jazz hands) and um the way people speak at their general assemblies is there are facilitators that keep a stack - which means a list of people who would like to speak. In New York, in New York they use something called a progressive stack which means if you have your name on a list and you come from a traditionally marginalised background, race, gender, ethnicity um anything that is traditionally marginalised you get bumped up the list

Noise: Woo hoo (jazz hands) 

Chair (W): This means we want to be able to hear what everyone has to say. Also one of the things stressed at Occupy Wall Street is the step up step back (heavy stress) this means people who have been privileged all (hand stress) their lives erm mainly white men white women even - people who have been privileged need to realise that they need to step up and step back (stress) if they have said what need to say (jazz hands)

Voice 1 (M): (in the middle of jazz hands) Isn't this supposed to be an egalitarian movement? 

Floor Male: Yea I think it doesn't matter whether, you know what, what their general background is, because you know the majority of us are already, you know, part of the marginalised class of people so it wouldn't matter 'cos more people who are already under that marginalised group would get to speak anyways and I think...  (No hand gestures at all)

Voice 2 (F): *That's such sh..* 

Floor Male: What? (non-agressive)

Male Near Chair: Alright, something we need to identify off the bat is when we talk about privilege we're talking about access to educational power OK those are things that come from skin colour, your sex, your class OK (emphasising lectern-hitting gestures) - and these are things you need to be aware of that you have prvilege over other people at different levels or you may have less privilege than other people um depending on who you are, Yes we may all be marginalised but some of us are far (stress) more marginalised than others and we need to be respectful of that and realise that there are some people way before now have lost all we need to help restore that.

Jazz hands and applause.

Voice 2 (M) *Thank you.*
Is it worth doing a poll here to ask whether or not this stack system should be applied more widely in this country? I can see some advantages but also dangers.
LP is pretty convinced although only mentions it briefly:




> all decisions, from the smallest breakout circle to general assemblies of thousands, are made using the "consensus" model of direct democracy, waving hands in various simple signals and operating with discussion facilitators rather than leaders, a system that some say originated in the Quaker movement several centuries ago.
> There are different dialects of hand-signal consensus in different countries-in Spain they wave their hands higher, *in New York a system called "progressive stack" is designed to ensure that minority voices are heard -- but the principle is the same.*
> It's a principle of democracy done at ground level, and people involved in this "consensus" process find it incredibly empowering -- a refreshing contrast to the alienating remoteness and weary predictability of parliamentary representative democracy, which most people here see as totally irrelevant to their real lives.
> The sense of collective engagement overwhelms the multiplicity of different strategies and suggestions within the movement: everyone turns up with their own problems and grievances, but the process of engagement becomes just as important . "I do not come here to affirm who I am already," one visiting Spanish activist in New York said last week, "I come here to discover who I can be with other people. This is a new kind of politics."
> I believe that what we are seeing here is the beginnings of a substantive change not just to the nature of modern politics, but to the way in which it is done, demanded and delivered


----------



## agricola (Apr 23, 2013)

> "I come here to discover who I can be with other people. This is a new kind of politics."
> 
> I believe that what we are seeing here is the beginnings of a substantive change not just to the nature of modern politics, but to the way in which it is done, demanded and delivered


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 23, 2013)




----------



## Brainaddict (Apr 23, 2013)

I don't think the progressive stack is the right thing to do, but I can't get as angry at it as you lot. They're trying to deal with a political problem that some people are more visible or more heard in a group than others. From what I've see there is some correlation between the less visible people and gender and/or oppressed minorities. I think this should be dealt with by facilitators and group members being aware of the issue and trying to talk to the less shouty individuals - probably outside meetings - in order to see if they have views that aren't coming out, to see if they can overcome their shyness or have other people put their views forward for them and so on. This would involve building up relationships with people rather than just treating them as their apparent profile.

As I say, as a way to address this issue I think the above example is misguided because of its potential to be divisive, but I don't see the call for so much anger. They have their reasons for doing it and it seems to me like something that can be discussed, rather than turning the perpetrators into _enemies_.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 23, 2013)

You're all disagreeing _in the wrong way. _Jesus, you're as bad as her.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 23, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> I don't think the progressive stack is the right thing to do, but I can't get as angry at it as you lot. They're trying to deal with a political problem that some people are more visible or more heard in a group than others. From what I've see there is some correlation between the less visible people and gender and/or oppressed minorities. I think this should be dealt with by facilitators and group members being aware of the issue and trying to talk to the less shouty individuals - probably outside meetings - in order to see if they have views that aren't coming out, to see if they can overcome their shyness or have other people put their views forward for them and so on. This would involve building up relationships with people rather than just treating them as their apparent profile.
> 
> As I say, as a way to address this issue I think the above example is misguided because of its potential to be divisive, but I don't see the call for so much anger. They have their reasons for doing it and it seems to me like something that can be discussed, rather than turning the perpetrators into _enemies_.


You want to _discuss_ with this fanaticism?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 23, 2013)

These are the sorts of people who in other times and societies would be religious fanatics feeling superior by berating their fellow man for not using the correct hand gestures to pray.


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## sihhi (Apr 23, 2013)

Is it worth discussing the trend or not - it's a sidetrack from just talking about left celebrities but the whole thread has lots of sidetracks:-

What we have is advice like 

http://criticallegalthinking.com/20...h-jodi-dean-on-democracy-occupy-and-communism

some of it good although should be good for all - e.g. risk of arrest should be explained to _everyone_ properly.


_*5 Tips for White Allies in the Occupy Movement*_

having its final ending advice to




> Support POC created events: Attend these events! At events organized by POC, focus on listening. Don’t jump in the spotlight. Be alert for white people who might be rude or aggressive at the event.  If possible, ask them to stop their behavior and give them more information about the purpose of the event.  Have this conversation away from the event, so they don’t disrupt it any further.


 

Why should people attend events created by immigrants if they aren't interested in them or engaged in them - simply out of a desire to be a better ally - even if these people say and do nothing the whole meeting I'd rather not have these people there. I don't want them policing meetings set up or called by immigrant groups - people who attend can police those who might be rude or aggressive by themselves.

It all seems like promoting the middle-class within immigrant groups who are au fait with the activist culture/approach/lingo - erasing capability and class differences within immigrant groups - all while providing opportunities for the whipping up of tremendous backlash.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 23, 2013)

Fuck them giving us their_ permission_ to talk.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 23, 2013)

J Ed said:


> These are the sorts of people who in other times and societies would be religious fanatics feeling superior by berating their fellow man for not using the correct hand gestures to pray.


Spot on, they are _Basij_ - and you don't discuss with _Basij_.


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## Brainaddict (Apr 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> You want to _discuss_ with this fanaticism?


I've discussed with you in the past.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Is it worth discussing the trend or not - it's a sidetrack from just talking about left celebrities but the whole thread has lots of sidetracks:-
> <snip>


 
It totally is for any number of reasons, the most insulting assumption of which weepiper nails above - i am off for the night though so can't offer much.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 23, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> They have their reasons for doing it and it seems to me like something that can be discussed, rather than turning the perpetrators into _enemies_.


 
What on earth am I or anyone else doing?

Another thing to bear in mind is how the progressive stack bit comes right at the start for someone attending for the first time - this is from Grand Rapids Michigan the hand symbols were from Gainesville.



> At the start of each meeting we review the process and hand signals for the benefit of new folks.
> 
> Meeting Outline
> Welcome
> ...


 
If there is a chair in any meeting like the video one already committed to a progressive stack it can be die is cast situation. The point of being a chair should be to try and be neutral only and let a meeting proceed as _equal citizens_ ONLY in deadlock extreme should a chair have to cast a vote.
With the cases like OWS, the chair is already committed to progressive stack and step up-step back meaning a heavy diversion or fracture before a damn thing of tactics has even been brought up!


----------



## Brainaddict (Apr 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What on earth am I or anyone else doing?
> 
> Another thing to bear in mind is how the progressive stack bit comes right at the start for someone attending for the first time - this is from Grand Rapids Michigan the hand symbols were from Gainesville.
> 
> ...


It's a good point. But big unfacilitated meetings don't really work, and if you do have facilitation you start with some baseline rules. I agree though that the facilitation - in London as well - came from an activist class with their own language. This was pretty offputting for a lot of people. A lot of it came just as much from anarchist groups as from other middle class frames of thought we might dub 'liberal'. The 'activist' package in UK and the US stinks of failure and decay in my opinion. These people will step up to the front next time too...so the point wasn't to defend their methods really. But they're not some foreign beast with inexplicable actions either.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 23, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> It's a good point. But big unfacilitated meetings don't really work, and if you do have facilitation you start with some baseline rules. I agree though that the facilitation - in London as well - came from an activist class with their own language. This was pretty offputting for a lot of people. A lot of it came just as much from anarchist groups as from other middle class frames of thought we might dub 'liberal'. The 'activist' package in UK and the US stinks of failure and decay in my opinion. These people will step up to the front next time too...so the point wasn't to defend their methods really. But they're not some foreign beast with inexplicable actions either.


 
Yes meetings should be chaired (with the position rotated - like any other), what gave you the impression I thought meetings shouldn't be chaired?


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## DrRingDing (Apr 23, 2013)

'Progressive' stack is bollocks but a good facilitator will take note of who hasn't spoken and I think there's a good argument if a couple of macho blokes have been windbags all night to allow someone else speak before they carry on with their thoughts.


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## agricola (Apr 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> If there is a chair in any meeting like the video one already committed to a progressive stack it can be die is cast situation.


 
The die is cast?  As a classicist you must get to speak last, if at all then.


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## Brainaddict (Apr 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Yes meetings should be chaired (with the position rotated - like any other), what gave you the impression I thought meetings shouldn't be chaired?


The point is that facilitation means rules and the first meeting a group has will be facilitated with undiscussed rules. You can say those rules should be 'neutral' but I'm sure the people running that meeting thought that their rules were very neutral - in that they were levelling the playing field by taking account of a historical imbalance.

Anyway, we both agree it is a crap method. I just saw people saying how _awful_ it is without really saying much else.


----------



## treelover (Apr 23, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Jesus
> 
> Got any links/info on that?


 
sorry no, will ask my friend who went..


----------



## treelover (Apr 23, 2013)

> If you're in a position to help build a democratic, non-sectarian socialist movement, committed to women's liberation, anti-racism, and the fight against environmental degradation, please consider donating what you can. Thank you.


 
perhaps the new ISN, SWP breakaway will invite her to join, no mention of poverty, inequality, austerity, at least Laura writes about them...


----------



## treelover (Apr 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Transcribed because I think it gives a glimpse of how the weird (to my eyes) hand gestures can give weight to those accustomed to using them - the activist core with years of uni or activism-as-leisure experience will win - 9 times out of 10:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 


I wonder what Seeds Of Change who have done some very good work on democratising meetings, etc think of all that?


----------



## treelover (Apr 23, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> I don't think the progressive stack is the right thing to do, but I can't get as angry at it as you lot. They're trying to deal with a political problem that some people are more visible or more heard in a group than others. From what I've see there is some correlation between the less visible people and gender and/or oppressed minorities. I think this should be dealt with by facilitators and group members being aware of the issue and trying to talk to the less shouty individuals - probably outside meetings - in order to see if they have views that aren't coming out, to see if they can overcome their shyness or have other people put their views forward for them and so on. This would involve building up relationships with people rather than just treating them as their apparent profile.
> 
> As I say, as a way to address this issue I think the above example is misguided because of its potential to be divisive, but I don't see the call for so much anger. They have their reasons for doing it and it seems to me like something that can be discussed, rather than turning the perpetrators into _enemies_.


 

one of the great things about RTS (and of course there were many issues like class not being recognised) is that organically a lot of the key people were women, not imposed, just developed..


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> The point is that facilitation means rules and the first meeting a group has will be facilitated with undiscussed rules. You can say those rules should be 'neutral' but I'm sure the people running that meeting thought that their rules were very neutral - in that they were levelling the playing field by taking account of a historical imbalance.
> 
> Anyway, we both agree it is a crap method. I just saw people saying how _awful_ it is without really saying much else.


 

Yes, the aim is to increase immigrant and women's self-assertion and expression (part of increasing working-class self-assertion as a whole) within political meetings - as much in any other arena. I agree with it wholly.

The way in which it has been effected here is potentially divisive and dangerous. A not insignificant number of white w/c people have experienced part of school or work under direct management of second or third generation immigrants managers/power figures. It's possible they will not consider themselves 'privileged' because however much they accept racist laws and structures assisted their parents' generation, they are do not see their advantaged privilege today. Fractures could emerge at their being demoted in a stack behind those whom they perceive as middle-class immigrants.

Who came up with it for Richmond Virginia? It's been taken from Occupy Wall Street because the chair/facilitator in the video visited there. There it was decided - my guess - by the general university student centre of gravity at the street protest and Zuccotti Park occupation that progressive stacks were the way to go.

This explains something of the OWS progressive stack as conducted by a _stack-keeper_.



> Another check on structurelessness comes in the form of the “progressive stack,” in which the “stack-keeper,” who is in charge of taking questions and concerns from the audiences at general assemblies, is given the ability to privilege voices from “traditionally marginalized groups.”
> 
> In other words: women and minorities get to go to the front of the line. Yesenia Barragan, 25, a Columbia student and longtime activist, notes that in reality, progressive stack often means, “my partner, who’s a white man, has to wait twenty minutes or more to say his piece. That’s how it works,” and how it should work, she says. “We need to address those power relations.”


 

I don't have any problem with this - the partner is probably middle-class like the woman, however situations could emerge where a non-university worker is structurally demoted down whilst a 25-year postgraduate student is promoted up the order.

Perhaps the aim should _not_ always be massive meetings but smaller meetings with single reps sent via mandate and recallability. Massive meetings produce 'who speaks first' issues much more heavily.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

treelover said:


> I wonder what Seeds Of Change ...


 
Seeds *for* change. Website has little mention of anything specific about race or class other than truisms like allow everyone to speak and don't let a minority of individuals hog the meeting time.

Only particular reference is:




> Large plenaries
> 
> Large group plenaries, where the whole group comes together in one place, can be used to share information, to make proposals and for final decision making.
> 
> ...


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

Simple answer.

Fewer meetings.

Smaller meetings.

Based around people who already know each other (friends, neighbours, workmates etc.)

Fewer self-identified activists.

Absolutely no need to artificially manufacture a "mass meeting" to create an "artist's impression" of "direct democracy".




...besides any movement that sees meetings (and their procedures) as key is fucked from the start. People hate meetings.


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## Louis MacNeice (Apr 24, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> It's a good point. But big unfacilitated meetings don't really work, and if you do have facilitation you start with some baseline rules. I agree though that the facilitation - in London as well - came from an activist class with their own language. This was pretty offputting for a lot of people. A lot of it came just as much from anarchist groups as from other middle class frames of thought we might dub 'liberal'. *The 'activist' package in UK and the US stinks of failure and decay in my opinion.* These people will step up to the front next time too...so the point wasn't to defend their methods really. But they're not some foreign beast with inexplicable actions either.


 
There is a failure to create any radical change or even strike a sustained chord with a larger public.

The demand for progressive stacks et. al. addresses this failure in that it means that change can be affected, albeit not radical change and change confined to a very limited activist community.

At best it all looks like a mildly thought provoking exercise at worst it is a genuinely disruptive distraction from the content of discussions.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## Balbi (Apr 24, 2013)

Build a shibboleth, build a shibboleth
put the art twats at the top,
put the commentariat in the middle,
and wait your turn you overprivileged fascist.


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## Idris2002 (Apr 24, 2013)

Wouldn't it be simpler to allocate speaking places by drawing lots?


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## Louis MacNeice (Apr 24, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Wouldn't it be simpler to allocate speaking places by drawing lots?


 
And subject yourself to the tyranny of chance?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice

p.s. Actually I think there's a lot to be said for lots.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 24, 2013)

Fuck 'em. Them and their privilege-checking stack-obeying bullshit can fuck right off from any politics I have anything to do with. What a total waste of time, effort and energy, all to make some privileged cocksuckers feel better about themselves by ceding 1% of ground to people less privileged than them, basically salving their consciences for not sharing the other 99% of ground.

Kill 'em all, but slowly, in a work-camp. Every single one of the privilege-abusing, discourse-controlling shitcunts.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 24, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Wouldn't it be simpler to allocate speaking places by drawing lots?


 
Be simpler just to liquidate them, and drawing lots wouldn't give them the warm glow of smug liberal satisfaction that - oooh! - letting a black man or a lesbian talk before one of them does.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Is it worth discussing the trend or not - it's a sidetrack from just talking about left celebrities but the whole thread has lots of sidetracks:-
> 
> What we have is advice like
> 
> ...


 
Totally about these liberal shits making themselves feel better.
"Oh baby, I checked my own privilege at the demo today, now suck it, bitch!"


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Kill 'em all, but slowly, in a work-camp. Every single one of the privilege-abusing, discourse-controlling shitcunts.


 
*jazz hands*


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

.


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## Lo Siento. (Apr 24, 2013)

The background to all this of course is that the reason these groups have to theorize participation in this way is precisely because they _aren't_ predominantly led by the marginalized. Groups that coalesce around ideas rather than shared experience are inevitably going to be cross-class, and for a variety of reasons will tend towards dominance by the people who are more dominant in society as a whole. There's a reason why the Quakers are cited as the model here (religion is also a question of ideals that can be held by anyone), and not any other of the variety of forms of working-class direct democracy that have emerged over the past 2 centuries.

Since working-class democratic assemblies are based on the _experience_ of marginalization, firstly the need for re-ordering everyone's privilege is less of an issue and secondly, the organic emergence of group leaders from within the marginalized group _is not necessarily a bad thing_ (certainly not in the same way that middle class domination of socialist and protest groups is). That's why the Quakers are the example and not say trade union democracy or revolutionary democracy, both of which are generally variations of the elected chair/small assembly/vote by show of hands or ballot /mandated delegates model.

The whole thing just seems like yet another way of dealing with a fundamental contradiction. If you're middle class you should be peripheral in any important social movement, but no-one likes to be peripheral to something they feel strongly about. So you invent a way to make yourself central by being the guardian of the "inclusivity" rules.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 24, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> The background to all this of course is that the reason these groups have to theorize participation in this way is precisely because they _aren't_ predominantly led by the marginalized. Groups that coalesce around ideas rather than shared experience are inevitably going to be cross-class, and for a variety of reasons will tend towards dominance by the people who are more dominant in society as a whole. There's a reason why the Quakers are cited as the model here (religion is also a question of ideals that can be held by anyone), and not any other of the variety of forms of working-class direct democracy that have emerged over the past 2 centuries.
> 
> Since working-class democratic assemblies are based on the _experience_ of marginalization, firstly the need for re-ordering everyone's privilege is less of an issue and secondly, the organic emergence of group leaders from within the marginalized group _is not necessarily a bad thing_ (certainly not in the same way that middle class domination of socialist and protest groups is). That's why the Quakers are the example and not say trade union democracy or revolutionary democracy, both of which are generally variations of the elected chair/small assembly/vote by show of hands or ballot model/mandated delegates model.
> 
> The whole thing just seems like yet another way of dealing with a fundamental contradiction. If you're middle class you should be peripheral in any important social movement, but no-one likes to be peripheral to something they feel strongly about. So you invent a way to make yourself central by being the guardian of the "inclusivity" rules.


 
this feels exactly right to me.  london occupy, in my experience, used the hand signals malarky at their general assemblies.  but it feel like a decision making process was going on.  it was just the same arguments and the same dominance as before except with hand signals - though this was because of poor chairing often.  what worked better was the working groups, and encouraging people to join them through a process of conversation - i.e. talking to everyone and trying to identify their skills and what they could offer to the groups.   though i will say this, that after a week or so i stopped going to the general assemblies because they were bollocks.  working groups have the ideas, GAs ratify them but are mostly white middle class men who don't care enough about an issue to join a working group arguing about what that group should be doing.  fuck that.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> The whole thing just seems like yet another way of dealing with a fundamental contradiction. If you're middle class you should be peripheral in any important social movement, but no-one likes to be peripheral to something they feel strongly about. So you invent a way to make yourself central by being the guardian of the "inclusivity" rules.


 
This should be the way, but every positive social movement has had middle-class dominance in some form or other... what were Emma Goldman's lectures to literati set? what was Wolfe Tone and his orientation towards merchants? what was the PCF's deep nesting by intellectuals throughout the 20s, 30s and beyond? i don't know the answer 

it all gets chicken and egg ... failure to mobilise w/c people leads to  m/c dominance which means harder to recruit w/c which means ...


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> *jazz hands*


 
Jazz hands up or down?

This is from Occupy Eugene, Oregon - 12 gestures to follow







Occupy Boston is easier only has 8


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 24, 2013)




----------



## Sue (Apr 24, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Fuck 'em. Them and their privilege-checking stack-obeying bullshit can fuck right off from any politics I have anything to do with. What a total waste of time, effort and energy, all to make some privileged cocksuckers feel better about themselves by ceding 1% of ground to people less privileged than them, basically salving their consciences for not sharing the other 99% of ground.
> 
> Kill 'em all, but slowly, in a work-camp. Every single one of the privilege-abusing, discourse-controlling shitcunts.


 
Not a fan then..?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> ...besides any movement that sees meetings (and their procedures) as key is fucked from the start. People hate meetings.


 
This was a feeling that some had about procedure and 'process not protest':











Does this kind of sign separate distance between street viewer and sign-holder?

"This is a process which uses direct action to protest'" BUT "not a protest"


----------



## Sue (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Transcribed because I think it gives a glimpse of how the weird (to my eyes) hand gestures can give weight to those accustomed to using them - the activist core with years of uni or activism-as-leisure experience will win - 9 times out of 10:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
I thought this was a pisstake. You mean it's not?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Here is sign with that slogan:






and someone has tagged it 'Robyn' but not anything else


----------



## Red Cat (Apr 24, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> There is a failure to create any radical change or even strike a sustained chord with a larger public.
> 
> The demand for progressive stacks et. al. addresses this failure in that it means that change can be affected, albeit not radical change and change confined to a very limited activist community.
> 
> At best it all looks like a mildly thought provoking exercise at worst it is a genuinely disruptive distraction from the content of discussions.


 
Radical change is completely overwhelming to even think about. I think a focus on checking one's privilege, the process, on the internal make-up of the group is a way of managing anxiety about what the fuck to do out there.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 24, 2013)

It was pretty clearly a protest, though.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 24, 2013)

Identity politics wanker at my uni (the one I mentioned a few posts back with the Foucault finger puppets who's gonna be a Sabb next year):



> it's also a good idea to remember that not everybody believes in or wants to conflate liberation campaigns with a critique of capitalism and that this should be respected if those campaigns are going to be able to be properly inclusive. Liberation campaigns are not your private army against the state


 
The cancer.is.spreading


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Identity politics wanker at my uni (the one I mentioned a few posts back with the Foucault finger puppets who's gonna be a Sabb next year:
> 
> 
> 
> The cancer.is.spreading


 
Have you asked him how he knows this?

And what's a Sabb, btw?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Sue said:


> I thought this was a pisstake. You mean it's not?


 
No, it's not a piss-take - it was from Occupy Gainesville, all Occupy hand signals have a minimum of 6-8. 
Sometimes ends up in odd places. Here it is in action on a celebrity TV interview with Michael Moore:



Woman on left is in agreement throughout increasing intensity of agreement with speed of hand movement. 
Man behind uses more conventional mode of agreement hand movement at a short sharp burst with Michael Moore's point to the NBC news host.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Identity politics wanker at my uni (the one I mentioned a few posts back with the Foucault finger puppets who's gonna be a Sabb next year:
> 
> 
> 
> The cancer.is.spreading


got to wonder what he thinks "liberation" is, don't you? What kind of "liberation" are we getting that leaves the questions of state and capitalism untouched?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 24, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Have you asked him how he knows this?
> 
> And what's a Sabb, btw?


 
Sorry, an elected student officer - a full time student politician on 18,000 quid.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 24, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> got to wonder what he thinks "liberation" is, don't you? What kind of "liberation" are we getting the leaves the questions of state and capitalism untouched?


 
Knowing the lad, I suspect he's in favour of whatever kind of liberation allows him to keep his inherited wealth and spend all day wanking over postmodernist literature while retaining vague left-wing credentials.

Check your privilege, anti-capitalists!


----------



## Lo Siento. (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This should be the way, but every positive social movement has had middle-class dominance in some form or other... what were Emma Goldman's lectures to literati set? what was Wolfe Tone and his orientation towards merchants? what was the PCF's deep nesting by intellectuals throughout the 20s, 30s and beyond? i don't know the answer
> 
> it all gets chicken and egg ... failure to mobilise w/c people leads to m/c dominance which means harder to recruit w/c which means ...


bit bleak, isn't it? I mean there's working-class democracy to be found in all of those movements somewhere (even if it gets crushed/incorporated in the end, but that's history for you...)


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Sorry, an elected student officer - a full time student politician on 18,000 quid.


 
Fuck's sake, that's 4K more than I got paid in Birmingham.


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

It's based on American Sign Language* so you can look up your own signs here: http://www.signingsavvy.com/sign/BLOCK/3051/1

*Unlike my earlier ACAB in International Sign Language


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> It was pretty clearly a protest, though.


 

Everyone knows it was a protest.

From the horse's mouth - a US feminist site:




> at the occupation’s General Assembly’s they use progressive stacking [taking names of who wants to speaks with order preference to marginalized voices] — the problem being that people are identifying who’s marginalized by their appearance, which is slippery with gender and definitely doesn’t account for class


 

http://www.canonballblog.com/?p=3123


----------



## Red Cat (Apr 24, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> It was pretty clearly a protest, though.


 
A protest means being clear what you're against, being against something means you know what you're for, knowing what you're for means having an answer, having an answer means thinking you're right, thinking you're right means you need to check your privilege. And around it goes.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> It's based on American Sign Language* so you can look up your own signs here: http://www.signingsavvy.com/sign/BLOCK/3051/1
> 
> *Unlike my earlier ACAB in International Sign Language


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> bit bleak, isn't it? I mean there's working-class democracy to be found in all of those movements somewhere (even if it gets crushed/incorporated in the end, but that's history for you...)


 
_Of course_ working class democracy is there and French Communism, American anarchism and Irish republicanism are positive efforts - the base keeping things honest. Even the trade unions from way back have essentially middle-class leaderships fulfilling a middle-class life of meetings with all manner of employers, accountants and government officials, only the exceptions stand out like A J Cook (and so sometimes come to symbolise the whole under a right-wing narrative)


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

> not everybody believes in or wants to conflate liberation campaigns with a critique of capitalism and that this should be respected if those campaigns are going to be able to be properly inclusive. Liberation campaigns are not your private army against the state


 
A stunning division into the _properly inclusive _immigrant liberals and _improperly inclusive _immigrants socialists. 
Likewise _properly inclusive _liberal feminists and _improperly inclusive_ radical feminists.

A smart form of radical-baiting - trying to draw the liberal vote. 

In the early 1970s era of Broad Left student union full spectrum dominance in all bar the richest of universities this kind of bureaucrat might have been saying 'not everyone believes in or wants to conflate an anti-capitalist campaign with a critique about sexuality or homosexual students, socialist campaigns are not your private army against how other people feel about you'.

That kind of left student feeling is all over by the late 1970s - so there is change but the bureaucratism remains.


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## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

This is what I've said on this in the past. 


I first encountered the hand gestures and all the "consensus decision making" stuff at an Earth First! meeting back in 1994 or so...I'd dragged a couple of friends along insisting that EF! was great and they should get involved. My friends being AFA/Red Action types sat open mouthed in disbelief as they were forced to sit on the floor, in a circle, with a bunch of hippies. Then the hands started flapping. I wasn't expecting it either, this being the first EF! meeting run in this way that I'd been to. Suffice to say, my friends never came back and wrote off EF! as a serious movement.

Embarassing, cultish and - crucially - disempowering. Such nonsense keeps nascent social movements retarded and seperates them from potential growth.

Jazz hands should be vociferally resisted, and if necessary ignored/over-ridden at open meetings.
chilango, Nov 25, 2011

and....

There are meetings where "jazz hands" can be a useful tool. Hell, I've been to many endless dreary work meetings full of people speaking for the sake of speaking where a talking stick and flopping hands would be eternally perferable...so for some organisational meetings it cane be a useful tool.

But, and this is my main objection, when the primary purpose of a meeting is that of building a movement, a struggle, a situation and a process of opening up to use what is essentially an insider language (no matter how simple) is of course going to alienate those who find it utterly different from the ways of communicating in group scenarios that they have used all their lives. To feel inhibited from full participation in such meetings is disempowering for the newcomers and for many already in the group wishing to open it up. Those more au fait with the insider language will already be in a relative position of power compared to those who aren't, and more able to control (willingly or not) the direction of the meeting - which is essentially the point of jazz hands anyway is it not?

In fairness many of the same criticisms can be levelled at a typical leftie meeting filled with arcane jargon and 2nd hand trade union mechanisms.
chilango, Nov 25, 2011

It's still my view on this.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> But, and this is my main objection, when the primary purpose of a meeting is that of building a movement, a struggle, a situation and a process of opening up to use what is essentially an insider language (no matter how simple) is of course going to alienate those who find it utterly different from the ways of communicating in group scenarios that they have used all their lives. To feel inhibited from full participation in such meetings is disempowering for the newcomers and for many already in the group wishing to open it up. Those more au fait with the insider language will already be in a relative position of power compared to those who aren't, and more able to control (willingly or not) the direction of the meeting - which is essentially the point of jazz hands anyway is it not?
> 
> In fairness many of the same criticisms can be levelled at a typical leftie meeting filled with arcane jargon and 2nd hand trade union mechanisms.
> chilango, Nov 25, 2011
> ...


 
What's your prefered method of facilitatiing a meeting?


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## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

Common sense.


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## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> This is what I've said on this in the past.
> I first encountered the hand gestures and all the "consensus decision making" stuff at an Earth First! meeting back in *1994* or so...I'd dragged a couple of friends along insisting that EF! was great and they should get involved. My friends being AFA/Red Action types sat open mouthed in disbelief as they were forced to sit on the floor, in a circle, with a bunch of hippies.


 
AFA in a primary school circle.  

The sign language stuff is apparently European and British, so the Americans can't be blamed - and you were there indavertenly popularising it at the start!  (just joking)



> This kind of sign-language decision-making is a new staple of left-wing protests. The gestures were popularized in 2007 by European groups like Climate Camp, Seeds for Change, and UK Uncut, but they were showing up in protest manuals as early as 1994.


 
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2011/10/occupy_wall_street_hand_gestur.html


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## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

Fuck! It is my fault!


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## phildwyer (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Sorry, an elected student officer - a full time student politician on 18,000 quid.


 

FFS, these people are all about 18 years old.  They'll grow out of the nonsense soon enough.


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## Steel Icarus (Apr 24, 2013)

.


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## J Ed (Apr 24, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> FFS, these people are all about 18 years old. They'll grow out of the nonsense soon enough.


 
Yeah, they grow out of semi-principled 'identity' politics and into right-wing Labourites


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## Thora (Apr 24, 2013)

It must be really difficult to decide who has more privilege just by scanning faces in a big meeting


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## Balbi (Apr 24, 2013)

I've seen jazz hands used at University stuff - in the end, those who are best at knowing the system are the best at getting their points across. They know the full range, whereas new people don't. Barrier.


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Balbi said:


> I've seen jazz hands used at University stuff - in the end, those who are best at knowing the system are the best at getting their points across. They know the full range, whereas new people don't. Barrier.


 
If you want to speak, stick your hand up and you'll be put in the stack. Simplez.


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## Balbi (Apr 24, 2013)

Thora said:


> It must be really difficult to decide who has more privilege just by scanning faces in a big meeting


 
If you can attend the 6pm meetings at LSE or whatever, you're London class.


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> Common sense.


 
I'm one for adopting a horses for course approach.

But when there is a large group of a people, a lot of people don't feel comfortable talking and you end up with a small number of people gassing on.

So what methods do you prefer?


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## Balbi (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> If you want to speak, stick your hand up and you'll be put in the stack. Simplez.


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## stethoscope (Apr 24, 2013)

I was at a feminist action a while ago where all the meetings were conducted using this hand signal approach - which is immediately alienating if you're not 'clued up'. I just about learned the 'twinkle/downtwinkle' by the end of it. Whilst its important that discussions are such that people feel able to say stuff, not get talked over, etc. this stuff just seemed to be a bizarre distraction tbh.


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

steph said:


> I was at a feminist action a while ago where all the meetings were conducted using this hand signal approach - which is immediately alienating if you're not 'clued up' - I just about learned the 'twinkle/downtwinkle' by the end of it. Whilst its important that discussions are such that people feel able to say stuff, not get talked over, etc. this stuff just seemed to be a bizarre distraction tbh.


 
Well any decent facilitator will go over this if there are new faces about. You had a shit facilitator.


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## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm one for adopting a horses for course approach.
> 
> But when there is a large group of a people, a lot of people don't feel comfortable talking and you end up with a small number of people gassing on.
> 
> So what methods do you prefer?



If you've got yourselves into that situation you've problems anyway.

As I said above, smaller meetings. 

Seriously. Far more conducive to discussion.


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## Balbi (Apr 24, 2013)

Every bloody meeting an explanation to the new people, who'll have to attend a few meetings to get used to the rules. Good facilitating and chairing beats this stuff hands down - instant hierarchy of the knowledgable. A shitshow shibboleth.


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## stethoscope (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Well any decent facilitator will go over this if there are new faces about. You had a shit facilitator.



I've been to shitloads of actions over the years where we seemed to get on just fine without it though.


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## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

Less Meetings.

More chats.


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> If you've got yourselves into that situation you've problems anyway.
> 
> As I said above, smaller meetings.
> 
> Seriously. Far more conducive to discussion.


 
I agree but sometimes you can't help but have more than a few people in the discussion.

Also, even in small groups you get certain types mouthing off and reasoned voices being drowned out in the banter.


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## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

steph said:


> I was at a feminist action a while ago where all the meetings were conducted using this hand signal approach - which is immediately alienating if you're not 'clued up'. I just about learned the 'twinkle/downtwinkle' by the end of it. Whilst its important that discussions are such that people feel able to say stuff, not get talked over, etc. this stuff just seemed to be a bizarre distraction tbh.


 

is it just me or is anyone elses thoughts dominated by the spectacle of a room full of people who look suspiciously like a bunch of wankers doing jazz hands...jazz hands in the name of jesus christ . That shit is for unicyclists and jugglers .
And its got nothing to do with democracy because plainly some elite bunch of twats invented it and imposed it on others .
Capitalism is safe for another few centuries at least by the looks of things .


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I agree but sometimes you can't help but have more than a few people in the discussion.
> 
> Also, even in small groups you get certain types mouthing off and reasoned voices being drowned out in the banter.



Yep.

Avoid creating situations where these "problem meetings" are important. Devolve decision making and power to the very bottom.


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## J Ed (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> is it just me or is anyone elses thoughts dominated by the spectacle of a room full of people who look suspiciously like a bunch of wankers doing jazz hands...jazz hands in the name of jesus christ . That shit is for unicyclists and jugglers .
> And its got nothing to do with democracy because plainly some elite bunch of twats invented it and imposed it on others .
> Capitalism is safe for another few centuries at least by the looks of things .


 
Mi5 must be pissing themselves with laughter at this stuff tbh


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## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Fuck 'em. Them and their privilege-checking stack-obeying bullshit can fuck right off from any politics I have anything to do with. What a total waste of time, effort and energy, all to make some privileged cocksuckers feel better about themselves by ceding 1% of ground to people less privileged than them, basically salving their consciences for not sharing the other 99% of ground.
> 
> Kill 'em all, but slowly, in a work-camp. Every single one of the privilege-abusing, discourse-controlling shitcunts.


song was written for them


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## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Mi5 must be pissing themselves with laughter at this stuff tbh


 
 and the fash, its like a recruiting poster for them . If its making leftists want to kill them the effect on everyone else must be electric .

ive a conspiracy theory spooks are behind half of this shit . Face it, most of the wankers who fuck everything up went to school with them, and usually have a lot to lose. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day but without fail everytime capitalism meets a crisis wankers like this come out of the woodwork .

jazz fucking hands


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## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This was a feeling that some had about procedure and 'process not protest':
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
they should just hold up a sign saying _we are taking the piss, nothing to see here, move along_


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## articul8 (Apr 24, 2013)

If anything makes me see the benefit of Leninism it's the prospect of consensus-by-jazz-hands


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## DaveCinzano (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> Less Meetings.
> 
> More chats.


 
I think there is a balance to be struck - one _might_ reasonably say that the likes of Jim Boyling were able to have an undue and disproportionate negative influence on RTS due to the vulnerability of that group's culture* of 'real business is decided through the chats outside of the meetings' - a culture that IMO deepened post-J18.

* Or perhaps "the culture of the more experienced/veteran group members" - which whilst short of an actual leadership group, for various reasons tended to drive forward the group despite participating less in the larger group meetings where newer people came and shared their own views, opinions etc.


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## Red Cat (Apr 24, 2013)

There was a jazz hand occupation of a disused factory near us a couple of years ago. I went to one of their meetings with my new born and my 4 year old who drew pictures to give to the people in the meeting and I'm sure I must have broken all their rules, it was only after that it really hit me how out of touch I must have seemed to them. I remember a discussion about setting up a school there and people suggesting what kind of lessons could be given and I said that surely it would be better if they actually do something to the space they were using and have lessons or share skills through activity. I'm not sure what people thought of that cos I wasn't looking at their hands.


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## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

and heres another thing..progressive stack and jazz hands . What if your an african woman, possibly lesbian, whos lost her arms in a landmine explosion and you turn up to one of those things . As if life wasnt cruel enough..


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## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> AFA in a primary school circle.
> 
> The sign language stuff is apparently European and British, so the Americans can't be blamed - and you were there indavertenly popularising it at the start!  (just joking)
> 
> ...


Roberts Rules Of Order was American, and the sign language symbols are ASL based as I showed earlier with the ASL signing link. It's an import along with privilege theory.


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## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> I think there is a balance to be struck - one _might_ reasonably say that the likes of Jim Boyling were able to have an undue and disproportionate negative influence on RTS due to the vulnerability that group's culture* of 'real business is decided through the chats outside of the meetings' - a culture that IMO deepened post-J18.
> 
> * Or perhaps "the culture of the more experienced/veteran group members" - which whilst short of an actual leadership group, for various reasons tended to drive forward the group despite participating less in the larger group meetings where newer people came and shared their own views, opinions etc.



Aye .

"Chats" don't work for bigger, more formalised/institutionalised groups. But the decision making procedures reflect the problems with having these bigger organised "things".

As I mentioned a couple of years ago when this last came up, the jazz hands phenomenon is just the other side of the coin to the fossilised procedures of the labour movement (as aped by more traditional leftist groups and NUS politics etc.).

That's why these things need breaking down. So that power and control isn't something that can be proceduralised (for good or Ill) at the centre.


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## frogwoman (Apr 24, 2013)

there's also the fact that most people have never heard of jazz hands. that meeting seemed like one of those school summer camp things except with added guilt tripping. "Now kids, I know that we all want to do this but why dont we do that"


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 24, 2013)

Just started catching up on the British twitter intersectionality war. It's weirdly entertaining watching the  "intersectional, privilege-checking, anarchoid, useless liberals and the very slightly famous commentariat useless liberals tearing chunks out of each other. I can't decide which side is more smug, more self-regarding, more aggravating or more pointless.

Here's the latest contribution, a white, male, cisgender, anarchist's guide to self-flagellation, with shout out to the anarchist federation: http://infantile-disorder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/am-i-too-white-able-bodied-straight-and.html


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## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> That's why these things need breaking down. So that power and control isn't something that can be proceduralised (for good or Ill) at the centre.


 That's all very well, and smaller groups and local groups can fight to retain their autonomy. But like it or not there will be large gatherings and events and the anarcholeft has to have some ways of dealing with this. I remember mayday in manchester in (iirc) 2000, when hundreds turned up instead of the small "affinity groups" that the EF! organisers had wanted and the group that initiated the event had little clue what to do.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> Roberts Rules Of Order was American, and the sign language symbols are ASL based as I showed earlier with the ASL signing link. It's an import along with privilege theory.


 
Are we sure that the Americans didn't borrow it from the European squatted social centre activist scene before it was re-borrowed into Occupy London or whatever.



Casually Red said:


> a room full of people who look suspiciously like a bunch of wankers doing jazz hands...jazz hands in the name of jesus christ


 
The American part is its increasing use out of the closed room _in the open_ eg when speeches were being made as part of a sit-down demo at Times Square before the police cars came:






Protestors raising hands to shake them to display agreement with a speaker.

For good or ill they became a target of centre-left as well as right-wing attacks.

For some reason their press group mandated 2 protestors - Jason Guidas and Ketchup - to go on the Colbert Report, where surprise, surprise they are unfairly belittled:

See here: http://gawker.com/5855105/stephen-colbert-trolls-occupy-wall-street

and the comedian takes advantage of the hand signals to hit all of OWS for six (first part of this clip):


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 24, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Just started catching up on the British twitter intersectionality war. It's weirdly entertaining watching the "intersectional, privilege-checking, anarchoid, useless liberals and the very slightly famous commentariat useless liberals tearing chunks out of each other. I can't decide which side is more smug, more self-regarding, more aggravating or more pointless.
> 
> Here's the latest contribution, a white, male, cisgender, anarchist's guide to self-flagellation, with shout out to the anarchist federation: http://infantile-disorder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/am-i-too-white-able-bodied-straight-and.html


 
Aye, me too. Odd, innit. I posted this a page back but it got lost amidst the sparkle hands conversation so here it is again

ETA no it's not cos it's contained in what you've just posted


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## frogwoman (Apr 24, 2013)

"Now I know we're all very excited about the fashion show but why don't we just have this meeting instead, and remember if you've got too many privileges you have to go back to the back of the line"


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## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

Fucking hell. 

It's another world innit?

Very, very alienating stuff.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 24, 2013)

Oh, that's the geezer that I quoted much, much earlier in this very thread when he said "Straight white men who don't like intersectionality or privilege theory unfollow and if possible stop breathing".


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Just started catching up on the British twitter intersectionality war. It's weirdly entertaining watching the "intersectional, privilege-checking, anarchoid, useless liberals and the very slightly famous commentariat useless liberals tearing chunks out of each other. I can't decide which side is more smug, more self-regarding, more aggravating or more pointless.
> 
> Here's the latest contribution, a white, male, cisgender, anarchist's guide to self-flagellation, with shout out to the anarchist federation: http://infantile-disorder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/am-i-too-white-able-bodied-straight-and.html


 
Is he attacking just the SWP here or all socialists?

"White men - and it nearly always is white men - who claim that we can deal with racism, sexism and other forms of oppression 'after the revolution' entirely miss the point. Dealing with them is an integral part of the revolution."


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## DotCommunist (Apr 24, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Oh, that's the geezer that I quoted much, much earlier in this very thread when he said "Straight white men who don't like intersectionality or privilege theory unfollow and if possible stop breathing".


fucking hell, boiling it down to oppression top trumps, bring out the wheel etc


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> That's all very well, and smaller groups and local groups can fight to retain their autonomy. But like it or not there will be large gatherings and events and the anarcholeft has to have some ways of dealing with this. I remember mayday in manchester in (iirc) 2000, when hundreds turned up instead of the small "affinity groups" that the EF! organisers had wanted and the group that initiated the event had little clue what to do.



I remember that! I was there! (Sort of. We noticed the crowds and fucked off sharpish on our own...) I must have known you then?

Anyway, large gatherings and events, yeah, like I said a mixture of common sense and limiting the role of such gatherings.


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## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> "Now I know we're all very excited about the fashion show but why don't we just have this meeting instead, and remember if you've got too many privileges you have to go back to the back of the line"


 

meanwhile

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/mar/20/barclays-bonuses-budget-day


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> That's all very well, and smaller groups and local groups can fight to retain their autonomy. But like it or not there will be large gatherings and events and the anarcholeft has to have some ways of dealing with this. I remember mayday in manchester in (iirc) 2000, when hundreds turned up instead of the small "affinity groups" that the EF! organisers had wanted and the group that initiated the event had little clue what to do.



Was that the "Challenge Anneka/Anarchy" year?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Just started catching up on the British twitter intersectionality war. It's weirdly entertaining watching the "intersectional, privilege-checking, anarchoid, useless liberals and the very slightly famous commentariat useless liberals tearing chunks out of each other. I can't decide which side is more smug, more self-regarding, more aggravating or more pointless.
> 
> Here's the latest contribution, a white, male, cisgender, anarchist's guide to self-flagellation, with shout out to the anarchist federation: http://infantile-disorder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/am-i-too-white-able-bodied-straight-and.html






			
				that person said:
			
		

> As the Anarchist Federation women's caucus described in last year's inspirational pamplet 'The Class Struggle Analysis of Privilege':


 
It wasn't an AF pamphlet, none of it is AF policy, it was a contribution to an internal debate.


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Are we sure that the Americans didn't borrow it from the European squatted social centre activist scene before it was re-borrowed into Occupy London or whatever.



We can't be sure at this stage because so far it's been sourced by reference to media reporting.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 24, 2013)

thing is i think all of this stuff is incredibly important and does need to be dealt with, as the SWP case shows

i think there's also issues with racism in these organisations as well, there's bound to be, we're all products of capitalist society 

but jazz hands is not the way to fucking do it. whoever thought you could solve this shit with jazz hands and "intersectional" jargon thats going to fuck everyone off


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> I remember mayday in manchester in (iirc) 2000, when hundreds turned up instead of the small "affinity groups" that the EF! organisers had wanted and the group that initiated the event had little clue what to do.


 
my advice when that happens, take up an immediate collection before anyone gets the jazz hands out to object


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Is he attacking just the SWP here or all socialists?


 
The latter. The point is to equate privilege/intersectionality liberalism with opposition to racism, sexism and homophobia. If you don't accept their borrowed American analysis and structure, and you are a socialist, then by definition you think all that stuff is for "after the revolution".


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It wasn't an AF pamphlet, none of it is AF policy, it was a contribution to an internal debate.


 
What was the result of the internal debate in the end?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> Was that the "Challenge Anneka/Anarchy" year?


 
Was it this?
http://radicalmanchester.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/challenge-anarchy

Something similar to London MayDay's Anarcho-Monopoly - a series of potential protest sites all over central London?


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It wasn't an AF pamphlet, none of it is AF policy, it was a contribution to an internal debate.



Although it then got exported to the Bookfair?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> whoever thought you could solve this shit with jazz hands and "intersectional" jargon thats going to fuck everyone off


 
i suspect someone who doesnt want it solved, because its plainly a complete load of old bollocks. And while i dont consider myself any type of barometer of the working class Id be astounded if the average persons reaction to all of this wasnt _look at that bunch of hippy wankers_ . It seems positively designed to garner that very response .
Either its propagators are so completely up their own arses they are incapable of any rational thought or they are a bunch of spooks puppets . Or a bit of both . This is so obviously embarassing as a spectacle it shouldnt even need pointing out .


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

I first encountered this stuff in the early-mid 90s. A number of people i talked to at that time said they had experienced it in feminist consciousness raising groups in the 70s and amongst the greenham common end of the 'peace movement' - in both the US and the UK, and that their experience of the former was that it allowed a false sense of formal equality that allowed middle class feminists to dominate via other methods and offered a helping hand to w/c feminists who did want to dominate and control the groups.


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## DotCommunist (Apr 24, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> The latter. The point is to equate privilege/intersectionality liberalism with opposition to racism, sexism and homophobia. If you don't accept their borrowed American analysis and structure, and you are a socialist, then by definition you think all that stuff is for "after the revolution".


 

Thats incredibly patronizing. What do they think people did before the great gift of intersectional theory.


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> thing is i think all of this stuff is incredibly important and does need to be dealt with, as the SWP case shows
> 
> i think there's also issues with racism in these organisations as well, there's bound to be, we're all products of capitalist society
> 
> but jazz hands is not the way to fucking do it. whoever thought you could solve this shit with jazz hands and "intersectional" jargon thats going to fuck everyone off



Yes.

It raises a lot of valid issues to do power relationships and structures, the assumption of roles as activists (soft vanguardism), the ossification of movements of struggle into bureaucracies, Partyism, separation, specialisation, the spectacle and voyeuristic approaches to protest, etc etc etc.

The whole bubble thing and the moribundity of Leninist organisational models and the problems they produce are kinda linked here by their alienation from the everyday life of the proletariat. No?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> Although it then got exported to the Bookfair?


Maybe (didn't go last year, and hadn't seen it had been turned into one) but not in the sense of here is a pamphlet from the Af oputlining their understanding and critique of privilege theory, in the way that say, Against Parliament is.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> What was the result of the internal debate in the end?


Nothing i think.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> The latter. The point is to equate privilege/intersectionality liberalism with opposition to racism, sexism and homophobia. If you don't accept their borrowed American analysis and structure, and you are a socialist, then by definition you think all that stuff is for "after the revolution".


 

I think the SWP sexual assault botch-and-hide (plus having the rump SWP still oppose privilege theory as in Marxism 2013) has been a gift for the privilege theory crowd.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

I'm mildly concerned that a pretty standard way of having meetings is being confused and intertwinned with this tumblr style of privilege checking.


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Was it this?
> http://radicalmanchester.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/challenge-anarchy
> 
> Something similar to London MayDay's Anarcho-Monopoly - a series of potential protest sites all over central London?



Yes. That was it.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm mildly concerned that a pretty standard way of having meetings is being confused and intertwinned with this tumblr style of privilege checking.


 
they should work in a cheat code, so if you throw a YMCA you get the floor regardless


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm mildly concerned that a pretty standard way of having meetings is being confused and intertwinned with this tumblr style of privilege checking.



They have a lot in common.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> they should throw in a cheat code, so if you throw a YMCA you get the floor regardless


 
This


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm mildly concerned that a pretty standard way of having meetings is being confused and intertwinned with this tumblr style of privilege checking.


How about making some sort of post outlining how this is happening, why it's bad, and how this confusion has came about. Maybe pull out the positives from the 'pretty standard way of having meetings' (and it's not btw, it may be standard for a small section of a small sub-culture though) and what are it's limitations. That sort of thing.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I first encountered this stuff in the early-mid 90s. A number of people i talked to at that time said they had experienced it in feminist consciousness raising groups in the 70s and amongst the greenham common end of the 'peace movement' - in both the US and the UK, and that their experience of the former was that it allowed a false sense of formal equality that allowed middle class feminists to dominate via other methods and offered a helping hand to w/c feminists who did want to dominate and control the groups.


 
Can you be more specific - do you mean hand signalling, progressive stacks or wider privilege theory analysis - I don't - personally at least - remember any of it from the mid-2000s.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm mildly concerned that a pretty standard way of having meetings is being confused and intertwinned with this tumblr style of privilege checking.


 
The same useless liberals, slightly different context.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Nothing i think.


 
So neither adopted nor rejected, leaving some members peddling it and others not?


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> They have a lot in common.


 
Putting your hand up to speak instead of trying to barge your way into the conversation is pretty standard and sensible.

Temperature checks are handy. I don't think anyone is in love with it but it's practical and it _can_ get us from A to B.....if slowly at times.

But there are ways of doing fast consensus.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Can you be more specific - do you mean hand signalling, progressive stacks or wider privilege theory analysis - I don't - personally at least - remember any of it from the mid-2000s.


Hand signals, a form of general privilege theory (that also assumed a wider equality among women as a whole) and a sort of informal unstated assumption that _victims_ get to speak first (but not, of course, _to actually be listened to, _once they had finished talking the social relations carried on, the box had been ticked though).


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I first encountered this stuff in the early-mid 90s. A number of people i talked to at that time said they had experienced it in feminist consciousness raising groups in the 70s and amongst the greenham common end of the 'peace movement' - in both the US and the UK, and that their experience of the former was that it allowed a false sense of formal equality that allowed middle class feminists to dominate via other methods and offered a helping hand to w/c feminists who did want to dominate and control the groups.


 
its a blindingly obvious way to completely subvert internal democracy as well as alienate movements from the broader mass of the  population . A spooks wet dream .


----------



## J Ed (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I think the SWP sexual assault botch-and-hide (plus having the rump SWP still oppose privilege theory as in Marxism 2013) has been a gift for the privilege theory crowd.


 
There seems to be a big amount of overlap of privilege theory types and people who were most vocal in speaking out. It's a bit worrying to think that if some of these people weren't in favour of privilege theory then they might have gone along with the CC.


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Putting your hand up to speak instead of trying to barge your way into the conversation is pretty standard and sensible.
> 
> Temperature checks are handy. I don't think anyone is in love with it but it's practical and it _can_ get us from A to B.....if slowly at times.
> 
> But there are ways of doing fast consensus.



We're not talking about "putting your hand up" we're talking about a codified set of rules and the creation of an insider language designed to engineer procedure.


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Maybe (didn't go last year, and hadn't seen it had been turned into one) but not in the sense of here is a pamphlet from the Af oputlining their understanding and critique of privilege theory, in the way that say, Against Parliament is.


It was used at London and Bristol http://www.afed.org.uk/blog/state/3...rivilege-theory--from-the-womens-caucus-.html

I don't know why infantile-disorder called it an international pamphlet, but the caucus's work on class struggle and privilige theory is certainly being used as a referrent.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> So neither adopted nor rejected, leaving some members peddling it and others not?


Seems to be the situation, nothing adopted nationally as far as i can tell. Locally, they don't seem to bothered about it (whilst not seeming to have as much emphasis on class as when i was a member, but i think that's because of their age, all very young). Its the students who were in the orbit of the swp who seem to be the only people going on about it. And boy, do they go on about it.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> It was used at London and Bristol http://www.afed.org.uk/blog/state/3...rivilege-theory--from-the-womens-caucus-.html
> 
> I don't know why infantile-disorder called it an international pamphlet, but the caucus's work on class struggle and privilige theory is certainly being used as a referrent.


Not sure what you mean by used- do you mean on sale? If so, well someone's printed them, they have to go!


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Not sure what you mean by used- do you mean on sale? If so, well someone's printed them, they have to go!


No, used as the basis for their workshops


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> We're not talking about "putting your hand up" we're talking about a codified set of rules and the creation of an insider language designed to engineer procedure.


 
But hand signals are just really for the facilitator so they know where to lob them in the stack.

Like is someone has a direct point to what the current speaker is gabbling on about. Or a technical point. Or whatever. For the record I'm really not a massive fan but if you're trying to move towards consensus then I'm yet to see another technique working appropriately.


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> But hand signals are just really for the facilitator so they know where to lob them in the stack.
> 
> Like is someone has a direct point to what the current speaker is gabbling on about. Or a technical point. Or whatever. For the record I'm really not a massive fan but if you're trying to move towards consensus then I'm yet to see another technique working appropriately.



My main problem with it is that the stack is stacked according to appearance, which can be very misleading.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 24, 2013)

Sounds a bit like a sort of situation where something edges towards being a de facto position, as its critics dont want to tackle it head on.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> But hand signals are just really for the facilitator so they know where to lob them in the stack.
> 
> Like is someone has a direct point to what the current speaker is gabbling on about. Or a technical point. Or whatever. For the record I'm really not a massive fan but if you're trying to move towards consensus then I'm yet to see another technique working appropriately.



Take a vote. Problem solved. As an added bonus some hippies may sulk.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> No, used as the basis for their workshops


What workshops?


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> But hand signals are just really for the facilitator so they know where to lob them in the stack.
> 
> Like is someone has a direct point to what the current speaker is gabbling on about. Or a technical point. Or whatever. For the record I'm really not a massive fan but if you're trying to move towards consensus then I'm yet to see another technique working appropriately.



I'm not trying to move towards consensus though...


----------



## Balbi (Apr 24, 2013)

The best thing to do would be to find some middle/upper class minority group people, and working class white people - get them to be stacked, and then pull the big reveal on the facilitator and nodding dogs.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

Balbi said:


> The best thing to do would be to find some middle/upper class minority group people, and working class white people - get them to be stacked, and then pull the big reveal on the facilitator and nodding dogs.


 
you need to check yourself for suggesting such people even exist


----------



## Balbi (Apr 24, 2013)

You need to check yourself for suggesting they don't!


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What workshops?


Meeting/workshop, whatever you want to call it. The Privilege Theory one on the timetable: http://anarchistbookfair.org.uk/whatson.html


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 24, 2013)

thing is i've experienced sexism in left wing organisations, probably the same amount at least than i have in the "real world". i've experienced "anti-zionist" racism as well. there's also a danger that if somebody is doing all this jazz hand shit (the guy going on about privileged was pretty white and male himself in that video) there's a danger that they'll just be blind to their own prejudice and just think right that's that I dont need to do any more and examine my own actions, I'll "check my privilege" by having a go at somebody else. Or at worst use this shit as a cover. Certainly some people on the left seem to think that just because that's their politics they don't need to examine their behaviour any further. "Oh yeah well i let the blacks go first isnt that nice of me".


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> privilege theory types


 
Attacking feminist socialists who criticise Beyonce [for being a millionaire employer or promoting  fairly crude antifeminist ideas (see Nasty Girl etc) or Pepsi or Revlon or Unilever any other number of anti-feminist firms] is fighting capitalism:




> When people attempt to undermine Beyonce’s empowerment and autonomy by defining *her merit by what she does or wears*, they’re actually reinforcing the oppressive society that dictates that everything including women and their rights are commodities and for sale and alienated from their person. This…
> 
> white feminists, PLEASE REMEMBER: just because you are for women’s empowerment does not necessarily mean you have completely shed your own racial prejudices so please curb your compulsion to police the feminist expressions of WoC because the policing often comes from a slightly less benevolent (read: _patriarchal and a little racist_) place. so, have a seat.


 
White feminists are more patriarchal than non-white ones. Yep, some have passed this stop too.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Take a vote. Problem solved. As an added bonus some hippies may sulk.


 
I see your channeling a 3rd rate ern on this sunny afternoon.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> My main problem with it is that the stack is stacked according to appearance, which can be very misleading.


 
Not any stack I've seen.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Not any stack I've seen.


 
How else can they possibly judge?


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Not any stack I've seen.


How else would they do it? How can they tell class from appearance, for example?


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> I'm not trying to move towards consensus though...


 
No?

Majority rule?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

Self-certification.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> How else would they do it? How can they tell class from appearance, for example?


 
I've never been at a meeting using this technique where appearance has been used to decide in what order you speak. The only preference I've seen and given is when someone has said very little and all hte other mouths have been chuntering away all night.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I've never been at a meeting using this technique where appearance has been used to decide in what order you speak. The only preference I've seen and given is when someone has said very little and all hte other mouths have been chuntering away all night.


So what basis were the stacks stacked on? Come on, you need to answer this.


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> No?
> 
> Majority rule?



Nope.

Not that either.

Depends on the purpose of the meeting/gathering doesn't it? 

There's no need to fetishise "consensus".


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> So what basis were the stacks stacked on? Come on, you need to answer this.


 
The order of the raised mitts. As well you know.


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I've never been at a meeting using this technique where appearance has been used to decide in what order you speak. The only preference I've seen and given is when someone has said very little and all hte other mouths have been chuntering away all night.


Ok, just a way to try and make sure it's not just the loudest voices vying for attention?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Attacking feminist socialists who criticise Beyonce [for being a millionaire employer or promoting fairly crude antifeminist ideas (see Nasty Girl etc) or Pepsi or Revlon or Unilever any other number of anti-feminist firms] is fighting capitalism:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
wtf?? beyonce says all sorts of anti-feminist and homophobic shit 
"if you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it" etc


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 24, 2013)

Does anyone else think this kind of propaganda is insulting and patronising, regardless of your opinions on intersectionality or whatever.






The sentence "intersectionality is the belief that oppressions are linked and can not be solved alone" is so much of an obvious truism that it's more or less a platitude.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I've never been at a meeting using this technique where appearance has been used to decide in what order you speak. The only preference I've seen and given is when someone has said very little and all hte other mouths have been chuntering away all night.


 
No one has suggested it is being used in Britain now - but it was extensively used in America a year back.

That much - let people who haven't spoken, speak - is sort of a truism. Organising an order then encouraging a speak just once 'step up step back' policy is another thing.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 24, 2013)

They lack class


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> So what basis were the stacks stacked on? Come on, you need to answer this.


How to prioritise the quiet ones once the loudest ones have had their say, sort of thing.


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> The order of the raised mitts. As well you know.



So you're just talking about people sticking their hands up to speak and the chair or whoever noting em down in order?

That's no really the procedure we're discussing here is it?


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> How else can they possibly judge?


 
Again, I think folk are getting confused with this style of meeting with some privilege checking.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> The order of the raised mitts. As well you know.


Hang on, you claimed 'progressive stacks' are not stacked on the basis of appearance, you're then asked on what basis they are stacked and your answer is that it's first come first served. Are you talking about a 'progressive stack' or not? if you are then you still need to answer the question of what basis they are stacked on rather than appearance, otherwise you're not offering any defence for the practice at all.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> Ok, just a way to try and make sure it's not just the loudest voices vying for attention?


 
That's why I appreciate it.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Again, I think folk are getting confused with this style of meeting with some privilege checking.


Pretty clear that you're the one confusing a 'progressive stack' with something that they are specifically designed to deal with and that its practitioners have identified as a problem.


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Does anyone else think this kind of propaganda is insulting and patronising, regardless of your opinions on intersectionality or whatever.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




What's interesting about that is that there is no indication at all about what "oppression" really means.


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> The order of the raised mitts. As well you know.


But surely the loudest ones would also be quickest to stick their mitts up? So do they let people speak in reverse order of putting mitts up then?


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Hang on, you claimed 'progressive stacks' are not stacked on the basis of appearance, you're then asked on what basis they are stacked and your answer is that it's first come first served. Are you talking about a 'progressive stack' or not? if you are then you still need to answer the question of what basis they are stacked on rather than appearance, otherwise you're not offering any defence for the practice at all.


 
No I haven't. At all. Go back and read.


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> But surely the loudest ones would also be quickest to stick their mitts up? So do they let people speak in reverse order of putting mitts up then?



..and people would just stick their hand up at the start to "reserve" their speaking spot.

In fact isn't there quite a famous example of a similar procedure being used in this way?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> How to prioritise the quiet ones once the loudest ones have had their say, sort of thing.


Make them speak by forcing them to, like job based participation 

There are no easy answers to this are there, but there are wrong answers i think. The progressive stack is one of them.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Again, I think folk are getting confused with this style of meeting with some privilege checking.


 
What? The 'progressive stack' aims to select for members of 'oppressed groups' when people want to speak. If you don't know the people at the meeting how are you going to judge whether they're a member of one of these groups unless you do so by sight?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> No I haven't. At all. Go back and read.


Yes you have:




			
				cesare said:
			
		

> My main problem with it is that the stack is stacked according to appearance, which can be very misleading.





DrRingDing said:


> Not any stack I've seen.


 
So we have you saying 'progressive stacks' don't stack according to appearance.

These 'progressive stacks' that you've seen, if they don't order on appearance what did they order on? If you again answer that it's first come first served then you're not talking about a 'progressive stack', and the confusion is yours.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 24, 2013)

what about "progressive stack" based on class then, out of interest? A "no privately educated people wittering on" rule would tempt me....


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Make them speak by forcing them to, like job based participation
> 
> There are no easy answers to this are there, but there are wrong answers i think. The progressive stack is one of them.


I just don't see how the progressive stack would work in practice unless it's a swift judgment call by the facilitator based on appearance.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Does anyone else think this kind of propaganda is insulting and patronising, regardless of your opinions on intersectionality or whatever.


 
'No liberation without equal representation' is an interesting one. 
What should the Oxbridge quota be?
Given that there are 7.24 million between ages of 18-24 in Britain, but only 40,000 in that age bracket who have attended Oxbridge - and over half of Oxbridge is private school.
What is the equal Oxbridge graduate:non-Oxbridge  representation ratio?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 24, 2013)

In a 'progressive stack' Laurie Penny, a privately educated upper-middle-class columnist, would come before a white working-class male since she identifies as working-class and poor and goodness knows how many other identity politics subgroups. That's ridiculous.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

I think this sort of thing has been useful as it clearly shows a non-class/cross-class model of organising is the default assumption for many people who think of themselves as radicals, as the only legitimate model, one that just needs a bit of self-finessing, but is essentially benign at worst or helpful at best.


----------



## brogdale (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> What's interesting about that is that there is no indication at all about what "oppression" really means.


 
Typical dotted square 'blindness'


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What? The 'progressive stack' aims to select for members of 'oppressed groups' when people want to speak. If you don't know the people at the meeting how are you going to judge whether they're a member of one of these groups unless you do so by sight?


 
I'm not talking about the 'progressive' stack. If you read back a lot of peope were getting upset with the hand signals popularly used in consensus based groups and that was getting tied in with this 'progressive' bother.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Yes you have:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Stack. Not progressive stack.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> I just don't see how the progressive stack would work in practice unless it's a swift judgment call by the facilitator based on appearance.


There really can't be - hence the silence when asked on what other grounds it could work. I can see one other way, people self-certify themselves as bourgeois or something prior to the meeting. On small scale extremely local community type initiatives this sort of thing would be done informally anyway as people know each other, this mess is partly due to the fact that people in these groups don't know each other in that way, don;t really work live and drink/eat together, they have come together as part of an event rather than through everyday life (this might only apply to stuff like occupy).


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

could you not try just punching a few people and see how you get on with that


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Stack. Not progressive stack.


Hey, guess what we're talking about?

Do you really think we're on about queuing?


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm not talking about the 'progressive' stack. If you read back a lot of peope were getting upset with the hand signals popularly used in consensus based groups and that was getting tied in with this 'progressive' bother.



So hand signals (beyond merely raising your hand to notify your wish to speak) good or bad?


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Hey, guess what we're talking about?
> 
> Do you really think we're on about queuing?


 
If you read back and not jumped in I was defending the method of consensus decision making.


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> There really can't be - hence the silence when asked on what other grounds it could work. I can see one other way, people self-certify themselves as bourgeois or something prior to the meeting. On small scale extremely local community type initiatives this sort of thing would be done informally anyway as people know each other, this mess is partly due to the fact that people in these groups don't know each other in that way, don;t really work live and drink/eat together, they have come together as part of an event rather than through everyday life (this might only apply to stuff like occupy).



Ex-fucking-actly.

The clue to the answer is here too...


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> So hand signals (beyond merely raising your hand to notify your wish to speak) good or bad?


 
They do more good than harm IME.

They enable people to get a word in edge ways. You can get a feel for what's possible with and wanted by the group.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> wtf?? beyonce says all sorts of anti-feminist and homophobic shit
> "if you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it" etc


 
This chorus is repeated half a dozen times in one of her songs where she is credited as writer and producer

"Nasty put some clothes on, I told you /
Don't walk out your house without no clothes on, I told you /
Girl whatchu thinkin' about lookin' that tow down [ugly], I told you /
These men don't want no hot female that's-been-round-the-block-female, you nasty girl"


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm not talking about the 'progressive' stack. If you read back a lot of peope were getting upset with the hand signals popularly used in consensus based groups and that was getting tied in with this 'progressive' bother.


 
Everyone else was. So maybe it's you who's confused about what we're talking about.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> In a 'progressive stack' Laurie Penny, a privately educated upper-middle-class columnist, would come before a white working-class male since she identifies as working-class and poor and goodness knows how many other identity politics subgroups. That's ridiculous.


 
Why can't the white male simply identify as immigrant? That's what this is all leading to.


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> They do more good than harm IME.
> 
> They enable people to get a word in edge ways. You can get a feel for what's possible with and wanted by the group.



They exclude people who are uncomfortable with it. They exclude those who are not familiar with the vocabulary of hand signals. They (can) serve as a mask for intrinsic problems with participation.

They do have a role, a limited one, at some meetings I guess, but as a generalised approach? Hell no!


----------



## J Ed (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Why can't the white male simply identify as immigrant? That's what this is all leading to.


 
There are tumblr blogs where white people genuinely identify as being Japanese or black, so there's always that option.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> They exclude people who are uncomfortable with it. They exclude those who are not familiar with the vocabulary of hand signals. They (can) serve as a mask for intrinsic problems with participation.
> 
> They do have a role, a limited one, at some meetings I guess, but as a generalised approach? Hell no!


 
As I said earlier any facilitator worth their salt would go over the hand signals first. It's not learning BSL.


----------



## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> Yes. That was it.


That was it, and a phrase in the article sums up exactly what I was talking about "there was also a group of about 200 people who we didn’t have facilitators for". Oh noes! We didn't have facilitators for them! So many of the anrchoid events around that time were inspired by raves and other events and unfortunately often had a similar producer/consumer divide. The producers would organise the fun games, the public would turn up and participate.

I was also there at the Sheffield event that they say was an inspiration. That was based on several tiny groups who all knew each otehr and who all made on the spot decisions. It was what chilango wants, i suppose. But then in the heaving industrial metropolis of Manchester on May 1st, the same model didn't work.

People turned up and there wasn't enough facilitators for them! I was one of those excess people, and we were fairly successful as a 200 strong crowd. People have to know ways of organising as a large crowd, instead of just backing away and deciding it's not your thing.


----------



## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> As I said earlier any facilitator worth their salt would go over the hand signals first. It's not learning BSL.


So the system working relies on a cadre of trained facilitators to make it work?


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Everyone else was. So maybe it's you who's confused about what we're talking about.


 
If you look people have been equatting hand signals with progessive stacks as mentioned more than once.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This chorus is repeated half a dozen times in one of her songs where she is credited as writer and producer
> 
> "Nasty put some clothes on, I told you /
> Don't walk out your house without no clothes on, I told you /
> ...


 
yeah how can anyone who's a feminist think that's ok? 

what's next, anti-racists defending the lyrics of skrewdriver songs?


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> So the system working relies on a cadre of trained facilitators to make it work?


 
Knowing a handful of hand signals isn't a big ask to go over at a start of a meeting for the order, fairness and lack of stress it gives.


----------



## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Knowing a handful of hand signals isn't a big ask to go over at a start of a meeting for the order, fairness and lack of stress it gives.


Managed fairness. Engineered fairness. And these facilitators' skill sets just happen to be the things that middle and upper class people are good at...


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

Dont mean to be pessimistic but the more of this stuff i read the more i start to think the methodology used is academic . Theres far *far* too many wankers out there embedded in or attracted to these left wing groups to permit me to have a shred of confidence, much less interest in, whatever decision or plan it is they eventually arrive at as a result of all their jazz handing and white man hating .
I can just imagine my factory colleagues reactions to this stuff if they were ever confronted with it . Its pitiful .
i dont mean to tar everyone on the left with that brush but the ships way too top heavy with self hating arseholes to go anywhere


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Knowing a handful of hand signals isn't a big ask to go over at a start of a meeting for the order, fairness and lack of stress it gives.


...and all the people who turned up, saw this and thought, _nah_ and just walked away


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Knowing a handful of hand signals isn't a big ask to go over at a start of a meeting for the order, fairness and lack of stress it gives.


 
it makes everyone look like a bunch of complete wankers It is completely offputting for normal people . Can you grasp that .


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 24, 2013)

> it makes everyone look like a bunch of complete wankers It is completely offputting for normal people .


 
_Normal_ people? Seriously?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> it makes everyone look like a bunch of complete wankers It is completely offputting for normal people . Can you grasp that .


 
Exactly.

It's almost as if these groups are using these cult-like theatre school mannerisms to filter out people with any sense of self-awareness


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> it makes everyone look like a bunch of complete wankers It is completely offputting for normal people . Can you grasp that .


 
How does the meetings you attend organise....and more importantly how does it make you look?


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 24, 2013)

> Exactly.
> 
> It's almost as if these groups are using these cult-like theatre school mannerisms to filter out people with any sense of self-awareness


 
Wow.  How many here have actually attended any style of large group meeting that has used hand signals?

Cult like? Seriously, lots of people only use the raising of hand signal anyway...hardly WACO in the making.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Exactly.
> 
> It's almost as if these groups are using these cult-like theatre school mannerisms to filter out people with any sense of self-awareness


 
spot on

if youd so little self respect to go along with that shit youd go along with anything . I dont need a psychology degree to figure that out . But chances are the cunts who came up with it have one .


----------



## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

By all means, groups can decide to use hand signals. But an open group that's supposed to be democratic should place the least possible restrictions on people who want to get involved, rather than just assuming they want all this organisational baggage.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Wow.  How many here have actually attended any style of large group meeting that has used hand signals?


None i bet. Not a one


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> ...and all the people who turned up, saw this and thought, _nah_ and just walked away


 
So, what's your.....







.....proposal then?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yeah how can anyone who's a feminist think that's ok?


 
*You've just committed some patriarchal chauvinism and a little racism, frogwoman.*

Remember WoC privilege theory anti-racists have already explained, you ought to have "curb[ed] your compulsion to police the feminist expressions of a WoC" [Beyonce], since this policing can be "slightly less benevolent" namely "patriarchal and a little racist" instead you should "have a seat" ie be silent and consider who to discuss on the basis of their skin colour _not_ their sexist and capitalist actions.

_You can have privilege without power! __Fight all oppression!_


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 24, 2013)

it discriminates against the arthritic who won't be able to throw shapes as quick as others and will there fore be alienated or as it shall henceforth be known 'destacked'


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> it discriminates against the arthritic who won't be able to throw shapes as quick as others and will there fore be alienated or as it shall henceforth be known 'destacked'


 
I think Laurie Penny's got a Workers Girder article in that.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 24, 2013)

Just to chip in my two cents' worth.

This "anti-jazz hands" thing for expressing disagreement with (I presume?) a speaker: it seems to me to be a very passive-aggressive means of channelling the kinds of disputes and disagreements that inevitably happen in any human gathering into a form that can't really allow the person disagreeing to really register that disagreement with any real force.

I mean, look at the kind of criticisms sihhi and frogwoman just made of those Beyonce lyrics. Some obscure hand signals would hardly substitute for that kind of thing.


----------



## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> it discriminates against the arthritic who won't be able to throw shapes as quick as others and will there fore be alienated or as it shall henceforth be known 'destacked'


"Comrade Rykov was not seen at the annual Central Working Group ceilidh last night. Sources close to the CeWoG say that he may have been destacked for his dissenting views."


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> If you look people have been equatting hand signals with progessive stacks as mentioned more than once.


 
Not really, though both make the group appear like a cult to the causal observer.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> it makes everyone look like a bunch of complete wankers It is completely offputting for normal people . Can you grasp that .


 
Feast your eyes:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/types-of-hipster-you-encounter-in-london


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> _Normal_ people? Seriously?


 
yes, normal people . Normal people dont go around doing this shit . They dont hate themselves because theyre white and male, and they dont signal their approval like the chorus line from the black and white fucking minstrels .


----------



## Thora (Apr 24, 2013)

I went to some meetings at the Bristol anarchist bookfair recently and realised I must be getting old, because I was dressed like a normal person and irritated by the smell


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> That was it, and a phrase in the article sums up exactly what I was talking about "there was also a group of about 200 people who we didn’t have facilitators for". Oh noes! We didn't have facilitators for them! So many of the anrchoid events around that time were inspired by raves and other events and unfortunately often had a similar producer/consumer divide. The producers would organise the fun games, the public would turn up and participate.
> 
> I was also there at the Sheffield event that they say was an inspiration. That was based on several tiny groups who all knew each otehr and who all made on the spot decisions. It was what chilango wants, i suppose. But then in the heaving industrial metropolis of Manchester on May 1st, the same model didn't work.
> 
> People turned up and there wasn't enough facilitators for them! I was one of those excess people, and we were fairly successful as a 200 strong crowd. People have to know ways of organising as a large crowd, instead of just backing away and deciding it's not your thing.



Yeah.

I think it was at that crux where people were wanting to move away from the conspiratorial path that the direct action scene was being pushed down post Newbury and into something more based upon mass participation, but still heavily influenced by idea of the "action". Challenge Anarchy was a good example of how the two didn't always make a neat match. It did work on a number of occasions the big M41 RTS being a good example. 

FWIW I don't recall any mention of the Sheffield thing in the planning meetings, but I could easily have missed that. My idea was even worse for the record. But I'll claim responsibility for the poster/logo...

It was a key time for EF! Et al in trying to figure out where to go next. Underground with the ELF, summit hopping, annual spectaculars, community organising etc. we're all in the mix and whilst some of the more obvious pitfalls were avoided the movement did start to wither pretty quickly with it's loss of direction.

You can see its influence on occupy and so on though, but they seem to have taken some of the weaknesses as a starting point (the mass happening, and the whole consensus,hand signal thing being discussed here too).

But, yet again, I'm digressing, we need some hand signal emotes to shut me up...


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Another point: what's to stop white middle-class activists successfully channeling and employing their 'social capital' resources to bulk up on privilege theory and how best to progressive stack (without it becoming oppression olympics) and facilitating manners so they can teach others below them how it should be done? Couldn't this skew the noble intent?


Isn't there a danger that the privilege theorising can turn into something of a game as to who is better at having checked their privilege?
 

Won't at least some of the 'minorities' (immigrants, disabled people and women though equals are marginalised under capitalism) feel like they are being used as a football by others? Isn't this a possibility at all?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 24, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> The background to all this of course is that the reason these groups have to theorize participation in this way is precisely because they _aren't_ predominantly led by the marginalized. Groups that coalesce around ideas rather than shared experience are inevitably going to be cross-class, and for a variety of reasons will tend towards dominance by the people who are more dominant in society as a whole. There's a reason why the Quakers are cited as the model here (religion is also a question of ideals that can be held by anyone), and not any other of the variety of forms of working-class direct democracy that have emerged over the past 2 centuries.
> 
> Since working-class democratic assemblies are based on the _experience_ of marginalization, firstly the need for re-ordering everyone's privilege is less of an issue and secondly, the organic emergence of group leaders from within the marginalized group _is not necessarily a bad thing_ (certainly not in the same way that middle class domination of socialist and protest groups is). That's why the Quakers are the example and not say trade union democracy or revolutionary democracy, both of which are generally variations of the elected chair/small assembly/vote by show of hands or ballot /mandated delegates model.
> 
> The whole thing just seems like yet another way of dealing with a fundamental contradiction. If you're middle class you should be peripheral in any important social movement, but no-one likes to be peripheral to something they feel strongly about. So you invent a way to make yourself central by being the guardian of the "inclusivity" rules.


 
I'd like to stick a spikey fist up the arse of their inclusivity rules, the pathetic bastards.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> yes, normal people . Normal people dont go around doing this shit . They dont hate themselves because theyre white and male, and they dont signal their approval like the chorus line from the black and white fucking minstrels .


 
Eh? _Normal_ people don't use hand signals? _Normal_ people don't raise their hands, clap, wave, thumbs up etc? 

What has this particular set of hand signals got to do with _'They dont hate themselves because theyre white and male....'  _


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Feast your eyes:
> 
> http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/types-of-hipster-you-encounter-in-london


 

jesus i hate hipsters


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> *You've just committed some patriarchal chauvinism and a little racism, frogwoman.*
> 
> Remember WoC privilege theory anti-racists have already explained, you ought to have "curb[ed] your compulsion to police the feminist expressions of a WoC" [Beyonce], since this policing can be "slightly less benevolent" namely "patriarchal and a little racist" instead you should "have a seat" ie be silent and consider who to discuss on the basis of their skin colour _not_ their sexist and capitalist actions.
> 
> _You can have privilege without power! __Fight all oppression!_


 
Somebody who's earning billions of pounds isn't allowed to have their privilege checked because they're black, great


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Another point: what's to stop white middle-class activists successfully channeling and employing their 'social capital' resources to bulk up on privilege theory and how best to progressive stack (without it becoming oppression olympics) and facilitating manners so they can teach others below them how it should be done? Couldn't this skew the noble intent?
> 
> 
> Isn't there a danger that the privilege theorising can turn into something of a game as to who is better at having checked their privilege?
> ...




...and again,the purpose of meeting needs consideration.

Is it a discussion/talking shop? Is it organisational? Internal? External? Surely the relevance of what a speaker has to say to the goal of meeting should be taken into account.

I'm often quiet in meetings where I haven't anything constructive to add or lack the knowledge/experience to make a useful point. What's the point in shutting more relevant speakers up to force me to say " yeah, er, well, dunno really"?


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Eh? _Normal_ people don't use hand signals? _Normal_ people don't raise their hands, clap, wave, thumbs up etc?
> 
> What has this particular set of hand signals got to do with _'They dont hate themselves because theyre white and male....'  _



So people already have a set of commonly understood hand signals? Why not just stick with them then?


----------



## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> But, yet again, I'm digressing, we need some hand signal emotes to shut me up...


 I'd write a proper reply, but I'm too busy trying to work out who you are... Who's side were you on, when the Free Trade Hall debacle happened...


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 24, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Eh? _Normal_ people don't use hand signals? _Normal_ people don't raise their hands, clap, wave, thumbs up etc?
> What has this particular set of hand signals got to do with _'They dont hate themselves because theyre white and male....'  _


 
No they don't - not like this, anyway. Raise your hands, clap, wave, give the thumbs up - you'll do that spontaneously in a framework you take for granted having been born and brought up in any given culture.

Or you could develop your own set of obscure hand signals which few if any people in your culture will understand - but you won't be trying to communicate with them anyway.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 24, 2013)

I've been at meetings where the hand signals were used and frankly I always thought it was ridiculous. It made what should have been meaningful conversations and debates about actions, resolving issues within he group and general decision making into something resembling a bastard cross between Kenny Everett's 'Brother Lee Love' sketches and those twats doing the hand jive during the closing credits of 'Blockbusters.'

Far better (and more practical) just to have a chair/facilitator who actually knows what they're doing and go from there, IMHO.


----------



## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Or you could develop your own set of obscure hand signals which few if any people in your culture will understand - but you won't be trying to communicate with them anyway.


 Is there an anthropological term for this kind of in-group marker? One that you can teach us so we can knowingly drop the term and thereby exclude the hipsters when we meet them?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

its a dead fucking loss , a waste of time .


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Identity politics wanker at my uni (the one I mentioned a few posts back with the Foucault finger puppets who's gonna be a Sabb next year):
> 
> 
> 
> The cancer.is.spreading


 
Ask him who decides what is "properly inclusive", please. Tell him that if he doesn't answer, a middle-aged Jewish "person with disabilities" is going to come up there and exert physical force direct action on his identity-politicking arse.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> jesus i hate hipsters


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> Is there an anthropological term for this kind of in-group marker? One that you can teach us so we can knowingly drop the term and thereby exclude the hipsters when we meet them?


 
Off the top of my head, the best I can come up with is "boundary marker" but there must be a better one. . .


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> ...
> 
> I'm often quiet in meetings where I haven't anything constructive to add or lack the knowledge/experience to make a useful point. What's the point in shutting more relevant speakers up to force me to say " yeah, er, well, dunno really"?


 
exactly . A lot of meetings Ive organised and even spoke at  have people going there who want to listen, maybe just to one or 2 people .
A decent chair will make sure everyone who wants to make a point or ask a question gets to do it, and if your talking shit you get told so . And even if the chairs no good the people in the room should insist on it .


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Somebody who's earning billions of pounds isn't allowed to have their privilege checked because they're black, great


 
* I'm sorry you've already been told to _have a seat_ -(hint: that means _be silent_.)_ *_

You must only attack white people who are the same skin colour as you, since you are white.
_Only_ black women - *not* black men *not* white women - _those who are in the same intersection hence have lived experience of the same cross-sections of oppression - _may criticise Beyonce. They, thus, are incapable of "undermining Beyonce’s empowerment and autonomy" and will not "define her merit by what she does or wears" meaning they are highly unlikely to be "reinforcing the oppressive society that dictates that everything including women and their rights are commodities and for sale and alienated from their person".


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> I'd write a proper reply, but I'm too busy trying to work out who you are... Who's side were you on, when the Free Trade Hall debacle happened...



Pm me.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> Is there an anthropological term for this kind of in-group marker? One that you can teach us so we can knowingly drop the term and thereby exclude the hipsters when we meet them?





Idris2002 said:


> Off the top of my head, the best I can come up with is "boundary marker" but there must be a better one. . .


A shibboleth? ( Of which we must have none).


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 24, 2013)

Balbi said:


> I've seen jazz hands used at University stuff - in the end, those who are best at knowing the system are the best at getting their points across. They know the full range, whereas new people don't. Barrier.


 
So we're back to social and cultural capital, and the disproportionate benefits that accrue to the middle class, again.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 24, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> No they don't - not like this, anyway. Raise your hands, clap, wave, give the thumbs up - you'll do that spontaneously in a framework you take for granted having been born and brought up in any given culture.
> 
> Or you could develop your own set of obscure hand signals which few if any people in your culture will understand - but you won't be trying to communicate with them anyway.


 
As I was saying:



_Note the special hand gestures._


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> So people already have a set of commonly understood hand signals? Why not just stick with them then?


 
except theyre normal hand signals for normal people .


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

I think we should have local hand signals for local people.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 24, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Oh, that's the geezer that I quoted much, much earlier in this very thread when he said "Straight white men who don't like intersectionality or privilege theory unfollow and if possible stop breathing".


 
Whoever wrote that needs to check his passive-aggressvity privilege.


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

Some normal people use the hand signals to talk with normally, and that's a cross class thing as well.


----------



## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> Pm me.


No, I'm too worried you're on of the wankers I hate. Although tbh none of them would have known any AFA/Red Action people


----------



## J Ed (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> * I'm sorry you've already been told to _have a seat_ -(hint: that means _be silent_.)_ *_
> 
> You must only attack white people who are the same skin colour as you, since you are white.
> _Only_ black women - *not* black men *not* white women - _those who are in the same intersection hence have lived experience of the same cross-sections of oppression - _may criticise Beyonce. They, thus, are incapable of "undermining Beyonce’s empowerment and autonomy" and will not "define her merit by what she does or wears" meaning they are highly unlikely to be "reinforcing the oppressive society that dictates that everything including women and their rights are commodities and for sale and alienated from their person".


 
I've had people tell me this, always non-Muslim identity politics types re: Islamists who call for the death of gay people but apparently there's an exception - if you study Islam in depth and speak classical Arabic (unlike most Muslims) then you can criticise Islamists for calling for the death of gay people. I have no idea how far this logic extends, should only Mormon police officers in America rescue abused children from FLDS cults in Utah? What level of operating thetan do you have to be to confront a Scientologist shop lifter?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Rob Ray made a point on libcom worth reading:

http://libcom.org/blog/rob-ray/meetings-which-dont-drag-03102006



> For the benefit of those not in the know, I should explain that wavy hands are the strange and unloved progeny of summit-hoppers who got fed up with people interrupting meetings to agree, at length, with things that had already been said.
> 
> The fundamental problem was that the solution – a series of hand gestures that would baffle deaf people everywhere - was worse than the problem, with stupidly large chunks of every meeting being given over to explaining that doing ‘Jazz Hands’ meant you agreed with something, making a ‘T’ shape was admonishing someone for going off on a tangent, etc. Curiously, it never occurred to people that a) this doesn’t stop summit bores from saying exactly what they want regardless until someone actually tells them to shut up rather than just glaring b) someone in a big room frantically ‘T’ing is easily ignored, and c) nodding was invented several thousand years ago for precisely the same reason as Jazz Hands, and smacks rather less of elitists filling the world with specialised political jargon.


 
"nodding was invented several thousand years ago for precisely the same reason as Jazz Hands"


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> No, I'm too worried you're on of the wankers I hate. Although tbh none of them would have known any AFA/Red Action people



I was a bit of a wanker back then though to be fair...


----------



## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

Even nowadays in meetings I find it hard to suppress the urge to jazz hands. I've been caderised


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

if abu hamza ever veers left therell be a blood bath in hipsterville


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I've had people tell me this by non-Muslim identity politics types re: Islamists who call for the death of gay people but apparently there's an exception - if you study Islam in depth and speak classical Arabic (unlike most Muslims) then you can criticise Islamists for calling for the death of gay people. I have no idea how far this logic extends, should only Mormon police officers in America rescue abused children from FLDS cults in Utah? What level of operating thetan do you have to be to confront a Scientologist shop lifter?


 
Only black people from Italy can hate Di Canio?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> What's interesting about that is that there is no indication at all about what "oppression" really means.


 
That feels like the underlying intention to me, with my cynical britches on - the reduction of the idea of oppression not to something based on fact, but on how people feel.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 24, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> what about "progressive stack" based on class then, out of interest? A "no privately educated people wittering on" rule would tempt me....


 
You don't need a progressive stack to stop that, just a decent right jab.


----------



## JimW (Apr 24, 2013)

You are still allowed to sit behind someone and make the slow wanking motion though?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Exactly.
> 
> It's almost as if these groups are using these cult-like theatre school mannerisms to filter out people with any sense of self-awareness


 
TBF, if that were actually the case, the dirty rotten bastards would be teaching people mimes, not sign language!


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> That feels like the underlying intention to me, with my cynical britches on - the reduction of the idea of oppression not to something based on fact, but on how people feel.


 
i agree .Its ludicrous .

And its the very same shit the right and the libertarians et al thrive on . Im reminded of Arnolds schwarneggers governor campaign years ago, and all these rich californians angrily pumping their fists to Twisted Sisters " we're not gonna take it ,anymore"


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 24, 2013)

JimW said:


> You are still allowed to sit behind someone and make the slow wanking motion though?


 
Depends whether it's the gesture you're performing, or the act itself, I expect!


----------



## JimW (Apr 24, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Depends whether it's the gesture you're performing, or the act itself, I expect!


I'm not that progressively stacked, gestures only.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> TBF, if that were actually the case, the dirty rotten bastards would be teaching people mimes, not sign language!


 
its conditioning, theyre dealing with remedial cases at this point . Im quite sure theyve a whole hipster case full of new tricks to teach people .


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> So people already have a set of commonly understood hand signals? Why not just stick with them then?


 
Have they always existed? Does everyone, everywhere in the world use them? Why are they used? What value do they have? What is wrong with having a few more to use in certain contexts?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> You don't need a progressive stack to stop that, just a decent right jab.


 
or maybe a left


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Have they always existed? Does everyone, everywhere in the world use them? Why are they used? What value do they have? What is wrong with having a few more to use in certain contexts?


 
because these ones make people look like wankers

and they dont work

and they exclude people from debate


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> I think we should have local hand signals for local people.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> because these ones make people look like wankers


 
You do know the semi-international hand signal for 'wanker' don't you?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 24, 2013)

Special forces teams communicate with handslang as well but if you laughed and called it jazzhands they'd make you wear your balls for earings


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> You do know the semi-international hand signal for 'wanker' don't you?


 
indeed

its the sign normal people make when walking away in disgust from jazz handing hipsters sitting on the ground proclaiming revolution


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> A shibboleth? ( Of which we must have none).


 
I'll have mine with a plate of chips and a pint of Old Rosie, please!


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> and they dont work


Eh? In my experience they do help with what they are designed to...less interuption, more order and flow etc. What experience do you have of them?



> and they exclude people from debate


 
Have you felt excluded? Or are you imagining others would?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Special forces teams communicate with handslang as well but if you laughed and called it jazzhands they'd make you wear your balls for earings


 
yeah biut they have to do that because of someone heard them talking thered be incoming heavy gunfire . Sadly this other mob dont have that excuse .


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> indeed
> 
> its the sign normal people make when walking away in disgust from jazz handing hipsters sitting on the ground proclaiming revolution


 
Normal people eh? You live in a world of normal and ab-normal people?

Whilst I think you have every right not to like 'hand signals' I am finding it hard to take you seriously on account of you basing your argument on such rigid definers/the idea that there are normal and abnormal people.

Do you use those definers to judge the value/usefulness of other things as well?


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Far better (and more practical) just to have a chair/facilitator who actually knows what they're doing...


 
How does a facilitator do that?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Have you felt excluded? Or are you imagining others would?


 
Ill be quite frank with you I would absolutely refuse to participate in a gathering where that was expected of me . I would view it as bereft of credibility and an assault on my own personal dignity . I feel humiliated enough as it is in my work and economic situation and just dont need that additional humiliation heaped on me by being made jump through someone elses hoops in order to fit into their world view  . I regard it as infantile, like something I experienced in nursery school, and as a grown adult would take actual offence at ever being made sit through it, or worse, participate in it .
And although Im not a spokesperson for anyone else Im very very very sure almost everyone else I know in my own political and working circles would take a very similar view . I honestly dont believe its just me who would have a serious problem with it . In fact if there was something designed to specifically alienate working class participation in a social project I cant think of anything more fit for purpose .
Thats my honest feelings on the subject .


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> Ill be quite frank with you I would absolutely refuse to participate in a gathering where that was expected of me . I would view it as bereft of credibility and an assault on my own personal dignity . I feel humiliated enough as it is in my work and economic situation and just dont need that additional humiliation heaped on me by being made jump through someone elses hoops in order to fit into their world view . I regard it as infantile, like something I experienced in nursery school, and as a grown adult would take actual offence at ever being made sit through it, or worse, participate in it .
> And although Im not a spokesperson for anyone else Im very very very sure almost everyone else I know in my own political and working circles would take a very similar view . I honestly dont believe its just me who would have a serious problem with it . In fact if there was something designed to specifically alienate working class participation in a social project I cant think of anything more fit for purpose .
> Thats my honest feelings on the subject .


 
So raising your hand and waiting your turn to speak is below you?


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 24, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  7s
> I don't suppose there's anybody in NYC who really really really wants to buy a 2 year old Macbook covered in revolutionary stickers?


 
Anyone?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Normal people eh? You live in a world of normal and ab-normal people??


 
I live in a world were its very difficult indeed to engage with my fellow workers on political and social issues, impossible to get any solidarity or radicalisation to the point of even getting a union organised . Where English soccer clubs seem the safe subject of almost every conversation and everyone keeps their heads down in fear of being sacked , as well as absolutely atrocious and sometimes dangerous working conditions .
And I can assure you if by some miracle I ever got to the point were i persuaded any of them to attend a left wing event were this stuff was going on theyd simply turn on their heels and never look back . Thats before they even got to hear sentiments such as white males take a seat or whatever, which would possibly result in physical violence . I can also picture my bosses pissing themselves laughing once their spies report back . Maybe that picture in my head is why i take such a vehement  reaction to it . But I am as sure of that as I am of the sun rising tomorrow morning .
Thats why i regard it as not just an affront to grown mens dignity and intelligence but structurally anti working class and therefore exclusive by design and intent . It has the hallmarks of yet another bourgeouis clique, positively reeks of it .


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> So raising your hand and waiting your turn to speak is below you?


 
yes, thats plainly what i said .


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> So neither adopted nor rejected, leaving some members peddling it and others not?


 
It has been refered to by members of AF in a personal capacity e.g. in a post sent on the ainfos list.

Obviously some within the AF seem to agree with it, but the majority don't because it is not part of the aims and principles or any official conference decisions.


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Anyone?


 
Oh maybe we could have a whip 'round and get the cash and have a good old analyse of her hard drive.


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> yes, thats plainly what i said .


 
That's basically what you're getting upset by. I don't know why you feel so slighted.


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## ItWillNeverWork (Apr 24, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Normal people eh? You live in a world of normal and ab-normal people?


 
Yes, and patronising, twinkle-fingered, jazz-handed loons are a clear example of abnormality. Seems pretty obvious to me, tbh.


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## DotCommunist (Apr 24, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Anyone?


she should go crack converters like the rest of us


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## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> That's basically what you're getting upset by. I don't know why you feel so slighted.


And you're so proud of not knowing. Go on. Shut yourselves up in those meetings and fade away.


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## Firky (Apr 24, 2013)

Covered in revolutionary stickers. Fuck sake.


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

So, what's a better alternative for meetings. Seriously?


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## DotCommunist (Apr 24, 2013)

Firky said:


> Covered in revolutionary stickers. Fuck sake.


 

bit of white spirit on a damp rag and you could get it saleable to any pawnshop


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## Treacle Toes (Apr 24, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> Yes, and patronising, twinkle-fingered, jazz-handed loons are a clear example of abnormality. Seems pretty obvious to me, tbh.


 
Because using these hand signals now and again in certain meetings/contexts is all that they are and can be. Yeah, obviously.


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> And you're so proud of not knowing. Go on. Shut yourselves up in those meetings and fade away.


 
I've spent quite enough time in those style of meetings. I've not said I'm a fan. It's just the most pratical way of dealing with a challenging meeting.


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## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> So, what's a better alternative for meetings. Seriously?


What sort of meetings are they?


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## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> So, what's a better alternative for meetings. Seriously?


 
stop doing stuff that attracts wankers like moths to a flame .


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> What sort of meetings are they?


 
There's a group of say 10 - 20 of people, some are familiar with each other, some are not. You need to discuss and organise for something.


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> stop doing stuff that attracts wankers like moths to a flame .


 
I'm going to put on my plastic psychologists hat and say you've had an upseting experience at a meeting the first time you encountered this method.

....and probs haven't been back.


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## SpineyNorman (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> or maybe a left


 
Yep, VP needs to check his right hand dexterity privilege, to realise that left handed people have been oppressed for centuries and learn to include them in his admittedly admirable plans for dealing with middle class trendies


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## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> There's a group of say 10 - 20 of people, some are familiar with each other, some are not. You need to discuss and organise for something.


I'd have thought that the hands up approach would prob be ok, not a big group so whoever's running the meeting can make sure it's not dominated by just a couple of people.


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> I'd have thought that the hands up approach would prob be ok, not a big group so whoever's running the meeting can make sure it's not dominated by just a couple of people.


 
What if someone has something to say regarding a point that's just being talked about but the stack is already large and it would be more appropriate to say the point now?


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## DotCommunist (Apr 24, 2013)

what about the conch?


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## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm going to put on my plastic psychologists hat and say you've had an upseting experience at a meeting the first time you encountered this method.
> 
> ....and probs haven't been back.


 
i can assure you ive never been to a meeting where this would ever be considered as appropriate behaviour for grown adults


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## ItWillNeverWork (Apr 24, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Because using these hand signals now and again in certain meetings/contexts is all that they are and can be. Yeah, obviously.


 
I'm sure they can be all sorts of things in all sorts of contexts, but it doesn't change the fact that what they are is cliquey and off-putting. I'm with Casually Red on this. I'd run a mile. In fact, I'd think twice before even going to an Occupy meeting if this is what they're like.

Anyway, it's more the whole package that I have in mind; cryptic hand gestures, all this 'progressive stacking' stuff, and that human gramaphone thing or whatever it's called. It's creepy.


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## brogdale (Apr 24, 2013)

Rather large potential for mis-interpreting leftists as oppositional, I'd say?

Don't you 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



?


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## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> What if someone has something to say regarding a point that's just being talked about but the stack is already large and it would be more appropriate to say the point now?


If loads of people have all put their hands up at once, sort of thing? I suppose whoever's running the meeting would just make sure that everyone got to have their say before moving on to the next point. Some hands would go down as people start making their points as sometimes what they want to say gets covered by a person before them.


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## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Personal opinion only. If I was given an opportunity to bring along a friend to a meeting about some aspect of public service cuts and given three options of a meeting:

i. with progressive stack.

ii. with extensive hand signals beyond a raised hand.

iii. with neither. 

I would choose iii. whatever the subject however distant, because the effect of i. or ii. would breach our bond of normal friendship/ damage our trust. I would have to give a long spiel about how such a system began, why it's not trying to be condescending or racist or annoying at all, how the people doing i. or ii. are committed to the cause of working class people in the area. I don't feel comfortable on that ground - giving that kind of speech that is persuasive. I am sorry if it offends supporters but that's my personal level, and yes it does a strong part of cowardice. I dunno - perhaps another time I'd feel stronger to choose i or ii - not right now though.


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## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> What if someone has something to say regarding a point that's just being talked about but the stack is already large and it would be more appropriate to say the point now?


If every new speaker wants to bring up a new topic your meeting probably has bigger problems than a meager repertoire of hand gestures.


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## Nigel Irritable (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It has been refered to by members of AF in a personal capacity e.g. in a post sent on the ainfos list.


 
Jesus, the clown who wrote that shit is in the AF?




			
				sihhi said:
			
		

> Obviously some within the AF seem to agree with it, but the majority don't because it is not part of the aims and principles or any official conference decisions.


 
I'm not sure that the majority/minority nature of that disagreement has been quite settled, as it doesn't appear to have been voted on. Just discussed. And then used as the basis for AF workshops at a couple of bookfairs. I suspect that it's more likely that there are quite a few privilege/intersectional liberals at one extreme, and quite a few people who know its bullshit at the other, but as the whole argument hasn't been challenged head on, toleration may slowly be becoming acceptance amongst a wider group of AF people than the ones who were first pushing it. The AF's role so far has been as conduit rather than bulwark.

Either way, it's worth noting that many of the Brit-twitter people who loudly embrace this stuff and who are feuding with their fellow liberals in the commentariat seem to identify themselves as "anarchists", and more tellingly as "class struggle anarchists". Take for example, the blogger I linked to a page or two back.


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## SpineyNorman (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> What if someone has something to say regarding a point that's just being talked about but the stack is already large and it would be more appropriate to say the point now?


 
What you describe here isn't a 'progressive stack' - it's 'chairing a meeting' and 'common sense'.


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## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

What is a progressive stack? I think I missed that one?


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What you describe here isn't a 'progressive stack' - it's 'chairing a meeting' and 'common sense'.


 
_I know_


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## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> I'm sure they can be all sorts of things in all sorts of contexts, but it doesn't change the fact that what they are is cliquey and off-putting. I'm with Casually Red on this. I'd run a mile. *In fact, I'd think twice before even going to an Occupy meeting if this is what they're like.*
> 
> Anyway, it's more the whole package that I have in mind; cryptic hand gestures, all this 'progressive stacking' stuff, and that human gramaphone thing or whatever it's called. It's creepy.


 
i was suspicious of them before but im resolved never to go to one now.

Ive no idea what the human gramaphone thing is..what is it


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## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> What is a progressive stack? I think I missed that one?


Apols for wiki link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_stack

It's what Sihhi was talking about a couple of pages back


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> i can assure you ive never been to a meeting where this would ever be considered as appropriate behaviour for grown adults


 
Out of curiosity what meetings do you attend ?


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## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Jesus, the clown who wrote that shit is in the AF?


 
AF Scotland - AF has a very federal approach - one region can be saying or approaching things fairly differently compared to another region. It's been written in the wake of the sexual assault from/in Occupy Glasgow at night.


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## SpineyNorman (Apr 24, 2013)

brogdale said:


> Rather large potential for mis-interpreting leftists as oppositional, I'd say?
> 
> Don't you
> 
> ...


 
I can see this causing confusion. If a bunch of fash came in and started sieg heiling people would just think they wanted to speak. Fortunately the progressive stack would prevent it. Unless they were Turkish fash or something, in which case the floor would immediately be theirs.


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> I'm sure they can be all sorts of things in all sorts of contexts, but it doesn't change the fact that what they are is cliquey and off-putting. I'm with Casually Red on this. I'd run a mile. In fact, I'd think twice before even going to an Occupy meeting if this is what they're like.
> 
> Anyway, it's more the whole package that I have in mind; cryptic hand gestures, all this 'progressive stacking' stuff, and that human gramaphone thing or whatever it's called. It's creepy.


 
These are all different things you've bunched together. I haven't got any interest in Occupy.


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## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> AF Scotland - AF has a very federal approach - one region can be saying or approaching things fairly differently compared to another region. It's been written in the wake of the sexual assault from/in Occupy Glasgow at night.


The Women's Caucus is all in AF Scotland?


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## SpineyNorman (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> i was suspicious of them before but im resolved never to go to one now.
> 
> Ive no idea what the human gramaphone thing is..what is it


 
I dunno but if it's anything like the human centipede they can fucking count me out


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## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> If every new speaker wants to bring up a new topic your meeting probably has bigger problems than a meager repertoire of hand gestures.


 
Poor agenda making - common mistake in meetings.


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## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> If loads of people have all put their hands up at once, sort of thing? I suppose whoever's running the meeting would just make sure that everyone got to have their say before moving on to the next point. Some hands would go down as people start making their points as sometimes what they want to say gets covered by a person before them.


 
its only a minority of people who even want to say things at meetings anyway, most just want to listen . If your attracting the right calibre of participant then a lot of problems dont even arise to begin with . And if your not then wanky hand gestures arent going to solve your internal problems, theyre a lot more deep rooted .


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## phildwyer (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> Ill be quite frank with you I would absolutely refuse to participate in a gathering where that was expected of me . I would view it as bereft of credibility and an assault on my own personal dignity . I feel humiliated enough as it is in my work and economic situation and just dont need that additional humiliation heaped on me by being made jump through someone elses hoops in order to fit into their world view . I regard it as infantile, like something I experienced in nursery school, and as a grown adult would take actual offence at ever being made sit through it, or worse, participate in it .


 
I too would scorn to attend any such meeting.

I imagine most people feel similarly.


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> If loads of people have all put their hands up at once, sort of thing? I suppose whoever's running the meeting would just make sure that everyone got to have their say before moving on to the next point. Some hands would go down as people start making their points as sometimes what they want to say gets covered by a person before them.


 
What I meant was what if someone had a point that was really appropriate and directly concerns what the current speaker is saying? There's already 5 people in the stack and by the time they've had their tuppence worth it'll be too long.


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## Nigel Irritable (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> What is a progressive stack? I think I missed that one?


 
A system in which people who are visibly disabled, or women, or brown skinned speak first at activist meetings. Or crass and occasionally offensive tokenism of an inward looking small group variety.


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## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> The Women's Caucus is all in AF Scotland?


 
No it was written by a single woman in AF Scotland proper link here http://scotlandaf.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/sexism-power-and-the-left


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> No it was written by a single woman in AF Scotland proper link here http://scotlandaf.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/sexism-power-and-the-left


 
You are talking past each other a bit. Cesare was pointing out that while that particular piece was by an AF Scotland member, the original document was by the women's caucus. So, particularly taken in combination with the bookfair workshops, it's clearly not something particular to AF Scotland.


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> If every new speaker wants to bring up a new topic your meeting probably has bigger problems than a meager repertoire of hand gestures.


 
Hey?


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## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Poor agenda making - common mistake in meetings.


 
thats it, agenda, chair and a reasonable calibre of activist in attendance , active discouragement of mountebankery . Common sense tends to prevail. No need to infantilise everyone because of a fear of telling a mouthpiece to shut the fuck up .


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## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> its only a minority of people who even want to say things at meetings anyway, most just want to listen . If your attracting the right calibre of participant then a lot of problems dont even arise to begin with . And if your not then wanky hand gestures arent going to solve your internal problems, theyre a lot more deep rooted .


I suppose it depends on what the meeting's for. If it's a series of speakers they usually ask for questions after they've spoken. If the meeting's got a specific purpose eg what's the next direct action and where, it'd be more participatory if they're deciding in something.


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## ItWillNeverWork (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> Ive no idea what the human gramaphone thing is..what is it


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

I see. Confused trots.


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## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> What I meant was what if someone had a point that was really appropriate and directly concerns what the current speaker is saying? There's already 5 people in the stack and by the time they've had their tuppence worth it'll be too long.


Then as Sihhi said, there's a problem with the agenda if whoever put it together underestimated how much time it would take to get through each point. I suppose. The person chairing it would have to take a view on whether to let it run over or not.


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> Then as Sihhi said, there's a problem with the agenda if whoever put it together underestimated how much time it would take to get through each point. I suppose. The person chairing it would have to take a view on whether to let it run over or not.


 
I'm not being offensive but are you a trot?


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## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm not being offensive but are you a trot?


Christ no.


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## ItWillNeverWork (Apr 24, 2013)

To be fair, in that second video it seems to actually serve a practical function in making the speaker audible to those at the back of the crowd. Why on earth they need to do it when there are half a dozen standing around like in the first video, is beyond me.

Reminds me of this.


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## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> To be fair, in that second video it seems to actually serve a practical function in making the speaker audible to those at the back of the crowd. Why on earth they need to do it when there are half a dozen standing around like in the first video, is beyond me.


Maybe some sort of system that amplified sound would be in order


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## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> Christ no.


 
It just seems very normal to have a horizontal participatory meeting. I've no interest in hierarchical, chaired meetings. I've got work for that.

If you do have hierarchical meetings then you would have a small group talking at the rest. Like trot groups and bosses at work. If you want active participation in meetings, giving everyone a real opportunity to talk then you need to be organised. It ain't perfect but hand signals are better than nowt.


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## ItWillNeverWork (Apr 24, 2013)

What is this 'amplifies' you speak of? Sounds like the devil's work.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Maybe some sort of system that amplified sound would be in order


 
That was banned. That's why they engaged in this Tomfoolery.


----------



## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> What I meant was what if someone had a point that was really appropriate and directly concerns what the current speaker is saying? There's already 5 people in the stack and by the time they've had their tuppence worth it'll be too long.


Just wait your turn. Your fantastic amazing urgent point isn't probably all that important. And letting people have their say and build up trust is one of the main real functions of meetings, allowing decisions to be made later on much faster.


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## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> I suppose it depends on what the meeting's for. If it's a series of speakers they usually ask for questions after they've spoken. If the meeting's got a specific purpose eg what's the next direct action and where, it'd be more participatory if they're deciding in something.


 
just in my experience the direction and planning bit tends to be focussed on more by an executive tier, people delegated to go forward with ideas and then report back to their areas . Although thats not set in stone,adaptibility is crucial . A good focussed chair is essential for that . The agenda has to be tight or nothing gets done .

As regards the set piece speaking with q and a its a bit looser . But insisting all points are put through the chair, with the chair stepping in on tangents or abusive statements , solves the majority of problems that might arise. Again no need to infantilise the whole room because of an organisations inability to maintain order or attract a decent calibre of activist .


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> That was banned. That's why they engaged in this Tomfoolery.


Yeah the American ones had to get permission first from the state (or whatever authority) to use microphones, loudspeakers etc, didn't they?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> That was banned. That's why they engaged in this Tomfoolery.


Ah, they damn well better comply then i suppose.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> You are talking past each other a bit. Cesare was pointing out that while that particular piece was by an AF Scotland member, the original document was by the women's caucus. So, particularly taken in combination with the bookfair workshops, it's clearly not something particular to AF Scotland.


 
I wasn't saying it was particular to AF Scotland, but that post was by someone in AF Scotland.

I don't think every woman in the AF is part of the Women's Caucus. AFAIK, the Caucuses don't make official policy on their own terrain without a majority vote for the whole thing. Its constitution means each group (as small as 3 in theory) is responsible for its own affairs - think what they like as long as it doesn't conflict with its 10 aims:




> GROUPS: A group shall consist of at least three members. Each group is autonomous in that it is responsible for its own internal affairs. The group shall hold regular meetings in the locality and keep in touch with isolated members in their area.
> 
> REGIONAL ORGANISATION: Groups shall federate regionally and shall organise regular meetings attended by group delegates from the region. Regional organisations will require a secretary. All groups and individual members in the region will be sent all minutes of regional meetings.


----------



## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> It just seems very normal to have a horizontal participatory meeting. I've no interest in hierarchical, chaired meetings. I've got work for that.
> 
> If you do have hierarchical meetings then you would have a small group talking at the rest. Like trot groups and bosses at work. If you want active participation in meetings, giving everyone a real opportunity to talk then you need to be organised. It ain't perfect but hand signals are better than nowt.


 Your skilled facilitators and cadre of skilled meeting goers are only "horizontal" for those already in the know. A chair who is elected by the meeting and who can be dismissed and replaced by the meeting is just as "horizontal", even if you are allergic to the term and think it's "trot" like.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


>




sweet mother of fuck


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> just in my experience the direction and planning bit tends to be focussed on more by an executive tier, people delegated to go forward with ideas and then report back to their areas . Although thats not set in stone,adaptibility is crucial . A good focussed chair is essential for that . The agenda has to be tight or nothing gets done .
> 
> As regards the set piece speaking with q and a its a bit looser . But insisting all points are put through the chair, with the chair stepping in on tangents or abusive statements , solves the majority of problems that might arise. Again no need to infantilise the whole room because of an organisations inability to maintain order or attract a decent calibre of activist .


 
"decent calibre of activist" "executive tier"


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> It just seems very normal to have a horizontal participatory meeting. I've no interest in hierarchical, chaired meetings. I've got work for that.
> 
> If you do have hierarchical meetings then you would have a small group talking at the rest. Like trot groups and bosses at work. If you want active participation in meetings, giving everyone a real opportunity to talk then you need to be organised. It ain't perfect but hand signals are better than nowt.


Who decides what the meeting's going to be about though, and what's going to be covered?

I'm not a fan of top down information giving only type meetings, but I've also got fairly pissed off and frustrated by interminable Swedish style consensus meetings where it takes months to get the simplest thing decided on.


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## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> I've also got fairly pissed off and frustrated by interminable Swedish style consensus meetings where it takes months to get the simplest thing decided on.


Rascist

edit: the Swedes will have long tacitly decided something they're just hanging around waiting for you to get the message, and are too scared of conflict to point this out


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Ah, they damn well better comply then i suppose.


 
The ethos was non-violent direct action NVDA - attempting to limit the amount of opportunity for police action as far as possible since 'cops stand with/are part of the 99%' 'cops are one lay off away from the 99%'.

Another possibility was smaller sub-meetings up to less frequent larger meetings of delegates - which was used a lot.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> "decent calibre of activist" "executive tier"


would you prefer undesirables


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> Who decides what the meeting's going to be about though, and what's going to be covered?
> 
> I'm not a fan of top down information giving only type meetings, but I've also got fairly pissed off and frustrated by interminable Swedish style consensus meetings where it takes months to get the simplest thing decided on.


 
Well if you're at the meeting it's been called for a reason. Then if an agenda has already been knocked up pass it around for additions.


----------



## cesare (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> Rascist
> 
> edit: the Swedes will have long tacitly decided something they're just hanging around waiting for you to get the message, and are too scared of conflict to point this out


Yes 

Conflict and Lagom don't mix


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> Yeah the American ones had to get permission first from the state (or whatever authority) to use microphones, loudspeakers etc, didn't they?


 
or to be more correct they took the view they required the states sanction on their use of loudspeakers


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> would you prefer undesirables


 
I'd prefer not to have an "executive tier".


----------



## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> Yes
> 
> Conflict and Lagom don't mix


 Did you hear there was a (rare) strike today across Sweden? It lasted for 50 minutes, then a deal was signed in which the companies promised to "consult with2 the union over agency staff


----------



## Random (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'd prefer not to have an "executive tier".


 The executive doesn't need an executive tier


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> or to be more correct they took the view they required the states sanction on their use of loudspeakers


 
Pretty sure it was from experience of having megaphones and other amplification equipment confiscated and/or addressing the need for all to hear at spontaneous less formally arranged meetings. Let's face it, a megaphone and/or a mobile mic/speaker system is not something we all have in the cupboard is it?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'd prefer not to have an "executive tier".


 
delegates chosen from the bottom up to represent the base and a chair,acting with strict adherence to a constitution,  whats wrong with it


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> delegates chosen from the bottom up to represent the base and a chair,acting with strict adherence to a constitution, whats wrong with it


 
Sounds like bourgeois parlimentarianism comrade.


----------



## BigTom (Apr 24, 2013)

chilango said:


> Less Meetings.
> 
> More chats.


 
Less Boring Meetings - More Tory Beatings!


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Sounds like bourgeois parlimentarianism comrade.


 
how exactly

without an executive theres neither co ordination, planning or accountability, no one to represent the base as delegates
without a chair theres chaos
without a constitution theres no parameters for the chair or executive to adhere to , and the base are completely fucked


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm not being offensive but are you a trot?


 
A question any Anarchist who shows too much sign of having some basic fucking sense can expect to be asked from time to time.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

brogdale said:


> Rather large potential for mis-interpreting leftists as oppositional, I'd say?
> 
> Don't you
> 
> ...


 
and if a bunch of nazis walked in theyd just assume they all wanted to say something very important


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 24, 2013)

'Clarify' could easily double as 'CLAW' or 'CRAB'


----------



## brogdale (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> That was banned. That's why they engaged in this Tomfoolery.


 
Graeber descibes the use of the "Human/Peoples microphone" method in his latest book, 'The Democracy Project'. Although the technique had been in use for some time in US protest movements, he claimed that the need arose, early in the OWS movement, when the (conventionally amplified) platform at the first scheduled assembly was 'hi-jacked' by the leninist Workers World Party. Hence the 'horizontals' gathered at some distance away from the 'Verticals' and used the repeated phrasing method to ensure that folk could be heard above the electrified din of the leninists.

I have to say that the first time I went to St. Pauls and encountered the OLS GA shenanigans I thought for a while I'd stumbled across some wierd cultish group of chritos what with all the signing and mantra-like repeating.

Also, just to throw this into the mix, a close family member has this year been denied the right to speak at an occupation because they were sat on a chair at the periphery of the assembly. "We're all on the floor, if you want to speak get off that chair!" Now that's privilege, eh?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 24, 2013)

just another thing about this victims stuff and how people should have the first say if they're more oppressed.

i am not a victim, i am a very strong and intelligent woman. I dont always feel this way about myself all the time and life is often a struggle for me. not as much as it is for other people but it often is for me, i often get feelings of suicidal thoughts etc. When people say stuff to me like "oh that must be so hard for you" about something in some kind of pitying manner and i'm thinking well no it isn't, because i've got used to it or i've never known anything else. i'm not saying stuff shouldnt be changed but like there's a danger with this oppression stuff of making it really patronising, like patting them on the head and being like "oh poor you, you have such a shit life so you can go first in this meeting because we want to be nice to you." But of course not listening to what they say anyway. Not giving them the chance to develop their confidence but treating them like zoo animals to be protected - but their life conditions not changed obviously - (which is what i've talked about on this thread before) and giving them special treatment almost out of pity.

well i think i can speak for most people when i say that i dont want to be pitied because of what oppression i've had in my life i want to be respected and that means that it should be on the basis of what i've said rather than what i look like.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 24, 2013)

brogdale said:


> Graeber descibes the use of the "Human/Peoples microphone" method in his latest book, 'The Democracy Project'. Although the technique had been in use for some time in US protest movements, he claimed that the need arose, early in the OWS movement, when the (conventionally amplified) platform at the first scheduled assembly was 'hi-jacked' by the leninist Workers World Party. Hence the 'horizontals' gathered at some distance away from the 'Verticals' and used the repeated phrasing method to ensure that folk could be heard above the electrified din of the leninists.
> 
> I have to say that the first time I went to St. Pauls and encountered the OLS GA shenanigans I thought for a while I'd stumbled across some wierd cultish group of chritos what with all the signing and mantra-like repeating.
> 
> Also, just to throw this into the mix, a close family member has this year been denied the right to speak at an occupation because they were sat on a chair at the periphery of the assembly. "We're all on the floor, if you want to speak get off that chair!" Now that's privilege, eh?


 
check your chair privilege.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> just another thing about this victims stuff and how people should have the first say if they're more oppressed.
> 
> i am not a victim, i am a very strong and intelligent woman. I dont always feel this way about myself all the time and life is often a struggle for me. not as much as it is for other people but it often is for me, i often get feelings of suicidal thoughts etc. When people say stuff to me like "oh that must be so hard for you" about something in some kind of pitying manner and i'm thinking well no it isn't, because i've got used to it or i've never known anything else. i'm not saying stuff shouldnt be changed but like there's a danger with this oppression stuff of making it really patronising, like patting them on the head and being like "oh poor you, you have such a shit life so you can go first in this meeting because we want to be nice to you." But of course not listening to what they say anyway. Not giving them the chance to develop their confidence but treating them like zoo animals to be protected - but their life conditions not changed obviously - (which is what i've talked about on this thread before) and giving them special treatment almost out of pity.
> 
> well i think i can speak for most people when i say that i dont want to be pitied because of what oppression i've had in my life i want to be respected and that means that it should be on the basis of what i've said rather than what i look like.


 
its absolutely patronising . Brownie points belong for people who are actually in the Brownies . And even they have to actually do something to be awarded them .


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 24, 2013)

The Wise brothers once described western maoism as the class consciousness of guilt, think there's something similar going on here, this is sort of the liberal-individual form of it in a period where the old-labour movements socialising role no longer exists.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 24, 2013)

heres some jewish occupy activists "pledging to hold themselves accountable for the occupation of palestine". god that fucked me off. presumably anyone who doesn't hold themselves to such a thing or points out the role of capital and class in maintaining the occupation is just not feeling guilty enough, perhaps they should flaggelate themselves until they've disabled themselves and then they can come first in the meeting.

just fucked politics on so many levels.

is it me or has occupy come to embody the very worst aspects of left wing (or pseudo left) politics of every kind? jesus wept


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 24, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> heres some jewish occupy activists "pledging to hold themselves accountable for the occupation of palestine".


 
That is just fucked up in so many ways that I can't begin to imagine why anyone thought it was a good idea.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 24, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> That is just fucked up in so many ways that I can't begin to imagine why anyone thought it was a good idea.


 
Yeah it's an absolute fucking disgrace.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 24, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Yeah it's an absolute fucking disgrace.


 
That is erm...no words really.

The conscientious objector stuff I appreciate/understand but this...erm, well...what?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 24, 2013)

> The conscientious objector stuff I appreciate/understand but this...erm, well...what?


 
i know, that was my reaction.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The Wise brothers once described western maoism as the class consciousness of guilt, think there's something similar going on here, this is sort of the liberal-individual form of it in a period where the old-labour movements socialising role no longer exists.


 
Look at this - it's Jodi Dean, studied Princeton, tenured as Political Science Professor in 1993 at NYU
author of _The Communist Horizon and __Zizek's Politics_.




> B&C: You said that Occupy enabled the Left to say ‘we’ again. But isn’t one of the big achievements of the historical Left that it was always wary of saying ‘we’ because it was aware of the exclusions resulting from such a ‘we’? Is this awareness incorporated into the movement and what are mechanisms expressing it? How can we reflect on these more problematic aspects of the ‘we’?
> 
> JD: First, there is a very concrete procedure for dealing with the potential problems of an exclusive ‘we’ that is called the ‘progressive stack’. If people want to speak in a general assembly they get ‘on stack’. The progressive stack makes sure that people who have not spoken and/​or are from historically disadvantaged or marginalized groups are moved up in the stack. That makes it impossible for privileged people to take up all the speaking time. Most working groups also adopted this mechanism. Secondly, there were multiple groups that were focused on women in the movement, racial differences, problems and issues for the undocumented etc. So there were particular caucuses and working groups on these very topics. So there was always self-​consciousness in the movement. The assumption that everybody just forgot fifty years of difference theory is ludicrous.


 
Concrete meeting procedure - for small meetings (working grps) aswell as large (assemblies) -overpowers the exclusive middle-class 'we'. It almost seems to say as long as "privileged groups" do not take up all the time that's OK problem sorted.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)




----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> just fucked politics on so many levels.
> 
> is it me or has occupy come to embody the very worst aspects of left wing (or pseudo left) politics of every kind? jesus wept


 
yeah, whatever it was, is or could have been its a complete load of bollocks now . I wouldnt touch it with a shitty stick .


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 24, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> heres some jewish occupy activists "pledging to hold themselves accountable for the occupation of palestine".


 
That's grotesque.



frogwoman said:


> is it me or has occupy come to embody the very worst aspects of left wing (or pseudo left) politics of every kind? jesus wept


 
Yeah it's a fucking car crash. Pathetic. _They lack the mettle of the old Chartists_


----------



## J Ed (Apr 24, 2013)

What should we make of this bizarre self-hate? Is it an inversion of a prejudiced upbringing?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What should we make of this bizarre self-hate? Is it an inversion of a prejudiced upbringing?


 
its a massive ego trip. Its a bunch of wankers who honestly believe the world revolves around them . They themselves and their guilt, issues and insecurities are central to every fucking single thing on earth. They cant just go on a quiet guilt trip in the corner..no...they have to take their trip on a big shiny fucking train, make us all buy a ticket while they wear the conductors hat and blow the bastard whistle non stop. But its ok because some black people and some gays get the nicer seats .

Absolute fucking narcissism .

edit

from spoiled pampered bastards told from day one by their hippy bastard parents they were the most special and clever little child on earth . And they still believe it .


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 24, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> That's grotesque.
> 
> 
> 
> Yeah it's a fucking car crash. Pathetic. _They lack the mettle of the old Chartists_


 
http://972mag.com/over-1000-jews-gather-at-wall-st-for-occupyyomkippur-kol-nidre/24808/ heres a better link btw

i've seen this bollocks used on a few websites to justify not challenging anti-semitic shit, because jewish people in the west are largely more privileged because of being white and that and anyway you should be _holding yourself accountable _

it's pathetic.

seriously, most of the people at this shit are more privileged anyway because they have the spare time and money to camp out in new york for days without working. does that type of privilege not come into it then?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

occupy the factories you cunts


----------



## weepiper (Apr 24, 2013)

Has anyone pointed out that the Occupy hand signal for 'point of order' looks awfully like the BSL sign for 'cunt' yet? Appropriate really.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 24, 2013)

I thought it had great potential to start with, shame it went this way.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 24, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I thought it had great potential to start with, shame it went this way.


 
i think in parts of the USA it did, things like the longshoremen#s strike etc where they actually offered some solidarity.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 24, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Has anyone pointed out that the Occupy hand signal for 'point of order' looks awfully like the BSL sign for 'cunt' yet? Appropriate really.


 Had no idea TBH


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 24, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Have you asked him how he knows this?
> 
> And what's a Sabb, btw?


It's short for Sabbatical, because the full-time elected positions are a) salaried and b) full-time+ meaning the office bearer must take time out from their course in order to perform their duties.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 24, 2013)

Thora said:


> It must be really difficult to decide who has more privilege just by scanning faces in a big meeting


That's where this comes in handy:






Courtesy of Proletarian Democracy. Winner gets to speak first


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> heres some jewish occupy activists "pledging to hold themselves accountable for the occupation of palestine".


 

Now we have to play self-oppression olympics whose is worse? Because these East Coast student anarchists offer all this:




> Each person who enjoys privileges granted by systems of prejudicial power (no matter how radical or revolutionary) must recognize the benefits and costs of *their* privileges. We must take responsibility for our prejudices and actions which perpetuate oppression.


 
What are the costs of a privilege? How can such a thing exist? A privilege by definition is a plus, a gain, it can't be a minus.




> We acknowledge that developing anti-oppression practices is a life-long work and requires a life-long commitment. No single workshop is sufficient for learning to change one’s behaviors. We are all vulnerable to being oppressive and we need to continuously struggle with these issues and behaviors.


 
We are vulnerable - start from here - start from where we are weak and unsure and pour more salt - that will help immigrants. Asylum seekers will feel welcome as soon as the poster goes up.




> We speak only for ourselves, and commit to hearing each other and creating opportunities for all voices to be heard, especially for those that have been historically marginalized or silenced, and for those that continue to be oppressed.


 
If people speak only for themselves as a group is a black male only anarchist space possible - after all they're just speaking for themselves?



> I challenge myself to be honest and open and take risks to address racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all other forms of oppression and hate head on.


 
Take risks to address racism? What risk? How much risk? Dangerous martyr complex invitation.


On the one hand it says:



> I will challenge the behavior not the person. I will be sensitive and promote open dialogue.


 
but then 



> I won’t feel guilty, but rather I will feel responsible. Being part of the problem doesn’t mean I can’t be an active part of the solution.


 
assuming the person is the problem



> I recognize when someone offers criticism around oppressive behavior. I will treat it as a gift rather than challenging the person or invalidating their experience. I shall give people the benefit of the doubt and won’t make assumptions.


 
Will you ever give the benefit of the doubt to people opposed to progressive stacks?



> I will acknowledge that the intent of an action may not have been malicious but the impact could have been. I will try not to write off people who make mistakes because I don’t want to be associated with them. I will help them admit what they did and take responsibility for making reparations for their behaviour.


 
Help the classists say sorry? How? What can we do? 'Please neo-Monbiotist deep greens say sorry for that vile 1999 article where you celebrated the closure of Rover plants  - it will make you feel better '.



> I will be mindful of how I project myself and my views and how I use body language and tone to assert power and control even without meaning to. I will challenge “macho-bravado” in myself, my friends and in my activism.


 
I find 90% of anti-oppression promises macho-bravado. We look forward to working-class members challenging it amongst friends minority middle-class macho 'we are the heirs of Fanon' bravado anti-white privilege groups? 




> _I will respect the community, its space, and the decisions it makes._


 



> I understand that I will feel discomfort and pain as I face my part in oppression. I realize that this is a necessary part of the process of liberation and growth.


 
Discomfort and pain - why? you're working for anti-capitalism, why should you feel personal discomfort and pain for things created by wider power structures?




> I will maintain these practices and contribute equal time and energy to building healthy relationships, both personal and political.


 
Equal what? Equal dumb?



> It is the role of the facilitator to ensure that the space is safe and welcoming for everyone. It is also the responsibility of each participant to contribute to this.


 
So it's everyone's role or not? Does the facilitator have some special power or status? Don't answer that one.



> Participants commit to active listening by not not monopolizing conversations.


 
What if the point you are making features several important, relevant, new examples ie is long? What sort of human says 'I want to monopolize conversation so people will think I'm windbag and avoid me' that you spell this out?



> Participants will be conscious of how their use of language may perpetuate racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and other oppression and hatred, either in person or online.


 
No classism? No educationalism? Who stole the spokes! 



> Participants will not call people out who have not spoken.


 
So it's OK to sit silently through other people's classism - that's the way to not get called out.



> Participants will be conscious of how much space they take up and how much they speak in a group. They will practice “stepping up, stepping back” so they can each contribute to equal participation.


 
Don't take up space, don't slouch or relax after a long day.



> Participants commit to creating a safe space that balances race, gender and age participation.


 
Balance for what? Balance why?



> People who haven’t yet spoken will get priority through the system of progressive stack.


 
So non speaker pale skin comes after non speaker dark skin.



> Participants are encouraged to use the word “ouch” to draw attention to what they find oppressive. Likewise they are encouraged to use the word “oops” to acknowledge when they may have done something oppressive.


 
You will sound like Teletubbies.



> we need to learn how to listen non-defensively and communicate respectfully if we are going to have effective anti-oppression practice.


 
Is giving an avalanche of tips on How to Make Friends of Leftists and Influence Radicals respectful communication?



> Five minutes at the end of each meeting will be reserved for reflection on group dynamics during the meeting.


 
And now we say 3 El-Fatihas or the Lord's Prayer.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 24, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I thought it had great potential to start with, shame it went this way.


 

You'd think the way occupy died under the weight of it's own weird micro-politics would lead some of them who made a name off it to question those methods of organising, but not that I've seen. The reaction to it in the US, in spite of some very partisan news coverage, was quite positive at first I recall. It looked like a little spontaneous outburst of class consciousness, strained through all sorts of hippy-ish counter cultural american tendencies true, but still it seemed to strike a bit of a chord. It's hardly surprising seeing as we'd just been through a massive sharp recession these things resonate I suppose. I think it was timed well and had a decent momentum for a bit.

In the UK it looked different from the start. Didn't Julian Assange turn up in a V for Vendetta mask, throwing sweets into the air? And another thing I noticed, they used to do that "people's mic" thing in London like they did in the US, even though they weren't being prevented from using loudspeakers and so on ( or rather they weren't being prevented at that particular time ) and I saw it in the regional satellites i visited - people struggling to conform to these hand gestures, and it taking up loads of time in discussions, it was totally awkward and stupid.

And it's not led to anything, has it? What was it Zizek said in his sermon on the mount at occupy? _"There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?" _I reckon occupy failed totally by this measure.


----------



## chilango (Apr 24, 2013)

I'd say occupy failed by pretty much any measure tbh.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 24, 2013)

wherewas it where they got the real beating of old bill, tear gassed constantly etc? okland occupy. I recall there was one occupy site that was given a real rough time of it...


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 24, 2013)

Occupy inspired me to get more involved in politics but once I met someone who said he donated a large amount of money to Occupy I was glad it wasn't them I got involved with. Really passive aggressive and he wasn't a good advert for them at all.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> wherewas it where they got the real beating of old bill, tear gassed constantly etc? okland occupy. I recall there was one occupy site that was given a real rough time of it...


 
U-Cal Davis campus














Then


----------



## weepiper (Apr 24, 2013)

The only experience i have of Occupy is the Edinburgh one where they camped out in a couple of places in the city centre for a while and everyone in the city basically ignored them and/or grumbled about them and nothing of note really seemed to happen, and the Glasgow one where a woman got raped and they made a big mess of how they handled it because they seemed essentially wafty and inneffectual. Neither of them makes me want to get involved or see it as a movement with anything constructive to offer me.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Random said:


> Your skilled facilitators and cadre of skilled meeting goers are only "horizontal" for those already in the know. A chair who is elected by the meeting and who can be dismissed and replaced by the meeting is just as "horizontal", even if you are allergic to the term and think it's "trot" like.


 
A chair elected the meeting? IME when people come together for a meeting when someone goes pipes up "who wants to facilitate" there's an eery silence while people look at their shoes until someone volunteers.


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 24, 2013)

There was some good stuff that came out of it, and it has improved individual lives considerably, but it was a mess


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> how exactly
> 
> without an executive theres neither co ordination, planning or accountability, no one to represent the base as delegates
> without a chair theres chaos
> without a constitution theres no parameters for the chair or executive to adhere to , and the base are completely fucked


 
IT'S 2013!


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

brogdale said:


> Graeber descibes the use of the "Human/Peoples microphone" method in his latest book, 'The Democracy Project'. Although the technique had been in use for some time in US protest movements, he claimed that the need arose, early in the OWS movement, when the (conventionally amplified) platform at the first scheduled assembly was 'hi-jacked' by the leninist Workers World Party. Hence the 'horizontals' gathered at some distance away from the 'Verticals' and used the repeated phrasing method to ensure that folk could be heard above the electrified din of the leninists.
> 
> I have to say that the first time I went to St. Pauls and encountered the OLS GA shenanigans I thought for a while I'd stumbled across some wierd cultish group of chritos what with all the signing and mantra-like repeating.
> 
> Also, just to throw this into the mix, a close family member has this year been denied the right to speak at an occupation because they were sat on a chair at the periphery of the assembly. "We're all on the floor, if you want to speak get off that chair!" Now that's privilege, eh?


 
It's was used in Occupy Wall Street as megaphones were banned.

I do not have anything to do with Occupy no do I have any particular interest in them.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> heres some jewish occupy activists "pledging to hold themselves accountable for the occupation of palestine". god that fucked me off. presumably anyone who doesn't hold themselves to such a thing or points out the role of capital and class in maintaining the occupation is just not feeling guilty enough, perhaps they should flaggelate themselves until they've disabled themselves and then they can come first in the meeting.
> 
> just fucked politics on so many levels.
> 
> is it me or has occupy come to embody the very worst aspects of left wing (or pseudo left) politics of every kind? jesus wept


 
It's just a nutter magnet.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> U-Cal Davis campus
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

Just the photos I was thinking off. Fucking disgraceful behaviour. Still, they do have a rep over there. Four dead in ohio etc.


----------



## emanymton (Apr 24, 2013)

Could some one please explain where I would fit in this progressive stacking thing, as a heterosexual white male but with a learning disability (OK so it just means I can't spell for toffee, but it still counts) where exactly would I come in the speaking order? Obviously we know being from a pretty poor working class background doesn't mean anything, but I must get some oppression points for having dyslexia? Obviously I would come after the people of colour and all the women. But what about someone who had just been on holiday to Spain and had a really good tan? Or someone with aspergers syndrome? Or another while male who was a Muslim? 

I am also a little concerned that no one would know I had a disability by looking at me, should I have a sign saying something to the effect of 'I have a none visible disability which means I get to speak before you, so there!' Obviously I would need to attach it to my back somehow to keep both hands free for waving around at the appropriate points. What do people missing one of both hands do I wonder?


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Could some one please explain where I would fit in this progressive stacking thing, as a heterosexual white male but with a learning disability (OK so it just means I can't spell for toffee, but it still counts) where exactly would I come in the speaking order? Obviously we know being from a pretty poor working class background doesn't mean anything, but I must get some oppression points for having dyslexia? Obviously I would come after the people of colour and all the women. But what about someone who had just been on holiday to Spain and had a really good tan? Or someone with aspergers syndrome? Or another while male who was a Muslim?
> 
> I am also a little concerned that no one would know I had a disability by looking at me, should I have a sign saying something to the effect of 'I have a none visible disability which means I get to speak before you, so there!' Obviously I would need to attach it to my back somehow to keep both hands free for waving around at the appropriate points. What do people missing one of both hands do I wonder?


 
Get one of these it should get you some effnic minority points.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Just the photos I was thinking off. Fucking disgraceful behaviour. Still, they do have a rep over there. Four dead in ohio etc.


 
That was like 2 weeks after a Bay Area shut down when a major foreclosure (kick people out of homes) bank Chase Manhattan was attacked. It led to these notes placed all around the property damage:














So the police went in harder.


----------



## rosecore (Apr 24, 2013)

At least Laurie has gone from Game of Thrones being "racist rape-culture Disneyland with dragons" to enjoying it judging by her recent tweet.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 24, 2013)

At my uni there is a bizarre identity politics war going on over a proposal to create another permanent salaried position for a black students officer, with proponents of the proposal accusing anyone who asks questions about the proposal of racism. Oddly, most of the people who are opposing have displayed very similar behaviour towards those who were against any of their proposals (gender quotas for elections, for example). It's almost like a microcosm of the Helen Lewis nonsense.

Very nasty, lots of grandstanding about who is more oppressed and personal attacks.

Funny how the claws only come out on issues like this, when things like a living wage for workers at the university are discussed there is very little interest in spending a fraction of the time and passion on that.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> At my uni there is a bizarre identity politics war going on over a proposal to create another permanent salaried position for a black students officer, with proponents of the proposal accusing anyone who asks questions about the proposal of racism. Oddly, most of the people who are opposing have displayed very similar behaviour towards those who were against any of their proposals (gender quotas for elections, for example). It's almost like a microcosm of the Helen Lewis nonsense.
> 
> Very nasty, lots of grandstanding about who is more oppressed and personal attacks.
> 
> Funny how the claws only come out on issues like this, when things like a living wage for workers at the university are discussed there is very little interest in spending a fraction of the time and passion on that.


 
What uni is this? Red brick?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> What uni is this? Red brick?


 
Sheffield


----------



## JimW (Apr 24, 2013)

Maybe the "we are better than this" was complaining at the failure to do more than crack a couple of windows?


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Sheffield


 
I hear that used to be a good crack.

Fuck off student politics and go find some local anarchos is my advice.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 24, 2013)

another career NUS politician, great.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

Thinking back to my one experience with Occupy an early morning picket of building sites for national pay agreements to be honoured - and I got told off as encouraging racism by someone younger than me because I used the phrase third world to describe changes. bit my lip nothing happened not scarred -  racism is worse than incorrect accusations of racism - sure.

If we agree that privilege analysis is incorrect - how can it be challenged without it being turned into 'aha, you're privileged (unchecked, natch) so it's self-interested for you to be against privilege theory/progressive stack'.

Everything can get personalised - and every person probably has a privilege weakness/vulnerability which can be exploited - it can all be pinned on that.
There's always someone worse off than you - that's entirely correct because things can be seen in many ways there *will* *always be* people who are less privileged and hence 'you're trying to stop privilege analysis to protect your meagre privilege, stop supporting capitalism by being such a 1960s oaf and talking about class primacy, it _all_ matters... no anti-racism without ableism, no class struggle without anti-homophobia, no anti-ageism without feminism.' (to many will sound like 'i'm checking my privileges and you can too, just accept the privilege analysis, take it in, there's a good boy/girl'

Perhaps it can't be challenged on an individual argument level. One person's opposition is too easily batted away.  Am I going crazy even thinking this through?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> IT'S 2013!


 
and what...its not hipster enough


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> and what...its not hipster enough


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> very nasty, lots of grandstanding about who is more oppressed and personal attacks.


 
Here's what confuses people too if a non-oppressed group people do not attend events about promoting 'oppressed group' members that's a sign of privilege but when they do and do talk there that can also be seen as privilege - should white women attend or not - surely they shouldn't it's about black women but white women are allowed but not black male students so there must be an expectation for white women to attend particularly with the answering FAQs point at sec4.
Should there also be an event for black intersectionality but for black students as a whole?




> EVENT DESCRIPTION
> STUDENT BLACK INTERSECTIONALITY WORKSHOP
> 
> Student Black Intersectionality Workshop
> ...


 




> • Introduction and ice-breaker
> 30 minutes
> • Session 1: What is intersectionality?
> 1 hour Defining intersectionality and what it means to us personally.
> ...


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Thinking back to my one experience with Occupy an early morning picket of building sites for national pay agreements to be honoured - and I got told off as encouraging racism by someone younger than me because I used the phrase third world to describe changes. bit my lip nothing happened not scarred - racism is worse than incorrect accusations of racism - sure......
> 
> Perhaps it can't be challenged on an individual argument level. One person's opposition is too easily batted away.  Am I going crazy even thinking this through?


 
*Anti Hipster Action*


----------



## sihhi (Apr 24, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Here's what confuses people too if a non-oppressed group people do not attend events about promoting 'oppressed group' members that's a sign of privilege but when they do and do talk there that can also be seen as privilege - should white women attend or not - surely they shouldn't it's about black women but white women are allowed but not black male students so there must be an expectation for white women to attend particularly with the answering FAQs point at sec4.
> Should there also be an event for black intersectionality but for black students as a whole?


 
I sound like an arse even writing the questions.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> *Anti Hipster Action*


 
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/...better-than-you-say-researchers-2013021259405


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> At my uni there is a bizarre identity politics war going on over a proposal to create another permanent salaried position for a black students officer, with proponents of the proposal accusing anyone who asks questions about the proposal of racism. Oddly, most of the people who are opposing have displayed very similar behaviour towards those who were against any of their proposals (gender quotas for elections, for example). It's almost like a microcosm of the Helen Lewis nonsense.
> 
> Very nasty, lots of grandstanding about who is more oppressed and personal attacks.
> 
> Funny how the claws only come out on issues like this, when things like a living wage for workers at the university are discussed there is very little interest in spending a fraction of the time and passion on that.


 
i once foolishly considered getting involved in left wing student politics only to find out they were campaigning to ban marlboro lights from the cigarette machine on the basis of a very odd theory they had links to the Ku Klux Klan . I changed not only my mind but my cigarette brand  and started smoking Marlboro.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> i once foolishly considered getting involved in left wing student politics only to find out they were campaigning to ban marlboro lights from the cigarette machine on the basis of a very odd theory they had links to the Ku Klux Klan . I changed not only my mind but my cigarette brand and started smoking Marlboro.


 
You was a student when there was Marlboro Lights? I assumed you were in your 50s.


----------



## Belushi (Apr 24, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> i once foolishly considered getting involved in left wing student politics only to find out they were campaigning to ban marlboro lights from the cigarette machine on the basis of a very odd theory they had links to the Ku Klux Klan


 
The three K's on the packet?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 24, 2013)

Belushi said:


> The three K's on the packet?


 
yup, they were cracking up about it


----------



## lazythursday (Apr 25, 2013)

I remember some stuff about boycotting Marlboro from my student days - but it was to do with their links to some anti-gay stuff, not the Ku Klux Klan. Though I think the K motif was sometimes mentioned, in a sort of pre-internet conspiraloonery way.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 25, 2013)

lazythursday said:


> I remember some stuff about boycotting Marlboro from my student days - but it was to do with their links to some anti-gay stuff, not the Ku Klux Klan. Though I think the K motif was sometimes mentioned, in a sort of pre-internet conspiraloonery way.


 
they probably got confused with _god hates fags_ or something

i never even bothered going to the meeting once i heard the banning the smokes KKK bit. Could well have been more detail but life was too short . Specially for a smoker .


----------



## sihhi (Apr 25, 2013)

J Ed said:


> There are tumblr blogs


 
Here's the latest popular one I'm having difficulty with is this a blog that should be fairly interesting (nothing about class and anti-unionisation or brand promotion and linking capitalist firms with public charity - but fun nonetheless) then interrupted by stuff like

http://yourfaveisproblematic.tumblr.com/post/48619152929/nicki-minaj

#SUICIDE TRIVIALIZATION


“And definitely [with] suicide you’re giving up and I don’t promote giving up. I promote fighting and winning.”
“Haters you can kill yourself” in song “Check it Out”
Is this really oppressive to depression sufferers and ableist suicide trivialization?

Then you get http://yourfaveisproblematic.tumblr...as-a-person-of-color-i-find-not-only-the-term

_As a ‘person of color’, I find not only the term offensive, but am super offended when it is written as poc/POC. You’re very concerned with how ‘people of color’ are represented, their cultures, etc, but can’t be bother to write out three words, seems sort of hypocritical. _

I will definitely take this into consideration. I do know that some people do not like the term, but I don’t know of any other term that is generally considered not offensive and is created by the people it represents. I will endeavor to at the least write it out more often. I had just seem it written that way so often, especially by people of color themselves so I figure it was harmless shorthand.

So 'of colour' _is_ offensive, but others say it isn't.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Then you get http://yourfaveisproblematic.tumblr...as-a-person-of-color-i-find-not-only-the-term
> 
> _As a ‘person of color’, I find not only the term offensive, but am super offended when it is written as poc/POC. You’re very concerned with how ‘people of color’ are represented, their cultures, etc, but can’t be bother to write out three words, seems sort of hypocritical. _
> 
> ...


 
despite whatever _lack of privilege_ there may be im quite sure there are POCs who are just as capable of being wankers as well. Anyone _*super offended*_ by a politically correct abbreviation coming from someone who most definitely isnt racist is probably just a wanker, god knows what theyd feel like if they met an actual race hate merchant . And wankers are generally best ignored regardless of pigmentation . Neither ethnicity or sexuality should entitle anyone to a wankers permit . Nobody should be super offended by anyone who patently isnt trying to be offensive .
Some people just want a license to be a dick and willl use any opportunity to make someone else feel small .


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> So 'of colour' _is_ offensive, but others say it isn't.


 
There's a particular issue with that term where "coloured" is considered an offensive description. Although, obviously that particular person is talking about something else.


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 25, 2013)

treelover said:


> I wonder what Seeds Of Change who have done some very good work on democratising meetings, etc think of all that?


i tried to get them involved in mediating a (cough) radical mental self-help group a few years ago.

they don't do mental health, apparently


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Apr 25, 2013)

What's radical mental self-help when its at home?


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 25, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> What's radical mental self-help when its at home?


based on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_Project
i was a little bit  when i was involved with them. i was young and trusting, what can i say?


----------



## cesare (Apr 25, 2013)

Random said:


> Did you hear there was a (rare) strike today across Sweden? It lasted for 50 minutes, then a deal was signed in which the companies promised to "consult with2 the union over agency staff


50 minutes! No, I hadn't heard. When you say across Sweden, do you mean a general strike?


----------



## Random (Apr 25, 2013)

cesare said:


> 50 minutes! No, I hadn't heard. When you say across Sweden, do you mean a general strike?


No, I just meant it wasn't a local strike. It was the freight transport union that shut down a few depots and the employers were ready for a lock out later in the day.


----------



## cesare (Apr 25, 2013)

Random said:


> No, I just meant it wasn't a local strike. It was the freight transport union that shut down a few depots and the employers were ready for a lock out later in the day.


Ah right. Effective to have only lasted 50 minutes though. I hadn't realised, btw, that it was the 1909 gen strike that resulted in this consensus model.


----------



## Random (Apr 25, 2013)

I don't see that it was effective. The union had previously refused to sign a collective agreement saying they wanted higher than 6.8 percent over three years and wanted a block on temp agencies. After 50 minutes they settled for 6.8... and being "consulted" on temp agencies. Unions in Sweden seem to be deathly scared of strikes.


----------



## cesare (Apr 25, 2013)

Random said:


> I don't see that it was effective. The union had previously refused to sign a collective agreement saying they wanted higher than 6.8 percent over three years and wanted a block on temp agencies. After 50 minutes they settled for 6.8... and being "consulted" on temp agencies. Unions in Sweden seem to be deathly scared of strikes.


Oh, I thought you meant that they got what they wanted within 50 minutes once they'd done the unthinkable - actually striking. They either folded or reached a very swift consensus then, depending on your point of view.


----------



## rekil (Apr 25, 2013)

Not a peep out of soi-disant feminist Laura about the garment workers in Bangladesh but thanks to her twitter I now know that her porn friend is on the front of Village Voice which reveals that she (stoya) wears a mink coat and smokes lots of fags.

Maybe this is a little bit feminisn't or a lot misogyny but it's almost as if she can't even be bothered to pretend to be interested in working class women's struggles at home or abroad.


----------



## love detective (Apr 25, 2013)

And meanwhile all her followers offer support, money and solidarity, not to those impacted by the tragedy in Bangladesh, but to Penny herself who has once again been pickpocketed in New York and will thus be 'poor for a few weeks'

_Laurie Penny, 23, never imagined she would find herself enmeshed in a world of poverty (for a couple of weeks)_


----------



## articul8 (Apr 25, 2013)

love detective said:


> And meanwhile all her followers offer support, money and solidarity, not to those impacted by the tragedy in Bangladesh, but to Penny herself who has once again been pickpocketed in New York and will thus be 'poor for a few weeks'


 really?  She seems remarkably unlucky as far as these bag/phone/iPad stealing incidents go


----------



## Red Cat (Apr 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Perhaps it can't be challenged on an individual argument level. One person's opposition is too easily batted away.  Am I going crazy even thinking this through?


 
No, there are a few students involved in the Birmingham anti-cuts groups, so the culture isn't limited to student politics. The first big meeting I went to this year proposed choosing women to speak first in preference to men. But then the majority of people at the last one I went to also voted that it was ok for a bunch of men to wear v for vendetta masks in a public meeting...

I find it all a bit...unnerving. I find it interesting that so many on here find it creepy because that was my response too, visceral rather than intellectual. Can't quite put my finger on it though.


----------



## love detective (Apr 25, 2013)

articul8 said:


> really? She seems remarkably unlucky as far as these bag/phone/iPad stealing incidents go


 
Yep indeed



> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> 16h
> Got robbed in New York again. Lost 140 quid in dollars. Bloody problematic. I needed that.


 


> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> 15h
> Thanks for the concern. I'm ok, I didn't see it happen, *just going to be poor for a few weeks*. Rubbish. I think I must have a robbable face.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 25, 2013)

White line fever?


----------



## brogdale (Apr 25, 2013)

I seriously struggle to understand why people bother reading all this sh1t on Twitter. Might be my age (and/or phone) I suppose, but really?


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 25, 2013)

A bit like the awesome ATOMIC SUPLEX experience of poverty.


----------



## rekil (Apr 25, 2013)

brogdale said:


> I seriously struggle to understand why people bother reading all this sh1t on Twitter. Might be my age (and/or phone) I suppose, but really?


Orders mate.  From the top. Bragg himself!



Spoiler


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 25, 2013)

http://mccaine.org/2013/04/24/preliminary-considerations-on-politics-identity-and-language/

A very thoughtful and thorough analysis of some of the issues raised in this thread. The stuff towards the end is perhaps more appropriate to what we've been talking about.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 25, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> really? She seems remarkably unlucky as far as these bag/phone/iPad stealing incidents go


 

if you can alwys get another one or the consequence of a missing bag is missing the cinema/drinks for two weeks and nothing more then you don't look after yer stuff properly. Simple as.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 25, 2013)

Call me a cynic, but makes you wonder whether these crowd sourcing "buy poor me a new phone" exercises aren't a good money spinner.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 25, 2013)

Nah, that's going too far.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 25, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Call me a cynic, but makes you wonder whether these crowd sourcing "buy poor me a new phone" exercises aren't a good money spinner.


 

occams says no. Yes it would make a few quid as a minor bit of con. Laura is on a fat cheque from the statesman. Why would she need to?


----------



## where to (Apr 25, 2013)

[QUOTE="Red Cat]But then the majority of people at the last one I went to also voted that it was ok for a bunch of men to wear v for vendetta masks in a public meeting[/QUOTE]

Fucking hell.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 25, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> occams says no. Yes it would make a few quid as a minor bit of con. Laura is on a fat cheque from the statesman. Why would she need to?


 top up her holiday money? Might not be that - but she does seem to be making a habit of it


----------



## rekil (Apr 25, 2013)

Going straight to twitter to blag cash off idiots instead of reporting the robbery to the cops is a little bit communism.


----------



## Pickman's model (Apr 25, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> occams says no. Yes it would make a few quid as a minor bit of con. Laura is on a fat cheque from the statesman. Why would she need to?


some people are born greedy


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 25, 2013)

where to said:


> [QUOTE="Red Cat]But then the majority of people at the last one I went to also voted that it was ok for a bunch of men to wear v for vendetta masks in a public meeting


 
Fucking hell.[/quote]


The whole v mask thing is proper shit.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 25, 2013)

and reminds me of creepy julian in the embassy


----------



## Firky (Apr 25, 2013)

copliker said:


> Not a peep out of soi-disant feminist Laura about the garment workers in Bangladesh but thanks to her twitter I now know that her porn friend is on the front of Village Voice which reveals that she (stoya) wears a mink coat and smokes lots of fags.
> 
> Maybe this is a little bit feminisn't or a lot misogyny but it's almost as if she can't even be bothered to pretend to be interested in working class women's struggles at home or abroad.


 
I was in the bath at the time and couldn't hear it properly but there was quite a big phone in on the radio about this, lots of people ringing in saying they'd never have bought their cheap clobber if they had known it was made in sweat-shops. I thought most people realised that high-street garments are often made by workers in appalling conditions, BBC 3 even did a series on it where they sent kids who wear designer gear to the factories it is made. Not sure what my point is... something about being surprised how many people appeared to be ignorant of how and where their clothes are made or something and that vaguely relating to LP's own ignorance of workers. 


(Bangladesh isn't as trendy as NYC which features often on her itinerary so I can't imagine it being on her radar).


----------



## treelover (Apr 25, 2013)

L/U are declaring 50% of delegates to their first conference in May (2 delegates per branch) must be women, good news...


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 25, 2013)

we do not forgive, we do not forget. We do not take these masks off even when at it. Which is rare.

expect us


----------



## treelover (Apr 25, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> A bit like the awesome ATOMIC SUPLEX experience of poverty.


 

what was that about?


----------



## cesare (Apr 25, 2013)

treelover said:


> L/U are declaring 50% of delegates to their first conference in May (2 delegates per branch) must be women, good news...


Quotas aren't good news.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 25, 2013)

Firky said:


> I was in the bath at the time and couldn't hear it properly but there was quite a big phone in on the radio about this, lots of people ringing in saying they'd never have bought their cheap clobber if they had known it was made in sweat-shops. I thought most people realised that high-street garments are often made by workers in appalling conditions, BBC 3 even did a series on it where they sent kids who wear designer gear to the factories it is made. Not sure what my point is... something about being surprised how many people appeared to be ignorant of how and where their clothes are made or something and that vaguely relating to LP's own ignorance of workers.
> 
> 
> (Bangladesh isn't as trendy as NYC which features often on her itinerary so I can't imagine it being on her radar).


 

this latest one was particularly shit as it wasn't even a fire. The building fucking fell down of its own accord. To make people work in those conditions is criminal.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 25, 2013)

Again don't let the often good stuff UKUncut do be tarnished disproportionately by this bunch of plonkers.


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 25, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> based on this:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_Project
> i was a little bit  when i was involved with them. i was young and trusting, what can i say?


 
There is a mental health self help group in Doncaster,I think ,which has the premsie that those who have a mental health issue have the right to make themselves better and that a medical model whereby they are passive subjects of treatment is one that undermines that right. I saw them speak at a conference.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 25, 2013)

treelover said:


> L/U are declaring 50% of delegates to their first conference in May (2 delegates per branch) must be women, good news...


 
I'm not so certain, even amongst a lot of women there is far from total support for quotas. I can see why they can be useful sometimes but my girlfriend thinks that they are patronising and unjustifiable except in the most extreme of circumstances (quotas for admission of black students to universities in the 60s, 70s and 80s in America for example).

I would be very interested to know exactly who was pushing for these quotas so early in the organisation's life, ex-SWP?


----------



## treelover (Apr 25, 2013)

'*Terry Conway: *I am a socialist feminist, activist in the LGBT movement, involved in my trade union UNISON and a supporter of Socialist Resistance. I live in Islington, north London


As its so new, there is a small ad hoc committee, seems to be coming from the top, Burgin, etc, perhaps this person

seems to be more about speed and doing things on the hoof, rather than usual top down, etc,'

http://leftunity.org/our-day-to-day-organising-group/


----------



## chilango (Apr 25, 2013)

Never mind the 30s in slow motion this is the 80s in shit montage.

Fucking useless.


----------



## treelover (Apr 25, 2013)

How come the US Left(which is tiny) in its widest sense(eg occupy) but particularly the academics are beginning to influence left politics in this county and not just theory, its going to have an impact on new formations like LU.


----------



## treelover (Apr 25, 2013)

chilango said:


> Never mind the 30s in slow motion this is the 80s in shit montage.
> 
> Fucking useless.


 
tbf, no one knows how it is is going to pan out, there are already arguments breaking out..

btw, Naomi Klein began her political life with identity politics, she soon learnt..


----------



## chilango (Apr 25, 2013)

Cos the remnants of the UK Left are adrift. Bereft of ideas and direction as all their old sureties have disintegrated.

This turn to identity is reassuring and familiar and provides plenty of introversion to substitute for real life.


----------



## Firky (Apr 25, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> A bit like the awesome ATOMIC SUPLEX experience of poverty.


----------



## chilango (Apr 25, 2013)

treelover said:


> tbf, no one knows how it is is going to pan out, there are already arguments breaking out..
> 
> btw, Naomi Klein began her political life with identity politics, she soon learnt..



She's hardly an example of a good class based strategist. Regardless of No Logo being quite a good book.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 25, 2013)

chilango said:


> She's hardly an example of a good class based strategist. Regardless of No Logo being quite a good book.


 
Weren't her parents in the CP of Canada?


----------



## Firky (Apr 25, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Fucking hell.


 

The whole v mask thing is proper shit.[/quote]

The Jarrow March this year is mostly composed of posh kids in V masks. They're calling it the Anonymous Jarrow Crusade too


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 25, 2013)

Firky said:


> The whole v mask thing is proper shit.


 
The Jarrow March this year is mostly composed of posh kids in V masks. They're calling it the Anonymous Jarrow Crusade too [/quote]

hope it goes better than the Childrens Crusade


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 25, 2013)

treelover said:


> How come the US Left(which is tiny) in its widest sense(eg occupy) but particularly the academics are beginning to influence left politics in this county and not just theory, its going to have an impact on new formations like LU.


 
This is a really interesting question. US cultural imperialism? I mean I started out reading Noam Chomsky before getting any sort of detailed knowledge of the british working class tradition, I think it's probably the same for a lot of people my age. It reflects how detached a lot of people involved in left politics are from that w/c tradition in their own country, how it's something far more alien to them than the radical american intelligensia.

Just generally I think the US far-left is the last place we need to be looking for guidance. Seriously.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

treelover said:


> How come the US Left(which is tiny) in its widest sense(eg occupy) but particularly the academics are beginning to influence left politics in this county and not just theory, its going to have an impact on new formations like LU.


Which left politics? What about class politics? Or to put it another way, the mass of working class people.


----------



## treelover (Apr 25, 2013)

chilango said:


> Cos the remnants of the UK Left are adrift. Bereft of ideas and direction as all their old sureties have disintegrated.
> 
> This turn to identity is reassuring and familiar and provides plenty of introversion to substitute for real life.


 
if you read some of the ideas people are posting on LU blogs, they do have imagination, etc, it is the (being ageist) the old lefties Burgin, etc who seem to be still in a bit of a time vortex.

but kudos to him for letting a thousands flowers bloom, anyone can say they are the organiser for a particular area..


----------



## treelover (Apr 25, 2013)

chilango said:


> She's hardly an example of a good class based strategist. Regardless of No Logo being quite a good book.


 
I meant she was part of that milieu in college days


----------



## articul8 (Apr 25, 2013)

chilango said:


> She's hardly an example of a good class based strategist. Regardless of No Logo being quite a good book.


Her book Shock Doctrine was a more useful intervention than the kind of thing Jodi Dean tends to say


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

chilango said:


> Cos the remnants of the UK Left are adrift. Bereft of ideas and direction as all their old sureties have disintegrated.
> 
> This turn to identity is reassuring and familiar and provides plenty of introversion to substitute for real life.


...but this time there is not going to be any jobs for its practioners post town hall and general election victories. What is the state and capital going to put in place to atomise communities and wider society now that the funding for top-down official multi-culturalism has dried up. The ideological construction of 'respectable culture' that i'm always on about is well in the lead at the minute - far ahead of all this "daycare for bourgeois adult babies" stuff damaging as the latter is in helping build a viable response to the former.


----------



## Pickman's model (Apr 25, 2013)

Firky said:


> The Jarrow March this year is mostly composed of posh kids in V masks. They're calling it the Anonymous Jarrow Crusade too


hope there's no pogroms in the rhineland this time round.


----------



## killer b (Apr 25, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> hope it goes better than the Childrens Crusade


dunno, the idea of a load of v-masked bellends being sold into slavery has a certain attraction to it...


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Her book Shock Doctrine was a more useful intervention than the kind of thing Jodi Dean tends to say


Great, now what? Can we find someone better than both? Worse then both? What? Why?


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 25, 2013)

articul8 said:


> really? She seems remarkably unlucky as far as these bag/phone/iPad stealing incidents go


 
It's pretty difficult to get robbed in NYC these days, unless one is up to no good.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 25, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Great, now what? Can we find someone better than both? Worse then both? What? Why?


I'm just saying that Klein is a fairly effective popularising analyst/critic of neoliberalism.  Her contribution is useful, so far as it goes.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 25, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> It's pretty difficult to get robbed in NYC these days, unless one is up to no good.


I know about Hackney and Harlesden but no idea about Harlem


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

Insurance fraud. Pretty clear pattern.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 25, 2013)

claiming the insurance _and_ crowdsourcing money for a replacement? is there no end to the evil


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 25, 2013)

articul8 said:


> I know about Hackney and Harlesden but no idea about Harlem


 
Put it this way, one could walk safely alone down 125th St at 2am, but one might not get away with 116th.


----------



## rekil (Apr 25, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> occams says no. Yes it would make a few quid as a minor bit of con. Laura is on a fat cheque from the statesman. Why would she need to?


What sort of response do you think she thought she'd get by posting something like that up?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 25, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> this latest one was particularly shit as it wasn't even a fire. The building fucking fell down of its own accord. To make people work in those conditions is criminal.


 
Their fault for being in that situation in the first place, don't they know how to _monetize their hotness_? They must be ugly and lazy.


----------



## rekil (Apr 25, 2013)

Elsewhere, it looks like Camila Vallejo has hijacked PD's Veg Wedge movement.  I wonder does she charge a fiver per pic like molly does.


----------



## Libertad (Apr 25, 2013)

copliker said:


> Elsewhere, it looks like Camila Vallejo has hijacked PD's Veg Wedge movement.  I wonder does she charge a fiver per pic like molly does.
> 
> View attachment 31848


 
See those chillies? _That's _monetizing your hotness.


----------



## treelover (Apr 25, 2013)

Isn't she just doing what an electoral candidate always does, hover around markets, kiss babies, etc?


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 25, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Just generally I think the US far-left is the last place we need to be looking for guidance. Seriously.


 
Most other countries have a left or even a far left that has _something _to show for their efforts over the years. What have the US far left got to show?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 25, 2013)

a widespread knowledge of the meat-packing industry


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 25, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> a widespread knowledge of the meat-packing industry


 
It's easy to mock.



frogwoman said:


> a widespread knowledge of the meat-packing industry


 
And I'll do the jokes, btw.


----------



## treelover (Apr 25, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> a widespread knowledge of the meat-packing industry


 

in the past a heck of a lot more, wobblies, etc, now....


----------



## agricola (Apr 25, 2013)

copliker said:


> Elsewhere, it looks like Camila Vallejo has hijacked PD's Veg Wedge movement.  I wonder does she charge a fiver per pic like molly does.
> 
> View attachment 31848


 
Is that the Occupy gesture for "Chillies, four for a pound"?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 25, 2013)

going back to occupy for a minute... i don't regret my short involvement in them at all as it was very educational, and perhaps a few of the kids learnt from me in the way that i learnt from some of the older, more experienced, more politically knowledgeable activists when i was a fey youth *apologies for ego*. but it was clearly a failure, for some very important reasons.

1. no decent politics. it was all things to all people and thus nothing to anyone.
2. too many egos, not enough people cleaning up.
3. a tolerance for stupid views - conspiracy loons etc.
4. not as good at self-policing as it thought it was.
5. whilst laden with an attempt to be inclusive still managed to alienate all the people usually alienated by white middle class movements.
6. paranoid as fuck.
7. which comes from 1-6 -> no clear direction, thus reactionary, thus fizzled out.


some good ideas i saw:

1. working groups -> a useful way of getting things done without the GA nonsense.
2. outreach groups -> building links with local communities to see what they wanted from Occupy, what Occupy could do for them. (but seen as unglamourous, therefore ignored by most occupiers, and media, and essentially couldn't survive once the camps went totally lord of the flies).
3. initially well-organised, able to feed and shelter people well in early days, until those people with organisational skills got fucked off with the whole thing and left.

none of these things are exclusive to occupy.

still, it was an interesting experiment and should provide some lessons for the next big idea!


----------



## Red Cat (Apr 25, 2013)

I think one of the problems is that big ideas don't work. It's the gap between what is actually do-able and the fantasy of the big idea that gets filled with such things as checking one's privilege.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 25, 2013)

well, i think the big idea involved in occupy was
1.  camp out. 
2. check privilege
3. government hands over control to occupiers and world becomes better.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 25, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> I think one of the problems is that big ideas don't work. It's the gap between what is actually do-able and the fantasy of the big idea that gets filled with such things as checking one's privilege.


 
true to an extent but the fact of left wing counter culture attracting wankers like moths to a flame cant be overlooked either . Theres absolutely no rational excuse for that stuff emanating from grown adults with half a brain and its primary political effect is to actively alienate the broad mass of working people, many of whom i believe may well have been initially sympathetic  . If there was an actual physical class war going on it could only be considered as active treason . I dont mean that in any jokey or hyperbolic sense either .
I can only speak for myself as someone whod be very sympathetic and very happy to see something like occupy go somewhere, but i would immediately withdraw from any project that started incorporating this utter rubbish into its structures . And i suspect a great many ordinary workers who dont subscribe to these counter cultures would too . This has the appearance of a bunch of cranks spotting a political vaccuum which they saw as an opportunity to propagate their ballsology and as soon as they did the vaccuum collapsed and they disappeared up their own backsides . And thats what theyll continue to do ad infinitum unless forces on the left challenge them and tell them to _check their utter bullshit_


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 25, 2013)

treelover said:


> in the past a heck of a lot more, wobblies, etc, now....


 
that Seattle business caused a bit of a shock and showed what can be done when you get workers as opposed to jugglers onside .


----------



## Red Cat (Apr 25, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> well, i think the big idea involved in occupy was
> 1. camp out.
> 2. check privilege
> 3. government hands over control to occupiers and world becomes better.


 
Emancipation is the big idea. Checking privilege is a filler activity.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 25, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> well, i think the big idea involved in occupy was
> 1. camp out.
> 2. check privilege
> 3. government hands over control to occupiers and world becomes better.


 
In some ways it seemed almost like a DIY version of the colour revolutions, only without a CIA or State Department to back it.



Casually Red said:


> true to an extent but the fact of left wing counter culture attracting wankers like moths to a flame cant be overlooked either . Theres absolutely no rational excuse for that stuff emanating from grown adults with half a brain and its primary political effect is to actively alienate the broad mass of working people, many of whom i believe may well have been initially sympathetic . If there was an actual physical class war going on it could only be considered as active treason . I dont mean that in any jokey or hyperbolic sense either .
> I can only speak for myself as someone whod be very sympathetic and very happy to see something like occupy go somewhere, but i would immediately withdraw from any project that started incorporating this utter rubbish into its structures . And i suspect a great many ordinary workers who dont subscribe to these counter cultures would too . This has the appearance of a bunch of cranks spotting a political vaccuum which they saw as an opportunity to propagate their ballsology and as soon as they did the vaccuum collapsed and they disappeared up their own backsides . And thats what theyll continue to do ad infinitum unless forces on the left challenge them and tell them to _check their utter bullshit_


 
Also based on a silly attempt to replay the 1960s? Which weren't the Woodstock paradise a generation of US kids has been led to believe they were.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Emancipation is the big idea. Checking privilege is a filler activity.


How was emancipation the big idea?

Big idea were banned as bad. _No demands._


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 25, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Also based on a silly attempt to replay the 1960s? Which weren't the Woodstock paradise a generation of US kids has been led to believe they were.


 
funny enough im just after reading a book on the global student uprisings of 1968 .The general cluelessness seems to be being replayed at least . Along with the privilege checking et al


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 25, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> funny enough im just after reading a book on the global student uprisings of 1968 .The general cluelessness seems to be being replayed at least . Along with the privilege checking et al


 
At least they had Bernadette Devlin. Is that the David Caute book you're reading, btw?


----------



## Red Cat (Apr 25, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> How was emancipation the big idea?
> 
> Big idea were banned as bad. _No demands._


 
I've got to go and buy some teabags. And I can't think when the kids are around.

Will try and explain what I was thinking later. It was only a half-formed though tbf


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> I've got to go and buy some teabags. And I can't think when the kids are around.
> 
> Will try and explain what I was thinking later. It was only a half-formed though tbf


No worries, and you've reminded me, i need milk.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 25, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> At least they had Bernadette Devlin. Is that the David Caute book you're reading, btw?


 
yeah, thats the one . Thought it was a pretty good read . Im not knowlegable enough to gauge its bias or accuracy but I thought it was pretty good .


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 25, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> How was emancipation the big idea?
> 
> Big idea were banned as bad. _No demands._


 
im starting to suspect Bono was behind the whole thing


----------



## cesare (Apr 25, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> im starting to suspect Bono was behind the whole thing


Assange, more like.


----------



## rekil (Apr 25, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> I've got to go and buy some teabags.





butchersapron said:


> No worries, and you've reminded me, i need milk.


Check your fridgelege people.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yep, VP needs to check his right hand dexterity privilege, to realise that left handed people have been oppressed for centuries and learn to include them in his admittedly admirable plans for dealing with middle class trendies


 
Pah. I'm functionally ambidextrous, motherfucker. I can knock you on your arse with either paw!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 25, 2013)

brogdale said:


> Rather large potential for mis-interpreting leftists as oppositional, I'd say?
> 
> Don't you
> 
> ...


 
Rather a large potential for those of us with upper limb mobility issues to get fucked over, too.


----------



## agricola (Apr 25, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> im starting to suspect Bono was behind the whole thing


 
cui bono?  Bono?


----------



## articul8 (Apr 25, 2013)

I'd be a bit worried if I saw everyone giving me the "clarify" sign


----------



## cesare (Apr 25, 2013)

agricola said:


> cui bono?  Bono?


Not pro bono at any rate


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 25, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> 'Clarify' could easily double as 'CLAW' or 'CRAB'


 
Or even "I've got crabs".


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 25, 2013)

articul8 said:


> I'd be a bit worried if I saw everyone giving me the "clarify" sign


 
that wouldn't be the clarify sign they'd be giving you.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 25, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> that wouldn't be the clarify sign they'd be giving you.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Pah. I'm functionally ambidextrous, motherfucker. I can knock you on your arse with either paw!


 
Check your privilege 

There's probably a serious point in here somewhere but I'm buggered if I can think what it is! 

Oh yes, what we just did was demonstrate using the humour how people with enormous privilege can use the narrow focus of identity politics to present themselves as oppressed by people far less privileged than them simply by focusing on one minor 'oppression' (one that's dwarfed by their massive privilege) they suffer from but the other person doesn't.

So if I were a rich, white, left handed person from the north without a disability I could ignore the fact that VP is a is Jewish prole with a disability and, tragically, comes from that London - and just claim to be a left hander, horribly oppressed by VP's ambidextrous privilege.

Like when Laurie Penny, with her private education, swanky media job, elite social networks etc is able to dismiss working class critics by pointing to their 'unexamined male privilege' (something that appears to also apply to female critics if they post on urban for some reason). And then if that doesn't work actually use that privileged media platform to defame them, safe in the knowledge that they have no real means of redress.

The interesting thing is that I think intersectionality was supposed to _combat _this kind of thing by showing how the various privileges and oppressions 'intersect' with one another. That the opposite is true - ie. that its most active practitioners view privileges and oppressions in isolation and use them as a stick to beat people with - is a damning indictment on the theory as a whole. It would be like Marxists using Marxism to 'show' that capitalists are exploited by their workers (and no, spiked/RCP doesn't count as Marxist lol)


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

articul8 said:


> I'd be a bit worried if I saw everyone giving me the "clarify" sign


Because you couldn't?


----------



## cesare (Apr 25, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Because you couldn't?


Because they'd be calling him a cunt


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Thinking back to my one experience with Occupy an early morning picket of building sites for national pay agreements to be honoured - and I got told off as encouraging racism by someone younger than me because I used the phrase third world to describe changes. bit my lip nothing happened not scarred - racism is worse than incorrect accusations of racism - sure.
> 
> If we agree that privilege analysis is incorrect - how can it be challenged without it being turned into 'aha, you're privileged (unchecked, natch) so it's self-interested for you to be against privilege theory/progressive stack'.
> 
> ...


 
Argument at an individual level will always privilege those who are most knowledgeable and articulate on the subject of privilege theory.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

They may well be, but that wouldn't effect the sweats he breaks out in when asked to clarify any of his wanky janus-faced points. The cunt.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 25, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> You was a student when there was Marlboro Lights? I assumed you were in your 50s.


 
Marlboro Lights have been around since the late '70s.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 25, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> What's radical mental self-help when its at home?


 
Self-administration of ECT via the mains?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Argument at an individual level will always privilege those who are most knowledgeable and articulate on the subject of privilege theory.


 
It seems there's two options then. Either we get really fucking good at privilege theory and intersectionalise the fuck out of identity politickers until they give up or we just abandon them as beyond redemption and go and talk to some normal people instead. I favour the latter approach


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 25, 2013)

articul8 said:


> really? She seems remarkably unlucky as far as these bag/phone/iPad stealing incidents go


 
She should deed poll her first name to Jonah.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> It seems there's two options then. Either we get really fucking good at privilege theory and intersectionalise the fuck out of identity politickers until they give up or we just abandon them as beyond redemption and go and talk to some normal people instead. I favour the latter approach


 
You missed option 3:  Beat them violently and relentlessly while screaming "Santayana was right. Those who won't learn from history *are* condemned to repeat it, you identity-politicking sacks of shit".


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> It seems there's two options then. Either we get really fucking good at privilege theory and intersectionalise the fuck out of identity politickers until they give up or we just abandon them as beyond redemption and go and talk to some normal people instead. I favour the latter approach


 
The sort of folk that stamp their feet about privilege are m/c teens and early 20s they mainly bang on about privilege in the main as to avoid the C word. Class.

Whereas the sort of folk that post on this thread are middle aged cantankerous blokes. I don't think you need to worry about formulating a plan about how to deal with them. You're unlikey to cross paths.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> The sort of folk that stamp their feet about privilege are m/c teens and early 20s they mainly bang on about privilege in the main as to avoid the C word. Class.
> 
> Whereas the sort of folk that post on this thread are middle aged cantankerous blokes. I don't think you need to worry about formulating a plan about how to deal with them. You're unlikey to cross paths.


 
Who am I unlikely to cross paths with?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> The sort of folk that stamp their feet about privilege are m/c teens and early 20s they mainly bang on about privilege in the main as to avoid the C word. Class.
> 
> Whereas the sort of folk that post on this thread are middle aged cantankerous blokes. I don't think you need to worry about formulating a plan about how to deal with them. You're unlikey to cross paths.


And you choo-choo-chose the first lot.

(ignoring the wildly inaccurate characterisation - and non-comparable [why not mention class for example?] of the posters here).


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Who am I unlikely to cross paths with?


 
Twinkling stroppy teenagers championing identity politics


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 25, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> And you choo-choo-chose the first lot.
> 
> (ignoring the wildly inaccurate characterisation - and non-comparable [why not mention class for example?] of the posters here).


 
Are you saying you're not a cantankerous middle aged bloke?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Are you saying you're not a cantankerous middle aged bloke?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Twinkling stroppy teenagers championing identity politics


 
This is why it's not a good idea to make assumptions about people you don't know.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 25, 2013)

there is a bit of value in the ideas that led to identity politics and intersectionality that is important to be aware of, let's not forget that.  just not the way that we are seeing it operate in the mainstream activist left at the moment (i.e. it is not a replacement for a class analysis, and not through playing the oppression olympics).


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> there is a bit of value in the ideas that led to identity politics and intersectionality that is important to be aware of, let's not forget that. just not the way that we are seeing it operate in the mainstream activist left at the moment (i.e. it is not a replacement for a class analysis, and not through playing the oppression olympics).


Damn right there is, which is  - for me - why this theft of the ideas, is so annoying.


----------



## Belushi (Apr 25, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Whereas the sort of folk that post on this thread are middle aged cantankerous blokes.


 
frogwoman


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> frogwoman


cesare, weepiper, equationgirl,red cat, dotcommunist, tufty79, kittyp, muscovyduck - ffs, 10 seconds thought (and even more as i'm typing).


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

This might have been posted a bit back but it's relevant to the occupy derail - Laurie Penny on the human centipede gramophone (and a hilarious title that shows she has no self-awareness whatsoever - I genuinely had to double check that it wasn't a PD pisstake!):

The return of the Radical Chic evening 



> Penn Badgley, an actor on the hit series “Gossip Girl,” has a face too mathematically perfect to be truly interesting, but at this celebrity consciousness-raising gig for Occupy Wall Street, he looks genuinely excited. He bounds onto the stage, grabs the microphone and yells “mic check!” Invited guests from the Occupy movement wince at this earnest misunderstanding of the people’s mic and its reworking of the relationship between society and spectacle in an age where politics takes place mostly on television.
> In the early days of Zuccotti Park, the people’s mic was developed as a solution to the police ban on electric amplification. The order ended up being a gift to the movement, as voices were carried by chanting a speaker’s words back to them — which kept remarks pithy and aware of the audience.


 
This is my favourite part:

'Invited guests from the Occupy movement wince at this earnest misunderstanding of the people’s mic and its reworking of the relationship between society and spectacle in an age where politics takes place mostly on television.'

This Laurie Penny shitness distilled to its pure form. Could it be any more obvious that she's using their 'wince' (which probably didn't happen) as a means of shoehorning in her personal views? How does she know that's what they were wincing at? They might have had haemorhoids or something.

But anyway - apprently it reworks the relationship between society and spectacle in an age where politics takes place mostly on television. So there 

I think she's saying it removes all privilege and hierarchy. Like twitter.


----------



## rekil (Apr 25, 2013)

PD's revolutionary software dev team could bang out a 'progressive stack app' in no time - and 'make a fortune' as gonch from grange hill would say.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

What is the age range for middle aged anyway?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

So, was there a mic or not Was it turned off? if so, whaty was it  there? If so, it's a fund-raising gig, whywas it turned off? Who invited who?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> frogwoman


 
our token young woman   see, we are insclusive!


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What is the age range for middle aged anyway?


Note age is classless in ralph's cartoon world, one in which he is the defender of:



> m/c teens and early 20s they mainly bang on about privilege in the main as to avoid the C word. Class.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  3m
Spending time in America makes me a better writer, unquestionably. Their literary and journalistic culture is so much healthier right now.

Which raises a troubling question - how bad would she be if she hadn't spent time in America? It's a horrifying thought


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Note age is classless in ralph's cartoon world, one in which he is the defender of:


 
Also middle aged men (apparently I'm one of those) never encounter these classless stroppy teens. Even if they're mature students.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 25, 2013)

the mic check thing can be quite useful in an action - it's way more effective than a single loudspeaker, and can be used to allow a small amount of people to pass on vocal information across a large area.  it is a tool of information delivery, not a fucking caste-mark of rebel cool.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Also middle aged men (apparently I'm one of those) never encounter these classless stroppy teens. Even if they're mature students.


And they never work hard to ensure their political activity includes stroppy teens (another pish characterisation).


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> the mic check thing can be quite useful in an action - it's way more effective than a single loudspeaker, and can be used to allow a small amount of people to pass on vocal information across a large area. it is a tool of information delivery, not a fucking caste-mark of rebel cool.


 
So it doesn't rework the relationship between society and spectacle in an age where politics takes place mostly on television? Gutted


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> And they never work hard to ensure their political activity includes stroppy teens (another pish characterisation).


 
The bastards


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  3m
> Spending time in America makes me a better writer, unquestionably. Their literary and journalistic culture is so much healthier right now.
> 
> Which raises a troubling question - how bad would she be if she hadn't spent time in America? It's a horrifying thought


Or how much better if she hadn't.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Or how much better if she hadn't.


 
Or how much better the journalistic culture in the UK would be if she fucked off to the US and didn't come back


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Now we have to play self-oppression olympics whose is worse? Because these East Coast student anarchists offer all this:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
This is my favourite part of the whole thread. Has anyone ever met one of these Anarchist Student Federation clowns in real life?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  8m
In New York, at least, it seems easier to be a young woman trying to do ambitious creative things without being torn apart and laughed at.

Translation: it's easier to get away with writing shite without being torn apart and laughed at. She still thinks it's all about her being a young woman (and I know it is for some people but she uses that to smear us all).

It's not because you're a young woman Laurie. It's because you're shit.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 25, 2013)

> Their literary and journalistic culture is so much healthier right now.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 25, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Marlboro Lights have been around since the late '70s.


 
and ive only been around since the early 70s...fuckin nerve of him . Young people these days..i remember during the woer..


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

I think Laurie might be looking at this thread again. She's running at about 2 tweets a second about not being able to write without getting the piss taken out of her laboured writing style, fabrications and political naivety misogynistic abuse and how much better it is in the US.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

The very democratic flat shite she talked about in the OP's article, means, _you can run, but you can't hide._


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

You was a bum over over and you're a bum over there. It's because you're a bum, not where you are.


----------



## rekil (Apr 25, 2013)

Louise Mensch wants to have coffee and show her round her house. Instead of telling her to get fucked, Laura says she can't because she's leaving NY. You couldn't make it up.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  3m
> Spending time in America makes me a better writer, unquestionably. Their literary and journalistic culture is so much healthier right now.
> 
> Which raises a troubling question - how bad would she be if she hadn't spent time in America? It's a horrifying thought


 
I've just realised what she means by their literary and journalistic and literary culture being healthier - she's on about Malcolm Harris and his twendy new york wadical set isn't she?

Personally I don't think his porn obsession and misogyny and homophobia apologism are indicative of a healthy literary culture but I'm just a normal so what would I know?


----------



## cesare (Apr 25, 2013)

copliker said:


> Louise Mensch wants to have coffee and show her round her house. Instead of telling her to get fucked, Laura says she can't because she's leaving NY. You couldn't make it up.


It's all about the social currency.


----------



## rekil (Apr 25, 2013)

*ChrisJDavies* ‏@*ChrisJDavies*14m​@*PennyRed* In New York in general, it's easier for ANYONE to do ambitious creative things. Britain just sneers at ambition and creativity.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

What the fuck have they got against sneering anyway? I love a good sneer, me.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 25, 2013)

copliker said:


> *ChrisJDavies* ‏@*ChrisJDavies*
> 14m​@*PennyRed* In New York in general, it's easier for ANYONE to do ambitious creative things. Britain just sneers at ambition and creativity.


 
thats why we cunted david blaine off. Nothing to do with a healthy disdain for charlatans people making it up as they go along eh


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 25, 2013)

who is that shitwit?

also, any radical who is so radical that former tory mp invites them round for coffee to show off the furnishings is clearly not doing a good job.


----------



## cesare (Apr 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What the fuck have they got against sneering anyway? I love a good sneer, me.


The best thing she ever came out with was hateweasels


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

Being disciplined by the wider movement = run away, i'm not subject to their laws. All so predictable and sordid now.


----------



## rekil (Apr 25, 2013)

cesare said:


> The best thing she ever came out with was hateweasels


And the unintentional bit of genius that was "radical downtime".


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 25, 2013)

I'm going to write an article called "My Train Journey" and submit it to the new ink wirry.

"The disembodied voice calls out that my train is cancelled, but our vibrant young future is not" etc


----------



## Firky (Apr 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  3m
> Spending time in America makes me a better writer, unquestionably. Their literary and journalistic culture is so much healthier right now.
> 
> Which raises a troubling question - how bad would she be if she hadn't spent time in America? It's a horrifying thought


 
In other words her paypal account is now bulging with dollar and sycophantic yanky concern.


----------



## Firky (Apr 25, 2013)

Isn't it strange she was selling a Macbook pro and a few hours later she comes out with some bullshit about being robbed? It's almost as if she was skint and selling her Mac wasn't making her a buck quick enough. Transparant as...

Hey boys and girls, I am selling my laptop as I am a bit skint. It has revolutionary and radical stickers, anyone want to buy it?​​_[No interest]_​​Hey boys and girls, I have been robbed in NYC. Oh woe is me, I am so skint, what can I do? BTW my paypal is lauriepenny@gmail.com​​_[Suddenly the US is great again and better then Britain]_​


----------



## Firky (Apr 25, 2013)

I have Mads Mikkelsen to watch (the Scandinavian Cillian Murphy), I always feel a bit stupid letting that daft twat wind me up.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

Firky said:


> Isn't it strange she was selling a Macbook pro and a few hours later she comes out with some bullshit about being robbed? It's almost as if she was skint and selling her Mac wasn't making her a buck quick enough. Transparant as...
> 
> Hey boys and girls, I am selling my laptop as I am a bit skint. It has revolutionary and radical stickers, anyone want to buy it?​​_[No interest]_​​Hey boys and girls, I have been robbed in NYC. Oh woe is me, I am so skint, what can I do? BTW my paypal is lauriepenny@gmail.com​​_[Suddenly the US is great again and better then Britain]_​


 
Guess it's possible she was taking her laptop to sell and someone robbed her for it.

It's the boy child of indeterminate gender who cried wolf Laurie, let that be a lesson for you.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 25, 2013)

So the proposal on a black students officer came up for debate in union council today. Left-wing councillors who asked critical questions were told that they were 'too white' to comment.

Identity politics is a cancer.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

councillors?


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 25, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> cesare, weepiper, equationgirl,red cat, *dotcommunist*, tufty79, kittyp, muscovyduck - ffs, 10 seconds thought (and even more as i'm typing).


----------



## J Ed (Apr 25, 2013)

copliker said:


> *ChrisJDavies* ‏@*ChrisJDavies*
> 14m​
> @*PennyRed* In New York in general, it's easier for ANYONE to do ambitious creative things. Britain just sneers at ambition and creativity.


 
lol, she'll be an ex-pat Thatcherite whining about entrepreneur-bashing Britain in 5 years max


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 25, 2013)




----------



## J Ed (Apr 25, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> councillors?


 
Student Union Councillors, unpaid elected student politicians


----------



## J Ed (Apr 25, 2013)

https://twitter.com/sarahljaffe/status/327490622502076417

Check your privilege Laurie!


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

This was?

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*49m​For example: recent meeting with London radicals wanting to expand media platform. Refused to consider lack of women editors a major problem


----------



## rekil (Apr 25, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This was?


A little dig, a disingenuous one most likely, at Aaron Peters there I think.

eta: yep, Aaron pipes up with "there are no editors and the hope is to get people involved who don't already have 80k followers"

More lies and snide accusations of misogyny against your own friends Laura? For shaaaaame.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

copliker said:


> A little dig, a disingenuous one most likely, at Aaron Peters there I think.


So nothing, and still nothing on:



> I'm actively involved in a number of campaigns that aim to change and challenge the bourgeois commentariat model.


 
i/m starting to have suspicions here.


----------



## cesare (Apr 25, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


>


I didn't want to mention it in case you self identified as female, tbh.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

I'm sure there must be something Laurie can do about this lack of wadical literary and journalistic initiatives in London (what about the rest of the country Laurie, are we not edgy and important enough to matter?) she seems to upset about but I just can't think what that might be. What could a well connected young journo with a massive social network of wadicals and journalists do to overcome a lack of wadical journalistic initiatives? It's a complete mystery.

Oh, hang on, no it's not - fucking start one yourself if it's so important


----------



## J Ed (Apr 25, 2013)

I've changed my mind, pretty certain now that she deliberately conflates criticism of her with systemic sexism.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 25, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This was?
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> 49m​For example: recent meeting with London radicals wanting to expand media platform. Refused to consider lack of women editors a major problem


 
https://twitter.com/aaronjohnpeters/status/327494981126336512

@*aaronjohnpeters* 
@*PennyRed* there are no editors and the hope is to get people involved who don't already have 80k followers

_Zing_


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> https://twitter.com/aaronjohnpeters/status/327494981126336512
> 
> @*aaronjohnpeters*
> @*PennyRed* there are no editors and the hope is to get people involved who don't already have 80k followers
> ...


So she met with wankers on the internet for a one second exchange rather than



> "I'm actively involved in a number of campaigns that aim to change and challenge the bourgeois commentariat model. "


list them laurie, list them.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> https://twitter.com/aaronjohnpeters/status/327494981126336512
> 
> @*aaronjohnpeters*
> @*PennyRed* there are no editors and the hope is to get people involved who don't already have 80k followers
> ...


 
I think he might have just checked Laurie's privilege for her


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

This is peters the dissent entrepreneur of course.

How is my mum going to get involved aaron?


----------



## Belushi (Apr 25, 2013)

I'd love to be able to swan off to New York and slag my fellow radicals (sorry, cantankerous middle aged men) off via twitter every time I dont get my own way on here


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 25, 2013)

http://disillusionedmarxist.wordpre...train-journey-an-article-for-the-new-inquiry/


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 25, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I've changed my mind, pretty certain now that she deliberately conflates criticism of her with systemic sexism.


 
it truly is _the man_


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I'd love to be able to swan off to New York and slag my fellow radicals (sorry, cantankerous middle aged men) off via twitter every time I dont get my own way on here


 
I'm guessing you've not seen this little exchange yet:

@*ChrisJDavies* @*pennyred* ain't you cosmopolitan sneering at the UK you international jet setters

 *ChrisJDavies* ‏@*ChrisJDavies*  36m
@*pasparakis* @*PennyRed* So flying abroad is elitist. In 2013. Riiiight. Any other 'cosmopolitan' affectations? Refrigeration? Roads? Literacy?

Yes, that really was his reply - not being able to afford to fly to the US is comparable to being illiterate and having no access to roads or refrigeration. I mean, it's 2013 ffs! Everybody does it.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

Get that other posh one from the planes in there tamsin or something


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 25, 2013)

actually, i'd have bought her macbook off her.  i bet she's not techsavvy enough to have perma-cleansed it...


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 25, 2013)

that bloody woman..shes like a cosmopolitan lefty danny dyer


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Apr 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'm guessing you've not seen this little exchange yet:
> 
> @*ChrisJDavies* @*pennyred* ain't you cosmopolitan sneering at the UK you international jet setters
> 
> ...


 
I wonder if this person realises which group of people in this country has the highest rate of illiteracy. Or just ignore me, because clearly, not being able to read is some quaint 19th century thing. My bad.


----------



## JimW (Apr 25, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> actually, i'd have bought her macbook off her. i bet she's not techsavvy enough to have perma-cleansed it...


But that would mean condemning yourself to reading things she's written! Think it through, man!


----------



## chilango (Apr 25, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> actually, i'd have bought her macbook off her.  i bet she's not techsavvy enough to have perma-cleansed it...



...but the "Ctrl" "C" and "V" keys would be really worn.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 25, 2013)

ive just googled the woman...wtf is with the flock of seagulls hairdo..sorry thats _barnet_ to you people
The 80s were horrific enough, we dont need reminding .


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Being disciplined by the wider movement = run away, i'm not subject to their laws. All so predictable and sordid now.


 
I think I'm starting to see how Laurie's mind works. Whereas we normals see a perfectly reasonable statement here, one that criticises her for fucking off to the US because the people she professes to speak for try and hold her to account, she'll see something completely different.

She'll see:

A tirade of misogynistic abuse = seek solace in progressive new york - I don't have to take orders from middle aged male normals*. All so typically female and hysterical.

*even if they're young women they're de-facto middle aged male normals due to posting on Urban.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

Like thatcher was a man because no woman could reach that position. Only men.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 25, 2013)

you're not the boss of me


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 25, 2013)




----------



## cesare (Apr 25, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> you're not the boss of me


I've been fucking saving that one


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 25, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> you're not the boss of me


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 25, 2013)

bollocks..just showed me age there


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 25, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Or even "I've got crabs".


 
Or if you're a Tory MP:

'Could someone pass me the circular cheese grater and the bottle of malt vinegar? I'd get it myself, but I'm a little tied up at the moment...'


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

What kind of thing would get me banned from twitter? Going on there winds me up and I end up trolling the trolls - it's really not healthy. But I know that unless I'm banned I'll keep going back, I can't do it voluntarily


----------



## sihhi (Apr 25, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> That's where this comes in handy:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Anticipating divisions along immigrant or non-white men against white women - Occupy Richmond Virginia chair said 'white men, even white women' - here it is in action:






If any of the info about the two are wrong please change or correct it.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

Ten minutes applause. You at the back too. Fantastic.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 25, 2013)

'Dear Weaponisers...?' 

Is that shit real?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 25, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> 'Dear Weaponisers...?'


Yeah, what's the prob?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 25, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> 'Dear Weaponisers...?'
> 
> Is that shit real?


 
Weaponising emotion. https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/299966677221781505

Weaponising workfare


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Anticipating divisions along immigrant or non-white men against white women - Occupy Richmond Virginia chair said 'white men, even white women' - here it is in action:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
That's even better than 'who are proletarian democracy'. Take a bow!


----------



## rekil (Apr 25, 2013)




----------



## J Ed (Apr 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Anticipating divisions along immigrant or non-white men against white women - Occupy Richmond Virginia chair said 'white men, even white women' - here it is in action:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

This is the best thing I've seen in months


----------



## weepiper (Apr 25, 2013)

'Please be careful when inserting extra axes'


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Apr 25, 2013)

that's fucking ace sihhi I take my hat off to you 

'with best nuclear wishes'


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 25, 2013)

The Congress of People's Soviets awards this a full eight minute standing ovation.

Whoever is running the PD twitter site, stick this up so I can retweet it.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 25, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Get that other posh one from the planes in there tamsin or something


 
Omond - she was actually blocked/expelled from Climate Camp's press subgroup for being loose with facts.

Having a fun time with Boris Johnson instead, is friends with her sister too.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 25, 2013)

weaponising...theres just no end to it

as someone whos worried  i might turn into a nazi in my old age I really need to stop reading this stuff


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 26, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> The Congress of People's Soviets awards this a full eight minute standing ovation.
> 
> Whoever is running the PD twitter site, stick this up so I can retweet it.


 
I just tried to do it but I've not logged in to it in ages and I think the password must have changed. This looks like a job for copliker


----------



## rekil (Apr 26, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> The Congress of People's Soviets awards this a full eight minute standing ovation.
> 
> Whoever is running the PD twitter site, stick this up so I can retweet it.


I'll put it on the blog tomorrow morn - _maximum impact._


----------



## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

On the progressive stack gathering decider ??! needs a better name

It *can* work with just about everyone.



it is a real game - even middle-class journalists will score - Monbiot won that for instance.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Apr 26, 2013)

BTW, good work SpineyNorman tackling that twat Chris Davies on Twitter earlier, very good


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> On the progressive stack gathering decider ??! needs a better name
> 
> It *can* work with just about everyone.
> 
> ...


 
Include historical figures too - what about Imelda Marcos vs Dennis Skinner?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 26, 2013)

Idi Amin vs Andrea Dworkin


----------



## rekil (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> On the progressive stack gathering decider ??! needs a better name


The Priv Off? Something 'Off' anyway.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 26, 2013)

copliker said:


> I'll put it on the blog tomorrow morn - _maximum impact._


 
Urban+Twitter+blog=Full spectrum intersectionality.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 26, 2013)

Can you do Laurie Penny vs that ace Chilean student leader whose name escapes me please sihhi?


----------



## Firky (Apr 26, 2013)

Nice work sihhi


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> On the progressive stack gathering decider ??! needs a better name


 
Commentariat trumps: the progressive stack edition.

Stuck for something to do in your radical downtime? Unsure whether Laurie Penny or Camila Vallejo occupies the highest position in the hierarchy of oppression?

If so, Commentariat Trumps: The Progressive Stack edition is for you! Fight oppression while you're playing cards in the bar after a £5000 reading group session with Malcolm Harris! Pit your intersectional wits against your radical friends while at the same time learning the skills you need to speak first at Occupy meetings! Find out who is oppressing who in the New Statesman offices!

All profits go towards liberating the oppressed masses of the world*

*in the form of a contribution to PD, as the only way to ensure real liberation is to construct the workers bomb


----------



## treelover (Apr 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Can you do Laurie Penny vs that ace Chilean student leader whose name escapes me please sihhi?


 






Camilla Vallejo, now hot(no pun intended) on the campaign trail


----------



## JimW (Apr 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Commentariat trumps


 
How Stacked Is Their Deck? _Iiiiiits_ Commentariat Prog-stack Baccarat*.

* No idea how you play that one.


----------



## rekil (Apr 26, 2013)

One quibble sihhi - This bit looks a little bit weird to me.


Would "Isn't sending immigrants back home the best way to make them more privileged?" be better?

eta: Ok, I fixed this.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 26, 2013)

_PennyRed : Anyone have a story of online sexism/harrassment they want to share with me for a piece I'm working on? Get in touch. *laurie*.*penny*@gmail.com _

is she on about here ye reckon


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 26, 2013)

treelover said:


> Camilla Vallejo, now hot(no pun intended) on the campaign trail


 
another famous dowling over there...the Irish must have shagged the half of latin america at one point .

was probably the preists come to think of it


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> _PennyRed : Anyone have a story of online sexism/harrassment they want to share with me for a piece I'm working on? Get in touch. *laurie*.*penny*@gmail.com _
> 
> is she on about here ye reckon


I.e pimp out again. I know a story, a boy called norm...he had etc...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 26, 2013)

treelover said:


> Camilla Vallejo, now hot(no pun intended) on the campaign trail


 
Top left pic - is it just me or does she appear to have her underpants on outside her jeans superman style? Even if she does I still think she's ace.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I.e pimp out again. I know a story, a boy called norm...he had etc...


 
I fucking will sue her if she does that - even if I have to sell a kidney to do it I'd still drag her through the courts for it


----------



## chilango (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Anticipating divisions along immigrant or non-white men against white women - Occupy Richmond Virginia chair said 'white men, even white women' - here it is in action:
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Thanks for that. It's brightened up my morning.


----------



## andysays (Apr 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Can you do Laurie Penny vs that ace Chilean student leader whose name escapes me please sihhi?


 
If we're doing Lolz vs Camila, someone will have to decided whether tea or matte drinkers are more privileged. I'm afraid I don't know enough about the latter to offer an opinion.


----------



## andysays (Apr 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Top left pic - is it just me or does she appear to have her underpants on outside her jeans superman style? Even if she does I still think she's ace.


 
Does that mean you're in favour of her electorising her hotness?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 26, 2013)

copliker said:


> Louise Mensch wants to have coffee and show her round her house. Instead of telling her to get fucked, Laura says she can't because she's leaving NY. You couldn't make it up.


 
Bubble-icious.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I've just realised what she means by their literary and journalistic and literary culture being healthier - she's on about Malcolm Harris and his twendy new york wadical set isn't she?
> 
> Personally I don't think his porn obsession and misogyny and homophobia apologism are indicative of a healthy literary culture but I'm just a normal so what would I know?


 
Spiney, you need to leave Malcolm the perve alone, and check your ginger privilege!


----------



## rekil (Apr 26, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Whoever is running the PD twitter site, stick this up so I can retweet it.


It's up now.

http://wp.me/p2npJh-j6

RT with intersectionality hashtags and the whole shebang.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 26, 2013)

copliker said:


> *ChrisJDavies* ‏@*ChrisJDavies*
> 14m​@*PennyRed* In New York in general, it's easier for ANYONE to do ambitious creative things. Britain just sneers at ambition and creativity.


 

Cultural difference, that's all. In the US people are happy to let you re-tread tired old artistic, journalistic or cultural tropes if that's your thing, and the culture of public questioning of journos is relatively small and new there (Jayson Blair could be said to have been the trigger). Here, we (the public) have always been more active in holding journos to account when possible. A few may be sneerers, but criticising the media has a long and honourable history, and if Milady Penny don't like it, then the sooner she fucks off to the supposed Utopia she imagines NY to be, the better.

Just remember, Laura: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and you may not like the repayment method that Pervy Malc has in mind for that dinner he bought you.


----------



## love detective (Apr 26, 2013)

copliker said:


> A little dig, a disingenuous one most likely, at Aaron Peters there I think.
> 
> eta: yep, Aaron pipes up with "there are no editors and the hope is to get people involved who don't already have 80k followers"
> 
> More lies and snide accusations of misogyny against your own friends Laura? For shaaaaame.


 
Seems to be a case of her not really giving a fuck about women in general, let alone working class women. Because they refused to let her get involved with it (because of issues with her) she does the usual and deliberately & disingenuously distorts justified personal criticism into structural sexism



> *Matt Cole* ‏@*FutureFutures*
> 14h​@*alex_charnley*@*pennyred* you know exactly the reasons we had reservations and it was not because of 'women' it was because of yr brand


 
edit: I can never quite work out why she continually lies about this kind of stuff in public. I don't think it's because she's that thick that she doesn't know she will get caught out, so the only other reason for her continuing to do it must be just sheer unadulterated arrogance and sense of entitlement


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 26, 2013)

Firky said:


> I have Mads Mikkelsen to watch (the Scandinavian Cillian Murphy), I always feel a bit stupid letting that daft twat wind me up.


 
Murphy wins in the "weirdo murderous eyes" stakes, though.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 26, 2013)




----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 26, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> _PennyRed : Anyone have a story of online sexism/harrassment they want to share with me for a piece I'm working on? Get in touch. *laurie*.*penny*@gmail.com _
> 
> is she on about here ye reckon


 
More than likely.

Like establishment stooges everywhere, Penny hates anything she can't control.


----------



## Red Cat (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> How was emancipation the big idea?
> 
> Big idea were banned as bad. _No demands._


 
Emancipation from the big idea is the same as emancipation from oppression by white men, no?

But surely some idea of emancipation or freedom from oppression is what identity politics is?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Emancipation from the big idea is the same as emancipation from oppression by white men, no?
> 
> But surely some idea of emancipation or freedom from oppression is what identity politics is?


We may have our wires crossed here - were you talking about the big idea of occupy, and that big idea being 'emancipation'?

Btw (and i'm not posting this to make a point in reply, it just popped u on my twitter machine):

Woman raped twice at Occupy London protest camp, court hears



> Self-declared leader of hacking collective Anonymous UK allegedly raped woman in a tent outside St Paul's cathedral


 
(I think i may have encountered this bloke before, in weston/bristol, i need to check)


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

Just been a massive argument at work, one of my colleagues walked out and the boss told her she wouldn't be paid, and tried to stop her leaving. I bet they dont have this at the "new ink wirry"


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 26, 2013)

Malcolm...has been on TV many times as a self-professed leader of Anon...met him myself a few times, gave him a wide berth other times.


----------



## co-op (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Anticipating divisions along immigrant or non-white men against white women - Occupy Richmond Virginia chair said 'white men, even white women' - here it is in action:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
I'm worried that I may be jumping ahead of the stack here, but this is FUCKING BRILLIANT!! Seriously I remember a shed load of this kind of stuff waaay back in the London left in the 80s and no one seemed really to have the confidence to take it on then we'd just mutter about it in the pub. I remember the 'thank fuck Thatcher's a woman' conversation well, it just neutralised the whole narcissistic feminist position kerblammo.Hence the 'she's a man in a woman's body' thesis - no REALLY, I HEARD it in PERSON! I swear. I could take you to the very street and point at the house.

Best post so far on a brilliant thread.

**applause**


----------



## Red Cat (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> We may have our wires crossed here - were you talking about the big idea of occupy, and that big idea being 'emancipation'?


 
I think I got my own wires crossed replying to a post on occupy but actually thinking about checking privilege.

I was thinking about big ideas and the attraction, the power of them, the excitement involved in working towards something 'big' like revolution. When I said they don’t work I didn’t mean that I was opposed to universalising ideas/grand narratives and in favour of some kind of relativist individualism or localism. What I meant (and this was in response to another post) was that the notion that what we need is another big idea is a bit magical thinking, or voluntaristic, that we can will things to change through a brilliant idea, or spectacle, or demo, or occupation, the right party, the right kind of Leninism,etc. I also think this is present when the Left is critisised for not mobilising the working class as though the Left are not the working class and so the responsibility for working-class activity is projected into something outside the working class.

I don't know...

I'm moving more to the notion of work in the community, that it's only through that everyday work of actually making things better (rather than trying to fill the gap between the idea of radical change and lack of political activity with e.g. manic activity (SWP) or checking privilege etc.) that we actually learn how to self-organise but I don't know how this kind of local activity then goes beyond the local.

I don't know if that makes sense at all. Half-formed thoughts.


----------



## rekil (Apr 26, 2013)

Feel free to twitter it at @glinner and the likes. It could do with a boost.


----------



## rekil (Apr 26, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Bubble-icious.


On the face of it, it's way beyond the pale of regular bubbleism, and it reflects disastrously on Laura that a tory and wretched figure of ridicule like Mensch can presume to be so familiar, but what if it's a case of applied multitudinous positionism? Should PD shoulder blame for questionable interpretations of their theoretical work?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 26, 2013)

copliker said:


> On the face of it, it's way beyond the pale of regular bubbleism, and it reflects disastrously on Laura that a tory and wretched figure of ridicule like Mensch can presume to be so familiar, but what if it's case of applied multitudinous positionism? Should PD shoulder blame for questionable interpretations of their theoretical work?


 
Certainly not! PD cannot be held responsible for the misuse to which _kulaks_ and elements of the _haut bourgeoisie_ put our theses! Comrade Mainwaring has spoken at interminable length on this matter!


----------



## treelover (Apr 26, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis...es-dangerous-to-draw-suicide-link?INTCMP=SRCH


Elli Mae has just written an impassioned and quite complex piece in Guardian Cif on why linking suicides to benefit cuts/Atos is not a good idea, its not going down too well.

for the record, I think Ellie is ok, and even if I didn't I don't feel I could be an arbiter of who is in or out..


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> The sort of folk that stamp their feet about privilege are m/c teens and early 20s they mainly bang on about privilege in the main as to avoid the C word. Class.
> 
> Whereas the sort of folk that post on this thread are middle aged cantankerous blokes. I don't think you need to worry about formulating a plan about how to deal with them. You're unlikey to cross paths.


 
How am I middle-aged? I accept 30 is coming creeping up on me quicker than I'd like but I'm by no means a canterkerous middle-aged bloke. It's really poor to make those assumptions.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> The sort of folk that stamp their feet about privilege are m/c teens and early 20s they mainly bang on about privilege in the main as to avoid the C word. Class.
> 
> Whereas the sort of folk that post on this thread are middle aged cantankerous blokes. I don't think you need to worry about formulating a plan about how to deal with them. You're unlikey to cross paths.


 
Well, anyone who vaguely even notices student politics is confronted by their stupidity constantly. My fear is that these people are very often upper-middle-class and well placed to be in a position of power in the future. I see that an identity politics type in Sheffield Labour Students is standing to be a councillor in the local elections, she is campaigning alongside the other student local councillor who is possibly the most transparently Thatcherite Labour party member I have ever met.

This stuff is going to be a real problem.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 26, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> How am I middle-aged? I accept 30 is coming creeping up on me quicker than I'd like but I'm by no means a canterkerous middle-aged bloke. It's really poor to make those assumptions.


 
I'm genuinely surprised and disapointed that so many folk here clumped together oddballs from Occupy, those preoccupied with identity politics and with a pretty standard way of holding meetings in some unholy mess.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm genuinely surprised and disapointed that so many folk here clumped together oddballs from Occupy, those preoccupied with identity politics and with a pretty standard way of holding meetings in some unholy mess.


 
Maybe but it hardly makes your generalisations any more accurate, does it?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm genuinely surprised and disapointed that so many folk here clumped together oddballs from Occupy, those preoccupied with identity politics and with a pretty standard way of holding meetings in some unholy mess.


Yet you appear confused, are unable to differentiate between a progressive stack and a que and can't quite say what your problem is.


----------



## chilango (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm genuinely surprised and disapointed that so many folk here clumped together oddballs from Occupy, those preoccupied with identity politics and with a pretty standard way of holding meetings in some unholy mess.



Symptoms of the same disease though aren't they?


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Well, anyone who vaguely even notices student politics is confronted by their stupidity constantly. My fear is that these people are very often upper-middle-class and well placed to be in a position of power in the future.


 
Indeed, building their CV.



J ed said:


> This stuff is going to be a real problem.


 
I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. Just move away from student politics.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Yet you appear confused, are unable to differentiate between a progressive stack and a que and can't quite say what your problem is.


 
People were getting very upset by hand signals. That was what I was addressing. As well you know.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 26, 2013)

chilango said:


> Symptoms of the same disease though aren't they?


 
Not IME.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 26, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Maybe but it hardly makes your generalisations any more accurate, does it?


 
My tongue was firmly in cheek.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> People were getting very upset by hand signals. That was what I was addressing. As well you know.


That's why you replied to a post about stacks then further defended stacking. Why don't you just do a proper post outlining where you think the problem is and why its important instead of this one line shit then running off?


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That's why you replied to a post about stacks then further defended stacking. Why don't you just do a proper post outlining where you think the problem is and why its important instead of this one line shit then running off?


 
Stacks and queues are the same thing. As you well know.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Stacks and queues are the same thing. As you well know.


Ok, one-liners only it is. Should have known.


----------



## treelover (Apr 26, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Malcolm...has been on TV many times as a self-professed leader of Anon...met him myself a few times, gave him a wide berth other times.


 
Doesn't seem to be massive media coverage as expected, maybe will when case finishes though..


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Ok, one-liners only it is. Should have known.


 
Where's your proposal to make meetings better? Or are you just going to sit and moan.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm genuinely surprised and disapointed that so many folk here clumped together oddballs from Occupy, those preoccupied with identity politics and with *a pretty standard way of holding meetings* in some unholy mess.


 
a standard way of holding meetings where

Ive been at left wing and anarchist meetings and gatherings from Belfast to Berlin and never, thankfully, even heard of this shit before .


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

https://twitter.com/fowlerruth/status/327582476308447233

Laurie gets called out on her faux working-class credentials, calls accuser jealous and pathetic instead of checking privilege


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Where's your proposal to make meetings better? Or are you just going to sit and moan.


Not going to be at any of your meetings thanks. Nor is my mum or anyone that i know.
Do a proper post, go on, please.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 26, 2013)

chilango said:


> Symptoms of the same disease though aren't they?


 
Indeed, although I prefer to use the term _creeping malaise_ , as its more sinister .


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/fowlerruth/status/327582476308447233
> 
> Laurie gets called out on her faux working-class credentials, calls accuser jealous and pathetic instead of checking privilege


Of course, in america LP makes it known that she 'was on a scholarship'. The NI people are from super-rich backgrounds, so there is some leverage here for her. I don't know why people imagine that you can't be from a rich background and on a scholarship - scholarships are one way that this privilege is transmitted. (see that turner bloke from eton with a guitar).


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Not going to be at any of your meetings thanks.


 
Sad times


----------



## treelover (Apr 26, 2013)

On the CIF article, someone has just posted enquiring whether Ellie Mae will "eventually become the new Melanie Phillips", too harsh, imo...


----------



## treelover (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Of course, in america LP makes it known that she 'was on a scholarship'. The NI people are from super-rich backgrounds, so there is some leverage here for her. I don't know why people imagine that you can't be from a rich background and on a scholarship - scholarships are one way that this privilege is transmitted. (see that turner bloke from eton with a guitar).


 

Is Ruth, the woman whose blog about London daily life being crap, eg low pay, was discussed here?

er, no is isn't, can anyone remember and provide a link?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

treelover said:


> Is Ruth, the woman whose blog about London daily life being crap, eg low pay, was discussed here?


I don't think so.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> calls accuser jealous


 
that word gets right to the heart of her fuckwittery .


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 26, 2013)

*Ruth Fowler* ‏@*fowlerruth*  11h
And @*pennyred* - if anyone actually read the insipid, liberal bollocks you write here, you'd have more sexism.


----------



## treelover (Apr 26, 2013)

> You are young, Ellie Mae. You are clearly intelligent. There is a certain arrogance which comes with youth and a certainty that comes with a good education - in this you are not unique.
> But it takes time, experience, and a broader base of knowledge than you demonstrate here to make the case you attempt to make here.
> I don't know if you are able-bodied; I don't know if you have ever suffered with a mental illness. But I think that many of us who are both will not agree with you, and I certainly don't.
> This is a very serious thing - I feel a white-hot outrage, and I feel a slow-burning hatred for the people who have placed those suicide victims in a situation that they can see no escape from other than death.
> Stick to your protests, Ellie Mae. This is not your forte.


 
A biting riposte to Ellie's article from an ex nurse and disabled person.

It may be this applies to a lot of these young bloggers, etc, but I still think Ellie does more good than harm..


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 26, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Spiney, you need to leave Malcolm the perve alone, and check your ginger privilege!


 
My beard, when I allow it to grow, is ginger. This, intersecting with my northern oppression, makes me intersectional enough to ginger bash.


----------



## chilango (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Not IME.



Clearly.

They are in mine however.

Lots of people here have made it pretty clear that this whole thing makes 'em distinctly uncomfortable.

Are you ok with this?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Sad times


 






is that the right hand sign


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 26, 2013)

chilango said:


> Clearly.
> 
> They are in mine however.
> 
> ...


 
What experience have you had with this style of meeting?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> What experience have you had with this style of meeting?


Total avoidance of question. Well done dingding.

(You'll not have bothered reading chilango's posts about his experiences earlier then - of course not, why would you?)


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Not going to be at any of your meetings thanks. Nor is my mum or anyone that i know.
> .


 
im thinking of bringing my 2 little nieces to one though . Theyd love it I reckon . Theyre tired of gagnam style now .


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Total avoidance of question. Well done dingding.
> 
> (You'll not have bothered reading chilango's posts about his experiences earlier then - of course not, why would you?)


 
One instance he mentioned.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> One instance he mentioned.


No. 

And of course, this instance told you nothing. Nothing.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

Just read the Ellie Mae O'Hagan article. Awful.

People shouldn't avoid making the link, like in Spain they should be making the link clearer, "these aren't suicides, they're murders".


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> No.
> 
> And of course, this instance told you nothing. Nothing.


 
I'm still awaiting your proposal as a better solution.

...and I'll continue waiting because you do not have one.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Just read the Ellie Mae O'Hagan article. Awful.
> 
> People shouldn't avoid making the link, like in Spain they should be making the link clearer, "these aren't suicides, they're murders".


Damn right. Fantastic banner(s).


----------



## weepiper (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Indeed, building their CV.
> 
> 
> 
> I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. Just move away from student politics.


 
You wouldn't lose any sleep over a self-perpetuating class system favouring the rich and keeping them in power?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm still awaiting your proposal as a better solution.
> 
> ...and I'll continue waiting because you do not have one.


A solution to what? Why people are put off by your style of meeting? Why do i have to come up with solution to that? You crack on.  i don't go around telling goths how they should dress, why should i bother with your sub-culture?

Are you going to write in any depth about what you've been moaning about or not? I'm sure you can if you try. Go on.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> I'm still awaiting your proposal as a better solution.
> 
> ...and I'll continue waiting because you do not have one.


 
a solution to what.


----------



## DrRingDing (Apr 26, 2013)

weepiper said:


> You wouldn't lose any sleep over a self-perpetuating class system favouring the rich and keeping them in power?


 
and you think student politics is the best place to put your energy into battling this?


----------



## weepiper (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> and you think student politics is the best place to put your energy into battling this?


 
A sapling's easier to push down than a full-grown oak.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

i do tend to agree with DrRingDing about the utter irrelevancy of student politics 

beats me why so many left wing groups of every type spend so much time on it


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

vote for some twat who can offer everyone free drinks after 7pm


----------



## cesare (Apr 26, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i do tend to agree with DrRingDing about the utter irrelevancy of student politics
> 
> beats me why so many left wing groups of every type spend so much time on it


Recruitment stream


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> and you think student politics is the best place to put your energy into battling this?


Energies, should, of course, be focused on eradicating public-rhetorical privilege in a tiny sub-culture and defending attempts to do so.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

why would you want to control NUS though or be on the steering committee? 
whole thing is rotten inside out


----------



## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> and you think student politics is the best place to put your energy into battling this?


 

I like yr posts most of the time but you're coming across as pretty weird here. Students have just had fees tripled, they can't receive benefits and working-class students are facing staying at home or doubling up in rooms  - surely - to some degree - students have to put some energy on their own turf before helping and fighting with/alongside others?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

oh if its opposing tuition fees etc then yeah that has to be fought, i thought ringding was on about NUS "steering comittees" and so on


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

Education is a huge class battle, they have ensured that it is - to retreat into some anti-student nonsense from the 70s is to capitulate. A pathetic reaction. to an attack.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I like yr posts most of the time but you're coming across as pretty weird here. Students have just had fees tripled, they can't receive benefits and working-class students are facing staying at home or doubling up in rooms - surely - to some degree - students have to put some energy on their own turf before helping and fighting with/alongside others?


 
One of the deputy managers at my job is leaving to go back to university (he had done a year of a degree then dropped out). He's leaving to move back in with his parents in England for a year so he can save up to pay for his fees. A _deputy manager of a large shop_ can't afford to save to go to university unless he moves back in with his mum and lives rent-free.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i do tend to agree with DrRingDing about the utter irrelevancy of student politics
> 
> beats me why so many left wing groups of every type spend so much time on it


 
I have no illusions about the importance of student politics, I wish student politicians did... in the past week I have heard Milibank compared to Paris 1968 and the US civil rights movement. Last week the Sheffield Students Union's support for gay marriage was unironically suggested as being a key motivation behind Cameron's push for the legalisation of equal marriage. Seriously. To say that these people are removed from the real world is a massive understatement.

But a lot of these people are going to be in Labour safe seats in 5-10 years, and that's what I am worried about.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Education is a huge class battle, they have ensured that it is - to retreat into some anti-student nonsense from the 70s is to capitulate. A pathetic reaction. to an attack.


 
oh ok, when i think of the terms "student politics" I think about NUS etc, who i actually kind of see as part of the management of universities given my own experience when i was there. I completely agree about tuition fees and all the other attacks students are facing, whether thats uni or FE or anything else


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> oh ok, when i think of the terms "student politics" I think about NUS etc. I completely agree about tuition fees and all the other attacks students are facing, whether thats uni or FE or anything else


I was talking more the rhetoric spouting dingding than you.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> why would you want to control NUS though or be on the steering committee?
> whole thing is rotten inside out


 
I think that the best thing for left-wing students to do is found an alternative union, but the problem is that a lot of those students are mostly angry with the NUS because they won't institute racial and gender quotas.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

what im saying i suppose is that trying to control NUS by some steering committee is a bit of a futile aim and that anything that represents students' interests should really be outside NUS because they are shit and do absolutely nothing in my experience.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I think that the best thing for left-wing students to do is found an alternative union, but the problem is that a lot of those students are mostly angry with the NUS because they won't institute racial and gender quotas.


 
a lot of left-wing students or a lot of students in general? im sure that's not the reason most students are angry with NUS


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 26, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i do tend to agree with DrRingDing about the utter irrelevancy of student politics
> 
> beats me why so many left wing groups of every type spend so much time on it


 
unfortunately its where the likes of laurie penny and quite a few others learned their bad habits . If they stayed students forever it wouldnt be such a bad thing but sadly the maggots turn into flies .


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 26, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> unfortunately its where the likes of laurie penny and quite a few others learned their bad habits . If they stayed students forever it wouldnt be such a bad thing but sadly the maggots turn into flies .


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> a lot of left-wing students or a lot of students in general? im sure that's not the reason most students are angry with NUS


 
Left-wing students, I think that a lot of students are unaware that the NUS exists


----------



## cesare (Apr 26, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> unfortunately its where the likes of laurie penny and quite a few others learned their bad habits . If they stayed students forever it wouldnt be such a bad thing but sadly the maggots turn into flies .


They took their bad habits into education, education isn't where the class issue started it's a furtherance of it.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Left-wing students, I think that a lot of students are unaware that the NUS exists


 
EXACTLY


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

What I want to know is where they get these bizarre privilege theory ideas from, I know that tumblr blogs pay a part but words like 'liberation group', 'white privilege' and so on seem to get thrown around a lot but I don't get the impression that people are aware of any theoretical basis for these words. When I've talked to people about the Maoist origins of white skin privilege theory and so on I get met with blank stares, just what are these people reading?


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 26, 2013)

I'm not even aware of what the NUS do at my uni, beyond supplying shopping discounts.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What I want to know is where they get these bizarre privilege theory ideas from, I know that tumblr blogs pay a part but words like 'liberation group', 'white privilege' and so on seem to get thrown around a lot but I don't get the impression that people are aware of any theoretical basis for these words. When I've talked to people about the Maoist origins of white skin privilege theory and so on I get met with blank stares, just what are these people reading?


Each other. No wider connection-->no wider understanding


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What I want to know is where they get these bizarre privilege theory ideas from, I know that tumblr blogs pay a part but words like 'liberation group', 'white privilege' and so on seem to get thrown around a lot but I don't get the impression that people are aware of any theoretical basis for these words. *When I've talked to people about the Maoist origins of white skin privilege theory and so on I get met with blank stares, just what are these people reading?*


 
I don't know what they're reading, but I'd like to know more about this Maoist white skin privilege thing - any recommended reading on that one?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 26, 2013)

cesare said:


> They took their bad habits into education, education isn't where the class issue started it's a furtherance of it.


 
but with actual education youd think theyd unlearn them . Have them challenged and be told by a peer group that behaviour is unacceptable . Surely that should be a big part of what left wing people should be doing in their universities , to actually improve them. Instead of that its jazz hands and oppression olympics .


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I don't know what they're reading, but I'd like to know more about this Maoist white skin privilege thing - any recommended reading on that one?


You've read how the irish became white, that stuff bascially


----------



## cesare (Apr 26, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> but with actual education youd think theyd unlearn them . Have them challenged and be told by a peer group that behaviour is unacceptable . Surely that should be a big part of what left wing people should be doing in their universities , to actually improve them. Instead of that its jazz hands and oppression olympics .



But people from this background tend to use their class privilege to get themselves into positions of power and influence including union structures, within education.


----------



## chilango (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> What experience have you had with this style of meeting?





DrRingDing said:


> One instance he mentioned.



You could infer from that anecdote alone, if you read it carefully, that I went to other meetings like that.

Which of course I did.

I've been to many, many meetings in my time.

Run in many, many different ways.

...but, hey, I'm a middle aged cantankerous bloke, so I guess my experience doesn't count?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 26, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


>




I wear a brown leather jacket thats quite similar to Pauls. That cant be mere coincidence .


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I don't know what they're reading, but I'd like to know more about this Maoist white skin privilege thing - any recommended reading on that one?


 
I haven't found much in the way of overall guides to it, I just know from googling it a bit to try and understand it myself that it seemed to originated with an American Maoist author here http://www.sojournertruth.net/whiteblindspot.html and here is a later Maoist critique of it http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/wbs-critique.htm


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

Any large scale importation of privilege theory into this country must have a material base - in the US it's ivy league and private liberal arts colleges (and the sons and daughters of finance capital that fund the institutions and the students). The ongoing privatisation of further education and the indivisdualisation of responses to this here (_i'm against it, i'm against all the bad things, but i'm on my own, what can i do but write about it_) in a period with no wider social movement and when the internet allows you to celebrate/monetise your individual opposition, is embedding this stuff and ensuring it becomes the dominant public face and voice of political opposition, As it has already in the US. To challenge this you need to challenge the social relations that produce these plonkers (whilst laughing at their behaviour). That's one reason why education is a class battle. To make the right to further education a part of basic class thinking, then we'll wipe these muppets out.


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What I want to know is where they get these bizarre privilege theory ideas from, I know that tumblr blogs pay a part but words like 'liberation group', 'white privilege' and so on seem to get thrown around a lot but I don't get the impression that people are aware of any theoretical basis for these words. When I've talked to people about the Maoist origins of white skin privilege theory and so on I get met with blank stares, just what are these people reading?



The only person in real life i know that uses the term white privilege is a Canadian comrade.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What I want to know is where they get these bizarre privilege theory ideas from, I know that tumblr blogs pay a part but words like 'liberation group', 'white privilege' and so on seem to get thrown around a lot but I don't get the impression that people are aware of any theoretical basis for these words. When I've talked to people about the Maoist origins of white skin privilege theory and so on I get met with blank stares, just what are these people reading?


 
What is a liberation group?

My impression was that the NUS is still dominated by the big-hitter Russell Group universities that contain many liberal students who concentrate on essentially liberal schemes: fairtrade coffee and student union shops, scholarship schemes for state school children, instant cooperative management meetings to discuss cuts to departments by transfering students as efficiently as possible, demands for students to be able boost their competitive abilities - more internship fairs, more short scholarships for students etc, charity funding etc.
I don't know if the privilege aspect and reserved quotas on committees is new or not, it's one thing having posts for anti-racism officers and international students representatives - but the quota could generate something unintended.


----------



## chilango (Apr 26, 2013)

...and to put it crudely, "jazz hands" and so on act as a sign that all this shit is not just valid, but that it must determine not just what we do, but also how we do it.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What is a liberation group?


 
Black students, LGBT students etc


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That's one reason why education is a class battle. To make the right to further education a part of basic class thinking, then we'll wipe these muppets out.


 
cut the head off the snake, stamp on the egg


----------



## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Black students, LGBT students etc


 
I suppose the free school meals students are just one other group that have to tussle in amongst the others to press their demands. 
Are women students a liberation group?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I suppose the free school meals students are just one other group that have to tussle in amongst the others to press their demands.
> Are women students a liberation group?


 
Disabled and Women students are the other two, yeah.

http://www.theyworkforstudents.co.uk/ is a good resource for unpicking the deliberate opaqueness of the NUS


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Any large scale importation of privilege theory into this country must have a material base - in the US it's ivy league and private liberal arts colleges (and the sons and daughters of finance capital that fund the institutions and the students). The ongoing privatisation of further education and the indivisdualisation of responses to this here (_i'm against it, i'm against all the bad things, but i'm on my own, what can i do but write about it_) in a period with no wider social movement and when the internet allows you to celebrate/monetise your individual opposition, is embedding this stuff and ensuring it becomes the dominant public face and voice of political opposition, As it has already in the US. To challenge this you need to challenge the social relations that produce these plonkers (whilst laughing at their behaviour). That's one reason why education is a class battle. To make the right to further education a part of basic class thinking, then we'll wipe these muppets out.


Here is part of how this will play out, i_f tutors, why not colleges?_:

Warning from headteachers as parents dig deep to fund boom in private tutors 



> Parents on modest incomes and families from ethnic minorities are behind a massive boom in Britain's multimillion-pound tutoring market, a Guardian investigation can reveal.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 26, 2013)

chilango said:


> ...and to put it crudely, "jazz hands" and so on act as a sign that all this shit is not just valid, but that it must determine not just what we do, but also how we do it.


 
cult behaviour


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

chilango said:


> ...and to put it crudely, "jazz hands" and so on act as a sign that all this shit is not just valid, but that it must determine not just what we do, but also how we do it.


..._and this is how you will do it too._


----------



## Random (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> in the US it's ivy league and private liberal arts colleges (and the sons and daughters of finance capital that fund the institutions and the students). The ongoing privatisation of further education and the indivisdualisation of responses to this here (_i'm against it, i'm against all the bad things, but i'm on my own, what can i do but write about it_) in a period with no wider social movement and when the internet allows you to celebrate/monetise your individual opposition, is embedding this stuff and ensuring it becomes the dominant public face and voice of political opposition


 Isn't this US elite individualism also something that was present 40 or so years ago, during a period of major industrial working class action you had rich kid students like the Weather Underground deciding that they were the vanguard, out on their own. Seems like nowadays we've got the same social layer without even the faintest whiff of a connection to class politics.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> To challenge this you need to challenge the social relations that produce these plonkers (whilst laughing at their behaviour). That's one reason why education is a class battle. To make the right to further education a part of basic class thinking, then we'll wipe these muppets out.


 
The social relations and a vision of the world based on having a personal chance in a world of constant competition that allows individual privilege assessments as a barometer of financial/philanthropic assistance could be starting to increase. Take things like total academy-isation and free schools* based in areas of high migrant concentration in inner cities.

Whether or not they will produce plonkers at the same level as Malcolm Harris is hard to judge, but a dissipated class perspective will remain.

Look at the backers and governors of the key one in West London headed by Toby Young - lots of finance sector, lots of private school products - these people are not messing around. They're having compulsory Latin until end of KS3 to give some back up to the nearly 100% private school Oxbridge Classics departments. 
Their argument is a safe dominant _privilege argument_ - ordinary children in a mixed catchment should experience a private school ethos of competition and an easy route to university - because they have been underprivileged and denied it.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

Random said:


> Isn't this US elite individualism also something that was present 40 or so years ago, during a period of major industrial working class action you had rich kid students like the Weather Underground deciding that they were the vanguard, out on their own. Seems like nowadays we've got the same social layer without even the faintest whiff of a connection to class politics.


In the US you did for sure - and look at the results. Except this lot haven't the bottle to put their necks on the line. The point though, is not the elitism as such today, but rather, the generalisation of these start points for firstly, public debate and secondly (and connected), the left as a whole. There have always been cultural wars between the middle-class dominated left and the class as a whole, but they took place in different conditions, where there was a real labour movement (with all its failings) - this stuff is not an _internal_ debate in that sense, it's almost an imposition.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Disabled and Women students are the other two, yeah.
> 
> http://www.theyworkforstudents.co.uk/ is a good resource for unpicking the deliberate opaqueness of the NUS


 
So _working-class students_ aren't a liberation group. An able-bodied male working-class student born of white parents who doesn't want to disclose his sexuality or is heterosexual has nowhere specific within the NUS constitution?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The social relations and a vision of the world based on having a personal chance in a world of constant competition that allows individual privilege assessments as a barometer of financial/philanthropic assistance could be starting to increase. Take things like total academy-isation and free schools* based in areas of high migrant concentration in inner cities.
> 
> Whether or not they will produce plonkers at the same level as Malcolm Harris is hard to judge, but a dissipated class perspective will remain.
> 
> ...


That's one reason why we have to make sure the battle isn't fought around scarcity or rationing of some type. And death to meritocracy


----------



## The39thStep (Apr 26, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> The only person in real life i know that uses the term white privilege is a Canadian comrade.


 
My gardener uses it


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 26, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> The only person in real life i know that uses the term white privilege is a Canadian comrade.



Aren't you being awfully loose with the word "comrade"?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> So _working-class students_ aren't a liberation group. An able-bodied male working-class student born of white parents who doesn't want to disclose his sexuality or is heterosexual has nowhere specific within the NUS constitution?


 
I don't know about _nowhere_ in the NUS constitution, but IME class just isn't mentioned in student politics. Becoming an elected student officer or NUS delegate requires a lot of time, if you have to work part time then it's significantly more difficult to do that and of course that excludes most working-class students.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> In the US you did for sure - and look at the results. Except this lot haven't the bottle to put their necks on the line. The point though, is not the elitism as such today, but rather, the generalisation of these start points for firstly, public debate and secondly (and connected), the left as a whole. There have always been cultural wars between the middle-class dominated left and the class a a whole, but they took place in different conditions, where there was a real labour movement (with all its failings) - this stuff is not an _internal_ debate in that sense, it's almost an imposition.


 
Yeah I was gonna say this stuff goes right back to the International Workingmens Association my mate just tweeted me this link http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/09/splits.htm Some choice quotes



> Woodhull's journal, May 4, 1872:
> "... In this decree of the General Council its authors presume to recommend that in future no American section be admitted of which two-thirds at least are not wage slaves. Must they be politically slaves also? As well one thing as the other...."
> "The intrusion into the International Working Men's Association of bogus reformers, middle-class quacks, and trading politicians is mostly to be feared from that class of citizens who have nothing better to depend upon than the proceeds of wage slavery."


 
There's much more but I'm pressed for time


I suppose one of the key material differences is that the IWMA had a large membership, leading Chartists were involved, it was linked to a nascent movement. So for all the vanity projects and crank there it had something else too. The theoretical output that came of the experience of the IWA, of which Marx and Engels is surely a part, is infinitely superior


----------



## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That's one reason why we have to make sure the battle isn't fought around scarcity or rationing of some type. And death to meritocracy


 
That Free School won't be a meritocracy - look at the people there.






This guy on (edit) right is the _education director - _he will make many decisions.




> 51-year-old Thomas Packer served as Headmaster of the independent Teesside High School near Stockton-on-Tees for five-and-a-half years.
> 
> Before that, Mr Packer was Headmaster at Stover School in Devon which caters for pupils of a large number of nationalities as both boarders and day pupils.
> 
> Mr Packer’s first acting headship was at Victoria College, an all-boys school with a mixed Sixth Form in Jersey, where he also served as Deputy Head.


 
For a start, it will filter out the unwanted "ADHD" "troublemaker" types before entry and after just a few dud exam performances if they step out of line just once - "better school discipline" - just as they do in private schools - brilliantly this means they don't effect exam result tables.

They will also promote those likely to do well to get into university (the richer wing of the mixed catchment intake) into special streams, try out new treaching resources onto them perhaps bring in graduated or holiday time middle-class students from as teachers/tutors to do bursts of pre-exam or holiday teaching. The exam results table will guide the flow of education.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That Free School won't be a meritocracy - look at the people there.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
An education in treachery, then?

One of the few good things about my school is that they were resolutely opposed to streaming.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That Free School won't be a meritocracy - look at the people there.
> 
> <snip> For a start, it will filter out the unwanted "ADHD" "troublemaker" types before entry and after just a few dud exam performances if they step out of line just once - "better school discipline" - just as they do in private schools - brilliantly this means they don't effect exam result tables.
> 
> They will also promote those likely to do well to get into university (the richer wing of the mixed catchment intake) into special streams, try out new treaching resources onto them perhaps bring in graduated or holiday time middle-class students from as teachers/tutors to do bursts of pre-exam or holiday teaching. The exam results table will guide the flow of education.


Meritocracy _isn't_. It can't _be_. But this is the badge they'll use.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Meritocracy _isn't_. It can't _be_. But this is the badge they'll use.


 
Yes - the badge is _meritocracy for that catchment_ (which doesn't have a close by grammar school), the free school must equal and then exceed the grammar school in its competitive rigorous approach to equalise the playing field.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Here is part of how this will play out, i_f tutors, why not colleges?_:
> 
> Warning from headteachers as parents dig deep to fund boom in private tutors


 
There was a mum on the radio earlier who had added up the cost of private tuition for her daughter so far (8 years of primary and secondary); it came to £8000. She came across as being proud of having made the sacrifice to provide for her child. This is another part of the very powerful individualist narratives so evident on this thread.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Apr 26, 2013)

The unquestioning acceptance of meritocracy as being a desirable goal! Whatever happened to need?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## Red Cat (Apr 26, 2013)

Toby Young was on Radio 4 News at 1 the other day supporting that Tory who suggested an end to toddlers running about with no purpose, doing so by arguing that there's evidence to show that it's children from deprived backgrounds who benefit most from an academic nursery education. I actually made a complaint to the BBC  about how they've given him the authority to speak on a subject that isn't his field because he's a powerful, middle-class man promoting and benefiting from Tory education policy.


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## weepiper (Apr 26, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Toby Young was on Radio 4 News at 1 the other day supporting that Tory who suggested an end to toddlers running about with no purpose, doing so by arguing that there's evidence to show that it's children from deprived backgrounds who benefit most from an academic nursery education. I actually made a complaint to the BBC  about how they've given him the authority to speak on a subject that isn't his field because he's a powerful, middle-class man promoting and benefiting from Tory education policy.


 
He gives me the gyp.


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 26, 2013)

> OLAASM @OLAASM 16h
> 
> .@PennyRed wouldn't the cost of flying back to London from NYC be roughly the same as a year's insurance in the states for someone ur age?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

makes me angry, my best mate, who posts on here, lives in the usa and wants to visit me but can't because of a shortage of time and money, shes been meaning to the last couple of years. I'd love to visit Florida where she now lives but can't. Plainly my horizons aren't broad enough.


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## DaveCinzano (Apr 26, 2013)

Noses pressed up against the restaurant window

Cigars lit with $50 bills


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## Louis MacNeice (Apr 26, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Toby Young was on Radio 4 News at 1 the other day supporting that Tory who suggested an end to toddlers running about with no purpose, doing so by arguing that there's evidence to show that it's children from deprived backgrounds who benefit most from an academic nursery education. I actually made a complaint to the BBC  about how they've given him the authority to speak on a subject that isn't his field because he's a powerful, middle-class man promoting and benefiting from Tory education policy.


 
He came across as an ignorant ideologue; his touchstone contributions in the several interviews he's done on the subject are:

1. his portrayal of Rousseau as the guiding light of all bad nursery education!

2. one report by some US economists into the effects of different pre-school education approaches.

He was completely unable to deal with the very strong evidence provided by the Finnish experience; one where late entry to formal education and play dominated pre-school provision produces very positive academic, emotional and social outcomes.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Malcolm Harris is the worst one out of all of them I reckon. Worse than Laurie, Molly, Owen, Sunni and Elly Mae all rolled into one.
> 
> He must be stopped. I don't care how it's done but the man is an affront to decency.


 
I have real trouble understanding what he is saying often:

"I think the racial semiotics of those terrible anti-teen-pregnancy ads with the babies is "not not not-white" (twitter 4 days ago)

(twitter 4 days ago) http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2010/02/16/the-left-s-top-25-journalists.html
with the phrase "Ain't no such thing as a left journalist"
What does this mean?
"Keeping your daughters off the cam is the new keeping your daughters off the pole."
(twitter 5 days ago) 
Salvia - not bad apparently:



> My friends and I def went through a try-all-the-technically-legal-exotic-drugs phase in hs. Y'all ever tried Wild Dagga? Kratom?
> 
> Don't. Just stick to weed. Except Salvia. Salvia rules.


----------



## chilango (Apr 26, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> ...the very strong evidence provided by the Finnish experience; one where late entry to formal education and play dominated pre-school provision produces very positive academic, emotional and social outcomes.
> 
> Cheers - Louis MacNeice



...which is a relief for all of us who can't afford to send our kids to nursery.


----------



## chilango (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I have real trouble understanding what he is saying often:
> 
> "I think the racial semiotics of those terrible anti-teen-pregnancy ads with the babies is "not not not-white" (twitter 4 days ago)
> 
> ...



Cock.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 26, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> He came across as an ignorant ideologue; his touchstone contributions in the several interviews he's done on the subject are:
> 
> 1. his portrayal of Rousseau as the guiding light of all bad nursery education!
> 
> ...


 
He's spent his whole life in his Da's shadow, and his vanity is writing cheques his intelligence can't cash.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

call me old fashioned but what a fucking pervert.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> call me old fashioned but what a fucking pervert.


 
He is obviously some sort of paedo


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

Are paedos an oppressed group on the wheel of oppression now?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

someone's taken mr h. bey's words of wisdom a bit too seriously methinks


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 26, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Aren't you being awfully loose with the word "comrade"?


 
She's someone I know through politics in Birmingham, maybe I should have said friend.


----------



## Firky (Apr 26, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> He was completely unable to deal with the very strong evidence provided by the Finnish experience; one where late entry to formal education and play dominated pre-school provision produces very positive academic, emotional and social outcomes.


 
I was reading about Finnish schooling a few weeks ago, it didn't really go into much detail but give a bullet point account of the methods and results. It all seemed so.. common sense.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Well, anyone who vaguely even notices student politics is confronted by their stupidity constantly. My fear is that these people are very often upper-middle-class and well placed to be in a position of power in the future. I see that an identity politics type in Sheffield Labour Students is standing to be a councillor in the local elections, *she is campaigning alongside the other student local councillor who is possibly the most transparently Thatcherite Labour party member I have ever met.*
> 
> This stuff is going to be a real problem.


 
Double barreled surname? If so he was in my 1870-1914 British social history seminar - made some very 'interesting' comments. Really, really fucking posh too.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Double barreled surname? If so he was in my 1870-1914 British social history seminar - made some very 'interesting' comments. Really, really fucking posh too.


 
That's the one


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Double barreled surname? If so he was in my 1870-1914 British social history seminar - made some very 'interesting' comments. Really, really fucking posh too.


 
And were these comments "interesting". . . in a good way?


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## Nigel Irritable (Apr 26, 2013)

Idris2002: Useful (if overly sympathetic) account of the development of the fringe/heterodox Maoist "white skin privilege" theory into today's liberal "privilege politics": http://kasamaproject.org/race-liber...-debating-its-place-in-revolutionary-politics


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 26, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Idris2002: Useful (if overly sympathetic) account of the development of the fringe/heterodox Maoist "white skin privilege" theory into today's liberal "privilege politics": http://kasamaproject.org/race-liber...-debating-its-place-in-revolutionary-politics


 
Merci beaucoup.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Idris2002: Useful (if overly sympathetic) account of the development of the fringe/heterodox Maoist "white skin privilege" theory into today's liberal "privilege politics": http://kasamaproject.org/race-liber...-debating-its-place-in-revolutionary-politics


 
The person it quotes from ends up recommending Buddhism:




> In Zen Buddhist practice, when we open up that space in ourselves through sitting, when we get underneath all our bullshit, there all the time is unconditional love. Each one of us, in every moment through our lives, has in the immediate capacity to act out of boundless compassion and love. When we let go of our preconceptions, we can see all things clearly, and do what’s necessary in each and every situation. A being who acts from this space, who acts towards the liberation of all beings, is called a boddhisatva.
> So for each of us, we can wake up. When we awake, when we are present in this moment as it is, we have the chance to see things clearly. By seeing them clearly, we can perceive what is needed, what each situation calls for. Unconcerned with how we perceive ourselves or how others perceive us, we simply help out however we can. There is no need for guilt or neurosis, strict rules or fear. The only need is for ourselves to be in world in a real and full way. We have a space of tremendous strength, courage, caring and understanding in ourselves, at all times in all places that we can always access, if we are paying attention.
> Always, to be full and real, that practice of sitting must return me to the world. To this world of authoritarian capitalist institutions and white supremacist colonization of our hearts and minds, this world of murderous transphobia and deep-rooted self-hatred, this world where partners rape and abuse each other, and this world where neighbors torture and terrorize each other, this world of dangerous sex and tremendous suffering, this world of touching beauty and unimaginable possibility. This world, right here, right now, where we all feel pain. This world, right here, right now, where we can all find ways of genuinely love and caring for each other.


 
Someone who doesn't use whiteness examines the importance of whiteness (Noel Ignatiev's term):


"I’m a woman, I’m white and I’m British. Growing up, my family had enough money for me to have what I needed, and more. I’m cisgender. I got a great education. Even though I’m queer, I date cismen too. I’m able-bodied, and I’m neurotypical. My nonmonogamy is easy to hide. I’m fat, but I’m the ‘acceptable’ kind of fat most people can get over. Aside from the fact I’m a ciswoman, I get to navigate the world in a way that means the world just works for me. In the simplest terms: I benefit from racism, capitalism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and heteronormativity. This happens whether or not I want it to.
All women are not the same. If you look at the list of attributes I just gave, you’ll see that I’m not just a woman. I’m a privileged woman, whose class and ethnicity and physical ability have completely and utterly dictated how I experience my society in a positive way.
The first step in becoming a less shitty person was understanding and then believing that not everyone is like me. The second step was listening to the people who are expressing the ways in which they are not like me. The third step was, and still is, figuring out how to facilitate change for the people who are not like me.
My privilege means I will mess up again and again. I will, consciously or otherwise, project my needs and experiences onto people whose needs and experiences are different to mine. The process by which you try and try to divest yourself of your own shittiness means you have to know that. Privilege means your rightness is reinforced often, and more women like me need to have their wrongness shown the hell up."


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 26, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> OLAASM @OLAASM 16h
> 
> .@PennyRed wouldn't the cost of flying back to London from NYC be roughly the same as a year's insurance in the states for someone ur age?


 


Literally handing herself on a plate for this kind of _priviledge checking_....it really does seem like self flagellation


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> That's the one


 
We were looking at public health one day and he started talking (at great length - loves the sound of his own voice that one) about how it was 'ironic' that back in the 1880s when people couldn't afford to pay a doctor we didn't have a national health service free at the point of use but _now everyone can afford to pay for their own healthcare_ we do.

'Fucking speak for yourself' was my response. I was told that while my sentiments were understandable the language I employed was unnecessarily aggressive


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 26, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> And were these comments "interesting". . . in a good way?


 
I'm afraid not.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Apr 26, 2013)

Does cisgender mean the same as transgender?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> We were looking at public health one day and he started talking (at great length - loves the sound of his own voice that one) about how it was 'ironic' that back in the 1880s when people couldn't afford to pay a doctor we didn't have a national health service free at the point of use but _now everyone can afford to pay for their own healthcare_ we do.
> 
> 'Fucking speak for yourself' was my response. I was told that while my sentiments were understandable the language I employed was unnecessarily aggressive


 
 I thought he was beyond the pale because I heard him say to Hillary Ben that his biggest problem with Labour was that they weren't flexible enough about businesses (on things like workfare) but that... wow. There are _Tories_ that would be horrified at someone saying that.


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 26, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> Does cisgender mean the same as transgender?


nope. means the opposite.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Apr 26, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> nope. means the opposite.


 
Ok, cheers. What does the cis bit stand for?


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 26, 2013)

it's not an acronym..


> Cisgender has its origin in the Latin-derived prefix _cis-_, meaning "on this side of," which is antonymous with the Latin-derived prefix _trans-_. This usage can be seen in the cis-trans distinction in chemistry, or in the ancient Roman term _Cisalpine Gaul_ (i.e., "Gaul on this side of the Alps"). In the case of gender, however, _cis-_ refers to the alignment of gender identity with assigned sex.


/wiki


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## ItWillNeverWork (Apr 26, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> /wiki


 
Laziness, I admit.  It's what the internet was invented for.


----------



## tufty79 (Apr 26, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> Laziness, I admit.  It's what the internet was invented for.


don't worry. i thought it had its origins in geometry 
(cis. not the internet.)


----------



## Libertad (Apr 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> 'Fucking speak for yourself' was my response. I was told that while my sentiments were understandable the language I employed was unnecessarily aggressive


 
And the horse he rode in on.


----------



## andysays (Apr 26, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Stacks and queues are the same thing. As you well know.


 
Are they? Why do we have different words for them then?

To my mind, a queue conjures up a horizontal line of people waiting at a bus stop or at a supermarket checkout, whereas a stack is a vertical pile of inanimate objects like bricks or books. I don't mind being expected to join a queue, but I'd rather not be put in a stack, thanks very much...


----------



## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> That's the one


 
I used to know someone who studied there and was told the head of Sheffield Labour Students - Jacob Hunt - was the son of Thatcher Tory minister David Hunt!


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

Blocked from LP's twitter


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Blocked from LP's twitter


 

joined the ranks of the soi disant radical trolls


----------



## BigTom (Apr 26, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> We may have our wires crossed here - were you talking about the big idea of occupy, and that big idea being 'emancipation'?


 
Although I think you make an absolutely fair point in your previous post (about "no demands") I also thought Red Cat was talking about the big idea of occupy and agree with her from my experience in Birmingham, it's just that different people thought emancipation meant different things, or perhaps more correctly from different elites.
So I'd characterise Occupy Birmingham as having broadly four groups:

1) Right wing, ron paul fan, anons (we don't have capitalism, we have corporatism) 
2) conspiraloons (fair amount of crossover with 1, especially the rothschild banker shit)
3) anarchists plus the odd trot
4) a smaller set of people who weren't (particularly) politically active prior to occupy. 

I think all groups were looking for emancipation from elites - the first from banksters, politicans and jews. The second from illumanati/NWO/jews. The third from capital/capitalism/class.

Now the first one isn't emancipation imo, the second is wrong, dangerous and no kind of emancipation really - and the zeitgeist/project venus lot looking for a new technocratic elite as well as the ron paul types just the same.

Still linking through that is the idea that we are not free, that we are under the yoke of the 1% and need emancipation.


----------



## BigTom (Apr 26, 2013)

ok, I want to splurge out a thought about intersectionality/privelige theory that I can't quite get through and I don't know if that's cos I'm just completely wrong or if I can't express it properly or am missing something, so please slap me down if what I put here is just idiocy 

So I feel like intersectionality theory does something quite special - it both overcomplicates something that is actually quite simple, and oversimplifies something that is actually fairly complex. This seems like it is totally contradictory but then I'm a marxist so you can suck on my dialectics! 

What I think is pretty simple, and intuitive, is that different people are oppressed and this oppression takes different forms, and that just because you are oppressed in some/one way doesn't stop you from being oppressive/an oppressor in others. Intersectionality takes this and overcomplicates it in the way academic stuff so often does. Partly I think that this is because there's an endless chasing of more axes of oppression through which to define people when actually you're better off looking at the person as a whole, not as a set of characteristics.

Then it gets complex - people are both oppressor and oppressed at the same time to different people or in different ways or different times and places. People can appear to be in oppressed categories but actually be oppressors. intersectionality/privelige theory (at its worst) reduces this to some kind of abacus style calculation that reminds me of the fail at the heart of ultilitarianism.

I dunno.. I've not been able to progress this thought further, got stuck so thought I'd see what comments people have. Still seems odd that something can both oversimplify and overcomplicate something.


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## muscovyduck (Apr 26, 2013)

Oversimplifying it because every situation is different and whether you could account for every situation ever would be a philosophical question rather than a practical one.
Overcomplicating it because no one expects every situation to be the same in the first place.


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## treelover (Apr 26, 2013)

'John Reid: Ten Days That Shook The World'

Have to wonder how the above would have fared on Urban if it had been around at the time: upper middle class, bohemian mileu, swanning around the world.

and no, Laura is not Reid or Hemingway for that matter.


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## treelover (Apr 26, 2013)

BigTom said:


> ok, I want to splurge out a thought about intersectionality/privelige theory that I can't quite get through and I don't know if that's cos I'm just completely wrong or if I can't express it properly or am missing something, so please slap me down if what I put here is just idiocy
> 
> So I feel like intersectionality theory does something quite special - it both overcomplicates something that is actually quite simple, and oversimplifies something that is actually fairly complex. This seems like it is totally contradictory but then I'm a marxist so you can suck on my dialectics!
> 
> ...


 
That anon guy, Blackburn was certainly one of the oppressors..


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## Libertad (Apr 26, 2013)

That Colin Preece needs re-education as well, in the face with a chair.


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## Blagsta (Apr 26, 2013)

Libertad said:


> That Colin Preece needs re-education as well, in the face with a chair.


I came across him at Birmingham occupy. He seemed a little, ermmm, eccentric.


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## muscovyduck (Apr 26, 2013)

Privilege theory reflects the box ticking culture of capitalism in general. ATOS assessments, exams, viewing figures, the list goes on. No one has really grasped the fact that some things just can't be measured.


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## Libertad (Apr 26, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> I came across him at Birmingham occupy. He seemed a little, ermmm, unbalanced.


 
I tried to engage with him but he exhibited an unwillingness to debate that I've previously seen with religious zealots.


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## andysays (Apr 26, 2013)

treelover said:


> 'John Reid: Ten Days That Shook The World'
> 
> Have to wonder how the above would have fared on Urban if it had been around at the time: upper middle class, bohemian mileu, swanning around the world.
> 
> and no, Laura is not Reid or Hemingway for that matter.


 
Hmm, there appears to be a suggestion there (apologies if I'm reading it wrong) that the criticism of Lol Penz is based primarily on her "upper middle class, bohemian mileu, swanning around the world" -ness, rather on the fact that much of what she writes is unutterable disingenuous, misinformed, faux-radical, self-referential crap.

Her "upper middle class, bohemian mileu, swanning around the world" -ness is actually being put forward as an explanation (of sorts) for the fact that much of what she writes is unutterable disingenuous, misinformed, faux-radical, self-referential crap.

I hope that distinction makes sense and is useful...


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## Red Cat (Apr 26, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Although I think you make an absolutely fair point in your previous post (about "no demands") I also thought Red Cat was talking about the big idea of occupy and agree with her from my experience in Birmingham, it's just that different people thought emancipation meant different things, or perhaps more correctly from different elites.
> So I'd characterise Occupy Birmingham as having broadly four groups:
> 
> 1) Right wing, ron paul fan, anons (we don't have capitalism, we have corporatism)
> ...


 
That's helpful. That _was_ the impression I got of occupy here but I didn't have any personal experience so I hesitated to go further with that thought. And then I couldn't remember what my original thought had been. I blame the kids.


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## Red Cat (Apr 26, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Privilege theory reflects the box ticking culture of capitalism in general. ATOS assessments, exams, viewing figures, the list goes on. No one has really grasped the fact that some things just can't be measured.


 
Yes, it cuts people up into sets of attributes.


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## ItWillNeverWork (Apr 26, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> No one has really grasped the fact that some things just can't be measured.


 
This does bring up a frightening thought about the way we have tried to quantify more and more aspects of the human condition. It's similar to how we view childcare as lacking value unless it's done by a stranger who gets paid for the job. Everything needs a number, a price, a measurable unit by which we can judge the worth/fairness/morality of a situation. We're turning into robots incapable of or discouraged from making human decisions anymore.


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## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

BigTom said:


> I dunno.. I've not been able to progress this thought further, got stuck so thought I'd see what comments people have. Still seems odd that something can both oversimplify and overcomplicate something.


 

Its real life applications today are about taking only the bad from the 'identity politics' of the 1980s (not the good sort or the good parts).
I don't want to speak about the disability movements because they are very complicated depending on the type of disabilities, but here is my gross summary for the rest:


In the early 1980s then the various "progressive" movements in London also had more muscle than what they do today. The Asian youth movements were around, anti-sus groups, in places like Haringey at least, were nearly wholly black organisations using lawyers on their own terms, women's movement had local groups - sometimes out of squats, sometimes not - that pushed for direct, local provision, the Turkish left groups were able to stand not as separate regional groups but within a large single umbrella 'campaign for democracy', internationally focused groups like the Anti-Apartheid Movement had functioning branches in nearly every borough for a fair many years - none of them were huge and none of them need undue praise.

But something important does happen between 1981-1986 under the GLC - somehow the various groups fracture and divide and lose strength - under an overall deepening recession at the same time as a GLC strategy of funding and incorporation.

The rigidity of today's applications - quotas, reserved seats and progressive stacks - are things that, in part at least, emerge out of the bureaucratisation of those movements.

Today those earlier 'progressive movements' don't really function in the same way (or to the same degree) meaning that the working-class parts of them are nearly absent as active agents and instead are almost passive 'left-wing'-charity-recipients.
So with privilege politics - from a working-class perspective - you've got a theory of society and action being constructed on stilts on a receding cliff - there is precious little working-class component to the 'liberation groups' that are apparently being catered for middle-class activists and 'allies'.

My guess is it's something to do with the effect of this recession on middle-class students - anguish at themselves for not having actually even taken much notice of unemployed people earlier, the intensification of chauvinism/sexism in wider society (hard to explain - some threads on it), guilt at how bits of third wave feminism has collaborated with unsavoury aspects of society.
Plus general stark realities as portrayed by a steadily as compared with 1981 (however slow the shift is, however much denied by some) proportionally more female and non-white media (although also more middle-class).
If a socially engaged middle-class student hears a few times - still against the grain of most media reports - of how black people are likely to end up in prison rather than go to university (without the class aspect of those statistics ever being reported on) - the desire to do something immediate and sudden is there - let's have more black faces being seen to be representing students - however that's brought about - that can't be bad, can it?
Somehow the guilt does spread itself outwards so that 'allies' are happy to accuse others in their non-'liberation group' of backward chauvinism without much listening to what people are saying - almost purely on the grounds that those in intersections experience oppression in a more real fashion.


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## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

Perhaps the Ignatiev and Maoist link are more remote today

Two popularisers of privilege concepts are black female professors:

bell hooks was tenured properly in 1983 by UCal Santa Cruz,
kimberle crenshaw was tenured properly in 1986 by UCLA. 


bell hooks first with the concept of triple oppression in Ain't I a woman?

Her main focus is almost wholly on how to teach people in universities better - a pedagogue - who explains that the best way to understand "race and gender and class" is through popular culture.
See here:



(A more Marxist approach would say that popular culture is only one site of production and cannot possibly reflect anything meaningful about other sites of production - the home, the state sector, the private firm)

Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality:

Intersectionality is what occurs when a woman from a minority group ... tries to navigate the main crossing in the city.... The main highway is "racism road." One cross street can be Colonialism, then Patriarchy Street.... She has to deal not only with one form of oppression but with all forms, those named as road signs, which link together to make a double, a triple, multiple, a many layered blanket of oppression.

California it should be noted had introduced an odd form of affirmative action hiring policies back in 1971 as a 'liberal state' and Crenshaw was tenured on the basis of a complex form of quota filling by points, her politics are in many respects liberal seeing society as basically a race between competing people to the crowning achievements - urging everyone to concentrate on producing a meritocracy:



US affirmative action is an absolute minefield btw, I'm not disagreeing with the thrust of the side of the debate in the video, but pointing out her political orientation.


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## Balbi (Apr 26, 2013)

The academic theory's untested in application within academia. Naturally, when it's co-opted into a 'For Dummies' style of shouty political identity activism, it's going to be fucking corrupted and broken and the reversal of what it's supposed to be.


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## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

racism road. 

self indulgent and pathetic and does nothing to fight racism and ironically makes a lot of white middle class people feel good about themselves because of how much they have "checked their privilege".Except they're not checking THEIR privilege are they, they're checking the privilege of random people that don't know the rules of their fucking "stacks", what a dehumanising and stupid concept if ever there was one.

this shit seems to be more about making people feel like they're doing something rather than actually helping anyone who has been the victim of racism, sexism etc.

do they think that people from minority groups want to see someone get on their knees and say "I am so sorry" like in that picture? is that their idea of what fighting racism is?

challenge the CONDITIONS that create racism, challenge the CONDITIONS that lead to this shit, this selfish, self-intersted, bullshit, that ironically encourages them to view themselves as different from everyone else through the very language of it, the very idea of being aware of how oppressed everyone is perpetuates the concept of viewing everyone as different depending on their race, sex, sexuality etc, does none of that. hanging out with the beautiful people of NYC does none of that.

and while they're doing this they're probably only going to be talking to white people anyway and using anyone non privileged they meet as fodder for their next new inquiry anecdotes anyway

makes me sick


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## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> racism road.
> 
> self indulgent and pathetic and does nothing to fight racism and ironically makes a lot of white middle class people feel good about themselves because of how much they have "checked their privilege".


 
The thing is if you do say you want no part of it - you will likely be attacked for your 'more privileged' status - your whiteness is saying all that because you want to hold on to your superior advantage.
'Your privilege is showing'. 

Do you think people are feeling good about themselves or bad? 
I have to say, this kind of stuff sounds pretty gruelling - considering yourself a shitty person on the basis of things you have no control over like your time growing up - people being ashamed and upset about their childhood. I mean people's childhoods already plague millions across the country for various reasons. It seems like adding an extra reason to bemoan your childhood:

"I’m a woman, I’m white and I’m British. Growing up, my family had enough money for me to have what I needed, and more. I’m cisgender. I got a great education. Even though I’m queer, I date cismen too. I’m able-bodied, and I’m neurotypical.
*...*
I’m a privileged woman, whose class and ethnicity and physical ability have completely and utterly dictated how I experience my society in a positive way. The first step in becoming a less shitty person was understanding and then believing that not everyone is like me. The second step was listening to the people who are expressing the ways in which they are not like me. _*The third step was, and still is, figuring out how to facilitate change for the people who are not like me.  ... *_The process by which you try and try to divest yourself of your own shittiness means you have to know that. Privilege means your rightness is reinforced often, and more _*women like me need to have their wrongness shown the hell up."*_


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## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The thing is if you do say you want no part of it - you will likely be attacked for your 'more privileged' status - your whiteness is saying all that because you want to hold on to your superior advantage.
> 'Your privilege is showing'.
> 
> Do you think people are feeling good about themselves or bad?
> ...


 
Yeah it sounds awful.

If I'm honest I've suffered quite badly with mental health issues and feeling guilty on the basis of my upbringing (or whatever) and other things that I had no control over and to be honest if i'd got involved with shit like this it would have sent me into a really really dark place.


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## weepiper (Apr 26, 2013)

It's too much like organised religion. Guilt imposed from above as a means of control


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## DotCommunist (Apr 26, 2013)

Balbi said:


> The academic theory's untested in application within academia. Naturally, when it's co-opted into a 'For Dummies' style of shouty political identity activism, it's going to be fucking corrupted and broken and the reversal of what it's supposed to be.


 

I've always said that the concepts hold use in order to examine your own position and perhaps confront prejudices in yourself you didn't think existed but were there anyway. But it is not yer weather underground self crit session. Nor a tool to tell someone else to sit down because they are not on the wheel enough.

Sihhi some pages ago was having a comedic exchange with frog about POC and her being a white woman who isn't allowed to challenge stuff because she is white.

What would happen if frog was literally being told 'you are white take a back seat' then silently pulled out the skullcap, placed it on her head and folded her arms?

Bumped up the proggressive fucking stack list with proffuse apologies eh!

this top trumps shit is so far removed from relevance its beyond a joke


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## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

Well these days it would be all right and i'd be bumped up the privilege list as long as i pledged to hold myself accountable for the occupation of palestine. why dont i pledge to hold myself accountable for the treaty of versailles and the death of christ while i'm at it eh?


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## Treacle Toes (Apr 26, 2013)

weepiper said:


> It's too much like organised religion. Guilt imposed from above as a means of control


 
I think that's a great analogy. If it is imposed and therefore people check themselves/invite others to because it's expected of them it isn't real growth/understanding/awareness...these things have always been more subtle than that.


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## chilango (Apr 26, 2013)

Fuck this.

I'm off to find some other privileged folk like me. And together we can do privileged stuff like what us privileged types should.

Is that better?


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## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Yeah it sounds awful.
> 
> If I'm honest I've suffered quite badly with mental health issues and feeling guilty on the basis of my upbringing (or whatever) and other things that I had no control over and to be honest if i'd got involved with shit like this it would have sent me into a really really dark place.


 

Sorry I was not trying to say anything about wider mental health problems affecting people, but these privilege checkers who have assumed they are 'shitty human beings' (really dislike the phrase) - appear to be making themselves upset - we can't know to what degree - that they had a happy childhood.
It is a tiny minority of rich people that do this, but it is odd. The danger is it spreading downwards so that middle-class and even stable working-class people begin to feel the same.

Benjamin Zephaniah recounts going to radical squats in the 1980s and a white middle-class origin woman saying to him (at that time young and recently out of prison with dreadlocks in a Rastafarian cap) when alone after sexual contact: 'I wish I could be black to proper feel the oppression you see'. Is this the same thing but unspoken - is that going too far?


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## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

Perhaps unrelated but I saw it in a bit in Moldova, people living in what is basically a third world country being told to feel guilty about africa "the third world".


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## DotCommunist (Apr 26, 2013)

chilango said:


> Fuck this.
> 
> I'm off to find some other privileged folk like me. And together we can do privileged stuff like what us privileged types should.
> 
> Is that better?


 

your round then


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## rekil (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Blocked from LP's twitter





DotCommunist said:


> joined the ranks of the soi disant radical trolls


Cast out by the priesthood and condemned to twander the twilderness like tweejits.


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## Balbi (Apr 26, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Perhaps unrelated but I saw it in a bit in Moldova, people living in what is basically a third world country being told to feel guilty about africa "the third world".


 
You think YOU'VE got it bad? Stop complaining and don't try and change your circumstances, it could be worse


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## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

chilango said:


> Fuck this.
> 
> I'm off to find some other privileged folk like me. And together we can do privileged stuff like what us privileged types should.
> 
> Is that better?


 
No because they would point to your being both white and male and feeling entitled to have a fun time at the expense of others when you could be doing stuff with them to struggle against their oppression - you need "to have your wrongness shown the hell up" 'you, chilango are showing chunks of racism and sexism, stop brutalising people' you are not allying with liberation properly.

This end of things has gotten awful depressing.



frogwoman said:


> Perhaps unrelated but I saw it in a bit in Moldova, people living in what is basically a third world country being told to feel guilty about africa "the third world".


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## JimW (Apr 26, 2013)

On the Maoist/privilege thing, sure I've read some texts from Detroit car workers militants who were the ones to coin the phrase IIRC. It was online I saw it, so should be able to dig it up.
ETA: Think it was this lot I had in mind: http://libcom.org/library/league-revolutionary-black-workers-coming-revolution-eric-perkins


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## el-ahrairah (Apr 26, 2013)

i'm starting to think those maoists were on to something.


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## chilango (Apr 26, 2013)




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## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

*Intersectionality in the classroom. *

A lesson based around this idea: http://kotaku.com/5910857/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is

as adapted to make the intersections clearer: http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/the-other-difficulty-mode

"Activating multiple skulls in a Halo game effectively models intersectional forms of oppression. The individual effects of each of these skulls do not simply run in parallel; rather, they intersect, overlap and interlock, just like systems of oppression."

The model of social life is still a contest - whether running track (Kimberle Crenshaw) or a computer game (John Scalzi).

Would you want (or want your kid, niece/nephew etc) to attend this kind of lesson?


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## Lo Siento. (Apr 26, 2013)

JimW said:


> On the Maoist/privilege thing, sure I've read some texts from Detroit car workers militants who were the ones to coin the phrase IIRC. It was online I saw it, so should be able to dig it up.
> ETA: Think it was this lot I had in mind: http://libcom.org/library/league-revolutionary-black-workers-coming-revolution-eric-perkins


they very strongly identified that their potential power in society came at the point of production though...


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## frogwoman (Apr 26, 2013)

"oh poor you, you're black and have such a shit life dont you, you can speak first in our meeting, but of course we're not going to listen to you"

"hey look everyone, we've got an actual black person speaking"


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## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> they very strongly identified that their potential power in society came at the point of production though...


 

They are also writing in a context of a segregated job floor and UAW labor leaders having their rest facilities (holiday camp) where no black UAW workers had the subs to take advantage of it.

Can this be faulted in 1970 when it was written?



> The League responds to this oppression with a new and vital vigor, Black workers "entered industry on the lowest rung of the industrial ladder" (18), and that is where they remain. Organized labor has not contributed much to black labor, and the few exceptions like the IWW and the UMW have not been enough to offset the systematic exclusion and assault of black Iabor, The League knows this. It recognizes this fact of betrayal as a fossil. What follows is that something must be done, and the League is doing it.


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## DaveCinzano (Apr 26, 2013)

No 'progressive stack' here. Black Panthers meet Young Patriots.


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## JimW (Apr 26, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> they very strongly identified that their potential power in society came at the point of production though...


Yes, wasn't saying they were identity politics types in the modern sense, far from it; it was to do with making class unity work by stopping divisive defence of racist advantages if I have it right.


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## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> No 'progressive stack' here. Black Panthers meet Young Patriots.


 
Had there been a progressive stack would women in the BPP/Young Patriots/White Panthers/Young Lords etc been better treated? because 'minorities' are the majority there women go to the top of the running order.
The claim of a progressive stack: That the chauvinists/ism with the BPP would have changed their dumping of childcare, behaviour, attitudes etc because women were granted first and many rights to speak.


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## muscovyduck (Apr 26, 2013)

https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet
This the same Malocolm Harris we speak of?


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## Lo Siento. (Apr 26, 2013)

JimW said:


> Yes, wasn't saying they were identity politics types in the modern sense, far from it; it was to do with making class unity work by stopping divisive defence of racist advantages if I have it right.


 


This amazing film from 1970 Finally Got The News is worth a watch 

As far as I can remember, the theory was that black workers position in production and distribution was such that they had the ability to shut society down (and the greatest interest in doing so) and would therefore act as the vanguard of the revolution (in the Leninist sense of that word).


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## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet
> This the same Malocolm Harris we speak of?


 
Yes.

"Have these Kickstarter movie star punks even *heard* of Shane Carruth?

Just make a damn movie with your friends

So many really great movies were made without financing by people who weren't already successful move stars."


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## Treacle Toes (Apr 26, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> No 'progressive stack' here. Black Panthers meet Young Patriots.




Ain't anything new under the sun. Thanks for linking this vid, makes the point _near_ perfectly.

I think though that this doesn't demonstrate some of the issues found at Occupy IME because the people at this meeting were from the same/similar community and class, therefore could see/feel they had much more in common to begin with.


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## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> As far as I can remember, the theory was that black workers position in production and distribution was such that they had the ability to shut society down (and the greatest interest in doing so) and would therefore act as the vanguard of the revolution (in the Leninist sense of that word).


 
It had a certain kind of warped logic in that sanitation/water supply and power station loaders for key connurbations were very often black. Although even in those fields across the country as a whole white workers were still a majority - also coal mining even by 1970 was mostly white.


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## muscovyduck (Apr 26, 2013)

http://memegenerator.net/Scumbag-Analytic-Philosopher/images/popular
Relevant?


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## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> *ChrisJDavies* ‏@*ChrisJDavies*  36m
> @*pasparakis* @*PennyRed* So flying abroad is elitist. In 2013. Riiiight. Any other 'cosmopolitan' affectations? Refrigeration? Roads? Literacy?


 
Laurie Penny in fact did point out the inequalities and elitism associated with drop of a hat flights in July 2010:



> most British women cannot afford to go abroad – especially during this financial crisis, which has seen a 15% drop in overseas holidays


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## rekil (Apr 26, 2013)

From a few months ago. Leery sexism 


> I sort of love seeing girls in Hijab over skin-tight designer jeans with major camel toe. London: never change.


https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/224148990810271745

And this bollocks about the London which she doesn't like anymore cos it's full of h8rs.


> Being poor and homeless and despairing here is not like being poor and homeless and despairing anywhere else. I have seen this city swallow friends whole, chew down its young for the meat and life under the skin and spit them out old and traumatised. London does this. You plonk your youth like an offering on the steps of Liverpool Street Station and you just have to hope the city will leave you a life worth living as it slurps up the marrow of your dreams. I will never forgive it. I will never stop loving it.
> 
> But it's all got a bit much lately, what with the total policing and the hysterical run-up to the Olympics. I need a break, and I'm fucked if I'm going to the country. London and I need some time apart. I've saved up some money and I'm leaving today tooff to see other cities for a while, starting with New York, which is a great floozie of a town with a far inferior subway system. But I'll be back, because it'll take more than godawful tea and all-night cupcake shops to make me forget where I come from. I come from the best city in the world ever. I come from London.


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## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

Re-posting this because I can't edit the post muscovyduck PMed me to make it clear:
Here is the 'Girls Gone Wild' payment in context. 

A poster marie123 asks:
_But what about when the "smart girls" who still want to be seen as sexually desirable have to do it on 'stupid terms', not those that allow them some self-respect and choice in the matter? It might become a dynamic of "show us your boobs!" or "no sexual intimacy/pleasure for you"_

Molly Crabapple responds:
They should seek out partners who aren't frat boys.
And if a smart chick does show her boobs to GGW or make out with her best friend for attention? So what! It doesn't take away from her IQ or ability to get shit done. Sexiness (even tanned, Maxim sexiness) is not incompatable [sic] with smarts. The only people who are negatively affected by this are women too dumb to monetize their hotness or cultivate anything about themselves besides being hot. Most women (like most men) are never going to be astrophysicists. It's more productive to give financial and media support to articulate, brilliant //


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## treelover (Apr 26, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Yeah it sounds awful.
> 
> If I'm honest I've suffered quite badly with mental health issues *and feeling guilty on the basis of my upbringing (or whatever)* and other things that I had no control over and to be honest if i'd got involved with shit like this it would have sent me into a really really dark place.


 


Not being personal but if you are referring to an affluent upbringing and its relation to your political activies/inclinations, you really have nothing to worry about, while of course there are concerns about MC domination of the left, I think you would be an asset to any organisation with your deep compassion and maturity beyond your years.

Now, about joining Left Unity...


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## Steel Icarus (Apr 26, 2013)

copliker said:


> And this bollocks about the London which she doesn't like anymore cos it's full of h8rs.


 
"I come from the best city in the world ever."

A succession of people have paid her to write lines like this that most people over the age of about 15 would be embarrassed to say.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The only people who are negatively affected by this are women too dumb to monetize their hotness or cultivate anything about themselves besides being hot.


 
So the message here is make pornography out of yourself or you're stupid, if after making pornography out of yourself you find that there are negative consequences then that is just because you are dumb.

Nice person, this Molly.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 26, 2013)

Her advert, that Delroy Booth forced me to watch today, is particularly nauseating.


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## rekil (Apr 26, 2013)

> Stoya steps into the tub and swims in a mass of green gauze ribbons and play money printed by Crabapple herself. Crabapple’s *$10,000* large-scale paintings of 2011′s political uprisings surround her; a rented bodyguard named Mike watches nearby. As Stoya poses in the tub, a throng of Occupy activists, lefty journalists, Jezebel bloggers, and burlesque stars in blue latex take turns snapping Instagram shots with her. The stench of marijuana wafts across the gallery. The windows around the tub steam up. “This is the New York I was promised,” Stoya says outside in her fur and heels, lighting one more Parliament. – Village Voice: Stoya, Pop Star of Porn


How much?


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## rekil (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> .


Everyone dies. Don't hand them ammo btw.


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 26, 2013)

https://twitter.com/itwassarcasm/status/327910235337547777 sigh


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## treelover (Apr 26, 2013)

One of the worst things about the US hipsters and twitterati is that they are living in a country of such extremes, people literally dying on the street and many millions on foodstamps while others live in massive mansions and spend obscene amounts on luxuries (yes its starting here) its just makes their petty pecadilloes, interests, and obsessions even more crass and bewildering..

though still baffled why they are important though and worthy of mega-threads, especially as some posters seem to be getting genuinely upset about their utterances.


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## Steel Icarus (Apr 26, 2013)

copliker said:


> Everyone dies. Don't hand them ammo btw.


 
Yeah, JEd, we don't want to prove their worst incorrect assumptions right, eh


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 26, 2013)

oh god sihhi, that is some vile.  people like that are the fucking enemy and no answer.

i swear if she does an exhibition in the uk me and a bucket of shit are going along.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 26, 2013)

treelover said:


> though still baffled why they are important though and worthy of mega-threads, especially as some posters seem to be getting genuinely upset about their utterances.


 
if you don't get the thread by now mate, you aren't going to.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> So the message here is make pornography out of yourself or you're stupid, if after making pornography out of yourself you find that there are negative consequences then that is just because you are dumb.
> 
> Nice person, this Molly.
> 
> I hope she dies.


 
Steady on that's a bit heavy we have no evidence that she does exploit the people she emloys.
Malcolm Harris - also effectively a manager as an editot TNI said this as a conclusion to discussion of sexual picture blackmail/abuse via mobile phones:

_no one likes the idea of creepy exes showing nude pictures of them to their friends. But eventually no one is going to care. So our flirting and sexual practices change in relation to technology — so what? The cops and parents will get over kids sending each other “show-me-yours” pics. No one is better about getting blasé about such things than teenagers. There’s nothing wrong with it... Carla Bruni Sarkozy has plenty of topless photos out there, but they’re nice and she’s French, so no one is angry. Why can’t that work for someone you recognize from Human Resources or math class?_

Far more belittling really. 

I think both are up for new experiences type people so taking on limey bastards on a forum would be a fun time for them - must be some way to reach them.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 26, 2013)

treelover said:


> though still baffled why they are important though and worthy of mega-threads, especially as some posters seem to be getting genuinely upset about their utterances.


 
For the very reason this thread exists. There's more intelligence, political theory, criticism, knowledge, ideas, and even humour in here than in the combined works of Jones, O'Hagan, Moran, Penny, Hundal, Lewis, Ball, etc etc etc. And yet they are the ones being read, being paid, being listened to, as if they are The Left. Not saying WE are, but ffs.

I do come at this as someone new to politics really and without either being at all well-read on politics or very articulate as far as politics goes, so forgive me if I'm presuming to speak for anyone else, I'm not really.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 26, 2013)

Firky said:


> Isn't it strange she was selling a Macbook pro and a few hours later she comes out with some bullshit about being robbed? It's almost as if she was skint and selling her Mac wasn't making her a buck quick enough. Transparant as...
> 
> Hey boys and girls, I am selling my laptop as I am a bit skint. It has revolutionary and radical stickers, anyone want to buy it?​​_[No interest]_​​Hey boys and girls, I have been robbed in NYC. Oh woe is me, I am so skint, what can I do? BTW my paypal is lauriepenny@gmail.com​​_[Suddenly the US is great again and better then Britain]_​


If she sells her laptop what will she write articles with?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Steady on that's a bit heavy we have no evidence that she does exploit the people she emloys.
> Malcolm Harris - also effectively a manager as an editot TNI said this as a conclusion to discussion of sexual picture blackmail/abuse via mobile phones:


 
I wasn't suggesting that she was exploiting people directly I just find her attitude creepy and sociopathic.


----------



## Firky (Apr 27, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> If she sells her laptop what will she write articles with?


 
The same as she ever did, the three I's


Imagination
Invention
Inaccuracy


----------



## sihhi (Apr 27, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> https://twitter.com/itwassarcasm/status/327910235337547777 sigh


 
"@mollycrabapple: needs more cleavage though" 
LP: "There are, for instance, far fewer young people trying to change media in the UK. There's no London equiv. of @newinquiry or @jacobinmag"
Seriously WTF? Parodying these people is getting harder and harder.


----------



## treelover (Apr 27, 2013)

S☼I said:


> For the very reason this thread exists. There's more intelligence, political theory, criticism, knowledge, ideas, and even humour in here than in the combined works of Jones, O'Hagan, Moran, Penny, Hundal, Lewis, Ball, etc etc etc. And yet they are the ones being read, being paid, being listened to, as if they are The Left. Not saying WE are, but ffs.
> 
> *I do come at this as someone new to politics really and without either being at all well-read on politics or very articulate as far as politics goes, so forgive me if I'm presuming to speak for anyone else, I'm not really.*



'
Didn't know that, i thought your initials in your name tag stood for the 'Situationist Internationale'


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 27, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> _PennyRed : Anyone have a story of online sexism/harrassment they want to share with me for a piece I'm working on? Get in touch. *laurie*.*penny*@gmail.com _
> 
> is she on about here ye reckon


I have a story about online harassment - about women who bandy about cries of 'misogynist' when they're legitimately criticised by other female posters.


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 27, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I have a story about online harassment - about women who bandy about cries of 'misogynist' when they're legotimately criticised by other female posters.


There's a half arsed doodle for that too but the visual metaphor isn't portrayed very well
(aka: it's shit) 
https://twitter.com/itwassarcasm/status/327836726531874816


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 27, 2013)

J Ed said:


> So the message here is make pornography out of yourself or you're stupid, if after making pornography out of yourself you find that there are negative consequences then that is just because you are dumb.
> 
> Nice person, this Molly.


 
is she actually talking about porn though, or solely about porn, as opposed to modelling naked . Theres a difference .

edit

what i took from it is shes saying you can make pretty decent money from naked modelling and it shouldnt hold you back from being taken seriously academically or as a writer if you have those talents too .


----------



## Firky (Apr 27, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> There's a half arsed doodle for that too but the visual metaphor isn't portrayed very well
> (aka: it's shit)
> https://twitter.com/itwassarcasm/status/327836726531874816


 
That person follows me 

WTF?


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 27, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> is she actually talking about porn though, or solely about porn, as opposed to modelling naked . Theres a difference .


I always thought it was the same thing, but I never thought much about it I guess. Could you explain the difference?


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 27, 2013)

Firky said:


> That person follows me
> 
> WTF?


 
Edit: Removing the post even though it obvious what I said because of reason discussed in post

It can be our... secret


----------



## sihhi (Apr 27, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I wasn't suggesting that she was exploiting people directly I just find her attitude creepy and sociopathic.


 
OK. It could be misinterpreted because of the booth babes and hiring of models in a specifically sexualised "burlesque" life drawing for the art lessons.


----------



## Firky (Apr 27, 2013)

> Nuala ‏@itwassarcasm 21 Mar
> #aspirationnation I aspire to have this scaled up to a poster size and stuck on my bedroom wall. pic.twitter.com/71NKMGgkLk


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 27, 2013)

Firky said:


>


ok right the problem is most my followers are teenagers my own age who watch made in chealsea and shop in forever 21 and so slipping in too much actual politics is awkward and so the timeline is a mess but oh well


----------



## Firky (Apr 27, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> shhhhhh
> it is definitely not me wanting to show off how sarcastic I am without revealing my identity


 


muscovyduck said:


> ok right the problem is most my followers are teenagers my own age who watch made in chealsea and shop in forever 21 and so slipping in too much actual politics is awkward and so the timeline is a mess but oh well


I wasn't taking the piss!!!

Aaahh! You're galleries great


----------



## Firky (Apr 27, 2013)

Right, I am going to stop twitter stalking you now, muscovyduck


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 27, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> I always thought it was the same thing, but I never thought much about it I guess. Could you explain the difference?


 
well the _art nude_ genre is considered quite respectable despite there being a lot of full frontal stuff. My ex ..who would be considered very "hot" by those standards..has done it for years, pretty much paid her way through university and phd . She still does it and is a university lecturer now . Not to mention a quite ferocious feminist whod go mad if i held a door open for her.


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 27, 2013)

Firky said:


> Right, I am going to stop twitter stalking you now, muscovyduck


Sometimes I twitter stalk myself and I end up wanting to punch myself in the face, although I have to admit my gallery is fabulous


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 27, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  6h
> Jetlag. Time distortion. Oh god where am I. I'm on a hacker's bedroom floor in Reykjavik. Right, first step emails, second step trousers.


 
Look everyone, I know a REAL hacker, who cares about my carbon footprint


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 27, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Look everyone, I know a REAL hacker


 
ill bet hes got a guy fawkes mask and everything..pwopa nawty


----------



## Firky (Apr 27, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Look everyone, I know a REAL hacker, who cares about my carbon footprint


 
She's so zany, first step emails, second step trousers. lol. What is she going to do next? By a mars bar in budapest. lol. she's KrAzY.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 27, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Labour


 
NUS General Secretaries since 2000:

Andrew Pakes has just been adopted Labour Milton Keynes prospective general election candidate.
Owain James is high up in a development+education charity.
Mandy Telford was a SpAd to Tessa Jowell and is a fulltimer in the Labour Party.
Kat Fletcher is already a Labour councillor.
Gemma Tumelty is high up in the always pro-Labour TUC full-timers international division.
Wes Streeting is already a Labour councillor.
Aaron Porter is chief of some science business and education charity.


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 27, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> well the _art nude_ genre is considered quite respectable despite there being a lot of full frontal stuff. My ex ..who would be considered very "hot" by those standards..has done it for years, pretty much paid her way through university and phd . She still does it and is a university lecturer now . Not to mention a quite ferocious feminist whod go mad if i held a door open for her.


So the difference is what people think of it?


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 27, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  25 AprThere are, for instance, far fewer young people trying to change media in the UK. There's no London equiv. of @*newinquiry* or @*jacobinmag*.
> 
> *Mark Kauri* ‏@*Mark_Kauri*  4h @*PennyRed* changing media comes from participation. Rather than bleakly, poorly observing, why not contribute to a transformation instead?
> 
> ...


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 27, 2013)

How does she not know she's entrenching what she claims to be tearing down? It's almost as though her entire upbringing has led her to believe she's _more special_ than most while also teaching her she should at least make the effort to come across as very 'umble..


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 27, 2013)

I sent her a sarcastic reply to that, too.
Twitter makes me so happy sometimes


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 27, 2013)

Not to mention that if her host was really a hacker, she just identified/outed them.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 27, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> So the difference is what people think of it?


 
well no . Its actual art as opposed to someone just getting their fanny out and their legs open . Your supposed to appreciate it, not have a wank over it .

dont be asking me to define art though, im not melvyn bragg .


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 27, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> well no . Its actual art as opposed to someone just getting their fanny out and their legs open . Your supposed to appreciate it, not have a wank over it .
> 
> dont be asking me to define art though, im not melvyn bragg .


I wonder where the line is. I guess it depends on the person viewing it.


----------



## rekil (Apr 27, 2013)

S☼I said:


> How does she not know she's entrenching what she claims to be tearing down? It's almost as though her entire upbringing has led her to believe she's _more special_ than most while also teaching her she should at least make the effort to come across as very 'umble..


https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/327481963227275264


> the Graun does make up for a lot, as does BBC. But US has NYT, LAT, Nation, Democracy Now, NPR...


 
LoL


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 27, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> I wonder where the line is. I guess it depends on the person viewing it.


 
it depends on the person creating it, what theyre trying to convey . Monet cant help it if someone starts ogling the tits on his paintings for sexual purposes, but it doesnt make him a pornographer if they do .
Pornography though is produced for the sole purpose of aiding ..and even abetting..masturbation .


----------



## J Ed (Apr 27, 2013)

copliker said:


> LoL


 
I actually think that a UK Democracy Now would be brilliant, although it'd just be hosted by Laurie Penny wouldn't it...


----------



## Firky (Apr 27, 2013)

copliker said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/327481963227275264
> 
> 
> LoL


 
That's a corker 




muscovyduck said:


> I sent her a sarcastic reply to that, too.
> Twitter makes me so happy sometimes


 

Careful now, you'll end up with a 'You are not authorized to look up related results for that Tweet.'

Only the liberal glitterati are worthy of her attention and praise.


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 27, 2013)

Firky said:


> That's a corker
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I logged out pretty much after the cleavage tweet, I restrict my Twitter hours to fool my friends into thinking I have a social life


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 27, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> it depends on the person creating it, what theyre trying to convey . Monet cant help it if someone starts ogling the tits on his paintings for sexual purposes, but it doesnt make him a pornographer if they do .
> Pornography though is produced for the sole purpose of aiding ..and even abetting..masturbation .


What if it's produced primarily for money?


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 27, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> What if it's produced primarily for money?


if what is . The art or the porn .


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 27, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> if what is . The art or the porn .


The image, whatever it is


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 27, 2013)

if an image is produced primarily for money its a  commercial enterprise . Commerciality though certainly doesnt determine whether somethings porn or not .


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 27, 2013)

treelover said:


> One of the worst things about the US hipsters and twitterati is that they are living in a country of such extremes, people literally dying on the street and many millions on foodstamps while others live in massive mansions and spend obscene amounts on luxuries (yes its starting here) its just makes their petty pecadilloes, interests, and obsessions even more crass and bewildering...


 
the sad fact is a lot of them probably love it, as the odd glimpse of it every now and again is an _experience_ and adds to the trendiness value of a district they havent quite gentrified just yet .


----------



## Firky (Apr 27, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> if an image is produced primarily for money its a commercial enterprise . Commerciality though certainly doesnt determine whether somethings porn or not .


 
captain_obvious.jpg


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 27, 2013)

well he asked


----------



## where to (Apr 27, 2013)

Casually Red said:
			
		

> ill bet hes got a guy fawkes mask and everything..pwopa nawty



There are actually many parallels between Laurie Penny's brand of journalism and that of Danny Dyer's when you stop and think about it.


----------



## where to (Apr 27, 2013)

They're basically on the same level intellectually, although Dyer obviously takes more risks.


----------



## where to (Apr 27, 2013)

More committed to his work.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 27, 2013)

where to said:


> There are actually many parallels between Laurie Penny's brand of journalism and that of Danny Dyer's when you stop and think about it.


 
i actually called her a danny dyer type lefty a number of pages back..mebbe 2 days ago . Its like she was chosen by some executives because she represents a sort of stereotypical realness thats completely fake . And chosen for perceived marketability over actual ability . And as its her stereotype thats the only marketable asset she has shell just keep going full tilt in that direction playing up to it without a shred of self awareness . Making regular howlers along the way .


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 27, 2013)

basically shes a _meme, _probably why hipsters like her


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 27, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> basically shes a _meme, _probably why hipsters like her


 

laurie has been known to turn out a good piece when talking about feminism and sexuality and rape. We do mock, but for all her reams of shite there is some good bits- someone dig out the rape piece for me. It was a good honest piece.

for all the mockery, she does have a nascent skill. If she'd stop winging it.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 27, 2013)

treelover said:


> Not being personal but if you are referring to an affluent upbringing and its relation to your political activies/inclinations, you really have nothing to worry about, while of course there are concerns about MC domination of the left, I think you would be an asset to any organisation with your deep compassion and maturity beyond your years.
> 
> Now, about joining Left Unity...


 
cheers mate. i dont have the energy right now. i'm pulling 11/12 hour days at the mo if you coubt travel. get home and can stay up watching crap documentaries and speaking to the bf and it gets to 10/11pm at night and i'm fucked.

i really am in a better position than lots of my mates tho, probably most of them, although i do know some in better situations than me.

i reckon being involved with any stacks or anything would send me over the edge


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 27, 2013)

The only stacks I know are stacks of disused pallets

_hey hey_

The only left unity I know is sinistral woes

_hey hey_

etc etc


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 27, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> laurie has been known to turn out a good piece when talking about feminism and sexuality and rape. We do mock, but for all her reams of shite there is some good bits- someone dig out the rape piece for me. It was a good honest piece.
> 
> for all the mockery, she does have a nascent skill. If she'd stop winging it.


 
so did danny dyer in the beginning

i honestly came to this thread thinking all the bitching was just lefty cosmopolitan parochialness about someone whod gone too mainstream or something . Im usually of the opinion that if someones promoting a left wing view point theres usually something positive in it . But almost 600 pages of pointing out the stuff shes doing horrifically wrong , that shes definitely reading, and there doesnt seem to be a flicker of self awareness . A pity .
No one can ever keep a bunch of whinging lefties happy unless youve guns in their backs but the ability to self critique, admit mistakes and take legit criticism on board is a sign of maturity and character . Shreiking about mysogyny and jealousy when she encounters criticism strikes me as superficiality and a complete lack of conviction in actual beliefs , and that the leftism is more an adopted pose or persona,  and the worry is that weakness in character will eventually extend to her politics as well .

Although im old and wise now and she was only in nappies when...all that stuff .


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 27, 2013)

oh yeah...me and krtek ahouby kissed and made up today and called off our long running internet feud . Thats maturity, i practice what I preach ms penny, if your reading this . Behold my maturity and learneth a lesson .


----------



## andysays (Apr 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Yeah it sounds awful.
> 
> If I'm honest *I've suffered quite badly with mental health issues* and feeling guilty on the basis of my upbringing (or whatever) and other things that I had no control over and to be honest if i'd got involved with shit like this it would have sent me into a really really dark place.


 
Me too - still do at times. At least we now have the option of suggesting that anyone who hasn't check their fucking privilege 

Stay strong


----------



## emanymton (Apr 27, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> oh god sihhi, that is some vile. people like that are the fucking enemy and no answer.
> 
> i swear if she does an exhibition in the uk me and a bucket of shit are going along.


If you need any extra contributions for your bucket let me know.


----------



## BigTom (Apr 27, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Look everyone, I know a REAL hacker, who cares about my carbon footprint



More aping Hunter s Thompson. Only he had stupid quantities of mind bending drugs to create time distortion. Jetlag doesn't really compare to mescaline in that regard.


----------



## andysays (Apr 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> cheers mate. i dont have the energy right now. i'm pulling 11/12 hour days at the mo if you coubt travel. get home and can stay up watching crap documentaries and speaking to the bf and it gets to 10/11pm at night and i'm fucked.
> 
> i really am in a better position than lots of my mates tho, probably most of them, although i do know some in better situations than me.
> 
> *i reckon being involved with any stacks or anything would send me over the edge*


 
Have this one on me:



* Captain Beefheart When It Blows Its Stacks*


----------



## weepiper (Apr 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> cheers mate. i dont have the energy right now. i'm pulling 11/12 hour days at the mo if you coubt travel. get home and can stay up watching crap documentaries and speaking to the bf and it gets to 10/11pm at night and i'm fucked.
> 
> i really am in a better position than lots of my mates tho, probably most of them, although i do know some in better situations than me.
> 
> i reckon being involved with any stacks or anything would send me over the edge


 
sympathy like. I pure get the rage when I think about these over-privileged wankers with their spare time and their opportunities sitting on the floor doing twinkley fingers and thinking they're changing things.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 27, 2013)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22263706 "how to eat healthily on £1 a day"


----------



## J Ed (Apr 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22263706 "how to eat healthily on £1 a day"


----------



## weepiper (Apr 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22263706 "how to eat healthily on £1 a day"


 
Aye how about the media just fucks off with articles like this. Seriously.


----------



## where to (Apr 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:
			
		

> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22263706 "how to eat healthily on £1 a day"



Note the stark difference between the headline and the actual conclusion of the report.

The report is flawed anyway as the author would be left with lots of unused fresh food going to waste following that plan, which the author would have paid a high price for. None of the meals cost the price stated, they would probably cost 4/5 times the stated price.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 27, 2013)

If I can eat on 1 quid a day with all this spare time and bulk purchases then why are all these stupid poor people complaining and going to food banks?!


----------



## weepiper (Apr 27, 2013)

where to said:


> Note the stark difference between the headline and the actual conclusion of the report.
> 
> The report is flawed anyway as the author would be left with lots of unused fresh food going to waste following that plan, which the author would have paid a high price for. None of the meals cost the price stated, they would probably cost 4/5 times the stated price.


 
As usual this kind of shit is written from the perspective of someone with a big kitchen, a large fridge and a chest freezer, as well as enough money to pay for the electricity to run it all and the time to cook things instead of coming home from their shitty minimum wage job they've been out at all day and being faced with hungry children NOW


----------



## BigTom (Apr 27, 2013)

J Ed said:


> If I can eat on 1 quid a day with all this spare time and bulk purchases then why are all these stupid poor people complaining and going to food banks?!


 
It's because the stupid poor people don't know how to use fridges, so waste £50/month of food (according to tory scum MP with a personal fortune of £110m) and/or only use foodbanks so they can spend their money down the pub getting pissed (according to some other tory scum MP)


----------



## Lo Siento. (Apr 27, 2013)

where to said:


> Note the stark difference between the headline and the actual conclusion of the report.
> 
> The report is flawed anyway as the author would be left with lots of unused fresh food going to waste following that plan, which the author would have paid a high price for. None of the meals cost the price stated, they would probably cost 4/5 times the stated price.


the dietician at the end concluded that anyone following that diet wouldn't get a enough calories anyway. But, a £7 a week diet will result in malnutrition isn't really news, I suppose.


----------



## JimW (Apr 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22263706 "how to eat healthily on £1 a day"


There was another one on the BBC site showing in Most Read stories on "how cheaply could you live" that trotted out all the govt propaganda surronding the benefit cap and then made it into some game of playing house that had me spitting feathers. It tells you so much about the author, editiors and institution that they can churn out endless pro-austerity-lite fluff like this but you'll not see one critique from outside that narrow "feckless poor" framing.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 27, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> and you think student politics is the best place to put your energy into battling this?


 
What happens if you leave a wound to fester, Dr?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 27, 2013)

Yeah I saw the 'can you really feed yourself on 13 pounds a week' article 


lisence fee well spent there.


----------



## JimW (Apr 27, 2013)

New BBC magazine features to look forward to:
"How a medieval book of home remedies could keep you out the GP's waiting room."
"Housing crisis, what housing crisis? Make a bijou shelterette for you and your children with just a few cardboard boxes and some traditional British brio."
"We meet the people with disabilities who refuse to lie down. Despite crippling pain Bobby still spends hours every day knitting bobble hats for Our Boys in Helmand."


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 27, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> cult behaviour


 
More insidious. It's classic "in-group" behaviour.  What these jokers don't grok is that their "inclusivity" behaviours act as markers of exclusivity.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 27, 2013)

Libertad said:


> And the horse he rode in on.


 
And the sack of shit who sold him the horse.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 27, 2013)

andysays said:


> Hmm, there appears to be a suggestion there (apologies if I'm reading it wrong) that the criticism of Lol Penz is based primarily on her "upper middle class, bohemian mileu, swanning around the world" -ness, rather on the fact that much of what she writes is unutterable disingenuous, misinformed, faux-radical, self-referential crap.


 
You forgot "...larded with literary cliché...". 
In this week's _New Statesman_ column (entitled "Modern life is science fiction - but would you dare go on a one-way mission to Mars?") contains some wonderfully bog standard examples of them, such as "...the unfathomable vastness of space..." nand "the gruelling physical ordeal of the journey".
She also says "The closest I'll get to outer space is watching interstellar cruisers blow each other into glittering bits on _Battlestar Galactica_. For the life of me, I can't remember that many instances of direct cruiser-on-cruiser action in either runs of it. It was mostly fighter to fighter.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 27, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> You forgot "...larded with literary cliché...".
> In this week's _New Statesman_ column (entitled "Modern life is science fiction - but would you dare go on a one-way mission to Mars?") contains some wonderfully bog standard examples of them, such as "...the unfathomable vastness of space..." nand "the gruelling physical ordeal of the journey".
> She also says "The closest I'll get to outer space is watching interstellar cruisers blow each other into glittering bits on _Battlestar Galactica_. For the life of me, I can't remember that many instances of direct cruiser-on-cruiser action in either runs of it. It was mostly fighter to fighter.


 
Pegasus vs the cylon Basestars


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22263706 "how to eat healthily on £1 a day"


Which seems to mean going to four different supermarkets to get the cheapest of anything, and the nutritionist consulted for the article said it was a good variety of food but not enough calories due to portion sizes.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 27, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> oh god sihhi, that is some vile. people like that are the fucking enemy and no answer.
> 
> i swear if she does an exhibition in the uk me and a bucket of shit are going along.


 
You're going to take George Osborne to a gallery event?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 27, 2013)

sihhi said:


> "@mollycrabapple: needs more cleavage though"
> LP: "There are, for instance, far fewer young people trying to change media in the UK. There's no London equiv. of @newinquiry or @jacobinmag"
> Seriously WTF? Parodying these people is getting harder and harder.


 
How *do* you parody people whose actions and outbursts are beyond parody?


----------



## Riklet (Apr 27, 2013)

Quick summary of the past 50 pages anyone? Has Laurie been back since then, and what has she said?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 27, 2013)

Riklet said:


> Quick summary of the past 50 pages anyone? Has Laurie been back since then, and what has she said?


 

popped in briefly to call us all weirdo stalkers and then fucked off again


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 27, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Pegasus vs the cylon Basestars


 
That's kind of my point, though, there's not much of it in BSG - a couple of instances, whereas there's fuckloads of battles between massed Vipers and Cylon fighters.


----------



## Riklet (Apr 27, 2013)

we're all just jealous of the emancipatory art lifestyle. 

must try harder for _nice things like revolutions and becoming faaaaamous._


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 27, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> That's kind of my point, though, there's not much of it in BSG - a couple of instances, whereas there's fuckloads of battles between massed Vipers and Cylon fighters.


 

not the thread for it really, but BSG's space battles piss all ove star trek. proper naval style capital ships engagement etc. Inertial dampeners take all the fun out of ship-to-ship barneys


----------



## rekil (Apr 27, 2013)

Riklet said:


> Quick summary of the past 50 pages anyone? Has Laurie been back since then, and what has she said?





lauriepenny said:


> You lot are hilarious. Really. The number of hours you've wasted ranting, hyperventilating and making up rubbish about me and stalking my friends is no doubt an enormous loss to the British left.


One week after this, she went on the twitter and made up some rubbish about her friends.

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/327484125034459137


> For example: recent meeting with London radicals wanting to expand media platform. Refused to consider lack of women editors a major problem


But got run out.

https://twitter.com/aaronjohnpeters/status/327494981126336512


> there are no editors and the hope is to get people involved who don't already have 80k followers



https://twitter.com/FutureFutures/status/327492242547822592


> you know exactly the reasons we had reservations and it was not because of 'women' it was because of yr brand


----------



## agricola (Apr 27, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> not the thread for it really, but BSG's space battles piss all ove star trek. proper naval style capital ships engagement etc. Inertial dampeners take all the fun out of ship-to-ship barneys


 
Babylon 5 did that type of thing best though.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 27, 2013)

agricola said:


> Babylon 5 did that type of thing best though.


 
If by "best" you mean "using special effects most closely resembling those from Thunderbirds", then yes, certainly


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 27, 2013)

sihhi said:
			
		

> Privilege means your rightness is reinforced often, and more _*women like me need to have their wrongness shown the hell up."*_




Is it me or is this quite creepy? Not the sort of message that young women should be receiving imo


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Is it me or is this quite creepy? Not the sort of message that young women should be receiving imo


Where has that come from? The original context I mean, of the message.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 27, 2013)

sihhi said:


> here


----------



## agricola (Apr 27, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> If by "best" you mean "using special effects most closely resembling those from Thunderbirds", then yes, certainly


 
All of those effects were done on a species of Amiga - an effective and oddly-lit strike against the tyranny of the PC, and one that should be applauded on this thread.


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 27, 2013)

> Malcolm Harris @BigMeanInternet 41m
> 
> UK trolls instantly blocked cuz Yorktown and finish your bourgeois revolution 'fore you open your gabs


 
Someone translate?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 27, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Someone translate?



Vaguely seems like he's trying to be ironic or something.

What a prat.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 27, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Someone translate?


 
‘Silver-spoon sociopath playing at politics can't take criticism’


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 27, 2013)

bourgeois revolution? haha ffs


----------



## JimW (Apr 27, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Someone translate?


Yorktown's some battle in the American Revolutionary War IIRC. The bit about the unfinished bourgeois revolution is testament to how even a very pricey education can leave you woefully ignorant. One might think that executing the king, then the Glorious Revolution a few decades later might count, but not to a pseudo-radical who when you scratch the surface still buys into many of the US's founding myths. Or makes crap jokes but let's not let that stand in the way of a rant.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 27, 2013)

the cowboys are circling the wagons to protect the womenfolk


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 27, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Someone translate?


He's being a dickhead. We're supposed to surrender or something because he uttered the word 'Yorktown'.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 27, 2013)

I do object to how legitimately criticising anything somehow makes us trolls, though.


----------



## rekil (Apr 27, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Someone translate?


 
He blocked ProleDem for this. It's Twar!


----------



## JimW (Apr 27, 2013)

copliker said:


> It's Twar!



T'wat is it good for?


----------



## love detective (Apr 27, 2013)

Malcolm Harris said:
			
		

> Sonic Youth is a pretty weird name for a band full of old people



Jesus fuck


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 27, 2013)

copliker said:


> He blocked ProleDem for this. It's Twar!


 
Okay but he didn't block me. Am I not important enough? Is it because I'm an oppressed young woman who just needs to be educated? I guess we'll just never know.


----------



## rekil (Apr 27, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Okay but he didn't block me. Am I not important enough? Is it because I'm an oppressed young woman who just needs to be educated? I guess we'll just never know.


I'm not even from the UK, I'm just on rostered twitter machine duty, but that's not the worst of it; by blocking PD, _he has given a de facto 'talk to the hand' gesture to the intergalactic working class. _


----------



## JimW (Apr 27, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Okay but he didn't block me. Am I not important enough? Is it because I'm an oppressed young woman who just needs to be educated? I guess we'll just never know.


You're just further back down his progressive blocking stack because you can't compete with PD leading cadre on the salt-of-the-earth working class axis.


----------



## JimW (Apr 27, 2013)

copliker said:


> I'm not even from the UK...


copliker isn't actually within this solar system, but he's very modest about his sterling work as delegate to the Fourth Intergalactical.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 27, 2013)

copliker said:


> I'm not even from the UK, I'm just on rostered twitter machine duty, but that's not the worst of it; by blocking PD, _he has given a de facto 'talk to the hand' gesture to the intergalactic working class. _


Harris is so first against the wall, come the PD revolution. Then he'll wish he hadn't blocked us.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> bourgeois revolution? haha ffs


 

we did that with cromwell


----------



## rekil (Apr 27, 2013)

JimW said:


> copliker isn't actually within this solar system, but he's very modest about his sterling work as delegate to the Fourth Intergalactical.


Doing a bit of admin work at the Kepler-22b branch atm.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 27, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Okay but he didn't block me. Am I not important enough? Is it because I'm an oppressed young woman who just needs to be educated? I guess we'll just never know.


Given his peccadlloes, I dread to think how he might go about 'educating an oppressed young woman'.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 27, 2013)

privileged women need to learn how worthless and shit they really are.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 27, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Given his peccadlloes, I dread to think how he might go about 'educating an oppressed young woman'.


And I sure as hell wouldn't like to find out.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 27, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Given his peccadlloes, I dread to think how he might go about 'educating an oppressed young woman'.


 

I recall one of Stalins cradle snatched lovers confided to a freind 'Comrade stalin has been raising my consciousness'

oh ho is that what they call it these days etc


----------



## Favelado (Apr 27, 2013)

copliker said:


> Doing a bit of admin work at the Kepler-22b branch atm.
> 
> View attachment 31923


 
You took the American one out first right?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 27, 2013)

someone on twitter who i normally quite like is going on about ex forces people being scum


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> someone on twitter who i normally quite like is going on about ex forces people being scum


 Ugly.


Someone I normally quite like on twitter tweeted today that she was really happy to be having a girl because she already has 2 little soldiers...what's with militarising a pair of young children ffs


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 27, 2013)

dude calling your boys little soldiers doesn't mean you want to send the to the mil. its just a term of endearment


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 27, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> dude calling your boys little soldiers doesn't mean you want to send the to the mil. its just a term of endearment


 
One I dislike. Girl.


----------



## rekil (Apr 27, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Harris is so first against the wall, come the PD revolution. Then he'll wish he hadn't blocked us.




Malcolm Harris, you stand accused of blocking PD on the twitter machine, 'turning rebellion into money' and numerous counts of pervery. How do you pl-BANG!

Too slow Malcolm. We've a lot to get through you know.

NEXT!


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 27, 2013)

copliker said:


> View attachment 31926
> 
> Malcolm Harris, you stand accused of blocking PD on the twitter machine, 'turning rebellion into money' and numerous counts of pervery. How do you pl-BANG!
> 
> ...


Oh no, I wouldn't shoot him, I'd make him watch while everyone else got shot.


----------



## rekil (Apr 27, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Oh no, I wouldn't shoot him, I'd make him watch while everyone else got shot.


No slacking!


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 27, 2013)

copliker said:


> No slacking!


I'd shoot him at the end. Don't worry!


----------



## chilango (Apr 27, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Oh no, I wouldn't shoot him, I'd make him watch while everyone else got shot.



No, make him shoot the others, whilst you have a cup of tea.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 27, 2013)

chilango said:


> No, make him shoot the others, whilst you have a cup of tea.


Ooh I like that idea better


----------



## chilango (Apr 27, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Ooh I like that idea better



He'd do it too.


----------



## chilango (Apr 27, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Oh no, I wouldn't shoot him, I'd make him watch while everyone else got shot.


Actually. Should probably be reverse progressively stacked, no?

Step up, step back (against the wall).


----------



## J Ed (Apr 27, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/27/bradley-manning-sf-gay-pride

This is a really good article that outlines an (admitedly extreme) example of the way in which identity politics is used for reactionary ends.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 27, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/328206544963530752 

Deliberate conflation of legitimate criticism with misogyny.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 27, 2013)

Excellent new take on "Don't you know who I am?" with "Do you know all the people I named?"



No, sorry - didn't go to school/college/tea/parties with them


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 27, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Excellent new take on "Don't you know who I am?" with "Do you know all the people I named?"
> 
> 
> 
> No, sorry - didn't go to school/college/tea/parties with them


 
I suspect you didn't waltz into highly-lucrative pretend journalism based on who you had lunch with that's also part of the Oxbridge wiberal bubble, either, but that didn't stop Penny Dreadful from doing so.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 27, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/328206544963530752
> 
> Deliberate conflation of legitimate criticism with misogyny.


Again.

These people really need to understand that somebody not liking something you've written or painted is valid criticism, not misogyny. They don't hate women, they just don't like your work.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 27, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  36s
> Looking at old FB photos. Realised with a shock that friends are right, I have lost weight, probably at least 2 stone in 2 yrs. A bit upset.


 
It's almost like an invitation...is it sado-macochism?


----------



## Favelado (Apr 27, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> It's almost like an invitation...is it sado-macochism?


 
She suffered from anorexia didn't she? Let's hope she gets no abuse at all with regards to her weight. It's good she gets upset about losing weight!


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 27, 2013)

Favelado said:


> She suffered from anorexia didn't she? Let's hope she gets no abuse at all with regards to her weight. It's good she gets upset about losing weight!


 
Yes but why tweet that given her history with anorexia? It's an invitation for arsey comments...I don't tweet about the things that are THAT personal and could be THAT affecting. :/

Personal boundaries and emotional safety are not something one has to give up to be relevant, edgey, likeable, or interesting.... There is a massive whiff of martyrdom in the air.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 27, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Again.
> 
> These people really need to understand that somebody not liking something you've written or painted is valid criticism, not misogyny. They don't hate women, they just don't like your work.


 
It is possible to give LP the benefit of the doubt - but looking through @pennyred tweets I don't see any generalised anti-women or belittling comments.

There's a large number of people looking for shout outs or promotion. A few being all let's joke about science fiction-fantasy. A few asking questions about her misrepresentations, a few asking questions about her politics.

LP stated:


> For example: recent meeting with London radicals wanting to expand media platform. Refused to consider lack of women editors a major problem


 
This was a half-truth - at best - or outright lie. For a start it emerges that there are no editors (lie-o-meter swinging). And were those radicals actually untroubled by having few women participants - did they refuse to consider it?
Was there other things going on?  


Let's note: LP has a talk to give in Germany in a couple of weeks' time called Cybersexism about online misogyny.




> Cybersexism
> POLITICS & SOCIETY
> Laurie Penny
> 6 Mai 14:45 - 15:15
> ...


 
A week ago this tweet - could it be an attempt to kick up a (non-)storm to lead in on with in speech/written story.



> Anyone have a story of online sexism/harrassment they want to share with me for a piece I'm working on? Get in touch. laurie.penny@gmail.com


----------



## sihhi (Apr 27, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Vaguely seems like he's trying to be ironic or something.
> 
> What a prat.


 
Situationism is possible. A wilful mangling of British history, cod-ironic American nationalism against Brits. 

Note an earlier piece by Malcolm Harris on why not being correct at stuff is OK and copying your homework helps you in the long run:


In Defense of Academic Dishonesty



> Every piece of information from a teacher also comes with an affirmation of the “pedagogical act;” we are always learning to be taught. Rather than reducing the need for authorities through some sort of knowledge-is-power liberation, the classroom teaches students through experience to be reliant on a teacher.


 






> Cheating is a challenge to pedagogical authority, a rejection of Miss Arnold’s demand that Danny “take her word for it.”  Far from stealing, plagiarism in the context of schoolwork is about the reclamation by students of their own work-time. And more power to them.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Apr 27, 2013)

JimW said:


> New BBC magazine features to look forward to:
> "How a medieval book of home remedies could keep you out the GP's waiting room."
> "*Housing crisis, what housing crisis? Make a bijou shelterette for you and your children with just a few cardboard boxes and some traditional British brio."*
> "."


 
Bootstraps - A gameshow from this  criminally neglected book by Rochdale's own Trevor Hoyle.



> _Vail_ is a black comedy set in a dreary, futuristic Britain. The work tells of how the title character loses both his wife and daughter in a highway accident and later arrives in London, where he is drawn into a sinister, scheming world.
> Populated by the off-beat, the bizarre, and the morally corrupt, the city defies conventional urban activity. While _Vail_ seeks to sustain his belief in a larger order of things through much of the work, he is ultimately engulfed by the growing anarchy surrounding him.


----------



## love detective (Apr 27, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Note an earlier piece by Malcolm Harris on why not being correct at stuff is OK and copying your homework helps you in the long run:
> 
> 
> In Defense of Academic Dishonesty
> ...


that's pure cringe inducing stuff isn't it - makes penny appear fairly sensible & grounded in comparison


----------



## sihhi (Apr 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Is it me or is this quite creepy? Not the sort of message that young women should be receiving imo


 
It's fine if it's from a sound class, feminist or anti-racist basis but if it's spurious and blaming people for things that they cannot control then it can be damaging. 

The blog which supported it and hosted it was having a discussion with Laurie Penny earlier:

https://twitter.com/renireni/status/328207840625963008




> #BlackPrivilege is always having to remember that white people's feelings come first and foremost when discussing racism
> PennyRed: BUT MY FEELINGS RENI. DON'T YOU CARE ABOUT MY FEELINGS. I HAVE SO MANY LET ME TELL YOU.
> ...
> PennyRed: lulz. Btw we must talk about the left. Email?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 27, 2013)

love detective said:


> that's pure cringe inducing stuff isn't it - makes penny appear fairly sensible & grounded in comparison


 
He's arguing from a socialist position - the importance of not quoting people's ideas, cheating to allow one party to do work while another to pretend they have competence over something which they don't, and allowing students to repeat themselves aimlessly (what the UMD restriction on students' wholesale repeating their previous work - from one tutor to another - is about).


----------



## love detective (Apr 27, 2013)

it's pure teenage anarchism stuff - embarrassing


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 27, 2013)

hmm...that exchange has more to it:



> *Reni Eddo-Lodge* ‏@*renireni*  5h
> #*BlackPrivilege* is always having to remember that white people's feelings come first and foremost when discussing racism
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  5h @*renireni* BUT MY FEELINGS RENI. DON'T YOU CARE ABOUT MY FEELINGS. I HAVE SO MANY LET ME TELL YOU.
> ...


----------



## sihhi (Apr 27, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Malcolm Harris is the worst one out of all of them I reckon. Worse than Laurie, Molly, Owen, Sunni and Elly Mae all rolled into one.
> 
> He must be stopped. I don't care how it's done but the man is an affront to decency.


 
This is his take on Harry Potter:



> Every scene between two characters is suffused with enough sexual tension so as to resemble porn exposition. Harry and Hermione, Ron and Hermione, Harry and Ginny, Harry and Malfoy, Ron and Lavender, Harry and Ron, Harry and Dumbledore, Harry and Malfoy


 
Not seen the film but sounds odd: how does basically cross-gender and same-gender friendship, teenage wistfulness/possible unrequited love etc "resemble porn exposition"

Comment below says: "they dont have sex in the movie because they dont have sex in the book. j.k. rowling wrote these books for kids"


----------



## J Ed (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This is his take on Harry Potter:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
If he's not a paedophile then he's giving an awfully good impression of one.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> hmm...that exchange has more to it:


 
Sorry wasn't trying to misrepresent just trying to keep the focus on LP - the cross-Atlantic journalist and editor - not other bloggers who haven't done anything dishonest.

My feeling is the acceptance of privilege politics by people like LP (once accused posters on this thread "of left-flavoured unexamined straight male privilege") let's it sink in where it would otherwise not be. LP attempts to cultivate supporters on the basis of _her_ fighting media (very occasionally) male privilege (as a crude summary).


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

J Ed said:


> If he's not a paedophile then he's giving an awfully good impression of one.


 
I strongly doubt it - instead there's a shade of revolutionary sexuality - (a wilder idea of the 1970s developed after late 1960s - the sexual revolution is happening but if people start to simply have sex with lots of people in many different ways, the desire for marriage will erode and a key linchpin of capitalism - the nuclear family can also be eroded)

Here is where he discusses sex and capitalism:





> Berardi is old. Besides the “you kids need to slow down” crap, I object to the way he describes sex as something that requires withdrawal from the (sometimes literal) circuits of production. One need not go to Damn You Autocorrect to know sexting provides more potential for the play of libidinal flows than a room with two sets of doors gave Moliere. He assumes post-humanism means the death of sensuality rather than its queering, which doesn’t seem right to me.


 
Post-humanism is - I think - the age the western world is entering with the rise of instant communication - smart phones, apps, twitter and the like - being part of a larger machine.

Damn you... is http://www.damnyouautocorrect.com.



> Sex (as I endeavor to have it, at very least), is an innovative act because, like Wittgenstein’s example of the required height of a shot in tennis, it is neither against nor within the rules, a practice of normality rather than norms. David Sedaris writes in his memoir Naked of losing his virginity as a process of production: “‘You kids think you invented sex,’ my mother was fond of saying. But hadn’t we? With no instruction manual or federally enforced training period, didn’t we all come away feeling we’d discovered something unspeakably modern?” If we can reject the shitty scripts we get from men’s and women’s magazines as well as bad porn, sex can be productive as, well, fuck. It’s important not to confuse fooling around with revolutionary praxis - despite what Andreas Baader may have said, fucking is not the same as shooting – but the exploration of unknown and unnamed potentials in the bedroom (or wherever) need not stop there. Sex can potentially serve as a model for innovative action that, unlike Berardi’s automaton-swarms, doesn’t follow instructions. Instead of a retreat from, sex can be an act of sabotage against and appropriation of capital’s machinery of subjective production. Hell, even riot police can be used as a sex toy.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Sorry wasn't trying to misrepresent just trying to keep the focus on LP - the cross-Atlantic journalist and editor - not other bloggers who haven't done anything dishonest.
> 
> My feeling is the acceptance of privilege politics by people like LP (once accused posters on this thread "of left-flavoured unexamined straight male privilege") let's it sink in where it would otherwise not be. LP attempts to cultivate supporters on the basis of _her_ fighting media (very occasionally) male privilege (as a crude summary).


 
Personally I found the exchange even stranger given that the tweet preceeding the one LP responded to said this:



> *Reni Eddo-Lodge* ‏@*renireni*  5h
> #*BlackPrivilege* is biting your tounge when watching white feminists don the cloak of white victimhood. They feel bullied, apparently.


 
Not sure she actually _got it_ at all!

Having read the blog it all becomes a little clearer.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2013)

someone give me £5k and I'll get on a plane to the states and batter Malcolm Harrris personally


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2013)

this is who he reminds me of


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> someone give me £5k and I'll get on a plane to the states and batter Malcolm Harrris personally


I'll come with you to hold your coat


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I'll come with you to hold your coat


 
Nah I actually need someone to do the whole "he's not worth it" thing whilst holding me back coz I reckon he'd probbably have me. Yorktown and stuff.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Nah I actually need someone to do the whole "he's not worth it" thing whilst holding me back coz I reckon he'd probbably have me. Yorktown and stuff.


In which case I'll sort him out while you hold my coat. I could take him for sure.


----------



## agricola (Apr 28, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> In which case I'll sort him out while you hold my coat. I could take him for sure.


 
Its not worth it, he would throw tea into the sea and everything.


----------



## barney_pig (Apr 28, 2013)

The way things stand, polpots gonna look like a fucking Salvation Army Sunday school compared to the mountain of soi dissant skulls we're going to build when our nice revolution happens


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2013)

I bet he's got a bodyguard the little wretch


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> The way things stand, polpots gonna look like a fucking Salvation Army Sunday school compared to the mountain of soi dissant skulls we're going to build when our nice revolution happens


I really don't want to be worse than pol pot


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

I'll do it for £500 - sneak onto a container ship or something.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'll do it for £500 - sneak onto a container ship or something.


 
Kickstarter? I've never been to America (believe it or not just jumping on a plane to New York isn't like getting the bus to town for us mere normals) I'd love to go there one day. I'd do it for a day out in New York doing all the touristy shit and to help combat my deeply engrained parochialism.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2013)

Fuck their scene. It's just a vanity project. New inquiry my arse. I was on a train back from sheffield tonight with a shitload of barnsley fans all singing "Who the fuck is maggie thatcher" they got the whole bastard train to join in. Even the guy collecting tickets was loving it. It was fucking brilliant. Then the train had to stop coz someone was running around in the train tracks and everyone was laughing their heads off at the police chasing him around. And coz we were stuck the conductor let everyone off for a cig. No-one got arsey. Everyone was actually having too much of a fucking laugh to care.

I see more things in my everday life that gives me hope for working-class people and radical politics in little funny events like that than I've ever got from shitty vanity journals like the New Inquiry or the fucking weasels who exist in that bubble. They're fuck all. I suppose the good news is chancers and charlatans like that are going to struggle in the future now the standard press model is collapsing, behold the last generation of the intelletual vanguard, hahah fucking chumps


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

Yeah that sounds very nice and everything but the real attraction is the opportunity to give Malcolm Harris a slap.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yeah that sounds very nice and everything but the real attraction is the opportunity to give Malcolm Harris a slap.


Two slaps. Each. Let's not waste the opportunity for fucks sake. 

It's SlapBet 2013, people.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This is his take on Harry Potter:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
If malcom harris wants to write extremely dodgy Harry Potter slashfic I'd thank him to keep it to those niche sites where such things exist and don't have to offend mine eyes.

Slashfic is a fucking menace. Last time I went looking for unpublished have-a-go Doctor Who fiction I stumbled across a massive Who slashfic site. I didn't 'get' the vibe untill I started reading one story where captain jack was bumming david tennant over the Tardis console while the time rotor wheezed and groaned, rising and falling in time to the thrusts

thankyou very fucking much, internets.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 28, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I really don't want to be worse than pol pot


 
i want to be better . For example i dont immediately assume that anyone wearing glasses is a foppish intellectual . Some of them arent .


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'll do it for £500 - sneak onto a container ship or something.


 
ive relatives in the filth over there...bung me 8 grand..theyll get half..sorted


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 28, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> i want to be better . For example i dont immediately assume that anyone wearing glasses is a foppish intellectual . Some of them arent .


 
He wore glasses himself, and there is no evidence that anyone was killed for simply wearing glasses. It's just one of those silly myths about them repeated for decades.


----------



## Bakunin (Apr 28, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Nah I actually need someone to do the whole "he's not worth it" thing whilst holding me back coz I reckon he'd probbably have me. Yorktown and stuff.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Situationism is possible. A wilful mangling of British history, cod-ironic American nationalism against Brits.
> 
> Note an earlier piece by Malcolm Harris on why not being correct at stuff is OK and copying your homework helps you in the long run:
> 
> ...


 
What a fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking moron. An imbecile, a complete vacuum of knowledge and understanding, a pustulous wart on the face of humanity, due a shitload of tea tree oil and sandpaper scrubbing, or preferably, fire.

He's got as much knowledge of the teaching and learning process as I do of his rich kids club for proper anarchists.

The snivelling little cunt.

The book he bases his grand fucking misconception on is from 1958, the theory from 1977. The theory's got some fascinating bits on social, cultural capital from a quick flick through - but he's just ignored about forty years of pedagogical, educational and psychological progress in teaching and learning. He's a fucking windbag.


----------



## brogdale (Apr 28, 2013)

Balbi said:


> What a fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking moron. An imbecile, a complete vacuum of knowledge and understanding, a pustulous wart on the face of humanity, due a shitload of tea tree oil and sandpaper scrubbing, or preferably, fire.
> 
> He's got as much knowledge of the teaching and learning process as I do of his rich kids club for proper anarchists.
> 
> ...


 
Hmmm an interesting take on that. Setting aside his attention seeking post title etc., I think that he does restate some genuine critiques of the role of homework within the pedagogic process. Maybe he is ignorant of some theory and research, but the reality for most kids in our education system is one of more, not less homework, and at earlier and earlier stages of their compulsory education. In my experience a surprising number of parents, let alone kids, resent the relentless and onerous imposition of extra tasks set by teachers that often appear to have been done so just to cover their ass.

I think that for most schools serious consideration and evaluation of homework is almost a taboo subject. It just has to happen, (according to the policy that will be inspected by Ofsted), and that's that; end of debate.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 28, 2013)

Depends on what end of the spectrum you're at - homework down my end of the school is reading with your child, working on phonics and the occasional bit of art/design work. All of it involves the child, and the parent, working together. The further you get up the system, the more independent the child - but homework where I am rarely takes the form of 'sit and do 100 sums' or 'write down x y and z' any more. Because that's ineffectual in most cases. Harris is critiquing a system that's been changed, because teachers are trying to make use that work at home is useful work.


----------



## brogdale (Apr 28, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Depends on what end of the spectrum you're at - homework down my end of the school is reading with your child, working on phonics and the occasional bit of art/design work. All of it involves the child, and the parent, working together. The further you get up the system, the more independent the child - but homework where I am rarely takes the form of 'sit and do 100 sums' or 'write down x y and z' any more. Because that's ineffectual in most cases. Harris is critiquing a system that's been changed, because teachers are trying to make use that work at home is useful work.


 
Fair enough, but I suppose that makes the point that we're all attempting to generalise from the specific.

As a parent of older, (now adult) offspring, I can honestly say that our experience of homework was rarely as positive as the situation you are enjoying. Hence, I felt that your reaction to Harris' post was rather harsh.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 28, 2013)

brogdale said:


> Fair enough, but I suppose that makes the point that we're all attempting to generalise from the specific.
> 
> As a parent of older, (now adult) offspring, I can honestly say that our experience of homework was rarely as positive as the situation you are enjoying. Hence, I felt that your reaction to Harris' post was rather harsh.


 
I fucking_ hate_ homework. But my kids' school is full of pushy middle class parents (we usually lose quite a few kids in primary 5 or 6 to the local private schools) so there's pressure on the teachers to set lots of homework. As an example my seven year old has reading twice a week, a reading task worksheet, a set of spelling words to copy out three times and write a sentence containing each word, and a maths worksheet. He's seven for crying out loud.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Harris is so first against the wall, come the PD revolution. Then he'll wish he hadn't blocked us.


 
Comrade Dr, I'm shocked that you would waste one of the Peoples' Bullets on such an unpromising specimen of white male privilege.

Surely the caress of the Peoples' Entrenching Tool is more apposite for such parasitic scum?


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2013)

Regardless of the ins and outs of the argument, artie isn't making them to forward a social critique of teaching etc but to simply _to be naughty_, to say_ look at me everyone, i'm arguing something the opposite of the mainstream view._


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## brogdale (Apr 28, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I fucking_ hate_ homework. But my kids' school is full of pushy middle class parents (we usually lose quite a few kids in primary 5 or 6 to the local private schools) so there's pressure on the teachers to set lots of homework. As an example my seven year old has reading twice a week, a reading task worksheet, a set of spelling words to copy out three times and write a sentence containing each word, and a maths worksheet. He's seven for crying out loud.


 
Exactly; and it just gets worse and worse....in our experience.

The reality for most teachers is that they are compelled to operate in pretty feudal cultures of fear; and the majority will set 'work' because the policy/"line manager" says they have to. Needless to say Gove's 'reforms' will only compound this process.


----------



## brogdale (Apr 28, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Regardless of the ins and outs of the argument, artie isn't making them to forward a social critique of teaching etc but to simply _to be naughty_, to say_ look at me everyone, i'm arguing something the opposite of the mainstream view._


 
It was on the internet.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

Zero tolerance on this Dennis Pennis lookalike cunt


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Excellent new take on "Don't you know who I am?" with "Do you know all the people I named?"
> 
> 
> 
> No, sorry - didn't go to school/college/tea/parties with them


 
Laura obviously sang "I'm Every Woman" to herself so many times as a kid that she ended up believing it.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> La Pennionara said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
It's possible. She was treated for anorexia.

Could just be a humble brag, though.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

brogdale said:


> Fair enough, but I suppose that makes the point that we're all attempting to generalise from the specific.
> 
> As a parent of older, (now adult) offspring, I can honestly say that our experience of homework was rarely as positive as the situation you are enjoying. Hence, I felt that your reaction to Harris' post was rather harsh.


 
Impossible to be too harsh with this one.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 28, 2013)

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. He's still a _massive_ cunt.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

He is writing about plagiarism at a university - OFSTED doesn't inspect universities! He at one point calls for _more tests _in the sciences at least (English Lit students like him probably get off). Tests mean even more homework or work at home because you are never ever properly ready. His arguments make little sense to me. 

Cheating or plagiarsm isn't struggle against homework - it's forcing teachers to be bad teachers and authoritarians who plough on with curriculum because they see students correctly completing homework which they haven't mastered properly or competently.

Struggle against homework comes from serious schoolstudent unions - who _collectively_ reduce homework production to its essentials cutting out the heavy unnecessary bits and the ideological impulse (by forcing the teacher body to more genuinely collaborate with students rather than impose a middle-class norm).


----------



## brogdale (Apr 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Impossible to be too harsh with this one.


 
I prefer to consider what people say in an argument.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

Fucking liberal.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Post-humanism is - I think - the age the western world is entering with the rise of instant communication - smart phones, apps, twitter and the like - being part of a larger machine.


 
Partly.  It has a lot to do with Post-Darwinist trends like evolutionary psychology too.  Basically the argument is that the boundaries between the human and the non-human are being eroded at either end: between humans and animals on the one hand; between humans and cyborgs on the other.



sihhi said:


> Damn you... is http://www.damnyouautocorrect.com.


 
Americans always think of sex.  Their minds are constantly in the gutter.  Far worse than any other nation ime.


----------



## brogdale (Apr 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Fucking liberal.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Situationism is possible. A wilful mangling of British history, cod-ironic American nationalism against Brits.
> 
> Note an earlier piece by Malcolm Harris on why not being correct at stuff is OK and copying your homework helps you in the long run:
> 
> ...


 
That's quite an amusing read, if not for the reasons Harris might like.
That he somehow translates the Bourdieu et Passeron quote as meaning that pedagogy is purely a transmission line for inculcating a reliance on pedagogues to mediate information isn't surprising (although it is risible - they say a lot more than that  ). What is surprising is his apparent embrace of a similar educational trope - that some form of "natural learning" will suffice (*if* you're as naturally-talented as Malcolm believes himself to be, anyway).
As for the comparison of education to production, while there are some confluences, his comparison is so reductive as to be almost meaningless (although I suppose his paraphrases of Marx will win him some high fives from those in his orbit). The intent of education may reside partially in the "production" of a literate, numerate subject, but it isn't necessarily "productive" of anything "useful" to capitalism, beyond another body in the pool of reserve labour.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2013)

love detective said:


> that's pure cringe inducing stuff isn't it - makes penny appear fairly sensible & grounded in comparison


 
To be fair, Monkey Harris is far more invested in himself than penny is in herself. He's at least neck-deep up his own arse.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I didn't 'get' the vibe untill I started reading one story where captain jack was bumming david tennant over the Tardis console while the time rotor wheezed and groaned, rising and falling in time to the thrusts.


 
I think Shippy has that manga.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 28, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> That's quite an amusing read, if not for the reasons Harris might like.
> That he somehow translates the Bourdieu et Passeron quote as meaning that pedagogy is purely a transmission line for inculcating a reliance on pedagogues to mediate information isn't surprising (although it is risible - they say a lot more than that  ). What is surprising is his apparent embrace of a similar educational trope - that some form of "natural learning" will suffice (*if* you're as naturally-talented as Malcolm believes himself to be, anyway).
> As for the comparison of education to production, while there are some confluences, his comparison is so reductive as to be almost meaningless (although I suppose his paraphrases of Marx will win him some high fives from those in his orbit). The intent of education may reside partially in the "production" of a literate, numerate subject, but it isn't necessarily "productive" of anything "useful" to capitalism, beyond another body in the pool of reserve labour.


 
The transmission line shit's pretty risky for Mr $5,000 a time to talk about a few parties he hung out at. I trained in pedagogy, and will tan your hide seven days from Sunday. He wouldn't last ten minutes in a classroom


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## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2013)

Remember the context for his remarks on teachers - calling on other teachers to scab against teachers involved in an ongoing strike - which itself, apart from being politically ridiculous, is a logical dogs dinner. If, as he argues teachers role make them the moral equivalent of prison guards (i.e it's a characteristic of the role full stop), then why would having teachers replace teachers make a blind bit of difference?

As for the return to natural education type stuff (people like Bey/Lamborn WIlson esp), always rather too close to _hey kids, why don't you take all your clothes up, look i'm not a teacher or your parents, or a nasty adult, look i'll do it too!_


----------



## Nice one (Apr 28, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> privileged women need to learn how worthless and shit they really are.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Remember the context for his remarks on teachers - calling on other teachers to scab against teachers involved in an ongoing strike - which itself, apart from being politically ridiculous, is a logical dogs dinner.


 
His very cleverly constructed phrase was done precisely to avoid this kind of charge - sort of got away with it isn't seen as a fruitloop as a result - it was simply a situationist critique of capitalist education.

Look at the flow of the argument after that post https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/245516465481080832

He says: "only people less elite than Chi teachers are Chi students..."

It was politically dangerous - the whole angle for w/class consumption of the Rahm Ehmanuel offensive against the AFT was that they were blocking Charter schools and Green Dots because they happily keep south side black Chicago in an educational prison of low expectations.


----------



## Thora (Apr 28, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I fucking_ hate_ homework. But my kids' school is full of pushy middle class parents (we usually lose quite a few kids in primary 5 or 6 to the local private schools) so there's pressure on the teachers to set lots of homework. As an example my seven year old has reading twice a week, a reading task worksheet, a set of spelling words to copy out three times and write a sentence containing each word, and a maths worksheet. He's seven for crying out loud.


Yep, reading with your child = fine, but any art/design projects that the parent has to do with them is totally ridiculous imo.  If the child can't do their own homework then what is the point of it?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

Thora said:


> Yep, reading with your child = fine, but any art/design projects that the parent has to do with them is totally ridiculous imo. If the child can't do their own homework then what is the point of it?


 
It's an 'impose costs of art education onto unpaid parents and carers' strategy.
The norm as it is now mostly blocks the school from genuine extended art and craft sessions so that part of it is thrust into the home.


----------



## Thora (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It's an 'impose costs of art education onto unpaid parents and carers' strategy.
> The norm as it is now mostly blocks the school from genuine extended art and craft sessions so that part of it is thrust into the home.


Actually (at primary school at least) I think it's because teachers/schools think it is important to encourage feckless parents to be more involved with their children, have some quality time where they are engaging with them instead of just sticking them in front of the TV.  It doesn't have to be an art project, it can be any homework that the child needs parental support to do.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Americans always think of sex. Their minds are constantly in the gutter. Far worse than any other nation ime.


 
I think that you're thinking of human beings...


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I think that you're thinking of human beings...


 
Could anyone but an American write this?  I think not.

"Sex (as I endeavor to have it, at very least), is an innovative act because, like Wittgenstein’s example of the required height of a shot in tennis, it is neither against nor within the rules, a practice of normality rather than norms."


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

Thora said:


> Actually (at primary school at least) I think it's because teachers/schools think it is important to encourage feckless parents to be more involved with their children, have some quality time where they are engaging with them instead of just sticking them in front of the TV. It doesn't have to be an art project, it can be any homework that the child needs parental support to do.


 
At KS3, first bit of secondary, art and craft is very limited. Heavy out of school long projects is often how it's done.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Could anyone but an American write this? I think not.
> 
> "Sex (as I endeavor to have it, at very least), is an innovative act because, like Wittgenstein’s example of the required height of a shot in tennis, it is neither against nor within the rules, a practice of normality rather than norms."


 
Yeah I know plenty of British pretentious idiots that have disappeared up their own arses while reading post-modernist articles about English literature. If you told me any number of people I know at uni wrote that I'd believe it.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Yeah I know plenty of British pretentious idiots that have disappeared up their own arses while reading post-modernist articles about English literature. If you told me any number of people I know at uni wrote that I'd believe it.


 
I don't know man, he sounds practically _French _there....


----------



## J Ed (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> His very cleverly constructed phrase was done precisely to avoid this kind of charge - sort of got away with it isn't seen as a fruitloop as a result - it was simply a situationist critique of capitalist education.
> 
> Look at the flow of the argument after that post https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/245516465481080832
> 
> ...


 
Are you saying he was trying to shill for Rahm Emanuel while retaining radical credentials?


Some of his later interventions are interesting:

*Malcolm Harris* ‏@*BigMeanInternet*11 Sep​@*OaklandElle*@*laurenriot*@*akerfoot* @OaktownMike @*OakScott* I got the best public education in the country and kids killed themselves a lot.

*Malcolm Harris* ‏@*BigMeanInternet*12 Sep​@*OakScott* @OaktownMike I've seen teachers enforce a system and produce situations that literally makes kids kill themselves


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)

Nice one said:


>


 
its not what i think! but that stuff sihhi quoted seemed to be saying it


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 28, 2013)

Having recently completed my GCSEs, can I just point out what a load of wank our education system is. I ended up quite ill from the stress at one stage, and it was seen as my health getting in the way of my education, not the other way around. It completely ruined my life, and I know that sounds like an overreaction but it's just how it is. Just because something's the norm, it doesn't make it right.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> His very cleverly constructed phrase was done precisely to avoid this kind of charge - sort of got away with it isn't seen as a fruitloop as a result - it was simply a situationist critique of capitalist education.
> 
> Look at the flow of the argument after that post https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/245516465481080832
> 
> ...


I suspect that he probably spotted the danger in what he was saying and had enough suss to work out some semi-plausible path out of it, but if he has got away with it (i don't know if he has) i wouldn't put it down to the content of his argument, more that the people he writes for have no understanding of what politics actually is. They think it's just a word-game, a parlour game and no effects beyond the rhetorical are to be expected from what ever you argue.

They are the sort of people who would consider it _devilishly delightful _to argue in the antebellum US that slavery must be preserved because it was the clearest demonstration possible of the unfree nature of that society. And once that's done, onto the next petty verbal provocation. As such these people are easily seen through by the wider class (esp that politically (formally) part of it, and have no social weight - are not really relevant.

But before someone replies if they have no social weight then why are you going on about them? If they don't matter then wtf are you on about? It must be remembered that it's their _ideas_ that have no social weight , their arguments. The role they play in putting people off this public-left is very very real though, that's where they have some social weight (even if negatively from our perspective). The two are part of one rotten whole. Their ideas have to be idiotic, self-centred and socially meaningless if they're going to be able to play this second role of alienating people from active political participation.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)

excellent post. do you mind if i quote it on my blog?

i've said before that i think that these people would have been - and the 30s equivalents of them were - the intellectual "bohemian" "liberal" apologists for fascism, who think it's wonderful that there's so much _vitality_ and _action_ going on whereas in the UK it's rainy and depressing etc. and of course the stuff about the "proletarian nation" having a right to fight back against the "imperialist nations". dilletantes who may have read a few books but know nothing, understand nothing, who are simply using this stuff as parlour games without any wider significance. i despise people like this.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

---
Slight aside. Not really relevant to Harris, but the vultures circling around him and his Share or Die:Forward! ideas are worth noting.
---
'On Monday, June 4, 2012, SharedSquared NY is holding a meetup called Trust: the Key Element to Success in Sharing. It features Andrea Howe of Trusted Advisor Associates; Sheila Karaszewski, Community Manager at Airbnb; and Anna Thomas, Loosecubes Chief Happiness Officer. The event will focus on the difference between trust, reputation and influence; how trust differs between sharing economy businesses; and rules for how companies can create trust.'

An internet company CEOs get-together is what Malcom Harris wrote about here



Scott Heiferman who hosted the event was for a while Sony's "Interactive Marketing Frontiersman" expert. He left the high corporate world said 'f you' to big capitalist firms by setting up several of his making a little money hitting the jackpot with MeetUp which is pretty big in the USA:

his twitter today: 





> 120,552 RSVPs to 19,073 Meetups today (all-time highs)... Lotsa new friendships will be made. See your town: http://meetup.com/find


 
It started out free but then began charging organisers of 'meetups' in Apr 2005, it went to make money some background here

An NYT bio of him here, he is an anti-corporatist, his website analysing a book by Doug Rushkoff called Life Inc has countless leftist clarion calls:

"personal freedom would become the rallying cry of one counterculture or another, only serving to reinforce the very same individualism... we were either individuals in thrall of the masquerade, or individuals in defiance of it. corporatism was the end result in either case."

Rushkoff (a media professor writer who coined the phrase 'viral' for internet-led popularity and 'digital native' describing Western teenagers who only know life with multi-media) himself is an advisor to Meetup:




> Advisory Board
> Jim Cashel, Steven Johnson, Kenneth Lerer, Robert Putnam, Ira Rosen, Richard Rowe, Douglas Rushkoff, Andrew Shapiro, Clay Shirky, Brian Sroub, Jeffrey Stewart.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> excellent post. do you mind if i quote it on my blog?
> 
> i've said before that i think that these people would have been - and the 30s equivalents of them were - the intellectual "bohemian" "liberal" apologists for fascism, who think it's wonderful that there's so much _vitality_ and _action_ going on whereas in the UK it's rainy and depressing etc. and of course the stuff about the "proletarian nation" having a right to fight back against the "imperialist nations". dilletantes who may have read a few books but know nothing, understand nothing, who are simply using this stuff as parlour games without any wider significance. i despise people like this.


Of course, no worries.


----------



## rekil (Apr 28, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Excellent new take on "Don't you know who I am?" with "Do you know all the people I named?"
> 
> 
> 
> No, sorry - didn't go to school/college/tea/parties with them





> doesn't have to be me. Get Nina, JD, Sophie, Marie, Zoe. Promote and advocate for women.


Nina = Nina Petrova obv.



JD = ?
Sophie = Sophie Wilkinson? Guardian columnist.
Marie = ?
Zoe = Laura's mate Stavvers (or Zoe Williams) NS, Indy, Guardian columnists


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2013)

copliker said:


> Nina = Nina Petrova obv.
> 
> 
> JD = ?
> ...


 
The voiceless major paper columnists.


----------



## kavenism (Apr 28, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Yeah I know plenty of British pretentious idiots that have disappeared up their own arses while reading post-modernist articles about English literature. If you told me any number of people I know at uni wrote that I'd believe it.


Would It too pretentious to say that that quote makes perfect sense to me, and although the sentence structure lends itself to being accused of post-modern posturing, the body of theory to which it refers is in reality quite opposed to all that PM guff. The Wittgenstein example is being used to draw attention to the distinction between a rule governed norm (like Laws against so and so) and a norm which comes about through repetitive practices (through history) which are not covered by explicit rules, such as those that that inform what is acceptable and non acceptable sexual conduct. Since these non rule governed norms have no explicit form they often appear as immutable cultural or historical facts and thus are difficult to challenge. Nevertheless they are a prime target for activists engaged in trying to think and act differently. Practices of freedom as Foucault would come to call them.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 28, 2013)

http://leftunity.org/the-cult-of-activism/ I think this is pretty good


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2013)

kavenism said:


> Would It too pretentious to say that that quote makes perfect sense to me, and although the sentence structure lends itself to being accused of post-modern posturing, the body of theory to which it refers is in reality quite opposed to all that PM guff. The Wittgenstein example is being used to draw attention to the distinction between a rule governed norm (like Laws against so and so) and a norm which comes about through repetitive practices (through history) which are not covered by explicit rules, such as those that that inform what is acceptable and non acceptable sexual conduct. Since these non rule governed norms have no explicit form they often appear as immutable cultural or historical facts and thus are difficult to challenge. Nevertheless they are a prime target for activists engaged in trying to think and act differently. Practices of freedom as Foucault would come to call them.


Or, *why* should i clean my room mum?

The questions aren't asked here by these people to uncover what value social norms offered historically - but just to pose as _the great questioner._


----------



## rekil (Apr 28, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The voiceless major paper columnists.


Is Zoe Stavri a Brighton College product as well? Williams is from Godolphin and Latymer School (5.5k per term)


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 28, 2013)

copliker said:


> Is Zoe Stavri a Brighton College product as well? Williams is from Godolphin and Latymer School (5.5k per term)


I know nothing about her.


----------



## rekil (Apr 28, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I know nothing about her.


Misogynist.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> They are the sort of people who would consider it _devilishly delightful _to argue in the antebellum US that slavery must be preserved because it was the clearest demonstration possible of the unfree nature of that society. And once that's done, onto the next petty verbal provocation. As such these people are easily seen through by the wider class (esp that politically (formally) part of it, and have no social weight - are not really relevant.


 
I don't think they are 'the worse, the better' types. Malcolm Harris does chop and change and *a lot* of what he writes about is reviews of culture especially highbrow novels and popular culture so the politics is hard to pin down.

Your ref to civil war is pretty heavy and doesn't really work with their vision of struggling against _liberal anti-racism_.

Going back to the privilege analysis that underpins some of the politics. Perhaps some are reacting against the liberal anti-racism of their parents - fair employment laws, welfare benefits and diversity programmes - but no direct engagement with the sharper end and moving to middle-class suburbs for good school precincts.

They are reacting with a hyper 'all white people are basically racist' and 'only white people can be racist' (both statements of course have large elements of truth) - the conservatives want to destroy all anti-racism, the liberals pretend to be anti-racists, so the left must be pretending too.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)

I understand the arguments for the whole "all white people are racist" and "only white people can be racist" things but i think they only ever really can apply in a first world context and even then they're very very flawed. what about NOI conspiracy theories about jews for instance or something like the Lozells riots?


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## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

copliker said:


> Nina = Nina Petrova obv.
> 
> View attachment 31949
> 
> ...


 
Ones that fit the names from the Guardian-Independent wing of newspapers are Nina Power for Nina, Zoe Stavri for Zoe and Marie Winckler for Marie. Could be totally barking up the wrong tree - and they might be working-class journalists in local papers or unemployed working class graduates.


----------



## andysays (Apr 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Could anyone but an American write this? I think not.
> 
> "Sex (as I endeavor to have it, at very least), is an innovative act because, like Wittgenstein’s example of the required height of a shot in tennis, it is neither against nor within the rules, a practice of normality rather than norms."


 
Hopefully anyone not American but writing in English would at least spell "endeavour" correctly


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I understand the arguments for the whole "all white people are racist" and "only white people can be racist" things but i think they only ever really can apply in a first world context and even then they're very very flawed. what about NOI conspiracy theories about jews for instance or something like the Lozells riots?


 
They're not meant to be taken literally - they are meant to scare white middle-class liberals. Bits of the black movement in the US used them to get rid of warn away middle-class interlopers (overwhelmingly whites). Saying it now doesn't win over black participants anyway - the NOI with AWAR and OWAR attitudes - only did well where it could organise serious anti-dug efforts at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s.


----------



## love detective (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> they might be working-class journalists in local papers or unemployed working class graduates.


----------



## JimW (Apr 28, 2013)

If you squint really hard down at the ground as your jet takes off from Heathrow en route for a New York art opening, you can sometimes spot a working class person and one of those might well be a journalist, so it's not like LP doesn't know any.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 28, 2013)

class clearly doesn't exist in NY - that's why Laurie will take up Louise Mensch's suggestion they meet up - it's all good for the sisterhood.


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## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Remember the context for his remarks on teachers - calling on other teachers to scab against teachers involved in an ongoing strike - which itself, apart from being politically ridiculous, is a logical dogs dinner. If, as he argues teachers role make them the moral equivalent of prison guards (i.e it's a characteristic of the role full stop), then why would having teachers replace teachers make a blind bit of difference?


 
Well quite. He's obviously Emersonian in his feelings about logical consistency.



> As for the return to natural education type stuff, always rather too close to _hey kids, why don't you take all your clothes up, look i'm not a teacher or your parents, or a nasty adult, look i'll do it too!_


 
The circumstantial evidence of crypto-noncehood keeps accumulating...


----------



## Balbi (Apr 28, 2013)

Thora said:


> Actually (at primary school at least) I think it's because teachers/schools think it is important to encourage feckless parents to be more involved with their children, have some quality time where they are engaging with them instead of just sticking them in front of the TV. It doesn't have to be an art project, it can be any homework that the child needs parental support to do.


 
Yep. We go for Art & Design and offer use of materials sometimes for parents - alongside reading, spelling and the odd bit of numeracy. The level our children come in at is pretty low, nursery kids who aren't entirely aware of their own name or how to indicate they want to go to the toilet, or to talk to other people, or play with other children at all. We start getting parents into the classroom to work with them, while we subtly model what working with your child looks like. That goes on all the way up to Year 3 and 4 - getting parents in one morning a week for a half hour to work with their child. Vital, vital, vital.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

Another figure at the heart of the New Inquiry is Mike Thomsen, author of Levivate the Primate, published/distributed by Marxist Zer0 books:







does the human relationships features for the New Inquiry




> Mike Thomsen: Do you think finally the values of dating are unnatural when you have these periodic impulses to just fuck? I think most people would identify with some subconscious, animal curiosity about other people’s sex.
> 
> MS: I think it’s possible to fuck someone and then decide you’re going to date. I know some people who hooked up on Craigslist Casual Encounters and then decided to have a relationship. I don’t think it’s contrary.
> 
> Mike Thomsen: Shouldn’t that be the primary way of looking at sex? Not that we’re having too much with too many partners, but that we’re not having enough, and attach too much preciousness to it when we do?


 
_People, stop attaching too much preciousness to sex!_

Here he is at a New Inquiry left reading/meeting event thing reading from Levivate the Primate which Harris describes as "A crushingly honest collection of confessions about love in the shape of sex, from which any American man could learn a thing or ten. Malcolm Harris"








He considers that dating (and beyond) a writer about sex means something important in increasing honesty in human relationships or something, and that there's nothing with being part of a writer's "post-hump confessional":




> All worthwhile sex writing must eventually confront this point, the necessary founding of love in an acceptance of someone else's most humiliating parts, to find in their balance with all the person's more admirable qualities some honest, mortal beauty. The threshold apprehension one feels on dates, the slow unfolding retreat to questionnaire conversations about subjects neither person especially cares about is a subconscious reaction to the suspicion that were we to be honest with one another, we would by definition be ugly. One either rejects this impulse as absurd and gets on with the process of intimacy by consciously fighting against or ignoring it; or else one hastens home to write about it after the fact.
> 
> If there is always something unpleasant about the prospect of losing control of one's narrative in someone else's post-hump confessional, there is also something reassuring in finding someone so overwhelmed by the formal impositions of dating culture that they can only handle processing it honestly in private.
> 
> ...


 
Seems to be enjoying the fact that contraceptives have been cooked inside frying pans besides designer salters:





A bit like Malcolm Harris with turning non-sexual culture into sexualised culture. Skyrim is a quest style computer game:


> It’s hard to not compare Skyrim’s checklist mission design with how-to sex writing. Consider: “Approximately an inch or two inside her vagina, you’ll feel a round spongy patch; that, my friends, is her G-spot. Move your fingers in a come-hither motion… To take it up a notch, use your other hand to press down on the area between her naval and her pubic mound…Coax her by saying things like ‘I can’t wait for you to come’” Now compare it with: “The mythical horn of Jurgen Windcaller is tucked away in Ustengrav located slightly northeast of Morthal…Once you reach a great opening that careens into a waterfall, make your way down for a chest on a path to the left…Head out and on to the Sleeping Giant Inn in Riverwood. Speak to Delphine and request the attic room. Head to sleep only to be woken by Delphine, at which point she finally relinquishes the horn…”


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## Thora (Apr 28, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Yep. We go for Art & Design and offer use of materials sometimes for parents - alongside reading, spelling and the odd bit of numeracy. The level our children come in at is pretty low, nursery kids who aren't entirely aware of their own name or how to indicate they want to go to the toilet, or to talk to other people, or play with other children at all. We start getting parents into the classroom to work with them, while we subtly model what working with your child looks like. That goes on all the way up to Year 3 and 4 - getting parents in one morning a week for a half hour to work with their child. Vital, vital, vital.


Inviting parents in is different to sending work home for parents to do.  Though actually I really object to a lot of the last minute "come to a special assembly/activity tomorrow" stuff schools do too.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I suspect that he probably spotted the danger in what he was saying and had enough suss to work out some semi-plausible path out of it, but if he has got away with it (i don't know if he has) i wouldn't put it down to the content of his argument, more that the people he writes for have no understanding of what politics actually is. They think it's just a word-game, a parlour game and no effects beyond the rhetorical are to be expected from what ever you argue.
> 
> They are the sort of people who would consider it _devilishly delightful _to argue in the antebellum US that slavery must be preserved because it was the clearest demonstration possible of the unfree nature of that society. And once that's done, onto the next petty verbal provocation. As such these people are easily seen through by the wider class (esp that politically (formally) part of it, and have no social weight - are not really relevant.
> 
> But before someone replies if they have no social weight then why are you going on about them? If they don't matter then wtf are you on about? It must be remembered that it's their _ideas_ that have no social weight , their arguments. The role they play in putting people off this public-left is very very real though, that's where they have some social weight (even if negatively from our perspective). The two are part of one rotten whole. Their ideas have to be idiotic, self-centred and socially meaningless if they're going to be able to play this second role of alienating people from active political participation.


 
Can't remember where I read it, although it might have been the old London Labour Briefing, but I recall someone making an argument for calling the effect "displacement", insofar as their ideas displace the allegiance of elements of the "tribal" left rightwards in...well, not disgust, but contempt. IIRC they blamed Crossman.


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## Balbi (Apr 28, 2013)

Thora said:


> Inviting parents in is different to sending work home for parents to do. Though actually I really object to a lot of the last minute "come to a special assembly/activity tomorrow" stuff schools do too.


 
That drives me up the wall - often the class teachers get about three hours notice on some of the stuff the head's arranged - and we get the joyous experience of copping the flak from the parents


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## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2013)

copliker said:


> Nina = Nina Petrova obv.
> 
> View attachment 31949
> 
> ...


 
Has to be someone from inside the bubble, obviously.
Might run the risk of the woman not being white and middle-class, and thus not fully up-to-speed on privilege theory, otherwise.

You know what's annoying me? I've been re-reading bits of Bakhtin lately, mostly "The Dialogic Imagination", plus a few analyses of his stuff, and it justs highlights for me how much writers like Penny, Harris, Hari, etc - all those who play on their supposed/imagined "out-group" or "othered" status - actually write stuff that's the epitome of what Bakhtin talked about when he spoke of "centripetal forces" within discourse. Stuff that's "establishment" through and through, that supports and sustains conservative forces, rather than challenging them on anything but a surface level.


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## ViolentPanda (Apr 28, 2013)

copliker said:


> Misogynist.


 
Doesn't that make him a racist too, on this thread?


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Are you saying he was trying to shill for Rahm Emanuel while retaining radical credentials?
> 
> 
> Some of his later interventions are interesting:
> ...


 
I'll say it again. The 'public school' (US for comprehensive) education he got would be very very different to the public school education black Southside Chicago students get because he was brought up in Palo Alto, a rich private town in California. Hardly the same thing at all by any stretch of the imagination.


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## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)

I've put somethign on the blog now if anyone wants to have a look. Bit rushed though and not as in depth as I'd like but I was sick of writing/thinking about these people


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## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Americans always think of sex. Their minds are constantly in the gutter. Far worse than any other nation ime.


 
And they - or some of them at least - think about it in peculiar ways. This just in: Diary of Anne Frank is "pornographic", says crazy person:

http://now.msn.com/gail-horalek-says-anne-frank-diary-is-porn-fights-to-pull-it-from-school/


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## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I'll say it again. The 'public school' (US for comprehensive) education he got would be very very different to the public school education black Southside Chicago students get because he was brought up in Palo Alto, a rich private town in California. Hardly the same thing at all by any stretch of the imagination.


 
US public schools are financed via local property taxes. So a school in a gutted post-industrial city like Detroit will face funding challenges unknown to the academies of Palo Alto.


----------



## treelover (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Another figure at the heart of the New Inquiry is Mike Thomsen, author of Levivate the Primate, published/distributed by Marxist Zer0 books:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Why has he got sunglasses clipped to his jumper, when he already has glasses on?


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> US public schools are financed via local property taxes. So a school in a gutted post-industrial city like Detroit will face funding challenges unknown to the academies of Palo Alto.


Exactly. It's easy to be a radical when mummy and daddy's money support your choice to live in New York without needing to get 3 jobs to make ends meet.


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## rekil (Apr 28, 2013)

Speaking of Palo Alto, The Onion two days ago.



> WASHINGTON—Declaring that every affluent child in America has the right to a well-balanced brunch, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the launch of a $40 million school brunch program aimed at distributing brioche french toast and smoked salmon to the nation’s richest school districts.
> 
> “We found that 70 percent of students in wealthy communities were not receiving their recommended allowance of eggs Benedict and fresh-squeezed orange juice,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters Friday. “Quite simply, we believe all children of privilege deserve a proper, well-composed brunch plate with complimentary jalapeno cornbread mini muffins and honey butter on the side. With this new program, we can finally begin to offer the superior culinary experience that until now has been sorely missing in school cafeterias from Greenwich, CT to Palo Alto, CA.”
> 
> Department officials said that if its brunch program proves successful, they remain open to the possibility of spending an additional $80 million annually to add live jazz music.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I've put somethign on the blog now if anyone wants to have a look. Bit rushed though and not as in depth as I'd like but I was sick of writing/thinking about these people


 
I've taken a look but this is way out there crazy - 

"I have said before that if these people – the people who present the public face of political protest but in reality do very little except alienate everyone around them – were around in the 1930s the vitality and action they saw in Germany and Italy would lead them to become liberal, bohemian apologists for fascism. Mussolini’s theory about the “proletarian nation” oppressed by other “imperalist” nations would appeal to them, it would make them feel like they were fighting against “oppression”. Not happy with how Italian trade unionists and communists or German Jews are being treated? Well check your privilege as you’re not in the “proletarian nation” and you “need to have your wrongness shown the hell up”! This may sound extreme, but the occupy movement and its jet-setting spawn seem to embody the worst, most reactionary aspects of the left in many ways"

There were no bohemian apologists for Nazism, were there - can you name a single one? Nazism destroyed Communists, bohemians and then independent or SPD minded trade unionists very quickly.
Even with Italy, how are these people like the small number of "liberals" who voted for Mussolini taking exceptional powers in 1922 (helping him ease his election) in 1924?
These people aren't Third World anti-imperialists and they aren't racists - they are middle-class progressives. 

There were a few middle-class and/or celebrity leftists in the 1930s in the USA and Britain - people like Prof Haldane - Old Etonian respected scientist becoming a Marxist in 1937 then a CPGBer in 1942 or Harold Laski in Britain or the Dorothy Parkers and Spanish Orphans Fund people in the USA.
The French celebrity types the Malrauxs etc also around in the 1930s. The middle-class progressives in Italy and Germany where either imprisoned or exterminated. The parallel is wrong.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I've taken a look but this is way out there crazy -
> 
> "I have said before that if these people – the people who present the public face of political protest but in reality do very little except alienate everyone around them – were around in the 1930s the vitality and action they saw in Germany and Italy would lead them to become liberal, bohemian apologists for fascism. Mussolini’s theory about the “proletarian nation” oppressed by other “imperalist” nations would appeal to them, it would make them feel like they were fighting against “oppression”. Not happy with how Italian trade unionists and communists or German Jews are being treated? Well check your privilege as you’re not in the “proletarian nation” and you “need to have your wrongness shown the hell up”! This may sound extreme, but the occupy movement and its jet-setting spawn seem to embody the worst, most reactionary aspects of the left in many ways"
> 
> ...


 
Wasn't Wyndham Lewis Unsound on the Blackshirts, even if not an outright Hitler fan?

Then there's this Orwell quote:



> The fact is that Socialism, in the form in which it is now presented, appeals chiefly to unsatisfactory or even *inhuman types*. On the one hand you have the warm-hearted un-thinking Socialist, the typical working-class Socialist, who only wants to abolish poverty and does not always grasp what this implies. On the other hand, you have the intellectual, book-trained Socialist, who understands that it is necessary *to throw our present civilization down the sink and is quite willing to do so*. And this type is drawn, to begin with, entirely from the middle class, and from a rootless town-bred section of the middle class at that. Still more unfortunately, it includes—-so much so that to an outsider it even appears to be composed of—-the kind of people I have been discussing; the foaming denouncers of the bourgeoisie, and the more-water-in-your-beer reformers of whom Shaw is the prototype, a_*nd the astute young social-literary climbers who are Communists now, as they will be Fascists five years hence, because it is all the go,*_ and all *that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat*. The ordinary decent person, who is in sympathy with the essential aims of Socialism, is given the impression that there is no room for his kind in any Socialist party that means business. Worse, he is driven to the cynical conclusion that Socialism is a kind of doom which is probably coming but must be staved off as long as possible. Of course, as I have suggested already, it is not strictly fair to judge a movement by its adherents; but the point is that people invariably do so, and that the popular conception of Socialism is coloured by the conception of a Socialist as a dull or disagreeable person. ‘Socialism’ is pictured as a state of affairs in which our more vocal Socialists would feel thoroughly at home. This does great harm to the cause. *The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat*, if you offer it tactfully; *offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight*.


The non-underlined bit in bold italics (my emphasis) sounds like the sort of thing Frogwoman's talking about.

Also in Jessica Mitford's memoirs, she quotes some public school boy friend of her first husband who starts out interested in Fascism and Communism alike, and only shuns the coloured shirt after being physically ejected from a BUF meeting.


----------



## chilango (Apr 28, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I've put somethign on the blog now if anyone wants to have a look. Bit rushed though and not as in depth as I'd like but I was sick of writing/thinking about these people



Link?


----------



## chilango (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I've taken a look but this is way out there crazy -
> 
> "I have said before that if these people – the people who present the public face of political protest but in reality do very little except alienate everyone around them – were around in the 1930s the vitality and action they saw in Germany and Italy would lead them to become liberal, bohemian apologists for fascism. Mussolini’s theory about the “proletarian nation” oppressed by other “imperalist” nations would appeal to them, it would make them feel like they were fighting against “oppression”. Not happy with how Italian trade unionists and communists or German Jews are being treated? Well check your privilege as you’re not in the “proletarian nation” and you “need to have your wrongness shown the hell up”! This may sound extreme, but the occupy movement and its jet-setting spawn seem to embody the worst, most reactionary aspects of the left in many ways"
> 
> ...



I dunno I could imagine Malcolm Harris types digging futurism and from there into fascism. L


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## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

> The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight.


 
About offering things to people too passive to do anything for themselves - whether Orwell's socialism or Left Book Club socialism. 
The CPGB changes things anyway. We're in a time where there is no such pole of obvious attraction - "a mass workers' party" and trade union movement is thoroughly incorporated. Had they been around at the time they might well have been CPGBers or Labour Party or something but not fascists.



Idris2002 said:


> Also in Jessica Mitford's memoirs, she quotes some public school boy friend of her first husband who starts out interested in Fascism and Communism alike, and only shuns the coloured shirt after being physically ejected from a BUF meeting.


 
But this isn't frogwoman's parallel in the blog post. There were upper class BUFers sure - but what's that do with the middle-class progressives fw is talking about?


----------



## rekil (Apr 28, 2013)

chilango said:


> I dunno I could imagine Malcolm Harris types digging futurism and from there into fascism. L


D'Annunzio was defenestrated just before Mussolini got in. Pay attention Malcolm.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> About offering things to people too passive to do anything for themselves - whether Orwell's socialism or Left Book Club socialism.
> The CPGB changes things anyway. We're in a time where there is no such pole of obvious attraction - "a mass workers' party" and trade union movement is thoroughly incorporated. Had they been around at the time they might well have been CPGBers or Labour Party or something but not fascists.
> 
> 
> ...


 
Aren't Penny and her ilk more akin to a modern version of that public-school layer Mitford was referring to, than to middle-class progressives?


----------



## J Ed (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Aren't Penny and her ilk more akin to a modern version of that public-school layer Mitford was referring to, than to middle-class progressives?


 
Good point. I don't know how progressive you can call someone who advocates scabbing during a teacher's strike.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

And does Bernard Shaw count as a "bohemian" admirer of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin?


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## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Wasn't Wyndham Lewis Unsound on the Blackshirts, even if not an outright Hitler fan?
> 
> Then there's this Orwell quote:
> 
> ...


 
sihhi i was thinking about this sort of thing and some of the middle/upper class supporters of the blackshirts many of whom were journalists and were attracted by some of the successes of fascism for example in this documentary:



and how they originally came from that sort of background.

I'll change it though if I've got it wrong. Sorry.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

On Wyndham Lewis:


> A complex affair: the critical understatement is finely judged, because complex affairs are invariably those that tend to get simplified, especially when emotions run high. In the case of Wyndham Lewis’s politics, the process has been particularly straightforward because, self-evidently, the situation is unambiguous and the important details are well-known and provocative. Early in 1931 Lewis published a series of articles in _Time and Tide _in which – following a brief visit to Berlin in November 1930 – he set out to understand the workings of the National Socialist party in Germany and, in particular, the political philosophy of its leader, Adolf Hitler. The book from which the articles were extracted, called simply _Hitler_, described its subject as ‘a man of peace’ and dismissed the _judenfräge_ as ‘a racial redherring’.http://www.urban75.net/forums/#_edn1_ When it was followed by two ‘peace-pamphlets’, Left Wings Over Europe (1936) and Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! (1937), together with an article in the inaugural issue of the relaunched British Union Quarterly, Lewis’s reputation as a fascist, ‘protofascist’, or fascist sympathiser, was sealed.[ii] His future status as the great pantomime villain of critical discourse, the Emperor Dalek of Modernism, was assured. The broad scope and substance of his political writings – D.G. Bridson counts fourteen books [iii] – has scarcely been allowed to trouble this easy caricature, and any possibility that the finer details of his ‘bad’ books might reveal something other than crass Hitlerian sympathies continues to be unthinkable.__
> 
> http://www.urban75.net/forums/#_ednref1  Wyndham Lewis, Hitler (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), p. 32, p. 44, p.43. Hereafter H. Lewis also uses the ‘Man of Peace’ phrase as a chapter heading.
> [ii]  Wyndham Lewis, Left Wings Over Europe: or, How to Make a War About Nothing (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936); Wyndham Lewis, Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! or A New War in the Making (London: Lovat Dickson, 1937); Wyndham Lewis, ‘“Left Wings” and the C3 Mind’, in The British Union Quarterly, 1 (January-April 1937), pp. 22-34. Hereafter LWE, CYD and LWC. The ‘protofascist’ reading of Lewis’s inter-war politics originates in Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 14-15. Hereafter FA.
> ...


_

"Emperor Dalek of Modernism" - brilliant.

http://www.academia.edu/1169080/In_His_Bad_Books_Wyndham_Lewis_and_Fascism_


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## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2013)

I like how in 'The Eagle Has Landed' the only collab person is an embittered saffa widow who still hasn't forgiven the british for the boer war.

Why don't they make good war films anymore.


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## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I like how in 'The Eagle Has Landed' the only collab person is an embittered saffa widow who still hasn't forgiven the british for the boer war.
> 
> Why don't they make good war films anymore.


 
Quiet you - the grown ups are talking.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)




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## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Quiet you - the grown ups are talking.


 

well mr. proffesor perhaps you can source a thing of ungooglable confusion for me. I once read aristo hitler lovers from britain referred to as 'junker allies'


any idea wtf that is about.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> well mr. proffesor perhaps you can source a thing of ungooglable confusion for me. I once read aristo hitler lovers from britain referred to as 'junker allies'
> 
> 
> any idea wtf that is about.


 
Ah, I think what this refers to is Hitler's overestimation of the political influence of the layer of the UK landed gentry that (for example) the Mitford sisters' came from, and whom Adolf thought he could cultivate as part of the pro-appeasement faction in UK politics. After Lloyd George's reforms to the House of Lords in early 1910s, that influence was heavily diluted. It certainly wasn't equivalent to the power of Prussian Junker nobility, who had remained a force in Germany even after the creation of the Weimar republic. In fact their continuing power was one reason why Weimar went up in smoke in the end (though butchersapron can tell you more about that, I reckon).

The Junkers still controlled large areas of agricultural land in what is now the former GDR and Poland - and unlike in UK where the agrarian question had been settled via enclosures and clearances in the 18th and 19th century, they still held sway over a large (and potentially disgruntled) peasantry. Hence their social and political position was not strictly analogous to that of, for example, Diana and Unity Mitford's father, Lord Redesdale.

The grown-ups thing was just a throwaway dig, disregard it if you like.

Oh, and I'm not actually a professor.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> well mr. proffesor perhaps you can source a thing of ungooglable confusion for me. I once read aristo hitler lovers from britain referred to as 'junker allies'
> 
> 
> any idea wtf that is about.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junker

Junker was the term for Prussian Aristocracy before WWII. Their land was redistributed by the Communists. Hitler didn't love the junkers as such though, he pretty much ignored them.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)

I would also argue that making creepy remarks like "keeping your daughters off the cam is like keeping them off the pole" and quoting approvingly from Hakim Bey and the like is pretty much the exact opposite of progressive.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Ah, I think what this refers to is Hitler's overestimation of the political influence of the layer of the UK landed gentry that (for example) the Mitford sisters' came from, and whom Adolf thought he could cultivate as part of the pro-appeasement faction in UK politics. After Lloyd George's reforms to the House of Lords in early 1910s, that influence was heavily diluted. It certainly wasn't equivalent to the power of Prussian Junker nobility, who had remained a force in Germany even after the creation of the Weimar republic. In fact their continuing power was one reason why Weimar went up in smoke in the end (though butchersapron can tell you more about that, I reckon).
> 
> The Junkers still controlled large areas of agricultural land in what is now the former GDR and Poland - and unlike in UK where the agrarian question had been settled via enclosures and clearances in the 18th and 19th century, they still held sway over a large (and potentially disgruntled) peasantry. Hence their social and political position was not strictly analogous to that of, for example, Diana and Unity Mitford's father, Lord Redesdale.
> 
> ...


 
oh I knew that, wasn't getting the hump prof

cheers for the explanation though, its fucking infuriating in the age of google to not be able to hunt down half remembered stuff and fit meaning to it.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

Actually, reading some more of that Wyndham Lewis essay, his various bloviations on matters politically don't sound that different in their inanity to the wibblings of this "Malcolm Harris".

Though to give sihhi his due, Lewis wasn't exactly representative of the bohemian intelligentsia of the time.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)

Yeah. There was someone else I'm thinking of, a middle class communist supporter turned fash in the 30s, name completely escapes me though.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Actually, reading some more of that Wyndham Lewis essay, his various bloviations on matters politically don't sound that different in their inanity to the wibblings of this "Malcolm Harris".
> 
> Though to give sihhi his due, Lewis wasn't exactly representative of the bohemian intelligentsia of the time.


 
Yeah I think Sihhi is right in some ways and I was probably exaggerating a bit, I don't actually recall the names of the people in the documentary but one guy IIRC talks about his mum who started off a liberal journalist and ended up like that, actually moving to germany if i  remember right.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 28, 2013)

Careful people, we're heading into Godwin territory.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Careful people, we're heading into Godwin territory.


 
To Godwinity - AND BEYOND!


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Careful people, we're heading into Godwin territory.


 
592 pages before Godwinsville is good going though. Youtube comment threads are there within 6 contributions, closely pipped to the top spot by 'I cannot fap to this'


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)

To be fair to her has LP publically disassociated herself from Harris? have any of them?or were they not aware of what he was saying?


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> There were no bohemian apologists for Nazism, were there - can you name a single one?


 
There were plenty for Mussolini though.  Not just Lewis, but Yeats and Pound and arguably Eliot, not to mention most of the Italian Modernists.


----------



## andysays (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Wasn't Wyndham Lewis Unsound on the Blackshirts, even if not an outright Hitler fan?
> 
> Then there's this Orwell quote:


 
That is absolutely spot on.

Malcolm Harris should have that quote tattooed on prominent parts of his person.

He strikes me as exactly the sort of upper-middle-class self-declared progressive who, with his ignorance and barely concealed dislike/fear of the working classes, would easily make the leap from self-serving faux-radicalism to some form of authoritarian rightism, as long as he didn't think it would impinge on the freedom of his immediate group to continue their "literary" circle-jerking.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> There were plenty for Mussolini though. Not just Lewis, but Yeats and Pound and arguably Eliot, not to mention most of the Italian Modernists.


 
i absolutely hate yeats..little fascist twat .


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> There were plenty for Mussolini though. Not just Lewis, but Yeats and Pound and arguably Eliot, not to mention most of the Italian Modernists.


 
Eliot was more of a Franco type, with his Catholic-style rejection of modernity. And the casual anti-semitism.



> It was Fascism, in short, which helped to close down the _Criterion_, a point overlooked by those for whom Eliot and his magazine were themselves of this persuasion. In fact, Eliot was not a Fascist but a reactionary, a distinction lost on those of his critics who, in the words of Edmund Burke, know nothing of politics but the passions they incite. Ideologically speaking, Fascism is as double-visaged as the Modernism with which it was sometimes involved, casting a backward glance to the primitive and primordial while steaming dynamically ahead into the gleaming technological future. Like Modernism, it is both archaic and avant-garde, sifting pre-modern mythologies for precious seeds of the post-modern future. Politically speaking, however, Fascism, like all nationalism, is a thoroughly modern invention. Its aim is to crush beneath its boot the traditions of high civility that Eliot revered, placing an outsized granite model of a spade and sten gun in the spaces where Virgil and Milton once stood.
> Fascism is statist rather than royalist, revolutionary rather than traditionalist, petty-bourgeois rather than patrician, pagan rather than Christian (though Iberian Fascism proved an exception). In its brutal cult of power and contempt for pedigree and civility, it has little in common with Eliot’s benignly landowning, regionalist, Morris-dancing, church-centred social ideal. Even so, there are affinities as well as contrasts between Fascism and conservative reaction. If the former touts a demonic version of blood and soil, the latter promotes an angelic one. Both are elitist, authoritarian creeds that sacrifice freedom to organic order; both are hostile to liberal democracy and unbridled market-place economics; both invoke myth and symbol, elevating intuition over analytical reason. The Idea of Europe, as Eliot dubbed it, is in its own civilised way quite as exclusivist as the Nazi state which in Eliot’s eyes helped to spell its ruin. It represented, as Thomas Mann understood, a disabling sublimation of the spirit that left actual human life perilously open to the assaults of barbarism. Moreover, though racism and anti-semitism are not essential components of right-wing Tory belief, as they are of most Fascist doctrine, they flourish robustly in that soil.


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n18/terry-eagleton/nudge-winking


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> i absolutely hate yeats..little fascist twat .


 
Good poetry, though.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

"We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene--militarism, patriotism--destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman."
                      -- Marinetti, _The Futurist Manifesto_


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Good poetry, though.


 
The best since Milton.

"Out of Ireland have we come,
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us from the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart."


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> "We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene--militarism, patriotism--destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman."
> -- Marinetti, _The Futurist Manifesto_


 
Wasn't there at least one futurist wanker who toddled off to the front in 1914, only to promptly die of lead poisoning?


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Eliot was more of a Franco type, with his Catholic-style rejection of modernity. And the casual anti-semitism.


 
He was also involved with Charles Maurras's _Action Francaise._


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Wasn't there at least one futurist wanker who toddled off to the front in 1914, only to promptly die of lead poisoning?


 
I hope so.

Almost as good as Rupert Brooke being buried at sea.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I hope so.
> 
> Almost as good as Rupert Brooke being buried at sea.


 
I hope so too.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Good poetry, though.


 
i hated that too . All that 1916..terrible beauty shite . Drives me up the wall . The opportunist git waits till its safe to write it, about 5 years after the British pull out of Dublin. Proclaims it was his work that actually motivated the decision to have an uprising and hey ho writes himself into the revolutionary narrative over ten years after the fact .
When in reality a revolution kicks off virtually outside his front door, led by people he knows on first name terms , including the woman hes been stalking for years, and he goes and hides under the bed . For 11 years. And then writes himself into it .


ggaaaaarrgghh..hate him


----------



## andysays (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Wasn't there at least one futurist wanker who toddled off to the front in 1914, only to promptly die of lead poisoning?


 
I was, presumably, what he would have wanted.

Another name which can be added to the list of artistically progressive yet politically well dodgy is DH Lawrence.

I hope we've done enough to convince sihhi that there were plenty of "bohemian apologists for fascism"


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> i hated that too . All that 1916..terrible beauty shite . Drives me up the wall . The opportunist git waits till its safe to write it, about 5 years after the British pull out of Dublin. Proclaims it was his work that actually motivated the decision to have an uprising and hey ho writes himself into the revolutionary narrative over ten years after the fact .
> When in reality a revolution kicks off virtually outside his front door, led by people he knows on first name terms , including the woman hes been stalking for years, and he goes and hides under the bed . For 11 years. And then writes himself into it .


 
He got it right the first time:

"What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave."


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

andysays said:


> I was, presumably, what he would have wanted.
> 
> Another name which can be added to the list of artistically progressive yet politically well dodgy is DH Lawrence.
> 
> I hope we've done enough to convince sihhi that there were plenty of "bohemian apologists for fascism"


 
I tried reading Lawrence's Women in Love last summer. It's one of the most unreadable books I've ever tried to read (Kerouac's Visions of Cody is the only one I genuinely couldn't read, but WiL came a very close second).

Evelyn Waugh's another shitehawk. Apparently even well into the war (and as a serving officer in HM Forces!) his private diaries contain a reference to Hitler "fighting for European civilisation".


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> i hated that too . All that 1916..terrible beauty shite . Drives me up the wall . The opportunist git waits till its safe to write it, about 5 years after the British pull out of Dublin. Proclaims it was his work that actually motivated the decision to have an uprising and hey ho writes himself into the revolutionary narrative over ten years after the fact .
> When in reality a revolution kicks off virtually outside his front door, led by people he knows on first name terms , including the woman hes been stalking for years, and he goes and hides under the bed . For 11 years. And then writes himself into it .
> 
> ggaaaaarrgghh..hate him


 
I think it's either Roy Foster or Ferriter who quotes Yeats' line "Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot" and says "almost certainly not".


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Evelyn Waugh's another shitehawk. Apparently even well into the war (and as a serving officer in HM Forces!) his private diaries contain a reference to Hitler "fighting for European civilisation".


 
When he was supposed to be aiding the Yugoslav patriots he accused Tito of being a lesbian.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> When he was supposed to be aiding the Yugoslav patriots he accused Tito of being a lesbian.


 
That's actually my favourite conspiracy theory - that Tito was a woman (apparently this belief is widespread in the former Yugoslavia).


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I think it's either Roy Foster or Ferriter who quotes Yeats' line "Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot" and says "almost certainly not".


 
somebody else wrote

_if Yeats had spared the pencil lead_
_would all those men have stayed in bed_


----------



## andysays (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I tried reading Lawrence's Women in Love last summer. It's one of the most unreadable books I've ever tried to read...


 
Yeah, I tried either that or Sons and Lovers once. I can't remember if it was unreadable, or just didn't strike me as very worth reading.

It's tempting to try to make an argument for the politically dodgy artist also being artistically uninspiring (Dali is another name which springs to mind from that period) but would probably be an oversimplification.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> That's actually my favourite conspiracy theory - that Tito was a woman (apparently this belief is widespread in the former Yugoslavia).


 
He does have a sort of womanly figure in the photos.

Apparently he sent a note to the British High Command: "Ask Sargeant Waugh why he thinks I am a lesbian."


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I tried reading Lawrence's Women in Love last summer. It's one of the most unreadable books I've ever tried to read


 
He did some good pomes though.


*How Beastly the Bourgeois Is*

by D. H. Lawrence

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--

Presentable, eminently presentable--
shall I make you a present of him?

Isn't he handsome? Isn't he healthy? Isn't he a fine specimen?
Doesn't he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn't it God's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the
thing

Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
man's need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life
face him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new
demand on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--

Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable--
and like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life
than his own.

And even so, he's stale, he's been there too long.
Touch him, and you'll find he's all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.

Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty--
How beastly the bourgeois is!

Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp
England
what a pity they can't all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15345#sthash.tpZbz1Qn.dpuf


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

Worthy of the great E.J. Thribb himself.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> The best since Milton.
> 
> "Out of Ireland have we come,
> Great hatred, little room,
> ...


 
yeah but come easter sunday morning, and the week that followed...and the 5 years that followed that it turns out his heart wasnt remotely fanatic at all , it was decidely faint. Too faint to even write something until it was well and truly in the past . It was all literally just outside his front door . And led by fellow poets too , by people from his own social circles. No excuse .

he was full of it i reckon


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> yeah but come easter sunday morning, and the week that followed...and the 5 years that followed that it turns out his heart wasnt remotely fanatic at all , it was decidely faint. Too faint to even write something until it was well and truly in the past . It was all literally just outside his front door . And led by fellow poets too .
> 
> he was full of it i reckon


 
I can't blame him for being anti-violence.

Must have taken guts to be a Protestant republican too.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Must have taken guts to be a Protestant republican too.


 
Not really. It would have been quite a common thing among his section of the intelligentsia. And later on, in the late 20s, the rump of the old Unionist party that was left behind in the south after partition had no problems merging with Cumman-na-Gael, the ruling party at the time.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

On her next flying visit, the bould Laurie is going to look at the last few pages and think "what the suffering fuck?"


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I can't blame him for being anti-violence.
> 
> Must have taken guts to be a Protestant republican too.


 
he was anti violence only when it was close and he might be on the receiving end , not when mussolini was dishing it out .
And as regards his protestant background that would have been a zero handicap . The protestant , and even english, leaders of republicanism at that time are well documented . Theres no evidence to suggest yeats even was a republican . Particularly given his contempt for the ordinary people .


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> Theres no evidence to suggest yeats even was a republican .


 
Wot?  I'd not heard any doubt cast on that.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)

chilango said:


> Link?


 
i should have put it on twitter


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> he was anti violence only when it was close and he might be on the receiving end , not when mussolini was dishing it out .
> And as regards his protestant background that would have been a zero handicap . The protestant , and even english, leaders of republicanism at that time are well documented . Theres no evidence to suggest yeats even was a republican . Particularly given his contempt for the ordinary people .





phildwyer said:


> Wot? I'd not heard any doubt cast on that.


Yeats was definitely a cultural nationalist, and a vital figure in the Gaelic revival in the 1890s - but remember that revival comes at a time when official nationalism is on the back foot after the fall  of Parnell, and revolutionary republican nationalism is still a matter of small circles of conspirators. Yeats does make a contribution to the wave of advanced nationalism that bursts into revolution in 1916 and afterwards, but I've never heard of him being a conscious republican, no.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Yeats was definitely a cultural nationalist, and a vital figure in the Gaelic revival in the 1890s - but remember that revival comes at a time when official nationalism is on the back foot after the fall of Parnell, and revolutionary republican nationalism is still a matter of small circles of conspirators. Yeats does make a contribution to the wave of advanced nationalism that bursts into revolution in 1916 and afterwards, but I've never heard of him being a conscious republican, no.


 
Then what did he think he was doing when he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood?


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Then what did he think he was doing when he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood?


 
Trying to get a shag off Maud Gonne.

But I admit that's a bit of the story I was not previously aware of. . .


----------



## J Ed (Apr 28, 2013)

https://twitter.com/JamesBrioche/status/328545247456010240

lol, got blocked by the anarcho-nonce


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/JamesBrioche/status/328545247456010240
> 
> lol, got blocked by the anarcho-nonce


 
I really couldn't resist - I know it's a bit immature but he was asking for it.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> There were plenty for Mussolini though. Not just Lewis, but Yeats and Pound and arguably Eliot, not to mention most of the Italian Modernists.


 
Again this is different to what frogwoman wrote suggesting these New Inquiry people would be fascists in 1930s - it's a ludicrous stretch from four artistic figures - and are they all "bohemian" anyway?
Can't a figure like Eliot simply be a reactionary anglican Tory? And Yeats simply the right wing of Irish nationalism?
Ezra Pound moved to Italy in 1924 to be a Mussolini supporter there.
Wyndham Lewis is a different type of figure again to the New Inquiry - he wrote _The Apes of God _to mock the British intellectual flirtation with left-wing politics: CPGB and Labour Party (becoming very 'left-wing' after the Ramsay Macdonald betrayal).
The Italian modernists I don't know - can you give some examples of them and their ideas?


IIRC elements of the British Labour Party weren't averse to Italian fascism in 1924 commending its social and housing programmes - but to suggest X in the Labour Party
(Edit: meaning *today* in the labour Party) would have supported fascism makes no sense.

Malcolm Harris supported Obama in 2008 as did Molly Crabapple there's zero indication of any kind of tendency apart from leftism.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Again this is different to what frogwoman wrote suggesting these New Inquiry people would be fascists in 1930s - it's a ludicrous stretch from four artistic figures - and are they all "bohemian" anyway?
> Can't a figure like Eliot simply be a reactionary anglican Tory? And Yeats simply the right wing of Irish nationalism?
> Ezra Pound moved to Italy in 1924 to be a Mussolini supporter there.
> Wyndham Lewis is a different type of figure again to the New Inquiry - he wrote _The Apes of God _to mock the British intellectual flirtation with left-wing politics: CPGB and Labour Party (becoming very 'left-wing' after the Ramsay Macdonald betrayal).
> ...


 
You and your "facts" and "logic".


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The Italian modernists I don't know - can you give some examples of them and their ideas?


 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Tommaso_Marinetti


----------



## andysays (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Again this is different to what frogwoman wrote suggesting these New Inquiry people would be fascists in 1930s - it's a ludicrous stretch from four artistic figures - and are they all "bohemian" anyway?
> Can't a figure like Eliot simply be a reactionary anglican Tory? And Yeats simply the right wing of Irish nationalism?
> Ezra Pound moved to Italy in 1924 to be a Mussolini supporter there.
> Wyndham Lewis is a different type of figure again to the New Inquiry - he wrote _The Apes of God _to mock the British intellectual flirtation with left-wing politics: CPGB and Labour Party (becoming very 'left-wing' after the Ramsay Macdonald betrayal).
> ...


 
See all the previous stuff about Futurism.

So supporting Obama makes you a leftist?

And I suggest you go back and read the Orwell quote which Idris posted (can't remember where that comes from originally. Anyone help me out?)


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 28, 2013)

andysays said:


> See all the previous stuff about Futurism.
> 
> So supporting Obama makes you a leftist?
> 
> And I suggest you go back and read the Orwell quote which Idris posted (can't remember where that comes from originally. Anyone help me out?)


 
Road to Wigan Pier.

And I don't think sihhi is totally off the wall. I think that era is different enough from our own to make the drawing of direct analogies difficult at best.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

andysays said:


> See all the previous stuff about Futurism.
> 
> So supporting Obama makes you a leftist?
> 
> And I suggest you go back and read the Orwell quote which Idris posted (can't remember where that comes from originally. Anyone help me out?)


 
The futurists yes they were supporters of Mussolini's fascism - anything to indicate the New Inquiry is like futurist art?

Malcolm Harris was in the progressive end of the coalition that voted for Obama as Democrat - just like Gus Hall did on the basis of him being more likely to be pressured in that kind direction. Not my position- but it's nothing to do with bowing down to movements like fascism.
Harris since then has become more explicitly anti-state and anti-electoral commending prison riots and Greek anarchists as "awesome".

Orwell quote - a group of middle-class people in the 30s who might be happy to accept either Fascist or Communist rule and be commissars for them depending on what might happen in a future (at the time) war. Again why the parallel with the New Inquiry?


----------



## barney_pig (Apr 28, 2013)

Loads of flirtations with fascism and corporativism within the middle class sections of the ilp in the late twenties and early 1930s, it was there that Moseley developed his ideas and gained his initial supporters. Stephen dorril's book blackshirt is full of them.


----------



## barney_pig (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The futurists yes they were supporters of Mussolini's fascism - anything to indicate the New Inquiry is like futurist art?
> 
> Malcolm Harris was in the progressive end of the coalition that voted for Obama as Democrat - just like Gus Hall did on the basis of him being more likely to be pressured in that kind direction. Not my position- but it's nothing to do with bowing down to movements like fascism.
> Harris since then has become more explicitly anti-state and anti-electoral commending prison riots and Greek anarchists as "awesome".
> ...


The cult of youth( a particular sort of youth) the necessity of Action!, the distaste for the sheep, and belief in their own position as a elite, born to be leaders.


----------



## andysays (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Road to Wigan Pier.
> 
> And I don't think sihhi is totally off the wall. I think that era is different enough from our own to make the drawing of direct analogies difficult at best.


 


I agree that the drawing of direct analogies is difficult, but I got the impression that sihhi was criticising frogwoman for what he *thought* she said/meant rather than what she *did* say/mean, or maybe what *I thought* she said/meant.

Although we shouldn't make a direct and literal analogy, I think the Orwell passage you quoted is, in general, totally applicable to the stuff we're discussing on this thread, ie upper-middle class faux radicals who are actually ultimately and objectively anti-working class, so thanks for reminding us of it.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The futurists yes they were supporters of Mussolini's fascism - anything to indicate the New Inquiry is like futurist art?
> 
> Malcolm Harris was in the progressive end of the coalition that voted for Obama as Democrat - just like Gus Hall did on the basis of him being more likely to be pressured in that kind direction. Not my position- but it's nothing to do with bowing down to movements like fascism.
> Harris since then has become more explicitly anti-state and anti-electoral commending prison riots and Greek anarchists as "awesome".


 
Do you think that his being an Obama supporter had anything to do with him supporting Rahm Emanuel's encouragement of scabbing during the Chicago strike?

Sort of like how Hitchens used state socialist rhetoric like "revolution from above" to justify neoconservative foreign policy


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> The cult of youth( a particular sort of youth) the necessity of Action!, the distaste for the sheep, and belief in their own position as a elite, born to be leaders.


 
ie very tenuous general aspects of many political theories in the 1920s and 1930s - revanchist Catholic renewal, Rexism, Chinese student movement, Balkan nationalism, middle-class university Communism, anti-colonial nationalism, APRA in Peru, republicanism in Turkey/Egypt/Iran etc. Nothing to pin it on fascism.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Do you think that his being an Obama supporter had anything to do with him supporting Rahm Emanuel's encouragement of scabbing during the Chicago strike?


 
No I don't. As I half explained  I see him as a situationist-anarchist since he left university and faced some unemployment.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> No I don't. As I half explained  I see him as a situationist-anarchist since he left university and faced some unemployment.


 
Right, sinus infection is destroying my memory I think 

I don't know, it still seems possible to me.


----------



## rekil (Apr 28, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> someone give me £5k and I'll get on a plane to the states and batter Malcolm Harrris personally





SpineyNorman said:


> I'll do it for £500 - sneak onto a container ship or something.


Its under control. We've had agent imposs1904 in place in manhattan for some time already.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Road to Wigan Pier.
> 
> And I don't think sihhi is totally off the wall. I think that era is different enough from our own to make the drawing of direct analogies difficult at best.


 
yep.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

He should have a chance to defend himself. The more LP doesn't come back to answer the questions the more the credibility is torn.

Can someone who still can - send this out to him?


----------



## Favelado (Apr 28, 2013)

The Hacienda Must Be Shilled.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> He should have a chance to defend himself. The more LP doesn't come back to answer the questions the more the credibility is torn.
> 
> Can someone who still can - send this out to him?


 
Done that for you, cuz.


----------



## andysays (Apr 28, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Done that for you, cuz.


 
Gets popcorn...


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

andysays said:


> Gets popcorn...


 
He is a very good internet user though - the Radiohead rumour, building up the New Inquiry by social media. I'm worried in case he sends someone who is not him as a baiting monkey to express completely foolish views so we are suckered into thinking it's him then he exposes the prank to prove that people posting really _*are*_ like Earl Cornwallis and unfairly think the worst of Americans.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> He is a very good internet user though - the Radiohead rumour, building up the New Inquiry by social media. I'm worried in case he sends someone who is not him as a baiting monkey to express completely foolish views so we are suckered into thinking it's him then he exposes the prank to prove that people posting really _*are*_ like Earl Cornwallis and unfairly think the worst of Americans.


 
You can be the mod for that if you're following the thread closely though sihhi. In any case, as long as everyone plays the ball and not the man they'll be on safe ground. Hmmm.


----------



## andysays (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> He is a very good internet user though - the Radiohead rumour, building up the New Inquiry by social media. I'm worried in case he sends someone who is not him as a baiting monkey to express completely foolish views so we are suckered into thinking it's him then he exposes the prank to prove that people posting really _*are*_ like Earl Cornwallis and unfairly think the worst of Americans.


 
If anyone looking like this turns up






we'll know your fears were justified...


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

Favelado said:


> You can be the mod for that if you're following the thread closely though sihhi. In any case, as long as everyone plays the ball and not the man they'll be on safe ground. Hmmm.


 
Having posted all that I doubt he'll come. 
What I mean is this interview from a month ago even him?





> What's your problem?
> 
> I love bad bitches, that's my fucking problem.


But he could express his own "Righteous hate" here if he wanted to.




 .


----------



## weepiper (Apr 28, 2013)

A conversation with the EDL about privilege-checking


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

Favelado said:


> You can be the mod for that if you're following the thread closely though sihhi. In any case, as long as everyone plays the ball and not the man they'll be on safe ground. Hmmm.


 
If I'm not allowed to abuse him and call him a cunt at least once in every sentence I'm not fucking playing


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

weepiper said:


> A conversation with the EDL about privilege-checking


 


Those seem like eminently sensible replies from the EDL.

I now want to take some of the student intersectionalistas it is my misfortune to know to my mum and dad's next time I go, get them to talk intersectionality to the old folks down at the allotments. It would be fucking hilarious.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Those seem like eminently sensible replies from the EDL.
> 
> I now want to take some of the student intersectionalistas it is my misfortune to know to my mum and dad's next time I go, get them to talk intersectionality to the old folks down at the allotments. It would be fucking hilarious.


 
Will the allotments committee be introducing hand signals or instituting a progressive stack?


----------



## Favelado (Apr 28, 2013)

Well he replied to me with a link for the Google image search results for the battle of Yorktown. As he's making a hasty retreat, I've replied with this which is definitely either moderately funny or _shite_. I guess he's not interested then. Fair enough.

e.


----------



## love detective (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I'm worried in case he sends someone who is not him as a baiting monkey to express completely foolish views


 
as opposed to the completely foolish views that he himself has expressed across various platforms over time!


----------



## sihhi (Apr 28, 2013)

love detective said:


> as opposed to the completely foolish views that he himself has expressed across various platforms over time!


 
He's not interested. He thinks it's *all *jokes*. *


----------



## Libertad (Apr 28, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Well he replied to me with a link for the Google image search results for the battle of Yorktown. As he's making a hasty retreat, I've replied with this which is definitely either moderately funny or _shite_. I guess he's not interested then. Fair enough.


 
Likewise so I sent him this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_washington


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Will the allotments committee be introducing hand signals or instituting a progressive stack?


 
They need to do something to ensure that the most oppressed allotment holders get their voices heard. The ones with teeth tend to dominate proceedings on account of their dental privilege allowing them to speak more clearly. Since the most oppressed allotment holder is my uncle John - deaf and no teeth - so I reckon hand signals would be just the ticket. Then again is he the most oppressed? As a male he benefits from patriarchy so maybe that cancels it out? All the women holders have teeth and none are deaf so it's a straightforward priv-off between gender and gummy deafness.

We need a middle class intersectionalista to tell us who is more oppressed.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Well he replied to me with a link for the Google image search results for the battle of Yorktown. As he's making a hasty retreat, I've replied with this which is definitely either moderately funny or _shite_. I guess he's not interested then. Fair enough.
> 
> e.View attachment 31964


 
It is funny.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 28, 2013)

[QUOTE*]@bigmeaninternet love the strategizing on the same thread they're trying to lure me on.*[/QUOTE]

Ah come on. It only makes it even easier for you. You can have us on toast surely.


----------



## Balbi (Apr 28, 2013)

So entirely not worth it though, in the end.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2013)

if he turns up we can get another 10 pages by tuesday. Strive!


----------



## andysays (Apr 28, 2013)

Favelado said:


> [QUOTE*]@bigmeaninternet love the strategizing on the same thread they're trying to lure me on.*


 
Strategizing? Is this your idea of strategizing, Malcolm?

(Just as well he can't see the shadow thread where the *real* strategizing goes on... )


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 28, 2013)

Favelado said:


> [QUOTE*]@bigmeaninternet love the strategizing on the same thread they're trying to lure me on.*


 
"You are not authorised to look up related results on that tweet" oh no


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 28, 2013)

can't we just wait until he comes to london and give him a kicking?  why do we need to have an argument with him.  no-one cares about his views except other sad paedo wankers.


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 28, 2013)

All he does is talk about his (UK)trolls. 
All Nicki Minaj does is rap about her haters. 
Troll = hater
Conclusion: Malcolm Harris is Nicki Minaj


----------



## andysays (Apr 28, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> "You are not authorised to look up related results on that tweet" oh no


 
He doesn't want you to see his strategising


----------



## Firky (Apr 28, 2013)

Hello Malcolm.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 28, 2013)

If you're going to ignore someone, just ignore them. Don't spend the afternoon tweeting about it. All the tweets about how he's totally not bothered about his UK trolls. He just doesn't care you know. Not a bit. He couldn't care _less. _Our awful glottal-stop infested limey moaning isn't penetrating the brownstone of his Williamsburg apartment. Nope. It isn't.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 28, 2013)

Favelado said:


> If you're going to ignore someone, just ignore them. Don't spend the afternoon tweeting about it. All the tweets about how he's totally not bothered about his UK trolls. He just doesn't care you know. Not a bit. He couldn't care _less. _Our awful glottal-stop infested limey moaning isn't penetrating the brownstone of his Williamsburg apartment. Nope. It isn't.


 
Where's the fun in ignoring someone if they don't know you're ignoring them though?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2013)

not sure how cunting someone off, on the politics board of a minor UK message board, counts as trolling tho


surely there has to be direct engagement for it to be trolling? Else its just people saying stuff about you on the internets


have you bastards been tweeting him? I bet you have.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

*waves to the lurker Malcolm Harris*

Come on to the thread and debate with us


----------



## Favelado (Apr 28, 2013)

DotCommunist A bigger boy made me do it.


----------



## chilango (Apr 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> No I don't. As I half explained  I see him as a situationist-anarchist since he left university and faced some unemployment.



I'm really not sure it's fair to label him a Situationist.

Debord would be turning in his grave.

He certainly doesn't seem to have gotten anything useful out of them.

As someone who who will happily admit a Sit influence I'm a bait offended to be linked with Malcolm.

He's Situationist in the same way Stewart Home is if you ask me.

I.e. not at all, but slings a few badly remembered words around to justify lame porn, parasitism and generally being a cock.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> not sure how cunting someone off, on the politics board of a minor UK message board, counts as trolling tho
> 
> 
> surely there has to be direct engagement for it to be trolling? Else its just people saying stuff about you on the internets
> ...


No need, he's following the thread, taking screenshots of it and tweeting them.


----------



## Firky (Apr 28, 2013)

U75 open in one window, barelylegalteens.com open in another. No wonde he went to the bother off cropping the screenshot.


----------



## Libertad (Apr 28, 2013)

Favelado said:


> DotCommunist A bigger boy made me do it.


 
And then I ran away.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> No need, he's following the thread, taking screenshots of it and tweeting them.


 

Really? the sad fucker.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Really? the sad fucker.


Oh yes, have a look:
https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/328590785358475264/photo/1


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2013)

Malcom, we are just all going to assume you wanted to fuck a pre-pubescent hermoine unless you arrive here to say otherwise


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

And we're worried, apparently *snort*


----------



## andysays (Apr 28, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> No need, he's following the thread, taking screenshots of it and tweeting them.


 
You mean *he's* stalking *us* now?

Ooh, Malcolm, you master-strategist, you! That'll teach us limey haters


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2013)

She was on saturday cooks yesterday as well, didn't recognize here till they said. There was this Saffa lady as well who was a proper monster, a masterchef judge iirc. You can tell she runs her kitchen like bergen belsen


----------



## chilango (Apr 28, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> not sure how cunting someone off, on the politics board of a minor UK message board, counts as trolling tho
> 
> 
> surely there has to be direct engagement for it to be trolling? Else its just people saying stuff about you on the internets
> ...



Yeah but if he knew who/what we were, he'd be gutted. It turns out the people he idolises are actually us, but how can that be?

Same with Laurie.

They love the radical chic, but when faced with the reality of a good sample of the last 30 years of British radicalism (yep, that's us folks!*) it's all a bit of a slap in the face.


* this is no time for false modesty. Anything of note that has happened on the British left in the last 3 decades I'm willing to bet there were Urbanites involved. I don't know of many places with such a collective history.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

andysays said:


> You mean *he's* stalking *us* now?
> 
> Ooh, Malcolm, you master-strategist, you! That'll teach us limey haters


Yes he is  Had he not tweeted about it, we wouldn't know. Genius, that one, not ignoring us yet saying he is. Malcolm, you're a card!


----------



## Firky (Apr 28, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Malcom, we are just all going to assume you wanted to fuck a pre-pubescent hermoine unless you arrive here to say otherwise


 
I'd like to know why he thinks subsidising porn is going to reduce rape and sexual assault. 

One of the most batshit theories I have come across.


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 28, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> have you bastards been tweeting him? I bet you have.


 
Only a little bit!
He'd have to be a lurk to rival even myself to find the connection between any tweets and this thread to be honest, and he'd have found the thread first. I think.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 28, 2013)

Much as I'm enjoying the show, I have to admit that I missed some key information from the start of this episode: Why do we hate this Malcolm dude in the first place? Can someone give me the Cliff Notes version? Isn't he just some guy who puts out a minor social democratic magazine?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2013)

Firky said:


> I'd like to know why he thinks subsidising porn is going to reduce rape and sexual assault.
> 
> One of the most batshit theories I have come across.


 
how does it even need subsidising, we all know the places to find it for free


----------



## weepiper (Apr 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Much as I'm enjoying the show, I have to admit that I missed some key information from the start of this episode: Why do we hate this Malcolm dude in the first place? Can someone give me the Cliff Notes version? Isn't he just some guy who puts out a minor social democratic magazine?


 
Because he's a terrible wanker?


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 28, 2013)

He makes as much money as possible off the back of an anti-capitalist movement.


----------



## chilango (Apr 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Much as I'm enjoying the show, I have to admit that I missed some key information from the start of this episode: Why do we hate this Malcolm dude in the first place? Can someone give me the Cliff Notes version? Isn't he just some guy who puts out a minor social democratic magazine?



He's the guy that charges $5000 to come and speak about #ows.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Much as I'm enjoying the show, I have to admit that I missed some key information from the start of this episode: Why do we hate this Malcolm dude in the first place? Can someone give me the Cliff Notes version? Isn't he just some guy who puts out a minor social democratic magazine?


He purports to talk on our behalf yet won't engage with us, preferring literary salons and writing about any topic that can be sexualised.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Much as I'm enjoying the show, I have to admit that I missed some key information from the start of this episode: Why do we hate this Malcolm dude in the first place? Can someone give me the Cliff Notes version? Isn't he just some guy who puts out a minor social democratic magazine?


 
he's basically a libertarian masquerading as a centre-left type.  would be sad and easily ignorable but he somehow or other managed to position himself as a self-appointed expert / spokesman for occupy and now earns a living telling massive lies monetising his (non-existant) radical experience.  likes really young girls and prostituted women; tries to convince everyone pornography is radical and to sent him photos of their tits.  parasite wearing socialist blackface for the bucks.


----------



## Firky (Apr 28, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> how does it even need subsidising, we all know the places to find it for free


 
Well quite, but it is what he proposed. Not an off the cuff remark either but something he's obviously thought long and hard (there's a bit of British innuendo for you Harris) about.



> Why is Malcolm Harris, perennial loser in school elections, making taxpayer subsidized porn a central issue in his campaign to become president of Maryland's student government?
> 
> He really should be asked how he can justify this nonsense in the context of a campaign that claims it will reduce sexual assaults on the UM campus and stop the University contractors from using "sweatshop" labor practices considering the well documented social pathologies that stem from pornography.
> 
> Even if he doesn't think that the production of porn is degrading to the women involved or that it encourages some men, usually physically unattractive and socially inept losers. to dehumanize women, or that women in porn often have no more options than a woman working in a "sweatshop" somewhere were there are lots of brown people he can patronize, he should realize that there is more than a free speech issue here and he's not Larry Flynt.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 28, 2013)

Firky said:


> I'd like to know why he thinks subsidising porn is going to reduce rape and sexual assault.
> 
> One of the most batshit theories I have come across.


 
it's a pretty common theory amongst the pro-porn 'movement'.  the two biggest problems with the argument are:

1) it assumes that men are basically rapists whose ball need draining every few minutes to protect women. 

2) it runs contrary to the evidence, whereby men who rape tend also to be heavy users of porn and use it to normalise their worldview.

he's basically a woman-hating type.


----------



## andysays (Apr 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Much as I'm enjoying the show, I have to admit that I missed some key information from the start of this episode: Why do we hate this Malcolm dude in the first place? Can someone give me the Cliff Notes version? Isn't he just some guy who puts out a minor social democratic magazine?


 
What everyone else said.

And because he looks like a smug wanker with his glasses and ginger sideburns


----------



## Firky (Apr 28, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> it's a pretty common theory amongst the pro-porn 'movement'. the two biggest problems with the argument are:
> 
> 1) it assumes that men are basically rapists whose ball need draining every few minutes to protect women.
> 
> ...


So if people start collecting golliwog tokens again they'll suddenly stop being racist


----------



## Firky (Apr 28, 2013)

He's probably "researching for a book".


----------



## Favelado (Apr 28, 2013)

Firky said:


> So if people start collecting golliwog tokens again they'll suddenly stop being racist


 
It's jam or genocide I'm afraid.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

Favelado said:


> If you're going to ignore someone, just ignore them. Don't spend the afternoon tweeting about it. All the tweets about how he's totally not bothered about his UK trolls. He just doesn't care you know. Not a bit. He couldn't care _less. _Our awful glottal-stop infested limey moaning isn't penetrating the brownstone of his Williamsburg apartment. Nope. It isn't.


 
The way he's going out of his way to explain how much he's not bothered about it makes it clear to me that there's no way he's bothered by it at all. If he was he'd say he was bothered rather than saying he's not bothered.

Very keen for us to know how unbothered he is by it all.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 28, 2013)

Firky said:


> So if people start collecting golliwog tokens again they'll suddenly stop being racist


 
well, i had a golliwog when i was a child and now i love black people, so there must be something in it


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Much as I'm enjoying the show, I have to admit that I missed some key information from the start of this episode: Why do we hate this Malcolm dude in the first place? Can someone give me the Cliff Notes version? Isn't he just some guy who puts out a minor social democratic magazine?


 
It would be far easier to list the things we don't hate about him:

there aren't any.


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 28, 2013)

He's tweeted Firky but I can't find what he's actually replied to? Maybe it's just this thread in general?
Edit: I'm so upset that he just completely ignored my tweet to him, but he replies to Firky. omfg I can't cope with how not bothered he is


----------



## Firky (Apr 28, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Only a little bit!
> He'd have to be a lurk to rival even myself to find the connection between any tweets and this thread to be honest, and he'd have found the thread first. I think.


 

I asked him to join us from my other twitter account because my main one seems to be earmarked by "these types"


----------



## chilango (Apr 28, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I suspect that he probably spotted the danger in what he was saying and had enough suss to work out some semi-plausible path out of it, but if he has got away with it (i don't know if he has) i wouldn't put it down to the content of his argument, more that the people he writes for have no understanding of what politics actually is. They think it's just a word-game, a parlour game and no effects beyond the rhetorical are to be expected from what ever you argue.
> 
> They are the sort of people who would consider it _devilishly delightful _to argue in the antebellum US that slavery must be preserved because it was the clearest demonstration possible of the unfree nature of that society. And once that's done, onto the next petty verbal provocation. As such these people are easily seen through by the wider class (esp that politically (formally) part of it, and have no social weight - are not really relevant.
> 
> But before someone replies if they have no social weight then why are you going on about them? If they don't matter then wtf are you on about? It must be remembered that it's their _ideas_ that have no social weight , their arguments. The role they play in putting people off this public-left is very very real though, that's where they have some social weight (even if negatively from our perspective). The two are part of one rotten whole. Their ideas have to be idiotic, self-centred and socially meaningless if they're going to be able to play this second role of alienating people from active political participation.



Worth reminding ourselves of the political reasons to hate him too.


----------



## Firky (Apr 28, 2013)

> Malcolm Harris ‏@BigMeanInternet
> @Firky no I didn't support Rahm Emmanuel against the teachers union, no I never received any $ to talk about Occupy, no I'm not a fascist


 
muscovyduck obviously knows more about twitter than me; it still befuddles the feck out of me


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 28, 2013)

Yeah, Malc old son, read that last post by chilango/butchersapron eh ^^^^


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> He purports to talk on our behalf yet won't engage with us, preferring literary salons and writing about any topic that can be sexualised.


 
And also he does come across as a massive wrong 'un in his writings about kids, porn and fucking.


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 28, 2013)

Firky said:


> muscovyduck obviously knows more about twitter than me; it still befuddles the feck out of me


If you didn't send him a tweet from that account he must be talking about this thread.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 28, 2013)

That's a considerable rap sheet. I think I just had him pegged as a social democratic magazine type, like a yank version of articul8.

The subsidised porn to reduce sexual assault thing sounds too creepy to be real. Is everyone sure that wasn't some kind of joke? Also, why is he being bated with the young girls stuff?


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> He's tweeted Firky but I can't find what he's actually replied to? Maybe it's just this thread in general?
> Edit: I'm so upset that he just completely ignored my tweet to him, but he replies to Firky. omfg I can't cope with how not bothered he is


{{{muscovyduck}}} there there love x x


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> That's a considerable rap sheet. I think I just had him pegged as a social democratic magazine type, like a yank version of articul8.
> 
> The subsidised porn to reduce sexual assault thing sounds too creepy to be real. Is everyone sure that wasn't some kind of joke? Also, why is he being bated with the young girls stuff?


If you look at his writings he keeps returned to the subject of young sexualised people in one way or another. And his porn platform is well documented. Have a look on the internet for yourself.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

A question for Malcolm: If someone paid you $5k to come and speak at a meeting and someone accidentally kicked the shit out of you would you press charges?

Also, do you want a fight?


----------



## Libertad (Apr 28, 2013)

Fight or fee? Tricky.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

andysays said:


> What everyone else said.
> 
> And because he looks like a smug wanker with his glasses and ginger sideburns


 
The hairs his sideburns are made up from are precisely the same as my pubes. The resemblance is uncanny in fact. And they're both attached to something unpleasant looking, though I reckon my scrotum is far more aesthetically pleasing than than his smug cunt fizzog.


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 28, 2013)

Can't wait for Malcolm Harris, Laurie Penny and the crew decide to launch a new international campaign to tackle U75.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Can't wait for Malcolm Harris, Laurie Penny and the crew decide to launch a new international campaign to tackle U75.


 
24 hours to save the internet!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

I don't know about anyone else but I'm really angry and frustrated by how not bothered he definitely is. If we has bothered I'd feel like I'd achieved something for once in my miserable life.

But since he's not bothered - and we know he's not cos he's told us and even tweeted screen dumps of posts he's especially not bothered about - I feel like I've failed.

I can't monetize my hotness like Molly, I can't monetize my noncery like Malcolm (especially hard that one as I'm not a nonce) and now it turns out I can't make Malcolm bothered like the yank trolls can. FML


----------



## Firky (Apr 28, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Can't wait for Malcolm Harris, Laurie Penny and the crew decide to launch a new international campaign to tackle U75.


Urban75 and why the left are failing: some of them didn't even go to University.

By Laurie Penny, Foreword by Malcom Harris. Illustrations by Molly Crabapple (sponsored by Samsung in association with lovely lolitas dot com)

 newstatesman.com/sdasldkdiwkd


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

Firky said:


> Urban75 and why the left are failing: some of them didn't even go to University.
> 
> By Laurie Penny, Foreword by Malcom Harris. Illustrations by Molly Crabapple (sponsored by Samsung in association with lovely lolitas dot com)
> 
> newstatesman.com/sdasldkdiwkd


Urban 75 and why the left are failing: Some of them aren't even full-time activists!


----------



## Firky (Apr 28, 2013)

Some of them are poor!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

Urban 75 and why the left are failing: They get all uppity and critical when Laurie and Malcolm try and tell them how to do communism.

Subtitle:

They should know their fucking place. Fucking peasants.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)

And they lack ambition and sneer at creative people.


----------



## Firky (Apr 28, 2013)

> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed 1h
> Dear geeks: what's the best, most accurate definition of the word 'hacker' you know? FYI @OddLetters


 
She really has no fucking shame what so fucking ever has she?


----------



## Favelado (Apr 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


>


 
Cravactivist.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

Sorry for the sensible comment, but I reckon this lot are much more like the fabians were in the Webbs' time than fash by the way.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 28, 2013)

I am reminded of Laurie's 'I have a _job_, you know!' comment a while back


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

Firky said:


> She really has no fucking shame what so fucking ever has she?


 
If she's talking about the 'hacker' she's staying with she'd probably be best looking up imaginary friends in a psychology textbook if she wants a definition that would fit this 'friend' well. I'd tweet this excellent advice to you Laurie but unfortunately you blocked me for pointing out that the Met probably didn't consider you a high security risk during Thatcher's funeral so I'll have to leave it here for the next time you have a look. Sorry.


----------



## Firky (Apr 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Sorry for the sensible comment, but I reckon this lot are much more like the fabians were in the Webbs' time than fash by the way.


 
Laurie and Beatrice Potter...


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 28, 2013)

I sat in Starbucks at the end of an inner-city high street, the shops around me in a dilapidated state. I opened my second hand laptop, covered with stickers to hide the stains left by the previous owner. I had two tabs open: the first, my Twitter feed, a mixture of the activist youth and radical journalists, and the second, a thread on the notorious urban75 forums - forums which were known to all throughout the world as the place for soi-dissident trolls to congregate and strategize against those who actually fight for the movement. I scrolled through the thread - at nearly six hundred pages long, the only topics covered were my toilet habits and nasty propaganda spread to smear the name of those who lead the Occupy movement.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)

shes blocked me i think as well. for saying she's vapid and asking whether the people shes speaking to were working class journos etc


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

Firky said:


> Laurie and Beatrice Potter...


 
Although Potter changed her name to Webb when she married Sydney - that's a little bit patriarchy.


----------



## Pickman's model (Apr 28, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I am reminded of Laurie's 'I have a _job_, you know!' comment a while back


that's fucking lame. i have three jobs but you don't see me wheeling them out when i don't have an argument to rely on.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

They're nowhere near as well organised and influential as the fabians were though obvs. Thanks fuck!


----------



## Firky (Apr 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> If she's talking about the 'hacker' she's staying with she'd probably be best looking up imaginary friends in a psychology textbook if she wants a definition that would fit this 'friend' well. I'd tweet this excellent advice to you Laurie but unfortunately you blocked me for pointing out that the Met probably didn't consider you a high security risk during Thatcher's funeral so I'll have to leave it here for the next time you have a look. Sorry.


 
I thought a good journalist was to investigative and make new ground, open up new areas of debate and state their own opinions. It's a bit like you asking these boards the same question and then publishing it. It stinks of laziness as much as anything else. She should just reword wikipedia and what people said on the internet and make up quotes; oh wait...

If I was a reporter I'd be pissed off at her rank laziness as she is a bit of a dirty mark on an already sullied profession. Horrible woman.


----------



## Firky (Apr 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Although Potter changed her name to Webb when she married Sydney - that's a little bit patriarchy.


 
I'd love if it she was also nicknamed Dave behind her back


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 28, 2013)

If we just accept that radical or emancipatory politics is just a scene where the likes of Harris and co can indulge their vanity, then the hard work of building a mass movement, embedded in the everyday experience of millions of people, will become much harder. It's right to kick back against this. If Malcolm Harris and Laurie Penny are the people who become, by virtue of their own egomania, drive, ambition, vanity, elite education and background, the public faces of the "Radical Left" then we're fucked. You couldn't wish for more obnoxious people, ripe for parody and who invite derision with every utterance, to alienate what little good will exists amonst the public for left politics.

The New Inquiry is a really poor excuse for a journal, I've had a look through the websites loads of times in the hope that it might have a decent article or essay in it buried in there, but I can't even remember seeing something vaguely decent in amongst the achingly self-conscious hispter drivel that's served up. After all even Jacobin occasionally has something worth reading, I could forgive some of this bullshit if the end product was something a tenth as good as bog standard liberal yank stuff like Salon and The Nation, but it's so fucking dire. It manages to pull off something astonishingly contradictory - to be extraordinarily pretentious and yet shallow enough to paddle in at the same time. Asking someone to pay money to sustain that is a brass neck. Who the fuck even cares enough to read that shit? Is it just people wishing to feel close to the scene? Is it just to rinse money out of hipsters with left wing pretensions? Christ I bet you could make a decent living mugging off all the daft left college kids in America...

I reckon he's basically a fucking con-artist, the fucking radiohead stunt took a brass neck and i can't help but like that, one scumbag reprobate to another. He probably goes to bed every night laughing his little ginger tits off that he gets away with it.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 28, 2013)

can we get some idea of whence he came? From money I bet


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 28, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> If you look at his writings he keeps returned to the subject of young sexualised people in one way or another. And his porn platform is well documented. Have a look on the internet for yourself.


 
I'm not entirely sure that I want to start Googling for Malcolm Harris, porn and sexualised young people, so I'll take you at your word.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 28, 2013)

yeah to be clear i'm not saying these guys are fash or anything like that, i'm just saying that i could imagine it might happen.


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I am reminded of Laurie's 'I have a _job_, you know!' comment a while back


Yes, because clearly we couldn't possibly have the wherewithal to get such things


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 28, 2013)

And of course when we consider that some people on these boards are unable to work it becomes even more of a cuntish thing to say.

She might as well have just pointed out how much more _important_ she is so why waste her time with us?


----------



## Firky (Apr 28, 2013)

We obviously don't work because we post shit to the internet all day where as Laurie Penny...


----------



## weepiper (Apr 28, 2013)

Firky said:


> We obviously don't work because we post shit to the internet all day where as Laurie Penny...


..._gets paid_ to post shit to the internet all day


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 28, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> can we get some idea of whence he came? From money I bet


Palo Alto is a private town, a wealthy enclave if you will, so he's upper-middle class for sure.


----------



## Nice one (Apr 28, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> If we just accept that radical or emancipatory politics is just a scene where the likes of Harris and co can indulge their vanity, then the hard work of building a mass movement, embedded in the everyday experience of millions of people, will become much harder. It's right to kick back against this. If Malcolm Harris and Laurie Penny are the people who become, by virtue of their own egomania, drive, ambition, vanity, elite education and background, the public faces of the "Radical Left" then we're fucked. You couldn't wish for more obnoxious people, ripe for parody and who invite derision with every utterance, to alienate what little good will exists amonst the public for left politics.


 

Which left politics? What about class politics? Or to put it another way, the mass of working class people.

Do you really think ordinary working class people give two shits either way as to what these people have to say for themselves? I think you're giving them way, way too much credit and status way beyond their actual impact and influence.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 29, 2013)

https://twitter.com/ShareefaEnergy/status/328587781335027712

Not a good week on the old twitter for LP

Also her hesitant use of the acronym JOC is vomit-inducing


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 29, 2013)

Nice one said:


> Which left politics? What about class politics? Or to put it another way, the mass of working class people.
> 
> Do you really think ordinary working class people give two shits either way as to what these people have to say for themselves? I think you're giving them way, way too much credit and status way beyond their actual impact and influence.


 
Butchers has already dealt with that one but since you've almost certainly not bothered reading the last few pages, and instead decided save time by jumping to the end to continue with the tired old crap about how we're all wasting our time (along with the implication that you're above all that kind of thing) I'll quote it for you.



butchersapron said:


> They are the sort of people who would consider it _devilishly delightful _to argue in the antebellum US that slavery must be preserved because it was the clearest demonstration possible of the unfree nature of that society. And once that's done, onto the next petty verbal provocation. As such these people are easily seen through by the wider class (esp that politically (formally) part of it, and have no social weight - are not really relevant.
> 
> But before someone replies if they have no social weight then why are you going on about them? If they don't matter then wtf are you on about? It must be remembered that it's their _ideas_ that have no social weight , their arguments. The role they play in putting people off this public-left is very very real though, that's where they have some social weight (even if negatively from our perspective). The two are part of one rotten whole. Their ideas have to be idiotic, self-centred and socially meaningless if they're going to be able to play this second role of alienating people from active political participation.


----------



## Nice one (Apr 29, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Butchers has already dealt with that one but since you've almost certainly not bothered reading the last few pages, and instead decided save time by jumping to the end to continue with the tired old crap about how we're all wasting our time (along with the implication that you're above all that kind of thing) I'll quote it for you.


 
yes i read that. "Alienating people from active political participation". How are the mass of working class people alienated from active political participation by what laurie penny says about stuff. And what does that say about working class people if that was the case?


----------



## agricola (Apr 29, 2013)

Firky said:


> If I was a reporter I'd be pissed off at her rank laziness as she is a bit of a dirty mark on an already sullied profession. Horrible woman.


 
Thats a bit much, huge swathes of the profession in question are so covered in filth right now because of the way that they have behaved that the amusing musings of LP arent going to make the slightest impression. 

Though then again, one of her latest tweets about wanting a programme that converts audio files into text should hopefully provoke some kind of neo-Luddite response.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 29, 2013)

Nice one said:


> yes i read that. "Alienating people from active political participation". How are the mass of working class people alienated from active political participation by what laurie penny says about stuff.


 
By seeing her and her private school mates and their endless wanking on about things of no relevance to our lives and thinking 'if that's lefty politics it's not for the likes of me'.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 29, 2013)

Nice one said:


> yes i read that. "Alienating people from active political participation". How are the mass of working class people alienated from active political participation by what laurie penny says about stuff. And what does that say about working class people if that was the case?


 
In the same way as I'm put off from getting involved in anything she's anywhere near. But absent any experience of left politics it's easy to see how people could be put off the whole lot. Which would seem to me to be a perfectly sensible reaction.


----------



## Nice one (Apr 29, 2013)

weepiper said:


> By seeing her and her private school mates and their endless wanking on about things of no relevance to our lives and thinking 'if that's lefty politics it's not for the likes of me'.


 


SpineyNorman said:


> In the same way as I'm put off from getting involved in anything she's anywhere near. But absent any experience of left politics it's easy to see how people could be put off the whole lot. Which would seem to me to be a perfectly sensible reaction.


 
but that wasn't what was said. "Alienating people from active political participation" is what was said. How is laurie penny alienating working class people from active political participation?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 29, 2013)

Have a think about it. It's really not that hard if you put your mind to it - I'm sure even you can manage it.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 29, 2013)

Nice one said:


> but that wasn't what was said. "Alienating people from active political participation" is what was said. *How is laurie penny alienating working class people from active political participation?*


 
By pretending she's 'working class'? 

Dishonesty and exploitation, masquerading as self-awareness.


----------



## agricola (Apr 29, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> By pretending she's working class?
> 
> Dishonesty and exploitation, masquerading as self-awareness.


 
Perhaps, though this thread is by far and away the most replied to and viewed on this subforum - perhaps people would get involved just to enjoy the show?


----------



## Treacle Toes (Apr 29, 2013)

agricola said:


> Perhaps, though this thread is by far and away the most replied to and viewed on this subforum - perhaps people would get involved just to enjoy the show?


 
For sure there is an element of that. I stand by my response to that question all the same.


----------



## Firky (Apr 29, 2013)

agricola said:


> Thats a bit much, huge swathes of the profession in question are so covered in filth right now because of the way that they have behaved that the amusing musings of LP arent going to make the slightest impression.
> 
> Though then again, one of her latest tweets about wanting a programme that converts audio files into text should hopefully provoke some kind of neo-Luddite response.


 
Fair point. I was talking about a personal response - I know it is unfair of me to call her a stain and that Laurie and her mates aren't really that well known outside of this thread*. Yet I can't but help think that Laurie does think of herself of some kind of pioneer of left wing journalism, that she believes that she is better than the rest and it gets up my nose. More than it should do, I really shouldn't get wound up by her but I can't help it; she does not speak for me or anyone that I empathise wiht. How damaging she is to the left is open for debate but I can't relate to her.

*Owen Jones however is quite a memorable, once you've seen him at his best you're unlikely to forget him no matter what side of the fence you sit on. People seem to remember him for what he said where as people seem to remember Laurie Penny for having a squeaky voice.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 29, 2013)

Nice one said:


> but that wasn't what was said. "Alienating people from active political participation" is what was said. How is laurie penny alienating working class people from active political participation?


 
Laurie Penny persona, intentional or not, is basically the caricature of a middle-class know-it-all lefty who is contemptuous of the actual working-class. This caricature is disseminated through the right-wing media, and it has some elements of truth to it, but usually not that much - because of this dissemination this caricature has been firmly established in popular consciousness so when they are confronted by the personification of this caricature in Laurie Penny at an event, in an article or by association or whatever then whatever she is associated with immediately loses credibility and by extension so does the political left.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 29, 2013)

agricola said:


> Though then again, one of her latest tweets about wanting a programme that converts audio files into text should hopefully provoke some kind of neo-Luddite response.


 
I always imagined that she outsourced her transcriptions to up-and-coming JOCs for cents on the dollar via Elance or whatnot.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 29, 2013)

You gotta _monetize _your hot JOCs


----------



## Nylock (Apr 29, 2013)

Although i imagine it would be (briefly) entertaining for Malcolm Harris to post on this thread, i can't help but think he will get up to the same shenanigans as LP has but with his own twist: Selectively misquoting posters, disingenuously replying to those who he perceives as being 'sympathetic' to him, accusing the female posters of misogyny, accusing everyone else of failing to check their privilege, posting various 'ironic' photos of select moments from the glorious revolutionary war and generally not answering a single fucking critique of his oeuvre. It'll be like watching someone chuck a mento into a bottle of coke -the post count will go through the roof and it'll generally get quite messy.

I totally agree with butcher's post regarding the likes of him and his ilk and their role in dissuading us normals from getting involved in left wing politics and how we ought to kick back against this vapidity. Trouble is, MH's contribution to this thread will be both fleeting and disruptive before he runs back to twitter laughing up his sleeve with a bunch of stuff that he can then use in subsequent $5k-a-go talking shops...

It's tragic to think that whatever positive 'legacy' the occupy movement may have had in terms of networks and ideas for future action has largely drowned in a stinking morass of conspiraloonery, sickening headlines concerning sexual predation by people involved and the smug profiteering of dissent by shameless carpet-baggers like Harris. The greater tragedy being that he will dine out off the back of this for the rest of his natural...


----------



## agricola (Apr 29, 2013)

Nylock said:


> Although i imagine it would be (briefly) entertaining for Malcolm Harris to post on this thread, i can't help but think he will get up to the same shenanigans as LP has but with his own twist: Selectively misquoting posters, disingenuously replying to those who he perceives as being 'sympathetic' to him, accusing the female posters of misogyny, accusing everyone else of failing to check their privilege, posting various 'ironic' photos of select moments from the glorious revolutionary war and generally not answering a single fucking critique of his oeuvre. It'll be like watching someone chuck a mento into a bottle of coke -the post count will go through the roof and it'll generally get quite messy.
> 
> I totally agree with butcher's post regarding the likes of him and his ilk and their role in dissuading us normals from getting involved in left wing politics and how we ought to kick back against this vapidity. Trouble is, MH's contribution to this thread will be both fleeting and disruptive before he runs back to twitter laughing up his sleeve with a bunch of stuff that he can then use in subsequent $5k-a-go talking shops...
> 
> It's tragic to think that whatever positive 'legacy' the occupy movement may have had in terms of networks and ideas for future action has largely drowned in a stinking morass of conspiraloonery, sickening headlines concerning sexual predation by people involved and the smug profiteering of dissent by shameless carpet-baggers like Harris. The greater tragedy being that he will dine out off the back of this for the rest of his natural...


 
This is an argument for us all to go to a Justin Bieber fansite, pose as fourteen year olds, mention Malcolm Harris and see if he turns up isnt it?


----------



## Firky (Apr 29, 2013)

Laurie Penny steps in to defend Malcolm Harris whilst still maintaining she's better than us.

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/328678224643108867



> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> @BigMeanInternet @Firky just ignore them babe. They're convinced they're somehow 'the real left'. So many more effective w/c activists.


----------



## JimW (Apr 29, 2013)

Firky said:


> > _Malcolm Harris ‏@BigMeanInternet_
> > _@ __Firky__ no I didn't support Rahm Emmanuel against the teachers union, no I never received any $ to talk about Occupy, no I'm not a fascist_


Never received any money = asked, because I am a grasping cunt parasiting off others' struggles; never got any, because even the bourgeois pricks who book these things can see right through me.

Looking forward to LP listing all those effective working class activists she knows. Bet they all love her too. Imaginary friends are the most steadfast.


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 29, 2013)

Christ on a bike.

When it comes to class experience and perceptions of others though, I would struggle to think of one person I know who has heard of her, and I know PFWC people. If they did they would be put off, I'm sure. I fear they'd also be put off by those who are sincerely 'active' in radical politics as well.

I remember danny la rouge (I think) coming out with an anecdote about a May Day march up in Scotland a while ago, and how after that experience he declined to go on any others. A group of working class women was stood on the pavement witnessing the march, and through their mockery were defining themselves outside of what it represented, laughing among themselves and saying the marchers weren't workers but a load of hippies.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> i can't help but like that, one scumbag reprobate to another.


 
Well tbf, quite a lot of working-class people would agree with you there.

Quite a lot of such people would regard many of those posting on this thread as ultra-radical, quasi-criminal headbangers (or "scumbag reprobates" as you put it), and as precisely the kind of folk they warn their children against becoming involved with. Most such people would prefer Laurie Penny over youse lot if push ever came to shove.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 29, 2013)

quasi is all I can manage these mornings. Once, once were the days...


----------



## JimW (Apr 29, 2013)

Quasi name, quasi guy.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 29, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> quasi is all I can manage these mornings.


 
Unlike some I could mention then.

Christ look at the time...


----------



## weepiper (Apr 29, 2013)

Firky said:


> Laurie Penny steps in to defend Malcolm Harris whilst still maintaining she's better than us.
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/328678224643108867


'Babe'
:vomit:


----------



## chilango (Apr 29, 2013)

Firky said:


> Laurie Penny steps in to defend Malcolm Harris whilst still maintaining she's better than us.
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/328678224643108867



Perfect.

They really don't see how this is panning out do they?


----------



## cesare (Apr 29, 2013)

chilango said:


> Perfect.
> 
> They really don't see how this is panning out do they?


I suspect they don't really care.


----------



## chilango (Apr 29, 2013)

cesare said:


> I suspect they don't really care.



They think they don't. But when this done they will, oh they will....

...the ego is a fragile thing.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 29, 2013)

Firky said:


> Laurie Penny steps in to defend Malcolm Harris whilst still maintaining she's better than us.
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/328678224643108867


 
He'll be wondering why she got the acronym for "Women of Color" wrong


----------



## andysays (Apr 29, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Much as I'm enjoying the show, I have to admit that I missed some key information from the start of this episode: Why do we hate this Malcolm dude in the first place? Can someone give me the Cliff Notes version? I*sn't he just some guy who puts out a minor social democratic magazine?*


 
Mere Pseud Mag. Ed.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 29, 2013)

Firky said:


> Laurie Penny steps in to defend Malcolm Harris whilst still maintaining she's better than us.
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/328678224643108867



Why does she feel the need to defend him? Doesnt she know he's not bovvered? Reads more like she's trying to persuade convince herself not him. 

If I could be arsed and I wasn't on my phone I'd gather up the dodgy homophobia and misogyny apologist quotes sihhi found and quote them next to that tweet. 

This says all you need to know about Laurie and what her 'principals' really mean. 

Double standards. 

Let's look at a contrast. Class based critique of liberal state multiculturalism by the iwca is racist. Even tweeting it is enough to be denounced as such. When there's nothing remotely racist about it. And she won't withdraw the accusation, even when she knows it to be untrue, until she's threatened with legal action. 

Someone writes a load of homophobia and misogyny apologetics and writes stuff about little girls and he gets defended from the nasty urbanites. 

Difficult not to come to the conclusion that since he's well connected and mixes in the same circles, comes from a similar background, she must defend him. We're just smelly proles who don't even have a column so its fine to slander us to deflect criticism. 

I reckon shes very class conscious. Just not in the way shed like us to think.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 29, 2013)

For someone who claims to be a feminist she's awful quick to jump into the prescribed female 'just leave it babe, they're not worth it' role.


----------



## rioted (Apr 29, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> A group of working class women was stood on the pavement witnessing the march, and through their mockery were defining themselves outside of what it represented, laughing among themselves and saying the marchers weren't workers but a load of hippies.


Just proves you get ignorant bigots everywhere. Even among the working class!


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 29, 2013)

Is this US stuff like a modern day grand tour for the sons and daughters of privilege? Now we learn:



> Americans – they're just a lot more poetic


 
(note: not a go at this other laura, beyond being from an aristocratic/gentry family and very expensive school i know nothing of her, just noting the possibility of a common theme here)


----------



## Favelado (Apr 29, 2013)

I'm not blocked from The New Inquiry's main account. Sent some music.


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 29, 2013)

rioted said:


> Just proves you get ignorant bigots everywhere. Even among the working class!


 
To me it proves just how irrelevant 'the left' has become to ordinary working class people.  Me and most of the people I know included.


----------



## where to (Apr 29, 2013)

Has Laurie Penny shown any evidence of a sense of humour yet?


----------



## emanymton (Apr 29, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Why does she feel the need to defend him? Doesnt she know he's not bovvered? Reads more like she's trying to persuade convince herself not him.
> 
> If I could be arsed and I wasn't on my phone I'd gather up the dodgy homophobia and misogyny apologist quotes sihhi found and quote them next to that tweet.
> 
> ...


I used to think she at least had some decent feminist principles, but by associating herself with Molly, poor women should just monetise their hotness, Crabapple and Malcolm, I wanted to shag Ema Watson even before she had breasts, Harris she loses any feminist credibility she had. She is about as feminist as Hugh Hefner. Which just makes it even more laughable when she accuses people on here of misogyny, when every poster on this thread, well almost everyone, has a better understanding of what it is to be a feminist than she will ever have.


----------



## rekil (Apr 29, 2013)

how's this for some fancy lurkin'


----------



## 8ball (Apr 29, 2013)

<waves at Officer Carstairs>


----------



## J Ed (Apr 29, 2013)

8ball said:


> <waves at Officer Carstairs>


 
Reckon he's Penny's handler?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 29, 2013)

hello malcolm.


----------



## Carstairs (Apr 29, 2013)

copliker said:


> how's this for some fancy lurkin'
> 
> View attachment 31984


 
Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm just an everyday average lurker.  I chose the name because it was funny and stuff.  (Sending a PM to Frogwoman to confirm as she knows me from elsewhere).


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 29, 2013)

Carstairs said:


> Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm just an everyday average lurker. I chose the name because it was funny and stuff. (Sending a PM to Frogwoman to confirm as she knows me from elsewhere).


----------



## chilango (Apr 29, 2013)

Is there any chance of "compiling the list" in an easy access form?

e.g.

*Laurie Penny* _The New Statesman_, twitter. Privately educated, plagiarising, lying parasite. called Urban racist and misogynist
*Molly Crabapple* _artworld_, twitter. "monetize your hotness", parasite.
*Malcolm Harris* _New Inquiry, #OWS_, twitter. $5000 to talk about #OWS, parasite, sleaze/borderline nonce.
*Owen Jones* _The Independent_. Nice lad but waay to close to bubble commentariat. Dresses Labour apologism in "lefty Boy next door" guise.
*Johann Hari* _The Independent_. Plagiarist and liar.

and so on. Nice hyperlinks to tiwtter feed, main crimes, main media outlets etc. Kept in a single, regularly bumped post?

It's make life easier.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 29, 2013)

Carstairs said:


> Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm just an everyday average lurker. I chose the name because it was funny and stuff. (Sending a PM to Frogwoman to confirm as she knows me from elsewhere).


Just remember who gave you your first Like


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 29, 2013)

chilango said:


> Is there any chance of "compiling the list" in an easy access form?
> 
> e.g.
> 
> ...


 
I favour an e-book exposing the whole rotten crowd, but titled _Pants on Fire: The Laurie Penny Papers_


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 29, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junker
> 
> Junker was the term for Prussian Aristocracy before WWII. Their land was redistributed by the Communists. Hitler didn't love the junkers as such though, he pretty much ignored them.


 
While he ignored the _Junkers_ as a stratum of the upper class, he certainly cultivated elements of the stratum, especially those in the military.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 29, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I would also argue that making creepy remarks like "keeping your daughters off the cam is like keeping them off the pole" and quoting approvingly from Hakim Bey and the like is pretty much the exact opposite of progressive.


 
The problem with wankers like Harris, is that it's hard to tell whether they're noncey, or they're just being clever-clever "transgressive".

Personally, I'd burn Monkey Harris as a nonce, but that could be my irrational hatred of utter twats coming to the fore.


----------



## JimW (Apr 29, 2013)

On-U to provide soundtrack:


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 29, 2013)

Ronaldo Bates said:


> Almost no would-be working class activists would ever come across these people though. It's almost impossible to do so without searching for them on the web or coming to this thread. How many working class people are likely to do either?
> 
> If a working class movement is ever to re-emerge, it will do so without any reference to Laurie, Molly or any of the other fairly amusing and wholly harmless children at play featured here.


 
That's remarkably optimistic by your standards. . .


----------



## Favelado (Apr 29, 2013)

Ronaldo Bates said:


> No you wouldn't. You'll never do anything but moan about them on here. Ever.


 
Hi there!


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 29, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Hi there!








Yes, hi there indeed!


----------



## killer b (Apr 29, 2013)

he claims not to have made any money from OWS, so i guess people aren't.


----------



## JimW (Apr 29, 2013)

Ronaldo Bates said:


> That people are daft enough to pay him ought to tell us something.


All we need to do now is get you and LP on this thread at the same time and the plan will have worked. Talk some sense in to her, lad.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 29, 2013)

killer b said:


> he claims not to have made any money from OWS, so i guess people aren't.


 
Remember that he proudly defends dishonesty.


----------



## killer b (Apr 29, 2013)

i can believe that one tbf.


----------



## chilango (Apr 29, 2013)

Ahh. Master Bates, who are you then?


----------



## killer b (Apr 29, 2013)

shh


----------



## Favelado (Apr 29, 2013)

Editor can check IP locations I guess but there's probably good reasons he wouldn't tell us.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 29, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> he's basically a libertarian masquerading as a centre-left type. would be sad and easily ignorable but he somehow or other managed to position himself as a self-appointed expert / spokesman for occupy and now earns a living telling massive lies monetising his (non-existant) radical experience. likes really young girls and prostituted women; tries to convince everyone pornography is radical and to sent him photos of their tits. parasite wearing socialist blackface for the bucks.


 
I think he imagines himself as a Patrick Bateman type of character, whereas he's actually more of a Jason Bateman type, albeit without the "apple pie" moderately good looks.


----------



## chilango (Apr 29, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Editor can check IP locations I guess but there's probably good reasons he wouldn't tell us.


 






etc.


----------



## JimW (Apr 29, 2013)

Ronaldo Bates said:


> That's good then. Isn't it?


Not so good but more amusingly, he had his agent mate touting him around for that fee but only didn't make money because even the silly sods who put on those sort of symposiums aren't that thick.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 29, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I think he imagines himself as a Patrick Bateman type of character, whereas he's actually more of a Jason Bateman type, albeit without the "apple pie" moderately good looks.


 
He may yet surprise us all and reveal himself as a sort of Norman Bates-man.

"Mother, what have you done?"


----------



## JimW (Apr 29, 2013)

Ronaldo Bates said:


> I suppose political activists having agents is a sign of a thriving service-based economy.


The market is always there ready to fill the vacuum, in this case with an empty vessel, it truly is like magic!


----------



## rekil (Apr 29, 2013)

Top NY lawyers don't come cheap. I wonder how much Martin Stolar cost Malc's mammy and daddy.


----------



## JimW (Apr 29, 2013)

copliker said:


> Top NY lawyers don't come cheap. I wonder how much Martin Stolar cost Malc's mammy and daddy.


Surely he donated his work as part of the broad-based mass worker's defence committees that form whenever Malcolm's being oppressed by the state.


----------



## Favelado (Apr 29, 2013)

Ronaldo Bates said:


> I think employing an agent could do wonders for the careers of one or two people on here.


 
What about a cravat?


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 29, 2013)

killer b said:


> he claims not to have made any money from OWS, so i guess people aren't.


He also claimed to not be bothered. Hm.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 29, 2013)

Ronaldo Bates said:


> That people are daft enough to pay him ought to tell us something.


 
What does it tell us Ronaldo? That's the interesting bit. Us having a whinge about Malcolm Harris for our own amusement is peripheral to what this thread's about, for all the reasons you've mentioned. But the issue of "why he was getting touted around charging $5k to speak" is a genuinely important one - what say you Ronaldo? Anything political to add to this?

I'm all in favor of depersonalising the content of this thread because Laurie Penny's become a bit of a lightning rod for criticism because she's an archetype, someone who exemplifies much wider issues surrounding role the mass media play in buttressing a capitalist economic system, and these are issues that will have a tangible impact on a w/c political regroupment in the near future. It's better to de-personalise it, even if taking the piss out of posh kids is good sport and provides a bit of a laugh for us on here, because it's not about the individuals and besides Laurie Penny really does get a chorus of sexist abuse that's pretty vile, so depersonalising it is fine with me. It's always worth remembering that even if she'd never been born it would've made little difference to these tendencies, there's no shortage of worthy middle-class kids who'd crawl through a sewage pipe to get the paid gig at the new statesmam who'd fulfill the exact same role as her given half a chance. I follow a few of them on twitter, it's hilarious.

Thing is it's hard not to make it personal when that individual slanders those who disagree with her as racist and sexist to obfuscate the substantive criticism that exists of her professional work and how her career is an excellent example of the class politics at work in the media. It's hard not take it personally when you hear her come out with the "some of us have jobs y'know" line when your unemployed. It's astonishing how quickly the mask of radicalism slips and the inner Tory comes out when challenged by those beneath her. It's hard not to take it personally when you get called a racist in public after a lifetime of militant anti-fascism, and I'm sure it's very galling for the women on here (many of whom have been involved in grassroots feminist politics for much longer than Laurie Penny) are dismissed as middle-aged sexist blokes on a par with those wishing rape and other graphic sexual violence on Don't Start Me Off or Guido Fawkes comments etc. These are vile slurs, made by someone with a platform in the bourgeois media, made safe in the knowledge those who are the victims lack the means by which to defend themselves. Then again this thread contains dozens of examples and lots of background information that over time is going to make it harder for her to do her job. The gig at the indepedent didn't go to well, I suspect, based widespread rumour, they were less willing to indulge the incredible co-incidences that make up much of her output. If I was a fraud and charlatan, and if my ability to earn a crust was being jeopardised by a load of no-marks combing through my journalistic output looking for falsehoods, and the only way to diffuse that is to accuse those participating of being motivated by crude sexism and a dislike of women in the media, then I'd do it. Everyone's gotta eat - that's why class politics is so fundamental 

Laurie Penny's prominence as a left-wing spokesperson is triumph of how far you can get in this country if you go to the right school, get a degree from Oxford or Cambridge and ruthlessly network yourelf as much possible, despite having nothing of much value to say. That's the interesting thing for me. And that's something which doesn't really revolve around Penny it could quite clearly be some other chump.

ALSO: Just as a giggle does she really go around the USA telling people that's she's a normal w/c girl who got a scholarship? hahaha god I hope it is, I bet some of these idiots really do fall for that.


----------



## chilango (Apr 29, 2013)

copliker said:


> Top NY lawyers don't come cheap. I wonder how much Martin Stolar cost Malc's mammy and daddy.


 
Doesn't look very grateful here. Obvs doing some erotic Harry Potter fanfic in his reverie...


----------



## chilango (Apr 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth

word.


----------



## rekil (Apr 29, 2013)

chilango said:


> Doesn't look very grateful here. Obvs doing some erotic Harry Potter fanfic in his reverie...


Sideshed neckwarmer hairdo and preppy wanker clobber. A most Communisn't look.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 29, 2013)

chilango said:


> Delroy Booth
> 
> word.


 
I also do fire and brimstone speeches, much like the one you favourited, in person for the very reasonable sum of £200 (or whatever you can get an ounce of skunk for in your area) so if you're interested PM me


----------



## JimW (Apr 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I also do fire and brimstone speeches, much like the one you favourited, in person for the very reasonable sum of £200 (or whatever you can get an ounce of skunk for in your area) so if you're interested PM me


And he once caused a stir at Heckmondwyke fete by posting a notice claiming the Grimethorpe Colliery band were going to be playing outside the village hall.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> ALSO: Just as a giggle does she really go around the USA telling people that's she's a normal w/c girl who got a scholarship? hahaha god I hope it is, I bet some of these idiots really do fall for that.


 
See here - note the pre-sixth form private schooling _at the same school_ is not mentioned:



> Eventually she was offered a scholarship to Brighton College Sixth Form, where she edited a student newspaper and never learned to wear a tie.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 29, 2013)

Ronaldo Bates said:


> Wow, an essay on the subject. Are you out of work?


 
Wow, aren't you a nasty piece of work.


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 29, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Yes, hi there indeed!


 
Indeed.  Welcome back LLETSA.


----------



## weepiper (Apr 29, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> See here - note the pre-sixth form private schooling _at the same school_ is not mentioned:


 
Who does she think she is, Peter fucking Pan? Christ.


----------



## killer b (Apr 29, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> Indeed. Welcome back LLETSA.


tout.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 29, 2013)

Libertad said:


> Fight or fee? Tricky.


 
I believe he's being offered fight *and* fee.

Urbanites are nothing if not inclusivist.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 29, 2013)

Ronaldo Bates said:


> Nasty? I'm like a stepping razor, sunshine.


 
Haven't heard that one for a heap of years. Very "late '90s" of you.
Although I've heard you're more like a blunt penknife, to be fair.


----------



## JimW (Apr 29, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> See here - note the pre-sixth form private schooling _at the same school_ is not mentioned:


So more like a cash-back scheme than a scholarship, really. Or air miles, which she must have a fair few of now too.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 29, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> The hairs his sideburns are made up from are precisely the same as my pubes. The resemblance is uncanny in fact. And they're both attached to something unpleasant looking, though I reckon my scrotum is far more aesthetically pleasing than than his smug cunt fizzog.


 
TBF, he looks like a picture of my great-great uncle Schmuley from the turn of the 20th century, except Unc had better dress sense. Unc was a proper anarchist, though. Fought and died for the Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine against the Whites and the Reds.  Can't see Monkey Harris fighting for his beliefs. Writing for them, maybe!


----------



## Aaron Peters (Apr 29, 2013)

You guys are my heros


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 29, 2013)

600 pages!


----------



## JimW (Apr 29, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> 600 pages!


That's several orders longer than a Laurie Penny published monograph! Someone get on the blower to Zero books.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 29, 2013)

JimW said:


> And he once caused a stir at Heckmondwyke fete by posting a notice claiming the Grimethorpe Colliery band were going to be playing outside the village hall.


 
I know. What a cunt. I was stood in the cold for AGES*


*I have actually seen them and they were fab


----------



## Favelado (Apr 29, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> 600 pages!


 
500,000 page views coming up.


----------



## JimW (Apr 29, 2013)

S☼I said:


> I know. What a cunt. I was stood in the cold for AGES*
> 
> 
> *I have actually seen them and they were fab


If I have them right preferred them doing their trad repertoire to some of these modern pop tunes that seem a bit gimmicky, but only seen them on the telly.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 29, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Sorry for the sensible comment, but I reckon this lot are much more like the fabians were in the Webbs' time than fash by the way.


 
As you, me and several others have already mentioned on this thread over its' course.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 29, 2013)

Aaron Peters said:


> You guys are my heros


 
are you the aaron peters what got called a cunt?  or am i getting confused now?


----------



## Aaron Peters (Apr 29, 2013)

yeah I imagine so


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 29, 2013)

Aaron Peters said:


> yeah I imagine so


 
it happens at my age.  carry on then.


----------



## articul8 (Apr 29, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> are you the aaron peters what got called a cunt? or am i getting confused now?


 wasn't that aaron porter?  (may also apply)


----------



## Aaron Peters (Apr 29, 2013)

no as in former that was referred to as a cunt


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 29, 2013)

JimW said:


> If I have them right preferred them doing their trad repertoire to some of these modern pop tunes that seem a bit gimmicky, but only seen them on the telly.


 
Nah, there was Flight of the Bumblebee, New World Hovis, Rossini's Lone Ranger Overture, the fuckin' lot.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 29, 2013)

Aaron Porter = NUS bellend
Aaron Peters = buff dissent entrepreneur, does Novara radio, mates with Laura


----------



## rekil (Apr 29, 2013)

chilango said:


> Is there any chance of "compiling the list" in an easy access form?
> 
> e.g.
> 
> ...


An old boss of mine followed PD on the twitter machine the other day. He gave me some work when he was editor of a tiny mag years ago. He's in the BBC now. I've yet to have a word so I can't promise anything but if you see an "Opportunism Within The Proletarian Milieu" Panorama special at some point in the near future, you're welcome.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 29, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> 600 pages!


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 29, 2013)

articul8 said:


> wasn't that aaron porter? (may also apply)


 
i cannae fucking remember.  mind you, if it was aaron porter, then she might have been right on that one, labourite pillock.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 29, 2013)

Nice one said:


> yes i read that. "Alienating people from active political participation". How are the mass of working class people alienated from active political participation by what laurie penny says about stuff.


 
It's not just Penny. As has been made *repeatedly* clear on the thread, it's her entire commentariat _milieu_, and the effect their shallow engagement with left politics has on people who get inspired by the rhetoric, but become quickly disenchanted when they realise the politics espoused by "the bubble" is skin-deep, inimical to class analysis, and is actually a vehicle for the writer.



> And what does that say about working class people if that was the case?


 
It says some of us are tired of leadership figures, self-styled "gurus" and "radicals" who promise to lead us to "the promised land" and then rip us off. For some of us, we try to get around this through applying bottom-up principles of self-organisation, but for others, the disenchantment leads to either political apathy of the "they're all the same" kind, or to an active eschewal of politics _per se_. You know this!


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 29, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Aaron Porter = NUS bellend
> Aaron Peters = buff dissent entrepreneur, does Novara radio, mates with Laura


 
entrepreneur?  what is he trying to sell us?  sorry, monetise.


----------



## rekil (Apr 29, 2013)

PD logoman was clearly modelled on superbuff Aaron.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 29, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> are you the aaron peters what got called a cunt? or am i getting confused now?


Are you thinking of Jacob from The Third Estate?


----------



## chilango (Apr 29, 2013)

copliker said:


> An old boss of mine followed PD on the twitter machine the other day. He gave me some work when he was editor of a tiny mag years ago. He's in the BBC now. I've yet to have a word so I can't promise anything but if you see an "Opportunism Within The Proletarian Milieu" Panoroma special at some point in the near future, you're welcome.



Can't he do a special post-revolutionary "wanted down under" where imprisoned commentariat weigh up the pros and cons of life in a London prison versus work camps in Devon.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 29, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Are you thinking of Jacob from The Third Estate?


 
i don't know anymore Dave


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 29, 2013)

Firky said:


> Laurie Penny steps in to defend Malcolm Harris whilst still maintaining she's better than us.
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/328678224643108867


 
Surely Penny calling Harris babe is matronising and demeaning of him and his gender?


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 29, 2013)

copliker said:


> PD logoman was clearly modelled on superbuff Aaron.


 

He is always captured mid shout. I wonder what he is shouting. 'Death yo the bourgeois commenteriat!' maybe


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 29, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> entrepreneur? what is he trying to sell us? sorry, monetise.


 
http://www.leftfootforward.org/2010...nt-2010-the-rise-of-the-dissent-entrepreneur/


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 29, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i don't know anymore Dave


I don't know, you confuse your Jacobs and your Jacobins, can't tell your Aarons apart, are undecided on whether you're 'self-proclaimed' or 'soi-disant'...

When did you get old?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 29, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> I don't know, you confuse your Jacobs and your Jacobins, can't tell your Aarons apart, are undecided on whether you're 'self-proclaimed' or 'soi-disant'...
> 
> When did you get old?


 
somewhere around page 250 of this thread


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Apr 29, 2013)

Aaron Peters said:


> no as in former that was referred to as a cunt


 
the one off Resonance?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 29, 2013)

S☼I said:


> http://www.leftfootforward.org/2010...nt-2010-the-rise-of-the-dissent-entrepreneur/


 
is that some sort of non-aligned vanguardism?  not sure what's entrepreneurial about it.  but at least he's not selling something.


----------



## JimW (Apr 29, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> ... I wonder what he is shouting....


"Calling occupants of interplanetary craft!"


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 29, 2013)

Ronaldo Bates said:


> No you wouldn't. You'll never do anything but moan about them on here. Ever.


 
There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, even as regards women with tattoos and dyed hair.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 29, 2013)

chilango said:


> Ahh. Master Bates, who are you then?


 
It's someone very obvious.


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 29, 2013)

JimW said:


> "Calling occupants of interplanetary craft!"


 

PD logoman will put on an iron shirt and chase the devil (capitalism) out of ert


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 29, 2013)

copliker said:


> Top NY lawyers don't come cheap. I wonder how much Martin Stolar cost Malc's mammy and daddy.


 

And If they think that's expensive they should wait till they see the legal fees once operation yewtree gets hold of him.


----------



## Aaron Peters (Apr 29, 2013)

why share something written two and a half years ago? Just a question. Quite boring as well. Up to you what you choose to read of course


----------



## chilango (Apr 29, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> It's someone very obvious.



It only takes a few posts doesn't it.

Ronaldo Bates Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability, and I want you to know that we are with you...


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 29, 2013)

chilango said:


> It only takes a few posts doesn't it.


 
He's so one note that it barely takes the first few blasts of his little whistle.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Apr 29, 2013)

Aaron Peters said:


> You guys are my heros


 
"Don't wanna be nobody's hero", as a Northern irish poet once had it.


----------



## J Ed (Apr 29, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Aaron Porter = NUS bellend





S☼I said:


> Aaron Peters = buff dissent entrepreneur, does Novara radio, mates with Laura​


​​​He's known on this thread cos of this exchange https://twitter.com/aaronjohnpeters/status/327492181558431745​​ 
Edit: also other stuff I guess


----------



## chilango (Apr 29, 2013)

Ronaldo Bates said:


> Well der etc...



We're so busy awaiting Malc's big entrance/the return of lauriepenny and distracted by the appearance of Aaron Peters that you sneaking back caught us off guard...

...for a moment.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 29, 2013)

Aaron Peters said:


> why share something written two and a half years ago? Just a question. Quite boring as well. Up to you what you choose to read of course


 
Cos it's the thing those few people who know who you are will associate you with, it's been posted way back on this thread Aaron. As in Aaron Dissent Entrepreneur rather than Aaron NUS fuck-knuckle


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 29, 2013)

J Ed said:


> He's known on this thread cos of this exchange https://twitter.com/aaronjohnpeters/status/327492181558431745


 
Oh yeah , that too.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 29, 2013)

And the radio show that had Laurie Penny on it


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Apr 29, 2013)

copliker said:


> PD logoman was clearly modelled on superbuff Aaron.


PD logoman is an excellent image. I have deconstructed it as follows. Firstly the pointed arm is pointing forwards horizontally as is the look on the face. There is no gazing heavenwards for support. Secondly the forward direction is to the left. So many left logos have people with flags marching to the right, a basic error. Thirdly the pointed hand is the right hand leaving the left hand free to hold the essential hammer. That means that the working hand the dominant hand is the left hand. This logo is impeccable.


----------



## rekil (Apr 29, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> He is always captured mid shout. I wonder what he is shouting. 'Death yo the bourgeois commenteriat!' maybe


Kids banging on his window while Strictly is on.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 29, 2013)

Aaron Peters doesn't deserve to be lumped in with the nauseating likes of Harris and co, even if the Novara radio thing seems like a cargo-cult of the gentrified american left, not a direction that I think we should be heading in personally but hey ho.

Welcome to the boards Aaron, please don't let the regulars scare you. They did me at first - but then I'm very sensitive. Please have a go at joining in rather than passive-aggressive debate via retweet. I'll promise to be nice. We've interacted on twitter a few times and you seem fairly decent.

Next time you get Laurie on your show could you ask her why she gave a platform to the leader of a fascist street gang, and then tried to justify it with hilarious convulated no-platform logic? I tried asking myself when Laurie graced us with her presence but I didn't get a reply - perhaps as someone who lives in London and is a proper radical and member of the real left the same question asked from your lips would deserve a reply  In the meantime I hope one day to be worthy of being treated like an equal human being and not have to get answers vicariously through my betters 

This is very serious btw, in amongst all the bollocks you'll find a nugget of seriousness on here. I know it's the online equivalent of sieving through your turds for pieces of sweetcorn but still. Giving a platform to Tommy Robinson at that time was dangerous and will have, in a minor way, materially aided the EDL. One of the reasons the EDL has lingered on dispite it's internal meltdown is because the EDL brand still has some value and name recognition, thanks in part to mainstream media being so keen to pruriently lavish him and them with TV coverage and press coverage. If it bleeds it leads, scary fascist street gangs get ratings, and glamourising what they do in a Danny Dyer way gets even more ratings. Laurie Penny's decision to interview him was the wrong one, especially in Vice as they also do a lot of the protest tourism stories that veer into this territory, it was something that I feel demonstrates how careerism trumps basic principle with certain left-wing celebrity journo's. It was a slap in the face to me and all the others who are concerned with the boring day to day anti-fascism out here in the provinces - where the EDL and the far-right are leaving the radical left standing in the race to build on w/c dis-illusionment with failing neoliberalism.

And also if Samsung offered you a load of money in a few years time to do an advert for 'em would you take the money and do it?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 29, 2013)

Aaron Peters said:


> why share something written two and a half years ago? Just a question. Quite boring as well. Up to you what you choose to read of course


 
Have you changed your opinion since then, out of interest? Coz all the stuff about horizontal networks was so in vogue at the time of the student movement, and I felt myself at the time that much of it was ill thought out pseudo-anarchist platitudes, so perhaps now looking back years later at the student movement you could pick out where and how this stuff failed? What oligarchical tendencies emerged from the horizontal networks and who benefitted from them and why? Why when the horizontalist approach was applied in the various Occupy camps it failed so dismally at producing any tangible political affects, why it led to day after after of micro-politics suffocating any sort of potential, how it utterly and miserably failed to even collectively manage the camps themselves (look at the fucking horror stories about rape and sexual assault that have been a feature of Occupy type events all over the world to pick the most grotesque example of these failings) these sorts of things. Also the phrase dissent entrepeneur makes me want to gip. Any regrets about using it, or is it a label you'd be happy to use today?

I'm not having a go coz you can't have been very old when you wrote that, and there's nowt wrong with changing your mind, I'd just be interested to see whether your thoughts have changed. I reckon you might've come on here looking for a row but I'm not going to give you one coz 1) you're pretty hench 2) I reckon you're a thoughtful person who has something worthwhile to add to these debates, and it'd be a shame if you didn't at least have a go at engaging before it ends with playground squabbling.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> And also if Samsung offered you a load of money in a few years time to do an advert for 'em would you take the money and do it?


 
In fairness to that illustrator, she may be a bit of a clown, but most of us here would take Samsung's money for that kind of old rope.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 29, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> TBF, he looks like a picture of my great-great uncle Schmuley from the turn of the 20th century, except Unc had better dress sense. Unc was a proper anarchist, though. Fought and died for the Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine against the Whites and the Reds.


 
Yeah right.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 29, 2013)

Delroy, stop sucking up to the new kid.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 29, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> In fairness to that illustrator, she may be a bit of a clown, but most of us here would take Samsung's money for that kind of old rope.


 
Truthfully? No. I couldn't do it unless I was starving or something. I know that sound stupid but part of why I'm 26 and unemployable is I'm very stubborn about that kind of thing. And yes I am a fucking idiot before you ask.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 29, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Delroy, stop sucking up to the new kid.


 
In fairness, if he's good we can invite him back to the clubhouse, where we all stand around a bust of Marx and drink toasts to evil.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Truthfully? No. I couldn't do it unless I was starving or something. I know that sound stupid but part of why I'm 26 and unemployable is I'm very stubborn about that kind of thing. And yes I am a fucking idiot before you ask.


 
It's a straightforward cash for dignity swap. Maybe your dignity costs more than mine.


----------



## Firky (Apr 29, 2013)

602 pages, 400 of which are since Christmas are there abouts. F'ing hell!!

Hello Ronaldo!

Is there anything worth catching up on?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 29, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Delroy, stop sucking up to the new kid.


 
You clearly weren't around when they were explaining the good cop bad cop stuff at the Urban 75 how to troll the gentrified left summer school.

Anyway I kiss all their arses, Owen Jones in particular, I was even sticking up for Laurie Penny a bit before she turned up in person and start making smart-arse Tory quips dissing the unemployed. Then calling my comrades racist. And sexist. And so on ad infinitum. I have a bit more faith in Aaron than I ought to be perhaps. We'll see.

I kiss their arses coz I think "There but for the grace of god go I" I could've ended up doing that if I hadn't fucked my life over in my early 20's, when I was in my mid-teens the idea of having a small, low circulation, hyper-stylized journal I could write for would've been very appealing. It would've been a wonderful little excuse to manifest my ego and feel like I was doing something just big enough to be good, just marginal enough to be cool. The sweet-spot. Like having a band that's about the size of Half Man Half Biscuit but no bigger, coz then you sell out, and that matters.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 29, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> It's a straightforward cash for dignity swap. Maybe your dignity costs more than mine.


 
Oh no it's not that. I have no dignity. At all. I'm just very stupid. Anyway I'm threadshitting let's let someone else talk.


----------



## JimW (Apr 29, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> It's a straightforward cash for dignity swap. Maybe your dignity costs more than mine.


I gave mine away so long ago I've had to fall back on selling off my reason and will to live.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Apr 29, 2013)

_Jodhpurs for goalposts_


----------



## Aaron Peters (Apr 29, 2013)

Of course my thinking has changed a great deal since then (anything I have written over the last two years looks sounds very different!). That particular term was one taken from social movement literature which can be very 'liberul' at times. With regards to myself events of late 2010, 2011 completely changed my disposition to things but also obviously dramatically changed my engagement with what I study (digital space and soc movements). I was at university when Lehman collapsed, AIG was bailed out, Russian stock exchange shut for two days etc in 2008, was member of Labour party and thought 'this is it, neo-liberal architecture has collapsed, its history now we, at the very least, go to some order of social democracy in the OECD'. Of course this discounted the fact that major powers were happy to bankrupt nation-states in the medium-term in order to carry on as usual. So it wasn't the end but if anything the beginning of an even more intensified period of dispossession, 'liberalisation etc etc. I have to admit I was very lost as to understanding the scale of the crisis and what to do until the student stuff and the subsequent period kicked off. This combined with the fact I have a great deal of time to engage with these things as I am lucky enough to do a Ph.d (state school but by all means feel free to call me a dickhead) has meant my thinking has changed (matured? Heaven forbid) a fair bit - but again this is evident in stuff I have written on at OD (unpaid) and spoken about on resonance fm/ Novara (unpaid) particularly over last 18 months, which people are free to read/ listen to/ shit on etc. What has Laurie said about the Robinson interview?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 29, 2013)

Aaron Peters said:


> Of course my thinking has changed a great deal since then (anything I have written over the last two years looks sounds very different!). That particular term was one taken from social movement literature which can be very 'liberul' at times. With regards to myself events of late 2010, 2011 completely changed my disposition to things but also obviously dramatically changed my engagement with what I study (digital space and soc movements). I was at university when Lehman collapsed, AIG was bailed out, Russian stock exchange shut for two days etc in 2008, was member of Labour party and thought 'this is it, neo-liberal architecture has collapsed, its history now we, at the very least, go to some order of social democracy in the OECD'. Of course this discounted the fact that major powers were happy to bankrupt nation-states in the medium-term in order to carry on as usual. So it wasn't the end but if anything the beginning of an even more intensified period of dispossession, 'liberalisation etc etc. I have to admit I was very lost as to understanding the scale of the crisis and what to do until the student stuff and the subsequent period kicked off. This combined with the fact I have a great deal of time to engage with these things as I am lucky enough to do a Ph.d (state school but by all means feel free to call me a dickhead) has meant my thinking has changed (matured? Heaven forbid) a fair bit - but again this is evident in stuff I have written on at OD (unpaid) and spoken about on resonance fm/ Novara (unpaid) particularly over last 18 months, which people are free to read/ listen to/ shit on etc. What has Laurie said about the Robinson interview?


 
Couple of quick points first before I get round to giving this a proper reply. First off, no-one's going to give you shit for doing a PhD. Lose that defensive-ness, this isn't about taking everyone who wears glasses to the football stadium and shooting them, there's more going on here than that and you shouldn't jump to that conclusion coz it's wrong. And other quick point is thanks for actually replying in good faith, certainly done more in that single post to treat the thread and the individuals on it with a bit of respect, rather than the barely disguised contempt Laurie exhibited when she turned up.

Oh yeah btw I made some quite specific criticisms of the horizontalism stuff myself in that first point I made to you, outlining some issues that I'd like to discuss that were in your article. If you get the time, before we digress, would you reply to them in detail? Cheers. I'll come back later and give your post a proper reply, busy man me, the glorious Proletariat of Shat needs me for an hour or so I'm afraid.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> thanks for actually replying in good faith


 
Seconded



Aaron Peters said:


> What has Laurie said about the Robinson interview?


 
At the time a lot of people questioned her giving him a platform, but also had a few relatively non-snarky questions about the _tone_ of the piece (pretty sneery against him from a class standpoint), whereupon she blocked a load of people on Twitter.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> this isn't about taking everyone who wears glasses to the football stadium and shooting them


 
Who exactly gave you the right to unilaterally roll back one of the key elements of the Proletarian Democracy programme like that?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 29, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Who exactly gave you the right to unilaterally roll back one of the key elements of the Proletarian Democracy programme like that?


 
Iron Law of Oligarchy mate  Doesn't matter what the General Assembly says, the ones running the twitter account decide when Year Zero begins.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 29, 2013)

Aaron Peters said:


> Of course my thinking has changed a great deal since then (anything I have written over the last two years looks sounds very different!). That particular term was one taken from social movement literature which can be very 'liberul' at times. With regards to myself events of late 2010, 2011 completely changed my disposition to things but also obviously dramatically changed my engagement with what I study (digital space and soc movements). I was at university when Lehman collapsed, AIG was bailed out, Russian stock exchange shut for two days etc in 2008, was member of Labour party and thought 'this is it, neo-liberal architecture has collapsed, its history now we, at the very least, go to some order of social democracy in the OECD'. Of course this discounted the fact that major powers were happy to bankrupt nation-states in the medium-term in order to carry on as usual. So it wasn't the end but if anything the beginning of an even more intensified period of dispossession, 'liberalisation etc etc. I have to admit I was very lost as to understanding the scale of the crisis and what to do until the student stuff and the subsequent period kicked off. This combined with the fact I have a great deal of time to engage with these things as I am lucky enough to do a Ph.d (state school but by all means feel free to call me a dickhead) has meant my thinking has changed (matured? Heaven forbid) a fair bit - but again this is evident in stuff I have written on at OD (unpaid) and spoken about on resonance fm/ Novara (unpaid) particularly over last 18 months, which people are free to read/ listen to/ shit on etc. What has Laurie said about the Robinson interview?


 
She's said nothing. It was an empty interview the guy and his minders got a free meal on the back of New Statesman subscribers.

It's great you don't still believe things like this any more:





			
				Aaron Peters said:
			
		

> In many ways the post-war middle class desire to ‘get on’ was tied up and ensured by the Bevanite system of collective welfare, employment security and entitlements such as grammar schools and guaranteed access to university education. This faith in the system eroded after 1979 with the belief that it was increasingly private debt that could fund homes, education, childcare and pensions instead of the old state-centric Bevanite model.


 

  (stick around)

Do you think Laurie Penny's journalism of the student movement helped it or hindered it from having a serious working-class base?

quotes in this post, for eg, are from LP's long piece in the New Statesman later recycled for the Indie etc. 

Honest question.


----------



## imposs1904 (Apr 29, 2013)

copliker said:


> Its under control. We've had agent imposs1904 in place in manhattan for some time already.


 
sorely tempted with the promised bounty. we looked into my visiting family in the UK this summer. We can't afford the cheapest plane tickets. 

eta: apologies for the off-topic reply.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 29, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Do you think Laurie Penny's journalism of the student movement helped it or hindered it from having a serious working-class base?
> 
> quotes in this post, for eg, are from LP's long piece in the New Statesman later recycled for the Indie etc.
> 
> Honest question.


 
Without preempting his answer, I don't see how it was really likely to make a blind bit of difference either way. I mean who buys the fucking New Statesman or the Independent in the first place?


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Apr 29, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Who exactly gave you the right to unilaterally roll back one of the key elements of the Proletarian Democracy programme like that?


Sir you parody the great work of Proletarian Democracy. Beware, that when the workers' bomb is constructed there will be dangerous life-threatening work to be done. You are now on the list of volunteers to do that work.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 29, 2013)

Aaron Peters said:


> this is evident in stuff I have written on at OD (unpaid)


 
How does open democracy work? 

How important Rosemary Bechler also part of Unlock Democracy?

Is Clare Sambrook at open democracy any relation to Richard Sambrook the BBC Executive? (not implying she is, just asking)


----------



## classicdish (Apr 29, 2013)

S☼I said:


> And the radio show that had Laurie Penny on it


This one? http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkin...ters/audio-new-media-and-british-commentariat
*The British media is exceptional in its status as part of the political class. But with the newsroom becoming defunct as a site of cultural production, and models of journalistic authority breaking down, this role is threatened. **Laurie Penny and James Butler discuss, hosted by Aaron Peters.*


----------



## agricola (Apr 29, 2013)

Hocus Eye. said:


> Sir you parody the great work of Proletarian Democracy. Beware, that when the workers' bomb is constructed there will be dangerous life-threatening work to be done. You are now on the list of volunteers to do that work.


 
Volunteering?  Surely PD should embrace monetizing as a concept?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 29, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Without preempting his answer, I don't see how it was really likely to make a blind bit of difference either way. I mean who buys the fucking New Statesman or the Independent in the first place?


 
That's why I'm asking - did it impact the perception of what was going on on the ground - over egging the pudding sort of thing. This is the only place where I have any connection with universities.

eg did a fellow socialist mind being described like this: "Ben Beach is the Justin Bieber of the new left: a baby-faced riot messiah from Bethnal Green in east London"


----------



## Aaron Peters (Apr 29, 2013)

Re Laurie and student movement (I think episode is better term, didn't have the institutions or even a shared identity among participants to ever go beyond December 9th vote imho) have to agree with fact that at the end of the day v few people read Indy/ NS and I think the stuff between Millbank and December 9th, nationally, was far bigger than that. End of the day the major reason why it couldn't be sustained after December 9th was that even own union was incapable of doing *anything* about what was clearly a huge grievance among FH/ HE students. That said it discredited coalition government far earlier than many had presumed would be the case and its relationship to August riots ( was in Tottenham night it kicked off as an observing social scientist *of course*) shouldn't be underestimated. Yeah tbh Laurie's stuff, like other journos, didn't make much difference with regards to participants/ prospective participants. I certainly regret doing that NS thing, but again, at end of the day was of v little consequence to success/ failure of things (more importantly for me is that people I respect still think I was a dickhead for doing it)


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 29, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That's why I'm asking - did it impact the perception of what was going on on the ground - over egging the pudding sort of thing. This is the only place where I have any connection with universities.
> 
> eg did a fellow socialist mind being described like this: "Ben Beach is the Justin Bieber of the new left: a baby-faced riot messiah from Bethnal Green in east London"


 
That's sort of a different question though. Ben Beach, whoever the fuck Ben Beach is, and really what sort of name is that anyway, was probably embarrassed to be described in that fashion in a national publication. But I doubt if if made much difference to whether the movement had "a working class base".

These sort of writers are epiphenomena rather than causes.


----------



## Aaron Peters (Apr 29, 2013)

'end of the day' three times, apols, obvs watching too many football interviews atm


----------



## Brainaddict (Apr 29, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Do you think Laurie Penny's journalism of the student movement helped it or hindered it from having a serious working-class base?
> 
> quotes in this post, for eg, are from LP's long piece in the New Statesman later recycled for the Indie etc.
> 
> Honest question.


I agree with Nigel. Didn't make much difference. Not just because no-one but the metropolitan 'elite' read that stuff but because the problems facing that kind of alliance are so much bigger than Laurie Penny. I don't know why I'm choosing this thread to make a serious point but here we go:

There is no shared political language that is in use both by the middle class and the working class, and not only not shared - there is barely a political language of our times at all - where I come from anyway. In the SE of england at least there is little collective memory of the kind of language and ideas that used to mobilise people. Most people look at you blankly if you try to talk about politics as something extraparliamentary. I've lived in London most of my adult life but I was raised elsewhere in SE England and where I come from there is a political base of fuck all.

So anyone trying to start *any* kind of political movement comes up against this massive problem of not having language to talk about their situation, particularly due to the ways the economy in the UK has been restructured, and the extent of the triumph of neoliberal thought - which the old left language never caught up with (Negri and others attempted it but with limited success imo). So the students naturally take language from academia, which makes most people's eyes glaze over, including their fellow students, and then they made what in my opinion was the massive mistake of importing the methods of the moribund 'activist' scene. To a lot of the students this was new and exciting, whereas in reality I think the processes etc create an in-language and also make groups quite inward-looking (I'd be interested in Aaron's thoughts on this now - he was quite keen on the ultrahorizontal approach for the UCL occupation but we've since had the debacle of Occupy). I think the anti-globalisation movement had failed to build alliances too and partly for the same reason = that they were obsessed with process.

So that was a mistake I think but my main point is that the size of the challenge in building an alliance between students and the 'working class' is enormous. You basically need to build a new political language and new forms of organisation and everything from scratch. It's fucking hard, and I haven't seen anyone who has made a dent in it.

So yeah, I think the scale of this problem is such that the likes of LP are pretty irrelevant. We are going to need an explosion of new energy and ideas to get past this impasse and when that happens I don't think people will be reading Laurie Penny.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 29, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> That's sort of a different question though. Ben Beach, whoever the fuck Ben Beach is, and really what sort of name is that anyway, was probably embarrassed to be described in that fashion in a national publication. But I doubt if if made much difference to whether the movement had "a working class base".
> 
> These sort of writers are epiphenomena rather than causes.


 
Your opinion is journalism had no role in the weakness or strength of the anti-fee rises protests/movement etc. OK. 

Ben Beach is a student, why have a go at his name?


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 29, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Your opinion is journalism had no role in the weakness or strength of the anti-fee rises protests/movement etc. OK


 
I believe that the strengths and weaknesses of the student movement against fees, the options open to it, and crucially the degree to which it developed a working class base were determined by much bigger factors than whether or not Laurie Penny wrote some silly shit in a couple of publications of distinctly limited audience.





			
				Ben Beach[/URL said:
			
		

> is a student, why have a go at his name?


 
It sounds more like the sort of name an aspiring actor-model-singer adopts a few minutes after getting off the bus in LA rather than a real one. Although I should add that I don't really care about the existence of Ben Beach or how he came by his name all that much.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 29, 2013)

What the fuck just happened with the formating there?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 29, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> I agree with Nigel. Didn't make much difference. Not just because no-one but the metropolitan 'elite' read that stuff but because the problems facing that kind of alliance are so much bigger than Laurie Penny. I don't know why I'm choosing this thread to make a serious point but here we go


 
There are working-class students who are students studying - in HE and FE.
As it has been explained to me - certain types of students - and large parts of student journalism - were speaking in the name of a w/c student body - the group that had zero parental assistance, less social capital (hate the phrase but can't think of a better one) often working weekends. 
That group saw university as a dangerous/risky endeavour anyway but one which had to be completed without arrest to secure the supposed advantage of taking the studies/qualifications (in the first place). This stuff impacted the movement (whatever it was, however limited or whatever it might have been to people).

Obviously a series of articles in the New Statesman is not the driving factor in this, but given that's it's a thread about journalism and writers that's the question i asked.


----------



## Aaron Peters (Apr 29, 2013)

On December 9th there seemed to be a convergent collective subjectivity between primarily FE youth and older HE students within universities (who will by now mostly be unemployed/ underemployed grads). This dissipated, the question is why. I don't think the task is as gargantuan as it sounds - there was definitely a convergence between what our Greek comrades refer to as the rioter subject http://sic.communisation.net/en/the-feral-underclass-hits-the-streets and our Lancastrian comrades refer to as the graduate without a future http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/01/graduates-2012-survive-in-cracks-economy (both highly problematic I know but I think they possess some use as terms in understanding present terrain). This convergence has now very clearly gone, the riots perhaps most clearly indicating that. 

_'So the students naturally take language from academia, which makes most people's eyes glaze over, including their fellow students, and then they made what in my opinion was the massive mistake of importing the methods of the moribund 'activist' scene. To a lot of the students this was new and exciting, whereas in reality I think the processes etc create an in-language and also make groups quite inward-looking (I'd be interested in Aaron's thoughts on this now - he was quite keen on the ultrahorizontal approach for the UCL occupation but we've since had the debacle of Occupy). I think the anti-globalisation movement had failed to build alliances too and partly for the same reason = that they were obsessed with process.'_


I agree with much of this - for me Occupy (at least in the UK) undermined much of the confidence I personally had from UCL where I had seen the same model work extraordinarily well (in retrospect this was mostly luck but was also due to fact that this was a homogeneous group in terms of age, grievance, and, although less than might have been expected, class). I can't speak for anywhere else but imagine same holds true for other occupations. I also think the TUC calling a demo on March 26th (organised labour will take over now rejoiced trots, but also many others) was a master stroke in defusing the situation. Finally I also think objective factors are yet to really play out in UK, I think we only really get a movement in this country when interest rates go up and we get something resembling a foreclosure crisis - combine this, potentially, with a weak labour government that promises the world after 2015 (read Papandreou 2009 or Hollande) and I think there is a lot to play for, and things will most definitely *move*. The hope would be that we are ready for that.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 29, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I believe that the strengths and weaknesses of the student movement against fees, the options open to it, and crucially the degree to which it developed a working class base were determined by much bigger factors than whether or not Laurie Penny wrote some silly shit in a couple of publications of distinctly limited audience.


 
Of course I agree.
But there was a journalism angle - an attempt to portray the people as wholly an instantly radicalised middle-class rebel set - which was not true. 



Nigel Irritable said:


> It sounds more like the sort of name an aspiring actor-model-singer adopts a few minutes after getting off the bus in LA rather than a real one. Although I should add that I don't really care about the existence of Ben Beach or how he came by his name all that much.


 
I didn't force you to have a go at his name. He was someone mangled by the type of journalism under discussion.


----------



## Aaron Peters (Apr 29, 2013)

'But there was a journalism angle - an attempt to portray the people as wholly an instantly radicalised middle-class rebel set - which was not true'

in fairness...


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 29, 2013)

Aaron Peters said:


> Of course my thinking has changed a great deal since then (anything I have written over the last two years looks sounds very different!). That particular term was one taken from social movement literature which can be very 'liberul' at times. With regards to myself events of late 2010, 2011 completely changed my disposition to things but also obviously dramatically changed my engagement with what I study (digital space and soc movements). I was at university when Lehman collapsed, AIG was bailed out, Russian stock exchange shut for two days etc in 2008, was member of Labour party and thought 'this is it, neo-liberal architecture has collapsed, its history now we, at the very least, go to some order of social democracy in the OECD'. Of course this discounted the fact that major powers were happy to bankrupt nation-states in the medium-term in order to carry on as usual. So it wasn't the end but if anything the beginning of an even more intensified period of dispossession, 'liberalisation etc etc. I have to admit I was very lost as to understanding the scale of the crisis and what to do until the student stuff and the subsequent period kicked off. This combined with the fact I have a great deal of time to engage with these things as I am lucky enough to do a Ph.d (state school but by all means feel free to call me a dickhead) has meant my thinking has changed (matured? Heaven forbid) a fair bit - but again this is evident in stuff I have written on at OD (unpaid) and spoken about on resonance fm/ Novara (unpaid) particularly over last 18 months, which people are free to read/ listen to/ shit on etc. What has Laurie said about the Robinson interview?


There's a few of us about (state school with PhD) so don't feel you have to hide it. It doesn't make you a dickhead unless you behave like one. 

Be proud of what you have achieved - you have earnt it


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Apr 29, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Of course I agree.
> But there was a journalism angle - an attempt to portray the people as wholly an instantly radicalised middle-class rebel set - which was not true


 
Sure, but noting the existence of such a journalistic angle is one thing. Attributing to it any significant influence on the course and prospects of the movement is another.




			
				sihhi said:
			
		

> I didn't force you to have a go at his name.


 
I'm quite capable of voluntary unpleasantness of a gratuitous sort.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 29, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Sure, but noting the existence of such a journalistic angle is one thing. Attributing to it any significant influence on the course and prospects of the movement is another.


 
That's why I asked someone who was properly involved and not people like me filling up the numbers as a non-uni supporter.

Edit: It was a question.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 29, 2013)

Aaron Peters said:


> Re Laurie and student movement (I think episode is better term, didn't have the institutions or even a shared identity among participants to ever go beyond December 9th vote imho) have to agree with fact that at the end of the day v few people read Indy/ NS and I think the stuff between Millbank and December 9th, nationally, was far bigger than that. End of the day the major reason why it couldn't be sustained after December 9th was that even own union was incapable of doing *anything* about what was clearly a huge grievance among FH/ HE students. That said it discredited coalition government far earlier than many had presumed would be the case and its relationship to August riots ( was in Tottenham night it kicked off as an observing social scientist *of course*) shouldn't be underestimated. Yeah tbh Laurie's stuff, like other journos, didn't make much difference with regards to participants/ prospective participants. I certainly regret doing that NS thing, but again, at end of the day was of v little consequence to success/ failure of things (more importantly for me is that people I respect still think I was a dickhead for doing it)


 
OK so it didn't particularly mobilise or put off anyone at all - ie it could have been written by anyone didn't any extra special talent. 
I don't blame the people being interviewed, doing the NS student special. the way it was written up _was_ a problem. I remember reading it at the time just after the parliament vote i think - didn't know who the author was at the time, thinking WTH?


----------



## Lo Siento. (Apr 29, 2013)

Aaron Peters said:


> The hope would be that we are ready for that.


 
Depends who you mean by "we" really. Not many on the left has being doing enough of the groundwork that builds the kind of networks you'd need on order to respond when "it moves"...


----------



## sihhi (Apr 29, 2013)

Aaron Peters said:


> in fairness...




Has good and bad - the start is all the cliche shots - students with lots of technology and nice clothes, followed by a double-barreled name, then someone travelling from lincoln to london instead of acting where he is (all protest need best go on in the few square miles around london), then mug with the word love kept in focus, plus a half snide attack on earlier student movements 'this isn't what student protests are like' several uni admin offices were occupied / papers burnt in the 1990s weakening the first beginning of fees - major couldn't get them in was left to blair.
the end is good because it lets someone apart from owen jones speak!


----------



## sihhi (Apr 29, 2013)

classicdish said:


> This one? http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkin...ters/audio-new-media-and-british-commentariat
> *The British media is exceptional in its status as part of the political class. But with the newsroom becoming defunct as a site of cultural production, and models of journalistic authority breaking down, this role is threatened. **Laurie Penny and James Butler discuss, hosted by Aaron Peters.*


 
Listened to the first 10 minutes of that - my first time.

'The fact of the newspaper as a public organ is already dying, newspapers are going to die within the next 10 to 15 years.'

I don't really see this at all. 

People like Niall Ferguson, Simon Schama, David Starkey are a very particular field they can do history documentaries on the media on the TV.

Academia is hardly being moulded with this kind of production as the end-point? Is it?

Will listen to rest later and post.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Apr 29, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Why does she feel the need to defend him? Doesnt she know he's not bovvered? Reads more like she's trying to persuade convince herself not him.
> 
> If I could be arsed and I wasn't on my phone I'd gather up the dodgy homophobia and misogyny apologist quotes sihhi found and quote them next to that tweet.
> 
> ...


 
I've got a column that even Nelson would be jealous of.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Apr 29, 2013)

Favelado said:


> What about a cravat?


 
Cravat emptor. Or something. Probably.


----------



## Brainaddict (Apr 29, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> Depends who you mean by "we" really. Not many on the left has being doing enough of the groundwork that builds the kind of networks you'd need on order to respond when "it moves"...


This is a key point. Last year a bunch of students, including Aaron, were talking about setting up a housing/renters organisation. Not sure what happened to that...


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 29, 2013)

Fair play for signing up and posting on here Aaron.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 29, 2013)

FWIW i've seen a few tweets of yours and you've always come across as a decent lad


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 29, 2013)

Were you 23 when you did that dissident entrepreneur thing? to be fair some of the things i thought when i was that age and younger are fucking embarrassing

Im 25 next month so will probably have even more to be embarrassed about when i'm as old as some of the people on ere


----------



## killer b (Apr 29, 2013)

I'm embarassed by some stuff I wrote this morning tbf.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 29, 2013)

yeah i'm embarrassed about that rubbish fash comparison. an element of truth to it but i went a bit over the top and probably didn't make it clear that it was just that i could imagine them doing it 

Also embarrassed about some of the spelling mistakes


----------



## Frances Lengel (Apr 29, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Were you 23 when you did that dissident entrepreneur thing? to be fair some of the things i thought when i was that age and younger are fucking embarrassing
> 
> Im 25 next month so will probably have even more to be embarrassed about when i'm as old as some of the people on ere


 
Yeah but you'll qualify for jobseekers allowance at _the full single persons rate -_ Hows about that then for a rite of passage?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 29, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> Yeah but you'll qualify for jobseekers allowance at _the full single persons rate -_ Hows about that then for a rite of passage?


 
oh don't mate i've only just got a full-time job, dont make me think about that shit


----------



## cesare (Apr 29, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> Yeah but you'll qualify for jobseekers allowance at _the full single persons rate -_ Hows about that then for a rite of passage?


But only have a year left of qualifying for a young persons rail card.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Apr 29, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> oh don't mate i've only just got a full-time job, dont make me think about that shit


 
Nice one - I wasn't trying to tek the piss btw (though I don't reckon you thought I was), I can remember though, my giro going up from seventy odd pounds a fortnight to ninety odd pounds when I hit the quarter C. I had a two berth gaffe in Oldham at the time - With an £8 pw heating charge - I'd have been sunk these days with the bedroom tax. I'm glad I grew up when I did. It's fuckin ruthless these days.


----------



## Firky (Apr 29, 2013)

I love this thread, keeps on giving.


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 29, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> This is a key point. Last year a bunch of students, including Aaron, were talking about setting up a housing/renters organisation. Not sure what happened to that...


 
There's some students in Brum setting up a housing co-op.


----------



## sihhi (Apr 29, 2013)

chilango said:


> I'm really not sure it's fair to label him a Situationist.
> 
> Debord would be turning in his grave.
> 
> ...


 
I am not linking you. How can we make the judgement, he defines what he is - not us.
For a start, he is anarchist and anarcho-communist


_The task is to read Calvino in the present-tense, to be reminded of the secret fire that builds society at a time when we glimpse it breaking free from its smothering institutions around the globe, to stoke that flame and remain fidelitous to its damaged human hearth. Indeed, to live something called Communism._


*and* also quite situationist influenced and anti-electoral after 2008

_What the market, democracy, and monarchy all share in common is that they are forms of meta-negotiation. All three are decisions about how social negotiation will take place and who will be entitled to more or less say i.e. useful speech. Any of these forms suffers from outside attacks by those who would live otherwise, against whom the institutions act. Guy Debord’s description of the spectacle as “absolument dogmatique et en même temps ne peut aboutir réellement â aucun dogme solide” (absolutely dogmatic and at the same time unable to come up with any solid dogma) applies to the permissive systems. The proliferation of discourses afforded by these institutional forms is seemingly wide but severely limited: the market gives us Hot Topic anarcho-punk to J. Crew prep, and our civic free speech provides both Rachel Maddow and Bill O’Reilly-flavored commentary. But communism is not for sale any more than anarchy is on the ballot._

He has often edited pieces that are very approving of Debord, concluding

_But if Guy Debord and his merry band had anything to teach the world, it is always to welcome impending situations, particularly those whose kairos may afford opportunity to rediscover the singular pleasures of the body in a way that doesn’t put money in someone else’s pocket._

which often mix low-brow pop culture with high Marxist thought:

_Less representatives of their particular American subculture than creatures of their historical moment, The Jersey Shore cast, in their unsentimental sexual pragmatism, embody the general human disposition under neoliberalism. According to David Harvey, neoliberalism “proposes that human well being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms.” If human well-being includes sexual fulfillment, then sexuality is in need of deregulation, so it may become more responsive to entrepreneurial initiative. The Situation is exemplary in this respect. He does not content himself merely with patrolling the boardwalk and nightclubs for willing women._

The New York Times reported on one of the New Inquiry's evening meetings:

"_Mr. Osterweil, the frustrated novelist, read from Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle.” Tim Barker, a junior at Columbia, awkwardly admitted that he, too, had chosen a reading from Debord. (What are the odds?)_"


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 29, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Then what did he think he was doing when he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood?


 
as Idris pointed out it was simply to try and get the ride from Maude Gonne . When that didnt work he quickly lost interest in it . She later did ride him but only the once , apparently the experience put her off the notion of sex with yeats for good .
Yeats absolutely shit himself when the 1916 uprising kicked off . He went completely silent until the coast was clear years later despite an explosion of nationalism and republicanism in its immediate aftermath. He did not want in any manner to be identified with republicanism and was most likely terrified his poetic identification with nationalism at a time when it more than just romantic posturing would land him in bother with the authorities.And in his later poems discussing his "muses" he expresses his contempt for them preferring to _conspire amongst the ignorant _than show their adoration for him .

And in fact your the very first person ive ever encountered whos suggested he was a republican . Ive never in my life heard anyone put that point of view forward before .


----------



## redsquirrel (Apr 29, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Is this US stuff like a modern day grand tour for the sons and daughters of privilege? Now we learn:
> 
> 
> 
> (note: not a go at this other laura, beyond being from an aristocratic/gentry family and very expensive school i know nothing of her, just noting the possibility of a common theme here)


Saw that dreadful article yesterday. The guardian music writers really are terrible first that shitty Frank Turner piece and now this.


----------



## treelover (Apr 30, 2013)

> I remember danny la rouge (I think) coming out with an anecdote about a May Day march up in Scotland a while ago, and how after that experience he declined to go on any others. A group of working class women was stood on the pavement witnessing the march, and through their mockery were defining themselves outside of what it represented, laughing among themselves and saying the marchers weren't workers but a load of hippies.
> seventh bullet, Yesterday at 3:02 AM Report


 
I remember marching through our city to support an asylum seeker who has sown his lips together, the looks we got from the public were unbelievable, and when we got to the market end of town, where the very poor shop, it got very hostile indeed, not very relevant to the discussion, or DLR's post, but a indication of where some people are coming from


----------



## treelover (Apr 30, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Laurie Penny persona, intentional or not, is basically the caricature of a middle-class know-it-all lefty who is contemptuous of the actual working-class. This caricature is disseminated through the right-wing media, and it has some elements of truth to it, but usually not that much - because of this dissemination this caricature has been firmly established in popular consciousness so when they are confronted by the personification of this caricature in Laurie Penny at an event, in an article or by association or whatever then whatever she is associated with immediately loses credibility and by extension so does the political left.


 
a proto Melanie Phillips?


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 30, 2013)

on the other hand we got applauded on a teachers' demo last year and on the nov 30th demo in 2011


----------



## treelover (Apr 30, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Have you changed your opinion since then, out of interest? *Coz all the stuff about horizontal networks was so in vogue at the time of the student movement, and I felt myself at the time that much of it was ill thought out pseudo-anarchist platitudes, so perhaps now looking back years later at the student movement you could pick out where and how this stuff failed?* What oligarchical tendencies emerged from the horizontal networks and who benefitted from them and why? Why when the horizontalist approach was applied in the various Occupy camps it failed so dismally at producing any tangible political affects, why it led to day after after of micro-politics suffocating any sort of potential, how it utterly and miserably failed to even collectively manage the camps themselves (look at the fucking horror stories about rape and sexual assault that have been a feature of Occupy type events all over the world to pick the most grotesque example of these failings) these sorts of things. Also the phrase dissent entrepeneur makes me want to gip. Any regrets about using it, or is it a label you'd be happy to use today?
> 
> I'm not having a go coz you can't have been very old when you wrote that, and there's nowt wrong with changing your mind, I'd just be interested to see whether your thoughts have changed. I reckon you might've come on here looking for a row but I'm not going to give you one coz 1) you're pretty hench 2) I reckon you're a thoughtful person who has something worthwhile to add to these debates, and it'd be a shame if you didn't at least have a go at engaging before it ends with playground squabbling.


 
Worked incredibly well at Climate camp, etc as far as I know, Ocuppy had to deal with an awful lot of social casualties, etc, maybe a bit more structure was needed there.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 30, 2013)

treelover said:


> I remember marching through our city to support an asylum seeker who has sown his lips together, the looks we got from the public were unbelievable, and when we got to the market end of town, where the very poor shop, it got very hostile indeed, not very relevant to the discussion, or DLR's post, but a indication of where some people are coming from


 
on the one hand youve the struggle for scarce resources at the bottom . On the other hand youve got the immigration influx targetted most heavily at the cheapest end of the housing market were the poorest live and in the jobs which the poorest tend to do . So in many ways its their immediate environment which gets changed most and quickest , and not for the better. And of course despite the entire left taking it for granted immigration is a wonderful idea nobody bothered asking these people what they thought about it, much less consulting with them beforehand or seeking their approval for their environment to undergo such far reaching change . A lot of which hasnt been positive from their point of view .

And the experience those people almost unfailingly get from the left when they voice concerns and frustration with neo liberal immigration policy , whether to Gordon Brown or to any of the hard left groups, is either to be branded a racist or to be completely ignored bar a stock formula reply reiterating unwavering support for the immigration policies theyre fed up with .

So when an entourage of lefties and students who they dont know come into their turf taking a pro immigration stance the response they get is quite likely to be similar to the utter contempt the left have had for them and their concerns . People shouldnt be at all surprised about that . Contempt breeds contempt .


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Apr 30, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> on the one hand youve the struggle for scarce resources at the bottom . On the other hand youve got the immigration influx targetted most heavily at the cheapest end of the housing market were the poorest live and in the jobs which the poorest tend to do . So in many ways its their immediate environment which gets changed most and quickest , and not for the better. And of course despite the entire left taking it for granted immigration is a wonderful idea nobody bothered asking these people what they thought about it, much less consulting with them beforehand or seeking their approval for their environment to undergo such far reaching change . A lot of which hasnt been positive from their point of view .
> 
> And the experience those people almost unfailingly get from the left when they voice concerns and frustration with neo liberal immigration policy , whether to Gordon Brown or to any of the hard left groups, is either to be branded a racist or to be completely ignored bar a stock formula reply reiterating unwavering support for the immigration policies theyre fed up with .
> 
> So when an entourage of lefties and students who they dont know come into their turf taking a pro immigration stance the response they get is quite likely to be similar to the utter contempt the left have had for them and their concerns . People shouldnt be at all surprised about that . Contempt breeds contempt .


 
Shouldn't forget that most migrants are working class too.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> on the other hand we got applauded on a teachers' demo last year and on the nov 30th demo in 2011


 
which would indicate that its some but not all the issues the left campaign on which have resonance among the working class.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 30, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> Shouldn't forget that most migrants are working class too.


righto..yeah..i plainly forgot that


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 30, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> as Idris pointed out it was simply to try and get the ride from Maude Gonne . When that didnt work he quickly lost interest in it . She later did ride him but only the once , apparently the experience put her off the notion of sex with yeats for good .


 
Yes. And that's _before _he had the operation to restore his "virility." One gets the impression that he was something of a Dirty Old Man. Indeed he writes about being such, brilliantly as always:

"How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!"



Casually Red said:


> Yeats absolutely shit himself when the 1916 uprising kicked off . He went completely silent until the coast was clear years later despite an explosion of nationalism and republicanism in its immediate aftermath. He did not want in any manner to be identified with republicanism and was most likely terrified his poetic identification with nationalism at a time when it more than just romantic posturing would land him in bother with the authorities.And in his later poems discussing his "muses" he expresses his contempt for them preferring to _conspire amongst the ignorant _than show their adoration for him .


 
With all respect, I gather that you are some distance short of being an objective source when it comes to Irish politics. I am aware of the tradition from which you speak, and I understand its beliefs and shibbolleths, but I do not share them.



Casually Red said:


> And in fact your the very first person ive ever encountered whos suggested he was a republican . Ive never in my life heard anyone put that point of view forward before .


 
Well I assure you it is the accepted view among Yeats scholars. See for example Richard Ellman's classic biography "The Man and the Masks." I suspect that your definition of "republican" is rather exacting tbf.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> "_Mr. Osterweil, the frustrated novelist, read from Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle.” Tim Barker, a junior at Columbia, awkwardly admitted that he, too, had chosen a reading from Debord. (What are the odds?)_"


 
About 5-4.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 30, 2013)

[quote="phildwyer, post: 12191571, member: 14741


> "Yes. And that's _before _he had the operation to restore his "virility." One gets the impression that he was something of a Dirty Old Man. Indeed he writes about being such, brilliantly as always:
> 
> "How can I, that girl standing there,
> My attention fix
> ...


 
well yeah..he was trying to shag Maude Gonnes daughter by that stage, after the mother wouldnt shag him any more . Once being enough .





> With all respect, I gather that you are some distance short of being an objective source when it comes to Irish politics. I am aware of the tradition from which you speak, and I understand its beliefs and shibbolleths, but I do not share them.


 

its not simply a tradition . Its a specific set of political beliefs and principles like any other, which arent really all that complicated. And the issue isnt whether or not you support them, or me, but whether Yeats did . And theres very little to suggest he did, and plenty of evidence in his writings that he viewed such beliefs and the people who held them with contempt . And evidence in his actions and reactions that he sought to personally distance himself from those beliefs .




> Well I assure you it is the accepted view among Yeats scholars. See for example Richard Ellman's classic biography "The Man and the Masks." I suspect that your definition of "republican" is rather exacting tbf.


 
well hush my mouth .

My very basic definition of republicanism is simply the same set of beliefs as Yeats own contemporaries, who were certainly republicans and made very clear what they were about. And who actually formulated the republican postion . And the historical record is quite clear as soon as they attempted to actually establish an Irish republic Yeats went to ground and put as much distance between himself and their beleifs and actions as he could .
Until years later when it was safe - and profitable- to resurface and then he attempted, and largely succeeded, in writing himself into that narrative .


----------



## seventh bullet (Apr 30, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Year Zero begins.


 
1792?


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 30, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> well yeah..he was trying to shag Maude Gonnes daughter by that stage, after the mother wouldnt shag him any more . Once being enough .


 
And she evidently told her daughter not to shag him either.  But he was indefatigable.  He'd have gone after her grandaughter if he'd lived long enough.



Casually Red said:


> its not simply a tradition . Its a specific set of political beliefs and principles like any other, which arent really all that complicated.


 
That's for sure.  Your politics were bred into your blood twenty generations ago, and there's nothing anyone could ever do to change them one iota.  You carry from your mother's womb a fanatic heart, as a wise man once said.  I learned not to argue politics with you as an 18 year-old barman in Kilburn.



Casually Red said:


> My very basic definition of republicanism is simply the same set of beliefs as Yeats own contemporaries, who were certainly republicans and made very clear what they were about. And who actually formulated the republican postion .


 
Well it's not quite a simple as that, now is it?  I bet you don't consider Michael Collins a republican either.



Casually Red said:


> And the historical record is quite clear as soon as they attempted to actually establish an Irish republic Yeats went to ground and put as much distance between himself and their beleifs and actions as he could .
> Until years later when it was safe - and profitable- to resurface and then he attempted, and largely succeeded, in writing himself into that narrative .


 
I can see why you'd say that.  I see it differently.  I think "Easter 1916" is an extremely apt and nuanced evaluation of radical republicanism, indeed the most mature and subtle analysis of such ever produced by an Irishman, and composed on the spot too.


----------



## rioted (Apr 30, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> on the one hand youve the struggle for scarce resources at the bottom . On the other hand youve got the immigration influx targetted most heavily at the cheapest end of the housing market were the poorest live and in the jobs which the poorest tend to do . So in many ways its their immediate environment which gets changed most and quickest , and not for the better. And of course despite the entire left taking it for granted immigration is a wonderful idea nobody bothered asking these people what they thought about it, much less consulting with them beforehand or seeking their approval for their environment to undergo such far reaching change . A lot of which hasnt been positive from their point of view .





Casually Red said:


> And the experience those people almost unfailingly get from the left when they voice concerns and frustration with neo liberal immigration policy , whether to Gordon Brown or to any of the hard left groups, is either to be branded a racist or to be completely ignored bar a stock formula reply reiterating unwavering support for the immigration policies theyre fed up with .
> 
> So when an entourage of lefties and students who they dont know come into their turf taking a pro immigration stance the response they get is quite likely to be similar to the utter contempt the left have had for them and their concerns . People shouldnt be at all surprised about that . Contempt breeds contempt .


"I remember marching through our city to support an *asylum seeker*. One of the great strengths of the working class is solidarity. Conflating asylum seekers and an influx of immigrants underlines something deeply unpleasant.


----------



## rekil (Apr 30, 2013)

chilango said:


> It only takes a few posts doesn't it.
> 
> Ronaldo Bates Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability, and I want you to know that we are with you...


Chilango reacts to LLETSA'S latest ban.



Spoiler


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 30, 2013)

[quote="phildwyer, post: 12191607, member: 14741




> That's for sure. Your politics were bred into your blood twenty generations ago, and there's nothing anyone could ever do to change them one iota. You carry from your mother's womb a fanatic heart, as a wise man once said. I learned not to argue politics with you as an 18 year-old barman in Kilburn.


 
Im quite sure my DNA has got very little to do with my politics , and my mothers most certainly not a republican . Just as Yeats mother wasnt either . Padraig Pearses father was an englishman . Yeats wasnt all that wise,im afraid.  He was just being all flouncy and poety .






> Well it's not quite a simple as that, now is it? I bet you don't consider Michael Collins a republican either.


 
well he was . One who committed treachery certainly but for his entire political career he publicly identified himself with the republican cause . Yeats definitely didnt .






> I can see why you'd say that. I see it differently. I think "Easter 1916" is an extremely apt and nuanced evaluation of radical republicanism, indeed the most mature and subtle analysis of such ever produced by an Irishman, and composed on the spot too.


 
Id profoundly disagree . Ive always felt it was mawkish, embarassing, sentimental and ultimately self serving nonsense that was devoid of any analysis whatsoever, bar the fact those executed were regarded as heroes. Which was stating the bleedin obvious by he time it was written . And even in it Yeats is forced to admit he frequently mocked their beliefs as opposed to sharing them.
But later tries to claim he was responsible for them . Self sering and self important . Written in an atmosphere where half the country were claiming they were in the GPO, Yeats there too..in spirit .


----------



## sunnysidedown (Apr 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Listened to the first 10 minutes of that - my first time.
> 
> 'The fact of the newspaper as a public organ is already dying, newspapers are going to die within the next 10 to 15 years.'
> 
> ...


 
It was a link to that particular show earlier in the thread that first introduced me to Novara, I could barley get through this particular show so I'm glad I checked out some of the others for a comparison, definitely worth a listen.

/brownnose


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 30, 2013)

rioted said:


> "I remember marching through our city to support an *asylum seeker*. One of the great strengths of the working class is solidarity. Conflating asylum seekers and an influx of immigrants underlines something deeply unpleasant.


 
how much solidarity did you get

and Id prefer if you clearly spelt out what unpleasantness it is your accusing me of as opposed to making some veiled reference to something or other

Have the courage of your convictions and spit it out, youll feel better for it


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 30, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> Im quite sure my DNA has got very little to do with my politics , and my mothers most certainly not a republican .


 
Your father was an IRA man iirc?  And no doubt his father before him?  And presumably your ancestor Cashelleigh O'Rheide went up to Carlow with Fiach MacHugh O'Byrne, am I right?



Casually Red said:


> well he was . One who committed treachery certainly


 
It's the "certainly" that gets me.  The definition of "treachery" depends where your loyalties lie doesn't it?



Casually Red said:


> Id profoundly disagree . Ive always felt it was mawkish, embarassing, sentimental and ultimately self serving nonsense that was devoid of any analysis whatsoever, bar the fact those executed were regarded as heroes. Which was stating the bleedin obvious by he time it was written . And even in it Yeats is forced to admit he frequently mocked their beliefs as opposed to sharing them.
> But later tries to claim he was responsible for them . Self sering and self important . Written in an atmosphere where half the country were claiming they were in the GPO, Yeats there too..in spirit .


 
It was written when most of the country vehemently opposed the rebellion, a position certainly not shared by Yeats, who basically applauds the motives while deploring the violence.  Which is a fair enough view of the matter imo.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 30, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> It was written when most of the country vehemently opposed the rebellion, a position certainly not shared by Yeats, who basically applauds the motives while deploring the violence. Which is a fair enough view of the matter imo.


 
As regards his views on violence only a few years earlier, when it seemed there was no prospect whatsoever of insurrectionary violence, he was openly scorning his fellow Dubliners about "romantic Ireland" being dead with Oleary - and by extension the Fenians- in the grave . Scorning them for their non violence, and by extension painting himself as a follower of the Fenians - again all this while desperately trying to pork the very republican Maud Gonne . OLeary though was a fenian dynamiter, a committed physical force activist and conspirator . The Fenians were the epitome of Irish physical force . And he was scorning those who didnt follow that example . Until of course someone did .

And the 1916 poem  was written in France in the immediate company of...guess who...Maude Gonne . Whom Yeats very thoughtfully set out to comfort now that she was a widow . All that stuff about moorcocks and hens..stone of the heart...all it was about was when was she going to let him ride her, and worrying she might sacrifice her carnal needs for attachment to republicanism . It was all about him and his cock , Not patriotism or republicanism.

And the bit


_*          I write it out in a verse—*_

Its him proclaiming himself as the man who conferred greatness on them . Its all about him .

Maud Gonne told him the poem  was a load of shite btw


and he made sure it wasnt published until years later because he was worried about losing his hoity toity upper class contacts and his British government pension . He only published it years later when there was sufficient concern on Irish victimhood  within the English bougouisie.

Maud Gonne knew him well and what his motivations were for writing it , herslef and her husband being part of its subject matter. And when she was telling him it was an shite poem she knew what she was talking about and what it was really about . And what he was about .


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 30, 2013)

rioted said:


> "I remember marching through our city to support an *asylum seeker*. One of the great strengths of the working class is solidarity. Conflating asylum seekers and an influx of immigrants underlines something deeply unpleasant.


 
well done, youve just copped onto the fact its not all that bright to call someone a racist for pointing out if working class people talk to the left about immigration concerns they immediately get branded a racist .

marvellous


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 30, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> As regards his views on violence only a few years earlier, when it seemed there was no prospect whatsoever of insurrectionary violence, he was openly scorning his fellow Dubliners about "romantic Ireland" being dead with Oleary - and by extension the Fenians- in the grave . Scorning them for their non violence, and by extension painting himself as a follower of the Fenians - again all this while desperately trying to pork the very republican Maud Gonne . OLeary though was a fenian dynamiter, a committed physical force activist and conspirator . The Fenians were the epitome of Irish physical force . And he was scorning those who didnt follow that example . Until of course someone did .


 
He was conflicted and ambivalent about his politics, as any rational observer of the Irish scene would have been. You should wish that more of your countrymen were more ambivalent and less certain in their opinions.



Casually Red said:


> And the 1916 poem was written in France in the immediate company of...guess who...Maude Gonne . Whom Yeats very thoughtfully set out to comfort now that she was a widow . All that stuff about moorcocks and hens..stone of the heart...all it was about was when was she going to let him ride her, and worrying she might sacrifice her carnal needs for attachment to republicanism . It was all about him and his cock , Not patriotism or republicanism.


 
It was about both. He did have difficulty separating his goal of shagging Maud Gonne from his aim of getting the Brits out. But the moorhens and that represent the changing historical circumstances, while the stone is republicanism, and the "stone of the heart" is physical force republicanism (as well as Maud Gonne's refusal to shag him).



Casually Red said:


> Maud Gonne told him the poem was a load of shite btw


 
She never did have taste. John MacBride I ask you.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 30, 2013)

just keep telling yourself that


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 30, 2013)

Laurie Penny is trying to make 'beauty privilege' a thing.
As you were.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 30, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Laurie Penny is trying to make 'beauty privilege' a thing.
> As you were.


 
If only she would use her powers for good and not for evil.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 30, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Laurie Penny is trying to make 'beauty privilege' a thing.
> As you were.


 
it probably is a thing.  but until she starts with a class analysis she can fuck off with it.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Apr 30, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Laurie Penny is trying to make 'beauty privilege' a thing.
> As you were.


 
Really?

Sounds like some desperate attempt to patch up the leaky privilege theory canoe, rather than face the reality that it's not up to the job, and jump ship to the proleterian clipper.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 30, 2013)

Is she saying w/c people are ugly now?


----------



## sihhi (Apr 30, 2013)

Crabapple is making a new project: "Because I say everything way in advance, and because its late at night. My next giant art show is about The Internet. I'll kickstart it"
But is unsure what level of art investment deserves what product - 
"Question for my kickstarter backers- if I did another kickstarter for an art show, what rewards would you like to see?"


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Is she saying w/c people are ugly now?


 
do we all need to post pics of ourselves to prove otherwise


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 30, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> do we all need to post pics of ourselves to prove otherwise


Remember, we've already established that she thinks  you can't be w/c and dress nice or have a nice car, you must live in some crack-hovel and have mud and old fish in your hair or something:



> There are more interesting questions – such as why a man who claims to be an authentic, representative voice of “working class” Britain turns up to a meeting in a shiny new BMW 1 series with leather seats, kitted out from top to toe in designer sports gear and reeking of posh cologne.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 30, 2013)

Butchers, for example,is a fine figure of a man:


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Apr 30, 2013)

Who was that Daily Mail journalist who reckoned she had all sorts of problems because she was so beautiful?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 30, 2013)

fish-free hair privilege


----------



## sihhi (Apr 30, 2013)

Lezard - still a prick:

Outside the Tube, I was nearly knocked over by the wind. Is Cameron in control of the skies? Nicholas Lezard's "Down and Out" column.

Talking of bad language, my revelation last week that I stamped on a mouse inspired someone to address me on Twitter with The Rudest Word. I don’t know. A quarter of a century in journalism with many strong opinions delivered along the way and the first time I get called a see-you-next-Tuesday is because I flatten a mouse. I ask you. Let me inform whoever hides behind their chosen pseudonym that (a) I don’t have a back garden to release any mice into and it’s rather patronising to expect that I do, (b) it wouldn’t have done any good if I had, and (c) not only would I gladly flatten Mousie again, for it turns out he is legion, I’ll dance on his grave singing “Hallelujah” when I do. ...

When the sun fails to shine when you might reasonably expect it to, you feel robbed: really robbed, as if something precious has been stolen from you – time, perhaps. I have got to that stage of life when I am conscious that I am now on the way out rather than on the way in, and each crappy summer induces a kind of panic, rather in the same way my father used to worry, before 2005, that he’d be dead before we ever retrieved the Ashes. (Although I sometimes wonder whether, if that series had been any more exciting, it might have in fact polished him off for good. It nearly did for me.) And I feel for my children, who live in a house where the radiators, for economic reasons, give off about as much warmth as a dog that has been dead for two hours.

It’s not made any better by this wretched, ghastly government, and an opposition so quiet and toothless I wonder whether it’s actually died. Poverty and cold weather go together in a most horribly inevitable way and I had a ghastly thought the other night that Cameron and his gang are actually in control of the skies and the air currents as well, and that making everyone freeze is part of a deliberate ploy to immiserate the less well-off completely, for no other reason except that it pleases them to do so. Rather in the way that we hear that members of the Bullingdon Club these days like to set fire to £50 notes in front of homeless people. Oh, to stamp them out like vermin.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"A quarter of a century in journalism with many strong opinions delivered along the way and the first time I get called a see-you-next-Tuesday is because I flatten a mouse."

The first time anyone has called him the c word


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 30, 2013)

working class people, yesterday https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=u...2hAeaoYCoCQ&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1429&bih=1027


----------



## Steel Icarus (Apr 30, 2013)

Dunno, I know Samantha Brick has said as much. 

Not linking to the pissing Mail.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Apr 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Lezard - still a dull prick:


 
corrected for you.


----------



## killer b (Apr 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The first time anyone has called him the c word


he's not been following this thread.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 30, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> Who was that Daily Mail journalist who reckoned she had all sorts of problems because she was so beautiful?


Samantha Brick, who got a mention off these people recently. Prob in relation to this stuff.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Apr 30, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Dunno, I know Samantha Brick has said as much.
> 
> Not linking to the pissing Mail.



Yeah that's the one.

I think we need to intersectionalise beauty, somehow, if it is both a privilege but also an oppression?


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Apr 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Samantha Brick, who got a mention off these people recently. Prob in relation to this stuff.



They already went there? FFS.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 30, 2013)

> It’s not made any better by this wretched, ghastly government, and an opposition so quiet and toothless I wonder whether it’s actually died. Poverty and cold weather go together in a most horribly inevitable way and I had a ghastly thought


 
really? really?


----------



## Balbi (Apr 30, 2013)

Shades of,


----------



## sihhi (Apr 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> really? really?


 
Yes was it rhetorical? .  Lezard is a writer:




			
				Nick Lezard said:
			
		

> “I’m a writer,” I explained. “I don’t even get out of bed if I can help it. And I don’t wear them during the summer.” (Which I concede means that in 2012 they only got about a week’s rest, so awful was last year for good weather.)


----------



## sihhi (Apr 30, 2013)

also knows a lot about poverty esp. how to sort out free alcoholic drinks and just randomly getting £500 from your friends:





			
				Nick Lezard said:
			
		

> As for specific wheezes, one thing I like to do is sit on my own in the Duke at a table that would normally be expected to hold four people eating its excellent-but-slightly-out-my-price-range food. The guv’nor, Alan, who has taken pity on me and yet in some bizarre way sees me as an adornment to his establishment (I helped him get a glowing review in the Standard), or at the very least an amusing curiosity, will then shove me over to a less prominent table, but *top up my pint by way of compensation.* This takes timing, but I’ve got it down, I would like to think, to a fine art. If some real high-flyers come in he will even give me a large whisky just to get me away from them.
> 
> Poncing off your friends is another matter. Most of mine are in almost the same boat as me, so I can’t. My housemate, Razors, and I scrounge off each other, because even though he earns a fantastic salary, it all goes straight out again to sort out his own tormented domestic issues. He gets paid in the middle of the month, I at the end, so we help each other like mountaineers scaling a cliff that would have defeated the solitary climber. And you do find, when you get divorced, that some of your so-called friends never call you again; and some of them lend you £500 when you really need it and say “pay me back when you can”.


----------



## chilango (Apr 30, 2013)

He doesn't understand climbing that's for certain.


----------



## agricola (Apr 30, 2013)

"My housemate, Razors"


----------



## rekil (Apr 30, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Laurie Penny is trying to make 'beauty privilege' a thing.
> As you were.


Saucy communist golems ftw. Not what she meant though.

What if one is really really good looking but has a somewhat cavalier attitude to personal hygiene? Step up or step back?


----------



## Tom A (Apr 30, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


>


Reminds me of the "rabid dog" hand puppet from this 80s public information film about rabies...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Apr 30, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Laurie Penny is trying to make 'beauty privilege' a thing.
> As you were.


 
SHe's plagiarising my idea from this thread


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 30, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> SHe's plagiarising my idea from this thread


 
Credit where it's due if she's done that deliberately to wind you up that's excellent trolling, fair play


----------



## Tom A (Apr 30, 2013)

BigTom said:


> So I'd characterise Occupy Birmingham as having broadly four groups:
> 
> 1) Right wing, ron paul fan, anons (we don't have capitalism, we have corporatism)
> 2) conspiraloons (fair amount of crossover with 1, especially the rothschild banker shit)
> ...


 
Not to dissimilar to how Occupy Manchester ended up (I know friends who were parts of groups 3 and 4), and it was soon left mostly to 1 and 2 - people I dub Zeitgeististas and the David Icke fan club, with a smattering of "freemen" thrown in for good measure, with a continually diminishing number of hangers on in group 3 desperately trying to reclaim Occupy before realising it was an exercise in futility.



> Still linking through that is the idea that we are not free, that we are under the yoke of the 1% and need emancipation.



The "the 99% vs the 1%" dichotomy bugged me from day one, it seemed extremely simplistic and ignorant of the way capitalism and the class system domineers over our lives.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 30, 2013)

That's sad reflection on how David fucking Icke and Alex Jones have done a better job at undermining the bourgeois media and changing the narrative than even the Owen Jones and Laurie Penny's of this world amongst a sub-section of disillusioned young people.


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 30, 2013)

agricola said:


> "My housemate, Razors"


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 30, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> That's sad reflection on how David fucking Icke and Alex Jones have done a better job at undermining the bourgeois media and changing the narrative than even the Owen Jones and Laurie Penny's of this world amongst a sub-section of disillusioned young people.


Or how off-putting the latter are to that group.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Or how off-putting the latter are to that group.


 
Not entirely without justification y'know, for instance the dancing anti-semitic priest and Old Holborn and the Assangeista's put me off too. Let the libertarians have 'em, they can draw some of the worst cranks away from the left, it's the bulk of people who are otherwise decent who end up getting drawn to it that's concerning me.

I gave up on that 99/1% stuff when I started hearing things like "The Jew 1%" get bandied around online. Still see it in the Socialist Party's literature from time to time. Well on top of the zeitgeist as always.


----------



## Tom A (Apr 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Yeah it sounds awful.
> 
> If I'm honest I've suffered quite badly with mental health issues and feeling guilty on the basis of my upbringing (or whatever) and other things that I had no control over and to be honest if i'd got involved with shit like this it would have sent me into a really really dark place.


I have Asperger's Syndrome. I can often say things in a manner that's misinterpreted and unwittingly causes offence - and then subsequently feel terrible guilt for when offence gets taken. I have to resist the tendency to tiptoe on eggshells as a result. So you can imagine how it might feel to find yourself on the receiving end of an accusation of (insert oppression here) even though you do your damnedest to oppose said oppression and avoid doing things that facilitate that oppression. Usually in time I will shrug it off and go "feck those wankers", but it still stings at the time, nonetheless.


----------



## Idris2002 (Apr 30, 2013)

Casually Red said:


>


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 30, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Not entirely without justification y'know, for instance the dancing anti-semitic priest and Old Holborn and the Assangeista's put me off too. Let the libertarians have 'em, they can draw some of the worst cranks away from the left, it's the bulk of people who are otherwise decent who end up getting drawn to it that's concerning me.
> 
> I gave up on that 99/1% stuff when I started hearing things like "The Jew 1%" get bandied around online. Still see it in the Socialist Party's literature from time to time. Well on top of the zeitgeist as always.


Nah, i said that penny etc put them off so they look at these others.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 30, 2013)

the jew 1%. 

i'm glad that i'm a bit older now so i can deal with this stuff rationally - when i first started to come into political activity and already had nationalist zionist and anti-muslim views this could have been a fucking disaster. i'm glad i was born when i was and not a few years later and have had time to "develop my consciousness" (sorry) 

so fucking dangerous this stuff.


----------



## phildwyer (Apr 30, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I gave up on that 99/1% stuff when I started hearing things like "The Jew 1%" get bandied around online. Still see it in the Socialist Party's literature from time to time.


 
Evidence?


----------



## leyton96 (Apr 30, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Evidence?


 
He's right (about using 99 vs 1% stuff, not the Jew 1% stuff just to be clear). It's used occasionally in leaflets and the paper. I think it's always used in the context of a broader explanation of class politics though, to be fair.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Apr 30, 2013)

leyton96 said:


> He's right (about using 99 vs 1% stuff, *not the Jew 1% stuff just to be clear)*.


 
Yeah I can't stress that bit enough. Apologies if I didn't make it clear


----------



## muscovyduck (Apr 30, 2013)

On the subject of literature (also because I can't find the art & design thread)
http://cosmarxpolitan.tumblr.com/ look what I found!


----------



## Casually Red (Apr 30, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> On the subject of literature (also because I can't find the art & design thread)
> http://cosmarxpolitan.tumblr.com/ look what I found!


 
_My boyfriend was a counter revolutionary_- COULD IT HAPPEN TO YOU


----------



## DotCommunist (Apr 30, 2013)

the asiatic mode of production and your butt


----------



## equationgirl (Apr 30, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> Who was that Daily Mail journalist who reckoned she had all sorts of problems because she was so beautiful?


Samantha Brick.


----------



## BigTom (Apr 30, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Not to dissimilar to how Occupy Manchester ended up (I know friends who were parts of groups 3 and 4), and it was soon left mostly to 1 and 2 - people I dub Zeitgeististas and the David Icke fan club, with a smattering of "freemen" thrown in for good measure, with a continually diminishing number of hangers on in group 3 desperately trying to reclaim Occupy before realising it was an exercise in futility.
> 
> 
> 
> The "the 99% vs the 1%" dichotomy bugged me from day one, it seemed extremely simplistic and ignorant of the way capitalism and the class system domineers over our lives.


 
Yep. Birmingham was overflowing with freemen. I asked them why they hadn't got their nobles together to go and petition the king yet, as the Magna Carta clause they like to think still exists allows them to do. They said they had their nobles but couldn't tell me why nothing had happened and why we were still not free 

I think there's a fundamental difference between the zeitgeist/project venus lot and some of the other conspiraloons though, in that the zeitgeist/project venus lot were genuinely looking for an alternative to capitalism - a "resource based economy" built around an open source software computer system that you inputed all the resources of the world into and it decided how to allocate them, coupled with complete automation of things so no-one has to work... a technocracy and a utopia. They thought it would mean freedom but couldn't get to grips with questions of what happens when you can't automate a process and how are decisions made about the software programming. Really poor but very different to the ron paul type conspiraloons who wanted more capitalism.


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 30, 2013)

leyton96 said:


> He's right (about using 99 vs 1% stuff, not the Jew 1% stuff just to be clear). It's used occasionally in leaflets and the paper. I think it's always used in the context of a broader explanation of class politics though, to be fair.


 
yes and i'm sure i've seen taaffe etc say that the idea is problematic and needs to be explained in a broader context of class etc.

I've got other issues but the party were pretty good on occupy i thought.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 30, 2013)

_And what taafe says, goes._


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> _And what taafe says, goes._


 
lol, nah it doesn't. to be honest i've not been to any SP stuff in ages. i've got quite a few issues with it to be honest. I still think it's probably the best group out there and there's a lot of stuff they get right but I'm not convinced any more that their way of doing things is "the way forward for the class" if you get what I mean


----------



## frogwoman (Apr 30, 2013)

I've still got loads of respect for lots of people in the party though, and there is loads of stuff that the SP has got right, they're way ahead of most trot groups in terms of grassroots campaigning and getting stuff done. It has been quite a big decision for me and I still feel quite conflicted over it but there were a few decisions over the last year or so that I really didn't agree with, got serious reservations about a lot of the PCS/RMT stuff for example.


----------



## Blagsta (Apr 30, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Yep. Birmingham was overflowing with freemen. I asked them why they hadn't got their nobles together to go and petition the king yet, as the Magna Carta clause they like to think still exists allows them to do. They said they had their nobles but couldn't tell me why nothing had happened and why we were still not free
> 
> I think there's a fundamental difference between the zeitgeist/project venus lot and some of the other conspiraloons though, in that the zeitgeist/project venus lot were genuinely looking for an alternative to capitalism - a "resource based economy" built around an open source software computer system that you inputed all the resources of the world into and it decided how to allocate them, coupled with complete automation of things so no-one has to work... a technocracy and a utopia. They thought it would mean freedom but couldn't get to grips with questions of what happens when you can't automate a process and how are decisions made about the software programming. Really poor but very different to the ron paul type conspiraloons who wanted more capitalism.


 

The "resource based economy" lot (wtf does that mean anyhow?  No one could ever explain it to me) reminds me of 19th Century utopian socialism.


----------



## butchersapron (Apr 30, 2013)

It is deliberately chosen not to explain anything but just to be counterposed to a money/profit based economy. It's PR. The utopian socialists were far far in advance of these money raking futurologists. They recognised production and use-value, made it the centre of their approach.


----------



## treelover (May 1, 2013)

maybe we can go back to the time of beards and fine moustaches...


----------



## coley (May 1, 2013)

treelover said:


> maybe we can go back to the time of beards and fine moustaches...



Sexist, sorry can't do smileys, might need the bog


----------



## butchersapron (May 1, 2013)

treelover said:


> maybe we can go back to the time of beards and fine moustaches...


Name them.


----------



## JimW (May 1, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Samantha Brick.


Sad really, because her parents, Arthur and Eva, were smashing folks who really threw themselves into the struggle.


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 1, 2013)

That's Freddie Mercury third from the left.


----------



## BigTom (May 1, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> The "resource based economy" lot (wtf does that mean anyhow?  No one could ever explain it to me) reminds me of 19th Century utopian socialism.



They were pretty vague about a lot of things really, but I think butcher's has nailed it. Resource as opposed to money based economy. 
They continue to be spectacularly bad at expressing their ideas though, iirc you were at the big anti cuts in January where Nick stood up and spoke and the first words out of his mouth were "what we need is more unemployment" 
But had he started by explaining he believed automation was reducing the need for human Labour to the point where full automation was realisable and that means we need to argue for full unemployment he might have got a bit further than he did.


----------



## Blagsta (May 1, 2013)

Idiots.


----------



## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

BigTom said:


> I think there's a fundamental difference between the zeitgeist/project venus lot and some of the other conspiraloons though, in that the zeitgeist/project venus lot were genuinely looking for an alternative to capitalism - a "resource based economy" built around an open source software computer system that you inputed all the resources of the world into and it decided how to allocate them, coupled with complete automation of things so no-one has to work... a technocracy and a utopia. They thought it would mean freedom but couldn't get to grips with questions of what happens when you can't automate a process and how are decisions made about the software programming. Really poor but very different to the ron paul type conspiraloons who wanted more capitalism.


 
There do share several common beliefs though, such as that 9/11 was an inside job, the government is poisoning us with chemtrails and water fluoridation, vaccines kill you and "Big Pharma" is covering up the truth, and all this is so the Illuminanti, Freemasons and/or NWO can enslave us under a one world government.


----------



## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I've still got loads of respect for lots of people in the party though, and there is loads of stuff that the SP has got right, they're way ahead of most trot groups in terms of grassroots campaigning and getting stuff done. It has been quite a big decision for me and I still feel quite conflicted over it but there were a few decisions over the last year or so that I really didn't agree with, got serious reservations about a lot of the PCS/RMT stuff for example.


Last year I helped a bit with the TUSC campaign in the Manchester Central by-election. The people there seemed pretty sound and it was good to know them, sadly when the election came we fell way below the mark. I agree TUSC aren't perfect but at present they seem like one of the more credible left alternatives, although hopefully TUSC/SP will get on board Left Unity, which seems to be getting somewhere because it's more than the same tired old leftie hacks.

But the SP/TUSC do seem to at least do a better job of engaging with the grassroots than the SWP do, although they seem a bit blinkered in focusing primarily on the unionised workplace, which is just one aspect of the working class as a whole.


----------



## Casually Red (May 1, 2013)

treelover said:


> maybe we can go back to the time of beards and fine moustaches...


 
the hipsters have got there before us


----------



## Blagsta (May 1, 2013)

Tom A said:


> There do share several common beliefs though, such as that 9/11 was an inside job, the government is poisoning us with chemtrails and water fluoridation, vaccines kill you and "Big Pharma" is covering up the truth, and all this is so the Illuminanti, Freemasons and/or NWO can enslave us under a one world government.



My first visit to Birmingham Occupy, when I asked them what it was about, I was told it was protesting about chemtrails and the fake queen.


----------



## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> My first visit to Birmingham Occupy, when I asked them what it was about, I was told it was protesting about chemtrails and the fake queen.


That pretty much sums up pretty much every Occupy in the UK outside of London (although even there they were still a major presence there, and that didn't stop Occupy London being full of other problematic shite). Leeds seemed to have it together for a while, the one time I was there Billy Bragg played there for a bit and there were some trade unionists there too, but they fizzled into nothing quite quickly, it was quite a small group anyway.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

In Dublin we didn't have to put up with too much of a Freemen/conspiracy nut element at Occupy, although there were definitely a few involved. The local craziness was mostly provided by a certain strand of the anarchoids and a few continental Europeans heavily influenced by the indignados, who shared a mutual loathing of anything reeking of politics or unions. That bunch were really outstandingly self-righteous, convinced that they were the change, that what they were doing was brand new, that everybody else was outdated etc. Truly tiresome wankers.

To be fair, the non-braindead local anarchists and anarchoids were some of the more effective people arguing against those clowns. The SWP made a particularly ham-fisted intervention, arguing thing that were basically correct in a way that served only to create wild paranoia and suspicion of a takeover.

Eventually there was a split, essentially along fucking morons / not fucking morons lines.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 1, 2013)

Speaking of Clowns, here's an article on Jacobin http://jacobinmag.com/2012/02/race-war-or-murdering-your-parents-a-left-debate/ with extra tweets by Malcolm "big shoes, bulbous red nose" Harris. Link taken from this, interesting, article http://mattbruenig.com/2012/05/10/purity-leftism/

Want some more? OK Then. http://thenewinquiry.com/features/obituary-borders-books-and-music/ The New Inq-wirry. Here's Nathan Barley himself. Check this out for bollocks.




> The Palo Alto Borders was my psychogeographical center. It seems strange to say that of a store, never mind an outlet of a giant and mostly uniform chain, but there was nowhere else I was so free to grow up.


 




> Mostly when we went to Borders we would pick an uninhabited aisle (Christian Lit was probably the most popular), sit down, and read aloud from the most outlandish book we could find.


 
Wild. Behold, Capital, and tremble.



> Why didn’t we go to a library? Or a park? Because public spaces were custodial. Librarians looked like teachers, and we didn’t want to be shushed. In Palo Alto on the weekends, the parks are marked off for Little League or AYSO or youth lacrosse games during the day. We were trying to avoid the PTA mafia, not waltz into their lair. And just try hanging out in parks at night without risking a chat with the police.


 
You can almost taste the ennui. The rest of the article's that same overwhelmingly narcissistic confessional shite that every fucking no-mark who's lived an upper-middle class life of generic Daria-esque bullshit feels everyone ought to read. It's fucking dreadful, way worse than even Penny has managed. Maybe they should spend some fucking effort editing their blogs beacuse that one has a huge section that's repeated in the middle because clearly no-one proof-reads Malcolm Harris, not even Malcolm Harris.


----------



## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

I mean this guy is dubbing on the thread yet comes out with this.  






'I would encourage generalised venom towards Jewish and Indian subcontinent Americans if it worked'.??


----------



## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

Once again, what is this stuff?

"On Friday afternoons in middle school, groups (by then co-ed) that could easily hit double digits would wander the blocks lazily, not having yet discovered the booze, drugs, and sex that would later send us to smoky basements in houses temporarily without parents. Borders was the assumed launching place for any downtown meetup; we learned each other’s waiting aisles. On nights we felt enterprising, we’d gather a group for capture the flag and use Borders’ two levels as opposing territories.
As a romantic destination, Borders lacks a certain ambiance, but it was the scene of countless half-dates and more awkward proto-flirting than the dances at the private girls’ school. The human sexuality aisle was our real sex-ed class, a copy of Sextrology —probably unsellable from all the adolescent finger smudges—taught us the various ways bodies fit together and why the punch lines of certain jokes heard years ago on playgrounds made sense. We read each other’s sexual horoscopes loudly, and usually failed to stifle giggles when an actual customer walked by.
As half-dates became the real thing, Borders was still the place I felt most at home, surrounded by plenty of books I could jabber about nervously. I still remember making out in one of the fiction aisles with my high-school girlfriend. "


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 1, 2013)

Innit. I know that type. Oh yes.


----------



## gawkrodger (May 1, 2013)

I'm guessing this has already been posted about 5 pages back, but in case it hasn't


----------



## Favelado (May 1, 2013)

I think I'd get kicked out of most of the bookshops round here if I spent all day there with a hard-on.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Speaking of Clowns, here's an article on Jacobin http://jacobinmag.com/2012/02/race-war-or-murdering-your-parents-a-left-debate/ with extra tweets by Malcolm "big shoes, bulbous red nose" Harris. Link taken from this, interesting, article http://mattbruenig.com/2012/05/10/purity-leftism/
> 
> Want some more? OK Then. http://thenewinquiry.com/features/obituary-borders-books-and-music/ The New Inq-wirry. Here's Nathan Barley himself. Check this out for bollocks.
> 
> ...


 
Youth - IN REVOLT!


----------



## emanymton (May 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Once again, what is this stuff?
> 
> "On Friday afternoons in middle school, groups (by then co-ed) that could easily hit double digits would wander the blocks lazily, not having yet discovered the booze, drugs, and sex that would later send us to smoky basements in houses temporarily without parents. Borders was the assumed launching place for any downtown meetup; we learned each other’s waiting aisles. On nights we felt enterprising, we’d gather a group for capture the flag and use Borders’ two levels as opposing territories.
> As a romantic destination, Borders lacks a certain ambiance, but it was the scene of countless half-dates and more awkward proto-flirting than the dances at the private girls’ school. The human sexuality aisle was our real sex-ed class, a copy of Sextrology —probably unsellable from all the adolescent finger smudges—taught us the various ways bodies fit together and why the punch lines of certain jokes heard years ago on playgrounds made sense. We read each other’s sexual horoscopes loudly, and usually failed to stifle giggles when an actual customer walked by.
> As half-dates became the real thing, Borders was still the place I felt most at home, surrounded by plenty of books I could jabber about nervously. I still remember making out in one of the fiction aisles with my high-school girlfriend. "


Fuck all those times I have been to Waterstones I have been doing it wrong!


----------



## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

On privilege issues here is part of anti-body chauvinism "fat acceptance movement" delineating acceptable behaviour from its allies ie anyone not fat, after questioning this slogan:







http://thisisthinprivilege.tumblr.com/post/48885126420/fatanarchy-kittyoftheyear-uhhh-no-there-is

"The first rule of ALLY CLUB: You do not talk in ALLY CLUB.

The second rule of ALLY CLUB: You DO NOT TALK in ALLY CLUB. 

The third rule of ALLY CLUB: If a marginalized person says STOP, the argument is over.

The fourth rule of ALLY CLUB: Ganging up on marginalized people and/or their blogs with a bunch of your privileged buddies means you’re out of ALLY CLUB. If marginalized people come after you in droves? YOU’VE FUCKED UP. APOLOGIZE. DON’T EXPECT TO BE FORGIVEN.

The fifth rule of ALLY CLUB: If you ping a bunch of marginalized people with the same bullshit “honest question, guise!” then you’re out of ALLY CLUB and automatically inducted into TROLL CLUB.

The sixth rule of ALLY CLUB: No “what about me,” no “but privileged people don’t have perfect lives, either.”

The seventh rule of ALLY CLUB: If you fuck with marginalized people you do not get to say when the argument is over. It’s over when the marginalized people you fucked with say it’s over.

The eighth rule of ALLY CLUB: If this is your first time reading a social justice blog run by a certain group of marginalized people, DO NOT SUBMIT SHIT."

All allies are allowed to do/criticised for "being a shitty human being" for not doing is repeating parrot-like what those in the intersection are saying in general. Any disagreement or discussion of the sorts of tactics or messages that might be applicable can be brought to an immediate halt by: "If a marginalized person says STOP, the argument is over."

In these circumstances it's inevitable that people who do not feel they are being listened to or that having a marginalised status=more listening time, will create their own privilege axes: asylum seekers to wield an 'immigration privilege' to have some power against other immigrants, ex illegal immigrants to accuse legal immigrants of 'legal immigration privilege', 'dark' West Africans might begin stressing 'colourism' to stop middle-class mixed race people at the top, non-fertile women sensing 'child-discussion privilege' amongst mothers, young offenders accusing other working-class young people of 'outside bars privilege'.

Working-class society pulled into permanent coalition with middle class, becoming a large snowglobe of bitterness and recrimination _aimed at_ groups and sub-groups also oppressed.


----------



## emanymton (May 1, 2013)

Most people think I look much younger that I actually am, this clearly puts me in a marginalized group. I just need to think up a collective name for 'people who look younger than they are' and then no one who looks their age will ever be able to tell me I am wrong about anything ever again.


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

Palo Alto is probably the most expensive place in the USA, an exclusive zone for high-rate engineers and executives in Silicon Valley. In rich districts, libraries put on events and have discussion rooms. Yet "librarians looked like teachers"


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## andysays (May 1, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Most people think I look much younger that I actually am, this clearly puts me in a marginalized group. I just need to think up a collective name for 'people who look younger than they are' and then no one who looks their age will ever be able to tell me I am wrong about anything ever again.


 
"Youth, after all, is not a permanent condition, and a clash of generations is not so fundamentally dangerous to the art of government as would be a clash between rulers and ruled"​ 
As anyone with a copy of the first album by The Clash could tell you...


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Most people think I look much younger that I actually am, this clearly puts me in a marginalized group. I just need to think up a collective name for 'people who look younger than they are' and then no one who looks their age will ever be able to tell me I am wrong about anything ever again.


 
Yes, but the general wider marginalised group:- youth fighting middle-age privilege - will resist your struggles ferociously because you are not calling for the abolition of all age-related barriers, and hence muddying the issue. They will accuse you of all the more virulent anti-youthism in an attempt to confound you and retain you as an ally. 

This what it amounts to retaining allies.


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## Idris2002 (May 1, 2013)

andysays said:


> "Youth, after all, is not a permanent condition, and a clash of generations is not so fundamentally dangerous to the art of government as would be a clash between rulers and ruled"​
> As anyone with a copy of the first album by The Clash could tell you...


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Exarcheia is really hip. How come she never hangs out in places like Merthyr Tydfil..


 
An imaginary hanging out on Mars is more important?


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> On privilege issues here is part of anti-body chauvinism "fat acceptance movement" delineating acceptable behaviour from its allies ie anyone not fat, after questioning this slogan:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


In other words, all people that aren't considered oppressed in the same way that any Oppressed Individual™ is oppressed in are considered guilty until proven innocent, and need to continuously abide by a set of arbitrary commandments that a certain group of oppressed people (whom by default represent ALL people facing that oppression) in order to be considered worthy of allydom, which can be instantly revoked the moment you say or do something that hurts the feelings of one of these great and holy Oppressed People™. Also you have no recourse should you find you get upset, or merely disagree with what an oppressed person says, and heaven help you if you think that something that's deemed oppressive may not be as awful as the Oppressed Individual™ makes out, because that's "derailing", a cardinal sin which results in instantaneous expulsion from Ally Club, resulting in the tarring and feathering of the offending privileged person, and a placard strung around their neck saying "Evil Enabler of Oppression". Remember, the people in the oppressed intersection are ALWAYS right, and if they say it's oppressive, it is, no ifs or buts. Four legs good, two legs bad!

Cheers andysays for the edit suggestion


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

Hang on a second. I know that the intergalactic proletariat does not concern itself with mere fairness, but Harris makes the wealth of the place pretty clear in his sketch of Palo Alto. For all its self-regard, his piece is a hostile sketch of a wealthy enclave, of a place that represents a kind of pinnacle of the upper middle class suburban dream, not a claim that it's the norm.


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## Blagsta (May 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Once again, what is this stuff?
> 
> "On Friday afternoons in middle school, groups (by then co-ed) that could easily hit double digits would wander the blocks lazily, not having yet discovered the booze, drugs, and sex that would later send us to smoky basements in houses temporarily without parents. Borders was the assumed launching place for any downtown meetup; we learned each other’s waiting aisles. On nights we felt enterprising, we’d gather a group for capture the flag and use Borders’ two levels as opposing territories.
> As a romantic destination, Borders lacks a certain ambiance, but it was the scene of countless half-dates and more awkward proto-flirting than the dances at the private girls’ school. The human sexuality aisle was our real sex-ed class, a copy of Sextrology —probably unsellable from all the adolescent finger smudges—taught us the various ways bodies fit together and why the punch lines of certain jokes heard years ago on playgrounds made sense. We read each other’s sexual horoscopes loudly, and usually failed to stifle giggles when an actual customer walked by.
> As half-dates became the real thing, Borders was still the place I felt most at home, surrounded by plenty of books I could jabber about nervously. I still remember making out in one of the fiction aisles with my high-school girlfriend. "


 
I'm gonna try that next time I'm in Bookmarks.


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Hang on a second. I know that the intergalactic proletariat does not concern itself with mere fairness, but Harris makes the wealth of the place pretty clear in his sketch of Palo Alto.


 
Oppose the capitalist oil industry because the people in Dallas hated each other and tried to commit suicide?  

That's the level Malcolm Harris's article is at.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 1, 2013)




----------



## rekil (May 1, 2013)

Crabapple bidding to expand her brand.



> Shell Game was covered by the New Republic, Rolling Stone, Fast Company, Wired, Reuters, the American Reader and many more. The openings were attended by hundreds of people –– many of whom, through their support of Shell Game’s kickstarter, made this whole project possible.
> 
> I’m starting to think about my next project, which will explore ideas of explicitly digital culture and privacy. I may even work with an institution or cultural organization to bring it to life on the largest scale possible.
> 
> ...


She made 10k for each drawing plus the kickstarter mug cash? Is that right? Cor. Amazing scenes.


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

As a footnote, I actively avoid any political links that are from Tumblr, since that place is just a festering ground for this toxic nonsense. I once knew and was Facebook friends with a trans* person whom when asked if all cispeople are effectively guilty until proven innocent, was to say that they were. I wasn't sure if they were joking or not, but later on I encountered the "Die Cis Scum" meme (if you fancy looking at more car crashes, I dare you to Google it), and whilst I wasn't stupid enough to argue "cisphobia" or "reverse oppression", made my feelings clear about how short minded, judgemental, and just plain pathetic and "full of shit" it was. This same person fully approved of this meme, and later on when I put as my status "die people whom go die X scum" was to say that "I think your status update is really full of shit". They disappeared from FB after that, and it took me a while to find out if I was unfriended or not since they started a new profile (which I wasn't invited to be friends with).

I acknowledge that this person may have been under a lot of tension due to unknown factors, and any recent, transphobic experience may have induced them to lash out at the nearest cisgender person whom got in their way, but I still feel this is not the way to go about building a better society for ALL people, regardless of how relatively oppressed or privileged they currently are. Sometimes I wonder if when people go "that's oppressive", what they really mean is "this offends me personally and I am going make you feel shit for making me feel that way".


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## andysays (May 1, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


>


 
Revolution is an opportunity to sell lots of trousers - Malcolm McLaren's Law


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Oppose the capitalist oil industry because the people in Dallas hated each other and tried to commit suicide?
> 
> That's the level Malcolm Harris's article is at.


 
Well, no, not quite. But it certainly does reflect a bored kids take on the pinnacle of the suburban dream rather than a more serious critique of capitalism. Which is why the "Daria" comments strike home more effectively than pointing out that Palo Alto is a wealthy enclave.


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## chilango (May 1, 2013)

copliker said:


> Crabapple bidding to expand her brand.
> 
> 
> She made 10k for each drawing plus the kickstarter mug cash? Is that right? Cor. Amazing scenes.




I note she does this AFTER she's made the money.

...and I presume she isn't giving away the physical originals.

Rubbish.


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## Idris2002 (May 1, 2013)

andysays said:


> Revolution is an opportunity to sell lots of trousers - Malcolm McLaren's Law


I think that's Vivienne Westwood's law. . .


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Sometimes I wonder if when people go "that's oppressive", what they really mean is "this offends me personally and I am going make you feel shit for making me feel that way".


 
To the privilege/intersectional view of the world, all oppression consists primarily of personal experience of marginalisation. Which neatly confuses the results of oppressive structures with their essence.


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## andysays (May 1, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I think that's Vivienne Westwood's law. . .


 
McLaren has been quoted as saying he invented the Sex Pistols in order to sell lots of trousers.

John Lydon has expressed a contrary position...


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## andysays (May 1, 2013)

Tom A said:


> In other words, all people with privilege are considered guilty until proven innocent, and need to continuously abide by a set of arbitrary commandments that a certain group of oppressed people (whom by default represent ALL people facing that oppression) in order to be considered worthy of allydom, which can be instantly revoked the moment you say or do something that hurts the feelings of one of these great and holy Oppressed People™. Also you have no recourse should you find you are get upset, or even disagree with what an oppressed person says, and heaven help you if you think that something that's deemed oppressive may not so awful, because that's "derailing", a cardinal sin which results in instantaneous expulsion from Ally Club, resulting in the tarring and feathering of the offending privileged person, and a placard strung around their neck saying "Evil Enabler of Oppression". Remember, the people in the oppressed intersection are ALWAYS right, and if they say it's oppressive, it is, no ifs or buts. Four legs good, two legs bad!


 
Should perhaps read

"all people who I don't judge to be oppressed in the way I define myself as being are considered guilty until proven innocent..."​​but other than that, spot on


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> To the privilege/intersectional view of the world, all oppression consists primarily of personal experience of marginalisation. Which neatly confuses the results of oppressive structures with their essence.


Technically I'm an "oppressed person" - as I explained a few posts back, I'm disabled because I am on the autistic spectrum. True, if people were to call me a "spazz" or a "mong", I would probably have a lot of unpleasant to say to and about them. However, I don't go looking for disablism everywhere I go, although I will highlight issues where a situation could have been made less problematic if people took proper account my disability, and made the effort to include me, but I don't want patronising pity either.

Meanwhile, I look at the opinions of autistic rights and disabled people's rights activists, and it seems their whole lives are dedicated towards telling people what a horrible life they lead because "the disablist system" keeps them down. I am not denying it sucks to be disabled, I am not arguing we shouldn't protest in order to fight for our rights, but I hate this "us and them" mentality, and I personally have more in common with my "neurotypical" friends than most of the people on the autistic spectrum that I have so far encountered.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

chilango said:


> I note she does this AFTER she's made the money.
> 
> ...and I presume she isn't giving away the physical originals.
> 
> Rubbish.


 
In fairness, (and I realise that I'm coming across like I'm defending these people which isn't really my intention), that's more than most professional artists do. It's fucking tough to make a living as a professional artist. It's one long grind of begging for grants and patronage, unless you are one of a handful at the very, very top.


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## chilango (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> In fairness, (and I realise that I'm coming across like I'm defending these people which isn't really my intention), that's more than most professional artists do. It's fucking tough to make a living as a professional artist. It's one long grind of begging for grants and patronage, unless you are one of a handful at the very, very top.



You don't need to tell me that...


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

Tom A said:


> As a footnote, I actively avoid any political links that are from Tumblr, since that place is just a festering ground for this toxic nonsense.


 
My fave is http://thisiswhiteprivilege.tumblr.com which has of course blogged the rules of how to be an ally. 
Chock full of 'hey allies, never speak, only repeat' alongside hundreds of social circumstances of people making assumptions of various kinds, repeated in the same _white privilege is _setting:

_White privilege is being welcome at any and every event on campus for different cultural groups and not having someone think you are lost because you are darker than beige and decided to support a friend and check out something new. Because obviously you don’t go here and must be visiting._ 

It has thousands of followers (try one demanding anyone middle-class shut up and you won't get far).

At the other end of the spectrum you get people who parody it implying all its concerns are nonsense with stuff like this: 




> thisiseveryoneexceptnerdsprivilege.tumblr.com
> You’ll talk about the persecution from jocks and the rejection from popular girls before they stole and ruin your culture by making casual video games and movie adaptations.
> 
> fightthewaifupersecution.tumblr.com
> ...


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

chilango said:


> You don't need to tell me that...


 
That your line of work? Didn't know that.


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## J Ed (May 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> My fave is http://thisiswhiteprivilege.tumblr.com which has of course blogged the rules of how to be an ally.


 
Wow, almost every single post is rude and mean spirited.

Tallies with own real-life experiences of these people, I'm yet to meet someone who subscribes to privilege theory who isn't a nasty piece of work. It really seems to attract bullies, not surprising really.


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## el-ahrairah (May 1, 2013)

i guess it's a natural response in many ways - we see it enough times on urban when a man decides to tell women what their feminism should be.  it's a way of trying to deal with that shit.  but not really a good way.  it suggests that people have given up on debate and discussion, or just kicking out / blocking idiots.  understandable, but not right-minded.


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## chilango (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> That your line of work? Didn't know that.



Yes.


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## andysays (May 1, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Cheers andysays for the edit suggestion


 
You're welcome.

How does that tagging thing work, BTW?


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

Another thing I find completely irksome (and tried to become a proponent of before I realised that it was, in the main, bollocks), is the concept of "cultural appropriation", which is apparently a racist attitude which white (who else) people adopt by displaying the symbols of an oppressed culture. Examples being the white person with dreadlocks even though he isn't a Rastafarian (okay, it increases the probability that they are a middle-class hipster douche but that's by the by), the use of the pentagram/pentacle by those whom aren't pagan (even though neopagans never had the monopoly on that symbol in the first place), wearing Native American headdresses as part of fancy dress costumes, which is quite popular on Halloween in the US, which supposedly acts to degrade the symbols of a highly marginalised people - although in that instance I somewhat feel that they have a point, although all the same, banning ignorant idiots from wearing headdresses isn't going to suddenly eliminate the terrible poverty which the majority of Native Americans suffer under.


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

andysays said:


> You're welcome.
> 
> How does that tagging thing work, BTW?


You place an @ before the name of the person you want to tag.


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## andysays (May 1, 2013)

Tom A said:


> You place an @ before the name of the person you want to tag.


 
Like this? Tom A


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

That's it.


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## J Ed (May 1, 2013)

> White privilege is being able to say “Everyone knows that people die in Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, you name it. Sadly and regretfully that’s what become reality over there. It does not make it any less evil and pointless, it is what it is over there and luckily, bombs are not integral part of everyday life in Boston” to a group of PoC’s who try to raise the issue of unlawful & often unheard treatment/killing of PoC’s in other parts of the world as well as in the States…
> Because apparently, bombings/death/mistreatment of PoC’s inside & outside the US is a part of their life & people should just get used it…


 
What a bizarre dichotomy, actually this bit reminds me of a few discussions I've read/heard recently at my university. Student socialists informed by privilege theory often seem to be very surprised when Muslims they consider allies on Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan do not fall into their dichotomised perception of the world as falling into righteous Third World (especially Muslims as a monolithic bloc) and imperialist West. Seen similar discussions surrounding Western role in the Balkans, turns out that Islamists think it isn't imperialism when they think they are benefiting, weird isn't it?


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## andysays (May 1, 2013)

andysays said:


> Like this? Tom A


 
Well, well, well. You can teach an old dog new tricks...


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## J Ed (May 1, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Another thing I find completely irksome (and tried to become a proponent of before I realised that it was, in the main, bollocks), is the concept of "cultural appropriation", which is apparently a racist attitude which white (who else) people adopt by displaying the symbols of an oppressed culture. Examples being the white person with dreadlocks even though he isn't a Rastafarian (okay, it increases the probability that they are a middle-class hipster douche but that's by the by), the use of the pentagram/pentacle by those whom aren't pagan (even though neopagans never had the monopoly on that symbol in the first place), wearing Native American headdresses as part of fancy dress costumes, which is quite popular on Halloween in the US, which supposedly acts to degrade the symbols of a highly marginalised people - although in that instance I somewhat feel that they have a point, although all the same, banning ignorant idiots from wearing headdresses isn't going to suddenly eliminate the terrible poverty which the majority of Native Americans suffer under.


 
Spot on, it's always funny to note how a lot of the people who complain about cultural appropriation are middle-class people appropriating working-class fashion. One of the people I know who is keenest on exposing 'cultural appropriation' is middle-class but has taken to wearing a combination of trackies and a flatcap.


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What a bizarre dichotomy, actually this bit reminds me of a few discussions I've read/heard recently at my university. Student socialists informed by privilege theory often seem to be very surprised when Muslims they consider allies on Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan do not fall into their dichotomised perception of the world as falling into righteous Third World (especially Muslims as a monolithic bloc) and imperialist West. Seen similar discussions surrounding Western role in the Balkans, turns out that Islamists think it isn't imperialism when they think they are benefiting, weird isn't it?


I used to have some quite bitter arguments (including when I was on Urban the first time round) about how the Left is allying with some pretty unpleasant and reactionary people in the name of opposing the bloodshed in [insert newsworthy Middle Eastern country here], and very soon you are deemed "Islamophobic" for stating that these Islamists, if given the chance, would do a lot of unpleasant things to the people they ruled, both Muslim and non-Muslim alike.


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Tallies with own real-life experiences of these people, I'm yet to meet someone who subscribes to privilege theory who isn't a nasty piece of work. It really seems to attract bullies, not surprising really.


 
They've just won the argument there, that's your x,y,x privilege shining through. You've proved you haven't progressed from "being a shitty human being" at all, hence you are "a shitty human being".


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## Delroy Booth (May 1, 2013)

Yeah I can see a need for the white privilige thing, even if the contributions are often either banal or trolling or badly thought out. The fat privilige one though, that's where it ends up. And there's no use saying "ah but that's privilige theory being abused" really, is it? Coz my worry isn't that it's the abuse of a good theory, my problem is that this _isn't_ an abuse of theory, it's consistent with the same line of thinking as the whiteprivilige one, as are the Tumblr accounts where people sexually identify as pokemon characters and denounces others privilige for not taking it seriously, as are the people who identify as a piece of toast and discuss toast privilige. I'm not saying that skin-colour racism is on a par with the oppression felt by some of the waifs and strays found on the limits of tumblr, just the logic used to justify them is the same. People get into this line of thinking and it becomes really dogmatic, and those who raise any objection to the dogma are dismissed arbritrarily on the basis of their skin colour or gender, the takfiri of the liberal-left, and this leads to the formation of a crude heirachy of legitimate opinion based (usually) on crude skin-colour racism, crude liberal "more women in the boardroom" feminism and other things that were once more honestly called political correctness until it went out of fashion. Intersectionality and privilige might've had roots in idea's like Maoist white-skin privilige, and might be grounded in good, materialist class politics, but when you see it simplistically grafted onto vapid post-class estabslishment liberal identity politics it's very dangerous. This is a mistake and a danger and I point it out repeatedly not because I'm desperately clinging onto my white privilige, but because I'm concerned the damage this will do. Politics that unite people are shared material necessities and beyond sectarianism.

The other worrying thing is the assumption that being an ally must = uncritical and total support. That's not my idea of being an ally. If I were present at a meeting of feminists and their allies, and one of those speaking started saying the holocaust was a hoax, would I in that situation be unable to criticise that? There's literally no means by which anyone can criticise what's said unless you fit certain racial and gender criteria, basically implying that if you are oppressed you can remain unchallenged no matter how bigoted your statements unless someone who outranks you on the oppression heirachy calls you out. The idea this stuff can call itself anarchism is hilarious, but we've already seen the fringes of the British supposedly class-based anarchism capitulate to this stuff rather than meaningfully interrogate it.

That's not how you take people seriously. What kind of ally would keep their mouths shut in and pretend all these problems just don't exist? Do you not think if people who are self-identifying as either feminists or allies, anti-racists, far-left etc are having misgivings here then the rest of society reaction will be any better? Or it's just all their fault? If you can't win over us then good luck with everyone else.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Yeah I can see a need for the white privilige thing, even if the contributions are often either banal or trolling or badly thought out.


 
Why on Earth would you make that concession? As opposed to saying that you can see the need to oppose people being smug, overbearing and racist? The whole point of the "white privilege thing" is that it isn't just anti-racism, it's a particular theory of racism, and "seeing the need for it" makes it impossible to effectively oppose the consequences and corollaries of it.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 1, 2013)

Middle class privilege is being able to push privilege theory to hide the amount of privilege you actually have.


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

> The other worrying thing is the assumption that being an ally must = uncritical and total support.


Exactly.



> That's not my idea of being an ally. If I were present at a meeting of feminists and their allies, and one of those speaking started saying the holocaust was a hoax, would I in that situation be unable to criticise that? There's literally no means by which anyone can criticise what's said unless you fit certain racial and gender criteria, basically implying that if you are oppressed you can remain unchallenged no matter how bigoted your statements unless someone who outranks you on the oppression heirachy calls you out.


Substitute "feminist" with "Muslim" and you'll very soon encounter people whom are willing to tolerate Holocaust denial (and other forms of anti-Semitism), not to mention patriarchy (enforced gender segregation in Stop the War Coalition meetings anyone?), and will readily accuse you of "Islamophobia" for calling them out.



> The idea this stuff can call itself anarchism is hilarious, but we've already seen the fringes of the British supposedly class-based anarchism capitulate to this stuff rather than meaningfully interrogate it.


Been there, done that, got unfriended by people on Facebook (and have unfriended people myself), and the less said about lifestyle anarchists/activists, the better.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 1, 2013)

Tom A said:


> although in that instance I somewhat feel that they have a point, although all the same, banning ignorant idiots from wearing headdresses isn't going to suddenly eliminate the terrible poverty which the majority of Native Americans suffer under.


 
There is a point, it's a legitimate position no-one dispute that. Same with bonfire night in this country. But banning the ignorant from wearing headresses isn't goint to eliminate any of the material and structural problems except in the most minor individualistic way, but it'll make the people who do the calling out feel good and superior, like going to Live 8 made all those worthy middle-class feel good and superior I mean hey they weren't just listening to a few bands they were materially helping, right? It's not just competitive language-policing it's smashing the kyriachy.


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Middle class privilege is being able to push privilege theory to hide the amount of privilege you actually have.


This.


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## Delroy Booth (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Why on Earth would you make that concession? As opposed to saying that you can see the need to oppose people being smug, overbearing and racist? The whole point of the "white privilege thing" is that it isn't just anti-racism, it's a particular theory of racism, and "seeing the need for it" makes it impossible to effectively oppose the consequences and corollaries of it.


 
Because it's got to be a component of fighting racism, an awareness of how deeply engrained racism is into the day-to-day lives of people. An awareness of that for people who otherwise wouldn't have to worry about it isn't by any means a bad thing. The idea that it presents a emanciptory act in itself is wrong however.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Because it's got to be a component of fighting racism, an awareness of how deeply engrained racism is into the day-to-day lives of people.


 
Why would you imagine that this is something that privilege theory is essential to? Do you really think that nobody ever noticed that racism is "deeply engrained" in "the day to day lives of people" before tumblr existed?

Not everything that is expressed using the language of privilege theory is useless, but the useful parts don't have to be expressed using the language of that theoretical framework.


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## Delroy Booth (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Why would you think that this is something that privilege theory is essential to?


 
It's not! I daresay it's possible to accomplish a similar aim without relying on a massively flawed individualistic framework that throws up these kinds of problems constantly.


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## J Ed (May 1, 2013)

These articles are by a middle-class student at my uni who appropriates working-class culture by wearing a flatcap and trackies on a pretty regular basis

http://marxistqueen.wordpress.com/2...g-the-struggle-of-native-american-liberation/
http://marxistqueen.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/cultural-appropriation-continued/


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

Hey, if I didn't shower after a week and ate crap food, I will probably soon be seen to be "appropriating" the culture of the homeless and those on the very margins of society!


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> It's not! I daresay it's possible to accomplish a similar aim without relying on a massively flawed individualistic framework that throws up these kinds of problems constantly.


 
Which brings us back to the question of why you say you can see the "need for the white privilege thing"? You don't need to make that concession and doing so cuts the feet out from under the rest of your argument. A central problem in debating with privilege/intersectionalists is that they like to portray opposition to their particular theoretical framework as opposition to anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc. It's really very important not to give ground on this.


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Which brings us back to the question of why you say you can see the "need for the white privilege thing"? You don't need to make that concession and doing so cuts the feet out from under the rest of your argument. A central problem in debating with privilege/intersectionalists is that they like to portray opposition to their particular theoretical framework as opposition to anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc. It's really very important not to give ground on this.


 
In many ways this can foster a hierarchy and dogma of its very own, where no one dare question what someone says in case they get opposed to the ideals of anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc. as a whole. There is no middle ground, no room for "ah, but what about..." with such people, and this makes debate almost impossible, and since this has infected large swathes of the movement it means one ends up abiding by their rules so they keep credibility within the movement by ensuring their allydom isn't at risk.

The worst thing about it is that this is meant to face down very real issues in society, and the worst case scenario is that people deliberately "go the other way" rather than be associated with them, becoming, for example, people who think that all feminists "hate men".


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

Also, I stumbled into privilege theory via disabled people's rights politics. A lot of good work is done by the disabled rights movement, like campaigning for the implementation of the social model of disability (which states that it's society that disables people, not their impairments), and building organisations of disabled people, led by disabled people. At the time it all made a lot of sense, however even though it has its good points (and disabled people are very likely to be excluded from other movements, as well as from other aspects of society that non-disabled people take for granted), it is still a form of identity politics, and there is that same "us and them" mentality which means that all non-disabled need to prove themselves worthy of allydom.


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## Delroy Booth (May 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> These articles are by a middle-class student at my uni who appropriates working-class culture by wearing a flatcap and trackies on a pretty regular basis
> 
> http://marxistqueen.wordpress.com/2...g-the-struggle-of-native-american-liberation/
> http://marxistqueen.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/cultural-appropriation-continued/


 
It's ok for middle-class people to take the piss out of the poor and appropriate their culture, infact laughing at the primark scum who don't get the lingo is half the fucking point. But mocking the native americans by wearing their clothes is bad - although it might change again and wearing a kaffiyeh will become a sign of solidarity and/or fashion accessory depending on the whims of leftist fashion in a few years. The material aspect of privilige is ignored again in favour of a view which implies privilige mainly manifests itself through cultural appropriation - which is interesting when you consider the person who wrote that lives a life of unimaginable comfort, wealth and security, as a by-product of the extermination of the native americans. The economic system we live in, western capitalism, necessarily depended upon the extermination of the native americans in the colonies. The wealth of that person, and of her parents, and of her parents parents etc, whether working-class or otherwise, was a direct product of mass murder. No amount of privilige checking articles will ever undo the vast privilige you have a accrued as a result of this genocide. The only way to ever stop being an oppressor isn't to check your words or call out those who are slightly insensitive, that's a trivialisation, in reality the only option would be to kill yourself, as for as long as you live that privilige will be with you, and the longer you live the more you perpetuate it and if you have children you pass it on them and thus reproduce the oppression for the next generation. Realistically suicide is the only legitimate position for a white middle-class 1st world person worried about their privilige.

It's better not to think about these things if your western and middle-class, better to focus on what people wear.


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Middle class privilege is being able to push privilege theory to hide the amount of privilege you actually have.


 
Once again, your saying this = an attempt to hold on to the fact of your p, q privilege.
The more you resist it, the more it shows up as being a privilege you are eager to hide hence the reason you are attacking it since it is in part unconscious. You might not like "being a shitty human being" but you are one, because after all "Can we learn to be “colourblind”? Abstract: Probably not."


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## seventh bullet (May 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Spot on, it's always funny to note how a lot of the people who complain about cultural appropriation are middle-class people appropriating working-class fashion. One of the people I know who is keenest on exposing 'cultural appropriation' is middle-class but has taken to wearing a combination of trackies and a flatcap.


 
In my limited experience (outside of student politics, thank fuck), it is usually done in an 'ironic' and mocking way. Appropriation as a way to mark middle class superiority over the dumb, common proles or 'chavs' (never recognised that as a legitimate working class subculture, though).


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## Delroy Booth (May 1, 2013)

I wonder if "alawite privilige" translates into Syrian for when Al-Nusrah massacre people, invite children to cut their heads off in the street with machete's etc? I wonder if there ever will be massacres over this tuff. Will the decline of the left in the UK lead to the sort of sectarian bloodbath we've seen in Russia and the Middle-East since their class-based left died out?


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## Delroy Booth (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Which brings us back to the question of why you say you can see the "need for the white privilege thing"? You don't need to make that concession and doing so cuts the feet out from under the rest of your argument. A central problem in debating with privilege/intersectionalists is that they like to portray opposition to their particular theoretical framework as opposition to anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc. It's really very important not to give ground on this.


 
Well in that allow me to rephrase "the need for a blog to carry instances of latent racism in society that white people probably wouldn't notice otherwise" there is that better? I like the EverydaySexism twitter because it does that sort of job without alienating people with pretentious intersectional buzzword bingo. It's a lot more effective as a result I'd say.


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I wonder if "alawite privilige" translates into Syrian for when Al-Nusrah massacre people, invite children to cut their heads off in the street with machete's etc? I wonder if there ever will be massacres over this tuff. Will the decline of the left in the UK lead to the sort of sectarian bloodbath we've seen in Russia and the Middle-East since their class-based left died out?


See also: Sunnis, Christians, and Mandaeans in Iraq.


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## emanymton (May 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> These articles are by a middle-class student at my uni who appropriates working-class culture by wearing a flatcap and trackies on a pretty regular basis
> 
> http://marxistqueen.wordpress.com/2...g-the-struggle-of-native-american-liberation/
> http://marxistqueen.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/cultural-appropriation-continued/


Think that guys a ISN member, thats the recent split from the SWP for those not keeping up.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Well in that allow me to rephrase "the need for a blog to carry instances of latent racism in society that white people probably wouldn't notice otherwise" there is that better?


 
Yes, it is better. And it would also be better if expressed in bigger terms than just advocating a blog. In the more general sense that it is necessary to address many of the things that privilege/intersectionalists address. It just isn't necessary to import their framework to do it, and doing so is more likely to be counterproductive than helpful.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Think that guys a ISN member, thats the recent split from the SWP for those not keeping up.


 
Hang on, isn't J Ed one of them too? Are we about to see a university ISN group torn to shreds over this?!?


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Think that guys a ISN member, thats the recent split from the SWP for those not keeping up.


I know a few ISNers and they seem like pretty sound people, did work on anti-benefit cuts and UKUncut campaigns in Manchester. The two I know the most seem pretty working-class and down to earth, probably hence why they aren't in the SWP anymore (in fact one of them is one of the expellees for "secret factionalism").


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## frogwoman (May 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> On privilege issues here is part of anti-body chauvinism "fat acceptance movement" delineating acceptable behaviour from its allies ie anyone not fat, after questioning this slogan:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Oh for fucks sake. I do actually think there is a point about this stuff, how patriarchal society imposes (especially on women, but also men) a certain idea of how beauty should be and how you "should" look, mostly for heterosexual society but some elements of the gay community end up self-imposing it as well, for example the whole butch/femme thing, it sort of becomes expected that's how "a gay person" looks etc. 

I also think that the fashion industry and the health industry is also responsible for promoting some very damaging perceptions of women's bodies, (and increasingly men's bodies as well) by for example pathologising everything apart from an impossibly perfect figure, the size zero stuff is one example of this but there are far more other more subtle ones.

I've had problems with my weight before, although never been obese. I think that some people (and actually women can be the worst for this, men often don't notice or don't care) are far too paranoid or bitchy about what are really quite minor fluctuations in people's weight, one of my best mates at uni is quite overweight although definitely not unhealthy, and she was really insecure about it despite eating healthily, because I think her family expected her to lose weight, they were also always on at her about "when are you gonna get married?" and I actually get the feeling she might be gay. But I think that is because of patriarchal/capitalist society and the way that it is in some families, obviously there is a flipside of that for example people saying "eat up you're too skinny" when the person is a normal weight.

There's also this idea that obesity is always the person's fault whereas where they live, the amount of money they have etc may restrict their access to nutritionally healthy food, they may for example work 12 hour shifts and not have any time when they get home so just end up sticking a pizza in the oven, or eat fatty food in work breaks if they're working a really physical job.

However, there does reach a point where obesity is medically unhealthy doesn't there? obviously people have the right to eat whatever they want but there does reach a point where it's clinically dangerous, for example because of the strain on your bones/organs and difficulty in walking for example. There are also binge-eating disorders where people think they're too thin and eat all the time. And telling somebody who wants to lose weight that they don't need to and the idea of promoting being obese being a "privilege" etc, because it's affecting their health could actually be really dangerous.


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

Libcom has just reposted a section of a new AK Press (main anarchist publisher in the anglo west) book titled _Insurrections at the intersections: feminism, intersectionality and anarchism_

I can't really call myself an anarchist, but I don't really feel we need or want "an intersectionality of our own" (as opposed to a liberal one)

Features ideas like: "Simply defending the right to legal abortion does not bring together all those affected by heteropatriarchy. Similarly, legal “choice” where abortions are expensive procedures does nothing to help poor women and highlights the need to smash capitalism in order to access positive freedoms. Reproductive justice advocates have argued for an intersectional approach to these issues, and an anarchist feminist analysis of reproductive freedom could benefit by utilizing an anarchist intersectional analysis."

So yes there is a problem but in fact serious class analysis has had a better go at sorting out these problems than intersectional ones.

It concludes:

"An anarchist intersectional analysis, at least the way we are utilizing the standpoint, does not centralize any structure or institution over another, except by context. Rather, these structures and institutions operate to (re)produce one another. They are one another. Understood in this way, a central or primary oppressive or exploitative structure simply makes no sense. Rather, these social relations cannot be picked apart and one declared “central” and the others “peripheral.” And they are intersectional. After all, what good is an insurrection if some of us are left behind?"

How does that make sense - that 'they are one another' ? How are immigration raids the same as rape within the family? 
How can those who are in danger of sweeps unite with those who experience domestic violence unite with those who think 'immigration has far gone too far' with those who think 'all this talk of domestic violence, I don't hit my wife, give her money to look after the kids'  unless there is a common target and a common aim of overcoming difference and gender ?


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## J Ed (May 1, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Think that guys a ISN member, thats the recent split from the SWP for those not keeping up.


 
He is, yeah.


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> However, there does reach a point where obesity is medically unhealthy doesn't there? obviously people have the right to eat whatever they want but there does reach a point where it's clinically dangerous, for example because of the strain on your bones/organs and difficulty in walking for example. There are also binge-eating disorders where people think they're too thin and eat all the time. And telling somebody who wants to lose weight that they don't need to and the idea of promoting being obese being a "privilege" etc, because it's affecting their health could actually be really dangerous.


 
There is a fine line between being concerned about one's health and moralising though, and a lot of fatphobes can be quite moralistic indeed - particularly amongst vegans, it must be said.


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> These articles are by a middle-class student at my uni who appropriates working-class culture by wearing a flatcap and trackies on a pretty regular basis
> 
> http://marxistqueen.wordpress.com/2...g-the-struggle-of-native-american-liberation/
> http://marxistqueen.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/cultural-appropriation-continued/


 
That guy pre-ISN obviously:



> SWP member Max Brophy spoke immediately after and denounced the attacks on the scabs as ‘sectarianism’!  He said he could make the same criticisms of Labour that comrade Rock had made, but deliberately refrained from doing so. Presumably this would alienate the LP, to whom the SWP are trying to present themselves as safe allies. He  then called for us all to unite and fight and all that. Basically, pretend political differences don’t exist. At least until the right moment, when ‘the party’ will suddenly spring its programme onto the class (presumably).


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

The presence of this stuff on Libcom is particularly funny for those of us who can remember the rabid, and sometimes offensive, hostility to identity politics that prevailed over there at one point.


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## frogwoman (May 1, 2013)

Tom A said:


> There is a fine line between being concerned about one's health and moralising though, and a lot of fatphobes can be quite moralistic indeed - particularly amongst vegans, it must be said.


 
Yeah I know but this probesity reminds me of the pro-ana sites, "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels" and all that shit.


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## emanymton (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Hang on, isn't J Ed one of them too? Are we about to see a university ISN group torn to shreds over this?!?


Pretty sure he has posted on their forum, not sure if that makes him a member or not though, I have posted on their forum and don't consider myself a member, more of an interested observer.


Tom A said:


> I know a few ISNers and they seem like pretty sound people, did work on anti-benefit cuts and UKUncut campaigns in Manchester. The two I know the most seem pretty working-class and down to earth, probably hence why they aren't in the SWP anymore (in fact one of them is one of the expellees for "secret factionalism").


PT? thought he was at uni in Leeds now?
Anyway the ISN seems pretty open an lose. IT seems to me to be a collection of all those who had problems withe the SWP (beyond the mess over the rape allegations) but they did not spilt over the same issue so are not really unified by anything beyond opersition to the SWP CC.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That guy pre-ISN obviously:


 
To be fair, you have to use your CPGB to English translator to get that part. The SWP student wasn't defending scabs, as far as I can make out, but objecting to the CPGB calling people who voted for a deal they don't like scabs.


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

emanymton said:


> PT? thought he was at uni on Leeds now?
> Anyway the ISN seems pretty open an lose. IT seems to me to be a collection of all those who had problems withe the SWP (beyond the mess over the rape allegations) but they did not spilt over the same issue so are not really unified by anything beyond opersition to the SWP CC.


Yeah him, I knew him when he was still in Manchester. One of the people who temporarily helped me get over my irrational dislike of the SWP, before events proved to me that dislike may not have been so irrational after all.


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## J Ed (May 1, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> In my limited experience (outside of student politics, thank fuck), it is usually done in an 'ironic' and mocking way. Appropriation as a way to mark middle class superiority over the dumb, common proles or 'chavs' (never recognised that as a legitimate working class subculture, though).


 

Yep, check this out from the 'far left fashion' blog:


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## Delroy Booth (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> The presence of this stuff on Libcom is particularly funny for those of us who can remember the rabid, and sometimes offensive, hostility to identity politics that prevailed over there at one point.


 
Why it's almost as bad as when Militant changed their opinions on the class composition of the Labour party 

So how long before class-struggle anarchism ceases to exist in this country and is subsumed within a crude cargo-cult imitation of the hyper-liberals on the American "left" I wonder?


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Yeah I know but this probesity reminds me of the pro-ana sites, "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels" and all that shit.


Filp side of the same coin, huh?


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## J Ed (May 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I wonder if "alawite privilige" translates into Syrian for when Al-Nusrah massacre people, invite children to cut their heads off in the street with machete's etc? I wonder if there ever will be massacres over this tuff. Will the decline of the left in the UK lead to the sort of sectarian bloodbath we've seen in Russia and the Middle-East since their class-based left died out?


 

The rhetoric used even by the likes of Laurie Penny with her call for 'gender war' certainly suggests that but somehow I think this would be the example of Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came


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## DotCommunist (May 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Yep, check this out from the 'far left fashion' blog:


 


gnnnngh


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Why it's almost as bad as when Militant changed their opinions on the class composition of the Labour party


 
Well, if you ignore the fact that the change was slow, was based on actual changes to Labour, and was explained in frankly tedious detail every step of the way, yes certainly.


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## J Ed (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Hang on, isn't J Ed one of them too? Are we about to see a university ISN group torn to shreds over this?!?


 
No.


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## Tom A (May 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Yep, check this out from the 'far left fashion' blog:


Where the hell do the Village People fit into this "cultural appropriation" malarkey? They have the dreaded "white man in a Native American headdress" and the stereotypical blue-collar worker in a hard hat, but then those calling them out could be deemed an unwitting part of a homophobic attack.


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> The presence of this stuff on Libcom is particularly funny for those of us who can remember the rabid, and sometimes offensive, hostility to identity politics that prevailed over there at one point.


 
What was offensive? iirc Class War burnt the Mohammed and Jesus effigies on Bonfire night, Libcom allowed open discussion, Libcom wasn't offensive unless you count hosting such discussion in and of itself offensive.


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## toggle (May 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> However, there does reach a point where obesity is medically unhealthy doesn't there? obviously people have the right to eat whatever they want but there does reach a point where it's clinically dangerous, for example because of the strain on your bones/organs and difficulty in walking for example. There are also binge-eating disorders where people think they're too thin and eat all the time. And telling somebody who wants to lose weight that they don't need to and the idea of promoting being obese being a "privilege" etc, because it's affecting their health could actually be really dangerous.


ask spangles, or go read some of her rants in some of the threads on diet that dismiss her diet choices.or mine.

yes obesity is dangerous. one of the reasons i went on a crash diet was that other diets didn't work. the pressure to achieve was overwhelming.

obesity is often a symptom of another issue, in my case, it was a safety blanket during a period of abuse, but we don't tell people with other psych problems that we fix it by telling them they are fat and lazy and should pull their socks up. we also ignore the growing body of evidence that being fat produces hormones that stop appetite regulation working. being fat promotes getting more fat.

sometimes there is a point whereby removing the psych pressure to diet needs to happen before someone can safely impose their own pressures to loose weight and succeed.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> So how long before class-struggle anarchism ceases to exist in this country and is subsumed within a crude cargo-cult imitation of the hyper-liberals on the American "left" I wonder?


 
It is actually interesting that sections of "class struggle Anarchism" have taken to it so enthusiastically, and that other, more sceptical sections are so loathe to challenge it head on. I'd have expected the broader anarchoid milieu to take to it like ducks to water, as its essentially a politics of personal purity, but the class struggle lot are a bit of a surprise.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What was offensive? iirc Class War burnt the Mohammed and Jesus effigies on Bonfire night, Libcom allowed open discussion, Libcom wasn't offensive unless you count hosting such discussion in and of itself offensive.


 
I wasn't actually talking about that at all, but about the extreme hostility that feminism etc used to get on the boards there.


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## J Ed (May 1, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> gnnnngh


 
Model and activist Ella Raff is fastly becoming one of FLF’s faves, positively smoldering in solidarity with coal miners. Ella recently became a hit dressing like a toff as part of a ‘posh protest’ in order to dismiss the inaccuracy that ‘lefty = badly dressed’. We wish her well in her modelling and campaigning, especially in her work championing free education.


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> The rhetoric used even by the likes of Laurie Penny with her call for 'gender war' certainly suggests that but somehow I think this would be the example of Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came


 
LP has never called for gender war unlike Malcolm Harris advocating some kind of generational war using shock troops in the prisons of schools and actual prisons alongside those who have taken out a college loan.


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I wasn't actually talking about that at all, but about the extreme hostility that feminism etc used to get on the boards there.


 
Was that offensive? Were offensive things encouraged/done in those discussions. I don't particularly remember it.


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## frogwoman (May 1, 2013)

toggle said:


> ask spangles, or go read some of her rants in some of the threads on diet that dismiss her diet choices.or mine.
> 
> yes obesity is dangerous. one of the reasons i went on a crash diet was that other diets didn't work. the pressure to achieve was overwhelming.
> 
> ...


 
completely agree.

btw is there not also sometimes a bit of sneering that goes on about people who go on diets, like the idea they're thick and only concerned with looks? or is it just me


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## J Ed (May 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> LP has never called for gender war unlike Malcolm Harris advocating some kind of generational war using shock troops in the prisons of schools and actual prisons alongside those who have taken out a college loan.


 
I've seen her use it a few times as a hashtag https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/319429708305530880 is she being ironic?


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## toggle (May 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> completely agree.
> 
> btw is there not also sometimes a bit of sneering that goes on about people who go on diets, like the idea they're thick and only concerned with looks? or is it just me


 
it's a no win situation.

if you want loads more info, i'm happy to discuss by pm rather than turn this thread into toggle's personal rant, but i'd suspect that would make more sence than half the things that are being dicsussed. that pro ally stuff made me feel a bit sick tbh


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Model and activist Ella Raff is fastly becoming one of FLF’s faves, positively smoldering in solidarity with coal miners. Ella recently became a hit dressing like a toff as part of a ‘posh protest’ in order to dismiss the inaccuracy that ‘lefty = badly dressed’. We wish her well in her modelling and campaigning, especially in her work championing free education.


 
Clare Solomon from Firebox Counterfire Lindsey German's crew actually tweeted them in a positive way

https://twitter.com/solomonsmfield/status/313207062085640194



> .@FarLeftFashion  Here's the @FireboxLdn crew in Emily Wilding Davison tshirts on IWD? From @philosophyfootball pic.twitter.com/bHwnm4oVO3


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## frogwoman (May 1, 2013)

toggle I've noticed there's this whole idea that going on a diet is like something that only stupid/shallow people do.


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## emanymton (May 1, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Yeah him, I knew him when he was still in Manchester. One of the people who temporarily helped me get over my irrational dislike of the SWP, before events proved to me that dislike may not have been so irrational after all.


Meet him  a couple of times quite briefly, but yeah he seems a good bloke. I was amazed he stayed in the SWP as long as he did though.


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## J Ed (May 1, 2013)

Has anyone else found the people who promote the idea that people who smoke tobacco are an oppressed identity politics group? There are some weird corners of the internet where right-wing libertarianism meets identity politics and tobacco denialism. UKIP's Gabi Coleman of recent 'don't ask don't tell policy towards Nazis' fame is a big proponent of this and is trying to set up a pub for smokers somewhere.


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## toggle (May 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> toggle I've noticed there's this whole idea that going on a diet is like something that only stupid/shallow people do.


 
cause you don't diet, you change lifestyle a little and it's fine, you don't need to diet unless you're unable to make changes. dieting is for idiots? but you must be an idiot to have got fat in the first place.


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Has anyone else found the people who promote the idea that people who smoke tobacco are an oppressed identity politics group?


 
Yes. One notable returning poster.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Was that offensive? Were offensive things encouraged/done in those discussions. I don't particularly remember it.


 
We are both seemingly dealing in vague memory here, but I seem to recall the line being crossed on quite a few occasions. But either way, the point I was making was less about how offensive the place used to be and more about how they are now posting up privilege/intersectionality stuff of a sort that would not all that long ago have been met with howls of derision. It's quite a reversal.


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## frogwoman (May 1, 2013)

its this whole orange tan/sunbeds/dieting/botox stereotype thing i think

might be imagining it though  does anyone know what i mean or am i talking bollocks?


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## J Ed (May 1, 2013)

This is the sort of thing I'm talking about.

People in the UK creating devilish caricatures of Aussie public health bods, advocating voting for MPs based on their approach to tobacco issues like plain packs.

They protest outside smoking cessation conferences, it's mad.

Someone on my facebook posts in one of their groups and the stuff they come out with is just wow. Sort of like how the mad identity politics people think it's okay to be rude to people who are less oppressed than them, they have similar approaches to non-smoker 'allies'.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

There's a certain commonality between the AF Women's Caucus Privilege stuff and this "Anarchist Intersectionality" piece, in that they seem to be first and foremost attempts to adopt fashionable language and ideas from radical liberalism while avoiding the most obviously liberal of the necessary political consequences of adopting that framework. It's an attempt to both have and eat a cake.


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## toggle (May 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> its this whole orange tan/sunbeds/dieting/botox stereotype thing i think
> 
> might be imagining it though  does anyone know what i mean or am i talking bollocks?


 
idk, but imo, anyone who criticizes a woman for altering her appearance, or any aspect of her appearance being grotesque, without realizing that their perception of their right to constantly criticize her is part of the reason she's fucked up about her appearance is a fucking moron


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## Delroy Booth (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> There's a certain commonality between the AF Women's Caucus Privilege stuff and this "Anarchist Intersectionality" piece, in that they seem to be first and foremost attempts to adopt fashionable language and ideas from radical liberalism while avoiding the most obviously liberal of the necessary political consequences of adopting that framework. It's an attempt to both have and eat a cake.


 
Basically this. Although the idea's associated with it aren't exclusively linked to liberalism, are they? There's a material basis for much of the oppression/privilige stuff and it's roots are in class politics. Which is why I made the point it's not intersectionaily per se that I feel bothered about, it's when this intersectionality stuff attaches itself onto late capitalist post-class liberal identity politics, gets strained through a million different tumblr's,  and then comes out masquerading as some kind of Anarchism when it's actually pretty straightforward heirachical liberal identity politics.

Worrying really coz if your too scared to defend your own political tradition for fear of being accused of various kinds of bigotry you're not gonna have much of a chance of overthrowing the state with violent revolution, are you?


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

An example of the word 'intersectionality' appearing, where before anti-sexism and anti-racism would have been used - a small green anarchist group in Australia:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/common-cause/common-cause-where-we-stand/107109362824677




> Intersectionality
> 
> We recognise that this mentality is in play where patriarchy employs sexist and misogynistic illogic to make women the scapegoats for the way that men allow our love of power to get the best of the power of love, just as we recognise that the same is true where white supremacy employs racism and xenophobia to make people with different skin colour scapegoats for the inability of white bigots to think for themselves or take control over the conditions of their own lives. Blaming those who have no control over the conditions of our own lives for our inability to take control over them ourselves just goes to show that the best argument against white supremacist ideology is its adherents.
> 
> We work then to develop an anarchist intersectionality that draws out commonalities between different forms of oppression by attempting to understand in practise how the mentality of the oppressor and tyrant, who sees in workers, women, the young, the old, people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, people of different sexualities and abilities as well as the flora and fauna as objects whose main value resides in their exploitability, with a view to enhancing our ability to fight back.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Basically this. Although the idea's associated with it aren't exclusively linked to liberalism, are they?


 
Yes, they are. Even in its original "white skin privilege" guise, before it passed through the liberal academy's digestive tract and was shat out as today's liberal privilege theory, it came from the fringe of US New Left semi-Maoism, which is best seen as the guilty anarchoid milieu of its day. Intersectionality is straight from the liberal academy, with less in the way of preexisting radical roots.


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Basically this. Although the idea's associated with it aren't exclusively linked to liberalism, are they? There's a material basis for much of the oppression/privilige stuff and it's roots are in class politics.


 
Its roots today are in the ineffectiveness/failure of class politics to have overcome (quickly enough) aspects of domination (racism, sexism etc) that also effect middle class people (hence spearheaded by middle-class people enduring backward assumptions and (c)overt prejudice).


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## toggle (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Yes, they are. Even in its original "white skin privilege" guise, before it passed through the liberal academy's digestive tract and was shat out as today's liberal privilege theory, it came from the fringe of US New Left semi-Maoism, which is best seen as the guilty anarchoid milieu of its day. Intersectionality is straight from the liberal academy, with less in the way of preexisting radical roots.


 
i was told the ideas originally came out of black feminism?????


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

toggle said:


> i was told the ideas originally came out of black feminism?????


 
Which ideas?

Privilege theory comes from "white skin privilege", a theory developed by a couple of white dudes in and around the semi-Maoist Sojourner Truth Organisation (Noel Ignatin and Ted Allen).
Intersectionality comes from black liberal feminist academics (Kimberle Crenshaw and Patrica Hill Collins).

Privilege/Intersectionalists prefer not to mention the embarrassing origins of privilege theory not as a howl of the oppressed but in the theorising of white dude, ahem, "allies". It raises all kinds of uncomfortable questions about white dudes speaking on behalf of "the oppressed". They also prefer to project intersectionalism back in time to the, somewhat more radical if also rather problematic, Combahee River Collective, which didn't actually use the term.


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## toggle (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Which ideas?
> 
> Privilege theory comes from "white skin privilege", a theory developed by a couple of white dudes in and around the semi-Maoist Sojourner Truth Organisation (Noel Ignatin and Ted Allen).
> Intersectionality comes from black liberal feminist academics (Kimberle Krenshaw and Patrica Hill Collins).


 
that fits. soz, if i get confused, i always check whether it's my understanding or my memory that's fucked.


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

Here's my take on Combahee, frogwoman

The Combahee group was for black women and encouraged essentially a form of separatism, certainly from male-infected family structure, all AFAIK were - to a greater or lesser extent - able to coincide with a lesbian feminist outlook.

Some of its members Audre Lorde (had a famous exchange with Mary Daly who said all religions were sexist, Lorde said black and African ones weren't) and Cheryl Clarke were involved in Conditions, particularly the famous 5th issue - a major collection of black feminist writing.
That issue in 1979, large run later reprinted in 1982, featured the brilliant or notorious poem (depending on how you look at it) 'Minority' (either expressed the rejection of black history or appeared to pit Jewish minority against black minority):
"Mine is not a People of the Book/ taxed but acknowledged;/
their distinctiveness is not yet a dignity;/ their Holocaust is lower case"

A lot of Combahee and Conditions production was _feeling-based_ and _literature-based_ featuring recollections of events of a past racism and sexism often in the formally segregated Deep South.
Not all black feminists left the mainstream women's organisations but the majority of those that did to form Combahee were southern black women.

Although anti-capitalist in general, because most were outside of the labour market in their formative experiences (which the consciousness raising was based/developed upon), a lot of the Combahee's focuses - as mostly black lesbian women in the south - were chauvinism from poor black males and poor whites.
In a sense, perhaps it was an inevitable result of a legacy of a 100 years of failed racist Reconstruction.

Virtually all of them entered either 1 Academia esp. literature and english departments (the old era of writing was dead and boring by the 1980s - needed blood), or 2 widening non-profit charities linked with support to women (funded properly for the first time as women starting making and holding onto their money).

Combahee has become a kind of totem for 'intersectionality' because it was people living through sexism, racism, classism and homophobia, although they only ever used the phrase 'interlocked', it has been retrospectively applied - to make it out as if 'intersectionality' comes from a huge movement when it comes from a 1991 liberal legalistic analysis of women's issues.

'intersectionality' is only tangentially involved with what was in the first place only a consciousness raising exercise (nothing wrong with that at all, but be careful of thrusting it cold to the non-political oppressed in different ways).

Interlocked is actually a much better description because people get it much quicker and it leaves open the aim/goal of people being able to unlock them.


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## frogwoman (May 1, 2013)

interesting ta, i dont know much about it tho, will have to read up before making any comments!


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

Yes, the Combahee River Collective is important to the radical liberals because it's the sort of group that they* would like* their ideas to have come from. Privilege as the brainchild of white dudes is embarrassing, while intersectionality as that of liberal academics doesn't have enough in the way of apparent radicalism even if they did have the decency to be black women.

The CRC is unassailable in radical liberal identity politics terms, and therefore they make perfect mythological founders. Their politics were far from unassailable from a Marxist point of view, but that's entirely beside the point.


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## J Ed (May 1, 2013)

What do people here think of Cornel West? Particularly interested in what sihhi thinks


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## caleb (May 1, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Privilege theory comes from "white skin privilege", a theory developed by a couple of white dudes in and around the semi-Maoist Sojourner Truth Organisation (Noel Ignatin and Ted Allen).
> Intersectionality comes from black liberal feminist academics (Kimberle Crenshaw and Patrica Hill Collins).


 
can the sojourner truth organisation really be described as 'semi-maoist'? certainly there were crossover and links with the 'new communist movement', and ignatin/ignatiev and a number of the other founders emerged from stalinist organisations, but the s.t.o. itself was more eclectic; c.l.r. james, operaismo, w.e.b. dubois being influences on their politics, rather than mao or maoism. they were definitely leninist, but maoist? not so sure.

despite my reservations with 'white skin privilege', i think this puts it well:



> thinkers like Ignatiev and Allen attempted to offer a rigorous theoretical Marxist answer to the eternal question of social sciences — Why is there no Social Democratic or Labor Party in the United States? — “critical whiteness” purges this theory of its militant content in order to transform it into an academic parlor game of ritual denunciations of the purported privileges between different essentialized identities. This academic fad has now caught on with the incorrigibly middlebrow, “theory”-inclined sectors of the German radical left, without regard for its origins as an attempt to explain the unique class composition of the North American proletariat and its idiosyncratic system of racial stratification.​


​ 
http://communism.blogsport.eu/2012/...bizarre-critical-whiteness-debate-in-germany/
​


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

Combahee probably had good and bad in it like all groups, as individuals many did unimpeachable work in rape relief centres or legal rights projects. 

It wasn't the first or the only black women's group, but it has become important for intersectionality (particularly Audre Lorde) rather than the early 1970 Third World women’s alliance, short-lasting but action-orientated (as the name suggests) Black women organized for action, the NBFO National Black Feminist Organization and the National Alliance of Black Feminists - perhaps because so much of its output was feeling-based. 

Neither Kimberle Crenshaw nor Patricia Hill Collins were involved in the civil rights movement, and both were not part of the feminist movement at the organisational end.

So when Patricia Hill Collins wrote _Black Feminist Thought, _it just simply assumes that had the civil rights movement accepted black feminist ideas we wouldn't be where we are in 1990 with George Bush in power and few black women anywhere of importance (things change with Clinton with a rise in affirmative and the legacy of earlier policies coming through in a black middle-class, but black women remain on the bottom shut out of welfare by clinton's programmes so you get a contradictory rise more black people going to college with rises far above the rise of whites at the same time as increasing poverty rates - ie 2 and a half decades of neoliberalism since Carter)

Kimberle Crenshaw - see this post - as a law professor you get the feeling almost wants (race plus a fudged class-based at times maybe?) affirmative action in universities and job hiring, promotion in the military and the nonprofit sector management and charity donations, which can all be enforced by tough minded lawyers and activist judges.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 1, 2013)

caleb said:


> can the sojourner truth organisation really be described as 'semi-maoist'? certainly there were crossover and links with the 'new communist movement', and ignatin/ignatiev and a number of the other founders emerged from stalinist organisations, but the s.t.o. itself was more eclectic; c.l.r. james, operaismo, w.e.b. dubois being influences on their politics, rather than mao or maoism. they were definitely leninist, but maoist? not so sure.


 
The earliest origins of WSP theory are in Ignatin and Allen's time in the Provisional Organising Committee (to Reconstitute a Marxist Leninist Communist Party in the United States). The POC was a highly "orthodox" Anti-Revisionist grouping, which actually predated "Maoism". Then in the earliest days of the Sojourner Truth Organisation, when White Skin Privilege was its main unique theory, it was eclectic but more "Maoist" than anything else. It got less "Maoist" and more eclectic as time went on. I said "semi-Maoist" and elsewhere described it as "on the heterodox fringes of US Maoism", because that gets the essential point across about where they coming from.

It's also worth noting that by far the biggest force which adopted and pushed White Skin Privilege in its pre-liberal academia days was the CP(ML), the closest thing the US had to an official Maoist party recognised by the Chinese.

And yes, that quote, although much more charitable to the original White Skin Privilege theory than I would be, does hit on the contrast between WS Privilege as a very specific theory about the interaction of race and capitalism in the US and its later preeminence as Privilege, the radical liberal theory of every kind of oppression everywhere.


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## sihhi (May 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What do people here think of Cornel West? Particularly interested in what sihhi thinks


 
I don't know what to think - he is a far-liberal Democrat-supporting academic. 
Is he relevant in terms of 'intersectionality' and privilege politics? I don't know I always considered him as a Jesse Jackson style liberal coalition supporter.

I am no kind expert at all on any of this - just find it interesting how the term has been imported into a context where there so little of no working-class-heavy immigrant movement in this country, from which it might have come.


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## Delroy Booth (May 1, 2013)

Y'know at some point I really want to go through this thread from the start and write some sort of critique about the whole thing. From the start. get all the pertinent stuff archived for when the time comes for the thread to die. I'd love to draw all the significant political stuff out and get it organised and put online somewhere without the hundreds of pages of bullshit.

I'd want help. Who wants to help? Come on there's shitloads of you who could do a great job at this. I've got loads of time to kill until November when I am (fingers crossed) fucking off out the country so lets get to work on this.

But I end up thinking about this a lot with other threads on here. Some sort of radical journal perhaps? Not too big to be sell-out, not too small to be too marginal etc etc


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## Delroy Booth (May 1, 2013)

And this: From Stavvers (who I notice was invited onto Newsnight tonight but appeared to decline the invitation.)

http://stavvers.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/may-day-haymarket-and-some-awesome-women/

Check this opening gambit out -



> May Day is all about the workers. So, if you’re a worker or unemployed, give yourself a pat on the back for not being the oppressor, at least in terms of class. Yay, us.


 
That's classism right there. It's good to be w/c because then you're not the oppressor. God forbid we ever get rid of wage-slavery, that'd be terrible, we'd all presumably be oppressors under socialism.

Pat yourself on the back for being exploited for profit. Well done.


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## Steel Icarus (May 1, 2013)

I'll help if I can, I'll have time in the summer, my current course finishes in a fortnight. You'll have to direct me though. I'd quite like to see a proper essay-style piece on why intersectionality and privilege theory and identity politics and the concept of a hierarchy of oppression is so problematic from a class perspective. It's so hard to get anyone who believes in this stuff - and it's usually fervent as fuck to the point of it being blasphemous to raise criticisms of it - to not just dismiss requests for where class fits into these theories as out-of-touch, misogynist dogma.


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## Steel Icarus (May 1, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> That's classism right there. It's good to be w/c because then you're not the oppressor. God forbid we ever get rid of wage-slavery, that'd be terrible, we'd all presumably be oppressors under socialism.
> 
> Pat yourself on the back for being exploited for profit. Well done.


 
Can you explain what you mean, Delroy?


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## Delroy Booth (May 1, 2013)

Thanks man. I need all the help I can get if I ever try. Already got a million and one things I'm writing atm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=28BXqQWqYJU#t=113s


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## J Ed (May 2, 2013)

New article http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2013/05/death-more-magazine-price-worth-paying-better-media


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## caleb (May 2, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> And this: From Stavvers (who I notice was invited onto Newsnight tonight but appeared to decline the invitation.)
> 
> http://stavvers.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/may-day-haymarket-and-some-awesome-women/
> 
> ...


 
also, it's an understanding of class as one of a variety of competing "oppressions"; the working class aren't _exploited _by capitalism but oppressed; wage slavery isn't an issue, the problem is ruling class privilege preventing t'werkers getting into parliament or leading businesses. sort that out and class isn't an issue anymore, right?


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## Nylock (May 2, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Y'know at some point I really want to go through this thread from the start and write some sort of critique about the whole thing. From the start. get all the pertinent stuff archived for when the time comes for the thread to die. I'd love to draw all the significant political stuff out and get it organised and put online somewhere without the hundreds of pages of bullshit.
> 
> I'd want help. Who wants to help? Come on there's shitloads of you who could do a great job at this. I've got loads of time to kill until November when I am (fingers crossed) fucking off out the country so lets get to work on this.
> 
> But I end up thinking about this a lot with other threads on here. Some sort of radical journal perhaps? Not too big to be sell-out, not too small to be too marginal etc etc


Best of luck with that, it's going to take ages just to whittle down the 18,303(and counting) messages that make up this thread so you have something coherent to write about (not to mention the various digressions and tangential discussions as well) 

...If i wasn't about to start the busiest time of the year for me, i'd offer to pitch in.. If you're still at it by October i might be up for helping out in whatever way i can


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## Delroy Booth (May 2, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Can you explain what you mean, Delroy?


 
Not without taking ages and I want to go to bed, I'll have a go but it won't be very good. But it's very annoying. Fucking "Classism" as though the whole class struggle can be reduced to "working class are oppressed therefore good, bourgeois class priviliged therefore bad" with the underlying assumption, that runs through the intersectional left like a thread, that class politics (if it's not deemed irrelevent in it's entirity) is just another piece of the big liberal identity politics jigsaw puzzle when it's not like that, it's not about individuals and their class bigotry, it's not reducable to the dumb reductionist framework of oppressed/privilige, it's about the allocation of the material resources required to survive, the one thing that unites every single person on earth regardless of identity - that we all need to eat, drink, have shelter. It's the only thing that intersects with _everything_ yet the very term "classism" presupposes class as seperate conceptual entity that occasionally intersects with other, also seperate, oppressions thereby utterly ignoring racism or sexism inherent within the class system and so on that was traditionally the foundation stone of the marxist feminism I am familiar with. Incidentally that's not something I think "intersectionality" as a pure abstract theory, divorced from it's real-world application, would endorse. But that's a massive digression.

Then there's this. _"give yourself a pat on the back for not being the oppressor, at least in terms of class" _well done proles, your proletarian life of drudgery is but a small price to pay to be free of the guilt of being an oppressor. Revel in your powerlessness. But you probably beat up your spouse and are racist so lets make sure there's a caveat in there to remind you of this, on the day of the workers. Comradely greetings etc etc.

And yes it's probably really unfair of me to read so much into that one sentence but fuck it I don't even care.


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## Delroy Booth (May 2, 2013)

caleb said:


> also, it's an understanding of class as one of a variety of competing "oppressions"; the working class aren't _exploited _by capitalism but oppressed; wage slavery isn't an issue, the problem is ruling class privilege preventing t'werkers getting into parliament or leading businesses. sort that out and class isn't an issue anymore, right?


 
Yes this. And i've not properly gathered my thoughts on it yet but to have this sort of dumb fucking framework then get grafted onto Emma Goldman and co is pretty fucking offensive. I wonder how Goldman, who was no fucking liberal, would appreciate that type of class analysis I wonder?


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## weepiper (May 2, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> And yes it's probably really unfair of me to read so much into that one sentence but fuck it I don't even care.


 
Stop oppressing them with your innate superior chip-shouldering ability Delroy


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## Steel Icarus (May 2, 2013)

Thanks Delroy that's a fair bit clearer now.


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## Firky (May 2, 2013)

J Ed said:


> New article http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2013/05/death-more-magazine-price-worth-paying-better-media


 


> What about when the people working in those jobs are paid to prop up state power and pick on young people, poor people, black people and activists?


 
Why not just say people or is that not emotive enough as saying 'black people' etc. (she should include 'my posh student friends' in that eclectic mix she made up).



> It’s rather like the tense discussion that comes up in activist circles whenever the police go on strike.


 
Really, you were there were you? Besides when did police in this country last strike, sometime after WWI wasn't it? WTF is she on about, "whenever the police go on strike", it's been nearly 100 years since they last went on strike. 

The entire article is just some anecdotal shite that you'd read on any forum, blog or facebook status. It's shite. I know some people on twitter, I know one who helped me write this article, etc. There's nothing concrete. It's anecdotal drivel.

Haha all the astrix points at the bottom of the article covering her arse.


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## Delroy Booth (May 2, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Stop oppressing them with your innate superior chip-shouldering ability Delroy


 
Am I just turning into a stereotypical northerner whinging about private schoolkids running the world like the freemasons? Eurgh stop it your making me hate myself.

It makes you hate yourself actually this whole thing coz I'd prefer, in a perfect world, to not have these fucking kinds of debates. I'm sure stavvers and laurie etc are all perfectly sound people and in a perfect world I'd much prefer to be broadly on the same side, perhaps not on the exact same page politically, but I'm fairly pragmatic about that and have no moral problem with deferring to women and stuff. And it's galling if you've tried pretty much your whole adult life to be a decent ally then have to fight these battles on top of it, scared if you dare openly criticise something that's blatantly obviously deeply flawed you'll be denounced as a . God I make more of an effort to moderate my behaviour and be considerate than any other rugby playing meathead from Huddersfield I can think of. On maybe 9 out of 10 substantive issues I'd probably agree or at least pose no obstacle to what they believe, and would

Every time I go off and have a rant on twitter about the dumbest examples of privilige and/or intersectionality I get fucking people I've never even met who are part of that scene sending me DM's going "omg thank you for saying that you have no idea how much this has been pissing me off" and I know it's a cliche (numerous PM's of support etc) but there's something wrong going on here when this is going on.


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## weepiper (May 2, 2013)

I just hate the way pointing out the essential bloody unfairness of it all leaves you open to accusations of chippiness or jealousy, as if that is somehow a moral failing, as if you should be 'bigger than that'. Well I'm fucking not.


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## Firky (May 2, 2013)

Delroy's 2am rants on twitter have to be seen


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## Favelado (May 2, 2013)

Delroy, you a great writer and poster and I've enjoyed every calorie you've burned on social media today.  xxx


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## treelover (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> I used to have some quite bitter arguments (including when I was on Urban the first time round) about how the Left is allying with some pretty unpleasant and reactionary people in the name of opposing the bloodshed in [insert newsworthy Middle Eastern country here], and very soon you are deemed "Islamophobic" for stating that these Islamists, if given the chance, would do a lot of unpleasant things to the people they ruled, both Muslim and non-Muslim alike.


 
they are a bit quieter on that score now and a fair few have left the boards, thanks god..


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## treelover (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Also, I stumbled into privilege theory via disabled people's rights politics. *A lot of good work is done by the disabled rights movement, like campaigning for the implementation of the social model of disability (which states that it's society that disables people, not their impairments), and building organisations of disabled people, led by disabled people. At the time it all made a lot of sense,* however even though it has its good points (and disabled people are very likely to be excluded from other movements, as well as from other aspects of society that non-disabled people take for granted), it is still a form of identity politics, and there is that same "us and them" mentality which means that all non-disabled need to prove themselves worthy of allydom.


 
O/T, but sadly the DWP/Govt has appropriated the social model to justify their welfare reforms and are slowly reconfiguring what it means to be disabled, etc, even the very term itself.


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## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

I recall the times when they formed their own (short lived) boards (Dissensus, then The Tolling Gang, and finally Meanwhile at the Bar). The quality of the argument seems to be much better now, even with those I used to lock horns with. Although it helps I'm a bit older and can understand where people are coming from now, and also being someone whom hasn't fully escaped from the Tory onslaught on the working class has meant I am no longer the wet liberal that I was


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## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

treelover said:


> O/T, but sadly the DWP/Govt has appropriated the social model to justify their welfare reforms and are slowly reconfiguring what it means to be disabled, etc, even the very term itself.


Ahh yes, the "biosocialphysical" model, which when first conceived had its merits, such as how a person's environment can be disabling, and how mental impairments can impact on physical impairments and vice versa. However, it has been bastardised by this American insurance company called UNUM, and used as the basis for the ATOS "work capability assessment". This is what they are using to justify the cuts and the taking away of benefits.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> I recall the times when they formed their own (short lived) boards (Dissensus, then The Tolling Gang, and finally Meanwhile at the Bar).


 
I think that you might be getting different people confused there.


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## treelover (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> I recall the times when they formed their own (short lived) boards (Dissensus, then The Tolling Gang, and finally Meanwhile at the Bar). The quality of the argument seems to be much better now, even with those I used to lock horns with. Although it helps I'm a bit older and can understand where people are coming from now, and also being someone whom hasn't fully escaped from the Tory onslaught on the working class has meant I am no longer the wet liberal that I was


 
for all their faults, I'm not sure that MATB posters screamed 'Islamaphobe' at anyone, it was the Trot-bots, now mostly gone off here, that's who I meant anyway.


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## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

I was making a comment about Urban (and particularly P and P) in general. But you're right, it was the "Trot-bots" who were busy screaming "Islamophobe" at everyone. It was the anarchists (well, the more dogmatic of the anarchists) whom tried forming their own boards IIRC.


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## The39thStep (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> I was making a comment about Urban (and particularly P and P) in general. But you're right, it was the "Trot-bots" who were busy screaming "Islamophobe" at everyone. It was the anarchists (well, the more dogmatic of the anarchists) whom tried forming their own boards IIRC.


 
You would be hard pushed to describe MATB as anarchist


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## barney_pig (May 2, 2013)

It might be better not to talk bollocks about matb especially as most of us are here


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## Blagsta (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Ahh yes, the "biosocialphysical" model, which when first conceived had its merits, such as how a person's environment can be disabling, and how mental impairments can impact on physical impairments and vice versa. However, it has been bastardised by this American insurance company called UNUM, and used as the basis for the ATOS "work capability assessment". This is what they are using to justify the cuts and the taking away of benefits.



Hmmmm, I've read a critique of the biopsychosocial model on (i think) the DPAC website. I didn't understand a lot of their critique tbh. Its a model used in mental health that means to take into account the biological (or medical), psychological and social aspects of mental health. Its certainly much better than the dominant psychiatric medical model.


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## Steel Icarus (May 2, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Every time I go off and have a rant on twitter about the dumbest examples of privilige and/or intersectionality I get fucking people I've never even met who are part of that scene sending me DM's going "omg thank you for saying that you have no idea how much this has been pissing me off" and I know it's a cliche (numerous PM's of support etc) but there's something wrong going on here when this is going on.


 
This is my experience, too, with DMs. "THANKS for saying that - I daren't Tweet it onto my timeline cos I don't want to be mobbed/accused/called names/out of Ally Club"


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## Paulie Tandoori (May 2, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Hmmmm, I've read a critique of the biopsychosocial model on (i think) the DPAC website. I didn't understand a lot of their critique tbh. Its a model used in mental health that means to take into account the biological (or medical), psychological and social aspects of mental health. Its certainly much better than the dominant psychiatric medical model.


In a nutshell, it's because the biopsychosocial model had been championed by doctors and healthcare professionals who have close working links with DWP and private insurance companies such as Unum (well-known for manipulating official government policies on welfare reforms for some years now), and is suspected of being used to deny the accounts people give of their ill health or impairment, as well as its affect upon them i.e. to claim these are psychosomatic sickness. Given some of the well-publicised cases of people being found fit for work with terminal cancer, or whilst in a coma, perhaps DPAC do have some cause for concerns?


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## The39thStep (May 2, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  6h
> If you're doing exams right now, hang in there. Understanding that exams are bullshit will help you pass. Soon it'll be summer. Good luck.


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## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> But I end up thinking about this a lot with other threads on here. Some sort of radical journal perhaps? Not too big to be sell-out, not too small to be too marginal etc etc


 
You're right. Some sort of inquiry.


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## rekil (May 2, 2013)

What Resistance Looks Like according to some pseud.



> In a small gallery space on Stanton Street on New York City’s Lower East Side, Molly Crabapple has visualized what resistance looks like. Her dramatic densely packed spaces of liberation open your eyes as you walk out of the space. It’s a potent and (accidentally nostalgic) reminder of what the 2011 moment meant. On this May Day, it’s good to remember that resistance isn’t about violence, it isn’t gendered masculine, and it’s not the preserve of white privilege. It is fun, it’s lovely, it’s life-enhancing, it reminds us what love means above and beyond heteronormative coupling clichés.


 
This is like having boiling sick poured into my eyes.


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## rekil (May 2, 2013)

LP said:
			
		

> If you're doing exams right now, hang in there. Understanding that exams are bullshit will help you pass. Soon it'll be summer. Good luck.


https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/3363605668


> Anthony Seldon is a LEGEND. He was my history teacher, and is a personal mentor. He's a lot of the reason I am like I am...






			
				LP said:
			
		

> I was informed by a teacher that I would be applying to Oxford. I was the smartest kid in a smart school which needed to boost its Oxbridge figures:


Report to Mr.Seldon's office and explain why exams are 'bullshit'. How can Brighton and Wellington hope to keep their Oxford figures up with that sort of insolence going round the schoolyard? VERY disappointed in you Laura.


----------



## Blagsta (May 2, 2013)

Paul T said:


> In a nutshell, it's because the biopsychosocial model had been championed by doctors and healthcare professionals who have close working links with DWP and private insurance companies such as Unum (well-known for manipulating official government policies on welfare reforms for some years now), and is suspected of being used to deny the accounts people give of their ill health or impairment, as well as its affect upon them i.e. to claim these are psychosomatic sickness. Given some of the well-publicised cases of people being found fit for work with terminal cancer, or whilst in a coma, perhaps DPAC do have some cause for concerns?


 
That's not really the fault of the model. The model attempts to integrate the differing perspectives of mental health, with varying degrees of success.

If its being used to deny people's own accounts then its not the bio-psycho-social model! As for psychosomatic - mental ill health and physical ill health are not separate issues, they are part and parcel of the same thing. IMO, the bio-psycho-social model is an attempt to recognise this and come up with a more holistic approach to illness. The fact that it is being misused and abused for political purposes should not mean we chuck the baby out with the bathwater.  People being found fit for work when dying of cancer is not connected to the bio-psycho-social model IMO.


----------



## Casually Red (May 2, 2013)

im stealing that one


----------



## JimW (May 2, 2013)

I wonder if Mr Seldon is considering suing to stop having his academic credentials associated in this way with LP's cavalier methods with facts, quotes and documentation.


----------



## The39thStep (May 2, 2013)

copliker said:


> What Resistance Looks Like according to some pseud.
> 
> 
> 
> This is like having boiling sick poured into my eyes.


 
Resisttance  last night looked like: a)me trying to convince some people in a pub that you can fly the St Georges flag without fear of prosecution by ethnic minorities b) getting the point across that the largest part of welfare cost is actually old age pensions c) managing to get a £20 bet out of a United fan that Mourinho will be at Chelsea next season


----------



## JimW (May 2, 2013)

If we haven't taken the strategically vital  commanding heights of the New York gallery crowd scene first we have no revolutionary ground to speak of, so I find this carping uncomradely.


----------



## The39thStep (May 2, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Resistance last night looked like: a)me trying to convince some people in a pub that you can fly the St Georges flag without fear of prosecution by ethnic minorities b) getting the point across that the largest part of welfare cost is actually old age pensions c) managing to get a £20 bet out of a United fan that Mourinho will be at Chelsea next season


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 2, 2013)

J Ed said:


> These articles are by a middle-class student at my uni who appropriates working-class culture by wearing a flatcap and trackies on a pretty regular basis
> 
> http://marxistqueen.wordpress.com/2...g-the-struggle-of-native-american-liberation/
> http://marxistqueen.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/cultural-appropriation-continued/


 
All the middle class student intersectionalistas, especially the more annoying of the SWP dissidents, in Sheffield seem to have taken to wearing tracky tops and jeans. 'Speaking as' a working class person who always wears and has always worn that stuff, and more because it's comfortable than anything else, it actually really does piss me off. Not because they're 'trivialising my culture' or anything like that - I just really really don't want to be associated with them.


----------



## toggle (May 2, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/01/women-gain-feminism-diana-rigg



> One of the problems with the jargon of intersectionality is that it splinters. Much "on trend" feminism has lost touch as it is over-determined by sexuality. Whether we are discussing "sex workers", trans issues or porn, the overriding differences between women are far less "sexy". They remain largely to do with class. If feminism is to mean anything to most women, it has to mean an extension of their choices.


----------



## Firky (May 2, 2013)

I don't understand that quote, I understand what it says but I don't get why IYSWIM.

Oh, it is Suzanne Moore. I am not reading that - winds me up too much


----------



## toggle (May 2, 2013)

says something when she's the one making a bit more sense to me on this.

if we focused on class, a lot of the other stuff would fall into place.


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> It might be better not to talk bollocks about matb especially as most of us are here


_On this very thread._


----------



## phildwyer (May 2, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Y'know at some point I really want to go through this thread from the start and write some sort of critique about the whole thing. From the start.


 
I think that's a fabulous idea.  I think that's the best idea you've ever had.



Delroy Booth said:


> I'd want help. Who wants to help?


 
I'd say it ought to be a solo effort really.  And you're _exactly _the right man for the job.



Delroy Booth said:


> I've got loads of time to kill until November when I am (fingers crossed) fucking off out the country so lets get to work on this.


 
No time like the present!



Delroy Booth said:


> Some sort of radical journal perhaps?


 
Definitely. 

Let us know how you get on, 'kay?


----------



## andysays (May 2, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> All the middle class student intersectionalistas, especially the more annoying of the SWP dissidents, in Sheffield seem to have taken to wearing tracky tops and jeans. 'Speaking as' a working class person who always wears and has always worn that stuff, and more because it's comfortable than anything else, it actually really does piss me off. Not because they're 'trivialising my culture' or anything like that - I just really really don't want to be associated with them.


 
Time for a new look?


----------



## Idris2002 (May 2, 2013)

andysays said:


> Time for a new look?


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

S☼I said:


> This is my experience, too, with DMs. "THANKS for saying that - I daren't Tweet it onto my timeline cos I don't want to be mobbed/accused/called names/out of Ally Club"


I have had a similar experience when I got denounced on Facebook for putting a few controversial/poor taste/light hearted digging memes (nothing that could be considered "blatantly" oppressive) on my wall once, when I got a message from someone else whom fell out with the accusers a while back saying that they'd essentially lost the plot and whilst she didn't agree with what I put that their attempts to police people's FB walls were just plain bullying. Made me feel a lot better about stuff, particularly knowing that not all left-minded, activisty people felt that way.


----------



## andysays (May 2, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


>


 
To be clear, I was suggesting the Mao look for Spiney, now that the intersectionalistas have appropriated his "look".

Who are you suggesting that get up for?


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> All the middle class student intersectionalistas, especially the more annoying of the SWP dissidents, in Sheffield seem to have taken to wearing tracky tops and jeans. 'Speaking as' a working class person who always wears and has always worn that stuff, and more because it's comfortable than anything else, it actually really does piss me off. Not because they're 'trivialising my culture' or anything like that - I just really really don't want to be associated with them.


I actually know an now-ex-swppie who now lives in Sheffield and looks sorta like that, but comes across as genuinely working class all the same, was originally from that exclusive petty-bourgeois enclave known as Rotherham. Seemed like a genuine person and a good comrade when we were doing anti-benefit cuts campaigns in Manchester.


----------



## treelover (May 2, 2013)

copliker said:


> What Resistance Looks Like according to some pseud.
> 
> 
> 
> This is like having boiling sick poured into my eyes.


 

when I read things like that I wonder what it would have looked like it if John Reid or Orwell had been into identity politics, how the books would have been different


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 2, 2013)

J Ed said:


> These articles are by a middle-class student at my uni who appropriates working-class culture by wearing a flatcap and trackies on a pretty regular basis
> 
> http://marxistqueen.wordpress.com/2...g-the-struggle-of-native-american-liberation/
> http://marxistqueen.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/cultural-appropriation-continued/


 
Mr. Brophy would be advised to:
a) Get someone to sub-edit his writings.
b) Perhaps entertain the possibility that the information he derives from his sources might, just possibly, be partisan
c) Learn the subject he discourses on in some kind of depth before writing blog posts.

I know that having a clue what you're talking about isn't fashionable for young middle-class bloggers, but it does make for a better read, and subbing your prose is almost always productive. 

Perhaps I should check my privileges, though.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Also, I stumbled into privilege theory via disabled people's rights politics. A lot of good work is done by the disabled rights movement, like campaigning for the implementation of the social model of disability (which states that it's society that disables people, not their impairments), and building organisations of disabled people, led by disabled people. At the time it all made a lot of sense, however even though it has its good points (and disabled people are very likely to be excluded from other movements, as well as from other aspects of society that non-disabled people take for granted), it is still a form of identity politics, and there is that same "us and them" mentality which means that all non-disabled need to prove themselves worthy of allydom.


 
Frankly, although I'm a disabled person, I've never been a wholehearted espouser of the social model, not least because many of the more wholehearted espousers rode the identity politics bandwagon quite hard back in the day ('80s and '90s), and made a point of anathematising the medical model and (more importantly IMO) *anything connected to it*.  This led to, for example, my mate Eddy's deaf parents prevaricating about him getting cochlear implants for a couple of years, until he was old enough to make the choice himself.
Too much identity politics *still* after more than 30 years "on the scene", throws the baby out with the bathwater. Life is about compromise, not ideological purity.


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Mr. Brophy would be advised to:
> a) Get someone to sub-edit his writings.
> b) Perhaps entertain the possibility that the information he derives from his sources might, just possibly, be partisan
> c) Learn the subject he discourses on in some kind of depth before writing blog posts.
> ...


 
he makes some good points but isn't "cultural appropriation" how we got things like fish and chips for example?


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Ahh yes, the "biosocialphysical" model...


 
That's "biopsychosocial".


----------



## Idris2002 (May 2, 2013)

andysays said:


> To be clear, I was suggesting the Mao look for Spiney, now that the intersectionalistas have appropriated his "look".
> 
> Who are you suggesting that get up for?


 
For the hipster intersectionalistas actually (googling for that image, I found plenty of examples of the real thing, btw, and they are very, very ugly indeed).


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> he makes some good points but isn't "cultural appropriation" how we got things like fish and chips for example?


 
It can certainly be reduced to that.
The problem for arguments about cultural appropriation is that "culture" (by which I mean both large-scale and small-scale culture) is not a static thing. Unless a culture is "closed", i.e. entirely isolated and insulated from outside influence, then culture is fluid, and it's probably the most promiscuously-hybridising force on G-d's green earth. All cultures appropriate ideas and practices from other cultures, and that's actually a good thing, because it keeps cultures alive and (more importantly) *relevant* to the mass of people within a culture or subculture.


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> It can certainly be reduced to that.
> The problem for arguments about cultural appropriation is that "culture" (by which I mean both large-scale and small-scale culture) is not a static thing. Unless a culture is "closed", i.e. entirely isolated and insulated from outside influence, then culture is fluid, and it's probably the most promiscuously-hybridising force on G-d's green earth. All cultures appropriate ideas and practices from other cultures, and that's actually a good thing, because it keeps cultures alive and (more importantly) *relevant* to the mass of people within a culture or subculture.


 
i mean the only time i can think it might be problematic is if it's done to take the piss, like people blacking up or something. or tory students dressing in burkhas at a fancy dress night or something like that.

I'm not going to cry my eyes out when i see bagel factory put it that way, in fact i think it's a good thing because i think that if the food or clothing becomes popular people can understand a bit more about the culture.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> I was making a comment about Urban (and particularly P and P) in general. But you're right, it was the "Trot-bots" who were busy screaming "Islamophobe" at everyone. It was the anarchists (well, the more dogmatic of the anarchists) whom tried forming their own boards IIRC.


 
Hmm, ernestolynch an anarchist...nah!


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i mean the only time i can think it might be problematic is if it's done to take the piss, like people blacking up or something. or tory students dressing in burkhas at a fancy dress night or something like that.


 
Even then, it depends on the context, _Svart Piet_, for example, isn't the same level of problem that The Black and White Minstrels were.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 2, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Hmmmm, I've read a critique of the biopsychosocial model on (i think) the DPAC website. I didn't understand a lot of their critique tbh. Its a model used in mental health that means to take into account the biological (or medical), psychological and social aspects of mental health. Its certainly much better than the dominant psychiatric medical model.


 
A lot of criticism/critiques of the biopsychosocial model aren't about the aptness of the model _per se_, but about how it gets applied, and to whom. It's certainly amenable to psychiatry (mis)using it with much the same results as their dominant discourse.


----------



## caleb (May 2, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> All the middle class student intersectionalistas, especially the more annoying of the SWP dissidents, in Sheffield seem to have taken to wearing tracky tops and jeans. 'Speaking as' a working class person who always wears and has always worn that stuff, and more because it's comfortable than anything else, it actually really does piss me off. Not because they're 'trivialising my culture' or anything like that - I just really really don't want to be associated with them.


 
in leeds the 'swp dissidents' as you put it jumped on the 'intersectionality'/'privilege' stuff as soon as they were out of the party. a sense of guilt?


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Even then, it depends on the context, _Svart Piet_, for example, isn't the same level of problem that The Black and White Minstrels were.


 
yeah but when I see bagel factory at reading train station i don't think it's an example of oppression, i think it's a good thing when food/clothing becomes popular and people are interested in it coz it means they learn more about the culture


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 2, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> It might be better not to talk bollocks about matb especially as most of us are here


 
Anarchist wankers!  Grrrr.


----------



## andysays (May 2, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> For the hipster intersectionalistas actually (googling for that image, I found plenty of examples of the real thing, btw, and they are very, very ugly indeed).


 
Your guys appear to be rocking a Hugo Ball look


----------



## Idris2002 (May 2, 2013)

For a split second I read andysays post there as "rocking a Hugo Boss look" and thought WTF?


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Frankly, although I'm a disabled person, I've never been a wholehearted espouser of the social model, not least because many of the more wholehearted espousers rode the identity politics bandwagon quite hard back in the day ('80s and '90s)


 
I can see that. Again there seems to be a lack of understanding that privileged (in this case, non-disabled) people have feelings too. Also a lot of the rhetoric tended to appear to blame *every* non-disabled person for the way disabled people are mis-treated in society. For example, when DAN (that's the Disabled People's Direct Action Network for everyone reading this) blockaded bus stations because buses at the time weren't wheelchair accessible, one of the slogans was "We're DAN, you're trapped, get used to it!". Now for commuters going about their daily lives that isn't going to garner much sympathy, and if you're an "Aspie" like me whom is caught up in this and just wants to get from A to B then one could understand not being that sympathetic at all (I can get royally freaked out if I am due to be somewhere and get held up).

Having said that, DAN back in the day did some good things, all bar a few buses in most urban areas have wheelchair spaces (though one still has to have faith that the driver won't rudely tell you to piss off), and it challenged the patronising way a lot of mainstream disability charities (which usually had very few disabled people working on them, especially at executive level) thought they knew what was best, and challenged the public perception of disabled people as these poor, pathetic creatures that needed to be saved from their tragic circumstances. However fast forward to two and a half years ago when I first heard of them, and the local group became inactive because any attempt to make a meeting happen, or build for an action was effectively vetoed by one or two old-timers in the group whom didn't like the fact it couldn't be 100% accessible to 100% of people.



> made a point of anathematising the medical model and (more importantly IMO) *anything connected to it*. This led to, for example, my mate Eddy's deaf parents prevaricating about him getting cochlear implants for a couple of years, until he was old enough to make the choice himself.


 
I really can't stand "Deaf with a capital D" people. I know privilege theory dictates I have no right to object because I can hear perfectly well, but I still cannot stand their separatist, holier-than-thou ways. I have similar issues with autistic spectrum rights people, no, I don't think that autism is something that needs to be "cured", nor should a cure be forced upon us (some of the US based work on finding a cure is well scary), but I don't like the separatist mentality which makes everything a neurotypical conspiracy against them. Also many of the more hardcore social model advocates really would rather remain impaired than have anything to do that would potentially improve their quality of life, and if they don't want any intervention, then fine, but leave the option open to those whom, say, would love to be able to walk again without being in extreme pain, for example.



> Too much identity politics *still* after more than 30 years "on the scene", throws the baby out with the bathwater. Life is about compromise, not ideological purity.


In many ways not too dissimilar to the state of the Left in general...


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yeah but when I see bagel factory at reading train station i don't think it's an example of oppression, i think it's a good thing when food/clothing becomes popular and people are interested in it coz it means they learn more about the culture


 
It means they have the *opportunity* to learn more, if they care to, at least.
And it's a "good thing", insofar as it makes cultures less insular and more accepting of difference.


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> he makes some good points but isn't "cultural appropriation" how we got things like fish and chips for example?


And Chicken Tikka Masala?


----------



## andysays (May 2, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> For a split second I read andysays post there as "rocking a Hugo Boss look" and thought WTF?


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i mean the only time i can think it might be problematic is if it's done to take the piss, like people blacking up or something. or tory students dressing in burkhas at a fancy dress night or something like that.


 
In the case of white Americans dressing up as Native Americans (particularly on Halloween), you can understand why that *can indeed* be problematic though.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> In the case of white Americans dressing up as Native Americans (particularly on Halloween), you can understand why that *can indeed* be problematic though.


 
Or Jean-Marie Le Pen parading around in an Indian chief's headdress.


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> In the case of white Americans dressing up as Native Americans (particularly on Halloween), you can understand why that *can indeed* be problematic though.


 
yeah obviously that's out of order that's why i said if they're doing it to take the piss.


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

caleb said:


> in leeds the 'swp dissidents' as you put it jumped on the 'intersectionality'/'privilege' stuff as soon as they were out of the party. a sense of guilt?


It's very likely they are trying to, for right or wrong, boost their pro-feminist credentials, especially since it was because of sexism that they ended up leaving the party in the first place. I do know one ex-swppie in Leeds who isn't like that though.


----------



## J Ed (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> he makes some good points but isn't "cultural appropriation" how we got things like fish and chips for example?


 
http://www.theonion.com/articles/grad-student-deconstructs-takeout-menu,85/

Disturbingly I've seen actual postcolonial deconstructions of Lebanese takeaway menus in Washington DC, can't seem to find them atm but they are out there... it's a real thing.

BTW Seymour posted this to facebook and (I'm not sure whether he was being ironic or not) he claimed not to see the satire. Whether he did or not, a few of his followers earnestly set about agreeing with the article.


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yeah but when I see bagel factory at reading train station i don't think it's an example of oppression, i think it's a good thing when food/clothing becomes popular and people are interested in it coz it means they learn more about the culture


But then the hipsters come and ruin it for everyone 

Which is probably why some many people get so hung-up on cultural appropriation, because all these "exotic" cultural symbols become like the Nike swoosh for middle-class hipsters. Annoying, but it's not the very worst thing to happen, and we all know what the posers look like, and they are readily mocked.


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yeah obviously that's out of order that's why i said if they're doing it to take the piss.


It's like how it's acceptable to use words like "gay" and "queer" to describe merely describe homosexuals, but not if they are used as an insult.


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> It's like how it's acceptable to use words like "gay" and "queer" to describe merely describe homosexuals, but not if they are used as an insult.


 
Is it? I thought "queer" was a much more charged sort of word.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 2, 2013)

Genuine question: has anyone seen the old GDR films with "Indians" as the heroes against the capitalist imperialist cowboys?


----------



## J Ed (May 2, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Genuine question: has anyone seen the old GDR films with "Indians" as the heroes against the capitalist imperialist cowboys?


 
No but now I desperately want to


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Is it? I thought "queer" was a much more charged sort of word.


Relative to gay it is, but it's been reclaimed by homosexuals and in certain places, now in general usage - "queer theory" for example.


----------



## phildwyer (May 2, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.theonion.com/articles/grad-student-deconstructs-takeout-menu,85/


 
This is better:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/dick-cheney-vice-presidential-library-opens-in-pit,32278/


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> But then the hipsters come and ruin it for everyone
> 
> Which is probably why some many people get so hung-up on cultural appropriation, because all these "exotic" cultural symbols become like the Nike swoosh for middle-class hipsters. Annoying, but it's not the very worst thing to happen, and we all know what the posers look like, and they are readily mocked.


 
yeah it might be annoying, for like five minutes, then everyone forgets about it 

when i think about racism, and think about the racism that i've had to put up with before, people buying bagels at reading train station or buying a doughnut from greggs or buying some fish and chips from the high street really isnt on my list of priorities. er yeah so different cultures get appropriated, my reaction is so what frankly, it's actually a good thing because it helps people to be less racist. 

if they're taking the piss about it that's a different matter but it's pretty easy to tell based on context


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Relative to gay it is, but it's been reclaimed by homosexuals and in certain places, now in general usage - "queer theory" for example.


 
Ah, right, I mean I've had the talk about being gay with my boy cos some kid called him a "faggot" which led to a conversation about how different people fancy different people etc but I'd never have used the word "queer"


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Is it? I thought "queer" was a much more charged sort of word.


 
i find the word queer offensive because thats the sort of thing i was called at school by homophobic bullies but most of these types would think i was crazy for thinking that.


----------



## andysays (May 2, 2013)

J Ed said:


> No but now I desperately want to


 
Me too. I've got to go out now but if someone can find a link, I'll look forward to watching later this evening...


----------



## andysays (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yeah it might be annoying, for like five minutes, then everyone forgets about it
> 
> when i think about racism, and think about the racism that i've had to put up with before, people buying bagels at reading train station or buying a doughnut from greggs or buying some fish and chips from the high street really isnt on my list of priorities. er yeah so different cultures get appropriated, my reaction is so what frankly, it's actually a good thing because it helps people to be less racist.
> 
> if they're taking the piss about it that's a different matter but it's pretty easy to tell based on context


 
I suspect the average racist is unaware of the cultural origins of fish and chips, and wouldn't believe you if you told him where they came from.

Fish and chips are, to many, as English as antisemitism.


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

andysays said:


> I suspect the average racist is unaware of the cultural origins of fish and chips, and wouldn't believe you if you told him where they came from.
> 
> Fish and chips are, to many, as English as antisemitism.


 
but it doesn't make people be anti-semitic. it's just a thing. and there's nothing to get upset about? it's not like they are taking the piss are they? and if they learnt about it then they might start to think a bit more differently about their views?

what im saying is i guess, even if that stuff doesnt do any good it doesnt do any harm. i would rather somebody with them views actually learnt about where its from than sat in a corner going on about chemtrails

maybe im just being naive but i really cant see whats wrong with it


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

In many ways privilege theory can be really reactionary, causing people to condemn and denounce anything that isn't part of *their* way of thinking.


----------



## andysays (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> but it doesn't make people be anti-semitic. it's just a thing. and there's nothing to get upset about? it's not like they are taking the piss are they? and if they learnt about it then they might start to think a bit more differently about their views?
> 
> what im saying is i guess, even if that stuff doesnt do any good it doesnt do any harm. i would rather somebody with them views actually learnt about where its from than sat in a corner going on about chemtrails
> 
> maybe im just being naive but i really cant see whats wrong with it


 
Sorry, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with people eating foods that come from other cultures, but I think the idea that it helps to make them less racist *is* a little naive.

Maybe that's not what you're saying though,and I'm afraid I have to go out so don't have time to discuss it now


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

I used to be quite racist against muslims, but learning and thinking about for example where numbers originally came from and that sort of thing does help you to become more tolerant, or at least doesn't make you more racist, does it? Sorry if this sounds really stupid but i don't object to it in the way some people seem to. I dunno.


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

andysays said:


> Sorry, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with people eating foods that come from other cultures, but I think the idea that it helps to make them less racist *is* a little naive.
> 
> Maybe that's not what you're saying though,and I'm afraid I have to go out so don't have time to discuss it now


 
yer i don't think that on it own helps, but i'm saying that it's not a bad tihng or worth getting upset about, and that that sort of stuff can be like a sign of cultural integration and that people are more accepted in society, rather than if everyone just regarded those types of foods as weird and avoided them along with the people that ate them.


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yer i don't think that on it own helps, but i'm saying that it's not a bad tihng or worth getting upset about, and that that sort of stuff can be like a sign of cultural integration and that people are more accepted in society, rather than if everyone just regarded those types of foods as weird and avoided them along with the people that ate them.


You still get racist "curry" jokes aimed at Indians and Pakistanis, and one of Prince Phillip's gaffes was something to do with how the Chinese would "eat anything".


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> You still get racist "curry" jokes aimed at Indians and Pakistanis, and one of Prince Phillip's gaffes was something to do with how the Chinese would "eat anything".


 
but people would make those jokes anyway


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> but people would make those jokes anyway


I know, I'm not aruging that only people from the subcontinent be allowed to eat curry as a result.


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

From Not the Nine O'Clock News:



"A lot of immigrants are Indians and Pakistanis for instance, and... I like curry. But now that we've got the recipe, is there really any need for them to stay?" (from 1:18)


----------



## Pickman's model (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> From Not the Nine O'Clock News:
> 
> 
> 
> "A lot of immigrants are Indians and Pakistanis for instance, and... I like curry. But now that we've got the recipe, is there really any need for them to stay?" (from 1:18)



it was such a disappointment to see so many of the 'alternative comedians' from the 1980s turn into establishment toadies.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> I actually know an now-ex-swppie who now lives in Sheffield and looks sorta like that, but comes across as genuinely working class all the same, was originally from that exclusive petty-bourgeois enclave known as Rotherham. Seemed like a genuine person and a good comrade when we were doing anti-benefit cuts campaigns in Manchester.


 
So not a middle class intersectionalista then. Why is this relevant?


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

Because I wanted to make the point that not all of them are like that?


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 2, 2013)

dispatches from the Glorious Intersectional Commentariat War, from the front lines in the twitter no-persons-land by your reporter Delroy "Fisk" Booth

Suzanne Moore wrote this. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/01/women-gain-feminism-diana-rigg?CMP=twt_gu

Stavvers wrote this. http://stavvers.tumblr.com/post/49427098074/an-open-letter-to-suzanne-moore-because-she-blocked-me

It seems Suzanne Moore (who I don't have much time for personally) is being anti-intersectional. Blasphemer!


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 2, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> it was such a disappointment to see so many of the 'alternative comedians' from the 1980s turn into establishment toadies.


 
yes, but at least it allows us to present evidence that _the middle classes will side with their own eventually and are therefore not to be trusted._


----------



## treelover (May 2, 2013)

[




el-ahrairah said:


> yes, but at least it allows us to present evidence that _the middle classes will side with their own eventually and are therefore not to be trusted._


 

Not always and it can work the other way, I remember one of the 47 Liverpool Councillors scabbing on the Liverpool Dockers


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> dispatches from the Glorious Intersectional Commentariat War, from the front lines in the twitter no-persons-land by your reporter Delroy "Fisk" Booth
> 
> Suzanne Moore wrote this. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/01/women-gain-feminism-diana-rigg?CMP=twt_gu
> 
> ...


 
An open letter to butchers from articul8 telling him to vote labour 

An open letter from spymaster to casually red saying why he isnt going to call it the malvina's

An open letter to my friend for deleting me off facebook

An open letter to another friend for forgetting my birthday


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

an open letter to suzanne moore because she blocked me

really. 

REALLY?


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> An open letter to butchers from articul8 telling him to vote labour
> 
> An open letter from spymaster to casually red saying why he isnt going to call it the malvina's
> 
> ...


Mebbe I should try that one with the person whom unfriended me from FB and blocked me on Twitter a year ago because I slagged off Occupy London.

Assuming I thought it was worth it that is


----------



## cesare (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> I can see that. Again there seems to be a lack of understanding that privileged (in this case, non-disabled) people have feelings too. Also a lot of the rhetoric tended to appear to blame *every* non-disabled person for the way disabled people are mis-treated in society. For example, when DAN (that's the Disabled People's Direct Action Network for everyone reading this) blockaded bus stations because buses at the time weren't wheelchair accessible, one of the slogans was "We're DAN, you're trapped, get used to it!". Now for commuters going about their daily lives that isn't going to garner much sympathy, and if you're an "Aspie" like me whom is caught up in this and just wants to get from A to B then one could understand not being that sympathetic at all (I can get royally freaked out if I am due to be somewhere and get held up).
> 
> Having said that, DAN back in the day did some good things, all bar a few buses in most urban areas have wheelchair spaces (though one still has to have faith that the driver won't rudely tell you to piss off), and it challenged the patronising way a lot of mainstream disability charities (which usually had very few disabled people working on them, especially at executive level) thought they knew what was best, and challenged the public perception of disabled people as these poor, pathetic creatures that needed to be saved from their tragic circumstances. However fast forward to two and a half years ago when I first heard of them, and the local group became inactive because any attempt to make a meeting happen, or build for an action was effectively vetoed by one or two old-timers in the group whom didn't like the fact it couldn't be 100% accessible to 100% of people.
> 
> ...


Do you hate all "Deaf" separatist people or just the middle class hipster commentariat ones?


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Do you hate all "Deaf" separatist people or just the middle class hipster commentariat ones?


Who said anything about "hate?" That's a pretty strong word which I don't appreciate being put in my mouth. I just find their holier-than-thou attitude (and the blaming everything on those that have average to good hearing abilities - a common theme within all identity politics) annoying in the extreme.


----------



## cesare (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Who said anything about "hate?" That's a pretty strong word which I don't appreciate being put in my mouth. I just find their holier-than-thou attitude (and the blaming everything on those that have average to good hearing abilities - a common theme within all identity politics) annoying in the extreme.



Yes, someone equated "can't stand" to "hate" with something I said last week too, and I didn't appreciate it so I get that.  I didn't have a fucking tantrum about it though. This "holier-than-thou" attitude - does that apply to their hand signals too btw?


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Yes, someone equated "can't stand" to "hate" with something I said last week too, and I didn't appreciate it so I get that. I didn't have a fucking tantrum about it though. This "holier-than-thou" attitude - does that apply to their hand signals too btw?


If I'm being accused of something - spit it out so I can properly defend myself. Oh and insinuating I'm "having a tantrum" - nice way to dismiss whatever I have to say.


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

Actually i may be labelled as some sort of intersectionalist but doesn't the criticism of the DAN for blockading bus stations also apply to other direct action groups as well? like some of the boycott workfare/tax evasion stuff as well. I think direct action needs to be done with some sort of attempt to talk to the people involved and get their support, for example giving leaflets out at bus stations etc but I don't think that this type of action is necessarily a bad thing just because people are inconvenienced, and if it resulted in getting better disabled access in bus stops etc surely that's a good thing? 

It's like people complaining about strikes on public transport because they're inconvenienced public transport is so shit i'd rather i was delayed for a good reason than because the bus broke down or some shit


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Actually i may be labelled as some sort of intersectionalist but doesn't the criticism of the DAN for blockading bus stations also apply to other direct action groups as well? like some of the boycott workfare/tax evasion stuff as well. I think direct action needs to be done with some sort of attempt to talk to the people involved and get their support, for example giving leaflets out at bus stations etc but I don't think that this type of action is necessarily a bad thing just because people are inconvenienced, and if it resulted in getting better disabled access in bus stops etc surely that's a good thing?
> 
> It's like people complaining about strikes on public transport because they're inconvenienced public transport is so shit i'd rather i was delayed for a good reason than because the bus broke down or some shit


I don't think it is entirely "a bad thing", and sometimes it cannot be helped if people are at least slightly inconvenienced, but the "we're trapped, get used to it", slogan seems very much attacking the non-disabled public as a whole. But then I tend to be very bitter and jaded when it comes to activism. However the one thing all direct action groups consistently fall short on is engagement with the wider public.

But hey, non-accessible buses have become an increasingly rare sight, so it must have worked


----------



## cesare (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> If I'm being accused of something - spit it out so I can properly defend myself. Oh and insinuating I'm "having a tantrum" - nice way to dismiss whatever I have to say.


I've spat out two questions, neither of which you've answered.


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> I don't think it is entirely "a bad thing", and sometimes it cannot be helped if people are at least slightly inconvenienced, but the "we're trapped, get used to it", slogan seems very much attacking the non-disabled public as a whole. But then I tend to be very bitter and jaded when it comes to activism. However the one thing all direct action groups consistently fall short on is engagement with the wider public.
> 
> But hey, non-accessible buses have become an increasingly rare sight, so it must have worked


 
see i think that if they got a victory out of it they might have had some slightly warped ideas but the good that came out of it (ie getting a collective victory and getting confidence in themselves) probably outweighs the bad, hopefully the experiences while campaigning will help them "relate to the public better" during direct action anyway 

and personally i think sometimes people overestimate the "negative PR" direct action will get, sometimes that sort of thing actually gives people hope


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> I've spat out two questions, neither of which you've answered.


Both of which to me appeared worded in an accusatory tone, designed to give you ammunition in order to character assassinate me. But since the only way to get you to shut up is to at least try, I will attempt to do so.




> Do you hate all "Deaf" separatist people or just the middle class hipster commentariat ones?


I *"can't stand"* (that's the actual term I used) separatist people from all forms of identity politics - "Deaf" people are only one example.



> This "holier-than-thou" attitude - does that apply to their hand signals too btw?


Using sign language has nothing to do with being holier-than-thou, the idea that it does is a load of bollocks. However, denouncing people who have cochlear implants IS holier-than-thou.


----------



## cesare (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Both of which to me appeared worded in an accusatory tone, designed to give you ammunition in order to character assassinate me. But since the only way to get you to shut up is to at least try, I will attempt to do so.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I used the word "hate" instead of "can't stand" which I accept and accepted. I also pointed out that it had been done to me last week, and I didn't like it either. However, you (unlike me) went completely off at the deep end over it (which I called a "tantrum" because it was, and continues to be completely disproportionate) and are still doing so. Fucking get over yourself.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 2, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Genuine question: has anyone seen the old GDR films with "Indians" as the heroes against the capitalist imperialist cowboys?


 
Saw one on German TV (one of the regional channels) back in '08. can't remember what it was called, though.  Good quality of acting, which surprised me.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 2, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> dispatches from the Glorious Intersectional Commentariat War, from the front lines in the twitter no-persons-land by your reporter Delroy "Fisk" Booth
> 
> Suzanne Moore wrote this. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/01/women-gain-feminism-diana-rigg?CMP=twt_gu
> 
> ...


 
Truly Moore should be treated as any apostate should be, and have her head chopped off!!!


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> However, you (unlike me) went completely off at the deep end over it (which I called a "tantrum" because it was, and continues to be completely disproportionate) and are still doing so. Fucking get over yourself.


By the standards of the Internet, I consider this a fairly reasonable response when people misquote me and twist my words:



> Who said anything about "hate?" That's a pretty strong word which I don't appreciate being put in my mouth.


 
No fighting words, no shouty language, and (unlike you) no swearing. I would have happily let it drop if you just acknowledged you conflated the two terms. Instead, you have a go at me for overreacting in an attempt to look down on me.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Actually i may be labelled as some sort of intersectionalist but doesn't the criticism of the DAN for blockading bus stations also apply to other direct action groups as well? like some of the boycott workfare/tax evasion stuff as well. I think direct action needs to be done with some sort of attempt to talk to the people involved and get their support, for example giving leaflets out at bus stations etc but I don't think that this type of action is necessarily a bad thing just because people are inconvenienced, and if it resulted in getting better disabled access in bus stops etc surely that's a good thing?
> 
> It's like people complaining about strikes on public transport because they're inconvenienced public transport is so shit i'd rather i was delayed for a good reason than because the bus broke down or some shit


 
TBF, DAN are pains in the arse to the general public, *but* they're highly-successful because they're pains in the arse, and aren't worried about getting nicked for their actions. Frankly, without direct action protests on public transport accessibility, we'd be even worse off than now (in London, only buses are properly accessible), with overground and underground stations not even at 25% of them being accessible.


----------



## sihhi (May 2, 2013)

Zoe Stavri said:
			
		

> Can I just ask why you’re saying “Caucasian” rather than white? Have you been in the US?


 




			
				Zoe Stavri said:
			
		

> It would be a gesture of good faith to Sam, who is a disabled WoC, who doesn't want you posting that without her consent.


 


How British is WOC?


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> TBF, DAN are pains in the arse to the general public, *but* they're highly-successful because they're pains in the arse, and aren't worried about getting nicked for their actions. Frankly, without direct action protests on public transport accessibility, we'd be even worse off than now (in London, only buses are properly accessible), with overground and underground stations not even at 25% of them being accessible.


Correction, DAN _were_ pains in the arse to the general public. They seem to be very quiet now, and nowhere as visible as they were in their early 90s heyday. Partly because other campaigns superseeded them, and also because the key people involved have passed away, as in many cases their impairments resulted in a shortened life expectancy.

I might not have 100% agreed with their tactics 100% of the time, but at the time they were successful in doing what they set out to do, and this country is a better place for disabled people as a result. I would actually like to see more DAN-style action against benefit cuts now.


----------



## cesare (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> By the standards of the Internet, I consider this a fairly reasonable response when people misquote me and twist my words:
> 
> 
> 
> No fighting words, no shouty language, and (unlike you) no swearing. I would have happily let it drop if you just acknowledged you conflated the two terms. Instead, you have a go at me for overreacting in an attempt to look down on me.


No, the person doing the looking down is you "by the standards of the internet" which if you want to reference, you can source whilst you're at it. I did acknowledge it, so don't misrepresent me. You over-reacted and are doing your best to deflect the conversation into that rather than the substance of what I was asking you.


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yer i don't think that on it own helps, but i'm saying that it's not a bad tihng or worth getting upset about, and that that sort of stuff can be like a sign of cultural integration and that people are more accepted in society, rather than if everyone just regarded those types of foods as weird and avoided them along with the people that ate them.


Why are you saying yer?


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> I did acknowledge it.


and then rather than just "acknowledge" that you continued to have a go at me. I was calm and polite, you were sweary and belittling. If anyone is over-reacting, it's not me.



> You over-reacted and are doing your best to deflect the conversation into that rather than the substance of what I was asking you.


 

As I was saying (maybe try and read the whole lot this time):


> Do you hate all "Deaf" separatist people or just the middle class hipster commentariat ones?​I *"can't stand"* (that's the actual term I used) separatist people from all forms of identity politics - "Deaf" people are only one example.
> This "holier-than-thou" attitude - does that apply to their hand signals too btw?​Using sign language has nothing to do with being holier-than-thou, the idea that it does is a load of bollocks. However, denouncing people who have cochlear implants IS holier-than-thou.


----------



## sihhi (May 2, 2013)

andysays said:


> I suspect the average racist is unaware of the cultural origins of fish and chips, and wouldn't believe you if you told him where they came from.
> 
> Fish and chips are, to many, as English as antisemitism.


 
Most English people think antisemitism is very 'un-English'.
Even the Tory right hold the Mail wholly wrong for supporting Moseley because of his antisemitism, don't they?


----------



## cesare (May 2, 2013)

Oh yeah, welcome back btw. 

And can you point me to any denouncing of people with cochlear implants? I'm aware that they're not supportive for many reasons, but the denouncing's past me by.


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Most English people think antisemitism is very 'un-English'.
> Even the Tory right hold the Mail wholly wrong for supporting Moseley because of his antisemitism, don't they?


Historically, the English were not at all very nice to the Jews at all, and there were plenty of massacres, a major one in York in 1190. Jews were banned from the country not so long after, and had to wait till Cromwell to be allowed back in.


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> And can you point me to any denouncing of people with cochlear implants? I'm aware that they're not supportive for many reasons, but the denouncing's past me by.


The choice of the word "denouncing" might have been OTT on my behalf, but the reasons why some many are anti-them seem a bit strange, dogmatic even, to me.

Now let's let that be the end of that.


----------



## sihhi (May 2, 2013)

Been reading Zoe Stavri's blog - sharper writing than LP - but this bit was confusing:




> Yes, we all fuck up, and nobody’s perfect, but embrace that criticism and learn from it and it will make you a better person.
> 
> Sometimes it’s hard to confront your own privilege, particularly when your life sucks because of one form of oppression you experience. But know that there are other forms of oppression that you are lucky not to have a fucking clue what the experience is like. Fuck the radfem mentality, or the privileged queer “let’s get married, everything else is fine” mentality, or *the “no war but class war” mentality*. All of these oppressions overlap, and fucks people over in different ways.
> 
> ...


 
a. the whole 'f- ... the “no war but class war” mentality' ...

b. how are "the few" privileged as "the privileged few"? In this country, 95% of the population is privileged because they are not non-white.

Am I being over-sensitive?


----------



## sihhi (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Historically, the English were not at all very nice to the Jews at all, and there were plenty of massacres, a major one in York in 1190. Jews were banned from the country not so long after, and had to wait till Cromwell to be allowed back in.


 
Sure, but a majority of racists in this country probably consider Britain's record superior to other European or Middle Eastern countries - hence a source of national pride etc.
Anyway derail over.


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

I so need to get to work on making Privilege Theory/Identity Politics Bingo


----------



## cesare (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> The choice of the word "denouncing" might have been OTT on my behalf, but the reasons why some many are anti-them seem a bit strange, dogmatic even, to me.
> 
> Now let's let that be the end of that.


Yes, denouncing was OTT. I can't remember which thread it was now, but there's a very interesting one where one of the posters here (mrsfran) describes what the results of cochlear implants are for the profoundly deaf. Iirc, the effect is like having white noise turned on because the sounds are just sounds, not language. The brain has to learn what sounds mean from scratch with no or little reference point, there's massive language implications beyond the physical effect. Anyway, I'm no expert on this at all, but it's worth getting an insight from mrsfran if you're interested.


----------



## andysays (May 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Most English people think antisemitism is very 'un-English'.


 
Many English people might think that overt expressions of antisemitism are very "un-English", frightfully bad form , don't you know, but many (not exactly the same many, but an overlapping one) still harbour antisemitic opinions and are not afraid to express them, if subtly, on occasion.

Note that I never said most, I compared antisemitism to fish and chips (you see why, right?), and most English people don't eat fish and chips every week anymore, if indeed they ever did.



sihhi said:


> Even the Tory right hold the Mail wholly wrong for supporting Moseley because of his antisemitism, don't they?


 
Do they? Are you talking then or now, and how (who) do you define the Tory right?


----------



## andysays (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Historically, the English were not at all very nice to the Jews at all, and there were plenty of massacres, a major one in York in 1190. Jews were banned from the country not so long after, and had to wait till Cromwell to be allowed back in.


 
Just as well he did, or we wouldn't have fish and chips (apologies if I've got the chronology slightly wrong)


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Yes, denouncing was OTT. I can't remember which thread it was now, but there's a very interesting one where one of the posters here (mrsfran) describes what the results of cochlear implants are for the profoundly deaf. Iirc, the effect is like having white noise turned on because the sounds are just sounds, not language. The brain has to learn what sounds mean from scratch with no or little reference point, there's massive language implications beyond the physical effect. Anyway, I'm no expert on this at all, but it's worth getting an insight from mrsfran if you're interested.


Okay, apologies for my ignorance on the matter. I am fully aware they aren't for everyone. Also if they happen to be on the autistic spectrum as well, and have an issue with sensory overload, then that's doubly unpleasant.


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Historically, the English were not at all very nice to the Jews at all, and there were plenty of massacres, a major one in York in 1190. Jews were banned from the country not so long after, and had to wait till Cromwell to be allowed back in.


The English? On this thread? And we have nice state/nasty state here don't we?


----------



## sihhi (May 2, 2013)

andysays said:


> Many English people might think that overt expressions of antisemitism are very "un-English", frightfully bad form , don't you know, but many (not exactly the same many, but an overlapping one) still harbour antisemitic opinions and are not afraid to express them, if subtly, on occasion.


 
OK, fair enough.



> Note that I never said most, I compared antisemitism to fish and chips (you see why, right?), and most English people don't eat fish and chips every week anymore, if indeed they ever did.


 
Because fish and chips was an idea from someone Jewish, although the chips part is very French. Is it just about it being Jewish or about it being a mixed concept - maybe even a  multicultural? thing back in the nineteenth century whenever it was.



> Do they? Are you talking then or now, and how (who) do you define the Tory right?


I was talking now. People on the Tory Eurosceptic social conservativist, anti-immigration wing - Nick Soames and all that, writers like Peter Hitchens.
They often ascribe "the country's" anti-anti-semitism as a great English/British strength.


----------



## andysays (May 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The English? On this thread? And we have nice state/nasty state here don't we?


 
Well we have nicer state/nastier state, but it's kind of a bigger version of good cop/bad cop...


----------



## andysays (May 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Because fish and chips was an idea from someone Jewish, although the chips part is very French. Is it just about it being Jewish or about it being a mixed concept - maybe even a multicultural? thing back in the nineteenth century whenever it was


 
I thought (although this may be something of an urban myth) that the technique of deep-frying food which gives us fish and chips came to Britain with Jewish refugees driven out by the Spanish Inquisition. Is that roughly the same time as Cromwell/ I don't claim to be much of a historian.



sihhi said:


> I was talking now. People on the Tory Eurosceptic social conservativist, anti-immigration wing - Nick Soames and all that, writers like Peter Hitchens. They often ascribe "the country's" anti-anti-semitism as a great English/British strength.


 
OK, fair enough. TBH (and I hope you'll excuse the obvious pun) I'd take that with a pinch of salt. It's more about the not making it too obvious thing I mentioned above.

It *is* frightfully un-English to wear jackboots, strut around like Mussolini and send train-loads to the gas chambers, but you still wouldn't want one of them to join the golf club, would you?


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Why are you saying yer?


 
dunno tbh, i sometimes do


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Most English people think antisemitism is very 'un-English'.
> Even the Tory right hold the Mail wholly wrong for supporting Moseley because of his antisemitism, don't they?


 
No I think you're right, especially since the second world war, and so much right-wing british nationalism is all about the war and churchill and the "blitz spirit" anyway


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> No I think you're right, especially since the second world war, and so much right-wing british nationalism is all about the war and churchill and the "blitz spirit" anyway


Although obviously that wasn't the case when Moseley and the BUF where at their height.


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

andysays said:


> Many English people might think that overt expressions of antisemitism are very "un-English", frightfully bad form , don't you know, but many (not exactly the same many, but an overlapping one) still harbour antisemitic opinions and are not afraid to express them, if subtly, on occasion.
> 
> Note that I never said most, I compared antisemitism to fish and chips (you see why, right?), and most English people don't eat fish and chips every week anymore, if indeed they ever did.
> 
> ...


 
in my experience there are some people who have anti-semitic views, consider themselves on the left, and don't consider themselves racist or on the right at all and probably hold daily mail readers etc in contempt

i don't think the people who were say involved in occupy and harboured anti-semitic opinions were the same people who it is stereotypically thought read the daily mail or vote ukip


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Although obviously that wasn't the case when Moseley and the BUF where at their height.


The BUF was pre-war and the post-war stuff was based on common euro-nationalism/black immigration. Anti-semitism didn't even enter into the equation.


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Although obviously that wasn't the case when Moseley and the BUF where at their height.


 
The war destroyed anti-semitism on a wide scale as a social force in this country imo. I don't think anti-semitism will ever have the social force it did in the country before the war. And even before the war there was massive resistance to it look at Cable Street for example.


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> dunno tbh, i sometimes do


Why?


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> in my experience there are some people who have anti-semitic views, consider themselves on the left, and don't consider themselves racist or on the right at all and probably hold daily mail readers etc in contempt


Regretfully they are often found in on the fringes of the Palestine solidarity movement.


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> The war destroyed anti-semitism on a wide scale as a social force in this country imo. I don't think anti-semitism will ever have the social force it did in the country before the war. And even before the war there was massive resistance to it look at Cable Street for example.


It was _never_ a social force in this country.


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

andysays said:


> Many English people might think that overt expressions of antisemitism are very "un-English", frightfully bad form , don't you know, but many (not exactly the same many, but an overlapping one) still harbour antisemitic opinions and are not afraid to express them, if subtly, on occasion.
> 
> Note that I never said most, I compared antisemitism to fish and chips (you see why, right?), and most English people don't eat fish and chips every week anymore, if indeed they ever did.
> 
> ...


 
I know the sort of people you're talking about and have had a bit of that shit but when I have told other people about it since, they have been shocked, because the overwhelming majority of people think it's unacceptable, a lot of that is because of the war.

 maybe i need to check my privilege or something but I just don't think that compared to many other countries it's that bad.


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

And the last stuff that happened was in 1290, that's almost a thousand years ago, you can't take the whole history of a country and say that that proves there's a deep tradition of it, because it was 800 years ago that happened and I don't think the UK today can remotely be compared to it, it's a completely different place, if we went back in time we wouldn't even be able to recognise anything and most of the towns and villages we have today wouldn't exist, we dont even have the same language we had then or the same anything


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Regretfully they are often found in on the fringes of the Palestine solidarity movement.


 
Yeah and I don't think most of those people even consider themselves british nationalists, they probably think they hate nationalism.

I don't think it's ever been a mass force or anything, it's not like I don't notice it, I always call it out when I see it and that sort of thing, but I just don't think it's part of the political traditions of the UK in the way that people on the thread seem to be saying it is.


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Yeah and I don't think those people even consider themselves british nationalists, they probably think they hate nationalism.


They are usually indeed "right on" lefties, despise anything that can be considered nationalistic of their own country, and claim to despise all forms of nationalism, unless it's branded as a legitimate struggle for liberation. But it's well documented that they will often side with all sorts of nasty reactionary groups if it means opposing "Western imperialism", unaware that there are rival imperialisms out there that are just as harmful.


----------



## equationgirl (May 2, 2013)

I read the new LP article. 

I couldn't take it seriously after reading 'lady-media industrial complex'. I mean, come on! Really??!! Pretentious!

And I felt bad because I felt she's touched on some interesting issues and started to make some good points, but then there was the bit about not defending some jobs and yes it might have been a job on a weekly magazine but it probably paid someone's rent and bills. A real mixture, this article.

C- lauriepenny I felt you could have done a lot better with this article given the subject.


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

Wow,



> Do we need to mourn every lost job without further comment, even in an industry that’s becoming toxic?


sounds like those who argued the printers should be defeated because of page 3. Who is the 'we' here? Whose job? 

(Lord, can i really start on this article tonight?)


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> They are usually indeed "right on" lefties, despise anything that can be considered nationalistic of their own country, and claim to despise all forms of nationalism, unless it's branded as a legitimate struggle for liberation. But it's well documented that they will often side with all sorts of nasty reactionary groups if it means opposing "Western imperialism", unaware that there are rival imperialisms out there that are just as harmful.


 
well there were a few people in psc who i heard expressing anti-semitic views on a few occasions, but i don't think they're representative of most of the country, they werent even that representative of psc and you'd expect to find that sort of shit there a lot more than you would down the pub for example


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Wow,
> 
> 
> sounds like those who argued the printers should be defeated because of page 3. Who is the 'we' here? Whose job?


 
What's she going on about?


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> What's she going on about?


It's an explanation of why she never joined the NUJ and why she now edits a paper that refuses to recognise unions. Because people who work on other mags can be put out of a job and she will be happy because she doesn't agree with them.


----------



## cesare (May 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It's an explanation of why she never joined the NUJ and why she now edits a paper that refuses to recognise unions. Because people who work on other mags can be put out of a job and she will be happy because she doesn't agree with them.


I'm not sure she has that level of self awareness and capacity for analysis.


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> I'm not sure she has that level of self awareness and capacity for analysis.


Indeed. It's just individual reactions around if she likes this or that. A child being fed at a table. No politics. No political understanding. Nothing beyond her.


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

> The class and gender issues behind this have been brewing for years. In a media industry staggering under the one-two punch of the internet and the recession, women are the last hired and the first fired. Certainly we are the very last to be promoted or fairly paid, as too many angry private rants from my contemporaries have lately reminded me.


 
From the lastest. What class issues (note note the reduction of class to an identity)? Never mentioned again, just used to tick a box.


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

> If you want to liberate the means of cultural production, you have to acknowledge that there's not a small risk that that process of liberation will leave many of us penniless, if we aren't already.


 
OK, what are the cultural MOP? Established mags. What does liberating them mean? Having more private school people talk for and in them or w/c people taking them over and kicking out people like LP? Does she support the latter? If so, how? She means, same ownership model, mags that i don't like out of business, compulsory redundancies. This is into real dangerous territory here.

(the pathetic shriveled  idea of _culture_ that this is based on is utterly destroying in itself)


----------



## sihhi (May 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> (Lord, can i really start on this article tonight?)


 
Hyenas. And what a brave left wing magazine. _Long live the CDU! __Long live works councils with Maoists as leaders who trade jobs for scraps of pensions! __Long live immigrant families of 7 burning whole to death in homes without central heating! __Long live a Special Branch cell assisting far-rightists in living their serial killer fantasies! _


----------



## sihhi (May 2, 2013)

> It’s rather like the tense discussion that comes up in activist circles whenever the police go on strike.


 
1919 had "activist circles". 



> I’m good friends with a number of them


 
What does "good friends" mean? People you shaft as being not worthy.


----------



## sihhi (May 2, 2013)

> Unless you already work in media, you’d probably be stunned to learn the real salaries paid to even well-known women working in traditionally male outlets - particularly if they are young, non-white, or both.


 
What the frig is this? On which publication are there lower salaries for non-whites? Name the names? No. Just be stunned.


----------



## sihhi (May 2, 2013)

> This isn’t about network good, hard copy bad. If I want to make, for example, a private post on my Facebook wall about how I can fit into my ‘skinny’ jeans for the first time in months, I’ll have to do so next to a banner advertising “one simple trick to a flat belly”, unless I download specific software to block those ads. Nor can I be sure that the blogger advising me, in the breathy tones of a fantasy best friend, to ditch my date and curl up with some starchy snacks and a japanese sex toy isn’t being sponsored by the makers of the Hitachi Magic Wand. Although if she is, I want her job.


Anyone want to decipher this, as LP doesn't seem to want to come back.


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

A shame that Sugar has gone, their advice columns were good iirc, i used to buy it regularly when i was about 12 or so


----------



## cesare (May 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> From the lastest. What class issues (note note the reduction of class to an identity)? Never mentioned again, just used to tick a box.



There could have been something really interesting to write here, in the immediate aftermath of Thatcher's death, if she'd tracked what has happened to the print industry. There's so much she could have written that was worth reading if she'd focused on the print. But no, a fucking puff piece on the back of some magazine no-one's heard of.


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What the frig is this? On which publication are there lower salaries for non-whites? Name the names? No. Just be stunned.


The new statesman? Laurie, _as an individual_ (given you are not NUJ or anything else) the best you can do is expose  - so expose. Like, right now.

To give the full flavour of that quote:



> Unless you already work in media, you’d probably be stunned to learn the real salaries paid to even well-known women working in traditionally male outlets - particularly if they are young, non-white, or both. I could list several female writers whose names, if you’re a follower of my work or my Twitter feed, you will certainly recognise, who are living hand to mouth, struggling to make rent, bullied into working unpaid overtime with no prospect of promotion by bosses who are almost exclusively male.


 
And the argument seems to be that she can argue that the sale of other peoples jobs is good because of the internet.

She might be stunned to learn how people outside the media are rubbing by.


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

exactly when was the last time polcie went on strike over here?


----------



## cesare (May 2, 2013)

Oh and that "bullied into working unpaid overtime with no prospect of promotion" ain't new and ain't restricted to luvvy-type media.


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> There could have been something really interesting to write here, in the immediate aftermath of Thatcher's death, if she'd tracked what has happened to the print industry. There's so much she could have written that was worth reading if she'd focused on the print. But no, a fucking puff piece on the back of some magazine no-one's heard of.


No instinct for news, for history or for issues beyond a narrow self-reflective few - there. I've never been in thrall to the idea of_ proper journos _but god, the avenues that your suggestion opens....for someone who gave a shit of course.


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Oh and that "bullied into working unpaid overtime with no prospect of promotion" ain't new and ain't restricted to luvvy-type media.


She got promoted. QED


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> exactly when was the last time polcie went on strike over here?


1919


----------



## cesare (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> exactly when was the last time polcie went on strike over here?


She's getting confused with the police pay protest march in 2008, I think.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> exactly when was the last time polcie went on strike over here?


 

between the wars was it? liverpool?


they aren't allowed to strike now iirc


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

so what the fuck is she going on about then .Any ideas?


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

Seriously she gets a column in a national newspaper and to be on newsnight and question time and that, what's she whinging about? As you say butchers and cesare it's all about her. Isn't redundancies at a rather lowbrow mag than the new statesman (not that that's a bad thing), likely to be admin assistants, proofreaders and cleaners etc, a mag mostly read by middle and working class women, the sort of thing a feminist should be concerned about?

Shes like a version of that poster on here who used to say that the left made him a tory, made him a zionist, made him scab on a picket line etc. Saying "do we need to mourn the loss of every job" like there is a "we" ffs.

I bet my fucking cats could give a better analysis than that pisspoor load of shite.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> She's getting confused with the police pay protest march in 2008, I think.


 







lest we forget


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

Seriously here we have somebody whinging about how shit their life is and yet saying they want an even shitter life for somebody else.


----------



## Limerick Red (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> They are usually indeed "right on" lefties, despise anything that can be considered nationalistic of their own country, and claim to despise all forms of nationalism, unless it's branded as a legitimate struggle for liberation. But it's well documented that they will often side with all sorts of nasty reactionary groups if it means opposing "Western imperialism", unaware that there are rival imperialisms out there that are just as harmful.


The defeat of imperialism should always be supported by the left, regardless of how reactionary the anti imperialist forces are, as only the defeat of imperialism can breed progression. The majority of the british left can never accept this, hence why the majority have a shit view on Ireland, had an even worse view on Libya, and for the most part have nothing worthwhile to say on Syria.


----------



## cesare (May 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> No instinct for news, for history or for issues beyond a narrow self-reflective few - there. I've never been in thrall to the idea of_ proper journos _but god, the avenues that your suggestion opens....for someone who gave a shit of course.



It's as if she's so self centred that whatever she writes will be confined to the limits of what she's comfortable with. And if she goes outside that, she doesn't do any hard investigative work but crowd sources her opinions from a self selecting group of sycophants.


----------



## sihhi (May 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The new statesman? Laurie, _as an individual_ (given you are not NUJ or anything else) the best you can do is expose - so expose. Like, right now.
> 
> To give the full flavour of that quote:
> 
> ...


 
The whole thing reads like an attempt to curry favour with certain kinds of people in the journalism world.

That quote bit forces people to follow _her twitter_ not just the paid output closely to guess as intelligently as possible who those in such a position are - is it Bim Adewunmi on the New Statesman, could it be Lucy Mangan on the Guardian? It's Probably not Holly&Rhiannon who write the Vagenda column for the New Statesman.

And we were told off for examining her stuff too closely?


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

Limerick Red said:


> The defeat of imperialism should always be supported by the left, regardless of how reactionary the anti imperialist forces are, as only the defeat of imperialism can breed progression. The majority of the british left can never accept this, hence why the majority have a shit view on Ireland, had an even worse view on Libya, and for the most part have nothing worthwhile to say on Syria.


Even if it means the creation of tyrannical regimes that brutalise their own people, such as Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Taliban?


----------



## Limerick Red (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Even if it means the creation of tyrannical regimes that brutalise their own people, such as Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Taliban?


absolutely, why whats western imperialism offering thats better?


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

Limerick Red said:


> The defeat of imperialism should always be supported by the left, regardless of how reactionary the anti imperialist forces are, as only the defeat of imperialism can breed progression. The majority of the british left can never accept this, hence why the majority have a shit view on Ireland, had an even worse view on Libya, and for the most part have nothing worthwhile to say on Syria.


 
i was about to reply disagreeing with you but not got time for an argument tonight, so just gonna say i dont entirely agree and leave it at that


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

Limerick Red said:


> absolutely, why whats western imperialism offering thats better?


What's Western imperialism offering that's worse? Some people of Kosovo and Sierra Leone actually welcomed intervention, naming their children after Tony Blair for example.

Is the whole crux of your argument that people like Assad are heroic freedom fighters, and allies of socialism?


----------



## agricola (May 2, 2013)

Limerick Red said:


> absolutely, why whats western imperialism offering thats better?


 
The quality of its twitter personalities?


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

Wrong thread tom and LR. Really the wrong thread. Unless you're talking about LP loving them bombs on libya.


----------



## cesare (May 2, 2013)

Oh! David Starkey's on QT


----------



## Tom A (May 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Wrong thread tom and LR. Really the wrong thread. Unless you're talking about LP loving them bombs on libya.


I wasn't intending to continue this argument for much longer anyway.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 2, 2013)

summoning casually red


----------



## Limerick Red (May 2, 2013)

Tom A said:


> What's Western imperialism offering that's worse? Some people of Kosovo and Sierra Leone actually welcomed intervention, naming their children after Tony Blair for example.
> 
> Is the whole crux of your argument that people like Assad are heroic freedom fighters, and allies of socialism?


Again absolutely not, but I dont think either of us are naive enough to believe the western intervention comes without a colossal price for a region, the plantation of a pro western government, contracts for resources and rebuilding going to western companies,in the case of Syria and Libya the reinforcement of sectarian division to prop up the inserted governments.

edit : Sorry ! fair enough completely off topic, just wound up! will drop it here!


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

> But writers are always more at risk of producing bad content when we have bad bosses, when we have editors and managers who exploit us, or encourage us to exploit ourselves in our turn.


 
She forgo the sub-editors. 

Look at this rock-star-model. I'm the talent i can't produce with out a b and c. And it's me that sells this mag. The mag that's dying. But she means other mags, and imagines that they are a) no=t facing the same laws of capital as all others (which is why the mag that she helps edits refuses to recognise unions) b) that they are about quality of content - what world is this?


----------



## killer b (May 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> She forgot the sub-editors.


you did too. you're welcome.x


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> summoning casually red


 
Has he written his open letter yet?

"Dear politics forum,

Words cannot convey how disappointed I am that you continue to call Las Malvinas by its colonial name. I am writing this open letter to you in what I hope will be a new spirit of constructive dialogue..."


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

killer b said:


> you did too. you're welcome.x


Nah, i meant she, as an act of bountiful charity, failed to blame them this time. It was all the other times. Maybe


----------



## equationgirl (May 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> From the lastest. What class issues (note note the reduction of class to an identity)? Never mentioned again, just used to tick a box.


My brain has now finished processing that part of the article and rejected the premise that women are 'the last hired and the first fired'. There's no proof offered, no evidence as to whether it's just the media sector this 'policy' applies to or other sectors/industries. If this statement is true then she should be outraged and fighting against it.


----------



## sihhi (May 2, 2013)

> Labour and gender issues intersect in media more than many other industries


 
My industry is considerably more intersectional than you (and maybe your non-industry).


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> My industry is considerably more intersectional than you (and maybe your non-industry).


I was just going to quote that bit and ask, do they? If so why? It doesn't make any sense. W/c women at home putting bits of plastic into bags for xmas toy markets, blokes digging ditches to lay various cables, cleaning floors in the middle of the night at ikea?


----------



## killer b (May 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Nah, i meant she, as an act of bountiful charity, failed to blame them this time. It was all the other times. Maybe


----------



## J Ed (May 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Wrong thread tom and LR. Really the wrong thread. Unless you're talking about LP loving them bombs on libya.


 
LP supported NATO intervention in Libya?


----------



## J Ed (May 2, 2013)

I didn't know that she really 'did' foreign policy


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

An open letter to my cat

Dear Denver,

I have asked you many times not to drink my water and jump on my bed shortly before my alarm goes off and you have ignored all my requests not to do so. I had hoped to have a constructive discussion with you about the common issues which affect both of us, but it appears that the window of opportunity has shut, something I very much regret. A course of action like the one you are embarking on can only lead to bitter recriminations in the future, something neither of us need.

I hope this open letter can prove to be mutually constructive, since attempts to keep you out of my room have been counterproductive and difficult for us both. Sadly, I have my doubts.Nonetheless as this letter shows I am willing to consider your points of view if you engage in a mutually beneficial dialogue with me.

Signed

Froggy
Plus twenty other random people you've never heard of


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

J Ed said:


> LP supported NATO intervention in Libya?


 
This in response to the first areal assualts:






UN solidarity.


----------



## sihhi (May 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I was just going to quote that bit and ask, do they? If so why? It doesn't make any sense. W/c women at home putting bits of plastic into bags for xmas toy markets, blokes digging ditches to lay various cables, cleaning floors in the middle of the night at ikea?


 
Textiles, assembly, perfume manufacture, midwifery, childcare - dozens of other examples of sexism and class relations.


----------



## J Ed (May 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This in response to the first areal assualts:



Wow.

#impressionable #imperialism #iwouldvesupportedtheiraqwarifiwasoldenough


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Textiles, assembly, perfume manufacture, midwifery, childcare - dozens of other examples of sexism and class relations.


Not as good at intersectionality as the new statesman.


----------



## sihhi (May 2, 2013)

_One day you’re writing about A-line skirts because that’s what you care about and you’ve a gas bill to pay, and the next day you’re stuck writing about A-line skirts for ever, because women who care about hemlines can’t possibly also know about climate change or stock market futures_ magazines like the New Statesman kill the NUJ mercilessly, so all the other jobs are already occupied.


----------



## sihhi (May 2, 2013)

_Big business finally woke up to fan fiction with Fifty Shades of Grey - but only in the most superficial of fashions, failing to really plumb the murky depths of Harry Potter porn forums and alternate-universe co-writing kink projects, where suspicious lumps of sexual and literary innovation float to the surface of an endless well of pixellated filth._ 

Failing to ... or sensibly avoiding using elementary capitalist logic?


----------



## frogwoman (May 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Textiles, assembly, perfume manufacture, midwifery, childcare - dozens of other examples of sexism and class relations.


 
Most jobs are tbh, what about the whole idea about not employing young women because "they'll get pregnant"?


----------



## butchersapron (May 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> _Big business finally woke up to fan fiction with Fifty Shades of Grey - but only in the most superficial of fashions, failing to really plumb the murky depths of Harry Potter porn forums and alternate-universe co-writing kink projects, where suspicious lumps of sexual and literary innovation float to the surface of an endless well of pixellated filth._
> 
> Failing to ... or sensibly avoiding using elementary capitalist logic?


The argument here is that they have failed to commericialise fan-fic. I wonder what hari's leroy would think?


----------



## sihhi (May 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Most jobs are tbh, what about the whole idea about not employing young women because "they'll get pregnant"?


 
The whole idea that women have kids to look after directly so will do what you say/can't hold out on strike for very long,women have more nimble fingers and get bored less easily.

Every workplace without a free funded creche is an example of it. 

LP's point was that journalism provided insights more than other industries - might be true but needs some evidence. A nationally-printed main-content column can't just be a personal reckon.


----------



## Nice one (May 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Wrong thread tom and LR. Really the wrong thread. Unless you're talking about LP loving them bombs on libya.


 
as did ian bone.

Yeah i think tom and LR momentarily forgot with was the laurie penny thread.


----------



## butchersapron (May 3, 2013)

Nice one said:
			
		

> as did ian bone.
> 
> Yeah i think tom and LR momentarily forgot with was the laurie penny thread.



Oh no, my world crumbles!

Wise words though, as ever.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 3, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Historically, the English were not at all very nice to the Jews at all, and there were plenty of massacres, a major one in York in 1190. Jews were banned from the country not so long after, and had to wait till Cromwell to be allowed back in.


 
Historically, the English (or, to be more accurate, the ruling classes of the British Isles) were no worse to the Jews than their European cousins.
Institutional anti-Semitism is nowhere near as manifest in the modern-day UK as it is in the more Catholic European states, though. It still exists here, but it really is just _bourgeois_ and ruling class spite, and the occasional working-class fascist with less critical thinking ability than a three day-old kitten.
I wouldn't want to live in Poland, for example, or Spain, if I were observant.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 3, 2013)

One thing this thread keeps drawing to mind is the whole issue of radical journalists.
By this I do actually mean the mainstream press journalist as a person with radical politics whose journalis*m* is permeated with those politics.

It seems to me that for every dozen radical journalists, perhaps one of them "stays the course". From the '60s we've got Pilger, but who else? So many of those tagged as "radical" then fell by the wayside.

Hmm. I think I might try to map the phenomenon. See whether there's a paper in it!


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 3, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Although obviously that wasn't the case when Moseley and the BUF where at their height.


 
That was the 1930s, not post-war.


----------



## Random (May 3, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> It seems to me that for every dozen radical journalists, perhaps one of them "stays the course". From the '60s we've got Pilger, but who else? So many of those tagged as "radical" then fell by the wayside.


 Apart from the celebrities like Pilger and Foot aren't there probably a few unsung reporters plugging away in particular sectors doing unglamorous research and investigations? Maybe not so many these days, apart from on specialist papers.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Wow,
> 
> 
> sounds like those who argued the printers should be defeated because of page 3. Who is the 'we' here? Whose job?
> ...


 
She knows women being bullied into working unpaid overtime.
I wonder if they're members of a union?


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 3, 2013)

Random said:


> Apart from the celebrities like Pilger and Foot aren't there probably a few unsung reporters plugging away in particular sectors doing unglamorous research and investigations? Maybe not so many these days, apart from on specialist papers.


 
That's kind of why I delieberately mentioned "mainstream press journalist". 
I know there are good people out there doing good work on "the fringe", but I'm more interested in how the mainstream uses radicalism/how radical journalists use the mainstream.

Just "spitballing" here, but too often, "radical journalism" appears to be a phase (kind of "making your mark" before moving on to better-remunerated things), rather than a state of mind or a moral position.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 3, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What the frig is this? On which publication are there lower salaries for non-whites? Name the names? No. Just be stunned.


 
While I've absolutely no doubt that women on the whole labour under a pay differential, and non-whites too, Ms. Penny's poor language-use implies some kind of differential *scale*, when what actually maintains a pay differential is increment scales, on the whole, where management more often than not award a greater percentage of increments to male staff than female staff. It's not conscious prejudice, and therefore unfortunately not amenable to legislative correction. Instead it's an artifact of institutional sexism, and can only be overcome by "making waves" within such institutions.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 3, 2013)

cesare said:


> Oh and that "bullied into working unpaid overtime with no prospect of promotion" ain't new and ain't restricted to luvvy-type media.


 
Unionise.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 3, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> exactly when was the last time polcie went on strike over here?


 
Early part of the 20th century, I think.
They're contractually disbarred from striking, anyway, so their "strike action" tends to be the mass sickie.


----------



## cesare (May 3, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Unionise.


I expect she already knows the NS's stance on that.


----------



## butchersapron (May 3, 2013)

She endorsed it by taking the job. In fact, she is now part of imposing it.

But but... the internet..individual bloggers...so alone..


----------



## cesare (May 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> She endorsed it by taking the job. In fact, she is now part of imposing it.
> 
> But but... the internet..individual bloggers...so alone..


Yes, it's not as though she was unemployed before starting there. She's also prepared to complain about pay equality and yet stop short of encouraging organisation - any kind, not just union membership.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 3, 2013)

cesare said:


> I expect she already knows the NS's stance on that.


 
Kind of my point. How can she care about such an issue if she's unwilling or unable to bring herself to make a stand?  It's not even as if joining the NUJ would get her fired. What Jason Cowshit is doing is about is not *recognising* an NUJ chapel at the NS. That doesn't disbar individuals from being members, it just makes it more difficult for them to organise.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 3, 2013)

cesare said:


> Yes, it's not as though she was unemployed before starting there. She's also prepared to complain about pay equality and yet stop short of encouraging organisation - any kind, not just union membership.


 
Fair point. You don't need to be a member of a union to organise a _bloc_ around a specific issue or issues.


----------



## frogwoman (May 3, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Historically, the English (or, to be more accurate, the ruling classes of the British Isles) were no worse to the Jews than their European cousins.
> Institutional anti-Semitism is nowhere near as manifest in the modern-day UK as it is in the more Catholic European states, though. It still exists here, but it really is just _bourgeois_ and ruling class spite, and the occasional working-class fascist with less critical thinking ability than a three day-old kitten.
> I wouldn't want to live in Poland, for example, or Spain, if I were observant.


 
I wouldn't like to live in France either frankly. I reckon the UK is probably one of the best countries in the EU in terms of tolerance of Jewish people (and probably most other minorities as well) not that I've lived in any of the others but just from stuff I've heard.


----------



## J Ed (May 3, 2013)

cesare said:


> I expect she already knows the NS's stance on that.


 
You're kidding? I know they used unpaid interns but fuck that's too much.


----------



## editor (May 3, 2013)

This thread has now been read well over half a million times!


----------



## treelover (May 3, 2013)

Random said:


> Apart from the celebrities like Pilger and Foot aren't there probably a few unsung reporters plugging away in particular sectors doing unglamorous research and investigations? Maybe not so many these days, apart from on specialist papers.


 
Sonia Poulton in the D/M does a sterling job for disabled/claimants and on other inequality issues.


----------



## cesare (May 3, 2013)

cesare said:


> They can't ban the NUJ by the way. They can only refuse to voluntarily recognise them, and it's now open to the NUJ to attempt the involuntary recognition route via the CAC.


I wonder if they've done this yet.


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 3, 2013)

editor said:


> This thread has now been read well over half a million times!


 
And yet SOME people still don't get what it's about.  (Hi, if you're still peeking!)


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 3, 2013)

cesare said:


> I wonder if they've done this yet.


 
They've talked about it, but they haven't forced it yet. I think they're still hoping against hope that Cowshit will fold.  Fat chance.


----------



## Barking_Mad (May 3, 2013)

editor said:


> This thread has now been read well over half a million times!


 
Ive only looked at it twice. DIdnt have time to read all 618 pages and im sure it's not that interesting


----------



## cesare (May 3, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> They've talked about it, but they haven't forced it yet. I think they're still hoping against hope that Cowshit will fold.  Fat chance.


Yep, I've just checked the CAC website - no applications since I last checked in Dec. There doesn't seem any degree of urgency about it, eh.


----------



## sihhi (May 3, 2013)

How the New Statesman celebrated a couple of weeks ago at head office:







I think that's Cowley behind a bald guy with glasses.

Here are just some of its adverts on its centenary issue - one for Finmeccanica which produces 1m$+ single assault helicopters for the US military (the kind that did the damage in the Wikileaks-leaked Colateral Murder video), one for BASF worldwide death merchants in health and safety in the chemicals industry resisted for years paying a dime in compensation over its wealth gained in support of the Nazi industrial machine, one for Lock & Co Hatters St James Street, an ultra exclusive part of central London, supplied hats for James Bond, cheapest standard hat at £215, 






Finally one for Barton Park an exclusive retirement and nursing home (not reflected in the wages of its staff) 
Barton Park:
A Barton Park retirement home.





A Barton Park nursing home.


----------



## editor (May 3, 2013)

Tis a tough life to be sure.


----------



## cesare (May 3, 2013)

My illusions about the New Statesman - shattered


----------



## Firky (May 3, 2013)

That carpet is enough to put anyone in an early grave.


----------



## sihhi (May 3, 2013)

It's worth attacking the fact that the New Statesman and the Guardian and Independent et al would rather give space to right-wing arseholes than allow young journalists of whatever colour or gender to have jobs/ be published.

So NS have got Simon 'Enoch Powell was a firm anti-racist' Heffer and David 'nuclear weaponry or bust' Owen
doing their extended analysis of Thatcher


----------



## treelover (May 3, 2013)

It changes over the years, in the late 90's it had lots of articles on direct action, anti-capitalism, etc.

blimey, 3.50 a week...


----------



## J Ed (May 3, 2013)

I know this is from the racist misogynist 'libertarian' filth Guido Fawkes but it shows you exactly what the NS is like:

http://order- order.com/2012/12/17/new-statesman-internship-auctioned-for-1000-interns-aware-say-staggers-should-be-ashamed/ 



> At the recent Olympics Ball raising money for Britain’s young athletes, the New Statesman, that paragon of equality of opportunity, auctioned off internships £1,000-a-pop. A great scoop from Dave Lee this lunchtime. “You will have the chance to contribute your ideas and writing to their hugely popular website” gushed Lot 75 with a starting bid of £1,000. Guido is currently trying to find out exactly how much the slave ship ticket actually went for.
> 
> Seeing as the Staggers would be getting the free labour from whichever champagne-swilling parent that coughed up for their lucky child’s week of work experience, would they be contributing anything to the deal? “No travel included”.


 


> Intern Aware have slammed the Staggers this afternoon:
> 
> “Most people can’t afford to work for free and even fewer people can afford to pay thousands of pounds for the privilege of interning. The New Statesman should be ashamed of operating a practice than puts opportunities out of the hands of hardworking and talented young people.”
> 
> They also estimate that “around 1/3 of the editorial staff at any one time are unpaid. Not only do they readily do all the necessary drudgework, they help to depress the wages of paid journalists there.” Shame on them.


----------



## butchersapron (May 3, 2013)

treelover said:
			
		

> It changes over the years, in the late 90's it had lots of articles on direct action, anti-capitalism, etc.
> 
> blimey, 3.50 a week...



No it didn't.


----------



## chilango (May 3, 2013)

Who the fuck reads the New Statesman anyway?

I never have. Why would I?


----------



## J Ed (May 3, 2013)

chilango said:


> Who the fuck reads the New Statesman anyway?
> 
> I never have. Why would I?


 
Honestly I prefer the Economist, better journalism and you're getting a more honest party line.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 3, 2013)

chilango said:


> Who the fuck reads the New Statesman anyway?
> 
> I never have. Why would I?


 
I remember it being quite good back in the 80s and early 90s. Went to hell after Blair turned to the Dark Side, though.


----------



## sihhi (May 3, 2013)

Weird article in the New Inquiry on twitter and voyeurism into teenagers:



> Twitter is a self-curated world of choose-your-own-adventure voyeurism. It becomes interesting when you realize that you can just sit behind the scenes of someone’s life and listen to them talk to themselves, when you realize how many inner monologues — those of friends, celebrities, strangers — are waiting there naked-faced in a neat backward scroll. Voyeurism is not widely acknowledged as useful, and social media are constantly being asked to justify their efficacy. Although Twitter succeeds as a mechanism for self-promotion and offers a way to connect with strangers or friends of friends, its main utility is as entertainment. We have all wished at times that we could be there for someone else’s argument, gossip session, or first date: Twitter gets us pretty close. Twitter is where we go to be creepy, and #followateen demonstrates this: It is precisely what has made Twitter so popular, so successful, and so addictive.


 
Thank goodness I don't have a twitter account.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 3, 2013)

nice implication of one-handed twitterism


----------



## The Pale King (May 3, 2013)

Hello there.
Sometime lurker, first time poster.

Here is Laurie Penny speaking truth to power at the Oxford Union:



Trigger Warning: she's pretty radical, you might not be able to handle it. She also swears at one point.


----------



## editor (May 3, 2013)

You would have thought they might have turned the heating on. It's so cold she's had to keep her hat and scarf on!


----------



## The Pale King (May 3, 2013)

Even the Oxford Union are not exempt from making savings in these austere times it seems. Is nothing sacred?


----------



## treelover (May 3, 2013)

great name, welcome..

have to be careful though, pale in what way. the privilege checkers will be out..


----------



## The Pale King (May 3, 2013)

Thanks treelover 

I now realise my choice of name has unfortunate associations not only with white skin-priviledge but also with patriarchal feudalism.

Fallen at the first hurdle! 

I have removed my service revolver from the desk drawer, and am awaiting a knock at the door.


----------



## butchersapron (May 3, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Hello there.
> Sometime lurker, first time poster.
> 
> Here is Laurie Penny speaking truth to power at the Oxford Union:
> ...


 
Oxford union society: _people who shape our world._ It really says that.


----------



## butchersapron (May 3, 2013)

What sort of freak wants to _thank the oxford union?_


----------



## butchersapron (May 3, 2013)

Cowabunga and labour leaders there.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What sort of freak wants to _thank the oxford union?_


 

Le Pen, or was that cambridge...


----------



## butchersapron (May 3, 2013)

> Personally i don't give a damn about boardrooms.we should get all the men and women out of all the boardrooms


 
Excellent, i agree, when are you off, when is your skill-sharing happening?


----------



## butchersapron (May 3, 2013)

That is a great vid. So revealing,


----------



## butchersapron (May 3, 2013)

OMG, listen from 5 mins on -_ the ambitious. _Jesus fucking christ.


----------



## agricola (May 3, 2013)

Interesting speech, but what it seemed to boil down to is one former Oxford student speaking to a roomful of current and former Oxford students about issues viewed through the lens of someone who went to Oxford.  Whilst dressed as Takashi Shimura's character in Ikiru.


----------



## Firky (May 3, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Hello there.
> Sometime lurker, first time poster.
> 
> Here is Laurie Penny speaking truth to power at the Oxford Union:
> ...


 
Fucking hell.

I want to kick something soft and cuddly after watching that.


----------



## Firky (May 3, 2013)

Oh and Welcome The Pale King

This thread has attracted loads of new posters in the last few months.


----------



## butchersapron (May 3, 2013)

She said to that audience, l_ook we are the ambitious, those whose ambition has put them here_. This is labour's poverty of ambition, and prefaced it with a sort of_ let's be honest here _(they are shit, we're not), seconds after declaring herself to be a revolutionary socialist. They are there in that room by willpower.

Fucking spoilt child.


----------



## butchersapron (May 3, 2013)

First thing i learnt if i was talking more than 5 mins. Have some liquid. She must be able to but herself a pint?


----------



## weepiper (May 3, 2013)

Fuck me. I want to punch something now.


----------



## The Pale King (May 3, 2013)

I think the move she pulled is known in American circles as a "Rubio":





reply to butchersapron


----------



## Firky (May 3, 2013)

"We Oxford Students are the ambitious, more than anyone else. People need to listen to us."



chilango said:


> Who the fuck reads the New Statesman anyway?
> 
> I never have. Why would I?


 
I know you weren't really asking but...


----------



## chilango (May 3, 2013)

I could't watch it.

Why ruin a sunny Friday evening making myself angry?


(Maybe I'll watch it on Monday morning...)


----------



## eatmorecheese (May 3, 2013)

I feel a bit sick after watching that, tbh.

The establishment's pet "revolutionary" being indulged.

I'm sure the queasyness will turn to anger in a minute, though...

Ah yes. Kicked in.


----------



## chilango (May 3, 2013)

Firky said:


> "We Oxford Students are the ambitious, more than anyone else. People need to listen to us."
> 
> 
> 
> I know you weren't really asking but...




Ah.

So definite not "people like me" then.

Maybe I lack ambition or something?


----------



## Firky (May 3, 2013)

Is it really the UK's most influential current affairs and business publication? 

PDF link of readership

http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/files/2013 media pack.pdf


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 3, 2013)

chilango said:


> Ah.
> 
> So definite not "people like me" then.
> 
> Maybe I lack ambition or something?


 
I blame your parents


----------



## killer b (May 3, 2013)

Firky said:


> Oh and Welcome The Pale King
> 
> This thread has attracted loads of new posters in the last few months.


By some distance the biggest new user magnet in p&p atm. Not sure whether thats a good thing or not.


----------



## cesare (May 3, 2013)

"Feminism is not an identity" then why treat it as one? Or has she changed her mind?


----------



## equationgirl (May 3, 2013)

Wow. I thought she had the makings of some good points until she was rude to Edwina Currie. Not because I'm a fan of Edwina, but because she totally disregarded Edwina's view. She effectively said 'your experience doesn't count'.

'People in here are going to be very powerful in the next few years'. The arrogance is pretty staggering in that statement.

It's very 'me me me', but once she loses her nervousness it does improve a bit.

And a touch of anti-Catholic sentiment as well, something for everyone really in that speech.


----------



## andysays (May 3, 2013)

editor said:


> You would have thought they might have turned the heating on. It's so cold she's had to keep her hat and scarf on!


 
Comment removed after being deemed inappropriate


----------



## Bakunin (May 3, 2013)

cesare said:


> "Feminism is not an identity" then why treat it as one? Or has she changed her mind?


 
It's an identity when it suits her and not when it doesn't, silly.

Are you unacquainted with revolutionary dialectics?


----------



## killer b (May 3, 2013)

andysays said:


> She looks like she takes her fashion tips from Pete Doherty, and by the pasty, blotchy look of her skin and the nasally sound of her voice, that's not all she's all she's following him in...


no need for this.


----------



## andysays (May 3, 2013)

killer b said:


> no need for this.


 
That was my honest and immediate reaction on watching it - I've never had the pleasure of watching/hearing Lol perform before


----------



## weepiper (May 3, 2013)

killer b said:


> no need for this.


 
None at all. There's plenty to attack in what she says without resorting to attacking how she looks or insinuating what she might get up to in her spare time


----------



## killer b (May 3, 2013)

(I have blotchy skin and a nasal voice. Id hope that wouldn't form part of any attack you might choose to make against my politics)


----------



## equationgirl (May 3, 2013)

andysays said:


> She looks like she takes her fashion tips from Pete Doherty, and by the pasty, blotchy look of her skin and the nasally sound of her voice, that's not all she's all she's following him in...


We don't focus on her appearance, but her overall body of work. Commenting on her appearance descends into bullying and puts the thread on a par with the Daily Mail.


----------



## cesare (May 3, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> It's an identity when it suits her and not when it doesn't, silly.
> 
> Are you unacquainted with revolutionary dialectics?



Yeah those revolutionary dialectics don't impinge on my consciousness. Impervious, that's me.


----------



## andysays (May 3, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> We don't focus on her appearance, but her overall body of work. Commenting on her appearance descends into bullying and puts the thread on a par with the Daily Mail.


 
OK, it was my honestly expressed opinion, but as three people have immediately reacted in the way you have, I'll happily remove it as being thought inappropriate.

Those of you who've quoted me are welcome to delete or leave as you see fit.


----------



## cesare (May 3, 2013)

andysays said:


> That was my honest and immediate reaction on watching it - I've never had the pleasure of watching/hearing Lol perform before


Why would your honest and immediate reaction be about what she looks/sounds like rather than what she's saying?


----------



## andysays (May 3, 2013)

cesare said:


> Why would your honest and immediate reaction be about what she looks/sounds like rather than what she's saying?


 
Because that's what generally happens when you watch someone speak rather than reading what they've written


----------



## Firky (May 3, 2013)

Wearing a hat indoors 

*ducks*


----------



## Firky (May 3, 2013)

andysays said:


> Because that's what generally happens when you watch someone speak rather than reading what they've written


 
What you doing on this thread if you've never read her work?


----------



## andysays (May 3, 2013)

Firky said:


> What you doing on this thread if you've never read her work?


 
As I thought I'd explained above, I have previously read her work but have never seen/heard her speak until I watched that video.

The first impressions it made on me were, as I said, not to do with what she was saying, but in what she looked like (some of which others have also commented on) and what she sounded like


----------



## cesare (May 3, 2013)

andysays said:


> Because that's what generally happens when you watch someone speak rather than reading what they've written


I agree that in watching someone, you take in details of how they look and sound. But I don't agree that in commenting on their speech you necessarily make extrapolations about their personal life based on that as your first reaction. This morning I watched Simon Hughes busy trying to minimise the collapse of the LibDem vote in South Shields, but whilst I inevitably formed a view about his face and dress and voice it didn't occur to me to make extrapolations about his personal life from that as my first reaction.


----------



## andysays (May 3, 2013)

cesare said:


> I agree that in watching someone, you take in details of how they look and sound. But I don't agree that in commenting on their speech you necessarily make extrapolations about their personal life based on that as your first reaction. This morning I watched Simon Hughes busy trying to minimise the collapse of the LibDem vote in South Shields, but whilst I inevitably formed a view about his face and dress and voice it didn't occur to me to make extrapolations about his personal life from that as my first reaction.


 
I didn't intend, particularly, to make extrapolations, rather to say what it made me think of, which isn't something we should draw any firm conclusions about. I accept that what I wrote came across that way, and that was careless of me.

I did it, I was wrong, I'm responsible, I've deleted my comment and I apologise.

Let's get on with the rest of the thread now...


----------



## cesare (May 3, 2013)

Although, having said that, there are definite exceptions such as Mark Oaten ...


----------



## rekil (May 3, 2013)

cesare said:


> "Feminism is not an identity" then why treat it as one? Or has she changed her mind?


PD's Multitudinous Positionism again isn't it.

I think she may have been ill. No excuse for terrible argument though. At 7:25, Laura says she walked out when someone said that "the most important thing a woman can ever do is hold a child she's given birth to" (and we don't know if she mangled that person's words) but here we have Camila Vallejo saying that her pregnancy is the greatest thing that has ever happened to her. In Laura's mad little self-orbiting bubbleworld, does that mean Camila is rubbish at feminism? Really communisn't? A little bit patriarchy even?



			
				Cde Vallejo said:
			
		

> This [pregnancy] has not emerged from calculations or frivolity, only from our love and our youth that is more than a question of age, but rather of energy and convictions, [This] has been reaffirmed much more now that inside of me grows another powerful reason to continue fighting for a country that is without abuses, truly just, and much happier, which is where I want my baby to grow up.
> 
> I would like to tell everyone that nothing in this life, let alone in this country, is easy, and there are millions of women who carry out their pregnancies in much more adverse contexts than I will.


----------



## Firky (May 3, 2013)

cesare said:


> Although, having said that, there are definite exceptions such as Mark Oaten ...


----------



## DotCommunist (May 3, 2013)

killer b said:


> By some distance the biggest new user magnet in p&p atm. Not sure whether thats a good thing or not.


 

Swappie implosion thread


----------



## killer b (May 3, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Swappie implosion thread


maybe, although they never seem to stay long. the LP newcomers do, i think?


----------



## frogwoman (May 3, 2013)

Firky said:


> Wearing a hat indoors
> 
> *ducks*


 
racist


----------



## frogwoman (May 3, 2013)

Firky said:


> "We Oxford Students are the ambitious, more than anyone else. People need to listen to us."
> 
> 
> 
> I know you weren't really asking but...


 
By "regularly taking part in political debate" do they mean calling tories cunts on the internet or something more rarified? And by hold an elected position do they mean treasurer of the darts club or treasurer of the treasury?

i think i know the answer to that


----------



## frogwoman (May 3, 2013)

39% were introduced to the magazine through personal recommendation

what, like the freemasons?


----------



## butchersapron (May 3, 2013)

Note the running together of affluent and charitable. Of morals with money.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 3, 2013)

chilango said:


> Who the fuck reads the New Statesman anyway?
> 
> I never have. Why would I?


 

I'd have a flick through if it was in the doctors waiting room, can't see myself parting with three large and fifty p for it though


----------



## Firky (May 3, 2013)

People from poorer background give more proportionally to charitable courses than the affluent. They're also more likely to donate.


----------



## cesare (May 3, 2013)

Firky said:


>


Hypocrisy, I am in you


----------



## frogwoman (May 3, 2013)

Most new statesman readers are responsible for a business budget of over £100,000


----------



## Firky (May 3, 2013)

"Opinion formers"

*shudder*


----------



## killer b (May 3, 2013)

it's like they gathered up the very worst of the guardian readership, and made a magazine just for them.


----------



## killer b (May 3, 2013)

presume that's something they put together to sell advertising btw. or stroke the egos of the readership. or both.


----------



## agricola (May 3, 2013)

Firky said:


> People from poorer background give more proportionally to charitable courses than the affluent. They're also more likely to donate.


 
No _ambition_, then.


----------



## frogwoman (May 3, 2013)

Jemima Khan’s interview with Liberal
Democrat leader Nick Clegg led the news
agenda, with much of the coverage
focusing on his admission that he “cries
regularly to music”. A rare instance of a
political interview which redefines public
perception of its subject

yes, it doesn't say what the perception was changed to though


----------



## DotCommunist (May 3, 2013)

killer b said:


> it's like they gathered up the very worst of the guardian readership, and made a magazine just for them.


 

so a vapid echo chamber for the capitalist with a conscience and heres your ad for a 200 quid kettle


----------



## frogwoman (May 3, 2013)

Our guest writers and contributors include:

Iain Duncan Smith

 Laurie, Laurie, Laurie


----------



## DotCommunist (May 3, 2013)

opinion was already formed. Thats why we all laughed at his crying to music


----------



## Tom A (May 3, 2013)

Firky said:


> People from poorer background give more proportionally to charitable courses than the affluent. They're also more likely to donate.


I used to be quite charitable, once upon a time, buying the big issue, dropping the odd pound into a tin (of course these days it's all about chuggers badgering you to set up regular direct debits ), and such like. Then my income plummeted dramatically after leaving uni, so charity began at home. Then I realised that a lot of these charities aren't really all they are cracked up to be, with all the "pity porn" designed to guilt trip you into giving "just twooooo pounds a month... pleaaaaase, open your heart!", yet the problem continues as it has done for decades. It's almost like... the charities don't want to solve the problem... because that would put them out of business.


----------



## frogwoman (May 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> OMG, listen from 5 mins on -_ the ambitious. _Jesus fucking christ.


 
people like us, who expect to be in the global 10% to 1% of global society 

plainly not one of the "99%" then


----------



## Firky (May 3, 2013)

Tom A said:


> I used to be quite charitable, once upon a time, buying the big issue, dropping the odd pound into a tin (of course these days it's all about chuggers badgering you to set up regular direct debits ), and such like. Then my income plummeted dramatically after leaving uni, so charity began at home. Then I realised that a lot of these charities aren't really all they are cracked up to be, with all the "pity porn" designed to guilt trip you into giving "just twooooo pounds a month... pleaaaaase, open your heart!", yet the problem carries as it has done for decades. It's almost like... the charities don't want to solve the problem... because that would put them out of business.


 
I got people to sponsor a holiday in a developing country in the name of charity. It's great. I really discovered myself.

Got some of my mates to take a photo of me being hugged by scruffy local kids for extra kudos.


----------



## sihhi (May 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Cowabunga and labour leaders there.


 
"Rachel Johnson may not seem the most likely person to offer a searing indictment of the class system. But that is what she does." (Owen Jones, Chavs)



Rachel Johnson, family connections aside, editor of _the Lady (_sits on a board room) novelist and married to boss of the National Trust's media and communications division Ivo Dawnay, also sits on a board room, both accepting of free trips just like that to Colombia by the Daily Mail:



> To cope with Rachel’s social withdrawal symptoms, I indulgently allowed her to set up a Miami dinner with a Caribbean legend, Gordon ‘Butch’ Stewart, the founder of Sandals, who just happened to be in town.
> Then I discovered she had already wheedled a night in the uber-fashionable, newly-opened, seven-star luxurious Soho Beach House. We had a penthouse suite the size of a tennis court.
> To my relief, an evening stroll through the bar revealed no one she knew. But at breakfast Tom Parker Bowles, food guru and stepson of the Prince of Wales, strolled over for a chat.


 



> Over the next ten days, we flopped from boutique-hotel to boutique hotel, sampling the relaxed lifestyles of the old Spanish caudillos.
> We stayed at the impeccable El Marques, the startlingly pretty Ananda and, my favourite, the ancient Casa Pestagua. Each had once been the private home of a colonial grandee and now offered five-star luxury. So what to do — apart, that is, from checking the ME-dia (Rachel’s joke for news alerts about herself)? In truth, the sights are the city itself.


 
In fact a front row of :







L-R

Camille Batmangelidjh onetime mates with Cameron, still a panhandler to private schools and financial firm foundations network for her efforts for working class youth vanity project, Businesswoman of the Year 2009 apparently.

Tessa Jowell, voted for invasion of Iraq, "would jump under a bus" for Blair-level of Blairite, a governor of the Ditchley Foundation ie on its boardroom.

Michael Beloff, a Master of the Bench, also a friend of Blair, guest at Chequers level, supporter of Iraq invasion

Cindy Gallop, advertising executive, formerly US operations chief of Bartle Bogle Hegarty - an important advertising agency famous for doing massive multinational Unilever's account, inlcuding Axe (Lynx in the UK) - with the notoriously sexist advertising, now CEO of her own firm Cindy Gallop LLC

"Madam President" (note, not just President) of the Oxford Union

Edwina Currie, helped Norman Fowler murder the NHS under Thatcher, Ayn Rand fan etc

Rachel Johnson [see above]

Natalie Bennett, former editor of the Guardian Weekly, GMG's product for Europe, now full-time politico on the subs of Green Party members as its Leader (no longer the Principal Speaker), on the right of the party

Laurie Penny

Nearly every single companion has been or is currently in a board room.


----------



## sihhi (May 3, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> people like us, who expect to be in the global 10% to 1% of global society
> 
> plainly not one of the "99%" then


 
No it's specifically saying 90-98.9% - ie don't worry you aren't the real elite.


----------



## Tom A (May 3, 2013)

Firky said:


> I got people to sponsor a holiday in a developing country in the name of charity. It's great. I really discovered myself.
> 
> Got some of my mates to take a photo of me being hugged by scruffy local kids for extra kudos.


Up against the wall with you, you scummy trustifarian voluntourist!


----------



## frogwoman (May 3, 2013)

.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 3, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> .


Just a question about the forum in general, why do people post full stops every now and again?


----------



## weepiper (May 3, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Just a question about the forum in general, why do people post full stops every now and again?


 
It means they've though better of a post and edited it. I think you should put it back though frogs, it was good and extremely relevant


----------



## cesare (May 3, 2013)

killer b said:


> it's like they gathered up the very worst of the guardian readership, and made a magazine just for them.


The Guardian predates the Fabians, never realised that until just now.


----------



## rekil (May 3, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> people like us, who expect to be in the global 10% to 1% of global society
> 
> plainly not one of the "99%" then


"We! Are! The 9.9%!"


----------



## Firky (May 3, 2013)

weepiper said:


> It means they've though better of a post and edited it. I think you should put it back though frogs, it was good and extremely relevant


 
The days when you couldn't edit a post you made the night before when you were drunk... aaggghh!


----------



## Firky (May 3, 2013)

I have been reading though that media pack for the NS and it's demoralising.


----------



## cesare (May 3, 2013)

Firky said:


> I have been reading though that media pack for the NS and it's demoralising.



Why?


----------



## Firky (May 3, 2013)

Probably reading too much into it, but it makes me angry that such a powerful demographic of readers are looking at Nick Lezard, Laurie Penny, et al and thinking they're the voice of the left, that they're the catalyst for change. And as this thread demonstrates, it's far from it - and yet when they see real ordinary people like the people on this thread, they just dismiss them entirely or insult them. I find it depressing.


----------



## sihhi (May 3, 2013)

Firky said:


> I have been reading though that media pack for the NS and it's demoralising.


 
"77% of readers are more likely than average to spend £2,500+ per person on a holiday abroad"

Says it all. Three quarters of readership are middle-class, one-quarter not.


----------



## Firky (May 3, 2013)

sihhi said:


> "77% of readers are more likely than average to spend £2,500+ per person on a holiday abroad"
> 
> Says it all. Three quarters of readership are middle-class, one-quarter not.


 
Were those your photos of the adverts in NS, sihhi? I am quite curious to see what else they have.

The helicopter advert may have had something to do with the recent privatisation of the RAF Sea King rescue helicopters.

http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/british-searchandrescue-a-billion-pound-partnership-02271/



> *March 26/13: SAR-H winner.* The UK’s Department for Transport awards Bristow Helicopters Ltd. the SAR-H contract, a GBP 1.6 billion deal to replace the British Armed Forces’ Sea Kings with a privately-operated service of 22 SAR helicopters from April 2015 – 2026. The service won’t become fully operational until summer 2017. Bristow will continue to operate S-92 helicopters as their long-range fleet, but their other fleet will eventually replace CHC’s contracted 7-tonne AW139s with their own 8-tonne AW189 machines. The AW189 is a new type, launched in June 2011 as a bigger and more robust offering for the oil and gas industry, SAR roles, etc. The AW189′s assembly center will be at Yeovil in Somerset facility, and Bristow expects to have 350 jobs in its SAR-H team.
> 
> 
> Bristow Group Inc. in Houston, TX has a long history of SAR services through its UK subsidiary, beginning in 1971 and extending to 2007, when CHC took the Coast Guard’s contract away from them. Over that history, their helicopters have flown more than 44,000 SAR operational hours in the UK, and conducted over 15,000 SAR missions. *UK Government*
> ...


----------



## sihhi (May 3, 2013)

Firky said:


> Were those your photos of the adverts in NS, sihhi? I am quite curious to see what else they have.


 
A mate's camera from a public library - all from the centenary issue - features proper articles from Boris Johnson, Vince Cable, Douglas Hurd, Zac Goldsmith and Michael Gove. Most of it not online turned it into some kind of bumper issue.

I too doubt the NS was giving much space to anticapitalists? J18 types in the mid-90s like what treelover seemed to suggest, but it's becoming something else now in the midst of this recession.


----------



## J Ed (May 3, 2013)

sihhi said:


> A mate's camera from a public library - all from the centenary issue - features proper articles from Boris Johnson, Vince Cable, Douglas Hurd, Zac Goldsmith and Michael Gove. Most of it not online turned it into some kind of bumper issue.
> 
> I too doubt the NS was giving much space to anticapitalists? J18 types in the mid-90s like what treelover seemed to suggest, but it's becoming something else now in the midst of this recession.


 
I wonder how much of that is down to the people who buy it, surely most people who read the NS are commuters and/or people who frequently travel by plane... people don't but stuff like this anymore I don't think, why would you?


----------



## Brainaddict (May 3, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> people like us, who expect to be in the global 10% to 1% of global society
> 
> plainly not one of the "99%" then


tbf, most posters on this thread probably are, or have been, or will be, in the top 10% globally at some point in their lives. I seem to remember the level is around $30,000 a year. Within the boundaries of britain it's not a particularly elitist category.

As an aside, one of many things the 99% idea obscured was that we workers in the top 10%-15% globally can't necessarily easily aligned our interests with the global working class - who support our lifestyles as well as those of our masters.

I've made a comment about class so now butchersapron will come and be mean to me.


----------



## equationgirl (May 3, 2013)

sihhi said:


> "77% of readers are more likely than average to spend £2,500+ per person on a holiday abroad"
> 
> Says it all. Three quarters of readership are middle-class, one-quarter not.


How much???!!!  

I can think of many things to do with that kind of money before blowing it on a holiday.


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 4, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Hello there.
> Sometime lurker, first time poster.
> 
> Here is Laurie Penny speaking truth to power at the Oxford Union:
> ...




That's pretty fucking vile. From the Sarah Teather school of comedy, and the Steven Fry school of in-depth political insight. "People like us". Look at them. Look at them cheering her claim to be a revolutionary socialist as she bangs on about getting to the top of society. It's embarrassing.


----------



## equationgirl (May 4, 2013)

Point to note: There's  a ton of bribery accusations surrounding both Finnmeccanica and Agusta Westland over alleged bribes for Indian govenermnet helicopter sales. Also joint venture negotiations with Embraer have been abruptly terminated:

http://australianaviation.com.au/2013/04/embraeragustawestland-cancel-joint-venture-negotiations/

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/23/finmeccanica-results-idUSL6N0DA4KO20130423


----------



## rekil (May 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> "Madam President" (note, not just President) of the Oxford Union


Maria Rioumine - "Oxford PPE student, @OxfordUnion President, Muscovite"

Rich Ambitious Russian parents?


----------



## andysays (May 4, 2013)

OK, I know I got into trouble the last time I made allusions/extrapolations on the back of that you-tube vid, but if Laurie's going on about ambition, does anyone think she's a fan of Subway Sect?



"And I won't be tempted by vile evils. Because vile evils are vile evils..."


----------



## rekil (May 4, 2013)

John Flansburgh from They Might Be Giants has a brother called "Paxus Calta".


> Calta authored a pamphlet about polyamory which has been translated into 5 languages. Calta considers himself an anarchist and is the principal organizer of the Fingerbook Propaganda Project, which produces and distributes "Fingerbooks" (small handbooks) on consensus decision-making, designing revolutions, polyamory, and intentional communities.
> 
> He has also been a member of Twin Oaks Community since 1998, serving as the community's recruiting manager, manager of outside work and a general manager of Twin Oaks Hammocks, Inc. He has appeared on both CNN and Voice of America videos discussing the community.


 
I didn't know this. Last one to Twin Oaks Community is an uptight heteronormative sheeple.


----------



## treelover (May 4, 2013)

> Rhian E Jones grew up in south Wales and now lives in London, where she writes on history, politics, popular culture and the places where they intersect. She has been a student politician, receptionist, data enterer, welfare adviser, shop assistant and freelance historian. Find her blog here


 


> December 12, 2012
> *Class, feminism and other intersections.*
> 
> This is a now outdated post written for Bad Reputation.


 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/26/peoples-assembly-revive-chartist-spirit

http://rhianejones.com/about-rhian-e-jones/

new working class interesting face on the block?

be good to see her on here


----------



## sihhi (May 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> Rich Ambitious Russian parents?


 
I think we have found a new male version of LP, he's the successor to the current Oxford Union president, Birmingham Joseph D'Urso, P-P-E student, former student at Sixth Form College Solihull, middle-class Birmingham place, 52 choices for A-Level plus International Baccalauerates, resident of King's Norton south of Selly Oak, fairly middle-class area.




> Away from Cambridge, Joseph D’Urso, aged 17, from Kings Norton, keeps Oxford in the frame after getting an A* in politics, as well as A grades in modern history and mathematics to secure a place at New College to study economics.
> Over the past 10 years, nearly 100 students from The Sixth Form College, Solihull have secured Oxbridge places. College Principal Paul Ashdown explained that the competition has got tougher and tougher.
> “We start preparing students for Oxbridge applications about halfway through their first year with us,” he said. “It is vital that they do extra work over the summer to set themselves apart from the crowd."


 





A contributor at Left Foot Forward

Here he is fighting against "the gratuitous and undemocratic austerity reforms imposed by Brussels"





> The key issue underlying the current Eurozone crisis seems to be that setting fiscal and monetary policy in different places is fundamentally inconsistent. The political will to keep the failing Euro project ongoing is proving resilient. The Spanish left ought to find a voice independent of the bellicose trade unions and accept the need for labour market reform, before fighting against the gratuitous and undemocratic austerity reforms imposed by Brussels which are failing to help elsewhere. These vital structural changes must come about before arguments against Rajoy’s other reforms are taken seriously.


 

'a voice independent of the bellicose trade unions'

Good at reporting on riots:



> Joseph D’Urso, a second year PPE student at New College who lives in Birmingham, described Monday night’s riots in his home town, saying, “a huge number of people gathered, and started rampaging through the city centre, smashing up shops and looting. Public transport was cut at about 10pm and it was impossible to get taxis so the entire inner ring road was like a warzone, poorly policed and with no transport. Looting continued until 3ish.”


 

Here he is buttering up David 'shell-suited hippos' Aaronovitch:





> Joseph D'Urso
> @DAaronovitch are you still in Oxford? disappeared after the debate, I meant to give you a termcard, come back for whatever you like!
> 
> David Aaronovitch ‏@DAaronovitch 26 Nisan
> ...


----------



## weepiper (May 4, 2013)

barf


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 4, 2013)

He's ambitious


----------



## sihhi (May 4, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> He's ambitious


 
Yes it comes out in him advising people from another country and in particular that country's left on what they should do (Spain overall official unemployment rate 27.2%):



> The Spanish left ought to find a voice independent of the bellicose trade unions and accept the need for labour market reform


----------



## J Ed (May 4, 2013)

sihhi you are just brilliant at collating this stuff, I'm convinced that you have folders of class enemies


----------



## J Ed (May 4, 2013)

Anyone who thinks that Spain's main problem is labour militancy is a fucking idiot.


----------



## frogwoman (May 4, 2013)

The Spanish left ought to find a voice independent of the bellicose trade unions and accept the need for labour market reform​​


----------



## BigTom (May 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Good at reporting on riots:
> 
> 
> 
> > Joseph D’Urso, a second year PPE student at New College who lives in Birmingham, described Monday night’s riots in his home town, saying, “a huge number of people gathered, and started rampaging through the city centre, smashing up shops and looting. Public transport was cut at about 10pm and it was impossible to get taxis so the entire inner ring road was like a warzone, poorly policed and with no transport. Looting continued until 3ish.”


 
lol. I'll admit I've never been in a war zone but I was in town for the riots from the start until sometime late (can't remember when I left tbh, midnight or something I'd guess but it's too long ago now).
huge number of people = around 100-200 initally, maybe a few hundred more joining in over the evening (again long time ago now so my memory may be faulty)

afaik, number of deaths (on the Monday night in town - the deaths happened on the Wednesday outside of the centre, though I can't remember where now) = zero, number of serious injuries = zero. Number of windows broken = lots, amount of severe property damage = zero. number of fires = zero.
That doesn't sound like a war zone to me.

the police lost control sure and there was no public transport but by 10pm everyone was long gone from the city centre anyway, except those rioting and those watching (and the police). There's not much in the way of residential stuff inside the inner ring road either.

Shops were attacked but by and large people weren't - the only one I saw was a photographer and as soon as they had his camera they left him alone. I've had enough other people tell me they saw looters being mugged (only for the muggers to get mugged by others) but really none of it was aimed at people.

I'm guessing he wasn't there, even though he makes his account sound like a first hand one.


----------



## frogwoman (May 4, 2013)

Nancy Pelosi possesses the talent of a heavyweight political leader in captivating a big audience, as anyone who was at the Union on Monday night witnessed. 

But in her more intimate interactions with Oxford students she also demonstrated the talent of a grandmother, gifted at dealing with inquisitive young people.

Tasked with looking after her between her mid-afternoon arrival and late evening talk, I took her on a tour of the city before dinner at the Union. I was anxious to protect such a conspicuous individual from intrusive crowds.
By the Union a scruffy looking young man in a ragged leather jacket barged in front of her, pointing a camera in her face. While security staff and I were preparing to usher her inside and block the man’s way, Pelosi struck up a conversation.

“So Jake, where would you like a photo then? Is this OK? How about this? Is that enough? It was nice meeting you Jake, you have a great day!” She carries congressional keepsakes with her, giving them out to people she meets, and has learned committee members’ names and stories before she is introduced. “Come see me in my office if you’re ever in Washington!”

As leader of the House Democrats she uses these skills to convince a disparate group of over 200 politicians, each with their own beliefs, to vote a certain way. It is initially hard to tell whether Nancy Pelosi is so good with people because she is a politician, or whether Nancy Pelosi is a politician because she is so good with people. After several hours in her company I came to believe the latter.

Her biggest legislative achievement as Speaker between 2007-2011 was extending health insurance to tens of millions of poor Americans. ‘Obamacare’ was signed into law in March 2010 after a brutal fight on the marble floors of Congress and the TV screens of America. “They spent two-hundred million dollars lobbying against the bill. That’s a lot of money, especially when it goes unanswered.”

The House Democratic caucus is now more than half female, ethnic minority or LGBT. However, she believes unrestricted ‘super PAC’ funding of political advertising is impeding further progress.

“If you reduce the role of money in politics, you’ll elect more women. Women always have an advantage in terms of ethics in government. 

“Mostly people trust women more, so they go right at you on ethics. They’ll invent something. Do people want to be mischaracterised so their kids are coming home from school crying?”

A politician frequently vilified by her opponents, she has little time for the culture that dominated Congress upon her arrival in 1987. 

In her book _Know Your Power_ she describes how male colleagues were initially polite but uninterested in her political opinions. She got hers across anyway.
“It was shocking to them that a woman would speak in this male bastion. They said ‘it’s not your turn’. We said ‘no, we’ve been waiting two hundred years!’”

On Monday, one student raised the topic of the 2016 presidential race, half-jokingly asking if she was going to become the first female President.  Pelosi was surprisingly open in her response. “Hillary Clinton is the full package. She’d be great. I just don’t know if she wants to do it, but I’m hoping and praying she runs in 2016.”

Earlier over dinner she told me that “Hillary Clinton would be President of the United States right now had she voted against the Iraq War. It was a ridiculous false premise, the evidence and intelligence was not there. There was no reason for us to go there, she voted for war and never abandoned her vote.”

The Iraq Resolution split the Democratic caucus in half. She doesn’t want it to happen again. She tightly whipped her troops for the Obamacare vote, which was split almost exactly down party lines – 219 ‘ayes’ to 212 ‘noes’.

“Bipartisanship is a very popular idea in America, and as long as they can make him [Obama] look partisan, they diminish him. He is not really a political president, and that’s what people love about him, but they try and paint him another way.”

Pelosi now has her sights on gun control. She gets more serious, unnervingly beating a steady rhythm on the table.

“We are not giving up. Even though we do not have a majority in the house, we fully intend to build up support. A drumbeat, if you wonder why I’m doing this, across America, to show that something must be done. 

“Asking our Republican friends to join our bill, we told them 90% of their constituents support this, and they all say ‘well I haven’t heard from any of them, I’ve only heard from the other side’.”

Although ‘government’ has become a dirty word to many in America, Pelosi does not shy away from defending its importance.

“Government shouldn’t be bigger than it needs to be, but the founding fathers saw that there needs to be a public role. There are people in Congress who are at war with government. They have daily votes on things that do not support clean air and water, food safety, healthcare, social security. There has to be a public role.” 

“I sometimes ask them, do you have children? Do you have grandchildren? Do they drink water, eat food, breathe air? What is it that makes you think there should be no referees on the field here?”

“I say to my Republican friends, and I have many, ‘take back your party’. To have this disruption instead of collaboration or compromise, it’s just… you just can’t do that, I can’t believe it.”


----------



## sihhi (May 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> barf


 
When he tweets this, is it an example of the male left doing intersectional politics better?



> my interview with the remarkable and inspiring @NancyPelosi RT @Cherwell_Online The Cherwell Profile - Nancy Pelosi http://bit.ly/12I3qZ0


 
'Men seeing left women as inspiring, that's got to be good news'


----------



## weepiper (May 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> When he tweets this, is it an example of the male left doing intersectional politics better?
> 
> 
> 
> 'Men seeing left women as inspiring, that's got to be good news'


 
remarkable and inspiring, which marks her out from_ most_ women, who are of course unremarkable and uninspiring.


----------



## frogwoman (May 4, 2013)

oh my god how is this shit published by "left foot forward" hes a fucking tory!

The employed in Spain, which currently amounts to just 77% of the adult population, are split into two categories. Around two thirds are permanent workers on fixed contracts. Making these employees redundant is phenomenally costly as the maximum limit of severance pay is 42 months salary. 
These workers are largely insulated from recession, and some are even seeing generous pay rises through Spain’s centralised collective bargaining system.


----------



## frogwoman (May 4, 2013)

just seen that it wasnt published by them sorry but really! fuck off!


----------



## J Ed (May 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> oh my god how is this shit published by "left foot forward" hes a fucking tory!
> 
> The employed in Spain, which currently amounts to just 77% of the adult population, are split into two categories. Around two thirds are permanent workers on fixed contracts. Making these employees redundant is phenomenally costly as the maximum limit of severance pay is 42 months salary.
> These workers are largely insulated from recession, and some are even seeing generous pay rises through Spain’s centralised collective bargaining system.


 
Left foot forward is a Blairite website, isn't it? A couple right-wing Labour people at my uni write for it sometimes.

The analysis is just awful - http://www.leftfootforward.org/2013/05/let-the-tories-do-a-2005-all-over-again/


----------



## frogwoman (May 4, 2013)

why are british workers getting less productive?

why indeed?

prick.


----------



## Pickman's model (May 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Left foot forward is a Blairite website, isn't it? A couple right-wing Labour people at my uni write for it sometimes.
> 
> The analysis is just awful - http://www.leftfootforward.org/2013/05/let-the-tories-do-a-2005-all-over-again/


just as i expected


----------



## Pickman's model (May 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> why are british workers getting less productive?
> 
> why indeed?
> 
> prick.


 i am getting less productive because i dislike working on saturdays.


----------



## sihhi (May 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> remarkable and inspiring, which marks her out from_ most_ women, who are of course unremarkable and uninspiring.


 
Did you know that Oxford students are actually labouring under a status of oppression?



> Comments on Mail Online such as 'do these dipsticks really have the mental ability to attend such an establishment?' demonstrate a funny situation in which Oxford as an institution is granted respect and deference by the general public, but the people who inhabit it are not. Oxford students aren’t given much of a chance. Either we are toffs and reactionaries, elitists and traditionalists, or we are whinging left-leaning typical students. If the latter is true, it is only interesting because we are meant to be the former.


 
 The struggle for Oxford students to be _given a chance_ begins here. 
All those who didn't attend Oxford can henceforth only be allies.


----------



## frogwoman (May 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Did you know that Oxford students are actually labouring under a status of oppression?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Check your privilege sihhi!


----------



## sihhi (May 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Left foot forward is a Blairite website, isn't it? A couple right-wing Labour people at my uni write for it sometimes.
> 
> The analysis is just awful - http://www.leftfootforward.org/2013/05/let-the-tories-do-a-2005-all-over-again/


 
It's not really, just pro-Miliband fight the Tories stuff:

http://www.leftfootforward.org/2013/04/ed-miliband-should-listen-to-len-mccluskeys-real-message




> Labour needs to be a strong opposition, and a good example is its pledge to reverse the NHS Health and Social Care Act. Further achievements will be ensuring that a growth programme for housing and jobs is central to economic policy.
> There is nothing wrong with Ed, as leader of the Labour party, claiming the right to decide the direction of the party – indeed it is necessary – but this means listening to key players such as McCluskey. The fear of being labelled ‘red’ shouldn’t drive the party to mimic the Tories; Miliband should find a way to identify a common discourse with McCluskey. The electorate will thank him for it in 2015.


----------



## J Ed (May 4, 2013)

Why are British workers too lazy to do the work that immigrants do? Probably because they are racist, if only they'd pick up the New Statesman...


----------



## Pickman's model (May 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The struggle for Oxford students to be _given a chance_ begins here.


 every year i give them the chance to jump off magdalen bridge.


----------



## Pickman's model (May 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Why are British workers too lazy to do the work that immigrants do? Probably because if they are racist, they'd only pick up the New Statesman...


 corrected for you


----------



## sihhi (May 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Check your privilege sihhi!


 
I'm sorry, are you making light of the suffering and stereotyping Oxford students face?
St. Andrew's believes it is more oppressed because it faces anti-Scottish oppression aswell and hence is in an intersection of its own with a special right to enter meetings at a higher level of the progressive stack, but the stereotyping against Oxford is something phenomenal this should be made clear in a new organisation tumblr account with Mehdi Hasan (Oxford P-P-E) as an honorary supporter.


----------



## sihhi (May 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Why are British workers too lazy to do the work that immigrants do? Probably because they are racist, if only they'd pick up the New Statesman...


 
The NS has rightly attacked the Mail Online for homophobic articles, when will it address this pressing issue?



> Comments on Mail Online such as 'do these dipsticks really have the mental ability to attend such an establishment?' demonstrate a funny situation in which Oxford as an institution is granted respect and deference by the general public, but the people who inhabit it are not.


 
Please can the general public be educated on this point?


----------



## J Ed (May 4, 2013)

It's interesting that we've reached a period in which in the media and public discourse it's a hell of a lot more acceptable to be xenophobic, sexist and certainly classist than it is to be homophobic. It seems to be reflected in popular attitudes too.


----------



## Firky (May 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> sihhi you are just brilliant at collating this stuff, I'm convinced that you have folders of class enemies


 
He's like an MI5 intelligence analyst. I hope he doesn't end up in a sportsbag inside the bathroom of a Chelsea flat


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 4, 2013)

chilango said:


> Who the fuck reads the New Statesman anyway?


 
I do.



> I never have. Why would I?


 
Decent arts section. Occasional good articles, plus "know thine enemy". Always worth knowing which way the wind is blowing in terms of who's backing Labour.
Of course, there's some utter shit in it too. Will Self's columns, and Ed "turn everything into a cricketing analogy because I'm a boring cunt" Smith, for example.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 4, 2013)

killer b said:


> (I have blotchy skin and a nasal voice. Id hope that wouldn't form part of any attack you might choose to make against my politics)


 
What if your politics are the politics of pro-nasalism (he rumbled in his usual basso-profundo)?


----------



## equationgirl (May 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> sihhi you are just brilliant at collating this stuff, I'm convinced that you have folders of class enemies


Alphabetically indexed too


----------



## equationgirl (May 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> why are british workers getting less productive?
> 
> why indeed?
> 
> prick.


I'm less productive because I now sit next to some very loud people in a high footfall part of the office.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 4, 2013)

i'm less productive now because i'm paid significantly less than the going rate with no payrise or appropriate contract.


----------



## emanymton (May 4, 2013)

I'm less productive because I'm lazy.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 4, 2013)

I'm less productive because NHS waiting lists are ridiculous and my health conditions are only getting worse.


----------



## treelover (May 4, 2013)

http://leftunity.org/what-would-a-ukip-of-the-left-look-like/#comment-4805


Please read the last post/comment here on this article, this woman has fire in her belly, is under 30 and puts Laura and all the others into perspective, it is a reply to mark perryman on the Left Unity site by Jasmin Al Hadaq


----------



## sihhi (May 4, 2013)

Why have you posted exactly the same post on two separate threads, including this one where it has zero relevance?


----------



## treelover (May 4, 2013)

because imo, she is an example of a young person who is the real thing and could be an asset..


----------



## sihhi (May 4, 2013)

You've restated the conclusion to be taken from your post #18673 take it to your left unity thread or whatever.


----------



## treelover (May 4, 2013)

board police!


----------



## Firky (May 4, 2013)

You may like this, treelover:

http://piratemoggy.tumblr.com/post/26135869284/tmi-confessions-friday-i-hate-laurie-penny

It was posted several pages back but worth seeing, but yeh... BOT!


----------



## toggle (May 5, 2013)

anyone want a real fruitloop to play with

http://www. cornwallcommunitynews.co.uk/2013/05/04/was-this-the-electoral-suicide-blonde/

link's broken, remove the spaces in front of 'cornwall


----------



## phildwyer (May 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I wouldn't want to live in Poland, for example, or Spain, if I were observant.


 
Observant what?


----------



## Idris2002 (May 5, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Observant what?


 

FFS, Phil. He means an "observant Jew". Do you genuinely not know that?


----------



## phildwyer (May 5, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> FFS, Phil. He means an "observant Jew". Do you genuinely not know that?


 
Sucka. If he's a Jew I'm Marie of Romania. Remember this little nugget of bullcrap:



ViolentPanda said:


> TBF, he looks like a picture of my great-great uncle Schmuley from the turn of the 20th century, except Unc had better dress sense. Unc was a proper anarchist, though. Fought and died for the Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine against the Whites and the Reds.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 5, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Sucka. If he's a Jew I'm Marie of Romania. Remember this little nugget of bullcrap:


 
Life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea.

And you ARE Marie of Romania, and I claim my five Leu.


----------



## phildwyer (May 5, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea.


 
An a lie is a thing that will always go wrong.

Great-uncle Schmuley indeed.  Great-uncle Bulgaria more like.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 5, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea.
> 
> And you ARE Marie of Romania, and I claim my five Leu.


 
If he were Marie of Romania, there'd be an excuse for him being a bit of a twat, I suppose. All that inbreeding.

As it is...


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 5, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> An a lie is a thing that will always go wrong.


 
And yet, all the many times you've accused me of lying, nothing has ever "gone wrong". Why is that, phil? Surely not due to you being wrong? 



> Great-uncle Schmuley indeed. Great-uncle Bulgaria more like.


 
Don't you have another worstseller you should be working on, phil?


----------



## phildwyer (May 5, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What sort of freak wants to _thank the oxford union?_


 
There used to be a boycott against it by everyone left of the LibDems.


----------



## phildwyer (May 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> And yet, all the many times you've accused me of lying, nothing has ever "gone wrong". Why is that, phil?


 
Alright, this is easily resolved.

Simply post up this picture of your alleged Great-uncle Schmuley.

If it exists.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 5, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Alright, this is easily resolved.
> 
> Simply post up this picture of your alleged Great-uncle Schmuley.
> 
> If it exists.


 
I don't have a picture of him. I don't have pictures of any of that aside of my family.
As I've related before on Urban, the Ukrainian side of my family died either at Soviet hands in the "famines", or in fascist hands during the Nazi advance through Ukraine.

Still, you know my family history better than my great-grandmother did, eh phil? 

You plum.


----------



## phildwyer (May 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I don't have a picture of him. I don't have pictures of any of that aside of my family.


 
Oh really?

Then perhaps you might like to tell us the name of the imposter who seized your keyboard and wrote the following_ just two days ago?_



ViolentPanda said:


> TBF, he looks like a picture of my great-great uncle Schmuley from the turn of the 20th century, except Unc had better dress sense.


 
You are well and truly busted _hombre._


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 5, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Oh really?
> 
> Then perhaps you might like to tell us the name of the imposter who seized your keyboard and wrote the following_ just two days ago?_
> 
> ...


 
What don't you understand about "I don't have"?
I've *seen* a picture of him. I don't *possess *a picture of him.

Fucking moron!* *


----------



## Idris2002 (May 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> What don't you understand about "I don't have"?
> I've *seen* a picture of him. I don't *possess *a picture of him.
> 
> Fucking moron!* *


 
Don't rise to him, ye big eejit.


----------



## spawnofsatan (May 5, 2013)

Here he is!


----------



## phildwyer (May 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> What don't you understand about "I don't have"?
> I've *seen* a picture of him. I don't *possess *a picture of him.


 
Yeah rıght.

Serıously, why do you keep up thıs rıdıculous pretence?  You don't know a matzoh from a meshugganah do you?


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 5, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Don't rise to him, ye big eejit.


 
You have a point. I don't want to give him a hard-on.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (May 5, 2013)

To be honest, uncle Schmuley does sound a little bit imaginary. Having said that, I've got a great-great grandad that protested the forced labour of some native Brazilians by sharing food with one of them in a public square. He got arrested over it and some freemasons campaigned to get him released. Sounds completely fictional and a little bit bonkers, but it's actually true. So I believe you Panda.

...or do I?


----------



## phildwyer (May 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> You have a point. I don't want to give him a hard-on.


 
Come off ıt _schmendrıck.  _You're a _goy._

I know ıt.  You know ıt.  You want me to prove ıt agaın or shall we let the matter rest now?


----------



## Idris2002 (May 5, 2013)

spawnofsatan said:


> Here he is!


 
The bould phildwyer may be a fine figure of a man, but what of the Great-Uncle?


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (May 5, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> ... meshugganah


 
Great band.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 5, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> To be honest, uncle Schmuley does sound a little bit imaginary. Having said that, I've got a great-great grandad that protested the forced labour of some native Brazilians by sharing food with one of them in a public square. He got arrested over it and some freemasons campaigned to get him released. Sounds completely fictional and a little bit bonkers, but it's actually true. So I believe you Panda.


 
Social and family history is made up of supposedly-implausible occurrences though, isn't it?


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (May 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Social and family history is made up of supposedly-implausible occurrences though, isn't it?


 
History in general is, I reckon.


----------



## spawnofsatan (May 5, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> The bould phildwyer may be a fine figure of a man, but what of the Great-Uncle?


 
Thats great-uncle Schmuely, Fester is just his nickname


----------



## phildwyer (May 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Social and family history is made up of supposedly-implausible occurrences though, isn't it?


 
Yours sure as hell ıs.


----------



## Bakunin (May 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Social and family history is made up of supposedly-implausible occurrences though, isn't it?


 

True, like the fact that my mother and stepdad's families were acquainted before my mother had married and divorced my biological father and married my stepdad instead. Odd, yes. Implausible-sounding, yes. True, absolutely.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (May 5, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> True, like the fact that my mother and stepdad's families were acquainted before my mother had married and divorced my biological father and married my stepdad instead. Odd, yes. Implausible-sounding, yes. True, absolutely.


 
That's nothing. Before I was even born and knew anything about it, my brother, my mum, and my dad all were acquainted and had been living together for several years. It's a small fucking world, I'll say that.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 5, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> That's nothing. Before I was even born and knew anything about it, my brother, my mum, and my dad all were acquainted and had been living together for several years. It's a small fucking world, I'll say that.


 
That's well fucking degenerate!!


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (May 5, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> That's well fucking degenerate!!


 
It's like something you'd see in a documentary about isolated villages where everyone is related.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 5, 2013)

Violent Panda is deffo a fourby, he once cheated me out of a pound and then kiled christ. Case closed imo


----------



## Zabo (May 5, 2013)

Don't call me Laura was on Radio 5 this morning having a 'head to head' with some dude from The Express.

For Sale. One smashed up radio with wallpaper scuff marks.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 5, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Violent Panda is deffo a fourby, he once cheated me out of a pound and then kiled christ. Case closed imo


 
I won that pound fair and square!!


----------



## J Ed (May 5, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/330851593211740161

wtf?


----------



## Bakunin (May 5, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/330851593211740161
> 
> wtf?


 
It's like the bastard offspring of some frantic back-alley coupling between this:






And this:


----------



## J Ed (May 5, 2013)

So people are going around dressed like this






...roleplaying racists?

Human beings are so weird


----------



## frogwoman (May 5, 2013)

do people actually dress like that?


----------



## J Ed (May 5, 2013)

It looks like it, tbh I can see why it would appeal to Laurie


----------



## frogwoman (May 5, 2013)

Yeah there wouldnt be anything to do with the far-right about anyone who liked to dress as a victorian with a gun, not at all.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> do people actually dress like that?


 
Yup.

And this is where the radical left will end up, as a small part of the New York literary and arts scene, unless it is rescued.


----------



## Favelado (May 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Yeah there wouldnt be anything to do with the far-right about anyone who liked to dress as a victorian with a gun, not at all.


 
Especially not a bunch of middle-class white people. It's all fine. Fine.


----------



## frogwoman (May 5, 2013)

Why would anyone even think such a thing? There's nothing remotely fash about wanting to hark back to a golden age of empire while parading around modern fancy weapons on view.


----------



## frogwoman (May 5, 2013)

Look at those twats on the far right (lol)


----------



## Favelado (May 5, 2013)

Easy to get into, because half the clothes were in the family attic (or museum) anyway.


----------



## tufty79 (May 5, 2013)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Sea_Scrolls






http://www.emusic.com/music-news/review/album/the-north-sea-scrolls-the-north-sea-scrolls/


> the Dead Sea Scrolls – which tell a weird alternative history of Britain.
> One of the key changes to accepted reality is that Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader who courted Hitler in the 1930s, actually got to form two governments. His ministers include Enoch Powell, the notorious racist politician who by some strange chicanery ends up joining the prog-rock band, Gong, and Tim Hardin, the heroin-addicted late-’60s singer-songwriter, who becomes Mosley’s Culture Secretary.
> In isolation, the songs about these implausible developments – the wry chucklemaster Haines on Powell; the pithier Coughlan on Hardin – are baffling, and leave you hanging on for every line in disbelief. Elsewhere, Haines has Ian Ball, the man who attempted to kidnap Princess Anne in 1974, sitting in Broadmoor psychiatric prison, mistakenly believing himself to be the same Ian Ball who sang in the Mercury Prize-winning alt-blues combo, Gomez.


 
is this the same thing?


----------



## rekil (May 5, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> is this the same thing?


Light years away.


----------



## treelover (May 5, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Sea_Scrolls
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
what on earth is that about?


----------



## rekil (May 5, 2013)

It's Luke Haines and Cathal Coughlan havin a laff. (of sorts)

Cathal Coughlan.


Spoiler








Luke Haines.


Spoiler


----------



## sihhi (May 5, 2013)

Laurie Penny is attending the Republica13 event in a function hall/former rail store house in Kreuzberg called the 'Berlin Station'

Here is what it is all about.

Here are the other speakers

This is the twitter discussion.



> Laurie Penny: So tomorrow I'm giving a talk in Berlin which will be the first outing for the ideas in my *drumroll* upcoming ebook, Cybersexism. Nervous.
> 
> Twitter: I'm going to Berlin on Friday for a few days, let me know if you find any cool places to go/eat.
> 
> ...


 
Off-topic single post:

The back story to these kinds of events in Kreuzberg: rising numbers of arts/design/subculture/neo-punk Germans and also foreigners (regarded as tourists) profiting from the 'ethnic' background of the area - T-shirt designs with 'Kotti', pictures of the old housing used as art, (at first) benefiting from cheap market goods but producing something 'art' 'nightlife' etc that is virtually closed off due to cost to the once mostly Turkish and Arab residents.
It has reached a point where Berlin Burlesque Academy (sic) as well as the British Shorts Film Festival (German equivalent of poncy foreign films) are both based in Kreuzberg - alongside dozens of galleries, craft centres, internet start ups, hotels and 'euro-bars'.
Leading to anti-tourist feeling.




Obviously rent increases come as well, even back in 2008 people were complaining of 600 euros a month rent for a 'normal' 3-bed home in an apartment block - very high - most housing in Germany is private landlord.
2012 Protests at rent increases:




youth protests in the evenings








and street encampment at the end of 2012.






On Valentine's Day 2013 an eviction occured in Kreuzberg (over late payment of rent under new terms and conditions), of the Gulbol family - the end of a six year legal battle. Neukolln leftists and local residents tried to stop it - leading to some burnt cars.




Most low income residents are being forced out to the outskirts of East Berlin - a bit like moving someone from Ealing to outer Redbridge.


----------



## sihhi (May 6, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> And they lack *ambition* and sneer at creative people.


 
That word has boomeranged in an unexpected fashion. 

Oxford Union = ambition (to be on the side of business)

Former Oxford Union President - describing himself as "PHD Candidate and Entrepreneur in Innovation and Crowdsourcing" has set up an internet company that offers "Online problem solving for businesses".

Does it match Molly Crabapple's idea of a DIY Empire - 5 Minute Talk in New York from 2010:


----------



## sihhi (May 6, 2013)

Here's another ex-President this time the Business Development Director of Sleepio which gives online assistance to people who are stressed and can't sleep - for a fee natch'.


----------



## sihhi (May 6, 2013)

Here is another former president of the Oxford Union - this time a tax lawyer actively resisting state revenue collection from some of the largest tax evading firms in Europe.




> Barker, Harper & Wickes v HMRC (First-Tier Tribunal)
> 
> Barclays Bank plc v HMRC (Judicial Review, High Court)
> 
> ...


 
This list is ambition realised.


----------



## treelover (May 6, 2013)

copliker said:


> It's Luke Haines and Cathal Coughlan havin a laff. (of sorts)
> 
> Cathal Coughlan.
> 
> ...




Blimey, I promoted Microdisney a couple of times in the mid 80's, nice guy


----------



## binka (May 6, 2013)

can you imagine what sort of cunt you'd have to be to get elected president of oxford union? it's already been established that oxford is for the ambitious, only the most ambitious of those will try and become president of the union so you'd have to be a real shit to win that election


----------



## DotCommunist (May 6, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I won that pound fair and square!!


 

thats what they all say #protocols


----------



## treelover (May 6, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Here's another ex-President this time the Business Development Director of Sleepio which gives online assistance to people who are stressed and can't sleep - for a fee natch'.


 
Not exactly a high flyer then...


----------



## rekil (May 6, 2013)

The last one kept losing his keys apparently.


----------



## frogwoman (May 6, 2013)

J Ed said:


> So people are going around dressed like this
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

See, their is nothing intrisicaly wrong with the steampunk aesthetic, it's actuall quite cool when don correct. Look to my man in the corner there. He is holding what looks like a minigun machine thing. He is done out in dapper apparel. Why not?

some of is bredrins there, dear o dear. No. 

the point of steampunk as a literary aesthetic is great, the dressing up-well. Observe.

Theres also loads of values associated with steampunk as a lit thing that don't sit right with me when it is done crass- there has been a rash of amerian authours in the last 4 years pumping out this stuff, neo scifi, often just the dressings without for an instance looking at what sort of society would produce it. lazy shit tbf.


em. rambling. just have a slight annoyance with the genre that does not wish to aknowledge the harsh realities /dc


----------



## treelover (May 6, 2013)

Froggie, just interested to know how you knew that was a minigun, not everyone would, do you play games?

btw, brutal weapon, a relly of mine is a gunner using one in the Navy.


----------



## frogwoman (May 6, 2013)

that was dc sorry lol

and he reckons it might not be a minigun anyway


----------



## DotCommunist (May 6, 2013)

its got lots of barrels but having lots of them does not mean its a minigun.

In steampunk world it could be a load of rifles welded together and linked to a single trigger


----------



## Nylock (May 6, 2013)

or a gatling*, possibly...




*I know that a minigun is basically a small gatling but it would be in keeping with the general tech ethos of the period to call it a gatling


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 6, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> See, their is nothing intrisicaly wrong with the steampunk aesthetic, it's actuall quite cool when don correct. Look to my man in the corner there. He is holding what looks like a minigun machine thing. He is done out in dapper apparel. Why not?
> 
> some of is bredrins there, dear o dear. No.
> 
> ...


 
wrong. 'steampunk' is rubbish.


----------



## frogwoman (May 6, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> wrong. 'steampunk' is rubbish.


 

much like your face

/dc


----------



## Idris2002 (May 6, 2013)




----------



## sihhi (May 6, 2013)

Anna Chen aka Madame Miaow has performed steampunk - alternative history to describe successful Chinese resistance to western imperialism.


----------



## Lo Siento. (May 6, 2013)

How old and unthreatening do your politics have to be to end up on a platform with Tariq Ali, Owen Jones Tony Benn, Lindsey German and Jeremy Corbyn?


----------



## phildwyer (May 6, 2013)

binka said:


> can you imagine what sort of cunt you'd have to be to get elected president of oxford union?


----------



## phildwyer (May 6, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Yeah there wouldnt be anything to do with the far-right about anyone who liked to dress as a victorian with a gun, not at all.


----------



## love detective (May 6, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> View attachment 32238
> 
> How old and unthreatening do your politics have to be to end up on a platform with Tariq Ali, Owen Jones Tony Benn, Lindsey German and Jeremy Corbyn?


----------



## Bakunin (May 6, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> its got lots of barrels but having lots of them does not mean its a minigun.
> 
> In steampunk world it could be a load of rifles welded together and linked to a single trigger


 





'PERFUMED PONCE!'


----------



## JimW (May 6, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> 'PERFUMED PONCE!'


First thing sprang to mind for me too. Sure I've seen similar in some Western or other. Was there a real such gun?


----------



## phildwyer (May 6, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Violent Panda is deffo a fourby, he once cheated me out of a pound and then kiled christ. Case closed imo


 
Violet Panda yesterday:


----------



## Greebo (May 6, 2013)

phildwyer said:


>


Fair enough, but I see you only came up with four.


----------



## Greebo (May 6, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Violet Panda yesterday:<snip>


Give it a rest, sweetie.


----------



## Greebo (May 6, 2013)

JimW said:


> First thing sprang to mind for me too. Sure I've seen similar in some Western or other. Was there a real such gun?


If there wasn't, there should have been.


----------



## sihhi (May 6, 2013)

Anna Chen in action.

Aren't the gas masks a bit weird?










Even Batman can be 19th century-ified


----------



## Bakunin (May 6, 2013)

JimW said:


> First thing sprang to mind for me too. Sure I've seen similar in some Western or other. Was there a real such gun?


 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nock_gun

The now-legendary Nock volley gun, yes. Which fired the slightly intimidating total of seven .50 calibre pistol balls all at the same time.


----------



## weepiper (May 6, 2013)

Middle class dressing-up. Boring.


----------



## JimW (May 6, 2013)

Greebo said:


> If there wasn't, there should have been.


I have resorted to Wikipedia for some Phil-depth level "research": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_barrel_firearms


----------



## Greebo (May 6, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Even Batman can be 19th century-ified


That's just wrong on so many levels.


----------



## Bakunin (May 6, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nock_gun
> 
> The now-legendary Nock volley gun, yes. Which fired the slightly intimidating total of seven .50 calibre pistol balls all at the same time.


 
It's very handy when popping to your nearest financial institution to request a 'no quibbling' loan.


----------



## Greebo (May 6, 2013)

JimW said:


> I have resorted to Wikipedia for some Phil-depth level "research": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_barrel_firearms


And to think that I can remember when saying that somebody used wikipedia for information was right down there with accusing them of having an occult library full of Llewellyn.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 6, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> thats what they all say #protocols


 
Not my fault you didn't read the rulebook, sonny!


----------



## JimW (May 6, 2013)

Greebo said:


> And to think that I can remember when saying that somebody used wikipedia for information was right down there with accusing them of having an occult library full of Llewellyn.


I used to have to read the academic book reviews in the Sunday papers to be a pub quiz bore style know-it-all, but with the magic of the Internet I can do it any day of the week.


----------



## sihhi (May 6, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Middle class dressing-up. Boring.


 
It apparently has a strong left/socialist heritage due to anti-capitalist figures like Molly Crapabble:




> Tim O’Shea: What is the core appeal of steampunk fiction for you as a creator?
> 
> Molly Crabapple: I started drawing steampunk pictures in college. A teacher assigned me to design a skateboard deck, and, rebellious thing that I was, I thought it would be hilarious to imagine skateboarding as the sport of trussed Victorian ladies. I drew a board titled “Lady Etheldrina’s Wheeled Conveyance”, which shows a bouffant haired aristocrat on a skateboard, which is then being hauled by her maid.
> I like working in the steampunk genre because I get to imagine the horrifying and hilarious ways technology would distort my favorite time periods.
> ...


----------



## J Ed (May 6, 2013)

> Crabapple: I had a few reasons. First, me and John feel like we’ve been pigeonholed as the people who make the comics about sexy sexy sex, and while we like boobs as much as anyone, doing only boobs causes people to overlook your other talents. Second, I hate content filters with a fiery passion. The world isn’t childproof- if you don’t want your kid to see the organ they came out of, keep them away from a computer. Not that that will work anyway.


 
I see that Molly and Malcolm share common interests.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 6, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Aren't the gas masks a bit weird?


 
Steampunkers probably come up with some spurious justification to do with the amount of sulphurous smogs caused by all those coal-fired boilers.


----------



## weepiper (May 6, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It apparently has a strong left/socialist heritage due to anti-capitalist figures like Molly Crapabble:


 
'Anti-capitalist' figures like Molly 'monetise your hotness' Crabapple?


----------



## sihhi (May 6, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I see that Molly and Malcolm share common interests.


 
He is so __________ it's unreal:

1 "Det. Olivia Benson backstory movie Kickstarter"

2 "If it turns out there actually are purity cults and no one invited me to join one it will totally hurt my feelings."

3 "Vanessa Hudgens is going with the whole evil thing and that's a cool artistic choice 24.media.tumblr.com/f4def59cf398d8… 25.media.tumblr.com/0e15411aa1b39d…"


Alongside more questions about defending education from neoliberalisation. Should that be "?"





			
				Malcolm Harris said:
			
		

> If The University were to be salvaged/defended from neoliberalism wouldn't that be like historically anomalous?


 
and bigging up the idea that you should promote your in-crowd, talking with some author complaining that the Nation didn't review his books:

https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/331261010520444928




> JeffSharlet: I interned at The Nation, published in The Nation, took money from The Nation Institute: Never a peep or word for any one of my five books.
> 
> Malcolm Harris @BigMeanInternet: promoting contributors' work is the fun part!
> 
> ...


 
I don't know how to describe him properly, but I think he is being weird on purpose - what is the word for that?


----------



## cesare (May 6, 2013)

I'd never heard of steampunk before I joined urban. And even then I thought it was Mad Max dressing.


----------



## J Ed (May 6, 2013)

I can't help but feel that steampunk is a bit stupid, but I don't like any kind of dressing up really. I like the fallout games which are apparently 'post-apocalyptic diesel-punk' but it wouldn't occur to me to dress up like I was in it...


----------



## J Ed (May 6, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I don't know how to describe him properly, but I think he is being weird on purpose - what is the word for that?


 
Malapropism?

I know what you mean, his Yorktown nonsense was very much like that.


----------



## sihhi (May 6, 2013)

cesare said:


> I'd never heard of steampunk before I joined urban. And even then I thought it was Mad Max dressing.


 
It's my first time hearing it too and part of it sounds like a Star Trek convention but it purposefully mangles history.




> What follows is a discussion of three pieces of short steampunk fiction: “The Anachronist’s Cookbook” by Catherine M. Valente, “Machine Maid” by Margo Lanagan, and “The Steam Dancer (1896)” by Caitlin R. Kiernan. Each of these stories approaches steampunk from a decidedly feminist angle while individually representing a unique perspective on the relationship between women, technology, and their bodies.
> 
> In the introduction to “The Anachronist’s Cookbook” from the anthology Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, Valente writes of steampunk: “I had so many political and intellectual issues with it that I couldn’t imagine writing a story that merrily went on its way without addressing them. Hence Jane was born, because you can’t have Victorian England without Levelers, Luddites, and angry young women.” Jane, the protagonist to whom Valente refers, is indeed an angry young woman, one of what the story refers to as a “confederation” of pickpockets who plagued Manchester, replacing the nicked goods with fiery political pamphlets. Sadly, Jane is picked up by the authorities, but she is far from defeated.
> 
> While imprisoned Jane is subjected to the sexual advances of one of the bailiffs, yet she faces the man with a bitter defiance and her body, plastered beneath her modest dress with riveting political pamphlets advocating the leveling of industrial machines and airships, becomes an agent of revolution rather than a vessel of submission. Jane’s world is one in which women have been replaced by “Programmable Home Tailors,” one in which the airships that hover above the city as “Floating Engines of Oppression,” are built on the “bruised bodies, broken knuckles, and lost limbs,” of young children; in short, Jane’s pamphlet remarks: “How wonderful is this world – for the Men who Made it.”


 

_you can’t have Victorian England without Levelers, Luddites, ___


----------



## sihhi (May 6, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Malapropism?
> 
> I know what you mean, his Yorktown nonsense was very much like that.


 
Go complete your nation's (already completed) bourgeios revolution


----------



## J Ed (May 6, 2013)

sihhi said:


> _you can’t have Victorian England without Levelers, Luddites, ___


 
http://steampunkanarchist.wordpress.com/what-is-steampunk/


----------



## cesare (May 6, 2013)

Sihhi, I think this was the first time I heard of it though it may have been mentioned before: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/steampunk-as-fashion-just-how-cool-is-it.224602/


----------



## andysays (May 6, 2013)

sihhi said:


> ...I don't know how to describe him properly, but I think he is being weird on purpose - what is the word for that?


 


J Ed said:


> Malapropism? I know what you mean, his Yorktown nonsense was very much like that.


 
No, I think the word is probably just "wanker"


----------



## Idris2002 (May 6, 2013)




----------



## sihhi (May 6, 2013)

cesare said:


> Sihhi, I think this was the first time I heard of it though it may have been mentioned before: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/steampunk-as-fashion-just-how-cool-is-it.224602/


 
Ta.  at ba's response: 



> It's like 4 Non Blondes isn't it - dreads with top hats, cyber-fagin oh god.


Content for Malcolm Harris to analyse:



> And I pray, oh my God do I pray
> I pray every single day
> For a revolution...
> And I say he- ey -ey ey ...
> And I say hey what's goin' on






			
				Malcolm Harris said:
			
		

> And Ke$ha says “I am capital. Capital is a liar.” ... If you do a close reading of almost any of these pop songs, especially the better ones, it’s amazing to see the fragments that stick out. The only feeling left for the music industry to sell back to us is crisis, and it makes for really great dance music.


----------



## andysays (May 6, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> snip


 
That is, like, some sick shit, bro...


----------



## Frances Lengel (May 6, 2013)

JimW said:


> I have resorted to Wikipedia for some* Phil-depth level* "research": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_barrel_firearms


 
You should've just put "Phil-level" research. There was a kid I went to junior school called Phil who was a bit chubby. One time after school I had to wait for my mum at his house til about eight at night for some reason. Anyway, on looking in one of the cupboards I noticed he'd written "Phil's" on the lids of all the pot noodles & amended the bit on the side that says Fill Level to read "Phil Level".

So you can see why it would've been better.

E2a - It was actually my brother who had to wait chez Phil, but I've appropriated his experience for the sake of having an anecdote to relate. Which is quite Pennyish really.


----------



## treelover (May 6, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/06/the-myth-of-web-toxicity

Back on topic, new article by Laura in the Guardian


----------



## sihhi (May 6, 2013)

Remember the gallery where MC placed pornographic star Stoya topless into a bath? Dissent Magazine held a discussion there for its BeLabored issue.


----------



## sihhi (May 6, 2013)

treelover said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/06/the-myth-of-web-toxicity
> 
> Back on topic, new article by Laura in the Guardian


 
If the guy is playing video games he is doing it wrong:




> Can anyone escape the internet? Tech journalist Paul Miller decided to give it a try. As an experiment, Miller, a New Yorker who has lived and worked largely online for half his life, spent an entire year in self-imposed exile from social media, search engines, pornography, email access and even text messaging, hoping in the process to discover his "real" self. In fact, he spent most of that year bored, cut off from family and friends, sitting on the sofa playing video games.


 
Good note to leave though.


----------



## J Ed (May 6, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Remember the gallery where MC placed pornographic star Stoya topless into a bath? Dissent Magazine held a discussion there for its BeLabored issue.


 
If only we could find some way to harness LP's smugness in this picture...


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 6, 2013)

a self-desrcibed "crypto-anarchist" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22421185


----------



## seventh bullet (May 6, 2013)

Upper middle class people talking about working class people in an art gallery with pictures of Laurie Penny on the walls?


----------



## phildwyer (May 6, 2013)

sihhi said:


> _you can’t have Victorian England without Levelers, Luddites, ___


 
You not only can, you must.

Neither the Levellers nor the Luddites were Victorian.


----------



## cesare (May 6, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> You not only can, you must.
> 
> Neither the Levellers nor the Luddites were Victorian.


I think that's why Sihhi took that Valente quote and added an


----------



## andysays (May 6, 2013)

J Ed said:


> If only we could find some way to harness LP's smugness in this picture...


 
Sorry, J, Lolz has already cornered the market in harnessing/monetizing her smugness.

You'll have to be a lot quicker than that if you want to beat the smartest kid from a smart school...


----------



## equationgirl (May 6, 2013)

Malcolm Harris makes a comment on Twitter that sure looks racist to me...


> *Malcolm Harris* ‏@*BigMeanInternet*
> 18h​@*pushinghoops* also iphones. only white people have iphones. black teens use cans with string.


 
He also seems to having a rather nasty exchange with the girlfriend of one of the guys recently arrested for obstructing the investigation into the Boston bombing.


----------



## equationgirl (May 6, 2013)

Seventh Billet said:


> It might be ironic racism. Everything's OK if you do it ironically.


How silly of me, I should have realised.


----------



## imposs1904 (May 6, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Remember the gallery where MC placed pornographic star Stoya topless into a bath? Dissent Magazine held a discussion there for its BeLabored issue.


 

From the same event. I wonder why Doug Henwood's looking so grumpy?


----------



## imposs1904 (May 6, 2013)

Seventh Billet said:


> You can tell that older bloke behind her only slipped in for the free wine. I'd go if I knew there was free wine.


 
that's doug henwood.


----------



## imposs1904 (May 6, 2013)

PS - anyone know which airline Laurie uses? I'd love to be to afford to travel from Britain to the States and back  four or five times a year.


----------



## imposs1904 (May 6, 2013)

Seventh Billet said:


> Oh. Never heard of him. Or any of the others until this thread started.
> 
> I think I might have seen Laurie on Newsnight once but I forgot about her when I switched channels.


 
His podcasts are worth a listen. There's probably a link to them on the link already provided.


----------



## love detective (May 6, 2013)

I thought it was Harold Bishop from Neighbours


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 6, 2013)

Seventh Billet said:


> In fact, the whole of society looks a bit ironic these days. Even some of the government look like geeky students and so does the leader of the opposition.
> 
> Tattoos and other forms of self-mutilation are big business. Teenagers of all social classes and ethnic backgrounds talk in a ridiculous made-up patwah like Ali G without the wit or intelligence. It's all like a caricature of 1968.


 
Back again?


----------



## treelover (May 6, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> a self-desrcibed "crypto-anarchist" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22421185


 

That man should be put in jail, its horrendous he is putting the plans for the 3d made gun on the net, it will be untraceable and will be used in many murders, etc.


----------



## andysays (May 6, 2013)

imposs1904 said:


> PS - anyone know which airline Laurie uses? I'd love to be to afford to travel from Britain to the States and back four or five times a year.


 
Tax-deductable Expenses Airways?


----------



## andysays (May 6, 2013)

Seventh Billet said:


> When Laurie calls herself a revolutionary socialist, what does she mean? Listening to her, I can't tell.


 
It means she's going round in circles, possibly also a reference to her clocking up enough airmiles to orbit the earth...


----------



## Rob Ray (May 6, 2013)

Edit nm already done above.


----------



## Jim Pooley (May 6, 2013)

So it seems the SWp has been doubly unlucky, since a new big broad left event has been set up just at the time that their brand has become toxic to lots of big name speakers?


----------



## Frances Lengel (May 6, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Back again?


 
Grass.


----------



## andysays (May 6, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Back again?


 
So, who was that who burned so briefly, or is it bad form to ask?


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 6, 2013)

Same person it always is.


----------



## andysays (May 6, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Same person it always is.


 
Sorry, I'm none the wiser


----------



## tufty79 (May 6, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> Grass.


Ffs. Grow up.


----------



## rekil (May 6, 2013)

Daniel Trilling Guardian article on Greece which, um, kinda contradicts Laura's analysis in Discordia.



			
				LP said:
			
		

> We came here expecting riots. Instead we found ourselves looking at what happens when riots die away and horrified inertia sets in






			
				DT said:
			
		

> Yet while journalists understandably want to draw attention to the threat Golden Dawn poses, every piece of sensationalist media coverage reinforces the party's deliberately crafted image. The violence it inspires is real enough, but Golden Dawn is far from being in a position of power. Its activist base remains small; it can not mobilise supporters in large numbers; and its rallies often take place unannounced, so that anti-fascist activists do not have time to gather and chase its members off the streets.
> 
> The food handouts, staged mainly for the benefit of the media, pale in comparison with the network of solidarity initiatives like the "potato movement" – markets that allow farmers to sell their produce directly to customers, at around 30% less than supermarket prices – or volunteer-run medical clinics, or free after-school tuition for children, that are helping Greek people cope with the impact of mass unemployment and falling salaries.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 6, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> Grass.


 
Nope, if I were a grass, I'd have named him and contacted the mods, you mug cunt.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 6, 2013)

andysays said:


> So, who was that who burned so briefly, or is it bad form to ask?


 
LLETSA, late of this parish.
Basically, anyone who starts banging on about tattoos being body mutilation, and it's evens that it's LLETSA trying to creep back from his ban.


----------



## andysays (May 6, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> LLETSA, late of this parish.
> Basically, anyone who starts banging on about tattoos being body mutilation, and it's evens that it's LLETSA trying to creep back from his ban.


 
Thanks. I think I've seen that name before, but he apparently pre-dates my time here.


----------



## redsquirrel (May 6, 2013)

copliker said:


> It's Luke Haines and Cathal Coughlan havin a laff. (of sorts)
> 
> Cathal Coughlan.
> 
> ...



Top album


----------



## FridgeMagnet (May 6, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It's my first time hearing it too and part of it sounds like a Star Trek convention but it purposefully mangles history.



The problem is that "steampunk" can mean a lot of different things. At one level it can refer to counter-historical pieces like Gibson & Sterling's _The Difference Engine_, which deal with what the world might look like if certain technologies had been more advanced at periods of history - in the case there, that Babbage's Engine had worked, giving computing power to the British Empire (the general conclusion being that they would have hammered foreigners with computerised artillery, created a consumerist culture with advanced industrialisation and used it to keep track of dissidents by the secret service). Or it is often satire of modern politics by reference to the imperial past. Or it could be a particular facet of industrial chic, basically without meaning, dressing up in a corset and skirt but wearing a hat with cogs on it. Or it could be lazily reproducing Verne and Wells and pretending that's new. Or it could be an actively reactionary movement which approves of technological progress but would like to see nice clear stereotypical Victorian social distinctions on top of that. Or lots of things.


----------



## Frances Lengel (May 6, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Nope, if I were a grass, I'd have named him and contacted the mods, you mug cunt.


 
Easy there big guy - I was only messin.


----------



## Frances Lengel (May 6, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> Ffs. Grow up.


 
Up ya mam.


----------



## tufty79 (May 6, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> Up ya mam.


Rather you than me 

Edit: sorry Frances, you caught my bank holiday Monday snappy bit.


----------



## Frances Lengel (May 7, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> Rather you than me
> 
> Edit: sorry Frances, you caught my bank holiday Monday snappy bit.


 
No worries 

You didn't need to apologise though, it's all just part of the badinage.


----------



## _angel_ (May 7, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Back again?


took you a long time grandad


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 7, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> took you a long time grandad


 
You know how Pickman's Model is always trotting out his little proverb about how it's "better to stay silent and be thought a fool..."?

Take note, eh?


----------



## Jim Pooley (May 7, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> The problem is that "steampunk" can mean a lot of different things.


 But in no version does it mean shoehorning the Levellers into the Victorian era, which seems to be sihi's quibble.

Of course Lutcher Arkwright encountered some legacies of the Civil War in what was arguably a steampunk story...


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 7, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> a self-desrcibed "crypto-anarchist" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22421185


 
I've seen that before - the guy is in fact an 'anarcho-capitalist' - a completely different breed of cunt from the ones we're discussing here


----------



## Jim Pooley (May 7, 2013)

maybe he thinks the crypto bit stands for someone in favour of encryption?


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 7, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I've seen that before - the guy is in fact an 'anarcho-capitalist' - a completely different breed of cunt from the ones we're discussing here


 
yes, that was my thought.  i just put it there so that he could be added to the list!


----------



## Fozzie Bear (May 7, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> The problem is that "steampunk" can mean a lot of different things.


 
Precisely - steampunk is simply another cultural battleground as with punk and other genres...

My mate Andy is in a steampunk band and they seem pretty good at combining punk and musical hall stuff as a celebration of working class culture.

They recently had socialist band Thee Faction supporting them and are always as pains to take the piss out of steampunks being all posh and shouting "Huzzah!".


----------



## killer b (May 7, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> My mate Andy is in a steampunk band and they seem pretty good at combining punk and musical hall stuff as a celebration of working class culture.


 
this sounds like a revolting concept.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (May 7, 2013)

killer b said:


> this sounds like a revolting concept.


 
I agree that it's not for everyone.


----------



## phildwyer (May 7, 2013)

imposs1904 said:


> From the same event. I wonder why Doug Henwood's looking so grumpy?[/ATTACH]


 
That's the fırst tıme I've seen hım ın a tıe.


----------



## Jim Pooley (May 7, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> That's the fırst tıme I've seen hım ın a tıe.


he doesn't post here does he?


----------



## phildwyer (May 7, 2013)

Jim Pooley said:


> he doesn't post here does he?


 
No.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 7, 2013)

andysays said:


> So, who was that who burned so briefly, or is it bad form to ask?





ViolentPanda said:


> LLETSA, late of this parish.
> Basically, anyone who starts banging on about tattoos being body mutilation, and it's evens that it's LLETSA trying to creep back from his ban.


 
Be brutal with your little LLETSA, and beat him when he sneezes.

He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases.


----------



## The39thStep (May 7, 2013)

andysays said:


> Thanks. I think I've seen that name before, but he apparently pre-dates my time here.


 
one of the many fallen I'm afraid.


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 7, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> My mate Andy is in a steampunk band and they seem pretty good at combining punk and musical hall stuff as a celebration of working class culture.


 
Those bloody Juwes get everywhere


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 7, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Those bloody Juwes get everywhere


 
Rothschild Zionists, you anti-semite


----------



## agricola (May 7, 2013)

#Killallmen?


----------



## Greebo (May 7, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> That's the fırst tıme I've seen hım ın a tıe.


That explains it then - force a man to wear a tie when he doesn't want to and you deserve all you get.


----------



## phildwyer (May 7, 2013)

Greebo said:


> That explains it then - force a man to wear a tie when he doesn't want to and you deserve all you get.


 
Yes ıt does.

Also, dıd you know that devout Muslıms don't wear tıes, on account of they resemble a crucıfıx?

Not that thıs applıes ın Doug's case of course.


----------



## Greebo (May 7, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Yes ıt does.
> 
> Also, dıd you know that devout Muslıms don't wear tıes, on account of they resemble a crucıfıx?<snip>


There was I thinking it was more to do with the tie being a symbol of western imperialism.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 7, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Also, dıd you know that devout Muslıms don't wear tıes, on account of they resemble a crucıfıx?


 
really?  that doesn't make a lot of sense.  but then, once you're willing to believe a holy book any weirdness is possible.


----------



## Firky (May 7, 2013)

I need to catchup on this thead but I must say I've enjoyed not getting myself wound up by such an inconsequential pieces of shit like Laurie and her pals.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 7, 2013)

i googled it, and it seems that the general consensus of the english speaking muslim world is that you can wear ties, and the reason some muslims once did not was because the muslim had a religious duty not to dress like an unbeliever.


----------



## Greebo (May 7, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i googled it, and it seems that the general consensus of the english speaking muslim world is that you can wear ties, and the reason some muslims once did not was because the muslim had a religious duty not to dress like an unbeliever.


Or, as in Iran after the Shah's deposition, a refusal to wear a tie was a signifier that you weren't one of the reactionaries.  Anyway, there's  the option of the Nehru collar, slightly better for hot climates and it doesn't require you to wear a noose.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 7, 2013)

Hey Firky check this out https://twitter.com/shhimacat/status/331806367910359040 "that guy blocked me ages ago for saying he shouldn't laugh at laurie penny receiving rape threats from leftists"

That's coz of your cartoon btw. how cool is that.


----------



## Firky (May 7, 2013)

Eh, he blocked you because I made a cartoon that I made (and had FA to do with rape)? Have I got that right?

Or he blocked you because he was laughing at rape threats LP received and you told him not to?

Delroy Booth


----------



## equationgirl (May 7, 2013)

Apparently you're a manarchist dickhead, firky.

I'm looking forward to the manarchist dickhead chapter in the new book


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 7, 2013)

Firky said:


> Eh, he blocked you because I made a cartoon that I made (and had FA to do with rape)? Have I got that right?


 
No he blocked me because ages ago they confused my saying "urban75 is not a den of misogynist trolls" when Laurie Penny was accusing us of that as a result of your cartoon with "hahah let's laugh at leftists making rape threats at laurie penny" - the rape threats I presume are a reference to the freaks on the Guido Fawkes columns and Dont Start Me Off because I don't remember anyone here making any rape threats, do you?

And whilst trying to explain this to that individual I got stonewalled with a load of "Um what you're doing is victim-blaming actually" shite so I blocked them rather than tediously explain the fucking details to some fool who's not even aware of what I was referring to in the first place. It was too much effort. Imagine that.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 7, 2013)

Firky said:


> Eh, he blocked you because I made a cartoon that I made (and had FA to do with rape)? Have I got that right?
> 
> Or he blocked you because he was laughing at rape threats LP received and you told him not to?
> 
> Delroy Booth


 
No they confused the rape threats with the accusations of misogyny aimed at this thread. That's what I was dismissing. This person didn't know the context, must have thought I was referring to the rape threats made on Guido Fawkes rather than the criticism of your cartoon as misogynist, and wouldn't give me the chance to actually explain what I was making a comment about in the first place. It was actually in references to Laurie's comments about your cartoon that kicked it off.


----------



## Firky (May 7, 2013)

If anyone made rape threats to LP on here they'd be rightly banned and jumped on by a legion of posters on here. SOmeone made a skit about her appearance a few pages back and were lynched, so I can't imagine in a thousand years anyone would make such threats.


----------



## Firky (May 7, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> No they confused the rape threats with the accusations of misogyny aimed at this thread. That's what I was dismissing. This person didn't know the context, must have thought I was referring to the rape threats made on Guido Fawkes rather than the criticism of your cartoon as misogynist, and wouldn't give me the chance to actually explain what I was making a comment about in the first place. It was actually in references to Laurie's comments about your cartoon that kicked it off.


 
Ah, right. Now I got it. 

I thought she wasn't bothered about us


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 7, 2013)

Firky said:


> If anyone made rape threats to LP on here they'd be rightly banned and jumped on by a legion of posters on here. SOmeone made a skit about her appearance a few pages back and were lynched, so I can't imagine in a thousand years anyone would make such threats.


 
and I should hope so, I mean fucking hell firky I know your cartoon was in bad taste and you've apologised for it but you see how this ends up panning out when people make witless crass comments or make attempts at risky jokes that backfire? Don't wanna be too much of a prick about it but look what happens.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 7, 2013)

Firky said:


> Ah, right. Now I got it.
> 
> I thought she wasn't bothered about us


 
Neither is Monkey Harris.


----------



## Firky (May 7, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> and I should hope so, I mean fucking hell firky I know your cartoon was in bad taste and you've apologised for it but you see how this ends up panning out when people make witless crass comments or make attempts at risky jokes that backfire? Don't wanna be too much of a prick about it but look what happens.


 
Laurie does get her "ideas" beaten up and rubbished by anarchists and socialists; that was the premise of the cartoon. Not the actual act of beating her up because that would be shit. 

This is the original:







IIRC it used to be I am a Mac / I am a PC user and "I am Linux".


----------



## equationgirl (May 7, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> No he blocked me because ages ago they confused my saying "urban75 is not a den of misogynist trolls" when Laurie Penny was accusing us of that as a result of your cartoon with "hahah let's laugh at leftists making rape threats at laurie penny" - the rape threats I presume are a reference to the freaks on the Guido Fawkes columns and Dont Start Me Off because I don't remember anyone here making any rape threats, do you?
> 
> And whilst trying to explain this to that individual I got stonewalled with a load of "Um what you're doing is victim-blaming actually" shite so I blocked them rather than tediously explain the fucking details to some fool who's not even aware of what I was referring to in the first place. It was too much effort. Imagine that.


I'm pretty sure that anyone making a rape threat against anybody on this thread would have been immediately reported and chased from the thread with pitchforks and flaming torches. Misogyny hasn't been tolerated so rape threats certainly won't be.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 7, 2013)

Firky said:


> Laurie does get her "ideas" beaten up and rubbished by anarchists and socialists; that was the premise of the cartoon. Not the actual act of beating her up because that would be shit.


 
Well, quite, i don't think you posted it to convey your sincere desire to see Laurie Penny literally beaten up, I just reckon it was a meme that backfired. (coz even the smallest hint of violence against women isn't going to be tolerated here, is it?)


----------



## Firky (May 7, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Neither is Monkey Harris.


 
So not bothered by it he sends me tweets out of the blue


----------



## Firky (May 7, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Well, quite, i don't think you posted it to convey your sincere desite to see Laurie Penny, I just reckon it was a meme that backfired.


 
Indeed but how that has resulted in you getting stick for something that was posted on a totally unrelated website to U75 is utterly baffling. Have you upset them in the past, a hatchet to bury? Twitter's shite, lad! You can't explain or have a proper debate in twitter. As I've said before it's like watching two limbless boxers go at it in a ring.


----------



## equationgirl (May 7, 2013)

Firky said:


> If anyone made rape threats to LP on here they'd be rightly banned and jumped on by a legion of posters on here. SOmeone made a skit about her appearance a few pages back and were lynched, so I can't imagine in a thousand years anyone would make such threats.


Aye, we're not the misogynists we're made out to be 

Talking of which, a new one turned up at work. Joy.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 7, 2013)

Firky said:


> So not bothered by it he sends me tweets out of the blue


 
He craves your approval (and perhaps believes you have a hot teenage sister).


----------



## equationgirl (May 7, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> He craves your approval (and perhaps believes you have a hot teenage sister).


Aye despite LP maybe he sees you as a new ally, Firky


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 7, 2013)

Firky said:


> Indeed but how that has resulted in you getting stick for something that was posted on a totally unrelated website to U75 is utterly baffling. Have you upset them in the past, a hatchet to bury? Twitter's shite, lad! You can't explain or have a proper debate in twitter. As I've said before it's like watching two limbless boxers go at it in a ring.


 
It's funny really I mean you've obviously gotta maintain a sense of detachment to it lol


----------



## Firky (May 7, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I'm pretty sure that anyone making a rape threat against anybody on this thread would have been immediately reported and chased from the thread with pitchforks and flaming torches. Misogyny hasn't been tolerated so rape threats certainly won't be.


 
Init. One of the good things about urban is that kind of shit has a zero tolerance policy, you may not get banned but your posting career is going to an arduous one as people lynch you post after post.


----------



## equationgirl (May 7, 2013)

Firky said:


> Init. One of the good things about urban is that kind of shit has a zero tolerance policy, you may not get banned but your posting career is going to an arduous one as people lynch you post after post.


Aye, look at thriller and his posting history since the infamous AIDS comment.


----------



## Firky (May 7, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> It's funny really I mean you've obviously gotta maintain a sense of detachment to it lol


 
It's bonkers, man! It is one step away from 4chan 




ViolentPanda said:


> He craves your approval (and perhaps believes you have a hot teenage sister).


 

*skin crawls*


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## ViolentPanda (May 7, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Aye despite LP maybe he sees you as a new ally, Firky


 
(((Firky)))


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## Firky (May 7, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Aye, look at thriller and his posting history since the infamous AIDS comment.


 
Or Frumious Bigot after telling women they're doing feminism wrong and they shouldn't worry their pretty little heads over Page 3 and sexist adverts.


----------



## equationgirl (May 7, 2013)

Firky said:


> It's bonkers, man! It is one step away from 4chan


----------



## equationgirl (May 7, 2013)

Firky said:


> Or Frumious Bigot after telling women they're doing feminism wrong and they shouldn't worry their pretty little heads over Page 3 and sexist adverts.


Oh yes. Him.


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## Firky (May 7, 2013)

Well I have invited them to the thread to discuss the matter, I'll be surprised they join but maybe they will.


----------



## Nice one (May 7, 2013)

Firky said:


> If anyone made rape threats to LP on here they'd be rightly banned and jumped on by a legion of posters on here. SOmeone made a skit about her appearance a few pages back and were lynched, so I can't imagine in a thousand years anyone would make such threats.


 
what about the three fellas who wanted to punch her in the face? Not a word from anyone, apart from yer man LLETSA


----------



## Firky (May 7, 2013)

I can't recall that but there was plenty people wanting to smack Malcom Harris in his smug face too!


----------



## J Ed (May 7, 2013)

Anyone watched this yet?



I don't know if I can bring myself to

The comments section is horrifying

*GorillaMountain *4 hours ago
Brilliant. Penny is one of the most eloquent feminist intellectuals on the net, engaged wholly in the cultures she's critiquing. I can't wait to read this book and get more depth.


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## Firky (May 7, 2013)

Her achievements include, blogging, tweeting and being awesome?

I turned it off at that point.

Watched it to 8 minutes, she says a lot of obvious stuff but nothing new so far. I'll give it a proper watch tomorrow.

She's a terrible public speaker, very nervous. I wouldn't like to stand up and give a speech like that, can't be easy.


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 7, 2013)

Imma get a strong coffee & some toast tomorrow morning and watch this. No, really


----------



## equationgirl (May 7, 2013)

Firky said:


> Her achievements include, blogging, tweeting and being awesome?
> 
> I turned it off at that point.
> 
> ...


But then, how many has she done? In my experience talks to large groups do get easier the more you do.


----------



## J Ed (May 8, 2013)

Watched the start of the video but couldn't carry on. I have to say, LP's accent is very affected, the glottal stops go almost entirely when she starts concentrating on something.


----------



## Paulie Tandoori (May 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Watched the start of the video but couldn't carry on. I have to say, LP's accent is very affected, the glottal stops go almost entirely when she starts concentrating on something.


i've got to say, you disseminating someone's speech habits is a bit sad really, get a life before i can't be bothered to carry on with you.


----------



## J Ed (May 8, 2013)




----------



## smokedout (May 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Anyone watched this yet?


 
5 minutes was enough

I think she's lying. She keeps on using the same grim quote as evidence that any woman who writes on the net will face a wall of misogynist abuse. Now I'm not a women, but Ive had a blog a long time that probably had just as many hits as hers ever had, and I get surprisingly little abuse - although i could point out a few pretty overt threats of violence and present this as the norm if i chose - but its not.

I find it hard to believe that only women bloggers would get the constant stream of abuse she claims to have had. On the other hand political blogging is shamefully male dominated and people like guido ramp up the macho factor, but outside of lp and her circle I just havent heard women bloggers complain about this - above and beyond the misogynist shit that exists in everyday life

if badgerskitten is lurking perhaps she'd comment (guess not)  but urbs very own high profile female blogger, who got a lot of real life shit from conspiracy people and documented it here and elsewhere certainly never spoke about what lp describes

and the reason this matters is that she gives this as a warning in the first five mins of that speech, that if young women speak out on the internet they will be met with this wall of gender based abuse - I'm more than willing to be proved wrong, but i dont believe thats true, and she is actively putting off young women writers by inventing what seems to be little more than a concept for her latest self-publicity drive and book.

(this is not meant to undermine the sexist shit that is all over the net, just the argument that any women who wants to speak out online will face what lp describes)


----------



## weepiper (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> 5 minutes was enough
> 
> I think she's lying. She keeps on using the same grim quote as evidence that any woman who writes on the net will face a wall of misogynist abuse. Now I'm not a women, but Ive had a blog a long time that probably had just as many hits as hers ever had, and I get surprisingly little abuse - although i could point out a few pretty overt threats of violence and present this as the norm if i chose - but its not.
> 
> ...


 
I got quite a few bonkers nasty shut-up-you-bitch comments on a blog I did about Reeva Steenkamp. And a few on others I've done since. Certain subject matter attracts the type. 

Edit, I haven't watched the video because I cba getting wound up by LP at this time of night


----------



## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

I'm not a blogger but have experienced some nasty stuff on here, mainly from the same few posters. The ignore function is very handy, and when it's really bad I've reported it to a mod and it's been dealt with. It's certainly not constant, and I would say the nasty misogynistic posters are outnumbered by more sensible types.

It was fairly recently that I'd posted I'd had no experience of gender-biased attacks after posting on urban for 8 years. Lucky me to be on the receiving end now.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> 5 minutes was enough
> 
> I think she's lying. She keeps on using the same grim quote as evidence that any woman who writes on the net will face a wall of misogynist abuse. Now I'm not a women, but Ive had a blog a long time that probably had just as many hits as hers ever had, and I get surprisingly little abuse - although i could point out a few pretty overt threats of violence and present this as the norm if i chose - but its not.
> 
> ...




This is rubbish of course women bloggers and tweeters get singled out for particularly nasty mysoginistic abuse and it has been documented a fair few times.

Unfortunately I'm on my phone so can't be asked to link to any articles but a quick google of obvious search terms should bring stuff up.

This post in no way is a defence of LP by the way.


----------



## J Ed (May 8, 2013)

From the experience of female friends, I have no trouble believing that LP would receive sexist abuse, especially when talking about gender issues. In fact, I've *seen* some of it on the Guido Fawkes website. 

It just makes me really sad when, rather than focusing on that abuse for what it is, she conflates it with the stuff that people write on here to delegitimise any criticism.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 8, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I got quite a few bonkers nasty shut-up-you-bitch comments on a blog I did about Reeva Steenkamp. And a few on others I've done since. Certain subject matter attracts the type.


 
All bloggers get nasty, crazy, shit from time to time, or at least all bloggers with an audience over a certain, small, size. Women bloggers definitely get more of it than men do, and it also tends to be gendered in its viciousness. Women bloggers who blog about feminist issues get drastically more again. Which stands to reason, as a disproportionate number of the kind of absolute dickheads who leave threatening abuse on blogs are misogynists. And a disproportionate number of misogynists are going to be particularly riled up by "uppity" women's opinions.

Whatever other criticisms can be justifiably made of Laurie Penny, she's not making this up or exaggerating it.


----------



## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> From the experience of female friends, I have no trouble believing that LP would receive sexist abuse, especially when talking about gender issues. In fact, I've *seen* some of it on the Guido Fawkes website.
> 
> It just makes me really sad when, rather than focusing on that abuse for what it is, she conflates it with the stuff that people write on here to delegitimise any criticism.


This. Abuse is not the same as legitimate criticism. Saying I don't like something she's written for X reason e.g. I don't agree with her arguments doesn't make that abusive or misogynistic. and her brief forays onto the thread have been mainly her marching on, saying we're all misogynists and marching away again.

A few times there have been glimmers of dialogue, which was excellent but all too fleeting.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> From the experience of female friends, I have no trouble believing that LP would receive sexist abuse, especially when talking about gender issues. In fact, I've *seen* some of it on the Guido Fawkes website.
> 
> It just makes me really sad when, rather than focusing on that abuse for what it is, she conflates it with the stuff that people write on here to delegitimise any criticism.


 
It's probably not always disingenuous. If I got torrents of abuse from right wing shitheads, and a smaller but regular dose of criticism from elsewhere, I'd tend to conflate the two sometimes as well. Even with the best will in the world, I'd be reading the incoming attacks with certain jaundiced expectations.

(Of course, I'd also deliberately conflate the two from time to time, but I'm cynical like that).


----------



## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

To be fair to LP, she probably gets a ton of nasty comments. I don't blame her for feeling under attack and angry.


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## J Ed (May 8, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> It's probably not always disingenuous. If I got torrents of abuse from right wing shitheads, and a smaller but regular dose of criticism from elsewhere, I'd tend to conflate the two sometimes as well. Even with the best will in the world, I'd be reading the incoming attacks with certain jaundiced expectations.
> 
> (Of course, I'd also deliberately conflate the two from time to time, but I'm cynical like that).


 
I think there's a bit of both going on.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 8, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> It's probably not always disingenuous. If I got torrents of abuse from right wing shitheads, and a smaller but regular dose of criticism from elsewhere, I'd tend to conflate the two sometimes as well. Even with the best will in the world, I'd be reading the incoming attacks with certain jaundiced expectations.
> 
> (Of course, I'd also deliberately conflate the two from time to time, but I'm cynical like that).


 
yeah that's true, just search laurie penny on twitter at any given time and there's some vile stuff out there it's pretty disturbing, it's bound to run into one if you're on the receiving end. We'd do the same if we were in that position.


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## Spanky Longhorn (May 8, 2013)

Firky


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## smokedout (May 8, 2013)

Im not saying that it never happens, of course it does, im questioning whether this is the norm, and also whether it is beyond the misogyny which exists outside of the net

in fact fuck it, im not saying anything other than my experience of blogging, as a man, but mostly blogging about benefits which is hardly the most endearing subject to some people

I'm not sure I'm articulating this very well and will come back to it tomorrow, but my experience is that given what I'm saying I'm constantly surprised how little shit i get, and the people who comment on my blog get, not how much

Misogyny is far less of a comment moderation problem than racism, or threatening to burn down the local jobcentre


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## J Ed (May 8, 2013)

smokedout what's your blog about exactly? I think that the content of your blog has a lot to do with it, social justice type blogs tend to attract a lot of nastiness.

I notice this at my uni too, the women's officer and women's councillor always receive far more abuse than any other elected student politicians and whenever either say anything in student media or on facebook they receive a lot of very angry abuse from what seem to me to be very hateful males.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> Im not saying that it never happens, of course it does, im questioning whether this is the norm, and also whether it is beyond the misogyny which exists outside of the net


 
Anonymity and distance allow people to be much ruder and more loudly vicious than they would be in real life. That goes for generally aggressive and dismissive behaviour, of a sort that anyone can be on the receiving end of, but it also goes for bigotry.




			
				smokedout said:
			
		

> Misogyny is far less of a comment moderation problem than racism, or threatening to burn down the local jobcentre


 
If you were primarily blogging about, say, maternity leave rather than benefits in general, you'd get more of it. And if you were a woman blogging about it, more still.


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## weepiper (May 8, 2013)

Er. I think you might be missing the point a bit tbh smokedout. I can guarantee you that if you were publicly female with the same blog you would get a whole heap more shit for exactly the same content.


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## smokedout (May 8, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Er. I think you might be missing the point a bit tbh smokedout. I can guarantee you that if you were publicly female with the same blog you would get a whole heap more shit for exactly the same content.


 
that was the point in my head i was failing to articulate.  having said that, im not sure that a lot of the benefit bloggers, many of whom are women, get the kind of shit that laurie alludes to.  i will ask them.


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## toggle (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> Im not saying that it never happens, of course it does, im questioning whether this is the norm, and also whether it is beyond the misogyny which exists outside of the net


 
yes it is the norm for women bloggers to get a lot of sexual threats. it's normal for feminist bloggers to get more.

i'd accuse LP of lying if she claimed to never revieve rape threats.


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## JimW (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> Im not saying that it never happens, of course it does, im questioning whether this is the norm, and also whether it is beyond the misogyny which exists outside of the net...


read something about it happening in the world of science blogging (ETA: as an example of somewhere you might not expect from the topic); think it goes beyond what happens in the offline world because of that famous enabling power of anonymity/lack of social restraints and the ability the technology affords these types to interact with women.


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## smokedout (May 8, 2013)

im prepared to concede i am mostly talking bollocks, but its bollocks based in honesty, my blog has had 30,000 comments over the years, many made by women, and some on posts about overtly feminist issues, I cant remember one sexual threat out of those


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## toggle (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> im prepared to concede i am mostly talking bollocks, but its bollocks based in honesty, my blog has had 30,000 comments over the years, many made by women, and some on posts about overtly feminist issues, I cant remember one sexual threat out of those


http://feministadminssupport.blogsp...iately-rapebook-page.html?zx=1436ee65aa110d9d


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## toggle (May 8, 2013)

that is specifically about faqcebook, but might highlight the scale of the problem women face


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## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> im prepared to concede i am mostly talking bollocks, but its bollocks based in honesty, my blog has had 30,000 comments over the years, many made by women, and some on posts about overtly feminist issues, I cant remember one sexual threat out of those


But, with respect, you are a man. I think it's great you've had so many comments, and that they're not rape threats but it is sadly an established fact that many female bloggers have received rape threats. In this instance I have every confidence that such threats are made in order to attempt to re-establish 'power' in favour of the person making the threat, it's using the ultimate weapon for the ultimate put-down. It's not about sex at all, it's about power.


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## smokedout (May 8, 2013)

I'm not denying theres a problem, i really hope people dont think that, im just unsure of lauries claims that this is a problem on the internet above and beyond what is experienced by most women in society, therefore women should approach the internet with special care if they wish to speak out.


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## smokedout (May 8, 2013)

sorry eq, was responding to toggle

am gonna shut up, its a difficult position to argue and ive fucked it up.


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## Spanky Longhorn (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I'm not denying theres a problem, i really hope people dont think that, im just unsure of lauries claims that this is a problem on the internet above and beyond what is experienced by most women in society, therefore women should approach the internet with special care if they wish to speak out.



As others have said women do face extra problems on the international due to anonymity and distance above and beyond what they would irl quite often


----------



## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I'm not denying theres a problem, i really hope people dont think that, im just unsure of lauries claims that this is a problem on the internet above and beyond what is experienced by most women in society, therefore women should approach the internet with special care if they wish to speak out.


 
It's difficult to quantify properly. I suspect it depends largely on if a woman blogs or not, and what she writes about. It's already been highlighted that certain subjects - social issues, benefits, feminism - seem to be hot buttons for some people out there and seem to attract the more nasty comments including threats like these. Some sites are very restrictive (a gaming forum I know is heavily, almost restrively moderated and any off-topic comments are removed immediately, never mind any abuse), for example, others like this site are very laid back in comparison (although threats off this nature would not be tolerated)

But every site? What about the BBC comments, Amazon or the Guardian, for example? We already know that youtube and DM comments tend to be quite bile-filled anyway.


----------



## smokedout (May 8, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> As others have said women do face extra problems on the international due to anonymity and distance above and beyond what they would irl quite often


 
in my experience violence that happens irl is somewhat more traumatic than that carried out online and its dangerous to conflate the two as seems to be happening


----------



## toggle (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I'm not denying theres a problem, i really hope people dont think that, im just unsure of lauries claims that this is a problem on the internet above and beyond what is experienced by most women in society, therefore women should approach the internet with special care if they wish to speak out.


 
I think she is absolutely right in this. I'm careful about how far I go in linking stuff to my real name, even though I have to do a certain amount of this.

if i was specifically feminist campaigning, i'd be doing so making sure there is no connection to my actual identity.because there is always the risk one of those fruitloops may be a local.

and even if they are 500 miles away or mjore, someone telling you in detail how they want to rape and murder you and your family is not an enjoyable way to start the day.


----------



## toggle (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> in my experience violence that happens irl is somewhat more traumatic than that carried out online and its dangerous to conflate the two as seems to be happening


 
i find the online threats deeply distressing. i've expereinced rape and domestic violence and i find it disturbing and triggering.

i also find it deeply upsetting when someone tries to tell me what my reaction to rape threats should be, particularly if they have not experienced this. and have real life expereinces of misogenist violence and rape to compare it to.


----------



## J Ed (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> in my experience violence that happens irl is somewhat more traumatic than that carried out online and its dangerous to conflate the two as seems to be happening


 
I know a self-described "mens' rights activist" whose misogyny was as far as I know limited to online misogyny, a couple of weeks ago he was arrested for being the shit out of his girlfriend.


----------



## toggle (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> sorry eq, was responding to toggle
> 
> am gonna shut up, its a difficult position to argue and ive fucked it up.


 
she may be lying about the particular experience she claims, but i'd probably not want to memorise quotes from a dozen descriptions of how my next rape should be. so she uses an example designed to make the general point. i'd probably do the same.

I'm no fan of the woman, i think she does a lot of us a major diservice and her claims that all criticism of her is an -ism is bullshit. but even she can be right ocasionally. and i'd suspect the abuse she gets is likely more graphic than she is saying in talks.


----------



## toggle (May 8, 2013)

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...n-results-thread.309781/page-35#post-12212174

the fruitloop site linked to off that (cornwallcommunitynews), bloke probably lives 5 miles from me, or less.


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## frogwoman (May 8, 2013)

online threats can be really scary and upsetting, when i was about 14 or 15 and used to go on fash boards to argue with them (yes, yes i know) i used to get rape threats etc, some were really scary and to be honest i was a bit traumatised by it. 

she gets a lot of horrible shit online. it doesn't mean that we cant criticise her obviously but i think the reason some people might go towards this intersectional stuff may be because they think that sort of thing doesnt get taken seriously.


----------



## cesare (May 8, 2013)

If anyone had the time and/or inclination it'd be interesting to see an intersectional* analysis by class.

* Yes I know the drawbacks of reducing analysis to intersectionality.


----------



## smokedout (May 8, 2013)

toggle said:


> i find the online threats deeply distressing. i've expereinced rape and domestic violence and i find it disturbing and triggering.
> 
> i also find it deeply upsetting when someone tries to tell me what my reaction to rape threats should be, particularly if they have not experienced this. and have real life expereinces of misogenist violence and rape to compare it to.


 
ok thats fair enough, sorry, it was a throw away comment and a bit crass



> i'd suspect the abuse she gets is likely more graphic than she is saying in talks.


 
tbh, the example she gives is graphic, and is the one she usually uses, but the other example shes often given of this misogyny is this thread, and she has referred to urban75 as a hate site

but im sceptical of the idea that this is something that is endemic on the net above and beyond the rest of the world, that a woman blogging is more likely to face this kind of shit than a woman working in a bar, in customer services, social work etc where some degree of conflict is an inevitable part of working life - thats not to excuse any of it, or suggest it should be ignored of course

and i dont understand why if lp is deluged with this stuff there isnt more of it elsewhere, far right sites, 4 chan and teenagers on youtube excepted, why not on this site, or on the benefits sites, or even guido, where casual sexism is the norm, but the type of stuff graphic threats being discussed is really an exception and gets removed

you can look and see what people are saying to and about lp on twitter, and its mostly people saying nice things, or people from this thread having a pop, so where does she get this torrent of graphic abusive messages that she claims happen everyday, shes not public on facebook, does she really get daily threats of violence to her email address - and if she does, which is shocking and inexcusable, is this not a result of being famous and on television rather than being a blogger


----------



## Jim Pooley (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> but im sceptical of the idea that this is something that is endemic on the net above and beyond the rest of the world, that a woman blogging is more likely to face this kind of shit than a woman working in a bar, in customer services, social work etc where some degree of conflict is an inevitable part of working life - thats not to excuse any of it, or suggest it should be ignored of course


 One major difference is that conflict at work ends when the working day ends, while abuse via the net continues 24/7. Plus anyone can be targeted by online threats, not just those who meet lots of strangers via work.


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## kavenism (May 8, 2013)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*11m
Sometimes there are mornings where the trolling and viciousness get almost unbearable and the only solution is to write something good.

Thing is I might have more sympathy if she didn't wallow in it quite so much.


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 8, 2013)

kavenism said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*11m
> Sometimes there are mornings where the trolling and viciousness get almost unbearable and the only solution is to write something good.
> 
> Thing is I might have more sympathy if she didn't wallow in it quite so much.


 
I've got sympathy for her, on this. It must be fucking shite. I know she's fairly high-profile in certain areas but no matter how semi-famous or not, no-one deserves the sort of shit she gets. Describing her as wallowing in it is the first step towards saying "get over it". She shouldn't have to.

I've been on here, and Twitter, and had arguments, and the only abuse I ever got that genuinely put the willies up me was someone saying on the Telegraph blogs - out of nowehere - that they had a bullet for me. Preposterous, but the nature of it is irrelevant - a threat to do me actual harm has happened ONCE.


----------



## kavenism (May 8, 2013)

She doesn’t have to get over it, but perhaps I’m just cynical in thinking that all of this is an extension of her self-orbiting shtick. After all she specialises in a specifically polemical form of op-ed writing, frames herself as an engaged activist rather than a desk warrior, and seemingly delights in the fact that she winds a lot of people up. Given this I take her oh so shocked by online abuse stance with a pinch of salt, especially as has already been pointed out she uses it as a means of deflecting and discrediting legitimate criticism of her work. Once she quits doing that my sympathy levels will no doubt rise.


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## ViolentPanda (May 8, 2013)

Firky said:


> Her achievements include, blogging, tweeting and being awesome?
> 
> I turned it off at that point.
> 
> ...


 
Her body language is interesting, especially as the video progresses. She's obviously done the "basic training" for public speaking (she's not making "closed" gestures like drawing her hands toward herself when she gesticulates, or folding her arms, for instance), but the amount of tension in her posture all the way through is weird - people usually relax as the speaking engagement progresses.
Dr. Panda's diagnosis?  - I think that she was busking it a bit, and that's why the nerves.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 8, 2013)

Paul T said:


> i've got to say, you disseminating someone's speech habits is a bit sad really, get a life before i can't be bothered to carry on with you.


 
"Disseminating someone's speech habits"?
Yeah, because remarking on how someone locutes is *so* offensive, isn't it?

So Paul, which axe are you grinding, and why do you believe that your being bothered to "carry on" with anyone carries any weight?


----------



## frogwoman (May 8, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Her body language is interesting, especially as the video progresses. She's obviously done the "basic training" for public speaking (she's not making "closed" gestures like drawing her hands toward herself when she gesticulates, or folding her arms, for instance), but the amount of tension in her posture all the way through is weird - people usually relax as the speaking engagement progresses.
> Dr. Panda's diagnosis? - I think that she was busking it a bit, and that's why the nerves.


 
to be fair if she was talking about nasty shit like getting threats etc i'd be a bit nervous as well.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> 5 minutes was enough
> 
> I think she's lying. She keeps on using the same grim quote as evidence that any woman who writes on the net will face a wall of misogynist abuse. Now I'm not a women, but Ive had a blog a long time that probably had just as many hits as hers ever had, and I get surprisingly little abuse - although i could point out a few pretty overt threats of violence and present this as the norm if i chose - but its not.
> 
> ...


 
I don't believe she's *lying*, but she comes across as way too tense to be "comfortable" with her material, so I'm of the opinion she on a blag - the usual "I haven't studied/revised properly, so I'll busk it and hope for the best, and that my reputation blinds people to any flaws or bald spots in my material" type of thing.  Maybe the book will be more rounded. I'd certainly hope so.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> to be fair if she was talking about nasty shit like getting threats etc i'd be a bit nervous as well.


 
Thing is, you'd still wind down your tension level, even if recalling that stuff winds you up. She stays in a pretty constant state of tension throughout.


----------



## frogwoman (May 8, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Thing is, you'd still wind down your tension level, even if recalling that stuff winds you up. She stays in a pretty constant state of tension throughout.


 
i don't think you can say how you would or wouldn't react tbh.


----------



## kavenism (May 8, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Thing is, you'd still wind down your tension level, even if recalling that stuff winds you up. She stays in a pretty constant state of tension throughout.


TBH her public appearances do seem to veer from _'isn't this so ironic I’m waving an e-sig at Andrew Neil'_ to the _'I'm outta my depth let's just accuse someone of tax evasion'_ variety.


----------



## frogwoman (May 8, 2013)

I'm extremely reluctant to accuse somebody of lying about stuff like that and also about what their feelings were about it, it might not be rational and stuff but online threats can really scare the shit out of people.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i don't think you can say how you would or wouldn't react tbh.


 
Well, I kind of can (  ), because I understand some of the physiological and psychological mechanisms that underlie the behaviour. The stress involved in recalling stuff like that is episodic - like peaks on a linear graph.  Her tension on that fillum isn't episodic, it's constant.
So, while I can't say "this individual is behaving strangely", I *can* say "she's not behaving according to standard models of emotional stress", and then take a punt as to the cause. It *is* only a punt, though.


----------



## toggle (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> ok thats fair enough, sorry, it was a throw away comment and a bit crass
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
can you go flick through some of the feminist blogs on this.

it's not that it isn't happening, it's that you don't see it cause it's not happening in front of you.


----------



## frogwoman (May 8, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Well, I kind of can (  ), because I understand some of the physiological and psychological mechanisms that underlie the behaviour. The stress involved in recalling stuff like that is episodic - like peaks on a linear graph. Her tension on that fillum isn't episodic, it's constant.
> So, while I can't say "this individual is behaving strangely", I *can* say "she's not behaving according to standard models of emotional stress", and then take a punt as to the cause. It *is* only a punt, though.


 
to be fair i'm in a pretty constant state of tension most of the time, dont think that its fair to criticise somebody over that, its like looking at polygraphs to see if someone did a crime. there's a shit load to criticise about our laurie but this is not one of them.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 8, 2013)

kavenism said:


> TBH her public appearances do seem to veer from _'isn't this so ironic I’m waving an e-sig at Andrew Neil'_ to the _'I'm outta my depth let's just accuse someone of tax evasion'_ variety.


 
Hmm, I was deliberately trying to not think about the Starkey debacle!  The look on Starkey's boat when he gets all puffed up and angry still makes me laugh whenever I re-watch that! 
But yeah, she's seemed perfectly "at home" recalling what we might call "traumatic stuff" at some venues, and does give the impression that having "not done her homework" is a regular feature in her life.


----------



## _angel_ (May 8, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Well, I kind of can (  ), because I understand some of the physiological and psychological mechanisms that underlie the behaviour. The stress involved in recalling stuff like that is episodic - like peaks on a linear graph. Her tension on that fillum isn't episodic, it's constant.
> So, while I can't say "this individual is behaving strangely", I *can* say "she's not behaving according to standard models of emotional stress", and then take a punt as to the cause. It *is* only a punt, though.


You're sounding like another person here who declared Amanda Knox guilty on the basis of crying when she was convicted.  weird. I wouldn't want either of you at my trial!


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I'm extremely reluctant to accuse somebody of lying about stuff like that and also about what their feelings were about it, it might not be rational and stuff but online threats can really scare the shit out of people.


 
No-one's accusing her of lying, frogs.


----------



## frogwoman (May 8, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Hmm, I was deliberately trying to not think about the Starkey debacle! The look on Starkey's boat when he gets all puffed up and angry still makes me laugh whenever I re-watch that!
> But yeah, she's seemed perfectly "at home" recalling what we might call "traumatic stuff" at some venues, and does give the impression that having "not done her homework" is a regular feature in her life.


 
to be fair i've talked about traumatic stuff before and not been traumatised by it at one point and then talked about it at another time and had a cry afterwards. it doesnt mean anything, you cant tell if someone is being dishonest by body language, its like thinking lie detectors are a good way of catching criminals, it's bollocks.


----------



## cesare (May 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I'm extremely reluctant to accuse somebody of lying about stuff like that and also about what their feelings were about it, it might not be rational and stuff but online threats can really scare the shit out of people.


She has written about her own experience of rape, and it's a fact that she's the recipient of some unpleasant sexist comments/threats. When she's talking about this, I don't find it that much of a leap to think that vocalising it brings it home and to the forefront of her consciousness. While she's talking she's reliving experiences and that's hard to do in a relaxed manner.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 8, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> You're sounding like another person here who declared Amanda Knox guilty on the basis of crying when she was convicted.  weird. I wouldn't want either of you at my trial!


 
Fine by me. Why would I want to attend your trial, or any trial for that matter?

What are you charged with, by the way?


----------



## _angel_ (May 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> to be fair i've talked about traumatic stuff before and not been traumatised by it at one point and then talked about it at another time and had a cry afterwards. it doesnt mean anything, you cant tell if someone is being dishonest by body language, its like thinking lie detectors are a good way of catching criminals, it's bollocks.


Yes. We're back into telling rape victims how to behave and that's depressing territory.


----------



## frogwoman (May 8, 2013)

There are people who lie about this sort of thing but they are few and far between and i need some fucking good evidence to start accusing someone of it. i don't like laurie at all but i've seen no evidence she'd lie about something like this.


----------



## treelover (May 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Anyone watched this yet?
> 
> 
> 
> ...




where was this, who funded it, tax on door?


----------



## treelover (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> that was the point in my head i was failing to articulate. having said that, im not sure that a lot of the benefit bloggers, many of whom are women, get the kind of shit that laurie alludes to. i will ask them.


 
Sue Marsh of 'Diary of a Benefit scrounger' received masses of abuse, etc, but afaik, it wasn't gendered, but attacks along the lines of 'how dare disabled claimants speak out'.

However, I can well imagine women bloggers getting horrendous abuse..


----------



## treelover (May 8, 2013)

S☼I said:


> I've got sympathy for her, on this. It must be fucking shite. I know she's fairly high-profile in certain areas but no matter how semi-famous or not, no-one deserves the sort of shit she gets. Describing her as wallowing in it is the first step towards saying "get over it". She shouldn't have to.
> 
> I've been on here, and Twitter, and had arguments, and the only abuse I ever got that genuinely put the willies up me was someone saying on the Telegraph blogs - out of nowehere - that they had a bullet for me. Preposterous, but the nature of it is irrelevant - a threat to do me actual harm has happened ONCE.


 
its not the same but everyday people on here spend ages and in great graphical detail describing what they would like to do to Tory M.P's etc, for me in these cases, its a sign of political weakness.


----------



## toggle (May 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> There are people who lie about this sort of thing but they are few and far between and i need some fucking good evidence to start accusing someone of it. i don't like laurie at all but i've seen no evidence she'd lie about something like this.


 
and i don't like the assumptions a lot of people have, which is to assume that something that isn't within their direct experience is a lie.

can some of the male posters go compare their everyday life to what is written on everydaysexism. think about how much shit happens to women and how women feel about this shit, before they start assuming that their experiences are the whole world's experiences.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 8, 2013)

treelover said:


> its not the same but everyday people on here spend ages and in great graphical detail describing what they would like to do to Tory M.P's etc, for me in these cases, its a sign of political weakness.


 
Very true. If we weren't politically weak we'd be doing it rather than talking about it.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 8, 2013)

toggle said:


> and i don't like the assumptions a lot of people have, which is to assume that something that isn't within their direct experience is a lie.
> 
> can some of the male posters go compare their everyday life to what is written on everydaysexism. think about how much shit happens to women and how women feel about this shit, before they start assuming that their experiences are the whole world's experiences.



Come now toggle surely you've realised by now if a woman says she experienced something a man hasn't written about and researched in great depth it didn't happen.


----------



## Paulie Tandoori (May 8, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> "Disseminating someone's speech habits"?
> Yeah, because remarking on how someone locutes is *so* offensive, isn't it?
> 
> So Paul, which axe are you grinding, and why do you believe that your being bothered to "carry on" with anyone carries any weight?


dunno really, all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time... to die..


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 8, 2013)

Paul T said:


> dunno really, all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time... to die..


 
Thanks for that, Mr. Batty.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> to be fair i've talked about traumatic stuff before and not been traumatised by it at one point and then talked about it at another time and had a cry afterwards. it doesnt mean anything, you cant tell if someone is being dishonest by body language, its like thinking lie detectors are a good way of catching criminals, it's bollocks.


 
I haven't said you can tell if someone's being dishonest, have I?  All I've said is that her posture is *indicative* of tension, and then *speculated* on the cause of the tension.
Oh, and "lie detectors" aren't used for catching criminals, they're used for testing the veracity of their statements! 
And they're not much good for that, for a number of different reasons.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> There are people who lie about this sort of thing but they are few and far between and i need some fucking good evidence to start accusing someone of it. i don't like laurie at all but i've seen no evidence she'd lie about something like this.


 
Who's claimed she's lying?


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 8, 2013)

treelover said:


> its not the same but everyday people on here spend ages and in great graphical detail describing what they would like to do to Tory M.P's etc, for me in these cases, its a sign of political weakness.


 
Do fuck off.
I describe what I'd do to MPs _per se_, not just Tories!


----------



## smokedout (May 8, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Who's claimed she's lying?


 
I possibly did last night after watching the first five minutes of her talk in which she claims that 3 or 4 young women a week write to her saying they want to be feminist bloggers/social activists but are worried about online abuse and that she herself receives graphic daily threats of sexual violence.

Without denying at all that it doesnt exist, and fully acknowledging I don't see a lot of it, and certainly not as much as female bloggers do, and recognising that online and offline misogyny are problems which should be urgently challenged, I still dont think that what she says above is true


----------



## love detective (May 8, 2013)

How true is what she says at 3:29 on that video?



			
				Laurie Penny at 3:29 said:
			
		

> the other kind of message i get* every day* goes something like this
> 
> 
> > There's nothing wrong with her that a couple of hours of cunt kicking, garrotting and burying in a shallow grave wouldn't sort out
> ...


 
Sorry if this is an unpopular thing to say, but I do think she is lying in what she says above

She clearly gets vile sexist abuse online, but to suggest she gets the kind of thing above every day just doesn't stack up. When she does get the kind of vile stuff above, she quite rightly talks about it publicly and makes it known who is saying it (and asked for it to be removed/retracted) and an appropriate backlash is directed at where it came from. But as smokedout says, she always uses this one same quote when talking about the volume/level/type of online abuse she gets

If she gets abuse every day of the sort that she mentioned in that quote, why did she only talk publicly about it happening and reveal who said it in for only a few instances of it happening. Why doesn't she out it every day when it happens every day? Why doesn't she use any other examples of it happening other than the handful of ones that have been talked about publicly. I can understand that someone may not want to talk publicly about abuse they have experienced, but she clearly was willing to talk about it in the instance she keeps mentioning, so why the silence on all the other supposed instances of it happening? If she is getting that level of abuse day in day out why isn't she revealing the identity of those doing it like she did with the example given in the speech?

She may well receive criticism every day, but it does feel that she's conveniently conflating (mainly) valid criticism of her/her methods/what she represents with sexist misogynistic abuse, something that we've seen happen on this very thread and countless times on twitter. If not that then she's clearly exaggerating the volume & frequency of sexist misogynistic abuse she receives. And to do that does, as smokedout says, risk putting young female writers off writing about stuff that they want to write about as the environment is made out to be even worse than it already is - she's debilitating rather than enabling freedom of expression for young females in that case. And it doesn't say much for her journalistic integrity that she will quite happily exaggerate events to suit her narrative


----------



## toggle (May 8, 2013)




----------



## toggle (May 8, 2013)

http://jezebel.com/rape-and-death-t...n=Buffer%3A%20%40RabidFeminist%20on%20twitter



> When the video went live, thousands of YouTube commenters weighed in with thoughtful comments like "Wow these bitches have got some serious rough grade sand in their vaginas" and "whenever i see a radically out of control feminist i just get this urge to shut her the fuck up with a proper cockin'." Then the persistent whiners and dangerous ideologues at A Voice For Men (their advice on how to stop rape includes "telling feminists to shut the fuck up") jumped in with an article by famed Canadian MRA Dan Perrins entitled “Little red frothing fornication mouth”, comparing Charlotte to Hitler and referencing her breasts. In a video that garnered over 246,000 views, the "Amazing Atheist" called the protestors "mindless cackling cunts" and repeatedly highlighted Charlotte's sour attitude. She's "the least likable person ever" he said with horror. Imagine a woman who doesn't smile silently when she has an opinion!


 

http://jezebel.com/5961867/the-online-culture-of-niceness-doesnt-extend-to-the-ladies



> I no longer care all that much when people tell me I'm a cunt who deserves to die or any subsequent variations thereof. I'm used to it. And I've stopped writing about it, because, honestly, I don't want to seem weak, or be thought of as a whiner — it's possible that's why men like Heller don't realize that not everyone is oh-so-nice online. But it still frustrates me that talented writers for respected magazines can get away with writing lengthy pieces about the "new niceness" without even setting aside a single paragraph to document how women are generally treated online when they dare to speak up, or speak at all. Which is: like shit.


 

http://jezebel.com/5924069/hey-lets...le-critic-of-video-games?tag=anita-sarkeesian



> Anita Sarkeesian didn't set out to piss off an army of male gamers when she launched a Kickstarter to raise money for a project that aimed to examine cliched, oversexualized tropes of women in video games. But apparently, daring to say anything bad about video gamers being sexist is enough to amass an entire army of jerks against you, jerks who are determined to video game beat you into submission. And now, one or more of those jerks has taken the time and effort to create a video game that allows players to beat up Anita Sarkeesian. That'll show ladies who think some video game tropes are sexist!


 


> According to Sarkeesian herself, this game is just another depressing evolution of what amounts to an all out campaign of harassment against her. She's received crudely drawn images of herself getting raped (by, uh, Mario, of Super Mario fame) in her inbox, had her image been made into a meme where hilarious people who are _hilarious_ design their own text to go over the image (sample text: "I like cock so much I raise my hands in the air!" and "I'm not a hypocrite, I'm a woman!"), and stills from her video with penises drawn ejaculating onto her face. She points out that "all of the images are attacking my gender or presumed sexuality and rely heavily on pre-existing sexist stereotypes" rather than any substantive point she's made or tried to make.


 

took me longer to cut and paste this stuff than it did to find it.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I possibly did last night after watching the first five minutes of her talk in which she claims that 3 or 4 young women a week write to her saying they want to be feminist bloggers/social activists but are worried about online abuse and that she herself receives graphic daily threats of sexual violence.


 
(Resists making an aside about Nicholas Lezard).



> Without denying at all that it doesnt exist, and fully acknowledging I don't see a lot of it, and certainly not as much as female bloggers do, and recognising that online and offline misogyny are problems which should be urgently challenged, I still dont think that what she says above is true


 
I think the content is true/accurate (the threats to her, and that she's had women who'd like to become more active tell her that one of the reasons they don't is fear of misogynistic abuse). I can't, however, make any judgement on the claims of frequency, and I certainly can't imagine (only empathise with) how being on the receiving end of such abuse must feel.
Her claims of frequency may be exaggerated, but then she is a journalist - it's a stock-in-trade for some to "round upward" in order to add more meat to a story (Johann Hari used to indulge in it quite often too) - she's got a narrative (and a book!) to sell, so the possibility of exaggeration as a promotional device should be borne in consideration.


----------



## love detective (May 8, 2013)

toggle said:


> took me longer to cut and paste this stuff than it did to find it.


you could have saved even more time by responding to what I said rather than something that I didn't


----------



## toggle (May 8, 2013)

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/context-and-variation/2012/01/24/blogging-while-female/

http://gretachristina.typepad.com/g...g/2011/07/why-we-have-to-talk-about-this.html

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/men call me things

http://fatuglyorslutty.com/


----------



## toggle (May 8, 2013)

love detective said:


> you could have saved even more time by responding to what I said rather than something that I didn't


 


 if i got a fuckton of abuse, i'd discuss it under my terms, not yours. I'd probably pick an exemplar quote rather than memorizing a few dozen rape threats to make you happy.


----------



## love detective (May 8, 2013)

toggle said:


> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/context-and-variation/2012/01/24/blogging-while-female/
> 
> http://gretachristina.typepad.com/g...g/2011/07/why-we-have-to-talk-about-this.html
> 
> ...


 
how you get that i've implied that online sexist/misogynistic abuse doesn't exit nor happen on a regular basis from what I posted is beyond me


----------



## killer b (May 8, 2013)

fucking hell lads, you know how cunty this makes you look? i think on this occasion you can assume that she's telling the truth, if only 'cause if she isn't she's utterly beyond the pale, and on a subject that she usually writes with more sincerity than normal. nail her on the shit she writes that's provably nonsense rather than just giving her fuel to fuck it all off, please. ffs.


----------



## cesare (May 8, 2013)

Aye, whatever people may privately think, I really can't see any benefit in trying to make her out to be a liar on this.


----------



## toggle (May 8, 2013)

love detective said:


> how you get that i've implied that online sexist/misogynistic abuse doesn't exit nor happen on a regular basis from what I posted is beyond me


 

do you want graphic details of every time i've been abused before you believe me as well?


----------



## smokedout (May 8, 2013)

toggle said:


> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/context-and-variation/2012/01/24/blogging-while-female/
> 
> http://gretachristina.typepad.com/g...g/2011/07/why-we-have-to-talk-about-this.html
> 
> ...


 
none of those sites support what lp is claiming, but mostly reference specific and horrible incidents that no-one is denying exist.

lp claims that she gets the kind of threat lovedetective just posted, on a daily basis, presumably to her email because it doesnt happen on twitter and her blog doesnt accept comments. 

another point is that the comment she speaks of wasnt a message to her, but a post on a site that slagged off celebrities run by someone trying to show how edgy and cool he was.  now if she is talking about comments made about her, rather than too her, then it becomes an issue of celebrity, and yes people say very misogynist and abusive things about celebrities all the time on the net - but that is a different issue which is more wrapped up in the misogynist nature of a lot of popular culture and society at large rather than a specific and new aspect of the internet and social media. She is conflating an unpleasant downside to being famous with a social phenomena that she claims will affect any woman who writes a blog post  - its the same trick hugh grant pulled essentially, and just like the dowler case, there is truth in it, but it is being distorted out of shape by her dishonesty.


----------



## love detective (May 8, 2013)

toggle said:


> if i got a fuckton of abuse, i'd discuss it under my terms, not yours. I'd probably pick an exemplar quote rather than memorizing a few dozen rape threats to make you happy.


 
it's not about making me happy

she has form for lying, she lies regularly, she's been caught out lying many times, many of us on this very thread have been the victim of her lying, so when she lies about something, regardless of what the topic is, i'm not going to apologise for pointing it out. she's a journalist for fuck's sake, she regularly lies about her life experiences and uses that to push her work and promote her brand. Most people are happy to pull her up on it in relation to her lies on other topics, and while I can understand/appreciate the sensitive nature of this, i don't see why she should get a free pass to lie about it. The truth of the matter is bad enough, there's no need to exaggerate/lie when talking about it, as it allows her (sexist, abusive) opponents to claim that she's talking a load of shite (in general) and diminish/belittle the actual real lived experience of her and others like her

i couldn't give a shit what pointing this out makes me 'look like'


----------



## _angel_ (May 8, 2013)

toggle said:


> I think she is absolutely right in this. I'm careful about how far I go in linking stuff to my real name, even though I have to do a certain amount of this.
> 
> if i was specifically feminist campaigning, i'd be doing so making sure there is no connection to my actual identity.because there is always the risk one of those fruitloops may be a local.
> 
> and even if they are 500 miles away or mjore, someone telling you in detail how they want to rape and murder you and your family is not an enjoyable way to start the day.


Is there somewhere you can report this? I'm sure there must be.


----------



## Sue (May 8, 2013)

killer b said:


> fucking hell lads, you know how cunty this makes you look?* i think on this occasion you can assume that she's telling the truth,* if only 'cause if she isn't she's utterly beyond the pale, and on a subject that she usually writes with more sincerity than normal. nail her on the shit she writes that's provably nonsense rather than just giving her fuel to fuck it all off, please. ffs.


 
I've no idea if she's telling the truth (or not) about the frequency of such abuse. She has, however, been caught making things up on various occasions, as well as, for example, falsely accusing other people of racism/misogny. Going on her past record does make me doubt the veracity of pretty much everything she says tbh.


----------



## smokedout (May 8, 2013)

cesare said:


> Aye, whatever people may privately think, I really can't see any benefit in trying to make her out to be a liar on this.


 
hadnt seen this before my last post, youre right, ill shut up


----------



## toggle (May 8, 2013)

love detective said:


> it's not about making me happy
> 
> she has form for lying, she lies regularly, she's been caught out lying many times, many of us on this very thread have been the victim of her lying, so when she lies about something, regardless of what the topic is, i'm not going to apologise for pointing it out. she's a journalist for fuck's sake, she regularly lies about her life experiences and uses that to push her work and promote her brand. Most people are happy to pull her up on it in relation to her lies on other topics, and while I can understand/appreciate the sensitive nature of this, i don't see why she should get a free pass to lie about it. The truth of the matter is bad enough, there's no need to exaggerate/lie when talking about it, as it allows her (sexist, abusive) opponents to claim that she's talking a load of shite (in general) and diminish/belittle the actual real lived experience of her and others like her
> 
> i couldn't give a shit what pointing this out makes me 'look like'


 
she is picking an example of something so she doesn't have to hold in her head a dozen examples of some nasty graphic descriptions of what men have said they want her next rape to be like.

i don't have a problem with that.


----------



## killer b (May 8, 2013)

Sue said:


> I've no idea if she's telling the truth (or not) about the frequency of such abuse. She has, however, been caught making things up on various occasions, as well as, for example, falsely accusing other people of racism/misogny. Going on her past record does make me doubt the veracity of pretty much everything she says tbh.


so catch her out on stuff you can catch her out on then. this isn't one of them things (unless she lets us have a root around her inbox), and only serves to help her dismiss any valid criticisms people on the thread might have.


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 8, 2013)

To further confound all the confused-looking old grumps here: presenting the Lego Steampunk collection!


----------



## Firky (May 8, 2013)

love detective, I have a lot of time and respect for you as you know and you quite rightly pulled me on on 'that cartoon', but I do think you're in the wrong here. Laurie Penny is a charlatan, a horrible manipulative liar but I can't imagine her surfing in the wake of rape to further herself. I of course could be wrong and you maybe right, but if I were you I'd keep those thoughts to myself because it is exactly the kind of thing she'll pick up on and use against you / us.

"I told you so! They were nasty misogynists all along!"

Anyway...


----------



## Sue (May 8, 2013)

killer b said:


> so catch her out on stuff you can catch her out on then. this isn't one of them things (unless she lets us have a root around her inbox), and only serves to help her dismiss any valid criticisms people on the thread might have.


 
So she's been caught lying on various occasions but we're not allowed to doubt her on this because it'll help her 'dismiss [any] valid criticisms'? Think you'll find she's already ignoring and/or misrepresenting those.


----------



## Firky (May 8, 2013)

She could well be lying but that isn't the point.


----------



## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> ok thats fair enough, sorry, it was a throw away comment and a bit crass
> 
> tbh, the example she gives is graphic, and is the one she usually uses, but the other example shes often given of this misogyny is this thread, and she has referred to urban75 as a hate site
> 
> ...


 

If a man makes rape threats to me in person, for example on the street or even at work, I'm going to be able to find out who he is even if I don't know him, there's likely to be CCTV images of him, witnesses, even a passing police officer or two. Chances of him being found would be reasonably high.

Online, it's somebody behind a screen. I don't know who they are. They might not even be in the UK. If the post isn't made on a site such as this one, via sign-up, I have no comeback whatsoever. There's no mod to tell even. That anonymity gives some men the courage to make threats against women that they wouldn't ordinarily make, simply because there is nothing to stop them.

So yes, on this I believe lauriepenny absolutely. Just ask the Feminist Harridans (TM) how much causal sexism there is on this site. More than there bloody should be - not that it's ALL male posters, not by a long shot, but there are a dedicated few who deliberately go after women posters on certain topics, certain threads. I've been told I shouldn't post on a football thread because I'm a woman, for example.

It's not right to doubt her about this. It crosses a line in my book. Victims of sexual violence - in real life or online - need our support, not our disbelief.


----------



## Tom A (May 8, 2013)

The latest from St. Laura:



> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  38m
> Only 3% of journalists entering the industry have a working-class parent, report finds. Awful implications. http://bit.ly/12bx0WE


Like her, you mean?


----------



## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

Tom A said:


> The latest from St. Laura:
> 
> 
> Like her, you mean?


That's not what the article even _says_. It says this:



> According to the ‘Journalists at Work 2012′ study by the journalism body NCTJ, 65% of those who manage to break into the industry have a parent who is a professional, a manager or a director. (That’s nearly _two thirds_.) *Just 3 percent of new journalists come from a family of ‘unskilled’ workers*.


 
A working class worker is not the same as unskilled worker by a long shot (although it would depend on the survey definitions of unskilled and working class to be fair). Take welding, for example. It's viewed as a skilled occupation and traditionally as a blue collar job.


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 8, 2013)

I'll say one thing for her. She's managed to cram 633 thread pages into a single tweet


----------



## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

S☼I said:


> I'll say one thing for her. She's managed to cram 633 thread pages into a single tweet


Impressive


----------



## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> none of those sites support what lp is claiming, but mostly reference specific and horrible incidents that no-one is denying exist.
> 
> lp claims that she gets the kind of threat lovedetective just posted, on a daily basis, presumably to her email because it doesnt happen on twitter and her blog doesnt accept comments.
> 
> another point is that the comment she speaks of wasnt a message to her, but a post on a site that slagged off celebrities run by someone trying to show how edgy and cool he was. now if she is talking about comments made about her, rather than too her, then it becomes an issue of celebrity, and yes people say very misogynist and abusive things about celebrities all the time on the net - but that is a different issue which is more wrapped up in the misogynist nature of a lot of popular culture and society at large rather than a specific and new aspect of the internet and social media. She is conflating an unpleasant downside to being famous with a social phenomena that she claims will affect any woman who writes a blog post - its the same trick hugh grant pulled essentially, and just like the dowler case, there is truth in it, but it is being distorted out of shape by her dishonesty.





love detective said:


> it's not about making me happy
> 
> she has form for lying, she lies regularly, she's been caught out lying many times, many of us on this very thread have been the victim of her lying, so when she lies about something, regardless of what the topic is, i'm not going to apologise for pointing it out. she's a journalist for fuck's sake, she regularly lies about her life experiences and uses that to push her work and promote her brand. Most people are happy to pull her up on it in relation to her lies on other topics, and while I can understand/appreciate the sensitive nature of this, i don't see why she should get a free pass to lie about it. The truth of the matter is bad enough, there's no need to exaggerate/lie when talking about it, as it allows her (sexist, abusive) opponents to claim that she's talking a load of shite (in general) and diminish/belittle the actual real lived experience of her and others like her
> 
> i couldn't give a shit what pointing this out makes me 'look like'


I'd be grateful if you would both stop speculating about whether or not she's supposedly lying about sexual threats.

It crosses a line, and with respect, neither of you will ever know what it's like to be on the receiving end of this stuff.


----------



## weepiper (May 8, 2013)

You know what? You know why she (and others) don't flag it up every single time some cunt threatens her/them/us online? Because it happens so often that it would frankly be boring. You look at it, go 'ffs', delete it and move the fuck on with your life most of the time. The really graphic ones stick in your head, like the guy on a facebook page who told me if he got his way single mums would have to work in state-run brothels to earn benefits to support our kids, and then went into enough detail to tell me he'd really _thought_ about this, and personalised it to what he could scrape together about me off my profile page. For having the temerity to express my opinion on benefits cuts in public. But all the low-level 'die bitch' 'suck my cock' 'shut up you slut' stuff fades into background noise. That doesn't mean it's not there.


----------



## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

Like for solidarity, weepiper not for the content. And yes, it would be boring to list it every single time.


----------



## Sue (May 8, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I'd be grateful if you would both stop speculating about whether or not she's supposedly lying about sexual threats.
> 
> It crosses a line, and with respect, neither of you will ever know what it's like to be on the receiving end of this stuff.


 
Given she's lied about lots of other things -- various of which it was easy to prove weren't true but she obviously thought she could get away with anyway -- I think it's not unreasonable to wonder what else she might be lying about. And if she hadn't told those lies in the first place, I'd not be doubting her now.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 8, 2013)

well tbh Sue your doubts are unfounded in this case, I don't doubt even for a moment she's telling the truth in this instance. Probably understated it if anything. You don't have to look too hard to find some proper virulent nasty shit about LP it's not some myth she's putting about, c'mon...


----------



## emanymton (May 8, 2013)

Firky said:


> She could well be lying but that isn't the point.


I think the suggestion is that she is exaggerating how much 'really bad' stuff she gets sent, which she quite possibly is. but as you say that is not the point. I find it quite plausible that she gets abusive messages on a daily, or almost, daily basis that are not as extreme as the example she gives in the video. But we should not be ranking abuse like that, any sexist abuse is unacceptable however 'mild' it may seem compared to the really bad stuff. 

Having said that I think that the discussion around this on here as been quite sensitive and serious on the whole, and really shows how out of place her accusations of misogyny at people on here was.

Oh not really reply to you Firky just seemed a convent post to follow.


----------



## Firky (May 8, 2013)

Sue said:


> Given she's lied about lots of other things -- various of which it was easy to prove weren't true but she obviously thought she could get away with anyway -- I think it's not unreasonable to wonder what else she might be lying about. And if she hadn't told those lies in the first place, I'd not be doubting her now.


 
Well given you only need to look at some of the comments on youtube to see some of the shite women put up with on the internet I don't really doubt her. 

Or better yet, go and google Don't Start Me Off.


----------



## emanymton (May 8, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> That's not what the article even _says_. It says this:
> 
> 
> 
> A working class worker is not the same as unskilled worker by a long shot (although it would depend on the survey definitions of unskilled and working class to be fair). Take welding, for example. It's viewed as a skilled occupation and traditionally as a blue collar job.


Also going from the bit you quote the report says 'a family' while she says 'a parent'. A family to be would indicate both parents, at least.


----------



## Firky (May 8, 2013)

And wasn't she talking about women receiving that level of abuse everyday and not her specifically? I CBA to take a look at the video again.

But yeah, your call. Believe her not, that's not the point. Point is that women protesting about such things are dismissed without a thought.


----------



## Combustible (May 8, 2013)

Sue said:


> Given she's lied about lots of other things -- various of which it was easy to prove weren't true but she obviously thought she could get away with anyway -- I think it's not unreasonable to wonder what else she might be lying about. And if she hadn't told those lies in the first place, I'd not be doubting her now.


 
Is it acceptable say the same thing about rape victims who happen to have a record of dishonesty? If not shouldn't a similar principle apply in cases like this?


----------



## Firky (May 8, 2013)

.


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## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Also going from the bit you quote the report says 'a family' while she says 'a parent'. A family to be would indicate both parents, at least.


A single-parent family is still a family, just with one parent.


----------



## Sue (May 8, 2013)

Combustible said:


> Is it acceptable say the same thing about rape victims who happen to have a record of dishonesty? If not shouldn't a similar principle apply in cases like this?


 
No, that's not acceptable. However, LP seems to be using this to bolster her career so that does make me dubious.

Anyway, as stated above, I don't doubt she gets harassing emails. I am questioning whether she gets such emails daily and we obviously can't prove that one way or the other. Guess I just find it interesting which things people think it's okay to question and which things it's not.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 8, 2013)

It's okay to question things when you have some actual reason to suspect that they are untrue, rather than just because you generally disapprove of Penny. Nobody who is "questioning" her account, which, incidentally, fits with a wider pattern and can, in her case, be partially confirmed by a bit of internet searching, has provided any real reason to question it other than the general presumption that she's a wrong 'un.


----------



## Firky (May 8, 2013)

Sue said:


> However, LP seems to be using this to bolster her career


 


You're mad.


----------



## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

For the record, I would believe anybody who said they had been the victim of sexual threats or crimes. Victims have fought for so long to be heard and believed it is the very least I can do.


----------



## sihhi (May 8, 2013)

There's _zero_ evidence on which to base anything in this case. But the fact that sue, ld and smokedout are questioning it (incorrectly imo), does highlight the danger of previous instances of exaggeration, (the crying wolf situation).

*However* the fear of being tarred an exaggerator can also make people unwilling to report or flag up sexist (or for that matter racist) taunts and threats.
Everyone - journalist and non-journalist alike - has a duty to be as honest as possible in reporting sexism, but also everyone has a duty believe all reports of sexism unless there is specific reliable manifest evidence of distortion.

Hence there is nothing wrong with the talk, but the gathering itself is quite insulting - a summit of internet entrepreneurs and bloggers, in a gentrification-leading old warehouse venue in Kreuzberg where the ordinary - mostly turkish and arab women and men - are complaining of gentrification and being priced out. (Ticket sales 210 euro each, btw). The manner of this anti-sexism can be improved - not a criticism of LP.


----------



## Sue (May 8, 2013)

Firky said:


> You're mad.


 
You know, her talk(s) and writings on cybersexism? That career?


----------



## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

sihhi said:


> There's _zero_ evidence on which to base anything in this case. But the fact that sue, ld and smokedout are questioning it (incorrectly imo), does highlight the danger of previous instances of exaggeration, (the crying wolf situation).
> 
> *However* the fear of being tarred an exaggerator can also make people unwilling to report or flag up sexist (or for that matter racist) taunts and threats.
> Everyone - journalist and non-journalist alike - has a duty to be as honest as possible in reporting sexism, but also everyone has a duty believe all reports of sexism unless there is specific reliable manifest evidence of distortion.
> ...


What does that 210 euro price tag actually get you, do you know? That's extortionate.


----------



## smokedout (May 8, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> It's okay to question things when you have some actual reason to suspect that they are untrue, rather than just because you generally disapprove of Penny. Nobody who is "questioning" her account, which, incidentally, fits with a wider pattern and can, in her case, be partially confirmed by a bit of internet searching, has provided any real reason to question it other than the general presumption that she's a wrong 'un.


 
actually I wasnt basing this on her being a bit of a wrong un, but the first few minutes of her talk, where she says should I tell girls the truth about speaking out online which is its horrible, its terrifying and implies that youll have to involve the police, people will follow your family round or try to blackmail you with naked photos - that this is the norm and an everyday experience along with daily threats of graphic sexual violence and murder like the shallow grave comment

I take on board a lot of what has been said in this thread, but I havent heard other women who write about this stuff, and ive read a lot of it, speak of it being this extreme - and I haven't seen examples of this on the kind of scale she implies - so I think she is giving quite a dangerous and off putting view to young women who want to start writing online if she is exaggerating in this context

I was wrong to speculate on whether she herself is telling the truth, the concern is really whether the situation is as she describes it for most women who start blogging and I dont think it is.


----------



## emanymton (May 8, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> A single-parent family is still a family, just with one parent.


True, what I meant was she is saying without a single parent who is working class, (whatever that means here) but if one parent was working class and one not they would not be included in the 3%


----------



## sihhi (May 8, 2013)

Nick Lezard takes on the neighbourhood:




			
				Nick Lezard said:
			
		

> Meanwhile, down the road, I notice that a new Swanky Shop is Opening Soon. This is not the kind of news I like. Ever since the picture-framer’s shop closed simply because the landlord saw an opportunity for screwing more rent out of a tenant (with the result that the premises have remained empty for months), I have been uneasily aware that the pleasant quality of my own little pocket of London – a place in which one does not have to be a millionaire in order to feel relatively comfortable – is very much under threat. (The Islamic bookshop has also closed down, I note. I was never going to be a patron of it, for all sorts of reasons, but at least it ticked the boxes marked “diversity” and “not an estate agent”.)


 
Is he saying there are many parts of London where you do have to be a millionaire to be relatively comfortable? No wonder people outside think all Londoners should die. Or have I got him all wrong?


----------



## Firky (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I take on board a lot of what has been said in this thread, but I havent heard other women who write about this stuff, speak of it being this extreme - and I haven't seen examples of this on the kind of scale she implies


 
Did you not take on board what weepiper said then?

In case you missed it:



weepiper said:


> *You know what? You know why she (and others) don't flag it up every single time some cunt threatens her/them/us online? Because it happens so often that it would frankly be boring.* You look at it, go 'ffs', delete it and move the fuck on with your life most of the time. The really graphic ones stick in your head, like the guy on a facebook page who told me if he got his way *single mums would have to work in state-run brothels to earn benefits to support our kids*, and then went into enough detail to tell me he'd really _thought_ about this, and personalised it to what he could scrape together about me off my profile page. For having the temerity to express my opinion on benefits cuts in public. But all the low-level* 'die bitch' 'suck my cock' 'shut up you slut'* stuff fades into background noise. That doesn't mean it's not there.


 
Call me stupid, but I am more inclined to listen to weepiper's experience of being a woman than what a man's chosen to read.


----------



## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> actually I wasnt basing this on her being a bit of a wrong un, but the first few minutes of her talk, where she says should I tell girls the truth about speaking out online which is its horrible, its terrifying and implies that youll have to involve the police, people will follow your family round or try to blackmail you with naked photos - that this is the norm and an everyday experience along with daily threats of graphic sexual violence and murder like the shallow grave comment
> 
> I take on board a lot of what has been said in this thread, but I havent heard other women who write about this stuff, and ive read a lot of it, speak of it being this extreme - and I haven't seen examples of this on the kind of scale she implies - so I think she is giving quite a dangerous and off putting view to young women who want to start writing online if she is exaggerating in this context
> 
> I was wrong to speculate on whether she herself is telling the truth, the concern is really whether the situation is as she describes it for most women who start blogging and I dont think it is.


I'm sure if a woman writes about cookery, or parenting, or being a homemaker or any other traditionally female occupation she'd see very little if any.

But write about feminist issues, or politics, or football, or video games, or any other traditionally male occupation she'd see a ton.

Please stop saying 'you haven't seen examples of this on the kind of scale she implies' - just because YOU haven't seen it doesn't mean that women everywhere aren't experiencing it and aren't reporting every single instance they're called a bitch for expressing an opinion, never mind the darker stuff.

You're probably not intending to, but you're coming across as 'mansplaining'.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 8, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> A working class worker is not the same as unskilled worker by a long shot (although it would depend on the survey definitions of unskilled and working class to be fair). Take welding, for example. It's viewed as a skilled occupation and traditionally as a blue collar job.


 
Definitely. If someone had told me and my workmates we were unskilled when I was working as a pipe fitter we'd have fed them their own teeth. To equate working class with unskilled is really fucking insulting. Practical skills are every bit as difficult to master as white collar ones (in fact having now been to university I'd say they're more difficult - my apprenticeship was much harder than my degree) and you have to really master them cos you only get one chance to do a piece of work properly - fuck it up and you're out of a job if it's a critical piece of work.

Yet more contempt from the spokesperson of the left. Fuck her.


----------



## chilango (May 8, 2013)

If blokes telling women "how to do feminism" etc. can be called "mansplaining"...

...can we call privates school/Oxbridge types acting all oppressed and/or radical "poshturing"?

(See what I did there? )


----------



## sihhi (May 8, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> What does that 210 euro price tag actually get you, do you know? That's extortionate.


 
Entrance to the Re Publica 13 Gathering for all 3 days (6 May - 8 May), 2 day Entrance  is 140 Euro, 1 Day Entrance is 70 Euro. 

https://twitter.com/republica/status/329613433798553600



> Die Preise an der Tageskasse: MO bis 19 Uhr 210 Euro, DI bis 19 Uhr 140 Euro, MI 70 Euro. Jeweils dann bis Ende


 
I think criticism on these grounds would make more sense.

The gentrification certainly affects the Turkish and Arabic speaking people - when they are forced out - they are made to move to East Berlin or sometimes wholesale to East Germany in places where there are few immigrants and without some semblance of community support - they become easier targets for direct manifestations racist graffiti within sight of homes, street harassment, firecracker attacks onto cars etc.


----------



## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Definitely. If someone had told me and my workmates we were unskilled when I was working as a pipe fitter we'd have fed them their own teeth. To equate working class with unskilled is really fucking insulting. Practical skills are every bit as difficult to master as white collar ones (in fact having now been to university I'd say they're more difficult - my apprenticeship was much harder than my degree) and you have to really master them cos you only get one chance to do a piece of work properly - fuck it up and you're out of a job if it's a critical piece of work.
> 
> Yet more contempt from the spokesperson of the left. Fuck her.


Couldn't agree more, Spiney, at my place they're called Craft workers to recognise that what they are is highly skilled craftsmen and women, and what they produce is exactly that.


----------



## BigTom (May 8, 2013)

I haven't watched the LP video, but for me I think there are enough dickhead MRA types, general assorted mysogynists and right wing trolls that she would get a lot of abuse even if each person only sent one message/comment once every few years, and not just on those occasions where something stirs the hornets nest but on a day by day basis. Does it really matter if it's not that level of abuse every day? If some days pass without any abuse? If it's 3 or 4 days a week where she gets some form of genuinely mysogynist abuse? I don't see much difference tbh and I'm sure that it could feel like every day even if it's not.

I think it's grim how she seems to dismiss pretty much all criticism as mysogynistic, but I've no real doubt that she does get a lot of mysogynistic crap posted at her, and that other women blogging do too - possibly not as much but then LP is pretty high profile (in internet terms).


----------



## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Entrance to the Re Publica 13 Gathering for all 3 days (6 May - 8 May), 2 day Entrance is 140 Euro, 1 Day Entrance is 70 Euro.
> 
> https://twitter.com/republica/status/329613433798553600
> 
> ...


210 euro just to go to the whole event - 70 euro a day? That's expensive.


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## Belushi (May 8, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The gentrification certainly affects the Turkish and Arabic speaking people - when they are forced out - they are made to move to East Berlin or sometimes wholesale to East Germany in places where there are few immigrants and without some semblance of community support - they become easier targets for direct manifestations racist graffiti within sight of homes, street harassment, firecracker attacks onto cars etc.


 
A minor quibble but a shit load of East Berlin has already been gentrified to fuck - a lot of visitors are surprised to discover that most of the centre of Berlin was on the Eastern side of the wall.  Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg etc have been utterly transformed in the past 20 years. 

I have close friends who are mixed race who grew up in East Berlin and it was no picnic.  They find London incredibly safe and welcoming for them in comparison.


----------



## sihhi (May 8, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> 210 euro just to go to the whole event - 70 euro a day? That's expensive.


 
Worth bearing in mind that Germany operates by means of Lander-based minimum wages by sector. So that the minimum wage for temporary or agency work in Berlin is 7.5Euro/hour. Minimum wage for commercial cleaning in Berlin is 7E/hr etc. We are talking weekly salaries of 280-320 at best for many people.
If you are on benefits as part of the Hartz system you get was 374 Euro _a month _as a single person. So to afford a ticket to the Conference (no concessions as far I could make out) you would be giving up just over 56% of your monthly financial resources.


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## Belushi (May 8, 2013)

IIRC a quarter of Germans are on low wages, and in Berlin (which has always been a relatively poor city) the figure is much higher.


----------



## frogwoman (May 8, 2013)

I'm inclined to believe someone reporting sexual assault, even someone I dont like, I think as anti-sexists/anti-racists etc you always have to start from a position of believing someone, and I don't think that looking tense or what have you proves anything.

i dont like LP at all for the reasons that everyone has said on the thread, but i think even if you dont like somebody you still have to start from a position of believing them when they report sexual assualt and only change that when you have some fucking good evidence to go on.

I've known a few people who I _think_ (but do not know for sure) lied about things like sexual assault but I think that not knowing LP personally we really cannot tell if that's the case. And with the girl I am thinking about I think she lied about some of it but not all.

I know ive lied about stuff especially when younger. I'd hate to have somebody look at my posts and say that because of what I've said in the past or because iv'e been a bit of a twat or whatever that means my experiences of sexual harassment and threats have been made up, i think even if the person lies that the sky is blue or whatever you still have to start off believing them until you have proper evidence that they're lying beccause the alternative, that you didn't believe it when it was true, is too horrible to contemplate


----------



## where to (May 8, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> What does that 210 euro price tag actually get you, do you know? That's extortionate.


 
a warm glow of self-satisfaction.


----------



## sihhi (May 8, 2013)

Belushi said:


> A minor quibble but a shit load of East Berlin has already been gentrified to fuck - a lot of visitors are surprised to discover that most of the centre of Berlin was on the Eastern side of the wall. Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg etc have been utterly transformed in the past 20 years.
> 
> I have close friends who are mixed race who grew up in East Berlin and it was no picnic. They find London incredibly safe and welcoming for them in comparison.


 
I was thinking of the out-of-town Eastern Berlin suburbs places like Kopenick not Prenzlauer. I'm informed by people that those who live there feel more threatened than central or western Berlin - could be wrong.
Apparently, the Gulen movement - hidden but rightwing religious schooling movement - is quite strong in these new places, because it allows people to feel safe and off the streets.

Not suggesting that racist incidents don't happen in West Germany either. This only 2 evenings ago was a molotov attack on a foreign family operated corner kiosk in Huckelhoven, which is apparently only 8 miles from the border with Holland.

German http://www.aachener-zeitung.de/loka...ne-hinweise-auf-fremdenfeindlichkeit-1.571179

Turkish http://haber.mynet.com/turklere-irkci-saldiri-694590-dunya


----------



## where to (May 8, 2013)

Firky said:


> You're mad.


 
hmm. i agree with you on the broader point here, but you can't play dumb in quite the way you're doing here imo. you and everyone else on this thread criticise her - quite rightly - for hamming various matters of her private life (or, often, her imagined private life) for the benefit of her articles and career. i agree with the principle of believing the potential victim here, but you can't go all "what, ham things up for her career? Laurie Penny? never!" on us - if that's what you intended - whilst slagging her off for doing exactly that every other day of the week!


----------



## sihhi (May 8, 2013)

Agree with you frogwoman, and there was a backlog of dodgy stuff from LP.
I remember Anna Span, Finn Mackay, Julie Bindel and Sofie Buckland who all complained of distortions:






This kind of LP behaviour - outright false statements and made up quotes - basically stopped once this thread got going.

None of it means that the reality of daily emails of misogynistic abuse to LP shouldn't be believed.

They are different things: poor journalism behaviour versus sexist abuse from rightwing and/or men's rights blacklash figures, we shouldn't get them confused.


----------



## equationgirl (May 8, 2013)

At least this thread has forced her not to use such tactics anymore.


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 9, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> At least this thread has forced her not to use such tactics anymore.


Well, for now, in the little backwater that is mean-minded Britain, at least, perhaps...


----------



## killer b (May 9, 2013)

don't think it's necessarily this thread tbh (she only discovered it a few hundred pages in after all) so much as the reasons for this thread existing - there has been much more scrutiny on her since those early fabrications from all over the place, specially since the hari debacle.


----------



## ymu (May 9, 2013)

smokedout said:


> im prepared to concede i am mostly talking bollocks, but its bollocks based in honesty, my blog has had 30,000 comments over the years, many made by women, and some on posts about overtly feminist issues, I cant remember one sexual threat out of those


You're a bloke. How in holy hell do you think your blog offers any relevant evidence whatsoever?



smokedout said:


> I'm not denying theres a problem, i really hope people dont think that, im just unsure of lauries claims that this is a problem on the internet above and beyond what is experienced by most women in society, therefore women should approach the internet with special care if they wish to speak out.


Because the problems that are part of society don't matter? Fact of life, nothing to see here. If women react to the volume and threat of abuse in their everyday 'normal' lives that's their problem. Nothing that mere men need to do about it. Just knowing that it happens but not making any connections at all is the best we can expect from the poor helpless little things, right?



smokedout said:


> in my experience violence that happens irl is somewhat more traumatic than that carried out online and its dangerous to conflate the two as seems to be happening


Then you should read the links people post to try and educate you. Fuck's sake, the internet is not separate from real life and this drives women (aka people, often with children) out of their homes.

Apologies for the Canuck, I'm sure this has been sorted out by now.


----------



## toggle (May 9, 2013)

chilango said:


> If blokes telling women "how to do feminism" etc. can be called "mansplaining"...
> 
> ...can we call privates school/Oxbridge types acting all oppressed and/or radical "poshturing"?
> 
> (See what I did there? )


 
yes.

that's why i tend to read more of these threads than comment, cause I can't call myself working class by any stretch of the imagination, and i don't want to be that kind of twat.


----------



## smokedout (May 9, 2013)

ymu said:


> You're a bloke. How in holy hell do you think your blog offers any relevant evidence whatsoever?


 
I mentioned it because most of that comment has nothing to do with me and is generally people arguing and talking amongst themselves, often about feminism, issues relating to women etc I also mod a quite large and active fb group, and have been involved in various other sites and havent seen evidence of what laurie describes on the scale she describes it, thats just the truth of my experience of blogging and being involved with the net as a man

if i'm wrong im fucking wrong and i apologise, im not trying to score a point or prove im right, if this is what political female bloggers face (and by that i only mean the impression given by laurie in the intro to her speech, not the general level of misogyny online - which i oppose and recognise as a significant problem) then i dont want to be wrong about this


----------



## toggle (May 9, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I mentioned it because most of that comment has nothing to do with me and is generally people arguing and talking amongst themselves, often about feminism, issues relating to women etc I also mod a quite large and active fb group, and have been involved in various other sites and havent seen evidence of what laurie describes on the scale she describes it, thats just the truth of my experience of blogging and being involved with the net
> 
> if i'm wrong im fucking wrong and i apologise, im not trying to score a point or prove im right, if this is what political female bloggers face (and by that i only mean the impression given by laurie in the intro to her speech, not the general level of misogyny online - which i oppose and recognise as a significant problem) then i dont want to be wrong about this


 
wish you weren't wrong. i really do.


----------



## Nylock (May 9, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> 210 euro just to go to the whole event - 70 euro a day? That's expensive.


wow... not even a discount for getting a ticket for all 3 days... that's a bit tight innit... =/


----------



## toggle (May 9, 2013)

smokedout said:


> *****s


 
http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/england-local-election-results-thread.309781/page-34

scan down to cnt36's posts, then imagine that the bloke writing that stuff had taken an interest in writing to a woman personally.

add in the threats.


----------



## equationgirl (May 9, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I mentioned it because most of that comment has nothing to do with me and is generally people arguing and talking amongst themselves, often about feminism, issues relating to women etc I also mod a quite large and active fb group, and have been involved in various other sites and havent seen evidence of what laurie describes on the scale she describes it, thats just the truth of my experience of blogging and being involved with the net as a man
> 
> if i'm wrong im fucking wrong and i apologise, im not trying to score a point or prove im right, if this is what political female bloggers face (and by that i only mean the impression given by laurie in the intro to her speech, not the general level of misogyny online - which i oppose and recognise as a significant problem) then i dont want to be wrong about this


Have you read the 'sexualisation of teenagers' thread over in general? Have a look at some of the comments female posters got on that thread. Someone got a temp ban for those comments. Some of us got some pretty vile personal attacks, myself included - and I'm not even a political blogger. Why would I voluntarily subject myself to unmoderated attacks from random men by being a blogger?

We're fortunate in that on this forum, reports of abusive behaviour are generally taken seriously. But it still happens, whether you see it or not. Please, just accept the word of the women it's happened to and stop saying you don't see it. Because we do.


----------



## ymu (May 9, 2013)

love detective said:


> it's not about making me happy
> 
> she has form for lying, she lies regularly, she's been caught out lying many times, many of us on this very thread have been the victim of her lying, so when she lies about something, regardless of what the topic is, i'm not going to apologise for pointing it out. she's a journalist for fuck's sake, she regularly lies about her life experiences and uses that to push her work and promote her brand. Most people are happy to pull her up on it in relation to her lies on other topics, and while I can understand/appreciate the sensitive nature of this, i don't see why she should get a free pass to lie about it. The truth of the matter is bad enough, there's no need to exaggerate/lie when talking about it, as it allows her (sexist, abusive) opponents to claim that she's talking a load of shite (in general) and diminish/belittle the actual real lived experience of her and others like her
> 
> i couldn't give a shit what pointing this out makes me 'look like'


And we all know how much women like to lie about being raped, right? It's so incredibly rare that most of them must be lying to make the stats look so horrific, right?

Fuck off. Just fuck off. You're part of the fucking problem. Put some fucking theory into praxis before the IWCA destroys itself just like the Assange cultists and then the swappies did. 

Until then, just fuck off.


----------



## ymu (May 9, 2013)

emanymton said:


> I think the suggestion is that she is exaggerating how much 'really bad' stuff she gets sent, which she quite possibly is. but as you say that is not the point. I find it quite plausible that she gets abusive messages on a daily, or almost, daily basis that are not as extreme as the example she gives in the video. But we should not be ranking abuse like that, any sexist abuse is unacceptable however 'mild' it may seem compared to the really bad stuff.
> 
> *Having said that I think that the discussion around this on here as been quite sensitive and serious on the whole, and really shows how out of place her accusations of misogyny at people on here was.*
> 
> Oh not really reply to you Firky just seemed a convent post to follow.


I said similar a few weeks ago. Turns out that there were a few people who just know what script to follow most of the time but have not spent much time at all thinking about it, let alone listening to what other people (usually women) have to say about it.

It's a bit like realising your dad is proud that you're in work and independent but still thinks you should be looking for a rich husband. Massive kick in the guts that won't go away.


----------



## equationgirl (May 9, 2013)

ymu said:


> I said similar a few weeks ago. Turns out that there were a few people who just know what script to follow most of the time but have not spent much time at all thinking about it, let alone listening to what other people (usually women) have to say about it.
> 
> It's a bit like realising your dad is proud that you're in work and independent but still thinks you should be looking for a rich husband. Massive kick in the guts that won't go away.


For years, my dad was all 'you should marry a farmer, they're loaded'. Then foot and mouth happened and I pointed out that the suicide rate for farmers went through the roof. He hasn't mentioned it since then.

I think he's given up on me even finding a new boyfriend to be honest, let alone a husband 

ETA: For a man of his generation, born during WWII, he's very progressive. I was brought up to believe there was nothing I couldn't do, that being a woman wasn't an issue and when I chose engineering as a profession he was supportive and encouraging. But I think he's still like to see me with a partner.


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## ymu (May 9, 2013)

treelover said:


> Sue Marsh of 'Diary of a Benefit scrounger' received masses of abuse, etc, but afaik, it wasn't gendered, but attacks along the lines of 'how dare disabled claimants speak out'.
> 
> However, I can well imagine women bloggers getting horrendous abuse..


Bendy Girl gets a lot of abuse related to gas chambers. I don't know whether she or Sue get more abuse than the men with similar blogs. I don't usually notice the sex of a blogger until the commenters start making threats and it's always been a woman when I have noticed that.


----------



## ymu (May 9, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I mentioned it because most of that comment has nothing to do with me and is generally people arguing and talking amongst themselves, often about feminism, issues relating to women etc I also mod a quite large and active fb group, and have been involved in various other sites and havent seen evidence of what laurie describes on the scale she describes it, thats just the truth of my experience of blogging and being involved with the net as a man
> 
> if i'm wrong im fucking wrong and i apologise, im not trying to score a point or prove im right, if this is what political female bloggers face (and by that i only mean the impression given by laurie in the intro to her speech, not the general level of misogyny online - which i oppose and recognise as a significant problem) then i dont want to be wrong about this


That's fine. Just cut out the ifs and the buts, accept that you cannot know what women experience, and attack her for the myriad of stuff she actually does wrong instead of strengthening misogynist tropes by calling her a liar about something that is depressingly and provably common.

You're coming across a bit like this prick. Not a good look, especially when you live in a country that does collect the statistics and even has a media that occasionally reports them (albeit rarely with any sensible analysis attached).


----------



## ymu (May 9, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> For years, my dad was all 'you should marry a farmer, they're loaded'. Then foot and mouth happened and I pointed out that the suicide rate for farmers went through the roof. He hasn't mentioned it since then.
> 
> I think he's given up on me even finding a new boyfriend to be honest, let alone a husband
> 
> ETA: For a man of his generation, born during WWII, he's very progressive. I was brought up to believe there was nothing I couldn't do, that being a woman wasn't an issue and when I chose engineering as a profession he was supportive and encouraging. But I think he's still like to see me with a partner.


My dad was a sexist shit who drummed into me that I was a failure and a disappointment for not being a pretty little thing. Bullied my mum, bullied me, taught my brother to bully me.

He's grown up now and is deeply ashamed of his immaturity and delighted that I have a stay-at-home partner looking after my domestic needs because I am fucking hopeless. 

My brother is busy putting his wife and kids through hell. That damage doesn't look like it will ever get undone.


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## equationgirl (May 9, 2013)

ymu said:


> My dad was a sexist shit who drummed into me that I was a failure and a disappointment for not being a pretty little thing. Bullied my mum, bullied me, taught my brother to bully me.
> 
> He's grown up now and is deeply ashamed of his immaturity and delighted that I have a stay-at-home partner looking after my domestic needs because I am fucking hopeless.
> 
> My brother is busy putting his wife and kids through hell. That damage doesn't look like it will ever get undone.


 sorry to hear this ymu, that sucks doesn't really cover it.


----------



## ymu (May 9, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I know a self-described "mens' rights activist" whose misogyny was as far as I know limited to online misogyny, a couple of weeks ago he was arrested for being the shit out of his girlfriend.


Words tend to express attitudes which may lead to action, you say? How very thought-provoking.


----------



## seventh bullet (May 9, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Definitely. If someone had told me and my workmates we were unskilled when I was working as a pipe fitter we'd have fed them their own teeth. To equate working class with unskilled is really fucking insulting.


 
True, and sadly us unskilled get looked down on by the skilled, as if we're outside of the working class. Seen it happen.


----------



## ymu (May 9, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> sorry to hear this ymu, that sucks doesn't really cover it.


I survived. But it's still happening and it is the men I grew up with who are still doing it to their daughters:



> I once had a guy tell me I was gaining weight around my waist, proceeded to pinch my sides, and then comment about how he knew another girl my age who was half my size with twice as much tits. Thanks, dad.
> (submitted by anonymous)
> 
> http://i-once-had-a-guy-tell-me.tum...i-once-had-a-guy-tell-me-i-was-gaining-weight


 
I'd like the men I grew up with to stop filling their sons' heads with the idea that women exist for their approval and their daughters' heads with the idea that these attitudes are to be tolerated. Whatever kinds of immature pricks they learnt from.


----------



## ymu (May 9, 2013)

And if it is hard to work out how discriminatory -isms feed into the over-arching power relation that is class then . The SWP implosion should have made that fucking obvious to the most dedicated of theory-over-praxis types.

A black middle-class lesbian, on average, has more power than a white working-class straight man. But it is (slightly) more likely that she is middle-class by birth than a similarly class-privileged straight, white man. All else being equal at birth, skin colour, sex, sexuality and health all make it much more likely that you will be economically dominated by others rather than in a position to do the dominating. ie to end up in the working class.

The SWP and others like it are dominated by those who think it is enough that power is abused by different people (middle-class white men like themselves, mostly). That is what democratic centralism and vanguardism is all about. And why it cannot succeed, IMO.


----------



## cesare (May 9, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> True, and sadly us unskilled get looked down on by the skilled, as if we're outside of the working class. Seen it happen.


Happens a lot with trades eg butchers, bakers. RTB didn't help either, those that own "better than" those in social housing etc.


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## ymu (May 9, 2013)

Divide and rule doesn't work if there is no one to spit on.


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## Sue (May 9, 2013)

ymu said:


> I said similar a few weeks ago. *Turns out that there were a few people who just know what script to follow most of the time but have not spent much time at all thinking about it, let alone listening to what other people (usually women) have to say about it.*
> 
> It's a bit like realising your dad is proud that you're in work and independent but still thinks you should be looking for a rich husband. Massive kick in the guts that won't go away.


 
Can you send on the bits of the script I'm missing? Thanks.


----------



## ymu (May 9, 2013)

Sue said:


> Can you send on the bits of the script I'm missing? Thanks.


You're not missing the script. You are missing the tools to analyse it. I can't help you there. You'll need to put some work into trying to understand what around a dozen people have been saying and then see if it changes your outlook at all. Repeating your mantra over and over again whilst not even trying to address their arguments doesn't work.


----------



## J Ed (May 9, 2013)

ymu said:


> Words tend to express attitudes which may lead to action, you say? How very thought-provoking.


 
You know, I wouldn't have thought so but to a lot of people this leap does seem to be quite revolutionary!


----------



## Sue (May 9, 2013)

ymu said:


> You're not missing the script. You are missing the tools to analyse it. I can't help you there. You'll need to put some work into trying to understand what around a dozen people have been saying and then see if it changes your outlook at all. Repeating your mantra over and over again whilst not even trying to address their arguments doesn't work.


 
I can't remember the last time I read something quite this patronising. If I question something that means I don't understand it? Really?


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 9, 2013)

double post


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## ViolentPanda (May 9, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Entrance to the Re Publica 13 Gathering for all 3 days (6 May - 8 May), 2 day Entrance is 140 Euro, 1 Day Entrance is 70 Euro.
> 
> https://twitter.com/republica/status/329613433798553600
> 
> ...


 
If they're lucky. Even outliers and places that haven't formerly been given a second glance to, such as "new" Marzahn, are being gentrified/put out of the price range of w/c Berliners. Most of what was West Berlin, and the more central sections of what was East Berlin are already beyond ordinary affordability.  My favourite bit of Berlin (Moabit - no fancy coffee shops, think Balham 30 years ago) has already seen rents almost double over the last 10 years.


----------



## love detective (May 9, 2013)

ymu said:


> And we all know how much women like to lie about being raped, right? It's so incredibly rare that most of them must be lying to make the stats look so horrific, right?
> 
> Fuck off. Just fuck off. You're part of the fucking problem. Put some fucking theory into praxis before the IWCA destroys itself just like the Assange cultists and then the swappies did.
> 
> Until then, just fuck off.


 
Unlike you, I've personally been on the receiving end of her lies - her accusations that I was both sexist & racist and peddling sexist & racist material

Others on this thread have had the same thing aimed at them individually, and in general the thread as a whole has been falsely accused by her of, and categorised as, sexist/misogynistic abuse

So in her catalogue/diary of sexist abuse that she receives every day - all the criticisms of her politics & method made on here are labelled by her as sexist & misogynistic abuse. We know this because she has told us this herself. This thread which has received over half a million views and has numerous posts a day on it and which by her own admission forms part of the ongoing online abuse that she receives each day is unfairly and disingenuously characterised by her as sexist/misogynistic abuse.

By and large most people on this thread dismiss her claims in relation to certain individuals here and the thread as a whole as rubbish and recognise her (either sub conscious or conscious) deflection of and response to a political critique of her/her methods/what she represents through claiming it is sexist & misogynistic abuse

So yes, I know she is lying about receiving sexist & misogynistic abuse from me personally and us individually on this thread. I have never denied that she receives actual sexist & misogynistic abuse from others nor that she was raped and to suggest I have done so (as the general theme of a number of posts above seems to suggest) is somewhat disingenuous. I have however questioned her claim as to the level & frequency of that abuse as I and everyone else on this thread knows that legitimate non-sexist/non-misogynistic criticisms that have been made of her and her politics here (and elsewhere) are categorised as sexist & misogynistic abuse by her. We know that it is not true. She is lying when she claims it is.

This attempt by others here to equate my specific dismissal of her claims of sexist/misogynistic abuse by us here on this thread with a general rejection of the a priori principle of at least initially believing the potential victim, is confused and wrong. I've seen and been on the receiving end of her lies about this personally so I make no excuses for not unconditionally accepting everything she says about this as true, as I and we know at least some of it is lies.


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## love detective (May 9, 2013)

cesare said:


> Happens a lot with trades eg butchers, bakers.


 
and candlestick makers


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## cesare (May 9, 2013)

love detective said:


> and candlestick makers


Casualty of industrialisation


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## ViolentPanda (May 9, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I was thinking of the out-of-town Eastern Berlin suburbs places like Kopenick not Prenzlauer. I'm informed by people that those who live there feel more threatened than central or western Berlin - could be wrong.
> Apparently, the Gulen movement - hidden but rightwing religious schooling movement - is quite strong in these new places, because it allows people to feel safe and off the streets.
> 
> Not suggesting that racist incidents don't happen in West Germany either. This only 2 evenings ago was a molotov attack on a foreign family operated corner kiosk in Huckelhoven, which is apparently only 8 miles from the border with Holland.
> ...


 
Racism in what was East Berlin isn't anywhere near as bad as it was 20 years ago, although you do still get a lot of old-fartism from those who remember the DDR. In the former DDR proper, though, it's still a big issue - big enough that the federal police have kept open the "temporary" inspectorate they set up to deal with it in the mid-'90s.


----------



## killer b (May 9, 2013)

love detective said:


> Unlike you, I've personally been on the receiving end of her lies - her accusations that I was both sexist & racist and peddling sexist & racist material
> 
> Others on this thread have had the same thing aimed at them individually, and in general the thread as a whole has been falsely accused by her of, and categorised as, sexist/misogynistic abuse
> 
> ...


actually, i see your point there. although tbf even this thread does regularly veer off into misogynistic abuse (or at least verging on it). it gets challenged, but it still happens, and more than i feel comfortable with.


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## ViolentPanda (May 9, 2013)

Nylock said:


> wow... not even a discount for getting a ticket for all 3 days... that's a bit tight innit... =/


 
Then add a minimum of 70 Euro for 3 nights accommodation at a hostel, more for a hotel or B & B.


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## ymu (May 9, 2013)

Sue said:


> I can't remember the last time I read something quite this patronising. If I question something that means I don't understand it? Really?


When it's been explained sixteen different ways in the course of five pages, it does tend to indicate an unwillingness to comprehend. If you're saying that you do comprehend them but are nevertheless not willing to adapt your own argument in the light of new information, that's fine. But if you can't or won't explain why you reject those arguments, you don't get to ask people to keep on repeating them in new ways. Well, you do. But you don't get to have your laziness indulged.


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## Steel Icarus (May 9, 2013)

Thank goodness. Here's an article about how the wor'in' clahsses don't need the middle-class to fight or speak for them. By Ellie-Mae O'Hagan.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/09/working-class-dont-need-middle-class?CMP=twt_gu


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## love detective (May 9, 2013)

killer b said:


> actually, i see your point there. although tbf even this thread does regularly veer off into misogynistic abuse (or at least verging on it). it gets challenged, but it still happens, and more than i feel comfortable with.


 
I wouldn't say it regularly veers of into verging on misogynistic abuse - but on the occasions when it does happen it's fairly quickly arrested and those responsible pulled up on it. It self polices itself in that regard, which makes her blanket dismissal of the thread itself as ongoing sexist/misogynistic abuse of her even more disingenuous


----------



## Idris2002 (May 9, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Racism in what was East Berlin isn't anywhere near as bad as it was 20 years ago, although you do still get a lot of old-fartism from those who remember the DDR. In the former DDR proper, though, it's still a big issue - big enough that the federal police have kept open the "temporary" inspectorate they set up to deal with it in the mid-'90s.


 
Uh-huh. My current place of work has a lot of people from Africa and Asia, and we're apparently sited in this particular former DDR town because the peelers here are more likely to take hate crimes against non-whites seriously.


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## butchersapron (May 9, 2013)

S☼I said:
			
		

> Thank goodness. Here's an article about how the wor'in' clahsses don't need the middle-class to fight or speak for them. By Ellie-Mae O'Hagan.
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/09/working-class-dont-need-middle-class?CMP=twt_gu



She should forget the Marxism stuff,  she is just misusing terms. 

What on earth does or could 'working class culture has certainly dwindled' ever mean?


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 9, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> She should forget the Marxism stuff, she is just misusing terms.
> 
> What on earth does or could working class culture has certainly dwindled ever mean?


 
It's not on telly so much/she doesn't have to see it herself any more (if she ever did)


----------



## killer b (May 9, 2013)

love detective said:


> I wouldn't say it regularly veers of into verging on misogynistic abuse - but on the occasions when it does happen it's fairly quickly arrested and those responsible pulled up on it. It self polices itself in that regard, which makes her blanket dismissal of the thread itself as ongoing sexist/misogynistic abuse of her even more disingenuous


well, yes - but it gets pulled up on guido, in youtube comments etc too. maybe not as immediately or robustly as here, but to exclude that abuse as invalid because it gets pulled up doesn't really follow imo.


----------



## Sue (May 9, 2013)

ymu said:


> When it's been explained sixteen different ways in the course of five pages, it does tend to indicate an unwillingness to comprehend. If you're saying that you do comprehend them but are nevertheless not willing to adapt your own argument in the light of new information, that's fine. But if you can't or won't explain why you reject those arguments, you don't get to ask people to keep on repeating them in new ways. Well, you do. But you don't get to have your laziness indulged.


 
Thought I'd explained myself reasonably well though must admit #19039 sums it up much more eloquently than I could (well maybe not sums it up as really don't have the time to type such comprehensive replies). Anyway, sometimes people have different opinions and experiences and you know what? Maybe they're just as valid as yours...


----------



## smokedout (May 9, 2013)

other columnists have form for this, Philip Hensher claimed in his national newspaper column that he was getting death threats on twitter after his piece defending Atos, it was complete bollocks, he was getting rightly slagged out but no-one threatened him with violence

I know its different, but death threats are death threats, this is a trick journalists have pulled to shut down criticism before and its very effective. suzanne moore was accused by some people of the same thing.


----------



## love detective (May 9, 2013)

killer b said:


> well, yes - but it gets pulled up on guido, in youtube comments etc too. maybe not as immediately or robustly as here, but to exclude that abuse as invalid because it gets pulled up doesn't really follow imo.


 
yeah i agree, but i'm not making a case to exclude any sexist/misogynistic abuse that does happen as invalid. It does and has happened on this thread but to suggest, as she does and continues to do so, that this is representative of the thread in general (and that this is the threads very purpose or reason for existing) is perpetuating a huge untruth


----------



## ymu (May 9, 2013)

love detective said:


> ...
> 
> This attempt by others here to equate my specific dismissal of her claims of sexist/misogynistic abuse by us here on this thread with a general rejection of the a priori principle of at least initially believing the potential victim, is confused and wrong. I've seen and been on the receiving end of her lies about this personally so I make no excuses for not unconditionally accepting everything she says about this as true, as I and we know at least some of it is lies.


Well boo fucking hoo. 80,000 women a year are raped in this country, 400,000 seriously sexually assaulted. Every fucking year. One in five women will be on the receiving end of at least one of those rapes and it is vanishingly unlikely that any of us will escape any serious assault at all.

And 93% are dismissed as liars.

So whatever personal wounds you are licking, don't endanger others by tapping into misogynist tropes. And don't assume she is over-reacting because you trumped her politically. I doubt she has the self-awareness to admit that. If you want to have a go at her you should think about also having a go at the nonces who are making the threats. They're not doing it to impress women, they're doing it to impress men. Try having a pop at them as well as at her and maybe she'll actually read what you want her to hear.


----------



## DrRingDing (May 9, 2013)

smokedout said:


> other columnists have form for this, Philip Hensher claimed in his national newspaper column that he was getting death threats on twitter after his piece defending Atos, it was complete bollocks, he was getting rightly slagged out but no-one threatened him with violence
> 
> I know its different, but death threats are death threats, this is a trick journalists have pulled to shut down criticism before and its very effective. suzanne moore was accused by some people of the same thing.


 
Women who speak out do come under massive and appaling threats and comments online. My OH is a feminist vlogger and her and her comrades get overwhelmed by wankers giving them shit. It's pretty fucking depressing.


----------



## love detective (May 9, 2013)

ymu said:


> Well boo fucking hoo. 80,000 women a year are raped in this country, 400,000 seriously sexually assaulted. Every fucking year. One in five women will be on the receiving end of at least one of those rapes and it is vanishingly unlikely that any of us will escape any serious assault at all.
> 
> And 93% are dismissed as liars.


 
As I said above, why you and others keep talking about rape I've no idea. I've called her a liar on things I know for certain she is lying about. I know she is lying because I was directly involved in it. So who the fuck are you to tell me how I should respond to her lies about me (and others here)



> If you want to have a go at her you should think about also having a go at the nonces who are making the threats. They're not doing it to impress women, they're doing it to impress men. Try having a pop at them as well as at her and maybe she'll actually read what you want her to hear.


 
Well I would, but apart from a small handful that she has publicly talked about and outed (who in turn received what they deserved in return) she doesn't seem to mention all the others that she gets daily. So not sure how you think it would be possible for me to have a go or have a pop at them as i've no idea who they are. The only other ones she has 'outed' that i'm aware of have been the collective authorship of this thread and as we've already established, this is a great big dirty lie


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## ymu (May 9, 2013)

There are quite a lot of people who have no trouble finding the misogynistic abuse. I'm sure you genuinely haven't noticed it but, have you tried looking for it? Or do you think that these comments get left up forever on people's blogs and articles because, you know, it's not only the internet and leaving violent sexual fantasies up is considered bad form for publishers and it's frankly fucking creepy having to read that shit, let alone forcing anyone else to.

I'd be astonished if she hadn't received abuse of the type and volume that she claims because it would not fit with any lived experience for me or any woman I know, speaking out on the internet or anywhere else.


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## love detective (May 9, 2013)

ymu said:


> There are quite a lot of people who have no trouble finding the misogynistic abuse. I'm sure you genuinely haven't noticed it but, have you tried looking for it?


I can just copy & paste bits from previous replies now as you clearly aren't reading them:-




			
				me in post 19039 said:
			
		

> I have never denied that she receives actual sexist & misogynistic abuse from others


 



			
				ymu said:
			
		

> I'd be astonished if she hadn't received abuse of the type and volume that she claims because it would not fit with any lived experience for me or any woman I know, speaking out on the internet or anywhere else.


 
so you and every other woman that you know who speak on the internet (or anywhere else) gets abuse on a daily basis, every single day, of the type below? :-

_There's nothing wrong with her that a couple of hours of cunt kicking, garrotting and burying in a shallow grave wouldn't sort out_

Seriously? (genuine question by the way)


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 9, 2013)

I wish this much of a fuss had been made about Redwatch for the last, ooh I dunno, 15 years. But I suppose anti-fascists don't count.

_My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit_ well seems to me like intersectional feminism focuses quite narrowly on the concerns of middle-class, mainly white, 1st world uni graduates and pays nothing more than occasional tokenistic lip-service to issues outside of that group's sectional concerns. Hence the lack of interest in Redwatch. And I certainly don't think that the MRA's of this country, disgusting as they are, have a track record of terrorism and violence that Combat 18 and the rest of Adolf Hitler's political descendants have.

I've been asking for days for someone to provide me with an intersectional analysis of the Syrian conflict, y'know so I can work out who are the oppressed and who I ought to be allies with, but alas, there doesn't seem to be one. I guess arabs don't count.

If I was really spiteful I'd go through all the blogs that invoke intersectionality as a easy-to-say buzzword and do a statistical study of which issues get the most prominence. Number of articles written using an intersectional analysis of who's saying what in the New Statesman this week: Over 9000. Number of articles about redwatch over the last 15 years? 0. Number of articles about Syria this week. 0. And so on.

Could it be that the intersectional analysis would fall flat on it's face when used in a situation like Syria, so it's much easier to stick to safer territory with debating the ethics of twitter hashtags and policing language in comment is free?


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 9, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What on earth does or could 'working class culture has certainly dwindled' ever mean?


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## ymu (May 9, 2013)

Maybe you don't realise how this looks:



toggle said:


> if i got a fuckton of abuse, i'd discuss it under my terms, not yours. I'd probably pick an exemplar quote rather than memorizing a few dozen rape threats to make you happy.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
It's not about making you happy, no, It's about you being allowed to call a woman a liar whenever you feel like it, even when she is talking about threats of sexual violence of which you know nothing.

Because women do that kind of thing, in your head. And only monsters rape, of course. Nothing you do or say could influence a rapist or stop a woman reporting them or a copper or a jury member. Not your fucking problem is it?

If you're going to call her a liar, make sure it is about things you can prove and not simply your failure to read sites run by women and/or give a shit about how men behave in the comments.


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## ymu (May 9, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I wish this much of a fuss had been made about Redwatch for the last, ooh I dunno, 15 years. But I suppose anti-fascists don't count.
> 
> _My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit_ well seems to me like intersectional feminism focuses quite narrowly on the concerns of middle-class, mainly white, 1st world uni graduates and pays nothing more than occasional tokenistic lip-service to issues outside of that group's sectional concerns. Hence the lack of interest in Redwatch. *And I certainly don't think that the MRA's of this country, disgusting as they are, have a track record of terrorism and violence that Combat 18 and the rest of Adolf Hitler's political descendants have.*
> 
> ...


Can you research some statistics before you make that kind of claim please? It's not hard to find stuff, if you want to know about it.

http://www.un.org/en/women/endviolence/pdf/VAW.pdf

http://www.svri.org/RapePerpetration.pdf

And it would cause an awful lot less offence.


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## Delroy Booth (May 9, 2013)

ymu said:


> Can you research some statistics before you make that kind of claim please? It's not hard to find stuff, if you want to know about it.
> 
> http://www.un.org/en/women/endviolence/pdf/VAW.pdf
> 
> ...


 
Yeah ok you research this then http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust


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## Nigel Irritable (May 9, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I've been asking for days for someone to provide me with an intersectional analysis of the Syrian conflict, y'know so I can work out who are the oppressed and who I ought to be allies with, but alas, there doesn't seem to be one. I guess arabs don't count.


 
I've been enjoying your work on that particular issue. Unfortunately, I tend to think that you are being a bit too subtle for the people you are trolling.


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## smokedout (May 9, 2013)

ymu said:


> Because women do that kind of thing, in your head.


 
I don't think thats fair, I can't speak for ld, but there are some quite unique factors in this issue and i dont think its fair to assume someones entire attitude towards rape and sexual violence can be deduced from it

she does have a well documented history of accusing people of mysogynist abuse when it isnt true

other journalists have made up (and over-stated if you accept some of the arguments around suzanne moore) threats of violence recently to deflect criticism and get a story out of it

her entire new book is based on her claims, now i actually happen to think thats a good thing for her to be writing, but if it is based on over-stated claims then that should be open to scrutiny. 

finally I did look, shes not actually that active online out of twitter where she has 60,000 followers.  I didn't find evidence of what she claims there, she gets a lot of shit, and quite a lot of sexist shit, but not the kind detailed in the emails she claims to get everyday.

and I know you'll slaughter me for saying this, but I have had a lot of online shit over the years, more than enough to be a reasonable sample.  now i am sure lp gets a lot more than me, and its a lot nastier, i fully recognise that online misogyny is a problem as ive said many times, but in my experience, as a male blogger, it never comes to my email, i can think of maybe a handful of times out of eight years and hundreds of everything from derogatory (usually classist or conspiracy rants accusing me of being cia/mossad etc) comments to a couple of cases threats of violence that were verging on credible

and tbh that was what made me a bit suspicious.  ive accepted i may be wrong, ive accepted i shouldnt have based this around accusing laurie of lying but on what she said about what women bloggers can expect to receive and given the responses from posters on here I respect then it looks like i might be wrong about that as well - although to clarify if you had asked me prior to this i would have been the first to argue that women bloggers (and elsewhere online) get a lot of misogynist shit, way above the shit men get and its something that needs to be challenged - i read a lot of feminist blogs and know a lot of female bloggers

but i found it surprising as i said the scale of it that lp claimed, which it sounds like i might be wrong about, but also the medium, why doesnt it come on twitter where she is most active

thats why i initially posted what i did, i sort of regret it, i wasnt wholly comfortable with it, and i could well be wrong, but it was for the reasons above and not because it is my attitude towards women reporting abuse generally


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## weepiper (May 9, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I don't think thats fair, I can't speak for ld, but there are some quite unique factors in this issue and i dont think its fair to assume someones entire attitude towards rape and sexual violence can be deduced from it
> 
> she does have a well documented history of accusing people of mysogynist abuse when it isnt true
> 
> ...


 
If you start a tweet with @(theirusername) only the recipient and any mutual friends see it, it's not 'public'. So you can't tell what she's getting tweeted at her by looking at her feed. Also what about direct messages?


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## cesare (May 9, 2013)

weepiper said:


> If you start a tweet with @(theirusername) only the recipient and any mutual friends see it, it's not 'public'. So you can't tell what she's getting tweeted at her by looking at her feed. Also what about direct messages?


I didn't know that, ta


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## Nice one (May 9, 2013)

love detective said:


> I wouldn't say it regularly veers of into verging on misogynistic abuse - but on the occasions when it does happen it's fairly quickly arrested and those responsible pulled up on it. It self polices itself in that regard, which makes her blanket dismissal of the thread itself as ongoing sexist/misogynistic abuse of her even more disingenuous


 
that's simply not true. There are the three examples of posters delighting in fantasising about punching her in the face. Nobody said a word apart from LLETSA who was in fact rounded upon for pointing the pretty basic ugliness directed towards laurie penny.


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## smokedout (May 9, 2013)

weepiper said:


> If you start a tweet with @(theirusername) only the recipient and any mutual friends see it, it's not 'public'. So you can't tell what she's getting tweeted at her by looking at her feed. Also what about direct messages?


 
you can if you search her twitter handle, and dms means she has to follow them as well


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## ymu (May 9, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Yeah ok you research this then http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust


You think I somehow don't know what Hitler did?

Really? You think that is an appropriate answer?

Violence against women does not usually involve industrialised murder and this makes it a trivial issue regardless of the one billion women who will be raped in your lifetime. Wow.

I didn't have you down as a hierarchy of oppression type. Shame.


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## ymu (May 9, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I don't think thats fair, I can't speak for ld, but there are some quite unique factors in this issue and i dont think its fair to assume someones entire attitude towards rape and sexual violence can be deduced from it...


Doesn't matter. He does not get to call a woman a liar about sexual threats unless he can prove it. Same as cartoonists don't get to depict Obama as a chimp and claim it's the same as depicting Bush as a chimp.

It's a trope that demeans and directly endangers more than half the people on the planet. That is the only thing you need to know before you decide that coming anywhere close to repeating it is a cunt's trick.


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## ymu (May 9, 2013)

weepiper said:


> If you start a tweet with @(theirusername) only the recipient and any mutual friends see it, it's not 'public'. So you can't tell what she's getting tweeted at her by looking at her feed. Also what about direct messages?


You can choose replies to see those that were replies.

Searching twitter for their Name brings up everything. That has not yet been deleted.


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## Delroy Booth (May 9, 2013)

ymu said:


> You think I somehow don't know what Hitler did?


 
And you think I'm oblivious to the actions of MRA's or something?

This is a stupid conversation. I'm out.


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## Delroy Booth (May 9, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I've been enjoying your work on that particular issue. Unfortunately, I tend to think that you are being a bit too subtle for the people you are trolling.


 
Yeah I know. It's tempting to write something like "I support Al-Nusrah because the Sunni's of Syria were systematically oppressed and the Alawite privileged, and it's not for a 1st world ally to judge what the appopriate methods of confronting privilege in the field should be, only to support the oppressed, so here's a video of 12 Alawite civilians being beheaded and I enthusiastically support these actions. All other allies who do not vocally support the oppressed in their time of need are traitors and cowards" etc etc but it'd go right over the heads of those it was intended for. It'd be a total meltdown.


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## fractionMan (May 9, 2013)

Nice one said:


> that's simply not true. There are the three examples of posters delighting in fantasising about punching her in the face. Nobody said a word apart from LLETSA who was in fact rounded upon for pointing the pretty basic ugliness directed towards laurie penny.


 
When did wanting to punch someone over the internet become misogynistic?


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## Delroy Booth (May 9, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> When did wanting to punch someone over the internet become misogynistic?


 
Listen if there's gonna be a thread like this about a high-profile female journalist, who just so happens to recieve bucketloads of misogynist abuse and violent threats, then as far as I'm concerned it needs to be absolutely free of all and any violence, no matter how jokingly or ironic it is. I think in the context it's absolutely right. There should be zero tolerance of anything with even a whiff or an undercurrent of violence - that's why Firky's cartoon got a bad reaction, coz alright it was meant as a daft meme and was meant to be an allegory for something none violent but even a trace of violence is too much.

This does not apply to Malcolm Harris, who I offered to beat up earlier on, 1) because Malcy Harris isn't subject to the same sort of abuse than LP is and 2) because he really, really deserves a punch in the face and I'd quite happily do time if I could chin him


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## ymu (May 9, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> And you think I'm oblivious to the actions of MRA's or something?
> 
> This is a stupid conversation. I'm out.


If you aren't, how could you write something as crass as this?



Delroy Booth said:


> And I certainly don't think that the MRA's of this country, disgusting as they are, have a track record of terrorism and violence that Combat 18 and the rest of Adolf Hitler's political descendants have.


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## Nylock (May 9, 2013)

fractionMan man threatening to punch woman is a little bit misogynistic surely?


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## muscovyduck (May 9, 2013)

Nylock said:


> man threatening to punch woman is a little bit misogynistic surely?


I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE


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## fractionMan (May 9, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Listen if there's gonna be a thread like this about a high-profile female journalist, who just so happens to recieve bucketloads of misogynist abuse and violent threats, then as far as I'm concerned it needs to be absolutely free of all and any violence, no matter how jokingly or ironic it is. I think in the context it's absolutely right. There should be zero tolerance of anything with even a whiff or an undercurrent of violence - that's why Firky's cartoon got a bad reaction, coz alright it was meant as a daft meme and was meant to be an allegory for something none violent but even a trace of violence is too much.
> 
> This does not apply to Malcolm Harris, who I offered to beat up earlier on, 1) because Malcy Harris isn't subject to the same sort of abuse than LP is and 2) because he really, really deserves a punch in the face and I'd quite happily do time if I could chin him


 
I get this, but I still think punching people over the internet is a unisex activity that can be enjoyed by everyone.


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## Nylock (May 9, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE


i tried to get the reply in to FM but clearly delroy and YMU were much quicker on the draw to each other than i was to him... (hence the edit)


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## Nylock (May 9, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> I get this, but I still think punching people over the internet is a unisex activity.


tbf, punching malcolm harris ought to be a unisex activity....


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## Delroy Booth (May 9, 2013)

Nylock said:


> tbf, punching malcolm harris ought to be a unisex activity....


 
I'd like to punch him in his "psychogeographical center." Twice - because he couldn't be arsed proof-reading and ended up repeating the same parapgraph halfway though his article. That'll learn him


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## Nylock (May 9, 2013)




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## weepiper (May 9, 2013)

Saying she must be lying about this because she lies about other stuff just gives me a bad taste in my mouth. Searching through twitter to see if you can find what you deem to be 'enough' threats/nastiness to prove it or otherwise strikes me as very much the wrong track. That's all.


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## toggle (May 9, 2013)

simple fact is, if she didn't get a whole fuckton of threats and abuse for being a woman, she would probably be the only 'feminist' (and yes, i know, she's not my kind of feminist) blogger/commentator/ 'reporter' that dosen't.

women get a fuckton of abuse on the net is as much a fact of our life as women get unwanted comments on their personal apearence, or women get felt up in nightclubs. it's astounding that someone can be even vaugely net savvy so unaware of how we get treated in our lives that they don't already know this


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## andysays (May 9, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Saying she must be lying about this because she lies about other stuff just gives me a bad taste in my mouth...


 
That's true, but saying someone *must* be lying is not the same as saying they *may* be lying, and certainly not the same as saying they may be unintentionally exaggerating because it feels like something is happening with the frequency they suggest.

I think that in the understandable intensity of feeling on this issue, those distinctions are in danger of being lost.


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## Delroy Booth (May 9, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Saying she must be lying about this because she lies about other stuff just gives me a bad taste in my mouth. Searching through twitter to see if you can find what you deem to be 'enough' threats/nastiness to prove it or otherwise strikes me as very much the wrong track. That's all.


 
Yeah me too tbh, my gut instinct is to take that kind of thing as true unless there's really compelling evidence to suggesting otherwise, and I'm not shy about criticising Laurie Penny. I daresay some people are less familiar than others with what sort of shit she gets, so if you don't trust her then take it from us it's not an exaggeration. There might be a million and one things LP has bullshitted about in her life but this isn't one of 'em.


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## muscovyduck (May 9, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Saying she must be lying about this because she lies about other stuff just gives me a bad taste in my mouth. Searching through twitter to see if you can find what you deem to be 'enough' threats/nastiness to prove it or otherwise strikes me as very much the wrong track. That's all.


 
It's not I think she must be lying, just that it's a possibility she might exaggerate or change some (relatively minor) details due to the way she's reacted to criticism before. Her main points are probably not false; overall she is talking about the truth. There's tons of misogyny online, often passive (advertisements, vague Facebook statuses etc) but sometimes it's personal and that's absolutely petrifying, because I know from experience that it's viewed as being the victim's fault. But it's the fine details that should be picked apart for an analysis of her journalism, not a personal "Oh I reckon she's lying" type thing. Because it's an argument I agree with - tackling discrimination in any form is important - and the fact that by posting on this thread I am counted by her a misogynist hurts. The fact that she can dismiss people who agree with such important points because we criticise her other work makes me wonder why I should bother applauding her for her decent work. And if I, as someone who agrees with her general points, blindly agree with everything she says, it'll only be someone seeking to dismiss those points who comes along and pulls her arguments apart.

Edit: I don't actually feel comfortable writing any of that because I'm aware of all the flaws in what I've just said and I just can't figure out how to phrase it. I think what I said needs to be taken in context with the fact that misogyny is so prevalent and there's a line as to when this thought process should be applied. I'm not sure where the line is in this situation and I'm worried about crossing it, because sexism is such a personal issue for most women, and it's expected that we don't take it personally. However, the issue isn't going away on this thread and I don't think anyone had put my viewpoint across. Usually it's best to just not say anything.

/awkward rambling


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## frogwoman (May 9, 2013)

I can see love-detective's point to be honest, in that half the people on this thread have already been accused of misogyny and that she seems to see all criticism of herself in a light which views it as being personal rather than political.

I still think that when people are talking about this sort of stuff that you need to start from a position of believing statements that people have been sexually assualted etc, however ymu i think you were a little unfair perhaps, criticising the analysis of intersectionality isn't the same as dismissing all experiences of sexism, i have major problems with intersectional theories but i think recent events on the left have shown that some interpretations of marxist theories have enabled the comrade delta's of this world to flourish

i do see love detective's point though, in that she wasn't only talking about her own experiences but about people writing to her, and so in that context it's not unreasonable to assume that she might possibly be exaggerating or talking about political criticism such as this thread as though it is personal.


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## smokedout (May 9, 2013)

ok last and only point, but if anyone is getting the kind of shit under discussion via email, then unless people are reasonably adept at hiding their IP and using online email, it is easily traceable. it is also very illegal, threats to kills can be punishable by up to 10 years in jail, and it breaks a whole host of other laws including the malicious communications act, people get locked up for this stuff, the police would (usually they are all bastards) take it seriously.

im not advocating that people should go to the police because they are all bastards, but there is a legal dimension to this that is worth being aware of


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## frogwoman (May 9, 2013)

I do think that this aspect of the whole thing is perhaps better not dwelt upon though, it's easier to get her on things that we are on firmer ground upon and which we can actually prove. The danger with things like this even if she is lying is that it might encourage people to suffer in silence with online/real life threats etc, because people will think "oh well if even someone famous isn't believed or taken seriously about this shit then i might not be either"


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## muscovyduck (May 9, 2013)

smokedout said:


> ok last and only point, but if anyone is getting the kind of shit under discussion via email, then unless people are reasonably adept at hiding their IP and using online email, it is easily traceable. it is also very illegal, threats to kills can be punishable by up to 10 years in jail, and it breaks a whole host of other laws including the malicious communications act, people get locked up for this stuff, the police would take it seriously.
> 
> im not advocating that people should go to the police because they are all bastards, but there is a legal dimension to this that is worth being aware of


If I had my way there'd be a campaign in which everyone reported all sexual harassment, sexual assault, etc to the police for a week or month. But I don't have the time to sort out the arguments for it, convincing women to do it and everything so it's just another idea I wish someone else would come up with.


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## smokedout (May 9, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> If I had my way there'd be a campaign in which everyone reported all sexual harassment, sexual assault, etc to the police for a week or month. But I don't have the time to sort out the arguments for it, convincing women to do it and everything so it's just another idea I wish someone else would come up with.


 
I wouldnt be surprised if laurie does, spontaneously after reading your post


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## SpineyNorman (May 9, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Thank goodness. Here's an article about how the wor'in' clahsses don't need the middle-class to fight or speak for them. By Ellie-Mae O'Hagan.
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/09/working-class-dont-need-middle-class?CMP=twt_gu


 
In addition to the misuse of Marxist terminology Butchers mentioned we have this little gem:



> If working-class people want to resist tyrannical bosses and landlords, they need to represent themselves, not have the middle class speak for them. That is how the women and girls working in the Bryant and May match factory in east London achieved better living standards in the match girls strike of 1888. It is how dockers working in the Port of London strengthened the British labour movement a year later, which has since won concessions such as standardised holiday pay, the minimum wage and the eight-hour day.


 
It's hard to think of a worse example than the match girls. Truth is they _did _have the middle classes speaking for them - most prominently Annie Besant. I think the leaders of their union were middle class too but not completely sure on that one.

What's shocking here is that the argument she's making in this particular quote is basically correct - that working class self-organisation is what matters - but she manages to support it with an example that would suggest that the opposite is true.

She really doesn't have a fucking clue does she? Dishonest though she might be, I think LP does understand feminist theory, and annoying though he is Owen Jones does have some idea what he's on about. I've not read any of her stuff before but if this is anything to go by this one is just completely clueless - how on earth does she get paid to write this crap?


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## toggle (May 9, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> If I had my way there'd be a campaign in which everyone reported all sexual harassment, sexual assault, etc to the police for a week or month. But I don't have the time to sort out the arguments for it, convincing women to do it and everything so it's just another idea I wish someone else would come up with.


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## muscovyduck (May 9, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I wouldnt be surprised if laurie does, spontaneously after reading your post


I am going to go absolutely ape-shit if that happens. I'm too old for this.


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## toggle (May 9, 2013)

i wouldn't.

the tit might do something useful for a change


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## frogwoman (May 9, 2013)

I can't say i've ever had those sort of threats about death threats and rape etc except when I was posting on fascist boards as a teenager  with people who were actually capable of doing that sort of thing. I am pretty much over it now but I was a bit traumatised about it for years, one guy who I was speaking to in a very naive attempt to convince him not to be a fash , put himself on webcam and posed with pictures of his guns, when I used to troll those boards as a kid and take the piss out of them I used to get PMs off of them asking for sex and saying things like "i'd sleep with you if you weren't a kike"

i never get threats on the same level now, because i don't make a habit of speak to fash on the internet even to take the piss, or ever speak or associate with that sort of person. i do feel uncomfortable when I see casual sexism on here though, I don't always feel able to call it out but when I do feel able to then I do

Its the more low level stuff, like waiting for a bus late at night and some weird bloke not wanting to leave you alone and hanging around asking you for your number, or asking you if you've got a boyfriend. It happens quite regularly or used to happen anyway, I get around it now by ignoring people or reading a book. I think it's more of a problem in other places, i was in belgium a couple years ago visiting a mate and i actually felt quite threatened at points by people (possibly more so coz i couldnt speak the language).

it's also quite common to get hassled on nights out etc.

of course i think an atmosphere of this sort of low to medium level harassment probably leads women to be alot more para than they should, like some people are shocked to find out that i walk back from the train station at night which is a fifteen minute walk, by myself, despite the fact that i've been doing the same walk for most of my life. i'm not paranoid about that but there are other things i'm probably a bit more paranoid about.


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## muscovyduck (May 9, 2013)

toggle said:


> i wouldn't.
> 
> the tit might do something useful for a change


She won't though. It'd be a way for her to further her own career so she carries more weight next time she accidentally calls me a middle-age man. And obviously as that happens, everyone will pile on and it'd be used to make completely wrong political messages and politicians will wriggle out of doing anything about it.

This is why we can't have nice things. Like a revolution.


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## frogwoman (May 9, 2013)

i've had that shit from exes as well. once an ex boyfriend i went out with a few years back when i wat at school told me while i was sitting in the car with him, i think when i was about 21/22 or so and meeting up with him the first time in many years (because he'd been a stalky nutcase, but i thought he might of changed and gave him the benefit of the doubt), when he gave me a lift home, that it was so dark and it would be easy for him to rape me and nobody would know  needless to say i never spoke to him again.

i posted on here about what a mentalist he was about the time that it happened if anyone can be arsed to look  

he was a fuckin fruitcake tho, believed in nazis on the moon


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## toggle (May 9, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> when he gave me a lift home, that it was so dark and it would be easy for him to rape me and nobody would know  needless to say i never spoke to him again.


 
ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

seriously ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww


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## frogwoman (May 9, 2013)

i know, at the time i thought it was more funny than scary though  i just couldn't take him seriously with his flying saucers and nazis on the moon bollocks


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## ymu (May 9, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I can see love-detective's point to be honest, in that half the people on this thread have already been accused of misogyny and that she seems to see all criticism of herself in a light which views it as being personal rather than political.
> 
> I still think that when people are talking about this sort of stuff that you need to start from a position of believing statements that people have been sexually assualted etc, however ymu i think you were a little unfair perhaps, criticising the analysis of intersectionality isn't the same as dismissing all experiences of sexism, i have major problems with intersectional theories but i think recent events on the left have shown that some interpretations of marxist theories have enabled the comrade delta's of this world to flourish
> 
> i do see love detective's point though, in that she wasn't only talking about her own experiences but about people writing to her, and so in that context it's not unreasonable to assume that she might possibly be exaggerating or talking about political criticism such as this thread as though it is personal.


It has nothing to do with the truth or who might be lying.

I am making only one point, and it is exactly the same point as this:










Depict Bush as a chimp and it says he is stupid. Depict Obama as a chimp and it says you are  racist.

If anyone says they have been sexually assaulted or threatened, you believe them. Because of Savile and Hall and Starr and Harris and Worboys and Rochdale and figure-fiddling coppers and, above all, because of the rape conviction rate of only 7% of the minority of cases that get reported.

And one of the main reasons so few get reported is that being disbelieved is often worse than the original crime. Hence the flood of allegations now that people know they might have a chance of justice.

So you don't ever express doubt. Not easy whilst also maintaining innocent until guilty. But you don't do it. Because doubt enables rapists. And you'd have to have been fucking asleep for the last 30 years not to know that.

Go on... rape her... she won't report it... 

I am also finding it particularly difficult to stomach when the SWP has just imploded because it was virtually inviting senior men to rape female members. Has no one joined the dots yet?


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## frogwoman (May 9, 2013)

but i'm not saying anything different


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## equationgirl (May 9, 2013)

Ah yes, the unilad example. I cannot even begin to describe how horrified I was with that.


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## ymu (May 9, 2013)

smokedout said:


> ok last and only point, but if anyone is getting the kind of shit under discussion via email, then unless people are reasonably adept at hiding their IP and using online email, it is easily traceable. it is also very illegal, threats to kills can be punishable by up to 10 years in jail, and it breaks a whole host of other laws including the malicious communications act, people get locked up for this stuff, the police would (usually they are all bastards) take it seriously.
> 
> im not advocating that people should go to the police because they are all bastards, but there is a legal dimension to this that is worth being aware of


If?

Seriously?

Did you read those links from earlier? Rapebook have no idea how their personal details got handed out, but they did. The moderator had to leave her home and the site was shut because no one else would risk it.

Your naivety is sweet, but entirely misplaced.

But you know, thanks for reminding us that the police should never be contacted. I've heard that somewhere before... Really shitty thing to say if you made the connection, If you didn't make the connection, well ... how? How could you miss it?


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## ymu (May 9, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> If I had my way there'd be a campaign in which everyone reported all sexual harassment, sexual assault, etc to the police for a week or month. But I don't have the time to sort out the arguments for it, convincing women to do it and everything so it's just another idea I wish someone else would come up with.


I'd like them to do it forever. Which would only require a minor tweak and add major value to the effort involved.

The only advice women need to hear about rape is: get evidence.


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## cesare (May 9, 2013)

I don't agree that "the only advice women need to hear about rape is: get evidence". If I had only one piece of advice for women on rape it would be: get even.


----------



## smokedout (May 9, 2013)

ymu said:


> But you know, thanks for reminding us that the police should never be contacted.


 
i didnt say that. I 100% support the right of the victim to make that decision, but i wouldnt always advocate going to the police over a nasty email, I havent gone to the police myself about a nasty email and far more serious crimes, because i fucking hate the cunts - so im not suggesting this is an action someone should take, but id hardly of mentioned it if i thought it was an action no-one should ever take


----------



## Nylock (May 9, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> She won't though. It'd be a way for her to further her own career so she carries more weight next time she accidentally calls me a middle-age man. And obviously as that happens, everyone will pile on and it'd be used to make completely wrong political messages and politicians will wriggle out of doing anything about it.
> 
> This is why we can't have nice things. Like a revolution.


I see what you did there ...


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 9, 2013)

cesare said:


> I don't agree that "the only advice women need to hear about rape is: get evidence". If I had only one piece of advice for women on rape it would be: get even.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 10, 2013)

I'm getting the impression that people might be talking at cross purposes here.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> If?
> 
> Seriously?
> 
> ...


 
Come on now. That first bit was you having a problem with the semantics of a sentence. 'If' in this instance did not imply disbelief. It wasn't said that it's always definitely traceable. It was actual advice. Advice that will be found useful by a large majority of people. I've never realised emails could be traced in any way. I now intend on researching this.

The police cannot be trusted. Maybe you're lucky to have had a decent experience, but I've reported sexual assault to the police, I gave them the signature and postcode of the man, tons of other information and it definitely wasn't worth it. The evidence did jack shit. Going to the police just prolonged the experience. 

Seriously, I understand how personal any general discussion on sexual assault is for women but misrepresenting arguments posts like that isn't the right thing to do.



ymu said:


> I'd like them to do it forever. Which would only require a minor tweak and add major value to the effort involved.
> 
> The only advice women need to hear about rape is: get evidence.


 
A week is more manageable for women than forever. Therefore the campaign would be more likely to succeed. It's not a minor tweak. 
As I implied above: If get evidence is your only advice then it's you who's naive.


----------



## AKA pseudonym (May 10, 2013)

Oh she has been travelling again....



> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  5m
> Just got back from Berlin. Landlords moved my key. Locked out on my front step. Phone dying. Bad night. #*fuckthis* #*cold*



I feel for her.. I would so tweet with a battery about to die.. it's essential...


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

Nylock said:


> I see what you did there ...


Two or three conversations going on at the same time on the same thread.
That's a little bit intersectional.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

AKA pseudonym said:


> Oh she has been travelling again....


 
Yeah and I was waiting for the conversation to move on to mention it but what do we think of Molly Crabapple visiting that Cooper Union thing?


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

AKA pseudonym said:


> I feel for her.. I would so tweet with a battery about to die.. it's essential...


 
Been there, done that


----------



## sihhi (May 10, 2013)

Agree with you again frogwoman - there's zero evidence of any exaggeration here.
The distortion and invented quotes all happened relatively early on in the career and are featured in the first book _Penny Red __Notes from the New Age of Dissent. _
Whether it was people noticing it in general (this thread a small subset of it), or women who were placed as the distorted quotees ? speaking up about it, or the dismissal of Johann Hari was the tipping point no one can say.
There's zero reason to expect any distortion or exaggeration particularly about a topic like this.
(I also think it's wrong to suggest that those who might have had doubts about LP's representation of her emails (in the context of how LP represented Dave Thurrock etc) are similar to rightists (Playboy or Paglia) who suggest that scepticism about rape claims is positive/sensible).

A last effort to persuade people of the veracity of the claims (apart from there being no evidence just speculation of their being distorted/exaggerated):

1 If you look through formsprings you do get 'anonymouses' giving women often women teenagers threats and the like (maybe using someone else's log-in from school computers).

2 If you are a journalist with your email address printed once a week in a national paper (no matter how low the circulation or how marginal it may appear) you will get feedback on it. An associate went to an AWL talk (yeah I know) about the Iraq war with Nick Cohen and Martin Thomas. In it, Cohen read out some of many emails with exactly how people wanted to kill him, how God would punish him in hell etc., how he was helping Israel because he was Jewish - basically racialised abuse.

3 If you look through say this thread Greek Extremists Attack Each Other Literally (Warning ugly sexist and racist comments) on Guido Fawkes - you also see that prominent lefty-taunting is a sport among the Libertarian Right (not forgetting that this swamp is where the particular breed of MRA grows).

Put all this together and the abusive emails square with reality - ie 'my female friend AB runs a blog as a woman about cuts, doesn't get much abuse ergo am sceptical' doesn't cut it.


----------



## toggle (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Ah yes, the unilad example. I cannot even begin to describe how horrified I was with that.


 
i've described it a lot. one of those bastards is at my uni.

where some fucking prick told me in class that feminism wasn't needed anymore.

i thought my reaction was relatively restrained considering. i didn't shout or bite him. i just told him he was talking bollocks, not to use anecdata and go read a bit more before commenting.


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

cesare said:


> I don't agree that "the only advice women need to hear about rape is: get evidence". If I had only one piece of advice for women on rape it would be: get even.


That would be my approach to getting evidence, but not all women have my pain threshold. Evidence is often the only way to get even, unless you want all the men you know white-knighting all over the shop. (That would be a no, from me.)

This woman is my hero. 

CSI fan spat on rapist's car seat and pulled out her own hair to make sure he was caught


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> C I've never realised emails could be traced in any way. I now intend on researching this.


 
online email providers like yahoo, gmail etc will hand over ip details to police which identifies the computer you are using (or usually using) and your internet provider company who will provide a name and address, they can do this pretty routinely (i cant remember the exact procedure) and will if they are investigating a crime.  facebook, twitter, google and all the rest will hand over details as well.  abusive/sexually offensive emails are pretty much covered the same way as abusive phone calls in law.  like a lot of things on the net abuse on social media etc, or things written about people rather than sent to them could be a bit legally messy because the laws werent really written to accommodate the reality of the net and theres a lot of stuff being tested in courts now - it is quite an important deal id say worth discussion outside of this thread, about what is acceptable/unacceptable abuse, private/public space etc

people can be anonymous, but youd need at least a reasonable level of technical knowledge (thats beyond me) in using proxies etc, or you can use cybercafs and online emails, but they do have cameras and witnesses and stuff, i doubt the old bill would go that far to investigate a malicious email, but they have in terrorism cases etc


----------



## cesare (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> That would be my approach to getting evidence, but not all women have my pain threshold. Evidence is often the only way to get even, unless you want all the men you know white-knighting all over the shop. (That would be a no, from me.)
> 
> This woman is my hero.
> 
> CSI fan spat on rapist's car seat and pulled out her own hair to make sure he was caught




My version of getting even doesn't rely on the criminal justice system


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Come on now. That first bit was you having a problem with the semantics of a sentence. 'If' in this instance did not imply disbelief. It wasn't said that it's always definitely traceable. It was actual advice. Advice that will be found useful by a large majority of people. I've never realised emails could be traced in any way. I now intend on researching this.
> 
> The police cannot be trusted. Maybe you're lucky to have had a decent experience, but I've reported sexual assault to the police, I gave them the signature and postcode of the man, tons of other information and it definitely wasn't worth it. The evidence did jack shit. Going to the police just prolonged the experience.
> 
> ...


I'll accept that I am in mightily pissed off mood and end my part in this bunfight but ...

I see absolutely no reason to make it a one week campaign. It should be the norm. If it was the norm then assault would not be the norm.

Given that most men who do commit a serious sexual assault do so only once in their lives, and only 1-2% commit many at all, I think almost all of them would be intelligent enough to keep their hands and pricks to themselves for a week or two, whilst switching to the delightful sort of verbal abuse which I find so much easier to handle.

I'd rather they stuck close enough to get a knee in the groin and I don't think we should give them prior warning of a temporary state of affairs where we will actually report them, but then stop if they promise to be nice.

I think the report and prosecute all assaults thing has to happen, but I also think it is important to ask the men in our lives to be a little sensitive to the fact that we are at significant danger from a substantial minority of men and they have a responsibility not to make that worse by accidentally giving the impression to some of these fucked up (and usually very immature, often teenage) men that it is socially acceptable to bait women, and to try to avoid caling them liars when the subject is whether or not they are experiencing excessively violent misogynistic attention of any kind at all.


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

cesare said:


> My version of getting even doesn't rely on the criminal justice system


Prison is far worse than any beating and I ain't going down for life for the sake of some worthless piece of scum.

He'd get as good a kicking as I could safely administer, but I want that fucker on the nonce-wing and am quite happy to ensure I gather enough scars to make sure of it.

It won't stop until the risk of prison is a serious one. Like seatbelts in the '70s and drink-driving in the '80s. It has not yet dawned on the criminal justice system that there is a law that they can enforce.


----------



## toggle (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> online email providers like yahoo, gmail etc will hand over ip details to police which identifies the computer you are using (or usually using) and your internet provider company who will provide a name and address, they can do this pretty routinely (i cant remember the exact procedure) and will if they are investigating a crime. facebook, twitter, google and all the rest will hand over details as well. abusive/sexually offensive emails are pretty much covered the same way as abusive phone calls in law. like a lot of things on the net abuse on social media etc, or things written about people rather than sent to them could be a bit legally messy because the laws werent really written to accommodate the reality of the net and theres a lot of stuff being tested in courts now - it is quite an important deal id say worth discussion outside of this thread, about what is acceptable/unacceptable abuse, private/public space etc
> 
> people can be anonymous, but youd need at least a reasonable level of technical knowledge (thats beyond me) in using proxies etc, or you can use cybercafs and online emails, but they do have cameras and witnesses and stuff, i doubt the old bill would go that far to investigate a malicious email, but they have in terrorism cases etc


 
 there are enough reports of them pulling stunts like this on actual rapes.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14844985


----------



## cesare (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> Prison is far worse than any beating and I ain't going down for life for the sake of some worthless piece of scum.
> 
> He'd get as good a kicking as I could safely administer, but I want that fucker on the nonce-wing and am quite happy to ensure I gather enough scars to make sure of it.


What on earth makes you assume I meant a beating?


----------



## classicdish (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> people can be anonymous, but youd need at least a reasonable level of technical knowledge (thats beyond me) in using proxies etc


This Wired article says you could just use Tor and hushmail: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/04/how-to/how-to-create-anonymous-email-accounts


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

classicdish said:


> This Wired article says you could just use Tor and hushmail: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/04/how-to/how-to-create-anonymous-email-accounts


 
thats a reasonable level of technical knowledge thats beyond me and fuck knows ive tried to do all that online security stuff


----------



## barney_pig (May 10, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> True, and sadly us unskilled get looked down on by the skilled, as if we're outside of the working class. Seen it happen.


Lots of this is the knowledge of just ow precarious the privileges of he skilled worker are, remove the skilled workers conditions and they are likely to be in a worse position than their unskilled colleagues.
  People are more interested, and impressed by,my Time as a train driver on my C V than they are by the history BA or the MA that I gained after redundancy. However, none of my driving skills are transferable or translate into new job offers.


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Put all this together and the abusive emails square with reality


 
who has claimed that she is lying about getting abusive emails (or abuse through any other medium)?


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

just as an aside, do people believe laurie gets 3 or 4 emails a week from young women who want to be bloggers/social activists asking her advice, which is what she says first, because I dont, Id be surprised if she gets that a month


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

i don't find that as difficult to believe as the claim that she gets abusive messages at the level of people wanting to rape/cunt kick/garrot/bury her every single day

she has a legion of young followers (in the wider non-twitter sense) who rightly or wrongly see her as some kind of role model and you just need to look at the replies to any of her tweets to see the level of fawning from both young and old, male and female. So wouldn't be surprised if a load of people are getting in touch with her or maintain regular communication with her in relation to things like that


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

I don't see why either one of them needs to be difficult to believe nor why someone who is not in a position to know thinks it is unlikely.

If this small group on Facebook attracted that amount of abuse and real life physical threat, exactly how unlikely do you think it is that she gets enough abuse along those lines for her claims to be a fair representation?

A number of women who blog and people who follow a lot of women bloggers who write about 'red mist' issues have told you what their experience is and that it accords with Penny's claims.

Why are you repeating this shit yet again? Is it to be deliberately offensive or are you genuinely this unaware?


----------



## cesare (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> just as an aside, do people believe laurie gets 3 or 4 emails a week from young women who want to be bloggers/social activists asking her advice, which is what she says first, because I dont, Id be surprised if she gets that a month


I'm quite cautious about her claims because I've seen evidence that she is prone to exaggeration, misrepresentation and lying (cf her treatment of Spiney, ld and Joe). However (as sihhi has shown) she is working (a) the middleclass network, and (b) the social media network, for all she's worth and she gets national media coverage. Even if she's exaggerating, it's something of a self fulfilling prophecy because the claims in themselves form part of the encouragement. So I don't find it hard to accept that there's a strong possibility that she is, and even if she's not it won't be long before she is.


----------



## cesare (May 10, 2013)

love detective said:


> i don't find that as difficult to believe as the claim that she gets abusive messages at the level of people wanting to rape/cunt kick/garrot/bury her every single day
> 
> she has a legion of young followers (in the wider non-twitter sense) who rightly or wrongly see her as some kind of role model and you just need to look at the replies to any of her tweets to see the level of fawning from both young and old, male and female. So wouldn't be surprised if a load of people are getting in touch with her or maintain regular communication with her in relation to things like that


I agree with what you said in your 2nd para


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

even so i dont find it plausible, although if it includes people she's in regular contact with its a bit different, but the impression given is that these are separate unsolicited emails

thats a fuck of a lot, just on one very specific subject for someone who in the general scheme of things is pretty obscure, i might buy that cheryl cole or wayne rooney gets that number of emails asking for advice every week, but not laurie penny


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

cesare said:


> What on earth makes you assume I meant a beating?


I meant a beating. I have no idea what you mean because you haven't said. I have a poor imagination I suppose.


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> A number of women who blog and people who follow a lot of women bloggers who write about 'red mist' issues have told you what their experience is and that it accords with Penny's claims.


 
Sorry but I must have missed the bits where you/they told me that they too get abusive messages at the level of people wanting to rape/cunt kick/garrot/bury them every single day. Because for their experiences to _'accord with Penny's claims'_ that would have to be the case

For example when it was put to you here I noticed you were unable to respond to it. Although given that you seem to have a remarkable and consistent ability to fail to either read or comprehend what i've written in my posts in relation to this i'm not surprised. I'm not sure whose points you have been engaging with in your replies to me, but they certainly haven't been the ones i've made in the posts that you have 'nominally' replied to


----------



## cesare (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> even so i dont find it plausible, although if it includes people she's in regular contact with its a bit different, but the impression given is that these are separate unsolicited emails
> 
> thats a fuck of a lot, just on one very specific subject for someone who in the general scheme of things is pretty obscure, i might buy that cheryl cole or wayne rooney gets that number of emails asking for advice every week, but not laurie penny


Even if you're right - what difference does it make?


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

and why would people ask her advice on being a blogger or social activist, given that she's neither - shes a journalist for an obscure left wing mag with a blog she's very rarely updated since around 2009


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

it shows how well she does at presenting the illusion that she is the things she says/thinks she is


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

cesare said:


> Even if you're right - what difference does it make?


 
none, in the general scheme of things except that she lied about it


----------



## cesare (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> and why would people ask her advice on being a blogger or social activist, given that she's neither - shes a journalist for an obscure left wing mag with a blog she's very rarely updated since around 2009


Are you  leading up to "so therefore we should all ignore her cos she's not worth paying attention to"?


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> even so i dont find it plausible, although if it includes people she's in regular contact with its a bit different, but the impression given is that these are separate unsolicited emails
> 
> thats a fuck of a lot, just on one very specific subject for someone who in the general scheme of things is pretty obscure, i might buy that cheryl cole or wayne rooney gets that number of emails asking for advice every week, but not laurie penny


I don't think it is. Who are her target audience? Politicised young 'uns, often at university, who will look to the loudest young progressive voices available. She and Jones are it.

The school kids ruled in 2003, when it came to short-notice, determined, angry protest and those amazing kids are now some pretty decent protesters. My avatar is a tribute to them, amongst other things.

There are a lot of them and they have not all yet had enough time, learning and life experience to see what they are being sold.

She writes so much ridiculous stuff, why pick and pick at something that just isn't very important. The fact that she needs to say it is important. Her insecurity shines through. Everyone's does sometime. You can use that to jab harder at the personal or you can focus on what she disseminates and reproduces.

There is so much important content on this thread. It is cheapened by this small-minded hatefulness and some very revealing attitudes.


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

love detective said:


> Sorry but I must have missed the bits where you/they told me that they too get abusive messages at the level of people wanting to rape/cunt kick/garrot/bury them every single day. Because for their experiences to _'accord with Penny's claims'_ that would have to be the case
> 
> For example when it was put to you here I noticed you were unable to respond to it. Although given that you seem to have a remarkable and consistent ability to fail to either read or comprehend what i've written in my posts in relation to this i'm not surprised. I'm not sure whose points you have been engaging with in your replies to me, but they certainly haven't been the ones i've made in the posts that you have 'nominally' replied to


Are you saying they are also national newspaper columnists?

I have had _phone calls_ making those threats. Mostly from American accents, thank fuck. Several a day for a week or two, occasionals for months after. One PC killed stone dead, one university network downed for three days by spam porn.

And that was for being in the paper for a week or two.

You might want to stop defending your position and start wondering whether it is at all defensible.


----------



## treelover (May 10, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> If they're lucky. Even outliers and places that haven't formerly been given a second glance to, such as "new" Marzahn, are being gentrified/put out of the price range of w/c Berliners. Most of what was West Berlin, and the more central sections of what was East Berlin are already beyond ordinary affordability. My favourite bit of Berlin (Moabit - no fancy coffee shops, think Balham 30 years ago) has already seen rents almost double over the last 10 years.


 
Blimey, I was in Marzahn, a few years ago, the big Stasi base/now museum is there, urban jungle,  lots of neo-nazis as well, didn't think it could be gentrified..


----------



## treelover (May 10, 2013)

cesare said:


> Casualty of industrialisation


 
Only in the west, still masses made globally..


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> Are you saying they are also national newspaper columnists?


 
I've no idea who they are, you are the person who brought them up


> I have had phone calls making those threats. Mostly from American accents, thank fuck. Several a day for a week or two, occasionals for months after. One PC killed stone dead, one university network downed for three days by spam porn.
> 
> And that was for being in the paper for a week or two.


Sorry to hear you have received such threats and harassment


> You might want to stop defending your position and start wondering whether it is at all defensible.


I'm more than happy to continue to defend my position though

i'm not saying she must be lying about this because she lies about other stuff, i'm saying she is lying about this because she has lied about it.

I and many others on here (including many females) have been falsely accused of giving her sexist/misogynistic abuse when all they have done is criticised her politics, her method and what she represents

By her own admission she counts this as part of the sum total of sexist/misogynistic abuse that she gets

My position is that she is lying about the level/frequency of sexist/misogynistic abuse that she gets and exaggerating the level/frequency of it. My evidence to support this is the huge amount of criticism that she has received on here (and from posters on here on twitter) which she disingenuously catalogues as being sexist & misogynistic abuse

You've already admitted in an earlier post though that:-




			
				ymu said:
			
		

> It has nothing to do with the truth or who might be lying


 
So there it is


----------



## cesare (May 10, 2013)

treelover said:


> Only in the west, still masses made globally..


I expect there are masses of handmade candlesticks made globally. I suspect the global number of industrially produced candlesticks is more though.


----------



## Nylock (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> even so i dont find it plausible, although if it includes people she's in regular contact with its a bit different, but the impression given is that these are separate unsolicited emails
> 
> thats a fuck of a lot, just on one very specific subject for someone who in the general scheme of things is pretty obscure, i might buy that cheryl cole or wayne rooney gets that number of emails asking for advice every week, but not laurie penny


3-4 emails a week = 150-200 emails a year. For someone, anyone, with LP's following, 'lecture'* schedule, travel itinerary and profile that's hardly breaking the fabric of reality... As others have said here there's plenty of *provable* exaggeration that LP's used in her articles and to focus on disputing something that is, in all probability, factually correct is a bit of an odd direction to take tbh...


*not the right word for it but that sort of thing....


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

cesare said:


> Are you leading up to "so therefore we should all ignore her cos she's not worth paying attention to"?


 
no, not at all, I've never said that, I think her and the bubble she operates in should come under scrutiny, for the reasons given in this thread many times

but she's not a national newspaper columnist, she write for an obscure left wing publication with a small subscription and occasionally goes on television shows no-one watches.  shes not even that big on twitter (in her field), which is where she's highest profile, caitlin moran has 400,000 followers, nearly ten time what laurie has

for her to get 3 or 4 emails a week asking for advice on how to be a blogger must mean she gets an astonishing amount of unsolicited email, because shes far more likely to be contacted by people saying hello, asking her to write about stuff or people with a story/some information.  I find it pretty hard to believe on that basis.


----------



## cesare (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> no, not at all, I've never said that, I think her and the bubble she operates in should come under scrutiny, for the reasons given in this thread many times
> 
> but she's not a national newspaper columnist, she write for an obscure left wing publication with a small subscription and occasionally goes on television shows no-one watches. shes not even that big on twitter (in her field), which is where she's highest profile, caitlin moran has 400,000 followers, nearly ten time what laurie has
> 
> for her to get 3 or 4 emails a week asking for advice on how to be a blogger must mean she gets an astonishing amount of unsolicited email, because shes far more likely to be contacted by people saying hello, asking her to write about stuff or people with a story/some information. I find it pretty hard to believe on that basis.


No, I never said that you'd said it ("are we leading up to ...?") - I'm just wondering where we're going with this and why.


----------



## phildwyer (May 10, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> really? that doesn't make a lot of sense. but then, once you're willing to believe a holy book any weirdness is possible.


 
Whare are you on about now?  What Holy Book do you belıeve forbıds the wearıng of a tıe?


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 10, 2013)

treelover said:


> Blimey, I was in Marzahn, a few years ago, the big Stasi base/now museum is there, urban jungle, lots of neo-nazis as well, didn't think it could be gentrified..


 
You'd be amazed what a bit of landscaping and cladding can do. Bear in mind their are decades-worth of situational crime-prevention measures that get deployed when communities like Marzahn see the developers arrive.  It's not beyond the wit of man to alter opportunity enough that anti-social elements, neo-nazis or otherwise, don't feel like loitering, even if they actually live there.


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

cesare said:


> No, I never said that you'd said it ("are we leading up to ...?") - I'm just wondering where we're going with this and why.


 
because shes using this to set herself up as an expert on blogging, claiming she gets contacted by hundreds of people asking her about the very subject that she happens to have been asked to talk about, which is her advice as a blogger when she isnt a blogger


----------



## cesare (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> because shes using this to set herself up as an expert on blogging, claiming she gets contacted by hundreds of people asking her about the very subject that she happens to have been asked to talk about, which is her advice as a blogger when she isnt a blogger


I'm not a fan of the content of her blog, but it's packed full of the latest fucking inanities from her:  http://www.penny-red.com/


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 10, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Whare are you on about now? What Holy Book do you belıeve forbıds the wearıng of a tıe?


 
don't be deliberately obtuse, it's unbecoming of a grown man.


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

cesare said:


> I'm not a fan of the content of her blog, but it's packed full of the latest fucking inanities from her: http://www.penny-red.com/


 
she posts up pictures of herself, and occasionally uses it for a piece she presumably cant flog (as all journos do), but its been four months since she even did that.  Id be suprised if her site currently gets more than 3 to 400 unique visitors a day and quite possibly less, even when she was active as a blogger, before the student protests and anyone had heard of her, she was never one of the biggest blogs


----------



## cesare (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> she posts up pictures of herself, and occasionally uses it for a piece she presumably cant flog (as all journos do), but its been four months since she even did that. Id be suprised if her site currently gets more than 3 to 400 unique visitors a day and quite possibly less, even when she was active as a blogger, before the student protests and anyone had heard of her, she was never one of the biggest blogs


But so what? It's all a means to an end for her. This is like stopping at the underdeveloped sapling at the fringes of a wood and shaking your fist at it.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> I'll accept that I am in mightily pissed off mood and end my part in this bunfight but ...
> 
> I see absolutely no reason to make it a one week campaign. It should be the norm. If it was the norm then assault would not be the norm.
> 
> ...


 
Yes it should be the norm but it'll take a lot more convincing to get women to waste so much time going to the police on a long term basis. That would fade out over time, even if it was successful. The idea would be that the campaign highlights how much we put up with that we shouldn't have to.

A lot of people don't even know what dos and doesn't count as rape and sexual assault. They're too wrapped up in LAD culture to bother caring. Most of them wouldn't even notice it as a campaign. I doubt most of them read much news. It wouldn't be a case of 'stopping if they promise to be nice', it be something to build on to further the campaign. That would not be the end of it but it's a useful focus/rallying point.

I agree with the last paragraph. The question is: How? Usually drip-feeding them feminist ideas over time sorts it out to an extent. Once enough people in a social groups aren't happy with an attitude, whoever's voicing the opinions shuts up. Mainly because people making misogynistic comments are usually the type who are looking for acceptance and popularity in their male friendship group, while wanting to appear shagworthy by the women.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> and why would people ask her advice on being a blogger or social activist, given that she's neither - shes a journalist for an obscure left wing mag with a blog she's very rarely updated since around 2009


She appears to be one. She also interacts with her fan base. On the face of it, she's a hardworking, friendly woman who is really passionate about her work. Half a year or so ago I might have done the same, and looked to her for advice.

Obviously, I'm not rich so it's just another career which is closed to me.


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

OK. Let's get the thread back on track.

Seumas Milne, public school and Oxbridge twat, naive anti-imperialist polemics via a column in the Guardian. Perfectly at home on this thread.

Caught here acting as propagandist and anti-imperialist cheerleader for Julian Assange in only slightly more coherent fashion than Glenn fucking Greenwald. And misreporting the legal process after it had been clarified fully by many legal bloggers.

Like Jones, at the higher end of the quality scale when it comes to political perspective. But I asked him to correct the article in that link three times and he refused twice before ending the conversation and that is shoddy fucking journalism. He's a Hari who can be arsed to do some homework.


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

cesare said:


> But so what? It's all a means to an end for her. This is like stopping at the underdeveloped sapling at the fringes of a wood and shaking your fist at it.


 
I'm basically building up to pointing out that my blog probably has a higher readership than laurie pennys new statesman column and website combined, around 5000 page views a day over the last few months which ive never actually told anyone before and sort of wanted to.

*and i get fuck all emails, abusive or otherwise, now given whats been said fair enough, ive probably understated the misogyny problem, which i thought was serious, but i wouldnt have guessed that female bloggers/online writers get about 1000 times more abusive emails than male bloggers with comparable readerships - but i find it hard to believe that laurie penny also gets a similar amount more emails asking for advice etc when ive never had one.  i get maybe 10 unsolicited messages a week if you include facebook, i recently took my email address off my blog for a while to slow it down because most of them were questions about peoples benefits and i dont have time to do that justice, so it used to be slightly more, but she must get hundreds if what she says is true, I dont know of anyone other sites with similar readership getting that kind of feedback on email, in fact it flies in the face of everything i know about running political sites.

maybe im wrong and an occasional newsnight gig and commentisfree piece vastly bumps up her feedback, but from the traffic i know the new statesman gets, the number of comments, retweets etc her column gets etc, this isnt reflected in that


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> maybe im wrong and an occasional newsnight gig and commentisfree piece vastly bumps up her feedback, but from the traffic i know the new statesman gets, the number of comments, retweets etc her column gets etc, this isnt reflected in that


 
I'd guess it does. Also we're not taking into account her twitter feed.


----------



## frogwoman (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> OK. Let's get the thread back on track.
> 
> Seumas Milne, public school and Oxbridge twat, naive anti-imperialist polemics via a column in the Guardian. Perfectly at home on this thread.
> 
> ...


 

that's a shame, i always used to think seumas milne was all right, could be completely wrong tho


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> I'd guess it does. Also we're not taking into account her twitter feed.


 
I am, id imagine she gets most feedback via twitter, her email address isnt that easy to find - well its not hard, but its not on her columns etc

I just wonder why this huge amount of feedback doesnt impact on her readership figures, which are probably in fairness about the same as mine (but a bit less)


----------



## cesare (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I am, id imagine she gets most feedback via twitter, her email address isnt that easy to find - well its not hard, but its not on her columns etc
> 
> I just wonder why this huge amount of feedback doesnt impact on her readership figures, which are probably in fairness about the same as mine (but a bit less)


Her email address is on the contact details of her website and she regularly gives it out on her twitter feed


----------



## killer b (May 10, 2013)

i think there is a difference between the type of journalism (cough) penny does and the type of journalism smokedout does too, which could account to some difference - essentially smokedout writes news stories (albeit with a very specific slant), whereas penny conducts a conversation with her readership - which would invite substantially more feedback. enough to make such a substantial difference, i dunno. but worth considering.


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

yeah i know, not saying its invisible, but for most people they would come across her and so very likely contact her on twitter, especially kids, they dont even know what email is most of em


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I am, id imagine she gets most feedback via twitter, her email address isnt that easy to find - well its not hard, but its not on her columns etc
> 
> I just wonder why this huge amount of feedback doesnt impact on her readership figures, which are probably in fairness about the same as mine (but a bit less)


Different audiences. Laurie Penny's going for the young, hip, radical, 'opinion-makers'. The type of people who read that sorry excuse for a newspaper. I imagine you concentrate more on your content, whereas Laurie focuses on her brand. It's the whole building a house on sand/stone parable, only without the happy ending.


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I'm basically building up to pointing out that my blog probably has a higher readership than laurie pennys new statesman column and website combined, around 5000 page views a day over the last few months which ive never actually told anyone before and sort of wanted to.
> 
> *and i get fuck all emails, abusive or otherwise, now given whats been said fair enough, ive probably understated the misogyny problem, which i thought was serious, but i wouldnt have guessed that female bloggers/online writers get about 1000 times more abusive emails than male bloggers with comparable readerships - but i find it hard to believe that laurie penny also gets a similar amount more emails asking for advice etc when ive never had one. i get maybe 10 unsolicited messages a week if you include facebook, i recently took my email address off my blog for a while to slow it down because most of them were questions about peoples benefits and i dont have time to do that justice, so it used to be slightly more, but she must get hundreds if what she says is true, I dont know of anyone other sites with similar readership getting that kind of feedback on email, in fact it flies in the face of everything i know about running political sites.
> 
> maybe im wrong and an occasional newsnight gig and commentisfree piece vastly bumps up her feedback, but from the traffic i know the new statesman gets, the number of comments, retweets etc her column gets etc, this isnt reflected in that


You're including the stuff on Guido's site, right? I'd imagine Harry's Place would be pretty grim too.

Have you compared notes with suey2y and Bendy Girl? Per reader/view count? They're highly comparable to you, although less political in perspective.


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

killer b said:


> whereas penny conducts a conversation with her readership - which would invite substantially more feedback. enough to make such a substantial difference, i dunno. but worth considering.


 
that did occur to me and as much effort as she puts into promoting herself i probably put into trying to hide, but i know details of other websites, campaigns etc and have been involved in other websites, and thats still a huge amount of feedback compared to her readership numbers


----------



## cesare (May 10, 2013)

Also there are no rules for what blogs look like or consist of. They don't have to be well researched and lengthy in order to draw attention and/or create an impression that is consistent with paid articles, networking and a twitter feed. She is marketing herself as a brand not as a blogger.


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> You're including the stuff on Guido's site, right? I'd imagine Harry's Place would be pretty grim too.
> 
> Have you compared notes with suey2y and Bendy Girl? Per reader/view count? They're highly comparable to you, although less political in perspective.


 
id guess they both probably get similar traffic, its a bit difficult to ask another blogger about their traffic out of the blue without sounding a dick to be honest


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

cesare said:


> Also there are no rules for what blogs look like or consist of.


 
well there should be


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> id guess they both probably get similar traffic, its a bit difficult to ask another blogger about their traffic out of the blue without sounding a dick to be honest


How do you find out about your traffic anyway? I tried using Google analytics for a while but it didn't go well.


----------



## cesare (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> well there should be


The crazy no holds barred world of the internet eh


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> How do you find out about your traffic anyway? I tried using Google analytics for a while but it didn't go well.


 
wordpress and blogger have built in stat counters, you can also use things like sitemeter, which just means adding a bit of code to your template and ive used it on other websites, it works pretty well and is a bit simpler than analytics


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> id guess they both probably get similar traffic, its a bit difficult to ask another blogger about their traffic out of the blue without sounding a dick to be honest


I meant the volume and style of abuse and proportion of content-free abuse.

You're making a lot of easily checkable statements, which contradict the experience of others. I am suggesting you ask people you trust who have comparable visibility on Twitter but happen to be female what their experience is rather than continue to rely on your imagination.


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

cesare said:


> The crazy no holds barred world of the internet eh


 
enough is enough I'm afraid - calling yourself a blogger because you put some photos of you on holiday on the internet ffs

actually its more a gripe about journalists who spend half their lives slagging off bloggers as unprofessional weirdos and the rest of the time stealing their content and pretending to be bloggers in the hope of getting some online cred


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

Well, you know, take it out on them. Don't dismiss the general experience of women on-line when you have plenty of ammunition that won't cause collateral damage.

You're pissed off with her because she's appropriating the experience of others and distorting it beyond recognition through ignorance and arrogance. Well, Oxbridge isn't the only means to develop that condition.

/shuts the fuck up


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> Well, you know, take it out on them. Don't dismiss the general experience of women on-line when you have plenty of ammunition that won't cause collateral damage.


 
i havent, not once have I questioned anything a single woman on this thread has said about their experiences on the internet and ive rolled back on questioning what laurie said

but yes I am questioning the amount of feedback she gets generally, thats not a gender based issue, if owen jones made the same claim i'd dispute it and he's got a much higher public profile


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

We still have to speculate about an immature young woman's claims and possible desperate clinging on to a post-crisis wave?

Not what she writes in a considered way for publication but what she farts out on a social medium that is designed to be impulsive and fleeting in nature and where you can't see how many other people are @ing her at the same time or in what manner unless you make an effort to check.

People who have tweeted at her: how many times have you attacked her and how many times have you attacked the misogynists who follow her around? Did you ever try to work out how it looks to someone who can see all the traffic coming in?

Anyway. Seumas? He's getting a free pass on this thread and I'd like to redress that injustice.


----------



## frogwoman (May 10, 2013)

i'm sorry, but she's a couple of years older than me, and she's plainly mature enough to have got a job at a national newspaper 

immaturity isn't an excuse. 

sorry.


----------



## frogwoman (May 10, 2013)

i don't like all this "immature young woman" stuff, i'm 25 years old, i, and most of my mates are tons more mature than her despite never having the opportunities she's had, it's patronising to her as well coz it says she's somebody that's got to be looked after in some way. know you don't mean that like that i'm just making the point.


----------



## weepiper (May 10, 2013)

'Immature young woman' might be ok in reference to a teenager but c'mon. As I've said before I'd been living away from home for ten years, done a degree, been supporting myself at work and was already a mother by the time I was her age. It's patronising and age doesn't get to be used as an excuse past about 18 IMO.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

weepiper said:


> 'Immature young woman' might be ok in reference to a teenager but c'mon. As I've said before I'd been living away from home for ten years, done a degree, been supporting myself at work and was already a mother by the time I was her age. It's patronising and age doesn't get to be used as an excuse past about 18 IMO.


And it's used too often for teenagers. Treated like a kid but expected to act like an adult, etc etc


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> We still have to speculate about an immature young woman's claims and possible desperate clinging on to a post-crisis wave?
> 
> Not what she writes in a considered way for publication but what she farts out on a social medium that is designed to be impulsive and fleeting in nature and where you can't see how many other people are @ing her at the same time or in what manner unless you make an effort to check.
> 
> People who have tweeted at her: how many times have you attacked her and how many times have you attacked the misogynists who follow her around? Did you ever try to work out how it looks to someone who can see all the traffic coming in?


 
As I've said before, I'm 17 and I'm already going back and deleting the immature stuff I've written on Twitter and Facebook. I do post a load of shit but not much of it is offensive, it's just pretentious and boring. I don't claim to be the voice of the youth, even though I'm actually youth. I don't claim every criticism of what I've said is personally aimed at me rather than at what I've written. I don't have a job at a newspaper. I've not got much hope of having a job, let along an actual career. This time last year I was still doing my GCSEs.

It's difficult to be taken seriously _just because_ of how old I am. Laurie Penny does not have this problem. She should not be immune from criticism just because of how immature she is, because she is old enough to be in the position where people don't immediately use her age to shut her up.


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

Some of my friends had bairns and a career before they were Laurie's age, but she works for a living.


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

You're 17 muscovyduck? Holy crap.

You do not look anywhere near that young. 

Big up da yoof!


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

smokedout said:


> i havent, not once have I questioned anything a single woman on this thread has said about their experiences on the internet and ive rolled back on questioning what laurie said
> 
> but yes I am questioning the amount of feedback she gets generally, thats not a gender based issue, if owen jones made the same claim i'd dispute it and he's got a much higher public profile


 
You said you took on board what was said on this thread yet ignored weepipers post,

Also you're just some bloke on the internet with a blog, one of billions. Laurie Penny, Owen Jones are people who appear on radio, TV, newspaper articles and god knows where else. Their audience is massive and varied and as such are going to attract odd balls.

Can't help but think of Jill Dando, I don't know why.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> You're 17 muscovyduck? Holy crap.
> 
> You do not look anywhere near that young.
> 
> Big up da yoof!


 
It doesn't stop me hating school children. I think that's just a personality trait


----------



## equationgirl (May 10, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> As I've said before, I'm 17 and I'm already going back and deleting the immature stuff I've written on Twitter and Facebook. I do post a load of shit but not much of it is offensive, it's just pretentious and boring. I don't claim to be the voice of the youth, even though I'm actually youth. I don't claim every criticism of what I've said is personally aimed at me rather than at what I've written. I don't have a job at a newspaper. I've not got much hope of having a job, let along an actual career. This time last year I was still doing my GCSEs.
> 
> It's difficult to be taken seriously _just because_ of how old I am. Laurie Penny does not have this problem. She should not be immune from criticism just because of how immature she is, because she is old enough to be in the position where people don't immediately use her age to shut her up.


Respect is due, you come across as much older. Fair play to you.


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

Prepare to be patronised, condescended and spoken down to now your age is common knowledge. 

You don't remember what it was like when Kurt died, maaan!


----------



## toggle (May 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> You're just some bloke on the internet with a blog, one of billions. Laurie Penny, Owen Jones are people who appear on radio, TV, newspaper articles and god knows where else. Their audience is massive and varied and as such are going to attract odd balls.
> 
> Can't help but think of Jill Dando, I don't know why.


 
look back a couple of pages and there's loads of examples of the kind of shit women get on the net.

but apparently LP is such a special one that none of that can apply to her. she's different. cause smokedout says she is.


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

who has claimed that 'none of that' applies to LP?


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> Prepare to be patronised, condescended and spoken down to now your age is common knowledge.


 
and receive a shit loads of PM's from firky and revol


----------



## weepiper (May 10, 2013)

love detective said:


> and receive a shit loads of PM's from firky and revol


 
that's just unnecessary.


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

because?


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

Have you ever received a PM off me, muscy, on here or on twitter, or is LD just getting pissy because he's been called out and can't handle criticism?


----------



## equationgirl (May 10, 2013)

love detective said:


> and receive a shit loads of PM's from firky and revol


What's that supposed to mean?


----------



## toggle (May 10, 2013)

love detective said:


> who has claimed that 'none of that' applies to LP?


 
anyone trying to say she's lying about getting rape threats.

who do you think that is?


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> Have you ever received a PM off me, muscy, on here or on twitter, or is LD just getting pissy because he's been called out and can't handle criticism?


 
you seriously took that post literally and seriously yes? (as opposed to all the other times similar digs have been made which you (and revol) have took in the spirit intended - like this one here for example)

as for being called out and can't handle criticism, you said yourself yesterday on facebook you mostly agree with what i've said on here


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

toggle said:


> anyone trying to say she's lying about getting rape threats.
> 
> who do you think that is?


 
who has said she is lying about getting rape threats - do you have a post you could link to where that's happened?


----------



## toggle (May 10, 2013)

love detective said:


> who has said she is lying about getting rape threats - do you have a post you could link to where that's happened?


 
nope. i couldn't be bothered to trawl through all that shit again, once was enough


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

if you tell me the name of the person who denied it i'll trawl through for you (or more correctly spend a couple of seconds on the search function)


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

love detective said:


> you seriously took that post literally and seriously yes? (as opposed to all the other times similar digs have been made which you have took in the spirit intended - like this one here for example)
> 
> as for being called out and can't handle criticism, you said yourself yesterday on facebook you mostly agree with what i've said on here


 
I did take it seriously, aye.

There are reasons to doubt Laurie given her history but I'd keep those thoughts to myself. I wouldn't post them on this thread because it only gives her ammo that we're all bogeymen out to get her. That's about the third time I've said that now. You've got a point but it's not one I feel comfortable with. I'd rather give her the benefit of the doubt and be wrong.


----------



## equationgirl (May 10, 2013)

(((thread)))


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> Have you ever received a PM off me, muscy, on here or on twitter, or is LD just getting pissy because he's been called out and can't handle criticism?





equationgirl said:


> What's that supposed to mean?


 
What's going on here then?

I didn't mean for this to happen


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

toggle said:


> anyone trying to say she's lying about getting rape threats.
> 
> who do you think that is?


 
No one has denied that she gets such threats, more the frequency of them / how threatening they are.



muscovyduck said:


> What's going on here then?
> 
> I didn't mean for this to happen



Think it was a joke that went over my head


----------



## chilango (May 10, 2013)

Laurie wins.

Well done.


----------



## equationgirl (May 10, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> What's going on here then?
> 
> I didn't mean for this to happen


I read it as LD implying Firky was trying to be sleazy around you, and I didn't think it was an appropriate comment to make.

You did nothing!


----------



## J Ed (May 10, 2013)

http://www.newstatesman.com/broadca...-prosecution-rapists-and-we-should-applaud-it

New Laurie article, actually quite good.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> Prepare to be patronised, condescended and spoken down to now your age is common knowledge.
> 
> You don't remember what it was like when Kurt died, maaan!


Who is Kurt?

(((joke)))


----------



## toggle (May 10, 2013)

was that seriously an implication that the onlty reason firky was talking to a woman was to sleeze?

he had his own harem a few weeks ago


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

toggle said:


> was that seriously an implication that the onlty reason firky was talking to a woman was to sleeze?
> 
> he had his own harem a few weeks ago


 
There's an old joke going back years that revol and I like sk8ter grls and I missed it, sorry love detective, you were too droll for me then.


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> I did take it seriously, aye.


 
ok well to confirm it was meant in the same spirit as the one linked to in the post you quoted above, as 'in joke' banter of a nature we have previously engaged in, in which you had taken and responded in the spirit intended

so apologies to both you and muscovyduck for it not coming across in the way it was intended (quite why you took it seriously though given we have engaged in the same kind of thing previously in a friendly/jokey manner and also how much worse the banter is on a certain other place that we both inhabit where neither of us take offence at due to understanding the spirit it is given in, I don't know)


> There are reasons to doubt Laurie given her history but I'd keep those thoughts to myself. I wouldn't post them on this thread because it only gives her ammo that we're all bogeymen out to get her. That's about the third time I've said that now. You've got a point but it's not one I feel comfortable with. I'd rather give her the benefit of the doubt and be wrong.


 
maybe not one you feel comfortable with, but one you (mostly) agree with


----------



## weepiper (May 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> There's an old joke going back years that revol and I like sk8ter grls and I missed it, sorry love detective, you were too droll for me then.


 
oh right, I didn't know about that hence my response.


----------



## equationgirl (May 10, 2013)

From the New Statesman, an article by Martha Gill in which she says the feminist reaction to campaigns about rape is 'a knee-jerk reaction' and 'group think'. 
http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tec...sex-little-girl-voice-internet-feminists-all-



> A couple of months ago a University in Colorado published some guidelines on how to minimise your risk of rape. The list was short and practical, and when it went up there was an immediate outcry across several social media sites, during which it was asked repeatedly why the message wasn’t “don’t rape” or “rapists are the ones to blame”, rather than “don’t get raped”. The response was so dramatic that the list was removed almost as soon as it went up, amid apology.
> 
> An almost identical episode happened last year over West Mercia Police's "Safe Night Out" campaign, which involved posters advising women how to avoid rape. A number of feminist websites, including the F-Word, picked up on it, and a prolonged and angry Twitter barrage followed. In the end West Mercia Police too, took down the posters and apologised.
> 
> The point the online commenters had been keen to make is that nothing excuses rape, and of course they're right.  But excusing rape is a very different thing from lowering the risks of rape. A number of things can lower the risks of rape – and these are things worth knowing about. The Safe Night Out campaign was never presented as a debate-framer, it was just some anti-crime info. Do we really need to couple every piece of “avoid being a victim of crime” advice with the rider “also, don’t commit crimes, crimes are illegal, and if anyone’s to blame for crimes, it’s definitely the criminal”? It's odd, not to say worrying, that these two concepts have become so muddled together in the case of rape that safety advice is being compromised


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

weepiper said:


> oh right, I didn't know about that hence my response.


 
i disclose it in the official register of 'in jokes' each year at the start of the posting season


----------



## equationgirl (May 10, 2013)

weepiper said:


> oh right, I didn't know about that hence my response.


And mine.

(((in-jokes)))


----------



## Belushi (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> You're 17 muscovyduck? Holy crap.
> 
> You do not look anywhere near that young.
> 
> Big up da yoof!


 
frogwoman must be over the moon, it's taken over a decade but she's no longer the youngest pnp'er


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 10, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> don't be deliberately obtuse, it's unbecoming of a grown man.


 
*Physically* "grown", but emotionally?


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Respect is due, you come across as much older. Fair play to you.


 
innit


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 10, 2013)

killer b said:


> i think there is a difference between the type of journalism (cough) penny does and the type of journalism smokedout does too, which could account to some difference - essentially smokedout writes news stories (albeit with a very specific slant), whereas penny conducts a conversation with her readership - which would invite substantially more feedback. enough to make such a substantial difference, i dunno. but worth considering.


 
What we used to call the "journalist/columnist divide", with smokedout obviously being the journalist.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> innit


You all say this but I still can't get served in off-licences.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> that's a shame, i always used to think seumas milne was all right, could be completely wrong tho


 
His "The Enemy Within", about the state's response to the Miner's Strike of '84-85, was an excellent piece of investigative journalism.


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> You all say this but I still can't get served in off-licences.


I'm sure someone could sort you out.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> From the New Statesman, an article by Martha Gill in which she says the feminist reaction to campaigns about rape is 'a knee-jerk reaction' and 'group think'.
> http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tec...sex-little-girl-voice-internet-feminists-all-


Oh dear. Do I want to read that article? She appears to have missed the point a bit.


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

love detective said:


> (quite why you took it seriously though given we have engaged in the same kind of thing previously in a friendly/jokey manner and also how much worse the banter is on a certain other place that we both inhabit where neither of us take offence at due to understanding the spirit it is given in, I don't know)



Over there it is more obvious! Sorry for getting the hump with you over it, but you know.. a man of my reputation.


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> innit


 
Pot / kettle


----------



## equationgirl (May 10, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Oh dear. Do I want to read that article? She appears to have missed the point a bit.


I read it twice because I couldn't believe what I was reading - and this is what gets me about the New Statesman. Their columnists just seem to wax lyrical about whatever subjects take their fancy, there's no cohesion.

lauriepenny really good article this week


----------



## equationgirl (May 10, 2013)

Just to expand on my last point a little: compare what LP wrote this week with what Martha wrote.

One writes about the tipping point in society to fight back against rape culture and the other one writes about how feminists all say the same things without thinking about it enough to have an individual viewpoint (and I felt the last had echos of some of the posts seen on the Prince Bert thread recently). How can two diametrically opposed views be endorsed by the NS?


----------



## J Ed (May 10, 2013)

It's interesting that the sort of people who provide a naked defence of the worst aspects of really existing capitalism and misogyny also defend paedos. Spiked should be strung up.


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Just to expand on my last point a little: compare what LP wrote this week with what Martha wrote.
> 
> One writes about the tipping point in society to fight back against rape culture and the other one writes about how feminists all say the same things without thinking about it enough to have an individual viewpoint (and I felt the last had echos of some of the posts seen on the Prince Bert thread recently). How can two diametrically opposed views be endorsed by the NS?


The content of their columns isn't what this thread is about (what's left of it that is) though is it? We're not going to cheer LP if she says things that we agree with are we? Was it really all about that?

(And ftr, the first part of that Gill piece was excellent).


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> From the New Statesman, an article by Martha Gill in which she says the feminist reaction to campaigns about rape is 'a knee-jerk reaction' and 'group think'.
> http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tec...sex-little-girl-voice-internet-feminists-all-


 
So basically a reiteration of the "situational awareness of potential victims" versus "education and of potential abusers" argument.


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> Over there it is more obvious! Sorry for getting the hump with you over it, but you know.. a man of my reputation.


 
No problem - and sorry to everyone else for not giving advance warning of an incoming in-joke and failing to erect a suitable & responsible package of healthy & safety precautions before it was delivered.....


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Just to expand on my last point a little: compare what LP wrote this week with what Martha wrote.
> 
> One writes about the tipping point in society to fight back against rape culture and the other one writes about how feminists all say the same things without thinking about it enough to have an individual viewpoint (and I felt the last had echos of some of the posts seen on the Prince Bert thread recently). How can two diametrically opposed views be endorsed by the NS?


 
I know everyone always says this, but they're chasing traffic.  they claimed 1.4 million unique views last month, thats starting to get lucrative, they want to keep it


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

love detective said:


> No problem - and sorry to everyone else for not giving advance warning of an incoming in-joke and failing to erect all the necessary healthy & safety precautions before it was delivered.....


Please don't be so spontaneous and experienced in the future.


----------



## equationgirl (May 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The content of their columns isn't what this thread is about (what's left of it that is) though is it? We're not going to cheer LP if she says things that we agree with are we? Was it really all about that?
> 
> (And ftr, the first part of that Gill piece was excellent).


No, but I if think she's written something good for a change I'm going to say so. I always have, throughout my postings on this thread.


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> No, but I if think she's written something good for a change I'm going to say so. I always have, throughout my postings on this thread.


Oh we are then? That shifts it onto the ground of how good a columnist she is rather than a critique of the role of columnist and what it entails. Saying how shit she is is fine though, that's not necessarily related to the role.


----------



## Blagsta (May 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> Prepare to be patronised, condescended and spoken down to now your age is common knowledge.
> 
> You don't remember what it was like when Kurt died, maaan!


 
You don't remember what it was like when Ian Curtis died _maaaaan!_


----------



## equationgirl (May 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Oh we are then? That shifts it onto the ground of how good a columnist she is rather than a critique of the role of columnist and what it entails. Saying how shit she is is fine though, that's not necessarily related to the role.


No, I said _I_ was doing that.


She's written a good article. I'm not saying she's the best journalist ever and she has on occasion written good stuff before. My personal viewpoint is that she's not yet consistently good and that her articles vary considerably depending on the audience.


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> No, I said _I_ was doing that.
> 
> 
> She's written a good article. I'm not saying she's the best journalist ever and she has on occasion written good stuff before. My personal viewpoint is that she's not yet consistently good and that her articles vary considerably depending on the audience.


It doesn't matter if she does or doesn't though - that's not the basis for the criticism of her and and her bubble is it? Or have i misread the thread entirely?


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It doesn't matter if she does or doesn't though - that's not the basis for the criticism of her and and her bubble is it? Or have i misread the thread entirely?


Why aren't you having a pop at J Ed? He posted it first and then later commented on it. Surely a much more worthy target of your righteous ire?


----------



## equationgirl (May 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It doesn't matter if she does or doesn't though - that's not the basis for the criticism of her and and her bubble is it? Or have i misread the thread entirely?


I'm sorry, I thought we were critiquing her output. On this occasion I think she got it right.


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I'm sorry, I thought we were critiquing her output. On this occasion I think she got it right.


In thought we were doing something a bit more than that.


----------



## equationgirl (May 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> In thought we were doing something a bit more than that.


which is....?


----------



## rekil (May 10, 2013)

> Brendan O’Neill, is possibly the closest thing the British Left has to a professional rape apologist, and has no qualms about monetising misogyny in his Telegraph blog.


Men: Monetize yr hotness, NOT yr misogyny. Even you, mekon head.


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> which is....?


The role of journalist, and what it requires to exist, the role of specialists and what social-relations they demand (bit of immanent critique there), how recuperation works, how social-movements talk to themselves - not whether something is a good bit of writing that you (not you personally) agree with or not.


----------



## toggle (May 10, 2013)

well, you m9ight not be able to manage more than one thing at a time, some people probably can.


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

Belushi said:


> frogwoman must be over the moon, it's taken over a decade but she's no longer the youngest pnp'er


But frogster will always be that amazing 13 year old who frankly could rival most of us for maturity back then let alone now.


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

toggle said:


> well, you m9ight not be able to manage more than one thing at a time, some people probably can.


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

Got the name of that poster who claimed penny was lying about being raped yet toggle?


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> Why aren't you having a pop at J Ed? He posted it first and then later commented on it. Surely a much more worthy target of your righteous ire?


----------



## toggle (May 10, 2013)

love detective said:


> Got the name of the poster who claimed penny was lying about being raped yet toggle?


 
nope.


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

So you were talking shit/lying afterall


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

And the sincerity just keeps on shining through.


----------



## binka (May 10, 2013)

whats happened to this topic? firky trying his best to act like he is grown up and mature now, complaints that butchers isn't arguing with enough people. the last twenty or so pages have been proper rubbish


----------



## equationgirl (May 10, 2013)

binka said:


> whats happened to this topic? firky trying his best to act like he is grown up and mature now, complaints that butchers isn't arguing with enough people. the last twenty or so pages have been proper rubbish


As opposed to you who has clearly just come on to the thread to stir up trouble?


----------



## binka (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> As opposed to you who has clearly just come on to the thread to stir up trouble?


yes i apologise for interrupting, it wasn't my intention to take this thread off topic


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

Yeah, binka you shit-stirrer.


----------



## weepiper (May 10, 2013)

Bloody hell, is it the phase of the moon or what.


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

There is this thing that no one wants to talk about:



ymu said:


> OK. Let's get the thread back on track.
> 
> Seumas Milne, public school and Oxbridge twat, naive anti-imperialist polemics via a column in the Guardian. Perfectly at home on this thread.
> 
> ...


----------



## J Ed (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> There is this thing that no one wants to talk about:


 
Why do you think that is? I mean, I have nothing really to contribute to criticism to Seumas Milne, I don't know about the specifics of the case but the overall narrative that he's suggesting seems plausible to me. Regardless of his class background, he's always struck me as one of the better contributors to cif, I like his articles on Latin America.

What is wrong with Greenwald? I have to admit, I really like him and have for some time. His work on Portuguese drug policy is great.

I haven't followed the Assange issue very closely, but what are the criticisms of either of these two?


----------



## smokedout (May 10, 2013)

Greenwald completely ignored the facts and just ran off assange's pr bullshit


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

Whilst supporting the war in iraq. The _role_ of _journalist_.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 10, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> You don't remember what it was like when Ian Curtis died _maaaaan!_


 
I can bloody remember what it was like when Hendrix died, ffs!


----------



## frogwoman (May 10, 2013)

muscovyduck I hope this does not sound patronising but you are way more clever than me when I was 17, at least you have the right idea, when i was your age i was a zionist 

i would honestly never ever have guessed you were that age, i might have seemed clever on here but i was an absolute moron


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> Why aren't you having a pop at J Ed? He posted it first and then later commented on it. Surely a much more worthy target of your righteous ire?


 
What ire? Why do you  think he's angry? He's not, he's just permanently grumpy because his cricket team is shit.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> muscovyduck I hope this does not sound patronising but you are way more clever than me when I was 17, at least you have the right idea, when i was your age i was a zionist


 
Is it true you had a poster of Jabotinsky on your wall?


----------



## frogwoman (May 10, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Is it true you had a poster of Jabotinsky on your wall?


 
i didn't know who jabotinsky was, i didn't know who any of them were really. i felt sorry for ariel sharon when he had his coma and thought people didn't like him because they wanted to slag off israel


----------



## J Ed (May 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Whilst supporting the war in iraq. The _role_ of _journalist_.


 
I've never really managed to get to the bottom of that, Sam Harris accused Greenwald of in the past supporting the Iraq war but all the claims I have read so far have been pretty unconvincing http://thedailybanter.com/2013/04/glenn-greenwalds-hilarious-denial-about-his-support-for-iraq-war/


----------



## frogwoman (May 10, 2013)

seriously, i didn't even know who most of these people were, and if someone had mentioned jabotinsky or whatever to me and some of the things they did, i'd just assume that was propaganda to slag off israel, i remember telling people that many of the things israel were supposed to have done was filmed by people to make money and that sort of stuff

i was a fucking idiot, a bit racist as well. i don't mind admitting it now though, and i know that if i had known (and believed) the truth of what was going on there, i'd never have agreed with it at all but i had all these naive views about it. i don't think i ever agreed with it all tbh, but i could like rationalise it so that i did and i can remember argueing things with people which if i heard now it would literally be the land of a thousand facepalms

at least i found this stuff out for myself though, i dont mind laughing about it now, but its given me at least a bit of an insight into the sort of pseudo answers that zionism etc can provide.

there are loads of people out there who were way more intelligent and mature than i was at my age, they might not be so now, but when i look at that entire period of my life and what an absolute dick i was at times, it just convinces me that the whole conept of intelligence is a bit flawed tbh


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> which is....?


 
Critiquing the political and experiential class bubble Ms Penny and many of her cohorts exist in.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The role of journalist, and what it requires to exist, the role of specialists and what social-relations they demand (bit of immanent critique there), how recuperation works, how social-movements talk to themselves - not whether something is a good bit of writing that you (not you personally) agree with or not.


 
You forgot "how 'specialists' are made, and by whom".


----------



## DotCommunist (May 10, 2013)

binka said:


> whats happened to this topic? firky trying his best to act like he is grown up and mature now, complaints that* butchers isn't arguing with enough people*. the last twenty or so pages have been proper rubbish


 

That never happened. Phonebox/fight/onhisown


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Why do you think that is? I mean, I have nothing really to contribute to criticism to Seumas Milne, I don't know about the specifics of the case but the overall narrative that he's suggesting seems plausible to me. Regardless of his class background, he's always struck me as one of the better contributors to cif, I like his articles on Latin America.
> 
> What is wrong with Greenwald? I have to admit, I really like him and have for some time. His work on Portuguese drug policy is great.
> 
> I haven't followed the Assange issue very closely, but what are the criticisms of either of these two?


Milne is better but it's very student anti-imperialism.

With Assange, read the article. He ties a safety rope and then proceeds to lie about the Swedish legal process. He is not wanted for questioning, he is wanted to face charges in court, is the first. But there's a pack of myths in there. Jack of Kent/David Allen Green kept updating legal sources and debunking myths for a while.

For Milne, it demonstrates shit instincts in the first place (it clearly was not a set-up by that point) and a willingness to trivialise rape when it suits the situation. And shoddy journalism because I sent him several verifiable legit sources and he refused to correct his errors, which means they are now deliberate lies.

Glenn Greenwald is all over the fucking place. He has this astonishing ramble- blog on Assange. He's trying to do a Hitchens backwards I think. Supported war on Iraq, now all frothy-mouthed anti-imperialist and all-round American Liberal.

The heroes and villains framework is a bit limiting. Milne has produced some useful work. Everyone mentioned or posting on this thread has also. And all have been idiots or mistaken or misled or a bit of a cunt at times too.

It doesn't strike me as very useful.

Assange took down a few people - Chomsky being the most regretful and Greenwald the least (outside the celebrity wank club). Milne has got off too lightly, I think. He belongs with the other flawed and self-appointed spokespeople of the left. I'll dig out the tweets if that is still possible, but that article (inc date and what had been published in English by that time) proves that he was intent on telling a convenient story, not illuminating anything like the truth.

I am not an obsessive watcher of the game. I want the game to be over. If any of those who do pay attention have some dirt on this dishonest little poser, and feel up to posting it, that would be interesting.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> seriously, i didn't even know who most of these people were, and if someone had mentioned jabotinsky or whatever to me and some of the things they did, i'd just assume that was propaganda to slag off israel, i remember telling people that many of the things israel were supposed to have done was filmed by people to make money and that sort of stuff
> 
> i was a fucking idiot, a bit racist as well. i don't mind admitting it now though, and i know that if i had known (and believed) the truth of what was going on there, i'd never have agreed with it at all but i had all these naive views about it. i don't think i ever agreed with it all tbh, but i could like rationalise it so that i did and i can remember argueing things with people which if i heard now it would literally be the land of a thousand facepalms
> 
> ...


 
Thing is, you did "the right thing" and chose to educate yourself.  Then, when the facts didn't fit your opinions, you changed your opinions.
You'd be surprised how many people don't and won't do that.


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> What ire? Why do you think he's angry? He's not, he's just permanently grumpy because his cricket team is shit.


And picking on the second person to mention it, and she didn't even post the article. Whilst completely ignoring the bloke who did post it and made a second post on the topic.

A bloke I have a lot of respect for. It is @butchersapron's choice of target (singular) that I am raising an eyebrow at. It strikes me as a little strange. Perhaps it is just me.


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> seriously, i didn't even know who most of these people were, and if someone had mentioned jabotinsky or whatever to me and some of the things they did, i'd just assume that was propaganda to slag off israel, i remember telling people that many of the things israel were supposed to have done was filmed by people to make money and that sort of stuff
> 
> i was a fucking idiot, a bit racist as well. i don't mind admitting it now though, and i know that if i had known (and believed) the truth of what was going on there, i'd never have agreed with it at all but i had all these naive views about it. i don't think i ever agreed with it all tbh, but i could like rationalise it so that i did and i can remember argueing things with people which if i heard now it would literally be the land of a thousand facepalms
> 
> ...


You were never a dick. There was a lot of surprise when people found out how old you were and it continued for 10 years everytime someone matched your current age with your log-in age and accused you of bull-shitting.


----------



## frogwoman (May 10, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Thing is, you did "the right thing" and chose to educate yourself. Then, when the facts didn't fit your opinions, you changed your opinions.
> You'd be surprised how many people don't and won't do that.


 
thing is, i think anyone can change their opinions given the right circumstances, to be honest i'm glad i wasn't born a few years later when the occupy movement was going on, and i actually had things like the iraq war protests back to look on, i could imagine my teenage self getting involved in something pretty nasty if i'd been born a few years later and my associations with the left had been with things like the occupy movement and if i hadn't had this website, i think this website actually helped to educate me out of the bullshit zionism even if i didn't really believe a lot of you at the time.

I was a bit of a conspiraloon as well and had a "unique" zionist take on 9/11 and the iraq war 

i think anyone can change their opinions. i think a lot of it is also how other opposing views appear to you at the time, like if they appear reasonable and rational then although you might not accept them at the time you're more likely to consider them later on.


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> And the sincerity just keeps on shining through.


 
what's wrong ymu, only a few hours ago on another thread you yourself were demanding that people present evidence when accusing others on the thread of doing something

In these hysterical times, please have the courtesy to prove your allegation when making it.

seems like the old evidence to back up claims route is something you're only in favour of when it suits you - sincerity shining through indeed


----------



## equationgirl (May 10, 2013)

Can we please just stop sniping at each other and get on with the thread? Now?


----------



## frogwoman (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> You were never a dick. There was a lot of surprise when people found out how old you were and it continued for 10 years everytime someone matched your current age with your log-in age and accused you of bull-shitting.


 
i was a dick, offline and on other forums, trust me on this.


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I've never really managed to get to the bottom of that, Sam Harris accused Greenwald of in the past supporting the Iraq war but all the claims I have read so far have been pretty unconvincing http://thedailybanter.com/2013/04/glenn-greenwalds-hilarious-denial-about-his-support-for-iraq-war/


Pretty simple i think. He supported it. He tries to put it within the context of a developing awareness, but refuses to really own it as it puts his current focus under pressure - why is he not not being led up the path today etc? How was he able to be so naive at that time etc, hero worship rather than critique etc The John Gray credibility problem.


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

love detective said:


> what's wrong ymu, only a few hours ago on another thread you yourself were demanding that people present evidence when accusing others on the thread of doing something
> 
> In these hysterical times, please have the courtesy to prove your allegation when making it.
> 
> seems like the old evidence to back up claims route is something you're only in favour of when it suits you - sincerity shining through indeed


The evidence is in your attempt to undermine Firky by insinuating that he was a paedo and, deliberately or carelessly, demean a 17 year old woman by implying that her primary purpose, now that it is known that she is a young woman, is to receive unwanted sexual attention from men.

Thanks for that. And all the other ways you have made it clear over the last few pages that your gloriously righteous theory is precisely skin deep. You don't give a shit and you don't even see why you should.

Like I said, you're part of the problem. You've actually managed to pick and then repeatedly defend the wrong line the week fucking Laurie Penny gets it near spot on and whilst the SWP is still imploding due to its own lack of sincerity on the 'women are part of the class too' line.

Fucking disgraceful.


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Can we please just stop sniping at each other and get on with the thread? Now?


 
i'll post what i like thanks

you, ymu and toggle may be keen to let this mystery person who claimed Penny had lied about being raped retain their anonymity, but don't see why everyone should take the same view on it


----------



## DotCommunist (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Can we please just stop sniping at each other and get on with the thread? Now?


 

But I just got my barrat .50


----------



## equationgirl (May 10, 2013)

Fuck it, I'm off this thread.


----------



## weepiper (May 10, 2013)

*sigh*


----------



## killer b (May 10, 2013)

fucksake, there was no paedo insinuation. wtf?


----------



## goldenecitrone (May 10, 2013)

Is it something to do with firky getting flashed on the bus? Wires well and truly crossed here I think.


----------



## J Ed (May 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I was a bit of a conspiraloon as well and had a "unique" zionist take on 9/11 and the iraq war
> 
> i think anyone can change their opinions. i think a lot of it is also how other opposing views appear to you at the time, like if they appear reasonable and rational then although you might not accept them at the time you're more likely to consider them later on.


 
ymu this is why I'm reluctant to criticise Greenwald too much for his previous ambivalence re: the Iraq War, especially since he's a very important voice speaking against Obama's wars and assault on civil liberties. I quite like his writing too, although the constant sarcasm isn't for everyone...

I absolutely take the point on his approach to Assange, though some good might have come out of both of that and the SWP scandal in that it exposed a lot of latent misogyny and misplaced solidarity that people were in denial about. Hopefully that will lead to better behaviour in the future.

I dunno about the good guys vs bad guys narrative being unhelpful, as human beings it's very difficult to escape that sort of dichotomy. It's built in as a defence mechanism, and I'm not entirely sure we should resist that when it comes to a lot of Anglo-American foreign policy, especially when I think about recent episodes like the coup in Honduras and the current US attempts to delegitimise the Venezuelan government. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong about making a moral case for certain issues.


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> The evidence is in your attempt to undermine Firky by insinuating that he was a paedo and, deliberately or carelessly, demean a 17 year old woman by implying that her primary purpose, now that it is known that she is a young woman, is to receive unwanted sexual attention from men.


 
That's not fair. It's a joke that goes back some years, between love detective, revol, madusa, a few others and myself. It's so old that I can't even remember how it started, I think it originated on another forum. I missed it on this occasion and did take it the wrong way but I don't think any offence was really taken and LD has apologised.


----------



## Belushi (May 10, 2013)

Oh FFS


----------



## killer b (May 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> That's not fair. It's a joke that goes back some years, between love detective, revol, madusa, a few others and myself. It's so old that I can't even remember how it started, I think it originated on another forum. I missed it on this occasion and did take it the wrong way but I don't think any offence was really taken and LD has apologised.


nor is 17 a child ffs.


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> The evidence is in your attempt to undermine Firky by insinuating that he was a paedo and, deliberately or carelessly, demean a 17 year old woman by implying that her primary purpose, now that it is known that she is a young woman, is to receive unwanted sexual attention from men.
> 
> Thanks for that. And all the other ways you have made it clear over the last few pages that your gloriously righteous theory is precisely skin deep. You don't give a shit and you don't even see why you should.
> 
> ...


 
you're all over the place - you don't have a clue what's going on in the majority of the threads you so deeply, pompously and dogmatically involve yourself in

if you'd been following the thread with even a minimal level of attention there's no way you would have posted what you just did there

as you did post what you did though you've just proved what i've said about you all along from the start of this little exchange, you are either unable or unwilling to read or comprehend what's been said before you wade in like a silly pompous shit. The only posts you are interested in reading are your own.

you need to sort yourself out


----------



## DotCommunist (May 10, 2013)

my days, I believe we all had a good time ribbing revol in the same vein- a Skins thing

'low this


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

If you want a punch bag here's one:


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

J Ed said:


> ymu this is why I'm reluctant to criticise Greenwald too much for his previous ambivalence re: the Iraq War, especially since he's a very important voice speaking against Obama's wars and assault on civil liberties. I quite like his writing too, although the constant sarcasm isn't for everyone...
> 
> I absolutely take the point on his approach to Assange, though some good might have come out of both of that and the SWP scandal in that it exposed a lot of latent misogyny and misplaced solidarity that people were in denial about. Hopefully that will lead to better behaviour in the future.
> 
> I dunno about the good guys vs bad guys narrative being unhelpful, as human beings it's very difficult to escape that sort of dichotomy. It's built in as a defence mechanism, and I'm not entirely sure we should resist that when it comes to a lot of Anglo-American foreign policy, especially when I think about recent episodes like the coup in Honduras and the current US attempts to delegitimise the Venezuelan government. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong about making a moral case for certain issues.


But this thread is not about individual items of writing (unless it is ) it is about the people who allegedly represent the left in the mainstream.

Winchester & Magdalene, IIRC. Or Magdalen, the Oxford one.

Prime imposter material, surely. Or are we back to judging content and not the personal again. I can never quite tell.


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> That's not fair. It's a joke that goes back some years, between love detective, revol, madusa, a few others and myself. It's so old that I can't even remember how it started, I think it originated on another forum. I missed it on this occasion and did take it the wrong way but I don't think any offence was really taken and LD has apologised.


I know the joke. It was the context and, more importantly, the non-apologetic nature of the stream of overly defensive apology posts. You are free to judge him sincere. I am calling bullshit.


----------



## BigTom (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I'm sorry, I thought we were critiquing her output. On this occasion I think she got it right.





butchersapron said:


> The role of journalist, and what it requires to exist, the role of specialists and what social-relations they demand (bit of immanent critique there), how recuperation works, how social-movements talk to themselves - not whether something is a good bit of writing that you (not you personally) agree with or not.


 
Personally, I thought we were doing both, as well as looking at the role of class/private schools/oxbridge in the media and how that relates to social movements.


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Personally, I thought we were doing both, as well as looking at the role of class/private schools/oxbridge in the media and how that relates to social movements.


 



			
				me said:
			
		

> Saying how shit she is is fine though, that's not necessarily related to the role.


 
Thought i'd covered my back - in this now pointless thread.


----------



## BigTom (May 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Thought i'd covered my back - in this now pointless thread.


 
It's really not pointless, unless everything that is to be said about the role of the journalist / class etc. has been said.  I read the Owen Jones thread too and I like the critiques of the journalism, but it hasn't (and doesn't) interest me anywhere near as much as the critiques of the role.

If it's fine to say how shit she is, why isn't it fine to say when she's good? (genuine question btw, why would her being good be neccesarily related to the role, when her being shit may or may not be?)


----------



## DotCommunist (May 10, 2013)

I'd recon cos how good she can or can't be is totally divorced from the mechanisms of privilege by which she got the platform to be occasionally good but mostly facepalm. The way the media bubble itself is a platform for the fail or not fail articles, paid and how these people are come to such platform.


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

BigTom said:


> It's really not pointless, unless everything that is to be said about the role of the journalist / class etc. has been said. I read the Owen Jones thread too and I like the critiques of the journalism, but it hasn't (and doesn't) interest me anywhere near as much as the critiques of the role.
> 
> If it's fine to say how shit she is, why isn't it fine to say when she's good? (genuine question btw, why would her being good be neccesarily related to the role, when her being shit may or may not be?)


Because the shitness is just her, to attack on that ground of shit journalism can only lead to _defences of good journalism _rather than attacks on the role of journalist full stop.


----------



## BigTom (May 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Because the shitness is just her, to attack on that ground of shit journalism can only lead to _defences of good journalism _rather than attacks on the role of journalist full stop.


 
cheers, makes perfect sense


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

No interest in shitting all over Milne from the great height that appears to be well deserved given this new clarity?



> The younger son of the former BBC Director General Alasdair Milne, Milne attended Winchester College and read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford and Economics at Birkbeck College, London University. His sister, Kirsty, was a visiting scholar at Harvard University and as a journalist has worked on _The Scotsman_, the _New Statesman_, _New Society_ and the BBC.[1][6][7]


 
Seriously:


> *Seumas Milne* (born 1958) is a British journalist and writer known for his left-wing views.[1][2][3] A columnist and associate editor at _The Guardian_ newspaper, he is author of a best-selling book[4] about the 1984-5 British miners' strike, _The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners_,[5] which focuses on the role of MI5 and Special Branch in the dispute.


He is known for his left-wing views.

Die motherfucker, die.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> muscovyduck I hope this does not sound patronising but you are way more clever than me when I was 17, at least you have the right idea, when i was your age i was a zionist
> 
> i would honestly never ever have guessed you were that age, i might have seemed clever on here but i was an absolute moron


I'm sure you weren't a moron. You don't seem like a moron


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

She was, total moron


----------



## killer b (May 10, 2013)

'was'?


----------



## rekil (May 10, 2013)

Musical interlude time? Babes In Toyland's Fontanelle album is 21 years old. They'd give Laura and the intersectionality crew a bit of a headache I imagine, eg, "you fuckin bitch, I hope your insides rot" sounds a bit misogyny, 'but they're women', yeah but they're "old" etc.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> She was, total moron


Say it isn't so frogwoman


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

copliker said:


> Musical interlude time? Babes In Toyland's Fontanelle album is 21 years old. They'd give Laura and the intersectionality crew a bit of a headache I imagine, eg, "you fuckin bitch, I hope your insides rot" sounds a bit misogyny, 'but they're women', yeah but they're "old" etc.



Fucking brilliant band. Almost got to put them on in Bristol.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 10, 2013)

Lets relive this moment to get us back on track:


lauriepenny said:


> Good grief, I've just discovered this. I'm not sure whether to be flattered or weirded out that you've all spent 208 pages on it. I've no idea why you care so much about my appearance and toilet habits.


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

My favourite post on the whole thread is the one from the Morning Star journalist. Let me go get it


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

You could hear her jaw drop from here.



Rob Ray said:


> Laurie Penny wrote: "then worked as a sub-editor on the Morning Star"
> 
> As a former co-worker I'd suggest not using your what, three months (if that), "working" for the Star as material for your "I didn't just walk into a national job" schtick. If the Star had operated as a normal workplace you'd have been repeatedly hauled over the coals for failing to show the slightest interest in doing anything which didn't advance the career of Laurie Penny. Did you even join the union in the end? We certainly asked you enough times and this was during a period when it actually mattered.
> 
> ...


----------



## DrRingDing (May 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i felt sorry for ariel sharon when he had his coma and thought people didn't like him because they wanted to slag off israel


 
Sweet Jesus froggy. That brings me hope.


----------



## frogwoman (May 10, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> Sweet Jesus froggy. That brings me hope.


 
Yeah dude, seriously you don't want to know. If you knew how much of a massive zionist I was you'd view me in a completely different light, I knew people here (on urban75) would react badly so I hid most of it from people on here.

I remember telling people that what went on in Israel wasn't as bad as scandals in the NHS being covered up and people in the UK dying in police custody 

these days of course, I've read a lot about the conflict from all sides, I am not sympathetic to zionism at all but I understand why disaffected young people might turn to far-right politics because it gives them a sort of pseudo answers to the problems of the world, and problems that they themselves have experienced, and a community.

And for that reason I don't think that the approach along the lines of Laurie Penny's approach is particularly valid, especially when the person saying it frequently has little idea what's going on in your life or the sort of pressures you face every day. If anything lecturing people is just going to make the problem worse especially because the people doing the finger wagging usually have little idea what else is going on in your life to make you think that zionism (or whatever) is an attractive option, and little idea of why their own politics appear so unattractive.

i know i didn't when i had a massive reaction against all that shit


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> I'm sure you weren't a moron. You don't seem like a moron


Moron is a temporary state of affairs. My abiding memory-image of frogster is sound as a pound and really well read. I admit I missed the Zionist interlude but I have been reading her from before that. She's always been the aces and a breath of fucking fresh air in the mustiest corners of P&P.

People don't change. Their ideas and ability to act on them does. Frog hasn't changed a bit, beyond gaining confidence and joy.


----------



## frogwoman (May 10, 2013)

I hid it from people on here because I knew how people would react


----------



## DotCommunist (May 10, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I hid it from people on here because I knew how people would react


 

but the question remains- TWWO STATES OR ONE!!11ELEVEN


----------



## frogwoman (May 10, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> but the question remains- TWWO STATES OR ONE!!11ELEVEN


 
THERE CAN BE NO SOLUTION UNDER THE CURRENT BOURGEOIS SYSTEM


----------



## frogwoman (May 10, 2013)

under decadent capitalism all states are oppressors etc


----------



## DotCommunist (May 10, 2013)

transitionally though.....two state untill it merges into one by inevitability. Like the GFA, which has deffo worked and not become a cap on a boil


----------



## frogwoman (May 10, 2013)

there can be no solution as long as capitalism still exploits the toiling masses etc


----------



## Belushi (May 10, 2013)

Get a room you pair


----------



## killer b (May 10, 2013)

this is their room.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 10, 2013)

killer b said:


> this is their room.


 

no listening!


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

Leave them kids alone!

The youth are the only ones making sense right now. My generation are apparently just waiting to die whilst exercising whatever futile power they have over the shininess of their ideological halo and their pursuit of Oxbridge twats. Apart from Seumas Milne. The BBC background makes for a more acceptable face of faux-leftism. Or something.


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

Do you do role play, Dotty as Benjamin Netanyahu and Froggy as Mahmoud Abbas?


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

Voice of a generation.


----------



## J Ed (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> Leave them kids alone!
> 
> The youth are the only ones making sense right now. My generation are apparently just waiting to die whilst exercising whatever futile power they have over the shininess of their ideological halo and their pursuit of Oxbridge twats. Apart from Seumas Milne. The BBC background makes for a more acceptable face of faux-leftism. Or something.


 
Wish I was as optimistic about my generation as you seem to be.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 10, 2013)

Firky said:


> Do you do role play, Dotty as Benjamin Netanyahu and Froggy as Mahmoud Abbas?


 

esther/haman


----------



## butchersapron (May 10, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Wish I was as optimistic about my generation as you seem to be.


Is there a crasser way to argue that people are isolated fashion shaped fools than the idea of generations?


----------



## ymu (May 10, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Wish I was as optimistic about my generation as you seem to be.


You're a young 'un too?

I rest my fucking case.


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

Didn't know where to stick this but seeing as this threads' full of twitter quotes from vacuous posh fuckwits:



> Nadine Dorries MP ‏@NadineDorriesMP
> Twitter is and has become dominated by the lower life on the left wing of politics. #fact


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 10, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> From the New Statesman, an article by Martha Gill in which she says the feminist reaction to campaigns about rape is 'a knee-jerk reaction' and 'group think'.
> http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tec...sex-little-girl-voice-internet-feminists-all-


 
seeing as they work in the same office, i think lauriepenny
 really needs to pop next door and have words.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 10, 2013)

yeah but naddine dorries has long been known as scum to 90% of people, she just has to deal with that percentage when she gets into twitter


----------



## love detective (May 10, 2013)

ymu said:


> I know the joke. It was the context and, more importantly, the non-apologetic nature of the stream of overly defensive apology posts. You are free to judge him sincere. I am calling bullshit.


 
I don't spend that much time here these days so only really been posting and reading this thread recently. I've been reading a few other threads tonight though and i'm struck by both the number and wide range of posters who have felt the need to tell you that you are either out of order in your approach or increasingly incoherent and not making any sense in your posts

So for your own benefit, i'm not going to continue this exchange with you. I don't know nor want to know the cause of your increasingly strange behaviour here, but I suggest you take some time away from the computer because you aren't doing yourself any favours by getting whipped up into a frenzy about things that you think are happening but aren't on here.


----------



## Firky (May 10, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> yeah but naddine dorries has long been known as scum to 90% of people, she just has to deal with that percentage when she gets into twitter


 
That quote is from months ago too but it seems to be doing the rounds again.


----------



## ymu (May 11, 2013)

_Forget about the quality, feel the width._

That;s the spirit!


----------



## chilango (May 11, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Fucking brilliant band. Almost got to put them on in Bristol.



Didn't Kat end up working as a waitress whilst fucking Courtney Love raked in the dosh with Hole? Grrrr.

Spanking Machine came out 23 years ago!


----------



## chilango (May 11, 2013)

I think the video below is a neat distillation of the spirit of this debate. Taking a dialectical approach (using what some might call the process of _aufhebung) _to the matters at hand.



*Note to youngsters* (frogwoman, muscovyduck, Delroy Booth, lauriepenny et al):

Beavis and Butthead were, many ways, the direct precursors of today's so called _commentariat_. Using their self-declared status as the "voice of a generation" to gain a media platform which they then exploited in the development of a personal brand.

Babes in Toyland were a popular beat combo during the *Golden Age of Music*, when there were proper tunes that you could dance to and that, not like today's rubbish which is just noise......


----------



## andysays (May 11, 2013)

ymu said:


> The evidence is in your attempt to undermine Firky by insinuating that he was a paedo and, deliberately or carelessly, demean a 17 year old woman by implying that her primary purpose, now that it is known that she is a young woman, is to receive unwanted sexual attention from men.
> 
> Thanks for that. And all the other ways you have made it clear over the last few pages that your gloriously righteous theory is precisely skin deep. You don't give a shit and you don't even see why you should.
> 
> ...


 
More disingenuous, pseudo-mind-reading distortionary bollocks.

Self-appointed thread crusader and police-person in projecting her own paranoia on to others shock?


----------



## andysays (May 11, 2013)

ymu said:


> Moron is a temporary state of affairs...


 
"Moron" was coined in 1910 by psychologist Henry H. Goddard[3] from the Ancient Greek word _μωρός_ (_moros_), which meant "dull"[4] (as opposed to _oxy_, which meant "sharp" (see also: oxymoron)), and used to describe a person with a mental age in adulthood of between 8 and 12 on the Binet scale.[5] It was once applied to people with an IQ of 51–70, being superior in one degree to "imbecile" (IQ of 26–50) and superior in two degrees to "idiot" (IQ of 0–25). The word _moron_, along with others including, "idiotic", "imbecilic", "stupid", and "feeble-minded", was formerly considered a valid descriptor in the psychological community, but it is now deprecated in use by psychologists​​Self-righteous language police in inability to understand language yet again shock?

I think I'll put you back on "ignore" now...


----------



## DrRingDing (May 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I hid it from people on here because I knew how people would react


 
So, fancy a tour of duty with the ISM?


----------



## Nice one (May 11, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> When did wanting to punch someone over the internet become misogynistic?


 
context is the key.This thread there has been a constant barrage of abuse (misogynistic or otherwise) and a whole heap of bullying directed almost exclusively at laurie penny (with a few obvious detours) - from the absurd "she is just shit" to the frankly creepy-stalker stuff. Within that context is perfectly okay for a man to want to punch a woman in the face. As long as the subject has been suitably belittled, humiliated, demeaned, de-humanised beforehand it makes perfect sense. I don't know if it's misogynistic or not but expressing delight in wanting to punch a women in the face is just fucked up in my book. No-one batting an eyelid when it happens is equally fucked up.


----------



## fractionMan (May 11, 2013)

But it'd be ok if LP was a bloke?  Is that what you're saying?


----------



## frogwoman (May 11, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> So, fancy a tour of duty with the ISM?


 
i would actually, but i don't have the time or money to go to palestine for a few months unpaid frankly and i don't fancy being chucked in a cell by the israeli government.


----------



## DrRingDing (May 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i would actually, but i don't have the time or money to go to palestine for a few months unpaid tbh and i don't fancy being chucked in a cell


 
You could get a free trip..... http://www.birthrightisrael.com/VisitingIsrael/Pages/Eligibility.aspx

You can do it on the cheap.


----------



## frogwoman (May 11, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> You could get a free trip..... http://www.birthrightisrael.com/VisitingIsrael/Pages/Eligibility.aspx
> 
> You can do it on the cheap.


 
i know, but i don't fancy being arrested and interrogated and thrown in a cell and having that permanently on my record, it wouldn't be good, and most people who go out there go out there for a few months, and i can't afford to go to somewhere for that length of time and not be working.

i'd like to go though but just for a short visit


----------



## DotCommunist (May 11, 2013)

You can get sponsored to go lol 'hey sponsor my jolly to the middle east'


----------



## ymu (May 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i know, but i don't fancy being arrested and interrogated and thrown in a cell and having that permanently on my record, it wouldn't be good, and most people who go out there go out there for a few months, and i can't afford to go to somewhere for that length of time and not be working.
> 
> i'd like to go though but just for a short visit


It has no effect on your record. I would much rather be banged up abroad with the consulate keeping an eye out and both them and the other prisoners cheering us on and handling all the paperwork, than get a criminal record and proper prison here.

It's easy doing time when you know you can get out by signing a bit of paper. Or even if you just know when it will be over and can imagine the time without panicking. The very worst period for us was the last night, after we were granted bail but whilst the prison were fucking us over and making it difficult to access credit cards to post it and taking forever to process us out.

And I did spy shit! Tucked my memory card in the back of my fag packet when the soldiers nabbed us so it wouldn't get wiped. Fags are the only thing you can take into prison. A visitor who shall remain nameless is offered a fag. "I don't smoke. " <pushes packet towards unnamed person> "You do now." It got to US indymedia before we met the governor. 


That's my Danish buddy. Fresh out of national service. Handy guy, as was uncle Brooklyn who charmed every US-Israeli soldier into submission. 

Having the whole of Israeli civil society supporting you and Palestinians advising you is very cushty. We were offered a deal by a desperate prosecutor and an unimpressed judge but we said no, Palestinians don't get to choose an easy way out and we want Israel to admit it is deporting us under martial law. We got time to reconsider, every Palestinian we spoke to, over many hours of tea and Arak, said 'fuck 'em' so we said; fuck you. And made them not convict us of anything. Deported under our own reconaissance. 

Sitting in prison is easy. Everyone else does the hard work whilst you read shit magazines and cause trouble for the guards.

Do it. I've said Black Laundry for years. Would suit you down to the ground. Anarcho-queer-anti-occupation. Think they're still going. Anarchists Against the Wall. Loads of Palestinian-led, Israeli-led, foreign-led NGO stuff.

And you should do the birthright thing. Both sides matter. See both sides as they want you to see it.


----------



## Nice one (May 11, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> But it'd be ok if LP was a bloke? Is that what you're saying?


 
if laurie penny was a bloke would you dedicate 2 years of your life permanently slagging him off? 

But i suppose it's to do with background and upbringing - the idea that it's unacceptable to hit a woman was one i was brought up with. But for a man to take pleasure in fantasising about hitting a woman and getting tacit approval for such an expression, definitely fucked up in my book.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 11, 2013)

don't forget loving your old mum and always getting your round in


----------



## frogwoman (May 11, 2013)

i'd consider the birthright thing, it's two weeks and free. i just can't afford to go for longer and to put myself at personal risk, at the moment I cant afford to miss a day off work let alone be detained indefinitely. and being thrown in a cell might be no biggie to experienced activists and all part of the "experience" and that, but i don't fancy being arrested and possibly tortured. being put in a jail cell isnt my idea of a fun holiday. while there you've still got to buy things and take out money and it all costs money.

besides my grandma and to some extent my dad sees things a bit differently and i'd rather not risk upsetting her over something like that.


----------



## Nice one (May 11, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> don't forget loving your old mum and always getting your round in


 
true enough mate  How can I hate women, my mum's one.


----------



## DownwardDog (May 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> ​i would actually, but i don't have the time or money to go to palestine for a few months unpaid frankly and i don't fancy being chucked in a cell by the israeli government.


 
They don't chuck you in a cell just for going there!

I wouldn't bother anyway, it's an absolute shit hole. I went with my brother in law to the WB for shits, giggles and, for him, real estate investment. It was fucking horrible.


----------



## frogwoman (May 11, 2013)

but if you're going with ISM etc there's a good chance of it.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 11, 2013)

Nice one said:


> if laurie penny was a bloke would you dedicate 2 years of your life permanently slagging him off?


Seriously, have you actually read the thread?


----------



## Nice one (May 11, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Seriously, have you actually read the thread?


 
every last painful post. It's not been fun, has it for you?


----------



## frogwoman (May 11, 2013)

ymu said:


> It has no effect on your record. I would much rather be banged up abroad with the consulate keeping an eye out and both them and the other prisoners cheering us on and handling all the paperwork, than get a criminal record and proper prison here.
> 
> It's easy doing time when you know you can get out by signing a bit of paper. Or even if you just know when it will be over and can imagine the time without panicking. The very worst period for us was the last night, after we were granted bail but whilst the prison were fucking us over and making it difficult to access credit cards to post it and taking forever to process us out.
> 
> ...





seriously, being able to go to prison and not worry about consequences is a privilege.


----------



## ymu (May 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i'd consider the birthright thing, it's two weeks and free. i just can't afford to go for longer and to put myself at personal risk, at the moment I cant afford to miss a day off work let alone be detained indefinitely. and being thrown in a cell might be no biggie to experienced activists and all part of the "experience" and that, but i don't fancy being arrested and possibly tortured. being put in a jail cell isnt my idea of a fun holiday. while there you've still got to buy things and take out money and it all costs money.
> 
> besides my grandma and to some extent my dad sees things a bit differently and i'd rather not risk upsetting her over something like that.


But that is incredibly rare. The worst fear is not that bad. Most people say there is one moment when all their fears crystallise, usually the first tank or aggro soldiers or whatever. And then it passes in seconds. The worst has happened and it was fine.

Injury is rarer still. But you can do completely safe actions. Checkpoint watch is a group of dedicated Israeli women who observe checkpoints. Men are not excluded but it is primarily women because their sons man those checkpoints and the purpose is to humanise as well as deter.

No competent group will put people at risk they don't want to take. Including arrest or imprisonment. There's always an escape route for legal observers, media support and comms. There has to be. Take a job where you need to be protected. 

And the insights into class and power are profound, IMO. The collaborative nature of communities under siege. Explain anarchism to a Palestinian, especially from a camp or Gaza, and they will say "Oh, OK. We do it like that too." Political parties are underpinned by welfare and social support, combined with protest and strikes.Lots of Irish activists there too. First time I understood the horror in NI. Properly. Catholic school. I always knew. But not knew. iyswim.

Anyway. Loads of options. Don't just see one side. Do it when there is time to do both. After a good bout of seasonal work or summat. Between home and not, to save a month's rent and bills. Ask for sponsors. Some people have money but no time. They might be grateful for the chance to do something more than support MAP.


----------



## Corax (May 11, 2013)

Firky said:


> Prepare to be patronised, condescended and spoken down to now your age is common knowledge.
> 
> You don't remember what it was like when Kurt died, maaan!


Wasn't Froggy even younger when she started posting on here? I don't recall her being spoken down to because of it - she was respected from the start IIRC, because of the content and quality of her postings.


----------



## Corax (May 11, 2013)

Blimey.  I came to read this thread after it was mentioned elsewhere, but it's 646 bloody pages!  

Is there a sensible place to start?

Or some York notes or something...?


----------



## J Ed (May 11, 2013)

Corax said:


> Blimey. I came to read this thread after it was mentioned elsewhere, but it's 646 bloody pages!
> 
> Is there a sensible place to start?
> 
> Or some York notes or something...?


 
A month back someone said that they were starting from the beginning, haven't heard them mention it since so maybe they are still working on it...


----------



## andysays (May 11, 2013)

J Ed said:


> A month back someone said that they were starting from the beginning, haven't heard them mention it since so maybe they are still working on it...


 
I AM THE WAY INTO THE DOLEFUL CITY,​I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL GRIEF,​I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN RACE.​JUSTICE IT WAS THAT MOVED MY GREAT CREATOR;​DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE CREATED ME,​AND HIGHEST WISDOM JOINED WITH PRIMAL LOVE.​BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS​WERE MADE, AND I SHALL LAST ETERNALLY.​ABANDON EVERY HOPE, ALL YOU WHO ENTER.​


----------



## J Ed (May 11, 2013)

Nice one said:


> But i suppose it's to do with background and upbringing - the idea that it's unacceptable to hit a woman was one i was brought up with. But for a man to take pleasure in fantasising about hitting a woman and getting tacit approval for such an expression, definitely fucked up in my book.


 
Obviously that's fine and everything and a good principle to live by (especially when it comes to just not liking a particular journo/what that particular journo represents!) but it would be very stupid if you applied that to all people and all situations. I know someone in an abusive relationship who has been attacked by his girlfriend with a knife several times, he's hit her in self-defence and I think you'd have to be a bit of an idiot to suggest that he's in the wrong there.


----------



## ymu (May 11, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Obviously that's fine and everything and a good principle to live by (especially when it comes to just not liking a particular journo/what that particular journo represents!) but it would be very stupid if you applied that to all people and all situations. I know someone in an abusive relationship who has been attacked by his girlfriend with a knife several times, he's hit her in self-defence and I think you'd have to be a bit of an idiot to suggest that he's in the wrong there.


Yes, but that has nothing to do with voicing violent fantasies:



Nice one said:


> if laurie penny was a bloke would you dedicate 2 years of your life permanently slagging him off?
> 
> But i suppose it's to do with background and upbringing - the idea that it's unacceptable to hit a woman was one i was brought up with. *But for a man to take pleasure in fantasising about hitting a woman and getting tacit approval for such an expression, definitely fucked up in my book*.


I'm not a fan of the white knight shit. Don't hit anyone. And don't fucking fantasise about hitting someone like you're getting off on it and/or have nothing useful to say. Self-defence is not violence.

Not hard.

(Not aimed at you, just rerailing).


----------



## frogwoman (May 11, 2013)

being able to do something like that is dependent on so many things - having an employer who will give you the time off to go, and pay you enough to be able to go, having a family who will support you if you are arrested and won't either freak out or disown you, having enough money to go in the first place, not having to fear consequences (financial, social, etc) from being arrested 

my mum's brother was in jail for 10 years for political reasons, i know for a fact she'd freak out if I did something similar.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 11, 2013)

Firky said:


> If you want a punch bag here's one:


 
The pale complexion of the chronic masturbator.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 11, 2013)

J Ed said:


> A month back someone said that they were starting from the beginning, haven't heard them mention it since so maybe they are still working on it...


 

a steady progression of likes marked their progress for me


----------



## ymu (May 11, 2013)

Like I said, fund it by going between gaffes. Miss a month or two in rent, spend next to nothing out there, deposit repaid and in bank by the time you get home. Get some estate agents on the lookout. There's free personal internet access, and cheap cafes, all over. Stay with friends a day or two whilst you do viewings and sign paperwork, done.

Birthright covers the Israel bit. Palestine is just a way of saving more rent and bill money by delaying the flight home. Loads of birthright people stay months. You don't need cash. People pool resources, and you have to time visits to avoid mealtimes, it is impossible not to get fed.

There's always a way and you won't get a better opportunity.


----------



## chilango (May 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> being able to do something like that is dependent on so many things - having an employer who will give you the time off to go, and pay you enough to be able to go, having a family who will support you if you are arrested and won't either freak out or disown you, having enough money to go in the first place, not having to fear consequences (financial, social, etc) from being arrested
> 
> my mum's brother was in jail for 10 years for political reasons, i know for a fact she'd freak out if I did something similar.



Yup.

Having that balance between having few enough commitments/ties to be able to take a risk like that, but at the same time having enough ties to provide you with a safety net when you get out/back is a tricky one.


----------



## andysays (May 11, 2013)

Nice one said:


> if laurie penny was a bloke would you dedicate 2 years of your life permanently slagging him off?
> 
> But i suppose it's to do with background and upbringing - the idea that it's unacceptable to hit a woman was one i was brought up with. But for a man to take pleasure in fantasising about hitting a woman and getting tacit approval for such an expression, definitely fucked up in my book.


 
I was brought up with the idea that it's generally unacceptable for anyone to hit anyone.

For anyone to take pleasure in fantasising about hitting anyone is fucked up - this goes beyond a gender issue (though there are gender-specific elements to it)


----------



## andysays (May 11, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Obviously that's fine and everything and a good principle to live by (especially when it comes to just not liking a particular journo/what that particular journo represents!) but it would be very stupid if you applied that to all people and all situations. I know someone in an abusive relationship who has been attacked by his girlfriend with a knife several times, he's hit her in self-defence and I think you'd have to be a bit of an idiot to suggest that he's in the wrong there.


 
There's a difference between taking pleasure in fantasising about hitting someone (what Nice one is referring to) and hitting someone in self defence


----------



## J Ed (May 11, 2013)

andysays said:


> For anyone to take pleasure in fantasising about hitting anyone is fucked up - this goes beyond a gender issue (though there are gender-specific elements to it)


 
_Anyone?_

_



_


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 11, 2013)

ymu said:


> No interest in shitting all over Milne from the great height that appears to be well deserved given this new clarity?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Standard middle-aged middle-class journo political journey fodder, though, frankly. Starts sliding towards centrism, starts agreeing with unsavoury people and unsavoury things while worrying about grabbing as much cash as possible to stuff in his pension. People who do this just make me roll my eyes. Some of them do this by deliberately setting themselves up as iconoclasts, others do it, like Milne, in a worm-like manner. They're not worth wasting much abuse on - it's not going to stop them being cunts, after all.


----------



## ymu (May 11, 2013)

Yeah, the family support and stuff matters. I thought my mum would kick up a stink but she just blurted out that she was proud and did all the legwork whilst I twiddled my thumbs.

It is also harder when you have someone who might lose you. However tiny the risk it's not fair if they're not cool with it. I wouldn't take those risks now, with  a dependent partner, and I've talked people with kids out of going. Priorities.

But that's what I mean about no better opportunity. Old people are boring and can't skip rent and bills as easily.

Take dotty. PD on the trail of tourist-activists, cultural imperialist pigdogs.

Or whatever. Not fluent in faux-Trot.


----------



## andysays (May 11, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> The pale complexion of the chronic masturbator.


 
We're not allowed to draw conclusions about people's habits from their appearance - didn't you get the memo?


----------



## chilango (May 11, 2013)

...but ymu is also right. It can, and has been done. I know. I went out to Sudan (it was originally going to be Gaza but that fell through) with a hundred quid in my pocket, a hundred quid in the bank at home. I quit my job, left my house, and had nothing in place for my return. Nothing. But then I also had no idea how long I was gonna be there.

As some of you know it all went tits up big time...some of the repercussions are still affecting me now a decade on. Recurrent malaria. A very curious period on my CV. Etc.

But I survived with some stories to tell...


----------



## chilango (May 11, 2013)

ymu said:


> Yeah, the family support and stuff matters. I thought my mum would kick up a stink but she just blurted out that she was proud and did all the legwork whilst I twiddled my thumbs.
> 
> It is also harder when you have someone who might lose you. However tiny the risk it's not fair if they're not cool with it. I wouldn't take those risks now, with  a dependent partner, and I've talked people with kids out of going. Priorities.
> 
> ...




Yep.

It was then or never for me. I had nothing to lose except myself. Which I nearly did.

I couldn't do it now. I would hurt too many people.


----------



## ymu (May 11, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Standard middle-aged middle-class journo political journey fodder, though, frankly. Starts sliding towards centrism, starts agreeing with unsavoury people and unsavoury things while worrying about grabbing as much cash as possible to stuff in his pension. People who do this just make me roll my eyes. Some of them do this by deliberately setting themselves up as iconoclasts, others do it, like Milne, in a worm-like manner. They're not worth wasting much abuse on - it's not going to stop them being cunts, after all.


I'm glad it's not just me. 

I cannot help but read him in the voice of Rick Mayall these days.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 11, 2013)

> Take dotty. PD on the trail of tourist-activists, cultural imperialist pigdogs.


 
I'd like to see golgotha. Well, the bus station they built on it.


----------



## andysays (May 11, 2013)

J Ed said:


> _Anyone?_
> 
> _
> 
> ...


 
Anyone, even them.

There is, however, a difference between fantasising and becoming overcome with spontaneous and uncontrollable violent anger if actually coming face-to-face with those two, and obviously the court of revolutionary justice (urban division) will take that into consideration


----------



## chilango (May 11, 2013)

...but to return to Froggie's point. We are privileged if we can make choices like this. It's similar to the idea of fucking off abroad to live/work. I think it requires at least social capital even if you do it when you're broke.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 11, 2013)

chilango said:


> ...but to return to Froggie's point. We are privileged if we can make choices like this. It's similar to the idea of fucking off abroad to live/work. I think it requires at least social capital even if you do it when you're broke.


 

not always though. Plenty of w/c lads and ladies have gone and winged it living abroad. Perhaps not so many as do it from the more monied end of the middle classes but a few. Met a couple of geordies my own age before who had lived in and out of europe for years, scraping by.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 11, 2013)

andysays said:


> We're not allowed to draw conclusions about people's habits from their appearance - didn't you get the memo?


 
I'm drawing no conclusion. I *know* he's a chronic masturbator. One of his friends told me "Malcolm is a massive wanker".


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 11, 2013)

ymu said:


> I'm glad it's not just me.
> 
> I cannot help but read him in the voice of Rick Mayall these days.


 
I've always read George Monbiot in Rik the Peoples' Poet's voice.


----------



## andysays (May 11, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I'm drawing no conclusion. I *know* he's a chronic masturbator. One of his friends told me "Malcolm is a massive wanker".


 
That's OK then (but make sure you tell us next time you have inside information)


----------



## rekil (May 11, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Fucking brilliant band. Almost got to put them on in Bristol.


Niall McGuirk brought them over to dubbelin and they played two shows in a weekend, both of which I failed to attend for whatever rubbish reasons, but I had a stab at assuaging the missed-gig-guilt'n'guttedness by picking up a decent quality bootleg from the man on O'Connell Bridge shortly afterwards.


----------



## ymu (May 11, 2013)

chilango said:


> ...but to return to Froggie's point. We are privileged if we can make choices like this. It's similar to the idea of fucking off abroad to live/work. I think it requires at least social capital even if you do it when you're broke.


Yes. Everyone with the time to do the fieldwork needs at least three people backing them: to take care of stuff at home, fund them, and handle legal, medical and media if shit happens. The more social and financial capital people have the more of that can take care of itself or be handled at short notice. Others need more support or have more responsibilities to deal with or are better suited to different roles.

I was giving a talk about ISM just after Rachel Corrie was killed and the phone call came in about Tom Hurndall. We went back to the talk with someone delegated to keep us updated and someone asked what they could do as a middle-aged mum with no holiday time. I said there was no video camera in Gaza when Rachel was killed and that meant less chance of justice. People need equipment. By the end of the meeting there were cheques for over a grand ear-marked for a video camera and media-ready laptop for Gaza, Delivered the following week by an ISMer who we handed it over to and helped her set it up to pass muster going over the border.

There's a Palestinian-owned club in King's Cross that will host benefit gigs and anyone can piggy-back off an ISM-London fund-raiser if they are willing to commit, do training etc. People who are flush people who are unemployed.

I was arrested with an unemployed (Jewish, Hebrew-speaking) software engineer from California, a bin-man from Japan, Danish guy just out of national service, young gay Icelandic lad, two American journos doing a Laurie, Aussie PR guy for Nablus Uni who was trying to get back to his home in Nablus and hitched a ride in with us, Jordanian journo from the Jordanian government press agency (international incident: check) who we met in the camp.

The media office were laughing their tits off when we relayed all that. Blatant media tartery across three continents? Check. 

I was worried that the anarchists would despise me for having a brand new rucksack. I ended up walking over a mountain with someone who had a suitcase on wheels packed full of books, amongst many others in our raggedy bunch. Anarchists and liberals get on because they're there to do a job and politics is for down-time, not decision-making. Palestinian-led troops and that discipline is kept. Some people self-fund, some people fund-raise, some people cross-subsidise if they can cover things like hostel or food without needing to worry.

How it should be. Gets shit done.


----------



## frogwoman (May 11, 2013)

ymu, if i'm being a bit cold with you it's because i'm both at work, and also because i'm still a bit annoyed about what you said to me last night and comments about shouty toddlers etc in response to what i said about seeing/experiencing racism, it seemed to me you were just dismissing what i was saying on that thread and telling me i shouldn't complain about it. it's easy for you to say that somebody else should just ignore it and not be 'distracted" by it, and imagine that it won't have an effect on what they do or don't decide to be involved in.

it's easy for somebody with a secure job who's able to get time off work to do this stuff, or who has saved enough not to be able to work. i have to work, i have no choice. i'm also in the position where this would cause the mother of all arguments in my family and i'm not really in a strong enough place to handle that.


----------



## frogwoman (May 11, 2013)

oh make no mistake i'm still thinking about going abroad eventually, but will need a secure job, secure accommodation, etc.


----------



## chilango (May 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> it's easy for somebody with a secure job who's able to get time off work to do this stuff, or who has saved enough not to be able to work. i have to work, i have no choice. i'm also in the position where this would cause the mother of all arguments in my family and i'm not really in a strong enough place to handle that.



To be honest I think it's often the opposite. You can't (and won't) do stuff like this if you have a secure job. You can only really do it when you don't have a job. IME anyway. The more security I've had in my life the less risks I've taken.

...but you're right on the rest.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 11, 2013)

having a solid trade or saleable skill can make it more viable though. Oh of course there is migrant labour work, often seasonal but a trade or a tefl etc is going to make comfortable living abroad easier


----------



## frogwoman (May 11, 2013)

chilango said:


> To be honest I think it's often the opposite. You can't (and won't) do stuff like this if you have a secure job. You can only really do it when you don't have a job. IME anyway. The more security I've had in my life the less risks I've taken.
> 
> ...but you're right on the rest.


 
I meant having a secure job in the country of your destination, not a few months unpaid as an activist


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 11, 2013)

chilango said:


> To be honest I think it's often the opposite. You can't (and won't) do stuff like this if you have a secure job. You can only really do it when you don't have a job. IME anyway. The more security I've had in my life the less risks I've taken.
> 
> ...but you're right on the rest.



Basically everyone's situation is different and we should be careful before we make sweeping recommendations or judgements.


----------



## ymu (May 11, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> ymu, if i'm being a bit cold with you it's because i'm both at work, and also because i'm still a bit annoyed about what you said to me last night and comments about shouty toddlers etc in response to what i said about seeing/experiencing racism, it seemed to me you were just dismissing what i was saying on that thread and telling me i shouldn't complain about it. it's easy for you to say that somebody else should just ignore it and not be 'distracted" by it, and imagine that it won't have an effect on what they do or don't decide to be involved in.
> 
> it's easy for somebody with a secure job who's able to get time off work to do this stuff, or who has saved enough not to be able to work. i have to work, i have no choice. i'm also in the position where this would cause the mother of all arguments in my family and i'm not really in a strong enough place to handle that.


I have never called you a shouty toddler. I will not take responsibility for people taking contextual observations the wrong way. If you think it is likely that I would lump you in with the likes of ... well, thanks.

I objected to you suggesting I might be overtired at 1am, for reasons I expanded on.

I was angry. You're angry. It's allowed. If you hold grudges, give me fair warning. I don't. I need to look up the rules of that game.


----------



## frogwoman (May 11, 2013)

it's got nothing to do with holding grudges, i just want you to think about what you're saying. and you didn't expand on the reasons really, you told me to fuck off last night, i didn't remark on it because i assumed you were pissed or something.

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...-boycott-litigation-fails-in-uk.308154/page-4

do you really not understand how this series of posts comes across? we all need to check our privilege at times (lol) and you're not an exception, and neither am i. especially since you've been attacking people on the boards, sometimes rightly, for not doing exactly the same thing


----------



## ymu (May 11, 2013)

You start a post with "It's not a fucking excuse..." and I start my reply with "Where have I said it is a fucking excuse?"

It's on that thread. I am responding to what you say. I'm not going to shut up about what is going on in Palestine just because some racists and some numpties and some racist numpties piggy-back a cause. Democratic centralism causes the abuse of power. Palestinians under occupation suffer it.

Priorities. Nuance. I think what I have said is clear. If you think I am insulting you, you are free to read it that way. There is no point going in circles making the same points.

If you think I'm insensitive, fine. If you choose to be insensitive in return and then react sensitively to the response, well I have to deal with the first bit. The rest is your stuff, not mine.


----------



## frogwoman (May 11, 2013)

ffs. 

you actually can't see what is wrong with what you said.


----------



## phildwyer (May 11, 2013)

ymu said:


> Caught here acting as propagandist and anti-imperialist cheerleader for Julian Assange in only slightly more coherent fashion than Glenn fucking Greenwald.


 
That's an absolutely brilliant article, thanks for forwarding it.

I hadn't previously been aware of the anti-Castro connection.  Milne's work is always excellent:

''And given the context, it's also hardly surprising that sceptics have raised the links with US-funded anti-Cuban opposition groups of one of those making the accusations – or that campaigners such as the London-based Women Against Rape have expressed scepticism at the "unusual zeal" with which rape allegations were pursued against Assange in a country where rape convictions have fallen. The danger, of course, is that the murk around this case plays into a misogynist culture in which rape victims aren't believed.''

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/21/why-us-is-out-to-get-assange


----------



## phildwyer (May 11, 2013)

chilango said:


> ...but ymu is also right. It can, and has been done. I know. I went out to Sudan (it was originally going to be Gaza but that fell through) with a hundred quid in my pocket, a hundred quid in the bank at home. I quit my job, left my house, and had nothing in place for my return. Nothing. But then I also had no idea how long I was gonna be there.


 
I lived in Amsterdam for six months without a penny to my name when I was 18 years old. Also travelled from there to Berlin and spent a few weeks there for no money whatsoever.  It would be harder these days, what with hitching being difficult and squatting being abolished, but still by no means impossible.


----------



## phildwyer (May 11, 2013)

chilango said:


> ...but to return to Froggie's point. We are privileged if we can make choices like this. It's similar to the idea of fucking off abroad to live/work. I think it requires at least social capital even if you do it when you're broke.


 
Bollocks. All it requires is a bit of initiative, and that is not the prerogative of any social class.


----------



## phildwyer (May 11, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The John Gray credibility problem.


 
What's this?


----------



## love detective (May 11, 2013)

laurie penny said:
			
		

> the very British idea that people can, in the end, only speak for and from the class into which they were born is something I encounter all the time, and makes me fearful for the future both of intelligent debate and socialist struggle in this country.


 
There it is then. Intelligent debate and socialist struggle are only possible if people like Penny step in and speak on behalf of a working class who on their own are not even capable of intelligent debate let alone socialist struggle

_Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self-activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others - even by those allegedly acting on their behalf._


----------



## cesare (May 11, 2013)

love detective said:


> There it is then. Intelligent debate and socialist struggle are only possible if people like Penny step in and speak on behalf of a working class who on their own are not even capable of intelligent debate let alone socialist struggle
> 
> _Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self-activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others - even by those allegedly acting on their behalf._


She's a middle class, privileged, "educated", patronising bitch that doesn't have the self awareness to realise that she's a fucking laughing stock


----------



## BigTom (May 11, 2013)

love detective said:


> There it is then. Intelligent debate and socialist struggle are only possible if people like Penny step in and speak on behalf of a working class who on their own are not even capable of intelligent debate let alone socialist struggle
> 
> _Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self-activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others - even by those allegedly acting on their behalf._



Hmmm, I thought part of the premise of intersectionality, privilege checking and so on is that you cannot speak outside of your identity. In this world class is regarded the same as any other identity so how come a man can't talk outside of their gender identity or a white person outside of their racial identity but a middle class/upper class person can talk outside of their class identity?
Does she not realise the contradiction she's placing herself in within her own theories?


----------



## agricola (May 11, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Hmmm, I thought part of the premise of intersectionality, privilege checking and so on is that you cannot speak outside of your identity. In this world class is regarded the same as any other identity so how come a man can't talk outside of their gender identity or a white person outside of their racial identity but a middle class/upper class person can talk outside of their class identity?
> Does she not realise the contradiction she's placing herself in within her own theories?


 
She is a _revolutionary_ though.


----------



## chilango (May 11, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Bollocks. All it requires is a bit of initiative, and that is not the prerogative of any social class.



No.

I didn't say it was the prerogative of any social class, but that the sort of trips being discussed here require a certain amount of social capital to a) plan b) execute and c) support you when it all goes wrong.


----------



## toggle (May 11, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Hmmm, I thought part of the premise of intersectionality, privilege checking and so on is that you cannot speak outside of your identity. In this world class is regarded the same as any other identity so how come a man can't talk outside of their gender identity or a white person outside of their racial identity but a middle class/upper class person can talk outside of their class identity?
> Does she not realise the contradiction she's placing herself in within her own theories?


 
i'ts not a contradiction if you don't recognize class issues


----------



## Firky (May 11, 2013)

cesare said:


> She's a middle class, privileged, "educated", patronising bitch that doesn't have the self awareness to realise that she's a fucking laughing stock


 
I've never heard or seen you call someone a bitch before. A seminal moment.

See what you do to people, Laurie?


----------



## cesare (May 11, 2013)

Firky said:


> I've never heard or seen you call someone a bitch before. A seminal moment.
> 
> See what you do to people, Laurie?


I don't often call people bitches, that's true. I am feeling very annoyed about women in that bubble at the moment


----------



## grit (May 11, 2013)

chilango said:


> ...but to return to Froggie's point. We are privileged if we can make choices like this. It's similar to the idea of fucking off abroad to live/work. I think it requires at least social capital even if you do it when you're broke.


 
Generations of Irish people have traversed the globe looking for work, most of them starting with fuck all. Its not a choice for many, its a necessity.


----------



## chilango (May 11, 2013)

grit said:


> Generations of Irish people have traversed the globe looking for work, most of them starting with fuck all. Its not a choice for many, its a necessity.



Indeed.

That's not the type of trip we're talking about though.


----------



## cesare (May 11, 2013)

chilango said:


> Indeed.
> 
> That's not the type of trip we're talking about though.


Exactly. We're talking about a liberal middle class crusade type trip.


----------



## cesare (May 11, 2013)

grit said:


> Generations of Irish people have traversed the globe looking for work, most of them starting with fuck all. Its not a choice for many, its a necessity.


My dad lost an eye working on an Irish road gang. Imported Irish labour still do a vast amount of construction work on English railways.


----------



## Firky (May 11, 2013)

chilango said:


> Indeed.
> 
> That's not the type of trip we're talking about though.


 
Pimms in a hamper


----------



## Firky (May 11, 2013)

cesare said:


> My dad lost an eye working on an Irish road gang. Imported Irish labour still do a vast amount of construction work on English railways.


 
They also built a great deal of the nuclear bunkers under Manchester in the 60s, I know someone who worked on them. He says they were paid twice, once to dig and again to keep quiet of where they were digging.


----------



## chilango (May 11, 2013)

cesare said:


> Exactly. We're talking about a liberal middle class crusade type trip.





That's one way of describing it!

A little harsh, but...


----------



## muscovyduck (May 11, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Bollocks. All it requires is a bit of initiative, and that is not the prerogative of any social class.


Sorry, no. I've heard this "all you need is a bit of initiative/hard work/etc" before. Didn't buy it at school, not buying it from the government, definitely not buying it from you.


----------



## Firky (May 11, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Sorry, no. I've heard this "all you need is a bit of initiative/hard work/etc" before. Didn't buy it at school, not buying it from the government, definitely not buying it from you.


muscovyduck meet Phil, he's a bit of a windup artist. Generally alright but knows what buttons to press. He's well traveled and consequently thinks it's just a case of getting on your bike. 

He looks silly in speedo swimming trunks - but so does everybody.


----------



## cesare (May 11, 2013)

Firky said:


> They also built a great deal of the nuclear bunkers under Manchester in the 60s, I know someone who worked on them. He says they were paid twice, once to dig and again to keep quiet of where they were digging.


I didn't know that! Maybe another question I should ask my dad, being as I was born there in the early 60s  He was out on the searches on the moors after the murders, maybe he knows loads more shit I haven't asked him about.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 11, 2013)

Firky said:


> muscovyduck meet Phil, he's a bit of a windup artist. Generally alright but knows what buttons to press. He's well traveled and consequently thinks it's just a case of getting on your bike.
> 
> He looks silly in speedo swimming trunks - but so does everybody.


I've already lurked on a few Julian Assange/Occupy threads. I know all this.


----------



## love detective (May 11, 2013)

cesare said:


> Exactly. We're talking about a liberal middle class crusade type trip.


 
or as some put it


> Palestine is just a way of saving more rent and bill money by delaying the flight home


----------



## killer b (May 11, 2013)

Firky said:


> He looks silly in speedo swimming trunks - but so does everybody.


speak for yourself. i look smoking hot in speedos x


----------



## seventh bullet (May 11, 2013)

Prison is easy.


----------



## cesare (May 11, 2013)

chilango said:


> That's one way of describing it!
> 
> A little harsh, but...



You've not noticed that I am quite harsh? 

Edit: I can fucking emerge victorious with seventh bullet in a prole point death match


----------



## chilango (May 11, 2013)

cesare said:


> Exactly. We're talking about a liberal middle class crusade type trip.




The difference, I think, between what we're talking about here (going overseas for "a cause", working abroad temporarily) and so on and economic migration boils down to two main aspects.

1/ the element of choice. 

2/ being able to "come home".

...and these are precisely the areas where privilege and social capital come in.

Laurie's trips to Greece and NY fall into this broad area too. She can be penniless in Manhattan or engage in protest tourism in Greece precisely because her privilege enables her to have these options and to fuck off home when it goes too pear shaped.

You don't have to be rich or middle class to have enough social capital to do this, but it does make it far more likely.


----------



## Favelado (May 11, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Bollocks. All it requires is a bit of initiative, and that is not the prerogative of any social class.


 
If you've got initiative and a trust fund, it's more likely to turn out well for you.


----------



## spawnofsatan (May 11, 2013)

There is a picture of Philys in budgie smugglers?   Link!


----------



## Firky (May 11, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> Prison is easy.


 
Jeffery, Jeffery Archer, is that you?


----------



## chilango (May 11, 2013)

love detective said:


> or as some put it




There is an element of truth in that for some though. However wanky it may sound.


----------



## Firky (May 11, 2013)

cesare said:


> I didn't know that! Maybe another question I should ask my dad, being as I was born there in the early 60s  He was out on the searches on the moors after the murders, maybe he knows loads more shit I haven't asked him about.


 
Well it could be one of his tall tales. He once told me there's no yellow snails in Ireland and I spent about an hour googling that one.


----------



## smokedout (May 11, 2013)

love detective said:


> There it is then. Intelligent debate and socialist struggle are only possible if people like Penny step in and speak on behalf of a working class who on their own are not even capable of intelligent debate let alone socialist struggle


 
and yet on cif today a breath-takingly honest and complete unaware statement from someone in her class speaking for us and explaining what they think of us



> You can try it for yourself. Imagine the most stereotypical "chav" you can. Imagine their clothes, their surroundings, their posture, their attitude. Now imagine them feeling surprise, anger, or fear. Easy right? Well now imagine them experiencing reverence, melancholy, or fascination. If you found that just as easy, congratulations. But I'd bet for a few of you it was just that bit harder. I'm ashamed to admit it was for me.


 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/11/benefits-claimants-other-research


----------



## J Ed (May 11, 2013)

smokedout said:


> and yet on cif today a breath-takingly honest and complete unaware statement from someone in her class speaking for us and explaining what they think of us
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/11/benefits-claimants-other-research


 
I found that bit of it fucking bizarre but at least the Guardian is talking about this Othering of benefit claimants, something that until now seems to have been ignored.


----------



## seventh bullet (May 11, 2013)

Firky said:


> Jeffery, Jeffery Archer, is that you?


 
Just a bit of fun isn't it.

ymu, have a fucking word.


----------



## smokedout (May 11, 2013)

yeah otherwise its not a bad piece, but i couldnt quite get over that statement


----------



## cesare (May 11, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I found that bit of it fucking bizarre but at least the Guardian is talking about this Othering of benefit claimants, something that until now seems to have been ignored.


The Guardian can fucking spin on it, frankly. Along with fucking "Staggers".


----------



## Favelado (May 11, 2013)

spawnofsatan said:


> There is a picture of Philys in budgie smugglers? Link!


 
We're talking PARROTS.


----------



## chilango (May 11, 2013)

cesare said:


> The Guardian can fucking spin on it, frankly. Along with fucking "Staggers".



Is it just me or does "Staggers" sound like a really public school nickname?


----------



## spawnofsatan (May 11, 2013)

Favelado said:


> We're talking PARROTS.


----------



## J Ed (May 11, 2013)

chilango said:


> Is it just me or does "Staggers" sound like a really public school nickname?


 
I thought that it was something that Guido Fawkes had made up when he was talking about them auctioning off internships at a charity fundraiser, but no... it's a self-description.


----------



## cesare (May 11, 2013)

chilango said:


> There is an element of truth in that for some though. However wanky it may sound.


Tefl has made going abroad and being able to earn a living far more likely nowadays than 20 years ago. But tefl costs too, and you have to be educated to the point where that's even a possibility.


----------



## chilango (May 11, 2013)

cesare said:


> Tefl has made going abroad and being able to earn a living far more likely nowadays than 20 years ago. But tefl costs too, and you have to be educated to the point where that's even a possibility.



Yup.

On the other hand it's harder to just rock up in a place and land a job etc. on the basis that your an English speaking Brit. A lot more competition these days, partly from the increase in qualified TEFL teachers.


----------



## J Ed (May 11, 2013)

cesare said:


> Tefl has made going abroad and being able to earn a living far more likely nowadays than 20 years ago. But tefl costs too, and you have to be educated to the point where that's even a possibility.


 
Depends where you're going too, much harder to do tefl in Western Europe now. I have some friends teaching in Spanish schools but they can only get by because they are doing it through the British Council and have had trouble getting paid even so..


----------



## J Ed (May 11, 2013)

I wouldn't mind doing TEFL but I don't really want to go all the way to East Asia.


----------



## audiotech (May 11, 2013)

grit said:


> Generations of Irish people have traversed the globe looking for work, most of them starting with fuck all. Its not a choice for many, its a necessity.


 
To add to this. A debate I viewed on-line sometime last year and what was being put forward is that movement flows of populations migrating is now small. The speaker went further and despite cheaper travel and connectivity the barriers to migration have got higher. Migration has always been the way that people escaped poverty and persecution. 1850 - 1900 a third of Ireland, Sweden and Italy populations migrated due to famine, poverty and persecution. A decision made of last resort, often against an individuals will - a decision by the group. One way to survive. That is still the case today. Poor people don't have the resources to leave. Most move to neighbouring countries.


----------



## cesare (May 11, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Depends where you're going too, much harder to do tefl in Western Europe now. I have some friends teaching in Spanish schools but they can only get by because they are doing it through the British Council and have had trouble getting paid even so..


Aye. Tbh I wasn't even thinking Western Europe. It's hard to learn other languages in Western Europe because often (well in urban areas) they speak English very well (even if with a slight seppoe twang) and mainly use the Brits as an opportunity to hone their own English language skills not impart their own.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 11, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I wouldn't mind doing TEFL but I don't really want to go all the way to East Asia.


 

Whats not to like? you get a decent wage, respect as a teacher and every day systemic poverty is shoved in your face till the point you are numbed to it. Happy days.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 11, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Whats not to like? you get a decent wage, respect as a teacher *and every day systemic poverty is shoved in your face till the point you are numbed to it. Happy days.*


You don't watch TV commercials too often do you? Comic Relief?


----------



## DotCommunist (May 11, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> You don't watch TV commercials too often do you? Comic Relief?


 
all the money goes to warlords employing child soldiers you know


----------



## Firky (May 11, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I wouldn't mind doing TEFL but I don't really want to go all the way to East Asia.


 
I know about 6 people who have done a TEFL. Four of them are now alcoholics (they even admit it) and one of them is now a lecturer at a university teaching Modern English Literature - well jealous (of her, not the alcoholics obviously). I think you need to have right charachter to stick it out without succumbing to cheap alcohol and loneliness.


----------



## frogwoman (May 11, 2013)

I went to Moldova on a fully funded scheme which was funded by the European Union, we got accommodation and flights paid for plus some spending money. We were told anyway that we were expected to work, some volunteers worked with children for several months in what was a pretty gruelling role. Some people actually didn't do work despite being funded to be there, towards the end I got slightly pissed off when I went to parties and social events which were largely or entirely attended by expats and people working in the country and encountered a fair degree of casual racism towards the moldovan population. Looking back on it in hindsight, we were living in tower blocks in moldova where our rent was paid by the charity, some people used to have parties all the time and some of the residents of the tower blocks would for example threaten to call the police when the music was too loud and there were too many people coming and going. People used to get annoyed with it but to be honest by the end I could see their point of view, especially when a small minority of people that I met (not generally the volunteers on the scheme I was on) tended to look down on them, and make racist comments.

I am still eligible for a short term project in some of the other countries they do their projects of 1-3 months, I'd like to do it at some point, but I suspect that being somewhat older I might get a bit impatient, there was a divide between the younger volunteers who were there to have fun and have essentially a bit of a gap year, and those of us who were there to work.


----------



## frogwoman (May 11, 2013)

A lot of them were there on schemes which were funded by the german government, which funds people go abroad as part of a sort of civilian service.

It certainly gave me an opportunity to see another part of the world, and the charity did try to give priority to people who were disadvantaged in some way, and it makes me sad that with the cuts and austerity across europe a lot of people will who would not have the money to pay to go to other "volunteering" things where you have to pay, will be deprived of this opportunity (of course its a fucking shame its not more widely available in the first place)


----------



## Frances Lengel (May 11, 2013)

cesare said:


> I didn't know that! Maybe another question I should ask my dad, being as I was born there in the early 60s  He was out on the searches on the moors after the murders, maybe he knows loads more shit I haven't asked him about.


 
It's true about the bunkers - The city father's didn't want the populace to know what was going on but coz the work was being done in the city centre people couldn't fail to notice sumat was up so a rumour was put about that gold had been struck. So I got told anyway.

http://www.atomica.co.uk/guardian/


----------



## frogwoman (May 11, 2013)

smokedout said:


> and yet on cif today a breath-takingly honest and complete unaware statement from someone in her class speaking for us and explaining what they think of us
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/11/benefits-claimants-other-research


 
wow it really is like the zoo animals thing

can they not just see people as people. i work in an office where we come into contact with some pretty privileged people from the upper classes and i have no trouble seeing them as human beings, i dont gawp at them like something from a zoo


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 11, 2013)

love detective said:


> There it is then. Intelligent debate and socialist struggle are only possible if people like Penny step in and speak on behalf of a working class who on their own are not even capable of intelligent debate let alone socialist struggle


 
Where's that from?


----------



## rekil (May 11, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Where's that from?


The comments section in her latest NS piece.


----------



## redsquirrel (May 11, 2013)

ymu said:


> No interest in shitting all over Milne from the great height that appears to be well deserved given this new clarity?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


For all his faults _The Enemy Within_ is about a billion times better than anything LP has written, or is likely to write.


----------



## treelover (May 12, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I found that bit of it fucking bizarre but at least the Guardian is talking about this Othering of benefit claimants, something that until now seems to have been ignored.


 
Yes, once that happens it really is downhill all the way, just look at the U.S where to be on benefits is looked on as shameful, total strangers tut tutting at claimants using vouchers etc at shopping check outs.


----------



## treelover (May 12, 2013)

> Above the threshold everyone will have to be an enterprise for himself or for
> his family. A society formalized on the model of the enterprise, of the
> competitive enterprise, will be possible above the threshold, and there
> will be simply a minimum security, that is to say, the nullification of
> ...


 

Apparently, Foucault predicted this process


----------



## classicdish (May 12, 2013)

audiotech said:


> ...movement flows of populations migrating is now small...


I'm not sure this is true, is it? So far this is all I have found:

"...There are far more international migrants in the world today than ever previously recorded – 214 million according to UN DESA (2009) – and their number has increased rapidly over the last few decades, up from 191 million in 2005. If the migrant population continues to increase at the same pace as the last 20 years, the stock of international migrants worldwide by 2050 could be as high as 405 million..."

source: http://publications.iom.int/booksto...uct_info&cPath=37&products_id=665&language=en

"...International migration, which includes both voluntary migration for economic or other reasons as well as the involuntary movement of refugees, is on the rise. Data are uncertain and trends are difficult to track, but, according to the U.N., at least 120 million people (excluding refugees) lived or worked outside of their own country in 1990, an increase from about 75 million in 1965..."

source: http://www.wri.org/publication/content/8397

Compare this with the number of Europeans who migrated to North and South America between 1820 and 1920 being around 50 million.


----------



## BigTom (May 12, 2013)

classicdish said:


> I'm not sure this is true, is it? So far this is all I have found:
> 
> "...There are far more international migrants in the world today than ever previously recorded – 214 million according to UN DESA (2009) – and their number has increased rapidly over the last few decades, up from 191 million in 2005. If the migrant population continues to increase at the same pace as the last 20 years, the stock of international migrants worldwide by 2050 could be as high as 405 million..."
> 
> ...



You need to compare as proportion of population rather than raw numbers though really. Not that I've any idea how those figures compare.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 12, 2013)

classicdish said:


> I'm not sure this is true, is it? So far this is all I have found:
> 
> "...There are far more international migrants in the world today than ever previously recorded – 214 million according to UN DESA (2009) – and their number has increased rapidly over the last few decades, up from 191 million in 2005. If the migrant population continues to increase at the same pace as the last 20 years, the stock of international migrants worldwide by 2050 could be as high as 405 million..."
> 
> ...


 
Obviously the population has massively increased since the period between 1820 and 1920 so %'s would be more useful than numbers.

However what audiotech seemed to be talking about was migration from to and within Western Europe which may well have declined by some indicators - however migration from to and within the developing world does seem to have increased drastically and perhaps unsurprisingly and I think that's what the figures about refer to.


----------



## weepiper (May 12, 2013)

treelover said:


> Yes, once that happens it really is downhill all the way, just look at the U.S where to be on benefits is looked on as shameful, total strangers tut tutting at claimants using vouchers etc at shopping check outs.


 
That already happens here. Or it did 4 years ago when I got Milk Tokens.


----------



## fractionMan (May 12, 2013)

Firky said:


> I know about 6 people who have done a TEFL. Four of them are now alcoholics (they even admit it) and one of them is now a lecturer at a university teaching Modern English Literature - well jealous (of her, not the alcoholics obviously). I think you need to have right charachter to stick it out without succumbing to cheap alcohol and loneliness.


 
I'll second this. I think it's something that's fine as a short term career, but if you're in it for the long term you have to be a certain type of person.

With only a few exceptions, the teaching ex-pats I used to hang out with were quite an odd bunch and after a year I was glad to return to the UK.


----------



## chilango (May 12, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> With only a few exceptions, the teaching ex-pats I used to hang out with were quite an odd bunch.



Tell me about it


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I wouldn't mind doing TEFL but I don't really want to go all the way to East Asia.


 

I met somebody earning a living doing TEFL in immediate post-Communist Poland. She hardly spoke a word of Polish. How does that work?


----------



## goldenecitrone (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> I met somebody earning a living doing TEFL in immediate post-Communist Poland. She hardly spoke a word of Polish. How does that work?


 
It's called language teaching. Quite popular I hear. I bet most Polish people could spell _tree_ better than you can these days.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> It's called language teaching. Quite popular I hear. I best most Polish people could spell _tree_ better than you can these days.


 

How can you teach something without being able to explain what you're doing in the language that the rest of the class speaks?

I spoke more Polish than this girl and I was shit. I wouldn't have even considered trying to teach a Pole English.


----------



## goldenecitrone (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> How can you teach something without being able to explain what you're doing in the language that the rest of the class speaks?
> 
> I spoke more Polish than this girl and I was shit. I wouldn't have even considered trying to teach a Pole English.


 
Mime and dance.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> Mime and dance.


 


Seems it'd have to be.

TEFL seemed to me to be largely a scam for eternal youngsters who can't hold down normal jobs or think they're on an adventure.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 12, 2013)

your fake nose and glasses just fell off


----------



## weepiper (May 12, 2013)

I am uncomfortably reminded of Lord Freud and his 'the poor should take the most risks because they have the least to lose' schtick.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/359910/Freud-Poor-should-take-more-risks

The middle classes go on gap years 'for charity'. Working class kids join the army, and it's not usually because they fancy an adventure.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> your fake nose and glasses just fell off


 

As ever, I wasn't wearing any.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 12, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I am uncomfortably reminded of Lord Freud and his 'the poor should take the most risks because they have the least to lose' schtick.
> 
> http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/359910/Freud-Poor-should-take-more-risks
> 
> The middle classes go on gap years 'for charity'. Working class kids join the army, and it's not usually because they fancy an adventure.


 

economic conscription ennit- they are quite shameless about advertising along those lines


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I am uncomfortably reminded of Lord Freud and his 'the poor should take the most risks because they have the least to lose' schtick.
> 
> http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/359910/Freud-Poor-should-take-more-risks
> 
> The middle classes go on gap years 'for charity'. Working class kids join the army, and it's not usually because they fancy an adventure.


 
Nobody with any sense would join the army now. Go and get shot at for a measly few fucking grand a year.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> Nobody with any sense would join the army now. Go and get shot at for a measly few fucking grand a year.


 

live fire training though


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> live fire training though


 
Yes-for shooting the likes of you. And me.


----------



## rekil (May 12, 2013)

LP said:
			
		

> ...I rather enjoy being told I'm pretty. It's just that I prefer class war.




Class war smarts.


----------



## J Ed (May 12, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/333562680491266050

This says a lot about both of them, I think, but particularly O'Neill. Who the fuck lets interns buy coffee for them?


----------



## _angel_ (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> How can you teach something without being able to explain what you're doing in the language that the rest of the class speaks?
> 
> I spoke more Polish than this girl and I was shit. I wouldn't have even considered trying to teach a Pole English.


I don't know how it works at all.


----------



## weepiper (May 12, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/333562680491266050
> 
> This says a lot about both of them, I think, but particularly O'Neill. Who the fuck lets interns buy coffee for them?


 
Who the fuck can afford to work unpaid aged 20 for the promise of jam (or a successful writing career interspersed with paid after dinner speeches) tomorrow? Oh yeah, not me, because I'm not like them.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 12, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/333562680491266050
> 
> This says a lot about both of them, I think, but particularly O'Neill. Who the fuck lets interns buy coffee for them?


 
I give you my fucking coffee and you just rip the piss? Name and number


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 12, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Sorry, no. I've heard this "all you need is a bit of initiative/hard work/etc" before. Didn't buy it at school, not buying it from the government, definitely not buying it from you.


 
Phil *has* to have that perspective. It validates *him*.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/333562680491266050
> 
> This says a lot about both of them, I think, but particularly O'Neill. Who the fuck lets interns buy coffee for them?


 

If I'd had an intern, I'd make him buy the coffee. Complacent little shit.


----------



## J Ed (May 12, 2013)

I wonder if the interns at the New Statesman have to buy the coffee


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> I don't know how it works at all.


 

I think you have to rely on the pupils knowing almost as much English as you, but try to fool them into believing that you know what you're talking about.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I wonder if the interns at the New Statesman have to buy the coffee


 
 Hope so.


----------



## J Ed (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> I think you have to rely on the pupils knowing almost as much English as you, but try to fool them into believing that you know what you're talking about.


 

That really isn't that uncommon or odd in language lessons, in fact it's preferable.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

J Ed said:


> That really isn't that uncommon or odd in language lessons, in fact it's preferable.


 

Yes, preferable for those who can't be arsed learning the language of those they're teaching.


----------



## Favelado (May 12, 2013)

Firky said:


> I know about 6 people who have done a TEFL. Four of them are now alcoholics (they even admit it) and one of them is now a lecturer at a university teaching Modern English Literature - well jealous (of her, not the alcoholics obviously). I think you need to have right charachter to stick it out without succumbing to cheap alcohol and loneliness.


 
Jesus. It's not that bleak! I don't know how you end up lonely doing it. It must depend on the country.


----------



## Favelado (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> Yes, preferable for those who can't be arsed learning the language of those they're teaching.


 
It's often preferable not to allow any use of their language in the classroom. It becomes a problem, not a help.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

Favelado said:


> It's often preferable not to allow any use of their language in the classroom. It becomes a problem, not a help.


 
Yes, especially when you don't understand what's going on.


----------



## Favelado (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> I met somebody earning a living doing TEFL in immediate post-Communist Poland. She hardly spoke a word of Polish. How does that work?


 
That's the point of TEFL courses. You don't always know where you're going beforehand, so you have to be able to teach without knowing their language. You can give a perfectly good class without ever using the learner's native language. In fact, the first day of my TEFL I was given a Polish lesson, with no English used, to demonstrate how it can be done. Poland was not part of my plans and it could have been any other language.


----------



## Favelado (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> Yes, especially when you don't understand what's going on.


 
This is why you do the course. You know what's going on because you're the teacher and you've organised everything appropriately. Or you can deal with such difficult moments in a way that they don't become a big deal.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

Favelado said:


> This is why you do the course. You know what's going on because you're the teacher and you've organised everything appropriately. Or you can deal with such difficult moments in a way that they don't become a big deal.


 

I don't know what I'm arguing for really. Normally I never think about TEFL and don't care one way or another.


----------



## Favelado (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> I don't know what I'm arguing for really. Normally I never think about TEFL and don't care one way or another.


 
Thanks for coming!


----------



## _angel_ (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> Yes, especially when you don't understand what's going on.


I guess that's the "immersion" technique.
Usually I think it helps to know a bit of the language already before going down that route.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 12, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/333562680491266050
> 
> This says a lot about both of them, I think, but particularly O'Neill. Who the fuck lets interns buy coffee for them?


 
TBF, if Owen Jones thinks Slug O'Neill is "one of the worst people on earth", he's shockingly fucking naive. O'Neill is a cunt, but he's hardly up there with the Assad dynasty, for example!


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> I guess that's the "immersion" technique.
> Usually I think it helps to know a bit of the language already before going down that route.


 
Whatever anybody says, it seems strange to be teaching English to Poles in Poland and yet you can't even ask for a pint of milk in a Polish shop (or sklep, as they say over there.)


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> TBF, if Owen Jones thinks Slug O'Neill is "one of the worst people on earth", he's shockingly fucking naive. O'Neill is a cunt, but he's hardly up there with the Assad dynasty, for example!


 

I think he probably didn't mean it literally.

Anyway, he's right. At least the Assad dynasty gets things done and isn't just a waffling talking shop.


----------



## _angel_ (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> Whatever anybody says, it seems strange to be teaching English to Poles in Poland and yet you can't even ask for a pint of milk in a Polish shop (or sklep, as they say over there.)


I'd want to know a bit of the language if I was going to be living there.

I have heard Polish is insanely difficult to learn.

Don't the Polish learn English at school anyway? They all seem very fluent.


----------



## love detective (May 12, 2013)

I've been learning Polish the last few years, it's difficult but not as hard as it looks once you've got a foot in the door so to speak


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> I'd want to know a bit of the language if I was going to be living there.
> 
> I have heard Polish is insanely difficult to learn.
> 
> Don't the Polish learn English at school anyway? They all seem very fluent.


 

They didn't twenty years ago. Not on a widespread scale. Russian instead but few wanted to use it.

Polish is a difficult language to learn, yes.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

love detective said:


> I've been learning Polish the last few years, it's difficult but not as hard as it looks once you've got a foot in the door so to speak


 

The grammar's horrific.


----------



## love detective (May 12, 2013)

it is, but even that isn't as bad as you think once you get going with it, frustrating as fuck initially though


----------



## Frances Lengel (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> Whatever anybody says, it seems strange to be teaching English to Poles in Poland and yet you can't even ask for a pint of milk in a Polish shop (or sklep, as they say over there.)


 
I've seen loads of Polski skleps, but there's a Polski Slonko not far from me. What's a slonko?


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> I've seen loads of Polski skleps, but there's a Polski Slonko not far from me. What's a slonko?


 

Don't remember but it sounds fucking horrible.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

love detective said:


> it is, but even that isn't as bad as you think once you get going with it, frustrating as fuck initially though


 

I'm a feckless twat though.


----------



## chilango (May 12, 2013)

love detective said:


> I've been learning Polish the last few years, it's difficult but not as hard as it looks once you've got a foot in the door so to speak



I learnt Russian for a bit a few years back and once you'd go your head around Cyrillic it was pretty logical. Related enough to Polish for me to pick up enough words to be polite at my local Polish bakery.


----------



## J Ed (May 12, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> TBF, if Owen Jones thinks Slug O'Neill is "one of the worst people on earth", he's shockingly fucking naive. O'Neill is a cunt, but he's hardly up there with the Assad dynasty, for example!


 
Sure, although I think you could make an argument that if O'Neill was in power implementing his ideas then he might be even worse...

I'm also unconvinced of the unique evilness of the Assad dynasty as awful as it is, Syria is just doing what Anglo-US ally Bahrain did but Bahrain doesn't need to murder and rape on quite the same scale because their rebels aren't being backed by a superpower and the superpower's proxies.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

chilango said:


> I learnt Russian for a bit a few years back and once you'd go your head around Cyrillic it was pretty logical. Related enough to Polish for me to pick up enough words to be polite at my local Polish bakery.


 

Kurva! That's all you need.


----------



## love detective (May 12, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> I've seen loads of Polski skleps, but there's a Polski Slonko not far from me. What's a slonko?


 
Słonko is a diminutive form of the polish word for sun (słońce) so something like little sun - it's usually used as a term of endearment


----------



## _angel_ (May 12, 2013)

love detective said:


> it is, but even that isn't as bad as you think once you get going with it, frustrating as fuck initially though


I'd have to be under imminent visit there to even bother trying. I'm so lazy.


----------



## Frances Lengel (May 12, 2013)

Ta.

E2a - That was to LD btw.


----------



## love detective (May 12, 2013)

chilango said:


> I learnt Russian for a bit a few years back and once you'd go your head around Cyrillic it was pretty logical. Related enough to Polish for me to pick up enough words to be polite at my local Polish bakery.


 
yeah, it's surprising how often they are the same once you've 'translated' the cyrillic word into latin letters - the russian and polish are quite similar


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

love detective said:


> Słonko is a diminutive form of the polish word for sun (słońce) so something like little sun - it's usually used as a term of endearment


 

How did you get the l with a line through it? 

The very thing that makes everybody call it Lodz instead of woodzh (approx.)


----------



## love detective (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> How did you get the l with a line through it?
> 
> The very thing that makes everybody call it Lodz instead of woodzh (approx.)


 
Łódź is wooj!

i've got all the letters here (just flip the keyboard setup from english to polish pro)


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

love detective said:


> Łódź is wooj!
> 
> i've got all the letters here (just flip the keyboard setup from english to polish pro)


 

I'm not that much of a technical wizard. I can just about manage to boot the computer up.


----------



## goldenecitrone (May 12, 2013)

I know Slovak, pretty similar to Polish. Jeden, dva, tri, schtiri, petch, shest, sedyem, osem, etc...

Ist do picy, stary kokot. Always learn the swear words first.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> I know Slovak, pretty similar to Polish. Jeden, dva, tri, schtiri, petch, shest, sedyem, osem, etc...
> 
> Ist do picy, stary kokot. Always learn the swear words first.


 

All the Slav languages are, to one degree or another, similar, with loads of words in common.


----------



## fractionMan (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> I think you have to rely on the pupils knowing almost as much English as you, but try to fool them into believing that you know what you're talking about.


 
I took several classes from almost zero english to simple conversation within a year and never spoke a word of the native tongue.   It's better if you don't tbh, I banned it in the classroom.


----------



## _angel_ (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> I'm not that much of a technical wizard. I can just about manage to boot the computer up.


And yet you're here!!!


----------



## fractionMan (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> Whatever anybody says, it seems strange to be teaching English to Poles in Poland and yet you can't even ask for a pint of milk in a Polish shop (or sklep, as they say over there.)


using the language outside the classroom is different, obv.


----------



## love detective (May 12, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> I know Slovak, pretty similar to Polish. Jeden, dva, tri, schtiri, petch, shest, sedyem, osem, etc...


 
yep, although some of them are spelt quite differently (schtiri in slovak, cztery in polish for example) phonetically they are pretty much exactly the same


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> I took several classes from almost zero english to simple conversation within a year and never spoke a word of the native tongue. It's better if you don't tbh, I banned it in the classroom.


 

I suppose it rules out having beginners in the class then?


----------



## love detective (May 12, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> And yet you're here!!!


 
you can't keep a good man down indeed


----------



## fractionMan (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> I suppose it rules out having beginners in the class then?


 
They were absolute beginners. Some of them knew things like 'hello' and that was it.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

love detective said:


> yep, although some of them are spelt quite differently (schtiri in slovak, cztery in polish for example) phonetically they are pretty much exactly the same


 

As it happened, there was a Polish couple sat quite close to me in the pub on Friday night. I listened in for a bit and then thought, 'Well, I've had a go, I didn't understand any of it, but I'm really up for getting pissed.'


----------



## Belushi (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> They didn't twenty years ago. Not on a widespread scale. Russian instead but few wanted to use it.


 
Yes, I remember a Polish friend telling me that it had been a point of pride at school to be really crap at Russian.

German was the other language they were taught iirc.


----------



## _angel_ (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> As it happened, there was a Polish couple sat quite close to me in the pub on Friday night. I listened in for a bit and then thought, 'Well, I've had a go, I didn't understand any of it, but I'm really up for getting pissed.'


to be fair we could be saying that about someone with a strong liverpool or glasgow accent.


----------



## goldenecitrone (May 12, 2013)

love detective said:


> yep, although some of them are spelt quite differently (schtiri in slovak, cztery in polish for example) phonetically they are pretty much exactly the same


 
There's a town on the border of the Czech Republic and Poland called Cesky Tesin/Polsky Cieszyn that has a market where you can hear all the Czechs, Poles, and Slovaks chatting away with one another as they buy and sell their stuff.


----------



## love detective (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> As it happened, there was a Polish couple sat quite close to me in the pub on Friday night. I listened in for a bit and then thought, 'Well, I've had a go, I didn't understand any of it, but I'm really up for getting pissed.'


 
I struggle to understand pretty much any of it when it's been spoken as well - usually can catch one or two words every now and again but that way that all the words seem to just merge into one long continuous word makes it difficult to get a foot in the door most of the time, reading it is much easier to understanding it being spoken, and speaking it is harder than reading it but still easier than understanding it being spoken i find


----------



## _angel_ (May 12, 2013)

love detective said:


> I struggle to understand pretty much any of it when it's been spoken as well - usually can catch one or two words every now and again but that way that all the words seem to just merge into one long continuos word makes it difficult to get a foot in the door most of the time, reading it is much easier to understanding it being spoken


I find the same with French French speakers but not so much with French speaking African countries or Belgians.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> I find the same with French French speakers but not so much with French speaking African countries or Belgians.


 

It's disconcerting to speak to somebody in their own language and not understand their answer.


----------



## goldenecitrone (May 12, 2013)

love detective said:


> I struggle to understand pretty much any of it when it's been spoken as well - usually can catch one or two words every now and again but that way that all the words seem to just merge into one long continuous word makes it difficult to get a foot in the door most of the time, reading it is much easier to understanding it being spoken, and speaking it is harder than reading it but still easier than understanding it being spoken i find


 
You've got to hear it constantly for a couple of years to really pick it up. Living in the country is obviously the best way to do this as you're totally immersed in it most of the time.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> to be fair we could be saying that about someone with a strong liverpool or glasgow accent.


 

And at least the Poles don't usually start saying stuff like, 'What the fuck are you looking at? Jimmy.' Or 'Calm down, calm down.'


----------



## phildwyer (May 12, 2013)

chilango said:


> I didn't say it was the prerogative of any social class, but that the sort of trips being discussed here require a certain amount of social capital to a) plan b) execute and c) support you when it all goes wrong.


 
That's a pretty loose defınıtıon of 'socıal capıtal.'  Some would call ıt 'braıns.'


----------



## Favelado (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> And at least the Poles don't usually start saying stuff like, 'What the fuck are you looking at? Jimmy.' Or 'Calm down, calm down.'


 
Okay. You are a wanker. Thought so.


----------



## Trealover (May 12, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Okay. You are a wanker. Thought so.


 
Oh shut up.


----------



## phildwyer (May 12, 2013)

spawnofsatan said:


> There is a picture of Philys in budgie smugglers? Link!


 
Of course not. 

It's true that Fırky ıs very fond of a certaın pıcture of me ın my bathıng costume, but ıt ıs cut less than sıx ınches above the ankle.


----------



## _angel_ (May 12, 2013)

Trealover said:


> And at least the Poles don't usually start saying stuff like, 'What the fuck are you looking at? Jimmy.' Or 'Calm down, calm down.'


How do we know if we cant understand them?


----------



## phildwyer (May 12, 2013)

Favelado said:


> If you've got initiative and a trust fund, it's more likely to turn out well for you.


 
If you have a trust fund you don't tend to develop much ınıtıatıve.


----------



## phildwyer (May 12, 2013)

chilango said:


> Is it just me or does "Staggers" sound like a really public school nickname?


 
''Sound_ lıke_?''


----------



## chilango (May 12, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> That's a pretty loose defınıtıon of 'socıal capıtal.'  Some would call ıt 'braıns.'



Don't be a dick. You know better than this.


----------



## phildwyer (May 12, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> With only a few exceptions, the teaching ex-pats I used to hang out with were quite an odd bunch


 
Just a bıt.  Ever read thıs notorıous account of TEFL teachers ın Cambodıa?  It features at least one U75 poster (my lıps are fırmly sealed).


----------



## phildwyer (May 12, 2013)

chilango said:


> Don't be a dick. You know better than this.


 
On the contrary, the dıfference between what people can do and what they wıll do never ceases to amaze me, and I fınd that partıcluarly true of posters on thıs thread.


----------



## phildwyer (May 12, 2013)

treelover said:


> Apparently, Foucault predicted this process


 
Along wıth much else, not least the emergence of the Carceral Socıety.

Where I lıve ın Istanbul there used to be graffıtı ın three-foot letters proclaımıng ''Foucault Was Rıght.'  Got paınted over before I could take a pıcture.


----------



## chilango (May 12, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> On the contrary, the dıfference between what people can do and what they wıll do never ceases to amaze me, and I fınd that partıcluarly true of posters on thıs thread.



Yes. But that's really not the issue here is it?

What's up with your letter "I" by the way? It's coming out all weird...


----------



## phildwyer (May 12, 2013)

chilango said:


> Yes. But that's really not the issue here is it?
> 
> What's up with your letter "I" by the way? It's coming out all weird...


 
I'm ın Turkey, where they use the dots from the I as a baharat to sprınkle on theır kahvaltılıklar.


----------



## chilango (May 12, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I'm ın Turkey, where they use the dots from the I as a baharat to sprınkle on theır kahvaltılıklar.


Oh. Ok.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 12, 2013)

One of my East Euro colleagues told me she had a nephew who taught himself English by watching Hollywood movies with the subtitles off.


----------



## fractionMan (May 12, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Just a bıt. Ever read thıs notorıous account of TEFL teachers ın Cambodıa? It features at least one U75 poster (my lıps are fırmly sealed).


 
I think I did read that a long time ago.  I'm going to give it another go now.


----------



## smokedout (May 12, 2013)

weepiper said:


> That already happens here. Or it did 4 years ago when I got Milk Tokens.


 
my relationship with my local shopkeeper changed dramatically the first time I asked if I could use a milk token to buy fags 

still, he said yes, so that was useful


----------



## _angel_ (May 12, 2013)

weepiper said:


> That already happens here. Or it did 4 years ago when I got Milk Tokens.


I never had a bad reaction to milk tokens maybe it's because they're not that unusual for this area. And I could hand them straight to the milkman as well.
I actually think there were some I didn't use.


----------



## seventh bullet (May 12, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> I know Slovak, pretty similar to Polish. Jeden, dva, tri, schtiri, petch, shest, sedyem, osem, etc...
> 
> Ist do picy, stary kokot. Always learn the swear words first.


 
My Latvian co-worker told me a lot of the swearwords he used back home are Russian.


----------



## Firky (May 12, 2013)

Trealover banned? Fuck me, the mods have been busy this afternoon.


----------



## love detective (May 12, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> My Latvian co-worker told me a lot of the swearwords he used back home are Russian.


 
Isn't there nearly more Russians/Stateless Soviets in Riga than Latvians?


----------



## killer b (May 12, 2013)

a friend of mine moved to latvia 'cause he wanted to move to russia but couldn't get a visa (journalist), and latvia is the closest he could get. everyone there speaks russian.


----------



## seventh bullet (May 12, 2013)

love detective said:


> Isn't there nearly more Russians/Stateless Soviets in Riga than Latvians?



No idea. My co-worker is Latvian though. Not ethnically Russian.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 12, 2013)

Firky said:


> Trealover banned? Fuck me, the mods have been busy this afternoon.


 
what happened with all the rest?  and was lletsa reckoning that he could pass himself off as being treelover?


----------



## killer b (May 12, 2013)

he was clearly just having a laugh. he never tries to pass himself off as anything other than him.


----------



## fogbat (May 12, 2013)

Firky said:


> Trealover banned? Fuck me, the mods have been busy this afternoon.


I think it's part of a new, wider movement. An encouraging sign.


----------



## rekil (May 12, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> what happened with all the rest?


All the rest who?


----------



## equationgirl (May 12, 2013)

Firky said:


> Trealover banned? Fuck me, the mods have been busy this afternoon.


LLETSA paying another visit perhaps?


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 12, 2013)

i noted that ymu and toggle had both been greyed out.  i suppose i could go and look...


----------



## equationgirl (May 12, 2013)

copliker said:


> All the rest who?


Toggle and ymu got 2 day bans, as did Prince Bert. Reckon Firky almost got one but made an apology instead and dodged a bullet.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 12, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Toggle and ymu got 2 day bans, as did Prince Bert. Reckon Firky almost got one but made an apology instead and dodged a bullet.





el-ahrairah said:


> i noted that ymu and toggle had both been greyed out. i suppose i could go and look...


What's the history to all of this then?


----------



## equationgirl (May 12, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> What's the history to all of this then?


A 92 page thread over in nobbing and sobbing. It is not pleasant reading, if you're minded.

Things got a bit heated last night, the word 'c*nt' was bandied about a lot, things were said, and ymu and toggle got 2 days bans, along with Prince Bert who started the thread with a rather controversial opening post and , well, it all went a bit Pete Tong from there on in. An early bannee was thriller, who has probably resurfaced somewhere on urban by now. It really doesn't make pleasant reading, there's some nasty stuff on it.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 12, 2013)

What the fuck happened to this thread? I leave you lot alone for a couple of days and this is what happens. I'm not angry with you, just very, very disappointed 

Next time I leave you lot on your own I'm gonna leave muscovyduck in charge, can't fucking trust the rest of you


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 13, 2013)

Bloody hell, just had quite the twitter discussion with an intersectionalist. It was actually quite interesting in that she was willing to follow the logic of her own argument as far as arguing that men who agreed with her were exercising privilege by disagreeing with anti-feminist women. Even if they listened carefully first.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 13, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Bloody hell, just had quite the twitter discussion with an intersectionalist. It was actually quite interesting in that she was willing to follow the logic of her own argument as far as arguing that men who agreed with her were exercising privilege by disagreeing with anti-feminist women. Even if they listened carefully first.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

I just had somebody comment on my blog, I think that basically they thought that because I was objecting to the concept of trigger warnings etc I must be some sort of sexist man, they assumed I was a man, without even reading what I was saying. I found their blog where they had reposted my post and completely misrepresented my words, while posting stuff like this 



> “I don’t know how I could transition into a life where money is a necessity after living like this as soon as I moved out of my parents. Like paying rent, apart from being a soul destroying concept to me in itself, the pressure of getting that money paid on time would stress me out so much. And full time employment on minimum wage (or less for migrants) and knowing all the hard work you do benefits you the least and what little you do get for it all goes on keeping a roof over your head and food on your table.​So although people sometimes say to me “it’s really good you can live for nothing” I always admire people for surviving and struggling in the fucked system we have now. Not everyone can drop out if it (or aspects of it) without facing much more violence, discrimination and general hardship than my lil white butt gets. Squatting ain’t easy, just difficult in different ways but people making the best life they can out of what they have is always what inspires me, not whether they pay for stuff or not.”​​


​


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I just had somebody comment on my blog, I think that basically they thought that because I was objecting to the concept of trigger warnings etc I must be some sort of sexist man, they assumed I was a man, without even reading what I was saying. I found their blog where they had reposted my post and completely misrepresented my words, while posting stuff like this
> 
> 
> ​


 
Link to the blog?


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

> went to a feminist fightback party last night. expectedly, me and my friends were the only non-white people there. we asked if they could play some hip hop and some honkey feminists said "no, hip hop is misogynistic" to which i responded "whoa, dats kinda racist", they spent the next few hrs angry and glaring at me thinking of how they could kick us out without looking racist. they walked around the party getting comforted from other white people about how they arent racist. later on in the night the two came up to me to "talk this out, since we take these accusations very seriously." (aka: please tell us we're not racist!). i reassured them that in the pecking order of the most racist things in the world what they said was pretty low but that reducing an entire genre of black music as misogynistic is not only completely ignorant but also stems from a particular kind of racism. lets just say they didn't agree, the next thing they asked was: "do you support the east london mosque?" as i stood there with a glass full of gin and very little tonic in my hand i didnt know what they were on about, 'erm what? sure yeah i do i guess why wouldn't i?, but thats a strange question, why do u ask?" to which they got up furiously. we left after that never to return to a feminist fightback party ever again. Facebook: im confused, why did they ask if i supported the east london mosque and why did my answer upset them so much?


 
Saturday nights in London sound ace, how is that these people haven't seized control of the state yet?


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Link to the blog?


 
,

i do realise that whats true for me might not be true for everyone but i'm fucking furious at how she chose to misrepresent my words tbh


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

edited, had an apology


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

Some comments following what I posted above



> Fairooz Aniqa ' it just reminds me of being beaten and having my whole family threatened for being white' OH POOR YOU, now translate that to literally every brown family facing the same shit, but, not on a one off basis, but EVERY FUCKING DAY, and while we're at it lets also think about alll of the brown people across parts of Africa and the Middle East who get the shit BOMBED out of their family because they're brown (bombed by the white govt of the USA/UK that is) and also every time there is a bomb going off having people calling for your head because you're brown and every brown person is at fault for one persons actions, suddenly your problem don't seem so big no more. Remember when all those horrible brown people institutionally oppressed the poor whites and took away their land, families, jobs, homes? remember when the browns had the poor whites in shackles and sold them off as slaves and beat them/whipped them til they bled? NO? that's because it never happened. So I can call you a honkey til i'm blue in the face but you will never ever, EVER face oppression or hate in the way that brown communities do. HONKEY!


 


> Jennifer Izaakson Simmer, honkey is not racist. Cracker is not racist. Big mashpotato-face cream-cake is not racist when directed to a white person about being white. Racism is not some post-modern bullshit about 'language' and that we can decide its meaning - it's about structural fucking oppression and systemic discrimination. Historical oppression is what words are loaded with, and why racist slurs are indeed slurs, and it's oppression that is missing when I call my white friend a fucking cream-cake.


 


> Robin Burrett Death to honkeys and crackers.


 


> Elena Papamichael earl Cameron, the word honkey comes from the Senegalese for "white" that was used by slaves to speak about their slave owners so sorry if it offends you to be reminded about slavery every once in a while


 
Half of these comments are coming from 'white' people, we can probably guess at their social class. Pathetic.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

where is this from?


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

Status update from https://www.facebook.com/joem5#!/ashok.kumar6?hc_location=stream


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

so thoughts anyone? i dont know whether i was wrong or not, maybe the person was right and i was being insesitive but i don't think it warranted a barely hidden suggestion that im "dangerous" or something


----------



## cesare (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> <link removed>
> 
> i do realise that whats true for me might not be true for everyone but i'm fucking furious at how the person chose to misrepresent my words tbh


Misrepresentation and also so arrogant "consider this your education" (for example). The person's own blog contains a lot of self indulgent, spoilt nonsense.


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

Just read the reply. Good god this person is a moron.


----------



## cesare (May 13, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Just read the reply. Good god this person is a moron.


So are the people reblogging it, do they have no idea how they sound?



> There is nothing more alarming than white anarchist/leftist men undermining/disregarding/”critiquing” safer spaces policies.


 
Quite clueless.


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

Intersectionalistas are the Beliebers of the left.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

they got my gender completely wrong, its like they assumed because i disagreed with them i have never experienced any of this and am also some kind of sex pest, and they also have blatantly not read anything else on the site where i talk about racism and sexism.

check your fucking privilege ffs


----------



## cesare (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> they got my gender completely wrong, its like they assumed because i disagreed with them i have never experienced any of this and am also some kind of sex pest, and they also have blatantly not read anything else on the site where i talk about racism and sexism.
> 
> check your fucking privilege ffs


The person's basically showing off to their mates, I think. Regurgitating bits and pieces they've cobbled together without doing any kind of analysis or even thinking about it too much. Grandiose grandstanding.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

well the person has apologised now, lets hope they learn something from it


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I just had somebody comment on my blog, I think that basically they thought that because I was objecting to the concept of trigger warnings etc I must be some sort of sexist man, they assumed I was a man, without even reading what I was saying. I found their blog where they had reposted my post and completely misrepresented my words, while posting stuff like this


 
Fucking hell. That's a pretty concentrated dose of in your face unreasonableness.


----------



## cesare (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> well the person has apologised now, lets hope they learn something from it


The apology seems genuine. I'm reluctant to edit my posts altogether because that's how I felt about it; but I see the person says they feel unsafe about the gender specifics (if I understood that correctly) so I've made some edits which I hope are OK for them.

I hope you're feeling a bit less scared and anxious now froggie, and I hope the same for them too tbh.


----------



## seventh bullet (May 13, 2013)

killer b said:


> a friend of mine moved to latvia 'cause he wanted to move to russia but couldn't get a visa (journalist), and latvia is the closest he could get. everyone there speaks russian.


 
I _never_ knew that.

However, Russian as a second language appears to be challenged over there, as love detective alluded to in his reply to me with the treatment of ethnic Russians. It was an interesting conversation with my co-worker, that they spoke Latvian (with being, like, Latvian) except in largely being crude, when vulgar Russian slang words are used. I didn't ask much about anti-Russian sentiment and xenophobia, which does exist.

I have no experience of Russian people, or others from former Soviet republics living in Russia, though. I have never been there, so I wouldn't really know what I am talking about.


----------



## killer b (May 13, 2013)

Hm, not sure what that facepalm was aimed at, but it wasn't you. Was just adding to the conversation rather than trying to contradict you or something. Sorry!


----------



## The39thStep (May 13, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Bloody hell, just had quite the twitter discussion with an intersectionalist. It was actually quite interesting in that she was willing to follow the logic of her own argument as far as arguing that men who agreed with her were exercising privilege by disagreeing with anti-feminist women. Even if they listened carefully first.


 
Dead end politics


----------



## love detective (May 13, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> I have no experience of Russian people, or others from former Soviet republics living in Russia, though. I have never been there, so I wouldn't really know what I am talking about.


----------



## love detective (May 13, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Bloody hell, just had quite the twitter discussion with an intersectionalist. It was actually quite interesting in that she was willing to follow the logic of her own argument as far as arguing that men who agreed with her were exercising privilege by disagreeing with anti-feminist women. Even if they listened carefully first.


 
_the very British idea that white men can, in the end, only speak for and from their own race & sex, into which they were born is something I encounter all the time, and makes me fearful for the future both of intelligent debate and socialist struggle in this country_


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

cesare said:


> The apology seems genuine. I'm reluctant to edit my posts altogether because that's how I felt about it; but I see the person says they feel unsafe about the gender specifics (if I understood that correctly) so I've made some edits which I hope are OK for them.
> 
> I hope you're feeling a bit less scared and anxious now froggie, and I hope the same for them too tbh.


 
i think it is genuine aye, hopefully that will be useful for them


----------



## seventh bullet (May 13, 2013)

killer b said:


> Hm, not sure what that facepalm was aimed at, but it wasn't you. Was just adding to the conversation rather than trying to contradict you or something. Sorry!



Sorry, was being an early morning grump.


----------



## fractionMan (May 13, 2013)

Just found that blog, well one of it's many sub-blogs/re-blogs on tumblr. It's fucking _awful_. And now missing from tumblr as far as I can tell.

Can't see any sign of an apology though.


----------



## fractionMan (May 13, 2013)

Jesus, I've never really paid much attention to all this intersectionality stuff beyond the twateratti but reading that makes me think it really is a bunch of self obsessed me me me I'm a victim point scoring lifestyle narcissistic bullshit.

Bleurgh. I need a bath.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 13, 2013)

intersectionality is important, because none of us are exploited or oppressed in one way.  there are hierarchies of exploitation, as it were.  it CAN be approached sensibly and sensitively and with a healthy class analysis.  don't let the point-scoring identity politicians make you blind to the realities!


----------



## fractionMan (May 13, 2013)

It's kind of self evident though isn't it? The fact that people can be black, gay, female, working class and/or disabled/whatever is hardly news.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> Just found that blog, well one of it's many sub-blogs/re-blogs on tumblr. It's fucking _awful_. And now missing from tumblr as far as I can tell.
> 
> Can't see any sign of an apology though.


 
they apologised on my blog, it seems genuine from what I can tell.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 13, 2013)

I used to go out with an Intersectionalist.


----------



## butchersapron (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> they apologised on my blog, it seems genuine from what I can tell.


Did the apology say

_Sorry, now i know that you're _*one of us*_ i will continue to direct the same attacks at others who aren't one of us but not at you._

If so, that maybe an apology, but it's not an understanding of what they did and why it was wrong/stupid/etc


----------



## fractionMan (May 13, 2013)

You're part of the gang now froggy. +10 intersectionality points.


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## fractionMan (May 13, 2013)

It just seems to be creating another tier of privilege tbh, those who understand and play this stupid game and those that don't.  If you're not in the first then you're not worth listening to.

 It's like the concept of the deserving poor but self applied.  Pile of elitist wank.


----------



## audiotech (May 13, 2013)

Having had a discussion with a woman recently with regards to her belief in the "new world order" and all things "conspiracy". I was informed that I didn't take her seriously because I'm a man and men are often irritated when a woman expresses a viewpoint and by implication it appeared I'm one of them. Err, I'm a man it is true I replied, it's just that I don't go along with your simplistic notions of "conspiracy theories" (by there very nature you can't prove them, which by that token makes it difficult for anyone to refute them), the ideas you are expressing about the illuminati and linking all that with Zionism, which to me sounds much like anti-Semitism. "Zionists are not Jews" she replied. Well yes some Zionists are not Jews, but Zionism was founded by secular Jews and significant numbers are in fact Jews. Apparently, she paid money to see David Icke and when I questioned her on the lizard idea being professed by Icke she shifted (not "shape shifted") somewhat and said a friend of hers would be able to explain better than her. Oh I said.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 13, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> It's kind of self evident though isn't it? The fact that people can be black, gay, female, working class and/or disabled/whatever is hardly news.


 
of course.  but people aren't always very good at remembering that.


----------



## butchersapron (May 13, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> It just seems to be creating another tier of privilege tbh, those who understand and play this stupid game and those that don't. If you're not in the first then you're not worth listening to.
> 
> It's like the concept of the deserving poor but self applied. Pile of elitist wank.


As noted above, it can only be useful to recognise internal cleavages and not pretend that we're all in the same situation - the failure to do that is one reason why the the left has such little social weight in the working class, as it so often substituted the political views of their middle class strata for class needs on the basis that the class is united (and united around what they say). But when you turn that demand for recognition into a personal invidualised form of relentless attack it becomes unhelpful and is deeply deeply unpolitical - or post-political, a sign of utter defeat (despite the people who do this thinking of themselves as intensely political). This from Kenan Malik last week puts the context of this in a nutshell:



> One of the key shifts over the past three decades has been disenchantment with the idea of social transformation, and the decline of organizations for collective social change. As a result people have begun to view themselves and their social affiliations in a different way. Social solidarity has become increasingly defined not in political terms – as collective action in pursuit of certain political ideals – but in terms of ethnicity or culture. The question people ask themselves are not so much ‘What kind of society do we want to live in?’ as ‘Who are we?’. The first question looks forward for answers and defines them in terms of the commonality of values necessary for establishing the good life.  The second generally looks back and seeks answers – and defines identity – in terms of history and heritage. The politics of ideology, in other words, has given way to the politics of identity.


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## el-ahrairah (May 13, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> It just seems to be creating another tier of privilege tbh, those who understand and play this stupid game and those that don't. If you're not in the first then you're not worth listening to.
> 
> It's like the concept of the deserving poor but self applied. Pile of elitist wank.


 
yes, exactly.  what they have done is taken a generally good theory and used it to decide that a) they are more oppressed than you (which is fine when i, as a working class white man am talking to e.g a working class black woman, but not so good when i am talking to an upper middle class woman with an oxbridge education and a decent establishment job), and b) that a class analysis is no longer needed (because fuck the working classes or because class analysis means that said upper middle class woman is no longer more oppressed than working class white man and can no longer lord it over them via oppression olympics).

fucking fucks.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 13, 2013)

also, on another thread i read a post suggesting that the reason someone didn't do conspiracy theories was because they were white.  the subtext being that if they weren't they'd understand that there _are_ conspiracies.  i wonder if there is an identity appeal regarding conspiracy theories.  has anyone been to an icke show and can comment on the apparent ethnic makeup of the audience?


----------



## butchersapron (May 13, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> also, on another thread i read a post suggesting that the reason someone didn't do conspiracy theories was because they were white. the subtext being that if they weren't they'd understand that there _are_ conspiracies. i wonder if there is an identity appeal regarding conspiracy theories. has anyone been to an icke show and can comment on the apparent ethnic makeup of the audience?


There was some discussion here on this from this post onwards a while back.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

you take fucking responsibiltiy for what you say, i don't go around saying to people that it's fine for someone to come out with anti palestinian and anti muslim shit and conspiracy theories because they're jewish. understand what makes someone say that sort of thing yes, understand why zionism becomes an attractive option for people, but never say things like "oh it's fine because they're a disadvantaged group". you've got to ask why that viewpoint is getting support but never excuse it! why would somebody use the fact they're a woman to excuse the fact they are racist, it doesn't make any sense. why the fuck would you do it?

and if you think about what she is saying audiotech it's still saying that only white christian men can have any kind of realistic perspective on world events and if anyone else is wrong then they can't help it!


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 13, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> There was some discussion here on this from this post onwards a while back.


 
cheers


----------



## audiotech (May 13, 2013)

From what I've seen of the ethic make-up of Icke's audience, on YouTube at least, it is overwhelmingly white.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

i find it incredibly patronising the idea that just because i'm a woman it means that it's allowed for me to say racist shit. Those poor dears they dont know any better.


----------



## fractionMan (May 13, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> yes, exactly. what they have done is taken a generally good theory and used it to decide that a) they are more oppressed than you (which is fine when i, as a working class white man am talking to e.g a working class black woman, but not so good when i am talking to an upper middle class woman with an oxbridge education and a decent establishment job), and b) that a class analysis is no longer needed (because fuck the working classes or because class analysis means that said upper middle class woman is no longer more oppressed than working class white man and can no longer lord it over them via oppression olympics).
> 
> fucking fucks.


 

Skipping the whole part about inherited privilege is pretty convenient for the (afaik largely middle class) advocates of this.


----------



## fractionMan (May 13, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> As noted above, it can only be useful to recognise internal cleavages and not pretend that we're all in the same situation - the failure to do that is one reason why the the left has such little social weight in the working class, as it so often substituted the political views of their middle class strata for class needs on the basis that the class is united (and united around what they say). But when you turn that demand for recognition into a personal invidualised form of relentless attack it becomes unhelpful and is deeply deeply unpolitical - or post-political, a sign of utter defeat (despite the people who do this thinking of themselves as intensely political). This from Kenan Malik last week puts the context of this in a nutshell:


 

Cheers for the link.  I just typed out a reply to this but lost it.

I get the need to see we're not all in the same situation, it's vital imo to reach a common goal.

The problem is that where it should be about people looking _outwards_, about empathy, understanding, co-operation & commanality it's become about looking _inwards_, about divisions, projection, individuals and isolation.

Depressing stuff.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> You're part of the gang now froggy. +10 intersectionality points.


 

to be honest i just hope they learn something from it.


----------



## phildwyer (May 13, 2013)

audiotech said:


> From what I've seen of the ethic make-up of Icke's audience, on YouTube at least, it is overwhelmingly white.


 
He's getting quıte well known ın Turkey.  I got told off the other day by one of hıs fans for lettıng my 3 year-old play wıth dınosaurs.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> He's getting quıte well known ın Turkey. I got told off the other day by one of hıs fans for lettıng my 3 year-old play wıth dınosaurs.


 
you need to check your dinosaur privilege.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> you need to check your dinosaur privilege.


 
"Mammal privilege", surely?


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 13, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> Cheers for the link. I just typed out a reply to this but lost it.
> 
> I get the need to see we're not all in the same situation, it's vital imo to reach a common goal.
> 
> ...


 
I've asked this same thing a few times - why concentrate on that which divides people, rather than what unites us? And always the answer "Recognising how you're oppressed in the same way as other people DOES unite!" aka recognising someone else who's into the concept, like a radical politics version of uniform dating dot com.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

if i was being beaten in an arguement it wouldn't even occur to me to say "yeah but i'm a woman you should listen to me" wtf? 

i mean actually wtf?


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 13, 2013)

Aye; I understand the concept that p'raps a man won't have the same experiences on something as a woman; certainly a bloke shouldn't be telling a woman about being a woman (I will NOT use any stupid fucking portmanteau words) but it's a load of shite, this "you must defer to me cos PATRIARCHY" at the first hint of disagreement.


----------



## audiotech (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> and if you think about what she is saying audiotech it's still saying that only white christian men can have any kind of realistic perspective on world events and if anyone else is wrong then they can't help it!


 
Her views on Pakistani men and immigrants are well out of order too, which I challenge. I don't believe she is an out and out racist, but someone who is all over the place in her views of her immediate surroundings - very egocentric - this affected by her bi-polar disorder.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

audiotech said:


> Her views on Pakistani men and immigrants are well out of order too, which I challenge. I don't believe she is an out and out racist, but someone who is all over the place in her views of her immediate surroundings - very egocentric - this affected by her bi-polar disorder.


 
for fuck's sake. 

you've got more patience than i have, i can tell you that.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> if i was being beaten in an arguement it wouldn't even occur to me to say "yeah but i'm a woman you should listen to me" wtf?
> 
> i mean actually wtf?


 
although if the argument was about e.g. a jewish woman's experience of social exploitation and a middle class goyim male was telling you how you experienced something contrary to your actual experience you should, quite rightly, pull the 'experience' card out!


----------



## killer b (May 13, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I got told off the other day by one of hıs fans for lettıng my 3 year-old play wıth dınosaurs.


i think i need more explanation on this phil.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

yeah but not on something that's got nothing to do with the topic. like why should somebody get away with talking bollocks just because they're from an oppressed group? and why shouldn't somebody be able to tell them so? i dont want to be treated like a kid.


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 13, 2013)

Plus contrary to some schools of thought yes I do get to have an opinion on feminism, sexism, etc, because these things affect my wife and no doubt will affect my daughter as she gets older.


----------



## phildwyer (May 13, 2013)

killer b said:


> i think i need more explanation on this phil.


 
It was quıte strange.

I was ın the park talkıng to a guy whose kıd plays wıth my kıd, and I mentıoned that mıne lıkes dınosaurs a lot. Hıs face suddenly fell, he shook hıs head and saıd ''dınosaurs not good.'' I dıdn't know what he was on about, so I saıd ''yes they're quıte expensıve aren't they,'' and he shook hıs head even more and saıd ''dınosaurs problem.'' So I changed the subject.

Then about half an hour later he started talkıng about how the traıls left ın the sky by aırplanes are gettıng bıgger, and how the reason was to change the atmosphere to suıt reptıles. Then ıt clıcked. I saıd ''have you ever heard of a man called Davıd Icke,'' and of course he turned out to be a major fan. He's a nıce, ıntellıgent, professıonal bloke as well.

So next tıme I see hım, I've told my kıd to wave hıs toy tyrannosuarus at hım to see how he reacts. I told hım ''I thınk Uncle Ahmed ıs frıghtened of dınosaurs,'' and of course my kıd doesn't belıeve me. Well he's goıng to fınd out just how rıght I am!


----------



## treelover (May 13, 2013)

Left Unity has just voted to have at least 50% of women on any committee/structure, etc, and 60% of the new team are women, laudable, but what happens if most of these women are middle class, comfortably off?, as many getting involved with LU clearly are, where will be the voices of the really marginalised?, it just becomes oppression bingo.


----------



## andysays (May 13, 2013)

Clearly the popularity of dinosaurs as toys is a part of grand conspiracy to prepare us all to accept the emergence of our new lizard overlords with equanimity. The scales (boom, boom) have fallen from my eyes...


----------



## killer b (May 13, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Then about half an hour later he started talkıng about how the traıls left ın the sky by aırplanes are gettıng bıgger, and how the reason was to change the atmosphere to suıt reptıles.


oh my.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

andysays said:


> Clearly the popularity of dinosaurs as toys is a part of grand conspiracy to prepare us all to accept the emergence of our new lizard overlords with equanimity. The scales (boom, boom) have fallen from my eyes...


 
You need to check your privilege, you don't know what it's like to be a lunatic who thinks fucking "lizards" are taking over the world.


----------



## phildwyer (May 13, 2013)

killer b said:


> oh my.


 
The thıng ıs, about 50% of what he says make total sense--the stuff about pharmaceutıcal companıes delıberately addıctıng people to Rıtalın, Prozac, Xanax and that ıs perfectly true.

But he leaps from there to how flourıde ıs actually poıson, and I thınk ''well maybe, but...'' and then he starts on about huggıng trees, and I thınk ''hang on a second...'' and the next thıng I know he's talkıng about how ıf you stare at a stone for 48 hours you begın to see what's _really _there, and I'm thınkıng ''I reckon thıs bloke's a nutter...''


----------



## andysays (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> You need to check your privilege, you don't know what it's like to be a lunatic who thinks fucking "lizards" are taking over the world.


 
While I applaud your curiosity in seeking to explore the weird wide world of intersectionality on the internet, I think you may have spent a little too much time there - it's starting to rub off...


----------



## treelover (May 13, 2013)

cesare said:


> So are the people reblogging it, do they have no idea how they sound?
> 
> 
> 
> Quite clueless.


 
it all seems a re-run of the 80's, at the local bookfair here at the weekend, one could even sense this growing move amongst activists, plenty wearing t-shirts with such slogans on.


----------



## cesare (May 13, 2013)

treelover said:


> it all seems a re-run of the 80's, at the local bookfair here at the weekend, one could even sense this growing move amongst activists, plenty wearing t-shirts with such slogans on.



Yes. I wanted no part of the destructiveness of it then, and I certainly don't now.

Edit: not that I have a problem with the idea of destruction, mind.


----------



## treelover (May 13, 2013)

audiotech said:


> Having had a discussion with a woman recently with regards to her belief in the "new world order" and all things "conspiracy". I was informed that I didn't take her seriously because I'm a man and men are often irritated when a woman expresses a viewpoint and by implication it appeared I'm one of them. Err, I'm a man it is true I replied, it's just that I don't go along with your simplistic notions of "conspiracy theories" (by there very nature you can't prove them, which by that token makes it difficult for anyone to refute them), the ideas you are expressing about the illuminati and linking all that with Zionism, which to me sounds much like anti-Semitism. "Zionists are not Jews" she replied. Well yes some Zionists are not Jews, but Zionism was founded by secular Jews and significant numbers are in fact Jews. Apparently, she paid money to see David Icke and when I questioned her on the lizard idea being professed by Icke she shifted (not "shape shifted") somewhat and said a friend of hers would be able to explain better than her. Oh I said.


 
is there any particular reason why this bastardised form of identity politics is growing? is it just that all political awareness is growing, as in the 80's or something different

ffs, people are committing suicide because of cuts, and this is growing?


----------



## andysays (May 13, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> "Mammal privilege", surely?


 
Hah, you wait until the lizards take over and see how far your fucking "mammal privilege" gets you then


----------



## treelover (May 13, 2013)

The thing is fwics (not really involved) women becoming more prevalent and yes, high profile, in left politics is happening, has been happening organically, I would say that at least 60% of the stalls at the bookfair were personed by women


----------



## sihhi (May 13, 2013)

love detective, I haven't accused you of suggesting LP was exaggerating about the fact that she experienced rape and death threats in emails. 
I said we have _no grounds_ for believing that LP's presentation of such emails was/is exaggerated.

Some unpacking of LP's talk to the internet entrepreneurs/bloggers and cyber-sexism.
LP places together different types of internet abuse as part of the same self-standing phenomenon. I think there are four basic types

a. abuse from right-wing libertarians or MRAs who play normally on their own 'goad the lefty scum' or 'rile up the lefty women, it's easy'

b. abuse as part of bullying (for all sorts of reasons) amongst teenagers

c. abuse as part of a collective hatched targeted campaign over a particular issue/as a result of an article (anti-Afghan war, pro-Palestine, anti-libertarians) with suitable proxy efforts and internet cafes. [choose to confront any 'weakness' in a blogger, journalists eg David Aronowitch's Jewishness or Nick Cohen's Jewish wife as well as women journalists being women]

d. abuse from a 'stalker'-type figure that might lead to violence

Each one of these is unacceptable. Crucially, to a receiver of email abuse abuse a. and abuse d. is indistinguishable.
(Not too dissimilar from when the UDA etc used to give death threats to republican and civil rights lawyers, sometimes people who received just one death threat were shot dead, whilst others had received packs of letters with bullets and they were never shot at)

Sadly, the 'men's rights' movement - abuse a - is a reality - it is in the interests of all people to confront it head on (its bedrock is anti-socialism, supporting an order where many men are killed at work as a moral collateral to justify the gender pay gap)
For the first time ever I believe in 2011 a 'men's rights' activist (not simply a backward-thinking male business executive or male bishop) was interviewed as a witness to a Select Committee discussion of women. 

On the Holocaust vs ongoing global violence against women controversy.

Men's rights activists - the type who seek out feminist blogs to send abusive death and rape threats to - anti-feminist trolls - themselves, as a general rule, do not seek to _physically_ target these feminist voices. The whole modus operandi is to claim they are being silenced and denied freedom of speech (describing themselves as a men's human rights movement - painting feminist and socialist protests against them as 'denying free speech').

[However the organised MRAs who don't physically attack the feminist voices give succour to looser canons who do (the classic example is the École Polytechnique massacre with the MRA)]

This is what I assume delroy booth meant, when stating that the racist far-right movements have inflicted more physical damage on anti-fascists (attacks on minority bookshops in the 1990s, EDL ganing up to jostle anti-EDL meetings, attacking a UAF leafletter away from the main group) than anti-feminist trolls have on feminists. However, the psychological damage that anti-feminist trolls and e-abusers have inflicted is also very real and severe.

Obviously sexism (the backdrop) also manifests itself in huge levels of actual domestic violence and rape. 

I think it's necessary to examine the political background of British internet 'cyber-sexism'. A quick look at the 3 prominent people who don't delete rape jokes and threats from. Old Holborn lives in a mansion somewhere in Kent.
Paul Staines/Guido Fawkes got rich as a manager of 'acid house' events. The guy behind Don't Start Me Off (which is where the garroting comment was left and not removed) is an estate agent manager. Staines was/still is a UNITA fan.
Old Holborn welcomed the leader of  Libertarian Party UK posting that all NUT-member teachers abuse children. The Don't Start Me Off Guy thinks things would be better if politicians weren't so "politically correct" about immigration, ie deported quicker and better.

They want to bring working-class males into their movement by picking up men who experience middle-class women doing better than them, and a personal instance of misfortune with women esp. divorce cases and child custody (See Batboy). They do this, in part, by suggesting that women _routinely_ exaggerate _all_ kinds of male behaviour and that women attempt to silence any discussion of this fact by declaring it 'sexism' and 'sexism-enabling'.  

So obvious truism: being accurate/precise with accounts of (one-on-one or no witness) racism, sexism, discrimination on grounds of poverty, disablism, homophobia and everything else is important. 

Exaggerations do not help us in the long run. In the Spanish Civil War the Communists spread exaggerated claims, full of 'black propaganda' about the extent of Fascist support crumbling in Morocco and the Balearics. It backfired and then fewer did believe them when fascists in villages did set upon and murder prisoners-of-war being held in detention. Exaggerative propaganda works for their side, not ours.
Obviously the fascists are responsible for the deaths, but PCE/Moscow didn't help defeat the situation.

Once again there's no evidence LP is exaggerating, she has written about 'involved' issues:




			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> To my mind the best one can ever do as a writer is be honest about your background and partialities and try to understand how they affect your outlook, to do violence to your own cliches, to practice compassion over caricature. That’s what I’ve tried to do, whilst learning on the job, where practical skills – how to take quotes properly, how to wriggle around libel laws – count for no more or less than emotional skills, like scoring out a line between propaganda and cowardice that you can walk along in good conscience and then, whatever the insults and death threats and character assassinations thrown at you from either side, continuing to put one goddamned foot in front of the other. The best journalists I know have found a way to walk their own line.


 



			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> As more and more ordinary men, women and children without degrees in journalism acquire the skills and technology to broadcast text and video, the media has become another cultural territory which is gradually being re-occupied. Those on the ground do not have to wait for the BBC and MSNBC to turn up with cameras: they make the news and the reporters follow. They have grown up in a world of branding and they know how to create a craze and set the agenda. They occupy the media. And the media is starting to worry. Let’s not be naive, though: the professional press still has power, and lots of it. If it didn’t, activists wouldn’t be frantically writing press releases in one occupation and beating up Newsnight cameramen in another. The success or failure of any political action outside the ballot box depends on the participation of the press, and that’s a source of resentment as well as suspicion. Most journalists are employed to produce stories that will sell. If we write for tabloids, we are encouraged to feign a species of objectivity that often includes giving equal weight to the voices of the one percent of the population who believe that all billionaires were sent by Adam Smith to save the free world from socialism and should be rewarded with fruit baskets, tax exemptions and the comeliest of our firstborn children. The best I can do is what I always do: *write what I see and believe to be true, and be prepared to take the consequences on either side.*


----------



## audiotech (May 13, 2013)

treelover said:


> is there any particular reason why this bastardised form of identity politics is growing? is it just that all political awareness is growing, as in the 80's or something different?


 
It indicates to me that there is indeed a growing awareness taking place, but the reasons given of what, or who is to blame (I avoid the blame game and address it in social, political and economic terms) is being clouded somewhat by these conspiracy theorists and the YouTube videos they produce for the gullible to take sound-bites from, who then create a patchwork quilt out of what they see for all the ills in the world. Infowars, Alex Jones, David Icke et al being the main purveyors of such theories, sometimes plagiarised from other sources, whilst also making wild assertions (I hear Icke is being pursued by lawyers over some of his claims) doesn't add much to the discourse surrounding this crisis and is almost certainly counter-productive.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> they got my gender completely wrong, its like they assumed because i disagreed with them i have never experienced any of this and am also some kind of sex pest, and they also have blatantly not read anything else on the site where i talk about racism and sexism.
> 
> check your fucking privilege ffs


 
There's the rub, froggie.
For people of this ilk "check your privilege" privilege is something they demand of others, *not* something they ever think to practice on themselves.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

like if someone pulled me up for being racist or whatever i'd be horrified, because to me being racist is one of the worst things you can be. i always try to make sure that i'm not generalising my experiences to anyone else or whatever and i do try and listen to what people say. i dont always succeed though. I don't understand the reaction that says "yeah but you're not listening to me because i'm a woman" (or whatever) when somebody gets pulled up on something to do with privileges that THEY need to check if you see what I mean.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> I _never_ knew that.
> 
> However, Russian as a second language appears to be challenged over there, as love detective alluded to in his reply to me with the treatment of ethnic Russians. It was an interesting conversation with my co-worker, that they spoke Latvian (with being, like, Latvian) except in largely being crude, when vulgar Russian slang words are used. I didn't ask much about anti-Russian sentiment and xenophobia, which does exist.
> 
> I have no experience of Russian people, or others from former Soviet republics living in Russia, though. I have never been there, so I wouldn't really know what I am talking about.


 
One of the Ukrainian slang-phrases for "homosexual" told me all I needed to know about their attitude towards Russia. It was "man from Moscow".


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> He's getting quıte well known ın Turkey. I got told off the other day by one of hıs fans for lettıng my 3 year-old play wıth dınosaurs.


 
That's the last straw


----------



## butchersapron (May 13, 2013)

_Monetise your hotness/weaponize your identity._

Two sides of the same (individual) coin.


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> if i was being beaten in an arguement it wouldn't even occur to me to say "yeah but i'm a woman you should listen to me" wtf?
> 
> i mean actually wtf?


 
More common I think is intersectionalistas just outright refusing to discuss or debate their ideas


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> intersectionality is important, because none of us are exploited or oppressed in one way. there are hierarchies of exploitation, as it were. it CAN be approached sensibly and sensitively and with a healthy class analysis. don't let the point-scoring identity politicians make you blind to the realities!


 
Problem being that for some of these proponents it's about intersectionality as marker(s) of difference only, not intersectionality as a marker of commonality.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> It's kind of self evident though isn't it? The fact that people can be black, gay, female, working class and/or disabled/whatever is hardly news.


 
Yeah, but for some people, all that is, is a series of high scores on a game of Top Trumps, rather than individual facets of a cohesive self-identity.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

treelover said:


> it all seems a re-run of the 80's, at the local bookfair here at the weekend, one could even sense this growing move amongst activists, plenty wearing t-shirts with such slogans on.


 
Problem is, most of the people who are biting on this stuff were either kids in the '80s, or not even born, so they don't have any memory of how badly the turn to identity politics affected the development and furtherance of non-identity-based forms of politics.


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Yeah, but for some people, all that is, is a series of high scores on a game of Top Trumps, rather than individual facets of a cohesive self-identity.


 
How *aware* of this are they?


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

treelover said:


> is there any particular reason why this bastardised form of identity politics is growing? is it just that all political awareness is growing, as in the 80's or something different
> 
> ffs, people are committing suicide because of cuts, and this is growing?


 
It's pretty much the "right time" for a form of politics that some people can reduce to "me me me", which is one of the reasons why it's growing.


----------



## cesare (May 13, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Problem is, most of the people who are biting on this stuff were either kids in the '80s, or not even born, so they don't have any memory of how badly the turn to identity politics affected the development and furtherance of non-identity-based forms of politics.



Yes. And I've noticed that they don't even give credit where it is due for some of what was achieved (which can get passed over in the well deserved criticism of the worst of it). It's as if they're discovering it as new.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (May 13, 2013)

treelover said:


> is there any particular reason why this bastardised form of identity politics is growing? is it just that all political awareness is growing, as in the 80's or something different
> 
> ffs, people are committing suicide because of cuts, and this is growing?


 
Maybe its because a lot of SWP types are pretty posh, and its slightly embarrassing to watch them go on about 'The Workers' and 'The Proletariat' etc? Liberal middle-class lefties distancing themselves from class-based analysis because patronising upper-class lefties have taken it upon themselves to be the vanguard? I don't know really.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

J Ed said:


> How *aware* of this are they?


 
That's a very good question.
We tend to take up "left" political positions for explicitly altruistic reasons, but that doesn't, of course, mean that there aren't underlying self-serving elements to such a position, even unconsciously self-serving elements.

I know that doesn't answer your question, but I don't think it *can* be answered, except on an individual-by-individual basis. Motivations and therefore awareness will differ.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (May 13, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I got told off the other day by one of hıs fans for lettıng my 3 year-old play wıth dınosaurs.


 
I fucking love playing with dinosaurs.. err, I mean I used to love playing with dinosaurs.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

andysays said:


> Hah, you wait until the lizards take over and see how far your fucking "mammal privilege" gets you then


 
Shoved in a feed bin along with the other mammals?


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

treelover said:


> The thing is fwics (not really involved) women becoming more prevalent and yes, high profile, in left politics is happening, has been happening organically, I would say that at least 60% of the stalls at the bookfair were personed by women


 
"Personed". 

"Staffed" is non-sexist enough, surely?


----------



## chilango (May 13, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> "Personed".
> 
> "Staffed" is non-sexist enough, surely?



No. That's a phallocentric term if I ever saw one!


----------



## butchersapron (May 13, 2013)

Universities have for some decades now been encouraging students to think of themselves as commodities, to find the best way that they can sell themselves. This seems to have seeped through into the uni-based political students (and those who still are yet to leave that milieu years fucking later) who - in the absence of a directly and immediately effective social movement - politically have _nothing to sell but their identity. _I think there's a fair degree of deliberate manipulation by middle class uni-groupies of the alienation that many young people from non-middle class or non-white backgrounds etc may feel on entering the university as well. And they are getting away with it. That said, none of this stuff has ever been mentioned by a single person to me outside of on here. No one.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> like if someone pulled me up for being racist or whatever i'd be horrified, because to me being racist is one of the worst things you can be. i always try to make sure that i'm not generalising my experiences to anyone else or whatever and i do try and listen to what people say. i dont always succeed though. I don't understand the reaction that says "yeah but you're not listening to me because i'm a woman" (or whatever) when somebody gets pulled up on something to do with privileges that THEY need to check if you see what I mean.


 
Well, some people who go on what are basically old-fashioned "moral crusades" for the internet age, aren't very reflexive. It doesn't occur to them that when they're telling you to check your privilege, that they could be exerting privilege over you, that they need to and should check theirs. I'm not sure any modern political ideology openly supports self-criticism, to be fair.


----------



## chilango (May 13, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Universities have for some decades now been encouraging students to think of themselves as commodities, to find the best way that they can sell themselves. This seems to have seeped through into the uni-based political students (and those who still are yet to leave that milieu years fucking later) who - in the absence of a directly and immediately effective social movement - politically have _nothing to sell  but their identity. _I think there's a fair degree of deliberate manipulation by middle class uni-groupies of the alienation that many young people from non-middle class or non-white backgrounds feel on entering the university as well. And they are getting away with it. That said, none of this stuff has ever been mentioned by a single person to me outside of on here. No one.



That's echoed elsewhere.

Brand me. Me.com etc. etc. 

Personal, individual branding is heavily pushed as how to fit into the labour market. Further eroding collective class consciousness.


----------



## butchersapron (May 13, 2013)

chilango said:


> That's echoed elsewhere.
> 
> Brand me. Me.com etc. etc.
> 
> Personal, individual branding is heavily pushed as how to fit into the labour market. Further eroding collective class consciousness.


Job-seekers being forced to do self-work (paid for by themselves) - people in computer/IT stuff having to do 'self-work' (i.e upgrade skills, paid for by themselves)...on and on...individual against individual...


----------



## chilango (May 13, 2013)

Yep.


----------



## two sheds (May 13, 2013)

And kids being told how essential it is to study (which I agree with) and go to uni to make anything of themselves. So they do study and get a degree and when they've done that and look for a job they're told they have 'too high expectations'.


----------



## sihhi (May 13, 2013)

Does anyone remember Lambeth Council's attempts for fulfilling its 3% quota of disabled people whilst cutting spending (except for executives and race advising - courses depending on who you believe)?

The jobs were unfilled for about a year (less spending, meeting Thatcher's cuts, not resisting them, Ted Kinght had been kicked out) - needed to have competitive interviews etc. And when the quota was fulfilled (350 disabled out of 10,000) many of the disabilities were mild hearing associated ones. To ensure this policy could be effected, jobs in its in house construction department (ie mostly male, minority Irish and minority black) were cut (complying with Thatcher Department of Housing circulars to build no more council homes).

Question to all posters:

The Journal of the Haringey Disability Association, HDA Journal Number 17, Dec 1986. HDA was a part council-funded liberation group. It has over a page of definitions for a small paper+staple-sheet for members of the public. Some are fine absolutely necessary then, but some almost naggingly prescriptive.

A section under it titled 'Disabled Lesbians and Gays' has:



> Lesbian & Gays - collective term used throughout this journal referring to all lesbians and gays. The word lesbian should always [underlined in pen in the original] precede gay to emphasise the existence of lesbians within the movement and to counteract the marginalisation of women.


 
Nothing wrong with that in a handbook for non-sexist writing, but in a journal for the public its subtext is almost hinting to the non-lesbians and non-disabled non-intersection 'say it right or go home'.
Is this just over-analysing it? After all clarity in language is useful and English as a gendered language has its problems, and female homosexuals shouldn't be ignored in favour of male homosexuals. Am I being too harsh?


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> _Monetise your hotness/weaponize your identity._
> 
> Two sides of the same (individual) coin.


 
A bloody counterfeit coin at that.


----------



## Greebo (May 13, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> The thıng ıs, about 50% of what he says make total sense--the stuff about pharmaceutıcal companıes delıberately addıctıng people <snip> and the next thıng I know he's talkıng about how ıf you stare at a stone for 48 hours you begın to see what's _really _there, and I'm thınkıng ''I reckon thıs bloke's a nutter...''


He sounds like the type of conspiraloon commonly found on some fringes of the Pagan/Alternative/New Age scene about 20 years ago.  Sooner or later they were bound to go mainstream, even in Turkey.  Tbh I'm shocked that you're shocked.


----------



## cesare (May 13, 2013)

I don't think you're being too harsh sihhi and it's a good example. I should see if my mum has kept any of the ridiculous stuff that used to come out from Tower Hamlets in the 80s.


----------



## TopCat (May 13, 2013)

Can someone summarise this thread please?


----------



## sihhi (May 13, 2013)

TopCat said:


> Can someone summarise this thread please?


 
I don't wholly understand what's gone in the past dozen or so pages either. 

Do you remember Linda Bellos? Is what I wrote about the '3% of all Lambeth council workers to be disabled' quota wrong?


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Universities have for some decades now been encouraging students to think of themselves as commodities, to find the best way that they can sell themselves. This seems to have seeped through into the uni-based political students (and those who still are yet to leave that milieu years fucking later) who - in the absence of a directly and immediately effective social movement - politically have _nothing to sell but their identity. _I think there's a fair degree of deliberate manipulation by middle class uni-groupies of the alienation that many young people from non-middle class or non-white backgrounds feel on entering the university as well. And they are getting away with it. That said, none of this stuff has ever been mentioned by a single person to me outside of on here. No one.


 
IME, the students who hang around campus politics long after they have graduated seem to be the worst for this.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 13, 2013)

TopCat said:


> Can someone summarise this thread please?


 
Reasons Why Liberals Must Be Strangled.


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

It's not surprising that identity politics is being used to channel frustrations, I think that's being done in a similar way to the way in which fascism was/is used to explain away problems that are a result of austerity. It's far easier to understand your poor lot in life as being a result of oppression by men, Zionists, heterosexuals, whites (including the white working-class even if you're black and middle-class) and so on.


----------



## TopCat (May 13, 2013)

I really meant it asking for a summary. I have never dipped into this thread before. I can't get my head around what the fuck it's about.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Does anyone remember Lambeth Council's attempts for fulfilling its 3% quota of disabled people whilst cutting spending (except for executives and race advising - courses depending on who you believe)?
> 
> The jobs were unfilled for about a year (less spending, meeting Thatcher's cuts, not resisting them, Ted Kinght had been kicked out) - needed to have competitive interviews etc. And when the quota was fulfilled (350 disabled out of 10,000) many of the disabilities were mild hearing associated ones. To ensure this policy could be effected, jobs in its in house construction department (ie mostly male, minority Irish and minority black) were cut (complying with Thatcher Department of Housing circulars to build no more council homes).
> 
> ...


 
I'd say it *is* over-analytical, but given the date it's also an attempt (at the "infancy" of the mainstreaming of identity politics in the UK) to define the scope of the issue at a time when the language around identity was a fair bit more amorphous.


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

Take



> Fairooz Aniqa ' it just reminds me of being beaten and having my whole family threatened for being white' OH POOR YOU, now translate that to literally every brown family facing the same shit, but, not on a one off basis, but EVERY FUCKING DAY, and while we're at it lets also think about alll of the brown people across parts of Africa and the Middle East who get the shit BOMBED out of their family because they're brown (bombed by the white govt of the USA/UK that is) and also every time there is a bomb going off having people calling for your head because you're brown and every brown person is at fault for one persons actions, suddenly your problem don't seem so big no more. Remember when all those horrible brown people institutionally oppressed the poor whites and took away their land, families, jobs, homes? remember when the browns had the poor whites in shackles and sold them off as slaves and beat them/whipped them til they bled? NO? that's because it never happened. So I can call you a honkey til i'm blue in the face but you will never ever, EVER face oppression or hate in the way that brown communities do. HONKEY!


 
This is from an elected student officer at a London Uni, I don't know but I assume it's a paid position, she genuinely seems to think that there is a race war going on and the US is waging it on non-whites. I don't even know where to begin with this.


----------



## Pickman's model (May 13, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Take
> 
> 
> 
> This is from an elected student officer at a London Uni, I don't know but I assume it's a paid position, she genuinely seems to think that there is a race war going on and the US is waging it on non-whites. I don't even know where to begin with this.


being a student or being elected doesn't make you intelligent and well-informed: look, for example, at the membership of the us congress


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I don't wholly understand what's gone in the past dozen or so pages either.
> 
> Do you remember Linda Bellos? Is what I wrote about the '3% of all Lambeth council workers to be disabled' quota wrong?


 
AFAICR there wasn't an actual quota, but Linda Bellos did want the number of disabled employees to more closely match the proportion of disabled people of working age in the borough's population.
Bloody hell, that was a long time ago, and things have gotten worse, not better!


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Take
> 
> 
> 
> This is from an elected student officer at a London Uni, I don't know but I assume it's a paid position, she genuinely seems to think that there is a race war going on and the US is waging it on non-whites. I don't even know where to begin with this.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 13, 2013)

TopCat said:


> I really meant it asking for a summary. I have never dipped into this thread before. I can't get my head around what the fuck it's about.


 
my summary was both honest and accurate.  basically it's about all those liberals who pretend to be lefties and pointing out the flaws, lies, and hypocrisies in their work.  it's best when they show up here to call us names.


----------



## sihhi (May 13, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I think there's a fair degree of deliberate manipulation by middle class uni-groupies of the alienation that many young people from non-middle class or non-white backgrounds feel on entering the university as well.


 
Who exactly is manipulating? It appears to come from an alliance of middle-class 2nd/3rd generation immigrant students and middle-class women/men.  

White working-class backgrounds can feel alienated in an environment where every other week is the Student Union's 'right on' culture or cause week. Go Green Week, India Week, International Week, RAG Week, Diversity Week, Women Week (around international women's day).


----------



## cesare (May 13, 2013)

J Ed said:


> It's not surprising that identity politics is being used to channel frustrations, I think that's being done in a similar way to the way in which fascism was/is used to explain away problems that are a result of austerity. It's far easier to understand your poor lot in life as being a result of oppression by men, Zionists, heterosexuals, whites (including the white working-class even if you're black and middle-class) and so on.


It's also easier to organise round, because it's much more obvious and personal. I don't know if I'm explaining that very well though. I think RTB etc did a lot to create an artificial hierarchy within the working class.


----------



## butchersapron (May 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Who exactly is manipulating? It appears to come from an alliance of middle-class 2nd/3rd generation immigrant students and middle-class women/men.
> 
> White working-class backgrounds can feel alienated in an environment where every other week is the Student Union's 'right on' culture or cause week. Go Green Week, India Week, International Week, RAG Week, Diversity Week, Women Week (around international women's day).


It seems to me the latter of the two groups you mention that are most active in working at making this student-common sense (political common sense that is, there is still, i think, a huge number of students who have never heard of this stuff) through filling official positions, filling up public debate and so on. It reminds me of a modern day version of lord and lady bountiful.

Damn right, and one of the reasons i never went!


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

TopCat said:


> I really meant it asking for a summary. I have never dipped into this thread before. I can't get my head around what the fuck it's about.


 
I'll have an attempt at a short precis for you:

it started off being about Laurie Penny making a cock-up with regard to Alex Callinicos/someone she thought was AC's son.
It then morphed into being about how a particular group of media personalities (incl. Ms. Penny)  had set themselves up as the voice of a generation/spokespeople for various leftish movements. These people and the milieu they operate in was termed "the bubble".
Many examples of people from "the bubble" talking shite, talking down to people not in the bubble and telling the w/c what was best for it followed.
Then Laurie Penny joined the thread, for some reason assuming we were picking on her, and were fascinated by her toilet habits.
She accused posters in general of being misogynist, and two posters in particular of being racist, due to her making assumptions about a piece of IWCA analysis. It took about 100 pages before she made a grudging extremely-qualified "apology".
Then we got onto her about how "the bubble's" fondness for identity politics and intersectionality obscure the most important divide of all: Class.
Things went downhill.


----------



## cesare (May 13, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> AFAICR there wasn't an actual quota, but Linda Bellos did want the number of disabled employees to more closely match the proportion of disabled people of working age in the borough's population.
> Bloody hell, that was a long time ago, and things have gotten worse, not better!


I don't know about councils, but there definitely used to be a green card holder quota in the private sector. 

Ah yep,  here we are http://www.stammeringlaw.org.uk/disability/green_card.htm


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Who exactly is manipulating? It appears to come from an alliance of middle-class 2nd/3rd generation immigrant students and middle-class women/men.
> 
> White working-class backgrounds can feel alienated in an environment where every other week is the Student Union's 'right on' culture or cause week. Go Green Week, India Week, International Week, RAG Week, Diversity Week, Women Week (around international women's day).


 
I don't think it's just the white working class who finds them alienating tbf


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Who exactly is manipulating? It appears to come from an alliance of middle-class 2nd/3rd generation immigrant students and middle-class women/men.
> 
> White working-class backgrounds can feel alienated in an environment where every other week is the Student Union's 'right on' culture or cause week. Go Green Week, India Week, International Week, RAG Week, Diversity Week, Women Week (around international women's day).


 
The idea that there could be a working-class week at Sheffield Uni actually seems kind of absurd, if it was proposed it's not that I wouldn't be extremely supportive I'd just be surprised.

It's Nakba Day today, there's a die in on campus.


----------



## sihhi (May 13, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I'd say it *is* over-analytical, but given the date it's also an attempt (at the "infancy" of the mainstreaming of identity politics in the UK) to define the scope of the issue at a time when the language around identity was a fair bit more amorphous.


 
Yes I can understand this sort of stuff then - when the AIDS panic was at its height etc when lesbians were accused of ruining children's lives by forcing dads to be single dads while they swanned around Greenham Common.

But some of the stuff now has even less subtlety and more arbitrary divisions. I'm sure that lot would never have accepted people using the word honkey like that S.U. officer is doing.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

J Ed said:


> The idea that there could be a working-class week at Sheffield Uni actually seems kind of absurd, if it was proposed it's not that I wouldn't be extremely supportive I'd just be surprised.
> 
> It's Nakba Day today, there's a die in on campus.


 
to be fair when i was a student we just sort of ignored these stupid "weeks" most of the time


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Yes I can understand this sort of stuff then - when the AIDS panic was at its height etc when lesbians were accused of ruining children's lives by forcing dads to be single dads while they swanned around Greenham Common.
> 
> But some of the stuff now has even less subtlety and more arbitrary divisions. I'm sure that lot would never have accepted people using the word honkey like that S.U. officer is doing.


 
It's not so much the SU officer doing it, but the number of (mostly white, probably middle-class) people in the comments under it lining up to talk about how great it is to call white people that.

These people seriously think that Obama is more oppressed than the working-class of Minsk.


----------



## chilango (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> to be fair when i was a student we just sort of ignored these stupid "weeks" most of the time



I think most students in most unis do.

I'm on campus most days, and live in the heart of studentville, and there's never even a hint of this kind of thing.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

J Ed said:


> It's Nakba Day today, there's a die in on campus.


 
i wonder what any palestinian students feel about that?


----------



## kebabking (May 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> ...White working-class backgrounds can feel alienated in an environment where every other week is the Student Union's 'right on' culture or cause week. Go Green Week, India Week, International Week, RAG Week, Diversity Week, Women Week (around international women's day).


 
even simpler, at my uni - so i suppose others - was that ledership/organistional roles within the student groups take time, and by and large the kids from less privilaged backgrounds had less time to give to such roles because they spent more time working, more time travelling, and more time studying - the kids from more affluent backgrounds generally had to work less because they got more support from home, they lived closer to the uni because they more money rather than catching 3 buses to come in from miles away, and they they were more relaxed about studying because they came from families with a history of university attendance.

so the kids from more affluent backgrounds took the society posts almost by default, concentrated on the 'ishoos' you've highlighted, and the other kids got bored and joined the climbing club.


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i wonder what any palestinian students feel about that?


 
A few Palestinians are taking part I think, they act out check points just in front of the student union entrance every now and again. It's kind of weird, they don't really try and involve the people going back and forth beside them, although when I think about it I'm not sure how they would do that lol


----------



## sihhi (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> to be fair when i was a student we just sort of ignored these stupid "weeks" most of the time


 
Of course you do. But the feeling that your union - the student's union - is just as distant from you as the university management - is there.Working-class students stay silent and don't attend the student meetings. So the experience of working-class people going through these institutions is erased as well as the structural problems of the institutions themselves. 

Instead we have it that universities are about:




> People who are ambitious. People who expect to be in the top 10 to 1% of global society either now or in a few years. People who are members of the Oxford Union or are invited to speak at the Oxford Union lucky enough to be invited to speak at the Oxford Union and what does it mean for us to say that we are feminists. Well, one of the reasons I wanted to speak against the motion was I agree with the speaker who actually stole my point and can see me afterwards about it... for any reason he likes really.


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

J Ed said:


> A few Palestinians are taking part I think, they act out check points just in front of the student union entrance every now and again. It's kind of weird, they don't really try and involve the people going back and forth beside them, although when I think about it I'm not sure how they would do that lol


fair nuff, good way of raising awareness i suppose.


----------



## sihhi (May 13, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Damn right, and one of the reasons i never went!


 
Had you been around the time LP was around, you might have reconsidered:

*To hell with the Gradgrinds – go to university. It matters that we live in a country that no longer believes in training minds from all backgrounds*




> The Gradgrinds may have won the battle, but they don't have to win the war. Some years ago, I worked as a teacher and mentor for Aimhigher, a programme designed to encourage gifted and talented youngsters from deprived backgrounds to apply to top universities. It was my job to fire up those kids to pursue their dreams of learning. It was my job to listen to them when they talked about the books and ideas they loved, to pay attention to their problems and passions, to reassure them that university wouldn't mean being burdened with lifelong debt, that they would find meaningful, fulfilling work.
> That programme has now itself been cut as part of the Government's austerity package, but if I had the chance to talk to those kids again, here's what I'd say.
> I'd say, go to university, but go for the right reasons. Education isn't a gun held to your head: it's a weapon in your hands. Go not because you're afraid of not getting a job – that's not something you can count on anyway – but go because you love to learn, because you're excited by ideas, because you believe that education is important for its own sake, and when you get there, pay attention, read everything you can get your hands on, cram yourself with words and figures and ideas, because that's the one thing they can never take away from you. The Gradgrinds will only truly win if you start believing that time and opportunity to read books is a luxury to be purchased, a product to be consumed, rather than a fundamental human right. Enjoy your studies, and whatever you do, don't let them win.


 
The idea that you can let them not win personally.


----------



## treelover (May 13, 2013)

J Ed said:


> It's not so much the SU officer doing it, but the number of (mostly white, probably middle-class) people in the comments under it lining up to talk about how great it is to call white people that.
> 
> These people seriously think that Obama is more oppressed than the working-class of Minsk.


 
not sure if I should be discussing what 19 year old students think, but it just reeks of middle class guilt and self-flagellation, I had to deal with some of it when I was a NUS officer. It was bad then, couldn't imagine having to deal with it, identity politics, at the level it has now reached.


----------



## chilango (May 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Had you been around the time LP was around, you might have reconsidered:
> 
> *To hell with the Gradgrinds – go to university. It matters that we live in a country that no longer believes in training minds from all backgrounds*
> 
> ...



But she IS their victory.


----------



## rekil (May 13, 2013)

Stoke Newington Literary Festival - 3rd - 8th June, I am in you.


> Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere.
> 
> £5. Time – 15.00, Saturday. Venue – Abney Public Hall
> 
> BBC Newsnight’s Economics Editor Paul Mason talks to Penny Red blogger & New Statesman writer Laurie Penny, on an issue that’s been debated in Stoke Newington since the 17th Century: dissent. Mason’s updated best-seller Why It’s (Still) Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions looks at the wave of revolt and revolution sweeping the planet, from Athens and the Arab Spring to Quebec and the UK. He and Penny discuss how social networking, economic crisis and a new political consciousness have come together to ignite a new generation of radicals and provide some insight and anecdotes into the future of global revolt.


----------



## fractionMan (May 13, 2013)

radicals LOL


----------



## weepiper (May 13, 2013)

Urgh. Middle class privately educated appropriation of working class terminology.


----------



## J Ed (May 13, 2013)

In Greece it's proper brap brap get me?


----------



## Tom A (May 13, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Saturday nights in London sound ace, how is that these people haven't seized control of the state yet?





> we asked if they could play some hip hop and some honkey feminists said "no, hip hop is misogynistic" to which i responded "whoa, dats kinda racist"


I wouldn't say that the statement "hip hop is misogynistic" is racist - but it's definitely ignorant to tar an entire genre with the same brush with those that sadly are indeed misogynistic. I say this as someone who isn't particularly keen on hip hop (although I do like Sage Francis).


----------



## sihhi (May 13, 2013)

J Ed said:


> In Greece it's proper brap brap get me?


 
Please stop appropriating mostly immigrant street English for your own white ends. This is a dangerous form of cultural appropriation that is resisted by all real progressive immigrants in defence of their cultural heritage. You can't understand what this is like, since a white Sheffield male there is no culture which anyone else would want to appropriate from you. All of us none of us. Stop being a shitty human being. Make the student left less shit. The left is a bit shit now. Make it better. Use your own goddamned white slang.


----------



## treelover (May 13, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Urgh. Middle class privately educated appropriation of working class terminology.


 
Paul Mason isn't a public school boy..


----------



## TopCat (May 13, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I'll have an attempt at a short precis for you:
> 
> it started off being about Laurie Penny making a cock-up with regard to Alex Callinicos/someone she thought was AC's son.
> It then morphed into being about how a particular group of media personalities (incl. Ms. Penny) had set themselves up as the voice of a generation/spokespeople for various leftish movements. These people and the milieu they operate in was termed "the bubble".
> ...


 
Thank you. Can you give an indication of where Ms Penny's toilet habits are discussed so i can cut straight to the shit?


----------



## andysays (May 13, 2013)

TopCat said:


> Thank you. Can you give an indication of where Ms Penny's toilet habits are discussed so i can cut straight to the shit?


 
I'm pretty sure that was less interesting (except perhaps to Ms P) than it might sound


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 13, 2013)

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/12/jaron_lanier_the_internet_destroyed_the_middle_class/

urgh


----------



## goldenecitrone (May 13, 2013)

copliker said:


> Stoke Newington Literary Festival - 3rd - 8th June, I am in you.


 
That looks good. Cheers for the heads up.


----------



## treelover (May 13, 2013)

[QUOTE_Laurie Penny is the contributing editor of the New Statesman_][/QUOTE]

when did that happen?


----------



## treelover (May 13, 2013)

btw

Billy Bingo?


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 13, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That said, none of this stuff has ever been mentioned by a single person to me outside of on here. No one.


 
I never really had you pegged as a tumblr man in the first place.


----------



## sihhi (May 13, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I never really had you pegged as a tumblr man in the first place.


 
Is that your moustache on twitter, Nigel?


----------



## sihhi (May 13, 2013)

Did you ever find how exactly this happened:



> I got this stuff from street queers and sex workers and trans women


 
Were sex workers really the ones leading this charge?


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Is that your moustache on twitter, Nigel?


 
I'm tempted to say yes, but honesty compels me to admit that it actually belongs to a former runner up in the world moustache championships.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Did you ever find how exactly this happened:
> Were sex workers really the ones leading this charge?


 
One suspects not, but much like the Combahee River Collective in a more important sense they should have been. There's a higher sort of truth involved in these things.

(To be fair to the intersectionalist involved in that conversation, she didn't claim that sex workers etc led the charge on intersectionalism in general. Just that she heard about it from that direction. Which I don't have any reason to doubt).


----------



## sihhi (May 13, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> One suspects not, but much like the Combahee River Collective in a more important sense they should have been. There's a higher sort of truth involved in these things.


 
Can you explain what hayrr was actually refering to? What started it all?


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Can you explain what hayrr was actually refering to? What started it all?


 
Some nonsense involving Lisa Ansell, I think.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

TopCat said:


> Thank you. Can you give an indication of where Ms Penny's toilet habits are discussed so i can cut straight to the shit?


 


Well that's just it, I'm not sure her toilet habits *were* discussed. There was some remarking on the photo she posted in an article that showed her bedroom, but nothing about poo-age and pissage!


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Yes I can understand this sort of stuff then - when the AIDS panic was at its height etc when lesbians were accused of ruining children's lives by forcing dads to be single dads while they swanned around Greenham Common.
> 
> But some of the stuff now has even less subtlety and more arbitrary divisions. I'm sure that lot would never have accepted people using the word honkey like that S.U. officer is doing.


 
I agree, but I'd argue that the whole thrust of this particular take on intersectionality that's being parlayed around at the moment isn't (as it was back then) about exploration of an alternative discourse to that pumped out by the mainstream - it's too often about carving out a personal identity-based "kingdom" from which you can feel justified in using such divisive terms as "honkey". After all, you're only reflecting back at others their oppression of you, or at least that's the assumption!


----------



## sihhi (May 13, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Some nonsense involving Lisa Ansell, I think.


 
What was it cos today we have this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/lisa-ansell




> lisaansell3 ‏@lisaansell3
> Basically our radical left is nasty wee posh boys practicing for when they get to the House of Commons or the media org of their choice.
> 
> Michael W Story ‏@MWStory @lisaansell3 radical anything is mostly nasty wee boys, posh or otherwise


 
Michael Story has himself as "Filmmaker, occasional writer, Social Policy Postgrad and Captain of Shooting at the LSE. Ignite talk here: http://Michaelwstory.com/talk
LSE, London · socialhypotheses.wordpress.com"
Why have these people bought websites that popularise their names?



> Hi, I’m Michael Story. I’m very interested in making videos and writing about things but I am too much of a dilettante to build an audience. Here are some things I have done:
> ‘London’s 66,000 guns’, recorded at Ignite London.
> ‘The Captain and the Enemy’, a short film about retired Capt. Maurice Seddon and his court battles.
> ‘How Religion Made Me Homeless’, a short film I made with Nadia Gomos, who told me her amazing story about being victimised by unscrupulous faith healers when she read…
> ...


 
"Too much of a dilettante" but has bought a website with his name.

Is this the radical left getting murdered on its own turf?


> Basically our radical left is nasty wee posh boys practicing for when they get to the House of Commons or the media org of their choice.


 
Is this what the radical left wants - to be the new Owen Jones - is that what it is?


----------



## Buckaroo (May 13, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Well that's just it, I'm not sure her toilet habits *were* discussed. There was some remarking on the photo she posted in an article that showed her bedroom, but nothing about poo-age and pissage!


 
No discussion but one post. Page 207. #6208


----------



## barney_pig (May 13, 2013)

I am glad that now middle class women will not be oppressed by their gardeners


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> No discussion but one post. Page 207. #6208


 
I'm slightly apprehensive that you knew that, Bucks.


----------



## Buckaroo (May 13, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I'm slightly apprehensive that you knew that, Bucks.


 
I didn't know it but I remembered her making reference to it, searched her posts and found  #6224 page 208.


----------



## Dillinger4 (May 13, 2013)

treelover said:


> Paul Mason isn't a public school boy..


 
He is from Leigh if I remember correctly.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 13, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> I didn't know it but I remembered her making reference to it, searched her posts and found #6224 page 208.


 
That's what you say *now*!


----------



## Buckaroo (May 13, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> That's what you say *now*!


 
How dare you imply something I don't comprehend. FTR I do not have an unhealthy interest in the toilet habits of the voice of a generation. Check your privylege.


----------



## weepiper (May 13, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> FTR I do not have an unhealthy interest in the toilet habits of the voice of a generation. Check your privylege.


 
*GROAN*


----------



## goldenecitrone (May 13, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> How dare you imply something I don't comprehend. FTR I do not have an unhealthy interest in the toilet habits of the voice of a generation. Check your privylege.


 
What about topiary? Check your privet 'edge.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What was it


 
I'm not entirely sure, because for obvious reasons I don't follow her on twitter. As I understand she posted some stuff about some Novara dude and some other leftist being posh boys. They responded by asking if scabbing fits into an intersectional analysis. They all seem to know and hate each other already.


----------



## BigTom (May 13, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I'm not entirely sure, because for obvious reasons I don't follow her on twitter. As I understand she posted some stuff about some Novara dude and some other leftist being posh boys. They responded by asking if scabbing fits into an intersectional analysis. They all seem to know and hate each other already.


 
I think I saw a bit of this, she said that Pierce Penniless and Aaron Peters edit: Adam Ramsey had done well out of austerity, which Pierce challenged and she said that they'd built this social network around initially the UCL (?) occupation and now Novara which was how they'd benefited. Accusing them of being in a media bubble and being faux-left and not really caring... which tbh is exactly what I thought she was.
oddly, when I saw Pierce's tweet asking her how they'd done well I thought about reply that he'd never got 4.5k followers on twitter without austerity.. then I saw her response and realised that basically was what she was saying.. because of course this is all that matters.
I have no idea what the Novara crew's financial/material position is - clearly they have a lot of cultural/social capital but I've never had the impression that Pierce is well off. I'm sure she was saying something about oxford too but I thought they were all UCL graduates.

tweet that started it but the conversation doesn't hang together on twitter: https://twitter.com/lisaansell3/status/333318813393235968


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 13, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I'm not entirely sure, because for obvious reasons I don't follow her on twitter. As I understand she posted some stuff about some Novara dude and some other leftist being posh boys. They responded by asking if scabbing fits into an intersectional analysis. They all seem to know and hate each other already.


 
A while ago Lisa Ansell wrote an article defending the right to scab, i wrote a pithy reply, in the style of Angry Letter to the Daily Worker circa 1935, calling her out for it, ended up escalating into a massive chidlish shitstorm (I posted on here about it at the time but I can't be arsed searching for it) and I'd thought we'd sorted out and made our peace amicably the last I spoke to her about it, but she brought it up when she was having a go at Novara-guy accusing him of "cheering on threats to her" or something - Which is really unfair to him beacuse even Lisa (quite graciously following a heated exchange of emails that I was a bit freaked out by) accepted that I wasn't threatening her and it was a misunderstanding, and I apologised for being a loudmouth gobby dickhead with fuck all self-awareness, and obviously I was happy that we managed to sort it out fairly amicably in the end. Trying to attack this guy by his supposed association and/or support of me, who's really no harm to anyone regardless of the what you think of the politics, is pretty cynical of her. I don't even know him.


----------



## sihhi (May 13, 2013)

BigTom said:


> I think I saw a bit of this, she said that Pierce Penniless and Aaron Peters edit: Adam Ramsey had done well out of austerity, which Pierce challenged and she said that they'd built this social network around initially the UCL (?) occupation and now Novara which was how they'd benefited. Accusing them of being in a media bubble and being faux-left and not really caring... which tbh is exactly what I thought she was.
> oddly, when I saw Pierce's tweet asking her how they'd done well I thought about reply that he'd never got 4.5k followers on twitter without austerity.. then I saw her response and realised that basically was what she was saying.. because of course this is all that matters.
> I have no idea what the Novara crew's financial/material position is - clearly they have a lot of cultural/social capital but I've never had the impression that Pierce is well off. I'm sure she was saying something about oxford too but I thought they were all UCL graduates.
> 
> tweet that started it but the conversation doesn't hang together on twitter: https://twitter.com/lisaansell3/status/333318813393235968


 


I'm not sure exactly what the source of it all is either, but she retweeted this that got sent to her:

@*lisaansell3* Some parties are left wing, some parties are right wing, but all parties are white wing


https://twitter.com/1000cuts/status/333313393123553280

based around how some Green Party types are snotty arseholes - no doubt some are.


Adam Ramsay _probably_ does do OK austerity or no austerity given that his family have a a Scottish Baronetcy with a castle and lots of farming land.
I think the Pierce Penniless guy obviously wanted to pointout the difference but got attacked.

Nishma Doshi an Asian Green Party member takes her to task for some bits of it but then gets attacked too:





> J ‏@piercepenniless
> @lisaansell3 I really can't have this conversation today Lisa, shouldn't have responded to your implication I've 'done well' from austerity.
> 
> NishmaDoshi: But Lisa, you're white so you must have done well out of austerity too!
> ...


 
Then some male leftists said something or other, and it became shouting at her and they will become the next Nigel Farage.

Her attack on the other lot still can't get down to it completely.




> *lisaansell3 *‏@*lisaansell3*
> Lesson one. Shouting at women might seem like the answer to everything, but its not. You'll end up like NIgel Farage. 1 solution politician





https://twitter.com/lisaansell3/status/333667217549967361

This is priceless though isn't it: - 
"Some parties are left wing, some parties are right wing, but all parties are white wing" 

Hey Sinn Fein, stop being white wing!


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

I find this whole hierarchy of oppression really offensive as well sihhi, i know this is more what you were going on about on the other thread but i do find it really offensive. Like the idea for example that the sort of sexual harassment women face if they are white is only 1/5 what an immigrant has to face for example. It's such bullshit, you can't say that sort of thing, any sort of sexual harassment or racist abuse etc is completely unacceptable.


----------



## treelover (May 13, 2013)

I think Lisa Ansell used to post quite hysterical pieces on Indymedia and certainly CIF.


----------



## cesare (May 13, 2013)

treelover said:


> I think Lisa Ansell used to post quite hysterical pieces on Indymedia and certainly CIF.


Someone hasn't sent me the memo on reclaiming hysterical.


----------



## sihhi (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I find this whole hierarchy of oppression really offensive as well sihhi, i know this is more what you were going on about on the other thread but i do find it really offensive. Like the idea for example that the sort of sexual harassment women face if they are white is only 1/5 what an immigrant has to face for example. It's such bullshit, you can't say that sort of thing, any sort of sexual harassment or racist abuse etc is completely unacceptable.


 
It might be. But go cry to white Santa Claus, etc.
The crude version is:
White women face a less intense, more straight-forward sexism compared to black women - no one knows the factor - I made the 'fives time more' up. But they can't really do any extrapolation, all they can do on matters of black men being sexist to black women, is keep silent. Any intervention helps an overwhelmingly white supremacist. If the Anti Racism Dog barked at you you'd understand. Sorry not sorry etc.

Listen to what Malcolm Harris said:

"What could a dog – an anti-racist one, at that – do to deserve it? @Anti_Racism_Dog had one real function: to bark at racist speech on Twitter. 
The account responded to tweets it deemed racist with the simple response ‘bark bark bark!’ Sometimes it would send wags to supporters but that was pretty much it. 
The account would respond mostly to what the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva would call ‘colour-blind racism’, that is, racisms that are generally right-libertarian in orientation and justified through appeals to supposedly objective discourses like science and statistics. It’s a notoriously insidious white-supremacist ideology, a virulent strain evolved specifically to resist anti-racist language. Colour-blind racism defends itself by appeals to neutrality and meritocracy, accusing its adversaries of being ‘the real racists’. Although its moves are predictable, they’re hard to combat rhetorically since they’re able to ingest the conventional opposition scripts. Colour-blind racists feed on good-faith debate, and engaging with them, especially online, is almost always futile. But when they’re barked at by a dog, one whose only quality is anti-racism, they flip the fuck out. ...
@Anti_Racism_Dog, by fully assuming the persona of an animal, was invulnerable to counter-attack. You can’t explain yourself to a dog and you look like an idiot trying. The only way to win is not to play but this is the colour-blind racist’s Achilles Heel: they’re compelled to defend themselves against accusations of racism. It’s the anti-racist argument that gives them content; theirs is an ideology that’s in large part a list of counter-arguments. After all, white-supremacists are already winning – their task now is to keep the same racist structures in place while making plausibly colour-blind arguments against dismantling them. @Anti_Racism_Dog was empty of anything other than accusation and so left its targets sputtering."


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

I find that ridiculous lol, what about polish women, or gypsies or travellers. Surely in some areas of the UK a Polish or Romanian woman, especially if she is working class, might expect to face more open racism than a black woman whose family who has been there for generations?


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

And as if white people never have to put up with any racism, I've had to deal with some quite bad racism especially when I was younger, and I'm white. Imagine how things were for for example, Serbs or Kosovar Albanians coming to this country as asylum seekers, who were mostly white, and the sort of abuse people can get if they dont speak english very well, even as a white person, especially working in a low paid job where people treat you like shit. I know you're not saying that btw, but the thought of it does make me a bit angry. Where does all this fit into their bullshit theories?


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> And as if white people never have to put up with any racism, I've had to deal with some quite bad racism especially when I was younger, and I'm white. Imagine how things were for for example, Serbs or Kosovar Albanians coming to this country as asylum seekers, who were mostly white, and the sort of abuse people can get if they dont speak english very well, even as a white person, especially working in a low paid job where people treat you like shit. I know you're not saying that btw, but the thought of it does make me a bit angry. Where does all this fit into their bullshit theories?


 
Northern Ireland?


----------



## sihhi (May 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I find that ridiculous lol, what about polish women, or gypsies or travellers. Surely in some areas of the UK a Polish or Romanian woman, especially if she is working class, might expect to face more open racism than a black woman whose family who has been there for generations?


 
This is like a flood of white tears etc. Black people are just structurally oppressed in Britain, it's the way it is. Their wealth was stolen from them by slavery and Britain has made no reparation for the descendents of this act of oppression.
Hence, your finding some Nigerians who arrived in the fifties living in Lewisham having parties at the weekend surrounded by a mixed community who don't mind the BEN music piping away is irrelevant. White people may experience racism from other white people yes, but only white people structurally inflict/have inflicted racism on others, moulding their psychological mindsets. You can't escape it by doing a Racism Awareness Training Course - what is this - the 1980s? All of us or none of us! End all oppressions not just classism. We want the whole damn bakery!

Frogwoman - at this point - you are doing "‘colour-blind racism’" by saying colour shouldn't matter in how and who gets listened to in general, remember that "it’s a notoriously insidious white-supremacist ideology, a virulent strain evolved specifically to resist anti-racist language."


----------



## frogwoman (May 13, 2013)

fuck this shit is disturbing. what about my mates who were refused to be served in a pub because they "looked like pikeys"? and pubs around hemel etc that always refuse to serve people they think are travellers!

i know youre not saying this sihhi but come on, i cant believe people actually argue this in the 21st century, its insane  

would people actually call someone a racist for pointing out this stuff?


----------



## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I know you're not saying that btw, but the thought of it does make me a bit angry. Where does all this fit into their bullshit theories?


 
To be honest it fits in very badly. Those of the world-wide working-class who are from Eurasia's Third World - from South-Eastern Europe, the Balkans, from Central Asia, 
Turks, Kurds, Azeris, Georgians, Armenians, Iranians, Syrians, Lebanese - and who pass as white are a problem - particularly if they've lived in Britain a long time. Many of them are 'below' in poverty levels than the settled Jamaican or Monserratian or Sindh or Gujarati or wherever extended families.

It would force them to accept that these black and Asians have a kind of 'black privilege' - which is, we can at least agree with them on this, a staggeringly dumb concept. 

So what gets done is the net is thrown out wider and globally - white people do still oppress black people - whites condescend to black people on Comic Relief (even if it's Lenny Henry doing it? or something), black people are still the threat to white people, white people think of them as the source of problems in the world overpopulation, disease and sorcery and witchcraft and albino murders. Overall however there are fewer murders of albinos in black societies than there are of blacks in western societies, so psychologically we in Britain are under this worldwide media pressure and education that produces racism against blacks. Hence UKIP threatens black people more than it does whites or East Europeans - they are just a stooges to attack black people. Stop denying race! End deaths of black people in custody whether the left wants to campaign on it or not! There is no hierarchy of oppressions! Class doesn't matter unless race matters! Go read bell hooks - she had to change her name to get away from racist assumptions that she was another white professor - do you know how demeaning that it is! No you don't you're  a honky. Say honky to yourself with your white breath save black people's time! It's like walking into a party full of people you don't know and them not wanting to change the music on your say so! All of us or none of us!


----------



## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> fuck this shit is disturbing. what about my mates who were refused to be served in a pub because they "looked like pikeys"? and pubs around hemel etc that always refuse to serve people they think are travellers!


 
LOL! You're doing to make yourself feel better to escape from the feeling of being a shitty person you can go on enjoying your white day in your white town. It's better to accept you're a shitty human being now rather than later. But you don't care with your white blinkers.

Go ahead list it all: white teenagers who wore NUM badges in Nottinghamshire got bundled into police cars if they were in a large group hanging around at night, white residents in Wapping who came to support the pickets had police impound their cars and release them a week later, white Communists who came out onto the streets of Notting Hill in 1958 to defend the black population from attack, white Greenham Common women facing a collective ban on motorway service stations, white Muslim converts who get a swarm of MI5 handlers and police to goad and encourage them to start thinking of plots to blow buildings up then get arrested, white Cypriot young women who went through the virginity examinations by gynaecologists at Heathrow like all the others, white immigrants with headscarves that still face 8 hour interrogations on fully complete visas, pubs and rural campsites or hotel say no travellers wanted. It's all a stream of cat urine compared to 5,000 Africans who die every day due to white intransigence.
Black people are in prisons in white jails, dying in white occupations, suffering white-inflicted hunger and your hand-wringing is for your white friends - who you probably would claim don't see colour - couldn't get into a pub owned by another honky. Do you care about systemic injustice or just lost revenues to the honky economy?

White sweat from hand-wringing - it ain't the same as black slavery.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 14, 2013)

"I was the whitest person in a white town"


----------



## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

This is the guy  https://twitter.com/broseph_stalin

behind this:



> went to a feminist fightback party last night. expectedly, me and my friends were the only non-white people there. we asked if they could play some hip hop and some honkey feminists said "no, hip hop is misogynistic" to which i responded "whoa, dats kinda racist", they spent the next few hrs angry and glaring at me thinking of how they could kick us out without looking racist. they walked around the party getting comforted from other white people about how they arent racist. later on in the night the two came up to me to "talk this out, since we take these accusations very seriously." (aka: please tell us we're not racist!). i reassured them that in the pecking order of the most racist things in the world what they said was pretty low but that reducing an entire genre of black music as misogynistic is not only completely ignorant but also stems from a particular kind of racism. lets just say they didn't agree, the next thing they asked was: "do you support the east london mosque?" as i stood there with a glass full of gin and very little tonic in my hand i didnt know what they were on about, 'erm what? sure yeah i do i guess why wouldn't i?, but thats a strange question, why do u ask?" to which they got up furiously. we left after that never to return to a feminist fightback party ever again. Facebook: im confused, why did they ask if i supported the east london mosque and why did my answer upset them so much?


 



> oxford phd student labor geography | autonomism | black nationalism | smashin state | eatin rich | liftin | dweebin | livin hackney | reppin chi across da globe


 

Here you go butchersapron, Chris Harman understood autonomism wrong these guys are doing it right. 

I don't even get the story why are men going to Feminist Fightback parties - the middle-class lot want to crowd in everywhere. LOL. 
_Stay_ to drink gin at people you've already observed as racist/(or should that be insufficiently intersectional)  and then spread the news on your twitter to 1,277 followers? It just all sounds so dumb it's unreal.


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

what a prick.


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## Idris2002 (May 14, 2013)

Have these people given any indication of how they see the endgame? By "endgame" I mean what happens when they get from point A to point B, point B being the situation when the racism they identify as the key problem is overcome. Or do they have no conception of such an endgame?


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Have these people given any indication of how they see the endgame? By "endgame" I mean what happens when they get from point A to point B, point B being the situation when the racism they identify as the key problem is overcome. Or do they have no conception of such an endgame?


 
Surely an endgame would defeat the purpose?


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## Idris2002 (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Surely an endgame would defeat the purpose?


 
You mean. . . they're not actually interested in ending the social evils they affect to condemn?


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## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Surely an endgame would defeat the purpose?


 
Here we go again - white doubt over non-white intentions. White people get on Oprah when they explain why racism is bad, when black people do the same they get people rolling their eyes - it makes them feel uncomfortable. Death to honkies and whites. First you kill the honkies, then you eat dinner in the same room with them. Saying anti-racists just want to keep racism alive to milk it for their own ends is what the BNP does. For real, you are a racist. Repeat after your white self: 'I am a racist'. Dig it! The red class struggle front is becoming every day like the National Front. Don't tell people who've had their music denied how to deal with the racism they experience every waking minute of their lives. Do you even know what a black minute feels like? The hell you do. White people want to pretend they are ending racism and explain that their traveller friends receive racism so they are racism victims too. There's no god-damned problem with exaggerating feelings, honky. There's no possible way in which backlash Tory (or Labour) sentiments could be whipped to the detriment of immigrants. Immigrants already face hell. If foreign criminals get deported in your so-called backlash we know what it feels like anyway. White British society is a large prison for non-whites, you dig? That's why foreign non-white people from the U.S. do PhDs in Oxford University after being elected student union top officials in mostly white student British universities.


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## Idris2002 (May 14, 2013)

"Dig it"? How old are you?


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

I'm sorry PoCs and JoCs


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## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

In all seriousness, J Ed can you explain how this stuff is improving the university anti-cuts struggle - can we expect a black students' exam boycott to squeeze the system cutting back on FE that "hits minorities disproportionately" etc?



> by Roshni Joshi, NCAFC National Committee and NUS National Executive Council
> As a member of all four Liberation campaigns and an advocate of intersectionality, I would say this event hit the mark in terms of providing a safe learning and organising space in which anyone could come together to discuss Liberation and share ideas.
> Having attended several NUS/ NCAFC/ student political conferences, I can honestly say that the first NCAFC Liberation Conference was the only one where I have felt intersectionality has truly been prioritised. I ran two sessions on the first day; the Stephen Simpson and Boniface Umale campaign planning workshop and the Hidden Black* identities discussion group. Both workshops had a fair to excellent turnout, especially of members who didn’t define as Black* themselves. The discussions had in the sessions were genuine and interested- it was a very good opportunity for people to air questions and learn about Liberation issues with which they has very little personal investment.
> I think the caucus and ally sessions, which allowed self-defining Black*/ LGBT/ Women/ Disabled people to come together and organise and then for our allies to join us in discussion afterwards, were too short for proper discussion to be had; but I think the tone of discussion within them was positive, progressive and constructive, and a solid base for liberation led anticuts campaigning.


 
What is Black*, is it like #Beautiful?


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## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

The black left is winning apparently:

https://twitter.com/Roshkneee/status/334041459789537284

But can you explain this J Ed

http://5pillarsand6colours.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/im-not-a-superhero-and-thats-okay/



> Hi, my name is Maryam, I’m a 21 year old undergrad student currently standing to be the next NUS Black Students’ Officer. I’m standing on a platform of intersectionality as I define into all of the Liberation Campaigns (Black, LGBT, women and disabled). The first three are aspects of myself I’m sure pretty much everyone knows of; the latter however, may not be so commonly known.
> 
> I define as disabled because of my mental health issues. I have struggled with depression on and off for years in varying degrees, I find stressful situations sometimes more difficult than most and am now realising that the ‘spoon theory’ is something which I increasingly find myself fitting into and indeed using.


 

How can someone _stand on_ a platform of intersectionality? Surely intersectionality is the _means/analysis by which_ a platform, policy or politics is reached?


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## cesare (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> <snip>
> 
> 
> How can someone _stand on_ a platform of intersectionality? Surely intersectionality is the _means/analysis by which_ a platform, policy or politics is reached?


 
This is the key point on which a perfectly reasonable (in principle) means/analysis/theory gets mutated into identity politics, I think.


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## butchersapron (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This is the guy https://twitter.com/broseph_stalin
> 
> behind this:
> 
> ...


 
Just...wow. Total wow. Lost for words.


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## Pickman's model (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I'm sorry PoCs and JoCs


how sorry?


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## agricola (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> How can someone _stand on_ a platform of intersectionality?


 
A _platform of intersectionality_ sounds like some large-scale Lego construct.


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

I have a few ideas about it but to be totally honest I can't explain any of this stuff, I just don't understand it at all. It's a million miles away from anything I understand and I have been trying to understand it for a while by looking at tumblr blogs, asking people involved and so on.

I just don't get it, I don't think we're supposed to.


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## DotCommunist (May 14, 2013)

mounted on the mechano wheels of opression


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## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

This report from the NUS Black Section conference has a number of things in it:

Keep UAF in even though the Delta affair still hangs like a millstone around its neck.

North African or very pale black people are not adequately black to share experience of combatting racism or something.

Some kind of demand for a 'don't robustly rebut first time attenders of a conference' rule?

#nusbsc13 – Little democracy, little accountability, no different



> I would say that, on average I am a strong woman. This weekend however, I was reduced to tears over my treatment by delegates and observers at the conference. As a first time delegate I will stand up and say that this is not acceptable. A healthy sign of democracy is debate and an ability to criticise the institutions that represent you. When I exercised my right to do this, I was attacked on twitter by a guest speaker! That is not professional. If I had insisted on being in a safe space all weekend, I would have had to stay in the designated room without my phone, how can NUSBSC committee think that is acceptable? However, having talked to others in the movement, I have heard that this is no different from usual.


 


> I attempted to hold a debate on the fact that UAF was included in the motion. This was after Aaron failed to acknowledge that Black female students were being forced to chose between parts of themselves. He insinuated that because Doreen Lawrence was the chair, we do not have any right to criticise the rape apologists within the movement. Sorry, but no! Doreen Lawrence is an amazing woman and has handled the tragedy in her life with dignity and strength and she is truly an inspiration. Ultimately however, I am not going to be forced to choose between anti-racism and sexism, they are both forms of oppression. Intersectionality is so important to those who define into more than one liberation campaign. The vote on whether to discuss my point of order was lost by around 2 votes, it is a shame that Aaron could not vote for it and defend something he obviously feels equally as strong about. I have no doubt that I would have lost the debate -due to the demographics in the room- but I believe I should have been given the opportunity to challenge everything that was being stated as fact, instead of opinion. There is no room for rape apology within the anti-Racism movement.


 


> Most of the dislike for Labour Students was centred around their choice to send out lines during elections, fine. However, when the Black Students Officer themselves posts lines on twitter telling his supporters how to vote, the word ‘hypocrite’ comes to mind. It may seem I am attacking Aaron but ultimately as a fellow Labour comrade, I would have expected better. Let us not forget he is a Labour Councillor and yet I felt marginalised and unaccepted for being Labour.


 


> I was humiliated by steering when attempting to do a Point of Order, even though I had never done one before. They attempted to shut me down without a vote, luckily an impartial NUS staffer was there to support me. It was a flagrant disregard for democracy and a great impression to make to new delegates. I wonder if I hadn’t supported Maryam, would I have been treated the same way?


 



> Now to discuss the role of a guest speaker at this event who has publicly attacked both myself and a fellow delegate for simply criticising his speech. Might I add, he was not even tagged in the original tweet, he was definitely in the mood for a fight. How infantile for a man in his 50′s. Lee Jasper has done a lot for the Black Students movement, there is no doubt about that. However, his speech became very provocative and upset me with his anti-white stance. I do not accept -as someone of dual heritage- that all white people are trying to oppress us. To suggest otherwise is angry and unhelpful. He also frequently used patronising terms such as ‘girls’ when referring to women and ‘the gays’ when referring to the LGBT community. I felt persecuted and bullied by this speaker and it is embarrassing for him that he cannot accept a little criticism from those who said it was awkward for them when he was shouting his aggressive anti-white rhetoric. Let us not forget that the dual heritage population is an ever growing one, we are still victims of racism. I would ask the new NUSBSC committee that he is not invited again. His behaviour has been unacceptable and actively bulling 19 year old and 26 year old students on twitter is shameful behaviour, especially from a man in his 50′s. He should know better. I want to see members of the committee condemning this sort of behaviour as it would not be accepted anywhere else in NUS, it should not be accepted here.


 


> I cannot believe I was a victim of racism at a Black Students conference, the one place you would expect to feel safe. I was not the only one either. Malia was challenged for sharing best practice with fellow Black Students (something which we really need). Apparently being North African excludes her from being able to give advice. This is simply not acceptable, if you are at Black Students Conference you self identify as Black. It is nobody’s right to challenge this and this sort of behaviour is callous and ignorant. Being an ethnic minority means you are open to racist abuse no matter what shade you are, that is a fact. Who could believe that this would even be questioned in an apparent safe space for Black Students.


 



> I will not be told - as I was - that my views were less important because of the colour of my skin. I am half white and I am half black. This weekend has proven what I have previously said which is that no matter where I am I can be the victim of racism from ANYBODY. Black people will challenge me and white people will challenge me. That is why it is important to be inclusive, that is why the anti-white rhetoric was appalling, that rhetoric was condemning half of my family, shame on you. It is not healthy, that is not how change happens. Why do we insist on a sort of campaigning which breeds off hate, why can we not celebrate our diversity, proving that multiculturalism has and does work? This rhetoric is not representative of all Black Students, just a faction in the room.


 



> Let me say one more thing, the Labour Party and especially Labour Students, actively support and respect the autonomy and importance of liberation campaigns. The support I have received as BAME Officer has been amazing. Dianne Abbott is a Black Labour MP, Aaron Kiely is a Black Labour Councillor and a speaker at the conference was a Black Labour Parliamentary Candidate for 2015. This was an NUS event, not an SBL event. I understand that SBL have a very strong presence within the liberation, but the speakers and indeed the speeches need to be more sensitive to other political views. I was not alone in feeling alienated just because of my political affiliation. Am I not still a Black Student? Do I not still deserve the opportunity to speak my mind when I disagree? NUS is a political body, but it represents the views of many factions. This event only catered to one, that is not representative. There are even Black Tory’s out there, yes they are few and far between but ultimately conference should not just be about slating a political party. It should be there to inspire us and give us the tools to make change happen. This was not my experience.


 



> My experience of conference was a negative one and I know I am speaking for others too. I had no safe space this weekend, conference floor wasn’t safe, even the internet was not safe. We should be allowed to criticise speakers without them going into a full frontal attack on first time delegates it is unacceptable behaviour that the NUSBSC leadership should condemn. I am not sure if I will be back next year, this weekend’s experience left me physically and emotionally drained. However, there were a few highlights such as meeting a few amazing people (you know who you are) and the fact that next years conference will be held in Scotland may just persuade me!


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

I guess I can explain some of the behaviour and views in the way that student politics is structured.

There are no specific paid positions (and certainly no incentive) to pursue class politics within student politics, and as far as I know there are no equivalent positions to the identity politics (or in their parlance 'liberation') groups in any student union in the country. So you will get motion after motion that pushes for things like positive discrimination in elections or an increase in paid elected positions for an identity politics group and so on from people who want to demonstrate that they can get things done and then get elected to a 'liberation' position in the NUS.

There is usually a lot of solidarity between liberation groups in student politics, and there are very real consequences if this gentleman's agreement is broken no matter how ridiculous or poorly thought out whatever is being pushed for is. For example, a motion for a black students officer (another paid elected position) at Sheffield Uni was agreed to in principle by members of the women's committee but several members of the committee suggested that their actual proposal was unconstitutional and needed some amendments before it could pass, the members of the women's committee voicing that opinion were subject to a lot of abuse and accusations of racism. In the end, the motion was found to be unconstitutional by the student press (which was then called right-wing and racist) and they are passing it with amendments again this week. I have no doubt that if the roles were reversed then members of the black students committee would have been subject to the same abuse.

When this threat of accusations of racism and abuse is directed at younger people, many of them still quite unsure of themselves and their politics and often influenced to some extent by identity politics and middle-class white guilt, you can see why this stuff goes unchallenged and gets more and more extreme.


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## Idris2002 (May 14, 2013)

The *Freedom Charter* was the statement of core principles of the South African Congress Alliance, which consisted of the African National Congress and its allies - the South African Indian Congress, the South African Congress of Democrats and the Coloured People's Congress. It is characterized by its opening demand; "The People Shall Govern!"[1]
In 1955, the ANC sent out fifty thousand volunteers into townships and the countryside to collect 'freedom demands' from the people of South Africa. This system was designed to give all South Africans equal rights. Demands such as "Land to be given to all landless people", "Living wages and shorter hours of work", "Free and compulsory education, irrespective of colour, race or nationality" were synthesized into the final document by ANC leaders including Z.K. Mathews, Lionel 'Rusty' Bernstein and Alan Lipman (whose wife, Beata Lipman, hand-wrote the original Charter). The Charter was officially adopted on 26 June 1955 at a Congress of the People in Kliptown.[2][3] The meeting was attended by roughly three thousand delegates but was broken up by police on the second day, although by then the charter had been read in full. The crowd had shouted its approval of each section with cries of 'Afrika!' and 'Mayibuye!'[4] Nelson Mandela only escaped the police by disguising himself as a milkman, as his movements and interactions were restricted by banning orders at the time.[5]
*The document is notable for its demand for and commitment to a non-racial South Africa, and this has remained the platform of the ANC.* Members of the ANC with opposing Africanist views left the group after it adopted the charter, forming the Pan Africanist Congress. The charter also calls for democracy and human rights, land reform, labour rights, and nationalization. After the congress was denounced as treason, the South African government banned the ANC and arrested 156 activists, including Mandela who was imprisoned in 1962. However, the charter continued to circulate in the revolutionary underground and inspired a new generation of young militants in the 1980s.[4]
On 11 February 1990, Mandela was finally freed and the ANC came to power soon afterwards in May 1994. *The new 'Constitution of South Africa' included in its text many of the demands called for in the Freedom Charter. Nearly all the enumerated concerns regarding equality of race and language were directly addressed in the constitution, although the document included nothing to the effect of the nationalization of industry or redistribution of land, both of which were specifically outlined in the charter.*


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This report from the NUS Black Section conference has a number of things in it:
> 
> Keep UAF in even though the Delta affair still hangs like a millstone around its neck.
> 
> ...


 
The fallout following the anti-fascism and anti-racism proposal at the NUS was bizarre, and I assume the result of the acrimony between Kieley and the right-wing Labour students. If either group actually cared about campaigning against racism or fascism then they could have compromised.

By the way, SBL is a front for the Socialist Alliance and they are more than happy to be bag carriers for right-wing politicians like Diane Abbot. Members of the SBL at Sheffield Uni have a history of very bizarre behaviour, one female student politician in particular was very weird - she openly praised Ahmadinejad!


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## chilango (May 14, 2013)

It's like a watered down version of bonkers US Maoists MIM:


> It is through MIM's unique analysis of the "labor aristocracy" that MIM differentiated itself from other leftist parties in what it terms the imperialist countries. The labor aristocracy today, MIM argued, is that class of workers in imperialist countries that receive more than the value of their labor by sharing in the superprofits extracted from the Third World. MIM saw the principal contradiction in society to be that between imperialism and the oppressed nations and upholds the right to self-determination for oppressed nations. Although it allows that there are "scattered" white proletarians, MIM considers most white workers in the U.S. to be members of a labor aristocracy, meaning that that they benefit so much from the system of imperialism that they are bought off, thus having no revolutionary potential. MIM developed this analysis in part from the book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai. MIM thus believes that revolution is impossible in the U.S. without external help of oppressed nations.
> MIM states that it serves to build public opinion in favor of anti-imperialist and national liberation struggle.
> MIM was one of the first Maoist organizations to explicitly oppose homophobia and heterosexism.
> MIM's newspaper, MIM Notes, was anonymously written; authors do not sign their names to articles. Instead, MIM Notes writers may use the moniker MCX (MIM Comrade X), where X is a number. This is reputedly to prevent their members and supporters from being known by the state. This also functions to keep the focus on theoretical line and arguments as opposed to personalities.
> ...


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## chilango (May 14, 2013)

...and we all know where this leads....

....the famous MIM movie reviews!



> SHREK 2:
> 
> Gender bureaucrat enemy of the people "Fairy Godmother" lives a life of dogmatism following the scripts in "Cinderella," "Snow White" and such books that she keeps in her library. Living off the exploited workers, and selling hocus-pocus to the people like many other unproductive sector flim-flam artists we can think of today, Fairy Godmother spreads her poisonous visions of the future everywhere and lords over even the king himself.
> 
> ...


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## butchersapron (May 14, 2013)

> I would say that, on average I am a strong woman. This weekend however, I was reduced to tears over my treatment by delegates and observers at the conference. As a first time delegate I will stand up and say that this is not acceptable. A healthy sign of democracy is debate and an ability to criticise the institutions that represent you. When I exercised my right to do this, *I was attacked on twitter* by a guest speaker! That is not professional. If I had insisted on being in a safe space all weekend, I would have had to stay in the designated room_* without my phone*..._


 


> Durruti worked in Paris as a mechanic. He then decided to return to Spain and arrived at San Sebastian, Basque Country, just across the border. Here, he was introduced to local anarchists such as Suberviola, Ruiz, Aldabatrecu or Marcelino del Campo, with whom he formed the anarchist armed-struggle group Los Justicieros ("The Avengers"). In 1921, during the inauguration of the Great Kursaal in San Sebastian, members of this group attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate King Alfonso XIII. Shortly after Buenasca, the then President of the recently-formed anarchist-controlled Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo CNT, persuaded Durruti to go to Barcelona to organise the workers there where the anarchist movement, as well as the syndicalists, was being brutally suppressed and most of its members jailed or executed. Here, with Juan García Oliver, Francisco Ascaso, and other members of Los Justicieros, he founded Los Solidarios ("Solidarity"). In 1923 the group was also implicated in the assassination of Cardinal Juan Soldevilla y Romero, as a reprisal for the killing of an anarcho-syndicalist union activist Salvador Seguí. After Miguel Primo de Rivera seized power in Spain in 1923, Durruti and his comrades organized attacks on the military barracks in Barcelona and on the border stations near France. These attacks were unsuccessful and quite a few anarchists were killed. Following these defeats, Durruti, Ascaso and Oliver fled to Latin America. They subsequently travelled widely, visiting Cuba and carrying out bank robberies in Chile and Argentina.[1]


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## Idris2002 (May 14, 2013)




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## Idris2002 (May 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Durruti worked in Paris as a mechanic. He then decided to return to Spain and arrived at San Sebastian, Basque Country, just across the border. Here, he was introduced to local anarchists such as Suberviola, Ruiz, Aldabatrecu or Marcelino del Campo, with whom he formed the anarchist armed-struggle group Los Justicieros ("The Avengers"). In 1921, during the inauguration of the Great Kursaal in San Sebastian, members of this group attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate King Alfonso XIII. Shortly after Buenasca, the then President of the recently-formed anarchist-controlled Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo CNT, persuaded Durruti to go to Barcelona to organise the workers there where the anarchist movement, as well as the syndicalists, was being brutally suppressed and most of its members jailed or executed. Here, with Juan García Oliver, Francisco Ascaso, and other members of Los Justicieros, he founded Los Solidarios ("Solidarity"). In 1923 the group was also implicated in the assassination of Cardinal Juan Soldevilla y Romero, as a reprisal for the killing of an anarcho-syndicalist union activist Salvador Seguí. After Miguel Primo de Rivera seized power in Spain in 1923, Durruti and his comrades organized attacks on the military barracks in Barcelona and on the border stations near France. These attacks were unsuccessful and quite a few anarchists were killed. Following these defeats, Durruti, Ascaso and Oliver fled to Latin America. They subsequently travelled widely, visiting Cuba and carrying out bank robberies in Chile and Argentina.[1]


 
not bad.


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## butchersapron (May 14, 2013)

> My experience of conference was a negative one and I know I am speaking for others too. I had no safe space this weekend, conference floor wasn’t safe, even the internet was not safe


 


> Lucio’s life is the stuff of legend. As an activist in 1950s Paris he counted André Breton and Albert Camus amongst his friends, worked with anarchist guerrilla Francisco Sabate in attempting to bring down Franco’s fascist regime and carried out numerous bank robberies to fund the struggle to free Spain. In 1977, after having his earlier scheme to destabilise the US economy by forgery rejected by Che Guevara, he put his plan into action. Lucio successfully forged 20 million dollars of Citibank travellers cheques to fund guerrilla groups in Latin America, bringing the bank to its knees in the process. In between he helped organise the kidnapping of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie from his hideout in Bolivia, aided the escape of Black Panthers from the US and not surprisingly was targeted by the CIA. Lucio has defended his life’s work saying… ‘we are bricklayers, painters, electricians - we do not need the state for anything’


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

You make a reasonable point, but she is framing her dissent as victimhood, which is the only accepted discourse in this context.


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## cesare (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> You make a reasonable point, but she is framing her dissent as victimhood, which is the only accepted discourse in this context.


Victimhood and retreat into artificially constructed "safe spaces".


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

cesare said:


> Victimhood and retreat into artificially constructed "safe spaces".


 
It's certainly a tactic. When a particular Sheffield ex-SWP ISN member disagrees with someone he will accuse the person he is disagreeing with of being homophobic (particularly amusing when that person is gay) and then if the person isn't removed then he will accuse whoever is in charge of the space of not providing a safe space. Anyone who contests this tactic is homophobic for not agreeing with an "oppressed comrade".


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

chilango said:


> ...and we all know where this leads....
> 
> ....the famous MIM movie reviews!


 
 is that real? i think workers' girder should hire this person as an arts and entertainment columnist.


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

MIM also held the unusual position that all sex under patriarchy is rape due to power relations in patriarchal society. They have drawn on the theoretical works of feminist author Catharine MacKinnon in coming to this analysis.​what the fucking fuck???  
​


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## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> what a prick.


 
Anyway this is the group being tarnished - Feminist Fightback -

http://www.feministfightback.org.uk/?p=405







Affiliated to the Muslim Council of Britain is the *East London Mosque & London Muslim Centre*, leadership elements is part of the IFE-Jamaat network - right-wing Bangladeshi Toryism.






Notice the FREE SEGREGATED EVENT line - receive sex-appropriate Muslim messages: men be strong and lead, women back up and get other women to pray.

It's bog standard Islamic right-wing nonsense:- women should divorce only if they have absolute proof, polygamy is a valid, Jews have beit dins why not shariah tribunals for Muslims, Muslim lesbians should really not be out within the "Muslim community", Muslims support one another go out on strike in a white owned place but not against a Muslim firm or a Muslim Labour council offering halal food building up a Muslim-responsive local state.

But they have plenty money from somewhere (IFE) - lots of the food was apparently free, only the main evening meal needed a donation, people spent the day and got fed without even having to spend anything. (Forward the Muslim working-class intersection! or something?)

So this Oxford PhD male apparently is racially abused because someone apparently says 'hip hop is misogynistic' and inappropriate for a Feminist Fightback Party.
Then these feminists are so stupid they assume him to be a practising Muslim although his name is a Hindu origin name and he is drinking an alcoholic drink. Apparently.
Then says even though he doesn't know what the ELM is, yeah they're OK, and the feminists whose party it is probably think hmmn this guy is just here to play his own music, and have some free gin and tonics (and be a bit of knob).

(I'm a knob aswell, but we shouldn't explain other people taking exception to our being knobs as evidence of structural oppression from in-built psychological nature of white people). As for tweeting to all your followers ... it's not a solid form of anti-racism.

No wonder a stronger separatist (less feeding back into wider local mixed anti-cuts action) radical feminism is reemerging, with middle-class guys like this.


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> ​MIM also held the unusual position that all sex under patriarchy is rape due to power relations in patriarchal society. They have drawn on the theoretical works of feminist author Catharine MacKinnon in coming to this analysis.​
> 
> what the fucking fuck???


 
lol sounds like a theoretical framework to adopt if you want an excuse for why you don't have a girlfriend


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## chilango (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> is that real? i think workers' girder should hire this person as an arts and entertainment columnist.



Yup.

http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/movies/

I used to get their paper from time to time.


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22509757

NUS says that enforced segregation at Islamic Societies is just like feminist self-organisation


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

Jesus christ!


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## chilango (May 14, 2013)

They were funny at first. But actually deeply unpleasant.




> Groundhog Day (1993)
> 
> How to get laid by a partner who can say no?  Phil, a cynical
> television weatherman suddenly doomed to live one day in his
> ...


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

Maybe that loon who said that women shouldn't speak in meetings at the Christian Union society should be hailed as a paragon of anti-oppression practice. 

fucking fuckers


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## cesare (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> It's certainly a tactic. When a particular Sheffield ex-SWP ISN member disagrees with someone he will accuse the person he is disagreeing with of being homophobic (particularly amusing when that person is gay) and then if the person isn't removed then he will accuse whoever is in charge of the space of not providing a safe space. Anyone who contests this tactic is homophobic for not agreeing with an "oppressed comrade".


The more aggressive and self serving/politically deluded will use it as a tactic. The people that actually could do with a bit of a temporary respite/calm in the middle of a storm will be encouraged to retreat into designated space spaces instead of getting stronger.

Edited to add a bit


----------



## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

chilango said:


> They were funny at first. But actually deeply unpleasant.


 
what the fuck how could you take an innocent film like groundhog day which is one of the most feel good and nice films imaginable and turn it into a plot about rape?


----------



## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Jesus christ!


 
Honestly it's not an uncommon response, when someone with a history of inciting the death of LGBT people, women, Shias or Ahmadi Muslims or the oppression of women is invited to a university and there is a backlash the NUS either run a mile from people objecting to the speaker or accuse those of protesting against people speaking at their university calling for their deaths of racism. 

Gender segregation is pretty common too, the end of year picnics at the Islamic Society at Sheffield Uni are not only separate, they are so separate that they are being held at separate times.

Right-wing groups have picked up on that and the vacuum it creates, the group publishing the report Student Rights is funded by neoconservative Think Tank the Henry Jackson Society.


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

Fuck the NUS, fucking in bed with management bourgeois shitpit.


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## chilango (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> what the fuck how could you take an innocent film like groundhog day which is one of the most feel good and nice films imaginable and turn it into a plot about rape?



Innit.

I mean it's a daft example, but indicative of the mindset we're talking.

grandstanding egotism using real shit as point scoring exercise.


----------



## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> There are no specific paid positions (and certainly no incentive) to pursue class politics within student politics, and as far as I know there are no equivalent positions to the identity politics (or in their parlance 'liberation') groups in any student union in the country. So you will get motion after motion that pushes for things like positive discrimination in elections or an increase in paid elected positions for an identity politics group and so on from people who want to demonstrate that they can get things done and then get elected to a 'liberation' position in the NUS.


 
Doesn't this raise a white backlash or raise white disinterest levels if you have more and more identity paid politics officers and fewer general ones?
What do you have in an average SU? SU chief, SU education expert, SU cultural events, SU women's, SU postgraduate, SU black, SU LGBTQI, SU foreign students, SU mature students, SU part-time students. Because of how things are quite boxed - the minority students often (but not always) get just SU black and SU foreign students plus maybe SU cultural events - so they demand a SU black women's and a SU black LGBTQI officer is that how it's working?




> There is usually a lot of solidarity between liberation groups in student politics, and there are very real consequences if this gentleman's agreement is broken no matter how ridiculous or poorly thought out whatever is being pushed for is. For example, a motion for a black students officer (another paid elected position) at Sheffield Uni was agreed to in principle by members of the women's committee but several members of the committee suggested that their actual proposal was unconstitutional and needed some amendments before it could pass, the members of the women's committee voicing that opinion were subject to a lot of abuse and accusations of racism. In the end, the motion was found to be unconstitutional by the student press (which was then called right-wing and racist) and they are passing it with amendments again this week. I have no doubt that if the roles were reversed then members of the black students committee would have been subject to the same abuse.


 



> When this threat of accusations of racism and abuse is directed at younger people, many of them still quite unsure of themselves and their politics and often influenced to some extent by identity politics and middle-class white guilt, you can see why this stuff goes unchallenged and gets more and more extreme.


 
No one wants to be called racist or sexist. Is this it?
But some seem to be fingering others as racist/sexist on _extremely tenuous grounds_, and when this is pointed out that's racism/sexism all over again.

It all feels like a cycle of action and reaction.


----------



## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

i'd be a bit worried about someone who was thinking about rape so much they saw it in that movie tbh.


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## DotCommunist (May 14, 2013)

how did they imply rapiness from the bit where he spends many of the (same)days learning ice sculpting with a chainsaw to impress the her?


----------



## Idris2002 (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Doesn't this raise a white backlash or raise white disinterest levels if you have more and more identity paid politics officers and fewer general ones?
> What do you have in an average SU? SU chief, SU education expert, SU cultural events, SU women's, SU postgraduate, SU black, SU LGBTQI, SU foreign students, SU mature students, SU part-time students. Because of how things are quite boxed - the minority students often (but not always) get just SU black and SU foreign students plus maybe SU cultural events - so they demand a SU black women's and a SU black LGBTQI officer is that how it's working?
> 
> 
> ...


 
A related thing is that these are nice middle-class kids who have been brought up with the idea that nice people aren't racist. But how many of them could articulate a case against racism, reasoning from first principles? Precious few, I'd imagine.


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## Idris2002 (May 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> e he spends many of the (same)days learning ice sculpting with a chainsaw to impress the her?


 
Ice sculpture, eh? Do you think that approach'd work for me?


----------



## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> MIM also held the unusual position that all sex under patriarchy is rape due to power relations in patriarchal society. They have drawn on the theoretical works of feminist author Catharine MacKinnon in coming to this analysis.​what the fucking fuck???


 
_A Bug's Life" is primarily a negative example to budding proletarian artists, because our art should take a definite, proletarian class stand. "A Bug's Life" fails to do this. It does not connect its abstract condemnation of feudalism and exploitation with the concrete reality that u.$. imperialism is the main supporter of feudalism and the biggest exploiter._






_Another problem with "A Bug's Life:" It actively works to reduce the attention span of those who watch it. This is a problem with much modern programming (and modern children's programming in particular.) We believe youth can and must concentrate and think about issues in depth._


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

jesus christ, how can they get this shit out of something like a bug's life?


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## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> It's certainly a tactic. When a particular Sheffield ex-SWP ISN member disagrees with someone he will accuse the person he is disagreeing with of being homophobic (particularly amusing when that person is gay) and then if the person isn't removed then he will accuse whoever is in charge of the space of not providing a safe space. Anyone who contests this tactic is homophobic for not agreeing with an "oppressed comrade".


 
How is this _ever _going to work?

Glaberman:



> reject the idea that nothing can happen until white workers are no longer racist. I don’t know what anybody thinks the Russian workers in 1917 were. They were sexist. They were nationalist. A lot of them were under the thumb of the church. But *they made a goddamn revolution that began to change them.* Whether there’s a social explosion or not doesn’t depend on any formal attitudes or supporting this particular organisation or that particular organisation.


 
If 'within the movement', person Y(oppressor stamp) gets removed for not agreeing with X(oppressed stamp) where will Y ever have her or his ideas (assuming they are homophobic/sexist/racist) properly challenged within common struggle. It'll be just a case of wait for capitalism to force us together by moving around permit workers as and when it wants, sell us all Chinese New Year dragons and popularise gay subculture sex tools.


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

> It'll be just a case of wait for capitalism to force us together by moving around permit workers as and when it wants, sell us all Chinese New Year dragons and popularise gay subculture sex tools.


 
Sorry but


----------



## cesare (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> jesus christ, how can they get this shit out of something like a bug's life?


But to balance it out a bit - I don't think there's any harm in just casually mentioning to your small daughter that  it's nice that the beast's behaviour was cured by love but that's just a fairytale ending.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 14, 2013)

If they made a disney version of Bluebeard, now there would be something to point out the dodginess of


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## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Durruti worked in Paris as a mechanic


 

Full fathom with the ultra-left's most famous guerrilla leader at a year 2 undergraduate middle-class but anti-fees mixed race student in mainland Britain.   


In spite of apparent histrionics:

1. Lee Jasper _still_ being invited as speaker (not observer or reporter) to black sections for NUS in 2013 is eroding any real autonomism. It is not working-class black students defining their own needs by themselves, but certain types following the dead weight of an established pattern of 'black sections within the Labour Party' politics. 



> Now to discuss the role of a guest speaker at this event who has publicly attacked both myself and a fellow delegate for simply criticising his speech. Might I add, he was not even tagged in the original tweet, he was definitely in the mood for a fight. How infantile for a man in his 50′s. Lee Jasper has done a lot for the Black Students movement, there is no doubt about that. However, his speech became very provocative and upset me with his anti-white stance. I do not accept -as someone of dual heritage- that all white people are trying to oppress us.


 
1a. General odd belittling stuff from him:



> To suggest otherwise is angry and unhelpful. He also frequently used patronising terms such as ‘girls’ when referring to women and ‘the gays’ when referring to the LGBT community. I felt persecuted and bullied by this speaker and it is embarrassing for him that he cannot accept a little criticism from those who said it was awkward for them when he was shouting his aggressive anti-white rhetoric.


 
2. Pushing acceptance of UAF on the basis of Doreen Lawrence (a black woman)'s participation:


> I attempted to hold a debate on the fact that UAF was included in the motion. This was after Aaron failed to acknowledge that Black female students were being forced to chose between parts of themselves. He insinuated that because Doreen Lawrence was the chair, we do not have any right to criticise the rape apologists within the movement. Sorry, but no!


 
3. An apparently judgmental form of colourism:-



> Malia was challenged for sharing best practice with fellow Black Students (something which we really need). Apparently being North African excludes her from being able to give advice.


 
with the suggestion that the black section is picking on its paler members on the basis of this paleness to hold their experiences to greater scrutiny/more doubt than the more wholly darker skinned:



> I will not be told - as I was - that my views were less important because of the colour of my skin. I am half white and I am half black. This weekend has proven what I have previously said which is that no matter where I am I can be the victim of racism from ANYBODY. Black people will challenge me and white people will challenge me. That is why it is important to be inclusive, that is why the anti-white rhetoric was appalling, that rhetoric was condemning half of my family, shame on you.


----------



## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Doesn't this raise a white backlash or raise white disinterest levels if you have more and more identity paid politics officers and fewer general ones?
> What do you have in an average SU? SU chief, SU education expert, SU cultural events, SU women's, SU postgraduate, SU black, SU LGBTQI, SU foreign students, SU mature students, SU part-time students. Because of how things are quite boxed - the minority students often (but not always) get just SU black and SU foreign students plus maybe SU cultural events - so they demand a SU black women's and a SU black LGBTQI officer is that how it's working?


 
Typically in universities there are two tiers of student government, paid officers which usually consists of (but varies according to almost every uni) a President, Vice President, Welfare, Treasury and Sports. At Sheffield we don't have a treasurer but we do have a women's officer and subject to referendum we will have a Black Students Officer in 2014-2015 These are the full time salaried positions, I think they are on about 18,000.

Then there are councillors who work for a few hours a week (if that) and are either representative (LGBT, disabled, women etc) or departmental councillors who represent the subject group they study in. At Sheffield councillors get paid per meeting to encourage attendance but I think that's atypical.

As far as a backlash goes, there usually isn't a backlash because almost all students are absolutely unaware of what goes on, it's a very closed shop although funnily enough it's a closed shop that involves a number of people who have long since stopped being students or have moved to London to be professional ex-student activists. There was something resembling a backlash when The Sun got banned from the SU shop but even then it was limited to a few exchanges between students and councillors, it's depressing that the one really contested issue this year was over the right to buy a right-wing newspaper.

The exchanges were pretty revealing, rather than trying to explain their reasoning for banning the newspaper while addressing people as equals or explaining why The Sun acted against their interests, councillors used contested in-group language like 'liberation group', patriarchy and rape culture. I assume as an attempt to win the argument through verbosity. Student politicians are openly contemptuous of the people they represent at university so I have no idea how they behave when they are a few more steps removed at the NUS.


----------



## chilango (May 14, 2013)

Waaay back I was a "Welsh students' rep" on our SU council for a year. "Elected" unopposed. 

I'm not even Welsh.


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## DotCommunist (May 14, 2013)

and what do these people actually do for their 18 large PA?


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## Delroy Booth (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> As far as a backlash goes, there usually isn't a backlash because almost all students are absolutely unaware of what goes on, it's a very closed shop although funnily enough it's a closed shop that involves a number of people who have long since stopped being students or have moved to London to be professional ex-student activists.


 
NUS politics is a joke. No-one cares amongst the vast majority of students because the NUS doesn't exist to serve their interests, but to be a playground for aspiring middle-class political types with an eye on a future career. We saw the NUS put to the test when they tripled tuition fees and they failed that test miserably.


----------



## chilango (May 14, 2013)

chilango said:


> Waaay back I was a "Welsh students' rep" on our SU council for a year. "Elected" unopposed.
> 
> I'm not even Welsh.




...then again, a bunch of us blagged our way into the NUS conference years back too. Just turned up, got chatting to the delegates from Aberdeen (iirc) who were short a few people cos of no-shows etc. they gave us the spare credentials. Bingo. Free food, accommodation and voting rights.

Student politics is a joke.


----------



## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

Stop decent music being played at students' union nights


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

free drinks. if your lucky another pool table

twats

but keep your NUS card, you can get amazing discounts with it.


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> and what do these people actually do for their 18 large PA?


 
As much or as little as they like, typically the former but not always. It really is what you make of it. Several student officers literally do not bother to spend 10 minutes writing up the report that they are required to write every fortnight while some unsalaried councillors who study full-time often put 20+ hours a week in.


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## Delroy Booth (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> but keep your NUS card, you can get amazing discounts with it.


 
Apart from the cost of actually getting an education in the first place, which is far from discounted...


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

chilango said:


> ...then again, a bunch of us blagged our way into the NUS conference years back too. Just turned up, got chatting to the delegates from Aberdeen (iirc) who were short a few people cos of no-shows etc. they gave us the spare credentials. Bingo. Free food, accommodation and voting rights.
> 
> Student politics is a joke.


 
Delegates from Sheffield Hallam take full expenses (including hotel rooms) for NUS conferences in Sheffield.

They were resolutely opposed to a needs budget for the uni however...


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## DotCommunist (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Delegates from Sheffield Hallam take full expenses (including hotel rooms) for NUS conferences in Sheffield.
> 
> They were resolutely opposed to a needs budget for the uni however...


 

its almost like practise for the grown ups gravy train


----------



## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> The exchanges were pretty revealing, rather than trying to explain their reasoning for banning the newspaper while addressing people as equals or explaining why The Sun acted against their interests, councillors used contested in-group language like 'liberation group', patriarchy and rape culture. I assume as an attempt to win the argument through verbosity. Student politicians are openly contemptuous of the people they represent at university so I have no idea how they behave when they are a few more steps removed at the NUS.


 
This is the women's councillor who was part of/leading the campaign:
A very interesting set of points using the experience of black/foreign student sections to press the case for 50/50 delegates from all universities.



What do people think about this kind of specific self-privilege checking

https://twitter.com/lucy_globalmind/status/334025849957400576




19 sa​@*HannahRudman_* @*AlishaRouse* @*_laurenarcher* @*Emma_Galley* You guys know how to have fun!




​*Lucy Pedrick*‏@*lucy_globalmind*
@*HannahRudman_* @*AlishaRouse* @*_laurenarcher* @*Emma_Galley* Sorry gendered language - I mean you lot (or something similar)


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## chilango (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Delegates from Sheffield Hallam take full expenses (including hotel rooms) for NUS conferences in Sheffield.
> 
> They were resolutely opposed to a needs budget for the uni however...



Oh yeah. NUS conference is a grand jolly.

Been two or three times...And NUS wales too. Food, posh hotel and spending money. Most of the weekend down the pleasure beach back in the Blackpool days.

Farcical.


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## chilango (May 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> its almost like practise for the grown ups gravy train



Absolutely.


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## cesare (May 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> If they made a disney version of Bluebeard, now there would be something to point out the dodginess of


It's a bit of a digression - but the Victorians had a lot to answer for when they dumbed down fairytales. They're meant to be scary and teach lessons, but in a safe environment.


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## Idris2002 (May 14, 2013)

cesare said:


> It's a bit of a digression - but the Victorians had a lot to answer for when they dumbed down fairytales. They're meant to be scary and teach lessons, but in a safe environment.


 
Just show your kids _Game of Thrones _instead.


----------



## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Typically in universities there are two tiers of student government, paid officers which usually consists of (but varies according to almost every uni) a President, Vice President, Welfare, Treasury and Sports. At Sheffield we don't have a treasurer but we do have a women's officer and subject to referendum we will have a Black Students Officer in 2014-2015 These are the full time salaried positions, I think they are on about 18,000.


 
I reckon anyone here could do this for the NUS

_helping to reduce tensions on campus, in particular around controversial external speakers, improve the student experience for students of faith, and encourage inter-faith dialogue and partnerships._

sounds cool for £31,000 - tell the dickheads to leave public education facilities and go talk in their own mosque or church hall - sorted . 

but "managing experience" is required 
_proven track record in managing successful projects_


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## cesare (May 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Just show your kids _Game of Thrones _instead.


Someone else mentioned that to me recently, is it a programme or a game?


----------



## fractionMan (May 14, 2013)

cesare said:


> Someone else mentioned that to me recently, is it a programme or a game?


 
TV Series.


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## cesare (May 14, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> TV Series.


Cheers!


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## Idris2002 (May 14, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> TV Series.


 
And book. And set of commemorative beer coasters.

PS, it was a joke about showing it to your kids.


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I reckon anyone here could do this for the NUS
> 
> _helping to reduce tensions on campus, in particular around controversial external speakers, improve the student experience for students of faith, and encourage inter-faith dialogue and partnerships._
> 
> ...


 
Speakers with a history of inciting the death of gay people have been speaking at both Sheffield Unis for over 5 years, I've e-mailed student officers about this for 2 years and nothing has been done. Sometimes questions are asked AFTER the speaker has been allowed to lecture students unopposed.

Imagine LGBT speakers with a history of calling for the murder of Muslims being invited year after year!


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

No Platform for these cunts. What happened to that?


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## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Speakers with a history of inciting the death of gay people have been speaking at both Sheffield Unis for over 5 years, I've e-mailed student officers about this for 2 years and nothing has been done. Sometimes questions are asked AFTER the speaker has been allowed to lecture students unopposed.
> 
> Imagine LGBT speakers with a history of calling for the murder of Muslims being invited year after year!


 
If so, what will the person (with management experience) who gets this role do?


----------



## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

"manage tensions". not, you know, oppose them being invited in the first place. 

if a far right speaker gets invited you make sure it doesn't happen you organise an attempt to disrupt it, you don't fucking _manage tensions_ around it.


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

for people who are seemingly so concerned about ending racism they don't actually do much to oppose it. to stop it from happening. still all those tensions that are managed (women/LGBT/etc feeling threatened on the campus by violent islamists) helps to keep them in a job.

fucking cunts.

or am i being naive? perhaps i'm just letting my privilege showing?


----------



## Limerick Red (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> for people who are seemingly so concerned about ending racism they don't actually do much to oppose it. to stop it from happening. still all those tensions that are managed (women/LGBT/etc feeling threatened on the campus by violent islamists) helps to keep them in a job.
> 
> fucking cunts.
> 
> or am i being naive? perhaps i'm just letting my privilege showing?


these are the kinda cunts that will quote Voltaire until the fuckin cows come home!


----------



## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

thing is if you tried to organise a protest or something against it they'd probably accuse you of being a zionist or something. this actually makes me so angry. how the fuck can they get away with inviting speakers who actually call for the death of gay people?


----------



## Limerick Red (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> thing is if you tried to organise a protest or something against it they'd probably accuse you of being a zionist or something. this actually makes me so angry. how the fuck can they get away with inviting speakers who actually call for the death of gay people?


In Ireland its the Student debating societies favorite passtime, since moving to England Ive seen a similar trend..edit :

Sorry, way too long to post here


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## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> for people who are seemingly so concerned about ending racism they don't actually do much to oppose it. to stop it from happening. still all those tensions that are managed (women/LGBT/etc feeling threatened on the campus by violent islamists) helps to keep them in a job.
> 
> fucking cunts.
> 
> or am i being naive? perhaps i'm just letting my privilege showing?


 
Yes almost certainly, you have a form of white privilege expecting others to police non-white people.

Ashok 'open letter to honky feminists' Kumar can hint at other white feminists to boycott Feminist Fightback. He is a black nationalist and an autonomist - the twitter bio says so.


But, you, frog 'open letter to my cat' woman, have no record of calling out other white people for their racism/oppression, and instead are only picking on Muslim hate scholars. Hinting that NUS liberation officers from its black section should oppose these homophobic and/or anti-semitic types is NOT OK from you as a white person who doesn't challenge racism in white people or oppose imperialism properly. For God's sake, try to create a safer space. 

Besides, radical intersectional feminists are fighting for women without giving the shitty end of the stick to Muslims. Did you not see the video above? 
Here again is the video for your white eyes:



Fight your own oppression without oppressing others  Muslim lesbians and gays will lead their own intersection.


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

They'd say you were racist for disrupting a meeting like that though.


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## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

Limerick Red said:


> In Ireland its the Student debating societies favorite passtime, since moving to England Ive seen a similar trend..edit :
> 
> Sorry, way too long to post here


 
You got rid of it - it was good, a calm summary of the issues.


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

why should somebody who's for example, come to this country from eastern europe or something and faced anti-semitism/homophobia have to hear that shit.fuck why should ANYONE have to hear that shit.

its not acceptable from nick griffin, its not acceptable from the head of the east london mosque. It's the same exact thing. Simple as.


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## Limerick Red (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> You got rid of it - it was good, a calm summary of the issues.


Okay will repost but it will take 2 or 3 posts its quite long


----------



## Limerick Red (May 14, 2013)

It was on the 30th January 1933 that Adolf Hitler, flushed with the success of having been made Chancellor of Germany and standing on the brink of what the Nazis termed the Machtergreifung, or ‘Seizure of Power’ called for a great victory parade that evening in celebration of the ‘new era’ that was unfolding. In stage managing the event, Dr Goebbels ordered every SA and SS man to put on their uniforms and take to the streets of Berlin.
In the six weeks leading up to the elections in July 1932, there had been 461 pitched street battles in which over 200 people (mostly Nazis and communists) were killed, hundreds more being wounded. At the first cabinet meeting, five hours after Hitler had been sworn in as Chancellor; Goring gave clear warning of his intentions, stating that existing laws and police forces might not be strong enough to maintain order. Using his powers as Prussian Minister of the Interior, Goring banned the protest demonstrations in Berlin, planned for that evening by the communists. This did not however, stop Nazis marching into red strongholds after the parade that night as clear provocations. In one bloody battle with Red Front Fighters in Charlottenburg’s Wallstrasse, the leader of the notorious Murder Storm Unit 33, SA Sturmfuhrer Hanne Maikowski, was shot dead along with a police sergeant. Goebbels, on hearing the news vowed to give the former, “a funeral befitting a king”.
With the Nazi ascension to power, violence dramatically increased, the SA street-fighters now bearing the stamp of state authority. The tide was fast turning against the forces of progress and Hitler, having escalated terror to government policy, was to admit that:
“Only one thing could have stopped our movement – if our adversaries had understood its principle and from the first day had smashed with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement.”
Stalingrad for Adolph was but a foreign city on some distant horizon, and he had given the game away for new generations of fascists that had yet to be born. Fascism was heading for a crushing defeat, but in years to come, Hitler’s words would have more relevance to his sworn enemies than for his followers. History can be a harsh teacher, and if we don’t learn the lessons, it will, as Marx suggests, repeat itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce”.
Being an ideology that glorifies violence and combat as part of a social Darwinist struggle for existence, the plunging of the globe into world war was a natural progression from the original street confrontations. As anti-fascism turned to meet this new bloodier phase in the struggle, Chinese republican Soong Ching Ling, fighting both Japanese and Chinese fascism in her native country was to proclaim:
“Labour is fighting in this war, and producing for it, because its hope for a better life is bound up with the beating down of blackest reaction, represented by fascism – fascism that begins by reducing its own workers to helots and then goes on to reduce the people’s of other countries to slavery.”
Confounding any serious radical analysis of the here and now however, is the promotion of the idea that class struggle and indeed class itself has become an outdated notion. On top of this, fascism itself is also now presented as a thing of the past or a term describing those movements that had risen to prominence between the World Wars. Ultimately this viewpoint becomes part of an attempt to hide the true class nature of fascism and its uses to bourgeois society.


----------



## Limerick Red (May 14, 2013)

When liberal historians have tried to explain what constitutes fascism, they have concentrated on the ideas of the movements rather than the factors that operated at the level of material or historical reality. Fascism in its germinating phase takes the righteous anger of ordinary people, not the rich, and turns these against progressive democratic forces that are interfering in and limiting capitalist profits. Fascist ideas for that reason rise to prominence at a time when finance capital feels the need to protect itself with whatever comes to hand. These ideas are consequently allowed to emerge when they are needed by reactionary class forces.
As the ideology of attack on progressive working class interests, fascism cannot be viewed as just another set of ideas. The pursuance of a tolerant agenda towards fascist groupings then, ranks about as foolish as allowing a rabid dog to live in your home. Within the field of militant anti-fascism, the No Platform for Fascists policy was therefore acknowledged as the one fit response to the prospect of fascist growth. Throughout AFA’s history however, it has been the liberal left that has tended to be our harshest critics, a consensus emerging within this constituency that the No Platform policy is nothing more than a means by which AFA members seek opportunities for violence.
Although AFA does promote the use of violence however, this is merely a means to an end and not a philosophy in itself, the rationalisation of proletarian violence being set against the fascists’ idealisation of violence. Frequently dredged up however, and delivered with the piety of a saint and the certainty of a dogmatist, is Voltaire’s assertion that, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
The road from profound wisdom to mindless cliché can be remarkably short and although words such as these once heralded the dawning of the Age of Reason, those who prefer absolutes to guides to action quickly relegated such sentiments to the same stable as, “it’s a funny old world”. Borrowing the voice of another to hide one’s own inability to reason however, is nothing new, and intellectual laziness has often been the hallmark of those whose self-perception of themselves is that of the well-educated and cerebral. This spirited defence of the rights of fascists tends to take the form of indignant emails and postings on the internet, producing a low buzz of white noise that is annoying to AFA’s membership but nothing more.
Ultimately what is given freedom of speech is decided by power struggle. A working class agenda might win itself freedom of speech, but will have to be prepared to be resisted every step of the way by powerful reactionary forces. Of course, AFA has frequently received the indignant question, “who gives you the right to deny fascists their freedom of speech”. This has a simple answer; No one. Around such questions, there are no divine or interplanetary interventions leaving only power struggles between opposing class forces. In spite of the smug claims and self-delusions however, no-one truly believes in unrestricted freedom of speech. When the state wishes to suppress the opinions of those that it disapproves of, there is an attempt to depoliticise the issue beneath the disguise of bad taste or endangerment to law and order. The broadcasting restrictions that were placed on republicans in the liberal democracies that were Britain and the 26 counties of Ireland were another, recent example of this.
We’ve also seen the limitations of these lofty ideals in the world of Hip-Hop, whereby a middle class driven, moral panic was set in motion, the practitioners being demonised and, Tipper Gore, stepping out from her husband’s shadow to crusade on behalf of the “little ones”, invoked her status as a parent to render her demands infallible. As part of this politically motivated crusade, Charlton Heston, who had appeared at an NRA meeting, holding aloft his rifle and reciting the redneck anthem of, “I will give up my gun when it is pried from my cold dead fingers” also felt the need to step forward. Ice T’s protest song against police brutality, ‘Cop killer’, we were told, moved him and many others, to resolutely condemn and demand the censorship of this song, comparing the anti-police sentiments, bizarrely, with anti-Semitism. Although Heston was happy to wave guns around in front of his associates, the prospect of black people from the projects, singing about using guns to protect themselves from both racist and police brutality caused uproar. This was a recurring historical theme, Malcolm X himself once complaining that,
“‘Malcolm X Advocates Armed Negroes!’ What was wrong with that? I’ll tell you what was wrong. I was a black man talking about physical defence against the white man. The white man can lynch and burn and bomb and beat Negroes – that’s all right: ‘Have patience’… ‘The customs are entrenched’… ‘Things are getting better.’ Well, I believe it’s a crime for anyone who is being brutalised to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to defend himself. If that’s how ‘Christian’ philosophy is interpreted, if that’s what Gandhian philosophy teaches, well, then, I will call them criminal philosophies.”


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## Limerick Red (May 14, 2013)

Black working class culture then, is more threatening to the likes of Heston and his class, than white racial murder. However, fear of the working class youth of whatever ethnicity, has also led to numerous campaigns for restrictions to be put on violent films and video games as these supposedly could endanger the fabric of society when the lower classes are ‘over stimulated’. Censorship then, no matter what the protagonists might think, always has a distinct bias within it.
The bourgeoisie in general and as a result, do not see or acknowledge the antagonistic nature of class society, preferring to see only differences between the haves and the have-nots. Therefore, the middle class idealists see only differences in ideology, the No Platform policy being an example of intolerance of other people’s opinions. More important however, are the class forces that lurk beneath. As Mao Tse-tung observes:
“In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.”
Consequently, because every ideology has a class character, and while fascism is the ideology of the bourgeois attack on the working class, militant anti-fascism is the ideology of working class self-defence. In class struggle there is no rulebook, nor indeed anyone to enforce any generally accepted rules, the state setting the parameters for mainstream debate depending on its own class character. Struggles for power between different class forces thus tend to be either in conjunction with, or in opposition to, the state.
It was the Italian semiologist Umberto Eco that said, “I see no real difference between the skinheads and neo-Nazis of today and the Nazis of a generation earlier… There is the same kind of stupidity and determination to destroy; the same hatred of others and the will to destruction.” This class prejudice that refuses to see that all fascists are not ignorant working class skinheads carries over to the working class opposition. Viewed by most within AFA as nothing more than a flimsy guise to cloak indolence, the aftermath of an AFA activity is always hallmarked by the previously mentioned, much posting across the internet as many step forward to blindly grope in the darkness of inexperience and intellectual drudgery for a stick to beat AFA with.
At the centre of the Nicaraguan city of Managua stands a statue. Fashioned in the soviet style, it depicts a worker holding a pickaxe in one hand and brandishing a Kalashnikov above his head. Etched in the statues plinth are the words of Augusto Sandino declaring, “Only the workers and peasants will fight to the end”. Sandino was no socialist, being himself a revolutionary nationalist fighting US domination of his country. The cold reality of political struggle however, moved him to recognise and acknowledge this fundamental truth.
The middle class idealists then; want the rain but fear the thunder and lightning, clinging desperately to the idea that harming another person devalues any struggle, irrespective of how much harm is inflicted by the status quo. Such an approach however, issues from the reality that the cause of anti-fascism is not as important to the middle class as to the proletariat. This leads to laziness and a lack of serious ambition, another result of liberal anti-racisms class make-up, ensuring that there is much theory with no real or effective practice. The upshot of this is that when one person’s idealised theory is set against another’s practice, the latter inevitably bears birthmarks, errors and the scars of first attempts. To the middle class liberals, their ideology is a precious commodity, requiring protection from the realities of the world we all have to live in. Preferring then to pursue a ‘less abrasive’ path, whether or not this brings defeat; such forces, in their denunciations of AFA, ignore the cause and concentrate purely on the form that militant anti-fascism takes. This inherent fear of getting blood on their hands permeates the class character, and as anyone who has avoided work may tell you, “If you do nothing, you don’t get your hands dirty”.
The field of liberal complaint as a result, becomes a vocation more than an all-important struggle, the middle class’s generous attitude towards fascism and the tendency to cite Voltaire in the defence of the fascists’ freedom of speech being due to the fact that they do not feel under threat, either from racial attacks or class-based political oppression. With the same intonation as a teacher would adopt when admonishing a young pupil who comes to them complaining of bullying, the solution is ““to just ignore them”. Given what history has taught some of us, such advice would fall heavily on the shoulders of a near dead concentration camp victim.
In attempting to foster a climate of tolerance, in a society where racial frictions are rife, the same forces that concentrate on making the public at large feel sorry for refugees also tend to be those that will condemn any who attempt to resist their own or another’s oppression through violence. Desiring victims with which to sympathise, if these do not peacefully make themselves into the passive, non-threatening victims that are required, interest rapidly wanes.


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## Limerick Red (May 14, 2013)

Furthermore, the middle class also lacks the greater tendency towards practicality inherent through necessity, within the working class. It is thus the maintenance of its working class perspectives that leads AFA to its position of not being content to participate in the ‘good fight’ against fascism. Given the seriousness of the struggle, nothing short of victory will suffice. In pursuit of concrete results rather than self created comfortable illusions, it is necessary to reject the extreme idealism of liberal anti-racism. Sacrificing our own safety for someone else’s abstract principles and conscience is not a working class position and so consequently, such notions must go to the wall. It would therefore be fair to say that it is exclusively to the working class that AFA would appeal, as these, ultimately are the targets, and indeed the true enemies, of fascism.
AFA has in the past also taken some criticism for our frequent denials of a platform to such racist organisations as the Immigration Control Platform (ICP), usually in their formative stages. Such a position we believe, has gone some way to allowing us to avoid having to deny a platform to fascism itself at later stages. This denial of a platform to the likes of the ICP therefore, must not be seen in the same light as our ‘No Free Speech for Fascists’ policy. While we deny fascists a platform on principle, we will also deny a platform to racists for strategic reasons when they are deemed to pose some kind of a threat.
Another constant problem and indeed irritation has also come from university student societies that will insist on inviting foreign fascists like David Irving, Jorg Haider and several BNP members to their meetings. The epitome of Voltairesque poseurs, these tend to offer as justification for their attempts to provide platforms to such controversial figures, the claim that the members of the societies will somehow overwhelm any reprehensible ideas that their exciting guests might espouse. There has never been any evidence that they would follow through with such a policing exercise however, suggesting that the class-based interests of those involved are questionable. Although defensively claiming that they would treat any fascist ideas harshly, this does not prevent many from espousing right-wing elitist sentiments, giving them new names and, among their favourites, expressing their “concerns about immigration”.
Defensively claiming that it is possible and desirable, to criminalise those that have lost the brilliantly put across arguments of the middle class liberal agenda, the theory here is that the intelligent will vanquish the ignorant. This however, ignores the reality that not everyone seeks truth from facts, fascism itself being an avowedly irrational philosophy. Rather, certain class-based interest groups will inevitably seek tautological evidence to support their desired conclusions. AFA however, does not wish to criminalise our opponents; our opposition to fascism is quite clearly political.


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## Limerick Red (May 14, 2013)

In any struggle it is then, always important to define who your friends and who your enemies are. While those within our ranks will have disagreements on how the working class agenda may be put forward, these contradictions are non-antagonistic. AFA’s contradictions with fascism however, are antagonistic and consequently, our differences cannot be reconciled.
Further complicating an analysis of contemporary times however, is the widely promoted assertion of Francis Fukuyama that we are now at the ‘end of history’. The collapse of the Eastern European regimes and the ending of the cold war struggle between alternative systems led the exponents of finance capital to declare themselves to be the natural order and indeed the last phase in human development. A corporate controlled media was only too eager to hail capitalism’s victory, effectively over working class aspirations, as total, confirming the delusion that the future belongs to those that control the present. However, it is a long time since Marx made the observation, “every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it imagines about itself is true.”
The contradictory nature of class society remains however, and it is a fact that the antagonistic class differences, far from being resolved, continue and will continue, to surface. In the words of Lewis Carroll, “It’s a poor sort of mind that only works backwards” and the future, with all its struggles and counter-struggles, spans before us.
The problem of racism and indeed fascism in Ireland therefore, requires a willingness to stare cold-eyed at the problem, drawing a line between the guilt-based middle class liberalism with its tendency to substitute emotion for scientific analysis and the promotion of a genuine pro-working class agenda. As Georgi Dimitrov warns, “Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory.”
There is of course no guarantee of how fascism may manifest itself in the future, but the reality of past fascist regimes and the fact that these were orders of governance consciously pursued and created makes it foolish to play according to someone else’s definition of fairness in our opposition. We can all propagandise in theoretical ether, but ultimately, conscious of what happened before and aware of what may lie ahead, on the ground and in the here and now, we pursue our policies resolutely in praxis.
This was originally published in AFA Ireland’s No Quarter No.2..

Sorry bloody long but well worth a read!


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> thing is if you tried to organise a protest or something against it they'd probably accuse you of being a zionist or something. this actually makes me so angry. how the fuck can they get away with inviting speakers who actually call for the death of gay people?


 
Depends on who is dealing with the issue. I've gotten three responses, in the order of frequency - 1) denial that it is happening or denia of knowledge that it has happened 2) accusations of Islamophobia 3) the idea that it is impossible for someone without an academic knowledge or Islam or who doesn't speak classical Arabic if they do have an academic knowledge of Islam to police the behaviour of Muslims


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## barney_pig (May 14, 2013)

"From red bases to safe places, the decline and fall of the radical student"
I feel a dissertation proposal coming on


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> If so, what will the person (with management experience) who gets this role do?


 
Something like this I imagine https://twitter.com/mercerPete/status/334277486189899778


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

Its a fucking disgrace that the most they can do about far-right speakers is to "manage the tensions" around them. And militant anti-fascists are going to be derided as racist for opposing it.


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## Tom A (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Yes almost certainly, you have a form of white privilege expecting others to police non-white people.
> 
> Ashok 'open letter to honky feminists' Kumar can hint at other white feminists to boycott Feminist Fightback. He is a black nationalist and an autonomist - the twitter bio says so.
> 
> ...



<serious mode>This cultural relativist BS, appeasing people and not calling out problematic behaviour because they are of an oppressed minority really pisses me off. The truth is the truth, no matter whom is speaking *telling *(must check ability to speak privilege lest I offend mutes) it, calling for the deaths of gays and Jews should never be acceptable, no matter who is calling for it. End of.</serious mode>


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## muscovyduck (May 14, 2013)

Fortunately, my college is quite good, so no one really needs the NUS in the short term. 

We're all too cynical to get involved with it for the long term.


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

Imagine if we'd had these clowns during Cable Street. Let's manage the tensions around Oswald Mosley's march around London.


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## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Old Holborn lives in a mansion somewhere in Kent.


 
Not that it's especially important, though it does say a fair bit about how insecure these twats are, but he doesn't actually live in a mansion. When he had his little spat with scousers on twitter his address came out and I found it on google streetview. He's given it the name 'Farqham hall' or something like that to make it sound really grand (and put stuff about it going for millions on the net too), I assume to boost his ego. But in fact it's a new build red brick detached on a housing estate in rural Kent. Very nice and certainly out of the price range of anyone working class but it's not a mansion. It's of a size that would probably cost about £200k in most of Sheffield but given its location it must be worth upwards of half a million.


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## chilango (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Imagine if we'd had these clowns during Cable Street. Let's manage the tensions around Oswald Mosley's march around London.



We wouldn't have done though would we?

They'd have been in a restaurant somewhere debating Cabaret costumes or some shit.


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## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

Tom A said:


> <serious mode>This cultural relativist BS, appeasing people and not calling out problematic behaviour because they are of an oppressed minority really pisses me off. The truth is the truth, no matter whom is speaking *telling *(must check ability to speak privilege lest I offend mutes) it, calling for the deaths of gays and Jews should never be acceptable, no matter who is calling for it. End of.</serious mode>


 
The argument usually asserted is that calling for NUS to non-invite who their ISOCs have invited will encourage the government to continue to clamp down on speech by Muslims in open opposition to British foreign policy allied with honey-potting and entrapment by intelligence and police operatives on terrorism charges. So even if we dislike the homophobic or sexist undertones all that need be done is non-attendance.

It doesn't really work because the homophobia and sexism mean you whip up a public backlash to such a degree that the government can for instance keep Abu Qatada under house arrest pretty much as it sees fit before deportation to Jordan. 
But it's along those lines. Like how if the left start obsessively policing for anti-semitism in Palestinian solidarity organisations, the government will attack solidarity organisations that defend armed resistance organisations as glorifying terror attacks and it doesn't help Palestinians and only whatever world forces or conjunctures aid Palestinian nationalism really matter for the global working class.


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## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Not that it's especially important, though it does say a fair bit about how insecure these twats are, but he doesn't actually live in a mansion. When he had his little spat with scousers on twitter his address came out and I found it on google streetview. He's given it the name 'Farqham hall' or something like that to make it sound really grand (and put stuff about it going for millions on the net too), I assume to boost his ego. But in fact it's a new build red brick detached on a housing estate in rural Kent. Very nice and certainly out of the price range of anyone working class but it's not a mansion. It's of a size that would probably cost about £200k in most of Sheffield but given its location it must be worth upwards of half a million.


 
I was misled by the internet although this thread has him being happy with the dosh he is making from land:

http://grumpieroldmen.co.uk/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6587&start=0

Brilliant signature summing up his sexism, racism and classism: "the difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time"


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## phildwyer (May 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Universities have for some decades now been encouraging students to think of themselves as commodities, to find the best way that they can sell themselves.


 
Yep. In other words, to lıe.

I can (just about) remember when educatıon was supposed to teach people to tell the truth. Or at least to _belıeve ın _the truth.


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

I reckon the government will start investigating organisations that glorify terrorist attacks regardless of what the left do. the left isn't that important.


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I reckon the government will start investigating organisations that glorify terrorist attacks regardless of what the left do. the left isn't that important.


 
People are already being locked up for putting pictures of burning poppies on twitter and the only people who are really objecting to that are a few columnists and 'special interest' groups. You can already basically just be arrested for expressing dissenting views if you are powerless.


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## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I was misled by the internet although this thread has him being happy with the dosh he is making from land:
> 
> http://grumpieroldmen.co.uk/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6587&start=0
> 
> Brilliant signature summing up his sexism, racism and classism: "the difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time"


 
He's definitely not short of a few quid - no doubt about that. I imagine you could buy something not far off a mansion in a less expensive part of the country for what he paid for that place. He was a company director before he worked for the recruitment agency whose bosses the scousers err.. informed about his twitter exploits.


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## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I reckon the government will start investigating organisations that glorify terrorist attacks regardless of what the left do. the left isn't that important.


 
Quite, but the NUS has a fair whack of money and needs to do something with it.


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## Limerick Red (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> You can already basically just be arrested for expressing dissenting views if you are powerless.


Marion Price - more than 300 days in solitary confinement


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## ViolentPanda (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The black left is winning apparently:
> 
> https://twitter.com/Roshkneee/status/334041459789537284
> 
> ...


 
It does come across a bit as "vote for me because I'm _w, x, y_ and _z_" rather than "vote for me because I intend to formulate and promote policy that deals with matters of _w, x, y_ and _z_.

Also interesting that she self-defines as "disabled" due to occasional depression.  Kind of comes across as trying to score a full house.


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> It does come across a bit as "vote for me because I'm _w, x, y_ and _z_" rather than "vote for me because I intend to formulate and promote policy that deals with matters of _w, x, y_ and _z_.
> 
> Also interesting that she self-defines as "disabled" due to occasional depression. Kind of comes across as trying to score a full house.


 
I don't call myself disabled because my problems don't affect my ability to do my work and also because I don't want my illness to make me into a victim. There are other people who are much worse off than me and deserve to be called disabled more, even though my illness has caused me some serious problems. I also don't want to define myself by the illness because i actually aim to recover from it completely.

Not saying you do but it annoys me when people do this sort of thing (the girl in the link)


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## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> The idea that there could be a working-class week at Sheffield Uni actually seems kind of absurd, if it was proposed it's not that I wouldn't be extremely supportive I'd just be surprised.
> 
> It's Nakba Day today, there's a die in on campus.


 
We should propose it just to see what happens. I'm game if you are.


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## frogwoman (May 14, 2013)

Also in everything I have read about the illness I have read that you must avoid trying to see it as a part of your identity, because it will actually restrict your life more and more and more, and you must become used to seeing it as something OUTSIDE of you.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 14, 2013)

The Anarchist Federation's various wobbles towards "Intersectionality", "Privilege" and the rest of the US radical liberal understanding of oppression, have received some attention here. I've just noticed that the Workers Solidarity Movement here in Ireland have published a theoretical article in their magazine adopting most of the same stuff, although as with the AF Women's Caucus document, there is a bit of an attempt to avoid the worst and most obvious pitfalls. As so often, the parts about race seem to be directly lifted from the US context which is particularly strange in an Irish publication (the most extreme manifestations of racism here have generally been directed against travellers).

http://www.wsm.ie/c/anarchism-intersecionality-gender-race-class

It's genuinely interesting that English language "class struggle Anarchism" is acting as a conduit for rather than bulwark against this stuff.


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## chilango (May 14, 2013)

I'm guessing that enough participants in the "class struggle anarchist" scene have enough in common in terms of background, interests and lifestyle aspirations with elements of the "radical commentariat" to mean that they move in the same circles and are exposed to the same arguments.


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## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> You can't understand what this is like, since a white Sheffield male there is no culture which anyone else would want to appropriate from you.


 
Tha knows nowt. Ee by gum whippet and flat cap etc.


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> We should propose it just to see what happens. I'm game if you are.


 
Bit late in the year for that


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## Nigel Irritable (May 14, 2013)

I mean, class struggle anarchism is a small movement, even by the low standards of the left, and class struggle anarchist organisations of any size are only slightly more common than hen's teeth. The WSM and the AF are actually significant in that context. We are talking about the largest class struggle anarchist organisations in Ireland and Britain.


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## Tom A (May 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> It's genuinely interesting that English language "class struggle Anarchism" is acting as a conduit for rather than bulwark against this stuff.


 
IME it's the anarchists (if not self-defining as such then heavily influenced by the theory) that are the worst offenders when it comes to obsessing over privilege theory, be they of the class struggle kind or the lifesylist kind (a lot of them are a mixture of the two). The Trots I know generally have no truck with that kind of thing, but they probably wander into equally problematic traps themselves.


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## chilango (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Tha knows nowt. Ee by gum whippet and flat cap etc.



"Youth" is that a Sheffield term?


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## sihhi (May 14, 2013)

Confusing. What do you make of this charlie mowbray ?



> If class is understood as being simply a matter of economics, and particularly those aspects of capitalist economics that appear most pressing to white heterosexual men; if class-centricity means that a deep understanding of the way in which capitalism produces capitalists and workers is essential for all anarchists, while deep understandings of the way in which patriarchy produces men and women, and white supremacism produces white people in relation to a multiplicity of (in) subordinate races[15], are not; then class must be removed from the centre of our theory. If, however, class is understood as encompassing the totality of hierarchical social relations, as being the product of many systems acting sometimes in concert and sometimes autonomously of one another, and moreover as bringing together a diversity of experiences and struggles in a spirit of solidarity and mutual recognition, then this is precisely the heart of anarchism.


 
I still dislike the word and its associations for North London, 2013.


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## cesare (May 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I mean, class struggle anarchism is a small movement, even by the low standards of the left, and class struggle anarchist organisations of any size are only slightly more common than hen's teeth. The WSM and the AF are actually significant in that context. We are talking about the largest class struggle anarchist organisations in Ireland and Britain.


You think the IWA's a small movement?


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## Nigel Irritable (May 14, 2013)

Tom A said:


> IME it's the anarchists (if not self-defining as such then heavily influenced by the theory) that are the worst offenders when it comes to obsessing over privilege theory, be they of the class struggle kind or the lifesylist kind (a lot of them are a mixture of the two). The Trots I know generally have no truck with that kind of thing, but they probably wander into equally problematic traps themselves.


 
Generally this is true, in part because Trotskyists tend to be more concerned with the coherence of their theoretical outlook, and so are slower to simply jam entirely new and ill fitting bits into it. But it's not universal: Look for instance at elements of the SWP dissidents. I even encountered a Socialist Party member who was into "intersectionality" on twitter, which genuinely astonished me.


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## ViolentPanda (May 14, 2013)

cesare said:


> The more aggressive and self serving/politically deluded will use it as a tactic. The people that actually could do with a bit of a temporary respite/calm in the middle of a storm will be encouraged to retreat into designated space spaces instead of getting stronger.
> 
> Edited to add a bit


 
It strikes me that using it as a tactic both indiccates the instrumentality of the person deploying it, and also signals that their "Interest" is ultimately non-constructive, because the tactic can't be *built on*. It holds the seeds of it's own destruction.


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## phildwyer (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Listen to what Malcolm Harris said:
> 
> "Colour-blind racism defends itself by appeals to neutrality and meritocracy, accusing its adversaries of being ‘the real racists’. Although its moves are predictable, they’re hard to combat rhetorically since they’re able to ingest the conventional opposition scripts. Colour-blind racists feed on good-faith debate, and engaging with them, especially online, is almost always futile.''


 
That's true enough actually. A ton of people who consıder themselves on the ''Left'' thınk ıt's terrıbly clever to be ''color blınd,'' whıch basıcally seems to ınvolve pretendıng ınstıtutıonal racısm doesn't exıst.


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## ViolentPanda (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> what the fuck how could you take an innocent film like groundhog day which is one of the most feel good and nice films imaginable and turn it into a plot about rape?


 
I hate to think what a review of _Baise-Moi_ would read like!


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## Nigel Irritable (May 14, 2013)

cesare said:


> You think the IWA's a small movement?


 
Yes. The IWA is a tiny, irrelevant, movement. It represents a large majority of organised class struggle anarchists, and in a couple of countries its affiliates are quite substantial on the midget scale of the far left, but by any objective measure it's a small movement.


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## cesare (May 14, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> It strikes me that using it as a tactic both indiccates the instrumentality of the person deploying it, and also signals that their "Interest" is ultimately non-constructive, because the tactic can't be *built on*. It holds the seeds of it's own destruction.


Yes, I agree. It can hold the seeds of destruction for class struggle movements in its wake though.


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## phildwyer (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This is like a flood of white tears etc. Black people are just structurally oppressed in Britain, it's the way it is. Their wealth was stolen from them by slavery and Britain has made no reparation for the descendents of this act of oppression.
> Hence, your finding some Nigerians who arrived in the fifties living in Lewisham having parties at the weekend surrounded by a mixed community who don't mind the BEN music piping away is irrelevant. White people may experience racism from other white people yes, but only white people structurally inflict/have inflicted racism on others, moulding their psychological mindsets.


 
Yep.

To deny any of thıs ıs to belıeve that hıstory does not create the present.  Somethıng that only a fool belıeves.


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## phildwyer (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> How can someone _stand on_ a platform of intersectionality?


 
Even more to the poınt, how can someone argue that the fact that they suffer from mental ıllness ıs a reason to vote _for _them?

The world has gone mad. Lıterally.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 14, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Even more to the poınt, how can someone argue that the fact that they suffer from mental ıllness ıs a reason to vote _for _them?


 
I'm not sure I like the general point you're making there. Care to elaborate?


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> The Anarchist Federation's various wobbles towards "Intersectionality", "Privilege" and the rest of the US radical liberal understanding of oppression, have received some attention here. I've just noticed that the Workers Solidarity Movement here in Ireland have published a theoretical article in their magazine adopting most of the same stuff, although as with the AF Women's Caucus document, there is a bit of an attempt to avoid the worst and most obvious pitfalls. As so often, the parts about race seem to be directly lifted from the US context which is particularly strange in an Irish publication (the most extreme manifestations of racism here have generally been directed against travellers).
> 
> http://www.wsm.ie/c/anarchism-intersecionality-gender-race-class
> 
> It's genuinely interesting that English language "class struggle Anarchism" is acting as a conduit for rather than bulwark against this stuff.


 
Yeah I'm genuinely astonished at how quickly some of the people who I follow on twitter are prepared to abandon the core principles of Anarchism rather than challenge this stuff, I didn't think they'd be that much of a pushover tbh I thought it'd take a few years for class struggle anarchism to be replaced by this stuff.

Let's all go to intersectional island - a safe space for juggalo's.


----------



## caleb (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The black left is winning apparently:
> 
> https://twitter.com/Roshkneee/status/334041459789537284
> 
> ...


 
I've seen this sort of thing before, and I'm really unsure how I feel about it, though I guess it makes me feel uncomfortable. As somebody who has suffered from depression to the extent that it has affected my ability to study and work (in quite significant ways), I can see that it _is_ a 'disability', but I definitely wouldn't feel right "self-identifying" as disabled, and I can't help but feel there's something cynical about doing so. Of course, from my own experience mental health can have a great impact on your physical well-being too, but by the logic of privilegistas themselves, can an otherwise physically-able person who suffers from depression really speak on behalf of a person whose disability leaves them immobile?


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Bit late in the year for that


 
I'm about next year if you are (I've got to re-sit the second semester cos I missed loads of time for family stuff)


----------



## phildwyer (May 14, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> I'm not sure I like the general point you're making there. Care to elaborate?


 
I mean that advertızıng one's mental ıllness ıs a stupıd way to try to wın an electıon.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

chilango said:


> "Youth" is that a Sheffield term?


 
Yep, and ey up. Nesh too. There's loads, you hear local dialect type stuff round here all the time.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 14, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I mean that advertızıng one's mental ıllness ıs a stupıd way to try to wın an electıon.


The problem is that to a lot of people, merely not keeping it a secret counts as 'advertising' it. May not be relevant in this case but it's something to be wary of when having discussions about it.


----------



## phildwyer (May 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This report from the NUS Black Section conference has a number of things in it


 
And ıt appears to have been wrıtten by an especıally narcıssıstıc 14 year-old.

''My experıence of conference was a negatıve one...''

Thank Chrıst for that.  The day thıs person has a posıtıve experıence at conference ıs the day conference should be levelled to the ground by B52s.


----------



## phildwyer (May 14, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> The problem is that to a lot of people, merely not keeping it a secret counts as 'advertising' it.


 
I'd certaınly consıder votıng for a clınıcal depressıve--many great polıtıcıans have suffered from depressıon, Churchıll sprıngs to mınd.

But to make ıt part of your campaıgn ıs (a) unpleasantly self-centered and (b) massıvely counter-productıve.


----------



## chilango (May 14, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I mean that advertızıng one's mental ıllness ıs a stupıd way to try to wın an electıon.



Perhaps not in these particular types of election.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> jesus christ, how can they get this shit out of something like a bug's life?


 
MIM was best understood as a performance art project exploring the deep interconnections between Maoist Third Worldism and certain forms of serious mental illness.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 14, 2013)

cesare said:


> Yes, I agree. It can hold the seeds of destruction for class struggle movements in its wake though.


 
Absolutely.
The question is "do they realise that?".
Further, "if they do realise that, do they care, if all 'intersectionality' is to them is an instrumental practice to start them on the road to a mainstream political career?".


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 14, 2013)

caleb said:


> I've seen this sort of thing before, and I'm really unsure how I feel about it, though I guess it makes me feel uncomfortable. As somebody who has suffered from depression to the extent that it has affected my ability to study and work (in quite significant ways), I can see that it _is_ a 'disability', but I definitely wouldn't feel right "self-identifying" as disabled, and I can't help but feel there's something cynical about doing so. Of course, from my own experience mental health can have a great impact on your physical well-being too, but by the logic of privilegistas themselves, can an otherwise physically-able person who suffers from depression really speak on behalf of a person whose disability leaves them immobile?


 
Well, there's the rub. Intersectionality should be all about NOT "speaking for" others who haven't nominated you to speak for them, but as this plays out, we see the "same old same old" practices from the privilegistas as we see from other student politicians and _soi disant_ "radical entrepreneurs" - the assumption of the right to speak as the voice of others.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 14, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Yeah I'm genuinely astonished at how quickly some of the people who I follow on twitter are prepared to abandon the core principles of Anarchism rather than challenge this stuff, I didn't think they'd be that much of a pushover tbh I thought it'd take a few years for class struggle anarchism to be replaced by this stuff.
> 
> Let's all go to intersectional island - a safe space for juggalo's.


 
It's almost as if the "core principles of Anarchism" didn't have too much purchase in the first place.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 14, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I'd certaınly consıder votıng for a clınıcal depressıve--many great polıtıcıans have suffered from depressıon, Churchıll sprıngs to mınd.
> 
> But to make ıt part of your campaıgn ıs (a) unpleasantly self-centered and (b) massıvely counter-productıve.


 
I guess it depends on the campaign. Using it to help explain why you're campaigning for something is good. Using it as an excuse for bigotry or immaturity is bad. Highlighting mental health issues where they're relevant is great. Highlighting specific mental health issues as more important where a broader spectrum of health problems are relevant isn't irritating.

I'm uncomfortable writing that because it implies people exaggerating their health problems is a common occurrence, and a lot of people already have extreme thoughts on both the amount of 'scroungers' around and what we should do with them. It's not a rule I'd universally apply to every situation for that reason. It's another one of those opinions I don't raise unless I have to due to the way it can be manipulated.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 14, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I mean that advertızıng one's mental ıllness ıs a stupıd way to try to wın an electıon.


 
Unless you're cultivating the disability vote.


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> ...But in fact it's a new build red brick detached on a housing estate in rural Kent.


 
East Sussex, not Kent, IIRC.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Delegates from Sheffield Hallam take full expenses (including hotel rooms) for NUS conferences in Sheffield.
> 
> They were resolutely opposed to a needs budget for the uni however...


 
Fucking cracking scooters though (she never did get back to me about donating them to disadvantaged local kids)


----------



## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'm about next year if you are (I've got to re-sit the second semester cos I missed loads of time for family stuff)


 
Probably won't be, not having much luck finding a job in Sheffield so I will probably have to move elsewhere. I actually think the SU would be pretty keen on the idea, just a bit confused!


----------



## muscovyduck (May 14, 2013)

Anyway, I'm now doing a post on Laurie Penny for my moany, obnoxious 'blog'. I've written a few objective posts before but the Tumblr mainly features stuff that looks like extracts from the Voice Of A Generation's drafts folder. I started with a brief rant on the Figurehead of the Student Protests but it kind of spiralled out of control, and I figured I may as well do a proper job while I'm here. Any advice/requests? Maybe I should ask the Inspirational Feminist herself? I mean she gets loads of youths bugging her for this type of thing every single day but I'm sure I'll be near the top of the list because I'm really un-privileged, and that means my opinions are more important and correct than everyone else's.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 14, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Anyway, I'm now doing a post on Laurie Penny for my moany, obnoxious 'blog'. I've written a few objective posts before but the Tumblr mainly features stuff that looks like extracts from the Voice Of A Generation's drafts folder. I started with a brief rant on the Figurehead of the Student Protests but it kind of spiralled out of control, and I figured I may as well do a proper job while I'm here. Any advice/requests? Maybe I should ask the Inspirational Feminist herself? I mean she gets loads of youths bugging her for this type of thing every single day but I'm sure I'll be near the top of the list because I'm really un-privileged, and that means my opinions are more important and correct than everyone else's.


 
I'd be happy to help, PM me if you want.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> I'm not sure I like the general point you're making there. Care to elaborate?


 
I assume you're replying to phil since I can't see it (you really should try putting him on ignore, it's a liberating (lol) experience). My guess is he said something 'controversial' and probably offensive.

He doesn't really believe it, he just gets some weird kind of quasi-sexual gratification from offending and winding people up. It's probably sexual frustration related to the fact that although he's a full 14 years older than me (and I'm an old cunt) he's still never had a sexual partner that he didn't have to pay for.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

caleb said:


> I've seen this sort of thing before, and I'm really unsure how I feel about it, though I guess it makes me feel uncomfortable. As somebody who has suffered from depression to the extent that it has affected my ability to study and work (in quite significant ways), I can see that it _is_ a 'disability', but I definitely wouldn't feel right "self-identifying" as disabled, and I can't help but feel there's something cynical about doing so. Of course, from my own experience mental health can have a great impact on your physical well-being too, but by the logic of privilegistas themselves, can an otherwise physically-able person who suffers from depression really speak on behalf of a person whose disability leaves them immobile?


 
I felt the same unease at that (and I've suffered from depression too). But I guess you could say that it's an issue with all purpose disability liberation (or whatever you might want to call it) in general. How can a deaf person speak for someone who needs a wheelchair? How can someone with only one arm speak for someone who is completely paralysed? And how can someone without a visible disability speak for those who do, when you consider that disability hate crime seems to be on the increase and those whose disability is not immediately obvious might not be on the receiving end - at least not as much anyway.

And this is before we even get on to the ways disability will affect people differently if they come from different class backgrounds, and I guess ethno-cultural ones too.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Probably won't be, not having much luck finding a job in Sheffield so I will probably have to move elsewhere. I actually think the SU would be pretty keen on the idea, just a bit confused!


 
I might have a go at it if I can get some of the working class kids and student socialist types to back me up on it. I'm seriously considering running for NUS president next year too, mainly because if the candidates are as shit as they were this year I reckon even a student hating old twat like me stands a chance of winning. I know I would hate it, but I reckon it would be even more unpleasant for the types we're discussing here (who really must be stopped) cos I'm an awkward bastard and they wouldn't guilt and bully me into submission and I'd get paid for it so I reckon I could handle it.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Anyway, I'm now doing a post on Laurie Penny for my moany, obnoxious 'blog'. I've written a few objective posts before but the Tumblr mainly features stuff that looks like extracts from the Voice Of A Generation's drafts folder. I started with a brief rant on the Figurehead of the Student Protests but it kind of spiralled out of control, and I figured I may as well do a proper job while I'm here. Any advice/requests? Maybe I should ask the Inspirational Feminist herself? I mean she gets loads of youths bugging her for this type of thing every single day but I'm sure I'll be near the top of the list because I'm really un-privileged, and that means my opinions are more important and correct than everyone else's.


 
I'd PM sihhi if I were you - if he has the time and inclination he'd be the best person of all to give you pointers.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'd PM sihhi if I were you - if he has the time and inclination he'd be the best person of all to give you pointers.


I PMed Delroy Booth, and if there's a way to add sihhi to the conversation and he wants to join in then I'll add him.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I might have a go at it if I can get some of the working class kids and student socialist types to back me up on it. I'm seriously considering running for NUS president next year too, mainly because if the candidates are as shit as they were this year I reckon even a student hating old twat like me stands a chance of winning. I know I would hate it, but I reckon it would be even more unpleasant for the types we're discussing here (who really must be stopped) cos I'm an awkward bastard and they wouldn't guilt and bully me into submission and I'd get paid for it so I reckon I could handle it.


 
Candidate quality has very little to do with NUS elections. Factional blocs, themselves drawn from a narrow layer of local su bureaucrats and various careerists, determine pretty much all results at NUS conference, I'm afraid. You'll have to join the Labour Party and spend a few years brownnosing the most aggravating dickheads in Christendom first.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Candidate quality has very little to do with NUS elections. Factional blocs, themselves drawn from a narrow layer of local su bureaucrats and various careerists, determine pretty much all results at NUS conference, I'm afraid. You'll have to join the Labour Party and spend a few years brownnosing the most aggravating dickheads in Christendom first.


 
I've got studenty friends to try and sort that kind of shit out - I was told by a few labour students that they'd have voted for me if I'd stood so I don't think the whip is especially strict around these parts.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I've got studenty friends to try and sort that kind of shit out - I was told by a few labour students that they'd have voted for me if I'd stood so I don't think the whip is especially strict around these parts.


 
Hang on, do you mean your SU President rather than NUS President?


----------



## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I might have a go at it if I can get some of the working class kids and student socialist types to back me up on it. I'm seriously considering running for NUS president next year too, mainly because if the candidates are as shit as they were this year I reckon even a student hating old twat like me stands a chance of winning. I know I would hate it, but I reckon it would be even more unpleasant for the types we're discussing here (who really must be stopped) cos I'm an awkward bastard and they wouldn't guilt and bully me into submission and I'd get paid for it so I reckon I could handle it.


 
NUS or SU President? Either way, you'd be great, go for it! If you're going to run for SU President maybe consider running for mature students councillor or something at the start of the year as well


----------



## butchersapron (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I've got studenty friends to try and sort that kind of shit out - I was told by a few labour students that they'd have voted for me if I'd stood so I don't think the whip is especially strict around these parts.


Have you a disability?


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## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

Spiney you should run on a Proletarian Democracy ticket


----------



## Bakunin (May 14, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Anyway, I'm now doing a post on Laurie Penny for my moany, obnoxious 'blog'. I've written a few objective posts before but the Tumblr mainly features stuff that looks like extracts from the Voice Of A Generation's drafts folder. I started with a brief rant on the Figurehead of the Student Protests but it kind of spiralled out of control, and I figured I may as well do a proper job while I'm here. Any advice/requests? Maybe I should ask the Inspirational Feminist herself? I mean she gets loads of youths bugging her for this type of thing every single day but I'm sure I'll be near the top of the list because I'm really un-privileged, and that means my opinions are more important and correct than everyone else's.


 
Which blog's that then?


----------



## muscovyduck (May 14, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Which blog's that then?


I feel a bit conscious of just posting it on this forum because I don't want to make it too easy to match things up to my identity. I'm not exactly anonymous on here or my blog or my Twitter feed etc but they all contain... different aspects of me I guess? When I finish the blog post I'll probably link to it on Twitter and PM it people etc. I know I sound really paranoid/dodgy for no reason but it would make my life difficult if certain people married up my various internet profiles to who I am.


----------



## killer b (May 14, 2013)

will self. i thought we'd got rid of you years ago.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Hang on, do you mean your SU President rather than NUS President?


 
Yeah


----------



## Buckaroo (May 14, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> I feel a bit conscious of just posting it on this forum because I don't want to make it too easy to match things up to my identity. I'm not exactly anonymous on here or my blog or my Twitter feed etc but they all contain... different aspects of me I guess? When I finish the blog post I'll probably link to it on Twitter and PM it people etc. I know I sound really paranoid/dodgy for no reason but it would make my life difficult if certain people married up my various internet profiles to who I am.


 
For a seventeen year old you're an articulate and accomplished young man. Blogs and Twitter feeds and the rest coming out of your arse. Well done. Keep it up.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Have you a disability?


 
I reckon I can self-define - suffered from depression so that ought to do it. Though I might use my status as a recovering heroin addict to self-define, just to see confused fear on the faces of intersectionalists who aren't convinced that's a legitimate disability


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Spiney you should run on a Proletarian Democracy ticket


 
That's actually not such a bad idea - did you see how popular the inanimate carbon rod was? And he nicked our idea - the workers bomb. I might run on a platform of support for the workers bomb and opposition to plagiarism in student election campaigns!


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> For a seventeen year old you're an articulate and accomplished young man. Blogs and Twitter feeds and the rest coming out of your arse. Well done. Keep it up.


 
Young woman, you big misogynist you


----------



## Buckaroo (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Young woman, you big misogynist you


 
Oops apologies!


----------



## muscovyduck (May 14, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> For a seventeen year old you're an articulate and accomplished young man. Blogs and Twitter feeds and the rest coming out of your arse. Well done. Keep it up.


Look I'm not going to lie it's not a very good blog, and as most of you probably noticed my Twitter feed isn't exactly revolutionary.  My blog was set up just as a place to put things really, I don't update it consistently, but it's better to have something than nothing. As posts stack up, followers and hits do, motivation goes up, quality goes up, themes will be established, and so on. I've been blogging since I was about 13 but I had the habit of just deleting and starting from scratch, so I know that doesn't work. My hope is that it'll get better over time. This post will be the first serious one in a while, and it'll take the longest time to research and to collect sources. That means any subsequent posts will seem easier than I would've found them beforehand.

Anyway yeah. WOMAN.


----------



## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's actually not such a bad idea - did you see how popular the inanimate carbon rod was? And he nicked our idea - the workers bomb. I might run on a platform of support for the workers bomb and opposition to plagiarism in student election campaigns!


 
I was just thinking about this a bit more when I was supposed to be doing work, unlike most stoodent politicans I think you could do a lot of good. There is absolutely no reason why you couldn't link up the Unite Community Union with the Student Union, there are a lot of people who are political that would be happy to help out and the SU already has a decent base of mostly non-political volunteers who would be happy to do some good works in Sheffield if they didn't appear to be heavily political.

When discussion on food banks came up before you said you were thinking about developing something in Barnsley, but there is absolutely no reason why you couldn't do the same at the SU. There are already plans to set up a food collection point for one of the Trussel Trust food banks but how much better would it be if there was something independent of the Tories' trojan horse' charities!


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I was just thinking about this a bit more when I was supposed to be doing work, unlike most stoodent politicans I think you could do a lot of good. There is absolutely no reason why you couldn't link up the Unite Community Union with the Student Union, there are a lot of people who are political that would be happy to help out and the SU already has a decent base of mostly non-political volunteers who would be happy to do some good works in Sheffield if they didn't appear to be heavily political.
> 
> When discussion on food banks came up before you said you were thinking about developing something in Barnsley, but there is absolutely no reason why you couldn't do the same at the SU. There are already plans to set up a food collection point for one of the Trussel Trust food banks but how much better would it be if there was something independent of the Tories' trojan horse' charities!


 
That's a good idea - I was also thinking about seeing what could be done to open up university facilities for local kids to use - sports stuff but maybe other stuff too - maybe linking it with the various leisure orientated societies to see if they can lead sessions (you know, football training, stuff like that).

Definitely worth some serious thought is that.


----------



## fractionMan (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's a good idea - I was also thinking about seeing what could be done to open up university facilities for local kids to use - sports stuff but maybe other stuff too - maybe linking it with the various leisure orientated societies to see if they can lead sessions (you know, football training, stuff like that).
> 
> Definitely worth some serious thought is that.


 
bath uni already do this - run football etc


----------



## muscovyduck (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's a good idea - I was also thinking about seeing what could be done to open up university facilities for local kids to use - sports stuff but maybe other stuff too - maybe linking it with the various leisure orientated societies to see if they can lead sessions (you know, football training, stuff like that).
> 
> Definitely worth some serious thought is that.


Oh hold on there was a campaign around here years ago to open school facilities to the public on weekends and holdays. Might be related to Every Child Matters? I was really young and can't remember it well. But at least there is/was stuff out there that might be worth linking up with.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> bath uni already do this - run football etc


 
Yeah that's the kind of thing I'm thinking of - but also maybe other stuff too for kids who aren't sporty (I wasn't as a kid). There must be all kinds of interesting stuff you could do for kids with the kind of facilities there are at a place like Sheffield Uni. There's a fucking cinema in the student union. Then there's stuff like astronomy - I'd have jumped at the chance to have a go at that with people who know what they're doing and all the right equipment.

I think the IWCA in Oxford arranged something similar with sports facilities - I might go and start a thread about it when I've got time to find out what people know about these kinds of schemes - they may even be doing some of it at Sheffield already, I don't know. Cos even if I don't go for SU president there's no reason why I shouldn't start a campaign around this kind of stuff - really make a difference to a lot of working class kids and it's the kind of thing that you could get non-lefty types to support and help with too. And as Unite Community grows (it's started to already with the bedroom tax stuff) a link between that and the SU could provide us with the contacts we need to actually make sure people in these communities know about it and think it's 'for them' rather than being some kind of worthy student charity case type thing.

Definitely beats the usual student politics anyway - and could be a way of breaking some of the better students out of the bubble and building real links and a sense of shared interests, bonds of solidarity etc with ordinary people in the communities that surround them (sorry for the wanky language but I can't think of a better way of putting it).

I would also be very fucking funny seeing an intersectionalist lead a bunch of kids from Parson's Cross in an under-16s footy training session


----------



## butchersapron (May 14, 2013)

Intersectionalism is for career minded people who ain't integrated/deny integration. Heavy emphasis on the latter.


----------



## J Ed (May 14, 2013)

I've spent a bit of time at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and when I was there I thought to myself how much better integrated the university and the surrounding community were there than Sheffield in spite of the class divide which is weird because you'd think that it would be the other way around. To take one example, lots of people I met there volunteered there in schools with working-class, mostly Hispanic kids to help them with university applications and so on. A bit of that goes on here through departmental initatives but nothing like on the scale there.

I think if the SU were to head in that sort of direction it might help restore my faith in humanity a bit


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Intersectionalism is for career minded people who ain't integrated/deny integration. Heavy emphasis on the latter.


 
Is that a reply to my post? If so I don't understand


----------



## butchersapron (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Is that a reply to my post? If so I don't understand


Of course it isn't.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Of course it isn't.


 
Ah, just read it again - I didn't see the 'is' so I read it as, 'Intersectionalism for career minded people who ain't integrated/deny integration. Heavy emphasis on the latter.' - thought maybe you were making a cryptic point about my ideas being somehow analogous to intersectionality or something.

Apologies - as you were


----------



## butchersapron (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Ah, just read it again - I didn't see the 'is' so I read it as, 'Intersectionalism for career minded people who ain't integrated/deny integration. Heavy emphasis on the latter.' - thought maybe you were making a cryptic point or something.
> 
> Apologies - as you were


Trust me norm. Just trust.


----------



## Pickman's model (May 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Is that a reply to my post? If so I don't understand


oh dear


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 14, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> oh dear


 
Head up arse moment. Let us never speak of this again!


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

Multi-layers of intersectionality.







Has the circle reached the point of no return?

A sample safer spaces protocol in a student occupation in Glasgow Jan-Feb 2011 I think
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




One from a US radical anti-sexual chauvinism/'queer liberation' action and social centre
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



Is this too harsh?/ Almost like heading towards ... ?
So many spokes they're coming off the damn wheels - the only way for anyone to actually improve the collective human condition with an analysis like this is to rely on individual charity/mobility from people privileged in one sphere to assist someone non-privileged in another sphere who might be able to assist someone else non-privileged in another sphere. All the while everyone checking their privilege and others' privilege ("It is everyone's responsibility to challenge prejudice") once every 2-3 minutes when not talking, but doing so at a rate of a dozen or so checks every minute whilst they themselves are talking. So that they don't make any assumptions or tough assertions about anyone which might mean infringing the growing pockets of safe spaces that are slowly, steadily going to envelop the world as radicals occupy from the octopus.


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## Hocus Eye. (May 15, 2013)

TopCat said:


> Can someone summarise this thread please?


Yes, it goes: fight, fight, fight, fight.


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## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Intersectionalism is for career minded people who ain't integrated/deny integration. Heavy emphasis on the latter.


 
Here's my response:

Note the _*Vibe Watchers in pink arm bands*_ in the second safer spaces chart - who are taking part in the banner making or benefit night etc but also controlling the emotional atmosphere so no one is upset emotionally scarred. Presumably there will be a meeting with a progressive stack to determine who steps up and steps back in taking on these kinds of roles and in the meetings to determine who should or shouldn't be suitable for that role.

That's not tokenism or waffle - a Vibe Watcher would have helped out Ashok 'honky feminists' Kumar's problems at the feminist fightback party in Tower Hamlets.
The Vibe Watcher would have made the policy clear on who chooses the music in a non-offensive manner, having bits of your favourite genre called misogynistic is a big blow if you are an immigrant. But what intersection would they represent? - ideally a (working-class, lesbian or bisexual, intensively (British) colonized origins:[Bangladesh OK, Tibet not], with irregular immigration papers, medium colour to be equidistant between dark Asian and white (although what happens with use of skin colour-softening over the years) Asian woman to sort out all the issues and keep the space safe for all.

It was clearly not safe for this guy so much so that he had to insinuate to 1,200 others that these women were racists whilst calling them "honkey feminists", although today we see that it was - at heart - just a form of acceptable psychotherapy from his particular intersection.



> there are about a million comments on this thread and there's no point going back and forth about the night's events cuz we'll prolly never agree. its cool that you all recognize the systemic racism in our political culture and want to do stuff about it, the point of the post was to: try to point out some of the racism i found in the white left, to highlight some of my thoughts from the night regarding generalizing about hip hop and misogyny but mostly, ill admit for me, it was using facebook as a form of psychotherapy, and it's refreshing to see so many down comments from my honkey comrades, let's end it at that


 
A problem given that this person uses public insinuations of racism as a form of psychotherapy is the mental disability intersection surely there should have been at least a partially mentally disabled Vibe Watcher?

I think broadly, these middle-class immigrants make it difficult for working-class immigrants to talk about class-based relations both in their origin and destination society.

Perhaps this is too presumptive, but middle-class immigrants nearly often set 'the immigrant agenda'. I don't know too much about all immigration but a bit on Turkish Kurdish Iranian Cypriot and just reading on the others.
To grossly generalise about this middle-class stamped and formed 'immigrant agenda', it is based around trying to prove to host society that the same (class) contours of society will be imposed upon the migrated society. And that affiliation or identification with overseas working-class people, your relatives back home - will only be in terms of sending them money.
So the agenda is equal representation in the structures of capitalist society: business, judges, parliaments and teaching staff. And to speed/smooth this passage positive action in the form of business grants, early promotion of black councillors to prospective MPs, black mentoring and pupillage schemes for the professions to be funded by the state or self-created.
Basically (better or worse) forms of affirmative action from the state, alongside building up social capital on a self-help basis - often in the long-term to help achieve those changes in affirmative action (more spending power in the immigrant business, better qualifications).

It's often there in the formal aswell as informal networks. The restaurant owners fund the Saturday schools, the philanthropic organisations asking the government for help to train up a new cadre of community liaison and youth work to cut down on estrangement or total separation, Gurdwara foundations, Chinese Associations, the overseas PNP and Congress branches of an earlier era, even the ostensibly progressive organisations the IWAs and Stalinoid cultural left.
(However much the rhetoric for back home Kurdistan, Tamil Eelam, Turkish M-L or Iranian M-Ls is guerilla action, for here it is strictly stagist, hence dominated by the culturally left middle-class immigrant layer)

It's not all bad - not all of the middle-class feminist agenda is bad: 50/50 boardrooms would eventually bring tangible improvements, grants for women to sort out their childcare whilst they work would be better than what we've got now, new laws against forced marriages are a sensible thing etc.

But we shouldn't let the middle-class immigrant account - 'immigrants have been held back from doing well because they are playing catch up to indigenous people' (note: the race will go on being run) - merge with justifiable indignation at the real instances of overt racism [employers straight away ignoring foreign names on CVs, the swearing at burqas, the night-time post-shift racial attacks, police profiling/swamping of black gang areas first, anti-Muslim newspaper headlines] alongside ongoing misunderstandings or misperceptions of different cultures (people seeing rap music as demeaning towards black women) etc to produce a hyper form of immigrant liberation, which this 'honky' business seems to be about.

This hyper anti-racism is the opposite of sober analysis of society's economic make-up. Let's be clear: the reason why 'unemployment amongst immigrants' is rising 'at a quicker rate than whites', why working-class immigrants aren't breaking through the glass ceiling etc is not increasing levels of racism imprinted on a coloniser 'pig' mindset etched into the British DNA for 500 years ever since Cabot left Bristol.
It is the results of capitalists tightening up their capitalist system with austerity and neoliberalism, working-class immigrants (alongside the rest of the w/c) experience the consequences.

Since the ratio of middle-class to working-class is lower for most immigrant groups this can be seen - on the surface - as tightening up of race war heading to the old days, sus is back, apartheid is returning. These things are inevitable police consequences of economic trends which can be fought effectively by economic power, combined working-class or independent trade union and community power - ie some form of united action.

They can be fought delusionally in terms of 'separate' black action overthrowing white power - leading to fear, mutual suspicion, clampdown and restriction for the immigrant working-class. Not blaming the French actions of 2005 and 2007 or the ones here in 2011 they are inevitable - wholly inevitable - given the society we have. I can only understand antagonising 'honkey feminists' as part of this delusional - almost fantasy struggle.

Race-based battles for funding or trading insults will never be to the advantage of immigrant working-class - these battles will fragment and split along new chauvinist lines (but the class dynamic will remain), even if the immigrant society becomes as 'successful' as the host society overall.


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

*


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## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

A platform of intersectionality? really? _really_?

have i read this right or are people trying to get elected on the basis of what race they are - oh, sorry "identify as" because they might not even be that race??

Peoples experience of racism etc might help them help others in the same position, but to be honest i doubt the people standing on these platforms trying to be elected have experienced much racism or other hardship at all. If they did they would understand that its not a game of "oppression bingo" and neither do you get over it by "managing tensions" (have you ever heard of a more revolting phrase to basically fob people off over the presence of far-right activists), its a very serious problem and it has to be fought politically not by boasting about how oppressed they are.

I can understand the idea of having safe spaces but surely that's just the idea of being respectful of people, and from my brief foray's into this weird "intersectional" world a lot of people within it are very very far from being respectful of anyone from outside that milieu.


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## cesare (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron Did you say a few pages back that you haven't seen any of this stuff irl yet? I haven't either but I've haven't been out and about much. I was wondering if it's mainly in the universities and on-line (blogs and twitter etc) ... anyone else seen it (apart from unis)?


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## smokedout (May 15, 2013)

is intelligence a privilege?

(is a question I want to ask whoever did the wheel diagram just to see what they say)


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## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

I dont understand the mindset. Experiencing racism and homophobia (i'm in a straight relationship now but anyway) was probably the most important thing that made me an anti-fascist (if a pretty confused one at times lol) and eventually a marxist. These people dont have the slightest interest in fighting racism they just want to build their own careers, theres nothing about what theyre going to do actually to take practical steps to fight racism, there's nothing about any of their other policies, what they are doing to fight for example cuts in the university, what their position is about disputes with university staff etc, let alone any of the "dogshit" politics that so many of these politicians ignore


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

cesare said:


> butchersapron Did you say a few pages back that you haven't seen any of this stuff irl yet? I haven't either but I've haven't been out and about much. I was wondering if it's mainly in the universities and on-line (blogs and twitter etc) ... anyone else seen it (apart from unis)?


Never seen it. And in politics terms meet studes, never no nay never. Nothing here


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Never seen it. And in politics terms meet studes, never no nay never. Nothing here


 
I've encountered an ever rising tide of the stuff on the internet, by which I mean British and/or Irish bits of the internet. But I haven't yet encountered it at a political meeting, or had someone I know for non-political reasons start talking about it. Then again, the meetings I go to are probably not representative of "left" meetings in general. You don't tend to get much of this stuff at SP meetings or at household tax meetings etc.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

Actually come to think of it, I'd love to hear someone give an "intersectionality/privilege" speech at a household tax meeting. It would be even better than a then SWP fulltimer / now charity worker's speech to a suburban bin tax meeting about the European Social Forum, all those years ago.


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I've encountered an ever rising tide of the stuff on the internet, by which I mean British and/or Irish bits of the internet. But I haven't yet encountered it at a political meeting, or had someone I know for non-political reasons start talking about it. Then again, the meetings I go to are probably not representative of "left" meetings in general. You don't tend to get much of this stuff at SP meetings or at household tax meetings etc.


Look, you need to say that it's happening to show how shit anarchism is - you like saying they are anarchists.


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## cesare (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Never seen it. And in politics terms meet studes, never no nay never. Nothing here


Nothing like this seems to have rushed in behind Galloway's departure here, but I might not be getting a feel for it. Not seen or heard anything and nobody mentions it in chit chat whatever. Not really a topic of conversation in politics terms or day to day life.


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I've encountered an ever rising tide of the stuff on the internet, by which I mean British and/or Irish bits of the internet. But I haven't yet encountered it at a political meeting, or had someone I know for non-political reasons start talking about it. Then again, the meetings I go to are probably not representative of "left" meetings in general. You don't tend to get much of this stuff at SP meetings or at household tax meetings etc.


I don't care what your rising tide of the stuff on the internet means.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Look, you need to say that it's happening to show how shit anarchism is - you like saying they are anarchists.


 
All dicking around aside, the "far leftists" I've heard it from have been 80% anarchists, 15% ex-SWP, 5% other. I got a lot less smug about it after I encountered my first SP member / intersectionalista. While I might poke fun about class struggle anarchists converting, with good reason, it seems that it's in the water generally when it comes to new recruits to socialist politics.


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

cesare said:


> Nothing like this seems to have rushed in behind Galloway's departure here, but I might not be getting a feel for it. Not seen or heard anything and nobody mentions it in chit chat whatever. Not really a topic of conversation in politics terms or day to day life.


No one my mother would even recognise. Who owns her, sold to a uk company to clean ferry paid, 12 months paid, them another 12 months in brum, where the fuck are here white tears?


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> All dicking around aside, the "far leftists" I've heard it from have been 80% anarchists, 15% ex-SWP, 5% other. I got a lot less smug about it after I encountered my first SP member / intersectionalista. While I might poke fun about class struggle anarchists converting, with good reason, it seems that it's in the water generally when it comes to new recruits to socialist politics.


Stop hanging around with them.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Stop hanging around with them.


 
Jesus, I don't hang around with these people.


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

100% trot all the way.


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## cesare (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> All dicking around aside, the "far leftists" I've heard it from have been 80% anarchists, 15% ex-SWP, 5% other. I got a lot less smug about it after I encountered my first SP member / intersectionalista. While I might poke fun about class struggle anarchists converting, with good reason, it seems that it's in the water generally when it comes to new recruits to socialist politics.


 
This stuff just gets a roll of the eyes and some fun poked at it.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> 100% trot all the way.


 
Can I take it from this that you've had a good evening?


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

cesare said:


> This stuff just gets a roll of the eyes and some fun poked at it.


 
Sure, but it's obviously not being taken that lightly everywhere.


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## cesare (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Sure, but it's obviously not being taken that lightly everywhere.


But where though? You're happy enough to join with the shit slinging of class struggle anarchists who actually do jump on bloody identity politics, which seems to have passed you by right under your nose.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

cesare said:


> But where though? You're happy enough to join with the shit slinging of class struggle anarchists who actually do jump on bloody identity politics, which seems to have passed you by right under your nose.


 
It's clearly taken seriously by the Anarchist Federation's women's group and by the WSM. Personally, I've noticed a lot of it on twitter, coming from people who I'd have expected better from. As for taking the piss out of class struggle anarchists about it, that really is the part of the far left I've mostly heard it echoed in, and I'm mocking precisely because I was expecting some serious resistance to it in those quarters.


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## cesare (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> It's clearly taken seriously by the Anarchist Federation's women's group and by the WSM. Personally, I've noticed a lot of it on twitter, coming from people who I'd have expected better from. As for taking the piss out of class struggle anarchists about it, that really is the part of the far left I've mostly heard it echoed in, and I'm mocking precisely because I was expecting some serious resistance to it in those quarters.


Edit (less grouchy):   Their serious resistance is more likely to be focused elsewhere


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Can I take it from this that you've had a good evening?


You can now take it that i wish i hadn't.


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## Rimbaud (May 15, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Problem is, most of the people who are biting on this stuff were either kids in the '80s, or not even born, so they don't have any memory of how badly the turn to identity politics affected the development and furtherance of non-identity-based forms of politics.


 
For those of us who were either kids or a glint in the milkman's eye in the 1980s, could somebody explain exactly what happened with identity politics in the 80s, or recommend something (ideally quite brief) to read about it? I've seen this referenced a few times in the thread, but I have no clue about what people are referring to.


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

From something i writted elsewhere:

The Scarman Report was commissioned by the Thatcher government to investigate the causes behind the Brixton 1981 riots but soon became recognised as actually concerning the national picture. Conservative commentators were surprised to discover that the report actually accepted a number of the starting points of the ‘social deprivation’ and ‘powerlessness and alienation’ theses - whilst still maintaining that a ‘law and order’ type response was necessary in the short term. One of his key findings was that “The lack of formal political representation at local and national government level of ethnic minorities created a sense of ‘political insecurity and rejection’ amongst these groups”. Essentially, he was arguing that if the state did not want a replay of the events of the early 1980s a mechanism had better be found that was able to both offer some incitement into the mainstream fold and deliver something tangible to those who decided to participate in or work towards this incorporation. The creation of a black stake in formal politics was needed to ensure ‘community cohesion’ in inner city politics, or at least to ensure that any fires were damped down and stayed within those communities. What these communities were and what they were supposed to represent we shall see shortly.

Around the same time as Scarman reported, the left-inside-the labour-party had embarked on a program of opposition to the thatcherite neo-liberal agenda of widespread cuts to a range of national and local services and so on from within local councils around the country. As part of this program they adopted a strategy of opening up the councils to what they saw as community interests - that is ethnic communities, religious communities, national communities and so on - in short, different cultures (There is significant debate over just how far this was actually a conscious pre-planned strategy, but even if it was not planned in any formal way it still spoke very clearly of how this section of the left viewed society as mix of competing cultures at that point in time). These were externally identified and authenticated by a mutually beneficial process of the ‘leaders‘ demands for recognition and the councils willing/planned recognition of them . Further ‘cultures’ were invited to constitute themselves, and then to identify their own leadership representatives from with the community. The community leaders, now fully authorised to speak for the people and culture it had been decided they represented, were placed on a range of public bodies, were given a default position as consultative for any initiative that was planned within ‘their’ communities. Race relations boards, equal opportunities units, police liaison committees and so on were set up and these community leaders played a key role in their functioning. This centrality helped reinforce their local power base which was then further consolidated when grants were handed out on the basis of community competition for funds. What then developed at that point was a form of clientelism in which community leaders received funds for their pet projects on behalf of their communities from the councils on the basis of the councils recognition of the authenticity of their culture, and then another layer of potential leaders received their funding from the existing leaders.

A reciprocal network of responsibilities to not act in ways that would be see as challenging the ‘communities’ stability - as defined by the council and leaders - was constructed, alongside a clear pathway into political influence for those prepared to ‘follow the rules’ was slowly developed. If you broke the rules your funding was cut, if the people you were supposed to represent got out of hand, your funding was cut.
Previously, individuals from ethnic communities had been able to advance - against significant hurdles - through participation in existing institutions - the labour party and the unions for example, but they had to participate on the basis of the already existing culture and practice of those institutions - the end result was individuals moving upwards on the basis of acceptance of existing wider mainstream‘culture’ but now it appeared that there was room for upward mobility for people on the basis of their own ‘culture’, and the beneficiaries of this mobility were then able to portray their individual mobility as that of their collective ‘ethnic community’ or culture.

So there was a mutually reinforcing dynamic of community incorporation and community construction at the same time - where issues that had formerly been seen as cross community questions, as general social or political issues - class issues - slowly transformed themselves into cultural questions, as questions could only be dealt with by the officially recognised cultures, and more clearly, by their leaders. Political issues were racialised but under the guise of culture and equality. A politics developed out of common experience of school, work, leisure, family and area was derailed onto a territory of competing cultural experiences and expectations with the result that attacks that struck at the working class as whole - whether as wage-labour, as potential labour-power, as claimants etc faced a disunited opposition, and even had the door opened to them to offer enticements to one cultural community or another to participate in these attacks. The ground for class re-alignment, for actively recognising or constructing shared class interests was made that much less firm, whilst already existing cross-community networks were placed under severe pressure.

This generally remained a local level strategy but was adopted by ‘new labour’ on the national level (see the aufheben article on the construction of the Muslim community or recent work by Kenan Malik etc). Essentially a layer of mediators was constructed between the national/local state and the ‘communities’ who had the largesse to offer opportunities (or the appearance of opportunities) to members of that community. What formal politics that existed existed only through these mediators on the basis of their top-down legitimacy - rather than acting as bottom-up expressions of the local communities interests they developed as transmission belts in the opposite direction. (of course, it would be too simplistic to pretend that this is the whole picture - the state does actually have to maintain its ideological dominance through meeting genuine social needs, increasingly so as it encloses may previously collective non-state functions). Top-down official multi-culturalism according to Kenan Malik developed into a “top-down bureaucratic social management deployed in capitalist economies which import labour from abroad.”.

An example of one outcome of this mechanism is given by Malik:




> To see this process in action, we need look no further than Lozells. The riots there showed how the process of politically recognising distinct identities can give rise to communal conflict. The roots lie 20 years earlier, in the 1985 riots which took place down the road in Handsworth, when blacks, whites and Asians took to the streets together in protest against poverty, unemployment and, in particular, oppressive policing.
> 
> In response, Birmingham council proposed a new framework for the engagement of minority groups. It created a number of community organisations, labelled Umbrella Groups, to represent the needs of their communities. By 1993, there were nine groups, defined by ethnicity and faith: the African and Caribbean People’s Movement, the Bangladeshi Islamic Projects Consultative Committee, the Birmingham Chinese Society, the Council of Black-led Churches, the Hindu Council, the Irish Forum, the Vietnamese Association, the Pakistani Forum and the Sikh Council of Gurdwaras. A Standing Consultative Forum was established as a single body through which the groups could collectively represent the views of minority communities to aid policy development and resource allocation.
> 
> ...


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

pt2

The mixed riot of 1985, based on common frustrations etc of 1985 was replaced 20 years later by two nights of rioting between the black and asian communities based on the rapid-fire spread of a rumour that a young black girl had been gang raped by 19 asian men. Two people were killed during the disturbances. In the aftermath, the explanations offered by people from both communities mirrored some of the mainstream frameworks mentioned above and demonstrated how a deracialised ‘race and disorder’ approach had taken root even in those communities whose actions it had originally developed to condemn. _They’re taking over all the shops, they treat us like thieves when we go in there, they won’t touch our hands when they give us change on one side and they steal from us, they disrespect our families, they don’t want to work or get on together._ The local media catering for each community gave wind to these cultural explanations of how large elements of two groups who had fought together in the past came to view each other as enemies today. The age of those involved significantly seemed to come from those who had grown up with the above mentioned multi-cultural policy as the norm. Class identity was often replaced with ethnic identity.

Multi-culturalism then, sought to divide the working class into competing factions by encouraging people with common cultural backgounds to construct themselves into communities and then produce their own leaders. This tended to be outside the workplace though, it acted more on the territorial level, and with the ongoing loss of the sort of work that had formerly been the backbone for internal discipline and socialisation of young people in these areas there was a consequent rise in people identifying as part of the muslim community or the Sikh community etc - and the path offered into a role in local institutions etc proved inviting for many. This was far cry from groups such as the Asian Youth movements of the late 70s and early 80s who had formed on explicitly secular non-sectarian grounds and recognised their actions and their aims as part of a wider class struggle. The sheer amount of effort required just to stay on the paths offered by the local councils was itself a drag on the activity these groups had been set up for:



> “the group’s time was taken up by organising activities to fulfil the criterion of the
> funding e.g. outings, youth centre sessions, playing pool, table tennis and management of the project itself.”
> 
> (Ramamurthy,Amanda - Race & Class , Volume 48 (2): 38 Oct 1, 2006)


 
The wider, longer term undermining of previously taken for granted class perspective and the spread of internal division was summed up very well by Mukhtar Dar one of the Sheffield AYMs long term activists:



> “The AYM’s symbolic black secular clenched fist split open into a submissive ethnic hand with its divided religious fingers holding up the begging bowl for the race relations crumbs.”


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## treelover (May 15, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> We should propose it just to see what happens. I'm game if you are.


 
I think this is a great idea, it will really expose identity politics for what it is, i'm sure their are other urbs at college who would join in..

btw, some of the lecturers who work in access would actually be sympathetic..


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## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

RImbaud I think it's a massive topic I think my perception of it is probably jaundiced because there is no coherent objective analysis so many things interact what comes to mind is: - effects of Thatcherism, the blanket protests and republican prisoners, the Labour sections struggle, Women Against the Pit Closures, Lesbians and gays support the miners, rate capping, the 2 Asians burnt to death by accident in the riots in Handsworth, Blue Star and the fracture in Indian immigrant politics, 'apartheid cannot be dismantled without social revolution', Sandinista not Zapatista coffee, the tabloids and the 'loony left', GLC and Ken Livingstone, Sam Bond, Derek Hatton, lesbian-feminist squatting, what age of male sons are acceptable in domestic violence shelters?, disputes over street prostitution in King's Cross, Bernie Grant, Ted Knight, David Blunkett, Margaret Hodge, Racism awareness training and courses, disabled/women/racial audits, council decentralisation and cuts, Race Today, the IRR, charities and charity commissioners. Someone around at the time needs to do something proper on it.
It was good because it asserted 'these are people's identities, give people space to be themselves, don't railroad over them' but it did also come with a dose of judgementalism or careerism.
I'd like a heavy detailed analysis too.


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## treelover (May 15, 2013)

killer b said:


> will self. i thought we'd got rid of you years ago.


 
was that mystery guest?


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## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

Looking forward to responses:





> Laurie Penny @PennyRed20h
> So today I'm asking male-identified people on Twitter: who were and are your role models for 'masculinity', and why?
> 
> Laurie Penny @PennyRed20h
> I'd also like to know if the internet thinks there's 'crisis in masculinity'- and what that even means? #masculinityetc


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

wtf is male-identified?


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## Limerick Red (May 15, 2013)

Rimbaud said:


> For those of us who were either kids or a glint in the milkman's eye in the 1980s, could somebody explain exactly what happened with identity politics in the 80s, or recommend something (ideally quite brief) to read about it? I've seen this referenced a few times in the thread, but I have no clue about what people are referring to.


Possibly could or could not be worth mentioning in regards to this, the AFA article "The Trojan Horse of Multiculturalism" from the Fighting talk magazine I havent read this in about 10 years, and cant read it now, as my work computer wont open the PDF, but if it is as I remember makes some
points worth including in this conversation.

Anyways heres the link
http://afaarchive.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/fighting-talk-issue-25.pdf


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## Idris2002 (May 15, 2013)

"crisis of masculinity" - my hairy Irish bollocks.


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## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> wtf is male-identified?


 
It includes transgender f-t-m males, intersex people who tick male on forms, and those born male (ie male genitalia) - so you count make your views known:

1 who is your role model for masculinity now?

2 who was your role model for masculinity in the past?


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It includes transgender f-t-m males, intersex people who tick male on forms, and those born male (ie male genitalia) - so you count make your views known:
> 
> 1 who is your role model for masculinity now?
> 
> 2 who was your role model for masculinity in the past?


Jesus. To even unpack the spectacular assumptions in those questions!  I think i may need to go on richard and judy.


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## Limerick Red (May 15, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> "crisis of masculinity" - my hairy Irish bollocks.


Isnt this the kind of shit John Waters has been makin a livin out for for the past 20 years, with the odd interlude to write counter-revolutionary eurovison songs.


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## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Jesus. To even unpack the spectacular assumptions in those questions!  I think i may need to go on richard and judy.


 
If the left doesn't make its views known, the right in the form of Malcolm Rifkind's son will:

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/334317923546042369

"I suppose I did quite badly want to be Luke Skywalker for a while."

>> The white straight left (that phrase must burn you to a cinder) don't want to analyse intersectionality and identity, but the right do, the right will win - up your game, sorry not sorry.


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

I can feel the future at my back and my white tears rolling under the fridge


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## cesare (May 15, 2013)

sihhi I can't give you detailed analysis but I can give you anecdotal experiences of how the likes of Trevor Phillips (for example) managed to create an impression of poor race relations in Thamesmead leaving residents of all backgrounds going "eh, you what!?!"


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## cesare (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I can feel the future at my back and my white tears rolling under the fridge


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## Idris2002 (May 15, 2013)

Limerick Red said:


> Isnt this the kind of shit John Waters has been makin a livin out for for the past 20 years, with the odd interlude to write counter-revolutionary eurovison songs.


 
Yeah, and all because Sinead O'Connor chucked him.

Mind you, I remember my supervisor - an old-school Marxist-Feminist anthropologist - saying she thought there was a crisis of masculinity, which surprised me a lot.


----------



## articul8 (May 15, 2013)

"male identified people"?  Does she mean men?


----------



## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> "male identified people"? Does she mean men?


no


----------



## articul8 (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> no


  people who think of themselves as men, who may or may not be recognised as men by others?


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I can feel the future at my back and my white tears rolling under the fridge


 
First smarten up here is a "permanent trigger warning" for you:

http://facebooksexism.tumblr.com/tw




> PERMANENT TRIGGER WARNING
> Please be advised, this page has a permanent trigger warning. I’m going to be sharing the words of sexists as they say them. That will include but is not limited to:
> 
> -rape jokes/rape culture/rape apologism
> ...


 
Are you taking the valid anti-oppressive mocking of "white tears" as a joke joke?

Here it is in action - 

http://facebooksexism.tumblr.com/post/49161617510/so-when-someone-says-ew-youre-white-thats-not




> panda-cat asked: so when someone says "ew, you're white" that's not racist? Or if someone doesn't let me join a club because I'm white? Or when I went to learn punjabi, all the kids were saying I can't because I'm not brown, that's not racist? There's no such thing as racisim against white people eh?
> 
> Nope, sorry. That’s people being mean maybe (maybe not even that) but racism is oppression + power. There is no structural inequality against white people and POC don’t disproportionately run everything like white people do.
> 
> ...


 
dab them while watching this:


----------



## Louis MacNeice (May 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> "male identified people"? Does she mean men?


 
 That depends on how you define men; if you accept self-idefication then they could be the same.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

I think i'm going to start a class war, as this really really has nothing to with race does it?


----------



## cesare (May 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> people who think of themselves as men, who may or may not be recognised as men by others?


Arti, some people change gender. It's not new - and I suspect it's not on the increase cos it's too damn hard to do on a whim- and it's right that they shouldn't be attacked or looked down on for it,  but it's not a sizeable proportion of people. What's happening here is that there's this creation of a huge phenomena (if you believe the likes of Laurie Penny in that bubble and everyone that's buying into this rubbish) that everyone's got to tiptoe round it and make a big deal out of looking at their personal identity to drive the politics. The reality is that queer bashing (for example) actually does still go on cos a comrade actually did get physically attacked over the weekend but there's no suggestion that the politics are about making everything about that identity - it's all a bit of a myth and I don't know why people are perpetuating this stuff.


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

but if somebody says something to a white person based on their race of course it's racist, how the fuck could it not be


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I think i'm going to start a class war, as this really really has nothing to with race does it?


 
OK. But who will be your Vibe Watcher when you do?


----------



## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

I ain't doing  a one of that shit. That party is ours and our cissy white music is going on.


----------



## Limerick Red (May 15, 2013)

cesare said:


> Arti, some people change gender. It's not new - and I suspect it's not on the increase cos it's too damn hard to do on a whim- and it's right that they shouldn't be attacked or looked down on for it, but it's not a sizeable proportion of people. What's happening here is that there's this creation of a huge phenomena (if you believe the likes of Laurie Penny in that bubble and everyone that's buying into this rubbish) that everyone's got to tiptoe round it and make a big deal out of looking at their personal identity to drive the politics. The reality is that queer bashing (for example) actually does still go on cos a comrade actually did get physically attacked over the weekend but there's no suggestion that the politics are about making everything about that identity - it's all a bit of a myth and I don't know why people are perpetuating this stuff.


Im actually confused who she is talking about here, dont we + bubble residents consider self identifying males as...well males? I know this isnt par for the course in day to day society, but am I missing something here, is there another section of people I dont know about/am ignorent of?


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

"do not assume anyone's survivor status" 

asking someone about sexual assault isn't the first thing you do when you meet them is it??


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> but if somebody says something to a white person based on their race of course it's racist, how the fuck could it not be


 
This blog is a log of obtuse privilege politics , done by a fairly apolitical science fiction story "fanfic" writer: 

http://wtfsocialjustice.tumblr.com/post/50456444508/what-the-fuck-this-was-on-the-social-justice




> *MAY 14, 2013*
> 
> 
> 
> ...


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This blog is a log of obtuse privilege politics , done by a fairly apolitical science fiction story "fanfic" writer:
> 
> http://wtfsocialjustice.tumblr.com/post/50456444508/what-the-fuck-this-was-on-the-social-justice


 
What a fucking surprise.


----------



## cesare (May 15, 2013)

Limerick Red said:


> Im actually confused who she is talking about here, dont we + bubble residents consider self identifying males as...well males? I know this isnt par for the course in day to day society, but am I missing something here, is there another section of people I dont know about/am ignorent of?


I don't think anything's much different than it ever was*. Back in the real world, you just don't see this. That's what I was asking last night, does anyone actually see any of it. 

* That's not to say that there won't be examples of racial tension, or incidents of queer bashing or whatever.


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

But I treat somebody who has changed their gender as that gender. I think that is what most people who change their gender want isn't it? I mean I could be wrong but if somebody I know has transitioned I think of them and refer to them AS THAT GENDER. Isn't that the right thing to do or am I missing something?


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I ain't doing a one of that shit. That party is ours and our cissy white music is going on.


 
That post is so tangential even your black-music-denying white self might do with a toolkit to keep you upright as a proper ally in 7 major liberation struggles (black, gender, disabled, fat, queer, immigrant, transgender liberations)  and activist in one other struggle(class liberation)?

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/330696473165582336




			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> @PennyRed:
> 
> Not for the first time, following some conversations, it occurs to me we need a better mental health toolkit for hackers and activists.


 
Remember:





			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> Not only is mental health politically situated, we need to talk about emotional strategies


----------



## Limerick Red (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That post is so tangential even your black-music-denying white self might do with a toolkit to keep you upright as a proper ally in 7 major liberation struggles (black, gender, disabled, fat, queer, immigrant, transgender liberations) and activist in one other struggle(class liberation)?
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/330696473165582336
> 
> ...


IM A FAT IMMIGRANT SHUT UP AND LET ME SPEAK!


----------



## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

Individual _emotional victory_ seems to be what's it all about.


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> "do not assume anyone's survivor status"
> 
> asking someone about sexual assault isn't the first thing you do when you meet them is it??


 
As I understand it, it means if you haven't ever been raped don't talk about rape or sexual violence unless you are sure there are no people who were once raped in the room.


----------



## cesare (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> But I treat somebody who has changed their gender as that gender. I think that is what most people who change their gender want isn't it? I mean I could be wrong but if somebody I know has transitioned I think of them and refer to them AS THAT GENDER. Isn't that the right thing to do or am I missing something?


Some people don't though. That much is true. I've seen some very unpleasant stuff just about letting someone change which toilets they use at work. But it doesn't happen all the time, it hardly happens at all. So you're aware of it and do what any decent person would do which is to say lay off with that shit. You don't build an entire political agenda from it.


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Individual _emotional victory_ seems to be what's it all about.


 
Do you still have that pic of that odd calm/relaxation/counselling tent from the Climate Camp lot?


----------



## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Do you still have that pic of that odd calm/relaxation/counselling tent from the Climate Camp lot?


That was lost on the old laptop when i was mugged - might be a copy on the matb archives.


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

But it's important to talk about! Some people might have been raped and not realise it until many months or even years later!


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

cesare said:


> Some people don't though. That much is true. I've seen some very unpleasant stuff just about letting someone change which toilets they use at work. But it doesn't happen all the time, it hardly happens at all. So you're aware of it and do what any decent person would do which is to say lay off with that shit. You don't build an entire political agenda from it.


 
Aye, I know.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> "do not assume anyone's survivor status"
> 
> asking someone about sexual assault isn't the first thing you do when you meet them is it??


 
what it means is that you don't know if someone has suffered from sexual violence or not so lay of the rape jokes / rapey behaviour etc as "well i didn't know" won't be accepted as an excuse.

i have written safer spaces policies before


----------



## cesare (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> But it's important to talk about! Some people might have been raped and not realise it until many months or even years later!


Yes, and it's a very silly thing to do because actually if you get more than about 10ish people together in a room the chances are quite high that at least one has been sexually harassed/abused in some way at some point.


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> what it means is that you don't know if someone has suffered from sexual violence or not so lay of the rape jokes / rapey behaviour etc as "well i didn't know" won't be accepted as an excuse.
> 
> i have written safer spaces policies before


 
fair enough, there's nothing wrong with that. 

although people just shouldnt fucking do it anyway and if they do they should be kicked out.


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I can feel the future at my back and my white tears rolling under the fridge


 

Also how similar is all this intersectionality stuff to racism awareness seminars for skin-colour white people? (I know does Fuad Siniora count when he's in France etc etc?):





			
				White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-racism Training said:
			
		

> Color also continues to be an issue in terms of our organizational and societal structures. It still plays a key role in one's ability to *make it in the system* and is a more prevalent factor than one's ethnic background or abilities. People can often hide their ethnic identities but not usually their racial identities. This reality must be examined in the group.
> A second dynamic in the group may be the denial of responsibility for racism: "I'm not responsible for what my ancestors did." This altitude should be explored in terms of the privileges whites have because of the racist nature of the system and in terms of the fact that whites maintain, support, and perpetuate the system. Although they are not responsible for the historical aspects of racism, the historical dimensions are still playing out today—in the criminal justice system, the educational system, the health care system, and so on.
> 
> Another part of Stage 5 explores one's individual racism through one's attitudes and behaviors and tries to uncover inconsistencies in them. Your role here is to help participants honestly discuss their real values, assumptions, and attitudes as well as understand the reasons why an attitude or a behavior may be racist.
> ...


----------



## cesare (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Aye, I know.


Yeah, I know you do


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 15, 2013)

also, while it might seem wanky and that a general "Don't Be A Dick" rule should be applied, our experience is that unless you expressively write a list of Proscribed Dick Moves people won't agree on what behaviour constitutes Being A Massive Fucking Nob End and it becomes impossible to evict arseholes. Lefty communities too often are too forgiving of bad behaviour.

Or too wet to do anything about the culprits..


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> fair enough, there's nothing wrong with that.
> 
> although people just shouldnt fucking do it anyway and if they do they should be kicked out.


 
yes, i agree.  safer spaces policies shouldn't be needed but, if my experience of communities such as the M11 Link Road protests and Occupy are anything to go by, or indeed anarchist groups, they are


----------



## cesare (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> fair enough, there's nothing wrong with that.
> 
> although people just shouldnt fucking do it anyway and if they do they should be kicked out.


But that's what's actually happening, they get turfed out. And if they don't, someone on twitter will say something like whatever happened to fucking safer spaces, we know that bloke's a wrong un, why wasn't he ejected? Cos by and large, they do get ejected if people know about them which is what encouraging people to talk about it does. Not try and sweep it under the carpet cf comrade delta.


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That was lost on the old laptop when i was mugged - might be a copy on the matb archives.


 
 Bloody hell, sorry to hear it.

Remember this though calling out people is hard and people might need a calling out chill out tent to take a break in:


----------



## cesare (May 15, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> yes, i agree.  safer spaces policies shouldn't be needed but, if my experience of communities such as the M11 Link Road protests and Occupy are anything to go by, or indeed anarchist groups, they are


But this goes back to keeping everyone alert and setting up safeguards as far as possible.


----------



## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

"calling out"  - what is this called in real life? Being challenged? Argued with? Debate? _Argument, scrap, fight, punch up, break some blokes nose_

Technical terms for normal interactions - are *you* in a cult? A collective?


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> yes, i agree. safer spaces policies shouldn't be needed but, if my experience of communities such as the M11 Link Road protests and Occupy are anything to go by, or indeed anarchist groups, they are


 
What do you make of people in pink armbands doing/helping keeping these policies in line?


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

cesare said:


> But that's what's actually happening, they get turfed out. And if they don't, someone on twitter will say something like whatever happened to fucking safer spaces, we know that bloke's a wrong un, why wasn't he ejected? Cos by and large, they do get ejected if people know about them which is what encouraging people to talk about it does. Not try and sweep it under the carpet cf comrade delta.


Exactly TALK ABOUT IT not say to people don't talk about it unless you know everyone's status.


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> "calling out" - what is this called in real life? Being challenged? Argued with? Debate? _Argument, scrap, fight, punch up, break some blokes nose_
> 
> Technical terms for normal interactions - are *you* in a cult? A collective?


 
It doesn't really matter - oppressive sentences are probably as bad as broken noses - as this quote by black liberation activist Toni Morrison liked over 6000 times proves:



> Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence.


 
http://stfu-moffat.tumblr.com/post/46677844294/oppressive-language-does-more-than-represent


----------



## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

Take care out there in them private liberal arts colleges people, it's tough out there. And remember - _*you*_ own all these issues


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

i dread to think about that "someone saying ew your white isn't racist" cunt or that "jews aren't oppressed because they control the media and have all the best jobs and institutional privileges" cunt deals with their ability to "call people out" and the privilege and power they have in that setting and how that gets abused. Or For that matter think about this. Somebody is raped or sexually assaulted and then told by the person that did it that they won't be believed and not to talk about rape when there's other people in the room. Anyway they are less oppressed and don't think about other people's experiences sensitively etc. 

you can see how this shit works.


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Take care out there in them private liberal arts colleges people, it's tough out there. And remember - _*you*_ own all these issues


 
Given that this broadly makes sense - ie men should challenge sexism wherever they are and not seek acceptance into feminist fora, will the same be applied to middle-class people?






Will middle-class activist people take the space they have in society & make it working-class?


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

"it was not rape, you weren't really raped think about how (insert x group here) is oppressed every day, and if you mention it to anyone you're being insensitive" etc.

or am i being over the top?


----------



## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

What about men who don't want to be feminists? i.e me. What do i need to do - what do you need to do Kelly?

The space they have in society - again, needs unpacking - and there is loads there isn't there?


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

separate but equal.


----------



## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> "it was not rape, you weren't really raped think about how (insert x group here) is oppressed every day, and if you mention it to anyone you're being insensitive" etc.
> 
> or am i being over the top?


Depends how/who you're saying to! It does 'call out' the projected inverted and weaponised Tu Quoque of much of this approach though.


----------



## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> separate but equal.


There is no equal here i'm afraid.


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

I'm giving an example of how all of this could be used to perpetuate what they say they're against.


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What about men who don't want to be feminists? i.e me. What do i need to do - what do you need to do Kelly?
> 
> The space they have in society - again, needs unpacking - and there is loads there isn't there?


 
That's the NUS's chief women's officer by the way - she is already doing it, check male privilege etc. 

If *you* want to help amplify the struggle she has tweeted this



> We're looking for a Campaigns and Communications Assistant in Team Liberation.


 
A job for £23k in London:




> NUS are looking for a proactive, confident and persuasive communicator to join the Political Strategy Unit. The role of Campaigns and Communications Assistant (Liberation) will require the post holder to work with staff and elected officers to promote the work of NUS National Liberation Campaigns and local Liberation Campaigns within member students’ unions in further and higher education.
> ... The role demands an articulate and enthusiastic individual who is self-motivated and passionate about communications and Liberation. Applicants will also be assessed on their ability to put together a working communications plan and their ability to absorb information and re-present it as concise and attractive communication.


----------



## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

> NUS National Liberation Campaigns and local Liberation Campaigns


 
Wow.

I can put them in touch with some irish-types. Would that help my application?


----------



## phildwyer (May 15, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I reckon I can self-define - suffered from depression so that ought to do it. Though I might use my status as a recovering heroin addict


 
Forget about NUS Presıdent, you ought to be Prıme Mınıster.


----------



## chilango (May 15, 2013)

Team Liberation.

Hah ha hah.

Wow.


----------



## phildwyer (May 15, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> For a seventeen year old you're an articulate and accomplished young man. Blogs and Twitter feeds and the rest coming out of your arse. Well done. Keep it up.


 
The lowest form of wıt ınnıt.


----------



## phildwyer (May 15, 2013)

cesare said:


> butchersapron Did you say a few pages back that you haven't seen any of this stuff irl yet? I haven't either but I've haven't been out and about much. I was wondering if it's mainly in the universities and on-line (blogs and twitter etc) ... anyone else seen it (apart from unis)?


 
Do you serıously thınk ıt could exıst outsıde a unıversıty?


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Wow.
> 
> I can put them in touch with some irish-types. Would that help my application?


 
Only if you are originally from Gaeltacht and speak Irish as a matter of course, anything else would be cultural appropriation, you're still white remember, from the same racism awareness training volume:



> One trap to be wary of is the reversion of some participants to their ethnic identities. Many people deny their whiteness by saying that their culture was derived only from their ethnic identity. Although clearly that is a part of one's cultural identity and heritage, in the United States we cannot ignore the role that racial identity has played. Many white immigrants have suffered discrimination, it is true, but because of their color, they and their families have ultimately been accepted. People of color, such as African Americans. Native Americans, Latinas and Latinos, and Asian Americans, on the other hand, have been discriminated against


----------



## J Ed (May 15, 2013)

You can see why the identity politics stuff would appeal to the NUS - lets them appear radical without challenging any actual vested interests or spending any resources. There's nothing in NUS identity politics that the CIA or Coca Cola could ever object to.


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

Accept your whiteness, Sinn Fein. Even tho you have been discriminated against you and your families have ultimately been accepted.


----------



## J Ed (May 15, 2013)

Belarussian working-class, check your privilege and accept your guilt for the African slave trade!


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

chilango said:


> Team Liberation.
> 
> Hah ha hah.
> 
> Wow.


 
The concept of 'liberation teams' is actually a part of some US universities' human resources departments:




> Welcome to the homepage for Oregon State University's student-led human relations facilitator group, Team Liberation.
> 
> It is our mission to provide *safe spaces* for *respectful communication* related to issues surrounding social justice including race, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion, age, and ability.
> 
> ...


 

http://oregonstate.edu/sli/teamliberation


----------



## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

> Welcome to the homepage for Oregon State University's student-led human relations facilitator group, Team Liberation.
> 
> It is our mission to provide safe spaces for respectful communication related to issues surrounding social justice including race, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion, age, and ability.
> 
> ...


 
What do you pay _your_ cleaners? _Your_ cooks? Your _security_ staff?


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

Dale Farm residents, accept that you are privileged over Barack Obama for your white skin!


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Belarussian working-class, check your privilege and accept your guilt for the African slave trade!


 






*Not responsibility to protect oppressor feelings.*

from

http://cariosity.tumblr.com/post/28649652065/the-white-tears-gif-makes-no-sense-shes-russian

In response to:




> the white tears gif makes no sense, she's russian, she's not white like that, i mean her race may be white but they have nothing to do with the white people here..


----------



## chilango (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The concept of 'liberation teams' is actually a part of some US universities' human resources departments:http://oregonstate.edu/sli/teamliberation


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Dale Farm residents, accept that you are privileged over Barack Obama for your white skin!


 
Sorry etc.


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

Moldovan working class, check your privilege! You might be earning less than 20 euros a month but at least you're white!


----------



## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Sorry etc.


Is that cultural appropriation of egyptian/nubian neck stuff?


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 15, 2013)

cesare said:


> But this goes back to keeping everyone alert and setting up safeguards as far as possible.


 
yep.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What do you make of people in pink armbands doing/helping keeping these policies in line?


 
every society needs its cops, i guess


----------



## phildwyer (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> wtf is male-identified?


 
People who pretend to be men on the ınternet.


----------



## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Sorry etc.


Fancy a conger stew now.


----------



## chilango (May 15, 2013)

...and so this kinda crap happens.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 15, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> People who pretend to be men on the ınternet.


 
are you self-identifying there?


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

chilango said:


> ...and so this kinda crap happens.


 
Check your privilege, Kosovan Albanians. Accept your responsibility for perpetuating an oppressive system and the enslavement of brown people all over the world!


----------



## cesare (May 15, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Do you serıously thınk ıt could exıst outsıde a unıversıty?



Not really. But I don't know much about universities.


----------



## chilango (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Is that cultural appropriation of egyptian/nubian neck stuff?


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What do you pay _your_ cleaners? _Your_ cooks? Your _security_ staff?


 
This is the kind of stuff they promote:



It helps you gain 




> Applications for the Winter 2012 Training are now available!
> 
> Benefits of joining Team Liberation
> 
> ...


 







This is their library (note that for class liberation they have Nickel and Dimed, which while I'm sure is useful, is still a middle-class ride through the working-class for under a year).


----------



## chilango (May 15, 2013)

That's a very small library.


----------



## Limerick Red (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Accept your whiteness, Sinn Fein. Even tho you have been discriminated against you and your families have ultimately been accepted.


this is pretty much true though.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 15, 2013)

chilango said:


> Team Liberation.
> 
> Hah ha hah.
> 
> Wow.


 
Liberation fuck yeah! Coming again to save the motherfucking gay yeah! Liberation fuck yeah! Intersectionality's the only way yeah!


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 15, 2013)

chilango said:


>


 
Bollocks, you got there before me


----------



## rekil (May 15, 2013)

"Anyone who doesn't know how to play Homophobic Arsehole (to a competent level) by Senseless Things, just haul your heteronormative husk outside and step in front of a big lorry please. And trigger alert!"


----------



## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

oy vey


----------



## Idris2002 (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Only if you are originally from Gaeltacht and speak Irish as a matter of course, anything else would be cultural appropriation, you're still white remember, from the same racism awareness training volume:


 
You're joking, of course, but a while back I saw a report on new immigrant groups in Ireland (by a couple of Irish academics) which in all seriousness described the Gaeltachts as "Ireland's bantustans".

Where. Do. You. Even. Start.


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

cesare said:


> Not really. But I don't know much about universities.


 
Here's the British version...  slower to get going - that Oregon uni HR wing has been around since 2001.
Eventually university management will start endorsing the intersectional perspective.

The Feminism and Teaching Network's Feminism and Teaching Symposium in 2011.

Wine for the lunches:





Here's the main speaker Dr Ben Brabon:




> My primary area of research is in British literature and culture from the period 1760-1840, the rhetoric of nationalism and critical theory. Book publications in this area include The Influence of Benedict Anderson (2007) and Gothic Cartography: A Literary Geography of Haunting (Palgrave 2010). I am also interested in contemporary representations of men/masculinity and postfeminism. Book publications in this area include Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture (Palgrave 2007) and Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories (Edinburgh University Press 2009). Current book projects include Key Concepts in Popular Culture (Sage 2011) and The Spectral Phallus (2011).
> I am a founding member of the North Gothic Network (NGN), a regional network of the International Gothic Association (IGA).


 
post- everything in action - in desperation struggling against a backlash to the liberalism with... more liberalism.








> Drawing upon his experience of teaching two modules that involve situating men and masculinity within feminism, his workshop will reconsider men’s position and roles within the feminist movement and problematise postfeminism’s potential to generate a male feminist perspective.
> 
> Dr Brabon explained: “In a postfeminist era, men’s and masculinity’s relationship with feminism has been troubled – not least because at times an inverse logic is applied by critics, whereby men are represented as oppressed simply because they are men. This levelling of the field of power, combined with the continued invocation of sexist and essentialist ideas within the general media and popular press – albeit often with a sense of postmodern irony – further complicates men’s affiliation with a contemporary feminist discourse.”


 
Break-out session on intersectionality discussing working-class people








Here's Break-out session on masculinities


----------



## JimW (May 15, 2013)

Trigger alert: you will be taken outside and shot in the neck after the revolution.


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## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

I should add, of course, academic workers _are_ part of class struggle.

But in intersectionality terms, how can you do the intersectionality by talking to other academics - wasn't it meant to be the working-class women crossover that leads that struggle, and you just faithfully report what they are saying.


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## cesare (May 15, 2013)

So this is what universities are like?


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Here's the British version... slower to get going - that Oregon uni HR wing has been around since 2001.
> Eventually university management will start endorsing the intersectional perspective.
> ...
> 
> ...


Men, yesterday:


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## cesare (May 15, 2013)

Some of the radfem stuff properly feeds into all of this as well.


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## articul8 (May 15, 2013)

Posh men are twice as oppressed


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Posh men are twice as oppressed


fuck off twat


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## Balbi (May 15, 2013)

cesare said:


> So this is what universities are like?


 
Not a pint of snakebite or kebab to be seen!


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## articul8 (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> fuck off twat


 that hangover not lifted i see


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> that hangover not lifted i see


Give me some money. Or tell hilary to give me some money. I'm serious.


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## articul8 (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron you what? a) what makes you think I have any money going spare and b) for what reason are you in need of it


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> butchersapron you what? a) what makes you think I have any money going spare and b) for what reason are you in need of it


Does the bubble not produce money? To shoot jackels. Does RP give money out?


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## articul8 (May 15, 2013)

No - it holds out a begging bowl.


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> No - it holds out a begging bowl.


No it doesn't. It pretends that it does whilst driving over the rest of us. 40 ft chickens.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> No - it holds out a begging bowl.


 
Really? Does it not pay contributors anything?


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Bloody hell, sorry to hear it.
> 
> Remember this though calling out people is hard and people might need a calling out chill out tent to take a break in:


 
Is this real? Or was it someone taking the piss back on MATB?


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## articul8 (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Really? Does it not pay contributors anything?


Ah.  This is a bit of an issue - if we paid all contributors NUJ freelance rates the mag wouldn't survive is the brute reality of it.  But we aren't a "for profit" title.


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## articul8 (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> No it doesn't. It pretends that it does whilst driving over the rest of us. 40 ft chickens.


 hair of the dog eh?


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Is this real? Or was it someone taking the piss back on MATB?


 
It's a radical/socialist art/culture group in Bay Area, California




> Think and Die Thinking Collective is working toward evoking a trend of DIY, all ages, youth-affordable and youth-accessible events within an accountable community. We want to acknowledge that all of these components are important and valid to a successful, radical community.
> Our vision is to create a space for community members who identify with radical culture, art and music that did not exist before. One of our long term goals is to open an all-ages space in San Jose. Our purpose is NOT to promote a centralized community influence but to empower community members to be effective and proactive. We want to facilitate musical events, workshops, dance nights, give back to our community, host out-of-town bands. We want to always protect the safe spaces created for those who feel systematically othered in our community (ie. queer folks, transfolks, people of color, youth, etc.)
> E-Mail us @ ThinkAndDieThinking@gmail.com


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> but if somebody says something to a white person based on their race of course it's racist, how the fuck could it not be


 
It's a semantic argument. There is a difference between individual racial prejudice (which anyone can be subjected to) and systemic racial discrimination and prejudice (which only happens to people who are members of oppressed racial groups). Some people use "racism" to cover both, some people use "racism" for the latter only, while including the former as racial prejudice.

Pointing out that these two things are different isn't actually unreasonable in and of itself. But in practice, the attempt to use the word "racism" to draw a sharp distinction tends to create quite a bit of confusion in my experience.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Ah. This is a bit of an issue - if we paid all contributors NUJ freelance rates the mag wouldn't survive is the brute reality of it. But we aren't a "for profit" title.


 
Does this mean that you don't pay anyone anything? Or does it mean that some people get NUJ rates and others don't? Or that everyone gets something but it's below NUJ rates?


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It's a radical/socialist art/culture group in Bay Area, California


 
I'm not entirely surprised that they are from the Bay Area.


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## articul8 (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Does this mean that you don't pay anyone anything? Or does it mean that some people get NUJ rates and others don't? Or that everyone gets something but it's below NUJ rates?


 
We pay our production staff (our designer, production editor and sub) plus our office staff and organiser at well above LLW. Our editors don't get a penny. We don't currently pay for contributions (other than photos) except in cases where the writer incurs travel or phone expenses to research the piece.
There's no preferential treatment - the "name" writers are less likely to get expenses that someone who really needs it (btw - we don't exercise copyright, which remains with the individual author).

It's not ideal, I know. But it's not like anyone's creaming off any kind of profit from it.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

Limerick Red said:


> IM A FAT IMMIGRANT SHUT UP AND LET ME SPEAK!


 
Sadly, it turns out that according to this list of seven major liberation struggles I'm bottom of the progressive stack and will never get to speak again. At least until I'm old enough to need a hip replacement, or my eyes start failing.

I did used to be an immigrant, and got told by some Fight Racism Fight Imperialism gobshite that the English revolution depended on leadership from oppressed Irish immigrants like me. At the time I was a postgrad student at the LSE. As was she, the fucking clown. That was a hang over from a previous form of bizarro identity politics, rather than an early example of the present wave: I doubt if Irishness gets you many privilege points amongst British intersectionalistas these days.


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## Limerick Red (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Sadly, it turns out that according to this list of seven major liberation struggles I'm bottom of the progressive stack and will never get to speak again. At least until I'm old enough to need a hip replacement, or my eyes start failing.
> 
> I did used to be an immigrant, and got told by some Fight Racism Fight Imperialism gobshite that the English revolution depended on leadership from oppressed Irish immigrants like me. At the time I was a postgrad student at the LSE. As was she, the fucking clown. That was a hang over from a previous form of bizarro identity politics, rather than an early example of the present wave: I doubt if Irishness gets you many privilege points amongst British intersectionalistas these days.


 
hmmmm I may have an ace up my sleave...sometimes on forms under sexuality I tick "prefer not to say" surely that would bump me up a bit?


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## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Sadly, it turns out that I'm bottom of the progressive stack and will never get to speak again. At least until I'm old enough to need a hip replacement, or my eyes start failing.
> 
> I did used to be an immigrant, and got told by some Fight Racism Fight Imperialism gobshite that the English revolution depended on leadership from oppressed Irish immigrants like me. At the time I was a postgrad student at the LSE. As was she, the fucking clown. That was a hang over from a previous form of bizarro identity politics, rather than an early example of the present wave: I doubt if Irishness gets you many privilege points amongst British intersectionalistas these days.


 

Sounds like we have an article for the Girder: 'Irish working-class males at the bottom of the progressive stack - Fighting back.'

Only consolation is you can know the identity politics stuff has transferred into the academia of your old university.

Listen to this guy Professor Michael Kimmel from 13 mins:

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/...s/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=1302

'She said something startling that's how privilege works. Privilege is invisible to those who have it. And it is a luxury I would say to the white people, you know, sitting in this room not to have to think about race every split second of your life. Privilege is invisible to those who have it.'

This is his book:




This is him rearing boys dedicated to women's liberation without the oppressive psychological pincer of masculinity. 





This is his book being read out:










Listen from 27 mins in on how white US working-class men feel "entitled" to jobs.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Listen from 27 mins in on how white US working-class men feel "entitled" to jobs.


 
It won't play for me, which, on mature reflection, is a cross I think I can bear.

Hang on, did you listen to it the whole way through? How did you know that there's funny shit half an hour in?


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## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> It won't play for me, which, on mature reflection, is a cross I think I can bear.
> 
> Hang on, did you listen to it the whole way through? How did you know that there's funny shit half an hour in?


 
Tried, I couldn't bear it towards the end, goes on this whole spiel about how feminist fathers produce better 'outcomes' for themselves and their children of whatever gender.
(Half nasty undertone being single parent mothers who willingly reject male involvement won't produce as good outcomes as families where both and women work and men and women do equal participation in childcare)
Will try again later.

Molly Crabapple is here for anyone who wants to try:
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/...s/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=1778


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## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> It's a semantic argument. There is a difference between individual racial prejudice (which anyone can be subjected to) and systemic racial discrimination and prejudice (which only happens to people who are members of oppressed racial groups). Some people use "racism" to cover both, some people use "racism" for the latter only, while including the former as racial prejudice.
> 
> Pointing out that these two things are different isn't actually unreasonable in and of itself. But in practice, the attempt to use the word "racism" to draw a sharp distinction tends to create quite a bit of confusion in my experience.


 
why not just say institutionalised racism then? And white people can still suffer that. To a lesser extent than other ethnic minorities (usually) but it can still happen.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> why not just say institutionalised racism then? And white people can still suffer that. To a lesser extent than other ethnic minorities (usually) but it can still happen.


 
In this context "systemic" involves more than simply "institutional" racism. And no, white people don't suffer systemic racism. At least not in Western Europe or North America, and not including groups like Irish Travellers for these purposes.


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## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> In this context "systemic" involves more than simply "institutional" racism. And no, white people don't suffer systemic racism (at least not in Western Europe or North America).


 
They can if they're travellers or gypsies or if they're from Eastern Europe. In certain countries and I think some parts of the US they can if they're jews. Although not this one really I think I'm OK as far as that spoke of the wheel of oppression goes.

And of course a white person can be denied a job if they're white, I'm thinking of cases Ive heard of where a white person has applied to a job at an Asian owned firm and been turned down for it despite having the necessary qualifications.


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## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> In this context "systemic" involves more than simply "institutional" racism.


 
Well explain the difference please as applied to Western Europe where we are.


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## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

When i was at school my ex gf's mate got beaten up by black kids for being mixed race, how does that fit on the wheel of oppression? or should we not waste our time looking at this stupid wheel and start looking at the causes of racism, the conditions within society that allow racist people to get away with it, the conditions that brutalise people into having a lack of empathy and blaming others for their problems, thinking they are the only person that matters etc.


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## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

> I did used to be an immigrant, and got told by some Fight Racism Fight Imperialism gobshite that the English revolution depended on leadership from oppressed Irish immigrants like me.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> They can if they're travellers or gypsies or if they're from Eastern Europe. In certain countries and I think some parts of the US they can if they're jews. Although not this one really I think I'm OK as far as that spoke of the wheel of oppression goes.


 
Yes, but those groups are being discriminated against because of their ethnicity, not because of their whiteness!




			
				frogwoman said:
			
		

> And of course a white person can be denied a job if they're white, I'm thinking of cases Ive heard of where a white person has applied to a job at an Asian owned firm and been turned down for it despite having the necessary qualifications.


 
Yes, such things happen, but they don't happen in a systemic way. This sort of thing is an example of some people being dicks on the basis of racial prejudice, but it's not something that a white person is going to have happen to them on a regular basis, or which forms one part of a whole range of shit they are going to get for being white over their lifetimes.

I really do think that it's missing the woods for the trees not to see that there's an important difference between racial prejudice and racial prejudice reflecting social power and systemic racism. A socialist analysis of racial oppression shouldn't be reduced to the truism that anyone can be a dick to anyone else.


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## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Yes, but those groups are being discriminated against because of their ethnicity, not because of their whiteness!
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
I agree m8, i don't think anyone is doing that though.


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## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

> e less likely to get expenses that someone who really needs it


 
This is how interns an scholarships work. The rich get sieved in. Well done red pepper, well done.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Well explain the difference please as applied to Western Europe where we are.


 
I was distinguishing between prejudice within or pushed by particular institutions (like the cops, or the welfare, or whatever) and prejudice which is both pushed by particular institutions and a general factor in society. Irish travellers are an interesting example to use, because despite their rather extreme paleness, it's quite easy to see how they face a truly remarkable mix of personal, institutional and social prejudice. It's individual being prejudiced dicks, but it's not just that. It's the cops treating them like shit, but it's not just that.


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## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I really do think that it's missing the woods for the trees not to see that there's an important difference between racial prejudice and racial prejudice reflecting social power and systemic racism. A socialist analysis of racial oppression shouldn't be reduced to the truism that anyone can be a dick to anyone else.


 
No that truism is kind of what the intersectionality approach does.
It states that if people simply focus on checking their privileges like sexism and aggressiveness and racism, they can by being called out regularly, thinking more instead of speaking or shouting as part of the progressive stack purge themselves of aspects of their in-built 'dick' or violent tendencies and reduce manifestations of 'dick' behaviour.


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## J Ed (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> They can if they're travellers or gypsies or if they're from Eastern Europe. In certain countries and I think some parts of the US they can if they're jews. Although not this one really I think I'm OK as far as that spoke of the wheel of oppression goes.


 
I've met a few people who think it's okay to be xenophobic about Eastern Europeans who would never dream of being racist, in fact UKIP's electoral strategy seems to be appealing to these people


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## frogwoman (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable Yeah what I'm saying is all those groups are pretty powerless in society so the whole idea of a "white skin privilege" (espeically when it's coming from a mouth of a privileged person who has had the time etc to sit around navel gazing about their identity, and is probably white themselves) is simplistic at best.

I also dont like the idea that if you aren't part of the oppressed group you benefit from the oppression, nobody benefits from oppression. I am in a straight relationship now but I was in gay relationships in the past and had to deal with a lot of homophobia when I was at school, now that Im in a straight relationship do i benefit from homophobia in _any way_ whatsoever? no of course i don't, it's taken me years to get over. what about someone who divorces their husband and meets a woman, have they been benefiting from homophobia all their lives and once they meet a woman they turn into someone whos oppressed rather than an oppressor? It doesnt benefit anyone, it stops you looking at the structure of capitalist society that encourages these things to occur and turns it onto the individual.

when someone changes sex and becomes a man does it mean they automatically become an oppressor, and if someone transitions to a woman does it mean they were benefitting from sexism before but now they're a woman they dont benefit from it any more? it's total nonsense, and its also got nothing to do with real life.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> No that truism is kind of what the intersectionality approach does.
> It states that if people simply focus on checking their privileges like sexism and aggressiveness and racism, they can by being called out regularly, thinking more instead of speaking or shouting as part of the progressive stack purge themselves of aspects of their in-built 'dick' or violent tendencies and reduce manifestations of 'dick' behaviour.


 
The privilege / intersectional approach does fall right back into that trap, as you note. But it's not the only route. "Colour blind" anti-racism is also an essentially liberal approach, just coming from a different part of liberalism. By removing the systemic elements, it reduces racism to just being a dick to others because of their race.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Nigel Irritable Yeah what I'm saying is all those groups are pretty powerless in society so the whole idea of a "white skin privilege" (espeically when it's coming from a mouth of a privileged person who has had the time etc to sit around navel gazing about their identity, and is probably white themselves) is simplistic at best.


 
I fully agree with this. "White skin privilege" was an interesting, but ultimately wrong, attempt to explain the centrality of race to American capitalism, taking slavery as a historical starting point. "Privilege" as a general explanation of all oppression everywhere is even more wrong and doesn't even have the merit of being interesting.


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## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I was distinguishing between prejudice within or pushed by particular institutions (like the cops, or the welfare, or whatever) and prejudice which is both pushed by particular institutions and a general factor in society. Irish travellers are an interesting example to use, because despite their rather extreme paleness, it's quite easy to see how they face a truly remarkable mix of personal, institutional and social prejudice. It's individual being prejudiced dicks, but it's not just that. It's the cops treating them like shit, but it's not just that.


 
Irish travellers do face severe levels of prejudice.

But where do "general factors of society" come from if not from being pushed by capitalist institutions: police (look out for Muslim terrorists alone not multi-million RAF aircraft), media (black criminals receive heavier coverage than white criminals), government (all landlords to be responsible on threat of fines for ensuring tenants are not illegals), local government (households with sharing migrants don't count as single households, unlike settled families, EU migrants pay more council tax), customs officials (flights from Morocco receive more attention than those from Canada)

It's not 'all white people' or 'white people' producing this, its institutions explicitly making it the way it is because of capitalist demands/protocol (violence that protects the credibility of state military alliance is not bad, advertising and sensationalist pressures on/from the capitalist press, immigration while extensive must still be mediated by the state, the local state will screw who it can after the neoliberal transformation, tax/customs evasion by the poor is always a serious crime poorer countries will have people trying to do it more than others)


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## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> "Colour blind" anti-racism is also an essentially liberal approach, just coming from a different part of liberalism. By removing the systemic elements, it reduces racism to just being a dick to others because of their race.


 
Doesn't colour-blind racism - via liberalism or socialism - try to make systemic elements colour-blind ie non-racist?

This is your sepcialism, no? How on earth did the early Soviet state try to overcome oppression against the central Asians, except by trying to institute a rigid proletarian colour-blindness, zero tolerance of anti-semitism, and education about the racism the British used against the Egyptians and why it mustn't be allowed to spread in the Soviet Union?


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> But where do "general factors of society" come from if not from being pushed by capitalist institutions:


 
I think it's more complex than that. Or at least, it depends on how broadly we are using the term "capitalist institutions" here. The state, in its many and various forms, does certainly produce and reproduce social prejudice against travellers, as does the media.

But there is also a real phenomenon of prejudice emanating "from below" in a semi-spontaneous way. Spontaneous in the sense that it hasn't been directly and immediately whipped up on every occasion by the state or by the media, but not of course spontaneous in any sense that means divorced from social conditions created ultimately by capital. Essentially, travellers come into (deeply unequal) conflict with settled communities over resources, property prices, dumping (an issue which is created in large part by the local state's failure to provide services), etc. The local state is in turn constrained from providing services, even to the limited extent that it is obliged to, because a significant proportion of settled locals will be enraged.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This is your sepcialism, no?


 
Jesus, no.

Good question on the early Soviet state. I'm not sure that "I don't see colour" style liberal anti-racism is going to have much in common with its approach though. The very idea that there was a particular question of prejudice against Central Asians to address in the first place is alien to that sort of "colour-blind" liberalism.


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> But there is also a real phenomenon of prejudice emanating "from below" in a semi-spontaneous way. Spontaneous in the sense that it hasn't been directly and immediately whipped up on every occasion by the state or by the media, but not of course spontaneous in any sense that means divorced from social conditions created ultimately by capital. Essentially, travellers come into (deeply unequal) conflict with settled communities over resources, property prices, dumping (an issue which is created in large part by the local state's failure to provide services), etc.


 
I see, but if those "settled communities" that do the racism (which we can agree they do) were the product of a not-capitalist society say a large fairly 'communalised' but hierarchical settled dayak village - the racism would not be the same.
It is the concerns about property prices and protecting assets - like a non-dumped environment - which motivates a lot of this stuff. The householders know that if they were to demand better services it would mean more council tax or whatever the Irish equivalent is(rates?) - easier to concentrate their attack on anyone who is disposed to recycling and dumping like the travellers - get quicker, easier results.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I see, but if those "settled communities" that do the racism (which we can agree they do) were the product of a not-capitalist society say a large fairly 'communalised' but hierarchical settled dayak village - the racism would not be the same.


 
Yes.




			
				sihhi said:
			
		

> It is the concerns about property prices and protecting assets - like a non-dumped environment - which motivates a lot of this stuff. The householders know that if they were to demand better services it would mean more council tax or whatever the Irish equivalent is(rates?) - easier to concentrate their attack on anyone who is disposed to recycling and dumping like the travellers - get quicker, easier results.


 
It's concerns about property prices and assets, but it also goes beyond that. Racism against travellers has a life far beyond that sort of immediate economic calculation. It also involves fear of crime, a sort of background assumption that they are atavistic savages and all kinds of other stuff.

Because racism against travellers is so extreme, and they really do live very segregated lives, neither living alongside nor often being employed alongside settled people, it can be easier to see issues that can be glossed over with other forms of racism. It should be said though, that because it's quite an extreme example, using it as a template might be as misleading as importing unmodified American assumptions about race and racism.


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## Tom A (May 15, 2013)

cesare said:


> Some people don't though. That much is true. I've seen some very unpleasant stuff just about letting someone change which toilets they use at work. But it doesn't happen all the time, it hardly happens at all. So you're aware of it and do what any decent person would do which is to say lay off with that shit. You don't build an entire political agenda from it.


I have a transwoman friend (who only came out as trans two years ago) whom has had a lot of shite hurled her way for using the ladies' toilets. It happens too often, and it's very unpleasant.


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## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Jesus, no.
> 
> Good question on the early Soviet state. I'm not sure that "I don't see colour" style liberal anti-racism is going to have much in common with its approach though. The very idea that there was a particular question of prejudice against Central Asians to address in the first place is alien to that sort of "colour-blind" liberalism.


 
Can colour-blind anti-racism not be socialist? I thought liberal colour-blind anti-racism was a bastardisation of Soviet or communist anti-racism.

'Communist' colour-blind anti-racism would have been the ANC-SACP doing what it promised nationalising everything then socialising (by some sort of popular mechanism) so that there would be no more boer white private schools or elite universities. Everything would be equalised to a point where blacks, whites and Indians alll had access - by proper post-revolution colour-blind equal comprehensive education - to all jobs and skills. Cuba is the closest but it's still not very close, I suppose.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Can colour-blind anti-racism not be socialist? I thought liberal colour-blind anti-racism was a bastardisation of Soviet or communist anti-racism.


 
I think that perhaps we are talking at cross purposes about "colour blind anti-racism". There's a difference between a "colour blind" analysis, one which for instance refuses to accept that black people are oppressed in a way that white people are not, and proposed solutions which may or may not be considered "colour blind" but actually rest on an understanding that some people suffer systemic prejudice.

I'm calling "I don't see colour" claims to anti-racism liberal. I'm certainly not saying that solutions which aim to abolish racial distinctions rather than perpetuate them but in allegedly non-oppressive form are inherently liberal.


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## Tom A (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> In this context "systemic" involves more than simply "institutional" racism. And no, white people don't suffer systemic racism. At least not in Western Europe or North America, and not including groups like Irish Travellers for these purposes.


What about Eastern Europeans? I'm thinking about the Daily Mail's paranoia of Poles, Bulgarians and Romanians conspiring to take our jobs...


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

Tom A said:


> What about Eastern Europeans? I'm thinking about the Daily Mail's paranoia of Poles, Bulgarians and Romanians conspiring to take our jobs...


 
They face prejudice for being immigrants, not because they are white.


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## Tom A (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> They face prejudice for being immigrants, not because they are white.


But isn't their immigrant status an axis of oppression in itself? Also isn't race more than just skin colour?


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## Nigel Irritable (May 15, 2013)

Tom A said:


> But isn't their immigrant status an axis of oppression in itself? Also isn't race more than just skin colour?


 
Yes and yes.


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> It's concerns about property prices and assets, but it also goes beyond that. Racism against travellers has a life far beyond that sort of immediate economic calculation. It also involves fear of crime, a sort of background assumption that they are atavistic savages and all kinds of other stuff.
> 
> Because racism against travellers is so extreme, and they really do live very segregated lives, neither living alongside nor often being employed alongside settled people, it can be easier to see issues that can be glossed over with other forms of racism. It should be said though, that because it's quite an extreme example, using it as a template might be as misleading as importing unmodified American assumptions about race and racism.


 
It's a very deep enduring problem. But the idea of their being atavistic savages almost comes from structural contour of society - the fact that there is such extreme segregation (ie travellers keeping away from settled people and vice versa).

The struggle against formal segregation in the US South allowed people to come into contact with one another to integrate to blow away those preconceptions. Similarly with the fruits of integration in disability after the 1970s also had some impact by the time a generation of people left school in the mid-1980s. But perhaps it was only surface deep ?

On the intersectionality front. I wonder how much of the _white_ racial intersectionalists/half of the people pushing this stuff is down to their experience of nearly all-white middle-class towns and grammar/private schools (where immigrants are rarer than most urban areas at least in Britain). They want to assume integration is impossible without their revolutionist rhetoric, their assumption being that all white people are psychologically racist (hence "should shut the hell up" in order not to "be a shitty human being") and do racism every waking minute because their white middle-class perspective has seen large dollops of middle-class hypocritical racism (eg Buy a fancy minority cooking books, but limit the pay to your immigrant babysitters. A Slovak immigrant who never revealed the name of the middle-class actor because she didn't want trouble, did reveal just before she left back to her country that this actor a. wasn't a very good employer (she was cleaner, food preparer and child-minder) b. also sent the only child to a private school in north London.)


----------



## JimW (May 15, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> ...
> 
> Good question on the early Soviet state. I'm not sure that "I don't see colour" style liberal anti-racism is going to have much in common with its approach though. The very idea that there was a particular question of prejudice against Central Asians to address in the first place is alien to that sort of "colour-blind" liberalism.


Some really interesting stuff on how the Chinese revolutionary state attempted to address the issue of "national minorities" - on paper it was a progressive awareness that with a massive Han preponderance (90%+ of population) special measures were required, which came with the autonomous regions and guarantees on language and cultural rights, but these ended up meaning little in practice and today there's popular resentment of affirmative action measures such as special dispensations for lower university entrance test scores for minorities or a perceived unwillingness of the police to target eg. Uighur pickpocket gangs that seem to mirror the failings of top-down multiculturalism in the West.


----------



## xslavearcx (May 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The role demands an articulate and enthusiastic individual who is self-motivated and passionate about communications and Liberation.


 
passionate about communications and liberation ... hilarious


----------



## seventh bullet (May 15, 2013)

JimW said:


> Some really interesting stuff on how the Chinese revolutionary state attempted to address the issue of "national minorities" - on paper it was a progressive awareness that with a massive Han preponderance (90%+ of population) special measures were required, which came with the autonomous regions and guarantees on language and cultural rights, but these ended up meaning little in practice and today there's popular resentment of affirmative action measures such as special dispensations for lower university entrance test scores for minorities or a perceived unwillingness of the police to target eg. Uighur pickpocket gangs that seem to mirror the failings of top-down multiculturalism in the West.


 
By following the 'Soviet model,' it was a modification of 1930s Stalinist nationalities policy in the USSR? But also using similar methods of the 1920s, like indigenisation or _korenizatsiya _to staff regional government and other state institutions with minorities? Affirmative action was eventually stopped by the Stalinist government.


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Speaking of Clowns, here's an article on Jacobin http://jacobinmag.com/2012/02/race-war-or-murdering-your-parents-a-left-debate/ with extra tweets by Malcolm "big shoes, bulbous red nose" Harris. Link taken from this, interesting, article http://mattbruenig.com/2012/05/10/purity-leftism/
> 
> Want some more? OK Then. http://thenewinquiry.com/features/obituary-borders-books-and-music/ The New Inq-wirry. Here's Nathan Barley himself. Check this out for bollocks.


 
He really hates schools - even the concept of schools.

Retweet of a teenager supporting the Boston bombing suspect:




> *Supporting Jahar* ‏@*Justice4Jahaar*
> 6 sa​why does school even exist why does society hate us
> *Malcolm Harris* tarafından retweetlendi


 

He looks forward to more technology as a new front in the war of schoolchildren examining problems honestly:




> *Malcolm Harris* ‏@*BigMeanInternet*
> 14 Mayıs​Once we have a programmable world though, I look forward to innovations in kids cheating on tests.


 

Fragment of ironic? misogyny noted:




> ​*Malcolm Harris* ‏@*BigMeanInternet*
> 17 sa​@*minkahunter* Bitches love Kathy Acker


----------



## butchersapron (May 15, 2013)

sihhi, i'm banning you from the internet for a period not exceeding 48 hours.


----------



## sihhi (May 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> sihhi, i'm banning you from the internet for a period not exceeing 48 hours.


 
As ever you're correct, busy next few days   - any response to overcoming racism in the soviet union?


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> As ever you're correct, busy next few days  - any response to overcoming racism in the soviet union?


In intersectional twittersphere, racism overcomes _you_.


----------



## Tom A (May 16, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> In intersectional twittersphere, racism overcomes _you_.


In Soviet Russia, intersectionality oppresses you.


----------



## seventh bullet (May 16, 2013)




----------



## Firky (May 16, 2013)

seventh bullet posted a blog of what it was like to be a black guy in Russia, it was years ago but very interesting and scary.


----------



## seventh bullet (May 16, 2013)

Moscow Through Brown Eyes? American bloke from Brooklyn, New York, going by the name Buster. He was staying in Russia for a year while doing research for his PhD.

The blog post.



> ADVICE: Should People of Color Go to Russia?
> 
> A reader writes in:
> ​
> ...


----------



## JimW (May 16, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> By following the 'Soviet model,' it was a modification of 1930s Stalinist nationalities policy in the USSR? But also using similar methods of the 1920s, like indigenisation or _korenizatsiya _to staff regional government and other state institutions with minorities? Affirmative action was eventually stopped by the Stalinist government.


I can't recall all the details without the texts in front of me (as usual!) but definitely was a conscious aping of the Stalinist model - the Soviet state had that set of principles for determining what constituted an ethnic group that included language, living in concentrated groups etc. Meant some groups went unrecognised and some moans that e.g. Tibetans got sub-divided - no reason why Sherpa are seen as a distinct ethnicity when Khamba aren't I think it goes.
Had a really interesting long internal document written by a retired Mongol cadre criticising the policy and its history from an orthodox M-L position, must have it packed away somewhere.


----------



## fractionMan (May 16, 2013)

Limerick Red said:


> hmmmm I may have an ace up my sleave...sometimes on forms under sexuality I tick "prefer not to say" surely that would bump me up a bit?


 
I sometimes tick white-other because my dads from the states.  That probably pushes me down tbh.


----------



## frogwoman (May 16, 2013)

i usually put white british but sometimes put white other lol


----------



## frogwoman (May 16, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> I sometimes tick white-other because my dads from the states. That probably pushes me down tbh.


 
+10 intersectionality points


----------



## fractionMan (May 16, 2013)

I'm so oppressed


----------



## cesare (May 16, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i usually put white british but sometimes put white other lol


I don't answer them at all, generally. That's because I know that they're very rarely used for what they're meant to be used for. If they're not doing something reasonablish with it, why should I provide them with my personal data.


----------



## frogwoman (May 16, 2013)

Yeah i always fill them in, I thought you were meant to as part of the job application so they can keep a record of it for the statistics or whatever. But if it's not compulsory then I won't fill it in.


----------



## cesare (May 16, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Yeah i always fill them in, I thought you were meant to as part of the job application so they can keep a record of it for the statistics or whatever. But if it's not compulsory then I won't fill it in.


They can't force you to disclose these things, it's sensitive personal data which doesn't have a bearing on the (in the job application example) job they're paying you to do. But if all they're doing is building up statistics, I personally don't see why I should help them. I think along these lines ... what are the statistics for? How will you use them? Will the data be used for anything else that I specifically haven't given permission for? Why should I help them carry out a box ticking exercise when I know the likelihood is that they'll be filed away in a drawer and never looked at again? All that sort of stuff. I do know what they're for and how they're meant to be used, but it's very rare that they're used that way


----------



## J Ed (May 16, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Speaking of Clowns, here's an article on Jacobin http://jacobinmag.com/2012/02/race-war-or-murdering-your-parents-a-left-debate/ with extra tweets by Malcolm "big shoes, bulbous red nose" Harris. Link taken from this, interesting, article http://mattbruenig.com/2012/05/10/purity-leftism/


 
You could make an argument that Malcolm's calling for a generational war is rational, as an upper-middle-class entrepreneur he wants to get rid of established competition and what better way to do it?


----------



## frogwoman (May 16, 2013)

on the other hand i was just in the high street and there is some mental anti-atheist anti-gay protest going on, some feminists are opposing it with signs saying "oppose rape culture" and argueing with them, so i feel a bit more relieved about the state of feminism.


----------



## phildwyer (May 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This is him rearing boys dedicated to women's liberation without the oppressive psychological pincer of masculinity.


 
That's yet another of Nıgel Lawson's brood ıf you ask me.


----------



## chilango (May 16, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i usually put white british but sometimes put white other lol



So do I.


----------



## chilango (May 16, 2013)

chilango said:


> So do I.



I also claim to be a Welsh speaker on the census....


----------



## JimW (May 16, 2013)

"White - tearful"


----------



## J Ed (May 16, 2013)

London student politics seems insane. Notice how ALL the back and forth is couched in accusations and counter accusations of isms.

http://www.london-student.net/newspaper/news/you-lost-have-some-dignity-senate-fail-to-sack-editor/



> The Senate meeting itself lasted for three hours, and was the most attended Senate of the year. Izaakson’s lawyer was present, and as soon as the meeting began the very basis of it was contested. ULU regulations for the ‘No confidence’ of officers requires any regulations which have been broken to be included in the motion. The proposed motion had none, and none could be added, given Izaakson has not broken any ULU regulations during her term. This then led to the farcical scenario that, in sacking Izaakson, ULU Senate would have to break ULU’s own regulations and so technically, causing far greater beach of their role than the London Student Editor has ever managed. The speech against this was taken by ULU President, Michael Chessum, who said “it didn’t matter anyway”. The Senate delegate from the Institute of Education, the only person who attended the meeting without prior knowledge of the situation or being allies of Cooper, Chessum or Izaakson, said they “could not vote for a motion that didn’t even adhere to the rules of ULU”


 
Editors of student newspapers have _lawyers_?


> The meeting quickly turned into a forum for allegations which had never previously been raised. Thais Yanez, the seconder of the motion, accused Izaakson of “throwing a wine bottle” at her. When asked where this bottle of wine had hit her, Yanez stayed quiet. Izaakson then offered a choice, paraphrasing a nursery rhyme: “head? shoulders? Knees and toes?” Yanez also accused Izaakson of calling her a “terrorist”, to which Izaakson’s rolled her eyes, commenting: “I only call governments terrorists, what a shit lie to make up about a Leftist.”


----------



## J Ed (May 16, 2013)

Fallout from the Feminist Fightback party bust up

http://www.london-student.net/newspaper/news/ncafc-conspire-to-quash-phd-on-india/



> The organisation ULU President Michael Chessum founded, the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC), has conspired on its mailing list to have a student’s PhD place removed.
> 
> London Student has been leaked the email thread circulated on the NCFAC Committee mailing list, where members discussed contacting the student’s supervisors. The research PhD is on Indian community organising and based at a department of Oxford University. For safety reasons, we have chosen to not reveal the identity of the student in question. The context of this leaked email discussion was a debate around race politics in the NCAFC ‘black power’ Facebook group.
> 
> ...


 
This identity politics stuff is taken very seriously in London SUs it seems! Wine bottles being thrown, attempts to throw people off their PhDs... what's next? Drive by shootings? Do I need to check my privilege for suggesting that?


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 16, 2013)

Judging from that it doesn't seem as if there actually was any attempt to have anyone thrown off any course. It looks like a bunch of student lefties muttering about someone who pissed them off and saying that someone should complain to somebody about something or other until someone else told them to calm down and get over it.

Those articles are pretty clearly just the people who control London Student using the paper to slag off the people they blame for trying to end their control of London Student. There doesn't seem to be anything "political" involved at all. Clique squabbles.


----------



## sihhi (May 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Take care out there in them private liberal arts colleges people, it's tough out there. And remember - _*you*_ own all these issues


 
Why did you not want to own *this* issue when asked? 




> Laurie Penny @PennyRed20h
> So today I'm asking male-identified people on Twitter: who were and are your role models for 'masculinity', and why?


 

The offering today is a bit weak - here's the conclusion of the 726 words :


_"Traditional masculinity", like "traditional femininity", is a form of social control, and seeking to reassert that control is no answer to a generation of young men who are quietly drowning in a world that doesn't seem to want them. There can be no doubt that men are in distress. Society's unwillingness to let go of the tired old "breadwinner" model of masculinity contributes to that distress. Instead of talking about what men and boys can be, instead of starting an honest conversation about what masculinity means, there is a conspiracy of silence around these issues that is only ever broken by conservative rhetoric and lazy stereotypes. We still don't have any positive models for post-patriarchal masculinity, and in this age of desperation and uncertainty, we need them more than ever._

There's literally no one now or from the past to have as a positive male model for us to look up to - it just doesn't exist.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 16, 2013)

the thing is, in the end, this whole white skin privilege is for middle class people.  it is completely indicative of a movement where no-one is actually oppressed (because all the non-middle class people have fucked it off or been alienated completely) and the rest of them are squabbling for points so that they can claim their movement represents The Oppressed - and of course, so they can stop trying to appeal to people they neither like nor understand (i.e. working classes or truely oppressed minorities).  IMO, obv.


----------



## seventh bullet (May 16, 2013)

I don't quite know how I would react in a real life situation where I could get screamed at by a class inequality-denying middle class arsehole, wanting to use me as a punchbag to assuage their own poisonous, deep-down pathetic guilt.


----------



## J Ed (May 16, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> I don't quite know how I would react in a real life situation where I could get screamed at by a class inequality-denying middle class arsehole, wanting to use me as a punchbag to assuage their own poisonous, deep-down pathetic guilt.


 
I don't think that there are many who actually deny class inequality, they just ignore it.


----------



## sihhi (May 16, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> they can stop trying to appeal to people they neither like nor understand (i.e. working classes or truely oppressed minorities). IMO, obv.


 
Some of them - outside the student arena - have professional 'roles' in being charity types or providing custodianship over support for 'oppressed minorities' - w/c, women, immigrants, sexual minorities. 

Note: Of course not all charity workers are like this, but that trend can develop within the third sector (and its progressive wing) and influence things.


----------



## sihhi (May 16, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> I don't quite know how I would react in a real life situation where I could get screamed at by a class inequality-denying middle class arsehole, wanting to use me as a punchbag to assuage their own poisonous, deep-down pathetic guilt.


 
They never scream, they imply by quiet, steadily building accusations that you are psychologically  racist, disablist sexist, and heteronormativist.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (May 16, 2013)

Maybe these people will all just grow out of it when they leave 'uni'.


----------



## seventh bullet (May 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> they just ignore it.


 
Yes. That's what I meant.


----------



## The39thStep (May 16, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> I don't quite know how I would react in a real life situation where I could get screamed at by a class inequality-denying middle class arsehole, wanting to use me as a punchbag to assuage their own poisonous, deep-down pathetic guilt.



Bring it up with Morrisons training officer


----------



## sihhi (May 16, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> Maybe these people will all just grow out of it when they leave 'uni'.


 
Looking at the twitter output of older non-uni types (Zoe Stavri, Sam Ambreen, Laurie Penny) suggests not all will grow out of this intersectionality privilege politics.


----------



## J Ed (May 16, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> Maybe these people will all just grow out of it when they leave 'uni'.


 
They grow up into columnists, civil servants and Labour politicians


----------



## J Ed (May 16, 2013)

Laurie Penny vs Nationalist Brony (?)

https://storify.com/asifandwhen/penny-vs-racist-brony


----------



## JimW (May 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Laurie Penny vs Nationalist Brony (?)
> 
> https://storify.com/asifandwhen/penny-vs-racist-brony


You get no points for looking reasonable shooting fish in a barrel, or a pony in the knacker's yard


----------



## rekil (May 16, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/334747495659872256

More lies. Twat.



			
				lauriepenny said:
			
		

> Also continuing surprise at how many men I can convince that I'm a fashion writer, despite my style concept being 'cyberpunk chimney-sweep'.


 

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/334977438591352832



			
				lauriepenny said:
			
		

> Aw @HackneyAbbott is quoting me! At length! All flattered and flustered now!


 
I don't think she's a revolutionary socialist at all.


----------



## frogwoman (May 16, 2013)

fucking bronies


----------



## sihhi (May 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I don't think that there are many who actually deny class inequality, they just ignore it.


 
Yes, they are aware of it, in reality they do think it means less - practically for people and as a basis for action - and that they have sorted out what to do which is roughly:-

1. do class struggle by compensating in cack-handed liberal ways for failing (on class grounds) liberal schemes (feminism and multiculturalism) that you klaxon about in any way you like "on a platform of intersectionality"

2. produce a no longer 'imbalanced' (too many whites, too many males, too many resident passport holders, too many able-bodied for the appropriate ratio of people on these isles) movement instead have one perfectly representing 'society'.

3. hence have nice things like a revolution

maybe step 2.a. produce psychological safeguards for the movement to assist in the correct balancing procedure while people call out/are called out. ?

Remember: "Not for the first time, following some conversations, it occurs to me we need a better mental health toolkit for _*hackers and activists*_."

_Carry on_ activism but with _more_ hand gestures, more empty phrases, more emotional (non)drama, more meetings about getting balances of groups right = dawn of new society, socialisation of production etc etc.


----------



## J Ed (May 16, 2013)

copliker said:


> I don't think she's a revolutionary socialist at all.


 
Well, she isn't alone in claiming to be a socialist while fawning over Diane Abbot.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Fallout from the Feminist Fightback party bust up
> 
> http://www.london-student.net/newspaper/news/ncafc-conspire-to-quash-phd-on-india/
> 
> ...


 
One of the people who took part in that email exchange is in our neck of the woods (and I didn't think she was a student to be honest). The person that the weekly worker reported being genuinely distressed by a female member of the SWP disputes committee being at her workplace because she is a rape denier (despite, as others noted, there almost certainly being actual rapists and misogynists in there every day, and though I'm no fan of the SWP DC member I don't believe for a second that her presence is a threat to anyone). She's not someone I've really had anything to do with but when I have encountered her I've found her irritating in the extreme - she's one of those people who loves to speak in meetings, at length, about themselves and what they're doing - even when it's completely and utterly irrelevant. She's hardly alone in that mind you.


----------



## cesare (May 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Some of them - outside the student arena - have professional 'roles' in being charity types or providing custodianship over support for 'oppressed minorities' - w/c, women, immigrants, sexual minorities.
> 
> Note: Of course not all charity workers are like this, but that trend can develop within the third sector (and its progressive wing) and influence things.


Absolutely. What also happens in that potentially toxic environment is that some of that third sector oppress their staff even more than the straightforward wage robbing. They use emotional blackmail to try and get them to do longer, unpaid hours "if you really cared about [X] cause, you would show that by [x y and z]".


----------



## sihhi (May 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Well, she isn't alone in claiming to be a socialist while fawning over Diane Abbot.


 
From the editorial meetings of the non-union New Statesman to the House of Commons bars, 'this is what a feminist looks like'.
From the sofa laughing with anti-union Andrew Neil to the gentrifying art galleries of New York, 'sisterhood is poweful'.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 16, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> I don't quite know how I would react in a real life situation where I could get screamed at by a class inequality-denying middle class arsehole, wanting to use me as a punchbag to assuage their own poisonous, deep-down pathetic guilt.


 
I do


----------



## sihhi (May 16, 2013)

Is this person taking the piss? - bits of it read as pure agony, but is it real?:




> All this is what makes living intersectionality hard. When I read the example, “White privilege is not having to feel uncomfortable while playing Bioshock Infinite. White privilege is not having to see demonized caricatures of your race in the game” my first thought wasn’t to consider this on its own, as something I’d never experienced before. Rather, my first thought was more along the lines of, “I know what you mean because seeing demonized caricatures of gay people is so aggravating!” Sometimes this is helpful; goodness knows I write and talk a lot about the ways in which the power structures underlying different forms of discrimination are similar. Plus, this reaction stems from a place of empathy and wanting to be able to connect to the experiences of others. “I feel your pain,” is basically what I’m trying to say.
> 
> However, sometimes (oftentimes), it’s really not the right reaction, because in that moment I’m not a queer person fighting to be heard. I’m a white person drowning out the voice of a person of colour. In that moment my attempt to say, “I feel your pain,” actually ends up becoming, “my pain is more important than your pain.” And all this can be really difficult to remember and consider before reacting to someone else’s expression of their oppression. It’s an odd thing to say, but in these moments I forget that I am white. I forget that I am part of the privileged group.
> 
> ...


----------



## sihhi (May 16, 2013)

Last one for tonight:







U of Wisconsin




> II.  Critical Thinking and Writing Skills:
> 
> Women’s Studies graduates should demonstrate competence in the following skill areas:
> 
> ...


 
If you "examine your privilege" in their dumb ways you do better on their courses. LOL


----------



## frogwoman (May 17, 2013)

but your personal life has nothing (or should have nothing) to do with the academic context of the course


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 17, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Is this person taking the piss? - bits of it read as pure agony, but is it real?:


 
I think it's genuine to be honest. I heard a couple of the old fellas from the pensioners bungalows across the road from my mum's having a conversation along similar lines at the allotments today.

Old Len was saying that he feels that he can relate to the feeling of powerlessness and exclusion felt by people in wheelchairs because he's almost blind and is excluded and disempowered because of that - but that he doesn't know whether he should say so because in doing so he might not be a blind person explaining his oppression but just another non-wheelchair user using his privilege to drown out a wheelchair user. Barry, who he was talking to, didn't say anything but later on he told me he'd wanted to say he knew how he felt because he has to use a colostomy bag and that makes him feel disempowered and excluded but he thought maybe he wouldn't be a colostomy bag user explaining his oppression but a non-blind person using his privilege to drown out a blind person. I asked if they'd heard of the progressive stack.

It's a fucking tight rope mate.


----------



## frogwoman (May 17, 2013)

I'm going to have to systematically other my cat in a few minutes time when I drown out the voice of his purring when I kick him out of the room and go to sleep.


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 17, 2013)




----------



## J Ed (May 17, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I'm going to have to systematically other my cat in a few minutes time when I drown out the voice of his purring when I kick him out of the room and go to sleep.


 
If the cat is Siamese then that's just Orientalism tbh


----------



## J Ed (May 17, 2013)

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/culturist-conference-2013.310024/#post-12240716

I think the brony LP was talking with has found U75...


----------



## seventh bullet (May 17, 2013)

Well, 'brony' is new to me.  I never played with My Little Pony toys when I was younger back in the 1980s, although at times I put down my Battle Beasts to play with my female friends' Sylvanian Families.


----------



## cesare (May 17, 2013)




----------



## SpineyNorman (May 17, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> Well, 'brony' is new to me. I never played with My Little Pony toys when I was younger back in the 1980s, although at times I put down my Battle Beasts to play with my female friends' Sylvanian Families.


 
My auntie great auntie Florrie (who was the kindest person you could ever hope to meet but utterly barking) bought be a barbie mini metro for my action men


----------



## The Pale King (May 17, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Why did you not want to own *this* issue when asked?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
The solution to everything seems to be to 'start an honest conversation'. In this 'age of uncertainty' (what's that?) we need 'positive models' to follow. Surprise surprise, who is going to lead us in this conversation that will sort everything out? Columnists! Like Laurie Penny! They will fearlessly break the silence!

Much modern feminism seems obsessed with discourse, in fact most of L.P's output centres around 'messages' that have a negative impact on women. Her writing is full of phrases like 'we were told' - we never find out by whom, but the idea is left hanging that state / society / culture is hovering like a victorian father saying things like 'you can't do that', and that what is needed is to replace this with 'yes you can' or some such. A glance at Penny's beat masterpiece 'Saudade' will show you what I mean:

_Who dared to dance until dawn and were drugged and raped by men in clean T-shirts and woke up scared and sore to _be told it was our fault
"There are more of us than you think, kicking off our high-
heeled shoes to run and _being told not so fas_t
Who were told_ our whole lives that we were too loud to risky too _
_fat too ugly too scruffy too selfish too much and refused to take_
_up less space refused to be still refused refused refused to be _
_tame_
Now there's obviously something self serving in this - i.e identify the problem as being solvable by replacing the bad messages with good ones and put yourself forward as the messenger. Remake yourself so you don't need to remake society. But I also wonder if we aren't seeing the result of 30 years of poststructuralism and linguistic theory in Universities. Discourses are now treated in themselves as being constitutive of social reality and also as the proper terrain of political intervention. Material, objective political relations have become rather passe. And that's why a lot of modern feminist writers spend their time analysing articles from women's magazines in an ironic voice. Then the solution isn't anything to do with structural change its...better magazines. Edited by someone in the golden circle. And featuring hard - hitting poetry by L.P.


----------



## J Ed (May 17, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/17/teresa-forcades-nun-on-mission

Bet Teresa Forcades wouldn't think much of the likes of Diane Abbot


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 17, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> I don't quite know how I would react in a real life situation where I could get screamed at by a class inequality-denying middle class arsehole, wanting to use me as a punchbag to assuage their own poisonous, deep-down pathetic guilt.


 
React appropriately. If someone screams in your face, assume that they're attacking you and lamp them.
Then you can watch them manifest some effects of class inequality when they call you a "violent chav" or some such.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 17, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/17/teresa-forcades-nun-on-mission
> 
> Bet Teresa Forcades wouldn't think much of the likes of Diane Abbot


----------



## Idris2002 (May 17, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> But I also wonder if we aren't seeing the result of 30 years of poststructuralism and linguistic theory in Universities. Discourses are now treated in themselves as being constitutive of social reality and also as the proper terrain of political intervention. Material, objective political relations have become rather passe. And that's why a lot of modern feminist writers spend their time analysing articles from women's magazines in an ironic voice. Then the solution isn't anything to do with structural change its...better magazines. Edited by someone in the golden circle. And featuring hard - hitting poetry by L.P.


 
I think this is spot on. And what a lot of people don't realise is that a figure like Foucault is wide open to criticism as a conservative thinker, not a radical or revolutionary.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 17, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/17/teresa-forcades-nun-on-mission
> 
> Bet Teresa Forcades wouldn't think much of the likes of Diane Abbot


 


> However, some question how she can be both a leftwing feminist and part of a misogynist church that bans contraception and backs punishment for abortion.


 
You don't say.


----------



## J Ed (May 17, 2013)




----------



## ViolentPanda (May 17, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I don't think that there are many who actually deny class inequality, they just ignore it.


 
Same effect, though.
And of course these _intersectionistas_ will deny class inequality not only until the cows come home, but until the cows have got old and been sent to the knackers' yard. Engaging with the reality of class inequality would mean engaging with something where their discourse wouldn't be the hegemon, just one voice among others. *That* wouldn't be tolerated by the _bourgeois_ do-gooders. Only situations that allow them to dominate the culture are allowed.


----------



## butchersapron (May 17, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I think this is spot on. And what a lot of people don't realise is that a figure like Foucault is wide open to criticism as a conservative thinker, not a radical or revolutionary.


There's another thing going on here as well - the same people who insist that they are free to adopt any cultural construction of identity whilst also insisting that others can only be trapped by their own _natural_ identities. They get to choose -  the rest of us don't. More pretty clear elitism.


----------



## love detective (May 17, 2013)

and ultra conservative


----------



## Idris2002 (May 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> There's another thing going on here as well - the same people who insist that they are free to adopt any cultural construction of identity whilst also insisting that others can only be trapped by their own natural identities. They get to choose the rest of us don't. More pretty clear elitism.


 
Just not clear to them.


----------



## cesare (May 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> There's another thing going on here as well - the same people who insist that they are free to adopt any cultural construction of identity whilst also insisting that others can only be trapped by their own natural identities. They get to choose the rest of us don't. More pretty clear elitism.


The other thing that happens is that if people are subjected to actual racism/sexism/whatever, (and especially if they've grown up in an environment where there's plenty of it drip drip drip)  there's a natural tendency to protect themselves by retreating into their identity. Not everyone's strong enough to fight - or, if they are, to fight on terms that they feel most comfortable with.


----------



## butchersapron (May 17, 2013)

cesare said:


> The other thing that happens is that if people are subjected to actual racism/sexism/whatever, (and especially if they've grown up in an environment where there's plenty of it drip drip drip) there's a natural tendency to protect themselves by retreating into their identity. Not everyone's strong enough to fight - or, if they are, to fight on terms that they feel most comfortable with.


Absolutely - and whilst LP and others get to choose what identity they want to individually adopt they can only see the identity in other as the result of oppression. Identity as freedom for one and oppression for 'the others'. And then these others are expected in turn only to act politically on the basis of these identities - and the ball rolls on...

edit: small example of that, the RCP lot (can't recall if it was them or one of their outreach groups) were trying to recruit me in the late 80s period - they were rather disappointed to find out on actually meeting me that i wasn't an irish republican spitting anger at the brits, which given my name, they had assumed was my natural and political identity.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Absolutely - and whilst LP and others get to choose what identity they want to individually adopt they can only see the identity in other as the result of oppression. Identity as freedom for one and oppression for 'the others'. And then these others are expected in turn only to act politically on the basis of these identities - and the ball rolls on...
> 
> edit: small example of that, the RCP lot (can't recall if it was them or one of their outreach groups) were trying to recruit me in the late 80s period - they were rather disappointed to find out on actually meeting me that i wasn't an irish republican spitting anger at the brits, which given my name, they had assumed was my natural and political identity.


 
You mean you didn't support the army of the peasants and the people?

Re: our current round of "kick the liberals" - another point is that they focus on the existence of oppression but don't stop to ask themselves why oppression itself should exist. . .


----------



## Bakunin (May 17, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I do


 
Is that for hitting people or shoving up their arse?


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 17, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Is that for hitting people or shoving up their arse?


 
It's actually a early 19th century implement called a slubbers mallet, used to get the little bobbly bits off cotton in preperation for spinning


----------



## phildwyer (May 17, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> My auntie great auntie Florrie (who was the kindest person you could ever hope to meet but utterly barking) bought be a barbie mini metro for my action men


 
Don't worry, you can exchange ıt ıf you take ıt back wıthın a week.


----------



## Tom A (May 17, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> It's actually a early 19th century implement called a slubbers mallet, used to get the little bobbly bits off cotton in preperation for spinning


Maybe we could also get them with a "Bow Street Bastard"?


----------



## J Ed (May 17, 2013)

https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/335378299712856064


----------



## Idris2002 (May 17, 2013)

J Ed said:


> https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/335378299712856064


 
Suffering Christ


----------



## kavenism (May 17, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I think this is spot on. And what a lot of people don't realise is that a figure like Foucault is wide open to criticism as a conservative thinker, not a radical or revolutionary.


 In what way is Foucault open to criticism as a conservative? He may be conservative relative to the French ultra left of the 1970s but that's still not very conservative really.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 17, 2013)

kavenism said:


> In what way is Foucault open to criticism as a conservative? He may be conservative relative to the French ultra left of the 1970s but that's still not very conservative really.


 



> In a 1981 lecture titled Modernity versus Postmodernity, Jürgen Habermas famously accused Michel Foucault of being a “young conservative.” The charge was meant to place Foucault, along with intellectuals such as Bataille and Derrida, within a postmodern tradition which rejected notions of scientific and moral progress stemming from the Enlightenment. Habermas portrayed these thinkers as preferring subjective propositions of aesthetic taste rather than objective rational thought. They were afforded the luxury of denying objectivity because their intellectual status rendered them “emancipated from the imperatives of work and usefulness”1 and therefore out of touch with the realities of daily life. In their preference for fanciful thinking over the concrete experiences of the real world, Habermas understood Foucault and his postmodern contemporaries as also disregarding the real intelligible structures which conditioned those experiences—an intelligibility which could possibility lead to changing society for the better.


 
http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/pub/departments/bcurj/pdf/gavin.pdf


----------



## yield (May 17, 2013)

Fuck Habermas


----------



## Idris2002 (May 17, 2013)

yield said:


> Fuck Habermas


 
At least he doesn't look like a circumcised penis.


----------



## love detective (May 17, 2013)

poor button


----------



## kavenism (May 17, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/pub/departments/bcurj/pdf/gavin.pdf


 
Habermas was wrong. All of Foucault’s genealogical studies on power and later the idea of care of the self begin with concrete practices and what people are thinking/writing when they are doing them. Habermas on the other hand claims as universal an abstract notion seemingly divorced from practice with which to ground his work on communicative reason i.e. the decentred subject. That is the idea that subjects make validity claims in three distinct areas correlating roughly with ethics, politics and aesthetics. What Habermas has failed to notice is that this division of reason corresponds exactly with the modern European subject of enlightenment, the secular, rational subject who is distanced and reflective upon their practices mirroring the development of European societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a historically particular and partial view not the universal ground of any theory of formal pragmatics. The accusation of presentism he levels at Foucault is far more suitable to himself.


----------



## butchersapron (May 17, 2013)

Still, at least he never lost his marbles and supported the mullahs as they slaughtered the left and the secularists.


----------



## yield (May 17, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> At least he doesn't look like a circumcised penis.


I'm ashamed to say I have a soft spot for Georges Bataille. Have you read the Accursed Share Idris?


----------



## kavenism (May 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Still, at least he never lost his marbles and supported the mullahs as they slaughtered the left and the secularists.


 I'm not sure he was supporting them 'AS' they slaughtered the left and the secularists. Before, certainly, and he wasn't the only one.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 17, 2013)

Zizek, I think, described the penis' support for the Mullahs as a "right move in the wrong direction", which sums him up in damning fashion, I think.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 17, 2013)

yield said:


> I'm ashamed to say I have a soft spot for Georges Bataille. Have you read the Accursed Share Idris?


 
That tends to be a cult book among American cultural anthropologists. . . and we don't talk to those . . . _people. _


----------



## yield (May 17, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> That tends to be a cult book among American cultural anthropologists. . . and we don't talk to those . . . _people. _


Ohh!  I thought the American cultural anthropologist versus European social anthropologist thing was dead?


----------



## love detective (May 17, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Zizek, I think, described the penis' support for the Mullahs as a *"right move in the wrong direction",* which sums him up in damning fashion, I think.


 
sounds like something articul8 would say


----------



## J Ed (May 17, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/335393920710213632

Cultural appropriation


----------



## Idris2002 (May 17, 2013)

love detective said:


> sounds like something articul8 would say


 
You are dead to me now, love detective.



yield said:


> Ohh!  I thought the American cultural anthropologist versus European social anthropologist thing was dead?


 
Basically, yeah.


----------



## love detective (May 17, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> You are dead to me now, love detective.


 
I meant the thing that you said zizek said, not the thing you actually said about it!


----------



## cesare (May 17, 2013)

love detective said:


> I meant the thing that you said zizek said, not the thing you actually said about it!


He sullied his hands with it though


----------



## Idris2002 (May 17, 2013)

cesare said:


> He sullied his hands with it though


 
Would you like to know where this hand's been? 



Spoiler


----------



## cesare (May 17, 2013)

Oaten


----------



## rekil (May 17, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/335371908591779841


> This morning's achievements: go to bank like an adult, give lots of money to the government, wish v hard that they'd spend it on welfare.


Nah you don't.


----------



## butchersapron (May 17, 2013)

kavenism said:


> I'm not sure he was supporting them 'AS' they slaughtered the left and the secularists. Before, certainly, and he wasn't the only one.


He was right behind them as they started their feb 79 crackown until novemberish and the hostage situation - then when they really cranked up the murder of the left _he was silent._ Not a word on Iran for another 5 years.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 17, 2013)

Post-modernism is for middle class conservative pseuds who want to pretend to be wadical and Foucault was a tosser.

End of debate.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 17, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Post-modernism is for middle class conservative pseuds who want to pretend to be wadical and Foucault was a tosser.
> 
> End of debate.


 

If you've got focault to say about it.....



been saving that one up for the very limited occasion it is viable


----------



## J Ed (May 17, 2013)

So I found this on that nationalist brony idiot's blog


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 17, 2013)

J Ed said:


> So I found this on that nationalist brony idiot's blog


 
The wheel of oppression was really just asking to be turned on its head like this. If you individualise oppression you open the door for people to claim that the oppression is down to the oppressed individual's own flaws and that the privileged have earned their privilege.

What is it with the post-modernist inspired liberal left and constructing brands of politics that are ripe to be co-opted by the hard right?


----------



## sihhi (May 17, 2013)

Laurie Penny's *Saudade*

There are more of us than you think, kicking off our high-heeled shoes to run and being told not so fast

The best minds of my generation consumed by craving, furious half naked starving-

Who ripped tights and dripping make up smoked alone in bedsits bare mattresses waiting for transfiguration.

Who ran half dressed out of department stores yelling that we didn't want to be good and beautiful

Who glowing high and hopeful were the last to leave the gig our skin crackling with lust and sweat and pure music

Who wrote poetry on each other's arms and cared more about fucking than being fuckable

Who worked until our backs stiffened and our limbs sang with the memory of misbehaviour that was what it was to be a woman

Who dared to dance until dawn and were drugged and raped by men in clean T-shirts and woke up scared and sore to be told it was our fault

Who swallowed bosses' patronizing side-eyes stole away from violent broken boys in the middle of the night and vowed never again to try to fix the world one man at a time

Who slammed down the tray of drinks and tore off our aprons and aching smiles and went scowling out into the streets looking for change

Who stripped in dark rooms for strangers' anodyne dollars because we wanted education and were told we were traitors

Who sat faces upturned to the glow of the network searching searching for strangers who would call us pretty

Who bared our breasts to hidden cameras and fought and fought and fought to be human

Who waited in grim hallways with synth-pop crackling over the speaker system for the doctor to call us clutching fistfuls of pamphlets calling us sluts whores murderers

Who crossed continents alone with knapsacks full of books bare limbs clear-eyed vision running running from the homes that held our mothers down

Who filled notebooks with gibberish philosophy and scraps of stories and cameras to prove we were there keeping our novels and the name of out children close to our hearts

Who were told all our lives that we were too loud too tisky too fat too ugly too scruffy too selfish too much too and refused to take up less space refused to be still refused refused refused to be tame

Who would never be still. Who would never shut up. Who were punished for it and spat and snarled and they shook the bars of our cages until they snapped and they called us wild and crazy and we laughed with mouths open hearts open hands open and would never not ever be tame.

Sara, I'm with you in hospital, in the narroe rooms where you have put off your veil to count your ribs through your T-shirt, short hair and secrets and quiet defiance crying together that we don't know how to be perfect-

Lara, I'm with you in mandatory art therapy, where we draw pictures of weeping cocks and are told we are not making progress-

Lila, I'm with you in a north London bathdroom, watchhing unreal maggots crawl in the cuts in your arms and listening to your girlfriend drunk and raging through the wall-

Andy, I'm with you in Bethnal Green where you love ambitious angry women with heart brain pen fingers tongue and you have a line from Nietzche tattooed over your cunt-

Adele, I'm with you in the student occupation, with your lipstick and cloche hat and teenage lisp drawling that there's not enough fucking in this revolution and we must take action-

Kay, I'm with you on the night bus, half drunk and high dragging bright-eyed boys home to our bed, where we watch them worn out sleeping and whisper that we will never be married-

Katie, I'm with you in Zuccotti Park, where a broken heart is less important than a broken laptop is less important than a broken future and we watch the cops beating kids bloody on the pavement for daring to ask for more-

Tara, I'm with you in Islington where you have thrown all your pretty dresses out of the window and flushed your medication so you can write and write-

Alex, I'm with you and a bottle of Scotch at two in the morning when you tell me that no man will make us live for ever and we must seduce the city the country the world-

We are always hungry.

There are more of us than you think.


----------



## J Ed (May 17, 2013)

I read that out to a room of stoned people a couple weeks ago, well I tried to... no one could stop laughing


----------



## chilango (May 17, 2013)

Is that for real?


----------



## The Pale King (May 17, 2013)

I think it's a craig brown parody


----------



## JimW (May 18, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> He was right behind them as they started their feb 79 crackown until novemberish and the hostage situation - then when they really cranked up the murder of the left _he was silent._ Not a word on Iran for another 5 years.


Don't know much about Foucault but read this thing on Wu Ming's blog which seems to have him more missing the point rather than actively supporting the Mullahs:
http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/wumingblog/?p=1394


----------



## butchersapron (May 18, 2013)

Read that a a few years ago. What that is attempting to do is a shallow defence of the idea of revolution as not necessarily leading to counter-revolution and just using Foucault as a entry point without discussing what he did and said in any great detail. The book Foucault and the Iranian Revolution does a a far better job and shows how he was nailed by the french and italian left at the time and how his responses to those criticisms amounted to _if you don't agree with me then you are a stalinist._


----------



## JimW (May 18, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Read that a a few years ago. Was that is attempting to do is a shallow defence of the idea of revolution as not necessarily leading to counter-revolution and just using Foucault as a entry point without discussing what he did and said in any great detail. The book Foucault and the Iranian Revolution does a a far better job and shows how he was nailed by the french and italian left at the time and how his responses to those criticisms amounted to _if you don't agree with me then you are a stalinist._


Yeah, I sort of got they were going somewhere else with that. TBH it just popped into my head when the topic came up as the one thing I'd read specifically on Foucault and Iran, so thought I'd chuck it in there  ETA: hadn't realised you link was to the full text of that, will check that book out.


----------



## J Ed (May 18, 2013)

http://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/cats-who-need-to-check-their-privilege


----------



## phildwyer (May 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Post-modernism is for middle class conservative pseuds who want to pretend to be wadical and Foucault was a tosser.


 
Moron that you are.

Personally I wasn't that keen on Foucault back ın the last mıllenıum, but I have to say that hıstory seems to be vındıcatıng hım wıth ever-ıncreasıng clarıty.  I've also caught up wıth hıs later, neo-Chrıstıan stuff, whıch ıs far better than hıs output ın the 60s. 

What ıs mıssıng from hıs analysıs ıs a theory of the commodıty.  But that can be found elsewhere.


----------



## phildwyer (May 18, 2013)

*


sihhi said:



			Laurie Penny's Saudade

Click to expand...

* 
*Allen Gınsburg has much to answer for.*


----------



## JimW (May 18, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> *Allen Gınsburg has much to answer for.*


He was actually good though. Top phrase-mongering. Shouldn't hold the later pale imitators against him.


----------



## phildwyer (May 18, 2013)

JimW said:


> He was actually good though. Top phrase-mongering. Shouldn't hold the later pale imitators against him.


 
A lot of people whose opınıon I respect rate hım hıghly.  I could never see ıt myself.


----------



## JimW (May 18, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> A lot of people whose opınıon I respect rate hım hıghly. I could never see ıt myself.


Can't say I actually like his work, just always struck me as very good in terms of prosody etc. Bit like Ezra Pound for me that way, not my thing and not my kind of bloke but definitely a good poet.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/cats-who-need-to-check-their-privilege


 
Weirdly enough teh first one of those makes a half decent point - this shit could easily be used (and undoubtedly will be) to say to people 'don't stomp on the experience and oppression of disabled people who cannot work by complaining about being exploited by your boss - you need to check your privilege'.

Just the slightest peek below the surface and you see this crap for what it is - a deeply conservative theory used by the middle classes to deny/hide class exploitation.


----------



## phildwyer (May 18, 2013)

sihhi said:


> and you have a line from Nietzche tattooed over your cunt-


 
_When you gaze too long ınto the abyss, the abyss also gazes ınto you. _


----------



## butchersapron (May 18, 2013)

_I saw the best minds of my generation fucked by _
_ greasy old men, starving hysterical naked_
_until the noise of wheels and children brought_
_ them down shuddering mouth-wracked and_
_ battered bleak of brain!_
_Children screaming under the_
_stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men_
_weeping in the parks!_


----------



## Favelado (May 18, 2013)

*Não acho que ninguem ficaría com saudades de Laurie, se ela desaparesse do mundo do jornalismo.*


----------



## J Ed (May 18, 2013)

Favelado said:


> *Não acho que ninguem ficaría com saudades de Laurie, se ela desaparesse do mundo do jornalismo.*


 
Sinto saudade do mundo do jornalismo sem Laurie Penny.


----------



## Favelado (May 18, 2013)

Well, we're a pair of knobheads J, but I think we both enjoyed that little reacharound.


----------



## J Ed (May 18, 2013)

Need to get some practical use out of my degree...


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Need to get some practical use out of my degree...


 
_Paul Calf: Are you a student?_
_Roland: No I work in the Virgin megastore actually, I finished my degree years ago._
_Paul Calf: Oh aye, what in?_
_Roland: Social anthropology_
_Paul Calf: That's handy._


----------



## rekil (May 18, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Andy, I'm with you in Bethnal Green where you love ambitious angry women with heart brain pen fingers tongue and you have a line from Nietzche tattooed over your cunt-


After some deliberation, I reckon that's my fave.

What's with the creeping Tex from Alan Partridge americansims? "Dollars", "scotch" and more! I think "gnarly" got wheeled out recently.


----------



## J Ed (May 18, 2013)

copliker said:


> After some deliberation, I reckon that's my fave.
> 
> What's with the creeping Tex from Alan Partridge americansims? "Dollars", "scotch" and more! I think "gnarly" got wheeled out recently.


 
I've noticed British identity politics types using 'y'all' a lot, I have a decent amount of people on my FB from the Southern US and they don't use it when writing status updates so I don't see why right-on Brits feel the need to.


----------



## chilango (May 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Sinto saudade do mundo do jornalismo sem Laurie Penny.


Foda-se, filhos de putas.

That's all I remember.


----------



## chilango (May 18, 2013)

I've been (very) guilty of Americanisms. My early posts here are littered with them. I still use y'all, kinda, gotta, and doubtless many many more.

I have finally stopped referring to gas stations and trash cans. But only just.


----------



## chilango (May 18, 2013)

JimW said:


> He was actually good though. Top phrase-mongering. Shouldn't hold the later pale imitators against him.



 I only own two books of poetry.

Ginsberg's collected works and a small volume of RS Thomas.


----------



## JimW (May 18, 2013)

chilango said:


> I only own two books of poetry.
> 
> Ginsberg's collected works and a small volume of RS Thomas.


RS Thomas I do really like, have his collected poems and that later one No Truce With the Furies.


----------



## J Ed (May 18, 2013)

chilango said:


> I've been (very) guilty of Americanisms. My early posts here are littered with them. I still use y'all, kinda, gotta, and doubtless many many more.
> 
> I have finally stopped referring to gas stations and trash cans. But only just.


 
I very much understand the function of y'all, English really needs a plural second person pronoun but it's just such an annoying affectation when used in writing or when used in speech by people who aren't black Americans or from the Southern US.


----------



## JimW (May 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I very much understand the function of y'all, English really needs a plural second person pronoun but it's just such an annoying affectation when used in writing or when used in speech by people who aren't black Americans or from the Southern US.


Youse?


----------



## love detective (May 18, 2013)

Usage by Scottish and Norn Irish only please


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I very much understand the function of y'all, English really needs a plural second person pronoun but it's just such an annoying affectation when used in writing or when used in speech by people who aren't black Americans or from the Southern US.


 
Y'all is common where I live, although said in a yorkshire accent you wouldn't think it was an americanism. It's not tbh I'm pretty sure some variation of Y'all was being said in this country for much longer than America has existed.


----------



## Firky (May 18, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Zizek, I think, described the penis' support for the Mullahs as a "right move in the wrong direction", which sums him up in damning fashion, I think.



Do you have a link for that, not that I don't believe you!


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 18, 2013)

What the fuck's wrong with 'you lot'?


----------



## cesare (May 18, 2013)

What part of "some of us take oppression seriously, and will not actively contribute to leading people, particularly women, into a position of retreat" aren't "you lot" getting yet?


----------



## JimW (May 18, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What the fuck's wrong with 'you lot'?


A question I often ask myself reading these forums.


----------



## cesare (May 18, 2013)

Direct action

No pasaran

Spontaneous solidarity

Class struggle


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## love detective (May 18, 2013)

Panegyric for Thompson, Bone, Hall, Ruggiero, Gramsci, Negri, Jackson, Linebaugh, Franks, and Douglass (TBHRGNJLFD)


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## _angel_ (May 18, 2013)

love detective said:


> Usage by Scottish and Norn Irish only please


scousers and geordies also.


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## love detective (May 18, 2013)

Dave, davy, david, dav and davey


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## Tom A (May 18, 2013)

Parodying privilege theory with the help of cats: http://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/cats-who-need-to-check-their-privilege


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## cesare (May 18, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Parodying privilege theory with the help of cats: http://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/cats-who-need-to-check-their-privilege



We know all this.


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## cesare (May 18, 2013)

love detective said:


> Panegyric for Thompson, Bone, Hall, Ruggiero, Gramsci, Negri, Jackson, Linebaugh, Franks, and Douglass (TBHRGNJLFD)


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## coley (May 18, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> scousers and geordies also.



Nope, it's yi,all or ye,all, around here.

As in,  ye,all can gan n fuck right off.


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## Nigel Irritable (May 18, 2013)

There are three different plural second person pronouns in Hiberno-English. "Yous" \ "Youse" is widely used in Dublin and also in the North. "Ye" is more rural. "Yis" is also used.


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## Greebo (May 18, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> _When you gaze too long ınto the abyss, the abyss also gazes ınto you. _


But all that is, was, and will ever be in the abyss when you gaze into it, is you.


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## Bakunin (May 18, 2013)

JimW said:


> He was actually good though. Top phrase-mongering. Shouldn't hold the later pale imitators against him.


 
True. Blaming Ginsburg for the likes of Penny Dreadful is like blaming Led Zeppelin for existence of Whitesnake.


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## The Pale King (May 19, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I very much understand the function of y'all, English really needs a plural second person pronoun but it's just such an annoying affectation when used in writing or when used in speech by people who aren't black Americans or from the Southern US.


in Scotland we say 'youse'. should be adopted more widely...


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## The Pale King (May 19, 2013)

Oops, didnae see posts above. Apparently it has been adopted more widely...


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 19, 2013)

_angel_ said:


> scousers and geordies also.


 and brummies.


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 19, 2013)

Yooz lot can fook roight off.


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## ViolentPanda (May 19, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> True. Blaming Ginsburg for the likes of Penny Dreadful is like blaming Led Zeppelin for existence of Whitesnake.


 
That fucker Page should have slit the schoolboy Coverdale's throat on his Satanic altar like he was supposed to, then none of us would have been subjected to decades of single entendre Whitesnake lyrics.


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## Bakunin (May 19, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> That fucker Page should have slit the schoolboy Coverdale's throat on his Satanic altar like he was supposed to, then none of us would have been subjected to decades of single entendre Whitesnake lyrics.


 
True.

Witness the rampantly sexist cheesiness of this Coverdale opus:


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## smokedout (May 19, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> That fucker Page should have slit the schoolboy Coverdale's throat on his Satanic altar like he was supposed to, then none of us would have been subjected to decades of single entendre Whitesnake lyrics.


 
in fairness deep purple were responsible for whitesnake, which is pretty bad because they were also responsible for deep purple


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## Bakunin (May 19, 2013)

smokedout said:


> in fairness deep purple were responsible for whitesnake, which is pretty bad because they were also responsible for deep purple


 
The mighty Purple were also responsible for this stormer though, to be fair. Witness the awesome organ-fondling of Mr. Jon Lord, Esq, the Lordmeister...


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## Firky (May 19, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What the fuck's wrong with 'you lot'?


 
When I read that it put the Christopher Eccelston sample in Orbital's "You Lot" straight into my head:



It's from that TV play a few years ago where the Second Coming was a man from Yorkshire.

"You are becoming Gods. There's a new master of creation - and it's you! You've unravelled DNA, and at the same time you're cultivatin' bacteria strong enough to kill every living thing. You think you're ready for that much power?

You lot?

YOU LOT?

Cheeky bastards... you're running around science like pithy ghosts.

If you want the position of God then accept the responsibility!"


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## J Ed (May 19, 2013)

Firky said:


> It's from that TV play a few years ago where the Second Coming was a man from Yorkshire.


 
That was ages back but it was really good


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## sihhi (May 19, 2013)

Open questions especially to current HE and FE students:

How far are intersectionalists a reserve team on behalf of university management?

I was reading through this report from a different Laura - Co-President of the Bristol University Feminist Society - who apparently also stands as part of the NUS Women's Committee's Black Caucus (even though she has some issues with the caucus approach, describes it below).

She was reporting back from the NUS Women's Conference held early March this year:

It has little sense of putting forward ideas of actual struggle - staff strikes, staff non-cooperation with bureaucracy, student boycotts - more like being an aid to management.





> SESSION: Fair to Care plenary
> 
> NOTES: really great research done to back an empirical evidence backed campaign to understand and aid the student
> experiences of people with caring responsibilities - they are more likely to have financial, academic and mental health issues than the general student body.
> ...


 
It almost sounds like doing the work of management itself (focus groups, prescriptive recommendations) so that some window-dressing or divisive mechanisms can be put in place by university HR and chancellors.
There's no mention of free (or as limited fees as possible) childcare. It's simply research _for existing students only "__anybody at the University"__, _ie those working-class potential/theoretical but not actual students with childcare responsibilities who are already out of the loop will stay out. Is this 'intsersectionalism'?





> SESSION: Workshop on Trans Feminism
> 
> ACTIONS: Make sure that the University offers a third box to tick when gathering data (other?). And try and get as
> many toilets as possible converted to gender neutral. It was recommended that especially where there is a stand
> ...


 


Surely the way to solve the problem is to demand another toilet for men - not to simply change the label on an existing toilet how will that help anybody of whatever gender?






> SESSION: Lad Culture
> 
> NOTES: Great research to give feminists empirical ammunition when talking about sexism on campus.
> 
> ...


 
So NUS Women's Committee doesn't know what to do about university sexism, and is talking with other bodies.
Is this the fruit of the intersectional approach talking with every other liberal (identity or not) group under the sun - so much so that actual action against the sexism doesn't happen as easily.

Yet according to this account there was a lot of bluster:





> I've been in a fair few feminist spaces and what stuck and really bothered me about NUS Women's
> Conference 2013 was the anti-men sentiment. I think that I have a good understanding of the privilege of
> men in our patriarchal society and, by all means, am fighting to combat it but I was shocked by the
> derogatory tone of many of the speakers towards men, simply for being men. Although this sentiment was
> ...


 



I have nothing against this kind of talk against men(all men) - it happens and that's that.
But this all-women's group of the NUS can't recommend any strategy, can't stiffen the nationwide defence against the Unilad sexism, because it has to meet with other groups?? WTF?


On the black caucus.





> My other main criticism of the conference was surrounding accessibility. Although I saw that there was an
> active attempt to make the vocabulary of the conference accessible at the beginning, I don't think this went
> far enough. As someone who has never attended an NUS event before, I had no idea and still have no idea
> what a 'Caucus' is. It was a definite problem that 'Black' was not defined at the beginning of the conference,
> ...


 

This feeling might be represented in her final score for it being the lowest out of all of them:-





> Black Caucus Black Women's Officer 6


 
Should it bother people that non-black and non-Asian minorities feel out of place in "black caucuses"?
They are, after all only a very small part of the population and only really experience discrimination in assumptions over their names, and problems with immigration and family status.
You could see the numerous aspects of racism which affect those who are more visibly black:- deaths in police custody, profiling for crime fighting, police failing to respond to racist attacks etc are a function of the police. So no number of black caucuses however well attended will end the deaths in custody until the whole working-class population assumes the mantle and self-confidence to assert itself in self-policing without capitalist police.
In intersectionality terms, it might suggest that white working-class young people who also feel the effects of police profiling (even though they might be able to modify it but dressing acting differently just as Muslim women might drop headscarves) could contribute to this struggle, which under the present situation of a 'black caucus' they are excluded from.
Obviously it's up to people how they organise on what grounds in what ways who they exclude or include, but I feel the whole championing of intersectionality by bits of the NUS is a mask for its wider structural failings.
However concerns such as mine about intersectionality (or aims to further explicitly working-class interests of all racial origins, genders and sexual inclinations) can be dismissed as 'unexamined privilege' and wanting to trample over black people, women, immigrants, homosexuals, transgendered people, disabled people, those suffering from poor mental health, those on the autistic spectrum etc.
Pushing through new quotas, new caucuses, new officer roles will come up against wider apolitical (rightist) tendencies within the NUS and this struggle will stand in place of actual struggle against management unless people are very careful.


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## The Pale King (May 20, 2013)

http://stavvers.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/kill-all-men/

Stavvers says "kill all men" and "die cis scum" are provocative structural critique. Thoughts?


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## TruXta (May 20, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> http://stavvers.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/kill-all-men/
> 
> Stavvers says "kill all men" and "die cis scum". Thoughts?


Except he/she doesn't.


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## The Pale King (May 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Open questions especially to current HE and FE students:
> 
> How far are intersectionalists a reserve team on behalf of university management?
> 
> ...


 
Pretty thin gruel at the NUS Women's conference from the sound of it. I agree that this isn't really activism in any meaningful sense, it's more akin to managerialism (which probably shouldn't surprise us, after all that's what the NUS trains you for - perhaps it was ever thus).
Seems to me this is part of a general tendency to pretty much back out of politics altogether, and fight proxy wars over representation and the composition of organisations.


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## tenniselbow (May 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I was reading through this report from a different Laura - Co-President of the Bristol University Feminist Society - who apparently also stands as part of the NUS Women's Committee's Black Caucus (she describes it below).


 
Why do you feel the need to include a photo that you found on Google of the undergraduate woman you're writing about ? What relevance does it have to her views or your discussion of them? You did the same ad nauseum with Molly. Wondering why you feel the need to do this?


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## chilango (May 20, 2013)

tenniselbow said:


> Why do you feel the need to include a photo that you found on Google of the undergraduate woman you're writing about ? What relevance does it have to her views or your discussion of them? You did the same ad nauseum with Molly. Wondering why you feel the need to do this?



Why wouldn't/shouldn't a photo be included?


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## DotCommunist (May 20, 2013)

nice way to insinuate theres a grubby motive without actually saying it though eh- cheap


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## chilango (May 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> nice way to insinuate theres a grubby motive without actually saying it though eh- cheap



'xactly.


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 20, 2013)

chilango said:


> Why wouldn't/shouldn't a photo be included?


 
Because this isn't Redwatch.


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## chilango (May 20, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> Because this isn't Redwatch.


 
wtf is that meant to mean?


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## cesare (May 20, 2013)

Never had sihhi pegged as an agent of the state - have I missed summat?


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 20, 2013)

chilango said:


> wtf is that meant to mean?


 
It means that posting up photos of someone who is clearly quite young on one of the biggest bulletin boards around, makes them unnecessarily recognisable and so puts them at risk.


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## chilango (May 20, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> It means that posting up photos of someone who is clearly quite young on one of the biggest bulletin boards around, makes them unnecessarily recognisable and so puts them at risk.


 
Don't be daft.


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 20, 2013)

chilango said:


> Don't be daft.


 
I guess you'll be posting up a photo of your own daughter/sister/etc some time soon then.


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## andysays (May 20, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> It means that posting up photos of someone who is clearly quite young on one of the biggest bulletin boards around, makes them unnecessarily recognisable and so puts them at risk.


 
There might, perhaps, be a point here in relation to the most recent photo, but if that's the point tenniselbow is trying to make, maybe it would be better if they made it in a straight forward rather than insinuating way.

And I don't think the same argument works at all in relation to Molly C, so why tenniselbow is attacking sihhi for that too is a bit of a mystery.


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 20, 2013)

andysays said:


> There might, perhaps, be a point here in relation to the most recent photo, but if that's the point tenniselbow is trying to make, maybe it would be better if they made it in a straight forward rather than insinuating way.
> 
> And I don't think the same argument works at all in relation to Molly C, so why tenniselbow is attacking sihhi for that too is a bit of a mystery.


 
I agree.


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## Firky (May 20, 2013)

Loads of photos (well three( in the public domain.

http://bristolfeminists.wordpress.com/comittee/


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 20, 2013)

Firky said:


> Loads of photos in the public domain.
> 
> http://bristolfeminists.wordpress.com/comittee/


 
It's the context though. A photo on a small blog likely to be read by a handful of people sympathetic to them, and most likely who know them in real life, is not the same as a photo attached to a hostile thread likely to be read by god knows who. I understand that there is an important issue being debated here wrt intersectionality and class etc, but it still remains a fact that women _are_ quite often the target of more serious attacks/threats for being involved in feminism. I don't see the need for that last photo, and I am yet to hear any reasons for why it is necessary or appropriate.


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## chilango (May 20, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> I guess you'll be posting up a photo of your own daughter/sister/etc some time soon then.



Have done.


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 20, 2013)

chilango said:


> Have done.


 
Did she give her permission for you to do so? How old is she? What was the context, tone, subject and intention of the thread?


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## chilango (May 20, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> It's the context though. A photo on a small blog likely to be read by a handful of people sympathetic to them, and most likely who know them in real life, is not the same as a photo attached to a hostile thread likely to be read by god knows who. I understand that there is an important issue being debated here wrt intersectionality and class etc, but it still remains a fact that women _are_ quite often the target of more serious attacks/threats for being involved in feminism. I don't see the need for that last photo, and I am yet to hear any reasons for why it is necessary or appropriate.



I doubt that a small photo buried deep within a 677 page thread is gonna add to whatever risk she might already face for being a public feminist activist.

A minute escalation of risk, maybe.

But Redwatch? Fuck Off.


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## chilango (May 20, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> Did she give her permission for you to do so? How old is she? What was the context, tone, subject and intention of the thread?



So public feminist activists in elected positions shouldn't be identifiable? Really? Ffs.


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 20, 2013)

chilango said:


> I doubt that a small photo buried deep within a 677 page thread is gonna add to whatever risk she might already face for being a public feminist activist.
> 
> A minute escalation of risk, maybe.
> 
> But Redwatch? Fuck Off.


 
I agree it is a small risk, but it is a risk all the same, and unless there is a good reason for the photo being included that trumps the reasons for not having a photo, it seems completely unnecessary. So can you explain what the photo adds to the debate?




chilango said:


> So public feminist activists in elected positions shouldn't be identifiable? Really? Ffs.


 

She's not running for PM for christ's sake, she's part of some tiny university society that has next to no impact on wider politics.


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## JimW (May 20, 2013)

Just seems of a piece with sihhi's "completist" style of posting-as-documentation. Can see from this thread that it's not a gendered approach so I think your concerns are misplaced, particularly given these are taken from the public domain and aren't really getting the sort of massive highlighting you seem to reckon by being on page whatever hundred of this thread.


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## Brixton Hatter (May 20, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> It means that posting up photos of someone who is clearly quite young on one of the biggest bulletin boards around, makes them unnecessarily recognisable and so puts them at risk.


She herself has already decided to put her pic in the public domain. 

And she can't even spell 'committee'.


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 20, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> She herself has already decided to put her pic in the public domain.
> 
> And she can't even spell 'committee'.


 
I know, but like I said already...


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 20, 2013)

JimW said:


> Just seems of a piece with sihhi's "completist" style of posting-as-documentation. Can see from this thread that it's not a gendered approach so I think your concerns are misplaced, particularly given these are taken from the public domain and aren't really getting the sort of massive highlighting you seem to reckon by being on page whatever hundred of this thread.


 
You may be right about my concerns being misplaced, and certainly the risks are small in posting up photos, but it still sits rather uncomfortably with me. I won't draw anymore attention to the issue because as you point out, the thread is very large; best to let the next 100 pages disappear the photo into obscurity.


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## chilango (May 20, 2013)

cynicaleconomy what bugged me was the insinuation, the slur implied in the raising of the photo.

I don't think it matters either way whether the photo is there or not.

The issue, for me, is the sly attack followed up by a rather alarmist argument.

She's not clandestine. We've not outed an underground activist. We are swamped by people's photos and online personal branding/promotion these days ( whether she partakes in this herself isn't really the issue). One small photo duplicated from one obscure online source to another will quickly be lost amongst the billions of others.

To imply that Sihhi had some nefarious reason for posting it or that Urban functions in the same manner as a explict fascist hit list is disingenuous at best.


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## love detective (May 20, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> I agree it is a small risk, but it is a risk all the same, and unless there is a good reason for the photo being included that trumps the reasons for not having a photo, it seems completely unnecessary. So can you explain what the photo adds to the debate?


 
I thought the photo was posted to illustrate the fact that someone who is clearly not black in either it's general usage or in terms of 'self-identifying' as black is considered 'black' for the purposes of the NUS black caucus 




			
				Laura Ho said:
			
		

> It was a definite problem that 'Black' was not defined at the beginning of the conference, especially since the NUS usage of the term is not the same as the general usage of the term. Although I fall under the NUS definition of 'black', I was confused as I do not self-identify with the term in its general
> usage. I believe that there was a fair number of 'black' students who didn't attend the Black caucus for this reason.


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## frogwoman (May 20, 2013)

I dont see a problem myself, there are loads of photos in this thread. Redwatch ffs.


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 20, 2013)

chilango said:


> cynicaleconomy what bugged me was the insinuation, the slur implied in the raising of the photo.
> 
> I don't think it matters either way whether the photo is there or not.
> 
> ...


 
I didn't imply anything regarding sihi. The parallel to Redwatch was to highlight the possible consequences of bounding about photos of people. The concern I have is not sihi's or anyone elses intent, it's with people not involved in this thread but with access to it who might have fucked-up attitudes to women. The internet has lots of dangerous people on it; that fact doesn't change because no-one here has bad intent.

Oh, and I still haven't been told what the photo adds to the discussion.


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 20, 2013)

love detective said:


> I thought the photo was posted to illustrate the fact that someone who is clearly not black in either it's general usage or in terms of 'self-identifying' as black is considered 'black' for the purposes of the NUS black caucus


 
A simple "she isn't black" would have sufficed.


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## love detective (May 20, 2013)

is that up to Sihhi to say/determine/decide?


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 20, 2013)

love detective said:


> is that up to Sihhi to say/determine?


 
What else would sihi say if that was the point she/he was making by posting up the photo?


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## DotCommunist (May 20, 2013)

> it's with people not involved in this thread but with access to it who might have fucked-up attitudes to women.


 

so you are worried about faceless, voiceless sweaty palmed wronguns who may or may not be reading this thread? I hate to break this to you but the boziers of this world are not going to be looking for fodder on a thread about liberal left journos and assorted trots


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## ItWillNeverWork (May 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> so you are worried about faceless, voiceless sweaty palmed wronguns who may or may not be reading this thread? I hate to break this to you but the boziers of this world are not going to be looking for fodder on a thread about liberal left journos and assorted trots


 
May or may not be _writing_ on the thread.


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## Firky (May 20, 2013)

Cuckoo


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## love detective (May 20, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> What else would sihi say if that was the point she/he was making by posting up the photo?


 
a picture paints a thousand words, and complements what she herself said about the issue

Anyroads, whether that was the reason her picture was posted or not, as others have said she's not exactly clandestine. And ironically only since you complained about it have I actually googled to find out more about her and look at her (public) facebook profile. So as a result of you and tenniselbow's misplaced 'white knighting' she has gained at least one person who is now searching for stuff about her on the internet. The kind of thing you were worried about happening in the first place has happened now not despite your intervention but because of it (not that i have bad intent like, but you know what i mean)


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## Thora (May 20, 2013)

I don't think the picture puts her at risk, but also don't see the need to post her picture?


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## Brixton Hatter (May 20, 2013)

What about the pictures in this thread: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/libertarians.309310/


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## manny-p (May 20, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> What about the pictures in this thread: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/libertarians.309310/


 
I hope their lifes are put at risk by being posted on urban75.


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## J Ed (May 21, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Open questions especially to current HE and FE students.


 
That is an interesting question in and of itsef but if it is true then at Sheffield things have noticably improved for women under the current women's officer. For example, the current women's officer has instituted a pro-choice policy, which in practical terms means that the union now provides financial help for travel etc for women who have abortions.


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## cesare (May 21, 2013)

J Ed said:


> That is an interesting question in and of itsef but if it is true then at Sheffield things have noticably improved for women under the current women's officer. For example, the current women's officer has instituted a pro-choice policy, which in practical terms means that the union now provides financial help for travel etc for women who have abortions.


If you don't mind me asking, have you established whether this women's officer [who is speaking for women and therefore some women may object] has established a method of finding out what they think before instituting (for example) a pro-choice policy? On the [traditionally "feminist" style] face of it, that appears a quick and easy win. The reality is that this might cause division and resentment.


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## J Ed (May 21, 2013)

cesare said:


> If you don't mind me asking, have you established whether this women's officer [who is speaking for women and therefore some women may object] has established a method of finding out what they think before instituting (for example) a pro-choice policy? On the [traditionally "feminist" style] face of it, that appears a quick and easy win. The reality is that this might cause division and resentment.


 
I don't see how it would be possible to canvass the opinon of all women in a students' union given that in every single one in the country most people know very little about student politics and care even less. Those who do know about the policy seem overwhelmingly supportive, I don't really know what objections there could be to it unless they were from students who were militantly anti-abortion, and those students would be in an even smaller minority than those involved in student politics I think.


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## el-ahrairah (May 21, 2013)

chilango said:


> I only own two books of poetry.
> 
> Ginsberg's collected works and a small volume of RS Thomas.


 
throw away the ginsberg and add a Dylan Thomas and you'll have all the poetry you'll ever need


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## el-ahrairah (May 21, 2013)

manny-p said:


> I hope their lifes are put at risk by being posted on urban75.


 
quite frankly it's a sad reflection on us that they aren't.


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## cesare (May 21, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I don't see how it would be possible to canvass the opinon of all women in a students' union given that in every single one in the country most people know very little about student politics and care even less. Those who do know about the policy seem overwhelmingly supportive, I don't really know what objections there could be to it unless they were from students who were militantly anti-abortion, and those students would be in an even smaller minority than those involved in student politics I think.


I was just curious about whether there was much of a religious (of any sort) influence and a few other things that I won't bore you with, cheers for the reply to what must have seemed an irrelevant question


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## J Ed (May 21, 2013)

cesare said:


> I was just curious about whether there was much of a religious (of any sort) influence and a few other things that I won't bore you with, cheers for the reply to what must have seemed an irrelevant question


 
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound stand-offish!

I get the impression that religious societies at the uni have their own sort of self-contained politics and generally don't get too involved in student politics and see it as a bit of a waste of time.


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## cesare (May 21, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Sorry, I didn't mean to sound stand-offish!
> 
> I get the impression that religious societies at the uni have their own sort of self-contained politics and generally don't get too involved in student politics and see it as a bit of a waste of time.


Cheers 

I'm always interested in birds-eye view of patterns of power emerging, particularly religion/anti-religion. It's sometimes hard to do when people constantly get distracted by the dog-whistle Flying Spaghetti Monster thing


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## Tom A (May 21, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> http://stavvers.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/kill-all-men/
> 
> Stavvers says "kill all men" and "die cis scum" are provocative structural critique. Thoughts?


I've encountered "die cis scum" on Facebook, and someone got very uppity when I pointed out that it isn't a particularly pleasant statement, pretty judgemental, divisive, and separatist, in fact. But then my identifying as the same gender as I was born with and having the sexual organs associated with that gender makes all my arguments null and void, of course.

As for radfems (whom ironically tend to be at loggerheads with the trans* community), the less said the better.


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## frogwoman (May 21, 2013)

it's just nationalism but nationalism based on gender/sexuality rather than race.


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## Tom A (May 21, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> it's just nationalism but nationalism based on gender/sexuality rather than race.


Exactly.


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## Delroy Booth (May 21, 2013)

to be fair, it's no more stupid than "eat the rich" or a million and one other lefty slogans. It is quite funny seeing people try writing deeply theoretical justifications of it though. I suppose writing pseud-ish commentaries on the ethics of a twitter hashtag is easier to do that than actually cutting a blokes head off, filming it and uploading it to liveleak. Actions speak louder than words.


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

love detective said:


> I thought the photo was posted to illustrate the fact that someone who is clearly not black in either it's general usage or in terms of 'self-identifying' as black is considered 'black' for the purposes of the NUS black caucus


 
How do you know she ısn't black?


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 21, 2013)

I know a family of an afro-carribbean guy married to a white woman. One of their kids has very dark black skin, the other one is ginger.


----------



## JimW (May 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I know a family of an afro-carribbean guy married to a white woman. One of their kids has very dark black skin, the other one is ginger.


Black and ginger would have you ten paces out front of any progressive stack you care to mention.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 21, 2013)

It's really really stupid looking at a picture of someone and going jumping to the conclusion they're not black because their complexion. If the purpose of putting that picture up there was to make that point (which I'm not saying it is, at all, sihhi's posts are always full of pictures and it'd be unfair to jump to that conclusion) that's really stupid. I accept this is partly to do with the fact word black is as much a descriptive term rather than a technical description of ethnicity, but still. Is a black albino not black? I mean white isn't an ethnicity either. White can mean Dagestani and Scottish, Latvian and Maltese, and an infinite mixture of many different ethnicities. Just as black, as a catch-all descriptive term, can apply to totally seperate ethnic groups. Igbo and Bantu, Acholi and Akan, all might come under the umbrella term black but they're not the same race. It's really silly, I mean I know Portugese people that have darker skin than 2nd and 3rd generation afro-carribean people. There's quite possibly an argumen that the use of the world black in this caucus in itself is part of these problems, as it's really imprecise and reflects a sort of crude eurocentric view of race, a hangover of classical imperialism, that assumes all black people are part of the same, implicitly inferior, race. Crude racialism of this sort really has no basis in reality I seem to find.

And no personally perhaps I wouldn't be as sensitive about these things if they were being directed at white people, if there where people looking at me pictures trying to figure out if I was _really_ white or not. That's mainly coz I'm a white man living in a white man's world, where there isn't systematical racial bigotry (dare I say it white privilege?) built into practically every facet of the societ I live in. Maybe in 200 years when China is world hegemon it'll be a different story and we'll have tumblrs on Han privilege and in such a situation I'd have a different attitude, but right here and now it's something I could brush off my shoulders no problem.

Jim can I ask about Han racism in China? What's the score with that, any experience of it? Sincere question. Not trying to make a daft point about reverse racism or owt.


----------



## love detective (May 21, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> How do you know she ısn't black?


 
well my starting point was that she does not 'self identify' as black in its general usage - looking at her picture she doesn't look black either, but more importantly regardless of that she does not want to be considered black, so i'm happy to let her be the better judge of whether she is black or not than you or I

identity politics are reactionary and conservative enough and do enough damage as it is without identity being externally imposed on individuals against their will


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 21, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> It means that posting up photos of someone who is clearly quite young on one of the biggest bulletin boards around, makes them unnecessarily recognisable and so puts them at risk.


 
You mean posting up their publicly-accessible photo that even a BNP bonehead could find with no probs off of her social media profile if they were minded to?


----------



## love detective (May 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> It's really really stupid looking at a picture of someone and going jumping to the conclusion they're not black because their complexion.


 
who did this?


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 21, 2013)

love detective said:


> who did this?


 
It was what cynicaleconomy was insinuating about sihhi's reasoning for putting the picture up, but didn't have the bollocks to openly say.

I accept the rest's a bit of a tangent, but there's no harm in that, surely?


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

love detective said:


> she doesn't look black


 
You may be rıght about how she ''self-ıdentıfıes,'' but you can't tell whether someone ıs black from theır appearance.  Race has nothıng to do wıth bıology.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 21, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> I guess you'll be posting up a photo of your own daughter/sister/etc some time soon then.


 
The picture of the NUS-wallah was put in the public domain by the NUS-wallah.
If people are daft enough not to pay attention to the security aspects of public life, that's not a fault of someone re-posting a publicly-available picture, it's the fault of the person posting it in the first place. None of this shit is hard to understand - if you don't want images used by people you haven't sanctioned to use them, then think twice before posting up a picture of yourself gurning at the camera next to the personal info on your facebook wall.


----------



## JimW (May 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> ...
> 
> Jim can I ask about Han racism in China? What's the score with that, any experience of it? Sincere question. Not trying to make a daft point about reverse racism or owt.


There's all sorts of ethnic conflicts and a fair amount of xenophobia, but not much of it has the same historical roots as racism in the Western colonial context so I tend not to bracket them the same. I mean, some of it does come from the local version of colonialism. Where I worked in the southwest there's a major minority ethnic group called the Yi who were only loosely under central control if at all until 1949 and there was a lot of use of disparaging ethnic terms among Han about them. There's also the patronising official attitude to the recognised national minorities despite a rhetoric of equality (like the way when they have an NPC conference the ethnics have to wear colourful national dress at the opening while Han people are in suits, telly shows where all the Mongols or Tibetans are good for is song and dance etc) which combines with some cack-handed preferential policies akin to our top-down multiculturalism to create resentments(preferential placements at scarce college places, perceived police unwillingness to tackle e.g. Uighur pickpocket gangs).
Then there's xenophobia against foreigners and that is complicated by the post-colonial history too. Some of it is pretty reasonable resentment of preferential treatment for white Westerners while local people get trampled all over - in service provision, by police etc. But you meet a fair few who buy into that colour-grading hierarchy - might not like whites but think they're advanced, repeat racist nonsense about Black people etc. Been interesting to see responses to what is now a fairly large established Black African community in Guangzhou (lot of traders go there to source cheapo goods), which has led to some racism but it's not entirely straightforward. One African lad died in police custody not so long back which led to community demos outside the cop shop, and Chinese response was as much good on 'em and 'we should be more like that when they kill a worker' as the racism, which was there too.
Err, that's just some random stuff off top of my head, it's a big topic as you can imagine.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 21, 2013)

chilango said:


> I doubt that a small photo buried deep within a 677 page thread is gonna add to whatever risk she might already face for being a public feminist activist.
> 
> A minute escalation of risk, maybe.
> 
> But Redwatch? Fuck Off.


 
Kind of presupposes that the main couple of muppets who lackadaisically update Redwatch have the gorms to "sweep" the net, fishing for "reds". Most of their info and pics probably still come from the OB.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 21, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Margaret Mead was never accused of academic fraud. The argument was that she had been spoofed by her informants when she was a very young anthropologist working in Samoa.
> 
> The accusation came from an ex-student of hers, Derek Freeman, a person who had 'issues', let's say. He claimed that when Samoan women told Mead of their liberated sex lives they were having her on. It's a long, long, long time since I looked at this debate, but some of it revolves around what the definition of sexual activity might be in Samoa as distinct from the United States. If it was more broadly than defined than mere penetrative intercourse, then there may be more truth in the stories Mead collected than Freeman thinks.
> 
> ...


 
Paul Shankman's book on the Mead-Freeman controversy is here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/132562536...-Studies-in-American-Thought-and-Culture-2009

It looks like he rescues her reputation and destroys that of Freeman. . .


----------



## frogwoman (May 21, 2013)

there's all sorts of politics around the "one drop rule" and people not being white enough in the USA ..


----------



## love detective (May 21, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> you can't tell whether someone ıs black from theır appearance. Race has nothıng to do wıth bıology.


 
thanks prof

i also heard something the other day about the pope having some kind of tendency/inclination towards catholicism - maybe you can say a few words on that as well

fairly disingenuous though that out of my response to your original question of '_How do you know she ısn't black?_' , which was the below:-




			
				me said:
			
		

> well my starting point was that she does not 'self identify' as black in its general usage - looking at her picture she doesn't look black either, but more importantly regardless of that she does not want to be considered black, so i'm happy to let her be the better judge of whether she is black or not than you or I


 
you decide to only quote this part:-



> she doesn't look black


 
and then reply as if that was the point I was making with some 6th form truism about race & biology

I know there's not a lot in your toolkit these days, anxious as you are, but i'm sure you can do better


----------



## JimW (May 21, 2013)

Here's a classic old text for fans of ethnic dynamics in the Celestial Empire: http://www.case.edu/affil/tibet/booksAndPapers/EKVALL.htm

Ekvall was a really interesting figure - son of Swedish (?) missionaries who grew up in the Chinese northwest, fled the massive Muslim rebellion there in the '20s (? dodgy dates) and ended up living in a tent with Tibetan nomads for about a decade. This is his anthropological work looking at relations between Tibetans, Hui Muslims and Han in south Gansu interface area. He later ended up as an interpreter at the Korean War peace talks too.


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

love detective said:


> fairly disingenuous though that out of my response to your original question of '_How do you know she ısn't black?_' , which was the below:-


 
My questıon was ın response to _thıs _comment of yours:



love detective said:


> I thought the photo was posted to illustrate the fact that someone who is clearly not black in either it's general usage or in terms of 'self-identifying' as black is considered 'black' for the purposes of the NUS black caucus


 
In the above you state that on the basıs of her pıcture alone, she ıs ''clearly not black... ın ıt's (_sıc_) general usage.''

So obvıously you meant that she ıs not black because she doesn't look black.

That was a sılly thıng to say because, no matter how quıckly you may try to back-pedal now, ıt assumes that race ıs a functıon of bıology.

And apart from anythıng else, she _does _look black. So you are wrong agaın.


----------



## love detective (May 21, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> she _does _look black.


 
you can't tell whether someone ıs black from theır appearance. Race has nothıng to do wıth bıology.

That was a sılly thıng to say because, no matter how quıckly you may try to back-pedal now, ıt assumes that race ıs a functıon of bıology.


----------



## TruXta (May 21, 2013)

How many minutes was that phil?


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

love detective said:


> you can't tell whether someone ıs black from theır appearance. Race has nothıng to do wıth bıology.
> 
> That was a sılly thıng to say because, no matter how quıckly you may try to back-pedal now, ıt assumes that race ıs a functıon of bıology.


 
Oh my Gawd, I'm dealıng wıth nothıng but ıllıterates here.

Lookıt. You saıd that she ''clearly ısn't black.''

I saıd ''she looks black.''

Do you really not see the dıfference? Don't you see ıt? _Serıously?_

Alrıght, one more tıme.

You made a comment about her race, based on her appearance.

I made a comment about her _appearance _based on her appearance.

So your comment was wrong, whıle mıne was rıght.

Do you see the dıfference now?


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 21, 2013)

A new low.


----------



## love detective (May 21, 2013)

I said:-

_someone who is clearly not black in either it's general usage or in terms of 'self-identifying' as black is considered 'black' for the purposes of the NUS black caucus_

I then said:-

_looking at her picture she *doesn't look black* either_

You replied directly to the comment above with :-

_you can't tell whether someone ıs black from theır appearance. Race has nothıng to do wıth bıology._

You then said:-

_she *does look black*_

I then said:-

_muppet_


----------



## 8ball (May 21, 2013)

Ted, I'm horribly confused.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 21, 2013)

fuck off dwyer, etc.


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

love detective said:


> I said:-
> 
> _someone who is clearly not black in either it's general usage or in terms of 'self-identifying' as black is considered 'black' for the purposes of the NUS black caucus_
> 
> ...


 
Wrıggle all you lıke.  You merely ımpale yourself yet more fırmly on the hook.

You saıd she ''ıs clearly not black ın eıther ıt's (_sıc_) general usage or ın terms of ''self-ıdentıfyıng'' as black.''

So you had obvıously decıded unılaterally that she was not black on the basıs of how she looks.

That was bad enough.  But you then compounded your error by allegıng that she does not even look black.

In realıty the sıtuatıon ıs precısely the reverse of the one you descrıbe.

She may or may not be black, contrary to what you allege.  And also contrary to your claım, she looks black based on her appearance.

And so you have been proved wrong not once but twıce.  Do you want to go for the trıple crown?


----------



## love detective (May 21, 2013)

did you write this post or not? (and do you actually know what unilaterally means?)

Interesting as well that you continue to seek to deny her the right to self identify as whatever she wants to self identify as - something that I have supported in every post on the matter whereas you in turn seek to reduce it all to the basis of how someone looks whilst brushing aside what the person involved has to say about it - classy and reactionary 

Once again

I said:-

_someone who is clearly not black in either it's general usage or in terms of 'self-identifying' as black is considered 'black' for the purposes of the NUS black caucus_

I then said:-

_looking at her picture she *doesn't look black* either_

You replied directly to the comment above with :-

_you can't tell whether someone ıs black from theır appearance. Race has nothıng to do wıth bıology._

You then said:-

_she *does look black*_

I then said:-

_muppet_


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 21, 2013)

Hang on I've lost track of a few pages is Laurie now saying she is black?


----------



## love detective (May 21, 2013)

Laura is saying she doesn't self identify as black, but Phil claims she looks black (why he considers that to be important or relevant i've no idea)


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> A new low.


 
Phil believes in constantly thwarting our expectations that he's reached the _nadir_ of his commentary.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (May 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> It was what cynicaleconomy was insinuating about sihhi's reasoning for putting the picture up, but didn't have the bollocks to openly say.
> 
> I accept the rest's a bit of a tangent, but there's no harm in that, surely?


 
I wasn't insinuating anything at all. If I want to say something, I'll say it straight. Read the thread again.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 21, 2013)

8ball said:


> Ted, I'm horribly confused.


 
Small.

Far away.

See?


----------



## chilango (May 21, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> I wasn't insinuating anything at all. If I want to say something, I'll say it straight. Read the thread again.



Aside from the "Redwatch" comment?

...and the supporting of tenniselbow's comment?

You could forgive people for seeing insinuation even if it was unintended, no?


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (May 21, 2013)

chilango said:


> Aside from the "Redwatch" comment?
> 
> ...and the supporting of tenniselbow's comment?
> 
> You could forgive people for seeing insinuation even if it was unintended, no?


 
The Redwatch comment was drawing a parallel to the potential effects of posting up photos of people on the internet, as you well know, and as I already said. It was over-the-top hyperbole, I admit, but there was nothing underhand meant  by it. The rest of it is pretty self explanatory from the following. I'm not 100% sure what it is I'm supposedly insinuating, to be honest.



cynicaleconomy said:


> So can you explain what the photo adds to the debate?


 


love detective said:


> I thought the photo was posted to illustrate the fact that someone who is clearly not black in either it's general usage or in terms of 'self-identifying' as black is considered 'black' for the purposes of the NUS black caucus


 


cynicaleconomy said:


> A simple "she isn't black" would have sufficed.


 


love detective said:


> is that up to Sihhi to say/determine/decide?


 


cynicaleconomy said:


> What else would sihi say if that was the point she/he was making by posting up the photo?


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

love detective said:


> did you write this post or not? (and do you actually know what unilaterally means?)


 
It means ''decıded by one person,'' usually wıth the ımplıcatıon that the vıews of others are beıng ıgnored. 

It ıs therefore an apt adverb to descrıbe your behavıor when you announced that the pıcture Sıhhı posted depıcted:



love detective said:


> someone who is clearly not black ... ın ıt's (_sıc_) general usage


 
Charıtably assumıng that the referent of ''ıt's'' (_sıc_) ıs ''black'' rather than ''someone,'' we see that you have decıded--unılaterally--that the person ın pıcture does not meet the generally-agreed defınıtıon of ''black.''

On what basıs do you decıde thıs?

On the basıs of her appearance alone.  As you put ıt yourself:



love detective said:


> a picture paints a thousand words


 
You thus reveal your reactıonary, bıologıcally-based understandıng of race.

When you were challenged by several posters you attempted to slıther away from your claım but succeeded only ın makıng matters worse for yourself by declarıng:



love detective said:


> she doesn't look black


 
As ıf that somehow justıfıed your dısmıssıve attıtude and peremptory verdıct.  And you were wrong anyway. 

But you were not fınıshed yet.  In response to demands that you justıfy your madness you added a _thırd _unılateral declaratıon, thıs tıme assertıng that she:



love detective said:


> is considered 'black' for the purposes of the NUS black caucus


 
If you thought that your scare quotes would dıstract anyone from your attempts at dıstractıon you were sadly mıstaken.  The facts are these:

1.  You have no rıght to say who ıs or ıs not black.

2.  The person ın questıon does not self-ıdentıfy as black ın any sense.

3.  It ıs ımpossıble to ıdentıfy a person's race on the basıs of theır appearance.

4.  Whether or not she ''looks black'' to your eyes ıs a matter of ındıfference.

5.  The NUS ıs not here to be used as a template for your excuses.

And fınally, you have used thıs ıssue as a technıque of deraılment, quıte delıberately desıgned to throw thıs thread off track and to confuse ıts partıcıpants.  You must thınk that the world has no conscıence.


----------



## love detective (May 21, 2013)

clearly rattled you haven't I prof



> you have decıded--unılaterally--that the person ın pıcture does not meet the generally-agreed defınıtıon of ''black.''


 
I think you'll find the reference to the generally agreed definition of black was something said initially by Laura herself (look back and see) and then repeated by me - hence your misuse (or misunderstanding) of the word unilaterally. Likewise the use of inverted commas for black was once again following on from the same usage of inverted commas around the word black by Laura herself. See below:-




			
				Laura Ho said:
			
		

> It was a definite problem that *'Black'* was not defined at the beginning of the conference, especially since the NUS usage of the term is not the same as the general usage of the term. Although I fall under the *NUS definition of* *'black'*, I was confused as *I do not self-identify with the term in its general **usage*. I believe that there was a fair number of *'black'* students who didn't attend the Black caucus for this reason.


 
you anxious anxious man

<ed: video removed >


----------



## TruXta (May 21, 2013)

LOL, the Prof has wet his sheets again.


----------



## Tom A (May 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> to be fair, it's no more stupid than "eat the rich" or a million and one other lefty slogans. It is quite funny seeing people try writing deeply theoretical justifications of it though. I suppose writing pseud-ish commentaries on the ethics of a twitter hashtag is easier to do that than actually cutting a blokes head off, filming it and uploading it to liveleak. Actions speak louder than words.


In the end I comprared it to when Michael Moore said "Kill Whitey". But I still find such throwaway statements immature, and in the case of "die cis scum" deliberately intended to wind people up regardless of how transphobic or not they actually are.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (May 21, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> You must thınk that the world has no conscıence.


 
You must hope that
the world has no memory.
You have shown that
you have no shame.

L. Macneice


----------



## articul8 (May 21, 2013)

Somewhere in that LD/Dywer exchange is a philosophical meditation on race, discourse, biology and identity


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 21, 2013)

Tom A said:


> In the end I comprared it to when Michael Moore said "Kill Whitey". But I still find such throwaway statements immature, and in the case of "die cis scum" deliberately intended to wind people up regardless of how transphobic or not they actually are.


 
You'd have to be pretty daft to get wound up by it. I mean you don't get people going "Oh my god you socialists literally want to _eat_ people" when you say eat the rich. What worries me is though is that there's a couple of people IRL I know that I've had to sit down and explain the context too before they went away thinking "wow feminists are fucking scum" and that's a danger of all this stuff. One of them is a woman in her early 20's who's just been getting into marxist feminism, with a bit of help from me lending her books and stuff, and this is exactly the sort of thing that alienates them. I don't think a lot of the people involved in the intersectional feminist scene really give a fuck about that, there's a deeply exclusionary mentality (reflected in the dense jargon and call-out culture) that revels in taking the piss out of those who are too dumb to get it. It's a bunker mentality - it's actually not that different to the dynamics of any other sect. If you're not in the scene, and don't know the in-jokes and nomenklatura, you're likely to walk away thinking something like that is a literal endorsement of murder, and that's something that a lot of people (feminists included, judging by many of the disapproving comments on the kill all men hashtag a couple of weeks ago) aren't happy with.

Of course there were some who tried justifying it (with references to SCUMM manifesto, which I always thought was meant to be deconstructed to the n-th degree, at least partially as a satire of a certain kind of male chauvinism, and not to be taken at face value) as a literal justification of the rights of women to use political violence against men as part of the struggle against patriachy. Which on some level I suppose agree with, although don't try killing me, you'd be making a big mistake, I'm fucking nuts. Which is kinda my first point - if you really do literally believe in indiscriminately killing men, or even killing specific men, don't just talk shit about it - do it. Go kill some male in a gruesome way and post it on liveleak. It's just insincere posing otherwise. I mean seriously, do you think the patriachy is gonna be overthrown without killing any men? Those kids in Syria who execute their oppressors and upload the videos on YouTube have got the right idea with this, they're not just talking about they're out there doing it, and they're seemingly far more successful in challenging their oppressors than their 1st world equivalents.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 21, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Somewhere in that LD/Dywer exchange is a philosophical meditation on race, discourse, biology and identity


 
quick, sign it up for a Red Pepper article on the dialectic.


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

love detective said:


> I think you'll find the reference to the generally agreed definition of black was something said initially by Laura herself (look back and see) and then repeated by me - hence your misuse (or misunderstanding) of the word unilaterally. Likewise the use of inverted commas for black was once again following on from the same usage of inverted commas around the word black by Laura herself.


 
Stıll slıtherıng and slıdıng away from the facts I see.

Dıd you or dıd you not wrıte the followıng post claımıng that the person shown ın the pıcture posted:



love detective said:


> is considered 'black' for the purposes of the NUS black caucus


 
Do you see any scare quotes there? Deny them ıf you can. You can't.

You wıll further note that thıs quote was wrıtten _after _your unılateral announcement that pıcture posted shows:



love detective said:


> someone who is clearly not black in either it's general usage


 
And also that ıt was wrıtten _prıor _to your allegatıon that:



love detective said:


> she doesn't look black


 
So ıf we assume that by ''general usage'' you were attemptıng to refer to any kınd of socıally-sanctıoned attıtude, we can clearly see that your claım that:



love detective said:


> a picture paints a thousand words


 
Can only have been a feeble effort to dıstract attentıon away from your arrogance and dıstortıon of the true sıtuatıon.

Now, you have already admıtted that you were ın error when you saıd that accordıng to your ''general usage'' the NUS black caucus has faıled to recognıze that thıs person has never self-ıdentıfıed as black.

So ıt would seem that your assertıon that the pıcture posted shows a black ''caucus'' member havıng been acknowledged by you--and you alone--as representatıve of some claım that she does not ''look black'' ıs among the more reactıonary outbursts wıth whıch you have favored us of late.

And that's _really _sayıng somethıng.

Let's get one thıng straıght here. You have _no _rıght to determıne who ''looks black.'' None. That ıs neıther your place nor your functıon. Do I make myself clear?

Good. Anyway she does look a bıt black ıf you ask me.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 21, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Anyway she does look a bıt black ıf you ask me.


 
Fuck off will you?


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Fuck off will you?


 
Hey man, don't shoot the messenger.


----------



## love detective (May 21, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Stıll slıtherıng and slıdıng away from the facts I see.
> 
> Dıd you or dıd you not wrıte the followıng post claımıng that the person shown ın the pıcture posted:
> 
> ...


 



			
				Laura Ho said:
			
		

> It was a definite problem that *'Black'* was not defined at the beginning of the conference, especially since the NUS usage of the term is not the same as the general usage of the term. Although I fall under the *NUS definition of**'black'*, I was confused as *I do not self-identify with the term in its general **usage*. I believe that there was a fair number of *'black'* students who didn't attend the Black caucus for this reason.


 
Didn't you like the review prof?


----------



## The Pale King (May 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> to be fair, it's no more stupid than "eat the rich" or a million and one other lefty slogans. It is quite funny seeing people try writing deeply theoretical justifications of it though. I suppose writing pseud-ish commentaries on the ethics of a twitter hashtag is easier to do that than actually cutting a blokes head off, filming it and uploading it to liveleak. Actions speak louder than words.


 
I think this hits the nail on the head. I'm not into policing peoples' rhetoric and I'm certainly not going to lecture feminists or LGBT activists on the niceties of how they should liberate themselves. The hashtags reminded me (in spirit) a bit of that Class War front page:
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=cl...0&ndsp=34&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0,i:84&tx=61&ty=53

But what gives the game away is the earnest, anguished and pseudish justification about the 'structural critique' supposedly and knowingly contained within these hashtags which, as you point out, can only illustrate the yawning chasm between their rhetoric and action.


----------



## Firky (May 21, 2013)

This used to be a good thread once upon a time but lately its been a bit shite.


----------



## TruXta (May 21, 2013)

Firky said:


> This used to be a good thread once upon a time but lately its been a bit shite.


Can't you make up some shite about the mods again then?


----------



## chilango (May 21, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> The Redwatch comment was drawing a parallel to the potential effects of posting up photos of people on the internet, as you well know, and as I already said. It was over-the-top hyperbole, I admit, but there was nothing underhand meant  by it. The rest of it is pretty self explanatory from the following. I'm not 100% sure what it is I'm supposedly insinuating, to be honest.



Fair enough.

It was your initial supporting of tenniselbow and the Redwatch dig that rankled. Your later posts haven't. Lets leave it there.


----------



## Firky (May 21, 2013)

I could.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 21, 2013)

I just don't like the idea of two people sitting around arguing about some total stranger who's totally oblivious whether they are or are not black. Now, love detective, with best of intentions I know you haven't said owt that crass here, but why are you indulging this fucking clown? There's enough absolute bollocks on this thread with you letting Phil spray his intellectual diahorrea all over the place.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (May 21, 2013)

chilango said:


> Fair enough.
> 
> It was your initial supporting of tenniselbow and the Redwatch dig that rankled. Your later posts haven't. Lets leave it there.


 
Agreed.


----------



## barney_pig (May 21, 2013)

With certain people on ignore catching up on this thread, and the assange one has taken so much less time(and been so much better on my blood pressure).


----------



## Fruitloop (May 21, 2013)

I'm interested in the 'die cis scum' hashtag thingy, because I thought that originally 'cis' was supposed to be a non-perjorative term to differentiate males who identify as male from transgender males. But it's seemed for quite a while like it's become a perjorative, without their being a totally cut-and-dried example, until now.


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> You'd have to be pretty daft to get wound up by it. I mean you don't get people going "Oh my god you socialists literally want to _eat_ people" when you say eat the rich. What worries me is though is that there's a couple of people IRL I know that I've had to sit down and explain the context too before they went away thinking "wow feminists are fucking scum" and that's a danger of all this stuff.


 
Yes, that worrıes me too.

But I thınk the real danger mıght be where you got someone who mıght say somethıng lıke ''OMG that is a literal endorsement of murder'' and then you mıght have to sıt down agaın and explaın all the context and that before you could really try to truly be a woman ın your early 20's who you were just helpıng a bıt to get ınto marxıst femınısm and lendıng her books and stuff. But then you mıght be lıke ''OMG feminists are fucking scum'' and then ıf she wasn't ın the scene and dıdn't know the ın-laws and the nomenklatatatura or the sprezzaratura they mıght be thınkıng thıs ıs just the kınd of thıng that alıenates me.

But ıt troubles me when you say:



Delroy Booth said:


> Of course there were some who tried justifying it (with references to SCUMM manifesto, which I always thought was meant to be deconstructed to the n-th degree, at least partially as a satire of a certain kind of male chauvinism, and not to be taken at face value) as a literal justification of the rights of women to use political violence against men as part of the struggle against patriachy.


 
Because I thınk there mıght be a real danger that when you were reflected ın the dense jargon and stuff she mıght be sayıng ''OMG you lıterally eat the rıch'' and stuff, although ıt's just ınsıncere posıng to be wrıtıng serıously that do you serıously thınk the patrıarchy ıs goıng to be overgrown wıthout kıllıng a few kıds ın Syrıa who lıterally execute theır oppressors and they're out there doıng ıt and lıterally beıng serıously successful ın challengıng theır mummıes when they have to go to bed wıthout even gettıng the ıce-cream they were lıterally totally promısed before you just talk about ıt and stop doıng ıt.

On the other hand, you make a good poınt when you say that:



Delroy Booth said:


> I don't think a lot of the people involved in the intersectional feminist scene really give a fuck about that, there's a deeply exclusionary mentality (reflected in the dense jargon and call-out culture) that revels in taking the piss out of those who are too dumb to get it. It's a bunker mentality - it's actually not that different to the dynamics of any other sect. If you're not in the scene, and don't know the in-jokes and nomenklatura, you're likely to walk away thinking something like that is a literal endorsement of murder, and that's something that a lot of people (feminists included, judging by many of the disapproving comments on the kill all men hashtag a couple of weeks ago) aren't happy with.


 
Because I defınıtely thınk that you mıght just be helpıng her to get ''ınto'' some femınıst marxısm and she's all knowıng the jargon and lıterally hangıng on your every word but then she's lıke ''OMG you're lıterally dıfferent to the dynamıcs of any other sect'' although judgıng by the dısapprovıng comments on your hashtag after he walked away thınkıng that I was nothıng but a lıteral part of the scene who thought that she mıght say they weren't too happy wıth my jargon and the completely lıteral face value that the male chauvınısts saıd they weren't goıng to put under the reflectıons of not knowıng all the nomenklatatatatura or lıterally beıng unsuccessful ın stoppıng my patrıarchy before bedtıme.

Apart from that bıt I thınk you mıght be onto somethıng.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 21, 2013)

Fruitloop said:


> I'm interested in the 'die cis scum' hashtag thingy, because I thought that originally 'cis' was supposed to be a non-perjorative term to differentiate males who identify as male from transgender males. But it's seemed for quite a while like it's become a perjorative, without their being a totally cut-and-dried example, until now.


 
That's a good point I hadn't thought of them. Why it's almost as if certain care more about playing their twitter call out games more than they care about the actual issue...


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 21, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Yes, that worrıes me too. etc


 
 I like that, good effort Phil.


----------



## The Pale King (May 21, 2013)

Fruitloop said:


> I'm interested in the 'die cis scum' hashtag thingy, because I thought that originally 'cis' was supposed to be a non-perjorative term to differentiate males who identify as male from transgender males. But it's seemed for quite a while like it's become a perjorative, without their being a totally cut-and-dried example, until now.


 
I think that's an interesting point. I only became aware of the term relatively recently but in that time like you i've begun to see it deployed as a pejorative in the way 'gay' used to be. I look forward to people saying 'that's so cis' etc. Funny thing is i guess that's equality of a sort...


----------



## DotCommunist (May 21, 2013)

Firky said:


> This used to be a good thread once upon a time but lately its been a bit shite.


 

it waxes and wanes. Bit waney atm


----------



## J Ed (May 21, 2013)

Getting back on topic, what do people think of https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/336577485598756864 ? I think it's a bit silly, weddings don't *have* to be that expensive!


----------



## DotCommunist (May 21, 2013)

registry office and function room at the dog and duck followed by a weekend in blackpool not good enough for some


----------



## Fruitloop (May 21, 2013)

A lot of non-queer people can't see the fucking point.

It's not exactly _Minima Moralia _is it.


----------



## Fruitloop (May 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> registry office and function room at the dog and duck followed by a weekend in blackpool not good enough for some


She needs to check her privilege.


----------



## TruXta (May 21, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Getting back on topic, what do people think of https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/336577485598756864 ? I think it's a bit silly, weddings don't *have* to be that expensive!


35 quid to get the notice to marry, plus whatever your local register office charges for the cheapest ceremony. The rest is optional.


----------



## J Ed (May 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> registry office and function room at the dog and duck followed by a weekend in blackpool not good enough for some


 
I could totally see her point if she was really struggling like a lot of people are and buying food on credit etc but I don't think she is. I think that her expectations of what a wedding costs and mine are quite different.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> registry office and function room at the dog and duck followed by a weekend in blackpool not good enough for some


 
posh bastard. Registry office, NALGO club, ferry to the Isle of Man and getting pissed around Douglas.


----------



## Belushi (May 21, 2013)

It's around £200 to get married iirc, anything you spend after that is optional.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 21, 2013)




----------



## DotCommunist (May 21, 2013)

my mate paid a ton to get married in this appaling high CofE place. Stank of papism


anyway


----------



## TruXta (May 21, 2013)

Belushi said:


> It's around £200 to get married iirc, anything you spend after that is optional.


70 + the minimum ceremony fee, which is gonna be less than 130 quid most places (I believe).


----------



## The Pale King (May 21, 2013)

Is she trying to say that heterosexuals earn more or something? That heterosexuals can all afford to get married and all want to?


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I just don't like the idea of two people sitting around arguing about some total stranger who's totally oblivious whether they are or are not black.


 
Yes, I don't not lıke that bıt eıther. It means owt.

Especıally when you haven't saıd owt that she wasn't alreadıng thınkıng was as much a descriptive term rather than a technical description of ethnicity but mainly coz I'm a white man living in a white man's world where I don't think a lot of the people involved in the intersectional feminist scene where personally perhaps I maybe wouldn't not have been twıce as sensitive about these things if they were being directed at white people but when they were lıterally up ın theır bedroom playıng at people looking at me pictures trying to figure out if I was _really_ white or not can apply to totally seperate ethnic groups. Quıte possıbly I seem to find there's a continuity wıthout the argument that the use of the world black in this caucus in itself is part of these problems, as it's really imprecise and reflects a sort of crude eurocentric view of race, a ethnocentrıc total hangover of twelve pints of classical imperialism that assumes all black people are part of the same, implicitly inferior, race. Crude racialism of this sort really has no basis in reality I seem to find.

But are you really sayıng owt here?



Delroy Booth said:


> White can mean Dagestani and Scottish


 
Because I don't thınk you're really sayıng owt.

In fact an infinite mixture of many different ethnicities mıght be your catch-all descriptive term that can't not can might doesn't apply to totally seperate lıterally ethnic groups. Igbo and Bantu is really silly if they saıd owt about the woman ın her early 20s I was just helpıng top get ''into'' the dense nomentatataruza but I mean I thınk I know I saıd that some Portugese people mıght have darker skin than 2nd and 3rd or 5th or 9th or 2nd generation afro-carribean people but I'm a white man living in a white man's world and maybe that's because the world is a whıte man's place although my hangover of that the use of the world black in this caucus in itself is part of these problems, as it's really imprecise and reflects a sort of crude eurocentric view of race, a hangover of classical imperialism, that references to SCUMM manifesto, which I always thought was meant to be deconstructed to the n-th degree.

That's true as far as ıt goes, but does ıt really have owt to teach us?

After all you go on to say:



Delroy Booth said:


> Not trying to make a daft point about reverse racism or owt


 
But personally perhaps I wouldn't be as sensitive about these things if they were being directed at white people do we believe in indiscriminately killing men or even killing specific men or do we believe in being in a white man's world where my Mum said I wouldn't literally not just talk shit about it but lıterally totally maybe do it in a gruesome way and otherwise it's just Dagestani and Scottish insincere posing nowt or owt I mean seriously Jim do you thınk the patrıarchy ıs goıng to ask about Han racism in China without killing any men or owt

So I feel you may have fallen ınto somethıng of an ınternal contradıctıon. But don't let that stop you or owt.


----------



## cesare (May 21, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Is she trying to say that heterosexuals earn more or something? That heterosexuals can all afford to get married and all want to?


Doesn't matter what she's saying really, all further examples of the same ill thought out nonsense.


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> That's a good point I hadn't thought of them. Why it's almost as if certain care more about playing their twitter call out games more than they care about the actual issue...


 
I don't thınk they care about owt.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 21, 2013)

I know that disagreeing with L.Penny is fun and all, but I'm not sure that we can really claim that not spending any money on a wedding is the working class norm with straight faces. On the other hand, seriously cheap weddings are pretty common amongst bohemian types of the sort Penny has been known to socialise with.


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Getting back on topic


 
Do we have a topıc or owt?


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 21, 2013)

Firky said:


> This used to be a good thread once upon a time but lately its been a bit shite.


 
I can try and get called a racist on twitter again by Laurie Penny if you think that might help?


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> posh bastard. Registry office, NALGO club, ferry to the Isle of Man and getting pissed around Douglas.


 
That's more than owt though ısn't ıt?

I thought ıt was meant to be deonstructed to the nth degree.

Portugese people mıght have darker skin than 2nd and 3rd generation afro-carribean people.

I'm a white man living in a white man's world and maybe that's because the world is a whıte man's place.

A sort of crude eurocentric view of race.  A hangover.  The SCUMM manifesto.

Over and owt.


----------



## cesare (May 21, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Do we have a topıc or owt?



There was one, originally I think. Before it became #everydayprivilegetheoryandintersectionalism interspersed with #everydaylauriepennyisms.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 21, 2013)

Fruitloop said:


> I'm interested in the 'die cis scum' hashtag thingy, because I thought that originally 'cis' was supposed to be a non-perjorative term to differentiate males who identify as male from transgender males. But it's seemed for quite a while like it's become a perjorative, without their being a totally cut-and-dried example, until now.


 
this is because being cis is totally bourgious and boring and only for losers.  alternative sexuality is where it's at, daddio.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 21, 2013)

I think it had something to do with Alex Callinicos, judging by the title.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 21, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I know that disagreeing with L.Penny is fun and all, but I'm not sure that we can really claim that not spending any money on a wedding is the working class norm with straight faces. Seriously cheap weddings are pretty common amongst bohemian types of the sort Penny has been known to socialise with.


 
Agree with that - when my brother and sister got married (not to each other and not at the same time before some smart arse comes along) we spent a fucking fortune on it. But what seems odd to me about this one is that she seems to be suggesting that this is part of a kind of structural homophobia - that it's not a problem straight people have to face (of course if she did that she'd have to admit it's a class issue). If I remember correctly I I'm pretty sure that I once read that on average gay people earn _more _rather than less so this would in fact affect straights more. Which just shows how fucking stupid identity politics is because if you follow its logic, that it's all about iddentity groups, this must mean that once it's legal straight people who wanted to be married are oppressed as a group. Which is lunacy.

And if it is a class point she's making (yeah right) then why mention queers in the first place? It's just weird and ill thought out. Like her politics in general.


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

cesare said:


> There was one, originally I think. Before it became #everydayprivilegetheoryandintersectionalism interspersed with #everydaylauriepennyisms.


 
Then perhaps ıt's tıme for Poetry Corner Wıth Delbert? 

It's easy once you get the hang of ıt, anyone else want a go?



Delroy Booth said:


> A woman in her early 20's
> Been getting into marxist feminism
> With a bit of help from me lending her books and stuff.
> 
> ...


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> It's just weird and ill thought out.


 
Ill thought owt.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 21, 2013)

LOL jesus christ phil are you having a breakdown or have I touched a nerve?


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 21, 2013)

Get Me Owt


----------



## cesare (May 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> LOL jesus christ phil are you having a breakdown or have I touched a nerve?


He's only doing what sihhi did last week


----------



## The Pale King (May 21, 2013)

New Statesman's 5 main issues facing modern feminism (just the main ones like):
http://www.newstatesman.com/v-spot/2013/05/five-main-issues-facing-modern-feminism

1. domestic labour ("just generally being more like Sweden")
2. Meeja - "unhelpful stereotypes" from Weetabix to page 3
3. "The glass ceiling" - not enough female CEOs and heads of state
4, Social inequality
5. Violence against women


----------



## Fruitloop (May 21, 2013)

It was my favorite phil post so far.


----------



## cesare (May 21, 2013)

Staggers can do one.


----------



## phildwyer (May 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> LOL jesus christ phil are you having a breakdown or have I touched a nerve?


 

A nerve? Touched a _nerve?_

My dear fellow, you have touched my _soul. _

You touch the very fıbre of my beıng wıth your peerless, ımmortal verse. Thıs ıs my personal favorıte:



Delroy Booth said:


> Sihhi's posts are always full of pictures
> Worth a thousand words.
> When China is world hegemon
> 
> ...


----------



## andysays (May 21, 2013)

Laurie sez:

Almost none of the queer people I'm close to- including myself - could afford to get married right now, even if we wanted to​ 
Maybe it's just because it's badly written (big fucking surprise, eh...), but that appears to suggest that she self-defines as "queer" _because_ she's "close to" herself, or are her queerness and her close-to-herselfness separate and unconnected with each other?

ETA: actually I suppose they should be recognised as separate but intersecting


----------



## andysays (May 21, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Is she trying to say that heterosexuals earn more or something? That heterosexuals can all afford to get married and all want to?


 
Either that, or that a proper "queer" wedding would cost more than a common-or-garden boring old hetro-normative one, I guess

Not that Laurie wants to pander to any of those gay stereotypes, you understand


----------



## JimW (May 21, 2013)

andysays said:


> Laurie sez:
> 
> Almost none of the queer people I'm close to- including myself - could afford to get married right now, even if we wanted to​
> Maybe it's just because it's badly written (big fucking surprise, eh...), but that appears to suggest that she self-defines as "queer" _because_ she's "close to" herself, or are her queerness and her close-to-herselfness separate and unconnected with each other?


I'm glad you quoted that,as I have to fire up a proxy to read twitter. And think how much poorer my life would have been without that nugget of wisdom from LP. Surely she could save a bundle on her wedding by getting one of her many school or uni mates with a stately home to provide the venue?


----------



## J Ed (May 21, 2013)

andysays said:


> Laurie sez:
> 
> Almost none of the queer people I'm close to- including myself - could afford to get married right now, even if we wanted to​
> Maybe it's just because it's badly written (big fucking surprise, eh...), but that appears to suggest that she self-defines as "queer" _because_ she's "close to" herself, or are her queerness and her close-to-herselfness separate and unconnected with each other?
> ...


 
As an aside, can anyone explain what gender queer actually means? I've tried to work it out before but every definition I've found of it basically encompasses every human being on earth in at least one respect.


----------



## andysays (May 21, 2013)

JimW said:


> I'm glad you quoted that,as I have to fire up a proxy to read twitter. And think how much poorer my life would have been without that nugget of wisdom from LP. Surely she could save a bundle on her wedding by getting one of her many school or uni mates with a stately home to provide the venue?


 
Glad to help


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 21, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> A nerve? Touched a _nerve?_
> 
> My dear fellow, you have touched my _soul._


 
There's so many jokes a less refined person could make at this point, but I'll leave you to it


----------



## andysays (May 21, 2013)

J Ed said:


> As an aside, can anyone explain what gender queer actually means? I've tried to work it out before but every definition I've found of it basically encompasses every human being on earth in at least one respect.


 
'_When I use a word_,' Humpty Dumpty Laurie Penny said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'​


----------



## JimW (May 21, 2013)

J Ed said:


> As an aside, can anyone explain what gender queer actually means? I've tried to work it out before but every definition I've found of it basically encompasses every human being on earth in at least one respect.


Not me, I'm more cis than Cooperative Insurance.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 21, 2013)

_Stupid, violent, basically 100% ignorant of everything and probably thinks of himself as on the "Left."_ was Phil's description of me ages back and btw for someone who doesn't know me IRL is a good shout. Fair play Phil.


----------



## coley (May 21, 2013)

cesare said:


> There was one, originally I think. Before it became #everydayprivilegetheoryandintersectionalism interspersed with #everydaylauriepennyisms.


I'm getting to,understand how drowning must feel.


----------



## cesare (May 21, 2013)

coley said:


> I'm getting to,understand how drowning must feel.


That's the background noise, unless you let it kill you.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 21, 2013)

This thread has sort of swallowed the rest of the politics forum. Just about everything ends up in here.

For a brief while, I thought that the SWP squabbles and expulsions thread's expansionist ambitions threatened this thread's hegemony, but in the end the SWP just couldn't compete with the leftish commentariat's outrage-industrial base.


----------



## cesare (May 21, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> This thread has sort of swallowed the rest of the politics forum. Just about everything ends up in here.
> 
> For a brief while, I thought that the SWP squabbles and expulsions thread's expansionist ambitions threatened this thread's hegemony, but in the end the SWP just couldn't compete with the leftish commentariat's outrage-industrial base.


A competition between the paper sales thread and the everything else thread


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 21, 2013)

cesare said:


> A competition between the paper sales thread and the everything else thread


 
It's not much of a competition really. It closed up to within 3,000 posts at one stage, but then people remembered that they hate liberals on twitter more than they hate the SWP.

(Actually, every time I look back at that SWP thread I wish that I hadn't given it such a flip and casual opening post before I knew what the substantial issue involved was).


----------



## DotCommunist (May 21, 2013)

the minutes of the new ISN meeting were worth a read though


----------



## J Ed (May 21, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> It's not much of a competition really. It closed up to within 3,000 posts at one stage, but then people remembered that they hate liberals on twitter more than they hate the SWP.
> 
> (Actually, every time I look back at that SWP thread I wish that I hadn't given it such a flip and casual opening post before I knew what the substantial issue involved was).


 
You could always edit it...


----------



## cesare (May 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> the minutes of the new ISN meeting were worth a read though


Why?

Edit: that wasn't a "fucking back that up, right now you cunt" type "why" btw, I'd like to know what they're doing differently.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 21, 2013)

cesare said:


> Why?
> 
> Edit: that wasn't a "fucking back that up, right now you cunt" type "why" btw, I'd like to know what they're doing differently.


 

tbh honest I was amused by the 'calling callincos a wanker' line. Like something from a bizarre derek and clive sketch. Then I got bogged down reading who had been assigned to do what. Things about subs etc


----------



## cesare (May 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> tbh honest I was amused by the 'calling callincos a wanker' line. Like something from a bizarre derek and clive sketch. Then I got bogged down reading who had been assigned to do what. Things about subs etc


A bit of light entertainment, and nothing wrong with that. But, yeah as you say it's the getting bogged down in the detail. So they're not doing anything different really, just another variation of the same auld but even smaller. Is that fair?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 21, 2013)

cesare said:


> Why?
> 
> Edit: that wasn't a "fucking back that up, right now you cunt" type "why" btw, I'd like to know what they're doing differently.


 
Mostly because of the Callinicos is a wanker line


----------



## DotCommunist (May 21, 2013)

cesare said:


> A bit of light entertainment, and nothing wrong with that. But, yeah as you say it's the getting bogged down in the detail. So they're not doing anything different really, just another variation of the same auld but even smaller. Is that fair?


 

by the looks of it aye- although there does seem to be a greater comitment to transparency itswim


----------



## cesare (May 21, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Mostly because of the Callinicos is a wanker line


Which, to be fair, we knew anyway. The amusing part is that they've finally realised.


----------



## cesare (May 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> by the looks of it aye- although there does seem to be a greater comitment to transparency itswim


Assange is into transparency.


Edit: and my point about transparency is this: that extra information is only useful at the time in order to make more informed (and therefore hopefully better) decisions. If you get to know everything that was going on afterwards, it's just history and only any use as one of a number of prediction tools. They do have previous for this, tbf. I can envisage a dystopian version of the ISN in 5 years time. Everyone poring over the documents that they managed to obtain during the Great Delta Split of 2012/2013, in order to pinpoint what went wrong and arguments about which exact point it went wrong. Meanwhile someone looks over their shoulder and checks that the website's been updated (tick) and before they leave someone says, "Christ, I nearly forgot Has someone sorted the childcare for ISNism 2018 or the girls will fucking slay us" " no problem comrade, one of the girls is seeing to it" "thank fuck, that was a close one eh! "


----------



## coley (May 21, 2013)

.


----------



## coley (May 21, 2013)

cesare said:


> That's the background noise, unless you let it kill you.



Background noise? I'm wearing google out looking up unfamiliar words and phrases.


----------



## cesare (May 21, 2013)

coley said:


> Background noise? I'm wearing google out looking up unfamiliar words and phrases.


You've ventured into the world of hegemony and discourse, mate. Here be dragons.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 21, 2013)

This really belongs on the other thread, but I don't think that "they're not doing anything different really" is a fair summation of the ISN. They are definitely doing things differently to the SWP in a number of ways. Although, they aren't doing anything noticeably different in the sense of doing something nobody else on the left has done before. There's a reason why they are hanging around with the ACI, their peers, and Socialist Resistance, their grandparents.


----------



## coley (May 21, 2013)

cesare said:


> You've ventured into the world of hegemony and discourse, mate. Here be dragons.


Back to google


----------



## cesare (May 21, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> This really belongs on the other thread, but I don't think that "they're not doing anything different really" is a fair summation of the ISN. They are definitely doing things differently to the SWP in a number of ways. Although, they aren't doing anything noticeably different in the sense of doing something nobody else on the left has done before. There's a reason why they are hanging around with the ACI, their peers, and Socialist Resistance, their grandparents.


Yep, it should be thrown like a grenade into the paper sales thread to become incorporated into what the working class needs - for sure. It's an aside here, but just an illustrative point.


----------



## frogwoman (May 21, 2013)

I think Oftrot will have to see evidence of a more comprehensive programme for the class if they're going to escape being rated unsatisfactory and forced to split

also, there probably aren't enough exclamation marks


----------



## cesare (May 21, 2013)

coley said:


> Back to google


You're safer here at the moment, btw. We say things like "I suppose that means I've got to swiftly atone for centuries of male oppression *trudges off to put kettle on* and everyone falls about laughing.


----------



## Frances Lengel (May 21, 2013)

coley said:


> Back to google


 A dragon for ya, chief.


----------



## sihhi (May 21, 2013)

cynicaleconomy, I have removed the public photo as you requested - although love detective's point stands and others have given a link with other faces I don't think they are doing anything wrong.
I posted earlier that physical attacks against feminists by men's rights or backlash forces in this country are close to non-existent - their tactics are goading and raising to prominence 'miscarriages of justice against men'. More importantly, the writing was against a managerial NUS officer mindset not a cursing anti-women one. So I did not see any evidence of danger (I still don't, but I take your word).

On the wider points that have come up:


The NUS with fixed positions/non-recallable year-long management committee, which in practical terms is open only to those with most time, social capital, resources inevitably means non-immigrant middle-class figures dominating it (ie under-representation compared to the student body as a whole). The NUS's liberation campaign system is a liberal way to correct its (liberal-caused) structural failings.

_Even on its own terms_, however, it throws up difficulties as to how people who are

of mixed immigrant and non-immigrant heritage, with the non-immigrant side bearing over their life history
simply 'white' but immigrant > fit in in the NUS structure.

Since "issues about all that sort of stuff are part of the black section", and the black section has a middle-class softly-racialised approach the working-class immigrant white or predominantly white (apologies, but no other way of putting it) is between two funny doors. [The NUS Black (for any and all self-definers) Section re-elected leader Aaron Kiely is, after all, already a Labour councillor with a general softly-racialised approach - black parts of society are underprivileged compared to white.]

Sections and caucuses can lead to immigrants from wholly immigrant backgrounds resenting middle-class domination that often is also mixed heritage. The dynamic behind them - asserting heritage identity over class identity - inevitable in order to iron out issues and orientations - can unfortunately lead to further resentment and tensions on a heritage basis. (Also, the intention to assert quotas for the non-privileged, in all fields, can become the sole drive.)
For instance:




			
				earlier quoted dual heritage mixed race LSE student at the NUS Black Liberation Conference discussing Lee Jasper said:
			
		

> it is embarrassing for him that he cannot accept a little criticism from those who said it was awkward for them when he was shouting his aggressive anti-white rhetoric. Let us not forget that the dual heritage population is an ever growing one, we are still victims of racism. I would ask the new NUSBSC committee that he is not invited again. His behaviour has been unacceptable and actively bulling 19 year old and 26 year old students on twitter is shameful behaviour, especially from a man in his 50′s. He should know better. I want to see members of the committee condemning this sort of behaviour as it would not be accepted anywhere else in NUS, it should not be accepted here.
> I cannot believe I was a victim of racism at a Black Students conference, the one place you would expect to feel safe. I was not the only one either. Malia was challenged for sharing best practice with fellow Black Students (something which we really need). Apparently being North African excludes her from being able to give advice.


 



Liberal middle-class immigrant means to advance working-class immigrant concerns are actually ineffective. So you can get concern/suspicion about dual heritage middle-class figures dominating the 'sections', which is counter-acted by stressing the black aspect. This concern/suspicion is there beneath the surface in all sorts of places/ways:

There in the subcontinent origin mosque and kuran school-based organisations (the official Asian organisations are full of mixed or out-marrying liberals who don't advance true Muslim interests), there in some of the more tough Sikh gurdwara associations, this feeling that dual heritage are taking over the field. Dual heritage who have the supposed advantages and connections from the non-immigrant side, and hence do not experience what other immigrants do, hence a twisted form of attacking "white parent" privilege or "marriage to a white" privilege.
Warning on this link - quite a tough British Chinese nationalist perspective on the issue:




> In terms of identity, Mixed race can be in an very advantageous position. Their ambiguous ethnicity allows them to manipulate equal opportunities policies. Those with identity issues can metaphorically conceal their 'Chinese blood,' so they can simply claim to be...
> 
> ...'White.' If that fails, they can then "play the race card" by jumping on 'ethnic' bandwagon by claiming to be...
> ...'Chinese.' In fact when that fails, they can try again a third time by claiming to be...
> ...


 



What you also get as butchersapron mentioned about Lozells is resentment politics between different immigrant (or variously heritaged) people. It is only because the country is still mostly white that these media-amplified resentments from whites (the housing goes to immigrant families) (immigrants don't worry about their kids getting mugged here, so work like robots undercutting us here) an be perceived as blanket "white privilege" and its corollary "white tears".

My guess is there is probably resentment politics (formalised or not) in all sorts of fractures and fissures, intersectionality-based counter-acting quotas, privilege stacks and 'schemes for minorities' will not overcome it. Each such scheme is a trade off: minimal advantage in equalising circumstances within the population as a whole (overcoming prejudices about 'immigrants can't do X') versus specifically enhancing the middle-class of the immigrant population at the expense of the working-class immigrant population.

Unless we are careful as (immigrant and non-immigrant) w/c populations, NUS quotas and reserved positions can act as a means by which middle-class people of all colours help _racialises _otherwise class-based issues. Class-based reality is very stark in both further and higher education and training, and access to both, yet the reality of resistance beyond tokenism and sponsored mobility is on the whole absent. 

Racialisation of class based issues has been going on a while - particularly with constant racial (and non-class based) statistics with respect to health, education, housing and 'public service outcomes'.

Some - either liberals or SWP - at the helm of UCU's FE section in South East and London regions have - over the years - demobilised trade union struggle on the grounds that (racially) discriminatory management decisions can be overturned by court cases or DDA or REA. The racial aspect is sometimes won with minor modifications but the class aspect is lost. Perhaps now with some experience cuts and restructurings are designed and brought in carefully so as _not_ to infringe 'equal opportunities' but to be just as deadly (in overall class terms).


----------



## brogdale (May 21, 2013)

I fear that the staff at Poppleton will struggle with their visit from Oftrot...



> New research findings from Dr Nicola Ingram of the University of Bath show that some middle-class students at the post-1992 University of the West of England feel distinctly “out of place”. Could this also be true of Poppleton?
> “Certainly not,” insists Nancy Harbinger, Deputy Head of Student Experience. “Our university has already taken major steps to reduce any such sense of alienation among its own rapidly diminishing group of middle-class students.”
> These steps include regular “bourgeois tea parties” with a menu featuring green tea, seeded batch bread and a choice of flourless chocolate cake or panettone. Middle-class students who continue to feel a loss of cultural capital after taking tea are offered an extended visit to the newly opened Ring Road branch of Waitrose.
> Members of academic staff have also been officially alerted to the linguistic sensitivities of middle-class students. However, Ms Harbinger declined to comment on the rumour that Professor Lapping of Media and Cultural Studies had been verbally reprimanded for repeatedly referring to the departmental lavatory as “the powder room”.
> http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/the-poppletonian/middle-class-moi/2003290.article


----------



## DotCommunist (May 21, 2013)

Oftrot need to be a real thing. 'Insufficient tenuous connections to 1917 in your literature describing modern class struggles' Nil points


----------



## frogwoman (May 21, 2013)

"Number of commanding heights demanded to be nationalised - 100, down on previous levels - unsatisfactory"
"Number of times general strike called for in last year - 20 - unsatisfactory"
"Number of recessions predicted out of last 5 - 15 - outstanding"


----------



## sihhi (May 21, 2013)

This is where all the politics could end - as in USA - the annual White Privilege Conference - 14 years running going still going strong - around the USA. It costs $435 for an individual, where if you are a non-white American you get to learn:




> People of color learn from this conference that White supremacy, White privilege, racism and other forms of oppression are designed to destroy you. This conference is designed to help people of color understand how that system works, to understand the philosophical design [and] belief in White supremacy. How it creates little things that add up, that cause hypertension and other health problems. This conference is an opportunity for people of color to learn about that system and to be better prepared to find success — but most importantly, to live healthy.


 
in response to:



> What does the White Privilege Conference offer to People of Color?


 
It's all part of an odd sounding "CONSORTIUM OF EQUITY CONFERENCES"



> The Consortium of Equity Conferences (CEC) is a group of progressive, like-minded organizations unified through their common interest in promoting access and equity through educational programs and conferences. Each CEC member organization is dedicated to peace, equity, and social justice. The Consortium's primary mission is to support, network and take action.


 
featuring




> Summit for Courageous Conversations
> October 20-24, 2012
> The Westin Riverwalk-
> San Antonio, TX
> ...


 
$12 a day university parking:






You can buy a water bottle for $13:






or a cap for $10:




and lots and lots of T-shirts:
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	



For $99 you can buy DVDs which feature white people agonising over how hard it was having black servants growing up and not being able to be too close to them:

and find out how to do anti-racism properly such as posting these on trees:




Note: working-class people not having enough money to shop is a diversion tactic.
If you are too poor to attend there's always a scholarship to try and win:




The first step to "be prepared to find success"


----------



## frogwoman (May 21, 2013)

£435 for a conference, fuck that. And is it only open to students as well?


----------



## DotCommunist (May 21, 2013)

a months rent


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## sihhi (May 21, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> £435 for a conference, fuck that. And is it only open to students as well?


 
You get academic credit sort of like the US version of coursework for going if you are a student depending on your course and age.

If you are a uni student it costs a more manageable $265.

You are encouraged to give money towards the scholarships.

Here's the radical kickstarter pyramid:




> Conference Partner $7,500
> 
> Conference Registration for eight
> A table for ten at the Shabbat Dinner
> ...


----------



## coley (May 22, 2013)

sihhi said:


> You get academic credit sort of like the US version of coursework for going if you are a student depending on your course and age.
> 
> If you are a uni student it costs a more manageable $265.
> 
> ...


And for all that the emperor gets some new clothes.


----------



## sihhi (May 22, 2013)

Sorry that's not a radical kickstarter pyramid, but this might be:



> the G/S LOFT in NYC are rather brilliant. Larisa works with Amanda Palmer and many more


 
They hosted Amanda Palmer's kickstarter rewards, usually do this kind of thing apparently:






That's "Meet me in Paris - clandestine cabaret" by "Gemini & Scorpio: weekly offbeat NYC events list & one-of-a-kind parties" 

This is their "Swing House Party":

"Gemini and Scorpio parties are now running 10 year strong, always themed, always costumed, always fun. Swing House is a particular one, with it's vintage and speakeasy style, with live band and artist performances throughout the night. The Blue Vipers of Brooklyn - a 5 man acoustic band - delivered a solid amount of old-time jazz, blues and early soul, and they were accompanied by _*Pandora - the Greek Godess of Burlesque*_ - delivering a joyful performance that perfectly fit the vibe of the place. To the amusement of beginners and experts alike, the show was preceded with a swing dance class, so that all could break their moves to the sound of the live entertainment. The crowd did not disappoint and came well prepared - dressed chic and with style that was maybe in contrast to the gloom location of an old warehouse, but hey! It's prohibition time - and underground - once again!"

From here (warning some photos NSFW)

Wasn't Pandora the first human woman like the ancient Greek version of Eve?

Anyway here's a sample of what you get if you help them carry on their subvervise time-shifting social centre/warehouse:



> $40 lace collar designed by Kambriel


 



> $80 Marshmallow Peep costume. Pole dancer not included.


 
Ha ha.




> Pledge $130 or more
> Include one line of poetry/wishes/inspiration/ideas/outreach/love note in our weekly events NEWSLETTER going out to over ten thousand in the creative underground community (we're the second-largest such list in NYC). No advertising or hate-speech; creative opportunities OK. http://www.geminiandscorpio.com/subscribe.html


 



> $500 or more
> Sxip Shirey will compose for you your own PERSONAL THEME SONG. Use it as your ringtone, or as entrance music every time you walk into a room. http://www.sxipshirey.com


 




> $4,000 or more
> G&S throws one of our CRAZY PARTIES in your living room (or any other accessible to you location), with any theme you choose, full bar, bands, DJs, and other fun bits of mayhem. We'll even invite some of our fabulous costumed friends, if you want.


 




> $7,000 +
> G&S throws you a PARTY in the loft (up to 150 people) on any non-holiday day, with any theme you choose, full bar, bands, DJs, and other fun bits of mayhem. Birthdays, weddings, corporate launches -- whatever you want (nothing that will get the cops called, though). If you're looking to donate in this budget range, but would like a different venue, email us -- we have lots of options all over NYC, and will set up a custom reward for you that includes another venue rental.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (May 22, 2013)

sihhi said:


> cynicaleconomy, I have removed the public photo as you requested - although love detective's point stands and others have given a link with other faces I don't think they are doing anything wrong.
> I posted earlier that physical attacks against feminists by men's rights or backlash forces in this country are close to non-existent - their tactics are goading and raising to prominence 'miscarriages of justice against men'. More importantly, the writing was against a managerial NUS officer mindset not a cursing anti-women one. So I did not see any evidence of danger (I still don't, but I take your word).
> 
> On the wider points that have come up:
> ...


 

Thank you. Good post, btw.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (May 22, 2013)

sihhi said:


> You get academic credit sort of like the US version of coursework for going if you are a student depending on your course and age.
> 
> If you are a uni student it costs a more manageable $265.
> 
> ...


 
Wow. So people get to buy an automatic pass on part of their degree by attending these things? What goes on at these conferences that is considered equivalent to doing actual coursework?


----------



## sihhi (May 22, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> a months rent


 
It gets funding from all sorts of institutions so that price is _probably_ quite cheap, to essentially promote the message that:




and hence white Americans should listen to black and new immigrant Americans

Its T-shirts aren't as good as the fashion lines


----------



## J Ed (May 22, 2013)




----------



## sihhi (May 22, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> Wow. So people get to buy an automatic pass on part of their degree by attending these things? What goes on at these conferences that is considered equivalent to doing actual coursework?


 
Presumably they write up on the experience.
It's just for
_Women’s and Ethnic Studies,__ Education: Curriculum and Instruction _for undergraduates
and _Sociology_, or _Education: Curriculum and Instruction _for postgraduates, as the link points out.

For clarity - that poster is a different campaign funded by different nonprofits in Duluth, Minnesota - part of the 'and that's unfair campaign'






which also did stuff like:




> •Two six-week workshops were offered for intensive discussion and reflection: “Worldview Awareness and Cross-Cultural Communication” and “Cracking the Shell of Whiteness.”
> •Author and lecturer Tim Wise gave a talk, “White Like Me: Reflections on Race,”
> to a packed audience in UMD’s Kirby Ballroom.
> •Campaign partners also facilitated a “Readers Theatre” in which 32 of the emails we had received—both positive and negative—were read aloud at Teatro Zuccone.
> ...


 
Notice that half the stuff is giving funding to, by hiring for talks/events, other anti-racism professionals/nannies.


----------



## sihhi (May 22, 2013)

How exactly do you speak up - from the outside - against a potentially racist stare or car-locking anyway?

You go to the website and it doesn't tell you.


----------



## cesare (May 22, 2013)

Feedback loop


----------



## J Ed (May 22, 2013)

A lot of this white people hating themselves seems almost like some sort of sexual fetish


----------



## J Ed (May 22, 2013)

So apparently this exists... http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/14/1120168/-Race-Sex-and-BDSM-On-Plantation-Retreats-Where-Black-People-Go-to-Serve-Their-White-Masters

Human beings are fucking weird.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 22, 2013)

Just seen this on Twitter. It's off topic, in so far as there is a topic, but it's a follow on from something a dozen pages ago. Here's a picture, apparently of the most recent edition of the London Student. The London Student is the ULU paper and has been the focus of a bitter internal row. This article attacks the ULU Vice President for giving money to a sinister, erm, "racist" "cult"... The AWL.

http://i.imgur.com/1JxzgEN.jpg


----------



## frogwoman (May 22, 2013)

sihhi said:


> You get academic credit sort of like the US version of coursework for going if you are a student depending on your course and age.
> 
> If you are a uni student it costs a more manageable $265.
> 
> ...


 
why is there a shabbat dinner?


----------



## Balbi (May 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> why is there a shabbat dinner?



It's your lot. AGAIN. Tsk.


----------



## frogwoman (May 22, 2013)

Balbi said:


> It's your lot. AGAIN. Tsk.


 
Yeah just struck me as weird because in the UK that would never happen, _ever_, except at a religious thing for my lot (or proddy christians that like to adopt that sort of thing as well)


----------



## Balbi (May 22, 2013)

White American Jews tell all non white people how oppressed they are, and all non Jewish white Americans how oppressive they are.

L O fucking L.


----------



## frogwoman (May 22, 2013)

Balbi said:


> White American Jews tell all non white people how oppressed they are, and all non Jewish white Americans how oppressive they are.
> 
> L O fucking L.


 
don't say that sort of stuff, i'll turn into my dad


----------



## DotCommunist (May 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Yeah just struck me as weird because in the UK that would never happen, _ever_, except at a religious thing for my lot (or proddy christians that like to adopt that sort of thing as well)


 

If I had my way Ian Paisely would be forced to exist on matzos and bumming


----------



## DotCommunist (May 22, 2013)

while having wolfe tones piped into his eyeballs regularly


----------



## Louis MacNeice (May 22, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> If I had my way Ian Paisely would be forced to exist on matzos and bumming


 
Perhaps he does...only it's his little secret.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## Tom A (May 22, 2013)

sihhi said:


>



I think they failed utterly with the use of puzzle pieces for their logo - which is eerily similar to the organisation Autism Speaks, which is almost universally hated by many autistic people and autism rights activists - some (myself not included) even tend to liken the puzzle piece to the Nazi swastika.


----------



## frogwoman (May 22, 2013)

Tom A said:


> I think they failed utterly with the use of puzzle pieces for their logo - which is eerily similar to the organisation Autism Speaks, which is almost universally hated by many autistic people and autism rights activists - some (myself not included) even tend to liken the puzzle piece to the Nazi swastika.


 
arent they the ones who use corporal punishment to try and "cure" autism?


----------



## Tom A (May 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> arent they the ones who use corporal punishment to try and "cure" autism?


Not heard about the corporal punishment bit, but yes, they want to find a "cure" for autism.


----------



## Fruitloop (May 22, 2013)

J Ed said:


> So apparently this exists... http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/14/1120168/-Race-Sex-and-BDSM-On-Plantation-Retreats-Where-Black-People-Go-to-Serve-Their-White-Masters
> 
> Human beings are fucking weird.


That is far more progressive than all the other guff.


----------



## J Ed (May 22, 2013)

Balbi said:


> White American Jews tell all non white people how oppressed they are, and all non Jewish white Americans how oppressive they are.
> 
> L O fucking L.


 
It's like they took the shit people make up on Stormfront and decided to make it real


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 22, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Bit waney atm


 
Danny Dyer weather forecast.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 22, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> LOL jesus christ phil are you having a breakdown or have I touched a nerve?


 
He's probably having one of his "I missed the deadline again, better pretend I'm going wonko so they don't sack me" sessions.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 22, 2013)

cesare said:


> He's only doing what sihhi did last week


 
Not as interestingly or effectively, though, to be fair to sihhi.


----------



## Tom A (May 22, 2013)

This is what I found on my Facebook yesterday, which shared by a friend (as in an actual friend, in spite of their support of privilege theory, though thankfully they don't downplay class):

With the tagline (from the person that this was shared from, not the friend who shared it):



> To all those who think 'but it's just a joke' - this is how your joke supports oppression.


 
Thoughts? I know that making jokes aimed at oppressed minorities is not on but "discussing feelings with like-minded others", isn't that what everyone does from time to time? "Insensitive remarks" - everyone is guilty of insensitive remarks from time to time, and they aren't necessarily at oppressed people. Also still find it hard to believe that this alone directly leads to genocide, it seems like a way of tarring and feathering anyone that offends [individual within oppressed group] with accusations that they are as bad as those whom would round [oppressed people] up, then turn on the showers and fire up the ovens.

Edit to add: "accepting negative information/screening out positive information": I, for one, am more concerned about whether the information is the truth or is a lie, rather than whether it is "positive" or "negative". People do shit things regardless of how many events they qualify for in the Oppression Olympics. Deal with it.


----------



## cesare (May 22, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Not as interestingly or effectively, though, to be fair to sihhi.


That rather depends on whether sihhi is doing the feedback loop on purpose, surely?


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 22, 2013)

cesare said:


> Feedback loop


 
I think "circle jerk" is a better description.
Don't know about you, but I've been followed round supermarkets plenty of times, "despite" being white. I've also watched peoples' attitudes change in line with my accent, then change again when I speak on a subject.
Of course, those liberals in the US who make their living from this _mea culpa_ bullshit aren't prepared to acknowledge that such occurrences are rooted in class, because acknowledging class means acknowledging that an even larger facet of their identities as liberals is perpetuating class cleavage for their own benefit.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 22, 2013)

J Ed said:


> A lot of this white people hating themselves seems almost like some sort of sexual fetish


 
Thing is, the "self-hate" is shallow, it's there merely s an "enabler" for their own prejudice, which is usually class-based.


----------



## cesare (May 22, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I think "circle jerk" is a better description.
> Don't know about you, but I've been followed round supermarkets plenty of times, despite being white. I've also watched peoples' attitudes change in line with my accent, then change again when I speak on a subject.
> Of course, those liberals in the US who make their living from this _mea culpa_ bullshit aren't prepared to acknowledge that such occurrences are rooted in class, because acknowledging class means acknowledging that an even larger facet of their identities as liberals is perpetuating class cleavage for their own benefit.


Yes of course, definitely, I have experienced those things but possibly in a different way because I am female.

When I said feedback loop, I was referring to the dynamics of this thread.


----------



## phildwyer (May 22, 2013)

J Ed said:


> So apparently this exists... http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/14/1120168/-Race-Sex-and-BDSM-On-Plantation-Retreats-Where-Black-People-Go-to-Serve-Their-White-Masters


 
Strıctly no peekıng.

Who can guess how many lınes untıl they mentıon Foucault?

Closest estımate wıns a sıgned copy of Delbert Booth's autobıography, _Owted._


----------



## TruXta (May 22, 2013)

Who opened phil's cage?


----------



## frogwoman (May 22, 2013)

"accepting negative information/screening out positive information" er everyone does this don't they? 

I think there's some truth to the thing in that in a climate where casual racism and discrimination are just accepted as part of everyday life you're going to see more institutionalised racism (or whatever) as well. and that means that people will have less access to housing, jobs etc and less possibility of defending themselves against attacks. which will make it more politically palatable for repressive laws etc to be passed. 

i don't personally see much wrong with it it doesn't seem to be saying x leads to y necessarily does it? except I don't know where "terrorism" fits into the whole thing


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 22, 2013)

cesare said:


> Yes of course, definitely, I have experienced those things but possibly in a different way because I am female.
> 
> When I said feedback loop, I was referring to the dynamics of this thread.


 
As opposed to the dynamics of some of the subjects of, and participants in the thread.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 22, 2013)

don't make me ban you from this thread phil. And turkey.


----------



## frogwoman (May 22, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Thing is, the "self-hate" is shallow, it's there merely s an "enabler" for their own prejudice, which is usually class-based.


 
yeah they're never hating THEMSELVES they're hating other people


----------



## cesare (May 22, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> As opposed to the dynamics of some of the subjects of, and participants in the thread.


Those too.


----------



## treelover (May 22, 2013)

can anyone suggest a theory why there is this growth in what is basically academic identity politics, at a time when in the U.S 40 million are on food stamps and of course food banks and poverty, benefit cuts, are happening here.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Who opened phil's cage?


 
Some weird animal rights fucker.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Who opened phil's cage?


 
just read this post to the tune of 'who let the dogs out'

which amuses only me


----------



## Tom A (May 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> "accepting negative information/screening out positive information" er everyone does this don't they?
> 
> I think there's some truth to the thing in that in a climate where casual racism and discrimination are just accepted as part of everyday life you're going to see more institutionalised racism (or whatever) as well. and that means that people will have less access to housing, jobs etc and less possibility of defending themselves against attacks. which will make it more politically palatable for repressive laws etc to be passed.
> 
> i don't personally see much wrong with it it doesn't seem to be saying x leads to y necessarily does it? except I don't know where "terrorism" fits into the whole thing


I acknowledge there is a lot of fair comment in there. But sometimes it's hard to say with 100% certainty that "[This] is [oppressive]" or "no [this] is not", and in some cases it's pretty far fetched to say that they are actively enabling further [oppression] of [oppressed people].


----------



## frogwoman (May 22, 2013)

> Thoughts? I know that making jokes aimed at oppressed minorities is not on but "discussing feelings with like-minded others", isn't that what everyone does from time to time? "Insensitive remarks" - everyone is guilty of insensitive remarks from time to time, and they aren't necessarily at oppressed people. Also still find it hard to believe that this alone directly leads to genocide, it seems like a way of tarring and feathering anyone that offends [individual within oppressed group] with accusations that they are as bad as those whom would round [oppressed people] up, then turn on the showers and fire up the ovens.




I don't think it is saying that though as far as i'm can tell it's just ranking different types of discrimination. It's a bit simplistic but i don't think it's the worst ive seen from the privilege theory milieu


----------



## frogwoman (May 22, 2013)

Tom A said:


> I acknowledge there is a lot of fair comment in there. But sometimes it's hard to say with 100% certainty that "[This] is [oppressive]" or "no [this] is not", and in some cases it's pretty far fetched to say that they are actively enabling further [oppression] of [oppressed people].


 
it's usually pretty easy for me to tell


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 22, 2013)

treelover said:


> can anyone suggest a theory why there is this growth in what is basically academic identity politics, at a time when in the U.S 40 million are on food stamps and of course food banks and poverty, benefit cuts, are happening here.


 
It's been mentioned many times on this thread.
It's about *CLASS*.
It's fine to be "concerned about", and to academicise about the effects of racism, because that allows you to hive off a single strand of social victims to be concerned about. Being concerned about class, though, that means challenging more than just your assumptions about a single strand of social victims, it means challenging the edifice on which your whole life, and your "privilege" is constructed, rather than just beating your chest about the effects on that single strand.


----------



## Tom A (May 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I don't think it is saying that though as far as i'm can tell it's just ranking different types of discrimination. It's a bit simplistic but i don't think it's the worst ive seen from the privilege theory milieu


Not the worst, no, though maybe I have become a bit hypersensitised to privlege theory, having seen far too much BS associated with it, and how it's used to mercilessly beat down on people for committing the slightest infraction.



> it's usually pretty easy for me to tell


I can usually figure out with something is bang out of order. It's when people go on about, say, the Mr. Creosote sketches from _The Meaning of Live_ being fatphobic is where it gets messy.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 22, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> It's been mentioned many times on this thread.
> It's about *CLASS*.
> It's fine to be "concerned about", and to academicise about the effects of racism, because that allows you to hive off a single strand of social victims to be concerned about, but being concerned about class, that means challenging more than just your assumptions about a single strand of social victims, it means challenging the edifice on which your whole life, and your "privilege" is constructed, rather than just beating your chest about the effects on that single strand.


 
think it might be fair to say that with a lack of a clear working class as a political represented 'labour' force that affects the polity as a whole then recourse to the wheel of bullshit becomes an option?


----------



## Tom A (May 22, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> It's been mentioned many times on this thread.
> It's about *CLASS*.
> It's fine to be "concerned about", and to academicise about the effects of racism, because that allows you to hive off a single strand of social victims to be concerned about. Being concerned about class, though, that means challenging more than just your assumptions about a single strand of social victims, it means challenging the edifice on which your whole life, and your "privilege" is constructed, rather than just beating your chest about the effects on that single strand.


Right on.


----------



## phildwyer (May 22, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> don't make me ban you from this thread phil.


 
I dowt you could frankly.

Only Delbert has the clowt to throw me owt.

And he doesn't seem to be abowt.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 22, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> think it might be fair to say that with a lack of a clear working class as a political represented 'labour' force that affects the polity as a whole then recourse to the wheel of bullshit becomes an option?


 
For the bullshitters, at least.
Thing is, the people who pull this identity politics bullshit, they're from the same class as the professional politicians and bureaucrats who work so hard to try to prevent the formation of a cohesive working class identity. That may seem paranoid, I know, but I do tend to see IPers as part of the problem, not the solution, IYSWIM.


----------



## frogwoman (May 22, 2013)

thing is i can understand why it might become attractive to people who are put off by the traditional left and how some of them use "identity politics" as an excuse to not do anything about sexism, racism within its ranks etc 

sihhi made a few good posts about this a while back in the thread when i made a similar point


----------



## Tom A (May 22, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> For the bullshitters, at least.
> Thing is, the people who pull this identity politics bullshit, they're from the same class as the professional politicians and bureaucrats who work so hard to try to prevent the formation of a cohesive working class identity. That may seem paranoid, I know, but I do tend to see IPers as part of the problem, not the solution, IYSWIM.


You don't mean to say... that all this pushing of identity politics... is just part of a conspiracy to... *divide and rule???*


----------



## Tom A (May 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> thing is i can understand why it might become attractive to people who are put off by the traditional left and how some of them use "identity politics" as an excuse to not do anything about sexism, racism within its ranks etc
> 
> sihhi made a few good posts about this a while back in the thread when i made a similar point


I found it quite attractive (particularly regarding disabled people's identity politics) for a while, after knowing all too well how the left in general can be oblivious to the situations faced by those whom don't have the Privilege Grand Slam of white, hetero, English-speaking, British passport eligible, able-bodied, cis-maleness. This wasn't helped by a long running resentment at how some in the left were happy to downplay LGBT and women's rights in order to cosy up to reactionary Islamist groups which they wanted to be a part of their "united front".


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 22, 2013)

Tom A said:


> You don't mean to say... that all this pushing of identity politics... is just part of a conspiracy to... *divide and rule???*




More "maintain the _status quo_ through 'divide and rule' and other devices", but essentially, yes.


----------



## barney_pig (May 22, 2013)

Tom A said:


> I found it quite attractive (particularly regarding disabled people's identity politics) for a while, after knowing all too well how the left in general can be oblivious to the situations faced by those whom don't have the Privilege Grand Slam of white, hetero, English-speaking, British passport legible, cis-maleness. This wasn't helped by a long running resentment at how some in the left were happy to downplay LGBT and women's rights in order to cosy up to reactionary Islamist groups which they wanted to be a part of their "united front".


I hit this "grand slam" of privilege (and my passport is perfectly legible, probably because it has no stamps as I have never been able to afford to go abroad).
 It strikes me that this whole shit is totally Tory. If with all my privilege, I am still living in a rented shithole, on minimum wage in a part time job, then IT MUST BE MY OWN FAULT! Whilst Laurie and her pals have overcome all that oppression I have been putting on them and succeeded through their own hard work.


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 22, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> I hit this "grand slam" of privilege (and my passport is perfectly legible, probably because it has no stamps as I have never been able to afford to go abroad).
> It strikes me that this whole shit is totally Tory. If with all my privilege, I am still living in a rented shithole, on minimum wage in a part time job, then IT MUST BE MY OWN FAULT! Whilst Laurie and her pals have overcome all that oppression I have been putting on them and succeeded through their own hard work.


 
Aye, since I came across it it's always struck me as peculiarly Thatcherite in a "no such thing as society, it's all about individuals" way. Fans of it - and their relationship with the idea does make the word apposite, as far as I can tell - will tell you how it brings people together but I dunno how, unless it's just to compare hardships (without bothering with much of the _reasons_ such privileges/non-privileges impacts people in different ways).


----------



## cesare (May 22, 2013)

Tom A said:


> You don't mean to say... that all this pushing of identity politics... is just part of a conspiracy to... *divide and rule???*


 
The other part of this is strength. This constant battering/visual reminder of a "kickback" aspect to the emergence of identity politics in the 80s, can be exhausting because in order to fight it [I will be against this thing] or ignore it [despite onslaught] there's no relaxation and it's very draining. The other downside is that when you are weakened by this drip drip drip fight/ignore you are susceptible to finding strength in your own identity - your strongest place. And so the cycle continues.


----------



## Tom A (May 22, 2013)

People say identity politics started in the 80s, but wasn't it more like the 60s, with the civil rights movement in the US, and the emergence of the LGBT rights movement after the Stonewall riots?

Also about identity politics being individualistic, to me it seems to promote a herd mentality within a group - dictating what is deemed oppressive and what is not, and anyone whom tries to respond to being called out by saying "I know an [member of oppressed group] which doesn't find it oppressive" will have their comment dismissed as "derailing".


----------



## frogwoman (May 22, 2013)

cesare said:


> The other part of this is strength. This constant battering/visual reminder of a "kickback" aspect to the emergence of identity politics in the 80s, can be exhausting because in order to fight it [I will be against this thing] or ignore it [despite onslaught] there's no relaxation and it's very draining. The other downside is that when you are weakened by this drip drip drip fight/ignore you are susceptible to finding strength in your own identity - your strongest place. And so the cycle continues.


 
Also I think some of the trot groups make an "identity" for their members which becomes as much part of it as the politics is. I'm not saying this is good or bad btw.


----------



## Tom A (May 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Also I think some of the trot groups make an "identity" for their members which becomes as much part of it as the politics is. I'm not saying this is good or bad btw.


I was never that much of a fan of Trotskyism (the politicos I usually associated myself at my uni were generally wannabe lifestyle anarchists), but after university I made a huge effort to distance myself from political stuff, since it *had* become pretty much my identity, and I was always known by people on campus as that "crazy leftie guy". I wanted people to see me as something much more than my politics, so I had to dismantle a lot of what had been considered my life for the past four years. I have only gradually gotten back into it as I have ended up having to defend myself from very real threats to my quality of life, but even now I want there to be more to my life than politics.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 22, 2013)

a ruinous drug habit maybe?


----------



## TruXta (May 22, 2013)

Lose the Doc Martins?


----------



## DotCommunist (May 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Lose the Doc Martins?


 

are you confusing punk with trotskyism again?


----------



## TruXta (May 22, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> are you confusing punk with trotskyism again?


Am I? Lose the leftie student uniform then.


----------



## phildwyer (May 22, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> are you confusing punk with trotskyism again?


 
TruXta thınks Doc Martıns was an Amerıcan cıvıl rıghts leader.

Let's not dısabuse hım just yet.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 22, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Strıctly no peekıng.
> 
> Who can guess how many lınes untıl they mentıon Foucault?
> 
> Closest estımate wıns a sıgned copy of Delbert Booth's autobıography, _Owted._


 
I clicked Phil's link and NOPED right on out of there. I guess it would be overoptimistic to hope for fuck-all Foucault?


----------



## DotCommunist (May 22, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I clicked Phil's link and NOPED right on out of there. I guess it would be overoptimistic to hope for fuck-all Foucault?


 

i did the foucault/fuckall joke three pages ago.


----------



## phildwyer (May 22, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I clicked Phil's link and NOPED right on out of there. I guess it would be overoptimistic to hope for fuck-all Foucault?


 
Heh, nıce try but no prıze for you.

You'll have to be content wıth _Owt and Abowt, _Delbert's guıde to ramblıng on the Yorkshıre moors.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 22, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> i did the foucault/fuckall joke three pages ago.


 
Oh the praties they grow small over here,

Oh the praties they grow small over here.

Oh the praties they grow small,

And we ate 'em skin an' all,

And they're better than Foucault, over here.


----------



## rekil (May 22, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/337203477568692224



"Oh so you're a racist."

I haven't read it. Is it as bad as people say?


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 22, 2013)

gwan jools


----------



## Fozzie Bear (May 22, 2013)

"Re-reading" is such a hipster gameplay as well, isn't it?

"Oh that? Yeah, I read it _years_ ago."


----------



## phildwyer (May 22, 2013)

Delbert Booth's *Saudade*

There are more of owt than you think.

The best minds of my generation consumed by craving furious half naked starving for owt . 

Who had a band that's about the size of Half Man Half Biscuit but no bigger coz then you sell owt and that matters.

Who have no moral problem with deferring to women or owt.

Who really give a fuck about that deeply exclusionary mentality reflected in the dense jargon and call-owt culture.

Who was doing something just big enough to be good just marginal enough to be owt. The sweet-spot. Like.

Who was really really stupid looking at a picture of someone and going jumping to the conclusion they're owt. 

Who don't get people going "Oh my god you socialists literally want to _ow__t_ people" when you say owt the rich.

Who was likely to walk away thinking something like that is a literal endorsement of owt and that's something that a lot of people feminists included judging by many.

Who failed so dismally at producing any tangible political owt.

Who slammed down the tray of drinks and tore off owt aprons and went scowling owt into the streets.

Who stripped in dark rooms because we wanted owt and were told we were nowt.

Who bared owt breasts to hidden cameras and fought and fought and fought. And fought.

Who literally waited in grim alleys with Half Man Half Owt literally snarling over the speaker system.

Who crossed  the road alone withowt books bare lımbs clear-eyed vision running running walking staggering tripping falling  crashing owt waking up in a pool of vomit from the homes that held our kittens down.

Who filled notebooks with gibberish philosophy and craps of stories to prove we weren't even keeping owt novels close to owt hearts.

Who refused refused refused refused refused refused refused refused refused refused to be owt.

Who never amounted to owt. 

Who were punished for it and spat owt and snarled.

Sara, I'm with you in all intersectional networks who was so owt of vogue at the time of the student movement.

Lara, I'm with you in ill thought owt pseudo-anarchist platitudes. 

Lila, I'm with you in oligarchical tendencies emerged owt of the horizontal networks and who benefitted from them and why.

Andy, I'm with you in laughing at the primark scum who don't get the lingo or owt. 

Adele, I'm with you owt of the closet.

Katie, I'm with you abowt taking everyone who wears  hats or glasses owt to the football stadium and shooting them.

Tara, I'm with you owt of my head.

Alex, I'm with you and a daft meme was meant to be an allegory for even a trace of owt.

We are always owt.

There are  more of us than you owt.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 22, 2013)

*applause*  well done dwyer.

that's a post i never thought i'd make


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 22, 2013)

copliker said:


> "Oh so you're a racist."
> 
> I haven't read it. Is it as bad as people say?


 
my girlfriend rates it, she hasn't mentioned anything about racism and she's pretty heavy on that sort of thing.  i have emailed her to accuse her of racism.  i will let you know what she says.


----------



## JimW (May 22, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> ...  i have emailed her to accuse her of racism...


An indispensable part of any truly loving relationship.


----------



## sihhi (May 22, 2013)

It's here, definitely of its time written in 1968-9, published in 1970, hard to follow the exact argument, relies on some stereotypes to tear down other stereotypes wants to prove "racism is a sexual phenomenon" and that "racism is sexism extended". Of course soon after, black women's liberation movement sought to prove that sexism was racism extended. It's not racism to like reading it though, most of it (including ch6) is not about race.


----------



## butchersapron (May 22, 2013)

Wait till she _re-reads_ the paedo bits.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 22, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> my girlfriend rates it, she hasn't mentioned anything about racism and she's pretty heavy on that sort of thing. i have emailed her to accuse her of racism. i will let you know what she says.


 
she says she hasn't finished reading it and hasn't been racist in the bits she's read yet, so i was forced into a retraction following an angry phone conversation where i tried to explain that the internet said she was racist not me.  sleeping on the fucking sofa tonight, i reckon.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 22, 2013)

It's a fascinating book, arguably the most important radical feminist text. It also has a whole bunch of problematic elements, and some complete weirdness. Sihhi's point above is important: The timing is key. It's early in the feminist movement, and to a large degree it reflects the origins of American feminism in the civil rights and socialist movements and an attempt to give central priority to the oppression of women over the concerns of those movements. Much of the book's argument is an argument both with and against Engels.

Well worth reading. I'm a bit amused that the issue Penny was getting questioned about is the book's attitude towards race. There's a lot to question there, certainly, but there's some even more obviously hair raising stuff in there as well. As ba notes.


----------



## Greebo (May 22, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> <snip>sleeping on the fucking sofa tonight, i reckon.


Sleeping on the no fucking sofa, surely?


----------



## rekil (May 22, 2013)

lauriepenny said:
			
		

> chapter 5 is fucking dodgy. In a 'trying hard and failing abysmally' sort of way. seriously, I have no defence of that chapter, it's unspeakably racist - but the rest I find useful.


If you don't agree that's it's racist then you're probably a misogynyist or something.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 22, 2013)

There's something rather distasteful in the current identity politics trend towards making previous articulations of identity politics beyond the pale because of the wrongheaded way in which they went about asserting the preeminence of their particular oppression.

I mean, really, did anyone actually think that Penny was endorsing Firestone's account of racism? Or that anyone at all reads Firestone because of her "insights" into race? Firestone's views on race were, to put it mildly, rather bizarre and I don't think it's particularly cynical to see them as being largely instrumentalist arguments, asserting the preeminent importance of women's oppression and therefore of a cross-racial women's movement (they were also a reaction to the sexism that was very common in the civil rights movement). As such they are something of an embarrassment, but they aren't the parts of her views that anyone I've ever encountered wants to learn from.

So what exactly is the purpose of "calling out" (urgh) Penny for saying that she likes Firestone's book? If it's just an implication that she hasn't read it, then fine, although I'd be reasonably confident that she has, given how often she's name-checked it. But if it's an assertion that Firestone shouldn't be taken seriously because she misunderstands racism in a confused and more than occasionally offensive way, well that sort of thinking, extended to all forms of oppression, would make a huge portion of interesting and useful writing beyond the pale. It's not far off dismissing Engels because he made some rather obnoxious jokes about gays.


----------



## JimW (May 22, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> There's something rather distasteful in the current identity politics trend towards making previous articulations of identity politics beyond the pale because of the wrongheaded way in which they went about asserting the preeminence of their particular oppression.
> 
> I mean, really, did anyone actually think that Penny was endorsing Firestone's account of racism? Or that anyone at all reads Firestone because of her "insights" into race? Firestone's views on race were, to put it mildly, rather bizarre and I don't think it's particularly cynical to see them as being largely instrumentalist arguments, asserting the preeminent importance of women's oppression and therefore of a cross-racial women's movement (they were also a reaction to the sexism that was very common in the civil rights movement). As such they are something of an embarrassment, but they aren't the parts of her views that anyone I've ever encountered wants to learn from.


I suppose it's easy to want to "catch them out" as that's how the uncharitable reading that a lot of their critiques boil down to come across as well.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 22, 2013)

copliker said:


> If you don't agree that's it's racist then you're probably a misogynyist or something.


 
Like that racist misogynist SpineyNorman bloke.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 22, 2013)

Jesus, they are really giving Penny an unfairly hard time on twitter about this one. One of the occasions where I can sympathise with her (although that sympathy is somewhat limited by a lingering doubt that she'd be above taking such an approach herself if it suited).


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 22, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> So what exactly is the purpose of "calling out" (urgh) Penny for saying that she likes Firestone's book? If it's just an implication that she hasn't read it, then fine, although I'd be reasonably confident that she has, given how often she's name-checked it. But if it's an assertion that Firestone shouldn't be taken seriously because she misunderstands racism in a confused and more than occasionally offensive way, well that sort of thinking, extended to all forms of oppression, would make a huge portion of interesting and useful writing beyond the pale.


 
Identity Politics doesn't do nuance.  It doesn't understand that someone can be right about some things and wrong about others.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 22, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> Identity Politics doesn't do nuance. It doesn't understand that someone can be right about some things and wrong about others.


 
I think it's more that such understanding is deeply selective. Points of view that reflect your own identity politics can be given quite a lot of leeway when it comes to things they say about other people's identity politics. Whereas other people's identity politics, or worse still views hostile towards identity politics, are often read in a manner that more closely resembles trawling for "call out" fodder than engagement.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 22, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I think it's more that such understanding is deeply selective. Points of view that reflect your own identity politics can be given quite a lot of leeway when it comes to things they say about other people's identity politics.


 
are you calling me a racist?


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 22, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> are you calling me a racist?


 
Yes. Also an essentialist and a transphobe.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 22, 2013)

One thing I always liked about Firestone and many of the other early feminist movement writers is that they knew how to write a polemic. No dancing around things. No equivocating. No trying to be diplomatic. Even when they were wrong, which was frequently, they were entertaining and interesting in a way that today's intersectionalista arguments rarely are. Perhaps partially because the intersectionalistas have to be constantly on their guard lest they say something inadvertently that could be seized on as ammunition.


----------



## JimW (May 22, 2013)

Trance-phobia - The Essential Mix. dancehall classic.


----------



## JimW (May 22, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> One thing I always liked about Firestone and many of the other early feminist movement writers is that they knew how to write a polemic. No dancing around things. No equivocating. No trying to be diplomatic. Even when they were wrong, which was frequently, they were entertaining and interesting.


That's exactly what's so infuriating about this wishy-washy point-scoring crap. Must talk over far more interesting marginalised voices than it's ever enabled.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 22, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> One thing I always liked about Firestone and many of the other *early feminist movement writers* is that they knew how to write a polemic. No dancing around things. No equivocating. No trying to be diplomatic. Even when they were wrong, which was frequently, they were entertaining and interesting in a way that today's intersectionalista arguments rarely are. Perhaps partially because the intersectionalistas have to be constantly on their guard lest they say something inadvertently that could be seized on as ammunition.


 

like this?



> They tell us the alternative is to hang in there and struggle, to confront male domination in the counterleft, to fight beside or behind or beneath our brothers—to show ‘em we’re just as tough, just as revolushunerry, just as whatever‐image‐they‐now‐want‐of‐us‐as‐once‐they‐wanted‐us‐to‐be‐feminine‐and‐keep‐up‐the‐home‐fire‐burning. They will bestow titular leadership on our grateful shoulders, whether it’s being a token woman on the Movement Speakers Bureau Advisory Board, or being a Conspiracy groupie or one of the respectable chain-swinging Motor City Nine. Sisters all, with only one real alternative: to seize our own power into our own hands, all women, separate and together, and make the Revolution the way it must be made—no priorities this time, _no suffering group told to wait until after_.


 
its good polemic alright


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 22, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> like this?


 
Yes. It was almost like a house style, across the many and deep political divisions between early versions of what would now be called Radical Feminists, Marxist Feminists and even Liberal Feminists. Going in with the studs showing, as a football bore would say.

I'll forgive people quite a lot of being wrong, and even a fair bit of being a complete maniac, if they do so in an interesting and angry polemic. Unfortunately, if people wrote like that today they'd probably get sent for sensitivity training.


----------



## sihhi (May 22, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> So what exactly is the purpose of "calling out" (urgh) Penny for saying that she likes Firestone's book? If it's just an implication that she hasn't read it, then fine, although I'd be reasonably confident that she has, given how often she's name-checked it. But if it's an assertion that Firestone shouldn't be taken seriously because she misunderstands racism in a confused and more than occasionally offensive way, well that sort of thinking, extended to all forms of oppression, would make a huge portion of interesting and useful writing beyond the pale. It's not far off dismissing Engels because he made some rather obnoxious jokes about gays.


 
I haven't urged calling anyone out for anything. I urge the opposite and have been arguing for a fair while here that the only grounds to challenge these kinds of politics are solid class grounds whether white working-class or immigrant, male or female, disabled or non-disabled etc etc.

Any other territory and it's either wholly meaningless or inevitable failure, as their superior credentials in challegning ability privilege, male privilege, white privilege etc are pulled out. 

LP refused to see how giving a slap up meal via the media for an essentially media-driven far-right organisation such as the EDL was not solid anti-racism.
There's zero point in leading a charge where you have _no_ ground to stand on (Shulamith Firestone wrote some racist things, don't read her). Allows actual criticisms to be mangled.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 22, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I haven't urged calling anyone out for anything.


 
Hold your horses, I wasn't having a pop at you. I was talking about the twitter conversation, not your comments here.


----------



## sihhi (May 22, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Hold your horses, I wasn't having a pop at you. I was talking about the twitter conversation, not your comments here.


 
My apologies. 

Over-sensitive after some of the stuff the past few days.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 22, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Yes. It was almost like a house style, across the many and deep political divisions between early versions of what would now be called Radical Feminists, Marxist Feminists and even Liberal Feminists. Going in with the studs showing, as a football bore would say.
> 
> I'll forgive people quite a lot of being wrong, and even a fair bit of being a complete maniac, if they do so in an interesting and angry polemic. Unfortunately, if people wrote like that today they'd probably get sent for sensitivity training.


 

Morgan was certainly kicking doors in and unashamedly so 




> Let’s run it down. White males are most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today. Yet who is controlling the supposed revolution to change all that? White males (yes, yes, even with their pasty fingers back in black and brown pies again). It could just make one a bit uneasy. It seems obvious that a legitimate revolution must be led by, _made_ by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, yellow, red, and white _women_—with men relating to that the best they can. A genuine Left doesn’t consider anyone’s suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom (and functioning as objectified prizes or coin as well). Goodbye to all that


 


_this_ is not twitter


----------



## Tom A (May 22, 2013)

It's almost like Michael Moore's chapter in "Stupid White Men" entitled "Kill Whitey".

However I still don't see how sharing the sharing the same gender and skin tone as the people "most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today" automatically makes me guilty by association.


----------



## sihhi (May 22, 2013)

Here's a summary of the last NUS Conference:




> I spoke outside conference to a colleague who pointed out several incidents which had made Conference an unsafe space for trans* people. One in particular was campaigning by agents for Labour Students-backed candidates outside hotel rooms, including 8am doorknocking. Either they were willing to disturb non-conference hotel goers, or they had a list of delegate rooms, which could only have come from NUS authorities, which would be particularly concerning. In any case, the activist I spoke to claimed that ‘the [winning candidate’s] campaign had endangered safe spaces…and actively outed several trans* people. This is unacceptable and plays tribute to the lack of mention of liberation issues in the said campaign.’ He concludes that ‘The NUS staff, NEC and NOLS have colluded to create an environment on conference floor, where *only white-cis gendered and able bodied delegates are able to speak freely.’*


 
If this is the case it can only mean a rapid increase in sexism, racism, homophobia and disablism from a the NUS situation decade ago.

More generally I want to ask if intersectionality is winning real gains for the immigrant working-class etc etc, what exactly is going wrong?




> By the second half of conference, an NUS sabbatical officer asked us to ‘thank Endsleigh (the insurance company) for all the help they have given the student movement.’ Never mind the students who had their heads kicked in on Whitehall defending free education, then. This was ten minutes after we had been patiently explained to why we really, really needed an unelected Chief Executive Officer paid £100,000 per year of students’ money to help represent students. After a couple more explosions of management speak, seemingly used without irony, I left to have a pint and mourn student democracy. Outside the conference, the mood was one of general despair at the intractable stage-managed nature of the whole affair.* Independent candidates had got nowhere.* First-time delegates were not even too sure what was going on. A series of errors with voting pads and a barrage of procedural motions including two votes of no confidence in the chair had delayed proceedings into a chilly evening. One Oxford NUS delegate recriminated a ‘lack of engaged debate’, whilst another dismissed the day’s sessions as ‘boring…considering the circumstances.’ The next morning, an independent candidate for student trustee said in her speech that she didn’t have a clue why she was standing there as she was never going to get in given the entrenched bureaucracy.


 
I really don't want to consider the possibility that £8,000 fees are the norm.

Also noticed - not as harsh as J Ed's example from the PhD guy attacking 'honky feminists', but there's a use of terms like 'white folk' and 'white people', it isn't racism, but repeated use leads to an overall sense of downgrading class analysis, not improving it by adding in nuances:

https://twitter.com/Selintifada/status/337253773812568065



> Right now approx 3 million Muslims (4.6% of UK population) are being targets of an ongoing smear campaign. I do not have time for white folk


 
It's hard to understand this kind of stuff - tend to the 3 million who are Muslims, leave alone the 50 million who are white.  Perhaps it is all just psychological therapy and should be ignored, but what about those who will mangle the stream of these kinds of comments for ulterior purposes.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 22, 2013)

Tom A said:


> It's almost like Michael Moore's chapter in "Stupid White Men" entitled "Kill Whitey".


 
Well, with the exception that it was new and angry and reflected a movement that was just forming and developing its ideas, rather than being a weird mixture of smugness and self-flagellation from a rich white dude decades later.


----------



## cesare (May 22, 2013)

sihhi said:


> My apologies.
> 
> Over-sensitive after some of the stuff the past few days.


Same here. Enquiry, any social experimentation going on here in last few days?


----------



## Tom A (May 22, 2013)

> but there's a use of terms like 'white folk' and 'white people', it isn't racism, but repeated use leads to an overall sense of downgrading class analysis


Thus ensuring the ruling class can continue to get away with screwing all working class people over, be they white or of colour, straight or queer, cis or trans, male or female, disabled or non-disabled.


----------



## Tom A (May 22, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Well, with the exception that it was new and angry and reflected a movement that was just forming and developing its ideas, rather than being a weird mixture of smugness and self-flagellation from a rich white dude decades later.


One follows the other I guess. Although your original quote could have easily have been lifted straight from Tumblr.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 22, 2013)

Tom A said:


> One follows the other I guess.


 
At a thirty or forty year remove. I disagree with most of that paragraph from Morgan, but you have to remember the context she was writing in: She wasn't "calling out" someone on twitter for getting their terminology wrong. She was writing at the birth of an angry and radical new movement, coming directly out of the civil rights movement and the socialist movement, both of which were drastically and openly more sexist than any similar movement today, and in opposition to a society which was more sexist than that again. It's a roaring fuck you rather than an entirely worked out analysis, and it certainly isn't the same as some rich white liberal proving their decency by flagellating themselves a bit.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 22, 2013)

yes, its worth reading the whole piece and in context- its new left american and pretty scathing. A fascinating period as a whole tbf, if you have the time tom.

not that I am any student of it...


----------



## JimW (May 22, 2013)

Think I'll just wait for the Molly Crabapple cartoon version.


----------



## rekil (May 22, 2013)

https://www.facebook.com/events/459759637445644/?fref=ts

Not on facebook so dunno, but.




I see something about Aaron Peters asking Vice why Laurie Penny bought yer man dinner.


----------



## Tom A (May 22, 2013)

VICE? Says all I need to know. Hipster tossers.


----------



## JimW (May 22, 2013)

Three quid's a positive bargain by their standards. That's only about 10p per gallon of pish.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 22, 2013)

JimW said:


> Think I'll just wait for the Molly Crabapple cartoon version.


 

The manga version of Rote Armee Faktion must surely be a bestseller as yet unwritten


----------



## butchersapron (May 22, 2013)

Vice, New Internationalist and Red Pepper. _And the greatest of these is Red Pepper. _Astonishing


----------



## andysays (May 22, 2013)

Tom A said:


> View attachment 32869
> 
> this is how your joke supports oppression.


 
How did we get from "this machine kills fascists" written on Woody Guthrie's guitar to "this is how your joke supports oppression" on someone's Facebook page, and is it really progress?

Post your answers on iamaselfrighteousfauxradicaltwat.com


----------



## sihhi (May 22, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Vice, New Internationalist and Red Pepper. _And the greatest of these is Red Pepper. _Astonishing


 
The person speaking on behalf of Red Pepper is Jenny Nelson who wrote this very soft piece on a Laurie Penny's Ralph Miliband Lecture at the LSE.

Highlights:



> Just as Selma James argued in 1972 that feminism is about money, power and economics, Laurie Penny insists that feminists embrace socialism. She is dismayed at what she sees as the recent triumph of ‘right wing feminism’.


 


> As for how the left should organise to deal with sexism, Laurie touched on this but admitted she doesn’t have all the answers. She did suggest that as a key environment for organising, ‘the internet is the most violently misogynist public space we have right now. So like Reclaim the Night, we need to Reclaim the Net.’


----------



## DotCommunist (May 22, 2013)

there is, I think, a really good analysis of misogyny by numbers on the internet to be made. I am not the *man* to make it. Not when i've an interview tomorrow and need to rehearse lines for that, and also not when nobody has ever, for obvious reasons, miso'd me.

been called a nonce a few times though. Thats the ultimate throwdown against male internet opponents generally


----------



## Tom A (May 23, 2013)

andysays said:


> How did we get from "this machine kills fascists" written on Woody Guthrie's guitar to "this is how your joke supports oppression" on someone's Facebook page, and is it really progress?
> 
> Post your answers on iamaselfrighteousfauxradicaltwat.com


Make that iamaselfrighteousfauxradicaltwat*.tumblr.com *


----------



## frogwoman (May 23, 2013)

what is it with tumblr and twats


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 23, 2013)

Has Laurie intersectionalised Woolwich yet?


----------



## cesare (May 23, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Has Laurie intersectionalised Woolwich yet?


Yo dawg. I heard you like intersectionalising the intersectionalism. All we're missing here is tagging her in for a meaningful conversation on class and race relations in Woolwich so she can call us racists and run away 

The onslaught of commentary/counter commentary on urban, twitter, news etc was quite useful in a way cos there was a photo that showed none of my nearest and dearest were there - highly useful when not wanting to add to the general panic, but needing to establish that fact.


----------



## love detective (May 23, 2013)

> Laurie Penny‏@PennyRed
> Top shelf of this bus - people of all races anxiously scrolling through news on devices. And one loud drunk Scotsman on the phone. #woolwich


I never knew buses had shelves

are they stacked progressively?


----------



## rekil (May 23, 2013)

LP said:
			
		

> Stay safe; fuck racism. #woolwich #edl


"Hi Thomas, dinner and chat tomorrow? It's on me!"


----------



## JimW (May 23, 2013)

love detective said:


> I never knew buses had shelves
> 
> are they stacked progressively?


 
Oblique reference to the pornification of society under the patriarchy.


----------



## phildwyer (May 23, 2013)

andysays said:


> How did we get from "this machine kills fascists" written on Woody Guthrie's guitar to "this is how your joke supports oppression" on someone's Facebook page, and is it really progress?


 
Yes.


----------



## Bakunin (May 23, 2013)

love detective said:


> I never knew buses had shelves
> 
> are they stacked progressively?


 






'Will the lifeboats be seated according to privilege..?'


----------



## andysays (May 23, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Yes.


 
That only answers the second part of my question, Phil, and even then is hardly adequate.

If you genuinely think it's progress, maybe you could enlighten us as to why?

Not what one would hope for from a purported academic, though sadly what one would probably expect...


----------



## andysays (May 23, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Make that iamaselfrighteousfauxradicaltwat*.tumblr.com *


 
*That* explains why my link doesn't work


----------



## andysays (May 23, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> 'Will the lifeboats be seated according to privilege..?'


 
Aren't they always?


----------



## J Ed (May 23, 2013)

Interesting/worrying to note that Miliband has condemned the EDL but Cameron hasn't


----------



## phildwyer (May 23, 2013)

andysays said:


> That only answers the second part of my question, Phil, and even then is hardly adequate.
> 
> If you genuinely think it's progress, maybe you could enlighten us as to why?


 
Because I thınk wrıtıng ''Thıs Machıne Kılls Fascısts'' on your guıtar ıs the act of a tosser.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 23, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Jesus, they are really giving Penny an unfairly hard time on twitter about this one.


 
Good.


----------



## andysays (May 23, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Because I thınk wrıtıng ''Thıs Machıne Kılls Fascısts'' on your guıtar ıs the act of a tosser.


 
Overwhelmed by the level of your analysis, Phil. Truly, we are not worthy.

But if you're going to make so little effort here, I won't feel any guilt about simply recycling my comment to you off the Julian Assange thread:



andysays said:


> You plum


----------



## Idris2002 (May 23, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Good.


 
The schadenfreudefulness is terrific.


----------



## Greebo (May 23, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> Because I thınk wrıtıng ''Thıs Machıne Kılls Fascısts'' on your guıtar ıs the act of a tosser.


A bit extreme.  

It's inaccurate - given that a guitar's more an instrument than a machine, and unless it was used as a bludgeon (or the strings were removed and used for garrotting) the most it might kill is fascism rather than fascists.  However, if you own the guitar outright then it's yours to do with as you see fit while you own it - even scrawling inaccurate or pretentious slogans on it.


----------



## rekil (May 24, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/337898964466688000


> Confirmed that the Eton entrance question is for real - and the headmaster of Eton has responded


Confirming that the exam questions that were on Eton's site were actually exam questions that were on Eton's site.



> The piece I've written on Eton refers to my own private school background so I'm expecting a ton of hate mail. But it needed to be said.


Expecting some chicanery here. And how about publishing the hate mail.

Eta:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politic...-question-how-british-elite-are-trained-think


> Had a question like this appeared on that [Brighton College scholarship] test, I know I’d have been torn. I wouldn’t be torn now, of course, I’d write ‘go fuck yourself’ across the paper in my sparkliest pens,


Nah, you wouldn't. Too _ambitious._


----------



## smokedout (May 24, 2013)

copliker said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/337898964466688000
> 
> Confirming that the exam questions that were on Eton's site were actually exam questions that were on Eton's site.
> 
> Nah, you wouldn't. Too _ambitious._


 


> The headmaster of Eton, responding to the furore on Twitter, claimed that this was an intellectual exercise, based on Machiavelli’s _The Prince_, and was taken out of context. It was nothing of the kind.


 
actually it was, its here:http://www.etoncollege.com/userfiles/file/KS 2011 General Paper 1.pdf

that doesn't mean it isn't telling, or that its not a reasonable point to have a dig, but it blatantly was an intellectual exercise, based on Machiavelli’s _The Prince_


----------



## The Pale King (May 24, 2013)

a very odd 'intellectual exercise' (what part of the intellect is it exercising?) and a very revealing one. Good training for Saif Gaddafi types though. What criteria would be used to judge success in this exercise? Thinking up good reasons for shooting demonstrators? Or sounding appropriately prime ministerial in that regretful, damp eyed, quavering Blair style?


----------



## phildwyer (May 24, 2013)

Greebo said:


> A bit extreme.
> 
> It's inaccurate - given that a guitar's more an instrument than a machine, and unless it was used as a bludgeon (or the strings were removed and used for garrotting) the most it might kill is fascism rather than fascists. However, if you own the guitar outright then it's yours to do with as you see fit while you own it - even scrawling inaccurate or pretentious slogans on it.


 
It's a bıt of a stupıd, pathetıc and self-aggrandızıng slogan though ınnıt.

If Laurıe Penny had wrıtten ıt on her keyboard everyone would be mockıng her mercılessly.

In fact I bet andysays _has _got ıt wrıtten on hıs keyboard. Or hıs forehead.


----------



## rekil (May 24, 2013)

Renowned fashbasher billy b.


----------



## butchersapron (May 24, 2013)

This machine votes lib-dem


----------



## where to (May 24, 2013)

I think the guy from Ocean Colour Scene wrote it on his guitar too.....


----------



## Greebo (May 24, 2013)

copliker said:


> Renowned fashbasher billy b.


It seems a bit odd to me that somebody who plays a guitar for at least part of their living feels the need to sign the thing.


----------



## rekil (May 24, 2013)

Greebo said:


> It seems a bit odd to me that somebody who plays a guitar for at least part of their living feels the need to sign the thing.


That's our Billy. Always a bit odd, always the same.


----------



## Greebo (May 24, 2013)

copliker said:


> That's our Billy. Always a bit odd, always the same.


Yes, but there's odd and there's really odd. I don't even play my guitar much but I'd be able to pick it out of similar ones. Signing your own guitar is on a par with tattooing your name on your baby's forehead, you just don't do it.


----------



## Tom A (May 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This machine votes lib-dem


And subsequently regretted doing so. As did I.


----------



## rekil (May 24, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Yes, but there's odd and there's really odd. I don't even play my guitar much but I'd be able to pick it out of similar ones. Signing your own guitar is on a par with tattooing your name on your baby's forehead, you just don't do it.


Maybe he was having a raffle?


----------



## Greebo (May 24, 2013)

copliker said:


> Maybe he was having a raffle?


No need to sign the front, he could have signed the back.


----------



## rekil (May 24, 2013)

Greebo said:


> No need to sign the front, he could have signed the back.


And depreciate its raffleability? You mad?


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 24, 2013)

Tom A said:


> And subsequently regretted doing so. As did I.


 
I'm assuming you didn't also write a book about how we are a classless society and the only way forward for the UK left was to embrace patriotism though did you?


----------



## Tom A (May 24, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I'm assuming you didn't also write a book about how we are a classless society and the only way forward for the UK left was to embrace patriotism though did you?


No. However I still admire BB and like his music, even if I don't 100% agree with all of his political beliefs today.


----------



## DrRingDing (May 24, 2013)

copliker said:


> Renowned fashbasher billy b.


 
What's 'tascists' a new type of posh biscuit?


----------



## Greebo (May 24, 2013)

DrRingDing said:


> What's 'tascists' a new type of posh biscuit?


People who discriminate against moustaches?


----------



## DrRingDing (May 24, 2013)




----------



## Sue (May 24, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> *It's a bıt of a stupıd, pathetıc and self-aggrandızıng slogan though ınnıt.*
> 
> If Laurıe Penny had wrıtten ıt on her keyboard everyone would be mockıng her mercılessly.
> 
> In fact I bet andysays _has _got ıt wrıtten on hıs keyboard. Or hıs forehead.


 
You'd need to take that up with Woody Guthrie...


----------



## andysays (May 24, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> It's a bıt of a stupıd, pathetıc and self-aggrandızıng slogan though ınnıt.
> 
> If Laurıe Penny had wrıtten ıt on her keyboard everyone would be mockıng her mercılessly.
> 
> In fact I bet andysays _has _got ıt wrıtten on hıs keyboard. Or hıs forehead.


 
To write it on your guitar in the early 1940's when Woody Guthrie did requires more of an act of imagination then most people would be capable of (even if it was inspired by inscriptions painted on the sides of airplanes used in the Spanish Civil War).

If Laurie Penny did have it written on her keyboard today (I have no idea on this either way) she would deserve to be mocked mercilessly.

And unfortunately, phil, you lose your bet. I don't have it written on my keyboard, my guitar or my forehead, but it is etched metaphorically on my heart, just above the line which reads

Boredom is Always Counter-Revolutionary​ 
and below

Only Anarchists are Pretty​


----------



## Greebo (May 24, 2013)

Sue said:


> You'd need to take that up with Woody Guthrie...


Seeing as that would involve conversing with the dead (or at least appearing to do so), somehow I don't think Dwyer would be up for that.


----------



## Sue (May 24, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Seeing as that would involve conversing with the dead (or at least appearing to do so), somehow I don't think Dwyer would be up for that.


 
Oh I don't know, he strikes me as a man of unusual talents.


----------



## Greebo (May 24, 2013)

Sue said:


> Oh I don't know, he strikes me as a man of unusual talents.


I didn't say that Dwyer couldn't, I said he wouldn't. Shall we get back to the thread's subject? He's really not worth argueing about.


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 24, 2013)

where to said:


> I think the guy from Ocean Colour Scene wrote it on his guitar too.....


More like his dad wrote 'This machine has for three years built up an operational legend of having killed fascists whilst scrupulously collating information on other stringed instruments which have claimed to have been involved in fascist-killing'.


----------



## Bakunin (May 24, 2013)

copliker said:


> Expecting some chicanery here. And how about publishing the hate mail.


 
You're trying to oppress her with demands for actual evidence?

Sounds more like she's warming up to start dismissing any and all criticism, regardless of fairness and accuracy, before it's even been voiced, to me.


----------



## Greebo (May 24, 2013)

copliker said:


> And depreciate its raffleability? You mad?


Or temporarily remove the strings, sign the label inside the guitar body (via the sound hole) refasten the strings, job done: One visible signature without defacement.


----------



## newbie (May 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Surely the way to solve the problem is to demand another toilet for men - not to simply change the label on an existing toilet how will that help anybody of whatever gender?


I'm catching up the last fortnight or so of meanderings of this thread, so this is out of sequence,

Do any of the intellectually/educationally privileged here know if there's been any contemporary examination of the politics of the toilet, taking the intersections into account? Preferably without lavatory 'humour'.

There's obvious scope for looking at the class and gender dimensions of provision, and the expectations contained in language (lavatory/loo/bog) and at toilets for those with disabilities. And then there's the (imo utterly disgusting and uncivilised) attrition of the formerly widespread public toilet, now judged for their profit/loss rather than as a public service and largely outsourced to 'for customer only' pubs and cafes. Provision of public drinking water comes into that too- few parks seem to have old fashioned drinking fountains these days. And then there's the politics of what gets scrawled on the walls.  I've never previously really thought about toilet arrangements for transgendered people, but there's clearly a (political) issue there.

Beyond that, in this country there's an almost universal concept of what a toilet is and should be. Around the world plenty of cultures prefer to squat rather than sit, aim at the floor not the wall, use a bidet in preference to paper and (for all I know) probably much else besides. Are universities and other places where there are high numbers of (for want of a better word) foreigners, or of locals with different cultural expectations, making any efforts to cater for their preferences? If not, why not?





There must be some carbon/energy/sewage farm efficiency implications of paper-v-water, and maybe health stats relating to squatting-v-sitting.

Has anyone published on the politics of all this?


----------



## Belushi (May 25, 2013)

> Are universities and other places where there are high numbers of (for want of a better word) foreigners, or of locals with different cultural expectations, making any efforts to cater for their preferences? If not, why not?


 
At the Uni I used to work at we had signs in all the toilets asking students not to squat on the seats.


----------



## JimW (May 25, 2013)

Squatter's rights!


----------



## seventh bullet (May 25, 2013)

newbie said:


> And then there's the (imo utterly disgusting and uncivilised) attrition of the formerly widespread public toilet, now judged for their profit/loss rather than as a public service and largely outsourced to 'for customer only' pubs and cafes. Provision of public drinking water comes into that too- few parks seem to have old fashioned drinking fountains these days. And then there's the politics of what gets scrawled on the walls.


 
(((Cottagers)))


----------



## JHE (May 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> At the Uni I used to work at we had signs in all the toilets asking students not to squat on the seats.


 
At a language school where I worked the notices had helpful diagrams to encourage sitting and discourage squatting.


----------



## JimW (May 25, 2013)

Remember looking at various designs for non-water-using hygenic toilets when I worked for that rural development org. Nightsoil was still an essential part of the fertiliser load used in the fields where we worked, but in the system then current where toilet combined with pig pen would only get a year's grace before being applied, whereas advice is it needs two years before any dangerous pathogens etc are dead. So there were these sorts where you dig two pits and have a shed thing that can be shifted from one to the other as you rotate usage - shitting into one, digging out t'other and muck-spreading it. this will be universal post communism, even in tower blocks


----------



## Bakunin (May 25, 2013)

newbie said:


> And then there's the politics of what gets scrawled on the walls.


 

'For a good time, call the less genuine members of the Westboro Baptist Church. Or possibly one of many, many leading British far-right politico's.'


----------



## newbie (May 25, 2013)

JHE said:


> At a language school where I worked the notices had helpful diagrams to encourage sitting and discourage squatting.


as they're not designed for squatting there must be H&S implications, so I can understand that.  I'm hoping someone has tried to unravel why they're not designed to be inclusive of other traditions, and whether they should be.


----------



## JHE (May 25, 2013)

newbie said:


> as they're not designed for squatting there must be H&S implications, so I can understand that. I'm hoping someone has tried to unravel why they're not designed to be inclusive of other traditions, and whether they should be.


 
Why _what_ are not designed to be inclusive of other traditions? Loos? If you ask me it's sheer bloody anglo-centric arrogance, chauvinism, racism and islamophobblewobble. Do you know some loos in Britain have still not been moved to ensure that the users do not face Mecca? It's an outrage!


----------



## newbie (May 25, 2013)

I don't know if it's an outrage or not; that's why I want to read the results of someone else's research & deep thought.


----------



## Belushi (May 25, 2013)

In India you sometimes see toilets that can be both squatted and sat on.  Maybe a national programme of replacing our eurocentric western imperialist loos with these more inclusive wc's would both make us a more tolerant nation and provide the economy with a much needed boost.


----------



## phildwyer (May 25, 2013)

Greebo said:


> I didn't say that Dwyer couldn't, I said he wouldn't.


 
Correct on both counts.

I dıd speak wıth Allen Gınsburg once, but he wasn't dead at that tıme.

And I dıd speak wıth Bılly Bragg once too, but he dıdn't have anythıng stupıd wrıtten on hıs guıtar at the tıme.

I wonder how many other Urbanıtes have spoken wıth famous dead poets whose guıtars lacked ıdıotıc slogans?


----------



## phildwyer (May 25, 2013)

newbie said:


> Do any of the intellectually/educationally privileged here know if there's been any contemporary examination of the politics of the toilet, taking the intersections into account? Preferably without lavatory 'humour'.
> 
> There's obvious scope for looking at the class and gender dimensions of provision, and the expectations contained in language (lavatory/loo/bog) and at toilets for those with disabilities. And then there's the (imo utterly disgusting and uncivilised) attrition of the formerly widespread public toilet, now judged for their profit/loss rather than as a public service and largely outsourced to 'for customer only' pubs and cafes. Provision of public drinking water comes into that too- few parks seem to have old fashioned drinking fountains these days. And then there's the politics of what gets scrawled on the walls. I've never previously really thought about toilet arrangements for transgendered people, but there's clearly a (political) issue there.


 
I have gıven consıderable thought to thıs matter.

It seems to me that all toılets ought to be unısex. Quıte apart from the human rıghts ıssue, there ıs a pragmatıc consıderatıon: Cleanlıness.

Where do we fınd the cleanest toılets ın the world?

That's rıght: on aırplanes.

And apart from theır unrıvalled cleanlıness, what else ıs unıque about aırplane toılets?

That's rıght: they are unısex.

Although ıt may also be because people suspect that there mıght be cameras ın them.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 25, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> More like his dad wrote 'This machine has for three years built up an operational legend of having killed fascists whilst scrupulously collating information on other stringed instruments which have claimed to have been involved in fascist-killing'.


 
A machine called Orwell, eh?


----------



## J Ed (May 25, 2013)

http://www.penny-red.com/post/51296503263/in-these-sour-times-islamophobia-and-the-woolwich

Displacement really is the order of the day.


----------



## J Ed (May 25, 2013)

If I don't acknowledge it, it won't exist - just keep calling acknowledging the existence of _it _racist and _it_ will go away... whatever _it _is


----------



## JimW (May 25, 2013)

Glad she managed to work a couple of references to writing a book in there too. All grist to the self-promoter's mill.


----------



## treelover (May 25, 2013)

Why didn't this dreadful murder of an old Muslim man gain media traction?


----------



## treelover (May 25, 2013)

good piece she quotes from Ash, but this bit about anglicising names has a long tradition in the Uk, with Jews, Polish, Hungarian, etc changing their name, my next door neighbour when I was young, changed their name from Janiki to James.


----------



## sihhi (May 25, 2013)

This a sample of the incisive writing LP trumpts in that column:

"Later on, a coach carrying members of the EDL is attacked as it goes through Stepney Green, its windows smashed and placards and traffic cones hurled inside by young Asian men who do not bother to cover their faces: confident, perhaps, that the retreating proto-fascists will not be able to tell them apart anyway."


----------



## J Ed (May 25, 2013)

I liked the bit by Ash too, but the rest of the piece just belies total ignorance of reality. The two terrorists clearly are not victims of paranoid delusions. They were attached to established groups and established networks which have become a part of institutions in a way that would not have been possible if people like her hadn't denied the possibility of that or called the pointing out of the existence of it racist.


----------



## J Ed (May 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This a sample of the incisive writing LP trumpts in that column:
> 
> "Later on, a coach carrying members of the EDL is attacked as it goes through Stepney Green, its windows smashed and placards and traffic cones hurled inside by young Asian men who do not bother to cover their faces: confident, perhaps, that the retreating proto-fascists will not be able to tell them apart anyway."


 
What does proto-fascist even mean? Does the EDL bus have a timemachine?


----------



## Hocus Eye. (May 25, 2013)

JimW said:


> Glad she managed to work a couple of references to writing a book in there too. All grist to the self-promoter's mill.


It is her blog. She can use it any way she wants. I thought her post was excellent including the comment from her friend Ash.


----------



## JimW (May 25, 2013)

I suspect part of the reason that horrible murder of the elderly bloke in Brum hasn't had quite the national purchase yet is that seems while a racial motive is one line of inquiry they have little to go on yet. Which compares to someone stating their motives calmly to a camera phone whilst stood with bloodied hands over the body etc. So while don't doubt racist violence is under-reported, hard to make the case conclusively comparing these two incidents.


----------



## The Pale King (May 25, 2013)

She mentions that she's written on the EDL before, and links to an old article. But she dosen't mention she's met and interviewed Steven Lennon / Robinson / Cuntface. Why so coy all of a sudden?


----------



## sihhi (May 25, 2013)

Weak piece, aimless quote:



> I haven’t blocked any of you because I want you to know that I’m calling you out as fascists.
> I hate that I’ve seen friends change their FB names to sound more anglicised: I hate that so many POC I know are rushing to assert “Britishness” as their primary identity. I hate that I feel like I have to insist on the “due process” of law (which I think is fundamentally violent and unjust anyway) because people are calling for torture. I hate trying to pretend like torture and killing aren’t things that the police do everyday anyway.


 
"I want you to know I'm calling you out as fascists" - so that's a campaign to isolate you and send you to Coventry, warning your trade unions about your fascism, attempting to block your organisational efforts by sane and focused class means ... no, not exactly, it's sending a note on facebook so everyone can see me personally doing it.

Reads like an attempt to impose and assert a non-British and (supposedly) all encompassing POC-identity. Not working, I fear, if the aim is to stop racism and unite across ethnic lines.


----------



## JimW (May 25, 2013)

Hocus Eye. said:


> It is her blog. She can use it any way she wants. I thought her post was excellent including the comment from her friend Ash.


 
I know she can. Remains the sort of self-promotion I find indicative.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 25, 2013)

newbie said:


> I'm catching up the last fortnight or so of meanderings of this thread, so this is out of sequence,
> 
> Do any of the intellectually/educationally privileged here know if there's been any contemporary examination of the politics of the toilet, taking the intersections into account? Preferably without lavatory 'humour'.
> 
> ...


 
Probably not what you're looking for but I found this interesting and amusing (though I'm a bit unusual on this score - love my toilet humour - find farts amusing etc so it might not be for everyone) if not especially rigorous in its analysis.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 25, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.penny-red.com/post/51296503263/in-these-sour-times-islamophobia-and-the-woolwich
> 
> Displacement really is the order of the day.


 



			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> And fuck anyone who believes that violence is an answer to violence.


 
Fuck militant antifascists then is it Laurie?


----------



## love detective (May 25, 2013)

Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> And fuck anyone who believes that violence is an answer to violence.


 
_this_, is why we can't have nice things


----------



## seventh bullet (May 25, 2013)

She'll invite the EDL to pub lunches instead.


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## Bakunin (May 25, 2013)

love detective said:


> _this_, is why we can't have nice things


 

Like a revolution, for example.

Those who fought Fascism in Spain are probably turning in their graves at the thought of Penny Dreadful posing as the voice of _any_ generation.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 25, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> She'll invite the EDL to pub lunches instead.


 

killing them with red meat- a subtle plan


----------



## JHE (May 25, 2013)

> I hate trying to pretend like torture and killing aren’t things that the police do everyday anyway


 

Do Penny and her ilk really believe that Plod tortures and kills every day?


----------



## Bakunin (May 25, 2013)

JHE said:


> Do Penny and her ilk really believe that Plod tortures and kills every day?


 
I doubt it, but she's always been heavy on the hyperbole and short on the facts.


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## JimW (May 25, 2013)

She practically lives in exile in New York out of fear of British police death squads who would love nothing more than to silence such a courageous journalistic voice.


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## DotCommunist (May 25, 2013)

bob cryer/klaus barbie


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## rekil (May 25, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> She mentions that she's written on the EDL before, and links to an old article. But she dosen't mention she's met and interviewed Steven Lennon / Robinson / Cuntface. Why so coy all of a sudden?


She says she spent months "fussing" over that ar'icle, ie chasing Thomas for a chat. Months. 

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/273895253998710784


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## rekil (May 25, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> She'll invite the EDL to pub lunches instead.


No throwing punches, more EDL pub lunches.


----------



## Bakunin (May 25, 2013)

JimW said:


> She practically lives in exile in New York out of fear of British police death squads who would love nothing more than to silence such a courageous journalistic voice.


 

I thought it was some 'hate site' called Urban75.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 25, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> I thought it was some 'hate site' called Urban75.


 

cesspit of hate and unexamined privilege


----------



## JimW (May 25, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> I thought it was some 'hate site' called Urban75.


 
All the forces of darkness swarm around the last beacon of integrity and decency.


----------



## Bakunin (May 25, 2013)

copliker said:


> She says she spent months "fussing" over that ar'icle, ie chasing Thomas for a chat. Months.
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/273895253998710784


 

Doesn't say much for how seriously she's taken that a publicity tart like Tommy Robinson has to be coaxed that much for that long before he thinks she's worth bothering with. Were all the serious journalists busy or could he just not be that arsed?


----------



## DotCommunist (May 25, 2013)

well its either a toss up between when he was free from judicial appointments or when he could get a booking at his local Toby Carvery


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## Delroy Booth (May 25, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Doesn't say much for how seriously she's taken that a publicity tart like Tommy Robinson has to be coaxed that much for that long before he thinks she's worth bothering with. Were all the serious journalists busy or could he just not be that arsed?


 
Yeah this is a guy who'll turn up for pretty much any interview for £50 expenses and/or a free meal. His minor celebrity is all that kept the EDL on life-support these last months. Perhaps the "fussing" was over who would publish said interview.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 25, 2013)

copliker said:


> No throwing punches, more EDL pub lunches.


----------



## Bakunin (May 25, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Yeah this is a guy who'll turn up for pretty much any interview for £50 expenses and/or a free meal. His minor celebrity is all that kept the EDL on life-support these last months. Perhaps the "fussing" was over who would publish said interview.


 

He'd turn up to the opening of an envelope if it advanced his 'career' for him.

And yet the 'voice of a generation' has to spend ages getting his attention.


----------



## JimW (May 25, 2013)

But look at how Tommy's career was on a relentless upward surge, just like the EDL itself, until that fateful steak and chips with LP brought the whole sorry edifice crashing down in a gale of coruscating prose.


----------



## Bakunin (May 25, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> well its either a toss up between when he was free from judicial appointments or when he could get a booking at his local Toby Carvery


 

'Try the porridge. It's excellent today...'

(And tomorrow. And perhaps for a good while afterwards...).


----------



## DotCommunist (May 25, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Yeah this is a guy who'll turn up for pretty much any interview for £50 expenses and/or a free meal. His minor celebrity is all that kept the EDL on life-support these last months. Perhaps the "fussing" was over who would publish said interview.


 

luckily Vice would publish the nutritional contents of a tin of Nurrishment if it got them 30 seconds attention


----------



## DotCommunist (May 25, 2013)

JimW said:


> But look at how Tommy's career was on a relentless upward surge, just like the EDL itself, until that fateful steak and chips with LP brought the whole sorry edifice crashing down in a gale of coruscating prose.


 

side of onion rings was the coup de grace


----------



## Bakunin (May 25, 2013)

JimW said:


> a gale of coruscating prose.


 

Or a blizzard of bullshit, take your pick.


----------



## sihhi (May 25, 2013)

Some excellent intersectional anti-fascism:



> When the opportunity to do this interview came up, I hesitated. As a reporter, I was fascinated by the possibility of getting to see the pocks and pores on the human face of British fascism, but as an anti-fascist, I’m aware that UK organisers have maintained a long tradition of refusing to grant any sort of media or speaking platform to the far-right. The "no platform" principle keeps right-wing extremists on the fringe by denying them the legitimacy they crave. No room for racists, neither in the public conversation nor on the streets. It’s part of a strategy that has been successful in driving back wave after wave of far-right organisations in this country down the years.


 


> He orders the most expensive steak on the menu, with an enormous plate of cheesy potato skins, and chuckles that this is why he likes to meet left-wing journalists: so he can have dinner on their dollar.


 


> "I want to see them, and I want them to see us,” says Hamid Soorghali, 22, an Iranian-born British student.


 


> Lennon begins to argue finer points of the Koran with my student companions.


 



> When I return, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is trying to explain the vital difference between attacking Muslims in the street and "real racism" to my student journalist friends. I find myself getting angry. Worse, I'm engaging with Lennon on his terms, which is precisely what he wants.


 


> Lennon offers us a lift back to the station in his BMW. On the way, he takes us on a little detour around Bury Park, an area of Luton with a large immigrant population, and points to all the mosques, shaking his head, telling us how violent they all are. “This is the Islamic centre, the most extreme mosque,” he says, pointing to a huge building down the street. “Um - it says it’s a church?” I say. He tells us that the mosque is somewhere behind the church. It's like going on a guided bus-tour with a cracked-out stormtrooper.


 
In short:



> The EDL is finished as a political force. That much was obvious within five minutes of meeting its leader, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon


----------



## DotCommunist (May 25, 2013)

I bet he had the kronenburg as well, rather than the cheaper fosters. More evidence of his degeneracy.

Co authored a parody of that particular piece, felt slightly guilty for the constant lampooning but re-reading it makes me think we could have gone far harsher


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## agricola (May 25, 2013)

sihhi said:


> In short:


 
Having read that piece, all I could think of was Golgafrincham Ark Ship B.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 25, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I bet he had the kronenburg as well, rather than the cheaper fosters. More evidence of his degeneracy.
> 
> Co authored a parody of that particular piece, felt slightly guilty for the constant lampooning but re-reading it makes me think we could have gone far harsher


 
Post it up then - don't be shy


----------



## DotCommunist (May 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Post it up then - don't be shy


 

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...r-workers-girder.293550/page-34#post-11753462

shocked at you not reading your Girder. Re-education becons


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 25, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...r-workers-girder.293550/page-34#post-11753462
> 
> shocked at you not reading your Girder. Re-education becons


 
Sorry comrade


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 25, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...r-workers-girder.293550/page-34#post-11753462
> 
> shocked at you not reading your Girder. Re-education becons


 
Needs to be posted on this thread in full though so Laurie reads it.


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## DotCommunist (May 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Needs to be posted on this thread in full though so Laurie reads it.


 

then do it, I'm far too retiring and shy to pimp collaborative work


ahem


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 25, 2013)

> *Louisa Pfennig hits Berlin (1925)*
> 
> After spending three days in the beating heart of the cabaret scene in Europe it was time for me to be rudely brought down to view the pockmarked visage of the new volkish right in Germany. My bohemian lifestyle among the artistes and activists of Weimar Berlin seemed a world away as I agreed to meet the rising star of German fascism in an exorbitant Munich restaurant.
> 
> ...


----------



## newbie (May 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Probably not what you're looking for but I found this interesting and amusing (though I'm a bit unusual on this score - love my toilet humour - find farts amusing etc so it might not be for everyone) if not especially rigorous in its analysis.



tvm.  a bit tangential to what I've been wondering about (hasn't he even noticed there are more interesting questions than his rather laboured french/english/german joke?), but good to see he acknowledges that toilets are an ideological battleground


----------



## newbie (May 26, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I have gıven consıderable thought to thıs matter.
> 
> It seems to me that all toılets ought to be unısex. Quıte apart from the human rıghts ıssue, there ıs a pragmatıc consıderatıon: Cleanlıness.
> 
> ...


otoh portaloos, also unisex, are usually vile.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 26, 2013)

if you are onsite and need to shift that tricky five coffees and a big breakfast shit, thunder boxes are like a gift from heaven.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 26, 2013)

I did a bit of work in Belgium once and was well impressed by the bogs. They had those outdoor urinals that you've started to see in that London now (looked a bit like a bus stop - I was so impressed that I took a pic of them - not noticing that a bloke was walking into it as I was preparing to take the shot - he didn't look impressed!). But most impressive were the shitters - the ones in the factory I was working in had circular seats and after you'd laid your cable, when you pulled the flush, the seat rotated through this cleaning device at the back. It was cool as fuck, I sometimes went for a shit when I didn't even need one just so I could use it lol

It was like this:


----------



## andysays (May 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I did a bit of work in Belgium once and was well impressed by the bogs. They had those outdoor urinals that you've started to see in that London now (looked a bit like a bus stop - I was so impressed that I took a pic of them - not noticing that a bloke was walking into it as I was preparing to take the shot - he didn't look impressed!). But most impressive were the shitters - the ones in the factory I was working in had circular seats and after you'd laid your cable, when you pulled the flush, the seat rotated through this cleaning device at the back. It was cool as fuck, *I sometimes went for a shit when I didn't even need one just so I could use it* lol


 
Sometimes I worry about you, Spiney. I'd say maybe you should get out more, but that obviously doesn't quite capture it...

(that is an interesting toilet seat innovation, but I certainly won't be travelling to Belgium anytime soon to check it out)


----------



## treelover (May 26, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Yeah this is a guy who'll turn up for pretty much any interview for £50 expenses and/or a free meal. His minor celebrity is all that kept the EDL on life-support these last months. Perhaps the "fussing" was over who would publish said interview.


 
in the video of him being 'escorted' by his minders thru Newcastle, the king of the EDL...


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What does proto-fascist even mean? Does the EDL bus have a timemachine?


 
I think that she meant that they're crypto-fascists, not Kapp _putschists_.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 26, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> She mentions that she's written on the EDL before, and links to an old article. But she dosen't mention she's met and interviewed Steven Lennon / Robinson / Cuntface. Why so coy all of a sudden?


 
I think she got a lot of shit for doing it, so keeps it a bit quiet. Not coyness, just (unusually for her) a modicum of self-awareness.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 26, 2013)

love detective said:


> _this_, is why we can't have nice things


 
At least we all now know for sure that if La Pennionara appears beside us on the barricades, she'll be expecting us to protect her, but we won't be able to expect the same courtesy in return.

Fragging, comrade? The grenade slipped from my hand due to a surfeit of revolutionary fervour, comrade. Honest!


----------



## DotCommunist (May 26, 2013)

andysays said:


> Sometimes I worry about you, Spiney. I'd say maybe you should get out more, but that obviously doesn't quite capture it...
> 
> (that is an interesting toilet seat innovation, but I certainly won't be travelling to Belgium anytime soon to check it out)


 

could be worse, my brother insists on christening all his new contract cleaning places with a wank in the bogs. Poo tourism seems so passe after hearing that


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Fuck militant antifascists then is it Laurie?


 
It's the sort of thing she's come out with that makes pacifism seem such a pusillanimous option. It refuses to acknowledge that sometimes violence is the only appropriate solution/reaction, rather than sitting in a circle singing _kumbayah_.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 26, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> cesspit of hate and unexamined privilege


 
Cesspit of hate, unexamined privilege, misogyny and even a couple of racists.


----------



## J Ed (May 26, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> It's the sort of thing she's come out with that makes pacifism seem such a pusillanimous option. It refuses to acknowledge that sometimes violence is the only appropriate solution/reaction, rather than sitting in a circle singing _kumbayah_.


 
It sort of makes sense though, doesn't it? Her whole ideology and now career is dependent upon the worship of real and imagined victimhood. If people stand up and start fighting back against the people who are fucking them over then she's out of a job.


----------



## andysays (May 26, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> could be worse, my brother insists on christening all his new contract cleaning places with a wank in the bogs. Poo tourism seems so passe after hearing that


 
Not sure if  or  is the appropriate response to that...


----------



## andysays (May 26, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Cesspit of hate, unexamined privilege, misogyny and even a couple of racists.


 
At least we're inclusive in our bigotry


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> It sort of makes sense though, doesn't it? Her whole ideology and now career is dependent upon the worship of real and imagined victimhood. If people stand up and start fighting back against the people who are fucking them over then she's out of a job.


 
Fair point. Also, a claimed pacifism serves to shore up that sense of victimhood she has, when as a member of the press, she gets "oppressed" by the OB at demos, or when she does a runner from a story because it's not worth getting (in her estimation) nicked for, or having her head split for.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 26, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> could be worse, my brother insists on christening all his new contract cleaning places with a wank in the bogs. Poo tourism seems so passe after hearing that


 
The lagger that used to work with me was that sort of dirty fucker. Used to pull the head off it in the bogs regularly, and was quite proud of the fact.

My dad was working at the same factory (but not for the same contractors) once when I was there one day when we were in the smoke hut he said to my dad, 'have you ever had a wank in the toilets by the canteen'. I was drinking a can of pop and it came out of my nose and I don't think the old man knew what to say!

He was also a thick fucker but a very good sport and so ended up more often than not being the victim of the practical jokes that make that kind of work bearable.


----------



## rekil (May 27, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/339006835921141761

"Stuck in a pen with the #EDL. Doing some interviews. Lots of angry noisy chanting. Many people here say they vote UKIP."


----------



## weepiper (May 27, 2013)

copliker said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/339006835921141761
> 
> "Stuck in a pen with the #EDL. Doing some interviews. Lots of angry noisy chanting. Many people here say they vote UKIP."


 

Not really getting this no platform thing huh.


----------



## JimW (May 27, 2013)

copliker said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/339006835921141761
> 
> "Stuck in a pen with the #EDL. Doing some interviews. Lots of angry noisy chanting. Many people here say they vote UKIP."


 
Like how her fan had to clarify the reasons she was glad LP is stuck in the kettle


----------



## cesare (May 27, 2013)

copliker said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/339006835921141761
> 
> "Stuck in a pen with the #EDL. Doing some interviews. Lots of angry noisy chanting. Many people here say they vote UKIP."


There is a God


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 27, 2013)

Wtf? Why? What on earth is this going to do to help anything? I mean even the pretense of no platform is being discarded. Fucks sake.


----------



## frogwoman (May 27, 2013)

She should be ashamed of herself.


----------



## cesare (May 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> She should be ashamed of herself.


She's got no shame. I hope she gets mistaken for fash.


----------



## butchersapron (May 27, 2013)

Interviews means talking to people then? In that case I did a whole load of EDL interviews on Saturday. Where's *my* parade?


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> She should be ashamed of herself.


 
Hahaha that's funny. Like she even knows how to feel shame.

If she keeps giving them a platform then as far as I'm concerned she's as good as on their side.


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 27, 2013)

cesare said:


> She's got no shame. I hope she gets mistaken for fash.


 
what do you mean by "mistaken" for fash she's out there right now interviewing the fuckers, jesus christ might as well join up Laurie.


----------



## cesare (May 27, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> what do you mean by "mistaken" for fash she's out there right now interviewing the fuckers, jesus christ might as well join up Laurie.


She's in an edl pen


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 27, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Interviews means talking to people then? In that case I did a whole load of EDL interviews on Saturday. Where's *my* parade?


 
Presumably these interviews will end up getting published somewhere or other. I meet EDL and sympathisers fairly often but I wouldn't fucking broadcast their views far and wide to build my career and repuations as a incisive journalist. It's deeply irresponsible shit. And it's all just naked careerism, someone who as far as I can tell has played absolutely no role in any anti-fascism of any kind in her life suddenly becomes an expert on the EDL stuff in the aftermath of this terror attack, so she can piggyback on the reactionary right-wing backlash in the aftermath of the murder of Lee Rigby. Soon as it dies down she'll fuck off, conscience clear, to some other part of the world to do the same thing there. It's deeply parasitic behaviour. Never let a good crisis go to waste.


----------



## Firky (May 27, 2013)

I can't really see how a ketteling situation is an ideal place to conduct interviews anyway, hemmed in like battery hens, no room to take your dictaphone out or write down a dramatised and not entirely accurate transcript. More likely she's stuck in a pen with a bunch of EDL lads and is pretending to be performing interviews for her twitter audience.

Still, nice to see her surfing in the wake of the EDL, is there nothing she won't do to further herself?

She's utterly repugnant.


----------



## frogwoman (May 27, 2013)

aye, naked parasitism.


----------



## JimW (May 27, 2013)

There could be some startling revelations about the relative lack of sophistication among EDL members when it comes to inter-faith matters, which I think justifies everything. They kept it so well hidden before.


----------



## Firky (May 27, 2013)

I wouldn't be surprised if she's wearing an EDL balaclava.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (May 27, 2013)

JimW said:


> There could be some startling revelations about the relative lack of sophistication among EDL members when it comes to inter-faith matters, which I think justifies everything. They kept it so well hidden before.


That reminds me I have got some ironing to do as well.


----------



## rekil (May 27, 2013)

> #EDL almost broke through the fence. Some screaming 'kill all the traitors.' I got spat on and beer thrown in my face. 'Left wing scum!'


Hmm.


----------



## Mr.Bishie (May 27, 2013)

> This screaming and racist abuse is taking place under the monument to the Women of WW2


 
Call the cops!!!


----------



## Bakunin (May 27, 2013)

Firky said:


> Still, nice to see her surfing in the wake of the EDL, is there nothing she won't do to further herself?


 

In short, no.


----------



## treelover (May 27, 2013)

no mention of this protest on national broadcast media.


----------



## Firky (May 27, 2013)

I know a couple of people there and they're saying everyone was kettled (in the loosest sense of the word), but they could see no groups penned in or anything kicking off. People are starting to go home now and there's only been the odd scuffle.

Dunno how I C&P texts :/


----------



## cesare (May 27, 2013)

She'll be snooping on this thread later, for more fodder.


----------



## Frances Lengel (May 27, 2013)

Firky said:


> I can't really see how a ketteling situation is an ideal place to conduct interviews anyway, hemmed in like battery hens, no room to take your dictaphone out or write down a dramatised and not entirely accurate transcript. More likely she's stuck in a pen with a bunch of* EDL lads* and is pretending to be performing interviews for her twitter audience.
> 
> Still, nice to see her surfing in the wake of the EDL, is there nothing she won't do to further herself?
> 
> She's utterly repugnant.


 
Might be some lasses as well.


----------



## frogwoman (May 27, 2013)

cesare said:


> She'll be snooping on this thread later, for more fodder.


 
_Fuck those who want to fight violence with violence._


----------



## cesare (May 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> _Fuck those who want to fight violence with violence._


And this is why we can't have nice things


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 27, 2013)

copliker said:


> > #EDL almost broke through the fence. Some screaming 'kill all the traitors.' I got spat on and beer thrown in my face. 'Left wing scum!'
> 
> 
> 
> Hmm.


 
I think people might be misinterpreting this - it is in fact Laurie coming out as a right winger. We all knew it was coming, it was just a matter of time.

Laurie's EDL mates almost broke through the fence and as she came to the front with them the antifascists saw her and decided the EDL could wait for a minute - they had a smartest kid from a smart school to deal with - and gobbed at her and threw beer. So she ends the tweet by calling them left wing scum - after all, some of them think it's acceptable - obligatory even - to fight far right violence with violence and they don't appear to want to doff their caps at her so fuck them.


----------



## Firky (May 27, 2013)

I can imagine the 'interview'

LP: Hello, I am Laurie Penny, you may have heard of me.
EDL: Who?


----------



## Bakunin (May 27, 2013)

Firky said:


> I can imagine the 'interview'
> 
> LP: Hello, I am Laurie Penny, you may have heard of me.
> EDL: Who?


 

Penny Dreadful: 'What? Don't you all know who I am?!'


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 27, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> _Fuck those who want to fight violence with violence._


 
Would she or wouldn't she, though? That is the question.


----------



## Nice one (May 27, 2013)

i saw owen jones and clare solomon today do i win a prize?


----------



## Firky (May 27, 2013)

And where are their heads?


----------



## Nice one (May 27, 2013)

i also stopped redwatch guy taking photos of student lefties, i was on a roll!


----------



## J Ed (May 27, 2013)

I can see the advantages for her interviewing the EDL, it's not as if many of them are going to read the New Statesman and come across her article misquoting them...


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 27, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/339128401313034240


----------



## weepiper (May 27, 2013)

S☼I said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/339128401313034240


 

Keeerrrr_ist._


----------



## ddraig (May 27, 2013)

Firky said:


> I know a couple of people there and they're saying everyone was kettled (in the loosest sense of the word), but they could see no groups penned in or anything kicking off. People are starting to go home now and there's only been the odd scuffle.
> 
> Dunno how I C&P texts :/


 
tried long press on the text and then select/copy all?


----------



## cesare (May 27, 2013)

Nice one said:


> i saw owen jones and clare solomon today do i win a prize?


There was a classic tweet from one of anti-fa earlier. Along the lines of squaring up to EDL and Owen Jones making speech behind us.


----------



## Balbi (May 28, 2013)

Laurie gets given a stark reminder that she's not the omnihuman she thinks she is.​ 


*Laurie Penny* @PennyRed
Just ignore Rod Liddle. He's a sad, vicious troll who wants your attention. Don't give it to him​​ 


*AvaVidal* @AvaVidal
I'd appreciate you not telling us how to react to racist comments@PennyRed. Our communities are under attack & ignoring it won't stop that.​ ViewConversation​36m​​ 


*Laurie Penny* @PennyRed
I'm not saying ignore racist comments, @AvaVidal. There's clearly a crisis underway. But Liddle is just trying to wind the internet up.​ ViewConversation​34m​​ 


*AvaVidal* @AvaVidal
Whatever he's trying to do@PennyRed makes no difference. The fact is the @spectator see fit to publish these comments& we're challenging it​ ViewConversation​32m​​ 


*Laurie Penny* @PennyRed
Alright, sure, @AvaVidal.@spectator should certainly be ashamed of itself for making money off racist bilge that actively hurts people.​ ViewConversation​28m​​ 


*AvaVidal* @AvaVidal
Probably best to take your lead from the people that are affected directly by that kind of language before dispensing advice@PennyRed​ ViewConversation​13m​​ 


*Laurie Penny* @PennyRed
Noted, @AvaVidal, but I'm not personally unaffected by the saturating of the media landscape I work in with casual racism.​ ViewConversation​​​*Jude Elliott-Jones*@judeinlondon
@PennyRed @AvaVidal Laurie, you’re too smart to try and compare your secondary experience of racism with a PoC’s. Come correct please.


----------



## Favelado (May 28, 2013)

Laurie is constantly involved in spats. I know Owen Jones gets lots of stick here too but, lordy, I think there's a world of difference between them. Laurie is a poor journalist and a worse activist.


----------



## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

Hardly a spat more a middle-class tiff. 

I read it as a LP chance to stack up the apologies about racism to underscore those credentials.




> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> I feel that I've learned something from what you said, anyway, @AvaVidal, and I've apologised publicly because of it.


----------



## Balbi (May 28, 2013)

Great how she didn't attach it to the conversation, so it's a lazy barrier to stop people seeing how her 'voice of the movement' schtick just got her schooled 

Jude was particularly kind.


----------



## rosecore (May 28, 2013)

Gives a platform to the EDL. Tells people to ignore Rod Liddle. And people wonder why she gets so much criticism.


----------



## Balbi (May 28, 2013)

VICTORY! 

https://t.co/G85cDxbVjJ






​*Laurie Penny*@PennyRed
It's a really stressful, horrid time, @AvaVidal. Sometimes I need to take deep breaths and remember it isn't about me. Sorry again.

*Laurie Penny* @PennyRed
Having your privilege checked hurts. Ow. My feelings right now. They are so important let me tell you.


----------



## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

Balbi said:


> *Laurie Penny*@PennyRed
> Having your privilege checked hurts. Ow. My feelings right now. They are so important let me tell you.


 
This taking the piss?

"Ow. My feelings right now."

I read it as 'Fuck feelings'

If feelings don't matter what exactly was the reason LP left this thread?


----------



## Balbi (May 28, 2013)

If you get your privilege checked by a POC it's ok. When we did it, not so cool - just jealousy


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

That was the moment this thread has been building towards for years now. There's a sort of sadistic pleasure in watching high profile intersectionalistas flagellate themselves. Its her acceptance that she was wrong to have an opinion and that she has no right to hurt feelings that brings the whole exchange towards privilege politics apotheosis.


----------



## butchersapron (May 28, 2013)

God, she weasels exactly like articul8


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This taking the piss?
> 
> "Ow. My feelings right now."
> 
> ...


 
She's referring approvingly to the privilege politics cliche that people who've been called racists/sexists/homophobes, or had their "privilege" "checked" by a "PoC", have no right to feel hurt or insulted, just as they also have no right to argue back.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> God, she weasels exactly like articul8


 
But articul8 doesn't finish by abasing himself.


----------



## butchersapron (May 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> But articul8 doesn't finish by abasing himself.


 
True, he does start by debasing himself though. And in that he is sincere at least - whereas laurie has a fakeness to her abasement. And her real anger at getting caught out is not being hidden that well.


----------



## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> That was the moment this thread has been building towards for years now. There's a sort of sadistic pleasure in watching high profile intersectionalistas flagellate themselves. Its her acceptance that she was wrong to have an opinion and that she has no right to hurt feelings that brings the whole exchange towards intersectionalista apotheosis.


 
What LP has done is not 'flagellation' - writing 1 sentence saying 'I was wrong, sorry' on a computer. It's pseudo-self-criticism.
What exactly has been learnt? Goodness knows. 

It's all weak in the first place anyway - tweeting to Rod Liddle that he's a racist arsehole - it's not harmful as LP suggested but it's not anything meaningful that needs to be defended, the fact that LP continued this exchange is proof that a. it's not really an issue and b. it's one where LP could score even by 'losing'/being silly.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This taking the piss?
> 
> "Ow. My feelings right now."
> 
> ...


 
Especially as this thread could be interpreted as a call out for Laurie to check her class privilege.

Why is class exempt from this kind of stuff by the way? Why can Laurie trample on our oppression but not that of POCs (btw - coloured was offensive when I was a kid, when did it become PC again?)


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What LP has done is not 'flagellation' - writing 1 sentence saying 'I was wrong, sorry' on a computer. It's pseudo-self-criticism.


 
It's exactly self-flagellation, an empty ritual to purify yourself so that you can take your place once more amongst the "ally" elect. Now, that's not to say that there's not a perfunctory element to her self-criticism, nor that there's no resentment underneath it, but those are the rules of the game these people play. She made a comment connected to racism, a "PoC" challenged her right to speak, therefore she had to apologise and agree that she has no right to an opinion.


----------



## The Pale King (May 28, 2013)

Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
I feel that I've learned something from what you said, anyway, @AvaVidal, and I've apologised publicly because of it

Be 'umble Urie! Ever so 'umble!


----------



## J Ed (May 28, 2013)

Favelado said:


> Laurie is constantly involved in spats. I know Owen Jones gets lots of stick here too but, lordy, I think there's a world of difference between them. Laurie is a poor journalist and a worse activist.


 

Is it part of the brand?


----------



## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

Why did LP respond publicly to 

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/339390447376015360




> AvaVidal ‏@AvaVidal 1 sa
> I'd appreciate you not telling us how to react to racist comments @PennyRed. Our communities are under attack & ignoring it won't stop that.


 
LP didn't need to respond, there was no case of anything going wrong, could have been left alone like hundreds of other mentions.
It's an odd statement to make by this person, assuming that PennyRed's attentive audience are somehow a sizeably immigrant one. I dunno it all reads really odd.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Why can Laurie trample on our oppression but not that of POCs (btw - coloured was offensive when I was a kid, when did it become PC again?)


 
Fifteen minutes ago when it started oozing across the Atlantic, from the American campuses through tumblr and twitter. I suspect that you could still cause some offence were you to start randomly using the term in some non-twitter social circles in Britain.


----------



## J Ed (May 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Fifteen minutes ago when it started oozing across the Atlantic, from the American campuses through tumblr and twitter. I suspect that you could still cause some offence were you to start randomly using the term in some non-twitter social circles in Britain.


 

Then it'd be a matter for the JOCs... (Laurie coined that term lol)


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> LP didn't need to respond, there was no case of anything going wrong, could have been left alone like hundreds of other mentions.


 
She had her privilege checked by a slightly known comedian and PoC. She had no choice, given the circles in which she moves.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 28, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Then it'd be a matter for the JOCs... (Laurie coined that term lol)


 
Should I even ask what the J stands for (journalists by any chance?)


----------



## DotCommunist (May 28, 2013)

judges?


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> She had her privilege checked by a slightly known comedian and PoC. She had no choice, given the circles in which she moves.


 
Yep - not replying means you're ignoring them and that's trampling on their oppression


----------



## J Ed (May 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Should I even ask what the J stands for (journalists by any chance?)


 

Yeah, she coined it when she was getting 'called out' actually on a class basis by a black American woman writer.


----------



## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> She had her privilege checked by a slightly known comedian and PoC. She had no choice, given the circles in which she moves.


 
But there were other (also immigrant) tweeters including Diane Abbott who basically agreed and said along the lines of 'So true. Rod Liddle really is a graspy knob. LOL'


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 28, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Yeah, she coined it when she was getting 'called out' actually on a class basis by a black American woman writer.


 
I was gonna suggest we coined the term proles of colour (or given its roots should that be color?) but I realised that's POC too so our united front against classist-racism could become a popular front against racism that tramples on the oppression of working class POCs (with the p standing for people again this time - I think - this is fucking confusing).

What's wrong with black anyway? The black people I am close to certainly prefer that term, in fact the black person I know best (my ex) is proud to call herself black.

It's all just really fucking weird and confusing.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> But there were other (also immigrant) tweeters including Diane Abbott who basically agreed and said along the lines of 'So true. Rod Liddle really is a graspy knob. LOL'


 
What happens when two people who share an oppression (let's say they're both POCs) disagree on something to do with that oppression. Do they have a proper argument like everyone else would or do they have an intersectional priv-off where they work out who has the most secondary oppressions (kind of like goal difference or away goals or something)?


----------



## JimW (May 28, 2013)

Takes me back to some of the classic struggle sessions of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign. Good times, good times.


----------



## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What happens when two people who share an oppression (let's say they're both POCs) disagree on something to do with that oppression. Do they have a proper argument like everyone else would or do they have an intersectional priv-off where they work out who has the most secondary oppressions (kind of like goal difference or away goals or something)?


 
I dunno, all I'm saying is I find it very odd that LP essentially wanted to be called out publicly over this point but couldn't share a link to this thread for people to see there was no discussion of her bedroom in a sexist way but the lies about 'The Hovel' etc.


----------



## Bakunin (May 28, 2013)

Balbi said:


> If you get your privilege checked by a POC it's ok. When we did it, not so cool - just jealousy


 

Is it because we is white?


----------



## J Ed (May 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I was gonna suggest we coined the term proles of colour (or given its roots should that be color?) but I realised that's POC too so our united front against classist-racism could become a popular front against racism that tramples on the oppression of working class POCs (with the p standing for people again this time - I think - this is fucking confusing).
> 
> What's wrong with black anyway? The black people I am close to certainly prefer that term, in fact the black person I know best (my ex) is proud to call herself black.
> 
> It's all just really fucking weird and confusing.


 

Can you imagine chatting with someone that's black or Asian in the pub and just casually using the term 'people of colour'? It'd be like something out of Peep Show or the In Betweeners...


----------



## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

JimW said:


> Takes me back to some of the classic struggle sessions of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign. Good times, good times.


 
Weren't struggle sessions for the GPCR?


----------



## JimW (May 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Weren't struggle sessions for the GPCR?


 
I meant the exercise of ritual self-criticism and self-abasement before the Party line, so you're right, struggle session probably not the English word. Though I think they distinguished between mass sessions with popular participation and small group stuff within the work unit/ Party cell etc. and both were called struggle. Now I will have to check 
ETA: My extensive historical research of googling around a bit now shows that struggle sessions (批评斗争) predate the GPCR at least as far back as the Anti-Rightist campaign and did sometimes take place in small meetings (批斗小组会).


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> But there were other (also immigrant) tweeters including Diane Abbott who basically agreed and said along the lines of 'So true. Rod Liddle really is a graspy knob. LOL'


 
Doesn't matter. The other "POCs" can agree, but that doesn't give Penny a way out. Because she'd still have to argue back. Which would be a further demonstration of privilege.


----------



## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Doesn't matter. The other "POCs" can agree, but that doesn't give Penny a way out. Because she'd still have to argue back. Which would be a further demonstration of privilege.


 
POCs - sounds like you're saying pox surely plural is POC.

Are 'POC' who grow up in essentially white households still 'POC'.
I'm not making this one up: but a white lesbian couple white heritage now have a twelve month old Iraqi Kurdish-white mixed heritage baby they have adopted. Does the 'whiteness' of the parents and culture contacts life opportunities matter trump over the biological origins?
If you can only challenge disablism or racism from POC people as a POC person, then won't it involve an incorrect form of self-categorisation, categorise as X in order to still have a voice?


----------



## love detective (May 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> a white lesbian couple white now have a....


 
it'll be all white on the night


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I'm not making this one up: but a white lesbian couple white heritage now have a twelve month old Iraqi Kurdish-white mixed heritage baby they have adopted. Does the 'whiteness' of the parents and culture contacts life opportunities matter trump over the biological origins?


 
For the purposes of interactions with privilege politics types / intersectionalistas it will centrally depend on how the baby "self-identifies".

(You can generally answer most questions about this outlook by asking yourself what the most solipsistic and personal experience/identity based response would be.)


----------



## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

love detective said:


> it'll be all white on the night


 
Won't the rigidity of the oppression rules into create safer spaces end up creating this kind of gaming the system? - males who otherwise seek female partners but like the look of a male celebrity or two self-identify themselves as bisexual, people who have a mild neuralgia self-identify as part of disabled people caucus, women who appear white on appearance who have christian type names who are not victims of direct racism and have families resident a generation, born with citizen status self-identify as WOC because of an Indian grandparent. The more this stuff takes off, the more the pressures will increase.


----------



## love detective (May 28, 2013)

it was a joke sihhi - your original post (before you edited) said:-

_a white lesbian couple white now have a twelve month old Iraqi Kurdish-white mixed heritage baby they have adopted_


----------



## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> For the purposes of interactions with privilege politics types / intersectionalistas it will centrally depend on how the baby "self-identifies".


 
That's my point: what if the child doesn't self-identify either way and doesn't want to - is that a bad thing, is that screwing up the oppressed side? 

I know it's sort of related to a huge issue in social work and adoption and all that - but the privilege issue just adds a whole new level of wilfully inserting problems to human affairs.


----------



## Fruitloop (May 28, 2013)

sihhi That's right and it's exactly how it should be. For the record, my grandmother was Scottish.


----------



## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

love detective said:


> it was a joke sihhi - your original post (before you edited) said:-
> 
> _a white lesbian couple white now have a twelve month old Iraqi Kurdish-white mixed heritage baby they have adopted_


 
I missed off the word heritage as in to stress that they themselves aren't by some coincide fostered or adoptees in Iraqi Kurdish culture and neither half is self-identifying as Iraqi Kurdish.


----------



## love detective (May 28, 2013)

i thought you'd typed white instead of right

then i did a joke doing the same thing

tough crowd tonight


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That's my point: what if the child doesn't self-identify either way and doesn't want to - is that a bad thing, is that screwing up the oppressed side?


 
If the child doesn't grow up to have a tumblr account, spend too much time on twitter, or get involved in radical liberal politics, the issue is unlikely to arise that often unless there's some visible indication that s/he is from an ethnic minority background.


----------



## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

love detective said:


> i thought you'd typed white instead of right
> 
> then i did a joke doing the same thing
> 
> tough crowd tonight


 
I wasn't having a go.  I get it now - Denis Norden crossed with Michael Barrymore. 

I am a knob.


----------



## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> If the child doesn't grow up to have a tumblr account, spend too much time on twitter, or get involved in radical liberal politics


 
Of course, sure, but this is the point - radical liberal politics - immigrant working-class people don't all want to go and be part of a POC liberation caucus, because they might not see things in such ethnicity-based terms.
We call it radical liberalism but LP is a socialist and a revolutionary socialist.


----------



## cesare (May 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Of course, sure, but this is the point - radical liberal politics - immigrant working-class people don't all want to go and be part of a POC liberation caucus, because they might not see things in such ethnicity-based terms.
> We call it radical liberalism but LP is a socialist and a revolutionary socialist.


LP just self defines as that - she isn't.


----------



## JimW (May 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> ...
> We call it radical liberalism but LP is a socialist and a revolutionary socialist.


Nationalise the top hundred trending hashtags!


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> We call it radical liberalism but LP is a socialist and a revolutionary socialist.


 
As Cesare notes, we are not bound to accept her "self identification".

It is worth saying though, that this stuff is percolating into the actual socialist left. As previously noted, we have some stuff by ISN members, the AF women's caucus, the WSM publishing an article defending it, random anarchos on twitter, and even, wiping the smug smile off my face, an SP member on twitter who was pushing the intersectional part of it. And to some extent, that's going to get worse unless there's a concerted push back because some of the demographics and groups the socialist left recruit from are ones were this sort of stuff if having some resonance.

When radicalish students sneeze, a lot of left groups get botulism.


----------



## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

cesare said:


> LP just self defines as that - she isn't.


 
I was thinking of 2'50'' here for the self-definition




There is _no_ rational grounds for challenging it in the privilege world.
In the privilege system - there is no "red-baiting axis" or non-victimisation for non-socialists privilege.

If working-class men challenge LP it's outside the rules, cross-intersection and psychological buried sexism, if working-class women challenge LP it's 'not the majority of working-class people' challenging her, and 'plenty of better of better w/c activists' (or whatever the line was to Malcolm Harris) who accept her as revolutionary socialist - hence no need to change any aspect of behaviour or self-identification.


----------



## J Ed (May 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> As Cesare notes, we are not bound to accept her "self identification".
> 
> It is worth saying though, that this stuff is percolating into the actual socialist left. As previously noted, we have some stuff by ISN members, the AF women's caucus, the WSM publishing an article defending it, random anarchos on twitter, and even, wiping the smug smile off my face, an SP member on twitter who was pushing the intersectional part of it. And to some extent, that's going to get worse unless there's a concerted push back because some of the demographics and groups the socialist left recruit from are ones were this sort of stuff if having some resonance.


 

What kind of pushback could there be? I'm sure it would happen if there was an influx of non-students into the left, but there isn't going to be because people associate the left with the people you mentioned!


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What kind of pushback could there be? I'm sure it would happen if there was an influx of non-students into the left, but there isn't going to be because people associate the left with the people you mentioned!


 
Groups that are aware of it and take a hard line on it, won't be pulled by it in the same way as groups that are willing to adapt to it.


----------



## andysays (May 28, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> I feel that I've learned something from what you said, anyway, @AvaVidal, and I've apologised publicly because of it


 
Well big fucking whoop...

It's still all about Laurie, as far as I can see. She may well have can her fingers burnt, her feelings hurt and even "apologised publicly", but pound to a penny* it won't make a blind bit of difference to her me, me, ME! schtick in the long run.

*unintentional pun, honest!


----------



## andysays (May 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> ...What's wrong with black anyway? The black people I am close to certainly prefer that term, in fact the black person I know best (my ex) is proud to call herself black...


 
Yeah, but if she really knew what was what, she'd be grateful to the smartest smuggest kid from a smart smug school for correcting her.

Or so Laurie would have us believe...


----------



## cesare (May 28, 2013)

This is heading back into that circular conversation again. Bearing in mind that I don't know the ins and outs of political theory - I would describe LP as a capitalist, and the business she has invested/investing in is herself/her brand/her monetise your [whatever]. Privilege theory and intersectionalism is just a blunt/crude method of analysis, but I don't think there's any harm in using it as a gentle nudge for yourself when talking with people. I dispute that this is gaining much traction yet in real life, apart from a very narrow audience.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

cesare said:


> I dispute that this is gaining much traction yet in real life, apart from a very narrow audience.


 
Nobody is saying that intersectionalism is all anyone talks about down the pub. But the socialist left itself is a narrow and specialised audience, which in turn disproportionately recruits from certain other narrow and specialised audiences.


----------



## cesare (May 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Nobody is saying that intersectionalism is all anyone talks about down the pub. But the socialist left itself is a narrow and specialised audience, which in turn disproportionately recruits from certain other narrow and specialised audiences.


The socialist left can appear much too inward thinking, and alienated from what's happening down the pub.


----------



## articul8 (May 28, 2013)

there are pubs and pubs - plenty of NE London hipster pubs that would love this intersectionalista talk


----------



## cesare (May 28, 2013)

articul8 said:


> there are pubs and pubs - plenty of NE London hipster pubs that would love this intersectionalista talk


Identity politics playgrounds.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

cesare said:


> The socialist left can appear much too inward thinking, and alienated from what's happening down the pub.


 
It certainly can. And none more so than those whose first priorities are the dynamics of "our spaces" or policing each other, and random people on twitter, for language errors. Which is a strata I suspect makes up a slowly increasing percentage of recruits to various left groups and activist circles.

[Note: This is not intended as a dismissal of people opposing sexism, racism, etc from other left activists. It's a comment about subcultural priorities]


----------



## Favelado (May 28, 2013)

articul8 said:


> there are pubs and pubs - plenty of NE London hipster pubs that would love this intersectionalista talk


 
"North-East" London was invented in 2001 and I reject its existence.


----------



## articul8 (May 28, 2013)

Favelado said:


> "North-East" London was invented in 2001 and I reject its existence.


Hoxton, Shoreditch, Dalston (these days)...


----------



## cesare (May 28, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Hoxton, Shoreditch, Dalston (these days)...


Regeneration places, influx of people with more money etc


----------



## articul8 (May 28, 2013)

Nathan Barley types - horrible


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Nathan Barley types - horrible


 
It's a bit more complex than that. The classic London hipster-led gentrification process goes in waves: Cheap rent -> Artists -> Associated hip types -> creative industry people -> media sorts -> outright yuppies. Each wave creates certain facilities and makes the area attractive to and safe for the next wave, and each wave is successively richer than the last. They actually teach Hoxton's recent history in both urban regeneration courses (as a good thing) and in urban studies / social geography courses (in a more critical light) because it's such a clear and archetypal example.


----------



## cesare (May 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> It certainly can. And none more so than those whose first priorities are the dynamics of "our spaces" or policing each other, and random people on twitter, for language errors. Which is a strata I suspect makes up a slowly increasing percentage of recruits to various left groups and activist circles.
> 
> [Note: This is not intended as a dismissal of people opposing sexism, racism, etc from other left activists. It's a comment about subcultural priorities]


But is it possible that your view is distorted by what you're looking at?


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

cesare said:


> But is it possible that your view is distorted by what you're looking at?


 
Yes, it certainly is possible. And this thread tends to draw people towards it, concentrating on particularly memorable examples.

But, while my recent reading habits and this thread may be magnifying this stuff, it isn't creating it from whole cloth. It is there, it is growing, and it wasn't there not very long ago, at least not in this form. Even ignoring the main stream of this stuff, three left groups have now published stuff putting this stuff forward (although they haven't necessarily adopted it as groups), which simply wouldn't have happened three years ago. That's a noticeable shift on the micro-scale of the far left.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

Actually this is off the point entirely, but does anyone know if the gentrification of Hoxton has now traveled North of Hoxton Square, ie into the main historical Hoxton area? Back 13 or so years ago, there was a kind of invisible barrier just past the Square which divided the gentrifying, hipster, part from the working class, in large part immigrant, old core of the area.


----------



## cesare (May 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Yes, it certainly is possible. And this thread tends to draw people towards it, concentrating on particularly memorable examples.
> 
> But, while my recent reading habits and this thread may be magnifying this stuff, it isn't creating it from whole cloth. It is there, it is growing, and it wasn't there not very long ago, at least not in this form. Even ignoring the main stream of this stuff, three left groups have now published stuff putting this stuff forward (although they haven't necessarily adopted it as groups), which simply wouldn't have happened three years ago. That's a noticeable shift on the micro-scale of the far left.


I agree that it's out there, but it seems (to me) to be confined (so far) to academia/students/occupy & activists that choose (for example) occupy over more structured class based work.


----------



## treelover (May 28, 2013)

http://www.leninology.com/


Mhairi McAlpine commenting on Lenins Tomb seems to tick a lot of the boxes discussed here


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

cesare said:


> I agree that it's out there, but it seems (to me) to be confined (so far) to academia/students/occupy & activists that choose (for example) occupy over more structured class based work.


 
I think you are broadly right about the (narrow) demographics who have started to adopt this stuff, but I don't think that there's a wall between them and the rest of the left. And there certainly isn't a wall between them and the people who end up in left groups and activist circles eventually.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

treelover said:


> http://www.leninology.com/
> 
> 
> Mhairi McAlpine commenting on Lenins Tomb seems to tick a lot of the boxes discussed here


 
Could you elaborate on this? She isn't really using the language there.


----------



## articul8 (May 28, 2013)

treelover said:


> http://www.leninology.com/
> 
> 
> Mhairi McAlpine commenting on Lenins Tomb seems to tick a lot of the boxes discussed here


and her points are broadly accurate, if a bit one-sided


----------



## cesare (May 28, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I think you are broadly right about the (narrow) demographics who have started to adopt this stuff, but I don't think that there's a wall between them and the rest of the left. And there certainly isn't a wall between them and the people who end up in left groups and activist circles eventually.


Do you mean that the (undefined) left will gradually adopt this language and way of looking at What's Going On by something similar to osmosis? If so, yes I'd probably agree with that if the left (1) aren't alert to it; and (2) don't identify it as a form of identity politics and reject it.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 28, 2013)

cesare said:


> Do you mean that the (undefined) left will gradually adopt this language and way of looking at What's Going On by something similar to osmosis? If so, yes I'd probably agree with that if the left (1) aren't alert to it; and (2) don't identify it as a form of identity politics and reject it.


 
Yes, pretty much. I think that with individual leftists knocking about on twitter or tumblr, or participating in certain studenty stuff, there can be a sort of adoption by osmosis. And then they bring those assumptions with them into their groups or when they join something. And so far, I think that groups have tended to either ignore it (most of them) or actively started to adapt to it. Slowly trimming your sails to what seems popular with radical subsections of "the kids" is an old tradition on the left.


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## J Ed (May 28, 2013)

What do people think of this article?

Particularly this bit



> 3. There is no future in attempting to collapse anti-racism into anti-austerity struggles. Such attempts represent a strain of workerism, and have emerged from some surprising quarters – including Alexis Tsipras. Racism does not simply emerge as a displaced form of despair over deprivation or insecurity. Its development and spread may be accelerated by profound political crisis, the breakdown of authority, crises of overproduction, financial collapses, and so on. And certainly, the struggles over the capitalist crisis and its resolution has a relationship to the struggle over racism: this means that initiatives such as Left Unity and the People's Assembly should take anti-racism seriously as a semi-autonomous component of their broader strategy. But to understand the relationship between racism, economic crisis and emerging political subjectivities requires an analysis light years ahead of the lingering "capitalist crisis = hard times = racism" model.


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## SpineyNorman (May 28, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What do people think of this article?
> 
> Particularly this bit


 
Well it seems to me that these two sentences contradict one another:



> Racism does not simply emerge as a displaced form of despair over deprivation or insecurity. Its development and spread may be accelerated by profound political crisis, the breakdown of authority, crises of overproduction, financial collapses, and so on.


How does racism emerge from crises of overproduction, breakdown of authority, financial collapses if it isn't by creating despair over deprivation and insecurity?

What he's doing is trying to promote the kind of politics he's always subscribed to by disguising his incoherent arguments with fancy language. Like articul8.

Just looking through that article though, there is absolutely nothing in it that could mark him out as a Marxist - it's post-modernist bollocks isn't it? And even on that basis it doesn't make much sense.


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## SpineyNorman (May 28, 2013)

He's basically just caricaturing the arguments of others, to make out they're economic determinists, so that he can then present his brand of liberal anti-racism as the only sensible approach.

I mean, nobody serious believes



> capitalist crisis = hard times = racism


any more than anyone sensible believes



> capitalist crisis = hard times = revolution


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## Idris2002 (May 28, 2013)

Fruitloop said:


> sihhi  my grandmother was Scottish.


 
He admits it openly.


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## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> He's basically just caricaturing the arguments of others, to make out they're economic determinists, so that he can then present his brand of liberal anti-racism as the only sensible approach.
> 
> I mean, nobody serious believes
> 
> any more than anyone sensible believes


 
If I understand "autonomous" properly.
It assumes there is a backbone left in migrant communities' organisations that will be able to lead this autonomist anti-racist unity fight - in fact there's a series of disparate atrophied organisations.

30 or 20 years ago there might have been but many have become either shells or charities often reliant on local state grants even as these are being cut and hence are less willing to stick neck outs to struggle for some large indistinct goal.

Contrary to the imagination of certain liberals, "autonomous" immigrants have do not act as a bloc of 'POC' and most do not have similar experiences to one another to be able to cohere together as a sensible autonomous component part in left things that take "anti-racism seriously as a semi-autonomous component of their broader strategy"


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## SpineyNorman (May 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> 30 or 20 years ago there might have been


 
Are you thinking stuff like the Asian Youth Movement here sihhi? If so I've been meaning to read up on them for a while - anyone have any recommendations/links?


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## butchersapron (May 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Are you thinking stuff like the Asian Youth Movement here sihhi? If so I've been meaning to read up on them for a while - anyone have any recommendations/links?


 
The politics of Britain's Asian Youth Movements 

Secular Identities and the Asian Youth Movements

Both by Anandi Ramamurthy


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## SpineyNorman (May 28, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The politics of Britain's Asian Youth Movements
> 
> Secular Identities and the Asian Youth Movements
> 
> Both by Anandi Ramamurthy


 
Cheers


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## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Are you thinking stuff like the Asian Youth Movement here sihhi? If so I've been meaning to read up on them for a while - anyone have any recommendations/links?


 
All the earlier community-defined ones yes but also the inter-'community' efforts specifically about racial profiling for instance United Black Youth League in Bradford, Sheffield Defence in your area, or the Broadwater Three Campaign here in the late 1980s. 
I mentioned the example of Meral Ece earlier in this thread who came from a NUPE immigrant section action is now a Lib Dem Lord, Shahnaz Ali from the UBYL is now a NHS senior manager. Linda Bellos from the Labour Party Black Sections struggle is now chair of the Institute of Equality and Diversity Practitioners and has her own business as such. 

I don't think the 2010s is the same 1980s and "struggling against Tory racism" then isn't the same as now.
The loss of productive industry being an important change which has (if you take the  liberal ideas seriously) certainly driven many sections of the white working-class to become an oppressed minority - fitfully unemployed, no secure jobs, half-unwanted.
Yet there is no equal demand (which there should be under liberal ideas) for former shipyard or power plant or car factory working-class only (no middle-class) to have autonomous sections for them. So the whole thing is now a mess and hard to rebalance.
There are many more mixed heritage people who don't see their immigrant side as an important one often with British or Irish names, there are more middle-class and professional immigrant people, thinking in London in particular there are more tensions and divisions within non-white heritage younger adults within the poorer of the working-class immigrant areas.
So it's not an easy thing to reconstruct an autonomous immigrant anti-racist model, in fact you might as well go for the IWCA working-class rule in working-class areas model.

It's also possible that the same things that went wrong with autonomous anti-racist struggle in the 1980s, might go wrong again now.


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## sihhi (May 28, 2013)

It's the similar in the Bradford AYM: Anwar Qadir became a consultant for Bradford Council's youth service helping calm down the 1995 and 2001 riots. Marsha Singh used to be known as Manjit Singh basically set up the Bradford AYM in 1977, he became Labour MP for Bradford West eventually. Several others became Labour councillors. Something 'Labour' was the end result in spite of the positive secularist stance it took against the Bradford Council of Mosques and the agitation for separate schools and Quran lessons etc etc.


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## Firky (May 29, 2013)

Jack Buckby on Laurie Penny.



> Jack Buckby ‏@JackBuckby 22m
> @Nationalist_UK @Edward_Flashman Wouldn't go near that cow [Laurie Penny] if she was the last creature on earth...she's no woman!


 
He's nothing but RW flotsam on twitter but there's a bit of barely concealed misogyny going on there.

Been poking fun at him and he's too stupid to realise it


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## SpineyNorman (May 29, 2013)

What a cock end. What year does he think this is, fucking 1920 or summat?


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## cesare (May 29, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Actually this is off the point entirely, but does anyone know if the gentrification of Hoxton has now traveled North of Hoxton Square, ie into the main historical Hoxton area? Back 13 or so years ago, there was a kind of invisible barrier just past the Square which divided the gentrifying, hipster, part from the working class, in large part immigrant, old core of the area.


Worth a thread in itself perhaps (gentrification). There's been quite a lot of housing redevelopment - but not much change to businesses apart from the immediate vicinity of stations on the Overground. I don't have any particular reason to go there (Hoxton and Haggerston) although Shoreditch/Hoxton is properly gentrified now. Old Street has loads of bars/cafes  and a street food market. There's a pincer effect from south and west and east (much redevelopment in Hackney/London Fields). Dalston is more prosperous. No design agencies springing up, those are still mainly Shoreditch/ south Hoxton. You'll get a much better feel for it if you ask the question in the General forum, I think, plus people will describe what's happened south (London Bridge to Tower Bridge) and south west (Brixton and surrounds) of the river.


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## Fruitloop (May 29, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> He admits it openly.


 
A highlander, so a survivor of ethnic cleansing.


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## ViolentPanda (May 29, 2013)

Balbi said:


> If you get your privilege checked by a POC it's ok. When we did it, not so cool - just jealousy


 
It's not just "okay", mate. It's, like, a badge of honour! "Hey, look at me, I had my privilege checked by a PoC, because I talked with a PoC!! I'm so wiberal!!!". 

Kill 'em all. Let their liberal deity sort the wheat from the chaff.


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## ViolentPanda (May 29, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> God, she weasels exactly like articul8


 
It's like watching someone dance "The Time Warp".


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 29, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Especially as this thread could be interpreted as a call out for Laurie to check her class privilege.
> 
> Why is class exempt from this kind of stuff by the way? Why can Laurie trample on our oppression but not that of POCs (btw - coloured was offensive when I was a kid, when did it become PC again?)


 
As I spent a couple of dozen posts explaining to Johnny Canuck earlier this year, "black" was the major self-descriptor used by most of our non-white ethnic minority communities in the '80s and '90s. "Person of Colour" was seen as NAACP liberal bullshit imported from the US, and "coloured" was (as you say) just downright rude.
This is (partly) about the privilege checkers attempting to "own" a vocabulary and thus establish a discourse whereby their vocabulary becomes the dominant one (and, of course, *they're* in a position to do so because of their own unchecked privilege!).

Why is class exempt? Because it's something so basic, so overarching, that the _intersectionalistas_ can *never* own it in the way they attempt to with their race and gender-based vocabularies. Therefore, they either ignore it or decry it in coded rhetoric about "the white working class".

Illiberal liberal scumsuckers. Same as always. Many of 'em will be on the right in a decade or so. Happens with every generation of wanna-be social vanguardists.


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## treelover (May 29, 2013)

> On a previous occasion she _actually bought the EDL leader dinner_ in an expensive restaurant!


 
anyone know which restaurant/, she must have mentioned it ala Ms German and her exotic food oddysey


----------



## frogwoman (May 29, 2013)

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/tommy-robinson-edl-laurie-penny-interview No idea mate but the original article is here

The man who drives us out to a steakhouse on the outskirts of Luton, claiming that he’ll get beaten up if he shows his face anywhere else, is irritable and erratic and keeps glancing over his shoulder for the enemies he says are waiting for him. He orders the most expensive steak on the menu, with an enormous plate of cheesy potato skins, and chuckles that this is why he likes to meet left-wing journalists: so he can have dinner on their dollar.


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## caleb (May 29, 2013)

It's not implied that it's an expensive restaurant is it, though? Just that he orders "the most expensive state on the menu". Could be anywhere.


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## frogwoman (May 29, 2013)

you're right, i'll change it.


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## treelover (May 29, 2013)

I wonder what Naomi Klein thinks of the re-emergence of identity politics, in her books she often talks about these issues as the main ones on campus(apart from Latin American issues) when she was a student, etc, she clearly doesn't write much about them now, concentrating on concrete subjects.


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## _angel_ (May 29, 2013)

caleb said:


> It's not implied that it's an expensive restaurant is it, though? Just that he orders "the most expensive state on the menu". Could be anywhere.


----------



## frogwoman (May 29, 2013)

i've changed it now. Sorry.


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## ska invita (May 29, 2013)

whats poc please?


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## CharlieChaplin (May 29, 2013)

Do you guys think Laurie Penny's opinion would be so significant if she wasn't a pretty young woman?


----------



## killer b (May 29, 2013)

ska invita said:


> whats poc please?


person of colour


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## Brainaddict (May 29, 2013)

OswaldMosley said:


> Do you guys think Laurie Penny's opinion would be so significant if she wasn't a pretty young woman?


Do I think your opinion would more significant if you didn't have a fascist name?

Yes. Possibly.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (May 29, 2013)

OswaldMosley said:


> Do you guys think Laurie Penny's opinion would be so significant if she wasn't a pretty young woman?


Yes she is pretty young, in her mid twenties I guess


----------



## CharlieChaplin (May 29, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> Do I think your opinion would more significant if you didn't have a fascist name?
> 
> Yes. Possibly.


 

Answer the question please.


----------



## frogwoman (May 29, 2013)

Calling yourself "Owald Mosley" on a board full of militant anti-fascists really wasn't the brightest of ideas


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## CharlieChaplin (May 29, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Calling yourself "Owald Mosley" on a board full of militant anti-fascists really wasn't the brightest of ideas


 

How do you know I'm not an anti-fascist?

Please quote my text when you respond to me so I get alerted.


----------



## Firky (May 29, 2013)

OswaldMosley said:


> Do you guys think Laurie Penny's opinion would be so significant if she wasn't a pretty young woman?


 

Her opinion isn't significant but unfortunately it is cited as being the official voice of the dissident in her generation. I am not sure how her attractiveness comes into that but being a woman will give her an insight into somethings more than it would if she was an old man. Also her class, peers and public school arrogance and confidence (that UMC trait) equally blinds her and she wears hats indoors.


----------



## frogwoman (May 29, 2013)

fuck you, i wont do what you tell me


----------



## Brainaddict (May 29, 2013)

OswaldMosley said:


> How do you know I'm not an anti-fascist?
> 
> Please quote my text when you respond to me so I get alerted.


It's a cunts name. I also suspect you of being a returning banned poster or something because it's clearly a troll's name too.


----------



## CharlieChaplin (May 29, 2013)

Firky said:


> Her opinion isn't significant but unfortunately it is cited as being the official voice of the dissident in her generation. I am not sure how her attractiveness comes into that but being a woman will give her an insight into somethings more than it would if she was an old man. Also her class, peers and public school arrogance and confidence (that UMC trait) equally blinds her and she wears hats indoors.


 
There should be less public school educated people in the media and in politics.



Brainaddict said:


> It's a cunts name. I also suspect you of being a returning banned poster or something because it's clearly a troll's name too.


 

This is my only account. You can take my word on that (for what it's worth).


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 29, 2013)

OswaldMosley said:


> There should be less public school educated people in the media and in politics.
> .


 
corrected for you


----------



## Firky (May 29, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> It's a cunts name. I also suspect you of being a returning banned poster or something because it's clearly a troll's name too.


 
Well why don't you go and grass him up to the teacher or put him on ignore?

It is a username, a stupid one at that. Get over it, wallflower. If he turns out to be fash or a troll he'll sharp hang himself as is the way.


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## Brainaddict (May 29, 2013)

Firky said:


> Well why don't you go and grass him up to the teacher or put him on ignore?
> 
> It is a username, a stupid one at that. Get over it, wallflower.


Yeah man, don't you know about postmodernism? Words don't actually mean stuff. You can use them however you want man...

Don't you think that people who are targets of fascists might feel uncomfortable posting  on a forum where people have fascist names?


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## Firky (May 29, 2013)

I don't think anyone is going to be afraid of posting to U75 because someone has the username OswaldMosley no. If the username offends your delicate sensibilities so much then put him on ignore or if you think he's a returner be a grass. Up to you, init.

E2A:

No point in getting worked up about it because RWs and fash always end up putting their  head in the noose themselves.


----------



## Brainaddict (May 29, 2013)

Firky said:


> I don't think anyone is going to be afraid of posting to U75 because someone has the username OswaldMosley no. If the username offends your delicate sensibilities so much then put him on ignore or if you think he's a returner be a grass. Up to you, init.


It doesn't offend me. Did I say I was offended? What is this 'offence' category. I said it was a cunts name and it is. I have explained why. I think the poster should change it. But it's a political position on the use of language, not 'offence'.


----------



## Firky (May 29, 2013)

Maybe he should have the prefix 'trigger warning'.


----------



## frogwoman (May 29, 2013)

i don't think he "should" change it,but he'd be a bit stupid not to. i'm not sure he's fash just think he thought he'd try and be controversial and it backfired.


----------



## CharlieChaplin (May 29, 2013)

I once defended a friend from racist abuse. I was badly beaten up and my friend didn't intervene but I'm still glad I stood up for him.


----------



## Firky (May 29, 2013)

There was a guy posting the other day called 'bukkake'


----------



## Louis MacNeice (May 29, 2013)

OswaldMosley said:


> I once defended a friend from racist abuse. I was badly beaten up and my friend didn't intervene but I'm still glad I stood up for him.


 
Did this happen in Bethnal Green?

Louis MacNeice


----------



## CharlieChaplin (May 29, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Did this happen in Bethnal Green?
> 
> Louis MacNeice


 

No it happened in Welling.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (May 29, 2013)

OswaldMosley said:


> No it happened in Welling.


 
Book buying?

Louis MacNeice


----------



## CharlieChaplin (May 29, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Book buying?
> 
> Louis MacNeice


 

Oh hardy-ha-ha

I don't think that bookshop is there anymore.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (May 29, 2013)

OswaldMosley said:


> Oh hardy-ha-ha
> 
> I don't think that bookshop is there anymore.


 
Posting on this bulletin board, with that name, you must have expected/wanted to provoke a reaction; to say otherwise marks you out as dishonest or stupid. So either you're getting what you want, or you're a liar or a fool.

Louis MacNeice


----------



## CharlieChaplin (May 29, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Posting on this bulletin board, with that name, you must have expected/wanted to provoke a reaction; to say otherwise marks you out as dishonest or stupid. So either you're getting what you want, or you're a liar or a fool.
> 
> Louis MacNeice


 

Didn't think about it. Needed a name, thought this was humorous. Can't believe so many of you are getting arsey about it.


----------



## rekil (May 29, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> you're right, i'll change it.


Just make up a restaurant name. As pretentious as possible.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (May 29, 2013)

OswaldMosley said:


> Didn't think about it. Needed a name, thought this was humorous. Can't believe so many of you are getting arsey about it.


 
George Carl was funny...Oswald Mosely wasn't; so for the time being fool it is.

Louis MacNeice


----------



## Firky (May 29, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Book buying?
> 
> Louis MacNeice


 

Took me a second


----------



## Louis MacNeice (May 29, 2013)

Firky said:


> Took me a second


 
Didn't take Oswald that long.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## CharlieChaplin (May 29, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> George Carl was funny...Oswald Mosely wasn't; so for the time being fool it is.
> 
> Louis MacNeice


 

Is it absolutely necessary for you to sign your name after every post?

Oswald Mosley


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 29, 2013)

It's something of a tradition.

Dave


----------



## rekil (May 29, 2013)

We are all a little bit Louis MacNeice.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 29, 2013)

copliker said:


> We are all a little bit Louis MacNeice.
> 
> Cheers - Louis MacNeice


Better that than Louis Mountbatten


----------



## rekil (May 29, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Better that than Louis Mountbatten


One from the playground.

How did they know that Mountbatten was washing his hair when he got blown up?

They found his head and shoulders on the beach!

(aware of the inaccuracy yes)


----------



## Firky (May 29, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Didn't take Oswald that long.
> 
> Cheers - Louis MacNeice


 

*badtoomtish*

I am giving Oswald the benefit of the doubt that he chose a stupid and deliberately provocative username because he didn't think of the repercussions and associations of such a name (or maybe didnt care). I haven't seen him post anything that would raise my alarm bells but I have only come across him on this thread asking if LP would be significant if she wasn't an attractive woman.


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 29, 2013)

copliker said:


> One from the playground.


 
As Herr Battenberg himself was wont to say


----------



## DotCommunist (May 29, 2013)

caleb said:


> It's not implied that it's an expensive restaurant is it, though? Just that he orders "the most expensive state on the menu". Could be anywhere.


 

its stated as 'on the outskirts of luton'

presumably because he's at too much risk of a slap in central

but steakhouse on the outskirts of town suggests a toby/hungry horse/ beefeater or similar family friendly carvery. So thats no more than 15-20 quid plus 3 quid for the cheese skins and a couple of pints, so 25 quid maximum. On vices' expense accnt.


----------



## articul8 (May 29, 2013)

Oh god - lauriepenny is on 10 O Clock News tonight - debating with Christine Hamilton.    The kind of TV that makes you want to poke your own eyeballs out


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 29, 2013)

OswaldMosley said:


> There should be less public school educated people in the media and in politics.


 
Fewer.


----------



## cesare (May 29, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Oh god -  laurie penny is on 10 O Clock News tonight - debating with Christine Hamilton.    The kind of TV that makes you want to poke your own eyeballs out



Why are you tagging her in?


----------



## Favelado (May 29, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Fewer.


 
"Less" is now acceptable with plurals according to grammar bibles like Swan, so best not pulling people up on it anymore. English has changed, it's just you haven't.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 29, 2013)

Favelado said:


> "Less" is now acceptable with plurals according to grammar bibles like Swan, so best not pulling people up on it anymore. English has changed, it's just you haven't.


 
It's not acceptable to me.


----------



## treelover (May 29, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Oh god - lauriepenny is on 10 O Clock News tonight - debating with Christine Hamilton. The kind of TV that makes you want to poke your own eyeballs out


 
debating what?


----------



## articul8 (May 29, 2013)

treelover said:


> debating what?


Feminism or strong women or summat


----------



## Firky (May 29, 2013)

cesare said:


> Why are you tagging her in?


 

Yeah, I'd hazard a guess she knows


----------



## Firky (May 29, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Feminism or strong women or summat


 

Nicola Adans is pretty strong.


----------



## cesare (May 29, 2013)

Firky said:


> Nicola Adans is pretty strong.


So was Eva Braun /godwins


----------



## muscovyduck (May 29, 2013)

Faboulous comment from Daid Allen Green on this blog post about Laurie Penny:



> Gosh.
> This blogpost is so turgid as to render it unreadable.
> I wondered what the fuss was about regarding my NS colleague Laurie. I have now tried to read this post twice, and I do not have a clue what much of it means.
> Whatever else you contend about Laurie, she certainly writes a lot better than you.
> ...


 
Followed by:



> @Nic
> Just seen your comment. Am from working class background, not an aristo.
> And I am certainly not a Keynesian, or a particular fan of Toynbee, or even an uncritical fan of Laurie
> 
> Comment by David Allen Green — April 17, 2012 @ 1:01 pm


 


> Further to my comment above, I apologise for the rudeness. I did find the post difficult to follow, but there was a more graceful way for me to say so.
> Sorry, Sophie.
> 
> Comment by David Allen Green — April 17, 2012 @ 2:01 pm


 
I propose the New Statesman Comment Box Bingo. Or drinking game.  Although alcohol and comment boxes don't go well together.


----------



## Balbi (May 29, 2013)

Louise Mensch just walloped Laurie 

http://unfashionista.com/2013/05/29/reality-based-feminism/


----------



## DotCommunist (May 29, 2013)

> American feminism gets organised. It sees where power lies, and it mobilises to achieve it. It gets its candidates elected. Feminism here is about running for office, founding a company, becoming COO of Facebook or Yahoo. It is power feminism that realises that actual empowerment for women means getting more money, since money and liberty often equate, and being able to legislate or influence.


 
great


----------



## butchersapron (May 29, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Louise Mensch just walloped Laurie
> 
> http://unfashionista.com/2013/05/29/reality-based-feminism/


 



			
				Louise Bagshawe said:
			
		

> The picture at the top is of me at school aged 14. Big glasses, nerdy, feminist, ambitious, idolising Thatcher, and determined to be famous, to be an author, and to be rich. I was at private school my parents couldn’t really afford because I bust my ass and won a 100% academic scholarship.


 




			
				reality said:
			
		

> She was born on 28 June 1971 in London, England, the daughter of Nicholas Wilfrid and Daphne Margaret Bagshawe (née Triggs).[3] Her father comes from a family of Roman Catholic gentry;[4] his grandfather was the marine artist Joseph Richard Bagshawe, who was himself grandson of one of the 19th century's most renowned marine artists Clarkson Stanfield,[5] and a nephew of Edward Gilpin Bagshawe, Roman Catholic Bishop of Nottingham. Her paternal grandmother Mary Frideswide Bagshawe was the daughter of Charles Robertson, a stockbroker and benefactor of St Philip's Priory, Begbroke and one of the co-founders of Westminster Cathedral.[6] She is the sister of Tilly Bagshawe, a freelance journalist and author, and also has a younger sister Alice and a brother, James.[7]


----------



## FridgeMagnet (May 29, 2013)

I got a _scholarship_.


----------



## Buckaroo (May 29, 2013)

She bust her ass.


----------



## Firky (May 29, 2013)

Louise Mensch, 43, never imagined she would find herself enmeshed in a world of poverty.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (May 29, 2013)

Firky said:


> Louise Mensch, 43, never imagined she would find herself enmeshed in a world of poverty.


Forced to leave her lucrative career as a wri'er and slum it as an MP for an impoverished town in Northamptonshire.


----------



## Balbi (May 29, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Forced to leave her lucrative career as a wri'er and slum it as an MP for an impoverished town in Northamptonshire.


 
*tries to get defensive about Corby and Northants*



*fails*


----------



## Brixton Hatter (May 29, 2013)

I've got mates in Corby. Decent new football ground. Large Wetherspoons.


----------



## The Pale King (May 29, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> I've got mates in Corby. Decent new football ground. Large Wetherspoons.


 
Aren't all Wetherspoons large?


----------



## sihhi (May 29, 2013)

1. After being set up via a contact, leaving Oxford University, she walked into a job at MTV Europe, from there into EMI's media division.

2. She's received a million dollar advance deal for writing what are 4 fairly short - in her own words - "trash" novels. Most of them openly espouse fairly traditional ideas non-feminist ideals (hero:make money if you can, be a wife if you can't).







3. Four generations of her family went to the same Oxford University college - Christ Church.

4. Her father - a prominent, rich stockbroker part of Investec's stocks and shares wing - is the _chair of governors_ at another private school Mayfield

5. Her sister also attended exactly the same private school Woldingham (the premier Catholic service-based private school for girls in the country).

6. This is the family aristocrat-landowning tree (dad at bottom)


----------



## Firky (May 29, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Aren't all Wetherspoons large?


 

Largely soulless.


----------



## Balbi (May 29, 2013)

Mensch/Penny collaboration. You heard it here first.


----------



## J Ed (May 29, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Louise Mensch just walloped Laurie
> 
> http://unfashionista.com/2013/05/29/reality-based-feminism/


 

Making me agree with Louise Mensch on a few points in this article is the worst thing that Laurie Penny has ever done (to me)


----------



## J Ed (May 29, 2013)

Also I wonder how much of the article is motivated by LP snubbing her when Mensch invited her to coffee in NY...


----------



## sihhi (May 29, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Making me agree with Louise Mensch on a few points in this article is the worst thing that Laurie Penny has ever done (to me)


 
First time I've seen some rightwing and British really have a go at an intersectionality buzzword:




> “Check your privilege”, for example, is a profoundly stupid trope that states that only those with personal experience of something should comment, or that if a person is making an argument, they should immediately give way if their view is contradicted by somebody with a different life story. It is hard to imagine a more dishonest intellectual position than “check your privilege”, yet daily I see intelligent women who should know better embracing it.
> Laurie Penny is an absolutely prime example; she does it all the time. The other day on Twitter she told people not to rise to what she felt was a race-baiting article by Rod Liddle in the Spectator. She was quite right. Everybody with a blog knows what “don’t feed the trolls” means. However, she was angrily contradicted by the black comedian @AvaVidal who told her that people of colour were striking back and they should rise to it. Instead of defending her position, Penny caved, recanted, and commented mournfully that “having your privilege checked” was painful. Not for a minute did she consider that another person of colour might have agreed that you shouldn’t feed the trolls. Or that she was just as entitled to her opinion as her interlocutor. No, the woman debating with her was a woman of colour and therefore, despite being clearly and obviously correct, Penny had to back down.


----------



## J Ed (May 29, 2013)

sihhi said:


> First time I've seen some rightwing and British really have a go at an intersectionality buzzword:


 

I think it's because most right-wing (or for that matter centrist or apolitical) people see this stuff then they just assume that it's what all socialists or Marxists think


----------



## Buckaroo (May 29, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Oh god - lauriepenny is on 10 O Clock News tonight - debating with Christine Hamilton. The kind of TV that makes you want to poke your own eyeballs out


 
It was 10 O Clock live show on channel four.


----------



## sihhi (May 29, 2013)

Can anyone make sense of this?


> This talk examines the narratives of professional transnational Muslim women of Turkish, Pakistani and Indian heritage living and working in Britain. Developing a postcolonial black feminist framework of embodied intersectionality, the paper explores the ways in which the regulatory discursive power to ‘name’ the ‘Muslim woman’ in the ‘West’ as either dangerous or oppressed is lived out on and within the body. Embodied practices such as choosing to wear the hijab, which one woman described as a ‘second skin’, allows an insight into the ways in which the women draw on their subjecthood and inner sense of self to negotiate the affective ‘postcolonial disjunctures’ of racism and islamophobia which framed their everyday lives. Embodied intersectionality as a feminist critical theory of race and racism shows how gendered and raced representation is powerfully written on and experienced within the body, and how Muslim women’s agency challenges and transforms hegemonic discourses of race, gender and religion in transnational diasporic spaces.


 
what are "the narratives of"?

What is "embodied intersectionality"?

What is the "regulatory discursive power"?

What is "subjecthood"?

What is "inner sense of self"?

Why is racism an "affective ‘postcolonial disjuncture’"?

What are "transnational diasporic spaces"?

How can "gendered and raced representation" be "powerfully written on" a "body" unless you are doing a Laurie Penny and biroing poems on your forearms?


part of a major defining annual lecture not a one-off study group





> Birkbeck Race Forum & MA Culture Diaspora Ethnicity Annual Lecture 2013
> 
> ‘A Second Skin’ | Embodied intersectionality, transnationalism and narratives of identity and belonging among Muslim women in Britain
> 
> ...


 
followed by drinks reception anyway - LOL!


----------



## J Ed (May 29, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Can anyone make sense of this?


 

FFS. It's just fiddling while Rome burns, isn't it?


----------



## The Pale King (May 29, 2013)

How can "gendered and raced representation" be "powerfully written on" a "body" unless you are doing a Laurie Penny and biroing poems on your forearms?

lol


----------



## sihhi (May 29, 2013)

J Ed said:


> FFS. It's just fiddling while Rome burns, isn't it?


 
Heidi Safia Mirza, sociologist professor of Asian Trinidadian heritage, is probably the biggest UK name writing on black feminism - published _Young, Female and Black_ about about girls in 2 south London schools in 1990s, and then _Black British Feminism_.
The talk is happening as part of the _Centre for Rights, Equalities and Social Justice_ at the Institute of Education, University of London.


----------



## CharlieChaplin (May 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> 1. After being set up via a contact, leaving Oxford University, she walked into a job at MTV Europe, from there into EMI's media division.
> 
> 2. She's received a million dollar advance deal for writing what are 4 fairly short - in her own words - "trash" novels. Most of them openly espouse fairly traditional ideas non-feminist ideals (hero:make money if you can, be a wife if you can't).
> 
> ...


 



self-made yo'


----------



## goldenecitrone (May 30, 2013)

She's on Radio 4 now, talking about all the lost 26 year-old men she hangs out with.


----------



## cesare (May 30, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> It was 10 O Clock live show on channel four.



I saw this in the early hours on 4/7. It was a bit meh, with the only decent point being made by Christine Hamilton (bloody hell) that it was fairly much ok for middle class women now, and if anything needed to be done by feminists it was best to concentrate on women whose lives were generally harder. It wasn't really a proper discussion and all three ended up looking a bit divorced from reality.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 30, 2013)

sihhi, if those aren't rhetorical questions i'll answer them later with appropriate critique.  mostly it's just academic-speak for stuff that should be obvious to most activists and works fine within the understanding of a multi-tiered class struggle analysis - not that i suspect they have one....  if it was a rhetorical question and you know all this then please accept my apologies, i've literally just got up and aren't very good at reading nuance yet


----------



## JimW (May 30, 2013)

cesare said:


> ...a bit divorced from reality.


 
This comes as an enormous surprise!


----------



## cesare (May 30, 2013)

JimW said:


> This comes as an enormous surprise!


Well, yeah  Throw David Mitchell's piss-taking posh attempts to control the conversation into the mix, and it was more of a point and laugh session than anything else  Which was probably the intention.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Can anyone make sense of this?
> 
> 
> what are "the narratives of"?
> ...


*How to write a call for papers just like a bona fide pompous academic*

*Step 1*: Start a journal, preferably something _electronic_. Humanities academics are afraid of computers, and anything that's published online seems edgy and dangerous. Capitalize on their dismay by giving your ejournal a hip name with almost zero relevance to your chosen field like _Sputnik_ (postmodern), _Ellipsis_ (poetics), or _Bloom_ (literary theory). Bonus points for choosing a title that's impossible to pronounce, like _Wor(l)d-Smith-leery _or _Te*t._ Get funding for your journal from a university body, even if it is only peanuts. It's important to be affiliate yourself with the higher ups. That always looks good on a CFP.
*Step 2*: Write a pretentious defense of your journal, involving a number of Latinisms and double negatives. For example:

"_Saffron_ is a *new* electronic journal devised and disseminated by the department of comparative literature at the University of Ingersoll.  Saffron is a spice of colour, the spice of life that permeates all substances it touches. The idea for our ejournal is not dissimilar; we seek to examine the idea of staining, of remainder and of transformation. The draw to saffron is that it is a precious and limited substance; it is not insignificant that the sexual organs of the crocus plant from which it is derived suggest a kind of renewal."

*Step 3*: Create an even more pretentious subject for the focus of your initial issue. Your issue theme should be somewhat related to your journal's ostensible focus, but it is imperative that the title of the issue be as obfuscated as possible. Use a colon.
 For example: _Saffron_, Issue 1: "At the Heart of the Matter:  Penetrating Loci"
Your CFP should also explain the focus of the issue. Here is where you stick lists of opposing terms and words that have little or no relevance to what you're actually interested in. Be creative! This is your place to demonstrate your word-smithery, your word-craft, the artisanlike qualities of verbosity with which you charm, implicate and (wo)manipulate your audience(s) and (de)monstrate your "smartyness." Equivocation is not only suggested but required. 
Suggested buzz words:


Reformulate
Discourse/dialogue
Launching
Liminal
Ideology
Authority/authorize/author-ize
Represent/Re-present
Don't be intimidated if you don't know what any of these words mean: nobody else does either. 
*Step 4*: Add generic categories that allow anyone to submit anything for consideration. You don't want anybody to feel left out, do you? Here's a good sample list:

Medieval
Renaissance
Postcolonialism
Writing Centers
Feminism
Folklore
Non-dramatic
Composition
Victorian
Gender Studies
Rhetoric
Marxism       
Dramatic
Narrative
Queer Studies
Pedagogy
Children
Psychoanalytic
Multimedia
Deconstruction
Literature
(Sub)Culture
Anything else ever written or thought by humans, or, to be on the safe side, by any higher-order mammal. 
*Step 5*: Make an insincere declaration to your readers promising impartiality in paper selection and quality in the editorial process. Nobody will believe you, but it is a nice touch anyway. 
*Step 6*: Leave an email address for submissions and a deadline date. Then just sit back, pour yourself a whiskey sour and wait for the proposals to start flowing in.  

http://philoillogica.typepad.com/philoillogica/2004/11/how_to_write_a_.html


----------



## JimW (May 30, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> *How to write a call for papers just like a bona fide pompous academic...*


 
Sadly for me, in the Chinese case, the next step is send it to me to translate.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 30, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> She bust her ass.


 
And since then, the equine world has been seeking revenge...


----------



## rekil (May 30, 2013)

The Morning Star is looking for a subeditor! lauriepenny could do this, AND bang out a shit opinion piece for the NS once a week on the train. Boom. No more whining about being enmeshed in a world of povs. You're welcome.

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/446#morstar1


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 30, 2013)

goldenecitrone said:


> She's on Radio 4 now, talking about all the lost 26 year-old men she hangs out with.


 
I do hope she's not trampling on their oppression by 'speaking for' them.


----------



## butchersapron (May 30, 2013)

Some of the poor things have only got _three _mags and papers to write for!


----------



## rekil (May 30, 2013)

https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/339495714012946432




			
				artie ziff said:
			
		

> just give me one proposed name for the party, one name you think would be good for it, that people could rally around. just a name


Proletarian Democracy.


----------



## Brainaddict (May 30, 2013)

I hate a lot of academic jargon for its inability to provide the language necessary to help people involved in political action, and I would even say a lot of it inhibits political action. But then since most of the left also offers a language that most people don't relate to and which positively inhibits participation in political action, I think people should ask if they are sitting in a glass house before throwing stones.


----------



## frogwoman (May 30, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> I hate a lot of academic jargon for its inability to provide the language necessary to help people involved in political action, and I would even say a lot of it inhibits political action. But then since most of the left also offers a language that most people don't relate to and which positively inhibits participation in political action, I think people should ask if they are sitting in a glass house before throwing stones.


 

i suspect most on this thread would agree with you


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> 1. what are "the narratives of"?
> 
> 2. What is "embodied intersectionality"?
> 
> ...


 
1. the experiences of those who the lecture studies, presumably to be treated rightly or wrongly as anecdata in making whatever point they seek to make.

2. trying to make their brand of feminism automatically recognise that not all women's experience is the same.  the argument generally made is that in the uk feminism is for white middle class women and doesn't include women from outside the islington milieu. 

3. the mainstream media version

4. how a person responds to number 3.

5. how they want to see themselves, generally also influenced negatively by number 3.

6. because victims of post-colonial racism often internalise racism and attempt to live with it, co-opt it, and sometimes therefore pass it unconsciously through their actions.  the disjunct is that they do not believe they are doing so, indeed may recognise the negative effect that colonialism has had on themselves and their community but still pass on the racist tropes of the colonial power.

7. banglatown, london and banglaville, paris, for example.  the question being do bangladeshi (for example) immigrants to london have more in common with their Parisian counterparts than with native londoners or native parisians; and are these questions asked in the bit quoted being asked and / or answered in these communities.

8. it means visibly and physically adopted - for example are immigrant women taking on the hijab because of cultural pressures from both within and without the community due to post-colonial perceptions of what these women should be.

-----

the language use makes it clear who the lecture is for.  it's nothing to do with anything except a bunch of internationalist academics and students talking about stuff that exists in a way that won't make any changes for anyone and can't anyway.


----------



## J Ed (May 30, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> I hate a lot of academic jargon for its inability to provide the language necessary to help people involved in political action, and I would even say a lot of it inhibits political action. But then since most of the left also offers a language that most people don't relate to and which positively inhibits participation in political action, I think people should ask if they are sitting in a glass house before throwing stones.


 

The two aren't really separate, look at how Seymour writes in the Guardian.


----------



## J Ed (May 30, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/28/post-woolwich-assault-racism-not-just-edl

Workerism? Hermeneutics? Techniques of racialisation? Ideational content? 

Really?


----------



## frogwoman (May 30, 2013)

"zetetic astronomy" made more sense


----------



## cesare (May 30, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/28/post-woolwich-assault-racism-not-just-edl
> 
> Workerism? Hermeneutics? Techniques of racialisation? Ideational content?
> 
> Really?


I couldn't even get past para 3. Reads like something you'd expect if you accidentallied got chugged by a SWPer selling papers.


----------



## Bakunin (May 30, 2013)

copliker said:


> The Morning Star is looking for a subeditor! lauriepenny could do this, AND bang out a shit opinion piece for the NS once a week on the train. Boom. No more whining about being enmeshed in a world of povs. You're welcome.
> 
> http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/446#morstar1


 
It'd be funny seeing her having to look subeditors in the eye, seeing as they seem collectively devoted to ruining _so, so many_ of her scribblings...


----------



## JimW (May 30, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/28/post-woolwich-assault-racism-not-just-edl
> 
> Workerism? Hermeneutics? Techniques of racialisation? Ideational content?
> 
> Really?


 
He seems to be arguing, in his call for a multi-pronged approach, that we stick a pitchfork in some racists, which I think I could get behind.


----------



## J Ed (May 30, 2013)

cesare said:


> I couldn't even get past para 3. Reads like something you'd expect if you accidentallied got chugged by a SWPer selling papers.


 

Some academics seem to end up imitating the writing style of people who they spend their time reading which imo is hilarious. It's a bit like little kids from the south visiting their grandparents in Scotland for a few weeks and coming back home with a Scottish accent..


----------



## JimW (May 30, 2013)

Whist and awa', now.


----------



## cesare (May 30, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Some academics seem to end up imitating the writing style of people who they spend their time reading which imo is hilarious. It's a bit like little kids from the south visiting their grandparents in Scotland for a few weeks and coming back home with a Scottish accent..


And replacing lots of words with Gaelic.


----------



## JimW (May 30, 2013)

cesare said:


> And replacing lots of words with Gaelic.


 
We used to go on holiday to Ullapool and I bought a book on Teach Yourself Gaelic. I think I can still say, "I'd like a whisky", "The dog is on the moor" and "It's raining", which TBF covers 99% of situations in the Highlands.


----------



## J Ed (May 30, 2013)

Mensch's attack on privilege theory made the Graunid http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/30/reality-based-feminism-louise-mensch


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 30, 2013)

I don't think I've ever read an article where I've disagreed so vehemently with most of it while agreeing so much with another bit of it. It's almost like Mensch is utterly confused.


----------



## The Pale King (May 30, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Mensch's attack on privilege theory made the Graunid http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/30/reality-based-feminism-louise-mensch


 
And now Dan Hodges wants a go...
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danhodges/100219309/the-latest-lefty-mantra-check-your-privilege/


----------



## The39thStep (May 30, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/28/post-woolwich-assault-racism-not-just-edl
> 
> Workerism? Hermeneutics? Techniques of racialisation? Ideational content?
> 
> Really?


 
'comment is free' except if you actually want to comment on that article


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 30, 2013)

Idiots like Hodges and Mensch are doing a fine job of discrediting anyone who has issues with privilege checking & intersectionality.


----------



## coley (May 30, 2013)

S☼I said:


> I don't think I've ever read an article where I've disagreed so vehemently with most of it while agreeing so much with another bit of it. It's almost like Mensch is utterly confused.


Which bits do you agree/disagree with?


----------



## J Ed (May 30, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Idiots like Hodges and Mensch are doing a fine job of discrediting anyone who has issues with privilege checking & intersectionality.


 

This was my first thought, ffs


----------



## andysays (May 30, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Oh god - lauriepenny is on 10 O Clock News tonight - debating with Christine Hamilton. The kind of TV that makes you want to poke your own eyeballs out


 


cesare said:


> I saw this in the early hours on 4/7. It was a bit meh, with the only decent point being made by Christine Hamilton (bloody hell) that it was fairly much ok for middle class women now, and if anything needed to be done by feminists it was best to concentrate on women whose lives were generally harder. It wasn't really a proper discussion and all three ended up looking a bit divorced from reality.


 


cesare said:


> Well, yeah  Throw David Mitchell's piss-taking posh attempts to control the conversation into the mix, and it was more of a point and laugh session than anything else  Which was probably the intention.


 
Sounds like the opening line of a joke:

Laurie Penny, Christine Hamilton and David Mitchell walk into a TV studio...​ 
Write your own punchline


----------



## cesare (May 30, 2013)

andysays said:


> Sounds like the opening line of a joke:
> 
> Laurie Penny, Christine Hamilton and David Mitchell walk into a TV studio...​
> Write your own punchline


Angela Epstein was one of the three women btw


----------



## ddraig (May 30, 2013)

the only funny bit about that was when Mitchell said the all women panel will discuss and then i'll decide, just like society


----------



## andysays (May 30, 2013)

cesare said:


> Angela Epstein was one of the three women btw


 
Who's Angela Epstein? (I know about google, but...)


----------



## cesare (May 30, 2013)

andysays said:


> Who's Angela Epstein? (I know about google, but...)


She's another journo/commentariat. Her take on being a woman (and by extension, stance on feminism) is an updated version of those 50s adverts about how to keep a man happy.


----------



## TruXta (May 30, 2013)

Saw a couple minutes of that. Hugely cringeworthy.


----------



## andysays (May 30, 2013)

cesare said:


> She's another journo/commentariat. Her take on being a woman (and by extension, stance on feminism) is an updated version of those 50s adverts about how to keep a man happy.


 
I'm probably not regretting that I missed that then. Did Laurie have anything of interest to say, or did they just swap tea-making tips?


----------



## The39thStep (May 30, 2013)

coley said:


> Which bits do you agree/disagree with?


 
This for one :



> I want to talk about the way that most of the modern feminist movement, at least online, appears to be wasting most of its time in frenzied internal debate about absolutely nothing, and in the process, solving absolutely nothing. It has come to be alien to the vast majority of women, who do not self-identify as feminists, and yet who, if asked, would support feminist goals.


----------



## The39thStep (May 30, 2013)

This article in the Independent caught my eye as well:



> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...ws-on-suffrage-street-interviews-8631771.html


----------



## cesare (May 30, 2013)

andysays said:


> I'm probably not regretting that I missed that then.Did Laurie have anything of interest to say, or did they just swap tea-making tips?


Well, AE was doing "feminism is dead and feminists don't do themselves any favours, and this is what men want" on stage left. CH was centre stage doing "why I didn't go into politics, me me me, politics is not an arena women feel happy in, every woman should vote cos of suffragettes, but yeah feminism should be directed where it's needed at the working class that I heard of once". LP was stage right doing "OMG I can't believe you said that, no let me finish, CAPITALIST PATRIARCHY, and feminism is more important to every women in the world EVER" with accompanying stutters and speaking with hands. David Mitchell using it as opportunity for pisstake. All that was lacking was for Greer to enter stage right and take all 4 out with a 12bore before turning it on herself.


----------



## andysays (May 30, 2013)

cesare said:


> Well, AE was doing "feminism is dead and feminists don't do themselves any favours, and this is what men want" on stage left. CH was centre stage doing "why I didn't go into politics, me me me, politics is not an arena women feel happy in, every woman should vote cos of suffragettes, but yeah feminism should be directed where it's needed at the working class that I heard of once". LP was stage right doing "OMG I can't believe you said that, no let me finish, CAPITALIST PATRIARCHY, and feminism is more important to every women in the world EVER" with accompanying stutters and speaking with hands. David Mitchell using it as opportunity for pisstake. All that was lacking was for Greer to enter stage right and take all 4 out with a 12bore before turning it on herself.


 
Reading your description I'm glad I don't have a TV.

Far more rewarding discussions to be had here


----------



## treelover (May 30, 2013)

Shouldn't say this but Christine Hamilton says some decent stuff when she is on the Wright Stuff, on benefits she even challenges the increasingly RW Matthew Wright, she has put her name to a number of petitions, etc against disability benefit cuts.


----------



## cesare (May 30, 2013)

andysays said:


> Reading your description I'm glad I don't have a TV.
> 
> Far more rewarding discussions to be had here


Well, it's meant to be a satirical view of events so the satire involves those taking part too, I guess. Massive home goal if you were doing anything other than getting airtime and advertising yourself.


----------



## muscovyduck (May 30, 2013)

Laurie Penny, universally known as the voice of the youth, was shocked to find a 700 page discussion thread dedicated to destroying her inspirational career. The young, 27 year old woman called her freezing flatmate away from the warm fire of newspapers, begged for by the residents of the hovel from the greedy, upper-class, voluntary newspaper salesmen. "That," she whispered "Is why we need to lead the working-class into a revolution. We shall condemn those who have no choice but to resort to violence, through the medium of interpretive dance. We shall draw our struggles, turn them into art, and sell them in ebook format. We shall charge $5000 to speak about the movement." Her voice gained strength. "We will alienate all those who disagree! We will accept awards from the monsters who have caused this!" She stood up, red marker-pen held high, surrounded by flames. "FOR WE WORK FOR A LIVING!" The proletariat on the street gave a standing ovation for her speech, and concentrated this new found energy into counter-acting the psychological kettle capitalism had trapped them in. Dawn was approaching; Laurie could see the morning star above her, and pulled it off the shelf to place on the fire.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 30, 2013)

cesare said:


> I couldn't even get past para 3. Reads like something you'd expect if you accidentallied got chugged by a SWPer selling papers.


 
Or one of articul8's posts.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 30, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Laurie Penny, universally known as the voice of the youth, was shocked to find a 700 page discussion thread dedicated to destroying her inspirational career. The young, 27 year old woman called her freezing flatmate away from the warm fire of newspapers, begged for by the residents of the hovel from the greedy, upper-class, voluntary newspaper salesmen. "That," she whispered "Is why we need to lead the working-class into a revolution. We shall condemn those who have no choice but to resort to violence, through the medium of interpretive dance. We shall draw our struggles, turn them into art, and sell them in ebook format. We shall charge $5000 to speak about the movement." Her voice gained strength. "We will alienate all those who disagree! We will accept awards from the monsters who have caused this!" She stood up, red marker-pen held high, surrounded by flames. "FOR WE WORK FOR A LIVING!" The proletariat on the street gave a standing ovation for her speech, and concentrated this new found energy into counter-acting the psychological kettle capitalism had trapped them in. Dawn was approaching; Laurie could see the morning star above her, and pulled it off the shelf to place on the fire.


 
Workers Girder, this post should go in you!

(stretched the meme a little bit there I know but I reckon I got away with it)


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 30, 2013)

700 pages.  hobnobs all round.


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 30, 2013)

I did the post that took it to page 700 

Do I get a prize?


----------



## DotCommunist (May 30, 2013)

all you can eat ticket for Firbox


----------



## muscovyduck (May 30, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I did the post that took it to page 700
> 
> Do I get a prize?


20% discount for Marxism


----------



## SpineyNorman (May 30, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> 20% discount for Marxism


 
I wouldn't mind going to be honest, before Deltagate it was a good event, only place where you'd get that many really good speakers all in one place (Harvey, Kliman, Zizek, Holloway, etc) - so long as you avoided the ones where the speakers were SWPers it was a decent do.

And this year I wouldn't mind going just to see what goes off - think there might be a few fireworks.

20% discount won't get me there though, it'd have to be free lol


----------



## Bakunin (May 30, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> 20% discount for Marxism


 

That's a prize?


----------



## sihhi (May 30, 2013)

Thank you el-ah 



> what are "the narratives of"?


 


> 1. the experiences of those who the lecture studies, presumably to be treated rightly or wrongly as anecdata in making whatever point they seek to make.


 

 So just anecdotes or what people say.




> 2. trying to make their brand of feminism automatically recognise that not all women's experience is the same. the argument generally made is that in the uk feminism is for white middle class women and doesn't include women from outside the islington milieu.


 
What does that have to do with* bodies?  *





> What is the "regulatory discursive power"?


 


> 3. the mainstream media version


 
Is mainstream academia a subsection of the mainstream media? If not, why not.

These journals and slideshows are a medium for transmitting ideas.



> What is "subjecthood"?


 


> 4. how a person responds to number 3.


 

What does that have to with *subjects*? 





> What is "inner sense of self"?


 



> 5. how they want to see themselves, generally also influenced negatively by number 3.


 

But what if people don't much focus on the media. Or if people don't care about how they see themselves.





> Why is racism an "affective ‘postcolonial disjuncture’"?


 


> 6. because victims of post-colonial racism often internalise racism and attempt to live with it, co-opt it, and sometimes therefore pass it unconsciously through their actions. the disjunct is that they do not believe they are doing so, indeed may recognise the negative effect that colonialism has had on themselves and their community but still pass on the racist tropes of the colonial power.


 
Is this like the concept of a self-hating Jew? 




> What are "transnational diasporic spaces"?


 



> 7. banglatown, london and banglaville, paris, for example. the question being do bangladeshi (for example) immigrants to london have more in common with their Parisian counterparts than with native londoners or native parisians; and are these questions asked in the bit quoted being asked and / or answered in these communities.


 
So just ... immigrant neighbourhoods. 





> How can "gendered and raced representation" be "powerfully written on" a "body"


 


> 8. it means visibly and physically adopted - for example are immigrant women taking on the hijab because of cultural pressures from both within and without the community due to post-colonial perceptions of what these women should be.


 

But why writing - written on...


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 30, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/28/post-woolwich-assault-racism-not-just-edl
> 
> Workerism? Hermeneutics? Techniques of racialisation? Ideational content?
> 
> Really?


 
Seymour really needs to stop masturbating in public.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 30, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Seymour really needs to stop masturbating in public.


 Like juggling, masturbation should only be done in public by the exceptionally skilled. (Mark Thomas)


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 30, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Laurie Penny, universally known as the voice of the youth, was shocked to find a 700 page discussion thread dedicated to destroying her inspirational career. The young, 27 year old woman called her freezing flatmate away from the warm fire of newspapers, begged for by the residents of the hovel from the greedy, upper-class, voluntary newspaper salesmen. "That," she whispered "Is why we need to lead the working-class into a revolution. We shall condemn those who have no choice but to resort to violence, through the medium of interpretive dance. We shall draw our struggles, turn them into art, and sell them in ebook format. We shall charge $5000 to speak about the movement." Her voice gained strength. "We will alienate all those who disagree! We will accept awards from the monsters who have caused this!" She stood up, red marker-pen held high, surrounded by flames. "FOR WE WORK FOR A LIVING!" The proletariat on the street gave a standing ovation for her speech, and concentrated this new found energy into counter-acting the psychological kettle capitalism had trapped them in. Dawn was approaching; Laurie could see the morning star above her, and pulled it off the shelf to place on the fire.


 
Shouldn't that be "*bought* by the residents of the hovel for the heady price of 2 verses and the chorus of "_The Internationale_..."?


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> But why writing - written on...


 
Wankspeak misrepresentation of Foucault's description of power "inscribing" its control onto people, rather than what el said, I think.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 30, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Like juggling, masturbation should only be done in public by the exceptionally skilled. (Mark Thomas)


 
I see that you attribute this to Mark Thomas, but tell me, have you personal experience of juggling in public?


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 30, 2013)

There was also a Jeanette Winterson novel called "Written On The Body" - a literary way of saying that your experiences shape you and you can't hide it.  I don't know if that is the origin of the whole thing though.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 30, 2013)

i think the most important question that sihhi raises is "does mainstream academia consider itself part of the regulatory discursive power?"

i suspect we all know the answer to that.  i imagine they see themselves as the last gunfighters, robin hoods, making daring assaults on the bastions of power to reclaim the personhood of the masses from the tyranny of post-colonialism.  when we all know that they're a bunch of ivory towered wankers who think they're radical socialists because they tip their cleaners at christmas.


----------



## sihhi (May 30, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> There was also a Jeanette Winterson novel called "Written On The Body" - a literary way of saying that your experiences shape you and you can't hide it. I don't know if that is the origin of the whole thing though.


 
This Jeanette Winterson idea of her (formative?) experiences imprinting on her intentions so indelibly can be used to justify certain things:

"This week, my godchild Eleanor finishes her three years pre-prep at St Paul's Cathedral School, ready to start at City of London School for Girls in September.
When she was born, I promised to pay for her education until she is 21. Her mother is my closest friend, I have no children of my own, and I can afford it. It gives my friend and her husband extra money for their second child, and it has meant that they can stay in the part of London they like, without having to move for the sake of that increasingly rare find; a good state school. I don't feel guilty about paying for Eleanor because I am not middle class."


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 30, 2013)

yeah, see, it's easy to hang on to the notion that if you were born poor everything else you do to participate in the whole perpetuation of the status quo thing is somehow class war, or at best, doesn't actually perpetuate the status quo.  it allows for a lot of wriggle room and i imagine it makes you sleep much better at night.  but the status quo is still perpetuated and those kids aren't going to learn socialism at school OR home now.

rick parfitt has a lot to answer for


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 30, 2013)

also, your files are even bigger than ern's.  remind me never to say anything in your presence that might come back and haunt me.


----------



## DotCommunist (May 30, 2013)

she also voted lib dem


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 30, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> she also voted lib dem


 
it's ok to do it if you're not middle class.


----------



## sihhi (May 30, 2013)

Some of the stuff coming out of academia just seems absurd nowadays:




> First, Stephanie A. Shield’s ‘Waking Up to Privilege: Intersectionality and Opportunity’ (Chapter 2) presents the perspective of a senior white woman faculty member. Using light as metaphor, she describes her retrospective understanding of her white privilege over a forty-year academic career. This “light” shone onto opportunities at critical junctions in her career, yet at the same time blinded her to things beyond her own experience. With the benefit of time and age, she came to acknowledge her taken-for-granted privileges. However, her understanding of the intersectionality of her identities brings complications. As she explains (p.39):
> 
> “The combined facets of my social identity connect me in complex ways to relative privilege and relative disadvantage. I am more than my whiteness. My class background, sexual orientation, age, gender, ability status and more – not just race – are all points of intersection that define my social identity at this moment. *Yet, at the same time as I mentally raise this protest, I know that the facets of my social identity – each intersection – mutually constitute, reinforce, and naturalize one another.* Thus, the thread of whiteness is inevitably woven through gender, age, and every other significant dimension that defines me."


 
So the intersections mutually reinforce one another do they? WTF?  I thought the whole point was how they didn't so that you had new breeds of oppression and activism to draw out against capitalism - disabled lesbians, black single mothers support groups, Sikh-specific movement rape crisis centres,  instead of generalised trade union and services efforts. (Although variations of these kinds of groups have been active since the mid-70s at least).

This is the reviwer's main focus:



> Food is one of the necessities to sustain our existence. Where it is in abundance, it is celebrated – in its diversity, creativity, and its role in different cultures. Where it is scarce, it is scavenged and fought over.
> 
> Local dishes and unique cuisines define some cities (think Spaghetti Bolognese, in Bologna; Poutine, in Montreal). The food is marketed by the city to attract tourists and visitors.
> 
> ...


----------



## JHE (May 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This Jeanette Winterson idea of her (formative?) experiences imprinting on her intentions so indelibly can be used to justify certain things:
> 
> "This week, my godchild Eleanor finishes her three years pre-prep at St Paul's Cathedral School, ready to start at City of London School for Girls in September.
> When she was born, I promised to pay for her education until she is 21. Her mother is my closest friend, I have no children of my own, and I can afford it. It gives my friend and her husband extra money for their second child, and it has meant that they can stay in the part of London they like, without having to move for the sake of that increasingly rare find; a good state school. I don't feel guilty about paying for Eleanor because I am not middle class."


 
I'm intrigued by that last sentence.  It's a bit ambiguous.  Does she mean that (i) it would be wrong to pay for private schooling if she were middle class, but since she's "not middle class", it's OK or (ii) it is OK to pay for private education, the only people who make the mistake of feeling guilty about it are middle class and since she's "not middle class" she doesn't make that mistake?


----------



## sihhi (May 30, 2013)

JHE said:


> I'm intrigued by that last sentence. It's a bit ambiguous. Does she mean that (i) it would be wrong to pay for private schooling if she were middle class, but since she's "not middle class", it's OK or (ii) it is OK to pay for private education, the only people who make the mistake of feeling guilty about it are middle class and since she's "not middle class" she doesn't make that mistake?


 
I think a bit of both, it's OK in general and especially OK if you are not middle class, but born working class like she is. She goes on to say:-



> The middle classes have been utterly brain-washed by Labour, new and old, into believing that sending their kids to a decent school is directly responsible for the breakdown of the State system. The truth is that Governments for the past thirty years have used education as a blackboard for their own particular ideologies - whether wrecking the grammar schools


 
basically suggesting the slight decrease in number of grammar schools makes it acceptable.

The argument seems to end on the lines that sending children to private state schools is acceptable so long as parents then fight for change in the state system:



> If the French film industry can use a ticket levy to plough money back into its movies, why can't we have an education levy on hamburgers and Harry Potter? Let's agree that education is the number one priority and use targeted taxation. So what if Government hates it? It's our money, our schools, our kids. Don't be guilty - fight for change.


----------



## Steel Icarus (May 30, 2013)

coley said:


> Which bits do you agree/disagree with?


 

2nd and 3rd paragraphs are pretty agreeable


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (May 30, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> those kids aren't going to learn socialism at school OR home now.


 
And where might they learn socialism instead?


----------



## Firky (May 30, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> And where might they learn socialism instead?


 

Right here on Urban75, durh!


----------



## Delroy Booth (May 30, 2013)

The grammar school system broke because it was institutionally elitist. No amount of retrospective Tory nostalgia should blind people to this fact. Fuck the people who want to bring it back, I hope their kids and their kids kids get the 3rd rate educate they assumed someone else's kids was going to get for their stupidity and selfishness.


----------



## coley (May 30, 2013)

Firky said:


> Right here on Urban75, durh!



You should have put that on the new jokes thread


----------



## Lo Siento. (May 30, 2013)

ironically, Mensch's nonsense is basically where "identity politics" leads you. Abolishing poverty is a collective project, redistributing poverty "more fairly" is an ultimately individualist project. So pretty logically consistent to say that identity feminism should mean making individual women more rich/more powerful...

(is it not the same logic that sees Laurie complaining that her political journalism isn't taken seriously in the bourgeois press because she's a woman? ie. that the bourgeois press would be significantly improved by taking women political journalists more seriously? But it'd still be the bourgeois press, still serving the same interests for the same reasons...)


----------



## sihhi (May 31, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> she also voted lib dem


 
She also addressed a Tory Conference to slag off Tony Blair:




> This is good for me as I go into major rant about this crap government and its low-grade response to the environment. Can you believe that it is the Conservatives who want a Climate Change Bill? The Conservatives are putting the environment on the main stage at their conference in October, instead of in some crummy cubicle where only three people can sit down. It is very embarrassing  - even more so for me because I have agree to go and speak at the conference – on the environment.
> Why? Because they have asked me, and because I will talk to anyone who will listen, and that certainly isn’t Tony Blair. Meanwhile, I have to pay VAT on the installation of my Geo-thermal heating system. Here I am cutting my personal household emissions by 75% at my own expense, and Labour is charging me VAT.


 
Stop thinking horrific things about Jeanette Winterson's commitment to the class which is still part of. Talking to the Conservatives is no crime, Blair is as bad as Hitler 




> ... Blair ... The man has become a mad tyrant like all those other twentieth century Taurean tyrants – Hitler and Stalin to name but two.


 


> I am beginning this on a British Airways flight from Cologne to London Heathrow on a cold bright Sunday morning with snow on the ground. I have been in a monastery outside Cologne, with other writers, on a British Council_* weekend*_ for German academics.


 



> Yeah, debt is the new money.
> 
> But what is it with the voodoos of central banks? The euro has made everything in Europe more expensive for those who are in the Euro, and everything in Britain has become more expensive because we are not in the euro. I don't understand it.
> 
> ...


 
Although she is a business owner with a freehold lease on a posh organic food shop in gentrified Spitalfields Market, Winterson proves that grammar schools and scholarships to Oxford must be good for the working-class since they produce such smart and well-balanced working-class people like her.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (May 31, 2013)

Winterson is a slightly different case to most of the other people in this thread, with the possible exception of that illustrator, in that she's not primarily a journalist and commentator. However incoherent or self serving some of her opinions may be, they aren't why anyone has heard of her.

(I will admit to being horrified when someone here first pointed out that she once voted Lib Dem though).


----------



## TruXta (May 31, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> There was also a Jeanette Winterson novel called "Written On The Body" - a literary way of saying that your experiences shape you and you can't hide it. I don't know if that is the origin of the whole thing though.


It goes at least as far back as Reich I'd say. Much further back if you start messing around with tattoing and branding as political expressions/tools of control of course. Not that these jokers mean it that literally.


----------



## cesare (May 31, 2013)

TruXta said:


> It goes at least as far back as Reich I'd say. Much further back if you start messing around with tattoing and branding as political expressions/tools of control of course. Not that these jokers mean it that literally.


Wilhelm? That's interesting.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 31, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i think the most important question that sihhi raises is "does mainstream academia consider itself part of the regulatory discursive power?"
> 
> i suspect we all know the answer to that. i imagine they see themselves as the last gunfighters, robin hoods, making daring assaults on the bastions of power to reclaim the personhood of the masses from the tyranny of post-colonialism. when we all know that they're a bunch of ivory towered wankers who think they're radical socialists because they tip their cleaners at christmas.


 
This may have been more true a couple of decades ago than it is now., I suspect Too many academics nowadays don't appear to engage with politics at all, except on a personal level. For every Callinicos, there are a hundred others keeping their heads down for the sake of their careers.
Not that I've ever looked to academe for a source of liberatory power.  That'd be too much like shooting oneself in both feet.


----------



## ViolentPanda (May 31, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> And where might they learn socialism instead?


 
I was going to reply "in the Soviet Union", but I had a premonition that you'd reply with "In Soviet Union, socialism learns you".


----------



## Hocus Eye. (May 31, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> [snip]...
> Not that I've ever looked to *academe* for a source of liberatory power. That'd be too much like shooting oneself in both feet.


How refreshing to see you use the correct word 'academe' instead of the made up word 'academia'


----------



## Brixton Hatter (May 31, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I did the post that took it to page 700
> 
> Do I get a prize?


A big red pen of justice


----------



## TruXta (May 31, 2013)

cesare said:


> Wilhelm? That's interesting.


He was quite radical for his time in his writings about the socio-sexual origins of what he called _body armour_ - his term for the physiological and behavioural manifestations of personality (or character) structure that serves to shield us against our own and others neuroses. This was before he went off the rocks and started going on about orgone energy and all that.


----------



## DaveCinzano (May 31, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> A big red pen of justice


I believe that you have just made what is known as a huffing pen toast.


----------



## Tom A (May 31, 2013)

Bloody hell, I'm agreeing with a Tory, and Louise Mensch at that, most particularly this bit, even if the rest of the article is bollocks that confuses feminism with capitalist greed done by a woman: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/30/reality-based-feminism-louise-mensch



> We have the unfruitful spectacle of some of the most leftwing commentators in Britain wondering if they are being leftwing enough, or if their background even gives them the right to make an argument. "Check your privilege", for example, is a profoundly stupid trope that states that only those with personal experience of something should comment, or that if a person is making an argument, they should immediately give way if their view is contradicted by somebody with a different life story. It is hard to imagine a more dishonest intellectual position than "check your privilege", yet daily I see intelligent women who should know better embracing it.
> Laurie Penny is an absolutely prime example; she does it all the time. The other day on Twitter she told people not to rise to what she felt was a race-baiting article by Rod Liddle in the Spectator. She was quite right. Everybody with a blog knows what "don't feed the trolls" means. However, she was angrily contradicted by the black comedian @AvaVidal who told her that people of colour were striking back and they should rise to it. Instead of defending her position, Penny caved, recanted, and commented mournfully that "having your privilege checked" was painful. Not for a minute did she consider that another person of colour might have agreed that you shouldn't feed the trolls. Or that she was just as entitled to her opinion as her interlocutor. No, the woman debating with her was a woman of colour and therefore, despite being clearly and obviously correct, Penny had to back down.


----------



## The Pale King (May 31, 2013)

Laurie strikes back for the intersectionalistas!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/31/louise-mensch-privilege-internet

"Intersectionality" is another new bit of equality jargon that the stiff suits in the conservative commentariat loudly claim not to understand – despite or perhaps because of the fact that schoolchildren have been using it on the internet for years. All it means is that you cannot talk in any meaningful way about class without also talking about race, gender and sexuality, and vice versa."

Got that? You cannot talk in ANY MEANINGFUL WAY about class without also talking (simultaneously?) about race, gender and sexuality.


----------



## Tom A (May 31, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Got that? You cannot talk in ANY MEANINGFUL WAY about class without also talking (simultaneously?) about race, gender and sexuality.


Of course you could NEVER have a society that manages to have some form of "equality" among genders, sexualities, and races... but is also unequal when it comes to whoever relates to the ownership of production. Never in a million years!


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 31, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> And where might they learn socialism instead?


 
well, that's a good question.  where did you learn socialism?


----------



## DotCommunist (May 31, 2013)

Schoolchildren have been using intersectionality for years?


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 31, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Got that? You cannot talk in ANY MEANINGFUL WAY about class without also talking (simultaneously?) about race, gender and sexuality.


 

well you can't really. 

but she misses a major trick, in that she has mistaken making up stories about gender and sexuality for having a meaningful discussion about class.

see, she sees class as being a subset of e.g. gender - i.e. once the [middle class] women are free everyone will be free.  but gender is a subset of class - middle class women have more social capital / value than working class men, but working class men have more social capital / value than working class women.  class is a better indicator of your likely success than race, gender, sexuality, or any of the other constructed values.  therefore class NEEDS to be the main area of attack, with recognition that race, gender, sexuality are also areas in which inequality needs to be abolished inna socialist stylee. 

tl; dr - her intersectionality is broken.


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 31, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Schoolchildren have been using intersectionality for years?


 
not when i was teaching.  they mostly called each other she-he and various Urdu insults no-one would translate for me.


----------



## rekil (May 31, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Schoolchildren have been using intersectionality for years?


When laurie penny says "schoolchildren" she means "laurie penny", just like when she goes on about "women" she means "laurie penny".


----------



## J Ed (May 31, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/340443407291908097 Laurie Penny confronts challenges to privilege theory by asserting her top trumps status.


----------



## The Pale King (May 31, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> well you can't really.
> 
> but she misses a major trick, in that she has mistaken making up stories about gender and sexuality for having a meaningful discussion about class.
> 
> ...


 
I'd be tempted to reverse the saying. I don't think you can have a meaningful chat about race/gender/sex without reference to class, because it overdetermines the content of those categories. I'm not so sure it necessarily cuts the other way. We can see that all history is the history of class war for example. To see all history as the history of conflict over sexuality would be a less useful mode of interpretation, although an interesting book no doubt.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (May 31, 2013)

I can't believe this rubbish appears to be one of the dominant narratives on the left at the moment. I mean, no-one is saying this stuff doesn't matter, but we're living through one of the worst periods of politics in recent memory - this is arguably worse than the Thatcher years now - and all the stuff which people have fought for for many years is being dismantled and sold/given to the private sector....and people are privilege point-scoring when arguably their efforts could be better directed elsewhere

ah fuck it, it's too depressing


----------



## el-ahrairah (May 31, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> I'd be tempted to reverse the saying. I don't think you can have a meaningful chat about race/gender/sex without reference to class, because it overdetermines the content of those categories. I'm not so sure it necessarily cuts the other way. We can see that all history is the history of class war for example. To see all history as the history of conflict over sexuality would be a less useful mode of interpretation, although an interesting book no doubt.


 
good point!


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## Brainaddict (May 31, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> I can't believe this rubbish appears to be one of the dominant narratives on the left at the moment. I mean, no-one is saying this stuff doesn't matter, but we're living through one of the worst periods of politics in recent memory - this is arguably worse than the Thatcher years now - and all the stuff which people have fought for for many years is being dismantled and sold/given to the private sector....and people are privilege point-scoring when arguably their efforts could be better directed elsewhere
> 
> ah fuck it, it's too depressing


innit


----------



## DotCommunist (May 31, 2013)

yes but outside commenteriat and campus politics, where is it the dominant narrative


----------



## TruXta (May 31, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> yes but outside commenteriat and campus politics, where is it the dominant narrative


Nowhere.


----------



## Idris2002 (May 31, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> yes but outside commenteriat and campus politics, where is it the dominant narrative


 
the United States.

that's half the appeal to Laurie and similar personages: it's got that sexy AmeriKKKan feeling.


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## DotCommunist (May 31, 2013)

coca cola, sometimes war. And intersectionality.


----------



## Brixton Hatter (May 31, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> yes but outside commenteriat and campus politics, where is it the dominant narrative


well yes, precisely.

The dominant narrative in the UK currently seems to be about benefit scroungers and immigrants and the need for cuts to 'pay off the credit card'.


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## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> well yes, precisely.
> 
> The dominant narrative in the UK currently seems to be about benefit scroungers and immigrants and the need for cuts to 'pay off the credit card'.


 
Not a whit of which this stuff challenges. Leave economics to the right.


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## Brainaddict (May 31, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> yes but outside commenteriat and campus politics, where is it the dominant narrative


I don't think the commentariat matter that much - particularly in broadsheets and the NS - but I think campus politics matter a lot in a country where close to half of young people go to university. For many of those people it's where they form their own political views for the first time. Even in countries where much smaller proportions of the population go to university, student politics often has a lot of significance and influence in national politics. Admittedly these days in the UK we are talking about a relatively small number of people actively involved in politics on campuses, but they are a significant percentage of the relatively small number of people involved in leftist political campaigning in total.

Though I'm not saying the privilege/intersectionality debate is the most off-putting thing in student political circles. On a possibly controversial note, what could be more counterproductive than emphasising working class identity to people who in their own minds are probably at university to ensure they either stay or become 'middle class'? In other countries people came up with a political role for 'intellectuals', which might include, for instance, the duty to assist those who didn't get their education. Instead people in this country seem to want to say 'oh the students will have to work for a wage too so we're all working class really and all in the same boat - join the working class revolution!'. I think it is unspeakably alienating to about 99.9% of people who hear it. Firstly they don't *want* to be working class (and why the hell should they? who the hell does?) and secondly they instinctively know that their interests are not aligned either with a British plasterer or a Bangladeshi textile factory worker.

I promised myself I'd give up trying to make these sorts of arguments here. *sigh*


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## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> I don't think the commentariat matter that much - particularly in broadsheets and the NS - but I think campus politics matter a lot in a country where close to half of young people go to university. For many of those people it's where they form their own political views for the first time. Even in countries where much smaller proportions of the population go to university, student politics often has a lot of significance and influence in national politics. Admittedly these days in the UK we are talking about a relatively small number of people actively involved in politics on campuses, but they are a significant percentage of the relatively small number of people involved in leftist political campaigning in total.
> 
> Though I'm not saying the privilege/intersectionality debate is the most off-putting thing in student political circles. On a possibly controversial note, what could be more counterproductive than emphasising working class identity to people who in their own minds are probably at university to ensure they either stay or become 'middle class'? In other countries people came up with a political role for 'intellectuals', which might include, for instance, the duty to assist those who didn't get their education. Instead people in this country seem to want to say 'oh the students will have to work for a wage too so we're all working class really and all in the same boat - join the working class revolution!'. I think it is unspeakably alienating to about 99.9% of people who hear it. Firstly they don't *want* to be working class (and why the hell should they? who the hell does?) and secondly they instinctively know that their interests are not aligned either with a British plasterer or a Bangladeshi textile factory worker.
> 
> I promised myself I'd give up trying to make these sorts of arguments here. *sigh*


 
How many people on campus are involved in this shite? Under 1% i reckon. Even there it means nothing beyond careerist and personal individual positioning. And none of these people are pushing class as one of the rubrics under which they operate as far as i can tell.


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## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

And being a student doesn't make you an intellectual. It might make you think that you are for a few years though. Students and education as a class demand = very important. Student politics  = irrelevant.


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## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

Actually, on re-reading, i don't know what on earth that last para is even supposed to be arguing. Have you given up on arguing it because you can't adequately explain it? Or we're too thick? Too stuck in an approach? If so, what?


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## Brainaddict (May 31, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> And being a student doesn't make you an intellectual. It might make you think that you are for a few years though. Students and education as a class demand = very important. Student politics = irrelevant.


I've just been to a Latin American country where many politicised students see it as their duty to pass on political and other forms of knowledge to people who don't have the chance to go to university. Some continue doing so after university. It is quite a significant force in organising. They see a role for themselves based on their good fortune in getting an education. i.e. based on a recognition of their position being different from that of the working masses (so to speak).
The political situation is different here and I'm not saying we can copy it. But I feel like, partly because the price of being an idiot is quite low here, many people allow theory to dominate their worldview and never even look at their own position and surrounding landscape, which would be the first step in creating a politics that would be relevant to the people around them.


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## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> I've just been to a Latin American country where many politicised students see it as their duty to pass on political and other forms of knowledge to people who don't have the chance to go to university. Some continue doing so after university. It is quite a significant force in organising. They see a role for themselves based on their good fortune in getting an education. i.e. based on a recognition of their position being different from that of the working masses (so to speak).
> The political situation is different here and I'm not saying we can copy it. But I feel like, partly because the price of being an idiot is quite low here, many people allow theory to dominate their worldview and never even look at their own position and surrounding landscape, which would be the first step in creating a politics that would be relevant to the people around them.


 
_Why_ have you just told me that? _What_ have you just told me? What do you mean by " the price of being an idiot is quite low here"? Is this related to "passing on" of knowledge by student intellectuals to the idiots who aren't students? Can you have a go at making what you are trying to say clear here please. I genuinely do not understand what you're getting at - and i'm getting some nasty vibes off it.


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## sihhi (May 31, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> secondly they instinctively know that their interests are not aligned either with a British plasterer or a Bangladeshi textile factory worker.


 
In this throwaway non-analysis, students studying plastering have opposite interests to plasterers, and students are only able to see foreign workers as some kind of opposing interest group. This is instinct, apparently - does it apply to non-students as well?

Do hospital porters instinctively know their interests are not aligned with plasterers, do textile workers instinctively know their interests diverge from people doing the same job abroad etc?


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## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

That's the word that was itching at me sihhi - _instinctively_.


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## The Pale King (May 31, 2013)

Hodges returns to sniff own vomit:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/d...mps-actually-laurie-penny-it-is-all-about-me/

Comments turned off as Telegraph readers just can't be trusted not to start up with the violent misogyny and racism. And I guess having 6 pages of rants about 'miscegenation' by posters whose avatars are knights templar isn't such a great look for attracting advertisers.

No matter how misguided Laurie is,  there's something distasteful about watching the glee with which no-marks like Mensch and Hodges have alighted on this (half understood) stuff as self-evident proof of the absurdity of the left.


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## sihhi (May 31, 2013)

It's an open goal for them mate:




> Laurie’s argument is she simply changed her mind “based on new, better information”. But what? The first point the lady tweeting Laurie made was that people in black communities were under attack. Well, Laurie knows that. I’ve read several pieces by her that make precisely that point.
> ...
> 
> Laurie changed her mind not because her opinion got trumped by a different opinion, but because that opinion was held by someone who was black. Which is fine; that’s her choice. But it is her choice. She isn’t under any artificial obligation to change her stance because of her “privilege”.


 
It pains to write it, but Hodges 1 - 0 Penny


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## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

penny said:
			
		

> The reason people often bother Mensch about class and race is not because she is personally ambitious, but because she has been personally involved in the Conservative effort to destroy the British welfare state


 
So why do we bother you? It's because you are both nakedly ambitious and using your privilege to further that ambition. This is the hole that you dug.

She wrote 'we' in that bit above as well i bet, then bottled it.


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## Delroy Booth (May 31, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> No matter how misguided Laurie is, there's something distasteful about watching the glee with which no-marks like Mensch and Hodges have alighted on this (half understood) stuff as self-evident proof of the absurdity of the left.


 
I agree with you, so much what passes for the new left discourse is ripe for parody, the right will run wild with it.


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## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

Note this retelling of the tale:



> In her piece, Mensch singled me out for criticism because this week, after getting into a short debate with several black women on Twitter over the appropriate way to respond to racism


 
there was no debate, you said something and caved. You don't do debate full stop.


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## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I agree with you, so much what passes for the new left discourse is ripe for parody, the right will run wild with it.


 
No it won't, the right won't even notice. This only got noticed because of mensch and the assiduous courting of her by LP. This means nothing to them. Nothing at all.


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## J Ed (May 31, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> the United States.
> 
> that's half the appeal to Laurie and similar personages: it's got that sexy AmeriKKKan feeling.


 

_Oh honey_, you sound so smart when you talk about intersectionality with _that accent_!


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## J Ed (May 31, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> How many people on campus are involved in this shite? Under 1% i reckon. Even there it means nothing beyond careerist and personal individual positioning. And none of these people are pushing class as one of the rubrics under which they operate as far as i can tell.


 

Way less than 1%, I think 1% is the percentage of people who are aware that it is going on.


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## J Ed (May 31, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I agree with you, so much what passes for the new left discourse is ripe for parody, the right will run wild with it.


 

When people (and not just right-wingers) are confronted with it they just assume that this is what all socialists and/or Marxists think.


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## Bakunin (May 31, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Note this retelling of the tale:
> 
> 
> 
> there was no debate, you said something and caved. You don't do debate full stop.


 
Makes a change from throwing libelous comments at people and then running away at the mention of possible legal troubles, I suppose.


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## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

penny said:
			
		

> As soon as I began getting regular work, I spoke out about the over-representation of private school kids like me in media. Big mistake.


 
Why? Did it stop your career? Where did you speak out? Where have you tried to help re this:



> “I believe it's on all of us, if we are fortunate, not just to acknowledge any privilege we have but to give a leg up to those without it. I try to do this all the time, but very occasionally the volume of nasty shit I get for being honest makes me wish I hadn't bothered.”


 
Do you even do your non-structural paternalism Laurie? Why would "the volume of nasty shit" you get mean that you wish you hadn't bothered tying to give non-privileged people a helping hand? Is it the non-privileged giving you the "nasty shit"? If not, why are you punishing them and removing your patronage for the actions of others?


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## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

J Ed said:


> When people (and not just right-wingers) are confronted with it they just assume that this is what all socialists and/or Marxists think.


 
And it is, because their interaction with the left is no longer at work or based on shared spaces - it is only via the media. There's no space for involved dialogue - nothing.


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## sihhi (May 31, 2013)

> Intersectionality" is another new bit of equality jargon that the stiff suits in the conservative commentariat loudly claim not to understand – despite or perhaps because of the fact that schoolchildren have been using it on the internet for years. All it means is that you cannot talk in any meaningful way about class without also talking about race, gender and sexuality, and vice versa.


 
Odd how disability or educational status is kept off the list but sexuality makes an appearance.


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## Bakunin (May 31, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Odd how disability or educational status is kept off the list but sexuality makes an appearance.


 

Well, Penny Dreadful hasn't exactly been prolific on disability issues, welfare reform and so on. Not enough professional advantage to be gained, I suppose, although her particular brand of cack-handed, credibility-free cobblers would probably do as much to harm the cause of disabled claimants as ATOS and the DWP so we should be grateful for small mercies.


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## The Pale King (May 31, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Odd how disability or educational status is kept off the list but sexuality makes an appearance.


 
Odd indeed. Seems arbitrary.


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## sihhi (May 31, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> And it is, because their interaction with the left is no longer at work or based on shared spaces - it is only via the media. There's no space for involved dialogue - nothing.


 
Has to be admitted - we (people) did have an interaction with left spokesperson on this very thread.


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## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Has to be admitted - we (people) did have an interaction with left spokesperson on this very thread.


 
And we got proper told where we are going wrong 

Imagine that happening millions of times over and over and over.


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## Bakunin (May 31, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Has to be admitted - we (people) did have an interaction with left spokesperson on this very thread.


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## sihhi (May 31, 2013)

> “I believe it's on all of us, if we are fortunate, not just to acknowledge any privilege we have but to give a leg up to those without it. I try to do this all the time, but very occasionally the volume of nasty shit I get for being honest makes me wish I hadn't bothered.”


 
Again, I hate to sound like an arse, but _where_ is this honesty?

"Laurie Penny, 23, never imagined she would find herself enmeshed in a world of poverty and the grip of the benefit system"


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## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

> the stiff suits


 
Wow, she might as well have wrote _the businessman in his suit and tie/squares._

To be writing this stuff after 19. Embarrassing.


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## Firky (May 31, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Odd how disability or educational status is kept off the list but sexuality makes an appearance.


 

Yes, I noticed that too but I thought I was being picky.


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## sihhi (May 31, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Wow, she might as well have wrote _the businessman in his suit and tie/squares._
> 
> To be writing this stuff after 19. Embarrassing.


 
Stiff suits is better than identical suits from the Morning Star in 2010:

"200 well-dressed members of the British literary and political class gathered in the Thomson Reuters building in Canary Wharf to watch three nice white chaps in *identical suits* jostle for the most recalcitrant position on immigration.
The great and good had assembled for the announcement of the Orwell Prize shortlist. And, after the winners had been applauded, the leaders' debate was screened over drinks and nibbles. Television history was made over the clink of champagne flutes in a dazzling, painful dramatisation of the alienation of mainstream politics from the reality of ordinary people's lives.
I had spent the early part of that morning bidding farewell to my housemates, who had finally been forced out of their Tottenham bedsit after years of frantic joblessness and graduate debt in which all of us were repeatedly denied welfare benefits and adequate health care because we had the temerity to be young, poor and disenfranchised. It took two years for us to lose hope."


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## Brainaddict (May 31, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> _Why_ have you just told me that? _What_ have you just told me? What do you mean by " the price of being an idiot is quite low here"? Is this related to "passing on" of knowledge by student intellectuals to the idiots who aren't students? Can you have a go at making what you are trying to say clear here please. I genuinely do not understand what you're getting at - and i'm getting some nasty vibes off it.


I think you're searching hard for something nasty is all 
I mean the price of holding facile, ill-thought-out political views that will never be able to have an impact is quite low for students in that (a) many of them are relatively comfortable, particularly globally speaking, and they won't lose much of that by holding crap political views (b) We're not in a time of large-scale leftist movements here and so in their heart of hearts they probably know that their 'radical' views will never be held by anyone except them and their friends, and they'll probably never have to defend it on national tv and so on.


----------



## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Stiff suits is better than identical suits from the Morning Star in 2010:
> 
> "200 well-dressed members of the British literary and political class gathered in the Thomson Reuters building in Canary Wharf to watch three nice white chaps in *identical suits* jostle for the most recalcitrant position on immigration.
> The great and good had assembled for the announcement of the Orwell Prize shortlist. And, after the winners had been applauded, the leaders' debate was screened over drinks and nibbles. Television history was made over the clink of champagne flutes in a dazzling, painful dramatisation of the alienation of mainstream politics from the reality of ordinary people's lives.
> I had spent the early part of that morning bidding farewell to my housemates, who had finally been forced out of their Tottenham bedsit after years of frantic joblessness and graduate debt in which all of us were repeatedly denied welfare benefits and adequate health care because we had the temerity to be young, poor and disenfranchised. It took two years for us to lose hope."


 
Astonishing. So many claims, so many lies, so much hyperbole, so much self-love and self-mythology in so many words. Who is hiring the peoples press?


----------



## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> I think you're searching hard for something nasty is all
> I mean the price of holding facile, ill-thought-out political views that will never be able to have an impact is quite low for students in that (a) many of them are relatively comfortable, particularly globally speaking, and they won't lose much of that by holding crap political views (b) We're not in a time of large-scale leftist movements here and so in their heart of hearts they probably know that their 'radical' views will never be held by anyone except them and their friends, and they'll probably never have to defend it on national tv and so on.


 
Thank you for explaining, glad to hear that you didn't think what i thought you thought. The replies to the rest of your posts though - any response?

Why are you sepearating students with left wing views from non-students btw?


----------



## sihhi (May 31, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Astonishing. So many claims, so many lies, so much hyperbole, so much self-love and self-mythology in so many words. Who is hiring the peoples press?


 
It ends with a note of disgust at the tie-wearing centre-right:

"Stepping out into the sparkling Docklands night, it felt like I had just attended the party at the end of the world. Televised debates may be new and exciting, but the magnitude of the crisis facing my generation is frighteningly misunderstood by the tie-wearing centre-right politicians of today."


----------



## cesare (May 31, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It ends with a note of disgust at the tie-wearing centre-right:
> 
> "Stepping out into the sparkling Docklands night, it felt like I had just attended the party at the end of the world. Televised debates may be new and exciting, but the magnitude of the crisis facing my generation is frighteningly misunderstood by the tie-wearing centre-right politicians of today."


By Docklands she means fucking Canary Wharf, no doubt.


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## sihhi (May 31, 2013)

cesare said:


> By Docklands she means fucking Canary Wharf, no doubt.


 
Yes the Reuters building :


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## Brainaddict (May 31, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Thank you for explaining, glad to hear that you didn't think what i thought you thought. The replies to the rest of your posts though - any response?
> 
> Why are you sepearating students with left wing views from non-students btw?


I don't know how useful it is to debate with someone who is never going to concede I've made a good point but will pounce on everything he considers incorrect like a starved dog on a raw steak 

In a very general way, I think people's politics should be based on the world they experience around them and that theory can be useful to modulate and inform that a little. Grounding your politics mostly in theory results in some truly absurd positions and in developing your own weird language and this is prevalent among students and quite a lot of the non-student left too.
So I almost wince if someone describes themselves or even their organisation as 'marxist', or 'leninist' or 'autonomist' or 'anarchist'. Theory can be a tool and a weapon, I'm just not sure its useful when it becomes something to bind yourself to, a system of beliefs, an identifier. Theory can help reveal the world to people who use it but a lot of the time I think it does precisely the opposite, becoming more important to people than the problems, relationships, situations right in front of them.


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## sihhi (May 31, 2013)

The ground floor foyer apparently:

"I was at the Orwell Prize party because my writing had been shortlisted for the award. But any amount of prizes, any amount of expensive canapes and any amount of televised right-wing pageantry will not make up for the manner in which the British political class has betrayed its poorest constituents and broken the hearts of its children.
On giant screens in the glittering Reuters foyer, Messrs Clegg, Cameron and Brown fought to score cheap laughs off each other's poster campaigns while appearing to be men of the people. ITV had to resort to a clunky gameshow formula to distinguish the speakers, with swooping close-ups and colour-coded ties - Gordon Brown chose a fetching metallic fuschia, presumably in order to deflect the impression that he had any sort of red flag around his neck."


----------



## sihhi (May 31, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> I don't know how useful it is to debate with someone who is never going to concede I've made a good point but will pounce on everything he considers incorrect like a starved dog on a raw steak


 
If you don't want to answer, don't, but this stuff is pretty senseless.


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## JHE (May 31, 2013)

> _the tie-wearing centre-right politicians of today._


 
If they take their ties off (as the Cameroons did for a while) are they any different?  No, of course they are not.


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## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> I don't know how useful it is to debate with someone who is never going to concede I've made a good point but will pounce on everything he considers incorrect like a starved dog on a raw steak
> 
> In a very general way, I think people's politics should be based on the world they experience around them and that theory can be useful to modulate and inform that a little. Grounding your politics mostly in theory results in some truly absurd positions and in developing your own weird language and this is prevalent among students and quite a lot of the non-student left too.
> So I almost wince if someone describes themselves or even their organisation as 'marxist', or 'leninist' or 'autonomist' or 'anarchist'. Theory can be a tool and a weapon, I'm just not sure its useful when it something to bind yourself to, a system of beliefs, an identifier. Theory can help reveal the world to people who use it but a lot of the time I think it does precisely the opposite, becoming more important to people than the problems, relationships, situations right in front of them.


 
Your last para is a banal truism, one that no one would disagree with - and you neglect to say who you are talking about whilst throwing non-specific accusations at posters here for making it hard for you to explain it.

I'm interested in why you think you've made a good point but won't reply to responses to it. You argued this stuff is important, i argued it wasn't. And so on. But let's do this 'ive been to latin america' one first. Have a crack.


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## Brainaddict (May 31, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Your last para is a banal truism, one that no one would disagree with.


Apart from anyone on the left who calls thems 'marxist' or 'leninist' or 'autonomist' or 'anarchist' or is in an organisation that declares itself as such.

The Latin America comment was simply about evidence that student politics can be important in national politics. You were quite dismissive.


----------



## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> Apart from anyone on the left who calls thems 'marxist' or 'leninist' or 'autonomist' or 'anarchist' or is in an organisation that declares itself as such.
> 
> The Latin America comment was simply about evidence that student politics can be important in national politics. You were quite dismissive.


 
No, i think that they would agree with such a banal truism too.

I was dismissive rightly, because you failed to develop anything out of your trip - all you did was some totally incoherent shouting and then stormed off. Work out what you want to say, then say it.

And why won't you respond to replies to your posts for gods sake? You posted them, defend or change them.


----------



## eoin_k (May 31, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> Apart from anyone on the left who calls thems 'marxist' or 'leninist' or 'autonomist' or 'anarchist' or is in an organisation that declares itself as such.


 
You should write a book about your ideas. You could call it _The Revolution of Everyday Life_. Oops it's already taken. It looks like your idea is not only already a few decades old, but one that was developed by Marxists, autonomists and anarchists.


----------



## Buckaroo (May 31, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> You were quite dismissive.


 
Quite.


----------



## emanymton (May 31, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Like juggling, masturbation should only be done in public by the exceptionally skilled. (Mark Thomas)


Masturbation is a lot like exercise in that it is a perfectly natural and healthy thing to do, but in neither case do I want to hear you talk about it or see you at it in park (Jeremy Hardy)


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## butchersapron (May 31, 2013)

Some might. I might dislike some things.


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## sihhi (May 31, 2013)

butchersapron said:


>


 
Privilege checking for upper class teenagers:

http://www.sherborne.org/news/2010/06/Boys_forge_surfing_freindships_with_Kids_Co




> A series of fundraising events run throughout the Lent term helped to finance a trip to Polzeath in North Cornwall for six young people from the London centres together with their support staff. Kids Company was set up by Camila Batmanghelidjh (an Old Girl of Sherborne Girls School). The Kids Company centres provide practical, emotional and educational support to vulnerable inner-city children. Boys and staff from Sherborne met a wonderfully enthusiastic group from Kids Company from the train before we set off to Cornwall in the sunshine with the aim of taking a break to make time to learn more about each other and to develop friendships.
> ...
> After a slightly later morning lesson on Sunday, we packed up and headed back to Sherborne, saying good-bye to the staff and boys from Kids Company at the station. With Facebook addresses exchanged and warm embraces we had all gained much from spending such a magical weekend together


----------



## frogwoman (May 31, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Privilege checking for upper class teenagers:
> 
> http://www.sherborne.org/news/2010/06/Boys_forge_surfing_freindships_with_Kids_Co


 
i thought that she was all right? bit naive of me im sure but i thought her charity had actually helped quite a few people? obviously charity etc etc but i had heard good things in the past, or am i being naive?


----------



## sihhi (May 31, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i thought that she was all right? bit naive of me im sure but i thought her charity had actually helped quite a few people? obviously charity etc etc but i had heard good things in the past, or am i being naive?


 
Good things By taking funding from Barclay's and HSBC the same people who caused the problems in the first, with the obvious proviso that the funders will receive no criticism or additional burden, instead a generalised "uncaring" society (ie ordinary people) are blamed.

Also lying 




> A poster ad for a children's charity that showed two black teenagers harassing a white man reinforced negative stereotypes and was therefore "racist", the advertising watchdog has ruled. The Advertising Standards Authority also found that another billboard ad for the Kids Company charity that stated "You are right – kids who can kill really are wrong in the head" beneath a picture of four black teenagers was likely to cause offence.
> In addition, this ad made misleading claims about a supposed link between emotional development, brain size and violent behaviour, the ASA said.
> Both ads were judged to be in breach of the ASA's code on decency, with the one featuring the claims about brain size also falling foul of clauses on truthfulness


 
Young neglected criminals have smaller brains - not actually true, who cares LOL! 

stiff suits left and right, person of colour in centre


----------



## frogwoman (May 31, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Good things By taking funding from Barclay's and HSBC the same people who caused the problems in the first, with the obvious proviso that the funders will receive no criticism or additional burden, instead a generalised "uncaring" society (ie ordinary people) are blamed.
> 
> Also lying
> 
> ...


 
the fuck, thats a bit "bell-curve" esque  she actually said that!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Good things By taking funding from Barclay's and HSBC the same people who caused the problems in the first,


 
The same as Unite?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> the fuck, thats a bit "bell-curve" esque  she actually said that!


 
It was the pictures of their advertisement campaign.

The ideas are nonsense:





			
				Camila in 2010 said:
			
		

> I am hopeful that the combined leadership of David Cameron and Nick Clegg will build on Labour's priorities to enhance the life chances of children. Self-direction, self-regulation, application and empathy are needed to mobilise the "good character" of our politicians in delivering not only a Big Society, but also a Moral Society. Perhaps they might want to follow the example of Winston Churchill : "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."


 





Guess who she worked for DEMOS with?
http://www.demos.co.uk/projects/the-character-inquiry
Anthony Seldon. LP's "personal mentor", "a lot of the reason" LP is "like who she is" hence "legend"


----------



## sihhi (Jun 1, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> The same as Unite?


 
UNITE are funded by subs, aren't they?


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 1, 2013)

to be fair i never knew much about her before this thread apart from she ran a kids charity in london. fuck


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It ends with a note of disgust at the tie-wearing centre-right:
> 
> "Stepping out into the sparkling Docklands night, it felt like I had just attended the party at the end of the world. Televised debates may be new and exciting, but the magnitude of the crisis facing my generation is frighteningly misunderstood by the tie-wearing centre-right politicians of today."


 
My grandad always wore a tie when he wasn't at work - he was a miner. Some of the blokes in my parents' village wear ties - most of them are retired miners. So the idea of ties = privilege doesn't really make any sense to me.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> UNITE are funded by subs, aren't they?


 
Yeah but one or other of those banks (can't remember which) is providing supporting a unite community social centre somewhere or other. I'm fucking glad the partner in the one I'm involved in is the NUM and not them.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 1, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Schoolchildren have been using intersectionality for years?


 
Only Smart kids at smart schools so you probably wouldn't know about it.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Wow, she might as well have wrote _the businessman in his suit and tie/squares._
> 
> To be writing this stuff after 19. Embarrassing.


 
i know.  i was a teenage pseud and even then i'd only have used that expression knowingly


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i thought that she was all right? bit naive of me im sure but i thought her charity had actually helped quite a few people? obviously charity etc etc but i had heard good things in the past, or am i being naive?


 

she is alright, by liberal standards.  [damned with faint praise]


not to be trusted from a socialist viewpoint to my mind.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 1, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> My grandad always wore a tie when he wasn't at work - he was a miner. Some of the blokes in my parents' village wear ties - most of them are retired miners. So the idea of ties = privilege doesn't really make any sense to me.


 
aye, my grandad was never seen without a tie.  he was a tube driver all his life and a staunch labourite unionist.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 1, 2013)

I had no idea that kids in private schools were doing intersectionality. Absolutely surreal stuff.

Seems like the theoretical equivalent of the private school trips to the third world to paint school buildings or whatever.


----------



## cesare (Jun 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> to be fair i never knew much about her before this thread apart from she ran a kids charity in london. fuck


Button calls her Queen Bean. "Her charity had an advert banned by the Advertising Standards Authority for blood soaked racism"


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 1, 2013)

> *What’s the point of the left? *
> 
> *China Mieville, Chris Nineham and Laurie Penny*
> 
> *Saturday, June 1, 10:00-11:15*


----------



## andysays (Jun 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Odd how disability or educational status is kept off the list but sexuality makes an appearance.


 
Cripz and thickyz R wack, but queers R cool, obvz​


----------



## andysays (Jun 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It ends with a note of disgust at the tie-wearing centre-right:
> 
> "Stepping out into the sparkling Docklands night, it felt like I had just attended the party at the end of the world. Televised debates may be new and exciting, but the magnitude of the crisis facing my generation is frighteningly misunderstood by the tie-wearing centre-right politicians of today."


 
Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your ties​


----------



## andysays (Jun 1, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Only Smart kids at smart schools so you probably wouldn't know about it.


 
Not just smart, SMARTEST


----------



## andysays (Jun 1, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> ...Theory can be a tool and a weapon, I'm just not sure its useful when it becomes something to bind yourself to, a system of beliefs, an identifier. Theory can help reveal the world to people who use it but a lot of the time I think it does precisely the opposite, becoming more important to people than the problems, relationships, situations right in front of them.


 
Reading the contributions on this and other threads, it should become clear that most people are primarily interested in

the problems, relationships, situations right in front of them​ 
and are using theory to help them understand and deal with those probs etc, rather than as an end in itself.

The real "tool" is the person who thinks they don't need any theory, who attempts to deal with their situation on the basis of subjective experience and nothing else.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 1, 2013)

This is where clowns at the top lead to. British intersectionalists have retweeted this:


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 1, 2013)

one outta 3 aint bad


----------



## rekil (Jun 1, 2013)

> @DangerousFest
> Have you got a dangerous idea? Even if you're not at #DIDT you can add your Dangerous Idea for Dangerous Times here: http://wp.me/p3zYPP-B


Hmmm.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 1, 2013)

Hatchet-job Hodges has a go at LP, but has closed the comments thread. What's he scared of?



> This morning Laurie Penny has had a little pop at me in The Guardian for not taking my privilege seriously enough. She has a bigger pop at Louise Mensch, who strangely is fast becoming a bigger hate figure to the feminist movement than Jeremy Clarkson, but I merit a guest appearance in Laurie’s piece.
> “Being made aware of your privilege can feel a lot like being attacked, or called a bad person, and when that happens you sometimes get the urge to stamp your feet and scream, *as Dan Hodges did at the Telegraph*in another swipe at those pesky privilege-checkers,” she wrote. I actually thought I was being quite restrained, but adopting a stance different to anyone on the Left these days is immediately characterised as a “strop” or “rant”, so we can probably let that one pass.
> Laurie, as ever, makes some valid points, and her assertion that “Dan, it's not all about you” admittedly had never occurred to me before. Others are less valid. “When someone asks you to check your privilege, it doesn't mean you should stop talking – it means you should start listening, and sometimes that involves giving the other person in the room a chance to speak”, she says. Which if you think about it, does actually mean you should stop talking.
> http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/d...mps-actually-laurie-penny-it-is-all-about-me/


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 1, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> I can't believe this rubbish appears to be one of the dominant narratives on the left at the moment. I mean, no-one is saying this stuff doesn't matter, but we're living through one of the worst periods of politics in recent memory - this is arguably worse than the Thatcher years now - and all the stuff which people have fought for for many years is being dismantled and sold/given to the private sector....and people are privilege point-scoring when arguably their efforts could be better directed elsewhere
> 
> ah fuck it, it's too depressing


 
It's not so much a "dominant narrative of the left", as it is a dominant narrative in a politico-journalistic bubble of mostly middle-class Oxbridge-ites who deludedly believe themselves to represent anything other than pushy middle-class gobshites like themselves.

Most of these cunts will walk away from intersectionality when they get tired of it, because it doesn't *really* affect the world they live in. It's a game to play to reinforce their own hegemony, while pretending that it doesn't. How does it reinforce their hegemony? It does so by channeling other activists into a futile attempt to quantify a hierarchy of oppression that doesn't actually exist.


----------



## Bakunin (Jun 1, 2013)

nino_savatte said:


> Hatchet-job Hodges has a go at LP, but has closed the comments thread. What's he scared of?


 

Penny Dreadful's wonderful at both listening to opposite POV and giving people a chance to speak. No doubt the near-instant blocking of anyone on Twitter saying something she disagrees with is a plot perpetuated by some evil misogynist hacker to discredit her quality reportage and infallible politics.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This is where clowns at the top lead to. British intersectionalists have retweeted this:


 
Isn't this precisely the same kind of mindset as people who blame all Muslims for 9/11, or use dodgy crime statistics to make out black people are all criminals?

Mirror image racism IMO


----------



## J Ed (Jun 1, 2013)

nino_savatte said:


> Hatchet-job Hodges has a go at LP, but has closed the comments thread. What's he scared of?


 

Have you ever read Telegraph comments? Their commentators can turn the comments section of something as innocuous as rhubarb crumble recipes into a forum for the discussion of the conspiracy of BBC-led Judeo-Marxist-Feminism to inundate Britain with immigrants just waiting to harvest the brains of heterosexual Christian children to stop them growing up into UKIP voters.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 1, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Isn't this precisely the same kind of mindset as people who blame all Muslims for 9/11, or use dodgy crime statistics to make out black people are all criminals?
> 
> Mirror image racism IMO


 
And, a cunts trick. A proper cunts trick.


----------



## andysays (Jun 1, 2013)

> @DangerousFest Have you got a dangerous idea? Even if you're not at #DIDT you can add your Dangerous Idea for Dangerous Times here: http://wp.me/p3zYPP-B


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This is where clowns at the top lead to. British intersectionalists have retweeted this:


 
This photo - and I'm sorry, but I don't know how to resize it - was taken in the Elmina slaver's castle in Cape Coast city in Ghana. I was told it was put there by representatives of local chiefs who were apologising for the role of their predecessors in assisting the slave trade.

E2A: SCHEISSE, I can't figure out how to upload the damn thing.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 1, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Isn't this precisely the same kind of mindset as people who blame all Muslims for 9/11, or use dodgy crime statistics to make out black people are all criminals?
> 
> Mirror image racism IMO


 
And any pointing out of the above to your average _intersectionalista_ will get you called a "racist".

So I wouldn't tweet such an observation to _La Pennionara_, if I were you!


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 1, 2013)

also werent irish people also sold as slaves?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 1, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> This photo - and I'm sorry, but I don't know how to resize it - was taken in the Elmina slaver's castle in Cape Coast city in Ghana. I was told it was put there by representatives of local chiefs who were apologising for the role of their predecessors in assisting the slave trade.
> 
> E2A: SCHEISSE, I can't figure out how to upload the damn thing.


 
Pu ze link up.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> also werent irish people also sold as slaves?


 
Not exactly - IIRC, they were sold off to Scandinavia and the West Indies as indentured labour. I think there are still villages of Irish descent in Jamaica, where the people just "keep themselves to themselves, like".


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 1, 2013)

They bloody were idris. Not indentured - but actual slaves. Which gives us a few notches on the privelo-meter.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Pu ze link up.


 
Boss, boss, ze link, ze link!


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 1, 2013)

See, you can do pics! Ta for that.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> They bloody were idris. Not indentured - but actual slaves. Which gives us a few notches on the privelo-meter.


 
And will that get us our potatoes back?


----------



## rekil (Jun 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> also werent irish people also sold as slaves?


Montserrat. 1000 intersectionality points for us.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QHYFXDGf4Y


----------



## smokedout (Jun 1, 2013)

Laurie Penny  @*PennyRed* 
Please note that i have seen no violence whatsoever. Antifascist Protesters standing around completely peacefully. #*antifa* #*bnp*


----------



## Belushi (Jun 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> also werent irish people also sold as slaves?


 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_01.shtml


----------



## Bakunin (Jun 1, 2013)

smokedout said:


> Laurie Penny @*PennyRed*
> Please note that i have seen no violence whatsoever. Antifascist Protesters standing around completely peacefully. #*antifa* #*bnp*


 

Is she blind, lying or turned up for the wrong 20 minutes or so out of the whole day?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 1, 2013)

Belushi said:


> http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_01.shtml


 
Wasn't only the Irish. These cunts raided anywhere they could.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Have you ever read Telegraph comments? Their commentators can turn the comments section of something as innocuous as rhubarb crumble recipes into a forum for the discussion of the conspiracy of BBC-led Judeo-Marxist-Feminism to inundate Britain with immigrants just waiting to harvest the brains of heterosexual Christian children to stop them growing up into UKIP voters.


 
I hate to say it, but I read them all the time. They're truly nuts but highly entertaining.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> also werent irish people also sold as slaves?


 
Yes and Highlanders too iirc.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 1, 2013)

nino_savatte said:


> Yes and Highlanders too iirc.


 
There can be only one.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 1, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> There can be only one.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 2, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> There can be only one.


This one?


----------



## treelover (Jun 2, 2013)

Brainaddict said:


> I've just been to a Latin American country where many politicised students see it as their duty to pass on political and other forms of knowledge to people who don't have the chance to go to university. Some continue doing so after university. It is quite a significant force in organising. They see a role for themselves based on their good fortune in getting an education. i.e. based on a recognition of their position being different from that of the working masses (so to speak).
> The political situation is different here and I'm not saying we can copy it. But I feel like, partly because the price of being an idiot is quite low here, many people allow theory to dominate their worldview and never even look at their own position and surrounding landscape, which would be the first step in creating a politics that would be relevant to the people around them.


 
I think this was quite common amongst a number of university educated people in the 80's not all left wing either, it seemed to die away after the poll tax, the rise of NL, and in a number of cases the move to hedonism/drug culture for the next generation.


----------



## treelover (Jun 2, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Well, Penny Dreadful hasn't exactly been prolific on disability issues, welfare reform and so on. Not enough professional advantage to be gained, I suppose, although her particular brand of cack-handed, credibility-free cobblers would probably do as much to harm the cause of disabled claimants as ATOS and the DWP so we should be grateful for small mercies.


 
Actually she wrote about her ex partner and the petty brutalities of the welfare system a couple of years ago and has returned to it since, but yes, its not her priority, identity politics is and it sells...


----------



## J Ed (Jun 2, 2013)

treelover said:


> I think this was quite common amongst a number of university educated people in the 80's not all left wing either, it seemed to die away after the poll tax, the rise of NL, and in a number of cases the move to hedonism/drug culture for the next generation.


 

New Labour just coopted it though, didn't they?


----------



## treelover (Jun 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Good things By taking funding from Barclay's and HSBC the same people who caused the problems in the first, with the obvious proviso that the funders will receive no criticism or additional burden, instead a generalised "uncaring" society (ie ordinary people) are blamed.
> 
> Also lying
> 
> ...


 
Unite Community took money from Barclays to fund their Community centre in Tower Hamlets


oops, already noted..


----------



## treelover (Jun 2, 2013)

is that made up or an event?


----------



## treelover (Jun 2, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Isn't this precisely the same kind of mindset as people who blame all Muslims for 9/11, or use dodgy crime statistics to make out black people are all criminals?
> 
> Mirror image racism IMO


 

How did the poor in UK benefit from slavery?, I known people like Bamber Gascoine's family did in Liverpool from where they soon fucked off, but most people there died in penury, genuine question,


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 2, 2013)

treelover said:


> How did the poor in UK benefit from slavery?, I known people like Bamber Gascoine's family did in Liverpool from where they soon fucked off, but most people there died in penury, genuine question,


 
They didn't.


----------



## treelover (Jun 2, 2013)

there is a argument they now had 'access to sugar' and of course someone manned the slave ships, etc, but I wonder how they were treated


----------



## Firky (Jun 2, 2013)

I think some slavers used some of their money to build schools, public spaces, soup kitchens and that kind of thing for the poor. Lord Armstrong did something similar with the blood money he made selling arms to both sides during the Boer war.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 2, 2013)

The Tate libraries were built with money made from sugar and slavery.


----------



## Firky (Jun 2, 2013)

nino_savatte said:


> The Tate libraries were built with money made from sugar and slavery.


 

Sweet!


----------



## toggle (Jun 2, 2013)

treelover said:


> How did the poor in UK benefit from slavery?, I known people like Bamber Gascoine's family did in Liverpool from where they soon fucked off, but most people there died in penury, genuine question,


 
only in that the industry changed society and provided the money for a large number of philanthropic and commercial ventures. the idea of slavery profits directly funding commercial ventures in Britain is debatable though. the effect was more about the money purchasing large quantities of goods.

there's also an argument that access to sugar made tea palatable, and tea was a major factor in the lives of the poor, it acted as an antibacterial and protected in a small way from the effects of living in the urban slums.

the effects of anti slavery were possibly more significant through, being one of the major drives in increasing the territory controlled by the empire.


----------



## toggle (Jun 2, 2013)

treelover said:


> there is a argument they now had 'access to sugar' and of course someone manned the slave ships, etc, but I wonder how they were treated


 
it was noted at the time that cruelty bred cruelty and slave ship masters acted little better towards their crew than their cargo. that isn't to say the crew behaved well towards the slaves, far from it.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 2, 2013)

butchersapron said:


>





nino_savatte said:


> This one?
> 
> View attachment 33185


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 2, 2013)

treelover said:


> there is a argument they now had 'access to sugar' and of course someone manned the slave ships, etc, but I wonder how they were treated


 
They _never_ benefited from slavery.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 2, 2013)

nino_savatte said:


> The Tate libraries were built with money made from sugar and slavery.


 
Not exactly the poor benefiting from slavery though was it (apart from maybe the people who built them)? And philanthropic foundations etc were usually just a sticking plaster like they are now.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 2, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Not exactly the poor benefiting from slavery though was it (apart from maybe the people who built them)? And philanthropic foundations etc were usually just a sticking plaster like they are now.


 
And were more often than not part of a wider system of social control.

Slavery was an integral part of the capitalist system back then - it supported the same structures that led to the decline of the handloom weavers (where people starved - there's examples of kids setting up sort of friendly societies at sunday school where they'd put a penny in when they could to pay for their funeral when they starved). The same system that put people in the work house.

It's an insult to the paupers and the working poor of Britain to suggest this somehow benefited them.

Were it not for that system there wouldn't have been any need for the services provided by philanthropic organisations - which always came at a price anyway.

Once again, when class is ignored you get a very twisted picture of when went on, who was exploiting who and so on.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 2, 2013)




----------



## toggle (Jun 2, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Once again, when class is ignored you get a very twisted picture of when went on, who was exploiting who and so on.


 
tehre are interpretations that claim slavery was beneficial to black americans.


but you can find small tangental benefits from anyhting if you really try hard enough, assume you've looked at the 'standard of living debate'. EP Thompson's analysis of that was spot on IMO, you can exhaustively calculate a few small trickledown effects and claim an increased access to some goods is a sign of an increase in spending power and standard of living. but these create a smokescreen that completely ignores the overall picture; a very slight increace from fuck all is still not very different from fuck all.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jun 2, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> And were more often than not part of a wider system of social control.
> 
> Slavery was an integral part of the capitalist system back then - it supported the same structures that led to the decline of the handloom weavers (where people starved - there's examples of kids setting up sort of friendly societies at sunday school where they'd put a penny in when they could to pay for their funeral when they starved). The same system that put people in the work house.
> 
> ...


 
Well said. This wasn't lost on the weavers themselves either. They understood where the cotton they worked with came from. The Industrial Revolution was inextricably linked and produced through the colonial state. Marx. That period of the late 18th and early 19th century, which saw the introduction of the factory system and capitalist labour discipline here in Britain, was accompanied and directly linked to the intensification of American slavery. Dominic Losurdo _Liberalism: A Counter-history_ is a good read on this, he points out how slavery reached it's most advanced and cruel state in the years _after_ 1776, it wasn't some fuedal hangover that gradually withered away as people turned against it, it got much more comprehensive as the demand for raw materials from the booming textiles industry in Britain increased at the beginning of 19th century. He goes on to mention how during the arguments over the abolition of slavery, British anti-slavery people like Wilberforce and your philanthropic Tory types regularly had their hypocrisy pointed out to them by pro-slavery Americans, for the conditions in the workhouses and in the urban parts of the country. It's not just about cruelty of working conditions for those who ended up in workhouses, the system actually resembles slavery in the sense that the individual loses their legal persona, they're the excess population, the Other, the Living Dead (say it in a Zizek-voice.) This is a good quote from Losurdo that I was going to paraphrase but I'll type it out in full:


> But however, poverty and degradation were not the most significant aspect of workhouses. At the start of the eigteenth century, Defoe favourably mentioned the example of the workhouse in Bristol, which "has been such a Terror to the Beggars that none of [them] will come near the City." In fact, the workhouse was subsequently described by Engels as a total institution: "Paupers wear the uniform of the house and are subject to the will of the director without any protection whatsoever." So that the "morally degenerate parents cannot influence their children, families are seperated; the man is sent to one wing, the woman to another, the children to a third". Families were broken up, but for the rest, all were amassed sometimes to the tune of twelve or sixteen, in a single room. Any kind of violence was inflicted on them, not even sparing the elderly and children, and involving particular attention to women. In practice, the inmates of the workhouses were treated as "objects of disgust and horror placed outside the law and human community". Thus was explained the fact, underscored by Engels, that in order to escape the "Poor Law Bastille's" (as they were popularly named), "many indigents or work houses preferred to die of hunger and illness rather than subject themselves to a workhouse"


It really isn't hyperbole to describe this kind of existence as a form of slavery. I'm not suggesting there were much evidence for political solidarity between those in the workhouses and factories and mines of Britain and slavery in America, just that it's foolish to presume that the people of this time were too ignorant to recognise how their own slavery and the American slave system were linked.

Now you can take a much longer view of history and point that over many decades after the 1850's, as the working-class became incorporated constitutionally into the bargaining power of the state, and started winning small improvements in their political rights and working conditions, they became structurally integrated into imperialism, that the ruling class shares the fruits of neo-imperialism more equitably amongst the first-world working clas, and you don't have to be a hardened Maoist to see this certainly true to some extent. It's also true though that the poorest section of working people in this country are systematically exploited by the same ruling class that dominates other countries and enforces that global exploition, just with certain political and economic concessions (ones that were not always there and are looking increasingly perilous. But going "white privilege" and posting pictures of slave ships on twitter doesn't really make that point very well. The problem I think is that all this historical detail is swept aside so that someone can squeeze into a 140 character soundbite a crude ahistorical binary _"Oppressed/Privileged" message._ Which is harmless enough when it's just tweets (reality check - it's just a tweet) a bit more problematic when that same reductionist mentality gets applied to more serious concerns. Mix that with an obssession with the purity of their own jargon, loads of in-group posturing, in-jokes and memes and other barriers based on cultural capital, and you end up with a right mess.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 2, 2013)

toggle said:


> tehre are interpretations that claim slavery was beneficial to black americans.
> 
> 
> but you can find small tangental benefits from anyhting if you really try hard enough, assume you've looked at the 'standard of living debate'. EP Thompson's analysis of that was spot on IMO, you can exhaustively calculate a few small trickledown effects and claim an increased access to some goods is a sign of an increase in spending power and standard of living. but these create a smokescreen that completely ignores the overall picture; a very slight increace from fuck all is still not very different from fuck all.


 
Also ignores the loss of control over their own lives, whether it be in the labour process (shift from 'formal' to 'real' domination of capital) or in everyday life (the way social policy was used to 'civilise' the working class, etc.)

And of course the 'benefits' all depend on what counterfactual you're measuring it against. If it's assumed that those same capitalist relations were in place, and the same rate of profit maintained, then sure, people would have been worse off without slavery. This is the counterfactual implicitly used by those who claimed the English w/c benefited. But since that counterfactual would have been utterly impossible in practice their arguments are somewhat dubious IMO.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 2, 2013)

Great post Delroy Booth


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 2, 2013)

The book: Liberalism: A Counter-history


----------



## toggle (Jun 2, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Well said. This wasn't lost on the weavers themselves either. They understood where the cotton they worked with came from. The Industrial Revolution was inextricably linked and produced through the colonial state. Marx. That period of the late 18th and early 19th century, which saw the introduction of the factory system and capitalist labour discipline here in Britain, was accompanied and directly linked to the intensification of American slavery. Dominic Losurdo _Liberalism: A Counter-history_ is a good read on this, he points out how slavery reached it's most advanced and cruel state in the years _after_ 1776, it wasn't some fuedal hangover that gradually withered away as people turned against it, it got much more comprehensive as the demand for raw materials from the booming textiles industry in Britain increased at the beginning of 19th century. He goes on to mention how during the arguments over the abolition of slavery, British anti-slavery people like Wilberforce and your philanthropic Tory types regularly had their hypocrisy pointed out to them by pro-slavery Americans, for the conditions in the workhouses and in the urban parts of the country. It's not just about cruelty of working conditions for those who ended up in workhouses, the system actually resembles slavery in the sense that the individual loses their legal persona, they're the excess population, the Other, the Living Dead (say it in a Zizek-voice.) This is a good quote from Losurdo that I was going to paraphrase but I'll type it out in full:
> 
> .


 
that criticism was present in Britain as well. Cobbett's comment on leaving Britain was that at least there were no Wilberforces in the US. but anti slavery became the national moral crusade, beside which all else was unimportant. and under which just about anything could be justified.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 2, 2013)

toggle said:


> tehre are interpretations that claim slavery was beneficial to black americans.


 
Are you thinking of _Time on the Cross_? I read that a bit back for a course I was doing on historiography - they used 'cliometrics' which was supposedly a scientific means of analysing history (sounds like dianetics and is about as scientifically rigorous) by looking exclusively at quantitative data in specific and narrow cases, then using that to generalise across time and space. That mental American poster who ruins any thread in world politics that talks about either slavery or the US civil war (deluded microbe or something) appears to have been heavily influenced by it, either directly or indirectly.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 2, 2013)

toggle said:


> that criticism was present in Britain as well. Cobbett's comment on leaving Britain was that at least there were no Wilberforces in the US. but anti slavery became the national moral crusade, beside which all else was unimportant. and under which just about anything could be justified.


 
Also, Wilberforce was one of the biggest cunts going if you were poor or working class. The same hypocritical moralism that informed his anti-slavery crusade also informed his temperance work, anti-vice work, and a whole host of other things that encroached on the freedom of the working class to spend their leisure time as they wished. The authoritarian cunt.

Nothing gets my goat more than when liberals and right wingers hold him up as some kind of hero. He wasn't. He was a massive cunt, and one who went on to benefit from slavery even after it had been 'abolished'.

Cobbett's a really interesting character though, his political trajectory confuses and fascinates me - I don't suppose you know of any reading you could recommend on him?


----------



## toggle (Jun 2, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Are you thinking of _Time on the Cross_? I read that a bit back for a course I was doing on historiography - they used 'cliometrics' which was supposedly a scientific means of analysing history (sounds like dianetics and is about as scientifically rigorous) by looking exclusively at quantitative data in specific and narrow cases, then using that to generalise across time and space. That mental American poster who ruins any thread in world politics that talks about either slavery or the US civil war (deluded microbe or something) appears to have been heavily influenced by it, either directly or indirectly.


 
I think so, I'd have to find where I left my notes to be certain.the bloke teaching the course I did was a great bloke, and a great dissertation supervisor, but his class teaching left me completely cold. but for a liberal, he did do a fair job of explaining how the focus on anti slavery was at the expense of any reform at home and he is very critical of what anti slavery became



SpineyNorman said:


> Also, Wilberforce was one of the biggest cunts going if you were poor or working class. The same hypocritical moralism that informed his anti-slavery crusade also informed his temperance work, anti-vice work, and a whole host of other things that encroached on the freedom of the working class to spend their leisure time as they wished. The authoritarian cunt.
> 
> Nothing gets my goat more than when liberals and right wingers hold him up as some kind of hero. He wasn't. He was a massive cunt, and one who went on to benefit from slavery even after it had been 'abolished'.
> 
> Cobbett's a really interesting character though, his political trajectory confuses and fascinates me - I don't suppose you know of any reading you could recommend on him?


 
I covered him more in passing, he was one of the few commenting on the pre reform act levels of corruption in Cornwall, and then again as one of the criticizers of Wilberforce.I'm mainly focused on the other end of the 19th century, mostly on how Cornwall responded to the third reform act and the home rule debate, the result of which is I'm drowning in Liberals atm.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 2, 2013)

toggle said:


> I think so, I'd have to find where I left my notes to be certain.the bloke teaching the course I did was a great bloke, and a great dissertation supervisor, but his class teaching left me completely cold. but for a liberal, he did do a fair job of explaining how the focus on anti slavery was at the expense of any reform at home and he is very critical of what anti slavery became
> 
> 
> 
> I covered him more in passing, he was one of the few commenting on the pre reform act levels of corruption in Cornwall, and then again as one of the criticizers of Wilberforce.I'm mainly focused on the other end of the 19th century, mostly on how Cornwall responded to the third reform act and the home rule debate, the result of which is I'm drowning in Liberals atm.


 
Fair enough - he was a Tory but drifted into radicalism and founded a newsletter that Thompson at least seems to think was really important in the development of the early labour movement - I don't really know anything of him beyond what Thompson wrote in _The Making of the English Working Class _though so I'd be interested if anyone knows where would be good to look.


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## treelover (Jun 2, 2013)

Big Hollywood film on Wilberforce: Amazing Grace, don't think it did much box office though.


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## toggle (Jun 2, 2013)

an important part of the campaigns for electoral reforms.

i'm just not close enough to know what is going to be good, or judge by names fro that period. soz.


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## toggle (Jun 2, 2013)

treelover said:


> Big Hollywood film on Wilberforce: Amazing Grace, don't think it did much box office though.


 
it got accross a few things that i can recall, wilberforce as the bloody pain in the arse enthusiast, and the treatment of equiano as a display rather than an individual and equal.


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## Smyz (Jun 2, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Fair enough - he was a Tory but drifted into radicalism and founded a newsletter that Thompson at least seems to think was really important in the development of the early labour movement - I don't really know anything of him beyond what Thompson wrote in _The Making of the English Working Class _though so I'd be interested if anyone knows where would be good to look.


Checked index and bibliography. Thompson says

-- I have referred frequently to Cobbett's Political Register 

-- and M Morris From Cobbett to the Chartists (1948) 

and a load more Cobbet mentions on Page 943


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## sihhi (Jun 2, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Fair enough - he was a Tory but drifted into radicalism and founded a newsletter that Thompson at least seems to think was really important in the development of the early labour movement - I don't really know anything of him beyond what Thompson wrote in _The Making of the English Working Class _though so I'd be interested if anyone knows where would be good to look.


 
The newspaper is the Political Register from 1802-1835 and it was important in creating the ground for the mass actions of 1830-2 that lead to passing the Great Reform Act and the first wide-scale extension of franchise in British history.


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## Idris2002 (Jun 3, 2013)

Another point that's not usually mentioned is that the abolition of 1830 did not, in fact, end slavery-like practices in her majesty's realms:



> *Blackbirding* is the recruitment of people through trickery and kidnappings to work as labourers. From the 1860s blackbirding ships were engaged in seeking workers to mine the guano deposits on the Chincha Islands in Peru.[2] In the 1870s the blackbirding trade focused on supplying labourers to plantations, particularly the sugar cane plantations of Queensland, Australia and the nation of Fiji.[3][4] The practice occurred between 1842 and 1904. Those 'blackbirded' were recruited from the indigenous populations of nearby Pacific islands or northern Queensland. In the early days of the pearling industry in Broome, local Aboriginal people were blackbirded from the surrounding areas, including aboriginal people from desert areas.


 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbirding

I'm pretty sure British capital remained involved in the slave trade after 1807 and 1830, even if it was no longer involved British ships.

And slavery wasn't abolished in the interior of Sierra Leone until 1928, after pressure from the League of Nations.


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## J Ed (Jun 3, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Another point that's not usually mentioned is that the abolition of 1830 did not, in fact, end slavery-like practices in her majesty's realms:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

IIRC, British 'anti-slaving' ships which 'rescued' slaves from countries that continued to traffic in slaves would sell the slaves that they 'rescued'.


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## Idris2002 (Jun 3, 2013)

J Ed said:


> IIRC, British 'anti-slaving' ships which 'rescued' slaves from countries that continued to traffic in slaves would sell the slaves that they 'rescued'.


 
Really? I've never heard that one before.  In the case of Sierra Leone, at least, a lot of the early setllers who formed the Krio ethnic group were people rescued from slave ships.


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## rosecore (Jun 3, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/01/activists-feminism-digital

Nice to see they picked a majority of white women. Great work Guardian.


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## frogwoman (Jun 3, 2013)

did anyone that "chime for change" thing about women's rights which had beyonce on the bill and lots of lyrics telling women they should look sexy and please men etc?


----------



## toggle (Jun 3, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Another point that's not usually mentioned is that the abolition of 1830 did not, in fact, end slavery-like practices in her majesty's realms:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
In theory, I think, there were penalties for investing in slavery.

one thing I did come across was the discussion of 'Chinese Slavery', immigrant indentureships in British Controlled South Africa.


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## Idris2002 (Jun 3, 2013)

toggle said:


> In theory, I think, there were penalties for investing in slavery.
> 
> one thing I did come across was the discussion of 'Chinese Slavery', immigrant indentureships in British Controlled South Africa.


 
Churchill (when he was a Liberal) complained about "chinese Slavery" in the Rand goldfields, and he was badgered into a retraction, saying that "slavery" was a "terminological inexactitude".


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## toggle (Jun 3, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Churchill (when he was a Liberal) complained about "chinese Slavery" in the Rand goldfields, and he was badgered into a retraction, saying that "slavery" was a "terminological inexactitude".


 
I've got it noted down as a huge issue in a 1903 by election, in a constituency where a lot of families were supported by miners working in south africa. but i won't know much else until i get into the newspapers for that era


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## el-ahrairah (Jun 3, 2013)

i dont even know where to begin with this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/03/day-i-became-a-terrorist


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 3, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Also, Wilberforce was one of the biggest cunts going if you were poor or working class. The same hypocritical moralism that informed his anti-slavery crusade also informed his temperance work, anti-vice work, and a whole host of other things that encroached on the freedom of the working class to spend their leisure time as they wished. The authoritarian cunt.
> 
> Nothing gets my goat more than when liberals and right wingers hold him up as some kind of hero. He wasn't. He was a massive cunt, and one who went on to benefit from slavery even after it had been 'abolished'.
> 
> Cobbett's a really interesting character though, his political trajectory confuses and fascinates me - I don't suppose you know of any reading you could recommend on him?


 
Anthony Burton's "William Cobbett - Englishman" is okay, but (IMHO) over-focuses on Cobbett's "Englishness".


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## articul8 (Jun 3, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Cobbett's a really interesting character though, his political trajectory confuses and fascinates me ?


 
Blue Labour avant la lettre


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 3, 2013)

With Cobbett the best thing to do is read rural rides (not the wurzels song) and watch as he goes around the country getting angrier and angrier and more radicalised by the conditions he encounters.


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## butchersapron (Jun 3, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Blue Labour avant la lettre


 
What utter nonsense. And still writing like a wanker  Even in a sentence with only five words.


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## el-ahrairah (Jun 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> With Cobbett the best thing to do is read rural rides (not the wurzels song) and watch as he goes around the country getting angrier and angrier and more radicalised by the conditions he encounters.


 
my only knowledge of Cobbett is through Rural Rides - my old history teacher was very fond of it and drummed large sections into us!  not that i can remember it twenty years on, but i was definitely lucky to have a load of old fashioned lefties teaching me when we studied the Corn Laws and the Enclosures and all that malarkey.


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## articul8 (Jun 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What utter nonsense. And still writing like a wanker  Even in a sentence with only five words.


 he has this "merrie England" golden age thing going on


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 3, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Blue Labour avant la lettre


 
While we're recommending reading, here's something for you.


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## toggle (Jun 3, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Another point that's not usually mentioned is that the abolition of 1830 did not, in fact, end slavery-like practices in her majesty's realms:
> 
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbirding
> ...


 
picked up this link, thought it might be an interesting addition:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/


----------



## JimW (Jun 3, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> With Cobbett the best thing to do is read rural rides (not the wurzels song) and watch as he goes around the country getting angrier and angrier and more radicalised by the conditions he encounters.


 
I brought a copy of that (in two vols) with me when I came here to start work in that rural development project. Was interesting comparing his observations then to what I was seeing. His concern with the well-being of people was always to the fore and speaks well of him I think.


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## The Pale King (Jun 3, 2013)

Now that privilege checking has broken out and is now happily gambolling across the broadsheets, a quick thought. It seems to me to be a quite transparent act of displacement, in which a sort of phony egalitarianism of discourse stands in for a proper politics of egalitarianism. It's freighted with all the liberal baggage (you have to work on yourself to remove the taint of racism, the aggregate of individual improvements will re-make society). It's as though you can level everyone at the level of discourse and that's enough. As long as subaltern voices are 'listened to' then we've really done all we can. The kernal of it as a mode of thought is both craven towards the actual political / economic situation and grossly patronising to the system's victims.
That's all, as you were!


----------



## where to (Jun 3, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:
			
		

> i dont even know where to begin with this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/03/day-i-became-a-terrorist



The woman winked and said "I know yr not really"! You can't make an article out of that! He ran off the bus for that?  

humourless prima Donna.


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## Idris2002 (Jun 3, 2013)

treelover said:


> Big Hollywood film on Wilberforce: Amazing Grace, don't think it did much box office though.


 
Nollywood - Nigerian film industry - not Hollywood, I think.


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## Firky (Jun 3, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> did anyone that "chime for change" thing about women's rights which had beyonce on the bill and lots of lyrics telling women they should look sexy and please men etc?


 

Big fucking Gucci advert wasn't it? I only saw the highlights on the news but that was enough to see that Gucci were promoting it. The same Gucci which often gets adverts pulled for being sexist.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 3, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i dont even know where to begin with this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/03/day-i-became-a-terrorist


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## The Pale King (Jun 3, 2013)

Just noticed this comment piece in the Grauniad by Molly Crabapple of this parish   and thought it might be of interest. haven't had time to read it yet will return later...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/03/bradley-manning-soldier-truth-trial


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## el-ahrairah (Jun 3, 2013)

she's not of this parish.  she's very firmly in their fucking parish, monetising her hotness.


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## Hocus Eye. (Jun 3, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Just noticed this comment piece in the Grauniad by Molly Crabapple of this parish and thought it might be of interest. haven't had time to read it yet will return later...
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/03/bradley-manning-soldier-truth-trial


Molly Crabapple is not of this parish. She is American. Good for her that she has raised the issue of what is happening to Bradley Manning. You could begin to believe that the media want to avoid the story.


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## The Pale King (Jun 3, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> she's not of this parish. she's very firmly in their fucking parish, monetising her hotness.


I know! Wish there was a smiley for 'tongue in cheek'...


----------



## Greebo (Jun 3, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> I know! Wish there was a smiley for 'tongue in cheek'...


 
Isn't the wink near enough?


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## The Pale King (Jun 3, 2013)

It'll do. Ta Greebo!


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 3, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> she's not of this parish. she's very firmly in their fucking parish, monetising her hotness.


 
The only parish she is from is Erick and Parrish Making Dollars


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 3, 2013)




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## frogwoman (Jun 3, 2013)

i dunno where to put this, but it might as well go here.  given this threas has become about the "social change" "intersectionality" "industry".

Horrible cunts. 

http://electronicintifada.net/content/palestinian-refugees-are-not-your-service/12464


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## rekil (Jun 3, 2013)

Essential kettle-on time. Or would have been.


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## Firky (Jun 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> View attachment 33252


 

Well they're both Oxbridge and upper middle class (Penny and Davison, think Davison went to Oxford?) so it's not entirely inaccurate. Can't say I've ever seen Emily's blog or twitter feed though.


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## The Pale King (Jun 3, 2013)

Thanks for sharing that Frogwoman, profoundly depressing read though it was.


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## cesare (Jun 3, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Thanks for sharing that Frogwoman, profoundly depressing read though it was.


Yes


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## Firky (Jun 3, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i dunno where to put this, but it might as well go here.  given this threas has become about the "social change" "intersectionality" "industry".
> 
> Horrible cunts.
> 
> http://electronicintifada.net/content/palestinian-refugees-are-not-your-service/12464


 


> The conduct of the student was neither easy nor graceful, papers were shuffled, questions fired. Um Muhammad answered and re-answered in the hope of getting to the part that she came for: to tell her story and find aid for her injured son.
> 
> 
> ...
> ...


 
Grim.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 3, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i dunno where to put this, but it might as well go here.  given this threas has become about the "social change" "intersectionality" "industry".
> 
> Horrible cunts.
> 
> http://electronicintifada.net/content/palestinian-refugees-are-not-your-service/12464


 
Very Important story, but it's more about foreign human rights workers and their bureaucratic demands - this existed way before 'intersectionality'.
Also, it was similar in the former Yugoslavia, people hunting to find cases relating to one form of mistreatment, not focused on any actual needs.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

It makes me sick in the back of my mouth to see Laurie Penny's name alongside Emily Davison. No matter what you think of Davison it's an insult to her memory to equate her with this inane hack. It's just the New Statesman liberal-left version of William Hague writing a book about Pitt the Younger (another scumbag btw) self-promotion via association. Go right ahead. Fuck 'em. After all, they're just another name to check, another movement to parasite off, another group to invoke to boost your credebiilty. Why fucking not? That's the MO. I think the contempt I have for her is fuck all compared to the contempt she has for the inferior orders who try and call her out for this.

Remember that time she stuck up for Niall Ferguson's homophobia? Yeah I do. That's where the loyalties are. That's the class consciousness peeping through. Get ready for it.

If the "Left" is the small, irrelevant, politically impotent and overwhelmingly middle-class scene that exists in London today then they've got absolutely no chance of being able to instigate any sort of radical political change. None. Zero. It's a scene. It's permitted to exist precisely because it poses no threat. It's not linked to any movement, it's not capable of organising politically (let alone winning mass support) - it's just an adjunct to the arts, literary and media scene in London. An indulgence. Good times. A right laugh.

One day there'll come a time in this country when these kids do something bold, an occupation, and the govt (which will be reactionary and authoritarian regardless of the party) will panic and set loose the EDL or whichever right-wing useful idiots around to clear them off the streets. What then? Who do you think wins in a popularity contest between the New New Left and the EDL right now? Who do you think wins a fight between the two, 9 times out of 10, if one day the police weren't there to control the whole process.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> One day there'll come a time in this country when these kids do something bold, an occupation, and the govt (which will be reactionary and authoritarian regardless of the party) will panic and set loose the EDL or whichever right-wing useful idiots around to clear them off the streets. What then? Who do you think wins in a popularity contest between the New New Left and the EDL right now? Who do you think wins a fight between the two, 9 times out of 10, if one day the police weren't there to control the whole process.


 

"Fuck those who want to fight violence with violence"


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

This is why we can't have nice things - like a revolution

http://www.liveleak.com/c/syria

^ That's what revolutions look like. Watch those videos. They're grim and violent, and unless you were desensitised by years of first person shooter games then too horrific to watch, let alone routinely watch a good few hours of them a day. Any revolution that's "nice" isn't a revolution. You think the British state would react any differently if we tried to seize power away from Crown and Parliament?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> It makes me sick in the back of my mouth to see Laurie Penny's name alongside Emily Davison.


 
I'll get a thorough coating for this but:


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> "Fuck those who want to fight violence with violence"


 
That's exactly the sort of liberal platitude that gets you shot if you're in my unit soldier.


----------



## Firky (Jun 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I'll get a thorough coating for this but:


 

Well it is better than Bugger the Bankers.

Davison is from my hometown and I don't think there was as single year went by at school when we didn't have to do a project on her.

Grace Darling and Cuthbert Collingwood were the other two which were stuffed down our throats.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> That's exactly the sort of liberal platitude that gets you shot if you're in my unit soldier.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 4, 2013)

Firky said:


> *Well it is better than Bugger the Bankers.*
> 
> Davison is from my hometown and I don't think there was as single year went by at school when we didn't have to do a project on her.
> 
> Grace Darling and Cuthbert Collingwood were the other two which were stuffed down our throats.


 
high praise indeed


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I'll get a thorough coating for this but:




I've just listend to that and I've got a infinitely more time for Grace Petrie than Laurie Penny just on that song's strength alone. At least Grace Petrie is sincere. At least she's fairly talented guitarist and songwriter. There's no bullshit there. On the whole it's fair to say that Grace Petrie's contribution to British politics has been a net positive, could you honestly say the same for Laurie? I don't think so. I think she's a danger and liability at best, and every bit as much the enemy as any Tory at worst.

This was an argument I was having with my mate about 4 months ago, who was reading Meat Market and we were discussing it's pro's and cons. His position was despite it's shortness, despite it's obvious "let's cash in on some old articles and build the Laurie Penny brand" stuff despite all the "confused diletantte-ish nonsense" in it that on the whole she's a net positive. This is because he's a bit more charitable than me, and hasn't actually seen all the bullshit added up cumulatively that's collated on here, infact it's probably the attitude I had towards her a few years ago, but no it's far more serious than that. I listed a few examples of Laurie at her worst. I planted a seed of doubt in his mind. Now he notices the self-promotion, the careerism, the cynicism, the dishonesty, the utter and total disregard for basic professionalism and integrity, all of this, and he's changed his mind. Interviewing Tommy Robinson was the final straw for him when he realised his naive, good-natured, benefit of the doubt attitude was nothing but bullshit that ends up condoning things that are genuinely damaging. People need to stop being so fucking soft when it comes to dealing with the Penny-ites. We should be far more belligerent imo.

But that's just my bloodlust talking, I'll probably calm down tomorrow and be a cuddly soft bennite again in the morning.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 4, 2013)

Are you being Mystic Meg or asking us to be?

PS is Saira Khan part of the 'New New Left' (need a better name)

https://twitter.com/IamSairaKhan/status/341454782600462336



> Lets start with a woman, having a Dr Who of colour may be too much for the Bbc to handle all in one go


 
A "Dr Who of colour". Who? She is the Sir Alan Sugar Apprentice figure who wrote this for the Daily Mail, ecnouraging Pakistani immigrants to deport people with an irregular immigration status:

"Most Pakistanis talk about blood and clan loyalty. They have no respect for British laws – unless it suits them. They say they are only helping those back home who are less fortunate. But I say that’s wrong and they must realise this, as well as the fact that those who are here illegally often end up being exploited, working long hours for little money, in conditions that are filthy and unhealthy.
More important still is the worry that they might be seduced by extremists to take part in terrorist acts.
I know this might sound dramatic, but it is a genuine concern. Many of these young men come from closed communities with very narrow views about Western behaviour. They are probably susceptible to persuasion by fanatics. As a moderate Muslim who is outraged at the creeping tentacles of extremism, it is important that I speak out against anything I believe may help to fan the flames."


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Dire Staits - Brothers in Arms]


----------



## Firky (Jun 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> high praise indeed


 

She's not that bad actually, there was an interview in the Guardian with her a few months back and she made me smile a couple of times. Came across as a very down to earth and honest woman. I'll dig it up.


----------



## Firky (Jun 4, 2013)

Firky said:


> She's not that bad actually, there was an interview in the Guardian with her a few months back and she made me smile a couple of times. Came across as a very down to earth and honest woman. I'll dig it up.


 

Here it is - was over a year ago!



> The 24-year-old typifies what we might call the cuts generation. Describing herself on stage as "a massive leftie and a massive gay", she's a youth worker who grew up in a leftwing household in Leicester, but had never written a protest song until after the last election, when she dashed off a "giant rant" called Farewell to Welfare. It gave her a powerful new songwriting voice. "You don't want to be scouring the headlines for something to write about," she says over a pint before the UCL show. "I've always written songs about things that make me sad or angry. It's just that before it was related more to girls than to politics."


 


> The challenge, she believes, is to convince people alienated by mainstream politics to feel empowered in other ways. "What I'd like to achieve through my songs is to put it into a language that people who are new to politics can understand. There's not much to be gained by singing to rooms full of lefties who agree with me already.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/nov/10/protest-music-akala-grace-petrie


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 4, 2013)

aye I wrote her an email once. A 3 am email.


theres some good stuff by her if you can stomach earnest which I can. I'll take buckets of earnest rather than knowing

http://music.gracepetrie.com/track/inspector-morse


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

I'm more a Ciaran Murphy man myself.


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> theres some good stuff by her if you can stomach earnest which I can. I'll take buckets of earnest rather than knowing


 
Bingo. I'll take earnest any day of the week. That's something Frank Turner was lacking and look what happened to him....


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## Firky (Jun 4, 2013)

I heard someone playing this over their phone on the bus once. Made me feel warm inside 

Not really my cup of tea and a bit confused but:


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## Firky (Jun 4, 2013)

Oh and this one was doing the rounds recently



Whatever happened to childhood?
We're all scared of the kids in our neighboorhood;
They're not small, charming and harmless,
They're a violent bunch of bastard little shits.
And anyone who looks younger than me
Makes me check for my wallet, my phone and my keys,
And I'm tired of being tired out
Always being on the lookout for thieving gits.

We're all wondering how we ended up so scared;
We spent ten long years teaching our kids not to care
And that &quot;there's no such thing as society&quot; anyway,
And all the rich folks act surprised
When all sense of community dies,
But you just closed your eyes to the other sidev Of all the things that she did.
Thatcher f**ked the kids.

And it seems a little bit rich to me,
The way the rich only ever talk of charity
In times like the seventies, the broken down economy
Meant even the upper tier was needing some help.
But as soon as things look brighter,
Yeah the grin gets wider and the grip gets tighter,
And for every teenage tracksuit mugger
There's a guy in a suit who wouldn't lift a finger for anybody else.

You've got a generation raised on the welfare state,
Enjoyed all its benefits and did just great,
But as soon as they were settled as the richest of the rich,
They kicked away the ladder, told the rest of us that life's a bitch.
And it's no surprise that all the f**k-ups
Didn't show up until the kids had grown up.
But when no one ever smiles or ever helps a stranger,
Is it any f**king wonder our society's in danger of collapse?

So all the kids are bastards,
But don't blame them, yeah, they learn by example.
Blame the folks who sold the future for the highest bid:
That's right, Thatcher f**ked the kids.


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

Yeah he's a massive Tory now. You can see it poking through in some of them lyrics.

He was pretty shallow Frank Turner and pretty knowing with it.


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## Firky (Jun 4, 2013)

Aye, I was surprised to see it being posted to lefty facebook groups. It's as if no one listened to the lyrics only the hook line, "Thatcher fucked the kids".


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## Firky (Jun 4, 2013)

I need to stop doing internets. It's bad for my mental health.


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## Firky (Jun 4, 2013)

Seriously though, I had a look at the hashtag #skint tonight following that Channel 4 show of the same name, people were calling for families to be gassed, kids to be sterilised by kicking them in the womb, burning down their houses etc.

Why isn't LP speaking up about that? Is it because she wants to secure further TV slots or does she not give a fuck because it's not trendy?

GAH..... angry. She makes me fucking seethe, not just her... the whole f'ing lot of them.


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## sihhi (Jun 4, 2013)

Firky said:


> Aye, I was surprised to see it being posted to lefty facebook groups. It's as if no one listened to the lyrics only the hook line, "Thatcher fucked the kids".


 
Your Scorsayzee song: the Queen's husband is a Freemason  
(it's gotta do more than rhyme ), I sense conspiracism


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## Firky (Jun 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Your Scorsayzee song: the Queen's husband is a Freemason
> (it's gotta do more than rhyme ), I sense conspiracism


 

That's partly what I meant when I said it is a bit confused. Mainly trying to think of young protest singer / song writers.

Clayton Blizzard can be quite good. Haven't heard this one, don't know what it is like:


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## J Ed (Jun 4, 2013)

Firky said:


> Seriously though, I had a look at the hashtag #skint tonight following that Channel 4 show of the same name, people were calling for families to be gassed, kids to be sterilised by kicking them in the womb, burning down their houses etc.
> 
> Why isn't LP speaking up about that? Is it because she wants to secure further TV slots or does she not give a fuck because it's not trendy?
> 
> GAH..... angry. She makes me fucking seethe, not just her... the whole f'ing lot of them.


 

I just searched twitter for this and you weren't kidding. Jesus.


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

Firky said:


> Seriously though, I had a look at the hashtag #skint tonight following that Channel 4 show of the same name, people were calling for families to be gassed, kids to be sterilised by kicking them in the womb, burning down their houses etc.
> 
> Why isn't LP speaking up about that? Is it because she wants to secure further TV slots or does she not give a fuck because it's not trendy?
> 
> GAH..... angry. She makes me fucking seethe, not just her... the whole f'ing lot of them.


 
Firky who gives a fuck if she "speaks up" for this kind of thing? It's not fucking privileged journo's speaking up in their ever dwindling circulation magazines that's going to change these sorts of attitudes. It's mass movements and political action that takes place over a period of generations that changes things, y'know the long hard slog, the thankless task of banging your head against a brick wall for years, none of which the Penny's of this world could give the slightest fuck about getting involved in. She might write something about it IF it presents her an opportunity to promote herself and move her career in a certain direction but even then it's actual impact in changing attitudes and changing the political climate that give rise to this sort of hatred is absolutely fuck all.


----------



## JimW (Jun 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> ... I'll take buckets of earnest rather than knowing...


 
Don't now this woman you're talking about but I very much agree with this.


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

Sorry for the weird fart video everyone - my niece is stopping with me for a couple of days and she sabotaged my laptop when I went to the bog. She won't admit it but I know it was her cos she can't look at me without an idiot grin moving across her lips 

I'm going to leave it up to teach me not to leave it unattended.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Sorry for the weird fart video everyone - my niece is stopping with me for a couple of days and she sabotaged my laptop when I went to the bog. She won't admit it but I know it was her cos she can't look at me without an idiot grin moving across her lips
> 
> I'm going to leave it up to teach me not to leave it unattended.


 
That "like" was for your niece btw. Needs a bit of comic relief this thread.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

I thought the part with the flour was a bit of a highlight myself


----------



## BigTom (Jun 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> View attachment 33252
> 
> Essential kettle-on time. Or would have been.



Emily Davison - throws herself under King's horse, leading to her death.

Laurie penny - won't go to protest as doesn't want to get arrested just for journalism.

Living in her shadow indeed


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Your Scorsayzee song: the Queen's husband is a Freemason
> (it's gotta do more than rhyme ), I sense conspiracism


 
And why are pissed off and disilliousioned working class kids with some "lefty" ideas turning to conspiracism?


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## Bakunin (Jun 4, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Emily Davison - throws herself under King's horse, leading to her death.
> 
> Laurie penny - won't go to protest as doesn't want to get arrested just for journalism.
> 
> Living in her shadow indeed


 

The shadow of anybody who's done something that was actually meaningful, I am in you.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Very Important story, but it's more about foreign human rights workers and their bureaucratic demands - this existed way before 'intersectionality'.
> Also, it was similar in the former Yugoslavia, people hunting to find cases relating to one form of mistreatment, not focused on any actual needs.


 
similar things happened in moldova as well (although obviously nowhere near as bad as that). i'll do a thread on it one day ...


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## Idris2002 (Jun 4, 2013)

And in Norn Iron also. I used to know a guy who'd wanted to do research on Short Strand, and they told him, "what would we get out of it?"


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## The39thStep (Jun 4, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Emily Davison - throws herself under King's horse, leading to her death.
> 
> Laurie penny - won't go to protest as doesn't want to get arrested just for journalism.
> 
> Living in her shadow indeed


 
She was at a family do. No passaran the cheesecake and bruschetta


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## Steel Icarus (Jun 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Firky who gives a fuck if she "speaks up" for this kind of thing? It's not fucking privileged journo's speaking up in their ever dwindling circulation magazines that's going to change these sorts of attitudes. It's mass movements and political action that takes place over a period of generations that changes things, y'know the long hard slog, the thankless task of banging your head against a brick wall for years, none of which the Penny's of this world could give the slightest fuck about getting involved in. She might write something about it IF it presents her an opportunity to promote herself and move her career in a certain direction but even then it's actual impact in changing attitudes and changing the political climate that give rise to this sort of hatred is absolutely fuck all.


 

Virtually no-one's spoken up about this, none of the "activists" and jump-on-every-nasty-article-about-women/gay marriage/etc people. That first couple of weeks mate it seemed like just me and you were calling the cunts cunts about that hashtag, and yeah I know it's JUST Twitter but I genuinely think a lot of those people genuinely hate and fear poor people, not enough to ACTUALLY gas and shoot them...but enough to not lift a finger to stop it in different circumstances (I hesitate to Godwin myself). 

Where's the angry mob outside Channel 4? The twitterstorm? Nowhere. Cos it doesn't matter to those people. All the "an attack on one is an attack on all" bullshit only applies, it seems, when a feminist says a trans woman isn't a woman, then it's pitchforks and angry typing. I've seen one of 'em today saying how brilliant it was that the suffragettes bombed the house of Lloyd-George. Aye, you reckon? What are you gonna do? Fuck-all. And neither am I. But I ain't inferring I'd do it, either.


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Virtually no-one's spoken up about this, none of the "activists" and jump-on-every-nasty-article-about-women/gay marriage/etc people. That first couple of weeks mate it seemed like just me and you were calling the cunts cunts about that hashtag, and yeah I know it's JUST Twitter but I genuinely think a lot of those people genuinely hate and fear poor people, not enough to ACTUALLY gas and shoot them...but enough to not lift a finger to stop it in different circumstances (I hesitate to Godwin myself).
> 
> Where's the angry mob outside Channel 4? The twitterstorm? Nowhere. Cos it doesn't matter to those people. All the "an attack on one is an attack on all" bullshit only applies, it seems, when a feminist says a trans woman isn't a woman, then it's pitchforks and angry typing. I've seen one of 'em today saying how brilliant it was that the suffragettes bombed the house of Lloyd-George. Aye, you reckon? What are you gonna do? Fuck-all. And neither am I. But I ain't inferring I'd do it, either.


 
If their propaganda is anything to go by the suffragettes (or at least a significant number of them) hated and feared the poor and the working class too so they're just keeping up the grand traditions of bourgeois feminism.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> If their propaganda is anything to go by the suffragettes (or at least a significant number of them) hated and feared the poor and the working class too so they're just keeping up the grand traditions of bourgeois feminism.


 
So where did Sylvia Pankhurst fit into that (genuine question)? And was the force-feeding of Suffragettes on hunger strike have any radicalising effect?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

And anyway, why would you bomb politicians (or do anything that has any kind of impact in the real world outside the bubble) when you can call people out on twitter? Much more effective.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> If their propaganda is anything to go by the suffragettes (or at least a significant number of them) hated and feared the poor and the working class too so they're just keeping up the grand traditions of bourgeois feminism.


 

I didn't know that. Do you have any examples?


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> So where did Sylvia Pankhurst fit into that (genuine question)? And was the force-feeding of Suffragettes on hunger strike have any radicalising effect?


 
I've not heard of her speaking out against it but I find it hard to believe she would have been comfortable with it. Like any 'single issue' type movement it was a fairly broad church and I have no doubt there would have been plenty who didn't agree with that kind of propaganda (pictures of dirty working and poor men, alongside middle class women involved in voluntary associations, basically saying how come these uncivilised and stupid proles get to vote when respectable propertied women can't? - when I get the time I'll see if I can find some examples and post them on here).

I'm afraid I could only speculate on the answer to the second question, it's not something I've ever really looked at in any detail, sorry.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 4, 2013)

S☼I said:


> I didn't know that. Do you have any examples?


 
I presume this is the sort of thing SpineyNorman is thinking of:


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

There were also some campaigners for female suffrage (not sure if they were suffragettes though) who argued that, with the inclusion of unpropertied men in the franchise, middle class women should be given the vote in order to defend white supremacy. It's ages since I did anything on this so I can't find sources right now but later on when I've got a bit more time I'll have a dig around.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I presume this is the sort of thing SpineyNorman is thinking of:


 
Yeah - though that's one of the less class specific ones tbh - and at least includes exploitative bosses and seems to class women factory hands as 'respectable'. Some of them were pure, unadulterated class prejudice - not just drunks, 'lunatics' etc. but 'commoners'.


----------



## seventh bullet (Jun 4, 2013)

S☼I said:


> I didn't know that. Do you have any examples?


 
butchersapron posted up info on this very thread about a pamphlet on this subject, connected to the Bristol Radical History Group.

The slides he also posted up about it are very good. The thing Spiney is on about.


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

There's one particular one I'm thinking of but I haven't managed to find it online yet. I'll have a proper look when I've got more time and if need be scan a copy from the library - I think this stuff should be available online anyway.

In the meantime, here's another 'convicts and lunatics' one


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> butchersapron posted up info on this very thread about a pamphlet on this subject, connected to the Bristol Radical History Group.
> 
> The slides he also posted up about it were very good. The thing Spiney is on about.


 
Yeah - and weepiper makes an important point in a post just above that - that when it comes to female suffrage and womens struggles generally we always hear about the suffragettes but very little is ever said about the working class women, who took great risks in far more difficult circumstances than the middle class women who always get all the credit.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 4, 2013)

still holds as well, no vote for the convicted or the sectioned.

there were rumblings last year about giving prisoners the vote. Came to fuck all of course, would be political suicide for a tory gov to let the bechokeyed vote. Come to think of it vast swathes of labour voters would probably take ill to the idea


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## ViolentPanda (Jun 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> View attachment 33252
> 
> Essential kettle-on time. Or would have been.


 
I'm afraid I just literally did that cartoonish "slack-jawed amazement" thing, trying to imagine _La Pennionara_ or any of her contemporaries even being fit (or courageous enough) to walk in Emily Davison's shoes or shadow.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

Also a surprisingly large number of suffragettes went on to get involved in the British Union of Fascists - Stephen Dorril mentions it in his biography of Mosley.


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## butchersapron (Jun 4, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> So where did Sylvia Pankhurst fit into that (genuine question)? And was the force-feeding of Suffragettes on hunger strike have any radicalising effect?


 
She rejected it, radicalised by the great unrest, the war and 1917 and was expelled by her racist and pro-empire suffragette family as a result. That's why she changed her paper from the womens dreadnought to the workers dreadnought.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Also a surprisingly large number of suffragettes went on to get involved in the British Union of Fascists - Stephen Dorril mentions it in his biography of Mosley.


 
Yes, but by then they had "passed their prime".



butchersapron said:


> She rejected it, radicalised by the great unrest, the war and 1917. That's why she changed her paper from the womens dreadnought to the workers dreadnought.


 
Cool story, bro.


----------



## seventh bullet (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yeah - and weepiper makes an important point in a post just above that - that when it comes to female suffrage and womens struggles generally we always hear about the suffragettes but very little is ever said about the working class women, who took great risks in far more difficult circumstances than the middle class women who always get all the credit.


 
Yes, unlike Ladies their families faced hunger and destitution, and they also faced hostility from within the socialist movement they were a part of.


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

Really reccomend people take a look at the pdf butchers linked to earlier in the thread - some great examples of the kind of stuff I was talking about, and also the way working class women were deliberately marginalised (in fact they didn't even try to hide it). But just as importantly it shows there were some who criticised it in fairly robust terms.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> This is why we can't have nice things - like a revolution
> 
> http://www.liveleak.com/c/syria
> 
> ^ That's what revolutions look like. Watch those videos. They're grim and violent, and unless you were desensitised by years of first person shooter games then too horrific to watch, let alone routinely watch a good few hours of them a day. Any revolution that's "nice" isn't a revolution. You think the British state would react any differently if we tried to seize power away from Crown and Parliament?


 
Come on Delroy, you really expect the likes of "the bubble" to be the ones fighting and dying "on the barricades"? The woman herself doesn't even have the bottle to take lumps for her journalism (remember the shitting in New York when she thought she might get a shoeing from NYPD, so stayed at home?).  The bubble are much more likely to swan in once the fighting is over, and then try to take some credit for "inspiring the masses with revolutionary prose".  Some nut on another board compared Penny with Rosa Luxemburg, and was quite upset when I said "Rosa was a revolutionary socialist who spent much of her adult life physically protesting on the streets when she wasn't writing polemic. Laurie Penny is a chancer".


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Come on Delroy, you really expect the likes of "the bubble" to be the ones fighting and dying "on the barricades"? The woman herself doesn't even have the bottle to take lumps for her journalism (remember the shitting in New York when she thought she might get a shoeing from NYPD, so stayed at home?). The bubble are much more likely to swan in once the fighting is over, and then try to take some credit for "inspiring the masses with revolutionary prose". Some nut on another board compared Penny with Rosa Luxemburg, and was quite upset when I said "Rosa was a revolutionary socialist who spent much of her adult life physically protesting on the streets when she wasn't writing polemic. Laurie Penny is a chancer".


 
Link us, please, if you would be so good.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Come on Delroy, you really expect the likes of "the bubble" to be the ones fighting and dying "on the barricades"? The woman herself doesn't even have the bottle to take lumps for her journalism (remember the shitting in New York when she thought she might get a shoeing from NYPD, so stayed at home?). The bubble are much more likely to swan in once the fighting is over, and then try to take some credit for "inspiring the masses with revolutionary prose". Some nut on another board compared Penny with Rosa Luxemburg, and was quite upset when I said "Rosa was a revolutionary socialist who spent much of her adult life physically protesting on the streets when she wasn't writing polemic. Laurie Penny is a chancer".


 
She also fought and died for what she believed in - how can anyone with even the most feeble grip on reality draw any kind of equivalence between the two? Even if Penny's journalism was spot on it would be an offensive comparison to make.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Your Scorsayzee song: the Queen's husband is a Freemason
> (it's gotta do more than rhyme ), I sense conspiracism


 
Wewll, that's fair comment really, because Phil *is* a Mason, so is the one that talks to rhododendrons.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Wewll, that's fair comment really, because Phil *is* a Mason, so is the one that talks to rhododendrons.


 
Bloody hell, are they letting anyone join these days?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 4, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Link us, please, if you would be so good.


 
The New York thing? I'll see if I can find it, but I'm sure it's already been mentioned on this thread.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 4, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Bloody hell, are they letting anyone join these days?


 
Seems like it, doesn't it?   Apparently Buck House and Windsor Castle both have several Masonic Lodges that meet on site, some for staff, others for the aristos.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Seems like it, doesn't it?  Apparently Buck House and Windsor Castle both have several Masonic Lodges that meet on site, some for staff, others for the aristos.


 
So mote it be.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 4, 2013)

BigTom said:


> Laurie penny - won't go to protest as doesn't want to get arrested just for journalism.


 
Ah, I see you remember it too!


----------



## seventh bullet (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> There were also some campaigners for female suffrage (not sure if they were suffragettes though) who argued that, with the inclusion of unpropertied men in the franchise, middle class women should be given the vote in order to defend white supremacy. It's ages since I did anything on this so I can't find sources right now but later on when I've got a bit more time I'll have a dig around.


 
In the earlier struggles for the right to vote American upper middle class women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton were against the enfranchisement of the 'negro man' before them. IIRC, old Stalinist Angela Davis went into that in her _Women, Race and Class_.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 4, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> So where did Sylvia Pankhurst fit into that (genuine question)? And was the force-feeding of Suffragettes on hunger strike have any radicalising effect?


Sylvia certainly got a fair bit of grief from her mother and sisters for being socialist in her suffragism, according to biographers. The woman herself merely mentions "friction" in those of her writings I've read (which pretty much amounts to Kathryn Dodd's "A Sylvia Pankhurst reader").


----------



## rekil (Jun 4, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/341878873107083264


> Loads of my radical friends seem to be quitting smoking now. There's a growing awareness that we may need to stay alive for a long fight.


 
No foolin'.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 4, 2013)

e-fag to replace rollies


----------



## rekil (Jun 4, 2013)

Giving up smoking is a little bit communism.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 4, 2013)




----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

If smoking is a little bit communism doesn't quitting smoking suggest you've been seduced by the forces of reaction? I think it does.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 4, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


>


 
and they went on to become consummate killers of kittens


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> If smoking is a little bit communism doesn't quitting smoking suggest you've been seduced by the forces of reaction? I think it does.


 
its just thirty hoving into view and the realisation that you can't enjoy your money if you are coughing your spare lung out aged 45


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 4, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


>


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 4, 2013)

That clegg is a fucking pervert. Supporting that shit.


----------



## toggle (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yeah - and weepiper makes an important point in a post just above that - that when it comes to female suffrage and womens struggles generally we always hear about the suffragettes but very little is ever said about the working class women, who took great risks in far more difficult circumstances than the middle class women who always get all the credit.


 
the category prisoners were placed in when they were imprisoned was class dependent. working class suffragettes had a much harder time than middle class women.

iirc, you mentioned the force feeding as well. Up until relatively recently, there has been a lot of shite written about this. comments included that women enjoyed the attention in some kind of masochistic fantasy and that the biggest problem was it risked a woman's looks. If you're really interested, a friend who is specializing in this area recommended June Purvis as a place to start reading on this.

but a lot of this is in the context of the middle class women who usually worked as campaigners being of the same social background as the charity do-gooders, and mainly because it was only them that had the time to become involved. a lot felt it would be necessary to improve the working classes before granting them the vote, some including beatrice webb, never thought the working classes would have the agency to speak for themselves. the examples of those who thought to communicate *with* the working classes rather than just claim to speak for them (while ignoring what they were saying) are noticeable, because they were different.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That clegg is a fucking pervert. Supporting that shit.


 
Let's not forget either his association with Judge Cal, an episode the mainstream media seems reluctant to properly address.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 4, 2013)

toggle said:


> the category prisoners were placed in when they were imprisoned was class dependent. working class suffragettes had a much harder time than middle class women.
> 
> iirc, you mentioned the force feeding as well. Up until relatively recently, there has been a lot of shite written about this. comments included that women enjoyed the attention in some kind of masochistic fantasy and that the biggest problem was it risked a woman's looks. If you're really interested, a friend who is specializing in this area recommended June Purvis as a place to start reading on this.
> 
> but a lot of this is in the context of the middle class women who usually worked as campaigners being of the same social background as the charity do-gooders, and mainly because it was only them that had the time to become involved. a lot felt it would be necessary to improve the working classes before granting them the vote, some including beatrice webb, never thought the working classes would have the agency to speak for themselves. the examples of those who thought to communicate *with* the working classes rather than just claim to speak for them (while ignoring what they were saying) are noticeable, because they were different.


 

probably a bit of a random question- but how much did these things tie into methodist led 'improvement' of the working class? All that muscular christianity stuff


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That clegg is a fucking pervert. Supporting that shit.


----------



## toggle (Jun 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> probably a bit of a random question- but how much did these things tie into methodist led 'improvement' of the working class? All that muscular christianity stuff


 
I don't come across muscular Christianity here, but Methodism can't be treated as a single entity. At one point, there were over 30 sects, many of them splitting from the main Wesleyan connection because of their conservatism in either political or spiritual matters (or both). I do come across enough of the self improvement drive from within working class dominated sects to know it wasn't entirely middle class led.and Methodism tended to lead to a slightly higher level of egalitarianism than Anglicanism would have done. most wesleyans were liberal. there was a lot to do with liberalism supporting non conformist rights, but also a feedback in that nonconformist rights were politically radical and supporting them exposed the supporters to the promotion of other radical ideals.

and I know this better in Cornwall than elsewhere, and one factor is that Cornwall didn't really do socialism, and the working class sects here tended to be more radical spiritually, than politically, even compared to the same sect elsewhere in the country. and as far as mainstream Methodism was concerned, temperance was radicalism and that was a big issue here, but there's also a cycle of revival and backslide.

the main pattern I see published tends to be 'lead by example' rather than 'shame into compliance. there's a lot of the ethic of 'you can achieve if you work', but also within the sects and the communities, a strong sense of communities helping each other. a fair amount of the self improvement stuff seems to be an offshoot of that.

Round here, the old suffragism was Quaker dominated. the late Victorian, early Edwardian was linked to liberalism, the disciples of Mill or radical carpetbaggers. I have a few determined universal suffrage supporters as MPs, including one who trusted his electorate to believe in women well enough that his wife and Millicent Fawcett opened his campaigning for him in the contentious 1886 election.


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## Idris2002 (Jun 4, 2013)




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## butchersapron (Jun 4, 2013)

Black metal/ Pankhurst crossover was a little bit ahead of its time.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 4, 2013)

I don't do likes toggle, so I shall just thank you for that

The schismatic nature of religion and society is always bewildering to me but the above does give me a bit. So cheers


As lost as I get in post-catholic sectarianism I can be sure that theres a jewish sect who out-weirded it. Frog will tell me of it.

Now I know that methodism made great gains in wales- no suprise that they had to fight for prominence in other regions. The society of friends are still hanging around looking like left wing versions of Christianity. Theres a meeting house down this way which doubles as a weslyan chapel. Strange state of affairs. They rent it out to the christadelpians on saturdays. Odd


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## Idris2002 (Jun 4, 2013)

Fun fact: volunteers from the Society of Friends/Quakers used to run the visitors' centre at the Maze prison.


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## toggle (Jun 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I don't do likes toggle, so I shall just thank you for that
> 
> The schismatic nature of religion and society is always bewildering to me but the above does give me a bit. So cheers
> 
> ...


 
nods.

one of the questions is whether the predominant non conformist sect of a region was a cause or a mirror of the predominant social attitudes in the area. there are some fairly strong arguments that the sect that made headway and retained followers was the one most suited to pre existing attitudes.

cornish and welsh history get compared a lot. one of the major questions is how the welsh nationalists were more successful in making headway into Methodist communities than in cornwall.


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## phildwyer (Jun 4, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Just noticed this comment piece in the Grauniad by Molly Crabapple of this parish  and thought it might be of interest. haven't had time to read it yet will return later...
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/03/bradley-manning-soldier-truth-trial


 
That's a great artıcle, good for her.


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## butchersapron (Jun 4, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Black metal/ Pankhurst crossover was a little bit ahead of its time.


 
HMHB had a fake clueless posh riotgrrrl band called pankhurst i think.


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## The Pale King (Jun 4, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> That's a great artıcle, good for her.


 
Much better than LPs article on the same topic here:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/06/bradley-mannings-case-about-more-freedom-speech

...but I'm still not very keen on it. Focuses on how America has become 'morally lazy' (more so than during Vietnam or Nicaragua?) and the good individual v military machine angle, without really examining the underlying logic of imperialism that is driving this. And the expressions of surprise about Manning's treatment reveal Crabapple to have as much misplaced faith in the system as the soldier she dissapprovingly quotes. Am I being too harsh?


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## caleb (Jun 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> This is why we can't have nice things - like a revolution
> 
> http://www.liveleak.com/c/syria
> 
> ^ That's what revolutions look like. Watch those videos. They're grim and violent, and unless you were desensitised by years of first person shooter games then too horrific to watch, let alone routinely watch a good few hours of them a day. Any revolution that's "nice" isn't a revolution. You think the British state would react any differently if we tried to seize power away from Crown and Parliament?


 
Nah, an illustrative quote:



> Power does not come from the barrel of a gun any more than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but the military dimension is not the central one. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into the armories, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes the logic of capitalism. Barricades and machine guns flow from this "weapon". The more vital the social realm, the more the use of guns and the number of casualties will diminish. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any non-violent principle, but because it will be a revolution only by subverting more than by actually destroying the professional military. To imagine a proletarian front facing off against a bourgeois front is to conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political revolution or a war (seizing someone's power, occupying their territory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the insurrectionary moment had overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for specialists, for knowledge that Knows, and for techniques to solve problems, in short for everything that diminishes the common man. In the service of the state, the working- class "militia man" invariably evolves into a "soldier". In Spain, from the fall of 1936 onward, the revolution dissolved into the war effort, and into a kind of combat typical of states: a war of fronts.




http://www.prole.info/texts/insurrectionsdie.html

Any, the real issue is Laurie - and the wider student radical milieu on whose struggles she found fame - mostly don't believe in "revolution" anyway, regardless of the pose; chase those nasty companies who don't pay tax to pay for education? Sure. Insurrection? No.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 4, 2013)

Penny has no idea about how people with guns works.


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## The Pale King (Jun 4, 2013)

Laurie's article on Bradley Manning is really shit. Windy generalities, a focus on sexuality and 'who is the _real _Bradley Manning?'.

"There are those to whom Manning represents everything loathsome about modernity. He is a queer, effeminate, angry nerd whose morality took precedence over his loyalty to the US military and who, perhaps worst of all, is frighteningly good at the internet. On the other hand, for every other nerd out there, for everyone who was ever bullied at school, for anyone who grew up different, as Manning did in small-town Oklahoma, his story provokes empathy."

"If there was a chance for us to understand the real Manning, that chance disappeared somewhere between Quantico and a hundred magazine features attempting to dissect the young, gay soldier’s mental state. He has become a symbol of the information war and its discontents. Yet, conveniently for their persecutors, symbols such as Manning have hearts that can be stressed and stilled and bodies that can be brutalised as a warning to others. Every institution faces the choice between appearing just and appearing powerful. The US military, in its treatment of Bradley Manning, has made its choice."

I mean, what is this word salad? How does this stuff get published?


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## el-ahrairah (Jun 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Penny has no idea about how people with guns works.


 
corrected for you.


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Laurie's article on Bradley Manning is really shit. Windy generalities, a focus on sexuality and 'who is the _real _Bradley Manning?'.
> 
> "There are those to whom Manning represents everything loathsome about modernity. He is a queer, effeminate, angry nerd whose morality took precedence over his loyalty to the US military and who, perhaps worst of all, is frighteningly good at the internet. On the other hand, for every other nerd out there, for everyone who was ever bullied at school, for anyone who grew up different, as Manning did in small-town Oklahoma, his story provokes empathy."
> 
> ...


 
Good to see she's concentrating on what's really important about Manning's ordeal.


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## el-ahrairah (Jun 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Penny has no idea about how people with guns works.


 
sorry, this is more likely.


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## el-ahrairah (Jun 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Penny has no idea about how people with guns works.


 
no, wait, actually...


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## DotCommunist (Jun 4, 2013)

> commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes the logic of capitalism.


 
are. you. fucking. joking

why, why is she saying these things that bear zero relevance to reality. For fucks sake


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## The Pale King (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Good to see she's concentrating on what's really important about Manning's ordeal.


 
I know! I guess this is where you get to with the intersectionality though. To her, Manning's sexuality _really is _the most important aspect. How can we hope to 'understand' him otherwise?


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

toggle said:


> I don't come across muscular Christianity here, but Methodism can't be treated as a single entity. At one point, there were over 30 sects, many of them splitting from the main Wesleyan connection because of their conservatism in either political or spiritual matters (or both). I do come across enough of the self improvement drive from within working class dominated sects to know it wasn't entirely middle class led.and Methodism tended to lead to a slightly higher level of egalitarianism than Anglicanism would have done. most wesleyans were liberal. there was a lot to do with liberalism supporting non conformist rights, but also a feedback in that nonconformist rights were politically radical and supporting them exposed the supporters to the promotion of other radical ideals.
> 
> and I know this better in Cornwall than elsewhere, and one factor is that Cornwall didn't really do socialism, and the working class sects here tended to be more radical spiritually, than politically, even compared to the same sect elsewhere in the country. and as far as mainstream Methodism was concerned, temperance was radicalism and that was a big issue here, but there's also a cycle of revival and backslide.
> 
> ...


 
If you're interested in this (or if DotCommunist is) there's some really good stuff on the relationship between dissenting sects - methodism in particular - and the early English labour movement in Thompson's _The Making of the English Working Class _(it's in the libcom online library). Stuff about how some of the vaguely democratic forms of organisation used by Wesleyan baptism were adapted and used for self-organisation and how the church often became a kind of hub for collective working class organisation. Also stuff about how religious discourses and idealised representations of feudalism were tapped into to critique early capitalism.

Ages since I've read it so I can't be that precise as to where in the book it is, but just looking at the contents chapter 2 and the first part of chapter 11 look like a good place to start (if you so wish).


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> Nah, an illustrative quote:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
I disagree with much of that you just quoted. In fact I think that's a highly idealised concept of what the practicalities of overthrowing the state would entail. But that's another thread entirely, is it too much of a digression to get into it here?


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> are. you. fucking. joking
> 
> why, why is she saying these things that bear zero relevance to reality. For fucks sake


 
To be fair that's not her quote - it's from Gilles Dauvé (whoever that is - not someone I've come across before) Seems to completely miss the point if you ask me - assumes that the violence can only be initiated by the oppressed class in siezing power rather than coming from the old elites in defending their position or trying to win it back.


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I disagree with much of that you just quoted. In fact I think that's a highly idealised concept of what the practicalities of overthrowing the state would entail. But that's another thread entirely, is it too much of a digression to get into it here?


 
Are you seriously worried about derailing this of all threads?


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## caleb (Jun 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I disagree with much of that you just quoted. In fact I think that's a highly idealised concept of what the practicalities of overthrowing the state would entail. But that's another thread entirely, is it too much of a digression to get into it here?


 
It's poetic, sure, but the point is that revolution isn't simply a violent act or the seizure (or overthrow!) of the state, it's also a process whereby new social relations are created and new modes of living developed, it's both an act of creation and destruction. Sure it will be violent, but _how _violent depends on entirely on conditions which we can't currently predict, especially since "the revolution" ain't gonna happen any time in the near future. I just don't think it's correct to post links to videos of the barbarism in Syria and say that it's the face of modern social revolution, since it blatantly isn't.

If you want to start a thread about it I'll probably join in but I'm pretty lazy and dumb.


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## ViolentPanda (Jun 4, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Let's not forget either his association with Judge Cal...


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## caleb (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> To be fair that's not her quote - it's from Gilles Dauvé (whoever that is - not someone I've come across before) Seems to completely miss the point if you ask me - assumes that the violence can only be initiated by the oppressed class in siezing power rather than coming from the old elites in defending their position or trying to win it back.


 
I think it's more a response to those who see revolution as violent by principle, and who _fetishise _that violence. Because, sadly, there are plenty of people who do exactly that.


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## toggle (Jun 4, 2013)

Methodism as 'psychic masturbation'.

I was told that Thompson was raised a Methodist so had a bit of an issue with it, blamed it for a lot of the things he thought was wrong in society and for personal stuff. There's an essay in Hobsbawm's labouring men as well.


A lot of the interest from the British Marxists goes back to Halevy's thesis. that Methodism prevented a revolution in Britain. the bloke had a slight issue with starting with assumptions and misrepresenting correlation with causation IMO.it's back to the sects being successful in areas where their teaching fitted, rather than them causing massive changes in society. halevy's theorem won't fit even in Cornwall, IMO. Although I have read Marxist analysis of Cornwall that does work, more examination of the socio-economic developments than attempting to explain the religion (bloke called Roy Green, Cornish historian who ended up teaching history in an East German uni)


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> I think it's more a response to those who see revolution as violent by principle, and who _fetishise _that violence. Because, sadly, there are plenty of people who do exactly that.


 
That's not the point delroy was making though - quite the opposite (at least that's how I read it anyway)


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## caleb (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's not the point delroy was making though - quite the opposite (at least that's how I read it anyway)


 
Perhaps not, but linking to footage of Syria and suggesting that it's what revolution looks like? I don't think that's quite right, and again - regardless of the intention - overplays the violent, destructive nature of revolution.


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> I think it's more a response to those who see revolution as violent by principle, and who _fetishise _that violence. Because, sadly, there are plenty of people who do exactly that.


 
There's always a danger of that, granted, that people will fetishize violence as an end in itself, but a revolution will be violent by necessity. If you challenge the state's monopoly of violence then that's what it entails. Anyone who doesn't realise that's what it entails is missing the point. That's why I feel a strange sympathy with the maoist grouplets in France during 68 who advocated the armed insurrection, even if it was pure pie the in sky, because the fact is once you've gone that far and actually challenged the state itself there's no turning back then, you can't just call ACAS and go back to the negotiating table once you've challenged the legitimacy of the state. You either have to see it through or lose.

And look what happened after 68 - De Gaulle came back with avengence. It was actually massive defeat in many ways 68.

It's too nice out for me to be staying in going over this stuff but later on I'll come back with some more thoughts on it.


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> Perhaps not, but linking to footage of Syria and suggesting that it's what revolution looks like? I don't think that's quite right, and again - regardless of the intention - overplays the violent, destructive nature of revolution.


 
It was clearly intended as a simple way of illustrating a point. I would be very surprised if the meaning it intended to convey was, 'all revolutions go exactly like this' - more that they're not the 'nice things' Laurie claims they are and that they _always _involve fairly extreme violence, in which people who don't deserve it are hurt and killed.

Unless every revolution in history is a kind of exception to the rule of course.


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> It was clearly intended as a simple way of illustrating a point. I would be very surprised if the meaning it intended to convey was, 'all revolutions go exactly like this' - more that they're not the 'nice things' Laurie claims they are and that they _always _involve fairly extreme violence, in which people who don't deserve it are hurt and killed.
> 
> Unless every revolution in history is a kind of exception to the rule of course.


 
That's the point. That revolutions are violent things, how violent exactly depending on a lot of things of course, but violence is pretty central to overthrowing a government. There may be exceptions but that's the rule.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 4, 2013)

its not a revolution unless I get to see bupa endorsed giblets on a wooden platter


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> its not a revolution unless I get to see bupa endorsed giblets on a wooden platter


 
Anthony Seldon?


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## caleb (Jun 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> That's the point. That revolutions are violent things, how violent exactly depending on a lot of things of course, but violence is pretty central to overthrowing a government. There may be exceptions but that's the rule.


 
And my point - and by extension Dauve's - is that there is far more to revolution that simply overthrowing a government.


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> And my point - and by extension Dauve's - is that there is far more to revolution that simply overthrowing a government.


 
Since nobody said revolutions were _just _about overthrowing the government I'm not really sure what point it is you're making


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

I can't actually think of any exceptions to that rule - has there ever been a revolution that was carried through without some form of mass violence? I certainly can't think of any.


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> And my point - and by extension Dauve's - is that there is far more to revolution that simply overthrowing a government.


 
Who's disputing that though? I'm certainly not.

It's the idea you could overthrow the state (or present the government or the ruling class etc) without the use of violence is what I'm getting at. That revolutions are _nice things_ when it's nothing of the sort, it's a traumatic and violent exercise. The extent of the violence depends on a lot of contigent factors, but it's always going to be there in one form or another. Without it the state can just crush it using it's monopoly of violence.


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I can't actually think of any exceptions to that rule - has there ever been a revolution that was carried through without some form of mass violence? I certainly can't think of any.


 
Or even the _threat_ of mass violence? The threat of violence alone might be enough to win certain concessions short of a revolution, it might set into motion events that lead to the otherthrow of a state or government, but it's always there even if it's latent.


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Or even the _threat_ of mass violence? The threat of violence alone might be enough to win certain concessions short of a revolution, it might set into motion events that lead to the otherthrow of a state or government, but it's always there even if it's latent.


 
I can't actually even think of a scenario where just the threat would be enough - even if they're (as in whoever the old elite is) sensible or scared enough not to directly engage in violence against you they can be relied upon to arm, support and place fascist loons and the like so they can sabotage stuff and generally wreak havoc. Unless by some almost historical fluke the revolution took place simultaneously across the globe so that there was no safe haven for the old elites.


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I can't actually even think of a scenario where just the threat would be enough - even if they're (as in whoever the old elite is) sensible or scared enough not to directly engage in violence against you they can be relied upon to arm, support and place fascist loons and the like so they can sabotage stuff and generally wreak havoc. Unless by some almost historical fluke the revolution took place simultaneously across the globe so that there was no safe haven for the old elites.


 
True, I can't off the top of my head, and certainly not the kind of revolution we'd be after anyway. You could probably cause a dictator to resign and flee to a safe country with the threat of violence, but would that could as a revolution? You've just got rid of a leader and someone and replaced them with someone more aligned to your interests - something that can be achieved through parliamentary democracy in many parts of the world, so I wouldn't be so sure if you could even call it a revolution.

I've gotta go out shortly but I'll mull this over and dig out some books and we'll have a good old natter about it later on. I wanna go out get some sun


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## thedockerslad (Jun 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Or even the _threat_ of mass violence? The threat of violence alone might be enough to win certain concessions short of a revolution, it might set into motion events that lead to the otherthrow of a state or government, but it's always there even if it's latent.


 
I see the Turkish ruling class are getting a little hot under the collar - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22767622


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## JHE (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I can't actually think of any exceptions to that rule - has there ever been a revolution that was carried through without some form of mass violence? I certainly can't think of any.


 

Most of the revolutions in 1989 were pretty bloodless.  (Romania was the exception.)


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## caleb (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Since nobody said revolutions were _just _about overthrowing the government I'm not really sure what point it is you're making


 
Delroy seemed to imply that at various points, he's cleared it up. But the point was: there's much more to revolution that violence and overthrowing a government. Syria is hardly a good example of what revolution looks like, certainly not what a social revolution will look like at any rate.

The other point: Laurie doesn't believe in revolution anyway. The 'this is why we can't have nice stuff...' shit was some internet meme, rather than a serious point worthy of critique.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> Delroy seemed to imply that at various points, he's cleared it up. But the point was: there's much more to revolution that violence and overthrowing a government. Syria is hardly a good example of what revolution looks like, certainly not what a social revolution will look like at any rate.
> 
> The other point: Laurie doesn't believe in revolution anyway. The 'this is why we can't have nice stuff...' shit was some internet meme, rather than a serious point worthy of critique.


 

thats a real ballache is that. I had assumed Penny would be leading us into the glorious dawn while consigning the pigdogs of imperialism to fiery grave


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## caleb (Jun 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> thats a real ballache is that. I had assumed Penny would be leading us into the glorious dawn while consigning the pigdogs of imperialism to fiery grave


 
Who needs guns when we have her red pen of justice anyway?


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## The39thStep (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Also a surprisingly large number of suffragettes went on to get involved in the British Union of Fascists - Stephen Dorril mentions it in his biography of Mosley.


 
why surprisingly?


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## The39thStep (Jun 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> e-fag to replace rollies


 
Not in France apparantly


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## DotCommunist (Jun 4, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Not in France apparantly


 
le e-pen


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## Firky (Jun 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Also a surprisingly large number of suffragettes went on to get involved in the British Union of Fascists - Stephen Dorril mentions it in his biography of Mosley.


 

Mary Richardson IIRC. She was the leader of the Women's Branch of the BUF and a bit of a pyromaniac.

Had the nick name Slasher.


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## andysays (Jun 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Come on Delroy, you really expect the likes of "the bubble" to be the ones fighting and dying "on the barricades"? The woman herself doesn't even have the bottle to take lumps for her journalism (remember the shitting in New York when she thought she might get a shoeing from NYPD, so stayed at home?). The bubble are much more likely to swan in once the fighting is over, and then try to take some credit for "inspiring the masses with revolutionary prose". Some nut on another board compared Penny with Rosa Luxemburg, and was quite upset when I said "*Rosa was a revolutionary socialist who spent much of her adult life physically protesting on the streets when she wasn't writing polemic*. Laurie Penny is a chancer".


 
And also spent time in prison as a result


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## el-ahrairah (Jun 4, 2013)

JHE said:


> Most of the revolutions in 1989 were pretty bloodless. (Romania was the exception.)


 
but that didn't happen in a bubble, did it?  it wasn't like one day a load of people from the internet went out into the streets and expected the government to step down for them.  there was a lot of history leading up to those events, IYSWIM.


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## Lo Siento. (Jun 4, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> why surprisingly?


quite. Pseudo-paramilitary organisation, pro-imperialist, penchant for uniforms, mostly middle class... signs all there.


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## JHE (Jun 4, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> but that didn't happen in a bubble, did it? it wasn't like one day a load of people from the internet went out into the streets and expected the government to step down for them. there was a lot of history leading up to those events, IYSWIM.


 
There is _always_ a lot of history leading up to a revolution whether it is beautifully peaceful, horrifyingly bloody or anywhere in between


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## el-ahrairah (Jun 4, 2013)

you know what i mean


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> why surprisingly?


 
Maybe a bad way of putting it. But they're usually presented as being progressive.


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## The39thStep (Jun 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Maybe a bad way of putting it. But they're usually presented as being progressive.


 
The aspiration for votes for women was progressive. Not all of the suffragettes were though, some were bitterly anti trade union and most backed the war.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Maybe a bad way of putting it. But they're usually presented as being progressive.


 

A lecturer at our uni wrote this, which may be of interest here, it's on my to read list...


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## toggle (Jun 5, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> The aspiration for votes for women was progressive. Not all of the suffragettes were though, some were bitterly anti trade union and most backed the war.


 
I've been told their reasoning was similar to John Redmond. prove they could be trusted, then they would get their wish.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 5, 2013)

toggle said:


> I've been told their reasoning was similar to John Redmond. prove they could be trusted, then they would get their wish.


 
AFAIK, there doesn't seem to have been much reasoning at all behind Redmond's decision to back the war. The account I read has him promising the volunteers to the war effort at a mass meeting where he was speaking off the top of his head, without prior consultation or argument with the Home rule MPs or anyone else.


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## Sue (Jun 5, 2013)

On R4 now talking about feminism and why she's not a radical feminist.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> If you're interested in this (or if DotCommunist is) there's some really good stuff on the relationship between dissenting sects - methodism in particular - and the early English labour movement in Thompson's _The Making of the English Working Class _(it's in the libcom online library). Stuff about how some of the vaguely democratic forms of organisation used by Wesleyan baptism were adapted and used for self-organisation and how the church often became a kind of hub for collective working class organisation. Also stuff about how religious discourses and idealised representations of feudalism were tapped into to critique early capitalism.
> 
> Ages since I've read it so I can't be that precise as to where in the book it is, but just looking at the contents chapter 2 and the first part of chapter 11 look like a good place to start (if you so wish).


 
I think you're better off going straight to the many books Christopher Hill wrote on them - and for the more barmy end of the scale Thompsons' Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law has masses and masses of info. The very young (about 12 i'd guess) great granddaughter of the last Muggletonian was at the re-enactment of the Fifth Monarchist/Venner's Rising in january, holding a pike and screaming heads on pikes and charging St Pauls


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## Idris2002 (Jun 5, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I think you're better off going straight to the many books Christopher Hill wrote on them - and for the more barmy end of the scale Thompsons' Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law has masses and masses of info. The very young (about 12 i'd guess) great granddaughter of the last Muggletonian was at the re-enactment of the Fifth Monarchist/Venner's Rising in january, holding a pike and screaming heads on pikes and charging St Pauls


 
Does she look like Arya Stark?


----------



## Bakunin (Jun 5, 2013)

Sue said:


> On R4 now talking about feminism and why she's not a radical feminist.


 

LP's not a radical anything, posing as one 'Prada-Meinhof'-style is a cushy career move though.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> To be fair that's not her quote - it's from Gilles Dauvé (whoever that is - not someone I've come across before) Seems to completely miss the point if you ask me - assumes that the violence can only be initiated by the oppressed class in siezing power rather than coming from the old elites in defending their position or trying to win it back.


 
Bit of a misreading there norm. Not being funny but you need to understand the political tradition Dauve is coming from - and it's one that largely came out of the violence surrounding the councils in the early 20s. The argument in that short extract is simply one that says without the social conditions for revolution existing then the defences against or attacks on the latter type of violence reinstate the old specialisations of bourgeois society and the political parties appropriating the struggles for the class and pursuing their own ends and thereby undermining precisely the social conditions required to win. The wider piece discusses how this happened in the 20th centuries great events and is well worth the read. As is almost all of his stuff.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 5, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Does she look like Arya Stark?


 
A little bit. (Not posting image)


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 5, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/quiz/2013/jun/05/check-your-privilege-quiz

Privilege checking now getting its own almost but not quite humorous quiz in the Guardian. That they think it worthwhile to publish this drivel is an indication that at least in the world of Guardian journalists and editorial staff there's an assumption that quite a few people know what it is.

There also seems to be quite a strong concern amongst mainstream liberals to police the boundaries of their liberalism against the more radical liberalism of privilege politics. So what's getting published about intersectionality/privilege consists of (a) people putting it forward, (b) people opposing it from a more moderate position within the liberal spectrum and (c) some easy right wing ridicule. That's actually quite problematic from the point of view of a left wing critic of this stuff. Criticism from the right risks making it seem more radical and attractive than it is.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 5, 2013)

Sue said:


> On R4 now talking about feminism and why she's not a radical feminist.


 
Is she actually engaging with radical feminism or setting up straw men to knock down? (Should I even be asking?)


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 5, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/quiz/2013/jun/05/check-your-privilege-quiz
> 
> Privilege checking now getting its own almost but not quite humorous quiz in the Guardian. That they think it worthwhile to publish this drivel is an indication that at least in the world of Guardian journalists and editorial staff there's an assumption that quite a few people know what it is.
> 
> There also seems to be quite a strong concern amongst mainstream liberals to police the boundaries of their liberalism against the more radical liberalism of privilege politics. So what's getting published about intersectionality/privilege consists of (a) people putting it forward, (b) people opposing it from a more moderate position within the liberal spectrum and (c) some easy right wing ridicule. That's actually quite problematic from the point of view of a left wing critic of this stuff. Criticism from the right risks making it seem more radical and attractive than it is.


 
That bubble can feel it breathing down their necks - young people form w/c backgrounds etc threatening their positions  because they've been achieved through privilege and they have chosen to transmit that same privilege unto the next generation. It's like some crazed meritocracy is attempting to bring  down their horrible little world.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 5, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> A little bit. (Not posting image)


 
Uh-huh. Maybe drilling with pikes should make a comeback. I had to do a bit in school for a play the headmaster had written about 1798.



Nigel Irritable said:


> (Should I even be asking?)


 
If you have to ask, you'll never know.


----------



## Bakunin (Jun 5, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It's like some crazed meritocracy is attempting to bring down their horrible little world.


 

You're suggesting that scribblers should actually earn their way into a cushy number and not based on what school they went to or who they had lunch with last week? 

HERESY!


----------



## J Ed (Jun 5, 2013)

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/...viously-a-colossal-pile-of-twat-2013060570924


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 5, 2013)

The Guardian quiz has attracted the usual level of twitter moaning. I keep being surprised when it shows up in my feed from people who I forgot I was following, or why, rather than it coming from the usual suspects.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 5, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/...viously-a-colossal-pile-of-twat-2013060570924


 
File under (c) easy right wing ridicule.


----------



## caleb (Jun 5, 2013)

The International Socialists Network (formerly of SWP) have got Penny speaking on 'Fighting Oppression: The Role of the Left' at their public meeting this weekend.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Bit of a misreading there norm. Not being funny but you need to understand the political tradition Dauve is coming from - and it's one that largely came out of the violence surrounding the councils in the early 20s. The argument in that short extract is simply one that says without the social conditions for revolution existing then the defences against or attacks on the latter type of violence reinstate the old specialisations of bourgeois society and the political parties appropriating the struggles for the class and pursuing their own ends and thereby undermining precisely the social conditions required to win. The wider piece discusses how this happened in the 20th centuries great events and is well worth the read. As is almost all of his stuff.


 
Fair enough - guess I'd have to read the whole thing to really get it. I think my misreading was because it seemed to be being quoted as an argument against the idea that revolutions are violent - when from what you're saying it looks like his point was that there's a lot more to revolutions than violence (ie. that more fundamental social processes are create the conditions for successful revolution and that any violence must be a part of this process rather than some socially detached insurrection or something) which is a very different thing and didn't ought to be controversial at all IMO.


----------



## caleb (Jun 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Fair enough - guess I'd have to read the whole thing to really get it. I think my misreading was because it seemed to be being quoted as an argument against the idea that revolutions are violent - when from what you're saying it looks like his point was that there's a lot more to revolutions than violence (ie. that more fundamental social processes are create the conditions for successful revolution and that any violence must be a part of this process rather than some socially detached insurrection or something) which is a very different thing and didn't ought to be controversial at all IMO.


 
Which is pretty much what I said, and quite clearly what Dauve meant... 



> It's poetic, sure, but the point is that revolution isn't simply a violent act or the seizure (or overthrow!) of the state, it's also a process whereby new social relations are created and new modes of living developed, it's both an act of creation and destruction. Sure it will be violent, but _how _violent depends on entirely on conditions which we can't currently predict, especially since "the revolution" ain't gonna happen any time in the near future. I just don't think it's correct to post links to videos of the barbarism in Syria and say that it's the face of modern social revolution, since it blatantly isn't.


 
Delroy picked up on something dumb Penny said ages ago, that we can't have 'nice things like a revolution' because we're bickering on here. It was a silly thing to say, but it clearly wasn't serious and didn't require any nitpicking - there's a lot more to criticise Penny for. I was simply pointing out that counterposing Penny's 'nice revolution' to the sectarian civil war in Syria, as proof revolution isn't 'nice' is a pretty shite argument against an inconsequential throw-away comment.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

caleb said:


> The International Socialists Network (formerly of SWP) have got Penny speaking on 'Fighting Oppression: The Role of the Left' at their public meeting this weekend.


 
That will be absolutely unbearable.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

caleb said:


> Which is pretty much what I said, and quite clearly what Dauve meant...


 
Yes - you got the wrong end of the stick with regards to what Delroy was saying, which led to me getting the wrong end of the stick with regards to the point you were making and what Dauve was saying in that quote. That's why I said seemed to be. It's ok, it happens - don't take it personally.






caleb said:


> Delroy picked up on something dumb Penny said ages ago, that we can't have 'nice things like a revolution' because we're bickering on here. It was a silly thing to say, but it clearly wasn't serious and didn't require any nitpicking - there's a lot more to criticise Penny for. I was simply pointing out that counterposing Penny's 'nice revolution' to the sectarian civil war in Syria, as proof revolution isn't 'nice' is a pretty shite argument against an inconsequential throw-away comment.


 
Don't think I agree. It may have been light hearted and tapping into some internet meme or something but it does I think illustrate the way she sees these things. Rather than being messy, dangerous and not to be taken lightly they're exciting, trendy, edgy, sexy, 'nice'. It's a theme that runs through everything she writes and that throwaway remark can be read as a distillation of her world view.


----------



## Sue (Jun 5, 2013)

Kind of tuned out TBH. Something about queer theory, sex workers and transsexuals.


----------



## kavenism (Jun 5, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/quiz/2013/jun/05/check-your-privilege-quiz


 
125 out of a possible 150
Sickeningly privileged; pay someone to check it for you.

Sweet!


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 5, 2013)

tim dowling appears to be about as funny as AIDS


----------



## kavenism (Jun 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yes - you got the wrong end of the stick with regards to what Delroy was saying, which led to me getting the wrong end of the stick with regards to the point you were making and what Dauve was saying in that quote. That's why I said seemed to be. It's ok, it happens - don't take it personally.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
One of the things that might just be sufficient to raise her in my estimations is if she fucked off to Syria to do some proper reporting. You know, having to make links with people on the ground, build relationships with people very different from her and possibly even put herself at genuine risk; all those things she's never done in her entire life.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 5, 2013)

didn't fancy a nicking at occupy NY, so the likelihood of her doing reportage from an actual shooting war is 0%

I wouldn't either. But my job is not 'Voice of a Generation'


----------



## seventh bullet (Jun 5, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> didn't fancy a nicking at occupy NY


 
Her friend did.  She even managed to 'monetise' it.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 5, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Is she actually engaging with radical feminism or setting up straw men to knock down? (Should I even be asking?)


 
that would explain why Julie Bindel has been reposting the thing where Penny has told massive lies about interiewing her, what she said, and what she meant.  I wish they'd just have a fist-fight and sort it out.


----------



## Bakunin (Jun 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> I wish they'd just have a fist-fight and sort it out.


 

Jelly wrestling.


----------



## caleb (Jun 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Don't think I agree. It may have been light hearted and tapping into some internet meme or something but it does I think illustrate the way she sees these things. Rather than being messy, dangerous and not to be taken lightly they're exciting, trendy, edgy, sexy, 'nice'. It's a theme that runs through everything she writes and that throwaway remark can be read as a distillation of her world view.


 
Aye, no argument there, but I think that's already quite clearly reflected in the gap between Penny's rhetoric and her actual politics. For all talk of being a 'revolutionary socialist' and putting bricks through windows, or her use of that 'full communism' meme, the content of her politics doesn't ever seem to go beyond taxing the rich, protecting the welfare state, and free education. Which is fine and all, but it's basically to the right of Attlee. Hardly communism, let alone full fucking communism.

But as I say above, it's not a problem unique to Penny; I've encountered it a lot amongst the 'student radical' milieu. I remember talking to an 'autonomist Marxist', who essentially believed 'autonomism' = individualist Marxism, and whose conception of communism was high taxes. I do wonder whether these people stop to think about whether they actually, y'know, _know_ what they're talking about.

Ironically, so often Owen Jones is a point of opposition for these people, and shite as his politics are -- he's a) at least honest about what he believes and what he represents, and b) probably, point for point, to the left of these "communists".


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

caleb said:


> Aye, no argument there, but I think that's already quite clearly reflected in the gap between Penny's rhetoric and her actual politics. For all talk of being a 'revolutionary socialist' and putting bricks through windows, or her use of that 'full communism' meme, the content of her politics doesn't ever seem to go beyond taxing the rich, protecting the welfare state, and free education. Which is fine and all, but it's basically to the right of Attlee. Hardly communism, let alone full fucking communism.
> 
> But as I say above, it's not a problem unique to Penny; I've encountered it a lot amongst the 'student radical' milieu. I remember talking to an 'autonomist Marxist', who essentially believed 'autonomism' = individualist Marxism, and whose conception of communism was high taxes. I do wonder whether these people stop to think about whether they actually, y'know, _know_ what they're talking about.
> 
> Ironically, so often Owen Jones is a point of opposition for these people, and shite as his politics are -- he's a) at least honest about what he believes and what he represents, and b) probably, point for point, to the left of these "communists".


 
Yeah agree with pretty much all of that - and I think what's been emphasised in the best parts of this thread is that Laurie Penny represents the problem rather than being its cause. But she's more prominent than any other case I can think of and tends to be a lot more crude and simplistic than most (though that's just a matter of scale - they're none of them exactly sophisticated in their political outlook) so if you're wanting to expose this stuff she makes a good target.


----------



## rekil (Jun 5, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/...viously-a-colossal-pile-of-twat-2013060570924


Gave up after 2 paras. I really hate the daily mash.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 5, 2013)

andysays said:


> And also spent time in prison as a result


 
Polish, German and (IIRC) Austrian prisons. So did most of the other Spartacists, for their alleged sins.


----------



## treelover (Jun 5, 2013)

caleb said:


> The International Socialists Network (formerly of SWP) have got Penny speaking on 'Fighting Oppression: The Role of the Left' at their public meeting this weekend.


 
in the middle of the biggest economic crisis for decades which has seen suicides, etc.


----------



## killer b (Jun 5, 2013)

not sure if i want her to get stuck into economics tbf TL.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Since nobody said revolutions were _just _about overthrowing the government I'm not really sure what point it is you're making


 
That he's read Dauve?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 5, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> le e-pen


 
Which one, Daddy or Neckbrace?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 5, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> Her friend did. She even managed to 'monetise' it.


 
*And* her hotness.
Now that's multi-tasking!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> that would explain why Julie Bindel has been reposting the thing where Penny has told massive lies about interiewing her, what she said, and what she meant. I wish they'd just have a fist-fight and sort it out.


 
Bindel is probably avoiding a fist-fight in case Penny mis-represents it as a torrid sexual encounter.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 5, 2013)

Has the effect of identity politics on left and left liberal criticism of Obama been discussed on this thread? I remember listening to a lecture by Chomsky in which he said that Obama was the CIA's preferred candidate because they recognised that having a black President could help mitigate a lot of criticism of US foreign policy, but I'm struggling to find the source.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 5, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Has the effect of identity politics on left and left liberal criticism of Obama been discussed on this thread? I remember listening to a lecture by Chomsky in which he said that Obama was the CIA's preferred candidate because they recognised that having a black President could help mitigate a lot of criticism of US foreign policy, but I'm struggling to find the source.


 
I'd say that's partial at best. Middle-class Obama fans like him because (in their eyes) he's the ultimate middle-class candidate.

If one of the black conservatives - like Alan Keyes - had been elected prez, I doubt if the same thing would apply.

What I mean is, maybe Obama's blackness trumps criticism, but if it does, it's only as part of the whole Obama package.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 5, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Has the effect of identity politics on left and left liberal criticism of Obama been discussed on this thread? I remember listening to a lecture by Chomsky in which he said that Obama was the CIA's preferred candidate because they recognised that having a black President could help mitigate a lot of criticism of US foreign policy, but I'm struggling to find the source.


 
Maybe not quite what you're after, but i'd say have a read of Black particularity reconsidered - Adolph L. Reed Jr. It is from 1979 but does recognise the contours of what was going to happen in the 80s and 90s (and what was happening around him as he wrote).


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 5, 2013)

copliker said:


> Gave up after 2 paras. I really hate the daily mash.


 
me too, horrible sneery crap. newsthump tends to be better.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 5, 2013)

Even fucking _taffboy_ is better.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 5, 2013)

Its like a shit version of the crap sneery bits of private eye.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

kavenism said:


> 125 out of a possible 150
> Sickeningly privileged; pay someone to check it for you.
> 
> Sweet!


 
Someone's been reading the PD blog and decided to rob ideas from it, then repackage them badly so it's not funny like the genuinely brilliant original and so it doesn't look like plagiarism.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Its like a shit version of the crap sneery bits of private eye.


 
I don't get who or what it's sneering at here:

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/wetherspoons-to-open-uks-first-human-zoo-2013060470772




> The ‘Wetherzoo’ promises attractions included the world’s reddest man, the two oldest-looking middle-aged women you’ve ever seen and a girl who can sustain an argument with her boyfriend for 39 hours.
> 
> A spokesman said: “The Wetherzoo will be an important scientific resource, as our researchers work to decode the grunts and growls of amazing specimens like ‘Billy’, the 29-stone Glaswegian former rail worker who uses a unique language to communicate with bar staff.
> 
> ...


 

people who like to be patronising about people who drink in cheap pubs or ... people who drink in cheap pubs 

What is the target?


----------



## J Ed (Jun 5, 2013)

This article was a particular low point  http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/...-would-have-banned-the-guardian-2013030661944


----------



## sihhi (Jun 5, 2013)

wow - (again right-wing=sexism) - 




> Office bitch sweating like a navvy
> 27-06-11
> BRITAIN was today enjoying the sight of the bitch in their office sweating like a filthy pig on heat.
> 
> ...


----------



## Firky (Jun 5, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/...viously-a-colossal-pile-of-twat-2013060570924


 
It's almost is they're trying to compete with Vice for edginess. I don't read the Daily Mash but has it gone downhill, I'm sure it used to have the odd genuinely funny article? Maybe I am confusing it with The Onion (which I never found funny).


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 5, 2013)

i think the thing about the mash it that the quality of the articles all depends on the contributor.  i don't think there's a strong editorial line, and the contributors' politics vary, so it's a bit like frankie boyle - funny when it mocks stuff you hate but otherwise pretty vile.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> wow - (again right-wing=sexism) -


 
i'm not even sure i understand that one.  am i missing something?


----------



## J Ed (Jun 5, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Maybe not quite what you're after, but i'd say have a read of Black particularity reconsidered - Adolph L. Reed Jr. It is from 1979 but does recognise the contours of what was going to happen in the 80s and 90s (and what was happening around him as he wrote).


 

Interesting read, thanks.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Its like a shit version of the crap sneery bits of *private eye*.


 

its sixth form laughing at sir but it does throw up some gold. Peter Cook used to be at the helm before his unfortunate encounter with cancer and you know how cracking he could be when on one. And also how much of a prick he could be. Doing little bit racism when imitating a cockney cos yeah thats what they all think.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

killer b said:


> not sure if i want her to get stuck into economics tbf TL.


 
She turned up at a roundtable debate on the financial crisis that involved people like David Harvey, Paul Mattick and Andrew Kliman and trolled them from the floor by perceptively noting that they'd not mentioned women, blacks or gays. Even though none of that stuff is really relevant when you're discussing the causes of a structural crisis of capitalism (rather than its effects, in which case that stuff is very relevant). I'm wasn't even the smartest kid at a shit school but I can understand that and would have had all kinds of relevant questions to ask.

If that's anything to go by I'm pretty sure I _don't _want her going anywhere near economics. Especially as her deliberate glossing over class issues would mean she'd have to get it so badly wrong it's not funny.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i think the thing about the mash it that the quality of the articles all depends on the contributor. i don't think there's a strong editorial line, and the contributors' politics vary, so it's a bit like frankie boyle - funny when it mocks stuff you hate but otherwise *pretty vile.*


 


I tell you whats vile, reproducing everything you ever did in standup, publishing it and claiming its a biography. Fucking thief. At least most comedians bios are a place for self reflection and the story of How I Became Me.

Boyles bio is thievery


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i'm not even sure i understand that one. am i missing something?


 
That depends. Did you miss that the article takes 150 words to say "fuck you uppitty women"? If not, then no.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 5, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Maybe not quite what you're after, but i'd say have a read of Black particularity reconsidered - Adolph L. Reed Jr. It is from 1979 but does recognise the contours of what was going to happen in the 80s and 90s (and what was happening around him as he wrote).


 
This is completely off the point, but Reed wrote the most effectively savage review of Treme I've seen:
http://nonsite.org/editorial/three-tremes


----------



## caleb (Jun 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> *She turned up at a roundtable debate on the financial crisis that involved people like David Harvey, Paul Mattick and Andrew Kliman* and trolled them from the floor by perceptively noting that they'd not mentioned women, blacks or gays. Even though none of that stuff is really relevant when you're discussing the causes of a structural crisis of capitalism (rather than its effects, in which case that stuff is very relevant). I'm wasn't even the smartest kid at a shit school but I can understand that and would have had all kinds of relevant questions to ask.
> 
> If that's anything to go by I'm pretty sure I _don't _want her going anywhere near economics. Especially as her deliberate glossing over class issues would mean she'd have to get it so badly wrong it's not funny.


 
Yeah, and Loren Goldner... She also claimed to be a fan of their work which, tbh, was the most questionable part...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> She turned up at a roundtable debate on the financial crisis that involved people like David Harvey, Paul Mattick and Andrew Kliman and trolled them from the floor by perceptively noting that they'd not mentioned women, blacks or gays. Even though none of that stuff is really relevant when you're discussing the causes of a structural crisis of capitalism (rather than its effects, in which case that stuff is very relevant). I'm wasn't even the smartest kid at a shit school but I can understand that and would have had all kinds of relevant questions to ask.
> 
> If that's anything to go by I'm pretty sure I _don't _want her going anywhere near economics. Especially as her deliberate glossing over class issues would mean she'd have to get it so badly wrong it's not funny.


 
This is the video by the way, Laurie's really perceptive questions are just after 1.37.00: 

Mattick's response was great though - where he points out that pursuing intellectual interests (which by implication also means talking about and writing about stuff - in other words everything Laurie does) is not a radical activity and that gender etc is not relevant to a highly abstract discussion of economic crisis.

The whole thing was fucked up by people like her too - people who would rather listen to their own voices and are really more interested in telling everyone what they think than letting the guest speakers everyone has come to hear have to say. The fucking moron who introduces them takes 20 minutes to ask introductory questions (which was really him saying what he thought - cos that's what everyone wants to hear) even though those speakers only got 10 minutes.

What really could have been an excellent meeting was utterly ruined by these consumer radical cunts. Most of us don't even get the chance to organise or go to stuff like this so it really winds me up when I go to watch a video of it online only to see it absolutely ruined by people who only care about their own egos.

Cunts.

/rant


----------



## Dan U (Jun 5, 2013)

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/steerpike/2013/06/dear-laurie-penny-please-explain-this/

*think* this is written by one of the Guido Fawkes lot.

anyway, i'm not going to wade through 700 pages to see if this has already been clocked, but here it is


----------



## sihhi (Jun 5, 2013)

Dan U said:


> http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/steerpike/2013/06/dear-laurie-penny-please-explain-this/


 
That Spectator guy's issue was dealt with about 2 years ago in the comments of the article that the guy is linking to 




> Oh, and I cite the 1988 New internationalist Story article in the back of the book - that's where the quote came from, Ramirez certainly didn't speak to me! I had thought the way the quote was phrased made that obvious. That whole 1988 special issue is actually brilliant and well worth a read. If that citation isn't in there then something's gone wrong with the (admittedly rather shaky) sub-editing process and I'll check it out.


 
What is it with journalists and not doing things properly   - I'm pretty sure everyone on this thread could do a better job of this comment 'journalism'.


----------



## killer b (Jun 5, 2013)

yes, it was clocked some time ago iirc. i expect staines has just come across this thread and is working his way through it, plagiarising our hard work. 

(by 'ours', i mean sihhi's)


----------



## Dan U (Jun 5, 2013)

killer b said:


> yes, it was clocked some time ago iirc. i expect staines has just come across this thread and is working his way through it, plagiarising our hard work.
> 
> (by 'ours', i mean sihhi's)


 

the thought did cross my mind 

*waves* cunts


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 5, 2013)

killer b said:


> plagiarising our hard work.
> 
> (by 'ours', i mean sihhi's)


 
Quality never goes out of style.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 5, 2013)

killer b said:


> yes, it was clocked some time ago iirc. i expect *staines* has just come across this thread and is working his way through it, plagiarising our hard work.
> 
> (by 'ours', i mean sihhi's)


 
Seaman Staines


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 5, 2013)

The twitter intersectionalistas, mostly of the British subspecies, are currently running a #howilearnedaboutintersectionality hashtag. Which seems a bit longwinded for 140 characters. The point seems to be to refute the (stupid) idea that they it's "too academic". None of the tweets are particularly interesting really, but it gives you a sense of its growing popularity and of the type of people attracted to it.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 5, 2013)

I think she did make it sound like Ramirez spoke to her and spoke to her 20 years after the quotes. Given it's placed within an overview of modern conditions and slap bang within her explaining "Of the women I spoke to..." and that all other uses of the piece were properly reffed.  A minor thing though may stem from sloppiness.. Huge chunks of that already tiny book seems to be a rip off/rephrasing of things like that and padded out with most generous quotation..


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 5, 2013)

Ah, it seems that the defensiveness about it being "too academic" comes from Julie Bindell telling some intersectionalist that it was too "Oxbridge" and "wanky". She's wrong about where it's coming from - it's not an Oxbridge thing, it's an American campus radical liberal thing which got to Britain through twitter and tumblr - so it's easy for the intersectionalists to refute her claims on that point. She does however make the solid point that her opposition to this stuff has nothing in common with the nasty sort of shit in that dailymash article.

The hashtag responses fall into three main categories:
1) I always knew about it, because I'm [insert three forms of identity here] but I only heard the word recently. These are essentially claims that it's obvious and automatically flows from the experience of oppression, rather than merely a single political interpretation amongst many.
2) I heard about it from black/trans/disabled/etc women. This is option 1 for people who are reluctant to claim the requisite oppression points for option 1, mixed with a bit of argument from authority.
3) I heard about it on twitter, on tumblr or through "fandom". This is the only common answer that actually explains the conduit.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 5, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> That depends. Did you miss that the article takes 150 words to say "fuck you uppitty women"? If not, then no.


 
no, i noticed that.  i was just unclear of why wishing hot weather on women was so terrible.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Most of us don't even get the chance to organise or go to stuff like this so it really winds me up when I go to watch a video of it online only to see it absolutely ruined


 
Don't worry, there's a reading and panel discussion at the Summer Fete for the New Inquiry featuring senior editor Malcolm Harris, deputy Emily Cooke and Maryam Monalisa a Harvard PhD postcolonial studies expert on 'Be an Outlaw, Be a Hero: Cinematic Figures of Transgression and Urban Banditry in Brazil, France, and the Maghreb'

Here's the invitation







The entry fee for 3 and a half hours is only $150 or $75



> Supporter Admission
> In addition to food, performance and an open bar, supporters will receive a New Inquiry tote bag including a rare, limited edition preview copy of The New Inquiry in print, a signed copy of Teju Cole's Open City, and a special gift from Leuchtturm1917.
> Jun 29, 2013 $150.00
> Regular Admission
> ...


 
A chance for some "intersectionality" with the immigrant working-classes of Red Hook, Crown Heights, Williamsburg, Gowanus etc.




> A Summer Fête: The New Inquiry's First Annual Summer Benefit
> The New Inquiry and The Gihon Foundation
> Saturday, June 29, 2013 from 7:00 PM to 10:30 PM (EDT)
> Brooklyn, NY


 
This is where it will be happening in (former docks and industry) Gowanus neighbourhood:-


----------



## kavenism (Jun 5, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Ah, it seems that the defensiveness about it being "too academic" comes from Julie Bindell telling some intersectionalist that it was too "Oxbridge" and "wanky". She's wrong about where it's coming from - it's not an Oxbridge thing, it's an American campus radical liberal thing which got to Britain through twitter and tumblr - so it's easy for the intersectionalists to refute her claims on that point. She does however make the solid point that her opposition to this stuff has nothing in common with the nasty sort of shit in that dailymash article.
> 
> The hashtag responses fall into three main categories:
> 1) I always knew about it, because I'm [insert three forms of identity here] but I only heard the word recently. These are essentially claims that it's obvious and automatically flows from the experience of oppression, rather than merely a single political interpretation amongst many.
> ...


 
It's actually a very sloppy radicalisation of feminist standpoint theory from the early 90s. A worthwhile tool in social research twisted into a means for Bo-bo commentators and political pundits to police their wretched domain. Incidentally in the literature the word privilege comes up most often when talking about the possible epistemic privilege people under oppressive conditions might have, although the scope of that claim is considerably more qualified than these intersectionalists would ever admit. It’s not used as a stick to beat the purported opposition as the point of standpoint research is to increase understanding of the workings of social domination rather than score points in pathetic online vanity games.


----------



## rekil (Jun 5, 2013)

killer b said:


> yes, it was clocked some time ago iirc. i expect staines has just come across this thread and is working his way through it, plagiarising our hard work.
> 
> (by 'ours', i mean sihhi's)


Nah, it was swiped off Julie Bindel today I reckon. She was having a right go.

https://twitter.com/bindelj/status/342216616966234112


----------



## sihhi (Jun 5, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> The twitter intersectionalistas, mostly of the British subspecies, are currently running a #howilearnedaboutintersectionality hashtag. Which seems a bit longwinded for 140 characters. The point seems to be to refute the (stupid) idea that they it's "too academic". None of the tweets are particularly interesting really, but it gives you a sense of its growing popularity and of the type of people attracted to it.


 
Blimey quite a blast of 'er durr it's obvious'




> Xander Salamander
> ‏@XanderSalamandr
> 
> #howilearnedaboutintersectionality it being skull-hammeringly obvious from listening to people for more than 10 seconds?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Don't worry, there's a reading and panel discussion at the Summer Fete for the New Inquiry featuring senior editor Malcolm Harris, deputy Emily Cooke and Maryam Monalisa a Harvard PhD postcolonial studies expert on 'Be an Outlaw, Be a Hero: Cinematic Figures of Transgression and Urban Banditry in Brazil, France, and the Maghreb'
> 
> Here's the invitation
> 
> ...


 
If that isn't designed to put off anyone even vaguely normal it's doing a very good impression of it.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 5, 2013)

copliker said:


> Nah, it was swiped off Julie Bindel today I reckon. She was having a right go.
> 
> https://twitter.com/bindelj/status/342216616966234112


 
Just noticed the defence by Roz Kaveney (also Oxford, also a friend of LP's):



> There is always slippage of this kind even in academic books and the idea that any unreferenced quote is being represented, by that lack of a reference, as part of an interview, is just more self-serving nonsense on your part. This is bullying, pure and simple, of somenoe who does good work, and an attempt to destroy someone valuable through cheap smears.


 
At the risk of LLETSA-ism, do some middle-class people even know what bullying is any more?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

killer b said:


> yes, it was clocked some time ago iirc. i expect staines has just come across this thread and is working his way through it, plagiarising our hard work.
> 
> (by 'ours', i mean sihhi's)


 
Just in case he is - one day you will swing from a lamp post by your own intestines Staines. (And you can't grass me up and say it's a threat of criminal violence cos I'm not gonna do it until after the glorious day, by which time it will be completely legal, if not mandatory)


----------



## kavenism (Jun 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> If that isn't designed to put off anyone even vaguely normal it's doing a very good impression of it.


 Fucking Verso are sponsoring it. Do they have no taste whatsoever?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 5, 2013)

yeah let us not descend into true yorkshireman style of 'Bullying? you don't know it lad! My dad used to stamp on my face after school' etc

but being pulled up for inaccuracy is not bullying. If you can't source it don't quote it.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 5, 2013)

copliker said:


> Nah, it was swiped off Julie Bindel today I reckon. She was having a right go.
> 
> https://twitter.com/bindelj/status/342216616966234112


Madam J-mo spotted it (and many offences to be taken into consideration ) first.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Don't worry, there's a reading and panel discussion at the Summer Fete for the New Inquiry featuring senior editor Malcolm Harris, deputy Emily Cooke and Maryam Monalisa a Harvard PhD postcolonial studies expert on 'Be an Outlaw, Be a Hero: Cinematic Figures of Transgression and Urban Banditry in Brazil, France, and the Maghreb'
> 
> Here's the invitation
> 
> ...


 
A rug really pulls a room together.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> yeah let us not descend into true yorkshireman style of 'Bullying? you don't know it lad! My dad used to stamp on my face after school' etc
> 
> but being pulled up for inaccuracy is not bullying. If you can't source it don't quote it.


 
You saying all Yorkshiremen are bullies? That's racist and sexist. Check your [insert place where DC lives here] privilege


----------



## sihhi (Jun 5, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> yeah let us not descend into true yorkshireman style of 'Bullying? you don't know it lad! My dad used to stamp on my face after school' etc
> 
> but being pulled up for inaccuracy is not bullying. If you can't source it don't quote it.


 
The criticism that was especially thought beyond the pale/bullying was:
the blogger and book buyer noting LP was putting old material into a new book and not warning that it was old material, then selling for £6.99.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The criticism that was especially thought beyond the pale/bullying was:
> the blogger and book buyer noting LP was putting old material into a new book and not warning that it was old material, then selling for £6.99.


 
She was only monetizing her shitness


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The criticism that was especially thought beyond the pale/bullying was:
> the blogger and book buyer noting LP was putting old material into a new book and not warning that it was old material, then selling for £6.99.


 

well fuck me, thats the equivalent of getting a chinese burn from a 7 year old boy.


----------



## rekil (Jun 5, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Madam J-mo spotted it (and many offences to be taken into consideration ) first.


Well yeah, I meant Bindel mentioned the madamjo blog today after LP's radio gig this morning. The spectator person  is more likely to have picked up on it from there rather than here.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 5, 2013)

copliker said:


> Well yeah, I meant Bindel mentioned the madamjo blog today after LP's radio gig this morning. The spectator person is more likely to have picked up on it from there rather than here.


 
That was more for the benefit of those joining us late on in the thread than your good self. Yep, the libertarian freaks would have got it from the mighty bindel.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 5, 2013)

This was the main part of the Roz Kaveney attack on the person who pointed out the flaws and wrong labelling/advertising:



> you are making up principles on the basis of which you are entitled to judge Laurie negatively. The chapters in Meat Market are reworkings, to a greater or lesser extent, of pieces some readers, but not most, will have read in blogs -so what? A lot of the people who have bought the book will have read them there and be perfectly content to have them in permanent form. The idea that, if you interviewed someone for a piece, you are debarred from using the same quotations in a reworking of the piece is anohter of these made up principles; if anyone has lied about this, it is Julie and Finn, who have had to backtrack from saying Laurie didn't interview them to saying that she interviewed them for the earlier form of the material, but not the book.


 
The point is that unlike the correctly-labelled Penny Red Notes from the Age of Dissent, LP's second book, there is no sense from the advertising accompanying it in which the first book is simply half a dozen already written blogs threaded together poorly.
Julie and Finn objected to sub-ten minute phone conversations for LP's blogs, being presented as their doing actual interviews for the book, they didn't backtrack at all.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 5, 2013)

The madamjo review of meat market blog post was deemed part of a sexist crusade against LP by Roz Kaveney, gender studies critic and all-round literati:



> There is the long-standing campaign of sexist bullying, smear and innuendo againg Laurie Penny, which you have enabled by this nit-picking post.


 
The act, DotCommunist, was not only bullying but sexist bullying, so there you go - judge for yourself if people are screwing around with reality.


----------



## kavenism (Jun 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This was the main part of the Roz Kaveney attack on the person who pointed out the flaws and wrong labelling/advertising:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Not to mention no doubt wanting to wash their hands of being associated with that travesty of a text. I read that damn thing three times for my Amazon review. Once with a highlighter in hand. Don't think I’ve used that highlighter since.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Don't worry, there's a reading and panel discussion at the Summer Fete for the New Inquiry featuring senior editor Malcolm Harris, deputy Emily Cooke and Maryam Monalisa a Harvard PhD postcolonial studies expert on 'Be an Outlaw, Be a Hero: Cinematic Figures of Transgression and Urban Banditry in Brazil, France, and the Maghreb'
> 
> 
> The entry fee for 3 and a half hours is only $150 or $75


 
My only real objection to this, and I'm well aware that this may result in me being chased off the thread by an angry pitchfork wielding mob, is the ridiculous price. Talks about obscure culture stuff from a left wing perspective aren't inherently to be mocked. Does "open bar" mean "free bar"? And if so how long is the bar free for? I'm trying to work out how much of that 50 quid you could reasonably expect to drink.


----------



## andysays (Jun 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Don't worry, there's a reading and panel discussion at the Summer Fete for the New Inquiry featuring senior editor Malcolm Harris, deputy Emily Cooke and Maryam Monalisa a Harvard PhD postcolonial studies expert on 'Be an Outlaw, Be a Hero: Cinematic Figures of Transgression and Urban Banditry in Brazil, France, and the Maghreb'
> 
> Here's the invitation
> 
> ...


 
Do you think if, say, 6 of us make a block booking we can get a reduction on the ticket price?

I know Spiney Norman is dying to go, he's just shy about saying so.


----------



## andysays (Jun 5, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> My only real objection to this, and I'm well aware that this may result in me being chased off the thread by an angry pitchfork wielding mob, is the ridiculous price. Talks about obscure culture stuff from a left wing perspective aren't inherently to be mocked. Does "open bar" mean "free bar"? And if so how long is the bar free for? I'm trying to work out how much of that 50 quid you could reasonably expect to drink.


----------



## andysays (Jun 5, 2013)

Or even


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


>


 
two things of note.

1. DJ Rupture?  isn't DJ Rupture some breakcore mentalist?

2. Michael Nesmith?  Is that the guy who was in the Monkees?

breakcore and the Monkees sounds like my kind of show, providing i can get close enough to Artie to break his nose with my forehead.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> At the risk of LLETSA-ism, do some middle-class people even know what bullying is any more?


 
this is what two generations of school anti-bullying campaigns have created.  a nation of self-entitled tosspots who can't tell the difference between legitimate critique and having their head flushed down the toilet every lunchtime for five years.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> You saying all Yorkshiremen are bullies? That's racist and sexist. Check your [insert place where DC lives here] privilege


 
he lives in northampton.  there's no such thing as northampton privilege (except for bumping into Alan Moore in the offie).


----------



## killer b (Jun 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> 1. DJ Rupture?  isn't DJ Rupture some breakcore mentalist?.


think he's gone increasingly dubstep over the years.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 5, 2013)

killer b said:


> think he's gone increasingly dubstep over the years.


 
did he go dubstep at about the sametime dubstep went shit?  if so, his names on the fucking list.


----------



## killer b (Jun 5, 2013)

Dunno. Wouldn't ever write him off though, the stuff he was doing a few years ago was remarkable.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> he lives in northampton. there's no such thing as northampton privilege (except for bumping into Alan Moore in the offie).


 

my brother lives two doors down


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> he lives in northampton. there's no such thing as northampton privilege (except for bumping into Alan Moore in the offie).


 
Could there be any greater privilege?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> my brother lives two doors down


 
Case closed.


----------



## rekil (Jun 5, 2013)

Random googling of those names



> *John Hagel III* - In 2007, Hagel, along with John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, founded the Deloitte Center for the Edge Innovation. Hagel is also involved with a number of other organizations, including the World Economic Forum, Innovation Exchange with John Seely Brown and Henry Chesbrough, the International Academy of Management, and the Aspen Institute. He is credited with inventing the term "infomediary" in his book, NetWorth.


 


> *Daphne Merkin* - She is the author of a novel, Enchantment (1984) as well as a collection of essays, Dreaming of Hitler (1997). Her father was the wealthy philanthropist Hermann Merkin. Her brother is J. Ezra Merkin, a hedge fund manager and philanthropist who was embroiled in the Bernard Madoff scandal.


 


> *Nadyne Edison* - (twitter machine bio) "A communication guru...let me persuade you to take a risk...with or without technology"


 


> *Lauren Cerand* - "advises her clients on buzz, and how to get it. [...] She has been called one of the “cultural gatekeepers in the literary world” by Time Out New York, and one of “50 Up-and-Coming New York Culture Makers to Watch in 2013″ by Flavorwire.


 
The weird weird fucking world of communisn't.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> two things of note.
> 
> 1. DJ Rupture? isn't DJ Rupture some breakcore mentalist?
> 
> ...


 
1. It is still a *reading and discussion* so that would take up most of the 3.5 hours - (you can't as Nigel seemed to suggest pay your 50 quid and sit at the bar to drink it dry/pour beer into empty plastic bottles for your napsack) or expect to be dancing non-stop. The Harvard PhD person would not have been invited otherwise. It just has a party and sunset watching afterwards.

2. Nesmith is not performing, he is there as a business owner but a new devotee of crowdfunding/crowdsourcing.

3. Rupture is also a fan of discussing literature (sample blog):




> This Sunday, April 28th, we’re meeting to discuss Sergio De La Pava’s wonderful, humane, laugh-out-loud funny, 689 page novel involving a public defender in New York City: A Naked Singularity (2008 ex libris, 2012 U Chicago Press). The opening chapter is a thing of wonder – try it and you’ll be hooked.
> 
> Book clubber Dan put me on to this; I recommend his thoughtful review from back when it was self-published. Dan writes:
> 
> “while the book is long, it’s never imposing. . . This is a book deeply concerned with the preterite: those who don’t have the resources to get themselves represented by others. It’s refreshing to find a recent New York novel that doesn’t bother to mention Williamsburg or Park Slope; the Upper East Side or Upper West Side might be mentioned in passing, but the Village, the East Village, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, the neighborhoods of New York that are seen in movies and literary fiction are absent from this book. There’s plenty left over; but we don’t usually read this. And this also stands out in that it’s a novel of work: Casi is a public defender, and spends most of his time at his job. The job isn’t lionized here: the protagonist is actively trying to be a good man, but he is decidedly not a hero by virtue of his work alone: the other occupants of his office are noticeably flawed, as he is. . .I’m also struck by how the book, comical as it often is, never has recourse to anything resembling magical realism.”


 
So will not be playing all 3.5 hours.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> My only real objection to this, and I'm well aware that this may result in me being chased off the thread by an angry pitchfork wielding mob, is the ridiculous price. Talks about obscure culture stuff from a left wing perspective aren't inherently to be mocked. Does "open bar" mean "free bar"? And if so how long is the bar free for? I'm trying to work out how much of that 50 quid you could reasonably expect to drink.


 
No real objection? Look at the flyer. As if the wanky style isn't enough to put you off it also says there'll be hors d'oeuvres hors d'fucking oeuvres. I don't even know how you say that, never mind what it is. I do know eating them, serving them or even mentioning them favourably would be a capital offence in any kind of civilised society.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 5, 2013)

copliker said:


> The weird weird fucking world of communisn't.


Malcolm Harris would resent that comment:






Here



> Dear editors plz don't commission me then get surprised when I'm all "overthrow the government" n shit. That's two this week.


 
Leading to:



> Revolution: not just a metaphor!


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 5, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> my brother lives two doors down


 
from the offie?  that's privilege right there.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> this is what two generations of school anti-bullying campaigns have created. a nation of self-entitled tosspots who can't tell the difference between legitimate critique and having their head flushed down the toilet every lunchtime for five years.


 
I reckon I could teach them the difference - it would have to be a practical lesson though.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> 2. Nesmith is not performing, he is there as a business ownerbut a new devotee of crowdfunding/crowdsourcing.


 
my mum used to babysit Davy Jones' kids when the Monkees were in London.  I wonder if that would get me a free ticket to this.


----------



## Favelado (Jun 5, 2013)

A lot of left-wing journos tweeting about Pippa Middleton getting her job for simply being rich and connected. Laurie's rather quiet on the subject.


----------



## andysays (Jun 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> No real objection? Look at the flyer. As if the wanky style isn't enough to put you off it also says there'll be hors d'oeuvres hors d'fucking oeuvres. I don't even know how you say that, never mind what it is. I do know eating them, serving them or even mentioning them favourably would be a capital offence in any kind of civilised society.


 
That's got 65 million French people worried...


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 5, 2013)

andysays said:


> That's got 65 million French people worried...


 
they had their revolution and blew it.  now it's Norman's turn.


----------



## killer b (Jun 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> my mum used to babysit Davy Jones' kids when the Monkees were in London.  I wonder if that would get me a free ticket to this.


Monkee priviledge.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 5, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Can anyone explain what this is all about?
> 
> Hugo Schwyzer "The End of Patriarchy is the BEGINNING of men's opportunity to stop being half-people and to become complete human beings"
> 
> which dear Laurie agreed with.


 
It means privilege checking is good and will help mean that men no long tell women what to do.

In action here - LP's friend Hugo attacks feminist anti-militarist organisation Codepink for noting Michelle Obama's support for extending the US military budget but cutting social spending, and Alicia Keys singing about peace and all that whilst a Obama supporter but then going to Israel for a set of concerts in Israel.

"So you've gone after @FLOTUS and @aliciakeys this morning, @codepink. Any more women of color not living up to your standards?"

As I read it, instead of debating the issues US power and Israeli occupation etc - Codepink are basically deemed as racist having insufficiently checked their white privilege (even though they have immigrant members but they don't call themselves a black or immigrant womens group - hence fair game)


----------



## rekil (Jun 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> my mum used to babysit Davy Jones' kids when the Monkees were in London. I wonder if that would get me a free ticket to this.


Will there be a Different Drum circle?

(It was a treat to hear Ronstadt's version in Seven Psychopaths, and then HMHB as well!)


----------



## kavenism (Jun 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> As I read it, instead of debating the issues US power and Israeli occupation etc - Codepink are basically deemed as racist having insufficiently checked their white privilege (even though they have immigrant members but they don't call themselves a black or immigrant womens group - hence fair game)


 
Yup, that's the idea in one. If you don't pseud yourself as member of the margins then you're just the KKK by another name.


----------



## love detective (Jun 5, 2013)

A real rigorous consistency and solidity of conviction pervades her politics



			
				laurie penny 5th June 2013 said:
			
		

> Muswell Hill mosque destroyed in suspected EDL firebomb attack. This is why we need uncompromising anti-fascism....[i'm] positive and supportive of those who risk their safety and freedom fighting fascism in the streets


 



			
				laurie penny 25th May 2013 said:
			
		

> fuck anyone who believes that violence is an answer to violence


----------



## Pickman's model (Jun 5, 2013)

killer b said:


> Monkee priviledge.


 
monkee magic


----------



## andysays (Jun 5, 2013)

Pickman's model said:


> monkee magic


 
Monkey Tennis?


----------



## Bakunin (Jun 5, 2013)

love detective said:


> A real rigorous consistency and solidity of conviction pervades her politics


 

Or, as the esteemed performer Mr. F. Mercury once put it:

'Any way the wind blows, doesn't really matter to me...'


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It means privilege checking is good and will help mean that men no long tell women what to do.
> 
> In action here - LP's friend Hugo attacks feminist anti-militarist organisation Codepink for noting Michelle Obama's support for extending the US military budget but cutting social spending, and Alicia Keys singing about peace and all that whilst a Obama supporter but then going to Israel for a set of concerts in Israel.
> 
> ...


 
That is fucking revolting. It's one of the cheapest cheap shots I've seen in a while. It's also incredibly fucking patronising to black women.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 5, 2013)

Amused to see Malcolm whatsit fighting the good fight on the Schwyzer tweet. The thread comes full circle.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 5, 2013)

This is the latest response

https://twitter.com/hugoschwyzer/status/342385794939486208



> @caulkthewagon @iamcaroline @BigMeanInternet I was calling out @codepink for harassing the First Lady of my country.


 
As I read it:

A Codepink member heckled Obama during a speech she was making about how much Obama supports gay rights (heckler said if he supports it so much why not sign through proper employment law for people who are dismissed as a result of it being discovered that they are gay). Michelle Obama refused to answer said shut up or I leave.

Some black middle-class Obama loyalist then got angry at Codepink on twitter, Codepink people said we're not on Michelle Obama's side, Obama's budget is still a war budget. Twitter frothed with rage that this was sexist and racist against Michelle Obama because Michelle Obama isn't the one making the decisions - or something.

As a result of numbers/history, the black middle-class in America is bigger than the black and immigrant middle-class, plus the greater volume of student types in general - equals lots of black intersectionalists and their white amplifiers/signal boosters (whose function is to repeat whatever they choose of blacks using intersectionality).

In the end, Codepink apologises and says sorry we will consider our intersectional analysis better.

Malcolm Harris and Hugo Schwyzer have previous beef about something also fairly stupid/blown out of proportion - Hugo saying men as "good men" shouldn't date women much younger than them, Malcolm saying 'no get lost' I can't find a link now.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 5, 2013)

kavenism said:


> Fucking Verso are sponsoring it. Do they have no taste whatsoever?


 
You only need look at their author list to know the answer to that!


----------



## andysays (Jun 6, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Or, as the esteemed performer Mr. F. Mercury once put it:
> 
> 'Any way the wind blows, doesn't really matter to me...'


 
He's just a poor boy, from a poor family​


----------



## caleb (Jun 6, 2013)

Verso = hipster Stalinism.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jun 6, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> That is fucking revolting. It's one of the cheapest cheap shots I've seen in a while. It's also incredibly fucking patronising to black women.


 

And the response was ridiculous. This is what, rather than a basic awareness of yerself and a bit of reflectivity (don't be a knobhead in other words), privilege checking by people so afraid to be seen as what someone else has decided they must be leads to - a war of contrition.


----------



## barney_pig (Jun 6, 2013)

J Ed said:


> A lecturer at our uni wrote this, which may be of interest here, it's on my to read list...


That is an interesting read


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 6, 2013)

I read an interesting essay by her a few years back ‘Motherly Hate’ Gendering Anti–Semitism in the British Union of Fascists. (Give us a sec and i'll upload it).

edit: here you go.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 6, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


>


 
That's not a Highlander, that's a faux Glaswegian.


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 6, 2013)

*Follow​*​​*Hugo Schwyzer*‏@*hugoschwyzer*​
@*caulkthewagon* @*iamcaroline* @*BigMeanInternet* I was calling out @*codepink* for harassing the First Lady of my country.

​*Hugo Schwyzer* ‏@*hugoschwyzer*13h​@*iamcaroline* @*caulkthewagon* @*BigMeanInternet* @*codepink* agreed. But heckling @*flotus* is not dissent, it's live action trolling.

Hugo Schwyzer is a fucking dickhead, says I.

Harrassment? Give me strength! "Of _my _country"? Dry your eyes Hugo you fucking tool.


----------



## andysays (Jun 6, 2013)

[URL='https://twitter.com/hugoschwyzer'][COLOR=#999999][COLOR=#333333]Hugo Schwyzer[/COLOR][/COLOR][/URL] said:
			
		

> heckling is not dissent, it's live action trolling


 
One's man's (sic) dissenting heckler is another man's troll, innit?


----------



## fractionMan (Jun 6, 2013)

The mash on checking ur privet



> Tom Logan, an opinion-haver from Stevenage, said: “If someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about I would tend to say something like ‘what the fuck would you know?’ or ‘you’re talking out of your arse’.
> “‘Check Your Privilege’ is obviously an attempt to replace those perfectly good phrases with the sort of trite self-importance that appeals to left-wing Twitter-Thugs.”




http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/...viously-a-colossal-pile-of-twat-2013060570924


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## seventh bullet (Jun 6, 2013)

Zdravstvyute.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 6, 2013)

I am tempted to do a poll - Do you think a school/university subject called intersectionality studies is a good idea

http://signsjournal.org/intersectio...er-empowering-theory-summer-2013-vol-38-no-4/

An intersectionality special from the major US feminist academic journal Signs:
with the jump off piece
*Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis*
Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall


----------



## agricola (Jun 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> US feminist academic journal Signs:
> with the jump off piece
> *Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis*
> Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall


 
The Klingon moon?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 7, 2013)

From ISN's Network News:



> *Public meeting: Crisis and Unity - where next for the left?*
> 
> The IS Network's first public meeting is taking place this Saturday 8 June, at Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX
> 
> ...


 
I feel confident that she will have much to say about how oppression should be fought, how the working class should resist, and where 'the left' is going.

Perhaps she will be offering up the faultless leadership of her good self and her fellow deadline-slaying opinion commandos?


----------



## rekil (Jun 7, 2013)

https://twitter.com/racybaldhero/status/342954493547278337


> If I was a computer whizz I'd put a speech bubble on this ... "Stop! Wait! Has everyone checked their privilege?!"


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 7, 2013)

sihhi said:


> *Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis*
> Sumi Cho, _*Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw*_, and Leslie McCall


 
Somebody's parents forgot to check their "spurious French-spelled name" privilege.


----------



## CharlieChaplin (Jun 7, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Hugo Schwyzer is a fucking dickhead, says I.
> 
> Harrassment? Give me strength! "Of _my _country"? Dry your eyes Hugo you fucking tool.


 
lol what a bell end.


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 7, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Somebody's parents forgot to check their "spurious French-spelled name" privilege.


 
I like Kimberle Crenshaw actually. Studied her at uni, she's an interesting writer and activist, who has actually accomplished things. Laurie Penny is not fit to sharpen her pencils.


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 7, 2013)

http://www.newstatesman.com/media/m...rdinary-people-and-feminists-are-needed-front

Good article from John Pilger


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 7, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> I like Kimberle Crenshaw actually. Studied her at uni, she's an interesting writer and activist, who has actually accomplished things. Laurie Penny is not fit to sharpen her pencils.


You like her so much you couldn't even be bothered to punctuate her name properly.


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 7, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> You like her so much you couldn't even be bothered to punctuate her name properly.


 
Thought you'd like that! Less 'spurious'...


----------



## sihhi (Jun 7, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Harrassment? Give me strength! "Of _my _country"? Dry your eyes Hugo you fucking tool.


 
"Harassment" can mean being told to desist from unacceptable behaviour as can "bullying". 
Of course when people are actually harassed and bullied at work or elsewhere, the new perception will be 'they've said sorry and checked their privilege all is well'


----------



## killer b (Jun 7, 2013)

Anyone got a link to a decent rundown (and hopefully class-based dismantling) of privilege checking for me to send to a friend who's started seeing the term all over the place and is a bit wtf?


----------



## rekil (Jun 7, 2013)

https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/342774564566220800

Shit bugles.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 7, 2013)

'I see your Owen Jones and raise you a Billy Bragg'



Proletarian Democracy Journalist Wing Support Poker.


----------



## weepiper (Jun 7, 2013)

Barf.


----------



## weepiper (Jun 7, 2013)

Is it just me or do Tories and 'activists' have a shared view of the working class who don't lap up their dribblings as 'bitter hate-filled lefties'?


----------



## J Ed (Jun 8, 2013)

Laurie Penny on what is the point of the left


----------



## toggle (Jun 8, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Is it just me or do Tories and 'activists' have a shared view of the working class who don't lap up their dribblings as 'bitter hate-filled lefties'?


 
add illiterate as well- lacking the education or political awareness to decide to support the right choices. this is nothing new.


----------



## emanymton (Jun 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Laurie Penny on what is the point of the left



I love how they have edited out all the contributions from the floor.

What was that odd finger waving thing she did after Nineham had finished speaking.


----------



## cesare (Jun 8, 2013)

emanymton said:


> I love how they have edited out all the contributions from the floor.
> 
> What was that of finger waving thing she did after Ninheim had finished speaking.


Did you listen to all of that? ADMIT IT.


----------



## emanymton (Jun 8, 2013)

cesare said:


> Did you listen to all of that? ADMIT IT.


I am still in bed and it was a good excuse not to get up yet, and I didn't bother wither their summing ups so only about 40 minutes.


----------



## cesare (Jun 8, 2013)

emanymton said:


> I am still in bed and it was a good excuse not to get up yet, and I didn't bother wither their summing ups so only about 40 minutes.


That's alright then  I thought for a minute we were going to have to escort you back to the paper sales thread under armed guard


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Laurie Penny on what is the point of the left




I can't bring myself to watch that. Seriously.


----------



## GoldenVision (Jun 8, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I can't bring myself to watch that. Seriously.


 
You should. I've watched three times; so intrigued was I by her involuntary gagging reflex. Can't decide if it's induced by her lying or anything she finds 'distateful'. I'm sure I've seen and heard her refer to being 'a little bit sick in my mouth' before. I think I'm arriving at the idea that she does it when she KNOWINGLY lies eg...the bit about her doing 'lots of work with disabled groups'. I doubt this is even remotely true, although maybe she's aware that reading the odd blog and giving the odd heads up on twitter can't reasonably be described as work. Then again my theory suffers in that it accords her a degree of self-awareness never hitherto seen.
The lying hypothesis is also difficult to confirm since she has such a bloated and deformed self image that she can happily assert complete bollocks regarding her activities which, in most people's books, count as little more than plain dishonesty.

Then again, if it does only occur when she finds certain topics distasteful, then watch again...she seems to find the organised left and disabled people 'make her a bit sick in the mouth'.

Finally...could be nerves, although if a supportive panel and appreciative but tiny crowd induce a nervous reaction then any future plans involving political participation and sizeable crowds seem unlikely...she'll be reduced to spreading her gospel through twitter and cosy panel discussions.
Good news all round really.
The lark's on the wing, the snail's on the thorn, God's in his heaven and this contemptible piece of shit is doomed to a life of virtual irrelevance; especially once her rapturous adolescent followers have to get out and earn a living, watch the kids and so lack the time to idolise pseudo-radical wannabes.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 8, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Is it just me or do Tories and 'activists' have a shared view of the working class who don't lap up their dribblings as 'bitter hate-filled lefties'?


 
Prior to us being "bitter hate-filled lefties", I believe we were written off as uneducatable and antagonistic.

Yep, I'm sure that when my great-gran got the vote, she voted Communist because she hated "the man", not because the Communists were the only buggers who made sense.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 8, 2013)

toggle said:


> add illiterate as well- lacking the education or political awareness to decide to support the right choices. this is nothing new.


 
Quite. It's as old as any member of the working class having the franchise, as well as having been an argument for denying women and the working class the franchise.


----------



## andysays (Jun 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Laurie Penny on what is the point of the left


 
andysays on what is the point of Laurie Penny:

​


----------



## toggle (Jun 8, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Quite. It's as old as any member of the working class having the franchise, as well as having been an argument for denying women and the working class the franchise.


 
 i've just spent a joyous couple of hours reading about how the Irish can't be trusted to manage their own affairs, until they were properly educated to listen to the English rather than their own leaders. and that a system of political parties representing various interests within Ireland was beyond their intellect to cope with.

the names and the details change, the attitudes don't


----------



## rekil (Jun 8, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I can't bring myself to watch that. Seriously.


That's because you're a misogynist. China Mieville takes the piss by ending his talk with something about the need for "socialism from below" - then the next speaker is Laura.



> "A lot of people are feeling really upset and traumatised and my overwhelming impression I took away from the situation with the SWP at the beginning of the year and obviously I was quite involved in that, because I erm I was one of the peop- I broke the story in the mainstream news and I was involved <clapping> oh thanks, but we wasn't uh like a just that was like just a platform..."


 


> "It's right to talk about emotions. It's right to talk about trauma. It's right to talk about the effect on us as activists, as people who see ourselves as members of the left because what the left is for is providing a space, providing an alternative emotional home for people. People are at the moment refugees from neoliberalism, people's lives are being destroyed and one of the functions that activism serves is to keep peoples lives from falling apart. At the moment I'm doing work with, a lot of work with disabled people against cuts and disability rights mental health rights groups across the UK..."


Emotional home I am in you.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 8, 2013)

copliker said:


> That's because you're a misogynist. China Mieville takes the piss by ending his talk with something about the need for "socialism from below" - then the next speaker is Laura.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

She broke the SWP story in the mainstream news? First I've heard of it.


----------



## cesare (Jun 8, 2013)

copliker said:


> That's because you're a misogynist. China Mieville takes the piss by ending his talk with something about the need for "socialism from below" - then the next speaker is Laura.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Sick bag, I am in you.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jun 8, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> She broke the SWP story in the mainstream news? First I've heard of it.


 
Andy Newman will be livid.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 8, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Andy Newman will be livid.


Andy Newman will be shot.


----------



## Bakunin (Jun 8, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> She broke the SWP story in the mainstream news? First I've heard of it.


 

Given her second-rate prose, relentless hyperbole, relaxed attitude to actual objective truth and the fact that she's an ethical and integrity-free zone, wouldn't she be far better off writing fiction for a living?

Oh, wait...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 8, 2013)

GoldenVision said:


> You should. I've watched three times; so intrigued was I by her involuntary gagging reflex. Can't decide if it's induced by her lying or anything she finds 'distateful'. I'm sure I've seen and heard her refer to being 'a little bit sick in my mouth' before. I think I'm arriving at the idea that she does it when she KNOWINGLY lies eg...the bit about her doing 'lots of work with disabled groups'. I doubt this is even remotely true, although maybe she's aware that reading the odd blog and giving the odd heads up on twitter can't reasonably be described as work. Then again my theory suffers in that it accords her a degree of self-awareness never hitherto seen.
> The lying hypothesis is also difficult to confirm since she has such a bloated and deformed self image that she can happily assert complete bollocks regarding her activities which, in most people's books, count as little more than plain dishonesty.
> 
> Then again, if it does only occur when she finds certain topics distasteful, then watch again...she seems to find the organised left and disabled people 'make her a bit sick in the mouth'.
> ...


 
Thanks - still don't think I could stomach it though


----------



## J Ed (Jun 8, 2013)

From an intersectionalista on facebook in response to this article



> ^ There was a lengthy Twitter discussion about this inane and slanderous article when it came out. I find it insulting that a so-called anti-racist would take the time to write something like this. Essentially, what it's doing is telling POCs off for offending their oppressors. First, it ignores the fact that people laugh at the EDL's inability to use English *because* they go around complaining about foreigners not speaking English. Second, this is typical of the left being unable to see anything except through the prism of class because, to them, the class war is the overriding issue and that's what POCs should really be talking about. If only these people would put down their copies of Das Kapital and actually speak to POCs. At one point in our discussion, the writer tweeted that accents are the only thing anti-racists "home in on". If this isn't stupid and slanderous, then I don't know what is.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 8, 2013)

> what the left is for is providing a space, providing an alternative emotional home for people.


 
Very revealing. Does she, at any point, talk about the need to transform society into something better (doesn't even need to be socialism, just some politics of some kind)?

Left as trendy subculture.

Consumer wadicalism, I am in you.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 8, 2013)

copliker said:


> Emotional home I am in you.


 

What she seems to be after is some sort of left-wing Starbucks...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> From an intersectionalista on facebook in response to this article


 
I was called a racist sexist on facebook the other day just for saying I agreed with some parts of Louise Mensch's article on privilege checking. They didn't even bother to ask which parts and it later transpired that they hadn't even read Mensch's article.

Then, when I suggested it might help if they read it, and also if I told them what part I agreed with, I got into a reasonably sensible and respectful discussion with a female fan of Penny. She ended up agreeing that, while we certainly should listen to people whose life experiences offer them a unique perspective on specific forms of oppression, once we have done that we are perfectly entitled to disagree, regardless of whether we share said oppression (eg. I can disagree with black people about antiracist strategy and the causes of racism etc but it's poor form to argue that I already have the answers and don't need to listen to what black people who disagree have to say first, same with women and womens liberation and so on).

I sort of summed up what we'd agreed and she said yes, she did indeed agree. Then a white man (and it will become clear why this is relevant) again called me a racist sexist and said what I'd posted (ie. the thing me and a woman agreed on) was sexist and racist and just another way of saying feminism has gone too far. He ended it by saying, 'boo hoo, women won't do what the white man says so he gets in a strop' - or something like that. 

When I pointed out that since a woman had just agreed with what I said it sort of appeared if anyone was guilty of that it was him, a 'white dude' who appeared to be telling a woman she was doing feminism wrong.

He went weird then and said, 'cool story bro' then something weird about leaving on a 'sick' (why does sick mean good now by the way, when did that happen?) motorbike leaving a cloud of dust.

It was so absurd I that I was disappointed to note that I wasn't even able to get righteously angry about it.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 8, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> She broke the SWP story in the mainstream news? First I've heard of it.


 
If she did it was only cos she read about it on here first.

She was probably very disappointed to read the consensus that prevailed among this misogynist community on that one...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jun 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> From an intersectionalista on facebook in response to this article
> 
> ^ There was a lengthy Twitter discussion about this inane and slanderous article when it came out. I find it insulting that a so-called anti-racist would take the time to write something like this. Essentially, what it's doing is telling POCs off for offending their oppressors. First, it ignores the fact that people laugh at the EDL's inability to use English *because* they go around complaining about foreigners not speaking English. Second, this is typical of the left being unable to see anything except through the prism of class because, to them, the class war is the overriding issue and that's what POCs should really be talking about. If only these people would put down their copies of Das Kapital and actually speak to POCs. At one point in our discussion, the writer tweeted that accents are the only thing anti-racists "home in on". If this isn't stupid and slanderous, then I don't know what is.


 
This sort of stuff is dangerous to anti-fascism. For a start the EDL don't really _"go around complaining about foreigners not speaking English" _that's a really crap attempt to justify class bigotry. It's the logic that permits the most reactionary and ridiculous behaviour (hypothetical example "who are you, with your white privilege, to lecture a POC's right to fly the Al-Queada flag at an anti-EDL demo, your an ally and your job is to either unconditionally support the oppressed or STFU")


----------



## Belushi (Jun 8, 2013)

It also assumes no 'POC' reads das kapital


----------



## J Ed (Jun 8, 2013)

Belushi said:


> It also assumes no 'POC' reads das kapital


 

He is doing a PhD, and writes and Ceasefire magazine (which seems to be full of these people)


----------



## sihhi (Jun 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> He is doing a PhD, and writes and Ceasefire magazine (which seems to be full of these people)


 
Fuck me Ceasefire Magazine how do they get away with repeating such smears:

"Add to this the largely secular appearance of the protesters, and a number of reports of head-scarfed women being attacked by secular activists, and it becomes more understandable why some religious Turks may be worried that these protests are somehow directed against them."

Some (usually men) opening Ocalan flags are attacked in some places.
The crowd is far larger than most and there's not a credible report of a single attack on any kind of woman.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 8, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Fuck me Ceasefire Magazine how do they get away with repeating such smears:


 

Wow, Muslims in a Muslim country objecting to theocracy being Islamophobic really has become an established intersectionalista talking point. Jesus.


----------



## caleb (Jun 8, 2013)

Belushi said:


> It also assumes no 'POC' reads das kapital


 
Well, bit of a tip: if they call it 'Das Kapital' they probably haven't. 

The whole thing about "the left being unable to see anything except through the prism of class because [...] the class war is the overriding issue" misses the point. It assumes class is an identity and "the class war" is about affirming it (a la identity politics), rather than abolishing class society itself. Gender cannot be ignored from class politics, in many places (the U.S. being a prime example) neither can race. But we look at these from the perspective of how the aid capitalist exploitation, for e.g. women's unpaid labour, reproductive labour, etc. So it's not a case of class politics being pitted against race or gender, but having entirely different aims and purposes.

That's my two cents anyway.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 8, 2013)

I've been away- is anyone dissing China now? he will beat you up. After he has finished with the Hooded Bastard


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> From an intersectionalista on facebook in response to this article


 
Is the intersectionalista white? Please say it's so - cos if he/she is I may be able to help you make their head explode.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 8, 2013)

Nah


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 8, 2013)

caleb said:


> Well, bit of a tip: if they call it 'Das Kapital' they probably haven't.
> 
> The whole thing about "the left being unable to see anything except through the prism of class because [...] the class war is the overriding issue" misses the point. It assumes class is an identity and "the class war" is about affirming it (a la identity politics), rather than abolishing class society itself. Gender cannot be ignored from class politics, in many places (the U.S. being a prime example) neither can race. But we look at these from the perspective of how the aid capitalist exploitation, for e.g. women's unpaid labour, reproductive labour, etc. So it's not a case of class politics being pitted against race or gender, but having entirely different aims and purposes.
> 
> That's my two cents anyway.


 
Agree with the thrust of what you're saying but to be fair I don't think race can be ignored from class politics _anywhere_ - Britain is certainly no exception. But class _is _the overiding issue - it determines the way other 'oppressions' (scare quotes cos I can't think of a better term, not cos I'm denying oppression) are felt, even _if _they are felt. For example, I can give examples of women and ethnic minorities benefiting from sexism and racism not despite racist and sexist social structures but because of them due to their location in the class system. It's this lack of a material anchor that leads identity politics down dead ends and leads to absurd propositions like bin men being privileged over Laurie Penny.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Nah


 
Bugger


----------



## sihhi (Jun 8, 2013)

Blimey, this is where it leads:-

https://twitter.com/akkasistan/status/339767821909241856

The guy who wrote the Stop laughing at the EDL article engaged in a bizarre non-argument with someone who likes talking this idea:




> Ibni Adam ‏@Adam_M_Ali
> @AvaVidal @BenhamAlex @JosephKay76 @akkasistan Because minority PoC communities empowering themselves via satire, is class prejudice #FukOff


 
How come classist abuse/satire against racists is acceptable?

Racist abuse/satire against a class oppressor (The Tata family or the Obamas) is unacceptable. Everyone agrees, but when it comes to abuse that denigrates people and not the system for poor education - it's fair enough because they are oppressor.

I don't buy the there are no hierarchies of oppression line these intersectionalists spin - it's crystal clear there is an order for them it goes like this: skin colour (dark-light), gender, sexuality, (diseases, disabilities, injuries etc) then class. 
You can use classist (probably get away with disablist at a push) humour against racists because they are top oppressors in the hierarchy of oppression.


Same guy tweets stuff like this:

It sounds like a joke, but I am not sure it is.


----------



## cesare (Jun 8, 2013)

I'm not sure that getting embroiled in the ins and outs is useful. You get into that feedback loop, when elsewhere - in normal real life world - things are simpler.


----------



## caleb (Jun 8, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Agree with the thrust of what you're saying but to be fair I don't think race can be ignored from class politics _anywhere_ - Britain is certainly no exception. But class _is _the overiding issue - it determines the way other 'oppressions' (scare quotes cos I can't think of a better term, not cos I'm denying oppression) are felt, even _if _they are felt. For example, I can give examples of women and ethnic minorities benefiting from sexism and racism not despite racist and sexist social structures but because of them due to their location in the class system. It's this lack of a material anchor that leads identity politics down dead ends and leads to absurd propositions like bin men being privileged over Laurie Penny.


 
Ignored wasn't the right word, you're absolutely right here... What I meant really was that race as an "oppression" doesn't operate the same way, have the same relation to capital, etc. in all places. The history of race in the U.S., and it's relationship to capitalist exploitation, is different to that of Britain. Which is why the importation of 'privilege theory' from the States via tumblr, etc. makes little sense.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 8, 2013)

cesare this is what set me off to look at that exchange - an intersectionalist happy with segregation by sexes - it's natural culture:

https://twitter.com/AvaVidal/status/343433023993307136

Sex segregation is good it works, Ava Vidal agrees.

This is the guy endorsing it:


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 8, 2013)

caleb said:


> Ignored wasn't the right word, you're absolutely right here... What I meant really was that race as an "oppression" doesn't operate the same way, have the same relation to capital, etc. in all places. The history of race in the U.S., and it's relationship to capitalist exploitation, is different to that of Britain. Which is why the importation of 'privilege theory' from the States via tumblr, etc. makes little sense.


 
Agree absolutely - the way oppressions - class, gender, etc are articulated through class (fuck, I'm turning into articul8 lol) differs from society to society and depends on specific historical circumstances.

I guess it is actually possible to conceive of a capitalist society in which neither race nor gender 'matters' but I doubt one will ever exist.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 8, 2013)

sihhi said:


> cesare this is what set me off to look at that exchange - an intersectionalist happy with segregation by sexes - it's natural culture:


 

WTF? Do the BBC make you go through an intersectionalismo course to get on the telly?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 8, 2013)

That Counterfire discussion video is like a one-way phone conversation you can't hear what the questions and comments actually were.


----------



## cesare (Jun 8, 2013)

sihhi I wasn't intending to directly criticise you, I see (I think/hope) what you're explaining/showing. All I'm saying is that too much looking at very specific things and people can end up with our focus being reduced to examining these very specific things/people and that's not what's actually going on irl. Well, it is, but only in that very narrow focus. That's not to say that we should disregard it - far from it - but it's not the sort of thing you encounter in a queue for the checkout at Morrisons.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 8, 2013)

cesare said:


> sihhi I wasn't intending to directly criticise you, I see (I think/hope) what you're explaining/showing. All I'm saying is that too much looking at very specific things and people can end up with our focus being reduced to examining these very specific things/people and that's not what's actually going on irl. Well, it is, but only in that very narrow focus. That's not to say that we should disregard it - far from it - but it's not the sort of thing you encounter in a queue for the checkout at Morrisons.


 
Of course it's not what you get at the supermarket queue.

But it should also be obvious that using 'they can't spell' "satire" against the EDL won't get us anywhere either - and it also has its potential disadvantages. That's not about protecting the EDL.

These people are in real life but in a very odd way - middle-class immigrant people who have done well do feel some kind of need to fight for/defend their 'community' in weird and sometimes stupid efforts.


----------



## cesare (Jun 8, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Of course it's not what you get at the supermarket queue.
> 
> But it should also be obvious that using 'they can't spell' "satire" against the EDL won't get us anywhere either - and it also has its potential disadvantages. That's not about protecting the EDL.
> 
> These people are in real life but in a very odd way - middle-class immigrant people who have done well do feel some kind of need to fight for/defend their 'community' in weird and sometimes stupid efforts.


But that's what middle class people do, isn't it? Regardless of immigrant/migrant status. They either feel guilty and compelled to fight for/defend - or trample over w/c in their rush to get ahead.


----------



## treelover (Jun 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Laurie Penny on what is the point of the left





a long 50 minutes of how the left is failing needs to show humility, listen to people, etc, then absolutely no footage of the audience, I have no idea of how many, what sort of people were there, what they said, not good.


----------



## kittyP (Jun 8, 2013)

I have never much read or contributed to this thread before but I am sure I heard LP on radio 4 this afternoon....


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 8, 2013)

kittyP said:


> I have never much read or contributed to this thread before but I am sure I heard LP on radio 4 this afternoon....


 

in a station devoted to middle class droning she would have stood out cos she's squeaky. Not to cuss on that basis, but she is. If she was talking righteous in that voice I would not be saying it. But she talks a load of crap.Which man of straw was she faced with this time? we've seen how at sea she is when faced with a right winger with a brain, surely radio bourgeois did not pit her against a decent opponent?


----------



## rekil (Jun 8, 2013)

GoldenVision said:


> You should. I've watched three times; so intrigued was I by her involuntary gagging reflex. Can't decide if it's induced by her lying or anything she finds 'distateful'.


35:00 mark on the vid. Some facetouching and gulping. Not a bother til then, apart from the bit where she claims to have been involved in the SWP fiasco and stumbles all over the place. 

Not sure how sciencey this is but there yiz go.


> A person may constantly be trying to lubricate their throat when they lie by swallowing, gulping or clearing their throat. Lying causes their body to increase production of adrenaline, which gets their saliva pumping and then creates very little. While the saliva is surging, the subject might be gulping it down. When the saliva is no longer surging, the subject might be clearing their throat.


----------



## rekil (Jun 8, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I've been away- is anyone dissing China now? he will beat you up. After he has finished with the Hooded Bastard


I have a (signed(!)) copy of Perdido St. Station. Is it worth the time?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 8, 2013)

Just a general warning that lying and trauma can give off the same tells.
Lots of police assume lies in their questioning sessions because of swallowing in fact it can be remembring of a bad and uncomfortable situation. 

We have zero evidence to say LP hasn't done or isn't doing work with disabled people against cuts.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 8, 2013)

copliker said:


> I have a (signed(!)) copy of Perdido St. Station. Is it worth the time?


 

Is it worth the time? fuck off. Its the best thing he ever laid pen to paper and produced. I'd sing the praises of his other works but you can buy them as well.

do take the time to read. I've done all of his works and it still ranks as his best imo. And I am well versed in skiffy/fantasy. Its really good


----------



## smokedout (Jun 8, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Which man of straw was she faced with this time? we've seen how at sea she is when faced with a right winger with a brain, surely radio bourgeois did not pit her against a decent opponent?


 
seems to me she falls apart when pitted against a woman from her own background like mensch, who happily wears her economic privilege on her sleeve - then the whole oppressed me routine collapses because mensch would laugh her out of town if she claimed not to be privileged


----------



## smokedout (Jun 8, 2013)

sihhi said:


> We have zero evidence to say LP hasn't done or isn't doing work with disabled people against cuts.


 
does she actually say that specifically in the video, because i know pretty much everyone on the dpac steering group and will probably see them monday so i can find out


----------



## kittyP (Jun 8, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> in a station devoted to middle class droning she would have stood out cos she's squeaky. Not to cuss on that basis, but she is. If she was talking righteous in that voice I would not be saying it. But she talks a load of crap.Which man of straw was she faced with this time? we've seen how at sea she is when faced with a right winger with a brain, surely radio bourgeois did not pit her against a decent opponent?


 

I recognised her voice from people posting videos of her on the "who's got the most grating voice" thread. 
I am sure it was her and she was spouting a load of crap too.


----------



## rekil (Jun 8, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> in a station devoted to middle class droning she would have stood out cos she's squeaky. Not to cuss on that basis, but she is. If she was talking righteous in that voice I would not be saying it. But she talks a load of crap.Which man of straw was she faced with this time? we've seen how at sea she is when faced with a right winger with a brain, surely radio bourgeois did not pit her against a decent opponent?


She was up against Finn Mackay. Repeat of a midweek prog. I didn't hear it but Mackay was furious afterwards on the twitter, accusing LP of making stuff up and the like.


----------



## rekil (Jun 8, 2013)

smokedout said:


> does she actually say that specifically in the video, because i know pretty much everyone on the dpac steering group and will probably see them monday so i can find out


Post #21496





> At the moment I'm doing work with, a lot of work with disabled people against cuts and disability rights mental health rights groups across the UK.


----------



## smokedout (Jun 8, 2013)

I'll find out then


----------



## SLK (Jun 8, 2013)

I post this as I'm about to watch it: http://internationalsocialistnetwor.../organisation/133-whats-the-point-of-the-left


----------



## SLK (Jun 8, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Is it worth the time? fuck off. Its the best thing he ever laid pen to paper and produced. I'd sing the praises of his other works but you can buy them as well.
> 
> do take the time to read. I've done all of his works and it still ranks as his best imo. And I am well versed in skiffy/fantasy. Its really good


 

Yes, I have bought and read all his books. I don't even like fantasy - but I started buying because I knew him at uni. Now I would buy no matter what. Even UnLundun


----------



## SLK (Jun 8, 2013)

"I don't think a denunciation of other left organisations including Labour is any way forward at all" Chris Nineham

What?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 8, 2013)

SLK said:


> Yes, I have bought and read all his books. I don't even like fantasy - but I started buying because I knew him at uni. Now I would buy no matter what. Even UnLundun


 

King Rat is avoidable tho. Has its moments but, no


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 8, 2013)

SLK said:


> "I don't think a denunciation of other left organisations including Labour is any way forward at all" Chris Nineham
> 
> What?


 
It says what it says. Where else are these rats going to find a home?


----------



## rekil (Jun 8, 2013)

Emotional Home Party.


----------



## SLK (Jun 8, 2013)

Laurie starts by saying "i thought we were going to have a chat".


----------



## SLK (Jun 8, 2013)

"I broke the story in the mainstream news". And then goes on to suggest many SWP members were phoning her up.


----------



## SLK (Jun 8, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It says what it says. Where else are these rats going to find a home?


 

I just can't believe how far Chris Nineham has travelled. Far farther to the right than me, for example, despite being involved in organised politics.


----------



## SLK (Jun 8, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> King Rat is avoidable tho. Has its moments but, no


 

I like King Rat as a novel you can read on holiday. It's fine.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 8, 2013)

SLK said:


> I just can't believe how far Chris Nineham has travelled. Far farther to the right than me, for example, despite being involved in organised politics.


 
_Despite_? Where do you imagine his shield is? And who gave it him?


----------



## SLK (Jun 9, 2013)

I don't know. It's a shocking video. I'm getting pelters on fb for criticising Penny at all.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 9, 2013)

SLK said:


> I don't know. It's a shocking video. I'm getting pelters on fb for criticising Penny at all.


 
Didn't know you'd gone north.


----------



## SLK (Jun 9, 2013)

I don't know what that means


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 9, 2013)

Belushi said:


> It also assumes no 'POC' reads das kapital


 
And/or that no-one who reads Capital talks with "people of colour" (I don't care what the fucking _intersectionalistas_ say, IMO that term is *insulting*!  )..


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 9, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Wow, Muslims in a Muslim country objecting to theocracy being Islamophobic really has become an established intersectionalista talking point. Jesus.


 
Nation speaks unto nation, and cunt speaks unto cunt.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 10, 2013)

I can never quite understand twitter.

Malcolm "teachers =:= prison gaurds" Tucker here saying he would have been a John Brown had he lived 2 centuries ago:

https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/342636199581712388



> So yeah, I woulda been a batshit messianic abolitionist plotting on some arsenal probs. And I'm good with that. #sorry #notsorry


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I can never quite understand twitter.
> 
> Malcolm "teachers =:= prison gaurds" Tucker here saying he would have been a John Brown had he lived 2 centuries ago:
> 
> https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/342636199581712388


 
Why is he not doing it now then? There are plenty of opportunities to do more than posture.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 10, 2013)

More wilful confusion from Molly Crabapple on VICE 'home of interviews with the EDL' magazine:




> I told the festival coordinator that we needed a radical redistribution of senses of entitlement.
> 
> My own sense of entitlement served me well. I got my first job at a candy store when I was 14. I worked in the stockroom. I would open a box, take out a smaller box, put a rubber band around the smaller box, and put it back inside the big one. I lasted two days. This job, I remember thinking, does not make use of my intellectual abilities. When I did need work, I went straight into the naked-girl industry. Honest employment was a treadmill. It's extreme privilege to believe your life is too valuable to waste.
> 
> ...


 
The fact that there is "assistant" and "artist" is indicative of a large division even in this anti-corporate monetisation effort.




> For my friends and I who fought our way to moderate financial success, money came from transgressing society's norms. It might have been fucking rich dude after rich dude you met on Seeking Arrangements. It might have been stabbing your stomach each morning with a syringe of hormones, in order to sell your genetically desirable eggs. With much luck, it required doing the ambitious work everyone said you weren't ready for, then getting mocked and rejected for it, until, slowly, the wall began to crack. You could never do what you were supposed to, never stay quietly in your place.


----------



## weepiper (Jun 10, 2013)

She's just dripping with class snobbery. People who stay poor stay poor because they're too stupid to break out of it.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 10, 2013)

Amazing being a pimp is now painted as transgression not as functional for the system you claim that you're challenging. Other peoples relationship with work is never as important as Molly/theirs.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Why is he not doing it now then? There are plenty of opportunities to do more than posture.


 
It might be irony because he also says



> Playing "who would I have been in X historical situation judging by my current relative position" is useful for keeping you grounded.


 
I can never quite tell. He is a situationist so people taking the idea as reality rather than irony might say something about society in a complex situationist experiment.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It might be irony because he also says
> 
> 
> 
> I can never quite tell. He is a situationist so people taking the idea as reality rather than irony might say something about society in a complex situationist experiment.


 
I think the situationists would have happily spat in his face. Debord certainly would. At least he took Lebovici's money and kept his mouth shut about it /spent it all on wine rather than shouting about how his pimpery was trangression ( that point is more relevant to Molly i suppose).


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Amazing being a pimp is now painted as transgression not as functional for the system you claim that you're challenging.


 

THIS.  FUCKING THIS.

what is it with these people who continue to see pimping (metaphorical or literal) as some sort of fucking anti-capitalist fuck you to the system rather than capitalism at its most purest fucking state.  at what point did we lose even the ability to definite basic terms.  it's like that fucking weirdos on other threads who keep saying anti-semitic stuff and claiming it isn't anti-semitic.  do they believe this, does Molly genuinely think, as she appropriates and profits from the exploited labour (or bodies) of others, that what she is doing is ok, is anti-capitalist?  surely not - i can understand why the mainstream media are happy to position her thus, but why do parts of the left still not run her out of town with flaming torches?

and breathe.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 10, 2013)

looks like Penny and Finn have made up and Penny wants a Game Of Thrones themed wedding.

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/statuses/313367134493347841

-------------

i think we all know WHICH game of thrones wedding we'd like them to have.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 10, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> looks like Penny and Finn have made up and Penny wants a Game Of Thrones themed wedding.
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/statuses/313367134493347841
> 
> ...


 
laurie has spent all this series wandering around in the desert doing fuck all with her stupid dragons anyway. But yeah, to the wedding!


----------



## sihhi (Jun 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I think the situationists would have happily spat in his face. Debord certainly would. At least he took Lebovici's money and kept his mouth shut about it /spent it all on wine rather than shouting about how his pimpery was trangression ( that point is more relevance to Molly i suppose).


 
He's not just a situationist, I suppose, and the two, Molly and Malcolm, are different. 

However he does use situationism in odd ways - like examining the relevance of rap lyrics:




> Gucci’s delusion is that he can bridge the traumatic rift between exchange and use values by returning to the point of separation — purchase. But this is a repetition of disappointment, as Guy Debord reminds in The Society of The Spectacle: “The object that is glamorous in the spectacle becomes vulgar the moment it enters the consumer’s home.” Shiny new buys fade quickly into a consumer’s total collected “stuff,” “crap,” or “shit.” Vulgar indeed. Consumers must be self-sacrificing lovers; in order for Homo Economicus to function properly, s/he must desire money not for what it can bring, but truly for itself, and then let it go circulate. The impossible urge to reconcile the two drives brings on a spiral of disgust and renunciation, leaving nothing but the temporary relief of trips to the store, to be repeated unto death. As Gucci puts it tragically:
> 
> I need another hoe/my old hoe was the truth
> I had to let her go/she kept naggin’ bout my goons
> ...


 
But also, at the same time, feels situationists have been overlooked in their political economic arguments:

https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/statuses/337282528572481536




> Guy Debord does a lot more political economy than he gets credit for.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 10, 2013)

Debord did not do a single word of political economy! It's the most infamous gap in his work. What on earth is he on about?


----------



## rekil (Jun 10, 2013)

Cuddly 2006 interview with Serge Ayoub in French edition of Vice.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 10, 2013)

They do like their vicarious fascism don't they? Was/isn't T Cash algerian?


----------



## seventh bullet (Jun 10, 2013)

weepiper said:


> She's just dripping with class snobbery. People who stay poor stay poor because they're too stupid to break out of it.


 
I open small-sized boxes, medium-sized boxes and large-sized boxes most days. I don't think that's a very good use of my abilities either. I bet she would, though.


----------



## chilango (Jun 10, 2013)

copliker said:


> I have a (signed(!)) copy of Perdido St. Station. Is it worth the time?



So do I.

Signed 1st editions of Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Both much better than they could've been. Decent reads the pair of them.


----------



## chilango (Jun 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> More wilful confusion from Molly Crabapple on VICE 'home of interviews with the EDL' magazine:
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Sorry but that shit from Molly is crap.

I've done plenty of big paintings with no sponsorship or money.


----------



## chilango (Jun 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It might be irony because he also says
> 
> 
> 
> I can never quite tell. He is a situationist so people taking the idea as reality rather than irony might say something about society in a complex situationist experiment.



No he's not.

Situationist my arse.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 10, 2013)

There is a great google translation in that vice thing btw (and i think it would be the sort of thing that Debord might like):



> History is a lie come true anyway.


----------



## rekil (Jun 10, 2013)

weepiper said:


> She's just dripping with class snobbery. People who stay poor stay poor because they're too stupid to break out of it.


That's not quite her conclusion this time tbf. It's just ye olde liberal guilt.


> It's easy to ignore luck, privilege, and bloody social climbing when you stand onstage in a pair of combat boots. It’s easy to say that if people are just good enough, work hard enough, ask enough, believe enough, they will be like us.
> 
> But it’s a lie. Winning does not scale. We may be free beings, but we are constrained by an economic system rigged against us. What ladders we have are being yanked away. Some of us will succeed. The possibility of success is used to call the majority of people failures.


Just noticed that she unblocked PD on the twitter machine. Dunno when that happened.


----------



## weepiper (Jun 10, 2013)

copliker said:


> That's not quite her conclusion this time tbf. It's just ye olde liberal guilt.
> 
> Just noticed that she unblocked PD on the twitter machine. Dunno when that happened.


 

Oh, ok. I didn't read the whole article because she's a loathsome smug wanky artist and I'd rather stab my own eyeball with a red-hot needle so I missed that.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 10, 2013)

I find the Molly Crabapple approach odd, she has chosen the photo of a young woman with a sign bare arms aloft.

Then asks for a translation.

https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/342056709952516097



> Can any of my Turkish speaking followers translate this protest sign?  "gaz cok guzel sen gelsene dadindan yenmiyor" For a drawing


 
Then shortens the translation to make it simpler.

To produce this: 

"Sketch based on photo @paulmasonnews sent me from #OccupyGezi. Will try and do lots more"








Which is a false image no one actually had that sign - it's just a mock up fantasy.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 10, 2013)

copliker said:


> Cuddly 2006 interview with Serge Ayoub in French edition of Vice.


 
Crabapple is off to the Caribbean for VICE aswell:

https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/342290128447873025



> Officially going to Guantanamo Bay in a week and a half to do an illustrated piece about it for VICE.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Why is he not doing it now then? There are plenty of opportunities to do more than posture.


 
Malcolm is strictly a lifestyle anarchist, if he's an anarchist at all beyond the "hip New Yorker" definition of the label.  He's about as likely to try to break into an arsenal as he is to have sex with a woman the same age as him.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 10, 2013)

weepiper said:


> She's just dripping with class snobbery. People who stay poor stay poor because they're too stupid to break out of it.


 
Damn the poor for not monetising their hotness, the scum!!!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 10, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It might be irony because he also says
> 
> 
> 
> I can never quite tell. He is a situationist so people taking the idea as reality rather than irony might say something about society in a complex situationist experiment.


 
I suspect his "situationism" is situated in Harris having a ready excuse for when he draws attention to his cuntitude, along the lines of "pah, you don't understand. I was playing a role to point up the blah blah blah".


----------



## redsquirrel (Jun 10, 2013)

MC said:


> _For my friends and I who fought our way to moderate financial success, money came from transgressing society's norms. It might have been fucking rich dude after rich dude you met on Seeking Arrangements. It might have been stabbing your stomach each morning with a syringe of hormones, in order to sell your genetically desirable eggs. With much luck, it required doing the ambitious work everyone said you weren't ready for, then getting mocked and rejected for it, until, slowly, the wall began to crack. You could never do what you were supposed to, never stay quietly in your place._


Christ, what a revolting moron


----------



## sihhi (Jun 10, 2013)

ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist Jews opposed to Israel, want other people to die for Israel apparently 

https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/343920151894302720

A considered tweet:



> Think a fundemental ethical problem of our time will be that we can see an infinate number of wrongs, but only have so much in us to care


 
What does that mean? Can someone explain? Is this not caring a problem for our time?
Did people care more before? wtf?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 10, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Amazing being a pimp is now painted as transgression not as functional for the system you claim that you're challenging. Other peoples relationship with work is never as important as Molly/theirs.


 
My guess is it's something to do with acting against a perceived prudery by some earlier feminists.

Stuff like this sort of sets the picture - it's attacking a strawman - no type of feminism today is uncomfortable with these women existing - rather the capitalist reality that forces sex work, sexist fashion modeling and pornography to continue draining female lives and labour.




			
				Molly Crabapple said:
			
		

> A feminism that is made uncomfortable by the existence of fashion models or porn stars or sex workers isn't feminism at all


 
But it's such a wide net, I'm sure De Beauvoir and Kollontai would fall on the wrong side of it. Their approach was that unless these things are pushed back against in a sensible way, then sexism and inferior perceptions of women will continue.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 11, 2013)

chilango said:


> Sorry but that shit from Molly is crap.
> 
> I've done plenty of big paintings with no sponsorship or money.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 11, 2013)

opinions are like arseholes.  many would say that a feminism that accepts patriarchal beauty myths and subserviant values is massive crock of self-defeating shite perpetuated by phonies, idiots, or turncoats.  which side are you on, crabapple?


----------



## J Ed (Jun 11, 2013)

sihhi said:


> ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist Jews opposed to Israel, want other people to die for Israel apparently
> 
> https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/343920151894302720
> 
> ...


 

I'm assuming that she is assuming that the people who are protesting are ultra-Orthodox Jews who aren't anti-Zionist like Neturei Karta but at the same time don't want ultra-Orthodox Jews to serve in the IDF. It does seem like a very odd thing in particular for her to highlight.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 11, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


>


 
Pah! That's not art, it's just graffiti! 

If it was *proper* art, that cock would be spunking!!!


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 11, 2013)

At least you can see what it's meant to be.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 11, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Pah! That's not art, it's just graffiti!
> 
> If it was *proper* art, that cock would be spunking!!!


 
It is, but the bearer of the cock has a weird infection that by some weird coincidence turns your spunk the same shade of orange as the wall so you can't see it


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 11, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> It is, but the bearer of the cock has a weird infection that by some weird coincidence turns your spunk the same shade of orange as the wall so you can't see it


 
Oh.

That's alright, then!


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 11, 2013)

I see that John Pilger has managed to annoy both intersectionalists and some of the remaining radical feminists.


----------



## rekil (Jun 11, 2013)

Nobody paints SEX in big letters on walls anymore. Masculinity in crisis?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 11, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> At least you can see what it's meant to be.


That has a sinister ring to it now


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 11, 2013)

copliker said:


> Nobody paints SEX in big letters on walls anymore. Masculinity in crisis?


----------



## rekil (Jun 11, 2013)

Got a million shitty things to do but one of these days I'll turn some of these into lyrics. Proper Bragg.

https://twitter.com/billybragg/status/344469194752028673


> @sirrontail well good luck with that sunshine. Class is no longer the political signifier it was in the 20th, if you haven't noticed.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 11, 2013)

This tweet from Billy Bragg: "we have to find a new language with which to express the ideals at we share"


----------



## J Ed (Jun 11, 2013)

copliker said:


> Got a million shitty things to do but one of these days I'll turn some of these into lyrics. Proper Bragg.
> 
> https://twitter.com/billybragg/status/344469194752028673


 

Shit musician too


----------



## sihhi (Jun 11, 2013)

Nick Lezard borrowing money off his brother:




> That this magazine seems to have paid me twice in the same month – although I may have got this wrong – added to this sense and so I spent a large part of the past month thinking I was far wealthier than I was and splurging like someone demob happy. (I have not invoiced this magazine for last month because I think that will make things OK again but I am now utterly confused and if someone from the NS accounts department can clear up what’s going on, I would be most grateful.)
> 
> So, to cut a long story short, I was saved by a parental birthday cheque and a fraternal last-minute loan. (“Am I going to get this back?” he asked with pardonable suspicion as I snatched the cash from him at the Marylebone Station cashpoint and made to sprint away. Of course you’ll get it back, Tony.) That, and the great generosity of my friends, who, having worked out that if there’s one thing I like, it’s wine, brought me so much wine that I think I may even be ahead on the deal. (It would appear that Majestic accepts returns, of full bottles at least, and all it asks of you when you rent its wine glasses is a £1 deposit each, so, if broken, it’s 1/180th of the price of a glass from which even Liberace in his pomp would have thought twice about sipping.)


 
I like how their family members always step in but this means they haze zero access to financial resources ie they are 'Down and Out'.

Good tips for anyone on a minimal income:



> I have discovered that you can make quite a lot of rillettes from a leftover fowl. This helps.


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 11, 2013)

chilango said:


> Sorry but that shit from Molly is crap.
> 
> I've done plenty of big paintings with no sponsorship or money.


 
I've never met an artıst who thought about money enough to wrıte an artıcle about ıt, let alone actually acquıre any of the stuff.

Really, who cares?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 11, 2013)

> Class is no longer the political signifier it was in the 20th, if you haven't noticed.


 
It was all good to go in 1991 eg "I've made passes / At women of all classes"



But no more - something happened - the Millennium Bug it didn't down any planes but stopped class signifying anything.


----------



## seventh bullet (Jun 11, 2013)

sihhi said:


> eg "I've made passes / At women of all classes"


----------



## YouSir (Jun 11, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Nick Lezard borrowing money off his brother:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

I... don't understand that article at all. Anyone know what the point of it was?


----------



## YouSir (Jun 11, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> I've never met an artıst who thought about money enough to wrıte an artıcle about ıt, let alone actually acquıre any of the stuff.
> 
> Really, who cares?


 

As a struggling artist I'm obliged to think about money quite a lot, turns out my landlord, phone company and various others really do care. Keep lighting cigarettes and trying to stare profoundly into the distance when the topic comes up but they never seem to respect the genius.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 11, 2013)

YouSir said:


> I... don't understand that article at all. Anyone know what the point of it was?


 
Start of the fourth para: 



> this magazine seems to have paid me twice in the same month


----------



## YouSir (Jun 11, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Start of the fourth para:


 

So it's a letter to the personnel department that's accidentally made it on to the website? Fair enough.


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 11, 2013)

YouSir said:


> As a struggling artist I'm obliged to think about money quite a lot, turns out my landlord, phone company and various others really do care. Keep lighting cigarettes and trying to stare profoundly into the distance when the topic comes up but they never seem to respect the genius.


 
Gıve up smokıng.  You'll save a fortune.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 11, 2013)

Interview report for a German weekly about online sexist/abusive comments has popped up:



> Ich habe in meiner Schulzeit viel Literatur der zweiten und dritten Welle des Feminismus gelesen. Und ich habe mich umgeschaut und gefragt: Wo ist das alles? Was ist unser Feminismus? Alles, was ich damals in den Zeitungen sah, suggerierte: Dieser Kampf ist vorbei. Es gibt nichts mehr zu sagen. Erst als ich online aktiv geworden bin und 2005 angefangen habe, feministische Blogs zu lesen, habe ich in diesen Communitys etwas komplett Neues entdeckt.


 
"I read in my schooldays a lot of literature of second and third wave feminism. And I looked around and asked myself: Where is all this stuff? What is our feminism? Everything I saw in the newspapers at the time, suggested: this struggle is complete. There is nothing more to say. It was only when I became active online and in 2005 started to read feminist blogs, I discovered something completely new in these communities."



> Wann wurden die Angriffe so richtig heftig?
> Es fing an, als ich regelmäßig für die Website des New Statesman zu schreiben begann. Es hat mich völlig überrascht. Ich dachte zunächst, all diese fiesen Kommentare und Blogbeiträge wären Reaktionen darauf, dass ich eine schlechte Autorin oder ein schlechter Mensch sei.


 
"When were the [online] attacks really heavy?


It started when I began to write regularly for the website of the New Statesman.
It took me completely by surprise. I initially thought all these nasty comments and blogposts were responses to the fact that I was bad writer or a bad person."




> Ich war 18 und in einer sehr weißen Gegend aufgewachsen.


 
"I was eighteen and I grew up in a very white area."


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 11, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


>


 
he's even bowing!


----------



## sihhi (Jun 11, 2013)

copliker said:


> Class is no longer the political signifier it was in the 20th, if you haven't noticed.


 
Forgot to add 'I bought this mansion at the end of the 20th century'


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 11, 2013)

'I raised a family, in time of austerity, check out my mansion lads, we are between the wars;


----------



## weepiper (Jun 11, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Nick Lezard borrowing money off his brother:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
So broke he buys his wine from Majestic Wine Warehouse, a company that will only sell you a minimum of six bottles per purchase.


----------



## rekil (Jun 11, 2013)

More billy lyrics.


> Never said that we live in a classless society, merely that class is no longer a viable basis for mass political organisation


----------



## sihhi (Jun 11, 2013)

Crowdfunding article in New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/arts/crowdfunding-finds-a-creative-outlet.html

features Molly Crabapple:




> When the American artist Molly Crabapple sought financing on Kickstarter for a live art installation, she eventually raised $25,805 from 745 backers. For her piece, titled “Molly Crabapple’s Week In Hell,” the artist locked herself in a room for five days, covered the walls with paper and covered them in drawings, which she offered to those who had given her financial support.
> ...
> 
> The rapidly increasing use of new media by installation artists opens up possibilities for even more participatory rewards. As part of “Molly Crabapple’s Week In Hell,” the artist created a live stream of her installation, which she made available to those who gave money to her project. She also let her backers send in e-mails with suggestions for her drawings.
> ...


 

Of the 745 funders most are like around $5, which simply receive a live stream to a camera of MC sketching, occasionally the sketching is obscured by the position of the back of the artist. Only a minority are the heavy lifters of the $25K , they get more goodies and actual product. This is all the future of anti-capitalism in art, apparently.

A point against from Ann Messner the sculptor installationist:




> Others worry that crowdfunding relies too much on the ability to quickly attract public attention. “I would consider the way crowdfunding depends on some form of notoriety or spectacle to be a disadvantage,”


 
Messner did an exhibition of anti-war material which featured boxes of her pamphlet-tabloid






free for people to take one each:











(gallery showing)





I like the correction at the bottom of the article!




> Correction: June 11, 2013
> 
> A photo caption with an earlier version of this article misstated the amount of money donors were required to give in order to receive a Spencer Tunick print. The minimum donation was $5,000, not $500.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 11, 2013)




----------



## treelover (Jun 11, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Forgot to add 'I bought this mansion at the end of the 20th century'


 
that's paid for by the sales of Mermaid Avenue in the U.S

having said that, can't think of anyone who has done more benefit gigs than BB


----------



## redsquirrel (Jun 11, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I see that John Pilger has managed to annoy both intersectionalists and some of the remaining radical feminists.


How?



J Ed said:


> Shit musician too


He's been shit for some time now but early work is fantastic as is the first Mermaid Avenue album. Just makes it all the more of a shame that he's lost it.


----------



## agricola (Jun 11, 2013)

redsquirrel said:


> How?


 
Isnt "being a man" enough?


----------



## grit (Jun 12, 2013)

weepiper said:


> So broke he buys his wine from Majestic Wine Warehouse, a company that will only sell you a minimum of six bottles per purchase.



the six bottles limit,is a licensing issue. many wine companies do it so they only need a wholesale licence. that in itself does not mean the wineisexpensive.


----------



## cesare (Jun 12, 2013)

grit said:


> the six bottles limit,is a licensing issue. many wine companies do it so they only need a wholesale licence. that in itself does not mean the wineisexpensive.


It's not so much the unit price, as needing to have the amount of disposable cash available to buy the minimum order.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 12, 2013)

cesare said:


> It's not so much the unit price, as needing to have the amount of disposable cash available to buy the minimum order.


 
Plus it's not as if The Lez lowers himself to drinking the cheaper wines. He wrote something a while back about spending about a minimum of £12 a bottle on "plonk", doubtless because his sophisticated palate can't bear the sheer coarseness of the lower end of vintnery.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 12, 2013)

'Vin de Table? fuck off'


----------



## sihhi (Jun 12, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> did anyone that "chime for change" thing about women's rights which had beyonce on the bill and lots of lyrics telling women they should look sexy and please men etc?


 
I didn't but hopefully you'll be able to better explain exactly what leftist South Asian Torontan Denise Balkissoon is saying when wishing why Beyonce should sort of be in the feminist club or something, on intersectional grounds:



> In theory, feminism is supposed to work for the liberation, freedom and choice of all women. In practice, it too often stays focused on those whose path to fulfillment is the least thorny. While Ms. is busy finding reasons to kick Beyoncé out of the club


 


> When feminism’s most prominent personalities refuse to reach for those ideals, I do wonder if I can call myself a feminist. It’s a label I would feel sad about shedding, but not as sad as I do about the 150 years that womanhood’s luckiest members have been kicking me, Beyoncé and most of the world’s women off of the membership roster.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

"Beyonce and most of the world's women"


----------



## sihhi (Jun 12, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> "Beyonce and most of the world's women"


 
That doesn't explain it. 

I don't know what to do about this. How can I or someone normal respond without helping right-wing forces like Mensch, is it bad because I don't have "intersectional-loving heart"? I don't know what to think anymore. 




> Why Do Feminists Hate Beyoncé?
> YES. A whole lot of win here. My intersectional-loving heart loves this article.


 



> No, really. To whoever started Beyonceisnotafeminist, and all the other feminists out there who take a shot whenever Beyoncé makes a decision in her career or personal life, I genuinely want to know:
> What would she have to do to get you to stop hating on her every decision?
> She is a successful, independent, confident black woman who has an all-women band, a family, and a solid sense of who she is. That sounds like a role model I’d like my daughter to look up to. I would want my daughter to grow up seeing a black woman who dominates the industry on her terms.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

sihhi said:


> is it bad because I don't have "intersectional-loving heart"?


 
Sorry, but


----------



## sihhi (Jun 12, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Sorry, but


 
For some context Beyonce is auctioning - for charity - a day's worth of internship for her, aimed at $25,000.




> The only downside is the current bid is $13,500, so you’ll have to do a whole lot of saving (and chatting-up the relatives) to get your hands on this prize.
> The charity auction, set up through website Charity Buzz, is set to raise at least $25,000 for the Miss A Meal Foundation, a cause very close to Beyonce and her sister Solange’s heart.


 
If a non-white working-class woman or man says 'the nerve' and badmouths her - that's OK.
If a white working-class woman or man says 'the nerve' and badmouths her - that's unacceptable. 
It's like these middle-class people are on a mission to create reverse racism.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

((((inter-sectional loving hearts)))))


----------



## sihhi (Jun 12, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> ((((inter-sectional loving hearts)))))


 
What do you make of all this - a manual for the "able-bodied, neurotypical"

Anyone can accuse you of anything anonymously and you have to know what they are talking about and apologise as publicly as possible.



> It will probably be anonymous, because these messages come from a place of feeling uncomfortable and unsafe. Respect that fact. Don’t jump to conclusions. Realize you are in a place of privilege. The above message whovianfeminism received is actually quite polite. It isn’t fun to hear that you’ve messed up, but the anon phrases it as an I-statement, making it about how they would feel if whovianfeminism did this one thing. This is great. When calling someone out, using effective communication strategies is awesome and helpful. However, if you are called out in a more rude, aggressive manner, you need to respect that anger. Their anger is rational. Their anger is a safety mechanism.


 
Note this phrase later on "how hard your privilege is".





> With any luck, because you read this, you’ll apologize immediately and all will be well. Many able-bodied tumblr feminists and SJ warriors have done it before you like diversityinya. You’ll be in grand company and can continue to party it up in the cool intersectional feminist club.
> 
> Unfortunately, sometimes you’re going to mess up the first time. You’re going to be upset and defensive and rush into things. It is okay. You can still fix things. Here on tumblr, someone else will probably call you out on your fuck up. This is a good thing! It is your second chance! Embrace it!


 


> Embrace the call out. It smells like intersectionality.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

this neurotypical thing fucks me off somewhat, it's like only people with autism and aspergers have conditions that affect the way they look at the world, interact with other people, etc. What about someone like me who has a condition like OCD which is fine a lot of the time, but can pretty much leave you a shaking wreck who is obsessed with meaningless thoughts and convinced they have to do pointless rituals "in case" something bad happens, depending on how bad it is / what else is going on in your life? but other days can be fine?

Is that "neurotypical"? i dont think so


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

Just to be clear I'm not arguing for a special form of "privilege" based on OCD or not, that is actually the very worst thing you could probably do in terms of recovery from the illness. Like essentialising it and seeing it as part of your identity, something you will never be free of, just makes it worse (although seeing it as an illness which you can never get better from and yourself as therefore weak and helpless based on societys stigma's round mental health is just as bad).


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

And also isn't that sort of privilege/identity politics stuff just reinforcing social stigmas around mental health, for example few people realise that one in two people suffer from a mental health condition at some point in their lives and the proportion is probably closer to two out of two, but people never report it because they think it is not serious enough, because they are ashamed, etc.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 12, 2013)

If it is any consolation to you frogwoman you fit as "neurodiverse" - the opposite of neurotypical - and hence move closer (based on your lack of privilege status) to the front of the progressive stack.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

But in that case at least half the population are neurodiverse? Surely the idea is to reduce social stigma around mental illness, poor mental health etc (btw im not saying that autism/aspergers is a "mental illness" btw) but you know what i mean - so that it is seen as something that everyone can suffer from, that it is in actual fact extremely common, and people should not be ashamed to talk about it?


----------



## JHE (Jun 12, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> ...obsessed with meaningless thoughts and convinced they have to do pointless rituals "in case" something bad happens, depending on how bad it is / what else is going on in your life?


 

...sounds like a description of religious belief and (patchy) observance...


----------



## sihhi (Jun 12, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> But in that case at least half the population are neurodiverse? Surely the idea is to reduce social stigma around mental illness, poor mental health etc so that it is seen as something that everyone can suffer from and people should not be ashamed to talk about it?


 
Those who have a privilege conception believe tearing away stigma does come from "calling out" the "shitty human being" who uses words like crazy or idiotic to describe stupid behaviour.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Those who have a privilege conception believe tearing away stigma does come from "calling out" the "shitty human being" who uses words like crazy or idiotic to describe stupid behaviour.


 
This is why I get pissed off at some of the forums about my illness and havent been on them for years, I think they can be useful for advice sometimes, but it is full of people talking about how awful they feel and why nobody understands them, and the guidelines of the forums often say that no reassurance is allowed (for things that people are worried over, because seeking reassurance is a compulsion, people ask for it over and over and over again to make sure that they haven't done anything wrong, for example annoyed people, and end up annoying people by doing it, so it goes on). but these forums are full of people seeking confirmation that they have not contaminated themselves, are not a sexual predator, aren't going to die or harm their family because they messed up a compulsion etc. I sometimes feel like it just enables it, and I felt like it really was not making me better, because every time I would just feel compelled to post on it and seek reassurance that something I had done didn't mean I was a terrible person or something, which is why I stopped going on them except when my illness is really really bad, but at the same time some of them almost seem like they sort of take pride in the fact they have it.

I hope that doesn't sound really wrong, but I honestly don't think all of this privilege stuff helps people recover from mental health problems. Obviously knowing the strategies to deal with it does, but like I feel worse when I am thinking about the fact that I will always have it and never get better from it and that sort of thing.

A bit off topic but I suppose it kind of fits in with what I am trying to say. I hope that doesn't sound really harsh.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

whereas the difference between OCD sufferers and "normal" people is the fact that the normal people dont ascribe a special meaning to thoughts or actions, if for example a thought goes through their minds when on a train station telling them to push someone off a track, they will just ignore it rather than rushing back inside and thinking that they are scum and a terrible person. Like part of the treatment of OCD (which I don't really manage to follow most of the time, but when I do I end up relaxing and the months where I haven't had the illness had been some of the best months of my life tbh) is to completely ignore those thoughts and train your mind to not have such anxiety over it. rather than thinking "I've got this illness so I will do this" and like making a part of their identity outof it?

does that make sense? Like its still encouraging you to think of yourself as "different" rather than like accepting yourself as who you are, and accepting others? Like if you always think about the fact you're different from everyone else (something i have a hard time not doing, i'm always obsessing over the idea that I've upset someone or people don't like me, or beating up myself over some past incidence where I have worried too much and pissed everyone off) you're just going to worry and therefore make it worse if you see what I mean?

or am I talking bollocks?


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

Also there's also this idea that "we're special because we worry about this stuff so much, other people don't care about the fact that they might be paedophiles/might have contaminated peoples food/might have hurt everyone's feelings" and personally i think that it ... well it is still enabling it, because you're still promoting the idea that the fears the illness creates are things that everyone should worry about and like incorporating it into your worldview if you see what I mean.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 12, 2013)

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art/33588/Riot+cops+storm+Turkeys+Taksim+Square



> *There have been demonstrations across the country in solidarity with those in the Square and Park. Many have been awash with Turkish flags as Islamophobic nationalists have tried to inject the movement with their poison.*


 
http://socialistworker.co.uk/art/33514/Turkeys+uprising+is+against+neoliberalism—not+‘Islamism’



> Many of the nationalists want to see the army overthrow the elected government and carry out an Islamophobic purge.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

oh my god you idiots


----------



## sihhi (Jun 12, 2013)

The privilege stuff is meant to be directed outwards at people denying help for the mentally ill, but I suppose you're saying it can get to wearing the being underprivileged as a badge of honour.

I tend to think capitalism's normal functioning esp under Western neoliberalism can perpetuate mental neuroses (eg having to compete against 900 others for a part-time janitor job in a Ohio school, whilst having grown up with your dad in prison will prob mean mental health issues are more likely).
At the same time mental illness means it's harder for people to fight against capitalism.

LP's point is that people should concentrate on the mental hurt first
provide the (better) sanctuary for current socialists/leftists and _from there_,
capitalism can be overthrown via revolutionary socialism.
I disagree with it, but I'm not really competent to produce something more coherent so I've held off on that score.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

Yeah it's really hard to put together a critique of this stuff without it looking like you're saying that people have nothing wrong with them or whatever, which I'm not saying at all. Someone more capable than me needs to do it I guess!


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The privilege stuff is meant to be directed outwards at people denying help for the mentally ill, but I suppose you're saying it can get to wearing the being underprivileged as a badge of honour.
> 
> I tend to think capitalism's normal functioning esp under Western neoliberalism can perpetuate mental neuroses (eg having to compete against 900 others for a part-time janitor job in a Ohio school, whilst having grown up with your dad in prison will prob mean mental health issues are more likely).
> At the same time mental illness means it's harder for people to fight against capitalism.
> ...


 
Absolutely. But of course capitalism, a lot of the conditions of wage labour etc produces/worsens mental ill health. Worrying about money/housing, bad food, long hours, not enough sleep etc ...


----------



## sihhi (Jun 12, 2013)

J Ed said:


>


 
Oddly enough when police retook the Taksim square and the cultural centre the slogans were taken down and in their place came courtesy of police - a large Turkish flag an Kemal Ataturk portrait.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

sihhi said:


> If it is any consolation to you frogwoman you fit as "neurodiverse" - the opposite of neurotypical - and hence move closer (based on your lack of privilege status) to the front of the progressive stack.


 

but how is it a privilege thing?

who benefits from people having OCD? (apart from pharmaceutical companies and counsellors lol)


----------



## sihhi (Jun 12, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art/33588/Riot cops storm Turkeys Taksim Square


 
Remember the author of that piece is this guy:


----------



## sihhi (Jun 12, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> who benefits from people having OCD? (apart from pharmaceutical companies and counsellors lol)


 
I think the broad line is:
Non-OCD people (privileged) want to keep OCD people (oppressed) down by denying that OCD is a problem, saying people with OCD always exaggerate stuff, and not letting them sort out their deeper issues.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 12, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Oddly enough when police retook the Taksim square and the cultural centre the slogans were taken down and in their place came courtesy of police - a large Turkish flag an Kemal Ataturk portrait.


 

There are just so many assumptions here that I do not understand.

In order for the SWP to suggest that Turkish secularists are Islamophobic (and the government they oppose is a victim of Islamophobia) then surely we have to assume the following:

1) The SWP has taken a position on who is Muslim and decided that orthodox Sunni Islam is the correct form of Islam.
2) The SWP has also taken a position on who is not Muslim and decided that secularist Muslims are not Muslims, clearly millions of Muslims believe that you can be both Muslim and not wear the hijab, does the SWP disagree?
3) Erdogan's anti-Alevi sentiment is not Islamophobic?


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

sihhi Well, fair enough. But I've seen people on these forums tie themselves in knots with worry over the idea that they "don't really" have OCD and are just attention seeking or that their problems aren't bad enough to demand help etc, or for that matter about what "type" of OCD they have. And this sort of obsessive "privilege checking" could really become a problem when the aim should be to just accept who you are and not worry too much, or beat yourself up when you do worry (easier said than done, I know)

Just seems like a very unhealthy environment.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)

Like the whole idea that there are like different people, some who suffer from mental health problems and some who don't - i dunno. Obviously there are greater or lesser degrees of severity but I have met people who probably have even worse forms of the illness than I have who would probably never think to go to a doctor about it or try to get help. Like does someone who is officially diagnosed with an illness, are they over or underprivileged over someone who isn't diagnosed with it, or someone who diagnosed themselves? The whole thing just gets ridiculous (and sounds increasingly like an OCD obsession tbh)


----------



## yield (Jun 12, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I tend to think capitalism's normal functioning esp under Western neoliberalism can perpetuate mental neuroses (eg having to compete against 900 others for a part-time janitor job in a Ohio school, whilst having grown up with your dad in prison will prob mean mental health issues are more likely).
> At the same time mental illness means it's harder for people to fight against capitalism.


I think there's also something in how mental neuroses are categorized under capitalism?

That NASA is a sheltered workshop for people with autism and asperger syndrome, a surgeon might ocd about cleanliness and stock brokers are psychopaths?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 12, 2013)

J Ed said:


> In order for the SWP to suggest that Turkish secularists are Islamophobic (and the government they oppose is a victim of Islamophobia) then surely we have to assume the following:
> 
> 1) The SWP has taken a position on who is Muslim and decided that orthodox Sunni Islam is the correct form of Islam.
> 2) The SWP has also taken a position on who is not Muslim and decided that secularist Muslims are not Muslims, clearly millions of Muslims believe that you can be both Muslim and not wear the hijab, does the SWP disagree?
> 3) Erdogan's anti-Alevi sentiment is not Islamophobic?


 
Anti-Zoroastrian anti-athiest sentiment is stronger still.
PM on PKK guerrilla : "These terrorists have their place these are Zoroastrians. They talk about Yeziditi."

AKP regional chief on atheists about a month ago:






"The fact that these demented mentally diseased atheist types are still in my country and swearing at my religion makes my blood boil. These type of people who've been raped should be destroyed" (yok edilmeli)


SWP is repeating arguments which are now 15 years out of date.
De facto there's not a job in Turkey which is closed to hijab women that is also closed to non-hijab women (de jure the law exists but that's to make the government the victim), but there are jobs closed all to women eg the burgeoning state priesthood has to be male discrimination by its very nature.

Is anyone more opposed to accepting the Armenian genocide than the Islamists one or neofascists?
Smart Kemalists have always been able to divert the issue by saying Kemal was on the Western front fighting against British and mercenary Commonwealth imperialists and he supported executing people who went too far when marching Armenians (this was only because they were political opponents but there we are).
Islamists are unable to accept it because it means their idea of a 'religion of peace and harmony' and social contentment comes crashing down.
Neofascists likewise because it posits the idea of 'Turks' as not being pure so any concept of society based upon Turkism is blown out of the water.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 12, 2013)




----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Jun 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Like the whole idea that there are like different people, some who suffer from mental health problems and some who don't - i dunno. Obviously there are greater or lesser degrees of severity but I have met people who probably have even worse forms of the illness than I have who would probably never think to go to a doctor about it or try to get help. Like does someone who is officially diagnosed with an illness, are they over or underprivileged over someone who isn't diagnosed with it, or someone who diagnosed themselves? The whole thing just gets ridiculous (and sounds increasingly like an OCD obsession tbh)


 

I think you accrue points for each year you went before diagnosis, after which a graduated point system is introduced that is linked to the type of treatment that is required. Higher dosages of meds means more points, but those with few side-effects are given a lower priority. Also, a person's DSM-IV scores may be used as a proxy measure of under-privilege (negatively offset for those that have better qualified therapists, of course).


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 13, 2013)

Is drug addiction an oppression?


----------



## agricola (Jun 13, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Is drug addiction an oppression?


 
Yes if its smack, no if its percocet.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 13, 2013)

agricola said:


> Yes if its smack, no if its percocet.


 
whereabouts does it come on the progressive stack? and are you still oppressed if you've stopped using? (once you're an addict you're always an addict, it never goes away and you've got to fight it for evermore and all that jazz)

If a white addict and a black non-addict are talking about a black drug gang who needs to step back and check their privilege? Sounds like a fucking minefield to me.


----------



## treelover (Jun 13, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Remember the author of that piece is this guy:


 
I always thought Ned Flanders was an all American guy...


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 13, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> *whereabouts does it come on the progressive stack?* and are you still oppressed if you've stopped using? (once you're an addict you're always an addict, it never goes away and you've got to fight it for evermore and all that jazz)
> 
> If a white addict and a black non-addict are talking about a black drug gang who needs to step back and check their privilege? Sounds like a fucking minefield to me.


 

at the back, robbing the coat pockets


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 13, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Is drug addiction an oppression?


 
surely drug addiction is a symptom of oppression, if the addict is someone we approve of, or a fucking idiot if it is not?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 13, 2013)

It used to be that most drug addicts were doctors, who had ready access to mind-bending chemicals.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 13, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> at the back, robbing the coat pockets


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 13, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> surely drug addiction is a symptom of oppression, if the addict is someone we approve of, or a fucking idiot if it is not?


 
[semi serious]if you're a recovering addict and people find out you do get treated differently, not trusted, treated like you're fragile and your mental state could disintegrate given the slightest push, etc etc so it could be seen as an oppression in and of itself[/semi serious]


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## ViolentPanda (Jun 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> whereas the difference between OCD sufferers and "normal" people is the fact that the normal people dont ascribe a special meaning to thoughts or actions, if for example a thought goes through their minds when on a train station telling them to push someone off a track, they will just ignore it rather than rushing back inside and thinking that they are scum and a terrible person. Like part of the treatment of OCD (which I don't really manage to follow most of the time, but when I do I end up relaxing and the months where I haven't had the illness had been some of the best months of my life tbh) is to completely ignore those thoughts and train your mind to not have such anxiety over it. rather than thinking "I've got this illness so I will do this" and like making a part of their identity outof it?
> 
> does that make sense? Like its still encouraging you to think of yourself as "different" rather than like accepting yourself as who you are, and accepting others? Like if you always think about the fact you're different from everyone else (something i have a hard time not doing, i'm always obsessing over the idea that I've upset someone or people don't like me, or beating up myself over some past incidence where I have worried too much and pissed everyone off) you're just going to worry and therefore make it worse if you see what I mean?
> 
> or am I talking bollocks?


 
No, you're not.
Some people attempt to address their issue(s) in the way you have done, by confronting them, and doing so carries a certain degree of risk that you'll relapse *because* you're at the "coal face" of your issue most of the time. It also happens to be the best way to lessen and eventually abandon your issue(s) over time.
There are other people with issues who very much live the culture of their issue(s) and live *within* the culture of their issues. people like mad-priders and deaf-priders make a conscious choice to operate within the culture of their issue and expect society to conform to their issues. While that's brave and forward-thinking, it's also a turning of the back on reaching accommodations with society on those issues, and does little to ameliorate or solve the issue if that's what someone wants. In fact I believe I mentioned on a disability thread last year that my mate's parents considered him somewhat of a "traitor" when he had ear surgery as a young adult after being brought up deaf by deaf parents.


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## frogwoman (Jun 13, 2013)

like I really don't think that the problem with OCD is that i am "oppressed by society" by having it, I think the problem is the illness itself.


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## el-ahrairah (Jun 13, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> [semi serious]if you're a recovering addict and people find out you do get treated differently, not trusted, treated like you're fragile and your mental state could disintegrate given the slightest push, etc etc so it could be seen as an oppression in and of itself[/semi serious]


 
that is true. the biggest issue, for me, is the getting-a-job catch 22. do you admit it on the medical section of the application form? if not, and problems arise, pow you get sacked for not being honest. if you do, you never hear back from them.

similar to the mental health problems bind. i had one job where they actually invited people with MH problems to apply. i got the job, but the HR department wouldn't let me become a properly contracted member of staff because of my history of MH problems. so i spent 8 months knowing i could be let go with a week's notice if my mental health state wasn't good enough. which, as you can imagine, was a major fucking stress and made it less likely i could perform 'normally'.

e2a: is this oppression?  well, it's capitalism.


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## frogwoman (Jun 13, 2013)

I never put it down on the application form. you'd have to be a fucking idiot to.


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## frogwoman (Jun 13, 2013)

Sucks but its a fact of life. it's capitalism, they value profits more than needs.


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## ViolentPanda (Jun 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> like I really don't think that the problem with OCD is that i am "oppressed by society" by having it, I think the problem is the illness itself.


 
Quite.

There's no doubt that people with such issues are *somewhat* oppressed by society, but that's not as relevant to the actual existing neurosis or psychosis that causes the issue as the person's own experience of the effects of their issue on them.


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## frogwoman (Jun 13, 2013)

oh yeah definitely, with things like employment etc.


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 13, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> that is true. the biggest issue, for me, is the getting-a-job catch 22. do you admit it on the medical section of the application form? if not, and problems arise, pow you get sacked for not being honest. if you do, you never hear back from them.
> 
> similar to the mental health problems bind. i had one job where they actually invited people with MH problems to apply. i got the job, but the HR department wouldn't let me become a properly contracted member of staff because of my history of MH problems. so i spent 8 months knowing i could be let go with a week's notice if my mental health state wasn't good enough. which, as you can imagine, was a major fucking stress and made it less likely i could perform 'normally'.
> 
> e2a: is this oppression? well, it's capitalism.


 
Yeah I just don't tell anyone. It's a shame you can't though cos if we could it would help remove some of the stigma by showing that you can go on to lead a relatively 'normal' life, contribute to society etc. Instead all people see of addicts is the obvious and visible ones - ie. the ones who conform to the stereotypes. Which leads to some of the ignorant crap we've seen on these boards from time to time (and from one poster in particular who will remain nameless - he's not posted on this thread as far as I know)

Of course a similar point (to the one about it being capitalism - don't employ women they might get pregnant etc) could be made about most of not all oppressions - demonstrating the bankruptcy of identity politics.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 13, 2013)

HE/FE places are sometimes better with the mental health issue. Not always obvs, but some actually recruit people with mh issues and give leeway for them. However, they are being cut to fuck anyway so look not there for work.

In general though, nobody admits to it on the form. Same with crim record, unless you'll be CRB'd you say nothing


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## BigTom (Jun 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> this neurotypical thing fucks me off somewhat, it's like only people with autism and aspergers have conditions that affect the way they look at the world, interact with other people, etc. What about someone like me who has a condition like OCD which is fine a lot of the time, but can pretty much leave you a shaking wreck who is obsessed with meaningless thoughts and convinced they have to do pointless rituals "in case" something bad happens, depending on how bad it is / what else is going on in your life? but other days can be fine?
> 
> Is that "neurotypical"? i dont think so


 
I feel kinda the same with clinical depression, definitely don't feel neurotypical. The term came about as a replacement for "normal" though with the connotation that Aspergers/ASD is abnormal rather than atypical which is an improvement imo. I think it'd be better if it evolved on into neurotypical/neuroatypical but who knows if it will.


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## frogwoman (Jun 13, 2013)

BigTom said:


> I feel kinda the same with clinical depression, definitely don't feel neurotypical. The term came about as a replacement for "normal" though with the connotation that Aspergers/ASD is abnormal rather than atypical which is an improvement imo. I think it'd be better if it evolved on into neurotypical/neuroatypical but who knows if it will.


 
But it is normal to have, not aspergers/autism etc, but some sort of mental health problem, a learning disability, etc, even if you have it temporarily ad then never at all. Part of the reason why mental illnesses go untreated is because there is such a massive stigma about talking about it, people are not familiar with the symptoms, it is not seen as normal like a physical health condition might be (depending on what it is, or the severity).


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## BigTom (Jun 13, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> But it is normal to have, not aspergers/autism etc, but some sort of mental health problem, a learning disability, etc, even if you have it temporarily ad then never at all. Part of the reason why mental illnesses go untreated is because there is such a massive stigma about talking about it, people are not familiar with the symptoms, it is not seen as normal like a physical health condition might be (depending on what it is, or the severity).


 
I agree, nonetheless there used to be (and still is) a normal/ASD terminology/language split.


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## J Ed (Jun 13, 2013)




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## DotCommunist (Jun 13, 2013)

can't tube atm, is that ranting taxi driver?


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 13, 2013)

It's gonna end with tragedy that Taxi Driver bloke. Saw this coming months ago.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 13, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> *It's gonna end with tragedy that Taxi Driver bloke*. Saw this coming months ago.


 

well he does have cancer


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 13, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> well he does have cancer


 
Not just that though, I think he's actually a pretty mentally vulnerable person. Sincere and decent and likable but with some problems. He used to follow me on twitter and he'd tweet me 40-50 times a day to promote his video's, sometimes with some really weird comments and non-sequiters. I even remember posting about it on here at the time coz it perturbed me. I thought he was having a nervous breakdown of some kind. Fuck knows what's going on but all the desperate self-promoting vultures are descending to feed on his modest internet meme status, Laurie Penny, Alex Jones, all the parasites. Watch this get worse.


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## Steel Icarus (Jun 14, 2013)

Is it just me or is Laurie in that video not getting how capitalism works?

"What capitalism and austerity does right now is...it's not just an assault on people's wages, on people's physical economic standard of living, it's a psychic assault. It's not just enough to take people's money away, you have to point the finger and say 'You don't deserve that, you're scum, you're a scrounger, why aren't you working?'"

I wouldn't say the narrative is deliberate in terms of saying these things to be a big meanie, rather it's just the best way of justifying cuts, privatisation, etc.


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## smokedout (Jun 14, 2013)

S☼I said:


> "What capitalism and austerity *does right now* is...it's not just an assault on people's wages, on people's physical economic standard of living, it's a psychic assault. It's not just enough to take people's money away, you have to point the finger and say 'You don't deserve that, you're scum, you're a scrounger, why aren't you working?'"


 
this frames the cuts as an issue of identity politics, look at the horrible things they are saying about this group, they should stop saying that stuff, then capitalism/austerity would be okay


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## cesare (Jun 14, 2013)

smokedout said:


> this frames the cuts as an issue of identity politics, look at the horrible things they are saying about this group, they should stop saying that stuff, then capitalism/austerity would be okay


Most of what she was saying was framed in terms of identity politics  + vague social justice (her version of anti capitalism) + "feminism"


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 14, 2013)

The definition of patriarchy she gives definitely isn't the one that underpins what she says and writes - 'patriarchy is um it's like um what anarchists call the man' lol


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## frogwoman (Jun 14, 2013)

I really hope not, I think the artist taxi driver is great and I'm a huge fan of his work.


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## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> The definition of patriarchy she gives definitely isn't the one that underpins what she says and writes - 'patriarchy is um it's like um what anarchists call the man' lol


 
Capitalism isn't really attacking the social-wage in the richest countries either. (I mean it is _doing_ that, but that's not really what capitalism _is_)


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Is it just me or is Laurie in that video not getting how capitalism works?
> 
> "What capitalism and austerity does right now is...it's not just an assault on people's wages, on people's physical economic standard of living, it's a psychic assault. It's not just enough to take people's money away, you have to point the finger and say 'You don't deserve that, you're scum, you're a scrounger, why aren't you working?'"
> 
> I wouldn't say the narrative is deliberate in terms of saying these things to be a big meanie, rather *it's just the best way of justifying cuts, privatisation, etc.*


 



think theres probably more to it than that also, which I'll try to articulate and probably fail. Theres a whole ideological narrative associated with this hard right economic program, a cultural as well as economic outlook closer to the rabid individualism of _some_ american social narratives. To frame things soley in terms of personal responsibility does not exist merely to justify the cuts/neoliberal economics but is part of the mindset as a whole. One hand washes the other.

if that makes any sense


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## J Ed (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> think theres probably more to it than that also, which I'll try to articulate and probably fail. Theres a whole ideological narrative associated with this hard right economic program, a cultural as well as economic outlook closer to the rabid individualism of _some_ american social narratives. To frame things soley in terms of personal responsibility does not exist merely to justify the cuts/neoliberal economics but is part of the mindset as a whole. One hand washes the other.


 

Do you mean that she talks about the cuts and austerity as attacks on individuals by nastier individuals without explaining why they are being implemented and who is benefiting from them? That is what I felt she was doing when I watched it the first time, the second time I realise it isn't quite _that bad_ but it is pretty bad.


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Capitalism isn't really attacking the social-wage in the richest countries either. (I mean it is _doing_ that, but that's not really what capitalism _is_)


 
Yes lol I wonder if, when wages were increasing, she'd have thought it was a little bit communism?

You'd expect her to not know the first thing about capitalism though, what with being some kind of post-modernist identity politicker who thinks class is dead (even though she says she doesn't). But feminism's her 'thing' - so it's telling that her definition of patriarchy could make the most misogynistic teenager a feminist because he's sticking it to the man by not wearing his school tie or summat.

She's basically saying 'what patriarchy is, um, patriarchy is all the um like bad stuff that you um don't like.'


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> think theres probably more to it than that also, which I'll try to articulate and probably fail. Theres a whole ideological narrative associated with this hard right economic program, a cultural as well as economic outlook closer to the rabid individualism of _some_ american social narratives. To frame things soley in terms of personal responsibility does not exist merely to justify the cuts/neoliberal economics but is part of the mindset as a whole. One hand washes the other.
> 
> if that makes any sense


 
something something hegemony


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## J Ed (Jun 14, 2013)

A lot of people that talk about patriarchy don't seem to have a definition for it


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## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> A lot of people that talk about patriarchy don't seem to have a definition for it


 
You could say the same for capitalism, imperialism, Islamophobia etc

Some help needed here on science fiction, Zoe Stavri posted this

http://www.socialjusticeleague.net/2011/09/how-to-be-a-fan-of-problematic-things



> Especially do not ever suggest that people not take media “so seriously”, or argue that it’s “just” a tv show.


 



> Secondly, do not gloss over the issues or derail conversations about the problematic elements. Okay, so you can admit that Dune is problematic. But wait, you’re not done! You need to be willing to engage with people about it! It’s not enough to be like “Ok, I admit that it’s problematic that the major villain is a fat homosexual rapist, but come on, let’s focus on the giant sandworms!”. Shutting people down, ignoring or giving minimal treatment to their concerns, and refusing to fully engage with their issues is a form of oppression. Implicitly, you’re giving the message that this person’s feelings are less important than your own. In fact, in this case you’re saying that their pain is less important than your enjoyment of a book, movie or tv show. So when people raise these concerns, listen respectfully and try to understand the views.


 
I'd never heard of Dune, but I don't get where the homophobia is even after googling.



> I like things, and some of those things are problematic. I like Lord of the Rings even though it’s pretty fucked up with regard to women and race (any narrative that says “this whole race is evil” is fucked up, okay). I like A Song of Ice and Fire even though its portrayal of people of colour is problematic, and often I find that its in-text condemnation of patriarchy isn’t obvious enough to justify the sexism displayed. I like the movie Scott Pilgrim vs The World even though it is racist in its portrayal of Matthew Patel, panders to stereotypes in its portrayal of Wallace, and trivialises queer female sexuality in its portrayal of Ramona and Roxy’s relationship. For fuck’s sake, Ramona even says “It was a phase”! How much more cliche and offensive could this movie be?


 
In fact I don't know any of these things, but I don't get exactly what's being said.



> Liking problematic things doesn’t make you an asshole. In fact, you can like really problematic things and still be not only a good person, but a good social justice activist (TM)!


 
Does this kind of leeway extend to hard classist interpretations of "intersectionality" and the like. Is it OK to like that? What about anti-immigration novels, are those beyond the pale? Is the Amanda Palmer band sexism OK?
Is this a green light for culturally appropriative art for white artists to wear Hindu bindis and Muslim headscarves as part of their critiquing or praise-giving art? What kind of manual is this? Or is it just for science fiction and fantasy - in which case what kind of movement needs a checklist on how to consume scifi and fantasy? I am confused. What is happening?


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

The homophobia in dune comes precisely from God Emperor of Dune where Duncan Idaho (the ghola version) show intense disgust for the Fish Speaker cilt, an all-women band who are often engaged in saphic arts. Idaho is often taken as Frank Herberts 'Mary Sue' but I don't buty that interpretation. However, its the popular one from popular crits


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

As for the thing about Baron Harkonnen being a homosexual rapist, thats a by-the-by. His vicious sadism is not about his homosexuality, his sadism is the point. And his sadism is on a grand scale


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

To focus on Baron Harkonnens homosexuality is in fact to absolve his greater agency as a murderous bastard in charge of an entire dynasty devoted to cruelty, industrialism and slavery


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> You could say the same for capitalism, imperialism, Islamophobia etc
> 
> Some help needed here on science fiction, Zoe Stavri posted this
> 
> ...


 

I would hazard I have read more feminist sci fi and could put together an 'appropriate' reading list for these cunts


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

> I like Lord of the Rings even though it’s pretty fucked up with regard to women and race


 
a banal truth, taken completely out of context. Tolkein was a total white academia bod of a bygone age. There was no agency to his talk of 'races' and characteristics attributed to them. Indeed its more to do with the drawing on older myths like the edda and so on that lends him to so. Not innate racism, he's a reactionry but not a bigot


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## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> The homophobia in dune comes precisely from God Emperor of Dune where Duncan Idaho (the ghola version) show intense disgust for the Fish Speaker cilt, an all-women band who are often engaged in saphic arts. Idaho is often taken as Frank Herberts 'Mary Sue' but I don't buty that interpretation. However, its the popular one from popular crits


 
Son, have you ever kissed a girl?


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

he was from an era and strata that rarely encountered women outside of rigidly defined social roles. His contemporary in the Inklings writing circle CS Lewis always resented him marrying and betraying th boys own club. You want mysogny?? look to Lewis. Tolkien didn't hate women he just never knew how to be with anyone other than wife-matron-mother.

same for many of his time and class


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## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I would hazard I have read more feminist sci fi and could put together an 'appropriate' reading list for these cunts


 
Would you agree that Russ' _The Female Man _doesn't build up to the same tension and catharsis as her short story, "When it changed"?


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Would you agree that Russ' _The Female Man _doesn't build up to the same tension and catharsis as her short story, "When it changed"?


 

not read it- is it considered cornerstone? I generally hit stuff as magpie


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## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> not read it- is it considered cornerstone? I generally hit stuff as magpie


 
I think it's considered _the _feminist SF novel - even more important than say, _The Left Hand of Darkness. _


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## J Ed (Jun 14, 2013)

Interesting that the people in the comments section of that article are so intently discussing the demographics of the cast of Firefly, what's way more problematic about the program (even though I like it) is that it has a very right libertarian theme but that seems to completely pass them by.

The theme of Firefly is particularly odd because Whedon's Dollhouse has a very anti-corporate and imo left-wing message. Interviews with him leave me with the impression that he is a leftist.


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## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

Isn't Firefly (which I've not seen) meant to be basically the post-civil war American west, but in space?


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I think it's considered _the _feminist SF novel - even more important than say, _The Left Hand of Darkness. _


 

ah right, Left hand is le guin isn't it? I prefer her Earthsea stuff tbh


this was the last piece of fem. sci fi I read

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Door_into_Ocean

last month. V. Good, if a bit 'ohh earth mother'


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Isn't Firefly (which I've not seen) meant to be basically the post-civil war American west, but in space?


 

considered to be o, I always took it as nameless frontierism in spaaaaace


never got on with it really. Hated the swashing of buckles. It's like the 90s never happened


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## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

Aye, and the frontierism is where the libertarianism comes in, I suppose.


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## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I would hazard I have read more feminist sci fi and could put together an 'appropriate' reading list for these cunts


 
My only half-knowledge on this kind of issue is Star Trek New Generation's anti-borg one with Picard has deeply unpleasant anti-communism tendencies,  borg do not kill only assimilate why not submit and add to the collective treasury of communal knowledge. Borg seek an end to hierarchies like Guynan's planet but because Guynan is a black female the whole thing is played as white borg want to colonise/rape black females.

I've never seen an episode of the original series but that was genuinely pretty loaded with sexism even though it was 'liberal' on race apparently.


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## J Ed (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Isn't Firefly (which I've not seen) meant to be basically the post-civil war American west, but in space?


 

More or less, I can't find it now but a while ago I came across fanfic that adapted it to a post Spanish Civil War story in space. Very weird!


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## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> My only half-knowledge on this kind of issue is Star Trek New Generation's anti-borg one with Picard has deeply unpleasant anti-communism tendencies,  borg do not kill only assimilate why not submit and add to the collective treasury of communal knowledge. Borg seek an end to hierarchies like Guynan's planet but because Guynan is a black female the whole thing is played as white borg want to colonise/rape black females.
> 
> I've never seen an episode of the original series but that was genuinely pretty loaded with sexism even though it was 'liberal' on race apparently.


 
Aye, and while the other stars were on strong contracts, Nichelle Nichols was initially just paid from week to week.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> My only half-knowledge on this kind of issue is Star Trek New Generation's anti-borg one with Picard has deeply unpleasant anti-communism tendencies,  borg do not kill only assimilate why not submit and add to the collective treasury of communal knowledge. Borg seek an end to hierarchies like Guynan's planet but because Guynan is a black female the whole thing is played as white borg want to colonise/rape black females.
> 
> I've never seen an episode of the original series but that was genuinely pretty loaded with sexism even though it was 'liberal' on race apparently.


 

It was liberal on race so long as James Tiberius Kirk could fuck it


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> My only half-knowledge on this kind of issue is Star Trek New Generation's anti-borg one with Picard has deeply unpleasant anti-communism tendencies,  borg do not kill only assimilate why not submit and add to the collective treasury of communal knowledge. Borg seek an end to hierarchies like Guynan's planet but because Guynan is a black female the whole thing is played as white borg want to colonise/rape black females.
> 
> I've never seen an episode of the original series but that was genuinely pretty loaded with sexism even though it was 'liberal' on race apparently.


 

Star Trek  TNG is an intensely liberal show. This is why they often wring hands over utter barbarism and decide the Prime Directive does not allow intervention.

The borg are not a metaphor for communism. Theres way to much hive fever stuff, enemy within, co-option....well actually maybe they are


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## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> The theme of Firefly is particularly odd because Whedon's Dollhouse has a very anti-corporate and imo left-wing message. Interviews with him leave me with the impression that he is a leftist.


 
Isn't he the guy who made Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I've never seen an episode but isn't that full of western unacknowledged colonialist mentality tropes playing with vampires and cultures who believe in the undead etc. 

LP's fellow Oxford friend Roz Kaveney is an expert on all this:

Reading The Vampire Slayer - The New, Updated Unofficial Guide To Buffy And Angel (2001)
From Alien to the Matrix: Reading Science Fiction Film (2005)
Superheroes!: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films (2006)
Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Film and Television from 'Heathers' to 'Veronica Mars (2006)
Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit, and Steel (2010)
Nip/Tuck: Television That Gets Under Your Skin (2011)


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## agricola (Jun 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Interesting that the people in the comments section of that article are so intently discussing the demographics of the cast of Firefly, what's way more problematic about the program (even though I like it) is that it has a very right libertarian theme but that seems to completely pass them by.
> 
> The theme of Firefly is particularly odd because Whedon's Dollhouse has a very anti-corporate and imo left-wing message. Interviews with him leave me with the impression that he is a leftist.


 
Its theme might be libertarian (though you could just as easily say its anarchist), but I fail to see how Firefly could ever be said to have a right-wing theme to it.


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## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

agricola said:


> Its theme might be libertarian (though you could just as easily say its anarchist), but I fail to see how Firefly could ever be said to have a right-wing theme to it.


 
Moorcock's essay Starship Stormtroopers covers a lot of this:

http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/moorcock.html



> Rugged individualism also goes hand in hand with a strong faith in paternalism -- albeit a tolerant and somewhat distant paternalism -- and many otherwise sharp-witted libertarians seem to see nothing in the morality of a John Wayne Western to conflict with their views. Heinlein's paternalism is at heart the same as Wayne's. In the final analysis it is a kind of easy-going militarism favoured by the veteran professional soldier -- the chain of command is complex -- many adult responsibilities can be left to that chain as long as broad, but firmly enforced, rules from 'high up' are adhered to. Heinlein is Eisenhower Man and his views seem to me to be more pernicious than ordinary infantile back-to-the-land Christian communism, with its mysticism and its hatred of technology. To be an anarchist, surely, is to reject authority but to accept self-discipline and community responsibility. To be a rugged individualist a la Heinlein and others is to be forever a child who must obey, charm and cajole to be tolerated by some benign, omniscient father: Rooster Coburn shuffling his feet in front of a judge he respects for his office (but not necessarily himself) in True Grit.


 
Was Heinlein's weird and creepy obsession with incest in some way connected to his right-libertarian politics?


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

its great how we have finally hit my specialist subject in this thread


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Was Heinlein's weird and creepy obsession with incest in some way connected to his right-libertarian politics?


 

I think its the extreme end of libertarian thinking- not only are gov rules invalid but basic familial and social assumptions are to be disregarded for the brave new man


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## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I think its the extreme end of libertarian thinking- not only are gov rules invalid but basic familial and social assumptions are to be disregarded for the brave new man


 
Their concept of liberty is essentially "the right of the powerful" - and that's where their ideology overlaps with fascism.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Their concept of liberty is essentially "the right of the powerful" - and that's where it overlaps with fascism.


 

which ties in with the idea that incest is fine for the patriarch as he is righteous in power


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## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

Until Arya Stark stabs him in the neck with a big knife.


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## frogwoman (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> its great how we have finally hit my specialist subject in this thread


 

this thread is basically a microcosm of urban


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Star Trek TNG is an intensely liberal show. This is why they often wring hands over utter barbarism and decide the Prime Directive does not allow intervention.
> 
> The borg are not a metaphor for communism. Theres way to much hive fever stuff, enemy within, co-option....well actually maybe they are


 
What are the Borg then? They were an unusual 'enemy' in sci fi. Usually the communistic societies are goodies.

I believe star trek next generation and maybe the other ones were quite well unionised all studio workers respected the writers' late 1980s WGA picket lines (iirc) even though it was breach of contract.

The intersectional side probably wins this one, a solid class analysis of popular culture eludes us:

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/240030095056699393



> I wish serious critics wouldn't treat geeky things, comics etc, as gimmicks they have to condescend to. Not that batman isn't now mainstream


 


> Essentially, FANFIC AND ORGASMS 4 EVAR. (Also, Full Communism.)


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> *What are the Borg then? They were an unusual 'enemy' in sci fi. Usually the communistic societies are goodies.*
> 
> I believe star trek next generation and maybe the other ones were quite well unionised all studio workers respected the writers' late 1980s WGA picket lines (iirc) even though it was breach of contract.
> 
> ...


 
a swarm society commanded by a central intelligence. Its a metaphor for Stalinism


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> this thread is basically a microcosm of urban


 
If Urban is a pub, this thread is the snug.

(Do you have snugs in Inglisch pubs?)


----------



## agricola (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> a swarm society commanded by a central intelligence. Its a metaphor for Stalinism


 
I disagree - I have watched every Borg episode ever filmed, and not once have I seen a drone with an ice-axe.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

Surely the Borg are meant to be rubber/PVC fetishists?

All sorts of alternative lifestyles here on Craggy Island.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 14, 2013)

agricola said:


> Its theme might be libertarian (though you could just as easily say its anarchist), but I fail to see how Firefly could ever be said to have a right-wing theme to it.


 

Really? That was my instinctive (partly guilty) reaction to watching it and enjoying it, and I know others who have felt the same!

I suppose that my thinking is that the Alliance is obviously supposed to be analogous to the union in the US Civil War, and the Alliance is portrayed as corrupt and tyrannical in Firefly although since the rebels in the TV programme are multi-ethnic we can probably assume that in Firefly the Civil War wasn't racially charged, although that in itself could be considered a nod to apologists for the Confederacy!

Thinking about it now though, Firefly is a lot better about class (it acknowledges that it exists for a start and is a driving factor in a lot of the plotlines) than most TV programmes.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Thinking about it now though, Firefly is a lot better about class (it acknowledges that it exists for a start and is a driving factor in a lot of the plotlines) than most TV programmes.


 
Let us not forget the tragic fate of Mycah the butcher's boy.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

agricola said:


> I disagree - I have watched every Borg episode ever filmed, and not once have I seen a drone with an ice-axe.


 

Mercer was a sleeper, borg nanites within him but otherwise passing. Think a deconditioned Locutus


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 14, 2013)

velvet acid christ, the anarchist (but slightly pro AR) industrial band, did a great sampling of the borg on an anti-fascist song they did


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

Charlie Stross' working title for Iron Sunrise was "Space Nazis Must Die".


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 14, 2013)

seriously do a search for "futile" by VAC, you'll see what I mean, it's amazing


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> a swarm society commanded by a central intelligence. Its a metaphor for Stalinism


 
Isn't this 'Stalinism' the standard version of all communistic efforts, especially in the US, after the Truman purges onward?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> its great how we have finally hit my specialist subject in this thread


 
apologism for racism in science-fiction and fantasy novels?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Isn't this 'Stalinism' the standard version of all communistic efforts, especially in the US, after the Truman purges onward?


 

seen through the lense of US liberalism yes. Picard, in stark contrast to his predecessor was an erudite thinker and peace-in-our-time man. But then obliterated resistance despite all the fine words. Because he spent time after every episode updating 'Captains log' in a finishing monolouge filled with platitudes we are supposed to assume the gross imperialism and attempts at hegemony by the Federation and its flag/gunship Enterprise is somehow softer. more just. Clinton.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> apologism for racism in science-fiction and fantasy novels?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> seen through the lense of US liberalism yes. Picard, in stark contrast to his predecessor was an erudite thinker and peace-in-our-time man. But then obliterated resistance despite all the fine words. Because he spent time after every episode updating 'Captains log' in a finishing monolouge filled with platitudes we are supposed to assume the gross imperialism and attempts at hegemony by the Federation and its flag/gunship Enterprise is somehow softer. more just. Clinton.


 
I get what you're saying the Federation always does good things. But Star Trek Next Generation began in the era of Reagan and ended with the final shot of Picard playing poker with his officers about fourteen months into Clinton's first term. Most of it was under  George Bush that writers were writing before Clinton was even a major figure, he was very much a suprise victor in the primaries AFAIR.


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> If Urban is a pub, this thread is the snug.


 
The snug's toılet.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I get what you're saying the Federation always does good things. But Star Trek Next Generation began in the era of Reagan and ended with the final shot of Picard playing poker with his officers about fourteen months into Clinton's first term. Most of it was under George Bush that writers were writing before Clinton was even a major figure, he was very much a suprise victor in the primaries AFAIR.


 

This does not mean the writers were reaganites. Quite the opposite.

Look at the ferengi. Go have a look. Tell me what you think and where they fit in it all.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> This does not mean the writers were reaganites. Quite the opposite.
> 
> Look at the ferengi. Go have a look. Tell me what you think and where they fit in it all.


 
Non-human monsters with big noses, who are obsessed with money. Whatever could this mean?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> This does not mean the writers were reaganites. Quite the opposite.
> 
> Look at the ferengi. Go have a look. Tell me what you think and where they fit in it all.


 
Yes they are liberals - angry at what Reagan and Bush had done.
The ferengi are hideous free-marketeers, right?
Star Trek is critical of the excesses of capitalist society - it has unionised writers after all.
Deep space nine I think had a double episode called past tense about earth in 2200 or whenever with job centres being fortified and untreated mental health problems and hungry elderly people and slum areas being zoned off to prevent crime and so troublemakers couldn't just pickpocket willynilly in middle-class areas.
Then this entirely non-violent hero called James Bell rescues some policemen in the midst of a mass free-for-all uprising where others are killed. This makes the middle-class people realise the poor are humans too and they share all their stuff freely and humankind makes the Federation happen. I can't remember it but it's fantastically inept but also a liberal warning of the future - some of the poor are going to hurt you and yours unless 'we' sort 'it' out.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

phildwyer said:


> The snug's toılet.


 
a broken condom machine in the snug's toilet.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

and there you have post TOS Star Trek. They are vile liberals- every other week the Enterprise is diverted into a humanitarian mission that establishes these credentials. However 'While en route to the Vega system with vital medical supplies we have been alerted by an ongoing crises in the shakinny-arkanz binary system. We are on course at warp factor five to deliver those cunts some justice'

DS9 is a different case, and came later. It's holding a DMZ. Has teeth, even a secret warship (Defiant) with naughty tech that is against existing treaties about cloaking devices.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

STOP TALKING ABOUT STAR TREK


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)




----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> STOP TALKING ABOUT STAR TREK
> 
> 
> 
> > science fiction is a window into the soul of what a society wishes it could be


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

Fucking hell, what does that say about the Draka?

(not that I've read the Draka series)


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> science fiction is a window into the soul of what a society wishes it could be


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> STOP TALKING ABOUT STAR TREK


 
In case it's not clear: I find Star Trek pretty shabby and with sharp slices of US anticommunism. But you're right, I don't want to have to watch it, to properly investigate its "problems" and relationship to society.  It's laughably bad - phasers, stun, warp factor


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> In case it's not clear: I find Star Trek pretty shabby and with sharp slices of US anticommunism. But you're right, I don't want to have to watch it, to properly investigate its "problems" and relationship to society.  It's laughably bad - phasers, stun, warp factor


 
Yes, sihhi. You watch Star Trek _ironically. _I believe you. Yes.


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Let us not forget the tragic fate of Mycah the butcher's boy.


 
Poor Mycah. They ran him down.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Yes, sihhi. You watch Star Trek _ironically. _I believe you. Yes.


 
Is this a Star Trek witch-hunt? I don't watch it anymore it hasn't been on the BBC for 20 years. I do find the masses of documentation endearing though. 

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Portal:Main

The Star Trek wikipedia above has more articles than all genuine wikipedia articles about eg Bolivia


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Fucking hell, what does that say about the Draka?
> 
> (not that I've read the Draka series)


 
Me neither, but I've read enough comments about it to seriously avoid anyone who tells me they're a fan


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

This is the episode I mentioned earlier, its plot is pretty lame as well - stuff happening that makes no sense.

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Past_Tense,_Part_I_(episode)

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Past_Tense,_Part_II_(episode)

It stood out for these (in retrospect naff) 'deep' conversations:



> "By the early 2020s, there was a place like this in every major city in the United States."
> "Why are these people in here? Are they criminals?"
> "No, people with criminal records weren't allowed in the Sanctuary Districts."
> "Then what did they do to deserve this?"
> ...


 
As soon as anyone says science fiction X is bad on the basis of having seen a few they are labelled as secret X addicts. This is I believe is _*geek privilege*_.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> You could say the same for capitalism, imperialism, Islamophobia etc
> 
> Some help needed here on science fiction, Zoe Stavri posted this
> 
> ...


 
The Scott Pilgrim critique is just plain daft. The whole impetus of the story is that young people are invariably shallow and fixated on self-gratification, and that's how almost all the characters act in the film. there's nothing racist, homophobic or sexist about it unless you fixate on minor issues of character that are entirely related to the shallowness of said characters, and which you couldn't convey the plot without.


Christ. I've just admitted watching "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World"!


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Christ. I've just admitted watching "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World"!


 
my girlfriend spent about twenty minutes explaining why this film was massively sexist.  i can't remember but the gist of it is something to do with fedoras.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> considered to be o, I always took it as nameless frontierism in spaaaaace
> 
> 
> never got on with it really. Hated the swashing of buckles. It's like the 90s never happened


 
Some of the derring-do was derring-overdone, certainly. Great characterisation, and anyone who says the Jaynetown episode isn't the funniest example of unintended consequences on TV is a damn fool!


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

Sorry, my mistake, it's oppression of geeks and non-geek privilege, which capitalists expoit to turn geeks into allies of capitalism.




> And the geek shall inherit the earth
> 
> There is a certain type of nerd entitlement that is all too easily co-opted into a modern mythology of ruthless capitalist exploitation, in which the acquisition of wealth and status at all costs is phrased as a cheeky way of getting one's own back on those kids who were mean to you at school. As somebody whose only schoolfriends were my Dungeons & Dragons team, I understand all too well how every socialist and egalitarian principle can pale into insignificance compared to the overwhelming urge to show that unattainable girl or boy who spurned your dorky sixth-form advances just what they were missing.
> 
> ...


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 14, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> The Scott Pilgrim critique is just plain daft. The whole impetus of the story is that young people are invariably shallow and fixated on self-gratification, and that's how almost all the characters act in the film. there's nothing racist, homophobic or sexist about it unless you fixate on minor issues of character that are entirely related to the shallowness of said characters, and which you couldn't convey the plot without.
> 
> 
> Christ. I've just admitted watching "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World"!


 
It's OK not only have I watched it, I have all the graphic novels


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> my girlfriend spent about twenty minutes explaining why this film was massively sexist. i can't remember but the gist of it is something to do with fedoras.


 
The whole film is based on these late teen-early 20s stereotypical (and I mean *baldly* stereotypical) whiny angsty characters. There's sexism, sure, but it runs both ways, as do the other -isms.
It has a good line on vegans, though.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> my girlfriend spent about twenty minutes explaining why this film was massively sexist. i can't remember but the gist of it is something to do with fedoras.


 
Are you sure you didn't watch by accident with a mate of hers?

Why would someone tell you something you aren't watching was sexist?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 14, 2013)

agricola said:


> Its theme might be libertarian (though you could just as easily say its anarchist), but I fail to see how Firefly could ever be said to have a right-wing theme to it.


 
Well, The Alliance are certainly what we'd call "right-wing authoritarian", in that you're free to do what you want as long as you do it The Alliance way, and the contradictions between how The Alliance do things, and how the outer planets do things very much points that up.
Also, to be fair, you could say it's about the ultimate in libertarianism too - The Reavers.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Was Heinlein's weird and creepy obsession with incest in some way connected to his right-libertarian politics?


 
Yes, probably.

H Bruce Franklin, the US literary critic and entertaining Maoist nutter, wrote a book about Heinlein that was I think the first academic literary criticism monograph about a science fiction writer. Heinlein fans hated it.

Heinlein's politics weren't consistent. He started out quite far to the left before moving early in his career hard to the right. Then he moved from a kind of authoritarian right wing attitude (Starship Troopers etc) to a kind of self-indulgent creepy old man right libertarianism, while still of course keeping his reverence for the military. As he's crudely didactic quite a lot of the time, you can quite easily trace the shifts in his views through his work.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I think its the extreme end of libertarian thinking- not only are gov rules invalid but basic familial and social assumptions are to be disregarded for the brave new man


 
Also the extreme end of socio-biological thinking of the time.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> my girlfriend spent about twenty minutes explaining why this film was massively sexist. i can't remember but the gist of it is something to do with fedoras.


 
Apparently, the guy who does the original comics changed the ending after seeing the film because he though it was sexist. The film came out before the final comic and had an ending based on a planned outline of the last comic.


----------



## weepiper (Jun 14, 2013)

I've given up on Alex Andreou after he tweeted this patronising sexist claptrap then said I should basically shut up about it being sexist because he was only talking about his own mum and he finds it adorable and he loves her


----------



## YouSir (Jun 14, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I've given up on Alex Andreou after he tweeted this patronising sexist claptrap then said I should basically shut up about it being sexist because he was only talking about his own mum and he finds it adorable and he loves her



Looks more like ageism than sexism. Old meme, old folks fail at technology.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> a banal truth, taken completely out of context. Tolkein was a total white academia bod of a bygone age. There was no agency to his talk of 'races' and characteristics attributed to them. Indeed its more to do with the drawing on older myths like the edda and so on that lends him to so. Not innate racism, he's a reactionry but not a bigot


 
The issue is not whether Tolkein was a "bigot" on a personal level. It's about the racism in his work. And there's a lot of it. While women essentially don't exist at all, except for the very rare appearance of an ultra-idealised semi-divine being or two. These truths are only "banal" if you regard race and gender as irrelevant beside the really important things in life like making up elvish languages, which is essentially what a lot of fantasy fan special pleading amounts to.

It's interesting though, and telling, that the intersectionalists pick up on the "problematic" politics of race and gender in Tolkein but don't ever mention the reactionary politics of class, which are if anything more up front and which were prominent in earlier left wing critiques going back to Moorcock.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2013)

I don't feel safe on this thread anymore.


----------



## weepiper (Jun 14, 2013)

YouSir said:


> Looks more like ageism than sexism. Old meme, old folks fail at technology.


 

It's both really, but it's based on attitudes that make it very difficult for middle-aged women to find work outside of care work, office admin or retail, all of which have shit wages and shit job security. It's not funny.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 14, 2013)

I'd be a lot happier if we could drop the sci fi weirdness and get back to talking about toilet habits


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> The issue is not whether Tolkein was a "bigot" on a personal level. I*t's about the racism in his work. And there's a lot of it*. While women essentially don't exist at all, except for the very rare appearance of an ultra-idealised semi-divine being or two. These truths are only "banal" if you regard race and gender as irrelevant beside the really important things in life like making up elvish languages, which is essentially what a lot of fantasy fan special pleading amounts to.
> 
> It's interesting though, and telling, that the intersectionalists pick up on the "problematic" politics of race and gender in Tolkein but don't ever mention the reactionary politics of class, which are if anything more up front and which were prominent in earlier left wing critiques going back to Moorcock.


 

name it. I can, I just want to see if you can. Disregarding the easterlings and umbar folks.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I don't feel safe on this thread anymore.


 

Is feeling uncomfortable about sci fi a privilege or an oppression?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I don't feel safe on this thread anymore.


 
We need a safe space where the sci fi fans can't use their geek privilege to silence and oppress us


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

as for the classism, well yes thats pretty naked througout. So is most fiction of its age


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

oh and its elven not elvish. He was very particular about that


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> name it. I can, I just want to see if you can. Disregarding the easterlings and umbar folks.


 
Give examples... apart from the most obvious examples? Aside from the swarthy hordes of the South and East, there are the Orcs, and on a reverse note the Dunedain.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> oh and its elven not elvish. He was very particular about that


 
It's a little bit elvish.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> as for the classism, well yes thats pretty naked througout. So is most fiction of its age


 
Special pleading again. Tolkein's views on class (and please never say "classism" again in my presence) were not simply typical of his time. He was a reactionary.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> We need a safe space where the sci fi fans can't use their geek privilege to silence and oppress us


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I don't feel safe on this thread anymore.


 
I have two options:
1.


> What went wrong? Should I have placed a trigger warning. I am sorry. Thank you for calling me out. I won't make light of culture-based oppression. The Clash were wrong to do covers of West Indian musical forms. I'm dealing with being a shitty human being.


 
or 
2. 


> Hey geek oppressor, stop with your micro-aggression, I'm calling you out.


 
Pick and chose - if you have a feisty following 2 - otherwise 1.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Give examples... apart from the most obvious examples? Aside from the swarthy hordes of the South and East, there are the Orcs, and on a reverse note the Dunedain.


 

no I asked you- but the 'swarthy' look of cross bred orcs and men is a good one.

on a nice mix is how the orcs are similarly industrial and also swarthy and squat, and rough of speech


----------



## agricola (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> no I asked you- but the 'swarthy' look of cross bred orcs and men is a good one.
> 
> on a nice mix is how the orcs are similarly industrial and also swarthy and squat, and rough of speech


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Special pleading again. Tolkein's views on class (and please never say "classism" again in my presence) were not simply typical of his time. He was a reactionary.


 
as I have already stated way up thread- shadow boxing?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I have two options:
> 1.
> 
> 
> ...


 
Please tell me that they're both real . I'd love to see #1 though. And people did argue that - they argued the pogues couldn't do their stuff as well. Same people probably.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Please tell me that they're both real . I'd love to see #1 though. And people did argue that - they argued the pogues couldn't do their stuff as well. Same people probably.


 
Then again, loads of Irish people think the Waterboys are an Irish group. . .


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Then again, loads of Irish people think the Waterboys are an Irish group. . .


 
_That's what they sound like what i think they should sound like! Big howling moon pre-packed romanticism and the great free life with a hat on._


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It's a little bit elvish.


 

elf privilege.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> shadow boxing?


 
A couple of your posts have followed the same pattern: Acknowledge the existence of, ahem, "problematic" views on race, class and gender in Tolkein... and then play down its significance. So pointing out the issues of race and gender is "banal", while his views on class become typical of the period. This is a fairly typical sort of response by fans who aren't stupid enough to try to simply deny the existence of those issues in the first place but who don't want to let those problems get in their way.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Please tell me that they're both real . I'd love to see #1 though. And people did argue that - they argued the pogues couldn't do their stuff as well. Same people probably.


 
I'm not going to link to it because the person is a young adult female (I lost the link anyway) but this tumblr poster had a go at someone (who works in a tattoo parlour and posts up his work as examples) for tattooing native American symbols onto (white) people's skins.
Also white people with dreaded or platted hair have been attacked for cultural appropriation.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I
> Also white people with dreaded or platted hair have been attacked for cultural appropriation.


 
Having a go at white people for having dreadlocks is perfectly fine with me, although the main line of attack should be about hippies and scabies not cultural appropriation.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> A couple of your posts have followed the same pattern: Acknowledge the existence of, ahem, "problematic" views on race, class and gender and Tolkein... and then play down its significance. So pointing out the issues of race and gender is "banal", while his views on class become typical of the period. This is a fairly typical sort of response by fans who aren't stupid enough to try to simply deny the existence of those issues in the first place but who don't want to let those problems get in their way.


 

Do you renounce his works! Do you renounce them!

they are typical of the period though, and the writerly milue (one day I'll work out how to spell that word).

the reason its 'banal' is because its something that cn be levelled at the entirety more or less of the post tolkien fantasy genre.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> A couple of your posts have followed the same pattern: Acknowledge the existence of, ahem, "problematic" views on race, class and gender in Tolkein... and then play down its significance. So pointing out the issues of race and gender is "banal", while his views on class become typical of the period. This is a fairly typical sort of response by fans who aren't stupid enough to try to simply deny the existence of those issues in the first place but who don't want to let those problems get in their way.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Having a go at white people for having dreadlocks is perfectly fine with me, although the main line of attack should be about hippies and scabies not cultural appropriation.


 
so we see how you disdain the dunlanders


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Are you sure you didn't watch by accident with a mate of hers?
> 
> Why would someone tell you something you aren't watching was sexist?


 
Me: "Shall we watch this?"  *indicates Scott Pilgrim DVD*

Her: "It's massively sexist because.... [20 minutes pass]... and that is why that film is massively sexist"

Me: "Shall we watch Predator again then?"

Her: "GET TO THA CHOPPA!!!"


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 14, 2013)

I was about to say that if people wanted to wear flatcaps and keep whippets as pets I don't have a problem with this cultural appropriation. But then I got an image of flatcap wearing hipsters and concluded I'd be opening the door to all manner of evils so I decided against it.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> elf privilege.


 
Aloof unavailable elf queen.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> they are typical of the period though, and the writerly milue (one day I'll work out how to spell that word).
> 
> the reason its 'banal' is because its something that cn be levelled at the entirety more or less of the post tolkien fantasy genre.


 
That "more or less" the entire post-Tolkein fantasy genre has reactionary politics isn't "banal". It's about the only thing about the genre interesting enough to bother talking about.

Tolkein's views were not typical of writers in his period. They were typical of people in his young fogey Christian academic milieu.


----------



## agricola (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Aloof unavailable elf queen.


 
Thats so much privilege she would have to spend most of her time in the Undying Lands checking it all.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Then again, loads of Irish people think the Waterboys are an Irish group. . .


 
Didn't they move to Galway? I'm sure they fit in just fine with all the other Celto-Poetic demi-crusties in that God forsaken hovel.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Aloof unavailable elf queen.


 

If you read the brilliant 'Last Ringbearer' (translated from russian) the elf queen refuses to fuck Aarogorn because as a 1000 year old being she regards sleeping with a human as akin to bestiality and peadophilia


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> Me: "Shall we watch this?" *indicates Scott Pilgrim DVD*


 
It's all out in the open now - preference for films of comic books about geeks


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> That "more or less" the entire post-Tolkein fantasy genre has reactionary politics isn't "banal". *It's about the only thing about the genre interesting enough to bother talking about.*
> 
> Tolkein's views were not typical of writers in his period. They were typical of people in his young fogey Christian academic milieu.


 

and there we have interest declared


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Didn't they move to Galway? I'm sure they fit in just fine with all the other Celto-Poetic demi-crusties in that God forsaken hovel.


 
Better the godforsaken hovel that is Galway than the filthy open sewer that is Dublin (a stinking shitpit that is unfit to be capital of any republic).


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I was about to say that if people wanted to wear flatcaps and keep whippets as pets I don't have a problem with this cultural appropriation..


 
i wear flatcaps and keep whippets.  i've been wearing flatcaps and keeping whippets since i was a boy.  AND I'M A SOUTHERN NANCY AND SPINEY APPROVES.

take that hipsters.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It's all out in the open now - preference for films of comic books about geeks


 
i still haven't seen it, mind.  two christmasses ago i got it, still in the wrap.  ONE DAY I WILL WATCH THE DAMN MOVIE AND MAKE UP MY OWN MIND, I PROMISE YOU.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> and there we have interest declared


 
I'm not running some vendetta against escapist nonsense. But I do think that the kind of places people like to escape to are interesting.

I also think that the contrast between the relatively varied politics of SF and the almost always reactionary politics of (post-Tolkein) fantasy is interesting. I say almost always because, of course, the genre assumptions have always produced hostile reactions from some writers.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

i love the lord of the rings.  it's awesome.  but, you know, problematic


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I'm not running some vendetta against escapist nonsense. But I do think that the kind of places people like to escape to are interesting.
> 
> I also think that the contrast between the relatively varied politics of SF and the almost always reactionary politics of (post-Tolkein) fantasy is interesting. I say almost always because, of course, the genre assumptions have always produced hostile reactions from some writers.


 
sci fi is not that varied either tbh, a hell of a lot is swashbuckling or hard science.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Better the godforsaken hovel that is Galway than the filthy open sewer that is Dublin (a stinking shitpit that is unfit to be capital of any republic).


 
There's nothing in Galway apart from state funded hippy art and its hangers on. The whole place's economy is based on grants for smug Celto-gobshitery. Like Belfast except you get funding to produce official culture instead of to stop kneecapping kids.

There must be some way to get the UVF to deal with Macnas.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i wear flatcaps and keep whippets. i've been wearing flatcaps and keeping whippets since i was a boy


 
Are you doing the flat caps the right way though?  







Is this the right way?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> _That's what they sound like what i think they should sound like! Big howling moon pre-packed romanticism and the great free life with a hat on._


 
I thought the woman who played Catelyn Stark must have been one of the Cusack family, but apparently not. . .


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

i'm afraid i do it like number one.  he looks a bit like my grandad.  except my grandad avoided the countryside.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> There's nothing in Galway apart from state funded hippy art and its hangers on. The whole place's economy is based on grants for smug Celto-gobshitery. Like Belfast except you get funding to produce official culture instead of to stop kneecapping kids.
> 
> There must be some way to get the UVF to deal with Macnas.


 
Yeah, nothing but state funded hippy art - and the medical equipment factory (unionised - well SIPTU, anyway) that my brother works in.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> sci fi is not that varied either tbh, a hell of a lot is swashbuckling or hard science.


 
Yes, but you'll find mainstream SF with political assumptions that range from the the further reaches of the far left at one end to demi-fascist right wing militaria at the other and covering most points in between.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

Sci fi is a dying genre, though - it will go the way of the western in our lifetime. And from what I see on sale in the shops, right wing milSF seems to predominate.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2013)

right wing milSF

Have they made #9?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Sci fi is a dying genre, though - it will go the way of the western in our lifetime. And from what I see on sale in the shops, right wing milSF seems to predominate.


 

bollocks, theres still good stuff out there. Its just like it ever was though, you have to kiss a lot of frogs


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

3.14159

(in response to butchersapron)


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Yes, but you'll find mainstream SF with political assumptions that range from the the further reaches of the far left at one end to demi-fascist right wing militaria at the other and covering most points in between.


 

you'll get the same with fantasy if you wade through the crap and learn to avoid the dead giveaway signals contained in first chapter, cover design and blurb.

cover design is not always a great indicator though. The most thoughtful anti-genre piece can  oft have some publisher go 'pic of bigboobed lady in armour holding a wand' as cover art


----------



## weepiper (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Are you doing the flat caps the right way though?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
That's not a leather jacket, it's a Barbour.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Yeah, nothing but state funded hippy art - and the medical equipment factory (unionised - well SIPTU, anyway) that my brother works in.


 
I think you might be taking a post that ends with a call for Loyalist goon squads to be unleashed on harmless hippies with giant puppets a little too seriously.

I do find Galway's immense smugness rather obnoxious, and really fucking hate "official culture" Celto-art and hippies, the two pillars on which rest much of Galway's culture and the two things that most obviously distinguish the place from any other small Irish town to the visitor.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

weepiper said:


> That's not a leather jacket, it's a Barbour.


 
And now the FASHION NERDS want in on the action.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> you'll get the same with fantasy if you wade through the crap and learn to avoid the dead giveaway signals contained in first chapter, cover design and blurb.


 
Well, yes, in the sense that books reacting to the genre's political assumptions exist. But as you've noted yourself, those assumptions are overwhelmingly dominant.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I think you might be taking a post that ends with a call for Loyalist goon squads to be unleashed on harmless hippies with giant puppets a little too seriously.


 
Damn, and I thought the SP was once again leading the way in innovative Marxist theorising.



Nigel Irritable said:


> I do find Galway's immense smugness rather obnoxious, and really fucking hate "official culture" Celto-art and hippies, the two pillars on which rest much of Galway's culture and the two things that most obviously distinguish the place from any other small Irish town to the visitor.


 
Better a second rate imitation of Celto-Irish culture, than the third-rate imitation of America that most of Ireland has become.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2013)

Time to stop anyway, too many people jumping back on the flat cap wagon. If hastily made caps on local market are anything to go by.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Celto-art


 
What's the relationship between that and Celtic art?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Someday the backwards flatcap by kangol as sported by me and samuel l jackson for most of the late 90s will make a comeback and I will be seen as a prophet before my time


----------



## agricola (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> you'll get the same with fantasy if you wade through the crap and learn to avoid the dead giveaway signals contained in first chapter, cover design and blurb.
> 
> cover design is not always a great indicator though. The most thoughtful anti-genre piece can oft have some publisher go 'pic of bigboobed lady in armour holding a wand' as cover art


 
Its a shame that there isnt a book to go with this, then.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What's the relationship between that and Celtic art?


 
Celtic art was art made by Celts. Celto-Art is Ireland's official state backed cultural export industry, heavily concentrated in Galway and largely produced by ruthless hippies in a style suffused with stage Oirishry and confused mysticism. Think of a Waterboys record that never stops playing.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

agricola said:


> Its a shame that there isnt a book to go with this, then.


 

Not read Discordia then?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Not read Discordia then?


 
Who has? 

Paul Mason and i think that's it.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> bollocks, theres still good stuff out there. Its just like it ever was though, you have to kiss a lot of frogs


 
this.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Someday the backwards flatcap by kangol as sported by me and samuel l jackson for most of the late 90s will make a comeback and I will be seen as a prophet before my time


 
before it was popular?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Who has?
> 
> Paul Mason and i think that's it.


 

looked at the pictures ftw


----------



## weepiper (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> And now the FASHION NERDS want in on the action.


 
Not something I've ever been called before!


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> before it was popular?


 

I had shaved sides and proper cheek length braids to go with it so I don't think popular is ever or was ever going to come into it


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Time to stop anyway, too many people jumping back on the flat cap wagon. If hastily made caps on local market are anything to go by.


 
it will come and go.  sometimes my head will be fashionable, sometimes it won't.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I had shaved sides and proper cheek length braids to go with it so I don't think popular is ever or was ever going to come into it


 
did you have massively baggy trousers?


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Better a second rate imitation of Celto-Irish culture, than the third-rate imitation of America that most of Ireland has become.


 
But that's just it: Galway is the same as every other small Irish town, but with added hippies and Celto-poetry. The unique things about Galway don't replace the usual shit, they add a particular piquancy to it.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> did you have massively baggy trousers?


 

kombats


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Who has?
> 
> Paul Mason and i think that's it.


 
No this guy has








_The shock of red hair, the unabashedly strident feminism, the radical politics, the sheer bloody-minded refusal to act and talk like middle class white women are supposed to. She’s an anomaly in modern British political commentary – a radical strident feminist whose sheer bloody-minded refusal to behave like a nice middle-class girl raises the hackles of her fellow writers. __Their sneers clash incongruously with her editing of The New Review, The New Statesman and regular contributions to the Independent (amongst others)_

_To be blunt she was a shock to the system. I didn’t know writers could do this. I didn’t know then, that this was what journalism could become; I didn’t know that journalism and activism weren’t mutually exclusive and that to report and change the world around you all you needed was the desire to say something and the courage to do something._

_There she filed her copy from the frontline of what people believed could be this generation’s revolution. New York must have been a surreal place to be that summer, full of writers and activists, rebels and dreamers and artists. It was there that Laurie Penny met Molly Crabapple, (yes, really) and once the summer of idealism faded the two of them jumped on a plane and came to Greece. The two of them are a radical odd couple_

_Penny is the wordsmith and Crabapple the illustrator. Both unashamedly radical in their own ways, talented and deeply political; charmingly the two have a deep affection for one another that at times border on the fangirlish (Laurie at one point sweetly claiming she wanted to follow her friend and make her coffee)._


_It’s here that this book? Essay? Memoir? kicks off, as these two unlikely friends pitch up in Athens to find out what makes the dogs of Athens howl in the night – as it is slightly pretentiously phrased. What follows is a beguiling cast of ordinary people doing quite extraordinary things in a nation that seems to have forgotten what normal really is. _

_these people are shown drunk, and angry, talking about their lives and dancing to blow off some steam. Rather than follow the rote of how these things should go, the people met seem human and more real than any ‘normal’ journalistic interview. This is life._

_The young, the angry and the desperate of Greece deserved a chance to have someone listen to their struggle, and Discordia documents it in all of its imperfection and anger. It’s strange to think that we were in the same country at roughly the same time and I’m just glad to get to join in with what they saw. Great stuff._


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2013)

Don't ruin my weekend drink sihhi


----------



## weepiper (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> No this guy has
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

That is appallingly badly written. He needs a good editor.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

Way to kill the buzz, sihhi.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

did he really just use the phrase sheer bloody mindedness in the same fucking paragraph


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Not something I've ever been called before!


 
Typical fashion privilege - pretending to have just worn the first thing that came to hand and not being interested in all that. 
Oppressing those of us with zero style sense.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> kombats


 
acceptable.  i was never any good at trousers.  combats were fairly standard but i did have a worrying period in the early 00s where the effect of the drugs manifested itself in my trousers, which went very stupid indeed.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

weepiper said:


> That is appallingly badly written. He needs a good editor.


 
he needs a kicking from an angry mob.

crypo-liberals


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i did have a worrying period in the early 00s where the effect of the drugs manifested itself in my trousers, which went very stupid indeed.


 
you mean you shat yourself on a trip?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

> _There she filed her copy from the frontline of what people believed could be this generation’s revolution. New York must have been a surreal place to be that summer, full of writers and activists, rebels and dreamers and artists. It was there that Laurie Penny met Molly Crabapple, (yes, really) and once the summer of idealism faded the two of them jumped on a plane and came to Greece. The two of them are a radical odd couple_


 
this is the same period where she wouldn't go to occupy for fear of a nicking right?


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jun 14, 2013)

vomit


----------



## weepiper (Jun 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> he needs a kicking from an angry mob.
> 
> crypo-liberals


 

Well yeah for preference, obviously


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> you mean you shat yourself on a trip?


 
no, but if i had it could have exited out my trouser leg without touching leg or cloth!


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> But that's just it: Galway is the same as every other small Irish town, but with added hippies and Celto-poetry. The unique things about Galway don't replace the usual shit, they add a particular piquancy to it.


 
Piquant shit is the best kind, IMV.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 14, 2013)

weepiper said:


> That is appallingly badly written. He needs a good editor.


 
And some new specs - those ones appear to be held together with sellotape a la Jack Duckworth.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Piquant shit is the best kind, IMV.


 
I'm not sure that this is an appropriate thread for your weird fetishes, Idris.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I'm not sure that this is an appropriate thread for your weird fetishes, Idris.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 14, 2013)

Mark O'Ten?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> he needs a kicking from an angry mob.
> 
> crypo-liberals


 
He's not a liberal, but a leftist, the description is *leftie*:

"Civilised leftie who winkles out the politics of social issues and pop culture"


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 14, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Mark O'Ten?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> did he really just use the phrase sheer bloody mindedness in the same fucking paragraph


 
The repeated phrase is 'sheer bloody-minded refusal' - an interesting point suggesting
LP is successful simply by refusing to present herself how 99% of Brighton College types also present themselves.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The repeated phrase is 'sheer bloody-minded refusal' - an interesting point suggesting
> LP is successful simply by refusing to present herself how 99% of Brighton College types also present themselves.


 

its easy to be a rebel when the fallout is a set of newspaper gigs and a reputation as a radical.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

This is Scottish leftie Jon's own effort:

*Greece is angry, young and unemployed*  21 Sep, 2012

_Recently I was lucky enough to spend a couple of weeks in Greece soaking up a little sun before returning to what will, no doubt, be another dreich Scottish autumn. Having never been to this part of Europe I was keen to try and tan, see some of the sights and soak up the culture. That in addition to the great food and the boundless hospitality and friendliness of the people make it one of the best holidays I’ve been lucky enough to go on – but looking back, something strikes me as odd._

_Wherever we travelled across the country one thing stuck out, graffiti adorning walls, roadways and buildings. Not graffiti in the normal course of any city – these words looked angry. Side by side with the usual swirls of artists tags and the inevitable swearing were other signs and symbols. Communist hammer and sickle, anarchist symbols and slogans almost everywhere you looked_

...

_The same technocrats who predicted that Britain’s economy would pick up thanks to austerity measures and the promise of market confidence, when Britain slipped into a double dip recession. The same technocrats who warned of disaster for Iceland and Argentina before that? Who watched as both these countries defaulted on unpayable debts and rebuilt their economies. The same people who claimed austerity would bring back stability in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy? I could go on, but with the lessons of the past, when these technocrats have been proven to be so wrong, so many times I hope some cynicism of them and their economics is the reaction of more than just me._


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2013)

Aren't "middle class white women are supposed to" hold the views of laurie? Generally nice and not nasty, non threatening, incoherent...


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

I like the use of Celtic-origin _dreich_.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2013)

God knows what views he think w/c women must have.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I like the use of Celtic-origin _dreich_.


 
Expropriate the expropriators.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Well, yes, in the sense that *books reacting to the genre's political assumptions* exist. But as you've noted yourself, those assumptions are overwhelmingly dominant.


 
they are the drivers, not the reactions. Two concrete examples of this are how cyberpunk via the likes of Gibson and steampunk by the likes of Meiville have have become sub genres in their own right, and most of it is fucking shit- but then you get Jonathon Letham or Paulo Gacipulpi


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Expropriate the expropriators.


 
Only one option here culture-defence by an onslaught on the expropriators:

You should check your cultural privilege expressed in a casual non-bothered-about-my-culture-but-it-is-older-than-yours trope. Scots are the original Celts, Irish culture is merely a borrowing of real (Scottish) Gaelic culture - P-Celtic is the real Gaelic language and Gaidhlig not Irish is the real inheritor of that language.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> looked at the pictures ftw


 
Typical male privileged dismissal  being horrific about LP's friends etc etc.

Here is a real critic who has read the words and observed the pictures








*A Portrait of the Artist as a Kohl-Eyed Entrepreneur*

_Everyone should welcome that an artist can now make a real living out of their creative gifts without starving or working for an insurance company. Uncompromising men and women are easy to admire but artists who subvert from within live to tell the tale._
_“As any strawberry picker can tell you, hard work and nothing else is a fast road to nowhere.” __– Molly Crabapple_

_Arguably some of her finest work came as a result of her collaboration with British writer Laurie Penny in ‘Discordia – Six Nights in Crisis Athens’. With Penny’s writing style evoking Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel, Crabapple’s bubblegum illustrations capture the anomic tragedy of modern day Greece and the essence of her internet wide appeal. This goth-lite artist is sexy, vivacious and has the anti-establishmentarian movement purring in admiration. __While it may have been romantic for artists to suffer in the inter-war era, the crowd sourcing phenomenon of the twenty-first century provides a new model. _


_Crabapple in this respect is a modern inspiration and should be applauded for her glamour inspired riches. Romantics may starve in dismay but aspiration and the arts no longer have to be mutually exclusive._


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> they are the drivers, not the reactions. Two concrete examples of this are how cyberpunk via the likes of Gibson and steampunk by the likes of Meiville have have become sub genres in their own right, and most of it is fucking shit- but then you get Jonathon Letham or Paulo Gacipulpi


 
You are collapsing fantasy and SF together there. Like any other genre, SF has had all kinds of "waves" and movements and reactions against previous assumptions. Fantasy is much more conventional, much narrower in terms of style and genre content. A Mieville stands out as unusual in the confined world of breeze block, endless series, "secondary world" fantasy, for all that he's had some influence. Fantasy isn't monolithic, but it's closer to it than any other commercially successful genre, bar perhaps the kind of Romance that's primarily marketed by publisher name rather than author name. By number of books published, and even more so by physical weight, it's truly remarkably conventional.

We are talking here about a genre where an endless series of breeze block size novels with a name like "A Song of Ice and FIre" is considered unusually sophisticated.

(It occurs to me that the term "Fantasy" can be a bit misleading, as it's really a catch all title for two genres, distinct but each extremely homogenous, and then a bunch of oddities around the edges of the two dominant genres. The two being books about farm boys who are secretly Princes in imaginary worlds and books about falling in love with a vampire in New York. And in both cases, what's interesting is less the predictability and narrowness of the escapism and more where the escape is to).


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Y*ou are collapsing fantasy and SF together there*. Like any other genre, SF has had all kinds of "waves" and movements and reactions against previous assumptions. Fantasy is much more conventional, much narrower in terms of style and genre content. A Mieville stands out as unusual in the confined world of breeze block, endless series, "secondary world" fantasy, for all that he's had some influence. Fantasy isn't monolithic, but it's closer to it than any other commercially successful genre, bar perhaps the kind of Romance that's primarily marketed by publisher name rather than author name. By number of books published, and even more so by physical weight, it's truly remarkably conventional.
> 
> We are talking here about a genre where an endless series of breeze block size novels with a name like "A Song of Ice and FIre" is considered unusually sophisticated.
> 
> (It occurs to me that the term "Fantasy" can be a bit misleading, as it's really a catch all title for two genres, distinct but each extremely homogenous, and then a bunch of oddities around the edges of the two dominant genres. The two being books about farm boys who are secretly Princes in imaginary worlds and books about falling in love with a vampire in New York. And in both cases, what's interesting is less the predictability and narrowness of the escapism and more where the escape is to).


 
draw the line then. It blurs. Many consider any FTL to place any book into fantasy


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> draw the line then. It blurs. Many consider any FTL to place any book into fantasy


 
As I was saying above, it's probably more useful to treat "Fantasy" as two distinct genres: The kind of books where there is or should be a map inside the cover, and the kind of books where someone has sex with an attractive but brooding werewolf. That's "fantasy" as it materially exists in terms of publishing, retail and consumption.

Discussions about "the fantastic" and whether any book with such an element should be categorised as "fantasy" tend towards the self-serving.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> As I was saying above, it's probably more useful to treat "Fantasy" as two distinct genres: The kind of books where there is or should be a map inside the cover, and the kind of books where someone has sex with an attractive but brooding werewolf. That's "fantasy" as it materially exists in terms of publishing, retail and consumption.
> 
> Discussions about "the fantastic" and whether any book with such an element should be categorised as "fantasy" tend towards the self-serving.


 
I'll just throw magic realism in there


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I'll just throw magic realism in there


 
A central point of "magic realism" is the desire to use some limited fantastical elements without getting categorised as "fantasy". If your book gets stacked in between embossed covered bricks called things like the Last Prophecy of Darnillion or the Canticle of Aldreth or beside a book where sexy supernatural archetypes have sex with sexy streetwise heroines in Brooklyn then you aren't writing "magical realism".


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

And yet you are still writing fantasy, its an imaginary construct genre that allows guardian readers to read rushdie without feeling sullied


----------



## J Ed (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> A central point of "magic realism" is the desire to use some limited fantastical elements without getting categorised as "fantasy". If your book gets stacked in between embossed covered bricks called things like the Last Prophecy of Darnillion or the Canticle of Aldreth or beside a book where sexy supernatural archetypes have sex with sexy streetwise heroines in Brooklyn then you aren't writing "magical realism".


 

Honestly I find magical realism frustrating, I can't get into a book where key plot elements don't let me get immersed in the storyline. Pick one or the other!


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Honestly I find magical realism frustrating, I can't get into a book where key plot elements don't let me get immersed in the storyline. Pick one or the other!


 

I've got a lot of time for rushdie. and Aruhydati Roy.

more for rushdie though. Better to take it as prose poetry then let the story emerge from there


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## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> And yet you are still writing fantasy, its an imaginary construct genre that allows guardian readers to read rushdie without feeling sullied


 
All genres are imaginary constructs in a certain sense, but the attempt to include anything with any element of "the fantastical" as "fantasy" (much like attempts to include anything with any element of "the future" under SF) is chiefly a self-serving attempt by fans of books about farm boys who are really lost princes to gain cultural cachet for those books by association. Books categorised as "magic realism" include, by definition, some examples of "the fantastic", but they do not exist within the genre conventions and assumptions of map inside the cover fantasy nor within those of sexy werewolf fantasy. They don't draw on that tradition, or concern themselves with a dialogue with it, and they aren't published, sold or received by readers as being part of that tradition. They have much more in common in terms of concern, style and audience with other literary fiction than with either of the two "fantasy" genres.

Ultimately "something unrealistic happens" isn't enough of a meaningful commonality to construct a super-genre around.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

its the map inside the cover thats doing you isn't it? How do you feel about dramatis pesonae lists and extended footnotes?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

also the lycanthrope boning thing exists in your head. Try Glen Duncan 'Last Werewolf'

you'll lose the boner


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 14, 2013)

Can you two get a fucking room or something and allow the rest of us to return to the important task of analysing Laurie Penny's toilet habits?


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## SpineyNorman (Jun 14, 2013)

Just to inject a bit of hypocrisy into proceedings after moaning about people talking about fantasy and that, an ISN member on my facebook just posted this with the heading 'Boom!' (I'm not down with da yoof but I think that means he approves)

GAME OF TROPES: Racefail 

I don't even understand what the author is talking about but I suspect it's probably bollocks.


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## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2013)

This is laurie freeing slaves (not reading your brothers guff norm):


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## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:
			
		

> its the map inside the cover thats doing you isn't it? How do you feel about dramatis pesonae lists and extended footnotes


 
Try not to sulk.

The map inside the cover is a shorthand way of saying "secondary world fantasy", the werewolf sex a summary of the central concerns of the books stacked under "urban fantasy". These two genres constitute the overwhelming bulk (in every sense) of what's sold and read as "fantasy", and trying to construct a common genre out of them and "magic realism" simply on the basis that something unrealistic happens in all three types of book is silly and transparent in its intentions.

Rather than trying to attach those genres (or really secondary world fantasy as urban fantasy readers seem to be less concerned with the place of their tastes on the literary snobbery totem pole) to other fiction with some fantastical element, it's more interesting to look at the relatively rare examples where someone who is consciously writing within the genre has tried to use or incorporate "literary" techniques rarely associated with it.


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## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Can you two get a fucking room or something and allow the rest of us to return to the important task of analysing Laurie Penny's toilet habits?


 
This stuff is, if I recall correctly, the kind of novel that Penny recommends from time to time, so clearly it's on topic.


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## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I don't even understand what the author is talking about but I suspect it's probably bollocks.


 
The language used is grating, but the central point actually seems fair enough.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> *Try not to sulk.*
> 
> The map inside the cover is a shorthand way of saying "secondary world fantasy", the werewolf sex a summary of the central concerns of the books stacked under "urban fantasy". These two genres constitute the overwhelming bulk (in every sense) of what's sold and read as "fantasy", and trying to construct a common genre out of them and "magic realism" simply on the basis that something unrealistic happens in all three types of book is silly and transparent in its intentions.
> 
> Rather than trying to attach those genres (or really secondary world fantasy as urban fantasy readers seem to be less concerned with the place of their tastes on the literary snobbery totem pole) to other fiction with some fantastical element, it's more interesting to look at the relatively rare examples where someone who is consciously writing within the genre has tried to use or incorporate "literary" techniques rarely associated with it.


 

Whose sulking? As far as I can see you are the only one with that hideous bourgois guardian readers prejudice against genre fiction, so quick to label someone who recognizes its flaws as a fanboy etc. Cop on nigel- you aren't nearly so wise to it as you think you are


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## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Whose sulking? As far as I can see you are the only one with that hideous bourgois guardian readers prejudice against genre fiction, so quick to label someone who recognizes its flaws as a fanboy etc. Cop on nigel- you aren't nearly so wise to it as you think you are


 
You are sulking. Noting the conservativism, in both a political sense and in terms of technique, of the overwhelming bulk of "secondary world" fantasy relative to other genre fiction does not imply a bias against genre fiction at all.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> You are sulking. Noting the conservativism, in both a political sense and in terms of technique, of the overwhelming bulk of "secondary world" fantasy relative to other genre fiction does not imply a bias against genre fiction at all.


 

and yet, you manage to do so- its not even implicit. The problem is of course that many who have merely dipped toes have a skewed take on genre fiction. Understandable that you'd take such views. I myself admit to its huge flaws and yes, the inherent conservatism. But you've attempted to paint me as an apologist for it because I pointed some context. So may I suggest respectfully that you get back in your box


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## J Ed (Jun 14, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> The language used is grating, but the central point actually seems fair enough.


 

The thing about the Dothraki is that they are such an amalgamation of different racist and Orientalist tropes that it's difficult to exactly put your finger on exactly what it is about them that makes them racist or whether that amalgamation means that it's actually alright. Their language is based on a mix of Hawaiian and Algerian Arabic but their nomadism is obviously a nod to the Mongol Horde. What's clear is that they do fulfill the 'black brute' stereotype.


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## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> The thing about the Dothraki is that they are such an amalgamation of different racist and Orientalist tropes that it's difficult to exactly put your finger on exactly what it is about them that makes them racist or whether that amalgamation means that it's actually alright. Their language is based on a mix of Hawaiian and Algerian Arabic but their nomadism is obviously a nod to the Mongol Horde. What's clear is that they do fulfill the 'black brute' stereotype.


 
**bah**


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

on the tele


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## J Ed (Jun 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> **bah**


 
I still like the programme it's just a bit dodgy on race


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## Nigel Irritable (Jun 14, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> and yet, you manage to do so- its not even implicit.


 
You are feeling offended because I'm being dismissive about the bulk of a genre you like. And so, while knowing nothing about my tastes, you are attributing some Guardian weekend supplement concern to police the boundaries between literary and genre fiction to me. I've said nothing dismissive about genre fiction in general and most of my comparisons involving "secondary world" fantasy have been with other genre fiction (SF and Romance).




			
				DotCommunist said:
			
		

> But you've attempted to paint me as an apologist for it because I pointed some context.


 
You are an apologist for it, at least in a limited sense. While acknowledging elements of the conservatism of "secondary world" fantasy, you've consistently downplayed the significance of that conservatism. And you also seem offended by a dismissal of the idea that secondary world fantasy and magical realism form a common genre, which is an attitude I've only ever encountered from fans of the former.


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## butchersapron (Jun 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I still like the programme it's just a bit dodgy on race


 
I got the wrong people,  meant lauries people.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

and the lumping together is an attitude that I have found offends the fans of the former. Oh no, It can't be fntasy. We have magical stuff happening but it deffo aint fantasy. No maps at the start of the book see? thus we are absolved


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## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 14, 2013)

You've gone right down in my estimation on this page of the thread DC


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## el-ahrairah (Jun 14, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> God knows what views he think w/c women must have.


 
i don't think they have views.  not human enough.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 14, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> You've gone right down in my estimation on this page of the thread DC


 

Its ok I'll say something funny next week.


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## J Ed (Jun 14, 2013)

https://www.facebook.com/notes/kell...to-get-involved-in-feminism/10151513943788883



> *This was a set of rules which women at a workshop at NUS Women's Conference devised as a guide for men who want to be involved in Feminism. Thanks to Talat Yaqoob of White Ribbon Scotland and Feminist Hero Extraordinaire for running the workshop and compiling women's views on the issue*
> 
> These are helpful tips and reminders and how you can be involved in the women’s movement, play your role in breaking down inequality in society and understand what we mean by “allies not leaders”. Feminism is an open movement, and as such, we support everyone’s involvement, including that of men, however we also believe in feminism being a safe space for women, so would appreciate you considering these rules as guidance in enabling that safe space to continue.
> 
> ...


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## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

Do you agree with this J Ed :




> _2. It is not your role to purposefully criticise the mandate of the liberation officer's or women leaders’ duties_


 
That only women should consider themselves able to criticise such things.


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## J Ed (Jun 14, 2013)

No, I think it's ridiculous. Men should probably be a bit more cautious of weighing in on issues like that but to make an absolute demarcation an article of faith is weird.

I really like this reply



> Hey if I may I want to express a sisterly disagreement with points 4 and 7.
> 
> Basically the problem with the politics of experience and an emphasis on subjectivity is that different women have different experiences and different opinions. I don't think people's opinions are as a direct result of their experiences, they may be but they may also have read things that have changed their mind etc. Putting that aside, if we were to assume that people have certain views as a result of their experiences, then which voices do we listen to?
> 
> ...


 
What do you think?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 14, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What do you think?


 


> 'Horse-trading, machine politics, demagogy, reliance on status, are the weapons of the powerful. Reason, science and arguing to convince are the weapons of the dispossessed.' From page 49 of The Case For Socialist Feminism, published 1989.


 
I agree with the quote and might suggest 'expressing common interests' as a 'weapon of the dispossessed' aswell. On demagogy: anyone opposed to an idea always says the opponent is engaged in demagogy so your answer above can be blamed as male demagoguery, as classic 'OMG what about the menz?' behaviour etc.


On this: "I think people love to dismiss socialist-feminism as being too based in class"

I find it a sad reflection that it is happening in feminist groups, usually socialist feminists are their backbone. Middle class feminists like to use working-class fellows as their activists for what appear, to me, empty goals - quotas, more liberation officers, procedural reserves for women at conferences women to be balanced with male voices, more (middle-class) women-friendly police training, more women police officers etc.
Yet this doesn't crop up in the cry for intersectionality.

If a working-class movement was to tackle sex inequality by imposing its demands :- force open creches, make workplace harassment an impossibility, increase social service provision, fully socialise pregnancy care and childcare etc, then the state will already have responded by having 50/50 women on boards and 50/50 women police officers.

As it stands now, every positive female advance in one area eg higher school grades and the like offers a backlash opportunity somewhere else eg too few male primary school teachers, destroying male grades.


Again on "I think people love to dismiss socialist-feminism as being too based in class"

Similar things are done to minority socialists who urge class cooperation against racism or immigration injustices - their ideas are too based on class, waiting for utopia, and hence damage minority interests etc - all largely false assertions but deployed with care by dominant middle-class elements of minority groups.


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 14, 2013)

_1. This is a privilege not a right_ - I remember when they told me selling The Socialist was a privilege not a right. This is basically just invoking the word privilege as a nod and a wink gesture to those with a fetish for obtuse intersectional jargon.

_ 2. It is not your role to purposefully criticise the mandate of the liberation officer's or women leaders’ duties_ - So in instances where the liberation officers in the NUS collude with management in helping make redundancies, to pick an example which I saw happen at my uni and has happend at other places since, it's not our role to critisize, but to acquiesce and go along with it no matter how wrong it may be.

_ 3. Prepare yourself, you might be wrong - _but even if you're right about something, shut up anyway_ (see 2.) _

_ 4. Here, the experiences of being a woman are as valid as the facts we use._ - I think the post J Ed posted is the best reply. This assumes all people's experiences are equal and absolute, but funnily enough objective facts are not. Would it be a bit obvious to point out the experiences of those involved in NUS feminism might differ from the experiences of women in general? Is it churlish to point out the fact that the NUS political activists are drawn from a very unrepresentative and privileged sub-section of the population who have been to uni, and that their experiences might be the exception rather than the rule?

_ 5. Feminism is a belief system; it not just about taking on the bits you like best_ - This implies that to be a feminist (or ally) you have to take the whole thing as a religious dogma, even if it involves abandoning your own political opinions in the process. You can't be a feminist and cling onto your class politics, embrace the most right-wing intrepretation of individualistic liberal pro-capitalist feminism in it's entireity or face ex-communication. Ex Ecclesiam Nulla Sallus....

_ 6. Sometimes it's good to just LISTEN -_ This rather depends upon what's being said, doesn't it?

_ 7. A women's opinion is as valid as yours, in some cases more so - _Oh this is a fun one. No argument with the substances of it, only that I'd hope that women's opinion being more valid than a mans is due to the opinions being on a topic that women would have direct experience and understanding of, and not just a general statement based on a crude notion of women's opinions being worth intrinsically better because they're women, regardless of what the topic in question is.

_ 8. Ask me don't tell me how feminism works - _Does that apply to Trans-exlusionary radical feminists too? If I asked them how feminism works what would I take from that? There is no universal definition of feminist as far as I can see, all sorts of reactionary right-wing arseholes haved been involved in feminism in the past alongside many good comrades and socialists. Who's the final authority here?

_ 9. This is a 24/7 way of thinking, not just at a meeting before you tell a rape joke to the lads_ - I like the assumption that telling rape jokes to the lads is the default behaviour all men who are sympathetic and show an interest in feminism do. I also beat up my girlfriend, read nuts, drink stella and fart in bed too. That's pretty offensive and whoever wrote that can fuck off.

_ 10. What women go through can be difficult and sometimes rubbish, acknowledging that is important. -_ bit of a banal statemen this one. Were they running out of ideas and how to round to to 10?

In all it basically amounts to saying you're not allowed to participate in feminism as a man, as any kind of supporter or ally unless you a) abandon all previous political beliefs and aspirations an accept an ill-defined variety of feminism in it's totality and b) accept a deeply subordinate passive role as a gormless cheerleader_. _That's the role that these rules want to impose on men who wish to get involved in feminism. Not for me thanks. That's not what I'd recognise as being an ally. That's not how you take people seriously, sometimes being ruthlessly critical is exactly what a good comrade should be doing, and keeping your mouth shut and not being critical even when it's warranted is what you do to children to stop their feelings getting hurt, naive kids who don't know any better so we shouldn't treat them the same way we'd treat anyone else.

I used to be far more willing to compromise about this kind of thing in the past, but these days nah I think it's horse-shit. They're even worse than trots for alienating people with in-group etiquette and indulgent navel-gazing.


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## emanymton (Jun 15, 2013)

I find 9 incredibly offense as well.


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## sihhi (Jun 15, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I used to be far more willing to compromise about this kind of thing in the past, but these days nah I think it's horse-shit. They're even worse than trots for alienating people with in-group etiquette and indulgent navel-gazing.


 
Many working-class males don't feel any need to request to have the label of "feminist" be applied to them from any group X or group Y, though they are anti-sexists.

https://twitter.com/talatyaqoob/status/345562030410956800

This is the organiser of that talk apparently:

*Talat Yaqoob*‏@talatyaqoob​
Quotas are a necessity. They bring women into public life who would otherwise be behind "entitlement". Quotas until we reach real equality.


I'm happy to make the case that quotas are not sexist and not a form of discrimination against men. However, any struggle that is serious about securing concrete social transformation must unite class interests and aim to transform conditions so that they allow women to participate fully (ie the basic 50-50 level).

To press for quotas is to demand the promotion of an extra layer of female bureaucrats - or the transformation of a group of male bureaucrats into female ones - as the first step of your struggle. A lunatic opening gambit given how bureaucratised left and feminist struggle already is.


More generally, why are the demands _always_ for race and gender quotas? Will the NUS institute a working-class quota - given that 70% of the country is working-class shall it be in future that 70% of the NUS executive positions - as a part of public life - must have no university parents.


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## sihhi (Jun 15, 2013)

Here's a fuller outline of the beliefs of the organiser/chair: 

http://talatyaq.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/searching-for-a-little-muslim-feminism

Are there any athiest feminists on this thread? Where does this statement fit in:



> Of course, feminism in India, China, Pakistan and countless other countries will be mostly led, rightly, by women from those cultures, but the women leading the feminist movement in a country must reflect the women they represent (much like how are parliament needs younger, non-white, non-male representation to reflect our society).


 
Note how representation is basically gender and race based so we get the following stuff:



> We live in  a multi-cultural society, so we need a little multi-cultural feminism. It wouldn’t be ok if, for example, an atheist feminist talked about Muslim women ‘s experiences of in British society.


 
http://talatyaq.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/searching-for-a-little-muslim-feminism/


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## DotCommunist (Jun 15, 2013)

> liberation officer's


 
please form an orderly queue in order to be liberated. A liberation officer will attend to you shortly. This is all normal and NOT repeat NOT some weird up our own arse shit.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 15, 2013)

All pointing out of the gross ers apostrophe will be killed with love


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## emanymton (Jun 15, 2013)

> but the women leading the feminist movement in a country must reflect the women they represent (much like how *are* parliament needs younger, non-white, non-male representation to reflect our society)


 

And these peope expect me to take them seriously?


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## kavenism (Jun 15, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Note how representation is basically gender and race based so we get the following stuff:
> 
> We live in a multi-cultural society, so we need a little multi-cultural feminism. It wouldn’t be ok if, for example, an atheist feminist talked about Muslim women ‘s experiences of in British society.​http://talatyaq.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/searching-for-a-little-muslim-feminism/


 
This is such a load of wank. One of the best books on the current situation for muslim women in Europe was written by a white non-muslim French woman at UCL. The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy talks about Muslim women's experience throughout with a view to undermining the distortion and dismissal their testimony often receives in mainstream debates. Should she just not have bothered?


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## The Pale King (Jun 15, 2013)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 38m
Sick of lefter-than-thous who spend all their time attacking other leftists on the internet for having the guts to actually try things.
 



 *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 42m
Really angry at lefter-than-thou leftists shutting down other radical people trying to do valuable work right now. Who does that help?


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## The Pale King (Jun 15, 2013)

Right everyone, stop attacking Laurie for doing valuable work. And for having guts! She has guts and does valuable work. Got that?


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## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2013)

What's she tried and what got shut down?


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## rekil (Jun 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What's she tried and what got shut down?


 


Oh right, I thought she said "shot down".


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## The Pale King (Jun 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What's she tried and what got shut down?


 
No idea. Stop thinking, stop critiquing, never question my intentions. never question my actions seems to be the message.
But then again, we shouldn't forget how to be a good ally:

2. It is not your role to purposefully criticise the mandate of the liberation officer's or women leaders’ duties

6. Sometimes it's good to just LISTEN

8. Ask me don't tell me how feminism works


----------



## toggle (Jun 15, 2013)

emanymton said:


> I find 9 incredibly offense as well.


 
overall, I have problems with that list, but I think they have a very clear point in this. There are a lot of blokes that claim some form of feminist position that think their humour should be exempt, cause it's just a joke right? i'm not supposed to take rape, and other nasty misogenistic jokes personally, i get told that a lot, either not to take the jokes seriously, or that i'm humourless. but you're taking the suggestion you might tell a joke like that personally.


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## toggle (Jun 15, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> _ 10. What women go through can be difficult and sometimes rubbish, acknowledging that is important. -_ bit of a banal statemen this one. Were they running out of ideas and how to round to to 10?
> 
> .


 
i'd say that's the only really important thing there. acknowledge the shitty expereinces women have,give a crap about that, and the rest flows from there.


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## emanymton (Jun 15, 2013)

toggle said:


> overall, I have problems with that list, but I think they have a very clear point in this. There are a lot of blokes that claim some form of feminist position that think their humour should be exempt, cause it's just a joke right? i'm not supposed to take rape, and other nasty misogenistic jokes personally, i get told that a lot, either not to take the jokes seriously, or that i'm humourless. but you're taking the suggestion you might tell a joke like that personally.


Oh I know those dicks exist, as Delroy said it is the assumption that this is the default.


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 15, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Oh I know those dicks exist, as Delroy said it is the assumption that this is the default.


 
yeah and not just that, it's the default that all men will do _unless we intervene to stop them_. Ex Ecclesia Nullus Sallus - without us there is no salvation from your base male desires. I've known people who were quite happy to spend all day repeating intersectional jargon but can tell racist jokes with the best of them once they're out of the sight of the in-group.


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## frogwoman (Jun 15, 2013)

I've known a trot who spent all day repeating trot stuff and then came out with racist bollocks when he was on his own about black people.


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 15, 2013)

Like Stewart Lee said, all political correctness has done is force racists to express their bigotry with more creative language, it really hasn't done very much to challenge what causes it. Racists and bigots are quite capable of adapting to the constraints imposed on the language they use, and they're even better at saying what's expected of them in public and being a bigot behind closed doors.


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## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2013)

Don't start posts with:



> Like Stewart Lee said


 
Ta.


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Don't start post with:
> 
> 
> 
> Ta.


 
That's a fair cop.


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## Libertad (Jun 15, 2013)

Red Herring


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## JimW (Jun 15, 2013)

As a certain Mr Lee once intimated...


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## andysays (Jun 15, 2013)

toggle said:


> overall, I have problems with that list, but I think they have a very clear point in this. There are a lot of blokes that claim some form of feminist position that think their humour should be exempt, cause it's just a joke right? i'm not supposed to take rape, and other nasty misogenistic jokes personally, i get told that a lot, either not to take the jokes seriously, or that i'm humourless. but you're taking the suggestion you might tell a joke like that personally.


 
You're right, there are blokes that *claim* some form of feminist position that think their humour should be exempt etc, but their claim or their attempts at justification are not really here or there.

If they are making jokes about rape or other things which demonstrate their misogyny, they're not feminists, they're misogynists and should be called on it*, but the idea that all men who claim to be feminists or to be sympathetic to feminism are secretly misogynists, or should be suspected/accused of such until they've somehow proved themselves is not only offensive on a personal level, it's also deeply divisive on a political level, and when added in to all the other stuff on that list, goes a long way to putting off people (both women and men) who might otherwise be sympathetic.

If you or anyone else is actually seeking to win over people to your argument, you really do need to be aware of the dangers of

_


Delroy Booth said:



			alienating people with in-group etiquette and indulgent navel-gazing.
		
Click to expand...

_ 
ETA: called on it by women and, particularly, by men


----------



## andysays (Jun 15, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> yeah and not just that, it's the default that all men will do _unless we intervene to stop them_. *Ex Ecclesia Nullus Sallus* - without us there is no salvation from your base male desires. I've known people who were quite happy to spend all day repeating intersectional jargon but can tell racist jokes with the best of them once they're out of the sight of the in-group.


 
Translation please (and check your classical privilege )


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## andysays (Jun 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I've known a twat who spent all day repeating trot stuff and then came out with racist bollocks when he was on his own about black people.


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## JimW (Jun 15, 2013)

andysays said:


> Translation please (and check your classical privilege )


 
He gives you one in the following sentence, or sort of - *Ex Ecclesia *means 'outside the church' I think and* Nullus Sallus* I presume is 'no salvation'
ETA: Never did the classical languages but I do like crosswords


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## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2013)

Tells us more about delboy to be fair.


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## andysays (Jun 15, 2013)

JimW said:


> He gives you one in the following sentence, or sort of - *Ex Ecclesia *means 'outside the church' I think and* Nullus Sallus* I presume is 'no salvation'
> ETA: Never did the classical languages but I do like crosswords


 
Makes sense now (never got the point of crosswords, but it's obviously worked for you  )


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## Delroy Booth (Jun 15, 2013)

JimW said:


> He gives you one in the following sentence, or sort of - *Ex Ecclesia *means 'outside the church' I think and* Nullus Sallus* I presume is 'no salvation'
> ETA: Never did the classical languages but I do like crosswords


 
just that, outside the church there is no salvation, pig latin


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## JimW (Jun 15, 2013)

andysays said:


> Makes sense now (never got the point of crosswords, but it's obviously worked for you  )


 
Now we have Delroy come back and point out my guess was bollocks.
ETA: or not, splendid.


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## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2013)

As Trotsky said, _one cannot be right outside of the party._


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## andysays (Jun 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> As Trotsky said, _one cannot be right outside of the party._


 
Wouldn't he have said it in Russian?


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## JimW (Jun 15, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> just that, outside the church there is no salvation, pig latin


 
When they say pig Latin do they mean people stringing together the words without doing the proper grammar etc.? Local vicar and grammar school types in days gone by?


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## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2013)

andysays said:


> Wouldn't he have said it in Russian?


 
Yes, he probably would have.


----------



## JimW (Jun 15, 2013)

I watched a pretty good Melyvn Bragg thing on William Tyndale just; interesting this democratic/anti-authoritarian urge that bubbled under for so long - ETA people insisting on the need to do it themselves outside the church I mean. In his case not particularly tied to anything socially progressive but of course lots of people did make that link and he helped spur that despite himself. Also did some of the best phrases in the English Bible, including ones you might think came from the KJV.


----------



## andysays (Jun 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Yes, he probably would have.


 
Can you?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2013)

andysays said:


> Can you?


 
No. I think translation stuff is good. Is this some odd defend trotsky thing? Or just genuine inquisitiveness?


----------



## andysays (Jun 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> No. I think translation stuff is good. Is this some odd defend trotsky thing? Or just genuine inquisitiveness?


 
It's certainly not the former. It's probably the latter with an added bit of gently pulling your chain.

All chain pulling aside, it's perhaps interesting that T adopted the concept based on an authoritarian religious outlook. As I understand it, he didn't have any sort of religious upbringing, but it's (at least vaguely) interesting that many who have rejected a certain type or authoritarian upbringing for a purportedly radical one still retain some of their previous authoritarianism under a new guise.


----------



## rekil (Jun 15, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 38m
> Sick of lefter-than-thous who spend all their time attacking other leftists on the internet for having the guts to actually try things.
> 
> 
> ...


 
This is about mollycrabapple going to Guantanamo.


> This is because I've had yet another friend screamed at by leftish haters after announcing an ambitious piece of journalism she's planning.


https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/345901565065953281

(But really it's about Laura)


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 15, 2013)

copliker said:


> This is about mollycrabapple going to Guantanamo.
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/345901565065953281
> 
> (But really it's about Laura)


 
Ah, makes sense.





 *mollycrabapple* ‏@*mollycrabapple* 15h
Apparently there's a karaoke bar on base at GTMO. I wonder how many times people have sung Johnny Cash?
 
 
 
She will return full of penetrating insights no doubt.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 15, 2013)

copliker said:


> This is about mollycrabapple going to Guantanamo.
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/345901565065953281
> 
> (But really it's about Laura)


 
What are the criticisms of her going to Guantanamo?


----------



## toggle (Jun 15, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Oh I know those dicks exist, as Delroy said it is the assumption that this is the default.


 
there's also a large number of men who seem to find varieties of feminist positions that could be potentially interpreted as accusatory as more offensive than the behavior the feminists are fighting against.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2013)

> This is because I've had yet another friend screamed at by leftish haters after announcing an ambitious piece of journalism she's planning.


Ambition is nice. That's what privateer school is is all about.



Spoiler






>





ish

What is leftish? Are now taking on themselves to pronounce takfiri?


----------



## rekil (Jun 15, 2013)




----------



## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2013)

andysays said:


> It's certainly not the former. It's probably the latter with an added bit of gently pulling your chain.
> 
> All chain pulling aside, it's perhaps interesting that T adopted the concept based on an authoritarian religious outlook. As I understand it, he didn't have any sort of religious upbringing, but it's (at least vaguely) interesting that many who have rejected a certain type or authoritarian upbringing for a purportedly radical one still retain some of their previous authoritarianism under a new guise.


 
T. was brought up in a georgian seminary and was open about the tricks they taught him.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2013)

copliker said:


> View attachment 33714


 
Poverty of aspiration on the rest of us.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 15, 2013)

copliker said:


> View attachment 33714


 

Aspiration Nation.


----------



## andysays (Jun 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> T. was brought up in a georgian seminary and was open about the tricks they taught him.


 
My understanding obviously wrong then (not for the first time )

Does provide an example of what I was referring to, even though I didn't realise it...


----------



## rekil (Jun 15, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What are the criticisms of her going to Guantanamo?


It's for Vice. LP is making way more of it than molly is.

https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/345755022648299521

Solid CV building gig this.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2013)

You're not 'covering it' molly, you're using it. You are monetising it.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 15, 2013)

JimW said:


> He gives you one in the following sentence, or sort of - *Ex Ecclesia *means 'outside the church' I think and* Nullus Sallus* I presume is 'no salvation'
> ETA: Never did the classical languages but I do like crosswords


 
I always thought that _*Nullius Sallus*_ was just a description of Bruce Grobbelar's attitude to goalkeeping - no saves.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 15, 2013)

andysays said:


> Wouldn't he have said it in Russian?


 
Or possibly Yiddish, if he were feeling "difficult".


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I always thought that _*Nullius Sallus*_ was just a description of Bruce Grobbelar's attitude to goalkeeping - no saves.


 
Without cash up front at least.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> T. was brought up in a georgian seminary and was open about the tricks they taught him.


That was Joe, surely?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 15, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> That was Joe, surely?


 
*whistles to self*


----------



## Nice one (Jun 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I've known a trot who spent all day repeating trot stuff and then came out with racist bollocks when he was on his own about black people.


 
and those in the london anarchist scene


----------



## Firky (Jun 15, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I've known a trot who spent all day repeating trot stuff and then came out with racist bollocks when he was on his own about black people.


 

Come across that a thousand times, from swappies union leaders too. Some of which were quite young (mid 20s) and I always associated that sort of thing with older folk for some reason.


----------



## andysays (Jun 15, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> That was Joe, surely?


 
wiki says yes:

When Trotsky was nine, his father sent him to Odessa to be educated. He was enrolled in an historically German school, which became Russified during his years in Odessa, consequent to the Imperial government's policy of Russification​ 
Geladze enrolled Ioseb into an Orthodox priesthood school against her husband's wishes...​...When Stalin was sixteen, he received a scholarship to attend the Georgian Orthodox Tiflis Spiritual Seminaryin Tbilisi​ 


butchersapron said:


> *whistles to self*


 
Whistling in the dark?


----------



## emanymton (Jun 16, 2013)

toggle said:


> there's also a large number of men who seem to find varieties of feminist positions that could be potentially interpreted as accusatory as more offensive than the behavior the feminists are fighting against.


True, but fortunately no one here is suggesting anything like that. 

Apart from what else has been said I find it really annoying to be accused of only paying lip service to any of my political positions. Which is probably part of why it bugs me so much, it is not just 'bad politics' in my opinion but I found it personally insulting as well.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 16, 2013)

andysays said:


> wiki says yes:
> 
> When Trotsky was nine, his father sent him to Odessa to be educated. He was enrolled in an historically German school, which became Russified during his years in Odessa, consequent to the Imperial government's policy of Russification​
> Geladze enrolled Ioseb into an Orthodox priesthood school against her husband's wishes...​...When Stalin was sixteen, he received a scholarship to attend the Georgian Orthodox Tiflis Spiritual Seminaryin Tbilisi​
> ...


 
I was making a glib point about stalinism being trotskyism in power.


----------



## andysays (Jun 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I was making a glib point about stalinism being trotskyism in power.


 
Fair enough - it's a good point, but it wasn't at all obvious (to me) that that's what you meant.

Without wishing to have a pop, you do have a tendency to be a bit cryptic at times, or at least assume that people will automatically know what you mean. We all do I guess...


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> T. was brought up in a georgian seminary and was open about the tricks they taught him.


 
You mean S not T.

J.


----------



## phildwyer (Jun 16, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I was making a glib point about stalinism being trotskyism in power.


 
YR.


----------



## rekil (Jun 16, 2013)

Laurie getting slapped down by rape crisis people.

https://twitter.com/RapeCrisisSth/status/346253927613857792




			
				LP said:
			
		

> With 'rape porn', as with any porn - consent is key. If it's clear participants are fully consenting, it's not a problem. If not, it is.






			
				rape crisis sthlondon said:
			
		

> @PennyRed @MsJodieLW  Rape porn is the the explicit erotisication of women's non consent.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 16, 2013)

Fucking hell, I'm a racist misogynist with unexamined white male privilege but even I instinctively know anything that goes by the name 'rape porn' is by definition iffy as fuck.

Bollocks, I'm being a misogynist again by telling her how to do feminism aren't I?


----------



## emanymton (Jun 16, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Fucking hell, I'm a racist misogynist with unexamined white male privilege but even I instinctively know anything that goes by the name 'rape porn' is by definition iffy as fuck.
> 
> Bollocks, I'm being a misogynist again by telling her how to do feminism aren't I?


Your the reason we can't have nice things, like family friendly rape porn were everyone smiles and waves at the camera at the end.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 16, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Your the reason we can't have nice things, like family friendly rape porn were everyone smiles and waves at the camera at the end.


 
Sorry, I didn't mean to 

She's responded to that by the way - appears to be saying that so long as the actors consent 'rape porn' is OK, and that vodeo of actual rapes is evidence not porn.

Completely missing the clear and obvious dangers of deliberately eroticising rape (something that in addition to glamourising it must surely help normalize it too).

I suspect she realises she was talking bollocks but doesn't want to back down. I wonder why she chose to check her privilege/back down over the Rod Liddle racism stuff but not this?


----------



## killer b (Jun 16, 2013)

what the fuck?


----------



## emanymton (Jun 16, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Sorry, I didn't mean to
> 
> She's responded to that by the way - appears to be saying that so long as the actors consent 'rape porn' is OK, and that vodeo of actual rapes is evidence not porn.
> 
> ...


Yeah she completely misses the point that the problem is not real rape as porn (I can't really imagine there is that much out there, not easily available anyway) but the whole idea of rape porn, even it it is just acted.

ETA on the backing down, because she is not a 'person of colour' but is a women and therefore does not need to defer to anyone else experience?


----------



## smokedout (Jun 16, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Completely missing the clear and obvious dangers of deliberately eroticising rape (something that in addition to glamourising it must surely help normalize it too).
> 
> I suspect she realises she was talking bollocks but doesn't want to back down. I wonder why she chose to check her privilege/back down over the Rod Liddle racism stuff but not this?


 
she's got to fight this one if unless shes coming from an anti-porn perspective (although she might bottle it) - if consensual rape porn is the 'explicit erotisication of women's non consent'  (which it is) is bdsm porn the explicit erotisication of violence towards women, is it okay to show a woman being bound and whipped, but not groped (at two extremes)?  leads into all kinds of problems, not least of which is how is rape porn defined, how do you show meaningful consent and if you agree with porn why do you have to, its not real

(not taking a position here myself btw, just think that's she seen the pitfalls from a pro-porn perspective)


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 16, 2013)

LP's New Statesman article on porn:
http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-...le-and-no-law-can-stop-us-polishing-our-lamps

in which she excoriates 'conservative' feminists who line up with conservatives to try and control what LP masturbates to. I realise she's got to keep in with the porn actin' burlesque dancin' big apple monetisin'- your- hotness scene, but I thought she might be more open to discussion given her previous interest in issues of representation / emotional/psychic harm. I've read interviews with people who support and shelter rape victims who say that 'rape porn' is used both as an inspiration and a weapon against many of the women they work with. Quite surprised that LP seems to think this totally unproblematic and if there's 'consent' (undefined) it's all good. What sort of intervention (or more accurately an intervention from whom) would make her consider 'stepping up and stepping back' as she did during the Rod Liddle brouhaha?


----------



## J Ed (Jun 16, 2013)

This defending rape porn is very Spiked Online, she did intern there...


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> This defending rape porn is very Spiked Online, she did intern there...


 
Did she? Interesting. Spiked online is garbage. Tedious, tendentious, self-aggrandizing. And Brendan O'Neill (I call him Eddie Cuntster) is the worst of all.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 16, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Did she? Interesting. Spiked online is garbage. Tedious, tendentious, self-aggrandizing. And Brendan O'Neill (I call him Eddie Cuntster) is the worst of all.


 

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/statuses/333567471955103745


----------



## articul8 (Jun 16, 2013)

It's a slippery slope once you start defining what consensual acts between adults are "unacceptable"


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 16, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Did she? Interesting. Spiked online is garbage. Tedious, tendentious, self-aggrandizing. And Brendan O'Neill (I call him Eddie Cuntster) is the worst of all.


 
His very existence brings shame on the ancient house of the O'Neills.

As for Laurie's latest episode, it's a pity such a good thread has to be marred with her regular insults to the intelligence.


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 16, 2013)

articul8 said:


> It's a slippery slope once you start defining what consensual acts between adults are "unacceptable"


 
I agree. But you've got to unpack the notion of 'consent' and what constitutes it a bit. I'm not really decided where I stand on the issues raised myself, but the eroticisation and commercialisation of female submission / enjoyment of abuse is not the sole concern of stuffy conservative moralists.


----------



## killer b (Jun 16, 2013)

is anyone attempting to define what consensual acts between adults are unacceptable?

i think a discussion about rape porn can be had without there being any suggestion of stopping people indulging in their own consensual rape fantasies if they choose to.


----------



## rekil (Jun 16, 2013)

LP said:
			
		

> No More Page 3- join the fightback if you think newspapers shouldn't be selling sexism http://www.change.org/nomorepage3


https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/247070857187446784

Is page 3 more or less consensual than 'rape porn'? Dunno about you lot, but this misogynist is massively confused.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 16, 2013)

It's almost as if she doesn't have any actual beliefs or principles other than promotion of self.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> It's almost as if she doesn't have any actual beliefs or principles other than promotion of self.


 
D'you reckon?


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 16, 2013)

copliker said:


> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/247070857187446784
> 
> Is page 3 more or less consensual than 'rape porn'? Dunno about you lot, but this misogynist is massively confused.


 
Me too. Laurie too I think:





 *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 4h
Taking a break from this porn convo now because I'm about to go crazy from sleep deprivation and no longer thinking straight #*sensible*
*Expand Collapse *

*Reply* 

*Retweet* *Retweeted* 
*Delete* 
*Favorite* *Favorited* 
*More*
Embed Tweet




Bit of frantic triangulation going on from the looks of things. She's examined sexual assault and rape through the lens of rape culture before (

http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2013/03/steubenville-rape-cultures-abu-ghraib-moment

) but drops it when confronted with actual 'rape porn' in favour of letting it all hang out and leaving the 'consenting' adults to it. Once she's caught up on her sleep I'm sure she'll find a way to square the circle.




I think she's a dilettante and a popinjay!


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 16, 2013)

Road Trip!


----------



## rekil (Jun 16, 2013)

LP said:
			
		

> Disappointed that people seem to think being anti-censorship means I'm a fan of violent misogynist porn. This debate unhelpfully polarised.


Why are you opposed to page 3 then? You twat.


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 16, 2013)

*Louise Mensch* ‏@*LouiseMensch* 6m
. @*PennyRed* @*EVAWhd* glad to see Penny is of the same mind as my earlier article on this. http://unfashionista.com/2013/06/10/the-campaign-to-ban-rape-porn-is-far-too-broadly-drawn/ … wrong to criminalise BDSM.
*Details Expand Collapse *

*Reply* 

*Retweet* *Retweeted* 
*Delete* 
*Favorite* *Favorited* 
*More*
Embed Tweet

 

Where Mensch leads, Penny follows! I want them to co-present a tv programme. Live studio audience divided into right and leftwing feminists (Menscheviks and Pennites) from whom some are chosen to compete against each other in a series of Generation Game / Krypton Factor style activities. Winner gets to choose whether to spend an afternoon with Mensch on the Upper West Side or to be taken to a riot by Laurie. Could be the new tfi friday.


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 16, 2013)

copliker said:


> Why are you opposed to page 3 then? You twat.


 




 *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 6m
However I AM absolutely against Page 3. For complex reasons explained in the article I wrote about it.
*Expand Collapse *

*Reply* 

*Retweet* *Retweeted* 
*Delete* 
*Favorite* *Favorited* 
*More*
Embed Tweet

 


For complex reasons yeah? You wouldn't understand.


----------



## rekil (Jun 16, 2013)

Shameless appropriation of our Multitudinous Positionism strategy by the private school class.


----------



## smokedout (Jun 16, 2013)

killer b said:


> is anyone attempting to define what consensual acts between adults are unacceptable?
> 
> i think a discussion about rape porn can be had without there being any suggestion of stopping people indulging in their own consensual rape fantasies if they choose to.


 
and if they film them?

hate to say it but I agree with Mensch on this, the violent porn act was bad law, any extension of it would be as well


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 16, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Road Trip!




'This word provocative, I've never heard it used of a man who's a political writer, never.'

That's just bullshit isn't it? It was unusual _not _to hear Christopher Hitchens described like that. (Not arguing with the wider implicit point - that what she writes never justified threats, sexist abuse etc - I agree with that)


----------



## CharlieChaplin (Jun 16, 2013)

The Sun should just put a man in underwear in the same image as the page 3 girl.

Everybody is happy that way.


----------



## JimW (Jun 16, 2013)

CharlieChaplin said:


> The Sun should just put a man in underwear in the same image as the page 3 girl.
> 
> Everybody is happy that way.


 
That's been done, can't remember who it was but one of them had a Page Seven Fella.
ETA: Looked it up to check it wasn't some disturbing drug-fuelled false memory: http://www.80sactual.com/2005/05/equality-in-80s-page-7-fella-and-story.html


----------



## redsquirrel (Jun 17, 2013)

copliker said:


> Laurie getting slapped down by rape crisis people.
> 
> https://twitter.com/RapeCrisisSth/status/346253927613857792


Fucking hell, what an utter idiot. I suppose it's where her dreadful individualistic politics lead though.


----------



## barney_pig (Jun 17, 2013)

Does the news that poor white boys are doing worse than any other group in schools mean:
A). That the cards in the intersectionality top trumps pack will have to be reshuffled. Or
B). More 'jokes' about thick chavs?


----------



## J Ed (Jun 18, 2013)

> G8 is a joke. China + Brazil excluded despite being top 8 economies. India excluded yet 9th largest econony + has 1bn people. Its like a whites only club


 
If only Brazil, while hundreds of thousands of its marginalised population, were allowed a seat at the table then all would be right with global capitalism.


----------



## rekil (Jun 18, 2013)

"Now the G20, _that's_ a little bit communism."


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 18, 2013)

J Ed said:


> If only Brazil, while hundreds of thousands of its marginalised population, were allowed a seat at the table then all would be right with global capitalism.


Who was that?


----------



## rekil (Jun 18, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Who was that?


This guy whoever he is.

https://twitter.com/leejamesbrown/status/346713139389288448

Laura in the NS however


> The G8 allows the world's richest nations to come together without representatives of the global south blocking the corridors and raising inconvenient points in meetings,


----------



## sihhi (Jun 18, 2013)

I don't understand anything any more - is this irony against internalised misogyny, general male sexism or against sexual exploitation?



> @seanbonner Harper @quinnnorton @drcabl3 since I joined SC it's been 100% people's dinners, pets and haircuts, no boobs. V. disappointing.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 18, 2013)

^ copliker's post


----------



## sihhi (Jun 18, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> Does the news that poor white boys are doing worse than any other group in schools mean:
> A). That the cards in the intersectionality top trumps pack will have to be reshuffled. Or
> B). More 'jokes' about thick chavs?


 
To take this seriously it can only mean a further splintering of working-class as a collective single reality/identity, namely:
since Somali boys, Bangladeshi boys and Pakistani boys are still doing worse than the average white boys it means there is a general collective oppression of Somalis, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis by everyone else white, black, Indian and Chinese or something, which these groups choose to deny.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 18, 2013)

Is Laurie 'i'm more irish than english' more culchie than commie do we think?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 18, 2013)

Watch it, Jackeen.


----------



## rekil (Jun 18, 2013)

GAA jersey and jumper tied around the waist. Fantastic.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 18, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Is Laurie 'i'm more irish than english' more culchie than commie do we think?


 
Are LP's grandparents rural Irish peasants?   Dunno. But leftist journalist for _VICE_ Molly Crapabble has been drinking in an Irish pub:



> Drinking in an Irish pub, across from a playground, it's easy to forget men are being forcibly tube-fed on the same base #GTMO


 
Crapabble may well also be one of the "razor-smart badasses" from "all over the world".



> The journalists covering #GTMO now are an unspeakable privilage to meet- razor smart badasses all of them, from all over the world


----------



## Limerick Red (Jun 18, 2013)

copliker said:


> GAA jersey and jumper tied around the waist. Fantastic.


Im sure some hang sangwiches in tinfoil and a hard boiled egg with her as well!


----------



## rekil (Jun 18, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Are LP's grandparents rural Irish peasants?


Her wiki now says she's of 'jewish descent' - it adds a certain amount of gravitas I think. She'll claim to be Irish when the need arises to boast about 'I'm great craic really' genes.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 18, 2013)

copliker said:


> Her wiki now says she's of 'jewish descent' - it adds a certain amount of gravitas I think. She'll claim to be Irish when the need arises to boast about 'I'm great craic really' genes.


 

Well, she does seem to admire American culture and an elastic heritage is something they enjoy!


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 18, 2013)

Elastic identity for them, the rest of us trapped forever in our identity as victims or oppressors.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 18, 2013)

Just as well my dad hasn't heard of her then, it was bad enough when the bernie madoff scandal happened and he spent ages panicking that the jews were going to have a bad image because of it.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 18, 2013)

As far as I gauge it from LP's tweets on the matter- parents both rich lawyers, born in Britain.
Father son of (1890s 1900s ??) pogrom-era Jewish immigrant couple. Mother with some Irish connection.


----------



## articul8 (Jun 18, 2013)

They said on the news that the Obama children have more Irish ancestry than the Kennedys.  #justsaying


----------



## rekil (Jun 18, 2013)

> You might have been forgiven for thinking the whole of Belfast loved Obama, were it not for the massive slogan marked out in white bedsheets on a nearby hill, visible across the city, and certainly from the presidential helicopter. The slogan reads “G8/NWO: WAR CRIMINALS.”


What does NWO mean Laurie?


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 18, 2013)

copliker said:


> What does NWO mean Laurie?


 

oh no she didn't did she ??


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 18, 2013)

What do white sheets with political stuff on them mean to a black american laurie?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 18, 2013)

Just for info the protest sign, quickly cleared up:


----------



## barney_pig (Jun 18, 2013)

copliker said:


> What does NWO mean Laurie?


Black helicopter?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 18, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Just for info the protest sign, quickly cleared up:


 
I'm sure I've walked that street in my time. . .


----------



## rekil (Jun 18, 2013)

http://www.newstatesman.com/politic...land-place-where-no-dissent-will-be-tolerated


> In Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, the streets are full of fake shop-fronts, designed to give the impression that empty stores are still selling things. *Some of them are so realistic that locals have attempted to walk through doors that turn out to be painted on.*


Believe.


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 18, 2013)

copliker said:


> What does NWO mean Laurie?


 
Is that the latest  rap combo?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 18, 2013)

copliker said:


> http://www.newstatesman.com/politic...land-place-where-no-dissent-will-be-tolerated
> 
> Believe.


 
I half buy it for this:






Not so much this


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jun 18, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Is that the latest rap combo?


_N***as with Occupy?_


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jun 18, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I half buy it for this:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Bloody hell, there's advance gentrification painted on the walls 

Because this is what we all should aspire to


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 18, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> _N***as with Occupy?_


 

Nathans with Occados


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jun 18, 2013)

straight outta brompton


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 18, 2013)

That banksy will do anything for money


----------



## Brixton Hatter (Jun 18, 2013)

Monetize your Norn Ironess


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 18, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That banksy will do anything for money


 
Maybe you could touch him for a few quid.



Might be the best few quid you'd ever spend.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 18, 2013)

Sharp struggle for young black working-class women by Malcolm:

https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/346898856979623936



> I guess Vice loves women in fiction if they're A. established, white, and over 58 or B. dead?


 
Also generally fighting adult privilege:

https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/346988251749429248



> I will fav all tweets about cool things ur kids do cuz kids are often awesome and when can they have their own twitter?


 
https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/346988633229754369



> Parents: At what age r ur kids allowed to have Twitter? R u scared they will get more followers than u?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 18, 2013)

I think people like you are what they scared of Malcolm. And not for the reasons you think.


----------



## killer b (Jun 18, 2013)

christ. he should be locked up.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 18, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That banksy will do anything for money


 
Still don't get my head round the whole phenomenon at all:

http://www.haringeyindependent.co.uk/news/10458366.Banksy_sold_for_more_than___750_000/




> The Turnpike Lane Banksy was sold for more than £750,000 at a private London auction. Slave Labour, which shows a young boy making Union Jack bunting, was bought at an event hosted by the Sincura Group in Covent Garden yesterday.


----------



## rekil (Jun 18, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Is that the latest rap combo?


Natural Wiz Opinioners


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 18, 2013)

Brixton Hatter said:


> Monetize your Norn Ironess


----------



## muscovyduck (Jun 18, 2013)

Right then, I know that area better than Laurie Penny does. So let me dissect her poorly written bollocks for you all.

Key:
Pink - exaggeration/lies
Blue - found out via a quick google search/Youtube videos/made up on the spot/stating the obvious/general Laurie Penny problems
Black - Probably untrue but I don't have the time to do any more than what I can do off the top of my head right now
'protest camp' is reported to be about 4 tents on the boggy field the Erne (river that goes around the town) flows into

_In Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, the streets are full of fake shop-fronts, designed to give the impression that empty stores are still selling things. Some of them are so realistic that locals have attempted to walk through doors that turn out to be painted on. The small Northern Irish town has 4.8 per cent unemployment, with an 82 per cent rise in redundancies last year, and a population of 14,000, plus about 3,000 police from all over Britain, plus a protest camp. It’s here that the 2013 G8 conference is taking place._

_The G8 allows the world's richest nations to come together without representatives of the global south blocking the corridors and raising inconvenient points in meetings, but that's not its only function. It is also about pomp and show. It’s a pageant of neoliberal capitalism functioning whether local residents like it or not. That sort of pageantry requires the suppression of dissent, especially in a political climate where the elite's only answer to a drop in living standards and a collapse of faith in democracy is to line up an epic number of police with water cannons and tear gas._

_“They’ve spent fifty million on policing,” Gerry Carroll, an activist in Belfast, tells me. “For god’s sake, could they not have just had the meeting on Skype?”_

_Since the 2001 summit in Genoa was targeted by 200,000 protesters, all subsequent G8 meetings have been held in remote locations designed to be inaccessible to the general rabble; last year the gathering was due to come to Chicago, but the location was changed to Camp David after the Occupy movement promised to converge on the city. This year, the chosen pitch is tiny Enniskillen, a good two hours' drive from Belfast even without roadblocks and hold-ups._

_There has been an enormous uptick in police presence and capabilities both on the streets of Belfast and in rural County Fermanagh. Central Belfast was virtually shut down on Saturday during the peaceful march called by local left groups, where 3,000 demonstrators were met by an almost equal number of police, even though the G8 leaders weren’t even in the country yet. Local prison facilities have been expanded, horrifying residents. "One of the top stories on the news here in the North was that they'd spent millions building this facility – they're so prepared for mass violence that they could lock up 300 people at will," Sean Mitchell, an activist with the Irish anti-austerity group People Before Profit, tells me._

_The choice to hold the G8 in Northern Ireland is an interesting one, designed in part to showcase the state's newfound stability, but also to demonstrate the lengths to which local law enforcement is prepared to go to defend that stability. In his speech at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast this morning, Obama praised the people of Northern Ireland for their commitment to ending sectarian violence, saying that the peace process gave "the entire world hope." He quoted Yeats and Heaney, made jokes about the craic, and spoke of sunny days free from the anticipation of violence. Outside it rained hard on 3,000 police, the sort of airless city rain that seems to come from all directions at once._

_You might have been forgiven for thinking the whole of Belfast loved Obama, were it not for the massive slogan marked out in white bedsheets on a nearby hill, visible across the city, and certainly from the presidential helicopter. The slogan reads “G8/NWO: WAR CRIMINALS.”_

_The governments in Westminster and Stormont are keen to show off a Northern Ireland free from the merest whimper of trouble, whatever it takes. In the process, they have collapsed the notion of hard-won peace into a logic whereby all protest is put down and suppressed in the name of "stability". This confuses, effectively, the idea of a state in which citizens work together to live better lives after years of fighting – some might call this a democracy functioning well – with a state in which no dissent is tolerated, which is the sort of crisis of representative democracy that most G8 leaders, from Putin to President Obama, are facing at home right now._

_This morning the streets of Enniskilllen, lined with abandoned shops disguised behind false fronts, were practically deserted. Protesters making their way to Fermanagh from across Northern Ireland expect to be arrested and thrown into one of the specially-developed dentention facilities standing ready for them. I spoke to young Fermanagh residents who had been hassled at home by the police merely for discussing the possibility of peaceful protest on the internet; all of them were too frightened of retribution to talk on the record. To mistake this bicep-flexing neoliberal muscle-show for a stable state full of happy people would be a mistake._

_"The argument is that we're in a new situation, a 'New Northern Ireland', but the security response to the G8 has broken that down," says Sean Mitchell. "It's the same mass-scale, repressive response to political protest - but this time used against anti-capitalist protesters." _


Note that the only bits that might be of any worth are other people's quotes. And we know what she's like with misquoting people etc.
She can fly back and forth to the USA but I guess Fermanagh just isn't cool enough for her.
Also she didn't bother mentioning that there had been bomb scares in the smaller villages around Fermanagh a couple of months back. They'd been reported in the local papers. But hey, if Enniskillen is tiny then I guess Derrylin etc doesn't even exist.


----------



## rekil (Jun 18, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Sharp struggle for young black working-class women by Malcolm:
> 
> https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/346898856979623936
> 
> ...


https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/344137225459609600


> How weirded out you would be if you were an upset 15 year old girl and Jonathan Safran Foer started talking to you


He seems to think that 36 is middle aged.

https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/344137994955022336


> Basic empathy says a middle aged man shouldn't approach a teen girl stranger sitting alone except under real extenuating circumstances.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 18, 2013)

Probably discussed earlier but the "NINE WORLDS GEEK FEST 2013" LP will take part in is pretty confusing:


> Nine Worlds promises to act as a mecca for geeks in the UK- whether you're into Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Star Trek or Settlers of Catan. We're particularly excited by their 'Geek Feminism' programme- including speakers like Laurie Penny on Cybersexism, talks from women working in technology and visual effects and in depth examinations of subjects like Joss Whedon's feminisim and the Women of Westeros.


 


> Nine Worlds is a new convention in London, UK, 9–11 August 2013. It’s about gaming, film, cosplay, fandom, literature, science, geek culture, meeting people and having a really big party


 
The only spiel is:





> Laurie Penny: Cybersexism
> 
> The Internet is changing the rules of sex and power, but just as gender takes new forms online, so does misogyny, rape culture and sexual violence. A talk on the structure of sexism online, and how women are fighting back.


 
Ticket is now £85 for 3 days, no single days.


> Adult ticket... Valid for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. £85.00


----------



## rekil (Jun 18, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Black - Probably untrue





> Gerry Carroll, an activist in Belfast


He's for real. He's SWP but she can't say that.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 18, 2013)

copliker said:


> He's for real. He's SWP but she can't say that.


 
Whatever happened to Davy Carlin? Didn't he say he was going to stay active in politics after he dropped out of the Belfast SWP?


----------



## muscovyduck (Jun 18, 2013)

copliker said:


> He's for real. He's SWP but she can't say that.


Black's just anything that didn't definitely fit into the other two categories.


----------



## Fruitloop (Jun 18, 2013)

I can't believe anyone has actually tried to walk into one of those fake shop things. Most of them are hilariously obvious and even the ones that are mildly photorealistic are totally at odds with what the actual NI shops look like.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 18, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Probably discussed earlier but the "NINE WORLDS GEEK FEST 2013" LP will take part in is pretty confusing:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

London Expo is cheaper, had better guests and you can do single days


----------



## muscovyduck (Jun 18, 2013)

Fruitloop said:


> I can't believe anyone has actually tried to walk into one of those fake shop things. Most of them are hilariously obvious and even the ones that are mildly photorealistic are totally at odds with what the actual NI shops look like.


They might have done in the same way I absent mindedly walk into the wrong shops if I'm on autopilot. She can't know for sure either way because it's painfully obvious she's never been there.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 18, 2013)

I wonder tha pennie would think a little bit of uncollapsing. Hard-won peace ffs.

Cheers for doing that btw muscovyduck.


----------



## rekil (Jun 18, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> But hey, if Enniskillen is tiny then I guess Derrylin etc doesn't even exist.


Derrylin was immortalised in this fantastic tribute song to disgraced tycoon Sean Quinn. She doesn't need LP's pity mentions.


Spoiler


----------



## kavenism (Jun 18, 2013)

My somewhat extended take on privilege discourse with Laurie as principle case study.

http://theaskesis.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/intersectional-theory-and-privilege.html

It's a bit dry in places but when dealing with people whose first line of attack is personal slander it's best to keep things mostly analytic.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 18, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> _He quoted Yeats and Heaney, made jokes about the craic, and spoke of sunny days free from the anticipation of violence. Outside it rained hard on 3,000 police, the sort of airless city rain that seems to come from all directions at once._


 
Isn't joking itself "craic"?




> airless city rain that seems to come from all directions at once


 


I don't get this.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 18, 2013)

kavenism said:


> My somewhat extended take on privilege discourse with Laurie as principle case study.
> 
> http://theaskesis.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/intersectional-theory-and-privilege.html
> 
> It's a bit dry in places but when dealing with people whose first line of attack is personal slander it's best to keep things mostly analytic.


 
Not a lesson i would take from any of this, but shall have a gander.


----------



## muscovyduck (Jun 18, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Isn't joking itself "craic"?


Like she would know. She's probably come across the Belfast Craic page on Facebook and hasn't married up the spelling of 'craic' to the pronunciation of 'crack'.


sihhi said:


> I don't get this.


Basically referring to that fact that it rains in Ireland. Hard hitting journalism from the voice of the youth there.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 18, 2013)

muscovyduck said:


> Like she would know. She's probably come across the Balfast Craic page on Facebook and hasn't married up the spelling of 'craic' to the pronunciation of 'crack'.


 
It has a number of uses/meanings too, right? So it's not clear exactly what the guy is joking about.



> Basically referring to that fact that it rains in Ireland. Hard hitting journalism from the voice of the youth there.


 
I feel dumb for asking the question.


----------



## rekil (Jun 18, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Whatever happened to Davy Carlin? Didn't he say he was going to stay active in politics after he dropped out of the Belfast SWP?


I have no idea, and this is the last thing on my mind atm.


----------



## muscovyduck (Jun 18, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It has a number of uses/meanings too, right? So it's not clear exactly what the guy is joking about.


I always assumed in that context craic just means banter, but with a large focus on in-jokes due to the fact 'banter' has become so overused.



sihhi said:


> I feel dumb for asking the question.


You never know with Laurie, she could've been using it as a metaphor for her struggle against the patriarchy.


----------



## treelover (Jun 19, 2013)

> *Merry Cross shares an excellent piece of advice about how to challenge domineering behaviour in others – or address it in yourself.*
> As a white disabled woman, I am already hugely bothered by the fact that too many thoroughly good people who joined Left Unity are thinking of leaving, because of the behaviour of white men (mostly those with a background in left politics). Already we have witnessed the tendency for such men to dominate proceedings – and to some extent disrupt them. My own reaction has swung from raging anger to a desperate sense of powerlessness and back again.
> My daughters though, one of whom is amongst those thinking of leaving, alerted me to this excellent piece of advice, from one white man to all others.
> 
> ...


 





> *Tools for White Guys who are Working for Social Change… and other people socialized in a society based on domination*
> 
> Thu, 23 Apr 2009 - 16:15 | Chris Crass
> More articles about:
> ...


 

Left Unity joins the checking your privilege brigade, its 'white men' who are the problem and the author offers up a classic US style admonishment and advice for such offenders.

The thing is some of this is common decency and the right thing to do but imo, its wrapped up in this mid atlantic 90's style individualised campus politics which will just alienate many.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 19, 2013)

is the sackcloth optional?


----------



## treelover (Jun 19, 2013)

No, but the hairshirt (male only) is...


----------



## Balbi (Jun 19, 2013)

Hands up who's met someone the lady in the first article's describing? *cautiously raises hand* 

That second article's just, well, obvious - isn't it? Don't be a twat


----------



## JimW (Jun 19, 2013)

I am a rambling Brighton lass
To privilege I was born
And many's the pointless hour I spent
By the banks of sweet Lough Erne
The real, live poor I can not endure
Like others of my station
To America I sailed away
To enhance my reputation.


----------



## chilango (Jun 19, 2013)

treelover said:


> Left Unity joins the checking your privilege brigade, its 'white men' who are the problem and the author offers up a classic US style admonishment and advice for such offenders.
> 
> The thing is some of this is common decency and the right thing to do but imo, its wrapped up in this mid atlantic 90's style individualised campus politics which will just alienate many.



She's the contact for my local group. Frankly, after reading that I won't be going along.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 19, 2013)

http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/06...state-long-enough-you-create-censor-your-head



> There are still ways to operate in private. If I want to have an online conversation or make a transaction that I’m absolutely sure can’t be snooped on, there are tools I can download, software I can teach myself to use. But it’s a faff, and it can protect you only so far unless you choose to go entirely off-grid, and I’ve been addicted to Facebook since 2006. It’s far less trouble to modify your behaviour so you don’t ever say anything that might give the wrong impression. It’s easier, in short, to behave.


 
Laurie Penny is secretly a Shining Path lone wolf sleeper, she just pretends to be a liberal intersectionalista online because the surveillance state is forcing her to modify her behaviour. 

While some of her points, especially re: Big Data are important and no doubt gleaned from elsewhere the rest is just ridiculous bullshit enough to turn anyone on the fence into an authoritarian. She seems just as if not more concerned with  a lack of graffiti, Olympic mascots and not being able to make jokes about bombs at airports.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 19, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> No idea. Stop thinking, stop critiquing, never question my intentions. never question my actions seems to be the message.
> But then again, we shouldn't forget how to be a good ally:
> 
> 2. It is not your role to purposefully criticise the mandate of the liberation officer's or women leaders’ duties
> ...


 
13. Yes we have no bananas.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 19, 2013)

articul8 said:


> It's a slippery slope once you start defining what consensual acts between adults are "unacceptable"


 
every time some liberal uses the expression slippery slope to avoid having the guts to define right and wrong or risk upsetting some wankers (in this case literally), i am reminded of why i believe liberals should be shot on sight.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jun 19, 2013)

chilango said:


> She's the contact for my local group. Frankly, after reading that I won't be going along.


 

Which I'm sure she see as a victory!

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## chilango (Jun 19, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Which I'm sure she see as a victory!
> 
> Cheers - Louis MacNeice



Aye. 

Probably for the best as there's no doubt I'd be disagreeing with the direction they're taking. Something she clearly doesn't want to hear from a "white man with a background in Left politics".

Oh well, whatever, nevermind.


----------



## rekil (Jun 19, 2013)

> Chris Crass outlines practical strategies for minimising everyday domination.
> 1. Practice noticing who’s in the room at meetings - how many gender privileged men (biological men), how many women, how many transgendered people, how many white people, how many people of color, is it majority heterosexual, are there out queers, what are people’s class backgrounds.


Sounds very inefficient tbh, not to mention riddled with the potential for insulting twattery. "But you _look_ like you just had a sex change."

So how about some Progressive Stack Optimization. Intersectionality Badges.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jun 19, 2013)

> The word that Michel Foucault uses to describe this type of modified behaviour is discipline.


 
A bit of a gratuitous name-check there to introduce the concept and word 'discipline'. I also wonder if she will expect to get paid by M&S for advertising that she uses their knickers.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 19, 2013)

Hocus Eye. said:


> A bit of a gratuitous name-check there to introduce the concept and word 'discipline'. I also wonder if she will get expect paid by M&S for advertising that she uses their knickers.


 

I can see it, product placement aimed at the right-on but guilty NS buying middle-class market. "Yes, I shop at M&S Tarquin, but like Laurie Penny I only splash out on their value range!"


----------



## kavenism (Jun 19, 2013)

Judging by the bottom row in that grid there's a category missing.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 19, 2013)

> 10. Struggle with the saying, “you will be needed in the movement when you realize that you are not needed in the movement”.


 
...



> 11. Struggle with and work with the model of group leadership that says that the responsibility of leaders is to help develop more leaders, and think about what this means to you: how do you support others and what support do you need from others.


 
...



> This includes men providing emotional and political support to other men. How can men work to be allies to each other in the struggle to develop radical models of anti-racist, class conscious, pro-queer, feminist *manhood* that challenges strict *binary gender roles* and categories.


 
...




> Thanks and love to my comrades in the* Bay Area gender privileged men’s group of the Ruckus Society* and the *men’s group (biological and transgendered men) of the Challenging White Supremacy Collective.*


 
...

Here is the reading it recommends:

http://www.phillyspissed.net/sites/default/files/ZINE ontheroadtohealing.pdf


----------



## kavenism (Jun 19, 2013)

Fucking hell! Frankly I'd sooner form a mutual support group with Peter Hitchens than these clowns.

YOU WILL SEEK INTIMACY WITH MEN!!!

....or not as the case may be.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 19, 2013)

This stuff is bordering on therapy - and the self-obsessed individual  type that fucked up so much stuff in the mid-70s and 80s. It starts with that stuff and ends up in fucking tee-pees.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 19, 2013)

...what do they mean by intimacy?


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 19, 2013)

the fuck


----------



## rekil (Jun 19, 2013)

It reminds me of the self-help section in bookshops. I always up the pace of my stroll a tiny bit when I have to go through it.


----------



## rekil (Jun 19, 2013)

J Ed said:


> ...what do they mean by intimacy?


Using the urinals instead of the cubicles I think.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jun 19, 2013)

That list of aspirations or targets or whatever contains only 11 items. Surely in the traditional the self-healing world there are always 12 'steps'.

Also what do those bullet-point symbols at the end of each line represent?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 19, 2013)

There are more than 11, in the 'Personal Goals' bit but the file size is too big.

This is the personal experiences and thoughts questionaire.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 19, 2013)

this is like therapy.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jun 19, 2013)

Sorry, I didn't mean to start off a massive derail.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> this is like therapy.


 
You can say that frogwoman because you are a woman, however men doing likewise is a sign of not really wanting to oppose sexism. Remember it is called 'A Booklet For Men Against Sexism' - stopping sexism is the aim of all this.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 19, 2013)

But how is filling out those questionnaires going to stop people being sexist? 

And knowing about this stuff doesn't necessarily stop a rapist from raping somebody, they could fill all the questions in in the "right" way and therefore make themselves seem more trustworthy and decent.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> But how is filling out those questionnaires going to stop people being sexist?


 
It's part of a larger political education and consciousness-raising.

Hence the importance of listening to feminists like Starhawk ("I'm Starhawk, author of many works celebrating the Goddess movement and Earth-based, feminist spirituality. I’m a peace, environmental, and global justice activist and trainer, a permaculture designer and teacher, a Pagan and Witch.")
and male-written emotion-based poetry:


----------



## Sue (Jun 19, 2013)

copliker said:


> It reminds me of the self-help section in bookshops. I always up the pace of my stroll a tiny bit when I have to go through it.


Priests in lingerie departments kind of thing..?


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 19, 2013)

Sue said:


> Priests in lingerie departments kind of thing..?


 

Check your not being a priest privilege and not living on a small irish island privilege


----------



## sihhi (Jun 19, 2013)

Sue said:


> Priests in lingerie departments kind of thing..?


 
Cue allies-of-minorities: <Whilst we are not Irish, we would please urge all people with mixed Irish heritage/who are fully Irish to look closely at the statement to help us consider whether or not it does or does not amount to cultural stereotypes being re-performed in a non-reclaiming (British) oppression-denying fashion. We await your command, if you think it is dismissive and patronising, we will ally with you against oppression. The intention doesn't matter, and it never will, only the offence. We don't want another Reginald D Hunter at the PFA situation on our hands. Help!>


----------



## Sue (Jun 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Check your not being a priest privilege and not living on a small irish island privilege



Check your gender/religious/placist assumptions...


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Check your not being a priest privilege and not living on a small irish island privilege


 
POST OF THE DAY

Checking your privilege is rather like making love to a beautiful woman. . .


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Cue allies-of-minorities: <Whilst we are not Irish, we would please urge all people with mixed Irish heritage/who are fully Irish to look closely at the statement to help us consider whether or not it does or does not amount to cultural stereotypes being re-performed in a non-reclaiming (British) oppression-denying fashion. We await your command, if you think it is dismissive and patronising, we will ally with you against oppression. The intention doesn't matter, and it never will, only the offence. We don't want another Reginald D Hunter at the PFA situation on our hands. Help!>


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Cue allies-of-minorities: <Whilst we are not Irish, we would please urge all people with mixed Irish heritage/who are fully Irish to look closely at the statement to help us consider whether or not it does or does not amount to cultural stereotypes being re-performed in a non-reclaiming (British) oppression-denying fashion. We await your command, if you think it is dismissive and patronising, we will ally with you against oppression. The intention doesn't matter, and it never will, only the offence. We don't want another Reginald D Hunter at the PFA situation on our hands. Help!>


 

Well plainly if we're going to do an intersectional analysis of Father Ted, Plainly Mrs Doyle has got to be the most oppressed out of everyone in Parochial House because she is a woman and has to make the tea for everyone. But then Father Jack is also oppressed because he is an alcoholic, old and unattractive. But he is also privileged over Mrs Doyle and quite regularly uses his privilege as a senior member of the clergy to demand people get drinks for him. Dougal is more attractive than Father Jack or Mrs Doyle, but he is also oppressed by them because he is younger and more inexperienced. Father Ted has to go to the back of the progressive stack because he is the most privileged, being neither old, nor uneducated or an alcoholic or a woman, although thinking about it he does have the oppression of having a criminal past, which Dougal often brings up by saying "the money was just resting in your account" displaying insensitivity and dismissing the reality of his oppression.

It's a right mess.

Idris2002


----------



## Sue (Jun 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Cue allies-of-minorities: <Whilst we are not Irish, we would please urge all people with mixed Irish heritage/who are fully Irish to look closely at the statement to help us consider whether or not it does or does not amount to cultural stereotypes being re-performed in a non-reclaiming (British) oppression-denying fashion. We await your command, if you think it is dismissive and patronising, we will ally with you against oppression. The intention doesn't matter, and it never will, only the offence. We don't want another Reginald D Hunter at the PFA situation on our hands. Help!>



I can rustle up an Irish grandparent or two I'll have you know. Do I get some points for that in the intersectionality bingo. .?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Well plainly if we're going to do an intersectional analysis of Father Ted, Plainly Mrs Doyle has got to be the most oppressed out of everyone in Parochial House because she is a woman and has to make the tea for everyone. But then Father Jack is also oppressed because he is an alcoholic, old and unattractive. But he is also privileged over Mrs Doyle and quite regularly uses his privilege as a senior member of the clergy to demand people get drinks for him. Dougal is more attractive than Father Jack or Mrs Doyle, but he is also oppressed by them because he is younger and more inexperienced. Father Ted has to go to the back of the progressive stack because he is the most privileged, being neither old, nor uneducated or an alcoholic or a woman, although thinking about it he does have the oppression of having a criminal past, which Dougal often brings up by saying "the money was just resting in your account" displaying insensitivity and dismissing the reality of his oppression.
> 
> It's a right mess.
> 
> Idris2002


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 19, 2013)

Sue said:


> I can rustle up an Irish grandparent or two I'll have you know. Do I get some points for that in the intersectionality bingo. .?


 


depends if you put the money in the hat.

Where does support for irish republicanism put one in the stack? does it have a spoke?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 19, 2013)

(Trigger warning- confusion, possible anti-Irish racism)

Allies-of-minorities Cheadle High Street: An Open Letter to the Wider Movement and Proletarian Democracy.

We are exceedingly confused. An Irish man (resident in Ireland) is backing up a non-Irish woman (resident in Britain) who has entered a privilege challenge against a mixed heritage Irish woman (resident in Britain) making a joke involving and/or invoking something sort of Irish but made with significant assistance from imperialist Channel 4, but exported to essentially non-imperialist RTE2. Urgent help is requested.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 19, 2013)

Sue said:


> I can rustle up an Irish grandparent or two I'll have you know. Do I get some points for that in the intersectionality bingo. .?


 

Doubtful, this stuff is all based on America and Americans seem to see Irishness as just another white privilege and not an oppression.


----------



## agricola (Jun 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Well plainly if we're going to do an intersectional analysis of Father Ted, Plainly Mrs Doyle has got to be the most oppressed out of everyone in Parochial House because she is a woman and has to make the tea for everyone. But then Father Jack is also oppressed because he is an alcoholic, old and unattractive. But he is also privileged over Mrs Doyle and quite regularly uses his privilege as a senior member of the clergy to demand people get drinks for him. Dougal is more attractive than Father Jack or Mrs Doyle, but he is also oppressed by them because he is younger and more inexperienced. Father Ted has to go to the back of the progressive stack because he is the most privileged, being neither old, nor uneducated or an alcoholic or a woman, although thinking about it he does have the oppression of having a criminal past, which Dougal often brings up by saying "the money was just resting in your account" displaying insensitivity and dismissing the reality of his oppression.
> 
> It's a right mess.
> 
> Idris2002


 
I agree with you about Ted, lets not forget he got Pat Mustard sacked as well.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 19, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Doubtful, this stuff is all based on America and Americans seem to see Irishness as just another white privilege and not an oppression.


 
Twas not always thus.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> (Trigger warning- confusion, possible anti-Irish racism)
> 
> Allies-of-minorities Cheadle High Street: An Open Letter to the Wider Movement and Proletarian Democracy.
> 
> We are exceedingly confused. An Irish man (resident in Ireland) is backing up a non-Irish woman (resident in Britain) who has entered a privilege challenge against a mixed heritage Irish woman (resident in Britain) making a joke involving and/or invoking something sort of Irish but made with significant assistance from imperialist Channel 4, but exported to essentially non-imperialist RTE2. Urgent help is requested.


----------



## Greebo (Jun 19, 2013)

J Ed said:


> ...what do they mean by intimacy?


 
Talking about feelings to other men without thinking that intimacy is something you can only every have with somebody who you hope (or intend) to fuck.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Well plainly if we're going to do an intersectional analysis of Father Ted, Plainly Mrs Doyle has got to be the most oppressed out of everyone in Parochial House because she is a woman and has to make the tea for everyone. But then Father Jack is also oppressed because he is an alcoholic, old and unattractive. But he is also privileged over Mrs Doyle and quite regularly uses his privilege as a senior member of the clergy to demand people get drinks for him. Dougal is more attractive than Father Jack or Mrs Doyle, but he is also oppressed by them because he is younger and more inexperienced. Father Ted has to go to the back of the progressive stack because he is the most privileged, being neither old, nor uneducated or an alcoholic or a woman, although thinking about it he does have the oppression of having a criminal past, which Dougal often brings up by saying "the money was just resting in your account" displaying insensitivity and dismissing the reality of his oppression.


 
A typical Gaelo-centric _reading, _failing to notice the_ glaring Orientalist assumptions _that underpin the entire household that privileges _white Irish womanhood_ over all other _women of colour_ who all fall over themselves to essentially side with Father Ted's racist bullshit against the overseas Chinese community of Craggy Island:






To back up this rigid analysis, I will quote from an US _Gramscian organic intellectual_ but university _academic_ who once relied on the _lived experience testimony_ of a _black woman_ still living in the rural deep South who reinterpreted _white skin privilege_ thus: 'the Irish may be white niggers but they are still white'.


----------



## Greebo (Jun 19, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> <snip>Checking your privilege is rather like making love to a beautiful woman. . .


As like it as pain is to pleasure, unless you're a masochist.


----------



## treelover (Jun 19, 2013)

Thing is, as I have said before again, this stuff is in a country where millions are locked up and 40 million are on foodstamps, it beggars belief they see this as a priority


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 19, 2013)

Also as steph says far more serious things go on in terms of racism, discrimination especially towards transgender people and it's odd that "misgendering" is seen as a priority.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> (Trigger warning-


----------



## rekil (Jun 19, 2013)

LAURA PENNY Vs URBAN75


----------



## stethoscope (Jun 19, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


>


----------



## cesare (Jun 19, 2013)

Don't know what's worse. Her pen or her sword.


----------



## rekil (Jun 19, 2013)

She bought a new hat.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 19, 2013)

the farangist fedora is becoming a weird fashion meme amongst fringe political people


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 19, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This stuff is bordering on therapy - and the self-obsessed individual type that fucked up so much stuff in the mid-70s and 80s. It starts with that stuff and ends up in fucking tee-pees.


 
i dunno butch, you, me, a nice bottle of cava and a sweat lodge.  what could be better?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 19, 2013)

any more for any more?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 19, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> any more for any more?


 
The worst thing about being an anthropologist is that people think you're into this sort of thing.


----------



## rekil (Jun 19, 2013)

I worked with a Finnish bloke whose idea of a holiday was to hole up in a shed in the middle of nowhere with his mate and drink (heavily) for a week. Fairly normal apparently.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 19, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> The worst thing about being an anthropologist is that people think you're into this sort of thing.


 

few cups of ayuhusca and balls out with the lads. Happy days


----------



## cesare (Jun 19, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> The worst thing about being an anthropologist is that people think you're into this sort of thing.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 19, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> few cups of ayuhusca and balls out with the lads. Happy days


 
We tend to just drink heavily - though not as much as the older generation. The last guy to share an office with me had an amusing anecdote involving a very drunk Marvin Harris and a hotel laundry basket.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> And knowing about this stuff doesn't necessarily stop a rapist from raping somebody, they could fill all the questions in in the "right" way and therefore make themselves seem more trustworthy and decent.


 
Oddly for such a booklet, sexual coercion isn't really discussed except for one part which starts off with this list:



How can those of us who are unable to "develop full relationships with both men and women" - ie everyone under a capitalism which alienates labour away from human needs - just take this "step".

Also what of the working-class who do "withdraw emotionally"? How can these kind of attitudes 'Stop withdrawing emotionally' assist political struggles.

Demands of men by (superior) feminist men.

1. Request consent from females for every instance of sexualised behaviour. - Fine.
2. Stop withdrawing emotionally. ??!?


----------



## J Ed (Jun 19, 2013)

This stuff is all dripping with extrovert privilege, and I'm not even being ironic.


----------



## smokedout (Jun 19, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


>


 
 I'm stealing that


----------



## killer b (Jun 19, 2013)

copliker said:


> I worked with a Finnish bloke whose idea of a holiday was to hole up in a shed in the middle of nowhere with his mate and drink (heavily) for a week. Fairly normal apparently.


sounds ok to me.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jun 19, 2013)

All it takes to stop sexism is for men to go through a individual voyage of self-discovery and enlightenment regarding the use of certain words and certain behaviours. Never mind white privilege, what about post-code privilege? What about the all-pervasive and systemic kinds of privilege that are dealt out that can't be personalised in this way, such as oooh Laurie Penny's education and subsequent career? Christ Herbert Spencer, Edmund Burke and the rest of 'em would've loved this lot - being an oppressor is the defect of the individual, and therefore oppression can only be combatted by getting individuals to act in a more virtuous way. With seminars and awareness raising and Bob Geldof and so on. Those who claim that oppression is discrete, depersonalised and, crucially institutionally embedded in the material basis of society, are just trying to excuse their own privilege by resorting to class determinism - ie Thomas Spence, William Godwin, Tom Paine, Robert Owen and the entire democratic socialist canon from that point on - all of them saw appealing to the grace of the individual as an inadaquet way to combat privilege, and believed that individuals are conditioned to behave in certain ways by the institutions they live under, all of which are grafted to a material basis. Challenging that material basis has to be the first step in taking it on. I wonder how many people who advocate intersectionality, or at least a particular version of it, realise they are choosing the side of classical liberalism against socialism in the great ideological battle of the last 250 years?

That doesn't mean that acting in a more considerate way is a bad thing, making concessions, being aware of how you benefit from your skin colour or gender, far from it, only that it's not a tool that can be useful in defeating oppression unless it's tied to those material critiques, rather than some post-freudian hippy vision of personal growth. Some try this, and run into problems trying to hammer the square through the circle hole - see some of the Anarcho's who've so quickly abandoned their own idea's and taken this collection of poorly-understood buzzwords up out of fear they'll be denounced if they don't, others don't have these qualms and make no attempt to try to reconcile the liberalism with their socialist pretensions and basically go full liberalism.

Also - is there scope for comparing the de-class-ing (sorry) of American party politics from the 1920's onwards to the current mess? In particular the way in which party politics was consciously and deliberately racialised to prevent the emergence of mass class-based political parties, as was the case in Europe, and which was mirrored in the USA in the latter part of the 19th century. Not my strongest area tbh this, so any info would be great.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jun 19, 2013)

copliker said:


> hole up in a shed in the middle of nowhere with his mate and drink (heavily)


 
This is pretty much my teens in a sentence.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 19, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Also - is there scope for comparing the de-class-ing (sorry) of American party politics from the 1920's onwards to the current mess? In particular the way in which party politics was consciously and deliberately racialised to prevent the emergence of mass class-based political parties, as was the case in Europe, and which was mirrored in the USA in the latter part of the 19th century. Not my strongest area tbh this, so any info would be great.


 
Union/mafia link ups never helped american unionism. In some cases the union bank was being used for low cost (IE never being payed back) loans to mobsters. A shitty thing but you ask yourself what choice did they have when the gov were happy to employ their own gunmen  over fucking workplace disputes


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> It's part of a larger political education and consciousness-raising.
> 
> Hence the importance of listening to feminists like Starhawk ("I'm Starhawk, author of many works celebrating the Goddess movement and Earth-based, feminist spirituality. I’m a peace, environmental, and global justice activist and trainer, a permaculture designer and teacher, a Pagan and Witch.")
> and male-written emotion-based poetry:View attachment 33893


 
On the strength of this, she's a much better poet than Laurie Penny. But that's not saying much. I would insert a link to the execrable Saudade here but I just can't face it again. I just can't.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jun 19, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Union/mafia link ups never helped american unionism. In some cases the union bank was being used for low cost (IE never being payed back) loans to mobsters. A shitty thing but you ask yourself what choice did they have when the gov were happy to employ their own gunmen over fucking workplace disputes


 
Not so sure about that, isn't it the case that the American labour movement won some of it's most important victories, and experienced some of it's strongest growth, during the periods in the 30's through to the 50's where the mafia were involved? After all, you don't scab if your union is run by the sort of guys who break legs for a living. This is true incidentally of the British labour movement, which actually experienced some of it's most important early growth in the years of the Combination Acts, from iirc 1799 to 1824, when they were essentially outlaw movements that we'd have called gangsters if they were around today. Not only did operating outside the law strengthen an discipline these unions, nothing builds a bit of solidarity between the workers than going out Ludding as Hobsbawn once said, it gave them some real muscle too - they were more than happy to use violence to keep their unions disciplined.

I mean there's a lot of politics going on there, I wouldn't know where to begin with the American stuff to be honest.


----------



## rekil (Jun 19, 2013)

killer b said:


> sounds ok to me.


Check your high alcohol tolerance and rural finland appreciation privilege. (It was better when my mate described it actually)


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 19, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Not so sure about that, isn't it the case that the American labour movement won some of it's most important victories, and experienced some of it's strongest growth, during the periods in the 30's through to the 50's where the mafia were involved? After all, you don't scab if your union is run by the sort of guys who break legs for a living. This is true incidentally of the British labour movement, which actually experienced some of it's most important early growth in the years of the Combination Acts, from iirc 1799 to 1824, when they were essentially outlaw movements that we'd have called gangsters if they were around today. Not only did operating outside the law strengthen an discipline these unions, nothing builds a bit of solidarity between the workers than going out Ludding as Hobsbawn once said, it gave them some real muscle too - they were more than happy to use violence to keep their unions disciplined.
> 
> I mean there's a lot of politics going on there, I wouldn't know where to begin with the American stuff to be honest.


 

if you get in bed with actual gangsters they will look after the family bank account. Labour movements are just a source to use to rip construction matriel from, subs from and boots on the cobbles. Its not a good mix, because for certain it allows your whole union to be declared illegal and these days fall under RICO purview


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 19, 2013)

J Ed said:


> ...what do they mean by intimacy?


 
I just tried to be intimate with old Arthur down at the allotments. There was some unpleasantness that led to the police being called. I am no longer allowed within 100 yards of the allotments, the old folks bungalows or the local primary school.

It's not just the oppressed that get oppressed by oppression - try and be a good ally and you end up on the register


----------



## rekil (Jun 19, 2013)

There should be intimacy oversight officers to catch out the spoofers. All men must keep their designated IOO informed of their whereabouts and when subjected to a check, must perform acts of intimacy on request with a randomly selected man.


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## DotCommunist (Jun 19, 2013)

my intimacy is when  i duck outside for a spliff. Along with sad uncles and fellow fiends. I share my spit


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 19, 2013)

Bishop Brennan is oppressed and privileged at the same time. He is privileged by class and the fact that as a bishop he has a senior rank to Ted, Dougal and Father Jack. However, he is also oppressed because of the patriarchal expectations of the church expecting him not to have a girlfriend and a son in California. When Father Jack discovers the video of Bishop Brennan, the girlfriend and the son on holiday on the beach and plays it to him he is in fact engaging in a form of "bishop-shaming" which aims to humiliate Bishop Brennan by highlighting the fact that he has gone against the patriarchy of the Vatican by secretly having a child. Dougal also uses ableist behaviour when he hides the rabbits in Bishop Brennan's room, oppressing him because of his phobia of rabbits. When Father Ted kicks Bishop Brennan up the arse far from the working class hero getting on over on "the man" as many so-called leftists would say, he is actually using his priest privilege (of not being a bishop so not having as much to lose) and the privilege of his superior strength to create a huge amount of oppression, which lasts until Bishop Brennan comes out of his coma. As an outsider in the Craggy Island community Bishop Brennan is doubly oppressed, both by Ted and by the fact that as a stranger from the "mainland" he is not familiar with the island ways.

copliker Idris2002


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 19, 2013)

copliker said:


> Sounds very inefficient tbh, not to mention riddled with the potential for insulting twattery. "But you _look_ like you just had a sex change."
> 
> So how about some Progressive Stack Optimization. Intersectionality Badges.
> 
> ...


 
A nice bit of recycling, Mr. c.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> ...
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

I knew that Iron John had started men down a weird road, but that's just terrifying!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 19, 2013)

J Ed said:


> ...what do they mean by intimacy?


 
I'm going to venture a guess that they mean emotional openness rather than a gay gangbang.


----------



## Sue (Jun 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Bishop Brennan is oppressed and privileged at the same time. He is privileged by class and the fact that as a bishop he has a senior rank to Ted, Dougal and Father Jack. However, he is also oppressed because of the patriarchal expectations of the church expecting him not to have a girlfriend and a son in California. When Father Jack discovers the video of Bishop Brennan, the girlfriend and the son on holiday on the beach and plays it to him he is in fact engaging in a form of "bishop-shaming" which aims to humiliate Bishop Brennan by highlighting the fact that he has gone against the patriarchy of the Vatican by secretly having a child. Dougal also uses ableist behaviour when he hides the rabbits in Bishop Brennan's room, oppressing him because of his phobia of rabbits. When Father Ted kicks Bishop Brennan up the arse far from the working class hero getting on over on "the man" as many so-called leftists would say, he is actually using his priest privilege (of not being a bishop so not having as much to lose) and the privilege of his superior strength to create a huge amount of oppression, which lasts until Bishop Brennan comes out of his coma. As an outsider in the Craggy Island community Bishop Brennan is doubly oppressed, both by Ted and by the fact that as a stranger from the "mainland" he is not familiar with the island ways.
> 
> copliker Idris2002


 
And all because I mentioned priests and lingerie departments... Anyway, good work all. Privilege theory in relation to Father Ted makes more sense than most of the other intersectionality rubbish...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> this is like therapy.


 
Exactly what occurred to me, reading the flyer sihhi posted.
The problem with it, if it is "therapy", is that it's not open-ended - it doesn't allow a person undertaking it to reach their own conclusion, it very deliberately *guides* the person undertaking it to reach a pre-ordained conclusion: That they're sexist, misogynist and chauvinistic, even if they don't actually manifest those traits.

It's like one of those _mea culpa_ exercises that liberals occasionally undertake in order to feel good about themselves.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jun 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Bishop Brennan is oppressed and privileged at the same time. He is privileged by class and the fact that as a bishop he has a senior rank to Ted, Dougal and Father Jack. However, he is also oppressed because of the patriarchal expectations of the church expecting him not to have a girlfriend and a son in California. When Father Jack discovers the video of Bishop Brennan, the girlfriend and the son on holiday on the beach and plays it to him he is in fact engaging in a form of "bishop-shaming" which aims to humiliate Bishop Brennan by highlighting the fact that he has gone against the patriarchy of the Vatican by secretly having a child. Dougal also uses ableist behaviour when he hides the rabbits in Bishop Brennan's room, oppressing him because of his phobia of rabbits. When Father Ted kicks Bishop Brennan up the arse far from the working class hero getting on over on "the man" as many so-called leftists would say, he is actually using his priest privilege (of not being a bishop so not having as much to lose) and the privilege of his superior strength to create a huge amount of oppression, which lasts until Bishop Brennan comes out of his coma. As an outsider in the Craggy Island community Bishop Brennan is doubly oppressed, both by Ted and by the fact that as a stranger from the "mainland" he is not familiar with the island ways.
> 
> copliker Idris2002


 

So where does that leave the Holy Stone of Clonrickert (except up Len Brennan's arse)?


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 19, 2013)

since it's been upgraded to a class 2 relic it needs to go behind all the other relics in the stack


----------



## sihhi (Jun 19, 2013)

Article on intersectionality. I am confused.



> Whites' "ego" complaints re: Black stars = 1) "they shouldn't be rich, I should! I'm White!" 2) "Blacks should be subservient..ahem humble!"
> 
> And that's the gist. B/c of course their personality demands of Black stars doesn't exist for White ones. Typical WS 101 stuff...


 
WS is white supremacy.

Resulting in this analysis:







> I checked Kanye West and ego and it has 9,360,000 results which is LOWER than Rihanna. Jay-Z has 4,290,000 which is LOWER than Beyonce. (The fact that Kim Kardashian, only has 5,910,000 compared to Rih and Bey is astounding but not surprising.)


This naked worldwide racism and sexism on a point that is crucial to the struggle of non-white working-class females appears monstrous. However ...
Beyonce has a song called 'Ego'. There is a Nigerian female singer called Ego (pronounced egg-'short o') Iheanacho who is often refered to discussed as a Rihanna lite or West Africa's Rihanna.

(Also the term 'alter ego' is searched and written as a whole a lot about both these singers and Lady Gaga more so than someone like Adele who has a single schtick.) Type in any other black singer and the hits are well down.

Does the higher incidence of hits for female name+ego (as opposed to male name ego) might reflect the fact that the internet is just polluted with often sexualised pictures of female celebrities, simply because we live in sexualised sexist society hence money, ads etc. After all a straight search of Beyonce gives 279million compared to Kanye at 171million.
So I am genuinely confused. Is this a psychological instinct to pick a bone with the research a desperate plea to minimise the effects of racism and sexism?
This is the problem with all the cultural and media chatter analysis it makes people second guess why they aren't particularly enfuriated at Game of Thrones for its pretty obvious 'imperialist saviourism'-type storyline (I haven't seen that or any other episode of it).
Normally people'd think 'well, ordinary people like me have better more real concerns to press for'
under the pressure of the middle-class intersectionalists it's becoming 'wait, do I not give a crap, because I'm white?' [ignoring their class status], and because people dislike racism a lot, the answer tends to 'yes probably - it's the way white people are, after all'.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Bishop Brennan is oppressed and privileged at the same time. He is privileged by class and the fact that as a bishop he has a senior rank to Ted, Dougal and Father Jack. However, he is also oppressed because of the patriarchal expectations of the church expecting him not to have a girlfriend and a son in California. When Father Jack discovers the video of Bishop Brennan, the girlfriend and the son on holiday on the beach and plays it to him he is in fact engaging in a form of *"bishop-shaming"* which aims to humiliate Bishop Brennan by highlighting the fact that he has gone against the patriarchy of the Vatican by secretly having a child. Dougal also uses ableist behaviour when he hides the rabbits in Bishop Brennan's room, oppressing him because of his phobia of rabbits. When Father Ted kicks Bishop Brennan up the arse far from the working class hero getting on over on "the man" as many so-called leftists would say, he is actually using his priest privilege (of not being a bishop so not having as much to lose) and the privilege of his superior strength to create a huge amount of oppression, which lasts until Bishop Brennan comes out of his coma. As an outsider in the Craggy Island community Bishop Brennan is doubly oppressed, both by Ted and by the fact that as a stranger from the "mainland" he is not familiar with the island ways.
> 
> copliker Idris2002


 
"Bishop bashing" surely?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 19, 2013)

perhaps the ritual humiliation of Brennan is then a form of sublimated masturbation

*strokes beard*


----------



## Casually Red (Jun 19, 2013)

[quote="sihhi, post: 12329674, member:

Demands of men by (superior) feminist men.

*1. Request consent from females for every instance of sexualised behaviour. - Fine.*
2. Stop withdrawing emotionally. ??!?[/quote]

im sorry but thats not fine, i seriously cannot imagine ever going out with someone for a few months and asking them if its ok first before i do this or that ...mid hug...is it ok if i feel your bum.... Thats utter bollocks. Relationships dont work like that for non freaks . You have to feel your way along..literally . I think a woman would get seriously annoyed and frustrated having to put up with that noinsense , tell me to  fuck off and call me a weirdo if i started doing that . Or if anyone else did.

feminist men are full of shit if thats what theyre coming out with


----------



## Casually Red (Jun 19, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I'm going to venture a guess that they mean emotional openness rather than a gay gangbang.


 
you know damn well thats not what they mean . Its the slippery slope to frenzied wolfbagging and well you know it . Under the guise of initial _emotional openness_ . Its not something that could ever end well .


----------



## Casually Red (Jun 19, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Not so sure about that, isn't it the case that the American labour movement won some of it's most important victories, and experienced some of it's strongest growth, during the periods in the 30's through to the 50's where the mafia were involved? After all, you don't scab if your union is run by the sort of guys who break legs for a living. This is true incidentally of the British labour movement, which actually experienced some of it's most important early growth in the years of the Combination Acts, from iirc 1799 to 1824, when they were essentially outlaw movements that we'd have called gangsters if they were around today. Not only did operating outside the law strengthen an discipline these unions, nothing builds a bit of solidarity between the workers than going out Ludding as Hobsbawn once said, it gave them some real muscle too - they were more than happy to use violence to keep their unions disciplined.
> 
> I mean there's a lot of politics going on there, I wouldn't know where to begin with the American stuff to be honest.


 
as well as that you get links between the bigger gangsters and politicians, who get lobbied by business interests . Rarely ends well for workers . Gangsters are just deregulated capitalists at the end of the day .


----------



## YouSir (Jun 19, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> you know damn well thats not what they mean . Its the slippery slope to frenzied wolfbagging and well you know it . Under the guise of initial _emotional openness_ . Its not something that could ever end well .


 

Had to Google Wolfbagging, rather I hadn't, much as I like bacon. Does that mean I'm emotionally closed and a massive anti-Feminist bastard then?


----------



## Casually Red (Jun 19, 2013)

YouSir said:


> Had to Google Wolfbagging, rather I hadn't, much as I like bacon. Does that mean I'm emotionally closed and a massive anti-Feminist bastard then?


 
and possibly even a racist, depending on which privilege you have to check too .


----------



## YouSir (Jun 19, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> and possibly even a racist, depending on which privilege you have to check too .


 

Shit... I check my privilege at least six times a day and it never gets any better. Fuck me and everything I do.


----------



## Casually Red (Jun 19, 2013)

thats the spirit


----------



## barney_pig (Jun 20, 2013)

.


----------



## Casually Red (Jun 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Article on intersectionality. I am confused.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
thats it....thats fucking it ..the last bastard straw. I cant take any more and they have to fucking die    .
Either that or an actual real re education camp to knock that shite out of them for good . Or die in one . If not the left in the west is utterly doomed . Doomed as in Dads army _ddooooommmed_ .

Bastards . Counter revolutionary bastards the lot of them .


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 20, 2013)

bagpiper meself


----------



## Casually Red (Jun 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> bagpiper meself


 
had you down as more of a trombonist, live and learn i suppose


----------



## muscovyduck (Jun 20, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> im sorry but thats not fine, i seriously cannot imagine ever going out with someone for a few months and asking them if its ok first before i do this or that ...mid hug...is it ok if i feel your bum.... Thats utter bollocks. Relationships dont work like that for non freaks . You have to feel your way along..literally . I think a woman would get seriously annoyed and frustrated having to put up with that noinsense , tell me to fuck off and call me a weirdo if i started doing that . Or if anyone else did.
> 
> feminist men are full of shit if thats what theyre coming out with


 
lol


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jun 20, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> [quote="sihhi, post: 12329674, member:
> 
> Demands of men by (superior) feminist men.
> 
> ...


 


> im sorry but thats not fine, i seriously cannot imagine ever going out with someone for a few months and asking them if its ok first before i do this or that ...mid hug...is it ok if i feel your bum.... Thats utter bollocks. Relationships dont work like that for non freaks . You have to feel your way along..literally . I think a woman would get seriously annoyed and frustrated having to put up with that noinsense , tell me to fuck off and call me a weirdo if i started doing that . Or if anyone else did.
> 
> feminist men are full of shit if thats what theyre coming out with


 
You wouldn't have to go out with me for a few _months_ before you put your hand on my arse. Christ, I'd think you were slow if you didn't have me up against the staircase wall of your flats after a week of courting.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 20, 2013)

I think what the point being clumsily made is that you do what you do and read signals as well, cos theres some glaring no signals when you overstep. Can be worse to the ego than an overt no cos it leaves you feeling you've done wrong- and you have. It can just be 'not yet' or 'not now' or so on. Either way, you learn to read people. Or you don't and are a dickhead.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jun 20, 2013)

what I don't get about all this is what kind of theory of liberation basically involves telling your oppressor to behave better? I mean if they're oppressive by their very nature, then what's the point in all this "good ally" crap? It's the equivalent of asking your boss to help you seize the means of production...


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 20, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> what I don't get about all this is what kind of theory of liberation basically involves telling your oppressor to behave better? I mean if they're oppressive by their very nature, then what's the point in all this "good ally" crap? It's the equivalent of asking your boss to help you seize the means of production...


 

more bossknapping


----------



## Greebo (Jun 20, 2013)

Casually Red said:


> you know damn well thats not what they mean . Its the slippery slope to frenzied wolfbagging and well you know it . Under the guise of initial _emotional openness_ . Its not something that could ever end well .


Pfft - trust you to twist it!  

The other label I've seen for that is "risking vulnerability" - in my arrogant opinion it would've been a lot clearer than the guff on that worksheet about "intimacy with other men".


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 20, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Bishop Brennan is oppressed and privileged at the same time. He is privileged by class and the fact that as a bishop he has a senior rank to Ted, Dougal and Father Jack. However, he is also oppressed because of the patriarchal expectations of the church expecting him not to have a girlfriend and a son in California. When Father Jack discovers the video of Bishop Brennan, the girlfriend and the son on holiday on the beach and plays it to him he is in fact engaging in a form of "bishop-shaming" which aims to humiliate Bishop Brennan by highlighting the fact that he has gone against the patriarchy of the Vatican by secretly having a child. Dougal also uses ableist behaviour when he hides the rabbits in Bishop Brennan's room, oppressing him because of his phobia of rabbits. When Father Ted kicks Bishop Brennan up the arse far from the working class hero getting on over on "the man" as many so-called leftists would say, he is actually using his priest privilege (of not being a bishop so not having as much to lose) and the privilege of his superior strength to create a huge amount of oppression, which lasts until Bishop Brennan comes out of his coma. As an outsider in the Craggy Island community Bishop Brennan is doubly oppressed, both by Ted and by the fact that as a stranger from the "mainland" he is not familiar with the island ways.
> 
> copliker Idris2002









WE ARE NOT WORTHY.

argle bargle blart blurt


----------



## rekil (Jun 20, 2013)

Bargain. 40 quid to listen to Gary Younge say that Obama is a bit disappointing.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 20, 2013)

The most oppressed person in Dad's Army is plainly the German airmen who are captured by the platoon. while they are privileged over Jones and Fraser who are older and more unattractive than they are, they are oppressed because of their nationality. Captain Mainwaring is a privileged oppressor, when the German airman asks Pike what his name is he uses his superior status to say "Don't tell him, Pike," speaking for him and denying Pike his experiences because he is younger and less educated, he patronises him by assuming that he was going to say his name. He also routinely denigrates him by calling him "a stupid boy". But when the German airman asserts himself against his oppression by saying "your name will go on the list" Pike displays his English Home Guardsman, whistling ability, and intellectual privilege by singing "Whistle while you work, Hitler is a twerp" and oppressing the differently abled in his language when he says "he's half barmy, so's his army".

At the same time, in another episode when Wilson and Mainwaring are holding an unexploded bomb, Jones stops being a good intersectional ally and shows his unrestrained masculinity when he says, "I am going to put this bank under Martial Law!" This violent, macho rhetoric shows the unexamined privilege that Jones benefits from and which damages us all. And when Fraser tells his stories about being doomed, he is speaking for Jones, Wilson, Mainwaring and Pike and denying them from expressing the reality of their oppression, because to them they might not feel they are doomed.


----------



## andysays (Jun 20, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> The most oppressed person in Dad's Army is plainly the German airmen who are captured by the platoon. while they are privileged over Jones and Fraser who are older and more unattractive than they are, they are oppressed because of their nationality. Captain Mainwaring is a privileged oppressor, when the German airman asks Pike what his name is he uses his superior status to say "Don't tell him, Pike," speaking for him and denying Pike his experiences because he is younger and less educated, he patronises him by assuming that he was going to say his name. He also routinely denigrates him by calling him "a stupid boy". But when the German airman asserts himself against his oppression by saying "your name will go on the list" Pike displays his English Home Guardsman, whistling ability, and intellectual privilege by singing "Whistle while you work, Hitler is a twerp" and oppressing the differently abled in his language when he says "he's half barmy, so's his army".
> 
> At the same time, in another episode when Wilson and Jones are holding an unexploded bomb, Jones stops being a good intersectional ally and shows his unrestrained masculinity when he says, "I am going to put this bank under Martial Law!" This violent, macho rhetoric shows the unexamined privilege that Jones benefits from and which damages us all. And when Fraser tells his stories about being doomed, he is speaking for Jones, Wilson, Mainwaring and Pike and denying them from expressing the reality of their oppression, because to them they might not feel they are doomed.


 
What about Steptoe & Son?


----------



## caleb (Jun 20, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> 18h​Why has my wikipedia page been amended to stress that I'm 'of Jewish descent'? I'm also of Irish and Maltese descent- is that unimportant?


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 20, 2013)

andysays said:


> What about Steptoe & Son?


 

I haven't seen enough of it to say


----------



## chilango (Jun 20, 2013)

How d'you make a Maltese Cross? Huh?


----------



## andysays (Jun 20, 2013)

*Nothing* about Laurie is unimportant, obvs


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 20, 2013)

fuck off Casually_Red, you plonker.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 20, 2013)

andysays said:


> *Nothing* about Laurie is unimportant, obvs


 

I'm glad that my dad doesn't know of the existence of Laurie Penny, when the Bernie Madoff scandal happened a few years ago he got in a total panic because he thought the jews were now going to be seen as untrustworthy and greedy lol, because Bernie was a Jewish banking fraudster. I remember him googling the religions of other fraudsters and asking me whether I knew if they were jews or not.


----------



## andysays (Jun 20, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I'm glad that my dad doesn't know of the existence of Laurie Penny, when the Bernie Madoff scandal happened a few years ago he got in a total panic because he thought the jews were now going to be seen as untrustworthy and greedy lol, because Bernie was a Jewish banking fraudster. I remember him googling the religions of other fraudsters and asking me whether I knew if they were jews or not.


 
Don't worry mate, if when he does discover her existence (can't believe there's anyone who hasn't already...) just tell him she's a Maltesa


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 20, 2013)

andysays said:


> Don't worry mate, if when he does discover her existence (can't believe there's anyone who hasn't already...) just tell him she's a Maltesa


 

those poor unfortunates who haven't discovered Penny's existence yet


----------



## agricola (Jun 20, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I'm glad that my dad doesn't know of the existence of Laurie Penny, when the Bernie Madoff scandal happened a few years ago he got in a total panic because he thought the jews were now going to be seen as untrustworthy and greedy lol, because Bernie was a Jewish banking fraudster. I remember him googling the religions of other fraudsters and asking me whether I knew if they were jews or not.


 
Thank heavens for the existence of "Lord" Eddie Davenport then.


----------



## captainmission (Jun 20, 2013)

andysays said:


> What about Steptoe & Son?


 

I think we need an intersectional analysis of keeping up appearences. A brave woman oppressed for her age and gender fighting her way into a patriarchal establishment that rejects her, all the while hounded by a brutish working class (onslow) that refuses to check his male privaledge. It basically the laurie penny story.


----------



## andysays (Jun 20, 2013)

captainmission said:


> I think we need an intersectional analysis of keeping up appearences. A brave woman oppressed for her age and gender fighting her way into a patriarchal establishment that rejects her, all the while hounded by a brutish working class (onslow) that refuses to check his male privaledge. It basically the laurie penny story.


 
There's a PhD thesis in this for someone...


----------



## Libertad (Jun 20, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> The most oppressed person in Dad's Army is plainly the German airmen who are captured by the platoon.


 
Point of Order Cmbbe.

The captured Germans were submariners. This automatically places them at the bottom of the stack.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jun 20, 2013)

captainmission said:


> I think we need an intersectional analysis of keeping up appearences. A brave woman oppressed for her age and gender fighting her way into a patriarchal establishment that rejects her, all the while hounded by a brutish working class (onslow) that refuses to check his male privaledge. It basically the laurie penny story.


 

This could be an addition to Alan Bennett's _Talking Heads _monologues; one where Patricia Routledge plays our heroine, looking wistfully (and not entirely accurately or consistently) back over her intersectional life and her dreams of full communism, as she gets ready for a 'reunion do' at the Firebox cafe. In the end she decides not to go, but rights it up glowingly in her diary all the same.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 20, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I'm glad that my dad doesn't know of the existence of Laurie Penny, when the Bernie Madoff scandal happened a few years ago he got in a total panic because he thought the jews were now going to be seen as untrustworthy and greedy lol, because Bernie was a Jewish banking fraudster. I remember him googling the religions of other fraudsters and asking me whether I knew if they were jews or not.


 

Keep reading that as baader meinhoff


----------



## rekil (Jun 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I half buy it for this:


Why would residents of a small ('tiny' according to LP) town with what, 2 or 3 streets of shops, suddenly start walking into fake fronts, especially after the sham has been so well publicised. It reminds me of when there used to be regular _only in Ireland! _'funny bits' at the end of the news.


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 20, 2013)

copliker said:


> Bargain. 40 quid to listen to Gary Younge say that Obama is a bit disappointing.


 
You could go and see Neil Young for less ffs.

Grauniad trying anything and everything to raise cash - things beginning to get desperate now I think. How long before they move to web only and stop printing the paper altogether?


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 20, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> The most oppressed person in Dad's Army is plainly the German airmen who are captured by the platoon. while they are privileged over Jones and Fraser who are older and more unattractive than they are, they are oppressed because of their nationality. Captain Mainwaring is a privileged oppressor, when the German airman asks Pike what his name is he uses his superior status to say "Don't tell him, Pike," speaking for him and denying Pike his experiences because he is younger and less educated, he patronises him by assuming that he was going to say his name. He also routinely denigrates him by calling him "a stupid boy". But when the German airman asserts himself against his oppression by saying "your name will go on the list" Pike displays his English Home Guardsman, whistling ability, and intellectual privilege by singing "Whistle while you work, Hitler is a twerp" and oppressing the differently abled in his language when he says "he's half barmy, so's his army".
> 
> At the same time, in another episode when Wilson and Jones are holding an unexploded bomb, Jones stops being a good intersectional ally and shows his unrestrained masculinity when he says, "I am going to put this bank under Martial Law!" This violent, macho rhetoric shows the unexamined privilege that Jones benefits from and which damages us all. And when Fraser tells his stories about being doomed, he is speaking for Jones, Wilson, Mainwaring and Pike and denying them from expressing the reality of their oppression, because to them they might not feel they are doomed.


 
Where does (Cde.) Barry Mainwaring come into this?


----------



## Libertad (Jun 20, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Where does (Cde.) Barry Mainwaring come into this?


 
Cmbbe. Barry was keeping watch.


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 20, 2013)

*Louise Mensch* ‏@*LouiseMensch* 4h
@*Mr_S_Clean* @*sazza_jay* @*mjrobbins* Where I lead, she follows. But as she's right I don't mind  @*pennyred* came out w/similiar after my piece




 *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 39m
@*LouiseMensch* @*mr_s_clean* @*sazza_jay* @*mjrobbins* I haven't read your piece- enjoyed S's and @*stavvers*', recommend.

 
*Mensch trolls Penny  *


----------



## rekil (Jun 20, 2013)

From a few pages back.


The Pale King said:


> Where Mensch leads, Penny follows!


Mensch lurking? Shit off Louise. 


The Pale King said:


> *Louise Mensch* ‏@*LouiseMensch* 4h
> @*Mr_S_Clean* @*sazza_jay* @*mjrobbins* Where I lead, she follows. But as she's right I don't mind  @*pennyred* came out w/similiar after my piece


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 20, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Where does (Cde.) Barry Mainwaring come into this?


 
A tired old relic of the class-obsessed male left


----------



## sihhi (Jun 20, 2013)

> M'lady @mollycrabapple is in GITMO drawing the camps and being a badass.


 
M'lady - short for my ladyship - spoken by service sector workers to rich women in Britain -


----------



## rekil (Jun 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> M'lady - short for my ladyship - spoken by service sector workers to rich women in Britain -


Dogtanian And The Three Muskehounds reference I reckon.


Spoiler


----------



## Limerick Red (Jun 20, 2013)

copliker said:


> Dogtanian And The Three Muskehounds reference I reckon.
> 
> 
> Spoiler





Spoiler



aaaagh that tunes going to be stuck in me head for days!


----------



## Casually Red (Jun 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> M'lady - short for my ladyship - spoken by service sector workers to rich women in Britain -


 
i think Ron Burgundy called Veronica Corningstone mlady just after boning her


----------



## Casually Red (Jun 20, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> fuck off Casually_Red, you plonker.


 
what the fuck did i do now


----------



## Casually Red (Jun 20, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> You wouldn't have to go out with me for a few _months_ before you put your hand on my arse. Christ, I'd think you were slow if you didn't have me up against the staircase wall of your flats after a week of courting.


 
i was trying to stay in character with my new avatar thats supposed to endear me to feminists more  ,as opposed to my usual 5 legged elephant riverdancing accross the Urban75 minefield of sexuality.
Its possible I may have erred a tad too much on the safeside in an attempt not to unwittingly antagonise anyone .


----------



## Mandalaa (Jun 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Just a quick one. Seaneen Molloy, quoted in the Laurie Penny article, is by a stunning co-incidence also an aspiring writer and blogger and looks keen on a career in journalism, and is one Laurie's twitter pals ie https://twitter.com/brain_opera/status/320300981646684160 . It would be nice to hear a quote from someone who's outside the London writer/blogger/acitivist clique every once in a while. So there's Rhian Jones and Seaneen Molloy. And someone else who may or may not be accusing her of lying. It might be worth going through some of Laurie's other articles and checking the quotes from people for evidence of mutual backscratching and schmoozing.
> 
> Here's her website http://seaneenmolloy.co.uk/?page_id=8
> 
> ...



Lovely to see some 'Neen promotion on here.  This lady is the genuine article, an outstanding writer with extensive experience of life on the fringes of society.   However, I think what you've written here about Laurie is a little harsh.  She's also got genuine experiences of her own to draw on and inform her work.  Yes, I am sure going to Oxford was rather helpful in terms of networking and building a higher profile career but I don't like the implication that said experiences are any less valid as a result of her being afforded certain privileges.


However I'd like to focus this post on encouraging anyone who hasn't to read Seaneen's mental health blog.  It's a fantastic insight into the contemporary politics, personal experience and unjust marginalisation of those living with mental illness.  It's been a great help to me, as has the lady herself whom I am truly blessed to know.


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 21, 2013)

i think laurie and seaneen both wrote for 'one in four' (mh magazine) at the same time.
might be wrong though.

i think seaneen is alright - again, i'm quite proficient at being wrong though


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2013)

Mandalaa said:


> Lovely to see some 'Neen promotion on here. This lady is the genuine article, an outstanding writer with extensive experience of life on the fringes of society. However, I think what you've written here about Laurie is a little harsh. She's also got genuine experiences of her own to draw on and inform her work. Yes, I am sure going to Oxford was rather helpful in terms of networking and building a higher profile career but I don't like the implication that said experiences are any less valid as a result of her being afforded certain privileges.
> 
> 
> However I'd like to focus this post on encouraging anyone who hasn't to read Seaneen's mental health blog. It's a fantastic insight into the contemporary politics, personal experience and unjust marginalisation of those living with mental illness. It's been a great help to me, as has the lady herself whom I am truly blessed to know.


 
What does valid mean?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 21, 2013)

Mandalaa said:


> It's been a great help to me, as has the lady herself whom I am truly blessed to know.


 
Hello Seaneen, welcome to urban.


----------



## Mandalaa (Jun 21, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What does valid mean?


 

What does "What does valid mean?" mean?


----------



## Mandalaa (Jun 21, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> Hello Seaneen, welcome to urban.


 
She's already kicking around here somewhere, I signed up via facebook which told me I have 2 facemates already on here - hence I ran a search for her name and found this


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2013)

Mandalaa said:


> What does "What does valid mean?" mean?


 
It means that i'm asking you what valid means in the context of describing laurie pennie's experiences as valid. As used here:



> Yes, I am sure going to Oxford was rather helpful in terms of networking and building a higher profile career but I don't like the implication that said experiences are any less valid as a result of her being afforded certain privileges.


 
It implies that posters here have ruled her experiences invalid and (more complicatedly) that there are experiences that are valid/invalid. There is no such implication on this thread.


----------



## Mandalaa (Jun 21, 2013)

There was a bit of inverse snobbery that *implied* she was amongst a breed of leftie/activist media types whose socio-economic background and associated privileges leave them ill-equipped to authoritatively or authentically write about issues around social injustice and marginalisation.

I only skim read a few pages though, so if I got the wrong end of the stick - good!


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 21, 2013)

Mandalaa said:


> There was a bit of inverse snobbery that *implied* she was amongst a breed of leftie/activist media types whose socio-economic background and associated privileges leave them ill-equipped to authoritatively or authentically write about issues around social injustice and marginalisation.
> 
> I only skim read a few pages though, so if I got the wrong end of the stick - good!


 
Seems, madam? Nay, it is.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2013)

Mandalaa said:


> There was a bit of inverse snobbery that *implied* she was amongst a breed of leftie/activist media types whose socio-economic background and associated privileges leave them ill-equipped to authoritatively or authentically write about issues around social injustice and marginalisation.
> 
> I only skim read a few pages though, so if I got the wrong end of the stick - good!


 
It's not inverse snobbery, it's researched critique. Her experiences are valid no matter what. The problem is that they don't stop meaning something at her.

Welcome to the boards btw


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 21, 2013)

Mandalaa said:


> She's already kicking around here somewhere, I signed up via facebook which told me I have 2 facemates already on here - hence I ran a search for her name and found this


 
they all say they don't read us, but they do.


----------



## andysays (Jun 21, 2013)

Mandalaa said:


> There was a bit of inverse snobbery that *implied* she was amongst a breed of leftie/activist media types whose socio-economic background and associated privileges leave them ill-equipped to authoritatively or authentically write about issues around social injustice and marginalisation.
> 
> I only skim read a few pages though, so if I got the wrong end of the stick - good!


 
Hmm, is it really inverse snobbery to suggest that her socio-economic background and associated privileges, which of their very nature mean that she has at best a partial experience of social injustice and marginalisation, leave her at least partially ill-equipped to authoritatively or authentically write about those issues?

Or is it perhaps that her socio-economic background and associated privileges lead to her writing about those issues (any issues) in a way which suggests that only she is equipped to do so authoritatively or authentically?

Smartest kid in a smart school syndrome...


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jun 21, 2013)

Mandalaa said:


> There was a bit of inverse snobbery that *implied* she was amongst a breed of leftie/activist media types whose socio-economic background and associated privileges leave them ill-equipped to authoritatively or authentically write about issues around social injustice and marginalisation.
> 
> I only skim read a few pages though, so if I got the wrong end of the stick - good!


Inverse snobbery like its cousin "reverse racism" isn't a real thing you know.


----------



## Mandalaa (Jun 21, 2013)

You know, I am usually the first to be sick in my mouth when someone uses the term 'reverse/inverse snobbery' but every once in a blue moon I find cause to call someone out for it.

I've been guilty of it in the past.  It's easy to get carried away slagging off/picking holes in someone on that basis.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2013)

Don't be _calling people out_ for stuff. Not on here.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jun 21, 2013)

Mandalaa said:


> You know, I am usually the first to be sick in my mouth when someone uses the term 'reverse/inverse snobbery' but every once in a blue moon I find cause to call someone out for it.
> 
> I've been guilty of it in the past. It's easy to get carried away slagging off/picking holes in someone on that basis.


Go with your first instinct.


----------



## Balbi (Jun 21, 2013)

June 21st, 2013. Skynet becomes self-aware.

*Laurie Penny* @PennyRed
@OwenJones84 @lisybabe also, I know how hard it is to take on board critique when you're getting attacked on all sides by vicious gripers.


----------



## Greebo (Jun 21, 2013)

Balbi said:


> <snip>@OwenJones84 @lisybabe also, I know how hard it is to take on board critique when you're getting attacked on all sides by vicious gripers.


 
At first glance I thought that said "vicious gropers" - really must drag my mind out of the gutter.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2013)

((kismet))


----------



## rekil (Jun 21, 2013)

Vicious gripers are worse than soi-disant trolls (and hateweasels, was that us?) right?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 21, 2013)

The term intersectionality has now entered mainstream lesbian and gay charity/lobby group Equality Now (in Scotland)

Who they are:-  http://www.equality-network.org/about/history

Their take on it all: 



> Similarly, a disabled lesbian Muslim will have to deal with ableism, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism and sexism. She might find physical barriers to accessing LGBT venues, but even when she can get into the building she might still face racism and Islamophobia from the white LGBT community.


 


> Often LGBT-focused organisations have little knowledge of, for example, race issues. This can lead to racism attitudes and practices carried by staff and other service users remaining unchecked, thus creating an unsafe space for a minority ethnic LGBT person who wants to access the services.
> 
> Our intersectional work is aimed at helping organisations become more inclusive of all their service users and respect every part of their identity. We work with a variety of organisations with diverse expertise, exchange awareness-raising sessions, and speak to intersectional service users. This extensive partnership work reveals that there are many ways to be inclusive without spending any extra money and that learning to be inclusive of people with complex identities benefits every service user.


 
_many ways to be inclusive without spending any extra money - _LOL!


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 21, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The term intersectionality has now entered mainstream lesbian and gay charity/lobby group Equality Now (in Scotland)
> 
> Who they are:- http://www.equality-network.org/about/history
> 
> Their take on it al


 
They're essentially correct though aren't they? Even if intersectionality is a shit word and concept


----------



## sihhi (Jun 21, 2013)

copliker said:


> Vicious gripers are worse than soi-disant trolls (and hateweasels, was that us?) right?


 
Are you sure you're not one of the "attention-seeking, stalky haterz".

Build a middle-class career out of your personal (overegged, cherrypicked) reactions to other people's confrontations with the police: Revolutionary socialism.

Notice inconsistencies anonymously and legitimately: Attention-seeking.

PS Why does haters have a 'z'?   And so - why not griperz?


----------



## J Ed (Jun 21, 2013)

sihhi said:


> _many ways to be inclusive without spending any extra money - _LOL!


 

I think there's a lot to this, not only is intersectional cheap in terms of money it's also cheap in terms of expending political capital stepping on toes. See, for example, the interest that NUS leaders put in 'liberation' and intersectionality workshops while voting through an austerity agenda and failing to oppose Labour or Conservative neoliberalism.

Intersectionality is great for them. It costs nothing and does nothing to threaten any established interests.

I wonder how long it is until Labour (and then the Tories probably!) adopt intersectionality as policy.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 21, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> They're essentially correct though aren't they? Even if intersectionality is a shit word and concept


 
Their content seems to be 'let's not be racist toward minority gay or lesbian people' - you're not gonna find anyone here disagreeing.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 21, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Their content seems to be 'let's not be racist toward minority gay or lesbian people' - you're not gonna find anyone here disagreeing.


No their point is that services for LGBT people often do not take into account cultural needs or indeed ethnic diversity stuff and that they should and that they can help with that, which seems cool to me.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 21, 2013)

J Ed said:


> the interest that NUS leaders put in 'liberation' and intersectionality workshops while voting through an austerity agenda and failing to oppose Labour or Conservative neoliberalism.
> 
> Intersectionality is great for them. It costs nothing and does nothing to threaten any established interests.


 
It gives a great psychological pay-off for the minority middle-class:
You get to play the advance guard of a worldwide revolution of black female peasants, by "calling out" white people who tattoo native American symbols as cultural appropriator oppressors.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 21, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> No their point is that services for LGBT people often do not take into account cultural needs or indeed ethnic diversity stuff and that they should and that they can help with that, which seems cool to me.


 
How can you meet cultural needs without spending money? Isn't it hypocritical (maybe insulting) to think you can.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 21, 2013)

sihhi said:


> How can you meet cultural needs without spending money? Isn't it hypocritical (maybe insulting) to think you can.


 
it is possible to do stuff in different ways without spending extra money especially awareness raising


----------



## Belushi (Jun 21, 2013)

Balbi said:


> June 21st, 2013. Skynet becomes self-aware.
> 
> *Laurie Penny* @PennyRed
> @OwenJones84 @lisybabe also, I know how hard it is to take on board critique when you're getting attacked on all sides by vicious gripers.


----------



## Belushi (Jun 21, 2013)

Pogo Patterson knows how you feel Laurie


----------



## rekil (Jun 21, 2013)

Never realised he was a ted.


----------



## chilango (Jun 21, 2013)

Gripper was fash.

He met up with neo-nazis on a school trip to Austria.

...according to the shit Grange Hill book I had when I was a kid anyway...


----------



## Belushi (Jun 21, 2013)

Ha! I read the same book 

Didnt he start a Grange Hill race riot?


----------



## chilango (Jun 21, 2013)

Can't remember!

I do remember he was trying to buy Nazi memorabilia but ended up iirc with his pants flown on a flagpole...


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 21, 2013)

chilango said:


> Gripper was fash.
> 
> He met up with neo-nazis on a school trip to Austria.
> 
> ...according to the shit Grange Hill book I had when I was a kid anyway...


 
And who is now in camerons fascist liverpool cultural city of the north bolloks


----------



## chilango (Jun 21, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Ha! I read the same book
> 
> Didnt he start a Grange Hill race riot?



It seems so...


----------



## chilango (Jun 21, 2013)

David Cameron: " "Indeed Gripper Stebson was one of my role models in life".


----------



## rosecore (Jun 22, 2013)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  9m
@*chiller* I'd say transphobic feminists are feminists. I just find their take on feminism bigoted, hateful and useless.

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  17m
For me, the only things that intellectually and ethically disqualify from feminism are racism and being anti-choice. #*iamnotaproperfeminist*


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 22, 2013)

Roll on the pro-choice tory femninists. Lays it all out.  The term now pronounced meaningless.


----------



## killer b (Jun 22, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@PennyRed
> 8m​Ok, to clarify, if we're defining racist feminists as 'not feminist' then transphobic feminists aren't either.


 
interesting definition of 'clarify'.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 22, 2013)

Who made Laurie Penny the one who decides who is and isn't a feminist? I think a lot of feminists would question the feminist credentials of someone who doesn't see a problem with rape porn.


----------



## andysays (Jun 22, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Who made *Laurie Penny* the one who decides who is and isn't a feminist?


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 22, 2013)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 6h
@*smalltownmoon* oh, come on. I didn't explain properly; I clarified; I try to learn as I advocate for trans rights. Give me a break, please.
...trouble with making sweeping declarations about what is and isn't feminism is that people understandably have their own ideas and definitions. Trouble with basing your politics on 'calling out' people is that pretty soon you get hoisted by your own petard and start begging for mercy.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 22, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 6h
> @*smalltownmoon* oh, come on. I didn't explain properly; I clarified; I try to learn as I advocate for trans rights. Give me a break, please.
> ...trouble with making sweeping declarations about what is and isn't feminism is that people understandably have their own ideas and definitions. Trouble with basing your politics on 'calling out' people is that pretty soon you get hoisted by your own petard and start begging for mercy.


And they aren't playing the game of mercy. These twats.


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 22, 2013)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 6h
@*B1ustreak* @*chiller* you might even be right about the racist feminists. Several early suffragettes joined Moseley's gang in the 30s, e.g.

...Didn't this stuff about fascist suffagettes come up here recently?


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 22, 2013)

We talked about the proper suffra-sisters being good old school pro-empire tories.


----------



## The Pale King (Jun 22, 2013)

A coincidence.


----------



## rekil (Jun 22, 2013)




----------



## andysays (Jun 22, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> A coincidence.


 
Either that or this thread is now one of L's research sources


----------



## Libertad (Jun 22, 2013)

LP's on the piss:

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  46s
Why do goths walk sp fast?


----------



## barney_pig (Jun 22, 2013)

Libertad said:


> LP's on the piss:
> 
> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  46s
> Why do goths walk sp fast?


Something about the experience of selling the militant?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

Mandalaa said:


> There was a bit of inverse snobbery that *implied* she was amongst a breed of leftie/activist media types whose socio-economic background and associated privileges leave them ill-equipped to authoritatively or authentically write about issues around social injustice and marginalisation.


 
LP has explained to us that such concerns - call it inverse snobbery if you particularly want to - no longer matter very much. 

"Social media has been an energising and empowering force for the British commentariat, rearranging some of the old hierarchies and allowing young people and those outside the mainstream press to amplify voices that would otherwise go unheard." (Speech on winning Editorial Intelligence Twitter Public Personality Award, October 2012)

Found an answer for this though:

"Not for the first time, following some conversations, it occurs to me we need a better mental health toolkit for hackers and activists." (May 2013)

It is Counselling for Social Change






> Counselling for Social Change offers an accepting and confidential space to discuss any issues currently affecting your life and work. We work in a supportive and empathic way to help you through life's challenges.
> 
> Our services include face-to-face and phone counselling, as well as retreats in rural Cornwall.  All our services are low-cost.  However, please get in touch if our fees are not affordable as you may be eligible for grants or bursaries.


 



> Our counsellors and trustees have a real understanding of the issues surrounding activism, care work and campaigning.  We've been involved with a range of organisations and campaigns including Climate Camp, Occupy, Friends of the Earth, the Network for Police Monitoring, Palestinian human rights groups, The Transition Network, the Cooperative Movement and many more.
> 
> Activists are very good at fighting for others, often to the point of forgetting our own health.  Counselling for Social Change has been established to provide time and space for self-care.  We have recently received funding from Lush to provide free phone counselling to activists.  We are also in the process of building a small low-impact retreat to provide space for campaigners looking to get away.


A worthy rival to the Activist Trauma Database




> You will find contacts for:
> 
> a) Activists who are specially trained to do trauma support
> b) People with different healing skills (herbalism, reiki, Bach-flowers,…)
> ...


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 23, 2013)

is this like a left wing alpha course?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> is this like a left wing alpha course?


 
The only part that's similar is the holiday _retreat_ for people like you who are "activists are very good at fighting for others, often to the point of forgetting our own health".


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 23, 2013)

i'd rather go kibbutz


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> i'd rather go kibbutz


 
Do you get a cool T-Shirt there?

I think not.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Do you get a cool T-Shirt there?
> 
> I think not.


 
oh my god that is fucking creepy.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 23, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> oh my god that is fucking creepy.


 
Sinister, but not  in a good way.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 23, 2013)

I wouldn't be comfortable sitting in a counselling room with somebody wearing a mask, sorry


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 23, 2013)

its not tears those tissues are for mopping


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> LP has explained to us that such concerns - call it inverse snobbery if you particularly want to - no longer matter very much.
> 
> "Social media has been an energising and empowering force for the British commentariat, rearranging some of the old hierarchies and allowing young people and those outside the mainstream press to amplify voices that would otherwise go unheard." (Speech on winning Editorial Intelligence Twitter Public Personality Award, October 2012)
> 
> ...



do they offer any services to people traumatised by activists?
i could do with a fucking holiday, and to stop being harrassed by the fuckwits around me who, funnily enough, have also been active members of


> Climate Camp, Occupy, Friends of the Earth, the Network for Police Monitoring, Palestinian human rights groups, The Transition Network, the Cooperative Movement and many more.


 
i miss leaving the house and checking my emails without worrying they're going to pop up in my face. reckon that'd get me a bursary for the fees?


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 23, 2013)

the cooperative movement


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

housing co-ops, workers co-ops, RRRRRRADICAL co-ops, as well as the proper big supermarketbanketc co-op...
this sorta thing

http://www.uk.coop/
http://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/

i love the radical routes 'legal and housing regulations' page - my ex co-op housemate (who applied for loanstock under my name after i'd moved out, and without my consent. it took a random vanity google in april to discover this..) is responsible for updating it 

'http://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/pub...links-to-legal-and-housing-regs-websites.html


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

(sorry, i appear to be using this thread as a rantposting safespace. i'm still a bit cross with 'em, to say the least. and possibly a bit over-defensive, probably due to the amount of apologist fuckwits i've encountered over the last few months. and i cba starting a 'omfg, what are they *doing*?' thread)


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i love the radical routes 'legal and housing regulations' page - my ex co-op housemate (who applied for loanstock under my name after i'd moved out, and without my consent. it took a random vanity google in april to discover this..) is responsible for updating it
> 
> 'http://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/pub...links-to-legal-and-housing-regs-websites.html


 
The what? nothing there.


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

'xactly.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> miss leaving the house and checking my emails without worrying they're going to pop up in my face. reckon that'd get me a bursary for the fees?


 
No, unlikely, this is a special service for activists required because of how well they are fighting for others.



> Activists are very good at fighting for others, often to the point of forgetting our own health


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> No, unlikely, this is a special service for activists required because of how well they are fighting for others.


 
so no non activist has ever fought for others?

bit vanguardist innit?


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

fair point, sihhi. she did say that she and her mates did/are doing stuff involving me against my wishes 'for the greater good'. must be a strain on the poor things


----------



## Tom A (Jun 23, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> i'd rather go kibbutz


*ZIONIST SCUM!!! *


----------



## Tom A (Jun 23, 2013)

> People with different healing skills (herbalism, reiki, Bach-flowers,…)


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 23, 2013)

Tom A said:


>




I did a lot of things like selling papers and doing "interventions" in demos over the last few years, I might disagree with the politics now but I don't need to go to counselling over it.


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

you're clearly suffering from 'compassion fatigue'


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> fair point, sihhi. she did say that she and her mates did/are doing stuff involving me against my wishes 'for the greater good'. must be a strain on the poor things


 
It's possible that they are doing the activist trauma support to help other activists, and do not see themselves as needing any support.




> Dragonfly housing coop has been running since 2000, housing 5 people in a quiet road in East Oxford that backs onto Florence Park. The house was previously home to Jigsaw housing coop.
> 
> Our current members have focused on many projects, often through Corporate Watch. We've also campaigned against GM, war, roads and runways and worked for sustainability, NVDA training, activist trauma support, activist legal advice, campaign publicity/props and the Climate Camp.


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

aye. i know of that lot too.
forgive me if i'm cynical about radical routes, since a few of their very involved members (no leaders, innit) straightfacedly informed me that '_there are some things you don't go to the police about_'. (more than one) sexual assault, fraud, that sort of thing, wrt a few of their member co-ops members and the organisations knowledge of what was happening..

i may also be having a complete sense of humour failure and can't work out whether i'm reading you straight


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> you're clearly suffering from 'compassion fatigue'


 
Activists are able to overcome this with the help of organisations like this:

*HOW AN ACTIVIST HEADED TOWARD BURNOUT CAN CHANGE COURSE: FOUR WAYS TO COPE WITH COMPASSION FATIGUE By Piper Hoffman — May 20, 2013 *

_It has taken me until 5 p.m. to write a word of this column. It was due yesterday. I feel like I’m burning out. It’s not the common kind of working-too-hard-and-needing-a-break burning out. *This is different, unique to activists and advocates and caregivers and whoever else cares that something really terrible is happening to someone*. This is compassion fatigue. I can’t pinpoint exactly which story of abuse or picture of zoo cages set me on the path toward burnout, but there were two that made me realize what was happening to me; I had to close them as soon as they flashed across my screen._

_<snip>_

_In a way I created this situation. I follow people and organizations on Twitter that tweet articles and photos about animals in unthinkable distress. I “friend” people on Facebook who post more of the same. I have created a pipeline to gather all of this toxic stuff and dump it into my psyche. On the other hand, I don’t have much choice. This is the work I do: I write articles about issues that people should know about – things that people need to change – and a big chunk of those articles are about animals. I can’t write about petitions that need signing or products that need boycotting if I don’t know about them. I also can’t write about them if I’m sapped by despair. My perfectionist tendencies don’t help. Whatever I do doesn’t feel like enough, so then there is guilt, too._

_An example is the Compassion Fatigue Awareness Project _

_“Caring too much can hurt.” So I’m not just a wuss. Good start. (Not loving the “too much” though. How much is just right, exactly?)_
_“When caregivers focus on others without practicing self-care, destructive behaviors can surface.” Like, maybe, napping every few hours? Wearing pajamas for days? Check._
_Compassion fatigue is what’s called a “secondary traumatic stress disorder.” Having an official label makes this feel more concrete and legitimate. Again, not a wuss._


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 23, 2013)

What the fuck?

How it unique to activists sihhi? What about people who for example work in the NHS or as support staff in homeless hostels, housing etc. How is becoming burnt out unique to activists??

I know you don't think this but jesus, the arrogance of these people


----------



## Tom A (Jun 23, 2013)

I remember one talk I went to in Manchester (at one of the recent spate of OK Cafe squats) regarding "activist burnout", and how disability and mental health affects people's ability to carry out activism, and it was suggested that yoga and meditation could be considered useful, something I utterly disagreed with at the time when I was prone to getting on my high horse over what I describe as "New Age mumbo jumbo". Although to be fair that was as far as it got in the woo department, and even I will admit there are some some psychological benefits associated with mediation. One thing they did address was how there was the problematic tendency to see treating activist burnout as essentially getting them to be a "good" activist again, regardless of any other mental health issues.

Of course nothing came of it, yet another meeting where it all got forgotten soon afterwards.


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

Tom A said:


> it was suggested that yoga and meditation could be considered useful


 
it can. for normals *as well* as activists 



Tom A said:


> One thing they did address was how there was the problematic tendency to see treating activist burnout as essentially getting them to be a "good" activist again, regardless of any other mental health issues.


 
aforementioned housemate tried to convince me to start seeing her therapist mate who's on the activist trauma support list, 'because she is brilliant with burnt out activists'. after i pointed out that the issues affecting me at the time were fuck all to do with that (i wasn't/aren't an activist), and everything to do with _my_ history/the people around me, she decided i was 'too broken to fix' 
so it seems like she then thought it would be a good idea to embark on few courses of action using a very dubious moral compass.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> aforementioned housemate tried to convince me to start seeing her therapist mate who's on the activist trauma support list, 'because she is brilliant with burnt out activists'. after i pointed out that the issues affecting me at the time were fuck all to do with that (i wasn't/aren't an activist), and everything to do with _my_ history/the people around me, she decided i was 'too broken to fix'
> so it seems like she then thought it would be a good idea to embark on few courses of action using a very dubious moral compass.


 
If you are not an activist you have no *activist history* - it's essentially your own fault for being upset with them for their taking liberties.
Plus it appears as if you have been resistent to your housemates' conflict facilitation efforts.




> 6. Reconnect with your vision as an individual and as a group. Most people are activists for highly personal reasons and when you connect the group's work to individual passions it helps foster awareness, empathy, and creativity. You can ask people to talk about their motivations or set aside time for people to get to know each other's activist histories. This is especially useful as a way to engage new members.
> 7. Learn to facilitate conflict. You can help the group reach a decision and ease stress simply through developing strong facilitation skills. There are many books on this but the best way to learn is to practice. Give group members turns practising. After all, you're going to be meeting anyway so it might as well be a learning opportunity.
> 8. Be intentional and deliberate about your work by setting SMART goals (SMART=Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant, Timebound). SMART goals give the group a shared standard by which to measure progress and review strengths and weaknesses. This is especially useful and necessary when group members need to talk about workload.


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> If you are not an activist you have no *activist history* - it's essentially your own fault for being upset with them for their taking liberties.


i was too agoraphobic to go to climate camp properly 
i did go to a radical routes gathering though. had to share a bed with housemate, and woke up screaming in the middle of the night. they don't like having to cater for people that don't like being made to sleep with others


----------



## Tom A (Jun 23, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> they don't like having to cater for people that don't like being made to sleep with others


Nor catering with people who have a major aversion being in a cold environment without any form of relief (as this was in an unheated, uninsulated building in the middle of February, just after some snow), whom were shivering even when huddled with a sleeping bag over their coat, jumper, and T-shirt (my other friend whom went had it much worse than me, he really can't hack the cold), and those whom are adverse to sudden, unexpected noises (e.g. loud children playing - this was in a building which, to be polite, had several health and safety issues, especially to children). My eternal gratitude to the person whom offered me a night in an Ibis hotel room (which I had to myself!) at the end of the second evening, I appreciated having a hot bath in somewhere which paid homage to the allegedly petty bourgeois concept of "creature comforts".

Anyway, on another point, too many activists treat commitment to (insert cause here) as some form of moral yardsitck, and organisations like Radical Routes make it worse with their idea of "work commitments" towards "radical social change" - in many ways RR is quite cultish.


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Nor catering with people who have a major aversion being in a cold environment without any form of relief (as this was in an unheated, uninsulated building in the middle of February, just after some snow), whom were shivering even when huddled with a sleeping bag over their coat, jumper, and T-shirt (my other friend whom went had it much worse than me, he really can't hack the cold), and those whom are adverse to sudden, unexpected noises (e.g. loud children playing - this was in a building which, to be polite, had several health and safety issues, especially to children). My eternal gratitude to the person whom offered me a night in an Ibis hotel room (which I had to myself!) at the end of the second evening, I appreciated having a hot bath in somewhere which paid homage to the allegedly petty bourgeois concept of "creature comforts".


from what i heard, the catering on the first day extended to 'baked beans with 'pasta' 
ffs


----------



## Tom A (Jun 23, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> from what i heard, the catering on the first day extended to 'baked beans with 'pasta'
> ffs


I actually helped with getting preparing the food the first evening (before the gathering started), memories were hazy but it seemed like your bog standard right-on radical vegan grub. Can't recall any "baked beans and pasta" incident though, though being bitterly cold for hours on end plays havoc with my memory and attention to detail.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

What event are you two describing? Some kind of road occupation?


----------



## Tom A (Jun 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What event are you two describing? Some kind of road occupation?


A Radical Routes gathering last year.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 23, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I wouldn't be comfortable sitting in a counselling room with somebody wearing a mask, sorry


----------



## agricola (Jun 23, 2013)

Tom A said:


> A Radical Routes gathering last year.


 
so a middle-of-the-road occupation, then?


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

Tom A said:


> An _*accessible*_ Radical Routes gathering last year.


fixed it for you 
(that one didn't require you to make a 2-mile trek up country paths to get to the venue)


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Anyway, on another point, too many activists treat commitment to (insert cause here) as some form of moral yardsitck, and organisations like Radical Routes make it worse with their idea of "work commitments" towards "radical social change" - in many ways RR is quite cultish.


i actually got patted on the head during a house meeting, and told that i wasn't expected to do the work commitment 'because the government thought i was poorly'.
it was a bit humiliating being the house's token disabled, tbh


----------



## captainmission (Jun 23, 2013)

I once went to a mental health for activist workshop at the earth first gathering. It ended in the person with probably the most severe mental health problems getting asked to leave for being disruptive whilst the rest of the group talked about the healing effects of st john's wort.


----------



## Tom A (Jun 23, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> fixed it for you
> (that one didn't require you to make a 2-mile trek up country paths to get to the venue)


But required you to rough it out in near-zero temperatures for hours on end. Some people really shut down in the cold, also not fun if you have arthritis, and with other people with underlying conditions (e.g. heart problems) this can be actually dangerous for them. I guess quite a lot of people have get to get beyond the squatting/roughing it in tents on protest sites mentality, or realise that it takes a certain kind of person to willingly put up with such hardship.


> i actually got patted on the head during a house meeting, and told that i wasn't expected to do the work commitment 'because the government thought i was poorly'.
> it was a bit humiliating being the house's token disabled, tbh


I would find it humiliating, how patronising and hypocritical. "Piss on Pity" is probably the most appropriate response to that one.


----------



## Tom A (Jun 23, 2013)

captainmission said:


> I once went to a mental health for activist workshop at the earth first gathering. It ended in the person with probably the most severe mental health problems getting asked to leave for being disruptive whilst the rest of the group talked about the healing effects of st john's wort.


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> If you are not an activist you have no *activist history* - it's essentially your own fault for being upset with them for their taking liberties.
> Plus it appears as if you have been resistent to your housemates' conflict facilitation efforts.


 i know  this is their perception of me/them - i'm the short paragraph that mentions brixton (where i've never worked)  see the activism gaps compared to everyone else 







Tom A said:


> I would find it humiliating, how patronising and hypocritical. "Piss on Pity" is probably the most appropriate response to that one.


 
i pissed in the back garden enough times to be comforted by the fact that there's probably still traces of it in the soil


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

Tom A said:


> A Radical Routes gathering last year.


 
In all honesty, why are AGMs called Gatherings?


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

.


----------



## Tom A (Jun 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> In all honesty, why are AGMs called Gatherings?


Makes it sound all communal, non-hierarchical and part of One Nice Big and Welcoming Community, rather than some boring and sterile business meeting - ugh, that sounds so capitalist, yeuch!


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i know  this is their perception of me/them - i'm the short paragraph that mentions brixton (where i've never worked)  see the activism gaps compared to everyone else


 
I still don't get it: Why would people sign your name as a member of taking out a loan if you didn't give consent to it?


----------



## rekil (Jun 23, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Makes it sound all communal, non-hierarchical and part of One Nice Big and Welcoming Community, rather than some boring and sterile business meeting - ugh, that sounds so capitalist, yeuch!


It's what the Irish government calls their campaign to gouge a few shillins out of ex-pats. It has tribaly celticy connotations.

http://www.thegatheringireland.com/







Official site has "fighting" spirit rather than "entrepreneurial" spirit. 


> Communities throughout Ireland are showcasing and sharing the very best of Irish culture, tradition, business, sport, fighting spirit and the uniquely Irish sense of fun.


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I still don't get it: Why would people sign your name as a member of taking out a loan if you didn't give consent to it?


 


i was aware that they'd applied and failed to sort out a loan _while i lived there_, but i'd been involved in the application process/writing up my info for that particular one etc.. wasn't told that i'd been included on any subsequent applications after i'd moved out.

it seems that they ignored my request to disassociate me from any membership/obligations/general association with the co-op when i left, and thought that what i *actually* meant was 'please! use my info! resubmit your application, and make bits up about me that you think i *might* say! in fact, put it all online and searchable on google, cos i have specifically asked you to *never* do that!'. i'd also imagine that they'd have visualised/done jazz hands with that.

when applying for loans/taking on new members etc they weren't very good at being straight with people about things like access to info about rules and regulations (housemembers) lists of current members (potential lenders), that sort of thing. i would imagine that if they'd applied for the loan with voids, it would've made their business model/projected income a bit wonkier than they were trying to make it out to be.

in short, they'd fuck their dead grandma for loanstock. and forge get her to write an endorsement if they thought it'd make their application likelier to succeed.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i would imagine that if they'd applied for the loan with voids, it would've made their business model/projected income a bit wonkier than they were trying to make it out to be.


 
Sort of like:-
They couldn't find enough actual people in advance to join their loan-drawing and so they tried to lie their way through.  ?


----------



## Tom A (Jun 23, 2013)

copliker said:


> It's what the Irish government calls their campaign to gouge a few shillins out of ex-pats. It has tribaly celticy connotations.


A lot of the people in Radical Routes would approve of the hippyish twang that provides. There's a lot of "getting back to the land" stuff about them, quite a lot are into their organic (and biodynamic - ugh) farming.


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Sort of like:-
> They couldn't find enough actual people in advance to join their loan-drawing and so they tried to lie their way through. ?


 something like that. and apparently they 'didn't think'. they're dead good at that.
personally, my take is that they (i'm referring to my former housemates, their colleagues, comrades, groups they're actively involved in and have dragged me into. mainly the leeds-based idiots, but a couple of oxford/manc/london people too)'re worryingly used to using 'assumed consent' in all their activities - sexual, financial, co-operative-wise, political - and it being 'dealt with within the activist community' (ie someone has a word, gets bought a pint, and it never gets mentioned again. and repeat when it happens *again*, for a couple of specific individuals)


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

copliker said:


> It's what the Irish government calls their campaign to gouge a few shillins out of ex-pats. It has tribaly celticy connotations.
> 
> http://www.thegatheringireland.com/


 
Not having a go but Irish activists also seem to use it:




> No Borders Ireland Gathering


----------



## rekil (Jun 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Not having a go but Irish activists also seem to use it:


Yes and the "grassroots gathering" stuff.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

copliker said:


> Yes and the "grassroots gathering" stuff.


 
That makes more sense because it's far more than one group or org coming together.

This is Britain's EF thing called the Summer Gathering:






But when it happens in winter it's called a Moot


----------



## andysays (Jun 23, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i know  this is their perception of me/them - i'm the short paragraph that mentions brixton (where i've never worked)  see the activism gaps compared to everyone else
> 
> View attachment 34159


 
If only you too could make "awesome sourdough"; maybe then your true value would have been recognised 

I think the most significant factor in "activist burnout" can be having to work alongside so many fucking cranks and cultists


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 23, 2013)

copliker said:


> It's what the Irish government calls their campaign to gouge a few shillins out of ex-pats. It has tribaly celticy connotations.
> 
> http://www.thegatheringireland.com/
> 
> ...


 

all around me fathers hat


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 23, 2013)

Surely I can't be the only one who doesn't have a clue what radical roots actually is?

I mean no offence to the good people on this thread who've been involved (especially as they both appear to now hold these groups in utter contempt) but it sounds a bit like an anarcho-vegan-liberal yoghurt knitting circle


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Surely I can't be the only one who doesn't have a clue what radical roots actually is?
> 
> I mean no offence to the good people on this thread who've been involved (especially as they both appear to now hold these groups in utter contempt) but it sounds a bit like an anarcho-vegan-liberal yoghurt knitting circle


they are a 'network of housing and worker co-operatives working for radical social change'.
these are their aims and principles:


> Here we are in twenty-first-century Britain, in a world not of our making but one that has been moulded over thousands of years of exploitation and injustice.
> 
> Our world is shaped by the forces of greed, capitalism and materialism, where maximum production and optimum profits are vigorously pursued, making life a misery for many and putting us and the environment at risk.
> 
> ...


it might be my eyes, but i don't see 'aims' or 'principles' defined. i do see a lot of 'we want' and 'specific means it is pursuing'.

they basically exist as a co-op of co-ops, with a 'radical' proviso.
financially, they support the co-operative movement by lending loanstock moneys (sourced from radicals, triodos bank, compensation from actions against the police, member co-ops, and interest on the loans they've previously given) to new/still growing/not paid off their mortgage yet co-ops. but only if they're fully paid up members of radical routes - try and get help and assistance otherwise (as i believe carlton mansions did in 2011 - i might be mistaken and mean another collective though. i know that they were based on coldharbour and came to one of the gatherings being desperate, and were told they'd have to wait months until their membership was approved before they would be given any advice, let alone financial assistance) and they'll tell you they can't do anything unless you've been approved by the gathering. and paid up your subs 
other ways they support it are by insularity, corruption, and not being quite as fluffy as they make out

part of the terms of your co-op becoming a full member, is that all members of your co-op (with some exceptions, subject to consideration) must do a minimum of 16 hours a week work 'towards radical social change'. there has been fierce debate as to whether this may include paid work, or not activist stuff like teaching etc.

it's not something that i want to ever have to go near again. but i'm more than fine to bitch about them...

i think that c has managed to update *some* bits of the website over the four+ years she's been maintaining it, so maybe use the online enquiry form for more info.
(that's not a swipe at *you* btw).


----------



## Tom A (Jun 23, 2013)

...and god help you if you want to do a food co-op which isn't vegan or (gasps in horror) does ethically slaughtered meat!


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i think that c has managed to update *some* bits of the website over the four years she's been maintaining it, so maybe use the online enquiry form for more info.
> (that's not a swipe at *you* btw).


my mistake - it doesn't work
http://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/contact-us-113.html


----------



## Tom A (Jun 23, 2013)

tufty79 said:
			
		

> There has been fierce debate as to whether this may include paid work, or not activist stuff like teaching etc



At the spring 2011 gathering the (coerced?) "consensus" was that teaching was fine and dandy as long as it was some radical initiative but not the state system (although I bet that teaching in a Steiner school would qualify).


----------



## J Ed (Jun 23, 2013)

Tom A said:


> ...and god help you if you want to do a food co-op which isn't vegan or (gasps in horror) does ethically slaughtered meat!


 

I don't eat meat but I find the nastiness of some vegetarian and vegan 'progressives' to people who eat meat really embarrassing. They care more about chickens and sheep than people.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 23, 2013)

Tom A said:


> At the spring 2011 gathering the (coerced?) "consensus" was that teaching was fine and dandy as long as it was some radical initiative but not the state system (although I bet that teaching in a Steiner school would qualify).


 
my old landlady was a great admirer of the steiner school approach


----------



## Tom A (Jun 23, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> my old landlady was a great admirer of the steiner school approach


 
I need to do a piece about how the Steiner movement and Anthroposophy has infected significant parts of the environmental movement and fed a problematic mentality. Think the "why the Greens are shit" thread would be a good place to put it.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jun 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Not having a go but Irish activists also seem to use it:


 
It's a sure sign social centre types are involved in a campaign over here. It has a vaguely hippyish connotation.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Surely I can't be the only one who doesn't have a clue what radical roots actually is?
> 
> I mean no offence to the good people on this thread who've been involved (especially as they both appear to now hold these groups in utter contempt) but it sounds a bit like an anarcho-vegan-liberal yoghurt knitting circle


 
I've not been involved at all, but I was told that Radical Roots or some fairtrade groups associated with them received some funding once from the cosmetics firm Lush.

Counselling for Social Change - the organisation above - also received some money from them aswell.




> 'Counselling for Social Change' has just received funding from cosmetics company, Lush, to provide counselling retreats and phone counselling for activists, carers and campaigners. This work is in addition to their work providing low-cost emotional support across Mid and West Cornwall.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> financially, they support the co-operative movement by lending loanstock moneys (sourced from radicals, triodos bank, compensation from actions against the police, member co-ops, and interest on the loans they've previously given) to new/still growing/not paid off their mortgage yet co-ops. but only if they're fully paid up members of radical routes - try and get help and assistance otherwise (as i believe carlton mansions did in 2011 - i might be mistaken and mean another collective though. i know that they were based on coldharbour and came to one of the gatherings being desperate, and were told they'd have to wait months until their membership was approved before they would be given any advice, let alone financial assistance) and they'll tell you they can't do anything unless you've been approved by the gathering. and paid up your subs
> other ways they support it are by insularity, corruption, and not being quite as fluffy as they make out
> 
> part of the terms of your co-op becoming a full member, is that all members of your co-op (with some exceptions, subject to consideration) must do a minimum of 16 hours a week work 'towards radical social change'. there has been fierce debate as to whether this may include paid work, or not activist stuff like teaching etc.


 
Is it a sustainable model? It seems to mean drawing people out of struggle elsewhere to concentrate on your cooperative and on deciding what cooperatives are allowed in or not.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I've not been involved at all, but I was told that Radical Roots or some fairtrade groups associated with them received some funding once from the cosmetics firm Lush.
> 
> Counselling for Social Change - the organisation above - also received some money from them aswell.


 
Ah a light bulb has just gone off in my head. There's a Lush shop on fargate in Sheffield and we were doing a bedroom tax stall there (think that's what it was - might have been childrens centres though) and someone came out of the shop and gave us some soap for free. What you've just posted explains why they'd have been sympathetic - I thought it was just a nice way of calling me a scruffy cunt 

The soap was weird stuff, a kind of moldy green with what looked like those little black sesame seeds in it. And it made me sneeze so I threw it away


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I've not been involved at all, but I was told that Radical Roots or some fairtrade groups associated with them received some funding once from the cosmetics firm Lush.
> 
> Counselling for Social Change - the organisation above - also received some money from them aswell.


plane stupid also got a chunk of lush funding a year to two back (don't know if they still do).

i was in the leeds shop t'other week, and they were fundraising for the city's survivor-led-mental-health-crisis-service (they're run by MH survivors, and don't involve mental health teams/CMHT/NHS crisis teams unless you reqeust/it's absolutely essential), who  are absolutely brilliant. so yeah, still feel ok about indulging in the odd bubble bar when i'm feeling minted.



SpineyNorman said:


> Ah a light bulb has just gone off in my head. There's a Lush shop on fargate in Sheffield and we were doing a bedroom tax stall there (think that's what it was - might have been childrens centres though) and someone came out of the shop and gave us some soap for free. What you've just posted explains why they'd have been sympathetic - I thought it was just a nice way of calling me a scruffy cunt
> 
> The soap was weird stuff, a kind of moldy green with what looked like those little black sesame seeds in it. And it made me sneeze so I threw it away


 
they donated stuff to occupy leeds as well 
and no dash for gas


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 23, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Is it a sustainable model? It seems to mean drawing people out of struggle elsewhere to concentrate on your cooperative and on deciding what cooperatives are allowed in or not.


seems to be more than successful, in their opinion


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

So first radical artist Molly Crabapple posts this:



> In case anyone didn't see it, I just got back from covering #GTMO for @VICE. Giant essay soon.


 
And then two tweets later just out of nowhere posts this question:



> Is there anyone on my twitter feed who spent time in Afghanistan in the late 90's/early 2000's pre 9/11? Want to talk to you about stuffs


----------



## J Ed (Jun 23, 2013)

http://internationalsocialistnetwor...ysis/151-brenna-bhandar-race-gender-and-class

First theoretical piece I've read on intersectionality from people in favour of it. May be of interest.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 23, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://internationalsocialistnetwor...ysis/151-brenna-bhandar-race-gender-and-class
> 
> First theoretical piece I've read on intersectionality from people in favour of it. May be of interest.


 
I recognise the name -  a middle-class South Asian Canadian legal studies professor - friend of Abbie Bakan I think.

This can be misleading too



> By emphasising African-American women’s contributions to their families’ well-being, such as keeping families together and teaching children survival skills… such scholarship suggests that Black women see the unpaid work that they do for their families more as a form of resistance to oppression than as a form of exploitation by men.


Just because someone sees something as a form of national (seeing black as a nation in the US) resistance, doesn't mean it is not part of a wider class and/or gender exploitation.

If we look at the history of Palestinian women, for instance, you have had until comparatively recently huge social pressure to give birth to and raise more children to provide new fighters/militants.

Look at women part of traditional Islamic sections of society in the Middle East, pressure to  Islamist movements 


No clue as to what the conceptualisation will be though, only



> What is needed is some thinking through of how political campaigns for a living wage, or campaigns against the increasing privatisation of security and prisons, campaigns aimed at fighting increasingly draconian and punitive immigration policies, anti-austerity politics, etc. need to be conceptualised in ways that take account of how capitalism is committed to and thrives on racism, sexism and hetero-normativity in all their complexity.


 
The conclusion seems to rest at:




> I think what is really vital is not simply using the language of anti-racism or anti-sexism.


 
If _anti-racism and anti-sexism_ are discarded for _anti-white privilege and anti-male privilege_, the lower-class bracket of the categories of whites and males will be excluded and prey to backlash forces, but for what gain? 
There's no way for a man to be a feminist or a white person to be a black nationalist, if those movements are to have any meaning at all.

It's easy for a middle-class white to stand up and say 'I'm an in-built racist and my behaviour shows it, however much I want to not show it' because they have money, foreign holidays and multiple cars.
It's harder when you are a working-class white to say things on these lines because immigration remains an element of capitalist-imposed division, whilst you are fighting to stay afloat. People are eager to assert their non-racism towards citizens and their loyalty to defending their position (low as it is) from potential attack by migrants on visas and permits. How adding the privilege concepts will help I don't know.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 24, 2013)

copliker said:


> It's what the Irish government calls their campaign to gouge a few shillins out of ex-pats. It has tribaly celticy connotations.
> 
> http://www.thegatheringireland.com/
> 
> ...










> and the uniquely Irish sense of fun.


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 25, 2013)

Wow checkout Laurie Penny's Twitter image . Its like the Al Jonson debate all over again


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 25, 2013)

blimey


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 25, 2013)

.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 25, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> .


 

She just interviewed pussy riot so my guess is that she's decided to dress up like them or something


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2013)

Pussy riot  = two years in prison for disrupting a public church service
Laurie penny = "That's it. Sorry, guys, but I'm not going back out there today. Really don't want to be arrested and deported just for journalism"


----------



## Balbi (Jun 25, 2013)

Al Lolson


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 25, 2013)




----------



## Balbi (Jun 25, 2013)

Changed back now


----------



## rekil (Jun 25, 2013)




----------



## Tom A (Jun 25, 2013)

What the...?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 25, 2013)

copliker said:


> View attachment 34275


Worst present in the world for a 7 year old - a Laurie Penny jigsaw.


----------



## Tom A (Jun 25, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Worse present in the world for a 7 year old - a Laurie Penny jigsaw.


*sniggers*


----------



## Bakunin (Jun 25, 2013)

I'm glad that motorsport isn't one of her interests after what happened on Saturday. God knows what kind of outright cobblers she'd make out of that if it was trending on Twitter or something.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 25, 2013)

Odd column.

http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/06...d-sidekick-and-satsuma-why-cant-he-become-she
I don't think I've ever watched an episode of Doctor Who, so I can't really comment.
But is this true?






> Right now, arguing about who the next Doctor should be feels more real than arguing about parliamentary politics, because there’s at least the slim chance that what we think might influence the outcome. If we were the Doctor, we could bring down the government with the help of a feisty sidekick and a satsuma, but we aren’t, and we don’t have a Tardis, so we have to go the long way round.


 
Is this true?



> For all these years, he’s been bringing down governments, destroying armies and species and saving others with a sweep of his sonic screwdriver. This is how we the British people saw ourselves for centuries, and how privately we still like to think of ourselves – a little silly, perhaps, but basically a benevolent world power, careering around the known universe making it better, not because we’re stronger than everyone else but because we’re smarter. It’s the Great Man Theory of History expanded to encompass the whole of time and space.


 
Is this true?




> Why is it so hard to conceive of a female Doctor, or a black Doctor? For the same reason that it’s so hard to conceive of a female president, or a black prime minister, or any world government or economic power not largely controlled by rich white men: because we cannot imagine it. Because we refuse to imagine it. Because the stories we tell ourselves and each other about power and history don’t often include women and non-white people in leading roles.


----------



## fractionMan (Jun 25, 2013)

Dr who is shit and I just ate veal. 

There goes my street cred.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 25, 2013)

copliker said:


> View attachment 34275


 
I'm afraid that since I don't have the photoshop skillz to do one of my own I'm going to have to steal that.


----------



## rekil (Jun 25, 2013)

do as thou wilt


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 26, 2013)

The question to which all great thinkers should apply their towering intellect: is blacking up more or less racist than re-tweeting something in a racist way?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Odd column.
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/06...d-sidekick-and-satsuma-why-cant-he-become-she
> I don't think I've ever watched an episode of Doctor Who, so I can't really comment.
> ...


 

actually he's a thief, a genocidal (more than once) lunatic and yet still makes claims to goodness


so yes the doctor is a bit like the british empire I supose


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 26, 2013)

> _Because the stories we tell ourselves and each other about power and history don’t often include women and non-white people in leading roles._/QUOTE]
> 
> this however is horseshit and I resent her complicit 'we'
> 
> speak for your fucking self


----------



## Combustible (Jun 26, 2013)

> Why is it so hard to conceive of a female Doctor, or a black Doctor? For the same reason that it’s so hard to conceive of a female president, or a black prime minister, or any world government or economic power not largely controlled by rich white men: because we cannot imagine it. Because we refuse to imagine it. Because the stories we tell ourselves and each other about power and history don’t often include women and non-white people in leading roles.


 
Unless I've missed something, doesn't the fact she selectively had to pick "a female president, or a black prime minister" and not vice versa undermine her argument entirely. Also are the Chinese leaders considered 'rich white men' for the purposes of her polemic?


----------



## J Ed (Jun 26, 2013)

> Why is it so hard to conceive of a female Doctor, or a black Doctor? For the same reason that it’s so hard to conceive of a female president, or a black prime minister, or any world government or economic power not largely controlled by rich white men: because we cannot imagine it. Because we refuse to imagine it. Because the stories we tell ourselves and each other about power and history don’t often include women and non-white people in leading roles.


 
Idiots like Laurie Penny who think that the main problem with NATO, or the G8 or whatever, is that they are run by white men are the reason why the CIA were so enthusiastic about Obama getting elected... and they were right. I'm sure that black families in Michigan are much happier being kicked out of their houses with a black President and Yemeni families often think to themselves "well, half my family were wiped out in a drone attack but looking on the bright side at least it was the responsibility of the first black commander in chief!"


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 26, 2013)

> _Why is it so hard to conceive of a female Doctor, or a black Doctor?_/QUOTE]
> 
> and it isn't We've speculated on here for years every time there was a new series about those possibilities. Patterson Joseph nearly got the role before they cast Matt Smith instead. Railing against an imaginary foe.


----------



## andysays (Jun 26, 2013)

Because the stories we tell ourselves and each other about power and history don’t often include women and non-white people in leading roles​ 
Without delving too deeply into LP's psyche, I get the feeling that the stories she tells herself quite possibly feature one particular woman in a position of power...



The39thStep said:


>


----------



## cesare (Jun 26, 2013)

Maybe it's her design for a tattoo - permanent balaclava. Can't believe how racist you all are thinking she was blacking up when she was masking up.


----------



## cesare (Jun 26, 2013)




----------



## J Ed (Jun 26, 2013)

cesare said:


> Maybe it's her design for a tattoo - permanent balaclava. Can't believe how racist you all are thinking she was blacking up when she was masking up.


 
No one here would be accusing someone of using blackface for posing in a profile picture looking like they were in blackface if they were male. More Urban75 misogyny.


----------



## cesare (Jun 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> No one here would be accusing someone of using blackface for posing in a profile picture looking like they were in blackface if they were male. More Urban75 misogyny.



Perhaps both 

Cos it's clearly a pair of finest denier stockings with holes cut out and Russian style hat


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 26, 2013)

I really don't think she was going for blackface, I recon she was going for guerilla chic. Which has not gone well.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Idiots like Laurie Penny who think that the main problem with NATO, or the G8 or whatever, is that they are run by white men are the reason why the CIA were so enthusiastic about Obama getting elected... and they were right. I'm sure that black families in Michigan are much happier being kicked out of their houses with a black President and Yemeni families often think to themselves "well, half my family were wiped out in a drone attack but looking on the bright side at least it was the responsibility of the first black commander in chief!"


 
It's like how people in Northern Ireland had it so much better when we had a female Prime Minister as well.


----------



## cesare (Jun 26, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I really don't think she was going for blackface, I recon she was going for guerilla chic. Which has not gone well.


Whichever it was, she's done it spectacularly badly 

Monetizing her bad taste.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 26, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I really don't think she was going for blackface, I recon she was going for guerilla chic. Which has not gone well.


 
I don't think it makes her racist really but people would have far more reason to find that pic offensive than some of the made up shit she gets faux offended by.

I think the most significant thing about that pic is what it says about her attitude - it takes a stunning lack of self-awareness to see that pic, not realise the first thing that comes into most people's heads when they glance at it will be 'why the fuck is she blacking up', and then make it her fucking profile pic 

But I think, given the way she's slandered all of us as misogynists without foundation, and me and love detective as racists for no reason, we have the right to make out she was intentionally blacking up because she's a massive racist. Her next profile pic may well feature a white pointy hood.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 26, 2013)

"I can explain everything" 
"Actually no, wait, I can't"


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I don't think it makes her racist really but people would have far more reason to find that pic offensive than some of the made up shit she gets faux offended by.
> 
> I think the most significant thing about that pic is what it says about her attitude - it takes a stunning lack of self-awareness to see that pic, not realise the first thing that comes into most people's heads when they glance at it will be 'why the fuck is she blacking up', and then make it her fucking profile pic
> 
> But I think, given the way she's slandered all of us as misogynists without foundation, and me and love detective as racists for no reason, we have the right to make out she was intentionally blacking up because she's a massive racist. Her next profile pic may well feature a white pointy hood.


 

_Some of those that work Statesman, are the same that burn crosses!_

_urgghhh! come on!_


*extended guitar bit*


----------



## cesare (Jun 26, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> "I can explain everything"
> "Actually no, wait, I can't"


"It was a deliberate action to see how people reacted"


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 26, 2013)

cesare said:


> "It was a deliberate action to see how people reacted"


 

"Should we all be racist now Laurie?"


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 26, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


>


Sir John Tenniel?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 26, 2013)

nino_savatte said:


> Sir John Tenniel?


 
Who he?


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 26, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Who he?


Here's one he made earlier




Tenniel, who drew cartoons for Punch had a habit of depicting the Irish as ape-like

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tenniel


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 26, 2013)

nino_savatte said:


> Here's one he made earlier
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Well, the Irish riot picture is American, so I doubt if Tenniel was personally involved (though maybe he was).


----------



## rekil (Jun 26, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Well, the Irish riot picture is American,


I think it's Thomas Nast, Harpers Weekly.

eta: yeah, signature on the bottom right


----------



## J Ed (Jun 26, 2013)

Here's a bit of Crabapple-Penny-Harris style pornography as activism

http://www.spiegel.de/international...ctedFrom=www&referrrer=http://t.co/7g6Df7PG7i



> A new documentary explores the lives of "Fuck for Forest," a group of Berlin-based neo-hippies determined to save the rainforests with a for-pay eco-porn site. It paints a sad picture of failed idealism -- but the group isn't taking the criticism lying down.
> 
> The activists have been living in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain for the past seven years. First, there were three of them: Tommy from Norway, Leona from Sweden and a German woman named Natty. Later, they were joined by Dan, from Norway, and Kaajal, a woman from India. They collect their clothing and food from dumpsters and think that drugs are a waste of time. "We're looking for people who enjoy sex and nakedness," they say. Their lives are disjointed, their apartment is a mess, their sex is a free-for-all -- and they call it freedom.
> 
> ...


 
Unfortunately...



> But the saddest moment is when the inconsistencies in the sex commune's worldview -- its euphoria and its failures --- become apparent on their trip to South America. Marczak accompanies Dan and his friends to the Amazon basin, where they want to bring the indigenous peoples their money and their message of sex and ideals. But the locals don't want any money or messages from these white freaks, who look like gophers in a compost heap. They're only interested in the chainsaw that another German wants to sell them. You could say that German technology has won out over German idealism.
> 
> *Somewhere in the border region between Peru and Brazil, Dan and Tommy bitterly complain about the huge TVs that the natives have in their huts.* They are so enthralled by the beauty of a young girl that they are half-tempted to take her along with them. They give long-winded lectures to the inhabitants of a jungle village, explaining how they have collected money and why they want to purchase land for the indigenous people.
> 
> The reaction is devastating. "I don't need your money," snaps an Indio woman. The hippies are called liars and pedophiles, and for a few moments it looks as if the locals are going to chase them out of the village. Leona, Dan and Tommy briefly fight back their tears and trudge away from the crowd. "If you don't want our money," they say, "then we'll go."


----------



## nino_savatte (Jun 26, 2013)

copliker said:


> I think it's Thomas Nast, Harpers Weekly.
> 
> eta: yeah, signature on the bottom right


Ah... similar style though. No?


----------



## andysays (Jun 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I don't think it makes her racist really but people would have far more reason to find that pic offensive than some of the made up shit she gets faux offended by.
> 
> I think the most significant thing about that pic is what it says about her attitude - it takes a stunning lack of self-awareness to see that pic, not realise the first thing that comes into most people's heads when they glance at it will be 'why the fuck is she blacking up', and then make it her fucking profile pic
> 
> But I think, given the way she's slandered all of us as misogynists without foundation, and me and love detective as racists for no reason, we have the right to make out she was intentionally blacking up because she's a massive racist.* Her next profile pic may well feature a white pointy hood*.


 
Here's a pic she's welcome to use:


----------



## andysays (Jun 26, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Well, the Irish riot picture is American, so I doubt if Tenniel was personally involved (though maybe he was).


 
It's a mid C19th meme, innit...


----------



## andysays (Jun 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Here's a bit of Crabapple-Penny-Harris style pornography as activism
> 
> http://www.spiegel.de/international...ctedFrom=www&referrrer=http://t.co/7g6Df7PG7i
> 
> Unfortunately...


 
You're just giving SpineyNorman more shit for his anti-Green trip 

I'm sorry you got stung by that Bolivian Arse Wasp, mate (what were you doing exposing your arse in Bolivia in the first place?) but you really need to fucking get over it now...


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 26, 2013)

andysays said:


> It's a mid C19th meme, innit...


You don't say.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 26, 2013)

andysays said:


> You're just giving SpineyNorman more shit for his anti-Green trip
> 
> I'm sorry you got stung by that Bolivian Arse Wasp, mate (what were you doing exposing your arse in Bolivia in the first place?) but you really need to fucking get over it now...


 
It's a centuries old tradition of the yamaho tribesman on the eastern yoghurt plains. Implying that it's some form of pervery, as you appear to be doing, is just a post-colonial form of discursive white supremacism or summat 

The tribesmen I met hated arse wasps too. And fucking hippy greens


----------



## sihhi (Jun 26, 2013)

A photographer called Clayton Cubbitt tweeted this it links to his site here
http://instagram.com/claytoncubitt

signing it as "Laurie Penny, anarcho-feminist badass."






Following up on the photographer Cubbitt. Just two tweets before he posted "Give your body its freedom" with a link to a photo of a naked body. His other work seems to revolve a lot around nakedness, if you do a google image search you get lots of naked bodies. And in both cases it's female naked bodies (in places genitalia too) no male bits through .

His bio is fantastic:

_Photographer. Filmmaker. Writer. Raised in New Orleans. Based in NYC. Available for commissions and exhibitions internationally._

_I mix art and fashion with technology. Kanye West loved my fashion story about black skinheads. I’m the guy behind those Hysterical Literature videos. I get zef with Die Antwoord. My Long Portraits inspired a Superbowl commercial. I got dirty during Hurricane Katrina. I think subculture is culture. I think deeply about how the present creates the future._

_My dad was a Canadian national running pot over the border from Mexico. My mom was a Cajun hippie runaway, go-go dancing on Bourbon Street. They met, married, and went on a lifelong road trip, conceiving me in the back of a VW van at a national park out west. *I saw more by age ten than most people do their whole life, and this informs my work.*_

_Editorial clients include: Vogue, Rolling Stone, Vibe, The FADER, Glamour, Elle, GQ, Surface, SPIN, Clear, Planet, URB, Vellum, Vice, Nerve, Metropop, Oyster, Smithsonian, Icon, Dezeen, Zink, XXL._

_Advertising clients include: Dolby, Converse, Nike, Charles & Colvard, HarperCollins, Eli Lilly, Ad Council, David Yurman, Interscope Records, Mulholland Books. Agencies include: Saatchi & Saatchi, BBDO, Grey Worldwide, VSA, Brand New School._

Who else loves the line: "I saw more by age ten than most people do their whole life, and this informs my work." ?


----------



## Dillinger4 (Jun 26, 2013)

Have her advertising clients been mentioned before? Because I find that particularly disgusting for a 'political activist'


----------



## andysays (Jun 26, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> It's a centuries old tradition of the yamaho tribesman on the eastern yoghurt plains. Implying that it's some form of pervery, as you appear to be doing, is just a post-colinial form of discursive white supremacism or summat


 
No, it's just a bit unwise when there's wasps around, as you have obviously discovered.



SpineyNorman said:


> The tribesmen I met hated arse wasps too. And fucking hippy greens


 
Something that unites people the world over


----------



## sihhi (Jun 26, 2013)

Wikipedia entry begins:

Clayton James Cubitt, a.k.a. Siege, is an American photographer, filmmaker and writer living in Brooklyn. He is known for applying an "arrestingly controlled and sleek sense of style" to art, portrait, erotic and fashion photography. He has been described as "one of a new breed of photographers no longer content to draw a distinction between the worlds of fashion, art, and porn."






He is also like Malcolm Harris a socialist.

http://instagram.com/p/SkL9v5pXjG

Who else would make this kind of symbol?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 26, 2013)

Dillinger4 said:


> Have her advertising clients been mentioned before? Because I find that particularly disgusting for a 'political activist'


 
They're his clients. On his website http://claytoncubitt.tumblr.com/about


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 26, 2013)

ACTUAL AMANDA PALMER LYRIC:

*You are a socialist cokehead, we know from your clothes.*


----------



## Tom A (Jun 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> signing it as "Laurie Penny, anarcho-feminist badass."


It's *anarcha*-feminist you vile sexist excuse for a human being


----------



## sihhi (Jun 26, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> ACTUAL AMANDA PALMER LYRIC:
> 
> *You are a socialist cokehead, we know from your clothes.*


 
That's why supporting Obama is good, especially via charity events endorsed by textile and perfumery firm Calvin Klein:


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 26, 2013)

sihhi - I know you hate music, but this is rather good, I thought:


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Who else would make this kind of symbol?


 
my old housemate  her anarchoprinter business card is pink, and  she's a soi-disant all of the above


----------



## Greebo (Jun 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Here's a bit of Crabapple-Penny-Harris style pornography as activism<snip>
> Unfortunately...


 
Anyone who can play the flute while being fellated worries me; either the fellator/rix isn't good enough to be distracting, or the flute playing wasn't that great in the first place.


----------



## killer b (Jun 26, 2013)

sihhi said:


> _Kanye West loved my fashion story about black skinheads. _


 
oh, i loved that too. shame he's a bellend.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 27, 2013)

From FB



> Richard Seymour
> 
> 
> Off to the American mid-west on a civilising mission. Will bring back shiny trinkets from the natives.


 
Many a true word said in jest


----------



## Tom A (Jun 27, 2013)

J Ed said:


> From FB
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Oh god...


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 27, 2013)

J Ed said:


> From FB
> 
> 
> 
> Many a true word said in jest


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 27, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Here's a bit of Crabapple-Penny-Harris style pornography as activism
> 
> http://www.spiegel.de/international...ctedFrom=www&referrrer=http://t.co/7g6Df7PG7i
> 
> ...


 
i went to see that at the cineman.  it was hilarious.  those hippies were awful awful sex-cases, especially the older bloke, and they were basically scorned out of town by the townspeople.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jun 27, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> ACTUAL AMANDA PALMER LYRIC:
> 
> *You are a socialist cokehead, we know from your clothes.*


 
"we know the smell of our own"


----------



## Buckaroo (Jun 27, 2013)

Voice of a generation is on Newsnight now, talking about her generation.


----------



## Bakunin (Jun 27, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> Voice of a generation is on Newsnight now, talking about her generation.


 

Monetising her fakery.


----------



## Joe Reilly (Jun 27, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> Voice of a generation is on Newsnight now, talking about her generation.


 
...and..."poor people".


----------



## rekil (Jun 27, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> For fuck's sake, I work for a living.


.


----------



## coley (Jun 28, 2013)

On NN tonight! 
Is this it. Today's 'left'
We're doomed, whey seriously fucked.


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 28, 2013)

at first i was all 'yes! the scales have finally fallen from his eyes!'



> *Markoneinfour*





> It's so strange sometimes to see someone who used to write for ONEinFOUR on Newsnight. That @*pennyred* is on telly more than I watch telly


https://twitter.com/MarkOneinFour/status/350417645385940992
and then i was ''



> *Markoneinfour*





> And hurrah for that!
> https://twitter.com/MarkOneinFour/status/350417737794863106


https://twitter.com/MarkOneinFour/status/350417737794863106


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 28, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> at first i was all 'yes! the scales have finally fallen from his eyes!'
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Hurrah for the blackshirtsface


----------



## Greebo (Jun 28, 2013)

Apologies for the almost 24 hour delay; intersectionality was mentioned on Woman's Hour yesterday, and "check your privilege" was explained.


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 28, 2013)

just to go back to my snippiness like a dog to vomit for a min



sihhi said:


> A worthy rival to the Activist Trauma Database


i contacted the person my old housemate recommended off there, on the email address given on the ATD website

she was quite puzzled as to how i'd got her 'private' email address 
sounds familiar...


----------



## treelover (Jun 28, 2013)

whatever her faults and they are legion, on Newsnight, I thought she did a good job, whether she was the right person to be on the panel, is another matter.

btw, what was Ed Howker going on about?, "NL made a deliberate attempt to embed benefits in all parts of society", well, yes, in work benefits, but savaged disability and other benefits..


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 28, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  14h
> On BBC Newsnight tonight talking about hardening attitudes to welfare. My top has a huge rip and I've no time to go home and change.


 
Its all about me


----------



## rekil (Jun 28, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> Voice of a generation is on Newsnight now, talking about her generation.


Apologies for the modsplaining but you have to say "g-g-g-generation". Like Jacqueline Taïeb here.



As noted on the other thread, when Laura defends her g-g-g-generation, she defends this.


> Privately-educated pupils are almost seven times as likely to get into Oxbridge as those from state comprehensives. They are also twice as likely to be admitted to Britain's top 30 universities.
> 
> Figures show some 48 per cent of pupils from independent schools won places at 30 top universities over the period, compared with just 18 per cent from state comprehensives and 27 per cent from sixth-form colleges.
> 
> ...


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/educatio...ces-dominated-by-just-five-elite-schools.html


----------



## Tom A (Jun 28, 2013)

I hope her career dies before we get old.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 28, 2013)

can someone post the limp bizkit song


----------



## Tom A (Jun 28, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> can someone post the limp bizkit song


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 28, 2013)

Nice to see that the others that she somehow talks for, 'a million of them' all live incredibly 'miserable lives'.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 28, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Its all about me


 

Every rip in her clothes is symbolic of another opened food bank


----------



## The39thStep (Jun 28, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Nice to see that the others that she somehow talks for, 'a million of them' all lives incredibly 'miserable lives'.


 
Not surprisingly in my book if they really haven't grasped the trinklet like significance of  Discordia and Pussy Riot and aren't allowed to blackup


----------



## treelover (Jun 28, 2013)

Laura's not the worse, anyone see that hipster ring wing Libertarian on QT last night?, arguing "the state must get out of people lives"


----------



## sihhi (Jun 28, 2013)

Script-keeper: Jeremy Paxman (Malvern College; until q recently weekly columnist at The Spectator; Oxford University)

Left: Laurie Penny (Brighton College; assistant to politics editor at The New Statesman; Oxford University)

'Centre': Ed Howker (Bradford Grammar School; Associate editor at The Spectator)

Right: Robert Oxley (Campaign Manager for TaxPayers Alliance, until recently Researcher for expenses cheat Tory MP Anne Main; Sheffield University) 

NB All three schools are major private schools (part of the Headmasters' Conference of the top 243)


----------



## Joe Reilly (Jun 28, 2013)

treelover said:


> whatever her faults and they are legion, on Newsnight, I thought she did a good job, whether she was the right person to be on the panel, is another matter.
> 
> btw, what was Ed Howker going on about?, "NL made a deliberate attempt to embed benefits in all parts of society", well, yes, in work benefits, but savaged disability and other benefits..


 
It was an emotional Tet offensive, she kept piling it on, I think she even said people were "starving" at one stage. It was like the exchange with David Starkey where she kept adding to the excuses - but in reverse. The only people moved by that drivel would have moved to the right. Though he didn't say it outright, Howker was probably talking about the extension of tax credits...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 28, 2013)

treelover said:


> Laura's not the worse, anyone see that hipster ring wing Libertarian on QT last night?, arguing "the state must get out of people lives"


 
But the right libertarian is openly a right wing libertarian and therefore doesn't pretend to be progressive. Laurie 'everyone who disagrees with me is a racist misogynist with unexamined white male privilege - even if they're black women' Penny is supposed to be a friend of the oppressed and voice of a wadical generation.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 28, 2013)

The opponents were someone from the Spectator and a chief of the TaxPayers' Alliance they're not going to be anything other than right-wing.


----------



## andysays (Jun 28, 2013)

treelover said:


> whatever her faults and they are legion, on Newsnight, I thought she did a good job, *whether she was the right person to be on the panel, is another matter*...


 
Surely this is actually the heart of the matter.

Laurie and her ilk (Owen Jones, etc, add your own fucking list) are now the default people to get on Newsnight, Today, whatever to represent "the left", "the young", anyone concerned about the way society is going.

Whatever she thinks her job is, however good a performance you or I or anyone else thinks she puts on any given occasion, her real job is to displace anyone who might actually make a real, radical critique for the viewers/listeners at home.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 28, 2013)

andysays said:


> Surely this is actually the heart of the matter.
> 
> Laurie and her ilk (Owen Jones, etc, add your own fucking list) are now the default people to get on Newsnight, Today, whatever to represent "the left", "the young", anyone concerned about the way society is going.
> 
> Whatever she thinks her job is, however good a performance you or I or anyone else thinks she puts on any given occasion, her real job is to displace anyone who might actually make a real, radical critique for the viewers/listeners at home.


 
Whereas the other side do get credible fighters who fight the corner for _their _ideology.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 28, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Whereas the other side do get credible fighters who fight the corner for _their _ideology.


 
But not as ideology. Which is the trick. And it's not one that laurie has played on her - she fits the role that she is supposed to - posh ideological shouty. They couldn't invent her.


----------



## andysays (Jun 28, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> But not as ideology. Which is the trick. And it's not one that laurie has played on her - she fits the role that she is supposed to - posh ideological shouty. *They couldn't invent her*.


 
Convenient that they don't have to, but it's not her as LP that really matters (despite what she seems to think). If she fell under a bus tomorrow someone else would be found who would fit the role just as well.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 28, 2013)

They didn't before. She has some agency here.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 28, 2013)

andysays said:


> Convenient that they don't have to, but it's not her as LP that really matters (despite what she seems to think). If she fell under a bus tomorrow someone else would be found who would fit the role just as well.


 

I agree, go into any student union in the country and look at people involved in student politics. One, two, three many Laurie Pennies!


----------



## cesare (Jun 28, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I agree, go into any student union in the country and look at people involved in student politics. One, two, three many Laurie Pennies!


How long does that last once outside the unis though? Mind you, LP might be trailblazing a way of monetizing student politics


----------



## Firky (Jun 28, 2013)

I saw her last night and she was quite forgettable. She seemed out of depth.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 28, 2013)

cesare said:


> How long does that last once outside the unis though?


 
This is the new normal for a lot of people, when I caught someone out at my student union over lying about something during his campaign he wasn't nearly as bothered about being caught out lying as he was about the damage I was doing to his personal image by showing that he was a liar on the internet. Other people on the thread have wrote about how at private schools now they tell you to build your personal brand through social media in much the same way as Laurie Penny has done.

It's all me me fucking me. I find it obnoxious and I'm suspicious of people it comes easily to, makes me want to run into the woods and be a hobbit.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 28, 2013)

Firky said:


> I saw her last night and she was quite forgettable. She seemed out of depth.


 

What better way to demonstrate why the spectrum of acceptable debate doesn't include people who challenge neoliberalism? Has anyone ever done a British version of Manufacturing Consent? I suppose no one really needs to, it's so obvious.


----------



## Ole (Jun 28, 2013)

treelover said:


> Laura's not the worse, anyone see that hipster ring wing Libertarian on QT last night?, arguing "the state must get out of people lives"


 







Her? She made my fucking blood boil, and I only heard her speak twice. With David Willetts next to her playing the 'prudent moderate', I had to switch off after 15 minutes for my health.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 28, 2013)

All of them (Steel excepted) talking about Snowden made me so angry. They should all be forced to have CCTV cameras in every room of their house viewable by any member of the public.


----------



## Tom A (Jun 28, 2013)

J Ed said:


> All of them (Steel excepted) talking about Snowden made me so angry. They should all be forced to have CCTV cameras in every room of their house viewable by any member of the public.


But you just know that Laurie Penny would just _loooooooooove_ to go on Big Brother, it temporarily slake her lust for publicity.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 28, 2013)

Tom A said:


> But you just know that Laurie Penny would just _loooooooooove_ to go on Big Brother, it temporarily slake her lust for publicity.


----------



## Tom A (Jun 28, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


>


There's something of The Young Ones about her in that picture.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 28, 2013)

I did like what a waster.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 28, 2013)

Tom A said:


> There's something of The Young Ones about her in that picture.





> During the year, Kat was successful in gaining a position with the City of Belmont that allowed her to continue her important role in the community but at a middle manager’s level. Kate believes local government is one of the best ways forward for engaging and resourcing the most marginalised people in the community.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 28, 2013)

Odd image - privilege and power are like a seesaw?? 
Anyone want to have a stab at it?


----------



## JimW (Jun 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> View attachment 34551
> 
> Odd image - privilege and power are like a seesaw??
> Anyone want to have a stab at it?


 
In the radical playground, when it's not swings and roundabouts it's the precarious balance of the forces of oppression. or something.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 28, 2013)

Define-enforce-maintain

Gives the game away.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jun 28, 2013)

sihhi said:


> View attachment 34551
> 
> Odd image - privilege and power are like a seesaw??
> Anyone want to have a stab at it?


----------



## Tom A (Jun 28, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> View attachment 34552


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 28, 2013)

Not sure where this goes in the intersectional analysis of Father Ted


----------



## Tom A (Jun 28, 2013)




----------



## frogwoman (Jun 28, 2013)

Tom A said:


>


 
The fuck, how are those items on the chart related, it's just putting random words together.


----------



## Tom A (Jun 28, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> The fuck, how are those items on the chart related, it's just putting random words together.


You do know what this is from, don't you?

E2A: Note how "human version of events" is highlighted in red, because humans are just that important. Speciesist bastards


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 28, 2013)

Tom A said:


> You do know what this is from, don't you?


 
I think you need to check your knowing the origin of daft intersectional charts privilege.


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 28, 2013)

Tom A said:


> You do know what this is from, don't you?


 
no


----------



## Tom A (Jun 28, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> no


Now... how should I break this to you? I know... http://lmgtfy.com/?q=brass+eye+site:youtube.com


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 28, 2013)




----------



## frogwoman (Jun 28, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Now... how should I break this to you? I know... http://lmgtfy.com/?q=brass eye site:youtube.com


 
oh my god  I'd fucking seen that "animals" episode before as well


----------



## Tom A (Jun 28, 2013)

Another from the great man Morris...


----------



## frogwoman (Jun 28, 2013)

"peter, you've added nothing"


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 28, 2013)

It's not early 2000s any more tom. Move on.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 29, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Its all about me


 

you'd think on her wages she could just pop in BHS and pick up a new one en route


----------



## agricola (Jun 29, 2013)




----------



## The39thStep (Jun 29, 2013)

J Ed said:


> All of them (Steel excepted) talking about Snowden made me so angry. They should all be forced to have CCTV cameras in every room of their house viewable by any member of the public.


 
That is quite a flight of fancy you have there boy


----------



## J Ed (Jun 30, 2013)

Voice of a generation on the Sunday Politics tomorrow talking about welfare.


----------



## JimW (Jun 30, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Voice of a generation on the Sunday Politics tomorrow talking about welfare.


 
I can't bring myself to watch her, so don't know - since they always get her in has she bothered to do much research? Can she reel off the numbers to cut through the bullshit or is it all just touchy-feely emoting?


----------



## J Ed (Jun 30, 2013)

JimW said:


> I can't bring myself to watch her, so don't know - since they always get her in has she bothered to do much research? Can she reel off the numbers to cut through the bullshit


 
No, doesn't even have the decency to crowd source it.



> or is it all just touchy-feely emoting?


 

Yeah, in a really awkward and insincere way. The Tories must rub their hands with glee when they see her on the telly.


----------



## JimW (Jun 30, 2013)

J Ed said:


> No, doesn't even have the decency to crowd source it.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Depressing. My sense of the sort of privilege she has is it lets you wing this sort of stuff without feeling embarrassed about not knowing what the fuck you're talking about, as decent people would. The bare-faced public school chancer's guide to getting ahead.


----------



## rekil (Jun 30, 2013)

AP: 7 people shot at Brooklyn party



> NEW YORK (AP) — Police say seven people have been shot at a party in Brooklyn, including a woman taken to a hospital in critical condition.
> 
> Authorities say shots rang out at a party at a residence at approximately 1 a.m. Sunday. They say the woman and six other people who sustained non-life-threatening injuries have been transported to Kings County Hospital.


Artie's do was last night. (!)


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jun 30, 2013)

fingers crossed


----------



## sihhi (Jun 30, 2013)

What does all this mean, especially this part

_As a kid growing up with books and films and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that upset me more than anything else. I felt it sometimes like a sharp pain under the ribcage, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might be nothing at all or might mean you're slowly dying of something mundane and awful. I remember that feeling when I understood how few girls got to go on adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, before mainstream female leads very occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn't bring the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire. _
_Stories matter. Stories are how we make sense of the world, which doesn’t mean that those stories can’t be stupid and simplistic and full of lies. Stories can exaggerate and offend and they always, always matter. In Doug Rushkoff's recent book Present Shock, he discusses the phenomenon of “narrative collapse”: the idea that in the years between 11 September 2001 and the financial crash of 2008, all of the old stories about God and Duty and Money and Family and America and The Destiny of the West finally disintegrated, leaving us with fewer sustaining fairytales to die for and even fewer to live for._
_This is plausible, but future panic, like the future itself, is not evenly distributed. Not being sure what story you're in anymore is a different experience depending on whether or not you were expecting to be the hero of that story. Low-status men, and especially women and girls, often don't have that expectation. We expect to be forgettable supporting characters, or sometimes, if we're lucky, attainable objects to be slung over the hero's shoulder and carried off the end of the final page. The only way we get to be in stories is to be stories ourselves. If we want anything interesting at all to happen to us we have to be a story that happens to somebody else, and when you’re a young girl looking for a script, there are a limited selection of roles to choose from._


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 30, 2013)

I think she's saying that society forces her to lie about herself (i.e the sort pick and mix shallow pomo stuff that allows her to call herself an anarcho-femnist etc) but that men either don't have to lie or are allowed to tell lies where they are the hero/centre/moving force etc - incredibly crude and simplistic. I mean this, how was this allowed to be published? Oh that's right, the imaginatively oppressed Laurie is her own commissioning editor.



> Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story.


----------



## J Ed (Jun 30, 2013)

The real world global struggle against austerity is actually a metaphor for Laurie Penny's career progression and battle to maintain radical activist credentials


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 30, 2013)

J Ed said:


> The real world global struggle against austerity is actually a metaphor for Laurie Penny's career progression and battle to maintain radical activist credentials


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 30, 2013)

She has a degree in english literature from Oxford, yet she insists on reading novels as works about individual heroes and villains. How did she ever pass? I suppose it fits the worldview of 1)glamorous active types able to don different identities at will (the heroes) and 2) those trapped in one passive victim-identity forever (these are who the heroes do their heroing _for_) and 3) the villains who are really the heroes gone bad, or more accurately, the people who have the same range of identity and action option open to them - the other people with agency.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 30, 2013)

Is this accurate? I am loath to ask a woman or indeed anyone in real life: 'Excuse me I've always wondered, do you behave in ways that stories sanction?'

_Women behave in ways that they find sanctioned in stories written by men who know better, and __men and women seek out friends and partners who remind them of a girl they met in a book one day when they were young and longing_


----------



## rekil (Jun 30, 2013)

> I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and The Hunger Games


When It Was Neither Profitable Nor Popular


----------



## sihhi (Jun 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> She has a degree in english literature from Oxford, yet she insists on reading novels as works about individual heroes and villains. How did she ever pass? I suppose it fits the worldview of 1)glamorous active types able to don different identities at will (the heroes) and 2) those trapped in one passive victim-identity forever (these are who the heroes do their heroing _for_) and 3) the villains who are really the heroes gone bad, or more accurately, the people who have the same range of identity and action option open to them - the other people with agency.


 
I sort of get that but there's something else being suggested in these bits:

_I try hard, now, around the men in my life, to be as unmanic, as unpixie and as resolutely real possible, because I don’t want to give the wrong impression. And it’s a struggle. Because I remain a small, friendly, excitable person who wears witchy colors and has a tendency towards the twee. I still know that if I wanted to, I could attract one of those lost, pretty nerd boys I have such a weakness for by dialling up the twee and dialling down the smart, just as I know that the hurt in their eyes when they realise you’re a real person is not something I ever want to see again. I still love to up sticks and go on adventures, but I no longer drag mournful men-children behind me when I do, because it’s frankly exhausting. I still play the ukelele. I wasn’t kidding about the fucking ukelele. But I refuse to burn my energy adding extra magic and sparkle to other people’s lives to get them to love me. I’m busy casting spells for myself. Everyone who was ever told a fairytale knows what happens to women who do their own magic._

Why the prominence of _I remain a small, friendly, excitable person _plus _I’m busy casting spells for myself _but capped with a reference to fairtytales (which is are an extremely sexist form of culture)?


----------



## Sue (Jun 30, 2013)

Missed 'an evening of comedy and thought-provoking debate about men and feminism' with our Laurie et al.
http://eastlondonfawcett.org.uk/are-men-doing-it.html. Last week alas.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 30, 2013)

I wonder if she'll ask the same questions of the event that she asked a male dominated panel in new york.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jun 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I sort of get that but there's something else being suggested in these bits:
> 
> _I try hard, now, around the men in my life, to be as unmanic, as unpixie and as resolutely real possible, because I don’t want to give the wrong impression. And it’s a struggle. Because I remain a small, friendly, excitable person who wears witchy colors and has a tendency towards the twee. I still know that if I wanted to, I could attract one of those lost, pretty nerd boys I have such a weakness for by dialling up the twee and dialling down the smart, just as I know that the hurt in their eyes when they realise you’re a real person is not something I ever want to see again. I still love to up sticks and go on adventures, but I no longer drag mournful men-children behind me when I do, because it’s frankly exhausting. I still play the ukelele. I wasn’t kidding about the fucking ukelele. But I refuse to burn my energy adding extra magic and sparkle to other people’s lives to get them to love me. I’m busy casting spells for myself. Everyone who was ever told a fairytale knows what happens to women who do their own magic._
> 
> Why the prominence of _I remain a small, friendly, excitable person _plus _I’m busy casting spells for myself _but capped with a reference to fairtytales (which is are an extremely sexist form of culture)?


 

overdosed on niel gaiman.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 30, 2013)

copliker said:


> AP: 7 people shot at Brooklyn party
> 
> Artie's do was last night. (!)


 





Here it was. In the centre is Rob Horning co-editor with Malcolm, promoting the LP article that muscovyduck tore to shreds

https://twitter.com/marginalutility/status/346680765549006849

He is also a socialist or supports socialist campaigns at least:



> Antigentrification campaigns protect the right of the poor to pay slumlords high rent to live in 'hoods w/ no resources


 
He also writes stuff like this using a Marxist understanding of the world I think 

_*The meta-ness of Katniss’s strategizing is interesting; by having Katniss think through how to symbolize and act out  generic falling-in-love story for an audience hungry for vicarious entertainment, Suzanne Collins is also having her narrate the novelist’s problems in plotting the novel*. Collins foregrounds the emotional manipulation of the story, problematizing it while indulging it along stereotypical lines, a clever means for having it both ways. This aligns we, the readers, with the audience of the violent reality show within the novel’s universe. Would we really want the Hunger Games put to a stop? Doesn’t our compulsion to keep reading betray us in that regard?_

_Not only does this scene remind us of our complicity in systems of control through vicariousness, it also illustrates the conundrum of authenticity under ambient surveillance. *Katniss can’t experience “falling in love” as a reaction; she can’t consume her own story. She can only perform it.* Her emotions are not responses to events but tactics. They are always competitive, a means to some end she’s fighting for. They can no longer unproblematically serve as  post hoc explanations of what an experience meant to her. Instead she has to wonder to what degree her performed emotions shaped what happened.  ”Because we’re supposed to be making up this stuff, playing at being in love not actually being in love,” as Katniss tells herself in the midst of playing up her love for Peeta._

_<snip>_

_*With social media surveillance as understood, we’re in the same situation. A paranoid hermeneutic reigns instead.* Everything we do is always understood as someone else’s entertainment, and the degree to which others are entertained or edified determines the “meaning” of what we are experiencing. Evaluating the authenticity of a response relative to our “real” feelings is no longer a meaningful way of analyzing events. We don’t know who to trust; we think everyone might be playing us if they are not merely consuming us as spectacle._


----------



## Sue (Jun 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I sort of get that but there's something else being suggested in these bits:
> 
> _I try hard, now, around the men in my life, to be as unmanic, as unpixie and as resolutely real possible, because I don’t want to give the wrong impression. And it’s a struggle. Because I remain a small, friendly, excitable person who wears witchy colors and has a tendency towards the twee. I still know that if I wanted to, I could attract one of those lost, pretty nerd boys I have such a weakness for by *dialling up the twee and dialling down the smart, just as I know that the hurt in their eyes when they realise you’re a real person is not something I ever want to see again.* I still love to up sticks and go on adventures, but I no longer drag mournful men-children behind me when I do, because it’s frankly exhausting. I still play the ukelele. I wasn’t kidding about the fucking ukelele. But I refuse to burn my energy adding extra magic and sparkle to other people’s lives to get them to love me. I’m busy casting spells for myself. Everyone who was ever told a fairytale knows what happens to women who do their own magic._
> 
> Why the prominence of _I remain a small, friendly, excitable person _plus _I’m busy casting spells for myself _but capped with a reference to fairtytales (which is are an extremely sexist form of culture)?


 
Oh FFS.  Can't say I know any women who do this (or feel they have to do this) or men who are surprised to find a woman is a 'real person'. Laurie must be hanging out with the wrong crowd or something.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 30, 2013)

This is University of Toronto's Equity Offices:




Although they just can't help "allying" themselves with Ontario Liberals to raise university fees to record heights.


----------



## Joe Reilly (Jun 30, 2013)

Sue said:


> Oh FFS.  Can't say I know any women who do this (or feel they have to do this) or men who are surprised to find a woman is a 'real person'. Laurie must be hanging out with the wrong crowd or something.


 
_" But I refuse to burn my energy adding extra magic and sparkle to other people’s lives to get them to love me."_

As with her 'love of the poor' posturing - a 100 per cent phony.


----------



## agricola (Jun 30, 2013)

Joe Reilly said:


> _" But I refuse to burn my energy adding extra magic and sparkle to other people’s lives to get them to love me."_
> 
> As with her 'love of the poor' posturing - a 100 per cent phony.


 
She should be applauded for her environmental sentiment, tbh - preventing the release of extra magic and sparkle into the atmosphere as a by-product of combustion of personal energy is something that everyone should aim to do.


----------



## Tom A (Jun 30, 2013)

Alain D'espair said:


> I managed to go to university for three years (from my mid to late twenties) without noticing student politics at all.


Bully for you. Wish the same could be said for me, however when I did my master's degree I made a convoluted effort to stay away from anything more political than Amnesty International or People & Planet. I voted for ReOpen Nominations for pretty much everything in the student elections that year


----------



## J Ed (Jun 30, 2013)

Alain D'espair said:


> I managed to go to university for three years (from my mid to late twenties) without noticing student politics at all.


 

Not a minority experience!


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Jun 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Not sure where this goes in the intersectional analysis of Father Ted


 

Not sure where this goes either, but it needs to be said.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 30, 2013)

_


sihhi said:



			Low-status men, and especially women and girls, often don't have that expectation. We expect to be forgettable supporting characters, or sometimes, if we're lucky, attainable objects to be slung over the hero's shoulder and carried off the end of the final page.
		
Click to expand...

_ 
Is she saying she's a low status woman/girl here?


----------



## sihhi (Jun 30, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Is she saying she's a low status woman/girl here?


 
There is some scope ambiguity but men and women is a run-on phrase so low-status covers both. So yes, you're now on LP's same team, SpineyNorman, as a low status male, alongside low status women and girls, hence 'we'. 



> Low-status men, and especially women and girls, often don't have that expectation. We expect to be forgettable supporting characters


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jun 30, 2013)

She's wrong then. I expect to be the hero in my story. And I am!


----------



## sihhi (Jun 30, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> She's wrong then. I expect to be the hero in my story. And I am!


 
Are you writing a story?  

If so, remember: "You cannot be a writer and have writing be anything other than the central romance of your life, which is one thing they don’t tell you about being a woman writer: it’s its own flavour of lonely. Men can get away with loving writing a little bit more than anything else. Women can’t: our partners and, eventually, our children are expected to take priority."


----------



## tufty79 (Jun 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> eventually, our children are expected to take priority."


children?  bit of pro-natalist privilege checking for you required, sihhi 

i'm a 'choose your own adventure' vintage edition


----------



## Tom A (Jun 30, 2013)

I'm very much an antihero.


----------



## rekil (Jun 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> She has a degree in english literature from Oxford, yet she insists on reading novels as works about individual heroes and villains. How did she ever pass? I suppose it fits the worldview of 1)glamorous active types able to don different identities at will (the heroes) and 2) those trapped in one passive victim-identity forever (these are who the heroes do their heroing _for_) and 3) the villains who are really the heroes gone bad, or more accurately, the people who have the same range of identity and action option open to them - the other people with agency.


Have you read James Kelman's Elitism and English Literature? She has pinched it, filleted it of class politics and rendered it through the prism of 30k school and oxford privilege. I could be wrong but the bits about 'heroes' and 'expectations' might not be easily waved away as pure happenstance.


----------



## rekil (Jun 30, 2013)

It's in And The Judges Said (and here) - Elitism and English Literature


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 30, 2013)

copliker said:


> It's in And The Judges Said (and here) - Elitism and English Literature


 
Top notch sunday nighting. Proper  salute.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 30, 2013)

Tom A said:


> I'm very much an antihero.


 
You could have had class, you could have been a contender - instead of a bum, which is what you are, let's face it.


----------



## butchersapron (Jun 30, 2013)

Yeah, fuck off.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jun 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Yeah, fuck off.


 
This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.


----------



## Tom A (Jun 30, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> You could have had class, you could have been a contender - instead of a bum, which is what you are, let's face it.





> Careful thinking. Forward planning. And that is why I sleep in the arms of a beautiful woman and you spend your evenings alone in your _bedsit. With cheap porn_.


It's not a bedsit... *it's a flat!

 *


----------



## Greebo (Jun 30, 2013)

Tom A said:


> It's not a bedsit... *it's a flat!*
> 
> *View attachment 34751 *


 
Flat flat or studio flat?


----------



## Tom A (Jun 30, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Flat flat or studio flat?


Flat flat.


----------



## Red Cat (Jun 30, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What does all this mean, especially this part


 

It doesn't mean anything, she just makes it up. I don't have an Eng Lit degree from Oxford but if I did I'm sure I would have read Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, George Elliot, Jane Austen, maybe Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, none of whom write forgettable, supporting female characters, and they're just a few off the top of my head. She'll have also done courses in critical theory, probably feminist critical theory, so she's more than capable of more 'sophisticated' analyses. It's almost like she's pretending to be less educated than she is. Why?

And I'd be very surprised if she's read James Kelman. They have nothing in common.


----------



## sihhi (Jun 30, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> It doesn't mean anything, she just makes it up. I don't have an Eng Lit degree from Oxford but if I did I'm sure I would have read Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, George Elliot, Jane Austen, maybe Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, none of whom write forgettable, supporting female characters, and they're just a few off the top of my head. She'll have also done courses in critical theory, probably feminist critical theory, so she's more than capable of more 'sophisticated' analyses. It's almost like she's pretending to be less educated than she is. Why?
> 
> And I'd be very surprised if she's read James Kelman. They have nothing in common.


 
Her point, I think, was that male writers write only forgettable, supporting female characters so from the list it's solely Thomas Hardy who counts but I've never read him so I don't know. 
The screenwriters for films which feature this sort of supporting love interest character - only mentions one film though  - are male.
I _think_ this is the claim, could be wrong.


----------



## smokedout (Jul 1, 2013)

JimW said:


> I can't bring myself to watch her, so don't know - since they always get her in has she bothered to do much research? Can she reel off the numbers to cut through the bullshit or is it all just touchy-feely emoting?


 
no, she was talking about new 7 day waiting period for the dole

key points of attack she didnt know about

seems to work against universal credit, which is supposed to allow people to move in and out of work easily, hard to see how the two schemes can be matched up as they've been described

supposed to be about looking for work first, but impossible to find work with no money to travel to interviews, buy clothes, have haircuts etc

this is an attack on people in work, if you get made redundant you will have to wait for benefits however much NI you've paid etc

perverse incentive - makes it risky for people to take temporary work, she does mention this but only in passing towards the end and without the context of almost all current welfare reforms in practice making it harder for people to take work, this was the magic shut up you stupid tory twat you dont know what your talking about angle and she used it as a throwaway point

instead it was just oh think of the poor people blah blah, and even that she cant do with integrity because she's so fucking posh


----------



## Red Cat (Jul 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Her point, I think, was that male writers write only forgettable, supporting female characters so from the list it's solely Thomas Hardy who counts but I've never read him so I don't know.
> The screenwriters for films which feature this sort of supporting love interest character - only mentions one film though  - are male.
> I _think_ this is the claim, could be wrong.


 

She talks about screenwriters but then also talks about stories, fiction in general. She doesn't say anything about male writers specifically when she's doing that. Maybe she just assumes that they're male which is bizarre from a woman who claims to live in world of books and did an Eng Lit degree.

Of course it's true that many male writers still rely on stereotyping for their female characters. It's not exactly news that actors find it hard to get good roles in US films. And I recently tried to read _Snow_, in which the main character, a poet, goes back to his home town in Turkey all the way from Germany to seek out a woman he used to have feelings for in order to marry her. I haven't figured out why yet apart from that she is beautiful. It pisses me off that 'serious' literature can still be based on a tale of man meets beautiful woman - I think, 'Are you kidding?'

I recognise the stereotype she writes about. I hate it too. It's just that she's not writing about the stereotype, pulling it apart, trying to understand it in it's historical, social context etc. It's just a fantasy, a geek's fantasy, the type of geek who fancies her. She's not writing about how that fantasy comes into being in the head of the geek or why it gets made into a film costing millions to produce because as usual she's not interested in the external world, she's only interested in talking about herself.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2013)

There are meant to be four basic plots which most stories are based on and I guess that's one of them ...


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Her point, I think, was that male writers write only forgettable, supporting female characters so from the list it's solely Thomas Hardy who counts but I've never read him so I don't know.
> The screenwriters for films which feature this sort of supporting love interest character - only mentions one film though  - are male.
> I _think_ this is the claim, could be wrong.


 
You should read Hardy sihhi, if you're making time for fiction it's well worth it.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Jul 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> There are meant to be four basic plots which most stories are based on and I guess that's one of them ...


 
I'm going to see if I can guess what they are.

1) Boy meets girl then does some love.
2) The audacious heist.
3) War.
4) Jokes about penis.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 1, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> She talks about screenwriters but then also talks about stories, fiction in general. She doesn't say anything about male writers specifically when she's doing that. Maybe she just assumes that they're male which is bizarre from a woman who claims to live in world of books and did an Eng Lit degree.
> 
> Of course it's true that many male writers still rely on stereotyping for their female characters. It's not exactly news that actors find it hard to get good roles in US films. And I recently tried to read _Snow_, in which the main character, a poet, goes back to his home town in Turkey all the way from Germany to seek out a woman he used to have feelings for in order to marry her. I haven't figured out why yet apart from that she is beautiful. It pisses me off that 'serious' literature can still be based on a tale of man meets beautiful woman - I think, 'Are you kidding?'
> 
> I recognise the stereotype she writes about. I hate it too. It's just that she's not writing about the stereotype, pulling it apart, trying to understand it in it's historical, social context etc. It's just a fantasy, a geek's fantasy, the type of geek who fancies her. She's not writing about how that fantasy comes into being in the head of the geek or why it gets made into a film costing millions to produce because as usual she's not interested in the external world, she's only interested in talking about herself.


 
That last para is spot on i think.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 1, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> I'm going to see if I can guess what they are.
> 
> 1) Boy meets girl then does some love.
> 2) The audacious heist.
> ...


 
It's a daft idea that revolves around a heroes adventures/quest. There are def _types_ of story but that's not saying much in itself.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 1, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> I'm going to see if I can guess what they are.
> 
> 1) Boy meets girl then does some love.


 
Under a purple sun, which then explodes.


----------



## Red Cat (Jul 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> There are meant to be four basic plots which most stories are based on and I guess that's one of them ...


 

Once upon a time, Kate travelled hundreds of miles from London to a really small town in the far north of Scotland. It was a painfully slow journey that gave her too much time to worry about whether Dave would marry her. The bus got stuck in a blizzard and she feared she might die. Kate hoped that this journey would be worth it because the last time she saw him he had a terribly nice arse. Stuck in London with writers block she dreamed that his arse would work its magic spell and unleash the poetry beast within. 'Oh, how I hope he'll marry me', she said to herself softly, drawing her blanket closely round her shoulders.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 1, 2013)

Have you hacked my email?


----------



## Red Cat (Jul 1, 2013)




----------



## sihhi (Jul 1, 2013)

Red Cat These are the points LP makes about male writers

_I wish I’d known, at 21, when I made up my mind to try to write seriously for a living if I could, that that decision would also mean a choice to be intimidating to the men I fancied, a choice to be less attractive, a choice to stop being That Girl and start becoming a grown woman, which is the worst possible thing a girl can do, which is why so many of those *Manic Pixie Dream Girl characters, as* *written by male geeks and scriptwriters*, either die tragically young or are somehow immortally fixed at the physical and mental age of nineteen-and-a-half._

_My Facebook feed is full of *young male writers* who I have encouraged to believe in themselves, set up with contacts, taken on adventures and talked into the night about the meaning of journalism with who are now in *long-term relationships with people who are content to be That Girl*._

_I packed two suitcases and walked out on *Garden State Boy*, to be a person who writes her own stories, rather than a story that happens to other people_

_*Men write women, and they re-write us, for revenge. *It's about obsession, and control. _

_Writing about Doctor Who this week got me thinking about sexism in storytelling, and how we rely on lazy character creation in life just as we do in fiction. <...>_
_The companions of the past three years, since the most recent series reboot, have been the ultimate in lazy sexist tropification, any attempt at actually creating interesting female characters replaced by... That Girl. Amy Pond was That Girl; Clara Oswald has been That Girl; River Song, interestingly enough, did not start out as That Girl, but the character was forcibly turned into That Girl when she no longer fit the temper of a series with contempt for powerful, interesting, grown-up women, and then discarded when she outgrew the role_


There are four examples referred to.
Films
1. Elizabethtown
2. Garden State
3. 500 Days of Summer 
Plus TV Series Doctor Who.

I believe each of these is male-written (haven't seen any of them tho), and that this point:-
*Men write women, and they re-write us, for revenge. It's about obsession, and control. *
is what is driven at, that many men use women for emotional self-satisfaction, not treating women as real humans compared to their male friends/associates ie sexism - which is true. 
However my point would be that it's important to stress that the kind of sexist culture of the films LP uses as examples comes heavily from a Hollywood industry hinged around _romance as complete fulfillment._
The thrust on the lines of:- once someone finds their reciprocal love all other social concerns can take a back seat, young people not able to find love is why they are so restless etc etc. There's a love or lost love interest in just about every Hollywood film that isn't a straight-out comedy or horror. Is that too much of a generalisation?


----------



## chilango (Jul 1, 2013)

Y'know I'm quite happy for Laurie to write about Dr Who and films and all that stuff. She can even go on TV and talk about em. And if she's wrong it doesn't matter a bit.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 1, 2013)




----------



## Bakunin (Jul 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Red Cat These are the points LP makes about male writers
> 
> _I wish I’d known, at 21, when I made up my mind to try to write seriously for a living if I could, that that decision would also mean a choice to be intimidating to the men I fancied, a choice to be less attractive, a choice to stop being That Girl and start becoming a grown woman, which is the worst possible thing a girl can do, which is why so many of those *Manic Pixie Dream Girl characters, as* *written by male geeks and scriptwriters*, either die tragically young or are somehow immortally fixed at the physical and mental age of nineteen-and-a-half._
> 
> ...


 

As a semi-pro scribbler myself I can sum up her arguments here in one word:

*Bollocks.*


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 1, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> *Bollocks.*


 
How phallocentric.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 1, 2013)

chilango said:


> Y'know I'm quite happy for Laurie to write about Dr Who and films and all that stuff. She can even go on TV and talk about em. And if she's wrong it doesn't matter a bit.


 
It's unlikely LP will be invited to discuss films and TV and the like, there are female middle-class TV critics. LP is however dominating in the female revolutionary socialist invites.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2013)

testecentric


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 1, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> testecentric


 
Bollocks more like.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 1, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> testecentric


----------



## agricola (Jul 1, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> As a semi-pro scribbler myself I can sum up her arguments here in one word:
> 
> *Bollocks.*


 
She isnt wrong about Doctor Who though, every post-Martha female companion has been crap.


----------



## JimW (Jul 1, 2013)

It's certainly some of the plummest analysis I've seen.


----------



## Balbi (Jul 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That last para is spot on i think.


 

Isn't it though? We had this discussion a couple of hundred pages back though, Penny gets into all the right positions, but then fails to score. She's the Fernando Torres of journalism. Although, tbf, at least Torres used to be good.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 1, 2013)

What do people think about this article?

http://www.vice.com/read/miley-cyrus-needs-to-take-an-african-american-studies-class



> Oh shit, I've done it now. I've fallen into the mental quicksand that is trying to analyze Miley Cyrus and what the fuck is happening in her latest video, "We Can't Stop." I would like to ignore it and shrug it off as old news and not worth talking about, since it came out a week ago and that's like an eternity in internet time. But there seems to be no escaping Miley Cyrus 2.0, the former Disney Hannah Montana starlet who's transmogrified into a sexed-up, ganja-puffing, white-washed Rihanna.
> 
> The video for "We Can't Stop" just broke VEVO's all-time record for views in 24 hours—even besting Justin Beiber, another child star getting ready to rebel against his child-friendly image. It's on the lips of every obnoxious Jersey Shore casting reject at every club that used to be playing "Call Me Maybe" on repeat a year ago. It's being discussed at length by bros who high five each other when they explain how much they want to fuck Miley now that they saw her half naked on all fours, ("She's 100 percent legal, dude!") It's being praised by the ironic music nerds who see it as a triumph of pop culture and Tin Pan Alley–like tinkering. And it's also being lambasted for its treatment of blacks, who appear in the video like accessories meant to signify authenticity, just as her tight white pants are meant to represent sexiness. Not to mention the fact that the whole thing feels like a blatant example of gross cultural appropriation, akin to the Pat Boones and Elvises of yesteryear.


 
This is the video they are talking about



While I understand exactly what they are talking about, I don't like the premise of the article, which seems to me to be that Miley Cyrus is only treating black people as accessories in her music videos because she is insufficiently educated, I think that most people who would find problems with the video have managed to go through life without having taken African-American Studies classes.

For example, here's British rapper Akala discussing a similar, albeit more egregious, example by a British white rapper



I usually think that complaints about cultural appropriation are a bit much, but Akala's talk here is persuasive IMO.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 1, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Isn't it though? We had this discussion a couple of hundred pages back though, Penny gets into all the right positions, but then fails to score. She's the Fernando Torres of journalism. Although, tbf, at least Torres used to be good.


She just needs her rafa.


----------



## Balbi (Jul 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> She just needs her rafa.


 

They should send her to Rafah, and not let her come back until she's worked it out for herself.


----------



## rekil (Jul 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What do people think about this article?


I think I'm going to have a Vic Reeves club style version of Achy Breaky Heart in my head for the rest of the day. That's what I think.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What do people think about this article?
> 
> http://www.vice.com/read/miley-cyrus-needs-to-take-an-african-american-studies-class
> 
> ...




1 The Miley Cyrus video appears as just outright sexism and objectification. Not sure how it needs discussion .

2 Akala, Ms Dynamite's younger brother talking about how an Irish rapper can't use a patois accent, Professor Green might say someone who lives in Kentish Town shouldn't go fingering as racist someone from Hackney talking about violence in the area. As for refering to Eminem as some yardstick of anti-classism ... ?

I dislike all the artists mentioned in the two articles.
Garbage has a high chance of being sexist, racist or classist.


----------



## Red Cat (Jul 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Red Cat These are the points LP makes about male writers


 
Yes, I know she talks about male writers and I understand her points but... she also talks about growing up reading stories and the expectations set up from childhood fiction and I just don't think it's true that growing up as a girl the only female characters we encounter in stories are forgettable supporting ones. For a start, the most famous children's fiction writers have been women, for largely sexist reasons, so what about the tension between views of femininity in novels such as _Little Women_ or _Little House on the Prairie_ or the _Railway Children?, _the books I remember most from my childhood with strong girl characters. It's not enough to just portray them as the odd tomboy who gets married off ASAP, they're more complex than that.

She may argue that she's only talking about fantasy fiction, which is very possible given how confusing her writing is (conveniently letting her off the hook whenever anyone challenges her about her generalisations). I think it's true that if the stories are aimed at boys, which much fantasy stuff is, they will have boy main characters. But even there that's not _all_ there is - what about Phillip Pullman's _His Dark Materials - _the main character is a girl, a strong female character. LP is just the age to have read that as a child, it must be, apart from Harry Potter, the most famous children's fiction of the past 3 decades, fantasy, a genre she likes, and yet...puff!...it's like it doesn't exist.

I don't want to suggest that there aren't problems of sexism in children's fiction, both old and new, because there are. But even Disney princesses aren't _that_ simple an experience for children however obvious the ideology looks to us. When I suggest that I don't like Disney princesses because there are more important things for women to do than just look pretty, my 5 year old looks confused and points out, rightly, that Snow White and Cinderella also work. From the point of view of a 5 year old the male characters don't _do _very much at all apart from sit on a horse.

But she omits anything that doesn't fit with whatever 'argument' she's getting paid for (on second glance looks more like 'I'm a real geek like you men geeks not a manic pixie dream girl' than a feminist argument) and in the process re-writes the experience of other women, just as she accuses men of doing.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2013)

I'm going to guess she was never a big fan of Chronicles of Gor though


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2013)

who is?


----------



## sihhi (Jul 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> who is?


 
At a guess the Kaotian religion (with Hebrew and Russian subtitles) ending here


----------



## chilango (Jul 1, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I'm going to guess she was never a big fan of Chronicles of Gor though



*shudders* as a Pre-teen who went on library sci-fi/fantasy binges during Summers at my Gran's I once took out a Gor book...scarred ever since.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2013)

always makes me laugh that the author was a Princeton PHD student who went on to lecture in philosophy.

while secretely yearning to churn out this really objectionable shit


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 1, 2013)

What is it? Paedo incest porn or something?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2013)

really really dodgy bdsm shit in a fantasy setting


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 1, 2013)

Isnt it a society where all women are slaves?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2013)

here:



> The _Gor_ novels have been criticized for their focus on relationships between dominant men and submissive women, the latter often in positions of slavery. _The Encyclopedia of Fantasy_ says, "later volumes degenerate into extremely sexist, sadomasochistic pornography involving the ritual humiliation of women, and as a result have caused widespread offence."[6][7] Science fiction/fantasy author Michael Moorcock has suggested that the _Gor_ novels should be placed on the top shelves of bookstores, saying, "I’m not for censorship but I am for strategies which marginalize stuff that works to objectify women and suggests women enjoy being beaten."[8]


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 1, 2013)

This is diff from fantasy stuff as a whole in what way?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 1, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> really really dodgy bdsm shit in a fantasy setting


 
Conan?

Lankhmar?

it must be some seriously dodgy bdsm shit...


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 1, 2013)

Fucking idris and his gifs


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This is diff from fantasy stuff as a whole in what way?


 
Some shitheads have actually turned it into a subculture in which there is 24 role playing of "dominant" and "submissive" roles.

The whole thing is quite positively sick-making.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Fucking idris and his gifs


----------



## sihhi (Jul 1, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Some shitheads have actually turned it into a subculture in which there is 24 role playing of "dominant" and "submissive" roles.
> 
> The whole thing is quite positively sick-making.


 
They regard it as a branch of the pagan religion. This is the 2006 raid (no arrests) referred to in the documentary above.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 1, 2013)

chilango said:


> *shudders* as a Pre-teen who went on library sci-fi/fantasy binges during Summers at my Gran's I once took out a Gor book...scarred ever since.


 
Yeah well, that was your mistake right there - I was strictly Hard SF, no fantasy or horror for me thank you very much.


----------



## chilango (Jul 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This is diff from fantasy stuff as a whole in what way?



It's more extreme/explicit/crude. Far far far worse than anything else I read.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 1, 2013)

chilango said:


> It's more extreme/explicit/crude. Far far far worse than anything else I read.


 

from what I remember it really lingers on it, the same way Terry Goodkind lingers on his extended torture scenes


----------



## chilango (Jul 1, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Yeah well, that was your mistake right there - I was strictly Hard SF, no fantasy or horror for me thank you very much.



I should've judged the book by its cover.

But then girls in bikini armour with muscle men with their swords erect is hardly unusual in the genre.

...and I was only 10 or so....


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 1, 2013)

chilango said:


> It's more extreme/explicit/crude. Far far far worse than anything else I read.


 
Worse than Zerzan?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 1, 2013)

chilango said:


> I should've judged the book by its cover.
> 
> But then girls in bikini armour with muscle men with their swords erect is hardly unusual in the genre.
> 
> ...and I was only 10 or so....


 
And most fantasy is reactionary - look at this paean to Tolkien for example:

http://www.thenightland.co.uk/MYWEB/wolfemountains.html


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Worse than Zerzan?


 
Worse than the chicken at Tresski's.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 1, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Worse than the chicken at Tresski's.


 
I don't like you when you have time on your hands. Busy yourself!


----------



## chilango (Jul 1, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> And most fantasy is reactionary - look at this paean to Tolkien for example:
> 
> http://www.thenightland.co.uk/MYWEB/wolfemountains.html



Indeed.

Wasn't this discussed at some length here recently?

I stopped reading fantasy in my early teens. Crime Fiction and "men falling off mountains" books are my dirty pleasures now.


----------



## Red Cat (Jul 1, 2013)

chilango said:


> "men falling off mountains" books


 
Feeding the Rat?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 1, 2013)

chilango said:


> Indeed.
> 
> Wasn't this discussed at some length here recently?


 
Uh-huh. I just found that link by the time the thread had moved on.


----------



## chilango (Jul 1, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Feeding the Rat?



Not read that one, but yeah that kinda thing.


----------



## Red Cat (Jul 1, 2013)

chilango said:


> Not read that one, but yeah that kinda thing.


 
I highly recommend it as someone not into the genre 

ETA: Sorry, I think I'm grinning because in a way it's a book about a certain kind of masculinity, feeding the rat describing the compulsive need to take life-risking climbs. It's a brilliantly written book (Al Alvarez is a poet) and I completely unexpectedly loved it.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I don't like you when you have time on your hands. Busy yourself!


----------



## Fruitloop (Jul 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What do people think about this article?
> 
> http://www.vice.com/read/miley-cyrus-needs-to-take-an-african-american-studies-class
> 
> ...




I don't find it that persuasive. Is Maverick Sabre's voice actually supposed to be Jamaican? It is weird and affected (quite intentionally so, I think), and in this particular video he has twisted it towards the way that Professor Green sounds, but it's not really representative of the way anyone speaks, Jamaican or otherwise. Professor Green sounds like he's from Hackney - which he is - although the extent to which he's playing it up is pretty much unknowable. Is the rest of the talk any better, 'cos the thing about eminem is just weird.

Couldn't bring myself to watch the Miley Cyrus thing....


----------



## Greebo (Jul 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> This is diff from fantasy stuff as a whole in what way?


Fantasy stuff on the whole doesn't leave me with the urge to self-decontaminate.  The Gor book I came across did.


----------



## Tom A (Jul 1, 2013)

Balbi said:


> They should send her to Rafah, and not let her come back until she's worked it out for herself.


No, god no... Palestine has more than enough pretentious pseudo-leftie bastards visiting there on a major ego-boosting trip!


----------



## andysays (Jul 1, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Once upon a time, Kate travelled hundreds of miles from London to a really small town in the far north of Scotland. It was a painfully slow journey that gave her too much time to worry about whether Dave would marry her. The bus got stuck in a blizzard and she feared she might die. Kate hoped that this journey would be worth it because the last time she saw him he had a terribly nice arse. Stuck in London with writers block she dreamed that his arse would work its magic spell and unleash the poetry beast within. 'Oh, how I hope he'll marry me', she said to herself softly, drawing her blanket closely round her shoulders.


 
Yes, yes...

...what happened next??

Did Kate's bus make it through the blizzard?

Did Dave still have a nice arse?

Did they get married and live happily ever after, struggling together with their comrades to achieve a new world of libertarian socialism?

You can't just leave us all fucking hanging like that


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jul 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> While I understand exactly what they are talking about, I don't like the premise of the article, which seems to me to be that Miley Cyrus is only treating black people as accessories in her music videos because she is insufficiently educated, I think that most people who would find problems with the video have managed to go through life without having taken African-American Studies classes.
> 
> For example, here's British rapper Akala discussing a similar, albeit more egregious, example by a British white rapper
> 
> ...




According to his wikipedia, Professor Green grew up on a council estate in Clapton (Northwold) and was a drug dealer at one point. Why should he be any more or less entitled to use that imagery than Akala, if it's representative of his life experience (not saying that it is, but that's a different argument...)?


----------



## J Ed (Jul 1, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> According to his wikipedia, Professor Green grew up on a council estate in Clapton (Northwold) and was a drug dealer at one point. Why should he be any more or less entitled to use that imagery than Akala, if it's representative of his life experience (not saying that it is, but that's a different argument...)?


 

A fair point, I didn't know that about Professor Green and I suppose I assumed that it actually wasn't the case because of how Akala was talking about him, although I think Akala might prefer that people don't glamourise criminal violence at all regardless of race. He criticised Maverick Sabre, who is black, for doing the video too and seems to regret it a bit.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> A fair point, I didn't know that about Professor Green and I suppose I assumed that it actually wasn't the case because of how Akala was talking about him, although I think Akala might prefer that people don't glamourise criminal violence at all regardless of race. He criticised Maverick Sabre, who is black, for doing the video too and seems to regret it a bit.


 
1. Maverick Sabre is not black.

2. To reiterate the general point. Akala (little brother of Ms Dynamite) who has never lived in Jamaica but is someone of mixed Scot-2nd generation Jamaican heritage, brought up by their Scottish mum in Kentish Town* not* Hackney attacking someone else from Hackney for allowing Jamaican inflexion on a song about Hackney is pretty absurd.

3. All of this middle-class bluster including Akala's sheds zero light on anything.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 1, 2013)

Oops I was confusing him with someone else  I didn't think that it did shed much light on anything really


----------



## agricola (Jul 1, 2013)

sihhi said:


> 1. Maverick Sabre is not black.
> 
> 2. To reiterate the general point. Akala (little brother of Ms Dynamite) who has never lived in Jamaica but is someone of mixed Scot-2nd generation Jamaican heritage, brought up by their Scottish mum in Kentish Town* not* Hackney attacking someone else from Hackney for allowing Jamaican inflexion on a song about Hackney is pretty absurd.
> 
> 3. All of this middle-class bluster including Akala's sheds zero light on anything.


 
So what you are saying is that Akala should really be harping on about _The Wicker Man_?


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jul 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> A fair point, I didn't know that about Professor Green and I suppose I assumed that it actually wasn't the case because of how Akala was talking about him, although I think Akala might prefer that people don't glamourise criminal violence at all r*egardless of race*. He criticised Maverick Sabre, who is black, for doing the video too and seems to regret it a bit.


 
Wasn't his point precisely not this, he was implying that he (and all other black people) did have the right to glamourise criminal violence (if they wanted to) but Professor Green didn't?

(and at root here, there's a deeper point about identity politics and appropriation. That for identity politics, it's legitimate to use whatever you like "authentically" within the identity group's experience, regardless of whether it was your own experience. It's illegitimate to use those experiences, even if they are your own, if you're outside the identity group, because then you put the whole coherence of that identity in trouble...)


----------



## J Ed (Jul 1, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> Wasn't his point precisely not this, he was implying that he (and all other black people) did have the right to glamourise criminal violence (if they wanted to) but Professor Green didn't?


 

What I got out of it was that he thought that no one should be saying these things, but white rappers in particular shouldn't be saying them which when you take class into account isn't very sensible really but wouldn't be quite as bad as if your interpretation is correct.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jul 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What I got out of it was that he thought that no one should be saying these things, but white rappers in particular shouldn't be saying them which when you take class into account isn't very sensible really but wouldn't be quite as bad as if your interpretation is correct.


 


> There's certain boundaries. Just because black people want to disrespect themselves on a case of being black ... doesn't give you the right because you might live next to them.


 
The boundary being erected is for Professor Green, that's the point of the intervention. (and the counter-point of course is that in the case of the things Professor Green is referencing, Hackney life, crime and violence, they are his experiences, he's not just living next to them. He's only excluded from them if you think those experiences are exclusively black experiences)


----------



## sihhi (Jul 2, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Yes, I know she talks about male writers and I understand her points but... she also talks about growing up reading stories and the expectations set up from childhood fiction and I just don't think it's true that growing up as a girl the only female characters we encounter in stories are forgettable supporting ones. For a start, the most famous children's fiction writers have been women, for largely sexist reasons, so what about the tension between views of femininity in novels such as _Little Women_ or _Little House on the Prairie_ or the _Railway Children?, _the books I remember most from my childhood with strong girl characters. It's not enough to just portray them as the odd tomboy who gets married off ASAP, they're more complex than that.
> 
> She may argue that she's only talking about fantasy fiction, which is very possible given how confusing her writing is (conveniently letting her off the hook whenever anyone challenges her about her generalisations). I think it's true that if the stories are aimed at boys, which much fantasy stuff is, they will have boy main characters. But even there that's not _all_ there is - what about Phillip Pullman's _His Dark Materials - _the main character is a girl, a strong female character. LP is just the age to have read that as a child, it must be, apart from Harry Potter, the most famous children's fiction of the past 3 decades, fantasy, a genre she likes, and yet...puff!...it's like it doesn't exist.


 
What do you think of this earlier LP analysis of Doctor Who - I haven't watched any of it  properly only for some baby-sitting.

"Even the most populist science fiction engages playfully with gender: consider Russell T Davies's relaunch of Doctor Who in 2005 which, along with scary monsters, intergalactic battles and epic quantities of BBC slime, posited the notion that, in the future, being gay or bisexual might not be any sort of social impediment.
At its most powerful, science and speculative fiction seeks to delocalise and make strange the structures of everyday existence. In so doing, it can't help but replicate the strategies of radical politics and identity politics."

More generally are the two claims here true:

"This particularly the case in Britain, which has long produced the best science fiction in the world, all of which has been roundly snubbed by the bourgeois literary establishment."

1 Have capitalist publishing and awards snubbed science fiction?

2 Does Britain produce the best science fiction in the world, after all Margaret Atwood as supported in the article is Canadian ?


----------



## cesare (Jul 2, 2013)

I thought Russell T Davies had a bad rep for his female characters. Or is that another writer? Vintage Paw does some good analysis on the Doctor Who thread here.


----------



## Vintage Paw (Jul 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> I thought Russell T Davies had a bad rep for his female characters. Or is that another writer? Vintage Paw does some good analysis on the Doctor Who thread here.


 
Stephen Moffat is the 'big bad' in that regard, although there have been criticisms of Davies' handling of it as well. At the moment, anyone who takes over the reigns as showrunner is going to be branded more generally as being crap at gender because the issue of having a woman in the role of the doctor has become quite a big issue for many, but even I admit that isn't necessarily fair (it's less the fact that the doctor has always been a man so far that annoys me, and more the attitude that it could never be a woman). With Moffat in particular, there have been endless examples of really quite dodgy gender politics, where otherwise 'strong female characters'  are undermined by little jibes about their gender and how it affects their abilities, you know the kind of stuff. There have been some good analyses of Amy and her role as wife/mother - the best of which take into account Rory's role, as well as River's positioning as wife/prisoner. I'd be hard pressed to find any of them again, but they're out there.

Moffat is also criticised for his portrayal of race and sexuality. Some of it can come across as being a bit 'I hate Moffat, I'll find as much wrong with his stuff as possible' but even accounting for that, the points many make do have merit, and when taken as a whole in the context of everything he's done as showrunner it all adds up to a pretty damning dossier of evidence against him.

There's very little said about his portrayals of class, but then I'm not surprised about that. We're far more likely to baulk at Amy's portrayal as going from kiss-a-gram to glam fashion model in terms of how it positions her as an object to be looked at by men than we are in terms of capital (even though the two are related and we should look at both); likewise we are far more likely to be angered asking why Clara has to be a governess or a nanny because 'why do women always have to take that caring, nurturing role' rather than also thinking about those roles in terms of buying a woman's labour in that way. It's not surprising, and I'm not certain there would be many people willing to entertain those arguments even within the most ardent groups of people who pick apart every gendered image in the programme.

You could make the argument that Davies does class better, with his portrayals of Rose and Donna. But his representations of them as women falls down at the end, despite how great and independent they were, because both of their stories end with them finding their own version of happiness with a man, and you could argue that is tied in with their class. Martha perhaps fares better here, because she's the one at the end who remains independent (despite being with Mickey), still fighting, being in charge, and living a life that is more or less equivalent to the doctor's in terms of trying to keep earth safe from alien threats. She was the middle class one of the 3 of Davies' companions - so you could easily make an analysis of that.

(I haven't read this thread; sorry if what I've written bears no relation to what you're all talking about.)


----------



## cesare (Jul 2, 2013)

Vintage Paw Thanks for posting. Yes, Moffat  at self. Sorry for tagging you without more explanation. At this point in the thread posters have been commenting on Laurie Penny's revolutionary feminist analysis of the fantasy fiction genre, and sihhi was asking about her Doctor Who analysis in the post immediately before mine.


----------



## Vintage Paw (Jul 2, 2013)

That's okay, tag away 

I'll spend some time reading back a bit, sounds like an interesting topic.

(I admit to having purposefully stayed away from this thread because the very premise of it sounds like the worst kind of hell - but I'm certain there have been some very interesting arguments and discussions that have sprung up in its 700+ pages.)


----------



## TruXta (Jul 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> More generally are the two claims here true:
> 
> "This particularly the case in Britain, which has long produced the best science fiction in the world, all of which has been roundly snubbed by the bourgeois literary establishment."
> 
> ...


 

Isn't your question 1 slightly different from the claim you quote? I certainly think it's true that SF/fantasy/horror has been largely snubbed by the established literati and the Serious Literature Award Givers. Publishing as a capitalist business, as making money off SF/F/H certainly hasn't snubbed these genres.

As for question 2 - how long is a piece of string?


----------



## Vintage Paw (Jul 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> 1 Have capitalist publishing and awards snubbed science fiction?


 
Specifically on this point, it is pretty much a given within 'the literary establishment' that SF* is often unfairly given the snub of 'genre fiction' - that title _is_ seen as a snub, it's not valued as highly as 'literary fiction'. However, it's recognised that there have been some great breakaway authors like Le Guin, Atwood, Dick, Delany etc. but even then there is the feeling that their work isn't _quite_ the same as something by Rushdie or Morrison (themselves positioned in certain genres _within_ literary fiction - writing on race, using magical realism, etc.), or the standard straight white male literary fiction.

In terms of capitalism, there is a clear and profitable market for SF writing, it sells quite well (but only to a certain type of customer). So on the face of it, it isn't snubbed in that regard. But, there are SF publishers and other literary fiction publishers, and rarely do SF books cross over from one to the other. They have their separate industry awards, and while there are some very prestigious SF awards, I don't get the impression that they hold as much weight within the literary fiction sphere of influence, and any winners of those awards are very, very unlikely to ever see their books entered in for the mainstream literary fiction awards.

Even though SF has shown itself to be able to subvert in quite ingenious ways because of its strangeness-yet-familiarness to our world, and take on some very hefty subjects, there's still a huge amount of snobbery involved.

And then we have Fantasy. Before GRR Martin and the Game of Thrones craze (and I'd argue since then as well), fantasy is seen as even lower down on the hierarchy of worthwhile fiction than SF. It's all wizards and dragons and magic and that sort of shit that kids and men who haven't grown up and women who fantasise about sexy vampires like. As you might expect, there's snobbery within the SF audience about fantasy too. This is an interesting piece on a similar subject (with ASOIAF spoilers - if you care about that sort of thing).

Categorisation doesn't help. Separating genres in bookshops, Amazon, etc. into 'Fiction' and 'Science Fiction and Fantasy' (and 'Crime') ensures that we think about them differently. When all 'serious' literary fiction gets put in the 'Fiction' category, then any literary SF still being put in the SF section sends the message that it isn't serious or worthwhile. But then of course we need to unpick what we mean by 'serious' and the snobbery involved in that. Political analysis can be made for every single book written.


* there's a ridiculous argument over whether you should call it SF or sci-fi - with SF giving off a more 'literary' and 'respectable' and 'worthy' air.


----------



## Red Cat (Jul 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> What do you think of this earlier LP analysis of Doctor Who - I haven't watched any of it properly only for some baby-sitting.
> 
> .......
> 
> ...


 

I'm not a fan but what I know about SF and attitudes toward it are covered much more comprehensively by Vintage Paw.

I don't watch Dr Who. Well, I saw a few Christopher Eccleston episodes back in 2005.....


----------



## rekil (Jul 2, 2013)

Ambition on a warm, muggy Saturday night can take many forms.







Ambition never looked duller. Or whiter. Nice of them to let a black man have a go on the decks however. Now that's intersectionality.


----------



## rekil (Jul 2, 2013)

Dance you fucking fuckers.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 2, 2013)

copliker said:


> Ambition on a warm, muggy Saturday night can take many forms.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Even Off line gets the occasional photo of a black person


----------



## seventh bullet (Jul 2, 2013)

lol.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 2, 2013)

copliker said:


> Ambition on a warm, muggy Saturday night can take many forms.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
there's not a pair of shoes in that photo that i'm not judging the wearer negatively on.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 2, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Even Off line gets the occasional photo of a black person


 
that's Todd.  we pay him by the snap.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 2, 2013)

Vintage Paw said:


> * there's a ridiculous argument over whether you should call it SF or sci-fi - with SF giving off a more 'literary' and 'respectable' and 'worthy' air.


 
then theres the rebranding attempt 'speculative fiction'


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 2, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> that's Todd. we pay him by the snap.


 
Should have got him into the Spirit of 45 then as Anna Chen has just pointed out  on the somewhat misnamed 'Socialist unity' the lack of black faces in that film as well.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 2, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Should have got him into the Spirit of 45 then as Anna Chen has just pointed out on the somewhat misnamed 'Socialist unity' the lack of black faces in that film as well.


 
poor todd, from one ghetto to another


----------



## sihhi (Jul 2, 2013)

Does this New Inquiry essay praise the thrust into Marighella war in the USA at the end of the 1960s with the Weathermen?

It points out 

_3. It is 1970, and the Weather Underground has just declared a state of war. In a recorded statement, the radical leftist group makes this declaration:_
_All over the world, people fighting Amerikan imperialism look to Amerika’s youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire. _

<snip>

_the left must develop methods for the perceptualization of politics if it is to counter the allure of capitalist narratives — narratives that include not merely audiovisual agitprop but also the taken-for-granted assumptions and expectations that are built into capitalist society._

_To perceive neoliberalism as oppressive requires the ability to put smaller experiential pieces into a pattern. It requires seeing that capitalism’s component parts — privatization, deregulation, risk-shifting, labor flexibility — together form a pattern of injustice. Shifting the terms of representation can make such patterns clearer:  Consider the sequence 1, 3, 7, 15, 31. Most people will glance over these numbers without noticing any meaningful relation between them. However, if one reorganizes the information into a new ontological grouping by rewriting the sequence in binary (1, 11, 111, 1111, 11111), a striking and obvious pattern reveals itself. Similarly, by recasting experience using novel political ontologies and taxonomies, one might render visible macro-patterns and perceptions that were previously unavailable._

<snip>

_Former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers explains that “the sense was that we had to do whatever we had to do to stop the war” and that “the mood … kind of ricocheted between determination and despair. There was a real sense that things were gonna get pretty bad.” Similarly, another former member Brian Flanagan says, “The Vietnam war, it made us crazy, it was sort of a mass mania driven by the United States bombing of Vietnam, among other things.”_
_This language — speaking of “moods” and “manias,” and how things “seemed” and “felt” — seems indicative of a politics that has been heavily perceptualized. Thus, when the radicals rallied behind the slogan “Bring the war home!” perhaps for them it already was._

A US author writing for a US audience. The implicit assumption is that:
1 abandoning mass struggle for urban guerrilla teams (secret/underground by their very nature) _was_ the way forward.
2 a similar emotional shift as accompanied the formation of Weather can help the masses 'see' that they are oppressed/neoliberalism is oppressive (1,3,7 as 1,11,111 etc)

Again hard to really understand what's being said.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 2, 2013)

copliker said:


> Dance you fucking fuckers.


 
The New Inquiry sponsored this festival party for the Brooklyn Book Festival where they did dance:







L-R Editor at Gawker Adrian Chen, Malcolm and Laurie Penny:


----------



## Tom A (Jul 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The New Inquiry sponsored this festival party for the Brooklyn Book Festival where they did dance:


Again looks very white, and their attire seems pretty middle-class.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 2, 2013)

copliker Probably obvious, but presence of a non-white participant doesn't mean a party event is not exclusive - there is a growing black middle class in the US (though you might not think there is from some analyses, slowed down in recession but still incorporation into upper-range colleges etc. esp. as a result of growing intermarriage). 

The $75/$150 entry fee means those participants white, Asian, black or Hispanic will almost certainly not be working-class which should be the focus for a radical journal committed to new ideas like _The New Inquiry_.


----------



## Tom A (Jul 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> copliker Probably obvious, but presence of a non-white participant doesn't mean a party event is not exclusive - there is a growing black middle class in the US (though you might not think there is from some analyses, slowed down in recession but still incorporation into upper-range colleges etc. esp. as a result of growing intermarriage).


Also (in this country at least) people still like to think they are nice and PC by having a token black person on board.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 2, 2013)

This does my head in Firky :

UK Uncut and UNITE Community's Ellie Mae O'Hagan welcoming Channel 4 gimmickry designed to elicit backlash and helping no one at all. 
People who want to observe Ramadan fasting don't have alarm clocks so all they need to do is set on their TV ?!?? ???


https://twitter.com/MissEllieMae/status/352020599809376257

This is great. Nice one @Channel4ht


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The New Inquiry sponsored this festival party for the Brooklyn Book Festival where they did dance:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Looks like my sort of scene for a bit of Dad dance routine


----------



## cesare (Jul 2, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Looks like my sort of scene for a bit of Dad dance routine


Not the MC Hammer trousers, though


----------



## Buckaroo (Jul 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The New Inquiry sponsored this festival party for the Brooklyn Book Festival where they did dance:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
That picture reminds me of an offensive cartoon. 'Go on Dave, plastic glass the cunt!'


----------



## Red Cat (Jul 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Does this New Inquiry essay praise the thrust into Marighella war in the USA at the end of the 1960s with the Weathermen?
> 
> 
> A US author writing for a US audience. The implicit assumption is that:
> ...


 
No, I don't think so. The Weathermen thing is just an example of the kind of _state of mind_ the author thinks is necessary for change, basically a shift in worldview. It's not an argument about political strategy and tactics at all beyond the question of how does the Left overcome the power of ideology when intellectual arguments aren't sufficient to shift a person's worldview. The shifting of people's worldview becomes the 'perceptualization of politics' and the shift itself psychologised and individualised as a 'gestalt shift'. He's taken a theory from the philosophy of science, mixed it with some psychology, a little bit of oppression, and come up with...not very much at all really.


----------



## not-bono-ever (Jul 2, 2013)

Some fuckin jet set lifestyle going on there.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> Not the MC Hammer trousers, though


 
Lol. Bit of a chino man at the moment . George Clooney has a lot to learn from me .


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 2, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> That picture reminds me of an offensive cartoon. 'Go on Dave, plastic glass the cunt!'


 
After Firkys ill advised poster we really don't need any more riske comments about violence against women commentariat thank you


----------



## Sue (Jul 2, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Lol. Bit of a chino man at the moment . George Clooney has a lot to learn from me .


----------



## cesare (Jul 2, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Lol. Bit of a chino man at the moment . George Clooney has a lot to learn from me .


I didn't know he was renowned for chino wearing!


----------



## Sue (Jul 2, 2013)

cesare said:


> I didn't know he was renowned for chino wearing!


 
Or dad dancing...


----------



## cesare (Jul 2, 2013)

Sue said:


> Or dad dancing...


I think I've found out more about George Clooney in the last few minutes than I've ever known. No immediate chino links or dad dancing, but he's 4 months older than me. I thought he was in his 60s for some reason.


----------



## Buckaroo (Jul 2, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> After Firkys ill advised poster we really don't need any more riske comments about violence against women commentariat thank you


 
.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 2, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This does my head in Firky :
> 
> UK Uncut and UNITE Community's Ellie Mae O'Hagan welcoming Channel 4 gimmickry designed to elicit backlash and helping no one at all.
> People who want to observe Ramadan fasting don't have alarm clocks so all they need to do is set on their TV ?!?? ???
> ...


 

I don't understand why they are calling it a 'deliberate provocation', I would prefer that broadcast media endorsed no religious events but if they are going to endorse, cover and fawn over Anglican and Catholic goings on and celebrations then I don't see the problem with Ramadan but presenting it as they have seems irresponsible.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 3, 2013)

I like to think that in some small way I have been a role model for him


----------



## sihhi (Jul 3, 2013)

I fear they are calling it that precisely to deliberately provoke UKIP or the Council of Ex-Muslims or whoever.
Also Channel 4 are not going to fawn over Catholic goings on. 

Should we expect a daily 5-minute Westminster Cathedral blessing after Mass session during Lent next year as part of their minority coverage? It's possible but unlikely IMO.
What do you think J Ed ?


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 3, 2013)

cesare said:


> I think I've found out more about George Clooney in the last few minutes than I've ever known. No immediate chino links or dad dancing, but he's 4 months older than me. I thought he was in his 60s for some reason.


 
A lot of women like the more mature man in my experience


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 3, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I fear they are calling it that precisely to deliberately provoke UKIP or the Council of Ex-Muslims or whoever.
> Also Channel 4 are not going to fawn over Catholic goings on.
> 
> Should we expect a daily 5-minute Westminster Cathedral blessing after Mass session during Lent next year as part of their minority coverage? It's possible but unlikely IMO.
> What do you think J Ed ?


 
Or sabbath candle times announced on the news.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 3, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Or sabbath candle times announced on the news.


 
That's much less invasive would take at most 30 seconds it's a single time before sunset  - far shorter than the whole ezaan.

Perhaps some mini-prayer calls from the Baha'i Kitab-i Akdas during the nineteen-day fast?

The problem is the Jedi community have failed - utterly failed - to impose any kind of fasting requirement on their followers. How can people take the religion seriously when they fail to do so?


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 3, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The problem is the Jedi community have failed - utterly failed - to impose any kind of fasting requirement on their followers. How can people take the religion seriously when they fail to do so?


 
Call themselves a religion  and they probably have the most programming


----------



## sihhi (Jul 3, 2013)

On a serious note, frogwoman, your religion is human freedom, do you get a daily broadcast at 5am in the morning and on the website.
Does Channel 4 let you or your followers announce the times and places of anti-cuts protests or gatherings to occur later in the day?


----------



## cesare (Jul 3, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Call themselves a religion  and they probably have the most programming


Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 3, 2013)

sihhi said:


> On a serious note, frogwoman, your religion is human freedom, do you get a daily broadcast at 5am in the morning and on the website.
> Does Channel 4 let you or your followers announce the times and places of anti-cuts protests or gatherings to occur later in the day?


 
Good point. We could claim communism/socialism (or whatever you want to call it) was a religion and that the constant promotion of toryism was an insult to our beliefs. Like that guy who claimed religious discrimination about his beliefs on global warming ...

I think that ^ would be a crap idea lol just in case anyone thinks i'm actually suggesting it, but seriously ...


----------



## J Ed (Jul 3, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Should we expect a daily 5-minute Westminster Cathedral blessing after Mass session during Lent next year as part of their minority coverage? It's possible but unlikely IMO.
> What do you think J Ed ?


 

I suppose that Channel 4 doesn't usually cover religious ceremonies, though the BBC does and has done for a while. I don't see why any of it is necessary, and they are obviously not doing this with good intentions for anyone other than themselves but if it was presented differently then it wouldn't be as bad as it is.

I would be interested to know what Muslims think of it, presenting Ramadan as a deliberate provocation doesn't exactly present the practice of their religion in a very good light.

I think we should get rid of all religious programming, faith schools and tax breaks for religious institutions and of course disestablish the church but until that point I'm not going to get too upset about Ramadan coverage on Channel 4 when there is coverage of Anglican ceremonies on BBC 2.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 3, 2013)

Well i find "songs of praise" etc bloody annoying. And I do agree with the point that if news/TV channels are going to broadcast loads of programmes to do with one religion (or broadcast programmes about religion at all) they should at least spend some time on broadcasting information about the other religions rather than just one (unless the other religions are in the news because a load of their followers have just been bombing people and thats the only reason its ever talked about, no "worship" programmes nothing else).

But there's a better way than this surely? the way its been marketed just seems to be a windup. If I was Muslim I'd be quite pissed off.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 3, 2013)

Personally I wouldn't have any of those annoying religious programmes like "Songs of Praise" at all, or maybe have one and then cover a different religion each week or something.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 3, 2013)

Well, the better way is to have a secular country that doesn't promote any religion through broadcast media, whether it's the state religion or not but when even atheists like Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg believe in belief we aren't going to get that are we?


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 3, 2013)

Yeah my own feelings on religion are very mixed   but I agree with you. I don't think any of them should be promoted tbh. I'm not sure why C4 are doing this.

Also does this mean Muslims are going to be bumped up the progressive stack now they have the "privilege" of a slot on C4?


----------



## sihhi (Jul 3, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I suppose that Channel 4 doesn't usually cover religious ceremonies, though the BBC does and has done for a while. I don't see why any of it is necessary, and they are obviously not doing this with good intentions for anyone other than themselves but if it was presented differently then it wouldn't be as bad as it is.
> 
> I would be interested to know what Muslims think of it, presenting Ramadan as a deliberate provocation doesn't exactly present the practice of their religion in a very good light.
> 
> I think we should get rid of all religious programming, faith schools and tax breaks for religious institutions and of course disestablish the church but until that point I'm not going to get too upset about Ramadan coverage on Channel 4 when there is coverage of Anglican ceremonies on BBC 2.


 
Unless you actually try to stop it from all angles, or put forward your culture of freedom as an alternative to fight against it, then the church will never be disestablished, the faith schools won't stop and religious programming will not end.

In practical terms the result will a rise of this kind of UKIP approach:- "The Anglican ceremony is, for all its ills, non-sex segregated men and women can listen to women priests together. The Muslim call is only ever performed by men to invite men to pray in the centre of the mosque with a man leading the routine, women can go to the tiny top floor or go pray in their home out of the streets. Go figure which one the lefties at Channel 4 love". It's the only result of this kind of 'provocation' - not to stop preconceptions about Islam, further deepen preconceptions about British society and media.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 3, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Unless you actually try to stop it from all angles, or put forward your culture of freedom as an alternative to fight against it, then the church will never be disestablished, the faith schools won't stop and religious programming will not end.


 
You are preaching to the choir to be honest  I agree with you wholeheartedly on what should be happening but any actual activism towards secularism seems like pissing in the wind and in any case seems to me to be a lot less important than other issues like fighting austerity.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 3, 2013)

J Ed said:


> You are preaching to the choir to be honest  I agree with you wholeheartedly on what should be happening but any actual activism towards secularism seems like pissing in the wind and in any case seems to me to be a lot less important than other issues like fighting austerity.


 
Sure but fighting austerity itself should be/is fighting for secularism against free schools which have a higher percentage of faith schools etc.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 3, 2013)

I quite like songs of praise. All the old classics.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 3, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I quite like songs of praise. All the old classics.


same


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 3, 2013)

to be fair if they did it about the hymns i'm used to singing i'd watch it


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 3, 2013)

it's just coz at the moment it just brings back memories of having to sing that stuff in school lol


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 3, 2013)

arg. i was dreaming about this thread last night. editor had changed the title to just 'laurie penny', because she'd said she was going to sue urbans for sexism and homophobia ('handbags' in the original title, and it wasn't originally just all about her).

er, yes.


----------



## rosecore (Jul 3, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  33m
> The Egyptian people have brought down #*Morsi*. I really hope everyone's as safe as possible in Cairo and elsewhere tonight.


 

More like a military coup...


----------



## andysays (Jul 3, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> arg. i was dreaming about this thread last night. editor had changed the title to just 'laurie penny', because she'd said she was going to sue urbans for sexism and homophobia ('handbags' in the original title, and it wasn't originally just all about her).
> 
> er, yes.


 
Obviously a dream, because as we've established many times now, it's _always_ all about her - do keep up


----------



## caleb (Jul 4, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> 2h​Spent lots of last night talking feminism, communism, ambition and nerdery with two amazing 18y/o lasses. Very excited for generation Z.


 
Uh, "communism [and] ambition", lol.


----------



## JimW (Jul 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> Uh, "communism [and] ambition", lol.


 
Could work - I aspire to be the most like Lei Feng in all my doings and dealings.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 4, 2013)

generation Z?


----------



## caleb (Jul 4, 2013)

I wonder what communism means to these people. Is it the abolition of the law of value, or is it a stronger welfare state. I wonder.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> I wonder what communism means to these people. Is it the abolition of the law of value, or is it a stronger welfare state. I wonder.


 
i have often wondered that.  they identify as anarchist and / or communist but don't seem to espouse any values that you wouldn't find in the modern Labour Party.  are we seeing a rebranding going on? or are they just that ignorant?


----------



## sihhi (Jul 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> You are preaching to the choir to be honest  I agree with you wholeheartedly on what should be happening but any actual activism towards secularism seems like pissing in the wind and in any case seems to me to be a lot less important than other issues like fighting austerity.


 
Here's Ellie Mae O'Hagan's weak response, UKIP's urge for Channel 4 to rethink might well be "bigotry" to a liberal, but will be seen by others as trying to uphold a losing line against 'newer' 'discriminatory' religions in Britain. It's been gifted them for zero reason.

https://twitter.com/MissEllieMae/status/352742456577638401

I'm aware of disagreements between Muslims over C4's decision, but I think we can all agree #UKIP's opposition is probably bigotry.


----------



## Paulie Tandoori (Jul 4, 2013)

rosecore said:


> More like a military coup...


i saw this gem, what a fucking dick she is....


----------



## caleb (Jul 4, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i have often wondered that. they identify as anarchist and / or communist but don't seem to espouse any values that you wouldn't find in the modern Labour Party. are we seeing a rebranding going on? or are they just that ignorant?


 
What gets me is it seems to be _wilful _ignorance. I remember someone from this sort of milieu (yeah, yeah...) who told me communism was robots taking over commodity production and exchange and profit being shared equally as universal income, thought Marxism and anarchism "are basically the same thing", and thought autonomism was 'individualist Marxism'. This is whilst identifying as a communist, anarchist and autonomist. Now it doesn't take five minutes, even on a source as questionable as wikipedia, to realise how wrong this all is, and one would have thought if you identify as a communist or anarchist you're looking through, say, the libcom library and getting to grips with the literature there on a regular basis. I wouldn't have the gall to call myself a communist unless I thought I knew what I was talking about, and yet...

I think it's a contrarian thing though, calling yourself a communist makes you're shite social-democratic politics look dangerous, glamorous, extreme.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 4, 2013)

well someone from the SP once told me that "businesses would flourish under socialism"


----------



## love detective (Jul 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> What gets me is it seems to be _wilful _ignorance. I remember someone from this sort of milieu (yeah, yeah...) who told me communism was robots taking over commodity production and exchange and profit being shared equally as universal income, thought Marxism and anarchism "are basically the same thing", and thought autonomism was 'individualist Marxism'. This is whilst identifying as a communist, anarchist and autonomist. Now it doesn't take five minutes, even on a source as questionable as wikipedia, to realise how wrong this all is, and one would have thought if you identify as a communist or anarchist you're looking through, say, the libcom library and getting to grips with the literature there on a regular basis. I wouldn't have the gall to call myself a communist unless I thought I knew what I was talking about, and yet...
> 
> I think it's a contrarian thing though, calling yourself a communist makes you're shite social-democratic politics look dangerous, glamorous, extreme.


Yep, it seems like the natural logic of the relentless imperialism of identity politics. And like all identity politics it's skin deep with no progressive substance


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 4, 2013)

I also think there's massive confusion about what communism/socialism really is by people who call themselves communists. Stalinists, trots, social democratic reformists and left communists all call themselves communists and the term has become a bit meaningless.

Fuck I call myself a communist and my view of communism is also pretty confused


----------



## seventh bullet (Jul 4, 2013)

Do you have to be 'well-read' or even be able to read to be a communist?


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 4, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> Do you have to be 'well-read' or even be able to read to be a communist?


 

No.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 4, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> Do you have to be 'well-read' or even be able to read to be a communist?


What do you think those re-education camps are for?


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 4, 2013)

the people like laurie penny and many of the trots who think they are well-read and all clued up about communism often aren't ... at all.
and that includes me tbf


----------



## sihhi (Jul 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> Yep, it seems like the natural logic of the relentless imperialism of identity politics.


 
This is pretty odd. When LP states herself a revolutionary socialist, as she does, it's not identity politics that's causing her to do so, is it? Middle-class domination (by access to professional and media roles etc) of working-class causes has a far longer heritage than identity politics.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 4, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> Do you have to be 'well-read' or even be able to read to be a communist?


 
definitely not.  i've told a lot of people on here that their views are communist or anarchist when they say what they are, but they don't consider themselves either because their ideas of what a communist or anarchist _are_ are different to what they think they themselves _are_.  if that makes sense.

the theory is a way of explaining the world, but to a communist or an anarchist you simple need to agree with a few key ideas and try to put them into practise. 

similarly, if you claim you're not a liberal but you participate in, hold viewpoints in agreement with, and promote capitalistic endeavour within the mainstream, then sorry malcolm and penny, you're a goddam liberal.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 4, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> definitely not. i've told a lot of people on here that their views are communist or anarchist when they say what they are, but they don't consider themselves either because their ideas of what a communist or anarchist _are_ are different to what they think they themselves _are_. if that makes sense.
> 
> the theory is a way of explaining the world, but to a communist or an anarchist you simple need to agree with a few key ideas and try to put them into practise.
> 
> similarly, if you claim you're not a liberal but you participate in, hold viewpoints in agreement with, and promote capitalistic endeavour within the mainstream, then sorry malcolm and penny, you're a goddam liberal.


Kinda difficult not to "participate in [...] capistalistic endeavour" tho isn't it?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 4, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Kinda difficult not to "participate in [...] capistalistic endeavour" tho isn't it?


 
yes, that was badly put.  but you know what i mean.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 4, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> yes, that was badly put. but you know what i mean.


Sorry , yes I do.


----------



## caleb (Jul 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> the people like laurie penny and many of the trots who think they are well-read and all clued up about communism often aren't ... at all.
> and that includes me tbf


 
You're being unfair on yourself here though, because from what I've seen on this forum I get the impression you have an intellectual curiosity and you're always looking for ways to learn more. My point is that with Penny and that, at least as far as "communism" is concerned, that doesn't exist. They're communists because they call themselves that, but "communism" could mean anything as far as they are concerned.


----------



## barney_pig (Jul 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> the people like laurie penny and many of the trots who think they are well-read and all clued up about communism often aren't ... at all.
> and that includes me tbf


When I left swap pie Trotskyism behind one thing that I realised was "all that reading" I and my comrades had done was so much bollocks. We had bought the books, and put them on the shelves, but no one actually did more than glance at them. Heaven forbid we ever allowed ourselves to be open to ideas outside of our comfort zone.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 4, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> similarly, if you claim you're not a liberal but you participate in, hold viewpoints in agreement with, and promote capitalistic endeavour within the mainstream, then sorry malcolm and penny, you're a goddam liberal.


 
But the disagreement there to LP is a subjective one.
Projects like the New Inquiry, Molly Crabapple's crowdfunder socialist-radical art etc. are anti-capitalist endeavours to LP.
You, el ahrairah, are at risk of being a hater (possibly also a reflecter of unexamined white left-flavoured privilege) because you deny that they are anti-capitalist.
LP merely wants you to examine your racism and sexism, LP doesn't deny you are anti-capitalist. 
It's basically impossible to settle.


----------



## love detective (Jul 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This is pretty odd. When LP states herself a revolutionary socialist, as she does, it's not identity politics that's causing her to do so, is it? Middle-class domination (by access to professional and media roles etc) of working-class causes has a far longer heritage than identity politics.


 
Not sure about causing her to do so, but I think it's identity politics (and in particular how identity politics apply to elites - i.e. fluid for her and her type, fixed for the rest of us) that enables her, in terms of self justification, to 'self identify' as a revolutionary socialist


----------



## ska invita (Jul 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> communism was robots taking over commodity production and exchange and profit being shared equally as universal income, thought Marxism and anarchism "are basically the same thing"...


this sounds a bit like me tbf, especially the fist bit....plus there is a lot of overlap between autonomist marxist tradtions and anarchism isnt there - why are these ideas so wrong?


----------



## sihhi (Jul 4, 2013)

Take this latest example:

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/352537070180368386

I've been meaning to Kickstarter a book for some time out of the many many projects I have in the air. But I must finish this one first!!

It ^^ is an anti-capitalist endeavour for LP. 
Plus the fact that she assists working-class journalists make contacts, enter internships and jobs that's also anti-capitalist endeavour, so doing ostensibly liberal pro-capitalist stuff is a price worth paying.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> You're being unfair on yourself here though, because from what I've seen on this forum I get the impression you have an intellectual curiosity and you're always looking for ways to learn more. My point is that with Penny and that, at least as far as "communism" is concerned, that doesn't exist. They're communists because they call themselves that, but "communism" could mean anything as far as they are concerned.


 

But a trot view of communism which is what i subscribed to at least partially for a long time and a sort of semi stalinist view of it which i subscribed to before that, that's an idea with some very major flaws to it, not least the fact that capital accumulation and exploitation of people's surplus labour value is still there, except it's done by the state instead of private enterprise. That's why I've come to the idea that vanguardism is such bullshit, because the people who think they are vanguards and advanced layers of the class often know fuck all, and often a lot less than the people they deride as being "backward layers" or whatever. I do think their ideas have some merits to them and they've done some important work but at the same time I think trotskyist parties have done some damage and a lot of the stuff I derided people on here for actually does have a point to it.

And yeah that includes me, there's loads I don't know about communism. You can have read like 20 books by trotsky and think you're advanced but have less actual understanding than somebody who's read no books ever.


----------



## love detective (Jul 4, 2013)

ska invita said:


> this sounds a bit like me tbf, especially the fist bit....plus there is a lot of overlap between autonomist marxist tradtions and anarchism isnt there - why are these ideas so wrong?


 
Are you asking what is wrong about the categories of commodity production & exchange and profit being talked about in the context of a communist society?


----------



## cesare (Jul 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> Not sure about causing her to do so, but I think it's identity politics (and in particular how identity politics apply to elites - i.e. fluid for her and her type, fixed for the rest of us) that enables her, in terms of self justification, to 'self identify' as a revolutionary socialist



Whatever personal problems that she's had in the past (and she's been public about anorexia and family breakup for example) appear to have caused the retreat into identity politics; the area she feels most secure in. Then she's built her politics on that. Class doesn't enter into it apart from being defensive when someone points it out - probably because the safety/security of the class and social/economic capital that she's been born into is something that she takes for granted.


----------



## love detective (Jul 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> Whatever personal problems that she's had in the past (and she's been public about anorexia and family breakup for example) appear to have caused the retreat into identity politics; the area she feels most secure in. *Then she's built her politics on that*. Class doesn't enter into it apart from being defensive when someone points it out - probably because the safety/security of the class and social/economic capital that she's been born into is something that she takes for granted.


 
isn't that pretty much what I said in the post that your post above replied to! (particular the bit above in bold)

identity politics have enabled her (without contradiction in her eyes) to superficially identity as a class struggle activist, despite the complete and utter lack of class content, analysis and outlook in her politics


----------



## caleb (Jul 4, 2013)

ska invita said:


> this sounds a bit like me tbf, especially the fist bit....plus there is a lot of overlap between autonomist marxist tradtions and anarchism isnt there - why are these ideas so wrong?


 
Love detective's got there before me, but to reiterate: commodity production and exchange, and profit would not exist in a communist society. Whether you think this is possible or not is beside the point.

And I didn't mention autonomism in relation to anarchism, but this person's assertion that autonomism is "individualist marxism", taking "autonomy" to mean _individual autonomy _rather than _class autonomy._


----------



## sihhi (Jul 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> Not sure about causing her to do so, but I think it's identity politics (and in particular how identity politics apply to elites - i.e. fluid for her and her type, fixed for the rest of us)


 
Good point. The idea of fluidity of identity politics for the middle-class is an important one which you've pointed out well here. 

I don't know if you were in Lambeth at the time but under Linda Bellos mentioned it earlier on this thread - it was often done like this. She and her decisions were on the side of the working-class because her mum worked in a factory, on the side of all black people because her father was black, on the side of all women since she was a woman, on the side of all racially conscious white people because her mother was white who had married across the colour line, on the side of all homosexual people because she was a lesbian, on the side of all religious minorities because her mother was Jewish.
UCATT and T&G as it was then which went on strike against scrapping the direct labour scheme iirc, it was whites holding out against the Lambeth (ie mostly black) service users, 'they'd rather we didn't start the playscheme for black mothers'.

However when the dishonest nature was pointed out it got pretty ugly :- accusations of coconuts, homophobes, racists, middle-class/working-class, typical whites, etc. 
Icky even writing all this stuff.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> isn't that pretty much what I said in the first place though (particular the bit in bold)!
> 
> identity politics have enabled her (without contradiction in her eyes) to superficially identity as a class struggle activist, despite the complete and utter lack of class content, analysis and outlook in her politics


I don't see the contradiction really - LP might wel use ID politics to justify herself, but structurally she's following a well-worn path that predates ID politics?


----------



## cesare (Jul 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> isn't that pretty much what I said in the first place though! (particular the bit above in bold)
> 
> identity politics have enabled her (without contradiction in her eyes) to superficially identity as a class struggle activist, despite the complete and utter lack of class content, analysis and outlook in her politics


Yes, you did. I was agreeing with you just putting it in a different way.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Sure but fighting austerity itself should be/is fighting for secularism against free schools which have a higher percentage of faith schools etc.


 

There certainly are a lot of crossover issues re: secularism and neoliberalism, good very recent example of that here.

http://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2013/07/church-to-take-over-thousands-of-community-schools



> The Church of England has struck a deal with the Government that will allow it to take control of thousands of non-religious community schools.
> 
> Despite reassurances that the character of community schools will remain intact, with no change in religious education, admissions policies or employment terms for teachers, the National Secular Society has expressed grave doubts that this promise will be kept over the long-term.
> Executive Director of the National Secular Society, Keith Porteous Wood, said that the move would inevitably lead to a further religionisation of the school system.
> ...


 
I would still be wary of arguing against this purely on the basis that the schools that are being converted are being turned over to the CoE, though I do find that worrying, partly because some secularists aligned to groups like the National Secular Society have hardly covered themselves with glory on this subject either. Rather than fight against free schools, some atheists have openly floated the idea of instead opening atheist free schools. 

In any case, there are a lot of reasons why parents and teachers should be very worried about academies and free schools that would probably resonate a lot more effectively with them than religion. CoE schools seem pretty popular with non-Anglican religious parents and even some non-religious parents.


----------



## Red Cat (Jul 4, 2013)

TruXta said:


> I don't see the contradiction really - LP might wel use ID politics to justify herself, but structurally she's following a well-worn path that predates ID politics?


 
What well-worn path is that?

ETA: I read backwards - you mean MC domination of WC politics


----------



## love detective (Jul 4, 2013)

TruXta said:


> I don't see the contradiction really - LP might wel use ID politics to justify herself, but structurally she's following a well-worn path that predates ID politics?


 
Well in the same way that for example, money, credit and exchange predated capitalism and the relentless imperialism of capitalist social relations disciplines, subordinates, reshapes and uses these things in accordance with its own logic, then the relentless imperialism of identity politics takes things that predate it and...erm....ahhh......i've lost the thread of this now....

Hopefully someone can untangle that and get to something close to what I meant - but I think the point is that Identity politics enables and offers a way in to domination/exploitation by elites that didn't exist prior to its dominance. Yes it ends up with the same result as always with elite domination and control, just like exploitation exists in pre-capitalist social relations and also exists in capitalist relations. But it's the manner, the method and the means by which that domination/exploitation is achieved/enabled that is different. And I think from the point of view of analysis these differences in method need to be looked at, differentiated and understood for what they are, as that's how the domination is effected/enabled and in turn provides the attack points for how it can be combatted. That manner and means (in relation to identity politics) is more subtle and on the surface something that looks progressive and something that could be your friend. Again I think this has parralles with the way exploitation is enabled under capitalism - it's all done through (distorted and inverted) notions of freedom

Have I stretched the analogy too far perhaps!


----------



## love detective (Jul 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> Yes, you did. I was agreeing with you just putting it in a different way.


 
We're not here to agree with each other!


----------



## cesare (Jul 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> We're not here to agree with each other!



Not a charity walk


----------



## TruXta (Jul 4, 2013)

love detective said:


> Well in the same way that for example, money, credit and exchange predated capitalism and the relentless imperialism of capitalist social relations disciplines, subordinates, reshapes and uses these things in accordance with its own logic, then the relentless imperialism of identity politics takes things that predate it and...erm....ahhh......i've lost the thread of this now....
> 
> Hopefully someone can untangle that and get to something close to what I meant - but I think the point is that Identity politics enables and offers a way in to domination/exploitation by elites that didn't exist prior to its dominance. Yes it ends up with the same result as always with elite domination and control, just like exploitation exists in pre-capitalist social relations and also exists in capitalist relations. But it's the manner, the method and the means by which that domination/exploitation is achieved/enabled that is different. And I think from the point of view of analysis these differences in method need to be looked at, differentiated and understood for what they are, as that's how the domination is effected/enabled and in turn provides the attack points for how it can be combatted. That manner and means (in relation to identity politics) is more subtle and on the surface something that looks progressive and something that could be your friend. Again I think this has parralles with the way exploitation is enabled under capitalism - it's all done through (distorted and inverted) notions of freedom
> 
> Have I stretched the analogy too far perhaps!


Cheers. I think, if I read you correctly, that we're agreeing?


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 4, 2013)

theres just such an arrogance to the idea that "we are the only revolutionary party" the only one that can lead the proletariat and the only ones with the "scientific method of marxism"


----------



## caleb (Jul 4, 2013)

Or: the proles are too busy watching the X Factor, they need activists dedicated to the cause to 'free them'.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> theres just such an arrogance to the idea that "we are the only revolutionary party" the only one that can lead the proletariat and the only ones with the "scientific method of marxism"


PD wants a word.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 4, 2013)

TruXta said:


> PD wants a word.


 

we are the spirit and memory of the class


----------



## emanymton (Jul 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> well someone from the SP once told me that "businesses would flourish under socialism"


WTF! 

Hope it wasn't a 20+ year veteran.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 4, 2013)

emanymton said:


> WTF!
> 
> Hope it wasn't a 20+ year veteran.


 

It was. Someone who'd joined militant in the 80s


----------



## TruXta (Jul 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> we are the spirit and memory of the class


A posthumous adumbration.


----------



## emanymton (Jul 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> It was. Someone who'd joined militant in the 80s


Christ that's bad.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 4, 2013)

I know.


----------



## caleb (Jul 4, 2013)

A few pages back you lot were talking about the 'RevSoc' zines from UEL and Leeds, well this has just gone up:

http://revsocs.wordpress.com


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> But the disagreement there to LP is a subjective one.
> Projects like the New Inquiry, Molly Crabapple's crowdfunder socialist-radical art etc. are anti-capitalist endeavours to LP.


 
The problem for me is that "the bubble's" anti-capitalism is of the reformist "change it from inside" type.  The sort that doesn't generally work, but *does* make the people undertaking it feel (wrongly, IMO) like they've earned their stripes.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> A few pages back you lot were talking about the 'RevSoc' zines from UEL and Leeds, well this has just gone up:
> 
> http://revsocs.wordpress.com


 
Good lord

_Perhaps people fail to be intersectional because it is difficult. Intersectionality makes you call out friends, family and comrades. In some circles it may mean you’re the one who always brings gender into the discussion, in some you’re always making it about race. Intersectionality means you complain about inaccessibility of events that may have been fantastic in every other way. *It means you find faults in people’s favourite songs, films, books, or fashion items, because they perpetuate racism, sexism, homophobia, trans*phobia, disableism, islamophobia, or other oppressive attitudes*. *Intersectionality means people may start to find you very annoying.*_

_Intersectionality is especially difficult if you don’t face much oppression. It means being an ally to a lot of people, and it means recognising your own privilege and educating yourself on problems some people face, that you may never have to._

_But as difficult as it is to be intersectional, it is so necessary. So long as the left is splintered and incoherent as we all struggle individually, we can never build the kind of strength we need. As a movement, we have to challenge and fight each facet of capitalism simultaneously and with equal amounts of energy and commitment._

Is this ripe for parody copliker?
_The Secret Diary of Intersectional Albert Mole Aged 18 and 3/4_.
A student goes around telling his parents how antisemitic they are for going to Wagner operas, his friends how sexist they are for still listening to My Chemical Romance records and his comrades how racist they are for not dancing along to Beyonce songs.

Would it be seen as too heartless or too much of an easy target?


----------



## caleb (Jul 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Good lord
> 
> _Perhaps people fail to be intersectional because it is difficult. Intersectionality makes you call out friends, family and comrades. In some circles it may mean you’re the one who always brings gender into the discussion, in some you’re always making it about race. Intersectionality means you complain about inaccessibility of events that may have been fantastic in every other way. *It means you find faults in people’s favourite songs, films, books, or fashion items, because they perpetuate racism, sexism, homophobia, trans*phobia, disableism, islamophobia, or other oppressive attitudes*. *Intersectionality means people may start to find you very annoying.*_
> 
> ...


 
Antisemitism rarely figures into intersectionalista's concerns tbh.

That highlighted part is mental (sorry, ableism) though, yeah.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 4, 2013)

http://revsocs.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/leeds-friends-of-syria-update/

This is interesting.


----------



## caleb (Jul 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> http://revsocs.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/leeds-friends-of-syria-update/
> 
> This is interesting.


 
I'm just taken aback by this lot tbh. The Leeds Friends of Syria group are active supporters of Western intervention in Syria, and their wider politics leave a lot to be desired. Why "revolutionary socialists" would seek to be involved with them is beyond me.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jul 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> *Intersectionality means people may start to find you very annoying.[...]*
> Is this ripe for parody?


 
Yes. Yes it is.


----------



## agricola (Jul 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Is this ripe for parody


 
Ripe?  Thats outrageous fruitism.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> The Leeds Friends of Syria group are active supporters of Western intervention in Syria, and their wider politics leave a lot to be desired.


 
Quite hard to work this out. This article here http://leedsfriendsofsyria.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/syria-and-the-west/ written by Harry Shotton https://twitter.com/HarryShotton certainly seems in favour of western intervention.



> Instead, I’d argue that, given the substantial mistakes that the West has made in the past, and continues to make on a daily basis, the West should focus on increasing diplomatic efforts in preparation for a transition of power. This could be done by increasing the pressure on Assad’s inner circle,diplomatically, economically, and militarily in an effort the force the conflict towards an end.


 
This is otherwise known as the John McCain neo-con republican position.

There's a great big "The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Leeds Friends of Syria" at the end of the article though. Maybe there's a pro-intervention and a anti-intervention split in the group?


----------



## J Ed (Jul 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> I'm just taken aback by this lot tbh. The Leeds Friends of Syria group are active supporters of Western intervention in Syria, and their wider politics leave a lot to be desired. Why "revolutionary socialists" would seek to be involved with them is beyond me.


 

Same thing is going on with Sheffield RevSoc IIRC, it's not that surprising though is it? Who are the ISN to contradict a 'self organising group of BME students' that they've worked with in the past?


----------



## sihhi (Jul 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Quite hard to work this out. This article here http://leedsfriendsofsyria.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/syria-and-the-west/ written by Harry Shotton https://twitter.com/HarryShotton certainly seems in favour of western intervention.


 
This irony or not:

https://twitter.com/HarryShotton/status/352144126512340992


----------



## caleb (Jul 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Quite hard to work this out. This article here http://leedsfriendsofsyria.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/syria-and-the-west/ written by Harry Shotton https://twitter.com/HarryShotton certainly seems in favour of western intervention.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
My mate was briefly involved and he said it's basically the general position.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> This irony or not:
> 
> https://twitter.com/HarryShotton/status/352144126512340992


 

Do you reckon that anti-Shia bigotry counts as Islamophobia to this lot?


----------



## Balbi (Jul 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Good lord
> 
> _Perhaps people fail to be intersectional because it is difficult. Intersectionality makes you call out friends, family and comrades. In some circles it may mean you’re the one who always brings gender into the discussion, in some you’re always making it about race. Intersectionality means you complain about inaccessibility of events that may have been fantastic in every other way. *It means you find faults in people’s favourite songs, films, books, or fashion items, because they perpetuate racism, sexism, homophobia, trans*phobia, disableism, islamophobia, or other oppressive attitudes*. *Intersectionality means people may start to find you very annoying.*_
> 
> ...


 

I've got a mate who's an intersectional feminist. She's black, queer and fucking smart enough to recognise that what this says is not just fucking stupid, it's not doable. So she'll fight the causes, recognise the intersections and complain a bit about Kanye's new album being all sorts of wrong. It's not about being an annoying isolated fuckwit who can't engage in culture without engaging in 24 hour criticism.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Do you reckon that anti-Shia bigotry counts as Islamophobia to this lot?


 
I missed the conference so I don't know.  

http://proletariandemocracy.wordpre...ia-and-lebanon-an-intersectionality-analysis/


----------



## J Ed (Jul 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> Antisemitism rarely figures into intersectionalista's concerns tbh.
> 
> That highlighted part is mental (sorry, ableism) though, yeah.


 

I can't work out whether the passage you bolded is indicative of self-awareness or a lack of it


----------



## J Ed (Jul 4, 2013)

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...has-opposed-american-involvement-in-the-past/



> Big majorities of the U.S. public (as well as the publics of many countries in the Mideast) have opposed the idea of the U.S. sending weapons to the rebels — something that President Obama this week decided to do after his administration concluded that the Syrian government had crossed a “red line” by using chemical weapons against its opposition.
> 
> In a survey conducted last December, 65% of Americans opposed the U.S. and its allies sending arms to anti-government groups in Syria, about the same number as held that view the previous March. About an equal number (63%) of Americans said the U.S. did not have a responsibility to get involved in the Syrian conflict.


 
I like how the ISN manages to be more pro-war than the American public on this lol


----------



## sihhi (Jul 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I can't work out whether the passage you bolded is indicative of self-awareness or a lack of it


 
That was my first thought - but it says "Intersectionality means people may start to find you very annoying." then nothing challenges that point and it later concludes also "as difficult as it is to be intersectional, it is so necessary." ie it's necessary for even other leftists and your relatives to start finding you annoying


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 4, 2013)

caleb said:


> Antisemitism rarely figures into intersectionalista's concerns tbh.
> 
> That highlighted part is mental (sorry, ableism) though, yeah.


 
I don't meet any "intersectionalists" (and I haven't met any tbh as far as I know) in real life, left uni in 2009 and i think the intersectionalist milieu (yeah i know...) is largely confined to student politics, which i managed to avoid when I was there, but a good deal of the anti-semitism I've experienced in recent years has been from political types 

also, some people in the muslim community are quite anti-semitic, heard some nasty views from muslim people when younger, (including out once on a demo about burma, when i was giving leaflets out a muslim guy asked me "thats very well but what are you going to do about the jews?") some people in the jewish community are quite islamophobic though so i'm not saying that one is worse or whatever, but i suspect laurie etc wouldn't have very much to say about that


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...has-opposed-american-involvement-in-the-past/
> 
> 
> 
> I like how the ISN manages to be more pro-war than the American public on this lol


 
I thought they were meant to be all about smashing imperialism and zionism and and that


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 4, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That was my first thought - but it says "Intersectionality means people may start to find you very annoying." then nothing challenges that point and it later concludes also "as difficult as it is to be intersectional, it is so necessary." ie it's necessary for even other leftists and your relatives to start finding you annoying


 
It's all part of your sacrifice for the struggle comrade. Trots selling papers to friends and family might be found annoying as well, but only to the backward layers


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 4, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Christ that's bad.


 
To be fair he was talking businesses below a certain size, but still


----------



## J Ed (Jul 4, 2013)

http://revsocs.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/rape-assads-secret-weapon/

The fact that the rebels also use rape as a weapon of war seems to have passed them by?


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 4, 2013)

I thought the left the swaps to get away from this shit.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 4, 2013)

I suspect that a lot of the ISN think that one of the problems with what went on, and failure of leadership, was a result of a lack of intersectionality/identity politics which I'm sure is an idea that was compounded by the leadership accusing them all of being autonomists and rad fems.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 4, 2013)

i'm getting quite sick of the term Calling Out.

i don't want to Call Out my comrades.  Where i believe they are wrong, mistaken, or ignorant I want to have a polite word, a bit of the old dialectic, understand where they're coming from, try and explain where i believe they are wrong.  I have learnt from this process, giving or receiving.

i might, however, make a public Pointing Fingers At; Denunciation of someone who isn't a comrade, some dickhead who is so far wrong that they will go straight to the fucking gulag without passing go.  you Call Out wankers, fake comrades, arseholes who deserve their arseholes to be exposed and mocked.

is there a difference, i wonder?


----------



## sihhi (Jul 4, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i'm getting quite sick of the term Calling Out.
> 
> i don't want to Call Out my comrades. Where i believe they are wrong, mistaken, or ignorant I want to have a polite word, a bit of the old dialectic, understand where they're coming from, try and explain where i believe they are wrong. I have learnt from this process, giving or receiving.
> 
> ...


 
If they respond well to someone having a word, but get annoyed at people calling them out in public, then they're racists (or whatever). 

Remember the manual 



> I don’t care about how hard your privilege is. I don’t care if it wasn’t intentional. These are not facts to bring up when you are called out. If you mess up, you need to own your mistake, not dance around it.


 
The intention of posts here might be to laugh at the middle-class socialist intelligentsia, but if someone else thinks it's homophobic bullying of a brave bisexual voice, and you mention your intention you've started dancing - game over, you lose.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 5, 2013)

caleb said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*
> 2h
> Spent lots of last night talking feminism, communism, ambition and nerdery with two amazing 18y/o lasses. Very excited for generation Z.
> Uh, "communism [and] ambition", lol.


 
A lass at uni called me sexist for saying lass once. Does the fact Laurie said it mean it's not misogynist or does it mean Laurie's a misogynist? I think we really need to know.


----------



## barney_pig (Jul 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> A lass at uni called me sexist for saying lass once. Does the fact Laurie said it mean it's not misogynist or does it mean Laurie's a misogynist? I think we really need to know.


She is also a northerner now


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 5, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> She is also a northerner now


 
Cultural appropriation


----------



## cesare (Jul 5, 2013)

Balbi said:


> I've got a mate who's an intersectional feminist. She's black, queer and fucking smart enough to recognise that what this says is not just fucking stupid, it's not doable. So she'll fight the causes, recognise the intersections and complain a bit about Kanye's new album being all sorts of wrong. It's not about being an annoying isolated fuckwit who can't engage in culture without engaging in 24 hour criticism.


I bet she's a bundle of laughs.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 5, 2013)

What does queer actually mean? Only I'm pretty sure it used to be homophobic.

I refuse to use intersectionalist language. If I have to refer to the ethnicity of a black person I will call them black and not a person of colour color (if it's good enough for the black people I know it's good enough for me), if I have to refer to the sexuality of a gay person I will call them gay (if it's good enough for the gay people I know etc) and if I have to refer to the gender of a woman I will call her a lass (if it's good enough etc).

I'll probably end up looking very politically incorrect like my (communist, staunchly antiracist) grandad who insisted on calling black people coloured up until his death in 1998 because he thought black was racist and coloured was the nice way of saying it (if it's good enough for him etc) but I think that's preferable to having my language policed by Laurie fucking Penny.


----------



## cesare (Jul 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What does queer actually mean? Only I'm pretty sure it used to be homophobic.
> 
> I refuse to use intersectionalist language. If I have to refer to the ethnicity of a black person I will call them black and not a person of colour color (if it's good enough for the black people I know it's good enough for me), if I have to refer to the sexuality of a gay person I will call them gay (if it's good enough for the gay people I know etc) and if I have to refer to the gender of a woman I will call her a lass (if it's good enough etc).
> 
> I'll probably end up looking very politically incorrect like my (communist, staunchly antiracist) grandad who insisted on calling black people coloured up until his death in 1998 because he thought black was racist and coloured was the nice way of saying it (if it's good enough for him etc) but I think that's preferable to having my language policed by Laurie fucking Penny.


Most people don't tie themselves up in knots over thinking this shit. You just pay attention in normal day to day stuff and maybe adapt your language from (eg) coloured to black just as a gradual thing. Queer used to be a derogatory term, now it's not. It's not that big a deal.


----------



## cesare (Jul 5, 2013)

Do normal people differentiate between the avid intersectionalists and the avid anti-intersectionalists?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 5, 2013)

What does queer actually mean though? Is it basically the same as gay?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 5, 2013)

> I don’t care about how hard your privilege is. I don’t care if it wasn’t intentional. These are not facts to bring up when you are called out. If you mess up, you need to own your mistake, not dance around it.


 
how long before these clowns bring back self-criticism sessions?


----------



## Superdupastupor (Jul 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What does queer actually mean though? Is it basically the same as gay?


 
someone who is either not heterosexual, hetro-normative or identifies as  their born sex .... so i think asexuals, people in polyamorous set-ups....... hmmm i wonder if a *patriarch with multiple concubines would count as 'queer'  that kind of thing

*or the other way round.


----------



## Balbi (Jul 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> I bet she's a bundle of laughs.


 

 She is. Her night bus rant about Owen Jones and Laurie Penny would have fitted in perfectly here.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What does queer actually mean though? Is it basically the same as gay?


Not gay as in happy but queer as in FUCK YOU


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

People used to call gay people etc queer when i was at school, I generally don't use it because it brings back some bad memories.


----------



## emanymton (Jul 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> A lass at uni called me sexist for saying lass once. Does the fact Laurie said it mean it's not misogynist or does it mean Laurie's a misogynist? I think we really need to know.


When you say it it's misogynist when Laurie says it it's hip and ironic. 



Actually I do dislike the word lass, could someone who bothers with this twitter shite have a go at her for me. Thanks


----------



## killer b (Jul 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What does queer actually mean though? Is it basically the same as gay?


it's an umbrella term for LGBT these days i believe.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 5, 2013)

I think its been reclaimed as it were. Certainly the body of work surrounding LGBTQ stuff is called queer theory now. afaik etc


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

My dad was going on an epic rant about Iran last night. I think I'm going to Call him Out for not being intersectional enough next time he mentions it.


----------



## andysays (Jul 5, 2013)

It's another of those Humpty Dumpty words, innit...


----------



## emanymton (Jul 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What does queer actually mean? Only I'm pretty sure it used to be homophobic.
> 
> I refuse to use intersectionalist language. If I have to refer to the ethnicity of a black person I will call them black and not a person of colour color (if it's good enough for the black people I know it's good enough for me), if I have to refer to the sexuality of a gay person I will call them gay (if it's good enough for the gay people I know etc) and if I have to refer to the gender of a woman I will call her a lass (if it's good enough etc).
> 
> I'll probably end up looking very politically incorrect like my (communist, staunchly antiracist) grandad who insisted on calling black people coloured up until his death in 1998 because he thought black was racist and coloured was the nice way of saying it (if it's good enough for him etc) but I think that's preferable to having my language policed by Laurie fucking Penny.


My dad is the same he uses coloured instead of black because when he was growing up that was the polite non-offensive term. Which gives me a disturbing thought I have not had before. In a few years time will the likes of us be seen as racist homophobes for clinging to 'black' and 'gay'? One more way in which I am turning into my dad!


----------



## andysays (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> My dad was going on an epic rant about Iran last night. I think I'm going to Call him Out for not being intersectional enough next time he mentions it.


 
You're going to "out" your dad? Good luck with that...


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

andysays said:


> You're going to "out" your dad? Good luck with that...


 

No  I meant call him out for not thinking about all the intersections.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> I think its been reclaimed as it were. Certainly the body of work surrounding LGBTQ stuff is called queer theory now. afaik etc


It's not LGBTQ anymore, it's QUILTBAG now. HTH.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> It's not LGBTQ anymore, it's QUILTBAG now. HTH.


 

whats the U stand for?


----------



## andysays (Jul 5, 2013)

emanymton said:


> My dad is the same he uses coloured instead of black because when he was growing up that was the polite non-offensive term. Which gives me a disturbing thought I have not had before. In a few years time will the likes of us be seen as racist homophobes for clinging to 'black' and 'gay'? One more way in which I am turning into my dad!


 
Yes, we will, if we're not already 



Yeah, I'm losing my edge. 
I'm losing my edge. 
The kids are coming up from behind. 
I'm losing my edge. 
I'm losing my edge to the kids from the New Statesman and from Oxford. 
But I was there...​


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What does queer actually mean though? Is it basically the same as gay?


 
I think it a) is used by people who think "reclaiming language" is a revolutionary act, and b) it was meant to signify a more fluid and flexible model of sexuality than the "gay" concept could model.

I'm sure there are whole shelves of PhD theses on this subject gathering dust somewhere.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> whats the U stand for?


Nothing I think - it's just the U in queer - so it's Queer, Intersexual, Lesbian, Trans-sexual, Bisexual, Asexual, and..... I can't remember the G - genderqueer maybe?


----------



## andysays (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> No  I meant call him out for not thinking about all the intersections.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

Is asexual actually a sexuality though? And how are asexual people oppressed? surely they can just become priests or something  

Is there systematic discrimination against people who don't want to have sex?


----------



## andysays (Jul 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Nothing I think - it's just the U in queer - so it's Queer, Intersexual, Lesbian, Trans-sexual, Bisexual, Asexual, and..... I can't remember the G - genderqueer maybe?


 
Geeky?


----------



## killer b (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Is asexual actually a sexuality though? And how are asexual people oppressed? surely they can just become priests or something
> 
> Is there systematic discrimination against people who don't want to have sex?


i once convinced myself i was asexual. turned out i was just too shy to talk to girls.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

killer b said:


> i once convinced myself i was asexual. turned out i was just too shy to talk to girls.


 

Well yeah that's it, I don't like to say the whole "it's just a phase argument" but ... that's what I think it is a lot of the time ...


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

Am I being oppressive or whatever? 

I don't think there's much oppression if that's the word against asexual people out there. I was single and never had sex with anyone for years and never felt oppressed because of it  Lonely but not oppressed.


----------



## killer b (Jul 5, 2013)

it could be some kind of glorious freedom were it real, tbf. not to be 'handcuffed to a maniac' as kingley amis almost put it.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Am I being oppressive or whatever?
> 
> I don't think there's much oppression if that's the word against asexual people out there. I was single and never had sex with anyone for years and never felt oppressed because of it  Lonely but not oppressed.


 
That means you're a nerd, not asexual.

Joking apart, could the rise of the "hikikomiri" be a form of oppression, or at least a side-effect of the permanent crisis in late capitalism?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23182523


----------



## Limerick Red (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Am I being oppressive or whatever?
> 
> I don't think there's much oppression if that's the word against asexual people out there. I was single and never had sex with anyone for years and never felt oppressed because of it  Lonely but not oppressed.


Loneliness is the oppression of oneself by oneself, call yourself out FFS.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

andysays said:


> Geeky?


Possibly.

And no, I don't think asexuals face oppression. Mild surprise maybe?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 5, 2013)

killer b said:


> i once convinced myself i was asexual. turned out i was just too shy to talk to girls.





Limerick Red said:


> Loneliness is the oppression of oneself by oneself, call yourself out FFS.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> That means you're a nerd, not asexual.
> 
> Joking apart, could the rise of the "hikikomiri" be a form of oppression, or at least a side-effect of the permanent crisis in late capitalism?
> 
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23182523


 

I think it's a sign of capitalist decomposition and decadence.

Anyway I'm a bit geeky but not really a nerd, I do go out and have normal friends.  that word "normal" lol, I need to call myself out again


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


>


 

"fucking idris and his gifs"


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> "fucking idris and his gifs"


 
"Worst. Urban poster. Ever."


----------



## killer b (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> "fucking idris and his gifs"


that's a jpeg tbf.


----------



## smokedout (Jul 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> If they respond well to someone having a word, but get annoyed at people calling them out in public, then they're racists (or whatever).
> 
> Remember the manual
> 
> ...


 
except this doesn't seem to apply when you call someone out from a class based perspective which shows despite what they say, class doesn't even get to be an identity group


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

killer b said:


> that's a jpeg tbf.


Not all jifs move.


----------



## killer b (Jul 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Not all jifs move.


i know. i checked though.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

anyway there's such a thing as "geek privilege" it never felt like much of a privilege to me


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

killer b said:


> i know. i checked though.


Geek. Wait - was it a jpeg or a jpg?


----------



## killer b (Jul 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Geek. Wait - was it a jpeg or a jpg?


you're exactly as capable of right-clicking on the image and checking as i am.


it's a jpeg.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Wait - was it a jpeg or a jpg?


 

a shameless display of geek privilege again


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

killer b said:


> you're exactly as capable of right-clicking on the image and checking as i am.


 

ableist


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> a shameless display of geek privilege again


I know - only true geeks pronounce GIF as "jiff".


----------



## smokedout (Jul 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> What does queer actually mean though? Is it basically the same as gay?


 
I remember hearing/reading I think Tatchell saying that when Outrage used queer in the 80s it was to mean any form of non traditional sexuality or gender expression, so not just lesbian, gay, trans but BDSM, fetish, androgyny etc - he said the idea was to try and promote the idea that everyone is queer, even if only in their heads now and then, which I thought was quite clever

seems to have moved a long way from that now though


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

I have mixed thoughts on whether people who do BDSM are "oppressed" 

plainly there's a lot of prejudice/misunderstandings about it but oppression? not sure. to me that like implies something systematic, although i'm sure with some of the laws that are on the books, the operation spanner case etc ...


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I remember hearing/reading I think Tatchell saying that when Outrage used queer in the 80s it was to mean any form of non traditional sexuality or gender expression, so not just lesbian, gay, trans but BDSM, fetish, androgyny etc - he said the idea was to try and promote the idea that everyone is queer, even if only in their heads now and then, which I thought was quite clever
> 
> seems to have moved a long way from that now though


Hasn't "kinky" taken on some or most of those connotations these days? Or is that passé as well?


----------



## BigTom (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> whats the U stand for?


 


Spoiler: dark humour



Malcolm told me it was for Underage. Check your adult sex having privilege!


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I have mixed thoughts on whether people who do BDSM are "oppressed"
> 
> plainly there's a lot of prejudice/misunderstandings about it but oppression? not sure. to me that like implies something systematic, although i'm sure with some of the laws that are on the books, the operation spanner case etc ...


NAMBLA took the line that pedos were being oppressed....


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> NAMBLA took the line that pedos were being oppressed....


 

Well they are oppressed but for a fucking good reason.


----------



## Limerick Red (Jul 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> NAMBLA took the line that pedos were being oppressed....


And the Sparts.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

I think I've found the G in QUILTBAG


----------



## Balbi (Jul 5, 2013)

smokedout said:


> I remember hearing/reading I think Tatchell saying that when Outrage used queer in the 80s it was to mean any form of non traditional sexuality or gender expression, so not just lesbian, gay, trans but BDSM, fetish, androgyny etc - he said the idea was to try and promote the idea that everyone is queer, even if only in their heads now and then, which I thought was quite clever
> 
> seems to have moved a long way from that now though


 

TBF, that's my personal view of queer, which is good enough for me.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

I think I've revealed too many of my prejudices on this thread


----------



## Balbi (Jul 5, 2013)

We can close the thread now, the whole aim was to reveal your inner Littlejohn


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> "fucking idris and his gifs"





killer b said:


> that's a jpeg tbf.





TruXta said:


> Geek. Wait - was it a jpeg or a jpg?





killer b said:


> you're exactly as capable of right-clicking on the image and checking as i am.
> 
> 
> it's a jpeg.


----------



## Superdupastupor (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Am I being oppressive or whatever?
> 
> I don't think there's much oppression if that's the word against asexual people out there. I was single and never had sex with anyone for years and never felt oppressed because of it  Lonely but not oppressed.




Can you not see how being asexxual in a highly cultural sexualised society would he oppresive? Really ? Pressure to conform they fact that a lot of asexuality is based in a sex abuseand  being part of a larger identiy group gives a sense of solidarity


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

Superdupastupor said:


> Can you not see how being asexxual in a highly cultural sexualised society would he oppresive? Really ? Pressure to conform they fact that a lot of asexuality is based in a sex abuseand being part of a larger identiy group gives a sense of solidarity


 

I agree with that but surely it could be that people aren't really asexual in that case but are just frightened of/traumatised by sex? And yes that is oppressive, it's more to do with what's happened due to past abuse tho surely (if that's really why?)


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I have mixed thoughts on whether people who do BDSM are "oppressed"
> 
> plainly there's a lot of prejudice/misunderstandings about it but oppression? not sure. to me that like implies something systematic, although i'm sure with some of the laws that are on the books, the operation spanner case etc ...


 
I think it can be difficult to talk to people about, and certainly the police used to be very keen on raiding bdsm clubs. The Spanner case was interesting (I sat through some of it) but it was at the extreme end of things. And the defendants were gay (woo! Intersectional!).

The cops aren't going to kick your bedroom door in because you like being tied up.

I think some bdsm people like the idea that they are doing secretive taboo stuff - and "being oppressed" fits into that identity.

You sort of get into a general discussion about sexuality at this point. I would say that gay people feeling unable to hold hands or kiss in public is a form of oppression.

I'm not sure that the naked rambler being arrested or that goth couple where the woman was carted around on a dog leash to general disapproval is _oppression_? Certainly they are having a rough time of it, but I am not sure oppression is the right word?


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> I think it can be difficult to talk to people about, and certainly the police used to be very keen on raiding bdsm clubs. The Spanner case was interesting (I sat through some of it) but it was at the extreme end of things. And the defendants were gay (woo! Intersectional!).
> 
> The cops aren't going to kick your bedroom door in because you like being tied up.
> 
> ...


 

Agreed. I've definitely experienced homophobia, and agree not being able to hold hands etc/kiss in public is oppression.


----------



## Superdupastupor (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I agree with that but surely it could be that people aren't really asexual in that case but are just frightened of/traumatised by sex? And yes that is oppressive, it's more to do with what's happened due to past abuse tho surely (if that's really why?)


 
being asked expected? to a a gf/bf/sexual realtions/not even with oneself  when you have no desire to and then people finding that weird/suspect is social oppression, id have thunk?


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

Superdupastupor said:


> being asked expected? to a a gf/bf/sexual realtions/not even with oneself when you have no desire to and then people finding that weird/suspect is social oppression, id have thunk?


 

Yeah, I suppose so. I guess it also depends who you hang around with as well because a lot of my friends are still single and I often feel like a bit of an odd one out myself, but other friends I've got are constantly going out with people and sometimes seem to expect everyone to as well. I'm not sure that's oppression though? 

I've experienced severe homophobia and I don't remember anyone receiving that kind of abuse simply for not wanting to go out with anyone.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 5, 2013)

What do you all think of this Anna Chen piece?

http://socialistunity.com/ken-loachs-the-spirit-of-45-review-ethnically-cleansing-history/

I sort of agree with the article insofar that the Atlee government's foreign policy was pretty indefensible, basically a continuation of Conservative party policy based on racism and colonialism in the colonies and support for the far-right to suppress the left in parts of Europe. If I remember correctly though the actual documentary doesn't mention foreign policy at all though, and I don't see how Loach could have without complicating the documentary even more.

The only interviewing white people thing is weird though, albeit obviously not actually 'ethnically cleansing history'. Maybe if Loach spent a bit less time putting Rees on screen he could have found a more representative set of interviewees.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

well i think the spirit of 45 thing is a load of bollocks tbh ...


----------



## Superdupastupor (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Yeah, I suppose so. I guess it also depends who you hang around with as well because a lot of my friends are still single and I often feel like a bit of an odd one out myself, but other friends I've got are constantly going out with people and sometimes seem to expect everyone to as well. I'm not sure that's oppression though?
> 
> I've experienced severe homophobia and I don't remember anyone receiving that kind of abuse simply for not wanting to go out with anyone.


 
(horrid archaic word to do with putting women in their place- that needs a modern day androgynous equiv ofc  .)

Do you not feel a spinster (that for no other reason than they have no desire for or have no want for a sexual relationship) has ever felt social stigma for not choosing to partener up in life?

or the other side where the asexual couples up for fear of being alone in life and throuugh sociolisation feel the best way/only realistic way of this happening is to enter in a sexual realtionship?

equality isn't always about abuse received- the other side is having your sexual identity being accepted.



eta: apparently socio-sexual  doesn't mean what i though it should  ppl with their words


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

well how do you know they may not fancy anyone? weren't a lot of single women who lived on their own actually gay and couldn't come out to anyone? Or they may have other reasons for being alone (or even wanting to be alone) besides not fancying anyone.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

I agree with you about social stigma but I'm not sure it's actually a "sexuality" - I think there are other reasons why people don't want to be in relationships or haven't met anyone they want to be in a relationship with, I find it really hard to believe somebody would fancy NOBODY.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I agree with you about social stigma but I'm not sure it's actually a "sexuality" - I think there are other reasons why people don't want to be in relationships, I find it really hard to believe somebody would fancy NOBODY.


They do exist.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> They do exist.


 

surely there are reasons behind it though, as supaduporstupor alluded to in their posts. Somebody might be really frightened of intimacy and convince themselves they don't want it at all.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> surely there are reasons behind it though, as supaduporstupor alluded to in their posts. Somebody might be really frightened of intimacy and convince themselves they don't want it at all.


There are reasons for everything. Why does asexuality seem so incredible to you?


----------



## killer b (Jul 5, 2013)

check your horny privilege frogz.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

http://www.asexuality.org/home/overview.html


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> There are reasons for everything. Why does asexuality seem so incredible to you?


 

Because there have been periods of my life when I haven't fancied anyone. Not because I haven't wanted it but because there was other stuff going on in my life at the time, that made me feel unattractive, or that were more interesting at the time than sex and also the people I perhaps "should" have fancied were all dicks.

And also a lot of the time there are issues around women (and some men) don't enjoy sex because of their partners not respecting consent issues and stuff like that so they convince themselves they don't enjoy it anyway, "lie back and think of england" that sort of shit.

There's also social taboos around women being expected not to say they enjoy sex or what they would like in the bedroom. 

I'm not saying there aren't asexual people around but I think a lot of the time people probably have other stuff going on.


----------



## Superdupastupor (Jul 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> They do exist.


 
for example endochrinological reasons. medicine side effects.


----------



## killer b (Jul 5, 2013)

not sure if loss of libido due to medication really counts as asexuality tbh


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

Superdupastupor said:


> for example endochrinological reasons. medicine side effects.


Sure, but asexuality is about being more or less permanently disinterested in sexual relations with other people. It's a disposition, not a condition.


----------



## Superdupastupor (Jul 5, 2013)

oh good point. i guess that i something different.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

And I think the pressure on people to get married early etc doesn't always apply to men as much as it does women.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I'm not saying there aren't asexual people around but...


 
I suspect that it is attitudes like this - unthinking, non-malicious attitudes a lot of the time - that has driven much of the intersectionality thing into the current political discourse; people who feel sidelined, ignored, overlooked, demeaned or otherwise told that they don't exist/shouldn't feel that way/get over it/"well it never happened like that for me" etc, getting angry and making themselves visible, audible and in-your-face.

Especially with those (generally less discussed/sometimes less obviously identifiable) issues lying outside the 'traditional' triumvirate of gender/race/sexuality (leaving aside class for one moment).


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> I suspect that it is attitudes like this - unthinking, non-malicious attitudes a lot of the time - that has driven much of the intersectionality thing into the current political discourse; people who feel sidelined, ignored, overlooked, demeaned or otherwise told that they don't exist/shouldn't feel that way/get over it/"well it never happened like that for me" etc, getting angry and making themselves visible, audible and in-your-face.
> 
> Especially with those (generally less discussed/sometimes less obviously identifiable) issues lying outside the 'traditional' triumvirate of gender/race/sexuality (leaving aside class for one moment).


 

you're right. Sorry.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

what im trying to say (and put it really badly, sorry) is that for a lot of people there are reasons why they don't want to have sex which are nothing to do with the fact that they are born that way. i'd imagine that child abuse etc would be one of them. or people ending up living alone because they are gay and they find it impossible to come out, or because they have BDSM etc fantasies and are really fucking ashamed of them and think there's something wrong with them is another reason. (I do think BDSM people have a claim to being oppressed tbh) Or they may be very repressed, they may not know what they want, or everyone around them might be a dick so they don't fancy them.

of course there are some people who don't want to have sex at all but I'd have thought they'd be a very very small minority. Perhaps I'm wrong though.


----------



## Red Cat (Jul 5, 2013)

Superdupastupor said:


> Can you not see how being asexxual in a highly cultural sexualised society would he oppresive? Really ? Pressure to conform they fact that a lot of asexuality is based in a sex abuseand being part of a larger identiy group gives a sense of solidarity


 

Is pressure to conform always oppression?


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> of course there are some people who don't want to have sex at all but I'd have thought they'd be a very very small minority. Perhaps I'm wrong though.


 
THere's little research, what exists suggests asexuals are about 1% of the population. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15497056


----------



## Tom A (Jul 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That was my first thought - but it says "Intersectionality means people may start to find you very annoying." then nothing challenges that point and it later concludes also "as difficult as it is to be intersectional, it is so necessary." ie it's necessary for even other leftists and your relatives to start finding you annoying


 




			
				Matthew 10:34-38 said:
			
		

> Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 5, 2013)




----------



## Tom A (Jul 5, 2013)

andysays said:


> You're going to "out" your dad? Good luck with that...


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 5, 2013)

the bdsm thing- changes to the law some years back means its possible for the person being whipped to be nicked as accessory to the 'assault'. Brilliant.

I don't know if thats ever happened though


----------



## Tom A (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I have mixed thoughts on whether people who do BDSM are "oppressed"
> 
> plainly there's a lot of prejudice/misunderstandings about it but oppression? not sure. to me that like implies something systematic, although i'm sure with some of the laws that are on the books, the operation spanner case etc ...


 
There's also the argument that BDSM imagery has been appropriated in order to justify oppression.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

Tom A said:


> There's also the argument that BDSM imagery has been appropriated in order to justify oppression.


 

well that 50 shades of shit was a good example.


----------



## Tom A (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> well that 50 shades of shit was a good example.


 
*nods*


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 5, 2013)

i do believe that a former urbanite did some very good research into asexuality.  interesting stuff.  many people on ADs report a massive or total loss of their sexual drive - and indeed for some it turns out to be a very liberating positive thing.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Is asexual actually a sexuality though? ?


yes.



frogwoman said:


> I was single and never had sex with anyone for years and never felt oppressed because of it  Lonely but not oppressed.


 
not the same thing.



Superdupastupor said:


> Can you not see how being asexxual in a highly cultural sexualised society would he oppresive? Really ? Pressure to conform they fact that *a lot of asexuality is based in a sex abuse*and being part of a larger identiy group gives a sense of solidarity


 




frogwoman said:


> what im trying to say (and put it really badly, sorry) is that for a lot of people there are reasons why they don't want to have sex which are nothing to do with the fact that they are born that way. i'd imagine that child abuse etc would be one of them. or people ending up living alone because they are gay and they find it impossible to come out, or because they have BDSM etc fantasies and are really fucking ashamed of them and think there's something wrong with them is another reason. (I do think BDSM people have a claim to being oppressed tbh) Or they may be very repressed, they may not know what they want, or everyone around them might be a dick so they don't fancy them.
> 
> of course there are some people who don't want to have sex at all but I'd have thought they'd be a very very small minority. Perhaps I'm wrong though.


 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16552173



> "People say 'well if you've not tried it, then how do you know?'" says Jenni.
> "Well if you're straight have you tried having sex with somebody you know of the same sex as you? How do you know you wouldn't enjoy that? You just know that if you're not interested in it, you're not interested in it, regardless of having tried it or not."
> ...
> Fifty or 60 years ago would anyone have actually felt the need to define themselves as asexual or would society have just accepted them not engaging in sexual behaviour?”​Mark Carrigan, University of Warwick
> ...


 
/my underinformed tuppenceworth.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 5, 2013)

fair enough.  at myself for being so ignorant. sorry.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> fair enough.  at myself for being so ignorant. sorry.


you're not ignorant at all. it's just coincindental that i've been having a bit of a nerdgasm reading up on asexuality recently (and fwiw if you're ignorant, so am i. i can only speak from a place of experience that involved celibacy/utter terror of sex as a result of abuse/assault in my childhood and recent past. i don't want to tar asexuals with my brush )
e2a: the post above this one was my personal opinion, not The Voice Of Asexuals


----------



## sihhi (Jul 5, 2013)

I've read it about mostly in terms of survivors of childhood events. In a large number of cases it's as a result of childhood trauma or child abuse. Sometimes it leads to a paraphilia, sometimes to revulsion at sexual contact from other people. If a true asexual has sex, it's rape - it's forcing someone who doesn't want to, to have sex.

The problem comes in systematising it as oppression versus privilege - it's simply a reality, a fact that some humans experience. Even those from within the experience, some say it's a privilege not having to worry about sexual feelings and that it allows enjoyment (sometimes arousal) from different sources, others that it's an oppression based on others' expectations. The majority do feel unhappy about it, hence it is seen as oppression, although would the unhappiness disappear even if everyone said 'asexual who cares?' some asexuals say yes some say no.

What of objectophilia - should it be regarded as an oppression for objectophiles and allies to fight against - it is seen as very odd in almost all cultures - or seen as a reality that simply needs airing - sexual relations with cars or trees is not against the law.  Who knows I don't claim to.

What makes little sense is this kind of 'advocacy' degrading majority sexuality (simply because its majority) to promote the minority:




(from wtfsocialjustice) it's an odd form of sexual chauvinism to do this.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Sometimes it leads to a paraphilia, sometimes to revulsion at sexual contact from other people.


ah! shiny new word - thank you


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> People used to call gay people etc queer when i was at school, I generally don't use it because it brings back some bad memories.


 
Yeah that's why I asked the question - there was a new lad at an SP meeting the other week who'd come over from Donny to hear one of us speak. I was talking to him and he asked about the LGBT section and I started talking to him about it and some how got around to telling him that some called it the LGBTQ section now. When he asked what the Q stood for and I told him he had exactly the same reaction as you and I don't blame him one bit - when I was a kid nobody was 'out' as gay at my school (they'd have been murdered - while things are still far from perfect I think that's got a lot better now thank God) but anyone who seemed a bit effeminate or whatever got called queer and I'm still not comfortable using the word for that reason. Not that it's any of my business if a gay person (or trans or anything else) wants to call themselves queer but I think you know what I mean.

Edit: just to clarify, the lad at the meeting was gay himself.


----------



## Superdupastupor (Jul 5, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Is pressure to conform always oppression?


 
not always of course. it can be a constant source of empowerment and a sense of self and those you kick against with 



tufty79 said:


>


 
yup i did write that without checking up first but yeh pretty sure that i had read that.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Nothing I think - it's just the U in queer - so it's Queer, Intersexual, Lesbian, Trans-sexual, Bisexual, Asexual, and..... I can't remember the G - genderqueer maybe?


 
Does it count if you're involuntarily asexual? That's been me for about 3 months now (not that I'm counting lol) so I'm wondering if I can be a QUILTBAG.

Serious question now: are people actually discriminated against for being asexual? Genuinely interested to know, I'm not taking the piss.

Edit: ah, I see froggy got there before me - apols, I'll try and read the thread before posting in future!


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 5, 2013)

i suspect that, in a way, all sexuality is a construct - hetero, gay, asexuality.  not self-constructed, necessarily, but as a result of a complex series of associations made whilst very young based on society, community, learnt behaviour and observed behaviour, parenting etc etc.  you don't really get to choose and it shouldn't be judged unless it causes harm, but definitely is relevant and reactionary to some aspect of society and culture.  if we changed society we'd get different sexualities and fetishes.  again, not necessarily for the better or worse, just different.  this needs to be recognised, but how important is it?  if society changed so that we recognised ritualised self-harm as being unhealthy, are we oppressing masochists? if society changed to eliminate gender roles and the patriarchy, won't that be intrinsically oppressive to people for whom gender roles and values are intrinsically linked?

just riffing out loud here working through the thoughts the last couple of pages have given me...


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Does it count if you're involuntarily asexual? That's been me for about 3 months now (not that I'm counting lol) so I'm wondering if I can be a QUILTBAG.
> 
> Serious question now: are people actually discriminated against for being asexual? Genuinely interested to know, I'm not taking the piss.


Yes. No, not really.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 5, 2013)

i guess in a highly sexualised society like the one we live in, if you don't have a good support network and you have to put up with dickheads teasing you for never going out getting laid then, ior making the assumption that because you never have a partner there must be something weird or untrustworthy about you,then i guess you are.  i dunno tbh.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i guess in* a highly sexualised society like the one we live in,* if you don't have a good support network and you have to put up with dickheads teasing you for never going out getting laid then, ior making the assumption that because you never have a partner there must be something weird or untrustworthy about you,then i guess you are. i dunno tbh.


 
tbf, what society is not. other than monks in their monk houses making honey and buckfast


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> tbf, what society is not. other than monks in their monk houses making honey and buckfast


Nonces the lot of em.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i guess in a highly sexualised society like the one we live in, if you don't have a good support network and you have to put up with dickheads teasing you for never going out getting laid then, ior making the assumption that because you never have a partner there must be something weird or untrustworthy about you,then i guess you are. i dunno tbh.


 
That's to suggest that people with eg compulsive shyness and hence no desire for going out or people who feel uncomfortable with sex before marriage but do not find a suitable partner also experience the same <oppression> as asexuals. I don't know either tbh.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 5, 2013)

smokedout said:


> except this doesn't seem to apply when you call someone out from a class based perspective which shows despite what they say, class doesn't even get to be an identity group


 
I think this is worth quoting, even without comment, as it needs to be emphasised again and again. 

Laurie can tell Malcolm not to listen to us 'babe' cos there's 'loads of better working class activists'. But she'd not dare say that about anyone black, gay or from a religious minority. They don't even apply their own theory consistently - intersectionality claims to take into account all forms of oppression yet in reality it uses forms of oppression other than class to completely remove class from their analysis.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 5, 2013)

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/07/miliband-cannot-treat-falkirk-little-local-difficulty

rabidly anti-union New Statesman singing from the same hymn sheet as the Daily Mail in it's attacks on Unite at the moment.

Worth remembering this. Scab is a scab.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 5, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I agree with you about social stigma but I'm not sure it's actually a "sexuality" - I think there are other reasons why people don't want to be in relationships or haven't met anyone they want to be in a relationship with, I find it really hard to believe somebody would fancy NOBODY.


 
It makes sense to me - after all, nobody is perfect so you're bound to fancy them


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Nonces the lot of em.


 
I think you'll find that the old buckfast increases the desire but reduces the ability.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I think this is worth quoting, even without comment, as it needs to be emphasised again and again.
> 
> Laurie can tell Malcolm not to listen to us 'babe' cos there's 'loads of better working class activists'. But she'd not dare say that about anyone black, gay or from a religious minority. They don't even apply their own theory consistently - intersectionality claims to take into account all forms of oppression yet in reality it uses forms of oppression other than class to completely remove class from their analysis.


 
If you do say this though you stand guilty on the sexism/racism/chauvinism front. 
I'd say it either _abuses and exploits _other forms of oppression or demolishes them.












"my life depends on you not wanting to kill me for who I am"

http://catbountry.tumblr.com/post/52356168379/diarrefpuckhookyplay-em-offs-nationalpost

"arthur is racist, transphobic, specieist, homophobic, oppressive, and capitalistic."


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I think you'll find that the old buckfast increases the desire but reduces the ability.


Been a monk for long?


----------



## sihhi (Jul 5, 2013)

LP's been arrested I think :

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/353177557274853376

Hope you all have fun in the sun this weekend. I'm in book jail till August, but some research suggests that book jail isn't the worst jail.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 5, 2013)

Otherkin ffs. I refuse to take them seriously and will continue to take the piss - I think it's for their own good and if that makes me a monster (monster - that's otherkinism lol) then so be it.

Is having severe flatulence (and quite liking the physical feeling of farting a lot but not the social consequences thereof) an oppression? If so I'm gonna start a liberation group!


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> LP's been arrested I think :
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/353177557274853376
> 
> Hope you all have fun in the sun this weekend. I'm in book jail till August, but some research suggests that book jail isn't the worst jail.


 
i.e working on her shit book. God help us all.


----------



## cesare (Jul 5, 2013)

One Day In The Life Of Ivan Pennysovitch


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

Funny how otherkin are always dragons and lions and never voles or roaches.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 5, 2013)

The Big Lie


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> LP's been arrested I think :
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/353177557274853376
> 
> Hope you all have fun in the sun this weekend. I'm in book jail till August, but some research suggests that book jail isn't the worst jail.


 
ffs, she just means she's doing a bit of reading or writing for a bit doesn't she? In other words she's got to do her fucking job - the rest of us call it 'work' rather than 'jail'. I've been in central heating system jail for most of today and tomorrow I shall be in clearing the yard behind a block of flats jail.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 5, 2013)

It's far far too easy to looking on tumblr for the most stupid interpretation of intersectional bullshit (otherkin would fall into this category) and going mad about it, but before everyone starts foaming at the mouth, please try and remember that the average age of someone on tumblr is probably about 15, it's really not worth getting too worked up over some of this incredibly daft stuff.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Is having severe flatulence (and quite liking the physical feeling of farting a lot but not the social consequences thereof) an oppression? If so I'm gonna start a liberation group!


 
Are the thousand and one paraphilias and odd mental and bodily quirks that humans also oppression/privilege?

Also since when is Tom Watson Molly's (or anybody's friend)?

https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/352840381186060288

On the 4th, friend and MP @tom_watson resigns from the shadow cabinet, in a marvelous letter

_Here’s my parting thought:_

_John Humphrys asked me why you were not at Glastonbury this weekend. I said Labour leaders can’t be seen standing in muddy fields listening to bands. And then I thought how terribly sad that this is true. So: be that great Labour leader that you can be, but try to have a real life too. And if you want to see an awesome band, I recommend Drenge._

_Yours sincerely,_
_Tom Watson_
_Member of Parliament_


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Been a monk for long?


 
Sometimes I pretend to be choking, so that when someone does the Heimlich manoeuvre on me I can turn around half way through, and get a hug.


----------



## cesare (Jul 5, 2013)

On reflection, I reckon LP ghost wrote Watson's resignation letter for him.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 5, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Sometimes I pretend to be choking, so that when someone does the Heimlich manoeuvre on me I can turn around half way through, and get a hug.


That's so sad, yet sweet.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> That's so sad, yet sweet.


 
It's also a joke, he typed frantically.


----------



## Libertad (Jul 5, 2013)




----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 5, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> tbf, what society is not. other than monks in their monk houses making honey and buckfast


 
i keep writing stuff and deleting it.  this subject to is too big and none of my answers are both accurate and concise.  save it for another day, i reckon.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jul 5, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> It's also a joke, he typed frantically.


 
If the opportunity ever arises, I'm nicking that.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That's to suggest that people with eg compulsive shyness and hence no desire for going out or people who feel uncomfortable with sex before marriage but do not find a suitable partner also experience the same <oppression> as asexuals. I don't know either tbh.


 
this thread needs more input from asexuals, we're all just floundering here!


----------



## cesare (Jul 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> this thread needs more input from asexuals, we're all just floundering here!


Fuck's hake


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 5, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Funny how otherkin are always dragons and lions and never voles or roaches.


 
if i google this to fact check, i know i'm going to regret it.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i keep writing stuff and deleting it. this subject to is too big and none of my answers are both accurate and concise. save it for another day, i reckon.


 

was a plank of it going to be how in western capitalist socities commodified images of sex and succesful heteronormative relationships are pumped into our eyeballs daily on macro and micro levels and thus the asexual could be left feeling like freaks because the overt nature of the relationship and family unit are rammed down our throats relentlessly?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 5, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> was a plank of it going to be how in western capitalist socities commodified images of sex and succesful heteronormative relationships are pumped into our eyeballs daily on macro and micro levels and thus the asexual could be left feeling like freaks because the overt nature of the relationship and family unit are rammed down our throats relentlessly?


 
in part, something like that.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 5, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> If the opportunity ever arises, I'm nicking that.


 
"Boldly, I took it for my own".


----------



## Limerick Red (Jul 5, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> If the opportunity ever arises, I'm nicking that.


you mean crowdsourcing it!


----------



## sihhi (Jul 5, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> in part, something like that.


 
But unmarried women who seek no partners also experience this - it's the inevitable result from a sexist and privatised society.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 5, 2013)

sihhi said:


> But unmarried women who seek no partners also experience this - it's the inevitable result from a sexist and privatised society.


 
yup, that it is.  no-one benefits - well, except those that do, obv.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 5, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I think this is worth quoting, even without comment, as it needs to be emphasised again and again.
> 
> Laurie can tell Malcolm not to listen to us 'babe' cos there's 'loads of better working class activists'. But she'd not dare say that about anyone black, gay or from a religious minority. They don't even apply their own theory consistently - intersectionality claims to take into account all forms of oppression yet in reality it uses forms of oppression other than class to completely remove class from their analysis.


 
They don't apply it consistently because it's impossible to apply consistently.  The good side-effect is that it means that people utilising the system do show themselves up as hypocrites consistently.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> On reflection, I reckon LP ghost wrote Watson's resignation letter for him.


 
Luckily for Watson, her poetic muse didn't strike, or the resignation letter could have been another "*Saudade*:

T_here are more of us than you think, kicking off our high-heeled shoes to run and being told "not in the corridors of power"_

_The best minds of my generation consumed by greed, expense account fetishism-_

_Who ripped tights and dripping make up hung alone in bedsits satsuma-in-mouth waiting for transfiguration._

_Who ran half dressed out of department stores yelling that we didn’t want to work for the proles_

_Who glowing high and hopeful were the last to leave the bar our skin crackling with lust and sweat and pure ethanol_

_Who wrote poetry on each other’s arms and cared more about fucking people over than being fuckable_

Etc, etc, etc.


----------



## andysays (Jul 5, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> was a plank of it going to be how in western capitalist societies commodified images of sex and successful hetero-normative relationships are pumped into our eyeballs daily on macro and micro levels and thus the asexual could be left feeling like freaks because the overt nature of the relationship and family unit are rammed down our throats relentlessly?


 
That's not a plank, it's a whole bloody timber yard


----------



## J Ed (Jul 5, 2013)

cesare said:


> On reflection, I reckon LP ghost wrote Watson's resignation letter for him.


 

lol that would explain so much!


----------



## smokedout (Jul 6, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I have mixed thoughts on whether people who do BDSM are "oppressed"
> 
> plainly there's a lot of prejudice/misunderstandings about it but oppression? not sure. to me that like implies something systematic, although i'm sure with some of the laws that are on the books, the operation spanner case etc ...


 
sorry missed this, dont think that was his point (that people involved in bdsm are oppressed) - the idea i think was that any form of non traditional, non procreative sex was queer, whether blokes watching lesbian porn or a woman who fancies someone in a firemans uniform - the idea being that sexuality is about more than just making babies and man & wife and any deviation from that could be considered queer so leave people the fuck alone about who and how they fuck because you ain't any different

gotta remember this was in the 80s, when bdsm/fetish was invisible let alone fashionable, transgenderism would get you beaten up and possibly even arrested anywhere outside of soho, it was illegal to have sex if you were gay until you were 21 and it was a criminal offence to show an erect penis on film

there's been an astonishing social change towards sexuality in a very short period, and one that seems almost taken for granted, as if it has always been this way


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 6, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Are the thousand and one paraphilias and odd mental and bodily quirks that humans also oppression/privilege?
> 
> Also since when is Tom Watson Molly's (or anybody's friend)?
> 
> ...


 
Tom Watson falls for the age old curse of having been to glastonbury- you have to mention it no matter how unrelated or inappropriate that might be.


----------



## barney_pig (Jul 6, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i do believe that a former urbanite did some very good research into asexuality.  interesting stuff.  many people on ADs report a massive or total loss of their sexual drive - and indeed for some it turns out to be a very liberating positive thing.


Not for the person married to them though


----------



## rekil (Jul 7, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/353902531065290754


> I have not watched a single tennis match this year, because I wildly dislike twee patriotism, competitive sports and summer. I'm sorry.


Laura trolling the normals and sheeple. And she has twee patriotism and weird anglocentrism coming out her ears ffs. How's this. "I come from the best city in the world ever. I come from London." Not to mention all the Dr.Who/tube/tea/oxford union bollocks and general anglocentrism. 

Surely "feminists" should be unconditionally supporting women involved in sport? Apropos of nothing: World numbers 5 and 11, Sara "anti-Inter" Errani and Roberta Vinci playing football.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 7, 2013)

it is a pretty rich statement to make given that she is a danny boyle olympic ceremony style patriot, the bragg mould.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 7, 2013)

Laura talking about twee patriotism?


----------



## J Ed (Jul 7, 2013)

Maybe she prefers bombastic marching patriotism


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 8, 2013)

Yeah rather than the twee patriotism let's have the hardcore variety. Maybe she could do a charity walk and give the money to a charity that makes patriotism less twee.


----------



## Favelado (Jul 8, 2013)

No wait! New York is the best city in the world . No, London. No, New York! Exactly what everyone in the media thinks because the Anglophone commentariat is so heavily based in those those two cities. If middle-class New Yorkers and Londoners spent more time talking to people from other cities at home and around the world, they wouldn't be so fucking unbearable.

With regards to "I don't like summer" etc. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn't. It's hard to know what's real just because of the sheer amount of posturing and dishonesty from her. I'm pretty sure she pretended to be drunk on her Twitter timeline the other week. All to create some kind of image or message or something.

Maybe she's just messed up, she had lots of problems when she was younger. Maybe she's just insecure and she just needs love and looking after. Maybe if she could drop all the posturing she could really become a decent journalist. Maybe that's what will happen one day.

Then again, maybe she'll end up dropping the politics, going for the filthy lucre and end up writing some kind of Burchill column for whoever will cough up for the next 40 years.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 8, 2013)

She already interned at Spiked Online, I'm pretty sure she has no actual principles or those that she does have are malleable to say the least.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 8, 2013)

When did she do that?


----------



## J Ed (Jul 8, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/statuses/333567471955103745


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 8, 2013)

Funnily enough I knew somebody in the SP who had done that ...


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> She already interned at Spiked Online, I'm pretty sure she has no actual principles or those that she does have are malleable to say the least.


 
Spiked are such a bunch of cunts its not even funny. The worst sort of dabblers. Toe dipping into left politics in order to stand arch and comment from the eyrie of grown up eagalism. May they fucking rot from the inside out.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Funnily enough I knew somebody in the SP who had done that ...


 
You look like you've got a nasty case of the Arborophile's Ellipsis.


----------



## newbie (Jul 8, 2013)

Catching up.

There's an agenormative factor to the pages of discussion about asexuality that troubles me. Probably the largest intersection to embrace both the reality and the liberation of the asexual life are the elderly, who have not been mentioned once. How dare an informed discussion of interesectional identification fail to take account of such a large group who are oppressed by such agenormative assumptions. That they simultaneously tut tut about the sexualisation of wider society, and thus may be seen as contributing to the oppression of the sexually active, is merely a paradox.

I think a serious examination of sexual privilege, if that's what it is (be honest, there's a strong body of elder thought that it's actually a driving force so strong as to be oppressive, and to be free of it is true liberation) is not only necessary but mandatory.


posted in solidarity with the asexual elders, but not seeking to speak for them.


----------



## rosecore (Jul 8, 2013)

> *Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed*  14h
> Good grief, can't believe how much grief I'm getting for being a bit cynical about the tennis. Always surprises me how vicious people get.
> 
> 
> ...


----------



## J Ed (Jul 8, 2013)

Owen Jones intervenes lol... https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/354151957830705152


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Owen Jones intervenes lol... https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/354151957830705152


 

solidaritea at 4 pm


----------



## rosecore (Jul 8, 2013)

Her mini Wimbledon rant was so unnecessary when it was a feel-good moment for any tennis/Murray fan. Not that she was trying to put the attention on herself or anything...


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 8, 2013)

Shit I'm not the world's best tennis fan, I do like playing it though (although I'm crap) and I don't have a clue who is who in the tennis world but I was pleased when Andy Murray won, it's been such a long time since the UK won anything especially something as important as Wimbledon.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 8, 2013)

I don't even understand the rules of tennis. I kept hoping a heroic dog would come sailing in from leftfield and snatch the ball, running away to freedom while being chased by a load of irate fans before being cornered on murrays mound and defiantly eating the ball before the horrified crowd


----------



## JHE (Jul 8, 2013)

There is an obvious problem with the comparison with a child standing in front of the TV:  the child impedes people's view of the TV, while LP's comments do not impede anyone's view of Wimbledon.

Twitter is a medium which promotes the publishing of trivia, including trivial opinions on, for example, sports events.  (The same is true of bulletin boards like u75, though fewer people read bulletin boards.)

Some young hack says she doesn't like summer, competitive sport or twee patriotism and so doesn't like Wimbledon.  So what?  Why do people get so bitchy?  In fact, why read her Twitterings in the first place?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 8, 2013)

JHE said:


> There is an obvious problem with the comparison with a child standing in front of the TV: the child impedes people's view of the TV, while LP's comments do not impede anyone's view of Wimbledon.
> 
> Twitter is a medium which promotes the publishing of trivia, including trivial opinions on, for example, sports events. (The same is true of bulletin boards like u75, though fewer people read bulletin boards.)
> 
> *Some young hack says she doesn't like summer, competitive sport or twee patriotism and so doesn't like Wimbledon. So what*? Why do people get so bitchy? In fact, why read her Twitterings in the first place?


 
its irritating posturing from someone who is all for a kind of soft left englandism the rest of the time.

I'm not on twitter so I have to wait till the tweets get posted here before I can get annoyed.

140 character cunts


----------



## BigTom (Jul 8, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Shit I'm not the world's best tennis fan, I do like playing it though (although I'm crap) and I don't have a clue who is who in the tennis world but I was pleased when Andy Murray won, it's been such a long time since the UK won anything especially something as important as Wimbledon.


 
Nah, loads of olympics stuff, Tour De France, F1, Champions cup/league, the Ashes... UK people/teams have won loads of things in the past few years, and I don't follow any sports so I bet there's even more. Just been a very long time since a men's champion at Wimbledon and of course that's on home soil so looms larger than the TDF or F1. 
Oh, and the Oxford-Cambridge boat race. The UK wins that every year 

I couldn't give a toss about wimbledon or any other sport, but I just don't say anything. Shiv Malik bang on with his comment there, if you're not interested in something, just keep quiet, no need to shout about how uninterested you are, people will learn you aren't interested by the fact you never talk about it or join in those conversations.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 8, 2013)

re: the attention grabbing thing, in a similar vein on twitter while saying that she is uninterested in the tennis she let us know that she would be willing to fuck Andy Murray which while obviously fine doesn't make her seem like she is trying to do anything other than get attention although to be fair she has made a decent living out of _monetizing_ attention so why stop now.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 8, 2013)

Edit - oh god I just looked at the comments on that, is this stuff satire?


*paulusthewoodgnome* ‏@woodgnomology18h​@PennyRed Actually, in light of yesterday's Bartoli atrocity, gender-balance demands a wouldn't.
*Smedley Butler* ‏@epivalent18h​@PennyRed same, and i have hetero-aligned outside genitals


----------



## YouSir (Jul 8, 2013)

Much as I dislike Laurie Penny some of the desperate attempts to slate her on this thread are a bit, well, disturbing really. Wrong and mediocre she may be but the trawling through the minutiae of her life in search of disapproval fodder is just a bit wrong really, isn't it?


----------



## killer b (Jul 8, 2013)

ooh, who's done that?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 8, 2013)

every five minutes some cunt turns up to cry misogyny, despite the wildly sprawling nature of the thread. Sometimes its even penny herself


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 8, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Spiked are such a bunch of cunts its not even funny. The worst sort of dabblers. Toe dipping into left politics in order to stand arch and comment from the eyrie of grown up eagalism. May they fucking rot from the inside out.


 
As  if the left is a private swimming pool fine with a  members only policy.

Some of Spiked's stuff is good imo .


----------



## YouSir (Jul 8, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> every five minutes some cunt turns up to cry misogyny, despite the wildly sprawling nature of the thread. Sometimes its even penny herself


 

Who said anything about misogyny? Or the thread as a whole for that matter?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 8, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> *As if the left is a private swimming pool fine with a members only policy.*
> 
> Some of Spiked's stuff is good imo .


 

I never said it was, but the spiked school of arch commentary is just shit. They don't even have a paper for gods sake 

but no I cannot recall encountering an article that did not annoy me


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 8, 2013)

YouSir said:


> Who said anything about misogyny? Or the thread as a whole for that matter?


 

don't pretend you weren't thinking it.


----------



## YouSir (Jul 8, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> don't pretend you weren't thinking it.



Oh piss off, don't tell me what I'm thinking.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 8, 2013)

if you stop thinking it I won't have to


----------



## YouSir (Jul 8, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> if you stop thinking it I won't have to


 

I don't have the fucking energy. Attribute whatever motivations to me you want and I'll form my opinion of you accordingly.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 8, 2013)

YouSir said:


> I don't have the fucking energy. Attribute whatever motivations to me you want and I'll form my opinion of you accordingly.


 

yes sorry, that was just me being a baiting cockhead for my own amusement

but if you look at this thread its really not solely about penny and her life. Indeed any signs of over-obsession are swiftly slapped into touch


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Maybe she prefers bombastic marching patriotism


 
_"Pfennig, Pfennig, uber alles..."_


----------



## Tom A (Jul 8, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Spiked are such a bunch of cunts its not even funny. The worst sort of dabblers. Toe dipping into left politics in order to stand arch and comment from the eyrie of grown up eagalism. May they fucking rot from the inside out.


 
They are pretty insidious because a lot of their rhetoric is quite seductive to liberal Guardianista thinkers and even more radical types, and they have their fingers in quite a lot of pies too, and people may not be aware of their true political affiliations.


----------



## Tom A (Jul 8, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> every five minutes some cunt turns up to cry misogyny, despite the wildly sprawling nature of the thread. Sometimes its even penny herself


 
The Intersectional Empire Strikes Back...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 8, 2013)

YouSir said:


> Oh piss off, don't tell me what I'm thinking.


 
He's a member of the Illuminati. He not only knows what you're thinking, he directs you to think it, too!


----------



## Sue (Jul 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Edit - oh god I just looked at the comments on that, is this stuff satire?
> 
> 
> *paulusthewoodgnome* ‏@woodgnomology
> ...


 
'Hetero-aligned outside genitals'?


----------



## JimW (Jul 8, 2013)

YouSir said:


> Much as I dislike Laurie Penny some of the desperate attempts to slate her on this thread are a bit, well, disturbing really. Wrong and mediocre she may be but the trawling through the minutiae of her life in search of disapproval fodder is just a bit wrong really, isn't it?


 
Come on, it's all she's useful for (and who'd read her otherwise?). It's not as if she's averse to parasiting the details of everyone else's lives as grist to her me-me-mill.


----------



## treelover (Jul 8, 2013)

New Statesman have been deleting comments on their site about the Unite affair, if they are critical of N/S's clear support for the purge and of the hacks endorsement,


----------



## Tom A (Jul 8, 2013)

treelover said:


> New Statesman have been deleting comments on their site about the Unite affair, if they are critical of N/S's clear support for the purge and of the hacks endorsement,


 
Time to kick up a stink on this? Although it's not like the New Statesman's opinions mean much to the average prole.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 8, 2013)

treelover said:


> New Statesman have been deleting comments on their site about the Unite affair, if they are critical of N/S's clear support for the purge and of the hacks endorsement,


 

Scum. I hope their piss poor magazine goes under.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 8, 2013)

They are (and are seen) as "the left" though. 

Bunch of arsewipes


----------



## rekil (Jul 8, 2013)

It's a bit surprising that there's been no mention of Bartoli's painting anywhere. Derivative? Hetero-normative? Anti-intersectional? A little bit patriarchy?


----------



## J Ed (Jul 8, 2013)

Did Marion Bartoli do that? It looks cool


----------



## rekil (Jul 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Did Marion Bartoli do that? It looks cool


https://twitter.com/bartoli_marion/status/351805049250398209


----------



## J Ed (Jul 8, 2013)

Has the disgusting comment about her by the BBC presenter been discussed yet? Horrible, and a relatively muted reaction to it too.


----------



## agricola (Jul 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Has the disgusting comment about her by the BBC presenter been discussed yet? Horrible, and a relatively muted reaction to it too.


 
TBH its amazing how much Inverdale gets away with.


----------



## andysays (Jul 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Has the disgusting comment about her by the BBC presenter been discussed yet? Horrible, and a relatively muted reaction to it too.


 
Asked about Inverdale's comments, Bartoli said: "It doesn't matter, honestly. I am not blonde, yes. That is a fact. Have I dreamt about having a model contract? No. I'm sorry.​"But have I dreamed about winning Wimbledon? Absolutely, yes."​ 
Not being a tennis fan, I've never heard of Marion Bartoli, but she clearly pisses all over John Inverdale in the class department.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Has the disgusting comment about her by the BBC presenter been discussed yet? Horrible, and a relatively muted reaction to it too.


 
Yes, lots of commentary on it in the sports forums - wouldn't say muted reaction personally, saw lots and lots of angry reactions since saturday and maybe two or three dickish ones.


----------



## Buckaroo (Jul 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Has the disgusting comment about her by the BBC presenter been discussed yet? Horrible, and a relatively muted reaction to it too.


 
It has and he apologised for saying she was ugly but reckoned he said it in a nice way.


----------



## Sue (Jul 8, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> It has and he apologised for saying she was ugly but reckoned he said it in a nice way.


 
Well that's alright then. I never mind when people say nasty things about my appearance if they reckon they're saying them in a nice way.   (At Inverdale, not you.)


----------



## sihhi (Jul 8, 2013)

His sexism is completely unacceptable. Inverdale, a very rich middle-class parent of two, imagines this to be supportive parenting towards 12-14 year old girls (in his mind, he's bigging up her dad):

"_Listen, you are never going to be, you know, a looker. You are never going to be somebody like a Sharapova, you're never going to be 5ft 11, you're never going to be somebody with long legs __so you have to compensate for that. __You are going to have to be the most dogged, determined fighter that anyone has ever seen on the tennis court if you are going to make it'_

Justine Henin was shorter than Bartoli, Serena is 5cm taller, Radwanska is only 2cm taller. What does being a champion and height have to do with determination? On what level does it have to with the sport?

No televised apology explaining why it's wrong to judge people on the basis of their appearances (he has led the Radio 5 Live paralympic and disabled sport coverage), nothing for a women's organisation in order to actually make amends.


----------



## RubyToogood (Jul 8, 2013)

While we're on sexism by sports commentators, one of ITV's Tour de France commentators said the other day "Somebody tell Geraint Thomas's mum that it's safe to come out of the kitchen now, because he's finished".   
(He had a cracked pelvis.)


----------



## J Ed (Jul 8, 2013)

This is interesting - an Egyptian critique of the politics of identity and their consequences on what is happening there  http://linkis.com/www.madamasr.com/con/cxxw


----------



## caleb (Jul 8, 2013)

This is also interesting, a review of Vivek Chibber's new book 'Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital', a critique of 'Subaltern Studies', which has undoubtedly had an influence on a lot of the identity / privilege / intersectionalista politics: http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/3937


----------



## sihhi (Jul 8, 2013)

J Ed said:


> This is interesting - an Egyptian critique of the politics of identity and their consequences on what is happening there http://linkis.com/www.madamasr.com/con/cxxw


 
Better link here:- http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12779/on-sheep-and-infidels
It's not really about identity politics in the sense it's used in intersectinal feminism.
It's about Egypt with useful observations but it's the voice of a liberal as you can see here "I voted for Mohamed Morsi in the second round of the presidential elections (to keep out Ahmed Shafiq)."
Every socialist group called for a boycott in the second round to register disgust with both betrayers of the uprising even before they took office.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 8, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Better link here:- http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12779/on-sheep-and-infidels
> It's not really about identity politics in the sense it's used in intersectinal feminism.
> It's about Egypt with useful observations but it's the voice of a liberal as you can see here "I voted for Mohamed Morsi in the second round of the presidential elections (to keep out Ahmed Shafiq)."
> Every socialist group called for a boycott in the second round to register disgust with both betrayers of the uprising even before they took office.


 

You are right, but this is the bit that resonated most with me "I state all this because Egyptian politics and society in general are split along identity lines in a way that they have never been in the last three years. This problem is so chronic that *the merits or flaws of an argument are almost entirely determined by who is making the argument* in a haze of fury and suspicion."

Liberal or not the author could very easily be talking about a lot of situations that have left me feeling very frustrated in the past.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jul 8, 2013)

.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 9, 2013)

Can someone please tell me what 





> hetero-aligned outside genitals


 are?

If I had to guess I'd usually think outside genitals was a euphemism for a willy (with inside genitals as a euphemism for a front bottom) but I don't think that's what she means. Seriously, has anyone got a clue what she's on about here?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 9, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Can someone please tell me what are?
> 
> If I had to guess I'd usually think outside genitals was a euphemism for a willy but I don't think that's what she means. Seriously, has anyone got a clue what she's on about here?


i have no idea. i didn't know that non-hetero people had different genitals *checks own, then remembers that all ladybits are different anyway*


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 9, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i have no idea. i didn't know that non-hetero people had different genitals *checks own, then remembers that all ladybits are different anyway*


 
My nan had an outside toilet - maybe they're genitals that are suited to using facilities like those - maybe they don't shrink in the cold or something? Although if this is the case then the 'hetero-aligned' part remains a mystery.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 9, 2013)

Just to be clear, I have no interest in Laurie Penny's genitals - whether they be inside, outside, hetero-aligned or otherwise - I'm just confused by the terminology used


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 9, 2013)

nor have i. and so am i. but i *am* interested in my own. after having had a good stare/rummage, i would like to start a *misaligned genital equality for all!!!1!!2!!* campaign 

reckon we could crowdsource funding?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 9, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> nor have i. and so am i. but i *am* interested in my own. after having had a good stare/rummage, i would like to start a *misaligned genital equality for all!!!1!!2!!* campaign
> 
> reckon we could crowdsource funding?


 
Mine are misaligned too - after spending about 20 minutes with a spirit level I can tell you (whether you want to know or not) that my left pendulum is a good 5mm lower than my right one - is this normal 

Apparently hetero-aligned outside genitals means she is cis-gendered. I still don't really understand what non-hetero-aligned genitals might be though. Surely if someone born with male genitals has an operation to turn them into female genitals they're a woman anyway and so they have hetero-aligned outside genitals too? Isn't she implicitly saying that trans women aren't really women? Or would trans women (or men for that matter) who either haven't had the op yet or don't intend to have non-hetero-aligned genitals?

It's almost like this language is custom designed to make people say offensive stuff by accident. I'm glad I've seen it on here and had the chance to find out what it means because if I was a bit pissed and someone said something to me about outside genitals I'd probably say something stupid like 'are you saying you've got a cock lol' which would be a fucking terrible thing to say to a trans person 

I've only known a couple of trans people in my time but thankfully they spoke in English rather than intersectional wankspeak so this problem never came up.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 9, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> It's almost like this language is custom designed to make people say offensive stuff by accident. I'm glad I've seen it on here and had the chance to find out what it means because if I was a bit pissed and someone said something to me about outside genitals I'd probably say something stupid like 'are you saying you've got a cock lol' which would be a fucking terrible thing to say to a trans person


every cis woman should own a cock, tbf (disclaimer: if they want to. and assuming there's no assexuality bias. and fuckit, fleshlights are fine too if i'm going for full equality. we'll have no phallocentry here etc)
mine's the best purchase i ever made


----------



## Tom A (Jul 9, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> It's almost like this language is custom designed to make people say offensive stuff by accident.


 
And to get people to build preconceptions and make judgements on a large swathe of people in an [oppressed group] even though the majority do speak English (or whatever language is commonplace where they live/grew up in), rather than Intersectionalese.



> I'm glad I've seen it on here and had the chance to find out what it means because if I was a bit pissed and someone said something to me about outside genitals I'd probably say something stupid like 'are you saying you've got a cock lol' which would be a fucking terrible thing to say to a trans person


 
With some of the more twatty types, it's almost is if they dig the pitfall just so they can attack you when you stray into it. Of course, the oppressed person makes the rules, those that are called out have no right to appeal, only to grovel, admit how wrong they are and to beg for their allydom to be reinstated  But using terminology that only their fellow intersectional brethren will understand is just asking for trouble, not only will no one in The Real World™ understand a bloody word of it, it's downright elitist, attacking people who don't understand the lingo. "Hetero-aligned outside genitals" - that's just gobbledygook - WTF does it mean?!? It's almost parody! At least (thanks to A level chemistry) I knew immediately what was meant by "cisgender", and have no more a problem with the term any I would with "heterosexual".



> I've only known a couple of trans people in my time but thankfully they spoke in English rather than intersectional wankspeak so this problem never came up.


 

This is how I deal with those who are prone towards "intersectional wankspeak" - apologise for any faux pas I end up committing that offend said person, but not for getting confused by their intersectional jargon. If they accept it and not set out to tar and feather me - good. If not, then I add them to the long list of people who's opinions I don't give a shit about


----------



## Tom A (Jul 9, 2013)

Also in the case of cismen (and indeed transwomen who haven't had sexual reassignment surgery), one bollock usually (if not always) dangles lower than the other, so how's that for misalignment?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 9, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Has the disgusting comment about her by the BBC presenter been discussed yet? Horrible, and a relatively muted reaction to it too.


 
I don't even get what he's on about - I just did a google image search and, to use the language Laurie used about Andy Murray (and since it's Lauriespeak it can't be objectification),



> would.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 9, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Also in the case of cismen (and indeed transwomen who haven't had sexual reassignment surgery), one bollock usually (if not always) dangles lower than the other, so how's that for misalignment?


 
I'm a pipe fitter by trade. If it's not perfectly level it's fucking misaligned


----------



## JimW (Jul 9, 2013)

Having a pipe that's fitter than mine is a kind of privilege too, you know   Check yourself - oh, you already did, with a level no less.


----------



## Tom A (Jul 9, 2013)

How many people will be fishing out their plumblines (or fashioning their own makeshift ones) and spirit levels to check the alignment of their various organs by the end of tonight, I wonder?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 9, 2013)

JimW said:


> Having a pipe that's fitter than mine is a kind of privilege too, you know  Check yourself - oh, you already did, with a level no less.


my pipe's well fit


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 9, 2013)

Tom A said:


> How many people will be fishing out their plumblines (or fashioning their own makeshift ones) and spirit levels to check the alignment of their various organs by the end of tonight, I wonder?


the wonders of mirrors and cameraphones 
and coffee. coffee has played a major role in my evening


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 9, 2013)

My grandma often says offensive things about Muslims, black people and how she likes Nigel Farage. I used to argue with her a lot about these things but then I thought that I might be silencing the voice of an elderly person who is not as privileged as me because of her age, so then I stopped arguing with her. But she always tells me how much she enjoys arguing and wants an argument, so is my not wanting to have an argument with her on topics such as immigration, the greatness of thatcher and so on just me trying to silence her voice again by stopping her arguing with me?


----------



## sihhi (Jul 9, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> My grandma often says offensive things about Muslims, black people and how she likes Nigel Farage. I used to argue with her a lot about these things but then I thought that I might be silencing the voice of an elderly person who is not as privileged as me because of her age, so then I stopped arguing with her. But she always tells me how much she enjoys arguing and wants an argument, so is my not wanting to have an argument with her on topics such as immigration, the greatness of thatcher and so on just me trying to silence her voice again by stopping her arguing with me?


 
You're not allowed to take this piss out of this stuff, frogwoman.
bc you're not a credible intersectionalist, no status as a real activist.
On th other hand people like LP or Ellie-Mae O Hagan are able to do so - both do their activism as "work for a living", so for them to make jokes about 'heterosexual genitalia' or misuse the concept for trigger warnings for fun is acceptable - it's legitimate destressing. 

https://twitter.com/MissEllieMae/status/354522735893942273

Labour's real selection scandal | Len McCluskey http://gu.com/p/3h6e9/tw  via @guardian [TRIGGER WARNING: CONTAINS PICTURE OF BLAIR]


----------



## stethoscope (Jul 9, 2013)

If its any consolation @SpineyNorman, I haven't got a fucking clue what 'hetero-aligned outside genitals' is supposed to mean either, and I ought to know about these things.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 9, 2013)

copliker said:


> It's a bit surprising that there's been no mention of Bartoli's painting anywhere. Derivative? Hetero-normative? Anti-intersectional? A little bit patriarchy?


 
<ProleDem interlude>
It is obvious from the suspiciously-erect stem of the rose, that the painting signifies both the quotidian nature of heteronormativity, with the thrusting rampancy of the male genitals making incursions whether welcome or not, and the essential artificiality of heterosexual relations in general, shrouded as they are with ritualistic behaviour such as flower-giving in the hope of sexual contact.  That the painting also signifies the indoctrination of the young into this _bourgeois_ perversion of natural sexuality, reveals the artist's true understanding of the mockery that is heteronormative sexuality.
</ProleDem interlude>


----------



## rekil (Jul 9, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> <ProleDem interlude>
> It is obvious from the suspiciously-erect stem of the rose, that the painting signifies both the quotidian nature of heteronormativity, with the thrusting rampancy of the male genitals making incursions whether welcome or not, and the essential artificiality of heterosexual relations in general, shrouded as they are with ritualistic behaviour such as flower-giving in the hope of sexual contact. That the painting also signifies the indoctrination of the young into this _bourgeois_ perversion of natural sexuality, reveals the artist's true understanding of the mockery that is heteronormative sexuality.
> </ProleDem interlude>


However, the prominent delineation of the rose, an emblem of so-called socialism, the jezebelesque hand maiden of class collaborationist liberalism, is clearly intended to 'cock a snook' at communism, particularly proper communism (proletarian democracy). Although we congratulate citizen Bartoli on her victory and naturally offer fanatically unconditional support against the common enemy, the male chauvinist private school sham BBC bell-end Inverdale, we feel compelled to provide an urgent but gentle reminder that tennis, like all sports, is an extreme form of Martovism and that by committing herself to her career and neglecting the current all-out no-nonsense class struggle, she is playing with fire.

The green snake of eco-fascism in there as well. Fucking hell.


----------



## cesare (Jul 9, 2013)

Pedantry being alive and well: cock a snook


----------



## rekil (Jul 9, 2013)

Ahhhh hetero-aligned outside genitals.


----------



## cesare (Jul 9, 2013)

copliker said:


> Ahhhh hetero-aligned outside genitals.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 9, 2013)

Long live non-alignment!


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 9, 2013)




----------



## frogwoman (Jul 9, 2013)

How do I tell whether my genitals are aligned? is it time to get a ruler out? may be a bit tricky


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 9, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> How do I tell whether my genitals are aligned? is it time to get a ruler out? may be a bit tricky


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 9, 2013)

is that some sort of BDSM device?


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 9, 2013)

Its one of Proletarian Democracy's prototype gender realignment tools but at the moment its only solar powered


----------



## caleb (Jul 9, 2013)




----------



## caleb (Jul 9, 2013)

Going back to the asexuality stuff, libcom have uploaded an archive of 'Solidarity for Social Revolution', full of interesting stuff, but also some shocking shit. There's an article called 'Thoughts on my Sexuality' which, well, have a read:

http://libcom.org/files/solidarity-04.pdf


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 9, 2013)

caleb said:


> Going back to the asexuality stuff, libcom have uploaded an archive of 'Solidarity for Social Revolution', full of interesting stuff, but also some shocking shit. There's an article called 'Thoughts on my Sexuality' which, well, have a read:
> 
> http://libcom.org/files/solidarity-04.pdf


 
That's a shame, 'cause the rest of that mag looks pretty good.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jul 9, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> That's a shame, 'cause the rest of that mag looks pretty good.


 
The bit reclaiming Robert Conquest for libertarian communism was a corker anyway.


----------



## caleb (Jul 9, 2013)

Full archive here:

http://libcom.org/library/solidarity-social-revolution-journal

Sure, there's some questionable stuff but I appreciate the eclecticism and the _attempt_ to do some serious stuff, alongside covering disputes, every day life and so on. Earlier on in the thread we've been talking about the output of ISN student group 'revsoc' with their zines and online blogs, and it makes even the most questionable stuff in here look excellent. 

edit: apart from that male separatist one, nothing can redeem that.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jul 9, 2013)

caleb said:


> Full archive here:
> 
> http://libcom.org/library/solidarity-social-revolution-journal
> 
> Sure, there's some questionable stuff but I appreciate the eclecticism and the _attempt_ to do some serious stuff, alongside covering disputes, every day life and so on. Earlier on in the thread we've been talking about the output of ISN student group 'revsoc' with their zines and online blogs, and it makes even the most questionable stuff in here look excellent.


 
As magazines go, it was interesting enough and it did contain useful material. But it also contained a large quantity of absolute horseshit. "Questionable" is an overly polite euphemism.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 9, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> The bit reclaiming Robert Conquest for libertarian communism was a corker anyway.


 
Come on, Nigel, you knew I was a middle-class reformist when you married me.

As for the male sexuality piece in that link, well it calls to me Levi-Strauss' line about Sartrean existentialism, that it was founded on the error of elevating one's own personal problems to the level of universal philosophical questions.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 9, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Come on, Nigel, you knew I was a middle-class reformist when you married me.
> 
> As for the male sexuality piece in that link, well it calls to me Levi-Strauss' line about Sartrean existentialism, that it was founded on the error of elevating one's own personal problems to the level of universal philosophical questions.


Errrrr... where would philosophy be without that strategy?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 9, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Errrrr... where would philosophy be without that strategy?


 
Fewer black polonecks sitting around saying "if existence precedes essence" while smoking them strong French fags.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 9, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Fewer black polonecks sitting around saying "if existence precedes essence" while smoking them strong French fags.


Meaning, we'd have no one to bitch about.


----------



## cesare (Jul 9, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Meaning, we'd have no one to bitch about.


Foucauld to bitch about


----------



## TruXta (Jul 9, 2013)

cesare said:


> Foucauld to bitch about


Not a Kant in sight.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 9, 2013)

Hegel, don't bother me.


----------



## cesare (Jul 9, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Not a Kant in sight.


Every one's a Winner \0/


----------



## cesare (Jul 9, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Hegel, don't bother me.


Getting run of the Mill now


----------



## TruXta (Jul 9, 2013)

Ayer, that'd be something.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 9, 2013)

Solidarity for self-management was Solidarity after it had gone through the therapist and identity politics wringer - provided the vanguard for aspects of the latter in fact. Very very different from the original Solidarity (and Social Revolution come to that).


----------



## cesare (Jul 9, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Solidarity for self-management was Solidarity after it had gone through the therapist and identity politics wringer - provided the vanguard for aspects of the latter in fact. Very very different from the original Solidarity (and Social Revolution come to that).


Even the name's a bit of a signpost


----------



## caleb (Jul 9, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Solidarity for self-management was Solidarity after it had gone through the therapist and identity politics wringer - provided the vanguard for aspects of the latter in fact. Very very different from the original Solidarity (and Social Revolution come to that).


 
Can you sketch that out a bit more? What's the link between the three?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 9, 2013)

Solidarity was the original group (or Socialism Reaffirmed as it was first called) - it came out of break with the old WRP sometime in th early 60s and became a pretty influential libertarian communist group with links to Socialism or Barbaraism and Noir et Rouge in france - they helped produce loads of councilist influenced analysis of modern stuff rather than just reproducing the same old stuff over and over, most of it of exceptional quality and probably the highpoint of non-trot communist stuff in this country post-war. Social Revolution came out of the post 60s rediscovery and recirculation of various non-bolshevik communist currents - mostly council communist but also the bordiguist derived italian left - and, various peoples involved in setting up the first ICC groups in this country (World Revolution at that time i think), along with people who had previously been in solidarity but left to from Revolutionary Perspectives (todays CWO) as well as SPGB refusniks. And then the wheel turned again and fed up of the tightness of these latter groups and repeated failed attempts at organisational realignment between them they then merged with the original Solidarity and produced Solidarity for Social Revolution and sort of wandered off into the labour party, local councilors and irrelevance.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jul 9, 2013)

Yeah, I'd be interested in more detail too. Particularly about the "therapist and identity politics wringer".


----------



## Tom A (Jul 9, 2013)

cesare said:


> Every one's a Winner \0/


 
Everyone's a winner, baby, and that's the truth...


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 9, 2013)

cesare said:


> Even the name's a bit of a signpost


 
It's not great is it? And to think it all started with the even worse _Socialism Reaffirmed.  _Should have tried _Up Yours._


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jul 9, 2013)

This essay seems to say that Social Revolution came out of the SPGB and then merged with Solidarity just after the proto-World Revolution (which would become the British ICC) split from it.
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/disband/solidarity/recollections.html


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 9, 2013)

That was written by this person. There was continuous crossover between all these groups right up until the early 90s. Bob's experience is a good example.


----------



## Nigel Irritable (Jul 9, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That was written by this person. There was continuous crossover between all these groups right up until the early 90s. Bob's experience is a good example.


 
Interesting. I hadn't realised that the SPGB, AF and various Left Communist grouplets were so connected. Did the crossover stop because Solidarity was the bridge between them?

Also, what was the therapy and identity politics stuff you mentioned earlier?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 9, 2013)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Interesting. I hadn't realised that the SPGB, AF and various Left Communist grouplets were so connected. Did the crossover stop because Solidarity was the bridge between them?
> 
> Also, what was the therapy and identity politics stuff you mentioned earlier?


 
I wouldn't say it stopped in the sense of a final stoppage, it was more the context that produced them changed so much that the amount of links that had previously existed and offered opportunities, the amount of people involved dwindled as class struggle itself faced a downturn of sorts in this country the 90s. Those who were involved prior to that point still co-operated (or refused to on principle) and shared their ideas - wildcat(s), subversion, ACF, Class War - or even the people doing more individual stuff like BM Blob and Combustion etc all had crossover from these previous groups, but they were operating in a different far tighter and less populated context from the 70s and 80s.

The therapy stuff is just the change from viewing class struggle as the key to changing yourself and society to seeing self-work, sorting yourself out as the key to changing society - so the interests changed and things became very inward looking. Which, from what various people who were involved in these groups at the time have told me, led to the more classically political being pissed off and joining the other attempts at regroupments that ended up in the labour party in the early-mid-80s - which itself helped produce two other developments - total rejection of labourism and identity politics by one set of these people following 83, and the growing influence of the ACF current (i.e anarchist communism influenced by left communist ideas on national liberation, trade unions etc) by people leaving the labour party and the swp. And the other was people finding a home in labour and local council politics based on the sort of crude identity politics within many local CLPs and labour ran councils - and just staying there until post-97.

There are at least four posters on here who went through all this stuff as participants aside from Bob (RIP) and i hope they read this and fill in the gaps and mistakes in the above.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 10, 2013)

caleb said:


> This is also interesting, a review of Vivek Chibber's new book 'Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital', a critique of 'Subaltern Studies', which has undoubtedly had an influence on a lot of the identity / privilege / intersectionalista politics: http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/3937


 
That's an excellent piece. I've put the Chibber book here - (not best version ever but perfectly readable) and the Chakrabarty book it is reply to is here. I've also added this excellent related piece from Chibber on The Decline of Class analysis in South Asian Studies.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 10, 2013)

Another interesting suggestion from Chibber that fits with a number of the points made earlier in the thread around the birth/growth of intersectionality - here he is replying to why he thinks post-colonial studies have become so influential in anglophone 'intellectual left':



> In my view, the prominence is strictly for social and historical reasons; it doesn’t express the value or worth of the theory, and that’s why I decided to write the book. I think postcolonial theory rose to prominence for a couple of reasons. One is that after the decline of the labor movement and the crushing of the Left in the 1970s, there wasn’t going to be any kind of prominent theory in academia that focused on capitalism, the working class, or class struggle. Many people have pointed this out: in university settings, it’s just unrealistic to imagine that any critique of capitalism from a class perspective is going to have much currency except in periods when there’s massive social turmoil and social upheaval.
> 
> So the interesting question is why there’s any kind of theory calling itself radical at all, since it’s not a classical anticapitalist theory. I think this has to do with two things: first, with changes in universities over the last thirty years or so, in which they’re no longer ivory towers like they used to be. They’re mass institutions, and these institutions have been opened up to groups that, historically, were kept outside: racial minorities, women, immigrants from developing countries. These are all people who experience various kinds of oppression, but not necessarily class exploitation. So there is, as it were, a mass base for what we might call oppression studies, which is a kind of radicalism — and it’s important, and it’s real. However, it’s not a base that’s very interested in questions of class struggle or class formation, the kinds of things that Marxists used to talk about.
> 
> Complementing this has been the trajectory of the intelligentsia. The generation of ’68 didn’t become mainstream as it aged. Some wanted to keep its moral and ethical commitments to radicalism. But like everyone else, it too steered away from class-oriented radicalism. So you had a movement from the bottom, which was a kind of demand for theories focusing on oppression, and a movement on top, which was among professors offering to supply theories focusing on oppression. What made them converge wasn’t just a focus on oppression, but the excision of class oppression and class exploitation from the story. And postcolonial theory, because of its own excision of capitalism and class — because it downplays the dynamics of exploitation — is a very healthy fit.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 10, 2013)

None of the greats of postcolonial theory - the Dipesh Chakrabartys, Edward Saids, Partha Chatterjees, Paul Gilroys etc - can ever say what it really is.

No one as yet has written in a fashion I can understand.


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## caleb (Jul 11, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> That's an excellent piece. I've put the Chibber book here - (not best version ever but perfectly readable) and the Chakrabarty book it is reply to is here. I've also added this excellent related piece from Chibber on The Decline of Class analysis in South Asian Studies.


 
Excellent stuff, thanks for that.


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## caleb (Jul 11, 2013)

Somebody posted this on facebook today; doesn't explicitly say 'journalist' but it resonates in many ways re: Penny and the 'radical journalist' bubble:



> " The academic, social worker, lawyer etc. may wish to attack capital but they characteristically do so by premising their resistance on the continued existence of their own role in a way unthinkable to the working class individual. Thus there are radical psychologists, radical philosophers, radical lawyers and so on,[26] but not radical bricklayers or radical roadsweepers! The latter are simply radical people who wish to escape their condition. By contrast, the former wish to engage in the struggle while at the same time retaining their middle class identities, including their specialized skills and roles. As such, their participation presupposes rather than fundamentally challenges the institutions and social relations that provide the basis of these identities.[27] It is no coincidence, it seems to us, that the leading figures of a post-autonomia scene which rejects (or at least neglects) the situationists' critique of roles and academia, and which redefines all areas of life - including academia - as working class, are themselves academics.[28]"


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## butchersapron (Jul 11, 2013)

That's from an old aufheben piece. Part of an attack on the idea and role of academics. Written by an academic.


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## rekil (Jul 13, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> And I'd be very surprised if she's read James Kelman. They have nothing in common.






			
				LP said:
			
		

> I'm not the best-read person I know by any means, but because of the way I read I'm one of the widest-read


That's you told. Did you read that Kelman essay? I wouldn't say she plagiarised it but the similarities were striking, put it that way. 

If she's really 'more Irish than English' as she claims then she should be forced to read Peig (and Toraiocht Dhiarmada Agus Grainne) like the rest of us.


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## Red Cat (Jul 13, 2013)

copliker said:


> That's you told. Did you read that Kelman essay? I wouldn't say she plagiarised it but the similarities were striking, put it that way.


 
I did. 

What did you find striking in particular?


----------



## rekil (Jul 13, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> I did.
> 
> What did you find striking in particular?


The bits about heroes, protaganists and expectations, how Kelman refers to token working class characters as "oddballs" while LP claims female characters were often "freaks". Of course it's problematic for LP that she's a product of the class and type of school that dominated the type of literature that Kelman is on about, but she can blank that out no problem. "Class analysis! - _Evanesco!_" Pffft!



			
				Kelman said:
			
		

> It is a peculiar thing that children like myself could identify with the pupils in those schools. I mean it was inconceivable that I would ever in my life meet up with boys from my own background, my culture and life experience, between these pages. Im not talking about Scottish kids in general Im talking about Scottish working class kids in general because it was possible to meet a scholarship boy or a boy from a colonial background, whether from Scotland or India or someplace. I cannot remember any African or Chinese boys making an entrance but perhaps it was possible, perhaps it did happen. These colonial boys would all be youthful aristocrats anyhow, back in their own country, even if they wore kilts, loin cloths or turbans, or whatever, they would be accepted as lower-rung aristocracy, and kids like Billy Bunter would give them the benefit of the doubt.
> 
> The English language as spoken by these young colonials always exhibited idiosyncratic mannerisms that were quite funny. They were exotic creatures and never made it as heroes in their own right. At the same time they were always supportive and loyal to boys such as Harry Wharton and Tom Merry. Kids like myself would identify with the last pair and other members of that regular cast of young English heroes, white christians to the core. There was no chance of me ever making a hero out of the exotic young colonials, even if one did happen to be Scottish. At eleven or twelve years of age who wants to be an oddball outsider with no sense of style and a funny way of talking.
> 
> ...


 



			
				LP said:
			
		

> Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else's. As a kid growing up with books and films and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that upset me more than anything else. It's a feeling that hit when I understood how few girls got to go on adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, before mainstream female leads very occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn't bring the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire.
> 
> Not being sure what story you're in anymore is a different experience depending on whether or not you were expecting to be the hero of that story. Low-status men, and especially women and girls, often don't have that expectation. We expect to be forgettable supporting characters, or sometimes, if we're lucky, attainable objects to be slung over the hero's shoulder and carried off the end of the final page.


Like I said I could be wrong but I wouldn't put anything past her. If there's one thing I know about ambitious private schoolsorts, it's that they're fantastic cheats, due in part to unshakeable chutzpah and a rabid sense of entitlement.


----------



## Firky (Jul 13, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Some shitheads have actually turned it into a subculture in which there is 24 role playing of "dominant" and "submissive" roles.
> 
> The whole thing is quite positively sick-making.


 

Richard Morgan takes the piss out of it all in his two Ringil Eskiath books (which are half baked). It's quite funny to see the fantasy genre turned upside down, inside out and then ridiculed. There's a bit of chin stroking going on between the lines that is missed because of the homoerotic anti-hero being the vehicle but it is quite well done. I bet there was a few people who got a shock they expected your normal run of the mill sword n sandal fantasy / scifi crossover and got full on hardcore gay sex with ancient aliens.

I think Morgan studied philosophy for a couple of years before switching to contemporary history (yes at Cambridge) which is why there's always an air of the political in his work but it's very rarely well executed. Still... Altered Carbon is one of the best sci-fis I've read and it features Quellcrist Falconer's gems 

I love his trilogy, I really do but it's so... I dunno, maybe this will explain better:



> “Every previous revolutionary movement in human history has made the same basic mistake. They’ve all seen power as a static apparatus, as a structure. And it’s not. It’s a dynamic, a flow system with two possible tendencies. Power either accumulates, or it diffuses through the system. In most societies, it’s in accumulative mode, and most revolutionary movements are only really interested in reconstituting the accumulation in a new location. A genuine revolution has to reverse the flow. And no one ever does that, because they’re all too fucking scared of losing their conning tower moment in the historical process. If you tear down one agglutinative power dynamic and put another one in its place, you’ve changed nothing. You’re not going to solve any of that society’s problems, they’ll just reemerge at a new angle. You’ve got to set up the nanotech that will deal with the problems on its own. You’ve got to build the structures that allow for diffusion of power, not re-grouping. Accountability, demodynamic access, systems of constituted rights, education in the use of political infrastructure”


 



> “The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.
> 
> Quellcrist Falconer
> Things I Should Have Learned by Now, Volume II”


 

See what I mean?

Anyway, not sure what my point was there - just rambling as I wait for my jacket potato.


----------



## Red Cat (Jul 13, 2013)

copliker said:


> The bits about heroes, protaganists and expectations, how Kelman refers to token working class characters as "oddballs" while LP claims female characters were often "freaks". Of course it's problematic for LP that she's a product of the class and type of school that dominated the type of literature that Kelman is on about, but she can blank that out no problem. "Class analysis! - _Evanesco!_" Pffft!


 
But he doesn't really talk of wc characters, he talks of characters who are not middle-class English, but middle-class something else, Scottish, Indian, and how their 'oddballness' creates a normalising of middle-class English culture and a normalising of the middle-class English voice, the voice of the powerful in the stories he read as a child, and as the one and only voice of LITERATURE. He's talking about how ideology works, through literature, by creating an identification with the oppressor, and silencing working-class people's natural voices. For Kelman, writing is about getting to grips with reality, and he _must_ use his natural voice to do that. It's a political act.

Whereas LP is talking about...what a shame it is that there aren't more powerful female characters that she can identify with to _escape_ reality and go on some adventures.


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## rekil (Jul 13, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> But he doesn't really talk of wc characters, he talks of characters who are not middle-class English, but middle-class something else,


Yes, my error, I had meant to correct that. But the point stands, it's possible that LP read Kelman's essay and eviscerated it to suit her nefariously trite purposes.


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## Red Cat (Jul 14, 2013)

It's possible, I suppose, but they're just such different arguments I don't get that at all. He's arguing that art should be about the truth of ordinary life; she's arguing that girls should be heroes in stories of their own making. They're on different planets. Which doesn't mean she's not capable of using an idea and emptying it of its meaning, it's just that I can't even imagine she'd be interested in Kelman in the first place.


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## Tom A (Jul 14, 2013)

Apparently saying "hey guys" (even in the genderless manner it's usually meant), is part of a sexist conspiracy to "censor women out of the written and spoken word". Somehow I think misogyny would carry on even if such "sexist" rhetoric was eliminated from pro-feminist discourse...


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## Firky (Jul 14, 2013)

Molly Crabapple monetising impunity:

http://mollycrabapple.com/2013/07/14/3096/


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## Idris2002 (Jul 14, 2013)

Firky said:


> Richard Morgan takes the piss out of it all in his two Ringil Eskiath books (which are half baked). It's quite funny to see the fantasy genre turned upside down, inside out and then ridiculed. There's a bit of chin stroking going on between the lines that is missed because of the homoerotic anti-hero being the vehicle but it is quite well done. I bet there was a few people who got a shock they expected your normal run of the mill sword n sandal fantasy / scifi crossover and got full on hardcore gay sex with ancient aliens.
> 
> I think Morgan studied philosophy for a couple of years before switching to contemporary history (yes at Cambridge) which is why there's always an air of the political in his work but it's very rarely well executed. Still... Altered Carbon is one of the best sci-fis I've read and it features Quellcrist Falconer's gems
> 
> ...


You might find this interesting (spoilers for season 2 of Game of Thrones)


Also NSFW


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 15, 2013)

Pulling together a number of the strands of this thread:

Help Defend Jacobin 



> On July 10, the left-wing magazine Jacobin published an article by Samantha Allen titled "CounterPunch and the War on Transgender People," which challenged a strand of radical feminism whose proponents, in Allen's words, see a transgender woman as someone who "invades 'real' women's spaces and perpetuates harmful gender stereotypes," and who acts "as a blight on the feminist movement."
> 
> In particular, Allen singled out Catherine Brennan as a leading proponent of trans-exclusive radical feminism--to the extent that Brennan has argued "against legal protections based on 'gender identity or expression,'" according to Allen. Allen also cited the CounterPunch website for publishing an article by Julian Vigo that defended Brennan and condescendingly attacked transgender activists for daring to criticize those who consider them a "blight."


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## tufty79 (Jul 15, 2013)

Tom A said:


> Apparently saying "hey guys" (even in the genderless manner it's usually meant), is part of a sexist conspiracy to "censor women out of the written and spoken word". Somehow I think misogyny would carry on even if such "sexist" rhetoric was eliminated from pro-feminist discourse...


'hey folks' is the accepted greeting. apparently.


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## killer b (Jul 15, 2013)

Artem Lusk said:


> In fact anybody but an American saying 'guys' in any context is a twat.


would you like a fight?


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Jul 15, 2013)

Artem Lusk said:


> yet one more example of the twattery that is rampant in today's society.


 
Would another example be people having tattoos?


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## Delroy Booth (Jul 15, 2013)

LLETSA?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 15, 2013)

Artem Lusk said:


> To be fair, women addressing other women or mixed company as 'guys' is yet one more example of the twattery that is rampant in today's society.
> 
> In fact anybody but an American saying 'guys' in any context is a twat.


 






hello again *waves*


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## el-ahrairah (Jul 15, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> LLETSA?


 





great minds...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 15, 2013)




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## killer b (Jul 15, 2013)

There really isnt any glory in outing him, guys.


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## Idris2002 (Jul 15, 2013)

Artem Lusk said:


> What is Game of Thrones? Genuine question.


 
Genuine answer: it is a TV series based on a series of fantasy novels.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 15, 2013)

Artem Lusk said:


> Undoubtedly. And multiple piercings. The mass outbreak of self-mutilation is disturbing, and another example of the erosion of individualism that gathers pace by the day.


 
Actually, round my way you get lots of 50 and 60 year old punks, apparently because that sort of thing was forbidden in the GDR, so they've had to make up for lost time.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 15, 2013)

Artem Lusk said:


> This is what the Wall was torn down for. Worldwide twattery.


 
Riek Machar, who challenged John Garang for leadership of South Sudanese liberation forces back in the early 90s, didn't have the ritual scarifications that are traditionally proof that a Nuer or Dinka man has gone through the male initiation rites. Yet he was also (like Garang) a pretty ruthless guy, and maybe even a bit of a twat.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 15, 2013)

Artem Lusk said:


> Twat pride worldwide.


 
We had an antifa demo in town the other week, when some neonazis tried to march through Halle. We stopped them getting past the railway station, and the antifa crowd included both normal people (lots of families with young kids) and also tattooed punk rockers.


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## JHE (Jul 15, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Actually, round my way you get lots of 50 and 60 year old punks, apparently because that sort of thing was forbidden in the GDR, so they've had to make up for lost time.


 

Ageing punks can jeer "noooooo fuuuuuutuure" with added conviction.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 15, 2013)

JHE said:


> Ageing punks can jeer "noooooo fuuuuuutuure" with added conviction.


 
Actual German antifa slogan: "Keine Zukunft fur Vergangenheit", i.e. "No future for the past".


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 15, 2013)

killer b said:


> There really isnt any glory in outing him, guys.


 
chillax man, the mods don't read this thread!


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## el-ahrairah (Jul 15, 2013)

Artem Lusk said:


> He doesn't mind, though. No hard feelings, guys.


 
*high fives*


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 15, 2013)

Artem Lusk said:


> Ah, I didn't realise that Brandon, the graduate who's just moved in next door but one with his girlfriend, with his tattooed calf and bicep, had been through some male initiation rite.
> 
> I just thought he'd been a member of Lager Soc.


 
We had a Japanese guy in QUB back in the 80s who was researching a Congolese ethnic group. He went through their male circumcision rite. . . and something went wrong, he had to be airlifted out, and was never the same again.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 15, 2013)

Artem Lusk said:


> Twat pride worldwide.


 

 v


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## Idris2002 (Jul 15, 2013)

Artem Lusk said:


> Oh.


 
I'm not having a go or anything, but are you OK? You don't seem your usual self.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 15, 2013)

Artem Lusk said:


> I've been feeling a bit 'fuck it all' for about a year, actually. Mid-life crisis maybe.


 
Well chin up. There are lots of people round here who think you're all right, even if you can be a pain in the arse sometimes.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 15, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Well chin up. There are lots of people round here who think you're all right, even if you can be a pain in the arse sometimes.


 
this, hope you manage to stick around a bit longer this time


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## Idris2002 (Jul 15, 2013)

Artem Lusk said:


> Actually, I quite like it.


Ac



Artem Lusk said:


> Not a chance.


 
Actually, you should give Game of Thrones a chance. It's view of the universe would sit fairly comfortably with your tendency to pessimism.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 15, 2013)

Maybe dye your hair, get a tattoo


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## The Pale King (Jul 15, 2013)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@*PennyRed* 1h
Writing some NSFW feminism. Not sure if I'll be allowed to publish it. #*sorrynotsorry*
 

Eh?


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## butchersapron (Jul 15, 2013)

> Later that night, as he thanked me for the best birthday present he had ever received, I explained I was going to have his ass tattooed. `Property of Leroy Jones. Access strictly forbidden except to owner.' I had it done a week later. You might see us around, my boy and me. I'm the one with the sharp suit and the big dick. He's the one with the tight ass, staring at his brother with silent love, ready at a moment's order to drop to his knees or to part his ass cheeks for his boss. If you see us, come say hi and get your wallet ready. I have lots of fit, prime boys you can buy -- and one very special one you can't


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## killer b (Jul 15, 2013)

never gets old


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## Sue (Jul 15, 2013)

What is this utter rubbish?


----------



## The Pale King (Jul 15, 2013)

*Paul Bernal* ‏@*PaulbernalUK* 11 Jul
Suffered from depression or mental health problems? Lost your job as a result? Need help? I'm #*HappyToPayYourBenefits*
Retweeted by *Laurie Penny*

 
Yuck. I'm not on twitter so don't know if this is doing the rounds, but it seems at best patronising, lordly and misguided and at worst it simply reinforces Tory logic w/r/t the social security system (i.e if you're not the kind of sort whose benefits I'm 'happy to pay' we will take them away and only give them to the 'deserving').


----------



## killer b (Jul 15, 2013)

Sue said:


> What is this utter rubbish?


Johanns incest nonce porn.


----------



## Sue (Jul 15, 2013)

killer b said:


> Johanns incest nonce porn.


Oh, Johann Hari? Can't say I'm familiar with his work...


----------



## Belushi (Jul 15, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Later that night, as he thanked me for the best birthday present he had ever received, I explained I was going to have his ass tattooed. `Property of Leroy Jones. Access strictly forbidden except to owner.' I had it done a week later. You might see us around, my boy and me. I'm the one with the sharp suit and the big dick. He's the one with the tight ass, staring at his brother with silent love, ready at a moment's order to drop to his knees or to part his ass cheeks for his boss. If you see us, come say hi and get your wallet ready. I have lots of fit, prime boys you can buy -- and one very special one you can't


 
That must be a huge elephant in the room at family get togethers.


----------



## Firky (Jul 15, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> *Paul Bernal* ‏@*PaulbernalUK* 11 Jul
> Suffered from depression or mental health problems? Lost your job as a result? Need help? I'm #*HappyToPayYourBenefits*
> Retweeted by *Laurie Penny*
> 
> Yuck. I'm not on twitter so don't know if this is doing the rounds, but it seems at best patronising, lordly and misguided and at worst it simply reinforces Tory logic w/r/t the social security system (i.e if you're not the kind of sort whose benefits I'm 'happy to pay' we will take them away and only give them to the 'deserving').


 

Billy Bragg said the most nauseating and smug thing in that hashtag campaign. It felt like a punch to the guts to read it.


----------



## caleb (Jul 15, 2013)

Here:



> *Billy Bragg* ‏@*billybragg*
> 12 Jul​I'm #*HappyToPayYourBenefits* because my fellow citizens paid for my benefits while I was learning to write songs


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 15, 2013)

I sense a targeted PD #payyourbenefitsback campaign coming on.


----------



## Firky (Jul 15, 2013)

That's what I suggested and was told:



> Clint Mansell ‏@iamclintmansell 12 Jul
> 
> @Firky @billybragg in fairness,I think Billy's done more than his fair share.


 
Clint Mansell!


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 15, 2013)

he singlehandedly reworked the internationale into a rousing english version, thats got to be worth 3 months JSA 

/dc


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Jul 16, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> he singlehandedly reworked the internationale into a rousing english version, thats got to be worth 3 months JSA
> 
> /dc


Nonsense he made it sound like the words of a mediocre Methodist hymn. Although the original English version doesn't scan properly it is far better than Bragg's bit of doggerel.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 16, 2013)

Malcolm Harris as co-editor of this magazine gives the go-ahead to stuff like this 

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/further-materials-toward-a-theory-of-the-hot-babe (NSFW picture)

"Once, only the professional Hot Babe adorned all major media outlets; now social media makes of everyone a Hot Babe, should they be willing. What is private, secret, is not the detail of the life but the disappearance at its core. I mean something that is always in the process of disappearing. That’s what the Hot Babe feels like to touch, although you are not strictly permitted to touch her; it would only be two nothingnesses touching, nothing touching nothing."

"The Hot Babe is not good or rational political praxis, or does not seem to point to any current ideas of good or rational praxis—“organization,” “demands”—yet she is the image of the desire of the object of that praxis, as a class. Looking down on the Hot Babe should give you vertigo: All qualities dissolve in her. In the end it’s you who disappears in the hard blue of her eyes, which are always blue, even if the Hot Babe’s particular eyes are green or brown."

He has a nice roof garden in his building 

https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/356791603983167489


----------



## J Ed (Jul 16, 2013)

What does any of that actually mean other than 'here's a an explanation couched in post-modernist bullshit for why it's alright to be lecherous'?


----------



## sihhi (Jul 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What does any of that actually mean other than 'here's a an explanation couched in post-modernist bullshit for why it's alright to be lecherous'?



that everyone who's not postmodernist to see through the advertising properly is sexist?

I don't know really, but let's please remember: "In the end it’s you who disappears in the hard blue of her eyes, which are always blue, even if the Hot Babe’s particular eyes are green or brown."


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> What does any of that actually mean other than 'here's a an explanation couched in post-modernist bullshit for why it's alright to be lecherous'?


 
here's more hipster-porn disguised as art. "Use Value" courtesy of Sugarape Vice

NSFW obviously

http://www.vice.com/read/use-value-000800-v20n7

Page 3 for the hipster left. Terry Richardson with pseudo-marxist pretensions.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I don't know really, but let's please remember: "In the end it’s you who disappears in the hard blue of her eyes, which are always blue, even if the Hot Babe’s particular eyes are green or brown."


 

Is that post-modernist for 'she wants it really' or something equally stupid?

This Malcolm Harris idiot is the worst of the lot.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 16, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> here's more hipster-porn disguised as art. "Use Value" courtesy of Sugarape Vice
> 
> NSFW obviously
> 
> ...



Good lord, is that Kim Gordon who helped form Sonic Youth from US socialist punk influences?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Good lord, is that Kim Gordon who helped form Sonic Youth from US socialist punk influences?


 
I dunno but well spotted.

Sonic Youth were shit fuck generation X.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 16, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I dunno but well spotted.
> 
> Sonic Youth were shit fuck generation X.



They were socialist or anarchist, whereas Nirvana were nihilist and empty.

This is Sonic Youth's record label http://www.protest-records.com - clear in intent.

I think it is her, googling gives us that apparently Richard Kern is a film-maker photographer and did a number of photoshoots of her and videos for Sonic Youth.


----------



## Firky (Jul 16, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Sonic Youth were shit.


 
*jukebox stops and barstools slide back*

They're great!


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Jul 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> They were socialist or anarchist, whereas Nirvana were nihilist and empty.
> 
> This is Sonic Youth's record label http://www.protest-records.com - clear in intent.
> 
> I think it is her, googling gives us that apparently Richard Kern is a film-maker photographer and did a number of photoshoots of her and videos for Sonic Youth.


 
Kern was a "transgressive" film maker and photographer in NYC in the early eighties who worked with a lot of similar music types at the time (Lydia Lunch, Foetus, Sonic Youth, etc). I've not clicked on the Vice link but he has being doing "hipster porn" for about 30 years so it shouldn't be a surprise.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 16, 2013)

Advice for the rest of us as recommended by LP: 

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/357149485119442946

http://sunnydrake.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/racism-is-to-white-people-as-wind-is-to-the-sky


LP doesn't do this, nor should you: 

"When I have failed to take the time to consider how I could make sure people of colour and Indigenous people are central in the decision making of groups I’m a part of."

"When I have spent more time reading white people’s opinions on racism than people of colour’s and Indigenous people’s opinions and lived experiences."

"When I have gotten acquaintances who are people of colour confused with each other. It doesn’t matter that I also frequently can’t recognise white people who I don’t know very well – this is where context matters. In the context of a racist world that makes invisible and dehumanises people of colour, my actions are racist."

The whole blog post is over 2,250 words about from this middle-class performance artist.


----------



## xslavearcx (Jul 16, 2013)

jeezo....


----------



## J Ed (Jul 16, 2013)

"When I have failed to take the time to consider how I could make sure people of colour and Indigenous people are central in the decision making of groups I’m a part of."

lol the second bit could be taken from the BNP manifesto


----------



## xslavearcx (Jul 16, 2013)

From the first comment:

_Thanks for making this post. I’m going to share it on my facebook wall and twitter._

wonder how long we'll find that posted on the annoying facebook posts thread


----------



## Limerick Red (Jul 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Advice for the rest of us as recommended by LP:
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/357149485119442946
> 
> ...


 

This is unbelievable, this shite winds me up so much, Its just more fuckin cultural imperialism/colonialism from the middle class of imperialist countries, Its Their job, Their place, Their right to make space for colonialised people, because the oppressed person is so fucking meek, so inarticulate, so unable to stand up for themselves that they need to be facilitated by middle class fuckin twats. And because of the world constantly revolving around these cunts they will never ever see it.


----------



## xslavearcx (Jul 16, 2013)

Limerick Red said:


> so unable to stand up for themselves that they need to be facilitated by middle class fuckin twats.


 
To be fair, hes pretty upfront about it:
"Sunny has over 15 years professional experience in the arts and community sectors, as a consultant, educator, facilitator, strategic planner and project manager and has run over 250 workshops."

http://sunnydrake.wordpress.com/about/

patronising prick...


----------



## Firky (Jul 16, 2013)

Limerick Red said:


> This is unbelievable, this shite winds me up so much, Its just more fuckin cultural imperialism/colonialism from the middle class of imperialist countries, Its Their job, Their place, Their right to make space for colonialised people, because the oppressed person is so fucking meek, so inarticulate, so unable to stand up for themselves that they need to be facilitated by middle class fuckin twats. And because of the world constantly revolving around these cunts they will never ever see it.


 

Well said.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 16, 2013)

yeah, i made this exact point earlier up the thread, it's like they think everyone else is whales that has to be saved.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 16, 2013)

Dearie us it links to that presentation again




Presumably for Britain everyone _white_ is _born belonging_.
Those born in India who send kids to private schools like Ann Leslie and Joanna Lumley, and those born with their mother in a shackled custodial birth - all just belong.
By contrast no one nonwhite no matter how rich the family, how large the family ties or how developed any nonwhite-white bonds can belong.


----------



## xslavearcx (Jul 16, 2013)

every one of those 250 workshops that Suny has facilitated will be another valuable input into the old CV. I wonder if there is parity between 'outcomes' gained from those workshops vis-a-vis himself and the service users. I suspect not...


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 16, 2013)

Which is the flipside of what the far-right say. "No black in the union jack" and all that shit.


----------



## Sue (Jul 16, 2013)

I must be really thick because whenever I see these kind of things (like that see-saw picture), I really have no idea what they're on about. Like the external heteronormal genitals or whatever it was upthread. Or is this just a sign that I need to 'check my privilege'? (something I'm also slightly confused about.)


----------



## xslavearcx (Jul 16, 2013)

Sue said:


> I must be really thick because whenever I see these kind of things (like that see-saw picture), I really have no idea what they're on about. Like the external heteronormal genitals or whatever it was upthread. Or is this just a sign that I need to 'check my privilege'? (something I'm also slightly confused about.)


 
me neither.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Advice for the rest of us as recommended by LP:
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/357149485119442946
> 
> ...


 

As a white person who has experienced racism and I've spent a good deal of my life involved in anti-fash stuff in one form or another, I find that fucking insulting tbh.

And plenty of white English people who aren't from any "minority" religious/ethnic backgrounds do experience racism based on their skin colour. It does not happen often but it happens.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 16, 2013)

Also it assumes that the only racism that matters is the one based on skin colour. What about Catholics v Protestants in Northern Ireland? Or people not being served in pubs because they "look like pikeys"? Where are these fools intersectional analyses of that?


----------



## sihhi (Jul 16, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> As a white person who has experienced racism and I've spent a good deal of my life involved in anti-fash stuff in one form or another, I find that fucking insulting tbh.
> 
> And plenty of white English people who aren't from any "minority" religious/ethnic backgrounds do experience racism based on their skin colour. It does not happen often but it happens.


 

LP's advice suggests that you are the one with the massive problem:

"If you’re a white person having a hard time reading this, I’d ask you to examine why are you feeling defensive? In my experience, when I’m defensive it’s usually because I’m avoiding some element of truth. It’s actually only threatening to me to admit that I have to unpack my own racism if I intend on doing nothing about it."


----------



## xslavearcx (Jul 16, 2013)

i worked for a shop run by this asian chap, who offered me the job when i was talking to him about how skint me and wife were following our daughter being born, elabrorating on bill situations and so forth, so he knew how desperate for money i was and offered me a job being general dogsbody for £2 an hour. During which him and his son would make negative stereotyping comments about white people being drunk, from which i learned the word 'gory' (sp?) to denote white which was used in that nasty stereotyping way.

I don't know if that was classism or racism, vis a vis myself being the employee and all that, but it sure as hell wasn't nice...


----------



## sihhi (Jul 16, 2013)

xslavearcx said:


> i worked for a shop run by this asian chap, who offered me the job when i was talking to him about how skint me and wife were following our daughter being born, elabrorating on bill situations and so forth, so he knew how desperate for money i was and offered me a job being general dogsbody for £2 an hour. During which him and his son would make negative stereotyping comments about white people being drunk, from which i learned the word 'gory' (sp?) to denote white which was used in that nasty stereotyping way.
> 
> I don't know if that was classism or racism, vis a vis myself being the employee and all that, but it sure as hell wasn't nice...


 

gori/gora in Hindi I think just means 'white' or 'fair' - it's not racist as a word.


----------



## xslavearcx (Jul 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> gori/gora in Hindi I think just means 'white' or 'fair' - it's not racist.


 
totally, nah but it was used conjoined to those stereotypes like...


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 16, 2013)

xslavearcx said:


> i worked for a shop run by this asian chap, who offered me the job when i was talking to him about how skint me and wife were following our daughter being born, elabrorating on bill situations and so forth, so he knew how desperate for money i was and offered me a job being general dogsbody for £2 an hour. During which him and his son would make negative stereotyping comments about white people being drunk, from which i learned the word 'gory' (sp?) to denote white which was used in that nasty stereotyping way.
> 
> I don't know if that was classism or racism, vis a vis myself being the employee and all that, but it sure as hell wasn't nice...


 

Heard that word too. It's not nice. (well not always)


----------



## Sue (Jul 16, 2013)

xslavearcx said:


> totally, nah but it was used conjoined to those stereotypes like...


 
Hmm, think you maybe need to do a wee bit of privilege checking there.  That see-saw drawing is a good place to start, so I'm told...


----------



## caleb (Jul 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Malcolm Harris as co-editor of this magazine gives the go-ahead to stuff like this
> 
> http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/further-materials-toward-a-theory-of-the-hot-babe (NSFW picture)
> 
> ...


 
Some context: there was a French journal in the late 90s / early 00s called Tiqqun. Same / similar people went under the name the Invisible Committee and wrote the now notorious 'Coming Insurrection', associated with the Tarnac 9 group which got busted a few years ago (and which that wonky-eyed undercover had some involvement in, if I remember write). Most apt description of Tiqqun I've heard is 'crimethinc for people who like French critical theory': sorta post-situationist with autonomist influences and the likes of Foucault thrown in, broadly associated with insurrectionary anarchism and what is now called communization theory.

Tiqqun wrote a piece called something like 'Preliminary materials towards a theory of Young-Girl', which wasn't meant to be gendered by a descriptiong of the current human condition for both males and females (or summin, I don't quite get it). The New Inkwirry published this last week, a feminist critique of Young-Girl:

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/further-materials-toward-a-theory-of-the-man-child/

I guess the piece you link must be part of this. Quite why, now, when Tiqqun dissolved over a decade ago I don't quite know.

(For the record, I only know of Tiqqun through third hand sources, so this might be a load of crap but there you go).


----------



## sihhi (Jul 16, 2013)

xslavearcx said:


> totally, nah but it was used conjoined to those stereotypes like...


 

I agree stereotypes are bad, but:
Isn't a form of bizarre stereotyping to suggest that it's_ committed anti-racist white people_ not remembering black people's names and not doing everything quite the way one black person commented on an art show etc that's keeping the worldwide black population stuck in poverty (how I undestand "white supremacy"). It's not capitalism and rule by its overlords.
It's stereotyping those not _anti-racist white people _as prejudiced unless they take up the 2,000 word guide book and liberal pathway.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 16, 2013)

caleb said:


> Some context: there was a French journal in the late 90s / early 00s called Tiqqun. Same / similar people went under the name the Invisible Committee and wrote the now notorious 'Coming Insurrection', associated with the Tarnac 9 group which got busted a few years ago (and which that wonky-eyed undercover had some involvement in, if I remember write). Most apt description of Tiqqun I've heard is 'crimethinc for people who like French critical theory': sorta post-situationist with autonomist influences and the likes of Foucault thrown in, broadly associated with insurrectionary anarchism and what is now called communization theory.
> 
> Tiqqun wrote a piece called something like 'Preliminary materials towards a theory of Young-Girl', which wasn't meant to be gendered by a descriptiong of the current human condition for both males and females (or summin, I don't quite get it). The New Inkwirry published this last week, a feminist critique of Young-Girl:
> 
> ...


 
Which Nina Power's She's just not that Into you review puts firmly in its place. The tiqquin rubbish is here btw. I wouldn't bother.

Lolling at the bit on that NI piece where they try to explain some of the early 70s autonomist stuff. Content: wrong. Chronology: hopelessly wrong.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> gori/gora in Hindi I think just means 'white' or 'fair' - it's not racist as a word.


 
I dunno about that y'know, I've heard Gora be used a pejorative insult too. Same's true of "black" it's really dependent on context but it can be used as a racist epithet for sure.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 16, 2013)

xslavearcx said:


> From the first comment:
> 
> _Thanks for making this post. I’m going to share it on my facebook wall and twitter._
> 
> wonder how long we'll find that posted on the annoying facebook posts thread


 
It's like flushing dye down the toilet to locate where your sewerage system blockages and leaks are.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 16, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I dunno about that y'know, I've heard Gora be used a pejorative insult too. Same's true of "black" it's really dependent on context but it can be used as a racist epithet for sure.


 
In which case it's no more racist as a word than 'white' is. What is the point you're making?


----------



## sihhi (Jul 16, 2013)

caleb said:


> http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/further-materials-toward-a-theory-of-the-man-child/
> 
> I guess the piece you link must be part of this. Quite why, now, when Tiqqun dissolved over a decade ago I don't quite know.
> 
> (For the record, I only know of Tiqqun through third hand sources, so this might be a load of crap but there you go).


 

I understand so little of his publication but his twitter today has been heavy on anger against people teaching in universities

https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/357167637844856832

That tweet compares the relationship between professor and student to that of boss and worker, and there's a discussion (with someone who's probably teacher) where Malcolm the editor suggests there's no such thing as a good school structure as opposed to a bad one:




> what about that was transactional/doesn't apply to all pedagogy? don't go all good school/bad school on me.


 
https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/357171939086839810

Confusing.


----------



## rekil (Jul 16, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Also it assumes that the only racism that matters is the one based on skin colour. What about Catholics v Protestants in Northern Ireland? Or people not being served in pubs because they "look like pikeys"? Where are these fools intersectional analyses of that?


Polish flags, upside down ones, have been going on 12th July bonfires lately.




Protestants need someone, some proper hardcore para-intersectionalists, to go in and check their privilege for them.


----------



## xslavearcx (Jul 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> In which case it's no more racist as a word than 'white' is. What is the point you're making?


 
well thats why i was saying wasn't sure if that usage and overall pattern of behaviour in that particular context was classist or racist and this is waht makes the whole interesectional take on things pretty damn confusing to me..


----------



## sihhi (Jul 16, 2013)

copliker said:


> Polish flags, upside down ones, have been going on 12th July bonfires lately.


 
That doesn't matter so much see below it needs a woman only then does sexist anti-polonism come into play (which naturally matters more than the anti-socialism).


----------



## sihhi (Jul 16, 2013)

xslavearcx said:


> well thats why i was saying wasn't sure if that usage and overall pattern of behaviour in that particular context was classist or racist and this is waht makes the whole interesectional take on things pretty damn confusing to me..


 
I have no idea how the intersectional take on it works, but yes if used in a racist or chauvinist manner, it's racist or chauvinist, but the word itself is not like n word or p word.


----------



## xslavearcx (Jul 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> I have no idea how the intersectional take on it works, but yes if used in a racist or chauvinist manner, it's racist or chauvinist, but the word itself is not like n word or p word.


 
aye totally, i think a lot of this discussion subsequent to my post has probably come about by my bad articulation of those events to which i apologise....


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jul 16, 2013)

sihhi said:


> That doesn't matter so much see below it needs a woman only then does sexist anti-polonism come into play (*which naturally matters more than the anti-socialism*).


 
yes I think it does doesn't it?


----------



## sihhi (Jul 16, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> yes I think it does doesn't it?


 

Of course it does to people on here  , but LP doesn't mind about it cue carrying on chummy twitter talk with vicious 'occupy the showers' anti-socialist Louise Mensch, but attacking SpineyNorman as racist for linking to an IWCA piece.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 16, 2013)




----------



## rekil (Jul 16, 2013)

Not clicking that. Summary please.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 16, 2013)

I can't bring myself to click it sober


----------



## xslavearcx (Jul 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I can't bring myself to click it sober


 
haha thats a cheek posting that and not even watching that haha!


----------



## The Pale King (Jul 16, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I can't bring myself to click it sober


 
Get drinking then!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 16, 2013)

It's shit. Don't bother clicking.

I didn't even need to watch it to provide everyone with this summary


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 17, 2013)

Actually, I'm up to about 1.30 and haven't so far heard anything I disagree with, or at least nothing I have a problem with 

Either she's learned something or I'm turning into a liberal. I did have a pint with Owen Jones on Saturday night though so maybe I am


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 17, 2013)

oblique delta reference


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 17, 2013)

That's probably the best talk I've ever heard her give to be fair. Admittedly the competition isn't very stiff because I've not heard her speak much at all and what I have heard has been crap but it's really not bad.


----------



## emanymton (Jul 17, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Actually, I'm up to about 1.30 and haven't so far heard anything I disagree with, or at least nothing I have a problem with
> 
> Either she's learned something or I'm turning into a liberal. I did have a pint with Owen Jones on Saturday night though so maybe I am


I wonder if anyone asked her what feminist rape porn would look like?


----------



## rekil (Jul 17, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's probably the best talk I've ever heard her give to be fair. Admittedly the competition isn't very stiff because I've not heard her speak much at all and what I have heard has been crap but it's really not bad.


 
Different prattle for different parties. Flitting between identities at will. China Mieville was there I see.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 17, 2013)

video has been removed by the user


----------



## rekil (Jul 17, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> video has been removed by the user


 
Try this.



In this one she says "she comes from a tradition of socialist and anarchist thinking which is at odds with the party structure, which is autonomism. [...] I'm an internet journalist which sits very very badly indeed with any party format right now."

Lies.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

WOW on so so so many levels.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 17, 2013)

copliker said:


> Try this.
> 
> 
> 
> ...





More 'Prada-Meinhof'- style fakery aimed at enhancing the 'rebel sell' brand, I see.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 17, 2013)

that's just putting random words together


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

This is why the SWP went on an on and on about their daft version of autonomism  - so they could situate muppets like this within it and say _look at these twats, steer well clear_, and now the muppets are mug enough to don the robes themselves.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

I wonder what aspects of the autonomist (or anarchist for that matter) tradition she feels that she is coming from?


----------



## love detective (Jul 17, 2013)

> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> Just finished an angry column about the benefits cap. It's a pure PR exercise which will cause untold pain, and we shouldn't stand for it.


 
Penny's poor choice of grammar inadvertently ends up delivering a spot on analysis of herself and her work


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 17, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Advice for the rest of us as recommended by LP:
> 
> https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/357149485119442946
> 
> ...


 
If I assume that the essayist is a self-regarding emotional dwarf who has less right to be alive than a Tory MP, does that make me prejudiced?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

love detective said:


> Penny's poor choice of grammar inadvertently ends up delivering a spot on analysis of herself and her work


 
 I like the way she feels that we need to be told that it's an angry column. I wonder how it can be both a pure PR exercise i.e not meaning or changing anything but peoples perceptions and also cause untold pain. More clunkiness.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 17, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Also it assumes that the only racism that matters is the one based on skin colour. What about Catholics v Protestants in Northern Ireland? Or people not being served in pubs because they "look like pikeys"? Where are these fools intersectional analyses of that?


 
That doesn't matter. The victims are white, and therefore can't be victims.

Makes you want to sharpen your axe, doesn't it?


----------



## agricola (Jul 17, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Makes you want to sharpen your axe, doesn't it?


 
Axes - tools of into-sectionality that everyone can agree on.


----------



## rekil (Jul 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I wonder what aspects of the autonomist (or anarchist for that matter) tradition she feels that she is coming from?


All of them but mainly Terry Pratchett.

That's not a gag.



			
				LP said:
			
		

> if you locked me in a room for a month and told me I was only allowed to read the works of one author, I'd probably go for the entire works of Terry Pratchett


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I wonder what aspects of the autonomist (or anarchist for that matter) tradition she feels that she is coming from?


 
Voting Liberal Democrat?


----------



## JimW (Jul 17, 2013)

Heard she was influenced by a _very_ early speech by Negri, along the lines of "I won't come home for my tea mum, we're still playing football."


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Voting Liberal Democrat?


 
That would be the _Comrade p45_ section of the lib-dems.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 17, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> That doesn't matter. The victims are white, and therefore can't be victims.
> 
> Makes you want to sharpen your axe, doesn't it?


 

and what about say, Muslims from the Balkans?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 17, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> that's just putting random words together


 
When it gets plaudits, it's Laura's journalism. When people say "that's a load of random crap!", Laura blames the subbies.


----------



## rekil (Jul 17, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's probably the best talk I've ever heard her give to be fair. Admittedly the competition isn't very stiff because I've not heard her speak much at all and what I have heard has been crap but it's really not bad.


 
Something Must Be Done.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 17, 2013)

the typewriters/monkeys school of journalism


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 17, 2013)

JimW said:


> Heard she was influenced by a _very_ early speech by Negri, along the lines of "I won't come home for my tea mum, we're still playing football."


 
And also influenced by Rage Against The Machine's "Killing In The Name Of...", I suspect.


----------



## caleb (Jul 17, 2013)

Articles a year old, but I've been meaning to bring this up because it makes me laugh.



> A new generation of feminists is discovering James's work. Academic Nina Power and writer and blogger Laurie Penny, for example, both cite her as an influence.






> "I saw the state close up. It was an enormous education. Almost all of them were awful. It is the ambition, it makes people awful." By the time she left, she had "had enough of the middle class, of the intelligentsia. I thought, I am going to be with working-class people from now on."






> "Politics, if it is fuelled by a great will to change the world, rather than by personal ambition, offers a chance to know the world, and to be more self-conscious of the actual life you are living rather than being taken over by what you are told you should feel: a chance to live, in other words, an authentic life. Such politics are a unique enrichment, not a sacrifice."




http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/08/life-in-writing-selma-james

This is the same 'ambition' Penny wears as a badge of honour.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 17, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> and what about say, Muslims from the Balkans?


 
Well quite.
Intersectional analysis can be a good tool, when properly used, but when deployed piecemeal to make _poseur_-ish clunky political points about the evils of whiteness that are basically appeals to the oppressed to "love me, I'm on your side!", then it's fucking worthless liberal guilt-tripping and class snobbery (because the liberal is always looking to condescend to the ignorant constituency that is the working class).


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jul 17, 2013)

caleb said:


> Articles a year old, but I've been meaning to bring this up because it makes me laugh.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

Perhaps it's gendered ambition that's bad; stripped of its ugly ,violent, grabbing maleness it can blossom into a beautiful, caring and sharing good?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## caleb (Jul 17, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Perhaps it's gendered ambition that's bad; stripped of its ugly ,violent, grabbing maleness it can blossom into a beautiful, caring and sharing good?
> 
> Cheers - Louis MacNeice


 
James talks about ambition elsewhere, including "ambitious feminism", so no, I don't think it's gendered at all. She never seeks to reclaim a 'positive' ambition, she sees it as negative in all cases.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

caleb said:


> Articles a year old, but I've been meaning to bring this up because it makes me laugh.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Wonderful interview that:



> She arrived back in London in 1969, just as the women's liberation movement invented itself. The British feminist, Bea Campbell – no friend of James – remembers it as "a torrid, marvellous time, with groups being formed suddenly, and everywhere". Campbell was 22, and recalls a movement as "full of women in their 20s". Enter James: "She was 40, fully-formed, fortified," says Campbell. "She knew how to do battle. A small Trotskyist sect formed her, and she has remained schismatic ever since. Schismatic, sectarian, polarising: Selma got on women's nerves."
> 
> That's not how James remembers it. The schism was not about age, she insists, but class: "I brought a reality to the movement they didn't want to acknowledge: that there is a struggle going on, and we have to decide whose side we're on." And all that talk of liberation through work! James had spent years working a double day in a factory and as a housewife: she knew what working-class women felt about factory work: "They walk in, they run out." Too many women in the movement simply "didn't know anything about the world".


 
There's a fantastic one she did last year too - def recommend the 50 minutes or so listen.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jul 17, 2013)

caleb said:


> James talks about ambition elsewhere, including "ambitious feminism", so no, I don't think it's gendered at all. She never seeks to reclaim a 'positive' ambition, she sees it as negative in all cases.


 

Sorry I should've included an irony smiley!

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## J Ed (Jul 17, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> and what about say, Muslims from the Balkans?


 
After spending a while asking questions like this I've come to the conclusion that the answer is usually that they don't know as they haven't thought about it that much and if they have then they don't care.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 17, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> When it gets plaudits, it's Laura's journalism. When people say "that's a load of random crap!", Laura blames the subbies.


 

Plaudits for the commentariat, coffee runs and abuse for the intern subeditors...


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 17, 2013)

how has selma james influenced laurie at all? from the article it sounds like laurie penny is the sort of thing selma james is going on about.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 17, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> If I assume that the essayist is a self-regarding emotional dwarf who has less right to be alive than a Tory MP, does that make me prejudiced?


 

If you are non-queer, then yes, most likely.
Compare it to how love detective's joke about LP's poor grammar is probably sexist.

ViolentPanda / Love Detective vs Sunny Drake / Laurie Penny
'Non-Queer'/ Male vs Queer / Female
Status: Privileged vs Oppressed

Malcolm took it to extremes
U75 posters / TNI editor Malcolm Harris
Citizens of Britain / Citizen of America (anti-colonial, Yorktown)
Status: Privileged / Oppressed


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jul 17, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> how has selma james influenced laurie at all? from the article it sounds like laurie penny is the sort of thing selma james is going on about.


 

Surely James is just an attempted value adding name check, not a genuine source of influence?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 17, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> how has selma james influenced laurie at all? from the article it sounds like laurie penny is the sort of thing selma james is going on about.


 
i'm sure that, like many people, LP is perfectly capable of cognitive dissonance regarding her own behaviour.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 17, 2013)

I'd say to a greater extent than most tbf


----------



## andysays (Jul 17, 2013)

copliker said:


> In this one she says "she comes from a tradition of socialist and anarchist thinking which is at odds with the party structure, which is autonomism. [...] I'm an internet journalist which sits very very badly indeed with any party format right now."
> 
> Lies.


 
I  can only presume you're unaware of the strong tradition of socialist and anarchist thinking at Brighton College and within the English dept of Wadham College, Oxford. Haters gonna hate...


----------



## rekil (Jul 17, 2013)

andysays said:


> I can only presume you're unaware of the strong tradition of socialist and anarchist thinking at Brighton College and within the English dept of Wadham College, Oxford. Haters gonna hate...


 
Joining Labour and interning and campaigning for their MPs is a *little* bit socialism tbf.

She did a happy clappy piece on Iceland's pirate party. Why doesn't she join the UK branch of those eejits?


----------



## sihhi (Jul 17, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Also it assumes that the only racism that matters is the one based on skin colour. What about Catholics v Protestants in Northern Ireland? Or people not being served in pubs because they "look like pikeys"?


 
Because you're white your objections don't much matter. (Unless you can list half a dozen projects with nonwhite people as an overwhelming majority.)
Remember this is the real practical application (ignoring the psychology stuff about confusing names).
It recommends you do avoid following

_- The times when I have tokenised people of colour by thinking “shit, my project is really white, I should ask some people of colour to be a part of it”_

_- When I have given more support, time and resources to white projects and individuals. It doesn’t matter if this was by default (like who happened to ask me). ... In a world where these communities are systemically barred from access to resources, it is racist to perpetuate this on a personal level in my own life._

Basically_ it is my responsibility to seek out and support people of colour and Indigenous people (if and when my support is welcome)_


----------



## rekil (Jul 17, 2013)

23 Oxbridge offers for Brighton College pupils - A new record







A thicket of clenched fists. Brighton College's socialist and anarchist tradition continues apace.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 17, 2013)

andysays said:


> within the English dept of Wadham College, Oxford. Haters gonna hate...


 

Oddly enough, Marxist Terry Eagleton is/was a professor and fellow of Wadham College.
Several leftist-socialist creative workers have done English from Wadham including Lindsay Anderson (film maker for _If.._), actor Jodhi May, and leftist British Asian authors Hari Kunzru and Monica Ali. There's probably others.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 17, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Because you're white your objections don't much matter. (Unless you can list half a dozen projects with nonwhite people as an overwhelming majority.)
> Remember this is the real practical application (ignoring the psychology stuff about confusing names).
> It recommends you do avoid following
> 
> ...


 

My best mate is Asian, I only get to see him every month or couple of months because it's too expensive to travel into London. However I work in an office where everyone is white.

Besides isn't saying that you'll going to seek out people of colour just another way of "tokenising"? whenever i've been talking about this sort of stuff with people i don't know i feel pretty uncomfortable with people saying things like "your people all work really hard and look after each other really well" and that sort of compliment (although they don't mean anything by it, it's mostly people in their 50s and 60s that say that sort of thing lol). or feeling sorry for me because i'm oppressed or something, it's really really irritating. I'm sure that black people must get it even more, being patronised etc because they are black or being "seeked out and supported" when they may not want to be.

And anyway if you do this aren't you just perpetuating a way of seeing everyone through a prism based on race? And it's still the noble savage thing, those black people etc are such beautiful exotic creatures and they've got to be helped and supported (by middle class white people) whenever you can.

Or am I misreading the whole thing?


----------



## Sue (Jul 17, 2013)

copliker said:


> 23 Oxbridge offers for Brighton College pupils - A new record
> 
> 
> 
> ...



A bit Henman at Wimbledon esque.


----------



## andysays (Jul 17, 2013)

copliker said:


> A thicket of clenched fists. Brighton College's socialist and anarchist tradition continues apace.


 
Most of those fists look suspiciously right-handed to me 



Check 3.40 onwards for the correct way to do it...


----------



## rekil (Jul 17, 2013)

Sue said:


> A bit Henman at Wimbledon esque.


 
Distinct lack of enthusiasm from 4-eyes on the left. We'll have to keep an eye on him.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jul 17, 2013)

copliker said:


> Distinct lack of enthusiasm from 4-eyes on the left. We'll have to keep an eye on him.


 

PD sleeper who needs to sharpen up his deep cover skills.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## caleb (Jul 17, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Oddly enough, Marxist Terry Eagleton is/was a professor and fellow of Wadham College.
> Several leftist-socialist creative workers have done English from Wadham including Lindsay Anderson (film maker for _If.._), actor Jodhi May, and leftist British Asian authors Hari Kunzru and Monica Ali. There's probably others.


 
Does kind of make me feel a little bit sick there are people out there who'll pick an Oxford / Cambridge college because 'it's the left-wing one'. Scum.


----------



## andysays (Jul 17, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Oddly enough, Marxist Terry Eagleton is/was a professor and fellow of Wadham College.
> Several *leftist-socialist creative workers* have done English from Wadham including Lindsay Anderson (film maker for _If.._), actor Jodhi May, and leftist British Asian authors Hari Kunzru and Monica Ali. There's probably others.


 
That's either  or , depending on how serious you are about using that particular combination of words...


----------



## sihhi (Jul 17, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> And anyway if you do this aren't you just perpetuating a way of *seeing everyone through a prism based on race*? And it's still the noble savage thing, those black people etc are such beautiful exotic creatures and they've got to be helped and supported (by middle class white people) whenever you can.
> 
> Or am I misreading the whole thing?


 
For middle-class blacks and middle-class whites, everything _*is*_ based on race note the term is _white supremacy_ not Western capitalism - that's what's being struggled against.

Hence, broadly, anything that promotes a black over a white in any field is a positive blow - the white become less supreme. China giving marginally cheaper loans to Africa, the ANC's black empowerment strategy, NBC putting black presenters on air, people going on holiday to Morocco rather than Spain, Obama in the White House, Beyonce selling more than any other solo artist in the world, the New Statesman giving freelance opportunities for middle-class black journalists, middle-class white allies finding woc or poc or joc for projects ... it's all part of this struggle.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 17, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Hence, broadly, anything that promotes a black over a white in any field is a positive blow - the white become less supreme. China giving marginally cheaper loans to Africa, the ANC's black empowerment strategy, NBC putting black presenters on air, people going on holiday to Morocco rather than Spain, Obama in the White House, Beyonce selling more than any other solo artist in the world, the New Statesman giving freelance opportunities for middle-class black journalists, middle-class white allies finding woc or poc or joc for projects ... it's all part of this struggle.


 

OH MY FUCKING GOD 

I can't believe there are people who write these things in all seriousness.


----------



## rekil (Jul 17, 2013)

Michael Foot, Cecil Day-Lewis and somebody who was on masterchef.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wadham_College_people

Laura is described as "an author and social activist".


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 17, 2013)

I don't think I've ever started any _projects_ let alone seek out and involve any people of colour in them. The one thing I did was starting a campaign and petition against bus closures in my area, I don't remember the races of people who signed the petition tho. Should I have done an intersectional analysis before I did it?


----------



## J Ed (Jul 17, 2013)

sihhi said:


> For middle-class blacks and middle-class whites, everything _*is*_ based on race note the term is _white supremacy_ not Western capitalism - that's what's being struggled against.
> 
> Hence, broadly, anything that promotes a black over a white in any field is a positive blow - the white become less supreme. China giving marginally cheaper loans to Africa, the ANC's black empowerment strategy, NBC putting black presenters on air, people going on holiday to Morocco rather than Spain, Obama in the White House, Beyonce selling more than any other solo artist in the world, the New Statesman giving freelance opportunities for middle-class black journalists, middle-class white allies finding woc or poc or joc for projects ... it's all part of this struggle.


 

Smash the G8! Towards the G20!


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jul 17, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Oddly enough, Marxist Terry Eagleton is/was a professor and fellow of Wadham College.
> Several leftist-socialist creative workers have done English from Wadham including Lindsay Anderson (film maker for _If.._), actor Jodhi May, and leftist British Asian authors Hari Kunzru and Monica Ali. There's probably others.


 

What are Jodhi May's leftist credentials?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## sihhi (Jul 17, 2013)

andysays said:


> That's either  or , depending on how serious you are about using that particular combination of words...


 

Just taking on board the point others have made that LP is not unique.
Cheltenham College-educated Lindsay Anderson studied English Lit and Classics from Wadham, Oxford, he founded his own magazine Sequence, the moved onto writing stuff in support of leftist cinema in Sight and Sound, then became the _New Statesman's _film critic for a long while, before producing _If... _a film about how horrible private schools were for their rich pupils.   
Then became artistic director at the Royal Court in the early seventies when leftist theatre and plays (_lots_ about women, strikes and working conditions, stuff against the NF, stuff against apartheid) were put on there and across plenty of venues.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 17, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I don't think I've ever started any _projects_ let alone seek out and involve any people of colour in them. The one thing I did was starting a campaign and petition against bus closures in my area, I don't remember the races of people who signed the petition tho. Should I have done an intersectional analysis before I did it?


 

I noticed a Socialist Action member (and they seem to be the worst for this stuff, even worse than the SWP) on an FB event talk about how great and representative the Trayvon Martin protest outside the US embassy was purely based on the 'representativeness' of the speakers. No comment on what was said, what happened or what had been achieved.

So, yes, perhaps you are supposed to focus more on the race of the people you are working with than what you are actually doing.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

Or what _they_ are doing.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 17, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> What are Jodhi May's leftist credentials?
> 
> Cheers - Louis MacNeice


 

appeared in and promoted left-wing/feminist plays eg Blackbird, also appeared in pro 'normalisation of homosexual relations across all time periods' TV and film stuff like Tipping the Velvet.
I think English at Oxford has a minority current of being pro-leftist causes, whether that's meaningful or not is another question.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Or what _they_ are doing.


 

I meant you plural


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

copliker said:


> Michael Foot, Cecil Day-Lewis and somebody who was on masterchef.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wadham_College_people
> 
> Laura is described as "an author and social activist".


 
Tariq Ali's daughter. (Not LP, but another Wahdamitte)


----------



## rekil (Jul 17, 2013)

There are no "people of colour" in this pic. There are 3 or 4 asians, but are rich asians "people of colour"? Are state-school non-university whiteys required to defer, check their privilege, step back etc?


----------



## sihhi (Jul 17, 2013)

copliker said:


> Michael Foot, Cecil Day-Lewis and somebody who was on masterchef.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wadham_College_people
> 
> Laura is described as "an author and social activist".


 

Michael Foot studied PPE though. There's a special circle for those types Miliband, Cameron.

Here's PPE graduate Toby Young:

_The journalist Toby Young, who read PPE at Brasenose College two years ahead of David Cameron, is a defender of the course and believes it offers a firm intellectual grounding for would-be leaders across the political spectrum._
_"Among the 10 people reading PPE at the same time as me at Brasenose, you had everything from Monday Club fascists to revolutionary Marxists, plus every shade of opinion in between," he says._


----------



## sihhi (Jul 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Tariq Ali's daughter. (Not LP, but another Wahdamitte)


 

He himself is another Oxford PPE of course.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jul 17, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Michael Foot studied PPE though. There's a special circle for those types Miliband, Cameron.
> 
> Here's PPE graduate Toby Young:
> 
> ...


 

An observation and quote that tells you all you need to know about Young's politics; i.e. it's an instrumental game to be played for personal advantage regardless of the actual content.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

They did produce a regicide though in John Cook.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

sihhi said:


> He himself is another Oxford PPE of course.


 
And his dad would have been wadham as well but for the war.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 17, 2013)

_[F]or the first 18 months after Oxford, when he was already a public leftie, Tariq had a proper job - working for Michael Heseltine. Heseltine had been impressed by his presidency of the Union, and had told Julian Critchley, editor of Town magazine, which Heseltine owned, to give him some work. So he did some theatre reviewing and other articles._
_'I was leading a march against the French Embassy one day, through Kensington, when I saw the Heseltines, out shopping. 'Look, darling, there's Tariq,' shouted Mrs Heseltine. I gave them a wave, then marched on. I was never totally what we would now call politically correct, even in my most militant phase. I always liked good food, good wines. I suppose it was because I had total confidence in myself.' (Hunter Davies interview of Tariq Ali)_

_These days, I live in two cities. In one of them, I'm a precariously employed young person. I associate with activists and jobless workers in squats and cramped, overpriced flats rammed with empty cereal packets and internet cables. People eat food out of skips and wear out their trainers running away from the police. In the other, I'm a media luvvie and mingle with people who take taxis to events that have name tags to make it clear something important is under way. TV and radio programmes are made, editorial meetings are held, and networking takes place in large glass buildings __(Laurie Penny Diary in Evening Standard)_

If nothing else our intersectionality will be boosted by the return of Tariq to this thread


----------



## Firky (Jul 17, 2013)

Posted elsewhere:



ChrisSouth said:


> Of course, most people may already have seen this, but apropos this board's feeling about Rushcroft Road
> 
> 
> http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/07/yuppies-out-living-front-line-gentrification-brixton


 
There's a bit of an irony about the NS printing such an article. They and their readership are the forces behind gentrification.

Now I'll go read it.

E2A: Oh, it's written by Cal Flyn of the Telegraph.



> Cal Flyn ‏@calflyn 3h
> @Lindapalermo yes! Are you camberwell direction? I'm sure ill be back staying and we can get a coffee in one if the fancy places ! X


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 17, 2013)

_



*[F]or the first 18 months after Oxford, when he was already a public leftie, Tariq had a proper job - working for Michael Heseltine.* Heseltine had been impressed by his presidency of the Union, and had told Julian Critchley, editor of Town magazine, which Heseltine owned, to give him some work. So he did some theatre reviewing and other articles.
		
Click to expand...

_


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

sihhi said:


> _[F]or the first 18 months after Oxford, when he was already a public leftie, Tariq had a proper job - working for Michael Heseltine. Heseltine had been impressed by his presidency of the Union, and had told Julian Critchley, editor of Town magazine, which Heseltine owned, to give him some work. So he did some theatre reviewing and other articles._
> _'I was leading a march against the French Embassy one day, through Kensington, when I saw the Heseltines, out shopping. 'Look, darling, there's Tariq,' shouted Mrs Heseltine. I gave them a wave, then marched on. I was never totally what we would now call politically correct, even in my most militant phase. I always liked good food, good wines. I suppose it was because I had total confidence in myself.' (Hunter Davies interview of Tariq Ali)_
> 
> _These days, I live in two cities. In one of them, I'm a precariously employed young person. I associate with activists and jobless workers in squats and cramped, overpriced flats rammed with empty cereal packets and internet cables. People eat food out of skips and wear out their trainers running away from the police. In the other, I'm a media luvvie and mingle with people who take taxis to events that have name tags to make it clear something important is under way. TV and radio programmes are made, editorial meetings are held, and networking takes place in large glass buildings __(Laurie Penny Diary in Evening Standard)_
> ...


 
Note that he was 'leading'. Always leading.


----------



## Firky (Jul 17, 2013)

sihhi said:


> _[F]or the first 18 months after Oxford, when he was already a public leftie, Tariq had a proper job_


 

That got a proper real life snigger


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Note that he was 'leading'. Always leading.


 

the vanguard of the class.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 17, 2013)

what was he harassing the gauls about- nuclear testing? would have been around the time of those undersea whoppers..


----------



## rekil (Jul 17, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> PD sleeper who needs to sharpen up his deep cover skills.
> 
> Cheers - Louis MacNeice





> Jeffrey Li (Ab) Wadham College Physics


Physics comes in handy for space stuff. This youngster has to be one of ours. Victory to Jeff!


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 17, 2013)

copliker said:


> Physics comes in handy for space stuff. This youngster has to be one of ours. Victory to Jeff!


 

I hope it was nuclear physics.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 17, 2013)

frogwoman said:


>


 

Is that the frogwoman salute for Tariq Ali in his Proletarian Democracy Heseltine sleeper cell?

Turns out Tariq Ali has been sabotaging the intersectional struggle all these years.

_In the Sixties I did get recognised a lot, but it always worried me. I never knew how they were going to react, whether they might abuse me. __So when people on the bus or in the street said 'Are you Tariq Ali?' I would say 'No, sorry,' then smile. 'We do all look the same . . .' _

How can white people better tell apart nonwhites if the nonwhites trick the whites, somebody tell Sunny Drake!


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

Just to remind people what SJ was up against.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Just to remind people what SJ was up against.


 



i was such an idiot back then in 2009 or whenever it was I started the thread   I properly hadn't thought about it at all. Sorry.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i was such an idiot back then   I properly hadn't thought about it at all. Sorry.


 
Eh? What you being sorry for, it was the others i was on about who reduced this stuff to men doing a fair share and so on. You readjusted with more info. I did scrub this post as it looks like shit stirring but it's really really not so reinstated it. Take that apology back


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Eh? What you being sorry for, it was the others i was on about who reduced this stuff to men doing a fair share and so on. You readjusted with more info. I did scrub this post as it looks like shit stirring but it's really really not so reinstated it. Take that apology back


 

Fair enough. Just facpalming at my naive OP


----------



## eoin_k (Jul 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Just to remind people what SJ was up against.


 

SJ as in Selma James?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

Yes. I think i may have meant that for the SWP thread.

edit: yes, wrong thread.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jul 17, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i was such an idiot back then in 2009 or whenever it was I started the thread   I properly hadn't thought about it at all. Sorry.


 

That's funny because I was an idiot back in 2009...and 2010, 11, 12, 13...

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 17, 2013)

Spoiler


----------



## eoin_k (Jul 17, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Yes. I think i may have meant that for the SWP thread.
> 
> edit: yes, wrong thread.


 


I am trying to get my head around this at he moment.  In the early 70s, _Power of Women_ seem to have had quite an Influence on the women's movement, claimants union etc. Even if other groups take up the demand for a guaranteed adequate independent income rather than wages for housework, and are critical about aspects of the demand they seem happy to acknowledge POWs influence on their analysis of unpaid housework and social reproduction.  At some point in the mid seventies this seems to break down.  In part this seems to be about difficulties relating some of the issues the women's movement is focused on directly to the demand - e.g. work on sexual and domestic violence based around Rape Crisis centres and Women's Aid.  Trying to unravel the sectarian wrangling (which POW members seem to have contributed to) from the material and ideological ones is proving to be a challenge.


----------



## rekil (Jul 17, 2013)

The thread was prompted by this.



			
				LP said:
			
		

> Of course, the old left is not about to disappear completely. It is highly likely that even after a nuclear attack, the only remaining life-forms will be cockroaches and sour-faced vendors of the Socialist Worker.


Now in addition to making stuff up about her political background, she's telling a pub full of sourfaced swaps that they "punch above their weight".


----------



## love detective (Jul 17, 2013)

to be fair, surviving a nuclear attack should probably count as punching above your weight


----------



## Tom A (Jul 17, 2013)

JimW said:


> Heard she was influenced by a _very_ early speech by Negri, along the lines of "I won't come home for my tea mum, we're still playing football."


 
Or Genesis' "Land of Confusion".


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 17, 2013)

love detective said:


> to be fair, surviving a nuclear attack should probably count as punching above your weight


----------



## sihhi (Jul 17, 2013)

Has Molly Crabapple entered the "Murdoch empire"?



> #leveson wasn't about unregulated press, it was about massive corruption between police and Murdoch empire


 


> Fantastic news- @mollycrabapple is writing a book, Drawing Blood, to be published by Harper Collins.


 
Or is it a new prairie fire?



> Yesterday James lit the fuse, today let Rupert set the prairie alight.
> 
> Victory to James Murdoch!
> Victory to Rupert Murdoch!
> ...


----------



## barney_pig (Jul 17, 2013)

I see that the indie have run a obit for nadezhda Popova*, another one who "sought to fight violence with violence"



* night witch and killer of fascists


----------



## Frances Lengel (Jul 17, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Michael Foot *studied PPE though*. There's a special circle for those types Miliband, Cameron.
> 
> Here's PPE graduate Toby Young:
> 
> ...


----------



## imposs1904 (Jul 18, 2013)

sihhi said:


> _These days, I live in two cities. *In one of them, I'm a precariously employed young person.* I associate with activists and jobless workers in squats and cramped, overpriced flats rammed with empty cereal packets and internet cables. People eat food out of skips and wear out their trainers running away from the police. In the other, I'm a media luvvie and mingle with people who take taxis to events that have name tags to make it clear something important is under way. TV and radio programmes are made, editorial meetings are held, and networking takes place in large glass buildings __(Laurie Penny Diary in Evening Standard)_


 


_" . . . a precariously employed young person"_ who can afford regular flights to and from New York.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 18, 2013)

enmeshed in a world of poverty


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 18, 2013)

imposs1904 said:


> _" . . . a precariously employed young person"_ who can afford regular flights to and from New York.


 

but won't face a nicking by being at Occupy when the shit was in the fan. I don't put myself in the firing line except for the odd march (allowed protest that changes nothing ftw), but if you are going to pose as a radical journo then wtf- get down there and smell the tear gas.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 18, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Note that he was 'leading'. Always leading.


 
Well, he *was* born to it, being a child of the post-Raj elites.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 18, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> I see that the indie have run a obit for nadezhda Popova*, another one who "sought to fight violence with violence"
> 
> 
> 
> * night witch and killer of fascists


 
The _nachthexen_. The German infantry were shit-scared of them, and rightly so. They flew their "sewing machines" low and slow enough to be able to bomb trenches, so unless you were bunkered, the witches could get you, usually silently too, as they'd cut their engines about 2k out from the target.

Much respect to the late comrade and her fellow witches.


----------



## rekil (Jul 18, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> The _nachthexen_. The German infantry were shit-scared of them, and rightly so. They flew their "sewing machines" low and slow enough to be able to bomb trenches, so unless you were bunkered, the witches could get you, usually silently too, as they'd cut their engines about 2k out from the target.
> 
> Much respect to the late comrade and her fellow witches.


 
Johnny Red had several storylines about them. Better than the history bukes at school.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 18, 2013)

andysays said:


> English dept of Wadham College, Oxford. Haters gonna hate...


 
To go back to this here Wadham's reputation is certainly the most left-wing college in the university (rest of the article is tripe):



> It famously hosts Queer Bop, originally a celebration of all types of sexuality, and the quad around the college bar is officially called Ho Chi Minh Quad. All Wadham bops, by college statute, conclude with the playing of ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ by the Specials. Whilst I was in attendance, the Wadham SU banned Coca-Cola products from the college on ethical grounds and forbade the serving of beverages in glass receptacles, preferring biodegradable plastic on the assumption that it was more environmentally friendly.


 
Here is the student union description:




> Wadham isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The patch of grass outside the common room is called the *Bar Quad, not Ho Chi Minh Quad.* The *wine cellar is one of the largest in Oxford*, while the majority of the college’s gardens are off limits to undergraduates. And you’re just as likely to find *‘I love Thatcher’ than ‘I love Lenin’* scrawled in the loos next door.
> 
> But note: *just as likely.* While at another college you might be strung up from the nearest chandelier for expressing any kind of feather-ruffling views, Wadham loves whatever you’re thinking, and is keen to hear it.
> 
> ...


 
It's officially the Bar Quad but Ho Chi Minh Quad retains a student irony following.


----------



## caleb (Jul 18, 2013)

hahahaha:


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 18, 2013)

good jazz hands, poor oratorical style


----------



## sihhi (Jul 18, 2013)

_The (middle-class) whites fighting white privilege:_

I'm going to initiate more discussions about my own privilege, and the privilege found both in my neighbourhood and in many parts of the Toronto yoga community.
I'm going to think about the ways that my life more closely resembles George Zimmerman's than it does Trayvon Martin's.
I'm going to think about more items that could be added to this list.
I'm going to start teaching Theo about racism and privilege in ways that are appropriate for his age.
Most of all, I'm going to try really, really hard to not make this about me. When people of colour raise their voice, I'm going to do my best to make sure that they get a megaphone, and then I'm going to hightail it to the back of the room and listen. I'm going to try harder to promote writing and thoughts and music and art that come from marginalized people. Rather than wearing a hoodie in solidarity or joking about starting riots, I'm going to talk about how I, a white woman, can do these things without fearing for my personal safety. I'm going to keep calling out racism and classism and sexism and ableism and homophobia and transphobia and all that other bad shit, even when I feel uncomfortable doing that. I'm going to be brave.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 18, 2013)

Theo


----------



## rekil (Jul 18, 2013)

Liking that young man's bobbing and weaving. Get in the ring motherfuckers.

*prays it's not a medical condition or something


----------



## eoin_k (Jul 18, 2013)

That name could give you a God complex. 

ETA i.e. Theo


----------



## eoin_k (Jul 18, 2013)

Is it me or is there a contradiction that recurs with the white, liberal journalists who embrace privilege theory.  First they tell their readers that racism isn't all about the privileged white reader and that they (i.e. the reader) needs to start listening to black people.  Then the writer demonstrates how _they_ have listened, how challenging this had been for _them_ and what _they_ are now going to do.  There is something very narcissistic about the whole exercise.


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Jul 18, 2013)

You mock, but which of us would be brave enough to challenge privilege in the Toronto yoga community?


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 18, 2013)

> Most of all, I'm going to try really, really hard to not make this about me.


 
A likely story.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 18, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> You mock, but which of us would be brave enough to challenge privilege in the Toronto yoga community?


*raises shaking but determined hand*


----------



## Fozzie Bear (Jul 18, 2013)

> I'm
> I'm going to
> my life
> I'm going to
> ...


----------



## eoin_k (Jul 18, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> You mock, but which of us would be brave enough to challenge privilege in the Toronto yoga community?


Sorry comrades, I'm going to have to bail on this one. I feel like a toad, but comfort myself by thinking that it would be worse for me to let you down in the heat of the battle.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 18, 2013)

They would hunt you like a rabid nazi dog, getting ever closer with that flying thing that in no way resembles flying. And they would catch you


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 18, 2013)

eoin_k said:


> Sorry comrades, I'm going to have to *bale* on this one. I feel like a toad, but comfort myself by thinking that it would be worse for me to let you down in the heat of the battle.


 
christian?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 18, 2013)

I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will bore you


----------



## sihhi (Jul 18, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> You mock, but which of us would be brave enough to challenge privilege in the Toronto yoga community?


 

I sense a special Proletarian Democracy mission for you, Fozzie, to produce a privilege-challenging in the Toronto yoga community special for the Workers Girder.

_Why Toronto yoga clubs need an outreach policy to open space for Canada's Inuit youth._

_Finding the oppressed but promoted yoga instructors of tomorrow?_

_Are Montreal's French-Canadian pilates classes part of the struggle against Anglo privilege *or* a determined policy to keep out Tamils who have learned just English but not French? Cdes Barry Mainwairing (Nuclear Physics for Socialists) and Billy Bragg (The Progressive Patriot) debate the issues._

_Yoga with trainers - a spoke in the wheel of Hindu oppression?_

_The absence of 'burka-welcoming' yoga in Yorkville: Islamaphobia rears its white Torontan head?_


----------



## The Pale King (Jul 18, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> More 'Prada-Meinhof'- style fakery aimed at enhancing the 'rebel sell' brand, I see.


 

from the video:

"something massive is happening all over the world...an enormous change on several levels is happening and em, i mean, i'm aware I only have five minutes, but I just wanted to...to bring people to the idea that...there is...that, let me put it another way..."


----------



## treelover (Jul 18, 2013)

> Worst game purchase I've made​Worst game purchase I've made
> ​Really should have researched it first but I saw a gameplay video online that made it seem enjoyable.
> ​It's got everything I don't want:
> ​Misogyny;
> ...


 


Intersectionality/identity politics reaches PC Gaming/ Steam

he or she is on about Far Cry 3!

ffs...


----------



## TruXta (Jul 18, 2013)

Kyriarchy? That one's new to me.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 18, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Kyriarchy? That one's new to me.


Clearly you have no commitment to this thread then


----------



## killer b (Jul 18, 2013)

yeah, fuck off newb.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 18, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Clearly you have no commitment to this thread then


No. I have not.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 18, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> You mock, but which of us would be brave enough to challenge privilege in the Toronto yoga community?


 
Shit writes itself, dude.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 18, 2013)

caleb said:


> hahahaha:




Here's the bit from LP's talk at the Oxford Union about who the 'we' at the Union is. The people Comrade Tariq was wining and dining.

_Who are we? People who are ambitious. People who expect to be in the top 10 to 1% of global society, either now or in a few years. People who are members of the Oxford Union or are invited to speak at the Oxford Union, or lucky enough to have been invited to speak at the Oxford Union and what does it mean for us to say that we are feminists? Well, one of the reasons I wanted to speak against the motion was I agree with the speaker who actually stole my point and can see me afterwards about it... for any reason he likes really._
_I believe that if we say that we are feminists we have missed the point of what feminism is about. Feminism is not about an identity, about saying 'it's all fine, we're feminists' cause maybe some of us can be equal within a system, we're feminists because for fifty years women have been allowed to be members of this society. Well is that a measure of social progress across the world, is it really?_
_Can we say we are all feminists now because, for example, maybe in a few years women will be allowed to be members of the Garrick Club? Fantastic, but personally I don't think that that is the main measure of what feminism is. Representation on the upper echelons of society. We now have this ridiculous debate over whether women can have it all?_
_Actually at the dinner before this, I talked to a couple of women who were already wondering how they were going to balance family life with their very big ambitions for what they are going to do when they leave Oxford. This idea of what can you do if you..., can we have it all, where it all is marriage to a man and babies - that's apparently all we're allowed to want now that's the standard. I think a few years ago there was a kind of feminism, and a kind of political imagination that allowed us to want more than that, different to that. It was a different right to not got married, to not to want to have babies. This idea that the most important thing a woman not a man can ever do is to hold a child, a child that she has given birth to._
_Actually, this is why I am not good debating, because when I heard all of you guys applaud when the honourable member said that, um I felt a bit sick and I had to leave the room [Applause] Thank you. [More Applause] Um thanks, um no but really I did. Some of you saw me leave and I was like I actually didn't know if I was going to come back in, because I thought 'Wow this is what this debate has come to, people applauding at such reactionary, disgusting opinions and sentiments'. How far have we not come in, in, in one of the most privileged rooms in the c-, people here who are going to be powerful in the next few years we are applauding the idea that this is the highest most important thing a woman can do. And then I came back in and I am glad I came back in because then I heard very young people saying things about feminism that I- I hadn't even got to yet in some cases. People, of both genders, the audience making such wonderful powerful speeches about what feminism means to them. I thought all right, all right. Over the last few weeks, it's not just people in this room who have given me hope, I've just come back from Cairo where I did some reporting in Tahrir Square you might - I am a reporter - I have a hat. This is my reporter's hat you get one actually, but they don't you about that when they're doing the media talks but you are all given a hat, I wear mine. ..._


----------



## rekil (Jul 19, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> What are Jodhi May's leftist credentials?
> 
> Cheers - Louis MacNeice


 
She was in Defiance with James Bond, having a go at the nazi jackboot.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 19, 2013)

> _ I am a reporter - I have a hat. This is my reporter's hat you get one actually, but they don't you about that when they're doing the media talks but you are all given a hat, I wear mine. ...__ I am a reporter - I have a hat. This is my reporter's hat you get one actually, but they don't you about that when they're doing the media talks but you are all given a hat, I wear mine. ...__ I am a reporter - I have a hat. This is my reporter's hat you get one actually, but they don't you about that when they're doing the media talks but you are all given a hat, I wear mine. ...__ I am a reporter - I have a hat. This is my reporter's hat you get one actually, but they don't you about that when they're doing the media talks but you are all given a hat, I wear mine. ...__ I am a reporter - I have a hat. This is my reporter's hat you get one actually, but they don't you about that when they're doing the media talks but you are all given a hat, I wear mine. ..._


 
i could read that bit all day.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 19, 2013)

> _People, of both genders,_


 
however, the intersectionality hat she is not wearing.  defaults to two genders


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 19, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Kyriarchy? That one's new to me.


 

Wasn't Kyriarchy one of these guys?


----------



## TruXta (Jul 19, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Wasn't Kyriarchy one of these guys?


Let's hope so. My first thought was that it had to with Kyrie Eleison somehow


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 19, 2013)

> _I am a reporter - I have a hat. This is my reporter's hat you get one actually, but they don't you about that when they're doing the media talks but you are all given a hat, I wear mine. ...__ I am a reporter - I have a hat. This is my reporter's hat you get one actually, but they don't you about that when they're doing the media talks but you are all given a hat, I wear mine. ...__ I am a reporter - I have a hat. This is my reporter's hat you get one actually, but they don't you about that when they're doing the media talks but you are all given a hat, I wear mine. ...__ I am a reporter - I have a hat. This is my reporter's hat you get one actually, but they don't you about that when they're doing the media talks but you are all given a hat, I wear mine. ...__ I am a reporter - I have a hat. This is my reporter's hat you get one actually, but they don't you about that when they're doing the media talks but you are all given a hat, I wear mine. ..._


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 19, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> You mock, but which of us would be brave enough to challenge privilege in the Toronto yoga community?


 
I'll do it if you let me take a couple of machetes to defend myself with.

Does Toronto have as "Stand Your Ground" law, do you know?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 19, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> i could read that bit all day.


----------



## rekil (Jul 19, 2013)

Elbowing into Greg Palast's personal brand isn't it.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 19, 2013)

copliker said:


> Elbowing into Greg Palast's personal brand isn't it.


Greg Dyke does Mickey Spillane


----------



## sihhi (Jul 19, 2013)

Apologies for having to rake over this - it's not an assault on any category of mental health patient / survivor however identified, but these different accounts don't sit well together:

LP in 2010



> It took me a year of hospitalisation, two relapses and a whole lot of work on myself to heal, but I'm there now, and I'm never going back. And I know others, men and women, who have made full recoveries. It's rare, but it does happen, and if the NHS took eating disorders more seriously it'd happen a lot more often. *I was incredibly lucky in the care I recieved, which I got because I had private healthcare cover.* If I had been treated by the NHS, there's every chance I wouldn't be alive today.


 
in 2013



> In my mid-teens, I had a severe breakdown that required hospitalisation. It worries me that many of the vital services that helped me to recover – fast, free *treatment on the NHS, support in the community from my doctor* and college nurse ... are no longer available.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 19, 2013)

Ooooops!


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 19, 2013)

well, at least she's lying for a good cause, i guess.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 19, 2013)

The cause being that young people can hack an end to economic and environmental injustice. A different kind of shift:

in 2010

_growing up after the end of the cold war, we have no coherent sense of the possibility of alternatives to neoliberal politics. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek observed that for young people today, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. For us, revolution is a retro concept whose proper use is to sell albums, t-shirts and tickets to hipster discos, rather than a serious political argument._


in 2013

_Now here’s a feeling: today’s teenagers are going to grow up to save the world. I get the feeling – too cautious and unformed to be an honest hope yet – that with the right support, this cohort of young people has the tools my generation lacked to hack a way out of the economic and environmental crisis closing in on us._


----------



## Limerick Red (Jul 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The cause being that young people can hack an end to economic and environmental injustice. A different kind of shift:
> 
> in 2010
> 
> ...


I think in fairness on this one, it isnt the same as lying, its just changing one nonsense opinion for another.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 19, 2013)

it's nice that she is more optimistic about young people though.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 19, 2013)

Limerick Red said:


> I think in fairness on this one, it isnt the same as lying, its just changing one nonsense opinion for another.


 

Of course it's not lying.  Like i said a different kind of shift, a 180 degree about-turn - in just three years - on wider social changes that can be effected by the same generation.


----------



## Limerick Red (Jul 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Of course it's not lying.  Like i said a different kind of shift, a 180 degree about-turn - in just three years - on wider social changes that can be effected by the same generation.


Sorry Im sneakin a peak at work, so I didnt see/read/notice your first line.apologies


----------



## The Pale King (Jul 19, 2013)

I find the whole discourse of 'generations' being ready or capable of making changes or not capable of same a bit weird tbh, don't get it. Zizek makes that point about apocalypse repeatedly but not as far as I remember (although I may be wrong about this) in specific relation to young people. I suppose it's that 'young people' is Laurie's brand, hence why she writes this generational stuff. She's positioned herself as the columnist who can tell broadsheet readers what the youth is up to, and from her lofty perch she can decide which generation has the x factor and which dosen't.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 19, 2013)

Limerick Red said:


> I think in fairness on this one, it isnt the same as lying, its just changing one nonsense opinion for another.


 
what i do quite frequently


----------



## love detective (Jul 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> Apologies for having to rake over this - it's not an assault on any category of mental health patient / survivor however identified, but these different accounts don't sit well together:
> 
> LP in 2010
> 
> ...


I thought at first they must be referring to two different things but it doesn't look like that is the case from what is written in this article by her in 2009

Incidentally that article from 2009 also doesn't sit well with what she says in 2013 about her own experience of the NHS either:-




			
				Laurie in 2009 about her own experience of NHS care for eating disorders in 2004 said:
			
		

> patients are at the mercy of their postcode, and hospital admission on overstretched general wards is too often a matter of force-feeding followed by rapid discharge. While this physical rehabilitation may put the patient temporarily out of danger, it is useless without addressing her mental distress - and so hospital admission becomes a revolving door, with patients quickly starving themselves again on release. This pushes up the hospitalisation figures even further. Of the nine teenagers on my ward in 2004, only myself and a skeletal boy of 13 were on our first admission.
> 
> The high relapse rate points to a tragic waste of medical resources. If proper care were provided for more of Britain's anorexic teenagers, the disease could be treated effectively when it first presents. This is a baffling omission on the part of the NHS, which still recommends that most anorexics be treated "on an outpatient basis". It is also a damning indictment of a culture that persistently fails to take the emotional distress of young adults, and particularly young women, seriously.


 



			
				Laurie in 2013 about her own experience of NHS care for eating disorders in 2004 said:
			
		

> It worries me that many of the vital services that helped me to recover – fast, free treatment on the NHS, support in the community from my doctor and college nurse ... are no longer available.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 19, 2013)

Limerick Red said:


> I think in fairness on this one, it isnt the same as lying, its just changing one nonsense opinion for another.


 
It might not be a lie, it is possible to recieve NHS treatment and have private health insurance too, and to recieve a mixture of both NHS and private care. Private healthcare in this country always leeches off the NHS anyway. Without getting into lurid levels of detail about her illness there's no way to knowing for sure and so I'd rather not speculate over it. I don't really care a great deal if Laurie Penny has or had private healthcare insurance anyway.

I think the interesting bit is how when a journalist so frequently self-references, or uses an anecdote or experience in a rhetorical way when writing articles, there comes with it an occupational hazard of saying things about yourself that in retrospect look pretty contradictory, such as the above two quotes sihhi. It's bound to happen if you try place yourself into every story you ever write. It also gets even trickier if someone wants to be able to change in and out of various guises to suit whichever audience they're talking to, because that'll mean details about yourself being slightly different for each audience. It's definitely not something that just Laurie Penny does either a lot of this goes on the comment pages of all the newspapers, I bet you could find these sorts of inconsistencies in loads of journo's if you look hard enough.


----------



## sihhi (Jul 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> what i do quite frequently


 

Do you?

Anyway LP's opening paragraph is confusing.

_A few weeks ago, I found myself squirrelled away in the corner of a posh party, talking politics with two teenage girls. Were I a right-wing hack addressing an audience of concerned Tory parents, this would be occasion for a stern, salivating rant about how today’s teenagers are abject, semi-criminal, knicker-dropping savages, weaned on violent video games and internet pornography. That’s why they are invariably the most interesting people at any party._

The 'That's why' bit is very confusing. It means either

1 Today's teenagers _are _not far from "semi-criminal, knicker-dropping savages, weaned on violent video games and internet pornography" and that's why they are invariably the most interesting people at any party.

or

2 _The fact_ that Tory parents (or columnist for them) thinks they are "semi-criminal, knicker-dropping savages, weaned on violent video games and internet pornography" is the reason why they are the most interesting people at any party.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 19, 2013)

yeah i change my opinions quite a few times over the years, from one load of bollocks to the next


----------



## sihhi (Jul 19, 2013)

love detective said:


> I thought at first they must be referring to two different things but it doesn't look like that is the case from what is written in this article by her in 2009
> 
> Incidentally that article from 2009 also doesn't sit well with what she says in 2013 about her own experience of the NHS either:-


 
You're right it is odd, in the picture of NHS anorexia treatment in 2004 is described as broadly positive in the 2013 article, but it is was described as broadly negative in the 2009 one.
Presumably it does all make sense and the things/aspects refered to are different ones. I dunno really.


----------



## love detective (Jul 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> You're right it is odd, in the picture of NHS anorexia treatment in 2004 is described as broadly positive in the 2013 article, but it is was described as broadly negative in the 2009 one.
> Presumably it does all make sense and the things/aspects refered to are different ones. I dunno really.


 
actually you might be right - i'd skimmed over this comment from her in the 2009 article:-




			
				Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> I am very lucky to have received such excellent care


 
So she had good care personally but generally for everyone else (including those in the same ward as her) it's pretty poor - guess that's what private healthcare gets you


----------



## killer b (Jul 19, 2013)

wasn't she lucky to go to a prestigious private school too? she's one lucky girl for sure.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yeah i change my opinions quite a few times over the years, from one load of bollocks to the next


 
no one is born wise.  the journey to wisdom necessarily requires that you stop occasionally at stupid for a while.  we've all been wrong in the past.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 19, 2013)

killer b said:


> wasn't she lucky to go to a prestigious private school too? she's one lucky girl for sure.


 
some would say, _born lucky._


----------



## sihhi (Jul 19, 2013)

The teenager saying this 

_The other had ambitions to be a foreign correspondent and was deeply suspicious of the culture of adventurism in conflict reporting. _

reminded me of this attack on everyone here


lauriepenny said:


> activism is tiring and we all need to relax, but is chilling out by slagging off people who are actually trying to help really the best use of radical downtime? Quite apart from the fact that I happen to be a real person, and not your counter-revolutionary wank-fantasy. I'm a 26-year old woman with a mum and a dad and baby sisters and a *job I work hard at and politics I believe in and am prepared to put everything on the line for*


 
peppered of course with this stuff

_That's it. Sorry, guys, but I'm not going back out there today. Really don't want to be arrested and deported just for journalism #s17 _(Twitter explanation for leaving early US 17 Sep 2012 protests with police cut offs and blocks)

_the line between activism and media production has become smudged to the point of irrelevance.But there’s a line in the sand, and you cross it when you start making most of your living writing about politics. Because once you have decided that you will always tell the truth you see in front of you, no matter what your bosses say, you have to decide what’s more important: your career or your conscience. _(2012 Essay)

_a snapshot of a nation in the grip of a very modern crisis where young and old see little reason to go on, the left is scattered and the far right is assuming greater power and influence. Along the way they drink far too much coffee, become hypnotised by street art, and somehow manage not to get arrested or mugged._ (Discordia Introduction 2012)


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 19, 2013)

radical downtime


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 19, 2013)

killer b said:


> wasn't she lucky to go to a prestigious private school too? she's one lucky girl for sure.


 

With such miraculous luck maybe I should ask her for next week's lottery numbers. 

Shame her memory is a little more suspect than her incredible good fortune, though...


----------



## sihhi (Jul 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> radical downtime


 

In your case, because you are a _young woman_ you have a defence for examining LP's articles - it's better radical downtime than taking up smoking. 




> One of them smoked a succession of perfect, hand-rolled cigarettes of the sort I didn’t learn to construct until my twenties, and asked me intelligent questions about rape culture and the application of feminist theory to campaigning. The other had ambitions to be a foreign correspondent and was deeply suspicious of the culture of adventurism in conflict reporting.
> *They asked me about ethics*_, about how to deal with sexism at school,_* about privilege*, about trauma. Staring up from the bottom of two gins, I tried to give helpful answers that weren’t simply asking them to please stop smoking, because it’s taken me years to quit and clearly we need *young women* like them around for a long time because the world isn’t going to save itself.


 

What kind of teenagers ask their elders about "privilege"?   Those who attend _posh parties ?  _ 



> I found myself squirrelled away in the corner of a posh party, talking politics with two teenage girls.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 19, 2013)

Pretty sure she was back on the fags around the time of Maggie's death #notastalker


----------



## andysays (Jul 19, 2013)

Fozzie Bear said:


> You mock, but which of us would be brave enough to challenge privilege in the Toronto yoga community?


 
Has anyone suggested yet that we should be taking a flexible position in this case?


----------



## andysays (Jul 19, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> It might not be a lie, it is possible to recieve NHS treatment and have private health insurance too, and to recieve a mixture of both NHS and private care. Private healthcare in this country always leeches off the NHS anyway. Without getting into lurid levels of detail about her illness there's no way to knowing for sure and so I'd rather not speculate over it. I don't really care a great deal if Laurie Penny has or had private healthcare insurance anyway...


 
I agree. She might be talking about two separate bits of treatment on two separate occasions.

In the interests of full disclosure (and in case anyone still reading wants to argue again that I'm posher than Laurie Penny, FFS), I can reveal that I had a stay in a psychiatric hospital paid for by private health insurance which my then partner had as a result of her job.

I've also had a couple of shorter stays in NHS psych hospitals, and whilst I'd rather that all hospitals were of the same standard as the best private ones, I'd be loathe to attack anyone for making use of private health care in an emergency (awaits flaming...)


----------



## sihhi (Jul 19, 2013)

andysays said:


> I agree. She might be talking about two separate bits of treatment on two separate occasions.


 

It's possible but reading all articles looking closely at the statement, it is a conditional:

"I was incredibly lucky in the care I recieved, which I got because I had private healthcare cover. If I had been treated by the NHS, there's every chance I wouldn't be alive today."

It has a straight meaning - _treatment by the NHS did not happen_, the treatment (which the articles cumulatively reveal lasted nine months inpatient (first and only stay) plus a bit longer via outpatient or visits, with full recovery and no return to either) was private.
The points made have nothing to do with anyone's illness, but about misrepresentation (or shocking weak representation) of the private healthcare accessed. It's on her own conscience what she writes - no one can prove it. It's less worse than Ken Livingstone refusing to answer questions on private healthcare (but then admitting he had bought private healthcare), she hasn't bought the healthcare, her parents have no one here has attacked LP for her circumstance of birth.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 19, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Wasn't Kyriarchy one of these guys?


 

Thats Steel


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jul 19, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Thats Steel


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 19, 2013)

no sign of Jet, creeping racism


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 19, 2013)

she's always banging on about feminism but she doesn't appear (as a punter or as a speaker, let alone as an organiser) at any feminism events, conferences, protests, discussion groups etc.  pure lip service, as ever.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 19, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> she's always banging on about feminism but she doesn't appear (as a punter or as a speaker, let alone as an organiser) at any feminism events, conferences, protests, discussion groups etc. pure lip service, as ever.


 

Not entirely accurate, to be fair. If the events in question are good for increased publicity and/or a fat appearance fee then she's been known to appear at them. Although her type tend to turn up to the opening of a door if it's likely to fit those criteria.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 19, 2013)

andysays said:


> Has anyone suggested yet that we should be taking a flexible position in this case?


 
To be fair, people have been bending over backwards to avoid provoking the Toronto yoga community.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 19, 2013)

It's been a flyaway success.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 19, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> she's always banging on about feminism but she doesn't appear (as a punter or as a speaker, let alone as an organiser) at any feminism events, conferences, protests, discussion groups etc. pure lip service, as ever.


she was a speaker at slutwalk in 2011..


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 19, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> It's been a flyaway success.


 





Toronton PD comrades challenging white privilege, yesterday.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 19, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> she was a speaker at slutwalk in 2011..


with a *cough* relevant-to-the-theme-of-the-day slogan written on her belly
(seriously, laurie. the whole 'we should have riots, and we shouldn't diet' thing has its time and place. but i fail to see where it belongs comfortably/obviously in the whole 'no means no' arena  )



e2a: randoms  like this one were clearly making a more appropriate statement. especially with the glittery moustache 



er, yeah. didn't think that one through  time to check my hypocrisy privilege


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 19, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> she was a speaker at slutwalk in 2011..


 
it's halfway through 2013.  she could show up more than once in every few years to events in her hometown that she feels are so incredibly important.  she's devoted more time to telling oxbridge wankers how ace they are than encouraging women of any classes towards action or empowerment.  except stripping, of course.  she loves her a stripper.  they're the most empowered of all.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 19, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> with a *cough* relevant-to-the-theme-of-the-day slogan written on her belly
> (seriously, laurie. the whole 'we should have riots, and we shouldn't diet' thing has its time and place. but i fail to see where it belongs comfortably/obviously in the whole 'no means no' arena  )
> 
> View attachment 37003


 
well, there are much worse.  the anti-feminist ladies wandering around with their baps out to absorb all the media footage with a different message, fo a start.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 19, 2013)

Ineffectual platitudes not thing!


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 19, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Ineffectual platitudes not thing!


are you missing some words there?


----------



## J Ed (Jul 19, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> are you missing some words there?


 

I just find it a really weird for her to use any slogan including the word riot, I mean is she proposing to start a riot or even multiple riots? Doesn't she think 'fuck those who use violence against violence'?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 19, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I just find it a really weird for her to use any slogan including the word riot, I mean is she proposing to start a riot or even multiple riots? Doesn't she think 'fuck those who use violence against violence'?


_nice_ riots. obvs.


----------



## rekil (Jul 19, 2013)

sihhi said:


> The teenager saying this
> 
> _The other had ambitions to be a foreign correspondent and was deeply suspicious of the culture of adventurism in conflict reporting. _
> 
> reminded me of this attack on everyone here


 
It reminded me that LP said she had wanted to be a foreign correspondent in some last minute piece of unarsedness or other recently. It's almost as if...

Besides, was this a children's party with 20 somethings mooching about? Or a 'grownups' party with a smattering of kids? Posh people are sooo decadent.


----------



## gawkrodger (Jul 19, 2013)

guessing this is the best thread for this. Genuinely pretty good article

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/18/trade-union-bosses-journalists


----------



## sihhi (Jul 19, 2013)

Maybe more of a why Guardian is in pan example.



> I went to the biggest event on the trade union calendar, the Durham Miners' Gala, last weekend. Notably absent among the brass bands, ale and working-class politics were the columnists furnishing us with their opinions on unions just a week earlier. These commentators were also lacking during last year's GMB, PCS and Unite conferences (and I should know – I went to all three)


 
Union full-timer bigging up their own work surely not? 



> but you can forget any support for the working class as soon as it starts standing up and demanding rights; as soon as it refuses to be totally deferential to a professional class that thinks it knows best


 
Exactly the same thing could be said of the professional class that McCluskey is at the head of and she in the middle of. Naturally most Guardians won't remember how Unite's lawyers threatened Visteon workers with expulsion and no legal help if they didn't vacate their factory occupation.
I'm sure UNITE members could make the point better though.


----------



## andysays (Jul 20, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> To be fair, people have been bending over backwards to avoid provoking the Toronto yoga community.


 
Standing on their heads...

Tying themselves in knots...

This shit just writes itself


----------



## andysays (Jul 20, 2013)

sihhi said:


> ...Exactly the same thing could be said of the professional class that McCluskey is at the head of and she in the middle of. Naturally most Guardians won't remember how Unite's lawyers threatened Visteon workers with expulsion and no legal help if they didn't vacate their factory occupation.
> I'm sure UNITE members could make the point better though.


 
As a UNITE member, I'm happy to support both your point and and your way of making it


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 20, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> _nice_ riots. obvs.


 

Do they have to be lucrative networking and publicity-building opportunities as well?


----------



## andysays (Jul 20, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Do they have to be lucrative networking and publicity-building opportunities as well?


 
*Everything* is a lucrative networking and publicity-building opportunity; we're just jealous haters because we don't know how to make use of them


----------



## lauriepenny (Jul 20, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Pretty sure she was back on the fags around the time of Maggie's death #notastalker



Well, you're doing a really good impression of one.


----------



## andysays (Jul 20, 2013)

*waves to @lauriepenny*


----------



## lauriepenny (Jul 20, 2013)

This is getting so ugly. Checked back in here after months to find you accusing me of lying about my treatment when I was a sick teenager. Actually, I was treated on private insurance first, in the acute ward at 17, and later after I left home I reeived NHS care as an outpatient, which was vital for my recovery. 

Additionally, I regularly speak at feminist events. If you can't find any since 2011 you're the ones not doing your research properly. Two days ago I gave a talk to a student feminist group at a secondary school in East London. 

Have you ever asked yourselves seriously how the sort of spiteful commentary you're dishing out on this thread might make a person feel? I know you like to think of me as a symbol of all you despise, based mostly on false information and assumptions about my background you've pulled out of nowhere. But actually, I'm a real person, a young woman trying her best to do good work. I try not to check this thread anymore because the level of wilful falsehood and bullying just makes me upset. But I wonder sometimes what you think you're going to achieve with it.


----------



## YouSir (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Well, you're doing a really good impression of one.


 

I was going to ask if you were the real Laurie Penny, but the notion of someone imitating Laurie Penny on this thread really really depresses me, so I won't.

Mind you, the notion of the real Laurie Penny posting on this thread depresses me quite a lot too. 

If it is you though - I don't think you're very good at what you do, please try to be better at it or stop completely if you don't think you can.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> This is getting so ugly. Checked back in here after months to find you accusing me of lying about my treatment when I was a sick teenager. Actually, I was treated on private insurance first, in the acute ward at 17, and later after I left home I reeived NHS care as an outpatient, which was vital for my recovery.
> 
> Additionally, I regularly speak at feminist events. If you can't find any since 2011 you're the ones not doing your research properly. Two days ago I gave a talk to a student feminist group at a secondary school in East London.
> 
> Have you ever asked yourselves seriously how the sort of spiteful commentary you're dishing out on this thread might make a person feel? I know you like to think of me as a symbol of all you despise, based mostly on false information and assumptions about my background you've pulled out of nowhere. But actually, I'm a real person, a young woman trying her best to do good work. I try not to check this thread anymore because the level of wilful falsehood and bullying just makes me upset. But I wonder sometimes what you think you're going to achieve with it.


 

Laurie, just curious whether you have ever found anything on this thread to be legitimate or relevant criticism? It's hard for me not to think that you're cherry picking contributions to portray this thread in as bad a light as possible. Is there nothing here where you've thought "ah, okay, fair cop"?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

i hope to achieve you being less of an exploitative lying shit, lauriepenny. can't speak for others on this thread, mind.
you're welcome x
(ps i only mentioned the 2011 slutwalk because at the time, i thought you were ok. so took a photo of you onstage, shared it, and people started telling me to check your facts. so to speak)


----------



## YouSir (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> This is getting so ugly. Checked back in here after months to find you accusing me of lying about my treatment when I was a sick teenager. Actually, I was treated on private insurance first, in the acute ward at 17, and later after I left home I reeived NHS care as an outpatient, which was vital for my recovery.
> 
> Additionally, I regularly speak at feminist events. If you can't find any since 2011 you're the ones not doing your research properly. Two days ago I gave a talk to a student feminist group at a secondary school in East London.
> 
> Have you ever asked yourselves seriously how the sort of spiteful commentary you're dishing out on this thread might make a person feel? I know you like to think of me as a symbol of all you despise, based mostly on false information and assumptions about my background you've pulled out of nowhere. But actually, I'm a real person, a young woman trying her best to do good work. I try not to check this thread anymore because the level of wilful falsehood and bullying just makes me upset. But I wonder sometimes what you think you're going to achieve with it.


 

No idea about the rest but sometimes criticism is just criticism, not a personal attack. I just find what you do to not be very good. It's far too self referential, far too tied into a seemingly self-selecting group of trendy 'activists' who find their own navel gazing far more interesting than doing the actual work required to write knowledgably about things. Whoever you are as a person I can't help but wonder what good, if any, you do for the Left and what possible harm you may do by perpetuating the self-indulgent student/Hipster school of political thought (or lack thereof).

Such is my opinion at any rate. As for the minutiae of your life I couldn't care less.


----------



## Sue (Jul 20, 2013)

Interested in the 'false information and assumptions' about your background and the 'wilful falsehoods and bullying' but a lot more interested in you addressing the political points made on here which so far you've completely failed to do.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 20, 2013)

Ah fuck it why bother asking the question I did, it's something that has bothered me about almost all privately educated people I have met. Nothing is ever their fault.


----------



## JHE (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> This is getting so ugly.


 

It's been ugly for a long time.  

There's quite a lot of ugly shit on this site.  It's not just a feature of this site, though.  It's a more general thing about the internet and about the way people like to slag off other people, including celebrities.  (LP in her own little way is a celebrity and, like many celebrities, doesn't really deserve her celebrity.)


----------



## lauriepenny (Jul 20, 2013)

There have been a couple of points which are, if not legitimate criticism, then at least points that it's valid for me to address and think about. Being committed to intersectionality means I do have to think about how my background might affect what I write, for example. The thing is, I knew all that already, and if I want honest unbiased critique, I look for it elsewhere. 

I don't expect to find useful critique on this thread because it's simply full of lies, distortions and people determined to think the worst of me- just as I wouldn't ask my most ardent fans to offer me vital critique on a piece, because I know they'd be biased.

Tufty, how you expect to change my mind whilst calling me things like an 'exploitative lying shit' is beyond me. If you actually want me to pay attention to you, treat me like a human being and don't start with baseless insults.


----------



## andysays (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> ... But actually, I'm a real person, a young woman trying her best to do good work...


 
Perhaps surprisingly, everyone who posts here is a "real person", and most are also trying their best to "do good work" in whatever way they can, although they perhaps spend rather less time blowing their own trumpets than someone I could mention.

And just so we're clear, are you claiming that as a "young woman" (many of those here also fall into that demographic, BTW), you are somehow above criticism in ways an "old man" like me would not be?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> This is getting so ugly. Checked back in here after months to find you accusing me of lying about my treatment when I was a sick teenager. Actually, I was treated on private insurance first, in the acute ward at 17, and later after I left home I reeived NHS care as an outpatient, which was vital for my recovery.
> 
> Additionally, I regularly speak at feminist events. If you can't find any since 2011 you're the ones not doing your research properly. Two days ago I gave a talk to a student feminist group at a secondary school in East London.
> 
> Have you ever asked yourselves seriously how the sort of spiteful commentary you're dishing out on this thread might make a person feel? I know you like to think of me as a symbol of all you despise, based mostly on false information and assumptions about my background you've pulled out of nowhere. But actually, I'm a real person, a young woman *trying her best to do good work*. I try not to check this thread anymore because the level of wilful falsehood and bullying just makes me upset. But I wonder sometimes what you think you're going to achieve with it.


 

I actually believe you there and I'm sorry if you have become the focal point for a lot of working class leftists sick to the back teeth of the privileged acting _for_ us. But you must understand where the anger comes from. We aren't looking for another Orwell or a saviour from the fabian set and it gets really fucking wearing to see the firebox and hari-loving set saying things for us. It also gets insulting.

You can, on occaison, write very good things- too often you don't, and you take the piss by not doing so. I'm about two steps away from the streets here, my prospects are zero and the sum total of my existence measures up to sweet fuck all. But you don't want to talk about disenfranchised alienated working class males do you?


----------



## J Ed (Jul 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Ah fuck it why bother asking the question I did, it's something that has bothered me about almost all privately educated people I have met. Nothing is ever their fault.


 


lauriepenny said:


> There have been a couple of points which are, if not legitimate criticism, then at least points that it's valid for me to address and think about. Being committed to intersectionality means I do have to think about how my background might affect what I write, for example. The thing is, I knew all that already, and if I want honest unbiased critique, I look for it elsewhere.
> 
> I don't expect to find useful critique on this thread because it's simply full of lies, distortions and people determined to think the worst of me- just as I wouldn't ask my most ardent fans to offer me vital critique on a piece, because I know they'd be biased.
> 
> Tufty, how you expect to change my mind whilst calling me things like an 'exploitative lying shit' is beyond me. If you actually want me to pay attention to you, treat me like a human being and don't start with baseless insults.


 


QED


----------



## Sue (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> There have been a couple of points which are, if not legitimate criticism, then at least points that it's valid for me to address and think about. Being committed to intersectionality means I do have to think about how my background might affect what I write, for example. The thing is, I knew all that already, and if I want honest unbiased critique, I look for it elsewhere.
> 
> I don't expect to find useful critique on this thread because it's simply full of lies, distortions and people determined to think the worst of me- just as I wouldn't ask my most ardent fans to offer me vital critique on a piece, because I know they'd be biased.
> 
> Tufty, how you expect to change my mind whilst calling me things like an 'exploitative lying shit' is beyond me. If you actually want me to pay attention to you, treat me like a human being and don't start with baseless insults.



And there we have it. You seem to have no idea how that comes across. Kind of sums up the entire thread.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

also, lauriepenny the fucker that raped me this year (and his friends) are big fans of yours. they really appreciate all your privilege theory evangelising, and i'm *wrong* for thinking it's being misused.
this article was cited by my rapist and his friends to try and justify why i shouldn't report or name him, let alone speak out to anyone 'outside the group' about what he did. and some of these people *are* your friends. your real life, breathing,lets-meet-up-and-fix-it-with-tea,  not-just-on-twitter friends.
on the 24th march, i ended up in hospital trying to section myself. posting on this thread was a major trigger - that's my problem not yours, and i appreciate that.
thankfully i've now realised that you and they are shitwits, and reported him. and his friends. for fucking harrassment over the last six months.

want to show some proper solidarity and write an article about the shit that's happened to me?
actually, i retract that. i wouldn't recognise your version of 'the truth' if it bit me on the arse.

/searingly honest post that some laurie pennys will find upsetting. if they've even got a shred of fucking humanity and compassion left in their vampire corpse.
i await your 'dignified silence' response with unbaited breath.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 20, 2013)

I'm not really sure how that article could be used that way but (((tufty)))


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I'm not really sure how that article could be used that way but (((tufty)))


'she didn't report her rapist. so why should you?'.


----------



## andysays (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> There have been a couple of points which are, if not legitimate criticism, then at least points that it's valid for me to address and think about...


 
Care to share? (Or share to care...)


----------



## J Ed (Jul 20, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> 'she didn't report her rapist. so why should you?'.


 

Jesus that is fucked up, I am so sorry.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

and lauriepenny, this is also why i hate you (i don't go on twitter unless i am really fucking furious, and resent having to resort to it as a method of contact):



 #*phew?*
#*responsible journalism my arse*

(just in case there's any confusion, i'm the 'grumpy midget from leeds' who was having that conversation with you)


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Jesus that is fucked up, I am so sorry.


not as sorry as i am.
and thank you.your post was genuinely appreciated.


----------



## lauriepenny (Jul 20, 2013)

Tufty- I'm shocked to hear your rapist has been citing my work. I'm not sure I understand what you're saying happened- did they use the article to say you should or shouldn't name him? Either way, of course they are wrong- it should never a rape victim's duty to name or not name their attacker. Ironically, after that article was posted I got people telling me that my choice not to name the man involved was wrong- and people, including people on this thread, telling me I'd made it all up. I found that hugely triggering as I'm sure you understand.

And I'm sorry to hear you've been unwell. I know how that goes. I hope you're feeling better and receiving the treatment you need. 

I find it hard to believe that friends of mine could have acted as you say- but then almost everyone DOES find it hard to believe, and that's how rape culture continues. If there's anything I can do to help, feel free to email me in total confidence- I will not share anything you write to me unless you specifically ask me to.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

fuck off you insincere careerist cow cunt.


----------



## rekil (Jul 20, 2013)

I made this for the imminent sinking of Bloodworth but I guess I can recycle it for special occasions like this.


Spoiler











(blame Idris2002 and his fucking gifs)


----------



## lauriepenny (Jul 20, 2013)

'she didn't report her rapist, so why should you'?

This is deeply fucked up and I'm so sorry some prick said it to you. The reason I didn't report was I was convinced I wouldn't be believed - and it took a while for me to understand that what happened to me was rape. And the reason I thought that was because of people with attitudes like whatever sexist dickhead told you this.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

just take this opportunity to think about the impact that *every. thing. you. write* has on people. 
for once in your un/lucky little life.

ta.


----------



## lauriepenny (Jul 20, 2013)

Tufty, you asked me for some solidarity, and as a fellow survivor of rape who has been disbelieved and shamed for it- including on this thread- I tried to show it, and to assure you that I don't agree with my article about my own experience being used to shame others into silence. The offer is still open. I hope you're as ok as you can be right now.


----------



## Sue (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Tufty, you asked me for some solidarity, and as a fellow survivor of rape who has been disbelieved and shamed for it- including on this thread- I tried to show it, and to assure you that I don't agree with my article about my own experience being used to shame others into silence. The offer is still open. I hope you're as ok as you can be right now.



Hole, stop digging? Just a thought.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> also, lauriepenny
> 
> want to show some proper solidarity and write an article about the shit that's happened to me?
> *actually, i retract that*/quote]


sorry, sarcastic font doesn't exist on this board yet.
i don't want someone with your journalistic skills on my side. thanks though.


----------



## lauriepenny (Jul 20, 2013)

And I do think about the impact of everything I write. I can't be responsible for sexist pigs deliberately misinterpreting it, but I can tell you I'm sorry that happened, and if there's anything I can do to help, I will. Even though you hate me. Solidarity has to mean something.


----------



## lauriepenny (Jul 20, 2013)

Tufty, I promise I won't write about this - I would never write on something so sensitive without permission. You have my word.


----------



## YouSir (Jul 20, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> just take this opportunity to think about the impact that *every. thing. you. write* has on people.
> for once in your un/lucky little life.
> 
> ta.


 



lauriepenny said:


> Tufty, you asked me for some solidarity, and as a fellow survivor of rape who has been disbelieved and shamed for it- including on this thread- I tried to show it, and to assure you that I don't agree with my article about my own experience being used to shame others into silence. The offer is still open. I hope you're as ok as you can be right now.


 

In this instance I'd say you're the one who should be listening to Tufty, whose advice would be well applied to everything you write and might make it seem less like like navel gazing self indulgence. DotCommunist's post earlier would be a good one to think on too imo.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 20, 2013)

you know what, I just typed near on 500 words trying to explain, but whats the fucking point. She won't respond


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> The reason I didn't report was I was convinced I wouldn't be believed - and it took a while for me to understand that what happened to me was rape. And the reason I thought that was because of people with attitudes like whatever sexist dickhead told you this.


my rapist totalyl isolated me from my support network at the time (and so did they, with thier own special interpretations of consent, to some extent). they tried to intellectualise the whole thing to convince me that i did really give consent, i just didn't remember it. or verbalise it. it was implied by my existing relationship with him. i carried on relying on him for 'support' for about six weeks after. and crumbled and reported him about six weeks/a month after it happened. (edited: sorry, make that two months)

so yeah.

as for the 'sexist dickhead' amd his mates, he's lauded by you and The Left for speaking out about the sexual abuse of women by undercover cops. you've publicly gushed over his/your mates' Activist actions as defining them as 'good people'. nice choice of friends and targetted approval there, laurie.


----------



## andysays (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> And I do think about the impact of everything I write. I can't be responsible for sexist pigs deliberately misinterpreting it, but I can tell you I'm sorry that happened, and if there's anything I can do to help, I will. Even though you hate me. Solidarity has to mean something.


 
Solidarity *does* mean something, even in the bear pit of U75. Many of those here have already provided far more solidarity and support to tufty79 than you're ever likely to do.

We're like the upper-middle-class privilege networks that you belong to in that regard - we look after our own. You're emphatically *not *one of us, and no one's fooled


----------



## lauriepenny (Jul 20, 2013)

YouSir- I have listened to Tufty, and as I said I do think about the impact of everything I write. I do not claim to speak on behalf of the working-class and never have. If you're angry at the way the media likes to frame the debate in those terms, setting up talking-heads rather than allowing working-class people space to speak for themselves in the mainstream press, I understand, but I hardly think I'm the right target for that rage.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 20, 2013)

> as a fellow survivor of rape who has been disbelieved and shamed for it- including on this thread-


 
people on here applauded it as your most honest piece and believed you.

edited out a 'most' from the start of my initial sentence. Nobody doubted you here


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

andysays said:


> Solidarity *does* mean something, even in the bear pit of U75. Many of those here have already provided far more solidarity and support to tufty79 than you're ever likely to do.


fucking bang on.
urban solidarity vs laurie penny's lolidarity 

i'm here all week. try the fish. i accept no responsibility if it's bile-flavoured.


----------



## lauriepenny (Jul 20, 2013)

'as for the 'sexist dickhead' amd his mates, he's lauded by you and The Left for speaking out about the sexual abuse of women by undercover cops. you've publicly gushed over his/your mates' Activist actions as defining them as 'good people'. nice choice of friends and targetted approval there, laurie.'

I still don't know who this is, but if there's someone in my networks who is an abuser and hasn't been called to account for it, I'd like to put that right. Obviously you're not under any obligation to tell me, but if you want to, and if you want to let me know what action you think needs to be taken, you have my assurance of complete confidence.


----------



## YouSir (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> YouSir- I have listened to Tufty, and as I said I do think about the impact of everything I write. I do not claim to speak on behalf of the working-class and never have. If you're angry at the way the media likes to frame the debate in those terms, setting up talking-heads rather than allowing working-class people space to speak for themselves in the mainstream press, I understand, but I hardly think I'm the right target for that rage.


 

Well that's deeply patronising. And I'm not sure I can be arsed to explain why.


----------



## YouSir (Jul 20, 2013)

YouSir said:


> Well that's deeply patronising. And I'm not sure I can be arsed to explain why.


 

Actually, it's blatantly obvious why it's patronising and I can't imagine you're so thoughtless or stupid as to not realise why. But thanks for negating all my criticism of you and your work by alluding to my misled rage and offering up the revelation that the mainstream media doesn't represent working class people.


----------



## andysays (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> ... If you're angry at the way the media likes to frame the debate in those terms, setting up talking-heads rather than allowing working-class people space to speak for themselves in the mainstream press, I understand, but I hardly think I'm the right target for that rage.


 
To the extent that you are happy to step into that framework (some might even say elbow your way in...) to build your faux-radical profile you are *absolutely* a valid target for that rage.


----------



## killer b (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> If you're angry at the way the media likes to frame the debate in those terms, setting up talking-heads rather than allowing working-class people space to speak for themselves in the mainstream press, I understand, but I hardly think I'm the right target for that rage.


 
you are the media ffs. you aren't outside of this shit y'know.


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## killer b (Jul 20, 2013)

lol. snap, andy.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

a song for laurie (are you doing the vocals? ):



(if you dare try and interpret this as an online threat to your safety, or as mysogyny, or sexist hating, i will be a bit pissed off. it's my version of gallows humour. i wish you no harm, but i think you need to take a fucking hard look at yourself, and stop digging your own lexical metaphorical grave)


----------



## andysays (Jul 20, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i'm here all week. try the fish. i accept no responsibility if it's bile-flavoured.


 
Just a green salad for me, in that case


----------



## lauriepenny (Jul 20, 2013)

See, this is what happens when I try to engage here- I can expect everything I say to be misconstrued and interpreted in the worst possible light. I only came on to set some facts straight and tell you how triggering it is to be told I've lied about my mental health history. Nobody has had the guts to apologise for that or for the rape apologism and stalkery behavior on this thread that, in my opinion, negates any valid criticism you might have to offer me.

Forgive me, I thought a request that I be treated with a bit of human understanding might be met with something other than insults. Clearly I was wrong.


----------



## cesare (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Tufty- I'm shocked to hear your rapist has been citing my work. I'm not sure I understand what you're saying happened- did they use the article to say you should or shouldn't name him? Either way, of course they are wrong- it should never a rape victim's duty to name or not name their attacker. Ironically, after that article was posted I got people telling me that my choice not to name the man involved was wrong- and people,* including people on this thread, *telling me I'd made it all up. I found that hugely triggering as I'm sure you understand.
> 
> And I'm sorry to hear you've been unwell. I know how that goes. I hope you're feeling better and receiving the treatment you need.
> 
> I find it hard to believe that friends of mine could have acted as you say- but then almost everyone DOES find it hard to believe, and that's how rape culture continues. If there's anything I can do to help, feel free to email me in total confidence- I will not share anything you write to me unless you specifically ask me to.



Name names, please. I don't recall *anyone* on this thread suggesting you were lying about being raped.


----------



## cesare (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> See, this is what happens when I try to engage here- I can expect everything I say to be misconstrued and interpreted in the worst possible light. I only came on to set some facts straight and tell you how triggering it is to be told I've lied about my mental health history. Nobody has had the guts to apologise for that or for the rape apologism and stalkery behavior on this thread that, in my opinion, negates any valid criticism you might have to offer me.
> 
> Forgive me, I thought a request that I be treated with a bit of human understanding might be met with something other than insults. Clearly I was wrong.


Specifics as to "rape apologism" on this thread, please.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

i apologise for the rape apologism on this page, and the stalkery behaviour.
i would also appreciate you pointing out where this has happened, because frankly i cba to find it myself. i'm not supporting it, just to clarify. i just haven't seen much beyond criticising the stuff you put out in the public sphere.


----------



## lauriepenny (Jul 20, 2013)

Tufty, I have tried to engage with kindness and solidarity and you've responded with hate. I just don't understand how you can have so little empthy. I'm finding your behavior deeply triggering. I hope you don't do this to anyone else.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

jesus fucking christ.


----------



## lauriepenny (Jul 20, 2013)

Well, I accept your apology- although none of that was your fault, Tufty.


----------



## Firky (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Tufty- I'm shocked to hear your rapist has been citing my work. I'm not sure I understand what you're saying happened- did they use the article to say you should or shouldn't name him? Either way, of course they are wrong- it should never a rape victim's duty to name or not name their attacker. Ironically, after that article was posted I got people telling me that my choice not to name the man involved was wrong- and people, including people on this thread, telling me I'd made it all up. I found that hugely triggering as I'm sure you understand.
> 
> And I'm sorry to hear you've been unwell. I know how that goes. I hope you're feeling better and receiving the treatment you need.
> 
> I find it hard to believe that friends of mine could have acted as you say- but then almost everyone DOES find it hard to believe, and that's how rape culture continues. If there's anything I can do to help, feel free to email me in total confidence- I will not share anything you write to me unless you specifically ask me to.


 



tufty79 said:


> fuck off you insincere careerist cow cunt.


 

Retort of the year.


----------



## andysays (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> See, this is what happens when I try to engage here- I can expect everything I say to be misconstrued and interpreted in the worst possible light. I only came on to set some facts straight and tell you how triggering it is to be told I've lied about my mental health history. Nobody has had the guts to apologise for that or for the rape apologism and stalkery behavior on this thread that, in my opinion, negates any valid criticism you might have to offer me.
> 
> Forgive me, I thought a request that I be treated with a bit of human understanding might be met with something other than insults. Clearly I was wrong.


 
Since I haven't suggested that you've lied about your MH history (in fact if you scroll back a bit you'll see I actually argued against that) or engaged in any rape apologism or in any particularly stalkery behaviour, I'm not offering any apologies for it.

If some have done some or all of those things, does that mean we're all of us guilty and that any and all criticism posted here is simply negated? Piss poor attempt to wriggle out


----------



## YouSir (Jul 20, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> jesus fucking christ.


 

Seconded.


----------



## lauriepenny (Jul 20, 2013)

I didn't see your last post before I wrote my next-to-last one


----------



## seventh bullet (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Nobody has had the guts to apologise for that or for the rape apologism and stalkery behavior on this thread that, in my opinion, negates any valid criticism you might have to offer me.



Too easy.

And by the way, have you had the guts to openly apologise for smearing people as racists on here?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Well, I accept your apology- although none of that was your fault, Tufty.


thank you. that's very kind of you.





lauriepenny said:


> I have tried


 everyone loves a tryer


lauriepenny said:


> I just don't understand


 clearly not.




lauriepenny said:


> I'm finding your behavior deeply triggering.


snap. and not just today.



lauriepenny said:


> I hope you don't do this to anyone else.


fuck right off.

and have a look at the dictionary definition of 'empathy'. it works both ways.

actually - sorry, internets. i'll leave this thread for a bit and let lauriepenny exercise her right to reply without me jumping in and getting cross.
today's fortune cracker joke?
what do you call two opposing rape survivors arguing on the internet?

a fucking disaster.



i'll prbably 'see' you next time we both write for one in four magazine, innit?


----------



## lauriepenny (Jul 20, 2013)

I'm getting nowhere with this. You're probably decent people individually, but together you behave like a pack of playground bullies, and your lack of empathy is shocking. I've tried in good faith to engage; you'd be hard-pressed to find another columnist who would- and I regret ever doing so.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> you'd be hard-pressed to find another columnist who would


 
.


----------



## Maurice Picarda (Jul 20, 2013)

JHE said:


> It's been ugly for a long time.
> 
> There's quite a lot of ugly shit on this site. It's not just a feature of this site, though. It's a more general thing about the internet and about the way people like to slag off other people, including celebrities. (LP in her own little way is a celebrity and, like many celebrities, doesn't really deserve her celebrity.)


 
Absolutely. Penny doesn't deserve to be blamed for, as far as I can see, pretty much _everything_, either.

There's a problem with the board having a rule against call-out threads and personal attacks, but having indexed, googlable, threads insulting actual people who then sign up and get treated with contempt. It doesn't work well.


----------



## emanymton (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> See, this is what happens when I try to engage here- I can expect everything I say to be misconstrued and interpreted in the worst possible light. I only came on to set some facts straight and tell you how triggering it is to be told I've lied about my mental health history. Nobody has had the guts to apologise for that or for the rape apologism and stalkery behavior on this thread that, in my opinion, negates any valid criticism you might have to offer me.
> 
> Forgive me, I thought a request that I be treated with a bit of human understanding might be met with something other than insults. Clearly I was wrong.


The mental health stuff was possibly a bit OTT, as you said a problem with the Internet is that people can forget that everyone one involved is a person. There is an apparent contradiction in what you wrote and it becomes like an intellectual puzzle to be solved. I had no part in the discussion by the way. 

But please stop saying that people on hear accused you of lying about your rape, or please point out where they have done so. Maybe one or two idiots did but the majority option was that not only were you telling the truth but that your writing on the subject was your best. 

I fell rather crass saying anything considering the ongoing discussion but it is a bit rich for you to accuse others of rape apologism when you seem to be believe that it is possible for an acceptable form of rape porn to be made. This was the point were any remaining creditability you had as a feminist evaporated in my opinion.


----------



## YouSir (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm getting nowhere with this. You're probably decent people individually, but together you behave like a pack of playground bullies, and your lack of empathy is shocking. I've tried in good faith to engage; you'd be hard-pressed to find another columnist who would- and I regret ever doing so.


 

Bawwwwwww. Fuck off with your self pity, lack of reflection, lack of even the vaguest attempt to understand and interact beyond being patronising, your random accusations and your massively selective reading. And as you fuck off try to consider that the reaction you get may not be down to everyone else but might, just might, have something to do with what you yourself say and do. Of course going on your contributions so far that level of self-awareness is a few miles beyond what you're prepared to do. Easier by far to paint us all as evil bullying scum (without backing up any of those accusations).


----------



## andysays (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Tufty, I have tried to engage with kindness and solidarity and you've responded with hate. I just don't understand how you can have so little empthy. *I'm finding your behavior deeply triggering. I hope you don't do this to anyone else.*


 
Sigh... OK, one more response and then I'm walking away.

It's not all about you, Laurie. This is not one of your privilege-created "safe spaces", this is a reflection of the real world that tufty79 and the rest of us live in every day, the one that we can't escape by jetting off to exciting cities on expenses.

You're not the only one who finds references to real life issues "deeply triggering", but most of us don't have any other option than to deal with our own issues and try to help our friends through theirs.

If you can't cut it in the the real world, maybe you should consider a change of "career" to, I don't know, writing empowering fantasy fiction for young women who fit your exclusive smartest kid from a smart school niche. The rest of us will just have to do without your pearls of wisdom


----------



## TruXta (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Well, you're doing a really good impression of one.


I was in the crowd at the death party in Brixton. I saw you smoking a fag. That is all. You're honestly not of great interest to me, if I may be so blunt. I'm sure the feeling is mutual.


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## seventh bullet (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> you'd be hard-pressed to find another columnist who would



!

Another fucking planet.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm getting nowhere with this. You're probably decent people individually, but together you behave like a pack of playground bullies, and your lack of empathy is shocking. I've tried in good faith to engage; *you'd be hard-pressed to find another columnist who would*- and I regret ever doing so.


 
just read that back to yourself and think about it


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## DotCommunist (Jul 20, 2013)

A columnist, no less. Gracing us.


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## Firky (Jul 20, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> !
> 
> Another fucking planet.


 
She _works_ for a living for us: not for herself.


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## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

reflective outcome of my contributions to this thread (for now):
i bought a proper, old-fashioned typewriter yesterday.
i'm going to, in future, type my responses to LP on it. it doesn't contain a ribbon, and i don't have any a4 paper, so my furyrants won't ever be seen by anyone else, and LP won't be triggered by my hating. it's that, or chop my fucking fingers off.


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## andysays (Jul 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> A columnist, no less. Gracing us.


 
Maybe she sees herself as a fifth columnist, working to subvert the establishment from the inside 

(sorry lauriepenny, didn't mean to blow your cover)


----------



## Das Uberdog (Jul 20, 2013)

tbh i do think that what valid criticisms of LP there are to be made have broadly been made (esp. around the student protest era) and most of what's left on this thread is just a form of broadly unhelpful catharsis. LP has an irritating journo style - as do most mainstream journos. she's supposedly of the left yet locked into a middle-class circuit of activists all obsessed with trendy intersectional politics, nothing to do with class politics, and in that she represents the degeneration of most of the organised left... Ok. point made. yet despite this i can't help but be tugged by some of LP's appeals for the bile to stop. she's been disproportionately targetted as the face of what is in fact a very broad and generalised evil and this thread has gone on now for what... 2 and a half years?

at least more recently she's moved into more overtly middle-class intersectional territory with her writings (and in that her stuff is not by a long shot the worst material emerging from that circle) away from the confused Morning Star position she once inhabited (which truly was offensive).

i think we can probably move on and let it go now.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 20, 2013)

good thing a fair chunk of this thread has nothing to do with her and has meandered into all sorts of territory then


----------



## rekil (Jul 20, 2013)

There has been no rape apologism on this thread. None. Let's get that straight shall we?

lauriepenny did an interview with notoriously sexist and rightwing springer group paper Die Welt last year. The springer group has a long history of hostility to the German left and they still don't accept adverts for Die Linke, KPD, DKP etc, an important issue with the election approaching. They have attacked friends of mine directly. Does Laurie know or care about any of this? No, having these cunts help to build her personal brand is "exciting". #solidarity how are ya.

Eta: Oh has she fucked off already? Well I was going to post that anyway. I didn't expect a driveby.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 20, 2013)

What would really make my day is if stalincos himself also turned up to lay down the law. But that isn't his role in the internet


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm getting nowhere with this. You're probably decent people individually, but together you behave like a pack of playground bullies, and your lack of empathy is shocking. I've tried in good faith to engage; you'd be hard-pressed to find another columnist who would- and I regret ever doing so.


 
You never "engaged" with those 3 questions I asked you months ago. You don't engage at all with this forum other than to collectively slander us all as racists, rape apologists, violent misogynists etc. We're decent people individually but you're not treating us like decent individuals, you're dealing with the place as a collective which in it's entirity engages in racism, rape apologism and a whole number of other unsubstantiated, behaviours. That's the only level you've ever tried to engage us on, slander and derision. "I work for a living" remember that?

If there's people on here who've been able to get away with rape apologism or racism then name their names and let's get it dealt with. I accept it's a bit of stalkery thread, it does turn you personally into a figurehead for much broader problems in the media, but it's *not* a place where racism or sexual assault can be apologised for. If anyone's guilty of that and managed to get away with it please point it out to us so it can be stopped.

I would've liked to ask you about your public rush to defend Niall Ferguson after he got exposed as a homophobe. That's solidarity right there - he'll be able to take your apology and use it as his Get Out of Jail Free card the next time he drops his guard and blurts out something homophobic. There's loads of things I'd like to discuss. I don't care about your treatment as a teenager but I would haved like to see your opinions on this:



Delroy Booth said:


> I think the interesting bit is how when a journalist so frequently self-references, or uses an anecdote or experience in a rhetorical way when writing articles, there comes with it an occupational hazard of saying things about yourself that in retrospect look pretty contradictory, such as the above two quotes sihhi. It's bound to happen if you try place yourself into every story you ever write. It also gets even trickier if someone wants to be able to change in and out of various guises to suit whichever audience they're talking to, because that'll mean details about yourself being slightly different for each audience. It's definitely not something that just Laurie Penny does either a lot of this goes on the comment pages of all the newspapers, I bet you could find these sorts of inconsistencies in loads of journo's if you look hard enough.


 
because that goes way beyond you personally. Any journalist over a long period of time who writes a lot of things will eventually leave a trail of contradictory statements behind them, which taken out of context can create this effect, but you're particularly bad for this, you go from "I'm an Anarchist" one minute to "vote Lib Dem" and "David Lammy is awesome" the next. I can understand how that might happen during a long 40 year career, how someone grows and changes, but you've only been around a few years, you're not much older than me. I think inconsistencies like that are part of the reason a lot of people view you as an insincere careerist hack.

Buy why bother? I didn't get a reply then, and I don't expect one now.


----------



## emanymton (Jul 20, 2013)

copliker said:


> Eta: Oh has she fucked off already? Well I was going to post that anyway. I didn't expect a driveby.


Oddly enough she seemed to vanish when people started to ask her to point out where on this thread anyone said she lied about being raped.

I feel rather sick making a political point out of it, but that was exactly what she was trying to do.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

sorry for stealing your thunder, delroy. obviously only rapedgirls deserve responses. which, tbh, i find pretty disgusting.
(and i apologise that i'm not typing this on teh typewriter of invisible posts. i really *am* going to get off the internet before i do any more damage)


----------



## YouSir (Jul 20, 2013)

*Laurie Penny* ‏@PennyRed14m​Why do I read the comments? Why do I ever, ever read the comments? Or the hatemail or the attack threads? *goes into hiding*


----------



## cesare (Jul 20, 2013)

She has no interest in a considered response, Delroy. It's just more of the same - unsubstantiated smear and scarper.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm getting nowhere with this. You're probably decent people individually, but together you behave like a pack of playground bullies, and your lack of empathy is shocking. I've tried in good faith to engage; you'd be hard-pressed to find another columnist who would- and I regret ever doing so.


 
You are getting somewhere with this; it's just not the place you hoped.

If you are up for some genuine reflection, ask yourself why aren't you getting where you want to go; is it perhaps because the place you apparently want to be (one where your talent, your conviction and impact are publicly acknowledged and applauded) is not where these boards are headed...it's not what they are for?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 20, 2013)

YouSir said:


> *Laurie Penny* ‏@PennyRed
> 14m​
> Why do I read the comments? Why do I ever, ever read the comments? Or the hatemail or the attack threads? *goes into hiding*


 

for fucks sake


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 20, 2013)

Everyone hates the comments. The comments are full of scum, the rabble, the swinish multitude.

Good job that the paid media and their model is dying on it's arse. When I see Laurie Penny or any of the other columnists for the mainstream press I can't help but think of the last Roman soldier doing the final watch on Hadrians wall just before the Romams left. Knowing they would be the last, and that once they go the barbarians will overrun their territory.

Whether or not anything superior replaces it is far from certain. Could be the dark ages, to stretch the metaphor into absurdity, but I think the days of the star columnist, the professional opnion former, is on the wane.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 20, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I think the days of the star columnist, the professional opnion former, is on the wane.


 
Unfortunately, that's the sentiment on which a bunch of self-facilitating media nodes bloggers like LP tiptoed into the op-ed pages in the first place - the same old half-baked filler, just punted out by hipper-seeming younger (privately-educated, non-WC, privileged) mediators with deadlines to meet, brands to build, careers to make, lip service to pay.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 20, 2013)

surely most print and its internets shadow exists to sell advertising space and so long as you have enough circulation or page views to demonstrate to the advertisers it cannot die


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Tufty, you asked me for some solidarity, and as a fellow survivor of rape who has been disbelieved and shamed for it- *including on this thread*


 
This is a new low for you Laurie, worse than the accusations of racism. It's a complete and utter lie. The only comments on this thread about that piece are ones expressing sympathy and saying what an excellent piece it is.

I didn't think I could be shocked by you any more but I guess I was underestimating (or should that be overestimating?) you.


----------



## rekil (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I've tried in good faith to engage; you'd be hard-pressed to find another columnist who would- and I regret ever doing so.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> There have been a couple of points which are, if not legitimate criticism, then at least points that it's valid for me to address and think about. Being committed to intersectionality means I do have to think about how my background might affect what I write, for example. The thing is, I knew all that already, and if I want honest unbiased critique, I look for it elsewhere.
> 
> I don't expect to find useful critique on this thread because it's simply full of lies, distortions and people determined to think the worst of me- just as I wouldn't ask my most ardent fans to offer me vital critique on a piece, because I know they'd be biased.
> 
> Tufty, how you expect to change my mind whilst calling me things like an 'exploitative lying shit' is beyond me. If you actually want me to pay attention to you, treat me like a human being and don't start with baseless insults.


 
I've got a question too Laurie. If you disagree with, say, black or trans activists about their politics you 'check your privilege'. But when you're disagreeing with (and often lying about and slandering) the people on this thread you think it's perfectly OK to tell Malcolm Harris that there are 'plenty of better working class activists' as if you're the arbiter of what a working class activist should be. Why don't you ever check your class privilege?

It seems like there are double standards at play here and when we're talking about the greatest privilege of all, class, the point at which, to use your own language, all other forms of oppression 'intersect' and a privilege you happen to enjoy you get to throw all that stuff out of the window.

It stinks, when we spoke on the phone I got the impression that you hadn't really thought too much about the effect your actions had on me, the other poster concerned and the wider Urban75 community, that you were just feeling like you were under attack and lashed out in an unthinking way. I felt sorry for you despite the trouble you caused me and my family and for a time tried to defend you and to open up a space for you to come onto this thread so we could all engage in a civil manner.

I regret that now. Your actions since suggest to me that none of it is ill-considered. It's all carefully calculated isn't it? You're the worst of the commentariat by a mile. I've made myself unpopular on here before defending people like Owen Jones and Ellie May O'Hagan but I'm fucked if I'm going to do it for you.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> YouSir- I have listened to Tufty, and as I said I do think about the impact of everything I write. I do not claim to speak on behalf of the working-class and never have. If you're angry at the way the media likes to frame the debate in those terms, setting up talking-heads rather than allowing working-class people space to speak for themselves in the mainstream press, I understand, but I hardly think I'm the right target for that rage.


 
You to Malcolm Harris: Ignore them 'babe' there's loads of better working class activists.

Because of course you're the ones who get to decide who's better, right?

Get to fuck.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm getting nowhere with this. You're probably decent people individually, but together you behave like a pack of playground bullies, and your lack of empathy is shocking. I've tried in good faith to engage; you'd be hard-pressed to find another columnist who would- and I regret ever doing so.


 
'I decide, in the spirit of charity, to bless you smelly Urban proles with my presence and you have the cheek to treat me in the same way you would a normal person who pulled the shit I've pulled'

This is Urban - if we don't like someone's work we'll say so without sugar coating it. And if you don't believe me take a look here: http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...ion-of-the-future.270729/page-6#post-10053478


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 20, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Nobody has had the guts to apologise for that or for the rape apologism and stalkery behavior on this thread that, in my opinion, negates any valid criticism you might have to offer me.


 
The stalkery part is more subjective and I can see where that impression may come from - but where is the rape apologism?

Don't you realise that you devalue such terms when you make these ludicrous accusations? Unless of course you'd like to point this 'rape apologism' out to the rest of us.

[goes away to have a fag and calm down before I do a whole page of posts without anyone else posting and make myself look like an obsessive]


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jul 20, 2013)

I'm just surprised that anyone is still surprised by the depths of hackery she's willing to mine.


----------



## rekil (Jul 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> The stalkery part is more subjective


It's counter-stalkery if anything. Surely people here have a right to have as much info as possible (within reason) about the class, character and motivation of the shit shovelling chancers whose job is to follow them about and live through them.


----------



## Sue (Jul 20, 2013)

copliker said:


> There has been no rape apologism on this thread. None. Let's get that straight shall we?
> 
> lauriepenny did an interview with notoriously sexist and rightwing springer group paper Die Welt last year. The springer group has a long history of hostility to the German left and they still don't accept adverts for Die Linke, KPD, DKP etc, an important issue with the election approaching. They have attacked friends of mine directly. Does Laurie know or care about any of this? No, having these cunts help to build her personal brand is "exciting". #solidarity how are ya.
> 
> Eta: Oh has she fucked off already? Well I was going to post that anyway. I didn't expect a driveby.



One of the things that specially annoys me is how shit her grasp of politics is and that she doesn't even seem to realise this.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 20, 2013)

copliker said:


> Ni olvido ni perdon.


 
Was gonna ask lauriepenny to use her posh school skillz and translate this Latin/foreign for me then I remembered google translate and found that it means, 'Neither forgiveness nor oblivion.'

To which it seems apt to add:

...but intersectional feminism.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 20, 2013)

Fuck those who fight violence with violence*

*excepting NATO drone strikes in Libya etc


----------



## rekil (Jul 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Was gonna ask lauriepenny to use her posh school skillz and translate this Latin/foreign for me then I remembered google translate and found that it means, 'Neither forgiveness nor oblivion.'
> 
> To which it seems apt to add:
> 
> ...but intersectional feminism.


 
Yeah, neither forget nor forgive, or variations thereof. I did the forrin to sound dead sophis.



Sue said:


> One of the things that specially annoys me is how shit her grasp of politics is and that she doesn't even seem to realise this.


And her coming from the socialist and anarchist tradition and all.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Was gonna ask lauriepenny to use her posh school skillz and translate this Latin/foreign for me then I remembered google translate and found that it means, 'Neither forgiveness nor oblivion.'


 
It's Spanish, basically what Anonymous say about neither forgiving nor forgetting.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jul 20, 2013)

She does this all the time - distancing herself from the very things that give her her privilege. So it's "the media" as though she's not climbing her way up it, the whole "giddy cos me - a revolutionary socialist - is talking to The Oxford Union" despite the fact if she hadn't gone to Oxford she'd not have got within a mile of the place, the perpetual crowbarring into any mention of her public school education of how she only went cos she was _made_ to, etc etc etc. The flipside of this is the royal "we" when referring to the poor, the jobless, the young disenfranchised, etc. This is the dishonesty I despise in her. It's far more insidious than any misremembered details about who was there at a party.


----------



## Sue (Jul 20, 2013)

copliker said:


> Yeah, neither forget nor forgive, or variations thereof. I did the forrin to sound dead sophis.
> 
> 
> And her coming from the socialist and anarchist tradition and all.


You so need to check your privilege on the language skills bit. Is it bad because it excludes people or good because it's foreign?


----------



## rekil (Jul 20, 2013)

Malcolm cranking the anti-Columnist hate machine. It's ok when this wanker does it. His motivations are rather different.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 20, 2013)

re: the above and the Chicago Teachers' Strike Malcolm Harris has a real hard on for people losing their jobs


----------



## J Ed (Jul 20, 2013)

Malcolm Harris RTed this https://twitter.com/ohhgawdd/status/357711030878617600 fucking nonce


----------



## Sue (Jul 20, 2013)

copliker said:


> Malcolm cranking the anti-Columnist hate machine. It's ok when this wanker does it. His motivations are rather different.
> 
> View attachment 37082


He has experienced the hunger obviously.  (Suspect even I could waste him in seconds and I haven't hit anyone since about 1982.)


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 20, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> sorry for stealing your thunder, delroy. obviously only rapedgirls deserve responses. which, tbh, i find pretty disgusting.
> (and i apologise that i'm not typing this on teh typewriter of invisible posts. i really *am* going to get off the internet before i do any more damage)


 
What damage? You mean to Ms. Penny's psyche? If most of us were "triggered" quite as easily as she implied earlier, I for one would excrete copious quantities of foul-smelling watery stools and turn into a catatonic mess every time I heard a banger go off!
And I'd far rather read your posts than the "poor me" stuff Ms. Penny sprays around every time she's here.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 20, 2013)

cesare said:


> She has no interest in a considered response, Delroy. It's just more of the same - unsubstantiated smear and scarper.


 
"Spray and pray".


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 20, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> What damage? You mean to Ms. Penny's psyche?


no, mine 



ViolentPanda said:


> If most of us were "triggered" quite as easily as she implied earlier


i am  i almost eviscerated my neighbour when he walked up behind me and said 'boo' the other night. )



ViolentPanda said:


> I for one would excrete copious quantities of foul-smelling watery stools and turn into a catatonic mess every time I heard a banger go off!


i have been planning to learn the ways of the ladybird (squirts toxic shit out of its knees when threatened) or the turkey vulture (can spontaneously vomit nasty shit all over its predators). or work out how to cope with the current levels of furious, and current self-triggeriness (see: posting on this thread without counting to five thousand before hitting 'reply'). everything is a bit raw/roar at the minute.

lauriepenny, i apologise for misdirecting *some* of my anger towards you. i didn't mean that you personally contributed towards what happened to me. just that in my head, i'll always have a weird link between you and it. or maybe not, it's clearly something i need to work on though.
and it wasn't fair of me to be so abusive to you.

oddly enough, i was watching this last night, under a fluffy blanket, and going 'fuck. yes.' i may as well try not to be a hypocrite.
http://www.makers.com/eve-ensler/moments/having-each-others-backs

fuck it, consider it an olive branch. and fingers crossed it'll get us out of our mutually-triggering-loop.
and thank you for the offer of support. i do appreciate that you mean well, buti have more relevant and appropriate support at the minute (and thank you to the people on here who helped me with the practical shit, as well as the urbans who have been patient and gentle with my mounting-horror-revelations and shrieking self-editing).


----------



## Firky (Jul 20, 2013)

I could quite happily kick Harris in the teeth. Fucking sex pest. I wouldn't trust him with an animal let alone a lass.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 20, 2013)

'what are you doing to those bicycle seats!'

another visit by laurrie eh. Nobody got called a racist this time though. Is this progress?


----------



## cesare (Jul 20, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> 'what are you doing to those bicycle seats!'
> 
> another visit by laurrie eh. Nobody got called a racist this time though. Is this progress?


It's not progress to (a) not unreservedly withdraw claims of racism and sexism; and then (b) compound previous smears with accusations of rape apologism, alleging that posters didn't believe her rape account, and (c) finally accusing tufty of "deeply triggering" behaviour in a transparent attempt to switch blame.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 20, 2013)

copliker said:


> It's counter-stalkery if anything. Surely people here have a right to have as much info as possible about the class, character and motivation of the shit shovelling chancers whose job is to follow them about and live through them.


 
I agree - but whereas it would be possible - though disingenuous - to paint some of that stuff as stalkery, there is absolutely nothing on here that she could claim is rape apologism. When Laurie's rape piece came up on here was one of the few times when we all seem to agree - and the consensus was that the piece was excellent and that she deserved sympathy over the ordeal it described.

Kind of like when someone's nicked a bottle of ribena and some fags and you catch them with the fags still in their pocket and red/purple stains around their lips. You know you've got them nailed on the fags so even though you know they nicked the ribena too you don't bother going after them for it cos the fags prove they're a thief anyway.

Shit similes ftw


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Was gonna ask lauriepenny to use her posh school skillz and translate this Latin/foreign for me then I remembered google translate and found that it means, 'Neither forgiveness nor oblivion.'
> 
> To which it seems apt to add:
> 
> ...but intersectional feminism.


 
Nobody noticed my 'neither Washington nor Moscow' reference 

Well, either that or it just wasn't funny


----------



## love detective (Jul 20, 2013)

cesare said:


> It's not progress to (a) not unreservedly withdraw claims of racism and sexism; and then (b) compound previous smears with accusations of rape apologism, alleging that posters didn't believe her rape account, and finally accusing tufty of "deeply triggering" behaviour in a transparent attempt to switch blame.


 
as bad as (a) and (b) were they never surprised me in the slightest given her track record, (c) on the other hand was something I was completely stunned by

a woman bravely speaks out about being raped by someone who not only lauds, but is lauded by, laurie penny

Then, when this woman understandably sees through and wants nothing to do with the hollow offers of solidarity or 'help' from penny (a friend of the rapist in the eyes of the victim), she is then blamed for 'triggering' stuff in laurie

Unbelievable that laurie even attempts to turn the whole thing into her being the victim, and the actual victim of a rape is turned into the perpetrator of a transgression against laurie


----------



## love detective (Jul 20, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Nobody noticed my 'neither Washington nor Moscow' reference
> 
> Well, either that or it just wasn't funny


 

I noticed it, hopefully that eliminates one of the potential scenarios


----------



## SLK (Jul 20, 2013)

I remember coming on here when I saw her post that piece about being raped. I think I was the first to link to it and I tentatively suggested that it rings true and was admirable. To be fair, I expected some to say "fuck off" but only one person was equivocal about it (I can't remember whom, but they never said they didn't believe her) - the rest were wholly supportive of the article and believed LP.

I suspect the slur she threw out then was one she knew was a lie.


----------



## love detective (Jul 20, 2013)

Laurie Penny said:
			
		

> Ironically, after that article was posted I got people telling me that my choice not to name the man involved was wrong- *and people, including people on this thread, telling me I'd made it all up *


 
For the record, here are all the comments in response to Laurie's article about being raped - articul8 was the only person to have even suggested that some people may not believe her




			
				SLK said:
			
		

> Her story about being raped is incredible, despite it being by her.


 



			
				Balbi said:
			
		

> Agreed, that's a bloody good piece of work.
> 
> And im not a usual Penny fan. She usually lacks the incisiveness and direction that this piece has.


 



			
				Captain Hurrah said:
			
		

> As someone who has been raped myself, that's a very brave piece.


 



			
				frogwoman said:
			
		

> I can relate to what she's saying in the article - it took me a very long time to realise the fact that it was rape and that the person responsible was "a rapist" because they didn't behave like how "a rapist" behaves and I still have trouble thinking of them like that. It was a long time ago and I'm not traumatised or anything and am now in a relationship with somebody I love, but I can relate to all the emotions that she talks about.


 



			
				articul8 said:
			
		

> Clearly she's struck a chord with peoples' experience, but Laurie's own track record for making shit up does her no favours at all when it comes to a piece like this


 



			
				Belushi said:
			
		

> Respect to everyone brave enough to talk about their own experiences; and much as I dislike Penny I find it hard to believe she'd fabricate something like this.


 



			
				Random said:
			
		

> She's gone up a lot in my estimation after writing that.


 



			
				love detective said:
			
		

> i don't think there is any reason to even think that she has made any of that up


 



			
				Idris2002 said:
			
		

> It reads very, very differently from her "probably made up" stuff.


 



			
				Riklet said:
			
		

> there are plenty of things to criticise laurie penny for, but that article and how she has responded to being raped are not on that list, IMO.


 



			
				el-ahrairah said:
			
		

> that was my thought exactly. the tone is very different.


 



			
				agricola said:
			
		

> It is really well written, but it is profoundly depressing in much the same way that hearing someone talk about how they lived through years of unreported domestic violence against them is.
> 
> I know she has made her feelings on reporting it known, but I really hope she changes her mind.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 20, 2013)

love detective said:


> as bad as (a) and (b) were they never surprised me in the slightest given her track record, (c) on the other hand was something I was completely stunned by
> 
> a woman bravely speaks out about being raped by someone who not only lauds, but is lauded by, laurie penny
> 
> ...


----------



## SLK (Jul 20, 2013)

So articul8 was the only one to be equivocal, and he didn't accuse her of making it up.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 20, 2013)

Since there is a possibility that Laurie may direct twitter followers towards this thread and they're more likely to take her word on the rape apologism than put in the 2 months it would take to read the whole 779 pages, I've decided to quote all the references to her rape article on this thread so that people can decide for themselves (and see what a dishonest hack she is - especially on a topic as important and sensitive as this, it really is utterly disgraceful and if she has a decent bone in her body she'll retract it and apologise).



SLK said:


> Her story about being raped is incredible, despite it being by her.


 


Balbi said:


> Agreed, that's a bloody good piece of work.
> 
> http://www.penny-red.com/post/29989130545/its-trigger-warning-week
> 
> And im not a usual Penny fan. She usually lacks the incisiveness and direction that this piece has.


 


Balbi said:


> We'll see how it turns out. Personal decision, yes - right one, maybe not. But her choice. I suspect some will be more direct in addrssing this issue to her today love detective, once her article gets a wider readership.


 


Captain Hurrah said:


> As someone who has been raped myself, that's a very brave piece.


 
(if you want me to delete that please tell me and I will, poster formerly known as captain hurrah)



frogwoman said:


> Sorry to hear that. I've been raped as well. I can relate to what she's saying in the article - it took me a very long time to realise the fact that it was rape and that the person responsible was "a rapist" because they didn't behave like how "a rapist" behaves and I still have trouble thinking of them like that. It was a long time ago and I'm not traumatised or anything and am now in a relationship with somebody I love, but I can relate to all the emotions that she talks about.


 
And you froggy - tell me if you don't want this quoted and I'll remove it.



Belushi said:


> Respect to everyone brave enough to talk about their own experiences; and much as I dislike Penny I find it hard to believe she'd fabricate something like this.


 


Random said:


> She's gone up a lot in my estimation after writing that. If it turns out she's made it up she'll sink to depths below even J hari. And probably lose all hope for a job in journalism tbh.


 


Idris2002 said:


> It reads very, very differently from her "probably made up" stuff.


 


Riklet said:


> there are plenty of things to criticise laurie penny for, but that article and how she has responded to being raped are not on that list, IMO.
> 
> _her _fault if that bloke goes off and rapes other women? isn't this the line of thinking we are struggling against?


 


agricola said:


> It is really well written, but it is profoundly depressing in much the same way that hearing someone talk about how they lived through years of unreported domestic violence against them is.
> 
> I know she has made her feelings on reporting it known, but I really hope she changes her mind.


 


tbtommyb said:


> Is there really anyone who doesn't consider what happened to Penny to be rape? the whole key element of the massive rape discussion over the last week was how doing x or y meant that it wasn't rape, 'bad manners' à la Galloway. But I read nothing that would ever have justified what happened to her.


 


The only even vaguely critical comments were these, which are certainly not rape apologism:



love detective said:


> probably best not to comment on this at all, but can't help thinking given her position of 'influence' in the left liberal media combined with the fact that she knows this person has done the same thing again to other women since it happened, her decision not to out this person is somewhat irresponsible
> 
> sure it's up to her what she does about it and she shouldn't be pressurrised into doing something she doesn't want to do - but it kind of pulls the rug away from all her 'sisterhood' type solidarity stuff when she has the power to stop this guy doing this to other women, but refuses to do so (yet still can talk about it enough to include it in a story and makes public tweets about it)


 


love detective said:


> i don't think there is any reason to even think that she has made any of that up - it just seemed odd to me how she was prepared to speak publicly about it and use it for one thing (writing about it) but not willing to out the person who she knows has done the same thing to other women since, and potentially will do it to others in the future (plus that person is apparently some kind of lefty)
> 
> i've never been in that position so don't know what doing such a thing would do to you personally/emotionally/psychologically so i shouldn't really be saying that i think she should do this or that - especially if it's something you've decided you just wanted to move on from and not talk about it - but she is talking about it, to 50,000 people on twitter


 


love detective said:


> did I say or imply it would be _her_ fault if _he_ raped someone else? He has raped someone else since then, have I implied anywhere that this was Laura's fault?
> 
> from my (admittedly small) experience of people who have been sexually assaulted, they don't want to report it to the police because they don't want to have to relive what happened to them and have what happened to them opened up to all kinds of prying eyes and impersonal systemic prodding. That is perfectly understandable that you would just want to blank it out/not let it get back in your head etc..
> 
> But if you are happy to give a detailed account of what happened to 50,000 people on twitter and and your blog, then it just seemed odd why she was adamant that she will not out this guy, both so that he is held to account for what he did to her and yes, to help make sure he doesn't do it to anyone else again.


 

and this:



articul8 said:


> Clearly she's struck a chord with peoples' experience, but Laurie's own track record for making shit up does her no favours at all when it comes to a piece like this


 
Which is inapropriate but is more about her dishonesty in other articles and the way that might impact on the way the rape article is seen. And it comes from articul8 - whose love of post-modernist type wankery makes him closer to Laurie than the class focused politics most of the rest of us subscribe to.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 20, 2013)

You bastard love detective. First you don't laugh at my sophisticated SWP gag then you steal my thunder on the reactions to the rape article 

I'm gonna go and call you a racist on twitter for that!


----------



## love detective (Jul 20, 2013)

sorry mate - but i really didn't expect that there would be two people on here sad enough to trawl through this thread on a saturday night copying & pasting quotes!


----------



## Firky (Jul 20, 2013)

love detective said:


> sorry mate - but i really didn't expect that there would be two people on here sad enough to trawl through this thread on a saturday night copying & pasting quotes!


 

Really?


----------



## love detective (Jul 20, 2013)

good point, scrap that


----------



## love detective (Jul 20, 2013)

back amongst her own (white middle class), with Paul Krugman

Who the fuck reserves a table in a pub!


----------



## Firky (Jul 20, 2013)

Is that Charles Stross, bottom right?


----------



## love detective (Jul 20, 2013)

yep - who is he?


----------



## Firky (Jul 20, 2013)

Science fiction author. Quite a good one.


----------



## love detective (Jul 20, 2013)

oxymoron


----------



## Favelado (Jul 20, 2013)

I'd love to go for a pint with Krugman.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 20, 2013)

I bet he has some great jokes about Ron Paul


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 20, 2013)

Favelado said:


> I'd love to go for a pint with Krugman.


 
such VIP access is not for the likes of us.


----------



## Favelado (Jul 20, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> such VIP access is not for the likes of us.


 
I did go to a private school though. It was under the old assisted places scheme. We lived on state benefits and struggled or failed to make ends meet. To this day I don't know what class I am as a result. I might have to start a thread with a poll to find out.


----------



## Firky (Jul 20, 2013)

Post your photo and I'll ask ern what ethnicity and class you are.


----------



## agricola (Jul 20, 2013)

Favelado said:


> I did go to a private school though. It was under the old assisted places scheme. We lived on state benefits and struggled or failed to make ends meet. To this day I don't know what class I am as a result. I might have to start a thread with a poll to find out.


 
Have you ever reserved a table in a non-hot food serving pub, though?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 20, 2013)

love detective said:


> oxymoron


 

Glasshouse is one of the best science fiction novels of the last decade. I shouldn't imagine you will read it though, given that you obviously don't have any time for that sort of book! 

His lovecraftian mashups are less good but fuck it, passes the time


----------



## rekil (Jul 20, 2013)

love detective said:


> back amongst her own (white middle class), with Paul Krugman
> 
> Who the fuck reserves a table in a pub!


 
 Ken MacLeod (Official enemy of Proletarian Democracy) there as well.


----------



## Favelado (Jul 20, 2013)

agricola said:


> Have you ever reserved a table in a non-hot food serving pub, though?


 
I can honestly say no; but I might if I was going with a Nobel prize winner.


----------



## Firky (Jul 20, 2013)

Baxter wasn't invited!


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 20, 2013)

Firky said:


> Baxter wasn't invited!


 

Good


----------



## Sue (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Nobody noticed my 'neither Washington nor Moscow' reference
> 
> Well, either that or it just wasn't funny



I noticed and wondered if our politico friend got it...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

Laurie definitely got it - surely you knew she was the smartest kind from a smart school? She laughed at it ironically though. Apparently that's what all the cool kids do. (Though I think they say 'sick' instead of cool these days)


----------



## Sue (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Laurie definitely got it - surely you knew she was the smartest kind from a smart school? She laughed at it ironically though. Apparently that's what all the cool kids do. (Though I think they say 'sick' instead of cool these days)



Oh. Having gone to a pretty average comp, obviously no idea how this works.


----------



## imposs1904 (Jul 21, 2013)

love detective said:


> back amongst her own (white middle class), with Paul Krugman
> 
> Who the fuck reserves a table in a pub!


 
Ursula Le Guin took the picture.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> (Though I think they say 'sick' instead of cool these days)


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> (Though I think they say 'sick' instead of cool these days)


say/are. same difference


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 21, 2013)

imposs1904 said:


> Ursula Le Guin took the picture.


 
China Mieville took it to boots to get it developed though


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 21, 2013)

oh god nobody does that anymore 

pass me my zimmer


----------



## redsquirrel (Jul 21, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Wonderful interview that:
> 
> 
> 
> There's a fantastic one she did last year too - def recommend the 50 minutes or so listen.


Wasn't Bea Campbell that horrible scumbag who defended (and to this day still defends) the social workers involved in the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" cases, or am I getting confused?


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 21, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm getting nowhere with this. You're probably decent people individually, but together you behave like a pack of playground bullies, and your lack of empathy is shocking. I've tried in good faith to engage; you'd be hard-pressed to find another columnist who would- and I regret ever doing so.



Oh don't give me that bullshit. I've had more support from this place and people on this thread than you are even capable of you vacuous vapid self obsessed little cunt.


----------



## andysays (Jul 21, 2013)

redsquirrel said:


> Wasn't Bea Campbell that horrible scumbag who defended (and to this day still defends) the social workers involved in the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" cases, or am I getting confused?


 
Yes, yes she was. She's also a regularish contributor to the Guardian, with some interesting attempts at self-justification:

Why I accepted my OBE​​Why I turned from red to Green​ 
Many of the removed comments refer to her involvement in the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" bollocks, which still casts a long shadow


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Jul 21, 2013)

copliker said:


> Ken MacLeod (Official enemy of Proletarian Democracy) there as well.


 
former housemate of 39thstep as well

I'd have liked to be sat round that table to be honest


----------



## Treacle Toes (Jul 21, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm getting nowhere with this. You're probably decent people individually, but together you behave like a pack of playground bullies, and your lack of empathy is shocking. I've tried in good faith to engage; you'd be hard-pressed to find another columnist who would- and I regret ever doing so.




Why are you engaging with anyone here as a 'columnist'? I think that is partly where you are going wrong tbh and why some folks here can't/won't be able to empathise with you. It's as if you are putting on a 'special' hat to respond, a coloumist is only one part of who you are! If all of us who use these boards only engaged through the limited position/rhetoric of what we do for a job/profession not much in the way of communication would be achieved IMO.

Also...I see you have made no disctinction between the different posters on this thread _' but together you behave like a pack of playground bullies'_...I think you are failing to realise that for a large portion of the users here there is no 'together' ...some people agreeing on some things doesn't equate to a 'pack' of anything much in forum using terms. 

I wonder why you haven't used the term 'gang'...'pack' is usually used to describe a collection of animals or 'objects' isn't it?

I want to be clear, you certainly do not have to like nor be forced to engage with anyone that you find/feel abusive/lacking empathy. You have your own boundaries, make your own choices etc just like the rest of us...a little reflection on how you have positioned/limited yourself and lumped/characterised/limited everyone else together in your post above might be helpful though IMO.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 21, 2013)

Postmodern wankery?  Bollocks!  Nonsense to suggest that class is any less central to my politics just because I point out how it is also a culturally/discursively mediated and constructed set of social relations


----------



## seventh bullet (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> (if you want me to delete that please tell me and I will, poster formerly known as captain hurrah)


 
No, it's fine.   Keep it there.


----------



## nino_savatte (Jul 21, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Why are you engaging with anyone here as a 'columnist'? I think that is partly where you are going wrong tbh and why some folks here can't/won't be able to empathise with you. It's as if you are putting on a 'special' hat to respond, a coloumist is only one part of who you are! If all of us who use these boards only engaged through the limited position/rhetoric of what we do for a job/profession not much in the way of communication would be achieved IMO.
> 
> Also...I see you have made no disctinction between the different posters on this thread _' but together you behave like a pack of playground bullies'_...I think you are failing to realise that for a large portion of the users here there is no 'together' ...some people agreeing on some things doesn't equate to a 'pack' of anything much in forum using terms.
> 
> ...


 
Exactly, she could have at least taken a leaf out of Andrew Gilligan's book and used a sockpuppet.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 21, 2013)

The individual feminist columnist is too often predicated on the assumption that writing about womens' oppression is more effective when it is authenticated by personal experience.   So as soon as a writer begins to take themselves and their experiences as integral to whatever is being discussed, there is the temptation to revel in your own direct victimhood or suffering the better to validate your writing as somehow the authentic expression of what your fighting against.  The whole genre sets up an implicit "ideal" columnist who has
- been abused as a child
- developed mental health problems or an eating disorder
- worked in the sex industry
- been raped
- been the victim of domestic violence
- had an abortion
...etc
The more you approximate to this ideal (or tick the boxes), the better your chances being offered platforms (and financial rewards) for your ability to claim to personify this suffering. 

Clearly LOTS of women have experienced one or more of these.  But most of them don't get paid for writing about and authenticating these experiences as qualifications for an ongoing professional position as commentators about women and their oppression. A certain kind of columnist is rewarded for a confessional and sometimes creative approach to their own experiences in order to better position themselves as a tribune of the oppressed.  There's been more than a few occasions (inc documented on here) when there are inconsistencies (or downright contradictions) between various accounts Laurie has given of her own personal history (conveniently discovering a life of poverty for instance).

Taken in isolation, I've no reason whatsoever to doubt the veracity of LP's rape account.  I do want to challenge the structural requirements of the confessional genre though, in terms of the narcissistic masochism it promotes and rewards.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 21, 2013)

What does 'taken in isolation" mean here?


----------



## articul8 (Jul 21, 2013)

It means that when someone claims to be raped, I begin from the premise that, at least provisionally, they are to be believed.  Nothing in that article seems to offer any grounds to suspend that provisional position.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 21, 2013)

can I have some of that meal before it all goes in your mouth


----------



## articul8 (Jul 21, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> can I have some of that meal before it all goes in your mouth


----------



## Firky (Jul 21, 2013)

nino_savatte said:


> Exactly, she could have at least taken a leaf out of Andrew Gilligan's book and used a sockpuppet.


 

She's a megalomaniac. She needs people to know it is Laura aka Laurie Penny.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

added bit to my earlier keyboard worrying:
lauriepenny (and i'm not taking your name in vain this time), i've re-read my posts from yesterday and i am genuinely sorry for sending you to triggerville. especially the shrigley song. i posted it with particular references-in-my-head to my situation, and the people around me. i didn't even stop to consider what sort of impact it would have on you, in light of your experiences with nasty fuckers on the internet. and i really hope you don't have me filed under the same category as them. i'm going to take my own advice and think about the impact that every little think i write has on people (you, 'them', and myself). especially when i'm seeing red. re-reading it is really uncomfortable, and looks like i was trying to indulge in a bit of 'i can out-victim yow', while being proper attacky. which is shit. i'd also like to make it absolutely clear that i understand and fully support any and everyone's decision not to report rape/assault, regardless of their reasons. as long as it's *their* decision.

i am going to email you this afternoon if that's still ok? and it's fine if you're a bit busy and can't respond quick sharp.
i think if i spoke to you, i'd be terrified of being your brain twin. we've got more in common than i dare admit in public on here  (including us both having a 'make the laurie thread 'all about meeeeeeeee' moment  at the same time. i think you get automatic rights there... )and i think half of my ranting yesterday was probably aimed at myself the most, with a few choice activists-that-aren't-you in the firing line. all sent in your direction. y'know i mentioned misdirected anger earlier? you're like a mirror of bits of me, if you like. and when i'm going nuclear at myself.. well.. i think my rantivism spoke for itself.
i've only started to go a bit 'raaaaargh' On The Internet in full detail (there's a bit of history of the 'lighter' side of all the shit that happened from march somewhere on here, involving chimneyclimbing fuckmuppets and thier imact on my life), so really need to stop doing it. as a result of going 'raargh' on urban last week, i stopped trying to deal with shit on my own, and got myself referred to some proper kickass agencies who are helping to make me feel safe again, and dealing with shit properly on my behalf. when all this kicked off earlier in the year, i could've really done with speaking out straight away about every single fucking strand of this particular can of worms 
so yeah. i'm in the early stages of getting my life back together after it exploded in my face. and have a bit of a hair trigger in terms of Shouting At The Internet at times. irl i'm a mouse that roars - wouldn't say boo to a goose 

i'm going to go and have a cup of solidaritea. while being a short, pixie like womman, who used to be well into glittery makeup and radicalism  if i ever meet you (and i think i'd probably like to, as long as i've not scared you shitless), i've got a fluffy blanket (was gonna say with your name on, but that'd be a lie. i could embroider it on in a stitchy bitch session if you want though?) that i suspect you'd like.

and thank you again urbs. you've got me through *years* of disastercrises. seriously, i'm not trying to do 'multiple pm's of support' or anthing, i'm just trying to say that this board has genuinely saved my life more than once.

gonna go listen to le tigre's 'get off the internet' now. and send you a calm, composed, and hopefully friendly message.

articul8 - cheers. you've also given me a lot of food for thought.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 21, 2013)

articul8 said:


> It means that when someone claims to be raped, I begin from the premise that, at least provisionally, they are to be believed. Nothing in that article seems to offer any grounds to suspend that provisional position.


 
It looks to me like you're saying 'Taken in isolation, I've no reason whatsoever to doubt the veracity of LP's rape account.' just after posting a load of reasons _not to take it in isolation_. You really have not got a good record so please be a bit more careful - and don't start talking about provisionally believing people ffs.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 21, 2013)

"not got a good record"?  I have a record of disbelieving rape victims?! Good luck proving that.  As for provisional, you know full well what I meant - ie. In the absence of sufficient reason to think otherwise.


----------



## weepiper (Jul 21, 2013)

too many provisos imply a position of doubt articul8.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 21, 2013)

Maybe "provisional" not best description - I don't mean getting proviso's in early, I mean a presumption of belief in the absence of reason to believe otherwise


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Postmodern wankery? Bollocks! Nonsense to suggest that class is any less central to my politics just because I point out how it is also a culturally/discursively mediated and constructed set of social relations


 
 Beyond the fragments etc


----------



## articul8 (Jul 21, 2013)

Have you read it?! It is not an attack on class politics, it is an attack on narrow and dogmatic assumptions about what the struggle for socialism might mean, to whom it appeals and on what basis.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

andysays said:


> we're just jealous haters


 
Wow, some shameful people here.... envy makes so ugly.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Wow, some shameful people here.... envy makes so ugly.


 

Dave?


----------



## Maurice Picarda (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Wow, some shameful people here.... envy makes so ugly.


 
I'm not sure it's envy, you know. Give your average Urbanite their very own column in the New Statesman and they would keep coal in it. I'm pretty sure it's straightforward contempt.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

Silas Loom said:


> I'm not sure it's envy, you know. Give your average Urbanite their very own column in the New Statesman and they would keep coal in it. I'm pretty sure it's straightforward contempt.


 
No it isnt contempt.  Too much serious anger, they wish they were her.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> No it isnt contempt. Too much serious anger, they wish they were her.


 

It's more a wishing that her & her ilk weren't pretending they're us. Have you read the thread?


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

S☼I said:


> It's more a wishing that her & her ilk weren't pretending they're us. Have you read the thread?


 
I looked at the last pages.  I never saw such shameful fury before.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> I looked at the last pages. I never saw such shameful fury before.


 

How'd you come across the thread?


----------



## rekil (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Nobody noticed my 'neither Washington nor Moscow' reference
> 
> Well, either that or it just wasn't funny


 
It wasn't funny when it was done 600 pages ago and it's not funny now. 

But that won't stop me nicking it and passing it off as my own sometime in the future teehee


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

J Ed said:


> How'd you come across the thread?


 
I certainiy wish I had not.  I'll move on to another one.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> I certainiy wish I had not. I'll move on to another one.


 

That didn't answer the question. Given that aside from liking one of Jazzz's posts and posting on here this is all you've done on urban...why this one? Do you even know who Laurie Penny is?


----------



## Firky (Jul 21, 2013)

Why is it within 48 hours of Laurie showing her face, her sycophantic followers register? They'll not even bother to read the fucking thread.

I wouldn't bother with them. They'll sharp fuck off back to twitter and in depth political conversation composed of 120 characters.


----------



## Belushi (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> I looked at the last pages. I never saw such shameful fury before.


 
You must mean the bit where Laurie Penny baselessly libels everyone on the thread as rape apologists?

She has form for this too, having in the past had to publicly apologise to one of the posters after baselessly accusing him (a long term anti-racism campaigner) of being a racist.


----------



## andysays (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Wow, some shameful people here.... envy makes so ugly.


 
Correlation not causation


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> I looked at the last pages. I never saw such shameful fury before.


 
I saw it. Great film. Samurai classic.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

S☼I said:


> That didn't answer the question. Given that aside from liking one of Jazzz's posts and posting on here this is all you've done on urban...why this one? Do you even know who Laurie Penny is?


 
I read her aticles.  Not good, not bad.  Defintely not worth the fury shown here.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> I read her aticles. Not good, not bad. Defintely not worth the fury shown here.


 

So what compelled you to register here and find this thread and give us all a good ticking off?


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

Belushi said:


> You must mean the bit where Laurie Penny baselessly libels everyone on the thread as rape apologists?
> 
> She has form for this too, having in the past had to publicly apologise to one of the posters after baselessly accusing him (a long term anti-racism campaigner) of being a racist.


 
OK, I don't know about this.  But I am very suprised to read so much vile hatred anyway.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> I looked at the last pages. I never saw such shameful fury before.


are you referring to any shameful fury in particular, duck? x


----------



## Belushi (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK, I don't know about this. But I am very suprised to read so much vile hatred anyway.


 
You need to read the entire thread if you want to understand the last few pages.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

S☼I said:


> So what compelled you to register here and find this thread and give us all a good ticking off?


 
Nothing.  No I'll move on to another thread - FAST!


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

run, forrest! RUN!


----------



## andysays (Jul 21, 2013)

S☼I said:


> So what compelled you to register here and find this thread and give us all a good ticking off?


 
If this is supposed to be a good ticking off, I'm a little disappointed.

All I've seen so far is a content-free plea not to be so beastly to Laurie


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jul 21, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> run, forrest! RUN!


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> are you referring to any shameful fury in particular, duck? x


 
Actually you are the only one who has thought about what they wrote afterwards, and I think you felt sorry for what you said before.

Some others though display a very bad side of themselves here.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

Firky said:


> I could quite happily kick Harris in the teeth. Fucking sex pest. I wouldn't trust him with an animal let alone a lass.


 
Probably run a mile if faced one-on-one with a woman.
It'd certainly go some way to explaining his much-expressed perving on pubescent and barely post-pubescent females.


----------



## binka (Jul 21, 2013)

Whenever I get a new book I only ever read the last 3 pages. Gives you the gist of whats happened without having to faff around finding out about all that pointless context. Also helps make me an extremely profilic reader - I'm up to almost one book a month now


----------



## andysays (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Actually you are the only one who has thought about what they wrote afterwards, and I think you felt sorry for what you said before.
> 
> Some others though display a very bad side of themselves here.


 
I'm sure those unnamed others would be happy to discuss this with you if you'd care to name them and be specific about what you're accusing them of doing. I know that I stand by every word I wrote in my exchange with Laurie, although she unfortunately chose not to address a single one of the points I was making - must have had a deadline looming for her latest column...


----------



## andysays (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi was last seen:​Viewing thread _bulgarian protests day 21_, 4 minutes ago​ 
Sudden interest in South Eastern European politics...


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

articul8 said:


>


 
He's saying "you're mealy-mouthed".

Personally, I'd have prefered him to have been saying "you're a vapid Fabian dick", but you can't always have what you want.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

I can't begin to think how you thought anything good could come of making that post articul8. You have a habit of putting your foot in your mouth on this stuff - comments about certain people's appearances making it difficult for you to get to the vinegar strokes spring to mind. Don't you think that sometimes it's best to either think about how what you say might be interpreted and attempt to pre-empt that by working out how people might respond, how you might respond to that and so on in order to clarify your thoughts and make sure you're not seen as a cunt or just not say anything?

(I don't think you're a rape apologist or anything of the sort fwiw but I don't think you always think this stuff through and take into account the wider implications of what you say - I think instead you start off with a position and then rationalise it after the fact, which leads you to taking all kinds of odd positions that I don't think you really subscribe to. It's the same with your discourse obsession - you claim to still be a materialist who accepts the centrality of class but when your views or subject to scrutiny you end up making idealist post-modernist arguments because you have to in order to rationalise whatever discourse related comments you've made)


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> No it isnt contempt. Too much serious anger, they wish they were her.


 
Why would people wish to be her?
We're all of us the sum of our own experiences, why would we wish to be someone who often (mis)-represents the working class experience for her own journalistic ends, when she represents the working class experience at all in her writing beyond vague condescension?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Dave?


 
I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> I looked at the last pages. I never saw such shameful fury before.


 
Which means you're drawing a conclusion that isn't contextually-based, but rather  based on your *opinion* of what you've read in the last few pages.

Can you see how that renders your claims about "envy" and jealousy hollow?

Rhetorical question, by the way. I doubt you can see.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

andysays said:


> I'm sure those unnamed others would be happy to discuss this with you if you'd care to name them and be specific about what you're accusing them of doing.


 
Violent threats, bitter name-calling, blaming her for everything in the world... just the most bitter hatred.  Sorry but I can't imagibne how a columnist could cause such strange anger, unless it was ENVY.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

articul8 said:


> Have you read it?! It is not an attack on class politics, it is an attack on narrow and dogmatic assumptions about what the struggle for socialism might mean, to whom it appeals and on what basis.


 
I've not read it, no. Not because I don't want to but because it's not available online or in any of the libraries I have access to and I can't afford to be buying every book anyone mentions to me so have to save what book money I do have for stuff that I really need for my studies. But I have read commentaries on it from the likes of Ellen Meiksins-Wood (cheers for pointing me her way frogwoman and butchersapron - great author!). It seems that just like you they claim, on the surface, not to abandon class politics but when their arguments are scrutinised they're painted into the same post-everything corner as you.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Which means you're drawing a conclusion that isn't contextually-based, but rather based on your *opinion* of what you've read in the last few pages.


 
Not 'opinion.'  I can read well enough to see what's happening here.  Tall poppy gets chopped down.


----------



## articul8 (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I can't begin to think how you thought anything good could come of making that post articul8
> 
> 
> > which post? The one on logic of confessional columns?  I stand by it.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

copliker said:


> It wasn't funny when it was done 600 pages ago and it's not funny now.
> 
> But that won't stop me nicking it and passing it off as my own sometime in the future teehee


 
Mine was better than that one though


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

Silas Loom said:


> I'm not sure it's envy, you know. Give your average Urbanite their very own column in the New Statesman and they would keep coal in it. I'm pretty sure it's straightforward contempt.


 
I'm not contemptuous of Ms. Penny/Dave/Laura.  She says some things that need to be said (although she doesn't, IMHO, "speak truth to power" anywhere near as loudly as her more slavish admirers appear to think she does). As a journalist she manages to do the job, but her underlying political motivations fluctuate (within her writing) and she's possible even less self-aware than her _N.S._ colleague Mr. Hasan, if that's possible.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I've not read it, no. Not because I don't want to but because it's not available online or in any of the libraries I have access to and I can't afford to be buying every book anyone mentions to me so have to save what book money I do have for stuff that I really need for my studies. But I have read commentaries on it from the likes of Ellen Meiksins-Wood (cheers for pointing me her way frogwoman and butchersapron - great author!). It seems that just like you they claim, on the surface, not to abandon class politics but when their arguments are scrutinised they're painted into the same post-everything corner as you.


 
Here

Do have a quick skim of Hillary's intro, it's articul8's posts on here almost word for bloody word.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> I saw it. Great film. Samurai classic.


 
The re-make as a western was well crap, though.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 21, 2013)

Laurie's initial comments when she joined up on here way back were sneering and dismissive. It's all very well to say "no other columnist would try this hard to speak to you savages" but I seem to remember her opening gambit on here being along the lines of "omg you basement dwelling losers, haven't you got something better to do than to talk about me, some of us work for a living y'know" or words to that effect.

By coming here to "engage" with that sort of initial mindset i think it's inevitably going lead to to an ugly argument, and that in turn is one of the reasons this thread is still going and hasn't sunk away off the front page of the forum for so long. A bit like the streisand effect, although in this case just a bit more like rubbernecking at a car crash, but I have a feeling had Laurie not turned up, or at least had a different attitude, this thread probably wouldn't even be on the front page of the forum routinely any longer. The Remzi poster is right on one thing - Laurie Penny's not actually important or interesting enough to warrant such forensic detail, and if it weren't for these occasional interventions this thread would be half the size. The size of the thread itself is perhaps the most intimidating thing.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

binka said:


> Whenever I get a new book I only ever read the last 3 pages. Gives you the gist of whats happened without having to faff around finding out about all that pointless context. Also helps make me an extremely profilic reader - I'm up to almost one book a month now


 
I was going to do a gag in response to that about how I only ever read the _third_ page of a newspaper (I don't _actually_ do this, now the Green 'un is no longer being published I don't even buy a newspaper - fuck you internet for killing the best weekly local sports paper in the world, used to be able to buy it on my way home from the match and read the report on the match I'd just been watching, I'm sure there was some witchcraft involved in getting it out so fast) but in the context of recent discussion on this thread it probably wouldn't have been appropriate!


----------



## andysays (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Violent threats, bitter name-calling, blaming her for everything in the world... just the most bitter hatred. Sorry but I can't imagibne how a columnist could cause such strange anger, unless it was ENVY.


 
More nonsense - made-up, hyperbolic, generalised, tarring-everyone-with-the-same-brush-because-if-you-were-in-the-least-specific-your-accusations-would-be-immediately-refuted nonsense.

You don't have even the ghost of a point


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Violent threats, bitter name-calling, blaming her for everything in the world... just the most bitter hatred. Sorry but I can't imagibne how a columnist could cause such strange anger, unless it was ENVY.


 
Look you really need to read more than just the last few pages of this thread to understand it. It is a long thread but you'll quickly see that it's more of a commentary on political writings than anything else (at least that's how I see it). It's not just LP that's critiqued in some detail and by some very knowledgeable and politically aware people I hasten to add, a whole raft of writers claiming to write for the working classes are examined.

LP has a habit of popping onto the thread, not liking what she sees, calling all the posters something pretty vile - racists, misogynists, rape-apologists, whatever - and going away again. We know she uses this thread for article material, yet funnily enough we're never credited. 

She is a fledgling writer in the big scheme of things but equally she is an adult and as tufty79 pointed out recently (and as others have pointed out throughout this thread), she should realise her writings have consequences and take responsibility. 

For the avoidance of doubt, her account of rape has been viewed as one of her best articles. There are no rape apologists here, nor are there racists or misogynists.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

andysays said:


> More nonsense - made-up, hyperbolic, generalised, tarring-everyone-with-the-same-brush-because-if-you-were-in-the-least-specific-your-accusations-would-be-immediately-refuted nonsense.
> 
> You don't have even the ghost of a point


 
Actually you are probably the bitterest one here.  Oh well I don't think this thread is good for me or for you.  Bye bye.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

This is a very odd post.



Remzi said:


> Violent threats, bitter name-calling, blaming her for everything in the world...


 
This part suggests to me that you have an over-active imagination. What violent threats? What bitter name calling (beyond the treatment we give to everyone we dislike politically)? Where is she blamed for everything in the world? (In truth people have been at pains to emphasise that she's more an expression of the problem than the problem itself).

Care to name names or quote posts?



Remzi said:


> just the most bitter hatred. Sorry but I can't imagibne how a columnist could cause such strange anger, unless it was ENVY.


 
But at the same time this suggests to me that you don't have much of an imagination at all. Can you really not imagine any other reason for the reception she gets? 

This 'hatred' is nothing compared to what I feel for people like Thatcher, Pinochet, Milton Friedman and so on - must I be envious of them too?

Your comments are just a re-heated form of the right wing 'politics of envy' slur. And they betray an elitist mindset - normals like us _must_ be jealous of Laurie. It's inconceivable that we might be quite happy in our own skins and aspire to other, IMO more profound, things. All normals want to be celebs. All proles want to be middle class. And so on.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Not 'opinion.' I can read well enough to see what's happening here. Tall poppy gets chopped down.


 
If your perspective is not informed by past information, then it is contextless.  If it has no context, then it is mere opinion. Your cry of "tall poppy syndrome" is, like your claims of envy and jealousy, mere opinion.


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> If your perspective is not informed by past information, then it is contextless. If it has no context, then it is mere opinion. Your cry of "tall poppy syndrome" is, like your claims of envy and jealousy, mere opinion.


 

That is just the same as anyone else's posts on here then....


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Not 'opinion.' I can read well enough to see what's happening here. Tall poppy gets chopped down.


 
All your arguments are based on the assumption that she's somehow superior to us. From this you go on to deduct that we must therefore be envious.

Fuck off. I'm perfectly happy being me, warts and all, and wouldn't swap places with her for the world.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> This part suggests to me that you have an over-active imagination. What violent threats?


 
Serously?  Come on.



Firky said:


> I could quite happily kick Harris in the teeth.


 
Thats just ONE, and it got 8 likes so far!  Real madness.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> That is just the same as anyone else's posts on here then....


Only if you ignore the whole first half of what vp wrote. He was attempting to establish what is required to go beyond mere opinion - and one of those things is awareness of past information and context. I mean he _literally_ said that and you decided to ignore it.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Violent threats, bitter name-calling, blaming her for everything in the world... just the most bitter hatred. Sorry but I can't imagibne how a columnist could cause such strange anger, unless it was ENVY.


 
Could you possibly bring yourself to elucidate these "violent threats", this "bitter name-calling" and "blaming", these incidences of "bitter hatred"?
And all within the few pages you've read, too!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

articul8 said:


> which post? The one on logic of confessional columns? I stand by it.


 
Yes. In the context of the accusations Laurie just made and the sensitive topic under discussion did you think this was an appropriate place to say it?


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Only if you ignore the whole first half of what vp wrote. He was attempting to establish what is required to go beyond mere opinion - and one of those things is awareness of past information and context. I mean he _literally_ said that and you decided to ignore it.


 

His understanding or perception of the context is subjective.

You drunk already?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Thats just ONE, and it got 8 likes so far! Real madness.


 
could you link me to the post so I can make sure I liked it myself?


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> All your arguments are based on the assumption that she's somehow superior to us.


 
Her post on this htead (the ones I read) are very far superior to yours.  She was kind and gentle while receving only spite and hate in return.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> His understanding or perception of the context is subjective.
> 
> You drunk already?


 
Marvelous. You misread something then lash out in a pretty pathetic way. Too too easy.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> That is just the same as anyone else's posts on here then....


 
Do fuck off, you awful bore.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> It's inconceivable that we might be quite happy in our own skins


 
Sorry to say so but tghose who are happy in themselves do not speak as you do.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Not 'opinion.' I can read well enough to see what's happening here. Tall poppy gets chopped down.


you *do* know she's about the same height as me? (not entirely serious - i don't _expect_ anyone to know anything about me, let alone remember it )
some very fucking short poppies around


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Only if you ignore the whole first half of what vp wrote. He was attempting to establish what is required to go beyond mere opinion - and one of those things is awareness of past information and context. I mean he _literally_ said that and you decided to ignore it.


 
It's grit responding to a post by a poster he doesn't like. Of course he's going to wilfully-ignore anything *material* in the post.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Sorry to say so but tghose who are happy in themselves do not speak as you do.


orly?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> His understanding or perception of the context is subjective.
> 
> You drunk already?


 
Of course it's subjective. However, it's also informed by long-standing participation in this thread, and a reading (and occasional re-reading) of it, not by drawing inferences through reading a handful of the latest pages.

You stoned already?


----------



## J Ed (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Thats just ONE, and it got 8 likes so far! Real madness.


 

It's referring to a different person. In any case it's not a threat, it's a desire, where are the violent threats towards LP?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Her post on this htead (the ones I read) are very far superior to yours. She was kind and gentle while receving only spite and hate in return.


 
You need to curb the hyperbole, and concentrate on the facts, or else you're in danger of looking ridiculous.


----------



## Firky (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Thats just ONE, and it got 8 likes so far! Real madness.


 
No objection to his perverted and slimy sleaziness I note.

This one got half a dozen likes:



equationgirl said:


> Every time I see that picture I want to punch him in the fucking face, really hard
> 
> 
> No doubt this will reported back to him by the party faithful as misandrist hate speech.


 
We love Harris 

Maybe people don't like him very much becuase he comes out with this creepy shit:



> Almost everyone was comfortably past puberty, and so Halloween became about what everything becomes about in high school: sex. Don't get me wrong: As a 15-year-old, having your school full of sexy nurses or sexy cowgirls or sexy unicorns (okay, not as many unicorns as I would have liked) seemed like a daydream. But as the years went on, before I noticed, I had stopped dressing up. Maybe it was the public school system killing my imagination, or maybe I was just distracted wondering how girls planned to skirt the dress code and still come to school as dominatrices, but I couldn't come up with a good costume anymore.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

Firky said:


> We love Harris


 
What crime has he comitted please?   Must be some dreadful attack if he deserves such vicious words.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Sorry to say so but tghose who are happy in themselves do not speak as you do.


 
I hate to disillusion you, but "human nature" (to use a ridiculous expression to encapsulate human social interaction and psychology) is such that people who are "happy in themselves" are *absolutely* capable of speaking in such a way.  "Human nature" is contradictory, dichotomous or "worse". Self-contradiction is part of everyday life, as is hypocrisy and "little white lies".


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Serously? Come on.
> 
> 
> 
> Thats just ONE, and it got 8 likes so far! Real madness.


 
And are you aware of the context around that post? Are you aware of the writings of Malcolm Harris and how he has a rather unhealthy obsession with young women, especially those who might not have reached the age of consent?


----------



## Firky (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> What crime has he comitted please? Must be some dreadful attack if he deserves such vicious words.


 

Go familiarise yourself with his writing and some of the stuff he comes out with. The obsession of puberty, sex, porn, young women and general seediness.


----------



## andysays (Jul 21, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> could you link me to the post so I can make sure I liked it myself?


 
Nah, you didn't "like" it Delroy Booth and neither did I (despite apparently being the bitterest one here ).

We're obviously a right couple of softies who need to up our game in the hater stakes if we want to cut it in U75...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Serously? Come on.
> 
> 
> 
> Thats just ONE, and it got 8 likes so far! Real madness.


 
That's not even about Laurie Penny. And it is indeed just one. As in not more than one. As in not plural. It's also not a threat - a threat goes like this: 'I'm going to find you and kick you in the teeth Malcolm Harris.' That one's just someone saying what they'd quite like to do.

I'd like to kill the entire Tory/Lib Dem cabinet with a cheesegrater. But even members of that cabinet would be sensible enough to realise that this is not a threat.

0/10 - must try harder.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Sorry to say so but tghose who are happy in themselves do not speak as you do.


 
Alright fucking Freud, could you show your working out on that one please?


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> And are you aware of the context around that post? Are you aware of the writings of Malcolm Harris and how he has a rather unhealthy obsession with young women, especially those who might not have reached the age of consent?


 
Yes I know him and NI magazine (read them not personally). 

Do you mean the quote about lust for his schoolfellow girls when he was 15?  If that is what you mean I see nothing wrong - do you?  Or is there anything worse?


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Her post on this htead (the ones I read) are very far superior to yours. She was kind and gentle while receving only spite and hate in return.


 

How kind and gentle is it to smear people as racists, sexists, misogynists and rape apologist?

Come to think of it, how kind and gentle was her dealing with the chap who threatened suicide? I seem to recall her using him for a story even after mental health advisors had explicitly advised against doing exactly that? While we're on that subject, how is that unfortunate individual doing these days in terms of their well-being after becoming byline fodder for a self-appointed 'voice of a generation' who, strangely for the 'voice of a generation', is largely rejected by political activists across the milieu for whom she claims to speak and be a part thereof?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

Firky said:


> Go familiarise yourself with his writing and some of the stuff he comes out with. The obsession of puberty, sex, porn, young women and general seediness.


 
It's pretty obvious the Remzi has no intention of doing anything as coarse as acquainting themselves with the context of *anything* they're sounding off about.

Now who does that remind me of?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Her post on this htead (the ones I read) are very far superior to yours. She was kind and gentle while receving only spite and hate in return.


 
Yeah - especially the part where she told tens of thousands of people I was a racist for no reason whatsoever, leading to real world problems for me and my family (including my black ex-partner and her mixed race children) and only retracted the statement when she was threatened with legal action.

That part was especially kind and gentle and I can see why you wouldn't understand why I didn't just bend down and kiss her feet afterwards.

You fucking mug.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> It's pretty obvious the Remzi has no intention of doing anything as coarse as acquainting themselves with the context of *anything* they're sounding off about.
> 
> Now who does that remind me of?


 







'Hi. I'm the voice of a generation. But you can all call me Remzi...'


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Of course it's subjective. However, it's also informed by long-standing participation in this thread, and a reading (and occasional re-reading) of it, not by drawing inferences through reading a handful of the latest pages.
> 
> You stoned already?


 

Which makes it .... wait for it..... an opinion!


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Yes I know him and NI magazine (read them not personally).
> 
> Do you mean the quote about lust for his schoolfellow girls when he was 15? If that is what you mean I see nothing wrong - do you? Or is there anything worse?


 
I mean his more recent articles, which if you read them you would see what he is writing. His writings are not about when he was 15.


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> Which makes it .... wait for it..... an opinion!


 
grit, just fuck off if you're on this thread solely to have a go at VP.


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> grit, just fuck off if you're on this thread solely to have a go at VP.


 

Nope, pointing out the complete break downs in someone's logic and reasoning is not "having a go".

Having a go is calling him a bitter old cunt. (just for reference like)


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Alright fucking Freud, could you show your working out on that one please?


 
Happy people are not angry.  Even when anger is just (as it is NOT here) it bring unhappiness.


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> Nope, pointing out the complete break downs in someone's logic and reasoning is not "having a go".
> 
> Having a go is calling him a bitter old cunt. (just for reference like)


 
Well you're clearly not here to participate in the subject of the thread, so fuck off anyway.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Happy people are not angry. Even when anger is just (as it is NOT here) it bring unhappiness.


 
That's, like, really profound maaaan!

Can I have your thoughts on this now please Jacques?



SpineyNorman said:


> Yeah - especially the part where she told tens of thousands of people I was a racist for no reason whatsoever, leading to real world problems for me and my family (including my black ex-partner and her mixed race children) and only retracted the statement when she was threatened with legal action.
> 
> That part was especially kind and gentle and I can see why you wouldn't understand why I didn't just bend down and kiss her feet afterwards.
> 
> You fucking mug.


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Well you're clearly not here to participate in the subject of the thread, so fuck off anyway.


 

Thats exactly what illustrating someones faulty argument is... taking part in the thread.

Or is it just too inconvenient, this threads sole purpose is for the usual suspects to sit around slapping each other on the back and calling each other comrade?


----------



## Firky (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Happy people are not angry. Even when anger is just (as it is NOT here) it bring unhappiness.


 
What a load of fucking shit. Did you read that in a Christmas cracker?


----------



## Remzi (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I mean his more recent articles, which if you read them you would see what he is writing. His writings are not about when he was 15.


 
OK.  I haven't seen such and I can't imagine them but if that's true then OK.

Now I'm going before I beome the new Penny or Hrris here.  What madness.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Happy people are not angry. Even when anger is just (as it is NOT here) it bring unhappiness.


or healing. which is a bit of a nicer result.
i'm pretty happy with the bits of my life that i chose tbh - is that good enough for you?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> Thats exactly what illustrating someones faulty argument is... taking part in the thread.
> 
> Or is it just too inconvenient, this threads sole purpose is for the usual suspects to sit around slapping each other on the back and calling each other *comrade?*


anyone calls me that, i will hurt them with my teeth.


----------



## Firky (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK. I haven't seen such and I can't imagine them but if that's true then OK.


 

But you claim to read them.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> Which makes it .... wait for it..... an opinion!


 
You may have noted that I used the term "mere opinion" for  Remzi's posts (based on, by their own admission, reading a handful of pages), so as to differentiate it from the "informed opinion" of people who've read the thread.
Or, more likely, you didn't notice, because you were too busy trying to throw a decent punch.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 21, 2013)

People don't like Malcolm Harris because he's a hipster twat who appears to be in the same temporary autonomous zone as Hakim Bey and Gary Glitter


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> You may have noted that I used the term "mere opinion" for Remzi's posts


 

Oh you can be sure that I noticed that! Thats what made it so fucking hilarious, you were attempting to suggest that your "mere opinion" was better than Remzi's "mere opinion".

This is gold, keep it coming.


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> People don't like Malcolm Harris because he's a hipster twat who appears to be in the same temporary autonomous zone as Hakim Bey and Gary Glitter


 
And his writing is crap.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Happy people are not angry. Even when anger is just (as it is NOT here) it bring unhappiness.


 
Please do me a favour and take a basic psychology class, in order to move beyond the frankly ridiculous (and intellectually unsustainable) set of beliefs you have about emotions.


----------



## Firky (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> And his writing is crap.


 

And his £5,000 fees to talk for half an hour.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> Oh you can be sure that I noticed that! Thats what made it so fucking hilarious, you were attempting to suggest that your "mere opinion" was better than Remzi's "mere opinion".
> 
> This is gold, keep it coming.


 
Not "better", more well-informed on the context of the thread, given that unlike Remzi (and possibly yourself) I've actually read the whole thing, and re-read parts of it several times.

Now, try again, maybe after a coffee.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK. I haven't seen such and I can't imagine them but if that's true then OK.
> 
> Now I'm going before I beome the new Penny or Hrris here. What madness.


 

It's like you're climbing up onto the cross and begging for nails.


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Not "better", more well-informed on the context of the thread, g


 

So more informed,valid and relevant then?

Yeah that's why I just used the word better as it communicated those ideas in a single word.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 21, 2013)

Firky said:


> And his £5,000 fees to talk for half an hour.


 

A Malcolm Harris speaking engagement, yesterday:


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Now, try again, maybe after a coffee.



i do not advocate that anyone* ever* posts on this thread after a coffee.
/projection.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK. I haven't seen such and I can't imagine them but if that's true then OK.
> 
> Now I'm going before I beome the new Penny or Hrris here. What madness.


 
Yeah, we should just be grateful to her for being superior to us and a great journalist who speaks for us to we don't have to speak for ourselves and we should ingnore inconvenient stuff like her slandering us as racists, making life difficult for us and our families and putting campaigns we are involved in at risk by giving our opponents (untrue) dirt to fling in our direction.

But before you go please can I have a response to this post:



SpineyNorman said:


> Yeah - especially the part where she told tens of thousands of people I was a racist for no reason whatsoever, leading to real world problems for me and my family (including my black ex-partner and her mixed race children) and only retracted the statement when she was threatened with legal action.
> 
> That part was especially kind and gentle and I can see why you wouldn't understand why I didn't just bend down and kiss her feet afterwards.
> 
> You fucking mug.


 
Otherwise I'll be forced to conclude that you don't know what the fuck you're on about and are too cowardly to address this inconvenient truth.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> anyone calls me that, i will hurt them with my teeth.


 
Is combabe acceptable?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

politicising hotness? check your privilege checking my privilege checking your.. you dawg. i heard you like privilege...
and taking it as a compliment rather than embracing my paranoia that it's a veiled dig 

cat-ivist will do fine, if you must 
(i kept being called an activist by well-meaning nice people until recently, when i started bursting into tears and explaining *why* it upset me. still wroking on it, but i really am a catnip-roots type low-level placard-waver who just gets a bit pissed off with things sometimes, and often gets it wrong as to how to go about changing 'em. as we all do )


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> And his writing is crap.


 
Structurally, his writing is excellent. It encompasses the styles of many excellent columnists.
It's the content that isn't particularly appealing to me. It's very much targetted at his own "cool" _milieu_, with all the archness and knowingness that implies, which makes it boring for anyone who isn't, or doesn't want to be part of, that _milieu_.

He's kind of the "anti-Penny", in my eyes: Her writing is structurally "all over the place", but her content is sometimes interesting, and isn't just aimed at appealing to "the cool kids".


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

double post.


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> double post.


 
So between the two of them they're one good writer?


----------



## andysays (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> ...But before you go please can I have a response to this post:
> 
> Otherwise I'll be forced to conclude that you don't know what the fuck you're on about and are too cowardly to address this inconvenient truth...


 
I think we're all justified in coming to that conclusion right now


----------



## emanymton (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Happy people are not angry. Even when anger is just (as it is NOT here) it bring unhappiness.


Do you write fortune cookies for a living?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> So more informed,valid and relevant then?
> 
> Yeah that's why I just used the word better as it communicated those ideas in a single word.


 
You're the one attributing value, not me.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i do not advocate that anyone* ever* posts on this thread after a coffee.
> /projection.


 
To be honest, I haven't drunk coffee for 19 years (gastric ulcers), so I've forgotten what the effects are of a strong coffee!


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> To be honest, I haven't drunk coffee for 19 years (gastric ulcers), so I've forgotten what the effects are of a strong coffee!


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> To be honest, I haven't drunk coffee for 19 years (gastric ulcers), so I've forgotten what the effects are of a strong coffee!


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

tufty79 said:


>



+ The Internet and a 'reply' button
=


(genuine trigger warning from a triggery person - the first minute is slightly dark and unease making. the rest of it makes me want to run through the streets howling)
magnified by 100,000,000,000


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Happy people are not angry. Even when anger is just (as it is NOT here) it bring unhappiness.


 
Oh fuck off. You know nothing about any of the posters on this thread and the reasons for their anger (if they have any).


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> You're the one attributing value, not me.


 

Then why refer to Remzi's "mere" opinion?

You are slipping, sad to see.


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Oh fuck off. You know nothing about any of the posters on this thread and the reasons for their anger (if they have any).


 

What a great response to an anger related post, this thread just keeps giving and giving.


----------



## The Pale King (Jul 21, 2013)

imposs1904 said:


> Ursula Le Guin took the picture.


 
Pint and a chaser for Krugman. He's going large tonight!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

tufty79 said:


>




I rember that *sort* of effect on my bowels after the first coffee and cigarette of the morning!


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> What a great response to an anger related post, this thread just keeps giving and giving.


 
grit fuck off. Now.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I rember that *sort* of effect on my bowels after the first coffee and cigarette of the morning!


 

If you'd smoked unfiltered Camels and drunk three mugs of Hot Lava Java you could have made history as Britain's first astronaut.


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> grit fuck off. Now.


 

Well since you asked so nicely.

No.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> Then why refer to Remzi's "mere" opinion?


 
I wasn't attributing value, I was attributing understanding of context.  That's fairly obvious.



> You are slipping, sad to see.


 


The fact that even after your last melt-down you're still non self-aware enough to keep knee-capping yourself, is what's "sad to see". 
Not for me, you understand, because I don't give a toss about you, but for those posters more compassionate than me, it might be painful for them to see.


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> Well since you asked so nicely.
> 
> No.


 
Then please contribute to the thread instead of disrupting it.


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I wasn't attributing value, I was attributing understanding of context. That's fairly obvious.


 
Which you implied gave more value, hence his opinion being "mere" in comparison to yours


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Then please contribute to the thread instead of disrupting it.


 

I have been, in fact its been my challenges to such appalling abuses of logic and reason that you initially took issue with.

In essence you originally kicked off at me for contributing to the thread. *shrugs shoulders*


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> If you'd smoked unfiltered Camels and drunk three mugs of Hot Lava Java you could have made history as Britain's first astronaut.


 
I'd have never been an astronaut, then, 'cos the smell of Camels used to make me heave even worse than the smell of _Gitanes_ did. 

(((((my career as Britain's first self-propelled astronaut)))))


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> I have been, in fact its been my challenges to such appalling abuses of logic and reason that you initially took issue with.
> 
> In essence you originally kicked off at me for contributing to the thread. *shrugs shoulders*


 
Bollocks did I. Not once have you commented on any of the writers featured on this thread.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> If you'd smoked unfiltered Camels and drunk three mugs of Hot Lava Java you could have made history as Britain's first astronaut.


 
Bakunin: feed me unfiltered Camels _Gauloises* _and three mugs of Hot Lava Java _zapatista propercoffee _and step well away after lighting the blue touchpaper. you might need a crash helmet too. not because of the effect on my bowels, but the ensuing spacecadettery 

*actually, cutters choice and red rizzla with a filter, if that's ok?


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Bollocks did I. Not once have you commented on any of the writers featured on this thread.


 

No but I did on the posters, which this being an internet forum, is a valid contribution.

I've already pointed this out to you.


----------



## Firky (Jul 21, 2013)

I have IBS and still drink coffee


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 21, 2013)

The Urban communal shithouse, yesterday:


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> No but I did on the posters, which this being an internet forum, is a valid contribution.
> 
> I've already pointed this out to you.


 
Bitching about posters is not 'a valid contribution' as you put it.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> Which you implied gave more value, hence his opinion being "mere" in comparison to yours


 
You're such a sweetheart!

For someone who claims to be logical, you appear to have not noticed the flaw in your own claim.  I implied nothing, *you* drew one of two possible inferences from what I wrote.  You being you, the inference you drew was the incorrect one, but consonant with your constant need to belittle a handful of poster whom you feel threatened by.


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Bitching about posters is not 'a valid contribution'


 

Agreed, thankfully that isint what I've done.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> You're such a sweetheart!


saying nowt except i approve of the use of the word 'sweetheart'.


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> Agreed, thankfully that isint what I've done.


 
Well you've continually attacked the poster not their post. Call it what you want.


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Well you've continually attached the poster not their post. Call it what you want.


 

Attached? oh you mean attacked, well I attacked (and perhaps gently mocked) the errors in their reasoning.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 21, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Do you write fortune cookies for a living?


 
I don't think anyone does that anymore - taken over by computer generated phrases.


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> saying nowt except i approve of the use of the word 'sweetheart'.


 

I'm all sunshine and lollipops


----------



## emanymton (Jul 21, 2013)

Greebo said:


> I don't think anyone does that anymore - taken over by computer generated phrases.


I've just died a little bit.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> Attached? oh you mean attacked, well I attacked (and perhaps gently mocked) the errors in their reasoning.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

I reckon bowel problems and falutulence should be considered oppressions and as a result we should get to be really obnoxious to people without any comeback. (the latter being my personal problem - well, actually it's not directly my problem cos I enjoy a good fart but society doesn't it would appear and shuns me as a result  )


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> I'm all sunshine and lollipops


i'm a pussy cat 
i  used it a bit witheringly recently, and it looks like all the sick/cool kids have caught on.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I reckon bowel problems and falutulence should be considered oppressions and as a result we should get to be really obnoxious to people without any comeback. (the latter being my personal problem - well, actually it's not directly my problem cos I enjoy a good fart but society doesn't it would appear and shuns me as a result  )


come round mine. we'll feed me some thorntons diabetic chocolate, and enjoy the nuclear wind 
*waves extra diabetic privilege card


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> Attached? oh you mean attacked, well I attacked (and perhaps gently mocked) the errors in their reasoning.


 
Failed to attack the errors in their reasoning more like.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

Greebo said:


> I don't think anyone does that anymore - taken over by computer generated phrases.





emanymton said:


> I've just died a little bit.


 
i am about to blow both of your minds.


----------



## andysays (Jul 21, 2013)

Firky said:


> I have IBS and still drink coffee


 
Irritable Bastard Syndrome? I get that if I don't drink coffee


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Failed to attack the errors in their reasoning more like.


 

You are firing on all cylinders today.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> come round mine. we'll feed me some thorntons diabetic chocolate, and enjoy the nuclear wind
> *waves extra diabetic privilege card


 
lol I'll have curry and guinness the night before and beans for breakfast and we could trump in harmony - fart cocktails ftw!

My cousin had a really bad accident a few years back - was knocked off his scooter (proper motorbike type one, not one of them kids toys hipsters insist on traveling on) and run over. Nearly lost his leg and was in hospital for weeks on a morphine drip. The morphine gave him severe constipation and no laxatives would work. But he's also diabetic so me and my mum got him some Thorntons diabetic chocs and the next time we saw him he had a massive grin on his face - they were literally the only thing that could make his bowels move!


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> You are firing on all cylinders today.


 
Meaning what, grit?


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Meaning what, grit?


 

Your response was piss poor.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 21, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i am about to blow both of your minds.


 
If logic be the food of minds, blow on.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Meaning what, grit?


 
Meaning he's run out of things to say so he's trying and failing to look clever by being cryptic.


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> Your response was piss poor.


 
*snort* as if you are the arbiter of quality around here. You're a disruptive pathetic knobend.


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Meaning he's run out of things to say so he's trying and failing to look clever by being cryptic.


 

More like you have!( I've decided to engage in equationgirls flawless debating style, I like it!).


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i am about to blow both of your minds.


 
behold, the cookies of good fortune. it was the first time i'd had a 'safe' friend visit after all the springdisaster, and we ate a fuckton of food and i could rant freely to someone who sort of knew what'd been going on, and the people involved, rather than someone bang in the middle of it or a MH professional who just thought i sounded like a paranoid nutbag.




oddly enough.. bt gave me an unexpected refund the next day.
and shortly after, i booked tickets to go see my favourite band in paris.

tell me to my face that a machine knew that, ey?


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> *snort* as if you are the arbiter of quality around here. You're a disruptive pathetic knobend.


 

Peas in a pod us two


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 21, 2013)

andysays said:


> Irritable Bastard Syndrome? I get that if I don't drink coffee


 

You should see Toggle waking up to an empty coffee mug...







'Now, will somebody please find me a mug of Java..?'


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> More like you have!( I've decided to engage in equationgirls flawless debating tactic).
> 
> *I like it!*


 
You're just a bit of a sad case really aren't you?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> *snort* as if you are the arbiter of quality around here. You're a disruptive pathetic knobend.


no, that's me


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> You're just a bit of a sad case really aren't you?


 

I'm not a case I'm a person!


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 21, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> no, that's me


 
You're not a knobend though, and you're certainly not pathetic.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

WE ARE ALL AUTONOMOUS INDIVIDUALS ON THIS THREAD.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

grit said:


> I'm not a case I'm a person!


 
That's just your opinion.


----------



## grit (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's just your opinion.


 

Indeed, hurrah, someone gets it! We finally made it 

A big aul gold star for you!


----------



## emanymton (Jul 21, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> WE ARE ALL AUTONOMOUS INDIVIDUALS ON THIS THREAD.


I'm Not


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

emanymton said:


> I'm Not


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 21, 2013)

e2a (actually no. *posted* to add - managed to hit the wrong buttons and type in the wrong box in amusement) : i just had a look at twitter (yeah. i know . i felt brave enough to face it without worrying about shouting today) to see what her reaction to yesterday was. saw the 'why do i read the trolllls?' thing, and realised she's blocked me 

*officially joined the the haterati*

i don't care *shrug*, innit? well, i do a little bit, but fuck it. there's an apology floating around in cyberspace, and that's enough from me, i suppose. and she's reacting in exactly the same way as i have to people recently who are trying to make amends  
one of us is clearly the evil twin. would that make me the anti-laurie? 


edit again: yeah, i'm a fuckwit. the reason i don't use twitter is because it makes me feel stupid, angry, out of my depth and confused. i think i just didn't know how to use it (and thought 'protected tweet'/'you do not have the authorisation to..' meant blocked. managed to scrawl on her wall, so i think i might've been mistaken 

fwiw, if i was her, i wouldn't be overkeen on coming back to be shouted at. 
it doesn't mean i don't think we've got legitimate criticisms on here,it just means i've realised that we're both sort of in the same shoes, just different flavours.


----------



## andysays (Jul 21, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> e2a (actually no. *posted* to add - managed to hit the wrong buttons and type in the wrong box in amusement) : i just had a look at twitter (yeah. i know . i felt brave enough to face it without worrying about shouting today) to see what her reaction to yesterday was. saw the 'why do i read the trolllls?' thing, and realised she's blocked me
> 
> *officially joined the the haterati*
> 
> i don't care *shrug*, innit? well, i do a little bit, but fuck it. there's an apology floating around in cyberspace, and that's enough from me, i suppose.


 
To be honest, I don't think you've said anything here you ought to apologise for, and definitely not to LP


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 21, 2013)

Yeah if either of you needs to apologise it isn't you tufty79 - it was absolutely disgraceful, given what you'd just told us, for her to try and turn it around to you being the baddie and her the victim when she claimed that she found your account of your experiences and the way her friends had used her work against you as 'triggering' (so much for privilege checking if it's practitioners use its language to try and silence victims of that kind of thing).

You're worth 10 lauriepenny s IMO, don't let her get to you and definitely don't let her make your feel like the guilty party. I made the mistake of letting this stuff get to me a bit too much when spineygate was going on (it certainly needed dealing with but I could have probably dealt with it better) but there's no doubt in my mind about who was in the right - same goes for you if you ask me and given what you've been through it goes without saying that her comments towards you are on a completely different level to a couple of unfounded accusations of racism.

TL/DR or cliche version: Don't let the bastards grind you down.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yeah if either of you needs to apologise it isn't you tufty79 - it was absolutely disgraceful, given what you'd just told us, for her to try and turn it around to you being the baddie and her the victim when she claimed that she found your account of your experiences and the way her friends had used her work against you as 'triggering' (so much for privilege checking if it's practitioners use its language to try and silence victims of that kind of thing).
> 
> You're worth 10 lauriepenny s IMO, don't let her get to you and definitely don't let her make your feel like the guilty party. I made the mistake of letting this stuff get to me a bit too much when *spineygate* was going on (it certainly needed dealing with but I could have probably dealt with it better) but there's no doubt in my mind about who was in the right - same goes for you if you ask me and given what you've been through it goes without saying that her comments towards you are on a completely different level to a couple of unfounded accusations of racism.
> 
> TL/DR or cliche version: Don't let the bastards grind you down.


 


an excellent deterrent to burglars, bailiffs (same thing really) and other ne'er do wells


----------



## emanymton (Jul 21, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yeah if either of you needs to apologise it isn't you tufty79 - it was absolutely disgraceful, given what you'd just told us, for her to try and turn it around to you being the baddie and her the victim when she claimed that she found your account of your experiences and the way her friends had used her work against you as 'triggering' (so much for privilege checking if it's practitioners use its language to try and silence victims of that kind of thing).
> 
> You're worth 10 lauriepenny s IMO, don't let her get to you and definitely don't let her make your feel like the guilty party. I made the mistake of letting this stuff get to me a bit too much when spineygate was going on (it certainly needed dealing with but I could have probably dealt with it better) but there's no doubt in my mind about who was in the right - same goes for you if you ask me and given what you've been through it goes without saying that her comments towards you are on a completely different level to a couple of unfounded accusations of racism.
> 
> TL/DR or cliche version: Don't let the bastards grind you down.


Just liking this post hardly seems sufficient, so urmm well said.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jul 22, 2013)

grit said:


> Which you implied gave more value, hence his opinion being "mere" in comparison to yours


 

How would you distinguish between the value you placed on opinions; or don't you?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 22, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> former housemate of 39thstep as well
> 
> I'd have liked to be sat round that table to be honest


 
I´ve had a pint with Ken Macleod, in the old Senior Common Room at QUB. He was enthusing over having found a copy of BICO´s _The Economics of Partition _in the QUB bookshop.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 22, 2013)

I left this thread already yesterday, but Spiney asked me three times to respond to his message.



SpineyNorman said:


> Yeah - especially the part where she told tens of thousands of people I was a racist for no reason whatsoever, leading to real world problems for me and my family (including my black ex-partner and her mixed race children) and only retracted the statement when she was threatened with legal action.
> 
> That part was especially kind and gentle and I can see why you wouldn't understand why I didn't just bend down and kiss her feet afterwards.
> 
> You fucking mug.


 
Now I've read all Laurie's posts here and I never saw her call you a racist.  I don't understand how it caused any real world problems for you either.  Abd because you are still angry and insult me for no reason, I'm sorry but I beleve her not you. 

The kind and gentle posts of Laure's I meant were to Tufty not you.

Honsetly you are taking this far too sriously.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> I left this thread already yesterday, but Spiney asked me three times to respond to his message.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 This will go well. Just take your own advice and fuck off eh?


----------



## weepiper (Jul 22, 2013)

it was on Twitter but discussed at great length afterwards on here.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> This will go well. Just take your own advice and fuck off eh?


 
Wow what a man.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Wow what a man.


he is, acksherly


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Wow what a man.


It's clear that you've no intention of actually trying to take in both sides in this debacle, so why bother? And your teenage psychologising is fucking embarrassing. Happy people aren't angry?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> I left this thread already yesterday, but Spiney asked me three times to respond to his message.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Is she denying it then? She certainly didn't deny it at the time. She called me, and another poster, racist. For no reason other than wanting to slander us for disagreeing with her. There was a massive twitter shit storm and eventually, after legal threats, an email conversation and a phone call, she was forced to retract the accusations and apologise.

Now, just to be clear - are you calling me a liar?


----------



## weepiper (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> It's clear that you've no intention of actually trying to take in both sides in this debacle, so why bother? And your teenage psychologising is fucking embarrassing. Happy people aren't angry?


Not only that, but angry people are never right apparently


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Not only that, but angry people are never right apparently


come here and say that to my face


----------



## Remzi (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Is she denying it then? She certainly didn't deny it at the time. She called me, and another poster, racist. For no reason other than wanting to slander us for disagreeing with her. There was a massive twitter shit storm and eventually, after legal threats, an email conversation and a phone call, she was forced to retract the accusations and apologise.
> 
> Now, just to be clear - are you calling me a liar?


 
Did I?  Certainly not, but when you make a claim like that, it is for you to prove it to me.  Because fronm your insult and language I have no reason to beleve you.  So if you show me where she called you raqcist I'll beleve you, not until then.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Did I? Certainly not, but when you make a claim like that, it is for you to prove it to me. Because fronm your insult and language I have no reason to beleve you. So if you show me where she called you raqcist I'll beleve you, not until then.


 
Yes. Because obviously I would make that up.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Happy people aren't angry?


 
I said angry people aren't happy.


----------



## cesare (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Did I?  Certainly not, but when you make a claim like that, it is for you to prove it to me.  Because fronm your insult and language I have no reason to beleve you.  So if you show me where she called you raqcist I'll beleve you, not until then.


There are numerous posters that witnessed all of this. You're the one saying it didn't happen - the onus is on you to show why. To the extent that anyone gives a damn what you believe or not, anyway.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Did I? Certainly not, but when you make a claim like that, it is for you to prove it to me. Because fronm your insult and language I have no reason to beleve you. So if you show me where she called you raqcist I'll beleve you, not until then.


 
Why are you calling everyone else who saw it, people on this thread, and people on twitter - liars?


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> I said angry people aren't happy.


That's equally stupid. I've  been both angry and happy this weekend. Very angry and very happy. I guess you'll call me a liar now.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> I said angry people aren't happy.


 
No one is either simply happy or simply angry. Please don't be so simply silly.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Yes. Because obviously I would make that up.


 
OK.  But to be honest there is a lot of stuff on this thread that looks madeup.  Not just you.  Harris lust for young girls - evidence?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

wouldn't that be just his own words?


----------



## Remzi (Jul 22, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> No one is either simply happy or simply angry. Please don't be so simply silly.


 
Of course not.  But when you are angry, you can't be happy at the same time.  Maybe the next day you change your mind, that's differentr.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Of course not. But when you are angry, you can't be happy at the same time. Maybe the next day you change your mind, that's differentr.


Guess you never heard about happy slappy then? Or righteous anger?

Why am I bothering here? Fuck this.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Start here and continue reading.

And if you can't see how a prominent lefty journo telling tens of thousands of people I'm a racist might affect me in the real world I'm not sure I can help you. People know me by that nickname, they offered 'support' to my black ex partner, assuming that we'd split up because of my 'racism'. I had people asking me about it and you could tell that they didn't believe my explanation - no smoke without fire etc. It meant I had to make people in the childrens centre campaign I was involved in aware of it in case the council tried to use it against us.

So how's about you fuck off you disgusting apologist cunt?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Of course not. But when you are angry, you can't be happy at the same time.


is there something wrong with you? 
i'd maybe speak to someone about that.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Of course not. But when you are angry, you can't be happy at the same time. Maybe the next day you change your mind, that's differentr.


 
Of course you can be - you can be angry at the crude arguments made by people and the implications that follow whilst also being very happy watching a cricket game. You are not either one or the other.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK. But to be honest there is a lot of stuff on this thread that looks madeup. Not just you. Harris lust for young girls - evidence?


 
None of the evidence is hidden - it's all right here on this thread. If you can't be arsed to read it that's your problem not mine.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK. But to be honest there is a lot of stuff on this thread that looks madeup. Not just you. Harris lust for young girls - evidence?


 
What else looks made up?


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> I left this thread already yesterday, but Spiney asked me three times to respond to his message.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

She did call him a racist; just try looking a little harder. I'm sure you must realise that reading only her posts is not really a very good way to understand what has gone on; a bit like trying to construct a accurate picture from one half of a telephone conversation or reading only one contributors letters in a series of correspondence.

The fact that you can't understand how it caused any real world problems is a little worrying. I'd put it down to naivety but it could also be due to the same lack of imagination you showed with your 'envy' comment. It really isn't so hard to place yourself in somebody else's shoes; you might want to ask yourself why you are finding it so tricky.

As for your last comment; one of the best things about Urban is that people take their politics seriously (which is not the same as being humourless). Would you rather people weren't serious about their politics; perhaps they would be better to treat it as a piece of participant observation or some sort of ladder climbing game?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What else looks made up?


The names. That much even I can tell.  Pretty sure mine is made up anyway.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Start here and continue reading.
> 
> And if you can't see how a prominent lefty journo telling tens of thousands of people I'm a racist might affect me in the real world I'm not sure I can help you. People know me by that nickname, they offered 'support' to my black ex partner, assuming that we'd split up because of my 'racism'. I had people asking me about it and you could tell that they didn't believe my explanation - no smoke without fire etc. It meant I had to make people in the childrens centre campaign I was involved in aware of it in case the council tried to use it against us.
> 
> So how's about you fuck off you disgusting apologist cunt?


 
OK she called you racist.  OK you deny it.  Who do I beleve?  The one who throws bitter insultas around and swears at me?  I don't think so.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

And if you can't see why Harris' weird obsession with teenage sex causes eyebrows to be raised I'm not sure I can help you with that either.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK she called you racist. OK you deny it. Who do I beleve? The one who throws bitter insultas around and swears at me? I don't think so.


 
Maybe you could believe Laurie Penny when she apologised for publicly  calling two posters here racist? Or is she lying too?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK she called you racist. OK you deny it. Who do I beleve? The one who throws bitter insultas around and swears at me?


 
i've changed my mind. can we keep this one?
(disclaimer: i'm not leaving the house today and need distracting from running out of fags)


----------



## fractionMan (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK she called you racist. OK you deny it. Who do I beleve? The one who throws bitter insultas around and swears at me? I don't think so.


 

I'm calling you out as a peado. Deny it all you want.  I know who'd I'd trust - these things don't just happen.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK she called you racist. OK you deny it. Who do I beleve? The one who throws bitter insultas around and swears at me? I don't think so.


 
So I'm a racist as well as a liar now? 

I suppose you may have a point though - only racists swear at ignorant cunts who call them a liar.

But it seems you're the only one who believes Laurie when she says I'm a racist. Not even Laurie Penny herself believes it. Hence her retracting it.


----------



## cesare (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK she called you racist.  OK you deny it.  Who do I beleve?  The one who throws bitter insultas around and swears at me?  I don't think so.


Investigation isn't your strong point. A career in - for example - journalism, is probably contra-indicated.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Sounds perfect for a column in the new ink wirry.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK. But to be honest there is a lot of stuff on this thread that looks madeup. Not just you. Harris lust for young girls - evidence?


 
Do you mean you are disinclined to believe it (because you don't want to?) or that there is evidence that is apparent to you that makes you suspect it; if it is the latter than share the evidence? Otherwise it all comes across a bit fingers thrust firmly in ears, loudly repeating  'I can't hear you...I can't hear you)'.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## Remzi (Jul 22, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> What else looks made up?


 
Honestly, the whole thread looks absolutly odd.  800 pages????  Of attacks on one person????  There's usually something odd happening.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Honestly, the whole thread looks absolutly odd. 800 pages???? Of attacks on one person???? There's usually something odd happening.


 
It's not a thread about one person. You'd know that if you'd bothered to read it too. This might sound a bit out there, but maybe if you're going to pass judgement on this thread and those who've contributed to it then it might be worth reading the fucking thing.

There's more focus on her than anyone but then again nobody else has turned up on here, misrepresented what's being said, and then slandered two posters (both committed antiracists who've been involved in stuff for more than a decade) as racists. That kind of thing does tend to draw peoples attention I'm afraid.

Are you ready to apologise for calling me a liar and a racist yet?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Honestly, the whole thread looks absolutly odd. 800 pages???? Of attacks on one person???? There's usually something odd happening.


 
Maybe, but i asked you 'What else looks made up?'. Come on, you have to help yourself here.


----------



## cesare (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Honestly, the whole thread looks absolutly odd.  800 pages????  Of attacks on one person????  There's usually something odd happening.


It's not a thread of attacks on one person. This allegation is an easily demonstrable lie.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> So I'm a racist as well as a liar now?
> 
> I suppose you may have a point though - only racists swear at ignorant cunts who call them a liar.


 
Yes but I didn't call you one.  So then who is lying now?


----------



## fractionMan (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Yes but I didn't call you one. So then who is lying now?


 
are you 12 years old or something?


----------



## J Ed (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK she called you racist. OK you deny it. Who do I beleve? The one who throws bitter insultas around and swears at me? I don't think so.


 

This is getting too stupid, it has to be a troll


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Yes but I didn't call you one. So then who is lying now?





Remzi said:


> OK she called you racist. OK you deny it. Who do I beleve? The one who throws bitter insultas around and swears at me? I don't think so.


that seems that you're saying that SN denied he is a racist, after being accused of being one by Laurie. and that you believe his accuser's accusation, not him.
i'm really not sure how it could be interpreted differently. enlighten me Remzi x


----------



## Remzi (Jul 22, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Maybe, but i asked you 'What else looks made up?'. Come on, you have to help yourself here.


 
OK I'll tell you.  When I see something like this thread, so angry and furious for so many pages, and never giving credit to the one attackes, always hating, always raging, I always think that somone has a secret motive for it.  Sorry but that's wehat life taught me.

For an example I gave you Harris obsession with young girls.  Many here claim it, but the only evidence shown was about when he was 15 himself - a perfectly normal emoption.  Now is there more evidence or not?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> emoption.


 
i am stealing that word. it's brilliant. cheers!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Yes but I didn't call you one. So then who is lying now?


 
Fuck off - the implication in this post is clear as day:



Remzi said:


> OK she called you racist. OK you deny it. Who do I beleve? The one who throws bitter insultas around and swears at me? I don't think so.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK I'll tell you. When I see something like this thread, so angry and furious for so many pages, and never giving credit to the one attackes, always hating, always raging, I always think that somone has a secret motive for it. Sorry but that's wehat life taught me.
> 
> For an example I gave you Harris obsession with young girls. Many here claim it, but the only evidence shown was about when he was 15 himself - a perfectly normal emoption. Now is there more evidence or not?


 
have you read the thread you daft twat?


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Honestly, the whole thread looks absolutly odd. 800 pages???? Of attacks on one person???? There's usually something odd happening.


 

But the thread isn't that. If you read it you will see what it is really about, which is a big and by turns thought provoking, heartfelt, dumb, funny, dull and incisive discussion, much more centrally concerned with questions of class and representation (in at least two senses) than with individuals or publications.

If your willing to work a bit harder at it you could really get something out of it; if not you'll be dissatisfied and probably laughed at and insulted for you laziness.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## J Ed (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> For an example I gave you Harris obsession with young girls. Many here claim it, but the only evidence shown was about when he was 15 himself - a perfectly normal emoption. Now is there more evidence or not?


 

The thread has a search function that could use to avoid seeming quite so stupid


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK I'll tell you. When I see something like this thread, so angry and furious for so many pages, and never giving credit to the one attackes, always hating, always raging, I always think that somone has a secret motive for it. Sorry but that's wehat life taught me.
> 
> For an example I gave you Harris obsession with young girls. Many here claim it, but the only evidence shown was about when he was 15 himself - a perfectly normal emoption. Now is there more evidence or not?


 
Did i ask you What else looks made up? I did didn't i? Not what do you think motivates the posts, but what is made up? Can you do that? If not, then why did you say it? Why accuse people of making things up if you don't have anything to point to? Not evidence that what they say is wrong, but even of them saying anything wrong.

I'm not being funny but i think you're missing a lot of what is going on here and that this may be due to english not being your first language - is that right?


----------



## Treacle Toes (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi and LP have very similar writing styles.

Are you a 'coloumist' too Remzi?


----------



## Remzi (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Fuck off - the implication in this post is clear as day:


 
Well maybe so, if you want it.  What esle is clear as day?  That you have no manners nor any control over your language.  Maybe if you could stop insulting you would not be doubted.  But like this?  Sorry no dice.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Well maybe so, if you want it. What esle is clear as day? That you have no manners nor any control over your language. Maybe if you could stop insulting you would not be doubted. But like this? Sorry no dice.


are you going to respond to my unsweary comment, remzi?


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK she called you racist. OK you deny it. Who do I beleve? The one who throws bitter insultas around and swears at me? I don't think so.


 
So are you now accepting that LP called SN a racist? Because that is how the above reads. It also looks as though accepting that LP did make the accusation you are saying you believe it to be true; is that also right?

If it is, that is very odd since LP has since retracted; perhaps you would like to do the same and apologise?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> What esle is clear as day? That you have no manners nor any control over your language.


welcome to The Internet 
it's nice here. you'll *love* it.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Well maybe so, if you want it. What esle is clear as day? That you have no manners nor any control over your language. Maybe if you could stop insulting you would not be doubted. But like this? Sorry no dice.


 

Thank goodness that we all know that there are no polite racists that never swear, makes the world a lot less complicated!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK I'll tell you. When I see something like this thread, so angry and furious for so many pages, and never giving credit to the one attackes, always hating, always raging, I always think that somone has a secret motive for it. Sorry but that's wehat life taught me.
> 
> For an example I gave you Harris obsession with young girls. Many here claim it, but the only evidence shown was about when he was 15 himself - a perfectly normal emoption. Now is there more evidence or not?


 
The evidence is all here on this thread - read it or STFU.

And if you think nobody has given her credit for anything maybe you should take a look at the posts I quoted here, relating to her excellent piece on rape.

You obviously haven't got a clue what you're on about. I suggest you apologise for your ignorant and offensive comments (especially those implying that posters here are liars and racists) and stop digging. And if you want to criticise the thread in general you should read it.


----------



## weepiper (Jul 22, 2013)

Jeez Spiney. Just stop being so working class all the time and he/she'll believe you. There, easy.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Well maybe so, if you want it. What esle is clear as day? That you have no manners nor any control over your language. Maybe if you could stop insulting you would not be doubted. But like this? Sorry no dice.


 
I have perfect control over my manners and language thanks very much. I don't really care whether you believe me or not either (it's not about believing or disbelieving - there's simply no debate over it, the evidence is all there if you care to look - LP openly retracted the accusations, this isn't a matter of opinion - it's a matter of fact. The accusations were completely without foundation).

You call me a liar over what was, for me, a very stressful experience (I can't think of many worse things to be called than a racist - rapist or paedo maybe but that's about it) and can't even be bothered to look deep enough to find that even my accuser doesn't actually believe it.

And then you expect me to be polite?

Ok then - I'm sorry to be a pain old chap but please would you fuck off and die if it's not too much trouble. Thanks awfully.

I think it says a lot about Laurie Penny and her defenders that this is the best they can do though.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 22, 2013)

J Ed said:


> The thread has a search function that could use to avoid seeming quite so stupid


 
Ok I just seaqrched for 'Harris.'  11 pages of the most awful insults, calling him paedophile etc.  Sorry but I found NO EVİDENCE AT ALL for it.  Yes he writes about sex and porn in a very liberal tone and maybe its not tasteful, but I found NOTHİNG to support the worst charge you could make.

So if I missed it, just please post it and I'll cetainly apologıze.  But if its not there you must admit its shameful.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> OK I'll tell you. When I see something like this thread, so angry and furious for so many pages, and never giving credit to the one attackes, always hating, always raging, I always think that somone has a secret motive for it. Sorry but that's wehat life taught me.
> 
> For an example I gave you Harris obsession with young girls. Many here claim it, but the only evidence shown was about when he was 15 himself - a perfectly normal emoption. Now is there more evidence or not?


 
This is an especially idiotic post. Starts off my claiming it's all against one person (lauriepenny) but then offers criticisms of Malcolm Harris as evidence of, well, I'm not sure what. Clearly demonstrating that this thread isn't about one person.

You're really not very good at this at all you know.


----------



## cesare (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Ok I just seaqrched for 'Harris.'  11 pages of the most awful insults, calling him paedophile etc.  Sorry but I found NO EVİDENCE AT ALL for it.  Yes he writes about sex and porn in a very liberal tone and maybe its not tasteful, but I found NOTHİNG to support the worst charge you could make.
> 
> So if I missed it, just please post it and I'll cetainly *apologıze. * But if its not there you must admit its shameful.



Why the sudden swap to Turkish keyboard "i" in the middle of a sentence?


----------



## fractionMan (Jul 22, 2013)

"you made me not reply with your naughty words", beloved of idiots who can't ever admit being wrong, everywhere.

Ah, I see what it is now.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> And then you expect me to be polite?


 
No I definitely don't expect it.  I expect you to rage, swear and insult like mad, as usual.  And I was perfectly right!


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> always hating, always raging,


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Ok I just seaqrched for 'Harris.' 11 pages of the most awful insults, calling him paedophile etc. Sorry but I found NO EVİDENCE AT ALL for it. Yes he writes about sex and porn in a very liberal tone and maybe its not tasteful, but I found NOTHİNG to support the worst charge you could make.
> 
> So if I missed it, just please post it and I'll cetainly apologıze. But if its not there you must admit its shameful.


 
Like you accusing me of being a liar and a racist then.

Read the thread and then comment.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi certainly is a popular Turkish name/nick online


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> No I definitely don't expect it. I expect you to rage, swear and insult like mad, as usual. And I was perfectly right!


 
Fuck off dwyer.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 22, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Remzi certainly is a popular Turkish name/nick online


 
_The plot thickens._


----------



## Greebo (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> <snip>You're really not very good at this at all you know.


 
They're trying.

Maybe if you answered their question about any hard evidence to back up what Harris is believed to have done, Remzi might raise their game.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Jul 22, 2013)

Ah...I was just going to notice the Americanised spelling too...I see SN's radar is working just as it should


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> No I definitely don't expect it. I expect you to rage, swear and insult like mad, as usual. And I was perfectly right!


 
That's all very nice, but where is my apology? Or do you still believe Laurie Penny on this one even though even Laurie Penny doesn't?


----------



## Firky (Jul 22, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Remzi and LP have very similar writing styles.
> 
> Are you a 'coloumist' too Remzi?


 

It's Phil Dwyer.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Jul 22, 2013)

Firky said:


> It's Phil Dwyer.


 
I know...see my posts above.  Turkish Nickname, Americanised spelling, all noted!


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Greebo said:


> They're trying.
> 
> Maybe if you answered their question about any hard evidence to back up what Harris is believed to have done, Remzi might raise their game.


 
I don't know enough about him to answer that one - unlike Remzi I'm not into all this talking authoritatively about stuff I haven't got a clue about. I'm sure someone like sihhi could furnish him with the evidence he wants. Or failing that he could read the thread.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 22, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> I know...see my posts above.  Turkish Nickname, Americanised spelling, all noted!


 
There was I hoping that he'd have better sense than this, if it is him.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 22, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Remzi certainly is a popular Turkish name/nick online


 
Yes, i'ts not my real name though.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Yes, i'ts not my real name though.


 
Obviously.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> This is an especially idiotic post. Starts off my claiming it's all against one person (lauriepenny) but then offers criticisms of Malcolm Harris as evidence of, well, I'm not sure what. Clearly demonstrating that this thread isn't about one person.


 
we should petition to rename the thread "general all-purpose whinging at the lefty commentariat thread (with extra bitterness)" and let's end the confusion, because it really would be bullying if every one of the endless number of posts here was just personally attacking Laurie for shits and giggles, but it's not like that, this thread goes off on all sorts of mad tangents now.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

editor can you see if it's Phil trying to sneak back in?


----------



## Greebo (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Yes, i'ts not my real name though.


 
It'd be amazing if it were. I of course am Greebo on the electoral roll, ViolentPanda is addressed as Mr Panda on all official letters, and Rutita1 is the eldest of the Rutita triplets.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Jul 22, 2013)

Greebo said:


> It's be amazing if it were. I of course am Greebo on the electoral roll, ViolentPanda is addressed as Mr Panda on all official letters, *and Rutita1 is the eldest of the Rutita triplets.*


 
Who the hell told you and why are you broadcasting it?


----------



## seventh bullet (Jul 22, 2013)

Dwyer busted,  lol.


----------



## Remzi (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> That's all very nice, but where is my apology? Or do you still believe Laurie Penny on this one even though even Laurie Penny doesn't?


 
Sorry but why do you want an apology from a man you tell to 'fuck off?'   Maybe the apology should be yours?  Or should I _say 'siktir git salak'_ to you in return?   And I suppose that answers the questions about my English too?


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Sorry but why do you want an apology from a man you tell to 'fuck off?' Maybe the apology should be yours? Or should I _say 'siktir git salak'_ to you in return? And I suppose that answers the questions about my English too?


What are your thoughts on usury, Remzi?


----------



## Tom A (Jul 22, 2013)

Smells like Dwyer, all right.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 22, 2013)

Greebo said:


> It's be amazing if it were. I of course am Greebo on the electoral roll, ViolentPanda is addressed as Mr Panda on all official letters, and Rutita1 is the eldest of the Rutita triplets.


 

And I once had a vet who sent out appointment cards addressed to my cat, if that helps at all.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> *Sorry but why do you want an apology from a man you tell to 'fuck off?'* Maybe the apology should be yours? Or should I _say 'siktir git salak'_ to you in return? And I suppose that answers the questions about my English too?


because he deserves one.


----------



## Tom A (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Sorry but why should I issue an apology for doing something that causes a man to tell me to 'fuck off?'



Corrected


----------



## editor (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> editor can you see if it's Phil trying to sneak back in?


The man is gone, gone, gone.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

editor said:


> The man is gone, gone, gone.


PHEW!


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

Remzi said:


> Sorry but why do you want an apology from a man you tell to 'fuck off?' Maybe the apology should be yours? Or should I _say 'siktir git salak'_ to you in return? And I suppose that answers the questions about my English too?


that's not very nice, from a man who finds swearing to be proof of bad character


----------



## Tom A (Jul 22, 2013)

editor said:


> The man is gone, gone, gone.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

cheers editor for making him go, unflinchingly


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 22, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> WE ARE ALL AUTONOMOUS INDIVIDUALS ON THIS THREAD.


 
No you're not. You're owned by a cat, as I recall.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 22, 2013)

Awesome


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> No you're not. You're owned by a cat, as I recall.


busted, outed, and unashamed 

although your files are wrong. i'm owned by two cats. although one of them is a temporary autonomous cat until she gets rehomed properly instead of just fostered by me. so i suppose i can forgive this particular .. editorial oversight. lack of editorial vigilance


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 22, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> busted, outed, and unashamed
> 
> although your files are wrong. i'm owned by two cats. although one of them is a temporary autonomous cat until she gets rehomed properly instead of just fostered by me. so i suppose i can forgive this particular .. editorial oversight.


 

Whereas the entire species regards me as their communal property. I'm thinking of arranging a share issue.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 22, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> Tufty, I have tried to engage with kindness and solidarity and you've responded with hate. I just don't understand how you can have so little empthy. I'm finding your behavior deeply triggering. I hope you don't do this to anyone else.


 
wowzers.  you sick fucker.  turning it around to make it about you.  yuk yuk yuk.


----------



## fractionMan (Jul 22, 2013)

Narcissists piss me off.  And anyone who utters the word "triggering" is a bloody tool.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> Narcissists piss me off. And anyone who utters the word "triggering" is a bloody tool.


sorry


----------



## fractionMan (Jul 22, 2013)




----------



## rekil (Jul 22, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> we should petition to rename the thread "general all-purpose whinging at the lefty commentariat thread (with extra bitterness)" and let's end the confusion, because it really would be bullying if every one of the endless number of posts here was just personally attacking Laurie for shits and giggles, but it's not like that, this thread goes off on all sorts of mad tangents now.


 
As long as "granny tattoos" gets to be in the title I don't give a shit what the thread is called.


----------



## Firky (Jul 22, 2013)

.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

Firky said:


> Stavvers uses a lot of trigger warnings. I think it probably can be useful for some people... not really sure what to make of it.
> 
> Over used I reckon.


there's a relevant time and place for them. especially if you know what your target audience's triggerysubjects/odd things are. imo.
they can be overused, but equally, they can be used well and wisely.


----------



## Balbi (Jul 22, 2013)

Still going chaps? Jolly good.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 22, 2013)

this thread will never die


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> this thread will never die


seeing as how it's been popping up in my dreams a few times  i think it might be a Draugr


----------



## Balbi (Jul 22, 2013)

Every two months Laurie resurrects like a shit Jesus who nobody could even be bothered to betray.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 22, 2013)

my subs my subs, why have they forsaken me


----------



## Firky (Jul 22, 2013)

Balbi said:


> nobody could even be bothered to betray.


----------



## Tom A (Jul 22, 2013)

How about coining the term "Pennista" for all those who follow in the footsteps of our beloved Miss Ms. (money) Penny?


----------



## Dan U (Jul 22, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm getting nowhere with this. You're probably decent people individually, but together you behave like a pack of playground bullies, and your lack of empathy is shocking. I've tried in good faith to engage; you'd be hard-pressed to find another columnist who would- and I regret ever doing so.


 

*coughs* jayrayner *coughs*


----------



## Balbi (Jul 22, 2013)

Tom A said:


> How about coining the term "Pennista" for all those who follow in the footsteps of our beloved Miss Ms. (money) Penny?


 

To be shortened to Penis for brevity in common usage.

"Oh, yes - he's a right Penis he is"


----------



## Tom A (Jul 22, 2013)

Balbi said:


> "Oh, yes - he's a right *Pennis* he is"


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 22, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Every two months Laurie resurrects like a shit Jesus who nobody could even be bothered to betray.


 

A bit like an Immortal from Highlander, only possibly a more viable candidate for summary decapitation.


----------



## rekil (Jul 22, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> I'm getting nowhere with this. You're probably decent people individually, but together you behave like a pack of playground bullies, and your lack of empathy is shocking. I've tried in good faith to engage; you'd be hard-pressed to find another columnist who would- and I regret ever doing so.





Dan U said:


> *coughs* jayrayner *coughs*


How many columnists is Paddick worth?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/1866274.stm

It's moronic anyway. There are journalists, writers, authors and all sorts on here. One was nearly killed in Genoa. I remember that Naomi Klein liked to 'engage' back in the day, and still does afaik. Funny how she manages it without being a total dick eh? (awaits torrent of Klein is dick anecdotes). Apart from that, journos have always been trying to wheedle their way into' groups for one reason or another, whether it's for hatchet jobs or the gloriously naked careerism of the likes of Laurie.

As for the interesting playground bullies comment. My local primary and secondary schools don't even _have_ playgrounds. Prefab classrooms have been plonked on them due to overcrowding. Check your gigantic posh school privilege Laurie.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> Narcissists piss me off. And anyone who utters the word "triggering" is a bloody tool.


Why's triggering bad language?


----------



## Greebo (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Why's triggering bad language?


 
Because it's pleading victimhood?


----------



## fractionMan (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Why's triggering bad language?


 

It's a pretentious word that's only used by pretentious people. I'd never heard of it before this thread. It's a word that's used to shut down debate and reminds me of people sticking their fingers in their ears. It's taking offence lite. "I'm finding your behavior deeply triggering."  I don't like what you're saying so I'm not going to listen to it.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 22, 2013)

copliker said:


> How many columnists is Paddick worth?
> 
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/1866274.stm
> 
> ...


 
You think maybe we could get that Camila Vallejo on the boards?


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Because it's pleading victimhood?


Even if you are one? I've heard plenty of people use the word in completely reasonable contexts, such as "this text contains triggers for x, y and z". How's that pleading victimhood? If you ARE in fact a victim of say for instance rape?


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> It's a pretentious word that's only used by pretentious people. I'd never heard of it before this thread. It's a word that's used to shut down debate.


Sorry, but that's a bit of a thin excuse. It might well be more of an Americanism, but unlike for instance "intersectionalism" it has an immediately obvious and clear meaning, no jargonistas need apply. And IME it's no more used to shut down debate than the words "class" or "capitalism".


----------



## fractionMan (Jul 22, 2013)

What's the purpose?  To flag things with the things they contain?


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> What's the purpose? To flag things with the things they contain?


Yup.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Even if you are one? I've heard plenty of people use the word in completely reasonable contexts, such as "this text contains triggers for x, y and z". How's that pleading victimhood? If you ARE in fact a victim of say for instance rape?


 
What if I am in fact a victim of being buried under a heap of buttons or having been stung badly by a wasp?  

If you take this apparently fine idea to its logical conclusion, anything and everything should carry a trigger warning, just to be on the safe side.


----------



## fractionMan (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Yup.


 

Maybe I'm missing the context of that penny quote.

Perhaps she found the content of what she read truly traumatising.  It's from "trauma trigger", right?


----------



## Favelado (Jul 22, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> this thread will never die


 
They said that about hardcore though.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

Greebo said:


> What if I am in fact a victim of being buried under a heap of buttons or having been stung badly by a wasp?
> 
> If you take this apparently fine idea to its logical conclusion, anything and everything should carry a trigger warning, just to be on the safe side.


Of course there's the danger of abusing the concept. Doesn't make it a bad concept. Is _racism_ a bad word because people misuse it?


fractionMan said:


> Maybe I'm missing the context of that penny quote.
> 
> Perhaps she found the content of what she read truly traumatising. It's from "trauma trigger", right?


I'm not sure where the term first became popularised. Either way, it's a bit too easy to sit here and say "no, you can't use the word "triggering" because that's you pleading victimhood."


----------



## fractionMan (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Of course there's the danger of abusing the concept. Doesn't make it a bad concept. Is _racism_ a bad word because people misuse it?
> 
> I'm not sure where the term first became popularised. Either way, it's a bit too easy to sit here and say "no, you can't use the word "triggering" because that's you pleading victimhood."


 

Being traumatised is not the same as being offended, shocked, repulsed, angry, annoyed or finding something disagreeable/distasteful and people should be careful about overusing the word.  

I'd argue that instead of triggering, she should have used traumatising, if that's what she meant.  Everyone knows what that means, no lingo involved.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> Being traumatised is not the same as being offended, shocked, repulsed, angry, annoyed or finding something disagreeable/distasteful and people should be careful about overusing the word.
> 
> I'd argue that instead of triggering, she should have used traumatising, if that's what she meant. Everyone knows what that means, no lingo involved.


I think we're in danger of mansplaining here.


----------



## fractionMan (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> I think we're in danger of mansplaining here.


 

perhaps we should flag the thread with it.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> perhaps we should flag the thread with it.


_*Laurie Penny and her ilk, mansplained!*_


----------



## cesare (Jul 22, 2013)

They could just say "warning" and be done with it. Warning: contains descriptions of rape and violence. That's simple enough.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> Being traumatised is not the same as being offended, shocked, repulsed, angry, annoyed or finding something disagreeable/distasteful and people should be careful about overusing the word.
> 
> I'd argue that instead of triggering, she should have used traumatising, if that's what she meant. Everyone knows what that means, no lingo involved.


If I may go back to this - being traumatised might well include being " offended, shocked, repulsed, angry, annoyed or finding something disagreeable/distasteful".... I don't see how one can create a clear distinction between being traumatised and being any of the above. If you do think that I think you need to explain it a bit more in detail to me.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

cesare said:


> They could just say "warning" and be done with it. Warning: contains descriptions of rape and violence. That's simple enough.


Sure, but.... Trigger words - is that really so hard to get? I mean, I've seen that used for years, so it could be that I'm the odd one out.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

(Somebody had to do it, may as well be me!)


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Even if you are one? I've heard plenty of people use the word in completely reasonable contexts, such as "this text contains triggers for x, y and z". How's that pleading victimhood? If you ARE in fact a victim of say for instance rape?


this. 
i agree with greebo's waspvictim extension as well. but at the same time - particularly in terms of physical/sexual trauma - i am quite glad the term exists and is used in *some* contexts. 
giving a name to something is getting power over it. saying something is 'triggering' rather than 'this is sending my brain on a one-way trip to loopyville when i encounter it, and i might go a bit fucking off on one at you as a result. even if you don't understand the reasons why, or get the logic' is more compact, and a little bit more helpful..
and it's a bit late to rename it now, innit?


----------



## cesare (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Sure, but.... Trigger words - is that really so hard to get? I mean, I've seen that used for years, so it could be that I'm the odd one out.


I don't think it's hard to get. TV etc have been using these warnings for a lot longer than "trigger warning" or "TW" became popular.


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## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

cesare said:


> They could just say "warning" and be done with it. Warning: contains descriptions of rape and violence. That's simple enough.


actually, this. this is pretty much perfect - no jargon, no eggshells, just a straight statement.
thanks, cesare.

the other thing i've found, on the other side of trigger warnings being positive, is that they can be triggers themselves. triggery triggering triggered times recently


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## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

In the context it was used here, though, deeply triggering meant 'what you are saying makes me look bad and the only way I know of dealing with criticism is to smear my critics and play the victim so I'm going to use lingo that was meant to protect people - for example rape victims - to prevent people criticizing me, in the process silencing a... oh...'


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## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> In the context it was used here, though, deeply triggering meant 'what you are saying makes me look bad and the only way I know of dealing with criticism is to smear my critics and play the victim so I'm going to use lingo that was meant to protect people - for example rape victims - to prevent people criticizing me, in the process silencing a... oh...'


i dunno. in the context of my experiences, LP's experiences, and this


tufty79 said:


> saying something is 'triggering' rather than 'this is sending my brain on a one-way trip to loopyville when i encounter it, and i might go a bit fucking off on one at you as a result. even if you don't understand the reasons why, or get the logic'


i am more than prepared to believe that she was genuinely upset.

i went mental at somone t'other week for playing jive bunny, ffs. because it's one of my more wtf (to the outside world) portals to being in the same brainspace as my brother 

traumabrain: like a free tardis. except someone else has the keys, and you don't know which particular horror you're going to go back to at any given time.


----------



## caleb (Jul 22, 2013)

copliker said:


> How many columnists is Paddick worth?
> 
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/1866274.stm
> 
> It's moronic anyway. There are journalists, writers, authors and all sorts on here. I remember that Naomi Klein liked to 'engage' back in the day, and still does afaik. Funny how she manages it without being a total dick eh? (awaits torrent of Klein is dick anecdotes). Apart from that, journos have always been trying to wheedle their way into' groups for one reason or another, whether it's for hatchet jobs or the gloriously naked careerism of the likes of Laurie.


 
I think it's more than trying to wheedle their way into groups or whatever. I have no doubt there are journalists with radical politics for whom 'radicalism' isn't part of their job. It's the opposite for Penny, who is paid to be a 'radical'.


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## frogwoman (Jul 22, 2013)

yeh and also the warning lets you imagine the content (or whatever) might be worse than it is.


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## cesare (Jul 22, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> actually, this. this is pretty much perfect - no jargon, no eggshells, just a straight statement.
> thanks, cesare.
> 
> the other thing i've found, on the other side of trigger warnings being positive, is that they can be triggers themselves. triggery triggering triggered times recently


I find if you see "trigger" everywhere it can feel as if the TWs are crowding in on you.


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## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> In the context it was used here, though, deeply triggering meant 'what you are saying makes me look bad and the only way I know of dealing with criticism is to smear my critics and play the victim so I'm going to use lingo that was meant to protect people - for example rape victims - to prevent people criticizing me, in the process silencing a... oh...'


I'm not disagreeing with that, but I think it's unfair to generalise from LP's usage to wider usage, is all. Anyway, sidetrack, I'm out for a fag. (No triggering intended. Or sniggering.)


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## frogwoman (Jul 22, 2013)

trigger warning: smoking


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## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yeh and also the warning lets you imagine the content (or whatever) might be worse than it is.


and *nothing* can be worse than imagined content. srsly. why d'you think i/other people argue on here and then fuck off and refuse to log back in for a bit


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## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> and *nothing* can be worse than imagined content. srsly. why d'you think i/other people argue on here and then fuck off and refuse to log back in for a bit


We all have lives to lead?  RIGHT. FAGS.


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## frogwoman (Jul 22, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> and *nothing* can be worse than imagined content. srsly. why d'you think i/other people argue on here and then fuck off and refuse to log back in for a bit


 
seriously, i do the same myself. i don't log in or look at threads i've called someone a cunt or whatever on because i don't want to know what people have said about/to me


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## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> We all have lives to lead?


how dare you


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## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i dunno. in the context of my experiences, LP's experiences, and this
> 
> i am more than prepared to believe that she was genuinely upset.
> 
> ...


 
I'm willing to believe she was upset too, but my experiences with Ms Penny lead me to suspect that the reason _why _she found it upsetting had more to do with it making her look bad - and, to credit her with some humanity, making her feel guilty - than any kind of deep-seated trauma. Certainly how it appeared if you look at the preceding posts and it's in line with her previous behaviour, which is all we really have to go on.


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## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> how dare you


I'm more afraid of the OH than I am of you lot?


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## frogwoman (Jul 22, 2013)

sometimes i do have to step away from the thread though, not because of trauma but because i can get really fucking angry about some things and just think about it for hours and what a cunt so and so is.

with ocd/anxiety stuff, i've got a lot better at "facing it" over the years.


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## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

I do think trigger warnings can have a place though. I once relapsed on an addiction because of something I saw on the telly that reminded me of the euphoria of drug use. If there'd been some kind of warning on there I probably wouldn't have watched it. Something else might have 'triggered' that relapse later on but I probably wouldn't have done it that day. I do think, as cesare said if I understood her properly, that rather than the fairly generic label 'triggering' more specific words to identify the type of 'trigger' would be more appropriate and it wouldn't be so open to abuse IMO


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## Tom A (Jul 22, 2013)

cesare said:


> They could just say "warning" and be done with it. Warning: contains descriptions of rape and violence. That's simple enough.


 
That predates the internet by some way, on TV programmes you have had a voice-over announce that "viewers may find the content of this programme/news piece disturbing/upsetting" for years.


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## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> I'm not disagreeing with that, but I think it's unfair to generalise from LP's usage to wider usage, is all. Anyway, sidetrack, I'm out for a fag. (No triggering intended. Or sniggering.)


 
I found that comment deeply triggering. I haven't touched a cigarette for a week but you've just re-triggered my nicotine addiction and I'm off out to smoke 40 Marlboro and some fuck off cigars. And it's all your fault for not giving a trigger warning


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## Firky (Jul 22, 2013)

Have a quick search of stavver's use of trigger warnings, sometimes it is understandable and at other times it's almost hyperbolic but mostly just surplus:



> Another Angry Woman
> ‏@stavvers
> #acab *Trigger warning*.RT @TransMediaWatch The London police have been accused of transphobia during a brutal arrest *LINK*


 
I mean really?


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## Tom A (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> (Somebody had to do it, may as well be me!)


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## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

frogwoman had some really interesting stuff to say about trigger warnings and mental health in a blog post she did a bit back. Do you mind if I link to that froggy?


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## frogwoman (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I do think trigger warnings can have a place though. I once relapsed on an addiction because of something I saw on the telly that reminded me of the euphoria of drug use. If there'd been some kind of warning on there I probably wouldn't have watched it. Something else might have 'triggered' that relapse later on but I probably wouldn't have done it that day. I do think, as cesare said if I understood her properly, that rather than the fairly generic label 'triggering' more specific words to identify the type of 'trigger' would be more appropriate and it wouldn't be so open to abuse IMO


 
yep defo.

All sorts of things can remind you of a thing I think which is why in some ways it's a bit inadequate. certain sounds, settings which are completely innocuous to everyone else might remind you of the scene of the trauma or the addiction or anything else.


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## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I found that comment deeply triggering. I haven't touched a cigarette for a week but you've just re-triggered my nicotine addiction and I'm off out to smoke 40 Marlboro and some fuck off cigars. And it's all your fault for not giving a trigger warning


I'm ever so sorry.


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## frogwoman (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> frogwoman had some really interesting stuff to say about trigger warnings and mental health in a blog post she did a bit back. Do you mind if I link to that froggy?


 
No not at all  I was mostly talking about anxiety related triggers but it probably applies to other stuff too.


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## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> No not at all  I was mostly talking about anxiety related triggers but it probably applies to other stuff too.


 
Here it is


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## cesare (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I do think trigger warnings can have a place though. I once relapsed on an addiction because of something I saw on the telly that reminded me of the euphoria of drug use. If there'd been some kind of warning on there I probably wouldn't have watched it. Something else might have 'triggered' that relapse later on but I probably wouldn't have done it that day. I do think, as cesare said if I understood her properly, that rather than the fairly generic label 'triggering' more specific words to identify the type of 'trigger' would be more appropriate and it wouldn't be so open to abuse IMO


Yes, I think if you're about to read/watch something that contains something that someone might react badly to, it's a good idea for the broadcaster/blogger/poster/writer to preface what they're saying with some kind of description/words. Overuse ends up with warnings being ignored, or feeling beset by warnings though. "Contains flashing imagery" "contains graphic descriptions of [whatever]" etc can be helpful if it's out of the ordinary content or something unexpected. It's a judgment call though because people's susceptibilities are so varied in type and strength and current frame of mind.


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## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Firky said:


> Have a quick search of stavver's use of trigger warnings, sometimes it is understandable and at other times it's almost hyperbolic but mostly just surplus:
> 
> 
> 
> I mean really?


 
How does that actually help? In order to know what kind of trigger it is you would need to read the thing anyway, so the triggering has been done. Unless of course all, for want of a better term, traumatised people are grouped in the same 'identity' and it's assumed best that they avoid stuff that could be a trigger for any kind of trauma. Which seems daft and a bit dodgy IMO


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## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> How does that actually help? In order to know what kind of trigger it is you would need to read the thing anyway, so the triggering has been done. Unless of course all, for want of a better term, traumatised people are grouped in the same 'identity' and it's assumed best that they avoid stuff that could be a trigger for any kind of trauma. Which seems daft and a bit dodgy IMO


not necessarily.
(edit in cos my phone interwebs wonked out)
i'd rather read something saying 'contains depiction/description of rape' than get halfway through the film/article and realise it's a really bad idea to watch/read it. 
i really wish someone had warned me that david tennant was going to get all rapey in 'the politicians husband' the other month. led to a right meltdown, that did.

i'm reading your post to mean that trigger warnings (or 'content warnings' - i've seen that used and have perferred it) trigger (whether they're worded as 'trigger' or not) and so should be avoided - sorry if i've got that arse about tit.


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## rekil (Jul 22, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> You think maybe we could get that Camila Vallejo on the boards?


 
She doesn't speak English so all her posts would be in forrin  but I'm in touch with a couple of people over there so you never know.

Meanwhile why not compare this 17 year old's speaking skillz with LP's shit bluffing and obsequious oxford union hat waffle. Not just the content (thanks to Riklet for help, general gist for non-forrin speakers here) but the tone, sense of commitment and general unfuckablewithness.


Spoiler


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## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> not necessarily.
> (edit in cos my phone interwebs wonked out)
> i'd rather read something saying 'contains depiction/description of rape' than get halfway through the film/article and realise it's a really bad idea to watch/read it.
> i really wish someone had warned me that david tennant was going to get all rapey in 'the politicians husband' the other month. led to a right meltdown, that did.
> ...


 
I was really just talking about that particular one that firky quoted - I think flagging up stuff that could prove traumatic for some people is generally a good idea. Just think like a lot of good ideas some people seem to be taking it to absurd extremes.


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## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

got ya - cheers for clarifying


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## The Pale King (Jul 22, 2013)

Tom A said:


> How about coining the term "Pennista" for all those who follow in the footsteps of our beloved Miss Ms. (money) Penny?


 
Or Pennite?


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## Tom A (Jul 22, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> Or Pennite?


 
That would work. But any word that ends in "-ista" gives you instant revolutionary cool... supposedly.


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## The Pale King (Jul 22, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> There have been a couple of points which are, if not legitimate criticism, then at least points that it's valid for me to address and think about. Being committed to intersectionality means I do have to think about how my background might affect what I write, for example. The thing is, I knew all that already, and if I want honest unbiased critique, I look for it elsewhere.
> 
> I don't expect to find useful critique on this thread because it's simply full of lies, distortions and people determined to think the worst of me- just as I wouldn't ask my most ardent fans to offer me vital critique on a piece, because I know they'd be biased.
> 
> Tufty, how you expect to change my mind whilst calling me things like an 'exploitative lying shit' is beyond me. If you actually want me to pay attention to you, treat me like a human being and don't start with baseless insults.


 
So, to recap. On this thread (which has amassed a fair bit of wisdom I reckon) there are 'a couple' of points that are not legitimate criticism, but 'valid points to address', but Laurie Penny knows all that stuff already and there are 'unbiased' people  whom she will talk to about those. She gives one of hundreds of examples and swiftly dismisses it.

I've noticed that these days no-one seems to want to really argue issues, but rather attack the standing of the person making the argument. You see nothing else at PMQs and it's the standard comment page mode of argumentation. We can't critique Laurie penny because we're 'biased' against her, or we are racists/sexists/soi-distant radical trolls/delete as applicable/keep going until you make one stick - so we simply have no right to question her work. Maybe someone in the broadsheet comment community has sufficient standing  to question her, I don't know. She clearly sees herself as part of that milieu and us as 'biased' outsiders. Besides, she says she means well, and it's good intentions that count, so why can't we just be grateful?


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## The Pale King (Jul 22, 2013)

Tom A said:


> That would work. But any word that ends in "-ista" gives you instant revolutionary cool... supposedly.


 
True - Pennite is too retro. They won't get it in Williamsburg


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## rekil (Jul 22, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Every two months Laurie resurrects like a shit Jesus who nobody could even be bothered to betray.


 
From the graaaave.







(sorry bout size, text should bigger but fuckit, that painting just overwhelms me)


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## ViolentPanda (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Even if you are one? I've heard plenty of people use the word in completely reasonable contexts, such as "this text contains triggers for x, y and z". How's that pleading victimhood? If you ARE in fact a victim of say for instance rape?


 
She hasn't said it is, she's asked whether it could be.
And that's a fair question. We have little idea, even with reference to a single trauma such as rape, of the actual degree of psychic trauma undergone across a range of survivors as well as how they handle/process it over time. It may be possible to *posit* that for *some* rape survivors, their susceptibility to triggers is low, and that there's "room" for some to claim triggering as a way of avoiding further interlocution and/or validating their own survivor-status.

I'm not, by the way, claiming that this is what has happened here, I'm merely advancing the possibility of such behaviour.


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## ViolentPanda (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Sure, but.... Trigger words - is that really so hard to get? I mean, I've seen that used for years, so it could be that I'm the odd one out.


 

Personally, the written word has never "triggered" memories of my own traumas. It's always been sounds and smells, which fortunately aren't that prevalent on bulletin boards.


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## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> She hasn't said it is, she's asked whether it could be.
> And that's a fair question. We have little idea, even with reference to a single trauma such as rape, of the actual degree of psychic trauma undergone across a range of survivors as well as how they handle/process it over time. It may be possible to *posit* that for *some* rape survivors, their susceptibility to triggers is low, and that there's "room" for some to claim triggering as a way of avoiding further interlocution and/or validating their own survivor-status.
> 
> I'm not, by the way, claiming that this is what has happened here, I'm merely advancing the possibility of such behaviour.


All I'm saying is it's better to err on the side of caution and assume that if someone says "these words cause me to have a bad time because I was raped/beaten/x/y/z" then that's what they're actually experiencing.


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## grit (Jul 22, 2013)

Louis MacNeice said:


> or don't you?
> 
> Cheers - Louis MacNeice


 

I don't on a forum such as urban, not due to the posters, but the topic. In this domain there is no correct answer just people spouting their opinion and on occasion linking to articles that share their same bias/view/whatever.

However I take a very different attitude to the engineering/technology forums I post in.


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## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

There is a difference between informed opinion and the kind of crap you tend to post though.


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## grit (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> There is a difference between informed opinion and the kind of crap you tend to post though.


 

There isint that's the whole point! 

I can technically have an "informed opinion" that you would still disagree with. You really can't grasp this simple concept can you.


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## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

grit said:


> There isint that's the whole point!
> 
> I can technically have an "informed opinion" that you would still disagree with. You really can't grasp this simple concept can you.


In fairness there's loads of room for subjectivity, bias, bullshit and bunfights on tech/sci issues too. Witness the many Apple/Google/MS/etc buns etc etc, not to mention the epic "plane takes off" thread.

So, in short, I think you're a bit off here.


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## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

grit said:


> There isint that's the whole point!
> 
> I can technically have an "informed opinion" that you would still disagree with. You really can't grasp this simple concept can you.


 
You could have an informed opinion and I may well disagree with it, also from an informed standpoint. That much is certainly true. This is because different peoples politics are based on different values and different ways of viewing the world (ontologies and that if you want to be a smart arse).

But you don't tend to have informed opinions, not on social or political questions anyway, and so you can be dismissed as just plain wrong rather than it being a simple disagreement surrounding two equally credible opinions.

You still can't grasp this simple concept can you?


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## grit (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> In fairness there's loads of room for subjectivity, bias, bullshit and bunfights on tech/sci issues too. Witness the many Apple/Google/MS/etc buns etc etc, not to mention the epic "plane takes off" thread.
> 
> So, in short, I think you're a bit off here.


 
Not really, in software engineering someone can state a view that can be tested and proven. So it is quite different.

I'm not referring to shit like "iPhone is better than Android". Im talking about things you can apply scientific rigor to


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## grit (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> You could have an informed opinion and I may well disagree with it, also from an informed standpoint. That much is certainly true. This is because different peoples politics are based on different values and different ways of viewing the world (ontologies and that if you want to be a smart arse).
> 
> But you don't tend to have informed opinions, not on social or political questions anyway, and so you can be dismissed as just plain wrong rather than it being a simple disagreement surrounding two equally credible opinions.
> 
> You still can't grasp this simple concept can you?


 
Whoosh.


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## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

grit said:


> Not really, in software engineering someone can state a view that can be tested and proven. So it is quite different.
> 
> I'm not referring to shit like "iPhone is better than Android". Im talking about things you can apply scientific rigor to


I got that, what I'm saying is that "scientific rigor" isn't as rigorous as all that. Otherwise we'd have known everything 150 years ago.


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## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

grit said:


> Whoosh.


 
Yes, clearly I'm the one not 'getting it'

It's never possible to say a political statement or whatever is definitely right but what you appear to be missing is that it most definitely _is _possible to say that some political statements are definitely wrong.

Which isn't actually all that different from the physical sciences - theories etc can be disproven but never proven, and at the edges there are differences of informed opinion. A difference between two informed opinions might be likened to debates between string theory and the standard model. Differences of opinion between you and someone who's got a clue what they're on about are more like those between young earth creationists and actual geologists on the age of the earth or the universe.


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## frogwoman (Jul 22, 2013)

Is there any chance that a mod could change the title of the thread so that we don't get people asking "why is this thread all about one person" all the time? FridgeMagnet?


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## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Is there any chance that a mod could change the title of the thread so that we don't get people asking "why is this thread all about one person" all the time? FridgeMagnet?


What's your new title suggestion?


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## Belushi (Jul 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Is there any chance that a mod could change the title of the thread so that we don't get people asking "why is this thread all about one person" all the time? FridgeMagnet?


 
Seconded.


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## smokedout (Jul 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Is there any chance that a mod could change the title of the thread so that we don't get people asking "why is this thread all about one person" all the time? FridgeMagnet?


 
lets call it the Alex Callinicos thread, then he'll have to wade though almost 800 pages before realising it hardly mentions him at all


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## frogwoman (Jul 22, 2013)

Something like "liberal commentariat wankers and posers" (was originally Alex Callinicos/Laurie Penny facebook handbags)

thats not my title suggestion btw.


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## Belushi (Jul 22, 2013)

TruXta said:


> What's your new title suggestion?


 
The Commentariat: First up against the wall


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## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Something like "liberal commentariat wankers and posers" (was originally Alex Callinicos/Laurie Penny facebook handbags)


I think you need a colon there after "commentariat". Else, yup, all correct.


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## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

Belushi said:


> The Commentariat: First up against the wall


Needs to be _The Commentariat: First up against the 4th wall_


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## Buckaroo (Jul 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Something like "liberal commentariat wankers and posers" (was originally Alex Callinicos/Laurie Penny facebook handbags)
> 
> thats not my title suggestion btw.


 
How about 'The artist formerly known as Dave'?


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## grit (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> It's never possible to say a political statement or whatever is definitely right but what you appear to be missing is that it most definitely _is _possible to say that some political statements are definitely wrong.


 
Can you provide an example please? (honest request)


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

grit said:


> Can you provide an example please? (honest request)


 
From you or more generally? (Not really got time to go through your posts to look for one but I could give an example of an opinion on a political or social issue that is demonstrably false.

For example, people who claim that the protocols are a legitimate historical document and that all revolutions since were orchestrated by Jewish elites are demonstrably wrong, and viewed by anyone serious in the same way as flat earthers are viewed by the scientific community. Same with those who think we're ruled by lizard overlords (Extreme examples I know but they illustrate my point I think).

There are even ones held by some supposedly serious people that can be proven false - for example Hayek's and Thomas Friedman's arguments that capitalism is natural and developed organically and peacefully through a series of mutually beneficial exchanges - we can prove that this is completely untrue as well.

Peoples political views and opinions are always based on truth claims about how the world is now. Some of these truth claims are open to debate - the role played by class, race, gender for example - but others are not. Most serious people agree on these latter kinds of truth claims - and those who base their views on a view of the world that gets this latter kind of truth claim wrong are demonstrably wrong.


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## grit (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> There are even ones held by some supposedly serious people that can be proven false - for example Hayek's and Thomas Friedman's arguments that capitalism is natural and developed organically and peacefully through a series of mutually beneficial exchanges - we can *prove* that this is completely untrue as well.


 
Oh, you have my interest with that one, got a link?

edit: bold mine.


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## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

Not really got time to go looking for links, but you're Irish aren't you? I assume you know how the British empire imposed capitalism on that country? Similar things were done around the world too. The ethnic cleansing of the native American population to allow people to take their lands into private ownership etc. In England the enclosures acts and the raft of legislation outloawing begging and vagrancy that went with it - you may argue that despite all this the change was still desirable, but unless you want to be branded a historical illiterate you can't pretend it was peaceful.


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## love detective (Jul 22, 2013)

_And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire_


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## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

love detective said:


> _And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire_


 
I had that exact quote in mind as I was typing that


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## grit (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Not really got time to go looking for links, but you're Irish aren't you? I assume you know how the British empire imposed capitalism on that country? Similar things were done around the world too. The ethnic cleansing of the native American population to allow people to take their lands into private ownership etc. In England the enclosures acts and the raft of legislation outloawing begging and vagrancy that went with it - you may argue that despite all this the change was still desirable, but unless you want to be branded a historical illiterate you can't pretend it was peaceful.


 
While its getting closer, its ultimately just your interpretation of someone elses secondary source. 

History is written by the winners.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 22, 2013)

Well done grits, you just said that marx won.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 22, 2013)

grit said:


> While its getting closer, its ultimately just your interpretation of someone elses secondary source.
> 
> History is written by the winners.


 

Is there an interpretation of the enclosures acts of it being a peaceful change? I would be very interested in that, although in the same way as I'm interested in things like Zeitgeist...


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 22, 2013)

or even the irish famine that caused the diaspora


----------



## grit (Jul 22, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Well done grits, you just said that marx won.


 

Win what?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 22, 2013)

History. Can you not remember what you only just posted?


----------



## grit (Jul 22, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> History. Can you not remember what you only just posted?


 

lol, you are hilarious butchers *wipes year from eye*


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

You know the thing I was saying about informed vs ill-informed opinions grit? I think you just helped me prove that point.

This commonly accepted (among those who take the subject seriously) version of history actually goes against the interests of those who 'won' and in fact backs up Marx's account of primitive accumulation hence butchers saying that you're claiming Marx won history.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 22, 2013)

grit said:


> While its getting closer, its ultimately just your interpretation of someone elses secondary source.
> 
> History is written by the winners.


 
And just to come back to this, it isn't my interpretation of someone else's secondary source. The legislation was well documented at the time (as legislation sort of has to be) so we can go back to the primary sources for this one - no need to rely on possibly biased accounts.


----------



## eoin_k (Jul 22, 2013)

But how do we really know that the Highland Clearances really happened?  I mean were any of you actually there?  I don't think so.  So perhaps Grits ill informed ramblings are... you know... as valid as anyone else's "opinions".


----------



## grit (Jul 22, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> This commonly accepted (among those who take the subject seriously)


 

How privileged we all are to have you to make such judgments for us. Thomas Friedman has nothing on you.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 22, 2013)

of course some opinions are wrong and demonstratably so.

nazism for example is a political opinion but the assumptions it is based on are completely flawed. analysis from the far-right about why they are/aren't doing well electorally and where for example Golden Dawn or whatever is heading is sometimes worth reading but the worldview of the committed neo-nazi is based on facts and arguments that are demonstratably false. likewise any political viewpoint based on a political/religious agenda where the claims are that the economy etc or inequality caused by class or whatever is not the biggest problem but the biggest problem is the "decline in moral values caused by secularism" and that it would solve everyone's problems if everyone just turned to god.

the same with toryism and lib-demmery. their worldviews make some assumptions that are demonstratably false and are easily disproved, although not as extreme as the above two examples.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> it would solve everyone's problems if everyone just turned to god.


i'm considering quakerism, tbh - how bad can they be?


----------



## TruXta (Jul 22, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i'm considering quakerism, tbh - how bad can they be?


Not very. Mostly harmless I'd say.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 22, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i'm considering quakerism, tbh - how bad can they be?


 
Well fuck yeah I mean I am not always exactly an atheist myself but if you base your political views on a religious agenda I don't think any good can come of it.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Well fuck yeah I mean I am not always exactly an atheist myself but *if you base your political views on a religious agenda* I don't think any good can come of it.


i dunno, a fair few of 'em seem to be peace-loving anti-nuclear folk 

e2a:
http://socialistunity.com/farewell-oliver-postgate/



> Oliver Postgate was certainly not interested in military derring do. He had been a conscientious objector in the second world war, influenced by personal eccentricity and having met anarchists at art college. In his 1999 autobiography “Seeing Things” he describes how the Army was totally unprepared for conscientious objection. When conscripted he reported for duty, one day late, as advised by Quakers, and declared that he would not be prepared to serve. Quite amusingly this was regarded by the army as an administrative inconvenience rather than a political challenge. He was treated politely and humanely, and after three months in prison was released with no further obligations. This left him with the difficult job of fitting into a militarised society as a civilian, which he did by becoming an agricultural worker and part time inventor.
> 
> ...Postgate was not really an overtly political man, but he came from the left intelligentsia. His father, Raymond Postgate, had been one of the most significant intellectuals to join the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain, and Oliver’s uncle was the theorist of guild socialism GDH Cole. His mother, Daisy Lansbury, was the daughter of George Lansbury, although I am unaware of Daisy having been active in politics herself.
> Oliver Postgate’s only significant foray into political activism was in the 1970s and 1980s when he became a tireless campaigner for nuclear disarmament, and he developed a convincing argument that NATO were illogical and insincere in their protestations that they would only use nuclear weapons in retaliation to a Russian attack. In fact, as he convincingly demonstrated in his pamphlet “_the Emperor’s New Clothes”,_ the British government’s own documents admitted that NATO was prepared to make a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union. His contribution was important because his arguments reached many who were unmoved by the more orthodox arguments from the traditional left and pacifists, he was able to use his status to appear on BBC Radio 4′ Woman’s Hour to speak against nuclear weapons, when conventional politicians could not have accessed that audience.


i might be stretching the association a bit, but from what i remember in his autobiography, he got a lot of inspiration/support/whatever from the quakers/being a quaker. i might also be remembering wrongly 

e2a again: maybe not.. 



> In those intervening years between SmallFilms of the past and SmallFilms now
> Mr Postgate has occupied his mind with such weighty affairs as theology and
> nuclear disarmament. He has produced at least three provocative pamphlets for the
> Quakers and a short film, 'Life On Earth Perhaps' which included a direct message
> ...


http://www.toonhound.com/oliverpostgate.htm



maybe i'll just start an oliver postgate worshipping cult instead


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 22, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i dunno, a fair few of 'em seem to be peace-loving anti-nuclear folk


 
i think most of them are fine to be honest.

what i am talking about is when people consider religion too much in their political opinions. So somebody for example basing whether they like a certain politician on whether they think he/she is "good for the jews" "good for the muslims" or whatever. Or thinking that the country's problems are caused by too many people being atheists and a "decline in moral values" or whatever. or thinking that they have to support a certain war because it is religious. stuff like that.


----------



## yield (Jul 22, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i dunno, a fair few of 'em seem to be peace-loving anti-nuclear folk


Richard Nixon was a Quaker.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 22, 2013)

frogwoman, i know. sorry, i was going off on a bit of a tangent.
yield - all the more reason to start up the cult of postgate then


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 22, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> frogwoman, i know. sorry, i was going off on a bit of a tangent.
> yield - all the more reason to start up the cult of postgate then


 
No worries mate!


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 23, 2013)

fuck i think religion has influenced my political views over the years a little bit too much anyway so i'm hardly one to talk


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 23, 2013)

grit said:


> How privileged we all are to have you to make such judgments for us. Thomas Friedman has nothing on you.


 
Seriously? You know who he is, right? He's a journalist and not a very well respected one. And I'm sure that since you find his arguments so credible you'll be able to find is a historian who backs up his ahistorical nonsense?

Actually, a historian isn't good enough is it? That's a second hand reading of a secondary source - you'll be able to find us primary source documents to back up his ahistorical arguments, right?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 23, 2013)

I assume that with the selective quoting to remove inconvenient statements you don't actually have any intention of discussing this properly grit so I think I'll stop wasting my time anyway.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 23, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> frogwoman had some really interesting stuff to say about trigger warnings and mental health in a blog post she did a bit back. Do you mind if I link to that froggy?


 
got some new stuff on there too recently so be interested in peoples opinions of that as well.

i'm planning to do a post about sexual violence and capitalism at some point as well


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jul 23, 2013)

grit said:


> *I don't on a forum such as urban*, not due to the posters, but the topic. In this domain there is no correct answer just people spouting their opinion and on occasion linking to articles that share their same bias/view/whatever.
> 
> However I take a very different attitude to the engineering/technology forums I post in.


 
Well you're a bit of a fool then; something I'll keep in mind if I read anymore of your contributions.

Louis MacNeice


----------



## newbie (Jul 23, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> You could have an informed opinion and I may well disagree with it, also from an informed standpoint. That much is certainly true. This is because different peoples politics are based on different values and different ways of viewing the world (ontologies and that if you want to be a smart arse).
> 
> But you don't tend to have informed opinions, not on social or political questions anyway, and so you can be dismissed as just plain wrong rather than it being a simple disagreement surrounding two equally credible opinions.
> 
> You still can't grasp this simple concept can you?


 
and thus it is that informed opinion crushes debate. To overstate slightly,  _I know more facts than you so your opinion is plain wrong_.

Political conversation is essentially circular, much of it based on citing handy historic precedent.  Just as you've done in this conversation, reaching for the protocols or enclosures or Hayek to prove that your ability to re-rehearse one or more previous 'facts' adds greater legitimacy to your opinion.  

We are asked to accept that because someone knows more facts their opinion carries more weight.  Does it?  Well I dunno, but that's what columnists trade on.  See Polly Toynbee:  fact, fact, fact opinion.  Dead easy to read that as fact, fact, fact FACT.  Yet few people here would say that because she gets her facts right her opinions are also necessarily right.

There you are, on a plate.  An opportunity to 'prove' that because she sometimes gets facts wrong, her opinion is worthless.  More to the point, if she can be shown to have got a fact wrong, then the opinion I've just typed out must also be worthless and can be dismissed.

You've noted that informed opinions hinge on the underlying belief system.  Well yes, and from that stems the 'facts' that are chosen by each informed opinion, and the relative importance or otherwise they should be given. Does one 'fact' trump another?  It might, at the serious academic level, where such things are extensively and rigorously researched, but on a board like this, nah. The academic stuff is borrowed and conveniently promoted or undermined as appropriate.  Both informed sides endlessly 'prove' facts about the twin towers or kellys death.

That's not to say debate should always be conducted from a position of complete ignorance (although many of us try  ), but that it's worth attempting to distinguish between 'informed' and 'opinion' and noting that respecting the former doesn't have to imply giving credence to the latter.


----------



## JimW (Jul 23, 2013)

newbie said:


> ...
> 
> We are asked to accept that because someone knows more facts their opinion carries more weight. Does it? Well I dunno, but that's what columnists trade on. See Polly Toynbee: fact, fact, fact opinion. Dead easy to read that as fact, fact, fact FACT. Yet few people here would say that because she gets her facts right her opinions are also necessarily right...


 
If the facts they know are germane to the topic under discussion I'd say certainly  the derived opinion ought to carry more weight.
Book I'm at reading just now (on Sino-Dutch war in 17th century, Koxinga versus the Dutch East India Company for Taiwan) has an example of a historical debate where new facts kept changing the game, to do with the expansion of the European colonial powers - to sum it up crudely, early belief that something superior/advanced about European societies was undermined at several turns by newly emerging evidence from Asia, e.g. bit I'm on now deals with a later iteration of the argument, that Western powers were militarily superior due to constant warfare between smaller states and that although Chinese had gunpowder hadn't used it for arms, both of which can be shown to be empirically false (former in sense that their was a sophisticated military tradition in China and the Ming especially had emerged out of a similarly lengthy period of conflict that changed war-fighting in China).


----------



## eoin_k (Jul 23, 2013)

newbie said:


> and thus it is that informed opinion crushes debate. To overstate slightly, _I know more facts than you so your opinion is plain wrong_.
> 
> Political conversation is essentially circular, much of it based on citing handy historic precedent. Just as you've done in this conversation, reaching for the protocols or enclosures or Hayek to prove that your ability to re-rehearse one or more previous 'facts' adds greater legitimacy to your opinion...


 

People aren't really using facts to support their political analysis on this thread on the whole.  It seems to be more about using historical analysis to discredit an alternative account which is untenable.


----------



## newbie (Jul 23, 2013)

sure, new facts change debate.  the vast number of words spent debating Kelly could all be rendered obsolete by the emergence of a single new fact.

I'm assuming you're not a world class scholar in the field, if you are, then you're somewhat out of place from the rest of us and how we debate.  That aside, I'll bow to your opinion on a subject you're more informed about than I am, all the more so because you're explicit that you're basing your post on the more informed author you're reading (and all your other reading).  Yet there must be other authors with equally informed opinions, but I doubt they all agree and, unless you're approaching this as a serious academic, I doubt you've read and rigorously tested all of them.  

If someone else turns up equally informed but with a different opinion,  approaching the same facts from a different perspective, or possibly having read or accepted other facts from different authors, you have to slug it out based on proving assertions and giving them weight.  Most of us aren't academics and whist we think through what we're told are facts, we can't and don't extensively research them.

As you've been reading you've been distinguishing between fact and opinion, and you've presented what you've written as the former not the latter.  If I choose to regurgitate your fact about military superiority in some later thread, am I informed or simply parroting?  What I write can be invested as being informed, cos it can be made to sound so, but actually all I know is what you've just written.  'Informed' isn't necessarily sufficient with people less explicit than you've been.


----------



## rekil (Jul 23, 2013)

Ghastly Thatcher puff piece by Laurie's favouritest and most ledge teacher, Anthony Seldon on the Number 10 site.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 23, 2013)

> On arrival, she described the Cabinet Ante Room as resembling ‘a down-at-heel Pall Mall club, with heavy and worn leather furniture’, while the rooms upstairs had a ‘furnished house to let’ feel about them.


 
Almost like a hovel


----------



## andysays (Jul 23, 2013)

copliker said:


> Ghastly Thatcher puff piece by Laurie's favouritest and most ledge teacher, Anthony Seldon on the Number 10 site.


 
Does your description of Seldon mean he's the one of Laurie's teachers you'd most like to push off a ledge?

Maybe those who suggest there's too much violent hatred on this thread have a point


----------



## JimW (Jul 23, 2013)

newbie said:


> ...
> 
> I'm assuming you're not a world class scholar in the field, if you are, then you're somewhat out of place from the rest of us and how we debate. That aside, I'll bow to your opinion on a subject you're more informed about than I am, all the more so because you're explicit that you're basing your post on the more informed author you're reading (and all your other reading). Yet there must be other authors with equally informed opinions, but I doubt they all agree and, unless you're approaching this as a serious academic, I doubt you've read and rigorously tested all of them...


 
Well, the point there was not what my opinion might be, just happened to be currently reading something with an example of a debate (and it was a back and forth with new facts supporting various positions) where certain positions became untenable because of emerging information that no-one reasonable was going to dispute. So while there's wiggle room in almost anything, there are usually certain positions that are just plain wrong (ETA and can be shown to be so).


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 23, 2013)

seldon said:
			
		

> According to her daughter Carol, ‘One MP was so horrified to find his chain of thought constantly interrupted by the Prime Minister bobbing up and down to check on the simmering frozen peas that he read the riot act to her.’


 
little bit communism


----------



## rekil (Jul 23, 2013)

andysays said:


> Does your description of Seldon mean he's the one of Laurie's teachers you'd most like to push off a ledge?
> 
> Maybe those who suggest there's too much violent hatred on this thread have a point


 
"I swear, I'll do time" etc.

Referring to this chummy exchange with a tory cunt btw.


> @ iaindale Anthony Seldon is a LEGEND. He was my history teacher, and is a personal mentor. He's a lot of the reason I am like I am...


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 23, 2013)

newbie said:


> sure, new facts change debate. the vast number of words spent debating Kelly could all be rendered obsolete by the emergence of a single new fact.
> 
> I'm assuming you're not a world class scholar in the field, if you are, then you're somewhat out of place from the rest of us and how we debate. That aside, I'll bow to your opinion on a subject you're more informed about than I am, all the more so because you're explicit that you're basing your post on the more informed author you're reading (and all your other reading). Yet there must be other authors with equally informed opinions, but I doubt they all agree and, unless you're approaching this as a serious academic, I doubt you've read and rigorously tested all of them.
> 
> ...


 
With all due respect, I don't think you've understood what I was saying at all. I said that there are differences of opinion between equally informed positions. Nobody is denying this at all.

The point I was making, possibly quite clumsily given that it seems to have been misunderstood - is that whilst there is no such thing as a 'right' opinion on political and social questions (for a variety of reasons - contested evidence, the role of values and principles that are not shared by both sides of a debate and so on) there are most definitely wrong ones - ones that are based on false premises - incorrect claims about how the world is now rather than how it should be.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 23, 2013)

new statesman doing cutting edge commentary http://www.newstatesman.com/lifesty...ing-mistakes-avoid-if-you-dont-want-die-alone


----------



## treelover (Jul 23, 2013)

copliker said:


> "I swear, I'll do time" etc.
> 
> Referring to this chummy exchange with a tory cunt btw.


 

Ian Dale is a public school boy, well I never


----------



## Firky (Jul 23, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> new statesman doing cutting edge commentary http://www.newstatesman.com/lifesty...ing-mistakes-avoid-if-you-dont-want-die-alone


 

She didn't get paid for that, surely?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 23, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> new statesman doing cutting edge commentary http://www.newstatesman.com/lifesty...ing-mistakes-avoid-if-you-dont-want-die-alone


 
I'd love to get a message that began "hey, sexy".


----------



## newbie (Jul 23, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> With all due respect, I don't think you've understood what I was saying at all. I said that there are differences of opinion between equally informed positions. Nobody is denying this at all.
> 
> The point I was making, possibly quite clumsily given that it seems to have been misunderstood - is that whilst there is no such thing as a 'right' opinion on political and social questions (for a variety of reasons - contested evidence, the role of values and principles that are not shared by both sides of a debate and so on) there are most definitely wrong ones - ones that are based on false premises - incorrect claims about how the world is now rather than how it should be.


You're right that that's not what I read you as saying, so thanks for the clarification.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 23, 2013)

To be fair to Penny Dreadful she's not as much of an abomination as Kay Burley.

Damning with faint praise, I know, but it's something for her to hold on to.


----------



## caleb (Jul 23, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> To be fair to Penny Dreadful she's not as much of an abomination as Kay Burley.
> 
> Damning with faint praise, I know, but it's something for her to hold on to.


 
Why should they even come up as a point of comparison though? Other than both being women and journalists (and one a columnist, the other a news broadcaster) I can't really see much similarity?

Point is, they can be as bad as each other in their own different ways. Kay Burley might have made Peter Andre cry, but her job isn't to recuperate radical movements for the Independent and New Statesman.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 23, 2013)

caleb said:


> Kay Burley might have made Peter Andre cry, but her job isn't to recuperate radical movements for the Independent and New Statesman.


*post of the day* award to you!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 23, 2013)

TruXta said:


> What's your new title suggestion?


 
British left commentators: The bubbletariat.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 23, 2013)

grit said:


> History is written by the winners.


 
...is a cliché, and should be treated as such.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 23, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Is there any chance that a mod could change the title of the thread so that we don't get people asking "why is this thread all about one person" all the time? FridgeMagnet?


 

how about 'suck my left one'?


----------



## trabuquera (Jul 23, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> ...is a cliché, and should be treated as such.


 
what, you mean it ought to be thrown into the dustbin of history?


----------



## Libertad (Jul 23, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Is there any chance that a mod could change the title of the thread so that we don't get people asking "why is this thread all about one person" all the time? FridgeMagnet?


 
How about "British Left Journalism, those that don't contribute to the struggle"?
Catchy eh?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 23, 2013)

trabuquera said:


> what, you mean it ought to be thrown into the dustbin of history?


 
Bad trabuquera!!!


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 23, 2013)

_We saw you_


----------



## TruXta (Jul 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> _We saw you_


Bit stalkery?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> _We saw you_


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 23, 2013)

We could always call it the 'Prad-Meinhof' thread.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 23, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> little bit communism





Casually Red said:


> the Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons


----------



## JimW (Jul 23, 2013)

Bubblicious: chewing over the radical posturing of the commentariat and assorted hanger-ons


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 23, 2013)

It needs to be something that ties into the 'why the x is shit' theme IMO


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 23, 2013)

Libertad said:


> How about "British Left Journalism, those that don't contribute to the struggle"?
> Catchy eh?


 
Or "British left journalism and the use of activism as CV padding"?


----------



## TruXta (Jul 23, 2013)

_Fake leftie journalists - eat our shit_ ?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 23, 2013)

_Why - and how - bubbles burst._

That is top notch, it gets everything in there and more!!, but i wouldn't advise it for this thread.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 23, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> It needs to be something that ties into the 'why the x is shit' theme IMO


 
why the poseur left is shit?

Why the pseudo-left commentariat is shit?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 23, 2013)

TruXta said:


> _Fake leftie journalists - eat our shit_ ?


could that tie in with a 'let us eat cake' reference?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 23, 2013)

"Why we can't have nice things: the bubbletariat and its' consequences".
" 'You're shit, and you know you are': Youthful left journalism in Britain and its ineffectiveness".


----------



## TruXta (Jul 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> _Why - and how - bubbles burst._
> 
> That is top notch, it gets everything in there and more!!, but i wouldn't advise it for this thread.


Sounds like something for the science forum.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 23, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> "Why we can't have nice things: the bubbletariat and its' consequences".
> " 'You're shit, and you know you are': Youthful left journalism in Britain and its ineffectiveness".


oh. god. i'm torn now.
i think the first one. maybe.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 23, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> " 'You're shit, and you know you are': Youthful left journalism in Britain and its ineffectiveness".


 
_We're shit and you know we are: journalism in the internet age._


----------



## TruXta (Jul 23, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> could that tie in with a 'let us eat cake' reference?


I suppose....


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 23, 2013)

The bubble burst from side to side


----------



## TruXta (Jul 23, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> _We're shit and you know we are: journalism in the internet age._


We're shit and you can tell us we are....?


----------



## JimW (Jul 23, 2013)

"They "work" for a living so you don't have to (even if you want to)."
Or "Do bubbles form in shit? It seems so."
Or "This bubble blows itself."

I clearly have nothing


----------



## TruXta (Jul 23, 2013)

JimW said:


> "They "work" for a living so you don't have to (even if you want to)."
> Or "Do bubbles form in shit? It seems so."
> Or "This bubble blows itself."
> 
> I clearly have nothing


That last one is great.


----------



## JimW (Jul 23, 2013)

TruXta said:


> That last one is great.


 
You can have a like for the encouragement. ETA: I might be able to parley this small Internet triumph into a gig an the Indy, do you reckon?


----------



## rekil (Jul 23, 2013)

Columnism, Calumny And Granny Tattoos


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 23, 2013)

Laurie's personal interventions in the thread suggest this:

"Infamy, infamy, they've all got it infamy"


----------



## TruXta (Jul 23, 2013)

JimW said:


> You can have a like for the encouragement. ETA: I might be able to parley this small Internet triumph into a gig an the Indy, do you reckon?


I'll check in with my man.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 23, 2013)

JimW said:


> "They "work" for a living so you don't have to (even if you want to)."
> Or "Do bubbles form in shit? It seems so."
> Or "This bubble blows itself."
> 
> I clearly have nothing





TruXta said:


> That last one is great.


 
I'd go with the first one, actually.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 23, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I'd go with the first one, actually.


You would, wouldn't you.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 23, 2013)

TruXta said:


> You would, wouldn't you.


 
I _sooooooo _would, wouldn't I?


----------



## TruXta (Jul 23, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> I _sooooooo _would, wouldn't I?


Mmmmm hhmmm.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 23, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Mmmmm hhmmm.


 
That's the way - UH-HUH UH-HUH - I like it.


----------



## equationgirl (Jul 23, 2013)

eoin_k said:


> But how do we really know that the Highland Clearances really happened? I mean were any of you actually there? I don't think so. So perhaps Grits ill informed ramblings are... you know... as valid as anyone else's "opinions".


 
I may not have been alive for the Highland Clearances but on journeys through the highlands the evidence of dwellings, crofts and villages cleared through this legislation social policy are seen all over the place. One or two dwellings scattered and abandoned could be argued as the consequence of all sorts of things - death from disease or poverty, sold by a landlord, building falling into disrepair - but not so many, and not villages.

The Highland Clearances can also be evidenced by the large jump in census figures for the two censuses (censi? censae?) either side of the clearance date. Most notable in Glasgow and to a lesser extent Edinburgh.

ETA: Edited to change 'legislation' for social policy. Clearances were more complex than a single piece of legislation.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jul 23, 2013)

_With a Rebel Sell: Rise of the Soi-disant Dissent Entrepreneur_


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 23, 2013)

They're forever blowing bubbles


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 23, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> They're forever blowing bubbles


 
Editors? Commissioning editors?


----------



## grit (Jul 24, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Seriously? You know who he is, right? He's a journalist and not a very well respected one.


 

Thank you for illustrating my point so beautifully 

You think he is not well respected/ you dont respect him, yet the man writes for the new yorker and has won the Pulitzer Prize 3 times.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 24, 2013)

grit said:


> <snip>You think he is not well respected/ you dont respect him, yet the man writes for the new yorker and has won the Pulitzer Prize 3 times.


 
You have no idea how many times I've resisted posting this.  You don't impress me much either.


Spoiler


----------



## grit (Jul 24, 2013)

Greebo said:


> You have no idea how many times I've resisted posting this.  You don't impress me much either.
> 
> 
> Spoiler




lol, what a contribution.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 24, 2013)

grit said:


> lol, what a contribution.


 
On a more serious note, IME people who walk around expecting respect and generally behaving like The Great I Am are the least deserving of it.


----------



## yield (Jul 24, 2013)

grit said:


> Thank you for illustrating my point so beautifully
> 
> You think he is not well respected/ you dont respect him, yet the man writes for the new yorker and has won the Pulitzer Prize 3 times.


You like Thomas Friedman? He's an appalling apologist for the US invasion of Iraq.

Syria Is Iraq By Thomas Friedman. July 24, 2012 

He writes for the New York Times not the New Yorker.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Jul 24, 2013)

grit said:


> lol, what a contribution.


 

It's just an opinion and I didn't think you went in for making value judgements on opinions. 

Louis MacNeice


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Editors? Commissioning editors?


 
I don't want to go to Chelsea.


----------



## grit (Jul 24, 2013)

yield said:


> You like Thomas Friedman? He's an appalling apologist for the US invasion of Iraq.
> 
> Syria Is Iraq By Thomas Friedman. July 24, 2012
> 
> He writes for the New York Times not the New Yorker.



I'm not a fan but he helps illustrate my point perfectly.


----------



## fractionMan (Jul 24, 2013)

what was your point again?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 24, 2013)

He doesn't like some people. I think that's about it.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 24, 2013)

yield said:


> You like Thomas Friedman? He's an appalling apologist for the US invasion of Iraq.
> 
> Syria Is Iraq By Thomas Friedman. July 24, 2012
> 
> He writes for the New York Times not the New Yorker.


 
Yeah, but he's won 3 Pulitzers, so you're supposed to forget that people like Friedman and Podhoretz basically shill for any part of the rightwing establishment that come calling.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 24, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Yeah, but he's won 3 Pulitzers, so you're supposed to forget that people like Friedman and Podhoretz basically shill for any part of the rightwing establishment that come calling.


 

Lots of money to be made from being a terrible but reasonably articulate person from a nice background and speaking a series of untruths to power. See Niall Ferguson.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 24, 2013)

They're not untruths. They're different opinions. Maaaan. Grit told me.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 24, 2013)

Shitness, We Are You


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 24, 2013)

sorry, i'm a page behind.


----------



## fractionMan (Jul 24, 2013)

this is why we can't have nice things: pennies from heaven


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 24, 2013)

Monetize your wadicalism: why the trendy lefty media set is shit


----------



## JimW (Jul 24, 2013)

"I'd love to accept your date for a social revolution but I'm spoken for (by this shower of cunts)"


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 24, 2013)

Pennies from anti-union Progressive Media International and Lebedev.

_Columnist crumbs._


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 24, 2013)

A little bit column-ism

(did you see what I did there?)


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 24, 2013)

Something with the word communisn't in it would be ace


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 24, 2013)

_We are getting paid for this right?_


----------



## JimW (Jul 24, 2013)

All Our Days Mournful and Overcast Forever - a memoir of the Ironic Columnists.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 24, 2013)

Fear and loathing of the people I speak on behalf of


----------



## JimW (Jul 24, 2013)

The Nelsons - they have a column where the shite collects.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 24, 2013)

JimW said:


> The Nelsons - they have a column where the shite collects.


 
cif


----------



## cesare (Jul 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> cif


Comment is free? Or the cleaning stuff that used to be jif?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 24, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Fear and loathing of the people I speak on behalf of


 
A savage journey to the heart of the middleclass liberal dream


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 24, 2013)

The former, but i had no idea of jifs pre-history. Someone insisted that stardrops was just a new name for another thing the other day. God i'm even boring myself.


----------



## cesare (Jul 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The former, but i had no idea of jifs pre-history. Someone insisted that stardrops was just a new name for another thing the other day. God i'm even boring myself.


Between test matches


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The former, but i had no idea of jifs pre-history. Someone insisted that stardrops was just a new name for another thing the other day. God i'm even boring myself.


 
Don't get your snickers in a twist.

(PLEASE KILL ME)


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 24, 2013)

cesare said:


> Between test matches


 
You got years of it


----------



## JimW (Jul 24, 2013)

I want to do something with being an ordinary kid from a very ordinary school but obviously that's not much to do with the search for a title - "one of the crowd and liked it"


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 24, 2013)

_Clever kids/clever schools_


----------



## cesare (Jul 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> You got years of it


Callinicos collapso - staggers bowls a maiden over.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 24, 2013)

Those, those were the paydays


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 24, 2013)

Anarchy Inaction

*slow applause for self*


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 24, 2013)

Fields, Factories, Workshops, and Laptops Taken To Starbucks Tomorrow


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 24, 2013)

Freedom To Go (On A Paid-For Jolly To New York To Hang Out With Fashionable Pornographers)


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 24, 2013)

The Fourth Estate Is Your Enemy


----------



## JimW (Jul 24, 2013)

The Child in the City, The Child in The Cuntery.


----------



## rekil (Jul 24, 2013)

The Forging Of An Arse


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 24, 2013)

copliker said:


> The Forging Of An Arse


 
Oh yes, there is gold here


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 24, 2013)

Lord of the anecdotes that Ring false


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 24, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> Freedom To Go (On A Paid-For Jolly To New York To Hang Out With Fashionable Pornographers)


 

Down and paid in London and New York


----------



## Limerick Red (Jul 24, 2013)

Calling Out Around the World....


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 24, 2013)

The Condition Of The Writing Class In England


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 24, 2013)

The Road To Staten Island Pier


----------



## rekil (Jul 24, 2013)

Das Limits To Social Kapital


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Pennies from anti-union Progressive Media International and Lebedev.
> 
> _Columnist crumbs._


 
Filth columnist?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 24, 2013)

the comedy hatted pisstakerists


----------



## JimW (Jul 24, 2013)

Oxbridge made me, let Oxbridge get deals for me.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 24, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Lord of the anecdotes that Ring false


 
A Song of Ice and Liars


----------



## Treacle Toes (Jul 24, 2013)

Has LP forsaken this discussion forever?


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 24, 2013)

Rutita1 said:


> Has LP forsaken this discussion forever?


 

Be a shame if she has. It's a bit like a circus in that there's plenty of action and LP plays the role of the resident clown falling on her arse between acts.


----------



## JimW (Jul 24, 2013)

Fair play to her, I had zero personal animus toward her to start off, thinking from the little she'd impinged on me consciousness she was just yet one more tedious example of a prevalent type, but her every intervention confirms she really goes for her role as water carrier for the established order in spades.


----------



## rekil (Jul 24, 2013)

An Officer And A Columnist


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 24, 2013)

Temporary Autonomous Sloane


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 24, 2013)

A certain Dale Carnegie classic comes to mind.


----------



## killer b (Jul 24, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Temporary Autonomous Sloane


 brilliant.


----------



## Firky (Jul 24, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> A Song of Ice and Liars


 

That reminds me, need to watch that video you posted for me!


----------



## andysays (Jul 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> The former, but i had no idea of jifs pre-history. *Someone insisted that stardrops was just a new name for another thing the other day*. God i'm even boring myself.


 
Starburst, surely?


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 24, 2013)

The Unbearable Slightness of Being


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 24, 2013)

andysays said:


> Starburst, surely?


 
Stardrops.


----------



## andysays (Jul 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Stardrops.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 24, 2013)

A real all round star turn

Must i have to point everything out?


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 24, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> The Unbearable Slightness of Being


 

She's an unbearable lightweight, that's for sure.

Her professional credibility is about as solidly built as a clown car and her factual reliabilty is seldom much improved.


----------



## andysays (Jul 24, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> A real all round star turn
> 
> Must i have to point everything out?


 
Yeah, I found that by googling, but if it's been

Trusted by the nation since 1946​ 
it doesn't make much sense that someone was insisting it's a new name for something else.

Still , at least for me, not that it matters...


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 24, 2013)

Anthony And Clearly Patronising


----------



## fractionMan (Jul 24, 2013)

Self facilitating media bores


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 24, 2013)

The curious incidence of the liars in daytime


----------



## rekil (Jul 24, 2013)

Tweeting The Fascists


Lest we forget



(yeah yeah i know they're not proper 'fascists' and that)


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 24, 2013)

I, Privileged


----------



## love detective (Jul 24, 2013)

copliker said:


> Tweeting The Fascists
> 
> 
> Lest we forget
> ...


 

And its sequel

Retweeting the Fascists


----------



## J Ed (Jul 24, 2013)

http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2013/07/babies-we-dont-care-about-today

Thoughts on this article? I thought it was okay as it goes.


----------



## weepiper (Jul 24, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2013/07/babies-we-dont-care-about-today
> 
> Thoughts on this article? I thought it was okay as it goes.


 



> We never do seem to talk about those babies and their mothers, or *allow them to tell their stories*, and this is precisely the week when we should.


 
I see she's doing nothing to change that, having clearly not actually bothered to speak to any real live single mums bringing up children in poverty before writing her article about us


----------



## J Ed (Jul 24, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I see she's doing nothing to change that, having clearly not actually bothered to speak to any real live single mums bringing up children in poverty before writing her article about us


 

Speaking of which, I thought this article in the Graunid was good http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jul/23/jack-monroe-face-modern-poverty

Her blog is well worth a look

I love this reply to some BTL idiots

http://agirlcalledjack.com/2013/07/...his-show-the-same-behaviour-as-crack-addicts/



> I don’t normally respond to online comments to news articles, but I have been astounded over the past few days by some assumptions and ‘advice’ on the Guardian forums.
> 
> Apparently having tattoos and mirrored kitchen tiles makes me akin to a crack addict.
> 
> ...


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 24, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I see she's doing nothing to change that, having clearly not actually bothered to speak to any real live single mums bringing up children in poverty before writing her article about us


 
Indeed.

It's just more royal baby fodder that article. Telegraph go mad with patriotism, Express are giving every reader a commemorative spoon, the guardian and the statesman write semi-cynical "won't someone think of all the other children who aren't posh" but it's still part of the same media narrative, it's still a Royal Baby story. _I've got the shotgun, you've got the briefcase, but it's all in the game though, right?_




The most radical and subversive thing to have done is just write an article about children born into poverty without the refencing the monarchy or this kid at all, but no, sadly that's now how it works


----------



## Belushi (Jul 24, 2013)

An attack on Laurie & the Grauniad, a bizarre Express story (a free spoon?) and you've managed to shoehorn in a gratuitous Wire clip.

Top work Delroy


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 24, 2013)

Belushi said:


> An attack on Laurie & the Grauniad, a bizarre Express story (a free spoon?) and you've managed to shoehorn in a gratuitous Wire clip.
> 
> Top work Delroy


 
I aim to please. 

Tbh that scene pisses me off a bit. Proper cheesy. The "gasps in the room" as Omar heroically exposes their hypocrisy is a bit cringeworthy I reckon.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 24, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Temporary Autonomous Sloane


Best so far


----------



## smokedout (Jul 25, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Speaking of which, I thought this article in the Graunid was good http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jul/23/jack-monroe-face-modern-poverty
> 
> Her blog is well worth a look


 
she seems okay, but this is blatant bollocks: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/jul/20/10-pound-a-week-recipes

the idea that you could get away with feeding a kid, let alone an adult, a small bowl of mushroom soup or half a can of chickpeas for a main meal is nonsense and not really helpful


----------



## smokedout (Jul 25, 2013)

and to be fair when I was living with my kid full time for a while on single persons JSA (£70 a week) I still had more than a tenner a week for food for both of us, find it all a bit


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 25, 2013)

smokedout said:


> the idea that you could get away with feeding ... an adult...half a can of chickpeas for a main meal is nonsense and not really helpful


*raises hand as survivor of living in a vegan co-op*
they saw nothing wrong with it


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 25, 2013)

and i'm going to splash out on some red wine vinegar tomorrow just to make the bacon casserole. cheers for the link - i'm going to well nick her recipes 

e2a: fucking hell, it's in four of the seven recipes. targeted at 'typical' guardian reader (at least, the food/drink section) shopper profiles much?


----------



## classicdish (Jul 25, 2013)

smokedout said:


> and to be fair when I was living with my kid full time for a while on single persons JSA (£70 a week) I still had more than a tenner a week for food for both of us, find it all a bit


 
I think her housing benefit stopped or something


----------



## weepiper (Jul 25, 2013)

smokedout said:


> she seems okay, but this is blatant bollocks: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/jul/20/10-pound-a-week-recipes
> 
> the idea that you could get away with feeding a kid, let alone an adult, a small bowl of mushroom soup or half a can of chickpeas for a main meal is nonsense and not really helpful


 

I don't know that it is bollocks tbh. I remember eating not much that wasn't based round tinned tomatoes, bacon, rice and pasta when mine were very small. They wouldn't have eaten the mushroom soup though.


----------



## weepiper (Jul 25, 2013)

classicdish said:


> I think her housing benefit stopped or something


 

reading up it appears the £10 a week for food thing came from when she had just moved in and built up rent arrears while her housing benefit claim was being processed, which she then had to try and pay off while also topping up her rent £20 per week because the housing benefit wasn't covering all of it even once they started paying


----------



## smokedout (Jul 25, 2013)

weepiper said:


> I don't know that it is bollocks tbh. I remember eating not much that wasn't based round tinned tomatoes, bacon, rice and pasta when mine were very small. They wouldn't have eaten the mushroom soup though.


 
its not presented as this is what I was forced to do though, but this is how you can live on a tenner a week for food, with a kid, and you can't - although that may be the guardians presentation rather than hers


----------



## Favelado (Jul 25, 2013)

Beans on toast, scrambled egg on toast, spaghetti on toast 2 or 3 nights a week when my mum ran out of money when I was a kid. We did occasionally shop at Sainsbury's when themeagre wages/maintenance money or benefits  (depending on which type of poverty we were currently subject to) came through. That was like a treat. I think it was Peter Lilley taking the piss out of single mums while mine was flat broke and struggling that turned me anti-Tory for life. I remember sitting watching the news as he did his funny song and feeling like he was actually talking right at me and my mum. Fucking cunt. I'll never forgive that.


----------



## weepiper (Jul 25, 2013)

smokedout said:


> its not presented as this is what I was forced to do though, but this is how you can live on a tenner a week for food, with a kid, and you can't - although that may be the guardians presentation rather than hers


 

yeah I think it is the guardian's doing, it smacks of press angle to me (like all those fucking BBC articles on how easy (positively enjoyable!) it is to eat on no money there were recently)


----------



## Belushi (Jul 25, 2013)

Well off people are always so fucking keen to lecture everyone else on how cheaply you can eat.

If I hear one more person talk about how they can make a chicken last a week...


----------



## weepiper (Jul 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Well off people are always so fucking keen to lecture everyone else on how cheaply you can eat.
> 
> If I here one more person talk about how they can make a chicken last a week...


 

They never even realise they're starting from a position of a) having the actual cash to buy a whole chicken b) having an oven, pans etc to cook it in c) having a big enough freezer to cook things in advance and freeze the results d) having a store cupboard full of basics they have already bought thus don't have to pay for with all that spare money they don't have to cook it into something more interesting/nutritionally valuable than just 'chicken'


----------



## smokedout (Jul 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Well off people are always so fucking keen to lecture everyone else on how cheaply you can eat.
> 
> If I hear one more person talk about how they can make a chicken last a week...


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jul 25, 2013)

It's the same with every one of these "helpful" guides. 

"First, simply buy a hundredweight of lentils and 14 different condiments. And a pan bigger than your local corpo pool."


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 25, 2013)

S☼I said:


> It's the same with every one of these "helpful" guides.
> 
> "First, simply buy a hundredweight of lentils and 14 different condiments. And a pan bigger than your local corpo pool."


the place i used to live in bought bulk from a wholefood co-operative. with a minimum £200 order iirc (although i think they might have hijacked one of their workers co-ops names to get the 'trade' minimum £100 order )
and they wondered why more people didn't do that and avoid supermarkets. 
'not ever having to go to a shop for food' was one of their selling points when they advertised rooms. so yeah, i was sort of lucky to move into a very-cheap-to-eat-in house (vegan communal evening meals if possible - i used to hide and then cook my own stuff later. no meat/meat derivatives beyond the garden gate. and i was lucky enough to be able to access bulk purchasing power. but still, i always had a little bit of sick in my mouth when they* couldn't understand how people had problems surviving on benefits. and we weren't allowed our own food cupboards. or uncommunal food, unless you hid it in your bedroom).

*except for two good eggs out of eight. they were ok, tbf)


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 25, 2013)

weepiper said:


> yeah I think it is the guardian's doing, it smacks of press angle to me (like all those fucking BBC articles on how easy (positively enjoyable!) it is to eat on no money there were recently)


 

At no point do they mention Farmfoods which is where I get all my best bargains


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 25, 2013)

poundshop for cooking bacon ftw


----------



## smokedout (Jul 25, 2013)

me and my kid are very pissed off with the price of pringles at the moment, it is literally out of control, you never see the guardian writing about that


----------



## Belushi (Jul 25, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> poundshop for cooking bacon ftw


 
But surely its far cheaper to raise your own pig organically in your orchard?


----------



## smokedout (Jul 25, 2013)

they do weird pringle flavours in the pound shop but i dont trust them


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> But surely its far cheaper to raise your own pig organically in your orchard?


my house helped block a co-op's loanstock/radical routes application because they were raising and as-ethically-as-you-can slaughtering their own meat


----------



## smokedout (Jul 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> But surely its far cheaper to raise your own pig organically in your orchard?


 
http://internationaltimes.it/our-greatest-challenge/



> Julian was born in March 1947, on the Hardwick Estate in South Oxfordshire's Chiltern Hills, the youngest of four children. On the premature death of his brother (1963) and his father a few years later, Julian suddenly found himself thrust from being the youngest sibling to the heir of the thousand-acre estate and baronetcy passed down from his great-grandfather.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jul 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> But surely its far cheaper to raise your own pig organically in your orchard?


 

I wrote this some years ago

*Come on, let’s save the planet!*

I don’t think you poor people are really trying.
You could do more.

Haven’t you invested in solar panels?
You should keep chickens.
Surely you have time to make your own cheese, yoghurt, and bread.
Especially if you don’t have a job.
You could even get your children to help you.
It would do you good to have activities the whole family could participate in.
Try not to overfill your kettle.
Organic food is much tastier, so it’s worth those few extra pennies!
Plan where you could put your compost bin.
And a pen for a lovely goat.
Surely you could do without your week’s holiday somewhere warm.
Especially if you don’t have a job.
Both _our_ cars runs on ecologically sound fuel.
You don’t have to stop spending, as long as you buy lots of eco-friendly things.
We can all save the planet together.

Just promise us
if all the good things we’re doing
and all the lovely green products we’re buying maniacally
somehow don’t work
and the climate changes apocalyptically
and we’re all trying to survive

you won’t eat us.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 25, 2013)

S☼I said:


> I wrote this some years ago
> 
> *Come on, let’s save the planet!*
> 
> ...


marry me.


----------



## Steel Icarus (Jul 25, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> marry me.


 

Taken, I'm afraid. But yes, if we can get away with it.

Isn't that big of me?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 25, 2013)

S☼I said:


> Taken, I'm afraid. But yes, if we can get away with it.
> 
> Isn't that big of me?


marry me. twice. that'd mean you'd be married thrice? 

*steps away from guinness*


----------



## J Ed (Jul 25, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> my house helped block a co-op's loanstock/radical routes application because they were raising and as-ethically-as-you-can slaughtering their own meat


 

I'm with them on that, if there's one thing more annoying than militant vegans it's people who smugly talk about how the only eat that they meat is what they've raised and killed themselves.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 25, 2013)

I thought slaughtering your own meat was actually illegal these days?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 25, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I thought slaughtering your own meat was actually illegal these days?


 

only if they catch you


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 25, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I'm with them on that, if there's one thing more annoying than militant vegans it's people who smugly talk about _*how the only eat that they meat is what they've raised and killed themselves*_.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 25, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I thought slaughtering your own meat was actually illegal these days?


sorry, i didn't phrase that very well. getting them slaughtered as 'nicely' as they could. not by their own hands.


----------



## Belushi (Jul 25, 2013)

I'd be quite up for watching a bunch of clueless hippies attempt to slaughter a pig


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I'd be quite up for watching a bunch of clueless hippies attempt to slaughter a pig


i know some 
you get the rope, i'll source the pig. and the shotgun...
disclaimer: not really.


----------



## Belushi (Jul 25, 2013)

Pigs are tough, intelligent, resourceful creatures. On big pig farms they have to wear chainmail in case the swine rush them and devour them


----------



## killer b (Jul 25, 2013)

i worked with a bloke who kept a pig with some mates - they decided to slaughter it themselves.

there was several broken arms, a mauling. and no bacon.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Pigs are tough, intelligent, resourceful creatures. On big pig farms they have to wear chainmail in case the swine rush them and devour them


Hogs will go for your belly first, rip you open and eat your innards. It's the most nutritious part you see.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I'd be quite up for watching a bunch of clueless hippies attempt to slaughter a pig


 

So when Hannibal went to that African village at the end of Silence of the Lambs he was actually going off to do some organic product placements and ethical sourcing for Firebox. Organic freshly sourced finest meats etc.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 25, 2013)

And when he went to "have an old friend for dinner" he was actually going to discuss how he could be a better ally and call out his own privileges in the manners described in the thread.


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 25, 2013)




----------



## frogwoman (Jul 25, 2013)

*An intersectional analysis of Hannibal Lecter*

Hannibal is the most oppressed character in Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon (but not in the TV series because Jack Crawford is black, even though he represents the forces of law and order). He is not only oppressed because he is passing as an aristocrat, after having come through the camps and the Eastern Front and so on. He is oppressed because he has to pass as a normal human being. His food tastes are denied and he is unable to express his own unique identity. He is forced to subject himself to the vulgarity of American culture which dismisses his experiences as an immigrant and his sense of propriety. Is it any wonder that he lashes out into ghoulash?

Clarice Starling is a great example of a good intersectionalist ally. She calls herself out on her own experiences of privilege as an FBI agent. She also seeks out Hannibal's help on a project when she gives him the case files to read and calls her American privilege into question while she does so, but does not treat him as merely a tokenistic example of a European serial killer.

Her own American privilege rests on shaky ground as she is two generations removed from poor white trash West Virginia coal-miners. It is indicative of the respect the two oppressed people have for each other that they engage in a game of "you tell me and I'll tell you". And both think to have one over on the other while they know they are doing it - an expression of how the white man's patriarchy engages us in multi-layered sections of oppression and privilege, degrading us all while doing so. Notice how Jack Crawford patronises Starling and says that he doesn't want to talk about the cases in front of a woman. Later he says it was just a trick, but no matter how well intentioned, that was still just an example of mansplanation.

Jack Crawford then exploits the mental illness of Will Graham, playing on ableistic stereotypes that every mentally ill person has a special talent, in this case solving murders. In some ways Will Graham is a massive trigger warning, which Jack Crawford then exploits. In many ways Jack Crawford divines the nature of his suspects by reading the trigger warnings upon the face of Will Graham. Jack Crawford symbolises the privilege which the able-bodied white male holds over those who are too weak to resist his influence, but despite that wish to contribute to their own oppression while their vulnerabilities are useful in maintaining the kyriarchy on which Jack Crawford's position rests.

Of course, Will Graham is never admitted as a full FBI agent, being known instead by the demeaning title of a "special consultant". His condition and his non-neurotypical gifts are so much tools in the hands of the patriarchy, to be used by the cis-scum and then thrown to wolves like Lecter. His behaviour, not expected of a privileged American white male, leads him to be ostracised from this boys' club like the black runner denied access to the white man's club - fine to win races, but never to drink in the bar.

Hannibal himself is the perfect example of somebody so broken on the wheel of oppression that he has forged his own wheel. And who are we to judge him for it?


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 25, 2013)

i'm going to see if i can get a code-y friend to set up an auto 'marry me' reply to selected posts on urban


----------



## seventh bullet (Jul 25, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> *An intersectional analysis of Hannibal Lecter*
> 
> Hannibal is the most oppressed character in Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon (but not in the TV series because Jack Crawford is black, even though he represents the forces of law and order). He is not only oppressed because he is passing as an aristocrat, after having come through the camps and the Eastern Front and so on. He is oppressed because he has to pass as a normal human being. His food tastes are denied and he is unable to express his own unique identity. He is forced to subject himself to the vulgarity of American culture which dismisses his experiences as an immigrant and his sense of propriety. Is it any wonder that he lashes out into ghoulash?
> 
> ...


 
What about an intersectional analysis of Buffalo 'I'd fuck me' Bill?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I'd be quite up for watching a bunch of clueless hippies attempt to slaughter a pig


 

only if I was stood by with a pistol to make the beasts suffering end after they'd basically re-enacted the murder of ceaser


----------



## emanymton (Jul 25, 2013)

smokedout said:


> me and my kid are very pissed off with the price of pringles at the moment, it is literally out of control, you never see the guardian writing about that


Aldi's cheap version are 80p a tube, and taste better.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 25, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> only if they catch you


 
Okay, so you kill the environmental health inspector, finish slaughtering and processing the pig, then reenact what they did in "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe".


----------



## Greebo (Jul 25, 2013)

weepiper said:


> They never even realise they're starting from a position of a) having the actual cash to buy a whole chicken b) having an oven, pans etc to cook it in c) having a big enough freezer to cook things in advance and freeze the results d) having a store cupboard full of basics they have already bought <snip>


Whenever people questioned how VP and I could afford to have a chest freezer, I explained that it was bought on installments from a catalogue.  Even paying that way was worth it because it made bulk buying just about affordable for two adults.   But yes, I do realise that we're lucky - when renting rooms I only had a third of a fridge shelf and half of a freezer drawer to myself (if I didn't mind risking my food being nicked).  It helps if you live in an area where a lot of the ethnic shops think a saucepan which will hold rice for 2 hungry adults is tiny - pans in some of the local ethnic shops are large as well as cheap.  

I also realise that when you're absolutely skint (because payments have been messed up or you're repaying debts from the last time they were etc) there's no such thing as "only £5" - even 5p extra can be unaffordable.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 25, 2013)

smokedout said:


>


 
Great graph - mind if I share it mate?


----------



## smokedout (Jul 25, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Great graph - mind if I share it mate?


 
not at all, came from yougov


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## ViolentPanda (Jul 25, 2013)

Belushi said:


> Well off people are always so fucking keen to lecture everyone else on how cheaply you can eat.
> 
> If I hear one more person talk about how they can make a chicken last a week...


 
You can, if you've already got a larder full of dry goods (rice, pasta, flour, pulse and beans etc), tinned goods and seasonings.  Unfortunately for some povs, they don't have those "larder essentials" that all good members of the chattering classes take for granted.


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## ViolentPanda (Jul 25, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> my house helped block a co-op's loanstock/radical routes application because they were raising and as-ethically-as-you-can slaughtering their own meat


 
Every time you mention them, they sound like a bigger bunch of up-themselves hypocrites, frankly!


----------



## TruXta (Jul 25, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> You can, if you've already got a larder full of dry goods (rice, pasta, flour, pulse and beans etc), tinned goods and seasonings. Unfortunately for some povs, they don't have those "larder essentials" that all good members of the chattering classes take for granted.


The only thing I can think of foodwise that is properly cheap and doesn't require much in the way of skill, equipment, time or effort is fermentation, like making sauerkraut. You do need enough money to buy veg tho.


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## ViolentPanda (Jul 25, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i know some
> you get the rope, i'll source the pig. and the shotgun...
> disclaimer: not really.


 
Shotgun would be crap. You'd blow away either a big chunk of chest, or a big portion of head, both of which are decent grub!


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## Bakunin (Jul 25, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Shotgun would be crap. You'd blow away either a big chunk of chest, or a big portion of head, both of which are decent grub!


 

Can I take it that using a heavy-duty chain fired from a cannon isn't an option, then?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 25, 2013)

TruXta said:


> The only thing I can think of foodwise that is properly cheap and doesn't require much in the way of skill, equipment, time or effort is fermentation, like making sauerkraut. You do need enough money to buy veg tho.


 
Yep.  I'm lucky (thus far). Our housing etc is stable enough that we've been able to accumulate those little extras that the article-writers take for granted, and because I get DLA, we occasionally are able to take advantage of the local cash and carry, or of Lidl's special offers. We usually get 5 of their 1kg vacuum packs of risotto rice and the large bags of various pasta when they do their "Italian week", and buy their 10kg sacks of basmati (yep, *two* types of rice in the house!), and make other long-term purchases along the same lines, but only because we scrimped for a chest freezer, and have enough-ish space to store bulk dry goods.

Hmmm, must have a look at sauerkraut recipes.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Jul 25, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Can I take it that using a heavy-duty chain fired from a cannon isn't an option, then?


 
Only if you're after pork mince.


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## TruXta (Jul 25, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Hmmm, must have a look at sauerkraut recipes.


 
All you need is cabbage and salt, and a container to put it in. Time takes care of the rest.


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## Bakunin (Jul 25, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Only if you're after pork mince.


 

It'd save you having to gut the beast though:



(Always assuming you have immediate access to a cannon, powder and a length of heavy chain, obviously).


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 25, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> What about an intersectional analysis of Buffalo 'I'd fuck me' Bill?






Good point. Buffalo Bill is trying in vain to escape the constraints of his privileged existence and discover a more feminine side. He is the victim of "cissplaining" when it is said that because he wants to cut off people's skins he can't be a real transsexual. Like Hannibal he has tried to pass as a normal human being, but having a few more spokes on the intersectional wheel than Hannibal, his attempts at fitting in to a white cis man's world are doomed to failure. Indeed he tries to live out the maxim "die cis scum". Clarice Starling tries to be an intersectionalist ally when she knocks on his door but ultimately she shows the privileged position even the most well-intentioned white cis female ends up taking when she takes Jack Crawford's side and second place in the kyriarchical structure of the movie when she alerts the other FBI agents to his presence


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## DotCommunist (Jul 25, 2013)

Harris' villains, the real baddies not the 'he's awful but we love him' Hannibal but the proper baddies, are all disfigured/disabled in some way. Red Dragons protaganist has a pretty awful hare lip, I recall my gran telling me to warn my brother about it in case he got upset (he's got a hare lip, not a botch repair like red dragon man)

thread takes another weid non-laura related twist


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 25, 2013)

I've just discovered this video. Make if it what you will combabes.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 25, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I've just discovered this video. Make if it what you will combabes.





I need a drink after watching that...


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 25, 2013)

managed about 30 seconds. Eat the rich (because the poor are tough and stringy etc)


----------



## TruXta (Jul 25, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> managed about 30 seconds. Eat the rich (because the poor are tough and stringy etc)


You need to slow-cook the poor.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 25, 2013)

TruXta said:


> You need to slow-cook the poor.


 

I recommend marinading your typical hobo for at least 48 hours in a mixture of strong cider and a selection of strongly-flavoured herbs and spices. Only after having rifled their pockets and been at their gold teeth and fillings with a set of pliers, naturally. Then having eviscerated and dissected your random poor person (they're readily available at all good cardboard boxes, derelict buildings and outside off-licences and supermarkets doing cheap booze deals) you put the excess in your deep freeze for later, putting the offal and a few choice cuts aside for your cat, naturally, (waste not want not in these difficult and austere times), you either do a nice casserole in your slow cooker or opt for gentle, slow-roasting at about 160 degrees while you're preparing the mixed vegetables and enjoying a nice glass of good red wine as red always works better with meat, I find.

One advantage to the current economic climate is that hobos are a constantly available food source and, if you're lucky, you can also appease your social conscience and sense of natural justice when you realise that your Sunday roast was once a banker, politician or previously employed by the DWP. Hobos aren't just for Christmas. If you're not too greedy they can last right through to New Year as well.

Bakunin: Providing austerity-friendly serving suggestions since 1975.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 25, 2013)

Self-pickled hobos!


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## Bakunin (Jul 25, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Self-pickled hobos!


 

Some do come pre-marinaded, yes. But your more cultured and sophisticated homicidal maniac will disdain these bargain basement ready meals in favour of the premium brand tramps that haven't been flavoured with white cider and recycled cigarette butts. Personally, as a gentleman of taste and distinction, I'd only opt for the own-brand type in the absence of fresher and more appetising produce.

One has to keep up one's standards, after all.


----------



## smokedout (Jul 25, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Aldi's cheap version are 80p a tube, and taste better.


 
they won't last, Tesco used to do an 80p version, gone now, you can't fuck with pringles


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 25, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Shotgun would be crap. You'd blow away either a big chunk of chest, or a big portion of head, both of which are decent grub!


i wasn't going to use it on the pig


----------



## smokedout (Jul 25, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> and i'm going to splash out on some red wine vinegar tomorrow just to make the bacon casserole. cheers for the link - i'm going to well nick her recipes
> 
> e2a: fucking hell, it's in four of the seven recipes. targeted at 'typical' guardian reader (at least, the food/drink section) shopper profiles much?


 
because it was annoying me in bed last night I had another look at this, which is supposed to cover all weekly food needs for two people. it comes to just over 4000 calories in total, so about 300 calories a day per person - around half of what japanese prisoners of war were given and probably not enough to keep you alive

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/jul/20/10-pound-a-week-recipes


----------



## tufty79 (Jul 25, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Every time you mention them, they sound like a bigger bunch of up-themselves hypocrites, frankly!


i spent a lot of time cooking chips to put on my shoulder when i lived there. as soon as i got offered a flat, i RAN


----------



## caleb (Jul 25, 2013)

Latest from the intersectionalistas is that it's racist to ask somebody where they are from.


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## andysays (Jul 25, 2013)

caleb said:


> Latest from the intersectionalistas is that it's racist to ask somebody where they are from.


 
It's not about where you're from, it's where you're at, maaaaan


----------



## JimW (Jul 25, 2013)

When I saw what I take you to be referring to, it did bring up that annoying thing people get of "where are you from?", you say Lewisham and then they go, "No originally" or whatever if you're not white, which I can imagine would get old very quick.


----------



## caleb (Jul 25, 2013)

JimW said:


> When I saw what I take you to be referring to, it did bring up that annoying thing people get of "where are you from?", you say Lewisham and then they go, "No originally" or whatever if you're not white, which I can imagine would get old very quick.


 
My dad's white and he gets that (swap Lewisham for Acton), because he speaks English with a non-British accent. I imagine it can be annoying, I don't think it's intrinsically racist. 

I'm not so much referring to the article either, but the discussions I saw about it, which included the assertion that it's okay for 'POC' to ask where somebody is from because they're likely to be 'genuinely interested' whereas when a cracker does it it's about asserting white supremacy.


----------



## JimW (Jul 25, 2013)

caleb said:


> My dad's white and he gets that (swap Lewisham for Acton), because he speaks English with a non-British accent. I imagine it can be annoying, I don't think it's intrinsically racist. I


 
Yeah, strikes me as one of those things where intent counts even though it likely is annoying.


----------



## Greebo (Jul 25, 2013)

smokedout said:


> they won't last, Tesco used to do an 80p version, gone now, you can't fuck with pringles


 
Lidl have an own brand version too in about 4 flavours.


----------



## Buckaroo (Jul 25, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Lidl have an own brand version too in about 4 flavours.


 
Aldi too. Check your pringles.


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## caleb (Jul 25, 2013)

JimW said:


> Yeah, strikes me as one of those things where intent counts even though it likely is annoying.


 
Intent and basic manners. I've been with my dad a number of times when people have gone 'where are you from? no, where are you _from _from?' and felt uncomfortable at where the conversation might go because of the person's tone or whatever, but it's always ended up being genuine interest. Also, I can't help but feel that a racist, xenophobe or fascist is going to judge whether a person is 'British' or not based on appearance, accent, name, etc., once they've decided that, they're hardly going to be concerned with establishing whether you were Deptford born and bred or not. 

But then most privilege theory people are only concerned with manners, really. Despite all the protestations that racism is structural and systemic - something I agree with, despite the fact it's only rattled out in order to argue that you can't be racist to white people - they're oddly fixated with the minutiae of individual actions, especially those which take place within the activist ghetto. It's not really about privilege, strip it all away and it's basic politeness.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 26, 2013)

Never really thought about it like that, brilliant! Although I would replace 'politeness' with etiquette


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jul 26, 2013)

Surely the racism is in disregarding the initial answer to "where are you from" rather than asking the question in the first place. Enquiring after origins is pretty standard small talk...


----------



## caleb (Jul 26, 2013)

J Ed said:


> Never really thought about it like that, brilliant! Although I would replace 'politeness' with etiquette


 
Yeah, etiquette is better.

It was reading about the 'thin privilege' stuff that made me realise it. Take away the 'privilege' shite (which makes no sense - how do thin people benefit from overweight people being overweight?) and it's basically "overweight people feel uncomfortable when people make comments about their weight, don't do it". It's something any sound person already knows, it's so basic it doesn't need much (if any) explaining, and certainly no hand-wringing. Yet when you start talking about 'privilege' you alienate people who would otherwise be on side, and _some _privilegistas seem to revel in this discomfort, which I find odd -- if the point is to improve organisational relationships, why be so deliberately divisive*? (The 'you can't be racist to white people' is another one of these -- even if it's true, why be so dismissive of people who challenge it?).

Noel Ignatiev, who developed privilege theory initially, has actually expressed bemusement at the way it's being used by activists to explain group dynamics.

*Worst example I've seen was a tweet along the lines of 'I can't wait until us brown people are in charge, and I can refuse to give Mr Smith a job because of his surname'. Like, I don't know why you'd even joke about making people unemployed.


----------



## Lo Siento. (Jul 26, 2013)

caleb said:


> Yeah, etiquette is better.
> 
> It was reading about the 'thin privilege' stuff that made me realise it. Take away the 'privilege' shite (which makes no sense - how do thin people benefit from overweight people being overweight?) and it's basically "overweight people feel uncomfortable when people make comments about their weight, don't do it". It's something any sound person already knows, it's so basic it doesn't need much (if any) explaining, and certainly no hand-wringing. Yet when you start talking about 'privilege' you alienate people who would otherwise be on side, and _some _privilegistas seem to revel in this discomfort, which I find odd -- if the point is to improve organisational relationships, why be so deliberately divisive*? (The 'you can't be racist to white people' is another one of these -- even if it's true, why be so dismissive of people who challenge it?).


 
One of my main problems with "privilege" as a concept is that it takes something positive (trying to make people aware of different experiences) and turns it automatically into a criticism, and makes an exchange instantly hostile.

I was reading Jill Miller's book _You Can't Kill The Spirit_ recently, about Women Against Pit Closures, and for me it demonstrates what an alternative "intersectionality" could be (for want of a better term). It's different groups of people (women in mining communities, black community groups, LGBT groups) finding sameness in their different struggles, understanding and helping each other through solidarity. That's difference manifesting itself as greater strength and class unity, not division.


----------



## andysays (Jul 26, 2013)

caleb said:


> ...Worst example I've seen was a tweet along the lines of 'I can't wait until us brown people are in charge, and I can refuse to give Mr Smith a job because of his surname'. Like, I don't know why you'd even joke about making people unemployed.


 
The most obvious  of that statement, though not perhaps the biggest, is the assumption that you can deduce from the surname Smith that someone is necessarily "white" and therefore deserving of such "payback" (assuming for the sake of argument that a "white" Smith _would_ be deserving)


----------



## andysays (Jul 26, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> One of my main problems with "privilege" as a concept is that it takes something positive (trying to make people aware of different experiences) and turns it automatically into a criticism, and makes an exchange instantly hostile.
> 
> I was reading Jill Miller's book _You Can't Kill The Spirit_ recently, about Women Against Pit Closures, and for me it demonstrates what an alternative "intersectionality" could be (for want of a better term). *It's different groups of people (women in mining communities, black community groups, LGBT groups) finding sameness in their different struggles, understanding and helping each other through solidarity. That's difference manifesting itself as greater strength and class unity, not division*.


 
Yeah, like working class women/members of black community groups/ members of LGBT groups would ever be together enough/able to overcome their racist/homophobic/anti-working class prejudices enough on their own, without some nice middle class privilegista to explain it all to them, to do *that...*


----------



## J Ed (Jul 27, 2013)

http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2013/07/page-three-not-online-porn

Laurie does Cameron's liberal gymnastics on porn but in reverse.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 27, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> One of my main problems with "privilege" as a concept is that it takes something positive (trying to make people aware of different experiences) and turns it automatically into a criticism, and makes an exchange instantly hostile.
> 
> I was reading Jill Miller's book _You Can't Kill The Spirit_ recently, about Women Against Pit Closures, and for me it demonstrates what an alternative "intersectionality" could be (for want of a better term). It's different groups of people (women in mining communities, black community groups, LGBT groups) finding sameness in their different struggles, understanding and helping each other through solidarity. That's difference manifesting itself as greater strength and class unity, not division.


 
I think this is an important point - it's almost as if the starting point for priveligistas is that these are all different struggles, in no way linked, and that for example black liberation is against the interests of, say, working class people. It's the opposite of solidarity - in order to be a good 'ally' you have to sacrifice yourself at the altar of the oppressed.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 27, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2013/07/page-three-not-online-porn
> 
> Laurie does Cameron's liberal gymnastics on porn but in reverse.


 
'Page 3 is the worst cos the proles read the Sun in their dinner breaks'


----------



## rekil (Jul 27, 2013)

love detective said:


> someone should tweet laurie penny something about how some women are too dumb to capitalise on their physical/youthful look and see if she agrees or disagrees


 

lauriepenny - whatcha reckon?


----------



## Firky (Jul 27, 2013)

Lo Siento. said:


> Surely the racism is in disregarding the initial answer to "where are you from" rather than asking the question in the first place.


 

Very well put.


----------



## emanymton (Jul 27, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2013/07/page-three-not-online-porn
> 
> Laurie does Cameron's liberal gymnastics on porn but in reverse.


----------



## smokedout (Jul 27, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> 'Page 3 is the worst cos the proles read the Sun in their dinner breaks'


 
this is the key point, women being objectified in Game of Thrones, or Kate Moss in her underwear in The Observer supplement is culture, working class women in a working class newspaper is porn and should be banned


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 27, 2013)

smokedout said:


> this is the key point, women being objectified in Game of Thrones, or Kate Moss in her underwear in The Observer supplement is culture, working class women in a working class newspaper is porn and should be banned


 
It's only basic good sense though. People sophisticated enough to read the Observer and watch game of thrones are obviously well balanced and intelligent enough to look at some tits and not become a sex pest as a result. But you just know that those proles will turn into Peter Sutcliffe at the merest glimpse of Sam Fox's nipple


----------



## emanymton (Jul 27, 2013)

J Ed said:


> http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2013/07/page-three-not-online-porn
> 
> Laurie does Cameron's liberal gymnastics on porn but in reverse.


So the problem with Page 3 is that it makes *her* life harder?


----------



## Belushi (Jul 27, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> It's only basic good sense though. People sophisticated enough to read the Observer and watch game of thrones are obviously well balanced and intelligent enough to look at some tits and not become a sex pest as a result. But you just know that those proles will turn into Peter Sutcliffe at the merest glimpse of Sam Fox's nipple


 


> Luckily, the amount of heroin I use is harmless, I inject about once a month on a purely recreational basis. Fine. But what about other people less stable, less educated, less middle-class than me? Builders or blacks for example. If you're one of those, my advice is leave well alone. Good luck.


----------



## _angel_ (Jul 28, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Whenever people questioned how VP and I could afford to have a chest freezer, I explained that it was bought on installments from a catalogue..


 
That's how I got our - crap- fridge freezer.

Littlewoods really aren't someone I'd recommend for electricals but what to do when the fridge breaks down (in summer!) and there's nowt else. Would love a chest freezer!
Prolly better to buy in instalments from a second hand shop/ market like we did wi the second tho.


----------



## caleb (Jul 28, 2013)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/27/new-generation-of-feminists-set-agenda

What does getting Jane Austen on a banknote mean for women for whom tenners are few and far between?


----------



## Balbi (Jul 29, 2013)

Just saying chaps, but the upcoming 13,000 word pamphlet on Online Misogyny is going to be Urbantastic.


----------



## weepiper (Jul 29, 2013)

caleb said:


> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/27/new-generation-of-feminists-set-agenda
> 
> What does getting Jane Austen on a banknote mean for women for whom tenners are few and far between?


 

I wish one of these crusading middle-class feminists would take on teenage single mothers not being allowed Housing Benefit unless they live with their parents or in 'supervised accommodation' for example. 
Also the reaction from some of them about the twitter rape threats has been illuminating. Make twitter a paid-for service. Yeah cos men who don't have to worry about money are never abusive wankers and working class men can't help themselves, after all they're all just wife-beaters aren't they


----------



## caleb (Jul 29, 2013)

Fucking hell, if you look at the No More Page 3 facebook page, some of the comments are absolutely disgusting in the manner they shame women:



> Bbc breakfast. ... arguing it now . This woman is brilliant. Stupid page 3 woman has no argument​


​


> The model is completely inarticulate and embarrassing. Kay is so strong and convincing. Well done to her.


​ 


> But they're not beautiful. They're fake, not natural. Since when did being fake, having no dignity or modesty or respect become beautiful? Selling yourself because you can't be bothered to work is not beautiful. It's sad. She seemed to come off very bi​tter... MONEY does not bring happiness. Thank God I was brought up being told I was worth so much more The amount of times I've been told, "If you look like that, whats the point in doing anything other than glamour modelling..." Unbelievable...​​The fact she admitted they objectify women and can't even see what's wrong with that, just shows how things like Page 3 have an effect on some girls and what they think they're worth.​


​

> I still don't understand why there are trampy magazines in the first place? A woman should keep her body to herself and for her loved one, the same goes for men. I'm so glad that I have dignity and respect for myself, I'd rather die than be a disgusting fake ugly whore!


 




​


----------



## J Ed (Jul 29, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Just saying chaps, but the upcoming 13,000 word pamphlet on Online Misogyny is going to be Urbantastic.


 


I hope that she is planning to check her privilege and give Urban75 the right of reply to equalise the unfair power dynamic.


----------



## Belushi (Jul 29, 2013)

she's picked the wrong bunch of bitter ageing leftists to start a pamphlet war with


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 29, 2013)

13 000 words is a medium sized article ffs, how pompous do you have to be to insist that it's produced as a pamphlet?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 29, 2013)

Belushi said:


> she's picked the wrong bunch of bitter ageing leftists to start a pamphlet war with


----------



## rekil (Jul 29, 2013)

lauriepenny said:


> And I do think about the impact of everything I write. I can't be responsible for *sexist pigs* deliberately misinterpreting it,


That's youse lot right? 


Balbi said:


> Just saying chaps, but the upcoming 13,000 word pamphlet on Online Misogyny Laurie Penny is going to be Urbantastic.


Fixed.


----------



## andysays (Jul 29, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> 13 000 words is a medium sized article ffs, how pompous do you have to be to insist that it's produced as a pamphlet?


 
I think we all know the answer to that one...


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 29, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> 13 000 words is a medium sized article ffs, how pompous do you have to be to insist that it's produced as a pamphlet?


A "medium sized article" where?

This lengthy James Meek essay from _LRB_, for instance, runs at just under 12,000 words, and pastes into 17 Word doc pages at 12pt.

I'm not suggesting that 13,000 words is a particularly long piece in or of itself, but I do question your terms of reference. 13,000 words would certainly be a long newspaper article.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 29, 2013)

In a serious magazine - something exactly like LRB, not in a newspaper. Ok medium-long.


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 29, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I hope that she is planning to check her privilege and give Urban75 the right of reply to equalise the unfair power dynamic.


 

I doubt it, that would seem like too fair a fight for her.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of us are selectively and/or deliberately misquoted and cited as prime examples of the enemy within. That's not to say that misogyny (online or offline) doesn't exist or that it doesn't need dealing with, just that this will be yet another instance in which everything somehow revolves around Penny Dreadful's personal career advancement.


----------



## smokedout (Jul 29, 2013)

Laurie Penny  @*PennyRed* 
Quietly working through a hangover - my fourth ever - and feeling v sorry for myself. How do people do this sort of thing regularly? #*booze*

there goes the hunter thompson style hedonism, tea and cakes not k and squats from now on


----------



## rekil (Jul 29, 2013)

Helen Lewis said:
			
		

> (And sorry for self-pity, just find it weird I get much more hate from my "own side")


This is most likely to be an untruth. This is as delusional as that stavvers person saying "And my goodness, I piss off the powerful" the other day.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 29, 2013)

who is that stavvers person?


----------



## smokedout (Jul 29, 2013)

Lauries mate and proper blogger Another Angry Woman

(by piss off the powerful she means mildly annoys Caitlin Moran)


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 29, 2013)

stavvers said:
			
		

> Opinion: I Was A Misogynist Comedian (Michael J Dolan)- Michael was a misogynist comedian. He got better.




yeh just been reading her blog now


----------



## andysays (Jul 29, 2013)

#ironyoverload

@*hollygriggspall* pdf? Just, if you're going to get publicity off saying you take issue with my work, maybe I should know about it.


----------



## cesare (Jul 29, 2013)

Kindle singles at 13000 words are selling now. Apparently they're the journalistic equivalent of a novella.

http://www.dystel.com/2011/02/e-mini-books/


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 29, 2013)

andysays said:


> #ironyoverload
> 
> @*hollygriggspall* pdf? Just, if you're going to get publicity off saying you take issue with my work, maybe I should know about it.


 
Publicity eh? They you go, game revealed entire. See this anarchist-autonomist act of self-reduction ad proletarian re-appropriation too:

I send my work for free to everyone who requests it _when I'm allowed to._


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 29, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Publicity eh? They you go, game revealed entire. See this anarchist-autonomist act of self-reduction ad proletarian re-appropriation too:
> 
> I send my work for free to everyone who requests it _when I'm allowed to._


 

Erm, as a freelancer myself as I can safely say that it's standard for a writer's fee and terms to be discussed and agreed* prior* to publication. You won't always do a deal with a formal contract, but whether a piece is to be paid for, how much is paid and copyright and reprint terms are usually agreed in detail *before* a piece is published.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 29, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I think this is an important point - it's almost as if the starting point for priveligistas is that these are all different struggles, in no way linked, and that for example black liberation is against the interests of, say, working class people. It's the opposite of solidarity - in order to be a good 'ally' you have to sacrifice yourself at the altar of the oppressed.


 
This is exactly what the 'isms' were like in the 80s


----------



## caleb (Jul 29, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I think this is an important point - it's almost as if the starting point for priveligistas is that these are all different struggles, in no way linked, and that for example black liberation is against the interests of, say, working class people. It's the opposite of solidarity - in order to be a good 'ally' you have to sacrifice yourself at the altar of the oppressed.


 
I missed this initially, but this is perfect. I mean, some will say 'there will never be an end to racism [or sexism, etc.] without an end to capitalism'*, but then there will be no analysis or discussion of capitalism, and very little of class outside of a narrow sociological definition aimed at redressing 'classism'. If you were to point out, for example, that cross-class black liberation movements won't bring an end to capitalism, you'd be accused of 'whitesplaining' to them. 

Show 'em the fucking League of Revolutionary Black Workers or summin and they'd have a heart attack. 

*often 'capitalism', 'patriarchy' and 'white supremacy' are interchangeable.


----------



## rekil (Jul 29, 2013)

The Prince And The Showgirl

I see that Laurie is quoted on the prof's wikipedia entry. Is there somebody going round inserting LP into wiki entries out of pure saddoness or is it part of a brand building strategy.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Jul 29, 2013)

caleb said:


> I missed this initially, but this is perfect. I mean, some will say 'there will never be an end to racism [or sexism, etc.] without an end to capitalism'*, but then there will be no analysis or discussion of capitalism, and very little of class outside of a narrow sociological definition aimed at redressing 'classism'. If you were to point out, for example, that cross-class black liberation movements won't bring an end to capitalism, you'd be accused of 'whitesplaining' to them.
> 
> Show 'em the fucking League of Revolutionary Black Workers or summin and they'd have a heart attack.
> 
> *often 'capitalism', 'patriarchy' and 'white supremacy' are interchangeable.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 29, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> This is exactly what the 'isms' were like in the 80s








What would Johnny Alpha do in this situation?


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 29, 2013)

fuck, i just came here to post that


----------



## TruXta (Jul 29, 2013)

el-ahrairah said:


> fuck, i just came here to post that


No you didn't.


----------



## DaveCinzano (Jul 29, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> What would Johnny Alpha do in this situation?


 
Kill his stinking father.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 29, 2013)

> I still don't understand why there are trampy magazines in the first place? A woman should keep her body to herself and for her loved one, the same goes for men. I'm so glad that I have dignity and respect for myself, I'd rather die than be a disgusting fake ugly whore!


good old single issue liberal politics, you get to share bedspace with the opinions such as the above


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 29, 2013)

TruXta said:


> No you didn't.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 29, 2013)

Balbi said:


> Just saying chaps, but the upcoming 13,000 word pamphlet on Online Misogyny is going to be Urbantastic.


 
13,000 is pretty much war and peace for this generation. I swear it's becoming impossible for people to write long, sustained arguments, I think the internet has killed people's ability to write more than 20,000 words let alone read that something that size.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> 13,000 is pretty much war and peace for this generation. I swear it's becoming impossible for people to write long, sustained arguments, I think the internet has killed people's ability to write more than 20,000 words let alone read that something that size.


How many people regularly write 20000+ words, or did so 10, 20, 50 years back?


----------



## cesare (Jul 29, 2013)

This is good: http://www.wordstopages.com/


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 29, 2013)

TruXta said:


> How many people regularly write 20000+ words, or did so 10, 20, 50 years back?


 
I'm trying to make a point that as a result of Twitter, Tumblr, the blog format, long sustained bits of writing that take a long time to read and work an argument through it over a sustained period are increasingly rare. People don't read long things - they piece together an ideological position from 4chan internet memes, browsing on wikipedia, youtubeb clips, tweets and checking out short articles on blogs. That's how a lot of people today get their information. It conditions them to reading only in little bursts, little chunks here and there, which doesn't lend itself to working out long and complicated arguments.

I find it myself, after being on twitter I would find it hard to read for sustained periods of time, unlike when I was younger when I had no problem in sitting down and reading for hours. Now I'm too easily distracted, too easy to just aimlessly browse. And it's something that I've noticed happening to me over the last 2 years and there's others that have mentioned it.


----------



## emanymton (Jul 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I'm trying to make a point that as a result of Twitter, Tumblr, the blog format, long sustained bits of writing that take a long time to read and work an argument through it over a sustained period are increasingly rare. People don't read long things - they piece together an ideological position from 4chan internet memes, browsing on wikipedia, youtubeb clips, tweets and checking out short articles on blogs. That's how a lot of people. It conditions them to reading only in little bursts, little chunks here and there, which doesn't lend itself to working out long and complicated arguments.
> 
> I find it myself, after being on twitter I would find it hard to read for sustained periods of time, unlike when I was younger when I had no problem in sitting down. Now I'm too easily distracted, too easy to just aimlessly browse. And it's something that I've noticed happening to me over the last 2 years and there's others that have mentioned it.


i've noticed the same thing, thought it was just me getting old. 

ETA: Noticed my own inability to read at length.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I'm trying to make a point that as a result of Twitter, Tumblr, the blog format, long sustained bits of writing that take a long time to read and work an argument through it over a sustained period are increasingly rare. People don't read long things - they piece together an ideological position from 4chan internet memes, browsing on wikipedia, youtubeb clips, tweets and checking out short articles on blogs. That's how a lot of people. It conditions them to reading only in little bursts, little chunks here and there, which doesn't lend itself to working out long and complicated arguments.
> 
> I find it myself, after being on twitter I would find it hard to read for sustained periods of time, unlike when I was younger when I had no problem in sitting down. Now I'm too easily distracted, too easy to just aimlessly browse. And it's something that I've noticed happening to me over the last 2 years and there's others that have mentioned it.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I'm trying to make a point that as a result of Twitter, Tumblr, the blog format, long sustained bits of writing that take a long time to read and work an argument through it over a sustained period are increasingly rare. People don't read long things - they piece together an ideological position from 4chan internet memes, browsing on wikipedia, youtubeb clips, tweets and checking out short articles on blogs. That's how a lot of people today get their information. It conditions them to reading only in little bursts, little chunks here and there, which doesn't lend itself to working out long and complicated arguments.
> 
> I find it myself, after being on twitter I would find it hard to read for sustained periods of time, unlike when I was younger when I had no problem in sitting down and reading for hours. Now I'm too easily distracted, too easy to just aimlessly browse. And it's something that I've noticed happening to me over the last 2 years and there's others that have mentioned it.


 
I get your point, I just don't think it's true. Or if it is true you haven't really given us any evidence apart from some anecdotes. Not trying to pick a fight, but I see this line of argument a lot, yet evidence seems scant.


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 29, 2013)

TruXta said:


> I get your point, I just don't think it's true. Or if it is true you haven't really given us any evidence apart from some anecdotes. Not trying to pick a fight, but I see this line of argument a lot, yet evidence seems scant.


 
Well it's certainly true for me. Unless you think I'm making it up?


----------



## TruXta (Jul 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> Well it's certainly true for me. Unless you think I'm making it up?


No, not at all. I'm merely questioning the extrapolation to "lots of people/many people". Book sales are up apparently - what does that mean for your hypothesis? Granted, reading an airport novel is hardly the same as a long argument-heavy essay, but it does mean that the long form is far from dead.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> I'm trying to make a point that as a result of Twitter, Tumblr, the blog format, long sustained bits of writing that take a long time to read and work an argument through it over a sustained period are increasingly rare. People don't read long things - they piece together an ideological position from 4chan internet memes, browsing on wikipedia, youtubeb clips, tweets and checking out short articles on blogs. That's how a lot of people today get their information. It conditions them to reading only in little bursts, little chunks here and there, which doesn't lend itself to working out long and complicated arguments.
> 
> I find it myself, after being on twitter I would find it hard to read for sustained periods of time, unlike when I was younger when I had no problem in sitting down and reading for hours. Now I'm too easily distracted, too easy to just aimlessly browse. And it's something that I've noticed happening to me over the last 2 years and there's others that have mentioned it.


 

I have had this experience dealing with some younger people involved in activism asking my opinion on a certain subject or whatever, I'd reply with about a page or two pages giving my opinion on something only to be told that the length was unacceptable and they'd need a week to get back to me. Interestingly the same person who needed a week to get back to me was happy to link me to articles from the ISR which were many times longer than what I had wrote, I suspect that the individual hadn't actually read what they were recommending to me.


----------



## cesare (Jul 29, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I have had this experience dealing with some younger people involved in activism asking my opinion on a certain subject or whatever, I'd reply with about a page or two pages giving my opinion on something only to be told that the length was unacceptable and they'd need a week to get back to me. Interestingly the same person who needed a week to get back to me was happy to link me to articles from the ISR which were many times longer than what I had wrote, I suspect that the individual hadn't actually read what they were recommending to me.


I don't think this is a particularly new phenomena - I just think that it's far easier to do/source nowadays.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 29, 2013)

> The work of liberals in the first half of the nineteenth century paved the
> way for that era of demagogic oppression which is now dawning. Those
> who demanded the equality of all citizens before the law certainly did
> not envisage the privileges the masses now enjoy. The old special jurisdictions have been suppressed, but the same thing in a new form is being
> ...


 
oh no, "demagogic oppression"!


----------



## TruXta (Jul 29, 2013)

cesare said:


> I don't think this is a particularly new phenomena - I just think that it's far easier to do/source nowadays.


How long were Olde Tyme propaganda pamphlets? Bet you they weren't 20K words long.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 29, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> oh no, "demagogic oppression"!


 
Pareto ended as a supporter of Mussolini in the very last years of his life (Pareto's life that is, not Musso's).


----------



## cesare (Jul 29, 2013)

TruXta said:


> How long were Olde Tyme propaganda pamphlets? Bet you they weren't 20K words long.


I've never really read any. But Notes From Borderland is still going strong and I'll wager each edition is in the region of 20,000 words long. At least


----------



## Delroy Booth (Jul 29, 2013)

TruXta said:


> No, not at all. I'm merely questioning the extrapolation to "lots of people/many people". Book sales are up apparently - what does that mean for your hypothesis? Granted, reading an airport novel is hardly the same as a long argument-heavy essay, but it does mean that the long form is far from dead.


 
This is a stupid discussion. "Book sales are up apparently" doesn't count as evidence of anything either, especially when it's not sourced and there's no qualification (what type of books, how long are these books, I mean Laurie Penny's Meat Market is a book and it's 90 pages long, this next one will be a "pamphlet" of 13,000 words which is a total rip-off more than anything else, that Kindle single's thing looks like an adaptation to this too)

The point I'm making is a fairly obvious one, and of course it's anecdotal, but so what? How does that disqualify it? If I jumped into a massive pot of boiling water to test the hypothesis that I would get scalded, and as I'm screaming "Aaah it burns it burns" all the people stood around watching say "ah but that's your personal anecdote, where your evidence that it's actually hot?"

If I find that the little nuggets of information you get used to reading on twitter make it harder for me to concentrate on reading over a long period, then isn't it logical to assume that I'm not the only person on planet earth experiencing it. I used to see people on twitter whinge about this all the time as it happens but that's anecdotal too so I suppose that doesn't count.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 29, 2013)

cesare said:


> I've never really ready any. But Notes From Borderland is still going strong and I'll wager each edition is in the region of 20,000 words long. At least


Fucking hell, what a mess of a website! http://www.borderland.co.uk/ Unless it's just me browser?


----------



## TruXta (Jul 29, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> This is a stupid discussion. "Book sales are up apparently" doesn't count as evidence of anything either, especially when it's not sourced and there's no qualification (what type of books, how long are these books, I mean Laurie Penny's Meat Market is a book and it's 90 pages long, this next one will be a "pamphlet" of 13,000 words which is a total rip-off more than anything else, that Kindle single's thing looks like an adaptation to this too)
> 
> The point I'm making is a fairly obvious one, and of course it's anecdotal, but so what? How does that disqualify it? If I jumped into a massive pot of boiling water to test the hypothesis that I would get scalded, and as I'm screaming "Aaah it burns it burns" all the people stood around watching say "ah but that's your personal anecdote, where your evidence that it's actually hot?"
> 
> If I find that the little nuggets of information you get used to reading on twitter make it harder for me to concentrate on reading over a long period, then isn't it logical to assume that I'm not the only person on planet earth experiencing it. I used to see people on twitter whinge about this all the time as it happens but that's anecdotal too so I suppose that doesn't count.


 
http://www.theatlantic.com/business...ep-turmoil-book-sales-are-on-the-rise/275217/

US figures, but still. Your point may be obvious, doesn't make it true. And your analogy with jumping into scalding water is frankly fucking laughable. As any fool knows, the plural of anecdote is not data.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 29, 2013)

TruXta said:


> How many people regularly write 20000+ words, or did so 10, 20, 50 years back?


 
The Black Hand?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 29, 2013)

My experience in left-wing politics is that a lot of people lie about how much and what they've read. Two reasons spring to mind: small bit of social power within your local/regional/national group and that leadership that accrues to being the one on top of theory and second rank of the parties are dominated by academics and people like that, people paid to be concerned with reading and critique and so on, who then shape - consciously or not - the culture of the parties into one where it's important to be _seen _to be up to date, to have read key works and so on - when it's plain from what they say that a lot of them haven't/can't. Which itself is an indication of a huge gap between the class and people who think they are/aim to be the class's political instrument. The internet has meant those same people who used to pretend to read can now read little reviews or short articles and pretend more effectively now. They can also be caught out more effectively as well.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 29, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Fucking hell, what a mess of a website! http://www.borderland.co.uk/ Unless it's just me browser?


 
Your browser.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 29, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> The Black Hand?


Who, what?


----------



## cesare (Jul 29, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Fucking hell, what a mess of a website! http://www.borderland.co.uk/ Unless it's just me browser?


 
I wasn't suggesting it as a model website - it's each individual issue that I'm talking about (subscription only btw).


----------



## TruXta (Jul 29, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Your browser.


Cheers, seemed like that could be the case. Actually it was my fucked up connection at work - seems the page didn't load properly.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 29, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Who, what?


 
ATTICA ATTICA


----------



## TruXta (Jul 29, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> ATTICA ATTICA


Consider me stupid (not hard really) - explain plz.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 29, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Consider me stupid (not hard really) - explain plz.


 
No, there was an old poster on here and MATB - and known to some people here in real life, if memory serves - who sometimes went by the handle "The Black Hand" and at other times as "Attica". He was an (in)famous legend in his own lunchtime - let's just leave it at that.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 29, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> No, there was an old poster on here and MATB - and known to some people here in real life, if memory serves - who sometimes went by the handle "The Black Hand" and at other times as "Attica". He was an (in)famous legend in his own lunchtime - let's just leave it at that.


Ah.... a small and dusty bell rings in the back of my noggin. Thanks.


----------



## cesare (Jul 29, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> No, there was an old poster on here and MATB - and known to some people here in real life, if memory serves - who sometimes went by the handle "The Black Hand" and at other times as "Attica". He was an (in)famous legend in his own lunchtime - let's just leave it at that.


He lasted posted here on 9 July 2013, still by his The Black Hand handle.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 29, 2013)

cesare said:


> He lasted posted here on 9 July 2013, still by his The Black Hand handle.


 

about the durham miners gala probably


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 29, 2013)

cesare said:


> He lasted posted here on 9 July 2013, still by his The Black Hand handle.


 
The legend lunches on!


----------



## barney_pig (Jul 29, 2013)

A posting stalwart, who has never been afraid of word counts


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 29, 2013)

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/03/423346.html

I think we had a recording of an introductory lecture at one time


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 29, 2013)

> Trevor Bark is also right that the British left is fossilised and conservative in tactics and strategy. 200 years ago, the working class was more unruly -one thinks of General Ludd or Lewislewis making a speech on a suitcase that he had reclaimed from the bailiffs and then his comrades dipping an old shirt in calf’s blood and hanging it on a stick on which they impaled a loaf of bread.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 30, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/362140951474470912

Being aggressively anti-union can be mitigated by employing enough people in your 'stable of bloggers 'to be considered inclusive. Also, sucking up to your aggressively anti-union box no doubt is helpful for career progression. Blergh.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 30, 2013)

stable of bloggers lol really ??


----------



## J Ed (Jul 30, 2013)

Makes it sound like a weird sex thing


----------



## YouSir (Jul 30, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> stable of bloggers lol really ??


 







Intersectionality always starts with a strong pimp hand on your blog.


----------



## J Ed (Jul 30, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/362142216757583872 Imagine a future in which we all work for free in workhouses under the watchful gaze of an inclusive stable of intersectionality moderators where women are forced to _monetize_ their hotness but only for the minority of people who are educated to be able to properly understand that week's intersectional diktat.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 30, 2013)

YouSir said:


> Intersectionality always starts with a strong pimp hand on your blog.


 
"The love of a pimp is not like that of an ordinary man".


----------



## YouSir (Jul 30, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> "The love of a pimp is not like that of an ordinary man".


 

"The love of a radical Left Wing journalist is not like that of an ordinary journalist"

I'd ask Laurie Penny if I could be her bottom bitch but I may have too much privilege to check first.


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 30, 2013)

Further Amanda Palmer revelations (NSFW):


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 30, 2013)

rank patronage is a little bit communisn't


----------



## Bakunin (Jul 30, 2013)

YouSir said:


> "The love of a radical Left Wing journalist is not like that of an ordinary journalist"
> 
> I'd ask Laurie Penny if I could be her bottom bitch but I may have too much privilege to check first.


 





'You fancy sleeping on top tonight..?'

'But there's only one bunk.'

'You said a mouthful...'


----------



## newbie (Jul 30, 2013)

TruXta said:


> How long were Olde Tyme propaganda pamphlets? Bet you they weren't 20K words long.


I've got boxes of them. They were such an important way to share ideas. They're mostly in the loft, not all though, some are still in the wild.

These are the first three pamphlets I found.

"A State of Siege Policing the coalfields in the first 6 weeks of the miners strike". Cost £2 in June 1984. 66 A5 pages, rather dense print, not many photos

"A Tax on Peace Conscientious Objectors & the Taxpayer" £1.50, no obvious date. 50 A5 pages, only 1 photo

"Without a Trace a forensics manual for you and me" £2 no date 32 A4 pages. This one's been dtp'd so a few graphics/photos.

e2a  according to the site Cesare linked, 18,000 words of 10pt Courier is 32 A4 pages.  The miners strike pamphlet is somewhat smaller than 10pt so 66xA5 is probably over 20k words.  It's not an unusually thick or dense pamphlet though.


----------



## TruXta (Jul 30, 2013)

newbie said:


> I've got boxes of them. They were such an important way to share ideas. They're mostly in the loft, not all though, some are still in the wild.
> 
> These are the first three pamphlets I found.
> 
> ...


 
I stand corrected then. Which doesn't mean I retract my overall point wrt Delroy's argument.


----------



## newbie (Jul 30, 2013)

I can't imagine how long it'd take to read them! My attention span has undoubtedly been dwindling since the late 80s when I first got a modem, and I don't suppose I've bought a pamphlet in the best part of 20 years. Call me shallow but I've no great regrets about that, I'd far rather read an argument about something, with both/many sides being put and torn to shreds than a single sustained view, however well thought through and developed.  I feel I learn more.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 31, 2013)

http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/181231/why-i-check-both-white-and-jewish/

wtf is this




> when all I have to do is close a door to make it seem like I am bulldozing an entire city? Simply by being white, I am aware that I trigger other people’s pain.





> Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/181231/why-i-check-both-white-and-jewish/#ixzz2acvyFAVf


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 31, 2013)

> All over in this country, my skin color grants me access and prompts trauma for others; while I involuntarily gentrify my Brooklyn neighborhood, my skin color actively upset a man on a rainy Saturday morning.





>




really??


----------



## andysays (Jul 31, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> wtf is this


 
There's possibly an interesting issue in there somewhere, but it's difficult to uncover it from under the

"naive-but-well-meaning priviledged young woman has sudden confrontation with a side of the real world her extensive education hasn't prepared her for"​ 
stuff.

What do you make of it?


----------



## Idris2002 (Jul 31, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> Simply by being white, I am aware that I trigger other people’s pain.


 
Whiteman - worst superhero ever.


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 31, 2013)

andysays said:


> There's possibly an interesting issue in there somewhere, but it's difficult to uncover it from under the
> 
> "naive-but-well-meaning priviledged young woman has sudden confrontation with a side of the real world her extensive education hasn't prepared her for"​
> stuff.
> ...


 

I find such stuff quite disturbing to be honest.


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> really??


Liberal suicide vs Huey Newtons revolutionary suicide. Sacrifice yourself, liquidate yourself.


----------



## Nice one (Jul 31, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/181231/why-i-check-both-white-and-jewish/
> 
> wtf is this


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 31, 2013)

> When I left the mostly white, affluent Chicago suburb in which I grew up for college at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia




'met poverty for the first time'

should have watched the tom hanks film first and then would have been semi prepared


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2013)

It's all simple, Stop doing what you're doing - go elsewhere and stop worrying about being where the next artists hang out is (this is stuff that you do voluntarily, the gentrification stuff). Stop looking at yourself and others in racialised terms. Try and understand how in the US race is a a refraction of class ('racecraft'). Talk to normal people. Stop thinking about yourself.


----------



## andysays (Jul 31, 2013)

Idris2002 said:


> Whiteman - worst superhero ever.


 
White/jewish woman, actually - check your super-hero stereotyping


----------



## andysays (Jul 31, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> It's all simple, Stop doing what you're doing - go elsewhere and stop worrying about being where the next artists hang out is (this is stuff that you do voluntarily, the gentrification stuff). Stop looking at yourself and others in racialised terms. Try and understand how in the US race is a a refraction of class ('racecraft'). Talk to normal people. Stop thinking about yourself.


 
In an attempt to be fair to the author, she does appear to be attempting to talk to normal people, and she does appear to have at least some insight into her position.

She's probably bang to rights on the gentrification stuff, but it would be even more a manifestation of privilege if she simply upped and went elsewhere to somewhere she wouldn't have a similar experience. Similarly, it takes a lot of thought and experience for most people to stop looking at self and others in racialised terms.

Her initial reaction seems to be overly emotional and thinking about herself, but maybe there's a possibility she can move beyond this. There's nothing in particular in her piece to suggest this, but who knows...


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 31, 2013)

andysays said:


> In an attempt to be fair to the author, she does appear to be attempting to talk to normal people, and she does appear to have at least some insight into her position.
> 
> She's probably bang to rights on the gentrification stuff, but it would be even more a manifestation of privilege if she simply upped and went elsewhere to somewhere she wouldn't have a similar experience. Similarly, it takes a lot of thought and experience for most people to stop looking at self and others in racialised terms.
> 
> Her initial reaction seems to be overly emotional and thinking about herself, *but maybe there's a possibility she can move beyond this. There's nothing in particular in her piece to suggest this, but who knows..*.


----------



## andysays (Jul 31, 2013)

The39thStep said:


>


 
Yeah, probably .


----------



## The Pale King (Jul 31, 2013)

"On a recent Saturday morning, I left my Bushwick apartment in yellow galoshes and a black raincoat, my red umbrella tucked under my elbow, my yoga mat swung over my shoulder."




"While I acknowledge the many manifestations of my white privilege and care deeply about creating an equitable society, I continually confront the paradox of being both the oppressor (white) and the oppressed (Jewish)."

Is it really so binary? Is it really so dificult 'confronting this paradox'?

"I have pondered, investigated and deconstructed my own social identity as both white and Jewish for years."

She should get out more

"when all I have to do is close a door to make it seem like I am bulldozing an entire city? Simply by being white, I am aware that I trigger other people’s pain."

Intersectionalists don't have a theory of power, or at least not a good one. It leads them to personalise political arguments and self-dramatise relentlessly. Politics becomes internal, about techniques of the self.

"Maybe it was the fact that I _had_ intentionally closed the door — not because he was Latino, but because he was a stranger, and no matter how socially aware I strive to be, no matter how hard I work to negotiate my white privilege and unpack my simultaneous identity as the oppressor and the oppressed, there is still an impulse, deep inside, to overlook a stranger in the doorway.
Sometimes, negotiating this often juxtaposed, yet simultaneous sense of self, that’s how I feel inside: a stranger in the doorway, not sure which identity is in, not sure which identity is out."

She can never unpack her identity enough. She can never eradicate the impulses. Is it just me or does this stuff sound more theological than political? And so solipsistic. Remember the whites still have the power...to make things better... by treating the locals better! Whites are still the centre of this story, the active subjects.


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 31, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> "On a recent Saturday morning, I left my Bushwick apartment in yellow galoshes and a black raincoat, my red umbrella tucked under my elbow, my yoga mat swung over my shoulder."
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 

I was saying to frog that this attempt to 'empathise' or 'recognize' the power imbalances through the prism of intersectionalty leads to an almost insulting noble-savage type concern. And yes thats massively solipsistic.

the paper seller doesn't even warrant a name!  a sidepiece in her own drama


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2013)

Yeah but, people don't think or act like that in reality - are we just identifying idiots or are we saying this stuff had some social weight? We're way off course here.  Find an idiot and laugh at them is not what this is about is it?


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 31, 2013)

how much social weight does it have? Outside of campus politics and the bubble- where is its impact? Apart from annoying me?

Some on this very thread have mentioned how its poisoning uni politics but outside of that?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> how much social weight does it have? Outside of campus politics and the bubble- where is its impact? Apart from annoying me?
> 
> Some on this very thread have mentioned how its poisoning uni politics but outside of that?


 
People who go on to make your life hell in official positions and who can mobilise to freeze out people in academia - people who go on to plan the state and capital, this time along open diverse lines in the Long term  People who make their guilt your issue in the short term.


----------



## The39thStep (Jul 31, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> People who go on to make your life hell in official positions and who can mobilise to freeze out people in academia - people who go on to plan the state and capital, this time along open diverse lines in the Long term People who make their guilt your issue in the short term.


 
Absolutely we had the same in the 80s where the 'isms' all got well paid jobs in the public sector and built hierarchies of oppression and healthy bank balances.

I have had this conversation before but the conclusion of the 1980s hierarchies of oppression ( which intersectionality is very similar to) produced the marvellous conclusion that if you were white the best you could be was an anti racist racist.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Jul 31, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> if you were white the best you could be was an anti racist racist.


 
they said i could be anything i wanted....


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 31, 2013)

http://disillusionedmarxist.wordpress.com/2013/07/31/jewsplaining/ if anyones interested lol


----------



## DotCommunist (Jul 31, 2013)

The39thStep said:


> Absolutely we had the same in the 80s where the 'isms' all got well paid jobs in the public sector and built hierarchies of oppression and healthy bank balances.
> 
> I have had this conversation before but the conclusion of the 1980s *hierarchies of oppression* ( which intersectionality is very similar to) produced the marvellous conclusion that if you were white the best you could be was an anti racist racist.


 
see I have considered this idea before and it older than your experience by my (patchy) reading, within movements and seeing a resurgence now. The real opposition must be laughing on the other side of their faces to see people get so mugged


----------



## frogwoman (Jul 31, 2013)

http://loreley.flyingparchment.org....ill-be-intersectional-or-it-will-be-bullshit/ .


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> http://loreley.flyingparchment.org....ill-be-intersectional-or-it-will-be-bullshit/ i don't know where to start with this ...


 
Why not ignore it?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2013)

Let's get Laurie.


----------



## andysays (Jul 31, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Let's get Laurie.


 
Define "get"


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2013)

Why?


----------



## andysays (Jul 31, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Why?


 
Sigh...

...Because unless you clarify what you mean by "Let's get Laurie" any meaningful response is impossible.

Or is tonight cryptic comments night and I've just misplaced my diary?


----------



## butchersapron (Jul 31, 2013)

Oh god, you _actually_ typed out 'sigh'.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Aug 1, 2013)

the psy


----------



## kavenism (Aug 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> http://loreley.flyingparchment.org....ill-be-intersectional-or-it-will-be-bullshit/ .


It's ok up to the last two paragraphs, then it goes completely conger eel.



> to reduce left politics to a simple class struggle is at best a futile academic exercise; at worst, it appropriates the struggles of queers, people of colour, women, and other marginalised groups for the benefit of privileged white men, and is in itself a manifestation of oppression.


----------



## kavenism (Aug 1, 2013)

Class struggle. Is oppression.


----------



## Limerick Red (Aug 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> http://loreley.flyingparchment.org....ill-be-intersectional-or-it-will-be-bullshit/ .


 
Dont worry white cis males, your oppression is only economic!


----------



## J Ed (Aug 1, 2013)

The inclusivity of my stable of bloggers will be intersectional with membership of the House of Lords or it will be bullshit! https://twitter.com/helenlewis/status/362880284447866880


----------



## Bakunin (Aug 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> The inclusivity of my stable of bloggers will be intersectional with membership of the House of Lords


 

Check your privilege.


----------



## J Ed (Aug 1, 2013)

101 Everyday Ways for Men to Be Allies to Women

http://michaelurbina.com/101-everyday-ways-for-men-to-be-allies-to-women/

A lot of these suggestions are good and you would think would be common sense to any decent human being but some of them just confuse me and are hardly universally applicable and some seem contradictory.



> 19. Let yourself cry and be emotional.
> 
> Men are taught that showing emotion (especially in public) is frowned upon and not masculine. Screw that… Challenge traditional expectations of masculinity and stand in solidarity with women and the LGBT community in changing gender expectations. Crying, being emotional, and being true to how you really feel despite cultural expectations is a MUST.


 


> 21. Read websites like Feministing, Colorlines, Jezebel, etc. for your news sources.
> 
> Check out these sites DAILY! All of them have great news stories from a feminist perspective and will help you in your journey towards becoming a better ally. What’s great about these sites is that they always have links to other great websites.


 


> 40. Never seek recognition or affirmation.
> 
> While some men are made fun of for caring about women’s rights and feminism, there is very something alluring about being a male feminist (or so I hear). There aren’t many of us, therefore it may seem tempting to let this get to your head. Also, it may seem tempting to seek validation and verbal recognition from women and people you know for caring about these issues and being different. Guess what, this is your responsibility. Why should you receive recognition when women don’t? This is why I absolutely hate it when I’m recognized at conferences for being one of like two or three males present. I don’t want the recognition and neither should you. Don’t advertise yourself as a “male feminist” in search of respect. You’re just going to come across as rude, fake, and completely disrespectful. Do the work with humility and modesty.


 
OK, got it, no t-shirts!



> 52. Learn about your own familial roots and culture.
> 
> If you don’t know where you came from, it’s going to be be difficult to see where you’re going. Explore! Culture and diversity is beautiful, and being able to appreciate and respect culture will make you a better ally.
> Intersectionality is vital to allyship! Your race/ethnicity are important, and it will set you down different paths. White male allies will have different experiences than male allies of color. Understanding how your identities intersect matter!
> ...


 
Fine for me and my family's Irish background but what if I were the descendent of some sort of Southern US aristo? Should my feminism be intersectional with neo-confederacy? 


> 70. Learn and use appropriate vocabulary.
> 
> Go back to #25 and check out those books. Familiarize yourself. Here are some keywords you should know: feminism, patriarchy, oppression, privilege, resistance, intersectionality, LGBTQQIAA (and what each letter stands for), double consciousness, masculinity, femininity, differences between sex and gender, gender spectrum, sexism (and all of the -isms), glass ceiling, glass escalator, whiteness, etc. That’s a good starter list. Believe me, there’s a lot more.


 
Weird how _intersectionalistas_ never think to make THEIR language more applicable to everyone else rather than vice versa.



> 80. Make your space feminist!
> 
> Posters, wall art, flags, or any feminist propaganda! Make your room an inclusive, decorative place to remind you of what you’re invested in. On my wall, I have posters and flyers from all the events and protests I have ever attended in my college career.


 
But point 40?



> 81. Make a Twitter account.
> 
> I’ve found tremendous success in connecting to other feminists and allies via Twitter! I strongly suggest you make a Twitter and use that to keep up with feminist blogs, activists, and movements.


 
lol



> 84. Cook with your girlfriend, partner, or spouse.
> 
> Come on, it’s cute. It shows her you care. It might even help you out later down the road.


 
What if I almost always cook for my girlfriend, should I be encouraging her to cook with me?



> 94. Showcase your feminist pride! (If you’re comfortable)
> 
> Wear t-shirts, sport wristbands, or put cool bumper stickers on your car. Make noise! There are many different ways to do so. As a man, you’re bound to draw attention and possibly rally support with your feminist gear. Here’s my favorite t-shirt design.


 
40?


----------



## caleb (Aug 1, 2013)

Was just about to post that. You left off one of the most ridiculous (and telling):



> *38. Put yourself in situations for self-growth through activism.*
> 
> If you have an opportunity to learn more through a job, internship, or position in activism, I encourage you to give it a whirl. Activism is a beautiful, raw way to put your beliefs into practice.


----------



## butchersapron (Aug 1, 2013)

The 'LGBT community' is always crying_. It's what they do._


----------



## butchersapron (Aug 1, 2013)

Hang on, to be _nice_ you must do an internship. Yep, that tells me all i need to know about your bubble.


----------



## J Ed (Aug 1, 2013)

How should I go about this crying in public business? Should I stand in a shopping centre and think about a movie with a dog dying in loyal service to its owner?


----------



## TruXta (Aug 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> How should I go about this crying in public business? Should I stand in a shopping centre and think about a movie with a dog dying in loyal service to its owner?


Ask some swappies?


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

caleb said:


> Was just about to post that. You left off one of the most ridiculous (and telling):


 
A position in activism? 

this doesn't even make sense.


----------



## butchersapron (Aug 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> How should I go about this crying in public business? Should I stand in a shopping centre and think about a movie with a dog dying in loyal service to its owner?


 
That needs a trigger warning. Afternoon ruined now.


----------



## butchersapron (Aug 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> A position in activism?
> 
> this doesn't even make sense.


 
Have you never been interviewed for a salaried position in activism?


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

_



			21. Read websites like Feministing, Colorlines, Jezebel, etc. for your news sources.
		
Click to expand...

_


> _Check out these sites DAILY! All of them have great news stories from a feminist perspective and will help you in your journey towards becoming a better ally. What’s great about these sites is that they always have links to other great websites._




_and that's what you should do to be a great ally? _


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Have you never been interviewed for a salaried position in activism?


 

I've been a trot and had some articles published in the paper. Does that count?


----------



## butchersapron (Aug 1, 2013)

Did you do an internship though?


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Did you do an internship though?


 

I did work unpaid for a publishing company for about two months once. i ended up in hundreds of pounds worth of debt. 

i didn't do an internship in trottery tho no.


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 1, 2013)

> _LGBTQQIAA_


 

fuck man, theres more letters and I have fallen behind again


----------



## Bakunin (Aug 1, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> fuck man, theres more letters and I have fallen behind again


 

Nine letters. Could be a nice little earner if I self-published the 'Bumper Book of Activist Sudoku.'


----------



## JHE (Aug 1, 2013)

_



			LGBTQQIAA
		
Click to expand...

_ 
_Someone must have made this up to take the piss_


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)




----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 1, 2013)

think the I is intersex. It was just LGBT for ages, then the Q for queer has been added as the word has been sort of reclaimed like. No idea on the others tbf.


----------



## TruXta (Aug 1, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> think the I is intersex. It was just LGBT for ages, then the Q for queer has been added as the word has been sort of reclaimed like. No idea on the others tbf.


The A's are (I think) Asexual and Androgynous.


----------



## JHE (Aug 1, 2013)

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual and Ally

...apparently


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

wtf? an ally is just a straight person that doesn't have a problem with or wants to "help" LGBT etc people aren't they?


----------



## love detective (Aug 1, 2013)

maybe they mean this ally


----------



## Limerick Red (Aug 1, 2013)

love detective said:


> maybe they mean this ally


I think this calls for a frogwoman intersectional analysis of the Zombies FC.


----------



## Sue (Aug 1, 2013)

love detective said:


> maybe they mean this ally


 
He's looking a bit lardy these days.


----------



## Sue (Aug 1, 2013)

Hmm, for some reason can't post up a picture of the other great footballing Ally.


----------



## el-ahrairah (Aug 1, 2013)

i think all those types of people are human and deserve fair consideration and rights and all that stuff.  does this mean i have to be an ally, or can i just be _not a prick_?


----------



## J Ed (Aug 1, 2013)

I can't believe I missed this 

http://michaelurbina.com/101-everyday-ways-for-men-to-be-allies-to-women/



> 9. Walk on the other side of the street when a woman is walking towards you at night.
> 
> I make every effort when I’m out at night to pose myself as a non-threatening person in order to make women feel more comfortable. Some ways that I do so include making sure my hands are always visible as I’m passing a woman, looking downward or away from the woman I’m passing by, or just completely crossing the street so the woman coming towards me doesn’t feel threatened in any way by my presence. I do what I can as a conscious male. *It’s also important to recognize that I am Latino. Sadly, men of color are more likely to be profiled as dangerous than white men. I began this practice knowing that I will be seen as more dangerous and threatening.*


 
When and where was this written? Antebellum South Carolina?


----------



## TruXta (Aug 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I can't believe I missed this
> 
> http://michaelurbina.com/101-everyday-ways-for-men-to-be-allies-to-women/
> 
> ...


I don't see what's so odd about that.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I can't believe I missed this
> 
> http://michaelurbina.com/101-everyday-ways-for-men-to-be-allies-to-women/
> 
> ...


 
what the fuck?

Self-hating crap.

to be fair, i do feel threatened by that sort of thing at night and fair enough if you're doing that but it's the way he's saying "I'm latino..." like that's something he can help.


----------



## rekil (Aug 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I can't believe I missed this


That bit is correct.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

90% of this is just obvious "don't be a dick" stuff.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

*27. **Support non-profit organizations and pro-feminist groups.*

Subscribe to email lists, participate in forums, seek internships, or become a part of non-profit organizations. There are plenty of ways to get involved!
*28. Journal daily and reflect on your behaviors, thoughts, ideas, etc.*

We all need self-reflection time. I’ve found journaling about my experiences and journey to be extremely helpful in keeping me motivated and connected to the broader movement.


----------



## TruXta (Aug 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> what the fuck?
> 
> Self-hating crap.
> 
> to be fair, i do feel threatened by that sort of thing at night and fair enough if you're doing that but it's the way he's saying "I'm latino..." like that's something he can help.


I read it as "I'm Latino, men of colour are more likely to be seen as dangerous". I don't see your point really.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

*56. Think about issues and your own life from an intersectional lens.*

Expanding on #52… We all have different experiences as men. We come from different backgrounds; therefore, we must take all of our identities into account when examining specific issues. For example, being a Latino, heterosexual male, I’m most definitely going to have a different opinion than a White, homosexual male on same-sex marriage. Rather than simply looking at issues as a male, it’s important that we all consider our complete background. This will give us the opportunity to acknowledge all voices and backgrounds and have a real dialogue around issues.
why would that be a given?


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

*80. Make your space feminist!*

Posters, wall art, flags, or any feminist propaganda! Make your room an inclusive, decorative place to remind you of what you’re invested in. On my wall, I have posters and flyers from all the events and protests I have ever attended in my college career.
I don't see what this has got to do with anything!! the guy who sexually assaulted me had a flat that was covered in political posters/literature.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

*84. Cook with your girlfriend, partner, or spouse.*

Come on, it’s cute. It shows her you care. It might even help you out later down the road.
_Cute? _
Really? Really?


----------



## J Ed (Aug 1, 2013)

TruXta said:


> I read it as "I'm Latino, men of colour are more likely to be seen as dangerous". I don't see your point really.


 

I don't know, I feel very uncomfortable with the idea that men who are stigmatised as being more likely to be violent because of their race feeling more obligated to move to the other side of a road than men who don't suffer from the same stigma.


----------



## TruXta (Aug 1, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I don't know, I feel very uncomfortable with the idea that men who are stigmatised as being more likely to be violent because of their race feeling more obligated to move to the other side of a road than men who don't suffer from the same stigma.


Sure, I get that. FWIW I often cross the road myself if I'm out walking in the dark and a woman is walking towards me. I'm white, but I've been known to wear clothes that some people apparently associate with less salubrious types. Is that sad and a bit wrong? Sure. I still think it's the easiest option to make someone elses life easier without going out of my way too much (pun not intended).


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

With this "Jewsplaining" thing I'm slightly confused as to whether I'm supposed to be privileged or oppressed and whether dotty's supposed to be my ally or I'm supposed to be his. Can anyone help? 



> crazykillerkungfuwolfbitch





> said: Not to mention, the Ashkenazi Jews went to Israel and did ALL THAT shit to the Palestenians. Oh, and they are now putting African people in concentration camps. Lastly, what Germany did to Africa before WWII makes the holocaust look like childs play.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Sure, I get that. FWIW I often cross the road myself if I'm out walking in the dark and a woman is walking towards me. I'm white, but I've been known to wear clothes that some people apparently associate with less salubrious types. Is that sad and a bit wrong? Sure. I still think it's the easiest option to make someone elses life easier without going out of my way too much (pun not intended).


 
No it's not wrong at all but I don't think that someone should feel any more of an obligation to do it just because of their race.


----------



## TruXta (Aug 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> No it's not wrong at all but I don't think that someone should feel any more of an obligation to do it just because of their race.


I don't think anyone should feel an obligation to do so at all. It's a nice thing to do if you have reason to think women in your area are a bit scared to walk alone after dark. If you don't there's nothing wrong with that either.


----------



## smokedout (Aug 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> to be fair, i do feel threatened by that sort of thing at night and fair enough if you're doing that


 
it's a fucking minefield especially if there's only one path, do you stay a sinister lurking distance behind, or attempt to overtake, thereby increasing the fear, but only temporarily until you get a safe distance in front

you have no idea what us allies go through


----------



## TruXta (Aug 1, 2013)

smokedout said:


> it's a fucking minefield especially if there's only one path, do you stay a sinister lurking distance behind, or attempt to overtake, thereby increasing the fear, but only temporarily until you get a safe distance in front
> 
> you have no idea what us allies go through


Always overtake. A moment of panic is surely preferrable to minutes of low-level fear? I'm referring to my own emotions of course.


----------



## smokedout (Aug 1, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Always overtake. A moment of panic is surely preferrable to minutes of low-level fear? I'm referring to my own emotions of course.


 
thats what I think, but some people might prefer drawn out low level fear to a quick adrenalin rush of terror, how are you supposed to tell


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Aug 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> With this "Jewsplaining" thing I'm slightly confused as to whether I'm supposed to be privileged or oppressed...


 
There's a point system, obvs. Kind of like that political compass thing. No idea what the axes would be, but I'm sure someone can help us out.


----------



## Limerick Red (Aug 1, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> There's a point system, obvs. Kind of like that political compass thing. No idea what the axes would be, but I'm sure someone can help us out.


Surely depends on skin tones, the whiter the person you're speaking to the more oppressed you are, the darker the more priviledged you are, there is a special coin you can send away to twitter for, in the case that you are speaking to middle-eastern people, this coin when flipped will determine which attitude you may adopt.


----------



## smokedout (Aug 1, 2013)

lots of questions emerging, looks like we need lauriepenny to come and explain thing to us again


----------



## agricola (Aug 1, 2013)

smokedout said:


> thats what I think, but some people might prefer drawn out low level fear to a quick adrenalin rush of terror, how are you supposed to tell


 
Run past them, then run back past them and follow them for twenty minutes, then ask which was the more terrifying whilst wearing a mask that conceals your ethnicity.


----------



## Limerick Red (Aug 1, 2013)

agricola said:


> Run past them, then run back past them and follow them for twenty minutes, then ask which was the more terrifying whilst wearing a mask that conceals your ethnicity.


while crying uncontrollably re: point 19.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

given julie burchill's well known liking for my religion, documented a few times on these forums, i am starting to wonder if she's actually my ally in a struggle against oppression, and by taking the piss out of her i'm actually just stifling her attempts to be a better ally and not helping her grow and get in touch with her true emotions and that. i mean i don't really have any idea how hard it is being julie burchill do i 

seriously, this "allies" stuff just reminds me of people like her going on and on about how they like a certain race or ethnicity and feel such an affinity to them, when all you have to do is not be a dick, not make a lifestyle choice out of it


----------



## Buckaroo (Aug 1, 2013)

Use common sense. If you sense they sense you're a nuisance make small talk. Ask them if they're on twitter. Do they know any good Lebanese restaurants. Have they got a tab to spare. etc


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

Buckaroo said:


> Use common sense. If you sense they sense you're a nuisance make small talk. Ask them if they're on twitter. Do they know any good Lebanese restaurants. Have they got a tab to spare. etc


 

don't forget to invite them back to your place to view your collection of feminist posters. that will make them feel really comfortable.


----------



## agricola (Aug 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> don't forget to invite them back to your place to view your collection of feminist posters. that will make them feel really comfortable.


 
Was there still any desire to change the title of this thread?  If so "_a collection of feminist posters_" might be a good one.


----------



## ska invita (Aug 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> going on and on about how they like a certain race or ethnicity


 
theres no such thing as race*  (*hoping people will stop using the term)


----------



## Buckaroo (Aug 1, 2013)

agricola said:


> Was there still any desire to change the title of this thread? If so "_a collection of feminist posters_" might be a good one.


 
Bravo


----------



## The Pale King (Aug 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> don't forget to invite them back to your place to view your collection of feminist posters. that will make them feel really comfortable.


 
lol they should already have spotted my feminist ally baseball cap and hoodie. I will rally support with my feminist gear!

94. Showcase your feminist pride! (If you’re comfortable)

Wear t-shirts, sport wristbands, or put cool bumper stickers on your car. Make noise! There are many different ways to do so. As a man, you’re bound to draw attention and possibly rally support with your feminist gear


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

In order to decrease your chances of burnout, find ways of practicing self-care in order to keep you motivated and productive in allyship. Self-care can come in many forms. For example: playing sports, hiking, doing yoga, reading non-feminist literature, going off the grid, dancing, working out, spending time with friends and family, etc. The possibilities are endless, but once you find things that make you happy, stick to them!

Does "non feminist literature" include things like Chronicles of Gor? I do hope not


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

While some men are made fun of for caring about women’s rights and feminism, there is very something alluring about being a male feminist (or so I hear). There aren’t many of us, therefore it may seem tempting to let this get to your head. Also, it may seem tempting to seek validation and verbal recognition from women and people you know for caring about these issues and being different. Guess what, this is your responsibility. Why should you receive recognition when women don’t? This is why I absolutely hate it when I’m recognized at conferences for being one of like two or three males present. I don’t want the recognition and neither should you. Don’t advertise yourself as a “male feminist” in search of respect. You’re just going to come across as rude, fake, and completely disrespectful. Do the work with humility and modesty. 
the whole blog post is him attempting to seek validation


----------



## TruXta (Aug 1, 2013)

Outed! (((dotsy)))


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

Often times, men who have close relationships with other men are seen as homosexual. *That is completely messed up *and demonstrates a perfect example of the institutionalized homophobia


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

TruXta said:


> Outed! (((dotsy)))


 

no he doesn't read that bollocks, i was laughing at how its a good idea to read "non feminist literature" to prevent "burnout"


----------



## emanymton (Aug 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> While some men are made fun of for caring about women’s rights and feminism, there is very something alluring about being a male feminist (or so I hear). There aren’t many of us, therefore it may seem tempting to let this get to your head. Also, it may seem tempting to seek validation and verbal recognition from women and people you know for caring about these issues and being different. Guess what, this is your responsibility. Why should you receive recognition when women don’t? This is why I absolutely hate it when I’m recognized at conferences for being one of like two or three males present. I don’t want the recognition and neither should you. Don’t advertise yourself as a “male feminist” in search of respect. You’re just going to come across as rude, fake, and completely disrespectful. Do the work with humility and modesty.
> the whole blog post is him attempting to seek validation


 
This whole ally thing is if you ask me.


----------



## ItWillNeverWork (Aug 1, 2013)

emanymton said:


> This whole ally thing is if you ask me.


 
It's all a bit patronising too. Look how many LBGTQQRSTFLMNOP friends I have! How thankful they must be for me helping them out in this way.


----------



## The Pale King (Aug 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> While some men are made fun of for caring about women’s rights and feminism, there is very something alluring about being a male feminist (or so I hear). There aren’t many of us, therefore it may seem tempting to let this get to your head. Also, it may seem tempting to seek validation and verbal recognition from women and people you know for caring about these issues and being different. Guess what, this is your responsibility. Why should you receive recognition when women don’t? This is why I absolutely hate it when I’m recognized at conferences for being one of like two or three males present. I don’t want the recognition and neither should you. Don’t advertise yourself as a “male feminist” in search of respect. You’re just going to come across as rude, fake, and completely disrespectful. Do the work with humility and modesty.
> the whole blog post is him attempting to seek validation


 

Totally. There's a gaping void where they're self-awareness ought to be. 

To quote Paul Calf "I'm a radical feminist. You have to be these days if you want to get your end away..."


----------



## smokedout (Aug 1, 2013)

The Pale King said:


> 94. Showcase your feminist pride! (If you’re comfortable)
> 
> Wear t-shirts, sport wristbands, or put cool bumper stickers on your car. Make noise! There are many different ways to do so. As a man, you’re bound to draw attention and possibly rally support with your feminist gear


 
if you're lucky you might even get laid

(is what he means)


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

cynicaleconomy said:


> It's all a bit patronising too. Look how many LBGTQQRSTFLMNOP friends I have! How thankful they must be for me helping them out in this way.


 

i don't know about you but whenever someone talks in this sort of way with me i generally feel quite uncomfortable and it's a few steps away from viewing people as all being oppressed and deserving of pity to viewing them in other stereotypical ways as well


----------



## smokedout (Aug 1, 2013)

http://www.blackpeopleloveus.com/


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

*I like Johnny and Sally because they NEVER flaunt their wealth in front of me. In fact, they go to great lengths to keep their valuables as well as their wallets and purses as far away from me as possible. How cool is THAT???*

* *


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 1, 2013)

smokedout said:


> it's a fucking minefield especially if there's only one path, do you stay a sinister lurking distance behind, or attempt to overtake, thereby increasing the fear, but only temporarily until you get a safe distance in front
> 
> you have no idea what us allies go through


 

Whats not on, regardless of race, gender or anything, is to casually walk two feet behind someone on a deserted night street. Even if the person in front of you is a brick shithouse built to municipal proportions and is clearly three sheets.

They can hear you. The scenarios are flashing through their head. Cross the damn road. That goes double if its a woman. Just courtesy. No need to shit someone up, give them that itch between the shoulder blades of 'oh fuck'. Have some manners


----------



## DaveCinzano (Aug 1, 2013)

smokedout said:


> you have no idea what us allies go through


 
Yalta, Tehran, Casablanca - and don't get me started on Bretton Woods.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> Yalta, Tehran, Casablanca - and don't get me started on Bretton Woods.


----------



## Greebo (Aug 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> <snip>Does "non feminist literature" include things like Chronicles of Gor? I do hope not


 
Chronicles of Gor barely qualifies as reading material, let alone literature.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

Greebo said:


> Chronicles of Gor barely qualifies as reading material, let alone literature.


 

but if you're so devoted to feminism why woudl you "chill out" by reading literature that was consciously "non-feminist"? it's like being an anti-fascist and then chilling out by reading some enid blyton? 

why would you do it?


----------



## Greebo (Aug 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> but if you're so devoted to feminism why woudl you "chill out" by reading literature that was consciously "non-feminist"?<snip>


 
I suppose it's on a par with going vegetarian for political/pulling reasons but sneaking the odd bacon sarnie because you just don't enjoy much of the vegetarian food you've tasted so far.


----------



## J Ed (Aug 1, 2013)

Greebo said:


> I suppose it's on a par with going vegetarian for political/pulling reasons but sneaking the odd bacon sarnie because you just don't enjoy much of the vegetarian food you've tasted so far.


 

lol I had a friend that did this (well sort of, his gf refused to date meat eaters) but he ended up veggie in the end


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 1, 2013)

not to mention transgression enjoyment

or even something so simple as reading tightly plotted trash cos you like it. For anyone who has read David Gemmel you know exactly what I mean. Characters called 'Bane the Bastard' who happen to be the wronged son of a clan chief and a man trained in the use of two swords in the fighting pits of the evil empire, who was bought from your wicked uncle by slavers but has fought to freedom etc etc

And that cunt with the repeating crossbow, Gemmel got three books out of him and I still can't remember his name. It was all about the plot/action


----------



## Bakunin (Aug 1, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> reading tightly plotted trash cos you like it.


 

Ahem, good sir. I will defend my collections of Frederick Forsyth to the last bullet even if he is a bit right-wing.


----------



## BigTom (Aug 1, 2013)

smokedout said:


> thats what I think, but some people might prefer drawn out low level fear to a quick adrenalin rush of terror, how are you supposed to tell


 
I reckon that as you are approaching them, you should shout loudly DON'T WORRY I'M A FEMINIST ALLY , I'M NOT A RAPIST, MURDERER OR MUGGER. That should set their mind at rest, knowing you are an ally and that.


----------



## Ole (Aug 1, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Whats not on, regardless of race, gender or anything, is to casually walk two feet behind someone on a deserted night street. Even if the person in front of you is a brick shithouse built to municipal proportions and is clearly three sheets.
> 
> They can hear you. The scenarios are flashing through their head. Cross the damn road. That goes double if its a woman. Just courtesy. No need to shit someone up, give them that itch between the shoulder blades of 'oh fuck'. Have some manners



I'm not gonna cross the rasclaat road whenever someone is in front of me at night but that doesn't mean I don't have manners. Same rules whatever the time, either keep an appropriate distance or overtake. What sort of absolute weirdo walks two feet behind someone for any noticeable length of time, whatever the time of day?


----------



## smokedout (Aug 1, 2013)

BigTom said:


> I reckon that as you are approaching them, you should shout loudly DON'T WORRY I'M A FEMINIST ALLY , I'M NOT A RAPIST, MURDERER OR MUGGER. That should set their mind at rest, knowing you are an ally and that.


 
FEMINIST ALLY COMING THROUGH ... would you like to see my posters in my feminist bedroom


----------



## weepiper (Aug 1, 2013)

smokedout said:


> FEMINIST ALLY COMING THROUGH ... would you like to see my posters in my feminist bedroom


 

wanna see some etchings of Virginia Woolf?


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 1, 2013)

One day me and my mate Paula were coming back from a night out. As we approached Paulas house (where i might have been living at the time, cant remember when i moved in) we heard a noise like a cat. We turned around and it was a guy, we heard his voice across the street "DON'T WORRY! I'M NOT A RAPIST!" we both started running like fuck, and bolted up the hill to where paulas house was. 

I'm now thinking that we had no reason to be scared and this guy was only trying to be a feminist ally.


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 1, 2013)

Ole said:


> I'm not gonna cross the rasclaat road whenever someone is in front of me at night but that doesn't mean I don't have manners. Same rules whatever the time, either keep an appropriate distance or overtake. What sort of absolute weirdo walks two feet behind someone for any noticeable length of time, whatever the time of day?


 

people in a crowded fast moving street


----------



## smokedout (Aug 1, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> I'm now thinking that we had no reason to be scared and this guy was only trying to be a feminist ally.


 
if he wasn't wearing a feminist ally armband you were right not to trust him


----------



## smokedout (Aug 1, 2013)

anyway I'm not a feminist ally, I'm a fucking feminist, ally is like Stalin to Churchill, a mutually beneficial allegiance for a specific gain


----------



## Ole (Aug 1, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> people in a crowded fast moving street


So only when completely involuntarily? OK.


----------



## toggle (Aug 1, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Ahem, good sir. I will defend my collections of Frederick Forsyth to the last bullet even if he is a bit right-wing.


 
Don't worry, no one looking at your book collection will notice anything other than the 95% of it or so that is about serial killers and the several large and brightly coloured mental health self help books


your secret will be completely safe from everyone who is running very fast back to town


----------



## Bakunin (Aug 1, 2013)

toggle said:


> Don't worry, no one looking at your book collection will notice anything other than the 95% of it or so that is about serial killers and the several large and brightly coloured mental health self help books
> 
> 
> your secret will be completely safe from everyone who is running very fast back to town


----------



## toggle (Aug 1, 2013)

best offer I've had in.........


erm, perhaps i should actually just speak to the bloke sitting 5 feet away from me


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 2, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> not to mention transgression enjoyment
> 
> or even something so simple as reading tightly plotted trash cos you like it. For anyone who has read David Gemmel you know exactly what I mean. Characters called 'Bane the Bastard' who happen to be the wronged son of a clan chief and a man trained in the use of two swords in the fighting pits of the evil empire, who was bought from your wicked uncle by slavers but has fought to freedom etc etc
> 
> And that cunt with the repeating crossbow, Gemmel got three books out of him and I still can't remember his name. It was all about the plot/action


 

Waylander! 

thats the bloke with the repeating cossbow and the moniker straight out of the 80s. Waylander, a man wronged, a man of mystery. All we know is his preternatural skill at arms and his repeating crossbow. Together with a ragged priest he will bring peace to a wounded land.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Aug 2, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Ahem, good sir. I will defend my collections of Frederick Forsyth to the last bullet even if he is a bit right-wing.


 
Forsyth is no Ludlum but he is a good thriller writer


----------



## DaveCinzano (Aug 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Forsyth is no Ludlum but he is a good thriller writer


_The Day Of The Jackal_ was a rollicking read, but I found his others something of a downward spiral. Too much showing off about how he could obtain fake passports/smuggle weapons/exfiltrate Nazis etc._ Dogs Of War_ was 90% boring detail about dodgy export certificates!


----------



## barney_pig (Aug 2, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> _The Day Of The Jackal_ was a rollicking read, but I found his others something of a downward spiral. Too much showing off about how he could obtain fake passports/smuggle weapons/exfiltrate Nazis etc._ Dogs Of War_ was 90% boring detail about dodgy export certificates!


It's all a bit;  ' aren't I edgy for knowing all this stuff, must mean I know the type of people who do this for real'
 Like Sean beans character in Ronin


----------



## DaveCinzano (Aug 2, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> It's all a bit; ' aren't I edgy for knowing all this stuff, must mean I know the type of people who do this for real'
> Like Sean beans character in Ronin


LOVELY BIT O' RASPBERRY JAM BACK THERE!

*BOKE*






PS So what colour _is_ the Boat Shed at 'Heerfud'?


----------



## Bakunin (Aug 2, 2013)

DaveCinzano said:


> LOVELY BIT O' RASPBERRY JAM BACK THERE!
> 
> *BOKE*
> 
> ...


 

Rather more squeamish than this gentleman:


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Aug 2, 2013)

all fair points, but then I like Desmond Bagley who pads his books with rewritten pages from text books on the finer points of West Indian or Iranian politics, corporate law, guns, boats, and cars in a very satisfying way.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 2, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Waylander!
> 
> thats the bloke with the repeating cossbow and the moniker straight out of the 80s. Waylander, a man wronged, a man of mystery. All we know is his preternatural skill at arms and his repeating crossbow. Together with a ragged priest he will bring peace to a wounded land.


 
Prefer Druss the Legend, myself. A good, straightforward "eat my axe, Nadir scum"-type.


----------



## Bakunin (Aug 2, 2013)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> all fair points, but then I like Desmond Bagley who pads his books with rewritten pages from text books on the finer points of West Indian or Iranian politics, corporate law, guns, boats, and cars in a very satisfying way.


 

Would this be a time to mention that, when I'm after something as simple and brainless as possible, I also have a collection of Leo Kessler?


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Aug 2, 2013)

Bakunin said:


> Would this be a time to mention that, when I'm after something as simple and brainless as possible, I also have a collection of Leo Kessler?


 
too violent for my liking


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 2, 2013)

Sven Hassel for violence imo


----------



## barney_pig (Aug 2, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> Sven Hassel for violence imo


Grew out of them by the time was 13
 Got bored with james Herbert by 14.


----------



## rekil (Aug 2, 2013)

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/363370550321610752


> I am often mocked for having gone to a private school, and yes, it's unfair. You know what else is unfair? Private schools. Suck it up.


Yeah. Suck it up losers.

Surely 'having a go' at someone _just_ for being sent to a private school is a bit silly, some of them turn out alright, it's the role the rest of them play in perpetuating and reproducing that system once they leave that's the problem.


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 2, 2013)

barney_pig said:


> Grew out of them by the time was 13
> Got bored with james Herbert by 14.


 
translated into english by spgb member Gen Ure who also did a young adults post apocalypse trilogy starting with 'plague 99'!

aint life weird


----------



## rekil (Aug 2, 2013)

There's a bit in SS General where a team of nazis fly into Stalingrad and tour the hospitals ripping bandages off patients in the hunt for malingerers. Very early ATOS.


----------



## TruXta (Aug 2, 2013)

ATOS = Aggressive Termination Of Services?


----------



## BigTom (Aug 3, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> One day me and my mate Paula were coming back from a night out. As we approached Paulas house (where i might have been living at the time, cant remember when i moved in) we heard a noise like a cat. We turned around and it was a guy, we heard his voice across the street "DON'T WORRY! I'M NOT A RAPIST!" we both started running like fuck, and bolted up the hill to where paulas house was.
> 
> I'm now thinking that we had no reason to be scared and this guy was only trying to be a feminist ally.



No. Your experience as a women shows that my idea was a bad one and that I need to check my male privilege on this one, and apologise to you for mansplaining. 

Although I'm not sure it's actually mansplaining cos I wasn't telling a woman how to be a feminist, I was telling a man how to be a better ally. Is that mansplaining? Anyway, I best check my privilege again just to be sure.

Next time I'll just shout out TRIGGER WARNING so that the woman is warned before I walk past her, with enough time for her to ask me to cross over the road if she would be triggered, which I'd do cos I'm a great ally.

(Lol, I can't believe someone actually shouted that, I'd run too)


----------



## butchersapron (Aug 3, 2013)

Going back to the prof, seems the constant edl paranoia has having some effect on him, he's moaning about foreigners buying all the housing this morning:

*Alex Callinicos* @alex_callinicos
Foreigners buy nearly 75% of new homes in inner London - FT.com fb.me/2GuZ1JtTk


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

Conor Oberst's 'punk' band, the somewhat tastelessly named Desaparecidos, has done a tribute tune to Camila Vallejo. Good for the first 10 secs then he starts. Corny reductionist twaddle. A little bit cornunism if you will.



Spoiler







Why hasn't Amanda Palmer, Billy Bragg or any of them two bob NY chancers done one about Laura and Molly yet? It's not fair.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Spoiler
> 
> 
> 
> ...


----------



## killer b (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Conor Oberst's 'punk' band, the somewhat tastelessly named Desaparecidos, has done a tribute tune to Camila Vallejo. Good for the first 10 secs then he starts. Corny reductionist twaddle. A little bit cornunism if you will.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




jesus.


----------



## Firky (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Conor Oberst's 'punk' band, the somewhat tastelessly named Desaparecidos, has done a tribute tune to Camila Vallejo. Good for the first 10 secs then he starts. Corny reductionist twaddle. A little bit cornunism if you will.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Ouch.

44 views, eh?
​


----------



## seventh bullet (Aug 3, 2013)

> Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
> I got to private school on a scholarship. But giving a few of places to clever kids from less well off homes doesn't make the system fair.


 

Unrelated, some shit from that nasty coward Old Holborn.



> Oldholborn ‏@devilholborn
> Is it me or does anybody else think @PennyRed just needs some cock.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 3, 2013)

fucking hell


----------



## weepiper (Aug 3, 2013)

seventh bullet said:


> Unrelated, some shit from that nasty coward Old Holborn.


 

He's not the first and he won't be the last. It's one thing she's right about; that sort of crap is endemic


----------



## J Ed (Aug 3, 2013)

When the SHTF Old Holborn should be one of the first to go imo.


----------



## cesare (Aug 3, 2013)

Good grief


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 3, 2013)

TruXta said:


> ATOS = Aggressive Termination Of Services?


 
Almost. Aggressive Termination Of Support.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Aug 3, 2013)

TruXta said:


> ATOS = Aggressive Termination Of Survival


 
Fixed.


----------



## Treacle Toes (Aug 3, 2013)

weepiper said:


> He's not the first and he won't be the last. It's one thing she's right about; that sort of crap is endemic


 

He is known for being utterly vile. And yes LP & others do receive some particularly vile/misogynistic comments.


----------



## toggle (Aug 3, 2013)

weepiper said:


> He's not the first and he won't be the last. It's one thing she's right about; that sort of crap is endemic


 
that is exceedingly mild compared to some of the stuff being thrown about. I've got much worse

anyone _still_ doubting the level of abuse aimed at women can look at Caroline Criado-Perez's twitter feed and some of the stuff she is retweeing that has been sent to her. it's not just that it's abuse, it's how gendered that abuse is.


----------



## andysays (Aug 3, 2013)

toggle said:


> that is exceedingly mild compared to some of the stuff being thrown about. I've got much worse
> 
> anyone _still_ doubting the level of abuse aimed at women can look at Caroline Criado-Perez's twitter feed and some of the stuff she is retweeing that has been sent to her. it's not just that it's abuse, it's how gendered that abuse is.


 
Unfortunately, you're absolutely correct.

The only part of your post I might take issue with is the idea that there's anyone here, apart from a few brain-dead trolls, who *does* still doubt the level of abuse aimed at women


----------



## toggle (Aug 3, 2013)

last time I discussed that, on this thread, the idea that Laurie had daily threats of rape was doubted.

she is a pita, throws accusation about anyone who disagrees with her, but if she's not getting daily rape threats, then she is probably the only woman with a prominent feminist profile that isn't getting that level of abuse.


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

andysays said:


> Unfortunately, you're absolutely correct.
> 
> The only part of your post I might take issue with is the idea that there's anyone here, apart from a few brain-dead trolls, who *does* still doubt the level of abuse aimed at women


 
Falsely accusing people of misogyny, racism and (the worst of the lot especially considering the circumstances) rape apologism, is pretty bad too. Pretty bad.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 3, 2013)

oh fuck it.


----------



## toggle (Aug 3, 2013)

Her habit of throwing that shit about like confetti does any real cause she attaches herself to a massive disservice.cause if the place people here about it is from her, they approach it with disbelief.

but that women who stick their head above the parapet online get an astounding amount of abuse, most of it highly gendered, some of it including detailed rape fantasies, some of it seeking to find out where the woman lives, all that shit doesn't become false because laurie says that happens to her.

personally, i'd rather be facing an online accusation of an -ism than a detailed rape fantasy of what my (and my kids) evening will be like, by someone who has made it clear they are at the very least searching for my home address. the behaviour of laurie, while unpleasant is in NO WAY SHAPE OR FORM a comparable level of threat.


----------



## andysays (Aug 3, 2013)

toggle said:


> last time I discussed that, on this thread, the idea that Laurie had daily threats of rape was doubted.
> 
> she is a pita, throws accusation about anyone who disagrees with her, but if she's not getting daily rape threats, then she is probably the only woman with a prominent feminist profile that isn't getting that level of abuse.


 
I don't remember the specifics of that.

I think it's understandable, if unfortunate, if some people do doubt some of LP's unsubstantiated claims, given her proven record of exaggeration and distortion. Doubting a specific claim of one person doesn't have to equate with doubting the general point you're making.


----------



## toggle (Aug 3, 2013)

andysays said:


> I don't remember the specifics of that.
> 
> I think it's understandable, if unfortunate, if some people do doubt some of LP's unsubstantiated claims, given her proven record of exaggeration and distortion. Doubting a specific claim of one person doesn't have to equate with doubting the general point you're making.


 
Definitely not defending her shit scattering. but if there's one thing she has said that I do believe, it is on that issue.


----------



## andysays (Aug 3, 2013)

toggle said:


> ...she is a pita...


 
Not that it's of huge importance, but what's a pita?


----------



## _angel_ (Aug 3, 2013)

andysays said:


> Not that it's of huge importance, but what's a pita?


pain in the arse


----------



## toggle (Aug 3, 2013)

andysays said:


> Not that it's of huge importance, but what's a pita?


pain in the arse.


----------



## andysays (Aug 3, 2013)

Shocking lack of orthographic correctness here.

Capitals for acronyms, always


----------



## andysays (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Falsely accusing people of misogyny, racism and (the worst of the lot especially considering the circumstances) rape apologism, is pretty bad too. Pretty bad.


 
Pretty bad, but not really comparable


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

toggle said:


> but that women who stick their head above the parapet online get an astounding amount of abuse, most of it highly gendered, some of it including detailed rape fantasies, some of it seeking to find out where the woman lives, all that shit doesn't become false because laurie says that happens to her.
> 
> personally, i'd rather be facing an online accusation of an -ism than a detailed rape fantasy of what my (and my kids) evening will be like, by someone who has made it clear they are at the very least searching for my home address. the behaviour of laurie, while unpleasant is in NO WAY SHAPE OR FORM a comparable level of threat.


You think that being on the end of false accusations doesn't have real world consequences? Righto. Ask SpineyNorman about what he had to deal with after Ms.Penny very publicly called him a racist. Did I say that threats and accusations are comparable? Nope. Both are intended to have different effects. Is that not obvious? 

This 'head above the parapet' rubbish has to stop really.


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

andysays said:


> Pretty bad, but not really comparable


 
Not you as well. FFS.


----------



## Firky (Aug 3, 2013)

Not this shit again.


----------



## toggle (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> You think that being on the end of false accusations doesn't have real world consequences? Righto. Ask SpineyNorman about what he had to deal with after Ms.Penny very publicly called him a racist. Did I say that threats and accusations are comparable? Nope. Both are intended to have different effects. Is that not obvious?
> 
> This 'head above the parapet' rubbish has to stop really.


 



it's the abuse of women that needs to stop.


----------



## andysays (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> You think that being on the end of false accusations doesn't have real world consequences? Righto. Ask SpineyNorman about what he had to deal with after Ms.Penny very publicly called him a racist. *Did I say that threats and accusations are comparable?* Nope. Both are intended to have different effects. Is that not obvious?
> 
> This 'head above the parapet' rubbish has to stop really.





copliker said:


> Not you as well. FFS.


 
You didn't say that, but bringing it up at that moment does unfortunately suggest that you're making some sort of comparison, even if that wasn't your intention.

And no one, as far as I can see, is suggesting that being on the end of false accusations doesn't have real world consequences.

We can condemn LP for making the accusations against Spiney or anyone else, and also condemn OldHolborn for the shit he came out with referring to her. There's no contradiction there, as sometimes seems to be suggested (not specifically by you, just in general)


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> This 'head above the parapet' rubbish has to stop


what does that mean exactly, please?


----------



## Belushi (Aug 3, 2013)

I've been accused of sexism and racism a few times over the years, not very nice when you think it isn't true.  Like most men I've never been threatened with sexual violence; if I were and I thought it remotely possible it might happen I'd be bloody terrified.


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

toggle said:


> it's the abuse of women that needs to stop.


Great post. Never thought of that. Are you going to answer my question please? Can false accusations have serious consequences?

If you want comparisons, I've posted on the Chile thread about what Vallejo, other spokespeople and schoolgirls have been enduring; home addresses being posted, strip searches, threats reminding them of what happened during the dictatorship and so on, and I've friends in Germany who've had to deal with nonsense from nazis for years.


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> what does that mean exactly, please?


We are not in Laurie's castle, put it that way.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 3, 2013)

an actual comprehensible answer, please. i still don't get what you mean. can you put it in a 'plain english' way?


----------



## andysays (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> We are not in Laurie's castle, put it that way.


 
I knew LP was keen on seeing herself as the lead character in her own fantasy saga, but I never realised she'd acquired a castle to provide the setting...


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 3, 2013)

inherited it


----------



## toggle (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Great post. Never thought of that. Are you going to answer my question please? Can false accusations have serious consequences?
> 
> If you want comparisons, I've posted on the Chile thread about what Vallejo, other spokespeople and schoolgirls have been enduring; home addresses being posted, strip searches, threats reminding them of what happened during the dictatorship and so on, and I've friends in Germany who've had to deal with nonsense from nazis for years.


 
and all designed to tell me to shut up, the abuse I complain about isn't important, because it's a 'woman's problem'.


----------



## Bakunin (Aug 3, 2013)

If I might try summing up this aspect, I don't disbelieve Penny Dreadful when she claims regular harassment and threats as it does seem that there's plenty of that going around and particularly online where vermin feel safer owing to distance and anonymity. I wouldn't personally dispute that she gets a lot of abuse and threats.

The problem for her (and other high-profile women suffering similar harassment) is that she has acquired a reputation, a well-deserved one, for exaggeration, hyperbole, dishonesty, throwing insults and smears around like confetti, smearing legitimate critics rather than genuinely engaging with them, malicious mud-slinging when she thinks she'll get away with it and self-professed victimhood when mud-slinging wouldn't be as effective at silencing critics. That does a disservice to people enduring this kind of problem because they may find themselves tarred with the same brush, rightly or wrongly.

I don't doubt for a second that she gets a lot of vileness thrown her way, but her tendency towards hypocrisy, manipulation, dishonesty and hyperbole, coupled a certain amount of enmity from what seems like many Urbanites (well-earned enmity as far a I can see) means that when she does have a solid and legitimate point to make it isn't likely to get past a default reaction of seeing her as either exaggerating or outright lying even when she isn't.

 To sum up, it seems like people are so used to her exaggerations and fabrications that their default, instinctive reaction is to assume she's either lying or blowing something up out of proportion. By all means, slate her for her many faults and call her out over exaggerations, fabrications, lies, smears and general bullshit. I have no problem with that as long as it's fair and accurate. But I wouldn't adopt a default position of assuming that absolutely everything she comes out with is automatically bullshit.


----------



## toggle (Aug 3, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> what does that mean exactly, please?


 
it means we need to be good girls and shut up, while the men get on with fixing the world. the attitudes behind it aren't very different to someone telling me to shut my mouth or they will fill it with their cock. it's still telling women to know their place.


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

toggle said:


> and all designed to tell me to shut up, the abuse I complain about isn't important, because it's a 'woman's problem'.


 
Is asking you a question somehow a ruse to shut you up?


----------



## andysays (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Great post. Never thought of that. Are you going to answer my question please? ...


 
Are you going to answer tufty79's?



tufty79 said:


> what does that mean exactly, please?


 
I think, if you have an answer, it might help to explain the point you're trying to make, coz at the moment it's not really coming across very well...


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> an actual comprehensible answer, please. i still don't get what you mean. can you put it in a 'plain english' way?


 
She's on the wrong side, always has been, and she's a twat.

Laura's 'parapet' is the media/politics bubble, specifically the opinionmonger section, and it's rammed with men and women just like her, same background, same schools, the People Who Matter. Is that clearer? I am sorry for being a bit monosyllabic  Shit day.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> She's on the wrong side, always has been, and she's a twat.


the wrong side of what?


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> the wrong side of what?


 
History!


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

andysays said:


> I think, if you have an answer, it might help to explain the point you're trying to make, coz at the moment it's not really coming across very well...


 
toggle's strawmen aren't worth arguing with tbh.



toggle said:


> it means we need to be good girls and shut up, while the men get on with fixing the world. the attitudes behind it aren't very different to someone telling me to shut my mouth or they will fill it with their cock. it's still telling women to know their place.


 
Drivel.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> You think that being on the end of false accusations doesn't have real world consequences? Righto. Ask SpineyNorman about what he had to deal with after Ms.Penny very publicly called him a racist. Did I say that threats and accusations are comparable? Nope. Both are intended to have different effects. Is that not obvious?
> 
> This 'head above the parapet' rubbish has to stop really.


 

Thing is, what Penny does, as a female columnist (I was going to say "journalist", but I think people need to acknowledge the difference between the two a bit more) with a fair degree of "brand recognition" will *invariably* invite attack for expressing an opinion. Lynda Lee Potter (hardly a "Left-wing" columnist) took glee in her (pre-the days of e-mail) postbag of anonymous hate mail, as did Eve Pollard.  To continue writing, knowing this, without changing the basic content of what is written to conform to what the "haters" want, is indeed "sticking one's head above the parapet", and such a thing is entirely divorced from anything to do with being the sort of eejit who chats shite and tries to deter criticism through throwing around accusations of racism and misogyny.  You can be "sticking your head above the parapet" as a female columnist while still being a bit of a fuckwit who chucks around accusations of racism at critics, and who smarms up to Yanks who're over-fond of pubescent females.


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

toggle said:


> and all designed to tell me to shut up, the abuse I complain about isn't important, because it's a 'woman's problem'.


 
"Woman's problem". Show me where I said that please. Nice use of inverted commas to make it look like a quote from me.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> "Woman's problem". Show me where I said that please. Nice use of inverted commas to make it look like a quote from me.


What _are_you saying?


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> What _are_you saying?


 
Is_it_not_clear_enough? Toggle replied to a post of mine with some strawman nonsense and some words in quotation marks in an attempt to smear me as a great big horrible sexist.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 3, 2013)

No, it really isn't clear. It looks to me like you came back at a general point about how women commentators, including LP, get misogynist abuse simply as a matter of course, by talking about her own actions more than once in a way that could very well be taken as justifying the former. Which was why I was asking. Because I'm sure that's not right.


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> No, it really isn't clear. It looks to me like you came back at a general point about how women commentators, including LP, get misogynist abuse simply as a matter of course, by talking about her own actions more than once in a way that could very well be taken as justifying the former. Which was why I was asking. Because I'm sure that's not right.


 
Ooooh did I get reported? You are correct. It's not right. I made it clear that I have documented the abuse women get and this was apparently taken to mean that I actually think the abuse women get is not important, a "womans problem" howareyou.

And can this thread title be changed or what.


----------



## equationgirl (Aug 3, 2013)

BigTom said:


> I reckon that as you are approaching them, you should shout loudly DON'T WORRY I'M A FEMINIST ALLY , I'M NOT A RAPIST, MURDERER OR MUGGER. That should set their mind at rest, knowing you are an ally and that.


 
Especially if the person is a woman. _Guaranteed_ to put her mind totally rest straight away, that is.


----------



## toggle (Aug 3, 2013)

Thanks fridgie.




I don't like the woman, I've made that clear on more than one occasion. I think her behaviour in throwing about accusation was atrocious, it is highly damaging to any cause she is purporting to support and she does tend to attach herself to some of the causes I support. I've looked at why she might do that shitscattering (other than being a fucking idiot) in the way of looking at how women can respond to this level of threatening behaviour, certainly not to excuse it.

But saying she is a fucking idiot should not and ever be an excuse to justify the people attempting to silence her through threats of sexual violence. and I do wonder how much of her fuck witted overreactions to criticism are driven by the high level of abuse over a long period.I'd probably be more likely to assume disagreement was abuse if I was getting threats on a daily basis rather than only a small number. (only 4 this week, all within a few minutes of having something I said retweeted by Caroline) gawds only knows how much more crap someone with a 'profile' like Laurie gets.Not excuses, I'll say that again, but if she wasn't subjected to so much being told she needs to be fucked until she bleeds and that will turn her into a proper quiet woman who knows her place is on her knees or in the kitchen, then she might, just might be a little bit less of a fucking idiot.

I doubt it, but she is about the same amount of fucking idiot as someone who actually seems to be arguing that all feminism is and can be is represented by her ideals and that means women looking for equality need to be shut up cause it's all some kind of privilege seeking. hear that copliker? I think you're shit, just cause it's a different texture to laurries, doesn't make yours stink any less.

and my gut feeling is the abuse is added to for any woman who can also be attacked as an 'other' in another way. who may well have less ability to convince journos to support her than Caroline. who doesn't make a nice blond photo opportunity and give a nice well spoken radio interview. and probably has fewer resources to cope with the risks (like packing up and moving to a hotel for a week until you find the bastard that is posting your address online and trying to convince people to join him for a gang rape). That's not the whole story, it's far more complicated than that. but if we as feminists had to spend less time coping with constant threat, then we might have more time to work out how to deal with what should be the important issues, and stopping the othering of some of the most vulnerable women within some feminist circles.



What do I do - not a lot. I write some women's history, and I write a bit of feminist history. I support groups that don't fuck over the vulnerable even more, and tell those that do that they don't speak for me. What I won't do is set myself up as a leader and spokeswoman for the kind of feminism I believe in, cause I'm not Laurie fucking penny speaking for the poor and downtrodden masses. Highlighting online abuse might, just might make a small difference to whether those underrepresented women feel more able to speak for themselves. When more do, I'll hold their coats.


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

toggle said:


> But saying she is a fucking idiot should not and ever be an excuse to justify the people attempting to silence her through threats of sexual violence.


Nobody here has suggested that violent threats against women are justified. Well there was Firky and his fucking shit cartoon which he refused to apologise for. Why he wasn't banned for that let alone his latest shenanigans is beyond me.

EDIT: Actually that's unfair. I don't know if you're shit or not. I know literally nothing about you apart from your last few bizarre posts. But I note that you're just as happy to be as dishonest as LP and misrepresent what people say. And that is unfortunate. So, all the best.


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 3, 2013)

toggle

you should know me well enough through my obsessive posting habit to ken I am not a prat. Well maybe a bit. But not in the manner of chauvinism and so on. The reason I say that is cos I see a misunderstanding here, resulting from ambiguities of language. Yeah that happens as ye know. Its an art not a science etc.

Recon you got the wrong end of the stick is all. That'll be my last word on the matter.


----------



## toggle (Aug 3, 2013)

so I didn't just read a whole load of bullshit that tells me to shut up about abuse on women cause some feminism is crap. thanks for that, i really needed to be told, never have worked it out on my own.


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 3, 2013)

thats not how I read it. Anyway I said that was all I was going to say. I just think theres been a pointless falling out here. I'll not bother again cos anything I do say will be 'explaining' like I'm some sort of cunt. Sort it out between yerselves.


----------



## smokedout (Aug 3, 2013)

in twitter news, they have issued new abuse guidelines

https://support.twitter.com/groups/...afety-center/articles/15794-abusive-behavior#

dont feed the trolls seems to be the line, which is likely to piss off a lot of people

I understand the argument why should it just be ignored, people not fight back etc, but everytime someone bites I also cringe a bit because I know whoever is doing it is probably laughing their tits off, joking about it on forums (trolls have forums I found one once) and its all a big game to them.  I think some of the talk about silencing isn't really addressing whats going on, which is abuse of anyone in the public eye, including men but more often women, in a way which can cause the most offence for the lulz - its like teenage boys writing fuck on a park bench, or on another level the type of stuff frankie boyle does is a sanitised version

there is a culture amongst some young men of trying to outdo each other by being offensive, I remember it all too well from the playground and it would use sexual violence, misogyny, racism, whatever was taboo and now they can go on twitter and do it and get instant feedback

(possibly not explaining this v well, am not acting as an apologist for it, or saying its the only thing going on, but i recognise this behaviour from some people ive known)


----------



## smokedout (Aug 3, 2013)

as an embarrassing example and I was 14, we used to write satanic slogans on the side of the local church, we werent really trying to silence the church or make any point at all, we were just being twats who thought we were being edgy and dangerous


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

toggle said:


> so I didn't just read a whole load of bullshit that tells me to shut up about abuse on women cause some feminism is crap. thanks for that, i really needed to be told, never have worked it out on my own.


 
Nobody told you to shut up or said that abuse of women isn't important.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 3, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> thats not how I read it. Anyway I said that was all I was going to say. I just think theres been a pointless falling out here. I'll not bother again cos anything I do say will be 'explaining' like I'm some sort of cunt. Sort it out between yerselves.


 

yep, agree with this completely.


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

Shit, better post something to prove how right on I am. Erm. I was at this gig.

Bikini Kill upstairs in a biker pub (flames painted on the outside) yeeears ago.


Spoiler







The awful Bis had an amusing tantrum when half the PA broke down. Team Dresch (lesbians!) also played.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Ooooh did I get reported? You are correct. It's not right. I made it clear that I have documented the abuse women get and this was apparently taken to mean that I actually think the abuse women get is not important, a "womans problem" howareyou.
> 
> And can this thread title be changed or what.


No, there wasn't a report, I was just wandering through threads as I do occasionally. I'm afraid that I still don't see how your opposition to the idea of women being attacked for "putting their head above the ramparts" works on the basis of SN having been accused by LP of racism; that seems entirely irrelevant to me.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> The awful Bis had an amusing tantrum when half the PA broke down..


i can't believe you just said that. you insensitive fuck 
*flashbacks to the horror that was bis's music*

(will trying to lighten all this with shit humour work?  )


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> No, there wasn't a report, I was just wandering through threads as I do occasionally. I'm afraid that I still don't see how your opposition to the idea of women being attacked for "putting their head above the ramparts" works on the basis of SN having been accused by LP of racism; that seems entirely irrelevant to me.


 
There are different ways to abuse people. Only an eejit would infer that acknowledging LP's penchant for malicious accusations is tantamount to an attempt to justify threats on women. Funny how I never got a reply to my question about whether being accused by public figures of this or that has real consequences. I concede I should have been much clearer about the 'parapet' business. Guilty of taking people's views for granted a bit there.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 3, 2013)

Well golly gee, I guess I'm an eejit then. I'm most awfully fucking sorry. Thanks for that, it really clears everything up.


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Well golly gee, I guess I'm an eejit then. I'm most awfully fucking sorry. Thanks for that, it really clears everything up.


 
You're lucky to get that much. You know the reason this is an issue at all right?


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 3, 2013)

I suppose I _am_ a proper internet defined bloke.


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> I suppose I _am_ a proper internet defined bloke.


Do you actually read the thread before jumping in with this sort of thing? I know it's huge but ffs. 


copliker said:


> Nobody here has suggested that violent threats against women are justified. Well there was Firky and his fucking shit cartoon which he refused to apologise for. Why he wasn't banned for that let alone his latest shenanigans is beyond me.


.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 3, 2013)

Yes that was the only thing you said.


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

.


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 3, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> I suppose I _am_ a proper internet defined bloke.


 

strike a fucking light, thats beneath you

This is blowhard bullshit, and I'm leaving this thread until it becomes either amusing or relevant again. 

Malcom Harris will be wanking into his sock to see this disgraceful show. Or maybe lolicon will be his stimuli of choice. Either way, this is crap


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> strike a fucking light, thats beneath you
> 
> This is blowhard bullshit, and I'm leaving this thread until it becomes either amusing or relevant again.
> 
> Malcom Harris will be wanking into his sock to see this disgraceful show. Or maybe lolicon will be his stimuli of choice. Either way, this is crap


 
I think FM may be posting from the pub, in which case I pardon him a bit. I can hardly make out what he's trying to say tbh.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 3, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> strike a fucking light, thats beneath you
> 
> This is blowhard bullshit, and I'm leaving this thread until it becomes either amusing or relevant again.
> 
> Malcom Harris will be wanking into his sock to see this disgraceful show. Or maybe lolicon will be his stimuli of choice. Either way, this is crap


Maybe this 'head above the parapet' rubbish does have to stop really.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> I think FM may be posting from the pub, in which case I pardon him a bit. I can hardly make out what he's trying to say tbh.


That works, well done.


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> That works, well done.


 
What do you want.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Why he wasn't banned for that let alone his latest shenanigans is beyond me.


 
that.


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> that.


 
I'm more likely to get banned for asking what private school FM went to, than firky is for _that_.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 3, 2013)

I don't know anything about this reference to Firky, I have no idea whether it was reported or not and I'm not going to address it here because it's a distraction from the point at hand.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 3, 2013)

So apart from all this shite about Firky, what's the excuse now?


----------



## toggle (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> Nobody told you to shut up or said that abuse of women isn't important.


 

Maybe this 'head above the parapet' rubbish does have to stop really.


----------



## andysays (Aug 3, 2013)

toggle said:


> Maybe this 'head above the parapet' rubbish does have to stop really


 
For what it's worth copliker, I still think an explanation of what you meant by this might, even now, go some way towards sorting this out.


----------



## toggle (Aug 3, 2013)

preferably one that doesn't assume anyone complaining about online abuse of women is supporting a version of feminism that is a m/c only club.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 3, 2013)

copliker said:


> What do you want.


You to display why your misogynist posts, weren't.


----------



## rekil (Aug 3, 2013)

andysays said:


> For what it's worth copliker, I still think an explanation of what you meant by this might, even now, go some way towards sorting this out.


I am bored out of my tiny paddy mind with this but I was referring to LP's imaginary role as plucky fighter for "the left", her poisonous habit of conflating criticism with misogyny and the notion that her position on the parapet is useful or realistically accessible to normals, let alone working class women, who she fucking hates.



			
				LP said:
			
		

> Personally, though, I think the problem with the British Left is that the people who are meant to be its best and most fervent fighters waste their time on in-fighting, petty bullying and tearing down anyone who puts their head above the parapet. I think the problem with the British Left is that too many of us would rather attack each other and turn our energy outwards. I think the problem with the British Left is that it's riddled with bitterness and barely acknowledged misogyny. And I think that this thread is the perfect example of all of those things.


Where is this parapet? How does one get up there? Which side of it are 'we' on? If parapet people are a bit shit, is there some way to recall them? I agree I should have been clearer. I assumed that those who have followed the thread would have been aware of the reference and the political connotations. I also assumed that other posts I've made on here would indicate that I'm (generally, within reason) supportive of women putting their heads above the parapet, 'our' parapet.



FridgeMagnet said:


> You to display why your misogynist posts, weren't.


And where are these fabled misogyny posts?


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 4, 2013)

edit: this isn't worth it


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> edit: this isn't worth it


 
Where are the misogyny posts?


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> Where are the misogyny posts?


Oh, you want to play?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

I thought copliker was just pointing out that Laurie is capable of using her twitter platform to say things that are damaging towards people too. (Although clearly nothing like the horror women must feel when threatened with sexual violence, in fact in no way comparable, it was very upsetting for me and my family. People asking me what the racism was about and me explaining it was unfounded but getting a look that said, 'no smoke without fire' would have been bad enough but when my black ex-partner denied it when asked she says she got a look that made her feel like a victim of domestic abuse covering for her husband it was pretty fucking hard to stomach). Pretty poor timing and I dare say in hindsight he might agree it was badly judged but since I'm not aware of any history of misogyny on his part I'd give him the benefit of the doubt. It's not really up to me obviously but that's the way I saw it - people can choose to ignore it as they wish.


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

No pleasing some people.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> You think that being on the end of false accusations doesn't have real world consequences? Righto. Ask SpineyNorman about what he had to deal with after Ms.Penny very publicly called him a racist. Did I say that threats and accusations are comparable? Nope. Both are intended to have different effects. Is that not obvious?
> 
> This 'head above the parapet' rubbish has to stop really.


Misogynist whataboutery as a direct attack on a simple claim of what happens to women when they say something. Start there.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> I thought copliker was just pointing out that Laurie is capable of using her twitter platform to say things that are damaging towards people too.


You were wrong.


----------



## weepiper (Aug 4, 2013)

copliker's no way a misogynist but his considerable and justified dislike of Laurie Penny is getting blurred round the edges by others here.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> copliker's no way a misogynist but his considerable and justified dislike of Laurie Penny is getting blurred round the edges by others here.


It looks to me like it's getting blurred by himself.


----------



## weepiper (Aug 4, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> It looks to me like it's getting blurred by himself.


 

No. He means _Laurie Penny_ has to stop using the head above the parapet imagery, because it smacks of some false solidarity, not that he believes women do not experience speaking out as raising our heads above the parapet. Am I right copliker?


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> No. He means _Laurie Penny_ has to stop using the head above the parapet imagery, because it smacks of some false solidarity, not that he believes women do not experience speaking out as raising our heads above the parapet. Am I right copliker?


He seems _remarkably fucking reticent_ when it comes to addressing the exact meaning. And remarkably abusive when enquiries take place.


----------



## JimW (Aug 4, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> He seems _remarkably fucking reticent_ when it comes to addressing the exact meaning. And remarkably abusive when enquiries take place.


 
You're wrong about him and should wind your fucking neck in.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 4, 2013)

JimW said:


> You're wrong about him and should wind your fucking neck in.


Am I now. Interesting defence.


----------



## andysays (Aug 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> No. He means _Laurie Penny_ has to stop using the head above the parapet imagery, because it smacks of some false solidarity, not that he believes women do not experience speaking out as raising our heads above the parapet. Am I right copliker?


 
If that's correct, as it may very well be, it's a shame he didn't make that properly clear a few hours ago when he had the opportunity to.

I haven't seen anything at all which suggests to me that copliker is a misogynist, but given that his comment about parapets came as a direct response to toggle, it's understandable that she interpreted it as a criticism of her argument rather than something LP said previously


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 4, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> He seems _remarkably fucking reticent_ when it comes to addressing the exact meaning. And remarkably abusive when *enquiries* take place.


 

you should spell that with an I the way you are going on


----------



## JimW (Aug 4, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Am I now.


 
First even vaguely sketchy comment I can recall in interacting with the lad here over several years. He's either hidden it really well or this is more of a misunderstanding than a crime.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> you should spell that with an I the way you are going on


What?


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 4, 2013)

JimW said:


> First even vaguely sketchy comment I can recall in interacting with the lad here over several years. He's either hidden it really well or this is more of a misunderstanding than a crime.


A misunderstanding I and other people have been asking him to address.

Thanks though, handy comment.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 4, 2013)

Sorry, any more random mates?


----------



## JimW (Aug 4, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> A misunderstanding I and other people have been asking him to address.
> 
> Thanks though, handy comment.


 
Asking him to address when the conversation's already off the rails and is going to produce more heat than light.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> What?


 
I think it's a reference to the new ink wirry


----------



## JimW (Aug 4, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Sorry, any more random mates?


 
Track record means nothing in the court of FridgeMagnet. One slip and you're fucked. Well done.


----------



## FridgeMagnet (Aug 4, 2013)

This 'head above the parapet' rubbish does have to stop really.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Sorry, any more random mates?


 
Are they like lucky dip durex?


----------



## andysays (Aug 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Are they like lucky dip durex?


 
That's more heeheehee than light...


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 4, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> What?


 

inquiry/enquiry. I'm sober, you ain't. You know I hold you no ill will but you are bang out of order here


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 4, 2013)

copliker's no misogynist im sorry im disgusted by whats going on here and very very confused by the frankly bizarre moderating decisions recently.

if he gets banned i am out of here.

sorry.


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 4, 2013)

he's not getting banned, just smeared. Obviously I would say that as he's my best mate and we have shared so many pints and fistbumps


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

There are some extreme double standards here. One poster sends an actual cartoon of Laurie Penny being violently assaulted - to Laurie Penny - nothing happens. Another makes a slightly badly judged comment but with no dodgy intent and he's vilified.

This place is going to shit.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> he's not getting banned, just smeared. Obviously I would say that as he's my best mate and we have shared so many pints and fistbumps


 
Is he a random one too?


----------



## Delroy Booth (Aug 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> One poster sends an actual cartoon of Laurie Penny being violently assaulted - nothing happens.


 
A stupid fucking cartoon that ended up bringing this thread to Laurie's attention, and her posting here objecting to it (quite rightly too) and this thread then becoming a million fucking pages long and a total car-crash that'll never leave the front page of the forum, a discussion where any hope that we could look at Penny's work critically and maturely without it descending into a farce is gone

Trolls trolling trolls winding up cranks, it's fucking mindboggling, I've seen some weird shit on the internet but this is SomethingAwful levels of drama and bullshit.


----------



## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

copliker is not a misogynist and his post was not about telling women to shut about abuse. If it was, he'd have got his arse kicked by a lot of posters myself included.

toggle, I really think there was a misunderstanding over what was posted.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

Delroy Booth said:


> A stupid fucking cartoon that ended up bringing this thread to Laurie's attention, and her posting here objecting to it (quite rightly too) and this thread then becoming a million fucking pages long and a total car-crash that'll never leave the front page of the forum, a discussion where any hope that we could look at Penny's work critically and maturely without it descending into a farce is gone
> 
> Trolls trolling trolls winding up cranks, it's fucking mindboggling, I've seen some weird shit on the internet but this is SomethingAwful levels of drama and bullshit.


 
But that poster is the king of the feminist allies so he gets a free pass.

At the time I dismissed Laurie's complaints about that but I was wrong to and I don't mind admitting I'm ashamed of that.


----------



## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> But that poster is the king of the feminist allies so he gets a free pass.


 
Don't be so sure of that after his latest behaviour.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Don't be so sure of that after his latest behaviour.


 
Sorry, I was being flippant - _acts like_ would be more accurate.


----------



## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> But that poster is the king of the feminist allies so he gets a free pass.
> 
> At the time I dismissed Laurie's complaints about that but I was wrong to and I don't mind admitting I'm ashamed of that.


 
Don't get me wrong, I've doubted other feminists in the past about the level of abuse they'd experienced, before getting directed to one feminist's blog and seeing for myself the graphic rape threats she got for a post that wasn't exactly controversial.

Sadly, there are cunts everywhere


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Misogynist whataboutery as a direct attack on a simple claim of what happens to women when they say something. Start there.


There was no misogynist whataboutery and no attack on any claim of what happens to women when they say something. You are simply making this up. It's extraordinary. I guarantee I've written a fuckload more than you about this and all.


FridgeMagnet said:


> He seems remarkably fucking reticent when it comes to addressing the exact meaning. And remarkably abusive when enquiries take place.


Lies. And remarkably abusive? Really?


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> copliker's no misogynist im sorry im disgusted by whats going on here and very very confused by the frankly bizarre moderating decisions recently.
> 
> if he gets banned i am out of here.
> 
> sorry.


I was off anyway, cos of normal stuff, like i said yesterday, but oh noes now it'll look like a flounce.


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> No. He means _Laurie Penny_ has to stop using the head above the parapet imagery, because it smacks of some false solidarity, not that he believes women do not experience speaking out as raising our heads above the parapet. Am I right copliker?


YES.


----------



## Buckaroo (Aug 4, 2013)

THE END.


----------



## cesare (Aug 4, 2013)

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...cebook-handbags.266196/page-217#post-11795658


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...cebook-handbags.266196/page-217#post-11795658


She says British Left. I'm (state school) Irish so anyone, (especially private schoolboys, that most notorious shower of cunts) who criticises me is most likely a racist. Privilege theory yo.


----------



## cesare (Aug 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> She says British Left. I'm (state school) Irish so anyone, (especially private schoolboys, that most notorious shower of cunts) who criticises me is most likely a racist. Privilege theory yo.


If only we had some kind of point scoring system to decide who wins in a death match of the isms


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> If only we had some kind of point scoring system to decide who wins in a death match of the isms


You mean..... something like this?


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

Apologies from FM and toggle for their disgusting lies aren't going to happen so who better to get the thread back on track than...


----------



## Red Cat (Aug 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> There are some extreme double standards here. One poster sends an actual cartoon of Laurie Penny being violently assaulted - to Laurie Penny - nothing happens.


 

You're kidding? Is that right? The same poster who then accused the mods of deleting posts made by Blagsta when it couldn't actually be found that he'd said what he was accused of sent a cartoon of Laurie Penny being violently assaulted to Laurie Penny? And he hasn't been banned?

Wow.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> You're kidding? Is that right? The same poster who then accused the mods of deleting posts made by Blagsta when it couldn't actually be found that he'd said what he was accused of sent a cartoon of Laurie Penny being violently assaulted to Laurie Penny? And he hasn't been banned?
> 
> Wow.


 

there's at least 20 other  people wondering exactly like that (why he's still here), and being ignored.

i dunno, i reckon editor's selling the rights to this thread to the torygraph as we speak, in the name of fairness and not being at all interested in the number of page views it gets.

he doesn't really help with *this*:


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

on a positive note,the impact of firky-and-friends's behaviour has now had me referred to a social worker, a prote4ction officer, and classed as a 'vulnerable adult' by officialdome again 


thanks - i've been trying to get that bit of life sorted for a while 

(it's ok, i obviously brought ALL of this on myself as well)


----------



## Red Cat (Aug 4, 2013)

toggle said:


> the attitudes behind it aren't very different to someone telling me to shut my mouth or they will fill it with their cock.


 
That's quite a serious accusation.


----------



## emanymton (Aug 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> No. He means _Laurie Penny_ has to stop using the head above the parapet imagery, because it smacks of some false solidarity, not that he believes women do not experience speaking out as raising our heads above the parapet. Am I right copliker?


 
I don't really want to get involved with this argument at all, but what I don't get is why he couldn't have just said that when tufty asked him? I had no idea what he meant by it, and he only replied with some cryptic nonsense before ignoring further attempts to get him to explain himself from tufty and Andy. This thread may have gone better for the last few pages if he had. Makes me wonder if he was even sure what he meant at the time.

Eta: Sorry my post shifted a bit as I was typing it so your post may not have been the best one to quote.


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> That's quite a serious accusation.


You have a gift for understatement.


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

emanymton said:


> I don't really want to get involved with this argument at all, but what I don't get is why he couldn't have just said that when tufty asked him? I had no idea what he meant by it, and he only replied with some cryptic nonsense before ignoring further attempts to get him to explain himself from tufty and Andy. This thread may have gone better for the last few pages if he had. Makes me wonder if he was even sure what he meant at the time.


I had the dinner on.


----------



## emanymton (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> on a positive note,the impact of firky-and-friends's behaviour has now had me referred to a social worker, a prote4ction officer, and classed as a 'vulnerable adult' by officialdome again
> 
> 
> thanks - i've been trying to get that bit of life sorted for a while
> ...


What the fuck, has he been up to?


----------



## Red Cat (Aug 4, 2013)

emanymton said:


> I don't really want to get involved with this argument at all, but what I don't get is why he couldn't have just said that when tufty asked him? I had no idea what he meant by it, and he only replied with some cryptic nonsense before ignoring further attempts to get him to explain himself from tufty and Andy. This thread may have gone better for the last few pages if he had. Makes me wonder if he was even sure what he meant at the time.


 

Because sometimes we think the ideas in our own heads are obvious to everybody. It's not a fucking mystery.

Why assume misogyny? I would never assume misogyny from a left-wing man unless I had good evidence. I would certainly _never_ base such an accusation on a few hastily posted words on urban and equate it to someone threatening sexual violence.


----------



## Red Cat (Aug 4, 2013)

emanymton said:


> What the fuck, has he been up to?


 

This isn't really about firky though is it? Right now it's about toggle smearing male posters.


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Because sometimes we think the ideas in our own heads are obvious to everybody. It's not a fucking mystery.


AND I had the dinner on. Saturday and all. Radical downtime!


----------



## emanymton (Aug 4, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Because sometimes we think the ideas in our own heads are obvious to everybody. It's not a fucking mystery.
> 
> Why assume misogyny? I would never assume misogyny from a left-wing man unless I had good evidence. I would certainly _never_ base such an accusation on a few hastily posted words on urban and equate it to someone threatening sexual violence.


 
I didn't assume anything, which was why I chose to stay out of it until now, it bugged me that he ignored people asking him to explain what he meant.

You're right about thinking our ideas are as clear to everyone else as they are to us. But someone asking what do you mean by that is usually a bit of a tip off they they aren't.


----------



## emanymton (Aug 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> I had the dinner on.


 
Ffs, seriously? You could have just said 'got the dinner on will explain later' or something.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> This isn't really about firky though is it?


it is for me.


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Ffs, seriously? You could have just said 'got the dinner on will explain later' or something.


Nah. I was disgusted by toggles posts by then. The pure idiocy and dishonesty of a poster I know nothing about.


----------



## emanymton (Aug 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> Nah. I was disgusted by toggles posts by then. The pure idiocy and dishonesty of a poster I know nothing about.


 
Yeah you can get 'tunnel vision' when caught up in an argument with one person.


----------



## Red Cat (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> it is for me.


 

Yes. Perhaps I shouldn't have posted that. He was also involved in smearing my partner last time toggle did so.

Fucking cunt.


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Yeah you can get 'tunnel vision' when caught up in an argument with one person.


And when you're trying not to fuck up the dinner.

I mean, this stuff ffs. I'll make all sorts of allowances for people who are upset but this is off the scale. It's a pretty clear indication that engaging with this person will only succeed in dragging the thread further into la la land.


> it means we need to be good girls and shut up, while the men get on with fixing the world. the attitudes behind it aren't very different to someone telling me to shut my mouth or they will fill it with their cock. it's still telling women to know their place.


----------



## emanymton (Aug 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> And when you're trying not to fuck up the dinner.


You're clearly desperate for someone to ask.
So, what were you making then?


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Yeah you can get 'tunnel vision' when caught up in an argument with one person.


one of my favourite lyrics  /jc3


> Tunnel vision lights my way
> Leave a little life today


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> one of my favourite lyrics  /jc3


actually, 'i was in guns and noses' might be a contender too.
and for copliker, 'i survived the dinner, then the air went thinner'.


all in the one glorious song that was playing (first time i'd heard it) when i got arrested earlier this year. life is proper funny weird and funny ha-ha at the same time, sometimes


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

emanymton said:


> You're clearly desperate for someone to ask.
> So, what were you making then?


Ugh does it matter? An approximation of a satay thing.


----------



## trampie (Aug 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> There are some extreme double standards here. One poster sends an actual cartoon of Laurie Penny being violently assaulted - to Laurie Penny - nothing happens. Another makes a slightly badly judged comment but with no dodgy intent and he's vilified.
> 
> This place is going to shit.


 
I have noticed there can be a huge fuss on urban for something that would be nothing at all in the outside world but perversely something that would be seen as out of order in the outside world can be seen as ok inside urban.

An example is what some on here have said about the Catholic church, yet if there is only a suggestion [and a suggestion only in somebodies mind] on other topics about something that would be nothing in the outside world then all hell breaks loose.

It just shows that there is a clique on urban that if their prejudices are not pandered too or they are challenged then watch out, yet within the confines of urban that very clique seem to be able to say what they like about anything.

If urban is a private club for only like minded posters with a very narrow outlook then fine, but it should be advertised as such.


----------



## Red Cat (Aug 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> Ugh does it matter? An approximation of a satay thing.


 

Maybe it does. Was it on a stick? Would the witness say that it was in any way an approximation of a phallus?


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

trampie said:


> An example is what some on here have said about the Catholic church,.


can you be a bit more specific? else i'm assuming that what was said is that they're all jolly nice people, but the tea and biscuits at communion are shit.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Maybe it does. Was it on a stick? Would the witness say that it was in any way an approximation of a phallus?




fwiw, i was wondering what you were having for dinner as well, copliker. i was hoping it was going to be a proper sunday roast so i could eat it vicarously.
yorkshire pudding, peas and gravy for me. with porridge for pudding (just checked my freezer/cupboards and have run out of 'inventive')


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Maybe it does. Was it on a stick? Would the witness say that it was in any way an approximation of a phallus?


<breaks down in witness box>
it's true it's true, everything i cook looks like willies
<pandemonium>


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> <breaks down in witness box>
> it's true it's true, everything i cook looks like willies
> <pandemonium>


ah! ta for the riminder - knew i still had some flour. breadbaking time is here again


----------



## andysays (Aug 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> <breaks down in witness box>
> it's true it's true, everything i cook looks like willies
> <pandemonium>


 
Sausages, carrots and potato croquettes for tea tonight, then?


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

andysays said:


> Sausages, carrots and potato croquettes for tea tonight, then?


Sausages on sunday? You mad?

oops, ableism?

Just reminded me that I have loads of celery ta


----------



## andysays (Aug 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> Sausages on sunday? You mad?
> 
> oops, ableism?
> 
> Just reminded me that I have loads of celery ta


 
Fish fingers? Chicken drumsticks?

And some of these for afters


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

andysays said:


> And some of these for afters


First day at school, my mam gave me a box of chocolate fingers to share with the class. I'd never had them before I scoffed the lot and got sick. Valuable lesson learned. At least I didn't shit my pants and cry like my best mate. Back then, teachers smoked in the class and an array of sticks and straps.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

trampie said:


> I have noticed there can be a huge fuss on urban for something that would be nothing at all in the outside world but perversely something that would be seen as out of order in the outside world can be seen as ok inside urban.
> 
> An example is what some on here have said about the Catholic church, yet if there is only a suggestion [and a suggestion only in somebodies mind] on other topics about something that would be nothing in the outside world then all hell breaks loose.
> 
> ...



Fuck off you racist welsh Tory twat.


----------



## toggle (Aug 4, 2013)

so the main problem seems to have started with me using a phrase that is now on a list to be disproved of, cause someone else used that 9 months ago.

can someone give me the complete list now.....


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> Yes. Perhaps I shouldn't have posted that. He was also involved in smearing my partner last time toggle did so.
> 
> Fucking cunt.



Is that why I've not seen blagsta on here much lately? Shame, he's a very good poster IMO


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> fwiw, i was wondering what you were having for dinner as well, copliker. i was hoping it was going to be a proper sunday roast so i could eat it vicarously.
> yorkshire pudding, peas and gravy for me. with porridge for pudding (just checked my freezer/cupboards and have run out of 'inventive')



If it helps, I'm having proper home made roast beef with all the trimmings today,  you know its the good shit cos I'm.having it at my mum's and my dad's cooking it so It's a little bit feminism 

PS: vienetta for pudding!


----------



## toggle (Aug 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> And when you're trying not to fuck up the dinner.
> 
> I mean, this stuff ffs. I'll make all sorts of allowances for people who are upset but this is off the scale. It's a pretty clear indication that engaging with this person will only succeed in dragging the thread further into la la land.


 
fair do's. I interpreted what you said as an attack on the ideas I was trying to get across that many women who speak out get a fuckton of shit for that. and that will make me red mist. I apologise for the accusation I made and I'll delete it if you wish.


----------



## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> If it helps, I'm having proper home made roast beef with all the trimmings today, you know its the good shit cos I'm.having it at my mum's and my dad's cooking it so It's a little bit feminism
> 
> PS: vienetta for pudding!


 
Are you having your Sunday dinner in the 1970s, if there's vienetta?


----------



## agricola (Aug 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Are you having your Sunday dinner in the 1970s, if there's vienetta?


 
Black Forest Gateau, surely?


----------



## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

agricola said:


> Black Forest Gateau, surely?


 
Only for dinner parties, mate.


----------



## rekil (Aug 4, 2013)

toggle said:


> fair do's. I interpreted what you said as an attack on the ideas I was trying to get across that many women who speak out get a fuckton of shit for that. and that will make me red mist. I apologise for the accusation I made and I'll delete it if you wish.


Much appreciated. Apologies for upsetting you. I concede I was a bit thoughtless and brusque. Nah, no need to delete anything.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Are you having your Sunday dinner in the 1970s, if there's vienetta?



The vienetta is my contribution to the feast, its on offer for a quid at sainsburys so i got 2


----------



## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> The vienetta is my contribution to the feast, its on offer for a quid at sainsburys so i got 2


 
Both the same flavour or different flavours? I haven't had one in years - it was the very height of sophistication in our house for Sunday lunch


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 4, 2013)

trampie said:


> I have noticed there can be a huge fuss on urban for something that would be nothing at all in the outside world but perversely something that would be seen as out of order in the outside world can be seen as ok inside urban.
> 
> An example is what some on here have said about the Catholic church, yet if there is only a suggestion [and a suggestion only in somebodies mind] on other topics about something that would be nothing in the outside world then all hell breaks loose.
> 
> ...


 

still crying?


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

toggle said:


> fair do's. I interpreted what you said as an attack on the ideas I was trying to get across that many women who speak out get a fuckton of shit for that. and that will make me red mist. I apologise for the accusation I made and I'll delete it if you wish.





copliker said:


> Much appreciated. Apologies for upsetting you. I concede I was a bit thoughtless and brusque. Nah, no need to delete anything.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Both the same flavour or different flavours? I haven't had one in years - it was the very height of sophistication in our house for Sunday lunch


Only vanilla Im afraid  they did a.special edition cappuccino one once which was ace but my favourite normal flavour is mint


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> The vienetta is my contribution to the feast, its on offer for a quid at sainsburys so i got 2


you beauty. just remembered i've got a£3 of nectar points to redeem


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> you beauty. just remembered i've got a£3 of nectar points to redeem


Theyve also got the single serving size carte d'or ice cream (cherry, tiramisu or caramel) on at 2 for 2 quid


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

tonight, Matthew, I will be having a propper veggie roast, maybe a cheek value cooking lager, and being both nice and nasty to my diabetes


----------



## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> Theyve also got the single serving size carte d'or ice cream (cherry, tiramisu or caramel) on at 2 for 2 quid


 
Have they now. That cherry one is pretty nice.


----------



## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> tonight, Matthew, I will be having a propper veggie roast, maybe a cheek value cooking lager, and being both nice and nasty to my diabetes


 
Diabetes has been pretty nasty to you, about time you gave it a taste of it's own medicine


----------



## andysays (Aug 4, 2013)

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/whats-for-tea-tonight-8.256241/

Just sayin'...


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

andysays said:


> http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/whats-for-tea-tonight-8.256241/
> 
> Just sayin'...


true 
will be a-postin' in there if my neighbour's nice enough to be going into sainsbergs waving my card around and pretending to be me (keep forgetting i haven't got a tardis to get there )


----------



## J Ed (Aug 4, 2013)

FFS now I have to go out and buy a vienetta


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> FFS now I have to go out and buy a vienetta


 
do you see what you've done, Spiney Norman? DO YOU SEE? 

paging DotCommunist. i think i remember him having a soft spot for vienetta


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 4, 2013)

I have never paid for mine


----------



## JimW (Aug 4, 2013)

Dotty as the Midge Ure of puddings: ♪ _It costs nooothing for meeee, Vienn(ett)aaaa _♫


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

whoda thunk a thread singling out a woman for abuse would turn out so shit?


----------



## JimW (Aug 4, 2013)

discokermit said:


> whoda thunk a thread singling out a woman for abuse would turn out so shit?


 
TBF, looking back at page one it was Callinicos got more flak early doors.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

JimW said:


> TBF, looking back at page one it was Callinicos got more flak early doors.


soon changed though. and any relevant points were lost amongst the shit.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

discokermit said:


> whoda thunk a thread singling out a woman for abuse would turn out so shit?


i happen to like the current vienetta theme, thank you. 
nice and vanilla.


----------



## JimW (Aug 4, 2013)

discokermit said:


> soon changed though. and any relevant points were lost amongst the shit.


 
I thought the relevant stuff stood out a bit more, but you're not the only one to feel that way and it's certainly had its low points (firky and his shit cartoon etc not least)


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

JimW said:


> I thought the relevant stuff stood out a bit more, but you're not the only one to feel that way and it's certainly had its low points (firky and his shit cartoon etc not least)


it may have early on but once the point had been made it has been mainly shit from then on. increasing exponentially after laurie posted as all the dickheads tried to make themselves look big and clever.

this thread fucking reeks. it's a disgrace to us all.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

To try and get this back to the more serious political and non-personalised stuff we were discussing earlier in the thread, I'm reading a collection of essays called: In Defense of History: Marxism and the Post-Modern Agenda. There's one in there by Francis Mulhern called 'the politics of cultural studies' and this bit stuck out for me:



> There is no doubt that cultural studies has attempted to further emancipatory social aims - socialist, feminist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist. Its intervention has been in those substantial, specified senses political. But it is romantic to go on thinking of cultural studies as an 'intervention'. It is now an instituted academic activity; and academic activity, whatever its intrinsic merits, is inevitably not the same thing as a political project. *What happens when an oppositional tendency becomes a budget holding discipline, offering credentials, careers, research funds? More or less what any realistic observer would expect.* No academic discipline may honourably or realistically apply political tests to its students and teachers. The day cannot be far off - indeed, it has probably arrived already - when the first real professionals of the discupline, trained in it and now pursuing it as a scholarly career, take their places in classrooms to give the introductory lecture on "subversion" or some other such routine syllabus heading.


 
It just seems to cover so many of the themes of this thread that I couldn't resist quoting it. And the bit I've bolded works for radical journalism too - when it becomes a career choice, which it clearly now is, you're fucked.

I think most of the same criticisms can be leveled at academic Marxism too FWIW


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

discokermit said:


> it may have early on but once the point had been made it has been mainly shit from then on. increasing exponentially after laurie posted as all the dickheads tried to make themselves look big and clever.
> 
> this thread fucking reeks. it's a disgrace to us all.


which is why i apologised for being a dickhead, and really regret how i responded to her.
hth.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> which is why i apologised for being a dickhead, and really regret how i responded to her.
> hth.


there are a lot of genuine posts as well. and genuine serious criticisms of laurie. trouble is they get lost amongst the shit.
i'm not singling anyone out. your reaction was angry but understandable, as was the reaction of laurie upon discovering this thread.

but the fact this thread has gone on for so long when other criticisms of media lefties fall by the wayside says something. even the way this thread has tended to focus on her, when callinicos has destroyed the organisation he's a part of by covering for a rapist, says something.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> To try and get this back to the more serious political and non-personalised stuff we were discussing earlier in the thread,


too late. start another thread.

i bet it won't get to over eight hundred pages though.


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 4, 2013)

discokermit said:


> there are a lot of genuine posts as well. and genuine serious criticisms of laurie. trouble is they get lost amongst the shit.
> i'm not singling anyone out. your reaction was angry but understandable, as was the reaction of laurie upon discovering this thread.
> 
> but the fact this thread has gone on for so long when other criticisms of media lefties fall by the wayside says something. even the way this thread has tended to focus on her, when *callinicos has destroyed the organisation he's a part of by covering for a rapist*, says something.


 
as ably covered by the swappie implosion thread


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> as ably covered by the swappie implosion thread


kinda. but not really.


----------



## SpineyNorman (Aug 4, 2013)

discokermit said:


> too late. start another thread.
> 
> i bet it won't get to over eight hundred pages though.


 
Give it a try - what do you think about the quote? Am I right? Being too harsh?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> strike a fucking light, thats beneath you
> 
> This is blowhard bullshit, and I'm leaving this thread until it becomes either amusing or relevant again.
> 
> Malcom Harris will be wanking into his sock to see this disgraceful show. Or maybe lolicon will be his stimuli of choice. Either way, this is crap


 
Malcolm Harris *is* a wanksock.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 4, 2013)

copliker said:


> I am bored out of my tiny *paddy* mind with this but I was referring to LP's imaginary role as plucky fighter for "the left", her poisonous habit of conflating criticism with misogyny and the notion that her position on the parapet is useful or realistically accessible to normals, let alone working class women, who she fucking hates.


 
Intersectionalism ahoy!!!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 4, 2013)

Henrik Oba said:


> Who's Malcolm Harris? Is he a TV presenter?


 
He's Everyman.

He's me, and he's very certainly you.


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 4, 2013)

nothing matters


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> he's not getting banned, just smeared. Obviously I would say that as he's my best mate and we have shared so many pints and fistbumps


 
Fist-bumping is so '90s.
Pints is well up-to-date, though.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> But that poster is the king of the feminist allies so he gets a free pass.


 
Not true, he merely plays the role in an online drama.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Don't get me wrong, I've doubted other feminists in the past about the level of abuse they'd experienced, before getting directed to one feminist's blog and seeing for myself the graphic rape threats she got for a post that wasn't exactly controversial.


 
The problem with/for Ms. Penny is that her penchant for hyperbole w/r/t her "journalism" means that some people *will* automatically assume that she engages in hyperbole in *all* subjects, with the knock-on effects that has for her and for anyone else suffering the same threats and hassles.



> Sadly, there are cunts everywhere


 
Yup.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 4, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> You're kidding? Is that right? The same poster who then accused the mods of deleting posts made by Blagsta when it couldn't actually be found that he'd said what he was accused of sent a cartoon of Laurie Penny being violently assaulted to Laurie Penny? And he hasn't been banned?
> 
> Wow.


 
Having a bonobo liver transpalnted into him has obviously given him so "special powers".


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 4, 2013)

trampie said:


> I have noticed there can be a huge fuss on urban for something that would be nothing at all in the outside world but perversely something that would be seen as out of order in the outside world can be seen as ok inside urban.
> 
> An example is what some on here have said about the Catholic church, yet if there is only a suggestion [and a suggestion only in somebodies mind] on other topics about something that would be nothing in the outside world then all hell breaks loose.
> 
> ...


 

Fuck off with your cross-thread beef and pathetic attempt to justify the crap you got banned for.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 4, 2013)

SpineyNorman said:


> If it helps, I'm having proper home made roast beef with all the trimmings today, you know its the good shit cos I'm.having it at my mum's and my dad's cooking it so It's a little bit feminism
> 
> PS: vienetta for pudding!


 
Are we allowed to use the "V" word on a thread that Dottie posts on?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 4, 2013)

DotCommunist said:


> still crying?


 
Like a baby.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Are we allowed to use the "V" word on a thread that Dottie posts on?


v for vienetta vendetta


----------



## weepiper (Aug 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Having a bonobo liver transpalnted into him has obviously given him so "special powers".


Even if he has behaved like a dick there's no call to make jokes about him nearly dying VP.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 4, 2013)

discokermit said:


> there are a lot of genuine posts as well. and genuine serious criticisms of laurie. trouble is they get lost amongst the shit.
> i'm not singling anyone out. your reaction was angry but understandable, as was the reaction of laurie upon discovering this thread.
> 
> but the fact this thread has gone on for so long when other criticisms of media lefties fall by the wayside says something. even the way this thread has tended to focus on her, when callinicos has destroyed the organisation he's a part of by covering for a rapist, says something.


 
TBF, there was a fair bit of criticism of the Swappie elite on the threads specifically about the cover-up/"peoples' court" bullshit at around the same time.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Even if he has behaved like a dick there's no call to make jokes about him nearly dying VP.


 
I've been repeatedly making the same "joke" directly *at* him for the last year, with no objections from anyone, so it's nowt to do with him having "behaved like a dick".
It's not, by the way, a joke about him "nearly dying", It's a joke about his healthcare trust giving him a bonobo liver, rather than a human one, because they're cheaper and one was available.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 4, 2013)

discokermit said:


> kinda. but not really.


 
Well, there wasn't a massive amount of direct criticism of Stalinicos, but that's more down to him being the Swappie _eminence gris_ as opposed to a workaday CC member, rather than anything else.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> Even if he has behaved like a dick there's no call to make jokes about him nearly dying VP.


fair game, imo - he's got a gsoh.



i have no idea if barney pig knew about my history of sexual assault/abuse. firky certainly did.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> true
> will be a-postin' in there if my neighbour's nice enough to be going into sainsbergs waving my card around and pretending to be me (keep forgetting i haven't got a tardis to get there )


he cba going into town 

but he DID just lend me a fiver til i get it together enough to get to the bank and stick my bastard postal order in and it clears 

he is off to the corner shop for some Lovely Fags (i ran out at 8am, and haven't obliterated myself or anyone else. i'm amazed) and some vegges 

should really go in the 'chuffed' thread, but fuck it. i appear to be trying to burn this one to the ground and salt the earth.


----------



## barney_pig (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> fair game, imo - he's got a gsoh.
> 
> View attachment 38539
> 
> i have no idea if barney pig knew about my history of sexual assault/abuse. firky certainly did.


Back then, no. But firky's 'joke' shouted out inappropriate, considering the context.

Knowing what happened since it is obvious that he was having a deliberate dig, one which his pals in red will pass over once again.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

could someone pm me about this firky thing?


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

sorted. ta. what a cunt.


----------



## frogwoman (Aug 4, 2013)

i still think renaming this thread would be a good idea.


----------



## weepiper (Aug 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> I've been repeatedly making the same "joke" directly *at* him for the last year, with no objections from anyone, so it's nowt to do with him having "behaved like a dick".
> It's not, by the way, a joke about him "nearly dying", It's a joke about his healthcare trust giving him a bonobo liver, rather than a human one, because they're cheaper and one was available.


 

It's not funny.


----------



## Belushi (Aug 4, 2013)

I vote close this thread and start another on the "commentariat" in general.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> It's not funny.


 
Which is a bit different from your original claim, isn't it?


----------



## weepiper (Aug 4, 2013)

Belushi said:


> I vote close this thread and start another on the "commentariat" in general.


 

tbh I agree. Nuke it from orbit and start again.


----------



## weepiper (Aug 4, 2013)

ViolentPanda said:


> Which is a bit different from your original claim, isn't it?


 
Not really. It's not funny because he interprets it as being a joke about him nearly dying, regardless of how you 'mean' it. Anyway I've defended him enough and if he wants to make more of a deal of it himself then he can but I'm leaving it there.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> i still think renaming this thread would be a good idea.


bin it would be better.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

bin/lock, imo. not nuke from orbit as in make invisible forevermore though..


----------



## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

Yeah, nuke this one from orbit like weepiper says. Lets do a general 'commentary on the commentariat' one instead. This one has jumped the shark.

ETA: I meant lock it, as in 'nuke new posts'.


----------



## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

Anyway, this thread has encompassed a wide range of writers for a while now, so should be changed.


----------



## Libertad (Aug 4, 2013)

weepiper said:


> tbh I agree. Nuke it from orbit and start again.


 
The easiest way to achieve this would be to ask Prince Rhyus , as the OP, if they wanted to close the thread iirc.


----------



## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

Prince Rhyus seeing as this thread has departed so far from the original OP, do you have any objections if a new one is started about the commentariat in general, and this one locked?


----------



## emanymton (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> fair game, imo - he's got a gsoh.
> 
> View attachment 38539
> 
> i have no idea if barney pig knew about my history of sexual assault/abuse. firky certainly did.


I have no memory of posting that.

Now I wonder what mess I accidentally trod in with blissful ignorance.


----------



## Firky (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> fair game, imo - he's got a gsoh.
> 
> i have no idea if barney pig knew about my history of sexual assault/abuse. firky certainly did.


 

This is going to have to be explained to me, sorry. Totally over my head, that one. Without seeing the context of that I am guessing someone asked why you were banned, and seeing as you're hardly the kind of person who gets banned, I'd assumed you asked for a ban. Barney_pig then makes a playful dig at me - I respond and 

Hold up my hand and admit the piccadilly thing was a bit of a cunt's trick but it's not as though ern is in here anyway, and I do regret that - it was a twatish thing to do, especially given how I think you said you find it difficult to feel secure (or words to that effect) at times. But I don't know how the above pictures proves anything or that I was making a dig, anything but (why would I haev a dig at you?), that one really has me confused.

Also copliker, FWIW I don't think he was being misogynistic, think he could have phrased it better - was a bit clumsy.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

emanymton - you didn't, don't worry 
i asked mrs m to ban me for a week, cos by my reaction to a totally innocent comment, i could tell i was already going a bit headwrong 
(i think i've mentioned that it's not always been a good idea for me to post on this thread )
i was scared that i was going to go absolutely fucking nuclear about all the shit taht'd gone on in my life over the previous month, and wasn't at the point where i felt ok about talking about it (and was being told 'not to talk outside the group' about stuff. i'd gone off on one about the 'milder' stuff the week before on here/fb, and it didn't go well).

so yeah. that night, i decided to go and have a sleep in the snow. then got bored and decided i needed sectioning so that i couldn't hurt myself or tell people what had gone on. admittedly, i'd expressed how blindingly furious i was with everyone involved, and that if they came near me i'd (er) hurt them.

and then had a horrendous text conversation with rapey ex, which ended up in him telling the crisis team i was about to stab his other partner up (she was 200 miles away), sending the paramedics, me walking out of the assessment in hospital being fucking traumatised and mildly hypothermic, and then getting arrested under the mental health act (unlawfully) and dragged out me house in handcuffs.

i did gob in a coppers face and call him a rape apologist cunt without any charges being pressed though 

/that is what happened the day i banned myself. interesting times


----------



## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

Firky, if you regret it why not actually apologise for what you did? A lot of personal information has been shared in private conversations and you gave ern access to all of that.


----------



## Frances Lengel (Aug 4, 2013)

Dunno what Firky said to Tufty or what, but one thing I've always been sure on is that Firky's a bit of a nasty piece of work - He tries to camoflage it, with some success most of the time & he has got it in him to be alright, but sooner or later his true colours come shining through. And they're not altogether pretty. Guy's a wanker.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Firky, if you regret it why not actually apologise for what you did? A lot of personal information has been shared in private conversations and you gave ern access to all of that.


AND PUT THE BLAME ON ME


----------



## Firky (Aug 4, 2013)

I did not put the blame on you.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

Firky said:


> This is going to have to be explained to me, sorry. Totally over my head, that one. Without seeing the context of that I am guessing someone asked why you were banned, and seeing as you're hardly the kind of person who gets banned, I'd assumed you asked for a ban. Barney_pig then makes a playful dig at me - I respond and
> 
> Hold up my hand and admit the piccadilly thing was a bit of a cunt's trick but it's not as though ern is in here anyway, and I do regret that - it was a twatish thing to do, especially given how I think you said you find it difficult to feel secure (or words to that effect) at times. But I don't know how the above pictures proves anything or that I was making a dig, anything but (why would I haev a dig at you?), that one really has me confused.
> 
> Also copliker, FWIW I don't think he was being misogynistic, think he could have phrased it better - was a bit clumsy.


fuck off.
you massive cunt.
you've been sussed.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> Dunno what Firky said to Tufty or what, but one thing I've always been sure on is that Firky's a bit of a nasty piece of work - He tries to camoflage it, with some success most of the time & he has got it in him to be alright, but sooner or later his true colours come shining through. And they're not altogether pretty. Guy's a wanker.


massive wanker.

edit, not you frances.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

longnecked fucktardis 
and as much of a cunt - if not more - than my rapey ex and his harrassing fuckwit partners, mates and colleagues put together  imo.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> longnecked fucktardis
> and as much of a cunt - if not more - than my rapey ex and his harrassing fuckwit partners, mates and colleagues put together  imo.


i'm not gonna 'like' this cos it would look wrong, but yeh.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

Firky said:


> I did not put the blame on you.


lying cunt.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

discokermit said:


> lying cunt.


aren't screenshots BRILLIANT


----------



## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

Firky said:


> I did not put the blame on you.


 
Piccadilly Commando did to be fair.

Still waiting for that apology though.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Still waiting for that apology though.


apology? he should be stabbed in the fucking face.


----------



## emanymton (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> emanymton - you didn't, don't worry
> i asked mrs m to ban me for a week, cos by my reaction to a totally innocent comment, i could tell i was already going a bit headwrong
> (i think i've mentioned that it's not always been a good idea for me to post on this thread )
> i was scared that i was going to go absolutely fucking nuclear about all the shit taht'd gone on in my life over the previous month, and wasn't at the point where i felt ok about talking about it (and was being told 'not to talk outside the group' about stuff. i'd gone off on one about the 'milder' stuff the week before on here/fb, and it didn't go well).
> ...


Fuck, this is horrible (well apart from the gobing on coppers bit), really hope you are doing better now.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Piccadilly Commando did to be fair.
> 
> Still waiting for that apology though.


from what 've seen, firky didn't bother correcting him at all (in the convo, at least). complicity much? imo they're equally responsible.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

emanymton said:


> Fuck, this is horrible (well apart from the gobing on coppers bit), really hope you are doing better now.


i was. then july happened and i tardissed backwards, with a little help from a rl 'friend' on urban, and then firky/ern's doings. tbh i get those two and ninja boy mixed up at times - they're just a massive glob of trollcunts that are pretty much indistinguishable half the time.

working on getting better, next week i'm going to try go further than 200m from my house on my own again. ffs - i went to *TODMORDEN* unassisted less than a month ago


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

discokermit said:


> apology? he should be stabbed in the fucking face.


i'd offer, but i don't want to get arrested again


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> from what 've seen, firky didn't bother correcting him at all (in the convo, at least). complicity much? imo they're equally responsible.


plus, if p.c. was firky's sock puppet that he passed on to ern, then how does anyone know which is to blame?

and why hasn't the cunt been banned yet? editor?


----------



## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> from what 've seen, firky didn't bother correcting him at all (in the convo, at least). complicity much? imo they're equally responsible.


 
We can't discuss contents on PMs on this thread tufty (but you're right).


----------



## killer b (Aug 4, 2013)

Christ, what did I miss?


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> We can't discuss contents on PMs on this thread tufty (but you're right).


why not? will it breach the rights of sockpuppets and trolls?


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

killer b said:


> Christ, what did I miss?


 
laurie penny came in and snogged firky, while proclaiming him to be The Voice Of The Left 

e2a: and i had fags. and coffee. lots of coffee 





tufty79 said:


> i do not advocate that anyone* ever* posts on this thread after a coffee.
> /projection.


 


ViolentPanda said:


> To be honest, I haven't drunk coffee for 19 years (gastric ulcers), so I've forgotten what the effects are of a strong coffee!


 


tufty79 said:


>


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

discokermit said:


> why not? will it breach the rights of sockpuppets and trolls?


it'll get us (or me) banned, while firky gets to stay


----------



## _angel_ (Aug 4, 2013)

I think you can discuss pms just not post em up?


----------



## cesare (Aug 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Firky, if you regret it why not actually apologise for what you did? A lot of personal information has been shared in private conversations and you gave ern access to all of that.


What does this mean?


----------



## cesare (Aug 4, 2013)

Firky said:


> This is going to have to be explained to me, sorry. Totally over my head, that one. Without seeing the context of that I am guessing someone asked why you were banned, and seeing as you're hardly the kind of person who gets banned, I'd assumed you asked for a ban. Barney_pig then makes a playful dig at me - I respond and
> 
> Hold up my hand and admit the piccadilly thing was a bit of a cunt's trick but it's not as though ern is in here anyway, and I do regret that - it was a twatish thing to do, especially given how I think you said you find it difficult to feel secure (or words to that effect) at times. But I don't know how the above pictures proves anything or that I was making a dig, anything but (why would I haev a dig at you?), that one really has me confused.
> 
> Also copliker, FWIW I don't think he was being misogynistic, think he could have phrased it better - was a bit clumsy.


What did you do with the picadilly (commando?) thing?


----------



## cesare (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i was. then july happened and i tardissed backwards, with a little help from a rl 'friend' on urban, and then firky/ern's doings. tbh i get those two and ninja boy mixed up at times - they're just a massive glob of trollcunts that are pretty much indistinguishable half the time.
> 
> working on getting better, next week i'm going to try go further than 200m from my house on my own again. ffs - i went to *TODMORDEN* unassisted less than a month ago


What did he/they do?


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Still waiting for that apology though.


i don't want an apology. i want him gone.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> What did he/they do?


got me back to the point of almost sectioning myself again - not feeling safe outside as it is. not feeling safe on here = not feeling safe in my home either (again) = that way madness and potential self-topping lie.
(thurdsay? or was it friday? was interesting, let's put it that way)


----------



## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i don't want an apology. i want him gone.
> 
> View attachment 38548


i also want him gone and so do a few others. i'm pretty sure most people who find out about what he's done will also want him gone.

if he doesn't go, i reckon quite a few will.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

discokermit said:


> if he doesn't go, i reckon quite a few will.


i'm tempted to emigrate to the fishco. but i wouldn't be able to post pictures of myself nekkid, or of mty cats, or my dinner


----------



## emanymton (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> i was. then july happened and i tardissed backwards, with a little help from a rl 'friend' on urban, and then firky/ern's doings. tbh i get those two and ninja boy mixed up at times - they're just a massive glob of trollcunts that are pretty much indistinguishable half the time.
> 
> working on getting better, next week i'm going to try go further than 200m from my house on my own again. ffs - i went to *TODMORDEN* unassisted less than a month ago


Really sorry to hear this, not much else that can be said really except I hope you you will be doing better soon.


----------



## Dan U (Aug 4, 2013)

Thread not making sense. Did firky give a troll account with personal conversations in it to Ern? Why would anyone give anything to Ern? The bloke is a total fucking idiot based upon his posts in here. 

Have I got that right? As ever with urban it's nudge nudge wink wink and most of us don't have a scooby what's going on. 

Either don't say stuff or lay it all out. This fannying around in the middle is no good for anyone.


----------



## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

Dan U said:


> Thread not making sense. Did firky give a troll account with personal conversations in it to Ern?


yes.


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## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

Dan U said:


> Have I got that right? As ever with urban it's nudge nudge wink wink and most of us don't have a scooby what's going on.
> 
> Either don't say stuff or lay it all out. This fannying around in the middle is no good for anyone.


sorry if i've been garbledposting. tunnel vision time, innit?


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## cesare (Aug 4, 2013)

tufty79 said:


> got me back to the point of almost sectioning myself again - not feeling safe outside as it is. not feeling safe on here = not feeling safe in my home either (again) = that way madness and potential self-topping lie.


  If you don't want to state publically what he/they did, that's ok of course. Is all of this after (time wise) the artisan bread thread?  Are you in a worse place now?


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## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

Dan U said:


> Thread not making sense. Did firky give a troll account with personal conversations in it to Ern?


yes. deeply personal conversations. they then blamed tufty.


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## cesare (Aug 4, 2013)

discokermit said:


> yes. deeply personal conversations. they then blamed tufty.


Blamed her for what?


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## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> If you don't want to state publically what he/they did, that's ok of course. Is all of this after (time wise) the artisan bread thread? Are you in a worse place now?


yep, it's since then.
i was in a worse place the other day. i'm full of coffee and rage directed outwards instead of inwards now. and fags. and i've not had a proper smoke (two homeopathic spliffs excepted the other night) since ..   errr.. thursday≥ and am relatively calm 
and have a social worker referral an ting, which i've been trying to get since feb/march. so silver linings etc.
i also managed the weekend without my mates (not sarcastic) around the corner being around, with a slightly 'ffs, you just need to pull yourself together' but generally awesome downstairs neighbour, and found that one of my cats has started sleeping next to my head.
i'm really annoying myself with pollyannaing (i think? only worked out what it meant the other day), but fuckit. counting blessings and ripping the piss outof grimness is working ok. as is (hopefully) knowing that not *everyone* around me is a cunt.


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## Dan U (Aug 4, 2013)

*If* that is true firky you are a massive fucking cunt.


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## weepiper (Aug 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> Blamed her for what?


 

'Piccadilly Commando' which was either Ern or Firky (both had the password) said tufty  invited him to the conversation, which was a lie.


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## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> Blamed her for what?


inviting them into the conversation. 
i had no fucking clue about any of this until last week - i'd left and blocked the original convo pretty much without reading it.


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## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

cesare said:


> Blamed her for what?


for bringing ern, secretly, into a deeply personal conversation.


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## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

Dan U said:


> *If* that is true


i've been told this by a couple of people now, both of whom i trust completely.


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## Prince Rhyus (Aug 4, 2013)

Happy for this one to be locked - had no idea it would end up lasting this long! Also, since posting it I've learnt a lot from a number of social media friends & probably wouldn't have used the same title if posting on the subject again.


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## YouSir (Aug 4, 2013)

Damn, s'one fucked up thread.


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## frogwoman (Aug 4, 2013)

in a vague attempt to get this thread back on topic, i just had a comment on my blog post - i mean is what i said offensive or owt? i don't think it is and i'm a bit pissed off because she seems to be implying that it's anti-semitic or something and i'm definitely not and i'm a bit annoyed that someone would imply that about me.



> statcounter told me people were accessing my blog via this post
> and like, i was sort of with her until she got to this paragraph — which is where i’m linked, incidentally:
> Some of the reactions by Jews to the “Jewsplaining” stuff are also fairly disturbing and the language used about “gentiles” (_really_??) disturbingly reminiscent of campaigns to stop people from “marrying out” and prevent “assimilation” (ie stop the “calamity” of Jews marrying non-Jews, as if marrying a non-Jew means you automatically stop being culturally Jewish or even following the religion. Without this “calamity” I wouldn’t be here). We get diatribes against "tumblr goyim” and people saying that “gentile is a privilege”.* Would the idea that “gentile is a privilege” apply to working-class Palestinians in Gaza? Because that’s where this idiocy leads straight back to.* Implicit support for the president of the US based on the fact he is black. Implicit support for the Israeli state based on it being a “Jewish state” or implicit support for other Middle Eastern states based on their leaders being Muslim and not white. Implicit support for Thatcher based on the fact she was a woman.​i fucking can’t deal with this so i’m going to leave this for someone who can. this so utterly decontextualizes religious privilege in the west and the antisemitism that leads a lot of jews to be suspicious of goyim (a word that i will almost always use instead of “gentile/s" because i’m a zionazi jewish supremacist), holy shit, what even


 
did i do anything wrong here? i mean i was brought up to think that using words like goyim and gentile were wrong and not to use them?


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## Belushi (Aug 4, 2013)

I'm happy to start a new thread if no one else wants to do it?  What should we call it - I like equationgirls 'Commenting on the Commentariat'


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## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> in a vague attempt to get this thread back on topic, i just had a comment on my blog post - i mean is what i said offensive or owt? i don't think it is and i'm a bit pissed off because she seems to be implying that it's anti-semitic or something and i'm definitely not and i'm a bit annoyed that someone would imply that about me.
> 
> 
> 
> did i do anything wrong here? i mean i was brought up to think that using words like goyim and gentile were wrong and not to use them?


 
I always thought they were wrong in this day and age, even as a non-Jew. I don't think she understands what you're talking about to be honest.


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## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> in a vague attempt to get this thread back on topic,


i wouldn't bother. this thread is fucked. was probably fucked the day Firky started sending lauriepenny misogynistic cartoons to get her over here.


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## frogwoman (Aug 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> I always thought they were wrong in this day and age, even as a non-Jew. I don't think she understands what you're talking about to be honest.


 
yeah the bit about the gaza thing, i wasn't trying to be like one of those PSC dickheads who always bring israel into any discussions like that. i meant that to say "gentile is a privilege" in every situation is bollocks and was pointing out a fairly obvious situation where it isn't. But maybe I need to make that clear(er)?


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## equationgirl (Aug 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yeah the bit about the gaza thing, i wasn't trying to be like one of those PSC dickheads who always bring israel into any discussions like that. i meant that to say "gentile is a privilege" in every situation is bollocks and was pointing out a fairly obvious situation where it isn't. But maybe I need to make that clear(er)?


 
Don't know how much clearer you could be, unless you pretend you;re explaining it to a small child which would be patronising to most of your audience.


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## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

equationgirl said:


> Don't know how much clearer you could be,* unless you pretend you;re explaining it to a small child* which would be patronising to most of your audience.


tbf, that's *exactly* how i ask people to explain things to me


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## Belushi (Aug 4, 2013)

New thread

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/commenting-on-the-commentariat.313592/


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## J Ed (Aug 4, 2013)

frogwoman said:


> yeah the bit about the gaza thing, i wasn't trying to be like one of those PSC dickheads who always bring israel into any discussions like that. i meant that to say "gentile is a privilege" in every situation is bollocks and was pointing out a fairly obvious situation where it isn't. But maybe I need to make that clear(er)?


 

I think that she doesn't understand what you're talking about or is being deliberately misleading in her reading of what you have written, her response doesn't make much sense either. She is acting like there are two possibilities here, and maybe in the reality that identity politics dictates must exist there are only two possibilities. Either being Jewish is a universal privilege or a universal oppression and the same must be true of being a gentile, it's either a universal privilege or a universal oppression.

How do people arrive at this kind of thinking? It just seems so counter-intuitive but at the same time there is no real theory of any substance behind it to overcome what must seem intuitive to most people. It's just stupid.


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## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

Belushi said:


> New thread
> 
> http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/commenting-on-the-commentariat.313592/


 











thank you


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## frogwoman (Aug 4, 2013)

J Ed said:


> I think that she doesn't understand what you're talking about or is being deliberately misleading in her reading of what you have written, her response doesn't make much sense either. She is acting like there are two possibilities here, and maybe in the reality that identity politics dictates must exist there are only two possibilities. Either being Jewish is a universal privilege or a universal oppression and the same must be true of being a gentile, it's either a universal privilege or a universal oppression.
> 
> How do people arrive at this kind of thinking? It just seems so counter-intuitive but at the same time there is no real theory of any substance behind it to overcome what must seem intuitive to most people. It's just stupid.


 
i've replied on the other thread


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## Red Cat (Aug 4, 2013)

discokermit said:


> i wouldn't bother. this thread is fucked. was probably fucked the day Firky started sending lauriepenny misogynistic cartoons to get her over here.


 

So he sent her misogynistic cartoons to encourage her to come here and smear us publicly as misogynists and racists?


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## Frances Lengel (Aug 4, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> So he sent her misogynistic cartoons to encourage her to come here and smear us publicly as misogynists and racists?


 
TBF, I don't reckon that was the spirit in which he sent her that cartoon. He's still a massive wanker over the blagsta debacle - blagsta was completely blameless in that & it's a shame he feels he's had to leave the boards - A lot of the time i never saw eye to eye with blags, but he is missed & I'll tell you what - He always brought more to the table than the wanker Firky.


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## discokermit (Aug 4, 2013)

Red Cat said:


> So he sent her misogynistic cartoons to encourage her to come here and smear us publicly as misogynists and racists?


i reckon so.

since he's been back he's tried to accuse me of sexism, tried to smear butchers apron and of course blagsta.

i don't know what other shit him and ern have been up to but i reckon that was his intent from the start. it should be looked into.


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## Red Cat (Aug 4, 2013)

Frances Lengel said:


> TBF, I don't reckon that was the spirit in which he sent her that cartoon.


 
From what I've learned of him today that seems to me precisely the spirit in which he sent the cartoons.


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## Red Cat (Aug 4, 2013)

discokermit said:


> i reckon so.
> 
> since he's been back he's tried to accuse me of sexism, tried to smear butchers apron and of course blagsta.
> 
> i don't know what other shit him and ern have been up to but i reckon that was his intent from the start. it should be looked into.


 

Why was he allowed back on the boards?


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## tufty79 (Aug 4, 2013)

saam.


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## rekil (Aug 5, 2013)

"I don't know for sure", typed someone on twitter, "but" - probably leaning forward conspiratorially, on the riot-bruised bus which snaked a route Britishly through London's piss-pattered 6am streets or something, she tapped silently with rollie-stained digits on her tea-stained Huawei Ascend G330 that has the internet and Dr.Who on it, "I might have heard from someone who used to know someone who went there for a conference once, that the USA is significantly less misogyny to brave journalist activist sorts than the beastly UK."

And that is that.


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## Lazy Llama (Aug 5, 2013)

Belushi said:


> New thread
> 
> http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/commenting-on-the-commentariat.313592/


 
I'll lock this thread now then.


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